What caused the War of Canudos?

A load of timber

The war began with an order that never arrived. Belo Monte, the town Antônio Conselheiro founded in 1893 in the backlands of Bahia, was building a new church. He bought the timber in Juazeiro, a trading town on the São Francisco River, and paid in advance. The wood never came. A rumor went round Juazeiro that the Conselheiro’s people would come and take it by force, and in October 1896 the town’s judge asked the governor of Bahia for troops. In Os Sertões, Euclides da Cunha files this under the “immediate causes” of the struggle.

Why a late delivery could start a war

A delayed shipment does not make a war on its own. By 1896 Belo Monte had powerful enemies, each with its own reasons:

• The secular Republic. The monarchy fell in 1889, and the Constitution of 1891 separated Church and State: only civil marriage counted, and cemeteries passed out of Church hands. The Conselheiro called it sacrilege and preached against the new regime. In 1893, Euclides says, he had new tax notices burned at a market, and police sent to arrest him were beaten off at Masseté.
• The landowners. Thousands of cowhands and sharecroppers left the ranches for Belo Monte. The local bosses, known as coronéis, lost hands for their fields and the votes they used to control.
• The Church. The archbishop of Bahia had banned the Conselheiro from preaching in churches in 1882. In May 1895 he sent Capuchin friars to the town. Friar João Evangelista found nearly a thousand armed men there, and his report spread the alarm.

Uauá, November 21, 1896

The governor sent 104 soldiers and three officers under Lieutenant Pires Ferreira. They stopped for the night at the village of Uauá. Before dawn on November 21 they woke to a procession: a wooden cross, the banner of the Holy Spirit, people praying. It was the Conselheiro’s followers, armed with machetes and old muskets.

The fight lasted four hours. The soldiers fired modern rifles from the windows. Ten of them died and, according to the official report, 150 sertanejos, the people of the backlands. Even so, the lieutenant retreated to Juazeiro with his men in rags and the expedition’s doctor driven mad. The telegraph spread the news as a defeat for the government.

How historians weigh the causes

In 1897 the press, and Euclides himself at first, explained Canudos as religious “fanaticism” exploited by monarchists, a charge tested in Was Canudos a monarchist revolt?. Historians such as Walnice Nogueira Galvão point to deeper roots in the backlands themselves: drought, land in few hands, people freed from slavery in 1888 with nothing, and a distant Church. Either way, after Uauá a local quarrel had become a question of the Republic’s pride. The government sent a bigger force, then a bigger one. The whole war, start to finish, is in What was the War of Canudos?.