The road to Porongos:

Abstract

The Porongos defeat over the secessionist rebels on November 14, 1844, militarily and politically solidified the barão de Caxias’ coming victory, which would end the longest rebellion in Brazilian history, the Farroupilha, 1835-1845. Most of the encounters to come were small, mopping-up and surveillance actions, except for one, at Arroio Grande, just two weeks after Porongos. Suspiciously, the targets of both these assaults were the libertos, slaves the rebels had seized from their provincial loyalist neighbors, and whom they armed and ostensibly freed. Before Porongos, Caxias and the farrapo general Canabarro had arrived at the same conclusion: in order to have peace, conciliation, and a return to Imperial order, the rebels needed proof that their cause was lost. The best and most convenient solution led Caxias and Canabarro to use Black losses to show the war was no longer winnable, and to defang them as a future menace. When Canabarro assembled what was the last great rebel army on the Cerro do Porongos, liberto soldiers comprised its very core. On that November morning, approximately 35% of Canabarro’s troops were either killed, wounded, or captured. Nearly all those who died or were taken prisoner came from the ranks of the liberto infantry. If the many mysteries swirling around Porongos were stripped away, what would emerge and converge at Porongos were two historical shadows still coursing through the borderlands, hatianismo and artiguismo. These were neither doctrines nor unique to the borderlands, yet together they advised both rebel and Imperial policy, and were implicit in the immediacies of decision-making which determined the libertos’ fate.