The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

By Jeffrey Needell

For centuries, slaveholding was a commonplace in Brazil among both whites and people of color. Abolition was only achieved in 1888, in an unprecedented, turbulent political process. How was the Abolitionist movement (1879-1888) able to bring an end to a form of labor that was traditionally perceived as both indispensable and entirely legitimate? How were the slaveholders who dominated Brazil's constitutional monarchy compelled to agree to it?

To answer these questions, we must understand the elite political world that abolitionism challenged and changed—and how the Abolitionist movement evolved in turn. The Sacred Cause analyzes the relations between the movement, its Afro-Brazilian following, and the evolving response of the parliamentary regime in Rio de Janeiro. Jeffrey Needell highlights the significance of racial identity and solidarity to the Abolitionist movement, showing how Afro-Brazilian leadership, organization, and popular mobilization were critical to the movement's identity, nature, and impact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503611030

Book preview

The Sacred Cause

THE ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT, AFRO-BRAZILIAN MOBILIZATION, AND IMPERIAL POLITICS IN RIO DE JANEIRO

Jeffrey D. Needell

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Needell, Jeffrey D., author.

Title: The sacred cause : the abolitionist movement, Afro-Brazilian mobilization, and imperial politics in Rio de Janeiro / Jeffrey D. Needell.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019010169 (print) | LCCN 2019011407 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503611030 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609020 | ISBN 9781503609020 (cloth: alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Antislavery movements—Brazil—History—19th century. | Blacks—Brazil—Politics and government—19th century. | Slavery—Brazil—History—19th century. | Brazil—Politics and government—1822-1889. | Brazil—History—Empire, 1822–1889.

Classification: LCC HT1128 (ebook) | LCC HT1128 .N44 2019 (print) | DDC 326/.80981—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010169

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Cover photograph: Abolition of slavery by Princess Isabel, 1888. Marc Ferrez, from the Gilberto Ferrez collection of photographs of nineteenth-century Brazil. Wikimedia Commons

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/12.5 Sabon

For Gabriel, for Renata, and for Ethan—with enduring love and great pride.

I am an abolitionist at heart and I take advantage of this solemn occasion to declare it. My conscience does not accuse me of having left aside a single occasion, when drafting opinions for this society, of having neglected to make propaganda for the abolition of slavery, and I hope to God that I shall not die without having given to my Country the most abundant evidence of my dedication to the Sacred Cause of Emancipation.

André Pinto Rebouças, Diário

Contents

Acknowledgments

Names, Spelling, and Translation

Maps

INTRODUCTION: Another Political World

1. The Land of the Dead: The Imperial Capital, 1822–1871

2. The Alliance with the Future: The Movement Emerges, 1871–1881

3. Retreat, Renewal, and the New Phase, 1882–1883

4. The Field of Agramante: The Liberals Attempt Reform, 1884–1885

5. The Fate of the Black Race: Radicalization and Its Failed Containment, 1885–1888

6. Sacred Abolition: The Triumph, 1888

7. Legacies and Oblivion

Illustrations

Notes

Sources Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my children, whose love continues to sustain me and whose character makes me so proud. Both that love and that character, as with so much of my happiness, derive from the marriage and family that Fátima, my wife, has made with me over the decades. As with the work that came before this, Fátima’s love, patience, and understanding as I have prepared this book have been critical. No one knows the book’s cost and its pleasures better than she, and I am deeply grateful.

I began work on this book in 2004, the year after submitting my second book’s manuscript to the press. Nothing as difficult and as demanding as this could have been done without generous support, and I have been very fortunate and remain very grateful. I have received two sabbaticals (2009–2010, 2016–2017) and three Humanities Enhancement Awards for summer research (2009, 2012, 2015) from the University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a summer research grant from the American Philosophical Society (2007), a Fulbright-Hays fellowship (2009, 2011), and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2013–2014), which supplemented archival research critical to this work but done for another project supported by the NEH in 1990–1991. In 2019, to help defray the cost of indexing, I was awarded a subvention by the University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment). The cost of preparing the book’s maps and illustrations was paid for in 2019 by a University Scholars Program bequest by Hali McKinley Lester.

Brian Ward, Joseph Spillane, Ida Altman, and Sean Addams, who chaired my department over these years, supported my research consistently and at critical junctures. David Geggus’s conversations and support were an abiding source of encouragement. Richard Phillips and Paul Losche, who have overseen the Latin American and Caribbean Collection here with loving care over the years, facilitated my research in countless ways, particularly in terms of access to and use of our microfilmed Brazilian periodicals. At Renaissance Printing, Jacquelyn Tight’s patience and skill with maps and images were welcome indeed. Since 2016, Margo Irvin, my editor at Stanford University Press, has taken an encouraging interest in my work and supported it, ably assisted by Nora Spiegel, whose timely advice was much appreciated. I am very grateful to the production editor, Anne Fuzellier Jain, for her clarity, rapidity, professionalism, and understanding, and to Christine Gever, the copy editor, whose tireless, extraordinary commitment saved me from many an error and much awkward or unclear phrasing.

In Brazil, the Lima Maia family, gift of my wife, welcomed us repeatedly and made our frequent stays in Rio both possible and precious. The support and generosity of Brazilian colleagues was also indispensable. Historians at the Casa de Rui Barbosa, particularly Antônio Herculano Lopes, Isabel Lustosa, and Eduardo Silva, welcomed my return and research there. Sátiro Nunes was critical to my success at the Arquivo Nacional; and I owe special thanks to Andréa Ferreira, who completed work there for me, as well. The staff overseeing the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, as always, welcomed me to their fundamental holdings. Beatriz Kushnir, at the Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, embraced my return there and ensured my success. Old friends at the Biblioteca Nacional, particularly Vera Lúcia Garcia Menezes, were critical to my research, as were the staff of the Arquivo Histórico do Museu Imperial in Petrópolis. In Recife, Marcus Joaquim Maciel de Carvalho welcomed me to his department at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and to his city; there, I was also hosted by the head of the Arquivo João Alfredo, Marcos Galindo Lima, whose generosity and patience in giving me access to that critical collection, both before and after its professional cataloguing, were essential to my work.

Much of my approach has to do with urban history, something I first studied with my mentor, Richard M. Morse. I continue to learn from him and to mourn his loss. My introduction to Brazilian slavery and abolition came from Emília Viotti da Costa. I owe a great deal to her, not least her critical engagement with the world of the elite. In my research on the monarchy’s politics over the years, I have had the great good fortune to learn from the two great masters of the subject, Roderick J. Barman and José Murilo de Carvalho. I have not always agreed with their conclusions, but I have always benefited from their support, their learning, their generosity, and their friendship. I also want to thank others whose support and interest over the years provided a sustaining encouragement more important than they may have known: George Reid Andrews, Leslie Bethell, John Coatsworth, and especially Joseph Love.

Finally, I want to thank those colleagues who, over many years, gave me a chance to discuss aspects of this study at conferences or workshops that they organized: Severino J. Albuquerque, David W. Blight, Dain Borges, Eric Duke, Marcela Echeverri Munoz, Zephyr Frank, Scott A. Ickes, Kenneth David Jackson, Herbert S. Klein, Gabriel Paquette, Eduardo Posada Carbó, Edward Rugemer, Stuart Schwarz, and William Summerhill.

Names, Spelling, and Translation

In common Brazilian usage, at the time and in print today, a person is generally referred to by one or two of his or her names, rather than the several given at birth, and those with noble titles are often referred to by those titles alone. Except for persons of greater importance to this study, that practice is followed here. Thus, the viscount de Jequitinhonha, who is referred to here in passing, goes by that name alone, rather than Francisco Gê Acaiaba de Montesuma, viscount de Jequitinhonha, while Paulino José Soares de Sousa, viscount de Uruguai, more critical to the book, is given all of his names when first mentioned but then subsequently referred to as the viscount do Uruguai or simply Uruguai. João Alfredo Corréia de Oliveira, also critical here, will be referred to, after first mention, as João Alfredo, as he was known then and afterward. For the names that are critical here, the book’s index will cross-reference between the names used and the full names where needed. For example, Uruguai will refer the reader to Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, viscount do Uruguai, and Alfredo, João will refer the reader to Oliveira, João Alfredo Corréia de.

The spelling of Portuguese in Brazil has changed several times over the last two centuries. Here, works and names cited in the sources follow the original spelling; current spelling is followed in the text. All published works cited in the notes and Sources Cited will refer to authors by the last of the author’s names as they are given in the original work. Names on the maps follow the spelling of the era.

Except where explicitly stated, all translations from the original Portuguese are the author’s.

MAP 1. The City of Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1830. Source: Adapted from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

MAP 2. Inset of the City of Rio de Janeiro showing particular sites and streets, ca. 1830. Source: Adapted from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

MAP 3. Brazil, ca. 1850. Sketch by Dumas-Forzel and engraving by Barthelemier. Source: Prepared for publication from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

INTRODUCTION

Another Political World

Brazil was the most important market of the African slave trade for over three hundred years; indeed, the trade from Africa to Brazil only ended in about 1850. From Brazil’s beginnings until deep into the nineteenth century, slaveholding itself was commonplace, considered inevitable and necessary; not only whites but people of color and freedmen held slaves, and slaves performed every sort of labor, from independent, urban artisanal work to the field work critical to the country’s economy. Yet, while the abolition of slavery itself was delayed and hard fought, it was finally achieved (1888) within the political process. Moreover, it was won by the Abolitionist movement without a civil war or enduring regional antagonism.¹ Given the fact that the state was dominated by slaveholders, as were the established parliamentary parties, how could this occur? How could the Abolitionist movement achieve the peaceful end of a form of labor traditionally so protected and perceived for generations to be both indispensable and entirely legitimate?

This is a fundamentally political problem. Yet, while the Abolitionist movement has been taken up in memoirs, participant histories, revisionist analyses, and, lately, subaltern and cultural studies, its essentially political nature—assumed by contemporaries but neglected more recently—has been poorly understood. None of the three established monographs, published in 1966, 1971, and 1972,² satisfactorily integrates the movement with the formal elite political regime of the era. They address that regime, to be sure, but they do not understand how it really worked; worse, they often tend to view it as a secondary phenomenon. Indeed, focusing upon the oppressed, upon the movement itself, and often shaped by essentially materialist interpretation, abolitionist scholarship then and over the last fifty years has failed to demonstrate precisely the articulation among Afro-Brazilians, the movement, and the parliamentary government of Brazil’s monarchy (1822–1889). Since the 1970s, work on Brazilian abolitionism derives in many ways from the historiographical trend associated with subaltern agency, itself associated with the larger trend of the late 1970s that emphasized social history, the agency of the masses, and de-emphasized political history and the role of middle-class or elite activists. In the study of Brazilian abolitionism, this has meant that the movement was either taken as a given and ignored, or simply dismissed entirely, as though irrelevant to how and why slavery was ended.

Nonetheless, by moving away from the national movement, there were very useful advances in studying abolitionism. Various aspects of the era and even the movement were recovered, such as local movements, juridical contestation, gender, and of course, always basic to these, the impact of the Afro-Brazilian masses, enslaved or free, themselves: Afro-Brazilian resistance in one particular region or town, the lived experience of the Afro-Brazilian masses in one particular town or region, the variation of the movement in one particular province or city, and so on. Among the works by Anglophones or works translated into English are those by Warren Dean, Cleveland Donald Jr., Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Roger A. Kittleson, Dale Torston Graden, Camillia Cowling, and Celso Castilho. The very influential works along these lines by Machado, Hebe Mattos, Sidney Chalhoub, and Carlos Eugênio Libano Soares remain untranslated, as do the related works, emphasizing Afro-Brazilian agency and the law in urban settings, by such authors as Joseli Maria Nunes Mendonça, Eduardo Spiller Pena, Beatriz Mamigonian, and Keila Grinberg. Almost all of this work emphasizes either Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo (Castilho treats Pernambuco; Kittleson, Rio Grande do Sul). There is also what might be called the Bahian school, scholars associated with João José Reis (e.g., Walter Fraga Filho and Wlamyra R. de Albuquerque), much of whose work also remains untranslated and all of which falls within this larger historiographical trend, albeit with a focus on Salvador, Bahia’s capital.³

In the end, the national movement’s political history, centered in Rio, has either been left as it was understood in the early 1970s or effectively marginalized by historians. Even recently, only one scholar, the sociologist Angela Alonso, has even attempted to address it, in her 2015 study of the movement at the national level.⁴ This general lack of work on the political history of the national movement is a significant lacuna in the historiography, not least because of Brazilian and Anglophone readers’ enduring interest in race relations, in slavery, and in the impact of political organization and political action upon both.

Since the late 1970s, I have undertaken historical research on nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Rio’s urban culture, society, and popular resistance; Brazilian political and social thought (in which issues of race, slavery, and their historical legacy were inevitably central); and the Brazilian monarchy’s formal political structure and history. Most recently, I published The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (2006), which traces the origins, development, and decline of the parliamentary monarchy. In my concluding remarks, written in 2003, I commented that the nature of the monarchy’s politics after 1878 were distinct from those that went before—another political era, another political world—and that they would require another political history. This is that history; I began its research in 2004. This book concerns nineteenth-century popular political mobilization at the monarchy’s end, focusing on the Abolitionist movement in Rio, its origins and its victory in parliament, and the role of Afro-Brazilian political agency in that struggle (1879–1888).

I have written a book that I hope will be useful to scholars interested in abolitionism, slavery, and urban movements in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. I have worked hard to make sure that it will also serve those scholars, students, and laypeople who, although ignorant of Brazilian history, are interested in topics of perennial, general concern: race, slavery, and race relations. The first chapter briefly lays out the history and formation of Rio; explores the nature, impacts, and evolution of Afro-Brazilian slavery there; and summarizes critical aspects of the political regime and its evolution for readers unfamiliar with The Party of Order. In each subsequent chapter, working through the history of the movement chronologically, I provide a detailed analysis of the fundamental interactions between the Abolitionist movement, its Afro-Brazilian following, and the evolving political response of the parliamentary regime dominated by the monarch and the elite. Many aspects of the way in which the mobilization of the urban masses was actually effected, as well as the role of race in that mobilization, are here made clear, as are the key aspects of the parliamentary regime’s and movement’s interactive evolution.

Many of the sources for this analysis have, with some exceptions, been drawn upon by other historians. What distinguishes my research from theirs is a greater immersion in them, particularly with regard to how parliamentary and movement politics were interwoven and shaped each other’s interaction. The primary sources comprise archived private correspondence, archived and published diaries and memoirs, and, especially, contemporary newspaper accounts. All of these are critical in terms of documenting the phasing and the nature of street mobilization and comprehending the perspective of contemporaries. While accounts of the illiterate mass’s perception of the movement are difficult to gauge directly, the sources I have used are critical to establishing both the successful appeal of the Abolitionist leaders and the political responses of their followers. The correspondence and other personal records provide us with the private perceptions of the Abolitionists, their observers, and their opposition; the dailies give us the narrative of the public events and, in the Abolitionist press, the propaganda that comprised a key part of that mobilization. Combined, the archived and published private accounts and the periodicals provide or corroborate the significant events, dating conflicts, indicating key individuals and their roles, and providing the language used in the critical parliamentary debates or meetings. For the articulation with parliamentary politics, I have also studied the most formidable periodical of the time, the Jornal do Commercio, the journal of record. Analysis of this newspaper charts the course of Abolitionism’s progress, high and low, from the debates in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate to reports on the street movement and, most especially, how the two affected each other. A great emphasis of this study is precisely on the impact of popular mass mobilization on parliament.

Not all of the research I initially planned worked out, which necessarily limited what I can say about popular mass motivations and perceptions. Most important, although colleagues have explored quotidian Afro-Brazilian resistance in Rio by pursuing archival records of police repression there, my 2007, 2009, and 2011 research in internal police and ministerial reports indicates that similar evidence does not exist for the Abolitionists or their movement. Such reports were apparently made verbally or informally, or were purged. Thus, for the government’s repression and its perception of the movement, just as for the perceptions and intentions of all of the actors concerned, research in the press and archived correspondence became especially crucial.

Work in the published material and the archived correspondence was the focus of my archival work in Brazil and my analysis at home until May 2012. After that date, I focused on the dailies steadily, finding and filing data. It is work that requires a great deal of patience and thorough preparation in rare primary published sources, command of the secondary literature, and an understanding of parliamentary history. The secondary literature on Brazilian slavery and abolition poses yet another challenge. It is very much a mixed bag, involving successful archival work, surprising lacunae, and a great deal of politicized analysis. I worked through the classics and much of the more recent work until 2009, and to master what has been done since then, in the summer of 2016. The work on the recent literature has been interesting and useful. While it adds to my knowledge of details and aspects of the past, it continues to confirm my sense that the interactive approach I am using, with its emphasis on a chronological narrative and analysis of the interweave between parliament, the movement, and public mobilization will provide a needed, unique contribution.

In my first two books, I relegated a great deal of the scholarly discussion to the notes, and in this book, I do the same. I have made a conscious decision to limit the notes to evidence and only the essential references to the critical debates or differences in analysis. I have already discussed much of the historiography and debates in previous, preliminary work and will take up anything I think requires further such discussion in future articles.⁵

The completed book’s organization can be suggested in broad strokes. Chapter 1, as noted, sets up the context in terms of the nature and development of Rio’s slavery and Afro-Brazilian urban history in the nineteenth century, up to 1871. It discusses critical aspects of the demographic shifts in Brazil over time, between regions and between the urban and rural sectors, and their impact on Abolitionism. It also lays out the nature and history of the formal political structure and the history of key abolitionist legislation up through 1871. It synthesizes some thirty years or more of published work (mine and others’) on the city’s society, history, popular culture, and politics. Chapter 2 begins the history of the movement with the aftermath of the Law of the Free Womb of 1871, the origins of the Abolitionist movement in parliament, its first public successes, its Afro-Brazilian components and appeal, and its initial defeat with the election of 1881. Chapter 3 discusses how the Abolitionist movement survived and gained strength over 1882–1883, particularly as a popular movement. It demonstrates how the movement radicalized in fundamental ways, both in its goals and in its strength in the streets, and moved forward from acts of emancipation largely affecting urban slaves and slaves in provinces where there were relatively few, to an explicit call for immediate and unconditional abolition, not just in the urban sector or provinces in economic decline but everywhere and all at once—a frontal attack on the nation’s export plantation establishment.

Chapter 4 details the pivotal Dantas administration’s rise and fall, explaining the monarch’s decision to contain the movement by a new reform, the parliamentary and electoral complexities of the administration’s fate, the critical role of Afro-Brazilian mobilization in that fate, and the triumph of the reaction against this administration, culminating in the 1885 Sexagenarian Law and the return of the Conservatives to power under the baron de Cotegipe. Chapter 5 (1885–1887) explains how the movement—in parliament, in the press, and in the popular movement in the streets—responded. It details the increased, successful mobilization, confrontation, and radical success both in Rio and in organizing individual and mass slave flight in the rural sector, particularly the economic frontier, thus slowly undermining the Cotegipe cabinet, dividing the Conservative Party, and compelling the monarch’s intervention to end slavery so as to contain further political and socioeconomic destabilization. Chapter 6 focuses on the legislative end of slavery itself. It provides a new, detailed analysis of how the Abolitionist movement allied with the new reformist Conservative cabinet of João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira to put a rapid end to legal slavery on 13 May 1888. Chapter 7, the final chapter, goes over the political issues arising from the Abolitionist triumph, from the constitutional issues raised by the cabinet’s role and in the debates to the collapse of the monarchy itself. It also discusses the questions that naturally arise from the law and the coup that followed, including the failure of the Abolitionists to effect further reform and the failure of the movement or its followers to address the enduring issue of racism, despite the success of a movement explicitly rooted in a recognition of the Afro-Brazilian’s historical role and the ideas of racial identity and solidarity. It concludes with a discussion of the principal leaders’ passing and how they and their roles have been recognized, remembered, and forgotten.

There are certain matters that this book does not address. While it necessarily details the impact of the new Rio movement on certain key provinces and their impact on the Rio movement, this study does not focus on the history of the movement in the provinces. Viotti da Costa pioneered that history, Toplin and especially Conrad did fine analyses of it, and Alonso has now grappled with it again. In sum, the book is focused on the Abolitionist movement and the imperial government in Rio. Indeed, this is one of its contributions.

There are good reasons for this focus. Rio was the seat of the imperial government in a highly centralized political regime in which parliamentary struggle and the rise and fall of cabinets were critical to events at the local level throughout the nation. Moreover, as will be explained, the movement began with speeches in the parliament there, the movement was supported in the press and public meetings there, and when national elections undercut Abolitionism in parliament, the movement was sustained by a rising, popular mobilization in Rio’s central parishes and streets. The new strength of the movement gathered in Rio (and from the rising response in certain provinces) was what compelled the monarch and the two elite parties to attempt its containment, then its quashing, and when that failed, its final containment.

If one of the contributions of this book is thus a careful reconstruction of the movement’s evolution in Rio, another is a formal parliamentary history. For the most part, the latter has only been referred to by historians of Abolitionism who knew enough to note it and its debates. Here, I have attempted something distinct from that: to grasp the nature of the regime and its statesmen over time, strengthened by the years of research and writing that culminated in The Party of Order. That is, from a careful study of archived correspondence, contemporaries’ memoirs, and the dailies of four decades, I came to an understanding of how the political regime took shape, how it worked, the nature of its parties, the role of the monarch, and the significance of ideology and individual statesmen as the regime matured. It is this that I have tried to bring into play in understanding how the regime interacted with this new movement, so unprecedented in so many aspects, and how both the movement and the formal political regime shaped each other in the ensuing struggle.

Many readers, used to studying the issues of Abolition in terms of radical urban middle-class organization, social history, history from the bottom up, and subaltern agency, will here be provided for the first time with the opportunity to understand the nature of the monarchy’s formal, elite political regime. As an indispensable part of that, they will come to understand the role of particular statesmen (including the monarch), the contingency of such statesmen’s interventions, the role of party loyalty, division, and ambition, and the critical relationship of the rise and fall of cabinets to the successes and failures of the Abolitionist movement.

Nowadays, the understanding of these matters might not seem to many colleagues an obvious necessity. While contemporaries understood the critical role of the parliamentary regime to the movement’s history, the understanding of and critical engagement with that regime’s history has drifted away over the generations. Among professional historians, in particular, the taste for it has largely disappeared. It would be foolish, however, to try to understand the political history of the Abolitionist movement without mastering the critical aspects and details of the history of the parliamentary regime; it would be comparable to trying to understand the success of the United States civil rights movement without reference to the federal and state governments, the Democratic Party, or the role of the presidents. The Abolitionist veterans and their contemporaries understood the significance of parliament and the monarch; indeed, as I shall show, they addressed both in their tactics and their strategy. We must grapple with them as well.

If contemporaries took these matters into account, the question might arise, then, as to why a new book is required, given the presence of the classic histories and memoirs on our bookshelves. Aside from the increasing rarity of these works and their continuing to remain untranslated and unread, there are other points to raise. What is brought to bear here, which cannot be found in the best of the works of contemporaries—particularly Evaristo de Moraes’s analyses⁶—is access to critical correspondence and diaries, the advantage of drawing upon the achievements of generations of scholars (particularly, a new understanding of the Afro-Brazilian past and of Brazilian racism and racial identity), and a more dispassionate analysis. What both Moraes and I attempt, however, is similar. It is to show how the actions and reactions between the parliamentary regime and the movement were critical to how and when the abolition of slavery took place in Brazil. One cannot understand the movement’s history as something apart from the elite political world that it challenged and changed—and that challenged and changed it in turn.

Finally, as alluded to more than once above, this study attempts to tackle an issue that is intriguing to those of us familiar with the history of race, race relations, and racial identity in Brazil. It places the issues of racial identity and racial solidarity where they belong in the Abolitionist movement’s history—at the center and at the beginning. The best work on the Abolitionist struggle has always argued that the movement was an urban, middle-class, white movement (albeit one with a few significant Afro-Brazilian leaders), and one that only gathered the support of the Afro-Brazilian masses over time. What I seek to demonstrate here is that this understanding of the movement is mistaken. It is based on a misreading of contemporaries’ statements, on the one hand, and the failure to analyze certain critical documents and the dailies’ language, on the other. A more careful reading and analysis of this evidence transforms our understanding of the early movement’s membership and of the popular masses present and mobilized in the streets in the movement’s earliest years.

I agree that the urban middle class was critical in the movement’s core leadership, its first meetings, and its first organizations, but I argue that the urban middle-class following of those first organizations (1880–1881) was largely Afro-Brazilian. I also agree that while numbers clearly grew dramatically over the years, especially among the urban masses, with increasing political consequence, Afro-Brazilian organizations and popular mobilization were already basic to the movement’s identity and impact as early as 1882. I have also argued that the Afro-Brazilian urban society of the imperial court before 1871 is very important to understanding both the potential and the reality of an Afro-Brazilian identity and popular culture in Rio, and I have tried to show how that that identity and that culture likely played a part in the success of Abolitionist popular mobilization.

In effect, this is a study that takes a particular urban history into account, focusing on its Afro-Brazilian components, and then interweaves that with elite political history, the nature and evolution of a reformist movement (its leaders, its goals, its organizations), and the place and impact of that movement’s Afro-Brazilian following with regard to the movement and to the politics of the Brazilian monarchy. It is a complicated analysis, then, and one pursued on several different planes, over time. However, it will reward the reader with a fundamentally truer understanding of the abolition of Brazilian slavery. It will explain how the seemingly impossible was made possible—how an urban political movement ended slavery in town and country alike and did so within the formal confines of a monarchy established, dominated, and maintained by an elite of rural and urban slaveholders. It will also address what was not achieved, discuss why that monarchy fell, and suggest how that elite managed to retain its hold on state and society—albeit without monarch or slaves.

1

The Land of the Dead

THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL, 1822–1871

At first surprised by the immense crowd of slaves spread about in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the observer, calmer, suddenly recognizes the particular character of dance and song of each of the different Negro nations that are found intermixed there.

In effect, it is mostly in the squares and around the public fountains, the habitual places of assembly among these slaves, where often one of them, inspired by the memory of his motherland, breaks out in song. It is then that his compatriots, spontaneously charmed by the notes of his voice, gather around him, and, according to custom, accompany each couplet with a national chorus, or simply with a suitable cry; a sort of bizarre refrain, sung over two or three notes, and adaptable, nevertheless, to varying character.

Nearly always the song, that electrifies them, is accompanied by an improvised pantomime, or varied one after the other by those of the spectators who wish to act in the middle of the circle formed around the musician. During this very clear drama, very suddenly, one sees, painted on the face of the mimes, the transport by which they are possessed. The coolest, in contrast, content themselves with maintaining the rhythm, marked by clapping their hands, twice quickly and once slowly. The instrumentalists, also improvised and always numerous, are each only equipped, it is true, but with two pieces of ceramic, or two small pieces of iron, or even a shell and a stone, or even whatever they are carrying, like a box of tin or of wood, etc. . . .

But with the song’s end, the charm ceases; and everyone coolly separates, thinking of their masters’ whip and of accomplishing the task that has been interrupted by that delightful interlude.

Debret, Le nègre chanteur, Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil

Thus, in the early 1800s, the French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret begins our study. The slave, possibly a porter (so many of whom thronged the streets and squares of Rio), puts aside his work, struck by a memory of his motherland, and begins to sing. Others join in spontaneously, drawn by a shared memory of home.

Which of the African nations did they come from? Debret makes it clear elsewhere that they were not angolas or benguelas; scholars of the African trade might well then suggest a congo. Together with the other two, congos were among the three most numerous peoples among the West Central African majority dominating Rio’s nineteenth-century African population. Moreover, congos were a people known to be well represented among the porters in the commercial area of old streets and wharves of the cidade velha, the old city, which drew on the shipping at the port city’s eastern and northern edges on the Bay of Guanabara. Perhaps a congo porter, then, carrying tin to the Rua dos Latoeiros (street of the tinsmiths—now Rua Gonçalves Dias).¹

For that street was near enough to either of the two more popular squares with public fountains: the Largo do Paço (Palace Square—now Praça XV), perhaps, or possibly the Largo do Carioca (Carioca Square), with its fountain fed by the Carioca stream, descending from the nearby hills. That square was just east of the Morro de Santo Antônio (Hill of Santo Antônio), a bit west from the commercial center surrounding the Largo do Paço—between the Morros do Castelo and de São Bento.²

The captives of the three African nations mentioned, all speaking variations of the Bantu language, had traversed the Atlantic, of course, the ocean that their traditions taught separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. The crossing was thus called kalunga, the crossing to the land of the dead.³ They had found that Brazil, however, was not death alone. The slaves made it far more than that, as Debret’s description suggests. In Brazil, they found ways to each other; in their shared experiences, they found the means to make or remake communities, and they laid the bases for shared cultures and common struggles. The task here is to understand one later, glorious moment of those struggles—the abolition of slavery. We begin, then, with Debret’s evocation, with the city itself and the slaves within it, the milieu in which the struggle and the movement for Abolition must be understood.

The City and Its Society

GEOGRAPHY, FEATURES, AND SLAVERY

We have mentioned squares and fountains, the cidade velha, the Bay of Guanabara, and the Morros de São Antônio, do Castelo, and de São Bento. All speak to the land and the water, the high places and low, critical to understanding Rio. The geography of the city was like that of the province. The Province of Rio de Janeiro, too, was divided between lowlands and highlands, between the Baixada Fluminense and the Serra Acima, that is, the coastal fluminense lowlands (fluminense is an adjective or noun referring to things or people of the Province of Rio de Janeiro) and the mountain range just above them, the nearest range of the Brazilian Highlands, which run along the South Atlantic coast. The highlands divide the South Atlantic coastal lands of Brazil from the great Amazon Basin, far inland. In the city of Rio, the marshy lowland had mostly been overmastered by the nineteenth century, built over by the city’s streets, which had slowly prevailed by means of draining and landfill. The city’s lowlands were framed or punctuated by hills or ranges of hills.⁴

In the colonial eighteenth century, Rio was raised from the rank of capital of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro (as the province was then called) to that of being the capital of the new Viceroyalty of Brazil. The viceroyalty fused all of Portuguese America—the old State of Brazil and Amazonia’s State of Great Pará and Maranhão. These changes in Rio’s rank reflected the grander policies of Portugal for South America and the regional supremacy of the hinterland that Rio served. Salvador, a still older port capital (the capital of Bahia and the first capital of the former State of Brazil), continued to preside over the cane sugar exports of Brazil’s Northeast, the traditional economic mainstay of the country. However, Salvador was distant from the Río de la Plata, where Portugal and Spain fought repeatedly over their colonial borders and the river’s critical access to the interior. Rio was not only closer to this military frontier, it had clear potential for interior linkage to Portugal’s portion of the Amazon Basin, which the crown had once administered separately from the old State of Brazil. Portugal’s Amazonia had a long, contested frontier with Spain’s silver-mining area in the Andes, at San Luis de Potosí. More recently, Rio had become the commercial nexus for the contraband trade with Potosí. Indeed, since the early eighteenth century, Rio was the port for Portugal’s own mining region in South America, which stretched north and west away from Rio’s nearest hinterland, Minas Gerais, and on to Goiás and Mato Grosso. Each of these new captaincies was rich with gold—indeed, Minas had diamonds to boot. Finally, sugarcane production in the coastal tropical lowlands of the Baixada Fluminense had burgeoned since the seventeenth century. Sugar was critical to the expanding trade in people that provided West Africans, and especially West Central Africans, for the mining and planting of the southeastern region that Rio served. Rio had thus become the greatest port for the region and its African trade, as well as the city with the largest captive population in the Americas.⁵

Made the viceregal capital in 1763, Rio was the logical site for the royal capital in 1815, when Brazil was raised to the status of a kingdom, coequal to Portugal itself, by the Portuguese monarch. Indeed, that monarch, together with the court, had fled to Rio from Lisbon in 1807, during the French war of 1807–1814. Then, in 1821, Dom João VI was forced to return to Portugal. He appointed his son, Dom Pedro, to take his place, making him prince regent. In 1822, however, Dom Pedro broke with Portugal and declared Brazil independent, as the Empire of Brazil. Rio then became the seat of Dom Pedro I’s new monarchy.

As noted earlier, Rio’s urban geography mirrors that of the province. The adjective applied to it, fluminense, from the Latin, refers to the river, rio, in Rio de Janeiro. The port city, after all, is on land stretching from west to east; its eastern edge is on the shore of the entry to Guanabara Bay, an entry that had first been mistaken for the mouth of a river. Higher land dominates the views in and around the city and the bay. One can see the coastal edge of the Serra Acima from the Atlantic, as one approaches the city, and the city itself, at least in the nineteenth century, was remarkably beautiful for its many hills. Indeed, the hills and nearby ranges that cut into the lowlands nearby dominated the horizon then, with their show of tropical rainforest. The city’s hills and the great bay made a dramatic contrast that never ceased to enchant the traveler.

The hills marked Rio’s history and growth. Rio had begun on the lower land between two hills and was then transferred to the top of another that was then fortified, becoming known as the Morro do Castelo (Hill of the Castle) on that account. The castle was a precaution against the French, who contested the South Atlantic coast with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. The other, larger hills came to be ornamented by churches and monasteries, and were often given the names of their saints. The commerce and most of the population sprang up in back of the eastern beaches that edged the bay. The first streets, between the hills of Castelo to the south and São Bento to the north, began at that eastern shore; then others crept into a great, flat expanse stretching deep into the west. This became the cidade velha (old city)—the first and enduring commercial center of Rio. The shore north of the cidade velha was less accessible to this flat expanse, owing to a barricade of low hills between the shore and the expanse, stretching between São Bento and the western mangrove swamp (mangal, mangue), where the bay crept in, defining a natural frontier to the city. Thus, the morros of Conceiçao, Saúde, Gamboa, Livramento, Providência, Pinto, and São Diogo all paraded parallel to the northern shore. This shore had one long beach, with only two accessible ways through the parade of morros to the cidade velha. The beach stretched between São Bento and Saúde, a long, curving, narrow beach; the two ways through to the cidade velha became the Rua da Prainha (Street of the Little Beach), between São Bento and Conceiçao, and the Rua do Valongo (Street of the Long Valley), between Conceição and Livramento. As commerce and population grew, this northern shore became the great port district of the nineteenth century, serving Rio’s overseas trade. The cidade velha, in back of the eastern shore, remained the center of commerce for both the eastern and northern port areas, and the older, eastern port served regional trade.⁶

By the early nineteenth century, the city was divided into six parishes (western parts of some of these would become new parishes over the years, and these western, often rural, suburban parishes would be included in the city’s administration and were used for raising the city’s food). The six parishes were crowned by Candelária, the heart of the cidade velha. It comprised the oldest markets, at the eastern shore near the Largo do Paço, from which street vendors bought the produce, fowl, and fish brought from the local farms and the plantation areas close to the bay. These markets lined up northward from the Largo do Paço, the old site of the viceregal (now imperial) City Palace; after 1879, the Ministry of Agriculture and Public Works was housed at this square as well. Nearby, just south of the square, stood the Chamber of Deputies, fronting on the Rua da Misericórdia (Mercy Street), right before it extended into the Rua Direita (Straight Street). East and west from the Rua Direita, the main commercial boulevard running north-south between São Bento and the Largo do Paço, was the warren of commercial and professional offices where the city and the region’s business was done. Rua Direita and the old streets crisscrossing east-west and north-south reached westward to the Rua Uruguaiana. Uruguaiana referred to the site of a military victory in the Paraguayan war (1865–1870). Before, the street had been the Rua da Vala, after the vala, ditch, which defended the western border of the colonial city.⁷

These narrow streets all thronged with Africans and Afro-Brazilians, most of them captives or freed men and women. They were carrying better-off free people in ornate sedan chairs or portering their burdens, singly or in crews; making and serving food to others of the poor in the squares or at the edge of the wider streets; selling their artisanry or searching for work. They spoke the various tongues of West and West Central Africa up through the 1860s or so (the slave trade with Africa ended in 1850), and often the women wore African dress. The men generally wore cast-off clothing from their masters. The narrow streets, however adorned with occasional corner shrines or echoing with the church bells marking the time of day, were dark, noisy, and deeply muddy during the estação de aguas (the season of waters). This season, roughly from October through April, made the provincial roads from the highlands to the coastal lowlands difficult to traverse, with heavy rains and flooding rivers. The air became ever hotter, thick with water, and steeped in the scents of tropical forest. In Rio, that same air became heavy with the smells of produce and people and cooking and coffee. The slaves generally made their way through the mud or on the paving unshod. After 1850, with the modern introduction of yellow fever, the season was unusually pestilent, adding this fatal disease to the port’s infamous, established fevers and contagious maladies.⁸

The parish of São José, the oldest part of the city, was dominated by Morro do Castelo and some of the oldest beach ports of the eastern shore. There was a flatter, marshy area between Castelo and the Morro de Santo Antônio, stretching west and south; an area of churches, small farms, and a landscaped public park—the Passéio Público. Two ministries were also housed in São José—the Ministry of Empire (domestic affairs ministry) was on the Rua da Guarda Velha, which led north from the park to the Largo do Carioca at the foot of Santo Antônio; and the Ministry of Justice, which was on the Rua do Passéio, that bordered the park east-west on its northern edge. At that time, the park’s southern edge was on the city’s southern shore. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also once on the Rua do Passéio, but after 1859 it was housed for many years on the Campo de Santana. This was the great field that had once lain west of the colonial city’s frontier; by the mid-nineteenth century, however, and now officially called the Campo de Aclamação (it was the site where Pedro I was first acclaimed by the masses), it was well integrated into the urbanized flatland stretching west from the cidade velha, noted above.

The parish of Sacramento was part of that expanse, stretching directly west of Candelária, mixing commerce, better residential areas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and numerous squares, churches, and theaters. The Rua do Sacramento, running north-south away from the Praça da Constituiçao (now Praça Tiradentes), was the site of the Ministry of Finance by 1879. To the north of this parish and that of Candelária lay the parish of Santa Rita. It included both the Morro de São Bento and the Morro da Conceiçao, the beginnings of the northern port area, and both the late eighteenth-century site of the African slave market on the Rua do Valongo and the center of the early nineteenth-century commerce in coffee at São Bento’s southern foot, on the frontier with the parish of Candelária. As in Candelária and Sacramento, artisanal and manufacturing establishments were plentiful.

Two more recent urban parishes were Glória and Santana. Glória, over the course of the nineteenth century, would serve as the first of a series of residential areas associated with the elite, stretching south of São José and the cidade velha, and providing larger lots for villas and mansions, cooled by the breezes from the bay. The Rua da Glória, curving along the bay’s shore toward the Morro da Glória (named after its small but precious towered church, beloved of the imperial family) was also the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by 1879. The parish of Santana straddled the western remainder of the hilly northern port area and the flat area of the western expanse south of it. It included the Campo de Santana, noted above, which by the mid-nineteenth century was edged by elite residences and government buildings. Santana also stretched into the land-filled (aterrado) area (covering and canalling the Mangal do São Diogo) called the cidade nova (new city) that led west to the suburban parish of São Cristóvão, where the residential palace of the monarchy was sited, and southwest to the suburban parish of Engenho Velho, which was largely given over to villas and farms.

In nineteenth-century Rio, given the lack of good data on race before 1872, it is difficult to assume that any one urban region comprised a black city, in the sense of an urban area mostly made up of African slaves, freedmen, or people Brazilians perceived as their enslaved or free descendants. Rather, African slaves and people (free and enslaved) taken to be their descendants worked everywhere. Even in the elite residential parish of Glória, there was a strong slave presence (after all, half of the slave population of the city worked as domestic servants). More to the point, even in the cidade velha, where slaves, freedmen, and people taken to be descendants of the latter did their work in their masters’ homes and workplaces (or where some slaves worked independently as negros de ganho—wage-earning slaves), the population was always a mix, made up of Afro-Brazilians, native-born Brazilians taken for white, and the immigrant poor (largely Portuguese). The slaves, freedmen, creoles (taken here to mean people who were of entirely African descent but born in Brazil), and people assumed to be their descendants worked and lived in the same areas (and occupations), side by side with those native Brazilians taken for white and with European immigrants.

The expression pequena África (little Africa), referring to the part of Rio most traditionally associated with Afro-Brazilians, for example, can