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  The centre of slave life consisted of the close ties and networks with loved ones – with family and intimate friends – and they did whatever was necessary to keep them secure. Often, they failed, and family break-up and separation left that emotional desolation that was a refrain in slave life across the Americas. Slaves were involved in permanent negotiations with their owners, striking a complexity of deals and arrangements for small but vital benefits: for land to cultivate and raise animals, with the produce sold and bartered – and the money sometimes set aside for freedom.[17] Wise planters and commentators agreed that slave gardens and plots were important: they benefited slave family life. The pressure for this came from the slaves themselves. Sometimes they had to make threats. When Brazilian slaves’ customary rights were denied – when rewards or plots for growing provisions were refused or revoked – slaves reacted violently. They attacked masters and overseers (and their animals), they ran away, and they even stirred up revolt.

  Slave rebellions, of various degrees of severity, were commonplace in Brazil, though not always with the intention of destroying slavery. They sometimes broke out to stop local abuses (or abusers) or to demand customary rights that were being denied. Revolts happened in new areas of expansion, where slaves were under severe pressure from the arduous labour. These were regions where heavy concentrations of African slaves were located, particularly young men captured in African conflicts, thence sold into Brazilian slavery. Gangs of African slaves from similar ethnic groups, some with military experience, seemed a recipe for rebellion. Bahia was particularly plagued by such troubles in the early nineteenth century, with upwards of thirty revolts. Most of them were on sugar plantations and were generally led by Hausa or Nago from Yoruba land: men who had arrived in Brazil via warfare sparked by the spread of Islam in their homelands.[18]

  By contrast, Rio in the nineteenth century remained much less troubled by rebellion, despite the huge numbers of Africans arriving there. This may have been because the Africans were predominantly Bantu-speakers with no experience of warfare. Moreover, Rio offered little encouragement for slave revolts. Though slaves struck back at oppressive masters, overseers and their property, and although slave owners worried endlessly about revolts, slaves in Rio found it easier, less risky, to run away and even to find other openings for themselves in the city. In many respects, Rio itself was also very different from Salvador in Bahia. It was home to the army, navy national guard, local militia, mercenaries and police. There were, in addition, slave patrols and private armies of armed slaves and informers’ employed by slave masters. Slaves in Rio had merely to glance around them to see the forts, the armed ships in the bay, soldiers on parade, the police barracks and patrols, to recognise a complex display of power. Such intimidating force was likely to dispel or curb thoughts of rebellion.[19]

  Brazilian slave owners – like slave owners everywhere – had learned their lessons from Haiti. They feared gatherings of slaves on the streets, and worried that they might simply get out of hand. Rio was regularly awash with rumours of plots and conspiracies, but open rebellions were unusual, and slaves took their revenge on a smaller scale: sabotage, theft, attacking and even killing masters and overseers. Though revolts erupted on plantations not too distant from Rio (even the Brazilian Emperor Pedro II suffered a revolt among sixty slaves on one of his plantations), the city did not have the rebellious record of Salvador.

  Brazilian officials were all too alert to the problems posed by Africans arriving from war-torn regions of the continent and gave instructions that they should be monitored and prevented from gathering: no drumming or festivities that might provide an occasion to assemble. This failed to prevent slave unrest, which culminated in the Malê (Muslim) rebellion of 1835 in Bahia. It was planned for the end of Ramadan that year, with Africans parading defiantly in the streets of Salvador wearing Islamic dress and displaying passages from the Qur’an. They were joined by slaves inspired by Yoruba gods of war. Other slave rebellions were also inspired by African deities and religious rituals from the slaves’ backgrounds. Catholic slaves were even persuaded to rebel by charismatic priests, and by the slaves’ attachment to saints who, they believed, would lead them to freedom. For example, as late as the 1880s, St Anthony became the patron saint of slave conspiracies’ in São Paolo.[20]

  The slave owners’ deep-seated fear – and the slaves’ inspiration – was, of course, Haiti. As early as 1805, a portrait of Dessalines was worn by black militiamen in Rio. Reports circulated of slaves openly talking about the Haitian revolution, and memories and images of Haiti frequently surfaced in Brazilian slave rebellions and plots: in Pernambuco (1817) and Laranjeiras (1824). Later, the line ‘Remember Haiti’ appeared in a poem that threatened whites in Recife.

  Sometimes, slave disturbances stemmed from much more mundane causes: misunderstandings and disappointments. Brazil’s gradualist legislation (offering qualified freedom, or freedom at some distant date) was often misunderstood by slaves who simply assumed that freedom was being granted – but denied or delayed by slave owners. Each new law seemed to prompt a revolt or conspiracy: in Espirito Santo (1831), Minas Gerais (1831 and 1833) and Campinas (1832). The abolition of the Brazilian slave trade (in 1850, rather than the original, ineffective abolition of 1831) and the Free Womb Law (1871) were similarly misunderstood and prompted slave disturbances. Even the last years of Brazilian slavery were pockmarked with revolts, especially in the southern coffee region.

  Slave owners viewed slave revolts as the ultimate crime committed by slaves, but there were many, less spectacular crimes that registered slave anger with their lot. Significantly, most slaves committed crimes against free people. As we have seen, the Brazilian slave system was itself a violent system, and its victims regularly turned to violence as their last means of resistance. They killed masters and their agents. (We know of slaves who preferred a life in jail to the life of a slave, handing themselves over to the authorities after committing murder.)[21] Much more commonly, slaves protested by running away. Indeed, what fatally undermined Brazilian slavery in its last years was the flight of slaves from the plantations. As they did during the last throes of other slave societies in the Americas, they simply quit the plantations in their thousands.

  Long before then, Brazilian slaves sought freedom by escaping to the wilderness or to the anonymity of town life. In one city after another, police arrested large numbers of runaway slaves. Police records and newspaper advertisements confirm that the largest group of runaways were young Africans, especially in the years of major African arrivals. In Rio in 1826, 86.7 per cent of runaways recorded in newspapers were Africans, the bulk of them aged ten to twenty years old. The evidence also suggests that the fugitives were helped by Africans of similar background.[22] Slaves fled from their masters for a great variety of reasons. They escaped cruelty and punishments, they sought out people who could advise and help, and many set out to find work in towns, perhaps even to find a new master who would treat them better. Others ran away to join the military in Brazil’s various internal and external conflicts. Some, living close to national borders, crossed into countries where slavery had already been abolished. Others escaped to join the numerous runaway communities – quilombos or mocambos – scattered across Brazil’s inaccessible terrain, or even those close to towns: communities too remote, too distant, too risky for authorities to bring to heel.[23] Most important of all, however, remained the emotional pull of family. Slaves ran away to loved ones, or from the fear of family break-up. The prospect of emotional turmoil forced slaves to escape, sometimes as a family.

  The problems posed by Brazilian slavery changed markedly during the nineteenth century, as the largest concentration of slaves shifted from the northern provinces (a legacy of the old slave economies) to the coffee-growing south. By the 1870s, the southern coffee-growing region was home to around 800,000 slaves, creating alarm among local politicians, who pointed to the fate of the US South as a warning of the dangers facing Brazil.
They feared that Brazilian slavery was simply decanting from the north into the south, and that northerners would effectively wash their hands of slavery itself, not caring whether it survived or not. The overwhelming fear was that slaves would soon begin to outnumber and overawe local white society, bringing all the physical dangers slave owners had feared for the past three centuries. These concerns about slavery were allied to a debate about the problems of Brazilian agriculture, and the difficulty of persuading free labour to work on the old plantations. Though contemporaries trotted out the lame excuses that Brazilians were lazy by inclination, the truth was different – and obvious. For centuries the plantations and other sections of rural life had been the preserve of African slaves. And who wanted to do slave work? In some places, however, harsh circumstances did indeed force the most wretchedly poor free labourers to toil on the old slave plantations.

  After the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade, and as slave prices rose, coffee planters hoped that European immigration (and even Chinese indentured labour) might solve their labour problems. Slowly, the outlook of some planters had begun to change. Mechanisation began to point to new ways of running the economy, in both the sugar and coffee industries. Machines could sort, polish and bag coffee beans – all work previously done by slaves. Even in the old sugar regions of northern Brazil, steam power began to make an impact. Most dramatic of all, some planters started to think that free labour might be better than slave labour.

  By 1870 Brazil, along with Cuba, had become the exception. The rest of the Western world had turned decisively against slavery. The US Civil War and the flight of the slaves from the plantations had not only destroyed slavery in North America but had created a post-war society hostile to slavery at large. Brazilians had traditionally looked to the USA as a sympathetic fellow slave society, but all that had vanished with the defeat of the South. Even the Spanish islands turned; Puerto Rico ended slavery in 1873 – and Cuba (formally at least) in 1880. Brazil was isolated. To compound the woes of Brazil’s slave owners, they also faced growing pressure from the country’s changing political landscape, notably from the rise of Brazilian abolitionism and from the nation’s transformed population. There were more and more free people in Brazil, especially the waves of recent immigrants from countries with no attachment to or even awareness of slavery. Government and regionally sponsored immigration schemes had seen tens of thousands of Italians settle in coffee-cultivating districts. Promoters of European immigration to Brazil realised that slavery had become a serious obstacle, because European immigrants seemed reluctant to work alongside slaves, not least because the Western world had spent much of the past few decades demonising slavery as a wicked and sinful institution. To increasing numbers of Brazilians, slavery was both distant and alien.

  In the years after the ending of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850, there was little sense of organised abolition sentiment in Brazil. The church was silent, and women remained largely uninvolved at first.[24] But that began to change by the 1870s. Brazilian arguments about slavery were, essentially, debates about the very nature and future of Brazil itself.[25] Abolition emerged as a major issue in Brazilian politics, as abolitionist organisations proliferated in towns across the country and local politicians began to consider the end of slavery in their province. Courtrooms also became a critical forum, not only for arguments about the freedom of individual slaves, but also for a more general legal debate about slavery and freedom. The foundations of Brazilian slavery were being slowly undermined. It was denounced abroad, its former friends (especially in North America) had been silenced, and it was being corroded at home by European immigration and by attack from Brazilian abolitionists. Opinion was shifting, especially in towns. Despite the ubiquity of urban slavery, city dwellers (especially those linked to the nation’s modernising industries and finances) were notably abolitionist. These new friends of black freedom were literate, often well educated, well connected and politically savvy.[26] Supporters of black freedom in Brazil’s towns created what was in effect an underground railroad, encouraging slaves to quit the plantations, and head for freedom among friends and sympathisers. Brazilian abolitionism began to grow into a broadly based popular movement, but to succeed it had to build support for appropriate legislation in parliament itself. Most crucially, it had to garner the strength of the slaves. Their opponents, Brazilian slave owners, also organised and campaigned to maintain their grasp over their slaves, and even by the late 1870s the prospect of black freedom remained uncertain.[27]

  The obstacle was the nature of Brazilian political power, which continued to be dominated by a regime, formed in colonial days, of slave holders and friends – with the Emperor, Dom Pedro II, wielding executive power. It was a political system designed to maintain stability (the Emperor appointed the government) and to limit change. The control of law and administration in the localities lay in the hands of men chosen by the cabinet. Elections were largely derisory, and their outcome unrepresentative of popular feeling. When Brazil’s Emperor wanted to gauge the feeling of the nation, he listened not to politicians but to the press and other sources of information. One odd consequence was that the Emperor became a supporter of a free press, and newspapers became vociferous critics of slavery. The most ironic twist to the story of abolition in Brazil is that it became a major national political issue in part thanks to the activities of Emperor Dom Pedro II.[28]

  The Emperor was concerned that slavery was damaging Brazil’s reputation among other advanced nations. The British – but especially the activities of the Royal Navy – remained a special concern. Although the Royal Navy delivered thousands of Africans freed from impounded slave ships to Brazil (where they were expected to become apprentices, though, in reality, they remained enslaved), they posed an aggressive threat. The Royal Navy blockaded Rio for six days in 1863, for instance. The Emperor also worried that events in the USA after 1860 might be repeated in Brazil. While Dom Pedro looked to Europe for both intellectual inspiration and cultural values, he feared that his country’s persistence with slavery was both demeaning and dangerous. He was concerned that Brazil’s attachment to slavery impaired the country’s aspiration to primacy in South America. He frequently hinted that slave emancipation was being considered – subject to various qualifications – but practical matters always got in the way.[29] The war against Paraguay (1864–70) also complicated Brazil’s slavery problems. Slaves were recruited and volunteered for the army (it offered an escape from slavery) and the disruption caused by that war also prompted slave upheavals and large-scale slave desertions from plantations. The war inevitably created huge strains; notably, recruiting slaves for the military led to unease among the old slave-owning class. To some, it seemed like a step towards emancipation, and was viewed as subversive encouragement to the slaves themselves. Once again, the shadow of Haiti was cast across local affairs. (The irony of the Paraguay war was that slaves conscripted for the war were freed, yet they were fighting for a slave state.) The war itself prompted the usual outbursts of slave escapes from the military, of mutinies and various acts of violence.[30]

  Victory in the Paraguay war in 1870 enabled the Emperor to bring the matter of slave emancipation before the cabinet (he had first raised it with them in 1867), and a law of limited range but important precedence was passed. The Rio Branco Law of 1871 decreed that all slaves born thereafter should be free, with masters caring for them for eight years. Then the masters should free them in return for compensation, or the slaves could work for them until the age of twenty-one. Henceforth, all slaves had to be registered. If not, they would be seized and freed.[31] The law prompted vehement and widespread opposition among slavery’s supporters, and the slave-holding elite fully expected slavery, in reality, to continue into the foreseeable future.

  Although slavery was important, in varying degrees, in every corner of Brazil, the internal slave trade began to create major problems by the 1870s. Slaves were being moved in huge numbers to the boom industries. T
hey were sold from Brazilian cotton regions, and from the southern ranching economies, to prospering regions of the country, notably to the coffee planters. Some years, as many as 10,000 slaves were traded along these internal slave routes – some involving enormously long journeys by land and water. The numbers of slaves removed from Bahia, for example, reached a peak in the 1870s. The distress caused by these enforced migrations was profound, both among the people uprooted and among those left behind. That distress became a deep-seated and widespread grievance in the coffee regions thereafter.[32]

  The internal Brazilian slave trade was a reprise, on an even larger scale, of what had happened in the USA before 1860. A profound anger settled among the slaves whose loved ones and friends disappeared into the internal slave trade, simply vanishing over the horizon – and this lay behind much of the unrest that erupted from the late 1870s onwards. Angry slaves, allied to other labour problems, were among the factors that began to edge some slave owners, notably coffee producers, to think about alternative sources of labour. This was compounded by concerns about the changing nature of the country’s demography, and by the fear of heavy concentrations of slaves in newer areas. And all the while, abolitionist groups began to coalesce.

  In 1881 a massive popular upsurge of abolition agitation broke out in Ceará – a north-eastern region stricken by drought – and a notable slave-exporting province. In January, thousands of people flocked to local beaches to block the movement of slaves from Fortaleza and other ports. It set in train a campaign that, by 1883, had not only freed slaves in that city but had inspired abolitionists nationally. The movement was greatly enhanced by the addition and effective work of female abolitionists, and agitation for black freedom began to spread. In the cities, where the power of new voters was undermining the influence of the old slave-owning class, abolition flourished as never before. Newspapers added their voice to the clamour for abolition. Most important of all, it flourished in Rio, where it fed into and was sustained by a much wider wave of popular radical politics about a range of local and national issues.[33] In 1880 the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society was founded and quickly became a critical force in promoting abolition in the country at large. Prominent abolitionists drew up specific plans – and drafted legislation – to free the slaves. Most striking of all, however, was the astonishing contagion of abolition; a veritable groundswell of popular abolition sweeping across Brazil. Ordinary people, of all colours and classes, flocked to public meetings – in theatres, concert halls and public squares – to add their presence, voice and names to demands for abolition. Abolition quickly took on a life of its own, seeping into all corners of the nation and capturing wide public appeal and support.