Gathering, recruitment and capture of children in Ceará, 19th century

Abstract

This article deals with the recruitment of poor boys to the Companhia de Aprendizes Marinheiros do Ceará, founded during the Paraguayan War. The ways in which the boys were interned in the institution, often without the consent of their relatives, demonstrate the arbitrariness of the State in the formation of the Armed Forces in Imperial Brazil. The text analyzes the multiple popular resistances against the enrollment of children, attempts by mothers and grandparents to get their children back before being sent to the Marine Corps, and the political and legal tensions that permeated family configurations in the 19th century, emphasizing female resistance, especially single mothers, exercise authority over their own family, far from state intervention. For that purpose, official sources were used (documents of the Presidency of the Province, imperial decrees, letters and circulars), news collected in the main local newspapers of the studied period and books of memoirs.