American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation by Roberto Saba

Abstract

Reviewed by: American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation by Roberto Saba Evan C. Rothera American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation. By Roberto Saba. America in the World. (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford, U.K.: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 373. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-691-19074-7.) In American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation, Roberto Saba, currently an assistant professor of American studies at Wesleyan University, offers a very different take from those found in accounts by other scholars who have explored slavery and abolition in the two countries. Saba describes how a group of antislavery reformers worked together to "boost capitalist development in both countries" and argues that "modern capitalism emerged not from the remaking of slavery in the nineteenth century but from its unmaking" (p. 2). These antislavery reformers were not particularly humanitarian in sentiment. Rather, they were pragmatic, cosmopolitan realists who sought to ensure that abolition benefited the interests of capital. In sum, the reformers Saba profiles "were in fact making, normalizing, and entrenching free labor in the form of the wage system" (p. 10). Part 1, "A New World Unchained," begins with Secretary of State John C. Calhoun's instructions to Henry A. Wise, the newly appointed U.S. minister to Brazil. Calhoun hoped Wise would cultivate friendly relations with the slaveholding power, but, despite Calhoun's desires, "neither Wise nor any other Southerner would be able to build a proslavery coalition with Brazil" (p. 17). Wise's high-handed actions alienated the Brazilian elite, and most Brazilians had little desire to enter a proslavery alliance with the United States. In stark contrast with Wise's failure, James Cooley Fletcher, a Presbyterian minister and missionary from Indiana, and many other northerners successfully cozied up to the Brazilian elite. Saba contends that these northern antislavery reformers, not southern planters, ultimately formed alliances with elite Brazilians. Northerners like James Watson Webb, who served as U.S. minister to Brazil during and after the United States Civil War, became involved in Brazilian infrastructure projects. Brazilian political elites cultivated these ties as they "set their country on the path to adopt the system of labor that had made the American North into a capitalist power" (p. 127). Part 2, "The World Free Labor Made," opens with a fascinating account of how different groups of people from the United States contributed to modernizing projects in Oeste Paulista (the plateau northwest of the city of São Paulo). Brazilians discouraged attempts by white southern ex-rebels from the U.S. South to reconstitute the Cotton Kingdom. However, they welcomed these transplants in hopes that they would become "small farmers employing the labor of family members or other immigrants" (p. 143). Ex-rebels were not always happy about their lives in Brazil, but, Saba notes, they had few options, and many ultimately filled the roles local elites wanted them to fill. At the same time, new agricultural machines provided by northerners from the United States paved the way for free labor. Simultaneously, missionaries from both northern and southern states also helped transform Brazil. Just as people from the United States moved south, Brazilians also moved north. They toured the United States, attended institutions of higher education, and lived in American cities for extended periods. During these travels, [End Page 774] Brazilians drew conclusions from their own experiences, specifically, that "the universalization of wage labor had given the United States the perfect formula for national advancement" (p. 172). Brazilians sought to replicate this model in Brazil as they worked to eliminate slavery. In the end, however, "instead of serving the needs of the working majority, Brazilian and American antislavery reformers forged a postemancipation arrangement that ended up concentrating wealth in the hands of very few" (p. 221). By foregrounding the actions of a transnational group of reformers who sought to yoke abolition to the interests of capital, American Mirror makes an important contribution to the historiography of slavery and abolition in the Americas. This well-researched, engaging book will work well in graduate seminars on slavery and abolition, capitalism, and race and labor in...