This keynote address takes place as part of the international conference "200 Years of the Monroe Doctrine". It explores the nearly century-long process of abolishing slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil, the last country to end the “peculiar” institution in 1888, and, along with the United States, the largest slaveholding power in the Western Hemisphere. The talk begins in the early 1820s, when Brazil achieved its independence from Portugal. Unlike in many Spanish American republics, sovereignty did not serve as a catalyst for emancipatory policies in Brazil. For example, while Simón de Bolívar was allying with a free, all-Black Haiti, Brazil was importing hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans in an illegal transatlantic trade. In fact, Brazil only ended its transatlantic slave trade in 1850, after decades of growing British pressure. Yet, because the Brazilian enslaved population never achieved endogenous growth, the end of the transatlantic trade in 1850 served as a first ring of the institution’s death knell.

After that date, enslavers placed increased attention on enslaved women’s reproductive capabilities, hoping to reproduce their enslaved labor force through biological growth. At the same time, they created a robust internal slave trade from the declining sugar-producing northeast to the growing coffee-producing southeast, which disregarded those same reproductive capacities by separating enslaved families. As other American nations continued to abolish slavery, including the United States in the mid-1860s, Brazil held an increasingly isolated status as slaveholding nation. Unlike in the United States, which fought a war to end slavery, Brazil followed in the footsteps of its Spanish American neighbors, relying on gradual abolition legislation to phase out the institution. In 1871, Brazil passed the Law of the Free Womb, which conditionally freed the children born to enslaved women. In 1885, it passed the Law of the Sexagenarians, which freed enslaved people over 60. Final abolition through the “Golden Law” occurred in 1888.

As this presentation will show, the true abolitionists in Brazil were not the anti-slavery statesmen who put their signatures on this important legislation but the enslaved people who fought for their own freedom and that of their families in the plantation fields, marketplaces, and courtrooms across Brazil.

Photo: ©Jonas Jacobsson / unsplash.com