Legal Abolition of Slavery
Following gradual abolition, the actual demise of slavery was a lengthy process in the Spanish Americas. Chile was the first country in South America to legally abolish slavery. But only a few days after the initial decree of July 24, 1823, another decree restricted the free legal status of freedpeople.
Eventually the Chilean Constitution enacted on December 29, 1823, permanently ended slavery. On December 12, 1842, during its civil war, Uruguay also enacted a law abolishing slavery. But a system of apprenticeship was established for women and children, which was reversed only with the end of the war in 1853.17During the next two decades, except for Brazil, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, slavery was abolished all over the Americas. In 1847, Sweden ended slavery in its American colony, Saint Barthélemy. On April 27, 1848, France ended slavery in all of its colonies, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana as well as Reunion Island and Senegal, and one year later it enacted a law awarding financial compensation to the former slave owners. The Danish West Indies also abolished slavery in 1848.18 The regions of present-day Ecuador, Colombia, and Panama passed legislation prohibiting slavery in 1851 (effective on January 1, 1852), most of Argentina in 1853, Peru and Venezuela in 1854, Bolivia in 1861, and Paraguay in 1869.19 The Netherlands abolished slavery in its colonies in the Americas in 1863 and, like France, compensated former slave owners.
The gradual abolition of slavery and the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas impacted various regions that largely relied on an enslaved workforce. In the decades that preceded the start of the Civil War in the United States, professional gangs of kidnappers abducted free and freed men, women, and children in cities such as Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York City, and Washington, DC, and sold them into slavery on plantations in the South of the United States.20 River ports such as New Orleans, Richmond, and Alexandria were among the busiest slave hubs in the United States during the period of the internal slave trade.
Some of the notorious slave pens in these cities remained active until the period of the Civil War. One nineteenth-century photograph shows the slave pen at 1315 Duke Street (figure 16.1), where today is housed the Freedom House Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. Successively used by various slave-trading companies, the structure was conceived as a prison with cells to hold enslaved people for several days before their transportation to the sugar and cotton plantations in the Deep South.
Figure 16.1. Mathew B. Brady, Slave Pens, Alexandria, VA, United States, 1862. Albumen silver print, 7 × 91/16 inches. Courtesy of Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Contrasting with the United States, where between the end of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century slavery was gradually abolished in the Northern states, slavery existed in the entire Brazilian territory. Without a similar division between north and south, except for the communities of self-emancipated slaves, there was no region within the country where slavery no longer existed and to where enslaved people could escape. But in southern Brazil, enslaved men and women escaped to the present-day region of Uruguay and Argentina, where in the 1850s, slavery had been definitively abolished. Because the enslaved workforce became scarce with the second ban of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850, professional kidnappers crossed Brazilian borders to reach Uruguay and Argentina to capture free and freed men, women, and children who had settled in the two neighboring countries and transported them back to Brazil, where slavery remained legal.21 Although Brazilian legislation punished the illegal enslavement of free people and the reenslavement of freedpeople, as in the United States, most of these criminals were not sentenced to prison time.
By 1850, slavery had been abolished in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America.
Meanwhile in the United States, the division between free and slave states became clearer. Slaveholding states were ready to fight to keep slavery in place and to further expand the slavery frontier. This crisis intensified when Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States in November 1860, because despite his moderate positions regarding slavery, he was not a representative of the Southern planters and slave owners. By the time of Lincoln’s election, nineteen US states had abolished both the slave trade and slavery, outnumbering the fifteen slave states, where the slave trade and slavery still existed. In December 1860, the South Carolina General Assembly announced its secession from the United States, an action it justified by the growing hostility to the institution of slavery by the free states.During the four months after South Carolina’s secession, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas announced their separation from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. In his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, President Lincoln had sought to appease the Southerners by promising not to interfere in the states where slavery existed. But the country was too divided to be soothed. In April 1861, five weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, the Civil War broke out. Between May and June, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee joined the Confederacy.
On April 16, 1862, one year after the beginning of the Civil War, President Lincoln abolished slavery in Washington, DC, by offering financial compensation to former slave owners. As the Civil War continued, many enslaved people escaped bondage by all available means, including crossing rivers on horseback (figure 16.2), whereas the federal government freed bondsmen who agreed to fight alongside the Union Army.22 On July 17, 1862, the United States Congress passed a second Confiscation Act freeing all slaves owned by Confederates. This measure paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation of the Confederate States of the South issued by Lincoln on September 22, 1862 (effective January 1, 1863).
The initiative was part of a wartime strategy to fight the Confederate states by gaining the support of freedpeople. The proclamation freed more than three million enslaved men, women, and children (figure 16.3), some of whom then enlisted as soldiers in the Union Army.23 Eventually, after four years of a bloody Civil War, the Union defeated the Confederacy, and slavery was eventually legally abolished in the United States in December 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. The abolition of slavery that followed the end of the Civil War in the United States freed a much larger number of enslaved men, women, and children (approximately four million) than previous emancipations. Also, except for Washington, DC, slave owners were not indemnified for their freed bondspeople.24
Figure 16.2. Timothy H. O’Sullivan and Mathew B. Brady, Escaping Slaves Crossing Rappahannock River, United States, August 1862. Albumen silver print, 215/16 × 4⅛ inches. Courtesy of Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States.
Figure 16.3. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, Slaves, J. J. Smith’s Plantation, near Beaufort, South Carolina, 1862. Albumen silver print, 87/16 × 10¾ inches. Courtesy of Jean Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA, United States.