As my readers know, Rio Grande do Sul tried to break off from the nation to create the Republic of Pampa. What may not be known by my readers, is that at one point later on in the 19th century, three other states (Pará, Bahia and Pernambuco) sought secession also. In a NYT article from November 12th, 1891 speaks to the possibility. What is surprising is that NYT included a quote towards the bottom which contains the N-word in it in reference to Africans (which I blocked out).

…The Government of the United States of Brazil has endured for almost exactly two years, for it was on the 15th of November, 1889, that Dom Pedro was dethroned by what had the appearance rather of a riot than of a revolution. It could not fairly be said that he was the victim of a popular uprising, for, although the abolition of slavery without compensation was doubtless very extensively resented throughout the empire, the “revolution” was confined to the capital itself, and was the result, in large part, of a military cabal, directed rather against the son-in-law of Dom Pedro than against that amiable monarch.

On the other hand, the revolt against the republic that has suceded the Imperial Government is evidently and unmistakably the result of a widespread popular discontent. It appears to be true that four States – Pará, Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio Grande do Sul – either have seceded or are upon the point of secession from the republic. These four States are so distant from each other that it is plain no local or sectional cause can have operated upon them all. Pará is almost the northernmost and Rio Grande do Sul quite the southernmost of the States of a country of magnificent distances, and these extremities are more than 2,000 miles apart, while Pernambuco occupies the easternmost point of South America and is seperated by some hundreds of miles from Bahia. The seceeding States are so far separated that no two of them are at all in touch with each other.

It is equally significant that these four States are, with the exception of the capital itself, the most commercial, civilized, and modern of all the States of Brazil. They are all on the coast, and Bahia and Pernambuco are in as intimate communication with the outer world as the conditions of Brazilian life permit. Pará is the chief seat of the rubber industry, and it was by reason of the great burdens imposed upon this industry by the Imperial Government that Pará became a centre of disaffection to that Government. In Bahia are several of the few cotton factories the Brazilians have had the enterprise to establish, while Pará, Bahia, and Pernambuco, with Rio, are the principal ports of Brazil. Of its five naval arsenals, one is at Pará, one at Pernambuco, and one at Bahia. Rio Grande do sul is the seat of the industry of “jerked beef,” which plays so important a part in the internal trade of South America, and it is also the State most largely peopled by European colonists. It is easy to see, therefore, that the defection of these four States would result in the complete break-up of Brazil, and that they are far more important to it than the statement of their population would show, although this is serious enough, since of the fourteen millions that are somewhat loosely estimated to inhabit Brazil, these four States contain over 4,300,000, or nearly a third.

This statement of the case indicates that any effort to coerce these provinces back into allegiance to the Central Government would be perfectly futile. Brazil, it is to be remembered, is in much the same situations in which the American colonies were at the time of the Revolution. That is to say, of its vast expanse, all that is necessary to be taken into political account is a thin fringe of population along the seaboard, while the interior is very largely even unexplored and is populated by what CARLYLE somewhere scornfully summerizes as an “unknown fraction of profligate “(n-word) and mulattoes,” and even more largely of savage Indians. If Massachusetts, New-York, Maryland, and South Carolina had seceded from the Union two years after its formation, the situation would have been much like that now presented in Brazil…”