3. The Paraguayan War (1864–70)*

The Paraguayan War or the War of the Triple Alliance (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) against Paraguay, which lasted for more than five years, from December 1864 to March 1870, was not only the longest but also the bloodiest inter-state war in the history of Latin America, indeed, apart from the Crimean War (1854–56), the bloodiest inter-state conflict anywhere in the world between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.¹ It claimed some 200,000 lives (mostly Paraguayan and Brazilian), either in battle or from disease and deprivation associated with the war. It had a profound effect on the economies, politics and societies of all four countries engaged, especially the two that did most of the fighting: Paraguay, the principal loser, and Brazil, the principal victor.

I

In a certain sense, all three of Brazil’s wars in the Río de la Plata during the half century after independence – the first in 1825–8 against the newly independent United Provinces of the Río de la Plata; the second in 1851–2, in alliance with Uruguay and the Argentine provinces of Entre Ríos and Corrientes, against the province of Buenos Aires; the third and by far the most important, in 1864–70, in alliance with Argentina and Uruguay, against Paraguay – had their roots in the rivalry between Portugal and Spain during the 17th and 18th centuries. Portugal’s involvement in the Río de la Plata began with the settlement of Colônia do Sacramento in 1680. The Spanish, however, later established themselves in Montevideo and under the treaty of San Ildefonso (1777) Portugal ceded to Spain the entire east bank of the river Uruguay. In 1811, at a time of revolution and war in the Río de la Plata, sensing an opportunity to recapture lost territory and fearful of the spread of liberal ideas, including slave emancipation, to the southern province of Rio Grande do Sul, the Prince Regent D. João sent Portuguese troops to the Banda Oriental. But they were quickly withdrawn. In 1816 Portuguese troops invaded the Banda Oriental a second time and this time occupied Montevideo. Furthermore, in 1821 the Banda Oriental was incorporated into the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves as the Província Cisplatina. It thus formed part of Brazil when independence from Portugal was declared in 1822.

The governments of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, however, never relinquished the idea of incorporating into the new state the Banda Oriental as well as Paraguay and Upper Peru (Bolivia), which had all formed part of the Vice-royalty of the Río de la Plata, and in April 1825 a revolt against Brazilian rule, followed by an invasion by exiles based in Buenos Aires, led to the annexation of the Banda Oriental. Concerned not only at the loss of territory but also the consequences for the balance of power in the region and the threat to free navigation in the Río de la Plata, Brazil immediately declared war. Lasting almost three years, the war was finally brought to an end as a result of mediation by Britain which, like Brazil, had an interest in political stability and free trade in the Río de la Plata. In August 1828 a treaty was signed in Rio de Janeiro under which the independent republic of Uruguay was created as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil. For Brazil, an unpopular and expensive war had ended in defeat with the loss of territory considered an integral part of the empire. The treaty, wrote the Rev. Robert Walsh in his Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (1830), was received in Brazil with ‘universal disappointment and discontent’. Along with opposition to the anti-slave trade and commercial treaties he had recently signed with Britain, as we have seen, as well as his authoritarian manner of governing and his refusal to separate himself totally from the ‘Portuguese’ faction in Brazil, the war of 1825–8 was one of the factors contributing to the abdication of Brazil’s first emperor D. Pedro in April 1831.

In independent Uruguay, conflict between blancos [Conservatives] and colorados [Liberals] led eventually to civil war, the Guerra Grande (1838–51). Juan Manuel de Rosas, governor of Buenos Aires between 1829 and 1832, who had returned to power in 1835, intervened on the side of the deposed blanco president, Manuel Oribe, and began a 13-year siege of Montevideo. As a result, first France (1838–40) and then France and Britain together (1843– 50) instituted a naval blockade of the Río de la Plata in order to protect their trade and the lives and properties of their citizens. Brazil remained neutral but was increasingly concerned to keep Uruguay out of the hands of Rosas, to defend the interest of the estancieiros [ranchers] of Rio Grande do Sul – and the growing number of Brazilian estancieiros in Uruguay – in unrestricted cross-border trade (at a time when the government in Rio was already struggling to defeat a movement, the farroupilha, for the separation of the province of Rio Grande do Sul from the empire), and to maintain free access to the rivers Paraná and Paraguay in order to reach the otherwise isolated Brazilian province of Mato Grosso. A diplomatic mission to Paris and London led by the visconde de Abrantes (1844–46) proposed ‘three power’ (sic) intervention in Uruguay, but it failed because neither France nor Britain envisaged a land invasion and, not least in the case of Britain, because Brazil was at the time refusing to renew the Anglo-Brazilian commercial and anti-slave trade treaties (see Essay 2).

Paulino José Soares de Sousa (from 1854 visconde do Uruguai), Foreign Minister from October 1849 in the Conservative government which had come to power the previous September, finally lost patience and abandoned Brazilian neutrality. In May 1851, after a diplomatic mission led by Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, marquês de Paraná, had reached agreement with the governors of the Argentine provinces of Entre Rio and Corrientes, enemies of Rosas, Brazil went to war with Buenos Aires. The siege of Montevideo was lifted and in February 1852 at the battle of Monte Caseros Rosas suffered total defeat. Brazil had become the dominant regional power, at least temporarily. Uruguay’s independence from Buenos Aires had been guaranteed, and with 5,000 Brazilian troops in occupation until 1855 it was politically subordinate to Brazil. The Brazilian economic penetration of Uruguay continued apace in the post-war period. By the end of the decade over 20,000 Brazilians, mostly gaúchos from Rio Grande do Sul, together with their slaves, were settled there. Brazilians constituted between 10 and 15 per cent of Uruguay’s population. They owned perhaps 30 per cent of the land, including some of the best estâncias, and freely transported their cattle to Rio Grande do Sul.

The war of 1851–2 did not bring an end to violent conflict in the politics of Uruguay. It was a rebellion in March 1863 led by the colorado caudillo General Venancio Flores for the overthrow of the blanco government of President Bernardo Berro, elected in 1860, that triggered off the sequence of events leading to the Paraguayan War. Both Argentina and Brazil supported the colorado rebellion – the first time the two countries had been on the same side in an Uruguayan conflict. President Bartolomé Mitre of Argentina, a Liberal, elected in October 1862, took this position because the Uruguayan colorados had backed him in the Argentine civil war of 1861 and because he believed the blancos in power in Montevideo constituted a possible focus for residual federalist opposition in the littoral provinces to the recently united Argentine republic. For Brazil the main issue was the tough line the Berro administration had begun to adopt towards the Brazilians in Uruguay, attempting to restrict settlement (and slaveholding) and to control, and tax, crossfrontier trade. Rio Grande do Sul, which had abandoned its struggle for independent statehood only 15 years before, expected the imperial government in Rio de Janeiro to protect Brazilian interests in Uruguay. The Liberal party was already dominant in Rio Grande do Sul, and as the political tide nationally began to turn in favour of the Liberals (culminating in January 1864 in the appointment of a LiberalProgressive government under Zacarias Góis e Vasconcelos) the Brazilian government became increasingly responsive to pressure from Rio Grande do Sul to join Argentina in supporting the colorado rebellion in Uruguay. It was in these circumstances that the blanco government looked to Paraguay as its only possible ally.

Paraguay, a former province of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, whose population was predominantly Guaraní-speaking, had successfully separated itself from both Spain and Buenos Aires in 1811–13. Under the dictatorship of Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1813–40) and (at least until the 1850s) under that of his successor Carlos Antonio López (1844–62), Paraguay had isolated itself, politically and economically, from its neighbours and played only a minor role in the civil and interstate wars of the Río de la Plata during the first half of the 19th century. It was, however, fearful and distrustful of its much larger, much more populous and potentially predatory neighbours: the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata and Brazil. Both had been reluctant, and late, to recognise Paraguay’s independence – Brazil in 1844, the United Provinces in 1852. Both had territorial claims against Paraguay: Brazil in the far northeast of the country on the borders of Mato Grosso between the rivers Apa and Branco, a region valuable for its natural yerba mate forests; Argentina east of the Paraná river (Misiones) but also west of the Paraguay river (the Chaco), a remote area potentially valuable for its quebracho trees from which tannin was extracted. There was also friction with both over freedom of navigation on the Paraguay/Paraná river system. During the 1850s, as Brazil adopted what Paraguay regarded as a predatory, imperialist policy towards Uruguay, the López government pursued with increasing urgency Paraguay’s economic, and military, modernisation, with an emphasis on industry and infrastructure, making effective use of British technology and British technicians.²

Francisco Solano López, to whom the blanco government in Uruguay looked for support in July 1863, had come to power in Paraguay the previous October on the death of his father. He was hesitant at first to make a formal alliance with the blancos, his natural allies, against the colorados in Uruguay, now that the latter were backed by both Brazil and Argentina. But during the second half of the year he issued warnings against what he saw as a growing threat to the existing balance of power in the Río de la Plata which guaranteed Paraguay’s security, territorial integrity and independence. He also saw an opportunity to make his presence felt in the region and to play a role commensurate with Paraguay’s new economic and military power. He had an army of 77,000 (compared to the Brazilian army of fewer than 20,000, with only 2,000 based in Rio Grande do Sul). In February 1864 Solano López began to mobilise for a possible war.

When, after diplomacy (the mission of José Antônio Saraiva in May 1864) had failed to resolve its differences with Uruguay, Brazil in August 1864 issued an ultimatum to the Uruguayan government threatening retaliation for the alleged abuses suffered by Brazilian subjects, Solano López in turn issued an ultimatum warning Brazil against military intervention. Underestimating the Paraguayan military and believing that Paraguay had no good reason to be hostile to Brazil, the Brazilian government ignored this warning and on 16 October Brazilian troops invaded Uruguay. Following an incident involving the seizure of a Brazilian merchant steamer, the Marquês de Olinda, leaving Asunción for Corumbá, with the president of the Mato Grosso on board, on 12 November, Brazil severed diplomatic relations with Paraguay. On 13 December, Solano López took the momentous decision to declare war on Brazil, and invaded Mato Grosso. After Argentina refused permission for the Paraguayan army to cross the disputed and largely uninhabited territory of Misiones in order to invade Rio Grande do Sul, Solano López also declared war on Argentina on 18 March 1865, and the following month invaded the Argentine province of Corrientes.³

To what extent Solano López’s actions were rational, provoked by Brazil (supported by Argentina), and essentially in defence of threatened national interests (perhaps even his country’s survival), or irrational, aggressive and expansionist – Brazilian intervention in Uruguay offering a pretext for a megalomaniac to realise a dream of empire? – is still a matter for debate. But whatever the thinking behind his actions, Solano López’s decision to declare war first on Brazil and then on Argentina, and to invade both their territories, proved a serious miscalculation, and one that was to have tragic consequences for the Paraguayan people. At the very least Solano López made an enormous gamble – and lost. He overestimated Paraguay’s economic and military power. He underestimated Brazil’s potential, if not its existing, military power – and its willingness to fight. He was wrong in thinking that Argentina would be neutral in a war between Paraguay and Brazil over Uruguay since Mitre did not believe that Argentine interests were threatened by what he expected to be a brief, surgical Brazilian intervention in Uruguay. Solano López also exaggerated Argentina’s internal contradictions and the possibility that, for example, Entre Ríos (under the powerful General José Justo de Urquiza) and Corrientes would prevent Argentina from waging war against Paraguay or, in the event of war, would take Paraguay’s side against Buenos Aires.

Solano López’s reckless actions brought about the very thing that most threatened the security, even the existence, of his country: a union of his two powerful neighbours – indeed, since Flores had finally managed to seize power in Montevideo in February 1865, a union of all three of his neighbours – in alliance and war against him. Neither Brazil nor Argentina had a quarrel with Paraguay sufficient to justify going to war. Neither wished nor planned for war with Paraguay. There was no popular demand or support for war; indeed, the war proved to be generally unpopular in both countries, especially Argentina. At the same time little effort was made by either to avoid war. The need to defend themselves against Paraguayan aggression (however much provoked or justified) offered both Brazil and Argentina not only an opportunity to settle their differences with Paraguay over territory and river navigation, but also to punish and weaken, perhaps destroy, a troublesome, emerging, possibly expansionist power in their region. Mitre seized the chance to remove a regime which, like Uruguay under the blancos, he regarded as a perpetual focus for federalist resistance to Buenos Aires and thus a constant threat to the process of nation building in Argentina. Emperor Pedro II seized the chance to strengthen and consolidate the imperial system in Brazil and assert Brazil’s undisputed hegemony in the region, and in particular Brazilian rather than Argentine hegemony over Paraguay as well as Uruguay.

The original war aims as set out in the Treaty of Triple Alliance signed by Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay on 1 May 1865 were: (1) the overthrow of the Solano López dictatorship; (2) free navigation of the Paraguay and Paranaá rivers; and (3) annexation of territory claimed by Brazil in the north-east of Paraguay and by Argentina in the east and west of Paraguay – this last clause kept secret until it was revealed, by Britain, in 1866. As the war progressed, it became, for Brazil in particular, a war for civilisation and democracy (sic) against barbarism and tyranny. This despite the awkward fact that as a result of the emancipation of the slaves in the United States during and immediately after the Civil War (Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863; the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified in December 1865) Brazil was now (as well as being the only remaining monarchy) the only remaining independent state in the Western Hemisphere whose economy and society was based on slavery.

The Paraguayan War was not inevitable. Nor was it necessary. But it could have been avoided only if firstly, Brazil had been less assertive in defence of the interests of its subjects in Uruguay and in particular had not intervened militarily on their behalf. Secondly, if Argentina had remained neutral in the ensuing conflict between Paraguay and Brazil. Finally, and crucially, if Paraguay had behaved more prudently, recognised the realities of power in the region, and attempted to defend its interests through diplomacy, not war.

II

Considering the enormous disparity between the two sides in size, wealth and population (and therefore in real and potential human and material resources) – Brazil (population almost 10 million), Argentina (1.7 million) and Uruguay (250–300,000) against Paraguay (300–400,000 – certainly much less than the one million or more frequently cited) – the Paraguayan War would appear to have been from the outset an unequal struggle. Militarily, however, the two sides were more evenly matched.⁴ At the beginning of the war, as we have seen, and for at least the first year, Paraguay had, numerically, a military superiority; and Paraguay’s army was probably better equipped and trained than the armies of its neighbours. Moreover, once the Paraguayan forces had been expelled from Argentine territory (and had no serious possibility of returning), Argentina reduced its commitment to the Allied war effort so that by the end of the war there were only some 4,000 Argentine troops on Paraguayan soil. Uruguay never had more than a symbolic presence in the theatre of operations. Brazil, on the other hand, expanded its standing army from 18,000 to 60–70,000 men during the first year of hostilities. This was achieved by means of transfers from the National Guard and the military police, appeals to patriotism and the formation of corps of voluntários da pátria (some more voluntary than others), and the forced recruitment of civilians, especially freedmen (ex-slaves), including Africanos livres, slaves liberated by the Anglo-Portuguese and Anglo-Brazilian courts of mixed commission in Rio de Janeiro between 1819 and 1845 and by the Brazilian authorities under the law of 1831 and more especially the law of 1850, but held in conditions close to slavery for 14 years or more, who had finally been granted letters of emancipation in September 1864 (see Essay 2). In October 1866, after nearly two years of war, defeat at the battle of Curupaití (see below) and the realisation that the war was likely to last much longer than expected, the decision was made (after much debate in the Council of State) to free slaves held in the imperial household and state-owned farms and industries [escravos da nação], slaves owned by the Church and religious orders, and some (though in the event few) privately owned slaves to fight in the war.⁵ (In the end only a few thousand slaves were liberated for military service.) In the course of the war Brazil is estimated to have mobilised some 140,000 men (fewer than the 200,000 indicated by some historians).⁶ And, unlike Paraguay, which had to rely on its own arsenal and shipyard, Brazil had access to arms, ammunition and warships, both purchased abroad, mostly in Europe, and manufactured and built in Brazil, as well as a loan of £7 million raised by Rothschilds in the City of London in September 1865 to help pay for them (see below). Finally, Brazil had the largest and most powerful navy in the region (33 steam and 12 sailing ships, with the first of many ironclads arriving in December 1865).

The war can be divided into three phases.⁷ The first began with the limited Paraguayan offensives against Mato Grosso in December 1864 and Corrientes in April 1865. In May 1865 the Paraguayan army finally crossed Misiones and invaded Rio Grande do Sul. Initially successful, the invasion was eventually contained by the allied forces. The Paraguayans never reached Uruguay. The Paraguayan commander Colonel Estigarribia surrendered to President Mitre (commander of the allied forces during the first two and a half years of the war), Emperor Dom Pedro II – on his only visit to the war zone – and President Flores at Uruguaiana on 14 September. The Paraguayan army then retreated back across the Paraná river and prepared to defend the country’s southern border. At the end of the first year of the war the only Paraguayan troops left on allied soil were those (few) in Mato Grosso (which remained a secondary front in the war). In the meantime, on 11 June at Riachuelo on the Paraná just south of Corrientes, in the only major naval battle of the war, the Brazilian navy had destroyed the Paraguayan navy and instituted an effective blockade of Paraguay, which it maintained for the rest of the war.

The second and major phase of the war (which included several periods in which there was little actual fighting) began when the allies finally invaded Paraguay in April 1866 and established their headquarters at Tuiutí at the confluence of the rivers Paraná and Paraguay. There on 24 May, in the first major land battle of the war, which left the commander of the Brazilian troops, Manuel Luís Osório, severely wounded, they repelled a ferocious Paraguayan assault. It was, however, more than three months before the Allied armies began to advance up the river Paraguay. On 12 September, at a secret meeting with Mitre at Yatayti-Cora, Solano López’s offer of concessions, including territorial concessions, to bring the war to an end, provided only that he survived and Paraguay was not totally dismembered or permanently occupied, was rejected. Ten days later, at Curupaití a few miles south of the great river fortress of Humaitá on the river Paraguay, the allies suffered their worst defeat of the war. They did not renew their advance until July 1867 when a movement was initiated to encircle Humaitá (Paraguay’s Sebastopol) which blocked access to the Rio Paraguay and the Paraguayan capital, Asunción. Even so it was more than a year before the allies occupied Humaitá (5 August 1868) and a further five months, following the decisive defeat and virtual destruction of the Paraguayan army at the battle of Lomas Valentinas on 27 December, before Allied (mostly Brazilian) troops under the command of Marechal Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, marquês de Caxias, Brazilian commander in chief since October 1866 and allied commander in chief since January 1868 (replacing President Mitre), finally entered a largely deserted Asunción on 1 January 1869 and brought the war to an end. Or so they believed.

There was, however, a third phase to the war. Solano López escaped, formed a new army in the Cordillera east of Asunción, and began a guerrilla campaign. Caxias had returned to Brazil after the fall of Asunción (believing the mission accomplished!), and in March D Pedro appointed his son-in-law, Gastão de Orléans, the conde d’Eu, commander of the allied forces. Solano López was defeated and his troops massacred in the last great battle of the war at Campo Grande or Acosta Nu, north-east of Asunción on 16 August 1869. Even now Solano López himself escaped capture. He and his Irish companion Eliza Alicia Lynch were pursued northwards by Brazilian troops for a further six months before he was finally cornered and killed at Cerro Cora in the extreme northeast of Paraguay on 1 March. The first contingents of voluntários da patria from Minas Gerais, Bahia and Pernambuco had already left Paraguay. They were received as war heroes on their arrival in Rio de Janeiro on 23 February (as was the conde d’Eu on 19 April). A preliminary peace treaty was signed on 27 July 1870.

Why did it take so long for the allies to bring the war to a successful conclusion despite their overwhelming naval and, at least after Tuiutí, military superiority? At the beginning of the war Mitre had boasted, famously, that the allies would be in Asunción within three months. In the event it was almost four years before the allies reached the Paraguayan capital. Even then the war dragged on for more than another year. The explanation lies, on the one hand, on the allied side, or rather on the Brazilian side, since after the first year or so Brazil fought the war practically alone. Brazilian governments faced enormous logistical problems, first organising, then transporting their troops thousands of kilometres either overland or by sea and up river, and finally supplying their troops. Breaking down Paraguay’s excellent land and river defences was not an easy task but it is also true that Brazilian commanders demonstrated a high degree of strategic and tactical ineptitude. On the other hand, the Paraguayan troops, indeed the Paraguayan people, remained loyal to Solano López and fought with extraordinary tenacity and in the end, when national survival was at stake, heroically.

III

There is a myth – a powerful myth, originating in the writings of André Gunder Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, 1967) and Eduardo Galeano (As Veias Abertas da América Latina, 1971) and developed by revisionist Latin American historians on both the Marxist Left and the nationalist Right in the 1970s and 1980s – that in the Paraguayan War or War of the Triple Alliance Brazil and Argentina were instruments of British capitalism, ‘client states’, ‘neocolonies’, prompted and manipulated by an ‘imperialist’ Britain, the ‘indispensable fourth Ally’, into waging war against Paraguay.⁸ Britain’s purpose allegedly was to undermine and destroy Paraguay’s state-led, nationalist economic development ‘model’ created by Dr Francia and his successor Carlos Antonio López in the half century after independence, which supposedly posed a threat to the advance of its own liberal capitalist ‘model’ in the region. More specifically, the aim was to open up the one remaining closed economy in Latin America to British manufactured goods and British capital and to secure for Britain new sources of raw materials, especially cotton, since US supply had been disrupted by the Civil War.

It is an appealing and intellectually stimulating argument, but unfortunately there is little empirical evidence to support a thesis which demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding both of the nature of Britain’s relationship with Brazil (and Argentina) and of British interests in Paraguay. Britain did not exercise the degree of control over Brazil (or Argentina) necessary to manipulate them into waging war against Paraguay, even had it so wished. There were those, not least among the British merchant community in Buenos Aires, who believed that Paraguay was an ‘American China’ of enormous potential for British trade and investment, but they constituted a small minority with little influence over British policy and their views were in any case scarcely credible. Paraguay was a remote, backward country with a population of no more than 400,000 of which little was known and which was of only marginal interest to the British government, British industrialists, British merchants or the City in the first half of the 19th century. There is no indication that interest in Paraguay as a market for British exports or source of raw materials increased in the 1860s. As for the British textile industry’s dependence on imported cotton about which so much has been made in the literature, Britain had already located alternative sources to the American South – the British West Indies, Egypt and Brazil. Moreover, Britain had no wish to worsen existing quarrels in the Río de la Plata, much less promote war, which could only threaten the free navigation of the Paraná and Paraguay rivers, British trade and British lives and property.

On the actual course of events leading to war, from the Brazilian invasion of Uruguay in October 1864, with the acquiescence of Argentina, in defiance of the ultimatum issued by the Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López to López’s invasion of the Brazilian province of Mato Grosso in December and the Argentine province of Corrientes in April 1865, Britain had, it seems, little influence. British interests were obviously greater in Argentina and Brazil than in Paraguay, and Edward Thornton, the British minister in Buenos Aires, who had responsibility for Paraguay, and British merchants on the spot, were critical of the Solano López regime, had contempt for the Paraguayans, generally blamed Paraguay for the war and favoured the allies, which has led to a great deal of misunderstanding. But the British government did nothing to encourage or promote war, was neutral throughout, did nothing actively to seek Paraguay’s defeat and consistently used its influence in the interests of peace. It is true that British manufacturers sold arms and ammunition to the belligerents – i.e. in practice to Brazil and Argentina, since Paraguay quickly came under a Brazilian blockade. But this was business, an opportunity for private interests in Britain, as for that matter in France and Belgium, to do well out of a war. It is also true that the £7 million loan raised by Rothschilds for the Brazilian government in September 1865 was used to buy warships, and in this sense Britain made an important contribution to the eventual victory of the allies over Paraguay. However, no further loans were made to Brazil for the duration of the war. Carlos Marichal has calculated that British loans represented only 15 per cent of total expenditure by Brazil (and 20 per cent of total expenditure by Argentina) on the Paraguayan War.⁹

It is true that Britain made little effort to mediate but it is also true that neither Paraguay nor the allies were much interested in mediation. Britain had its own dispute with the Paraguayan government over its refusal to release British subjects held in Paraguay against their will (mainly because so many of them were essential to the Paraguayan war effort). After the summer of 1865 it was impossible to get out of Paraguay. On three occasions British warships went through the Brazilian blockade to reach trapped British subjects.¹⁰ But there was no great show of force or direct intervention on behalf of the allies. As British ministers insisted throughout, there was never the slightest danger of Britain itself being dragged into the Paraguayan War.

Finally, if Britain really had been as deeply involved in the Paraguayan War as some historians would have us believe, it was a well-kept secret at home. Sir Richard Burton, the British scholar and explorer, consul in Santos (1865–8) and author of Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil (2 vols., 1869), travelled to Paraguay to report on the war. Burton was in Paraguay twice; for three weeks in August to September 1868 and two weeks in April 1869. His excellent Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870), it is claimed, greatly influenced Conrad in the writing of Nostromo. Returning to Britain at the end of the war Burton found in London a ‘blankness of face whenever the word Paraguay ... was named and a general confession of utter ignorance and hopeless lack of interest’.¹¹ There is no avoiding the conclusion that the prime responsibility for the Paraguayan War lay with Brazil, Argentina, to a lesser extent Uruguay, and of course, most of all, sadly, Paraguay itself.

IV

The large number of Brazilian first-hand accounts of the war by Brazilians include Reminiscências da Campanha do Paraguai, 1865–70 (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército, 1980) by General Dionísio Cerqueira; André Rebouças, Diário: A guerra do Paraguai (1866) (São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos Avançados da Universidade de São Paulo, 1973); and the various writings of Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay – Em Matto Grosso (1866–7), Marcha das forças (expedição de Matto Grosso: 1866–7), Recordações de guerra e de viagem, Memórias and, above all, La retraite de Laguna (see below). Equally valuable are the writings of Bartolomé Mitre, published as volumes 1–VI of the Archivo del General Mitre (Buenos Aires, 1911–13), and other Argentine and Paraguayan participants in the war. Accounts by foreign combatants and outside observers include, besides Sir Richard Burton, Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (1870) (see above), The War in Paraguay (1869) by Colonel George Thompson, the former British army officer and specialist in fortifications and entrenchment who was one of Solano López’s senior military engineers until his capture by the allies in 1868; Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869) by George Frederick Masterman, the young British military apothecary who directed the pharmaceutical services of the Paraguayan army until his arrest for plotting against Solano López in 1868; and The History of Paraguay, With Notes of Personal Observations (1871) by Charles Ames Washburn, who was US minister in Asuncion until his expulsion in 1868.

The war literature produced in Brazil during the Paraguayan War – novels such as Amores de um voluntário, plays like Um herói do Riachuelo performed at Teatro São José in São Paulo and Os voluntários da honra at the Teatro Santa Isabel in Recife – was not of a high quality. More interesting and of more lasting value was the literature not directly related to the war but reflecting an emerging Brazilian patriotism/nationalism. One of Brazil’s greatest poets Castro Alves, who had enlisted as a voluntário in August 1865, aged 18, and served for four months, presented his play Gonzaga ou a Revolução de Minas based on the life of the 18th century mineiro poet Tomas A. Gonzaga at the Teatro São João in Salvador da Bahia in 1867. It enormously impressed José de Alencar and Machado de Assis (‘o jovem Dante’ they called him) and served as his passport to literary circle in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Famous for his poetry directed against slavery, Castro Alves also dedicated poems to the campaign to help orphans of the heroes of the war. At the end of the War Castro Alves published his first book of poems Espumas Flutuantes (1870), social realist in theme, romantic in sentiment, before his early death, aged 24, in 1871. Machado de Assis himself, like Alencar, was best known for articles, essays in newspapers, especially his crónicas in support of the War (up to the invasion of Paraguay) in the Diário de Rio de Janeiro, 1864–5. Alencar had published his famous novel Iracema in 1865, but Machado’s great novels came later. However, John Gledson has made a good case for the influence of the Paraguayan War on Machado’s novels, Iaiá Garcia (1878), Bras Cubas (1881), Quincas Borba (1891) and especially Dom Casmurro (1899).¹²

The one undoubted literary masterpiece produced by the war was Alfredo d’Escragnolle Taunay’s La retraite de Laguna, an account of a failed Brazilian military operation in Mato Grosso early in 1867 by a then engineer, later novelist (Inocência, 1872) and historian. It was written and first published in French by the Imprensa Nacional in 1871. A Portuguese translation by Salvador de Mendonça followed in 1874. La retirada de Laguna stands with Os sertões (1902), on the Canudos rebellion in the interior of Bahia in 1897, by Euclides da Cunha, also an engineer, as one of the classic works of Brazilian literature. Another Brazilian classic, which has a great deal on both the origins and the conduct of the war is Joaquim Nabuco’s biography of his father: Um estadista do Império: Nabuco de Araújo [1898–99] (5th edn., 2 vols., Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 1997).

The war also generated an extraordinarily rich iconography. Best known perhaps is the work of Cándido López, the young painter from Buenos Aires who joined the Argentine forces at the outbreak of the war, lost his right arm at the battle of Curupaití, taught himself to paint with his left hand and spent the next 20 years painting in oil from earlier sketches and notes the scenes and especially the battles he had witnessed.¹³ Several Brazilian artists, notably Victor Meireles de Lima (Batalha Naval de Riachuelo, Passagem de Humaitá) and Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo (the magnificent Batalha do Avaí, 10 x 5 metres) painted battle scenes, although unlike Cándido López they were trapped in the aesthetic of academic neoclassicism first introduced into Brazil by the French artistic mission of 1816. The Italian naval officer and amateur artist Edoardo de Martino, who arrived in Montevideo in 1864 and Rio de Janeiro in 1868, was commissioned by D. Pedro to accompany Admirals Tamandaré and Barroso and record the naval battles of the War. The Swiss-born Argentine Adolf Methfessel, the Argentine José Ignacio Garmendia, the Uruguayan Juan Manuel Blanes, the Paraguayans whose woodcuts were published in the illustrated journals Cabichuí and El Centinela – all left lasting images of the war. Most interesting, and useful, perhaps, is the work of two outstanding Brazilian caricaturists: the German-born Henrique Fleiuss, who had arrived in Brazil in 1858, aged 35, and the ltalian-born Angelo Agostini, who had arrived in Brazil in 1859, aged 16. Fleiuss’s work appeared in Semana Ilustrada, Rio de Janeiro’s (and Brazil’s) first great illustrated weekly (1860–76). Agostini’s work, even more brilliant and certainly more savage, appeared first in O Diabo Coxo (1864) and O Cabrião (1866–7) in São Paulo, then in O Arlequim (1867) and, beginning in 1868, in Vida Fluminense (1868–75), both published in Rio de Janeiro – and later in Revista Ilustrada (1876–98).¹⁴

The Paraguayan War was the first South American war to be recorded by photographers. Photographs were the basis for the lithographs published in the illustrated press in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and European capitals as well as a key source for historical paintings. We do not have a complete visual record of the Paraguayan War of the kind provided by Mathew Bray and his assistants, notably Alexander Gardner, for the American Civil War. The firm of Bate & Co., established by the Irish-born American photojournalist George Thomas Bate in Montevideo (Bate & Co. W. after it was sold to Bate’s Belgian partner Juan Vander Weyde in May 1866), was a pioneer in battlefield photography in the early years of the war. A collection of the work of Javier López and his assistant can be found in the Biblioteca Nacional in Montevideo. The Brazilian government sent photographers to document the later stages of the war. See the album of Carlos César Recordações de la Guerra do Paraguay on the siege of Humaitá and two albums by unidentified photographers Lembranças do Paraguay and Excursões ao Paraguay on the occupation of Asunción in the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁵

During the war there was an outpouring of patriotic music – hymns and songs such as Hino da guerra, Hino da vitória, Vitória ou morte, Viva o Brasil, Os voluntários da pátria, A vitória de Paissandú, Os vencedores, Aliança triunfante ou Queda do tirano López, etc.¹⁶ But the most remarkable musical creation in this period, though only indirectly related to the war, was the opera Il Guarany by Antônio Carlos Gomes, Brazil’s (and Latin America’s) greatest 19th century composer. Very much influenced by Verdi, it was written in Italy, where Gomes spent the entire period of the war. However, based on the novel O Guarani (1857) by José de Alencar which was set in 16th-century colonial Brazil, its theme was nativist. It was first performed at La Scala, Milan on 19 March 1870 (less than three weeks after the end of the war), but then nine months later (2 December) at the Teatro Lírico Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro. Neither performance included the Sinfonia overture which was added in 1871 and became a second Brazilian national anthem. O Guarani was a huge success in Europe and throughout the Americas and has remained in the repertoire ever since.

Towards the end of the war, on 3 May 1869, a few days before his 40th birthday, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a native of New Orleans, the greatest North American composer and virtuoso pianist of the 19th century, arrived in Rio de Janeiro at the end of his first South American tour. Hugely popular throughout the Americas for his romantic compositions for orchestra, orchestra and piano and solo piano and his lively, syncopated piano pieces (50 years before ragtime), he had visited Lima and Santiago before spending two years between Montevideo and Buenos Aires – both countries at war. He found in Rio what he regarded as the most vigorous musical scene in the New World. His first concert, on 3 June, at the Teatro Lírico Fluminense in the presence of the Emperor D. Pedro and members of royal family, like many subsequent concerts during next three months, was sold out. For his first concerto monstro à la Berlioz on 5 October he arranged music (including his own) for 16 pianos, 32 pianists and two orchestras. And for the ‘biggest concert ever’ at the Teatro Lírico Fluminense, on 24 November, he employed 650 performers and nine bands (fewer in fact than he had gathered together for a concert in the Grand Tacón theatre in Havana in 1860). The concert ended, to huge public acclaim, with his Grande fantaisie triomphale sur l’hymne national bresilien (op. 69) for solo piano work composed in Brazil and his Gran Marcha Solemne, composed in Santiago for a Chilean audience, but re-worked first in Buenos Aires, then in Rio de Janeiro, with the help of the Brazilian pianist Arthur Napoleão. It was dedicated to the Emperor and re-titled, significantly, Humaitá. The concert was due to be repeated two days later. In the meantime, at a regular concert at the Sociedade Philarmonica Fluminense on 25 November, immediately after playing one of his most popular compositions Tremolo on his favourite Chickering grand piano imported from Boston, Gottschalk faltered at the start of a work entitled Morte! (op. 60) and collapsed over the keyboard. He died three weeks later on 18 December at Bennett’s Hotel in Tijuca, four years to the day after the death of Francisco Manoel da Silva, the composer of Brazil’s national anthem.¹⁷

V

The Paraguayan War was for Paraguay an almost unqualified disaster.¹⁸ In the event Paraguay survived as an independent state, although in the immediate post-war period under Brazilian occupation and tutelage. (2,000 Brazilian troops and six Brazilian warships were only finally withdrawn in July 1876.) The ultimate consequence of total defeat – total dismemberment – was avoided, but its territory was reduced by 40 per cent. What was left of Paraguay’s army was disarmed, its famous and formidable river fortifications permanently dismantled. Although population loss has been grossly exaggerated – even put as high as 60 or 70 per cent of Paraguay’s (usually inflated) pre-war population, more modest recent estimates of 15–20 per cent of a much smaller pre-war population, i.e. 50–80,000 deaths, in battle as well as from disease (measles, small pox, yellow fever and cholera), are enormously high percentages by the standards of any modern war.¹⁹ Paraguay’s economy was left in ruins, its manufacturing base and infrastructure destroyed, the beginnings of development outwards through greater trade and closer integration into the world capitalist economy set back a generation. Finally, a huge indemnity was imposed by the victors, although this was never collected and eventually cancelled (not, however, in the case of Brazil until the Second World War).

Argentina suffered estimated (possibly exaggerated) losses of 18,000 in battle, plus 5,000 in internal disturbances triggered by the war and 12,000 in cholera epidemics. The territory it gained fell short of its ambitions. In the treaty it finally signed with Paraguay in February 1876 it secured Misiones and the Chaco Central between the rivers Bermejo and Pilcomayo. Astute Brazilian diplomacy kept Argentina out of the Northern Chaco between the rivers Pilcomayo and Verde. (This area Argentina was persuaded to submit to arbitration, and in November 1878 US President Rutherford Hayes awarded it to Paraguay.) Nevertheless, an increasingly strong, potentially expansionist Paraguay had been removed from the politics of the Río de la Plata. On balance the war had contributed positively to national consolidation: Entre Rios and Corrientes had not broken ranks; montonero rebellions in various provinces had been suppressed; Buenos Aires was accepted as the undisputed capital of a united Argentine republic; Argentine national identity had been considerably strengthened. The ground had been laid for Argentina’s remarkable economic, social and political transformation during the following half century.

Brazil, which had made the major contribution to the war effort, suffered human losses totaling at least 50,000 in combat, and more from disease, though fewer than the total of 100,000 sometimes claimed. The financial cost of the war put a great strain on Brazil’s public finances. Brazil had, however, successfully realised all its objectives. Under the treaty signed with Paraguay in January 1872 Brazil gained all the territory it claimed between the Rio Apa and the Rio Branco. Argentina had also gained territory but had been kept out of the northern Chaco. Free navigation of the rivers Paraguay and Paraná, important to Mato Grosso and western São Paulo, had been secured. And Paraguay itself, even more than Uruguay, was now firmly under Brazilian influence and control. Brazil had consolidated for the time being its undisputed regional hegemony, although rivalry with Argentina would continue long after the fall of the empire in 1889.

The war had a profound impact on the Brazilian economy, society and politics. It had stimulated Brazilian industry, directly in the case of cotton textile mills (for army uniforms) and Rio’s arsenal, indirectly as a result of the protectionism provided by the higher general import tariffs imposed to finance government deficits. The war also modernised Brazil’s infrastructure and rudimentary state organisation, which suddenly and unexpectedly became responsible for the recruitment, training, clothing, arming and transportation of a large standing army engaged in a war beyond Brazil’s borders.

At the same time the war sharpened social tensions in Brazil in a number of ways – the inevitable result of mass mobilisation (and, after the war, demobilisation). It is not easy to disentangle the impact of the emancipation of the slaves in the United States (and other international influences and pressures at the time, notably from Great Britain and France) from the impact of the Paraguayan War itself – justified as a war between civilisation and barbarism – in explaining the beginnings of a change in the intellectual and political climate in Brazil on the issue of slavery. The fact is that it was necessary, as we have seen, to offer freedom to the several thousand slaves recruited to fight in the war. Moreover, prompted by the emperor, various projects for the gradual, though even now not immediate, abolition of slavery in Brazil were brought before the Council of State during the early years of the war. At the same time the war provided a reason, or a pretext, for delaying any significant steps towards the final abolition of slavery in Brazil. Nevertheless, the ground was prepared for at least a law of free birth, introduced and passed in 1871 immediately after the war (see Essay 4).

The Paraguayan War also stimulated discussion of political reform in Brazil. The conflict between on the one hand Caxias, the Brazilian commander in chief from October 1866 (and from January 1868 the allied commander) and a leading Conservative politician, and on the other Zacarias, Liberal prime minister again from August 1866, dominated the middle years of the war, and raised for the first time in Brazil the question of civilian control of the military. It culminated in the socalled Conservative ‘coup’ of July 1868 (which was also aimed at slowing down progress towards abolition).²⁰ Zacarias’s resignation, however, led directly to the formation of various new Radical and Liberal centres and clubs, many of them close to the conde d’Eu, the emperor’s French son-in-law, commander of the Brazilian forces in Paraguay in the final stages of the war (from March 1869) and a well-known Liberal (and opponent of slavery). A Reform Manifesto (May 1869) raised a wide range of political and constitutional issues and proposed among other things greater autonomy for the judiciary, limited tenure for senators, a reduction of the powers of the Council of State and slave emancipation. This was followed in November 1869 by a Radical manifesto, which added to the reform agenda an extension of the suffrage, the election of provincial presidents and an end to the Emperor’s ‘moderating power’ (used to remove Zacarias from power), and in December 1870 a Republican manifesto and the formation of the Republican party.

The Paraguayan War also produced for the first time in Brazil a modern, professional army that aspired to play a political role and was increasingly dissatisfied with Brazil’s existing political institutions.²¹ The link between the Paraguayan War, the questão militar in the 1870s and 1880s and the military coup of November 1889 that overthrew the empire and established a republic in Brazil, only 18 months after the abolition of slavery, is too well known to require elaboration here. For many Brazilian historians Brazil’s victory in the Paraguayan War represents a division of the waters in the history of the slave-based monarchy, both its apogee and the beginning of its decline – something therefore of a Pyrrhic victory.

* This essay is based on ‘O Brasil no mundo [1822–1889]’, in L. Moritz Schwarcz (ed.), História do Brasil Nação vol. II, J.M. de Carvalho (ed.), Construção nacional 1830–89 (Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE and Rio de Janeiro: Editora Objetiva, 2012), pp. 157–68, which drew on ‘A Guerra do Paraguai: história e historiografia’, ‘O imperialismo britânico e a Guerra do Paraguai’ and ‘A Guerra do Paraguai: cronologia’, in M.E. Castro Magalhães Marques (ed.), A Guerra do Paraguai: 130 anos depois (Rio de Janeiro: Editores Relume Dumará, 1995) and The Paraguayan War (1864–1870) (Research paper, Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 1996).

1 450,000 people (two-thirds Russian) lost their lives in the Crimean War. There were, of course, several prolonged and extremely savage civil wars in the middle decades of the 19th century, notably the Taiping Civil Wars in China in the 1850s and 1860s, with incalculable loss of life, and the American Civil War (1861–65), in which more than 600,000 Yankee and Confederate soldiers died. In The Age of Capital (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975), Eric Hobsbawm described the 1860s as ‘by any standards … a decade of blood’.

2 In The British in Paraguay, 1850–1870 (Oxford, 1976), Josefina Plá estimated that there were 200 British subjects (excluding women and children) in Paraguay in the period before the War, most of them under contract to the government, either as engineers employed in the shipyard, the arsenal at Asunción, the iron foundry at Ibicui, constructing railways and telegraph lines, or in the army medical corps. Paraguay’s chief engineer from 1855 was the Scotsman William K. Whytehead. Paraguay’s agents in London, J. and A. Blyth of Limehouse, supplied industrial and military hardware (pig iron, railway materials, arms and ammunition, even a steam warship or two).

3 On the origins of the Paraguayan War, the modern secondary literature begins with Pelham Horton Box, The Origins of the Paraguayan War (1927), a useful but traditional (predominantly diplomatic) account, in which Solano López is largely blamed for the war. See also R.J. Cárcano, Guerra del Paraguay: orígenes y causas (Buenos Aires, 1939) and Guerra del Paraguay: acción y reacción de la triple alianza (2 vols. Buenos Aires, 1941); L.A. Moniz Bandeira, O expansionismo brasileiro e a formação dos estados na Bacia do Prata: da colonização à Guerra da Tríplice Aliança [1974] (3rd edn., Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan/Brasilia: Editora da UnB, 1998); Alfredo da Mota Menezes, Guerra do Paraguai. Como construímos o conflito (Cuiabá, MT, 1998); M. Pastore, ‘Análisis de las causas económicas de la Guerra del Paraguay’, Revista Paraguaya de Sociologia, 39 (2002); and T.L. Whigham, The Paraguayan War, vol. 1 Causes and Early Conflict (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002). On the War itself, see Fancisco Doratioto, Maldita Guerra. Nova história da Guerra do Paraguay (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002); L. Capdevila, Una guerra totale: Paraguay, 1864–1870 (Buenos Aires, 2010); and in English the long-awaited second volume by T. Wigham, The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay Versus the Triple Alliance 1866–1870 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2017).

4 For comparative data on population, government revenue, armed forces, etc., see D. Abente, ‘The War of the Triple Alliance: three explanatory models’, Latin American Research Review 22 (1987), Table 1 Regional power capabilities of Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, c. 1860, Table 2 Weighted index of power capabilities.

5 On the mass recruitment for the war, especially of blacks (slave, freed and free), see R. Salles, Guerra do Paraguai: escravidão e cidadania na formação do exército (São Paulo, 1990); H. Kraay, ‘Patriotic mobilisation in Brazil: the Zuavos and other black companies’, in H. Kraay and T.L. Whigham (eds), I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Parguayan War, 1864–1870 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); V. Izecksohn, Slavery and War in the Americas. Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870 (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2014), ch. 3 and 5. In Prince of the People: The Life and Times of a Brazilian Free Man of Colour (London: Verso, 1993), E. Silva offers a singular portrait of one free black voluntário, Cândido da Fonseca Galvão, better known as Dom Oba II d’Africa. See also E. Silva, ‘O Príncipe Oba, um voluntário da pátria’, in M.E. Castro Magalhães Marques (ed.), A Guerra do Paraguai: 130 anos depois (Rio de Janeiro: Editores Relume Dumará, 1995).

6 Francisco Doratioto provides the following estimates of Brazilian troops enlisted after the outbreak of the War (joining a regular army of c.18,000 men): voluntários da patria, 54,992; Guarda Nacional, 59,669; general recruitment and slaves freed to serve, 8,489, in Maldita Guerra, p. 458.

7 A. Tasso Fragoso, História da Guerra entre a Tríplice Aliança e o Paraguai (5 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1934) is the classic Brazilian military history of the war.

8 See, for example, L. Pomer, La Guerra del Paraguay. Gran negocio! (Buenos Aires, 1968; Port. trans. São Paulo, 1980); J.J. Chiavenatto, Genocídio Americano: A Guerra do Paraguai (São Paulo, 1979); J.A. Fornos Peñalba, ‘The fourth ally: Great Britain and the War of the Triple Alliance’, unpublished University of California PhD thesis, 1979. For an alternative view, see L. Bethell, ‘O imperialismo britânico e a Guerra do Paraguai’, in M.E. Castro Magalhães Marques (ed.), A Guerra do Paraguai: 130 anos depois (Rio de Janeiro: Editores Relume Dumará, 1995), pp. 131–64; reprinted in Estudos Avançados 9 (1995). See also J.C. Herken Krauer and Maria Gimenez de Herken (Paraguayan historians), Gran Bretana y la Guerra de la Triple Alianza (Asuncion, 1983); and most recently A. da Mota Menezes (a Brazilian historian), A Guerra é Nossa. A Inglaterra não provocou a Guerra do Paraguai (São Paulo, 2012).

9 C. Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 92–3.

10 E.N. Tate, ‘Britain and Latin America in the 19th century: the case of Paraguay, 1811– 1870’, Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv (1979), pp. 62–3.

11 R. Burton, Letters from the Battlefieids of Paraguay (London, 1870), p. vii.

12 J. Gledson, The Deceptive Realism of Machado de Assis (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), pp. 140–56.

13 See Cándido López (Buenos Aires: Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 1971), texts by Marta Gil Solá and Marta Dujovne, and Cándido López (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Banco Velox, 1998), text by Marcelo Pacheco.

14 See H. Lima, História da Caricatura no Brasil (4 vols., Rio de Janeiro, 1963), vol. 1, and M.C. Silveira, A Batalha de Papel. A Guerra do Paraguai através da caricatura (Porto Alegre: L & PM Editores, 1996).

15 On the iconography of the Paraguayan War, see M.A. Cuarterolo, Soldados de la Memoría. Hombres e imágenes de la Guerra del Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta, 2000) and ‘Images of war: photographers and sketch artists of the Triple Alliance Conflict’ in H. Kraay and T.L. Whigham (eds.), I Die with My Country, Perspectives on the Paraguayan War, 1864– 1870 (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); André Meneses Toral, Imagens em desordem. A iconografia da Guerra do Paraguay (1864–1870) (São Paulo: Humanitas, 2001); and, most important, Ricardo Salles, Guerra do Paraguay. Memorias e Imagens (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Biblioteca Nacional, 2003).

16 See M. de Moura Reis, A Musica Militar no Brasil do seculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Militar, 1952), which has an entire section on ‘patriotic songs of the Paraguayan War’. Vinícius Mariano de Carvalho is engaged on a study of the military bands and the music they played during the Paraguayan War. For example, five pieces composed by Filippe Neri de Barcellos, band master of the 7th battalion of Voluntários da Pátria dated February 1866 were discovered in the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio de Janeiro: O rompante de Lopes, O attaque do Riachoelo, O explendido triumpho de Uruguayanna, Hymno de Gloria (O Imperador do Brasil) and A patiada aos paraguays. See V.M. de Carvalho and R. McMahon, Military Music in the War of the Triple Alliance: Explanatory Notes and Revealed Manuscripts, unpublished MS.

17 On Gottschalk, see S.F. Starr, Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), re-issued in paperback as Louis Moreau Gottschalk (Urbana, Ill., 2000). Gottschalk’s autobiography, Notes of a Pianist, ed. and trans. from the original French by his sister Clara Gottschalk Peterson (Philadelphia, 1881), covers his tours of the West Indies, 1857–62, the United States, 1862–65 and South America, 1865–68. Unfortunately, it ends before his visit to Brazil in 1869. On the last seven months of his life in Rio de Janeiro, see ‘Vida y muerte de Louis Moreau Gottschalk en Rio de Janeiro (1869)’, Revista de Estudios Musicales’, Universidad de Cuyo, I, August 1950, vol. II nos 5 & 6, December 1950/April 1951 by the German born Uruguayan scholar Francisco Curt Lange. See also, J.M. de Carvalho, ‘Gottschalk: Glória e Morte de um pianista no Rio’, in Pontes e Bordados. Escritas de história e política (Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 1998).

18 See J. Hoyt Williams, The Rise and Fall of the Paraguayan Republic, 1800–1870 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1979), the best history of the Paraguayan republic up to and including the war since E. Cardozo, Paraguay independiente (1949); H.G. Warren, Paraguay and the Triple Alliance: the Postwar Decade 1869–1878 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1978).

19 On the much debated question of Paraguay’s losses and the demographic impact of the War, see V. Blinn Reber, ‘The demographics of Paraguay: a reinterpretation of the Great War, 1864–70’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 68, (1988) and ‘Critique’ by T.L. Whigham and B. Potthast, HAHR, 70 (1990); and a later exchange of views between Reber, Whigham, Potthast and J.M.G. Kleinpenning, in Latin American Research Review, 37 (2002). See also V. Blinn Reber, ‘A case of total war: Paraguay, 1865–1870’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, 5 (1999).

20 On domestic politics in Brazil during the Paraguayan War, see R. Graham, ‘Brazil from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Paraguayan War’, in L. Bethell (ed.), The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 789–91, and Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: the Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), ch. 5 & 6.

21 On the militarisation of politics and the politicisation of the military in Brazil during the war, see W. Peres Costa, A Espada de Damocles: o exército, a Guerra do Paraguai e a crise do império (São Paulo, 1996); V. Izecksohn, O Cerne da Discordia. A Guerra do Paraguay e o Núcleo Profissional do Exército (Rio de Janeiro, 2002); and F. Doratioto, General Osório. A espada liberal do Império (São Paulo, 2008).