THE FATHER OF MODERN BRAZIL
XIV. John VI, mulatto ruler of Portugal, who went to Brazil and set up his throne there. (See SEX AND RACE IN THE OLD WORLD.)
In the army and in the priesthood, the same liberality prevailed. Even in the white regiments, says Koster, some of the officers were mulattoes, who were of noble birth, of which aristocratic status one had to be unless he rose from the ranks. He mentions one mulatto colonel, Noguiere, who went to Lisbon and was decorated with the Order of Christ by the Queen of Portugal and later returned to Brazil. “A chief person of one of the provinces,” said Koster, “is the son of a white man and a woman of color; he has received an excellent education, is of a generous disposition, and entertains most liberal views upon all subjects. He has been made a colonel and a degree of nobility has been conferred upon him; likewise the Regent is sponsor to one of his children. Many other instances might be mentioned. Thus has Portugal of late years from policy continued that system into which she was led by her peculiar circumstances in former times. Some of the wealthy planters of Pernambuco and of the rich inhabitants of Recife are men of color.” The best church image painter of Rio de Janeiro, he said, was “a black man.”
The above was also true of the priesthood, which was then very powerful and much looked up to. Walsh wrote, “I have seen myself three clergymen in the same church at the same time, one of whom was white, another a mulatto, and a third, a black.”23
Some of the unmixed Negroes were very wealthy, according to Koster. One of these a runaway slave became a great landowner, and later gave his master, whom he now had at his mercy, several hundred head of cattle as a present. Ewbank wrote similarly in the 1850’s, “Here are many wealthy people of color. I have passed some black ladies in silks and jewelry with male slaves in livery behind them. Today one rode past in her carriage accompanied by a liveried footman and a coachman. Several have white husbands. The first doctor of the city is a colored man, so is the President of the Province. The Viscountess C---- a, and scores of the first families, are tinged.”24
Mulatto offspring of the rich whites were sent to be educated in the best schools of Portugal. As Kelsey says, “Titled families and aristocrats who had mixed white blood with black sent their mulatto children to Coimbra University in Portugal; these returned more Portuguese in speech, voice and manner than the sugar barons themselves. Some of Brazil’s brightest names have come from these trained men—Antonio Vieira, the purest orator; A. P. de Figueiredo, whose political and social writings are believed to have influenced imperial policy.”25
To the upholders of the doctrine of white racial superiority, the general racial harmony that existed in Brazil, was displeasing, even repugnant. Among the latter was no less a person than Count de Gobineau, himself, the originator of the doctrine of white racial superiority, who happened to be French Minister to Brazil in 1869.
Gobineau, who like most racialists was a neurotic, seems to have been in perfect misery while in Brazil. He was oppressed alike with the heat: the size of the flowers, and even of their brilliancy, but most of all at seeing “Negroes and mulattoes of both sexes” even in the royal palace or in high government positions. The Foreign Minister with whom he had to confer frequently was a mulatto, Baron de Cotegipe. He wrote, “There is no longer a Brazilian family that has not Negro and Indian blood in its veins.” It was a population, he said, “entirely mulatto in mind and ugly enough to make one afraid… . Not a Brazilian of pure blood but the combination offspring of the marriages between whites, aborigines and Negroes are so multiplied that the shades of carnation are innumerable and all that has produced in the lower classes, as in the higher, a degeneration of the saddest aspect.
“The best families are mixed with Negro and Indian. The latter produces creatures particularly repugnant of a reddish-copper. The Empress has three Maids-of-Honor, one of chestnut color; the other bright chocolate: the third, violet.” The chocolate colored one, he says, was “Her Excellency, Dona Josephina da Fonseca, favorite of the Empress.”
In his letter to the French government, he added, “The greater part of those called Brazilians are mixed-bloods, mulattoes, quadroons, caboclos of different degrees. They are found in all social situations. The Baron de Cotegipe, the Foreign Minister, is a mulatto; in the Senate are also mulattoes. In a word whoever says Brazilian says with few exceptions, man of color.”26
The only thing that seemed to please this veteran grumbler was the art work in the Cathedral of Rio. He goes into raptures over it, saying that it was executed with “unforgettable skill and cleverness.” Of course, he attributed it all to the mulattoes and omitted the blacks, who undoubtedly must have done much of it, not to mention the whites. But doing so would not have squared with his theory which is that for a people to be highly gifted in art, music, and poetry, it must have a Negro strain, that is, to be varying degrees of the mulatto.27
C. S. Stewart, an American naval officer, also found the general absence of a color line revolting. Writing in 1850, or thirty-eight years before the emancipation in Brazil, he denounced “the fearfully mongrel aspect of much of the population, claiming to be white. Mulattoes, quadroons, and demi-quadroons, and every other degree of tinted complexion and crisped hair, met, at every turn, indicate an almost unlimited extent of mixed blood. This cannot fail to be revolting, at least to a visitor from the Northern states of our country; especially as exhibited in the female portion of the lower orders of the community as they hang over the under half of the doors of their houses, gazing up and down the street, or lean, black, white and gray, three and four together, in the closest juxtaposition from their latticed windows.
“A striking exhibition of the incongruous mingling of races and mixture of blood was presented in the first object upon which my eye fell on entering the Campo D’Acclamacao on my way to the Senate Chamber. A squadron of dragoons in a scarlet uniform had just been placed in line on one side of the square. A mounted band in Hussar dress of the same color was in attendance. I took a station near this. It was composed of sixteen performers; and in number included every shade of complexion from the blackest ebony of Africa, through demi, quarter, and demi-quarter blood to the purely swarthy Portuguese and Brazilian; and the clear red and white of the Saxon with blue eyes and flaxen hair. Such in a greater or less degree is the mixture seen in every sphere of common life—domestic, social, civil, and military and scarce less frequent than elsewhere in the vestibule of the palace and the altars of the church.”28
Debret, who like Gobineau, was French, was more optimistic. He deplored the aggressiveness of the mulattoes and their prejudice for the blacks, but added, “The mulatto at Rio de Janeiro is the one whose physical organism is perhaps considered the most robust; this native, half-African, blessed with a temperament in harmony with the climate resists most of the extreme heat.” The mulattoes, he said also, “furnished the majority of skilled workers; they were also the most turbulent element and in consequence the easiest to influence in fomenting discords and revolts… . Among these half-whites in their state of perfect civilization, particularly in the principal cities of Brazil, you will meet a great number honored with the general esteem that they owe to their success in the sciences and the arts as medicine, music, mathematics, poetry, surgery and painting… .”29
As regards the rivalry that existed between the whites and the mulattoes on one hand, and the mulattoes and the blacks, on the other he said that the whites looked down upon the mulattoes while the blacks, over whom the mulattoes exercised power, detested the latter, calling them monsters, since “God had made only the white man and the black man.”
Walsh, too, thought that the mixed-bloods and Negroes were superior to the whites. He said, “The superiority of the colored population