Anti-Tocqueville Counterpoints: The Brazilian Empire Ponders Population Controls in the United States

In the 1830s through 1850s, Brazilian statesmen often turned their gaze toward the United States. Whether to consider its well designed prisons or Andrew Jackson’s suspension of habeas corpus rights, these government officials were less interested in the democratic institutions enthusiastically lauded by Tocqueville than in policies that increased governmental power. Top among these were incipient measures of population control. This presentation will analyze prison construction, directed settlement and Indigenous “pacification” policies as three particular areas of government intervention influenced by Brazilian lawmakers’ close attention to the United States. Using newspaper sources, diplomatic correspondence, and print ephemera, the presentation advances that the U.S. provided a technical blueprint for the design of population control mechanisms such as the criminalization of vagrancy, the orchestrated settlement of poor migrants, and the coercion of Amazonian indigenous peoples into preemptive penal labor. These measures, however, were not implemented as part of a policy-driven vision of governance, but as an improvised response to political crises at the heart of national formation.