Was Brazil’s independence peaceful?

The war began before the cry

Brazil’s independence is often told as a bloodless affair: a prince shouts by a stream on September 7, 1822, and a country is born. It was not like that. In Bahia, in the northeast, the fighting began seven months before the cry.

In February 1822 Salvador, Bahia’s capital, was split between Portuguese and Brazilian-born troops. On February 20 Portuguese soldiers broke into the Lapa convent and killed its abbess, Joana Angélica, who was trying to bar the door. General Madeira de Melo’s Portuguese garrison took control of the city.

Bahia’s own independence day

The answer came from the Recôncavo, the sugar country around the Bay of All Saints. Planters, farmhands, freedmen, enslaved men and Indigenous fighters formed an army and besieged the capital by land. One of its soldiers, “Soldier Medeiros,” was a woman: see Who was Maria Quitéria?. On November 8, 1822, some 10,000 men fought at Pirajá, on the edge of Salvador.

At sea, the new government in Rio hired a British admiral, Thomas Cochrane, to build a navy and blockade the port. On July 2, 1823, the Portuguese sailed out of Salvador. Bahia still marks the day with a holiday and a parade, the Dois de Julho, and many Bahians call it the real date of independence.

From Piauí to the far south

The war was not only Bahia’s. In Piauí, on March 13, 1823, poorly armed backlanders faced Major Fidié’s Portuguese troops at the battle of Jenipapo. There was fighting in Maranhão, in Pará and in the Cisplatina, the southern province that later became Uruguay. In Belém, 256 prisoners were locked in the hold of the brig Palhaço, and 252 of them died.

How many died in all? No one knows. There is no reliable total, only the certainty that the dead ran into the thousands between February 1822 and the end of 1823.

Where the myth comes from

Partly from comparison with Spanish America, where the wars of independence lasted more than a decade. Partly from continuity: the Portuguese king’s heir became Brazil’s emperor, and the monarchy stayed. And partly from the cry itself, a single picture that crowds out the war that followed. The political steps are in How did Brazil become independent from Portugal?.

Historians still debate what the war means. For some, it shows that 1822 was a real break, with ordinary people fighting for a new country. For others, what changed was the government, not society: the same elites stayed in charge. One fact weighs on that debate: about 1.5 million people, a third of the population, were still enslaved after independence. Slavery lasted until 1888: see Was Brazil the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery?.