Sabinada Revolt

Sabinada Revolt, the rebellion that led to the seizure of Brazil's second-largest city, Salvador (capital of the northeastern province of Bahia), from 17 November 1837 to 16 March 1838. Occurring during the tumultuous and experimental years of Brazil's Regency period (1834–1840), the Sabinada was initiated by radical liberals and republicans, the most famous of whom, Francisco Sabinó Alvares da Rocha Vieira (or Sabino), gave the rebellion its name.

The movement began with the revolt of the soldiers of the Third Artillery Battalion, garrisoned in the Fort of São Pedro. Leading them were several civilians, including Sabino, a doctor and editor of the radical Novo Diário. Within hours, the city's Third Infantry Battalion had joined; ultimately, only the marines and part of the National Guard would remain loyal to the government. Soldiers and civilian adherents soon occupied the city and declared the province's independence from the central government in Rio de Janeiro.

At the onset of the Sabinada, many civilians, especially Portuguese merchants whose privileged position with the Rio government rendered them the source of widespread antipathy, fled to the Recôncavo (the nearby sugar-producing region), where large property owners had begun to organize the resistance forces known as the Restorationist Army. By the end of November, they had 1,900 men, mostly National Guardsmen, on the outskirts of Salvador. With land routes already cut off, the arrival of warships from Rio assured that the capital would also be without water-borne cargoes. By December, Salvador felt the first pangs of hunger resulting from the blockade.

Reinforcements from neighboring provinces swelled the Restoration Army to nearly 5,000, and on 12 March the siege to retake Salvador began. In what was easily one of the most violent periods in the city's history, hundreds of rebels and innocent bystanders were massacred within two days after the battle began. Surrender came quickly, on 16 March. A week later the government captured Sabino, and after lengthy court hearings, exiled him to remote Goiás. Thousands of others were condemned to hard labor on the island of Fernando de Noronha.

Scholars have interpreted the Sabinada in a number of ways: as the result of battles between liberal separatists and conservatives who supported greater centralization within Brazil's monarchy; as a reaction to the narrow scope of political options that followed independence in 1822; or as a conflict fueled by discontent within the army and the militia over a series of military reforms in the early 1830s.

Most recently scholars have explored the rebellion in social terms, highlighting the ways in which questions of race and class challenged the dominant political arrangements from "below." As the Sabinada ran its course, the goals of its poor mulatto and black adherents became far more radical than those of the men who initiated the rebellion. The latter group, for example, supported the monarchy and only grudgingly freed Brazilian-born slaves (on 19 February 1838) after vast numbers of them escaped bondage by joining the rebel army. Given this comparatively conservative stance, the lower classes had no choice but to take matters into their own hands: this they did by burning the houses of their enemies. As a result, mulatto and black rebels suffered the harshest punishments once the rebellion was over, and more vigorous government surveillance of the lower groups ensued. It would be decades before federalist and republican sentiments were so boldly expressed, and individual rather than collective acts would characterize the resistance of the poor to a system that continued to discriminate on the basis of skin color and to maintain humans in bondage.

See alsoBrazil, The Regency .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paulo Cesar Souza, A Sabinada: A revolta separatista da Bahia (1837) (1987), and Hendrik Kraay, "'As Terrifying as Unexpected': The Bahian Sabinada, 1837–1838," in Hispanic America Historical Review 72, no. 4 (1992): 501-527.

Additional Bibliography

Morel, Marco. As transformações dos espaços públicos: Imprensa, atores políticos e sociabilidades na cidade imperial, 1820–1840. São Paulo: Hucitec, 2005.

Vainfas, Ronaldo. Dicionário do Brasil imperial, 1822–1889. Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2002.

                                       Judith L. Allen