André Rebouças

André Pinto Rebouças was born on the thirteenth of January 1838 at Cachoeira in the province of Bahia, the son of Antônio Pereira Rebouças — a free-born mulatto lawyer who served as a deputy in the Brazilian general assembly under the Empire — and Carolina Pinto Rebouças. The Rebouças family represented one of the very few Afro-Brazilian household lineages permitted access to professional formation under the imperial system.

He entered the Imperial Military School at sixteen and graduated in 1861 with degrees in mathematics, physical sciences and military engineering — the first Black engineer commissioned in the Empire of Brazil. He served as a combat engineer in the Paraguayan War, designing the field fortifications at Curupaytí. After demobilisation he turned to civil engineering: in 1871 he won the imperial concession for the redesign of the port of Rio de Janeiro, the largest infrastructural project of Pedro II's reign, and supervised the construction of the docks at Mauá and the renovation of the wharves of Saúde.

From 1879 he became, with José do Patrocínio (placed in this archive) and Joaquim Nabuco, one of the three principal organisers of the radical abolitionist movement. He co-founded the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão in 1880, drafted the most consequential of its parliamentary memoranda, and used his personal income from the port concession to fund the underground railroad that smuggled escaped slaves out of São Paulo's coffee plantations.

After the proclamation of the Republic in 1889 — which he opposed as a monarchist who had been personally close to Princess Isabel and Pedro II — he followed the imperial family into exile in Europe. He died on the ninth of May 1898 on the island of Funchal in Madeira, possibly by suicide.

He is honored here as the engineer who designed Rio's port and helped end Brazilian slavery.