During the first half of the nineteenth century the Brazilian Amazon was characterized by extraordinary political and military instability. Its late adhesion to independent Brazil (1823) and the different disturbances that took place at the time were processes involving not only the Luso-Brazilian political elite, but also different groups of runaway slaves and natives who operated along wide and intricate areas of the border, attentive to the revolutionary ideas coming from abroad which played a fundamental role in the construction of the specificity of northern Brazil.