What was the Inconfidência Mineira?

A name chosen by the prosecution

The plotters did not choose the name Inconfidência. In the legal Portuguese of the 1700s it meant disloyalty to the sovereign, a crime against the Crown. It is the prosecution’s word, the one used in the inquiry into the plot. That is why some Brazilian historians prefer Conjuração Mineira, the Minas Conspiracy, a term that describes what the men did rather than the charge against them. Both names refer to the same events.

Gold, quotas and a threatened levy

In the 1690s gold was found in the hills of Minas Gerais, and for most of the next century the region made Portugal rich. The work was done by tens of thousands of enslaved Africans. The king was owed a fifth of all gold, the quinto, and from 1750 the region promised a minimum of a hundred arrobas a year, about 1,500 kilograms. If the foundry houses came up short, residents had to make up the difference through a special levy, the derrama.

Then the easy gold ran out. Only 57 arrobas came in during 1785. By 1789 the shortfall had reached 582 arrobas, close to six years of quota. In May 1789, Minas’s own treasury board would admit to the queen that the people could not pay.

But this captaincy has reached the state of its total decline, the state in which the Intendancy Houses cannot yield the 100 arrobas, nor can the people answer for the shortfall, as the agreement requires.

Lisbon blamed smuggling, and in July 1788 it had already sent a new governor, the Viscount of Barbacena, with orders to collect the arrears, by the derrama if necessary. Other grievances piled up: a royal decree of 1785 had banned textile factories in Brazil, and tax contracts had left several rich men owing the Crown fortunes.

The plotters and the plan

The example came from North America. The thirteen colonies had declared independence in 1776 and won it. In 1787 a Brazilian student, José Joaquim da Maia, even sought out Thomas Jefferson in Nîmes, France, to ask for help; Jefferson promised nothing. In the parlors of Vila Rica, talk turned to a free Minas. Around the tables sat three poets, Cláudio Manuel da Costa, Tomás Antônio Gonzaga and Alvarenga Peixoto, along with the commander of the local dragoons, priests, landowners, a young scholar back from England, and a talkative ensign called Tiradentes.

According to the sentence later passed on them, the plan was to act on the day the derrama was declared. With the population in revolt, the troops would come over to their side. The governor would be arrested and shipped off, or killed. The new republic would have its capital at São João del-Rei and a university at Vila Rica. Their coded phrase for the day was “such a day is the baptism.”

How it ended

The baptism never took place. On March 15, 1789, Colonel Joaquim Silvério dos Reis, one of the debtors the plotters had courted, revealed everything to the governor. Around the same date, Barbacena suspended the derrama, and the revolt lost its spark before it had begun. Arrests followed in Minas and in Rio. Three years of inquiries ended with the sentence of April 18, 1792: eleven men condemned to hang, ten spared by the queen, and one, Tiradentes, hanged on April 21.

Who really led it is still debated. What is clear is that the freedom they had in mind was for Minas against Lisbon, not for the enslaved people who dug its gold.