“A Stalwart Motor of Revolutions”: An American Merchant in Pernambuco, 1817–1825

Anew order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.¹

While we know the broad strokes of this story—the diplomatic controversies, the commercial treaties, the battles and the wars—the more subtle narratives remain unclear. We know little about what these grand changes meant to individual Americans, thousands of whom traveled to the insurgent territories and thousands more of whom devoured books and newspaper articles about the events that were taking place. This paper will focus on one of these travelers: a white Philadelphia merchant named Joseph Ray. Ray served as consul to one of Brazil’s oldest and wealthiest urban centers, the northeastern port city of Recife. The hub of anti-monarchical agitation in Brazil, Recife experienced two massive revolts in just eight years, and Ray was involved in both. His is a tale of wealth, republicanism, and race, and how ideas surrounding them streamed between two distant places in the early nineteenth century.

Ray’s revolutionary predilections encountered a mixed reception. For on one hand, Ray endangered the Portuguese and then Brazilian monarchies by linking republicans and capital across national lines. In the process, he simultaneously endangered his own nation’s officially proclaimed neutrality, and so he quickly lost his consular post. But all the while, Ray grew increasingly popular among Recife’s rebel sympathizers, whom he provided with valuable personal, political, and commercial connections. To trace his experiences is thus to gain a sense of how early U.S.-Brazilian relations unfolded in the realm of daily life, not just among official statesmen, but also among merchants, intellectuals, military officers, and the laboring poor. It is likewise to learn how men like Ray alarmed national policymakers from Washington to Rio. In this age of state formation, after all, non-state actors like Joseph Ray could almost definitionally threaten the new nations that men like James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Dom Pedro I were struggling to build. While Ray initially might have reinforced U.S. policy with his commerce and his republican evangelizing, therefore, he ultimately undermined that policy by using the same tools.

To be sure, Ray’s involvement in Brazilian revolts transcended what most Americans were willing or able to do. Still, of the countless men who flocked from the United States to Spanish and Portuguese America in the early nineteenth century, most supported the revolutionaries. Thousands went as privateers, men who attacked Iberian merchant ships, stole the loot, and then sold it to eager buyers throughout the hemisphere. Other common sailors, lured by promises of higher pay, deserted their ships to enlist in rebel navies. Meanwhile, merchants and traders also crossed the equator, hungry to profit as markets that had been closed for centuries opened their ports to the world. Accompanying all these men, finally, were the agents of American interest, the dozens of diplomats, consuls, and other officials who sailed south to monitor the changes that were underway. Ray was thus one drop in a much broader current of southward-bound American adventurers, albeit a big and notorious one. As Portugal’s ambassador in the United States repeatedly insisted, “here there are infinite Rays.”²

It was in the thriving port city of Recife that Joseph Ray established himself as this prototype for revolutionary meddling. Capital of the northeastern province of...