Independence of Brazil
The independence of Brazil comprised a series of political and military events that led to the independence of the Kingdom of Brazil from the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves as the Empire of Brazil. It is celebrated on 7 September, the date when prince regent Pedro of Braganza declared the country's independence from the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves on the banks of the Ipiranga brook in 1822 on what became known as the Cry of Ipiranga. Formal recognition by Portugal came with the Treaty of Rio de Janeiro, signed in 1825.
In 1807, the French army invaded Portugal, which had refused to participate in the continental blockade against the United Kingdom. Unable to resist the invasion, the Portuguese royal family and government fled to Brazil, which was then the richest and most developed of the Portuguese colonies. The installation of the House of Appeals and other public bodies of the Portuguese government in Rio de Janeiro represented a series of political, economic and social transformations that led to then prince regent John of Braganza, to elevate the State of Brazil to the status of a kingdom on 16 December 1815, united with its former metropolis.
In 1820, a liberal revolution broke out in Portugal and the royal family was forced to return to Lisbon. Before leaving Brazil, however, the now king John VI named his eldest son, Pedro of Braganza, as prince regent of Brazil. Although Pedro was faithful to his father, the desire of the Portuguese courts to repatriate him and returning Brazil to its former colonial status led him to stay in Brazil and rebel.
During the war of independence that ensuedwhich began with the expulsion of the Portuguese troops from Pernambuco in 1821the Brazilian Army was formed by hiring mercenaries, enlisting civilians and some Portuguese colonial troops. The army immediately opposed the Portuguese forces, which controlled some parts of the country, namely, in the then provinces of Cisplatina, Bahia, Piauí, Maranhão and Grão-Pará. At the same time that the conflict was taking place, a revolutionary movement broke out in Pernambuco and other neighboring provinces, which intended to form their own country, the Confederation of the Equator, with a republican government, but it was harshly repressed.
After four years of conflict, Portugal finally recognized Brazil's independence and the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance was signed between the two countries on 29 August 1825. In exchange for recognition as a sovereign state, Brazil committed to paying a substantial compensation to Portugal and signing two treaties with the United Kingdom by which it agreed to ban the Atlantic slave trade and grant preferential tariffs to British goods imported into the country.
Officially, the date celebrated for Brazil's independence is 7 September 1822, when the event known as the Cry of Ipiranga took place on the banks of the Ipiranga brook in the city of São Paulo. Prince Pedro of Braganza was acclaimed Emperor of Brazil on 12 October 1822, being crowned and consecrated on 1 December 1822, and the country became known as the Empire of Brazil.
Background
The land now called Brazil was claimed by the Kingdom of Portugal in April 1500, on the arrival of the Portuguese naval fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral. The Portuguese encountered Indigenous peoples divided into several tribes, most of whom shared the same Tupi–Guarani language family, and shared and disputed territory. But the Portuguese, like the Spanish in their North American territories, had brought diseases with them against which many Indians were helpless due to lack of immunity. Measles, smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza killed tens of thousands.Though the first settlement was founded in 1532, colonization only effectively started in 1534 when King John III divided the territory into fifteen hereditary captaincies. This arrangement proved problematic, however, and in 1549 the king assigned a governor-general to administer the entire colony. The Portuguese assimilated some of the native tribes while others slowly disappeared in long wars or by European diseases to which they had no immunity.
By the mid-16th century, sugar had become Brazil's main export due to the increasing international demand. To profit from the situation, by 1700 over 963,000 African slaves had been brought across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the plantations of Brazil. More Africans were brought to Brazil up until that date than to all the other places in the Americas combined.
Through wars against the French, the Portuguese slowly expanded their territory to the southeast, taking Rio de Janeiro in 1567, and to the northwest, taking São Luís in 1615. They sent military expeditions to the northwest of the South American continent to the Amazon River basin rainforest and conquered competing English and Dutch strongholds, founding villages and forts from 1669. In 1680 they reached the far southeast and founded Colônia do Sacramento on the bank of the Río de la Plata, in the Banda Oriental region.
At the end of the 17th century, sugar exports started to decline, but beginning in the 1690s, the discovery of gold by explorers in the region that would later be called Minas Gerais, current Mato Grosso and Goiás saved the colony from imminent collapse. From all over Brazil, as well as from Portugal, thousands of immigrants came to the mines in an early gold rush.
The Spanish tried to prevent Portuguese expansion northwest, west, southwest and southeast into the territory that belonged to them according to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas division of the New World by the Bishop and Pope of Rome, Alexander VI and succeeded in conquering the Banda Oriental region in 1777. However, this was in vain as the Treaty of San Ildefonso, signed in the same year, confirmed Portuguese sovereignty over all lands proceeding from its territorial expansion, thus creating most of the current Brazilian southeastern border.
During the French invasion of Portugal by Emperor Napoleon I in 1807, the Portuguese royal family fled across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of the British Royal Navy to Brazil, establishing Rio de Janeiro as the de facto capital of the Portuguese Empire during the ensuing worldwide Napoleonic Wars. This had the side effect of soon creating within Brazil many of the institutions required to exist as an independent state; most importantly, it freed Brazil to trade with other nations at will.
After Napoleon's Imperial French army was finally defeated at Waterloo in June 1815, in order to maintain the capital in Brazil and allay Brazilian fears of being returned to colonial status, King John VI of Portugal raised the de jure status of Brazil to an equal kingdom and integral part of the new United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves, rather than a mere colony, a status which it enjoyed for the next seven years, appointing his son, Dom Pedro, as prince regent.
Path to independence
Portuguese ''Cortes''
In 1820 the Constitutionalist Revolution erupted in Portugal. The movement initiated by the liberal constitutionalists resulted in the meeting of the Cortes, that would have to create the kingdom's first constitution. The Cortes at the same time demanded the return of King Dom John VI, who had been living in Brazil since 1808, who elevated Brazil to a kingdom as part of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves in 1815 and who nominated his son and heir prince Dom Pedro as regent, to govern Brazil in his place on 7 March 1821. The king left for Europe on 26 April, while Dom Pedro remained in Brazil governing it with the aid of the ministers of the Kingdom and Foreign Affairs, of War, of Navy and of Finance.The Portuguese military officers headquartered in Brazil were completely sympathetic to the Constitutionalist movement in Portugal. The main leader of the Portuguese officers, General Jorge de Avilez Zuzarte de Sousa Tavares, forced the prince to dismiss and banish from the country the ministers of Kingdom and Finance. Both were loyal allies of Pedro, who had become a pawn in the hands of the military. The humiliation suffered by the prince, who swore he would never yield to the pressure of the military again, would have a decisive influence on his abdication ten years later. Meanwhile, on 30 September 1821, the Cortes approved a decree that subordinated the governments of the Brazilian provinces directly to Portugal. Prince Pedro became for all purposes only the governor of Rio de Janeiro Province. Other decrees that came after ordered his return to Europe and also extinguished the judicial courts created by João VI in 1808.
Dissatisfaction over the Cortes measures among most residents in Brazil rose to a point that it soon became publicly known. Two groups that opposed the Cortes' actions to gradually undermine Brazilian sovereignty appeared: Liberals, led by Joaquim Gonçalves Ledo, and the Bonifacians, led by José Bonifácio de Andrada. The factions, with quite different views of what Brazil could and should be, agreed only on their desire to keep Brazil co-equal with Portugal, united in a sovereign monarchy, rather than Brazil being merely provinces controlled from Lisbon.
Avilez rebellion
The Portuguese members of the Cortes showed no respect towards Prince Pedro and openly mocked him. And so the loyalty that Pedro had shown towards the Cortes gradually shifted to the Brazilian cause. His wife, princess Maria Leopoldina of Austria, favoured the Brazilian side and encouraged him to remain in the country which the Liberals and Bonifacians openly called for. Pedro's reply to the Cortes came on 9 January 1822, when, according to newspapers, he said: "As it is for the good of all and for the nation's general happiness, I am ready: Tell the people that I will stay".After Pedro's decision to defy the Cortes and remain in Brazil, around 2,000 men led by Jorge Avilez rioted before concentrating on mount Castelo, which was soon surrounded by 10,000 armed Brazilians, led by the Royal Police Guard. Dom Pedro then "dismissed" the Portuguese commanding general and ordered him to remove his soldiers across the bay to Niterói, where they would await transport to Portugal.
Jose Bonifácio was nominated minister of Kingdom and Foreign Affairs on 18 January 1822. Bonifácio soon established a fatherlike relationship with Pedro, who began to consider the experienced statesman his greatest ally. Gonçalves Ledo and the Liberals tried to minimize the close relationship between Bonifácio and Pedro, offering to the prince the title of Perpetual Defender of Brazil. For the Liberals, the creation of a Constituent Assembly to prepare a Brazilian constitution was necessary, while the Bonifacians preferred that Pedro create the constitution himself, to avoid the possibility of anarchy similar to the first years of the French Revolution.
The prince acquiesced to the Liberals’ desires, and signed a decree on 3 June 1822 calling for the election of deputies that would gather in a Constituent and Legislative General Assembly in Brazil.