“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

matter was overblown and that reports stemmed more complaints from a local merchant
against the town’s leaders than from any real threat to order. Loureiro then brought suit to
protect his own reputation against the “articles impugning his character and position in the
town.” 63
The file ultimately ended without any additional action on Loureiro’s libel suit. The
seriousness with which both local and provincial officials took the claims, however, reflected
the obsession with order on the Brazilian periphery. As gaúcho liberals in Porto Alegre
asserted their autonomy from the imperial government, they equally kept in mind their need
to control the countryside. These forces combined to ensure that even as riograndense elites
complained about the central government’s “tyranny,” they willingly supplied the bulk of
fighting forces for the national cause in the Paraguayan War. They forged a compromise in
which the state recognized their own relative autonomy and social standing in exchange for
military service and order in the countryside – two elements that peripheral elites in the
Brazilian borderlands were more than happy to provide. Viewed from this perspective, Rio
Grande do Sul’s “seigneurial liberalism,” to borrow Roger Kittleson’s term, provided an
mechanism by which peripheral elites in the Brazilian borderlands could successfully fold
themselves into the empire. 64
Conclusion
By the end of the 1870s, elites in the borderlands connecting Argentina, Brazil and
Uruguay had largely incorporated themselves into national systems. Technical advances like
the Remington repeating rifle combined with the growing professionalization of the military
to erode the ability of mounted caudillo armies like those under Lopéz Jordán and Timoteo
63 Ibid.
64 Kittleson, The Practice of Politics, 6.
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