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  The simmering discontent among Africans came to a head in 1843–4 in the revolt of La Escalera. The rebellion involved slaves, free people of colour and whites (with support from British abolitionists), and began with a series of slave uprisings in 1843 in the sugar region east of Havana. A plot for a much wider rebellion was betrayed, prompting savage reprisals, with hundreds of suspects tied to ladders and mercilessly whipped. Today, the La Escalera revolt is viewed as the most serious of slave revolts in Cuba’s history, though it was more a collection of outbursts that were given a more sinister form by panic-stricken authorities anxious to curb slave unrest.[18] It was crushed with a violence that shocked even contemporaries accustomed to such behaviour.

  The cruelty involved and such repeated violent denials of Cuban slave demands were glaringly at odds with the progress in Spain’s former colonies in South America. And that may provide a clue. Having lost its mainland empire, Spain (whatever the pressures from slaves and abolitionist friends at large – notably the British) was not willing to concede in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Spanish rule became increasingly despotic, slaves’ lives more harshly managed and controlled – and all the while, tens of thousands of disaffected Africans continued to arrive in the island to keep the planters happy.

  The tensions in Cuba were accentuated by the fiction, played out in Spain, that the islands were part of Spain and that their residents were progressing to becoming full Spanish citizens. Madrid viewed the colonies as provinces and their populations as ‘Spaniards who would one day enjoy the same political and civil rights’. This prospect, however, was not offered to slaves, nor even to free people of colour: as their fellow Cubans edged closer to full Spanish citizenship, slaves were totally excluded from the political bargain. Here, there was a substantial slice of the population who could have little optimism that their future lay with Spain. This was to have the major consequence, as it had in the South American independence movements, of rallying people in favour of independence. Spain had effectively lost the support of the slaves and of the free people of colour.[19] The outcome was that supporters of independence from Spain also supported freedom for the slaves. Even people who were uncertain about black freedom came to recognise that Cuban independence would inevitably involve slave emancipation.

  Serious discussion about slavery and emancipation developed in Madrid in the late 1860s, prompted by the American Civil War and the end of US slavery. Madrid – at last – banned the slave trade in 1867. When Spain refused to extend reforms to Cuba in 1868, some of the planters began to demand independence from Spain. A major war for Cuban independence broke out in the east of the island. The rebellion – what became the ‘Ten Years War’ (1868–78) – quickly gained control of much of the eastern part of Cuba, but only 10 per cent of the island’s slaves lived there: most were concentrated in the sugar region in the west. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, a major regional planter, launched the move for independence, freeing his slaves at the same time and addressing them as ‘Citizens’: shades – once again, of Haiti. He urged them to rally to the cause of Cuban independence. In 1869, the rebel leaders (of what was known as Cuba Libre) tempted slaves by offering freedom to those who joined the insurgency. Later, they freed all slaves in areas under rebel control.

  Slaves now became critical in converting a separatist struggle led by white slave-holding elites in eastern Cuba into a war for personal liberation’.[20] In fact, both sides tried to win over slaves to their side – but in the process, slavery itself began to unravel. Slaves, intent on securing their own freedom, joined the rebellion and the rebel ranks – both foot-soldiers and officers – filled with men of African descent. Slaves joining the rebels openly admitted that they had done so to become free, but their opponents tried to spread alarm by claiming that the war had become a war to end slavery. Whenever rebel soldiers of African descent rose to prominence, their enemies spread the rumours that black rebels were seeking a reprise of the Haitian revolt. The rebels were unable to break out of the east of Cuba and in 1878 finally agreed to a truce – the Pact of Zanjón. The agreement granted freedom to slaves who had fought in the conflict – but it produced a bizarre compromise. Rebel slaves were freed, but slaves who had steered clear of the conflict remained as slaves. Even so, the war had fatally damaged Cuban slavery.

  The war persuaded Madrid of the need for change, but without alienating the slave lobby or conservative opinion. The Moret Law of 1870 promoted a raft of rights at home and in the colonies and was Madrid’s attempt at a move towards emancipation. It banned the use of the whip and the break-up of slave families, and it freed certain categories of slaves, notably the newborn, the old – and those who had fought for Spain. It also freed all Africans landed in the island from impounded slave ships. As usual, these concessions came with a string of qualifications that give slave owners plenty of scope to side-step or delay the measures. The new law was, inevitably, obstructed or simply ignored in Cuba (less so in Puerto Rico) and for years planters and their supporters managed to maintain their traditional control over their slaves.[21] Not surprisingly, the Moret Law faced a hail of criticism from abolitionists. But, despite its limitations and critics, and for all the obvious concessions to slave owners, it signalled the beginning of the end – and it clearly encouraged the slaves. They used the legal provisions that allowed slaves to purchase their freedom, and the number of slaves in Cuba began to decline after 1870. Others simply abandoned the plantations, often encouraged by sympathisers, who sometimes provided the practical assistance required.

  Puerto Rico’s slaves, now few in number and with their sugar industry of decreasing importance, were more easily helped by both Spanish and local abolitionists, and in 1873 Spain finally freed the remaining 20,000 slaves on the island (Madrid later tried unsuccessfully to revoke the decision), but obliged them to work for their former masters for another three years.[22] The slaves again resolved the matter by simply leaving the plantations.

  After Cuba’s delegates had returned to the Spanish Cortes in 1880, Spain agreed to abolish slavery (there were still 200,000 slaves in Cuba) – by the technique of renaming both slave holders and slaves. Henceforth, slave holders were to be known as patronos (patrons) and slaves as patrocinados (apprentices). It was little more than a rebranding of slavery – and yet another sop to the slave lobby. It freed a quarter of the slaves, at three-year intervals, and by 1888 all would be freed. In the meantime, slaves over eighteen could demand wages; food and clothing were guaranteed; slave children were to be educated; and self-purchase was also made easier. Most importantly, perhaps, the grip of the slave owners was weakened by the establishment of a system of supervision. Slaves could bring their owners to account for any wrongdoing.

  The Act of 1880 had in effect created a system of apprenticeship, but most slaves were simply unwilling to wait – even for a few more years. They quit the plantations by the thousands. Some negotiated deals with their former owners, working for them on new terms – and for wages. Whatever decision the slaves took, the law was now available to help them: slave owners found themselves being monitored. Throughout the slave empires, it had been an unwritten but golden rule that slave owners were in effect the lords of all they surveyed, unaccountable to anyone. In Cuba, after 1880, they had to answer for their behaviour.

  The end of the prolonged Cuban war in 1878 had released a widespread desire to see an end to the entire system. What more did the slaves have to do to prove themselves? They had been vital to the planters in revitalising Cuba’s economy and essential in the recent conflict when arguments for colonial independence had become inextricably linked to arguments against slavery. Now they demanded freedom, taking whatever steps were necessary to secure it. They had fought for freedom in the recent conflict; now they simply walked away from slavery or negotiated a personal end to it. After 1880, they exposed and denounced slave owners who broke the law about slavery. Slave owners finally recognised that reality was closing in around them. It had become pointless to dela
y the inevitable. Full freedom was brought forward, and Cuban slavery ended on 1 October 1886.[23] Once again, slaves had seen off their oppressors. That left only one slave society in the Americas – the biggest, and the one that had started the entire story – Brazil.

  9

  The Last to Go: Brazil

  BRAZIL’S VAST LANDMASS and its ever-changing economy swallowed Africans by the million. North-east Brazil is the closest point in the Americas to Africa, and the trade winds and oceanic currents pushed the slave ships heading to Brazil. Brazil effectively came to dominate the Atlantic slave system: almost a half of all Africans shipped across the Atlantic were carried in Portuguese or Brazilian ships, with Rio de Janeiro and Salvador the largest slaving ports of the Atlantic system. Prominent trading houses linked Bahia and West Africa, and Brazilian managers and prominent slave traders regularly moved back and forth between their two trading centres – at home and at ease in both Africa and Brazil. And despite the persistent struggles by slaves themselves and a growing chorus of criticism, both in Europe and the Americas, Brazilian slavery experienced a massive expansion in the nineteenth century.

  The demand for tropical produce, conceived and nurtured under the old colonial regimes, was both strengthened and expanded by the massive increase in global populations in the nineteenth century. There were many millions of consumers who wanted commodities which spilled from the tropical economies. Sugar, coffee and tobacco had set the pattern in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: in the nineteenth century all three expanded hugely and were now joined by cheap US (slave-grown) cotton. Coffee – production of which was once dominated by St-Domingue’s slave plantations – became Brazil’s major export, greatly helped and advanced by powerful vested interests which monopolised the economy and held political sway on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Slavery in Brazil attracted plenty of critics at home and abroad, but criticisms that rested on philosophy, theology or simple humanity faced the formidable obstacle of economic reality. Slavery and Brazilian economic wellbeing went hand in hand, and Brazilian planters, like their earlier Caribbean counterparts, could swat aside criticism by simply pointing to slavery’s economic benefits. That prosperity was based on the millions of African slaves who, from start to finish, were engaged in their own struggle against the system: resisting, adapting and always searching for elusive routes to freedom.

  Brazil’s slave population was enormous. At Brazilian independence from Portugal in 1822, the population consisted of 2,813,351 free people and 1,147,515 slaves, the latter concentrated mainly in the old centres of slave activity: in the sugar regions of Bahia and the north-east, in the gold-mining district of Minas and in Rio de Janeiro. From the 1820s, however, that pattern began to change, thanks to the development of Brazilian coffee. Coffee planters instinctively turned to Brazil’s traditional source of labour – African slaves – to establish the industry. Though slaves worked alongside free labour, it was the slaves who bore the brunt of the heavy fieldwork. They laboured across Brazil’s vast agricultural landscape, became a striking presence in the burgeoning towns and cities, working as domestics, at myriad manual tasks in the streets, and as jobbing labourers and artisans, rented out to provide income for their owners.

  The most striking feature of Brazilian slavery in the nineteenth century was the huge numbers of Africans who were landed at the very time the Atlantic slave trade was under growing pressure, especially from the aggressively abolitionist British. Portuguese governments (and the Crown) periodically agreed to restrict their Atlantic trade, but they did little in practice to stop it. After 1822, the newly independent Brazilian state, anxious to secure British help, agreed to implement earlier Portuguese promises to end the slave trade, but, even then, the trade continued. A law of 1831, for instance, ordered the freeing of Africans landing in Brazil, with heavy penalties for illegal slave trading, but the law was not implemented and had little effect. Despite British diplomatic pressure and despite the Royal Navy impounding Brazilian slave ships, Brazil continued to absorb huge numbers of African slaves. In the half-century to 1850, an estimated 2,150,000 Africans disembarked in Brazil, and more than one and a half million of those arrived between 1825 and 1850.[1] In one decade alone, the 1840s, between 30,000 and 40,000 Africans were landed each year. A simple explanation for these huge figures might seem to be the enormity of Brazil’s coastline, which stretches over 4,500 miles. In fact, most of the Africans (some 1.2 million of them) landed at or close to Rio in the space of a century. These vast numbers of new Africans drove forward the growth of Brazil’s slave population. After 18 50, however, the overall slave population in Brazil declined, from 1,715,000 in 1864 to 1,540,829 ten years later, thence down to 1,240,806 in 1884. Finally, on the eve of emancipation, Brazil was home to 723,419 slaves.[2] The last years of Brazilian slavery saw numbers decline quickly – for one simple reason: the enslaved fled from slavery in enormous numbers.

  Brazil’s voracious demand for slave labour in the nineteenth century was made possible by government officials (in thrall to the nation’s major economic interests) ignoring the law and turning a blind eye. Brazilian slave traders and slave owners, of course, did not want to end the trade and were usually able to intimidate local juries when rare cases were brought to court. Prosecutors determined to press charges against slave traders ran into the resistant buffer of Brazilian slave interests.

  Slavery already had deep popular roots in Brazil. The law of 1831 abolishing the Brazilian slave trade was greeted by a plethora of petitions demanding its repeal, just when the British Parliament was flooded with petitions demanding an end to colonial slavery. British politicians, notably their aggressive foreign secretaries, were in no mood to tolerate Brazilian prevarications, nor to worry about the feelings (or the legal rights) of nations who refused to heed British demands to stop the Atlantic trade. The British had been able to enforce favourable trade deals, which flooded Brazil with British goods. And, after 1845, a new British Act authorised the Royal Navy to impound suspected slave traders in Brazilian waters – and try them in British Admiralty courts. Brazilians thus developed an understandable distrust of the British, not helped by the fact that some British residents in Brazil were themselves happy to own slaves. Brazilians were not alone in pointing out that Britain had, in living memory, derived enormous prosperity from its own slave trade. By mid-century then, Brazilian distrust of Britain had curdled into a widespread hostility, which was exploited by the Brazilian slave lobby to its advantage.[3]

  The massive expansion of Brazilian slavery in the nineteenth century may have been focused on coffee, but it also fuelled changes in the wider Brazilian economy. The old sugar industry revived with the development of new regions of sugar cultivation (helping to supply the rising global demand for sugar – after the collapse of Haitian production). Brazilian cotton cultivation also expanded, along with other agricultural activities (ranching, for example). No other industry, however, used as much slave labour as the coffee industry.

  Coffee had been introduced to Brazil in 1727, and was cultivated, largely for domestic use, around Rio de Janeiro from 1760, but it was the great valley of the Paraíba do Sul River that provided ideal conditions for coffee cultivation. Acquiring land for coffee cultivation was often a matter of brute force wielded by powerful men who could eject competitors and squatters, then legalise their claims through biddable lawyers and judges. With both land and slaves plentiful, it soon became apparent that coffee produced with free labour was unable to compete with the volume and cost of slave-grown coffee, and from the 1830s onwards, there was a major expansion of coffee cultivation in the Paraíba valley, later spreading to large areas of São Paulo province. By the mid-century, this coffee-growing region was Brazil’s main area of slave labour. Though old roads had been established by mining activity, the caravans of mules carrying the coffee sometimes spent days reaching the nearest port. It took ten costly days to reach Santos over the old tracks, and the time accounted for upwards
of one-third of the cost of coffee production.[4]

  Although coffee production was a relatively simple process, it required substantial investment in slaves. Their work was back-breaking toil: weeding the land, picking and packing the beans, which were then shipped out on mules. In the phrase widely used in governing circles in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘Brazil is coffee and coffee is the Negro.’[5] The agents handling the transportation of the coffee beans tended to be British and American, and the prime market for Brazilian coffee was North America, where demand grew at an explosive rate. In 1791 the USA imported 1 million pounds of coffee: by 1844 that had grown to 150 million pounds.[6]

  Coffee quickly became Brazil’s major export crop and, by the time slavery ended in 1888, it accounted for more than 60 per cent of the nation’s export earnings. In the process, it prompted a major process of modernisation: ports and transportation (notably railways) were modernised, and the latest financial and commercial systems were put in place. Yet all this, initially at least, went hand in hand with slavery. It was not unlike the story of cotton in the US South: modern capitalism, the newest banking arrangements and highly industrial manufacturing systems, all functioning smoothly on the back of slave labour.

  The Brazilian reluctance to act against the slave trade was driven partly by the widespread ownership of slaves. There were, quite simply, large numbers of Brazilians, even among the humblest of people, who benefited from cheap African slave labour. Tens of thousands of Brazilians owned slaves of their own – albeit in small numbers – and needed those slaves for the income they generated. This was especially striking in urban life. Rio’s population of 206,000 at mid-century included 80,000 slaves; 40 per cent of Salvador’s population of 75,000 were enslaved; and at much the same time, almost a quarter of Sao Paulo’s 31,000 residents were slaves.[7] As already touched upon, visitors to Brazil were invariably amazed by the ubiquity of slaves on the streets, with slaves transporting every imaginable item, from bags, packs and barrels, as well as their owners in a variety of sedan chairs. Slaves also provided a host of urban services – dispensing food and drink, sharpening knives and working as odd-job men, forming a blur of economic and social activity that was caught in the sketches and portraits by contemporary artists.