Reconsidering Recruitment in Imperial Brazil*

E-ISSN： 1533-6247|55|1|1-33

ISSN： 0003-1615

Source： The Americas, Vol.55, Iss.1, 1998-07, pp. : 1-33

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Abstract

Third Sergeant Wenceslau Martins Leal may have misunderstood his orders for 18 July 1888 but his greater mistake was, in fact, carrying them out too well. With his patrol from the Sixteenth Infantry Battalion, he reported to the police subdelegate of Salvador’s São Pedro parish at 7:00 p.m. and received orders to arrest and take to the fort “all the vagrants that he could find, for the time had come for impressment [recrutamento forçado].” Because the subdelegate did not limit the number of men to be impressed and pointed out the best places to find such “vagabonds”—Dois de Julho Square and the nearby alleys—Leal concluded that he had unlimited authority to put his ten men to work on this “arduous task.” It only took an hour. In a first sweep, they picked up thirty-five men; in a second, seventeen more. Two resisted “tenaciously” and had to be forcibly subdued. By 8:00, the duty officer had developed serious misgivings about the large number of prisoners arriving at the fort. He checked with the subdelegate who denied having given such orders in the first place and released the detainees. An indignant Leal justified his actions on the grounds that he had merely followed orders to the best of his ability.