Causes for the Abolition of Negro Slavery in Brazil: An Interpretive Essay

Abstract

ONE MAY EXAMINE the general histories of Brazil in vain in search of satisfactory explanations for the passage of the law in 1888 which freed three quarters of a million slaves, bringing ruin to many landowners and destroying the political system they had created. Although these histories mention some of the same factors with which this article is concerned, they do so only in passing and without stressing their causative importance. One is left with the general impression that the Brazilian Parliament issued the law freeing the slaves in response to humanitarian sentiments and to the pressure of public opinion aroused by a propaganda campaign ably directed by a handful of abolitionists. Pandia' Cal6geras insisted that the step was the inevitable consequence of irresistible national opinion. Clarence H. Haring, in his summary of secondary works on Brazilian history, said that Public meetings, articles in the daily press, and abolitionist societies . . .wore down the reluctance of a Parliament dominated by slavery interests. Brazilian textbooks, not surprisingly, place their emphasis either on this same crusading effort or on the humanitarian sentiments of the emperor and the princess rather than on the pressure applied by the slaves themselves in their own behalf. The only English-language study of the question-an article published in 1933 by Percy Alvin Martin-points to the abolitionist campaign, to parliamentary activity, and to voluntary action on the part of some slave owners and refers only in passing to the failure of the army to pursue runaway slaves.'