Blood tribute

An older law had already established conscription by sortition in 1874, but popular resistance from the "list rippers" prevented its implementation, and forced recruitment continued to exist in practice.

The state had a low degree of bureaucratization and grasp over the population, leaving the administration of recruitment to the influence of local elites.

Recruitment was violent, called "human hunting", and military service took place under harsh conditions and was considered a punishment.

Central authorities, wishing to fill the ranks without harming the economy, lived in a precarious balance with administrative agents, who needed to fulfill the task without interfering in patronage networks, and the free population.

The great demand for troops in the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) overloaded the system and created tension in its social relations.

Both military officers and reformist parliamentarians wanted to reform recruitment throughout the 19th century, seeking to civilize the "human hunt" and modernize the Armed Forces.

The 1874 reform attempt failed because it threatened the society's mode of coexistence with impressment, and even the first military lottery in 1916 came eight years after the new law was passed in 1908.

[2][3] These were replaced in the Empire of Brazil by the National Guard, whose recruitment (called "enlistment") was complementary and antagonistic, absorbing personnel of a higher social level.

[11] The violence and arbitrariness of recruitment, added to the harsh discipline and low remuneration in service, gave it the connotation of punishment,[12][13][14] being associated with captivity in the popular imagination.

[24] During long periods of service, older soldiers became attached to their chiefs, installed their families near the barracks, and were accompanied by their women on campaign.

[28] Police forces had few means to act, there was a lack of qualified manpower in the administration and it was very difficult to maintain a civil registry and carry out a population census.

There was resistance to the census, as in the Ronco da Abelha [pt] revolt, and one of the reasons was precisely fear of recruitment.

[37] Once coronelism developed, the threat of recruitment was one of the ways through which coronéis (local oligarchs) intimidated voters into voting as they wished.

[41] The abandonment of towns and cities and the flight of young men harmed the economy:[11] "at their approach journeymen disappeared and harvests were lost".

Exempt individuals were captured, but provincial presidents, representatives of the Crown, released many of the recruits, reinforcing their legitimacy.

[51] Those recruited were "vagrants, ex-slaves, orphans, criminals, migrants, unskilled workers and the unemployed", contributing to the degrading connotation of military service.

[52] The barracks were "the male equivalent of brothels", and the soldiers, seen as "degenerates, criminals, sick, misfits and social irrecoverables".

[58] Distributive justice was the problem in the choice of recruits, governed not only by the law but also by a "moral economy of unwritten rules" and conceptions of who should receive the burdens.

[28] The "honorable poor", small farmers who fulfilled their family and National Guard obligations, saw recruitment and patronage as a natural way of differentiating themselves from socially undesirable individuals.

[63] In 1874, João José de Oliveira Junqueira Júnior [pt], the Minister of War, calculated that the arrest 20,000 people would be needed to make 2,000 recruits.

[39] From 1860 to 1875, the provinces of Alagoas, Amazonas, Espírito Santo, Maranhão, Pará, Pernambuco and Sergipe, in addition to the Court, contributed a number of recruits proportionally greater than their population.

The provinces of Bahia, Minas Gerais, Paraíba, Rio Grande do Norte, Santa Catarina and São Paulo had a lower per capita contribution.

The war required large-scale forced recruitment, arresting men traditionally free from military service.

[65][66] The "sanctity" of the domestic environment was threatened, and "family men" were forced to serve alongside slaves and criminals.

[70] In the Legislature, it had been discussed since 1827 and the current model was condemned in rhetoric, but successive projects failed to eliminate it, showing how much it was still convenient for power.

[71] In Europe, a reference for the Brazilian elite, the model after the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) was that of industrialization, states with greater control over the population and large conscript armies, which, after 1 to 3 years of service, went into a growing reserve, to be mobilized during wartime through rail networks.

In August 1875, on the day scheduled for the start of the enlistment, crowds of "list rippers" in ten provinces impeded the work.