The author of the Cartas, Lafayette Rodrigues Pereira (1834-1917), was one of the most distinguished jurists in the last two decades of the Brazilian Second Empire. He was also a gifted essayist, a skilled parliamentarian, and an egotist of Rui-like proportions. Once a fervent Republican who signed the Manifesto of 1870, Pereira later defected and regained the complete confidence of Pedro II. In his long political career he served variously as a provincial president (in Maranhão), a federal deputy, a senator, and an ambassador, reaching an apogee in 1883-1884, when he was prime minister in a Liberal cabinet.
With one exception all of the letters included in this volume were written by Pereira between 1863 and 1895 to his brother, Washington Rodrigues Pereira, a minor political figure. The brothers came from Minas Gerais, although most of the letters were written from Rio de Janeiro. Their chief value is the light they shed on the backstage maneuvering of Liberal politicians such as Teófilo Ottoni, the Viscount of Sinimbu, and Manoel Pinto de Sousa Dantas. They illustrate the bitter intraparty divisions between different wings of the Liberal party, particularly within the populous state of Minas Gerais.
The letters are published in extenso, but Pereira’s direct and concise style fortunately emphasizes the political questions most likely to interest modern readers, rather than irrelevant personal and family affairs. The collection has been very ably edited by João Camilo de Oliveira Torres, who also supplies an interesting sketch of Minas politics prior to the career of Pereira and numerous helpful notes which identify persons, places, and publications mentioned in the text. The volume closes with 1) a genealogical sketch of the Pereira family; 2) the well-known speech of Pereira before the Chamber of Deputies on May 29, 1878, in which he advocated electoral reforms; and 3) the speech by Alfredo Pujol of July 23, 1919, before the Brazilian Academy of Letters, a laudatory biographical sketch of Pereira.
Far too often the private letters of prominent Latin Americans are lost to historians. The present collection of 110 letters is evidently only a small portion of those written by Pereira, but their rich content, the ample scholarly apparatus which complements their basic utility, and the importance of their author, will make this book of interest to all historians dealing with politics and politicians of the later empire period. Perhaps the volume will also inspire the comprehensive biography of Conselheiro Lafayette Rodrigues Pereira— the “militant mineiro”—which curiously to date has never appeared.
