In 1876 he paid a long visit to the United States, something he had long wanted to do, and the occasion of the Philadelphia Exhibition, celebrating one hundred years of American Independence, seemed like a good time. His one regret was never to have met Lincoln, whom he deeply admired (as do Brazilians to this day; “Lincoln” is a favorite name for boys), and he tried to meet Harriet Beecher Stowe. He had corresponded with the Boston Transcendentalists and the Abolitionists (his correspondence is staggering), and translated some of their writings. One was a poem by Whittier called “The Cry of a Lost Soul”—not an anti-slavery poem, as might be expected, but a poem about an Amazonian bird, and Dom Pedro sent the poet a case of these birds, stuffed (at least not alive, like the macaws of earlier centuries). But it has Abolitionist overtones, perhaps, and Dom Pedro may have felt it expressed his own hopes for freeing the slaves. The bird
“Lifts to the starry calm of heaven his eyes;
And lo! rebuking all earth’s ominous cries,
The Cross [Southern Cross, naturally] of pardon lights the tropic skies!”
Longfellow gave a historical dinner-party for the royal visitor, and Dom Pedro attempted to give a Brazilian abraço (“hug”) to the shy, Quaker Whittier, and at the end of the highly successful evening, succeeded. Longfellow called him a “modern Haroun-al-Raschid wandering about to see the great world as a simple traveller, not as a king. He is a hearty, genial, noble person, very liberal in his views.” He visited Yale, Harvard, and Vassar, among other educational institutions, and seems to have met almost everyone of importance in the country. One exhausted Brazilian protégé called him “a library on top of a locomotive.”
At the Philadelphia Exhibition he met Alexander Graham Bell and was one of the very first to order telephones; he had them installed in all his palaces in Brazil. He also took back several of the newly-invented sewing-machines to the ladies of his court. It was a triumphal tour of over ten thousand miles.
There is a photograph of the royal party taken on their visit to Niagara Falls. There is something sad, almost tragic about this little foreign-looking group, dominated by the towering old Emperor, all dressed in the ugly, conventional clothes of the period, paying the conventional visit to the conventional “sights” and having their picture taken — something
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During Dom Pedro’s long reign Brazil’s material expansion really began. In 1850 a Commercial Code was issued that has remained in force, with additions, to this day. More banks were established and foreign capital, still mostly British, began to come in. The first railroad started off towards Petrópolis, the Emperor’s favorite place of residence, in 1854—only fifteen kilometres of it to begin with; and gas-lights were put in the streets of Rio. Other short railroads were built, but transportation was, and continues to be, one of the biggest problems of Brazil. Progress was slow partly because of Dom Pedro’s life-long preference for the landed aristocracy, who were usually conservative and indifferent to “progress” and looked down on the new class of merchants and bankers. The towns were still mostly inhabited by artisans and Portuguese merchants, and the aristocracy lived on their estates and much preferred to go to Paris, when they could. Dom Pedro created many titles, mostly Barons, but with one big exception, they were all landed proprietors who had grown rich on sugar or coffee — for by now coffee was the leading crop and Brazil was providing the world with it. The exception was the Baron de Mauá, later Visconde de Mauá, the J. P. Morgan of Brazil. Some of his many activities are reflected in his extraordinary coat of arms that shows a steamship, a locomotive and four lampposts (like the ones he had installed in Rio).
Visconde de Mauá was an associate of the Rothschilds and part-owner of banks in London, New York, Uruguay, and Argentina. He was the figure that marks the change from the purely agricultural economy of the plantation world to the world of modern, expanding capitalism.
However, when ennobled, he, too, took an Indian name, as did almost all the others; it was the period of Indianismo; it was also considered stylish to have an Indian (a chief, preferably) among one’s ancestors. The Counts of Itaboraí, Tamandaré, Barons Maracajú, Paranaguá—it is as if the United States had had Count Massachusetts or Baron Ohio.
There had been two foreign wars, the first undertaken to get rid of the brutal Rosas regime in Argentina, in 1851–52. The second was Brazil’s one real war — against Paraguay, — and it lasted five years, from 1865 to 1870, and is still regarded by Brazilians with aversion, almost shame. Its beginnings were complicated, having to do with Brazilian citizens in Paraguay, and it was urged on the nation by the always more war-like south. Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil were allies; Paraguay was completely ruined by the war, with one man left to every fifteen women in the population, and the war-debt incurred by Brazil hung over Dom Pedro for the rest of his rule. The war also ruined Visconde de Mauá, and one of the harshest criticisms heard of Dom Pedro is that he could have saved Mauá with a government loan, but didn’t.
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The biggest problem of Dom Pedro’s reign, and probably of his life, as well, was slavery. So closely was it bound up with the Empire and the Emperor that the end of the Empire and the death of Dom Pedro both followed soon after the emancipation. He was against slavery; he felt it to be a shameful blot on his beautiful, beloved country (he had liberated all his inherited slaves as early as 1840). But he also thought that emancipation had to come gradually, in order not to upset the country’s economy, dependent almost entirely, in the early years of his reign, on slave-labor. As a result of a bargain of Dom Pedro I with the English, the slave trade was prohibited in 1831, but thousands of slaves continued to be smuggled into the country every year, and this was a constant source of trouble with the English, who searched Brazilian vessels at sea and on occasion even blockaded Brazilian ports or landed marines on Brazilian soil.
Steps towards complete emancipation were taken, usually agitated for by the Liberals and then actually taken when a Conservative government again came into power. The law of the Ventre Livre provided that all children of slaves born after 1871 were free, and all slaves still belonging to the crown or to the states were free. The next step, in 1887, was that all slaves were free upon reaching the age of sixty. São Paulo freed all slaves within the city, various states began freeing theirs, and the army began to refuse to pursue run-away slaves. The institution of slavery was obviously doomed, but the landed proprietors in general did nothing to provide for their futures without slave-labor. There had been sporadic attempts to encourage immigration. Germans and Swiss had settled north of Rio, and later many Italians came to work on the huge São Paulo coffee fazendas. But, as Haring says, it was hard to get workers to come to a country “where agricultural labor was equated with human slavery.”