O massacre dos libertos: Sobre raça e república no Brasil (1888–1889)

Abstract

Historians of Atlantic slavery live in a brave new world. Some years ago, books crossing national borders via comparison, connection, or synthesis were considered pioneering works at best and mere oddities at worst. That is no longer the case. While the traditional concerns and approaches of the different national historiographies of Brazil, the United States, and Cuba continue to be alive and kicking, these historiographies now exchange topics and approaches more often. Matheus Gato's O massacre dos libertos (The freedpeople's massacre) is part of a new Brazilian historiography seeking to understand how racial projects were key to not only social inequality but also political debates at the time of abolition in 1888—a concern that echoes those of historians such as Tâmis Parron, Flávio Gomes, Maria Helena Machado, and Petrônio Domingues.Gato investigates a shooting that took place in São Luís, the capital of Maranhão, on November 17, 1889—18 months after Princess Isabel signed the Golden Law abolishing slavery. While the incident has remained poorly understood ever since, for Gato it was a key expression of, and a penetrating window into, the process of racialization taking place in Brazil during the immediate postabolition years (pp. 27, 104, 117–18). After a methodical analysis of how journalists, historians, and memorialists presented the incident, the author discusses Maranhão in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Like other Brazilian provinces Maranhão had a thriving plantation economy in the early 1800s, but in Maranhão, unlike in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, that economic sector did not survive the end of slavery. By the time of abolition, most of Maranhão's plantations, dedicated to cotton, were either in decline or extinct, and the province hosted a large free Black population who primarily stayed in the countryside, owned land informally, and did not have access to the means for agricultural modernization.While under slavery Brazilian elites always made sure to create multiple and overlapping hierarchies—Brazilian-born versus African, free Black versus slave, urban versus rural—in order to avoid the formation of racial identities, by the mid-to-late nineteenth century the proximity of abolition racialized public debates. Former slave owners and state officials started referring to freedpeople as a “social problem,” a primitive and anticapitalist type of worker who was to blame, they argued, for the decadence of the province's agriculture (p. 60). Maranhense elites pushed for vagrancy laws and other coercive measures after 1888, maintained physical punishment for labor control, and aggressively lobbied the imperial parliament to compensate former slave owners for the loss of enslaved labor. They also organized the republican movement in Maranhão, an elite-led attempt at creating a republic that brought order and technocratic rationality to Brazilian institutions without the participation of popular groups. To planters and white elites in the province, Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II's sympathy for abolitionism felt like a betrayal, and it gradually pushed them toward republicanism. To Black Maranhenses, Dom Pedro II's sympathy had the opposite effect. In a move that recalled when Rio de Janeiro's freedmen organized the Black Guard to support Princess Isabel in a context of increasing republican agitation, in Maranhão the free Black population became devout monarchists. The republican cause came to be seen as the whites' freedom, while most Black Maranhenses saw the imperial family, and by extension the monarchy, as the guarantors of abolition in the Brazilian empire.When the first and somewhat confusing news of the republic's proclamation in Rio de Janeiro on November 15, 1889, reached São Luís, the province's army officers chose to wait for official confirmation. A crowd of mostly Black workers (stevedores, market vendors, artisans, urban dwellers) marched on the morning of November 17 to the city government's headquarters, where the republic was supposedly going to be publicly proclaimed—and, according to rumor, slavery was going to be reinstated. Facing popular and Black hostility toward the public proclamation, however, local authorities canceled this event. When the same demonstrators marched to the republican newspaper O Globo that afternoon to defend the imperial family and reject the republic's proclamation, the troops stationed there opened fire, killing at least three in the crowd and injuring eleven, in what became ingrained in popular memory as “the freedpeople's massacre.”The republican government in Maranhão took steps over the following years to whitewash its image, such as creating a red, black, and white state flag to symbolize racial fraternity in the new era. However, as Gato emphasizes, such symbols could not erase the idea that the new government's alleged racial fraternity was built on a massacre embodying multiple forms of racial and social exclusion. While the author occasionally abuses block quotations and tables, which at times prevents a more fluid narrative, this book is a much-needed and excellent analysis of the politics of abolition in the understudied but fascinating northern state of Maranhão.