Historians call it the Revolt of the Tailors, the Bahian Conspiracy, the Revolt of Buzios - or, because of the broad working-class base, the First Brazilian Social Revolution. It stood apart from the better-remembered Inconfidência Mineira of 1789, which was led by white elites and never spoke for the enslaved. The Alfaiates conspiracy was different. Its proposals included liberating enslaved people - a proposal so radical in the sugar economy of Bahia that the elites feared it would bring a second Haitian Revolution. Its leaders came from what contemporary sources called "the most oppressed or discriminated classes" of colonial society: freed Black people, enslaved Black people, freed and enslaved pardos (mixed-race people), soldiers, artisans, and above all tailors, whose workshops doubled as meeting rooms.

Salvador was the first capital of colonial Brazil and a city built on sugar, enslaved labor, and global trade. By the 1790s, Enlightenment ideas had reached the city through European books, visiting sailors, and - especially - French intermediaries. The Knights of Light, a Masonic society formally established on July 14, 1797, spread revolutionary pamphlets through its networks. A Frenchman named Larcher, held under military watch in Salvador, founded the society and inspired two of the army lieutenants who would join the conspiracy. But the revolt's heart was not in the salons. It was in the tailors' workshops, where men stitched fabric and talked politics. Lucas Dantas d'Amorim Torres hosted planning meetings at his home. João de Deus do Nascimento, a master tailor, argued the port of Salvador should be "free to all Foreign Nations to come and trade, bringing cloth and all merchandise to be exchanged for sugar, tobacco and other crops of the land without need of Portugal."

Francisco Moniz Barreto, a teacher and member of the Knights of Light, wrote a forty-four-line poem in support of the conspiracy's ideals - independence, equality, liberty, reason. The poem circulated quickly. Luís Gonzaga dos Virgens, a soldier, was arrested on August 22 for spreading propaganda. When they took him to prison, he refused to confess, but he did say something that unsettled his captors: propaganda, he told them, was an excellent way to initiate revolution, "because in this way the people would be encouraged and they would become accustomed little by little to the ideas of liberty and independence." Manuel Faustino dos Santos Lira, the young apprentice tailor, criticized the Catholic Church for defending slavery. Lucas Dantas worked inside his regiment to destabilize the military from within, recruiting other soldiers to the cause. These men were not philosophers writing essays. They were working people arguing for a world in which their own children would not be born enslaved.

Less than two weeks after the first arrests, authorities had apprehended forty people. Thirty-six were brought to trial. Seventeen were absolved. Four received prison sentences. Eight were exiled to Africa - meaning they were shipped as unfree passengers across the Atlantic. Two enslaved conspirators were sold and discharged from the military. Five were sentenced to death; one sentence was later reduced. On November 8, 1799, the four remaining condemned men were publicly hanged, in this order: Lucas Dantas d'Amorim Torres the soldier, Manuel Faustino dos Santos Lira the apprentice tailor, Luís Gonzaga dos Virgens the soldier, João de Deus do Nascimento the master tailor. Lucas Dantas and Manuel Faustino both refused their last rites. All four were Black or mixed-race and poor. Meanwhile, Cipriano Barata de Almeida, a white surgeon educated at the University of Coimbra who had spread the same propaganda, was acquitted. Francisco Moniz Barreto, the poet, was absent from Salvador and faced no punishment.

"The plot and resultant repression," wrote one historian, "demonstrates the divergent goals that previously silent social groups were bringing to the foreground, and the importance of class position in determining the depth of commitment of individual insurgents." Put plainly: the white elites who had flirted with revolutionary ideas walked away free. The Black tailors and soldiers who had actually tried to make those ideas real were hanged. Brazil would not formally abolish slavery until 1888 - ninety years after the tailors were executed - and in 1798 the prospect of a Black-led republic in the most Afro-Brazilian part of the country was not merely dangerous to Portuguese authority. It was existentially threatening to the plantation economy that colonial Bahia was built on. The four men who died did not live to see independence, which came in 1822 but brought slavery with it. Their names now appear on plaques and streets in Salvador. The Praça da Piedade, where they were hanged, bears a monument to the revolt. Brazilian historians came to call them the Inconfidentes Baianos - Bahian Conspirators - which sounds noble. They were also just tailors and soldiers who thought everyone should be free.