Brazil

The struggle to end the Brazilian slave trade lasted more than forty years and was essentially a conflict between Britain on the one hand and Portugal and Brazil on the other. For hundreds of years prior to the nineteenth century, transporting the enslaved blacks from Africa to Brazil was considered essential in the Luso-Brazilian world because of the great importance of slave labor to the Brazilian economy and the inability of the slave population in that country to increase or even maintain itself through natural reproduction. The essentiality of the Brazilian slave trade is revealed by its long duration and the huge numbers of slaves involved. No precise figures exist, but it is certain that the volume of this forced migration was much larger than that to any other American colony or country, including the United States. According to recent estimates, perhaps 100,000 slaves arrived in Brazil from Africa in the sixteenth century, 2 million in the seventeenth, another 2 million in the eighteenth, and about 1.5 million in the last fifty years of the slave trade, which finally ended in 1852. This total of well over 5 million persons does not include the hundreds of thousands who died en route.

In the early years of the nineteenth century, when the British campaign against the Brazilian slave trade began, the demand for slaves in Brazil was as large as it had ever been, so it is not surprising that Portuguese governments in Rio de Janeiro (and later those of independent Brazil) resisted British interference in this basic enterprise. However, for many complex economic and humanitarian reasons, including the cost advantage that the slave trade gave Brazilian producers over British competitors in the world sugar markets, British governments persisted in their crusade for nearly half a century, forcing the rulers of Brazil outwardly to restrict, then outlaw, the traffic while in fact they continued to tolerate and even encourage it on a vast scale.

The following key events in this long struggle suggest the high level of determination on both sides. In 1810, following the transfer of the Portuguese royal government from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, the prince regent of Portugal, Dom João, reluctantly agreed to ban participation by Portuguese subjects in slave trading in the non-Portuguese territories of Africa. In two agreements reached in 1815 and 1817, Portugal yielded to British demands to outlaw Portuguese slave trading north of the equator and to establish measures to enforce certain restrictions. These included the British right to board and search Portuguese ships at sea, to detain vessels involved in illegal trafficking, and to deliver those ships to special tribunals or "mixed commissions" in Brazil and Africa. Finally, in 1826, four years after Brazil became independent, the imperial government grudgingly agreed to a total ban on the slave trade, to take effect three years from the date of the treaty's ratification, such trading in slaves henceforth to be "deemed and treated as piracy." Thus, after nearly twenty years of unrelenting British effort and almost equally adamant Luso-Brazilian resistance, the Brazilian slave trade became illegal on 13 March 1830. Less than two years later, on 7 November 1831, a Liberal government in Rio de Janeiro confirmed this commitment with legislation declaring the freedom of slaves entering the country from that day forth.

These extraordinary British efforts did not, however, end the slave trade. For seven years after the legal prohibition, Liberal governments made serious efforts to enforce the law, and the number of Africans entering Brazil, therefore, remained comparatively small. In 1837, however, with the rise to power of a proslavery Conservative government, attempts to prevent slave landings or otherwise to control the traffic all but ceased, and an illegal slave trade involving ships and citizens of many countries developed on a large scale that continued for another fifteen years. During those years the energies of Brazilian governments were in fact more often directed toward deceiving British diplomats and protecting slave importers and their illegal property than toward complying with treaties and enforcing laws. To cite one of the most egregious examples, under the first article of the anti-slave-trade law of 7 November 1831, the many hundreds of thousands of slaves who entered Brazil after that date were legally free, but most were in fact condemned along with their children to live out their lives in a state of de facto slavery.

In the 1840s, Britain persisted in its efforts to end the slave trade, seizing hundreds of ships at sea and on the African coast, and even encouraging a wave of public opposition within Brazil in the late 1840s. However, it was not until 1850, when the British government forcefully extended its naval campaign to the Brazilian coast itself, that the imperial government was at last persuaded to adopt more serious measures. Humiliated by British seizures of slave ships in Brazilian harbors and territorial waters, and fearing a British blockade of legitimate shipping and even war, the Brazilian government legislated the Queirós Law of 4 September 1850, which provided severe penalties for slave traders and permitted Brazilian authorities to seize ships known to be involved in the traffic, even when no slaves were found on board. Even then, however, Brazilian efforts were piecemeal and selective, and all but nonexistent at the port of Bahia. Thus another British threat to send warships into Brazilian territorial waters was made in January 1851. From then on, the Brazilian campaign against the slave trade was serious and effective, all but suppressing it by 1852.

The ending of the African slave trade generated an unprecedented internal commerce in slaves between the northern and southern provinces and a rapid decline of the slave population in the country as a whole, both of which were significant causes of outright abolition of slavery in 1888, less than forty years later.

See alsoSlavery: Brazil .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (1970).

Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee Country, 1850–1900 (1970).

Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (1976).

Joaquim Nabuco, Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle, edited and translated by Robert Edgar Conrad (1977).

Jacob Gorender, O escravismo colonial (1978).

Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (1983), and World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil (1986).

Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (1987).

Joseph Calder Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (1988).

Additional Bibliography

Butler, Kim D. Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-abolition, São Paulo and Salvador. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

Graden, Dale Torston. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900. 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.

                                  Robert Edgar Conrad