Abolition

The abolition of slavery in the Americas occurred in fits and starts, some of them convulsive, between the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 and the promulgation of the golden law of Brazil in 1888. Slavery was an institution entrenched both in economic life and in the social fabric of essentially hierarchical societies. The commodities produced by slave labor, particularly sugar, cotton, and coffee, were crucial to the expanding network of transatlantic trade. In Brazil and Cuba slaveholding was also widespread in the cities and in some food-producing regions. Thus while the ideological transformations accompanying the growth of capitalism in Great Britain set the stage for a general critique of chattel slavery and championing of "free labor," it took more than a changing intellectual climate to dislodge the institution. Abolitionism took on its greatest force when it coincided with economic change and domestic social upheaval, and particularly when it became an element in the defining of new nations or new colonial relationships.

It was often slaves themselves who forced the question to the center of the stage, threatening or carrying out revolt, and offering or withholding support for republican challenges to colonialism. Slaves seized upon moments of division within the free population to expand or redefine their customary rights, advance new claims, flee their owners, or join in the warfare that might finally bring slavery to an end. At times they found allies among free people of color, whose civil rights were in continual danger as long as slavery was recognized in law and in social practice.

Over the past decades scholars have moved from a chronicling of the political process of formal abolition to an examination of the dynamics of emancipation as a social and economic process, one intertwined with the politics of abolitionism but not simply derivative of it. While different studies vary in the weight given to slave initiatives and economic necessity, external pressures and internal conflicts, elite ideology and popular resistance, there is no necessary contradiction involved in recognizing the importance of each of these. As Robin Blackburn has argued, the key turning points in the campaign against slavery generally occurred when some combination of class conflict, war, and pressure for new forms of government brought into question the rights of property and encouraged a widening of the concepts of citizenship and national interest. Internal and external forces were thus inextricable.

In Latin America, the ending of slavery took place in three successive stages. The first was marked by emancipation in the context of and as a consequence of war. The Haitian Revolution opened the age of emancipation and helped to place abolition on the agenda when anticolonial rebellions erupted in Spanish America. This emancipationist phase was consolidated in Haiti, remained incomplete in most of the Spanish American republics, and was thwarted in Brazil and Cuba. The second stage was a more gradual one, marked by the slow breakdown and elimination of slavery through the nineteenth century in the mainland republics. But concurrent with this phase was the expansion of what one scholar has termed the "second slavery"—vigorous export economies based on slave labor in Cuba, Brazil, and the United States. The third and final phase of emancipation was initiated by the Civil War in the United States, the Liberal Revolution of 1868 in Spain, and the definitive suppression of the transatlantic slave trade. Nominal abolitionism finally became part of the Liberal creed in Spain, while a more militant opposition to slavery became central to Cuban anticolonial struggles. In Brazil a cautious abolitionism emerged as an element in the public moral stance of the imperial state. But in both cases the pace and character of emancipation were shaped by slave initiatives, including participation in insurgency in Cuba and widespread flight from plantations in Brazil.

EMANCIPATION IN THE CONTEXT OF WAR

The French colony of Saint Domingue (the western part of Hispaniola) was between 1791 and 1804 the site of the first successful large-scale slave revolt in the Americas, which established the second independent state in the hemisphere—one founded on a repudiation of slavery. The mobilization of rebellion rested on a longstanding tradition of slave resistance, combined with the cultural creations of a new, shared language (Creole, or Kreyol) and a vigorous popular religion (Vodun), as well as brilliant military leadership under Toussaint Louverture and Jean Jacques Dessalines. The opening for revolt was provided by an unparalleled international conjuncture, marked by the ideological innovations and ambiguities of the French Revolution, the fragmentation of colonial authority during that upheaval, and the military and political divisions with France itself. At the same time, events in Haiti illustrated the ambiguous role of free populations of color, torn between an isolated struggle for group privilege, allegiance to established authority in defense of property and order, or allegiance to slaves in revindication of broader rights. The insurgents were eventually able to achieve independence from France and establish the new nation of Haiti, while continuing to resist multiple efforts by both the French and British to recolonize them. Under Toussaint Louverture's leadership, the insurgents were also able to take over Spanish Santo Domingo (the eastern part of Hispaniola) and abolish slavery there in 1801, but this accomplishment was reversed one year later by a French military expedition.

The Haitian Revolution frightened slaveholders throughout the Americas and had an important direct effect on the course of the Spanish American wars of independence. After being thwarted in his initial revolutionary efforts, the "Liberator" Simón Bolívar went in 1815 to Jamaica and then to Haiti to seek assistance. President Alexandre Pétion of Haiti insisted on a commitment to emancipation as a condition for support, and Bolívar made such a commitment. Opposition to slavery became an element in a new Spanish American ideal of citizenship, expanding the possibility of recruiting among slaves and others opposed to the power of slaveholders. Material and strategic support from Pétion gave Bolívar's cause new life, but many of the leaders of the independence movement continued to temporize when faced with the choice between forthright abolitionism and the mobilization of slaves and free people of color on the one hand, and the continued protection of property rights as a means for obtaining or retaining elite support on the other.

It was thus not surprising that antislavery commitments were ratified by some of the early republican congresses, such as that of the Republic of Gran Colombia at Cúcuta in 1821, but encumbered with conditions and timetables that stalled the actual process of emancipation. The republicans of Peru were even more cautious, putting property rights and social stability first and not declaring emancipation, even as they sought to recruit among slaves and free people of color. In what was later to become the Dominican Republic, however, nationalists were overtaken by events, as Haitian forces under President Jean-Pierre Boyer invaded in 1822, declaring the freedom of all slaves for a second time, promising land to the freedmen, and enforcing these policies through a military occupation.

THE BREAKDOWN OF SLAVERY IN THE MAINLAND REPUBLICS

In the newly established mainland Spanish American republics, the question of slavery continued to be a contested one. Chile, where slaves were few in number and largely engaged in domestic service, was the first to make a definitive abolition of slavery, through a Senate decree in 1823. Abolition was declared in Central America in 1824. In Mexico, slavery, already in decline, was suppressed by decree during the presidency of Vicente Guerrero in 1829. In most of South America, however, there was sparring over the mode and timetable for conforming to this element of the republican credo. Estate owners and other slaveholding elites generally stalled, while some leaders, including Bolívar, argued for abolition as a matter of moral authority and nation building. Weak manumission laws and "free womb" legislation (declaring free the children of slave mothers) initiated very gradual processes of abolition, but final emancipation was delayed for decades in Venezuela, Colombia, Paraguay, and Argentina.

Around mid-century, as much of Latin America moved into a new and more externally oriented political economy, the aging slave populations of the remaining republics finally achieved juridical freedom. Slavery was legally abolished in Uruguay in 1846; in Colombia in 1850; in the Argentine Republic in 1853; in Venezuela and Peru in 1854; and, finally, in Paraguay in 1870. In each case formal abolition was essentially a coda to a longer process of gradual emancipation. The development of new economic sectors largely rested on modes of labor in which workers were nominally free—though the exaction of their labor might contain significant elements of coercion. Chattel slavery, the holding of property rights in men and women, had become a relic.

Symbolically and to some extent juridically, emancipation in the Spanish American republics can be seen as an outgrowth of the independence struggles, in which many slaves and free people participated. The ideology of those struggles and the mobilization of so many persons of color during them made a full reimposition of slavery nearly impossible. In that sense, the independence movement brought the ending of slavery. In practical terms, however, slavery died a more lingering death. Juridically, drastic inequalities of power within the nation and within the slaveholding household blocked full revindication of the rights of slaves and their freeborn children, keeping gradual abolition to a slow pace and minimizing its social consequences. Economically, free labor gradually supplanted slave labor and diminished the vested interests of slaveholders in the institution.

EMANCIPATION IN CUBA AND BRAZIL

Resisting the tide of emancipation and republicanism, the elites of colonial Cuba and imperial Brazil constructed vigorous slave-based export economies in sugar and coffee. They purchased new slaves from Africa, oversaw the opening of new lands on the frontier, and developed new and expanded overseas markets. In Cuba, the most prosperous planters also purchased modern processing equipment, hired technicians from overseas, and established massive sugar factories. Into the 1870s, the work of Cuban sugar plantations continued to be done by slave men and women, as well as indentured Chinese immigrants and small numbers of free workers. In Brazil, the internal trade in slaves from north to south enabled coffee plantations to expand on the basis of slave labor, despite the attacks on the transatlantic trade.

Scholars differ in their opinions of the viability of this "second slavery." On one level, it was a great success for the planters, yielding numerous fortunes for Brazilian coffee "barons" and Cuban sugar "aristocrats." On another level, it was increasingly vulnerable, as the British campaign against the slave trade threatened its labor supply and increased labor costs. Some historians have argued that slave-based prosperity was founded on a central contradiction, and that rising slave prices, and a necessarily uneducated work force, would block the full modernization of the plantation complex. Slavery was a rapacious form of economic development, exploitative of those who labored and of the land they worked. Whether such rapaciousness had truly led to crisis, however, remains in dispute. One view is that slavery was essentially incompatible with the development of capitalism and that the resulting decline in profitability was leading unavoidably to abolition. Others argue, however, that planters were highly adaptable capitalists, preferring a gradual substitution of free laborers to taking substantive steps toward full emancipation.

Wherever one stands on the question of "internal contradictions," it is clear that by the late 1860s the slave economies of both Cuba and Brazil faced major challenges. The victory of the Union Forces in the Civil War in the United States was a major ideological blow to modernizing slaveholders in Cuba and Brazil. It cast doubt on the compatibility of slavery and sustained economic progress and removed a key example that proslavery apologists had cited in debates with proponents of free labor. Equally important, the transatlantic slave trade was definitively abolished by the 1860s. Since the slave populations of Cuba and Brazil did not, overall, sustain their numbers through natural reproduction, planters would have to find some alternative sources of labor. And many feared—correctly—that free immigrants would shun societies based on coerced labor.

In Cuba, these latent contradictions became an open crisis when the question of abolition was taken up by anticolonial insurgents. Spain, the colonial power, was placed on the defensive by the Cuban rebels who rose up in 1868. To try to undercut the appeal of the rebellion, and to bring Spain into belated conformity with liberal principles, a cautious law of gradual abolition, the Moret Law, freeing children and the elderly, was approved by the Spanish Cortes in 1870. It was enforced even more cautiously by the colonial authorities in Cuba. (In Puerto Rico, where the stakes were lower, it was followed by abolition in 1873.) By 1879, however, continued nationalist rebellion in the eastern end of Cuba, and resistance to work on the part of slaves, forced the issue. The Spanish Cortes declared all Cuban slaves free in 1880, though it imposed upon them an eight-year "apprenticeship" to their former masters. This apprenticeship was drastically undermined by multiple initiatives on the part of the apprentices, many of whom achieved their own freedom through flight, self-purchase, and legal challenge, hastening the arrival of formal emancipation, finally declared in 1886.

In Brazil, the balance of forces within the elite was changing, particularly with the growth of urban professional sectors. Moreover, many believed that the future of agriculture lay with the attraction of immigrant labor. But Brazilian slaveholders remained very powerful and were able to help shape and control the cautious responses to abolitionist pressure. Although abolition was formally carried out through a series of parliamentary and executive maneuvers, much of the driving force came from slaves themselves. Legal abolition began with the Law of the Free Womb (Free Birth Law) in 1871, followed by municipal and provincial legislation in selected areas of the Northeast. In the final phase, slave initiatives accelerated what was intended to be a controlled process, and flights from the estates became widespread in the period just prior to the proclamation of final abolition in the Lei Aurea, or Golden Law, of 1888.

By 1888, almost a century after the Haitian Revolution, formal chattel slavery was gone from Latin America. In some areas, particularly Mexico and Argentina, the descendants of former slaves were absorbed, at least in theory, by a larger process of mestizaje, though death and social denial also figured in their apparent disappearance. In Colombia, the descendants of slaves remained regionally isolated, their presence viewed as anomalous within a nation defined by its elite as European and mestizo. In Cuba and Brazil, where the descendants of slaves constituted a large fraction of the population, class divisions continued to be marked by distinctions of "race." Though legal freedom made new forms of struggle possible, people of African descent generally faced discrimination and lack of access to productive resources, which together undermined the juridical equality that was the legacy of abolition.

See alsoDebt Peonage; Slavery: Spanish America.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Emília Viotti Da Costa, Da senzala à colônia (1966).

Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (1972).

Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (1975).

Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar (1978).

George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (1980).

Leslie Bethell, ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 3 (1985), pp. 299-346.

Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (1985).

Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (1986).

Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (1988).

Rebecca J. Scott et al., The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (1988).

Dale W. Tomich, "The 'Second Slavery': Bonded Labor and the Transformation of the Nineteenth Century World Economy," in Rethinking the Nineteenth Century: Movements and Contradictions, edited by Francisco O. Ramirez (1988).

Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (1993).

Additional Bibliography

Andrés Gallego, José. La esclavitud en la América española. Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro; Fundación Ignacio Larramendi, 2005.

Graden, Dale Torston. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Landers, Jane, and Barry Robinson. Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Mendonça, Joseli Maria Nunes. Entre a mão e os anéis: A lei dos sexagenários e os caminhos da abolição no Brasil. Campinas: Editora da UNICAMP: CECULT, 1999.

Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Empire and Antislavery Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Vila Vilar, Enriqueta and Luisa Vila Vilar. Los abolicionistas españoles: Siglo XIX. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1996.

                                            Rebecca J. Scott