Maria Graham at the Confederation of Ecuador
an Englishwoman as a mediator between the Empire and the Republic
Abstract
This article investigates the representativeness of the English writer Maria Graham (1785-1842) in the negotiations for the rendition of the Commander of the Confederacy of Ecuador, Manoel de Carvalho Paes de Andrade, in August 1824. At the request of her friend Admiral Thomas Cochrane, Commander of the Brazilian Imperial Navy, Maria Graham performed the role of a mediator between the capitulation proclamations imposed by the government of Dom Pedro I and the resistance of the seditious republicans to the federalist cause in Pernambuco. The texts Journal of a Voyage to Brazil (1990) and the Biographical Notes of D. Pedro I (1997), constitute the bibliographical sources of this study, whose objective, under new theorical approaches, is to contribute to the re-signification of the English writer in the historiography of Brazilian Independence.