The Unlikely Protagonist - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 22

of Bahia and the forests of the Amazon, around whom he would structure his Iliad and
Odyssey : Os Sertões and his fragments of Paraíso Perdido .
Lineages of the Modernizing Military
Slavery and monarchy—the structuring institutions of the Brazilian state in the nine-
teenth century—were heldinplace bytheglueofthemilitary,aninstitution that became
more complex as the century wore on. By the time da Cunha studied at the War College,
it was a breeding ground for insurrection, actively engaged in abolition and conspiring
for the expulsion of the emperor. But the military in Brazil was an exceedingly contra-
dictory organization in the last half of the nineteenth century: it had transformed itself
fromakindofpenalinstitutioninhabitedbycriminalsandreprobatestotheembodiment
of disciplined masculinity and modern nationalism.
Da Cunha's credentials as a member of the revolutionary Republican Army served
him all his life: he married into an influential military family and moved in and out of
military assignments throughout his career. Sent to Praia Vermelha to take advantage of
its technical training, he could not be indifferent to the highly divergent social strands
that coalesced in the military and gave it legitimacy in a period of such monumental
transitionsinBraziliansociety.Newideologiesofthemilitaryelevatedittothekeyinsti-
tution for nation building because of its ability to integrate regional and racial differen-
ces in a functioning bureaucracy and fighting machine, and as an incubator of modernist
thought. 38
The military was racially complex. In the early and mid 1800s the army had es-
sentially functioned as a form of indentured incarceration, but the experience of the
Paraguay War (which will be discussed below) was decisive in changing the view of
blacks within the military,and the self-image ofthe military itself. The army had always
been a venue for some social ascension for Brazil's poor, and its officer class provided
an honorable profession for Brazil's petty bourgeoisie. The military command clearly
ascribed to racial hierarchies, but until abolition, it was an institution that could take a
slave and make him free. Runaway slaves might billet themselves into the army in a
different city. The dragoons that swept through Brazil's hamlets snatching everyone of
color often seized slaves and, at the end of their tour of duty, manumitted them. Military
impressments, however, could also take free men of color and make them slaves. To es-
cape the eight-year obligation of involuntary service, a regular stream of deserters fled
into the backlands and frontiers, and often into quilombos . 39
The impressments for army service, which grabbed fathers, husbands, and sons to
fight against secession movements and insurgencies or to chase after fugitive slaves, did
not endear the monarchy to the populace at large. Historian Peter Beattie describes how
women would set upon the conscriptors, drive them away, and then burn their records.