Freedom Read online

  Popular abolition initially hardened the hearts and resolve of slave owners and their supporters, but their political power was draining away. Slavery was collapsing locally across Brazil. Popular politics, the concentration on securing freedom in specific localities, legal challenges in courts and, most critical of all, the slaves’ growing awareness that the tide was running in their favour, all served to sap the slave lobby’s strength. Coalitions of abolition societies came together to form a powerful national lobby, and one Brazilian city after another succumbed to campaigns to free local slaves. In the event, only small numbers of slaves were freed, but the movement developed its own dynamic and language, which was important for the subsequent national discussion about slave freedom.

  It was becoming clearer by the month that ‘Brazil was no longer totally a slave nation.’ [34] Then, in 1884, Brazil found itself with a Prime Minister, Manoel Pinto de Souza Dantas, who was an abolitionist; his son Rodolfo proposed immediate and uncompensated emancipation for all slaves over sixty. The subsequent political crisis propelled abolition centre-stage, with candidates at elections being forced by popular politics to declare themselves on the question of abolition. This was an exact reprise of events in Britain fifty years before. The short-term outcome was that most abolitionists lost their seats, but a new government in 1885 passed a very restricted form of abolition, this time with compensation. By 1886, it seemed that the old order had reasserted itself. In fact, the hardline anti-abolitionist administration had merely stirred a hornet’s nest of slave resentment. Slaves needed little encouragement to add the critical mass of their numbers to the argument. Their desire for freedom had always been there, of course. Now, it had been heightened by the agitation and political successes of recent years. It was as if the slave genie was finally out of the bottle and the slaves took matters into their own hands.

  The old pattern of slaves fleeing from their owners now became a veritable epidemic. Slave conspiracies proliferated: some turned to violence against property and people. In São Paulo slave revolts were nipped in the bud in 1882 and 1885. Abolitionists urged fugitive slaves to escape to ‘free’ territories and, again with royal support, funds flowed in to help. Free slave communities lured slaves across Brazil. Often, slaves left plantations en masse. The number of Brazil’s slaves went into a swift, steep decline. In the four years to 1888 it fell from one million to half a million.[35]

  The government tried to staunch the flight of the slaves with new laws punishing anyone who helped runaway slaves, but the days of supplicant slaves merely asking for freedom had vanished into the dust raised by tens of thousands of slaves quitting the plantations. In these massive human upheavals, old scores were settled: masters and their helpers were killed by vengeful slaves. In the last years of Brazilian slavery, in places such killings ‘became so ordinary that newspapers avoided publishing news about it for fear of creating panic among the free’.[36]

  The flight of the slaves was unstoppable and large communities of freed slaves mushroomed outside cities across the country: outside Porto Alegre, Fortaleza, Ouro Preto and Rio. In Bahia, the city of Cachoeira ‘became a place of refuge’ for fugitive slaves.[37] In Pernambuco, 3,000 escaped along a ‘maritime freedom route’ organised by local abolitionists. Thousands fled in droves from São Paulo’s coffee plantations, heading for the security of free communities in the city of Santos. Everywhere, fugitives flooded Brazil’s streets to join friends and supporters in mass displays of popular demands for abolition.

  Whole regions became in effect areas of freedom that welcomed fugitive slaves, and Brazil’s underground railroad became an overcrowded transit system between slavery and freedom. This underground railroad was more massive and more open than its North American namesake. Sometimes an entire slave population of a plantation fled, many boarding real trains to head for freedom. Local police and military were simply powerless in the face of such numbers, and most refused to intervene. Slave resistance, flight and violence – all and more proved beyond the power of local and national authorities to contain, not least because the public mood had shifted. The abuses of slaves that had once passed unremarked now caused outrage. Slave masters found it hard to believe what was happening. Slavery was collapsing all around them and they lost confidence in the ability of the state – or the locality – to maintain control in the face of such volatility. Many simply threw in the towel. When planters resisted or slaves hesitated, abolitionists converged on the plantations (especially those of notorious planters), urging slaves to down tools and walk away. The proliferation of free communities served to transform local urban politics by giving power to abolition and severely weakening the national government’s dogged opposition to freedom. Waves of civil and personal disobedience by slaves and their supporters were bringing slavery to its knees. Even the army was powerless to do anything about this popular uprising – and it refused even to try.[38]

  By 1886 planters worried that they would not have enough labour to harvest their various crops, and many began to negotiate their own employment arrangements with the slaves. In Parliament the slave lobby proposed several solutions, trying to secure a compromise between freedom and contractual labour. The last debate revolved around compensation for slave owners (with memories of Britain’s £20 million clearly in mind). It was a hopelessly optimistic last throw of the slave owners’ dice. And it failed.

  This extraordinary black liberation – the loss of half the nation’s slave population to a contagion of self-liberation – was now compounded by an unlikely but invaluable intervention by the sympathetic Princess Regent, Isabel (the Emperor was in Europe). She proved a stalwart friend to the slaves, supporting their cause in public and in the face of resistant politicians. She nominated João Alfredo Correa de Oliveira as Prime Minister, giving him instructions, in May 1888, to push through a law for immediate abolition – with no compensation.

  Free at last, Brazil’s slaves (and many others) embarked on celebrations the likes of which dwarfed all previous Brazilian carnivals and joyous public outbursts. For three days, newspapers were not able to publish: their workers were on the streets celebrating. And at the heart of those celebrations, the crowds of freed slaves paraded images of the heroes of abolition.[39]

  African slaves had been the essence of Brazilian history for more than three centuries. They had created wealth and ostentatious living on a lavish scale – all the while enduring a brand of misery like no other. Millions had suffered enslavement in Africa, the hell that was an Atlantic slave ship, followed by the multiple (and repeated) upheavals, cruelties and heartbreaks of Brazilian slavery. In the process, their labour brought into being a society quite unlike any other in the Americas. Now it was gone. Slavery had been the foundations on which Brazil’s ancien régime had rested, and with the overthrow of slavery, the regime itself tottered. The monarchy had abandoned the slave owners to support the slaves and when, in 1889, the military revolted, the Emperor had no friends to which to turn. The regime fell – dragged down by the death throes of the slave regime that had sustained and enriched Brazil for so long. Slavery ended in 1888 and in the following year Brazil became a republic.[40]

  The struggle to overthrow Brazilian slavery had been protracted and bitterly resisted. Its dogged defenders seemed not to care that Brazil became the only surviving Christian country to tolerate it. Though it is true that opinion changed dramatically in the last years of slavery, when swathes of Brazilian life turned against slavery, educated and enlightened Brazilians were ashamed to hear their nation compared to slave-holding Turkey. The decisive factor in the ending of the system was the slaves themselves. As the ideological and commercial justifications for slavery disintegrated, it was the slaves who, to use the words of David Brion Davis ‘turned the tide’. They sometimes negotiated, occasionally rebelled, regularly plotted – and periodically hit back – and finally fled in their tens of thousands. Their resistance sapped the resolve of slave owners and their political supporters, who found the
mselves increasingly powerless in the teeth of massive slave defiance. The slaves toppled the system that for so long had held them in miserable bondage. Their efforts had created Brazil’s wellbeing: now, they had brought down slavery in their collective surge to freedom.[41]

  10

  Abolition and the Wider World

  FOR MUCH OF their history, the slave societies of the Americas were sustained by the umbilical cord that was the Atlantic slave trade. But by 1867 that had ended. Twenty years later, the last American slave society fell. This enormous system, of Atlantic slave ships and African slave labour – finally collapsed – to a chorus of political denunciation and moral outrage. Yet for centuries slavery had survived with little criticism or opposition. Now, it was reviled throughout the Western world.

  Notwithstanding earlier intellectual and religious roots in France and North America, the political campaign to bring down slavery was British in origin. Throughout the nineteenth century, the British used all their economic and political power (which went from strength to strength as the century advanced) to stop the maritime trade in slaves. But herein lies a curious paradox: had not the British been the dominant slave trader in the North Atlantic before 1807? And had not the Royal Navy (henceforth the scourge of Atlantic slave ships) been the naval guardian of British Atlantic slavery? This British conversion from slavery to abolition was as swift as it was confusing. Not surprisingly, other nations found such a volte-face deeply suspicious. This odd paradox – British zeal for abolition after years of successful slaving – was to become a central feature of British historical remembrance, and forgetfulness, from that day to this. The British like to recall their abolitionist past, but soon became forgetful about their earlier involvement with slavery. Even today, there is a temptation to remember abolition and to overlook what had gone before.

  Throughout the nineteenth century, British foreign secretaries (some of them belligerently abolitionist) arrived at diplomatic gatherings determined to negotiate an end to slave trading. Often, they were armed with massive public support: 1,370 petitions and upwards of 1,375,000 signatures accompanied the delegates to the Congress of Vienna in 1815, for example.[1] They made slow progress. It took Europe’s major powers thirty years to agree to abolish the slave trade, and a further thirty years to implement those agreements fully. During all that time, the US Navy and the Royal Navy made energetic efforts to intercept the Atlantic slave ships. By 1839, when the Royal Navy had seized 77 slave ships and freed 104,034 slaves, another 2,640 vessels had carried almost two million Africans to the Americas. By the time the last Africans landed in Cuba in 1867, almost three million Africans had been shipped to the Americas as slaves since 1807.

  Despite the sluggishness of abolition, the Western world had embarked on an utterly new venture. For the first time in recorded history, major powers came together to end slave trading: a business that had characterised human society for centuries. The first move had been taken at Vienna in 1815 with the assertion that the slave trade was a violation of the rights of man. Though hardly noticed at the time, this was ‘the first hesitant step in the direction of the present international human rights movement’. Unconsciously perhaps, that gathering marked the start of a protracted legal and diplomatic struggle that continues to this day: to outlaw slave trading and slavery in all corners of the globe.[2]

  The determination to root out slavery became a diplomatic and political obsession of British diplomacy throughout the nineteenth century, and as early as 1830 the ‘Slave Trade Dept’ had become the largest section in the Foreign Office. It became ever clearer, to diplomats and abolitionists, that slave routes and slavery thrived in all corners of the world. Attacking slavery on a global scale, however, posed very different problems from ending slavery in colonies or in nation states that were friends or allies. The world was laced with slave routes. Africa posed its own complex problems. Trans-Saharan caravans, routes between the Horn of Africa and Arabia, between east Africa and islands in the Indian Ocean, trade linking Zanzibar to the Congo – these and many more generated enormous movements of slaves. India, too, challenged the evangelical British, who began to realise the extent and variety of slave systems on the sub-continent, especially among the myriad princely states.

  When western Europe’s imperial powers revived their interest in Africa in the late nineteenth century, they faced the problem of how to deal with slavery. Europe’s latest phase of imperial expansion (‘the scramble for Africa’) was fired by strategic and economic interests, but it was disguised and justified by a Christian fervour to bring ‘civilisation’ to an Africa plagued by widespread forms of slavery. By then, abolition had (in the words of Seymour Drescher) become the gold standard of civilisation. The preferred tactic used by the British was to bring slavery to heel through diplomatic agreement with the guilty state or head of state. By 1890, more than three hundred bilateral or multilateral treaties had been concluded (though all were directed at oceanic slave trading and none against overland routes or slavery itself).[3] When doing this, London made a none-too-subtle distinction between ‘agreements’ with ‘barbarous Chiefs’ and international compacts with ‘Civilized States’.[4] If Foreign Office diplomacy failed, the Royal Navy was always available to lend a muscular hand. The navy destroyed African slaving posts in the 1840s, attacked Brazilian vessels in 1850 and occupied Lagos in 1851–2, leaving no doubt about Britain’s determination to attack slavery when it deemed it necessary.

  As the century advanced, what began as a campaign to end the remnants of the old colonial slave systems in the Atlantic became a drive against slavery wherever it existed. Abolition gradually became a truly global campaign. But to be effective, campaigners needed the authority of international legal agreements and, when necessary, military power. In the process, a debate emerged in all Western nations and in diplomatic congresses about human rights. The demand for an end to slavery became a rallying cry for the rights of enslaved people everywhere.

  By the late nineteenth century, the focus of attention had shifted from the Americas to Africa, the Indian Ocean and beyond. In India, for example, the British decreed slavery to be illegal in 1860, though enforcing that resolve proved altogether more difficult. There – indeed wherever abolitionist nations looked – they encountered forms of slavery that differed greatly from the slave systems with which they had been familiar in the Americas. Even so, by the late nineteenth century, Europe’s major imperial powers had swung into line behind a political and diplomatic abolitionist culture. This represented a major transformation. In the late eighteenth century the instinct of Europe’s colonial powers had been to acquire as big a share as possible of the Atlantic slave economy, and to outbid rivals for a share of the Atlantic slave trade. A century later, by – say, 1900 – all of them shared a contrary political and cultural outlook. Every major European imperial power defined itself as an anti-slavery nation: their cultural superiority was rooted in an unquestioned opposition to slavery. An abolitionist ethos was now the essence of Western civilisation: slavery had become the mark of a heathen backwardness. As western Europe emerged as a pre-eminent force in world affairs, it left slavery far behind – so far behind that Europeans tended to forget their own intimate and valuable involvement with it. Societies that clung to slavery seemed to offer the West an invitation to step forward and bring it to an end.

  A succession of European diplomatic gatherings between 1815 and 1888 had issued a variety of denunciations of slavery, but those high-sounding pronouncements were often little more than diplomatic hot air. Then, in 1888, the tone and the direction of European abolition changed – thanks largely to the Catholic Church. In July of that year the eccentric French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie launched a crusade against the slave trade from the pulpit of St-Sulpice in Paris. Lavigerie had been a missionary in Africa, Archbishop of Algiers, founder of a French missionary order and Primate of Africa. His fierce anti-slavery sermon in 1888 was based on missionaries’ reports from twenty years before and po
rtrayed African slavery in the most gruesome and blood-curdling light. He also took aim at Arab slave traders in what looked like a revival of the millennium-old clash between Christianity and Islam. Despite the faded evidence, Lavigerie’s apocalyptic tone had a seismic impact, first in Paris, then across Europe. Abolitionist societies proliferated across Catholic Europe and the Pope found himself propelled to the head of a European-wide anti-slavery furore. The outcome was a new international anti-slavery campaign (though it was severely divided by nationality and between Catholic and Protestant).[5]

  Following concern about Belgium’s rapacious conduct in the Congo, a new treaty of 1885 decreed that both slavery and slave trading were illegal and ordered European powers to bring them to an end in their respective African possessions.[6] Behind the vaunted principles, however, much simpler and more brutal forces were at work. The upsurge in abolition sentiment flourished on the back of Europe’s latest zeal for empire, with major powers acquiring a passion for new imperial acquisitions, and all confirmed by diplomatic agreements at the Berlin Congress of 1889–90 to divide Africa into recognisably modern spheres of interest. Europe’s major powers had gobbled up vast tracts of Africa to gain access to markets, raw materials and strategic advantages. But the entire process came gilded with the principles of a civilising mission – at the heart of which was the resolve to end slavery.[7]