Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro

Nicolau Pereira de Campos Vergueiro, better known as Senator Vergueiro, was a Portuguese-born Brazilian coffee farmer and politician and slave trader. He was a pioneer in the implementation of a free workforce, as opposed to slavery, in Brazil by bringing the first European immigrants to work in the Ibicaba farm, which he owned. The contract was prepared by Vergueiro himself, establishing ownership of the production and other measures, mostly of an exploitive nature. Faced with this, the immigrants working in Vergueiro's main property, the Ibicaba farm, revolted under the guidance of Thomas Davatz, a Swiss immigrant and religious leader, who instigated the immigrant workers to grow their ambition to become small or medium-sized landowners, as they imagined they would be when they had left Europe.