4. The decline and fall of slavery in Brazil (1850–88)*

I

In the middle of the 19th century between six and seven million Africans and African-Americans were held in slavery in the three remaining major slave societies in the Americas, more than twice as many as there had been at the time of the first emancipation of slaves in some of the former British colonies in North America during the last quarter of the 18th century and Haiti, the former French colony of St Domingue, in 1804. Most of the Spanish American republics had abolished slavery in the period during and immediately after the wars of independence, Britain in its Caribbean colonies in 1834 and France in its colonies in 1848. There were, however, in the United States four million slaves (compared with half a million at the time of independence in 1776 and under one million in 1800, though now entirely concentrated in the states of the South and ‘border South’), in Brazil between two and two and a half million (compared with under one million in 1800 and between one and one and a half million at the time of independence in 1822) and in the Spanish colony of Cuba 300–400,000 (compared with under 200,000 in 1800). The increase in the number of slaves since 1800 was, above all, a result of the expansion of production for world markets of cotton in the American South, coffee in the south-east of Brazil and sugar in Cuba. Slavery was abolished in the United States during and immediately after the American Civil War (1861–5) – when the slave population was at its peak.¹ It was not, however, abolished in Cuba until 1880–6² and in Brazil until 1888 – in each case after the protracted decline of the slave population.³

The annual injection of new slaves from Africa through the transatlantic slave trade was largely responsible for the steady growth of the slave population during the first half of the 19th century in Brazil (unlike that of the United States where the slave trade was effectively abolished in 1808 and the slave population reproduced itself internally). More than two million African slaves were imported into Brazil between 1800 and 1850⁴, three-quarters of a million or more during the 1830s and 1840s when the trade was entirely illegal under the terms of the Anglo-Brazilian treaty of November 1826 (which the newly independent empire had been required to sign as the price of British recognition and support and which declared the Brazilian trade illegal three years after the treaty’s ratification, i.e. in March 1830) and the Brazilian law of 7 November 1831 (which prohibited the importation of slaves into Brazil). In spite of persistent British diplomatic pressure to persuade Brazil to fulfill its treaty obligations, successive Brazilian governments proved largely unable or unwilling to enforce the 1831 law. The efforts of the British navy to suppress slavery on the high seas were restricted by limited powers and, even after the passage of the notorious Aberdeen Act in 1845, limited resources. Finally, however, the British government’s decision in 1850 to permit the British navy to enter Brazilian territorial waters and ports in pursuit of illegal slave ships, in blatant violation of Brazilian sovereignty, was largely responsible for persuading the Brazilian government to enact new legislation against the slave trade and for the first time effectively to enforce it.⁵ (See Essay 2.)

The final suppression of the transatlantic slave trade by the Brazilian government in 1850–1 dealt a decisive blow to the institution of slavery in Brazil, such was its dependence on massive inflows of new slaves from Africa each year. In contrast to the United States where the slave population grew three or four times between the ending of the slave trade and the outbreak of the Civil War, in Brazil the slave population entered a period of decline immediately after the abolition of the trade: birth rates were lower than in the American South (in part because of the sex ratio within the slave population, itself a reflection of the slave system’s previous dependence on the external supply of slaves, mostly male); mortality rates were higher (in part because of ill treatment but more because of Brazil’s disease and nutritional environment). Brazil also had a long history of both slave manumission and quilombos [settlements of fugitive slaves]. Nevertheless, in 1866–7, when Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro published his great study A Escravidão no Brasil: ensaio histórico, jurídico e social, there were still, he calculated, 1,700,000 slaves in Brazil. Brazil’s first national census in 1872 indicated a slave population of 1,500,000. Slaves, however, constituted only 15 per cent of Brazil’s total population (compared with some 30–40 per cent during the first half of the 19th century for which there are no precise figures).

Since 1850, driven by demand for labour and relative slave prices, there had also been a significant re-location of Brazil’s slave population through an inter-provincial trade (5–6,000 per year for 20 years) from the north and north-east, and to a lesser extent the south, to the centre-south where three provinces – ‘as províncias negreiras da nação’ – Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo – now accounted for more than half of the total slave population. There had also been an intra-provincial trade, including within the Centre-South itself, from the cities to the countryside (in Rio de Janeiro, which had been more a city characterised by slavery than, for example, New Orleans or Havana and where in mid century 40–50 per cent of the population were slaves, the slave population had declined to less than 20 per cent), from less profitable small and medium-sized farms to large plantations, from subsistence and nonexport agriculture to plantation agriculture, especially the production of coffee, and from declining coffee areas in the Paraíba valley to expanding coffee areas in the interior of São Paulo province, where there were actually more slaves than there had been 20 years before.⁶ Slaves, however, could still be found in every province, north and south (there were no ‘free-soil’ provinces in Brazil), in both urban and rural areas and in both export and non-export agriculture. Unlike the United States before Civil War, slavery in Brazil remained a national institution deeply embedded in the economy, society and culture of the entire country.

Slavery in Brazil in 1870 was not doomed inevitably to wither away – at least not in the short and even medium term. It remained highly profitable – as it had been in the American South before the Civil War. There were no signs of a weakening of the Brazilian slave owners’ commitment to slave labour. Slave owners were not consciously turning to free labour from preference, nor yet from necessity, despite the rising cost of slave labour and the beginnings of a problem of slave supply. There was no attempt at a significant mobilisation of free and freed labour in nonexport and subsistence agriculture which now represented over 80 per cent of the rural labour force in the country as a whole (compared with less than 50 per cent in 1822) for work on plantations. Nor was there yet any significant attempt to attract European immigrants to Brazilian agriculture. And slave-owners and their political representatives in parliament – both Conservative and Liberal – had no difficulty justifying slavery. Compared with the American South, there was less of an ideological commitment to slavery as a permanent institution, fewer rationalisations founded on race and identity in Brazil, where over 40 per cent of the total population in the 1872 census was free black or mulatto, but the economic imperatives sustaining slavery were just as strong. How was a free labour market to be organised in conditions of an open frontier and free, unoccupied or only nominally appropriated land, especially in the regions growing coffee, which accounted for 60–70 per cent of Brazil’s exports? Moreover, with access to land, a good deal of spatial mobility and therefore alternative survival strategies, why would small producers, tenants and squatters of various kinds, or rural labourers and peasants sell their labour and submit themselves to the harsh discipline of plantation agriculture which had always been served by and associated with slave labour?

As always, since José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva’s Representação to the Constituent Assembly in 1823 arguing in favour of an end to the slave trade and the gradual emancipation of the slaves, there were in Brazil individual voices denouncing slavery on the grounds of its injustice and its supposed economic inefficiency (for example, Aurélio Cândido Tavares Bastos in Cartas do solitário, 1863), but no widely-held abolitionist opinion. There were a few short-lived philanthropic associations formed to accelerate the processes by which slaves secured their freedom though manumission, but no organised abolitionist movement, no popular mobilisation first against the slave trade, then against the institution of slavery, of the kind seen in Britain and the United States earlier in the century. The Brazilian parliament had rejected a bill introduced by Pedro Pereira da Silva Guimarães in 1852, immediately after the suppression of the slave trade, for the gradual emancipation of the slaves, beginning with freeing of children born to slave mothers, and afterwards it had been silent on the issue for more than a decade and a half.

II

It was the Emperor D. Pedro II who put the future of slavery on the political agenda for the first time in the mid 1860s. He had come to the view that slavery in Brazil could no longer be justified, and that its evident decline since the end of the slave trade should be accelerated, though in a gradual, controlled fashion so as to ensure the minimum of economic and social dislocation. He was also keenly aware of Brazil’s increasing international isolation on this issue: all the Spanish American republics had abolished slavery by this time, and the expected ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution (approved by the Senate in June 1864 and the House of Representatives in January 1865) would finally end slavery throughout the United States. At the same time, the British government never ceased to demand information on the fate of the so-called emancipados (the slaves liberated by the Anglo-Portuguese and Anglo-Brazilian mixed courts in Rio de Janeiro from 1819 to 1845) and Africanos livres (illegally imported slaves captured and liberated by the Brazilian authorities under the law of November 1831 and more particularly in the years immediately after the passage of the law of September 1850) for whom the Brazilian government was responsible. (In September 1864, under intense British pressure, some 5,000 remaining Africanos livres, including emancipados, still held in conditions of semi-slavery were granted letters of emancipation.) More serious because it threatened the very existence of slavery in Brazil, the British government never ceased to insist that all Africans illegally imported since 1830 when the Anglo-Brazilian treaty of 1826 came into effect, together with their children and grandchildren, were legally free. The refusal to repeal the Aberdeen Act of 1845 and the so-called ‘Christie affair’, the British blockade of Rio de Janeiro (December 1862–January 1863), although unauthorised and repudiated, were reminders that Britain was always capable of resorting to force in its dealings with Brazil on issues relating to slavery (see Essay 2).

D. Pedro’s instructions to Zacarias de Góis e Vasconcelos, the newly appointed Liberal-Progressive president of the Council of Ministers in January 1864 began:

In April 1865, the month the American Civil War ended, the emperor invited a well-known jurist and close associate Senator José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, the visconde de São Vicente, to draft legislation not only to improve the condition of the slaves but to move towards gradual abolition by the end of the century. The most important of the five draft bills he submitted in January 1866 proposed that children born to slave mothers would henceforth be free, but it found little support in the Conservative cabinet headed by the Marquês de Olinda, who had replaced Zacarias as Prime Minister.

The main reason (or excuse) offered for inaction was Brazil’s involvement since the end of 1864 in the war (with Argentina and Uruguay) against the López dictatorship in Paraguay. Nevertheless, in August 1866 a new government led by Zacarias caused a political commotion by stating in a reply to an appeal from the Comité Français d’Emancipation, drafted with the emperor’s full knowledge, that ‘the emancipation of the slaves, a necessary consequence of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, is therefore only a question of form and opportunity’. In October, as the shortage of manpower in the war became critical, and despite deep divisions in the Council of State on the issue, the decision was taken to free state-owned slaves [escravos da nação], slaves owned by the Church and religious orders and, finally, privately owned slaves to serve in the army, although no undue pressure was brought to bear on slave-owning fazendeiros [plantation owners] because of the needs of Brazilian agriculture and in the end only a few thousand slaves were liberated for military service (see Essay 3). In his Fala do Throno in May 1867, which Joaquim Nabuco later described as coming ‘like a bolt of lightning in a cloudless sky’,⁸ D. Pedro repeated his view that the issue of the ‘servile element’ would have to be dealt with at the appropriate time, although agriculture, ‘our leading industry’, would be safeguarded and existing property rights (that is to say, ownership of slaves, including slaves imported after 1830) would be respected.

A committee of the Council of State was established and charged with consolidating Pimenta Bueno’s various drafts into a single bill whose main feature would be the liberation of children born of slave mothers. Its chairman was senator José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo, one of the few prominent politicians in Brazil opposed to slavery at the time. As Minister of Justice (1853–7) he had been responsible for the repression of the last, desperate attempts to import slaves into Brazil. In July 1868, however, a political crisis led to yet another change of government. The emperor, anxious about the lack of progress in the war against Paraguay, removed Zacarias and called upon the Conservative Visconde de Itaboraí to form a government. Itaboraí was totally opposed to abolition, and there would be no further discussion of the slavery question for the next two years.

The political crisis of 1868, however, revitalised the reform wing of the Liberal party. Nabuco de Araújo denounced the ‘coup d’etat’ that led to Itaboraí’s appointment. He helped found the radical Liberal newspaper A Reforma, which adopted an anti-slavery stance, and in 1869, with other reform-minded Liberals, established the Centro Liberal, which, although its main objective was electoral reform, included in its programme slave emancipation – the first political organisation in Brazil to do so. At the same time, a number of associations aiming to encourage and assist the emancipation of slaves were formed: according to Angela Alonso, in what she refers to as the ‘first cycle of abolitionist mobilisation’ in Brazil, 25 associations were formed between 1869 and 1871 in 11 of the 20 provinces of the empire.⁹ Nevertheless, international pressure was unrelenting. In 1869 the International Abolitionist Association based in Paris sent a message to ‘the people of Brazil’ encouraging them to end slavery, ‘the disgrace of mankind’, once and for all.

The war with Paraguay ended in March 1870 and in May of the same year Itaboraí resisted pressure from the emperor to move forward on the slavery question, and resigned. In July the Spanish Cortes passed legislation freeing all slaves over 60 and children born of slave mothers since the Liberal revolution and the beginning of the Ten Years War for Cuban independence in 1868. In March 1871 D. Pedro finally found a Conservative politician, José Maria da Silva Paranhos, the visconde do Rio Branco, willing to form an administration that would bring before the Brazilian parliament a bill to free children born of slave mothers. After a long and bitter series of debates throughout June, July and August, during which Conservative and Liberal pro-slavery deputies received dozens of representations from slave-owners throughout the country, organised for the first time in defence of slavery, the bill was finally passed in the Chamber of Deputies on 28 August with 61 (Conservative and Liberal) votes in favour and 35 (mostly dissident Conservatives) voting against. When the bill came before the Senate on 27 September only four senators voted against, though many more were absent. It was approved by the Princess Regent Isabel in the absence of the emperor, who was travelling in Europe at the time, and became law on 28 September 1871.¹⁰

By cutting off the internal supply of slaves – no-one could now be born a slave in Brazil – 20 years after the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade had cut off the external supply, the Lei de Ventre Livre [Law of Free Birth] condemned slavery to eventual extinction. The clock was set ticking on the end of slavery in Brazil. No single slave, however, had been emancipated. Moreover, the children born of slave mothers [ingênuos], though nominally free, were to remain with their masters until they were eight years old (at which point they would be freed, and handed over to the state for protection, with payment of compensation to their owners in government bonds) or, as proved to be more common, continue in semi-slavery until they reached the age of 21, their owners compensated by their labour up to that time. Thus the law implicitly recognised the slave owner’s right to indemnification if and when slavery were eventually abolished. A modest Emancipation Fund aimed at stimulating the voluntary emancipation of slaves by their owners and the self-purchase of freedom by the slaves themselves, which owners were now obliged by law to permit if full remuneration were offered, was slow to be established. In the 10 years after 1871, the number of slaves freed under the new law (less than one per cent) was not significantly greater than the number regularly freed each year during the previous two decades. Finally, the Law of 1871 provided for a national register of all existing slaves.¹¹ As many politicians and slave-owners had anticipated in supporting it, however reluctantly, the law thus recognised the legitimacy of existing slave property, posed no immediate threat to it, and ended once and for all, in favour of the slave owners, the debate on whether slaves imported since 1830/1831, and their descendants, were legally free. The passage of the 1871 law and the 1872 national register of slaves ended further debate in parliament on the slavery issue for almost a decade.

III

During the 1870s the Brazilian slave population continued its steady, albeit relatively slow, decline: in 1879 there were still one and a quarter million slaves in Brazil (15 per cent of the population). But, as a result of the intensification of the inter-provincial slave trade from the north–east and now from Ceará, which was suffering from severe drought, to the centre-south – it had reached 10,000 per year¹² – the regional concentration of slavery was further accentuated. By the end of the decade slaves constituted less than ten per cent of the population in more than half of Brazil’s provinces, less than five per cent in more than a quarter (mostly in the north, the south and the centre-west), the level at which the northern states in the United States had opted for emancipation a hundred years earlier. Like the progressive decline of the slave population of working age, the decline of the slave population as a proportion of the total population, the intra-provincial slave trade (progressively emptying the cities of slaves, leaving an urban population without a strong commitment to the survival of slavery), the inter-provincial slave trade contributed to hastening the end of slavery by reducing the number of provinces that would be adversely affected by its abolition and thus making it more vulnerable to attack nationally. In December 1880 and January 1881 the provincial assemblies of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo were sufficiently concerned that whole areas of Brazil were becoming ‘free soil’, a haven for fugitive slaves and a base for abolitionism, that they imposed crippling taxes on the importation of slaves. This virtually brought the inter-provincial trade to an end, although it only became illegal throughout Brazil with the passage of the Sexagenarian Law in September 1885 (see below).

The north-east, where two thirds of Brazil’s slave population was located in 1822, had by now fewer slaves than, for example, the province of Minas Gerais. In Pernambuco and especially Bahia, there were sugar planters who retained hundreds, in some cases thousands, of slaves. There had, however, been little recent investment in slaves; the existing slave population, unable to renew itself, was ageing fast. In Pernambuco, however, there was an adequate supply of alternative ‘free’ labour which was now being tapped. While not actively promoting its final collapse, many planters in the north-east no longer regarded the survival of the slave system as a matter of life and death. Die-hard slavocrats were mostly to be found in the centre–south, especially in the older, declining regions of coffee production in Rio de Janeiro province and southern Minas Gerais. There, many landowners had invested recently and heavily in slaves (through purchase at high prices and through maintenance); their slaves were younger than those in the north-east and potentially mobile (that is to say, given the opportunity ready to move to new areas of coffee production in São Paulo); and no adequate, cheap alternative free labour force was readily available.

On the new, expanding coffee frontier in the north and west of São Paulo province the problem was more complex. Fazendeiros there, producing coffee for a buoyant world market, found themselves in an unprecedented situation: for the first time in the history of Brazil slavery could no longer supply the labour needs of the most dynamic sector of the economy. Slaves were increasingly difficult to obtain, increasingly expensive to buy and maintain, and now perhaps a poor long–term investment. The so-called ‘progressive’ fazendeiros, that is to say, the most capitalist in attitudes to land, credit, investment in machinery and transport, were thus less committed to slave labour than the fazendeiros of the Paraíba valley – or even the sugar planters of the north-east. It is, however, a mistake to think of them as necessarily opponents of slavery. Free Brazilians were still not considered suitable for, nor were they apparently willing to engage in, disciplined labour on coffee plantations. At least in the short term, until an alternative could be found, slavery continued to be the preferred system of labour for most planters in São Paulo.

There was still relatively little public discussion of the inexorable process of transition from a predominantly slave to a predominantly free labour system. The Lei de Locação de Serviços (March 1879) was a first attempt to structure a ‘free labour market’ in Brazil by outlawing vagrancy, regulating experiments with long term employment contracts (three years for Europeans, five years for free Brazilians, seven years for libertos [freed slaves]) and controlling ‘free’ labourers by punishing breaches of contract and collective resistance to conditions of work, especially strikes.¹³ The broader issue of how in the longer term to provide plantation agriculture, especially the production of coffee, with a permanent supply of free labour was, however, rarely seriously addressed. One possible solution was Chinese indentured (‘coolie’) labour. One thousand or so Chinese labourers were imported in 1874. The Chinese government, however, was reluctant to sanction emigration to Brazil, not least because of the notoriously harsh treatment of the Chinese in Cuba, Peru and Britain’s tropical colonies. The British government was also opposed: in 1873 Chinese migration from Hong Kong was banned (except to Britain’s own colonies) and in 1874 the Portuguese authorities in Macau were persuaded to do the same. In 1878 the Brazilian government finally declared itself favourable to Chinese immigration, and the following year sent a mission to China. But fazendeiro opinion, as evidenced, for example, at the two national Agrarian Congresses held in Rio de Janeiro in July and Recife in October 1878, was divided on the Chinese solution. The Brazilian press and public were hostile, mainly on ethnic or racist grounds (fears for the ‘degeneration’ of the Brazilian population). Abolitionists were opposed because the traffic in cules could become ‘a new slave trade’ extending the life of slavery.¹⁴ In the end, fewer than 3,000 Chinese labourers were imported into Brazil during the 1870s.

IV

In January 1878, after ten years of Conservative rule, the emperor invited the Liberals to form a government. The government led by the Visconde de Sinimbu supported slavery unconditionally, and the newly elected Chamber of Deputies, overwhelmingly Liberal, was no less committed to agriculture and opposed to slave emancipation than its Conservative predecessor. However, the reform wing of the Liberals, which had become increasingly frustrated with the limited impact made on the institution of slavery in Brazil by the 1871 Law of Free Birth, sensed an opportunity to challenge the pact between state and slave-owners and re-open the issue of gradual emancipation. And they found a new leader in Joaquim Nabuco.¹⁵

Before his death in March 1878, Senator José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo, with the support of Domingos de Souza Leão, barão de Vila Bela, the Liberal leader in Pernambuco, had prepared the ground for his son, the 28-year-old Joaquim, to be elected to the Chamber of Deputies in the elections scheduled for September. In April Nabuco, an attaché at the Brazilian legation in London at the time, abandoned his brief career as a diplomat and returned to Brazil. He was duly elected a Liberal deputy in Recife and took his seat in January 1879. It fell to Dr Jerônimo Sodré Pereira, a Liberal deputy from Bahia – professor of medicine, ultramontane Catholic and son-in-law of the senator for Bahia Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas – in a speech on 5 March and Rodolfo Dantas, Senator Dantas’s son, in a speech on 22 March to put the abolition of slavery on the political agenda for the first time since 1871. Nabuco’s first speech was on the issue of religious freedom, not the emancipation of the slaves. However, he soon adopted the issue as his own and from 1879 until slavery was finally ended in May 1888 he was entirely dedicated to the cause, both inside and outside parliament.

How and why did Nabuco become an abolitionist? He was familiar with the names of English and North American abolitionists, notably William Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and, of course, Lincoln, from his extensive reading as a child. In Minha formação, his ‘literary, intellectual and political autobiography’ published in 1900, he claimed to have read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘a thousand times over’.¹⁶ However, it was as a student in the faculty of law in São Paulo (1866–8) that he read the anti-slavery poems of Castro Alves and came into regular contact for the first time with anti-slavery (and republican) ideas circulating among the professors and students. The influence of his father, José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo, Minister of Justice, senator and member of the Council of State, was also important in the evolution of Nabuco’s thinking on slavery and abolition. ‘No moral influence was as strong as my awareness of the relationship that bound me to him’, Nabuco wrote in Minha formação.¹⁷ He describes how, as a young student in the Faculty of Law in Recife (1869–70), he followed closely his father’s involvement in the struggle to enact the Law of Free Birth, helping him translate documents published in the Anti-Slavery Reporter, the journal of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. In a letter written to his father in 1870, Nabuco confessed that his greatest wish was to see him President of the Council of Ministers for just two days so that he could abolish slavery by decree, thus becoming ‘Brazil’s Lincoln’ (o Lincoln brasileiro).¹⁸

Above all, he was, Nabuco writes, inspired by his own personal experience of slavery as a child in Pernambuco. There is a well-known passage in Minha formação in which he describes a visit he made in 1869 to Massangana, the engenho [sugar plantation] worked by slaves in Cabo de Santo Agostinho 50 kilometres south of Recife owned by his godmother, where he had spent the first eight years of his life. He entered the small enclosure behind the little chapel of São Mateus that had been a cemetery for slaves. Standing among the crosses marking the graves, he reflected on the past and remembered the names of many of the slaves that he had known. ‘It was thus’, he wrote, ‘that the moral problem of slavery was laid out for the first time before my eyes in all its clarity and with its obligatory solution ... right there at twenty years of age I resolved to devote my life ... to the service of this most generous of races’.¹⁹ The driving force behind his opposition to slavery was, he claimed, the memory of his childhood and of the suffering he witnessed. That is to say, it was a personal, emotional, indeed sentimental, essentially moral commitment to abolish slavery.

This chapter of Minha formação was, however, written almost 30 years after the visit to Massangana. In ‘A escravidão [Slavery]’, a lengthy student essay written at the time,²⁰ in his diary, in his later writings, notably O abolicionismo (1883), and in his election campaign speeches of 1884 and 1887, slavery was challenged with different arguments: it was a crime (the first two parts of ‘A escravidão’ were entitled ‘O crime’ and ‘A história do crime’ – the projected third part, ‘A reparação do crime’, was never completed); it was largely unlawful because of the Brazilian law of November 1831; it was an outrage against civilisation; along with latifundia and monoculture it was responsible for the country’s social and economic backwardness, an obstacle to economic and political progress, citizenship and the construction of a nation. Slavery was also responsible for Brazil’s pariah status internationally (Brazil, ‘o Paraguai da escravidão’). Abolition thus would be the catalyst for both national regeneration and international respect.

Moreover, while there is no doubt that Nabuco was totally opposed to slavery throughout his life and wished it brought to an end, there is little evidence, either in his extensive correspondence or in his diaries, that his decision to devote his life to its abolition was taken earlier than 1879, the year he entered parliament for the first time. In the years following his graduation from the faculty of law in Recife in November 1870, abolition was not Nabuco’s central preoccupation; he pursued a career as a literary critic, poet and playwright – and as a diplomat. On his first visit to Europe, principally Paris and London, in 1873–4, in the United States in 1876–7 as attaché in the Washington legation and again in England in 1877–8 as attaché in the London legation, it seems he made no effort to make contact with local abolitionists. He did, however, write in his diary in Washington in June 1877 – the only reference to abolition in his diary before his election to parliament: ‘In Brazil the abolitionist campaign should be renewed. The law of 1871 must be seen only as a first step. There is no contract with the fazendeiros to stop there. It is necessary to destroy the stain [nódoa] that shames us in the eyes of the world ‘.²¹

The specific initiative that first brought Nabuco national and international renown as the champion of the slaves in Brazil was his denunciation of the British-owned St John d’El Rey Mining Company for owning slaves (illegally) in his speeches in the Chamber of Deputies on 26 August and 30 September 1879. In addition to its own slaves, the company kept over 1,000 slaves at its Morro Velho gold mine in Nova Lima, Minas Gerais that had been acquired (‘rented’) from the Cata Branca, Cocais and Gongo Soco mining companies when they collapsed in the mid 1840s, with a contractual clause to free them after 14 years’ service. However, 20 years had gone by without any steps being taken to secure their freedom.²² Nabuco’s speeches had repercussions around Europe (it produced favourable comment in, for example, the Revue des deux mondes in France) but more particularly in Great Britain. The Secretary of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Charles Harris Allen, wrote to congratulate him on his defence of the Morro Velho slaves. In his reply Nabuco wrote, ‘I assure you will always find me at the fighting post I now occupy … I place the emancipation interest beyond any other, above any party allegiance or engagement … Compared to this great social reform ... political reforms remain in the shade’.²³

Nabuco told Allen in April 1880 that he was planning to submit to parliament a bill for the total abolition of slavery in Brazil on 1 January 1890. Immediate abolition was impossible because of its impact on public finances and agricultural production. He did not expect even this modest proposal to pass in view of the existing strength of pro-slavery opinion, in the Liberal as well as the Conservative party. But, as Wilberforce had done in England to secure the passage of the bill declaring slavery illegal throughout the empire in 1834, he planned to introduce it in every session until it was eventually passed. ‘The frontier of the next decade’, Nabuco predicted, ‘shall not be crossed in Brazil … by any man calling himself a slave’.²⁴

A bill for the amelioration and eventual abolition of slavery was introduced in the Chamber of Deputies on 24 August. It included new taxes on slave property to strengthen the Emancipation Fund under the 1871 law, the prohibition of the inter-provincial slave trade, the abolition of the corporal punishment of slaves, the prohibition of the separation of slave mothers and children under eight years old, greater protection for slaves over 60 and the emancipation of any remaining slaves owned by the state. But, in view of the strength of the inevitable opposition, it was moderate, inasmuch as it not only envisaged a ten-year period before the total emancipation of the slaves but offered compensation to the slave-owners, as Britain had done, Nabuco pointed out, in its colonies half a century earlier. Nevertheless, the bill failed to make progress. Initially, 38 of the 122 deputies signed a motion for an early decision [urgência na votação] on whether to hold a debate on the bill, but when, a week later, Sinimbu’s successor as Liberal president of the Council of Ministers, Senator José Antônio Saraiva, made it a question of confidence in his government, only 18 deputies (14 of them from the north and north-east, including seven from Pernambuco) actually voted for a debate and the bill was quietly withdrawn. Nabuco was deeply disappointed. However, he continued to believe that abolition was a matter for parliament only. ‘Emancipation’, he told Allen, ‘cannot be done through a revolution, which would be to destroy everything – it will only be carried by a parliamentary majority’.²⁵

In 1879–80, for the first time since 1867–71, a number of associations dedicated to the emancipation of slaves were formed in Brazil. The members were mainly younger and more educated members of the growing urban professional middle class, influenced in their opposition to slavery by what John Stuart Mill had called ‘the spread of moral convictions’, though in Brazil, unlike Britain and the United States earlier, these were secular rather than religious convictions: there were no Quakers in Brazil and there was no ‘Great Awakening’. They were frustrated by the disappointing results of the 1871 law and encouraged by the opportunity for progress to be made offered (they believed) by the return of the Liberals to power. The most important associations were the Associação Central Emancipadora, established in August 1880 and led by André Rebouças, a black engineer and professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Rio, and the militant journalist José do Patrocínio, a cafuso [a mixture of Indian, European and African] who identified himself as negro, and the Sociedade Brasileira Contra Escravidão founded by Nabuco and a group of fellow abolitionists meeting in Nabuco’s home on 7 September (Brazilian independence day). Nabuco himself was elected president of the Sociedade, with his friend Rebouças as its treasurer. Several smaller anti-slavery associations joined the Sociedade and the executive committee included seven representatives of the Associação Central Emancipadora as well as five deputies and two former provincial presidents.

Nabuco immediately found an opportunity to put the Sociedade Brasileira Contra Escravidão on the map and re-ignite the debate on slavery in parliament, in the press and on the street. On 19 October 1880 he wrote an open letter to Henry Washington Hilliard, former US Congressman and University of Alabama law professor who had been appointed US minister in Brazil in October 1877, soliciting his views on slavery, emancipation and free labour in the American South. Nabuco knew Hilliard to be a pro-Union Southern moderate who had defended slavery as a legal institution under the Constitution but was now ready to seize an opportunity to redeem himself by becoming an agent of slave emancipation in Brazil. Hilliard replied to Nabuco on 25 October offering his full support to the Sociedade and the cause of abolition in Brazil, and proposing the symbolic date of 28 September (the passage of the Law of Free Birth – though not until 1887) for the emancipation of Brazil’s remaining 1.5 million slaves. The exchange of letters between Nabuco and Hilliard received enormous coverage in the press, as did the banquet on 20 November offered in Hilliard’s honour at the Hotel dos Estrangeiros in Rio by the Sociedade and attended by 50 prominent Brazilians (and with a large crowd outside the open windows listening in). The room in which the banquet was held had on the walls portraits of Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and the menu included mayonaisse de homards à la Wilberforce, jambon d’York à la Garrison, culotte de boeuf à la Paranhos, etc. Speeches were followed by liqueurs l’Emancipation.²⁶ The Hilliard affaire reignited the public debate about abolition in Brazil. The US minister was accused in the Conservative press and by Conservative politicians of interfering in Brazilian domestic issues, and there was a debate – on both Hilliard’s intervention and slavery – in a special session of the Chamber of Deputies on 25 November.

In his speech at the banquet for Hilliard Nabuco emphasised the need to mobilise public opinion worldwide in support of the movement for emancipation in Brazil. Public opinion had not yet been mobilised in Brazil itself and there was no sign of any weakening in the resistance to abolition in parliament. But the Brazilian political elite, including the emperor, if not the slave-owners themselves, could be influenced by international, especially British and French, opinion. Use of external pressure against internal resistance had undoubtedly contributed to the introduction and passage of the Law of Free Birth in 1871. In December, taking advantage of the parliamentary recess, Nabuco left for Europe in order personally to raise international awareness of the continued existence of slavery in Brazil.

In Lisbon Nabuco was received in the Chamber of Deputies as the leader of the abolitionist ‘party’ in the Brazilian legislature. In Madrid, where a year earlier the Cortes had abolished slavery in Cuba,²⁷ he was honoured by the Sociedad Abolicionista Española. In Paris he met the veteran president of the French abolitionist society, Victor Schoelcher, who had played a central role in the abolition of slavery throughout the French colonies in 1848.²⁸ Arriving in London in February 1881, he immediately sought out the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which had been founded in 1839 after the emancipation of the slaves in the British Empire precisely in order to act as a clearing house for information on slavery and anti-slavery and to promote its abolition throughout the world and which the Brazilian Society regarded as ‘the first and most influential organisation of its kind in the world’ whose cooperation was essential in the fight against slavery in Brazil.²⁹ For its part, the Society welcomed Nabuco at a special session in his honour on 4 March and on 23 March he was offered a splendid breakfast in the Charing Cross Hotel presided over by Thomas Fowell Buxton, son of the famous abolitionist of the same name who was about to become president of the Society. One hundred and fifty people were present, including 11 members of parliament. The banquet was widely covered by the London press – and, equally important, by the Rio de Janeiro press. The British connection was consolidated, and especially relations between Nabuco and Charles Allen, the Secretary of the BFASS from 1879 until 1898, who became, and remained a close friend until Allen’s death in December 1904.

Nabuco returned to Brazil in April 1881. When the Chamber of Deputies was dissolved on 30 June – with nothing achieved on abolition – he offered himself as a candidate for the first district of the Corte [the capital, Rio de Janeiro] in the elections to be held on 31 October. Despite a strong campaign, he was defeated and forced to leave parliament. In the newly elected legislature the abolitionists were an even smaller minority than before: perhaps a dozen sympathisers, mostly Liberal – for example, Adolfo Bezerra de Menezes (RJ), Afonso Celso (MG), Rodolfo Dantas (Bahia) and Rui Barbosa (Bahia), José Mariano (Pernambuco). Only Mariano could be said to be fully committed. The leaders of neither the Liberals nor the Conservatives were prepared to assume responsibility for a bill abolishing slavery, even for gradual abolition. One Liberal Prime Minister Saraiva gave way to another, Martinho Campos, who was closer to the Conservatives and strongly opposed to slave emancipation. He did not believe slavery was destined to last forever; under the law of 1871 it would gradually give way to free labour. But for the foreseeable future slavery was necessary for the production of coffee and for ‘paz e tranquilidade’ in the countryside.³⁰ In his frustration, and despite being accused by some of too readily abandoning the struggle, Nabuco left Brazil in December and returned to London.

During his stay in London, from December 1881 to April 1884, Nabuco earned his living as a legal consultant to English firms with investments in Brazil and as the foreign correspondent of Rio’s leading newspaper, the Jornal do Commercio, but devoted much of his time to promoting the cause of abolition in Brazil. He worked closely with the Anti-Slavery Society, attending its monthly meetings. With Charles Allen he set up an efficient propaganda scheme – Nabuco would give information to Allen who would be responsible for releasing it to the press, especially The Times. When Allen was unable to do so, which rarely happened, he would publish it in the Society’s own journal, the Anti-Slavery Reporter. The Times, which Nabuco referred to as ‘a voz da civilização [the voice of civilisation]’,³¹ and which took a clear stance in favour of abolition in Brazil, was the ideal medium because of its enormous influence, not least in Brazil. He maintained his ties with abolitionists in Madrid and in Paris and attended a number of international abolitionist meetings, notably the International Law Congress held in Milan in September 1883. He planned to hold a great, international Anti-Slavery Congress at the Grand Hotel D’Orleans in Petrópolis in August 1884, which would bring to Brazil the leading abolitionists from Europe and the United States. The Congress, however, never took place.

Regarding abolition itself, Nabuco’s position had become more radical. On 14 July 1882, Bastille Day, Antônio Pinto, deputy for Ceará, presented to the Brazilian parliament a petition written by Nabuco in London, not this time for abolition after ten years, but for the ‘total abolition of slavery, either immediately or within a short period of time to be defined immediately’ – though indemnifying slave-owners for the loss of their slaves.³² In O Abolicionismo, a major work of political propaganda for which Nabuco had researched for more than a year in the late Richard Cobden’s library in Brighton and in the British Museum, he recognised more clearly than in 1880 that the 1871 law, far from advancing the cause of abolition, had paralysed it: ‘Imperfect, incomplete, unjust, even absurd’, apart of course from the fact that ‘no-one can ever again be born a slave’, the law had served morally to anaesthetise slaveowners.³³ He repeated the need for the immediate emancipation of the slaves, but now without any compensation for their owners who, he argued, had been sufficiently compensated by the labour of their slaves. Inevitably, his petition failed to secure any significant support but he continued to believe that abolition should be peaceful, not as a result of insurrection as in Haiti or war as in the United States but by law passed in parliament: ‘thus it is in Parliament, not on the plantations or in runaway slave camps [quilombos] in the interior or in the steets and plazas of the cities, where the cause of freedom will be won or lost’.³⁴

In May 1884, after almost two and a half years in London, Nabuco returned to Brazil. Not yet 35 years old, he was in poor health, homesick and in need of a holiday from the grind of writing nine lengthy articles a month for the Jornal do Commercio and since November two each month for La Razón in Montevideo. His decision to return was also influenced by the fact that the abolitionist movement outside parliament had gained considerable momentum during his absence, not least because of parliament’s failure to pass the antislavery legislation proposed by Nabuco in August 1880, the defeat of Nabuco (and other anti-slavery candidates) in the election of October 1881, and a succession of five anti-abolitionist Liberal prime ministers between 1878 and 1884 – Sinimbu, Saraiva, Martinho Campos, visconde de Paranaguá (from July 1882) and Lafayette Rodrigues Pereira (from May 1883). It was time to re-engage personally with the movement, re-assert his leadership, time, Nabuco told Allen, for ‘some energetic kind of action’ on his part.³⁵

V

In the years from 1878 to 1885, the period of Liberal government, Angela Alonso has calculated that some 230 abolitionist associations were formed (compared with 22 during the period of Conservative government before the passage of the 1871 Law, 1868–71, and only six during the period of Conservative government, 1872–77) – more than a third of them in 1883 alone. Thirty-three were established in Pernambuco, 32 in Rio de Janeiro, 21 in Ceará, 14 in Amazonas, 14 in Rio Grande do Sul, 10 in Rio Grande do Norte and ten in São Paulo.³⁶ The members of these associations were predominantly lawyers, journalists, students, professors, writers, artists, typographers and, not least, women. They were overwhelmingly white in the case of Pernambuco, for example, but with a strong mulatto and African element in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian abolitionist movement – and it is possible for the first time to refer to a ‘movement’ – was at this stage largely peaceful and moderate in its methods and its aims. It adopted a policy of organising open public meetings to bring popular pressure to bear on reluctant or hostile governments, national and provincial, which were protecting the interests of slave-owners. These events usually took place in theatres rather than town halls, churches and chapels, as in England and the United States (hence the concept ‘a teatrização da política’ used by Alonso), and included music, poetry readings or plays. The aim was to raise money to bolster private and municipal emancipation funds, and the meetings ended with the presentation of a number of certificates of slave manumission [cartas de alforria]. At the same time, abolitionists like Luís Gama, the son of a Portuguese father and an African mother who had been sold into slavery and later freed, brought cases of slaves imported into Brazil in violation of the 1831 law – and their descendants – before the courts. Gama died in 1882, but his work was carried on by others.

In May 1883 15 abolitionist societies, 11 from Rio plus one each from Espírito Santo, Pernambuco, Ceará and Rio Grande do Sul, had come together to form the Confederação Abolicionista, with as its president João Clapp, the son of US emigrants who had risen to becomes a manager of the Banco do Brasil. Other provinces also attempted to consolidate their various abolitionist organisations. In July, for example, 14 organisations in Recife had unified under the Central Emancipadora do Município do Recife.³⁷ The Confederação Abolicionista provided national coordination for the abolitionist movement. It was soon active in ten of Brazil’s 20 provinces, including seven of the nine provinces in the north/north-east. In August it issued a radical manifesto in favour of immediate abolition without indemnification.

At the same time, the Rio press was increasingly opposed to the institution of slavery. José do Patrocínio, who had since 1879 written for the Gazeta de Noticias, in 1881 switched to the more militant A Gazeta da Tarde, founded by José Ferreira de Menezes. The Rio News, which was widely read (and not only by the English-speaking community), owned and edited by Andrew Jackson Lamoureux, who had come to Brazil from the United States in 1874, consistently supported immediate abolition without indemnification. The Jornal do Commercio, the most influential newspaper in the capital, did not ostensibly take sides, but one of its editors from 1880, Francisco Gusmão Lobo, a friend of Nabuco, also from Pernambuco, was a committed abolitionist, and the editor-in-chief since 1868, Luís de Castro, also discreetly supported the cause. Most importantly, the weekly Revista Illustrada published the devastating satirical lithographs of the Italian-born artist Ángelo Agostini, Brazil’s Daumier. Nabuco later described the Revista Ilustrada as ‘the abolitionist Bible of the people, the people who can’t read’, that is to say, the vast majority of Brazilians.³⁸

On 25 March 1884 Ceará – where in município after município slaves had been freed and where in May 1883 the jangadeiros [raft fishermen] in Fortaleza had famously refused to carry slaves to steamers leaving for southern markets³⁹ – became the first of Brazil’s provinces to emancipate all its slaves. Ceará was followed on 10 July by Amazonas and on 7 September by Rio Grande do Sul. These were, of course, provinces with relatively few slaves: 20,000 in Ceará, 1,600 in Amazonas, 60,000 in Rio Grande do Sul. As Adam Smith said of the Quakers in Pennsylvania and other northern states in the United States which opted at the end of the 18th century for emancipation, ‘[Their] resolution . . . to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number is not very great’. Nevertheless there were huge celebrations in Recife and Rio de Janeiro (a crowd of 10,000), and events to mark the occasion in Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and London. While José de Patrocínio was having a celebratory dinner with Victor Hugo in Paris, Nabuco attended, along with Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, and the prince of Wales, a banquet offered by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London.

VI

In June 1884, recognising the growing strength of abolitionism as a national political movement, the Emperor D. Pedro invited one of Brazil’s most experienced and reform-minded politicians, Senator Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas – four times a deputy, president of three different provinces, minister of Agriculture, Justice and the Interior, Councillor of State – to form a government, the sixth Liberal government in six years, prepared to introduce the first antislavery legislation since the Law of Free Birth in 1871 13 years earlier, albeit legislation whose purpose was still gradual not immediate abolition. The bill submitted to the Chamber of Deputies by Dantas’s son Rodolfo (who was a great friend of Nabuco) and fellow deputy from Bahia Rui Barbosa on 15 July reinforced the existing Emancipation Fund, introduced new taxes to discourage slavery in urban areas and proposed to establish agricultural colonies for ex-slaves and immigrants, but its main purpose was to free slaves over 60 years of age. A modest proposal, it might be argued, but the bill was radical in the sense that it represented the first direct challenge to existing slave property in Brazil. Significant numbers of slaves would be freed, and no compensation would be offered to their owners. Moreover, the bill was somewhat more far-reaching than appeared at first sight since many slaves under 60 had been registered as older than they in fact were so that their owners could claim that they, or their parents, had been legally imported before the 1831 law prohibited the importation of slaves into Brazil. The bill aimed to liberate some 110,000 slaves, 10 per cent of the slave population, and another 95,000 by 1894. Nevertheless, unless further legislation were introduced, slavery would not come to an end until 1930 when the slaves born before the 1871 law reached 60! The Times was more optimistic: as a result of this first step it confidently predicted that slavery would be abolished in ten years.⁴⁰

Support for the immediate liberation of slaves aged 60 and over without indemnification gained extraordinary force in the following weeks, especially in the press. Though many were disappointed that Dantas’s bill did not go further, most abolitionists, including Nabuco, united in its support. They recognised it was the best they could hope for from the Legislature elected in 1881. In writing to the press the supporters of Dantas adopted British and North American pseudonyms: for example, Nabuco signed his articles Garrison, Gusmão Lobo Clarkson, Rui Barbosa Lincoln. At the same time, there was organised resistance to the bill and petitions flooded in from Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, São Paulo, Bahia and Pernambuco. A Congresso da Lavoura Nacional was held to defend the importance of slavery for Brazilian agriculture, the economic prosperity of the nation and, not least, social peace and stability. Abolition, it was argued, represented ‘suicídio nacional’.

The Liberals had 75 deputies in the Chamber, a majority of 28 over the Conservatives, but Dantas could not unify the party behind his bill. Too many Liberal deputies were hostile or indifferent. Only 29 initially gave their support, and in the end the bill was defeated on a motion of confidence by 59 votes (Conservatives and dissident Liberals) to 52 (48 dantista Liberals and 4 Conservatives). However, ignoring the wishes of the Council of State, which voted 9 to 3 against his decision, the emperor granted Dantas the dissolution of parliament and new elections before the end of the year.

This presented Nabuco with an opportunity to re-enter parliament. He was still regarded as the principal leader of the abolitionists, its best candidate, certainly its best speaker, despite a certain rivalry with José do Patrocínio and spasmodic attacks on him for his extended absence from Brazil. (Nabuco and Patrocínio were never close friends. Their personalities, social and racial backgrounds, and political strategies for abolition were markedly different but they worked together, usually thanks to the mediation of André Rebouças.) Nabuco had been interested in standing for Ceará although the Confederação Abolicionista had wanted him to stand in the Corte. But Dantas, following the intervention of the president of Pernambuco province, Sancho de Barros Pimental, a friend of Nabuco, who needed him to defeat the Souza Leão clan, preferred that he became a candidate for the first district of Pernambuco (the city of Recife), which had elected him in 1878. The second district would be contested by José Mariano, a popular politician and, despite family ties to sugar, a strong opponent of slavery, who had been elected in 1878, one of few abolitionists reelected in 1881 and one of 29 initial supporters of the Dantas bill.

The elections of December 1884, in which the Dantas bill was the key issue, indeed virtually the only issue, were the first to be held under the new rules introduced by the Saraiva political reform law of January 1881. Elections were no longer indirect, and the vote was restricted to literates, except those already registered to vote. The abolitionists expected to be the main beneficiaries of these changes since they increased the weight of the urban vote and reduced both outright fraud and the influence of government in elections. Nabuco and Mariano were the first Brazilian politicians to campaign in a national election on a platform of immediate abolition without compensation for slave-owners. Equally if not more radical, under the influence of both Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) and André Rebouças’s Agricultura nacional: estudos econômicos (1883), they proposed land reform; a reform, Nabuco claimed in a speech on 5 November ‘so comprehensive, so broad and so profound that it could be called a Revolution’.⁴¹ The electorate consisted of 1,500 male voters, but Nabuco delivered 18 addresses between 12 October and 31 November, including six in the Teatro Santa Isabel in Recife, to crowds of hundreds, sometimes thousands. It was the first time any Brazilian politician had used popular pressure as a political tool. His name appeared on hats, cigar boxes, beers, etc. The election, Nabuco reported to Charles Allen in London, was ‘first of its kind in Brazil, quite an English or American election, disputed in public meetings instead of corrupt system of intimidating and buying votes in which Slavery puts its force’.⁴²

On 1 December Nabuco narrowly defeated the incumbent Conservative candidate Manoel do Nascimento Machado Portela (who while calling himself an ‘emancipacionist’ had opposed the Dantas bill) by 746 votes to 744. (Mariano won more convincingly, 917 votes to 646.) However, due to some disturbances, irregularities and accusations of fraud the result was declared invalid by the oversight committee. In a second election on 9 January 1885 Machado Portela chose to abstain and Nabuco therefore won unopposed, only for the credentials committee of the Chamber to overturn the result of the December election (51 votes to 48) when it met in May and awarded the seat to Machado Portela after all. However, the representative of the 5th district of Pernambuco, the municípios of Nazaré da Mata and Bom Jardim, had died in March and the other potential Liberal candidates stood aside in favour of Nabuco. On 5 June he was duly re-elected to the Chamber. He described for Allen the reception his victory received: ‘Never was such a scene seen before. More than 50,000 people took part in it and it was a general holiday, all the city being in flags, music, flowers and illuminations in the evening. This shows the strength the abolitionist movement has acquired, it is a national resurrection or still better a national birth’.⁴³ This time he was allowed to take his seat.

Before Nabuco finally re-entered parliament in August 1885, however, after an absence of four years, the Dantas bill had been reintroduced into the newly elected Chamber (in which the Liberals had an even bigger majority) and again defeated – by 52 votes to 50. Dantas failed to persuade the emperor to grant him a second dissolution and was forced to resign on 4 May. He was replaced by José Antônio Saraiva, who in August secured the Chamber’s approval (by 73 votes to 17) of a much watered-down version of Dantas’s bill which aimed to ‘tranquillise’ the slave-owners and their friends in the Conservative (and Liberal) parties by slowing down the emancipation process: slaves between the ages of 60 and 63 would be freed but forced to work for three more years, slaves of 63 for two more years, at which point they would be free and the slave-owners would receive compensation for their emancipation. Only slaves over 65 were immediately freed unconditionally. Masters who emancipated slaves under 60 would be indemnified from an enhanced Emancipation Fund, but in these cases freed slaves were obliged to remain in their municípios and provide their services for a further five years. (Prices for slaves were fixed at levels far above the market price not only in the interests of masters choosing to free slaves or seeking indemnification if and when slavery were finally abolished, but also in order to hinder the freeing of slaves by abolitionist associations and self-purchase by the slaves themselves.) The Times now conceded that, unless further legislation were introduced, slavery in Brazil could now legally persist until 1935!⁴⁴

Nabuco bitterly opposed the ‘shameful’ Saraiva bill, for ‘making us and poor people and the old slaves themselves, besides all those who have spontaneously liberated their slaves, pay taxes for the redemption of other people’s slaves’. The ‘political oligarchy’ had successfully replaced the Dantas bill with one for the liquidation of slavery (sic) ‘on the best possible terms for the persons interested in it’. He accused the Saraiva government of seeking to ‘make the death of slavery and its burying so soft that no one be aware of it – neither the master nor the slave, the country nor the world’.⁴⁵ Even so, Conservative opposition was such that Saraiva did not feel he had enough support to have his bill approved in the Senate. He therefore resigned after only three months in power, and the emperor called upon Senator João Maurício Wanderley, barão de Cotegipe, leader of the Conservative party and, together with his Conservative colleague Paulino José Soares de Sousa Jr, one of the fiercest opponents of abolition, to complete what Saraiva had begun. The bill was passed in the Senate in August and became the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law, better known as the Sexagenarian Law, on 28 September 1885, the 14th anniversary of the Law of Free Womb.⁴⁶ On 26 October new elections were called for 15 January 1886, which the Conservatives won in a landslide. Nabuco was again defeated in Recife. José Mariano won his seat, but his election was later overturned by the credentials committee of the Chamber. The other Liberals elected were all anti-dantista supporters of the Saraiva-Cotegipe Law.

VII

Following the rejection of the Dantas bill by the Chamber of Deputies twice, the successful mobilisation of the anti-Dantas resistance in and out of parliament, the appointment of Cotegipe as prime minister, the passage of the Saraiva-Cotegipe law and the January 1886 election removing virtually all Liberal abolitionist deputies from the Chamber, no further measures towards the liberation of Brazil’s remaining one million slaves were to be expected from the Cotegipe government – and none were forthcoming. The political representatives of the slaveholding elite in parliament continued for the most part to regard slavery as both indispensible and legitimate. Neither the Liberal party nor the Conservative party favoured its abolition. Slavery was to be allowed to die naturally. Even the most optimistic abolitionists expected the process to take eight to ten years and some calculated it could take another 30 years. João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira, since the death of the visconde do Rio Branco in 1880, the leader of the reformist wing of the Conservative party, proposed the final abolition of slavery on the centenary of Brazilian independence in 1922.⁴⁷

Moreover, the Cotegipe government adopted a policy of repression towards the abolitionist movement. There were bans on public meetings; the use of the military as well as the police in rounding up fugitive slaves; additional judicial obstacles erected to slave manumission. The onward march of the Brazilian abolitionist movement was temporarily halted. Abolitionist activities were reduced to ‘anti-slavery days’ like 25 March (the abolition of slavery in Ceará) and 28 September (the 1871 law) and special events like the election of Patrocínio as a vereador [municipal councilman] in Rio de Janeiro in July 1886 and the funeral in October 1886 of the Liberal politician and poet José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, o Moço, who had defended abolition.

Disenchanted and disillusioned, Nabuco spent much of the year 1886 writing for the press and publishing pamphlets, including O erro do Imperador and O eclipse do abolicionismo in which he bitterly criticised the emperor for having first encouraged the abolitionists with the choice of Dantas and then surrendered the government first to Saraiva and then to the uncompromisingly pro-slavery Cotegipe. Nabuco wrote a regular column ferociously attacking the pro-slavery Cotegipe government for the Rio newspaper O Paiz, which had been founded in 1884 by the republican Quintino Bocaiúva, who considered abolitionist propaganda useful in his criticism of the political system of the empire. One positive achievement was forcing the government to adopt measures for the greater protection of slaves, notably in October 1886 legislation to abolish the use of the whip [pena de açoites]. This followed a particularly brutal case in which four slaves in Rio province were each condemned to 300 lashes and two subsequently died. Slave-owners believed that without the whip there would be a breakdown of plantation discipline – as proved to be the case. In the end Nabuco felt he had done more for the cause of the slaves writing for O Paiz, he told Allen, than he could have done as a deputy. It was though the press that the Conservative government had been forced to pass a law abolishing flogging, ‘which if we had judges and the laws with regard to slaves were a reality, would amount practically to the end of slavery’.⁴⁸

In April 1887 Nabuco returned to London as correspondent for O Paiz – but he did not stay long. The appointment of Machado Portela to a ministerial post in July presented Nabuco with an opportunity to return to parliament. Under the rules at that time there had to be a ‘special election’ in Recife to reaffirm Machado Portela’s mandate. This was normally a formality as it was never seriously challenged but Nabuco returned from London to contest the election. He was greeted by hundreds of supporters in the docks of Recife on his arrival on 27 August. The next day, in defiance of the police ban on public meetings in the city’s streets and squares, he addressed a huge gathering outside the Teatro Santa Isabel. His campaign on a platform of immediate abolition without compensation produced a level of popular mobilisation not seen in Recife, indeed in Brazil, since his October–November 1884 campaign. His speeches received extensive coverage in the press throughout Brazil and Nabuco won the election on 14 September 1887 by 1,409 votes to 1,266. It was a huge blow to Cotegipe’s credibility from which he never fully recovered; ‘golpe de morte no ministério Cotegipe [the death-blow to the Cotegipe cabinet]’, Nabuco wrote in his diary.⁴⁹ In his study of the politics of abolition in Pernambuco Celso Thomas Castilho calls Nabuco’s victory in Recife in September 1887 ‘a monumental upset … the most significant victory by an opposition candidate in the 1880s’.⁵⁰ It was also a huge shot in the arm for the abolitionist movement.

VIII

In the second half of 1887, after the setbacks during the period 1884–6, the abolitionist movement had again began to grow in strength and, frustrated by the lack of progress in parliament and the repression imposed on its peaceful activities by the Cotegipe government, it had become radicalised.⁵¹ Meetings were held and the work of freeing slaves, municípios by município, block by block, even street by street, in the Corte, Recife and São Paulo and smaller towns in, for example, the provinces of Rio Grande do Norte, Goiás and Santa Catarina continued. But also now, for the first time, abolitionists engaged in direct action to subvert the slave system, as slaves began to desert plantations in São Paulo, Minas Gerais and even Rio de Janeiro in unprecedented numbers, at times accompanied by violence against masters and overseers. (It could be argued that slaves uprooted from their families by the internal slave trade from the North East to the Centre South during the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s were the most likely to flee, and the most likely to resort to violence but this needs further research.) Antônio Bento in São Paulo and Carlos Lacerda in Campos were notable examples of the many abolitionists inciting slaves to flee, organising transportation to cities (called the ‘underground railway’ in the United States) and providing urban sanctuaries for fugitive slaves.

The flight of slaves from the plantations was facilitated by the fact that junior officers in the Brazilian army, many of whom were positivist, abolitionist and republican, were becoming less willing to support the slave system by coercing slaves into remaining on plantations and in particular by pursuing fugitive slaves. This was, in part, another contribution Nabuco made to the cause. He took his seat in Parliament on 5 October. Two days later in his first speech he appealed to the military to stop the pursuit and capture of fugitive slaves.⁵² On 25 October the president of the Clube Militar successfully petitioned Princess Isabel, acting as regent in the absence of the emperor, who had gone to Europe in June for medical treatment, to excuse the military from this increasingly onerous and disagreeable task.

Slave flights accelerated the natural decline of slave system, as did the dramatic increase in the number of the voluntary liberation of slaves by their owners. Despite frequently proclaiming their humanitarian intentions, they were really attempting to bring what was happening all around them under some sort of control and prevent the complete collapse of the plantation labour system by offering the slaves who had not yet fled eventual freedom in return for promises to remain on their plantations for up to three years, thus guaranteeing a more orderly transition to free labour.

Equally significant in the final demise of slavery in Brazil was the first crucial break in the ranks of the defenders of slavery. The coffee fazendeiros of the north and west of São Paulo, where the demand for slave labour was greatest and the commitment to slavery as an institution with a long-term future weakest, had finally secured at this critical juncture an alternative source of labour in the form, not of free Brazilian wage labourers, but European, mainly Italian, immigrants. As early as 1878 Antônio de Queirós Telles, the future visconde de Parnaíba, had visited eight countries in western Europe on behalf of the Associação Auxiliadora de Colonização e Imigração of São Paulo and singled out Italy, which was suffering rapid population growth, land hunger and unemployment, as the most promising source of non-slave labour for coffee production in São Paulo. Italians began to arrive in significant numbers from the mid 1880s. In 1884 São Paulo had received 5,000 European, mostly Italian, immigrant workers, their transportation subsidised by the provincial government; 6,500 in 1885, 9,500 in 1886 and 32,000 arrived in 1887. These numbers were sufficient to satisfy the paulista coffee fazendeiros that their labour requirements could be met and to persuade their leading political representatives, like Senator Antônio da Silva Prado, that they could safely support the abolition of the remnants of slavery in Brazil. Prado had agreed to serve as minister of agriculture in the Conservative government formed by Cotegipe in August 1885. He resigned in May 1887, and before the end of the year he had broken with the die-hard anti-abolitionists.⁵³

By the beginning of 1888 Brazil’s political leaders were being forced to face the fact that the slave system was not only losing support but was clearly close to collapse. The slave population, which had declined by 20 per cent between 1874 and 1884 (from 1.5 to 1.25 million) and 40 per cent in the three years between 1884 and the slave registration of March 1887 (to 725,000), had fallen by a further 50 per cent in the 12 months from March 1887 to March 1888 (to between 250,000 and 500,000 – less than four per cent of the total population of Brazil). The abolitionists were threatening large-scale popular mobilisation in favour of immediate abolition, which led to exaggerated fears that the final stages of slavery’s collapse might be accompanied by a major social upheaval, even a Haiti-style bloodbath. Abolition could no longer be avoided, although even now few abolitionists expected it immediately. Patrocínio thought 1889, the centenary of the French Revolution and the Declaration of Rights of Man, an appropriate date; Dantas proposed 31 December 1889.

In the Conservative dominated Legislature elected in January 1886, the majority of the Liberal deputies were now – finally – in favour of abolition; perhaps in five, four, two years. The Conservatives, however, were divided. Finally, on 10 March 1888, Cotegipe was persuaded to resign by the princess regent. He was replaced by the moderate João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira, who had indicated his willingness to form a government committed to the emancipation of Brazil’s remaining slaves. Initially João Alfredo hoped to be able to postpone final abolition for at least five years, and to secure some kind of indemnification for slave-owners, but this proved to be an impossible dream. Antônio Prado returned to government as foreign minister, and within days of taking power he and João Alfredo consulted privately in Petrópolis with André Rebouças, one of most influential of the abolitionist leaders. By the end of March Rebouças had drafted legislation for immediate and unconditional abolition. It was presented to the cabinet on 7 April and agreed sometime between 20 and 29 April, a decision accepted by the princess regent.⁵⁴

Joaquim Nabuco was in London when he heard that João Alfredo had formed a cabinet and that abolition was now certain. He had travelled once again to Europe with the principal objective of persuading Pope Leo XIII to speak out against slavery. Princess Isabel, who was believed to be increasingly sympathetic to the cause of abolition, was well known for the strength of her religious sentiments, and Nabuco calculated that she could be persuaded to take the necessary steps to emancipate Brazil’s remaining slaves if the pope gave her his blessing. After waiting around in Rome for a month, Nabuco was finally received by the pope on 10 February and Leo XIII promised – and issued – a papal encyclical condemning slavery.⁵⁵ Nabuco immediately returned to Brazil where on 12 April in Recife he addressed yet another huge abolitionist rally at the Teatro Santa Isabel.⁵⁶ On 18 April he was in Rio de Janeiro ready for the reopening of parliament on 3 May and prepared to lead the final battle for abolition. He admitted in his diary, however, that many of the leaders of the Confederação Abolicionista, especially José do Patrocínio writing for Cidade do Rio, were angry with him for spending so much time outside Brazil. ⁵⁷

On 8 May a bill for the immediate abolition of slavery without compensation was submitted to the Chamber of Deputies. Nabuco, the historic leader of the abolitionists in parliament, though still only 38 years old, took it upon himself to ensure that the Liberals supported the bill, albeit introduced by a Conservative government, that there was no backsliding by the Conservatives in their commitment to immediate unconditional abolition, and that the Chamber dispensed with its normal timetable for legislation and allowed the bill to pass rapidly as a matter of urgency. The bill was approved by 83 votes to nine (mostly die-hard Conservatives from Rio de Janeiro) on its second reading on 9 May. It was given a third reading and sent to the Senate the following day. Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas took responsibility for the bill when it was submitted to the Senate on 11 May. It was approved on its second reading the following day, by 46 votes to six (including that of Cotegipe), with eight abstentions. On 13 May, after the bill’s third and final reading in the Senate, Nabuco had the satisfaction of addressing a large and enthusiastic crowd from a window of the Paço da Cidade (Paço Imperial) in Rio de Janeiro where the princess regent had signed the Lei Áurea [Golden Law] declaring slavery in Brazil extinct and liberating all of Brazil’s remaining quarter to half a million slaves – without compensation to the slaveowners.⁵⁸

IX

In the course of the American Civil War some 600,000 slaves (14 per cent of the total slave population) were freed, the rest – some 3.3 million – only in December 1865 when the slow process of securing the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution by three-quarters of the states was concluded.⁵⁹ The urgent question now became ‘What to do with the negro?’ post-emancipation. Radical Republicans demanded that post-war reconstruction include legislation aimed at the political and social inclusion of the former slaves but there was fierce resistance to this, and not only in the south. Many Republicans in the north who had opposed slavery were as hostile to free blacks and to racial inclusion as the Democrats in both the north and the south who had defended slavery to the end. They were especially opposed even to the limited black suffrage proposed by Lincoln in a speech soon after the end of the war. It was fear of ‘nigger citizenship’ which had provoked John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln on 14 April 1865. Four million slaves may have secured their legal freedom, but they faced a future of poverty, limited education, disenfranchisement on grounds of their race (and their illiteracy) and eventually segregation (even in North).⁶⁰

‘What to do with the negro?’ was not such an urgent question in Brazil when slavery was abolished. The slave population had been in steady decline for almost 40 years since the end of the slave trade in 1850–1 when there were between two and two and half million slaves in Brazil. There were 250– 500,000 in 1888. ‘Nigger citizenship’ was not an issue because under the law of 1881 the vote was restricted to (male) literates. At the time of abolition only 120,000 Brazilians, less than one per cent of the population (of 13 million), had the vote. At the same time, there was in Brazil, unlike the United States, no ‘backlash’ to slave emancipation and the social inclusion of former slaves leading to segregation on racial grounds. Miscegenation had been a feature of Brazil’s slave-based society since the 16th century. The slaves legally freed in May 1888 were absorbed into a society in which already more than half the population were free blacks and mulattos. The 1872 census showed a population composed of 38.1 per cent whites, 19.6 per cent blacks, 38.2 per cent pardos [mixed race] and 3.9 per cent Indians. Blacks and pardos together (free, freed and slave) constituted 57.8 per cent of the total population; excluding slaves, 42.7 per cent were free blacks and pardos, an extremely high percentage compared with other slave societies in the 19th century.⁶¹ The 1890 census still showed a population that was less than half white (44 per cent), despite the beginnings of mass European immigration during the previous decade.⁶²

Nabuco had argued in O Abolicionismo that, as a consequence of ‘contacts between the races’, ‘the unlimited degree of social mixing which [went] on between the slave and the free’, during three centuries of slavery, there had never developed in Brazil obstacles to social advancement based on race alone. He quoted the British historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay in the House of Commons in 1845: ‘I do not deem it unlikely that the black population of Brazil will be free and contented within eighty or a hundred years; I do not envision, however, a reasonable likelihood of a similar change in the United States’.⁶³ ‘In Brazil’, Nabuco wrote in Minha formação, ‘slavery was a melting of the races. In the United States it was a war between them’. However, he showed himself painfully aware that the abolition of slavery in Brazil had not been accompanied by the ‘complementary social measures in favour of the freed slaves’, especially in the provision of education and land that he had strongly advocated in O abolicionismo and in his campaign speeches of 1884–5 and 1887. The sad truth, he wrote, was that in Brazil ‘the abolitionist movement stopped on the day abolition was decreed and retreated the day after’. He could only hope that ‘in time a more just society will be built on the ruins of slavery’.⁶⁴

* This essay is a revised and expansed version of ‘Joaquim Nabuco e a abolição da escravidão no Brasil em perspectiva internacional’, in Joaquim Nabuco no mundo: abolicionista, jornalista, diplomata (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2016), ch. 2, pp. 49–117, which drew on ‘Introdução’ (with J. Murilo de Carvalho), in Joaquim Nabuco e os abolitionistas britânicos: Correspondência 1880–1905 (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2008).

1 Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1 January 1863) declared slaves in Confederate states in rebellion against the Union free, but could be applied only as and when these states came under the control of the Union. Lincoln’s proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, to give permanence and constitutionality to the abolition of slavery throughout the United States, was approved by the Senate in June 1864 and the House of Representatives in January 1865, but not ratified by the required number of states (27 of the then 36 states) until December 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War (and Lincoln’s assassination).

2 In January 1880 the Spanish parliament, which had ended slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, abolished slavery in Cuba, but slaves were to remain for eight years under a system of patronato. Like apprenticeship in the British Caribbean after abolition in 1834, it guaranteed the continued labour of ex-slaves for a limited period. The patronato system was ended 15 months early in October 1886.

3 There are three recent general studies of abolition in the Americas: D. Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); S. Drescher, Abolition: a History of Slavery and Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); R. Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011) – all excellent books, but it is fair to say not at their strongest on Brazil.

4 Since the first scholarly attempt to calculate the size of the transatlantic slave trade to the Americas, P. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), the figures have generally been revised upwards, especially for Brazil. See H. S. Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999; 2nd edn. 2010); D. Eltis, ‘The volume and structure of the transatlantic slave trade: a reassessment’, William and Mary Quarterly (January 2001); and D. Eltis and D. Richardson (eds.), Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

5 On the abolition of the slave trade, see L. Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question 1807–1869 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). On the revisionist literature since 1970, see J.D. Needell, ‘The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850: historiography, slave agency and statesmanship’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 33 (2001).

6 On the internal slave trade after the abolition of the transatlantic trade, see R. Graham, ‘Another middle passage? The internal slave trade in Brazil’ and R.W. Slenes, ‘The Brazilian internal slave trade, 1850–1888: regional economies, slave experience and the politics of a peculiar market’, in W. Johnson (ed.), The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

7 Quoted in H. Lyra, História do Império de Dom Pedro II (3 vols, São Paulo 1940), vol.II, pp. 235–6; R.J. Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 195. Further research is needed on the impact of the end of slavery in the United States during the Civil War on the future of slavery in Brazil.

8 J. Nabuco, O Abolicionismo (London, 1883); English translation Abolitionism: the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Struggle, R. Conrad (ed.) (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 49.

9 A. Alonso, Flores, votos e balas: o movimento abolicionista brasileira (1868–88) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015), pp. 68, 436–7.

10 On the debate and the vote on the Law of Free Birth (1871), see J.M. de Carvalho, A Construção da Ordem, Teatro de Sombras (2nd edn., Rio de Janeiro; Editora UFRJ/Relume Dumará, 1996), pp. 280–90; Barman, Citizen Emperor ch. 7; J.D. Needell, The Party of Order: the Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 284–303.

11 See Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian, ‘O Estado nacional e a instabilidade da propriedade escrava: a Lei de 1831 e a matrícula dos escravos de 1872’, Almanack, Guarulhos (2011), pp. 20–37 and Africanos livres, ch. 10 ‘Registro de escravidão e da liberdade’.

12 Slenes,’The Brazilian internal slave trade’, pp. 330–1.

13 See M.L. Lamounier, Da escravidão ao trabalho livre (A lei de locação de serviços de 1879) (Campinas, 1985) and A. Gebara, O mercado de trabalho livre no Brasil (1871–1888) (São Paulo, 1986).

14 See R. Conrad, ‘The planter class and the debate over Chinese immigration to Brazil, 1850–1893’, International Immigration Review, 9/1, 1975.

15 The most recent biography is A. Alonso, Joaquim Nabuco (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2007). See also L. Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo. Abolicionista, jornalista e diplomata (Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2016).

16 J. Nabuco, My Formative Years (Oxford: Signal Books in association with Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, Rio de Janeiro, 2012) edited and with an introduction by L. Bethell, p. 127. This is the first translation in English of Minha Formação [1900] (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2012).

17 Nabuco, My Formative Years, ch. XVIII ‘My father’.

18 Quoted in C. Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco por sua filha (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1928), pp. 36–7. It was in 1870 that Nabuco, a final-year law student, famously defended before the court of appeal in Recife a slave, Thomaz, accused of killing a man who was publicly flogging him and another who attempted to prevent his flight from custody. Arguing that slavery was itself a crime, Nabuco secured a life sentence for Thomaz instead of the expected death penalty. See Peter M. Beattie, ‘Joaquim Nabuco, o advogado, e Thomaz, o escravo: perspectivas locais, nacionais e comparativas sobre anti-escravidão e pena de morte’, in Conferências sobre Joaquim Nabuco (2 vols., Rio de Janeiro: Bem-Te-Vi Produções Literárias, 2010): vol. 2 Joaquim Nabuco em Wisconsin, Severino J. Albuquerque (ed.).

19 Nabuco, My Formative Years, chap. XX ‘Massangana’.

20 ‘A escravidão’ (1870), donated to the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro by Nabuco’s widow, Evelina, in September 1924, was published for the first time in the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, 204 (1949); 2nd edn. (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1988).

21 J. Nabuco, Diários I 1873–1888, II 1889–1910 (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Bem-Te-Vi/Recife: Editora Massangana, 2005), preface and notes by Evaldo Cabral de Mello, vol. 1 p. 169: 17 June 1877.

22 Nabuco pursued the freedom of the Cata Branca slaves through the Brazilian and British courts until the 223 still alive were finally freed in June 1882. See C.J. Campbell, ‘Tinha apenas em vista chamar a atenção: Joaquim Nabuco, os abolicionistas e o caso de Morro Velho’, in Conferências sobre Joaquim Nabuco, vol. 2.

23 Allen to Nabuco, 8 January 1880, Nabuco to Allen, 8 April 1880, in L. Bethell and J.M. de Carvalho (eds.), J. Nabuco, British abolitionists and the end of slavery in Brazil. Correspondence 1880–1905 (London: University of London Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2009), pp. 25–6, 28–31. Some parts of this essay are taken from the Introduction to the volume. I am grateful to José Murilo de Carvalho, co-author of the Introduction, for permission to do so.

24 Nabuco to Allen, 8 April 1880, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.) Joaquim Nabuco, p. 30.

25 Nabuco to Allen, 5 June 1881, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 46.

26 See D.I. Durham, A Southern Moderate in Radical Times: Henry Washington Hilliard 1808– 1892 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), ch. 7, pp. 166–96. Also D.I. Durham and P.M. Pruitt Jr, A Journey in Brazil: Henry Washington Hilliard and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama School of Law, 2008).

27 See n. 2. On the abolition of slavery in Cuba, see A.F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); R.J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Anti-Slavery: Spain, Cuba and Puerto Rico, 1833–74 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).

28 See A. Alonso, ‘O abolicionista cosmopolita. Joaquim Nabuco e a rede abolicionista transnacional’, Novos Estudos CEBRAP 88 (Nov. 2010), pp. 55–70.

29 Sociedade Brasileira contra Escravidao to British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 20 December 1880, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 35.

30 I.A. Marson and C.R. Tasinafo, ‘Considerações sobre a história do livro e de seus argumentos’, in Joaquim Nabuco, O abolicionismo Brasília: (Editora UnB, 2003), pp. 30–4.

31 Nabuco to Allen, 27 July 1883, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 79.

32 Annaes do Parlamento Brasileiro 1882 tomo II, p. 294; Jornal do Commercio, 15 July 1882.

33 Nabuco, Abolitionism, ch. VIII, ‘The promises of the “Law of Emancipation”’. O abolicionismo was meant to be the first in a series of volumes on ‘reformas nacionais’: the abolition of slavery, financial reform, the reform of public education, improvements in political representation, a degree of administrative de-centralisation, religious equality, European immigration. The abolition of slavery was only the beginning of the ‘Brazilian Rinnovamento’. However, ‘the emancipation of the slaves and of the ingênuos [the first of whom had under the Law of Free Birth 1871 become legally free at the age of eight in 1879] … must take precedence over every other reform’. Nabuco, Abolitionism, Preface.

34 Nabuco, Abolitionism, p. 24.

35 Nabuco to Allen, 31 March 1884, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 84.

36 Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, pp. 120, 146, 181, 398, 437–44.

37 On the abolitionist movement in Pernambuco, see C.T. Castilho, ‘Abolitionism matters: the politics of anti-slavery in Pernambuco, Brazil, 1869–88’ (University of California, Berkley, unpublished PhD, 2008) and Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).

38 O Paiz, 30 Aug. 1888, cited in M. Balaban, Poeta do lapis. Sátira e Política na trajetória de Ángelo Agostini no Brasil Imperial (1864–1888) (São Paulo: Editora Unicamp, 2009), pp. 86–7.

39 See Nabuco’s letters to The Times,5 April, 28 May 1883.

40 The Times, 31 July 1884.

41 J. Nabuco, Campanha abolicionista no Recife (eleições de 1884) [1885] (2nd edn. Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Editora Massangana, 1988), p. 47.

42 Nabuco to Allen, 22 February 1885, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 89.

43 Nabuco to Allen, 23 June 1885, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 96.

44 The Times, 19 June 1885.

45 Speeches of 3 July & 24 July 1885, in J. Nabuco, Discursos parlamentares, 1879–1889 (São Paulo: Instituto Progresso Editorial, 1949) (Obras completas vol. XI), pp. 159–211; Nabuco to Allen, 17 May 1885 & 6 August 1885, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, pp. 90–1, 97–100. Allen was equally outraged: the revised bill was ‘monstrous … after working the poor wretches nearer to death, these men are to be paid for giving freedom to their worn out slaves with one foot already in the grave!’. Allen to Nabcuco, 8 June 1885, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, pp. 92–3.

46 On the law of 1885, see J. Maria Nunes Mendonça, Entre a mão e os anéis. A lei dos sexagenários e os caminhos da abolição no Brasil (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 1999). It did little to accelerate the end of slavery: fewer than 20,000 slaves over 60 were freed under the new law during the first 12 months.

47 Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, p. 257.

48 Nabuco to Allen [April 1887], in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 116.

49 Nabuco, Diários, vol. 1, p. 284: 14 September 1887.

50 Castilho, Abolitionism matters, p. 221.

51 On the abolitionist movement outside parliament during the 1880s, the classic study is Evaristo de Moraes, A campanha abolicionista 1879–1888 [1924] (Brasília: Editora da Universidade de Brasília, 1988). See also E. Viotti da Costa, Da senzala à colonia (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1966); R. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972; Port. trans., Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1975); Sidney Chalhoub, Visões da liberdade: uma história das últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990); M.H. Pereira Toledo Machado, O plano e o pânico. Os movimentos sociais na década da abolição (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo: Editora da URFJ/Edusp, 1994); C. T. Castilho, ‘ Abolitionism matters’ (2008); and, above all, A. Alonso, Flores, votos e balas (2015), cited above. An attempt to ‘recontextualise abolitionism’ by showing how the abolitionist movement interacted with elite, parliamentary politics is J.D. Needell, ‘Brazilian abolitionism, its historiography and the uses of political history’, Journal of Latin American Studies 50 (2010).

52 Speech of 7 Oct. 1887, in Nabuco, Discursos parlamentares, pp. 189–91.

53 T.H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in Sao Paulo 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), Appendix 4, p. 179. See also Holloway, ‘Immigration and abolition. The transition from slave to free labour in the São Paulo coffee zone’, in D. Alden and W. Dean (eds.) Essays Concerning the Socio-Economic History of Brazil and Portuguese India (Gainsville: University of Florida Press 1977). 92,000 European immigrants arrived in São Paulo (of 135,000 to Brazil) in 1888 and three-quarters of a million, mostly Italian, in the decade after abolition.

54 Needell, ‘Brazilian abolitionism’, p. 40, n. 43.

55 See Nabuco, My Formative Years, ch. XXIV ‘At the Vatican’. In the event, Cotegipe managed to have its publication postponed, but Nabuco’s account of his meeting with the pope was published in O Paiz and the pope’s position on slavery became generally known.

56 Castilho, Abolitionism matters, p. 260, quoting reports in A Provincia.

57 Nabuco, Diários, vol. 1 p. 291: 23 April 1888.

58 Nabuco commented to Allen, ‘It was a very daring, bold thing the Princess did but I trust in God she will not lose her throne for it’ (Nabuco to Allen, 8 January 1889, in Bethell and Carvalho (eds.), Joaquim Nabuco, p. 145). The empire was overthrown 18 months later on 15 November 1889.

59 Two outstanding recent studies of the end of slavery in the United States are E. Foner, The Fiery Trial. Abraham Lincoln and American slavery (New York: Norton, 2010) and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, NY: Norton, 2013.)

60 See E. Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1988; 2nd edn. 2014).

61 S. Chalhoub, ‘População e sociedade’, in História do Brasil Nação: 1808–2010 , vol. II A Construção nacional 1830–1889, J. Murilo de Carvalho (ed.) (Madrid: Fundación Mapfre/ Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2012), pp. 41–2.

62 During the 1880s Brazil received a total of 450,000 immigrants, two-thirds of them in 1888–9 alone: 62 per cent were Italian, 23 per cent Portuguese, seven per cent Spanish, four per cent German and two per cent French.

63 Nabuco, Abolitionism, pp. 121–2.

64 Nabuco, My Formative Years, pp. 135, 147.