Brazil and Cuba
Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas. Contrasting with the United States, where the gradual end of slavery started at the end of the eighteenth century, the first laws gradually extinguishing slavery in Brazil were enacted only in the 1870s, when the abolitionist movement emerged.25 When the Portuguese royal family moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 to escape the invasion of Napoléon Bonaparte, Portugal opened the Brazilian market to the importation of British manufactured products.
Britain increasingly pressured Portugal to end the slave trade to Brazil. In 1810, Portugal and Britain signed two treaties that gave Britain a gainful tariff on British goods imported to Brazil and started the gradual end of the slave trade to Brazil, measures that favored Brazilian independence. In 1815, a treaty signed between Portugal and Britain banned the slave trade north of the equator, making illegal the slave trade from West Africa to Brazil. Nonetheless, its requirements were never fully enforced. British pressures on Brazil continued after its independence from Portugal in 1822. Brazil became an empire and the only independent nation in Latin America to maintain a long-term monarchical system. In this new context, neither slavery nor the slave trade were abolished.In the decade that followed Brazilian independence, nearly half a million enslaved Africans disembarked on the country’s shores. In November 1826, a new treaty between Brazil and Britain established that the trade in enslaved Africans from any African region to Brazil was to end within three years. But when the deadline to stop the slave trade as established in the treaty arrived in 1830, the slave trade instead continued as usual. In 1831, the Brazilian parliament finally took a first step to stop the inhumane trade by passing the Feijó Law, which prohibited the import of enslaved Africans to Brazil.
Although the law was never effectively enforced, it included several measures to inhibit the trade. Among them, the law stated that Africans who were illegally introduced into the country would be emancipated and reexported. In practice, this provision created a new category of “liberated Africans” (Africanos livres, briefly discussed in chapter 11), similar to that of Africans liberated by the British squadrons in other parts of the Atlantic world. But once these Africans had their status confirmed, they were not simply allowed to go. Forced to toil under very harsh conditions, they were employed by the Brazilian state to perform public works or by private individuals whom they should work for as servants or free workers for a period of fourteen years.26 Despite this legislation, as we have seen in Luiz Gama’s letter that opened this chapter, the illegal slave trade to Brazil continued until 1850, when the Eusébio de Queirós Law banned slave imports from Africa to Brazil for a second time.Between 1831 and 1856, nearly 786,00 enslaved men, women, and children were illegally introduced into Brazil, of which only 11,000 were emancipated by Brazilian authorities. Brazilian abolitionists denounced the illegal enslavement of these Africans and their descendants. As noted in chapter 12, however, only in September 1871 was the Free Womb Law (or Rio Branco Law, no. 20140) enacted, liberating newborns of enslaved mothers, albeit with certain conditions. As in other parts of the Americas, the law established that free newborns would remain the property of the enslaved mother’s master until the age of eight. Then, the owner could choose either to continue using the child’s labor for free until the child turned twenty-one, the age of maturity, or to free the child and receive a financial compensation of 600 mil-réis (literally 1,000 réis) from the Brazilian government. Prices of enslaved people in the Brazilian domestic slave market varied according to several factors, especially age and sex.
In 1871, this amount would probably not be enough to purchase a new adult enslaved person in the southeastern coffee plantation areas. Existing studies show that in Campinas, São Paulo, the average price of a bondsman in 1870 between fifteen and forty years of age was more than 2 contos (1 conto corresponded to 1,000 mil-rĂ©is or 1 million rĂ©is), whereas the average price of an enslaved woman was 1.1 conto.27 Following the Free Womb Law, São Paulo’s province slave owners alone obtained approximately 414 contos and 882 mil-rĂ©is in financial compensation.28 Although the new legislation did not emancipate any living enslaved persons, it mandated the creation of a register that became a tool to identify Africans introduced illegally in Brazil after 1831.Likewise, in 1885, the Sexagenarian Law (or Law Saraiva-Cotegipe) emancipated enslaved individuals older than sixty years of age.29 Unsurprisingly, the new legislation again established financial compensation for slave owners and further declared that the newly freed individuals should work three additional years at no cost or until the age of sixty-five. Despite the pitfalls of this legislation gradually abolishing slavery in Brazil, the growth of the abolitionist movement became evident. Starting in the 1870s, and especially during the 1880s, enslaved people and abolitionists intensified their campaigns to abolish slavery. Bondspeople also engaged in massive flights in both urban and rural areas.30 Social unrest along with widespread calls to end slavery contributed to the intensification of the crisis of the Brazilian slave system.31 Fearing revolts, slave owners freed thousands of enslaved men, women, and children, and hundreds of others ran away in the coffee zones of Brazil’s southeast. Still, slaveholders counted on their representatives in the Chamber of Deputies to obtain financial compensation, or at least some kind of measure allowing them to maintain a position of dominance over the future freed population.32 On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel, the regent, eventually signed the Golden Law, which emancipated nearly 700,000 enslaved men and women.33 Although the law did not include any provisions to pay indemnities to slave owners, after the abolition they continued to put pressure on the government to be compensated for the loss of their enslaved property, but they were unsuccessful.34
Meanwhile, notwithstanding legal prohibitions, the slave trade from Africa to Cuba continued in the first six decades of the nineteenth century.
Whereas in Spain the debates about gradual emancipation intensified after the deposition of Queen Isabella II in 1868, in Cuba, the colonists from the eastern part of the island embraced the idea of independence in an uprising that gave origin to the Ten Years War (1868–78).35 Bondspeople and free people of color, who were also discriminated against by colonial policies, supported the elites in the fight for the abolition of slavery and independence from Spain.36 As the upper classes feared the movement for independence on July 4, 1870, the Spanish Parliament passed the Moret Law, which in addition to freeing children born to enslaved women after September 17, 1868, also emancipated enslaved people who served under the Spanish flag during the Ten Years War. Moreover, the Moret Law also liberated enslaved people older than sixty. But as pointed out in chapter 12, like the free womb legislation in other regions of Latin America, the law contained several restrictions, through the creation of a patronato system, similar to the British apprenticeship. In this framework, Cuban slave owners who remained loyal to the Spanish crown received financial compensation and could use for free the labor of the children newly emancipated from slavery until the age of eighteen, who would become free at age twenty-two.37 Although the size of Cuba’s enslaved population decreased from nearly 300,000 to 200,000 in the decade that followed the enactment of the Moret Law, few of the newly emancipated people were individuals of working age.38The 1870s and 1880s witnessed the last years of slavery in the Spanish Empire. Following popular demonstrations in several Spanish cities, on March 22, 1873, the Spanish Parliament passed a law ending slavery in Puerto Rico. The law freed around 29,335 enslaved individuals, who still had to keep working under three-year labor contracts held by their former owners.39 Cuba maintained slavery for seven more years. Eventually, on February 13, 1880, the Patronato Law passed in the Spanish Parliament to end slavery in Cuba. In theory, the new law abolished slavery. In practice, it also established an eight-year period of apprenticeship. Ultimately, the patronato ended on October 7, 1886, two years prior to the established date of 1888. As many enslaved people freed under the Patronato Law (known as patrocinados) obtained their freedom in the five years that followed the creation of patronato, upon the final demise of this system, Cuban registers included approximately 99,566 patrocinados.40