Sunday 13 May 1888 dawned sunny in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Brazilian Empire. It was a day of celebration.
Slavery was ended by a law passed by the Senate and signed by Princess Isabel.
Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Over the course of more than three centuries, Brazil was the world’s largest destination for trafficked Africans – nearly five million people.
Chronology of slavery in colonial and imperial Brazil
- Portuguese navigation pioneers and the early years of colonial Brazil
- Quilombos and resistance to slavery
- Freedoms and the abolition of slavery
ESCRAVIDÃO NO BRASIL- Quanto Tempo Durou e Como Aconteceu
1. Portuguese maritime pioneering and the early years of colonial Brazil
It is generally accepted that Portugal was the first European nation to conquer the Atlantic, when it undertook exploratory voyages along the African coast in search of alternative routes to the sources of the coveted and lucrative spices monopolised in the Mediterranean by merchants mainly from Italic microstates such as Genoa.
Cape Bojador, off the coast of Western Sahara, was formerly known as Cape Fear. Sharp-edged reefs dominate the area, making navigation very risky.
At 25 kilometres from the Cape, in the open sea, the depth is only 2 metres.
The height of the waves, the frequency of storms, the violence of the winds, the lack of knowledge of ocean currents and the permanent fog made navigation extremely dangerous.
Those who crossed never returned. Legends tell of more than 12,000 failed attempts.
Some believed that the winds would blow south from there, preventing them from returning to Portugal and heading north.
Others thought it was the end of the world, and that the fog was the result of the evaporation of the water as it boiled as it fell into the hell below. Legends told of sea monsters and gigantic, ferocious whirlpools.
The sea boiled in the heat, and only certain bizarre creatures could survive the intense heat and dryness. There were tales of great treasures guarded by ferocious dragons and giants that would enter the sea and destroy ships.
Imaginative tales of abandoned and returned crews fuelled the legends. Cape Bojador was considered insurmountable, the end of the known world.
All historians agree that the commander of Pedro Álvares Cabral’s fleet, setting out from the Cape Verde Islands in search of the Cape of Good Hope, strayed too far to the west from the route that Vasco da Gama had advised him to take and ended up on the Brazilian coast on 22 April 1500.
Supporters of the accidental discovery of Brazil believe that the Captain Major, against his will and unaware of the distance, was carried by the equatorial current to the coast of a country to the west of the Black Continent, of which he was unaware.
On one of these voyages, Pedro Alvares Cabral accidentally diverted his course and discovered a new land to the west of Africa, but these lands, which were to have various names until they reached their present form, Brazil, did not immediately arouse the interest of the Portuguese Crown, except perhaps for the Brazilian wood and other so-called spices, which were found in much smaller quantities, since financial and material efforts were spent on the extremely lucrative sea routes leading to what was to the east.
In fact, the French took advantage of the carelessness (or inability) of the Portuguese to try to establish a colony.
The most famous case is that of France Antarctique, which was established in the Rio de Janeiro region to serve as a port of call for French voyages and a base for eventual colonisation.
Unlike the Portuguese, it is well known that the French were able to establish a certain degree of friendship with the indigenous tribes, both in South America and later in North America; it was no different with the Tamoios and Tupinambás, indigenous peoples considered extremely hostile by the Portuguese, who inhabited the region chosen for Villegaignon’s mission.
The Antarctic France project lasted only five years, from 1555 to 1560, when the invaders were driven out by Portuguese forces under the command of Mem de Sá, as the Crown feared losing a territory with enormous potential that had been so little explored.
The Indians didn’t show any interest in working.
The Indians did not show the same willingness as the African slaves to carry out the activities imposed on them: “[…] they were lazy and incompetent; they tired easily and ran away if they were not constantly watched”.
In the first decades of effective colonisation, that is, from 1530, the shortage of labour was exacerbated because the natives, at first easily seduced by trinkets of all kinds, began to demand goods that the Portuguese were reluctant to give up, either because they were expensive, such as more sophisticated clothing, or because they were potentially dangerous to the colonisation process, such as weapons.
Villegaignon also describes the conditions that were particularly unfavourable to colonisation in a letter written at the beginning of the second half of the 16th century to his friend John Calvin, one of the leaders of the Reformation:
There were no houses, no roofs, no crops or grain. The people of this place live from day to day without bothering to cultivate the land.
So we didn’t find food supplies in one place, we had to go farther and farther to look for it and collect it.
From the 1540s, the creation of plantations, especially of sugar cane, made it necessary to apply the Portuguese experience of using black slave labour on the Atlantic islands.
The proximity of Portugal and its African colonies to the Brazilian coast, in relation to the other European nations and their colonies, facilitated trade between the three parties, creating an exchange of goods.
- At one end, Portuguese ships left Portuguese ports with goods such as cloth and food to be sold to their colonists in the Americas;
- In Brazilian ports, they were loaded mainly with tobacco, and later cachaça, to be exchanged for slaves in Africa, although currency was also used;
- With slaves on board, the ships returned to Brazil, where labour shortages had always been a problem;
- Finally, from the Brazilian ports, the ships went to Portugal, mainly with sugar, the main product produced in these lands until the discovery of the gold mines.
This commercial logic involved producers and distributors, buyers and sellers, dominators and subordinates, in a complex game led by the European powers.
But this commercial logic depended essentially on the existence of slave traders willing to exchange the manufactured goods transported by European merchants – firearms, rum, cotton fabrics from Asia, iron, low-value jewellery, etc. – for their own countrymen, black people enslaved in the Americas, who would in turn be exchanged for sugar, tobacco, coins or gold and silver bullion.
Brazil had a great need for slaves as there was a shortage of labour.
In 1831, Brazil outlawed the slave trade. Anticipating this, slave traders transported a record number of people in 1829. Soon after the law was passed, the trade fell, but then rose again and was not finally banned until 1850.
It is estimated that there were already between 50,000 and 60,000 black slaves in Brazil in 1630, with another 10,000 arriving in that year alone.
The slave trade involved not only Portugal but also other European countries such as England, Spain, Holland and France.
2. Quilombos and resistance to slavery
The consolidation of a bipolar Atlantic system linking Africa to Brazilian ports, ensured by the reconquest of Angola in 1648, guaranteed a continuous flow of slaves and made the sugar economy viable in a very unfavourable international climate.
The Portuguese situation was marked by competition in the sugar market with the Antilles, the collapse of the eastern “pepper empire” (Portuguese trade in India at the beginning of the 17th century), the cost of the war against Spain for independence and heavy taxation to cover the costs of diplomacy and the defence of the kingdom.
During this turbulent period, the number of “alforrias” (freedom granted by the master to the slave) increased.
The slaves’ resistance to slavery accompanied the entire process of Portuguese colonisation, but was more pronounced in times of social fragility.
This fragility was evident during the Dutch invasion and subsequent conflicts with Portuguese-Brazilian settlers, which provided good opportunities for slaves to resist.
The greatest symbol of this resistance, the Quilombos, appeared as early as the 16th century as an attempt to reconstruct African ways of life and should not be idealised, as has often been done, as “territories free of slavery”.
Quilombos were hiding places for runaway slaves, usually in bush areas.
It was in this context that the Quilombo dos Palmares, a confederation of eleven quilombos in the Zona da Mata, between Alagoas and Pernambuco, reached its peak.
The Quilombo dos Palmares resisted for more than a century, becoming a modern symbol of African resistance to slavery.
The Quilombo survived by hunting, fishing, gathering fruit and farming. Surpluses were traded with neighbouring populations, so much so that settlers even leased land to plant and traded food for ammunition with the quilombolas.
With the expulsion of the Dutch from northeastern Brazil, there was an acute shortage of labour to resume production in the region’s sugar mills.
With the price of African slaves high, attacks on the Quilombo dos Palmares to recapture its members increased.
The quilombola Antônio Soares was captured and promised his release in exchange for revealing where he was hiding.
The leader of the Quilombo dos Palmares, Zumbi, was cornered and killed in an ambush on 20 November 1695.
Mechanisms of torture and punishment of slaves
In the pictures, enslaved people are flogged in public places, paraded through the streets wearing so-called tin masks – a flexible metal mask, usually with three holes (two for the eyes and one for the nose), locked behind the head with a padlock – chains and neck straps. These are just a few examples of the punishments meted out to the enslaved.
The records show the cruelty and naturalisation of punishment, a practice that was used throughout slavery and was part of everyday life in Brazil.
In the Dictionary of Black Slavery in Brazil, Clóvis Moura and Soraya Silva Moura describe some of this violence in the entry on “deformations of the body”: “A constant during slavery in Brazil was the equation of the captive’s body with that of beasts, animals.
As a result, mutilation was constantly practised, sometimes as a punishment, with a red-hot iron, or by cutting off the runaway’s ear, sometimes as a symbol of ownership.
In addition, we cannot forget the marks left by the instruments of torture, such as the little angel and the trunk, the whip marks, the signs of burning.
Rarely did a slave not have one of the marks of rape on his body (…).
The relationship between escaped slaves and the marks of torture and punishment spans the entire period of slavery and was a mechanism of the ruling class to keep the captive in a state of absolute submission and obedience, without which slave labour could not be maintained for long”.
Legal torture of slaves
Unlike Spain and France, which had specific legislation for the enslaved people of their colonies, the crimes committed by prisoners in Brazil during the colonial period were determined by the Portuguese legal code, Book V of the Philippine Ordinances.
Under this code, punishments were determined not only by the quality of the crime, but also by the judgement of the person who committed it. In the case of enslaved people, the responsibility for the punishment determined by the sentence lay with the master.
Towards the end of the 17th century, this began to change. A charter forbade slave masters to use iron instruments in their punishments and to send enslaved people to private prisons.
The Portuguese Crown was concerned not only with social stability – very harsh punishments could lead to rebellions – but also with controlling the slave system by limiting the authority of the masters to royal power.
After independence, Article 179 of the Constitution of 1824 guaranteed the abolition of corporal punishment. “Flogging, torture, branding with a hot iron and all other cruel punishments are hereby abolished”.
However, in 1830, with the promulgation of the Brazilian Penal Code, article 60 defined that “if the accused is a slave and is sentenced to a punishment other than capital punishment or flogging, he shall be sentenced to flogging and, after suffering it, shall be handed over to his master, who shall be obliged to beat him with an iron for the time and in the manner determined by the judge; the number of lashes shall be fixed in the sentence, and the slave shall not be able to receive more than 50 lashes per day”.
In other words, specific punishments for enslaved people – based on torture – were consolidated and became a matter for the state rather than the master.
“Many jurists, politicians and masters defended the maintenance of specific punishments for slaves, arguing that the country’s “cultural level” and “social evolution” were incompatible with the classical principles of equality between human beings,” Keila Grinberg points out in the text Physical Punishment and Legislation.
Two forms of punishment were more common for slaves:
- public flogging, for those who had been tried and convicted
- flogging in the dungeon, which replaced private punishment.
Masters had to pay for the service of punishing their slaves – not only for the whipping and subsequent medical treatment, but also for board and lodging.
In the beginning they could demand many hundreds of lashes, and there are records that some officials tried to limit the number of lashes or spread the punishment over several days, with a maximum of lashes per day.
Not a few slaves died in prison as a result of their injuries, and many probably died after leaving the Calabouço.
Some masters used the prison as a way of getting rid of unwanted slaves who were difficult to sell: the masters handed them over to the institution and simply stopped paying.
After repeated threats, the state tried to find a way to sell the slaves on its own.
It wasn’t until October 1886, two years before the abolition of slavery, that the Brazilian parliament passed a law abolishing the practice of flogging slaves.
But it took a long time for the practice to disappear: the slave was publicly flogged, humiliated and tortured.
Then, weeks later, when he had recovered (from the whipping), the slave would go back to work.
So torture was legal in Brazil until 1888, but only for slaves.
3. Freedom and the abolition of slavery
At the celebration, Isabel was praised by the people. But the abolition of slavery was not a benevolent act on the part of the princess and the Senate. Nor did it result solely from the exhaustion of the economic model based on slave labour, which had to be replaced by free labour.
The end of slavery in Brazil was driven by several factors, including significant popular participation. More and more slaves, free blacks and whites joined the abolitionist movement. Especially in the 1880s.
The main tactics were meeting in various abolitionist associations, organising artistic events to rally support, filing lawsuits and even supporting slave revolts and escapes.
The carta de alforria was a type of formal and legal document by which a slave owner legally granted freedom to an enslaved person.
It was used during the period of slavery in Brazil (1500-1888). Enslaved people could obtain their freedom by being granted it for free, by buying it, or by being granted it in exchange for a service.
- Many manumissions imposed various obligations on the freedman, such as providing services to the former master’s family.
- Although it was rare, manumissions could be revoked at any time by the slave’s former owner.
- There were different types of manumission, such as free manumission, which depended on the will of the master, or paid manumission, where the slave or a third party bought his freedom.
- Some letters of emancipation provided for the slave’s freedom only after the master’s death.
- During the Paraguayan War, the Brazilian state bought the freedom of slaves so that they could fight in the conflict.
- The Lei Áurea (Golden Law) is considered the ultimate document of freedom, as it freed all the country’s slaves.
In the second half of the 1880s, the abolitionist movement swept Brazil.
The states of Ceará, Amazonas and some isolated cities had already declared themselves free of slavery. Slave escapes and revolts became more frequent.
After escaping, they tried to reach quilombos and territories that had already been liberated. The police were called in to repress them, but they too began to rebel.
The head of the army even wrote to the princess, extolling freedom and saying he would no longer hunt down runaway slaves.
Debates about abolition raged in Parliament. In the courts, more and more cases were brought for freedom.
In the cities, artistic performances were followed by mass liberations of slaves – at the end of which flowers were thrown on the stage and the audience left shouting “Long live freedom, long live abolition”.
The law signed by the princess – nicknamed the Golden Law – came late. Every country in the Americas had already abolished slavery.
The first was Haiti, 95 years earlier, in 1793. The majority were slow to follow, abolishing between 1830 and 1860.
The United States in 1865. Cuba, the penultimate country to abolish slavery, did so two years before Brazil.
But in no other country was slavery as widespread as in Brazil.
While 389,000 Africans landed in the United States, 4.9 million in Brazil – 45 per cent of the total population – left Africa as slaves.
Some 670,000 slaves died along the way. The sheer scale of slavery in Brazil made it difficult to end – it was ingrained in national life.
The first prohibition of human trafficking dates back to 1831. It was the result of Brazil’s wrestling with England, which was trying to force an end to the slave trade.
But the law was not very effective. For the first two years, the trade in Africans fell. Then it rose again and continued as if nothing had happened. It wasn’t until 1850 that the slave trade was finally outlawed.
Chronology of slavery in colonial and imperial Brazil
- 1559 – The Portuguese crown allows black slaves to enter Brazil.
- 1693 – The Palmares quilombo (the largest concentration of escaped slaves in the country) is destroyed after resisting 17 expeditions organised by the landowners. Its leader, Zumbi, is killed two years later.
- 1807 – England declares the slave trade illegal.
- 1830 – In order to get England to recognise Brazil as an independent nation, Pedro I promises to abolish the slave trade in the country.
- 1831 – Law passed by the Feijó government declaring all slaves from outside the empire free.
- 1835 – Penalties for slaves who commit crimes.
- 1850 – The Eusébio de Queirós Law is passed, prohibiting the traffic of blacks to Brazil.
- 1860 – The Institute of Lawyers declares that slave labour is illegitimate under natural law. The idea of slavery is seen as incompatible with industrial development.
- 1864 – Slaves are considered to be subject to mortgages and pledges.
- 1866 – Dom Pedro II signs several letters of liberty (documents granting freedom to slaves).
- 1871 – The Free Womb Law is passed. The law stated that the children of black women born after the date of its enactment would no longer be slaves, but would be freed after the age of eight by the government paying compensation to their owners.
The Free Womb Law was one of the precursors to the Golden Law, which stipulated that from 28 September 1871, enslaved women would only give birth to free babies. According to the law, no more enslaved people would be born on Brazilian soil.
The deputies passed the Free Womb Bill in three and a half months. The senators followed suit in just three weeks. The law was immediately sanctioned by Princess Isabel, who was in charge of the empire while Dom Pedro II was abroad.
As well as freeing the children born to slave mothers, the Free Womb Law also allowed slaves to save money and buy their freedom.
There were more problems with freeing the children, however. There were reports that birth records were falsified to make it appear that the children had been born before the law and were therefore slaves.
In other cases, the mothers’ owners continued to exploit child labour.
- 1885 – The Saraiva-Cotejipe (Sexagenarians) Law declares slaves over the age of 65 free, subject to compensation.
- 1888 – Princess Isabel approves the Golden Law, which establishes the immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery.
