José Carlos Rodrigues (1844–1922) was a Brazilian journalist, financial expert, and philanthropist, with connections to both the United States and Great Britain. Early life He was born in Cantagallo in the province of Rio de Janeiro, the son of a fazendeiro with extensive coffee estates manned by slaves. After inheriting from an aunt, he freed his slaves before emancipation came about in Brazil. He was educated at the São Paulo Law School, and on one of his rides there was converted to a non-denominational Protestantism by reading a Bible found in a house he stayed in. This gave him both work when he needed it as a young man and an absorbing subject of study in his old age. He was a born journalist; like so many in that profession he started at university, contributing to newspapers and even founding a law review. At nineteen he published an annotated edition of the Brazilian constitution that went through ten editions! After he graduated he began to practise law in Rio, and soon one of his law professors became Minister of Finance and made José Carlos his aide. This was presumably the foundation for his later expertise in financial journalism, and could have launched him early on a brilliant legal and perhaps political career in Brazil. But after a short time he was charged, apparently correctly, with financial irregularity, and fled to the United States. He did not return to Brazil for twenty years, when a statute of limitations meant that he was free from the threat of prosecution. In the United States He went first to Lowell, Massachusetts, and then to New York City. Arriving from Rio almost penniless, he made his living to begin with by translations from English into Portuguese. Some were for a religious society which produced tracts, little works on morals or doctrine which were distributed in great numbers in most Protestant countries. In the early 1870s Rodrigues spent some time in Washington, D.C., where he spent months translating for the Attorney General many pages of American documents on the Alabama claims dispute between the US and Britain. He did not lose touch with Brazil, let alone contemplate becoming an American citizen. He was in correspondence with Joaquim Saldanha Marinho a little before Marinho, a keen Mason, became the leader of the newly formed Republican Party in 1870. He began sending long monthly dispatches to an eminent