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This article traces the career of LieutenantColonel Francisco Xavier Bigode, the last commander of Salvador’s black militia, the Henrique Dias Regiment (later Battalion), from his enlistment in 1797 to his murder after the 1838 Sabinada Rebellion. It examines how he adapted his Old-Regime baroque ideology and his understandings of the segregated militia’s place in the colonial order to the liberal principles of the newly independent Brazilian empire that continued to pay salaried black militia officers less than their white counterparts and, in 1831, abolished the black militia. Although he was not a leader in the movement for independence, his four-decade military career spanned the entire independence process in Bahia and his choices reveal some of the options available to Brazilians at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]