Às armas cearenses, é justa a guerra: nação, honra, pátria e mobilização para a guerra contra o Paraguai na Província do Ceará: (1865-1870)

Abstract

The present work has the objective to analyze the process of military mobilization to the war against Paraguay (1865-1870) in the Province of Ceara as well as to reflect on the social impacts of the war effort on significant part of the population of Ceara at that period. The war effort demanded for the imperial government a wide movement of military recruitment never seen before in Brazil and felt in the whole national territory. The process of state-owned extraction of recruited pointed out contingents to that conflict, and the interference of the central government in the dynamic of the local life and in the relationships of established power, created a big social tension in the Province of Ceara. In other words, the enlargement of the recruitment meant to come in areas of influence and domain of the powerful locals, what demanded from the imperial State a complex and tense negotiation with the potentates. In spite of the considerable affluence of the soldiers in the first year of war (1865), the post-war years were of great violence and terror in Ceara backlands. The resistance of the recruited target population produced great conflicts in the countryside of the Province, with escape and rescue of recruited, breaks of prisons, attacks on commissions of recruitment, self-mutilations, body injuries, etc. Together with the efforts of the men enlistment to be incorporated into Brazilian military forces, developed also in Ceara, a wide movement call. The speech of call aimed to make war legitimate as well as to motivate the most delicate matters in the military mobilization to the conflict in Province of Ceara, was the call of underage from the Navy Learners Company of Ceara in order to be crewed in the warships of the Brazilian Navy in action in the Prata basin.