When did Portugal abolish slavery in Brazil?

Slaves at a coffee yard in a farm. Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo, 1882.

Brazil was the last place in the Americas to abolish slavery — it didn't happen until 1888 — and that meant that the final years of the practice were photographed.

This has given Brazil what may be the world's largest archive of photography of slavery, and a new exhibition in Sao Paulo is offering some new insights into the country's brutal past.

One image at the exhibition, for example, has been blown up to the size of a wall. "Things that you could never see, suddenly you see," says anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz, one of the curators of the new exhibition called Emancipation Inclusion and Exclusion.

In its original size and composition, the image from photographer Marc Ferrez, one of the most impressive photographers from 19th century Brazil, shows a wide shot of a group of slaves drying coffee in a field. Their faces are indistinct but the overall impression is one of order and calm. But once the picture is blown up, the expressions become distinct and details emerge. A female slave is breastfeeding a child in the field; clothes that look neat are seen to be tattered.

"Expanding the photos, we can see a lot of things we couldn't see and the state didn't want to see," Schwarcz says. "We do not want to show slaves only like victims."

Brazil's History With Slavery

Slavery in Brazil lasted for 300 years, and it imported some 4 million Africans to the country. These images were taken during the waning days of slavery and Brazil's monarchy. Many were commissioned by the state in an attempt to show slavery in a better light.

Black woman with white child on her back. Bahia, 1860.

Sergio Burgi with the Moreira Salles Institute, which donated the photographs to the show, says blowing up the images shows the underlying brutality of the system. In another image, slaves are lined up waiting to be taken into the field. All are barefoot. In between them, once the image is enlarged, we can see many young children.

"Its incredible what you see," Burgi says. "The amount of children who very early go out ... how would they manage to take care of these children out in the fields?"

Lilia Schwarcz says the slave system was based on violence, and the photos, when when viewed closely, show just how violent that system could be. Whats astounding about the exhibition is the variety of situations that slaves were photographed in: not only in the fields but in their owners' homes, in the city and taking care of the white children of their masters.

One of the most striking images is of a white woman sitting in a litter. The two slaves that would carry her through the streets of the city are standing next to her. One looks down, in deference. The other man is leaning against the litter, his hat tipped at a jaunty angle, staring straight at the camera.

"He's showing himself, and saying 'I'm not just like this, I'm another thing. I'm something different. I'm something else," Schwarcz says.

A detail from a photo of slaves going to the coffee harvest with oxcar. Vale do Paraiba, Sao Paulo, 1885.

Opening New Discussions

The images in the exhibition were taken from 1860 to 1885. Slavery ended in Brazil in 1888, and the photos also reveal a tricky and difficult moment for slave owners in Brazil, says Maria Helena Machado, a historian who also contributed to the exhibition.

"It was almost the end of the slave system in Brazil, but those owners ... they wanted very much to keep the slave system," Machado says.

Machado says the late 19th century was even more brutal than before because, with slavery about to end, owners wanted to get as much as they could in terms of slave work. "They are not concerned anymore about surviving, so who cares? 'I need to get my money back,'" she says.

A lady with two slaves, in Bahia, Brazil, 1860.

Machado says many slaves were running away, while others had formed armed bands and were revolting. The enlarged images show the look in the eyes of the slaves. The battle, says Lilia Schwarcz, is very evident.

"They were fighting for their freedom," she says. "So you have here a discussion about freedom."

A discussion that curator Sergio Burgi says continues today, with the people who have come to see the exhibition. "People here in Brazil have reacted in very interesting ways saying 'Oh that reminds me of my time as a kid, and I used to live in a rural area and everything looked similar,'" he says.

Burgi says even decades after slavery, blacks lived in the same conditions, and that legacy continues to resonate today.

The exhibition runs through the end of December at the University of Sao Paulo.

The Portuguese populate their island colonies off the coast of western Africa largely with enslaved Black Africans. The Portuguese also take many African captives back to Portugal.

Spain and Portugal begin establishing colonies in the New World. Large parts of the Caribbean will be depopulated during the European conquest. Increasingly, captives will be shipped from Africa to replace the enslaved Indians.

Great Britain abolishes the slave trade with its colonies.

The U.S. Congress bans the importation of slaves into the country.

Brazil outlaws the slave trade. As slavery remains legal in the country, however, the smuggling of enslaved Africans into Brazil continues for several more decades.

Brazil formally abolishes slavery on May 13.

< 4.1 Paraguayan War – 4.3 Abolition >

This painting by English painter Augustus Earle, who lived in Rio de Janeiro from 1820-1824, is captioned “Negroes fighting, Brazils.” However, the men’s body movements are of Capoeira, a martial art practiced among Afro-Brazilians to this day. Women and children observe, and a white police officer approaches the scene. Original in National Library of Australia, Canberra.

Events and Intellectual Movements

Calls for the abolition of slavery in Brazil started in the early nineteenth century. As early as 1825, José Bonifácio Andrada e Silva, a leading figure in engineering Brazil’s independence from the Portuguese, wrote in favor of gradual emancipation. Britain, Brazil’s primary trade partner and financier, forced the issue in 1850, and the slave trade was abolished. A smattering of legislation led up to the official but gradual abolition of slavery: the 1871 “Law of the Free Womb,” which declared free all children of slaves born after the law was passed; the 1885 Sexagenarian Law, which freed slaves over 60 years of age; and finally the total emancipation law in 1888.

The data for the decade before 1840 are imprecise, but the British Foreign Office’s 1844 memo on the subject estimated that around 128,000 African slaves had been brought into Brazil between 1831 and 1839, with the majority coming in the second half of the decade. Between 1840 and 1851, a total of 371,615 slaves came to Brazil (Data from Bethell 70).

One of the first attempts to legislate against the slave trade came in 1828 when a law outlawing the practice was approved. It was to go into effect in 1831, just months after the emperor, Dom Pedro I, left the country and returned to Portugal, leaving behind his six-year-old son as temporary head of state. However, this law, which declared all slaves free upon entry to Brazil, was scarcely noted by slave traders, who continued business as usual after a brief lull in trading patterns in the early 1830s. Rather, merchants and politicians alike viewed the law as “uma lei para ingles ver” [a law for the British to see], something to appease the British on whom the nation was financially dependent.

In the year 1865, the institution of slavery was still legal in Brazil. Brazil remained a largely agrarian economy. The political system was a combination of a hereditary monarchy and a parliamentary body, highly centralized and ruled by a vulnerable authority figure, Pedro II. Even before the abolition of slavery, Brazil had a considerable population of free people of color.

Yet, according to Thomas Skidmore, “the free man of color, who existed at every level of Brazilian society, was conspicuously ignored by the Romantic authors” ? some of the most popular philosophers of the day ? unlike the Afro-Brazilian slaves they extolled.

The Paraguayan War presented an ideological shift among the military and changed the demographics of slavery. Since their enlistment in the Army, many slaves had proven their worth on the battlefield, a realization that caused officers to be increasingly skeptical of the institution of slavery and unwilling to fulfill the Army’s responsibility to recover runaway slaves. New philosophical movements such as Positivism and Republicanism, embraced by many Brazilian politicians, emphasized rationality and went hand-in-hand with calls for progress and modernization.

By the time of the “Golden Law” of 1888, many Brazilians had already decided for themselves to free their slaves. A January 24, 1884 article in the newspaper O Provinciano, of Paraiba do Sul, listed the following series of manumissions:

Dona Anna S. José, 16 slaves liberated, and a farm given to them for their own use.

Dona Maria de Caula, 16 slaves liberated, with the condition they serve five years on works of charity in the local Casa de Caridade (Charity House).

Condessa do Rio Novo, 200 slaves liberated by her will and the Cantagallo Plantation given them for a home.

José Eunes Baganha, Portuguese, died in Lisbon and left $100,000 for the liberation of his old slaves.

Barão de Simão Dias,163 slaves liberated, who remain on his plantation as workers.

Barão de Santo Antônio, 168 slaves liberated by his will and two plantations given to them for their own use (Burns 267).

This drawing appeared in the book Brazil and the Brazilians, published in Philadelphia in 1856. Captioned “The Rio Team (Now Abolished),” it notes that “formerly, all this work was performed by human hands, and scarcely a cart or a dray was used in the city, unless ? it was drawn by Negroes. Carts and wagons propelled by horse-power are now quite common ?” From Daniel P. Kidder, Brazil and the Brazilians, portrayed in historical and descriptive sketches.

• What external economic and political factors affected the fluctuations in the slave market during the nineteenth century?
• What were the political, economic, and demographic circumstances surrounding abolition? Why did it happen in 1888, and not before or after?

Racial Thought and National Identity

These engravings, “Different Nations’ Negroes,” are from a series of drawings by French painter Jean-Baptiste Debret made during his time in Brazil between 1816 and 1831. The details show heads, faces, and hairstyles, emphasizing different, exaggerated phenotypes between African nations. From Jean Baptiste Debret, Voyage Pittoresque et Historique au Bresil. Copy in the John Carter Brown Library.

European thought, unsurprisingly, set the pace for the discourse on the hierarchy of nations. Having gained a global audience by the mid-nineteenth century, European thinkers linked the economic and political success of their countries to their racial and climatic superiority, a conclusion that implied that “darker races and tropical climates could never produce comparable civilizations.” This conclusion had a formal name: determinism. To these thinkers, Brazil clearly fell into the category of countries with “darker races and tropical climates.”

A travelogue chronicling the trip to Brazil undertaken by American professor Louis Agassiz and his wife shows the wide-ranging effects of the determinist theory. Throughout their journey, the Agassizes note the effects of the tropical climate on the Brazilian population as a whole, and particularly on its African slaves, who are condemned to a less civilized nature by the hot regions of their birth. Of the state of Minas Gerais, Mrs. Agassiz writes:

This province is said to be remarkable for the great energy and intelligence of its inhabitants, as compared with those of the adjoining provinces. Perhaps this may be owing to its cooler climate, most of its towns lying among the highlands of the Serras, and enjoying a fresher, more stimulating air than those nearer the sea-coast (Agassiz 64).

One nagging question for many Brazilian elites, including those who viewed slavery as detrimental to their society, was whether or not Brazil could ever become an advanced, modern nation with its non-white population and non-European climate.

Before all else, many thought that the first step was to free Brazil of the noxious disease of slavery. In his 1880 abolitionist manifesto, Joaquim Nabuco argued that slavery slowed the course of progress, arguing against the claim of Conservatives that slavery was necessary for the country’s survival:

If a nation can progress only by using the forced labor of an extra-legal caste, then it is a mere first approximation of an independent and autonomous state. If a race is able to develop in a latitude only by making another race work to support it, then that race has not yet attempted to acclimatize. Traditional Brazilians think that a Brazil without slaves would quickly perish. Even that result would be better than a life that can be maintained only by undermining national character and humiliating the country. If abolition should mean suicide, then humanity would be rendered a service by those incapable of surviving on their own. At least they would have the courage to leave to the stronger, heartier and braver, the incomparable heritage of a land that they could not cultivate and where they could not survive.

Instead of being suicidal, ending slavery would be a provident and just act. It would summon forth new qualities in our national character and launch the nation on an epoch of progress and free labor, which would be the true period of our definitive development and our real independence (Skidmore, 22).

Further Reading

• Thomas Skidmore’s Black Into White addresses the development and change of racial theory in Brazil into the twentieth century.

Sources

• Agassiz, Louis and Mrs. A Journey in Brazil. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1871.
• Bethell, Leslie. The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
• Skidmore, Thomas. Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993.
• University of Virginia Digital Media Lab. Exploring Cultural Landscapes. http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/.

< 4.1 Paraguayan War – 4.3 Abolition >