The Unlikely Protagonist - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 26

ing on his yacht in military drag. His son-in-law, Count d'Eu, theoretically in charge of
muchofthewar,wasbothbellicoseandbaffled.Hisquasi-deafnesswasasmuchameta-
phor of character as a real affliction, and even though he acquitted himself reasonably
well, officers such as Benjamin Constant de Magalhães viewed the royal commanders
with total contempt, a disdain that no doubt later fed the revolutionary impulses of the
officer class. 60 Most of the management of the conflict fell to the Duke of Caxias, best
known for his pitiless suppression of rural uprisings and especially for his abilities in
prosecuting guerrilla warfare, having honed his skills in uprisings in Maranhão. Even he
hadn't the stomach for the final days of hunting down López and his teenage sons in the
swamps of the Pantanal *1 and, on the pretext of his health, returned to Rio de Janeiro to
manage the country while Pedro II toured Europe.
Brazil got everything it wanted out of the war—the end of the caudillo Francisco
López, 142,000 square kilometers of Paraguayan territory, and open navigation on the
Río Paraguay—but it was a pyrrhic victory. First, the military was profoundly alienated
by civilian behavior that they viewed as basically cynical, unpatriotic, and incompetent.
The army increasingly favored abolition, in part as an outcome of the numbers of blacks
in its ranks who had fought valiantly and helped win the Paraguayan War. The military
also had a sense of the broader incompatibility of slavery with modern warfare. Internal
military alliances for abolition arose after the Paraguay War and dovetailed with antis-
lavery sentiments in other sectors of society. 61 While full emancipation was not granted
until 1888,thedeath knell forboththemonarchy andslavery came in1886,whenIsabel
was politely informed by Floriano Peixoto (later a president of the First Republic) that
the army would not hunt for runaway slaves any more.
At an ideological and nationalist level, the army (which had grown substantially dur-
ing the war) saw itself as a different, new kind of institution. Rather than reinforcing
old-fashioned European sovereigns and emphasizing the difference between the rulers
and ruled, the army had incorporated men of different races and social classes from all
regions of the country and had been able to unify, organize, and mobilize them for the
national good: this reinforced a kind ofmystical link between the army and the nation. 62
Recruits rather than royalty became the incarnation of the patria , the embodiment of
national honor. The military, in all imaginable skin colors, was put forward as an ideo-
logical and workable, practical model for a modern Brazilian polity. 63 The army saw a
“nation in arms” as perhaps the only disinterested force for the construction of a new
type of state and nation.
The military yearned for a new role in Brazilian politics, especially as the army
itself became more allied with Republican politicians from the new merchant and coffee
classesofSãoPaulo.Theseinclinationswereinflamedbytheresentmentsofthemilitary
old guard with patriotic credentials from the Paraguay War who were deprived of mod-