The Sacred Cause: The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro 9781503611030

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The Sacred Cause

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The Sacred Cause The Abolitionist Movement, Afro-Brazilian Mobilization, and Imperial Politics in Rio de Janeiro

Jeffrey D. Needell

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Needell, Jeffrey D., author. Title: The sacred cause : the abolitionist movement, Afro-Brazilian mobilization, and imperial politics in Rio de Janeiro / Jeffrey D. Needell. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019010169 (print) | lccn 2019011407 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503611030 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503609020 | ISBN 9781503609020 ­(cloth:­alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Antislavery movements—Brazil—History—19th century. | Blacks—Brazil—Politics and government—19th century. | Slavery— Brazil—History—19th century. | Brazil—Politics and government— 1822-1889. | Brazil—History—Empire, 1822–1889. Classification: LCC HT1128 (ebook) | LCC HT1128 .N44 2019 (print) | DDC 326/.80981—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019010169 Cover design: Rob Ehle Cover photograph: Abolition of slavery by Princess Isabel, 1888. Marc Ferrez, from the Gilberto Ferrez collection of photographs of nineteenthcentury Brazil. Wikimedia Commons Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/12.5 Sabon

For Gabriel, for Renata, and for Ethan— with enduring love and great pride.

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I am an abolitionist at heart and I take advantage of this solemn occasion to declare it. My conscience does not accuse me of having left aside a single occasion, when drafting opinions for this society, of having neglected to make propaganda for the abolition of slavery, and I hope to God that I shall not die without having given to my Country the most abundant evidence of my dedication to the Sacred Cause of Emancipation. André Pinto Rebouças, Diário

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi



Names, Spelling, and Translation 

xiii



Maps 

xiv

introduction: Another Political World 

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1. The Land of the Dead: The Imperial Capital, 1822–1871 

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2. The Alliance with the Future: The Movement Emerges, 1871–188152 3. Retreat, Renewal, and the “New Phase,” 1882–188395 4. The Field of Agramante: The Liberals Attempt Reform, 1884–1885122 5. The Fate of the Black Race: Radicalization and Its Failed Containment, 1885–1888166 6. Sacred Abolition: The Triumph, 1888201 7. Legacies and Oblivion224 Illustrations265 Notes273

Sources Cited331

Index345

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Acknowledgments

This book is dedicated to my children, whose love continues to sustain me and whose character makes me so proud. Both that love and that character, as with so much of my happiness, derive from the marriage and family that Fátima, my wife, has made with me over the decades. As with the work that came before this, Fátima’s love, patience, and understanding as I have prepared this book have been critical. No one knows the book’s cost and its pleasures better than she, and I am deeply grateful. I began work on this book in 2004, the year after submitting my second book’s manuscript to the press. Nothing as difficult and as demanding as this could have been done without generous support, and I have been very fortunate and remain very grateful. I have received two sabbaticals (2009– 2010, 2016–2017) and three Humanities Enhancement Awards for summer research (2009, 2012, 2015) from the University of Florida’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and a summer research grant from the American Philosophical Society (2007), a Fulbright-Hays fellowship (2009, 2011), and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship (2013–2014), which supplemented archival research critical to this work but done for another project supported by the NEH in 1990–1991. In 2019, to help defray the cost of indexing, I was awarded a subvention by the University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment). The cost of preparing the book’s maps and illustrations was paid for in 2019 by a University Scholars Program bequest by Hali McKinley Lester. Brian Ward, Joseph Spillane, Ida Altman, and Sean Addams, who chaired my department over these years, supported my research consistently and at critical junctures. David Geggus’s conversations and support were an abiding source of encouragement. Richard Phillips and Paul Losche, who have overseen the Latin American and Caribbean Collection here with loving care over the years, facilitated my research in countless ways, particularly in terms of access to and use of our microfilmed Brazilian periodicals. At Renaissance Printing, Jacquelyn Tight’s patience and skill with maps and images were welcome indeed. Since 2016, Margo Irvin, my editor at Stanford University Press, has taken an encouraging interest in my work and supported it, ably assisted by Nora Spiegel, whose timely advice was much appreciated. I am very grateful to the production editor, Anne Fuzellier Jain, for her clarity, rapidity, professionalism, and understanding, and to Christine Gever, the

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Acknowledgments

copy editor, whose tireless, extraordinary commitment saved me from many an error and much awkward or unclear phrasing. In Brazil, the Lima Maia family, gift of my wife, welcomed us repeatedly and made our frequent stays in Rio both possible and precious. The support and generosity of Brazilian colleagues was also indispensable. Historians at the Casa de Rui Barbosa, particularly Antônio Herculano Lopes, Isabel Lustosa, and Eduardo Silva, welcomed my return and research there. Sátiro Nunes was critical to my success at the Arquivo Nacional; and I owe special thanks to Andréa Ferreira, who completed work there for me, as well. The staff overseeing the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, as always, welcomed me to their fundamental holdings. Beatriz Kushnir, at the Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, embraced my return there and ensured my success. Old friends at the Biblioteca Nacional, particularly Vera Lúcia Garcia Menezes, were critical to my research, as were the staff of the Arquivo Histórico do Museu Imperial in Petrópolis. In Recife, Marcus Joaquim Maciel de Carvalho welcomed me to his department at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and to his city; there, I was also hosted by the head of the Arquivo João Alfredo, Marcos Galindo Lima, whose generosity and patience in giving me access to that critical collection, both before and after its professional cataloguing, were essential to my work. Much of my approach has to do with urban history, something I first studied with my mentor, Richard M. Morse. I continue to learn from him and to mourn his loss. My introduction to Brazilian slavery and abolition came from Emília Viotti da Costa. I owe a great deal to her, not least her critical engagement with the world of the elite. In my research on the monarchy’s politics over the years, I have had the great good fortune to learn from the two great masters of the subject, Roderick J. Barman and José Murilo de Carvalho. I have not always agreed with their conclusions, but I have always benefited from their support, their learning, their generosity, and their friendship. I also want to thank others whose support and interest over the years provided a sustaining encouragement more important than they may have known: George Reid Andrews, Leslie Bethell, John Coatsworth, and especially Joseph Love. Finally, I want to thank those colleagues who, over many years, gave me a chance to discuss aspects of this study at conferences or workshops that they organized: Severino J. Albuquerque, David W. Blight, Dain Borges, Eric Duke, Marcela Echeverri Munoz, Zephyr Frank, Scott A. Ickes, Kenneth David Jackson, Herbert S. Klein, Gabriel Paquette, Eduardo Posada Carbó, Edward Rugemer, Stuart Schwarz, and William Summerhill.

Note on Names, Spelling, and Translation

In common Brazilian usage, at the time and in print today, a person is generally referred to by one or two of his or her names, rather than the several given at birth, and those with noble titles are often referred to by those titles alone. Except for persons of greater importance to this study, that practice is followed here. Thus, the viscount de Jequitinhonha, who is referred to here in passing, goes by that name alone, rather than Francisco Gê Acaiaba de Montesuma, viscount de Jequitinhonha, while Paulino José Soares de Sousa, viscount de Uruguai, more critical to the book, is given all of his names when first mentioned but then subsequently referred to as the viscount do Uruguai or simply Uruguai. João Alfredo Corréia de Oliveira, also critical here, will be referred to, after first mention, as João Alfredo, as he was known then and afterward. For the names that are critical here, the book’s index will cross-reference between the names used and the full names where needed. For example, “Uruguai” will refer the reader to “Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, viscount do Uruguai,” and “Alfredo, João” will refer the reader to “Oliveira, João Alfredo Corréia de.” The spelling of Portuguese in Brazil has changed several times over the last two centuries. Here, works and names cited in the sources follow the original spelling; current spelling is followed in the text. All published works cited in the notes and Sources Cited will refer to authors by the last of the author’s names as they are given in the original work. Names on the maps follow the spelling of the era. Except where explicitly stated, all translations from the original Portuguese are the author’s.

M ap 1. The City of Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1830. Source: Adapted from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

Map 2. Inset of the City of Rio de Janeiro showing particular sites and streets, ca. 1830. Source: Adapted from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

Map 3. Brazil, ca. 1850. Sketch by Dumas-Forzel and engraving by Barthelemier. Source: Prepared for publication from the original in the author’s collection, in collaboration with the Graphics Department of Renaissance Printing, Gainesville, Florida.

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The Sacred Cause

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introduction

Another Political World

Brazil was the most important market of the African slave trade for over three hundred years; indeed, the trade from Africa to Brazil only ended in about 1850. From Brazil’s beginnings until deep into the nineteenth century, slaveholding itself was commonplace, considered inevitable and necessary; not only whites but people of color and freedmen held slaves, and slaves performed every sort of labor, from independent, urban artisanal work to the field work critical to the country’s economy. Yet, while the abolition of slavery itself was delayed and hard fought, it was finally achieved (1888) within the political process. Moreover, it was won by the Abolitionist movement without a civil war or enduring regional antagonism.1 Given the fact that the state was dominated by slaveholders, as were the established parliamentary parties, how could this occur? How could the Abolitionist movement achieve the peaceful end of a form of labor traditionally so protected and perceived for generations to be both indispensable and entirely legitimate? This is a fundamentally political problem. Yet, while the Abolitionist movement has been taken up in memoirs, participant histories, revisionist analyses, and, lately, subaltern and cultural studies, its essentially political nature— assumed by contemporaries but neglected more recently—has been poorly understood. None of the three established monographs, published in 1966, 1971, and 1972,2 satisfactorily integrates the movement with the formal elite political regime of the era. They address that regime, to be sure, but they do not understand how it really worked; worse, they often tend to view it as a secondary phenomenon. Indeed, focusing upon the oppressed, upon the movement itself, and often shaped by essentially materialist interpretation, abolitionist scholarship then and over the last fifty years has failed to demonstrate precisely the articulation among Afro-Brazilians, the movement, and the parliamentary government of Brazil’s monarchy (1822–1889). Since the 1970s, work on

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Another Political World

Brazilian abolitionism derives in many ways from the historiographical trend associated with “subaltern” agency, itself associated with the larger trend of the late 1970s that emphasized social history, the agency of the masses, and de-emphasized political history and the role of middle-class or elite activists. In the study of Brazilian abolitionism, this has meant that the movement was either taken as a “given” and ignored, or simply dismissed entirely, as though irrelevant to how and why slavery was ended. Nonetheless, by moving away from the national movement, there were very useful advances in studying abolitionism. Various aspects of the era and even the movement were recovered, such as local movements, juridical contestation, gender, and of course, always basic to these, the impact of the Afro-Brazilian masses, enslaved or free, themselves: Afro-Brazilian resistance in one particular region or town, the lived experience of the Afro-Brazilian masses in one particular town or region, the variation of the movement in one particular province or city, and so on. Among the works by Anglophones or works translated into English are those by Warren Dean, Cleveland Donald Jr., Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Roger A. Kittleson, Dale Torston Graden, Camillia Cowling, and Celso Castilho. The very influential works along these lines by Machado, Hebe Mattos, Sidney Chalhoub, and Carlos Eugênio Libano Soares remain untranslated, as do the related works, emphasizing Afro-Brazilian agency and the law in urban settings, by such authors as Joseli Maria Nunes Mendonça, Eduardo Spiller Pena, Beatriz Mamigonian, and Keila Grinberg. Almost all of this work emphasizes either Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo (Castilho treats Pernambuco; Kittleson, Rio Grande do Sul). There is also what might be called the Bahian school, scholars associated with João José Reis (e.g., Walter Fraga Filho and Wlamyra R. de Albuquerque), much of whose work also remains untranslated and all of which falls within this larger historiographical trend, albeit with a focus on Salvador, Bahia’s capital.3 In the end, the national movement’s political history, centered in Rio, has either been left as it was understood in the early 1970s or effectively marginalized by historians. Even recently, only one scholar, the sociologist Angela Alonso, has even attempted to address it, in her 2015 study of the movement at the national level.4 This general lack of work on the political history of the national movement is a significant lacuna in the historiography, not least because of Brazilian and Anglophone readers’ enduring interest in race relations, in slavery, and in the impact of political organization and political action upon both. Since the late 1970s, I have undertaken historical research on nineteenthand early twentieth-century Rio’s urban culture, society, and popular resistance; Brazilian political and social thought (in which issues of race, slavery, and their historical legacy were inevitably central); and the Brazilian monarchy’s

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formal political structure and history. Most recently, I published The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831–1871 (2006), which traces the origins, development, and decline of the parliamentary monarchy. In my concluding remarks, written in 2003, I commented that the nature of the monarchy’s politics after 1878 were distinct from those that went before—another political era, another political world—and that they would require another political history. This is that history; I began its research in 2004. This book concerns nineteenth-century popular political mobilization at the monarchy’s end, focusing on the Abolitionist movement in Rio, its origins and its victory in parliament, and the role of Afro-Brazilian political agency in that struggle (1879–1888). I have written a book that I hope will be useful to scholars interested in abolitionism, slavery, and urban movements in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. I have worked hard to make sure that it will also serve those scholars, students, and laypeople who, although ignorant of Brazilian history, are interested in topics of perennial, general concern: race, slavery, and race relations. The first chapter briefly lays out the history and formation of Rio; explores the nature, impacts, and evolution of Afro-Brazilian slavery there; and summarizes critical aspects of the political regime and its evolution for readers unfamiliar with The Party of Order. In each subsequent chapter, working through the history of the movement chronologically, I provide a detailed analysis of the fundamental interactions between the Abolitionist movement, its Afro-Brazilian following, and the evolving political response of the parliamentary regime dominated by the monarch and the elite. Many aspects of the way in which the mobilization of the urban masses was actually effected, as well as the role of race in that mobilization, are here made clear, as are the key aspects of the parliamentary regime’s and movement’s interactive evolution. Many of the sources for this analysis have, with some exceptions, been drawn upon by other historians. What distinguishes my research from theirs is a greater immersion in them, particularly with regard to how parliamentary and movement politics were interwoven and shaped each other’s interaction. The primary sources comprise archived private correspondence, archived and published diaries and memoirs, and, especially, contemporary newspaper accounts. All of these are critical in terms of documenting the phasing and the nature of street mobilization and comprehending the perspective of contemporaries. While accounts of the illiterate mass’s perception of the movement are difficult to gauge directly, the sources I have used are critical to establishing both the successful appeal of the Abolitionist leaders and the political responses of their followers. The correspondence and other personal records provide us with the private perceptions of the Abolitionists, their observers, and their opposition; the dailies give us the narrative of the public events and, in the Abolitionist press, the propaganda that comprised a key

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part of that mobilization. Combined, the archived and published private accounts and the periodicals provide or corroborate the significant events, dating conflicts, indicating key individuals and their roles, and providing the language used in the critical parliamentary debates or meetings. For the articulation with parliamentary politics, I have also studied the most formidable periodical of the time, the Jornal do Commercio, the journal of record. Analysis of this newspaper charts the course of Abolitionism’s progress, high and low, from the debates in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate to reports on the street movement and, most especially, how the two affected each other. A great emphasis of this study is precisely on the impact of popular mass mobilization on parliament. Not all of the research I initially planned worked out, which necessarily limited what I can say about popular mass motivations and perceptions. Most important, although colleagues have explored quotidian Afro-Brazilian resistance in Rio by pursuing archival records of police repression there, my 2007, 2009, and 2011 research in internal police and ministerial reports indicates that similar evidence does not exist for the Abolitionists or their movement. Such reports were apparently made verbally or informally, or were purged. Thus, for the government’s repression and its perception of the movement, just as for the perceptions and intentions of all of the actors concerned, research in the press and archived correspondence became especially crucial. Work in the published material and the archived correspondence was the focus of my archival work in Brazil and my analysis at home until May 2012. After that date, I focused on the dailies steadily, finding and filing data. It is work that requires a great deal of patience and thorough preparation in rare primary published sources, command of the secondary literature, and an understanding of parliamentary history. The secondary literature on Brazilian slavery and abolition poses yet another challenge. It is very much a mixed bag, involving successful archival work, surprising lacunae, and a great deal of politicized analysis. I worked through the classics and much of the more recent work until 2009, and to master what has been done since then, in the summer of 2016. The work on the recent literature has been interesting and useful. While it adds to my knowledge of details and aspects of the past, it continues to confirm my sense that the interactive approach I am using, with its emphasis on a chronological narrative and analysis of the interweave between parliament, the movement, and public mobilization will provide a needed, unique contribution. In my first two books, I relegated a great deal of the scholarly discussion to the notes, and in this book, I do the same. I have made a conscious decision to limit the notes to evidence and only the essential references to the critical debates or differences in analysis. I have already discussed much

Another Political World

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of the historiography and debates in previous, preliminary work and will take up anything I think requires further such discussion in future articles.5 The completed book’s organization can be suggested in broad strokes. Chapter 1, as noted, sets up the context in terms of the nature and development of Rio’s slavery and Afro-Brazilian urban history in the nineteenth century, up to 1871. It discusses critical aspects of the demographic shifts in Brazil over time, between regions and between the urban and rural sectors, and their impact on Abolitionism. It also lays out the nature and history of the formal political structure and the history of key abolitionist legislation up through 1871. It synthesizes some thirty years or more of published work (mine and others’) on the city’s society, history, popular culture, and politics. Chapter 2 begins the history of the movement with the aftermath of the Law of the Free Womb of 1871, the origins of the Abolitionist movement in parliament, its first public successes, its Afro-Brazilian components and appeal, and its initial defeat with the election of 1881. Chapter 3 discusses how the Abolitionist movement survived and gained strength over 1882–1883, particularly as a popular movement. It demonstrates how the movement radicalized in fundamental ways, both in its goals and in its strength in the streets, and moved forward from acts of emancipation largely affecting urban slaves and slaves in provinces where there were relatively few, to an explicit call for immediate and unconditional abolition, not just in the urban sector or provinces in economic decline but everywhere and all at once—a frontal attack on the nation’s export plantation establishment. Chapter 4 details the pivotal Dantas administration’s rise and fall, explaining the monarch’s decision to contain the movement by a new reform, the parliamentary and electoral complexities of the administration’s fate, the critical role of Afro-Brazilian mobilization in that fate, and the triumph of the reaction against this administration, culminating in the 1885 Sexagenarian Law and the return of the Conservatives to power under the baron de Cotegipe. Chapter 5 (1885–1887) explains how the movement—in parliament, in the press, and in the popular movement in the streets—responded. It details the increased, successful mobilization, confrontation, and radical success both in Rio and in organizing individual and mass slave flight in the rural sector, particularly the economic frontier, thus slowly undermining the Cotegipe cabinet, dividing the Conservative Party, and compelling the monarch’s intervention to end slavery so as to contain further political and socioeconomic destabilization. Chapter 6 focuses on the legislative end of slavery itself. It provides a new, detailed analysis of how the Abolitionist movement allied with the new reformist Conservative cabinet of João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira to put a rapid end to legal slavery on 13 May 1888. Chapter 7, the final chapter, goes over the political issues arising from the Abolitionist triumph, from the constitutional issues raised by the cabinet’s role and in

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the debates to the collapse of the monarchy itself. It also discusses the questions that naturally arise from the law and the coup that followed, including the failure of the Abolitionists to effect further reform and the failure of the movement or its followers to address the enduring issue of racism, despite the success of a movement explicitly rooted in a recognition of the AfroBrazilian’s historical role and the ideas of racial identity and solidarity. It concludes with a discussion of the principal leaders’ passing and how they and their roles have been recognized, remembered, and forgotten. There are certain matters that this book does not address. While it necessarily details the impact of the new Rio movement on certain key provinces and their impact on the Rio movement, this study does not focus on the history of the movement in the provinces. Viotti da Costa pioneered that history, Toplin and especially Conrad did fine analyses of it, and Alonso has now grappled with it again. In sum, the book is focused on the Abolitionist movement and the imperial government in Rio. Indeed, this is one of its contributions. There are good reasons for this focus. Rio was the seat of the imperial government in a highly centralized political regime in which parliamentary struggle and the rise and fall of cabinets were critical to events at the local level throughout the nation. Moreover, as will be explained, the movement began with speeches in the parliament there, the movement was supported in the press and public meetings there, and when national elections undercut Abolitionism in parliament, the movement was sustained by a rising, popular mobilization in Rio’s central parishes and streets. The new strength of the movement gathered in Rio (and from the rising response in certain provinces) was what compelled the monarch and the two elite parties to attempt its containment, then its quashing, and when that failed, its final containment. If one of the contributions of this book is thus a careful reconstruction of the movement’s evolution in Rio, another is a formal parliamentary history. For the most part, the latter has only been referred to by historians of Abolitionism who knew enough to note it and its debates. Here, I have attempted something distinct from that: to grasp the nature of the regime and its statesmen over time, strengthened by the years of research and writing that culminated in The Party of Order. That is, from a careful study of archived correspondence, contemporaries’ memoirs, and the dailies of four decades, I came to an understanding of how the political regime took shape, how it worked, the nature of its parties, the role of the monarch, and the significance of ideology and individual statesmen as the regime matured. It is this that I have tried to bring into play in understanding how the regime interacted with this new movement, so unprecedented in so many aspects, and how both the movement and the formal political regime shaped each other in the ensuing struggle.

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Many readers, used to studying the issues of Abolition in terms of radical urban middle-class organization, social history, history from the bottom up, and subaltern agency, will here be provided for the first time with the opportunity to understand the nature of the monarchy’s formal, elite political regime. As an indispensable part of that, they will come to understand the role of particular statesmen (including the monarch), the contingency of such statesmen’s interventions, the role of party loyalty, division, and ambition, and the critical relationship of the rise and fall of cabinets to the successes and failures of the Abolitionist movement. Nowadays, the understanding of these matters might not seem to many colleagues an obvious necessity. While contemporaries understood the critical role of the parliamentary regime to the movement’s history, the understanding of and critical engagement with that regime’s history has drifted away over the generations. Among professional historians, in particular, the taste for it has largely disappeared. It would be foolish, however, to try to understand the political history of the Abolitionist movement without mastering the critical aspects and details of the history of the parliamentary regime; it would be comparable to trying to understand the success of the United States civil rights movement without reference to the federal and state governments, the Democratic Party, or the role of the presidents. The Abolitionist veterans and their contemporaries understood the significance of parliament and the monarch; indeed, as I shall show, they addressed both in their tactics and their strategy. We must grapple with them as well. If contemporaries took these matters into account, the question might arise, then, as to why a new book is required, given the presence of the classic histories and memoirs on our bookshelves. Aside from the increasing rarity of these works and their continuing to remain untranslated and unread, there are other points to raise. What is brought to bear here, which cannot be found in the best of the works of contemporaries—particularly Evaristo de Moraes’s analyses6—is access to critical correspondence and diaries, the advantage of drawing upon the achievements of generations of scholars (particularly, a new understanding of the Afro-Brazilian past and of Brazilian racism and racial identity), and a more dispassionate analysis. What both Moraes and I attempt, however, is similar. It is to show how the actions and reactions between the parliamentary regime and the movement were critical to how and when the abolition of slavery took place in Brazil. One cannot understand the movement’s history as something apart from the elite political world that it challenged and changed—and that challenged and changed it in turn. Finally, as alluded to more than once above, this study attempts to tackle an issue that is intriguing to those of us familiar with the history of race, race relations, and racial identity in Brazil. It places the issues of racial identity

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and racial solidarity where they belong in the Abolitionist movement’s history—at the center and at the beginning. The best work on the Abolitionist struggle has always argued that the movement was an urban, middle-class, white movement (albeit one with a few significant Afro-Brazilian leaders), and one that only gathered the support of the Afro-Brazilian masses over time. What I seek to demonstrate here is that this understanding of the movement is mistaken. It is based on a misreading of contemporaries’ statements, on the one hand, and the failure to analyze certain critical documents and the dailies’ language, on the other. A more careful reading and analysis of this evidence transforms our understanding of the early movement’s membership and of the popular masses present and mobilized in the streets in the movement’s earliest years. I agree that the urban middle class was critical in the movement’s core leadership, its first meetings, and its first organizations, but I argue that the urban middle-class following of those first organizations (1880–1881) was largely Afro-Brazilian. I also agree that while numbers clearly grew dramatically over the years, especially among the urban masses, with increasing political consequence, Afro-Brazilian organizations and popular mobilization were already basic to the movement’s identity and impact as early as 1882. I have also argued that the Afro-Brazilian urban society of the imperial court before 1871 is very important to understanding both the potential and the reality of an Afro-Brazilian identity and popular culture in Rio, and I have tried to show how that that identity and that culture likely played a part in the success of Abolitionist popular mobilization. In effect, this is a study that takes a particular urban history into account, focusing on its Afro-Brazilian components, and then interweaves that with elite political history, the nature and evolution of a reformist movement (its leaders, its goals, its organizations), and the place and impact of that movement’s Afro-Brazilian following with regard to the movement and to the politics of the Brazilian monarchy. It is a complicated analysis, then, and one pursued on several different planes, over time. However, it will reward the reader with a fundamentally truer understanding of the abolition of Brazilian slavery. It will explain how the seemingly impossible was made possible—how an urban political movement ended slavery in town and country alike and did so within the formal confines of a monarchy established, dominated, and maintained by an elite of rural and urban slaveholders. It will also address what was not achieved, discuss why that monarchy fell, and suggest how that elite managed to retain its hold on state and society—albeit without monarch or slaves.

1

The Land of the Dead The Imperial Capital, 1822–1871

At first surprised by the immense crowd of slaves spread about in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, the observer, calmer, suddenly recognizes the particular character of dance and song of each of the different Negro nations that are found intermixed there. In effect, it is mostly in the squares and around the public fountains, the habitual places of assembly among these slaves, where often one of them, inspired by the memory of his motherland, breaks out in song. It is then that his compatriots, spontaneously charmed by the notes of his voice, gather around him, and, according to custom, accompany each couplet with a national chorus, or simply with a suitable cry; a sort of bizarre refrain, sung over two or three notes, and adaptable, nevertheless, to varying character. Nearly always the song, that electrifies them, is accompanied by an improvised pantomime, or varied one after the other by those of the spectators who wish to act in the middle of the circle formed around the musician. During this very clear drama, very suddenly, one sees, painted on the face of the mimes, the transport by which they are possessed. The coolest, in contrast, content themselves with maintaining the rhythm, marked by clapping their hands, twice quickly and once slowly. The instrumentalists, also improvised and always numerous, are each only equipped, it is true, but with two pieces of ceramic, or two small pieces of iron, or even a shell and a stone, or even whatever they are carrying, like a box of tin or of wood, etc. . . . But with the song’s end, the charm ceases; and everyone coolly separates, thinking of their masters’ whip and of accomplishing the task that has been interrupted by that delightful interlude. Debret, “Le nègre chanteur,” Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil

Thus, in the early 1800s, the French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret begins our study. The slave, possibly a porter (so many of whom thronged the streets and squares of Rio), puts aside his work, struck by a memory of his motherland, and begins to sing. Others join in spontaneously, drawn by a shared memory of home. Which of the African nations did they come from? Debret makes it clear elsewhere that they were not angolas or benguelas; scholars of the African trade might well then suggest a congo. Together with the other two, congos were among the three most numerous peoples among the West Central

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African majority dominating Rio’s nineteenth-century African population. Moreover, congos were a people known to be well represented among the porters in the commercial area of old streets and wharves of the cidade velha, the old city, which drew on the shipping at the port city’s eastern and northern edges on the Bay of Guanabara. Perhaps a congo porter, then, carrying tin to the Rua dos Latoeiros (street of the tinsmiths—now Rua Gonçalves Dias).1 For that street was near enough to either of the two more popular squares with public fountains: the Largo do Paço (Palace Square—now Praça XV), perhaps, or possibly the Largo do Carioca (Carioca Square), with its fountain fed by the Carioca stream, descending from the nearby hills. That square was just east of the Morro de Santo Antônio (Hill of Santo Antônio), a bit west from the commercial center surrounding the Largo do Paço—between the Morros do Castelo and de São Bento.2 The captives of the three African nations mentioned, all speaking variations of the Bantu language, had traversed the Atlantic, of course, the ocean that their traditions taught separated the land of the living from the land of the dead. The crossing was thus called kalunga, the crossing to the land of the dead.3 They had found that Brazil, however, was not death alone. The slaves made it far more than that, as Debret’s description suggests. In Brazil, they found ways to each other; in their shared experiences, they found the means to make or remake communities, and they laid the bases for shared cultures and common struggles. The task here is to understand one later, glorious moment of those struggles—the abolition of slavery. We begin, then, with Debret’s evocation, with the city itself and the slaves within it, the milieu in which the struggle and the movement for Abolition must be understood.

The City and Its Society Geography, Features, and Slavery

We have mentioned squares and fountains, the cidade velha, the Bay of Guanabara, and the Morros de São Antônio, do Castelo, and de São Bento. All speak to the land and the water, the high places and low, critical to understanding Rio. The geography of the city was like that of the province. The Province of Rio de Janeiro, too, was divided between lowlands and highlands, between the Baixada Fluminense and the Serra Acima, that is, the coastal fluminense lowlands (fluminense is an adjective or noun referring to things or people of the Province of Rio de Janeiro) and the mountain range just above them, the nearest range of the Brazilian Highlands, which run along the South Atlantic coast. The highlands divide the South Atlantic coastal lands of Brazil from the great Amazon Basin, far inland. In the city of Rio, the marshy lowland had mostly been overmastered by the nineteenth

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century, built over by the city’s streets, which had slowly prevailed by means of draining and landfill. The city’s lowlands were framed or punctuated by hills or ranges of hills.4 In the colonial eighteenth century, Rio was raised from the rank of capital of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro (as the province was then called) to that of being the capital of the new Viceroyalty of Brazil. The viceroyalty fused all of Portuguese America—the old State of Brazil and Amazonia’s State of Great Pará and Maranhão. These changes in Rio’s rank reflected the grander policies of Portugal for South America and the regional supremacy of the hinterland that Rio served. Salvador, a still older port capital (the capital of Bahia and the first capital of the former State of Brazil), continued to preside over the cane sugar exports of Brazil’s Northeast, the traditional economic mainstay of the country. However, Salvador was distant from the Río de la Plata, where Portugal and Spain fought repeatedly over their colonial borders and the river’s critical access to the interior. Rio was not only closer to this military frontier, it had clear potential for interior linkage to Portugal’s portion of the Amazon Basin, which the crown had once administered separately from the old State of Brazil. Portugal’s Amazonia had a long, contested frontier with Spain’s silver-mining area in the Andes, at San Luis de Potosí. More recently, Rio had become the commercial nexus for the contraband trade with Potosí. Indeed, since the early eighteenth century, Rio was the port for Portugal’s own mining region in South America, which stretched north and west away from Rio’s nearest hinterland, Minas Gerais, and on to Goiás and Mato Grosso. Each of these new captaincies was rich with gold—indeed, Minas had diamonds to boot. Finally, sugarcane production in the coastal tropical lowlands of the Baixada Fluminense had burgeoned since the seventeenth century. Sugar was critical to the expanding trade in people that provided West Africans, and especially West Central Africans, for the mining and planting of the southeastern region that Rio served. Rio had thus become the greatest port for the region and its African trade, as well as the city with the largest captive population in the Americas.5 Made the viceregal capital in 1763, Rio was the logical site for the royal capital in 1815, when Brazil was raised to the status of a kingdom, coequal to Portugal itself, by the Portuguese monarch. Indeed, that monarch, together with the court, had fled to Rio from Lisbon in 1807, during the French war of 1807–1814. Then, in 1821, Dom João VI was forced to return to Portugal. He appointed his son, Dom Pedro, to take his place, making him prince regent. In 1822, however, Dom Pedro broke with Portugal and declared Brazil independent, as the Empire of Brazil. Rio then became the seat of Dom Pedro I’s new monarchy. As noted earlier, Rio’s urban geography mirrors that of the province. The adjective applied to it, fluminense, from the Latin, refers to the river, rio, in

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Rio de Janeiro. The port city, after all, is on land stretching from west to east; its eastern edge is on the shore of the entry to Guanabara Bay, an entry that had first been mistaken for the mouth of a river. Higher land dominates the views in and around the city and the bay. One can see the coastal edge of the Serra Acima from the Atlantic, as one approaches the city, and the city itself, at least in the nineteenth century, was remarkably beautiful for its many hills. Indeed, the hills and nearby ranges that cut into the lowlands nearby dominated the horizon then, with their show of tropical rainforest. The city’s hills and the great bay made a dramatic contrast that never ceased to enchant the traveler. The hills marked Rio’s history and growth. Rio had begun on the lower land between two hills and was then transferred to the top of another that was then fortified, becoming known as the Morro do Castelo (Hill of the Castle) on that account. The castle was a precaution against the French, who contested the South Atlantic coast with the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. The other, larger hills came to be ornamented by churches and monasteries, and were often given the names of their saints. The commerce and most of the population sprang up in back of the eastern beaches that edged the bay. The first streets, between the hills of Castelo to the south and São Bento to the north, began at that eastern shore; then others crept into a great, flat expanse stretching deep into the west. This became the cidade velha (old city)—the first and enduring commercial center of Rio. The shore north of the cidade velha was less accessible to this flat expanse, owing to a barricade of low hills between the shore and the expanse, stretching between São Bento and the western mangrove swamp (mangal, mangue), where the bay crept in, defining a natural frontier to the city. Thus, the morros of Conceiçao, Saúde, Gamboa, Livramento, Providência, Pinto, and São Diogo all paraded parallel to the northern shore. This shore had one long beach, with only two accessible ways through the parade of morros to the cidade velha. The beach stretched between São Bento and Saúde, a long, curving, narrow beach; the two ways through to the cidade velha became the Rua da Prainha (Street of the Little Beach), between São Bento and Conceiçao, and the Rua do Valongo (Street of the Long Valley), between Conceição and Livramento. As commerce and population grew, this northern shore became the great port district of the nineteenth century, serving Rio’s overseas trade. The cidade velha, in back of the eastern shore, remained the center of commerce for both the eastern and northern port areas, and the older, eastern port served regional trade.6 By the early nineteenth century, the city was divided into six parishes (western parts of some of these would become new parishes over the years, and these western, often rural, suburban parishes would be included in the city’s administration and were used for raising the city’s food). The six

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parishes were crowned by Candelária, the heart of the cidade velha. It comprised the oldest markets, at the eastern shore near the Largo do Paço, from which street vendors bought the produce, fowl, and fish brought from the local farms and the plantation areas close to the bay. These markets lined up northward from the Largo do Paço, the old site of the viceregal (now imperial) City Palace; after 1879, the Ministry of Agriculture and Public Works was housed at this square as well. Nearby, just south of the square, stood the Chamber of Deputies, fronting on the Rua da Misericórdia (Mercy Street), right before it extended into the Rua Direita (Straight Street). East and west from the Rua Direita, the main commercial boulevard running north-south between São Bento and the Largo do Paço, was the warren of commercial and professional offices where the city and the region’s business was done. Rua Direita and the old streets crisscrossing east-west and northsouth reached westward to the Rua Uruguaiana. “Uruguaiana” referred to the site of a military victory in the Paraguayan war (1865–1870). Before, the street had been the Rua da Vala, after the vala, ditch, which defended the western border of the colonial city.7 These narrow streets all thronged with Africans and Afro-Brazilians, most of them captives or freed men and women. They were carrying better-off free people in ornate sedan chairs or portering their burdens, singly or in crews; making and serving food to others of the poor in the squares or at the edge of the wider streets; selling their artisanry or searching for work. They spoke the various tongues of West and West Central Africa up through the 1860s or so (the slave trade with Africa ended in 1850), and often the women wore African dress. The men generally wore cast-off clothing from their masters. The narrow streets, however adorned with occasional corner shrines or echoing with the church bells marking the time of day, were dark, noisy, and deeply muddy during the estação de aguas (the season of waters). This season, roughly from October through April, made the provincial roads from the highlands to the coastal lowlands difficult to traverse, with heavy rains and flooding rivers. The air became ever hotter, thick with water, and steeped in the scents of tropical forest. In Rio, that same air became heavy with the smells of produce and people and cooking and coffee. The slaves generally made their way through the mud or on the paving unshod. After 1850, with the modern introduction of yellow fever, the season was unusually pestilent, adding this fatal disease to the port’s infamous, established fevers and contagious maladies.8 The parish of São José, the oldest part of the city, was dominated by Morro do Castelo and some of the oldest beach ports of the eastern shore. There was a flatter, marshy area between Castelo and the Morro de Santo Antônio, stretching west and south; an area of churches, small farms, and a landscaped public park—the Passéio Público. Two ministries were also

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housed in São José—the Ministry of Empire (domestic affairs ministry) was on the Rua da Guarda Velha, which led north from the park to the Largo do Carioca at the foot of Santo Antônio; and the Ministry of Justice, which was on the Rua do Passéio, that bordered the park east-west on its northern edge. At that time, the park’s southern edge was on the city’s southern shore. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was also once on the Rua do Passéio, but after 1859 it was housed for many years on the Campo de Santana. This was the great field that had once lain west of the colonial city’s frontier; by the mid-nineteenth century, however, and now officially called the Campo de Aclamação (it was the site where Pedro I was first acclaimed by the masses), it was well integrated into the urbanized flatland stretching west from the cidade velha, noted above. The parish of Sacramento was part of that expanse, stretching directly west of Candelária, mixing commerce, better residential areas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and numerous squares, churches, and theaters. The Rua do Sacramento, running north-south away from the Praça da Constituiçao (now Praça Tiradentes), was the site of the Ministry of Finance by 1879. To the north of this parish and that of Candelária lay the parish of Santa Rita. It included both the Morro de São Bento and the Morro da Conceiçao, the beginnings of the northern port area, and both the late eighteenth-century site of the African slave market on the Rua do Valongo and the center of the early nineteenth-century commerce in coffee at São Bento’s southern foot, on the frontier with the parish of Candelária. As in Candelária and Sacramento, artisanal and manufacturing establishments were plentiful. Two more recent urban parishes were Glória and Santana. Glória, over the course of the nineteenth century, would serve as the first of a series of residential areas associated with the elite, stretching south of São José and the cidade velha, and providing larger lots for villas and mansions, cooled by the breezes from the bay. The Rua da Glória, curving along the bay’s shore toward the Morro da Glória (named after its small but precious towered church, beloved of the imperial family) was also the site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by 1879. The parish of Santana straddled the western remainder of the hilly northern port area and the flat area of the western expanse south of it. It included the Campo de Santana, noted above, which by the mid-nineteenth century was edged by elite residences and government buildings. Santana also stretched into the land-filled (aterrado) area (covering and canalling the Mangal do São Diogo) called the cidade nova (new city) that led west to the suburban parish of São Cristóvão, where the residential palace of the monarchy was sited, and southwest to the suburban parish of Engenho Velho, which was largely given over to villas and farms.

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In nineteenth-century Rio, given the lack of good data on race before 1872, it is difficult to assume that any one urban region comprised a black city, in the sense of an urban area mostly made up of African slaves, freedmen, or people Brazilians perceived as their enslaved or free descendants. Rather, African slaves and people (free and enslaved) taken to be their descendants worked everywhere. Even in the elite residential parish of Glória, there was a strong slave presence (after all, half of the slave population of the city worked as domestic servants). More to the point, even in the cidade velha, where slaves, freedmen, and people taken to be descendants of the latter did their work in their masters’ homes and workplaces (or where some slaves worked independently as negros de ganho—wage-earning slaves), the population was always a mix, made up of Afro-Brazilians, native-born Brazilians taken for white, and the immigrant poor (largely Portuguese). The slaves, freedmen, creoles (taken here to mean people who were of entirely African descent but born in Brazil), and people assumed to be their descendants worked and lived in the same areas (and occupations), side by side with those native Brazilians taken for white and with European immigrants. The expression “pequena África” (little Africa), referring to the part of Rio most traditionally associated with Afro-Brazilians, for example, can be misunderstood. The phrase was used from the early twentieth century on to refer to a late nineteenth-century part of the city. North-south, it took up the hills and flat expanse just south of the northern port area, and eastwest, the flat expanse from the cidade velha to the Mangue area, the cidade nova, occupying, in turn, parts of Candelária, Santa Rita, Sacramento, and Santana. While this area was associated with traditional Afro-Brazilian work, residence, and culture, we cannot assume it was an area demographically dominated by Afro-Brazilians; at least by the late nineteenth century, the statistics demonstrate that Afro-Brazilians were a minority there. Demography aside, however, its centrality to Afro-Brazilian Rio is a commonplace. Pequena África was the area traditionally central to Afro-Brazilians’ historic presence and culture.9 Race and Slavery before 1850

As just suggested, throughout this study the issues of race, status, ethnicity, and self-identity and solidarity will all be significant, and they are all complicated. Nowadays, assumptions about these matters, within or outside of Brazil, often differ from assumptions in nineteenth-century Brazil. Therefore, certain understandings should be made clear. The very concepts of racial solidarity or racial identity must be reexamined. In nineteenth-century Portuguese and English, “race” could mean

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anything from an ethnicity to a biologically defined group. In the discussions to follow, we shall use “race” to mean only the biologically defined group. It is important to realize that after more than three centuries of race mixture and social mobility in Brazil, “Afro-Brazilians” (a modern term) will refer here to Brazilians of completely or partially African descent and perceived as such by Brazilians at the time. Among such Brazilians, one’s race and one’s social status, at least in public, were conflated and defined by social usage. Regardless of somatic features, a free person’s social identity was also defined by family connections, deportment and dress, education, and wealth. Among Afro-Brazilians, legal status (that is, enslaved, freed, or born free) was most critical. Apparently racial terms were actually social-status terms: negro (black) was generally taken to mean “slave,” while crioulo (creole) implied a higher social status than that associated with someone known to be born African, because creoles knew Portuguese and Brazilian ways and thus were “civilized.” Mulato, or pardo (mulatto, or colored), could mean a free person who looked like an African; it did not necessarily mean a person of mixed European-African origin. The phrase pretos e pardos (blacks and colored) was often used in describing the urban Afro-Brazilian popular masses. Any personal reference in public to a particular higher-status free person’s visibly African descent, however, was considered insulting, because it indicated barbarous, slave descent; for this reason, there are nineteenth-century public figures whose racial origins a scholar cannot ascertain without knowledge of the family, a photograph, a caricature, or a private reference in correspondence. In public, social usage and etiquette demanded that members of the elite and the middle class be treated as white, regardless of their racial phenotype. Among all Afro-Brazilians, then, racial identity as such could hardly be assumed on the basis of biology alone. A slave might be of mixed African and white descent; a person who appeared entirely African might be a slave or free or a member of the middle class; a mulatto might be a slave, a freedman, a professional, or a member of the elite. Indeed, scholars of slavery have pointed out how any notion of a common self-identity or solidarity among slaves was undercut by birthplace, somatic appearance, one’s work, one’s particular African ethnicity, and one’s chances for manumission.10 A further impediment to a common identity or sense of community among slaves in particular was due to nação (nation), a term that also needs explanation. Rio’s African population was made up of people who self-identified with one of many nations—distinct peoples or ethnicities from various parts of Africa. Let us take minas, a people from West Africa, first. While these had constituted a significant portion of the slaves and free Afro-Brazilians in eighteenth-century Rio, they were by far the minority in the nineteenth century, and most of those in Rio had come there by way

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of Salvador. Mostly they came in two distinct eras—post-1835, when they were sold south in response to an urban slave revolt that year in which they were the critical actors, and in the 1870s, when they were sold or immigrated to Rio in the aftermath of the great drought of those years. Such people were generally known as minas in reference to the most important slave port of West Africa for the trade to Brazil, namely, El Mina (now Elmina, in present-day Ghana).11 This raises one of the most problematic and significant points about nação: it began as a slavers’ fiction and became an ethnic identity. Minas, for example, could be captives taken from any number of different peoples of El Mina’s hinterland from which the African intermediaries at the slave port bought. They might have been enemies within the region, taken prisoner in the wars that flourished there (partly in order to acquire captives for trade), and then sold together. Given their proximity in Africa, they might speak similar languages and share other customs, religious beliefs or practices, or forms of social organization, but they were not a single people. In Rio, however, these common attributes, combined with the common horror of the Middle Passage and years’ shared experience of captivity in Brazil, all worked together to form a new, common set of bonds and an identity that could and did evolve over time, surviving over generations and the status line of manumission. This was true as well as for angolas, benguelas, cabindas, congos, and mozambiques. Thus, whether one referred to a mina, an angola, a benguela, a cabinda, a congo, or a mozambique, one was referring to an African to whose self-identity had been added the identity imposed by slavers and slaveholders, an identity that the slaves themselves took and refashioned as a new ethnic group in Brazil, blending their African commonalities and informed by the experiences of the African slave trade and Brazilian captivity. These new ethnic identities could and did divide the Africans in Rio and their descendants, but as we shall see, not necessarily or in every case, and when they did, not always permanently.12 Another significant aspect of the Afro-Brazilian experience in Rio, particularly before 1850 (the end of the Atlantic slave trade), was the potential for manumission. Manumission was a general, traditional practice in Brazil, particularly in towns, and was often practiced by slaveholders in the nineteenth century to mark and celebrate an important family occasion, to strengthen slaves’ loyalty and work ethic, or, by a dying slaveholder, to express affection or gratitude for work. Urban slaveholders were far more likely to reward loyalty or service (or acknowledge a sexual bond or illegitimate child) by freeing their slaves in the era before 1850 because slaves’ prices were relatively low then and their replacement relatively cheap and easy. After 1850, manumission might still be used to ensure the slaveholder’s authority through the possibility of reward.

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Far more interesting, self-purchase among urban slaves who worked independently as negros de ganho, however difficult, had been a clear possibility before 1850 and the hope of it a critical part of the moral economy of urban skilled labor. A slaveholder with artisanal skills (often an immigrant or a freedman) could teach a captive those skills and establish an understanding with the slave regarding the slave’s self-purchase price, the amount of the slave’s earnings he or she could keep toward paying that price (usually everything short of the earnings regularly turned over to the slaveholder during captivity), and then send the slave out onto the street (often with the responsibility for his or her own food and board). Manumission would always take years, but it could be achieved. It was more common among street vendors and porters, for example. Indeed, the porters, often organized into teams by nação, chanting to keep rhythm as they jogged through the crowded streets, worked together to fund manumission according to seniority, as their labor was literally crippling after more than ten years or so. Urban slaves, whether because of the potential for intimacies as domestic labor or for amassed earnings in wage-earning street labor, had a real hope of freedom in these ways and, with it, relatively significant social mobility. As freed persons, they could continue to ply their skills to purchase loved ones (or other captives for labor), they could own property, and they could vote. They often formed patron-client relations with their former masters (by the provisions of their manumission paperwork or by the logic and tradition of patronage that bound so many Brazilians together vertically in this very hierarchical society). In whatever form their freedom came and evolved, it was a tangible change in status that significantly improved a person’s opportunities, self-perception, and social status.13 Finally, while one must remember that domestic slaves were often restricted to their masters’ residences and other skilled slaves to their workplaces, certain slaves (as well as all freedmen and their descendants) had a freedom of movement in the city far greater than that of rural slaves. Most negros de ganho and certain domestic slaves (laundresses and water and food suppliers, for example) were free to move about in the city unsupervised as they did their work. They could meet with family members or members of the same nação, attend religious festivities or celebrations in the street or a chapel, or gather in the squares and the Campo de Santana. All of this was critical to making and maintaining larger relationships and communities, learning about issues of common concern, and creating and maintaining vibrant, evolving identities. Moreover, it meant that both Africans and AfroBrazilians could meet, mingle, and make and maintain relationships with each other and with the working poor perceived as white. Travelers’ accounts and the scholarly literature alike make it clear that they did so; slavery in Rio was complicated and rich with possibilities.14

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The Atlantic Slave Trade, Its End, and Rio after 1850

The law ending the slave trade with Africa constituted a watershed in Brazilian slave society. It superseded another, associated with international agreements made with the United Kingdom in the 1820s, that allegedly ended the trade in 1831. The difference was that the 1850 law, within a very few years (1856), was effectively enforced.15 Over the centuries, the Atlantic slave trade involved the sale of more than ten million people in the Americas. This figure does not include the deaths of captives during the Atlantic voyage or the deaths suffered en route from the original African site of capture or sale to the coast, and it omits the deaths in the coastal barracoons while awaiting purchase. Nor does this figure take into account the destruction, destabilization, and deformation of the African polities involved or the militarization among those African polities driven into the slave trade, generation after generation. Nor can any of this convey the repeated traumas to each individual—torn from family and friends and land and culture, repeatedly abused, witness to the deaths and torture of fellow captives in Africa, on the ships, and in the first year of slave labor, when so many died. We shall confine ourselves, however, to the American diaspora of those who survived the Middle Passage. More than a third of the roughly ten million who survived the Atlantic were bought in Brazil. Of these, about two million were purchased after 1800, and about 745,097 of these were purchased illegally, after treaties with the English were supposed to have ended the Atlantic trade in 1831. Of these contraband captives, 579,591 were sold into the southeastern region behind Rio, in the great port capital’s economic hinterland, mostly in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and especially Minas Gerais.16 The reason for the preponderance of southeastern sales has to do with the relative regional export trends. It is true that the Northeast, traditional source of Brazilian cane sugar exports, had recently been strengthened in the North Atlantic market by the destruction of sugar production in Saint Domingue, a result of the Haitian Revolution (1790–1804). The latter had opened the market to Caribbean competitors and Brazil, if only for a while. Cuba, however, had become the premier source for cane sugar by the 1840s. Brazilian sugar (and two other northeastern strengths, cotton and tobacco) went into general decline by midcentury, albeit with occasional rises afterward. Even before then, the region’s slaveholders’ relative need and purchasing power had declined simply because of the southeastern region’s dramatic success with sugar and then, especially, with coffee. The Province of Rio de Janeiro’s market burgeoned over the early and mid-nineteenth century, as did that of Minas Gerais. Minas, which had purchased people in great quantity in the

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eighteenth century for the mining of gold and diamonds, continued to buy them in great numbers in the nineteenth century, in order to maintain its production of food for domestic consumption in the expanding fluminense coffee-plantation areas and, again, in southern Minas and eastern São Paulo, when coffee took off there.17 Indeed, coffee was the most significant driver of the slave trade in Brazil after the 1820s. Initially grown for export in Rio itself and then in the Baixada Fluminense, coffee began its triumphal march into the highland valley of the Paraíba River in the late eighteenth century. Coffee spread along the river’s highland course, from eastern São Paulo, along the border with southern Minas, before it flows down from the Serra Acima to water the tropical lowland sugar lands around Campos, near the coast, where it finally empties into the Atlantic. It was the success of this highland, slavegrown coffee that established Brazil as the leading producer for the expanding United States market by the 1830s, the decade when coffee became the single most significant Brazilian export by volume and value. Brazil was the world’s leading producer overall by midcentury, and by century’s end Brazil alone produced more than half of the world’s supply.18 Brazil’s success was due to its ability to produce low-end coffee more cheaply than any other country. It had lots of suitable land, cheap slave labor, and after the advent of railroads began making a difference (by the 1860s), cheap and efficient transport deeper into the hinterland’s highlands. Up until then, the Paraíba Valley and the areas close to it in southern Minas and eastern São Paulo had determined the limits of production, constrained by the difficulty of transport and the remoteness of the further hinterland; transport depended upon mules and wretched roads and bridges going up into the nearer highlands of the Serra Acima, routes often useless during the season of waters. All of this formed the complex web of wealth and power for the imperial elite and the imperial state, whose revenue derived largely from international trade. In that original site, Rio’s immediate highland hinterland, coffee production began to decline after about 1850, undercut by poor use of the land, the aging of the coffee trees, and the increasing price of slave labor.19 Coffee, as well as sugar and all other plantation exports, was generally held to be completely dependent upon African captives—such was the assumption of the Brazilian elite. This had driven the contraband trade in people after an initial drop in the immediate aftermath of the 1831 law. Indeed, as already noted, of the 745,097 captives bought illegally in Brazil after 1831, 579,591 were bought in the southeastern region; of these, about 300,000 were sold after 1841 alone, sales doubtless driven by an expanding coffee frontier and by increasing fear of British intervention as well.20

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British foreign policy in Latin America generally involved very significant commercial interests: Britain was the dominant foreign economic power in most of the region until 1914. In the nineteenth century, the British also pursued an antislavery policy (following the ban on its own Atlantic slave trade in 1807 and then the abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies in the 1830s). Its abolitionist policies involved a degree of intervention both in Spanish affairs in Cuba and in Brazilian affairs, peaking in the 1840s. In the Brazilian case, Britain’s commercial and abolitionist policies were tied together in 1844, when the British were disappointed by Brazil’s refusal to renew British commercial privileges that had been in place since the 1820s or earlier, together with Brazil’s continued refusal to do anything about its legal responsibilities regarding the Atlantic slave trade. While they could do little in regard to the commercial privileges, the British could and did begin unilateral intervention at sea against the slave trade. In the 1840s, Britain had thrust a significant naval force into a multilateral blockade of Buenos Aires, to force international access to the Río de la Plata. In 1848, once Buenos Aires had come to terms, that same force was withdrawn and shifted over to Brazilian waters. British ships began to pursue negreiros (slavers) into Brazilian territorial waters, within sight of coastal ports. It was an affront that would clearly result in armed conflict if it were not managed diplomatically and with haste. As it happened, Brazil had joined with the British and French in the 1840s blockade of Buenos Aires mentioned above. Once the European powers reached agreement with the Argentines in 1848, however, Brazil was left alone to sort out its affairs there. These were long-standing and serious, and diplomatic efforts were clearly failing; war became a certainty. The Brazilian government was thus left with a dual threat, facing an inevitable war with Argentina and a dangerous stalemate with Britain at the same time. Under the circumstances, the Brazilian cabinet of the time decided upon an adroit turnabout with Britain. Between 1848 and 1850, it acted against the slavers piecemeal and then passed enabling legislation closing them down—the Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850 (named after the minister of justice at the time). This freed Brazil to focus on war with Argentina. This brief discussion of the international crisis has been necessary to explain the end of the contraband African slave trade (1831–1850). After all, it was a trade that had been effectively pursued and sustained by the most powerful political elements of the Brazilian ruling class for a generation, derived from the perception that the trade was critical to the nation’s economy and their own fortunes. Nonetheless, Brazil engaged and complied with British diplomats and the greatest naval power on earth to remove the issue—and it did so without immediate social, economic, or political chaos.

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One should also note, to tie things together, that after pacifying the British, Brazil effectively pursued a diplomatic and military alliance with Uruguay and fractions of the Argentine provincial elite to fight and defeat the Buenos Aires government in 1852.21 The Brazilian foreign minister critical to both successes, Paulino José Soares de Sousa, later viscount do Uruguai, wrote privately to his successor, José Maria da Silva Paranhos, later viscount do Rio Branco, that the nation needed to look to European immigrant labor immediately as a solution to the inevitable labor shortage that the end of the African trade would ensure. Indeed, some effort was made in that direction, but it failed. This had everything to do with the slaveholders’ inability to manage wage labor fairly, leading to complaints and the flight of immigrants, diplomatic intervention against further experimentation, and the slaveholding elite’s reaffirmed conviction that only Africans or Afro-Brazilian slave labor, managed by the slaveholder’s absolute power and the threat and use of violence, could sustain private and public wealth.22 Basic to the issues here is an assumption that may cause the reader familiar only with United States slavery to be puzzled. Why had Brazil traditionally been forced to seek new slave labor from Africa? After all, of the nearly ten million people sold into the Americas, more than three and a half million were bought in Brazil, while fewer than four hundred thousand were sold into what became the United States. Yet, there was no problem with slave labor supply over the centuries in the latter—natural reproduction more than met the needs of the slaveholders, even with the frontier advancing into the Deep South with cotton. Why did natural reproduction not suffice for Brazil? The issue is actually a false one. Brazil was not unusual in its dependency on the Atlantic trade for its supply of slave labor; it was the United States that was unusual in the success of its slaves’ natural reproduction. Throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where most Africans were sold, the vast numbers brought over the water had everything to do with the fact that the dramatically expanding slave trade was indispensable for the plantations’ economy. The greater and greater wealth produced by what shifted from export luxuries to export staples between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries in the Atlantic world (sugar, tobacco, cacao, coffee) meant that the merchants and planters involved did not buy and maintain their captives with natural reproduction in mind. It would not have made economic sense: slaves could and did earn their own purchase price in a very short time. Thus, the vast majority of the millions purchased over the centuries were bought with the expectation that, although they would die quickly, they could produce ample profits more quickly still. There was therefore no good economic reason to buy men and women in equal numbers to promote the formation of families. Slaveholders bought far more men than women

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because they assumed men were more fit for the work. Nor did the men and women bought live long (much less young children): the work was very, very hard, particularly sugar, which was the most common initial and sustained plantation export crop throughout the region. Moreover, the work was done in a tropical lowland environment, rife with disease, and the hard work was performed by captives malnourished, traumatized by enslavement, dislocation, and violence, and required to work long hours.23 To be sure, in the generations before 1850, a moral economy had long since emerged in Brazil; slaveholders and slaves worked out customs that made plantation slavery viable. However horrifying, it had to be made to work, and it was. There were days of rest, plots of one’s own, accepted assumptions about discipline, and the possibility of family formation if the relatively fewer girls and women could manage pregnancy and childbirth. Creoles were born. Among them, enough girls survived birth and childhood, so that every creole generation had the normal gender balance. Yet for generations, despite all of that, there had not been enough survival and growth to ensure the slaves’ demographic reproduction. For slaveholders of the viscount do Uruguai’s generation, then, the end to the Atlantic trade was indeed a threat. The response varied. Recent research suggests, however, that many midcentury southeastern slaveholders might have begun to take action, if only gradually. It has been argued that, even before 1850, in response to the British threat in the 1840s, there was a slow but fundamental shift in the slaveholders’ management of the slave population. Ricardo Salles, for example, has recently demonstrated that more girls and women were bought, so that birthrates and gender balance improved. Although in Salles’s opinion the reasons for this shift in purchase patterns might have varied, one thing seems sure. During the British threat to the slave trade between 1840 and 1850, and after the actual end of that trade in the 1850s, when the cheap Atlantic supply had dried up, slaveholders’ purchase patterns and behavior effectively increased slave survival and reproduction. The post-1850 slave population underwent a clear, if very gradual, shift toward greater demographic growth through natural reproduction. Thus, although the captive population initially declined after the trade’s end, it then actually, albeit slowly, began to grow. In 1850, the estimated slave population in Brazil was around 2,500,000; in 1864, it is estimated to have fallen to 1,715,000. In 1872, however, the number of slaves suggests a less drastic rate of decline: 1,532,926; and in 1884, 1,217,659. Moreover, Salles’s argument suggests that this last figure is misleading. If one includes ingênuos (i.e., those born “free” after the “free womb” legislation of 1871, to be discussed below), the 1884 figure would be 1,621,486, a clear demonstration of the demographic growth of accessible captive labor. The ingênuo was both captive and accessible: these

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children could be kept and worked like slaves until the age of twenty-one, and generally they were so kept and worked.24 If we shift our examination from the plantation to the port, the midcentury impact was more rapid. The end of the Atlantic slave trade was one of several midcentury factors that affected Rio’s society and economy dramatically. The significantly greater wealth generated by the export expansion of the century’s middle third was accompanied by imperial commercial and infrastructural legislation designed to strengthen development radiating from and focusing upon Rio. The cabinets of 1848–1857 explicitly encouraged the first new railroads to tap into the port’s hinterland, set up a new bank and financial legislation, and granted concessions to encourage the provision of urban amenities from transportation to sewage. With the city’s growth as the administrative and economic center of Brazil, the middle and professional sectors grew, feeding the imperial bureaucracy and the new urban companies, together with the middle-class and elite consumption that sprang up. There was a new readership for periodicals and literature, and plenty of intellectual talent flowed into both. Finally, the investment capital that had profited from the contraband slave trade is generally thought to have found different foci in new manufacturing and in the stocks and bonds of the city’s new infrastructure, the new railroad companies, and the new urban amenities.25 The impact of this apparent advent of Civilization and Progress on Rio’s captives and their descendants was complicated. The end of a cheap and readily available supply of captives had a dramatic impact on Rio’s society, as it did in towns and cities throughout the nation, within a few short years. With the end of the Atlantic trade and the rural hinterland’s rising demand, the price of captives soared quickly. Most urban slaveholders could no longer afford to purchase new captives, and captives’ capacity to buy their own freedom eroded dramatically. Most urban slaves were increasingly working as domestics or farmworkers in the suburban parishes of the city. The negros de ganho shrank in number and in their percentage of the workforce. All of this caused the rate of manumission to decline drastically. For the freed and the native free poor and middle class, many (possibly most) of whom were Afro-Brazilian, the opportunity for social mobility that cheap slave labor had made possible quickly disappeared. While export expansion and increasing wealth led to the growth of and increased opportunities for the urban population, many urban slaves suffered enormously to help make that happen, specifically by being sold from the urban sector into plantation slavery, both a threat and a reality from 1850 into the 1880s. Furthermore, social mobility became much more difficult for the working poor and middle class; without cheap slave labor, their income, business prospects, and status suffered. Their declining situation

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was also affected by the financial crises that began to strike the nation every decade, with a disproportionate impact on those whose income depended upon wages or salaries, and domestic markets rather than foreign earnings. These crises, often related to financial crises in the North Atlantic world or shifts in prices for Brazilian exports, became increasingly significant after 1870, as we shall see.26 If we understand “free” and the term “white” in the broad sense that Manolo Florentino and Hebe Mattos have suggested, this means that a large majority of those facing increasingly difficult circumstances—from the working poor up through the middle class (e.g., middling property owners and professionals)—were Afro-Brazilian. If we accept instead the far more conservative assumptions of the Brazilian census in 1872 (see the figures given in the following paragraph), only about 44 percent of Rio’s Brazilian population were defined as negro or mulato. Still, how many of the 56 percent of “whites” were Afro-Brazilians whose personal social status in the middle or upper class allowed them to pass? In effect, how many of those to whom the Abolitionists appealed, the economically stressed urban poor and the middle class, were of slave descent themselves? We shall turn to this again and again below.27 Complicating both racial and class factors in post-1850 Rio was the constant and increasing flow of European (mostly Portuguese) immigration, making up an increasingly significant part of the population. As the city’s opportunities grew with the nation’s prosperity and the city’s slave population declined (from 78,855 in 1849 to 37,567 in 1872—by death, sale, or manumission), immigration increased, thereby maintaining the cheap labor pool and depressed wages. In 1849, there had been roughly 36,320 foreigners in a total free population of 116,319. In 1872, there were 69,661 immigrants in a total free population of 191,176; of that free population, 53,509 were Afro-Brazilian. The percentage of free immigrants had increased from about 31 percent of the free population at midcentury to about 36 percent by 1872. In that same year, the Afro-Brazilian free made up about 28 percent of a total (i.e., free and slave) population of 228,743, while slaves made up about 16.4 percent. Consequently, captive Africans and Afro-Brazilians, about 44.4 percent of the total 1872 population, faced a growing challenge to find wages, either in skilled or unskilled labor, that would suffice for themselves and their families. Worse, as Zephyr Frank has argued, the opportunities for social mobility increasingly favored the more educated and skilled, as well as those better connected to the elite. Well-established Afro-Brazilian families might continue to do well, using their relationships and proven skills, but they were relatively few compared to the majority of the Afro-Brazilian population, who, as Frank has demonstrated, had it rough.28

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The Prospects for Afro-Brazilian Political Mobilization The Use of Popular Political Mobilization before 1879

We shall present a more focused analysis of Brazil’s formal politics and political history later in this chapter. Here, however, in discussing Afro-Brazilian political mobilization in the era from independence (1822) past the Law of the Free Womb (1871) to the era of the Abolitionist movement (1879–1888), a few generalizations will be useful. The years from independence to 1848 were clearly unstable. Independence and the nature of the new nation’s constitutional monarchy had divided both the national and regional elites. The arenas for the debates and the occasional violence resulting from these divisions had more often been cities, particularly Rio, inevitably the theater of formal politics as the national capital. The reign of the first emperor, Dom Pedro I (1822–1831; known as the First Reign), had only deepened the crises of the first years, finally compelling the emperor to abdicate in 1831. The subsequent Regency (1831–1840) had tested the monarchy and the leading factions of the elite most severely. There were violent urban movements, rural revolts, and two major regional threats to the nation’s integrity. In response, between 1837 and 1841, a majority of the parliamentary, national-level elite shifted ideologically toward a centralized, more authoritarian monarchy in a movement aptly named O Regresso (The Reaction). In 1840, the second emperor, Dom Pedro II, was put in power before his legal majority in a bloodless coup, beginning the Second Reign, 1840–1889. By 1848, O Regresso, two crushed provincial revolts (1842 and 1848), and the emperor’s abuse of his already considerable constitutional powers had brought about a final political consolidation of the regime. From then on, until the 1880s, there were no serious threats of domestic political violence against the assumptions, usages, and political understanding established at midcentury.29 In all of this, Afro-Brazilian political mobilization had largely been confined to the elite factions’ use of elements in the urban masses, which had been a constant in all of the violence noted here. With few exceptions, however, this mobilization cannot be characterized as having been around and for explicitly Afro-Brazilian agendas. At most, popular hatred of the Portuguese (who dominated the higher reaches of the imperial state during the First Reign and dominated urban retail commerce throughout the century and beyond), the call for a more representative or decentralized regime, and popular support for the monarchy were all used by one Brazilian elite or middle-class political leader or another to pull “the people” into the streets for violence or its threat. This often led to brief destabilization and, at times, significant, dramatic political shifts (e.g., the dissolution of

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the 1823 Constituent Assembly, the 1831 abdication, several near coups between 1831 and 1834, the bloodless coup of 1840, the Praieira Revolt of 1848, and the associated street violence in Rio that year). However, none of these were Afro-Brazilian in the sense that Afro-Brazilian leaders and followers pursued or obtained political goals defined around race or racialized status. The exceptions alluded to are interesting for our purposes. The more radical urban elements in the First Reign and the Regency made an explicitly racial appeal in attempting to rally support: they defined Brazilians as people of color, as opposed to the elite, often Portuguese born or of recent immigrant Portuguese stock. It has been argued that the divisive and dangerous potential of the racial appeal led to a combination of successful, violent repression and self-censorship, but in any case, this appeal was ephemeral and, in effect, inconsequential in promoting an Afro-Brazilian identity or political agenda. The lusophobic racism of the radical elements in the Cabanagem (the Amazonian revolt of 1835–1841), in which all whites were targeted by many of the rebels (some of whom were African or Afro-Brazilian), led to a ferocious local and national repression in which a fifth of the region’s population has been alleged to have perished. The Muslim elements in Salvador’s mina population (free and slave), the so-called malês, attempted to take over the city one morning in 1835. They were not self-identified as Afro-Brazilian, however, and did not make common cause even with all captives. They were betrayed by a creole slave and quashed in a matter of hours. In 1837, a radical revolt (the Sabinada), with clear Afro-Brazilian potential, broke out, again in Salvador. It involved Afro-Brazilian soldiers and other free men, and it racialized in process, recruiting creole slaves. It too was quashed, however, and was largely rejected by mulatos. One can generalize about all of these (except for the malê revolt) that they began as attacks on the established order and attempted to exploit AfroBrazilian grievances and mass potential out of desperation. In the end, this appeal to the mass of Afro-Brazilians led only to a reaction against them and to their repression by more powerful elements. Too many in Brazilian society, no matter what their race, had a vested interest either in the status quo or at any rate in survival.30 Indeed, it is significant that the threat of AfroBrazilian political mobilization along racial lines was known as “haitianism” in Brazilian politics up through midcentury, at least. The term alluded to a political and socioeconomic fear so basic that association with it was politically toxic. Rhetorically, this began early on: the events in Saint Domingue were abused for tactical advantage in Brazil’s constitutional debates of 1823, where, in debating the rights of freedmen, those who sought to contain the liberal exuberance of others merely pointed to where “philosophic” ideas had led in the Caribbean.31

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And so, from midcentury to the 1880s, neither significant political violence nor appeals to Afro-Brazilians as such rippled the waters of formal politics. Rather, at most, the two traditional parties of the Second Reign, the Liberals and the Conservatives, used professional Afro-Brazilian street fighters, capoeiras (generally referred to as desordeiros, disorderly ones), to facilitate electoral results at the street level through the threat or use of violence. One might disparage a political enemy using his racial antecedents in private correspondence, but until the Abolitionist movement of the 1880s, race, racial identity, and racial solidarity were generally absent from public political discourse. Indeed, in the debates of 1871 over the Law of the Free Womb, the most celebrated abolitionist legal scholar of his day, Agostinho Marquês Perdigão Malheiro, censured an opponent in the Chamber of Deputies for raising the issue of possible working-class violence, arguing that it was an implicit allegation of the potential for urban popular Afro-Brazilian racially motivated violence. Perdigão Malheiro dismissed it by ridiculing the possibility of racial division in Brazil, denying its existence as foreign to common Brazilian social relations.32 Afro-Brazilian Possibilities

Were there no bases, then, for Afro-Brazilian organization before the Abolitionist struggle? The record is mixed. Slaves were forbidden to organize or join public institutions during the colonial and postindependence periods with one exception: the Catholic Church. Slaves could build churches or chapels devoted to a saint particularly beloved. They could also organize or join irmandades, Catholic lay brotherhoods, associated with their nation or status and dedicated to the worship of one particular saint or another, if the irmandade in question so permitted. The same was true for freedmen and others of African descent. Aside from such Catholic institutions, however, while free Africans and Afro-Brazilians were at liberty to do what others did, they could not do so on the basis of their racial appearance, except with regard to military units, which (during the colonial and early national period) were organized by color—as negros, mulatos, or brancos (whites). Both racial distinction and slaves were effectively excluded from political or public institutions (except for those of the church) after independence (although, as noted, the process was gradual in the military). Indeed, neither race, slavery, nor racialized status appears in the Constitution of 1824, with one exception. In defining citizenship and its rights, freedmen were explicitly defined as citizens and included among the great mass of those entitled to vote for electors (voting was indirect, as it is in the United States, and one voted for the electors who, in turn, voted for the candidates for deputy or

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senator). As such, freedmen (libertos) were defined as persons effectively superior to persons deemed dependent or under another’s control: minors, adult children living at home, domestic servants, religious, and those without a very minimal annual income. Still, libertos were tainted when it came to superior political rank. They could not serve in high office or even as electors but were excluded from such, along with others deemed unworthy because of some fundamental impediment—those with a lack of sufficient income or certain categories of criminals. In effect, freedmen were tainted by previous servitude. Race, however, was implicitly not the issue—it was their past as slaves; the children of freedmen suffered no such taint.33 Of those public institutions in which Afro-Brazilians could and did organize as Afro-Brazilians, none is more important to this analysis than the irmandade. Most of these brotherhoods, however, were not Afro-Brazilian so much as open to certain categories of slaves or free people of color. There were, for example, irmandades for particular nações, for mulatos, for creoles, and so on. In effect, they were exclusive and spoke to the very divisions separating out and dividing Africans and their Brazilian descendants.34 There was one critical exception, however. The most inclusive and certainly the most prestigious irmandade was not so limited in its membership. This was the Irmandade da Nossa Senhora do Rosário e de São Benedito (Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary and of Saint Benedict), which had built its own church on the Rua da Vala (later, the Rua do Uruguiana, as noted earlier) in the eighteenth century. Saint Benedict was a saint of African birth, held captive in Italy. The cult of the Virgin of the Rosary had been propagated among Africans in Portugal by the Dominicans and in Angola itself by the Jesuits; many captives arrived in Brazil as its devotees, and it was the most widespread brotherhood in all of Brazil. While it was exclusive to angolas in some places, it was inclusive in Rio, taking in African and creole slaves of all nações, men and women alike. Like all irmandades, that of Rosário addressed not only devotion and festivities on its saint’s feast day but the critical issues of a proper Christian burial, and like many irmandades, freedom; it set up a fund promoting members’ self-purchase.35 In effect, the Church and Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary was one Afro-Brazilian institution that suggests abolitionist potential along Afro-Brazilian lines. It welcomed all people of African birth or descent and actively supported the freedom of those members still captive. We will find that, unsurprisingly, it played an explicit, active part in the Abolitionist movement. Before moving on from the irmandade as an institution, it is worth pointing out two other links between the irmandades and the Abolitionist movement: forms of popular public mobilization and the nature of popular

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public culture. Rosário and the other irmandades emphasized forms of selfidentification and mobilization in public that may well have influenced those of the Abolitionists. Both irmandades and Abolitionists gathered at the public meeting places of those with their beliefs (a church or the headquarters of the Abolitionist press, respectively) at appointed days and times. They were led in street processions behind a standard (of their saint or of their Abolitionist organization). They proceeded to a larger public space (a church patio or a square or field; for the Abolitionists, a theater, a square or field, or the street in front of the office of an Abolitionist paper). The meeting at the larger public space involved a celebration, some cultural performance, some public harangue, or some combination of these. It would make sense for the Abolitionists, without any Brazilian public political precedents for organized, institutional, popular political mobilization, to reach out to the irmandade model as they worked out ways to mobilize the masses: after all, it was familiar to everyone.36 Another aspect of Abolitionist mobilization with possible linkage to the irmandades is related to the broader popular public religiosity of which the irmandades were a key part. Africans and Afro-Brazilians created a rich and varied popular public culture within the accepted activities of the Afro-Brazilian irmandades, churches, and chapels. Colonial authorities had permitted the processions, the dancing, the music, and the festivals associated with Sundays and saints’ days in the streets, squares, churches, and fields of Rio. Moreover, although much of this was forbidden by new legislation in the early nineteenth century and many scholars speak to its gradual decline by the 1870s, it continued to go on informally in local neighborhoods and the Campo de Santana. This seems to have been due in part to these activities’ widespread, traditional acceptance by the middle class and the elite, who not only enjoyed the spectacles but participated in some of them. This trans-class participation in popular public mass festivities and meetings may also have lent itself to certain aspects of the Abolitionist movement, particularly public fundraising in public spaces, in which Abolitionists generally mixed two aspects of popular Catholicism, charity and cultural performance.37 Finally, there are other parallels with popular public religiosity that are striking, that is, certain urban locations. The Abolitionist movement’s headquarters were in the offices of the key Abolitionist daily, first the Gazeta da Tarde and then the Cidade do Rio (on the Rua de Uruguaiana and the Rua do Ouvidor, respectively). Both had their offices close to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and to the port areas and cidade velha, where so many Africans and Afro-Brazilians worked and worshipped (not only Rosário, but a number of the oldest churches and chapels of Afro-Brazilians). While this may well have been inevitable (given the small size of the cidade velha and

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the association of labor, working-class residence, and office space there), this series of proximate linkages lent itself to the movement. At the very least, in practical terms, it facilitated street mobilization. One could walk from the Largo do Paço to the Campo de Santana in a half hour, or from São Bento to the Passéio Público in about the same time.38 Another interesting coincidence has to do with the Campo de Santana. The chapel of Saint Anne (from which the field took its name) was only one of several chapels or churches particularly sacred to Afro-Brazilians from colonial days. The chapel of Santana was associated with creoles. The Campo itself was three blocks west of the churches of São Domingos, Santa Efigênia, and Lampadosa, churches associated with creoles, minas, and congos, respectively. It is true that the Campo de Santana, as a center of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, suffered a series of blows over the nineteenth century. During the colonial era, its marginality to the elite concerns of the cidade velha had lent itself to an Afro-Brazilian identity. Afro-Brazilians had been free to worship and celebrate without close scrutiny or oversight. However, by Independence, that had changed; the Campo had become the site of the Senate and the City Council (Câmara Municipal) in the 1820s, numerous palatial residences, and by 1849, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the 1850s, Afro-Brazilian worshippers and the general Afro-Brazilian religiosity of the Campo suffered the worst affront: the chapel of Santana was destroyed, and the first railway station in Brazil, the Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II, was built on the site. The affront of this elite transformation was deepened by the English-style park that the French landscapist Auguste Glaziou created at the Campo in the 1870s. Nonetheless, the Campo could not be lost to Civilization and Progress owing to mere vulgar material change. It remained located in Rio, central to the geography of the AfroBrazilian masses of the cidade velha’s parishes and their natural extension into the cidade nova to the west. It remained a locus for popular religious and cultural gatherings. Indeed, the whole area in which it was situated marked the geographic transition from the oldest extension of the cidade velha into the Santana and Engenho Velho parishes. It was associated with the nineteenth-century urbanization of the cidade nova and the western reaches of what was later known as pequena África. Moreover, the Campo de Santana was central to much of the Afro-Brazilian religiosity studied by Martha Abreu and the cultural community discussed by Maria Cecilia Velasco e Cruz. A block or so from the Campo lay a region of cheap residential housing, artisanal activity, and, a bit further to the west, the rural parish farming frontier of Engenho Velho. In it mingled and massed a great population of Afro-Brazilians; in 1872, in terms of captives alone, about a third of the urban parishes’ remaining slave population lived there.39

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The Land of the Dead Freedom, Nações, Creolization, and the Potential for Afro-Brazilian Identity

One of the most important divisions among Afro-Brazilians in nineteenthcentury Rio was manumission. It opened the door to social mobility and the world associated with white identity. Given the right circumstances, the descendants of freedmen, as well as some free children of slaves, could rise high indeed. As indicated above, moreover, the fundamental status distinction in this society was based on slavery and not on race in and of itself. Indeed, one of the two or three foremost spokesmen defending slaveholders in parliament referred to the free as “white,” although he and his audience doubtless knew that most free native-born Brazilians were probably of African descent, especially among the working masses, as well as among the “whites” of the the middle class and elite. In effect, just as slavery was racialized, so was freedom; when one crossed the line, one whitened. There was great incentive in this racist society to emphasize a free, “white” identity and not a black, “negro” identity conflated with slavery.40 In Rio, however, there were contrary forces at work as well that doubtless affected far more than those relatively few people (in the middle class or elite) who successfully achieved social mobility. Even the basic division between captive and free was blurring rapidly between 1850 and the 1880s among the Brazilian masses. Rio’s slave population, for one thing, was declining rapidly. In 1849, there were 78,855 slaves in the urban parishes of the city; in 1872, there were roughly 37,567; in 1884, there were 32,103 in all of the city’s parishes, urban and rural. At least as important, the free poor and the dwindling numbers of enslaved Afro-Brazilians mingled at religious festivities, in the increasing number of tenements, and in the artisanal or manufacturing sites where they worked side by side—and they all lived in the same parishes. A world of “pardos e pretos” had emerged, and with it the potential for identification along lines of African descent among the great mass of the working poor in Rio. Thus, if there was a desire to distinguish oneself from the racialized status of slavery, away from “negro,” there were also forces emphasizing a common Afro-Brazilian experience among the masses, whether free or slave.41 Yet, aside from slavery, other divisions among Afro-Brazilians remained. Another significant division among Afro-Brazilians, free and slave, was that of nação. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, one can still find instances not only of Africans who identified as congos or cabindas or minas, and so on, but also of creoles who identified as such. The slavers’ fiction had become the Brazilians’ fact, and slaveholders, slaves, and slaves’ free descendants often continued to identify by nação because descent, culture, and custom made it a reality for them.

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This tendency was undercut by status issues, however. For the mulatos or creoles who belonged to the minority with good connections and great talent leading to education, patronage, and social mobility, there was, of course, no incentive to identify by nação. Moreover, as with slavery itself, there was a pejorative aspect to being an African and a positive one associated with assimilating to the culture and customs of the free majority and its white minority elite. One’s opportunities improved dramatically the closer one approached the upper ranges of society, while people identified with Africa by nation were likewise identified with barbarism and slavery.42 Even for the masses of slaves, freedmen, and their descendants, scholars have also identified other processes that worked against division by nação. As the Africans died off and their descendants intermarried or lived intermingled, long after the constant reinforcement by new Africans was ended in 1850, a process of creolization (in the sense of cultural assimilation to New World norms) undermined identity by nação. Intermarriage, cultural assimilation, poverty, and freedom were the lot of most Afro-Brazilians in Rio after 1850, and along with them, increasing distance from division by nação. There was also the very considerable, common experience of racialized hierarchy and oppression among the Afro-Brazilian masses—part and parcel of the common heritage of slavery itself. In effect, captivity, time, and assimilation tore away identity by nation just as it wove together the common cloth made of common suffering, common labor, common prejudice, and common aspiration. All strengthened the potential for identity and solidarity by race rather than by nação.43 There was another common trend within cultural assimilation that carried the potential for a common identification or community, namely, religious creolization. In her classic study of Rio slaves’ religion before 1850, Mary C. Karasch focuses on a critical feature of the religious belief system of the West Central African majority, the Bantu-speakers (e.g., congos, benguelas, cabindas, angolas), which involved confronting the many evils of the world with the spiritual force of the good that emanates from the supreme being and is mediated through ancestral spirits and the icons representing a variety of forces for good—protection, strength, health, and the like. In this religious perspective, the names of such icons, representing gods or saints, were not important; in a new place, the believer could and should find and identify the forces for good, whatever their names, embrace them, and adopt them as his or her own. In this way Karasch explains the religious adoption by the West Central African majority of both the pantheon of orixás maintained by the West African minority and the saints of the Catholic Church. The West Central Africans did not lose their religious heritage; rather, it was maintained as the foundation for a later, creole religion, Umbanda, and lent itself to West Central Africans’ ability to commingle and worship as believers among both West Africans and Catholics.44

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In effect, Karasch’s analysis provides yet another argument for an emerging potential for Afro-Brazilian identity, rather than enduring divisions between nações, or places of origin, divisions exacerbated by distinct religious belief systems. Afro-Brazilians were becoming increasingly comfortable together; indeed, they seem to have been laying the foundations for a religious community in Rio, as is suggested by twentieth-century activities that apparently developed over the generations at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. There, in 1979, at a religious site strongly associated with the nineteenth century’s West Central African majority and a Catholic saint’s devotion, one could find descendants of legendary leaders of the mina community, so strongly associated with Candomblé, celebrating as well. As with Umbanda, such religious and ethnic mingling points to the successful evolution toward a common Afro-Brazilian community in Rio, emerging over the nineteenth century.45 The forces slowly wearing away identity and division based on nação were not always positive, leading to the mingling together of Afro-Brazilians and creating the basis for an Afro-Brazilian identity. Some involved active hostility toward organizing along nação lines or even racial ones, that is, hostility from the imperial state itself. A forceful example may be provided by one of several attempts by members of the congo nação to achieve recognition by the imperial state in the 1860s and 1870s, something that has attracted the attention of scholars. It is interesting to us here both as an attempt at institutionalizing a nação within imperial law, and more important still, for the reasons for which the attempt was quashed. Indeed, it provides an idea of both the potential for and limits of Afro-Brazilian struggle after midcentury. It also has the value of using a particular case study to humanize the broader trends about which we have generalized, by discussing two men, possibly related, in terms of the opportunities and difficulties Afro-Brazilians faced in the middle third of the nineteenth century.46 A number of leading free congos associated with the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary put together a mutual aid society, the Sociedade Beneficiente da Nação Congo, something not uncommon among the free poor in mid- and late nineteenth-century Rio. Most such societies, however, were associated with a craft or industry common to its members, whereas this one was organized along ethnic and status lines alone. Members were congos or creoles of exclusively congo descent (mulatos were implicitly excluded). Like the Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary, both men and women were admitted, but unlike many of the irmandades associated with nações, slaves were not. Indeed, unlike many irmandades and mutual aid societies in Rio, it did not concern itself with manumission; its purpose was to support the ill and provide succor to those who had been arrested (depending upon whether the nature of the crime was “degrading”), as well as to bury the dead, pray for them, and care for their families.47

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The rise of such an organization and the sort of people it represented gives us an opportunity to discuss in detail the trends described more broadly up until now. So, for example, the leaders of this society were apparently literate men of means and influence in their milieu (given their signatures, their dues, the process of members’ selection, and their election to high offices), which would indicate unusually successful congo freedmen or, more likely, their sons, men who had done well in the era before 1850 (when the possibilities for such social mobility were greater). They were men who had been able to master Portuguese, attain a significant level of income, and network within the ranks of middling Rio society—after all, they were associated with the most prestigious Afro-Brazilian church in Rio, and the president and vice president were busy men of stature, men who could retain lawyers to sign for them in their absence. The president of the society was one Miguel Antônio Dias.48 Professionals and successful artisans and businessmen were regularly listed in the city’s great Almanack Laemmert, the annual compilation of the public and the professional data of the city and the empire. One such successful businessman bore the same name as the congo president, Miguel Antônio Dias. He headed up a tin smithy, whose address was on the Rua dos Latoeiros, a short walk from both the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and the Rua do Hospício, where the congos met. This Miguel Antônio Dias, however, was not the congo president. The congo president’s signature does not match the tinker’s, and the congo president likely died in early 1864, whereas the tinker was still alive in the 1870s. These three names—Miguel, Antônio, and Dias—are so common among Portuguese-speakers that the men may have been unrelated; or given that the combination of all three names in the same order is less common, they might have been kin. There is as yet no direct evidence for kinship; indeed, not even the tinker’s ethnicity is clear. Nevertheless, the coincidence of names allows us to entertain the possibility that the two men, both Miguel Antônio Dias, were related—perhaps even father and son.49 One can imagine, for example, that the congo president had done well as a freedman tinker. Perhaps the freedman tinker, possibly the first congo of the family in Rio, had learned his craft as a slave and then, as a freedman, slowly prospered, learning his business, buying and training his own slaves, becoming literate, rising among the worshippers at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Eventually, he might have left his established business to his son and namesake, the second Miguel Antônio Dias, and then devoted himself in his old age to good works and the betterment of other congos in the late 1850s and early 1860s, becoming the congo society’s president. As we noted earlier, the expansive successes of Brazil’s export economy and the end of the Atlantic slave trade were a mixed blessing for Rio.

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Specifically, prospects for success among the mass of Afro-Brazilians (slaves, freedmen, and most of their descendants) quickly became bleaker in many ways. If the two Dias men were in fact father and son, they exemplify this. From what the documents of the mutual aid society indicate, the congo president must have been relatively successful. But the tinker was not; in the increasingly difficult circumstances of the post-1850 era, the second Dias failed as a businessman, and in 1860 he was forced to sell his stock to satisfy his creditors and close his business. Subsequently, however, he was somehow able to continue living well enough to have bought his own home in Rio by the early 1870s.50 If we may continue to assume that the two men named Miguel Antônio Dias were related, the failure of the tinker’s firm was not the only reversal of fortune experienced by the family. Whatever the paperwork of the mutual aid society reveals about the congo president’s established position in middling Rio society, the society itself was unsuccessful. The statutes of the organization, drawn up in 1861, were reviewed in 1862 by the Council of State, which had recently been encumbered with the oversight of banks, companies, and other public organizations whose number rose dramatically at midcentury, fruit of the rising export wealth and consequent domestic investment and new regulatory legislation of the time. To be able to function legally, the congos’ mutual aid society had to pass muster with the council.51 The Council of State was the most prestigious body in the imperial state. It comprised a dozen men, appointed for life from among the most illustrious, experienced statesmen of the monarchy by the emperor himself, and regularly advised the monarch and his cabinet. It is worth noting here that in the 1860s, at least two of the twelve were Afro-Brazilian (the viscount de Jequitinhonha and the viscount de Inhomirim).52 In the case of the Sociedade Beneficiente da Nação Congo, three councilors reviewed the statutes of the organization. Two voted against approval of the society on the basis of its emphasis on congo identity, while the third disagreed with the findings of his colleagues but failed to convince them they were wrong. This would not have been a surprise to any of the councilors (or anyone else in the political elite), as the third councilor was the marquis de Olinda, a proud contrarian who had served both emperors, been elected sole regent toward the end of the Regency, served as an ephemeral leader in two different parties (the Conservative Party and the Progressive League), and had always preferred to stand alone rather than follow others. Here, once again, he disagreed with the critical points made by his colleagues, José Antônio Pimenta Bueno and the marquis de Sapucaí, both renowned legal minds.53

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Indeed, Pimenta Bueno is celebrated as the best known of the analysts of the Constitution of 1824, which seems likely to have informed his judgment here. After all, the Constitution enshrined the legal absence of racial distinction in the Brazilian nation. As stated previously, there is no place for slavery and race in the Constitution of 1824; freedmen, or libertos, only appear as a particular variation among those citizens allowed to vote but prohibited, along with some others, from serving as electors or serving in high office. Libertos were not barred from citizenship because of their race or their former status, and as citizens were allowed, like most of the free, male, working poor of a certain very minimal income, to vote. Furthermore, the children of libertos suffered no legal impediment by birth whatsoever.54 In the case concerning the Sociedade Beneficiente da Nação Congo, Pimenta Bueno and Sapucaí were effectively being asked to recognize congos as citizens apart, and they would not have it. Pimenta Bueno rejected the notion as a dangerous one, raising the issue of Africans or their descendants as being somehow different “by color or caste,” an idea that was not “convenient to approve.” Once free and resident in the empire, he argued, these people were no longer members or subjects of the “Congo Nation,” especially if born in the empire. The two councilors also rejected the society’s proposed discrimination against applicants on the basis of mixed ethnic descent. Pimenta Bueno noted that the usage “Congo origin” was a more acceptable and precise way to describe congos, and that an organization’s dispensing charitable benefits to unmixed congos alone was to be rejected, as it had the problematic effect of “barring others of congo origin who were not black.” Most important, the two councilors added that “humanity is not composed only of the color black, and with pretentions to one origin by descent.”55 These wonderfully inclusive and democratic sentiments were undercut rather dramatically when the two councilors responded to Olinda. Olinda argued that there was no problem with the congos’ proposed exclusions on the basis of color and origin, reminding his colleagues of the traditional practices of the irmandades, who discriminated between negros and mulatos. Pimenta Bueno responded to the marquis but ignored the irmandades and instead used the analogy of secular organizations. He argued that accepting a beneficent society for these “so called Congos” was not the same as doing so for Italians or Frenchmen and others who were members of foreign nations and foreign subjects. The congos in Brazil were not a foreign nation; they came from a “barbaric horde of Africa” and were “freed slaves, or born from such, in both cases subjects of the empire and not subjects, like those [European] foreigners, of other governments.”56 Pimenta Bueno then concluded, stating:

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The Land of the Dead I believe that it is not appropriate to approve special associations for blacks, mulatos, caboclos, etc., etc. Policy is better suited by the rule of remaining silent about such. Once the principle is adopted, so will its development and consequences be. The distinction or division by caste is always bad; homogeneity, if not real at least supposed, is one of the types desired for nationalities. At least let us not consecrate ostentation to the contrary.57

It is ironic, then, to see that the state and one of its best constitutional thinkers joined in condemning the recognition of racial or ethnic division while allowing the horrors of a racialized status, namely, slavery, and its consequences to endure. Secular organization along ethnic or racial lines was simply forbidden among Brazilians as being contrary to the nation’s ideals. The fact that the poverty and discrimination faced by congos and other nações were directly related to their race and its direct association with captivity went unmentioned here. Congos, as with all Afro-Brazilian nations, would have to struggle against the consequences of past captivity as Brazilian citizens—nothing more and nothing less. In reality, however, they were less: they were Brazilians clearly set apart by the inferiority of their past and their origins, and these were denoted by race. They would have to struggle against the consequences of racialized slavery as if the racial part, with its associated stigma, were simply not there. In at least one critical way, however, the Abolitionists would refuse to turn a blind eye to race. They would seek to mobilize Afro-Brazilians as Afro-Brazilians—they would promote racial identity and solidarity among and between the free and the enslaved. We shall see how they did so as this analysis unfolds, having already become acquainted with the context and the foundations for it. Indeed, it is ironic to note that creolization, the traditions of Rosário, and the harsh realities of post-1850 alike encouraged the potential breakdown of division among Afro-Brazilians just as the Brazilian state, for reasons of its own, was denying Afro-Brazilian organization as such. More ironic still, just as Africans had once adapted the fiction of the nação to their own ends and realities, Abolitionists would learn to adapt Pimenta Bueno’s (i.e., the Constitution’s) fiction of a colorblind citizenship and bend it toward both the ideal of a common humanity and the struggle to assert the historical role of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil and their right to be freed and integrated into the nation on an equal footing with other citizens. That, however, lies ahead. Now we must turn to the political world in which the Abolitionist struggle began and ended. The Abolitionist struggle, after all, was a political struggle; without understanding its political context we can understand neither its hardships nor its victories.

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The Nature of the Political Establishment and the Law of 1871 Brazil’s Constitutional Monarchy

The reality of nineteenth-century Brazilian political history that we have been discussing in bits so far was the world that the Abolitionists would have to face and to change. It was no easy task. It was a world shaped by slaveholders, run by slaveholders, and wedded to an ordered, stable, and wealthy hierarchy based upon slavery and presided over by people who believed deeply that slavery was both necessary and natural to the lawful order over which they presided. In 1871, one former minister put it this way: “The institution of slavery among us, in the Constitution, in the country’s legislation, in the usages and customs of centuries, is an institution of law. As such, it has made juridical relations that cannot be forgotten nor suppressed at will, nor only with the sonorous canticles of philanthropy.”58 The various regional ruling oligarchies had supported independence from Portugal under a dynastic monarchy largely to maintain this traditional order. Initial, significant differences concerning the balance of power between their representatives and the monarch had been worked through from 1822 to 1837. In the end, the majority of the elite’s representatives in the Chamber of Deputies decided, in O Regresso (1837–1841), that greater regional and local control under a more liberal, decentralized state was not worth the challenges to the social order or the nation’s unity that such reforms (1831–1834) seemed to have encouraged earlier. Thus, the liberal reforms of the early Regency were overwritten and a more highly centralized, authoritarian state was created. They hoped, nonetheless, to balance this with the check of a representative Chamber and the newly established assumption that the executive power, the cabinet, should partly derive its support and legitimacy from the Chamber’s majority, rather than the Constitution of 1824’s formula, that is, that the cabinet was appointed by the emperor and simply served at the pleasure of the monarch, who, just as parliament did, represented the nation.59 The majority of deputies who embodied this reaction constituted the foundation for what was first called the Party of Order and then the Conservative Party. The minority of radicals and provincial potentates who formed an alliance to oppose them would in time be called the Liberal Party. The defeat of the opposition alliance’s provincial revolts of 1842 and the radical provincial revolt of 1848 would undercut Liberal acceptance of violence. By 1850, both parties accepted the rules of the game, most of which had been set down by the Party of Order by 1844. The origins of each of the two parties lay in the political and personal divisions in parliament between 1832 and 1837. The leaders of each party were generally those who represented the

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most significant socioeconomic interests of their provinces through intelligence, skill in debate, personality, and quite often, family connections by birth or marriage. Over the course of the years between 1834 and the mid-1840s, the more local regional oligarchies in each province were recruited into each party. Their recruitment was facilitated by the local oligarchies’ appreciation of the newly established political reality. Without a connection to one of the two national parties, they had no support for their local concerns. By the same token, without the local oligarchies’ loyalty the national parties had no local agents and consequently no local electoral support. Thus, at the local level opportunistic calculation was as much in play as were partisan ideological differences over the nature of the monarchy. Once forged, however, these links tended to endure and become part of local elite family heritage. Such local “influences” used their considerable local power to ensure electoral support for their particular party when it was in power and to defend their interests as best they could when it was not.60 If we are to understand parliamentary politics, central to the Abolitionist struggle, a more detailed analysis is called for. The critical feature of this relationship between local influences and the parties was due to the new centralizing laws crafted by the Regresso leaders in parliament. Under this legislation, the cabinet possessed enormous patronage powers through appointment. Whichever party dominated the cabinet could, and almost always did, purge the state of key crown servants from the opposing party and replace them with crown servants loyal to the party in power. Such appointments impacted not only the imperial ministries in Rio but also the provincial presidencies and the judges and police at the county (município) level. This had critical parliamentary consequences, since the provincial president and each county’s judicial agents basically controlled the elections. The cabinet could and did fix the elections to ensure a legislative majority. The key to the whole mechanism, then, was the monarch: it was he who appointed the cabinet, and it was he who could dissolve the Chamber and call for new elections to form another legislature.61 The Evolution of the Emperor’s Role

While the Constitution of 1824 prescribed the three main powers customary in Atlantic liberalism at the time, there was also a fourth, a moderating power. This power, embodied in the monarch (advised by the Council of State), was given the critical role of constitutional oversight as the nation’s representative. Along with that power, the monarch exercised the executive power, which he directed through the cabinet (the Council of Ministers), appointed by himself as the moderating power. That the cabinet should

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also represent the majority in the Chamber of Deputies (the parliament’s lower house, indirectly elected by the citizens, who voted for the electors who voted on the candidates) was unwritten, a usage (adapted from English practice and French theory and practice) that had been promoted since the 1820s through its association with the victory over the first emperor by the provincial oligarchies’ representatives in the Chamber.62 Thus, by the 1830s the Chamber enjoyed apparent independence and power; during the 1840s, however, both were quickly undercut, both for constitutional reasons and owing to newly accepted usage. The monarch’s constitutional powers were broad and powerful. As noted, he appointed the Council of State and the cabinet (the Council of Ministers). He also appointed the members of the Senate, parliament’s upper house, freely choosing from the three candidates for each chair who had won the most electoral votes. In fact, he sanctioned all of the appointments in all three branches of power. He could dissolve the Chamber of Deputies and call for new elections. Finally, he was constitutionally “irresponsible”—he could not be held legally responsible for the actions of his ministers. His name or alleged actions were not even to be mentioned directly in parliamentary debate.63 The emperor in question, Dom Pedro II, had lost his mother as a baby and then been abandoned by his father as a child of five, with the 1831 abdication. During the Regency, he had learned to be a scholar and to keep his own counsel. The absence of his parents together with the constant presence and direction of tutors, courtiers, and statesmen who surrounded or visited with him taught him of his power and its limits: he was the critical actor in the monarchy but dependent upon others for success. He also learned that he could trust no one to stand by him, to act for him alone, to advise him in his best interest. Furthermore, while he came to power illegally (before his majority, through a coup in 1840), he quickly freed himself of those who had brought him to the throne. Within four years of his coronation, Dom Pedro II began the practice of control by discreet intervention, using others to get his way. Initially, it was a defensive measure, to establish his dominance in a world disputed by men grown old in the struggle for personal dominance. Soon afterward, it also allowed him to pursue his sense of his and the state’s purpose—to transform Brazil along the lines of the Civilization and Progress already achieved in France and Britain. Their works and wonders had been his refuge during his lonely years of study, and their study consumed his private hours throughout the years of his life. The political consequences of this quiet, controlling intervention were transformative. In 1844, in order to gain and maintain his independence, the emperor compelled the resignation of one cabinet and appointed another, more amenable one. To maintain this cabinet he dissolved the

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Chamber and called for new elections. The cabinet, using its patronage appointments, ensured that the elections were controlled to create a supportive majority. When Chamber votes nonetheless began to peel away from the cabinet, the latter, having lost its majority, resigned, and the emperor simply appointed another. Between 1844 and 1848 he repeated the process, appointing five different cabinets. It became clear to everyone that the price of cabinet appointment was loyalty to the emperor and support for whatever direction he provided. In 1848, however, faced with major foreign and domestic crises, the emperor turned away from such loyal, weak cabinets and appointed one dominated by the Conservative leaders of the time. He knew that they had the strength required for the difficulties he faced—and that they respected his position. They amply demonstrated all of this over the years 1848–1853. To secure their support at the outset, the emperor dissolved the opposition-majority Chamber and allowed the Conservatives to fix the next election to achieve a majority, as their opposition had done in 1844. The pattern was set from then on: the emperor chose the cabinet adequate to his policies and dissolved the Chamber if it was unsupportive; then his new cabinet fixed the next Chamber elections and secured a loyal majority.64 Generally, the emperor eschewed cabinets dominated by more independent, partisan statesmen in favor of moderates he thought would be loyal to him and cooperative regarding the gradual reformism he preferred. Thus, in 1853–1857, with the 1848 challenges resolved, the emperor explicitly directed a policy of material progress (continuing policies along the lines that the previous cabinet had set into motion, with booming exports, expanding cities, and more domestic investment capital), and a postpartisan “conciliation,” in which the moderate Conservatives in the cabinet were expected to make (and did so make) opportune alliances with more moderate Liberals. Post-1857 arrangements were much the same through the 1860s, when matters were institutionalized in the form of the Progressive League (1862–1868), which more ideological radicals in either party considered the emperor’s “official party.” Progressive cabinets were generally led by one-time moderate Conservatives (or better, statesmen who had begun in the Conservative Party but had slowly become amenable moderates) and secured support from an unstable alliance of moderates from both parties in the Chamber. The impact on the two traditional parties was increasingly divisive. As early as the 1850s, the more ideological, partisan leaders were generally either unwilling to serve the emperor in cabinet positions (the case of the saquaremas, the traditional Conservative chieftains and their followers) or not asked to do so (the case of the históricos, the traditional wing of

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the Liberals). Each of these groups maintained the ideological distinctions that had separated the two parties in the 1840s: the saquaremas supported O Regresso’s centralized, authoritarian, representative constitutional rule; the históricos supported a less centralized, more democratic state and a more circumscribed role for the monarch. Thus, históricos condemned the emperor for his unconstitutional intervention in policy and parliament and called for constitutional reform to restrict him. The saquaremas condemned cabinets for their opportunism, the corruption of the constitutional balance of powers, and the ebbing, independent role of parties and parliament. Their fundamental beliefs forbade any attack on the monarch.65 The situation became dramatically different as a consequence of the War of the Triple Alliance (1865–1870), in which Brazil allied with Uruguay and Argentina against Paraguay.66 This war’s complications need not concern us here; we shall confine ourselves to its impact on the parliamentary history under discussion. The war was initially undertaken under Progressive League administration, and it bogged down early on, owing to the increasing responsibility of Brazil alone and the lamentable state of the imperial military, unprepared and poorly supported for years yet now expected to win a war against a well-trained enemy fighting a defensive war on very difficult terrain. The emperor pressed the progressista cabinet to appoint the empire’s best general, the duke de Caxias. Caxias was appointed, but the appointment was bitterly resented: Caxias was a past Conservative prime minister. He, in turn, thought himself publicly undercut by the cabinet through the press, and soon he resigned. The emperor made it clear to the cabinet that, if he had to choose between cabinet and commander, Caxias would be retained. The cabinet accepted the signal and settled with Caxias. Now publicly and privately humiliated, however, and thus fatally weakened by the monarch (whose support remained critical to their credibility), the progressistas found a transparent excuse to resign shortly thereafter. The emperor called upon the Conservatives to take their place, and the progressista leadership turned on him, describing his actions as a constitutional coup. They abandoned the Progressive League and officially joined the Liberal Party. The emperor’s turn to the Conservatives makes sense: he had lost his confidence in the progressistas’ capacity and support and needed the Conservatives both to sustain his general and secure the monarchy in a time of war, instability, and financial difficulty. The Chamber was consequently dissolved and new elections held under Conservative auspices; the Liberals refused to participate. Indeed, they institutionalized their antagonism, publishing the celebrated Manifesto do Centro Liberal in 1869, which listed a series of fundamental radical reforms designed to mobilize broad support.

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The Land of the Dead The Debate of 1871 and the Law of the Free Womb

One of the reforms, interestingly enough, addressed slavery. It followed a step taken first by the emperor in the mid-1860s: a gradualist abolition project. Two sources of foreign pressure were critical to this. The first materialized in 1862–1863, when the British envoy to Rio made it clear that he was willing to use threats and diplomatic embarrassment concerning superficial matters if the imperial government made no move against slavery, an institution Britain had targeted abroad since it had abolished slavery in its own colonies in the 1830s. The emperor’s government refused to give way on either the alleged claims made by the envoy or the slavery issue behind them and temporarily broke off relations with Britain. The threat was clear, nonetheless, and all too reminiscent of British intervention against the African slave trade in the 1840s. The second source of pressure materialized in 1863, with the Emancipation Proclamation of the United States, which threatened to leave the Empire of Brazil the sole slaveholding nation in the hemisphere (Cuba was still a colony of Spain). As the emperor had personally been an abolitionist since the 1850s and was deeply affected by the claims of Civilization and Progress, this embarrassing isolation was deeply felt, and then sharply exacerbated by a formal message from French intellectuals and statesmen in 1866 beseeching him to support abolition. The emperor’s first steps occurred as early as 1864, when he pressed the prime minister of the time, the progressista Zacarias de Góis e Vasconcelos, to consider the matter and asked a councilor of state, Pimenta Bueno (the opponent of the congos), to begin a review of abolitionist legislation. In time the emperor compelled the Council of State, despite considerable resistance, to support the idea and then, once they had succumbed, commissioned a committee of the council to polish up the project submitted by Pimenta Bueno. As early as 1867, the emperor demanded that the Progressive League cabinet at the time (again headed up by Zacarias) mention the project in the Speech from the Throne, the traditional annual announcement of a cabinet’s views and policies at the opening of parliament. An Abolitionist historian recalled later that it was like a bolt from the blue—neither party was prepared to hear it, much less support it. There are several ways to explain the shock. First, despite a few abolitionist speeches, publications, and societies in the past (which had been politically marginal or ephemeral and thus had had no significant political consequences), there was nothing like an abolitionist movement at the time, in the sense of an organized, enduring public group that drew attention and dramatic popular support over time and had political impact. Second, while the emperor’s direction and concern with regard to public

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affairs was a fact of life, this was distinctly different. It was not a process of gradual state aggrandizement or a limited personal intervention in parliamentary government to promote gradual, useful reforms, as in the 1840s, 1850s, or the Progressive League. Instead, it was clear that Dom Pedro II was promoting a specific legislative project of his own, one whose impact was threatening to most of the elite in both parties. No cabinet would have made such a radical move on its own, and furthermore, the Progressive League was known to be the monarch’s instrument. Third, the origin of this project flouted the constitutional proprieties. Legislation was only to be proposed and prepared in parliament, not by the moderating power or the executive. True, cabinet ministers were expected to bring projects useful to their portfolios to parliament, but again, this was different: it was the monarch’s project, not a minister’s, and everyone knew it. No minister would have pressed such a proposal without the monarch’s determined insistence. Fourth, the proposed project directly attacked the right to private property, safeguarded by the Constitution. Fifth, the property in question was not only private, but its retention was a traditional aspect of Brazilian society and remained basic to the economy of the nation (and the state, which depended upon international trade for most of its revenue). And sixth, while slavery had declined in the towns, in the middle class, and in some regional plantation areas, it remained critical to the wealthiest and most powerful families in the empire, who were directly represented in parliament and in the highest ranks of the imperial and provincial governments. However, at the time and for a few years afterward, nothing came of the emperor’s project. It was deftly deferred by cabinets as being inopportune, given the war in Paraguay. If the Progressive League cabinets of the 1860s were more diplomatic, their Conservative successor, the cabinet of 1868– 1870, were less so. After all, the emperor had appointed a strong cabinet, one sure to mobilize Conservative loyalty and strength; both the prince and the party were relying on these to resolve the problems then confronting the empire. The last such Conservative cabinet had had similar origins and similar challenges. It had featured Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres, viscount de Itaboraí, and the viscount do Uruguai, both reactionary stalwarts of great personal prestige with the commercial and planter elite. The new cabinet had strong links to this older one. We may recall that after the end of the African slave trade, the viscount do Uruguai had written to José Maria da Silva Paranhos, something of a protégé, about the inevitable labor crisis to follow. Now Uruguai was dead, and Paranhos, who had repeatedly proven himself in diplomacy, cabinets, and the Council of State, was a minister again, serving under Itaboraí, the last surviving member of the founding leadership of the Conservatives. Paranhos would also serve alongside Uruguai’s namesake, his

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son, Paulino José Soares de Sousa. Paulino had entered the Chamber in the 1850s and assumed the mantle of reactionary leadership by force of talent, rhetoric, and family and business connections. He was not only Uruguai’s son but Itaboraí’s nephew, and like Itaboraí and the men of his mother’s family, he was a planter.67 If anything, then, the cabinet of 1868–1870 was not just a Conservative cabinet, it was a saquarema cabinet. Its strength was grounded in the traditionally reactionary ideology and chieftains of the party’s origins. Unsurprisingly, then, when the emperor discussed the abolitionist project early on after the cabinet’s ascent, they made it clear to him then, and year after year after that, that they would not move forward on it. They did so even after they had successfully led the nation to victory over Paraguay in 1870. With the war over, the emperor, no longer dependent upon this reactionary cabinet for steady political support during an international and financial crisis, would not continue to be put off. He found a way to make this clear. He prompted a maverick Conservative to challenge the cabinet on the issue of abolition. The cabinet called for a vote of confidence, and the Chamber voted to support the cabinet. The emperor’s role and intention, however, had been made clear; no one could think the maverick’s challenge had been spontaneous. Itaboraí, knowing the crown’s confidence had been publicly withdrawn, had no choice: true to Conservative ideology, in 1870 he found an excuse for the cabinet to resign, pointedly refusing to break with the emperor in public, as he did not wish to subject the monarchy to still more damage than the Liberals had already done in 1868–1869. The emperor then went ahead, tapping Pimenta Bueno (since 1867 viscount de São Vicente) to champion the project for which he himself had done so much to prepare. Whatever his finesse with law, however, São Vicente completely lacked the political capacities critical to such a difficult mission, and in 1871 he made way for Paranhos.68 Paranhos had just recently (1870) been made viscount do Rio Branco, and it was well earned. Initially a Liberal, he had been the empire’s chief diplomat in Platine affairs since the 1850s, apprenticing there first under Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, marquis de Paraná, and then the viscount do Uruguai, both Conservative statesmen who together had no trouble in ushering him into the Conservative Party’s highest ranks. Indeed, his first ministerial position was in Paraná’s cabinet of 1853–1857. He served in several Conservative cabinets over the years, with both moderate and saquarema colleagues, and was known for being an effective and loyal minister, blessed with considerable rhetorical skill. All of this prepared him for the task ahead in terms of personal respect and political credibility in the party. He was especially well suited for this particular project because he had no direct

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personal connection to the socioeconomic elite (planters and merchants) dominant among the Conservative chieftains. Rather, Rio Branco, illegitimate and relatively poor, had left Bahia to try his fortune by way of Rio’s military schooling, rising thence through Liberal journalism and an early start in a Liberal provincial administration in the 1840s. He had even married for love rather than a plantation. He was a proud but loyal servant of those who had advanced him, first Liberals, then Conservatives. But he was above all a staunch servant of the monarchy who felt especially loyal to his emperor, who not only represented the regime but had personally overseen his earliest steps in public service and his dramatic rise over the years.69 All of this meant that Rio Branco was prepared to carry out the project, despite ample evidence of saquarema opposition (in which he himself had shared, on both the Council of State and in the Itaboraí cabinet). Indeed, Paulino had made sure, before his uncle’s resignation, to establish explicit political support for the cabinet’s opposition to abolition by calling for the Chamber vote of confidence mentioned earlier. The majority vote had been a strong one. Moreover, João Maurício Wanderley, baron de Cotegipe, a stalwart among the party’s reactionaries, had warned Rio Branco of the Conservatives’ resistance. Cotegipe was probably the most powerful Conservative chieftain in the Northeast, as well as a ministerial colleague of Rio Branco in the 1850s and of Rio Branco and Paulino in Itaboraí’s recent cabinet. He had taken a very strong position against the project, but once out of power, he had come to recognize the emperor’s determination and thus the project’s inevitability. Cotegipe pointed to the latter, assured Rio Branco of his support (and that of his provincial delegation, one of the larger ones), and warned Rio Branco of the storm to come. He had taken Paulino’s measure.70 The debate over the project in 1871 has been analyzed in detail elsewhere.71 Suffice it to state here that the Conservatives split. The half dozen reasons for parliamentary shock in 1867 were now ventilated in the Chamber repeatedly and in detail by the Conservatives’ most able orators, who uniformly spoke up for the “Conservative dissidents,” led by Paulino. The most able spokesman for the emperor’s project was Rio Branco, who had been commissioned with the final draft of the legislation by the emperor. Since the emperor had gone over the details privately with him, Rio Branco was unwilling to entertain any changes to the draft in form or substance, despite both formal and informal overtures from the dissidents. There was little façade of a constitutional legislative process: the Chamber was pressed to pass the project just as the emperor and the prime minister had handed it down. Most important, Rio Branco had put together a solid, if bare, majority. The latter is best explained by the particular weight of patronage in the Northeast by this period. As noted earlier, since midcentury that region’s

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exports had been unstable or in decline in the world market. Populous, proud, and politically well disciplined, however, the region could deliver solid blocks of votes in exchange for government jobs and favors, now increasingly critical to elite and middle-class families whose private affairs were suffering. Rio Branco had Cotegipe’s pledged support for Bahia and that of João Alfredo Correia de Oliveira for Pernambuco. João Alfredo was the well-connected, up-and-coming chieftain from that northeastern province whom Rio Branco had kept on from Pimenta Bueno’s cabinet.72 It was a masterly appointment, not simply because João Alfredo could speak for his province’s significant delegation but because he was willing and unusually able to perform his duties as Rio Branco’s whip in the Chamber, making sure of both quora and the critical votes. Paulino had learned, bitterly, the math of politics as the leader of the saquaremas in past legislatures, which, even when they had nominally Conservative majorities, had drifted from the saquarema position; they had consistently supported moderate Conservatives and then Progressive League cabinets in the 1850s and 1860s. But Paulino recognized in this debate something that demanded extraordinary action; he saw it, correctly, as a critical watershed for his party as a whole and for the monarchy itself.73 For Paulino and the dissidents this was not merely a battle over slavery but the culmination of a long struggle over Brazil’s constitutional monarchy. They were explicit on this issue; they pointed repeatedly to the looming gap between the state and society posed by a law handed down from the heights of the monarchy without regard for the Constitution or the rights or representatives of those presiding over society and economy alike. They also pointed to the danger of state intervention in the social relations of the plantation, constituting a clear threat to the moral authority of the master that was traditionally critical to the slaveholder, his family, and the stability of a hierarchical world and its own established ways—a moral authority that had generally gone unchallenged and had thus traditionally proven viable. Rio Branco, in his own speeches, ignored all of this; he was forced to do so, given the facts as well as the party’s and his own past opposition to the project. Rather, he emphasized the moral and progressive qualities of abolition in the age of Civilization and Progress. Only when it became clear to the dissidents that Rio Branco would not be moved to revise the project and that the Chamber’s majority remained firm in its loyalty to him did they attempt to take the moral high ground away from Rio Branco (and the emperor). They offered an alternative abolitionist project, better designed to address the constitutional and social-order issues alike.74 The emperor’s project, after all, was a problematic one. It was a “free womb” law, based on Portuguese precedent, which made the newborn

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children of captive women free. It had been designed to end slavery gradually, without dramatic impact on existing plantation labor: no living slave would be freed immediately and none manumitted under its provisions would be freed without compensation. However, it set up provisions for statefunded manumission and formal recognition of slaves’ rights to purchase their own freedom or have it purchased by others, regardless of the slaveholder’s wishes. It had the advantage of allowing the emperor to proclaim the (eventual) end of slavery without touching existing private property directly, without crippling the economy, and without fostering manumission without due compensation. The alternative project of the dissidents was prepared by the foremost judicial abolitionist of the day, Perdigão Malheiro (whom we introduced earlier—the champion of Brazil’s claimed exemption from racism). By birth, marriage, and belief he was kin to the saquarema elite. In Perdigão Malheiro’s project, in stark contrast to that of the emperor, slaves could look forward to freedom for themselves (and not just for their unborn children). They would know, however, that the date of their own liberty depended entirely upon their masters. Perdigão Malheiro proposed the immediate beginning of a program of phased manumission based on categories of captives, with state compensation and in a process under the complete control of each particular master on each plantation. The project thus ensured that the slaveholders’ personal authority, if anything, was strengthened; that their property rights were addressed; and that slavery ended, but over a prolonged, transitional process. The project addressed all of the planters’ rights and fears, and it anticipated and contained the slaves’ hopes, which were likely to rise once news of abolition began to spread. Fundamental to its origins, it was also a law proposed from the Chamber (thus restoring the constitutional role of the legislature). Clearly, the dissidents supported this alternative as the best that they could manage against an abolitionist project backed by the prime minister’s majority in the Chamber. By posing an attractive alternative, they hoped to undercut the moral high ground of the cabinet, lure to their side the very few deputies necessary to destroy the prime minister’s majority and build a majority of their own, and wrest something of a victory out of a dismal situation. If their slaveholding were going to be successfully challenged by the state, they at least wanted to salvage what they could of both the established social order and their notion of the constitutional, representative nature of the monarchy that was supposed to protect that order. If the issue had been the abolition of slavery alone, the dissidents’ alternative would seem to have been the better project. For Rio Branco, however, and presumably his monarch, the issue was meeting the emperor’s

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expectations. These had been made clear: they were wrapped up in the project the emperor had commissioned, supported, and toiled over for years. Thus, João Alfredo immediately killed the dissident project using a parliamentary maneuver and shortly thereafter made sure that the Chamber voted on the emperor’s project. We should remember that this Chamber consisted of the same legislature that had supported Itaboraí and Paulino in the 1870 vote, demonstrating confidence in Itaboraí’s position against that selfsame project. Now it reversed itself, voting in favor of the project, which became known as the Rio Branco Law or the Law of the Free Womb (28 September 1871).75

The Law of the Free Womb’s history thus represents the culmination in the development of parliamentary politics in Brazil traced over the last part of this chapter. It provides us with a sense of how the parties, politicians, and prince had come to be what they were by the 1870s. Moreover, it was a dramatic turning point in the relationship between the slaveholding elite that dominated parliament and the prince who dominated the state itself. The capacity of the emperor and the imperial administration to dominate and then direct the political order against the interests of the socioeconomic elite had been made dramatically clear. The capacity for state intervention against slaveholding had been established. It was not just a principle or a potential—it was a fact, something that had occurred, and it could occur again. Nonetheless, it had been legislation that the emperor had designed to preserve as much of the status quo as possible (by his lights, at least); both the socioeconomic and political establishments remained in place, and both were still wedded to slaveholding. Indeed, while a great deal had happened in parliament and in the minds of the political elite, little happened elsewhere as an immediate consequence of the law’s passage. The law itself, particularly in terms of its promoting manumission for the existing slaves, was largely unenforced—after all, who were the state’s representatives at the local level? Slaveholders, their kin, and their clients. Inaction and the awesome weight of the rich and powerful prevailed. Perhaps one of the dissidents had alluded to the law’s fate best and bluntly in the last weeks of the 1871 debates: “When this reform arrives on the solid ground of reality, when the practical measures involved in the project are studied, we will see the government obliged to ask the nation, and especially those respectable classes whose just grievances have been so disdained, for the means to execute these measures.”76 One thing that did happen, however, was a census, a detail of the law inserted to establish the actual number of slaves in Brazil. It was determined

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that in 1874 there were 1,540,829 captives in a population of 9,761,449. Most of the slaveholders (and even the sprinkling of abolitionists at the time) concerned with the future of these slaves seem to have thought that the issue of slavery’s abolition had been settled. All that could be done would seem to have been done, and although slavery was doomed to end, it would only be after many decades. Thus, when they needed to do so, slaveholders continued to purchase people from the remaining million and a half captives throughout the 1870s, apparently sure that slavery was a safe investment for years to come.77

2

The Alliance with the Future The Movement Emerges, 1871–1881

The Aftermath of 1871 The Impact of the Law

Among the many provisions of the Rio Branco Law, the most important were the establishment of an emancipation fund for every province and a set of regulations covering the “apprenticeship” of the ingênuos (the freeborn children of slaves). As noted in Chapter 1, however, it was slaveholders or their representatives who were charged with enforcement, and so failure and abuse could be expected. In fact, over the several years that followed, there were questions about the veracity of birth registration, there was a general irregularity in the gathering and use of emancipation funds, and there was widespread employment of ingênuos as slaves until they reached the age of twenty-one—labor allowed to their mothers’ masters as a form of compensation. Indeed, ingênuos were often advertised and sold for their labor during their years of “apprenticeship.” It has been said that during the 1870s more people were manumitted in traditional fashion by their masters than by the larger opportunities supposedly introduced by emancipation funds and the right to self-purchase and slave savings that the new law ensured.1 In effect, the law may well have raised slaves’ hopes only to frustrate them. There were reports of violent plantation resistance in the early 1870s, ascribed to 1871 and its failings. Still, over the 1870s the planters’ apparent concerns focused on the eventual need for dependable rural labor (particularly on the economic frontier or in the far future), growing financial difficulties at home and abroad, and the competitive market affecting their export crops. In regard to captive rural labor in the immediate future, however, they bet on it. In the southeastern region, they used their ingênuos and continued to buy people from Brazilian provinces whose exports were in decline, as well as from the towns and cities. The market for captives in the

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coffee provinces was brisk, due to demand, particularly on the expanding economic frontier in western São Paulo; slavery, then, seemed safe for some time.2 The same could not be said of politics. Division and Unity among the Conservatives

The aftermath of 1871 in terms of slavery is but one aspect of the context critical to understanding the rise of the Abolitionist movement. After all, it was a movement that began and ended in parliament; the mobilization of people outside of parliament was designed by the movement’s leaders to affect that body and to compel it to end slavery in law. If we are to understand the movement’s history, we must understand the parliamentary milieu, a subject we introduced in Chapter 1. At the same time, this parliamentary reality cannot be separated from the larger socioeconomic reality. Each party was dominated by representatives of a socioeconomic class traditionally associated with slavery, large landholdings, and an economy driven by plantation exports. The significance of the linkage is not far to seek. Thus, while gradual abolition had been imposed by the emperor and supported by both the Liberals’ Manifesto of 1869 and the Conservative majority in the Chamber under Rio Branco’s direction, it was hardly embraced by any of the three as a measure of progress for the slaves. Rather, as suggested in Chapter 1, it was a measure designed to appease foreign critics (by the emperor), to retain and recruit reformists into the party (by most of the Liberals), and to keep the emperor’s support (by the bare majority of Conservatives, led by Rio Branco and pushed forward by his whip, João Alfredo, in the Chamber).3 The passage of the law had, as noted at the end of Chapter 1, settled the matter politically. Presumably, its lack of immediate, significant consequence vis-à-vis the slaves was, if anything, both desired and embraced by the majority of both parties, and as we shall see, a matter of secondary concern for the emperor. Abolition was seemingly now off the table—those who sat at the table had made it so. There was, in effect, nothing inevitable or necessary about the Abolitionist movement that followed—years later. The question, rather, is rather stark: How could and why would such a movement even emerge? We need to explore the political realities of 1871–1878 to understand how and why an Abolitionist movement appeared by 1880. Many of these realities demand attention to several related matters: the key role of the emperor and party leaders in the use of power, party transitions in power, and the problem of party unity. Throughout the era 1837–1871, the Conservative Party prided itself on the coherence of its ideology, its defining role in the monarchy, the leadership of its chieftains, and its discipline of action in the Chamber. These had

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frayed at times, to be sure. However, the division caused by the emperor’s actions and the associated debate of 1871 was quite different. Paulino, the dissidents’ leader, had earned his position among Conservatives through his leadership as an orator during the years of “conciliation” in the 1850s and the years of the Progressive League, when such traditionalists as his faction of the party, the saquaremas, were marginalized and the party’s moderates flocked to serve the emperor in the Progressive League. Paulino, however, had come into his own as Itaboraí’s lieutenant when the emperor had called the saquaremas to power again in 1868, mostly to win the Paraguayan war. In his parliamentary and cabinet roles, Paulino had been the faithful student of his father, the viscount do Uruguai, whose constitutional analysis of the imperial government was the Conservatives’ sacred text.4 Thus, in the debates of 1871, Paulino had been very, very careful to stay within the Conservatives’ constitutional and historical traditions; he condemned the cabinet, not the emperor. Moreover, under Paulino’s leadership the Conservatives responded to Rio Branco’s 1871 victory by successfully mustering a shocking vote of no confidence in the next legislative session of 1872. Ordinarily, this would mean resignation. Instead, the prime minister secured the dissolution of the Chamber by the emperor and a new election. This response of the emperor deepened and widened the division among the Conservatives, something recognized as unprecedented and troubling— troubling in the context of the Liberals’ radical attacks on the emperor’s interventionism in response to the coup of 1868; troubling given the dependence of Rio Branco upon the emperor that such actions demonstrated; and troubling because the 1872 vote of no confidence in Rio Branco (by the same legislature that had supported the 1871 law) underscored the fact that the 1871 majority that had supported Rio Branco was an ephemeral majority, owing much to the northeastern delegations, who were desperate for patronage. Furthermore, this last also pointed to Rio Branco’s reliance upon the baron de Cotegipe, the Conservative chieftain who led the Bahian delegation, which he notoriously controlled through corruption and cabal. The 1872 election, in turn, only deepened the public’s sense of parliamentary corruption. It produced the expected supportive majority in Rio Branco’s favor but could only be explained by the support of the monarch and Cotegipe. It did nothing to unify the party or give Rio Branco credible public independence; rather, it made more obvious his obvious personal dependence. Everyone knew he was there not because of his strength in his own party but because he had served the emperor well and could rely on the monarch’s continued support, as well as electoral corruption. Worse, this dependence meant that in serving the emperor afterward he had lost what little freedom he might previously have had in dealing with his monarch. More than ever, Rio Branco owed his position to his prince.5

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In fact, Rio Branco dutifully followed the emperor’s interest in embarking on a series of reforms, apparently designed to continue to outflank the Liberals’ post-1868 reformism and usher in further signs of Civilization and Progress under the emperor’s auspices. Why support Liberal radicalism, after all, if the established regime could propel the nation forward? Among these reforms was a proposal for electoral reform, perhaps even involving direct elections, to shore up the appearance of the representative legitimacy of the parliament—a legitimacy by now in tatters. An initial stab at such reform was introduced in 1875 among the Conservatives. Cotegipe, now ambitious to lead, broke with Rio Branco on the issue by advocating direct elections. The challenge to Rio Branco and the further division in the party were significant: he now faced additional internal opposition along with that of the 1871 dissidents.6 Other issues confronted the cabinet, among them the celebrated Religious Question of 1872–1875. New ultramontane bishops challenged the traditional domination of the Brazilian church by the monarch; Rio Branco, following the emperor’s direction, struck back, asserting the monarch’s established role. When the bishops defied both prince and prime minister, the bishops were arrested and tortuous diplomatic negotiations with Rome ensued. These would drag on until a compromise was forced upon the emperor by the next cabinet, one less dependent on the monarch.7 Aside from the question of electoral reform and the Religious Question, there was another question, one having to do with financial affairs. There had been financial crises in Brazil in 1854–1858 and 1864–1870, and in 1875 there was another. Such crises were always linked to European financial problems; this one was driven by the crisis and war debts of the 1864–1870 era, the 1875 depression in Europe, and the consequent financial collapse of the bank of the viscount de Mauá. Mauá was the critical financier and entrepreneur of the midcentury empire and its cabinets. Both the Rio Branco cabinet’s involvement with Mauá and its attempt to intervene on his behalf left Rio Branco open to parliamentary challenge. Exhausted by the ongoing crisis with the church, the electoral reform debate, and the dubious success of the 1871–1875 reform program, he found in the financial crisis grounds for handing in his resignation and did so.8 Rio Branco was succeeded by Caxias, the conqueror of Paraguay. Old and ailing, Caxias accepted out of personal loyalty to his monarch and his party. The real direction of affairs was provided by Cotegipe, now minister of foreign affairs and later, finance. This cabinet’s legacy consisted in two achievements: ending the Religious Question9 and unifying the Conservative Party again—the latter being the more difficult. Early, tenuous success owed a great deal to party leaders. With Rio Branco’s resignation, the path back to the Conservatives’ famed unity and partisan discipline was open. Paulino,

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under Caxias’s auspices and concerned to maintain the party’s continued hold on power, reached out to Rio Branco personally and worked hard and successfully to restore their earlier good relations; the recovery of party unity between their two factions followed.10 The problem now was leadership. The cabinet was beset by the recent past, not least by lingering divisions over the path to electoral reform, which was now the great political issue of the day. Cotegipe was unable to lead the party toward any resolution of the matter; instead, they merely revised the existing system in 1875 and went on to a transparent failure in the 1876 election, which frustrated everyone. Nor could Paulino pose an alternative to Caxias and Cotegipe as the party’s leader. The emperor’s apparent personal distaste for Paulino’s role in the 1871 debate, when he had led the dissidents against the emperor’s position, made his appointment as prime minister impossible. João Alfredo, seen as Rio Branco’s heir in the 1871 reformist faction of the party, would doubtless have been more appetizing to the monarch. After 1875, however, João Alfredo was committed to recovering Conservative unity and saw doing so as impossible under anyone but Cotegipe, a reactionary who had nonetheless backed the 1871 reform, and a statesman with seniority and Senate rank. All Conservatives could join behind him, despite his inability to finesse the electoral reform issue. But then a personal financial scandal, again involving corruption, unexpectedly made Cotegipe’s leadership impossible and put a sudden end to his party’s hold on power. For, in the aftermath of the scandal, the emperor could not support Caxias’s cabinet, given his key minister’s public disgrace. With Cotegipe’s scandal and Caxias’s weakness, to whom among the Conservative chieftains could the emperor turn? Paulino was persona non grata, and João Alfredo was personally committed to Cotegipe. Thus, after Cotegipe’s personal scandal broke in late 1877, the emperor, despite the party’s ten years in power and their new unity and strength, turned away from the Conservatives entirely. Instead, in early 1878 he turned to the Liberals.11 The Liberals’ Return to Power

The Liberals’ ascent had much to do with the electoral reform issue, whose difficulty derived in part from constitutional issues. The problem was how to reform something in the Constitution without calling a constitutionally required reform session of the legislature, which risked allowing other constitutional reforms to be addressed (e.g., those touching upon the monarch’s own role). For years the emperor had resisted anything but a minor reform of the existing two-tier voting process (a system involving an electoral college). The Conservatives had supported this—hence the failed reform of 1875. However, the problematic election of 1876 made clear that more was

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needed. The emperor was now forced to consider a fundamental change, namely, direct elections. Given the Liberals’ early espousal of this solution, together with the lack of a suitable Conservative leader, the emperor’s turn to the Liberals made sense. If he could find a moderate Liberal willing and able to serve in this capacity, the matter might finally be resolved.12 Ten years in the political wilderness had created a great deficit of patronage and power among the Liberal chieftains, and so men willing to work with the emperor in exchange for cabinet power again could readily be found. The problem was the perennial one among Liberals (and between the party and the monarch). A significant faction of the party had always been and continued to be more radical and reformist than the majority of the party; they would have to be contained. The two most significant chieftains of this faction were Zacarias (the prime minister who had broken with the emperor over Caxias in 1868) and José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo (in many ways the intellectual and political leader of the League and the principal author of the Manifesto of 1869). Even if the faction had been agreeable to the emperor (it was not), neither leader had been acceptable to him earlier in the 1870s. Zacarias, however, had died in 1877, and Nabuco de Araújo had renounced political leadership by 1874. The emperor, then, was free to consider the more acceptable Liberals, that is, the moderates and their many chieftains, and he settled on José Luis Vieira Cansanção de Sinimbu, whom he knew to be manageable. Sinimbu accepted in January 1878.13 Sinimbu understandably wanted to hold on to what he had been handed. Anticipating the hostility of the Conservative majority in the Chamber (once it reconvened on the regular May date for the legislative season), he asked the emperor for dissolution and new elections, which were granted. He took the usual precautions to fix the elections later that year but did so even more seriously than usual, both in anticipation of the reform and to provide the long-famished Liberals a feast of power and patronage. In the intersession, he began discussions over managing an electoral reform designed to restrict the electorate dramatically but allowing that restricted electorate to vote directly.14 At the same time, Sinimbu convened two agricultural congresses; given the change in the party in power and the fundamental issues at hand, the established planter elite needed to be attended to. The congress in the Northeast, however, the region in decline, took place in October 1878. The other, more significant congress came first, meeting 8–12 July in Rio; it concerned the southeastern region, the empire’s economic frontier, apparently to hear out (and garner support from) the most powerful regional elites at a time of clear adversity for the national economy. The congress in the Southeastern region brought together the coffee and sugar planters of Rio’s hinterland and

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thus is particularly useful for our analysis. This congress, which met 8–12 July in Rio, clarified the issues closest to the planters’ concerns. Subsequent references to this congress in regard to Abolitionism distort those issues rather dramatically. Generally, contrary to what others have suggested, the speakers did not attack the 1871 Law of the Free Womb. For the most part, they considered it a fait accompli of little importance, probably because of its lack of enforcement, the medium-term stability of the slave population, and its consequent limited impact. Instead, they emphasized the long-term problem of a future shortage in the dependable labor force, the continuing lack of accessible credit (most planters were generally indebted, and the problem was growing), and the ongoing issue of pressing forward with critical infrastructure (to cut costs in crop transport and access new lands).15 With the issue of electoral reform, this consensus makes clear the perception of a looming, two-front crisis, a perception common to the majorities in both parties. First, the electoral reform points to the monarchy’s eroding legitimacy, born of the parliament’s lack of a real representative quality and the emperor’s traditional interventionism. Second, the consensus on an ongoing economic crisis, in which accessible credit, the need for a future increase in dependable, stable agricultural labor, and the threat posed by increasing global competition and intermittent slumps in export prices all challenged the national economy. Conservatives had failed to resolve any of these matters; now it was the moderate Liberals’ turn. The concern with resolving the electoral reform issue and addressing the economic crisis would be the two emphases of Liberal cabinet programs from 1878 to 1884. While the historiography points to the abolition of slavery as critical to imperial parliamentary politics from 1878 on, that is mistaken. Under Sinimbu’s administration (1878–1880) the focus was on the contest between moderate Liberals seeking to resolve the issue of electoral reform and grapple with economic crisis from within the established political framework and status quo, on the one hand, and reformist Liberals, seeking the dramatic transformation of that framework by a multitude of reforms, on the other. In all of this, the emperor naturally tended to support the moderates, as their path did not challenge either his role or the monarchy as it had evolved under his hand. In a nutshell, then, the Abolitionist movement’s emergence as the leading issue of the 1880s was neither foreseen nor embraced by either party or the monarch at the beginning of the decade. That would change—driven by the Abolitionist movement. As it changed, each cabinet in turn would attempt to marginalize, manage, or repress the movement as the years went by. Let us see, then, how and why it could emerge at all under such circumstances.16

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The Reformists and the Origins of the Abolitionist Movement The Manifesto of 1869 and Its Legacy

In the aftermath of the coup of 1868, the Progressive League’s members generally allied with the históricos, the veterans of the Liberal Party, in a newly reinvigorated Liberal Party behind the reformist Manifesto of 1869. The manifesto had five basic points: electoral reform, judicial reform, the abolition of forced military recruitment, the abolition of forced National Guard recruitment, and the emancipation of the slaves.17 Electoral reform addressed the issue of the representative quality of the monarchy’s legislature, thus working to offset the abuses of the monarch by strengthening the legitimacy of parliament and the representative quality of the cabinet (which would have to work with the majority to secure its budget and present any legislative projects it required). Judicial reform addressed the political abuse of O Regresso legislation by reforming its centralized authoritarian quality, which put so much power in the hands of the state’s agents at the local level, leading to partisan abuse and electoral corruption. Forced recruitment into the military and National Guard had been used to enhance elite and partisan control of the masses by threatening and recruiting men who could not ward off the press gang by calling on a patron’s intervention. Emancipation (i.e., ending slavery gradually and with compensation) put an end to slavery’s backward barbarism without either a sudden, radical shock to the economy or an uncompensated attack on private property.18 In terms of the Liberal Party, the manifesto was clearly calculated to recruit partisans as broadly as possible. It spoke to traditional issues of the históricos and the deep sense of betrayal that the more moderate progressistas felt in the 1868 coup. It also spoke to the socioeconomic shifts that had transformed the electorate between the 1820s and the 1860s. We have mentioned aspects of this in discussing the era of 1850 in Chapter 1, particularly with regard to Rio. Still, the urban trends there had a more general impact beyond the imperial capital. The export expansion in the northeastern and especially the southeastern regions of Brazil had led to the dramatic growth of the great cities, together with the expansion of the urban poor and working class (free and captive) and the growth of a more independent middle class (professionals, bureaucrats, and petty entrepreneurs). This middle class, literate and perched on the Atlantic coast, in constant contact with western Europe’s Civilization and Progress and oriented by them, formed a natural basis for the growth of reformist liberalism, especially since so many members of that class were only indirectly dependent upon the great planters and agro-export merchants who had previously dominated the urban and

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rural sectors of the most populous provinces. Such urban liberals included Eurocentric intellectuals, reformist students, investors with a more urban set of targets, and businessmen attracted by recent North Atlantic innovations in finance and company formation. Many of these comprised the literati and the new readership of an expanding daily press as well.19 This shifting reality helps explain not only the threat to the Conservative majority but the sudden reversal in the election of 1860. In that election the cabinet, faced with increased political challenges to its legitimacy by the saquaremas, had overseen an election explicitly designed to test public opinion, or better, the actual strength of the saquaremas and their moderate and Liberal opposition (the opposition that would emerge in 1862 as the Progressive League and then again in the newly strengthened Liberal Party in 1868). The result was an election that demonstrated the continued dominance of the Conservatives under saquarema leadership among most of the empire’s electorate. As in 1837 the Conservatives remained the majority party. However, 1860 also demonstrated a clear shift in the minority of the electorate who lived in the great port cities, who for the first time voted decidedly for the Liberals. They were a minority in the Chamber, to be sure, but they were a majority in the provincial political centers and, most important, in the imperial capital, Rio, from which all power and ideas flowed. While most people lived in the rural sector, under the hand of Conservative planters and merchants and their agents, in the imperial capital and in Salvador, Recife, and other major ports, most did not. In these places, by the 1850s and 1860s, the parties and their ideas were truly contested. There, the reformism of 1869 counted for something.20 In 1879, however, that reformism was dramatically challenged by the Sinimbu program. While it explicitly took on electoral reform, as commissioned by the emperor, in order to manage the challenge to the regime’s legitimacy, all other reformism was put aside. As suggested earlier, Sinimbu and the majority of the Liberals were closely connected to fractions of the socioeconomic elite that dominated both parties; they defended imperial society as it was. Thus, though the manifesto had helped retain and recruit more urban-based reformers as Liberals over 1869–1878, it did not empower them now. They remained a minority in the Liberal Party. Once in power, the prime minister accepted the electoral reform task from the emperor and the planter-merchant concerns of the elite (made clear in the agricultural congresses) as the principal points of his program, emphasizing both in the emperor’s Speech from the Throne in mid-December of 1878. He quietly ignored anything else.21 For the few reformist deputies elected to this first Liberal-majority Chamber in a decade, the program was a frustrating betrayal. On 5 March 1879, a deputy from Bahia, Jerônimo Sodré Pereira, stood up in the Chamber. He

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was the son of a traditionally Liberal family, an emancipationist since the 1850s, an urban physician and professor in Salvador, and the son-in-law of Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas, a former progressista minister under Zacarias and a chieftain among Liberal reformists in his province, Bahia. Jerônimo Sodré made a short speech, calling for a panoply of Liberal reforms involving education, immigration, and the “servile element,” as slavery was signaled in parliamentary language at the time, but the speech had little impact. On 22 March, another reformist from the Northeast stood up, a deputy from Pernambuco: Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Araújo, a younger son of the progressista and Liberal reformist Nabuco de Araújo. He raised a series of reforms again, including the need to address emancipation, and he challenged the call for “coolie” labor that had been advocated by some planters and their allies in the 1878 agricultural congress in Rio and in the Chamber. The reference to emancipation, like Sodré’s, was vague—a call to improve upon the 1871 law. Again, the impact in and outside of the Chamber was inconsequential; in the teeming parishes of the cidade velha, such vague talk of reform paled before other, more immediate concerns.22 Both the deputies in the Chamber and the ordinary folk in Rio, however, might have been moved by some of these more immediate concerns. In addressing the contextual issue of an ongoing economic crisis, its daily impact on the urban middle and working class is too often ignored; in this case, in late 1879, the impact was dramatic. Sinimbu wished to address the economic crisis partly through austerity measures and partly by increasing imperial revenue, as the state’s resources had suffered seriously with the war debt, the great drought in the Northeast in the 1870s, the 1875 financial crisis, and a slump in commerce (both export prices and imports had slumped, and taxes on both were the principal source of state revenue). As part of this, Sinimbu had raised the price of urban transportation by adding an additional tax of a vintém (about US$.01 at the time) to streetcar fare. While this would have seemed negligible to frock-coated cabinet ministers, it would not to the lower reaches of the middle class and the upper reaches of the working poor, who were already suffering both directly and indirectly from the impact of the ongoing economic crisis.23 As a result, by late December 1879 the more radical reformists of the time protested the tax and raised the larger issue of the cabinet’s disregard for “the people.” Demonstrations took place, which were violently suppressed by the police. At this point, public radical reformists (Republicans and radical Liberal populists and journalists) and parliamentary opposition figures (Liberal reformers and Conservatives with a Rio constituency) got involved as well, emphasizing the cabinet’s use of violent repression and the rights of “the people” to protest. The street demonstrations escalated into streetcar destruction and barricades, which along with the violent repression that

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followed became known as the Vintém Revolt of 1880, as the worst violence occurred in early January of that year. The cabinet, clearly unprepared for what had happened, withdrew the streetcar tax, and the escalating violence ceased. Nonetheless, the cabinet’s maladroit handling of public order, critical to any cabinet’s credibility throughout the monarchy’s history, was one of several missteps that led to the decline of the emperor’s confidence in Sinimbu.24 In the following month, February 1880, Sinimbu asked the emperor to dissolve the Chamber in support of the new electoral reform project his cabinet had put together in 1879. Despite the divisions among the Liberals over reform generally as well as specific aspects of the electoral reform, Sinimbu had managed to pass a bill associated with that project in the sitting Chamber, a bill supporting a special constituent legislature confined to the specifics of the reform proposed by the cabinet. When that bill was defeated in the Senate, he decided, in response, to request the Chamber’s dissolution in order to manage the election of a more supportive legislature, hoping that such a demonstration of the electorate’s support of the cabinet and its reform would compel the support of the Senate. The emperor, however, what with the parliamentary difficulties and the mismanagement of the Vintém Revolt, had had enough. He refused, compelling Sinimbu’s resignation. In March 1880 the emperor called to power José Antônio Saraiva. Saraiva accepted, with the understanding that he would put aside the idea of a special constituent reform Chamber and pursue the reform as an ordinary law rather than a constitutional reform.25 This was typical of Saraiva, who only pursued goals he deemed possible, and who enjoyed enormous respect from the emperor and most Liberals for his moderation, prudence, and conciliatory style. When Saraiva presented his cabinet’s program, just as Sinimbu had done, he emphasized the electoral reform and the ongoing economic crisis. He mentioned the Liberals’ “other reforms” only to state that they were beyond the cabinet’s mission.26 The Decision to Pursue Abolitionism

Yet it was under the mandate of this able political operator that the Abolitionist movement really began. It was not because of what Saraiva proposed to do but because of what he refused to do. More important, it was because of what the Liberal reformers in the Chamber decided to do in response. Here, in discussing the reformists’ response, the historian is compelled to speculate based on action and context; correspondence and other contemporary archival records yield no direct evidence regarding motivation. For those Liberals who wanted to press for reform, the fall of Sinimbu was heartening and the Vintém Revolt must have been instructive. The

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fall of Sinimbu allowed for at least the possibility of change: Saraiva was conciliatory in style and clearly interested in more successful management of public affairs—perhaps he could be persuaded. The Vintém Revolt was instructive because it demonstrated that the Rio population were able and willing to be mobilized in regard to public affairs if they thought their own interests were involved. More important still, the fall of the Sinimbu cabinet demonstrated that both the threat and the reality of public mobilization in the streets and the press could cause political change. Reformists might be a powerless minority in the Chamber, but if they could provide leadership and direction in the streets to people willing to follow, they could have a direct impact in parliament and in the monarch’s calculations. Finally, there was also the contrasting, cautionary lesson of the revolt’s denouement. Once the cabinet had revoked the vintém increase, the urban population went home, and immediately afterward a new cabinet with a very similar program was appointed. A program of significant reforms, then, would require a more impressive and sustained political mobilization to secure success. What cause could stir such a general, reformist mobilization and keep it going?27 Of the five causes central to the Manifesto of 1869, all of them had been addressed by reforms under Rio Branco’s cabinet (with, as noted earlier, mixed results). The two most significant in terms of general and associated impacts were emancipation and electoral reform. The latter, which was clearly being managed by the cabinet already, was extremely divisive and problematic for the reformists as a way forward. A reform that allowed for a direct vote had the broadest appeal, but if applied regardless of literacy, it might be impossible to pass in parliament, where the elite balked at mass political participation, and might not attract middle-class support, for similar reasons. Besides, particularly in the rural sector, who could assume anything but the elite-controlled voting by local influences that dominated the indirect elections that had taken place since 1824? A reform that limited the direct vote to the propertied and the literate—the option actually worked out and passed under Saraiva in 1881—would surely alienate the urban masses, most of whom were impoverished and illiterate. All in all, electoral reform would be divisive and problematic for broad-based mobilization.28 Emancipation, however, was distinctly different. The gradualist law of 1871, which had been designed to settle the matter of slavery’s abolition, had freed very few to date, and its effects and potential over the years so far had been meager to the point of farce. Moreover, while it was extremely divisive insofar as the dominant political and socioeconomic elite of both parties had a vested interest in maintaining slavery and prolonging it as far as possible, the number of potential recruits for the measure in the cities could only continue to grow. Urban slaveholding was declining year after year: in

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1849, about 38 percent of Rio’s urban parishes were slaves; in 1872, less than 17 percent were. As Zephyr Frank has pointed out, few of the Brazilian whites, “whites,” or clearly Afro-Brazilians in the middle class or among the impoverished urban masses had a vested interest in slaveholding anymore.29 Finally, in the Eurocentric urban sector the contradiction between slavery and everything coveted in Civilization and Progress was obvious. For those Liberal reformists inclined to broader analyses, the destruction of slavery through an urban mass movement of reform might also lead to the other reforms and regenerated monarchy of which many dreamt, by bringing about mass participation in reformist politics and thereby challenging the socioeconomic and political bases of traditional politics. Urban middle-class professionals, bureaucrats, and military officers were particularly open to such possibilities, as we shall see.30 Even the urban factions in the small and effectively inconsequential Republican movement could support abolitionism. An offshoot of Liberal radicalism in 1870, the Republican Party was split between two main constituencies: the landed slaveholding plantocracy, largely in the western economic frontier of the Province of São Paulo, and members of the empire’s urban middle class. The planters of western São Paulo were an elite generally excluded from the upper ranges of the imperial state, which were dominated by those with life appointments (e.g., senators and councilors of state). Western paulista planters had come to wealth only after the 1860s, with the new reach of railroads into the paulista highlands. The old elites of the Northeast and Rio’s immediate hinterland had been working their way up into the commanding heights of the monarchy since the 1820s. The western paulistas resented being excluded, and some found that the idea of a republican, decentralized dispersal of power and state revenue made sense—although they would, of course, be averse to abolition. But the urban Republicans, while they agreed to exclude mention of abolition from the Republican manifesto in the interest of party unity, were often personally opposed to slavery, for the same reasons as their urban middle-class monarchist counterparts.31 In effect, the reformists of Rio may have been inspired by the Vintém Revolt and its consequences. They had good reason to mull over the mixed results of the Manifesto of 1869 and to single out abolition. It had promise in the same urban milieu of the revolt but had greater possibilities beyond that. It could appeal to the urban slaves themselves on up to a minority in the parliamentary elite. Furthermore, such a movement might well pave the way for a new political culture of popular mobilization with broader implications for the monarchy’s transformation into a modern nation-state.

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The Abolitionist Leadership

Most of the historiography on the Abolitionist movement’s leadership points to a few, mostly middle-class men in Rio who provided the movement with its direction, organization, and public identity. Here, we will introduce them in terms of their particular circumstances and then describe their actions up to mid-1880, when the political challenge of Abolition was first laid down in the Chamber of Deputies. Of course, this initial focus on leaders, is hardly meant to suggest that the movement was limited to such men and their class. Rebecca Bergstresser has already done a great deal of analysis of the hundreds of middle-class Abolitionists who supported and followed this leadership. In effect, that work, together with the previous, pioneering work of Emília Viotti da Costa, Robert Conrad, Robert Toplin, and Richard Graham, strengthened the assumption that the Abolitionist movement was an urban, middle-class endeavor. However, while that points to those who led and participated in many of the critical organizations and meetings, particularly in the movement’s first phase, it does little to help us to understand the mass AfroBrazilian mobilization that was crucial to the movement’s nature and success from early on.32 Indeed, while they identify the few Afro-Brazilians among the Abolitionist leadership, the classic studies on the Abolitionist movement (not including Bergstresser, who attempted an analysis of racial solidarity and identity, and their impact on the larger population in Rio), tend to ignore or discount the presence and participation of the Afro-Brazilian middle class and masses in the movement. That presence and participation, implicit in the earliest histories of the movement by contemporaries (e.g., Evaristo Moraes and Osorio Duque-Estrada), are central to the concerns of this study. Thus, in discussing the leadership, indispensable to the movement, we will also emphasize their successful appeal to the great mass of their Afro-Brazilian followers. The necessary work on the role of those in between, the urban, middle-class Abolitionists, has already been done, particularly by Bergstresser. This will be integrated into the narrative and analysis that follows as the pioneers have given it to us, fortified by this study’s fresh research and emphases.33 The movement’s principal organizer was André Pinto Rebouças, the son of a self-trained lawyer, Antônio Pereira Rebouças. The elder Rebouças was a former Liberal deputy from Bahia who had become a successful lawyer in Rio after midcentury. He and his wife, Carolina Pinto Rebouças, had three sons, of whom André was the eldest. Born in Bahia, André studied engineering in Rio after the family moved there; he continued his studies at the École de Ponts et Chausées in Paris, with his brother Antônio. Before

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returning to Brazil, André studied innovative examples of infrastructural engineering in England and the Netherlands. Upon his return to the empire, he began a professional career pursuing various aspects of coastal port work and railroads tapping the interior. He served in the army during the Paraguayan war, as well, where he worked with the count d’Eu, French consort of the emperor’s heir, imperial princess Isabel. Indeed, Rebouças’s family and education, as well as his professional service, meant that he met and made connections with the foremost statesmen, engineers, businessmen, and bankers of his day, particularly since his infrastructural projects generally involved concessions from the government, working relations with financiers and foreign engineers, and at times the support of key ministers as well as the emperor himself. In fact, the emperor’s father, Dom Pedro I, had been a patron of his own father, and Dom Pedro II, as he did with so many rising students in the better schools in Rio, first took an interest in Rebouças in the 1850s—in the classroom. Rebouças returned the favor, in a manner of speaking: he was later tutor to one of the emperor’s grandsons.34 The first Rebouças in Brazil, a Portuguese tailor, had married a freed woman; thus, André Pinto Rebouças’s father, Antônio Pereira Rebouças, was a mulato. André’s mother was the daughter of a white merchant; we do not know her mother’s race. André and his siblings, however, were unmistakably mulatos and were clearly perceived as such by others, something that affected his and at least one of his brothers’ professional and social relations at times. Except when in the United States, however, André rarely noted a professional problem in this regard; whenever he encountered enmity or opposition, he generally attributed it to an opposing clique of patrons and clients—a characteristic of his profession in Brazil. In terms of status issues, his father, as a once-prominent provincial statesman and political figure, had fought explicitly against any racial discrimination toward free AfroBrazilians. A sense of racial identity and solidarity can thus be assumed to have prevailed in the Rebouças household, although it stopped short of challenging slavery. For years, Antônio Pereira Rebouças’s successful legal practice accepted the established rights of slaveholders; indeed, the Rebouças family itself owned people who served in the home. Principles and practice do not always coincide, as the reader will have experienced as well, no doubt.35 Nonetheless, in 1868 André Rebouças moved further than his father had done and rejected slavery in principle. He may have been moved by a changing milieu in which the emperor and the cabinet had publicly challenged slavery for the first time, through the Speech from the Throne, in 1867, which introduced the necessity of gradualist abolition (the parliamentary origin of the 1871 law), as discussed earlier. Given the general political surprise and dismissive response to that speech, however, it seems useful to consider more personal reasons as well. Rebouças kept a meticulous diary, in which

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it is strongly suggested that he was moved to oppose slavery by deeply felt religious sentiments, which were pervasive in his private life. Rebouças noted his quiet study of the Gospels of St. John and St. Luke on Good Friday of 1868 and his consequent, quiet, personal decision to commit to abolition. On 15 June 1868, at one of the learned societies to which he belonged, he made a formal profession of his abolitionism. Furthermore, he stated his determination to devote himself to its advocacy for the rest of his life, describing it as the “Sacred Cause of Emancipation.” He apparently convinced his father as well: on 10 August 1868, his birthday, Antônio Pereira Rebouças freed the child of a woman whom he had already freed on the occasion of his wife’s death. On 24 June 1870, father and son freed their last remaining three captives.36 In this early period (1868–1871) these private and public acts were matched by Rebouças’s persistent lobbying on behalf of abolition. He spent time, particularly on Good Fridays or at critical political junctures associated with the emperor’s abolitionist project (the basis for the Free Womb Law of 1871), writing up abolitionist legislative projects of his own and sharing and discussing them and the emperor’s project with key political figures in his circles: the viscount de Lage (a member of the prestigious Imperial Instituto Fluminense de Agricultura), the viscount de Itaboraí (prime minister and minister of the treasury, 1868–1870), Mariano Procópio (a pioneering infrastructural entrepreneur and a deputy), the count d’Eu, and the viscount do Rio Branco.37 Rebouças’s entrepreneurial successes were petering out by 1875, closely linked to political intrigues involving patron-client relations. Under the Caxias cabinet (1875–1878), in which Cotegipe dominated, they foundered almost completely. Rebouças would always be associated with infrastructural projects (some dating back to his pioneering work of 1863–1875) for the rest of his career, but after 1875 his appointments at his alma mater, the Escola Politécnica; occasional articles in periodicals; and the returns on his investments and occasional consultations would be his main sources of income. While his diaries indicate a range of travel in and outside of Brazil and a polymath’s variety of studies and pastimes, by 1880 his frustrations with the impact of the established, politicized patron-client relations that so frequently checked the progress and reform to which he was committed had left him in despair. While there is no record of abolitionist activity on his part between 1871 and 1880, during 1880 events found him willing and able to answer the call when others raised the question again. He would prove invaluable and omnipresent after that call came. It came on 22 April 1880.38 On that day, Saraiva, the new prime minister, provided the Chamber with an account of his cabinet’s origins and its program, as was the custom. In that session, in response, Joaquim Nabuco raised the issue of slavery. This

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time, contrary to his speech the previous year, Nabuco emphasized abolition alone and as a reform suitable for inclusion in Saraiva’s program, given its Liberal antecedents. Martinho de Campos, a proud champion of slaveholding and chieftain of the Chamber’s Liberal majority, responded by condemning abolition as inopportune. On 18 May, the legislature’s first formal session, Nabuco stood up again, this time in response to Saraiva’s explicit rejection of an emancipation project Nabuco had submitted to the prime minister before the session. Saraiva felt compelled to respond to Nabuco and his project, and did so more definitively and directly. He described the idea as significant but economically threatening and inopportune. He reemphasized the priority of electoral reform instead and dismissed the issue of slavery as “a very grave question to resolve, upon which the administration does not now reflect.” Nabuco responded in a conciliatory speech in which he took the opportunity to outline his project, citing previous Liberal chieftains and proposing a gradual process of phased emancipation, ending slavery by 1890.39 As we may recall, Joaquim Nabuco was a son of José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo, the principal author of the Manifesto of 1869. As a councilor of state, Nabuco de Araújo was also one of those who had first debated, supported, and then helped prepare the legislative project that became the Law of the Free Womb (1871). Thus, his son’s position in 1879 as a Liberal reformist would seem unsurprising. Yet his position in 1880, as the stubborn champion of Abolitionism in the Chamber’s reformist faction is quite surprising—certainly political calculation, class, and status would argue against it.40 Aside from his offending the Liberal Party’s leadership and separating himself from the moderate majority, Nabuco’s family on his mother’s side, the Paes Barreto clan, was one of the oldest planter slaveholding oligarchies of Pernambuco, recently led by the marquis de Recife and related by blood and marriage to the province’s interwoven oligarchies in innumerable ways. His father’s family, while only established in Brazil since the eighteenth century, was adorned with at least one noble title and one senatorial seat. On both sides, then, Nabuco belonged solidly among the established, white, powerful, and wealthy. In fact, he had been raised on a slave plantation by his godmother; the small fortune she left him allowed him to indulge in his enduring passion for the literature and high culture of France and England, countries he toured after taking degrees at the empire’s most elite schools, where the ruling class customarily sent its brightest sons to prepare for a career in the imperial state. Nabuco entered diplomatic service in England and served there and in the United States briefly; left to his own tastes and ambitions at the time, he might have stayed abroad. While his father attempted to insert him into the Pernambuco delegation to the Centro Liberal in 1871 and to the Chamber in the elections of 1872 and 1876, Nabuco himself viewed politics then and thereafter as low, mean, and sterile.

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Significant reform, however, was different. As a law student and in the years immediately afterward, he had taken a serious interest in such reformism. With his political activities and as the author of a pamphlet encouraging the military to take a radical, reformist, interventionist role in the late 1860s, he had been an object of concern for the Itaboraí cabinet. He had also taken a personal interest in the plight of the slaves, writing a long attack on slavery, and he had pressed his father to move forward on the subject as the most glorious of reforms.41 Since 1871, however, like so many others, Nabuco had apparently considered the matter settled. The law was passed, and the Conservatives remained firmly in power for years; there seemed to be neither a reason nor an opportunity for further abolitionist reform. In fact, Nabuco only bowed to his family’s pressure that he stand for office when his father died in 1878: the Liberals were to return to power, and his time to carry on the family traditions had come. A high-placed Liberal chieftain in Pernambuco, a friend of his father’s, barely managed to succeed in fixing the election of the young man, as he was unknown in the province’s elite circles except for his family connections and his reputation as a dandy, a ladies’ man, and a littérateur in Rio (where he had been raised since the age of eight).42 Upon election, Nabuco wrote to another old friend of his father’s (and his protector), the Brazilian ambassador to Britain, the baron de Penedo. He expressed his dismay and disgust with his parliamentary prospects and the milieu, together with his ardent hopes of returning to London and his diplomatic career during the annual parliamentary intersession. But then, however, a series of contingencies apparently changed everything. First, there was the dismal moderation of Sinimbu and the sudden manifestation in the Vintém Revolt of the potential for popular mobilization around political reform. Second, there was his international, public success over 1879–1880 as a deputy in the Chamber, where he attacked the scandalous case of a British firm’s slaveholding in Brazil. Finally, there was Sinimbu’s fall and the possibility that Nabuco glimpsed in Saraiva’s opportunism. All of these seem to have persuaded him that there might be something worth fighting for in parliament. Perhaps the glorious reform of which he had once dreamt a decade before could be made to happen; the British slaveholding case was certainly a taste of such glory, after all. Moreover, for someone with no interest in a safe political career in the Liberal Party, so foolhardy an endeavor would not have been too troubling—and the prize was glorious enough to lay at the feet of his father’s shade and satisfying enough to sate the ambitions of his family for him. And so Nabuco decided to shuck off the vague, general reformist position Sodré and he had announced in 1879. Instead he sharpened his reformism to the lance point of Abolitionism and, as related previously, threw down the challenge, twice, at Saraiva’s feet. He

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recalled later that he thought Abolitionism might well take a generation to accomplish; success was by no means certain. It would seem that it was the glory of the struggle itself that appealed to him.43 Still, as we shall see, a good deal of that struggle would be carried out in the streets of Rio, not in parliament; it would require special talents. It is best to think of Rebouças as the movement’s organizer and Nabuco as its most celebrated public face and paladin. The third most important figure in the movement, José Carlos do Patrocínio, had the talents for the street, and is best understood as the movement’s charismatic popular spokesman. Patrocínio was born in Campos, center of the old sugar country in the Baixada Fluminense. His mother, Justina Maria do Espírito Santo, most likely a mulata, was made pregnant at twelve or thirteen by the planterpriest who owned her, João Carlos Monteiro, a man of mixed Indian and Portuguese blood himself. Justina Maria was freed and years later became a well-known quitandeira, a street vendor selling vegetables. Until he was thirteen, Patrocínio, known widely to be the priest’s son, lived with his mother in his father’s Campos residence or on his plantation, where his mother had probably been born. The priest was a European university graduate, a celebrated preacher, and a well-known Liberal, serving in the fluminense provincial assembly for many years.44 The relationship between Patrocínio’s father and mother cooled over the years as others took her place, but when he was a child, at least, some form of relationship existed between him and his father. Patrocínio was well educated and well treated in material terms. He took his mother’s part when she was displaced, however, and finally he left his father’s home at age fourteen. The priest arranged for a monthly stipend for a while as the boy went off to Rio to make a career. From 1868 to 1874, Patrocínio was a hospital worker and a tutor and studied medicine and pharmacy, taking his pharmacy diploma in 1874. However, without the capital to set up a shop, he was forced to accept help from a friend’s family. Both the friend and then the family had been impressed by his very evident capabilities; they took him in and made him tutor for the household’s younger children. It was something of a pattern: as he would disclose years later, at each step of his first years in Rio Patrocínio was repeatedly rescued through the patronage of men who had taken note of his gifts and helped him find ways to ensure his employment, room and board, and education. In the home of Emiliano Rosa de Sena, an army officer, Republican, and real estate speculator, where he tutored after 1874, Patrocínio found more than a home and employment: he found a patient and loving spouse. He fell in love with one of his patron’s daughters, Maria Henriqueta de Sena, and she returned his affections. Despite their difference in status (Maria Henriqueta was not only well to do

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but white) and her father’s initial reluctance to accept such an alliance, they would later wed. Indeed, later still, Sena and the rest of the family, already Republican, would join Patrocínio in the Abolitionist struggle.45 His involvement in the struggle came by way of political journalism. Patrocínio, like most of the small literate stratum of the time, was well read in the language and literature of Civilization, that is, the prose and poetry of contemporary France. He began publishing prose and poetry himself and had already published poetry by 1877. His verse attracted the attention of Ferreira de Araújo, the editor of one of the mass-readership dailies that had been established by the 1870s, the Gazeta de Noticias, which catered to popular reformism. Araújo not only hired Patrocínio to write a weekly crônica (a regular personal column) in verse but made him a reporter for the Chamber debates as well. By 1879, Patrocínio had moved on to a regular political crônica and the pseudonym he made famous, Proudhomme— apparently an homage to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (d. 1865), the celebrated French anarchist of the mid-nineteenth century.46 Unlike either Rebouças or Nabuco, Patrocínio was far more radical in regard to the monarchy. While the other two moved in its upper circles and were deeply attached to the regime, Patrocínio was a populist, a selfproclaimed republican, and an admirer of European socialism and positivism. Nonetheless, after Nabuco stood up for Abolitionism in 1880, Patrocínio not only took an immediate interest, he committed to Nabuco’s cause wholeheartedly; over the ensuing years, little else seemed to matter to him. According to his brother-in-law’s memoir, Patrocínio’s commitment had its roots in childhood, stemming originally from an incident in which Patrocínio had been reprimanded by his father for striking a domestic slave in a moment of irritation. After that, the boy reversed roles—he took the part of his father’s slaves, interfering in his father’s household and plantation. It was a phase that figured among the reasons for Patrocínio’s departure for Rio, where his abolitionism mixed with his other radical beliefs from the mid-1870s on. It is critical to note as well that later, his identification with the slaves took the remarkable form of his public self-identification as “negro”—despite his obvious higher status as a freeborn, educated mulato. While we cannot be sure of the first date of this public self-identification, it represents a unique, deeply personal revolt against the racialized social usages of his time and place. In a short time, this self-proclaimed negro became the chieftain of the young literati who roamed the fashionable heart of the cidade velha, self-consciously modeling themselves on their French Romantic predecessors, the self-styled boêmios (bohemians). Patrocínio led them all in the crusade against slavery; he became the movement’s exposed, beating heart, celebrated for his fiery journalism, passionate speeches, and radical conclaves.47

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In Patrocínio’s rhetoric at Abolitionist meetings and in his weekly columns, one contemporary noted that the Bible came first among his influences. What accounts for this, given his politics? Despite the radical influences that inspired him, could it be that his father’s faith and occupation took hold on the boy? Or given their more nurturing relationship, was the influence his mother’s? After all, both their names clearly suggest an attachment to the folk Catholicism we have observed in Afro-Brazilian religiosity. Justina Maria had the name of the Holy Spirit (Espírito Santo), whose cult was central to Afro-Brazilian public celebrations, while Patrocínio’s own name was a reference to his birth date, associated in fluminense practice with the patronage of the most Holy Virgin. Nor was his rhetorical attachment to Catholicism limited to references and metaphors. Although it remains unclear when he did so, Patrocínio’s links to the faith and practice of Catholicism were made formal in a most traditional manner among successful Rio Afro-Brazilians: he became a member of the prestigious Irmandade do Rosário, which has already appeared in this analysis as a key institution in traditional AfroBrazilian life and culture in the capital. This institution offered Patrocínio (initially an outsider to Rio) legitimacy and direct access to the Afro-Brazilian elite and masses in the old parishes of the port and cidade velha, Candelária, Santa Rita, Sacramento, Santana, and São Jose, and unsurprisingly, it played a role in the Abolitionist struggle that unfolded over the decade. From the newspaper offices where he worked over the years, all of them close to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict, he was well placed and prepared in more ways than one for the task at hand—the mobilization of Afro-Brazilian Rio.48 Two others central to that critical task must be mentioned here, not only because their work was crucial to such mobilization but because it has generally been forgotten. If they are not recovered here, this oblivion may continue and, with it, the loss of critical aspects of the Abolitionist movement in Rio. The better known of the two is Vicente Ferreira de Sousa. While his role in the movement fades from view after 1882, he was a central figure both in the initial Abolitionist organization and in the first phase of Abolitionist meetings, as well as, most significantly, the mobilization of organized labor on behalf of Abolitionism. Research on the origins of Rio’s organized labor and the linkage between it and the Abolitionist struggle is relatively recent and provocative, although one must admit that few labor organizations existed in the 1870s. One in particular stands out in regard to Abolitionism: the Association of Fluminense Typesetters (Associação Tipográfa Fluminense), which was both pioneering—it was formed in the 1850s—and politically conscious from birth. As a result of its political orientation, it and its members became involved in the beginnings of Abolitionism, greatly owing to the activism of Vicente de Sousa, who, like Sodré and Nabuco, attacked

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slavery as one of several targets for reform, in this case as early as 1879, in a conferência (public meeting).49 Vicente de Sousa, a Bahian mulato, took a degree in 1879 from one of the empire’s two distinguished medical academies, the one in Salvador, and then moved to Rio with his wife, Cacilda. With his office established a short distance from the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict, on Rua General Câmara, he quickly began working as a radical political organizer. A self-proclaimed socialist, he attacked slavery and aspects of the established parliamentary monarchy. In 1880 he apparently decided to commit to the new movement focused on Abolition as well; during July and August of that year, together with Rebouças, he helped organize the pioneering Associação Central Emancipadora. And on 25 July 1880, he gave the first of the conferências of the Abolitionist movement. Vicente de Sousa was clearly a leader and a link between fledgling labor organization and the new Abolitionist movement. He was indispensable and unique in setting up organizations in both movements and taking part as a leader and organizer of meetings and street demonstrations devoted to one or both causes. Regrettably, far too much concerning his role remains obscure, particularly after early, when he seems to have stepped away from Abolitionist leadership; we shall address that in Chapter 3.50 The name of the other figure critical in the analysis of Rio’s Abolitionist mass mobilization is almost unknown; he seems almost to have cultivated the oblivion that has shrouded his name and role. Yet he figured in the movement from beginning to end, taking up the slaves’ cause earlier than Rebouças, in the late 1860s, and serving Rio Branco in the struggle over the first abolitionist legislation of 1871. He was also close to all three of the top leaders of the movement, Rebouças, Nabuco, and Patrocínio, and an executive member of the Associação Central Emancipadora by 1882. Later, he was a founding member of the Confederação Abolicionista (1883). Yet one cannot find a word about him in most of the historiography and barely anything at all from his contemporaries; his name appears at most on lists of Abolitionists who, later on in the movement’s history, sheltered slaves in the fugitive slave settlements (quilombos) of Rio. We find his presence only here and there in the contemporary press, in the fine detail of the first movement histories, and especially at critical moments in Rebouças’s indispensable diaries.51 One suspects that this obscurity has everything to do with how he earned a living: he was a lesser bureaucrat in the imperial bureaucracy. Too public a role as an activist Abolitionist at the time might have meant the loss of his job; indeed, at one point later on it did. It might also have to do with his particular role in the movement. There is good and repeated, albeit indirect, evidence to indicate that, aside from his institutional positions in Abolitionist

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organizations, his setting up a quilombo at one point, and his working as a journalist at Patrocínio’s paper at another, he was the chief intermediary between Rebouças (in his role as the leadership’s key organizer) and the Afro-Brazilian masses, particularly in the parish of Santana—named for the sacred ground of Afro-Brazilian religiosity and culture, the Campo de Santana, and the parish where so much of what was later known as pequena África was located—where he worked. Indeed, this obscure Abolitionist not only lived at various addresses close to the Campo (settling finally on the Rua do Catumbi), he worked on very sacred ground indeed. He was a despachante (dispatcher) at the Almoxarifado (freight section) of the Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II Station—the train station built on the colonial site of the Chapel of Santana. His name was Miguel Antônio Dias.52 We may recall the discussion in Chapter 1 of two other people with the same name, intended at least in part to indicate patterns and problems of identity and social mobility among Rio’s Afro-Brazilians in the early and middle nineteenth century. While the Arquivo Nacional has records of several people with this name, only two had enough status in 1860–1880 to appear as well in the Almanack Laemmert, the indispensable record of institutions and the elite, professionals, and successful small businessmen and bureaucrats. The first Miguel Antônio Dias we discussed, the congo president, does not show up in the Almanack. We can only assume that, given the successful socioeconomic mobility demonstrated in his election and investments in the congo organization over which he presided, this omission was due to his retirement. It is the other two with this name who can be found in the Almanack, namely, the unlucky tinker and the Abolitionist dispatcher.53 Earlier, we have discussed the possibility that the congo president and the tinker might have been father and son. The congo president apparently died in 1864. The tinker lived on, at least into the 1870s. The facts suggested a pattern illustrative of socioeconomic and cultural shifts over the first two-thirds of the century, and were used that way in Chapter 1. If the older man, prominent in the congo nação, and linked to the Church of the Rosary, was a freedman or the son of one, he had risen dramatically by the 1840s or 1850s. His literacy and his position clearly indicate as much. At that time, his possible son and namesake, the tinker, might have taken over the business or branched out on his own and prospered briefly before his final business failure in the early 1860s, illustrating the post-1850 challenges for Afro-Brazilians attempting to build up status and mobility, with the collapse of the market for cheap slaves and the increasing difficulties posed by the new demands of Rio’s economic milieu. This second Miguel Antônio Dias’s own status and connections, however, may have survived for a little. At the very least, he lived on and he owned his own home into the 1870s.54

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In effect, both the congo president and the tinker were men successful enough to be literate and prominent in the middling ranks of Rio’s society. The first was devoted to the congo nation but failed in his confrontation with the imperial state in 1862. The second left no record of activism or politics at all. Indeed, as noted earlier, we cannot even establish his ethnicity. He happened to have the congo’s name and happened to live on a street strongly associated with Afro-Brazilian residence.55 However, if one takes up the plausible connections between the congo and the tinker, they suggest some intriguing possibilities concerning the third Miguel Antônio Dias, the dispatcher. We know for certain that his appointment to the bureaucracy dates from 1867. Such a position would have granted him both security and status; it would have been a boon to someone aspiring to middling respectability. In that year, Zacarias’s Progressive League cabinet, made up of former moderate Conservatives and Liberals, apparently used its patronage to benefit both. The celebrated poet (and later novelist) Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, for example, whose career was marked by Liberal political journalism in his youth, was only then appointed to help edit the Diário Oficial under Zacarias himself (who was both prime minister and minister of finance). Whether the third Miguel Antônio Dias was a Liberal or not is unclear, although his position on slavery and his personal connections suggest he was. It is clear, however, that he, too, was appointed by the same cabinet, albeit, to a far lowlier position under Manuel Dantas (Jerônimo Sodré’s father-in-law), the minister of agriculture and public works. It has been remarked that, for an Afro-Brazilian such as Machado de Assis or Dias to achieve a position in the imperial bureaucracy, several things were required that were very rare among the great mass of Afro-Brazilians: literacy, some degree of “whiteness” (a reference to middle- or upper-class status, bearing, and possibly mixed blood), and connections to the elite or respectable people in the middling reaches of society. Machado de Assis had a great deal to offer on all three counts by this time in his life: he was a wellknown poet and journalist, a mulato, and connected to the best literary and political circles of Rio, being personally acquainted with the prime minister himself. Perhaps the third Miguel Antônio Dias had something to offer as well. Perhaps he had grown up in the 1850s as the son of the tinker; we know he had enough money and leisure to get a reasonable education. We know he could write, given his career, his later journalism, and his correspondence with Rebouças and Nabuco. He also had the required “whiteness” (he was described as mulato by Rebouças). In terms of connections, on the other hand, we have no clear evidence before the late 1860s or 1870.56 The evidence from those years comes from Rebouças’s diary, where he notes that Dias intervened against the sexual exploitation of slaves and that

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he stepped forward to support Rio Branco’s abolitionist legislation in 1871. What intervention or support could a lowly dispatcher give? By about 1870, Dias had paid for Salvador de Mendonça, a rising Republican journalist and lawyer, to write up propaganda against the forced prostitution of slaves imported to Rio from the North and Northeast. In 1871, the case is less clear. There is no good evidence of a popular movement for the Law of the Free Womb. There is, however, evidence of subsidized propaganda in its support and of support from the galleries in the Senate for Rio Branco’s triumph. Could this have been the support to which Rebouças referred? Did Dias write or subsidize propaganda favoring the legislation? Did he recruit other middling Afro-Brazilians to give vociferous support to the prime minister for his triumph in the highly contested debates of the 1871 struggle? There is no definite record of either; all we have is a passing allusion to Dias’s support for Rio Branco at the time. Nonetheless, both sorts of support are possibilities, given the nature of Dias’s Abolitionist work in the 1880s, which involved both journalism and mobilization.57 Aside from reformist connections and a commitment to the slaves by the late 1860s, another issue concerning Dias’s background is the source of Dias’s devotion to the slaves’ cause. It was almost certainly not party affiliation: if anything, Dias was likely a reformist Liberal. He had been appointed by a progressista cabinet to a ministry headed up by a reformist Liberal and had collaborated with a Republican against slaves’ prostitution. Rio Branco himself was a Conservative, not a Liberal; thus, the attraction in 1871 must have been abolitionism itself. If Dias were a Liberal reformist, he might have overlooked partisan differences (as Rebouças and other abolitionists did in 1871 and in the 1880s) in favor of the reform. Still, the larger question remains: Why would a dispatcher commit to alleviating the plight of slave prostitutes and abolitionism? We have discussed the reasons for a lack of racial solidarity and identity before 1850, which had only begun dissipating by the 1860s, as the congo president’s organization (based upon congo, not Afro-Brazilian, identity) illustrates. There is no clear evidence in 1871 for a widely prevalent sense of Afro-Brazilian solidarity among Rio’s Afro-Brazilians. Although its potential was growing, as we have shown, there was no popular movement supporting it or any other clear, widespread, popular manifestation of racial solidarity. Indeed, as we explained in Chapter 1, Afro-Brazilians were traditionally divided, nação from nacão, slave from free, African from creole, negro from mulato. Why would an educated mulato, so precariously privileged as to obtain a bureaucratic appointment, risk so much in the early 1870s or 1880s to step forward toward Abolitionism?58 In 1891, more than twenty years after his first recorded steps toward the slaves, Dias himself spoke directly to the matter in a letter he wrote to Nabuco, thanking him “for all that you did in favor of my brother slaves in

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Brazil. Since I was very young, I linked myself to the interests of the slaves, defending them as I could, accompanying the few men of talent who defended them, and among these none exceeded or equaled Your Excellency.”59 The words are clear enough. However free and middling in status, Dias identified with the slaves as his brothers and wanted to defend their interests. While his sense of identity and solidarity with the slaves is explicit, however, there is no explanation for them except the implicit one of his own descent. Yet, if he were the son of a tinker and the grandson of a congo president, his possible motivations are more interesting still. His possible grandfather, whom he may have known as a child (assuming he was around twenty in 1867, he could have known the older man, who died in 1863), had risen to a position of prominence among congos. In 1862, however, he had failed to defend their interests, as congos, in the world of imperial legislation. His possible father, the tinker, who by the 1850s had achieved both education and business success as the head of a tinkering company, had seen his business fail by 1861. He nonetheless remained a property owner on into the 1870s, and if the dispatcher were in fact his son, had had enough money to ensure his son’s education. He may even have had the connections to obtain the requisite patronage for a lowly position in the imperial bureaucracy in 1867. The dispatcher, then, may have been brought up to admire the congo president, but he may have also learned from his defeat. In the world of imperial law, defended by Pimenta Bueno, congos, the sons of a “barbaric horde,” could not prevail as congos; they might, however, have a chance as Brazilian citizens. Moreover, an Afro-Brazilian two or three times removed from Africa might well have identified more strongly with the common experience of slavery and the struggle up from it so common among AfroBrazilians born in freedom around 1850. The dispatcher may have also seen, in the tinker’s fate and his own comparative success and security, the importance of professional status and of patron-client relations with “men of talent” to achieve success for oneself and others. Without connections, without a bureaucratic position, perhaps his education and his own potential would have been wasted—hence his capacity and willingness to ally himself with others, such as Salvador de Mendonça, the viscount do Rio Branco, Rebouças, Vicente de Sousa, Nabuco, and Patrocínio, in order to promote the interests of his “brother slaves.” Finally, we should take note of the sites where Miguel Antônio Dias lived and worked. Like the tinker and so many other Afro-Brazilians, he lived a short walking distance from the Campo de Santana. If he were the congo president’s grandson and known to be so, that also might mean something special in such a place, even with the slow process of creolization, it might mean prestige and the potential for leadership among congos and their descendants, a significant portion of the Bantu-speaking nações who formed

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Rio’s majority among Afro-Brazilians in the early nineteenth century. Dias’s workplace is also noteworthy. An Afro-Brazilian committed since youth to the fate of the slaves and possibly prominent among the great Afro-Brazilian masses of Santana parish owing to his name and descent, together with his socioeconomic standing as an educated mulato, could have sought no workplace more significant than the sacred ground where the Chapel of Santana had stood for generations.60 But even if the third Miguel Antônio Dias had nothing to do with either the congo president or the tinker, the position of the dispatcher among Abolitionists was clearly distinct and significant. As a successful Afro-Brazilian committed to abolition, his location and status in the parish of Santana were ideal for mass mobilization. He worked among the Afro-Brazilian masses and within walking distance to the cidade velha, the Campo de Santana, and the theater district, where so many Afro-Brazilians lived and worked and where all of the public meetings and demonstrations of the movement would take place. As for mobilizing the masses, it seems clear that this is what Dias must have done. In analyzing Rebouças’s diaries with regard to those half dozen or fewer men with whom Rebouças met in coordinating the movement’s public actions, the roles of these men are clear from their professions and their public respectability; they fit the pattern of urban, middle-class professionals that the historiography emphasizes as typical among the leadership. But this cannot explain the presence of the mulato dispatcher, who nevertheless is at the same key meetings and is involved with the organizations and their alliances, with the movement’s propaganda among the masses, with the movement’s demonstrations, marches, and other public actions. It is clear from Rebouças’s diaries that, particularly for critical public events, Dias was often there. It is also clear that by 1882 he had earned Rebouças’s personal trust. If the others at decisive meetings concerning tactics and strategy, being professionals with skills and status useful to the organization, prestige, connections, and propaganda of the movement, had something obvious to offer, what did Dias bring to the table? He brought something unique, namely, the connections among the masses basic to mobilization among them. His position in Rio’s racialized, hierarchical society allowed him to reach down to the popular masses as someone who knew them, lived among them, and may well have come from them. Vicente de Sousa and Patrocínio had something of this as well, of course, if only by virtue of color and the contacts their activism brought. Yet among these three mulatos Dias stood apart. The other two mobilized the masses as public speakers and activists with special organizational links: Vicente de Sousa was a labor organizer; Patrocínio, a charismatic journalist and speaker with a link to the Irmandade do Rosário.

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While both would have been of higher status than Dias, given their professional degrees and status, this would also have implied a class distinction, a status apart from the masses. Dias was closer to the masses because of the very lack of such status; he was more part and parcel of Rio’s Afro-Brazilian world. Patrocínio and Vicente de Sousa came to Rio as outsiders, born and raised in Campos and Salvador. Dias was far closer to the city and to the ways of its streets. Even if we are wrong about Dias’s descent (which would have given him two generations or more of depth in Rio), we do know that he had been committed to the slaves as an activist living in the Campo de Santana area for years—for about a decade before either of the other two focused on it. He had lived, he had worked, and he had risen among the Afro-Brazilian masses in the Santana area since at least 1868. He must have known them, and they, him, since his youth. Although Patrocínio’s and Vicente de Sousa’s contributions to mobilizing the masses are well known, Dias’s contribution has been almost completely obscured. It only glitters in the Almanack Laemmert, around the edges of private records, and from time to time in an occasional, passing mention in a periodical. One may conclude, then, that Dias’s role in the movement’s inmost circles and the very silence and oblivion surrounding it suggest both his importance and the nature of his activism. He must have been the movement’s quiet, direct connection to those who, like Dias himself, moved in the obscure world of Rio’s Afro-Brazilian poor. He had credibility there because he was of that world, the origin of so much in the city’s past and future, the well from which the Abolitionist movement drew the mass participation critical for success. Dias must have reached out to them through familiar conversations and long-established contacts in the neighborhoods in which he had lived, on the streets where he walked, and in the workplace where he made his living.61

Marginalization, Mobilization, and Parliamentary Defeat The Struggle with Saraiva

Nabuco’s challenge to the new Liberal administration of Saraiva has already been discussed. Twice, at the legislature’s beginning in 1880, Nabuco had asked Saraiva to take up abolitionist reform, and twice he had been refused. On 24 May, less than a week after the second rebuff, Nabuco formally obtained Chamber permission to present his project, a direct challenge to the cabinet and party leadership in the Chamber. All of this parliamentary activity had begun to create a stir. On 21 May, Rebouças, apparently galvanized, began his work on propaganda. Then he met with Nabuco, noting on 9 July an alliance with the deputy. Nor was Rebouças alone; the impact of Nabuco’s parliamentary Abolitionism in May materialized rapidly in and out

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of the Chamber far more broadly. As early as 15 June, the Anglo-American biweekly, the Rio News, called for immediate abolition and referred to an “abolitionist party.”62 On 24 July, Carlos Gomes, the celebrated Brazilian opera composer and a mulato, friend of Rebouças, and ardent abolitionist, was the subject of an Abolitionist cultural event at the Teatro Imperial. It combined music, an homage to the composer by organizations from the Escola Politécnica, the Academia de Medicina, the São Paulo Academia do Direito, and Rio’s Escola de Belas Artes—in effect, a sampling of the elite institutions concerned with the empire’s Civilization and Progress—and Abolitionist speeches, capped by the formal emancipation of a few slaves. This combination of high culture and Abolitionism in a theater event, generally referred to as a conferência, would be typical of the movement in Rio, particularly in its first phase. On the next day, 25 July, the pattern was set. The fledgling Associação Central Emancipadora hosted the first official Abolitionist conferência, featuring Vicente de Sousa, who, speaking for the association, thus initiated a series of such conferências at the Teatro São Luís. They would generally combine features of the first two conferências: cultural performances (usually musical performances and poetry recitation) and a series of Abolitionist speeches by the best orators of Rio’s reformist circles, from Liberals to Republicans. Significantly, these were aimed not only at the middle class or the elite; free entry “to the people” was proclaimed.63 Although Rebouças’s published diary is not explicit on the issue, it is clear that much of this extraparliamentary response to Nabuco’s speeches in May was not spontaneous. As mentioned previously, Rebouças noted the beginning of his active collaboration with Nabuco on 9 July; also on 9 July, he recorded that he had written an article for the Jornal do Commercio (the empire’s most widely read daily, effectively the journal of record) on Carlos Gomes and “emancipation.” On 22 July, he began publishing Abolitionist propaganda with the Gazeta da Tarde (then under Ferreira de Menezes). On 2 August, Rebouças also, behind the scenes, co-organized (with Vicente de Sousa) the Associação Central Emancipadora, which began the movement’s sustained series of public meetings and popular mobilization. In sum, between late May and early August, Rebouças became the link between, on the one hand, elite parliamentary abolitionism and its leader, Nabuco, and, on the other hand, the movement in the streets, marked by propaganda in important periodicals and, at least as important, the first movement organization designed to mobilize the public. The Associação Central Emancipadora’s first conferência series featured such radicals as Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, and the Republicans Lopes Trovão and Ubaldino do Amaral, as well as such establishment speakers as Nicolau Moreira. Moreira, a member of numerous scientific and academic

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societies in Rio, was also a high officer of the Associação Central Emancipadora, along with Vicente de Sousa and José Maria do Amaral. The latter was a diplomat, poet, and Liberal journalist, founder of the Liberal Party’s Correio Mercantil and closely linked to Francisco Otaviano (poet, senator, the greatest Liberal journalist of his time, and an eminent statesman of the century’s third quarter). The contemporary record does not make it clear how Miguel Antônio Dias first emerged among the Abolitionists, but Rebouças later noted that his activism in the movement dated from 1880; the Associação Central Emancipadora records his presence as its second treasurer from 1881 or 1882 to 1884.64 The organizational strategy of the Abolitionist leadership becomes clearer still in August and September 1880. On 24 August, two months after he had been granted permission to introduce an Abolitionist project, Nabuco stood up once again in the Chamber and asked for its urgent consideration. Press support was strong, but the Saraiva cabinet made sure that the Chamber’s majority effectively blocked him on 26 August 1880 through parliamentary maneuver. Again, Nabuco stood up, this time on 30 August, and disclosed the cabinet’s parliamentary tricks. What he said afterward was an inspiration to many who heard it then or read it in the Jornal do Commercio the next day.65 Indeed, years later, Miguel Antônio Dias wrote to Nabuco that he “still recalled that sublime declaration,” and quoted him: In the question of emancipation . . . in the conviction that it is necessary to move beyond the Law of 28 September [1871], I would separate myself, not only from the cabinet, not only from the Liberal Party, not only from public opinion and the widespread plotting of the nation, but from all and everything! On this point, I make an alliance with the future. Every year will be a victory for our ideas.66

In the vote that followed on 30 August regarding Nabuco’s petition for the urgent consideration of his project, the numbers were indicative of the parliamentary challenge: sixteen supported urgency, seventy-seven did not. Saraiva made his opposition clear again on 2 September. Nabuco responded on 4 September, putting the project into the public record, with a speech summarizing his position, a position generally accepted by the movement until 1883, when Nabuco himself called for a more radical one. He proposed a phased transition to complete the abolition of slavery over ten years, with rural slaves being raised to the status of servos da gleba (serfs), an end to the interprovincial slave trade, various taxes and restrictions on urban and domestic slavery, and taxes on slaves to pay for the 1871 emancipation fund. The speech seems implicitly but clearly fashioned to construct a bridge between the parliamentary struggle and the public one emerging in the streets. Indeed, on 6 September, Patrocínio, writing in the Gazeta de Noticias, attacked the cabinet’s actions and defended the justice of the new

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cause against the interests of the planters and on behalf of society in general. Having clearly lost the first battle in the Chamber, Nabuco was now moving into the more public one outside its doors, where his allies had been preparing the ground.67 Organization, the Press, and the Initial Mobilization

On 7 September, Nabuco founded the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, to be organized on 28 September as the preeminent Abolitionist organization. That it was not seen as rivaling the Associação Central Emancipadora is clear from its founding and supporting membership. As the Associação itself would proudly note in introducing conferência speakers later on, Associação and Sociedade leadership and founding members were often the same or connected. Sociedade members included Joaquim Francisco Alves Branco Muniz Barreto (Liberal editor of the Correio Mercantil, owned by the president of the Associação Central Emancipadora, Amaral), Nicolau Moreira, Vicente de Sousa, Patrocínio, and, of course, Rebouças. In effect, both organizations allied reformists from the Liberal establishment with more radical activists from the new Abolitionist press and even the Republicans.68 In both the press coverage of these two organizations and their own self-coverage, there would also be an enduring aspect, characteristic of the movement. While men such as Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, and Ubaldino do Amaral, self-proclaimed Republicans, may have joined the movement at least partly to take advantage of the opportunity to destabilize the monarchy in favor of a different regime, Nabuco and Rebouças, the movement’s principal leaders and strategists from the beginning, saw the movement and abolition itself as the cutting edge for transformative reformism from within the monarchy. They wanted change without revolution. Both of Nabuco’s major speeches in the Chamber, on 22 April and 4 September, emphasized past Liberal Party positions and chieftains, gradualism, and economic practicality. Nabuco recognized cabinet opposition but sought to press the cabinet forward to collaboration by increasing pressure on the prime minister in and outside of parliament. It is indicative of this interest in reform within the established order (so as to transform that order) that Nabuco (in parliament and in the Sociedade’s propaganda) reached out publicly to Saraiva; indeed, he would do so repeatedly over the years, albeit privately. He seems to have been counting on Saraiva’s pragmatism, his political savoir faire, and the emperor’s confidence in the man. It is also indicative of this reformism that both organizations emphasized not only establishment figures among their leaders but the gentility of those who attended Associação

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conferências. While “the people” were encouraged by way of free admission to come, all of the seats (if the Gazeta da Tarde reports are to be believed) were taken by “ladies” and “gentlemen.” Indeed, the presence of senhoras was emphasized, doubtless to suggest the nonviolent, moral respectability of the movement. The point was not to frighten the monarchy’s elite but to press them—to convince them of the movement’s identity with Civilization and Progress, its crusading determination, and its abiding commitment to public political pressure.69 In effect, the Associação carried out the work of ongoing propaganda and public mobilization in Rio through confêrencias and press coverage (generally written up by Rebouças), while the Sociedade carried out the work of national leadership, as evinced by its bringing together various Abolitionist leaders, its emphasis on movement strategy, and Nabuco’s leadership. We do not find in the written record the Sociedade promoting any public events aside from the banquet to be discussed below. Both organizations’ efforts were aided not only by notices in the Jornal do Commercio but by the active support of allies in the press, particularly the Rio News, the Gazeta da Tarde, the Gazeta de Noticias, and the Revista Illustrada (the superbly illustrated biweekly of the reformist immigrant Angelo Agostini).70 Here we should make explicit what is implicit above: rather than being a divided movement with two distinct leaders (one, the established parliamentary forces led by the privileged, white Nabuco, and the other, the more radical street movement, led by the bastard journalist, the mulato Patrocínio), there was a single Abolitionist movement, led by an alliance of activists, in which Nabuco held primacy. This was recognized by both the movement’s leaders and their contemporaries. While there would be differences between the two wings in terms of style and action, their goals were the same. As these goals changed over the years, their unity remained constant; likewise, as circumstances changed, ideas about strategy and tactics would also change, but not the essential solidarity of the movement. And even though Nabuco and Patrocínio would be criticized privately by one another or by their close associates over the years, in public the two supported one another. Nabuco remained the Abolitionists’ chief leader and representative to the nation and the world, just as Patrocínio remained its fiery champion among the masses and the self-proclaimed representative of the captives. Finally, Rebouças’s quiet, pivotal role was understood by both of his colleagues; Nabuco, in particular, spoke publicly of it at the time and wrote publicly of it afterward. In effect, one of Rebouças’s chief roles would be to bridge the gap between the other two men and to coordinate the distinct roles and approaches that each of his colleagues epitomized, in order to achieve their common goals.71 Bridging the gaps within Rio’s divided society was another critical task of the movement. We have already discussed the nature and the evolution

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of Rio’s racialized hierarchy, focusing on the growing potential for AfroBrazilian identity across both status and ethnic and religious lines. Now we must address to what extent these issues surfaced in the initial stage of the movement. We have mentioned issues of class earlier in this chapter. Rebouças’s descriptions of the conferências, while noting free admission for “the people,” are generally infused with cultural references and audience descriptions that suggest the movement’s initially genteel nature. The Teatro São Luís, on the Rua dos Teatros, between the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and the Largo da Constituição, is inevitably described as “elegant,” and the musical program and performers are described with care as the musicians worked their way through Gottschalk, Gounod, and Verdi. The audience consists of “many ladies in the boxes and, everywhere, distinguished gentlemen.” Given the racialized assumptions about social status, we might assume an audience of middle- or upper-class whites. Indeed, in his diary for 10 March 1882, Rebouças noted in frustration, “Only 3 mulatos in the Abolitionist Party. It is my greatest suffering!” As we have already noted, other historians have described the Abolitionist movement as primarily urban, white, and middle class, along with comments suggesting or arguing a lack of Afro-Brazilian racial solidarity in Abolitionist mobilization. We even find Nabuco, in 1886, bemoaning the absence of the mass of “negroes” supporting the movement.72 Yet very early on, there is in the history of the movement’s mobilization an explicit demonstration of the significant role of Afro-Brazilians among those whom the Abolitionist leaders were successfully striving to recruit. At the Teatro São Luís on 30 January 1881, Patrocínio publicly addressed a published attack on the Abolitionists, an attack focusing on the fact, apparently self-evident, that Abolitionists “were largely of African descent.” Patrocínio responded: But, gentlemen, could there be anything more holy and more noble than that we, of the African race, are working, day and night, to free our brothers from the barbarous shackles of captivity. (General applause.) What would be repugnant, what would be infamous, what would be below all possible description, is if we, out of fear, or from any other vile sentiment, cowardly and selfish, were not in the vanguard, among the first combatants, ready for everything, to conquer or die, for the most sacred of causes: a cause that is all ours by blood, by brain, and by heart. (Acclamations. Repeated applause.)73

How, then, to reconcile this explicit claim of (and call for) the presence of Afro-Brazilians in the movement and the statements of Rebouças and Nabuco, or the implicit assumptions we might have about the early Abolitionists’ status and race, given the contemporary descriptions of the theater and the audience on that night?

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First, we can assume that Rebouças’s diary comment about the three mulatos in the “Abolitionist Party” referred to the leadership of the movement, not to the movement as a whole. He was, after all, the person who copied and saw to the publication of Patrocínio’s statement above; he clearly shared Patrocínio’s views on the race of most of those in the movement. Thus we can assume that Rebouças was referring not to the movement but to its leadership, and probably meant to indicate himself, Patrocínio, and Vicente de Sousa as the three mulatos (Miguel Antônio Dias, although an activist by 1880, had not yet achieved a leadership position by early 1881). At the time, the word “party” could be and was used, in both Portuguese and English, in reference to the prominent people who supported a political position—as, for example, in the mid-1880 Rio News comment, quoted above, about an “abolitionist party,” clearly referring only to Nabuco and his supporters in the Chamber. Second, we should remind ourselves of Emília Viotti da Costa’s useful discussion of “racial etiquette” in nineteenth-century Brazil. In public discourse, to allude directly to the Afro-Brazilian origins of someone deemed respectable was unacceptable. When Rebouças describes the Abolitionist audience as made up of ladies and gentlemen, he is not assuming a white middle-class and elite audience—if anyone is assuming as much, it is we. Rebouças is simply treating them with respect. Patrocínio, self-identifying as Afro-Brazilian at the same time as he made the speech and striving (successfully) to make a critical political point about self-identification and racial solidarity, could and did break the usual etiquette; he not only got away with it, he was wildly applauded by others who apparently shared his sentiments. In short, given what Patrocínio said to and about that same audience and their enthusiastic reception of his points, many or most of them must have been Afro-Brazilians, Afro-Brazilians who had embraced Abolitionism (as Miguel Antônio Dias and Patrocínio did) as a moral act of racial identity and racial solidarity. Furthermore, Rebouças and Patrocínio must have been confident that such a message made sense in their endeavor to strengthen and increase the much wider support and readership of Abolitionists or potential Abolitionists, or they would not have printed it. The point was mobilization: they must have assumed a largely Afro-Brazilian readership. If they had assumed a largely white readership, such propaganda would have made little sense. Third, when Nabuco referred to the lack of “negro” support for the movement in the Brazilian election of 1886, he was writing to a British abolitionist, explicitly contrasting African-American support for abolition in the United States and its basis in a widespread sense of racial identity and racial solidarity among African Americans, with the Brazilian situation, where these were lacking. However, it is one thing to say that most

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Afro-Brazilians did not share these values and participate in the movement, and another to say that many or most of the Abolitionists were precisely the Afro-Brazilians who did share them. Doubtless both were true: most of the Afro-Brazilian middle class and working masses did stay home, but most of those who did not stay home were apparently Afro-Brazilians who shared those values, as did Rebouças, Patrocínio, and Miguel Antônio Dias. This parallels an argument that can be made about the urban middle-class basis for Abolitionism, common in the historiography: no one argues that most of the urban middle class joined the movement, but one can argue (correctly) that most of the leadership was from the urban middle class.74 Finally, certain aspects of the early movement’s rhetoric should be emphasized, for they are both telling and abiding. Even in the short quotations given so far, the bases of the Abolitionist appeal are clear. Two of the most celebrated orators of the movement, Nabuco and Patrocínio, emphasized a unique moral commitment, one linked to Civilization and Progress and the future. Patrocínio’s language also suggests the sacralization of the cause, as both holy and as grounded in Afro-Brazilian solidarity. The moral and religious appeal speaks across class and party lines, just as the appeal against barbarism and to the future speaks to the larger values of Civilization and Progress—the values of urban middle-class and elite whites and Afro-Brazilians in the increasingly Eurocentric port city at the nineteenth century’s end.75 Initial Successes, Electoral Reform, the Election of 1881, and the Movement’s Prospects

The formal inauguration of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão took place on the date of the 1871 Free Womb Law—28 September—and an official periodical, Abolicionista, and office were set up over October 1880. Far more important to the movement and its premier organization was Nabuco’s first successful international propaganda coup. In 1878–1879, his first year in the Chamber, Nabuco had cultivated a relationship with Henry Washington Hilliard, the United States minister to Brazil in Rio, a former Southern congressman and Confederate general. Hilliard had become a convinced supporter of United States emancipation and its impact on the South after the war, something clear in his conversations and correspondence with Nabuco. In a tactic that would characterize his actions in the years to come, Nabuco sought North Atlantic public support to reinforce the movement’s credibility and support in Brazil as a force allied with Civilization and Progress. Hilliard was an especially welcome ally, not only in this regard but because, given his background, he could also undercut the established

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Brazilian argument that slavery was economically indispensable to the empire. Hilliard argued that the South had not only survived emancipation, it had flourished. Nabuco arranged for his correspondence with Hilliard to be published in the prestigious Jornal do Commercio on 31 October 1880. On 20 November, this was followed by a Sociedade banquet honoring Hilliard and dominated by speeches from key Abolitionists, ranging from radicals to establishment reformists. The latter made explicit efforts to link the banquet, the movement, and Saraiva’s cabinet. Again, as in May and September, it was a clear attempt to convince the moderate Liberal prime minister and the Liberal majority that Abolitionism was a sensible choice for accommodation and inclusion in the cabinet’s goals, as well as an implicit attempt to demonstrate the ongoing public pressure the movement threatened. These gestures were fruitless, however; on 25 November, the banquet was attacked as foreign intervention in the Chamber, and Saraiva felt compelled to reinforce his stance against any support.76 Others went further; the assemblies of the provinces dominating the economy, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, seeing the threat that the movement already posed, passed prohibitive taxation on the interprovincial slave trade in December 1880 and January 1881. This was not, as some Abolitionists claimed in 1881, a victory for the movement. It resulted from slaveholders’ determination to avoid the logical political result of the demographic shift of slaveholding from the declining northeastern economy to the flourishing southeastern one. They made it clear that they were working to keep the Northeast a slaveholding region, to buttress and maintain a unified slaveholding front against Abolitionism in the Chamber, where the Northeast, however great its economic decline, still held a substantial portion of the votes. The slaveholders’ statesmen had, indeed, learned something from the history of the United States’ South, but not the lesson that Hilliard and the Sociedade had wanted to teach.77 Still, by 1881 the gains of the Abolitionist movement were evident. The movement was organized and increasingly reported, and constituencies among various academic and professional as well as popular groups were organizing in Rio, including a Sociedade Acadêmica de Emancipação in the Escola Militar (August 1880). Nor was Abolitionist organization limited to the imperial capital. A Clube Abolicionista was founded in Recife on 11 August 1880, the Sociedade Cearense Libertadora in Fortaleza on 8 December 1880, and the Sociedade Libertadora Bahiana in Salvador in 1883. While abolitionist societies in various provinces can be traced back to the 1850s in Brazil, especially in the liberal and radical aftermath of the 1868 crisis (particularly in São Paulo and Bahia), these were generally limited in

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their recruitment and impact, and ephemeral. The growth and success of Abolitionism in Rio (the imperial center, after all) changed this. Rio’s movement brought leadership and inspiration to Abolitionism throughout Brazil, something recognized as early as 5 January 1881 by the Rio News, which lauded the importance of the “abolitionist party” in and out of the Chamber and its successful impact in terms of propaganda throughout the empire. Still, one doubts that Saraiva had anything but frustrated contempt for the movement’s impact. Besides, he may have had other things on his mind.78 The parliamentary session in Rio generally took place from early May to the onset of the season of waters, around September or so, when tropical rains and consequent flooding made so many things impractical. An extraordinary session of the Chamber had been held nonetheless, from October 1880 to 10 January 1881, with the purpose of resolving the electoral reform issue. This was finally accomplished on 9 January 1881, and it was something of a triumph for Saraiva. The issue of electoral reform, which has already been discussed at some length, had been a traditional issue for the more ideological, radical factions of both major parties in response to the emperor’s perennial interventionism. The electoral reform of 1856, imposed by a cabinet thoroughly dominated by the emperor, was widely seen as amplifying that interventionism, since it undercut the electoral role of both parties at the provincial level and expanded that of the emperor’s cabinet. As early as 1847, in response to the emperor’s interventionism, the party from which the Conservatives evolved, the Party of Order, had called for electoral reform. The Conservatives had done so again in the late 1860s and 1871 in response to post-1856 politics, while the Liberal reformists had made it one of the five great reforms of their Manifesto of 1869.79 In both cases, the goal was to enhance the representative character and thus the legitimacy of the Chamber in the hope of restoring the balance of power of both the Constitution of 1824 and the parliamentary practice that had evolved from 1826 to 1840.80 In both parties, the radical minority called for a direct election, as opposed to the indirect electoral process set up in 1824 and modified in the 1856 reform. In both parties, similarly, the majority of deputies agreed upon the need for increasing the barriers to mass participation; in effect, the majority of the elite wanted a reform that simply did away with the threat and complications of broader participation. In the end, then, despite the more democratic ideas of the Liberal reformists, the only reform that could secure majority support from both parties in the Chamber was a direct vote by an electorate limited by higher property-owning requirements and, most important, a literacy requirement. The most recent analysis concludes that this reduced the electorate from roughly one million to about a hundred thousand (in a population of about ten million). Granted, under the previous

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system popular participation had been pervasively corrupted by the clear and recognized influence of the cabinet in collusion with their partisan local political chieftains. Nonetheless, at least in the greater port cities, there had been a significant, growing democratization of the vote; the post-1850 elections showed the rising political independence of the urban middle class and working poor. Indeed, before the 1881 reform, the property-owning requirements were quite low, such that even the more successful freedmen and others of the working poor could vote. The 1881 reform directly undercut all of that.81 Saraiva tried to make the first election after the reform of January 1881 a vindication of his own intent and the reform’s merit by stating publicly that there would be none of the usual cabinet fixing in the elections to come. By stating this in February, he thus gave both parties ample time to organize their support before the 31 October vote.82 The Abolitionists, of course, must have realized the significance and challenge of the pro-elite reform and elections for their chances of election to parliament. Even the Rio News, their ally, implicitly recognized the Abolitionists’ long odds, describing the nation’s general lack of concern with the “sham” of 1871 and the relative political isolation of the “small band of abolitionists” from an indifferent people. Accordingly, Abolitionist propaganda and mobilization in the streets increased over 1881. By late January, in the Province of Ceará, Abolitionists took action to suppress further slave trade between their province and the southeastern region—the first step in a vanguard position they took up in the national struggle and one closely studied and trumpeted in Rio, where any such advance was played up. Abolitionist propaganda and public mobilization continued in Rio, with frequent conferências over the course of 1881, particularly the first six months, and the continued organization of various Abolitionist groups went on, presided over by Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, and Nicolau Moreira.83 The movement advanced dramatically with the acquisition of what became, in effect, its most powerful public voice. On 10 July 1881, Patrocínio, who had left the Gazeta de Noticias, bought the Gazeta da Tarde, founded by José Ferreira de Menezes, a like-minded mulato reformist, who had just died; he was backed financially by his father-in-law, Emiliano Rosa de Sena. The office was on the Rua do Uruguiana, the street of the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. Abolitionism was the Gazeta da Tarde’s great cause; in time, its offices became the movement’s headquarters in Rio.84 This new position of the Gazeta is visible in its role in the conferências of the movement, as well as the birth of new Abolitionist organizations, and the two activities were often combined. One movement veteran, Osorio Duque-Estrada, recalling the era of such organizing in 1881–1883, describes how, after a modest sum was donated by Abolitionist recruits, a standard

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was made, a conferência scheduled for the next Sunday, and a public procession organized from the Gazeta da Tarde offices on the Rua Uruguiana to the Recréio Dramático on the Rua Espírito Santo, near the Largo da Constituição. Throughout Duque-Estrada’s account of public organizing, it is important to note that, however small the number of people mobilized, they included the Gazeta’s staff (members of the middle class) and a group from the popular masses, both categories presumably made up partly or mostly of Afro-Brazilians. The point is clear in his description: “The German Band . . . played at the door of the Gazeta at 10 in the morning. The people gathered.” He goes on to write that Patrocínio and João Clapp (a local shop owner who had by now emerged as an untiring Abolitionist organizer) chose among the people [os populares] one who was the best dressed and entrusted the standard to him. The procession was organized, with the band at the front, the journalists after, and then the standard accompanied by a wave of the masses [onda popular], all going on to the Recréio Dramáctico theater. . . . They stopped at the door, where Patrocínio had already placed a committee of genteel maidens [gentis senhoritas] dressed in white, with a ribbon in Brazilian colors at the neck, ready with greetings. Once the band and the committee had entered, the people went in and deposited their contributions in silver, paper or nickel, coming up with a sum often superior to 800 mil-réis [about US$400].85

All of this, he tells us, was followed by a formal presentation of the new Abolitionist organization’s directors, short speeches, and then the musical or dramatic entertainment.86 In this description, the secularized modeling on Afro-Brazilian irmandades’ public ceremonials is transparent in the standard, the music, the procession, the mass meeting, and the musical or dramatic finale. The relative poverty of most or many of the participants is indicated by the references to populares and povo, the choice for standard-bearer, the sum of the contributions, and the reference to an onda popular. Finally, at least some of the names of the organizations thus set up in this early phase are also significant. Among those set up in 1881–1883, Duque-Estrada lists seventeen, four of which are more clearly middle class, professional, or academic, while a number of others clearly are not: the Clube dos Libertos de Niterói, Clube Abolicionista Gutenberg, Clube Abolicionista dos Empregados do Comércio, Clube Caixa Emancipadora José do Patrocínio, and Clube Caixa Emancipadora Vicente de Souza. The first was a freedmen’s organization; the last four refer to the working poor: typesetters, commercial employees, those linked to the Irmandade do Rosário, and Vicente de Sousa’s organized workers. The socioeconomic or racial attributes of the other Abolitionist organizations that he lists are unclear. They are named after Abolitionist leaders or refer to the

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provincial origins of the members (Ceará, Pernambuco, Espírito Santo, Rio Grande do Sul). The ongoing mobilization and propaganda in Rio during this era took place under the direction of Rebouças and Patrocínio, with the support of others such as Nicoláu Moreira, João Clapp, Vicente de Sousa, and presumably the discreet Miguel Antônio Dias.87 As suggested earlier, however, popular mobilization hardly enhanced electoral prospects, especially given the elitist reform of 1881. Nabuco’s case is illustrative. In mid- and late 1879, before committing to Abolitionism, Nabuco had confided to the baron de Penedo, his London protector, his intention to return to Europe after the Chamber’s adjournment. If new elections occurred after the presumed electoral reform, they were no concern of Nabuco’s. The years under Sinimbu had clearly confirmed his distaste for a political career, and he happily contemplated a return to diplomacy instead. However, the correspondence changes markedly by May 1880; after his first steps in the Abolitionist movement and despite his marginalization in the Chamber, he confides that he may yet linger in politics. By late 1880, he does in fact return to Europe, but it is now as the movement’s representative and ambassador, departing as such in late December 1880 and returning in May 1881. After public triumphs in Portugal and Spain, he proclaimed to Penedo, “Today I am a man of one idea, still no fanatic or missionary, but a soldier steady at his post.”88 During his time in Europe, his Abolitionist activities were reported avidly by the Gazeta da Tarde and the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão. He was welcomed by the Abolitionists of Portugal and Spain in their parliaments in the first two months of 1881 and given the opportunity to address the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London that March. Upon his return to Rio in May, he was greeted by Patrocínio’s Gazeta da Tarde as a conquering hero and the leading figure of the Abolitionists. His reception at the port was followed by a banquet at the prestigious Hotel dos Estrangeiros, in Flamengo, one of the fashionable districts south of Glória.89 Nabuco decided that his best chances for reelection in October 1881 lay in Rio rather than Recife—doubtless a realistic appraisal of how unappetizing his Abolitionism was among moderate Liberals in Pernambuco. His electoral campaign was organized on the prestigious Rua do Ouvidor in the cidade velha, in August. Nonetheless, his correspondence from midyear on assumes only the worst about his electoral prospects after the 1881 reform: even if he were to be elected, he asks for Penedo’s protection and advice about establishing a career in London. Without a personal fortune, and politically and personally incapable of getting or accepting a political sinecure, Nabuco dreamt of earning enough in London as a journalist with the Jornal do Commercio and as a lawyer to be financially and politically independent. If he should win, he proposes to Penedo that he live in London

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during the annual parliamentary intersessions. His repeated analyses over the months convinced him that his election was increasingly doubtful. On 1 October, he confirms with Penedo their negotiations with the Jornal do Commercio for the position in London, should he lose, and asks again for Penedo’s additional support in finding work as a lawyer and consultant with Anglo-Brazilian interests there. 90 Nabuco’s pessimism was justified. By October’s end, the political news for Abolitionists, the cabinet, and the Liberals was wretched indeed. In short, the electoral reform simply amplified the strength of the slaveholding interests because it amplified those of the elite in general, in which slaveholding remained central and sacrosanct. A glance at fluminense politics is indicative. They suggest an anti-Abolitionist alliance between moderate Liberals and Conservatives. The Gazeta da Tarde pointed to Saraiva’s preelection appointment of Martinho de Campos, his ally and a known opponent of Abolitionism, as president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, as part of an implicit understanding with the Conservatives in the Chamber, under Paulino’s leadership. Putting Martinho de Campos in charge of the province not only strengthened Liberal moderates supportive of Saraiva’s anti-Abolitionist position but made for a more congenial relationship with the province’s saquaremas. After all, Paulino himself was fluminense, and the saquaremas’ greatest strength (and indeed their base) was in the province’s cane sugar and coffee plantations, from the Baixada Fluminense to the Serra Acima. Moreover, this also successfully further marginalized Francisco Otaviano, the fluminense Liberal senator, who was a traditional chieftain of fluminense (and imperial) Liberal urban reformism and an Abolitionist.91 Even without such direct cabinet intervention (which directly contradicted Saraiva’s public posture in regard to abstaining from electoral intervention) and without such an implicit alliance, one could assume that Liberal moderates and Conservatives opposed to Abolition doubtless represented the majority of the elite electorate of 1881. That electorate was now thoroughly alive to the Abolitionist threat, and thus the electoral reaction against that threat and the Liberal administration during which it had been mounted could hardly have been surprising. The question was not how many new Abolitionists would now enter the Chamber so much as how many of Nabuco’s supporters would survive there. Many did not; Leslie Bethell has estimated that only a dozen remained. Nabuco himself was humiliated, losing badly with only ninety-eight votes. Even Quintino Bocaiuva, a fluminense Republican, did better. Indeed, with the relative lack of cabinet involvement in the elections throughout the empire, the Conservative minority in the Chamber made a dramatic surge forward, to fifty-four, against a paltry Liberal majority of sixty-eight. Using the credentials committee, the Liberals did reduce the fiftyfour Conservatives to forty-seven, adding seven to the Liberal majority, but

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it was still a remarkable Conservative showing. Worse still, three of Saraiva’s cabinet ministers lost in their bids for reelection and had to resign—a startling cabinet reversal, nearly unheard of, which led to a cabinet crisis for days as Saraiva scrambled to pick up the portfolios now dropped to the floor. Such a reversal meant an inevitable loss of prestige and credibility for Saraiva and the cabinet’s certain resignation in the near future.92 In all, the Abolitionist movement’s beginning in 1880 doubtless challenged the parliamentary establishment, but not to the point where the cabinet or its supporters were willing to accommodate an Abolitionist reform. Much the reverse. Instead, the parliamentary leadership of the movement, led by Nabuco, was effectively marginalized in the Chamber. The movement’s growing extra-parliamentary component, however successful in at least the beginnings of public mobilization among the middle class and working poor (including the clear presence of Afro-Brazilians in both) did not change this. Again, much the reverse. The support of the Gazeta da Tarde, under Patrocínio’s direction by 1881, in alliance with other pro-Abolitionist periodicals; the use of theater meetings; the organization of Abolitionist societies among the working poor, organized labor, junior military officers, and middle-class professionals had not created significant sympathy or enough support to move the established political elite in the imperial capital. Nor did the beginning of Abolitionist organization and activism in the provinces compel cabinet concessions. Yet again, much the reverse. Indeed, by the end of October 1881, the Chamber majority against the movement had been strengthened dramatically by the new elections. Given the aggrandizement of elite domination of the electoral process (the clear impact of the 1881 electoral reform), this should not be surprising. The continued strengthening of the movement and its mobilization over the course of 1881, particularly at its point of origin in Rio, as well as Nabuco’s triumphs in Portugal, Spain, and Britain between February and April, seem, if anything, to have hardened reactionary resistance. The election of 31 October buried Nabuco and many of his few Abolitionist colleagues in the Chamber; even the moderate Liberal majority there suffered a serious reversal. Now the Conservative Party, even after the purging of the credentials recognition process, had 47 of the 122 deputies, giving it an enormously enhanced potential for obstruction. It had only to recruit 14 disgruntled Liberals to check the cabinet—a cabinet humbled by the loss of 3 ministers in that same election. Nabuco, disgusted by his own humiliating defeat in the very birthplace of his movement, wrote privately of going ahead with his plans to seek a new career and a new life in Britain.93 His views in early October, before

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the defeat, had been somewhat more sanguine about maintaining his Abolitionism, even from abroad: in negotiating a position covering European affairs in London for the Jornal do Commercio, he had made it clear that his Abolitionism presented no conflict of interest. I shall not, however, pursue politics in coverage from London, and, as regards emancipation, I will have other means to affirm my ideas, my personal actions regarding the party in formation, such as a book, a pamphlet. . . . I accept the position with the understanding that it does not negate my personal liberty of action in relations with the abolitionist movement, to which my honor is bound. . . . The politician will have other means to make the country see that he remains always identified with the movement that he helped begin and for which he is suffering.94

In the first few days after the bitter defeat at October’s end, however, there was little such thought of maintaining his Abolitionist position. He wrote to a close friend and Abolitionist, who had also lost in the election: My only personal hope is to go live in London, independent, for many years. . . . Without dependence on the government . . . I will live happy and forgotten in the society that I most esteem, in the city that is the political center of the world . . . in the study of the progress of nations and the circulation of capital as my career—and of the arts and letters as a distraction. . . . Decidedly, I was not made for what they call politics among us. The word, the pen, the ideal are weapons that serve for nothing and pity him who has no others. Character, scruples, independence, patriotism, all this is worthless, it has no impact among the electors. Happily, it is no longer the emperor . . . of whom we can complain—it is us ourselves. Sad and unhappy nation.95

Nabuco left for London weeks after his defeat, having secured the Jornal do Commercio position. He still hoped to be a successful lawyer for various British enterprises with Brazilian investments or prospects, as well. Despite his private sense of failure, a brave face was put upon matters. Upon his embarkation on 1 December, he was sent off by a delegation of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão. In a farewell address published that same day, Nabuco spoke of leaving for London “temporarily.”96 Once, in August 1880, Nabuco had spoken of an alliance with the future. Now that alliance must have seemed all but broken.

3

Retreat, Renewal, and the “New Phase,” 1882–1883

The Parliamentary Context in Early 1882 Saraiva Yields to Martinho de Campos

Saraiva’s cabinet never really recovered from the reactionary shift made clear by the election of 1881. The humiliation of his ministers’ electoral defeat left Saraiva with three portfolios to distribute; on 3 November, he and two other ministers added one each to their responsibilities, and the cabinet then staggered on, albeit not for long. On 21 January 1882, Saraiva resigned, and in an apparent nod to the rightward shift in the election, the emperor called upon Martinho de Campos, champion of slaveholding and leader of the Chamber’s moderate Liberal majority—someone who might reach out to the Conservatives, if need be, and thus perhaps hold on to power. In fact, however, the reactionary moderate Liberal cabinet was now confronted by an inherently unstable political situation. While the specifically Abolitionist faction in the Chamber had been reduced to nearly nothing, most of the Liberal reformist minority remained, however weakened, and they were unhappy with the cabinet’s politics. More important still, the Conservatives had returned in greater numbers and with a clear sense of empowerment. The moderate Liberals needed either votes from the reformist Liberal minority or votes from the Conservative minority for the majority of votes necessary to pass legislation or to survive threats of a “no confidence” vote. While some observers doubted that the reformists would bolt (for fear of bringing down the Liberal cabinet and possibly tempting the emperor to bring the Conservatives back into power), no one could know how long Conservatives’ opportune support for the proslavery Martinho de Campos might endure. While Conservatives doubtless applauded his emphasis on the economic crisis and counted on his position on slavery, they knew full

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well that the Liberal reformists would press for further change and that the Abolitionist movement, while defeated in parliament, still remained in the streets and might grow. A right-leaning, proslavery Liberal cabinet, however weak, was better than a reformist Liberal cabinet, but the cabinet’s weakness was a poor shield for the interests dear to the Conservatives. Nevertheless, it was a shield, and the new cabinet lasted for months as an essentially bipartisan administration, partnering with the Conservatives. Only in July 1882 did the reformists finally decide they could take no more. Under the leadership of Martim Francisco Filho, the prestigious heir to a founding Liberal family, they demanded that Martinho de Campos transform his essentially reactionary program into a progressive one that faithfully reflected the Liberal Manifesto of 1869. The Conservatives apparently decided that furthering Liberal division and cabinet instability suited them (and their chances of a return to power), and they turned on Martinho. They voted “no confidence” along with the Liberal reformists, and the cabinet fell.1 The Emperor’s Intervention

Such events were a recurring motif of the Liberal years in power; they reflected the inherent divisions within the party, played to the strength of the Conservatives (a tradition of disciplined bloc voting in the Chamber), and exposed more directly the role of the monarch in choosing the course of state policy as he searched for a prime minister amenable to his direction but strong enough to achieve a Chamber majority. Since the 1840s, what Dom Pedro II had traditionally preferred were stable, moderate reform administrations under cooperative prime ministers, men willing to pursue gradualist reforms in support of his self-imposed mission of “civilizing” his nation. The problem with Liberals in the 1880s was not a lack of such amenable, ambitious chieftains—if anything, there were too many—but chieftains who were capable of unifying their fractious party, eternally divided between moderates and reformists. Now, in addition (given the Conservatives’ new strength), the emperor sought a Liberal capable of both reform and compromise: to unify Liberals, on the one hand, by bringing in the reformists (as Martinho never had), and, on the other hand, to find some common ground with the Conservatives in order to mollify them as much as possible—a tall order. Moreover, only a Liberal would do, not only because of the emperor’s interest in gradual reform but because he found his options among the few Conservative chieftains exceedingly unappetizing. For reasons discussed in Chapter 2, Paulino and João Alfredo, a reactionary and a reformist, were off the table. Cotegipe, the Conservatives’ paramount chieftain, capable of imposing his will on both of the other two, was incapable of appealing to the monarch.

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The baron—proud, reactionary, opportunistic, overbearing, and famously corrupt—was manifestly unattractive and problematic to the emperor as a prospective junior partner, particularly along the path of reform, however slow and cautious.2 Thus the agreeable marquis de Paranaguá, a Liberal, took office on 3 July 1882. His program reflected precisely the hope of being all things to all who mattered. He emphasized support for the reformism of the Manifesto of 1869 together with educational and decentralizing measures. First and foremost, however, he talked of further work on the 1881 electoral reform and the economic crisis. He even spoke of modification to the 1871 law— the first time since 1871 that a cabinet program publicly embraced further reform on slavery. Two contemporaries later wrote that the emperor had wanted such reform in 1878 and that this was why he brought the Liberals back into power at that time, and that this explained Paranaguá’s mention of the 1871 law in 1882. One of the memoirists, a Liberal reformist, claimed that this stemmed from Dom Pedro II’s ambition to end slavery before his reign was over. The other, a Conservative, simply suggested that this abiding abolitionism undergirded the emperor’s Liberal turn in 1878, given the Liberals’ public embrace of the cause in 1869 and the evident intransigence of such Conservative chieftains as Cotegipe and Paulino regarding any further abolitionist reform. While one can find no direct evidence for abiding abolitionism on the part of the emperor as being a principal motive in 1878 or 1882, the inclusion of a specific mention of abolitionism in Paranaguá’s program suggests one of two possibilities. Either the memoirists were correct, or more likely, it was a new political calculation: that is, the emperor and Paranaguá wanted to draw in the Liberal reformists either by making the gesture, or more likely still, were hoping to do both that as well as something to slow or contain the Abolitionist movement (as Patrocínio feared). Some Abolitionists were hopeful about this shift.3 Joaquim Serra, a key Abolitionist journalist close to Nabuco and Rebouças, wrote to Nabuco, “We expect something from Paranaguá; his program is limited, but better this than the silence of his predecessors. . . . This is no business for the administration to speak of and do nothing. We, in the Abolitionist press, are in expectant sympathy.”4 Here, the reader may well be confused. When we last discussed the movement, after all, it was to conclude the analysis of 1881, where we noted the Abolitionists’ dismal fate in the aftermath of the parliamentary election of 31 October 1881 and Nabuco’s decision to leave political life for a self-imposed European exile. Abolitionism seemed finished. Why would either the emperor or Paranaguá have anything to support or contain? We must return to the movement’s evolution in early 1882 to explain the matter.

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Abolitionist Division, Disarray, and Initial Recovery: 1882 Divided Leadership, Survival, and New Strength

In discussing the origins and effective division of labor between the three principal Abolitionist leaders, we identified Rebouças’s critical role as an organizer, propagandist, and go-between; Nabuco’s role as the political and public leader and representative of the movement; and Patrocínio’s as the fiery popular mobilizer and chief of the movement in the press and streets. All of this suffered substantially with the apparent end of parliamentary representation; the balance between effective political leadership in the Chamber and effective political mobilization among the public was gone. Nabuco’s voice could be heard only through the considerable delay of overseas correspondence through Rebouças, and as he struggled to make a new career in London, his interest in and communication with the movement understandably waned. With the silence in parliament, however, Patrocínio’s significance, together with that of the press and the movement’s extra-parliamentary mobilization, grew. The Abolitionists in Rio and the provinces regrouped and continued their labors, making the emergence of a new political force evident. Furthermore, Rebouças’s oversight and coordinating role behind the scenes, albeit limited by the parliamentary reversal and Nabuco’s absence, was still operative. In a very difficult period, he worked to hold matters and men together, to recover the balance, and to maintain a coordinated direction among Abolitionists everywhere.5 Rebouças was especially important in dealing with Patrocínio. As the owner and editor of the Gazeta da Tarde after June 1881, Patrocínio’s lack of financial skill and his political radicalism were apparently thought very problematic among other leading Abolitionists. Over the course of 1882, others attempted to step in. Joaquim Serra, for example, a key member of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão and, as we have noted, a prominent journalist in the movement, as well as a trusted ally of both Rebouças and Nabuco, negotiated with Patrocínio to resolve several issues at once. By early February 1882, Patrocínio had agreed to Serra’s management of the Gazeta da Tarde, effective May 1882, effectively confining Patrocínio to his indispensable strength—personal, polemical journalism; he would only be responsible for his celebrated “Semana Política” (Political Week) column. In April, with the issues concerning the journal apparently resolved, Rebouças suggested to Nabuco that they support Serra in officially endorsing the Gazeta da Tarde as the journal of the Sociedade, in compensation for Patrocínio’s exclusion from the small clique dominating the Sociedade (now run by Adolfo de Barros, Nabuco’s kinsman).6 But Serra’s and Rebouças’s early 1882 remedies were not enough. By September 1882, even Patrocínio’s

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role as a movement polemicist was being questioned. Serra wrote directly to Nabuco, after months at Patrocínio’s journal, that he had broken with Patrocínio and the Gazeta da Tarde, writing with barely contained bitterness, “I left the Gazeta because of absolute incompatibility with Patrocínio, who will destroy our cause. I left without making a lot of noise, in order to avoid weakening still more this Abolitionist party.”7 To hazard a generalization about Patrocínio’s 1882 journalism, it was erratic, swinging between threats to the monarchy and the slaveholding elite and support for the emperor or his ministers, depending upon the circumstances of the moment. To the extent that there were guiding themes, they seem to have been a call for Afro-Brazilian mobilization against the emperor and the elite, an assumption that the Abolitionist press impacted cabinet policy, and steadfast support for the Abolitionist policy put forth by Nabuco in August 1880 (i.e., Nabuco’s project for a ten-year transition, involving serfdom and preparation of slaveholders and captives for freedom in 1890). The clear contradiction between attempting to persuade ministers, parliament, and the crown to pursue Nabuco’s Abolitionism while attacking or threatening them all repeatedly was Patrocínio’s trademark.8 For example, in the aftermath of Paranaguá’s ascent, which Serra greeted privately with hope, Patrocínio remarked, “The inclusion of slavery in the administration’s program was . . . an exclusive victory of [public] opinion. . . . Now it is in no one’s hands to contain the movement. . . . Abolition will be made in parliament or in the public square; it will be crowned either with peace’s rays of light or the red flames of combat.”9 It was the unprecedented use of Afro-Brazilian popular mobilization as a revolutionary threat to the established political order that Serra (and presumably Rebouças and Nabuco) found so worrying. Patrocínio seemed to be alarming the very people who had to be persuaded. Yet one wonders if Patrocínio’s visceral radicalism did not in fact serve the movement extremely well, by inspiring and heartening the people in the street who kept it alive. Furthermore, both they and that journalism may have provided the mounting political pressure that was beginning to persuade the emperor and his cabinets (beginning with Paranaguá) to shift from annoyance at the movement to recognizing that something needed to be done about it. Thus, those Abolitionists who initially were troubled by Patrocínio’s radicalism may in fact have benefited from it, as it served as an enabling medium for the formal, polished, political voice of their leadership. As we shall see, Patrocínio’s style of mobilization would later (by 1884 and afterward) be more broadly employed by the others, and as it may have done in 1882, it then clearly forced the monarch and his statesmen, who likely feared what Patrocínio represented personally and politically, to seek accommodation with the movement’s more establishment leadership, Nabuco and Rebouças.

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Even in 1882, as already suggested, Patrocínio’s style of mobilization may also help explain Paranaguá’s mention of abolitionism. Would either the emperor or his prime minster have added the modification of 1871 to their program in July 1882—essentially putting Chamber support from both the moderate Liberals and the sizable Conservative minority at risk—without that mounting polemical pressure and its mobilizing results? The pressure came not only from Patrocínio’s inflammatory language but from the steady reports of conferência after conferência and the steady increase in the formation of new Abolitionist organizations in Rio. It also came from a critical new advance in São Paulo and the ongoing manumission campaign in Ceará. Ceará represents something truly distinctive at this point and will be discussed below. In regard to São Paulo, the linkage to the street movement in Rio and to the Gazeta da Tarde is more immediate and clear. On 23 July 1882, a commission of Abolitionists from the Gazeta da Tarde helped found the Centro Abolicionista de São Paulo in the law office of Luís Gama (followed later by the establishment of an Abolitionist journal, Ça ira). Gama, a freeborn mulato, had been enslaved as a child to pay his white father’s debts. He had worked his way up from slavery to become an abolitionist lawyer, using the flagrant illegality of many slaves’ captivity to compel their manumission; he was personally responsible for the freedom of hundreds of captives. The paulista organization, taking Gama’s achievements as its inspiration (he himself died 24 August 1882), not only crowned this one abolitionist’s crusade but now linked it to a larger urban movement in the city of São Paulo, affiliated with the movement in Rio. The new center would become one of the most dynamic provincial Abolitionist organizations in the empire, the happy conjunction of the Gazeta’s style of activism and São Paulo’s traditional Liberal reformism, students at the Academy of Law, and the city’s journalists and literati. Active among them were Afro-Brazilians from the working poor, who by 1886 would come to play a unique and crucial role in the national movement as mobilizing agents in the rural sector, as we shall see.10 In 1882, however, one of the most important aspects of the new paulista center (as with the 1881 Pernambuco Abolitionists in Recife and the 1883 Sociedade Libertadora Bahiana, both mentioned in the last section of Chapter 2) was its reflection of the impact of the Rio Abolitionist movement in yet another city strongly bound to the political and planting elite of the empire. Slaveholding was as powerful in São Paulo as it was anywhere, yet even there, the established order was no longer safe. As in Rio, the Court, this was now true in several of slaveholding’s most traditional provincial bailiwicks. While Abolitionist clubs and associations had come and gone before, these, strengthened immeasurably by the movement’s organization and success in Rio, would be different. They would not be ephemeral but, taking strength

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and example from the movement’s organization and success in Rio, each would play a significant part in the struggle over the years to come. The Absent Leadership

As the movement’s growing presence in journalism and conferências in Rio began to influence a flourishing provincial Abolitionism, the emperor and the upper reaches of the political world were compelled to take note. They were not the only ones. Over the year, Rebouças kept Nabuco, the movement’s leader, informed of progress with letters to England; Nabuco, while maintaining this correspondence, was clearly much more involved over the first half of the year in what turned out to be a failing attempt to establish himself in London. Although the Jornal do Commercio paid for his articles on Europe, this amount was meager; he had always counted on making a living fit for a gentleman in London as a lawyer to the British firms doing business in Brazil. While he still had hopes of this as late as April or May, his personal correspondence continued to express his disgust with Brazilian political affairs, with no mention of his return. He continued to maintain, as he had in late 1881, that a position of any kind in Brazil was unthinkable because of his need for uncompromised political independence. By June, however, a shift in his letters is observable: he wrote that he could not return, as much as he might like to, unless some sort of independent position in law or journalism could be fashioned for him in Rio. He began to sound out both Rebouças and Serra about a possibility, a dream, that would trail through his correspondence for years: a new, independent journal that he would head up, as paladin and voice of Abolitionism and other reforms. In a sense, he wanted what Patrocínio already had—except that Nabuco lacked the wealthy father-in-law to provide the necessary capital. But neither Rebouças nor Serra, although they supported this idea, could find the capital for Nabuco. Nonetheless, after mid-1882 Nabuco’s interest in returning to Brazil quickened rapidly. His intention became firm, and while he pressed others for a practical career solution that would make it possible, he began to involve himself more actively in the movement’s direction again. Without full-time work in London, he began to intervene in Abolitionist affairs in Brazil, both parliamentary and provincial. His activities in Brazil were generally carried out through Rebouças, who passed on Nabuco’s ideas (or, in the case of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, direction). Beginning in June, Nabuco was clearly emphasizing to Rebouças the need for a national organization. He discussed its planning and pressed Rebouças to write personally to the prominent Abolitionists in various provinces. By September, Nabuco had also begun serious research in Brighton and then London, laying the

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foundation for his best-known contribution to the movement’s propaganda, O abolicionismo (1883).11 While Nabuco’s planning for a national organization, involving a campaign to reach out to various provincial Abolitionists and his efforts to make his voice heard (however indirectly) in the Chamber, seem to have made some headway, they depended entirely upon Rebouças. As did so much else. Whatever the direct and indirect successes of the movement associated with Patrocínio and the Gazeta da Tarde, and however promising Nabuco’s renewed involvement must have been, far too many of the new hopes for and successes of the Abolitionist movement in Rio depended on the correspondence and ongoing personal attention and intervention of Rebouças. Nor were matters made easier, one imagines, by the growing rift between Serra and Patrocínio. It apparently became too much for Rebouças to manage: on the very eve of Serra’s break with Patrocínio and the Gazeta da Tarde in August 1882, Rebouças, exhausted and ill, apparently gave out. He decided to leave for London, where he had significant professional contacts.12 There is nothing in the historiography or archived correspondence to indicate more precisely the nature of Rebouças’s troubles or his intent in leaving. However, a brief excerpt in the correspondence of two kinsmen dated the day after Rebouças left for England (1 September 1882) strongly suggests a physical collapse accompanied by despair: [Rebouças’s departure] took place yesterday, the Politécnica students going to accompany him onboard, making, with other friends, a touching and edifying farewell to him. May the trip be a fortunate one for him, and may his health be restored with the same strength of that privileged intelligence with which he is endowed. Upon saying farewell to me, he said that if he found a way to make money in England he will not return to Brazil.13

And so, while Nabuco had recovered his interest in returning to the movement in Brazil and was actively participating in it again from abroad, his most trusted ally and agent apparently gave up; Serra wrote to Nabuco of Rebouças’s illness and the general concern among friends that he might even die. At the end of September, the month when Serra broke with Patrocínio, Rebouças, now in London, wrote to Miguel Antônio Dias, clearly his trusted friend by then, apparently asking him to sell off his furniture.14 Then on 4 October, Nabuco had better news. While writing to Penedo that he was researching in Brighton and had begun his work on abolitionism in Brazil, Nabuco referred to Rebouças in passing, noting that “my friend, André Rebouças, who passed a week in Brighton, returns to London tomorrow and will go to see you then. He went through a grave crisis, from which he finds himself perfectly reestablished.”15

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Having recovered his health and spirits, perhaps thanks to the ocean voyage and a bit of rest in Brighton, apparently Rebouças was nonetheless still determined to explore professional options in London. His diary reveals that he began visiting his English engineering contacts on the day after his London arrival, 24 September, and continued doing so after his return from Brighton to London on 6 October. Soon Rebouças’s diary records that he was beginning regular employment on Brazilian port works at the office of an old colleague, Charles Neate. Indeed, his diary suggests that over the months he spent in Europe afterwards, mostly in London, he and Nabuco rarely met, despite their both living in the great city and their common commitment to Abolitionism. Aside from the Brighton visit, Rebouças only mentions attending a 15 November meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society to hear Nabuco speak. His entry for 31 December seems conclusive: he notes that José Américo dos Santos “took my place in Rio de Janeiro” (presumably at the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, where Santos, an engineer and publisher, was first secretary). Although the Almanack Laemmert for 1883 registers Rebouças as the Sociedade treasurer, it gives Rebouças’s London address.16 We must assume, then, that Rebouças had given up active collaboration in the movement in late 1882. The published diary entries for this European stay deal largely with engineering and with social contacts with José Carlos Rodrigues, an expatriate entrepreneur and journalist Rebouças had met in New York in the 1870s. They met again in London around 14 October and thenceforth it was with Rodrigues that Rebouças spent his leisure time. Contacts with Abolitionists in either England or Brazil were few and far between.17 The Abolitionists’ Acephalous Triumph in 1882

The year 1882 was, then, a complicated one for the movement, one in which its leadership, direction, and hopes varied enormously. And the parliamentary context was at least as complicated and varied. Early in the year, on 15 February 1882, Nabuco, perhaps grasping at straws, mentioned the adherence of the reformist Liberal Silveira Martins to the cause (“emancipation by 1890”), and on 4 October, he noted that Afonso Celso de Assis Figuereido, one of the foremost Liberal chieftains, had made mention of the movement. For the most part, however, together with the Paranaguá cabinet’s mention of abolition in 1871, these were but glimmering lights over the months. Despite the Abolitionists’ initial hopes about Paranaguá’s program, the parliamentary situation was tremendously unstable, as Serra’s correspondence with Nabuco tends to demonstrate, and the hopes of Serra

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and other Abolitionists flickered accordingly. It was clear that Abolitionism had become an issue of concern at the highest level, but it was only one of many concerns, and more important, it was subordinate to the others—most especially, maintenance of the Liberal cabinet’s strength in the Chamber. In the end, the Paranaguá cabinet turned out to be a weak, transitory administration; it was moribund by September 1882, the fateful month for Rebouças, Serra, and Patrocínio, as we have noted. In despair, Serra speculated that even the Conservatives might ascend. Both he and Nabuco hoped, instead, that Saraiva would return and pick up the cause in an alliance with the emperor to unify the Liberals and lead them to victory and abolitionist reform. Indeed, Nabuco had written to Saraiva along these lines by late November 1882. Their continued hopes for the Liberal factions’ rapprochement under a stronger prime minister allied with the monarch doubtless had a great deal to do with Serra’s early September break with Patrocínio. Any prospect of a unified Liberal Chamber moving forward under Saraiva with the emperor’s support toward an abolitionist reform could ill afford the rantings of a republican radical. They were working hard for the embrace of Abolitionism at the highest levels of the regime and the Liberal party; what Rebouças had once termed Patrocínio’s “disagreeable” remarks were virtually certain to offend the establishment allies that they coveted.18 Tactical differences among the Abolitionists were doubtless intensified by confusion concerning the direction of the current cabinet and Chamber, given the Liberals’ continuing disunity and the crippling role played by the Conservatives. Nor, of course, were differences among the Abolitionist leaders likely to be resolved, given their separation. The increasing significance of Patrocínio in 1882 was at least partly due to the fact that he alone among the three key leaders was playing a visible public role in Rio for most of the year. Furthermore, not only were there differences in their tactical approaches and impact in Rio, there would also appear to have been a surprising lack of teamwork even between Nabuco and Rebouças during their English sojourns. Although their stays there overlapped from September 1882 through January 1883, there was little contact, as noted above: Rebouças seems to have devoted himself entirely to his professional work in London offices, while Nabuco kept up his paid journalism, researched and began writing O abolicionismo on his own, and kept up only a sporadic Abolitionist correspondence. He occasionally provided direction to the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, while keeping track of cabinet and Chamber prospects as things began moving swiftly toward the cabinet’s fall.19 This nearly complete breakdown in the Abolitionist leaders’ unity, presence, and impact in Rio becomes more dramatic at the end of 1882, when the movement, in terms of the three principal leaders in the imperial capital, became utterly acephalous. In October 1882, after Rebouças’s collapse and

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voyage abroad and following the break with Serra, Patrocínio likewise left Rio. He may have been confident that his radical threats and bluster and his charismatic success in mobilizing the masses had everything to do with the continued survival of the movement in Rio up until then. Nor was his success owing to the written word alone; he had been among the first to speak at the conferência series in Rio in 1880, and he had clearly done extremely well over 1881 and 1882. Indeed, Patrocínio had become a subject of fascination by 1882: articles were written about him, and his speaking style was discussed there by admirers. His October departure, therefore, rather than being a retreat in despair like those of the other two Abolitionists in late 1881 and September 1882, seems to have been more an effort to strengthen the movement in the streets still further. That is why, when Patrocínio left Rio, he left for Ceará.20 This choice seems to have been due to Patrocínio’s commitment to popular mobilization. By 1881, no other province in the empire had accomplished more in that respect than Ceará. Although at first Ceará had seemingly followed the Rio movement, it had soon made more rapid progress in terms of tactics and goals. At the beginning of its mobilization, the cearense Abolitionist movement had emphasized conferências, as Rio had done. However, as indicated in Chapter 2, slaveholding interests in the Southeast, worried about the ongoing decline of slaveholding in the Northeast and the North, had acted against the interprovincial slave trade in order to avoid a future split in regional support for slavery. They successfully pressed their provincial assemblies to pass prohibitive tax laws by which they ended the interprovincial slave trade to the Southeast (December 1880–January 1881). The implications of this were clearly understood by the cearense Abolitionists. Seeing the prices of captives fall as their markets in the Southeast were cut off, they reasoned that cearense interest in the trade and in slaveholding would weaken significantly. They decided to work with the boatmen (jangadeiros) in Fortaleza harbor to end any further cearense participation in what was left of the interprovincial trade (which still existed to the North). This had worked, and it had had a spontaneous impact on the remaining cearense slaveholders—such manumissions had increased over the next two years. After February 1881, Ceará passed Rio in the number of manumissions, thereby hastening the erosion of slavery in their province and undercutting its credibility throughout the empire. The Saraiva cabinet, however, had taken steps to contain this success. First, it replaced the provincial president and provincial chief of police with pro-slaveholding hardliners. Then, in August 1881, when the market for cearense slaves began to improve in Pará, the provincial government engaged in active repression against key Abolitionists; even the cearense Abolitionist press virtually ceased publication over the course of 1882. Apparently, then, Patrocínio went to Ceará not

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only to learn from their initial success but to understand its downturn, as well as to see what could be done to rekindle the flame there and continue to fan it elsewhere.21 The nature of cearense tactics and their success will be examined subsequently, when they were brought to bear in Rio in late 1882 and over the course of 1883. Here we must return to the larger point: that by October 1882, for a variety of reasons, the Abolitionist movement in Rio was bereft of its initial key leadership and had seen the hopes associated with Paranaguá fade. What were the consequences in Rio? They were surprising, albeit largely ignored in the later histories of the movement. If anything, the street movement in Rio was now strong enough that its ambitions for public mobilization began to grow. Although the three chief leaders were no longer present and the hopes placed in the cabinet and parliament by the more establishment Abolitionists were fading, what we might call the Rio movement’s second-tier leadership decided to take the lead. Most of them had been heavily involved in the successful street mobilization and conferências of 1880–1882; among them were the boêmio crew of the Gazeta da Tarde. This crew was critical in maintaining the radical political journalism Patrocínio had promoted and in celebrating the successes in Rio’s streets and Ceará, where Patrocínio’s activism with his cearense colleagues was having an impact on increased voluntary manumissions among slaveholders. It was in alliance with these associates of Patrocínio and presumably, the Associação Central Emancipadora, that João Clapp, Nicolau Moreira, Vicente de Sousa, Ernesto Sena (Patrocínio’s brotherin-law), and Ubaldino do Amaral, along with Raúl Pompeia (representing the paulista Abolitionists in Rio) and Federico Severo (representing the cearense Abolitionists in Rio), organized an unprecedented show of popular strength. Significantly, there is no evidence in the correspondence of Nabuco, Serra, or Rebouças that they or the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão were involved in this at all. What the Gazeta group did was to set up a mass, public street demonstration on 8 December to celebrate a decision by the countess do Rio Novo to emancipate four hundred of her captives. Ostensibly led by João Clapp’s Clube dos Libertos de Niterói, the demonstration included a number of the Abolitionist organizations now prominent in Rio: the Clube Abolicionista Gutenberg, the Centro Abolicionista Ferreira de Menezes, the Clube Alberto Victor, the Caixa Emancipadora José do Patrocínio, and the Associação Operária Vicente de Sousa. The Gutenberg typesetters met at the Gazeta, from which they went on to the Largo do Paço, where they met the Niterói freedmen and the others, each association marching behind its own standard and all accompanied by a marching band. From there, this “civic procession” marched from the Largo up the fashionable Rua do Ouvidor through the cidade velha, stopping to salute the headquarters of the various supportive

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dailies, and then up the Rua do Teatro through the Praça da Constituição (now Praça Tiradentes), arriving at the Campo de Santana. There, at the Afro-Brazilians’ sacred ground, they presented a portrait of the countess to the City Council, housed in one of the buildings now surrounding the field. After speeches by Vicente de Sousa and João Clapp, twenty more slaves were freed at a conferência in the nearby Teatro Recréio Dramático, one of the Abolitionists’ favorite sites for such, at a session presided over by Nicolau Moreira.22 In all of the great public demonstrations and marches to follow over the years, much of this, including the route (particularly through the cidade velha, with stops at the Largo do Paço and at the newspapers’ offices), would be the same. It maximized exposure to the urban sites associated with the monarchy and the Chamber, as well as to both the elite and the masses; it emphasized Abolitionist civic participation; and through the speeches and the emphatic presence and formal emancipation of slaves, it sacralized and made symbolic the Abolitionists’ struggle and purpose. An anonymous Gazeta reporter offered some interesting comments on this 8 December demonstration. First, he described the demonstration as being of the masses: “The festival was of the people and only of the people.” He also described Nicolau Moreira as “chief of the Abolitionist party.” Finally, he recorded the Clube dos Libertos’ announcement of new sócios benemeritos (worthy members), among them the emperor, Manuel Dantas, and a number of Abolitionists (e.g., Nicolau Moreira, Angelo Agostini, João Ferreira Serpa Júnior, and Ubaldino do Amaral). He also listed the organization’s new members, including Vicente de Sousa and Ernesto de Sena (who was, like Patrocínio, his brother-in-law, a radical journalist). In effect, using the decorous cover of Nicolau Moreira’s establishment prestige, the Gazeta group and their allies among the Abolitionist press and more radical urban activists had side-stepped the currently unstable, muddled parliamentary medium entirely, as well as Nabuco, Rebouças, and the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão. It seems to have been an apparent attempt to foster a popular street movement appealing directly to the slaveholding elite to support voluntary manumission (as exemplified by the countess do Rio Novo), with tactical appeals to those in an established position to support this: the city government, the Liberal reformist Dantas, and the emperor (whose inclination toward some measure of abolitionist reform has been discussed previously in detail)—for additional support.23 It was a strategy that seems to have drawn from the successes in both Rio and Ceará. The Abolitionists in Rio had emphasized popular mobilization through conferências and local urban Abolitionist organizations, recruiting everyone from freedmen to organized workers and middle-class professionals, all of whom were evident in the Rio organizations of 8 December. The cearense Abolitionists had demonstrated in early 1881 and late 1882 the

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potential for mobilizing public support to persuade slaveholders to free their slaves voluntarily. Their tactics may well have influenced the planning for 8 December, involving as it did the celebration of the countess’s emancipation of four hundred slaves and the emancipation of twenty more as part of a very public demonstration through the city’s center. Moreover, while we cannot assume that the turnout was especially impressive (could more than several hundred fit into the theater?), it was far greater than had been common before, and the magnitude of the organization, drama, mass participation, and public moralism on display was unprecedented in the imperial capital. That might well have been impressive indeed. Altogether, the events of 8 December 1882 must have raised a number of critical questions. How much of a threat did this popular triumph represent to the unified movement Nabuco had begun in 1880? How much potential for actually ending slavery in all of Brazil did the popular mobilization to buy and free slaves in towns and cities have, given that most captives lived in the rural sector? What chance did a popular street strategy have of persuading the political elite that dominated parliament to move toward passing an abolitionist law? In early 1883, in the aftermath of division among the key leaders and the European self-exile of two of them, the increasing success of the popular emancipationist street movements in Ceará and Rio, and the mixed and unstable parliamentary context, all of these questions must have been the focus of intense discussion among the Abolitionists.

The Renewal of the Abolitionist Movement: 1883 New Strength and Policy Radicalization

By 1883, the reactionary reversal signaled by the election of 1881 had slowed, at least, as the emperor and Paranaguá sought to find and shore up Liberal unity by vague reformist talk during 1882. Moreover, despite its parliamentary defeat and its divided and absent leadership, the Abolitionist movement was growing and becoming increasingly effective, both in Rio and in Ceará. Even in São Paulo, after Luís Gama’s death in August, the Abolitionists reorganized rapidly under the more radical, more charismatic Antônio Bento de Sousa e Castro. A tremor in the larger society dominated by the plantations was felt. The Gazeta da Tarde and the Rio News reported on scattered, violent plantation risings or flights in the course of November 1882 in São Paulo and Espírito Santo. Initially the Gazeta da Tarde said they were fabrications designed to justify the movement’s repression, then that they were spontaneous responses by the captives to the horrors of their plight. The Rio News urged abolition as the best way to forestall even worse events. Such destabilization had to be worrisome to a social and political establishment that traditionally depended upon a secure order in the vast rural

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sector, dominated by plantations, so isolated and so basic to the society and the economy of the empire. By 15 December, even the staid Jornal do Commercio proclaimed that it now supported moving forward on abolition.24 By mid-January 1883, Vicente de Sousa, clearly inspired by the cearense tactics and success and apparently working with the same people who were responsible for the 8 December “civic procession,” had organized a group in the Rio movement to realize the idea of ending slavery in the imperial capital and held a conferência celebrating the new initiative. He also founded the Commissão Central de Emancipação; by 9 February, Nicolau Moreira was its president. By 12 February, the emperor signaled his impatience with the cabinet’s failure to manage matters and successfully contain the Abolitionists, by donating money to the cearense movement, clearly indicating the direction he wanted taken: a more progressive position on emancipation. He seemed, at least at this point, to prefer getting out in front of matters rather than constantly trying to catch up. Paranaguá understood the signal: on 20 February, the Gazeta da Tarde reported that the Commissão Central de Emancipação was holding discussions with the prime minister. If the emperor and his prime minister were hoping to manage the street movement by reaching out, they must have been seriously concerned about what happened after 21 February 1883. On that date, Patrocínio returned to Rio, triumphant, from Ceará. There is no indication of how it happened or what was discussed, but from that point on, the leadership roles of Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira, as well as the conversations with the Paranaguá administration, simply disappear from the record. Sousa and Moreira continued in their Associação Central Emancipadora roles (at least on paper), but their cearense-style initiative had evaporated by early March. The Gazeta da Tarde crew’s activities, clear in December 1882, continued, but now under the direct, charismatic leadership of Patrocínio again, with his fierce, radical propaganda. Beginning on 23 February, he wrote a series of provocative and hostile articles addressed to the emperor, and his first “Semana Politica” piece was a scathing indictment of the cabinet’s actions.25 On 27 February, there was a full frontal attack on the regime in which the emperor was advised that “your throne is the cause of all our evils,” and many of those evils were listed: the war against Paraguay, slavery, the contraband slave trade before 1850, and the corruption of the parliamentary system.26 Even so, Patrocínio would not dominate the Abolitionist movement as a whole, although that might increasingly have seemed to be the case by the beginning of 1883. On 28 February 1883, Nabuco had his return to Brazil in May 1883 announced in Rio. Although he did not in fact return then or in any other month of 1883, his announcement served as a sort of signal of his resumption of direction from abroad. The reality followed shortly, and Rebouças was its herald. His diary entries for his European stay, as already

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recounted, provide no significant mention of or contact with Nabuco or the Abolitionist movement in late 1882. Then, in January 1883, everything inexplicably shifts: Rebouças was making plans to return to Brazil and the movement. Had the English work proved disappointing? Had Rebouças repented of leaving the Sacred Cause? Had he regained hope with the late 1882 successes? We do not know. Rebouças left England on 9 February 1883 and arrived in Rio on 4 March. To meet him at the quay were a combination of engineers and Abolitionists (among them, Miguel Antônio Dias, José Américo dos Santos, and Adolfo de Barros), complete with the Politécnica’s school standard, the Abolitionists’ conferência band (Musica dos Alemães), and a luncheon at the Hotel Novo Mundo, at the edge of the Largo do Paço, near where Rebouças had just disembarked. He immediately set up house at a hotel in Santa Teresa (the lovely hill district, rising close to his father’s former home near the Passéio Público), and began his visits, picking up the varied life that he had left. From 6 to 8 March, he paid calls on the English engineer Stanley Youle; on Patrocínio; on Gusmão Lobo, the Abolitionist editor who played a critical role at the Jornal do Commercio; on Serra; on Nabuco’s family; on Adolfo de Barros, the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão interim leader; and on the celebrated pianist Artur Napoleão, among others. On 8 and 9 March, he also paid more formal visits to the cabinet ministers of the time, apparently lobbying on behalf of his professional business. Despite his decision to leave London, he would seem to have done well there as an engineer and entrepreneur and had plenty of new prospects to discuss and promote. March marked the intersession in the Chamber’s regular year, occurring during the season of waters, with its heavy tropical rains; there was time to prepare before the opening of parliament. Within a matter of four or five days, as just described, Rebouças had begun to gather up not only the threads of his own private concerns but also, in his own, quiet, methodical way, those of the dynamic force behind the movement Nabuco had led. He visited with those Abolitionists who had not been at the port to welcome or lunch with him (among them, Patrocínio). By 7 April, roughly a month before the Chamber was to open, he was ready to reinvigorate the more establishment organization of the movement, Nabuco’s Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão. By 10 April, Rebouças, busy man, had also overseen the printing of a great synthesis of his previous work on the reforms central to Brazil’s social and economic development, Agricultura nacional, preparing it for public distribution later that year. Rebouças considered the breakup of the latifundia, the abolition of slavery, and the establishment of free labor on small-farm landholdings essential to the national progress and democracy of the Brazil of which he dreamt. He and Nabuco held many such ideas in common: both men wanted a more democratic society, a flourishing economy,

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and a state freed from the domination of the great landholders. Thus, in early 1883, Rebouças had, through organization, contacts, and propaganda, begun laying the groundwork for a more radical understanding of what the Abolitionist movement must involve. The end of slavery was merely the critical first reform.27 However, the battle standard of the new way forward was yet to be raised, and that standard was Nabuco’s.28 On 11 April, the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão held its first meeting since Rebouças’s return; Rebouças conveyed a message from Nabuco to the society and had it summarized in the Gazeta da Tarde as well. Indeed, on that day and the next, 12 April, Rebouças’s indispensable function in the movement is particularly clear; it consisted in not only promotion of the movement’s propaganda but articulation of the pieces on the board. Whatever Patrocínio’s politics and personal feelings, he listened to Rebouças. He was clearly willing and able to work with Rebouças, even if it meant accepting Nabuco’s clear resumption of the movement’s national direction and policy, which was, in fact, what was happening. The policy Rebouças conveyed at the 11 April Sociedade meeting and in the Gazeta on 12 April was Nabuco’s policy, and its announcement was part and parcel of Nabuco’s resumption of leadership of the Abolitionist movement. Moreover, the policy was—however quiet, even formal, in its style—a revolutionary one, a profoundly radical shift in the movement’s goals, far more challenging than the emancipationist tactics in Ceará, in Rio, or in the movement’s original policy, Nabuco’s cautious 1880 call for phased abolition. The 12 April article effectively made a complete break with that gradualist approach, that is, the ten-year transition from slavery to emancipation through a period of serfdom. Indeed, Nabuco did not even refer to it; instead, he simply urged an alternative to the cearense urban emancipationist model crafted and embraced by Patrocínio and recently adopted by Nicolau Moreira and Vicente de Sousa, distinguishing between that model and immediate, complete abolition. He was tactful; the point was not to divide the movement or to attack the successes so far but to press for a new way forward. Thus, Nabuco explicitly celebrated and accepted the recent plans for emancipating Rio’s slaves using cearense tactics, but he then made it clear that, in the future, the funds and efforts of the movement would best be used to shape public opinion through propaganda and in the courts. Piecemeal, gradual urban emancipation would not suffice; rather, he wrote, “Our primary mission is to spread our ideas throughout the country so that they affect all of the people and might be useful to all of the slaves.” It was time to shift the focus away from the emancipation of that minority of the slaves who still dwelled in cities and towns and demand the immediate, unindemnified liberation of all the captives, most of whom were rural. The

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movement’s resources “should . . . be applied to the goals of society, which are not those of ransom, but of abolition.”29 Patrocínio was understandably impressed; in the same issue of the Gazeta da Tarde, he explicitly supported Nabuco’s new position, announcing that “we make these ideas of the great Abolitionist leader ours.”30 More was to follow. One of the radical Abolitionists involved in the popular 8 December 1882 demonstration, Ubaldino do Amaral, a Republican, attacked Nabuco for his decision to leave Brazil in 1881. This obvious attempt at undercutting Nabuco’s position in the movement (and thus the policy direction of 12 April) was refuted by Patrocínio himself in some detail (doubtless taken from Rebouças’s account of Nabuco’s English exile). While acknowledging his political differences with Nabuco (after all, like Ubaldino, he was a Republican and Nabuco a monarchist), Patrocínio not only defended Nabuco’s decision to leave Brazil but praised Nabuco’s sacrifices and character. This public embrace of Nabuco and his ideas amply demonstrates Patrocínio’s acceptance of Nabuco’s resuming leadership of the movement. Either convinced by Rebouças or persuaded by his own reading of Nabuco’s message, Patrocínio apparently saw the revolutionary character of this shift in direction from the 1880 program, as well as its superiority to the gradual approach of cearense emancipationism. Such private, piecemeal emancipation could only go so far and so fast, and Nabuco was right—it had little impact on most slaves, held captive and thought indispensable on the great plantations of the rural sector. Most slaves were field slaves and could only be pried out of the hands of planters by parliamentary legislation ending slavery altogether. While Patrocínio would continue to attack the established regime for years, he apparently had concluded that he must support Nabuco’s approach as well if slavery itself were to be ended. A republic was a distant hope—it might never come to pass; abolition, if the urban emancipationism and the monarch’s gestures had proved anything, might have a chance. In April 1883, Patrocínio’s decision meant that, despite his radical politics, he had reaffirmed his work with Rebouças and his alliance with Nabuco to help make abolition a reality.31 As he wrote himself, to “Joaquim Nabuco, my political adversary. . . . I am not bound by ties of friendship; but simply by relations as an abolitionist to that parliamentary youth who paid with exile for the boldness of his merit and of his patriotism.”32 Midyear Reorientation

In the aftermath of these events, through late April, Rebouças met several times with Patrocínio and other key Abolitionists. On 2 May, matters quickened. Rebouças met with Patrocínio and José Avelino Gurgel do Amaral, a

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noted cearense reformist, to discuss the movement. Later that day, a preliminary meeting at the Gazeta da Tarde was held among representatives of many of the Abolitionist organizations in Rio, including provincial Abolitionist organizations with representatives residing there. During this meeting, all of the representatives were sounded out and then tasked with conferring with their constituencies; they were to return on 9 May for the inaugural session of a new national organization and deliberation on its formation and officers. As part and parcel of these new efforts, on 3 May the Abolitionists’ new approach and new organizational planning received a great gift: in his customary Speech from the Throne to open parliament, the emperor raised the slavery question again. On the following day, 4 May, Rebouças recorded another meeting with Patrocínio and José Avelino Gurgel do Amaral, in which they agreed that the emperor’s speech confirmed the “new phase” in the political mobilization and pressure for abolition. The political context was fluid. On that same day, the noted pernambucano reformist and Abolitionist, deputy José Mariano Carneiro da Cunha, brought on a ministerial crisis by raising the issue of decentralization and increased provincial rights. Paranaguá, doubtless frustrated by and fed up with the ongoing party divisions that he had been unable to resolve, called immediately for a vote of confidence—and he lost. The emperor, faced with Paranaguá’s request for resignation, called in Saraiva, who declined the prime ministry and counseled instead a cabinet reshuffle, in order to unify the Liberal factions. The emperor, in one account, then called in a series of Liberal chieftains from the reform wing—José Bonifácio (the younger), Manuel Dantas, and Lafaiete Rodrigues Pereira. It was an embarrassing display of the Liberals’ division and lack of partisan discipline. Once again, the emperor sought to resolve matters by selecting a prime minister who could unify the Liberal deputies and thus dominate the Chamber’s Liberal majority, in order to move forward and, not least, to manage the issue of slavery’s reform. Both the miserable history of the Paranaguá administration and this succession crisis make it clear, and not for the first time in this chapter, that the emperor had decided that something had to be done about abolition as soon as possible—within the existing structure of the regime, of course. It had to be done to contain the movement, which had not only survived the parliamentary reversal of 1881 but grown into an unprecedented extraparliamentary movement, both in Rio and in several key provinces. Anyone with ambitions to be prime minister would now have to deal with this; abolition had become the price of power. The last of the reform-wing Liberals called in by the emperor was Lafaiete, who was in a peculiar position. A former Republican, without deep roots in the Liberal party, Lafaiete felt especially incapable of unifying the Liberals. Nonetheless, he was the last man standing;

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Dantas himself pressed him to accept, urging him to seek out the counsel and support of the more influential Liberal leaders in the Senate. Lafaiete did so, and, blessed with their support, on 24 May, after nearly three weeks of cabinet crisis and Liberal travail, he at last organized a cabinet designed to unify the party and move forward. It was the fifth Liberal administration since 1878.33 During this crisis, the Abolitionists went on with their own deliberations. Rebouças wrote to Nabuco on 5 May, doubtless updating him, and met with Patrocínio on 5, 7, and 8 May at the Gazeta da Tarde; only Clapp attended the meetings with Patrocínio on the 5th and 8th. Then all of the Abolitionist representatives assembled, as scheduled, in the Gazeta da Tarde offices on 9 May and formally inaugurated and began organizing the Confederação Abolicionista, under the guidance of Rebouças, Patrocínio, Clapp, and José Avelino, a group who also met alone, apparently sorting out the decisions and publishing them, between 9 May and the final general sessions of 12 and 17 May. The Republican Aristides Lobo presided over the inaugural meeting, which, like the preliminary meeting, involved representatives from various Abolitionist organizations from Rio and several provinces. There were some intriguing absences we should note, absences that may speak to the early 1883 shift in the movement’s leadership suggested above. Both Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira were not mentioned as being present. While both continued on as Rio Abolitionists heading up the Associação Central Emancipadora (at least they are so listed in the Almanack Laemmert), for unknown reasons their participation in the leadership of the movement seems at this point to have ceased. Miguel Antônio Dias continued on as treasurer of the Associação Central Emancipadora through 1884, on least on paper, but the organization, clearly superseded now by the Confederação Abolicionista, had disappeared from the record by the end of 1885, and neither the Associação Central Emancipadora nor its two wellknown chieftains appeared in the list of those supporting the Manifesto of the Confederação Abolicionista, which was written and published by August 1883. Miguel Antônio Dias was one of the select few meeting among the corpo deliberativo (i.e., its representative council) of the new organization, along with Rebouças. He is also listed in the Manifesto as a representative of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão. By contrast, the absence of Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira is striking; both unremarked and unexplained, we can only speculate on the reasons. Given the populist, extraparliamentary urban emancipationist movement that Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira had championed in late 1882 and early 1883, they may well have disliked Nabuco’s April alternative or felt rebuffed by it. They may also have been quietly cut out among the urban populist wing of the movement by Patrocínio, as suggested earlier. Or they

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may have simply decided that they had done their part in the movement’s evolution and that the time had come for each to return to his other concerns, Vicente de Sousa’s radical labor organization and Moreira’s vast list of imperial professional and scientific organizations and publications. In any case, while they would surface on occasion in the future history of the movement, they no longer took leadership roles. With Nabuco things were clearly different: even during his European exile, his leadership position had strengthened, if anything, through his control of the movement’s direction and Patrocínio’s repeated public support for both his leadership and that direction. Indeed, although he remained in London over the year, his explicit recognition on 17 May as the Confederação Abolicionista’s official delegate to Europe highlighted his position.34 After these decisions in May 1883 and long before the Confederação Abolicionista’s Manifesto was presented to the nation in August, its leadership’s ideas, the “new phase” of the movement, was made clear. Much had been anticipated in April, when Nabuco’s call for a national movement pressing for slavery’s immediate abolition had been published in the Gazeta da Tarde. After mid-May, Rebouças began publishing anonymous praise and analysis of the United States underground railroad. By the end of the month, he had added a number of anonymous series in the dailies, beginning with a discussion of postabolition societies in the Americas (late May) and then freedmen’s labor, followed by a long series of pieces on immediate abolition without indemnification (over June), published as a brochure by 24 August. On 19 October 1883, he also finally brought out Agricultura nacional, trumpeting the list of truly radical reforms of which he and Nabuco dreamt: the end of slavery, the end of the latifundium, and the consequent regeneration of Brazil’s national society, economy, and politics on the basis of more equitable landholding and more productive agriculture. Many of these ideas had already been promoted in the “Immediate Abolition” series by 14 June. Additionally, before the publication of his own book, Rebouças had taken care to arrange for the publication of Nabuco’s O abolicionismo (once it was completed in London), both as a book (June 1883) and as a series of syntheses in pamphlet form (October 1883), tasks delegated to Miguel Antônio Dias.35 O abolicionismo sets out much of Nabuco’s political thinking for the movement and the monarchy. Basic to it is an embrace of the historical role of Afro-Brazilians both in making Brazil and in constituting the basis for the nation’s population. Nabuco championed abolition in recognition of this and the manifest injustice of slavery from which the nation and its achievements derived. He advocated the integration of Afro-Brazilians among other Brazilians as equals as an obvious corollary. As part of a radical analysis of slavery’s oppressive, perverting effects on Brazilian society, its economy, and

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its politics, together with a call for larger reforms to address all of these, Nabuco also laid down his program for how the Abolitionist movement might serve as the cutting edge of the monarchy’s necessary regeneration. In his view, the movement, allying as it did both new, independent urban activists and a select group of reformers from the elite, could generate a powerful force of public opinion. By public opinion, he meant something new in Brazil: an organized urban movement, sustained over time and focused upon public affairs and national reform. In his view, such a movement could put pressure on the emperor—the only real locus of political power and direction in the nation—who could in turn put pressure on parliament to move forward. This method of reform, once abolition had been achieved, could then be used to undertake the series of reforms necessary for the empire to achieve true Civilization and Progress.36 Nabuco’s emphasis on the novel quality and critical function of urban public opinion in the monarchy’s potential for renovation seems to reflect what he had observed in the Vintém Revolt in 1880, what he must have learned about English politics in his London studies, and what he proposed to achieve in the movement from that point on. Here, as in Rebouças’s propaganda and book, in the mingling of abolition, the movement, and the associated, transformative reforms both men advocated, we can see the breadth and depth of what both men intended. Abolition was not only advocated as an end in and of itself but understood as the beginning of a new Brazil—of a monarchy and a society transformed into a civilized, progressive nation.37 Rebouças Triumphant

It is difficult to imagine the Abolitionist movement’s unprecedented 1883 success in political, ideological, and organizational terms without recognizing Rebouças’s central role, as we have seen in the narrative and our analysis of the year’s course. Upon his return from England, the engineer had quietly acted on two key institutional fronts. It was he who undertook the successful reactivization of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão as the seat of the elite organization of the movement and Nabuco’s institutional base; likewise, it was he who quickly achieved an entirely successful rapprochement with Patrocínio, who dominated the Gazeta da Tarde and the more radical, populist activists associated with it—and all of this between March and mid-April. Having rebuilt the Sociedade and the relationship with Patrocínio and the Gazeta group, Rebouças would employ them separately for different tasks. In 1883, with the success of the street movement’s pressure over the course of 1882, he tended to emphasize the use of Patrocínio and his followers. It was through the Gazeta da Tarde and not the Associação Central Emancipadora

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(which he had helped organize in 1880 but now apparently had left behind, along with Nicolau Moreira and Vicente de Sousa) that the new focus (which Nabuco had urged upon him privately in 1882) on national organization and propaganda was undertaken. In fact, it was the Gazeta da Tarde that literally served as the site where the Confederação Abolicionista originated and was organized, and it was the Gazeta da Tarde that published most of the “new phase” propaganda described above. In effect, Rebouças was behind both of the organizations (the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão and the Gazeta da Tarde) and the two men (Nabuco and Patrocínio) as they carried out their roles in leading Abolitionism forward. In publication, as in other matters, Nabuco’s and Patrocínio’s organizations and spheres of action remained separate, however allied in the movement’s new, larger policy and vision. Each of the other two leaders was crucial, but Rebouças was the man who served as the indispensable link between them and, it seems, everything else. He was the key player in the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, the indispensable go-between in coordinating Nabuco’s vision (and his own) with Patrocínio’s popular mobilization. Indeed, while Rebouças never undertook Patrocínio’s particular role as charismatic popular speaker and journalist, he was, in effect, the propagandist in chief. He was coauthor of the Confederação Abolicionista’s Manifesto, as well as the various series described above. As he had done with the Associação Central Emancipadora conferências, he also wrote up the movement’s message. With the conferências, he had described and transcribed them in pamphlets; now, he wrote up the more radical reformism of the “new phase” in the Gazeta. And when Patrocínio took ill in May 1883, it was Rebouças who took over the Gazeta’s direction altogether.38 While some aspects of Rebouças’s role are clear in earlier histories of the movement, others are not—principally, Rebouças’s pairing of his entrepreneurial interests and his postabolitionist vision. As mentioned previously, Rebouças had renewed relations with José Carlos Rodrigues, a Brazilian expatriate, journalist, and entrepreneur, during his stay in London. They apparently entered into discussions on various joint business possibilities involving British capital and Brazilian opportunity. By July 1883, months after his return to Brazil, Rebouças records correspondence with Rodrigues concerning one of these ideas, related to the postabolitionist “rural democracy” of which he dreamt. It brought together plans for extending a railroad into the mineiro hinterland, buying up land close to the line, and organizing the transportation to and resettlement of European immigrants on the smallholdings thus created. The site in view was to be called “Terra Roxa” (Red Earth), and by mid-September 1883, Rebouças was writing up its prospectus and discussing its promotion with Nabuco (still in London).39

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Entrepreneurial interest in immigration after 1871’s abolitionist reform in Brazil was hardly new. The Congresso Agricola of 1878 in Rio had made it clear that the planters of the port-capital’s hinterland were very keen on using immigrant labor as a substitute for a slave population that was going to decline over the years. Many speakers called for importing Chinese “coolies,” as we have indicated, a common strategy throughout the Americas in the United States, Cuba, and Peru. Many Brazilians opposed using coolies, however; we may recall that Nabuco had done so in 1879. In fact, by the mid-1880s the paulista planters, led by one of their foremost families, the Prados, would be involved in a large-scale scheme for Italian immigration. So, while Rebouças was not alone in his interest in bringing European immigrants to Brazil (and opposing Chinese indentured labor), there were significant differences between him and other such advocates on this matter. Rebouças did not base his argument for immigrant labor on a belief that Afro-Brazilian freedmen were by nature averse to rural labor or unable to perform it without the lash, which was a common assumption among many southeastern planters. On the contrary, in Agricultura nacional and in his other propaganda, Rebouças’s postabolition plan called for freedmen (and their descendants) as well as European immigrants in its proposals for small-farm agricultural settlements. The Terra Roxa idea of recruiting and establishing the European component was apparently part of this larger plan.40 It is also as part of this larger plan that we should understand Rebouças’s decision to play a significant role in an immigration lobbying society. At the end of September 1883, the same month in which he was planning and corresponding about the Terra Roxa project with Rodrigues and Nabuco, he was also meeting with Carl von Koseritz and Alfredo Maria Escragnolle de Taunay. Koseritz, who was staying at the same hotel in Santa Teresa as Rebouças, was a German-born immigrant, now well established in Brazil, and something of a polymath—a journalist, an educator, and a provincial deputy, representing the German-speaking immigrant colony in the Province of Rio Grande do Sul. The two men had found common ground in their support for European immigration. Taunay, someone Rebouças knew far better, was a Conservative deputy in the Chamber and a member of an emigré French aristocratic family that had become distinguished in the arts in Brazil. Like Rebouças, Taunay was a veteran of the war against Paraguay and a lover of classical music; he was also an accomplished littérateur. Despite his marriage into one of the most notable planter families of Rio de Janeiro (the Teixeira Leite clan of the Paraíba Valley, staunch saquaremas), Taunay himself was a member of the Conservatives’ reform wing, an Abolitionist, and a personal friend of Nabuco.

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In mid-October, Rebouças and these two men founded the Sociedade Brasileira de Imigração (soon renamed the Sociedade Central de Imigração), favoring European immigration and opposing Chinese indentured labor. Rebouças arranged immediately with Patrocínio to support the new society’s protest against plans for coolies. By mid-November, obviously as part of this aspect of his postabolitionist vision, Rebouças went still further: as leader of the Escola Politécnica’s Abolitionist center, he published a project for a territorial tax, expressly designed to attack the latifundium and foster small landholding.41 In short, whether in the new organizations just mentioned, or in the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão (on the Rua do General Cámara), or at the Gazeta da Tarde (on the Rua Uruguaiana), or in his own business office (on the Rua do Carmo)—all of them within walking distance of one another in the cidade velha—Rebouças’s various reform and professional interests were interwoven. By 1883, most of these organizations had been founded or organized or were run with his constant, critical, and consistent participation. His diary, meticulously registering everything from the weather and the time of his morning ablutions to his various meetings, studies, and cultural pastimes was dense indeed. Even during the parliamentary intersession, but particularly in the year’s last two-thirds, he made his way down from Santa Teresa or (later) Petrópolis and then through the narrow, closely packed streets of the cidade velha, stopping to enter the doors of office after office. Hour by hour he notes his rounds, which varied daily, from meetings with Abolitionists, interviews with cabinet ministers, teaching in the Politécnica, contacts with engineers and other businessmen, writing up and delivering propaganda, maintaining his considerable correspondence, evenings at the homes of his close friends or with other devotees of music at the Clube Beethoven. Quietly, steadily, successfully, Rebouças had not only recovered his health but recovered and strengthened his key, nurturing role in the movement, his Sacred Cause. It is a measure of their established, close working relationship that Miguel Antônio Dias’s role becomes more apparent over the course of this phase of Rebouças’s complicated Abolitionist work. The diary mentions Dias fifteen times, which is comparable to Rebouças’s meetings with Serra or his letters to Nabuco. More significantly still, when Rebouças left Rio on 5 September to review a prospective railroad route into Minas Gerais, he recorded making farewells in Rio to only three people: Clapp, Patrocínio, and Dias, whom he describes as the “Chefes Abolicionistas,” thereby suggesting that these were his three key allies in the growing mass component of the movement.42 In terms of the movement’s daily operations in regard to both journalism and the street, we know why Patrocínio and Clapp might be designated as such: their public roles at the Gazeta da Tarde and the Confederação

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Abolicionista have been well established. But again, the exact nature of Dias’s role is somewhat obscure, even though Rebouças’s private record testifies to it. At every Abolitionist meeting or encounter with someone that he registered, the role of that person is clear from his professional status or public position. Patrocínio is the movement’s preeminent journalist and public speaker; Clapp, a small-time financier and then businessman, presumably has organizational skills and a cidade velha network—he is the president of the Confederação Abolicionista; José Américo dos Santos, an engineer, Sociedade Brasileira contra Escravidão stalwart, and publisher, is clearly a committed professional; and so on. In stark contrast, Dias, just a petty bureaucrat, ostensibly has no particular skill or status to explain his Abolitionist role, yet he is clearly a trusted agent and a key activist; his past membership in the foundational Associação Central Emancipadora, his membership in the Confederação’s councils and those of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão—all indicate the esteem he had earned. He was clearly close to Rebouças, playing a critical operational role in the latter’s Abolitionist work—one of the “chiefs” in the movement. How do we explain this petty bureaucrat’s achievement? First, it is obvious that Dias had impressed Rebouças. Dias is among the very few people Rebouças calls “friend,” when referring to his presence at critical gatherings. Second, Dias was a trusted propaganda agent—preparing a pamphlet on Ceará’s Abolitionist triumph; joining the select group reading of the Confederação Abolicionista Manifesto; one of the select group sharing the first pages of Nabuco’s O abolicionismo and an agent of its subsequent divulgation. Third and perhaps most significant, Dias was involved in popular public events: for example, the farewell to Patrocínio (when he decided to leave in November 1983 for a brief stay in Europe), in a “Festival Abolicionista” at the Teatro Politeama, and in a similar popular festival celebrating Ceará’s Abolitionists at the Recréio Dramático.43 In short, Miguel Antônio Dias had earned the trust of Rebouças for his devotion, his discretion, and his proficiency in the arenas of organization, propaganda, and popular mobilization. When Rebouças wanted important popular propaganda reviewed or undertaken, he turned to Dias to hear it or prepare it; when a major public event needed to be arranged and attended, Dias apparently helped organize the event and the audience. The mulato dispatcher was apparently efficient, trustworthy, good with words, and capable with events focusing on the urban middle and working classes. If we assume, plausibly, that many if not most of Rio’s Abolitionists were middle- and working-class Afro-Brazilians, to whom would it make more sense to delegate such responsibilities than Dias, a devoted and capable mulato, a petty bureaucrat who lived and worked among such people, who had skillfully proven his commitment to the slaves’ plight years before there

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was a movement and had known the city’s streets and districts, its business, and its people since at least the 1860s? As the Abolitionist movement’s popular mobilization survived and grew in strength over 1882 and 1883 and as Rebouças needed to mobilize still more support around the movement’s “new phase,” Miguel Antônio Dias’s role thus inevitably became more important. That will be more obvious still, as we shall see, for the movement’s mobilization would only become more salient in 1884–1885, when the Sacred Cause and its more radical “new phase,” so clear in its propaganda and its street mobilization, brought the battle into the Chamber in earnest.

4

The Field of Agramante The Liberals Attempt Reform, 1884–1885

The Abolitionist Wave Lifts Dantas Ceará and the Abolitionists’ Triumphs

As late as 22 March 1884, despite Rebouças’s nurture of the linkages between Nabuco (together with the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão group) and Patrocínio (together with the Gazeta da Tarde group), differences among the Abolitionists, at least at the personal level, lingered. On the March date, for instance, Rebouças wrote to Nabuco about a planned international congress on Abolition to be held in Petrópolis from which Patrocínio and the other boêmios were to be explicitly excluded: “We will be free of the boys from the Rua do Ouvidor.”1 Yet Rebouças’s own radical ideas, ideas akin to Nabuco’s—specifically, a series regarding “nationalization of the soil”—were published in the Jornal do Commercio that same day, with others to follow. The divisions within the movement’s leadership were due to differences not so much over radical reforms as over tactics and the monarchy, namely, the means and the regime by which to achieve fundamental change.2 These differences may seem petty to many readers today, given the common struggle and goals of the Abolitionist movement—not least in March 1884. For that was also the month when the tactics that Patrocínio had helped to perfect in 1882–1883 finally triumphed in Ceará. These tactics involved the Abolitionists’ use of moral suasion and fund-raising to work through a town street by street; they went door to door, pressing their cause upon slaveholders until they yielded and allowed their slaves to be bought out of their chains or freed them themselves without indemnification. After experimenting with this in the small town of Acarape in late 1882–early 1883, the cearenses moved on throughout the province. Finally, at the end of March 1884, Ceará was liberated, and the provincial government officially

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declared that slavery there was over. The news was celebrated by Abolitionists throughout the empire. In Paris, Patrocínio (who, as the reader may recall, had left for Europe in November 1883) marked the occasion with a banquet and a pamphlet he wrote in French for the celebrated French abolitionists who attended.3 In Rio, the Abolitionists celebrated the occasion from 23 to 25 March, particularly on the 25th, the imperial holiday marking the 1824 publication of the Constitution. The marches, music, fund-raising, and emancipations and speeches in the cidade velha that marked 23 March brought both Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira back into the public eye, however briefly, but do not seem to have involved the Confederação Abolicionista. The confederation, however, dominated the events of 24 and 25 March, particularly the latter, which the Abolitionists marked by a mass demonstration at the Teatro Politeama. This event was successfully combined with the court’s official celebration of the Constitution; indeed, the emperor made a point to receive official delegations from both the Confederação Abolicionista and the cearense Abolitionists’ organization. No wonder that, by the month’s end, one Abolitionist daily, the Gazeta de Notícias, wrote that the chieftains of both established parties, Liberals and Conservatives alike, had had to recognize the movement’s strength, as well as the political necessity “to direct the torrent and use it.” The last bit of the phrase, “and use it,” should especially be remembered: the political use of abolitionist reform for political ascent to power will play a decisive role in this chapter.4 The click of falling dominos could be heard. In April, the president of the Province of Amazonas began a campaign to liberate it, using public pressure and indemnification. The movement gained ground quickly and successfully, and something similar began in Rio Grande do Sul. While opponents could argue that, like Ceará, there were relatively few slaves to begin with in such provinces, Abolitionist movements also flourished in Pernambuco and Bahia, where despite the decline in the regional economy and thus the slave population, Abolitionists still faced staunch and powerful opposition from planters and where those who still held sizable slave crews were also the most powerful faction of the elite. On 2 April, a Confederação Abolicionista meeting was held at the Gazeta da Tarde to begin planning for a cearense-style liberation of Rio—more than a year after the first attempted organization of such a campaign (by Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira) was begun and then abandoned. Now, the movement’s growing strength was telling: by 4 April 1884, some forty Abolitionist organizations in the city had agreed to it.5 Over April and May, the Abolitionists nibbled away at Rio’s slaveholding, beginning in the cidade velha area near the Escola Politécnica, Rebouças’s alma mater and the school where he taught (and headed up

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an Abolitionist club). Again, however, Ceará and Fortaleza were starkly different from the Province of Rio de Janeiro and Rio itself. Slaveholding flourished in the fluminense rural sector, where some 258,238 were captive—the second-highest provincial number in the empire. While Rio was the focal point of the national movement, the city still had a substantial slave population (32,103, at least 10 percent of the total urban population), however much diminished by sales to the countryside. In Rio, many of these slaves had great financial worth and often served a critical economic and social function. Thus, the movement to free them ended in failure, as it also failed in the city of São Paulo, where a similar attempt was made at this time. There was additional opposition to the movement in the rural sector. Fluminense planters in the valley of the Paraíba do Sul, the old heartland of coffee, met with Rio’s Clube da Lavoura e do Comércio (Agriculture and Commerce Club) in Barra Mansa, on the border with the Province of São Paulo, to organize resistance to Abolitionism. They ranted about the movement’s illegal and incendiary actions, alluding to the Abolitionist underground railroad and raising concerns about the possibility of the murder of isolated planter families.6 Nevertheless, the growing reaction against the movement was simply a response to its triumphs. While talk of further abolitionist reform had been hushed in parliament in 1879 and 1880 and its paladin, Nabuco, and the small group of deputies supporting him had been effectively eliminated in 1881, in mid-1882, as we have seen, pressure outside of parliament from the movement was such that, under Paranaguá, the subject had at least been brought up in the cabinet’s announced program. By 1883, the movement had created a national organization and a more radical program; in May 1884, roughly a year after Paranaguá was succeeded by Lafaiete, parliamentary debate on slavery actually took place. Abolition was now central to public and parliamentary concern, and in that same month Nabuco, the recognized leader of the movement, returned to Rio. Rebouças went to great pains for a festival Nabuco, securing the palatial Cassino Fluminense (the elite’s favorite venue for aristocratic pastimes), across from the Passéio Público, as well as police permission to clear the streets beginning at the quay where Nabuco was to land, at the foot of the hill of São Bento, all the way to the fashionable Flamengo district, the location of his family’s mansion, to accommodate the expected throngs. But it was not to be. On 13 May, the Chamber majority, mostly moderate Liberals in alliance with the strong Conservative minority, prevailed; mass demonstrations in the streets to welcome Nabuco were forbidden, and on 17 May, Nabuco was merely welcomed aboard ship by Abolitionist delegations and personal friends. Perhaps it was just as well—Nabuco suffered desperately from a weak constitution and frequent bouts of ill health, and he was in very

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poor health now. Nonetheless, on 23 May, he wrote of his rapid recovery and anticipated beginning his Abolitionist “agitation” soon. That same day, Patrocínio also returned from Europe, robust and excited, and was greeted by Abolitionist delegations and a crowd at a quay, just off the Largo do Paço. When he arrived at his home in the distant, impoverished São Cristóvão district, his friends had arranged a visit in a rented streetcar, accompanied by a band. On the next day, Rebouças met briefly with Patrocínio alone, doubtless both to welcome him back and to coordinate the actions to come.7 Both Nabuco and Patrocínio faced a complicated parliamentary situation: there was great political uncertainty about the cabinet and only flickering promise for the movement. While this had been the case since 1882, Nabuco perceived something new: the organized reaction of planters and merchants against the movement that we have just noted. At the time, however, he considered this reaction as likely being inconsequential. Most of his focus was on Lafaiete’s cabinet, which he thought weak and likely to fall in the new legislative session’s first month or so. He dismissed the possibility of a Conservative return to power, though, and anticipated Saraiva’s triumph instead. Indeed, in early June, Lafaiete’s cabinet, which had begun weak and bled further over the year of its sickly existence, came so close to losing a vote of confidence that they simply anticipated matters and asked the emperor to be allowed to resign.8 The Emperor, Dantas, and the Abolitionists’ Prospects

As was so often the case, the emperor first called upon Saraiva, in the hope that the capable political operator would lend his many strengths to the throne. The result, however, as it had been before, was an unhappy one. Matters were complicated but can be described more or less briefly. The Abolitionist movement’s threat to the political stability of the realm was now plain and increasing dramatically, not least with its explicit, radical “new phase,” its spread throughout the country, the impact of Ceará and Amazonas, and now the return of its adroit, charismatic leader and its worrisome radical popular tribune. This was all new and had to be controlled somehow. Compounding it was the rapidly growing reactionary movement, led by the wealthy and influential Clube da Lavoura e do Comércio, which had decided between April and early May to organize a series of meetings of its own to confront Abolitionism. While these elements were also new, the Liberals’ lack of unity was far too old: divided between its noisy reformist faction and a moderate majority particularly hostile to Abolitionism, the party’s flickering solidarity had plagued the Liberals’ successive cabinets since

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Sinimbu’s administration of 1878–1880. In stark contrast, the Conservative opposition in the Chamber, decisively more cohesive since its mid-1870s recovery, had grown since the election of 1881. It was avid to return to power and increasingly concerned with the emperor’s apparent decision to recognize and deal with Abolitionism (apparent in his appointment of Paranaguá and then Lafaiete, together with the explicit mention of abolitionist reform in both cabinets’ projects). This Conservative parliamentary bloc could, as it had done before, form an alliance with either of the two Liberal factions, moderate or reformist, depending upon the circumstances, either to block a reform or topple an administration.9 The emperor’s strategy had become increasingly clear through his actions since 1882. He wanted to manage the Abolitionists by getting a cabinet into power that would pass some sort of abolitionist reform; as was his customary preference, he hoped to achieve reform in partnership with an amenable cabinet, statesmen willing to take his lead. While the Conservative administration of Rio Branco, 1871–1875, had worked in this way very well, the emperor now had no viable Conservative chieftain ready to hand. As has already been noted, the obvious choice, the acknowledged chief of the party by age, rank, and experience, was Cotegipe—and he was clearly both persona non grata and no reformist. Thus, the emperor was left with the squabbling Liberals and the critical problem of how to recruit a prime minister who might somehow unify the Liberal majority in the Chamber, despite the fact that the Liberals were divided by precisely the issue the emperor and the Abolitionists had made the question of the day. While Saraiva had managed the electoral reform of 1881 through successful compromise within the Liberal majority and by reaching out to the Conservatives, even he doubted a similar possibility existed in the case of abolitionism. After all, the majority of each of the two parties seated in the Chamber were fundamentally opposed to it, as had been the case with the previous legislature (elected in 1878) and as had been made clear again in the marginalization and then expulsion of Nabuco and other reformists over 1879–1881. Indeed, the 1871 reform, once so hard fought, was now proclaimed by the Liberals’ majority chieftains to be the best and last solution. Saraiva therefore refused to serve, even though in public he himself would soon describe abolition as a “national aspiration.” He would go no further than that assertion, however; he prided himself on winning, and the probable risk of losing a battle, no matter how worthy, was not acceptable.10 After Saraiva, the emperor summoned other Liberals. He found that both Sinimbu and Afonso Celso (a former Progresssive League minister) thought that the reform of 1871 sufficed and that further reform was inopportune, not least given the ongoing economic crisis. This left the emperor with only one plausible Liberal chieftain, one who, like Paranaguá and Lafaiete, was

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associated with the reform faction of the party, namely, Manuel Dantas. One underscores “associated with”—Dantas was hardly an ideologue but above all, like Saraiva, a superb political operator. He had risen in the Province of Bahia, itself sharply divided between the two major parties since the 1840s. Dantas was elected to the Chamber in the 1850s; by 1868, he was editing the provincial party daily, the Diário da Bahia, which became the party’s de facto headquarters after the emperor’s “coup” of 1868, the Liberal Manifesto of 1869, and the ten years of Liberal exile from power that followed. Indeed, as mentioned in Chapter 2, Dantas had been a minister under the last Progressive League cabinet, the one toppled in 1868, and an ally not only of Zacarias but of their fellow baiano, Nabuco de Araújo, the author of the 1869 manifesto and the father of Joaquim Nabuco. Despite this long association with the reform wing of the party, Dantas also understood the necessities of power and consequently was willing to serve either wing of his party. When the moderate Liberal Saraiva, another baiano, called upon him to serve in the cabinet of 1880–1882, he agreed. When his oldest son, Rodolfo Epifânio de Sousa Dantas, was called to serve under Martinho de Campos, another moderate Liberal (he who had made an opportune alliance with Paulino against Liberal reform), he too agreed. Perhaps, then, no other Liberal chieftain was so suited for the attempt to achieve Liberal unity and Abolitionist reform than Dantas. He also understood the emperor. As noted, Dantas had been a minister in the cabinet that the emperor had abandoned in 1868; thus, in the negotiations that Dantas undertook with his monarch, he made sure that the emperor would support him if, despite his skills, the Chamber refused reform. This arrangement, which he never explicitly clarified in public, nonetheless became known in the debates as his “pact” with the emperor: if he was faced with a vote of “no confidence,” Dantas would not resign and the emperor would dissolve the Chamber, allowing for a new election so that Dantas could have another chance of gaining the support of a presumably more sympathetic Chamber majority. Finally, Dantas was also well prepared to attempt abolitionist reform through his personal connections, a basis for especially strong confidence in him on the part of the reformists. Aside from his long ascent and personal associations among the Liberal reformists, his son Rodolfo was a good friend of Joaquim Nabuco and an even closer friend of Manuel Dantas’s protégé for many years, Rui Barbosa de Oliveira, a baiano, an ardent reformist like his own father, and an outspoken Abolitionist. Dantas’s minister of justice, the deputy Francisco Maria Sodré Pereira, was the brother of former deputy Jerónimo Sodré Pereira (Dantas’s son-in-law), the deputy who had preceded Nabuco in 1879 in pressing for abolition again in the Chamber, the first to do so in the post-1871 era. Altogether, Dantas was a statesman whom leading reformists might trust.11

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Nabuco and Rebouças lost no time in approaching the Liberal leadership during this juncture. The Lafaiete cabinet resigned on 4 June, and the Dantas cabinet ascended on 6 June. On 7 June, the two Abolitionists sought out Saraiva, apparently to ask for his support and to sound out the influential, calculating moderate on his sense of the possibilities. The reader may recall that Nabuco had written to Saraiva months before, precisely to urge him to take charge of the Liberals and the reform himself. Now that Saraiva had refused, they may well have wanted to hear his appraisal of the challenge ahead and perhaps to press for his support—probably both. The meeting, like so many to follow between these two Abolitionists and leading Liberal statesmen, was entirely in private, lest the opposition get wind of prominent Abolitionists’ contacts or possible influence. Accordingly, the meeting was held where Saraiva was staying, at the home of Pedro Leitão da Cunha, a Liberal statesman whom Rebouças had known and impressed as a young engineer in the early 1860s. Afterward, the fruit was quick to ripen. On 9 June, in a parliamentary speech concerning his refusal to accept power himself, Saraiva emphasized the need for party unity if abolitionist reform were to succeed and implicitly supported such a reform by referring to it as a “national aspiration.” Nabuco, in private, described this as a watershed: the most powerful and prestigious Liberal chieftain and the emperor’s favorite had now in effect legitimized abolitionist reform and the cabinet chosen to carry it forward among the Liberals. It was, he noted, a far cry from his own 1880 marginalization at the movement’s very beginning, when Saraiva and the moderates had dismissed both Abolitionism and its leader as unacceptable.12 The Reform, the Abolitionists’ Role, and the Reaction

On that same day, 9 June, the Dantas reform project was introduced by the new prime minister in the Chamber. A contemporary recalled that deputies were alarmed by the decisive nature of his remarks. Instead of the vague references of his predecessors, Dantas laid out an actual legislative project and its principal measures. This was scarcely softened by his introduction, in which he noted the necessity of resolving the question “not by retreating, not by stopping, and not by moving too fast,” as well as his reference to slavery as an “anomalous institution.” The prime minister went on to describe the cabinet’s political task: “It is the overdue obligation of the government, supported by the Legislative Power, to determine the limit at which prudence permits, and civilization demands, that we arrive; in this way we will be enabled to avoid instabilities and excesses that might compromise the solution of the problem, instead of advancing it.” He then proceeded to

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the reform’s main points: that the cabinet put a complete end to the sale of slaves between provinces; that the emancipation fund be greatly expanded by a national tax affecting everyone and not simply the propertied; that all slaves age sixty or older be freed; that a series of pro-immigration measures (concerning commercial legislation, mortgages, labor laws, and civil marriage) be pursued with special attention; and that the cabinet consider enabling processes to nationalize land alongside railroads and navigable rivers as a support for immigrants’ settlements on small farms. Dantas completed his list by remarking on the proximity of the next scheduled election (1885) and pledging his cabinet to a policy of neutrality, as Saraiva’s cabinet had done in 1881. In effect, he was committing his cabinet to a critical reform and then a national referendum. He ended by asking for the Liberals’ support and then, speaking directly to the Conservatives, quoted their favorite French political theorist, François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot: “To resist is also to support.” Thus, he concluded, “it is not permissible for the Cabinet to dispense with the accompaniment of the illustrious Conservative opposition”; instead, “the cabinet asks and counts upon [it] for its review and advice in serving the fatherland.”13 Over the next six weeks, the reform and its politics were worked out in the cabinet and between it and its principal supporters: the emperor himself and the Abolitionists. This last may seem surprising; after all, there is an enormous distance between the principal goal of the Abolitionists’ “new phase,” that is, the immediate abolition of slavery without indemnification, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the freeing of slaves age sixty or older and the public’s indemnification for emancipation of any others. But before addressing this seeming contradiction between the goals of the cabinet and those of the movement, let us address some relevant aspects of responsibility and chronology to lay out what happened more clearly. First, the project itself has long been recognized to be the work of Rui Barbosa, then a Liberal deputy. Already noted for his legal scholarship and acumen, Rui served Dantas and his son, Rodolfo, discreetly and well, undertaking the research and writing of the project. All three men lived in or near the coastal Flamengo district, so that going to or from the Chamber downtown (in the cidade velha near the Largo do Paço) they could easily visit with one another as they collaborated from day to day. Between 9 June, the day of the project’s announcement in the Chamber, and 15 July, the day of the project’s formal, finished presentation, their consultations and drafts were followed closely by both the emperor, possibly at the city palace at the Largo do Paço, and the Abolitionist leadership of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, with its office near the Largo do Paço. Just as he had done in regard to the 1871 project, the emperor not only reviewed the work but contributed to it, as Rui’s private correspondence

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with Dantas makes clear. The Abolitionists’ role is likewise made clear in Rebouças’s diary. Almost immediately, the Abolitionists began planning a press campaign in support of the cabinet. By mid-June, in fact, Rebouças had discussed this with Gusmão Lobo, the Abolitionist editor of the prestigious Jornal do Commercio. Doubtless at Dantas’s behest, in order to maintain at least a façade of cabinet independence, all of the Abolitionists supporting the cabinet had to use pseudonyms, chosen from among those of British and United States abolitionists: Nabuco’s comments, for example, were published over the byline “Garrison.” The same insistence on a façade of distance between the Abolitionists and the cabinet affected Rebouças, who at Dantas’s personal request agreed to stop publishing his Abolitionist propaganda from the Abolitionist center at the Escola Politécnica, a state institution, and to accept the center’s closure. This did not mean, of course, that the Abolitionists had to feign public indifference from the bastions of their own institutions. By 7 July, the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão had decided to support the cabinet formally. On 14 July, the eve of the cabinet project’s presentation, Rebouças, Nabuco, Miguel Antônio Dias, Joaquim Serra, and João Clapp met to determine how the “partido abolicionista” should demonstrate that support the next day. It is worth noting that Patrocínio was not at the meeting. Perhaps the shift from railing against the monarchy to supporting one of its cabinets, however reformist, was more than he could stomach, at least at this time. Or perhaps the others felt that there was too much at stake to risk his radical participation. Or yet again, perhaps it seemed wise to keep the radical card up their sleeve as a threat in reserve. We cannot know.14 Indeed, the issue of Abolitionist support by any of these men must be sorted out. Why would the Abolitionists, whose “new phase” radicalism differed so markedly from what Dantas proposed, support him in public? As “Garrison,” Nabuco took a very critical, pessimistic public position regarding the prime minister, perhaps to make the latter’s position seem more responsible to parliament. Although he supported the Dantas reform in a column, stating that it would please the slaves and signal the movement’s triumph, he argued that many of its proposals were small and insignificant, and that those that were not were unlikely to win Chamber support. “Garrison” did point out, however, that the reform would free most of the captives enslaved illegally during the post-1831 contraband trade with Africa, that it would end the scandal of exploiting the aged or selling them for less than the price of an animal, and that it offered a legal precedent for freedom without indemnification. Later, in 1885, when explaining his past Abolitionist support for the cabinet, Nabuco emphasized the last point again. This all suggests the movement’s calculated opportunism with respect to Dantas. Indeed, as “Garrison,” Nabuco had felt free to call for Saraiva’s

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ascent and urge his embrace of the cause, arguing that Dantas lacked the majority of Liberals’ support in the Chamber. Yet in a private letter to Penedo in London, he was happy to exploit the cabinet for the benefits it offered, however temporary. He confirmed, for example, that he expected the Chamber’s dissolution and new elections, which under Dantas’s oversight would favor his reentry into parliament. He emphasized a related, second factor: the considerable credibility and power that the relationship with Dantas’s cabinet brought to the Abolitionist movement: “We have made immense progress [over 1883–1884] and Dantas came to give us much strength. From there [London], one cannot imagine the moral authority of the administration’s intervention.”15 While the Abolitionists both in and out of parliament could call for legislation to bring about immediate abolition and legislation to bring about extensive land reform and so forth, as a minority they themselves could not pass such laws. Indeed, until 1883 at the earliest, they had been dismissed as inopportune at best and dangerous radical troublemakers at worst, at the only site where such legislation could be introduced and passed, namely, parliament. Now there was a cabinet willing to work with them to begin the legislative struggle for at least two radical ideas: first, that the state could and ought to intervene in slaveholders’ property rights (by freeing sexagenarians), and second, that the state could and ought to promote nationalization of at least some land to promote immigration and smallholdings. Another point, the significant expansion of the 1871 emancipation fund (albeit by revenues drawn from everyone and not just the wealthy), albeit not radical in principle, was radical in its potential impact: the dramatic expansion of emancipation in short order, by funding it seriously. Saraiva, with his political credibility and influence, had held obvious attractions, but he had refused the risk. Dantas, a known chieftain in Liberal reformism with great personal and political skills had accepted it, so long as the emperor’s backing was sure. How could the Abolitionists have withheld their support? It was the first viable opportunity for an abolitionist reform, however paltry. Moreover, if their support were clear and useful, their own political prospects with respect to future credibility and influence were promising. In sum, it was an alliance of great, opportune potential. Although Nabuco was dismissive with respect to the reactionaries’ response, one wonders if Rebouças and Patrocínio were quite so sure. The public organization by the Clube da Lavoura e do Commércio, together with the support of the prestigious Associação do Comércio, would lead to the organization of planters at the county level throughout the key province of Rio de Janeiro (including public meetings in Rio and in the province’s towns), propaganda, and, shortly, violence against both slaves and local Abolitionists. The movement was not only being taken seriously by the imperial state

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but being attacked by both established and new organizations linked to the dominant agro-export fluminense elite. However little Dantas’s reform and his position seemed to represent, compared with the Abolitionists’ hopes, it was at least their first real opportunity for the beginnings of substantive change at a time when the Abolitionist movement was under serious threat. How could they turn away from state support?16 Finally, we should recall Nabuco’s political analysis of the monarchy and progressive reform. In most ways, the conjuncture of 1884 fit what he had hoped for in 1883. In O abolicionismo, he accepted both the emperor’s established interventionist role and the new possibility of mobilized urban public opinion—the first was simply a political fact of life for his generation; the other, an innovation of great promise. Thus, an alliance between the emperor (through the medium of Dantas) and the Abolitionist movement, an example of such public opinion, made perfect sense.17 It must be understood, however, that this alliance was utterly abhorrent to many traditional Liberals, and, especially, Conservatives. For the ideologues of both parties, the emperor’s intervention in 1884, like that of 1871, flew in the face of the separation of powers and the ideas of an elite, representative, constitutional government. As for the Abolitionist movement, it was no more welcome to them than mob rule or the French revolutionary crowds had been to their forefathers—a sign not of Civilization and Progress but of a threatening, disorderly decline into chaos.18 On 15 July, the day set for the introduction of the reform project, Rodolfo Dantas asked for a vote of confidence. Cabinets often asked for such a vote to compel support from their partisans in the Chamber, knowing that most deputies of their own party would not vote against their cabinet; traditionally, a majority vote of no confidence might lead to the resignation of the cabinet or to a new election, or both, in which case their own seats (and however unlikely, their party’s domination of the state) would be put at risk. Despite all of the factors favoring strong support, Dantas’s majority was very, very weak. The project won by a majority of only 3 votes (55 to 52). From that point on, with the cabinet’s vulnerability made plain, its viability was in question; the cabinet lurched from one political crisis to another. The votes on other matters over the next few days repeatedly demonstrated a startling lack of support in the Chamber, including a vote on 23 July against praising the formal end of slavery in the Province of Amazonas. Nevertheless, Dantas made it clear that he had no intention of resigning. In all of this, whether in a formal delegation of the Confederação Abolicionista to Dantas’s home (15 July) or in private assessment and planning sessions with the prime minister or other cabinet members, Rebouças and Nabuco supported the administration, in the planning sessions doing so, in effect, from within Dantas’s inner circle.

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On 28 July, despite the efforts of Dantas’s supporters, two motions by his opposition were moved in the Chamber, both effectively denying the cabinet its confidence. The second, made by a Liberal, spoke directly to the reform project and formally denied the administration its confidence on account of it. This time, the vote went against Dantas: 59 to 52. Another deputy at the time recalled that the majority was made up of forty-two Conservatives and seventeen Liberals—a little more than a fourth of the sixty-five Liberals voting—demonstrating precisely the dilemma the Liberal cabinets had been facing time and time again since 1881. Only a fraction of the Liberal majority needed to stray into the arms of the substantial Conservative minority to topple a Liberal cabinet.19 In this case, representative constitutional practice would imply Dantas’s resignation, but he refused to resign and instead made a formal request to the emperor for the Chamber’s dissolution and a new election. On the day he did so, 28 July, Rebouças and Nabuco conferred directly with Rodolfo Dantas and Gusmão Lobo about a propaganda offensive for 29 July defending the cabinet and the dissolution idea, and met with the entire cabinet afterward. On 29 July, the Council of State attacked that position, advising the emperor against supporting Dantas and dissolving the Chamber—hardly surprising, given the Conservatives’ domination of the council. Both Dantas and the monarch ignored this advice; instead, on 30 July, the emperor acquiesced to Dantas’s formal request and dissolved the Chamber, calling for a new election to be held on 1 December 1884. In the Chamber there were denunciations of the emperor’s decision, its constitutional consequences, and the obvious alliance among monarch, minister, and the Abolitionists and their “mob.” Abolitionist popular mobilization in the streets around the Chamber was certainly on hand, and it was critical to political perception. On that same day, 30 July, for example, the Abolitionists orchestrated an unprecedented mass demonstration of some five thousand people to salute and celebrate the emperor, Dantas, the pro-Dantas deputies, and the Abolitionist press. They assembled in the Largo do Paço, just next to the Chamber, to salute the first three before parading up the cidade velha’s fashionable main street, the Rua do Ouvidor, to salute the pro-Abolitionist dailies there, ending at the Gazeta da Tarde on the Rua Uruguaiana to pay tribute to Patrocínio and hear him speak.20 While the Confederação Abolicionista and the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão had publicly supported the cabinet, they had often done so in delegations or meetings of properly dressed, middle-class Abolitionists and in press propaganda; this is the first mention in the record of such popular, mass demonstrations in the streets. It should be emphasized as well that the number mentioned, five thousand, likewise represents a marked departure from street mobilization in earlier times. At the beginning of the movement,

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most Abolitionist meetings and demonstrations probably numbered in the hundreds, or at best, one or two thousand. The number five thousand was significantly more impressive, and its consequences would be telling.21 Aside from the significant growth in numbers, Abolitionist support for the cabinet is noteworthy for other reasons. First, the mass street support was probably the best demonstration of this aspect of Miguel Antônio Dias’s talent. After all, he was a member of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão and the Confederação Abolicionista, the two Abolitionist organizations dominating the work and alliance with the cabinet, and as such, he was most probably the organizer of such people in such numbers. In fact, the Sociedade, the more elite organization, was the principal link to the cabinet. Rebouças records that Dias had participated in the critical Sociedade meeting on 14 July that decided upon public commitment to the cabinet. Afterward, all of the meetings that Rebouças notes for 28 July, when tactics were doubtless finalized, took place at the highest level, with Nabuco and key journalists Gusmão Lobo (Jornal do Commercio) and Joaquim Serra (Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão) as well as cabinet ministers. If mass mobilization was being planned, as one must assume from the results, and then set in motion, it was being orchestrated from this leadership down, and the most likely bridge between such elite leadership and the masses was Dias. He was both one of Rebouças’s three “Abolitionist Chiefs” (as noted earlier) and the only one of them with the sort of obvious, direct access to the masses such mobilization would have required. In effect, since it was the Sociedade running the relationship with Dantas (as Rebouças’s diary makes clear), it was probably Dias, Rebouças’s right-hand man, who was responsible for raising, organizing, and delivering the crowds that were doubtless deemed essential to demonstrate public support for the beleaguered cabinet. Second, such public Abolitionist support was not always uniform, which points to a possible division in Abolitionist support for the cabinet, something we discussed earlier. Most significant, while Patrocínio and the Gazeta da Tarde group publicly supported the alliance with the cabinet together with the demonstration of 30 July, which Patrocínio addressed, we cannot be sure of the character or dependability of this support (much less its role in organizing the mass demonstration). Somewhat later, on 30 August, for example, Patrocínio assessed the emperor’s role in supporting the cabinet with rather grudging phrasing: “Events placed the Monarch at the vanguard: it is well that the Monarch moves forward so that liberty is not obliged to push him.” Surely this is a sentiment difficult to reconcile with the celebratory mass meeting of thousands and their salute of the emperor, cabinet, and pro-Dantas deputies on 30 July (when even Patrocínio saluted Dantas for “putting himself at the front of the Abolitionist movement”). It is also in stark contrast with the other Abolitionists’ steadfast embrace of the cabinet,

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such as the banquet at the Hotel do Globo on 19 August that the Confederação Abolicionista hosted to celebrate Ceará’s liberation, attended not only by pro-Dantas deputies but by Rodolfo Dantas himself. Perhaps Patrocínio, radical republican that he was, was ambivalent about solidarity among the movement, the monarch, and the Dantas cabinet.22 A third aspect of the Abolitionists’ support is noteworthy as well. Not all of it was focused solely on the cabinet’s abolition reform. Rebouças, in particular, began a series of private meetings, largely with Dantas, to advance the other, related projects that he had been promoting in the dailies and in private, projects in which Abolition was linked to socioeconomic rural reforms: new railroads, European immigration, the promotion of smallholding colonies, and so on. This is unsurprising in view of Rebouças’s key role both in the Abolitionist movement and in the related projects linked to smallholding colonization, together with Dantas’s public embrace of ideas related to such reforms. Yet it does illustrate the Abolitionists’ firm support for the cabinet and identification with its fate; not only abolition but a great many related reforms were also on the line.23 The Conservatives’ response to the 28 July vote and the dissolution announced on 30 July must be analyzed as well. Since the announcement of the reform in early June (and Dantas’s disclosure of his having unspecified guarantees from the emperor), the principal orators of the opposition had been frequent and ferocious in their criticism. Domingos de Andrade Figueira, for example, one of the most rigid of the constitutionalists and opponents of state abolitionism, had been fierce in his attacks. On 31 July, however, condemnation of the emperor’s decision to maintain the cabinet after the “no confidence” vote and dissolve the Chamber, despite the Council of State’s opinion, inspired exceptional rhetorical efforts by the highly respected Antônio Ferreira Viana and, especially, Paulino himself.24 The emperor’s commitment to the reform, evident in his public actions, was also evident in private. The reader will recall, for example, his participation in crafting the reform project. At least as interesting is his willingness to engage in an extraordinary personal appeal, reinforcing an unusual effort by the prime minister. From the beginning, Dantas, who was necessarily conscious of the opposition that he faced in the Chamber and the significant role played in it by the substantial Conservative bloc, sought to woo away the reformists in that bloc. He appealed privately to their chief, João Alfredo, who had been Rio Branco’s capable agent in the Chamber deliberations and votes that made the 1871 victory possible and had become the heir to Rio Branco’s faction of the Conservatives upon the retired prime minister’s death in 1880; João Alfredo, however, refused Dantas. Hearing of this, the emperor himself took João Alfredo aside and made the same appeal, but again João Alfredo refused to support the cabinet. In September 1884, however, after

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the emperor appealed to him a second time, João Alfredo responded with a suggestion of his own: rather than asking him to form an alliance with the Liberals to bring about abolitionist reform, the emperor should instead return the Conservatives to power. João Alfredo pointed out that Cotegipe was clearly the recognized chieftain of his party, to whom both the reformists and the saquaremas, under Paulino, were loyal. He claimed that if Cotegipe were to embrace abolitionist reform, both wings of the Conservatives would and could provide the disciplined support for its passing.25 The emperor did not commit himself; he merely suggested that João Alfredo confer with Cotegipe. João Alfredo decided to act on the idea immediately. Like Nabuco, he apparently took the emperor’s interventionist potential for what it was, a proven reality, one that he had witnessed back in 1871 and now again in 1884. As stated earlier, a successful abolitionist reform measure had become, quite obviously, the price of power: it had figured in the ascent of Paranaguá, Lafaiete, and now of Dantas; it had kept the Liberals in power since at least 1883; and it might serve to bring the Conservatives back to power as well. It was not difficult for João Alfredo to convince Cotegipe of this; whatever his traditional Conservativism or personal attachment to slaveholding, Cotegipe was above all an opportunist who valued power above all. He had been a key supporter of Rio Branco in 1871 (despite his personal clash with the emperor over the free-womb project earlier), just as he had been a member of the Conciliation cabinet of 1853–1857, early in his career. In both cases, he had broken away from the saquaremas’ ranks because he valued being in power more highly than maintaining ideological coherence. He had, in effect, understood and profited from the emperor’s personal abuse of his power by serving the emperor when the latter was determined to intervene, and he was prepared to do so again. Nor was Cotegipe alone among Conservatives in this. Under the monarchy, the party in opposition had few means by which to protect its interests, ideology, or following. The Conservatives had now been out of power for six years, and they were ravenous for the prerequisites of office and the protection it ensured. It was time to return.26 So, on 28 September 1884, the traditional date of the Conservative reformists’ banquet to celebrate the passage of the Law of the Free Womb in 1871, Cotegipe unexpectedly appeared there with João Alfredo. There he made a speech, in which he stated for the public record that “the Conservative Party wants, can, and must realize the reform of the servile element.” It was characteristic of Cotegipe that he did this without consulting Paulino. He had the power to dominate the party; sensitivity to others’ pride or respect for their opinions was hardly typical of his political style. He had made his calculations, and that was an end to it. Paulino’s close ally and cousin, Francisco Belisário Soares de Sousa, a deputy and the editor of the Conservative

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daily O Brazil, was shocked in private and exploded with indignation; we can only imagine Paulino’s reaction. Nevertheless, they made no public break with their chieftain, probably not only as a matter of party discipline, but also because they certainly understood what Cotegipe intended, namely, a Conservative alternative to tempt the emperor if the Liberals’ political divisions finally ended in Dantas’s failure.27

The Election of 1884, the Slaveholders’ Triumph, and Dantas’s Fate The 1884 Election and Its Impact 28

Nabuco viewed the possibility of being elected to the Chamber again with optimism. Apparently, like other Abolitionists, he viewed his chances through a lens polished by the electoral realities dominant in Brazil since the 1840s. The emperor chose the prime minister, the prime minister’s cabinet purged and replaced the judiciary and executive agents of the imperial state, and their loyal agents oversaw the elections, ensuring a supportive, partisan majority. Thus, Nabuco and other Abolitionists, as allies of the Dantas cabinet, initially approached the 1884 elections with high hopes.29 However, two critical factors affected matters now. First, the electoral reform of 1881 had weakened the influence of the cabinet, which, as Nabuco soon found, meant a consequent strengthening of the local oligarchies. Second, as the results of the 1881 election had demonstrated, the far smaller, more elite electorate ensured by the 1881 voter requirements meant that the local elites throughout the nation had, if anything, even more weight in the elections than previously. This not only meant that the elites depended less on the cabinet for support or the party’s leadership for direction but also that they did not need to corral the lower strata in town or country as before. Indeed, as noted in Chapter 2, the increasingly reformist urban electorate significant in the Liberals’ new strength after the 1850s was cut dramatically by 1881’s more elite qualifications, literacy requirements and more documentation most of all. The difficulty non-elite would-be voters had in arranging such documentation probably helped account for the very reactionary Chamber results of 1881, when the Liberal moderates’ domination of the Liberal majority was strengthened and the Conservative opposition’s numbers in the Chamber increased forcefully.30 There were also special factors in play in this particular election. It was explicitly a referendum on Dantas’s abolitionist reform project, which meant that it was not only a contest between Liberals and Conservatives but between Abolitionists and the majority in both of the two established parties. To be nominated, Abolitionists had to contend with the hostility

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of the elite, established partisan machinery of their own party, even before they could compete with the opposing party. Yet, despite the national significance of the 1884 election in this regard, the historiography has generally neglected it, with one exception—its results with respect to Nabuco. The Abolitionist leader’s electoral fortunes then and afterward, because of their significance with respect to the movement, have traditionally claimed attention, and for the same reasons the Nabuco election claims our attention here. Let us, then, examine what happened in the Abolitionist leader’s native province.31 Dantas was able to support Nabuco in two ways. First, he was able to persuade the Liberals’ provincial leadership to accept Nabuco’s candidacy. Second, after Nabuco realized the very real post-1881 limits to the cabinet’s influence upon the local electorate, he carefully used what remained of it (particularly cabinet patronage) with the greater discretion and focus now necessary.32 In most ways, however, Nabuco had to count upon local support and his own talents. The provincial leadership, rather than undercut Liberal chances in the rural sector by foisting the Abolitionist’s candidacy upon planters there, offered Nabuco an urban district—in Recife. To the extent that reformists from either party had a chance of survival after 1881, it was logically greater in the more independent, progressive urban centers. Nabuco recognized this, of course, and accepted. Moreover, his chances in a Recife district were enhanced dramatically by his Abolitionist connections there, owing not only to the Abolitionist movement that had grown up after his 1880 speeches in the Chamber and the reformist and abolitionist traditions of Recife preceding 1880, but also to their culmination and conflation in the 1884 position of José Mariano, with whom Nabuco had made a strong personal political alliance. José Mariano, who had supported Abolitionism in the Chamber, following Nabuco in 1880–1881, had, unlike Nabuco, survived the election of 1881, a result not of luck but of practiced calculation and established strength, the outcome of a remarkably capable political career in Recife as a popular reformist in the 1870s. In many ways, José Mariano had anticipated the methods of the Abolitionist movement in Rio over those years. He had used a reformist daily, popular demonstrations and meetings, and a reformist organization (the Clube Popular) to mobilize the urban masses. Furthermore, his reformism, unlike the Abolitionist movement in Rio, had coupled this innovative mobilization with the dexterous management of established patronage and machine politics, using his increased electoral strength among post-1878 Liberal administrations and the Liberal oligarchy in Pernambuco to negotiate patronage for up-and-coming urban interests. Like the urban Liberals in many of the empire’s great cities, he had also been willing and able to muster street violence to protect his popular following against the

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traditional employment of thugs that had become a staple of local electoral politics everywhere in the empire after the 1840s.33 In short, when Nabuco returned to Recife in September 1884, he had not only Dantas’s support and the grudging welcome of the Liberal establishment but the critical personal support of one of the most successful popular reformists in the nation. He also had strengths of his own, of course. He had made a keen study of popular mobilization in England, Ceará, and Rio. He had the established provincial prestige of his father’s political career and the patina derived from the highly respected elite connections of his mother’s family. He had been blessed with unusually good looks, an eye for making the best of them, and a charismatic presence and remarkable rhetorical ability. Above all, he had the unique glory derived from his leadership of the Abolitionist movement. These last strengths cannot be overemphasized: he had spoken repeatedly and well in the Chamber and in various languages before various distinguished audiences in Brazil, Portugal, Spain, France, and England. Now, as he had done recently, in June 1884 in Rio, he was to test them before the popular masses, most of whom were doubtless AfroBrazilian. Again, the novelty of such popular, mobilizing politics in Brazil must be underscored: the quality of that mass participation had an unprecedented, marked impact on the way the politics of the struggle worked out.34 Let us see how. Over the month and a half between mid-October and the 1 December election, Nabuco made more than a dozen and a half speeches. The direct, mass appeal of the campaign was remarkable in and of itself. Nabuco intentionally addressed people who could not even vote, apparently seeking to mobilize the masses in order to build a context of fervent public opinion that would impress the relatively select electorate who alone could actually vote. Thus, he not only gave more formal conferências in the fashionable Teatro Santa Isabel in Recife’s old center but also speeches for the working poor, crowds that attended his open-air meetings. These latter were often estimated to bring in from 2,000 to 4,000 people: the electorate for his district was merely 1,600. These mass meetings were called “meetings populares,” using an English word for a political phenomenon still too foreign in Brazil to have acquired a Portuguese equivalent. Of the nineteen speeches listed at the time, eight took place at the more clearly formal conferências at the Teatro Santa Isabel or other similarly formal settings; the other eleven took place in working-class halls, suburban and city streets and squares, and parks, all venues where the masses could assemble freely to hear him. Three were designated “meetings populares,” and one was a “speech to working men.” Others were intended for voters but could be heard by others as well, given the sites. It is important to note that these Recife campaign speeches must have been considered important and good enough for general propaganda purposes—why else would they

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have been collected and published in Rio by 1885? One reason for discussing them here is precisely because they were considered not merely applicable to the Recife setting alone but suitable for Rio’s readership and audience and doubtless those of other towns throughout the nation. Nonetheless, some have been lost to us: the notes to the contemporary collection indicate that, in addition to the nineteen listed between 12 October and 30 November, Nabuco also gave speeches at select voters’ meetings and at popular demonstrations, speeches that were not recorded. The published collection contains only a dozen of all of the speeches listed and mentioned here, because most of Nabuco’s presentations were not transcribed by others or were based upon speeches previously written up by Nabuco himself, which is unfortunate. Among the speeches made without notes, the collection states that there were speeches relating slavery to mass poverty and a speech “in the great meeting of the Liberal party” in which Nabuco focused upon “the special duty of men of color with regard to the abolitionist movement.” This last indicates two points: first, the unsurprising fact that many Liberals in Recife were Afro-Brazilian; and second, as Patrocínio had done since at least 1881 and as Nabuco had done in O abolicionismo, Nabuco clearly and explicitly emphasized Afro-Brazilians’ significance in the movement and promoted their racial solidarity.35 In sum, much of what Nabuco had to say in his Abolitionist campaign in Recife was addressed not only to the Liberal urban middle-class reformists but to the Afro-Brazilian middle class and masses specifically. This was part of a calculated plan to create and strengthen a new kind of public opinion, that of the mobilized Afro-Brazilian popular masses in the streets, like what had been successfully cultivated in the Rio conferências and demonstrations over the 1880s. In July 1884, at the Largo do Paço in Rio, such mobilization had been brought to bear yet again, in support of Dantas, the emperor, and parliamentary Abolitionist reform; now it was thrust into the fray in Recife in support of the movement’s champion. The time had come, the stakes were high, and such people came in their thousands; as in Rio, this was both new and decisive for the outcome. Nabuco felt strongly that the Abolitionist mass mobilization of his campaign and that of other Abolitionist candidates in late 1884 had an emergent revolutionary potential that would lead to victory at the vote and then in the Chamber when it met early in March 1885. Clearly, however, he underestimated the opposition. The level of reactionary mob mobilization and of fraud in Recife and elsewhere was striking. Even with all that Nabuco brought to bear in Recife, his own victory was razor-thin (746 to 744). Worse still, of Pernambuco’s delegation of thirteen, only he and José Mariano were Abolitionists; the other eleven were Liberals and Conservatives opposed to the movement. Moreover, in an election under a Liberal

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cabinet, the Liberal majority in the pernambucano delegation was a bare one: six of the thirteen deputies representing the province were Conservative. Indeed, Nabuco’s district rival was Manoel do Nascimento Machado Portela, an established Conservative, who contested Nabuco’s victory, forcing him (along with other contested candidates) to wait for the result of a protracted credentials committee struggle in the Chamber that went on from February until May 1885.36 Whatever his Recife successes as a speaker and candidate in 1884, however, in the 1885 legislature Nabuco and other Abolitionists with contested seats, as well as Dantas, would all lose. They may have won in the street and in the vote, but in the parliamentary maneuvers in the Chamber, where they faced a very capable opposition alliance of moderate Liberals and Conservatives fighting on its own terrain, they lost. The Parliamentary Alliance against Abolitionism

The electoral results of 1884 gave the Liberals sixty-seven seats in the Chamber; the Conservatives won fifty-five seats and the Republicans three. The Liberals, while maintaining a very weak majority, had lost ground, while the Conservatives had gained. This meant that the Conservatives actually strengthened their potential for allying with Liberal dissidents to topple the cabinet, if only they could woo more than a half dozen of the latter. In fact, one contemporary recalled that while most of the sixty-seven Liberals did support the cabinet, around fifteen did not. A small number of Abolitionist and other Liberal candidates supportive of the cabinet who could have helped offset those dissidents, such as Nabuco, could not be seated and vote; they were forced to await the delays and decision of the appropriate credentials committee. Other key Abolitionists were not even in a credentials battle; they had lost too obviously to challenge the vote: Rui Barbosa, the author of Dantas’s reform, for example, was defeated, as was a member of the cabinet, João da Mata Machado (minister for foreign affairs). In 1885, even with the prestige, power, and patronage that the cabinet possessed, together with the credibility signified by the monarch’s obvious support, Dantas and those who backed him were actually facing a stronger opposition bloc than before.37 The consequent parliamentary struggle was both complicated and a turning point in the history of the Abolitionist movement. This parliamentary struggle comprised three phases as it played out over the next five months. The first might be called the Abolitionists’ response and the cabinet’s strategizing; the second, the consolidation of the reactionaries; the third, the final conflict. In the first phase, from January through early February 1885, the

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Abolitionists took stock of the difficulties ahead and prepared for battle, undertaking both private and public discussions, propaganda, and public demonstrations of strength. For example, given the Conservatives’ commitment under Cotegipe to an abolitionist reform in September 1884 as well as the electoral results, Patrocínio’s bitter and cynical analysis in the Gazeta da Tarde is not surprising. In early January 1885, he wrote that Cotegipe and Paulino were using the resolution of the problem of slavery as a political ploy to prepare for a Conservative ascent. The analysis, clearly a solid one, was repeated by others in the Abolitionist press and picked up in the opinion pages of the Jornal do Commercio. Then on 25 January, claiming victory for his contested seat in Recife, Nabuco returned to Rio. The Abolitionists carefully made use of the occasion to increase the pressure and the sense of Abolitionist momentum, in defiance of the Chamber’s obstruction of Nabuco’s claims. A festa with demonstrations, a march, and speeches was planned and announced by the Gazeta da Tarde on 24 January. Along with the movement’s organizations, the Gazeta explicitly urged “the people” to come. Once again, Miguel Antônio Dias played a central role in the results; indeed, Antônio Bento, the charismatic, populist Abolitionist leading the movement in São Paulo, telegrammed Dias to ask him to represent the paulistas at the celebrations. The contrast with the reception Nabuco had received upon his return from Europe in 1884 was dramatic. This time, with a friendly administration’s blessing, the navy saluted the conquering hero at the quay off the Largo do Paço. Nabuco was welcomed with mass demonstrations that accompanied him from there up the fashionable Rua do Ouvidor and down the Rua Gonçalves Dias and Rua Uruguaiana for one speech after another at the various headquarters of the Abolitionist press, until turning west and arriving at the Escola Politécnica for the culminating moments. Whatever their tactical or political differences, Patrocínio understood the central symbolic importance of Nabuco’s leadership and the occasion. When the crowds, in their thousands, came to the Gazeta office, it was he who came forward at the upper-story balcony to make the speech. The crowds numbered between five and six thousand, and we can imagine them packed in the Rua Uruguaiana, up and down the street in front of the Gazeta office, the headquarters of the Confederação Abolicionista. There, Patrocínio, . . . praising Nabuco, finished by saying that he asked to be permitted by the people to salute the youth who followed the glorious traditions of his illustrious father, who descended from two generations in the Senate, [and who now] came to place his talent and his most ardent strength at the service of the race . . . martyred for almost four centuries. Gentlemen, he exclaimed, beating energetically on the balcony rail, this house is poor, however, it represents the most desperate efforts in favor of human dignity.

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Afterward, turning toward Joaquim Nabuco, in a truly eloquent cry, he exclaimed: “The representative of one and a half million enslaved people kneels at the feet of the Redeemer of his race!” An electric current ran through the hearts of everyone and burning tears streamed from many eyes. . . . Nabuco . . . expressed his thanks for the generous words . . . and said that he took advantage of the occasion to salute, in person, at the Gazeta da Tarde, José do Patrocínio, his comrade for all time in the great struggle for the liberty of humanity.38

Clearly, the Abolitionists had now closed their ranks and formed up behind Dantas. It was an hour of great danger: the fate of Abolitionist reform hung in the balance. In view of this, on 9 February, Rebouças reports a dinner attended by himself, Patrocínio, Quintino Bocaiuva, and Clapp, joining Dantas, Cândido de Oliveira (Dantas’s minister of war), and others at the Nabuco de Araújo mansion in the Flamengo district. There, Nabuco honored José Mariano, his indispensable ally in the Recife contest, but we can assume that more than old times and good fellowship were toasted and discussed. While most of the names are familiar, two new ones require an introduction. Quintino, an older journalist, much admired by Nabuco since student days, was, like Patrocínio, a celebrated Republican and an Abolitionist. As for Cândido de Oliveira, no minister save Dantas would speak more forcefully and cunningly in defense of the cabinet in the months to come. The common Abolitionist struggle had brought together Liberal reformists and Republicans, shoulder to shoulder in a common struggle. The principals immediately got down to business: on February 10, Rebouças, Nabuco, Rodolfo Dantas, and Gusmão Lobo met at the Ministry of War from 9:30 to midnight with the rest of the cabinet to discuss the cause, propaganda, and the new legislature’s first meeting. (As this was a special session, following the special election, the preparatory meetings began 11 February for the March opening rather than the regular time in early May.)39 The second phase, the consolidation of the reactionaries, ran from that first preparatory session (11 February) to the regular sessions of late March. From 11 February through 14 February, Dantas pressed the Liberals supporting him in the Chamber to put together the votes necessary to gain control of the key Chamber positions and committees, particularly the credentials committee. Not only Nabuco’s seat but many others were in play; the outcome could mean the difference between winning a Chamber majority or not. Traditionally, control of the presidency of the Chamber, critical to the composition of such committees, was the obvious parliamentary test of strength. On this occasion, the results made it clear that Dantas’s harangues had been in vain. The Conservatives quickly made a decisive alliance with

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Liberal dissidents, forming a bare Chamber majority, and triumphed. They had the votes to gain control of the Chamber’s presidency and, through the president’s nominations, the credentials committee. Thus, the reactionaries had prevailed.40 Given the increasing tension in and around the Chamber, the Abolitionists realized that the possibility of violence was increasing. Patrocínio himself made sure to publish a manifesto from the Confederação Abolicionista calling for peace during the unfolding parliamentary crisis. He and the others knew full well that violence among the mobilized Abolitionist masses who were likely to be present in the Chamber galleries and the surrounding streets in the cidade velha would only strengthen the forces of reaction, forces whose strength was already striking. Despite the emperor’s speech opening parliament on 8 March, in which he once again made clear his expectation of a resolution of the “servile question,” the February votes just detailed above would indicate that the door to Dantas’s reform had begun to close. 41 This was certainly apparent to Dantas’s triumphant opposition. By 23 March, the reactionaries had basically announced their position through a speech by one of their most respected leaders, Paulino. As historians generally ignore the Conservatives’ key role in the reactionary opposition alliance, this requires some attention here. Paulino had only recently ascended to the Senate, and, fittingly, he made the reactionary position his maiden speech there. His speech made several points. First, he laid out a basic analysis of how the two established parties were supposed to play their roles in the monarchical regime: the Liberals pulled the state forward with reforms, while the Conservatives, the junta do couce (“team of the rear,” the term for the oxen yoked at the rear of a heavy cart—a famous metaphor once used by Cotegipe) pulled backward, stabilizing the state and preserving it from the danger of rolling forward too quickly. In this case, Paulino accused Dantas of pulling ahead too fast, putting the monarchy and society in danger. Second, Paulino stated that at this point the Conservatives themselves were willing and sufficiently unified to pursue abolitionist reform, fulfilling their traditional role. By acting now they could “tranquilize” the nation, after the irresponsibility of the Dantas cabinet in moving forward too fast. Moreover, a Conservative cabinet could pursue reform without the weakness, division, and danger of the Liberals, or the unconstitutional measures promoted by Dantas (a reference to the dissolution and election of 1884 and an implicit accusation aimed at the emperor). Third, Paulino went on to sketch out the Conservative party’s position on the “tranquilizing” reform: it must emphasize planters’ rights, gradualism, and indemnification, as had been alluded to in the particulars of Cotegipe’s September 1884 speech, as well as in recent debates in the Chamber and the press.42

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There are aspects of this third component that would benefit from further analysis. While we approach 1885 from the present, contemporaries, of course, did so from the past; to understand what they did, therefore, we must know something of that past. The particulars of the proposed Conservative reform to which Paulino made reference, for example, might remind us of Nabuco’s 1880 reform project, with its proposal for a phased transition from slave labor through serfdom to free wage labor over a period of ten years. However, Nabuco’s ideas in 1880, and certainly Paulino’s in 1885, likely derived from something far earlier: the abolitionist debates in 1871. As we may recall from Chapter 1, the established Conservative abolitionist Perdigão Malheiro had formulated a Conservative dissident abolitionist alternative to the emperor’s project (the project that became the Free Womb Law of 1871). Perdigão Malheiro’s failed alternative was a compromise, in that it originated from the Chamber (thus rebuffing the unconstitutional intervention of the emperor in legislation) while addressing the need to abolish slavery. Moreover, his proposal was for a phased, indemnified transition over a fixed series of stages under the planter’s supervision until complete abolition was achieved. The whole process—unlike Dantas’s project (or the 1871 project)—reinforced the property rights and authority of the planters and limited direct, statist intervention on the plantation, issues that were of perennial significance to the slaveholders whom Paulino represented.43 Finally, aside from such implicit references to past Conservative abolitionist policy, Paulino’s speech was meant to signal not only to both parties but to the emperor and the Abolitionists that, whatever the shock in 1884 of João Alfredo and Cotegipe’s decision to publicly commit the Conservatives to abolitionist reform, any past division between the party’s two wings or between Cotegipe and the saquaremas was no more. It was also explicitly meant to demonstrate how the Conservatives’ leadership intended to put an end to the anxiety sweeping through the slaveholders as well as those concerned with the political crisis’s impact on the economy and to meet the Abolitionist challenge. At this point, the speech was also something of a victory oration. As had become abundantly clear in parliament, where the Conservatives had long dominated the Senate and had just demonstrated domination of the reactionary Conservative-Liberal dissident opposition in the Chamber (where Conservatives provided the majority of the opposition alliance), Paulino was laying out these matters from a position of strength. In effect, the Conservatives had triumphed in parliament; Paulino was preparing the ground for what was to come next.44 This second phase, the consolidation of the reactionaries’ alliance, naturally led to the third and final phase (from late March to early May), the final conflict, of which there are roughly three components. First, on 13 April, the

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opposition led off by calling for a motion of no confidence, refusing even the presentation of Dantas’s project for debate. Both Cândido de Oliveira and then Dantas defended the project, and a motion to support the cabinet was called: the vote was 50 to 50. Dantas, doubtless under the pressure of hypertension, suffered a syncope in the Chamber itself and was taken home to convalesce for four days. Despite the unrelenting pressure to resign that ensued, he held firm from home. On 17 and 20 April), having returned to parliament, Dantas argued that the vote was illegitimate: until the credentials committee deliberations were concluded and the contested deputies were admitted and heard, the Chamber would not be lawfully empowered nor would any of its votes be representative or legal. According to Dantas, these candidates, once admitted, would complete the true majority of the Liberals and would be seen to support him. During his recovery, the Liberal dissidents met with a Liberal senator, Silveira Martins, a reformist himself, to discuss their opposition. It became clear that while they themselves were willing to debate the reform, they opposed the Dantas cabinet, for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons, though something it would have been unseemly to state outright, goes to a key issue, namely, political power. Apparently, just as the Conservatives had made it clear by September 1884 that they were willing to pass an abolitionist reform measure if that were the price of power, so too were many Liberal moderates. This was a turnabout, of course. As we recall, most of the Liberals elected in 1878, 1881, and 1884 were moderate Liberals; they had been entirely intent upon marginalizing Abolitionism once it surfaced in 1879–1880. By 1884, however, when the emperor demonstrated that he insisted upon some form of abolitionist reform, that had changed. A majority of the moderate Liberals in the Chamber had then been willing to support such a reform for partisan reasons and had voted for Dantas in 1884, and they had just done so again, in 1885. While not Abolitionists, they were Liberals; when they voted to keep Dantas in power and to unify the party behind him to that end, they were voting for continued Liberal domination of the state. Some, however, a mixed minority of the moderate Liberals, while willing to support Liberal retention of power, would not vote to keep Dantas as prime minister—these were the dissidents. What, then, motivated them? Why were they hostile to the cabinet? Some, of course, were steadfastly against abolitionist reform, among them Moreira de Barros, the recently elected president of the Chamber. Moreira de Barros was a planter and an uncompromising opponent of Abolitionism, but many of the others were not dissidents because of such principles. What motivated at least some of these dissidents may well have been the power that came from access to the cabinet. They had no such access with Dantas’s administration and wanted a new Liberal cabinet with which they would. It was that simple.

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In 1884, Nabuco himself, in private correspondence, had indicated how this worked. He confided that Dantas’s cabinet was unusually “weak,” even for a Liberal cabinet of the day, and that he had had doubts about its strength from the beginning, given that three prominent Liberal chieftains were all disaffected from the cabinet. Nabuco went on to say that this meant that “interests” linked to those chieftains, or more broadly, many of the Liberal deputies from those chieftains’ provinces, were cut off from the cabinet, while it enjoyed (and rewarded) the support of other deputies with cabinet access. Reflecting on the vast ideological and policy gap between two of the chieftains who provided such access to Dantas, Martinho de Campos and Lafaiete (a proslavery moderate and a reformist, respectively), reveals that what was at play here was neither ideas nor policy but patronage. As Nabuco’s comment about the organization of Dantas’s cabinet implies, the more successful prime ministers always had to keep the provincial delegations and their patronage networks in mind when choosing their ministers. The implication, then, is clear: Dantas had chosen poorly. Nabuco did not, unfortunately, hazard an explanation as to why. Dantas made no new cabinet appointments to improve his support in the 1885 Chamber, which meant that the Liberals from provinces unlikely to support him because of a lack of cabinet access amounted to about a third of the Chamber’s Liberals in the new legislature. From a provincial patronage standpoint, then, the situation is clear. The 1885 cabinet ministers hailed from Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and Maranhão, but the deputies of only two of these provinces (Rio de Janeiro and Bahia) were numerous (twenty-six altogether). In sum, Dantas’s cabinet selection did little to promise secure support—in fact, on the contrary. In early 1885, then, after the new elections, Nabuco assumed that many of the Liberal dissidents were hostile to the cabinet largely in hopes of Dantas’s fall, the rise of a new Liberal prime minister, and consequently a new opportunity to gain access to a new cabinet themselves. That so many of the Liberals in the Chamber did in fact back Dantas that year had doubtless more to do with grudging partisan feelings, particularly in the context of the Conservatives’ new numbers and consequent growing threat, as discussed above; abolition had little to do with it either way. Aside from the political factor (cabinet position, access, and influence), the dissidents might have been swayed by two others peculiar to the cabinet: the so-called pact with the emperor (something repugnant to the traditional Liberal position opposing the emperor’s interventionism) and the alliance with the Abolitionist movement. The “pact” issue, however, would seem unlikely to have been influential. Most Liberal moderates would appear to have been, like Dantas, willing to work with the monarch in exchange for political power. While a few may not have been willing to

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gain power through the emperor’s intervention, it seems likely that by this late date in the regime’s history such deputies were very few. There is no better example than the prime minister, himself a victim of the emperor’s 1868 intervention and an 1869 Liberal reformist. Not only had Dantas accepted the emperor’s interventionism in 1884 but he apparently had demanded that it be part of the “pact”—an obvious and personal dose of intervention that had enabled him, through an unusual dissolution of the Chamber and a new election, to stay in power despite the lack of Chamber support.45 Yet, while the “pact” may be dismissed as unlikely to have been a factor in the dissidents’ opposition to the prime minister, there is no question that the alliance with the Abolitionists represented something unprecedented, repugnant, and worrisome, particularly given the popular mobilization in the press and, most especially, in the streets. However significant—indeed, crucial—this extraparliamentary mobilization had been to the survival and growing impact of the movement from 1880 to 1884, it now reached a new level of significance among the political elite, both Liberal and Conservative, through April and May of 1884, owing to the numbers and the sort of people taking part, as well as their actions. Contemporary accounts and memoirs all emphasize that by May of 1884 this mobilization and its relationship to the cabinet had become the key factor in the debates. The Conservatives, especially, would speak to the alliance between the Abolitionists and Dantas, together with its impact on the plantation slaves and the urban masses, in terms intended to suggest the threat of unmanageable violence on the part of people who were beyond the pale. The cabinet’s spokesmen and allies in the press would respond to such charges by denying cabinet complicity in any unusual violence that did occur and describing what violence did occur as greatly exaggerated by their opposition for partisan reasons. Furthermore, they would explain or even praise the mobilization as understandable support for the cabinet in its righteous cause.46 Nor was this issue of popular mobilization untouched by the Abolitionist leadership, increasingly angered and frustrated by the clear threat to the cabinet and its reform. After 17 April, when the prestigious Jornal do Commercio reported rumors that Saraiva had the reactionary opposition’s support and, with a less troubling abolitionist project ready and a cabinet all picked out, was expecting to replace Dantas, Patrocínio took the lead in responding to this threat with one of his own. On 18 April, he called for the emperor either to abdicate or to act decisively by dissolving the Chamber and installing a strong cabinet to carry out the Abolitionist reform and accompanying financial arrangements: “Either the emperor makes the

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revolution or the people will.” The article was immediately used as proof in the Senate of Dantas’s alliance with a dangerous, violent element. On 20 April, the Liberal Silveira Martins condemned Patrocínio, calling for repression in view of Patrocínio’s potential impact on rural slaves. Responding in that same session, Dantas again refused to resign and defended public agitation as justified by the unexpected impasse. Nor was Nabuco much more moderate than Patrocínio. On 21 April, the credentials committee had voted five to four supporting his admission to the Chamber, but even the Abolitionist press thought that he was likely to be voted down when the report was submitted to the Chamber. On 24 April, Nabuco let loose with an article in the Gazeta da Tarde supporting Dantas in inflammatory terms, with a scarcely veiled threat of independent Abolitionist action in the event of the latter’s fall.47 Providing a backdrop to the Abolitionists’ response was the ongoing street mobilization. In late April and early May, crowds organized in support of the cabinet in the streets in the immediate neighborhood of the Chamber; small groups were evident every day of the debates. The opposition claimed that some of the people in these groups were thugs hired by the cabinet to harass dissidents; the Gazeta da Tarde, in response, argued that they were opposition agents provocateurs.48 On 31 April, a critical event was alleged to have taken place. A pernambucano Liberal dissident and a friend were harassed upon leaving the Chamber; the friend claimed to have been hit by a thrown stone. On 1 May, Soares Brandão, a Liberal pernambucano senator, used the incident as preamble and then made a formal request for the cabinet’s guarantee of parliamentary security and independence. This became the central issue on 4 May for yet another Chamber motion of no confidence. Dantas’s ministry was explicitly charged with responsibility for the disorderly conduct in the galleries of the Chamber itself, as well as in the neighborhood surrounding the building. The motion stated that the Chamber withdrew its confidence in the cabinet’s capacity to contain the disorder and the violence against parliament, thus making impossible the calm necessary for deliberation on the project. In sum, it neatly separated abolitionism from the cabinet and its Abolitionist alliance, attacking the second two as hindering the first. It was an adroit maneuver, publicly damning the cabinet while suggesting the opposition’s potential for abolitionist reform (and thus the emperor’s favor). The vote carried, 52 to 50. The Chamber suspended its session, and Dantas left for the emperor’s summer palace in Petrópolis that same day, where, that evening, he asked the monarch for another dissolution of the Chamber and another election. This time, the emperor denied him. On 5 May, Saraiva was asked to succeed Dantas, and he accepted.49

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As we have seen, the immediate role of popular mobilization intended by the Abolitionists in early 1885 was doubtless to support the Dantas administration and thereby to exert pressure when the cabinet came under attack. We have also seen that this very mobilization became a critical factor in the opposition alliance’s successful effort to compel the cabinet’s resignation. This merits discussion in more detail, as it is basic to the analysis of the AfroBrazilian impact on the Abolitionist movement that is central to this study. First of all, as noted earlier, street mobilization and violence of some sort were not unknown in Rio’s political history. In defending Dantas in the Chamber, the Liberals even pointed to recent episodes in an attempt to suggest that the reactionary opposition were overreacting and exaggerating the crowds’ impact and doing so for political purposes. In regard to the small, violent groups near the Chamber, the traditional use of paid capoeiras as capangas (thugs) has already been mentioned. The Abolitionists and other cabinet defenders were quick to point out that it was against the cabinet’s interest to employ such professionals on this occasion—precisely because of the sort of charges now being raised—and very much in the interest of the Conservatives to do so. There is good reason, then, to dismiss the alleged fear and concern of the reactionary opposition as a partisan pretense. But there is more to this story than simple partisan cynicism and cunning.50 There was no precedent in Rio since the 1840s, if then, for the size of the crowds and the kinds of people mobilized in 1885. Given our previous account of the role of Patrocínio (as a journalist and as an activist in and through the Irmandade da Nossa Senhora do Rosârio), we might suppose that some of this mobilization was organized and might have been due to him and his connections through the Caixa Emancipadora José do Patrocínio and Israel Soares to the Rosário brotherhood. More plausibly, however, we might suspect that most of the responsibility for the organized mobilization lay with Miguel Antônio Dias, given his apparent role in propaganda and demonstrations as Rebouças’s confidential agent, as well as what we have suggested about his background, status, and location in Afro-Brazilian Rio. We might speculate that the Abolitionist leadership turned to him for this sort of thing and, in a crisis demanding both careful planning and effective street actions, did so again. Moreover, most of the relations between the Abolitionists and the cabinet, as stated earlier, were by way of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão elite, rather than Patrocínio’s Gazeta da Tarde wing. Dias was uniquely positioned to act on behalf of all Abolitionists, in coordination with Rebouças and the Sociedade, since he was, like Rebouças, a member of both the Sociedade

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Brasileira contra a Escravidão and the Confederação Abolicionista and was on good terms with Patrocínio and his followers, as well. Indeed, unlike Rebouças, Dias clearly enjoyed a favorable reputation among the more activist extraparliamentary Abolitionists in the street, as Antônio Bento’s early 1885 telegram to him (published in the Gazeta da Tarde) demonstrates. This was a reputation doubtless earned through his discreet and capable actions as the movement gained strength at the popular level. Furthermore, while Patrocínio was busy with journalism, meetings, and discussions and would have had to reach out to Israel Soares to get to the Afro-Brazilian masses, Dias was already among them—it was his milieu, as he walked between home and work, across the Campo de Santana to the railway station.51 All of this, of course, assumes that the kinds of people composing these crowds, demonstrations, and small gatherings were made up wholly or mostly of the Afro-Brazilian urban middle class and working poor. What contemporary evidence do we have for this? Let us go over the ground with care. At the time, and in memoirs, the parliamentary speakers describing the street crowds used class terms alone, in keeping with the racial etiquette and assumptions that we have discussed in Chapter 1. For the most part, such etiquette and these assumptions neither necessitated nor, indeed, allowed public racial identification of the free; to the extent that race does come into public rhetoric, it is in reference to slaves rather than free people. Thus, when contrasting the former with the latter, the speaker will refer to slaves and brancos, as if all slaves were entirely African in appearance, thereby excluding slaves who appeared to be of mixed race, and as if all of the free were entirely European in appearance, thereby excluding obviously mixed-race free people or free people of apparently African appearance. An example comes from the critical debate on 4 May, when the deputy allegedly assaulted in the street counters his pro-Dantas opponents in the Chamber by stating that “some of the noble deputies want liberty for the slaves and have no tolerance for whites,”52 that is, rhetorically, all slaves were black and all of the free were white. In contrast, both Nabuco and the Gazeta da Tarde, in keeping with their established racial politics, emphasized racial solidarity between the enslaved and the free. As he had done in O abolicionismo and his conferências, Nabuco spoke of Brazilians as a people of mixed descent: “Our people is a racial mixture. The liberty of the black is as sacred among us as at least that of the white, because black and white are conflated by the million in our population.”53 The Gazeta da Tarde reporter, as Patrocínio had done since at least 1881, implied the same racial identity and solidarity between the free and the slaves by the use of “brother.” In describing the crowds outside the Chamber, he pictured them in this way, as “the people . . . awaiting the Abolitionist deputies to salute them . . . raising vivas to those that labor and,

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understanding the grandeur of our century, attempt to redeem their brothers, redeeming, in turn, the fatherland.”54 Aside from such Abolitionists, however, race went unmentioned in public observations in the papers and speeches when describing the popular masses. In referring to them, disparaging class or status terms were used instead: populaça, povo, capangas, or gente reles (roughly, the masses, the people, thugs, or worthless people, respectively). African descent is invisible in public discourse; indeed, as we saw in Chapter 1, even according to the census most of the people in Rio at the time were “white” and more than a third of the free population were immigrant and poor (largely Portuguese). How do we know, then, that the Abolitionist middle class and masses thronging the streets were largely Afro-Brazilian? There are no close-up photographs of the Abolitionist crowds, and even if the Abolitionist journalist and illustrator Agostini had drawn Abolitionist crowds, which he did not, his crowd portrayals display racial bias. Despite Antonelli’s politics, when he portrays Brazilian street scenes with people whom he favors, their appearance is drawn as invariably European or Europeanized (even in the case of slaves’ facial features). When his subjects are people he dislikes (e.g., police agents, capangas, or the religious masses), he tends to portray them with exaggerated African features.55 In view of this, in order to establish that the Abolitionist middle class and masses thronging the streets were largely Afro-Brazilian, let us begin by recalling the arguments presented in Chapter 2 regarding the Afro-Brazilian identity of the Abolitionists in the movement’s beginning. The reader may remember that even when Patrocínio addressed a relatively genteel crowd of Abolitionists in an “elegant” theater in 1881, in the early days of mobilization (when the audience was more likely to be middle class—Rebouças’s account describes them as “ladies” and “gentlemen”), he addressed them as largely Afro-Brazilian and spoke of the Abolitionists in general as such. It makes little sense to suggest that by 1885 the movement’s growing mass following had become more European in appearance over time—if anything, the reverse was true. In this society, it is highly unlikely that the white working poor would come to dominate the following behind a movement initially associated with predominantly Afro-Brazilian membership. In such a racist, class-bound hierarchy, one of the few markers of superiority the white working poor had would have been their race. Furthermore, while some organized urban workers did support the movement, as we have seen, we have no reason to assume that most of the workers supporting the movement were white (the most noted Abolitionist labor organizer, Vicente de Sousa, was mulato), or that organized urban workers constituted the majority of the masses supporting the Abolitionist movement. While, as we saw in Chapter 2, some of the organized Abolitionist groups have names that clearly indicate organized labor, most of the names do not.56

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However, we can do better than to extrapolate from 1881 forward and what we know about the Abolitionist organizations involved in the movement in Rio. In fact, we can argue for both the Afro-Brazilian racial identity of the Abolitionist popular mobilization in 1885 and its consequent political significance by means of the description provided by one of the best-informed participants and witnesses of the events. In 1886, in propaganda discussing the mass mobilization to which the reactionary parliamentary opposition alliance responded in parliament and the press, Nabuco addressed the class and racial identity of that mass mobilization and the impact of both, as well as their representative quality in the clearest of terms. But before sharing Nabuco’s observations, we need to contextualize them in terms of the political discourse of the moment—to quote from the sort of political assessment that the reactionary opposition gave to that mobilization and to suggest what they saw and felt or at least projected about it. Who could be more representative of the reactionary alliance of Conservatives and Liberal dissidents than Paulino? Let us turn to him. When Paulino addressed colleagues in the Senate whose names, education, and political careers represented the highest ranks of the Brazilian elite, he referred to Dantas’s allies in the street as those “who live from disorder, without family, nor stable conditions for a regular life. It was in this element that at another time the [French] Reign of Terror was supported; it was from this that the Paris Commune [was supported] in our days!”57 In short, Dantas’s alliance was with people who embodied disorder and revolutionary violence, people whose irregular lives derived from their birth and income. We should note, however, that there is nothing here to explain how Paulino knew any of this; he must have made assumptions (which clearly were shared by his audience) based on the demonstrators’ appearance and actions. Nabuco addressed precisely these assumptions, manifested by Paulino’s analysis and fear, but explicitly addressed their racial and class significance. Here is his ruthless, acid description and sense of the matter: The cabinet received from the people the greatest demonstrations of support. The noble and aristocratic adversaries of Mr. Dantas, almost all descendants of sugar and coffee planters, when they got to the Chamber windows and saw one of these popular demonstrations, did not find top hats nor frock coats, but, immediately, feet on the ground [pés no chão] and shirt sleeves, [and] said only, “That isn’t important, it’s the canaille.” Perhaps, but our people are precisely that, they are a people of feet on the ground and shirt sleeves, and they are not white people. In this city, if one were to see a great popular demonstration, meeting the standards of [our] tolerant elite nobility, it would be a foreigners’ demonstration. . . . It was, in sum, a scandal. After three centuries of slavery suffered without a murmur, the Brazilian people—descended from slaves in the majority—got to the point of being bold enough to shout support for abolition!

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Such orgies cannot continue. The public peace was perturbed. The president of the Chamber was the object of booing in the streets. And what is so extraordinary when, at the least ill-willed excitation, the illiterate, the enslaved, the forgotten of our society go to the extreme of shouting at him? . . . In no other country would one give the lightest public shove the significance of a revolution.58

In regard to the excerpt quoted here, we should bear in mind that in nineteenth-century Rio, the phrase pés no chão (feet on the ground; now, as in English, meaning “sensible”) might have also referred to a class distinction. In that time and place, the poor and the slaves walked on the muddy streets of the tropical port city; the better-off took a streetcar, cab, or carriage except for the occasional stroll down such elegant streets as the Rua do Ouvidor. The phrase pés no chão might therefore be a class and racial marker, like Nabuco’s reference to “shirt sleeves.” Nabuco himself, whose origins were the same as those he attributes to the deputies, was never seen, outside the privacy of his bedroom or study, without his coat on; it simply was not done. Thus, knowing both the elite and the people well, the Abolitionist paladin gets to the real issues with a ferocious acuity.59 In sum, the Abolitionist organizers had been able to attract and mobilize mass demonstrations, largely composed of the Afro-Brazilian poor. While such people from such a background were often used politically as electoral thugs, and while a certain level of mobilization had occurred from time to time in the past, everyone recognized that this was different. Dantas was clearly supported by a mass movement, and the movement had not only grown, it was now linked to the highest echelons of the state by the hope of abolitionist reform. Although Nabuco was correct to point out how little disorder had been in evidence, however, he must have known that the smallest amount of disorder on the part of such people had larger significance. He must have known that Paulino and those whom Paulino represented and spoke to had a very great deal to fear. The movement was new, and not only was it uncontained, it was growing. It was now politically significant, given its linkage to a cabinet. It drew upon and appealed to the great mass of Afro-Brazilians, whom the elite had traditionally dominated, exploited, and taken for granted as dependably dominated and exploited. Thus we may conclude that Nabuco was feigning a rather disingenuous view when he suggested that the elite had exaggerated the significance of booing the president of the Chamber or shoving a dissident. There were good reasons for the opposition’s reaction. Some of it was simply visceral apprehension, no doubt, fear at the sight of poor AfroBrazilians organized politically and disrespecting traditional political usages and representatives. Much of it, however, may have come from an assessment

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of the radical potential that such a novel phenomenon represented. Nabuco said that he saw the People acting publicly to support Abolition; Paulino said that he saw the Revolution. Then and there, they both saw the same thing, and they were both correct. Paulino and his supporters had a great deal to fear, not least because, as Rebouças’s and Patrocínio’s and Nabuco’s propaganda had made explicit over the course of 1884 and 1885, the Dantas reform was perceived by the Abolitionists to be a door on the other side of which were any number of radical reforms, and they were determined to open it. In the end, however, the decisive act was that of the emperor: he decided to try and close that door. When Dantas headed out of Rio, across the bay, and took the train up to Petrópolis, he fully expected the emperor’s support, and for good reason. It was clearly what the monarch had agreed to, in negotiating with Dantas to head up a cabinet to pass an abolitionist reform. Moreover, Dantas’s alliance with the Abolitionists had made perfect sense, especially if the emperor was interested in containing the movement. Giving the movement measured support also meant successfully getting it to accept much less than their 1883 manifesto had demanded and to work within the established system, all of which had happened.60 So, if the emperor had agreed to supporting Dantas and had gotten in return both a reform and a useful alliance with the movement, why did he turn his back on them now? In 1887, Rebouças described a conversation with Dantas in which the statesman recalled the emperor’s Petrópolis “defection.” Unhappily, Rebouças did not share the particulars in his diary, but the word “defection” confirms what Dantas had expected, namely, the emperor’s solidarity. What might explain this “defection”? In Dantas’s public speech to the Senate afterward, he said that he and the emperor had agreed that, given the hostility of the Chamber to Dantas himself, Saraiva would have a better chance of moving an abolitionist reform forward—the chief goal of the monarch and his prime minister alike. This smacks a good deal of a face-saving statement for both minister and monarch.61 Nabuco, in his frustration with the decision and its aftermath, offered yet another explanation in 1886. He wrote that the emperor had drawn the Liberals into the failed Dantas reform exercise only so that they might finally and fatally divide and fail, allowing him to move forward toward the Conservatives in order to get what he really wanted, that is, to pass a “safe” reform and undercut the Abolitionists’ momentum. In this way, by not only containing the movement but installing a repressive regime after Dantas’s fall (which we will explore in the next chapter) he could stabilize the political situation.62 While we can understand Nabuco’s bitterness and its impact on his analysis, he may have assumed far too prescient and cunning a prince.

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The explanation may be more obvious, albeit a bit more complicated. We shall discuss it in terms of two components: the reactionary opposition and the emperor. Let us begin with the reactionary opposition’s perspective. First, by 1884 it was clear to both traditional parties that the price of power was endeavoring to satisfy the emperor’s desire for more progress on gradualist abolitionist reform, a desire probably born of his concerns with the Abolitionist movement and his frustration with the failure of his 1871 project. Second, Dantas’s obvious “pact” with the emperor posed a threat to representative government and, less high-mindedly, to elite influence on state policy. Third, Dantas’s reform posed an explicit threat to private property and the stability of rural labor by challenging the planters’ authority on the plantations and raising the destabilizing prospect of freedom before the captives’ eyes. Fourth, Dantas’s alliance with the Abolitionists was deeply threatening because of its urban, popular Afro-Brazilian base and the larger reforms that the movement had publicly embraced together with the explicit and manifest threats that this base and these reforms posed to the political and socioeconomic establishment. Abolitionists wanted more than Dantas’s reform—a great deal more—and they had said so. Thus, to get into power and to confront such threats, the opposition alliance of Conservatives and Liberal dissidents not only had to topple Dantas but had to propose a reform of their own. They had to stop Dantas and contain the Abolitionists by transforming the project, taking the threat out of it. They had to move forward, if only a little, to provide a sop to the emperor and to undercut the Abolitionists’ increasing domination of public opinion. The Italian aristocrat and writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa put it well once, in his novel Il Gattopardo: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”63 Thus, the opposition alliance, in both the Conservative Paulino’s March speech and the dissidents’ claims in May, argued that their opposition was not to abolitionist reform but rather to Dantas and his unacceptable Abolitionist allies. They were willing to pass a reform, but it would be quite a different one. Now let us turn to the emperor’s perspective. We have explained the emperor’s motives for wanting abolitionist reform and his preference for the Liberals as the party to carry it out. It is likely that he decided not to grant a second dissolution and election to Dantas, however, because that would have exposed him much more openly to the charge of intervention. Furthermore, it would likely have led, over the ensuing period of months, to far greater popular mobilization and increased potential for political violence and division, throughout the elections and in the new Chamber. The sense of being on a precipice was not his alone but can be glimpsed in private correspondence and the dailies as well. The appointment of Saraiva,

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together with the obvious alternative possibility of the Conservatives’ ascent (given Cotegipe’s and Paulino’s speeches), offered the emperor both a relatively rapid resolution of the reform issue within established institutions (rather than the street) and greater potential for a rapid social and political stabilization of the realm. Saraiva and the Conservatives were known quantities, wedded to the status quo; Dantas and the Abolitionists, in stark contrast, ensured an open-ended, destabilizing process with unknown and clearly dangerous possibilities.64 Thus, confronted with the threatening Abolitionist movement, both the emperor and the reactionary opposition to that movement moved forward together to engage and contain Abolitionism. Both influenced the other’s actions: the emperor by effectively making a reform the price of power, the reactionaries by preparing a transformed, alternative reform approach, providing a way forward for the emperor when they successfully thwarted and blocked Dantas and the Abolitionist threat associated with him. It is little wonder, then, that the emperor and the reactionary alliance made the choices they did.

The “Tranquilizing Reform” Saraiva and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885

As noted earlier in this chapter, there were detailed rumors of support for Saraiva’s ascent in April 1885 and of Saraiva’s own preparations. Apparently, these were not exaggerated. Called by the emperor on 5 May to organize a cabinet, he did so on 6 May and promptly appeared on 11 May in parliament to announce a program emphasizing an abolitionist reform and the improvement of the long-standing financial predicament of the nation. In describing the project he had in mind, Saraiva spoke of gradual emancipation in order to stabilize the situation without disturbing agriculture or endangering the planters. The Abolitionists responded on that same day with a mass demonstration supporting the fallen cabinet. On 12 May, the project, designed as a compromise, nonpartisan undertaking, was submitted to the appropriate committee for review. The emperor’s Speech from the Throne on 20 May described the project’s purpose in words recalling Paulino’s maiden speech of March 1884: it was a project designed to “tranquilize” agriculture. The cabinet and its project were immediately criticized by Abolitionists both in parliament and in the press. As we have noted, Abolitionist leaders had courted Saraiva in the past, time and again, in the hope of his embracing Abolitionism, unifying the Liberal party, and passing a progressive reform; his new stance thus was greeted with bitter disappointment and a sense of betrayal. As if to signal the significance of this political watershed, on the very same day (12 May) that the new reform project was introduced, Nabuco’s case and

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credentials as a deputy, barely supported in committee, were finally brought forward for a vote in the Chamber and were condemned; the majority voting against Nabuco comprised most of the Conservatives and seven dissident Liberals. On that same day as well, a second mass demonstration of some four thousand paraded from the cidade velha all the way to Dantas’s residence, in back of the Flamengo district coast, in support of the fallen minister. There, in the speeches that followed, there was condemnation of the new project, lambasted by Rui Barbosa, who dismissed it as “most backward.”65 The political shift away from the Dantas reform was apparently felt by many Liberals to endanger Liberal unity still further, and thus, the party’s continued hold on power, for reasons that seem obvious. It was the Conservatives who had provided the majority of those who had ousted the Dantas cabinet, and the same was true of the majority ousting Nabuco. Moreover, Saraiva was explicitly courting Conservative support and ideas and emphasizing a “nonpartisan” abolitionist project. Given the nature of the project, Conservative votes would be critical to securing its passage in the Chamber; as Rui had made clear on 12 May, it was not a reform that the Abolitionists could support. Finally, everyone was well aware that the Conservatives were using their own abolitionist reform talk as a bridge away from the Liberals’ alliance with the Abolitionists and toward the emperor, both to avoid the dangers posed by the movement and to move from being out of power to holding it once again. If the Liberals would not support the new “bipartisan” project, the emperor might bring the Conservatives back in to pass something like this new reform in a reform of their own.66 In response to the Conservative threat, the Liberals factions allied. After the unexpected death of the Liberal deputy for Pernambuco’s fifth district, two plausible Liberal candidates for the consequent by-election to replace him were convinced to put aside their personal ambitions and Nabuco was urged by pernambucano Liberals to take their place, in the hope that Liberals, Abolitionist and moderate alike, would back him to avoid yet another Conservative victory. The reader may find this a shocking reversal, as indeed it was, but it addressed a shocking predicament. Whatever the many concerns the established provincial Liberal machine had with respect to Nabuco, they, like most Liberals, were now more concerned with maintaining the Chamber’s Liberal majority (and thus claims to cabinet power and partisan patronage). Nabuco, supported by Liberals from both factions, could win, and speaking for both in the Chamber, could go on to be a powerful voice in the struggle against the Conservatives that clearly loomed. Nabuco accepted the opportunity, and late on 7 June, news came that he had been successfully elected. Such a triumph at such an hour was a welcome ray of hope. On 6 June, before news of the triumph arrived, Dantas, Rui, and Nabuco addressed a

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mass meeting in Rio of the Confederação Abolicionista, criticizing Saraiva. On 7 June, there was another mass meeting, celebrating the Dantas cabinet. That evening, after the first telegrams of Nabuco’s victory were received, the Gazeta da Tarde called for a celebration to congratulate Nabuco at his family residence. On 8 June, then, Nabuco’s victory was marked by mass demonstrations in Rio’s streets and a march from the Rua do Ouvidor in the cidade velha to the Flamengo district. Patrocínio’s paper, the Gazeta da Tarde, described him as the “Messiah of national resurrection.”67 Nor was that all. In Rio, the Abolitionist leadership rapidly made the most of the electoral triumph. Between 8 and 11 June, Rebouças recorded meetings with Nabuco, Serra, Clapp, and Patrocínio, another two with them and Miguel Antônio Dias, another with Patrocínio at his home (to prepare for Patrocínio’s possibly accompanying Nabuco to Recife), and another with all of the others back in the cidade velha. On 12 June, Nabuco left for the North with the vice president of the confederation, Luís de Andrade. Nabuco and Andrade’s journey to Recife and back again was a triumphal one at the major ports, where thousands gathered to see and acclaim the conquering hero. Back in Rio, it had apparently been decided that Patrocínio should stay in the capital and, with Rebouças, serve the cause with a new propaganda offensive. They met repeatedly, focusing on an intense flurry of Abolitionist propaganda for the middle part of the month.68 Despite all of this, the weeks between May and August 1885 were really a period of triumph for Abolitionism’s enemies. True, Nabuco had presented the movement with an unexpected victory and a semblance of Liberal unity in the aftermath of division and defeat. On 12 June, however, the day Nabuco left on his triumphal journey to the North, Saraiva apparently turned the tide again, presenting the Chamber with the first revision of his project, which the Abolitionists spurned as a travesty. Briefly, it included setting an inflated value on each slave by age; indemnification by the state for each liberated slave according to the new, inflated values; a new emancipation fund for such indemnification (drawn from taxes and revenues from the established 1871 fund, from new revenue from an additional 5 percent on all government taxes except that levied on exports, and from annual bonds to be redeemed when abolition was completed); the fixation of the residence of new freedmen (including five years within the county where they had been freed); heavy fines on anyone urging slaves’ flight or harboring slave fugitives; and the liberation of sexagenarians, but this time with the obligation of three years’ service to their masters as a form of indemnification. By their nature the new taxes meant that the cost of state indemnification fell mostly on the vast majority of Brazilians, most of whom owned no slaves themselves. The law also provided for a drop in the matriculated value of each slave year by year over thirteen years, so as to end slavery in

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1898. Such a guaranteed end to slavery, which would presumably have been considered a victory by Abolitionists in 1880, now constituted only part of the manifest victory of reaction in 1885. Gradualism, indemnification, and stable rural labor were being proposed as the new law of the land; and once this abolitionist reform was in place, despite its patent contradictions with post-1883 radical Abolitionism, there may even have been hope among the reactionaries of undermining the recent spurt in public and political support for the Abolitionist movement. From their point of view, the project was a shrewd, calculated victory for those determined to defend and perpetuate slaveholding as long as possible.69 Indeed, while Nabuco’s return to Rio 28 June was triumphal, with two thousand meeting him at the quay, a march, speeches, and a parade, the political meaning and threat of the Sexagenarian Law for the movement became increasingly clear in the following weeks and months. Anyone deaf to Rui’s point-by-point attacks on the project’s first draft or Nabuco’s similar detailed condemnation of the revised project after his triumphal return to the Chamber on 3 July would surely have seen the law for what it was as the debates went on. Nonetheless, these debates merely led to improvements from the Conservatives’ and slaveholders’ point of view: for example, the prominent Conservative from São Paulo, Antônio da Silva Prado, representing the new coffee frontier in his province, supported the project forcefully, only asking that Saraiva accept amendments. Such bipartisan sponsorship had always been an explicit condition for Saraiva’s legislative proposal; Saraiva accepted such Conservative amendments and welcomed the consequent Conservative support in return. Conservatives’ domination of the process of the reform’s revision was patent and necessary to achieve the “compromise” Saraiva celebrated. In the end, after a meeting of Chamber Conservatives jointly chaired by João Alfredo and Paulino (the chieftains of the party’s two wings), the party’s deputies all agreed to support Saraiva’s project, with the exception of Andrade Figueira, who remained, as always, a steadfast opponent of the state’s intervention against slaveholding.70 If any further proof of the opposition alliance’s successful reactionary response to the Abolitionist movement was necessary, it came in the most brutal fashion. The Gazeta da Tarde soon began reporting violent repression of the movement’s following in the provincial towns of Rio de Janeiro, particularly Campos, as well as in Rio itself. The new repression was such that on 1 July, José Mariano warned of the potential for violent revolutionary response if the protection of law was not extended to the Abolitionists. Throughout July, the movement not only reported and attacked such repression but maintained a high profile in meetings, conferências, and Chamber rhetoric from Nabuco, whose scathing analyses of the Saraiva project in its first and second readings was relayed through the press throughout the

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empire. On 30 July, his concluding remarks emphasized the contribution of Afro-Brazilians to the nation’s people and history, a motif he had brandished since 1883. As Patrocínio had done from early on, Nabuco continued to make a point of embracing and affirming Afro-Brazilian identity and solidarity among the urban masses, the people who were the heart of the movement’s survival and growth.71 Saraiva’s Victory, His Resignation, and the Emperor’s Decision

On 13 August, Saraiva’s Sexagenarian Law was put to a vote in the Chamber and passed, 73 to 17. In analyzing the vote, two things are salient: first, Saraiva’s dependence upon the disciplined Conservative bloc for his victory, and second, that the division among the Liberals was made quite clear again. Of the 125 deputies elected to the Chamber in late 1884, only 90 participated in the vote, and as indicated, only 17 voted against it. If most of the 55 Conservatives were present and voted—a strong possibility given their discipline and their commitment to doing so beforehand—then roughly two-thirds of the 73 backing Saraiva were Conservative. As there were only 67 Liberals in the Chamber, this also means that more than half of them were either absent or voted against the measure. One can only assume that members of this Liberal group either opposed the project out of sympathy for Abolitionism or hostility to Saraiva’s explicit alliance with the Conservatives. One contemporary observer put it bluntly: “Saraiva won but was unable to concentrate and harmonize the Liberal party in the Chamber. It was to the Conservatives that he owed the great part of the triumph.”72 Saraiva was certainly aware of this demonstrable lack of unified Liberal support. As the reader may recall, it had been precisely fear of this which he had given publicly as the reason for his refusal to form a government in 1884. Whatever his reason for finally accepting the emperor’s appeal in 1885, he did so knowing that it would mean dependence upon the Conservative and Liberal-dissident opposition alliance in the Chamber; whatever the putative Liberal majority in the Chamber, it was this opposition alliance that now formed the operating reactionary majority in the Chamber. We have seen his consequent public embrace of “bipartisanship” in order to carry out the emperor’s desire for some sort of “tranquilizing” abolitionist project, and Paulino had certainly outlined the prerequisites in 1884. Essentially, one can assume that the 73 votes supporting Saraiva comprised at least 50 or so Conservatives, probably the Liberal dissidents (roughly 10 or 12), and about 10 or so moderate Liberal deputies particularly loyal to the cabinet. Saraiva knew, once the vote was taken, that his administration was over. The next step in the progress of the project lay in the Senate, where the Conservatives

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had the majority. Indeed, even in the Chamber, he faced the prospect of having to attempt either to govern henceforward dependent upon the Conservative minority (an entirely incongruous, unprecedented, and dubious matter) or to reconstitute Liberal unity after a bitter four or five months of fatal party division. He knew better than to attempt either. On 15 August, two days after the vote, Saraiva wrote to the emperor, pressing him to allow the cabinet’s resignation. He stated that they had taken counsel regarding whether to attempt Liberal reunification or to await the obvious alternative, namely, a vote of no confidence by most of the Liberals (doubtless with support from the Conservative minority, obviously interested in supporting Liberal division, weakness, and instability). Resignation seemed the most plausible and palatable decision, with the excuse that it would allow a new Liberal cabinet to be formed, drawing strength from the Liberal majority in the Chamber while that Chamber remained in session. On 16 August, at the emperor’s residence at São Cristóvão, Saraiva met with his monarch and refused the emperor’s predictable request to stay on. Moreover, apparently given the unprecedented, anomalous situation of his relations with the Liberal majority, Saraiva refused the normal ritual of suggesting his Liberal successor. On that same day, the emperor began a process of calculated assessment. He sought the counsel of the Liberal president of the Chamber, now Pádua Fleury, and the Conservative president of the Senate, Cotegipe, on the matter. He first met with Cotegipe, who indicated the Conservatives’ willingness to promote an abolitionist reform that was gradualist, based upon the bipartisan project that had emerged in the Chamber. The emperor then consulted with Pádua Fleury, who in turn claimed that the Liberal majority in the Chamber would unite behind any Liberal cabinet. After exploring the state of play with both of them, the emperor instructed each to take the counsel of their respective political allies and then to meet with him again on the 17th. What Pádua Fleury said was doubtless true: for the Liberal majority in the Chamber to unite behind any Liberal cabinet was the only way for the Liberals to hold on to their seats and for the party to maintain its position dominating the state. Such newfound Liberal unity would stabilize the situation and enable a new Liberal cabinet to manage the immediate financial questions in play. In fact, in these critical August days even Nabuco greatly hoped for such an outcome; he even discussed the matter with a Liberal dissident, Siqueira, a fellow pernambucano deputy who had figured in the dissidents’ May 1885 call for Dantas’s resignation. The point, after all, was no longer the Dantas reform and Dantas’s Abolitionist alliance; now it was the Liberals’ survival in power and the merest possibility of progressive reform, as opposed to the ascent of the Conservatives, foremost champions of the status quo, and quite possibly years of political marginalization and reaction.

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After his conversations with the two presidents and some reflection, the emperor asked Pádua Fleury to call upon the amenable Paranaguá. They met on 19 August at nine o’clock in the morning. Paranaguá, the reader will remember, had been one of Dantas’s failed reform predecessors, and in 1885, he had become a minister in Saraiva’s cabinet. But his willingness to serve emperor and colleagues was not inexhaustible. Paranaguá’s memory and political realism probably prevailed against any hope for greater success at mending the rent cloth of Liberal unity. Citing loyalty to the Saraiva cabinet and its unanimous decision to resign, Paranaguá passed. The emperor again called the president of each house of parliament to the palace and again heard them out; then he asked Cotegipe to take power.73 The Emperor’s Choice

In Paulino’s maiden speech in the Senate, discussed earlier, he had compared the Conservatives’ behavior in the Chamber to that of the Liberal majority by stating, “The field of Agramante is there and not here.”74 It was not unusual in the era’s political rhetoric to embellish a point with a literary reference to the classics, in this case an episode in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1510), in which a confused struggle of conflicting interests took place in one disputed place, the field of Agramante. After so many pages detailing the travails of the Liberals, we should appreciate the reference. From 1878 to 1885, the Liberals had time and time again been embroiled in a struggle between their moderate and reformist factions, leading to political weakness and executive instability as cabinet after cabinet was voted out of office. There had been seven different cabinets since the Liberals’ ascent in 1878—seven cabinets in seven years. Even the amenable Paranaguá had now made it clear that he saw no way of working up a cabinet that could unify his party. His conclusion, essentially the same as that issuing from Saraiva’s cool calculations, was in dramatic contrast with Pádua Fleury’s sanguine appraisal. The emperor’s acceptance of the former is hardly surprising: Pádua Fleury seemed to be desperately grasping at straws—the same straws the two veteran ministers had already watched fall through their fingers. The emperor certainly had hoped for success with a Liberal cabinet; we have already noted his preference for the Liberals as his partners in moving reform forward, first in regard to electoral reform, then in regard to abolitionist reform. He cannot be faulted for impatience. Since 1882, however, in regard to abolitionist reform, the Liberals had failed miserably. Saraiva’s recent success could hardly be defined as a Liberal one; on the contrary, as we have seen, it was due entirely to an alliance between a minority of Liberals and the disciplined ranks of the Chamber’s Conservatives, whose leadership had helped shape both the nature of the

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reform and the success of the vote. The Saraiva reform, as passed, was explicitly designed to “tranquilize” the planters as Paulino had demanded, and its underlying principles embraced the Conservatives’ public position on the matter. It was also implicitly designed to contain the increasingly radical and tumultuous Abolitionist movement by claiming an end to the issue, something that must have been of paramount importance to the monarch. Now it had to be passed by the Senate, likewise dominated by the Conservatives. Conservative ascent had come to assume something of the air of inevitability. Why, then, had the emperor avoided it for so long? His views of the Conservative leadership, which we have already discussed, certainly help to explain the delay. After the Rio Branco cabinet of 1871–1875, the monarch had clearly been unhappy with the remaining Conservative chieftains, men among whom he would have had to choose for any Conservative cabinet to follow. We have noted that Rio Branco’s resignation and Caxias’s failing health had left only three obvious leaders by 1878: Paulino, João Alfredo, and Cotegipe. As also explained earlier, Paulino, whatever his recognized leadership in the Chamber, was displeasing to the emperor owing to his determined opposition to the emperor’s 1871 project as well as the monarch’s interventionism. João Alfredo was junior to the two other men and determined to support unity above all; he deferred to Cotegipe, by the 1880s the recognized, unifying party chieftain. But despite being the obvious choice, Cotegipe, even after the reform guarantee he had made in September 1884, seems to have been personally unsavory to the emperor. What could it have been about Cotegipe’s politics or political style that would explain this personal distaste? After all, despite his prominence and seniority, it is striking that the emperor had never made Cotegipe a prime minister or a councilor of state, the two highest ranks in the empire, both of which involved constant contact with the monarch. There are two likely explanations for the emperor’s reluctance for such contact: Cotegipe was abrasively domineering and notoriously corrupt.75 Cotegipe kept up with his family in Bahia through correspondence. When he read that his grandson had developed good teeth, Cotegipe replied, “I am pleased that Joaquim has good teeth—to bite. Because he who does not bite is not respected.”76 Since the 1850s, Cotegipe had bitten quite a few colleagues, and he was not intimidated by rank; indeed, he had spoken back to the emperor himself on the free womb project. That would not be forgotten.77 Cotegipe also bit at what was tasty. Whatever prestige or holdings he inherited were not enough. He had married the heiress of the wealthiest planter of Bahia; he had a Rio mansion, where he hosted a renowned salon. Yet all this was not enough. In the early 1870s, although official reports detailed the well-established corruption of Cotegipe’s Bahian political network, the baron was left alone by Rio Branco; after all, the numerous Bahian deputies’

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support in the Chamber was significant in cabinet legislative success. And even such free rein was not enough. But in 1877–1878, Cotegipe, the effective leader in Caxias’s cabinet, was publicly exposed when his hand in customshouse corruption was denounced. The scandal was reputedly critical to the emperor’s decision to shift his favor from the Conservatives to the Liberals with indecorous haste. Apparently, he could not abide further constant personal dealings with Cotegipe. The man would keep on biting—that was his nature; the emperor, bitten once himself, had had enough.78 This, then, may help explain the emperor’s delay in turning to the Conservatives, yet turn he did. On 19 August 1885, he received the president of the Senate, the great chieftain of the Conservatives, the baron de Cotegipe—the statesman whose authority, whose primacy, no other Conservative could or would dispute despite his overbearing style and his famous corruption. The Liberals had been tried and tried and tried again and had failed. The emperor would no longer venture onto the field of Agramante; he had to turn to the Conservatives, even though that meant Cotegipe. The discussion with the baron was brief. Cotegipe wanted the emperor’s assurance that he would dissolve the Chamber and call for a new election, but only after the Chamber had voted for the budget. He needed the budget from the Chamber, of course, to manage the state—that could be neither denied nor delayed; but he knew that afterward it would be impossible to run his administration with a hostile Liberal majority. These were the political facts of life, and the emperor’s acquiescence doubtless came easily. In return, Cotegipe committed, as he had done nearly a year before, to abolitionist reform, specifically the Saraiva project. It was done.79

The Cotegipe cabinet was announced on 20 August, and on 24 August its program was described before a shocked and frustrated Liberal majority (and jubilant Conservative minority) in the Chamber. In his speech, Cotegipe referred to passing the Saraiva project as “indispensable for returning calm to public opinion and for inspiring confidence, because, so long as this question agitates public opinion, we shall be unable to have tranquility in the Fatherland, nor credit, nor confidence.”80 At this point, the Conservatives’ perspective from on high must have seemed broader and brighter than had been the case for many years.

5

The Fate of the Black Race Radicalization and Its Failed Containment, 1885–1888

Who says that he is indifferent to the fate of the black race is indifferent to the Brazilian nation. Nabuco, 31 July 1885

The Conservative Reaction and Abolitionist Radicalization The Conservatives Empowered

Just as Saraiva became a sort of bridge between many moderate Liberals and the Conservatives in the confection of the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, his administration also ushered in the repression of the Abolitionist movement (we referred to this in passing in Chapter 4), which involved violence and reprisal in both Rio and the fluminense hinterland. For a while, the planter and commercial elite had been promoting increased violence against captives and attacks on Abolitionists throughout the Province of Rio de Janeiro, but most of the headlines focused on Campos. There, an old childhood friend of Patrocínio, Carlos de Lacerda, had by 1884 become a militant and successful Abolitionist, publishing a daily, organizing, and reaching out to the captives themselves. Throughout the era after 1885, he and his followers would be the targets of vigilante violence and judicial repression. In Rio, under Saraiva, increased police activity, both official and clandestine, hampered, harassed, and physically intimidated Abolitionists. We will recall José Mariano’s warning on 1 July 1885 about the danger of such activities pushing the Abolitionist movement to revolution. That was under Saraiva’s administration, well before Cotegipe got started. Under Cotegipe, these activities extended to penetrating mass meetings and demonstrations by means of secretas (secret agents) and capangas (thugs) to act as agents provocateurs or to attack outright.1 No matter how bitterly Abolitionists suffered under both Saraiva and Cotegipe, the slaves suffered worse. By 1884, for all the talk and growing concern of the slaveholders about being murdered by their captives in the isolation of the plantations, most of the rural violence reported in the dailies

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was being meted out by slaveholding vigilantes and their hired thugs, in an apparent effort to intimidate the slaves by preemptive action.2 Once in power, Cotegipe made João Coelho Bastos chief of Rio’s police. Coelho Bastos would become the principal target of censure during Cotegipe’s administration, as the Abolitionists attacked his abuses. Among the Afro-Brazilian poor, Coelho Bastos earned the sobriquet rapa côco, slang for “head shaver,” as it was his officers’ custom to shave the heads of captured fugitive slaves before sending them back to their owners.3 Another aspect of Cotegipe’s regime, characteristic of his vision and hopes, was not only to put a halt to any further abolitionist reforms but to subvert the Sexagenarian Law itself. He did usher the measure through the Senate to its signature on 28 September 1885, the month and day made sacred by the 1871 law. Indeed, the reformist wing of the Conservatives used that same date to put an end to their annual banquet, as their raison d’être had finally been officially achieved. The 1885 law, together with abolition itself (at least as defined by the law), was now an explicit policy of the Conservatives. They proclaimed that they had taken abolition as far as it could reasonably go and that any further movement forward was neither necessary nor even reasonable. For the nation’s own good, it must be blocked. Yet, under Cotegipe’s first year in power, the cabinet went further. Contemporaries observed that, as was the case with so many of the 1871 law’s provisions, the 1885 law was being poorly enforced. Far worse, in mid-1886 and mid-1887, the Cotegipe cabinet revised aspects of the law. On 12 June 1886, in what Abolitionists called the Black Regulation, the cabinet decided that the law’s provision against selling slaves across provincial borders did not apply to Rio (legally distinct from the Province of Rio de Janeiro as the “neutral district”) and the city’s provincial hinterland. The cabinet also reinterpreted a key provision of the slaves’ valorization, such that slavery, formerly understood to end in thirteen years, was extended to fourteen and a half. In late July 1887, the administration also reversed the provision holding that if the state determined that one had failed to register one’s slaves with the state, their immediate emancipation followed. Some thirteen thousand people, already emancipated by that policy in the Campos region, were immediately threatened with reenslavement on that account.4 The cabinet’s sense of empowerment was strengthened immeasurably by its parliamentary strength. Upon Cotegipe’s first speech to the Chamber on 24 August 1885, a vote of no confidence was called and passed—after all, the Chamber majority was still Liberal. Nonetheless, Cotegipe refused to resign; indeed, within a month or so, after he had seen to the passage of the Sexagenarian Law, he asked the emperor to dissolve the Chamber, as expected, and on 29 September the emperor did so, as he had agreed. New elections were held on 15 January 1886. While Saraiva and Dantas had

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overseen postelectoral reform elections, which, however tainted in some respects, were in historical perspective relatively fair (and had thus returned significantly numerous Conservative minorities on both occasions as a result), this did not occur under Cotegipe.5 The prime minister did not leave anything to chance. Cotegipe wanted to reward party members who had awaited the party’s return to power and to ensure an overwhelming majority, and he did both. As early as 5 October, the Rio News reported that the cabinet had carried out an extensive purge of the police and other officeholders, replacing them with Conservative loyalists. While partisan purges and patronage appointments were traditional, Nabuco would (in 1886) publish a stinging analysis of the extensive abuses in which the cabinet engaged. In December 1885, the Abolitionist press even charged that alleged slave insurrections were being used as a ploy to justify sending army units into the provinces to intimidate the Conservatives’ opposition. Coelho Bastos’s increased use of capoeiras in Rio street violence in late November was alleged to be electoral preparation.6 The rewards for such strenuous electoral precautions were dramatic. In a Chamber of 125, the Conservative majority numbered 103, and many of the surviving Liberals were former allies of the Conservatives from the 1884–1885 reaction. Nabuco, of course, was routed in Recife. Even José Mariano, who had clearly won there, was subsequently (mid-1886) purged by the credentials committee. It would only be in the Senate—nominally a Conservative bastion—that some significant parliamentary resistance would be mustered, as we shall see.7 The Radicalization of the Abolitionist Movement

It would be understandable if the movement had faded away under the frustrations, defeats, and betrayals of 1885, as well as the increasing state repression that began with Saraiva. Indeed, contemporaries pointed to Abolitionism’s ebb during the 1885–1886 season of waters, with the end of the legislative session in September 1885 and the terrible electoral defeats of January 1886. Yet in hindsight it makes more sense to emphasize the beginnings of a more radical turn, initiated by the response to Dantas’s fall and the mass mobilization associated with it. Indicative of this are the demonstrations of 11 and 12 May 1885 and the condemnation of the Saraiva project inside and outside of parliament that followed, as well as, even more, the election of Nabuco in June 1885 and Carlos de Lacerda’s Abolitionist mobilization that same month in Campos. The coastal ports’ mobilizations celebrating Nabuco’s victory are also telling, together with Nabuco’s unrelenting attacks on the 1885 project, from Saraiva’s administration to that of Cotegipe, as

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well as the Confederação Abolicionista’s inauguration of a series of new conferências from July 1885 into 1886. By September 1885, the Gazeta da Tarde was reporting a new wave of slave resistance (strikes) in Campos, and that same month marked a new political mobilization in Rio as Patrocínio joined forces with a new republican organization, running successfully for vereador (town councilman) in Rio with the full public support of Nabuco and Rebouças, nominal monarchists.8 Indeed, after the Chamber dissolution of late September 1885, Nabuco began the most radical shift in his political trajectory. Both he and Rebouças had become entirely disillusioned with the emperor as a statesman and ally. On 2 March 1886, Rebouças had written to Nabuco: It is necessary to convince yourself that P II & Co. are as much the enemies of Joaquim Nabuco as of André Rebouças. The King is the greatest parasite, he is biologically the protoplasmic nucleus of all the national parasitism—Aristocracy, Philocracy, Oligarchy, and Theocracy are evolved transformations of this hideous protoplasm. We, Democrats, march resolutely against all these anachronisms. . . . Democracy claims you entirely. . . . Nothing of illusion, my dear Nabuco: we are at the evening before 1889. . . . The struggle is to the death between Democracy and Parasitism.9

With Dantas’s fall, Rebouças’s radical propaganda, which began with his 1883 series promoting the underground railroad, immediate abolition, and agrarian reform in the movement’s “new phase” before Dantas, now hardened into a more intransigent position and sort of jeremiad: his “Decalogue,” unfurled in the Gazeta da Tarde in June 1885. The first of the ten “maxims and assumptions” for Abolitionists was that “slavery is a crime”; the second, that “the slaveholder is a contrabandist”; the third, that “the enslaved is more compromising than counterfeit money; he is a document that cannot be refused, a living proof of a series of crimes committed in Africa, in midocean, and throughout the Brazilian Empire”; and so on.10 Rebouças could not speak publicly, but he could write for all the world to see. In effect, in their political positions and actions, Rebouças and Nabuco moved much closer to Patrocínio after Dantas’s fall in May 1885. In personal relations they drew closer as well, to the point that Rebouças became godfather to one of Patrocínio’s children.11 A radical position had been a relatively easy one for Patrocínio, who had begun his political career at the edge of the reformist press, as an eclectic radical ideologue, embracing republicanism, socialism, and positivism. For Rebouças, though, whose father had held an established position in the political and elite circles of Salvador and Rio, and who himself had enjoyed

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a privileged education and useful, constant social, business, and political relations with the imperial elite, from financiers and ministers to members of the imperial family itself, such a step was a significant one. How much more so, then, for Nabuco, a man with blood kin among the imperial aristocracy, whose father had been a councilor of state and a senator, whose grandfather had been a senator, a man on speaking terms with the great chieftains of the Liberal party? Nabuco had had every reason to think that he had joined the front ranks of a triumphant Liberal reformism early in 1885: an ally of Dantas, the leader of a movement apparently supported by the monarch, a deputy twice elected by voters of Pernambuco against the oligarchy and the odds. How great the gap between the regime and his movement had grown in a matter of months. This extraordinary deputy, defeated and dismissed by the Chamber in May 1885 only to be redeemed in June, had, in the mid-January 1886 election, been cast down and out again, lost with so many others in the Conservative avalanche. Nabuco now came to see himself faced with a stark choice: he could retreat to London again, defeated, and attempt to make a career in journalism and business law without any real hope of a political return, or he could stay in Brazil, continuing as the recognized leader of the Abolitionist movement and a champion of Liberal reformism. Indeed, the struggles of 1884 and 1885 had begun to convince him that his place was in Brazil, between Rio and Recife, in the thick of the struggle. The days when he pined for Europe dwindled. He was now consumed with both anger and the ambition to conquer. The catalyst for his decision was a very tiresome matter. However privileged his background and tastes, without a seat in the Chamber Nabuco had no way to support himself in Brazil as the aristocratic gentleman that he was. He had no plantation, and his father had not left enough of a fortune to allow him financial independence. He himself had failed twice to marry the great love of his youth, Eufrásia Teixeira Leite, a wealthy heiress of the fluminense plantation elite, who preferred Paris to returning as his wife to Brazil. For four months in early 1886, Nabuco discussed his preferred solution with friends: a new periodical, O Século, which he would edit and from which he would lead. To that end, he lobbied friends and allies in the hope of securing the necessary capital, but it never quite materialized. At another point, he, Rebouças, and Patrocínio went to great lengths to strengthen the Gazeta da Tarde and set up an allied daily, the Gazeta da Manhã, but that too never came to pass. Then, in April 1886, Nabuco decided to accept an offer from another daily, O Paiz. Owned by the count de Montesinos, a successful reformist Portuguese immigrant businessman, and edited by Nabuco’s friend Quintino Bocaiuva, reformist, Republican, and Abolitionist, the paper could not offer him the complete political and financial independence that

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he wanted, but it did offer enough of both. Coaxed by Rebouças, Serra, and others to accept, he did so.12 Previously, in early 1886, as part of his dream of leading a reform movement as an independent radical journalist, Nabuco had published a series of three pamphlets, done to analyze the defeats of 1884–1886, in preparation for his proposed periodical O Século and the next move forward in politics. The pamphlets were O erro do imperador, O eclypse do Abolicionismo, and Eleições liberaes e eleições conservadores. They were clearly designed to scandalize and marshal the forces of reformism. The first criticized the monarch for his betrayal of the movement. The second assessed the success of Cotegipe’s anti-Abolitionist suppression and again the emperor’s ultimate responsibility. The third, the bitter accounting of a candidate still coming to terms with defeat, was a pitiless exposé of the Conservatives’ electoral abuses, the emperor’s role, and the Liberals’ notorious past errors while in power, as well as an analysis of the barriers to successful voter mobilization. Published between February and March 1886, these pamphlets were clearly an attempt not only to rally flagging support for the cause but to create an urban political readership for the periodical he had in mind. Although they were unsuccessful in regard to the latter, in regard to the former they remain useful to us, basic to understanding the strategy Nabuco and his allies were apparently putting together as they tried to take heart, gather strength, and plan their way forward.13 Our study of the years 1886 and 1887 reveals a strategy of three related Abolitionist responses to the reactionaries’ victory. At the level of parliamentary politics, Nabuco and Patrocínio would lead a campaign of public critique and exposé from the Gazeta da Tarde and O Paiz, designed to delegitimize the cabinet and shame the monarch into a reversal. They often picked up on reports of particularly brutal acts of cruelty to slaves, to underscore the barbarity essential to the continuing slaveholding to which the cabinet and the crown were tied. They were joined from within parliament by Dantas, in the Senate, who along with allies from both parties would propose Abolitionist legislation to challenge the new status quo as well as to organize obstruction and articulate outrage regarding the measures taken by the cabinet. We will return to this below. At the street level, the Confederação Abolicionista, doubtless using the skills of Miguel Antônio Dias, would organize ad hoc demonstrations around particularly shameful acts, with crowds reaching the thousands during the Chamber sessions of 1886 and 1887. Several of these were especially successful: that on 29 June 1886 addressing the Black Regulation (two thousand people) and those on 13 and 15 July 1886 attacking the Chamber’s disgraceful vote purging José Mariano (six to eight thousand people and ten thousand people, respectively). They mobilized again when on 20 and 23

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July 1887 the cabinet reversed the emancipations in the Campos region. On 5 August 1887, the first meeting and march on this issue brought together about six thousand people and was followed with a gathering on 6 August at the Teatro Politeama. These two days of protest led the police to institute an effective closure of all evening meetings, together with a restriction on daytime meeting sites, for at least the next ten days. According to the detailed description of the events in the Gazeta da Tarde, the 6 August meeting at the Teatro Politeama was attacked by police and their capoeiras; the Abolitionists defended themselves with chairs and revolvers. This violent repression was protested by Abolitionists in Recife and São Paulo. In Rio, on 8 August, members of parliament went to join a protest meeting at the Campo de Santana called in response to all of this but left upon being warned by the police. The Abolitionist masses were less fortunate: they showed up and were then set upon by police infantry, then by cavalry, and finally by reluctant army troops. The confrontation between the retreating Abolitionists and the troops only ended at the Ouvidor office of the Gazeta da Tarde, where the Abolitionist leadership successfully arranged a peaceful dispersal with the help of Lt. Col. Antônio de Sena Madureira, a celebrated Abolitionist army officer. A subsequent Politeama meeting was canceled in the face of a threat of fire and a police warning that they could not guarantee protection. By this point, the Liberal minority of the Chamber had resolved to send a committee to join the Confederação Abolicionista at any subsequent meetings. By 15 August 1887, the Rio News reported that Rio had been under effective police rule for ten days, a manifest signal that the cabinet’s vaunted capacity to stabilize the political situation was dubious.14 Aside from the public, legal efforts in the press, parliament, and the streets, the Abolitionists also worked clandestinely and illegally in the rural and urban sectors to attack slavery directly. Rebouças had promoted the United States model of the underground railroad earlier, in 1883; indeed, according to one scholar, there is indirect proof that by 1883–1884, the Confederação Abolicionista was providing financial support for it. By 1884, moreover, there were complaints about it in the meetings of the Clube da Lavoura e do Comércio. Contemporaries recall a number of Abolitionists who participated actively in its success. There was a set process, in which captives who were able to slip away from their owners in the countryside made their way to Rio (or São Paulo, or Santos, or Recife) by train or on foot with the help of Abolitionist agents. They would be passed along by agent to agent until they were left at a quilombo or successfully shipped off to liberated Ceará. Quilombo was a traditional term for a fugitive-slave settlement, an established form of slave resistance since the colonial era. By 1886, there were Abolitionist quilombos in or on the outskirts of the cities just mentioned, in particular, Santos, which had the largest quilombo, Jabaquara, nearby, and Rio, whose rail network

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drained off fugitives from the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas, and São Paulo. In Rio, the largest quilombo was at a chácara (suburban farm) in Leblon, but there were perhaps a half dozen smaller quilombos closer to the cidade velha. Miguel Antônio Dias, who in view of his work and workplace may well have played a critical part in transferring fugitives who arrived by train was also noted for maintaining one of these quilombos near his home, situated at the foot of the Catumbi hill.15 Far more important to the movement was something very different, taking place in another province. Just as the movement in Ceará had a decisive impact on the national movement begun and organized in Rio, so too a recent shift in the Abolitionist strategy in São Paulo had major national repercussions. There, as noted earlier, after the death of Luís Gama, Antônio Bento had swiftly assumed leadership. An eccentric, charismatic member of the paulista elite, with an apparent affinity for the religiosity pervasive in the popular culture and Abolitionist rhetoric of the time, he was able to move not only the students and liberal professionals associated with the paulista law school and the Abolitionist press but the Afro-Brazilian working poor, including members of the city’s Irmandade do Rosário. Working with the irmandade and the Nossa Senhora dos Remédios church, he founded a new periodical, A Redenção (The Redemption). The Remédios church became the seat of an organizing network for agents who went out to the plantations to inspire and organize mass flights among the slaves. These agents, who must have been Afro-Brazilian to move and mingle with the slaves, came to be called caifazes, probably a reference to the New Testament, where Caiaphas, high priest of the Jews, is quoted in John (11:49–50) as calling for the sacrifice of Jesus—“It is better . . . that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish”—and prophesying that Jesus’s sacrifice was necessary “for the scattered children of God, to bring them together and make them one.” These caifazes risked their own lives, then, to redeem their brethren, going out to the plantations, speaking to the captives, organizing their flights in whole groups. Not a single fugitive, here and there, such as those who had been making their way to the quilombos by means of the Abolitionists’ underground railroads. Not a few spontaneous risings, such as those Maria Machado has found in the provincial records of the 1880s. No—this was distinctly different and distinctly threatening. This was groups of field slaves who, after about 1886, were organized by Abolitionists and marched through the Province of São Paulo toward the quilombos of Santos, where they would add enormously to the thousands that had come to live there by late 1887. The significance of this for paulista slaveholding and then for the Cotegipe cabinet cannot be overestimated; we will assess the cumulative impact of this tactic later, when it falls dramatically into place in the parliamentary narrative for 1887–1888.16

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In sum, there were three main components to the radicalization of the Abolitionist movement after Dantas’s fall: press and parliament, significant growth of popular mobilization in the streets, and clandestine, illegal movement in town and country involving fugitive slaves and Abolitionist quilombos. On the one hand, delegitimizing and destabilizing the cabinet and crown policy by criticism, exposé, and obstruction through legal actions. On the other hand, destabilizing slavery itself through illegal actions. We should also emphasize that all three strategies were undertaken either directly or indirectly by Abolitionists tied to the Rio movement, with direct consequences for that movement as well as the national movement of which it remained the acknowledged leading element. We should also emphasize that the leaders of the Abolitionist movement not only were well aware of the illegal, clandestine component but supported it publicly as being both justified and essential to the success of the entire movement—which it was. As Nabuco wrote to one Abolitionist in 1886, “There is no political or parliamentary abolitionism unless there exists in the country that other abolitionism of immediate, intransigent popular action, that pushes the parties and the administrations forward and conquers for the slave the liberty to which he has the same right as the master, and for this, all the means that are moral are legitimate.”17 The Initial Destabilization of the Cotegipe Cabinet

The impact of even the legal, public strategies on Cotegipe’s cabinet by the end of 1886 are measurable. The point of Dantas’s raising an alternative Abolitionist reform on 1 June 1886 must have been to keep Abolitionism in debate in parliament. The point of the press campaign, emphasizing the more gruesome cases of captives’ torture, murder, and other abuse, must have been the ongoing Abolitionist attempt to recruit and maintain popular support for the movement, despite the Sexagenarian Law. Much of this must have been derived from Nabuco’s analysis of the catastrophic vote in the 15 January 1886 election. One of the matters that concerned him deeply was the need to mobilize more Afro-Brazilian support among the poorest reaches of the urban electorate, people literate and gainfully employed but still too mired in patronage and dependency to reach out to the movement on the basis of racial solidarity. Both his pamphlets and the kinds of stories he and the others published, emphasizing the plights of individuals, were doubtless designed to make identification with captives more compelling, probably with the Afro-Brazilian readership especially in mind.18 By midyear, there would seem to have been some success at mobilization, when two thousand people responded on 30 June to the Confederação

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Abolicionista protest against the Black Regulation. Success was even more in evidence with the crowds of six to ten thousand who protested the treatment of José Mariano when he was purged from the Chamber. The Black Regulation demonstration was also in support of Patrocínio’s vereador campaign, and that Patrocínio won his seat is also indicative of growing Abolitionist and reformist strength; for a radical Republican and Abolitionist to be seated at the city council of the imperial capital in an era of clear Conservative domination was remarkable. The ongoing cumulative impact may well have influenced the rising opposition in the Senate, where Dantas took an unprecedented step with unprecedented success. In Brazilian parliamentary history, a cabinet’s political fortunes and direction were traditionally indicated in the lower house. The Chamber debates and votes measured cabinet success. However, with the crushing majority of Conservatives in the Chamber, any significant opposition to Cotegipe in regard to Abolition was simply impossible. Instead, Dantas decided to organize an increasingly large bipartisan group in the Senate targeting the cabinet’s obvious manipulation and distortion of the Sexagenarian Law of 1885. By focusing on its abolitionist policy, he was thus actually able to achieve, albeit briefly, a majority that was willing to vote for the cabinet’s censure.19 The censure took the form of two amendments to the agriculture budget. As such, they were ineffective as binding law—they would have had to be accepted by the Chamber for that—but in propaganda terms, they were a clear declaration of a lack of confidence in the cabinet’s handling of abolition. This embarrassment was keenly felt. The minister of agriculture, Antônio Prado, and then Cotegipe himself felt compelled to respond. More important still, the fact that Cotegipe’s promotion of the Sexagenarian Law, his manipulation of it, and his explicit claims of being somehow pro-abolition were so clearly public failures was becoming increasingly obvious. If the slaveholders, the Conservatives, and the emperor were depending upon Cotegipe and his management of public affairs to erase the Abolitionist movement and stabilize the social and political milieu, they must have been disappointed. The prime minister’s credibility was thinning cloth, wearing away quickly. The emperor was widely reported to have complained about the drift of the cabinet’s abolitionism as early as his tour of the Province of São Paulo, accompanied by Prado and the press, in late 1886; indeed, one contemporary recalled the tour as the beginning of the end of Prado’s support for Cotegipe. Without the emperor’s confidence, after all, a prime minister’s future was dubious: he might be challenged; he might be replaced.20 It was not only the public demonstrations, the police violence, and the Senate’s censure that affected Cotegipe’s public standing over 1886. An even more striking illustration of Cotegipe’s predicament may be provided by one

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spectacular victory of Abolitionist pressure, having to do with the penalty of the lash. This penalty was derived from the law of 10 June 1835, which held that slaves convicted of killing their master or their overseer or any member of either’s family, or of participating in an insurrection, were guilty of a capital crime and were to be sentenced to death. Given the emperor’s established tradition of commuting a death sentence, such slaves were generally condemned instead to a public flogging, to be carried out by the imperial judicial system. The usual sentence was two hundred strokes, in successive sets of fifty, with medical care and time between the sets to ensure survival.21 In mid-1886, five slaves were convicted of the 1885 killing of their overseer in the Province of Rio de Janeiro; one was sentenced to life in prison, the other four to the penalty of the lash. The sentence was harsher than usual: three hundred strokes rather than two hundred. Each of the captives underwent the torture, with one or two days between sets, and then, twenty-six days after the last set, they were released to their owner’s employees. These men bound the captives’ upper bodies and tied them behind their horses, mounted up, and proceeded to make their way back to the plantation, with the four men forced to walk or trot behind. Two of the captives died en route. Later, after exhumation by imperial officials (because of the public outcry, to be detailed below), it was determined that they had died of pulmonary congestion, likely caused by congestive heart failure, which resulted in their lungs being filled with bloody fluid and led directly to death, given the inability to breathe properly. Effectively, they died from the consequences of traumatic physical stress. The deaths occurred in late July 1886 and were witnessed; Nabuco was advised and reported the case in O Paiz as yet another example of the barbarism made possible by Brazilian slavery. However, while other cases of torture and death at the hands of slaveholders had been reported by the Abolitionists, this case was special, because the imperial government was directly involved. It was charged that the flogging, barbaric in any case, had been performed by the imperial state, which was thus directly responsible for the killing of the two men. Dantas brought the case directly to the Senate and demanded an investigation, all the while using the case, as had Nabuco, as exemplary of the bloody horrors inevitable in slaveholding. He not only asserted the state’s culpability in this particular case but argued that it demonstrated the inescapable horrors of slavery, which itself must be outlawed to end such uncivilized behavior.22 Cotegipe, already on the defensive because of the Senate’s earlier unprecedented attack on his abolitionist credentials (an attack arising from the response to the Black Regulation in public and in the Senate) decided to avoid the public association of his cabinet with a defense of the flogging and its gruesome results. In an adroit series of decisions, his ministers carried out a full investigation and, parallel to that, urged the Abolitionist

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senators to move for an end to the flogging penalty in parliament, with the cabinet’s blessing. Politically speaking, this was a masterstroke. The cabinet could claim the moral high ground and limit any direct taint from the case. They could and did argue that their support for the reform of the penalty of the lash was part of their more general abolitionism, leading the nation forward toward the light of freedom and preparing the captives for emancipation by removing this particular vestige of the past. They did this in debates and in the investigations unfolding over August and September. Moreover, they did this despite strenuous efforts by Abolitionist senators and journalists to prove that the cabinet was guilty by association and to point out the contradiction between such a reform and the continued legality of corporal punishment by slaveholders in their private relations with their property. Thus Cotegipe successfully used his personal and his ministers’ support for the reform to regain much of his parliamentary credibility (at least among Conservatives), as demonstrated by the parliamentary response to the cabinet’s actions. As the reform moved forward in parliament, he gamely called for two votes of confidence on his general handling of abolitionism, one in the Chamber on 5 October and one in a joint session of both houses on 9 October. It worked—he won both. In effect, he had used the reform of the penalty of the lash to reverse at least some of the momentum created by the Abolitionists in the press and parliament against his policies, and he had done so with tremendous success—at least in parliament.23 Nonetheless, his triumph was far from complete. In the connection between the masters’ flogging of their slaves and the state’s, Cotegipe and his supporters lost significant ground. As noted previously, the Abolitionists had called attention to the incoherence between the state’s ending its own flogging and its allowing masters to continue theirs. In the Senate debates on the matter, Cotegipe insisted that the two situations were legally distinct and that the reform of the one had no legal bearing on the other. But even his supporters, particularly in the Chamber, understood the issue in a way much closer to that of the Abolitionists, that is, in terms of the plantations’ moral economy. What would become of the master’s moral authority to flog his captives if the imperial state, in all of its majesty, banned flogging and claimed it to be unacceptable in principle? Both Abolitionist and Conservative deputies realized that private flogging stood condemned by the public reform. In the courts and on the plantations, flogging was beginning to be condemned and abandoned. One memoir reported a dramatic shift in captives’ behavior over the course of 1887 in the aftermath of the reform, and it was predicted in parliament that the impact on plantation discipline would be fatal. The Abolitionists argued that it was tantamount to ending slavery altogether, and in the debates slaveholders and Conservatives often agreed.24

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Thus, during 1886, Cotegipe’s credibility in terms of an abolitionist solution, effective management of his opposition, and the future of the status quo were all eroding. He had been effectively put on the defensive, along with slaveholding itself. While he had fended off his Senate opposition in the October 1886 votes of confidence, the Abolitionists there and elsewhere had demonstrated, by their successes in survival, in mobilization, in challenging his abolitionism, and in putting an end to flogging, that the reactionary victory over the Abolitionist movement had been ephemeral. Cotegipe’s first year in office left him far from the domination of public affairs that the triumphant election of January 1886 had suggested would be the case. In 1887, additional factors would combine with Abolitionist radicalism to further destabilize the weakened Cotegipe administration. One of the most striking had to do with the army.

The Final Destabilization of the Cotegipe Administration in 1887 The Military Question

The army in Brazil, except for the very early years of the Regency (1831– 1840), had not been involved directly in political affairs; it had simply served the monarchy in its early wars, both in domestic repression and Platine interventions. In contrast with the Spanish American experience, there had been no protracted war of independence during a disputed political regime to foster political strength and ambitions in the military. Instead, both the army and navy had generally served as the instrument of the charismatic, constitutional, centralizing monarchy that oversaw and shaped the transition to national independence and unity between the 1820s and 1848. As in the navy, the army rank and file were largely pressed into service from the free poor and were largely Afro-Brazilian, as was also the case with the police. Unlike the navy officer corps, however, who were traditionally associated with the imperial aristocracy, army officers were generally recruited from the middling reaches of society: the urban middle class, the poorer rural landholders, or families with a tradition of military service over the generations. Such families might send their brighter, more ambitious sons to the military schools for the opportunity of a higher education, since, owing to a comparative lack of wealth, connections, and political prospects, the two academies of law (where the elite’s more promising sons went) were generally off limits to them. The training in the military schools was modeled on French military examples and emphasized the sciences, which meant that after midcentury the influence of positivism was increasingly strong. Many of the younger officers who served in the Paraguayan war (1865–1870) were shaped by positivist ideas. Over time, as the result of underfunding, the embarrassing difficulties of the Paraguayan campaign (for which the empire and its armed forces were

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poorly prepared by cabinets drawn from the traditional political elite), and a sense of being considered inferior by the political elite, the potential for a critical view of the political status quo had grown. Positivist ideology armed these tendencies with the tempered metal of science and progress, emphasizing Brazil’s desperate lack of industrial and infrastructural progress, condemning the nation’s backwardness, and blaming both on two fundamental Brazilian institutions: the monarchy itself and slavery. Indeed, as mentioned in Chapter 2, one of the earliest Abolitionist organizations in Rio was founded by army cadets, namely, the Sociedade Académica de Emancipação, founded in the Escola Militar itself in August 1880.25 Among the officers resentful of the military’s status and inclined toward Abolitionism was an older veteran of Paraguay, Lt. Col. Antônio de Sena Madureira, who enjoyed considerable respect for his military service. In 1883, however, this decorated veteran had been censured for publishing a criticism of a ministerial reform involving the military retirement fund. Perhaps he resented the reprimand; he certainly disliked that regulations demanded an officer clear his comments before publishing them. In 1884, he tested the limits again, this time, as head of one of the specialized military schools in Rio, hosting Francisco José do Nascimento, the leading boatman in the celebrated Ceará boycott of the interprovincial slave trade that had done so much to galvanize the initial cearense Abolitionist movement. For taking such an Abolitionist position in public, Sena Madureira was punished again, this time by being sent away from Rio to a provincial post in Rio Grande do Sul, the empire’s southernmost province. The provincial president at the time was Gen. Manuel Deodoro da Fonseca, one of the most prestigious officers in the army and, like Sena Madureira, a man very sensitive to personal slights and anything touching military honor. When yet another officer, Col. Ernesto Augusto de Cunha Matos, published an unauthorized response to personal political attacks made against him in the Chamber in 1885, he too was censured. Both Sena Madureira and Deodoro took up Cunha Matos’s case, as did other officers. The larger issue, the right of the military to get involved in political affairs publicly, became known as the Military Question. It resonated with all officers’ longsuffered slights and created a more encompassing atmosphere of aggrieved solidarity, which led to the founding of Rio’s Clube Militar in June 1887. In this same context, some of the younger officers, particularly the positivist militants, began to discuss establishing a republic, and some among them began conspiring against the Cotegipe cabinet in alliance with more radical Abolitionists.26 This alliance between the positivist militants and Abolitionists had developed over time as Patrocínio took note of the growing disaffection of the officer corps. The reader may remember, for example, that Patrocínio had

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called for military intervention as early as 18 April 1885 (at the height of Dantas’s political crisis). On 30 June 1886, when he was campaigning as a Republican for vereador, in the shift toward the Abolitionist movement’s more general radicalization, Patrocínio had received public moral support from both civilian positivists and young officers from the Escola Militar (led by Serzedelo Correia and Lauro Sodré, two of the leading figures among the young positivist militants in the officer corps). Patrocínio nurtured the relationship with such men and cultivated it in his journalism, supporting the idea of the right and duty of the army to participate in public political affairs—the heart of the Military Question.27 In 1886, he called upon them to see and to defend their common cause as oppressed Afro-Brazilians: It is from the classes excluded and oppressed by the empire, it is from the despoiled and oppressed race from which the great majority of our army spring. Most of our soldiers are recruited from among men of color and these certainly will not lend themselves to the fratricidal mission of killing the flesh of their flesh, the blood of their blood. Let us look at one another [for] a moment, let us count on one another, and let us decide to conquer or to die.28

If anything, Cotegipe’s handling of the Military Question over the course of 1887 made matters worse. Early on, this led to the emperor’s intervention and the mid-February 1887 resignation of the minister of war, Alfredo Chaves. The question persisted afterward because the officers thought their political rights had been ignored and their military honor injured, and no suitable satisfaction had been offered. Nor was Patrocínio the only Republican Abolitionist involved in supporting the military and stoking the fire. On 14 May 1887, after yet another cabinet resignation took place (that of the minister of agriculture, Antônio Prado), thus increasing the pressure on the cabinet, O Paiz (directed by Quintino Bocaiuva) published an ultimatum signed by Deodoro and the viscount de Pelotas. The viscount, another great hero of the Paraguayan campaign and a Liberal, was a senator and a friend of Dantas. He had defended Cunha Matos in the Senate when that case had arisen and since then had been allied with Deodoro on the larger issues. On 8 May, Pelotas had used the Senate floor to challenge Cotegipe on such matters. The ultimatum of 14 May was the public statement by both officers of their dissatisfaction with Cotegipe’s treatment, and on 18 May, Pelotas again attacked Cotegipe in the Senate. On the same day, in the Gazeta da Tarde, Patrocínio called for a coup; others called for Cotegipe’s resignation.29 Patrocínio’s talk of a coup in May did not come out of nowhere. Earlier, by 20 April 1887 (and apparently unbeknownst to the other Abolitionist leaders), Patrocínio and other civilian Republicans, moved by rumors of the emperor’s failing health and apparently imminent death, had begun conspiring with military officers in regard to mounting a coup. They contemplated

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reaching out to Deodoro and Pelotas. Nothing came of this in April, but when the Senate crisis erupted over mid-May, not only did Patrocínio call for a coup publicly, but the head of the Republicans in Rio, Saldanha Marinho, who had been involved in the conspiratorial discussions in April, was approached by another Republican, Aristides Lobo (an Abolitionist), on the officers’ behalf and asked to support a coup, to take place immediately. Saldanha Marinho refused to participate; he thought the Republicans were completely unprepared and the military support for a new regime uncertain. He decided it was best to let the Military Question work itself out.30 In the end, Pelotas and Cotegipe allowed two Liberal senators, the viscount do Ouro Preto and Silveira Martins, to intervene in the matter (20 May) to reach a satisfactory compromise over reprimands and honor. The situation had become so tense that the cabinet was prepared to resign rather than accede and, on 19 May, had conveyed this to João Alfredo so that he could prepare to succeed Cotegipe. There were conversations with Conservative chieftains (among them, Paulino) and with the emperor, who was extremely ill at the time. It was, altogether, a dismal moment for the monarchy. The Liberal senators’ intervention, however, brought an end to the crisis, although even that nearly failed, owing once again to divisions among the Liberals in the Senate: Dantas and Cándido de Oliveira had argued against support for the cabinet, preferring that it be forced to resign.31 Aside from adding dramatically to the difficulties of the cabinet and the general perception of a weak administration, unable to manage affairs, the events of 1887 fed the disaffection between the officer corps and the political elite, fomented by Abolitionism and a heightened sensitivity among the offended officers regarding military honor. These would come together in the last three months of the year, in conjunction with other blows to the cabinet. Conservative Disarray in 1887

Over the course of 1887, the Cotegipe cabinet began to fall apart under the outside pressures just described, as ministers left the embattled administration. The portfolios for war, justice, agriculture, and empire were left on the table over the year: the first in February, the second two in May, and the last in July. These resignations increased the perception of a cabinet in crisis and undercut support in the Chamber, which looked to a cabinet for strength and direction. The portfolios were picked up by others in the cabinet, but in some cases this was temporary, and new ministers were recruited. Empire, for example, was taken up by Machado Portela; agriculture was taken up by Rodrigo Augusto da Silva. Machado Portela was Nabuco’s old nemesis, who had won the contested Recife seat in 1885 and returned to it in the Conservative triumphs of January 1886. Now, with his new ascent to the

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cabinet in July 1887, the regulations demanded a by-election for his seat, which was set for September. Normally, these by-elections were pro forma: a new minister always won his seat back easily, owing to the prestige of the ministerial appointment and the obvious support of the cabinet. The Abolitionists, however, given the increasing perception of the cabinet’s weakness, saw an opportunity and encouraged Nabuco to contest the seat again. He did so, campaigning with the full support of the Rio and Recife Abolitionists. On 14 September, in an unprecedented feat, Nabuco won an undisputed victory. This was justly perceived throughout the empire as a signal reverse for the cabinet, a clear sign of its weakness; Nabuco himself wrote in the privacy of his diary that it was the administration’s “death blow.”32 Indeed, it could not have come at a worse time for Cotegipe. Following the May crisis over the Military Question, Dantas had raised (3 June) his second proposal for a new Abolitionist law. On 30 June, the emperor, finally overcome by his maladies, had been compelled to depart for a European cure, leaving the imperial heiress, Isabel, as princess regent; most did not expect him to return. This intensified the growing concern about Cotegipe’s direction, given the emperor’s increased incompetence during early 1887 and the perception of the princess regent as a weak monarch. In July, as already mentioned, the new minister of agriculture, Rodrigo da Silva, reversed the emancipation of thirteen thousand slaves. On 3 August, in resistance to this reversal, Dantas took a formal stand against Rodrigo da Silva, and on the next day, João Alfredo backed him—a clear blow to the cabinet and the prime minister from one of his foremost Conservative allies. This same emancipation reversal, as we saw, led to massive popular demonstrations in August and a police takeover of Rio for a week and a half at August’s end.33 To the public actions of the Abolitionists in Rio were added the clandestine successes of the Abolitionists in São Paulo. Antônio Bento’s agents, the caifazes, had enjoyed increasing success, and the mass flights of captives had grown to the point of threatening the harvests in western São Paulo, Brazil’s economic frontier. By September, in response, local planters in some counties began negotiations with their slaves, offering emancipation in exchange for staying on in the fields for two or three years. On 13 September, Cotegipe’s former minister of agriculture, Antônio Prado, rose in the Senate to discuss the profound impact the mass flights of slaves were having in the province. He argued that these flights were becoming more numerous because some planters refused to negotiate with their captives as others were beginning to do. He asked Cotegipe to address the abolition issue again and went on to suggest a national policy that would involve something similar to what the paulista planters had begun to put forward,

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that is, a reform of the 1885 law involving a transition over a few years in which the status of slaves who stayed at work would improve over time, from slavery to complete emancipation. On 17 September, João Alfredo (as he had in Dantas’s response to the cabinet’s revocation of emancipation in late July) again intervened for further reform. This time, he rose in the Senate to back Prado. Both he and Prado used the most supportive and conciliatory language in addressing Cotegipe. On the surface, they were simply asking for the prime minister’s consideration, and if he agreed, his leadership in working up this proposed new reform. In reality, they doubtless knew their man better; they must have anticipated that he would regard their proposal as a frontal attack on his reactionary intransigence, however politely put. His response was certainly typical of his style, albeit at its most polished. In his initial answer on 14 September, Cotegipe stated that he would stand by the 1885 reform and go no further. A few days later, after João Alfredo’s speech on 17 September, he added little, only making it clear to both men that he would “study” the matter. Later, after Prado clarified and fortified his position (19 September), Cotegipe responded that the sort of novelties that Prado proposed might be practical for his province but were impossible for others, which needed far more time to make the transition to free labor.34 The September Senate speeches marked the beginning of the end of Conservative solidarity on how to confront the Abolitionists and demonstrate the destabilization of dependable rural slave labor that Abolitionists had begun by means of the underground railroads, the mass flights, and the reform of the penalty of the lash. Throughout the empire, captives’ resistance was perceptibly increasing, and in São Paulo, the nation’s expanding economic frontier, the threat to the annual harvest from growing desertion posed an immediate danger to the paulista planters. Over the next few months, led by Prado himself, paulista planters would attempt to manage the situation through a unified provincial policy of relatively rapid transition to freedom. Unlike the paulista planters on the western frontier, however, fluminenses (and sugar planters in the Northeast, for that matter) did not have the capital to address the crisis by means of a few years’ transition to wage labor. Indeed, they were having difficulty making their debt payments and meeting their annual expenses. Obtaining new loans was an ongoing challenge; most of the collateral for their standing debts, particularly in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, had been based, precisely, on their most valuable assets—their slaves. After 1883, such collateral had been dismissed by the banks as no longer acceptable. Representing the fluminense planters, Paulino would respond by developing a provincial policy to counter the paulista solution in the public forum and meet the mounting Abolitionist challenges in Rio and its hinterland.35

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The larger point here remains a political one. By late 1887, Cotegipe’s cabinet and its larger reactionary policy no longer enjoyed strong or stable support, even among key Conservative chieftains. In fact, a close analysis of the Conservative rank and file in the Chamber, published by Patrocínio on 19 December 1887 in his new daily, Cidade do Rio,36 led him to claim that nearly half of the Conservatives there were already turning away from the cabinet. If this growing opposition combined with the Liberal minority by the time of the regular opening of parliament in May 1888, Cotegipe potentially faced losing a vote of confidence. Furthermore, beyond such weakening parliamentary backing, Cotegipe necessarily depended upon two state institutions to address the mounting threats of the Abolitionist movement—the army and the monarch—neither of which would prove to be supportive. We shall deal with the latter issue when it comes most dramatically onto the stage, in 1888; that involving the army, as we have seen, was more immediate. In the aftermath of the crisis over the Military Question in May 1887, military hostility to the status quo began to bleed into the Abolitionist issue directly. On the ground and in public statements, the willingness of the army’s officers to contain the captives’ mass flights in the Province of São Paulo ebbed and then dried up entirely. One of the first matters Nabuco took up after his mid-September election and return to Rio in triumph was an appeal to the army on 6 October to reject the role of capitão do mato (“bush captain,” a reference to the ruffians who traditionally profited by hunting down fugitive slaves), which he described as beneath military honor. The officers, many of whom were Abolitionist, agreed. Only shortly after Nabuco’s appeal, with the escalation in mass paulista plantation slave flights and the consequent escalation in army interventions in late 1887, one officer in the field protested against his being used in this fashion. On 25 October, the Clube Militar formally rejected the role as unsuitable. Moreover, it did so in an entirely irregular fashion: rather than going through the minister of war, they sent a statement directly to the princess regent, asking to be relieved of such an unsuitable task. While the cabinet never formally acknowledged the officers’ action, this soon put an end to army support for the cabinet’s position of maintaining the established rural hierarchy. By the end of 1887, something like twelve thousand fugitive slaves had taken shelter in the Abolitionist quilombo in the Serra do Cubatão, near Santos.37 Conservative Abolitionist Alternatives

As we have seen, the ongoing success of Abolitionism in town and country, particularly Antônio Bento’s success in São Paulo, had a dramatic political effect on the Conservatives and the imperial state. The increasing, unyielding popular mobilization in Rio was difficult enough to manage; mass flights

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of the captives themselves, with their crippling effects on the rural social and economic order, were clearly going to be fatal if nothing were done. With the Senate challenges of Prado and João Alfredo targeted directly on this issue, Cotegipe’s policy leadership was irreparably undermined. In this context, three principal policy alternatives emerged in a matter of months, each associated with a particular Conservative chieftain: Prado, Paulino, and João Alfredo. There was, of course, a larger public debate on alternatives to the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 that prefaced these Conservative alternatives. In the face of the Abolitionist movement’s 1883 embrace of immediate abolition without indemnification, parliamentary Abolitionists—Liberals—had proposed less radical compromises. On 1 June 1886, as noted earlier, Dantas, in the Senate, proposed a transition in slaves’ legal status toward free wage labor over a five-year period. On 4 May 1887, in the Chamber, the Liberal deputy Afonso Celso Filho (that is, son of the older Afonso Celso, the Liberal chieftain in the Senate) proposed immediate abolition upon the completion of two years’ service as indemnification. On 23 May 1887, Jaguaribe Filho, in the Chamber, called for a five-year transition project, beginning in September 1888. This was soon eclipsed by another Dantas proposal, on 3 June, calling for abolition by 31 December 1889 and referring to the earlier projects just mentioned. In short, there was a growing sense of impatience and opportunity, a cumulative urge among Liberals in parliament to press Abolitionism forward in response to both the cabinet’s intransigence and its deepening weakness over 1887.38 It was in this context that Prado, in the course of his first September speech, had suggested his own preference. As indicated earlier and as disclosed in João Alfredo’s later speech supporting him, Prado’s ideas had been shaped over the past few months. He called for a national transition from slavery to wage labor over a period of a few years, drawing not only upon the paulista planters’ negotiations with their captives but a possible (albeit implicit) acceptance of Dantas’s earlier 1886 transition proposal. It was a nod to the Liberals but not to their most recent, more radical position. Moreover, while the proposal was made in national terms, it must be emphasized that it was apparently conceived in the context of a new paulista initiative in regard to promoting immigrant wage labor. Antônio Prado’s brother, Martinho Prado, had organized a Sociedade Promotora de Immigração (Society for the Promotion of Immigration) in April 1886. This organization, which had nothing to do with the immigration society organized in Rio by Rebouças, Koseritz, and Taunay earlier (see Chapter 3), was set up to promote Italian immigration and funnel it into São Paulo, and it had an imperial subsidy, secured by Antônio Prado while minister of agriculture. The idea of state subsidization for such a policy had been one of the amendments that Antônio

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Prado had wrested from Saraiva in the 1885 negotiations over the sexagenarian project; he had helped pass it in the Senate and made sure that the final regulations favored his province. By 1886, the number of immigrants coming in from Italy was both substantial and growing. In sum, Prado’s 1887 apparent transition plan for the labor crisis in his province emphasized two related components that paulistas (as the leading coffee exporting province by 1885) could endorse because of circumstances that set them apart from any other province’s planters: growing profits robust enough to afford wage labor and the pressing need for an increasing number of laborers to supplement the labor of slaves and freedmen. Furthermore, they may well have anticipated that, by increasing the free wage-labor pool, they would drive down the cost of wages. In Prado’s plan, abolition reform was critical: it was the key to stabilizing slave labor on paulista plantations during a few years’ transition to abolition and free wage labor in order to avoid the threat of losing harvests in the interim. The related promotion of immigrant wage labor was the key to counterbalancing a dwindling supply of Brazilianborn labor as the economic frontier continued to expand and planters faced the need as well as the opportunity to increase coffee production. The whole scheme was so critical to the paulista economy that Prado was willing and able to organize and promote it in late 1887, regardless of cabinet policy or other planters’ circumstances. This go-it-alone paulista position doubtless drove the private and public character assassination that other Conservatives engaged in through the dailies as Prado’s public policy matured and undercut slaveholding by undermining the moral authority of slavery and thus actually increasing the number of slave flights in São Paulo. This unexpected impact affected the neighboring provinces over late 1887 and early 1888 as well. There were, for example, mobilizations, slave flights, and violent repression in Campos during October and November 1887. Moreover, in the first two months of 1888, with the spreading threat posed by rumors of massive labor destabilization in São Paulo, some of the wealthiest and most influential planters of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais anticipated matters and began to negotiate with their own slaves. All of this was blamed by Cotegipe and Paulino on Prado’s late-1887 position. By breaking ranks and negotiating with slaves, the paulista leader and his provincial followers had provided a model and results that other provinces’ planters and captives had begun to follow. In fact, Prado’s organizational thrust was crowned on 15 December 1887, when he held a meeting of noted paulista planters in São Paulo, founding the Sociedade Libertadora e Organizadora do Trabalho (Liberating and Organizing Society for Labor), which committed to a three-year transition without indemnification, amidst fears of cascading uprisings and mass flights. In mid-January 1888, the Jornal do Commercio argued that a watershed had been passed in public opinion,

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noting the impending end of slaveholding in the Province of São Paulo and the threat to plantation slave labor in both Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The paper advocated for a national political solution to manage matters, in the face of Cotegipe’s apparent stubbornness and the consequent increasing fear of an extended destabilizing crisis.39 Others, of course, had also taken notice of slaveholding’s rapid drift toward disaggregation and policy disarray. One should not be surprised that the most adroit Conservative response to the impasse between Cotegipe and Prado came from Paulino. Since the days of Lafaiete’s administration (1883–1884), the fluminense chieftain had suggested a willingness for flexibility on abolition, as he reminded others in his first Senate speech in 1885. To be sure, he would not compromise on the issues of gradualism (i.e., a phased transition from slavery to wage labor over a period of years) and indemnification; consequently, he continued to loathe and fear the Abolitionist movement. Nonetheless, he would demonstrate, as he had done time and again, a capacity for opportune adjustment. When confronted with the clear indication of the emperor’s abiding interest in new abolitionist reform, for example, Paulino had pronounced his willingness to talk. Facing Cotegipe’s and João Alfredo’s opportune embrace of a Conservative abolitionism in September 1884, he had at first been silent and then, when it became obviously inevitable, he was explicitly supportive. Indeed, confronted with Saraiva’s sexagenarian project, he had worked with João Alfredo to organize and direct Conservative support and amendments in the Chamber. Afterward, however, Paulino was widely assumed to be the sinew and bone behind Cotegipe’s stubborn decision to hold the line at the 1885 reform. This more recent decision makes sense; the 1885 project had everything Paulino could hope for under the circumstances. It was draped with constitutional, representative trappings: its amendments and final finish were due to the Chamber, not the prime minister or emperor. It had gradualism: it perpetuated slavery for more than a decade. It had indemnification: explicit in its procedures for emancipation from the beginning to the end. Moreover, it increased the nominal value of all slaves, which must have been a great benefit, particularly for fluminenses, mineiros, and northeastern slaveholders, most of whom were deeply in debt and exporting from areas manifestly in economic decline. Indeed, it was this economic decline that complicated the issue of abolition for Paulino’s personal constituency, the fluminense planters, among whom he himself was an exemplar. When Paulino, the grandson of planters, had married into a planting family in the Cantagalo region of his province in the 1850s, he had begun direct participation in the fluminense coffee boom at its newest frontier. After the 1850s, however, fluminense coffee planting, once preeminent in Brazil, went into steady decline. Poor, wasteful land use,

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aging coffee trees, and the increased costs of slave labor meant that fluminense planters could produce less and less, could afford fewer and fewer captives (from the urban sector or the Northeast), and sank more and more into debt. In the 1878 Congresso Agricola, the planters had emphasized both the need for access to greater credit and for cheap and plentiful labor to supplement the existing slave population. Moreover, as indicated above, their profits and debts were such that they could not bear the costs of paying freedmen’s wages or those of new immigrants without state financial support or some other way to supplement dwindling coffee profits. While the post-1850 expansion of the railways in the province had cut their costs, that alone would not suffice. They were not in São Paulo’s expanding, profitable economic position; along with their deputies and senators, they formed the bedrock of resistance to any abolitionism that threatened what little security and hopes on which they could still count. Paulino, their undisputed chieftain, thus could hardly embrace Prado; in fact, Prado’s provincial solution threatened fluminense stability directly, obviously, and increasingly. Rather, Paulino had to work out a political and economic solution of his own, and by mid-November 1887, two months after Prado’s Senate challenge, he had done so. In the position Paulino took then, he was apparently careful to make full use of rumor, character assassination, coordinated press reports, public meetings, private understandings, and published position statements. Thus, as early as 18 November 1887, the Cidade do Rio (Patrocínio’s new daily) would report that Paulino was rumored to be willing to accept a five-year transition policy. This was transformed into a “promise,” conveyed by January 1888 and referenced in a public meeting in the fluminense hinterland on 20 March 1888 in which Paulino was said to have told slaveholders that they could count on five more years of slave labor. This had apparently been used to calm his constituency, as well as possibly signaling his bargaining position on any further abolitionist reform. At the same time, it was probably Paulino and Cotegipe who saw to it that Prado and João Alfredo were personally attacked for the ideas that had led to destabilization in the fields, ideas and destabilization associated with their embrace of negotiation with slaves and support for projects involving a more rapid transition to freedom. These behind-the-scenes efforts were in stark contrast to what Paulino did publicly. Using coordinated press reports, position statements, and public meetings, he offered an alternative project, first reported on 18 November as well, which only mentioned abolition itself in his caustic criticism of the paulista strategy. Instead, Paulino outlined a “reasonable and practical” solution to the problem of his province’s declining slave population and coffee production, complicated by the financial inability of planters to emancipate immediately or in a few years owing to debt taken on during earlier years

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of expansion. He called for diversification in exports, state support for immigration of foreign wage labor, and careful, select land reform, involving the exploitation of plantations without labor and of landholdings near roads and railways (a reform designed to support the diversification and immigrant labor components of his plan). This position, which seemingly jibed with Cotegipe’s negative response to Prado’s and João Alfredo’s speeches favoring further abolitionist reform in September, was then advanced in meetings begun in November in Rio among fluminense planters and culminating in early December meetings with fluminense provincial assemblymen and the fluminense deputies to the imperial Chamber. On 9 December, the Jornal do Commercio reported that Paulino had presented a formal legislative project along these lines to the provincial assembly, where a younger kinsman, Belisário Augusto Soares de Sousa, publicly took responsibility for its passage. The next day, the Jornal do Commercio reported that Rodrigo da Silva, the minister of agriculture, had officially supported the fluminense request for subsidized immigration, and the paper published Paulino’s project in full. On the day that Prado’s São Paulo meeting to establish the Sociedade Libertadora e Organizadora do Trabalho took place, Belisário Augusto formally presented Paulino’s project to the fluminense provincial assembly. It seems now, from our perspective, that Paulino’s project and copious press support, with its obvious lacuna regarding any explicit abolition measure, was meant to do two things: to provide a viable measure addressing the planters’ concerns (by explaining their plight and suggesting practical ways to cope with it) and, by attacking Prado’s solution for slavery but presenting none of his own, to offer an opening for others to suggest a compromise abolitionist solution—one that would address his planters’ concerns, as the Sexagenarian Law had done. Paulino’s new project, with its clearly progressive embrace of diversification, immigration, state financial support, and a certain limited kind of land reform, indicated a willingness both to change and to address certain reforms. By withholding support for a rapid end to slavery without indemnification, however, it also maintained Paulino’s consistency with his past positions and thus his credibility among his constituency and Conservatives in general. Now, to gain Paulino’s support and that of the planters he represented, someone else would have to make a proposal addressing abolition, one promising, as ever, a gradual transition and indemnification to those who could or would not follow the paulista model. Here is where the rumor of a fiveyear transition plan, reported in November 1887 and apparently granted credence among fluminense planters by January 1888, comes into play. If indeed Paulino had put this option out indirectly, he may have done so to indicate what he would find acceptable.40

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There is good reason to believe that Paulino expected that such an acceptable alternative might come from João Alfredo. After all, João Alfredo was clearly a shrewd statesman with an abiding commitment to resolving the slavery issue and unifying Conservatives around the matter. In 1871, when Paulino had led the Conservative dissidents against the emperor, Rio Branco, and the thin Conservative majority Rio Branco had pieced together, it was João Alfredo who had captained that majority and successfully managed the rules, the votes, and the blockage of the dissidents’ attempted alternative abolitionist project (that of Perdigão Malheiro, discussed earlier). No one knew better than Paulino how capable an operator João Alfredo was. Paulino was also well aware of João Alfredo’s ambitions. He knew that it was João Alfredo who had successfully maneuvered Cotegipe into accepting abolitionist reform as the price of power in 1884 and that, having successfully brought the Conservatives back into power in this way, he had refused an offer of a cabinet portfolio from Cotegipe. He clearly wanted to preserve his independence of action. Indeed, he had then entered into conversations with Prado about further abolitionist reform, supported Dantas’s attack on the cabinet’s revocation of thirteen thousand freedmen’s emancipation, and most recently, joined Prado in effectively challenging Cotegipe’s and Paulino’s intransigence on post-1885 abolitionist reform. Paulino would also have been aware of João Alfredo’s rising position as the next prime minister among Conservatives, something explicit in Conservative circles during the military crisis in May 1887. Acceptance of João Alfredo’s ascent was only reasonable on Paulino’s part: he was certainly the most obvious choice for the monarch. The emperor himself had approached João Alfredo in 1884 on Dantas’s behalf—he obviously thought well of him as Rio Branco’s heir among the Conservative reformists— while Paulino, however respected, was doubtless persona non grata for the highest position. As explained more than once, Paulino was obviously a poor partner for reform under the emperor’s direction. True, his skills, achievements, and position had merited the monarch’s recognition; for example, the emperor had over the years appointed Paulino a minister, a councilor of state, and a senator. Still, Paulino was clearly too much of a strong-willed reactionary to be selected by the monarch for partnership as a prime minister in a reformist government. Whether Dom Pedro II returned from Europe healthy enough to resume power (a dubious proposition at the time) or Dona Isabel, his heiress, took the throne, the reformist inclinations of both were well known, and thus Paulino was unsuitable as an instrument. Furthermore, there may well have been good reason to suspect that Paulino would have refused the position if offered. He had outlined his own sense of the independence required of a cabinet minister over the years, in

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line with his constitutionalism and consequent stand against the emperor’s interventionism (experienced by his father, his uncle, and him in the cabinets of 1848–1853 and 1868–1870). Paulino understood perfectly what would be in store for any prime minister and cabinet under Dom Pedro II or his daughter, at least with regard to slavery: the prime minister would have to be willing to take direction from the monarch in resolving the question. Paulino may have preferred to deal with the crisis by working through and correcting someone much more comfortable with such a relationship. João Alfredo, by virtue of past experience and obvious ambition, was plainly such a person. In sum, if Paulino was interested in maintaining his independence and yet continuing to exert influence on Conservative policy, his actions were perfectly designed to achieve both. In the context of late 1887–early 1888, he was particularly interested in shaping an acceptable abolitionist project; something must be done both to contain the collapse of slavery and to stop the cascading mass flights devastating São Paulo and beginning to bleed Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, spreading panic. Yet there was only so much toward the resolution of the issue that Paulino or his followers were willing to accept; accordingly, he spelled out his limits. João Alfredo, accepting as he was of the monarch’s interventionism, knowing both wings of the party well, and superb at Chamber calculations, would surely be called to office should Cotegipe prove inadequate to the situation, as increasingly seemed to be the case. In order to manage the Chamber’s Conservative majority, João Alfredo would surely have to have something to offer both Paulino and Prado. Prado’s expectations were public by late 1887. By early 1888, Paulino had made it clear what he expected, as well; the only remaining issue was whether João Alfredo could agree to it.41 João Alfredo, for his part, would surely have known, as Cotegipe’s cabinet declined, that his own possible succession loomed and that both the burden and the glory of his ascent would have to be the resolution of the slavery issue. He must also have seen it coming soon. He knew Cotegipe’s stubbornness and the likely results: the princess regent’s increasing concern, the radicalization of the Abolitionist movement, and continued destabilization. He would also have known that parliamentary Abolitionists might well be open to working with him; Dantas had proposed two projects emphasizing a gradual transition, for example, as had other Liberal reformists in Parliament. And clearly, Cotegipe had no credibility among Abolitionists. Even rumors in late January 1888 of Cotegipe’s planning for a three-year transition project were simply dismissed by the Abolitionist press as a political ploy. The prime minister was known too well, and his abolitionism was entirely dubious. João Alfredo, on the other hand, had reformist credibility born of a reformist record. What, then, was he prepared to do?

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If called to power, João Alfredo knew that he would have to promote a policy that had the monarch’s backing and both unified the party and attracted Abolitionist support. In fact, there were good grounds for hope of the latter: the Cidade do Rio had begun to champion João Alfredo as early as November 1887, stating that either Dantas or João Alfredo would serve as a suitable ally to the movement in the struggle to resolve matters. By early December, possibly succumbing to a bout of political reality (given the Conservative majority in the Chamber), Patrocínio’s paper had begun to talk up João Alfredo alone. The Cidade do Rio actually celebrated the senator’s birthday and political prospects on 10 December, calling for a public demonstration in the streets. As the reformist’s political strength seemed to increase, Cotegipe’s dwindled. The prime minister’s standing, even among Conservatives in the Chamber, as we noted earlier, was no longer secure. Provincial assembly elections in both Pernambuco and even Bahia in January 1888 were reported by the Jornal do Commercio as undercutting the baron and, by extension, the Conservative party’s candidates in both provinces. Then Cotegipe’s personal political position was suddenly struck a body blow. On 12 February, at a public festival in Petrópolis, the highland resort where the court and the wealthy generally spent the hot and rainy season of waters, the princess regent made her first public statement on the crisis, emphasizing the need to move forward on abolition. On 14 February, her sons underscored the point by publishing abolitionist verse in a local paper there. In a matter of days, in the aftermath of the crown’s declaration so clearly undercutting Cotegipe, both Paulino and João Alfredo finally acted. Toward the end of February (around the same date, 25 February, that the city of São Paulo was declared free of slavery), a fluminense deputy, Alberto Bezamat (a political operator close to Paulino), reported in the Jornal do Commercio that Cotegipe was rumored to be contemplating resignation. While there is no good evidence that he was, Bezamat and two prominent colleagues, Alfredo Chaves (the former minister of war, compelled to resign by Cotegipe’s mishandling of the Military Question) and Rocha Leão (the president of the Province of Rio de Janeiro), all known to be Paulino’s allies, pressed an intermediary to ask the presumptive Conservative successor, João Alfredo, what he himself would propose regarding slavery—seemingly a transparent move to negotiate and push the Conservative succession forward. João Alfredo obviously understood the gambit and responded accordingly. He proposed an eight-year transition project—five years of slavery and three years of fixed-location wage labor by the freedmen—to a select number of Conservative chieftains apparently gathered for the occasion. Paulino was then asked what he thought of the proposal. Rather predictably (and doubtless with an air of pleased surprise, put on for the occasion), he is supposed to have stated that he “considered the project worthy of frank support.” It was

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delicate, deft diplomacy between two experienced Conservatives, preserving appearances and finessing the possibility for a calm transfer of power in an era of crowding, tumultuous, rapid change and widespread fear.42

The Struggle for Containment: 1888 The Princess Regent and Cotegipe’s Fall

However clear the shift in power seems in retrospect, it was only unexpectedly realized at the time by the actions of the princess regent. Yet she had been in power since her father’s departure for Europe in mid-1887, more than six months before, and had widely been seen to defer to Cotegipe in all matters. Why and how, then, had she suddenly come to intervene? Let us start with Isabel herself. The imperial family had been blessed with several children in the first years of the emperor’s marriage at midcentury. Two of the children were male, but they died very young; the oldest surviving child, Isabel, thus became the heir to the throne. The emperor advised her on statecraft on the few occasions when he left Brazil, and he made sure that she and her consort, the count d’Eu, were included in the Council of State. However, Barman’s magisterial analysis of both Pedro II and Isabel suggests that, in spite of these minimal exercises, the heir to the throne was poorly prepared. The emperor was psychologically incapable of facing his own death and preparing Isabel properly for the complicated burdens of state, owing to his own egocentrism and the gender biases of his society. Then, too, Isabel’s own character and inclinations did little to offset the emperor’s failings: she possessed a strong sense of duty but disliked personal conflict, and, particularly after the traumatic loss of one of her children, she sought solitude within her family and the deepening solace of her religion. Isabel’s consort, the count d’Eu, was both foreign and deaf, and was given little independent responsibility by the emperor, which added little to the prospects for his wife’s exercise of the monarch’s constitutional or customary role. As has been demonstrated repeatedly here, Dom Pedro II had not simply reigned, he had ruled, dominating high politics and policy through other statesmen, people whom he had come to know over many years through observation, interaction, and intervention. Neither the emperor’s heir nor her husband was prepared by nature or the monarch to take his place. Thus, by the early 1880s, with the emperor’s increasing maladies and wavering focus and appetite for work, many in the political elite had become increasingly concerned with the future of the monarchy. When the emperor took ill in late February 1887, the political impact on and against the Cotegipe cabinet was significant. The baron was accused of taking advantage and overstepping his role. The accusations only increased once the emperor left for Europe on 30 June 1887; the prime minister was thought by many

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to be presuming upon the princess’s inexperience and exercising his power without any real oversight. Nevertheless, it was the princess rather than the emperor who became the focus of entreaty and threats during 1887; constitutionally, as regent, she was still the head of state. Patrocínio, for example, increasingly shifted the target of his political harangues from the emperor to her. As stated earlier, when the emperor finally departed for Europe, it was generally thought that he would not return. The attacks on Cotegipe and the appeals to Isabel took place in this context; there was a sense, on the one hand, of the prime minister playing an increasingly overbearing role and, on the other, of the regent’s apparently passive acceptance.43 How did Isabel herself see matters? Months after her regency (July 1887– August 1888), she wrote a private account of it for her children, in which she discussed her initial decision to keep the besieged Cotegipe in office. She explained that he was a staunch Catholic, that he provided strong leadership in unstable times, that she had an aversion to sudden changes, and that Cotegipe had convinced her that the manner in which he had resolved the Military Question was designed to spare her ailing father (presumably, a reference to Cotegipe’s uncharacteristic decision to accept an embarrassing compromise under military threat rather than resigning). She also said that they worked well together for some time. We might be inclined to think that this last had more to do with Cotegipe’s character and hers dovetailing to some degree: the prime minister loved to have his way, and the princess regent was unwilling and unprepared for the constant and consistent oversight and intervention typical of her father in his prime.44 Beginning in September 1887, all of this underwent an increasingly radical transformation, partly due to the imperial couple’s abolitionism. The count d’Eu was a convinced abolitionist and had been so since at least the 1870s, doubtless a result of his being something of a military modernizer, a European prince of his particular generation and, like many Brazilian officers who were veterans of the Paraguayan war, someone deeply impressed by the unflattering impression the empire made as a slaveholding power when contrasted with the republics with whom Brazil had allied (and the Paraguay that Brazil had fought, for that matter). Indeed, in Rebouças’s earliest abolitionism, the two veterans had often talked about promoting emancipation as part and parcel of the increased national progress for which they both yearned. The princess imperial’s abolitionism was different but also shared another aspect of Rebouças’s commitment to the Sacred Cause, that is, a deeply religious, moral commitment to the slaves as the suffering oppressed. In Isabel’s case, the connection between her faith and her abolitionism were public knowledge. Nabuco, in Europe again by late 1887, obtained an 1888 audience with the pope and urged him to issue an encyclical favoring abolition,

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which was done. Nabuco was acting precisely in the hope that the princess imperial might be moved still further toward abolition and possibly support a reversal of crown policy in regard to both the cabinet and the cause. Just like Patrocínio and Rebouças, the Abolitionists’ leader saw Isabel as being the key to bringing about Cotegipe’s fall and an Abolitionist victory; after the emperor had failed them in May 1885, they began to hope that the princess regent might correct the course of affairs in 1888.45 In 1890, Rebouças noted in a diary entry for 14 September something else about the couple and Cotegipe, something he had learned in talking with the count d’Eu, namely, that the critical shift in Isabel’s perception of Cotegipe came, understandably enough, with her and the count d’Eu’s shock at Nabuco’s victory in September 1887 in the by-election against Cotegipe’s minister, Machado Portela: “Since that day the Princes Count d’Eu and Isabel lost their faith in the slavocratic Cotegipe.”46 In effect, it was not only their abolitionism but their political calculation in regard to Cotegipe’s strength and policy that came into play. Isabel’s notes to her children do not mention this loss of confidence in Cotegipe’s strength, but they do speak directly to a related concern: she was becoming increasingly convinced about abolition and reading widely (possibly a reference to the Abolitionist press, among other papers), and decided to confront Cotegipe about moving forward on the issue. She also emphasized that she was put off by him when she did so. Over the remainder of the months from September 1887 to February 1888, she relates that she would seek opportunities to press her prime minister, as well as his cabinet colleagues during their regular required meetings, asking them to take up the September 1887 arguments of Prado and João Alfredo and pointing to the political losses in the December provincial elections, together with the associated growth of Conservative division. Again and again, she relates, she was simply put off. The aide-mémoire strongly suggests that she felt dismissed and disrespected, and not only on abolition: her opinions on other matters were also ignored. As the months passed, she grew increasingly ashamed of her failures to influence Cotegipe or compel his resignation. She concluded that “perhaps out of an excessive desire to go along, to avoid an outburst, which is always disagreeable to me, I neglected to force the resignation of a cabinet that I felt . . . did not do well for the country and, afterward, would drag me with it into the abyss.”47 Then, unexpectedly, what must have seemed like a small glimpse of that abyss cracked open under the imperial court. An unexpected, violent explosion of disorder broke out in Rio. It was much more serious than the 1880 Revolta do Vintém in its immediate urban and political consequences and much more devastating in its impact than the August 1887 breakdown of Rio’s urban order that occurred in response to Cotegipe’s repression of the

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Abolitionists that month. Curiously enough, however, it had nothing to do directly with abolition at all. On 27 February 1888, the local police overreacted in a case of domestic disturbance in Rio. The police arrested the culprit, Antônio José Leite Lobo, a naval officer, and took him into custody, and then they beat him up at the police station. It was the sort of police violence and associated sense of entitlement and impunity of which the Abolitionists had complained under the more repressive mandate of Cotegipe’s police chief, “rapa côco” (Coelho Bastos). So Patrocínio took a keen interest when it turned out that the police had beaten up not just any naval officer but one especially well connected. The victim’s uncle, Luís de Beaurepaire Rohan, a lieutenant colonel in the army, was the brother of an army field marshal. When Luís de Beaurepaire Rohan appeared at the police station to sort things out, the police disrespected him. Word of this got out and spread among navy men in Rio and through the press; the Abolitionists, in particular, made much of the affront to military honor, so sensitive an issue at the time, and again pointed to Coelho Bastos’s record for violent abuse. Such an affront could not be borne. On the night of 29 February / 1 March, in retribution for the attack on one of their own and the disrespect shown to his uncle, navy men began attacking the police. On 2 March, the police (now including their allies among the city’s capoeiras) began carrying out serious attacks on any navy men they could find. The Clube Militar then made common cause with the Clube Naval and took action to protect and evacuate wounded navy men, who by now were being set upon in ambushes throughout the city’s streets. Soon the navy recalled all of its personnel from the city; the cabinet, in a clear demonstration of official loss of control, ordered that the police be recalled to their stations and that the army take over urban security. It was not enough. After the first three days of upheaval, it was apparent that unaffiliated capoeiras were also getting involved, committing random acts of violence that included attacks on the police as well as ordinary members of the public, particularly at night. The army attempted, at first in vain, to maintain order in various districts of the city; in the end, they were forced to remain in central parishes until 12 March. Within the first few days of violence, the Jornal do Commercio was demanding cabinet action to maintain peace and order—its basic domestic mission, after all. General public dismay as the days wore on may be imagined.48 In sum, the police had abused their power, the navy had retaliated, and then the police and their allied thugs had run amok for three days and nights. Afterwards, urban thugs in general had taken the opportunity to attack the police and civilians, barely kept in check by army patrols. Rio, the imperial capital, the imperial court, had been lost to peace and order for nearly two weeks. The cabinet, through both its close association with the police initially

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responsible and then its inability to reassert complete control for a week and a half, was the target of press frustration, contempt, and anger. Certainly, Cotegipe’s reputation for maintaining the established order, already doubtful, now lay in soiled tatters. As remarked earlier, in the intersession months of the season of waters, the imperial family and many of the Rio elite retreated away from the rains, mud, and seasonal yellow fever of Rio to the temperate clime and salubrious airs of Petrópolis, nestled in the nearby highlands and an easy journey from the port city. Thus, although the scenes of mayhem were out of sight, they were easily conveyed. Yet it was two or three days before the princess regent, reading the dailies, became frustrated and deeply concerned over just how serious the situation in Rio had become. She was also angry with the cabinet’s silence in this regard and on 3 March made that clear to Samuel Mac Dowell, the minister of justice. On 4 March, she wrote to him about what she was reading in the press concerning the cabinet’s mismanagement and political isolation, public perception of the affair, and the depths to which Cotegipe’s administration had sunk in terms of moral authority. All of this, particularly in regard to the cabinet’s treatment of her and her concerns, doubtless fit quite precisely with the opinion the princess regent had formed of the cabinet in general. Mac Dowell, in his 4 March response, mentioned that her clear lack of confidence in the cabinet’s handling of these matters made it necessary for him to share her 4 March letter with his colleagues. Constitutionally, the cabinet served at the monarch’s pleasure and only so long as it maintained the crown’s confidence, and apparently that confidence had been affected. So, while Cotegipe took care (5 March) to update the regent on the current state of affairs, her 4 March letter was brought to a cabinet meeting and discussed. Cotegipe drafted a letter of resignation accordingly, citing the manifest lack of confidence in the cabinet’s information and actions, and then met with the princess regent on 7 March. After discussing the matter with her, he judged himself compelled to hand the letter to her. She accepted it. In his private correspondence in the weeks leading up to this event, Cotegipe made it clear that he thought he had done his best for the nation but had been let down by Prado and the consequent divisions among Conservatives. United, he argued, they might have prevailed against Abolitionism. He had no regrets. Presumably, he would have continued as prime minister. Now, however, with the obvious lack of support from his monarch, he had no choice but to resign.49 Was the handling of the Rio violence the reason for the princess regent’s withdrawal of confidence? What is certain is that at the end of this meeting, rather than ask the baron to recommend an appropriate successor, as was customary, the princess regent instead commanded Cotegipe to contact

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João Alfredo so that he might meet with her to discuss the organization of a new government. In the unlikely event that Cotegipe had any doubts about the princess regent’s motives in compelling his resignation, this command selection of the reformist surely did away with them. Indeed, in his private correspondence later in the month, he made it clear that, in the end, the cabinet fell as the result of the princess regent’s differences with him over abolition. The urban revolt was the opportunity, not the cause, for her formal withdrawal of confidence in him and his direction.50

After the Liberals had failed in parliament, the fate of the “black race” had been placed in the hands of the Conservatives, who had won a great victory. Not only had they steered the Saraiva administration toward the perversion of an Abolitionist reform by passing the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, but they had actually come to power under Cotegipe, the most heavy-handed of their reactionary chieftains. They had won a dissolution of the Chamber and control over the next election; with the latter, they had utterly dominated the next Chamber. The Abolitionist movement had responded with a radicalization of strategy. Forced out of the Chamber, frustrated by the defeat of their alliance with Dantas’s reformist administration, Abolitionists in town and country faced new imperial repression and the “tranquilizing” Sexagenarian Law of 1885, a law clearly designed to stabilize the status quo by provisions and guarantees acceptable to the planters and Conservative chieftains alarmed by Abolitionist mobilization and the consequent real and perceived threats to the traditional order. The Abolitionists fought back with the weapons and on the terrain left to them. Their methods included more radical propaganda, Senate obstruction, and urban street mobilization, as well as supporting underground railroads in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, and São Paulo and organizing and supporting the mass flights that began in São Paulo and, by early 1888, had spread to Rio de Janeiro and Minas. Their strategy and tactics had worked: by mid-September 1887, the Conservatives had publicly begun to break ranks as they scrambled and divided over the best way to contain labor and political destabilization. The popular Afro-Brazilian component in all of this was both evident and remarked upon; it was critical to both the movement’s successes and the threat those successes posed. Nabuco, as we noted, emphasized this explicitly in his 1886 assessment of Abolitionist urban demonstrations. The same sort of urban demonstrations, mobilizing thousands, had taken place repeatedly against the Saraiva and Cotegipe cabinets from 1885 through 1887, the most significant being those in mid-May 1885, in June and July 1886, and particularly in August 1887. And all had taken place during

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parliamentary sessions, when they would have had the greatest political impact. Furthermore, the mobilization of Afro-Brazilians was celebrated explicitly. On 7 November 1887, for example, the Cidade do Rio reported a festival at the “Abolitionist Church,” referring to an explicitly Abolitionist celebration of St. Benedict, the black saint, at Rio’s Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and St. Benedict. During this festival, Abolitionist speeches were made and a procession of the Rosary irmandade took place, clearly acknowledging and demonstrating the strength of urban Abolitionist AfroBrazilian mobilization as such.51 Nor, as we have shown, was such Afro-Brazilian mobilization limited to the urban sector. The Abolitionist leadership supported Afro-Brazilian activism in its rural manifestations as well, explicitly calling for illegal resistance and flight on the part of plantation slaves. Since Nabuco’s 1883 enunciation of the “new phase” of the Abolitionist movement, condemning the captivity of the rural slaves—indeed, freeing all slaves immediately and without indemnification—had been and continued to be their battle cry.52 Afro-Brazilians were also involved implicitly, of course, in the activity of the caifazes, Afro-Brazilian Abolitionists who penetrated the rural sector and plantations undetected. And more obviously still, it was the enslaved Afro-Brazilians themselves who responded to the caifazes and the increasingly widespread propaganda of the urban movement, taking counsel among themselves and choosing the considerable danger of flight, singly or in groups. These captive Afro-Brazilians, who faced and suffered the violence of overseers, of slave catchers, of the police, and until late 1887, of the army, were essential. It was their actions—inspired, often organized, and always supported by Abolitionists and in the context of the Abolitionist urban popular mobilization and constant critiques and moral propaganda—that comprised the final, fatal turning point. In the end, it was the campaign to destabilize plantation slavery itself, organized and carried out by the Abolitionists following Antônio Bento, that finally broke the Conservative ranks and led to the fatal challenge to Cotegipe’s intransigence. Perhaps Patrocínio puts it best. On 16 January 1888, after a caustic analysis and dismissal of the rumors of Cotegipe’s alleged contemplation of further abolitionist reform (and another call for Cotegipe’s resignation in favor of either a Conservative abolitionist or Dantas), Patrocínio went on to credit Prado’s critical, newfound reformism, that is, phased emancipation, to the efforts of the Abolitionist chieftain, Antônio Bento, and his followers. It was their particular strategy, he argued, that had prevailed in the Province of São Paulo and compelled Prado to act. Typically, Patrocínio also argued that the Abolitionists in São Paulo (and throughout Brazil) were also unlikely to be satisfied with Prado’s solution: The movement that the immortal Antônio Bento [leads], the almost unknown, great hero of the paulista transformation, the glorious successor of

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Luis Gama: the great movement that returned to the black consciousness of his rights and carried out the resurrection of his dignity, was the origin of the economic solution of phased liberations. Antônio Prado understood well that Antônio Bento is invincible: that his soul, encarnated in the enslaved population of S. Paulo, had enough force to resolve . . . the slave problem in the province. . . . The paulista abolitionist accepted as a service to the cause the work of Mr. Antônio Prado but did not consider it the realization of his hopes. It is clear that abolitionism, whether in all Brazil or in S. Paulo, will not resign itself to complying with . . . a reform requiring a transition.53

In fact, Patrocínio’s point should be taken to apply to more than just Prado’s proposed policy. The three distinct projects of the Conservative party’s chieftains, Prado, Paulino, and João Alfredo, and the negotiated settlement between the latter two, were all due to Abolitionist triumphs. They were Conservative responses to the successful radical Abolitionist strategy, from the growing mobilization in the streets to rural slavery’s destabilization by the captives’ mass flights. Without Abolitionism, no urban demonstrations, no underground railroads, no mass flights from the plantations, no urban quilombos; without urban demonstrations or underground railroads or mass flights from the plantations or urban quilombos, no pressure for a new Conservative cabinet and a new abolitionist reform. It was in the face of this implacable Abolitionist threat to the established order that João Alfredo began to elaborate a response, as he traveled back and forth between 8 and 11 March 1888 to and from the princess regent in Petrópolis and his meetings in Rio. As he did so, preparing, calculating, and organizing his administration, he did so in the final phase of the evolving context that we have laid out, chapter after chapter, a context that the Abolitionists had transformed, in alliance with the free and captive AfroBrazilians and others whom they had inspired, joined, and mobilized. João Alfredo was well aware of this, of course. Thus, it may not surprise the reader to see in the next chapter that as he set about his difficult, complicated tasks, João Alfredo decided to do what Dantas had done: he reached out to the Abolitionists.

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João Alfredo’s Assessment The Cabinet’s Mission

The 7 March note from Cotegipe to João Alfredo was brief. It notified him of the cabinet’s resignation and the command that he prepare and report to the princess regent that evening to organize a new one. It advised him to prepare for the interview accordingly. Upon João Alfredo’s consultation with the princess regent, two critical issues were clear. First, João Alfredo’s only mandate from the monarch was to resolve the matter of slavery; second, otherwise, João Alfredo’s program (and his choice of ministers) would be for him to decide, although both the princess regent and the count d’Eu expressed opinions (not always favorable) about the ministers he then proposed. In effect, save for slavery’s resolution, it was very much a carte blanche. In a context of urban upheaval, military unrest, ongoing Abolitionist mobilization, critical financial problems, and rapidly increasing slave-labor destabilization in the empire’s most critical export region, the princess regent saw the central issue as abolitionist legislation, and she wanted it resolved. In terms of the press and private correspondence, this focus was certainly not hers alone. In January, the Jornal do Commercio spoke for many in its assessment that ongoing uncertainty in regard to slavery was the key issue that had to be addressed. Of course, the other issues were often related to abolition, and financial questions, in particular, had to be addressed by the new cabinet.1 Financial Affairs, Abolition, and Political Strategy

The reader will recall that, since the 1870s, financial affairs, rather than slavery and its abolition, had been the one constant. For reasons discussed

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from time to time in the preceding chapters, addressing the ongoing financial and economic crises had either completely eliminated slavery from cabinet programs or, better, had been seen as of preeminent or equal significance. Indeed, Cotegipe had discussed the need to resolve the abolition issue precisely in order to free his government to address financial affairs (a sequence that Saraiva had pioneered in his brief administration in 1885). When Rebouças had critiqued the Cotegipe cabinet’s efforts, he focused not only on its reactionary abolition policy but on its financial policies as well as they took shape over the months. Indeed, he referred to the cabinet as that of Cotegipe and Francisco Belisário, thereby indicating the significance of Cotegipe’s minister of finance. Francisco Belisário was a kinsman and ally of Paulino, as noted earlier; deputy and then senator, he was also the editor of the Conservative daily O Brazil, a constitutional analyst, and a noted financier. His emphasis as minister was on strong fiscal management derived from a reduction in expenses, reorganization of the ministry itself, consolidation of the debt, an attack on inflationary paper currency, tariff reform to stimulate production, the balancing of the budget, and raising and stabilizing the exchange rate. Whatever they said in public, even the Abolitionists recognized the political value of Francisco Belisário’s triumphs—which is why they targeted him (and why Cotegipe worked so hard to keep him from resigning as the cabinet’s situation deteriorated).2 João Alfredo would not escape the ongoing burden of Brazil’s economic difficulties any more than the previous administrations. It is clear in his decision to keep the portfolio of finance for himself. However associated with abolitionist reform, he himself was committed to the resolution of the financial threat, which he saw, understandably enough, as intertwined with the cabinet’s abolitionist mission. In his private papers and correspondence, the relationship between these two questions was central as he began his preparations over March and April of 1888 for the opening of parliament. He sought advice from both planters and financiers concerning the impact of abolition on economic affairs. Among his papers, one, apparently an undated note to himself, seems to synthesize how he saw that the crises might be sorted out together. The significance of the note seems clear—he saved it among an array of critical correspondence and records, and he titled it “Ideas capitaes” (Essential ideas): First. If slave labor repels free labor, with abolition decreed, large-scale immigration logically ought to follow, which will have to bring us foreign workers. Second. If the necessary cost of paper currency repels foreign investment, one ought to attempt to extinguish paper currency. Third. Banks of emission could provide a great service toward the redemption of paper currency.3

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We should remember that, first, for both the new cabinet and Abolitionists alike, financial concerns and the end of slavery were, as they had always been, inextricably linked, and that, second, these concerns and their connections turned on the issues of immigrant free labor, foreign capital, and domestic currency and credit. Along with abolition, João Alfredo would therefore emphasize, on the one hand, a financial policy designed to attract both foreign workers and foreign investment, and, on the other hand, domestic banks, designed to furnish credit while managing inflation. He did not see these matters as separate from slavery’s end, nor should we.4 Nonetheless, the primacy of abolition was taken for granted, not simply because of the princess regent’s direction or João Alfredo’s political baggage but because in the coffee region the end of slave labor was, if not yet a fait accompli, something nearly so. One issue was when and under what conditions it could be achieved in law without fatally impacting the larger socioeconomic and political order. The prime minister had to act decisively to limit wider collateral damage. He had already taken the critical step of unifying the Conservatives by reaching out to the most reactionary component of his party, led by Paulino. A second issue emerging now was whether their February 1888 phased-transition project of eight years could possibly hold up under the rapidly increasing pressure of the slaves’ and the Abolitionists’ combined successes.5 Apparently with that issue in mind, João Alfredo acted conservatively. He rapidly fashioned a cabinet designed to capture a majority of the Conservative deputies, and if the understanding with Paulino failed to hold, a majority that could withstand and isolate Paulino and his followers. In effect, apparently foreseeing the clear potential for the failure of the transition project, he returned to Rio Branco’s Chamber strategy of 1871, which successfully defeated Paulino’s faction then, by successfully capturing a Chamber majority. How was he to cobble together such a majority? One of the critical moves João Alfredo made to achieve this was a sort of armed peace with Cotegipe. The latter was clearly unhappy with both his fall and the looming possibility of a more radical Abolitionist reform. Yet, as he had shown time and again, the baron was capable of coming to terms with policies and power hostile to his point of view if he could not successfully defeat them. In this case, he agreed not to oppose João Alfredo’s administration, which implicitly suggested that the Bahian Conservatives would fall into line as well. As for Pernambuco, João Alfredo’s own province and power base, he had nothing to fear: the Conservative provincial delegation was entirely loyal to him. So, with many or most of the two most significant northeastern delegations in his pocket, João Alfredo’s cabinet choices favored ministers representing paulista and fluminense interests. He quickly secured the adherence of his recent ally in the Senate, Antônio Prado, and

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then, with Prado’s support, managed to retain Rodrigo da Silva, Cotegipe’s last minister of agriculture and a mainstay of the traditionally reactionary eastern paulista planters. That left the Rio de Janeiro delegation, naturally dominated by Paulino. Here, João Alfredo did what little he could: he pried away Rio’s Antônio Ferreira Viana, the noted constitutionalist reformer, as well as the Campos deputies Costa Pereira and Tomás Coelho. None of these could compete in influence with Paulino, but (or so one assumes) João Alfredo reasoned that the three, together, at least weakened fluminense Conservative unanimity through their presence and what influence they had. One notes, for example, that Ferreira Viana and Tomás Coelho were the first and third most popular deputies among Conservative voters in the 1886 election. Moreover, João Alfredo knew from bitter experience that Ferreira Viana was one of the most fearsome of the dissident orators of 1871; this time he wanted Ferreira Viana’s oratory on his side. He noted as well that Tomás Coelho could be successfully won over. As for Costa Pereira, he had been João Alfredo’s comrade in the embattled cabinet of 1871; he could be counted on for capable, unyielding support.6 Altogether, between the Conservatives of Bahia and Pernambuco, the cabinet could expect to carry 14 and 12 deputies, respectively, and between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro delegations, 7 and 3, for a secure base of 36 out of the 103 Conservatives in the Chamber. If there was a break with Paulino, all that Paulino could count upon were his 9 fluminenses. The remaining 58 Conservative deputies would be disputed between Paulino’s faction and the cabinet, and the cabinet had four times as many deputies as a base from which to draw those 58, combined with all of the advantages of access to patronage and power that a cabinet could distribute, as well as the increasingly obvious threat that the Abolitionists and the rural destabilization posed. Moreover, within a short time of João Alfredo’s coming to power, an unprecedented partisan decision was made. Leading Liberal chieftains in parliament made it public that they too would support João Alfredo if he proposed a rapid solution to the crisis—and the Liberals in the Chamber amounted to 22. Added to the cabinet’s 36, this was a total of 58, nearly the majority needed (63) to pass a law or secure a cabinet against a vote of no confidence. It was a cabinet prepared for both the best and the worst possibilities, a cabinet that could unify the Chamber if things went well and that could survive and triumph if Paulino decided on war.7

The Abolitionists and Abolition The Abolitionists’ Role

Until the princess regent’s decision to break with Cotegipe, the Abolitionist press had assumed the worst. While Patrocínio had called upon her

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repeatedly to abandon the cabinet over the last months of 1887 and the beginning of 1888, and while he had courted and lauded João Alfredo as the best possible Conservative alternative to the baron, his flirting with a coup in May 1887 and these later actions make clear his sense of desperate struggle against a well-entrenched, capable foe. Nabuco, too, as late as October 1887, still believed that Cotegipe would survive at least until parliament’s customary opening in May of the new year; there was no good reason to assume a sudden shift in the Abolitionists’ favor. Indeed, after the close of parliament in October 1887, Nabuco had returned to Recife to strengthen Liberal and Abolitionist forces there and then departed for Europe again in late November, where, after some relaxation, he embarked on his successful trip to the Vatican and then planned for an early 1888 tour of the United States’ South and the Caribbean, in order to study postabolition societies. Like Rebouças, who used the intersession to study various aspects of abolition, Nabuco was essentially using these months to strengthen the movement at home and abroad, as well as for comparative abolitionist study and reflection, with a view to formulating fresh Abolitionist propaganda against the Conservatives during the coming 1888 parliamentary session (ca. May–September 1888). Such pessimism about forcing Cotegipe’s resignation, after reaction’s triumph against Dantas and the ongoing disarray of the Liberals, makes sense. After all, aside from the reactionary triumph of 1885–1886, Cotegipe had seemingly weathered both the Military Question and the parliamentary challenges of the late session in 1887, just as he had survived the Senate’s obstruction and the penalty of the lash issue in 1886. All three leading Abolitionists, then, continued to think in terms of a clear, incremental political strategy, driven by the radical propaganda and mobilization that had been so markedly successful over 1886 and 1887 in parliament, public opinion, and the rural sector. With regard to cabinet policy, at least, there was a rapidly growing overall sense that Cotegipe would have to cope with how dramatically the mass flights in São Paulo, with their spreading impact in Rio de Janeiro and Minas, were driving opinion among the crown, the Conservative chieftains, and over the first third of 1888, key planters and periodicals. Abolitionists must have recognized and welcomed their successes (and the impact of their successes), but no one could have anticipated the sudden political impact of the urban riots of early March 1888. Thus, while as early as mid-January both the Jornal do Commercio and Patrocínio’s Cidade do Rio were reporting a shift in public opinion, spurred on by slavery’s apparent collapse in São Paulo (and its spreading mutation and collapse in the neighboring provinces), the political denouement remained uncertain and Cotegipe unwavering in his determination to remain in power. Even if the Abolitionist press attacked rumors of Cotegipe’s planning

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a compromise abolitionist reform as a worthless political ploy, there was clearly no way to be certain that it could not work and thus undercut both Prado and João Alfredo. Indeed, Paulino’s project, which entirely avoided mention of any movement on the abolition issue at all, was seemingly gaining strength among the elite and even in the opinion pages of the Jornal do Commercio through February. Furthermore, if the Abolitionists had word of the compromise emerging between Paulino and João Alfredo late that month, it was hardly an abolitionist reform that they could embrace: a half decade more of slavery and then three more years of paid serfdom. Again, in the end, it was the unexpected that triumphed. As it did for Cotegipe and everyone else, the accident of the sudden urban revolt of early March 1888 changed everything for the Abolitionists, by inspiring the princess regent’s sudden decision.8 Rebouças’s home in Rio had been with his father at a residence facing the delights of the Passéio Público, the eighteenth-century public park on the southern bay coast of the cidade velha, on the way to Glória parish. When he left for Europe, ill and in despair in late 1882, he may have sold or rented it; upon his return, he seems to have lived at a hotel in Santa Teresa, doubtless because it was cool enough for the whole year. Later, from 1884 on, he seems to have divided his residence between such furnished rooms in Rio’s better hotels (during the drier, cooler season of the year) and Petrópolis (during the season of waters and the legislature’s traditional intersession). While living in Petrópolis, he would descend to Rio for professional and Abolitionist purposes for a day or a few days, taking the train and bay ferry (about a two-and-a-half-hour trip), as did the many others who commuted. It was in Petrópolis, then, at the Hotel de Bragança, where he often stayed, that he heard of the riots of early March 1888. His diary mentions that he commuted to Rio on 1 March and 8 March, on both occasions for other business. He did use these occasions, however, to confer with the key Abolitionists in the cidade velha about the startling events. Since Miguel Antônio Dias and Patrocínio were among those with whom he met on one or both occasions, he would have been as well informed as anyone outside of the cabinet. There is no mention in the diary of the riots’ impact on the administration or the possibility of its fall. On 11 March, of course, the world had changed—dramatically. Indeed, Rebouças records a long conversation with Antônio Prado, a man he had not even acknowledged socially during the Cotegipe administration when Prado had been agriculture minister. Now they talked privately in Rebouças’s Petrópolis rooms. Prado and João Alfredo had traveled to the summer capital to confer with the princess regent about the formation of the new cabinet (10 March). In fact, the two had taken the room next to that of Rebouças. While the choice of hotel might have been based on its reputation, the

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choice of room suggests that the two ministers were eager to speak with the Abolitionist. While the new prime minister conferred with the princess regent, Rebouças spoke with Prado for two hours; afterward, upon the prime minister’s departure for Rio, he then had an opportunity to exchange a few words with João Alfredo. During the time with Prado, they spoke of the Abolitionist movement in São Paulo. Rebouças was specific on the topics: “the labor of Antônio Bento, the final conversion of Moreira de Barros [paulista leader of the dissident Liberals in 1885]”; and he went on to note Prado’s discussing the Abolitionist movement “with the same enthusiasm as Joaquim Nabuco. . . . Today we converse like old friends and school mates!! . . . Sacred Abolition! How many miracles you have produced!!!” He noted Prado’s saying goodbye upon leaving Petrópolis for Rio the next day.9 Although Rebouças also thanked God for Prado’s conversion to the cause and described it as a miracle, it is noteworthy that Prado and Rebouças discussed Antônio Bento’s “labor.” Certainly, the miracle of Prado’s conversion had as much or more to do with the impact of the caifazes as it did with divine intervention. In short, while João Alfredo was seeking crown approval that day for a cabinet designed as an effective political weapon in parliament, he must certainly have delegated Prado, soon to be his minister of agriculture (and thus the minister overseeing abolitionist legislation), to reach out to Rebouças and, through him, to the Abolitionist movement. João Alfredo needed the princess regent and the cabinet to propose an abolitionist reform and see it through parliament. He needed the Abolitionists to support his reform—to support it in the streets and press, among Abolitionists in parliament, and among their allies in the provinces, especially São Paulo. The Abolitionists, as Patrocínio had made clear in late 1887, were quite willing. As with their alliance with Dantas in 1884–1885, they doubtless saw a cabinet alliance as the way forward toward the legislation ending slavery of which they had dreamt since 1880. However, Rebouças clearly saw the opening to the cabinet as a two-way street, just as the Abolitionists had seen the Dantas project as a new opening, not the goal, for their labors. Now, again, Rebouças’s actions at this point indicate that he was never interested in simply supporting the new cabinet ; his response, both at this initial meeting and those that followed, indicates instead that he saw the Abolitionist movement, correctly, as the force that had driven parliamentary politics forward. He now, quite justifiably, wanted to partner with the cabinet in shaping the new world to come. The radicalization of 1885–1888 had put down deeper roots and created far more significant political potential outside of parliament than during Dantas’s administration. Rebouças may well have reckoned that the movement was a far stronger partner now and could, however discreetly, act directly to influence the actual content of the cabinet’s legislative program. Accordingly, he also would act to promote rural

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labor reforms associated with abolition, reforms designed both to allay rising fears of freedmen on the part of the elite and to ensure the growth of the rural democracy he had proposed (and that the Abolitionists had explicitly embraced in their propaganda) since 1883. When Prado departed Petrópolis on 12 March, he made it clear to Rebouças that he would become minister of agriculture on 15 April (the delay had to do with his having to sort out his affairs in São Paulo before being able to return to work and live in Rio). Although there is no record in Rebouças’s diary that Prado had actually discussed with him his plans or ideas for the cabinet’s abolitionist project, it seems likely that such a discussion would have taken place. Even if, given the rapidly changing situation in the countryside, Prado’s ideas at the time were very much in the making, Rebouças would have been at least as well informed as Prado. Paulino’s fluminense reform project was public knowledge, of course, as was Prado’s paulista labor-transition project. Even if Rebouças and Patrocínio had not yet heard of the eight-year transition project João Alfredo had agreed to with Paulino in late February, a strong preference for some sort of gradualism and access to dependable slave labor was clear in both Conservative and Liberal public discourse. Pressure for immediate abolition, while central to the Abolitionist movement’s public pronouncements since 1883, was only now being promoted in the press by some, but it had no support among Conservative spokesmen. In effect, there was no reason for Rebouças to be sanguine about the legislation this new Conservative cabinet might propose. Indeed, with the widening collapse of slavery in São Paulo since December 1887 (particularly in the western region of the province), a striking aspect of public discourse in the Jornal do Commercio opinion pages would have alarmed Rebouças. It involved an emerging, great concern with vagabundagem, the idea, often quite explicit, that the slaves, if freed from one day to the next, would leave labor altogether and form a useless, possibly dangerous rural mass of unregulated people. While some disputed this assumption, it seems to have dominated published opinion. A good deal of that same published opinion held that a transition over years, with the freedmen obliged to provide fixed wage labor on the plantations in the last few years, was critical for the slaves’ “apprenticeship” as they learned their new place in the countryside. Rebouças did not discuss his thinking at any length in his diary, but the actions he detailed there make it clear that he sought to confront such ideas and to shape João Alfredo’s policies on these matters. He did so by drawing up legislative projects addressing them and making sure that his projects were conveyed directly to Prado in São Paulo. Rebouças discussed and drafted them with his old friend and entrepreneurial ally, José Carlos Rodrigues, who had returned to Brazil from London and who enjoyed direct relations with

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Prado in São Paulo. Thus, on 30 March, Rebouças notes an early-morning meeting with Rodrigues in which Rebouças drafted two legislative projects, one for abolition and one for “Rural Services”; he copied both of them and gave Rodrigues the copies. That afternoon, the two discussed abolition, immigration, and railroads for São Paulo, and Rebouças wrote a second draft of the two projects. He noted later that Rodrigues traveled to São Paulo and was entrusted by Prado to draw up Prado’s projects for abolition and rural services. In the end, though, this effort at exerting influence seems to have failed; Prado’s final draft was far more conservative, differing from Rebouças’s approach dramatically. Rebouças was wise to act on more than one front. Aside from using Rodrigues to get to Prado, Rebouças worked around Prado and reached out to the prime minister directly. On 1 April, Rebouças attended an emancipation event in Petrópolis along with Patrocínio, João Alfredo, Costa Pereira, Rodrigo da Silva (then interim minister of agriculture), and the count d’Eu. On 2 April, Rebouças touched up his “Rural Services” project; on 3 April, he shared both that project and his abolition project with Joaquim Serra, conferring with him at O Paiz. On 6 April, he noted João Alfredo’s staying at the Hotel de Bragança again to visit with the princess regent; the next day, 7 April, Rebouças acted, more than a week before Prado was to take office, and got into an early-morning conversation with the prime minister regarding Prado’s abolitionist work, using the opportunity to submit his own two projects. He noted in his diary that he and João Alfredo then commuted to Rio together. Presumably, the two-and-a-half-hour trip allowed for further discussion. He noted continued revision on both drafts the next day for possible propaganda purposes; if necessary, it seems, he would not rely only upon private pressure on the prime minister. On 9 April, Rebouças added to the “Rural Services” project a supplement, a “Regulation for Rural Penitentiary Colonies,” and shared all of these with Nabuco on 24 April. He then gave João Alfredo a copy of the latter on 29 April, along with a note on breaking up the state-owned plantations in Piauí into lots for sale to Brazilian colonists (in line with his concept of “rural democracy”).10 Of these, what must be João Alfredo’s copies remain in the prime minister’s archive. The first can be quoted here, as it is brief. It is quoted in the original Portuguese, as it is of historical significance: Projecto de Lei de Abolição Art. 1o. Fica abolida a escravidão no Imperio do Brazil Art. 2o. Ficam revogadas todas as disposições em contrario.11

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An English translation would be: Project for an Abolition Law First Article. Slavery is abolished in the Empire of Brazil Second Article. All the provisions to the contrary are revoked.

The second project on rural labor is lengthier but can be summarized. The first chapter defined rural labor as that done by the landholder on his own land or by wage labor or sharecroppers. The second chapter regulated wage labor for those indentured or those sentenced to temporary rural labor for crime or for debt. The third promoted the creation of rural penal colonies in São Paulo, Minas, and Rio de Janeiro, to which would be committed vagabonds, the unemployed, and rural laborers sentenced to service for debt in court. It concluded with general provisions regarding enabling regulations, the source for necessary expenses, and the revocation of laws to the contrary.12 The third project, on the regulation for agricultural penal colonies, may also be summarized. The first chapter set up the colonies on sea or river islands conducive to complete isolation and run by an inspector supported by an armed contingent adequate to maintain discipline among those detained and those employed in administering the colony. The second chapter set out the organization appropriate for those detained, according to their morality and behavior in several, ranked categories, including, first, a category involving working in crews, meals in common, locked cells, wages, and deprivation of tobacco or liquor; another category involving less restricted sleeping arrangements; yet another category with more specialized work, meals and sleep in family units; and finally, the highest category, involving the right to sell the fruits of one’s labor in nearby markets. The third chapter dealt with labor compensation and detainees’ costs and debts. The fourth chapter covered penalties and compensation, penalties including return to the more restricted categories, prison with forced labor, and prison with a restricted diet. No corporal punishment was allowed. Compensation included promotion in one’s category rank and, finally, restoration to freedom once debt-free.13 There is a fourth document, probably the one referred to in the diary as a note dealing with Piauí rural colonies. In any case, it is a useful piece of evidence in regard to Rebouças’s ideas about promoting “rural democracy.” Like the project for abolition, it is brief: Colonisação Nacional A Assemblea Geral decreta Art. 1o. Fica o Governo authorisado a mandar divider em lotes para vender

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a Colonos Nacionaes e a Immigrantes as Fazendas Nacionaes e as terras desponiveis a margem das estradas de ferro, podendo empregar n’estes serviços as sobras do Fundo de Emancipação Art. 2o. Revogadas as desposições em contrario.14

An English translation would be: National Colonization Parliament decrees First Article. The Government is authorized to command that the National Plantations and the disposable lands at the sides of the railroads be divided into lots for sale to National and Immigrant Colonists, with the remaining monies of the Emancipation Fund made accessible for use in these services. Second Article. Provisions to the contrary are abolished.

It should be understood, in trying to make sense of Rebouças’s projects for rural labor and penal colonies, that he was preparing projects for a Conservative cabinet facing the same Chamber majority of Conservatives elected under Cotegipe in 1886. These were the same deputies who had supported the cabinet’s 1886 and 1887 reactionary interpretations of the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, which itself was a piece of reactionary legislation passed by the legislature in 1885 to “tranquilize” the elite so deeply concerned with the Dantas-Abolitionist administration of 1884–1885. While one could argue that these deputies and their elite constituencies were truly worried about a destabilized rural order dominated by freedmen unused to labor without the lash and the domination of an all-powerful master, there is a more cynical interpretation. Consider that the same readers and writers supporting the periodical-press propaganda decrying the alleged nature of the freedmen and their alleged threat to an ordered, productive society and economy had other sources of information that such negative arguments simply ignored. For example, the Jornal do Commercio demonstrated with recent statistics that freedmen and their descendants in the Northeast had been shouldering an increasingly large share of rural plantation labor in that region since 1850 without any marked impact on the established order or regional production. Similarly, the Rio News noted that paulista slave fugitives were quite willing to work on plantations; they simply wanted the opportunity to avoid working for their former masters and to work for a wage. To that end, they were bargaining with planters whom they did not know on their own, or in the case of some of the quilombos organized by Abolitionists, the latter were acting as their representatives. Both the established success of freedmen and their descendants in the Northeast and the months-old success of new freedmen in the southeastern region might have suggested to the less partial reader

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that the arguments against immediate abolition on the grounds of looming economic or social catastrophe might be dubious—that they might be a last-ditch attempt by reactionaries trying to hold on to dependable slave or serf labor for as long as possible by arguing, despite the facts, that freedman could not be ready for liberty from one day to the next.15 Nevertheless, knowing that this significant and powerful negative opinion was held by many of the cabinet’s presumable constituency, an opinion increasingly voiced and published as well as inherent in much of Paulino’s project and the eight-year compromise with João Alfredo, Rebouças may well have judged it prudent to respond. He thus apparently decided to supply João Alfredo with carefully restricted legislative projects, projects that would address the alleged fears but not undercut the kinds of laws (and society) that Rebouças wanted, namely, laws effecting immediate abolition without indemnification, without transition, without serfdom, and laws promoting small-lot farming by wage labor, national or foreign. The carefully circumscribed projects dealing with rural labor and penal colonies met the strident fear-mongering of the reactionaries on every legitimate point without putting any conditions on all new freedmen. They addressed only the imagined freedmen, the vagabonds and criminals, that this fear-mongering conjured up. In Rebouças’s projects, freed people who worked, avoided debt, and committed no crimes were not affected. We shall see what became of each of these four projects. Here, the larger point is that from the day after João Alfredo organized his cabinet, he cultivated a discreet relationship with Rebouças, and through him a direct alliance with the leadership of the Abolitionist movement. More important, Rebouças was quick to use this quiet relationship to attempt to undercut the great weight of reactionary opinion (or even Prado’s opinions) by aggressively promoting the Abolitionist movement’s agenda with the new cabinet’s leader. In the end, though, the key to what success Rebouças and the other Abolitionists did have would be limited by a context they influenced but could not shape beyond a certain point: a context combining the ongoing Abolitionist mobilization of the urban popular masses and the related, increasingly spontaneous destabilization among the plantation slaves and their masters. These both would necessarily focus the cabinet’s concerns on slavery alone as a way to contain both—this is the focus of the present chapter. The larger issues of postabolition society and further reform would be another matter, which will figure among the issues addressed in the chapter to follow. In order to see how the issue of slavery played out, let us look at how events and shifts in town and country were interwoven with the decisions made quietly by the powerful men in and out of the cabinet in Rio and Petrópolis. First, let us look at the decisions made outside the cabinet. On 14 March, Rio’s municipal chamber voted to liberate Rio by 29 July. On

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15 March, the Araruama family, the most powerful sugar-planting clan of the Rio de Janeiro lowlands, announced plans to emancipate its captives in exchange for their agreement to stay and work on the plantations for a fixed term. Over 17–18 March, essays published in the Jornal do Commercio emphasized the dangers of slave resistance or revolt should anything less than immediate abolition be undertaken. By 1 April, Rebouças noted that the active operation of an underground railroad spiriting off slaves from the plantations around Petrópolis was enjoying the active support of a committee presided over by the count de Ipanema. Moreover, Petrópolis itself was declared liberated—under the auspices of the princess regent herself. By 25 April, two of the most distinguished merchant-planting families of Rio, those of the viscounts de Novo Friburgo and São Clemente, freed some 1,200 captives in the Cantagalo region of Rio de Janeiro. They were followed by other slaveholders, whose captives ranged in number from 1 to 130. There were reports of mineiro families following suit, with holdings ranging from 2 to 140.16 Second, let us look at published and partisan opinion. Parallel to these signs of slavery’s collapse and Abolition’s triumph were critical signs in the upper reaches of imperial politics. By mid-March, as alluded to earlier, two of the great Liberal party chieftains (Dantas and Afonso Celso) committed themselves to supporting the cabinet provided that it promoted an abolitionist reform equal to or more radical than Dantas’s own latest endeavor (the call on 3 June 1887 for abolition by the end of 1889). On 16 and 17 March, opinion pieces in the Jornal do Commercio took a supposedly nonpartisan position: that abolition was not one party’s reform but a national aspiration. Both the cabinet and the Abolitionist movement would make this their own public position as well. On 19 March, Patrocínio made it clear that the movement had, in effect, superseded both parties and parliament; it had made and was making a revolution outside of parliament and imposed upon parliament by “the people,” led by the Abolitionist movement and by the crown’s appointed ministers.17 Third, let us look at political calculation inside the cabinet. All the while, the cabinet kept its actual position on the nature of its abolitionist legislative project vague, likely because, through March and into April, as the evidence strongly suggests, João Alfredo remained uncertain. Prado had taken ill and remained so until June 1888; he therefore remained in São Paulo and was unable to affect cabinet discussion on the matter directly. Nonetheless, he worked away at his project. He had written to João Alfredo from the very beginning that he thought that the project should abolish slavery immediately, but his final draft makes it clear that he understood this immediate abolition as conditional manumission. After ending slavery as it was, that is, he would argue for stabilizing, fixed labor by setting

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conditions on the new freedmen, conditions forcing them to stay in place for some time. While Prado worked away, João Alfredo was seeking counsel from trusted, prominent figures in finance and agriculture in regard to the issues involved. One deputy’s memoir records how the uncertainty about the cabinet project was both very real and general, noting the increasing pressure of the captives themselves “effecting mass exodus from the plantations” but also recalling that the Abolitionists still feared that the cabinet would compromise, forced to do so by the slaveholding elite. All of this doubtless helps us to understand Rebouças’s timing, drafting his projects between the end of March and early April, and submitting them to João Alfredo by 7 April. Between 8 and 19 April, Prado himself began to prepare the ground for cabinet acceptance and publication of his more conservative project by leaking components of it, thus apparently attempting to foreclose anything more liberal. By then, however, such conservatism was probably far too late.18 Over the course of April, the alliance between the Abolitionists, the Liberals, and the Conservative cabinet had become quite firm. It was signaled by the Abolitionist and Liberal support for the successful by-election of Ferreira Viana as the Conservative candidate for Rio, whose victory on 19 April was perceived as a great victory for each of the allies. By late April, private correspondence among the cognoscenti also indicated that João Alfredo’s political strategy had been successful; he likely already had the support of the majority in the Chamber, and this without having even specified the nature of his reform. In effect, by the time he received Prado’s project, João Alfredo knew that if he decided in favor of Rebouças’s project (rather than Prado’s or the more conservative eight-year project to which Paulino had agreed), he had the political strength necessary to do so.19 Still, what was Prado’s project? On 20 April, Prado’s brother-in-law submitted Prado’s final draft from São Paulo. It called for the abolition of slavery immediately, but then followed with more than a half dozen pages, largely detailing two years of fixed, compensated labor for the freedmen. The dates and the context just sketched make it clear that João Alfredo might well have made his decision earlier in April, before he even received this proposal. The prime minister’s decision was to support the Abolitionists’ project, given to him by Rebouças on 7 April.20 The reasons seem clear enough. It must have been manifest to João Alfredo (as it was to many over March and April) that slavery was collapsing, even in the Province of Rio de Janeiro, where key plantation oligarchs were no longer willing to await his decision and were ending slavery on their own lands in the hope that the freed labor would stay on. A little later, Gusmão Lobo, Abolitionist editor at the Jornal do Commercio, summarized this in a letter to José Maria da Silva Paranhos, the son and namesake of the viscount

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do Rio Branco. He argued that Prado, through his late 1887 actions, had “awakened the black and the black made abolition, by threat. . . . Slavery became frightening after the example of S. Paulo.”21 If, then, there was no practical possibility of maintaining stable slave labor, even by granting freedom with the condition of fixed-location wage labor over a transition period (which was what was failing in São Paulo), then João Alfredo might well have reasoned that it was best to abolish slavery immediately and unconditionally, as Rebouças argued. He may have concluded that any conditions imposed upon the freedmen would not have been enforceable—they had not been enforced in São Paulo, after all—and would separate him politically from his Liberal allies and the triumphant Abolitionists. They would also extend the indecision, debates, labor destabilization, and popular urban mobilization he was obviously expected to contain by the monarch, by parliament, and by nearly everyone else invested in the very great deal that remained of the established social, political, and economic order. Only immediate and unconditional abolition could begin to address the widening fears of the collapse of a rural labor force. If, as had been shown in São Paulo, freedmen and fugitives who left their plantations then sought wages and rural labor (if not always on their former plantations with their old masters), the rural labor destabilization might finally end. The freedmen might settle down to work for other planters on other plantations under different conditions. More, the end of slavery would dramatically encourage an increase in immigrant wage labor, meeting the need for an expanding rural labor supply, an issue about which planters had complained for years. Finally, by late April it was also clear that not only was immediate, unconditional abolition likely the most expedient practical measure; it was politically feasible. As noted just above, João Alfredo could face Paulino in the Chamber with a supportive majority by early May. Ironically, the rumors about Prado’s more conservative project may even have served the prime minister well in the end: they may have encouraged Paulino’s hopes of a transition project involving fixed rural labor’s stability over a few more years. Thus, the rumors might have kept the fluminense chieftain silent and waiting while the cabinet’s decisions were quietly being made without him. Those decisions, of course, came to focus upon Rebouças’s solution. Indeed, although Rebouças’s role in the final legislation was not acknowledged then (or for generations afterward), João Alfredo certainly knew about it. In fact, the prime minister seems to have decided on a sort of courtesy call, apparently paying tribute to Rebouças’s role. Thus, Rebouças noted a meeting on 29 April in Petrópolis with the prime minister, accompanied by Costa Pereira, when they “came to bring to the Princess Regent the Speech from

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the Throne and the Law of Abolition Project.”22 Although his characteristic modesty apparently forbade him to crow, a glance at the principal document, the abolition project, must nonetheless have been enormously satisfying. The changes, relative to his 7 April draft, were minimal. The project read: Art. 1o: É declarada extincta a escravidão no Brasil. Art. 2o: Ficão revogadas as disposições em contrário.23

Which may be translated: First Article: Slavery in Brazil is declared extinct. Second Article: The provisions to the contrary are revoked. Parliamentary Triumph

On 3 May, four days after Rebouças knew of the cabinet’s abolitionist proposal, it was vaguely alluded to in the Speech from the Throne. Nonetheless, doubtless given Rebouças’s inside knowledge of its particulars, the Confederação Abolicionista had decided to act. They sponsored massive public demonstrations of support at the Senate (organized by Clapp, Patrocínio, Luís de Andrade, and Miguel Antônio Dias), on the edge of the Campo de Santana. The demonstrators then paraded from the Senate through the cidade velha to the Largo do Paço, accompanying the princess regent and the count d’Eu to the City Palace. On 5 and 6 May, the Liberals in parliament formally proclaimed their support for the cabinet’s abolitionist reform project even before it was introduced, so long as it was immediate and unconditional— which suggests that Rebouças had not tipped them off and that his particular role with regard to the cabinet remained a secret among the inner circle of the Abolitionist movement’s leadership alone.24 On 7 May, in a Chamber marked by profound silence (and packed in the galleries by Abolitionists), João Alfredo provided the customary narrative and explanation of the change in administrations as circumspectly as possible, and then, in a phrase, came to the point in regard to his cabinet program: “the immediate and unconditional extinction of slavery.”25 The turmoil and cheering in the Chamber and its galleries were noted by the scribe. It was also customary for the former prime minister to explain his resignation, and earlier that same day Cotegipe had risen from his seat in the Senate to do so. However, the baron had been careful to lay the ground for a constitutional attack on the princess regent and João Alfredo, by making it clear that João Alfredo was a choice that the monarch had made alone; she had not really bothered to consult with him, as was customary, in regard to

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his successor, despite the fact that the Chamber majority’s support for Cotegipe and his policies had yet to be tested. Cotegipe’s point was something of an ambush, preparing for the parliamentary debate to come.26 Others, however, had already laid the groundwork for the cabinet’s support in the debates about to open. Nabuco had left Europe in late March and, after a brief stay in Pernambuco, had quietly arrived in Rio on 18 April and conferred with his Abolitionist colleagues in the leadership. On 24 April, as noted earlier, Rebouças shared drafts of his Abolitionist project and the one for rural service with Nabuco. The movement’s paladin thus was prepared for what was to come, knew of the quiet alliance between the cabinet and the movement, and was in his place as a deputy in the Chamber. On 7 May, the great tribune rose in the Chamber to champion the new cabinet. He responded to Cotegipe’s charge of monarchical intervention earlier that day by defending the cabinet’s origins, arguing that João Alfredo and the princess regent represented and spoke for the nation’s greatest hope.27 On 8 May, Rodrigo da Silva, minister for agriculture, formally introduced the Abolitionist project. The ironies of his position are noteworthy: Silva was not only the man who had replaced Prado in Cotegipe’s cabinet, but by past political history (and marriage—he was son-in-law to Eusébio de Queirós, the “saquaremas’ pope”), he was a steadfast ally of the most reactionary, traditional element in his party. Indeed, he had shared their dissident position against the emperor’s free womb project as early as 1870, even before Rio Branco’s administration (1871–1875). Speaking up in the debate then, he had attacked the proposed legislation as unconstitutional in origin because it sprang from the crown. Now, in unity with Prado, he had joined the princess regent’s cabinet and presented its principal project: a radical reform promoted by the throne and the cabinet that fundamentally contradicted his saquarema past.28 In regard to the new legislative proposal’s origins, at least, while the crown’s support was crucial and known, it was a reform whose origins were quite distinct from those of the free womb project. It is impossible to imagine its emergence without the Abolitionist movement, whose formative impact on political and socioeconomic realities (and the monarch, for that matter) could hardly be doubted. The movement had changed the political world of the 1870s. Whatever Rodrigo da Silva, this aristocratic homme du monde, thought of the movement or its mobilized masses, his cabinet and his project were their results. Indeed, it was entirely in keeping with this that, on 8 May, the movement’s presence was felt in unprecedented style: against Chamber rules and tradition, on that day the streets and the Chamber were one. Rebouças observed around five thousand people inside and outside the Chamber. Evaristo de Moraes, then a journalist and an

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eye-witness, recorded that the later references to prolonged acclamation and noisy popular demonstrations inside and outside the Chamber did not fully capture the sound of the masses or the explosions of enthusiasm in the streets around the Chamber’s site, promoted by the Abolitionist associations and press. The Chamber was as though besieged during the project speeches and the voting on the project. Everything that was done inside radiated outside. Applause broke out, at one and the same time, in and out of the building; they were the vibrations of one soul alone, that of a multitude in a delirium of happiness.29

Nabuco and others skillfully made the most of this milieu to press the parliamentary procedures forward in unprecedented fashion, asking for the nomination of a committee to issue the formal opinion; it included Nabuco himself and three others, who quickly agreed to accept the project. Then the committee’s spokesman requested that publication be forgone so that the proposal could be brought forward the next day for a vote. Nabuco, of course, supported this request, calling for haste in the vote on it and brushing aside any opponents to such haste as men with “hearts of bronze.” Andrade Figueira, traditional orator of the slaveholders, was incensed by the procedural lapses and general lack of decorum and found Nabuco’s comment insupportable. He quipped, “I would say to the noble deputy . . . that judges himself prepared to know of what material my heart is made, that I do not know if it is of bronze; but, if it is, I prefer that it be of bronze rather than of mud.” Nabuco answered that he “left the insult on the carpet, from which it did not merit being raised.” The motion was made and passed. The scribe noted there was prolonged applause from the galleries and the Chamber itself, where “citizens” had entered.30 On 9 May, Andrade Figueira spoke at length about his constitutional concerns concerning the origin of the reform and its impact. He was supported by Alfredo Chaves, the former minister of war and a saquarema stalwart. Afonso Celso (the younger), an abolitionist, called for closure, and after a friendly amendment regarding the law’s date for taking effect, a nominal vote was called and the proposal passed, eighty-nine to nine—eight of the nine were fluminenses and the ninth was a pernambucano baron, a planter.31 During the requisite third discussion of the bill on 10 May, one of the most notable of the Liberal dissidents against Dantas in 1884–1885, Lourenço de Albuquerque, defended his change of position; like so many, he now supported abolition in terms of the shift in realities. It was bitter support; indeed, he attacked the revocation of the penalty of the lash as critical to the ongoing rural destabilization, a significant step in Abolitionism’s triumph. Pedro Luís Soares de Sousa, yet another relative of Paulino, had inherited his kinsman’s position in the Chamber as the leader of the saquaremas there.

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He attacked the project for its radicalism, its inconsistency with both the Constitution and Conservative tradition, and its potential impact. Nonetheless, the final vote went against the fluminenses—and this in a Chamber with an overwhelming Conservative majority. The project was then sent on to the Senate, with one after another explosion of popular support at each of the two formal procedural steps. The prolonged applause and shouting were graced with showers of flowers and bouquets cast from the galleries; they covered the Chamber’s deputies and the ceremonial table of the Chamber president.32 On 11 May, in the Senate, amidst rumors from Europe of a sudden turn for the worse in the emperor’s health, Dantas requested a special committee to push the project forward immediately; the Senate voted its support, and again without publication, the project was put up for debate the very next day. All of this took place in the Senate’s chamber while it was thronged with “the people,” joined by deputies and the principal Abolitionist leaders, all of the latter by no means sure of the outcome. There was still a general sense of anxiety among the Abolitionists regarding the upper chamber’s approval. The 12th of the month, then, the next to last day for debate, was filled with tension. Yet the only truly significant speech was Cotegipe’s: it was lengthy and became famous among contemporaries not least for his historical role and perspective. In the end, though, he too went along, albeit, while bowing to the inevitable passage of the bill, he did use the occasion, as Moraes recalled, to make “a species of political testament, mixing his own personal pride and poorly disguised fear for the future of the monarchy’s institutions.” That fear was genuine; it marked his private correspondence.33 On 13 May, the Senate met again; as it was a Sunday, this had required the convocation of an “extraordinary session.” On that day, the only speech given in opposition to passing the bill was made by Paulino, and as in the 1871 debates over the Law of the Free Womb, it was a tour de force. He went over the ground covered by Andrade Figueira and by Cotegipe the day before, but like the baron’s, his comments were suffused with a sense of the inevitable. He emphasized the corruption of the monarchy’s parliamentary system, demonstrated by the cabinet’s origins and those of the project, and provided a history of recent politics to demonstrate João Alfredo’s ideological incoherence and political contradictions in regard to the idea of unconditional, immediate abolition, quoting from a speech the prime minister had made against Dantas in 1884. He ended with a prideful contrast, referring to his own consistency in performing his duties and to his claims upon public respect: “having preferred even today, as I must always prefer, political honesty, integrity, and honor to all glories, to all grandeurs.” It was a pitiless, careful, and capable oration, meant for his constituency, his peers, and posterity.34

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The two final speeches on the 13th were made by Manuel Francisco Correia (a member of Rio Branco’s cabinet) and Dantas, and as such, were doubtless intended and understood as testaments from veterans of abolition’s parliamentary history in 1871 and 1884. In all, the session, so historical in importance, lasted only about an hour and a half; the debate’s closure was immediately followed by the vote approving the project and then the nomination of the committee charged with presenting the law to the princess regent for her signature. The Senate president named two Liberals and two Conservatives, all abolitionists; the others, chosen by lots, were ten, including one of the oldest Conservatives alive, a man whose partisan credentials were as old as the party itself, Pereira da Silva. A celebrated littérateur, historian, and memoirist, in the final pages of his Memorias do meu tempo, which concluded with 1886, he had written, after celebratory notes on Cotegipe’s first year or so as prime minister, these words: Nonetheless, fearful clouds gathered behind the horizon, which seemed still clear and transparent. Like roots that remain hidden in the earth, and that suddenly flourish into poisonous plants against the expectation of farmers, so anarchic ideas weakened the breast of political society, unperceived by those tied by the greatest interest to the institutions [of the empire].35

This reactionary appraisal, so consonant now with that of Andrade Figueira, Cotegipe, and Paulino, was a quiet, bitter, prophetic cry. It was overwhelmed on the 13th of May by the tumultuous waves of popular joy and the heavy scent of the flowers that pervaded parliament that day. Indeed, after the Senate presentation committee was formed, João Alfredo noted that the princess regent would be waiting for the committee at the City Palace at 3 p.m.—again, an interesting touch. As Paulino had said at the end of his speech, it would not do to keep the lady waiting. The senators’ committee, accompanied by a multitude of parading demonstrators, left the old Campo de Santana, sacred ground for the Afro-Brazilian masses, and crossed the cidade velha to the Largo do Paço. Two short blocks north from that square, at the Alfândega (the customs house), from colonial times up to its prohibition in 1831, Africans had been disembarked in their thousands and thousands and shuffled through the port streets in manacled parade to the slave markets, later to be sold. Now, after coming down from Petrópolis, the princess regent was surrounded by demonstrating popular masses, some of whom were doubtless descendants of some of those same Africans. They crowded around Dona Isabel’s entourage, escorting her from the Arsenal da Marinha quay, north of the Alfândega, to the Largo itself. Let us hear Moraes again, who was there; he recalls the “great popular mass that accompanied her, until the Palace. . . . The building was invaded by people of all social classes. Around it, more than

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five thousand people moved, captured by an overwhelming enthusiasm, in an unsuppressed expansion of effusive sentiments.”36 Upon entering the palace, accompanied by her consort, the count d’Eu, and the ministers of agriculture and empire (Rodrigo da Silva and Costa Pereira), she headed to the throne room on the second floor. There, Dantas, head of the Senate committee appointed earlier that day, read and then gave her the manuscript of the law, to which she responded, “It would be one of the most beautiful days of my life, if I did not know that my father were ill. May God permit that he return to us, to become again, as always, useful to our fatherland.”37 After Dantas made a short speech, she then accepted a golden, bejeweled pen and signed the manuscript at 3:15. Moraes recalled that “sudden acclamations were heard in the Palace windows and in the streets. Like someone in a trance, José do Patrocínio threw himself at the feet of the Princess, attempting to kiss them. From one of the windows, Joaquim Nabuco told the multitude that slaves no longer existed in Brazil.”38 Another account states that there followed a few words by the dignitary who had passed the princess the pen; then, after Nabuco’s proclamation to the multitude, there were speeches to them, the princess regent was presented to them for applause, and the Confederação Abolicionista presented her with a bouquet. After Dantas gave another speech to the people at the palace door, the imperial entourage departed for Petrópolis at 4:00 p.m. Patrocínio’s close companion, João Marqués, was also there. As he recalled many years later: We ran to the City Palace. We wanted to see the signing. I saw D. Isabel, radiant with happiness, bow over the table and sign the decree of her immortality. . . . Between me and her, two meters did not measure the distance. I heard Patrocínio pronounce the words that were never silent in my ears afterward: “My soul arises from its knees in these Palaces.” And we, the abolitionists, we embraced, we kissed, with our eyes bright with tears and with voices hoarse from shouts of enthusiasm and happiness.39

The Abolitionist leaders (among them, Patrocínio, Nabuco, and Clapp) went on to the Abolitionist press offices and left from there at dusk to dine together at the Hotel do Globo (at the northwest corner of that same Largo do Paço). There was champagne, and then they discussed who should preside over the dinner. João Alfredo was out of the question: “By his official position he could not come to fraternize with us.” Then Dantas was suggested, and he did in fact come to join them; according to Marqués, they celebrated until midnight. Afterward, Nabuco recorded going to gala performances in their honor, where they heard “Viva the free fatherland!”40 Marqués and Patrocínio went out into the night, where the streets were thronged with

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people: from the Hotel do Globo to the streets, to a street car, to a corner bar, out to the streets again. Everywhere, Patrocínio was recognized and acclaimed by the masses. This went on and on, even when, in the early morning, he and Marqués tried to make their way, exhausted, to the district where Patrocínio lived. Finally, not far from their residences, near the Campo de São Cristóvão, Marqués turned to Patrocínio, forced him to stop, and said: What a beautiful day for you to die, Patrocínio. You will never find another as good. You will die in complete apotheosis and your death will shock Brazil and reverberate throughout the world. Perhaps you will even go to Heavan, old man, because God must be very happy with you. Your family, with the excitement that is going on, will be free of all necessities, perhaps millionaires. Your children will be adopted by the Nation. Your burial will be a triumph greater than the Roman triumphs, and your tomb will be another Holy Sepulcher. Your statues will adorn the public squares and your name will endure as a symbol. [However,] you are going to live, old man, and you will go into politics . . . and that soils, my friend. . . . He [Patrocínio] did not say a thing. . . . At his door, upon parting, he let loose one of those metallic giggles so characteristic of him and embraced me, saying: “Wicked one! My assassin!” There was something in his tone that was anxious. The day was breaking and I, laughing at myself too, shouted in the street “Viva José do Patrocínio! Viva the hero of liberty!”41

With Rebouças, things were different. On 7 and 8 May, he was in Rio, observing and planning the events for which he had worked so long. Then he returned to Petrópolis in the late afternoon of 8 May. From the 9th to the 11th, he remained there, noting the events, conferring with the count d’Eu, and beginning to arrange his notes on the movement for which he had done so much. On 12 May, he descended to Rio to plan with the others for the events of the next day but then left for Petrópolis again, to continue with his notes and archive. On 13 May, he stayed in Petrópolis. That evening, he went to the Petrópolis train station with the crowds that had gathered to receive the princess regent upon her triumphal return from Rio at 6:30: “All Petrópolis accompanied the Heroine on foot to the Palace, and, afterward, to the Igreja Matriz, where she went for Mary’s Month prayer. A sublime scene, that only God saw entirely, illuminating it with lightning and shedding tears of infinite joy.”42 On 14 May, Rebouças continued with his propaganda on reforms—he knew there was a great deal more yet to do. He took notes documenting the 13 May celebrations throughout Brazil. Finally, he descended to Rio to participate and be honored on the 15th and 16th, but even then he did so in the academic and professional milieux where he had worked and planned for so long. Perhaps he was happiest on the 15th, at 3:00 in the afternoon, at O Paíz, where he met with Nabuco, Serra, Clapp, and Patrocínio, or on the 16th, where he met with Abolitionists of various

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organizations, finally celebrating at the Cassino Fluminense with a concert by Artur Napoleão, the prized musician of Rio’s belle époque. Abolitionists, the press, fine music—these comprised Rebouças’s chosen accompaniment at the triumph of his Sacred Cause.43 If Rebouças thus kept to his discreet, personal tastes even at this moment, should we be surprised by the absence of Miguel Antônio Dias in the accounts? To each his own. After Rebouças notes Dias’s participation in the events of 3 May, Dias disappears from the available record entirely. It seems safe to assume that, unlike Rebouças, he was in the thick of the demonstrations from 7 to 13 May. But was he at the Hotel do Globo banquet thrown together on 13 May? If so, his presence went unrecorded by Marqués or the Jornal do Commercio or Nabuco, our sources. It seems reasonable to suggest, rather, that he kept to his obscure, effective ways among the Afro-Brazilian masses. One imagines that he was probably in the streets, celebrating with the people whom he had apparently done so much to organize, to rally, and to lead year after year in the teeming streets and obscurity of Afro-Brazilian Rio. It is certainly safe as well to suggest that he too was overcome with joy. Like Nabuco, after all, Dias had made an “alliance with the future.” Only Dias’s had been made earlier, by the late 1860s. Now, at last, had come the triumph: “the victory of our ideal.”44

7

Legacies and Oblivion

The two issues dominating press and parliament in April and May of 1888 were the unexpectedly rapid collapse of slavery and then its consequent, legal, unconditional extinction. The victory of the Abolitionist movement’s principal idea was no longer a distant “alliance with the future”; it was present. We have seen why this came to pass in fewer than eight years and how it occurred in the interweave between parliamentary politics, the Abolitionist movement, and the mobilization of Afro-Brazilians. In this last, concluding chapter, it will be useful to go over some aspects of 1888 in greater detail, to see how the moment connects with the years before and certain critical problems afterward. Let us begin with what was said by statesmen as they debated the crisis in their own context, and then go on to what was done and not done in abolition’s immediate aftermath. Afterward, we will address postabolition issues related to one of our key questions here, Afro-Brazilian identity and mobilization. We will end with a few comments about the actors we have come to know and what one might call the justice of posterity.

Parliamentary Discourse The Constitutional Reaction

The political history of the empire has been analyzed elsewhere in this book, with particular emphases on issues pertaining to the crown, the constitutional evolution of the monarchy, and slavery. In the discussion that really dominated parliament in early May 1888, these key issues concerning the regime and its political discourse inevitably were raised again, led by three men among the Conservatives: Andrade Figueira, Cotegipe, and Paulino; the most significant speech in response was Nabuco’s. These speeches often

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dealt with the same three issues: the proper role of the crown; the monarchy as a representative, constitutional regime; and slavery’s place in that regime and society. Let us synthesize the main positions in order to contextualize the arguments of 1888, recapitulating some points and political history that have been discussed over the course of the preceding chapters. From the beginning of the independent monarchy, there was a fundamental dispute over the relative power of the monarch and the Chamber of Deputies. It was veiled within the Constitution of 1824, which provided two principal roles for the monarch, as the moderating power and the head of executive power. Supposedly, most of the emperor’s direct attributes in the exercise of either power involved only advice, consent, and appointment. The cabinet proposed policy and executed it and the laws, the latter of which themselves were the purview of parliament. While each of the cabinet’s ministers might propose a law relevant to his portfolio, the proposal only became a legislative project if an appointed committee of the Chamber reviewed and accepted it. Only then could it even be debated, and if successfully passed there, be sent up to the Senate to undergo a similar process.1 In the 1840s, both of the two major parties then in the process of being formed began to criticize the monarch for his abuse of his constitutional role in regard to the Chamber and legislation. Indeed, over 1826–1840, the Chamber had actually strengthened its role. Through the use of obstruction, the successive elected legislatures made it clear that, although the monarch (and then, over 1831–1840, the regents) headed the executive, the cabinets could not administer the state without majority support in the Chamber. By the 1830s, this usually meant that the crown had to have appointed its ministers from the majority dominating the Chamber. When a cabinet lost majority support, it was expected that it would resign and that the crown would seek a successor capable of regaining support from the majority. The only alternative was dissolving the Chamber and holding new elections, after which the crown and cabinet would have to try their luck with the new majority.2 During the 1840s, however, this changed dramatically: the emperor began to be criticized for ruling through cabinets that did not represent the majority of voters. Once the crown appointed them, cabinets had learned to dominate the Chamber by using the considerable powers and patronage of the state to fix the elections in order to achieve a supportive majority. This became an expected, if often lamented, practice.3 Consequently, throughout the 1850s and 1860s, the ideologues of both parties called for electoral reform to put an end to this obvious farce, which undercut the representative character and independent power of the Chamber. After all, from the late 1840s on, the emperor customarily chose the prime minister, and the prime minister got his way with the Chamber by patronage and partisan discipline, or if that failed, the emperor could dissolve

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the Chamber, allowing the cabinet to fix new elections to achieve a dependable majority. Everyone knew that the emperor not only dominated the cabinet but that, through the cabinet, he dominated the legislature by means of the cabinet’s electoral intervention and patronage. If the Chamber (and the parties) were to have independence, if a true balance of powers were to be in effect, the Chamber had to reestablish its representative origin and role. Only then could the Chamber actually take charge of legislation, standing up to the executive as needed and ensuring that only legislation that had the support of the voters whom they represented was passed.4 In the political crisis of 1868, discussed in Chapter 1, this capacity of the emperor to dominate affairs was made much more dramatically clear. He compelled the resignation of the cabinet by withdrawing his confidence publicly; he appointed a Conservative cabinet to pursue the goals he set; he dissolved the Chamber of the day (with its progressista and Liberal majority, loyal to the previous Progressive League cabinet); and he allowed the usual fixed election, which returned a strong Conservative majority, as expected. Furthermore, when the cabinet of 1868–1870 balked at the emperor’s explicit demand to promote the legislative proposal for a gradualist abolition project that he himself had demanded and pushed forward, he effectively forced the cabinet’s resignation by making clear his loss of confidence. He then appointed one and then another Conservative prime minister to pursue his project. The second prime minister, the viscount do Rio Branco, was the Conservative capable enough to manage it, and he did.5 Much of what has just been summarized should be familiar, having been referred to, in pieces, when it was useful in the preceding chapters. Here, though, this summing up is intended to put the 1888 Abolitionist project and passage into the appropriate constitutional perspective. Andrade Figueira and Paulino spoke for the same constitutional principles in 1888 that they had defended in 1871, as two of the great orators of the Conservative faction that attacked the emperor’s free womb project as unconstitutional in its origin, because it came from the monarch, and problematic in practice, because it attacked private property, undermined the economy, and threatened the social order by undercutting the moral authority of the slaveholder. As so-called Conservative dissidents, their objection to the 1871 project was thus twofold: it concerned both constitutional issues and the impact on the social order. This was not a question of mere self-interest versus high-minded ideals; to them, the high-minded ideal was a constitutional monarchy that defended the established order, of which slavery was a legal component. They saw no conflict—much the reverse: the established order and the constitutional monarchy were supposed to reinforce one another. Therefore, having realized that they did not have the Chamber majority necessary to defeat the monarch’s project, they sought to wrest that majority from Rio

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Branco. They proposed an alternative abolitionist project that preserved what they could of the established constitutional and social order. This was the project Perdigão Malheiro put together. It was constitutional in origin, since it came from the Chamber, and it better protected the interests of the elite presiding over the established order, since it placed a process of abolition in the hands of the masters rather than the state. It would also, as has been argued elsewhere in this book and a previous one, have been better for the slaves, in that it began a process of freeing captives in the immediate future, rather than their children in the years to come. But no matter: the dissidents failed. In the end, the struggle was over the monarch’s role. Rio Branco was not interested in abolition so much as in passing the legislative project with which the emperor had entrusted him. The monarch had won.6 Similarly, over the 1880s, with the increasing success of the Abolitionist movement’s mobilization and the cautious, ambivalent support of the emperor, the Conservatives again had come to organize around an alternative abolitionist strategy. In the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, they had hoped to contain the Abolitionists, satisfy the emperor, delay abolition, and indemnify the slaveholders. Again the hope was to keep the legislation within constitutional parameters and protect what they could of the sociopolitical status quo. The law would come from the Chamber and keep the process of abolition under the slaveholders’ control, minimizing state intervention and maximizing the moral and legal authority (and financial interests) of the masters. These ideas were also at the heart of Prado’s, João Alfredo’s, and Paulino’s different proposals for how to move beyond the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 when the Abolitionist movement’s radicalization and ongoing Afro-Brazilian popular mobilization finally made the 1885 law untenable. Again, the Conservative alternatives to 1885 failed as well. The Abolitionist movement, and as a consequence of that movement, the captives themselves, who had been mobilized by that movement, simply made the alternative Conservative proposals irrelevant; by 1888, they were simply too little and too late. The Abolitionist movement had called for immediate abolition without indemnification as early as 1883, and after the catastrophic failure of the Dantas reformist administration of 1884–1885, the Abolitionists became unwilling to compromise anymore. By 1888, they had no reason to do so: their movement had triumphed.7 All of this explains the frustration, the fear, and the sense of betrayal conveyed in Andrade Figueira’s, Cotegipe’s, and Paulino’s speeches in 1888. They were frustrated with the faits accomplis of the movement, they feared for the practical and political consequences of such a radical shift, and they felt betrayed by the crown and its instrument, João Alfredo, who as late as the end of February, perhaps even early March, had clearly been expected

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to manage a compromise reform the Conservatives could accept involving the survival of slavery for a while and then fixed-location wage labor for a few years.8 Each Conservative orator in 1888 had particular strengths. Andrade Figueira emphasized the continuity between 1871, 1885, and 1888 inasmuch as all were impositions by the state in violation both of property rights guaranteed by law and of private initiative: a warning to citizens not to trust in the state, the law, or cabinet promises. Cotegipe, in his first speech, used his account of his resignation to make it clear that it was the princess regent who had compelled him to resign, with the intention of promoting abolition: an obvious abuse of her constitutional role made transparent by her calling upon the reformist João Alfredo, without the customary request for the resigning prime minister’s advice. In effect, the princess regent chose an instrument suitable to her own policy with no regard for the majority opinion in the Chamber, which had yet to manifest itself against Cotegipe. In his second speech, Cotegipe emphasized the collapse of both of the two parties’ cohesion and roles as the result of the question of abolition and the monarch’s actions. He argued that the present project should have been raised and passed by the Liberals, given its radicalism, and further, that abolitionism as radical as the 1888 project would have divided even the Liberals, just as it was dividing the Conservatives, causing the collapse of any degree of party discipline or ideological coherence and leading to the parties’ consequent transformation. He also pointed out (however hypocritically) that if he had imposed dramatic reforms on the 1885 law, as he had been pressed to do, it would have amounted to confusing the proper relations between the executive and the legislative powers. The implication for the present cabinet (which is what he intended, of course) was obvious: the cabinet, by imposing a radical reform on parliament, was thus reversing and conflating the executive and legislative functions. Paulino’s oration on 13 May went over much of the same ground as the other two, as we saw in Chapter 6. Yet, it is important to emphasize the constitutional motif and its relationship to the established order and the monarchy itself. Once again, as he and others had done in 1871, Paulino noted the centrality of the crown’s role in the situation: decisive in forcing Cotegipe’s resignation and imposing the Abolitionist project on the Chamber, thus further weakening the monarchy by eroding the foundational ties between the regime and the “class or classes” that had traditionally supported it. The overall effect was likely fatal: the relationship between the monarch and the elite “has come to an end, whether this was intended or not.” Paulino also supported Cotegipe’s point that the ideological distinctness, coherence, and separate functional role of each party and each constitutional power were

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critical to the monarchy, and all had been dramatically undercut. In effect, as Cotegipe had done explicitly and Andrade Figueira implicitly, Paulino made it clear that this revolutionary moment was the beginning of still further threats to the established order, to the parties, and to the monarchical regime.9 A Constitutional and Party Crisis or National Will and Progress

The cabinet, elements in the press (the Jornal do Commercio and the Abolitionist press), and Nabuco, at critical moments in the debates of early May, had all anticipated one particular prediction made by the reactionaries, namely, the collapse of party ideology and policy coherence together with the parties’ distinctive roles. Rather than accept the situation as a constitutionally dangerous moment, however, they sought to promote and celebrate these changes as positive ones, constituting an inclusive, bipartisan unity propelled by a common, inevitable popular aspiration across the empire. They argued that the cabinet was not being Conservative in promoting abolition but rather being responsive to the national will. Ironically, one of the most notable proclamations of this from within the cabinet came from Ferreira Viana, the minister of justice, whose political career and pamphleteering had hitherto identified him with the same constitutional position on the separation of powers still being championed by his former allies Andrade Figueira and Paulino. At a public march and demonstration called to celebrate his by-election victory (one owing much to Liberal and Abolitionist support), he had placed emphasis on the union of cabinet and national hopes with the expectations of the people. That same sentiment was widely asserted in the Abolitionist press and the statements of the Liberal reformists, most notably, Nabuco, whose comments in fact took constitutional matters to a new political level that will be addressed just below.10 What we must emphasize here is that, whether they viewed this as a dangerous collapse and confusion (the reactionaries’ position) or a great nationwide step forward in the direction of progress and civilized transformation (the position of the cabinet and its allies), by May 1888 the leading orators in parliamentary politics agreed that the role and discipline of the two traditional parties had reached a critical turning point as a direct result of the Abolitionist movement. The cabinet used this reality as a basis for public self-congratulation and celebration: they were realizing a nonpartisan, national aspiration. The reactionaries and others opposed to the Abolitionist denouement condemned it as a fatal constitutional collapse: the Conservatives were divided and doing the work of the Liberals, while the Liberals were supporting Conservatives (and had been divided over abolition themselves). Nabuco’s opinion, however was perhaps more interesting than either.

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In his radical 1886 critiques of the emperor and the established political order, Nabuco had taken the interventionist practices of the monarch as a fact of political life, just as he had in O abolicionismo (1883). For him, unlike the reactionary ideologues (or the traditional Liberals, for that matter), the issue was not that the monarch’s intervention lacked constitutional or parliamentary grounds; rather, it was what the monarch did when he intervened that was the issue. Nabuco’s 1886 argument had been that the monarch had failed not by intervening but by intervening in the wrong direction. He had failed by withdrawing his support from Dantas in 1885 and thereby betraying the Abolitionist movement. Now, particularly in his 7 May 1888 speech in support of the João Alfredo cabinet and its Abolitionist project, Nabuco extended this position significantly.11 In response to the charge that the cabinet and its project were being unconstitutionally imposed on the nation by the princess regent (rather than deriving originally from the majority of deputies in the Chamber), he began by arguing that the regent acted constitutionally because the monarch’s role in the Constitution of 1824 was described therein as being the nation’s representative. He also supported his position by arguing that the Chamber (which, in the Constitution, also represented the nation) would support the reform as well. He then, however, took matters considerably further, defending an enlightened authoritarian government on the basis of an exceptionalist view of Brazil’s present state of political development. He argued that the reform represented the national will in a country in which the Abolitionist movement and its many proposed reforms had transformed the political reality and political parties, such that the established constitutional and party ideologies no longer corresponded to the political reality. Given the still-backward state of the masses and the size of the nation, dictatorship was effectively inevitable. In such circumstances, the crown and the cabinet should be supported when they were identified with and acted to effect the national will, the latter made plain as it was in popular mobilization around an issue central to the enslaved members of the “black race”—the nation’s majority and matrix. In short, the nation was largely Afro-Brazilian, the nation now condemned Afro-Brazilian slavery, and the crown thus represented the nation in putting an end to that slavery by appointing a cabinet organized to carry out that policy.12 The speech is coherent with much in O abolicionismo, where Nabuco had called for a movement capable of creating and mobilizing public opinion to effect national transformation. Now the hour had come, and Nabuco called for the Chamber together with the movement and its allies to embrace it. Rather than fearing the cabinet’s potential for enacting revolutionary

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reforms, like Cotegipe and Paulino, Nabuco pointed to that potential with enthusiasm and called for embracing and enacting such reforms along with the consequent transformation of the traditional parties. Today we may well be concerned with Nabuco’s exceptionalism and his interpretation of the monarch’s role and the supersession of liberal constitutionalism. However, it is useful here to reflect upon that role and that constitutionalism as they were practiced at the time and in Nabuco’s experience. The emperor had long come to dominate the political process; each political party and its leadership had conformed to that reality (when in power, at least) and used it to their advantage when they could. The two political parties, both before and after the electoral reform of 1881, had largely undertaken the reforms that they had only to the extent that they could see a benefit to their elite constituencies. Otherwise, more democratic, representative, or liberating reform was avoided or, if enacted, often unenforced, as was certainly the case with the abolitionist legislation of 1871 and 1885. In 1871 and in 1888, the most capable defenders of the Constitution of 1824, in their opposition to abolitionist reform, had done so on behalf of an explicitly elitist understanding of state-society relations; when they deplored the impact of abolitionist reform on those relations, it was precisely on behalf of the wealthy and powerful families who dominated society and, as they thought, best represented and presided over it. In effect, the elite were defended as society itself; it was they, not the great masses, whom the parties and parliament represented. Nor should we forget that the Brazilian elite’s views of representative government and the distinction made (or assumed) between society and the masses have much in common with those of the elites in Britain and France, the two societies that the Brazilian elite (and the elites of much of the Western world) most admired. Indeed, United States readers would do well to recall the great distance between the United States Constitution and the hopes of Jacksonian democracy, on the one hand, and the realities of the “Gilded Age”—the “robber baron” era—and of that era’s United States Senate, often described then as a “millionaires’ club,” on the other. Finally, we must remind ourselves that Nabuco’s sense of Brazil in 1888 was not at all his view of its future potential. Nabuco (and Rebouças, of course) presumed there would be further social and economic reform to lay the foundations for a more egalitarian society, one more fit for a truly democratic, representative, and constitutional regime. For Nabuco and the other leading Abolitionists, slavery’s end was to be only the beginning.13

What Was Done and What Was Not Done The End of Slavery

In many ways, as the debates of May 1888 indicated, slavery had already ended by 13 May. In São Paulo, its collapse was tossed off as a given, albeit

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this was something of an exaggeration. Certainly, though, mass flight had become commonplace there and had spread to Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, and the Jornal do Commercio was reporting on wage labor performed by fugitives and freedmen. By the end of 1887, the slave population in the nation as a whole had already been reduced to about 650,000; in Rio, the focus of our study, slaves numbered about 7,000 by then. Nevertheless, it would be foolish indeed to assume there was anything like a clean break with the past of racialized enslavement.14 In the rural sector, as, for example, Stein’s and Hebe Mattos’s classic studies suggest for the Province of Rio de Janeiro, the transition that now began in May 1888 from slavery to freedom would hardly be immediate and transparent. Planters worked hard to maintain some form of fixed, dependable rural labor among the new freedmen, despite rural freedmen’s efforts to make real their legislated liberty. In Rio, however, the dawn of the new day seemed bright. The first weeks or so after 13 May were given over to celebration. The mass of 17 May in the Campo de Santana, presided over by the princess regent, the cabinet, and many of the Abolitionist leaders and organizations, and attended by thousands of the masses and middle class, was photographed. A mass for the restoration of the emperor’s health (held by an Abolitionist association, with the princess regent attending) at the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary, together with the deposit of the Abolitionist organizations’ standards there, should also be noted, as it supports one of the arguments in Chapter 1 concerning that church and its irmandade’s role in the movement as well as in the growth of a sense of solidarity among AfroBrazilians in Rio by the time of Abolitionism and the continuities between Afro-Brazilian religiosity and the forms and rhetoric of the Abolitionist movement. When Antônio Bento journeyed to Rio in August 1888, his triumphs were fêted by the Abolitionists, as was the emperor’s return to Brazil that month. Even in Rio, however, the origin and focus of the Abolitionist movement, the legal end of slavery was not the transformation of which the Abolitionists had dreamt. If the rural elite scrambled to find ways to contain the impact of abolition informally, their representatives did so formally in Rio. Abolitionism as a movement of transformational reforms was ended in 1888 in more ways than one.15 The Containment of Reform

As stated repeatedly, from at least 1883 and Abolitionism’s “new phase,” the Abolitionist leadership had understood abolition as simply the most pressing of a series of reforms critical to Brazil’s transformation along the lines of Civilization and Progress. Rebouças, in particular, had emphasized “rural democracy” in Agricultura nacional (1883), which gathered together studies

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he had undertaken since the early 1870s, and in his post-1883 propaganda in the dailies. The political hopes of Nabuco’s O abolicionismo (1883) have also been highlighted here. Moreover, just as such reformism was supported in the Abolitionist press and by the Confederação Abolicionista, it impacted the cabinet program of Dantas and, as we have seen, informed Rebouças’s private conversations with the Dantas cabinet ministers. Finally, along with the Abolitionist law project draft, there were Rebouças’s drafts to João Alfredo, explicitly dealing with postabolition rural labor, immigration, and land reform, all central to much of this.16 Nor were the reactionaries ignorant of these aspirations, made public in the dailies. In Cotegipe’s famous speech of 12 May, he warned not only of constitutional and party collapse but of the threat of coming radical reforms. Indeed, he called explicitly for passing the Abolitionist law immediately, precisely in order to contain any further reformism–which in effect is what transpired. After 13 May, the João Alfredo cabinet soon found themselves in a defensive posture, such that all they could do was try to maintain a governing majority. While Rebouças carefully registered in his diary attempt after attempt to persuade the prime minister and his colleagues to move forward on his reforms, nothing was done. Even his attempt to get João Alfredo to avail himself of Rebouças’s past propaganda against the growing Conservative pressure in the Chamber for postabolition indemnification was politely received and then ignored—like all the rest. Plainly, the cabinet thought that their public support of such Abolitionist propaganda or reformism against their key constituency, the great landholders, would be suicidal. The Chamber’s majority in 1888 was the same one elected under Cotegipe in the reactionary triumph of 1886; it would obviously be deeply opposed to any such reforms. Rebouças somehow thought that João Alfredo’s cabinet was supportive of a national democratic transformation, perhaps owing to the cabinet’s personal deference to him, as well as the passion with which he hoped to see his vision realized. Perhaps it was these hopes that also blinded him to the facts about the prime minister: that João Alfredo was a capable political operator and a Conservative who, mindful of the divided party of 1871–1875, had deferred to Cotegipe, had refused to back Dantas in 1884, had supported Cotegipe’s rise to power and the Sexagenarian Law strategy, and had only abandoned the latter (in late 1887) when it had manifestly failed in its purpose, namely, to contain Abolitionism and to “tranquilize” the slaveholders and the interests they represented. João Alfredo’s decision to adopt Rebouças’s abolition project and his consequent betrayal of Paulino clearly had more to do with political realism and calculation than a liking for more radical reform. He and the Conservative majority in May 1888 supported the law of 13 May as the best way to stabilize a potentially

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revolutionary situation. For that alone, Cotegipe and most of the Conservatives had voted to support him. Now João Alfredo’s position was plainly and necessarily focused on political survival, which depended on maintaining his party majority’s support, not least in order to continue with his plans for stability and a successful economic transition.17 Thus, while the key Abolitionist leaders, Nabuco, Rebouças, and Patrocínio, publicly and privately made clear their determined support for the cabinet (out of both loyalty and hope of further reform), they must have come to realize that, sooner or later, the administration was likely doomed, being all too familiar themselves with the precise arithmetic of imperial parliamentary politics. The Abolitionist project had enjoyed nearly unanimous support from a Chamber with an unusually strong Conservative majority and a few Liberals (many of whom were the dissidents previously hostile to Dantas). Most of them were hardly the stuff of a reformist legislature; they had supported the 13 May law only for one obvious reason: most of them wanted threatening change to stop.18 Indeed, when Cotegipe had supported the law publicly, he did so explicitly to contain, not promote, radical reforms. The Chamber’s majority did the same: they recognized the faits accomplis, as João Alfredo had done, and voted to end the political, social, and economic destabilization. That was as far as their staunch support for the cabinet went. Then they reversed themselves, not only because of anger and frustration in the face of the Abolitionist triumph and João Alfredo’s part in it but because they thought João Alfredo’s attempts to manage things afterward were insufficient. While he had pursued policies designed to support the planters’ long-standing concerns with financial stability, accessible credit, and the promotion of foreign immigrant labor, the prime minister refused to take up what became the reactionaries’ battle cry: indemnification. Perhaps the reason, then, that the cabinet survived as long as it did was the princess regent’s strong support and the lack of an obvious, amenable Conservative chieftain to replace João Alfredo, despite Cotegipe’s early attempt to persuade Prado to step forward in late June 1888.19 The Monarchy under Siege

Although the focus of this study has been the Abolitionist movement in Rio, the end of slavery and the end of the monarchy have always, traditionally and correctly, been linked. Thus, some account, however brief, of the fall of the regime would seem to be appropriate. The emperor survived both his maladies and his physicians in 1888 and returned to Brazil in late August, although he was no longer capable of ruling as he had done before. Nevertheless, over the 1888–1889 intersession the

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fragile cabinet and its fading monarch survived, now safe for a while from the increasing parliamentary hostility that had arisen during the remaining legislative session of 1888, hostility coiled around the issue of indemnification and signaled by news of the increasing recruitment of planters into the Republican party. Nabuco’s correspondence indicates that even he differed with the cabinet publicly on its financial policy. He also reported that the Liberals both inside and outside the Chamber were too weak and divided to challenge the cabinet. The focus of the cabinet’s greatest concern was Paulino and the threat that he and the other reactionaries posed to the cabinet’s one-time majority in the Chamber. As early as mid-1888, when Nabuco had written privately of the Chamber’s Liberals turning against the administration then, he predicted that, should they ally with the Chamber’s Conservatives and successfully manage to force João Alfredo out of office, Paulino would most likely be his successor.20 In the first days of May 1889, the beginning of the next session, these concerns came together. After Cotegipe’s defeat in February 1888 and his death in February 1889, Paulino’s position among the Conservatives in both chambers inevitably strengthened. Then, on 3 May, Paulino was elected president of the Senate—a tremendous blow to João Alfredo, given the unequivocal personal and political divide between the two men, as well as what such a vote meant among the rank and file of the Conservative Party. Quite simply, there was now no longer any Conservative chieftain more prestigious than Paulino.21 With the opening of the legislature that same day and a few vague words by the cabinet about a bit of land appropriation and new settlements to promote immigrant labor (a common goal of all factions by now), the threat of reform, however slight, reared its head again. Almost as if in response, came a still stronger reactionary shift in parliament. On 4 May, Rebouças wrote that the election of Paulino on the previous day to the Senate presidency had created a political crisis for the cabinet. As noted, Paulino’s new prestige could only consolidate his leadership over Conservatives; enough of them in the Chamber, joined by the Liberal minority, could topple João Alfredo. Sure enough, over the next four weeks, the Chamber’s ranks closed against João Alfredo, with an alliance firming up, comprising Paulino’s increasing Conservative supporters and the Liberal minority (hoping for the other party’s loss of power). It was clear that the cabinet had lost its majority support. Toward the end of May, rather than wait for a vote against him, João Alfredo formally asked the emperor to dissolve the Chamber. The monarch called for the Council of State to meet to advise on the question. João Alfredo, as Dantas had in 1884, apparently wanted a dissolution in order to fend off the attack and to attempt fixing the next election to create a more supportive Conservative majority. As in 1884, the Council’s majority was

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clearly against dissolution; this time, however, the emperor accepted its decision, leaving João Alfredo no choice but to resign. He did so on 1 June. In the face of Paulino’s ascent and João Alfredo’s loss of Conservative support, the emperor apparently determined to do what he had in 1885 with Dantas, that is, once again, having decided his reformist prime minister had no hope of political survival, he decided to foster a new administration without the taint of Abolitionist alliance yet willing to support some reformism. Thus, up through 5 June, the emperor attempted to encourage the formation of a Conservative reformist cabinet, to maintain the timid reformist program João Alfredo had announced, but to no avail. Having been refused by Manuel Francisco Correia, João Alfredo’s colleague from the Rio Branco cabinet, the emperor turned to Vieira da Silva (João Alfredo’s minister of the navy). Neither man had the standing in the party Paulino could muster, however seasoned and successful they had been in serving the state. Nonetheless, Vieira da Silva worked hard, with João Alfredo’s support, to organize a cabinet that could both bind the party together again as well as extend the timid reformism with which João Alfredo and his followers in the party were now associated. On 4 June, however, the ministerial candidate representing Paulino’s wing of the party, Pedro Luís Soares de Sousa (Paulino’s kinsman and lieutenant in the Chamber), made it clear that he could not participate, putting an end to any possibility of success. Without Paulino’s support, drawing upon the majority, reactionary wing of the party, no Conservative cabinet could survive a Chamber vote of confidence. On 5 June, the emperor was advised; by the end of the day, rather than ask Paulino to form a government (the logical choice, given Paulino’s triumphant political position in the Chamber and the Senate alike, not to mention what Paulino expected after making a reformist alternative impossible), the emperor turned in desperation to Saraiva, the Liberal operator, once again. The viscount de Taunay, privy to all the Conservative negotiations, concluded that the personal divisions between João Alfredo’s wing and Paulino’s were simply too great to manage a unity Conservative cabinet and blamed the failure on that rather than on the emperor. Nonetheless, one wonders. The reader may well remember the emperor’s perennial resistance to Paulino. If this had apparently been firm in the years after Paulino’s leadership of the dissidents against the abolitionist reform of 1871, it may have become even firmer after 13 May. Surely the emperor preferred not to work with a statesman who had not only opposed his project in the 1870s or that of the princess regent in 1888 but who had (however implicitly) impugned the crown’s right to intervene on both occasions and was dead set against reformism, however timid. Thus, rather than accept the strongest leader of the Conservatives, the party historically most zealously identified with the monarchy’s defense, and a chieftain who

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obviously might expect to enjoy the sitting legislature’s firm support (indeed, even if the Conservatives were divided over reform, the reactionaries were clearly the majority among them, and all Conservatives, from either faction, might well have chosen to unify in order to stay in power), he turned to the Liberals—to the Field of Agramante—a party thoroughly divided, with only a small minority in the legislature, and many times proven incapable of managing its divisions or its elections either to stay in power or to carry out meaningful reform.22 The emperor may also have made this choice, however, not only out of personal antipathy to Paulino and an inclination toward reformism but out of an appreciation of the advance of the Republicans in the aftermath of 13 May. In fact, this may have strengthened his continuing interest in gradual reformism; he may have thought that some reforms would be required to undercut the Republicans’ radical appeal. This may have been behind his support for João Alfredo’s timid reformism in early May, in the face of the reactionaries’ ascent. The Conservatives under Paulino would never have served such a platform; rather, they would have pressed for maintaining the threatened status quo and for the financially difficult measure of indemnification. At least the Liberals, however divided and without clear leadership, had a strong reformist faction and might have a better chance of success against the newly emerging Republican threat. As explained in Chapter 2, the Republicans emerged in 1870 from the far left of the Liberals. Their interest in recruiting and keeping planters in the party had led them (in contrast to the Liberal reformists) to elide abolition from their partisan proclamations then and thereafter. While individual Republicans could and did embrace Abolitionism (e.g., Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, and Quintino Bocaiuva), the party as such did not. Nonetheless, many of those Republicans associated with (or simply close observers of) the Abolitionist movement watched the success of the Abolitionists’ popular urban mobilization with admiration. In the immediate aftermath of 13 May, in private correspondence, they urged that the Republicans attempt to capitalize on Abolitionism’s impact and mobilize as the Abolitionists had done to recruit more of an urban middle-class and mass following. This proved disappointing, for good reason. Aside from the party’s traditional stance against taking an Abolitionist position, the Confederação Abolicionista (and Patrocínio most particularly) had broken with the Republicans over their 1888 decision to contest Ferreira Viana’s by-election in Rio. In fact, Quintino, a stalwart Abolitionist personally, was the opposing Republican candidate. The breach was ferocious, especially on Patrocínio’s part, for whom Abolitionism trumped all other causes. Indeed, it led to a nasty personal altercation between Patrocínio and Nabuco, who defended Quintino, his old friend and colleague at O Paiz. Then, after 13 May, the

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leading Abolitionist chiefs—Nabuco, Rebouças, and Patrocínio—continued as João Alfredo’s staunch supporters, not only because of 13 May but because they saw João Alfredo as the target of the Republicans, whose ranks were increasingly bloated with reactionary planters, and because they now saw the reformist cabinet as their best chance of continued reform. Indeed, Patrocínio, who had promoted João Alfredo as Abolitionism’s best hope since late 1887, had become a fervent supporter of the princess regent; he also explained and promoted João Alfredo’s financial policies and became the known organizer of the Guarda Negra, a picked gang of capoeiras explicitly devoted to the princess regent and the defense of the cabinet and monarchy against Republicans in the bit of street mobilization that the Republicans did manage to bring off. Rebouças and Nabuco, while their monarchism had ebbed dramatically after Dantas’s fall in 1885, had never been Republicans, despite their having supported and allied with Rio Republicans in 1886, in Patrocínio’s campaign for vereador and on O Paiz, where both Serra and Nabuco worked. Now, of course, they were also fervent supporters of the cabinet and had renewed faith in the monarchy as the vehicle for further reforms. They both believed, as did Patrocínio, that the Republicans had profited enormously from the reaction against 13 May and were now to be identified with it rather than with any significant reforms. Thus, the Republicans, rather than being able to recruit from the mobilized Abolitionist middle class and urban masses in Rio, had to face the fact that such people looked to the Abolitionist leaders for direction and that Nabuco, Rebouças, and Patrocínio were actively opposed to them. They and Rio’s mobilized urban masses were fervent supporters of Isabel, the Redemptress.23 For all these reasons, Republicans who might have seen in the Abolitionist movement a model and political base for immediate urban popular and middle-class mobilization for regime change were disappointed. However, those who might have seen in the movement and its impact a useful, indeed, special instrument for destabilization were clearly more successful. As already mentioned, the divisions in both traditional parties as well as the bad blood between their chieftains had weakened those two great pillars of the regime profoundly—something as clear in João Alfredo’s fall in 1889 as it was in the Dantas era of 1884–1885 or in the speeches in early May 1888. Moreover, as we have seen, before the triumph of 13 May, Abolitionism had added to the alienation against the monarchy in one absolutely key group, that is, the younger officers in the army. In the end, faced with their own failures to achieve rapid political success through partisan urban popular and middleclass recruitment the Republicans decided to reconsider the card they had refrained from playing in mid-1887: they decided on a coup. The reader may recall that many officers’ Abolitionism dated from the first few months of the Abolitionist movement in Rio and that slavery was also

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condemned by positivism, the philosophy that had become the intellectual framework of so many of the younger officers as they passed through the military schools in Rio. The reader may also recall that, during the origins of the Military Question and its first political impact, in 1883–1887, Patrocínio, a positivist and Republican himself at the time, had been explicit in his support for the officers involved, and in turn, the Abolitionist Republican had been publicly supported in his political campaign for vereador in 1886 by two of the young officers’ leaders, the republican militants Serzedelo Correia and Lauro Sodré. Finally, Patrocínio had participated in the Republican conspiracy for a military coup in 1887 and had regularly called for military action against the regime during the Cotegipe administration. Now, of course, for Patrocínio, matters were very different. They were not, however, very different for the officers: happy as many were with Abolitionism’s triumph, their own cause remained largely as it had been. Although, as noted in Chapter 5, two Liberal senators, Silveira Martins and Afonso Celso (the older), had intervened in 1887 to head off Cotegipe’s resignation, compelling him to back down in a confrontation with two highly prestigious generals, Pelotas and Deodoro, the fundamentals remained in place. Officers were still considered insubordinate and subject to discipline if they publicly took a political position or questioned ministerial orders or policy. They had formed the Clube Militar early on, and it continued to act as their formal venue for complaints and political organization. At one point, they had even supported Deodoro as a candidate for senator of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, and they remained critical of the civilian elite of both parties. Eventually, the new Liberal administration succeeding João Alfredo’s in 1889 (to be discussed just below) began planning to reorganize the Guarda Nacional, as a counterweight to the potential threat clear in the officers’ now institutionalized hostility. Like the Republicans, then, by 1889 the officers were running out of options within the established system, and the reorganization of the Guarda Nacional was a clear affront on any number of levels.24 As we have seen, when the Conservatives failed to join together to support João Alfredo’s timid reformism or to provide a reformist successor to him, the emperor, rather than turn to Paulino, had turned again to the Liberals, calling upon Saraiva on 5 June. The latter, however, ailing and doubtless still nursing the wounds of 1885, turned him down, but not without indicating that Afonso Celso (the older) might be amenable. When on 6 June 1889 the emperor called upon Afonso Celso, he accepted. Afonso Celso had been ennobled as the viscount de Ouro Preto in mid1888. He was a longtime leader among the Liberal chieftains of the 1880s and had been a candidate in previous successor crises during that period. Now, however, he came to this heavy responsibility in an hour of unparalleled difficulty. The emperor was obviously in marked physical decline. The

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princess regent not only showed little interest in stepping forward but was something of a liability, widely held in contempt by the leading statesmen of both parties and their constituencies for her role in Abolitionism’s triumph, her gender, her religiosity, and her alienation from politics. There were discussions of an altered succession to favor one of her sons; even more serious, particularly since 13 May there had been a great deal of speculation about the survival of the monarchy itself. This fed the increasing apprehension we have noted with regard to the growing strength of the Republicans. We have discussed the Republicans’ links to the Military Question and to the enraged planters, but there were other reasons for Republican strength. Nowhere, aside from among Rio’s ideologues, was republicanism stronger than in São Paulo, where the increasing frustrations of the paulista elite were palpable. A significant fraction of the paulista elite, in the Liberal party, had been founders of the new Republican party in the 1870s. Generally, the paulista elite were well aware that their province’s coffee provided a disproportionate share of imperial revenues, while the latter were dispensed out of Rio by an imperial state that had always favored the older plantation regions of the empire, that is, the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and the Northeast. This was due to the fact that the critical positions of power in the imperial state were life appointments (e.g., the Senate, the Council of State) or based upon population (i.e., the Chamber delegations, where São Paulo’s deputies were fifth in number, behind Minas, Bahia, Rio and Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco). Accordingly, paulistas were at a perennial disadvantage: by the 1880s they led the country in exports and in providing state revenue but had little control over state power, patronage, policy, or expenditure. Decentralization, a key component of Republican federalist doctrine, only increased the attractions of the new party over the years. It was precisely this reform that Ouro Preto formally opposed, even as he proposed other policies, particularly financial ones, hoping that these might appease the paulistas sufficiently. They did not.25 In addition to the Republicans and the military, Ouro Preto had also to face the frustrated and enraged Conservatives, who had seen not only Abolitionism triumphant but their party deprived of the cabinet and then the Chamber, the dissolution of which Ouro Preto had requested for obvious reasons. While the Liberals were overjoyed with the prospect of the new election (August 1889, which Ouro Preto fixed to assure their majority, of course), the Conservatives were beside themselves. So were the Republicans: at least the Conservatives could look forward to minority representation, but as the election went forward, despite (or more likely, because of) their increased popularity among the elite electorate, the Republicans saw their candidates systematically eliminated by cabinet intervention, owing to the significantly greater threat to the party and the regime that they now posed.26

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Ouro Preto’s aggressive policies toward other parties and the officers was not matched by any success in addressing the divisions among the Liberals, whose lack of unity remained plainly discernible. While Ouro Preto laid out a program of financial reforms upon his ascent in an endeavor to recover ground among the planting elite, he was personally and explicitly against the growing call for federalism. Yet the more advanced Liberal reformers (such as Nabuco) thought it central, and so Ouro Preto, as he had with Republicans, generally excluded such Liberal reformists from election as well. In sum, as Barman has pointed out, while Ouro Preto pursued financial policies designed to support the planters, famished for easy credit, and while he stimulated investment in general, his political policies were abrasively provocative. He effectively threw most spokesmen for an opposing point of view out of the parliamentary system.27 At the same time, Ouro Preto continued the civilian provocation of the officer corps. Soon after his accession, he decided to demote Deodoro from the provincial post he currently held to another in the same province, and then appointed as his superior another military officer, an officer disliked by Deodoro and junior to him in military rank. It must have been (or certainly, seemed) a deliberate brace of insults. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that Deodoro abruptly left the province altogether and returned in September 1889 to Rio. In effect, Ouro Preto had not only marginalized all civilian political opposition in the coming legislature, he had simultaneously enraged the leader of the army’s officer corps, a man whose personal sense of honor and susceptibility to affront he should have understood from the 1887 incidents. What followed, then, had a clear logic. In the months after 13 May, the civilian Republicans had drifted toward the possibility of a coup; the Rio Republicans reached out again to the radical positivist militants among the officer corps. Upon Deodoro’s return to Rio, these younger officers and their Republican allies cultivated him. At a crucial meeting in which Deodoro and prominent Republicans participated, it was agreed among them that the army would overthrow the cabinet, with the Republicans’ political support. There is no consensus in the records that Deodoro consented to anything more; on the contrary, his apparent intent was only to compel the cabinet’s resignation. On 15 November 1889, then, Deodoro led a few units to the Ministry of War, across the street from the Campo de Santana, where the cabinet, barely forewarned, had sought refuge. There, however, after a brief delay, the commander charged with defending them, Floriano de Peixoto, threw in with Deodoro. Deodoro took the cabinet prisoner, responded to Ouro Preto’s indignant claims of betrayal with a harangue about Paraguay and military sacrifice, and then advised them of their removal from office and sent them home.

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Any attempts to prepare a countercoup were quickly undermined by the emperor’s actions. Advised by Ouro Preto of the events, the monarch descended from Petrópolis to Rio to sort things out and arrange for another cabinet. He went to the City Palace at the Largo do Paço, and called for Ouro Preto, as was the custom after a prime minister’s resignation, to ask for his advice on a successor. Ouro Preto suggested Silveira Martins, and the emperor called for him. Unhappily for the monarchy and unknown to Ouro Preto, Deodoro and Silveira Martins had developed an enmity in the past. Deodoro soon heard of the emperor’s summons. He was already being pressed hard and repeatedly by the Republicans, who by now had paraded through the cidade velha, proclaiming a new regime. Given the news about Silveira Martins, Deodoro decided to support the establishment of the republic. In the meantime, unaware of Deodoro’s new adherence, the emperor had called for the Council of State, to ask their opinion about the succession; they advised him of the personal issue with Deodoro, and the emperor promptly decided against Silveira Martins in favor of Saraiva. But it was too late: news of the emperor’s reversal reached the general only after he had made up his mind; his commitment to the new regime was final. This news was followed by the imprisonment of the emperor, imperial princess, and her consort in the City Palace, where they had been involved in the ill-fated discussion about succession. On 16 November, they were all advised that they were to be exiled to Europe immediately. On 17 November, they departed with all of the imperial family and a small coterie; they never saw their country again.28 One of the Ouro Preto cabinet ministers, the baron do Ladário, late to the cabinet meeting on 15 November at the Ministry of War, had been shot in the street on his way there when, upon seeing what was going on, he shouted his resistance to the coup. For the most part, though, except for the very highest echelons of the imperial state and the army and bystanders on the streets of the cidade velha, the Rio population were ignorant of what was happening until the imperial family were arrested in the palace and word was spread in the press. Any hope of an armed response (which the count d’Eu and Rebouças had each independently thought to organize upon hearing of Deodoro’s coup against the cabinet) was effectively dashed by the emperor’s descent to Rio. By placing himself, in effect, in the army’s hands, the emperor had made any initial armed response impossible. Once formally arrested, moreover, he made no effort to support violent resistance. Perhaps, as was the case with so many of those who remembered the First Reign and the Regency or knew their history, the monarch would not countenance domestic political violence and its associated possibilities for social upheaval and national division. The establishment of (or return to) a stabilized, unified nation-state had been the basic mission of the monarchy

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in the early nineteenth century and was part of the basic intellectual and political heritage of the regime’s statesmen. In 1889, such a stabilized, unified nation-state must have seemed to be slipping away. On the one hand, the monarch and his successor seemed unable or unwilling to rule. The traditional elite were alienated and frightened, and their two parties internally divided, weakened, and embittered. On the other hand, the Republicans had successfully allied with the military. However lacking in popular or general elite support, they had managed a quick, sharp blow to the vitiated imperial regime that the latter no longer had the leadership or the determined, unified support to withstand. With a republic proclaimed, the legitimate leadership exiled, and a provisional government established (with Deodoro as its president), adherence became the order of the day; Paulino, for example, would take this position publicly. Between a new regime, established and defended by the army, and uncertainty, instability, and the clear potential for a descent into violence and prolonged chaos, the choice must have seemed obvious to those presiding over what was left of the traditional order.29

What Was Passed On and What Passed Afro-Brazilian Identity, Mobilization, and the Movement’s Achievement

A central purpose of this study has been to demonstrate the role of AfroBrazilian mobilization in the Abolitionist movement and in Rio, as well as within the parliamentary struggle leading to the Abolitionist law of 1888. In Chapter 1, we laid out the reality and context of Rio’s slavery and the slaves’ descendants and discussed the processes leading to the potential for political mobilization along the lines of Afro-Brazilian identity. We analyzed the emergence of this potential in the intermingling of nações and slaves and their free descendants. We analyzed its potential in the Irmandade da Nossa Senhora do Rosário. We traced its religious basis in the evolution of Umbanda. We contrasted it with organization along congo lines and put it in the elite, constitutional perspective of the time, with its emphasis on the denial of ethnicity or racial discrimination in the law. In the course of analyzing the history of the Abolitionist movement, chapter by chapter, we saw clear evidence of the role of that identity and of the solidarity associated with it. In regard to the movement’s leadership, we saw, for example, Patrocínio’s explicit embrace of such a notion. Patrocínio himself publicly identified as negro and as the representative of the slaves, although he was neither a negro nor a slave. His statements are, thus, a demonstration of racial identity and solidarity—he identified with the cause of the slaves on the basis of a common African descent. He broke with the racist etiquette of his time and his class and proclaimed his descent, identified with it, and defended his solidarity on

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the basis of that descent and the suffering of the captive people who shared it. More important, this identity and solidarity were apparently accepted by the people who followed Patrocínio and the other Abolitionist leaders who emphasized that identity and that solidarity. In Patrocínio’s 1881 speech (reprinted twice for the broadest possible readership) at the very beginning of the movement, he embraced, on the movement’s behalf, the African descent of many, probably most, within that movement. He seized upon the attempt to attack the movement as largely Afro-Brazilian in its membership and turned it into a proclamation of racial identity and solidarity on behalf of himself and the Abolitionists in his audience and readership, for which they applauded him. He was not alone: indeed, we saw a similar sentiment in the private correspondence of the mulato Abolitionist activist Miguel Antônio Dias, a lesser bureaucrat who explicitly identified himself with the movement as someone who considered slaves his brothers and had been committed to their cause since his youth. In Rebouças’s concern over the relatively few mulatos in Abolitionism’s leadership early on, we also see a commitment, albeit implicit, to the cause on the basis of racial solidarity; he is frustrated by the lack of such commitment on the part of other middle-class Afro-Brazilians like himself. We also see it in Rebouças’s open support for Patrocínio’s propaganda of racial solidarity, which he himself copied down to publish as movement propaganda in the press and in a pamphlet.30 This propaganda was something of a revolution in public discourse, which in nineteenth-century Rio associated African origins or descent with barbarism and slavery. They were shameful, and publicly shunned; people knew of one another’s racial origins by physical appearance but, unless insult, contempt, or class condescension was intended, they did not identify others as being of African origin—the etiquette was to treat one’s free equals as whites and to describe public gatherings in terms of participants’ social status; at most, race was implicit. For this reason, it is generally difficult to find direct public evidence for the racial identity of an individual, an audience, a crowd, a parade, or a demonstration. Indeed, generally, Rebouças or other witnesses, reporting on who came to an Abolitionist event, do not specify race, whether or not many or most on such a occasions were Afro-Brazilian. Social delicacy dictated silence, based on a racialized socialization that would have condemned the occasion and the group if either were publicly characterized as Afro-Brazilian. We are most often left, then, with a vivid contradiction that contemporary Brazilians mostly assumed and draped in silence but that we must unwrap and analyze. Thus, the 1881 occasion when Patrocínio intentionally disclosed the reality and Rebouças made sure to publicize it is an exception that belies the rule. In the dailies’ reports early on, when the events were held in theaters and the cultural entertainment was associated with Eurocentric refinement, the

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propaganda reporting them employed adjectives that emphasized status respectability: “ladies” and “gentlemen” and “elegance” are characteristic, and race went unmentioned. If the adjectives were accurate representations of the participants, the movement at this time was at least largely middle class, as the historiography generally has reported, and the descriptions were meant to indicate the respectability of the movement. Yet Patrocínio’s exceptional 1881 proclamation of one audience’s racial identity and its solidarity with slaves on that basis—a proclamation made to repeated applause and widely circulated by the Abolitionists themselves—also shows conclusively that many or most early Abolitionists were not only respectable in terms of status but that they were Afro-Brazilians, there at least partly because they were Afro-Brazilians. Indeed, on this occasion, the emphasis on and propagation of this racial identity and solidarity must have been intended by Patrocínio and Rebouças to encourage such racial identity and solidarity among readers—why else would it be emphasized and circulated as widely as possible?31 Rapidly, and certainly by the time of the mass demonstration of December 1882, others along with the respectable middle class became involved. The popular mobilization undertaken by Patrocínio, Rebouças, Miguel Antônio Dias, and Vicente de Sousa and others in print publication (which could be read aloud to the illiterate and the poor), street organization, irmandade mobilization, and labor organization were all intended precisely to make that possible, to attract and involve the free and enslaved working poor. Again, adjectives pertaining to race were not employed in press coverage by others (or by the Abolitionist press itself in most cases), but given the likely position of Afro-Brazilians among the working poor and the increasingly likely cultural and religious identification, residential and workplace associations, and growing potential for racial identity and solidarity discussed in Chapter 1, it makes sense to assume that many or most of the popular mass following of the Abolitionist movement were Afro-Brazilian. Indeed, given the traditional conflation of race and status in the terms observers used, such as “povo,” “populaça,” “turba-multa,” and so on, for those in the Abolitionist crowds, marches, and demonstrations, their Afro-Brazilian identity can be assumed. Although such race-blind terms, technically speaking, might indicate the increasing number of impoverished Portuguese working-class immigrants, it does not make sense to suppose that they do so. Much to the contrary. To assume that the Abolitionist crowds were white or largely white is dubious at best and (unhappily) nonsensical at worst. Why would a Portuguese working-class immigrant identify with and fight on behalf of people over whom he was provided by his European appearance with a striking sense of superiority and a decided advantage in both a very competitive labor market and the narrowing opportunities for social mobility?

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Finally, any doubts about the racial identity of the mobilized Abolitionist urban street crowds should be laid to rest by what Nabuco wrote about them in 1886, when he explained the political reaction against the Abolitionist movement in part by emphasizing and detailing the Afro-Brazilian identity of the crowds mobilized in the street. In his writing, he takes apart the components generally conflated within adjectives pertaining to socioeconomic status. He begins with “canaille” but ends with an explicit identification of that canaille with Afro-Brazilians of the laboring poor—whom he champions as the origin and basis of the Brazilian nation.32 If, then, one can assume that most of the followers mobilized by the Abolitionist movement’s leadership (two of the three key members of which were self-identifying Afro-Brazilians themselves) were Afro-Brazilians of the urban masses and members of the urban middle class, the remaining issue is impact. The intent of the three key leaders, Nabuco, Rebouças, and Patrocínio, was legislative reform. It is true that Patrocínio self-identified as a revolutionary; we have also seen him calling for a republic and for a coup, and in 1887 conspiring to bring about both. He had his contradictions, however, and they often depended on circumstances. His radical, republican, and violent propaganda was generally at the service of a cause focused upon prince and parliament to carry out reform within the system. Moreover, and most significant, as part and proof of this Patrocínio accepted the direction and leadership of Nabuco and Rebouças both publicly and privately, whatever his unsettling tactical differences with them now and again. He supported their purpose, even after the frustrating defeat associated with Dantas’s fall in 1885, agreeing with the enduring strategy of the movement as one designed to compel reform and transformation within and through the monarchy. We will recall, for example, Patrocínio’s embrace of João Alfredo as early as November 1887, as a solution to a problem to be resolved by princess and parliament. The leadership’s goals were radical and in many ways revolutionary, but (Patrocínio’s ephemeral 1887 conspiracy apart) they were not seeking the violent overthrow of the monarchy. The best indication of all of this is what they did and what they said about it, and nowhere is this clearer than in Nabuco’s discussion in O abolicionismo (1883). As we have argued, the point was to use the political potential glimpsed in the Vintém Revolt of 1880, the potential of urban mass mobilization, to transform imperial politics and the empire by creating an urban movement that would transform public opinion, and then, by means of the latter, to transform the nation by compelling parliamentary, legislative change. At least in terms of ending slavery, they were successful. Indeed, without the success of the leadership in mobilizing members of the Afro-Brazilian masses and middle class to identify with the captives on the basis of their race and their suffering and to demonstrate that solidarity by

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coming out into the streets, again and again, in larger and larger numbers, that success is impossible to imagine. This too has been demonstrated here. The key shifts in imperial politics regarding slavery (after 1871) are due to the Abolitionist movement. If the movement had been restricted to parliament alone, as it was at its beginnings in 1879–1880, it would successfully have been marginalized, as in fact the cabinets had managed to do by 1881. It was Nabuco’s and Rebouças’s and Patrocínio’s decision to organize Abolitionism outside of the Chamber by 1880, in associations and in the press, that kept the idea and the movement alive in 1880–1881—none of it dependent upon parliament. It was this extraparliamentary component of the movement that pushed the cause forward, by using propaganda, fashioning and adapting tactics, and steadily increasing recruitment for meetings and demonstrations. It was success in all of this by late 1882 and early 1883 that compelled the emperor to attempt further reform (at best) and containment (at worst), by making abolitionist reform the price of power for the leadership of the two traditional parties between 1883 and 1885. Finally, it was the radicalization of the movement in its extraparliamentary components from 1885 on that successfully obstructed, divided, and finally toppled the reactionaries in both parties, reactionaries who had sought to contain and destroy the movement and prolong slavery for years with the Sexagenarian Law of 1885. It is simply not possible to imagine this outcome without taking into account the Abolitionist popular mobilization Nabuco described in 1886. A movement most of whose members were Afro-Brazilian, sustained over years around a moral, sacralized cause and evident in the streets in the thousands again and again, was unprecedented in Brazilian history. Indeed, that it was unprecedented contributed significantly to the fear they inspired and the change they compelled. We can quote from Nabuco in 1886, or from journalists Tobias Monteiro or Evaristo Moraes, recalling years later the scenes that they witnessed, or from the press coverage of the street mobilization around and in parliament at the time, which perhaps gets at this best. The Afro-Brazilians mobilized by their leadership (and working with them directly on the scene in 1888) would not be put off; they had to be dealt with—and they were. In 1889, an eyewitness and Conservative abolitionist senator, the viscount do Cruzeiro, emphasized this in a conversation with Rebouças. After discussing their own early abolitionist efforts in 1870 and 1871 (which had come to so little), he acknowledged that “it was the Confederação Abolicionista that made the Law of 13 May, besieging the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate with its eight standards, with its bands, and massive, disorderly crowds.”33 We must, of course, acknowledge critical, compelling factors in the movement’s success that did not take place in Rio. No one could doubt the

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significant impact on the national movement of the Ceará movement over 1881–1884, or the impact of the successive provincial Abolitionist successes in Amazonas and in Rio Grande do Sul, in Pernambuco and in Bahia. However, Ceará’s movement (and the provincial movements elsewhere) took their initial inspiration from the pioneering work of the Abolitionists in the imperial capital after 1880; moreover, it was in Rio that all were linked and organized into the Confederação Abolicionista (1883), itself conceived by the Rio movement’s leadership. Furthermore, the provincial Abolitionists’ impact was significant precisely because of the inspiration and support they provided to the national movement, initiated, organized, and headed up in Rio, in its struggle for ending slavery in all of Brazil. In regard to the end of Brazilian slavery, what would the provincial movements’ importance have been, otherwise? It was the Rio movement that gave their efforts meaning because it was in Rio that the imperial state resided and responded; it was in Rio that provincial political change nurtured national political change; and it was in Rio that such change was consolidated by legislation. This is particularly important in discussing the Abolitionist triumphs in São Paulo. The movement there took its initial organizational direction and support from the Rio movement early on. While Luís Gama was honored and embraced by paulista and Rio Abolitionists alike, his tactics were not those that were critical to the national abolition of slavery; he used individual legal cases to free individuals. The movement in Rio encouraged and helped the paulista movement to organize along Rio lines and toward the Rio movement’s goals. Thus, by 1883, the paulista movement had become part of a national movement that worked for all slaves’ freedom at once. Furthermore, the paulistas’ crucial role in bringing about the actual collapse of slavery through their organization of mass flights from the plantations and their setting up the safe havens provided for such fugitives, was led and organized in the city of São Paulo by Gama’s successor among the Abolitionists there, Antônio Bento (ally of the Rio Abolitionists), through the Afro-Brazilian agents he recruited and led, the caifazes. While spontaneous flights of slaves in São Paulo are recorded from earlier on in the 1880s, and while these may well have continued to occur without direct Abolitionist intervention, it makes no sense to argue that their rapidly increasing numbers and their consequent critical impact over 1887–1888 in Rio would have occurred as they did without the Abolitionists’ organized actions in the rural sector, the Abolitionist quilombos (particularly in Santos), and the propaganda and politics of the national Abolitionist movement in Rio, all of which created their enabling context. The arguments in support of this come easily to hand. As has been argued and documented in Chapters 5 and 6, contemporaries had no doubt; they remark in parliament, in the press, and in private correspondence on

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any number of links between the breakdown of slavery in São Paulo (and elsewhere, for that matter) and Abolitionism. They point in particular to the agency of the caifazes, the revocation of the penalty of the lash, the refusal of the army to contain the flights, and the paulistas’ decision, under these circumstances, to give in—to negotiate with their captives—all of which broke down the unchallenged repression, moral authority, and lack of support that had clearly kept the captives in place before. The mass flights, in short, originated as part of the Abolitionist movement and through their impact expedited the movement’s goals, decisively. As with Ceará’s movement, therefore, the origins and wider significance of the paulista collapse lie with the movement in Rio and the imperial politics there. It is worth remembering that the Prados had no doubt of the connection: as they decided to break with Cotegipe’s strategy and moved dramatically toward a policy of rapid transition, they reached out privately to Nabuco and Rebouças to convey their intentions. Why did they do so? Clearly, they assumed that Antônio Bento was the key to the mass flights and was someone who could be influenced by the Rio leaders. While no direct evidence has been found to date demonstrating that they did influence him, we do know that Rebouças, Nabuco, and Patrocínio encouraged and supported the rural slave flights and urban quilombos throughout the empire, of which the paulista mass flights and Santos’s vast quilombo were the best and most important examples.34 What the Movement Did Not Achieve

A related issue is what did not happen. The more obvious failure is further, fundamental reform. The reader may wonder why, having accomplished so much, the movement did not successfully undertake the larger transformation of Brazil that they envisioned and wrote of. Another obvious failure, particularly from our more modern perspective, has to do with racism. That is, if Afro-Brazilian identity and solidarity were so significant in ending slavery in 1888, why were they not a force for confronting racial oppression afterward? Although the obligation of the historian has more to do with recovering what did happen and attempting to explain why it did so rather than with making counterfactual arguments about what did not happen, the two are related. Something might be hazarded, at least, about postabolition reforms and about Afro-Brazilian identity. To a great extent, in fact, the issue of further reform has already been addressed. As noted in Chapter 6 and in this chapter, Rebouças, for one, had promoted other reforms related to abolition, both before and after 13 May. As we have seen, the reformist hopes of Rebouças and Nabuco, the movement’s key ideologues, were public knowledge, purposely disseminated in the movement’s propaganda. Rebouças’s diary makes it clear that he continued

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to lobby the cabinet on these matters, and Nabuco, in his correspondence, makes it clear that he supported João Alfredo’s administration (a Conservative one, after all) and the monarchy, not only out of loyalty for the abolition of slavery but as a bulwark against the swelling reactionary tide against further reform and as a potential instrument for beginning the reshaping of Brazilian society toward progress. Patrocínio’s support for the regime has also been made clear: he went into the streets with capoeiras of the Guarda Negra to defend the reformist monarchy against the reactionary Republicans. Moreover, the project announced by the 1889 Speech from the Throne for João Alfredo’s second legislative session, however vague and timid in regard to reform, still made it plain that the cabinet, however cautiously, was committed to some forward movement. This also accounts, to a certain degree, for the emperor’s support of the cabinet (and his shift toward the Liberals); while it would be foolish to assume either cabinet or crown was radical in its reformism, reformism is the direction both preferred.35 It is clear, however, that precisely because of its Abolitionist victory and alliance as well as its reformist bent, the cabinet did not have the Chamber’s support; it remained the staunchly Conservative, reactionary legislature elected under Cotegipe’s auspices in 1886. While the emperor, whose preference was traditionally to work with an amenable cabinet to effect gradual reform, supported João Alfredo, that proved impossible owing to Paulino’s victories and support in parliament. When he then searched for an alternative Conservative reformist cabinet that might serve as the successor to João Alfredo’s, the lack of support from Paulino’s wing of the legislature simply made that impossible as well. Thus, the emperor turned to the Liberals, together, of course, with dissolution of the legislature and a new election, in the hope of a new cabinet and legislature more supportive of reform. It is doubtful that this move would have borne abundant fruit, if any at all; the election of 1884 makes it clear that most of the Liberal electorate and their moderate Liberal statesmen, the faction dominating the Liberals, were no more enamored of reform than most Conservatives. There is little reason to believe they would have been any more pleased to consider and pass significant land-reform legislation, for example, or to encourage small farms among freedmen or immigrant wage labor. As the moderate Liberals, the Liberal majority, of legislature after legislature had demonstrated from 1878 to 1884, they were often as identified with the interests of plantation exports and servile labor as the Conservatives; moreover, given the reaction to Abolition and the elitist electoral reform of 1881, the antireform majority would likely have been a strong one. The emperor’s choice of Ouro Preto, with a view to holding the party together and to attempting some bit of gradual reform and confronting the Republican appeal, makes sense under the circumstances of 1889; but significant success must have seemed dubious indeed.

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In all of this, the direction is clear. As warned in 1871 and again in 1888, if the monarchy put reform between itself and the elite who presided over society, the monarchy itself would lose support. In the context of this and the associated divisions in the two traditional elite-dominated parties, as well as the disaffection of the army officer corps, a coup took place. Albeit undertaken by a small faction of the military and without significant popular support (or significant elite support, for that matter), it succeeded. As explained earlier, it was a sharp push against an institution gradually weakened from within and without and now beset by confusion and fear of an unprecedented, mobilized urban public opinion captained by leaders seeking radical change; weak, off balance, without clear direction, that sharp push was enough; the monarchy fell. As noted above, it is significant indeed that Paulino, chief of the party traditionally most zealous on behalf of the monarchy, thought it best to accept the republic and its provisional government; adherence to a regime backed by the army at least promised the possibility of reestablishing order and maintaining national integrity.36 While a valid argument can be made that what emerged at first was a crippled attempt to install a progressive, positivist dictatorship in 1891 (after a coup against Deodoro by Floriano de Peixoto), both that regime (1891–1894) and the previous government of 1889–1891 were ephemeral. What was reinstated successfully over the years 1894–1902, under two Republican civilian coffee planters from São Paulo, Prudente de Morais and Campos Sales, was an oligarchical new regime under the self-proclaimed “conservative classes,” the planter and merchant families who had dominated the empire. Essentially, the larger, transformational program of the Abolitionist movement did not succeed because it was buried by a coup, then by two unstable military administrations, and then by a civilian regime dominated by an elite representing the sort of traditional families that had always presided over the socioeconomic reality of the country. Between the state’s instability and financial confusion (1889–1894), marked by coups and civil war, on the one hand, and a boom-and-bust cycle, on the other, and then the reconstruction of a stable civilian regime under a coalition of state oligarchies (1894–1902), there was no opportunity for further significant reform. Once the “conservative classes” truly dominated the federal government, there was no interest on the part of the state in such reform, either. Under Rodrigues Alves (1902–1906), the third paulista planter (once a Conservative statesman serving under Cotegipe and then a minister in Floriano’s positivist dictatorship), the press often wrote of a program of “regeneration,” referring to a new stability and a program embracing Rio’s urban renovation and embellishment along Parisian lines, in effect, a proclamation of Brazil’s return to a “civilized,” conservative

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regime, promising increased exports and stable growth.37 In contemplating Abolition and then the planters’ republic, however, one is less likely to think of regeneration than, as with the Sexagenarian Law of 1885, of Lampedusa’s maxim: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”38 In this case, the state had been changed in order to retain as much of the traditional order as possible. In some ways, oddly enough, the savagely repressed Revolta contra Vacina (Revolt against Vaccination) of 1904 suggests a last, failed attempt at an inclusive, national transformation, however different from the one of which the Abolitionist leadership had dreamt. The revolt of 1904 was an alliance between positivist militant radicals led by Lauro Sodré and an urban labor movement deeply rooted in pequena África and led by Vicente de Sousa that sought to overthrow the oligarchs’ republic in favor of a progressive, inclusive, positivist dictatorship. In most ways, it contrasts starkly with the sort of radical, national transformation contemplated by the Abolitionist leadership. The Abolitionists tried to change Brazil through mobilized public opinion, pressing the monarch and parliament forward, and emphasized rural reform as the foundation for a small-holding, popular class as the basis for an emergent liberal democracy, whereas the positivist militants favored urban industrialization under a scientific dictator intent upon the rapid modernization of a strong, inclusive nation state. In any case, the 1904 revolt ended in considerable bloodshed and devastating defeat. Indeed, that defeat was preceded by the navy’s bombardment of the Afro-Brazilian residential areas of the hills in back of the northern port district. After bombarding and then invading the area, the regime’s forces took their prisoners and their revenge. The former were generally eliminated by internal exile; the republic gathered up Rio’s more troublesome elements among the rebellious and the poor and sent them off to the far reaches of Amazonia, on ships that one journalist compared to those of the old African slave trade.39 If transformational national reform was one thing left undone, the other failed possibility, noted earlier, has to do with a continued struggle against racist oppression: that is, why was there no movement after 1888, taking strength from the triumph over slavery and emphasizing racial identity and racial solidarity, to scour out racist oppression? After all, if racial identity and solidarity were so important to the leaders and followers in the Abolitionist movement, as demonstrated in this study, why should the movement not have endured, moving on from slavery to confront racism? During the movement, free Afro-Brazilians had reached down to their enslaved brethren to free them; yet once the latter were liberated from slavery, the former apparently thought that racism itself was not an issue and that nothing more needed to be done. To many of us today, that is surprising: what remained to be done was to combat the racial aspects of class prejudice that continued

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to burden Afro-Brazilian freedmen and free alike. Did the movement’s veterans not see this? Let us assume that Afro-Brazilians did see this, that they saw then what we see now, namely, what social scientists have since demonstrated about social and economic relations in Brazil: that racial attitudes and discrimination play a part in everything from employment to criminal justice.40 Why, then, if they saw this, did Abolitionists after 1888 not mobilize against such racism? The easy response is that any significant further reform (as we have seen) was successfully contained after 13 May. After all, in a society that had just successfully eliminated the possibility of transformative reform in something as structurally significant as land reform, how successful would an ongoing movement against something arguably more significant, that is, racism, be? More realistically, however, there is something far less obvious. Many of our ideas about the nature of racism and racial solidarity harbor presuppositions that are anachronistic. That is, if we consider thinking more in line with contemporaries’ perception (the task of the historian, after all), the reason such an antiracist movement might not have developed has much to do with enduring differences between racism in Brazil and racism elsewhere. There are good grounds for imagining that when Nabuco, Rebouças, Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, or Miguel Antônio Dias thought of social mobility in Brazil, race was not a key to their understanding of barriers. Although Bergstresser has shown how Patrocínio used racism explicitly in attempting to cultivate racial solidarity, nevertheless, with the exception of Patrocínio’s occasional tactics, racism was not a general motif of the movement. This is understandable: the Abolitionist leaders, white and mulato alike, may well have thought, as so many Brazilians did, that racism was not a significant issue in their society. After all, given what they experienced in their own situations (e.g., educational or professional success in the careers of the Abolitionist mulatos) or observed around them, among friends and others in the middle class and the elite, social mobility was apparently not limited by race. Rather, talent and issues of family circumstances, such as wealth, education, and connections, were the significant factors in one’s life chances. We might wonder as well if their failure to recognize a pervasive racism was due to how racism was defined and perceived there and then. By the 1870s and 1880s, such abolitionists as Perdigão Malheiro and Nabuco, for example, argued that racism was alien to Brazil, where Afro-Brazilians rose to the highest ranks, intermingled with whites socially and institutionally, and faced no discriminatory legislation. They emphasized their point by making an explicit comparison with the United States, where infamously this was not the case. There, they pointed out, racism was basic to relations

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so vicious and so entrenched that they were enshrined in explicitly racist legislation; the law derived from and strengthened racist relations and attitudes.41 In Brazil, more generally, as noted in Chapter 1, the reality was quite different, suggesting to such men, in accordance with their understanding of racism then and there, that Brazil was not racist. After all, the Constitution made no discrimination among Brazilians on the basis of race; as we have seen, when a freedman’s son was born, he faced none of the clearly racist discriminatory legal restrictions that African Americans did. Indeed, in Brazil there was rampant inequality, but the horrors of it affected all of the poor masses, without overt racial distinction. The overwhelming, crippling barriers of malnutrition, family instability, poor health and housing, illiteracy, and precarious employment opportunities (not to mention how dreadful the work was when one could get it) that were faced by the working free poor made it difficult to separate the lives of the poor in Rio by race alone. Indeed, even recent research on Rio’s nineteenth-century urban poor demonstrates that generally they often did the same work, lived in the same areas and housing, and ate and drank much the same, regardless of race. One can understand, then, why progressive Afro-Brazilians such as Rebouças, Vicente de Sousa, and Patrocínio, before and after 1888, thought in terms of attacking poverty and the oppression of the urban or rural working poor rather than fastening on racism. They apparently did not see race as the critical factor—they saw class.42 Indeed, such an assumption persisted in the analysis of Brazilian race and class for generations, perhaps most famously in the case of the Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes. One of the most interesting reassessments of such analysis is that of George Reid Andrews’s Blacks and Whites in São Paulo. In his pioneering, revisionist study of race relations in São Paulo after abolition, Andrews argues that racism per se becomes most obvious to the scholar at the point when Afro-Brazilians became qualified to compete for the same work as whites, generations after 1888. Before that, the more obvious, plausible explanations for differences in life opportunities had to do with poverty—with class barriers alone. Fernandes and others argued that Afro-Brazilians were not employed or were rapidly fired because their qualifications were not competitive enough, or so it was thought, and thus that capitalist progress would erase what remained of racial difference in the workplace. Andrews found, however, that as time passed and some AfroBrazilians in São Paulo acquired the appropriate urban usages and necessary education, discrimination continued, that is, when applicants with the same qualifications applied for work or had it, Andrews found that discrimination against Afro-Brazilians in terms of hiring and firing became evident. Capitalist progress had occurred, but racism persisted.43

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Much of this, of course, involves one of the more complicated questions, namely, the distinct nature of racism in Brazil. As in the nineteenth century, among Brazilians and outside observers both, it was common to deny the existence of Brazilian racism altogether until late in the twentieth century. While here is not the place to discuss this topic at any length, some aspects of it are clearly pertinent. Many readers will be familiar with Gilberto Freyre’s position: that Brazil did not have race prejudice and that Afro-Brazilians enjoyed social mobility without racist impediment. Freyre based a great deal of this on the study of travelers’ accounts of nineteenth-century Brazil together with his own experience of the Jim Crow South of the United States. On the basis of foreign assumptions and their experience of racism elsewhere, North Atlantic travelers in the nineteenth century understandably often thought that Brazil was free of racism. Freyre’s experience was similar: he had been raised in Recife but undertook his college education and some travel in the United States South between 1918 and 1930. If one understood racism, as so many Atlantic travelers did, as what was experienced in the United States then or before, Brazil might well seem free of racism.44 Nonetheless, we should note that, at the time of the Abolitionist movement, some of the Abolitionists themselves were familiar with race prejudice, often uncomfortably so. For example, we have mentioned Patrocínio’s use of racism in his rhetoric. His sense of it was not merely tactical but personal: his white father-in-law had objected to his daughter’s interest in marrying Patrocínio because of Patrocínio’s color. Another example is provided by Rebouças, who was clearly embarrassed by the way he was treated in the United States. Yet he also knew that racism, his “condition as a mulato,” played a role in at least some of his own professional difficulties. There is also Perdigão Malheiro, who in the same remarkable speech on racism in the 1871 debates in the Chamber referenced earlier, in Chapter 1, denied the existence of Brazilian race prejudice altogether, explicitly comparing Brazilian race relations to those of the United States, but did so in what would seem to be a relatively racist way, making the implicit assumption that a black skin was a negative distinction: “If I had black skin and, nevertheless, a good heart, what blame would I have for the color of my skin?” And let us recall Pimenta Bueno’s contradictions. Here was a statesman and jurist who refused to recognize differences among Brazilians on the basis of color or ethnicity and went on to work up the first draft of the legislative project that became the 1871 abolitionist law; yet he was also the man who dismissed the congos as being only descendants of an “African horde” rather than a nation. Is this not, at least implicitly, racist? Surely it is difficult to believe that he would have dismissed contemporary Italians (i.e., natives of Italy in the 1860s, to whom he refers in the same analysis)

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as a horde, even though they, like the congos, were without the trappings of a European nation-state until 1861. Another, vivid example of Brazilian racism, in which Nabuco reproved the literary critic José Veríssimo, is provided to us by Emília Viotti da Costa. As she recounts, Veríssimo had written a tribute to their friend Machado de Assis after the latter’s death, in which he referred to the great writer, correctly, as a mulato. Nabuco was upset—as we have noted, the term “mulato” was considered insulting in social relations among equals—and he responded briskly: “For me Machado was a white, and I believe he thought so about himself.”45 That such examples can be found in the middle class and the elite demonstrates the subtle but pervasive quality of Brazilian racism, how it could ravel within and between members of the upper reaches of society, so that Afro-Brazilians there could still read and hear references to the presumed inferiority of Afro-Brazilians. Yet, how could a popular movement about this sort of prejudice be mobilized, or the case that it was racism even be made, in a world where the word was associated with legislated separation, restriction, and lynching? Furthermore, no matter how pervasive racist usages and attitudes were in Brazil, it was still a nation in which many past prime ministers and cabinet ministers, senators and deputies, titled nobles and noted literati, were obvious Afro-Brazilians. It was also a nation where most of the military and police rank and file were Afro-Brazilians, as well as where, at least before 1850, most free Afro-Brazilians may well have owned slaves or hoped to do so, and thus a nation in which most slaveholders were probably Afro-Brazilian. How could racism, which was associated with race relations in the United States, be associated with such a nation as well? In view of all this, how could the Abolitionist movement be mobilized against a phenomenon that, in the Brazil perceived by contemporary Brazilians, was not a critical issue? Indeed, even for such Afro-Brazilian radicals as Vicente de Sousa and Evaristo de Moraes, both of whom devoted themselves to Rio’s labor movement, it was not race and racism that were apparently central to their analysis or their propaganda but class or socioeconomic oppression. To give an example, Moraes was personally involved in the Rio port workers’ organization in the early 1900s. While there is good work demonstrating the carryovers in labor organization, between nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian slaves and freedmen among port workers and the early 1900s port workers’ organization later, the issues of racism and race as such went unmentioned by contemporaries. The port workers’ organization made no reference to race in its organization’s name, and Moraes (like Vicente de Sousa, a participant in the Abolitionist movement and a mulato himself) apparently saw himself and the port workers as engaging in a class struggle, not a struggle against racism.

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Indeed, both Moraes and Vicente de Sousa were self-proclaimed socialists; both had been committed to the struggle against slavery, and both were now committed to the struggle against class oppression. While the two of them may have identified personally with both groups of the oppressed on the basis of racial solidarity, to date there is no evidence to support it. From what we do know, they fought against both slavery and class oppression as manifestations of socioeconomic oppression; there is no indication that either man saw race as the critical issue in either struggle.46 The Justice of Posterity

During 1988, the centenary of the Abolition of Brazilian slavery, there were many who were critical, attacking the celebratory character of the event and the movement and pointing to the remaining, untouched legacy of racism and deprivation most Afro-Brazilians continued to suffer.47 We have just gone through some discussion of why these matters were left for our own times to confront. As shown in our discussion, Brazilians of that period had a different context and different perspective. Moreover, opinion was hardly uniform; even in the years immediately after 13 May 1888, the very nature and justice of their assessments of the leaders and the movement varied among them and between them and ourselves. For example, in writing to Nabuco on 13 May 1891, Miguel Antônio Dias alluded to the rapid deterioration of the truth about the past in the day’s papers: Holy God!, how they write for this poor people, eternally foolish, stupid, how they twist the truth, how they lie! Thus, even the Jornal do Commercio, among other untruths, says that the motto—Immediate Emancipation and without Indemnification, is Patrocínio’s, when the truth is that it belongs to our good friend Dr. Rebouças. . . . I lament that our poor Patrocínio lends himself to this sort of thing.48

Nabuco himself, just a few years later (1893–1899), did a preliminary analysis of the various roles of those who contributed to 13 May. He grouped statesmen Dantas, João Alfredo, and Antônio Prado as abolitionist, noting the supportive propaganda of José Bonifácio (the younger), Cristiano Otoni, and Silveira da Mota in passing. He divided the movement leaders into two groups: those closest to him and those allied with him. In the first group, he put Rebouças, Gusmão Lobo, and Joaquim Serra; in the second, Patrocínio, Ferreira de Menezes, Vicente de Sousa, Nicolau Moreira, João Clapp, and the Confederação Abolicionista. Later in the chapter, he drew a conclusion about the early phase: “The two groups of which I spoke met one another, worked together, mixed, but the dividing line could be sensed:

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one represented political action, the other revolutionary [action], even if each one reflected the influence of the other at times.”49 Surely, while we have noted this division, especially in the early years, it elides what has been demonstrated here in regard to the Abolitionists’ essential unity in terms of their goals and, particularly after 1883, or better, after 1885, in terms of their strategy. It is also interesting to see how contemporaries and the new generation viewed the Abolitionists during the last years of their lives, particularly if we are wondering about the assessment of the Afro-Brazilian masses. In a letter to Nabuco, one witness to the popular response to Patrocínio’s death (1905) wrote: I attended the glorification of Patrocínio—I liked him and his merit was great—but the apotheosis that was made for him was the greatest corruption of a death-loving people—8 days, in a carnavalesque [celebration]. . . . There is no human conception that can describe what that was.50

Nabuco experienced something of this himself. When he returned to Brazil in 1906 after time away as an ambassador, he passed through Recife and was fortunate enough to experience the masses’ judgment of his worth himself. An eyewitness remembers Nabuco’s reception: A great demonstration awaited him. The abolitionist disembarked into the arms of the blacks whom he had so beautifully helped to liberate. . . . The clouds cleared. And at the hour of arrival . . . the sun shone over the multitude that filled the whole district. I had never seen, except in processions of the Senhor dos Passos, in São Cristóvão, Sergipe, so many people together. It was the first great spectacle of a public demonstration that I witnessed, emotional, solemn, and simple at the same time. Nabuco actually disembarked into the arms of the blacks, who carried him on their shoulders from the quay . . . to the Santa Isabel Theater. This was full, as I had never seen it before and as I never saw [it] afterward. . . . From the balcony, stuffed with students, came shouts and vivas. Nabuco entered onto the stage, followed by delegations. A lectern had been set up. . . . Nabuco, on the theater stage, stretched out his arm [and] said, pointing to the audience, which was pervaded by a silence that one could feel: “It was here that was made . . . that we made Abolition!”51

This scene took place a year after Patrocínio’s death in 1905, with its days and days of tumultuous popular celebration. Patrocínio’s parting was preceded by that of Rebouças in 1898, and Nabuco followed them both in 1910. The final years of all three are worthy of our attention. Nabuco’s career after abolition is the best known. After settling down in 1889 with a young heiress, Evelina Torres Soares Ribeiro, he lost her fortune by speculating in the Argentine boom before the great bust of 1890. He had

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rejected political office, as a monarchist, during the republic’s early years, so this financial disaster confined them to genteel poverty in Rio for most of the 1890s, during which time he wrote an indispensable history of the monarchy by way of a three-volume biography of his father, Um estadista do imperio (1897–1899). In addition to this, a great deal of journalism, his unique autobiography, Minha formação (1900), and literary affairs (he was a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters), he made a deeply felt return to the church; there was no sign of what was to come. In 1899, the new president, Campos Sales, who had admired Nabuco when both were deputies in the imperial Chamber, became so impressed by Um estadista that he courted Nabuco, convincing him to serve Brazil, if not the republic, in diplomacy. For a decade thereafter, Nabuco was an impressive champion of his nation, particularly after 1904 as the representative of foreign minister (1904–1912) José Maria da Silva Paranhos, baron do Rio Branco. The latter, a friend of Nabuco’s since youth and the son and namesake of the viscount do Rio Branco, became the great legend of Brazilian diplomacy from the 1890s until his death in 1912. Nabuco served under the baron as Brazil’s first ambassador to the United States (1904–1910). Rio Branco had pondered the hemispheric consequences of the Spanish American War of 1898. Whereas Argentina attempted to set itself up as the United States’ rival and failed, Rio Branco sought to make Brazil the new great power’s informal ally and succeeded. Nabuco was sent to Washington to help make this happen, and his 1906 return to Brazil (referred to above), when he brought the Pan American Congress to meet in Rio, was a crowning moment. Nabuco appears in a group photograph, with Machado de Assis and others, taken to celebrate this triumphant return to Rio. Afterward, Nabuco returned to Washington and continued to serve. For many years he had suffered from maladies and the near escapes from death they occasioned; he cautioned his fiancée that he might have only a few years to live. He stayed by her side far longer than expected but, in the last few years, violent headaches presaged the stroke that took him, in Washington, on 17 January 1910. There were state funerals in both capitals; that in Rio took place at the Palácio Monroe, originally Brazil’s contribution to the 1904 Universal Exposition in Saint Louis. It was a striking, Beaux Arts–style building, like so many of the buildings of the “civilized” Rio that had just emerged (1902–1906) to demonstrate Brazilian progress under the republic. It had been brought to Brazil and reconstructed, precisely to serve as the seat of the 1906 Pan American Congress. Rio Branco renamed it after the United States president for the occasion—a fitting site, surely, for celebrating the last phase of Nabuco’s career.52 Patrocínio’s postabolition career stands in stark contrast. While his passing brought forth the collective mass grief described earlier, his last years

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before that glorification were marked by increasing poverty, failure, and the slow death of tuberculosis. João Marqués remembered his great friend’s pathetic end in a memoir conveyed to Patrocínio’s brother-in-law, Ernesto de Sena. After Marqués described the May 13th night that the two spent together in Rio’s streets, he wrote, “Patrocínio died a little at a time, in pain from illness, disappointments, disillusions and—why not say it?—of poverty. He dwelt in a poor outlying district, in a rustic shack of boards.”53 Like Nabuco and Rebouças, Patrocínio opposed the coup of 15 November 1889. In his case, his opposition to the republic, particularly the dictatorship of Floriano, led to his brief internal exile to Amazonia in 1892. Then, in 1893, Patrocínio ran afoul of the Floriano dictatorship again. His paper, Cidade do Rio, was closed down; he was rumored to have hidden himself far away from Rio, in Minas Gerais, for months. There were even rumors of his being caught and killed. In fact, however, he had been living all along hidden at home, working on journalism under another name, to sustain himself and his family. After these disasters, except for a failed congressional campaign in 1895, Patrocínio kept out of politics, focusing on journalism and on a dream that seems like something of a metaphor—flight. Seduced by a dream of building and flying a lighter-than-air balloon, he invested a great deal of time and what little money he could put together to build it, but it was never finished. Nonetheless, he clung to the dream, and became a great advocate of the automobile as well. In a 1905 speech honoring Brazil’s great aviation pioneer, Santos Dumont, he was interrupted by a tubercular attack of coughing, a bloody prelude to his final days, and died soon afterward, at home. In that impoverished, distant shack, he, his wife, and their children had lived for years, maintaining a free school for some forty children. It was a place so far from the railway station that Patrocínio commuted to the city’s papers every day by horse to get to the station. Sena records that he was interrupted by death in that same shack, writing a crônica; he barely made it to his bed in a coughing fit, choking on blood, and died on 29 January 1905. His passing was marked by thousands over two weeks and in three stages. The first stage, it should be noted, ended in the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosârio, on the Rua Uruguaiana, where he lay in state for public viewing.54 As miserable as this narrative is, that of Rebouças is more melancholy still. He continued to lobby for reforms with João Alfredo’s cabinet until its end and then was apparently preparing to do the same with Ouro Preto. His customary season in Petrópolis put him in constant contact with the imperial family, for whom his erstwhile respect and dedication had revived and even increased in the aftermath of 13 May. On 15 November 1889, after coming down from Petrópolis for his usual professional tasks in Rio, he heard of the coup against Ouro Preto. He was immediately involved with the viscount de

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Taunay at the Senate in plans for a countercoup. When that proved fruitless, he went to join the imperial princess and the count d’Eu, who were in Rio trying to assess the situation and contact the emperor. After helping them to do so, Rebouças and others tried and failed again to organize a countercoup. With the emperor’s decision to return to Rio and sort matters out in council, all of their efforts were useless. Rebouças immediately became involved instead in bringing the emperor’s grandchildren to Petrópolis and then in the family’s necessarily rapid preparations for exile. When it became apparent that one of the aristocrats holding a critical imperial household position could not accompany the imperial family to Europe, Rebouças stepped forward to take his place, without hesitation. In addition to a characteristically strong affective bond with those who had fought for abolition or supported him otherwise in the past, Rebouças also felt deeply that the coup was the clear consequence of 13 May: the response of the slaveholders, who had been filling Republican ranks for a year and a half, who had felled João Alfredo, and who had blocked further reform. He felt that Brazil had betrayed the emperor and his family, and in response, he committed to exile from the nation that he had served and did so forever. He felt not only that he owed the imperial family his loyalty and support but that he could no longer work in any position linked to the new regime.55 From 1889 to the death of Dom Pedro II (1892), Rebouças was either with the emperor or close enough to visit with him. After the monarch’s passing, Rebouças left Europe for Africa. Indeed, his references to himself now began to emphasize his being African, and he seems to have wanted to do something on behalf of African progress. After traveling down the continent’s eastern coast and around the Cape, however, with a brief stay in Luanda, he settled in Funchal, on the island of Madeira, the Portuguese outpost in the Atlantic between Europe and Africa. There he lived on his diminishing funds and suffered a slow and painful decline in health, despite repeated pleas from many friends to return to Brazil, to teach at the Escola Politécnica; to stay with friends’ relations in London; or to accept money in Madeira. To no avail. Rebouças refused the money and refused to leave the island, the exile, or the memories. Immersed in Tolstoy, in mathematics and other studies, and in his correspondence, he sank into penury, crippling illness, solitude, and remorse for the monarchy. In the end, completely self-isolated, living on words from the past and words to and from friends such as Taunay and Nabuco, a final word came, from the authorities of Funchal: on 9 May 1898, they had found his body at the foot of a steep boulder, 60 meters high.56 On 17 May, Nabuco recorded, “Today I receive the news of Rebouças’s death. He went to join Joaquim Serra. For some time I have looked at the other side in a way that the death of a friend like him no longer seems to me a separation anymore. He will arrive a little earlier than I, voilà tout.”57 Nearly a month passed

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before the body could be shipped to Brazil and buried in Rio. In an apparent reference to the contrast between his friend’s characteristic discretion, self-effacement, and lonely death and the spectacle of the inevitable public celebration in church and cemetery, Nabuco recorded the ceremonies (18 June) in his diary as something that would have caused “horror and scandal to that spirit, if he could imagine something of the sort! What a contrast with the great symbolism of that whole end!”58 One wonders, then, if we are fortunate in our ignorance of the fate of Miguel Antônio Dias. The man so clearly indispensable to Rebouças, the movement’s likely link to Rio’s popular mass mobilization, the man respected by Antônio Bento—that man vanishes. There is no trace of him in the archival correspondence after the early 1890s. Indeed, after 1886, the Almanack Laemmert no longer mentions him as a lesser bureaucrat at the railroad station near the Campo de Santana; he was apparently dismissed from his position during Cotegipe’s administration. We may imagine him returning home to his place on the Rua do Catumbi, to retirement, or maybe finding work in another position, perhaps through an Abolitionist connection. After 1888, though, whether retired or working, surely he talked of the movement with friends and family and recalled the triumphant struggle alongside “men of talent.” There is no way to know if he wanted anything more, except perhaps that the truth of what had been done and who did it be remembered.59 In this, as Dias’s 1891 letter suggests, we may share with him some regret about the justice of posterity. Most of what is still celebrated about the leaders of the Abolitionist movement and the movement itself lies at the feet of two icons—Nabuco and Patrocínio. If the movement itself has fallen into relative obscurity among historians, studies such as this one, which has attempted to show more precisely the ways in which parliamentary politics, the movement, and the Afro-Brazilian masses interacted to free the slaves through the very monarchy run by slaveholders—will, hopefully, lead to a better appreciation of how Abolition was achieved. In so doing, perhaps greater justice will be done to the central role of Rebouças. Surely, excellent, pioneering work has already been done on his thought. However, unhappily, barring the supreme achievement of 13 May, much of that thinking came to naught, detritus of 15 November and the triumph of the “conservative classes.”60 It is shocking to think that, while Rebouças’s thought has been studied and celebrated, not only has his centrality in the movement itself been relatively neglected, but his critical role in 1888 and particularly in 13 May’s legislation itself has been generally forgotten.61 Indeed, what place has posterity given to the man dead at the base of the steep Funchal boulder? It certainly does not compare to the celebrations in and after life given to Nabuco and Patrocínio. Quiet, efficient, untiring, Rebouças preferred to work behind the scenes with a small number of colleagues;

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yet without him, who would have helped construct the initial and then the later Abolitionist organizations and coordinate them, or acted for the exiled Nabuco, or kept Patrocínio, Nabuco, and their lieutenants linked in policy and coordinated in action? Without Rebouças, who would have written or published so much of the key propaganda, or worked so closely with Miguel Antônio Dias? There was no major policy shift in the movement without Rebouças’s thought, contribution, and initiative. The Abolitionists looked to him if they wanted success; he was the soaring, seeing, searching being between the two wings of the movement. Nabuco conceived of the content of the national movement’s “new phase” over 1882–1883, but it was Rebouças who made sure it was proclaimed and promoted in Rio while Nabuco remained in London. In the critical last months before 13 May 1888, when so much was at stake and so much could still have gone wrong, Rebouças was, again, clearly critical. To whom did João Alfredo turn upon beginning his administration? Who linked the cabinet to the movement, discreetly accepting the contact, discreetly shaping the legislation, discreetly helping to orchestrate supportive public mobilization in the first days of May in the streets? If justice has not been fully done by posterity in regard to Rebouças, it may be in part because justice has not been fully done in regard to the enabling or explanatory details of the movement in which he played so critical a part. The reconstruction completed here, through the extensive use (or new analysis) of contemporary sources, has been done to help correct the balance, by demonstrating more precisely how timing, people, papers, and power actually came together to make abolition possible. Writing shortly after his friend’s death, Nabuco alludes to Rebouças and these matters, celebrating in inspiring prose the crucial role Rebouças played within Abolitionism’s many moving components, as the hidden but essential unifying force of the movement: Rebouças . . . did not have, in public, either the word, or the style, or the action; it could be said that in a movement led by orators, journalists, popular agitators, no salient role fit him, nevertheless, he had the most beautiful of all . . . the greatest, the primary role, although hidden, the motor, the inspiration that was shared among everyone. . . . One almost did not see him, from outside, but every one of us who was seen, was looking at him, sensed his presence inside, we regulated ourselves to the multitude by his invisible gesture, . . . we knew that the conscience capable of resolving all the problems of the cause was his alone, that only he entered the burning bush and saw the Eternal face to face.62

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Illustrations

Nabuco elected by Pernambuco, 1885. The figure to the left is Andrade Figueira. Source: Revista Illustrada, 13 June 1885. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Saraiva demonstrates that the emperor, icon of marble, offers no protection to the slaves. Source: Revista Illustrada, 19 July 1885. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Cotegipe toasts the Conservatives’ ascent. João Alfredo, barely hidden, is to the right; the monkey on the left is the artist’s conception of the imitative Conservatives, who used abolition to recover power. Source: Revista Illustrada, 31 January 1885. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Paulino and Cotegipe in the aftermath of Abolition. Source: Revista Illustrada, 30 June 1888. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Antonio Bento. Source: Revista Illustrada, 25 August 1888. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

Abolitionists (top to bottom, left to right): Princess Isabel, Joaquim Nabuco, Manuel Dantas, João Alfredo, José do Patrocínio, João Clapp. From portraits made to celebrate the triumph of Abolition, 13 May 1888. Note the absence of André Rebouças: however striking, it is entirely consistent with his preferred role behind the scenes. Source: Revista Illustrada, 19 May 1888. Periodicals Collection, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

André Rebouças, ca. 1880s. Source: Clube de Engenharia Collection, Rio de Janeiro.

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Notes

Introduction 1.  “Abolition,” “Abolitionism,” and “Abolitionist” will be capitalized throughout the book to indicate someone or something having to do with the movement begun and organized in Rio de Janeiro in 1879–1880 and triumphant in 1888. The terms will not be capitalized when referring to the more general concept or to someone or something associated with a different idea or program in regard to ending slavery or freeing slaves. 2.  See Costa, The Brazilian Empire; Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery; and Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil. 3.  For an analysis of the historiography up to about 2010, see Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism.” Subsequent works touching upon Rio include Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Many of the authors mentioned in this Introduction (but not all) were useful to the study here and thus can be found in the Sources Cited at the end of the book. Works on slavery and the state, slaves, slave resistance, and so on, are legion and growing constantly; it would be impractical to list them all; those that were “off task,” in the sense of focusing on an aspect of resistance, for example, or a place not central to this analysis, were not used and therefore are not cited. Finally, this study (and its sources) are not the place to look for an explicit discussion of comparative abolitionism. Accordingly, secondary works, such as Celia M. de Azevedo, Abolitionism in Brazil and the United States (New York: Garland Press, 1995), Ana Lucia Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), and especially Seymour Drescher’s oeuvre, particularly his most recent book, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), also go uncited here. 4.  See Alonso, Flores, votos e balas. 5.  As suggested here, I put aside further reading in the secondary literature in fall 2016, when I began writing. There are works that might be pertinent to my concerns here which thus were not used, including Patricia Acerbi, Street Occupations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017), and Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). There are other works addressing the concerns I addressed in The Party of Order (concerns present here, to be sure, particularly in the synthesizing political history in Chapter 1), but which do not extend in coverage to the Abolitionist movement central to this study. I decided these would best be addressed in a historiographical essay of assessment, something I intend to undertake shortly. These works include Márcia Berbel, Rafael Marquese, and Tâmis Parron, Escravidão e política (São Paulo: HUCITEC,

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2010); Tâmis Parron, A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011); Sidney Chalhoub, A força da escravidão (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012); and Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Africanos livres (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2017). 6.  Moraes, A campanha abolicionista and “A escravidão.” Chapter 1 1.  On the origins of the slave population, see Karasch, Slave Life, 8, 10–17; on congos, see ibid., 15–21, 247–49; cf. Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 127–28, 284; Gomes, “Atlantic Demographics of Africans,” 15–18. 2.  Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 119; Karasch, Slave Life, 228. 3.  Karasch, Slave Life, 241, 247–48n101, 391; cf. Rodrigues, Da costa, 226, 242–43, 360n8. 4.  This paragraph and the next four synthesize the literature on Rio and its hinterland in the late colonial and early national eras; see Needell, Party of Order, 10–23. 5.  On the shift from West to West Central Africans and mining, see Gomes, “Atlantic Demographics of Africans,” 11–14; on Rio’s primacy, particularly in terms of urban slavery, see Alden, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil, 43–44; Karasch, Slave Life, xxi; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 27; and Needell, Party of Order, 10. On the most recent figures for slaves disembarked, see Emory University, Voyages, http://www.slavevoyages.org./assessment/estimates. Please note: the figures from the database increase over time with ongoing research. 6.  Aside from Needell, Party of Order, 10–23, see Barreiros, Atlas, here and for the next four paragraphs. The original city site was between the hills of Dog Face and Sugar Loaf; see ibid., prancha, note 4. On the city’s history and residential areas (here and below), see also Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 23–28. 7.  On the location of the public buildings, here and below, see Almanaque Laemmert (henceforth, AL), 1849, 1859, 1869, 1879, 1888. On the markets, see Farias, “Mercado em greve,” 2–3. 8.  On the city’s urban life, diseases, and its slaves, see Karasch, Slave Life, chaps. 3, 5, 6, passim. On yellow fever’s special impact, see Needell, “Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” 696–98, esp. 697n21. 9.  On the slave market, see Karasch, Slave Life, 29–50; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 39–41; and Silva, Negro na rua, 61–63. On the location of Afro-Brazilian residence, see Graham, “Being Yoruba,” 10; Silva, Dom Obá II d’África, 84; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 29, 34–35, 222, 242–44; Frank, Dutra’s World, 32– 33, 52, 92; and Florentino, Tráfico, 335. On racial and slave integration in the workplace and in residences, see Frank, Dutra’s World, 52, 54–55; Silva, Negro na rua, 55–56; Moura, Tia Ciata, 67–68; and Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 260–68, 275–78. On slaves’ occupations, see Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 93–94, 124, 128, 150–59, 164–68; Frank, Dutra’s World, 48; Frank and Berry, “Slave Market in Rio de Janeiro,” 94; Silva, Negro na rua, 21, 88–94, 108–9, 121–22, 152–53; Farias and Gomes, “Descrobrindo mapas dos minas,” 116; Soares, “Os últimos malungos,” 168, 181–97; Silva, Dom Obá II d’África, 75–76, 81–82; and Abreu, O império do divino, 79, 201–3, 322–33, 337. On pequena África, see Silva, Dom Obá

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II d’África, 81–82, 126; Moura, Tia Ciata, 42–43, 51–58; and Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 275–78. On the statistics, see ibid.; and cf. Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 367–80, passim. 10.  On race and status, see Karasch, Slave Life, 3n3, 46, 73–75; Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 34–36, 56, 58, 105–11; and Costa, Brazilian Empire, 240–43. For Afro-Brazilian divisions, see Moura, Tia Ciata, 39–40; Jesus and Lacerda, “Dinâmica associativa,” 137, 139; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 69, 303–4; Engemann, “Da communidade escrava,” 356–57; Gomes, “Reinventando as ‘nações,’” passim; and Faria, “Identidade e communidade,” 125–27, 129–30. On race and the masses, see Silva, Dom Obá II d’África, 75–78, 124–26. On racial identity among public figures, see, e.g., Needell, Party of Order, 196, 211, regarding Francisco Otaviano; see also the depictions of Sales Torres Homem and Justiniano José da Rocha in Magalhães, Três panfletârios; and cf. ibid., 6–7, 129. 11.  On nação, see Karasch, Slave Life, 8–28; Gomes, “Atlantic Demographics of Africans,” passim. On minas, see Karasch, Slave Life, 25–27; Moura, Tia Ciata, 42–44, 69–71, 86–87, 91; and Farias and Gomes, “Descobrindo mapas dos minas,” 110–35; cf. Gomes, “Para além da Casa da Tia Ciata,” esp. 178–80, 195–96. 12.  On this ethnogenesis, see Karasch, Slave Life, 25–27, passim; on West Central Africans, cf., e.g., Miller, “Central Africa,” 22, 44–47, 55–58, 61, 63. On nação survival into the 1860s, see note 47 below regarding the case of the congos. 13.  Karasch, Slave Life, chap. 11, passim, esp. 342–67; Frank, Dutra’s World, 52, 68–69; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 29, 49, 124–28, 142, 276–79, 281–84, 288, 300; Silva, Negro na rua, 82, 88–95, 98–99, 102–3, 107–10, 112–19, 121– 24; and Farias and Gomes, “Descobrindo mapas dos minas,” 116–25. Cf. Florentino, “Sobre minas,” on the shift in manumission rates from the late colonial era through the middle to late nineteenth century and ethnic differences, 336–42, 344–45, 351–57. 14.  See Karasch, Slave Life, chaps. 3, 7, 8, 9, passim, with copious references to travelers’ accounts. 15.  On the international agreements and the contraband trade, see Needell, “Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” 686. 16.  For the recent trade estimates, see Emory University, Voyages. Demographic analysis for the Middle Passage includes Klein et al., “Transoceanic Mortality”; and perhaps most recent, “Middle Passage—Digital History,” www .digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=446. On the horror as a whole, see Klein, Atlantic Slave Trade. The dean of the history of the Angola slave trade, the most critical component of Brazilian supply in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, estimated West Central African captives’ deaths en route to the coast for sale to be equal to “the number of their companions who survived to board the slave ships”—a worst-case assumption. See Miller, Way of Death, 153. See ibid., chap. 5, for his study of the “demography of slaving” over three centuries in West Central Africa. For the southeastern domestic trade, see Needell, Party of Order, 11–18, 23. 17.  On northeastern sugar, in particular, see Schwartz, Sugar, chaps. 7, 15, esp. 163–64, 422–29. On the Northeast more generally, see Slenes, “Demography and

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Economics,” 181, 187–89, 196–97, 207–9, 211–12. On Brazil in general, see Graham, “1850–1870,” 113–18; and Costa, “1870–1889,” 164–65, 226–27. 18.  Costa, “1870–1889”; Needell, Party of Order, 15–18. 19.  Needell, Party of Order, 15–18, 61–62; Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 128–29, 142–43, 146–47, 163n21, 166n26, 167n29, 168n31, 181, 187– 88, 205; Stein, Vassouras, chap. 9. 20.  Needell, Party of Order, 43, 120–21, and “Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,” 686–87. For the statistics, see Emory University, Voyages. 21.  On British and Brazilian foreign policy regarding the abolition of the African trade and the complications associated with Buenos Aires, see the classic work by Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade; and Needell, “Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade” and Party of Order, 120–23, 138–39, 149–60. 22.  Visconde do Uruguay to Paranhos, Paris, 2 January 1856, AHI: Rio Branco / Uruguay, 23L1 M2 P1; cf. Visconde do Uruguay to Carvalho Moreira, Rio, 11 February 1858, AHI: Penedo/Uruguay. On the failure of midcentury immigrant labor, note that it was also linked to land policy; see Needell, “State and Development,” 89, 93, and the literature cited, esp. Dean, Rio Claro, chap. 4, passim. 23.  See, e.g., the literature cited in notes 17–20 above for an introduction to the issues and the historiography. 24.  For the traditional view of Brazil’s fatal dependency on Africa alone for an adequate slave-labor supply, see, e.g., Stein, Vassouras, chap. 3, esp. 78–79; Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 124, 140–43; and Needell, Party of Order, 139. But see also the shift in thinking about natural reproduction in, e.g., Florentino and Góes, A paz das senzalas, 45, 67–69, 95, where the authors argue for more successful reproduction after the initial threat to the African trade in the 1830s; and particularly Salles, E o vale era o escravo, chap. 4, esp. 169–71, and chap. 5, esp. 195–207, where the author argues for greater success in achieving gender balance by the 1840s. Indeed, as indicated in the text, Salles argues that by the 1880s, if one adds the ingênuos, the captive labor population had not only stabilized but grown between 1872 and 1884 (262–66, esp. Quadro 13): from 1,532,926 to 1,621,486 including 403,827 ingênuos. The figure in the text here for 1850 is from Stein, Vassouras, 494. On the improving balance among Rio’s slaves in terms of both nativeborn and gender, 1849–1872, see Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 34–35, 92. 25.  Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 22–28, esp. 25–26, and 161–62, 172, 181–82, 185–88, Party of Order, 118–19, 168–69, 211–12, 250–51, and “State and Development,” 83–84, 86–89, 91–92; Frank, Dutra’s World, 70–77. 26.  Frank, Dutra’s World, 70–77, 84, 86–91; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 29, 34–35, 49, 53, 65, 67–82, 85, 92–95, 108, 124, 128, 142, 158–59, 276–80, 282, 284; Florentino, “Sobre minas,” 339–42, 375, 377. Note that the latter two pages indicate that about 53,000 of the roughly 121,000 native-born in Rio’s urban parishes in 1872 were free negros or mulatos. There is no way to know how many of the alleged white majority were Afro-Brazilians taken for white. In 1890 (ibid., 381–82), about 73,000 of the roughly 311,000 native Brazilians were counted as negros or mulatos; again, there is no way to know how many of these 311,000 were “white.” In “Migrantes,” Florentino and Machado argue that in 1872, half

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of the free population of Rio were Afro-Brazilian (369). On the financial plight of Rio’s majority, see below in the text. 27.  Florentino and Machado, “Migrantes,” 369; Florentino (“Sobre minas,” 336–37) argues that the colonial free population of the captaincy’s white minority not only included whites but free people of color who were “culturally white.” Cf. Castro, Das cores do silêncio, 34–36, 56 (“In the urban context . . . [there was] a near lack of differentiation in the world of the free, a world that was, then, predominantly, ‘mulatto’”); see also ibid., 105–9, for the conflation of white and free after 1850 (and cf. Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 69). 28.  Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 53, 76–78, 157–59, 368, 369, 372, 373; Frank, Dutra’s World, 86–91, 107. Note that the population figures here in the text include the urban parishes only. 29.  The reference for this paragraph and the following is Barman’s classic, Brazil, chaps. 4–8; see also Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 2–4. 30.  See Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 2–4, esp. 39–40, 60–61, 69, 145–49. 31.  Ibid., 148. On the 1823 usage, see, e.g., Assembléia geral constituiente e legislativa, Diario, Muniz Tavares, 30 September, A V 258; Silva Lisboa, 30 September, A V 261; and Maciel da Costa, 30 September, A V 264. On the issue of Haitianism more generally, see Needell, Party of Order, 145, 148, 377n75. 32.  See, e.g., Needell, Party of Order, 96–99, 209–16, passim, and “Brazilian Election,” passim. On Perdigão Malheiros’s comments, see Needell, “Percepções,” 11–13. 33.  On colonial and national-era Catholicism among Afro-Brazilians, see, e.g., Karasch, Slave Life, 83–87, 243, 247, 249, 257–59; Mulvey, “Slave Confraternities,” passim, and “Black Brothers and Sisters,” passim, esp. 270; and Souza, Reis negros no Brasil escravista, 179–208, passim. On colonial racial categories and institutions, see previous citations in note 33; and Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces, 6–8, 22–23, 98, and passim. On the Constitution and libertos, see Constituição politica, Titulo 2o, Art. 6; Titulo 4o, Cap. VI, Arts. 91; 92; 94, II; and 95. 34.  Regarding the church, see the citations in note 33 above. 35.  See the citations in note 33, as well as Karasch, Slave Life, 57, 83, 238, 280, 282–83; Mulvey, “Black Brothers and Sisters,” 256–57, 259, 265, 267; see also Kiddy, “Who Is the King of Congo?,” 157–58, 160, 163–68; and Melo, “As confrarias,” 108–9. 36.  See the descriptions in the references cited in notes 33 and 35 and compare them with, e.g., Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 91–93 (or the descriptions in the periodical references to street demonstrations in the following chapters). Cf. Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 124–29, esp. 126–29. Alonso explicitly denies Catholic religious impact on the movement’s techniques, which she argues, without citing evidence, borrowed from the abolitionists of Cuba and Puerto Rico in Madrid. Yet the ubiquitous quality of Afro-Brazilian Catholic religiosity seems clear enough in Abreu’s analysis of popular culture and religiosity in Rio’s streets, for example; see note 37 below. 37.  See Abreu, O império do divino, 34–36, 41, 78–80, 92–93, 102–5, 198– 99, 268–70, 279–82, 284–86, 304–5.

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38.  On Afro-Brazilian work and residence, see the discussion of the five parishes above in the text and particularly the issue of pequena África. For Afro-Brazilian churches, see Karasch, Slave Life, 82–88. 39.  On Afro-Brazilian religion, churches, etc., near the Campo de Santana, see Karasch, Slave Life, 82–88; and Abreu, O império do divino, 71, 78–79, 103–4, 137–40, 176, 182, 185, 198, 268–78. On Glaziou and this initial era of urban reform, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 32, 164, 251n76; on pequena África, see the text above; Abreu, O império do divino, as cited here in note 39; and Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 269–79; cf. Faria, “Identidade e comunidade,” 144–46. For the 1872 figures, see Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 276. 40.  See Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 303–4; on the collapse and conflation of the distinctions between free and “white,” see note 27 above. For the speech, see Andrade Figueira, quoted in Needell, “Percepções,” 10–11. 41.  For the demography, see Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 368, 373, 392. Note that the 1884 figures in the text include all parishes; the 1849 and 1872 figures include only the urban parishes, excluding the more agricultural parishes. If all parishes were counted for 1849 and 1872, the figures would be 110,602 and 48,939, respectively; thus, the 1884 figure is probably too high. The 1849 figure for the urban parishes is 71% of the total for the city, while the 1872 figure for the urban parishes is 76% of the total, an increase probably reflecting the ongoing sale of the farming slaves to the hinterland’s plantations. If one assumes another 5% increase for 1884 (i.e., to 81%) for the urban parishes alone, the total for the urban parishes would be 26,003. For the mingling that had been going on since the colonial era, see the citations in note 10 above; for the latter part of the century, see, e.g., the discussion of pequena África in 1872 in Cruz, “Tradições negras, 276; the discussion in Silva, Dom Obá II d’África, 75–82, 124–25; or Abreu’s discussion of the Campo de Santana region over the century’s course in O império do divino, cited in note 37 above. 42.  Africans, free and enslaved, often self-identified and were identified by others by nação into the late nineteenth century (although they were a dwindling minority of Afro-Brazilians), as shown in Silva, Dom Obá II d’África; Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 261–62; Gomes, “Reinventando as ‘nações,’” passim; Farias and Gomes, “Descobrindo mapas dos minas,” 110, 116, 118–35; Soares, “Os últimos malungos,” 174–75; and Silva, Negro na rua, 56, 71–73. On this persistence of ethnic identity even among creoles, see the congo case below in the text. 43.  See Gomes, “Para além da Casa da Tia Ciata,” 178–79; Faria, “Identidade e comunidade,” 126–28, 134–35, 138–39, 143; and the Cruz, Silva, and Abreu citations in note 41 above. 44.  Karasch, “Central African Religious Tradition,” esp. 234–39, and Slave Life, chap. 9, esp. 254–72, 284. 45.  Karasch, Slave Life, 83–84, 238, 280–84; see also Melo, “As confrarias,” 108; Faria, “Identidade e comunidade,” 134–36; and Moura, Tia Ciata, 131, 132, 144, 157. 46.  On the congo nação organizations, see, e.g., Chalhoub, Machado de Assis, 242–54, “Politics of Silence,” 73–76, and “Solidariedade e liberdade,” 225–36;

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Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 19–20; Jesus, Visões da monarquia, 113–14; and Jesus and Lacerda, “Dinâmica associative,” 129–34. 47.  Estatutos da Sociedade de B. de Nação Congo P. da Sociedade de R. e S. Benedicto, Cap. 1, in Consulta do Conselho de Estado, Sociedade, 7–5–1862, AN: Conselho de Estado (1R) Cx. 531, doc. 46. On mutual aid societies, particularly among Afro-Brazilians in nineteenth-century Rio, see Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 19–20, 86–88, 91–104, 106–14. 48.  Estatutos da Sociedade de B. de Nação Congo P. da Sociedade de R. e S. Benedicto, Cap. 1, in Consulta do Conselho de Estado, Sociedade, 7–5–1862, AN: Conselho de Estado (1R) Cx. 531, doc. 46; Cap. 2, Arts. 9, 10; Cap. 15, Art. 60. On the signatures, see the signature page following and affirming the statutes, dated 6 February 1861. On Dias’s use of an avogo, see the page submitting the statutes to the imperial government, the second page after the signature page. Note that Dias did sign the signature page and his signature is clearly distinct from that made by his legal representative. 49.  On Dias’s business, see AL, 1858–1861. On the signatures, see the congo president’s signature on the page cited in note 48 above and the tinker’s signature in Miguel Antônio Dias to Jacques Saveli, Rio, 1 October 1857, AN: Galeria A, Cx. 944, no. 390, Ano 1859, ZW CODES/DJE. The congo president’s death is suggested by Antônio Joaquim de Azevedo, Miguel Antônio Dias, AN: Juizio de Orfãos e Ausentes, Galeria A, Cx. 3875, no. 13, Ano 1861, 2L CODES/DJE (in which a Miguel Antônio Dias agrees to serve as witness and executor for the late Azevedo [a congo and freedman] in the associated paperwork). Dias’s death before resolution of the case is noted in associated correspondence dated 28 May 1864; see José Francisco Ribeiro to Juiz de Orfãos, Rio, 28 May 1864, in Antônio Joaquim de Azevedo, Miguel Antônio Dias, AN: Juizio de Orfãos e Ausentes, Galeria A, Cx. 3875, no. 13, Ano 1861, 2L CODES/DJE. The death of a Miguel Antônio Dias (listed as a free African) is dated 25 January 1864 in JC, 27 January 1864, 1. For the tinker’s presence among the living, see the signature in Miguel Antônio Dias, Outorgante; Maria José de Araujo, Outorgando/a, AN: venda, Ofício de Notas, Rio de Janeiro, 5–5H, Livro 2, Folha 22, 22 December 1874, no. 531. 50.  On Dias’s sale of his stock, see JC, 1 May 1860, 2; 5 May 1860, 3; 6 July 1860, 5; 7 July 1860, 4. On Dias’s purchase of a home and his ownership of it in the early 1870s, see the last reference in note 49 above. 51.  Chalhoub, Machado de Assis, 249. 52.  On the Council of State, see Needell, Party of Order, 54, 80, 101–2, 179, 230; on its members in the 1860s, see [Javarí], Organizaçôes e programas ministeriais, 426–27. 53.  See José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, Visconde de Sapucahy, Marques de Olinda, “Sobre o requerimento . . . Sociedade Beneficente da Nação Congo,” in Consulta do Conselho de Estado, Sociedade, 7–5–1862, AN: Conselho de Estado (1R) Cx. 531, doc. 46. On Olinda, see Needell, Party of Order, 60, 68–69, 80–95, passim, 116–23, passim, 130, 132, 201–4, passim, 217–18. On Pimenta Bueno, see ibid., 234–38, passim. 54.  On the Constitution and libertos, see note 33 above.

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55.  See Pimenta Bueno et al., “Sobre,” in Estatutos da Sociedade de B. de Nação Congo P. da Sociedade de R. e S. Benedicto, Cap. 1, in Consulta do Conselho de Estado, Sociedade, 7–5–1862, AN: Conselho de Estado (1R) Cx. 531, doc. 46, 3v, 4. 56.  For Olinda, see ibid., 6; for Pimenta Bueno, see ibid., the one-page addendum to the consultation, responding to Olinda, beginning with “Pra. tirar-se a limpo.” 57.  Ibid. 58.  Pereira, JC, 13 August 1871, 3. 59.  Barman, Brazil, chaps. 3, 5–7, passim; Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 2 and 3, esp. 34–43, 59–72, passim, 76, 107; Constituição politica, Titulo 3, Art. 11; Titulo 5, Art. 101, VI. 60.  Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 3 and 4, esp. 40–46, 52–80, passim, 102– 5, 108–11, 123–38, 167–69. Good case studies for politics at the local level include Bieber, Power, Patronage, and Political Violence; and Mosher, Political Struggle, Ideology, and State Building (for the Minas Gerais hinterland and for Recife, respectively); see also Graham, Patronage and Politics, where the author provides a general anthropology of local electoral activity but eschews ideology altogether. 61.  Needell, Party of Order, 64, 99–100, 176–77. 62.  The fourth power derived from the first emperor’s interest in ensuring his constitutional dominance; it was drawn from the constitutional thought of Benjamin Constant. See ibid., 34. On the emperor’s constitutional attributes and councils, see Constituição politica, Titulo 5, Caps. I, II, VI, VII. On the evolution of the Chamber’s role vis-à-vis the cabinet, see Needell, Party of Order, 34–43, passim, 72, 76, 106–7. On the role of the Chamber during the Regency, see ibid., chap. 2, and the Chamber’s constitutional attributes regarding the regents in Constituição politica, Titulo 4, Cap. V, Art. 123. Note that the latter refers to both the Chamber and the Senate (the General Assembly), not the Chamber alone. However, as indicated in Needell, Party of Order, 35–37, the Chamber dominated at the time, doubtless as the more representative of the two, given its being the seat of the liberal opposition that had precipitated the abdication crisis and was very much the parliamentary focus of direction (to the extent that anyone was). 63.  See the reference to the monarch’s constitutional attributes in note 62 above. 64.  See Barman, Citizen Emperor, chaps. 1–4; Needell, Party of Order, 31–32, 80–83, 91–95, 108–16, 177–80, passim; Carvalho, D. Pedro II, 181; and Miranda, “Liberal Quinquennium.” 65.  Needell, Party of Order, chap. 5, passim, esp. 168, 172–75, 180–95, 200– 232, 238–66. 66.  For this paragraph and the next seven, see ibid., chap. 6, esp. 214–15, 220–27, 233–71, passim. Note that the interpretation of 1871 here and below in the text has been dismissed or ignored by some recent scholarship touching on the issues. However, none has done so by addressing the evidence and the reasoning derived from it, that is, two chapters based on a close reading of nearly thirty pages of largely archival or other contemporary sources; thus, the burden of proof still lies with these colleagues. See, e.g., Chalhoub, “Os Conservadores,” 317–16 (cf.

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Needell, “Resposta a Sidney Chalhoub,” 291–301); Salles, E o vale era o escravo, 113n20, 133n12; and Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 45–52. 67.  For Paulino, see Needell, Party of Order, 171, 178, 204–5, 223–26, 231–32. 68.  For Paranhos, see ibid., 157–64, 170–74, 206, 214, 226–29, 236–37, 246, 250–54, 269–71. 69.  For this paragraph and the next seven, see ibid., chap. 7. See also the comment on more recent scholarship in note 66 above. 70.  For Cotegipe, see ibid., 129, 173–75, 204, 219, 245–46, 252–53, 279–81. 71.  Ibid., chap. 7, esp. 284–303. 72.  For João Alfredo, see ibid., 269, 282, 291–92, 299. 73.  For 1871 and the monarchy’s politics, see ibid., 303–14. 74.  For the 1871 project and the dissidents’ alternative (Perdigão Malheiro’s project), see ibid., 276–78, 291, 298–99, 309–12. 75.  For the critical vote, see ibid., 300–301. 76.  Duque-Estrada, JC, 30 September 1871, 3–4 [20 July 1871]. On the issue of the divide between the sociopolitical elite and the imperial state in regard to enforcement of the law, see the discussion comparing enforcement of the 1850 law ending the African slave trade and the failed enforcement of the 1871 law in Needell, Party of Order, 312–14. 77.  For the statistics noted, see Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 284. On the slaveholders’ perspective on slavery’s future in the 1870s, the traditional position in the historiography was that the slaveholders were faced with a steady decline in slaves’ numbers, however extended over many years. See, e.g., the Stein, Slenes, and Needell citations in note 24 above. Indeed, Slenes (“Demography and Economics,” 234–36, 248) made it clear that despite its apparent irrationality, the slaveholders continued to purchase people in the 1870s without apparent concern for the morrow. Salles’s new analysis, as indicated above in the text and in note 24, at least in demographic and economic terms, may explain the rationality of the slaveholders’ actions. As noted earlier, he argues, first, that the stable management of midcentury plantation slavery, particularly in the coffee region, involving the purchase of more girls and women, led to a slow but clear rise in natural reproduction (rather than the atrocious combination of rapid mortality and cheap purchase traditional over the centuries of the Atlantic slave trade). That, along with access to northeastern captives being sold out of a region in decline, as well as the legal right to the slave labor of the post-1871 “freeborn” slaves’ children, led to confidence in a stable, legal source of captive labor for at least twenty years. See Salles, E o vale era o escravo, 169–71, 195–207, 262–66, esp. Quadro 13. As Salles argues, “in 1884 . . . the slaveholders would be able to count upon . . . a demographically stable labor force for a future period not less than 20 years” (265). Chapter 2 1.  On the Rio Branco Law, see Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 305– 9. On enforcement and abuse, see Needell, Party of Order, 303, 313–14; Miguel Dias to Joaquim Nabuco, Rio de Janeiro, 13 May 1891, AJN: CPp29 doc. 697;

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and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 107, and “A escravidão,” 271; see also Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 392. 2.  On the post-1871 plantation evidence, see Camaragibe to João Alfredo, Camaragibe, 28 March 1871, AJA; and Albino Je. Barbosa de Oliva. to José T. Nabuco de Araujo, Faz. do Rio das Pedras, 13 February 1873, IHGB: Col. Nabuco de Araújo, 364/86; on 1871 fears, see Needell, Party of Order, 299, 309; on 1870s planters’ national slave trade and economic environment appraisal, see, e.g., the major speeches in Congresso Agricola, 54–66, 69–79, 185–90, 211–15, 230–31, 233–39. For the traditional sense of these matters, see Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 128–29, 132, 140–47, 167–69, 207–14, 235–40, 244–50, 261–62; and Colson, “Destruction of a Revolution,” chap. 3, passim, particularly 92–103; but cf. Salles, E o valle, as cited in Chap. 1, notes 24 and 77. 3.  See Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 3, 6, 7, passim. 4.  Ibid., chap. 7, passim; Carvalho, D. Pedro II, 186, 189–90. On Paulino, see Needell, Party of Order, 171, 178, 204–5, 223–26, 231–32, 252–64, passim, 286, 299–300, 308–15. The constitutional analysis critical to Paulino was his father’s (the viscount do Uruguai). On Uruguai and his work, see ibid., 229–31. The constitutional analysis is Uruguay, Ensaio sobre o direito administrativo. 5.  On the 1872 conflict and related actions, see [Paulino José Soares de Sousa], Carta aos fazendeiros e commerciantes fluminenses; Paulino, Andrade Figueira, Antonio Ferreira Viana, J. J. Lima e Silva Salvo., Isidoro Borges Monteiro, Luis Joaquim Duque Estrada Teixeira, F. Belisario Soares de Souza, “Circular castigo,” Rio, 15 February 1872, IHGB: Col. Leão Teixeira, L751 P9; José Sesinando de Avelino Penha and Joaquim José da Silva, n.l. [Circular against Teixeira Junior, 1872], IHGB: Leão Teixeira, L752 P15; cf. Baependi to Teixeira Júnior, Sta. Rosa, 25 January 1872, AN: Col. Teixeira Jr., 272. On the issues related to dissolution, see Rio Branco to emperor, Rio, 17 May 1872, AHMI: POB M165 Doc 7587; Dantas to Nabuco [de Araújo], Salvador, 11 June 1872, IHGB: Col. Nabuco de Araújo, L363 P5; and Rio Branco to the emperor, Rio, 15 June 1872, AHMI: POB M165 Doc 7587. On the emperor and Rio Branco, see, e.g., Needell, Party of Order, 303–4; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 238–39, 240, 250, 253, 261, 269. On the Northeast and patronage, see Needell, Party of Order, 13–18, 118, 163, 185, 203–4, 245, 246, 281–82, 330–331. On Cotegipe’s importance to Rio Branco in the early 1870s, see ibid., 279–81; on Cotegipe’s provincial dominance, see, e.g., Antonio Candido da Cruz Machado to João Alfredo, Salvador, 21 April 1875, AHMI: João Alfredo, uncat.; same to same, Salvador, 2 May 1874, ibid.; same to same, n.l., n.d. [probably Salvador, May 1874], ibid.; and Rebouças, Diário, 275–77. 6.  On parliamentary legitimacy and electoral reform before 1871, see Needell, Party of Order, 76, 112, 184–89, 191–96, 263–64; on the 1870s reforms, see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 248–51, 270, 273; and cf. Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 3:256–57, 422–39. See also emperor to Rio Branco, Petropolis, 24 April 1873, and same to same, 28 April 1873, Petropolis, AHI: Col. Visconde do Rio Branco, 1338, vol. 3, pt. 2, nos. 42 and 43. On Rio Branco’s differences with Cotegipe and a vote of confidence, see Rio Branco to emperor, Rio, 25 May 1874, AHMI: POB, M170 Doc 7816; yet cf. Cotegipe to Rio Branco, Salvador, 7 December 1874, AHI:

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L38 M1 P1; and João Ferreira de Moura to Saraiva, Carapiá, 20 December 1877, AN: 66I P29 anto. Cx. 65. 7. Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 3:364–87; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 253–58, 270–71. 8.  Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 1:255–67; Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, 27–31, 69–70; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 269; Schulz, Financial Crisis of Abolition, chap. 3, passim; Needell, “State and Development,” 86–90; Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution, 38–39, 188–94, esp. 193. On Mauá, see Needell, Party of Order, 202–3. 9.  Barman, Citizen Emperor, 269, 270. 10.  Alvaro Paulino Soares de Sousa, “Tres brasileiros illustres,” 69–70, IHGB; Paulino J. S. de Souza to Rio Branco, Val de Palmas, 28 August 1879, AHI: L321 M2. 11.  Barman, Citizen Emperor, 270, 285–86, 288; João Ferreira de Moura to Saraiva, Carapiá, 20 July 1877, AN: 66I P29 ant. Cx. 65; Nabuco de Araújo to Saraiva, [Rio], 26 June 1870, IHGB: Col. Nabuco de Araújo, L 296 D 14; João Alfredo to Cotegipe, Recife, 1 January 1876 [typescript of original], AJA: CE.000.013a–c; Rodolpho Dantas to Rui Barbosa, n.l., 17 July 1877, ARB: 482; J. M. da Silva Paranhos [filho] to Penedo, Liverpool, 3 November 1877, AHI: L 9052.2.8. 12.  On the emperor’s position, see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 251–53, 270–71, 273, 286, 288; on the electoral reform legislation and views from both parties over time, see Graham, Patronage and Politics, 180–206. Cf. Carvalho, D. Pedro II, chap. 23. 13.  On the Liberal chieftains, see Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 3:541–45; but cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 288; see also Silva, Memorias, 2:192–93, on Sinimbu and the reform discussions of 1878–1879. 14.  Silva, Memorias, 2:192–93; Graham, Patronage and Politics, 192–96. 15.  On the origins and representative quality of the congresses (in terms of the elite), see Carvalho, “Introdução,” v–ix, esp. vi–vii; and Congresso agricola, 1–2. On the great concerns, see the reference in note 2 above. On later references to 1871 in the congress, see, e.g., Moraes “A escravidão,” 272; and Toplin, Abolition of Slavery in Brazil, 59–60. On the issue of the slave population and its perception in the 1870s, see Chap. 1, notes 24 and 77. 16.  On the Liberals’ programs, 1878–1884, see [Javarí], Organizaçôes e programas ministeriais, 177–210, passim. Note that the en passant inclusion, under the Paranaguá cabinet, of emancipation and other Liberal reform faction issues in 1883 was very much the exception that proved the rule. Its true significance will be discussed in Chap. 3, where its lack of traction is made clear. The argument for emancipation’s early significance is made by Otoni, Autobiografia, 205–7, and suggested by Silva, Memorias, 2:185. Otoni states explicitly that the emperor called upon the Liberals with abolition in mind. See also, e.g., Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 135–39, but cf. 145–47, 163, and Toplin, Abolition of Slavery in Brazil, 61–62, 81, both of whom suggest the significance of abolition in parliament from 1878 on. Alonso’s understanding of imperial parliamentary politics and their transformation over time often differs dramatically from mine. On this question,

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for instance, see Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 119, 120–21; more generally, see, e.g., 156–60, 178, 201, 277, 293. 17.  On the emergence of the new Liberal opposition, see Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 3:116–34; on the Manifesto of 1869, see ibid., 3:145–46; on its significance, see ibid., 3:146–50. See also Needell, Party of Order, 240–45. 18.  Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 3:145–50. 19.  Ibid., 3:146–50; Needell, Party of Order, chap. 5, pt. 4, esp. 201, 203–4, 207–17. The key idea of shifts in material conditions being critical to the advance of abolitionism was pioneered by Costa, Da senzala à colônia (see, e.g., xxxvii– xxxviii or 342–43) and is clearly present in such subsequent classics as Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, and Bergstresser, “The Movement.” It constitutes one of the advances of the classical Marxist era in the study of abolitionism; see Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism,”233–38, esp. 234. 20.  Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 2:72–76, 3:146–50; Needell, Party of Order, 209–21; see also Carvalho, “Radicalismo e republicanism,” 19–48; and cf. Barbosa, “A política.” Alonso, Flores, votos e balas (68, 89–94, and passim), and Costa, Da senzala à colônia (393), argue for the beginnings of abolitionism in the 1860s and 1870s, respectively. The analysis here, focusing on the movement (rather than ideas alone) in Rio and the flow and interaction of ideas and organization leading up to 1888, dates the Abolitionist movement from 1879, as did its leader, Nabuco. Cf. Carvalho, D. Pedro II, 186, 190. See note 22 below. 21.  Sinimbu, in [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 177–78; Falas do trono, 449–50. Note that the speech to the Chamber mentions electoral reform alone and adherence to the emperor’s speech, which referred to the economic crisis as well. 22.  Sodré, Jornal do Commercio (henceforth, JC), 6 March 1879, 1; Nabuco, JC, 23 March 1879, 1. While the Gazeta de Noticias is alleged in the literature to have promoted the abolitionism in both speeches at the time, one finds nothing in the relevant March issues (cf. Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 13). Nor does the archived contemporary correspondence or Rebouças’s Diário note anything. Rather, one imagines that the significance given both speeches afterward derives from later developments rather than immediate response. For the later appreciation of the speeches’ significance by contemporaries, see, e.g., Nabuco, Minha formação, 226, 230–31; Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 13; and Verissimo, André Rebouças, 199. The explanation seems obvious: at the time, both reformists were speaking generally about the distance between the administration and the reformist agenda and urging the cabinet to close that gap. Neither speaker, in fact, focused upon the plight of the slaves alone; it was only one of many issues. Nonetheless, Nabuco may well have dated the movement from 1879 because that is when an additional reform to slavery was championed in parliament again for the first time since 1871. The movement, in organizational terms, dates from 1880; it cannot be said to have been called for in 1879. The explicit call for a movement occurs in Nabuco’s 1880 speeches, to be discussed below. See also Nabuco, in Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 12–13. 23.  Revista Illustrada (henceforth, RI) nos. 189, 205 (1880); Rio News (henceforth, RN) 5 January 1880, 2; Bergstresser, “The Movement,” 18–22; Graham,

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“The Vintem Riot,” 431–49. Both Bergstresser and Graham see the antecedents to Abolitionism in the Vintém Revolt, as does Needell, “O chamado às armas.” 24.  See note 23 above and Silva, Memorias, 2:194, 204–7; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 290; and Graham, Patronage and Politics, 196. Patrocínio was at the heart of the revolt’s organization. See Patrocínio, “Atas de reuniões . . . 1880,” BNSM: I-05, 24, 096. 25.  Silva, Memorias, 2:201, 206–12; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 189–90; Graham, Patronage and Politics, 192–96. 26.  On Saraiva, see Afonso Celso, Oito anos de parlamento, 36–38; and Silva, Memorias, 2:207, 212; cf. Sisson, Galeria dos brazileiros ilustres, 1:47–56; Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, 2:165–86; and Pinho, “Infancia e mocidade,” 3–54. On the program, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 185–87. 27.  On the evidence, see notes 22 and 23 above. On Sinimbu and Saraiva and the political milieu, see, e.g., the Nabuco to Penedo correspondence, Rio, 22 January 1879 to 8 May 1880, in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:30–38, passim, esp. 31, 32, 35, 37. Note the complete lack in all of Nabuco’s published and archived correspondence of any mention of organizing or organized Abolitionism in this era. See the similar lack in Rebouças, Diário: his first mention is in ibid., 21 May 1880. 28.  On the electoral reform and attitudes toward inclusion and exclusion, see Graham, Patronage and Politics, 192–206. On voting and influences before, see ibid., chaps. 1–6, passim; and Needell, Party of Order, 52–63, passim, 67–70, 98– 100, 195–99, passim, 209–18, passim. 29.  See Adamo, “Broken Promise,” 4–7; Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 29, 34, 69–71, 76–82; and Frank, Dutra’s World, 58, 68–69, 75, 84, 86–91. 30.  Much of this was explicit in the propaganda of the Abolitionist leaders. In regard to the general urban middle class and Abolitionism, see Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 420–59, passim; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 143, 147, 210; Bergstresser, “The Movement,” chap. 3, esp. 51–55, 61–76, 78–79, 87–90; and Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, 59, 61, 62–68, 87, 119–30. See also Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 188–92. 31.  Santos, Os republicanos paulistas; Boehrer, Da monarchia à república; Love, São Paulo, 102–13; Cano, Raízes da concentração industrial, chap. 1, pt. 1, passim; Morse, From Community to Metropolis, chaps. 10–14, passim; Barman and Barman, “Role of the Law Graduate,” 430, 438; Carvalho, “A composição social,” 8–9, 14–17; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 240–44; Costa, Brazilian Empire, 72–73, 214–15, 226–29. The more recent approach and research are synthesized and referenced by Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” 405–18. 32.  See note 30 above; and Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization, 171, 175–76. 33.  See Bergstresser, “The Movement,” chap. 5. Yet even she sees the movement as something apart from “the Negro”; see, e.g., 141–43, and note the lack of primary sources and the apparent assumption that the middle class was essentially white. She does emphasize the Abolitionist leadership’s positive evaluation of Afro-Brazilian potential (144–50), but even that is sometimes ambivalent. Cf. her citations of Nabuco’s position on the equality and the necessity of integration of

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the “Negro” and miscegenation as early as 1881 (146–48). Still, note esp. 161–63, where she is ambivalent and dubious in her logic as to the significance of racial solidarity and self-identity in Abolitionist rhetoric; and after explicitly denying the potential for racial solidarity and self-identity among the Afro-Brazilian middle-class, she suggests the rhetoric was for the masses alone, going on to say, “The extent of such a proletarian black constituency and its importance in the campaign, however, can be assessed only inferentially on the basis of present evidence” (161–62). She allows that the rhetoric was “designed to activate lower-class elements” (163) but concludes “that the constituency . . . and its effectual role in the campaign remain questions to be answered in subsequent research.” This is part of the present study’s mission. In Moraes and Duque-Estrada, the implicit quality of AfroBrazilian participation has to do with their pointing to the masses in class rather than racial terms; see, e.g., Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 43, 52, 147; and Duque-Estrada, 49, 92–93, 148, 159. One of the pioneering studies on the subject is the short piece on “Negro” participation in the movement by Porter, “The Negro in the Brazilian Abolition Movement,” but she identifies mostly Abolitionists in leadership roles. On the classic studies’ dismissal of Afro-Brazilians in the movement, see, e.g., Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 425, 426–28 (yet cf. 426, 429, 430, 442, where she acknowledges Afro-Brazilian adherence to the movement toward the end); and Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 143–44. Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, stands apart from the other pioneers by affirming Afro-Brazilian mass participation, if only in passing, as part of his attempt at making his racial and class argument (66, 69–72). For a recent analysis of the historiography, see Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism” (2010). Since then there have been other contributions. Mattos and Santos, in “Abolicionismo” (19–21), provide a useful synthesis of the classics; for current trends and the secondary literature, see esp. the text and citations in Castro, “Raça e cidadania,” and Machado, “Teremos grandes desastres.” Alonso’s attention to the issue is only en passant; see, e.g., Flores, votos e balas, 131–48, passim, where she holds to Viotti da Costa’s (and Conrad’s) position regarding race and popular mobilization, i.e., that Afro-Brazilian participation was significant only toward the movement’s end. 34.  For Rebouças’s career, see Verissimo, André Rebouças; and Juca, “André Rebouças.” Biographical and political detail on his father, Antônio Pereira Rebouças, is in Spitzer, Lives in Between; and particularly Grinberg, O fiador dos brasileiros. There are a number of studies of one aspect or another of Rebouças’s career; among the most recent and capable is Rezende de Carvalho, O quinto século. 35.  See sources in note 34 above, esp. Rebouças, Diário, 160, 173, 194–204. Alonso’s generalizing analysis of Rebouças’s racial sense differs from the author’s; see Flores, votos e balas, 12–30, passim, but cf. Rebouças, Diário, chaps. 4–5, passim. Spitzer emphasizes a great deal of felt prejudice, but none of his Diário citations support Rebouças’s alleged perception of explicit racial motivation or perception except that of 20 September 1871 (196). Cf. Verissimo, André Rebouças, 71–74 (which Spitzer cites in his support!). The analysis here is strengthened by the fact that Rebouças was hardly oblivious to racism—he simply did not record it in every instance where later scholars have done—and he was there, of course.

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See, for example, Rebouças’s sense of racism as relayed to us in Verissimo, André Rebouças, 185, and in Rebouças, Diário, 196, both of which demonstrate that Rebouças did register racism when he experienced it. In the United States, this sensitivity to the issue is, for obvious reasons, clearer still; note, as well, Rebouças’s own racial comments regarding African Americans of the working class in Diário, 245, 251–53, passim. A more plausible reason, other than racism, for Rebouças’s difficulties professionally in the 1875–1878 period was Cotegipe’s powerful position in the cabinet: aside from protecting his own network of favorites, Cotegipe was an old enemy of Rebouças’s father from their earlier Bahia days (see Diário, 13, 276, and passim). 36.  Rebouças, Diário, 283–84, 286. Note that Rebouças used “emancipation” and “abolition” interchangeably at this time. 37.  Ibid., 283–88, passim. 38.  Regarding continued professional interests after 1880, for example, over 1883–1884, one notes more than a dozen infrastructural projects with which Rebouças was closely involved, mostly railroads, port works, and urban infrastructure (see the manuscript diaries in the IHGB, cited below). On the particular reasons for Rebouças’s failing business efforts in the 1870s, see note 35 above, as well as the reference to Cotegipe there. For his early professional years, see also Rebouças, Diário, chaps. 4–5, 278; cf. Verissimo, André Rebouças, chaps. 3–5, esp. 71–73. 39.  Quotation from JC, 19 May 1880, 1. For the rest, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 185–87; JC, 23 April 1880, 1; 19 May 1880, 1. 40.  On Nabuco de Araújo, see Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, particularly vol. 3, chaps. 1–5; and Needell, Party of Order, 117, 164, 173–75, 180–83, 194, 200, 206–7, 216–21, 236–38, 246, 252–53, 301. On Nabuco, a select list of biographies includes Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco; Viana Filho, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco; Alonso, Joaquim Nabuco; and Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo; his autobiography is titled Minha formação. There are two recent anthologies derived from two conferences commemorating the centenary of his death as well; see Albuquerque, Joaquim Nabuco e Wisconsin; and Jackson, Conferências sobre Joaquim Nabuco. 41.  See Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, pt. 1, and Minha formação, chaps. 1, 4, 6, 9, 14; on elite education, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, chap. 2, pt. 1. On Nabuco de Araújo’s efforts on behalf of Nabuco’s political career, see Vila Bela to Nabuco de Araujo, Recife, 26 October 1871, IHGB: Col. Nabuco de Araújo, 364/7; same to same, 11 June 1872, n.l., ibid.; same to same, Recife, 16 August 1876, ibid.; and Nabuco de Araújo to Barão de Binque, Rio, 8 October 1876, ibid., L3612 P10. On Nabuco’s perspective, see Nabuco to Barros Pimentel, Rio, 5 October 1872, AJN: CAp1 doc. 2; Nabuco to Penedo, São Vicente, 7 April 1878, AHI: Penedo/Nabuco; Nabuco to Salvador de Mendonça, Rio, 4 June 1878, AJN: CAp1 doc. 12; and Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 8 June 1878, BNSM: 63, 03, 005, no. 25. On Nabuco’s early radicalism, see, e.g., Nabuco, Minha formação, 6–8, chap. 3; Barão de Muritiba to José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Rio, 30 January 1870, AHI: visconde do Rio Branco, L338 v. 2, no. 56; Romano de Decadencia [pseud. of Joaquim Nabuco], “O povo,” 39; Nabuco, “A escravidão”; and

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Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, 35–37. On his first, early commitment to the slaves, see Nabuco, Minha formação, 223–25. 42.  See Barros Pimentel to Nabuco, Aracaju, 7 September 1871, AJN: CAp1 doc. 12; Nabuco, Um estadista do imperio, vol. 3, bk. 5, chaps.4–8; bk. 6, chaps. 3, 7, passim; Needell, “A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 160–63; and Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, 57–58. The election was fixed by the Barão de Vila Bela, Nabuco de Araújo’s loyal colleague in pernambucano politics (see correspondence cited in note 41 above). On the election, see Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, 60–61; cf. Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, 65–66. 43.  On Nabuco’s initial response to politics, see Nabuco to Penedo, 8 June 1878, cited in note 41 above; and those following in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:29–36, passim. The British slaveholding case concerned the labor associated with the São João del Rei mines, owned by a British firm. Nabuco successfully contested the legality of the slaveholding in parliament, and his efforts won him local and international acclaim between late 1879 and early 1880. See, e.g., RN, 15 March 1880, 1; Campbell, “‘Tinha apenas’”; and Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, 75–77. Bethell cites a letter from Nabuco to a British abolitionist, making clear Nabuco’s commitment to “emancipation” as early as 8 January 1880. However, no similar commitment at that time was made in public or in any other private correspondence (archived or published) found. Thus, one assumes that it was the Vintém Revolt and, most important, its aftermath and the consequent change of cabinet that tipped the balance toward calling for a movement. On the initial assessment for success, see the speech of 30 August below and Nabuco, Minha formação, 226. 44.  Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, chap. 13, esp. 358–59, 382; Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 353–66; Orico, O tigre, 21–70, passim; Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, chap. 1, esp. 7–13. 45.  See citations in note 44 above. Magalhães Júnior has better dating. On the issue of Patrocínio’s courtship, status, and marriage, see Orico, O tigre, 60–65. 46.  Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 363–64; Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, chaps. 3–5, passim, esp. 41–42. 47.  On Patrocínio’s early abolitionism and racial solidarity, see Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 354–55; and on these and his early politics, Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, chaps. 2–5, passim. On Rio’s bohemians, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, chap. 6, pt. 6; Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 367–70; and Netto, A conquista (a roman à clef; Coelho Neto, a great littérateur of the belle époque in Rio, was one of Patrocínio’s followers as a provincial youth come to Rio). 48.  Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 286–88, 359, 364, 365, 371; Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, 9, 10; Silva, Dom Obá II d’África, 174; Abreu, Império do divino, 33–46. The link between Patrocínio and the irmandade was Israel Soares, a freedman and president of the Caixa Emancipadora José do Patrocínio (Emiliano de Sena, Patrocínio’s father-in-law, was treasurer). Soares was instrumental in the underground railroad and quilombos discussed later in this study. See Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 186–88; and Silva, “Resistência negra e formação do underground abolicionista,” 5–15. 49.  Souza, “Conferencia realizada no Theatro de S. Luiz.” Alonso (Flores, votos e balas, 29–31) emphasizes Vicente de Sousa’s association with Patrocínio

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and Rebouças at this time, but in 1879 this had yet to happen. Indeed, the 1879 conferência’s focus was not Abolitionism, as is argued in the text here; rather, it was a socialist, republican attack on the monarchy and so forth, and no reference to the movement—yet to begin, after all—was made. For a better idea of the Associação Tipográfa Fluminense’s commitment to emancipation and then to the Abolitionist movement, see Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 157–60, particularly his analysis of the 1879 conferência. Yet Mattos, too, suggests (158–59) that this speech was part of the movement. Again, given the speech’s focus, together with the lack at that point of any Abolitionist movement organization per se, this is anachronistic; the meeting was indeed pioneering in its mention of abolitionism, but not part of an organized movement. Recent research on Rio’s organized labor and Abolitionism that is useful here includes Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 20–21, 40–55, 61–68, 75–79, 104, 106–14, 134, 147–49, esp. 149–63, 200–201, 212–14; Farias, “Mercado em greve,” 1–12; Jesus and Lacerda, “Dinâmica associative no século xix,” 137, 139; Cruz, “Tradições negras, 244–50, 253–78, passim; Terra, “Hierarquiazação e segmentação,” 73–75; Costa, “Escravizados moralmente lutam,” 89–110; and Arantes, “Pretos, brancos, amarelos e vermelhos,” 133–36. 50.  For the 1879 conferência, see Souza in note 49 above. On Souza’s location, see AL, 1879. On his Associação Central Emancipadora position, see AL, 1881, and Rebouças, Diário, 290, as well as the reference to 25 July in Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 23. On his background and abolitionism, see Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 116, 157–60. See also Fausto, Trabalho urbano, 47n12; and Needell “Revolta contra Vacina,” 255n41. 51.  Verissimo (André Rebouças, 197) notes that Rebouças’s abolitionist actions dated from 1867 but that Rebouças himself placed Dias’s actions as earlier still; this, however, may be an error in interpretation: see note 57 below. See also Rebouças, Diário, 370. Regarding relations with Patrocínio, Dias was one of those select comrades entrusted with the Gazeta da Tarde in Patrocínio’s absence in November 1883; see Gazeta da Tarde (henceforth, GT), 13 November 1883, 1. On Dias in the Associação Central Emancipadora, see AL, 1882; for Dias in the Confederação Abolicionista, see Patrocínio and Rebouças, Manifesto da Confederação Abolicionista,” 21. On Dias’s quilombo in Catumbi, see, e.g., Silva, As camellias do Leblon, 32. On Dias’s mention in the early histories, see, e.g., Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 34. 52.  On Dias’s bureaucratic position, see AL, 1868–1886. On its loss, see Dias to Joaquim Nabuco, Rio, 29 January 1887, AJN: CP331p doc. 6745, and note his name’s absence from AL’s list for the Estrada Dom Pedro II employees in 1887 and 1888. For his residences, see AL, 1868–1886. The indirect evidence for his Abolitionist role will be repeatedly noted in the pages to follow. On the ethnic and cultural significance of his residential and work locations, see, e.g., Abreu, Império do divino, 71–79, passim, 102–5; and Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 268–78. 53.  On the first Dias’s socioeconomic standing, see Chap. 1 and the text below. The standing of the other two is discussed in the text and notes below. 54.  In establishing that the congo president and the tinker were two different men, one can compare their signatures and note the apparent death of the congo president in 1864 and the tinker’s survival into the 1870s. For signatures, see Chap.

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1, note 49. For the death of the congo president, see ibid. For the tinker’s situation in the 1860s and 1870s, see Chap. 1 and notes 49 and 50. For mid-nineteenthcentury Afro-Brazilian patterns, see Frank, Dutra’s World, 68–91, esp. 86–91. 55.  The tinker came to live on the Rua do Príncipe dos Cajueiros (later the Rua Senador Pompeu); see Chap. 1, last reference in note 49. On the neighborhood, see, e.g., Silva, Dom Obá d’África, 78–85. It is the ownership of the place that is indicative of middle-class status; the neighborhood may well have been in decline then—it certainly was over the next two decades, at least as suggested by Silva’s description. 56.  See AL, 1868, for the appointment. On the Progressive League and that cabinet, see Chap. 1. On Machado de Assis and the context of his career, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 186–87, 192–93. On Machado and Zacarias, see, e.g., Magalhães Júnior, Vida e obra de Machado de Assis, vol. 2, chap. 31, esp. 9–11, 14. On Afro-Brazilian ascent into the state bureaucracy, see Frank, Dutra’s World, 107. On Dias’s correspondence, see, e.g., the reference in note 52 above; and Rebouças, Diário, 370. On Dias’s being mulato, see ibid. 57.  On Dias’s intervention (and its dating) on slave prostitution ca. 1870, see Rebouças, Diário, 370; and Verissimo, André Rebouças, 197. On 1871, and the issue of public opinion and popular support, see Needell, Party of Order, 263–65, esp. 263n110. On Rio Branco’s public and published support, see ibid., as well as 289–90, 301; and JC, 29 September 1871, 1. Rebouças merely noted the 1871 support for Rio Branco without specifying its nature in Diário, 370. The other issue is clearer. Apparently, Dias paid Salvador de Mendonça, a well-known radical and Republican at the time, to write against the slaves’ prostitution. As Rebouças notes (ibid.), the “horror ended, thanks to the delegado Miguel Tavares.” Salvador de Mendonça knew Miguel Tavares; they were both admitted to the prestigious Order of Brazilian Lawyers (Ordem dos Advogados Brasileiros) in 1871. Salvador de Mendonça not only wrote up the propaganda, he may well have published it in the first or second year of A Republica (1870), which he edited. Miguel Tavares acted in 1870 or 1871; see F. Ferraz de Macedo, Da prostitutição em geral, e em particular em relação á cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Rio: Academica, 1873), 72; and Mauricio Limeira, Nas horas mortas (Rio: n.p., 2004), 115n177. 58.  On Rebouças’s abolitionism and collaboration with Conservatives, see note 37 above. On the issue of Afro-Brazilian identity and solidarity, see Chap. 1. 59.  Miguel Dias to Joaquim Nabuco, Rio, 13 May 1891, AJN: CPp29 doc. 697. 60.  On Dias’s residences and workplace, see note 52 above. 61.  Dias’s actions will be documented in the narrative to follow as they arise. However, in support of the argument made here regarding his role, note that, e.g., in 1883, a key year for the movement’s organizations and propaganda, he appears thirteen times in Rebouças’s diary; see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 25 February, 11 April, 17 May, 7 June, 19 June, 26 June, 19 July, 27 July, 11 August, 23 August, 5 September, 29 September, 2 October, IHGB: DL 464.2, and note the nature of the occasions. In 1884–1888, his name is less in evidence, but strongly correlated again with key planning sessions, particularly those having to do with decisive public events and demonstrations. See, e.g., Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 13 January (Abolitionist Festival), 17 May (Nabuco’s public return reception), 14 July

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(Abolitionists’ role regarding Dantas’s project), 27 October and 3 December (Rio Abolitionist support for Nabuco’s key Recife election), IHGB: DL 464.3; “Diário,” 1885, 22, 24, and 26 January (public reception for Nabuco’s return to Rio), 8 March (mass demonstrations supporting Dantas’s project), 8, 10, and 11 June (Nabuco’s by-election victory celebration), IHGB: DL 464.4; “Diário,” 1886, 15 July (mass demonstrations of public response to José Mariano’s purge from the Chamber), IJN: Arquivo André Rebouças, DPp10 doc. 18; “Diário,” 1887, 14 May (military confrontation with Cotegipe), 24 September (Nabuco’s electoral triumph reception), IHGB: L464.5; Rebouças “Diário,” 1888, 1 March (public disorder and Cotegipe cabinet crisis), 3 May (mass demonstrations supporting João Alfredo at parliament’s opening), IHGB: DL 464.6. It should be noted that the author’s attention to and analysis of Dias’s role occurred subsequent to his Brazilian archival research and derives from later analysis of the notes taken then; more material may well be found in the future if one focuses on the issue in the archives. 62.  JC, 25 May 1880, 1; Rebouças, Diário, 289, 290; on press response, see, e.g., RN, 15 June 1880, 1. Note that Moraes (A campanha abolicionista, 13) claims Gazeta de Noticias support for abolition as early as March 1879, but one cannot corroborate this. 63.  On 24 July, see JC, 26 July 1880, 1; on 25 July, Rebouças, Diário, 290; and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 23; note that the Associação Central Emancipadora’s actual foundation dates from 2 August, a collaboration of Rebouças and Vicente de Sousa (Rebouças, Díario, 290); see below in the text. Also note that the 26 July edition of the Jornal do Commercio does not record the Teatro São Luís event described here, nor does Rebouças or Moraes note the Teatro Imperial conferência. The 25 July event has primacy in the movement’s history because of its official connection to the Associação. 64.  Rebouças, Diário, 290, 370n72; Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 23–25; AL, 1881–1884. On Moreira, Amaral, and Francisco Otaviano, see Blake, Diccionario bibliographico brazileiro, vols. 6, 5, and 3, respectively; for Francisco Otaviano and the Correio Mercantil, see Needell, Party of Order, 157, 211, 250. 65.  JC, 25 August 1880, 1; 27 August 1880, 1, 3; 31 August 1880, 1. See also RI, September 1880, no. 222: 2, 4–5; RN, 24 August 1880, 2. 66.  Miguel Dias to Joaquim Nabuco, Rio, 13 May 1891, AJN: CPp29 doc. 697. 67.  JC, 31 August 1880, 1; Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 18–19; JC, 3 September 1880, 1; 5 September 1880, 1; Patrocínio, Campanha abolicionista, 23–27. 68.  RN, 15 September 1880, 2; Rebouças, Diário, 291; on Associação Central Emancipadora membership, see Associação Central Emancipadora, Boletim, no. 8: 9, 10. 69.  Part of this reformism is clear in the periodicals’ privileging of Nabuco (an establishment scion, after all) over others and the emphasis on respectability in the movement’s self-coverage. See, e.g., RN, 24 September 1888, 2; 5 October 1880, 3; see the self-coverage of Abolitionists in the conferência reports, written by Rebouças for the Gazeta da Tarde (Rebouças, Diário, 290, 291 [5 September and 10 October 1880, respectively]), in Associação Central Emancipadora, Boletim, no. 8:

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16, 19. On the attempt to reach out to Saraiva and the moderate Liberal majority, see the speeches cited in notes 65 and 67 above, as well as those published after the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão banquet for Hilliard, discussed and referenced below. Nabuco’s and Rebouças’s sense of the movement as reformist is obvious in their private correspondence and published propaganda, as will be shown. Nabuco made this very clear to foreign supporters from early on; see, e.g., Nabuco to Allen, 5 June 1881, in Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 46. 70.  For the conferências and Rebouças’s role, see note 69 above. One only finds one public event hosted by the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, namely, the Hilliard banquet (see below). Patrocínio moved from the Gazeta de Noticias to the Gazeta da Tarde in July 1881, as we shall see. On the role of the press, see also Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 401; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 147; and Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, 68–69. The Anglo-American commercial and political periodical Rio News was run by United States expatriate Andrew Jackson Lamoureux, a dedicated abolitionist. On Agostini, see Sodré, A história da imprensa, 234–35, 249–52, esp. 252n144. 71.  These issues have been broached earlier; see Needell, “O chamado às armas,” 293, 301–3nn5, 19, and “Politics, Parliament, and the Penalty of the Lash,” 96n18. The historiography, however, has often argued for a division between the leaders and between the two components, parliamentary and extraparliamentary (the urban streets and the plantations). See, e.g., Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 358, 401–5, esp. 403–4; Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, 66, 72–78; and most recently, Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 122–30, passim, 144, 149, 153, 165–67, 169–70, 180–81, 198–99, 202–3, 206–7, 230–37, 290, 347; yet, cf. Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 163. Nabuco’s sense of these matters in 1900 (see Minha formação, 230–32, 233–35, 243–44) holds up well in studying the contemporary records, as will be shown below. Indeed, the unity on leadership and policy can also be glimpsed early on; see the references to Nabuco’s leadership and the August 1880 idea of a transition to freedom through serfdom, both in the Gazeta da Tarde, 9 May and 10 November 1881, i.e., before and after Patrocínio’s takeover of the daily. 72.  On the class of Abolitionists in the conferências, see, e.g., the Rebouças references in note 69 above. On Rebouças’s frustration regarding race and the Abolitionists, see Rebouças, Diário, 295 (10 March 1882). On Afro-Brazilian participation in the movement and the historiography, see note 33 above. On Nabuco’s comment on “negroes” (sic) and the movement, see Nabuco to Allen, Pernambuco [Recife], 23 January 1886, in Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 106–8. 73.  Associação Central Emancipadora, Boletim, no. 8: 17–18. Note that the speech was copied and published by Rebouças for the widest possible Abolitionist and potentially Abolitionist readership, presumably a readership that the leaders must have been sure was largely Afro-Brazilian itself, given what was being said to and about them. Note also that, aside from publication in the Associação’s regular bulletin, it was also published in the Gazeta da Tarde, 31 January 1881, 1, then under the management of the mulato Ferreira Meneses (see below).

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74.  RN, 15 June 1880, 1. In Brazilian political history and usage, the great parties and their factions derived their leadership from parliament; see Needell, Party of Order, e.g., 40–46, 208–12. Such parliamentary factions worked out and down from parliament to the provinces and the oligarchic networks and electors there. On “racial etiquette,” see Costa, Brazilian Empire, 240–42; see also Needell, “Percepções,” 7–13. Nabuco is quoted from p. 106 in the letter to Allen cited in note 72 above. In that same year, Nabuco makes it clear that Afro-Brazilians were critical to the popular mobilization of the movement; see Chap. 4. On the urban middle class and Abolitionism, see notes 30 and 32 above and the associated text. 75.  “Civilization and Progress” are values central to the analysis of urban cultural history in nineteenth-century Rio in Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque; see, e.g., 44–50, 141, 152, 176–79, 185–87. 76.  Rebouças, Diário, 291–92 (7 September, 20 September, 13 October, 17 November, 20 November). On Hilliard and Nabuco, see JC, 31 October 1880, 2; Hilliard, Politics and Pen Pictures, 381 (note that Hilliard mistakenly dates their acquaintance to 1877–1878, when Nabuco was abroad; he doubtless meant 1878–1879). On the banquet, see JC, 25 November 1880, 3; on the issue of rapprochement with the Saraiva administration, see the speeches in ibid. On the issue of foreign intervention, see JC, 6 November 1880, 1. 77.  Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 137, has pointed to the disproportionate northeastern support for Nabuco in the vote of 30 August 1880. On the votes against the interprovincial trade and its rationale, see ibid., 171–73. For the Abolitionists’ false claim of victory, see GT, 21 January 1881, 1. 78.  RN, 24 August 1880, 1; Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 83; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 150. On abolitionist organization from 1850 to the early 1880s in Brazil, see ibid., the classic account, 18–19, 27–28, 45–46, 68–69, 80–85, 93–95, 125, 127–30, 149–50; and see also more recent works, e.g., Graden, From Slavery to Freedom, 78–80, 96–97, 146–58, 162– 71, particularly 164–67; Kittleson, Practice of Politics, chap. 4; Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 38–52, 82–104, 114–16, 178; and Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, chaps. 1, 3, passim, esp. 90, 105–8, 124–33, 138, 142, 144– 51, 217–18. 79.  On the earlier history, see notes 6 and 17 above. 80.  See Needell, Party of Order, as cited in notes 6 and 17. 81.  See Graham, Patronage and Politics, chap. 7, passim. 82.  Silva, Memorias, 2:224–25; Graham, Patronage and Politics, 202. 83.  RN, 5 February 1881, 1. On Ceará, see Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 174–82, esp. 177–80 and his GT references. On Rio propaganda and conferências, see Associação Central Emancipadora, Boletim, no. 8; and Rebouças, Diário, 292–94 (2, 20, 25 January; 2, 11, 22 February; 6, 28 March; 14, 17, 24 April; 8, 11 May; 12 June; 12 August; 28 October). See also Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 91; the latter apparently refers to mid-1881 on. 84.  Patrocínio, quoted in Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 357–58; see also Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 364–65; and Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 92–109, passim. On Ferreira Meneses, see Blake, Diccionario bibliographico brazileiro, vol. 4;

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and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 26–27. The Gazeta da Tarde had moved its office from the Rua Uruguiana to the Rua do Ouvidor by 1886. 85.  Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 92. 86.  For the entire paragraph, see ibid., 91–93. 87.  The list is in ibid., 93. Note that the Caixa Libertadora José do Patrocínio was the organization linking Patrocínio to the Irmandade do Rosário through the freedman Israel Soares; see note 48 above. Miguel Antônio Dias’s participation is suggested by his prominent role in the Associação Central Emancipadora by this time. 88.  Nabuco to Penedo, Bordeaux, 27 January 1881, in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:40–41. 89.  For the paragraph before the quotation referenced in note 88, see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 8 July 1879; and same to same, Rio, 31 October 1879, ibid., 1:33– 36; for the paragraph after the quotation, see same to same, Rio, 89 May 1880, ibid., 37; and Rebouças, Diário, 291–94 (1 December 1880, 1 January 1881, 8 January 1881, 8 February 1881, and 11 May 1881). See also Nabuco, Diários, 1:252–53 (1 January to 21 May 1881). See also, e.g., GT, 7 February 1881, 1; 1, 2, and 9 May 1881, 1. 90.  Nabuco to Penedo, n.l., 11 February 1881; same to same, Rio, 26 May 1881; same to same, Rio, 8 June 1881; and the following correspondence for the year, particularly same to same, Rio, 1 October 1881, all in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:42–43, 46, 47–49, and 57–59, respectively. See also Rebouças, Diário, 294 (12 August 1881). 91.  See GT, 19 February 1881, 1; 4 May 1881, 1; 10 June 1881, 1; and 10 October 1881, 1. 92.  GT, 1 November 1881, 2; 2 November 1881, 1; Silva, Memorias, 2:224– 26; Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco no mundo, 84. On the cabinet, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 185–86, correcting Silva, who stated that only two ministers resigned. During the campaign, the Gazeta da Tarde attacked the monarchy and anti-Abolitionist cabinet intervention on 25 October 1881, 1–2; 26 October 1881, 1; 27 October 1881, 1; and 18 October 1881, 1. Note that in the propaganda there was a bitter attack against the Republican party as well, by both Patrocínio and Vicente de Sousa, both Republicans, a polemic sustained on the second page of the Gazeta da Tarde in a series of open letters, starting 12 October, because the Republican party had taken a position against the movement. Note that in Rio, despite Silva’s comments about relative calm, there was startling violence against the opposition press on 30 and 31 October, in which the Gazeta da Tarde was threatened and other papers’ offices attacked, and Patrocínio himself was threatened—all with the police standing by. See GT, 31 October 1881, 1. Note that in the text, the final numbers seated come from [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 379. 93.  Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 3 November 1881, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:59–60. 94.  Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 8 October 1881, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, no. 27; see also Nabuco to Allen, Rio, 23 October 1881, in Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 48–49.

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95.  Nabuco to Sancho de Barros Pimentel, Rio, 8 November 1881, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:61. 96.  Rebouças, Diário, 294 (1 December 1881). The quotation from O Abolicionista, 1 December 1881, is taken from Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 51n28, which excerpts the reference to Nabuco’s temporary exile. Chapter 3 1.  On Saraiva’s cabinet, see Chap. 2, note 92. For the Conservative view of Saraiva and Martinho, see Silva, Memorias, 2:208–17, 243–48, 255. For the reformers’ appraisal, see Nabuco to Penedo, London, 2 January 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:64–65; same to same, London, 9 February 1882, ibid., 1:66–67; same to same, London, 15 February 1882, AHI: Penedo-Nabuco; Joaquim Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 30 April 1882, IJN: CPp7 doc. 135; same to same, Rio, 13 May 1882, ibid., CPp7 doc. 138; GT, 24 April 1882, 1; 28 April 1882, 1; 12 June 1882, 1. 2.  On the emperor’s perspective, see Chap. 1, “The Evolution of the Emperor’s Role”; on the Conservative chieftains, see Chap. 2, “Divisions and Unity among the Conservatives,” passim; on the 1882 Conservative leadership in parliament, see Silva, Memorias, 2:253. 3.  On Paranaguá and his program, see Silva, Memorias, 2:255; and [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 200–202. On the claims of the emperor’s 1878 abolitionism, see Chap. 2, note 16, references to Otoni and Silva. On the Abolitionists’ response to the 1882 program, see Joaquim Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 15 July 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 149. Note that, given the crisis among the Liberals, Patrocínio reported a rumor that João Alfredo might be appointed (see GT, 1 July 1882, 2), something Serra discussed (see letter cited above) if Paranaguá failed. Upon Paranaguá’s ascent, Patrocínio (GT, 6 July 1882, 1), characteristically, declared himself unimpressed. He ran through the modifications that the cabinet suggested for the 1871 reform and proclaimed them unsatisfactory. He wanted to move forward toward freeing slaves rather than tinkering with a past reform. Later, he claimed that the cabinet’s position was an attempt to “channel . . . a torrent” (ibid., 17 July 1882, 1): a temporary measure. On Patrocínio’s concern with an attempt to slow or contain the movement, see ibid. Note also his threat of revolution if the emperor did not lead forward toward an effective solution. Yet Serra’s letter, quoted in the text here, suggests that Patrocínio might have been posturing to keep up the pressure; after all, Serra and Patrocínio were then working together at the Gazeta da Tarde (see text below). 4.  Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 15 July 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 149. 5.  For the perception of Abolitionism’s waning as of late 1881–early 1882, see Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 145, 163, 168–69, 182, 183; for the distinctions between the parliamentary wing and the extraparliamentary wing (the streets), see Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 99–117, 125–28. In general, the literature on the narrative from 1879 to 1883 is thin; the archives of the leaders and the press are our best sources. Unhappily, the Biblioteca Nacional’s collection of the Gazeta da Tarde lacks January–March 1882. Note that the coverage in GT, 1 April 1882, 3, of the great meeting (sessão magna) of the

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Caixa Emancipadora Joaquim Nabuco, presided over by Nicolau Moreira, with orations by Patrocínio, Vicente de Sousa, and Paula Nei (and attended by both Liberal and Conservative deputies), rather undercuts the kinds of distinctions and differences Bergstresser, Toplin, and Alonso emphasize between more establishment and more radical activists. For the archival coverage supporting this paragraph, see Nabuco to Penedo, London, 2 January 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:64–65; J. Serra to Nabuco, Novo Friburgo, 3 February [1882], IJN: CPp6 doc. 117; Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 16 April 1882, IJN: CPp7 doc. 131; Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 30 April 1882, IJN: CPp7 doc. 135; and same to same, Rio, 13 May 1882, IJN: CPp7 doc. 138. 6.  On Patrocínio, see esp. Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, chap. 13, esp. 356–57, 365, 368–72. Moraes was a journalist at the time and knew both Patrocínio and, doubtless, most of the men whom he cites. On the rest, see Serra to Nabuco, 3 February [1882], IJN: CPp6 doc. 117; Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 16 April 1882, ibid., CPp7 doc. 131; Serra to Nabuco, 30 April 1882, ibid., CPp7 doc. 135; Nabuco to Adolfo de Barros, London, 12 November 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:85–86 (which demonstrates implicitly Patrocínio’s exclusion from Abolitionism’s leadership in the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão); and Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 19 September 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 158. 7.  Ibid. 8.  See, e.g., GT, 19 June 1882, 1; 3 July 1882, 1; 6 July 1882, 1; 17 July 1882, 1; 28 August 1882; 28 September 1882, 1. 9.  Ibid., 17 July 1882, 1. 10.  On the ongoing conferências and Abolitionist association organizing, see, e.g., ibid., 1 April 1882, 3; 24 April 1882, 1; 4 May 1882, 1; 26 June 1882, 1, 3; 3 July 1882, 2; 24 July 1882, 2; 25 August 1882, 1; 26 August 1882, 1; 15 September 1882, 1; 28 September 1882, 3; 9 October 1882, 1. On the Abolitionist movement in Ceará, see “The Abolitionists’ Acephalous Triumph in 1882,” in the text below. On the paulista movement and Luís Gama, note the lack of correspondence between Nabuco, Rebouças, and Serra on these; apparently, they were very much the province of the Gazeta da Tarde activists associated with Patrocínio. One recovers the events and the individuals in the Gazeta da Tarde itself; see GT, 25 July 1882, 2; 1 August 1882, 1; 11 August 1882, 1; 25 August 1882, 1; 26 August 1882, 1; see also RI, 26 August 1882, 1; GT, 28 August 1882, 1; 29 August 1882, 1; 30 August 1882, 1. One also picks these data up in the initial historiography of the movement by participants; see, e.g., Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 47, 51, 91n1, 267–68, 317–20; and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 250–60. The list of founders includes many critical figures in both the later Rio movement and national politics, e.g., Serpa Júnior, Raúl Pompeia, Alberto Torres, et al. 11.  On Nabuco’s early 1882 ambivalence and hopes, see Nabuco to Penedo, London, 2 January 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:64–65; Serra to Nabuco, Novo Friburgo, IJN: CPp6 doc. 117; Nabuco to Gouvêa, London, 15 April 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:69–70; Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 15 July 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 149; Nabuco to Gouvêa, London, 18 June 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:72–73; Nabuco to [Gusmão] Lobo, London, 12 November 1882, ibid., 1:83–84; Nabuco to Serra, London, 17 November 1882, ibid., 1:88–89; and Nabuco to Homem de Melo,

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London, 28 November 1882, IJN: CAp3 doc. 42. On Nabuco’s new direction, see Nabuco to Rebouças, London, 6 June 1882, IJN: CAp doc. 25; Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 7 July 1882, ibid., CPp8 doc. 146; Nabuco to Penedo, Brighton, 4 October 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:73–74; Nabuco to Pedro Américo, London, 10 November 1882, ibid., 1:78–82; Nabuco to Adolfo [de Barros], London, 12 November 1882, ibid., 1:85–86; same to same, London, 17 November 1882, ibid., 1:87–88; and Nabuco to Saraiva, London, 28 November 1882, ibid., 1:89–95. 12.  Verissimo, André Rebouças, 175, notes the European trip but states that it had to do with Abolitionism and Brazilian port works; Juca, “André Rebouças,” does not mention his illness or the trip, and Resende de Carvalho does not refer to it either, although she does allude to his exhaustion and illness in 1883–1885. Rebouças, Diário, 295n34, is critical to both; otherwise, this edited record is very sparse for 1882 and only refers to the trip en passant in the entries for 1 August and 1 September, without Rebouças himself mentioning his health or purpose there. The evidence here, then, derives from correspondence alone; see ibid.; and Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 19 September 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 158: “The illness of Rebouças disoriented him. I don’t know how he arrived there [Europe]; here we considered him completely lost.” Cf. Nabuco to Penedo, Brighton, 4 October 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:73–74, quoted in the text below. 13.  Conselheiro Antônio Verissimo de Matos to José Verissimo, quoted in Rebouças, Diário, 295n34. Note that these correspondents were Rebouças’s kinsmen through marriage: Antônio Verissimo de Matos was a lawyer and the uncle of the future literary critic José Verissimo. Antônio Verissimo de Matos’s son and namesake was an engineer, like Rebouças and his brother, Antônio Pereira Rebouças Filho. The younger Antônio Verissimo de Matos’s sister, Matilde, married Antônio Pereira Rebouças Filho, and after the latter’s early death in 1874, André Rebouças remained close to the widowed Matilde’s family (see the Diário, passim). In turn, José Verissimo’s son, Inácio José Verissimo, was one of the editors of the Diário and the author of the biography of Rebouças cited first in note 12 above and elsewhere in this text. 14.  See the Serra letter quoted in note 12 above; and Rebouças, Diário, 27 September and 26 October 1882. 15.  Nabuco to Penedo, Brighton, 4 October 882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:73–74. 16.  Rebouças, Diário, 295–97, passim. AL, 1883. 17.  Rebouças, Diário, 296–97, passim. 18.  Serra to Nabuco, 3 February [1882], Novo Friburgo, IJN: CPp6 doc. 117; Nabuco to Penedo, London, 15 February 1882, AHI: Penedo-Nabuco; same to same, Brighton, 4 October 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:73–74; Serra to Nabuco, Rio, 15 July 1882, IJN: CPp8 doc. 149; same to same, Rio, 19 September 1882, ibid., CPp8 doc. 158; Nabuco to Saraiva, London, 28 November 1882, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:89–95; Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 16 April 1882, IJN: CPp7 doc. 136. 19.  On Nabuco, see note 11 above; on Rebouças, see notes 12–16. 20.  On the Ceará voyage, see GT, 10 October 1882, 1. On confidence, see, e.g., ibid., 3 April 1882, 1; 17 July 1882,1; 24 July 1882, 1. On Patrocínio’s debut

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in 1880, see Chap. 2, “Marginalization, Mobilization, and Parliamentary, Defeat.” While Nabuco was extraordinary as a parliamentary speaker, he viewed his 1881 campaign for deputy in Rio with clear disgust; see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 31 July 1881, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:51–52. As we shall see, all that changed in 1884 and afterward. On the fascination with Patrocínio, see GT, 2 November 1882, 1; 24 November 1882, 2. 21.  See Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 223–28, 365–66; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 125–26, 274–82, 186–88; and Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 170–75, 195–98. 22.  Conrad, in Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 168–69, 182, 183, sees 1881– 1882 as a great ebb in the movement, despite the evidence presented here to the contrary. In regard to late 1882, he has nothing to report and points to May 1883 as the turn of the tide. One finds no mention of 1882’s events even in Moraes, A campanha abolicionista. Alonso (Flores, votos e balas, 191) mentions the absence of Nabuco and Rebouças and Patrocínio’s significance but has nothing on the 1882 December triumph. Oddly enough, she mistakenly associates Patrocínio (absent in Ceará until late February 1823) with the new Commissão Central Emancipadora, along with Vicente de Sousa and Nicolau Moreira, but fails to note these two latter activists’ role in the December 1882 event. Given the lack of coverage in either the archived correspondence of the leaders or the historiography, the evidence here derives entirely and directly from the Gazeta da Tarde; see GT, 7 December 1882, 1; 9 December 1882, 1. 23.  See the GT citations in note 22 above. 24.  There will be much more on Antônio Bento later in this study. On this conjuncture, see GT, 29 August 1882, 1; [Andrada], “A abolição em São Paulo”; and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 260–62. On slave plantation violence and flight, see GT, 4 November 1882, 1; 10 November 1882, 1; 14 November 1882, 1; RN, 15 November 1882, 2; GT, 17 November 1882, 1; 21 November 1882, 1; 23 November 1882, 1; 29 December 1882, 1. On the Jornal do Commercio’s new Abolitionist stance, see GT, 15 December 1882, 1; 28 December 1882, 1. 25.  See GT, 16 January 1883, 2; 3 February 1883, 1; 9 February 1883, 1; 10 February 1883, 2; 12 February 1883, 1; 14 February 1883, 1; 17 February 1883, 1; 20 February 1883, 1; 21 February 1883, 2; 22 February 1883, 3; 5 March 1883, 2. For the radical shift in the Gazeta da Tarde, see ibid., 23 February 1883, 1; 24 February 1883, 1, 3 (which undertake a provocative analysis of the imperial state’s attack on the officer corps, apparently related to an alleged troop revolt in Pernambuco associated with Abolitionism; see ibid., 22 February 1883, 1). See esp. ibid., 26 February 1883, 1, a frontal attack on the cabinet. On this important shift in leadership and direction in the movement, Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 191, 202, has little to offer. Even Moraes, A companha abolicionista, neglects it, as does Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (see, e.g., 151–54). Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” tends to take a thematic, static rather than narrative, chronological approach, which frustrates making such analyses (see chaps. 3 and 4). Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, apparently takes little interest in such matters; see chaps. 13 and 14. 26.  GT, 27 February 1883, 1.

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27.  On Nabuco’s announcement of return, see GT, 28 February 1883, 2. On Rebouças’s initial activities, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, January–February, passim. On Rebouças and the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 7 April; on Agricultura nacional, see ibid., 10 April; Rebouças, Agricultura nacional; Juca, “André Rebouças,” chaps. 3 and 4; Carvalho, O quinto, esp. chap. 3. While the emphasis on political reform is central to Nabuco’s O abolicionismo, larger, closely related socioeconomic reforms were envisaged as well; see, e.g., Needell, “A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 163–65 and the bibliography. 28.  For this paragraph and the next, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 11, 13, 24 April; GT, 11 April 1883, 2; 12 April 1883, 1. 29.  Both of Nabuco’s quotations are drawn from GT, 12 April 1883, 1. Note that Bethell (Joaquim Nabuco, 88) points out that as late as July 1882, Nabuco had publicly proposed abolition with compensation, either immediate or with a short delay. 30.  GT, 12 April 1883, 1. 31.  On Ubaldino’s attacks and Patrocínio’s response, see GT, 23 April 1883, 2–3; 24 April 1883, 1. On cearense news, see ibid., 17 April 1883, 1. 32.  Ibid., 23 April 1883, 3. 33.  On Rebouças’s meetings, see “Diário,”1883, 24, 25, 30 April; 2, 4 May; on the Gazeta da Tarde’s preliminary organizational meeting for the Confederação Abolicionista of 2 May, see GT, 3 May 1883, 1. On the emperor’s speech, see Falas do trono, 475–76. On the Paranaguá cabinet crisis, see Silva, Memorias, 2:256–58. 34.  Rebouças’s ongoing centrality to the organization of the movement is clear in the private meetings he held with its public leaders, Patrocínio and Clapp, on 5, 7, and 8 May (see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883). See, for the Confederação Abolicionista’s organizational meetings, ibid., 9–12 May; and GT, 9 May 1883, 1; 10 May 1883, 1 (which provides the list of constituent organizations); 11 May 1883, 1; 14 May 1883, 1 (which provides the committees and their membership). Miguel Antônio Dias shows up in the corpo deliberativo; Patrocínio is in that body and on the committee charged with writing up the manifesto to parliament. Rebouças is on the executive committee, with Clapp et al., as well as the manifesto committee; he is also treasurer. On the participants in the confederation, see the lists in GT, 14 May 1883, 1; and Patrocínio and Rebouças, Manifesto da Confederação Abolicionista, 21–22. On Nabuco’s official role, see GT, 18 May 1883, 1. In contrast with the text here and below, the narrative and parliamentary, political context for the antecedents and organization of the confederation are often poorly understood or simply noted rather than analyzed elsewhere in the literature. See, e.g., Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, pt. 2, chap. 5; Viana Filho, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, chap. 7; Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco, 85–92; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 154, 156, 158, 193; and Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 202–10. Alonso, despite her rich list of primary sources, is particularly puzzling for the distinction she tries to make between Nabuco’s perspective in O abolicionismo and that of the confederation’s Manifesto (authored, after all, by Rebouças and Patrocínio, who clearly looked to Nabuco for the movement’s policy and direction). Indeed, neither she nor Conrad found the critical coverage of Nabuco’s new policy position for the

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movement in the April 1883 articles in the Gazeta da Tarde and the unity between Nabuco and Patrocínio publicly affirmed then. It seems, generally, that despite her research, Alonso’s handling of the narrative, the policy, and the personnel regarding the movement and its leadership can be worrisome. In Alonso, Joaquim Nabuco, 170, she places Rebouças in Ceará with Patrocínio in 1882 (when the former was in Europe) and then puts both of them in Rio in early February 1883 (when the former was still abroad and the latter was traveling south from Ceará). Nabuco is left in London, writing O abolicionismo (171–73), which, again (ibid.; and see also Flores, votos e balas, 206–7), she suggests supported gradualism and indemnification (which it does not; indeed, as shown here, even before his book’s divulgation in Brazil, he had called for immediate abolition without indemnification in April 1883). In short, Alonso persists, in both books, in arguing for a key policy distinction between Nabuco, on the one hand, and Rebouças and Patrocínio, on the other, that did not exist. She argues for Nabuco’s being the more conservative in the movement’s goals, when (as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter and this one) he was the founder of the movement (August 1880) to which both of the others adhered, and he remained its pioneer regarding both national organization (June 1882) and immediate abolition (April 1883). Moreover, as shown in this study, Nabuco and Rebouças worked together closely, even when separated by the Atlantic. Patrocínio would, indeed, distinguish himself from the other two by his propaganda tactics and his general politics; he remained their staunch ally, however, in regard to the movement and its goals, and publicly accepted Nabuco’s leadership repeatedly, as shown here. 35.  On Nabuco’s call for complete abolition, see notes 28–30 above. On Rebouças’s periodical propaganda, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 20, 21, 31 May; 3; 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26 June; 29 July; 5, 8, 24, 28 August. On Agricultura nacional, see note 27 above and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 25 July; 10, 13, 19 October. On O abolicionismo, see below; on its publication in England and Brazil, see ibid., 23 August, 29 September, 2 October; Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 24 September 1883, IJN: CPp11 doc. 204; and Dias to Nabuco, Rio, 8 October 1883, ibid., CPp319 doc. 6507. On the articles themselves, see, e.g., GT, 21 May 1883, 1; 1 June 1883, 1; 2 June 1883, 1; 4 June 1883, 1; 6–26 June 1883, passim. 36.  See Nogueira, As desaventuras do liberalism, chap. 2; Needell, “A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 163–68; Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco, 86–88; and Salles, Joaquim Nabuco, 96–145, passim. 37.  It is important to note that the Manifesto of the confederation, written by Patrocínio and Rebouças together, focused upon slavery. Addressed as it was to parliament rather than to movement activists or reformists in general, its purpose was to justify the movement’s championship of immediate abolition without compensation. That was, of course, radical enough—and the most common goal all Abolitionists accepted (we cannot know, after all, if the other radical, socioeconomic and political goals the Abolitionist leadership promoted publicly were as widely accepted). It seems likely, then, that the authors were reluctant to use the confederation’s manifesto to press for their other desired reforms because it would jeopardize parliamentary reception of unindemnified abolition still further;

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after all, the Manifesto was addressed to the stronghold of an elite whose various personal interests would all have been challenged by the other reforms discussed here. 38.  On Rebouças’s institutional and organization role, see the text above, passim; on his propaganda role specifically, see, e.g., note 35 above; on his role at the Gazeta da Tarde in Patrocínio’s absence, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 15 May. 39.  On Rebouças’s role, see, e.g., Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 154; Toplin, Abolition of Slavery, 70; and Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, passim, esp. 147–52. On this colonization project and relations with J. C. Rodrigues, see Rebouças, Diário, 14 October and 1 December 1882, 296–97, and “Diário,” 1883, 22 July; 21 August; 4, 5, 6, 18, 28 September; 1, 7, 8, 9, 17 October; 1 November. 40.  On the Congresso Agricola of 1878, see Chap. 2, note 2. Nabuco’s speech (see Chap. 2, “The Manifesto of 1869 and Its Legacy”) took place on 22 March 1879; see JC, 23 March 1879, 1. On Rebouças’s views on freedmen, mixed-labor regimes, and “rural democracy,” see GT, 4 June 1883, 1; and Rebouças, Agricultura nacional, 50, 69, 115–16, 119–20, and chaps. 18, 27, 28, 43, 59, 64, and 65. Rebouças integrates Abolitionism, colonization, and the attack on the latifundium in Rebouças to Nabuco, Rio, 24 September 1883, IJN: CPp11 doc. 204, with explicit reference to the Terra Roxa project. 41.  On Rebouças’s immigration society, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 26, 28 September; 8, 14, 15, 16, 17 October; 18, 30 December. The society had changed its name to the Sociedade Central de Imigração by year’s end; see ibid., 18 and 30 December; see also AL, 1884. On Kozeritz, see Blake, Diccionario bibliographico brazileiro, s.v. “Carlos von Kozeritz”; cf. Neves, “Uma cidade entre dois mundos,” passim. On Taunay, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 57, 118, 193, 268n67. On the territorial tax project, see JC, 14 November 1883, 2. 42.  See Rebouças “Diário,” 1883, passim; on “Chefes Abolicionistas,” see ibid., 5 September. 43.  On “amigo,” see, e.g., ibid., 11 April, 17 May, 7 June, 19 June. On Ceará propaganda, see ibid., 9 July, 8 December. On the Manifesto, see ibid., 27 July. On O abolicionismo, see ibid., 23 August (see also 29 September, 2 October). On Patrocínio’s departure on 15 November, see ibid., 13 November, 1. The trip was to address work on his novel, Pedro hespanhol, the “precarious state” of his health, and urgent reforms to the Gazeta da Tarde. Note that Dias is one of the friends whom he singles out in his farewell. Chapter 4 1.  Rebouças to Nabuco, Petrópolis, 22 March 1884, AJN: CPp12 doc. 224. The congress never took place. 2.  See, e.g., ibid.; on the series, see JC, 22 March 1884, 3. Note that the article quotes from Nabuco’s O abolicionismo, and see also Nabuco, Henry George. This perceived division in tactics, alluded to in Serra’s 1882 correspondence (see Chap. 3, “Divided Leadership, Survival, and New Strength,” esp. notes 6 and 7), was clear to other activists as well. See, e.g., Alencastro Junior to Nabuco, Rio, 12 February 1884, AJN: CPp320 doc. 6523, in which the recent impact of propaganda by

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Patrocínio at the time is alluded to and deplored, specifically journalistic attacks on slaveholders and the emperor rather than on the cabinet and its policy. 3.  On Ceará and Patrocínio’s participation there, see Chap. 3, “The Abolititionists’ Acephalous Triumph in 1882.” On the tactics and their success, see ibid.; Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 186–89; and, e.g., Charles B. Trail to Frederick Frelinghuysen, Rio, 21 May 1884, 16–17, dd110; or Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 112–13; as well as Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 196–98. On Patrocínio in Paris, see Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, 143–47 and chap. 15. Although Victor Hugo did not attend the banquet, it was presided over by Victor Schoelcher, who had figured in the French abolition of slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1848. 4.  On the planning, associated fund-raising, and cearense alliance, see the notes and clippings in Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29 March; 1, 2 April; on the events, see JC, 24 March 1884, 1; 25 March 1884, 2; 26 March 1884, 1, 2. There were additional Ceará-linked events in late March and early April; see ibid., 31 March 1884, 1; 4 April 1884, 1. On the 31 March 1884 Gazeta de Noticias comment, see Moraes, “A escravidão,” 280. 5.  On Amazonas, see, e.g., Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 199–204. On the broader impact on other provinces, see Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 61–62. On planning for the liberation of Rio, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 2 April [clipping from GT]; and JC, 5 April 1884, 3. The latter indicates the effort is, in effect, an alliance between Abolitionist and emancipationist organizations, which may point to the strategic difference between the Abolitionist movement associated with Nabuco, Rebouças, and Patrocínio and the emancipationist approach associated with Nicolau Moreira and Vicente de Sousa. 6.  On the movement to liberate Rio, see JC, 5 April 1884, 3; 16 April 1884, 1; 18 April 1884, 1; 10 May 1884, 4. On its failure, note the absence of news on the issue by midyear, and see Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 195–96. On the failure in São Paulo, see ibid., esp. 197. One estimates the 1884 slave population as being at least 10% of the total population based on an estimate for the latter, using a number halfway between the 1872 population of 274,972 and the 1890 population of 522,651. On the slaves’ worth and demographics for Rio and its province in 1885, see Soares, O “povo de Cam,” 53, 56–59; and Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 291, respectively. On the reaction against Abolitionism, see, e.g., JC, 9 May 1884, 3; 11 May 1884, 1; 10 June 1884, 1. Note the careful analysis of the differences between Ceará and the southeastern region of the empire in ibid., 29 March 1884, 2. 7.  See JC, 11 May 1884, 3, on the possibility of the discussion of slavery in the Chamber (citing GT). On Nabuco’s return, see Rebouças to Nabuco, Petrópolis, 2 May 1884, IJN: CPp12 doc. 234; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 April; 3, 13, 16, 17 May; Nabuco, Diários, 1:265; and Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 May 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:112–13. On Patrocínio’s arrival, see Magalhães Júnior, A vida turbulenta, 160; and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 24 May. 8.  Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 May 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:113–14; Silva, Memorias, 2:271–73. 9.  The organizing reaction is referred to in note 6 above, as well as in JC, 11 June 1884, 4. For the Conservatives’ post-1881 position, see Chap. 3, particularly the first part, “The Parliamentary Context in Early 1882.”

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10.  On the emperor’s governing preferences, see Chap. 1, “The Evolution of the Emperor’s Role.” On the Conservative divisions and chieftains generally, see Chap. 2, “Division and Unity among the Conservatives.” More specifically, on the emperor and Cotegipe, see Needell, Party of Order, 254–56. On Paulino’s role among the saquaremas, see ibid., 252–64, 308–15. On the leaders of the two parties’ majorities’ view of 1871, see, e.g., JC, 10 June 1884, 1 (for the Liberals, particularly Saraiva); and see also Silva, Memorias, 2:174–75. 11.  On the emperor’s conversations with Liberal leaders, see JC, 10 June 1884, 1, passim; and Silva, Memorias, 2:273. On the emperor’s motivations, see ibid. On Dantas, see Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 65–66; Lyra, Instituições políticas, 322–23; Viana Filho, A vida de Rui Barbosa, 30–31; Dantas, Correspondência, 9–12, Dantas to Nabuco de Araujo, Salvador, 11 June 1872, IHGB: Col. Nabuco de Araújo, L363 P5; and [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 185, 191. On the “pact” between Dantas and the emperor, see, e.g., JC, 10 June 1884, 1, esp. Manuel Francisco Correia; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 7 June 1884, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 71; Silva, Memorias, 2:279–80; and Trail to Frelinghuysen, Rio de Janeiro, 5 August 1884, dd 123. For Rui Barbosa’s links to Dantas, see Viana Filho, A vida de Rui Barbosa, 30–31 and chaps. 4, 5, 10, and 11; and in the text below. For Rodolfo Dantas and Nabuco, see, e.g., Nabuco, [note to] Nabuco, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:121; and in the text below. 12.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 7 June; on Leitão da Cunha, see Rebouças, Diário, 18, 35, 46, 132, 154; JC, 10 June 1884, 1; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 June 1884, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 32. 13.  All quotations from Dantas in [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 211– 24, passim; the contemporary was Pereira da Silva: see his Memorias, 2:274. 14.  On Rui and his role, see, e.g., Senna, “Apresentação.” All addresses are clear in the cited correspondence, below. On the collaboration among Dantas, his son, the emperor, and the Abolitionists, see, e.g., Rodolfo to Rui, 11 July 1884, ARB: CRB 482 2/2:142; same to same, n.d., ibid., CRB 482 1/2:12, 22, 31; Rodolfo to Rui, 15 July 1884, Dantas, Correspondência, 113n1; Gusmão Lobo to Paranhos, 10 July 1884, in Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 108; same to same, 24 July 1884, ibid., 112–13; same to same, 31 July 1884, ibid., 115–16; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 13 July 1884, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 33; and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 15, 21, 22 June; 7, 14, 15, 19, 21 July. Cf. Barman, Citizen Emperor, 325. 15.  Quotation from Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 July 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:116–17. On the “Garrison” pieces paraphrased, see JC, 12 June 1884, 3; 13 June 1884, 2. On Nabuco’s 1885 position, see this chapter, below. 16.  On the reaction against the movement and Nabuco’s response, see the references in notes 6 and 7 above, particularly the Otoni speeches in JC, 10 June 1884, 1, and 11 June 1884, 4; as well as, e.g., Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 May 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:114; and same to same, Rio, 31 May 1884, ibid., 116. 17.  See, e.g., Needell, “A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 166–67. 18.  On the constitutional issues, fundamental to the debates of 1871, see Needell, Party of Order, chap. 7. For the echo in 1884, see the comments by Ferreira

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Viana in JC, 16 July 1884, 2, and the discussion and notes below in regard to the Chamber’s votes against Dantas, the Council of State’s critique, and the debates on the emperor’s dissolution of the Chamber. The response to the movement, as indicated here, will be explicit below as well and is already apparent in some of the extraparliamentary reaction; see the references in note 16 above and the comments on Abolitionism made by the Associação Comercial do Rio de Janeiro’s proclamation, dated 2 May 1884 but published in June (JC, 22 June 1884, 2). 19.  On the votes, debates, and erosion of Dantas’s Chamber support in late July, see, e.g., JC, 16 July 1884, 1–2; 29 July 1884, 1–2; and Silva, Memorias, 2:276–79. On the Abolitionists’ support, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 14, 15, 16, 19, 21, 23, 28 July. 20.  On the Council of State, see JC, 1 August 1884, 1. Note that the council had already divided over and criticized points in the reform project itself in a consultation in June; see Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 71–74. On Dantas, the emperor, the Abolitionists, and the constitutional issues, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 28 July; Silva, Memorias, 2:279–80; and JC, 30 July 1884, 2; 31 July 1884, 4; 1 August 1884, 1–2. 21.  The exceptions suggest the rule. Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 104, claims around two thousand people gathered to hear the manifesto of the Confederação Abolicionista in August 1883, in the Teatro Pedro II. The combined celebrations, festivals, and demonstrations of 24 March 1884 (the liberation of Ceará) reportedly drew ten thousand, but that involved not only politics but public merry-making. The marches included only two thousand or a bit more (ibid., 117); see also Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 195. Before 1884, the numbers involved were far smaller. See ibid., 143–44, 148. Bergstresser (“Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 49) estimates that (presumably during the initial phase) the movement in Rio numbered about three hundred activists, although she estimated only the members of Abolitionist organizations, not the possible crowds of supporters such organizations might have attracted, as she herself notes. In discussing the latter, she mentions reports of as many as two thousand persons at some Sunday celebrations during the early years. Her number of three hundred “excludes nonliterate, proletarian groups” (ibid., 50), hence the vague reference to numbers in the text here. Indeed, the repeated use of the number two thousand strongly suggests estimates, at best, even when things went well. 22.  On the primacy of the SBCE elite (particularly Nabuco, Rebouças, and Serra) vis-à-vis cabinet relations and coordination, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 4, 7, 12, 15, 17 June; 7, 14, 15, 21, 23, 28 July. The first Patrocínio quotation is from GT, 30 August 1884, 1; the second, quoting from GT, is from JC, 31 July 1884, 4. The Hotel Globo banquet is noted by Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 19 August. 23.  For Rebouças’s promotion of private socioeconomic reform projects with the Dantas cabinet, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1884, 21 July; 3, 4, 13, 25, 26, 29 August; 3 September. 24.  See JC, 20 June 1884, 1, 2; 16 June 1884, 1; 1 August 1884, 1. See also Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 83–90, passim. See also these orators’ role in 1871 in Needell, Party of Order, chap. 7, passim.

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25.  Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 178–82. It should be noted that Monteiro’s account is based on interviews with the actors. 26.  Ibid., 182–83. On Cotegipe in 1853 and 1871, see Needell, Party of Order, 173–75, 279–81. 27.  The quotation is from Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 183; for the Francisco Belisário reaction, see ibid. Note that João Alfredo had already begun work on consolidating Conservative unity in the face of the pending 1884 election; see João Alfredo to barão Ibiapaba, Rio, 20 August 1884, AJA: CE 000.001 a–c. 28.  A preliminary, more detailed analysis of this election was presented at Oxford University in 2012 at a conference organized by Eduardo Posada Carbó. See Needell, “Brazilian Election of 1884.” 29.  On Nabuco’s expectations, see, e.g., Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 July 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:116–17. 30.  On the 1881 electoral reform, see Chap. 2, particularly “The Liberals’ Return to Power” and “The Electoral Reform and the Election of 1881.” Note that the electoral reform’s more elitist impact, clear in 1881, would be strengthened still more in 1884. In 1881, the literacy requirement had been deferred; only the income qualification and the new documentation restrictions had been employed. From 1884 on, new registrants had to be literate as well; see Graham, Patronage and Politics, 198–200. On Nabuco’s reassessment of a cabinet’s potential for intervention, see, e.g., Gusmão Lobo to Paranhos, Rio, 1 September 1884, in Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 131; and Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 1 September 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:119. 31.  For the 1884 election in Recife, here and below, aside from Needell, “Brazilian Election of 1884,” see Hoffnagel, “From Monarchy to Republic,” 71–87; Gouvêa, “Estudo introdutório,” xii–xix; Castilho, “Abolitionism Matters,” chaps. 3 and 4, “Agitação abolicionista,” and Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 125–34. 32.  On Dantas’s intervention among pernambucano Liberals, see note 31 above. On Nabuco’s use of cabinet influence, see, e.g., Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, Recife, 20 October 1884, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:121–22. 33.  On José Mariano and urban radicalism in Recife, see Hoffnagel, “From Monarchy to Republic,” 24–50; and Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 60, 62. 34.  On Nabuco as a parliamentary orator, see Afonso Celso, Oito anos de parlamento, 66–67. So far as the author can establish, Nabuco did not participate in addressing the popular masses until 22 June 1884, when he addressed his first conferência. See Nabuco, Conferencia, which Rebouças described as “one of his greatest triumphs” (“Diário,” 1884, 22 June). 35.  On Nabuco’s Recife speeches, see Nabuco, Campanha abolicionista no Recife, and Gouvêia’s introductory comments, together with the Castilho citations in note 31 above; see also Needell, “Brazilian Election of 1884,” 8–9. On Nabuco’s emphasis on Afro-Brazilian identity and solidarity, see Chap. 3, note 36. For an example, from his first conferência in Rio, see Nabuco, Conferencia, 37–38, 40–41; and note Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 129–30. On the Recife speeches, see, e.g., Nabuco, Campanha abolicionista, 39, 147.

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36.  On Nabuco’s perception of victory and revolutionary potential, see Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 7 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:127– 28. On the fraud in Recife and across the empire, see ibid.; and Needell, “Brazilian Election of 1884,” 9–10; for the Conservative perception, see also Barman, Citizen Emperor, 325–26; and Silva, Memorias, 2:283–84. The comparative success of the Conservatives in both 1881 and 1884 (traditionally not to be expected, given their opposition to the cabinets on both occasions) hardly suggests a failure to confront fraud, patronage, and violence but rather greater success at employing them. The size of the Conservative minority elected actually grew in 1884, despite the considerable effort of Dantas within the new constraints. See Graham, Patronage and Politics, 202–4; see also Afonso Celso, JC, 3 May 1885, 1–2. In private correspondence with Saraiva, Dantas actually denied “the least intervention”; see Dantas to Saraiva, Rio, 29 January 1885, IHGB: L272 P42. 37.  [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 388 (see also ibid., 379). On the dissidents, see Silva, Memorias, 2:285; see also Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, 1 April 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:132. On Rui, see Viana Filho, A vida de Rui Barbosa, 95–98. 38.  The quotation is from GT, 26 January 1885, 1. Concerning the rest, see, on the response to João Alfredo and Cotegipe’s abolitionism, ibid., 10 January 1885, 1; RI, 31 January 1885, 4–5; RN, 5 February 1885, 5; 25 February 1885, 2. On Nabuco’s triumphal return, see GT, 24 January 1885, 1; 26 January 1885, 1. Antônio Bento’s telegram concerning Dias is published in ibid.. 39.  On the dinner on 9 February, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 9 February; on the meeting, see ibid., 10 February. The dinner guests also included Luís de Andrade, a noted abolitionist journalist; Alencastro, the SBCE’s lawyer; and the baron Homem de Melo, the noted Liberal reformist and intellectual, along with members of the Nabuco family. On Quintino Bocaiuva, see Boehrer, Da monarquia à república, chap. 7 and passim; and Nabuco, [note], in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:172; on Homem de Melo, see ibid., 1:95. On Cândido de Oliveira, see Lyra, Instituições políticas, 243–44. 40.  See Silva, Memorias, 2:285–88; see also, for Nabuco’s hopes, Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 7 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:127–28; same to same, Rio, 7 February 1885, ibid., 1:130–31; same to same, Rio, 9 March [1885], ibid., 1:131. 41.  On Patrocínio’s manifesto from the Confederação Abolicionista, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 17 February. On the speech, see Falas do trono, 485–86. 42.  On the historiography, see Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism,” 234–35, and, e.g., on the complete neglect of this speech and its significance, see Toplin, The Abolition; Conrad (Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 119–21) mentions neither the Conservatives’ role nor Paulino. Alonso (Flores, votos e balas, 274–77), although well aware of Paulino’s importance and that of the reactionary alliance, neglects this speech and its significance. For the speech itself, see JC, 26 March 1885, 1. 43.  On Nabuco’s 1880 proposal, see JC, 5 September 1880, 1; and Chap. 2, “The Struggle with Saraiva.” On Perdigão Malheiro’s 1871 alternative, see Chap. 1, “The Debate of 1871 and the Law of the Free Womb”; or the more detailed analysis in Needell, Party of Order, 277, 298, 301, 308–12.

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44.  The assessment of the likely outcome of the political situation at the time surfaces in the press; see, e.g., RI, 31 January 1885, 4–5; RN, 24 February 1885, 2; 5 April 1885, 4. 45.  On 13–20 April 1885, see JC, 14 April 1885, 1; 18 April 1885, 1; 21 April 1885, 1. On the dissidents, see Silveira Martins’s account in ibid. The issue of the majority of moderate Liberal support for Dantas based on partisanship was assumed by Nabuco; see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 7 June 1884, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 31; and Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 7 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:127. However, Paranhos was far more cynical, and in the end, correct; see Paranhos to Penedo, Paris, 5 November 885, AHI: L834 M3. Nabuco’s calculations of the votes at the end show how the Liberal partisanship ebbed away from him (and Dantas); see Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, [Rio], 1 April 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:132. On cabinet access, see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 7 June 1884, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 31; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 June 1884, ibid. 63, 3, 5, No. 32; and Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, Rio, 19 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:129–30. On the delegations’ strengths, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 379, 388; in ibid., the Rio de Janeiro and Bahian Liberal delegations amounted to three and nine, respectively. On Nabuco’s assumptions about the dissidents’ speculation, see Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, Rio, 19 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:129–30; and cf. Franco de Sá, JC, 23 April 1885, 1. On the “pact,” see, for the Liberal perspective, Silva, Memorias, 2:275; as well as the allusion to representative government in the analysis of, e.g., Martinho Campos, JC, 18 April 1885, 1. 46.  On the impact of popular mobilization April–May 1884, see Silva, Memorias, 2:289–91; Otoni, Autobiografia, 219–20; or better, see the periodical accounts, e.g., Paulino, JC, 26 March 1885, 1; Moreira de Barros, ibid., 14 April 1885, 1; GT, 16 April 1885, 1; Martinho de Campos, Correia, et al., JC, 18 April 1885, 1; Silveira Martins and Dantas, ibid., 21 April 1885, 1; Franco de Sá, ibid., 23 April 1885, 1; GT, 30 April 1885, 2; Franco de Sa, JC, 2 May 1885, 1; 3 May 1885, 1; Paulino, ibid., 3 May 1885, 102; “Publicações a Pedido,” in ibid., 2; GT, 4 May 1885, 1. 47.  JC, 17 April 1885, 1; GT, 18 April 1885, 1; JC, 21 April 1885, 1; RN, 24 April 1885, 2; GT, 24 April 1885, 1. The quotation from Patrocínio is from GT, 18 April 1885, 1. 48.  See the citations in note 46 above, particularly the GT citations, e.g., 1 May 1885, 1, 2; Franco de Sá, JC, 23 April 1885, 1; JC, 2 May 1885, 1, 3, 4; 3 May 1885, 2. See also Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 99, 106–8. 49.  Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 99, 106–8; JC, 2 May 1885, 1; 3 May 1885, 1; GT, 4 May 1885, 1, 3; RN, 4 May 1885, 4; JC, 5 May 1885, 1, 2; GT, 5 May 1885, 1; [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 217. On the vote, note that the dissidents who allied with the Conservatives to fell Dantas were nine. In terms of the Liberal provincial delegations alluded to by Nabuco, they jibe: two were from Alagoas and five from Minas. The other two were a cearense and the pernambucano who had been assaulted; see JC, 5 May 1885, 2; and [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 383–87. On Dantas’s meeting with the emperor, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 27 June, and below in the text.

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50.  See, e.g., the periodical citations in notes 48 and 49 above. 51.  On Patrocínio’s possible role in street mobilization, see Chap. 2, “The Abolitionist Leadership.” On Dias’s possible role, see ibid.; and also note Dias’s involvement in Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 22 and 24 January (Nabuco’s arrival demonstrations); 26 January (planning for the Conferação Abolicionista); and 8 March (the conferência honoring Carlos de Lacerda, the celebrated Abolitionist militant of Campos). The lack of diary references to Dias in late April and early May suggests a shift in Rebouças’s personal focus, given his constant leadership-level meetings at the time. In turn, this may explain the comparative dearth of meetings involving Dias, who may have been delegated to the more activist street-level issues and thus become more involved with Patrocínio and the Gazeta da Tarde group for the mobilization. Rebouças himself was meeting only with cabinet ministers, Nabuco, Gusmão Lobo, Clapp, and Patrocínio during the February–May period—usually small, one-on-one encounters and strategic sessions with a few—and most of his references to events even in parliament were observations rather than records of participation. His role during this crisis was policy leadership, employing his connections, organizational skill among the elite, and strategic coordination. While he was critical for planning, he was never directly involved personally in public mobilization; such action was presumably what he relied upon Dias for. 52.  Siqueira, JC, 5 May 1885, 2. 53.  JC, 26 April 1885, 1. 54.  GT, 30 April 1885, 2. 55.  See, e.g., RI, 19 June 1886, 5; 30 November 1885, 4–5; 19 April 1884, 4–5. Only the latter, in its portrayal of Holy Week street scenes, suggests the AfroBrazilian identity of the common, free population. The author undertook research in both the ministerial records in the Arquivo Nacional and the police records in police, city, and state archives in Rio in the hope of finding internal police correspondence describing people involved in the Abolitionist street mobilization taking place in the 1880s, but there was none to be found. 56.  See the discussion of the conferência of 30 January 1881 at the Teatro São Luís in Chap. 2, “The Organization, the Press, and the Initial Mobilization.” On organized labor and Vicente de Sousa, see Chap. 2, “The Abolitionist Leadership.” On the initial Abolitionist organizations, see Chap. 2, “Initial Successes, Electoral Reform, the Election of 1881, and the Movement’s Prospects.” 57.  JC, 3 May 1885, 1–2. 58.  Nabuco, O erro do imperador, 4–5. 59.  On “feet on the ground,” see, e.g., Karasch, Slave Life, 58–59, 130–31, and the contemporary illustrations of street life, passim; see also RI, 19 April 1884, 4–5; Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, 465; Ewbank, Life in Brazil, 78, 267, 277; and Kidder and Fletcher, Brazil and the Brazilians, 29–30, 132–36. On Nabuco in shirt sleeves, see Nabuco, Oito décadas, 62; and Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 139, 166–71. 60.  The frustrated, angry statements of Patrocínio and Nabuco in April 1885 were apparently attempts to frighten the reactionary establishment into supporting Dantas’s compromises by suggesting to their enemies both the Abolitionists’ independence and radical potential. That is, they may well have wanted to portray

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Dantas as the lesser of two evils; the Abolitionists could act more radically if they chose to do so. All of this was to suggest why parliament and prince should accept Dantas and the Abolitionist alliance as the only path forward while keeping the peace, however frightening it seemed. For their statements, see note 47 above; for what Dantas expected from the emperor on 4 May, see below in the text. 61.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 27 June; JC, 12 May 1885, 1. Cf. Silva, Memorias, 2:292. 62.  This synthesizes key elements of Nabuco’s radical pamphlets of 1886: O erro do imperador, 3, 4, 7–9, 11, 12–13; O eclipse, 31, 40; and Eleições liberaes, 55–56. 63.  Lampedusa, The Leopard, 40. The author was reminded of the reference by Joseph L. Love. 64.  See, e.g., Trail to Frelinghuysen, Rio, 21 May 1884, 17–18, 22–23, dd 110; same to same, Rio, 8 June 1884, 4–5, ibid.; Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 7 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:127–28; and same to same, Rio, 29 January 1885, ibid., 1:128–29; cf. Dantas to Rui Barbosa, [Novo] Friburgo, 21 May 1885, ARB: CRB 481 2/3:44; GT, 9 March 1885, 1; JC, 26 March 1885, 1; 14 April 1885, 1; ibid., cited in GT, 17 April 1885, 3; RN, 24 April 1885, 2, 3. 65.  JC, 12 May 1885, 1, 2; 13 May 1885, 1; Silva, Memorias, 2:295–96; Falas do trono, 486–87; GT, 12 May 1885, 1; 13 May 1885, 1–2; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 12 May; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 17 May 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:136–37. 66.  See the parliamentary debates associated with Saraiva’s ascent and the Abolitionist comments in note 65 above. 67.  GT, 9 June 1885, 1. 68.  Needell, “Brazilian Election of 1884,” 10–11; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 17 May 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:136; same to same, Recife, 24 June 1885, ibid., 1:137–38; GT, 7 June 1885, 1; 8 June, 1, 2; 9 July 1885, 2; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 14 May, 7–17 June. 69.  For the narrative, see Silva, Memorias, 2:296–98. The final law is in Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 310–16. See the Abolitionists’ rejection and analysis of the original project and its premises in, e.g., GT, 15 May 1885, 1. Mendonça (Entre a mão e os anéis) has analyzed the law’s origin in terms of the moral economy on the plantation, using Campinas as the case study. Given the parameters that she thus establishes (see, e.g., 22–23, 28–29) and the nearly complete exclusion of the Abolitionist movement and parliamentary history in her analysis, the work has been of no use here. 70.  On Nabuco’s return, see GT, 30 June 1885, 1; on Rui’s attacks, see ibid., 15 May 1885, 1; 16 June 1885, 1. On Nabuco’s Chamber speech, see JC, 4 July 1885, 2. See also RN, 5 July 1885, 2; and Otoni, JC, 2 September 1885, 1. On the Conservatives’ and Prado’s role, see, e.g., JC, 2 July 1885, 1; and Nabuco’s attack, ibid., 25 July 1885, 2. On the Conservatives’ formal support for Saraiva, see João Alfredo’s aide-mémoire on the back of Andrade Figueira’s calling card, a card inviting João Alfredo to a meeting of Conservatives at the Hotel Globo. João Alfredo writes that the meeting was to decide their actions with respect to the Saraiva project and that it was presided over by Paulino and himself, seated side by

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side. Paulino wanted the Conservatives “to help the Liberal cabinet. Only Andrade Figueira differed.” See AJA: [uncat. document dated 9 October 1885]. 71.  The Abolitionists’ fluminense mobilization and its championship in Rio were consistent motifs in the era after May 1884, especially in Campos under Carlos de Lacerda, an old friend of Patrocínio’s; see Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 235–50; and Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 197–98. The origins of the campista movement vis-à-vis that of Rio came together in 1881. Lacerda founded his periodical, Vinte e Cinco de Março, in 1884 and modeled it on the Gazeta da Tarde. On the Gazeta da Tarde and the Confederação Abolicionista’s support, see, e.g., GT, 8 June 1885, 1; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 8 March (conferência); 19 March (Patrocínio’s arrival from Campos); 2 June (legal intercession for Lacerda); 17 June (Lacerda freed). For José Mariano, see JC, 2 July 1885, 1; for Nabuco, see ibid., 31 July 1885, 2. 72.  On the vote and the Conservatives’ role, see Silva, Memorias, 2:297–98; the quotation is from ibid., 298. On the numbers, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 388; and Alonso, Flores, votos e balas, 285. 73.  See JC, 17 August 1885, 1; 19 August 1885, 1; 20 August 1885, 1; 23 August 1885, 2; 25 August 1885, 1; see also Silva, Memorias, 2:290–301; Siqueira to [Soares] Brandão, Rio, 19 August [1885], IHGB: Soares Brandão, L611 P42. 74.  JC, 26 March 1885, 1. 75.  See the first part of this chapter and Chap. 3, “The Emperor’s Intervention,” as well as, e.g., Lyra, Instituições políticas, 280–81. For detail, see, e.g., Needell, Party of Order, 129, 173–75, 245–46, 252–53, 255–56, passim, 279–81, 300–301; and the text below. 76.  Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 1 January 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, L341 bs2. 77.  See the correspondence in late 1853 in IHGB: Leão Teixeira, L748 P40. On the incident with the emperor, see citations in Pinho, Política e politicos, 137–38. 78.  See Pinho, Cotegipe, 15–45, 613–26, passim; Patrocínio, e.g., GT, 5 June 1886, in Campanha abolicionista, 144; Pinho, Salões e damas, chap. 10; and Chap. 2, “Divisions and Limits among the Conservatives,” notes 5 and 11. 79.  See JC, 25 August 1885, 1; see also Silva, Memorias, 2:301–2. 80.  Quotation is from [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 221. Chapter 5 1.  On Campos, and on José Mariano’s warning about the new repression, see Chap. 4, “Saraiva and the Sexagenarian Law,” esp. note 71. For the rural-sector violence and the situation under Cotegipe, see the text below. 2.  For the planters’ propaganda views, see, e.g., JC, 9 May 1884, 3; 11 May 1884, 1. For a general survey of the slaves’ situation in this regard, see Otoni’s Senate speech, ibid., 10 June 1884, 1. 3.  For an early attack on Coelho Bastos and general police abuse, see, e.g., RI, 30 November 1885, 4–5. 4.  On the passage of the law, see Otoni, Autobiografia, 222–24; GT, 29 September 1885, 2; and Moraes, “A escravidão,” 296. On the end of the 1871 banquet, see RN, 5 October 1885, 4. On enforcement of the 1885 law, see Otoni, Autobiografia, 230–31; and Moraes, “A escravidão,” 297–98. On the 1886 “Black

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Regulation,” see Otoni, Autobiografia, 231; GT, 22 June 1886, 1; and Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 234–35. On the revised valorization of slaves, see Otoni, Autobiografia, 231; and Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 234–35. On the registration penalty’s reversal, see first page of GT, 26, 27, 30 July 1887; RN, 15 August 1887, 2. 5.  On the vote of no confidence, see JC, 25 August 1885, 1; and Silva, Memorias, 2:306–7. On Cotegipe’s intervention in the election of 1886, see RN, 5 October 1885, 4; GT, 29 December 1884, 1; and Graham, Patronage and Politics, 203–4. 6.  See note 5 above; Nabuco, O erro do imperador, 12, and Eleições liberaes e eleições conservadoras, 48–49, 52, 53–54; and RI, 30 November 1885, 4–5. 7.  On the results, see Graham, Patronage and Politics, 203–4; and Nabuco, O erro do imperador, 12, and Eleições liberaes e eleições conservadoras, 48–49, 52, 53–54. On José Mariano, see below in the text. On Pernambuco’s delegation, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 398. 8.  On the sense of retreat, see Nabuco, O erro do imperador, 12, and O eclypse, 31–32; and Moraes, “A escravidão,” 297. On the mass mobilization of 1884–1885, see Chap. 4, “The Reform, the Abolitionists’ Role, and the Reaction” and “The Nature and the Role of Popular Mobilization in 1885.” On Nabuco’s election in June 1885 and the Campos mobilization, see Chap. 4, “The ‘Tranquilizing Reform,’” and the references in note 71. On the vereador election, see below in the text. 9.  Rebouças to Nabuco, Petropolis, 2 March 1886, IJN: CPp16 doc. 306. Cf. E. T. Leite to Nabuco, Paris, 1 July 1886, AJN: CPp17 doc. 333. 10.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 15, 16 June. The quotation is from GT, 16 June 1885, 2. On the 1883 shift, see Chap. 3, note 35. 11.  See the diary entries for 1885, where the closer relationship with Patrocínio is clear: e.g., Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, 8 May; 9, 11, 12, 15, 21, 22 June; 23 July (note that in July, Rebouças undertook his seasonal move to Petrópolis); 8, 11, 13, 18, 20, 27 t, 29 August; 3, 29 September; 8, 24 October; 7 [clipping], 24 November. For Rebouças’s act of standing as godfather to José do Patrocínio Filho, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1886, 29 May. 12.  Nabuco’s quandary has recently been traced; see Needell, “O chamado às armas,” esp. 297–301. On his personal and public situation in early 1886, see also ibid.; Nabuco to Paranhos, Rio, 3 April 1886, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:142– 44; Nabuco to Allen, Rio, 18 April 1886, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 110; and Penedo to Nabuco, 5 May 1886, AJN: CPp17 doc. 325. On his hopes of founding a new periodical, the early manifestation goes back to 1882; see Chap. 3, “A Faltering Leadership.” On the later efforts, note that they subsided in 1884 because of Nabuco’s electoral concerns, only to pick up, apparently, when he thought himself safely elected; see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 29 January 1885, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:128–29; Nabuco to Rodolpho Dantas, Rio, 19 January 1885, ibid., 1:19–30; Rebouças to Nabuco, Petropolis, 11 February 1886, IJN: CPp16 doc. 302; same to same, Petropolis, 19 February 1886, ibid., CPp16 doc. 301; same to same, Petropolis, 14 March 1886, ibid., CPp16 doc. 310; and Penedo to Nabuco, London, 5 May 1886, AJN: CPp17

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doc. 325. On O Paiz, see A. Carlos Fera. da Sa. to Nabuco, Recife, 11 May 1886, ibid., CPp329 doc. 6710; and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1886, 14 April, 7 May, 8 May. Note that the discussion about a kind of partnership with Patrocínio (the Gazeta da Manhã–Gazeta da Tarde idea) appears in Rebouças, “Diário,” 1885, in many of the entries listed in note 11 above, esp. 21–22 June, 23 July, and 18 August. By 18 August 1885, they are planning yet another journal, A opinião; see Rebouças to Nabuco, Petropolis, 19 August 1885, IJN: CPp15 doc. 285. 13.  On the pamphlets’ intention regarding a journal, see the title pages: Nabuco, O erro do imperador, O eclypse, and Eleições liberaes e eleições conservadoras. See also the correspondence: Rebouças to Nabuco, Petropolis, 1 March 1886, IJN: CPp16 doc. 306; same to same, Petropolis, 14 March 1886, ibid., CPp16 doc. 310; Serra to Rui, Novo Friburgo, 18 March 1886, ARB: CRB 133 6/2:6; same to Nabuco, [Novo] Friburgo, 21 March 1886, IJN: CPp16 doc. 313. 14.  On the press campaign, see, e.g., GT, 12 February 1886, 1; 15 February 1886, 1; see also RI, 18 February 1886, 4–5; and Rebouças “Diário,” 1886, 1 June. On the Black Regulation demonstrations, see GT, 22 June 1886, 1; 30 June 1886, 1; on José Mariano’s purge demonstrations, see ibid., 13 July 1886, 1; 14 July 1886, 1; 15 July 1886, 1; 16 July 1886, 1–2. On the Rodrigo da Silva– Campos reversal demonstrations, see ibid., 6 August 1887, 1–2; 8 August 1887, 1–2; 9 August 1887, 1–2; RN, 15 August 1887, 2. On Miguel Antônio Dias’s role, only one 1886 meeting with him and the other leaders recorded by Rebouças was found, with a possible tie to street demonstrations; see Rebouças “Diário,” 1886, 6 July (preceding the José Mariano demonstrations of mid-July). We should note here that the author’s access to the 1886 diary was severely limited (it is archived at the IJN in Recife, and the author had only two or three days there on that occasion). We might also surmise that, given Rebouças’s schedule and focus in this period, as well as Dias’s established role by this time, Dias was doing this sort of work independently, working with the Confederação Abolicionista when he and the others there perceived a necessity or opportunity. While no meetings with Dias are recorded by Rebouças around the August 1887 events, one notes (26 April, 14 and 28 May, 24 September, 20 October) other meetings related to “propaganda”: that of 24 September is linked to Nabuco’s return to Rio, and that of 20 October is a private meeting in which Rebouças brought Dias to meet with Nabuco, ill at the time. In effect, the trust and importance of the relationship was maintained but apparently was not related to street actions. 15.  On Rebouças’s promotion of the underground railroad, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, 20 and 21 May; and GT, 21 May 1883, 1; on rumors and complaints of it, see JC, 9 May 1884, 3; 11 May 1884, 1. On the Confederação Abolicionista’s support, see Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 36–39; see also Silva, As camelias do Leblon, 16–18. 16.  Andrada, “A abolicão,” esp. 265–67. Cf. Machado, O plano e o pânico, 2nd ed., chap. 2, esp. 85–92 (particularly the actual numbers involved over time, e.g., note 21). The beginning of caifaz activity has been dated variously. Andrada, a participant, provides no date, while Machado suggests 1883; however, Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 155, 242, suggests 1886–1887, and Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 429–31, does likewise. The contemporary periodicals and

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correspondence (see below) suggest that the significant impact had occurred by mid-1887. The explanation for the origin of the word caifaz is from Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 242. 17.  On Abolitionist leadership’s support, see, e.g., [Rebouças], “Confederação Abolicionista: Maximas . . . ,” GT, 16 June 1885, 2, which explicitly declares the laws maintaining slavery and slaveholding illegitimate. The quotation is from Nabuco to My Distinguished Ally, Rio, 18 October 1886, IJN: Cap5 doc. 91; see also Dantas’s explicit support for aiding fugitive slaves, speaking in the Senate on 15 September 1887, JC, 16 September 1887, 1. 18.  Rebouças “Diário,” 1886, 1 June; Nabuco, Eleições liberaes e eleições conservadoras, 57; Nabuco to Allen, Pernambuco, 23 January 1886, Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 106–8. 19.  GT, 13 July 1886, 1; 19 July 1886, 1; JC, 10 August 1886, 2. 20.  On Prado’s response, see JC, 10 August 1886, 2; Cotegipe’s response is handled below. On the emperor’s reported concern, see Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 195–96. On what happened to cabinets publicly exposed as being without the emperor’s support, see, e.g., Itaboraí’s plight in 1870 in Needell, Party of Order, 254–66. 21.  This paragraph and the following six draw upon Needell, “Politics, Parliament, and the Penalty of the Lash.” On the penalty and its history, see ibid., 92n2; Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, chap. 2, esp. 44–48, 52–53; and Brown, “‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation.’” 22.  O Pais (henceforth, OP), 29 July 1886, 1; 31 July 1886, 1; GT, 29 July 1886, 1; JC, 31 July 1886, 1; 18 August 1886, 1; 23 August 1886, 1. 23.  Ibid., 3 August 1886, 1; 21 August 1886, 1; 30 September 1886, 1, 2; 1 October 1886, 1; 5 October 1886, 1; 6 October 1886, 2; Silva, Memorias, 2:319–20. 24.  JC, 30 September 1886, 1; 1 October 1886, 1; 5 October 1886, 1; 14 October 1886, 2. Cf. Nabuco to Allen, London, April 1887, Nabuco, Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil, 116; and Otoni, Autobiografia, 276. 25.  On the military’s history during independence and the monarchy, see Barman, Brazil, chaps. 2–8, passim, esp. 104–6, 108, 121–22, and Citizen Emperor, 37, 320–21, 353; and esp. Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces, chaps. 6 and 7, passim. On education and positivism, see Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 7–8, 52–53, 182–83. On recruitment and status, see Kraay, Race, State, and Armed Forces, chaps. 6 and 7, passim; Love, Revolt of the Whip, 20–22; Holloway, Policing Rio de Janeiro, 173–74; and esp. Beattie, Tribute of Blood, chaps. 1–4, passim, esp. 95–98. On the founding of the Abolitionist organization in the Escola Militar, see RN, 24 August 1880, 3. 26.  See Barman, Citizen Emperor, 353–55; Beattie, Tribute of Blood, 95–98; and Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” 419–26. 27.  GT, 18 April 1885; see Chap. 4, “The Parliamentary Alliance against Abolitionism,” and in this chapter, “The Radicalization of the Abolitionist Movement.” Lemos (“A alternativa republicana,” 426) notes that Serzedelo Correia was holding meetings among younger officers at his home. Patrocínio’s cultivation

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of the younger officers and the rank and file in print is clear; see, e.g., GT, 22 June 1886, 1; 15 October 1886, 1; and Cotegipe to Araujo Pinho, Rio, 9 February 1887, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, L548 P77. 28.  GT, 22 June 1886, 1. 29.  On the Chaves resignation, Cotegipe, and the emperor, see J. Avelino Gurgel do Amaral to João Alfredo, Rio, 7 February 1887, AJA: CR005.099. Amaral thought that the cabinet nearly fell, owing to the emperor’s clear dislike of both the cabinet and Chaves’s actions. The ongoing Republican support for the officers’ interventionist position is noted by Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” 424. Many thought that the February crisis had put an end to the question; see Cotegipe to Araujo Pinho, letter cited in note 27 above; and Saraiva to Paranaguá, n.l., 28 February 1887, AHMI: I-DPP-17, 187—Sar. C 1–3 CL no. 4D. The cabinet’s minister of agriculture, Antônio Prado, resigned on 10 May 1886, and two replacements came in, for his and another ministry, the latter held temporarily by still another minister, allowing for a reshuffle; see [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 219–21. On the public May crisis, see, e.g, OP, 14 May 1887, 1; GT, 14 May 1887, 2; OP, 15 May 1887, 1; GT, 16 May 1887, 1; 17 May 1887, 1; 18 May 1887, 1, 2; OP, 18 May 1887, 1; JC, 19 May 1887, 1; OP, 20 May 1887, 1; 21 May 1887, 1. The manifesto of 14 May was actually provided to Pelotas by Dantas; it was drafted by Rui Barbosa (Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 149). 30.  On the emperor’s health, see the text below. He suffered attacks of fever, vomiting, and headache between February and April, with three such in April alone, as well as obvious changes in his behavior, possibly due to one or more minor strokes; see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 332–33. There is no notice of this conspiracy in Rebouças’s diary or in the historiography; see, e.g., Lemos’s survey of the era, “A alternativa republicana” (with its focus on the military), esp. p. 425, where he synthesizes the current literature (ca. 2010) and suggests that the military was ready for such an action but did not carry it out, citing Monteiro. The latter (Pesquisas e depoimentos, 144–48) does indeed allude to conspiracy, but only in May, and in this case the critical agents are all military men, however linked to Campos Sales, Aristides Lobo, and especially Quintino Bocaiuva, the apparent link to the younger officers’ embrace of a coup leading to a republic. Serzedelo took the idea to Pelotas, who put off the objective of an immediate republican regime change, emphasizing the conspirators’ unity as being most important, with the republic to follow. Monteiro includes an 1890 letter in which Pelotas states that, even in November 1889, he did not expect a republic as long as the emperor lived and would himself just have deposed him. If true, Saldanha Marinho’s concerns were well founded. As for the participation of Patrocínio in the April conspiracy or the decisive action of Saldanha Marinho in May, the evidence has remained archived without impact on the historiography, except for the obscure newspaper publication indicated here: see Saldanha Marinho to Nascimento e Glycerio, Rio, 20 April [1887], AGC: (467) 41-1-61:5; same to J. de Castilhos, Rio, 23 April [1887], ibid., (624) 41-1-61:7; same to Glycerio [original missing—middle of May 1887], cited in Theodoro Magalhães, “O Archivo de Saldanha Marinho e a propaganda republican,” published clipping, archived in AGC, from A Cidade series, 6 March 1918, drawn from the archived original, AGC: 41-1-59:5–6.

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31.  For João Alfredo’s testimony, see Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 135– 36. Note that there was considerable doubt among the ministers about maintaining the cabinet, even before Pelotas’s threats; see, e.g., Cotegipe to Francisco Belisario, Rio, 6 April 1887, IHGB: L244 doc. 56; Saraiva to Paranaguá, [Rio], 2 April 1887, AHMI: I-DPP-17 1.887.—Sar. C 1–3 CL No. 4. The opposition press emphasized internal doubts and disarray and, during the crisis, the emperor’s illness, in order to augment the cabinet’s difficulties (see GT and OP citations in note 29 above; see also JC, 19 May 1887, 1). 32.  On the cabinet changes, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas, 219–21. On Nabuco’s role and the by-election, see Numa Pompilio to Nabuco, Recife, 13 July 1887, IJN: CPp333 doc. 6778; Conceição to Nabuco, Rio, 30 June 1887, ibid., CPp332 doc. 6771; [Luís de Andrade] to Nabuco, Rio, 24 July 1887, ibid., CPp333 doc. 6786; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 17, 20, 21 August; 6, 14, 15, 29 September; Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 15 September 1887, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:160–61, and Diários, 1:284 (14 September 1887). 33.  JC, 4 June 1887, 1; on the emperor’s departure, see Conceição to Nabuco in note 32 above; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 333–34; on Cotegipe’s public and private reputation as the emperor’s health ebbed, see, e.g., Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 144–45; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 332–33; and GT, 18 May 1887, 1; on the July–August crisis, see note 14 above; on Dantas’s and João Alfredo’s Senate reaction to Rodrigo da Silva’s actions, see GT, 6 August 1887, 1; 10 August 1887, 1; RN, 15 August 1887, 2, 3. 34.  See JC, 14 September 1887, 1; 15 September 1887, 1; 20 September 1887, 1. Note that the reference to the Abolitionists’ responsibility for mass flight is clear but that Antônio Bento goes unnamed; for his role in all this, see below in the text. That the movement was involved, however, is explicit in Prado’s reference to “this evil and dangerous movement that works in the labor regime of these regions.” His brother, Eduardo Prado, in writing to Nabuco, also refers explicitly to both Nabuco’s “party” and its (political) pressure as well as the role of “The Abolitionists of S. Paulo” in a letter in which he sounds Nabuco out about the sort of conditional emancipation (freedom for two and a half years’ service) the paulista planters are contemplating in order to stabilize slave labor in the province by the end of 1887, including an explicit reference to breaking ranks with the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Note also that their private correspondence precedes Antônio Prado’s speech by nearly two months; Eduardo Prado to Nabuco, Paris, 21 July 1887, IJN: CPp18 doc. 357. Unfortunately, there is no record of Nabuco’s response. 35.  The paulista solution both in the field and in provincial deliberation will be discussed further below, as will Paulino’s. The differences between the various export regions and/or their impact on different provincial elites’ responses to abolition have been discussed by others; see, e.g., Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 128–32, 204–9, 211–12, 228, 231, chap. 16, passim, 258–59; Costa, Da senzala à colônia, 398, 399, 402, 408, 413, 418; Colson, Destruction of a Revolution, 1:90–95, 96–97, 98–200; and Slenes, “Demography and Economics,” 128– 29, 131–32, 134, 138, 139, 140, 142–43, 146–47, 167n29, 181, 187–89, 196–97, 200, 207–12, 244–45, 248, 261–62. Schulz (Financial Crisis, 47–48) notes that after 1872, most mortgages based on slave collateral went almost exclusively to

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the Province of Rio de Janeiro, still the economic leader at the time. New loans based on slaves, however, had generally ceased by 1884; few plantation mortgages were approved thereafter. The emphasis on easier local credit banks in the 1870s and 1880s debates to address the increasing need for credit among planters in both the southeastern and northeastern regions is a response to this crisis. That default would be a common threat, to be shouldered by the imperial treasury (ibid., 50– 51), was assumed. Schulz emphasizes 1884 and afterward as a period of acute economic difficulty particularly for fluminense planters, still unable to secure new credit or to meet their past commitments. As we have already seen and will see again below, however, the great political weight wielded by Paulino counted for a great deal. It seems to have tipped Cotegipe’s financial policies to support the fluminense (and northeastern) planters in easing credit, as specified in ibid., 60–61, not least by exempting sugar from an export tariff. The significance of slaves as mortgage collateral in Rio de Janeiro is detailed in Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution, 206. Note that 93% of the outstanding mortage debt held by the Banco do Brasil in 1880 was on plantations with slaves, and that the uncertainty, poor loan performance, and defaults were only increasing by 1885. Summerhill details how the state effectively used its creditworthiness to subsidize credit support to the planters in 1885–1888 (9, 206–7). 36.  Patrocínio had broken with a partner at the Gazeta da Tarde on 31 August and then founded the Cidade do Rio (hereafter, CR). Its first issue came out on 28 September 1887. 37.  On ebbing Conservative confidence, see the disarray in the cabinet (note 31 above) as well as the break with Prado and João Alfredo discussed above. See [Luís de Andrade] to Nabuco, Rio, 24 July 1887, IJN: CPp333 doc. 6786; Lucena to João Alfredo, [Rio], 20 September 1887, AJA: uncat.; Cotegipe to Lucena, Rio, 11 November 1887, APEP: Arquivo Barão de Lucena, No. 654; Moura to Paranaguá, n.l., 11 November 1887, AHMI: I-DPP-s1.11.887 Mou c CL No.5; Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 25 November 1887, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, L548 P80; esp. Antonio Bandeira to Lucena, Rio, 10 December 1887, APEP: Arquivo Barão de Lucena, No. 650; same to same, Rio, 29 December 1887, ibid., No. 652; Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 11 December 1887, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, L548 P80, doc. 2; same to Rodrigues Alves, Rio, 12 December 1887, IHGB: Rodrigues Alves, L808 P64; Nabuco to Penedo, 8 October 1887, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:162; and CR, 19 December 1887, 1. Nabuco’s arrival was on 29 September; see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 29 September. On Nabuco, slave flight, and the military’s withdrawal of support for pursuit of fugitive slaves, see JC, 9 October 1887, 1 (noted but not quoted); see CR, 8 October 1887, 2; 19 October 1887, 2; JC, 19 October 1887, 2; 20 October 1887, 2; CR, 20 October 1887, 1; 21 October 1887, 1; JC, 22 October 1887, 2; GT, 25 October 1887, 1; CR, 24 October 1887, 1; 27 October 1887, 1; JC, 27 October 1887, 3; 28 October 1887, 5; CR, 30 October 1887, 1; JC, 31 October 1887, 3. By 12 December 1887, in writing to the paulista provincial president, Rodrigues Alves, Cotegipe had acknowledged the cabinet’s lack of strength in containing the situation (see the letter, cited above in this note). 38.  On the Liberals’ efforts, see Moraes, “A escravidão,” 297; Rebouças,

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“Diário,” 1886, 1 June; Afonso Celso, Oito anos de parlamento, 93; and JC, 4 June 1887, 1. 39.  On the 14 September plan, see note 34 above. On the ambiguous relationship with Liberals’ Abolitionism, cf. RI, 30 September 1887, 4–5; RN, 5 October 1887, 2–3. On the Martinho Prado project and Antônio Prado’s success at obtaining imperial support, see Holloway, “Immigration and Abolition,” esp. 167–68; and Needell, “Brazilian Abolitionism,” 252–53. On Prado, paulista abolitionism, and slave flight, as well as their impacts elsewhere, see JC, 20 September 1887, 1; RN, 5 October 1887, 2–3; JC, 19 September 1887, 2; 22 October 1887, 2; GT, 25 October 1887, 1; 27 October 1887, 1; CR, 24 October 1887, 1; 27 October 1887, 1; 28 October 1887, 1; 6 November 1887, 1; 16 November 1887, 1; 17 November 1887, 2; 22 November 1887, 1–3; 23 November 1887, 1; 26 November 1887, 1; JC, 26 October 1887, 1; 31 October 1887, 3; 7 November 1887, 2; 17 November 1887, 2; 19 November 1887, 2; 21 November 1887, 1; 22 November 1887, 2, 4; 23 November 1887, 3; 24 November 1887, 1, 3, 4; 25 November 1887, 4; 26 November 1887, 1; CR, 28 November 1887, 1; JC, 12 December 1887, 2; CR, 13 December 1887, 1. On the common 1888 declarations, see JC, 14 January 1888, 1–2; see also Castro, Das cores do silêncio, chaps. 12 and 13, on spreading labor instability. 40.  On Paulino’s propaganda, role, and alternative reform, see JC, 7 November 1887, 2; 18 November 1887, 1; 26 November 1887, 2; 27 November 1887, 2, 3; 28 November 1887, 2; CR, 18 November 1887, 1; 25 November 1887, 2; JC, 2 December 1887, 3; 6 December 1887, 1; 8 December1887, 2; 9 December 1887, 2–3; 10 December 1887, 1, 3; 15 December 1887, 1, 3; 16 December 1887, 2; 17 December 1887, 3, 4; 20 December 1887, 3; 22 December 1887, 4; 24 December 1887, 3; 27 December 1887, 2, 3; 28 December 1887, 3; 30 December 1887, 2; 31 December 1887, 2, 3; CR, 29 December 1887, 1. On the January Vassouras commitment, see Stein, Vassouras, 254. On the particular lot of fluminense planters, see note 35 above; and, for a case study, Stein, Vassouras, chap. 9. Note that proCotegipe provincial petitions as part of the pro-Paulino position were published in late 1887; see JC, 16 December 1887, 2; 23 December 1887, 4; 26 December 1887, 2; 28 December 1887, 2, 3; 29 December 1887, 1; 30 December 1887, 2; 31 December 1887, 2. 41.  On João Alfredo’s refusal of a ministry, see Antonio Bandeira to Lucena, Rio, 26 August 1885, APEP: Arquivo Barão de Lucena, 559. On João Alfredo’s probable succession, see Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 156–57. Note that the cartoons of the Revista Illustrada portraying the September 1884 Cotegipe abolitionist pronouncement and João Alfredo’s role and position relative to power suggest that the situation was quite clear. For background on Paulino’s ideological and personal potential for refusal, see Needell, Party of Order, 230–33, 254–66, 308–14. 42.  On the January rumors of Cotegipe’s alternative, see CR, 13 January 1888, 1; 16 January 1888, 1; 25 January 1888, 1. On the shifting position of the Abolitionists with respect to João Alfredo in late 1887–early 1888, see CR, 3 November 1887, 1; 18 November 1887, 1; 21 November 1887, 1; 28 November 1887, 1; 10 December 1887, 1; 12 December 1887, 1; Sousa Bandeira to Lucena, Rio, 4

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January 1887 [1888], APEP: Arquivo Sousa Bandeira, 649. On Cotegipe’s ebbing strength and the northeastern provincial elections, see JC, 23 January 1888, 2; 27 January 1888, 2; 3 February 1888, 2. On Paulino’s coverage in February, see JC, 3 February 1888, 1–2; 5 February 1888, 1–2; 8 February 1888, 1–2; 9 February 1888, 4. On the public festival in Petrópolis, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 12 February. On João Alfredo’s proposal, see the interview in Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 187n1. 43.  Barman, Citizen Emperor, 127, 129–30, 145–46, 150–52, 154–56, 262– 69. For fuller development, see Barman, Princess Isabel, chaps. 1–6, esp. 111–19, 132–35, 176–85. On the perception of the emperor and the princess regent, together with examples of Cotegipe’s abuse of his role, see, e.g., Barman, Citizen Emperor, 332–33, 341, and Princess Isabel, 178; Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 144–45; OP, 14 May 1887, 1; 15 May 1887, 1; GT, 18 May 1887, 1, 2; 6 August 1887, 1; 8 August 1887, 1; 9 August 1887, 2; 10 August 1887, 1; CR, 12 November 1887, 1; 15 November 1887, 1; 21 November 1887, 1; 23 November 1887, 1; 28 November 1887, 1. 44.  Isabel, [notes to her children], ca. December 1888, AHMI: POB M-199 Doc 9030. 45.  For the count d’Eu, see Barman, references in note 43 above, particularly Citizen Emperor, 93–119, 121–22, 142–47, 164, 170, 200–201, esp. 185–86, 198–99; see also Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” esp. 419–20; and note 25 above, particularly Needell and Beattie citations. For the princess regent, see Barman citations in note 43 above, esp. Princess Isabel, 117, 173–74. On Nabuco’s papal mission, see Nabuco, in Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:165n1, and Nabuco to Penedo, Rome, 9 February 1888, 168–69; on the Abolitionists’ hope of the regent’s intercession, see, e.g., the post–June 1887 GT and CR citations in note 43 above. On the Battle of Flowers and Rebouças’s perception of the regent, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 12 February. 46.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 14 September [note added 8 September 1890]. 47.  Isabel, [notes to her children], ca. December 1888, AHMI: POB M-199 Doc 9030. Note that Cotegipe’s response was only that he was unwilling to break with the 1885 reform, but that he might be willing to interpret it so that it might be shortened to three or four years. We have seen how a rumor of this surfaced. He committed to “study” this, as he publicly stated in the Senate in response to Prado and João Alfredo. See Patrocínio’s remarkably prescient sense of matters and his continued pressure on the princess regent to force Cotegipe’s resignation; CR, 27 February 1888, 1. 48.  For this urban disorder, see JC, 29 February 1888, 1; CR, 29 February 1888, 1; JC, 1 March 1888, 1; 2 March 1888, 1, 2; CR, 2 March 1888, 1; JC, 3 March 1888, 1, 3; CR, 3 March 1888, 1 (note that CR here credibly disputes JC’s account); RI, 3 March 1888, 4–5; JC, 4 March 1888, 1; 5 March 1888, 1, 2 (with regard to the issue of rising police abuse under Cotegipe, note the data on police arrests 1885–1887); RN 5 March 1888, 1–2; CR, 5 March 1888, 2; JC, 6 March 1888, 1; CR, 6 March 1888, 1; JC, 7 March 1888, 1; CR, 7 March 1888, 1; JC, 8 March 1888, 1; CR, 8 March 1888, 1; JC, 9 March 1888, 1; CR, 9 March 1888, 1; 12 March 1888, 1; JC, 12 March 1888, 1. Cf. Kraay, Days of National Festivity,

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326–29, for an interesting but unrelated and lesser example of a similar sort of urban violence in 1876. 49.  Isabel to MacDowell, Petropolis, 3 March [1888]. Note that this is in response to MacDowell to Isabel, Rio, 3 March [1888], which Isabel apparently only received after reading the dailies. Afterward, she wrote a second time, the next day: Isabel to MacDowell, Petropolis, 4 March [1888]. Cotegipe’s attempt to report matters in Rio is Cotegipe to Isabel, Rio, 5 March [1888]; his resignation letter is same to same, Rio, 7 March [1888]; all of these are archived in AHMI: POB M-199 Doc 9030. On Cotegipe’s sense of his performance, see, e.g., Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 19 February 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, DL548.82 L341 bs3; and same to same, Rio, 19 March 1888, ibid., DL548.83 doc. 1. 50.  See JC, 8 May 1888, 1, for Cotegipe’s testimony in the Senate, and note his message to his successor at the time, Cotegipe to João Alfredo, Corte, 7 March [1888], AJA: uncat. Note also Cotegipe’s anticipation of Isabel’s selection in Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 11 January 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, DL548.82 L341 bs2, in which he refers to João Alfredo as “o preconisado 1o. ministro” (i.e., the expected or recommended prime minister). On Cotegipe’s sense of the Abolitionist motive for his fall, he is quite clear in Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 19 March 1888, ibid., DL548.83 doc. 1. 51.  CR, 7 November 1887, 1. 52.  See notes 11 and 18 above. Note that while not admitting to the Abolitionists’ illegal activity, even Dantas, in the Senate itself (JC, 16 September 1887, 1), defended the movement from the charges of anarchism, comparing the Abolitionists to Jesus’s first disciples and pointing to the abolitionist activities and statements of the emperor and the reformist solidarity of João Alfredo. 53.  CR, 16 January 1888, 1. Chapter 6 1.  Cotegipe to João Alfredo, Corte, 7 March [1888], AJA: uncat.; João Alfredo, “Organização do ministerio de 10 de março,” n.l., n.d. [ca. 7–10 March 1888], AJA: uncat., 2o pacote, 1888; see also JC, 14 January 1888, 1–2. 2.  See Chap. 2, notes 2 and 8, and “The Liberals Return to Power.” On Rebouças, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 26 May; 19, 25, 26, 28 June; 1 July; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 7 March. On Francisco Belisário, see Lyra, Instituições políticas, 253–54; Needell, Party of Order, 421nn42, 48; Schulz, Financial Crisis, 60–62; Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution, 95–96, 208; and Cotegipe to F. Belisario, Rio, 6 April 1887, IHGB: L227 doc. 56. 3.  João Alfredo, “Ideas capitães,” n.l., n.d. [archivist notes April 1888], AJA: “Diversos,” pacote 2o, 1888. See the various letters responding to João Alfredo’s inquiries regarding the economy and labor in ibid., e.g., Anon., “Com a extincção,” n.l., n.d., ibid.; José Vergueiro to João Alfredo, Fazenda Yibicaba [eastern Province of São Paulo], 23 March [1888], AJA: uncat., pacote 3o, 1888; Arthur S. Hitchings to João Alfredo, Rio, 18 March [1888], ibid. 4.  See the “Ideas capitães,” in note 3 above. Note that the Cidade do Rio would support João Alfredo’s financial policies fervently and in detail throughout early 1888 in a series of articles. Patrocínio himself apparently also sought a quiet

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advisory role with respect to both financial policy and players as well as Rio’s market speculation; he seems to have been angling for a cabinet subsidy in return. See Patrocínio to João Alfredo, Rio, 20 March 1888, AJA: uncat., pacote 3o, 1888. One finds no further correspondence between the two in the present archive, despite Bergstresser, “The Movement,” 176n116, where she notes that the AJA, located in Rio in 1968, “contained a file of correspondence from José do Patrocínio to which the writer was denied access in 1968.” This author was given the most cordial and supportive access to the AJA in 2007 and 2011 and could not find this file, despite the professional cataloguing completed by the later date. One can only suppose that it was removed, lost, or destroyed before its transfer to the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. 5.  On the collapse of slaveholding in the Province of São Paulo, see JC, January– February 1888, passim, e.g., 13 January, 2–3; 14 January, 1–2; 23 January, 1; 30 January, 1. On the agreement between João Alfredo and Paulino, see Chap. 5, note 42. 6.  On Cotegipe’s negotiation, see Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 19 March 1888, IHGB: DL548.83, doc. 1; same to same, Rio, 30 March 1888, ibid., doc. 2. On the rapid recruitment of Prado, see João Alfredo to Prado, 7 March 1888 [telegram], AJA: CC.000.487; Prado to João Alfredo, S. Paulo, 17 March 1888, AJA: uncat., 1888. On Rodrigo da Silva, see João Alfredo, “Organização do ministerio de 10 de março,” cited in note 1 above. On the fluminense recruits, see ibid., where João Alfredo notes motivations and responses. On the 1886 election results, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 394–95, 398. 7.  See [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 398. On the Liberals’ declarations, see below in the text and note 17. 8.  On Patrocínio, see the April–May 1887 conspiracy discussed in Chap. 5, note 30; for assessment of Cotegipe’s strategy, see, e.g., CR, 9 January 1888, 1; 13 January 1888, 1; and Chap. 5, note 42, first three CR citations. On Nabuco, see Nabuco to Penedo, Petropolis, 1 February 1887, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:151; Nabuco to coreligionario, Rio, 18 October 1887, AJN: CAp doc. 91; Mattosinhos to Nabuco, Rio, 13 December 1887, IJN: CPp337 doc. 6853; and esp. Nabuco to Penedo, Pernambuco, 8 October 1887, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:162, and Diário, 1:279–82, 285–86; and Nabuco to Salvador de Mendonça, London, 27 December 1887, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:165–66. On Rebouças, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1887, 23 October, 24 October, 3 November, 13 December, and “Diário,” 1888, 4 January, 30 January. On political opinion, see the periodicals cited in Chap. 5, notes 40, and 42, regarding Paulino’s coverage. On the shock of 7 March 1888, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 7 March. Note that Rebouças had seen no reason to descend from Petrópolis between 1 March and 8 March. Cf. João Alfredo to Prado, Corte, 7 March 1888 [telegram], AJA: CCC 000.487; JC, 6 March 1888, 1; 7 March 1888, 1; 8 March 1888, 1; CR, 8 March 1888, 1. 9.  On Rebouças’s annual residential pattern, see AL, 1884, 1885, 1886, etc.; and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1883, early March entries. On early March 1888, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 1, 8, 11 March; the quotation is from 11 March. 10.  On the Abolitionists’ view of the Dantas alliance, see Chap. 4, “The Reform, the Abolitionists’ Role, and the Reaction.” On Prado’s expected schedule,

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see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 12 March. On Paulino’s and Prado’s projects, see Chap. 5, “Conservative Abolitionist Alternatives.” On libertos and vagabundagem, see, e.g., JC, 20 October 1887, 2; 26 November 1887, 2; 20 December 1887, 3; 31 December 1887, 2; 14 January 1888, 1; 1 February 1888, 1–2; 5 February 1888, 1–2; 23 February 1888, 1. Cf. ibid., 23 November 1887, 1; 24 January 1888, 2; RN, 24 January 1888, 2; 5 February 1888, 2. On Rebouças’s actions, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, for the dates noted in the text. 11.  [Rebouças], “Projecto de Lei,” AJA: 1888 3o, pacote. 12.  [Rebouças], “Projecto de Lei de Serviços Ruraes,” ibid. 13.  [Rebouças], “Projecto de Regulamento para Colonias Penetenciarias Agricolas,” ibid., 9 April 1888. 14.  [Rebouças], “Colonisação Nacional,” ibid., n.d. 15.  On the northeastern success with free Afro-Brazilian labor, see JC, 23 November 1887, 1; 24 January 1888, 2. On paulista success with freedmen, see RN, 5 February 1888, 2. Cf. more recent research on northeastern particulars in the earlier nineteenth century, especially the varied role of the freedmen in various export sectors, in Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 130–31, 148–49. 16.  On Rio’s liberation project, see CR, 15 March 1888, 1; JC, 16 March 1888, 2–3; 17 March 1888, 1. On the Araruamas, see JC, 15 March 1888, 1. On the Jornal do Commercio’s endorsement of immediate abolition, see JC, 17 March 1888, 1; 18 March 1888, 3. On Petrópolis’s liberation and underground railroad, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 1 April. On mass private manumission, see JC, 25 April 1888, 1; 4 May 1888, 1. Note that in some of this manumission there were conditions of further service for a certain amount of time, etc. 17.  On Liberals’ support, see JC, 14 March 1888, 2; CR, 14 March 1888, 1; JC, 15 March 1888, 2. On Abolition as nonpartisan, see ibid., 16 March 1888, 2; 17 March 1888, 1. On the Abolitionists’ critical role, see CR, 19 March 1888, 1. 18.  On Prado, see [Javarí], Organizações e programas ministeriais, 233; Elias Antonio Pacheco e Chaves to João Alfredo, S. Paulo, 20 April 1888, AJA: 1888, pacote 1o, 2508; Prado to João Alfredo, S. Paulo, 17 March 1888, AJA: uncat., 1888. On the final project, see [Antônio Prado], “Projecto de lei abolindo a escravidão no Brazil” [Project of law abolishing slavery in Brazil], attached to Chaves to João Alfredo, S. Paulo, 20 April 1888, cited just above. Note that the lengthy conditional component was recommended; only immediate abolition was critical, as Chaves noted: “He [Antônio Prado] only insists upon the first article.” The latter reads “fica abolida a escravidão no Brazil” (slavery in Brazil is abolished). However, Prado was clearly serious about the conditional component, to which he devoted pages; see also Prado’s strategy regarding his project, just discussed in the text. For the rest, see Prado to João Alfredo, S. Paulo, 12 April 1888, AJA: 1888, pacote 1o, 2507. See also Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 14 April 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, L548 P83. On João Alfredo’s private consultations, see, e.g., note 3 above. On the uncertainty, see the Cotegipe letter just cited above; and Afonso Celso, Oito anos de parlamento, 44. On probable Prado leaks, see JC, 8 April 1888, 1; “Provincia de S. Paulo . . . 13 Abril,” 19 April 1888, 3. Needell (“Brazilian Abolition,” 257–58n44) mistakenly argued that Prado leaks were thought to have actually spurred public Abolitionist rejection of Prado’s plan,

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citing Duque-Estrada, A abolição, 235, and Moraes, A campanha abolicionista, 328, and that this spurred the cabinet’s decision. However, a more careful review of Duque-Estrada and Moraes as cited, as well as the press at the time, indicates that this argument is mistaken. What was published, in passing, was only a telegram allegedly revealing Prado’s end date for slavery (CR, 9 April 1888, 1), not Prado’s draft. Moreover, Moraes’s account of the cabinet’s reception of Prado’s draft states it was not published—precisely to avoid conflict with the Abolitionists. What a review of the contemporary press does make clear was not an attack on a Prado leak but rather that support for immediate, unconditional abolition was growing and perceived increasingly as inevitable, and not just in the Abolitionist press. See, e.g., note 17 above; JC, 1 April 1888, 3; RN, 5 April 1888, 2; CR, 12 April 1888; 17 April 1888, 1. The larger point made in Needell, “Brazilian Abolition,” that the cabinet was partly swayed by a desire to avoid confrontation with the mobilized Abolitionist movement in a context of widespread rural destabilization and private emancipation, as well as by the princess regent’s pressure and increasing parliamentary support for rapid resolution, stands. 19.  On Ferreira Viana’s support by Liberals and Abolitionists, see JC, 4 April 1888, 1; CR, 4 April 1888, 1; JC, 6 April 1888, 2; CR, 9 April 1888, 1; 12 April 1888, 1; 13 April 1888, 1; 18 April 1888, 1; 19 April 1888, 1; JC, 20 April 1888, 1. On private assessment of the cabinet’s strength, see Antonio Bandeira to Lucena, Rio, 18 April 1888, APEP: no. 671; cf. Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 26 April 1888, AJN:, CAp5 doc. 95. 20.  See the Prado draft’s citation in note 18 above. Note that Conrad (Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 270–71) discusses the draft, citing its publication in the South American Journal, 26 May 1888. 21.  Gusmão Lobo to Rio Branco, [Rio], 13 May 1888, in Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 147–48. 22.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 29 April. Conrad (Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 271) first pointed to Rebouças’s role in 1972, citing published sources by Rebouças. The clear relationship between Rebouças’s project and the cabinet’s final project was first confirmed on the basis of archival evidence (the same quoted and cited here) in Needell, “Brazilian Abolition,” 255–58. Moraes (“A escravidão,” 305) gave Ferreira Viana credit for authorship and did so again in A campanha abolicionista, 329n255, after dismissing Monteiro’s assertion in favor of Vieira da Silva, another minister in the cabinet. Costa (Da senzala à colônia, 438) bypasses the issue, as does Verissimo (André Rebouças, chap. 6); Toplin (Abolition of Slavery, 238–43) does not address the authorship issue. Alonso (Flores, votos e balas, 342–51, passim), in her narrative of the cabinet’s origins and abolitionism, also affirms Rebouças’s authorship of the law, albeit without citing Conrad, Needell, or Rebouças’s archived MS. 23.  JC, 9 May 1888, 1. This is the original text presented by Rodrigo da Silva to the Chamber on 8 May 1888. Minor, friendly amendments were accepted later, giving us the Lei Auréa known to history: “Art. 1o: E’ declarada extincta desde a data desta Lei a escravidão no Brasil. Art. 2o: Revogam-se as disposições em contrario.” Again, the relationship to Rebouças’s original language is clear. 24.  See CR, 3 May 1888, 1; JC, 4 May 1888, 1; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 3

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May. The description in the Jornal do Commercio makes it clear how impressive the numbers were, but no estimate is provided there or in the Cidade do Rio. The Jornal do Commercio only records “thousands of people” (JC, 4 May 1888, 1). On the Liberals, see JC, 6 May, 1; 7 May 1888, 1; CR, 7 May 1888, 1. 25.  JC, 8 May 1888, 1. 26.  Ibid. 27.  Ibid. 28.  On Rodrigo da Silva’s connections and past, see Needell, Party of Order, 260–63, table 4, 421n42. Note that Rodrigo da Silva had been brought into João Alfredo’s cabinet partly to ward off the clear possibility of a split between the paulista saquaremas in the eastern part of the province and the western paulistas of the advancing economic frontier, who looked to Prado. See [João Alfredo], “Organização,” cited in note 1 above. 29.  Moraes, “A escravidão,” 307; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 8 May. 30.  JC, 9 May 1888, 1. 31.  Ibid., 10 May 1888, 1. 32.  Ibid., 11 May 1888, 1. 33.  Ibid., 12 May 1888, 1; CR, 11 May 1888, 1; JC, 13 May 1888, 1; Moraes, “A escravidão,” 310; see also Afonso Celso, Oito anos de parlamento, 42; Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 30 March 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, DL548.83; same to same, Rio, 14 April 1888, ibid. 34.  Needell, Party of Order, 308–10; JC, 14 May 1888, 1. 35.  The quotation is from Silva, Memorias, 2:320. On the day, see JC, 14 May 1888, 1. On Pereira da Silva, see Blake, Diccionario, 3:479–85. 36.  Moraes, “A escravidão,” 313. On the events, see JC, 14 May 1888, 1. On the slaves and the Alfândega, see Karasch, Slave Life, 35–36. 37.  JC, 14 May 1888, 1. 38.  Moraes, “A escravidão,” 313. 39.  Marqués qtd. in Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 705. The phrase Marqués heard may be a reference by Patrocínio to a passage from Victor Hugo’s Les misérables, vol. 4, bk. 5, chap. 4, “A Heart beneath a Stone,” where the poet refers to the “palace of dreams” and how “certain thoughts are prayers. There are moments when . . . the soul is on its knees.” 40.  Marqués qtd. in Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 705–7; see also JC, 14 May 1888, 1; and Nabuco, Diários, 1:292, 13 May 1888. 41.  Marqués qtd. in Senna, Rascunhos e perfis, 708–9; see also ibid., 707–8. 42.  Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 7–13 May; quotation is from ibid., 13 May. 43.  Ibid., 14–16 May. 44.  Ibid., 3 May. Quotation is from Dias to Nabuco, Rio, 13 May 1891, IJN: CPp29 doc. 697. Chapter 7 1.  See Needell, Party of Order, particularly chaps. 3, 6, and 7; on the period before 1850 and the constitutional issues, see Barman, Brazil, chaps. 4–7, passim; and Needell, Party of Order, chaps. 2 and 3, passim; Constituição politica, titulos 3, 4, 5; and here, Chap. 1, “The Evolution of the Emperor’s Role.”

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2.  See Chap. 1, “Brazil’s Constitutional Monarchy.” 3.  Barman, Brazil, chap. 8, passim; Needell, Party of Order, 64–72, and chap. 3, passim. 4.  See Chap. 2, “Division and Unity among the Conservatives,” notes 6 and 12, and “The Liberals’ Return to Power.” 5.  See Chap. 1, “The Evolution of the Emperor’s Role,” esp. note 67, and “Monarch, Parliament and the Law of the Free Womb.” 6.  Ibid., “Monarch, Parliament and the Law of the Free Womb”; on Perdigão Malheiro’s project and the slaves, see Needell, Party of Order, 298–99, 309, 311–12. 7.  On the 1885 reform and the later reforms to it proposed by the Conservatives, see Chap. 4, “Saraiva and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885,” and Chap. 5, “Conservative Abolitionist Alternatives,” respectively. On Nabuco’s 1880 proposal, see Chap. 2, “The Struggle with Saraiva” and note 67. On the Abolitionists’ 1883 goal, see Chap. 3, “New Strength and Policy Radicalization.” On the Dantas administration, see Chap. 4. 8.  See the Conservatives’ speeches summarized and cited in Chap. 6, “Parliamentary Triumph.” On João Alfredo’s initial, early 1888 positions, see Chap. 5, “Conservative Abolitionist Alternatives,” note 42. His position in early March, as asserted here, is speculative; it is based on his late February position (see ibid.) and that of his ally, Prado, his key minister in the early March cabinet organization and the minister designated as responsible for the reform; see Chap. 6, note 18. 9.  For the speeches’ texts, see Chap. 6, “Parliamentary Triumph” and the citations for each speaker. 10.  On the nonpartisan, national position, see, e.g., JC, 4 May 1888, 1; 10 May 1888, 1; 11 May 1888, 1; 12 May 1888, 1; 14 May 1888, 1; CR 19 April 1888, 1; 2–5 May 1888, passim. On Ferreira Viana, note João Alfredo’s specific interest in recruiting him in [João Alfredo], “Organizacão do ministerio de 10 de março, n.l., n.d. [probably Rio, 10 March 1888], AJA: uncat., 1888 pacote 2o; and see also Needell, Party of Order, 421n42, 422n64. Viana’s demonstration speech is in CR, 24 April 1888, 1. On Liberal and Abolitionist support for Viana’s byelection, see Chap. 6, note 19. 11.  On 1886, see Chap. 5, “The Radicalization of the Abolitionist Movement,” note 13. On O abolicionismo, see Chap. 3, “Midyear Reorientation,” note 36, and Chap. 4, “The Reform, the Abolitionists’ Role, and the Reaction,” note 17. On the rhetorical response of the Conservatives and the traditional Liberals, see, e.g., the response to Cotegipe’s disclosures regarding 7 March 1888 in the Senate speeches of 7 May 1888, in JC, 8 May 1888, 1. The JC, 8 May 1888, 1, version of Nabuco’s speech is abbreviated; see, rather, the complete version in CR, 10 May 1888, 1. 12.  Ibid. 13.  For 1871, see Needell, Party of Order, chap. 7, passim; for 1888, see the 1888 Conservatives’ speeches discussed and cited in this chapter, in “The Constitutional Reaction,” and the Conservatives’ speeches cited in Chap. 6, “Parliamentary Triumph.” On Brazilian elite assumptions about “society,” see the quotations in Needell, Party of Order, chap. 7, passim, and, e.g., A Tropical Belle Epoque,

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45–51, 61–63, 111, 128–29, 138–39. On the distance between United States constitutional democracy and the reality of late nineteenth-century United States politics and class relations, an efficient reference might be the text and bibliography of Nash, The American People, vol. 2, chap. 19. For Nabuco’s hopes and assumptions, see Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 25 May 1888, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:171– 72; or Needell, “A Liberal Embraces Monarchy,” 166–67. 14.  On the labor situation in early 1888, see, e.g., Chap. 6, notes 5, 10, 15, 16. On the slave statistics for the end of 1887, see RN, 5 April 1888, 3. On postabolition fluminense rural labor, see Castro, Das cores do silêncio, chaps. 12 and 13; and Stein, Vassouras, 356–74. 15.  On the Campo de Santana mass, see CR, 17 May 1888, 1. For online access to the photography, e.g., search using “fotografia da missa de 17 de maio de 1888.” On the Rosário mass and deposit, see JC, 14 May 1888, 2; cf. ibid., 1; and Silva, “Resistência negra e formação do underground abolicionista,” 12. On Antônio Bento’s reception, see Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 22 August, 23 August; and Nabuco, Diários, 1:295 (26 August). 16.  See, e.g., Chap. 3, “Midyear Reorientation,” Chap. 4, “The Reform, the Abolitionists’ Role, and the Reaction,” and Chap. 6, “The Abolitionists’ Role.” 17.  See Cotegipe in JC, 13 May 1888, 1; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, e.g., 25, 30 May; 18, 26, 27 June. On contemporary assessment of João Alfredo’s likely postabolition vulnerability, see Cotegipe to Pinho, Rio, 30 March 1888, IHGB: Araújo Pinho, DL548.83 doc. 2; Visconde de São Laurindo to Rodrigues Alves, Antinhas, 15 May 1888, IHGB: Rodrigues Alves, L113 P95; Rebouças to João Alfredo, Rio, 21 May [1888], AJA: uncat., 1888; same to same, Rio, 28 May 1888, AJA: CR001.934. 18.  For Abolitionist support for João Alfredo, see Rebouças citations in note 17 above; and Rebouças, “Diário,” 1889, 26 May; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 23 May 1888 [unsent, incomplete], BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 35; same to same, Rio, 25 May 1888, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:171–72; same to Costa Ribeiro, Rio, 17 July 1888, IJN: CAp5 doc. 100. 19.  See Cotegipe, JC, 13 May 1888, 1; see also 8 May 1888, 2, for the Chamber speeches. On the cabinet’s fragility and its financial policies regarding the planters, particularly indemnification, see the Nabuco letter dated 23 May 1888 in note 18 above; Isabel, [aide-mémoire], n.l., n.d. [post–18 May 1888], AHMI: POB M199 Doc 9030; Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 15 September 1888, BNSM: 63, 3, 5, No. 36; Gusmão Lobo to Rio Branco, [Rio], 22 and 24 June [1888], Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 157, 159; Schulz, Financial Crisis, 65–69; and Summerhill, Inglorious Revolution, 208–9. The reference to Cotegipe’s support for Prado’s replacement of João Alfredo comes from an unsigned, contemporary note [later typed] in AJA: “Diversos,” 1888, pacote 2. 20.  See Nabuco letters dated 17 July 1888 in note 18 above and dated 15 September 1888 in note 19 above; or Gusmão Lobo to Rio Branco, [Rio], 13 June 1888, Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 155. See also Barman, Citizen Emperor, 342–49. 21.  Ibid., 349. 22.  Falas do Trono, 511; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1889, 4 May, 9 May, 5–7 June;

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Barman, Citizen Emperor, 349; Taunay, Pedro II, 64–76. See also Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 175. 23.  On the advance of the Republicans after 13 May 1888, see the text and note 18 above; Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 165–66; and Barman, Citizen Emperor, 348–49. On the reformism of the last program of João Alfredo, see the speech in note 22 above; and Taunay, Pedro II, 58–61, particularly the emperor’s perspective. On the Republicans’ emergence and their abolitionist ambivalence, see Chap. 2, “The Decision to Pursue Abolitionism.” On the Republican response to Abolitionist success, see Campos Salles to Saldanha, Campinas, 6 October 1887, AGC: 41-1-60:32; Rangel Pestana to Saldanha Marinho, S. Paulo, 16 May 1888, ibid., 41-1-59:13; Campos Salles to Aristides [Lobo], S. Paulo, 14 May 1888, ibid., 41-1-60:35–36; Francisco Rangel Pestana to [Saldanha Marinho], S. Paulo, 10 June 1888, ibid., 41-1-60:39; C. Salles to same, S. Paulo, 31 June 1888, ibid., 41-1-60:43; and [circular draft], Rio, 14 May 1888, ibid., 41-1-61:12. On the break over the by-election, see Chap. 6, note 19. On Patrocínio’s particular position and later argument with Nabuco over the issue, see, e.g., CR: 13 April 1888, 1; 18 April 1888, 1; 23 April 1888, 1; esp. 28 April 1888, 1; 30 April 1888, 1; and Nabuco, Diários, 1:291 (21 and 23 April). On post–13 May Abolitionist support for João Alfredo, see notes 17 and 18 above. On Patrocínio’s support, see Chap. 5, “Conservative Abolitionist Alternatives,” esp. note 42, for his support for João Alfredo on Abolitionist grounds and his continuing post–10 March 1888 coverage in the Cidade do Rio regarding João Alfredo’s financial policy. On Patrocínio and the Guarda Negra, see Magalhães, A vida turbulenta, 250, 257, 272; better, see Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 175–80. Note that Bergstresser mentions (176n116) a critical file on Patrocínio’s correspondence with João Alfredo in the AJA to which she was not allowed access; no such file was found by the author in 2007 or 2011. On the position of Nabuco and Rebouças, see Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 168–70; Chap. 5, “The Reorientation of the Abolitionist Movement”; and the diary and correspondence citations in notes 17 and 18 above. On the position of the Rio masses, see Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 168–70; and Kraay’s detailed survey in Days of National Festivity, 350–56. 24.  Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” 424, 428–30; Chap. 5, “The Military Question,” esp. notes 25 and 27; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 355–56. 25.  Taunay, Pedro II, 70, 72; Lyra, Instituições políticas, 217; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 344–47, and Princess Isabel, 184–92. On paulista republicanism, see Chap. 2, “The Decision to Pursue Abolitionism,” esp. note 31. 26.  The end results are speculative, as the last legislature never met, but the elections and the cabinet’s intervention did take place in August 1889; see Barman, Citizen Emperor, 351–53; and Graham, Patronage and Politics, 204. 27.  Barman, Citizen Emperor, 351–53. 28.  The best account is ibid., 356–63; see also, e.g., Lemos, “A alternativa republicana,” 428–29, 430–35; Senna, Deodoro, 76, 83, 85, 89; Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 204, 206, 233, 237–39; and Taunay, Pedro II, 92–93. 29.  Lyra, Instituições políticas, 298; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1889, 15, 16, 17 November; Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 261–79; Barman, Citizen Emperor,

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364–65, 369, 370; Taunay, Pedro II, 82–83, 85; Gusmão Lobo to Rio Branco, [Rio], 22 November 1889, Lobo, “Correspondência com Gusmão Lobo,” 208–9; same to same, [Rio], 23 November 1889, ibid., 210; same to same, [Rio], 29 November 1889, ibid., 212–13; Azevedo, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 815–19. 30.  See Chap. 2, “Organization, the Press, and Initial Mobilization.” 31.  See ibid., note 74, for further discussion and citations. 32.  See Chap. 4, “The Nature and the Role of Popular Mobilization in 1885.” 33.  Quotation from Rebouças, Diário, 18 June 1889, 339. See Nabuco, O erro do imperador, 4–5; Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 106; Moraes, “A escravidão,” 307; and, e.g., JC, 8 May 1888, 1; 14 May 1888, 1. 34.  See Eduardo Prado to Nabuco, Paris, 21 July 1887, IJN: CPp18 doc. 357; Rebouças, “Diário,” 1888, 11 March. On the Abolitionist leaders’ support for slave flight and quilombos, remember that Rebouças began publishing propaganda on the underground railroad in May 1883 and the “Decalogue” in 1885; that Nabuco was in close touch with Clapp on Rio’s underground railroad and quilombos; and that Patrocínio celebrated Antônio Bento’s role in paulista slavery’s demise in 1888. See Chap. 5, note 10; Nabuco to Clapp, Rio, 7 February 1886, AJA: CAp4 doc. 80; Clapp to Nabuco, Rio, 13 December 1887, ibid., CPp337 doc. 6854; and, e.g., CR, 16 January 1888, 1. 35.  On Rebouças’s postabolition lobbying, see “The Containment of Reform” above, and esp. note 17; on Nabuco, see, e.g., Nabuco to Penedo, Rio, 25 May 1888, Nabuco, Cartas a amigos, 1:171–72 (and his 7 May 1888 speech in CR, 10 May 1888, 1), as well as “Nabuco’s Embrace of Enlightened Populist Dictatorship” above. See also Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 163–75. On Patrocínio, see note 23 above. On João Alfredo and the emperor’s gradualist reformism, see note 22 above. 36.  The Republican Party, while doubtless growing, remained a minority party. Barman (Citizen Emperor, 348–49, 351–53) suggests the divisions and the fragility of appeal the Republican Party suffered. Concern about a possible countercoup led to the provisional government’s decision to banish the emperor as quickly as possible. Neither the navy nor other army units had supported the regime change; see, e.g., Monteiro, Pesquisas e depoimentos, 261–79, passim. Paulino’s public message in 1890 emphasized stability, political rights, and national integrity; see Azevedo, “Conselheiro Paulino,” 816–17. 37.  See the synthesis in Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 7–22, 31–51. 38.  Lampedusa, The Leopard, 40. Again, the author thanks Joseph L. Love for reminding him of the reference. 39.  See Needell, “Revolta contra Vacina.” 40.  The work on Brazilian racism has been too copious for too long to attempt listing here. Nevertheless, particularly useful works since the 1970s, often with rich bibliographies, include Hasenbalg, Discriminação e disigualidades raciais; Adamo, “Broken Promise”; Andrews, Blacks and Whites; Fischer, “Quase Pretos de Tão Pobres?”; French, Legalizing Identities; and Wood and Ribeiro, “Crime Victimization.” 41.  For Abolitionists, see Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” 140–50, 154–55. For Patrocínio in particular, see ibid., 156–58. For Perdigão

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Malheiro, see JC, 5 September 1871, 3; for Nabuco, see Nabuco, e.g., Discursos, 79. Note that this speech is from early on in the movement, dated 8 October 1879. 42.  See, e.g., Mattos, Escravizados e livres, 61–68, 207–9; Farias, “Mercado em greve,” 8; Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 264–65, 269, 275–78; Terra, “Hierarquização e segmentação,” 73–79; and Costa, “Escravizados moralmente lutam,” 92–98. See also Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations, 187–91, for a discussion of the post-Abolition popular mobilization in Recife, where José Mariano emphasized popular (i.e., class) unity in political struggle. It was the Republican opposition that attempted to use racialized class rhetoric to mobilize elite support, similar to what we have seen here in the reactionaries’ rhetoric against the Dantas-Abolitionist alliance of 1884–1885. 43.  See, e.g., Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 7–12, 158–74. The Fernandes classic in this regard is Florestan Fernandes, A integração do negro à sociedade de classes (São Paulo: USP, 1964). 44.  For Freyre and the development of his racial ideas, see Needell, “Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity.” 45.  For Rebouças’s experience of racism, see Chap. 2, “The Abolitionist Leadership,” esp. note 35. For Patrocínio’s experience of racism, see Orico, O tigre, 58–65; see also Bergstresser, “Movement for the Abolition of Slavery,” note 41 above. For Perdigão Malheiro’s quotation, see JC, 5 September 1871, 3. For Pimenta Bueno, see Chap. 1, “Freedom, Nações, Creolization, and the Potential for Afro-Brazilian Identity,” esp. notes 55 and 56; the quotation source is cited in note 56. For Nabuco, see Costa, Brazilian Empire, 240–43; the quotation is from p. 241. Note that Veríssimo’s family was related to Rebouças: Rebouças’s brother, Antônio, married Veríssimo’s cousin, Matilde. Viotti da Costa (241) states as well that Veríssimo himself was mulato. Like Rebouças, then, Veríssimo too might have been far more sensitive to his “condition as a mulato” and that of others than Nabuco. 46.  Indeed, Vicente de Sousa’s sense of the Africans is rather close to Pimenta Bueno’s of congos: see Souza, Conferencia realizada no Theatro de S. Luiz, 14–15. He opposed slavery not out of racial solidarity (at least there, at the conferência) but as a backward form of oppression and a barrier to progress and European immigration (see, e.g., ibid., 35, 38–39). Moraes, after mastering the law on his own, left journalism to practice law in the early twentieth century and focused his support of organized labor in pequena África, particularly the port workers’ area, where stevedores were predominantly Afro-Brazilian. This focus may well have been associated with his youthful Abolitionism, but it could also have stemmed from solidarity with the oppressed rather than with Afro-Brazilians as Afro-Brazilians. In his indispensable A campanha abolicionista, he does not champion slaves as Afro-Brazilians but as the oppressed victims of an uncivilized institution. He sees slavery in terms of economic oppression, and race does not enter into his discussion of its maintenance or destruction but as a factor in the nation’s racial and social origins; see, e.g., A campanha abolicionista, 14, 15–16, 385–86, 396, 397, 401. On his labor organizing and the port workers see, e.g., Moura, Tia Ciata, 67 [photograph], 76–72; and Cruz, “Tradições negras,” 168–90, and “Puzzling Out Slave Origins,” 210–13, 243–44. Note that, in the latter pages, Cruz uses Moraes deftly

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to point to the ways in which the port workers’ struggle had close continuities with the struggle against slavery. She also points to the conflation between racial and social status and the desire for social mobility away from negro (i.e., at the time, “slave”) status. Unhappily, the use of “niggers” as the translation for negrada (literally, a group of negros, i.e., at the time, “slaves”) confuses the critical difference between Brazilian usage and Afro-Brazilian consciousness, on the one hand, and United States usage and African-American consciousness, on the other. After all, the NAACP embraced racial identity and social mobility among its African American members and their national community; the Sociedade de Resistência (the port workers’ organization in Rio) championed equal rights for its members as workers, regardless of their racial identity (which varied). In effect, the port workers’ society was struggling against its workers being treated as slaves, not as “niggers.” 47.  This is not the place to discuss the justice or the contribution of the centenary assessments. Research for useful and interesting attempts to do so, however, might begin with Scott, “Exploring the Meaning of Freedom”; Cardoso et al., Escravidão e abolição; Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 187–88; and the works cited in ibid., note 103. 48.  Miguel Antonio Dias to Nabuco, Rio, 13 May 1891, IJN: CPp29 doc. 697. 49.  Nabuco, Minha formação, 228–29, 230, 233. The quotation is from p. 233. 50.  José Augusto Ferreira da Costa to Nabuco, Petersburgo, 3 May 1905, IJN: CPp160 doc. 3328. 51.  Amado, Minha formação, 118–20. 52.  See Nabuco, A vida de Joaquim Nabuco, pts. 3 and 4, passim, and Oito décadas, 209–10; Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 122–24, and “Glória no crepúsculo,” passim; and Bethell, Joaquim Nabuco, chap. 4, passim. For a glimpse of the more recent research on Nabuco, particularly on Nabuco’s last phase, see, passim, the scholarly anthologies, Jackson, Conferências sobre Joaquim Nabuco, and Albuquerque, Joaquim Nabuco e Wisconsin. 53.  Marqués, in Sena, Rascunhos e perfis, 709. 54.  Ibid., 709–10. See also Magalhães, A vida turbulenta, chaps. 29, 30, 36, 39, and pp. 417–21. 55.  Regarding João Alfredo, see Rebouças references in note 17 above. On Ouro Preto, see Rebouças, Diário, 337–51 (5, 6, 8, 27 June; 10, 13 July; 15, 17, 28 August; 26 October; 15, 16, 17, 18 November); on the rest, see 358–59 (correspondence excerpts and editors’ notes), and the correspondence after 1891, ibid., 383–451, passim, e.g., to Taunay, n.l., 3 March 1892; same to same, [Barbeton], 17 June 1892; same to same, n.l., 14 July 1892; same to Nabuco, Barbeton, 17 August 1892; same to Taunay, n.l., 13 September 1892; and same to Taunay and Nabuco, Barbeton, 15 November 1892. 56.  See correspondence and notes in ibid., 383–451, for the last years; and ibid., 450–51, on Rebouças’s death. See also Juca, “André Rebouças,” chaps. 6 and 7, esp. 239–40. 57.  Nabuco, Diários, 2:119. 58.  Ibid., 2:121. 59.  On Miguel Antônio Dias’s dismissal, see Dias to Joaquim Nabuco, Rio,

330

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29 January 1887, AJN: CP331p doc. 6745; and see AL, 1886, 1887; on “men of talent” and his concern for the historical truth about the movement’s details, see note 48 above. In regard to his finding other work through an Abolitionist connection, this is speculation. Nonetheless, Nabuco (see the 29 January 1887 letter cited above) clearly took an interest in Dias’s dismissal, for example, and Dias had worked at Patrocínio’s paper in the past, as noted earlier. 60.  On the analysis of Rebouças’s thought, see, e.g., Juca, “André Rebouças” and “Estudo introdutório”; and Carvalho, O quinto século. As Graham’s citations indicate, however, the best account to date of the particulars of Rebouças’s contributions to the movement may still be that of his kinsman, Veríssimo; see, e.g., Conrad, Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 145–46; and Veríssimo, André Rebouças. 61.  See Chap. 6, “The Abolitionists’ Role,” esp. notes 11, 22, and 23. 62.  Nabuco, Minha formação, 234–35.

Sources Cited

Archives

AGC

Arquivo Geral da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro.

AHI Arquivo Histórico Itamarati, Rio de Janeiro (since relocated to Brasília). AHMI Arquivo Histórico do Museu Imperial, Petrópolis. AJA Arquivo João Alfredo, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife. AJN

Arquivo Joaquim Nabuco, Instituto Joaquim Nabuco, Recife.

AN

Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.

APEP Arquivo Público do Estado de Pernambuco, Recife. ARB

Arquivo Rui Barbosa, Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, Rio de Janeiro.

BNSM Biblioteca Nacional, Seção de Manuscritos, Rio de Janeiro. dd

Diplomatic dispatches from Rio de Janeiro 1881–1888, Latin American and Caribbean Collection, University of Florida, Gaineˇ sille.

IHGB Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro. IJN

Instituto Joaquim Nabuco, Recife.

Periodicals

AL

Almanaque Laemmert

CR

Cidade do Rio

GT

Gazeta da Tarde

JC

Jornal do Commercio

OP

O Pais

RI

Revista Illustrada

RN

Rio News

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Index

O abolicionismo (Nabuco), 101–2, 104, 115–16, 120, 132, 151, 230, 233, 246 Abolicionista, 86 Abolition: in Ceará province, 122–23, 135; in Petrópolis, 213; in Rio de Janeiro, 212–13; in São Paulo, 183, 186–87, 192, 231–32; in United States, 44, 86–87. See also Abolition law (1888) Abolitionist leaders: Afro-Brazilians, 65, 70–74, 75–79; of Associação Central Emancipadora, 80–81, 82, 109, 114; in Ceará, 106, 112–13, 179; celebrations of abolition, 221–23; at conferências, 80–81; divisions, 98–100, 104, 122, 134, 302n5; later careers and deaths, 258–62; meetings, 159, 299n34, 308n51; motives, 76– 77, 79, 82; political views, 82, 246, 252; racial attitudes, 253; racial identities, 8, 85, 152; relations among, 98–99, 104–5, 159, 299–300n34; retrospective views of, 257–58, 262–63; in São Paulo, 100, 108, 173, 182, 199–200; second tier, 106, 109, 114–15; solidarity with Afro-Brazilians, 243–44; unity, 83, 258, 299n34; from urban middle class, 8, 86. See also Araújo, Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de; Clapp, João; Dias, Miguel Antônio (dispatcher); Moreira, Nicoláu; Patrocínio, José Carlos do; Rebouças, André Pinto Serra, Joaquim; Sousa, Vicente Ferreira de Abolitionist movement: achievements, 1, 217, 246–49; alliance with Dantas, 143, 156, 207; alliance with João Alfredo, 217– 18, 237–38, 246; alliance with military, 179–81, 184; Dantas on, 319n52; failures, 249, 251, 252–53; foreign support, 86–87, 91; goals, 110–12, 115, 116, 156, 232–33, 246, 252, 300–301n37; headquarters, 30–31, 89; influence on Conservatives, 199–200, 217; initial success, 87–88, 93; key role of Rio, 6, 174, 248; legacy, 238; “new phase” (1883 and after), 108–18, 121; organized labor and, 72–73, 152, 288–89n49; origins, 59–64; parliamentary

context, 53–58, 62–64, 95–97, 103–4, 113–14, 124, 125, 126–28, 131, 135–37, 141–42, 143–48; political candidates from, 137–41; pressure on João Alfredo, 200, 206–11, 212, 214, 215–16, 227, 233–34, 321–22n18; previous scholarship on, 1–2, 4, 6, 7, 65, 73, 299–300n34; in provinces, 87–88, 89, 100–101, 105–6, 122–23, 168–69, 183, 247–49; public support, 99, 116, 132, 139, 186–87, 205; radicalization, 99–100, 111–12, 166, 168–74, 198, 207, 227, 247; as sacred cause, 86, 194; strategies, 81–83, 87, 107–8, 111– 12, 116–17, 171–74, 205, 246; support of Dantas reform project, 129, 130–35; violent repression, 131–32, 160, 166–67, 172. See also Afro-Brazilian mobilization; Popular mobilization; Propaganda Abolitionist organizations: of freed slaves, 90; membership, 90–91, 93; national, 101, 102, 113, 114; provincial, 87–88, 113. See also Associação Central Emancipadora; Confederação Abolicionista; Conferências; Popular mobilization; Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão Abolitionist policies: British, 21, 23, 44; conditional manumission, 213–14, 215; foreign pressures, 44; immediate, 208, 211–12, 213, 214–15; indemnification, 111, 123, 129, 144, 145, 159–60, 187, 233, 234, 235; of Liberal Party, 59, 61, 185. See also Abolition legislation; Conservative abolitionist policies; Gradual emancipation Abolitionist press: coverage of events, 83; meetings in offices, 30; mobilization role, 3–4, 245, 247; in São Paulo, 100; support of reformism, 233; threats against, 294n92. See also Cidade do Rio; Gazeta da Tarde; Revista Illustrada; Rio News; Propaganda Abolition law (1888): aftermath, 231–42, 249–58, 261; centenary observation, 257; constitutional context, 224–31; debates,

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217–20, 226, 227–29, 233; economic context, 201–3; introduction to parliament, 216, 217–18; Isabel’s role, 201, 215–16, 217, 228, 230; João Alfredo’s decision on, 214–16, 233–34; parliamentary approval, 1, 219–20, 234; political context, 1, 7, 191–93, 203–16; public celebrations, 220–23, 232; Rebouças proposal, 209–10, 212, 215–16, 322n22; signed by Isabel, 221; text, 216, 322n23 Abolition legislation: background, 44–47; Dantas project, 127–37, 141–42, 143– 44, 146, 155; debates in 1871, 28, 47– 50, 53–54, 56; debates in 1880, 67–68, 69–70, 79–80, 81–82; debates in 1884, 124, 128–37; debates in 1885, 144–46, 159–62; Malheiro proposal, 49, 145, 227; Nabuco’s project (1880), 81–82, 99; obstacles, 45, 47; opponents, 47, 48, 68, 92–93, 95–96, 131–32, 135–36, 143–47, 153–55, 156, 160; Pedro II’s proposal, 44–46, 53; Saraiva’s proposal, 157, 158, 159–62. See also Abolition law (1888); Law of the Free Womb; Sexagenarian Law Abreu, Martha, 31 Academia de Medicina, 80 Acarape, 122 African Americans, see United States Afro-Brazilian mobilization: by Abolitionists, 38, 140, 150–55, 198–99; background, 26–32; based on identity, 38, 85; Cabanagem revolt, 27; by Dias, 74, 78–79, 120, 134, 150–51, 171, 216, 245, 312n14; in election campaign of 1884, 140; irmandade model, 29–31, 90; Nabuco on need for, 174; by Patrocínio, 99–100, 105, 117, 150, 216, 245, 247; racialized fear of, 27, 153–54; in Rio, 105, 106–8, 199; role in Abolitionist movement, 8, 84–86, 105, 198–99, 243– 47, 285–86n33; in rural areas, 199; in São Paulo, 100; use by elites, 26. See also Slave escapes Afro-Brazilians: Abolitionist leaders, 65, 70–74, 75–79; celebrations of abolition, 223; clothing, 13; communities, 10, 16, 17, 18, 34; creoles, 15, 16, 23, 27, 29, 31, 33; divisions among, 32–34, 76; effects of end of slave trade, 24; legal status, 16; Liberal Party supporters, 140; meaning of term, 16; in military, 28, 178, 180, 256; Nabuco on, 115–16, 161; na-

çãos, 16–17, 29, 32–33, 34–38; origins, 9–10, 16–17, 32; population, 25, 230, 276–77n26; port workers, 256, 328– 29n46; previous scholarship on, 2, 4; racial discrimination, 38, 249, 252–57; in Recife, 140; religiosity, 29–31, 33–34, 72, 232; Rio neighborhoods, 13, 15, 31, 32, 77–78, 79, 252; roles in Abolitionist movement, 8, 65, 84–86, 140, 243–46, 285–86n33; in São Paulo, 173; as slaveholders, 1, 67, 256. See also Freed slaves; Mulatos; Racial identity; Racial solidarity; Slaves Afro-Brazilians, social status: of freed slaves, 16, 18, 24, 35, 38; middle class, 25, 35, 65, 85, 86, 140, 151, 152, 244–45; mobility, 24–25, 32–33, 35–36, 74–75, 253, 254–55; of mulatos, 33, 66, 75, 253; poor, 25, 32, 245, 246, 254; terms used, 35, 244–45, 256. See also Social status; Working class Agostini, Angelo, 83, 107, 152 Agricultural congresses, 57–58, 61, 118, 188 Agricultura nacional (Rebouças), 110, 115, 118, 232–33 Agriculture: credit, 58, 183, 188, 315– 16n35; exports, 52; reform proposals, 119, 135, 188–89; smallholdings, 117, 131, 135; state funding, 175; sugarcane, 11, 19. See also Coffee; Ministry of Agriculture; Plantations; Rural reform proposals Albuquerque, Lourenço de, 218 Alfredo, João, see Oliveira, João Alfredo Correia de Almanak Laemmert, 35, 74, 79, 103, 114, 262 Alonso, Angela, 2, 6, 299–300n34 Alves, Rodrigues, 251 Amaral, José Avelino Gurgel do, 112–13, 114 Amaral, José Maria do, 81, 82 Amaral, Ubaldino do, 80, 82, 106, 107, 112 Amazonas province, 123, 132, 248 Amazon Basin, 11, 27 Andrade, Luís de, 159, 216, 306n39 Andrade Figueira, see Figueira, Domingos de Andrade Andrews, George Reid, 254 Angolas, 17, 29, 33 Araruama family, 213 Araújo, Ferreira de, 71

Index Araújo, Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Na­ buco de, 57, 68, 69, 127; O abolicionismo, 101–2, 104, 115–16, 120, 132, 151, 230, 233, 246; aboli­t ion debates (1885), 160–61, 162; aboli­t ion law passage, 217, 218, 229, 230–31; on Abolitionist goals, 111–12; in Brit­ ain, 94, 98, 101–2, 104, 109, 112, 115; cartoon depicting, 265 (fig.); Confed­e ração Abolicionista and, 115; at con­f erências, 305n34; on Cotegipe cabinet, 205; Dantas and, 138; Dantas cabinet and, 130–31, 132, 133, 134, 147, 149, 155–56; death, 258, 259; Dias and, 75, 76–77, 81, 257, 262, 329–30n59; on dictatorship, 230–31; diplomatic career, 259; election (1878), 69; election (1881), 91–94; election (1884), 137, 138, 139–41, 142–43, 149, 157–58; election (1885), 158–59, 160; election (1886), 168, 169, 170; election (1887), 182, 195; in Europe (1887), 194–95, 205; family, 68, 139, 170; on fellow Aboli­t ionists, 257–58; health, 124–25; Hill­i ard and, 86–87; on illegal activity, 174; on João Alfredo cabinet, 235, 250; later life of, 258–59; leadership of Abolition­i st movement, 83, 112, 115, 117, 257; marriage, 258; military and, 184; at O Paiz, 170–71, 176, 238; pamphlets written by, 171, 174; Patrocínio and, 83, 112, 142–43, 237, 246, 257, 299– 300n34; on popular mobilization, 153– 54, 155, 246; portrait, 270 (fig.); racial attitudes, 256; on racial makeup of Brazil, 151; on racism, 253; reaction to abolition, 221; on Rebouças, 257, 261–62; Rebouças and, 79, 101– 2, 103, 104, 110–11, 122, 124, 169, 217, 263; as re­f ormer, 61, 69, 82, 116, 233, 249–50, 284n22; returns to Brazil, 124–25, 217; role in Abolitionist movement, 70, 71, 91, 93–94, 98, 101–2, 104, 109, 171, 247, 263; Saraiva and, 128, 130–31; support for abolition, 61, 67–70, 79–80, 81–82, 99, 284n22, 288n43; view of monarchy, 132, 171, 230–31, 238, 250. See also Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão; Manifesto of 1869 Argentina, 21, 22, 259. See also Paraguayan War

347

Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando furioso, 163 Army: abolition supporters, 87, 179, 194, 238–39; Escola Militar, 87, 179, 180; hunts for escaped slaves, 184; political activities of officers, 178–81, 238–39, 241; relations with Rio police, 196–97; violent repression of Abolitionists, 172. See also Military; Paraguayan War Arquivo Nacional, 74 Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de, 75, 256, 259 Associação Central Emancipadora: conferências, 80–81, 82–83, 84, 89–90, 100; leaders, 80–81, 82, 109, 114; organization of, 73, 80, 291n63; replacement, 114, 116–17 Associação do Comércio, 131 Associação Operária Vicente de Sousa, 106 Associação Tipográfa Fluminense (Association of Fluminense Typesetters), 72, 288–89n49 Atlantic slave trade: African ports, 17; to Brazil, 1, 10, 11, 13, 17, 19, 22; British blockade, 21, 44; continued demand for slaves, 22–23; deaths, 19; effects in Africa, 19; end of, 1, 13, 19, 21, 23, 24–25, 35–36; illegal, 19, 20, 21, 24; to United States, 22; volume, 19 Bahia province: Abolitionist movement, 87, 123, 248; deputies from, 60–61, 65, 127, 203, 204; Liberal Party in, 127; slavery, 123. See also Northeast region Baixada Fluminense, 10, 11, 20, 70, 92. See also Campos region Barbosa, Rui, see Oliveira, Rui Barbosa de Barman, Roderick J., 193, 241 Barreto, Joaquim Francisco Alves Muniz, 82 Barros, Adolfo de, 98, 110 Barros, Moreira de, 146, 207 Bastos, João Coelho, 166, 168, 196 Belisário, Francisco, see Sousa, Francisco Belisário Soares de Benedict, Saint, 29, 199. See also Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict Benguelas, 17, 33 Bento, Antônio, see Castro, Antônio Bento de Sousa e Bergstresser, Rebecca Baird, 65, 253, 285– 86n33, 304n21 Bethell, Leslie, 92 Bezamat, Alberto, 192

348

Index

Black Regulation, 167, 171, 174–75 Bocaiuva, Quintino, 92, 143, 170, 180, 237, 314n30 Boêmios, 71, 106 Bonifácio, José, o moço (the younger), 113, 257 Brancos, see Whites Brandão, Soares, 149 O Brazil, 137, 202 Brazil, Empire of, see Empire of Brazil Brazilian political structure: as dictatorship, 251, 252, 260; history, 39–43; oligarchies, 39–40, 41, 45, 68, 137, 251; as republic, 242–43, 251–53, 259, 260; slavery embedded in, 39. See also Cabinet; Council of State; Elections; Monarchy; Parliament; Political parties Britain: abolition of slave trade, 19, 20; antislavery policy, 21, 23, 44; Nabuco in, 94, 98, 101–2, 104, 109, 112, 115; Penedo as British ambassador to, 69, 91– 92, 102, 131; Rebouças in, 102–3, 104– 5, 109–10, 117; relations with Brazil, 44; relations with Latin America, 21 British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, 91, 103 Brotherhood of the Rosary, see Irmandade da Nossa Senhora do Rosário e de São Benedito Bueno, José Antônio Pimenta, marquis de São Vicente, 36–38, 44, 46, 255–56 Cabindas, 17, 32, 33 Cabinet (Council of Ministers): appointments by emperor, 39, 41–43, 45, 225– 26; Chamber majorities and, 39, 40–41, 59, 133, 225; elections fixed by, 40, 42, 57, 69, 89, 168, 225–26, 240; patronage, 40, 42, 75; powers, 225; of Progressive League, 75, 126, 127, 226. See also Conservative cabinets; Liberal cabinets Caifazes (rural Abolitionist agents), 173, 182, 199, 207, 248, 249 Caixa Emancipadora Joaquim Nabuco, 295–96n5 Caixa Emancipadora José do Patrocínio, 90, 106, 150, 288n48, 294n87 Caixa Emancipadora Vicente de Souza, 90 Campo de Santana, 14, 30, 31, 74, 77, 107, 172, 216, 232 Campos, Martinho de, 68, 92, 95–96, 127, 147 Campos region: Abolitionist movement,

166, 168, 169; deputies from, 204; freed slaves, 167, 172; Patrocínio family, 70; slave flights, 186; slave strikes, 169 Candelária parish, 13, 14, 15 Candomblé, 33 Cane sugar exports, 11, 19. See also Sugarcane Capangas (thugs), 150, 152, 166 Capoeiras, 28, 150, 168, 172, 196, 238, 250 Cassino Fluminense, 223 Castilho, Celso, 2 Castro, Antônio Bento de Sousa e: celebrations of abolition, 232; Dias and, 151; portrait, 269 (fig.); relations with other Abolitionist leaders, 249; role in Abolitionist movement, 108, 173, 182, 199– 200, 207, 248, 249 Catholic Church: bishops, 55; papal encyclical on abolition, 194–95; priests, 70, 72; Religious Question of 1872–1875, 55; slaves and, 28, 29, 33. See also Church of Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic lay brotherhoods, see Irmandades Caxias, duke de, 43, 55–56, 67, 165 Ceará province: Abolitionist leaders, 106, 112–13, 179; Abolitionist movement, 89, 105–6, 107–8, 111, 112, 120, 122–23, 247–48; abolition of slavery, 122–23, 135; fugitive slaves, 172; manumissions, 100, 105, 106 Celso, Afonso, see Figuereido, Afonso Celso de Assis, viscount do Ouro Preto Celso, Afonso, Filho, see Figuereido, Afonso Celso de Assis, Filho Censuses, 25, 50–51, 152 Centro Abolicionista de São Paulo, 100 Centro Abolicionista Ferreira de Meneses, 106 Chalhoub, Sidney, 2 Chamber of Deputies: building, 13; cabinets and majority, 39, 40–41, 59, 133; constitutional powers, 43, 48, 225, 226; emperor’s power and, 41–42; legislative powers, 41, 43, 45, 49, 226, 227; Regresso (Reaction), 26, 39, 40, 43, 59. See also Abolition legislation; Elections; Parliament Chaves, Alfredo, 180, 192, 218 Chinese immigrants, 61, 118, 119 Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict, 29, 30–31, 34, 72, 199, 232, 260

Index Cidade do Rio: closing of, 260; founding, 316n36; offices, 30; political reports, 184, 188, 205; reports on Abolitionist movement, 199; support of João Alfredo as prime minister, 192, 319n4 Cidade nova (new city), 14, 31 Cidade velha (old city): early development, 12; government buildings, 13–14; markets and businesses, 13, 14; Passéio Público, 206; public demonstrations, 106–7, 133–34, 216; residents, 15, 30–31; slavery, 9–10, 13, 123–24. See also Campo de Santana Citizenship, of freedmen, 28–29, 37 City Palace (Paço da Cidade), 13, 216, 220– 21, 242 Civilization and Progress: abolition as part of, 48, 64, 83; cultural institutions, 80; defined, 293n75; France and Britain as models, 41, 44; impact on slaves, 24; influence on Pedro II, 44; middle class and, 59, 64, 86; reforms, 55, 116, 232–33; urban development, 31 Clapp, João: in Abolitionist organizations, 114, 299n34; conferências, 90; meetings with Abolitionist leaders, 159; passage of abolition law and, 221; portrait, 270 (fig.); public demonstrations, 106, 107; role in Abolitionist movement, 91, 119– 20, 216, 257; support of Dantas reform project, 130, 143 Clube Abolicionista dos Empregados do Comércio, 90 Clube Abolicionista Gutenberg, 90, 106, 107 Clube Alberto Victor, 106 Clube da Lavoura e do Comércio, 124, 125, 131, 172 Clube dos Libertos de Niterói, 90, 106 Clube Militar, 179, 184, 196, 239 Clube Naval, 196 Coelho, Tomás, 204 Coelho Bastos, João, see Bastos, João Coelho Coffee: exports, 14, 20, 186, 240; plantations, 19, 20, 92, 187–89, 203; slave labor, 20, 52–53, 124, 160, 183, 203 Commissão Central de Emancipação, 109 Confederação Abolicionista: banquet, 135; call for peace, 144; conferências, 169, 305n34; formation, 114, 117, 248; goals, 233; influence, 247; leaders, 114, 119–20, 150–51, 299n34; Manifesto, 114, 117,

349

300–301n37; meetings, 123, 299n34; members, 73; Nabuco and, 257, 305n34; public demonstrations, 123, 158–59, 171, 174–75, 216; reactions to abolition, 221; Republican Party and, 237; support of Dantas reform project, 132, 133–34; underground railroad support, 172 Conferência band, 110 Conferências: abolitionist, 80–81, 82–83, 84, 89–90, 100, 109; in Ceará, 105; in Rio, 72–73, 288–89n49 Congos, 9–10, 17, 31, 34–38, 77–78 Congresso Agricola, see Agricultural congresses Conrad, Robert, 2, 65 Conservative abolitionist policies: of Cotegipe, 136–37, 142, 162, 167, 182–83, 191, 205–6; efforts to slow radical change, 144, 156, 157, 234; gradual emancipation, 144–45, 157, 162, 192– 93, 208; of João Alfredo, 192–93, 233– 34; Malheiro’s proposal, 49, 145, 227; Paulino’s proposal, 183, 188–89, 191, 206, 208, 227; Prado’s proposal, 185–86, 188, 199–200, 208, 209, 213–15, 227, 249, 321–22n18; reform of penalty of the lash, 176–77, 249. See also Abolition law (1888); Sexagenarian Law Conservative cabinets: of 1848–1853, 42, 191; of 1868–1870, 45–47, 54, 191, 226; of Caxias, 55–56; of Rio Branco, 46–50, 54, 55. See also Cotegipe cabinet; João Alfredo cabinet Conservative Party: abolition debates, 47– 50, 53–54, 142, 182–90, 191–93, 226– 29; Chamber majorities, 143–44, 168, 211, 214, 233; containment of reform, 144, 156, 157, 232–34; Dantas reform project and, 135–37; deputies, 126; divisions, 54, 55, 145, 183–90, 235; electoral reforms, 88; leaders, 42, 45–47, 54, 55–56, 96–97, 164, 235, 236–37; moderates, 42, 48, 54, 92; opposition to abolition, 46, 95–96, 126, 135–36, 218–19, 226–29, 231; origins, 39; patronage, 168; Pedro II and, 42, 164, 165, 190–91, 236; in Pernambuco, 141; reformists, 118, 136, 167, 190, 191–93, 199–200, 236; Regresso (Reaction), 26, 39, 40, 43, 59; Saraiva cabinets and, 158; Saraiva reform project and, 160, 161–62, 163–64, 165, 309–10n70; unity, 53–54, 55–56; voters, 60. See also Elections; Saquaremas

350

Index

Constitution of 1824: absence of racial distinction, 28, 37, 254; balance of powers, 41, 43, 45, 48, 88, 226; holidays commemorating, 123; powers of monarch, 40, 225, 230; property rights, 45, 49. See also Electoral reforms Correia, Manuel Francisco, 220, 236 Correia, Serzedelo, 180, 239, 313n27, 314n30 Correio Mercantil, 81, 82 Corruption scandals, 56, 164–65 Costa, Emília Viotti da, 6, 65, 85, 256 Cotegipe, baron de, see Wanderley, João Maurício, baron de Cotegipe Cotegipe cabinet: abolitionist policies, 167, 182–83, 191, 205–6; censure by Senate, 175; destabilization and decline, 174–78, 181–85, 191, 192, 197, 204–6; elections of 1886, 167–68, 169, 170; fall, 197–98, 201, 216–17, 228; financial issues, 201–2; formation, 163, 164, 165; members, 175, 180, 190, 203–4, 206; Military Question, 179–81, 194, 239; repression of Abolitionist movement, 166, 167; resignations, 181; urban violence in Rio and, 196–97, 205, 206; votes of confidence, 177 Council of Ministers, see Cabinet Council of State: abolition legislation and, 44–45, 133; appointments by emperor, 41, 164; João Alfredo cabinet and, 235– 36; members, 36–37, 193; military coup and, 242; oversight of public organizations, 36–38; role, 40 Coups: of 1840, 26, 27, 41; of 1868, 54, 59, 127; conspiracy (1887), 180–81, 239; of November 1889, 241–43, 251, 260–61 Cowling, Camillia, 2 Creoles (crioulos): births, 23; churches, 31; irmandades, 29; in Rio, 15; slaves, 27; social status, 16, 33 Creolization, 33–34, 38 Cruz, Maria Cecilia Velasco e, 31 Cruzeiro, viscount do, 247 Cuba, 19, 21, 44 Cultural events, see Conferências; Music Cunha, José Mariano Carneiro da, 113, 138–39, 140, 143, 160, 166, 168, 171, 175 Cunha, Pedro Leitão da, 128 Cunha Matos, Ernesto Augusto de, see Matos, Ernesto Augusto de Cunha

Dantas, Manuel Pinto de Sousa: Abolitionist movement and, 107, 158–59, 221, 257, 319n52; abolition law presented to Isabel, 221; abolition proposal in Senate, 174, 175; in cabinet, 75, 127; career, 127; family, 61, 127; health, 146; Lafaiete and, 113–14; meetings with Abolitionist leaders, 143; Nabuco and, 138; political power, 127; portrait, 270 (fig.); in Senate, 176, 182, 185, 191, 219, 220, 319n52; support of João Alfredo cabinet, 213. See also Dantas cabinet Dantas, Rodolfo Epifânio de Sousa, 127, 129, 132, 133, 135, 143 Dantas cabinet: abolitionist reform project, 127–37, 141–42, 143–44, 146, 155, 233; alliance with Abolitionists, 143, 156, 207; fall, 155–57, 158; formation, 126–28; Liberal factions and, 146–49; members, 127, 143; opposition and, 141, 143–44, 156, 158; popular mobilization in support of, 148–49, 150, 158–59; popular support, 144, 148–49, 150, 153–54, 157, 158–59 Dean, Warren, 2 Debret, Jean-Baptiste, 9, 10 Democracy: reforms, 231; rural, 117, 208, 209, 210–11, 232–33; supporters, 43, 110, 169, 231, 252. See also Elections; Electoral reforms; Voting rights Demographics: Afro-Brazilian population, 25, 230, 276–77n26; gender balance of slaves, 22–23, 276n24; natural reproduction of slaves, 22, 23, 281n77; slave population in Brazil, 23, 50–51, 232, 276n24; slave population in Rio, 25, 32, 63–64, 124, 232, 278n41; urbanization, 59–60. See also Immigrants Deodoro da Fonseca, Manuel, see Fonseca, Manuel Deodoro da Dias, Miguel Antônio (congo president), 35–36, 74–75, 77, 289n54 Dias, Miguel Antônio (dispatcher): AfroBrazilian mobilization by, 74, 78–79, 120, 134, 150–51, 171, 216, 245, 312n14; celebrations of abolition, 223; family background, 77; on history of Abolitionist movement, 257, 262; job, 74, 75, 78, 262; later life of, 262; meetings with Abolitionist leaders, 159, 299n34, 312n14; motives for antislavery views, 76–77, 79; Nabuco and, 75,

Index 76–77, 81, 142, 257, 262, 329–30n59; Patrocínio and, 151, 289n51; propaganda, 120, 290n57; publication of Nabuco’s book, 115; quilombo maintained by, 173; racial solidarity, 244; Rebouças and, 75–76, 78, 102, 110, 119–21, 150– 51, 206, 308n51, 312n14; residence, 77–78, 79, 173; role in Abolitionist movement, 73–74, 75–76, 119–21; support of Dantas reform project, 130; as treasurer of Associação Central Emancipadora, 81, 114 Dias, Miguel Antônio (tinker), 35–36, 74– 75, 77, 289–90n54–55 Discrimination, see Racism Donald, Cleveland, Jr., 2 Dumont, Santos, 260 Duque-Estrada, Osorio, 65, 89–90 Education: Escola Politécnica, 67, 80, 110, 119, 123–24, 130, 142; military schools, 87, 178, 179, 239 Elections: of 1844, 42; of 1860, 60; of 1872, 54, 68; of 1876, 56–57, 68; of 1878, 57; of 1881, 89, 91–94, 95, 137, 138; of 1884, 133, 137–41, 142–43, 149, 157–58, 250; of 1885 (by-elections), 158–59, 160; of 1886, 167–68, 169, 170; of 1887 (by-elections), 182, 195; of 1889, 240, 250; Afro-Brazilian mobilization, 28; fixed, 40, 42, 57, 69, 89, 168, 225– 26, 240; indirect, 41 Electoral reforms: of 1856, 88–89; of 1881, 88–89, 91, 93, 137, 305n30; direct elections, 55, 57, 63, 88; proposals, 55, 56– 57, 58, 59, 62, 63, 225–26 Elites: education, 178; oligarchies, 39–40, 41, 45, 68, 137, 251; paulista, 240; political divisions, 26; political power, 39–40, 53, 63, 64, 92, 137–38, 231, 251; reactions to popular mobilization, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154–55, 247; residential areas, 14, 15; trade revenues, 20; wealth, 24. See also Planters; Slaveholders Emancipation, see Abolition; Manumissions Emancipation Proclamation, United States, 44 Emperor, see Monarchy; Pedro II Empire of Brazil: export revenues, 20; First Reign, 26–27, 41, 242; independence from Portugal, 11, 39; map, xvi; military coup (November 1889), 241–43, 251, 260–61; political instability, 26–27; Sec-

351

ond Reign, 26, 28, 242–43; war with Argentina (1852), 21, 22. See also Brazilian political structure; Constitution of 1824; Military; Monarchy; Paraguayan War Engenho Velho parish, 31 Escola de Belas Artes, 80 Escola Militar, 87, 179, 180 Escola Politécnica, 67, 80, 110, 119, 123– 24, 130, 142 Espírito Santo, Justina Maria do, 70, 72 Estrada de Ferro Dom Pedro II, 31, 74 Ethnic identities, see Naçãos Eu, count d’: Abolitionist movement and, 209, 216; on Council of State, 193; imprisonment and exile, 242, 261; João Alfredo and, 201; Rebouças and, 66, 67, 194, 195, 222, 261; at signing of abolition law, 221; view of Cotegipe, 195 European immigrants, see Immigrants, European Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850, 21 Fernandes, Florestan, 254 Figueira, Domingos de Andrade: abolition debates, 135, 160, 218, 219, 226, 227– 28, 229; cartoon depicting, 265 (fig.) Figuereido, Afonso Celso de Assis, Filho (later, count de Afonso Celso), 185, 218 Figuereido, Afonso Celso de Assis, viscount do Ouro Preto, 103, 126, 181, 213, 239– 42, 250 Finance ministers, 202 Financial crises, 24–25, 55, 58, 61 Financial policies, 201–3, 235, 241 First Reign, 26–27, 41, 242 Flamengo district, 91, 124, 129, 143, 158, 159 Fleury, Pádua, 162–63 Florentino, Manolo, 25 Fonseca, Manuel Deodoro da, 179, 180–81, 239, 241, 242, 243, 251 Fortaleza: Abolitionist movement, 87; slave trade, 105 France: abolitionists, 44; École de Ponts et Chausées, 65–66; immigrants from, 118; Patrocínio in, 123 Francisco, Martim, Filho, 96 Frank, Zephyr L., 25, 64 Freed slaves: abolitionist organizations, 90; in Campos region, 167, 172; citizenship, 28–29, 37; descendants, 32, 35–36, 37, 74–75, 254; as farmers, 118, 135; mu-

352

Index

tual aid societies, 34–38; in Northeast, 211; political rights, 28–29, 37, 89; relations with former masters, 18; in Rio, 13, 15, 25, 232, 276–77n26; seen as threat, 208, 211–12; seen as white, 32, 33, 244–45, 277n27; social status, 16, 18, 24, 35, 38; transition to freedom, 208, 232; voting rights, 18, 28–29, 37, 89; wage laborers, 18, 186, 188, 208, 211, 212, 213, 215, 232. See also AfroBrazilians; Manumissions; Sexagenarian Law Free Womb Law, see Law of the Free Womb Freyre, Gilberto, 255 Fugitive slaves, see Slave escapes Gama, Luís, 100, 108, 248 Gazeta da Manhã, 170 Gazeta da Tarde: conferências and, 83, 89– 90; Dias and, 289n51; event announcements, 142; meetings, 123; on monarchy, 294n92; Nabuco and, 149, 159, 170; offices, 30, 89, 114, 117, 133, 142–43, 172; political reports, 92; on racial solidarity, 151–52; Rebouças and, 80, 117, 169; reports on Abolitionist movement, 160, 169, 172; reports on Nabuco, 91; role in Abolitionist movement, 89–90, 93, 106– 7, 113, 116–17, 171; Serra and, 98, 99, 102; staff, 90, 100, 106–7, 109; threats against, 294n92. See also Patrocínio, José Carlos do Gazeta de Noticias, 71, 81–82, 83, 89, 123 Gender balance of slaves, 22–23, 276n24 German immigrants, 118 Glaziou, Auguste, 31 Glória parish, 14, 206 Gomes, Carlos, 80 Graden, Dale Torsten, 2 Gradual emancipation: advantages, 59; in Ceará, 112; Conservative proposals, 144– 45, 157, 162, 192–93, 208; Nabuco’s project (1880), 81–82, 99, 111, 145; Paulino’s proposal (1887), 187, 188–89, 208; proposed by Pedro II, 44–46, 47, 48–50, 53, 66; Saraiva’s proposal, 157, 158, 159–60. See also Law of the Free Womb; Sexagenarian Law Graham, Richard, 65 Grinberg, Keila, 2 Guarda Nacional, see National Guard Guarda Negra, 238, 250 Guizot, François-Pierre-Guillaume, 129

Haitian Revolution, 19, 27 Hilliard, Henry Washington, 86–87 Históricos, 42–43, 59 Hotel do Globo, 135, 221–22, 223 Immigrants: Chinese, 61, 118, 119; laborers, 22, 118, 185–86, 189, 203, 215 Immigrants, European: French, 118; German, 118; Italian, 118, 185–86; poor, 15; Portuguese, 15, 25, 26, 27, 152, 170, 245; in Rio, 25; settling on smallholdings, 117–19 Immigration promotion, 117–19, 185–86, 189 Ingênuos, 23–24, 52 Inhomirim, viscount de, 36 Ipanema, count de, 213 Irmandade da Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito (Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict): members, 29, 34, 72; processions, 30, 199; role in Abolitionist movement, 29–30, 72, 90, 150, 232; in São Paulo, 173 Irmandades (Catholic lay brotherhoods), 28, 29–31, 34, 37, 90, 245 Isabel, Princess: Abolitionist movement and, 216; abolition law signed by, 220–21, 222; celebrations of abolition, 232; children, 192, 193, 240, 261; Cotegipe and, 193–94, 195, 197–98, 204–5, 216–17, 228; imprisonment and exile, 242, 261; João Alfredo and, 198, 200, 201, 206, 215–16, 228, 234; personality, 193, 194; political opposition to, 240; popular support, 238; portrait, 270 (fig.); Rebouças and, 261; regency, 182, 184, 191, 193– 95, 197, 228; support of abolition, 192, 194–95, 201, 213, 217, 228, 230; training in statecraft, 193 Itaboraí, viscount de, see Torres, Joaquim José Rodrigues, viscount de Itaboraí Italian immigrants, 118, 185–86 Jabaquara, 172 Jequitinhonha, viscount de, 36 João Alfredo, see Oliveira, João Alfredo Correia de João Alfredo cabinet: abolitionist mission, 191–92, 201, 202–3, 212, 213–14; alliance with Abolitionists, 200, 214, 217– 18, 237–38, 246; Council of State and, 235–36; fall, 235–37; financial issues, 201–3, 235; formation, 197–98, 200,

Index 201, 206–7; Isabel’s support, 234; Liberal support, 204, 213, 214, 216; majority in Chamber, 204; members, 201, 203–4, 206–7, 217, 229, 323n28; Pedro II and, 234–36, 250; pressure from Abolitionist movement, 200, 206–11, 212, 214, 215– 16, 227, 233–34, 321–22n18; reform proposals, 250; weakness, 233–34, 250. See also Abolition law (1888) Jornal do Commercio: articles by Rebouças, 80, 122; editors, 110, 130, 214–15; event announcements, 83; on freed slaves, 211–12; Nabuco and, 91, 92, 94, 101; Nabuco-Hilliard correspondence, 87; opinion pages, 142, 206, 208, 213, 229; political reports, 81, 148, 189, 192, 201, 205; reports on Abolitionist movement, 4; support of abolition, 109, 186–87, 213 Journalists, see Abolitionist press; Newspapers; Patrocínio, José Carlos do Karasch, Mary C., 33–34 Kittleson, Roger A., 2 Koseritz, Carl von, 118–19 Labor: negros de ganho (wage-earning slaves), 15, 18, 24; organized, 72–73, 152, 245, 252, 256, 288–89n49, 328– 29n46; porters, 9–10, 13, 18; port workers, 256, 328–29n46; regulations, 210. See also Immigrants; Rural reform proposals; Slaves Lacerda, Carlos de, 166, 168 Ladário, baron de, 242 Lage, viscount de, 67 Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, Il Gattopardo, 156, 252 Law of Abolition Project, see Abolition law (1888) Law of the Free Womb (1871): debates, 28, 48–50, 145, 217, 226–27, 255; emancipation fund, 52, 81, 129, 131; impact, 50–51, 52–53, 58, 63, 69, 281n77; lack of enforcement, 50, 52, 53, 58, 156, 167; passage, 50, 53, 226–27; revisions, 97, 100, 295n3; supporters, 53, 76, 126, 136, 167 Laws, see Abolition legislation Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquis de Paraná, 46 Leão, Rocha, 192 Leite, Eufrásia Teixeira, 170 Liberal cabinets: of Martinho de Campos,

353

95–96, 127; instability, 163; of Lafaiete, 113–14, 125, 126, 128; of Ouro Preto, 239–42, 250; of Paranaguá, 97, 99, 100, 103–4, 113, 124, 126, 295n3; of Sinimbu, 56–58, 60–63, 69. See also Saraiva cabinets Liberal Party: abolitionist policies, 59, 61, 185; abolition supporters, 82, 92, 97, 127, 146, 172, 185; alliance with Abolitionists, 143, 148–49, 156, 207, 214; electoral reforms, 56–58, 59, 62, 88; elites controlling, 137–38; factions, 57, 59, 104, 125–26, 146–48, 158, 161–62, 163, 241, 250; históricos, 42–43, 59; João Alfredo cabinet and, 204, 213, 214, 216; leaders, 57, 60, 103–6, 113; moderates, 42, 57–58, 62–64, 82, 92, 95, 146, 250; newspapers, 81, 82, 127; opponents of abolition, 92; origins, 39; patronage, 147; populists, 61; reformists, 82, 95, 113, 138–39, 237, 241; reform proposals, 55, 60–61; view of monarchy, 132; voters, 60, 137. See also Elections; Manifesto of 1869 Libertos, see Freed slaves Lobo, Antônio José Leite, 196 Lobo, Aristides, 114, 181, 314n30 Lobo, Gusmão, 110, 130, 133, 134, 143, 214–15, 257 Mac Dowell, Samuel, 197 Machado, João da Mata, 141 Machado, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo, 2, 173 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, see Assis, Joaquim Maria Machado de Machado Portela, Manuel do Nascimento, see Portela, Manuel do Nascimento Machado Madureira, Antônio de Sena, 172, 179 Malês, 27 Malheiro, Agostinho Marquês Perdigão, 28, 49, 145, 227, 253, 255 Mamigonian, Beatriz, 2 Manifesto of 1869 (Manifesto do Centro Liberal), 43, 44, 53, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64, 68, 88, 96, 97 Manumissions: in 1888, 213; in Ceará, 100, 105, 106; conditional, 213–14, 215; phased, 49; potential, 17–18, 24, 32; at public events, 107; in Rio de Janeiro province, 213, 214; self-purchases, 18, 24, 29, 49, 52; voluntary, 17, 106, 107–8, 213, 214. See also Freed slaves

354

Index

Mariano, José, see Cunha, José Mariano Carneiro da Marinho, Saldanha, 181, 314n30 Marqués, João, 221–22, 223, 260 Martins, Silveira, 103, 146, 149, 181, 239, 242 Mass mobilization, see Afro-Brazilian mobilization; Popular mobilization Matos, Ernesto Augusto de Cunha, 179, 180 Mattos, Hebe, 2, 25, 232 Mauá, viscount de, 55 Mendonça, Joseli Maria Nunes, 2 Mendonça, Salvador de, 76, 290n57 Menezes, Ferreira de, 80, 89, 257 Middle class, see Social status; Urban middle class Military: Afro-Brazilians in, 28, 178, 180, 256; coup (November 1889), 241–43, 251, 260–61; coup conspiracy (1887), 180–81, 239; forced recruitment, 59; National Guard, 59, 239; organization by racial groups, 28. See also Army; Navy Military Question, 179–81, 184, 194, 239 Minas, 16–17, 31 Minas Gerais province: Abolitionist movement, 198; planters, 186; railroads, 119; slavery, 19–20, 232; taxes on slave trade, 87 Ministry of Agriculture, 13, 175, 180, 181, 182, 189, 204, 217. See also Prado, Antônio da Silva Ministry of Empire, 13–14, 181 Ministry of Finance, 14, 202 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 14, 31 Ministry of Justice, 14, 127, 181, 197, 229 Ministry of War, 143, 180, 181, 241 Mobilization, see Afro-Brazilian mobilization; Popular mobilization Monarchy: constitutional, 39–43, 48, 49, 132, 225, 226–29, 230; fall, 242–43, 251; political roles, 28, 39, 40–43, 48, 225–26, 230–31, 242–43; popular support, 26; reforms advocated by Nabuco, 116; Regency (1831–1840), 26, 27, 36, 39, 41; residential palace, 14; Rio as capital, 11; support from Abolitionists, 250. See also Empire of Brazil; Isabel, Princess; Pedro II Monteiro, João Carlos, 70, 71, 72 Monteiro, Tobias, 247

Montesinos, count de, 170 Moraes, Evaristo de, 7, 65, 217–18, 219, 220–21, 247, 256–57, 328n46 Morais, Prudente de, 251 Moreira, Nicoláu: in Abolitionist organizations, 80–81, 82, 89, 109; conferências, 80–81; meetings, 295–96n5; public demonstrations, 106, 107; role in Abolitionist movement, 91, 107, 111, 114–15, 123, 257 Mota, Silveira da, 257 Mozambiques, 17 Mulatos: in Abolitionist movement, 70–74, 75–79, 84–85, 152, 253; irmandades, 29; in military, 28; Rebouças family, 66; in Rio, 276–77n26; seen as white, 256; social status, 33, 66, 75, 253; use of term, 16, 256. See also Afro-Brazilians Music: at conferências, 84, 110; public festivities, 30, 90; slave songs, 9 Musica dos Alemães, 110 Muslims, 27 Mutual aid societies, 34–38 Nabuco, Joaquim, see Araújo, Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Nabuco de Araújo, see Araújo, José Tomás Nabuco de Nações, 16–17, 29, 32–33, 34–38 Napoleão, Artur, 110, 223 Nascimento, Francisco José do, 179 National Guard (Guarda Nacional), 59, 239 Native Brazilians, 15 Navy, 178, 196–97, 252. See also Military Neate, Charles, 103 Negro (black), use of term, 16, 28. See also Afro-Brazilians; Slaves Negros de ganho (wage-earning slaves), 15, 18, 24 Nei, Paula, 295–96n5 Newspapers: coverage of Abolitionist events, 247; Liberal, 81, 82, 127; massreadership, 71; support of abolition, 83. See also Abolitionist press; Jornal do Commercio; Rio News Northeast region: agricultural congress, 57; crops, 11, 19; deputies from, 54; economic decline, 19, 87; exports, 11, 19, 59; freed slaves, 211; patronage, 47–48, 54; slaves, 87, 105. See also Bahia province; Pernambuco province Novo Friburgo, viscount de, 213

Index Oligarchies, 39–40, 41, 45, 68, 137, 251 Olinda, marquis de, 36, 37 Oliveira, Cândido de, 143, 146, 181 Oliveira, João Alfredo Correia de: abolition debates (1871), 48, 53, 190; abolition debates (1887), 183, 191–92, 208; abolition debates (1888), 203, 219, 227–28, 233–34; Abolitionist movement and, 257; abolition proposal (1888), 192–93; in cabinet, 190, 202; cartoon depicting, 267 (fig.); Cotegipe and, 56, 182, 183, 190, 203; Dantas reform project and, 135–36, 145; Isabel and, 198, 200, 201, 206, 215–16; Paulino and, 192–93, 203, 204, 235; Pedro II and, 190; political career, 48, 56, 164, 181, 190, 233; portrait, 270 (fig.); Rebouças and, 209–11, 212, 214, 215–16; Saraiva reform project and, 160, 309–10n70. See also João Alfredo cabinet Oliveira, Rui Barbosa de, 127, 129–30, 141, 158–59, 160 Otaviano, Francisco, 81, 92 Otoni, Cristiano, 257 Ouro Preto, viscount do, see Figuereido, Afonso Celso de Assis, viscount do Ouro Preto Ouro Preto cabinet, 239–42, 250 Paço da Cidade, see City Palace Paes Barreto clan, 68 O Paiz, 170–71, 176, 180, 209, 222, 237, 238 Pan American Congress, 259 Paraguayan War (War of the Triple Alliance), 13, 43, 46, 54, 66, 118, 178–79, 194 Paraná, marquis de, see Leão, Honório Hermeto Carneiro, marquis de Paraná Paranaguá, marquis de, 108, 109, 163 Paranaguá cabinet, 97, 99, 100, 103–4, 113, 124, 126, 295n3 Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, Júnior, baron do Rio Branco, 214–15, 259 Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, viscount do Rio Branco: abolition legislation and, 53; in cabinet, 22, 45–46; career, 46–47; Cotegipe and, 164–65; dependence on emperor, 54, 55; Paulino and, 54, 55–56; Rebouças and, 67; reforms, 55, 63; son, 214–15, 259. See also Law of the Free Womb; Rio Branco cabinet Pardos, 16, 32. See also Mulatos

355

Parliament: constitutional powers, 41, 43, 45, 49, 225, 226, 227; corruption, 54; elite influences, 39–40; legitimacy, 55, 58, 59, 88. See also Abolition legislation; Chamber of Deputies; Elections; Political parties; Senate Party of Order, 39, 88. See also Conservative Party Passéio Público, 206 Patrocínio, José Carlos do: in Abolitionist organizations, 82, 89, 98, 114, 144, 299n34; Afro-Brazilian mobilization by, 99–100, 105, 117, 150, 216, 245, 247; campaign for town councilor, 169, 175, 180, 238, 239; career, 70, 71; Catholic Church and, 72, 288n48; in Ceará, 105– 6, 109; conferências, 80, 90; on Cotegipe cabinet, 204–5; death, 258, 259–60; Dias and, 151, 289n51; education, 70; family, 70, 71, 72, 169, 260; health, 117, 260; on Isabel, 194, 238; João Alfredo and, 238, 246, 319–20n4; journalism, 71, 81–82, 98, 99, 109, 112, 142, 184, 213, 260; life of, 70–71, 259–60; marriage, 70–71, 255; on military, 179–81, 239; Nabuco and, 83, 112, 142–43, 237, 246, 257, 299–300n34; on Paranaguá cabinet, 295n3; in Petrópolis, 209; political views, 71, 169, 246, 260; portrait, 270 (fig.); propaganda, 109, 159; racial identity, 71, 85, 243–44, 255; reaction to abolition, 221, 222; Rebouças and, 98–99, 111, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 169, 206, 246; relations with other Abolitionist leaders, 98–99, 104–5, 159, 299–300n34; Republican Party and, 112, 237; role in Abolitionist movement, 70, 71–72, 78–79, 83, 91, 98–100, 104–6, 119–20, 130, 151, 171; on São Paulo abolitionists, 199–200; Serra and, 98–99, 102, 104; speeches, 84, 85, 86, 105, 133, 134, 142–43, 244, 245, 295–96n5; threats against, 294n92; trip to Europe, 120, 123, 125; view of monarchy, 134–35, 148–49, 250. See also Cidade do Rio; Gazeta da Tarde Patronage: of cabinets, 40, 42, 75; in Conservative Party, 168; influence on elections, 225–26; in Liberal Party, 147; in Northeast region, 47–48, 54; by slaveholders, 18 Paulino, see Sousa, Paulino José Soares de (filho)

356

Index

Pedro I: 14, 26, 41, 66 Pedro II: Abolitionist groups and, 107, 109, 123; cartoon depicting, 266 (fig.); children, 193; Conservative Party and, 42, 54, 164, 165, 190–91, 236; Cotegipe and, 96–97, 126, 136, 162, 164–65, 175; Dantas and, 126–27, 149, 155–57; death, 261; death sentence commutations, 176; electoral reforms and, 56–57, 62, 88; end of Regency, 26; gradual abolition proposal, 44–46, 47, 48–50, 53, 66; illness, 180, 181, 182, 193, 219, 232, 239, 314n30; imprisonment and exile, 242, 261, 327n36; interventionism, 41, 43, 88, 132, 136, 147–48, 191, 230; João Alfredo cabinet and, 234–36, 250; Liberal Party and, 56–58, 60, 62, 95, 96–97, 146, 147–48, 155, 162–63, 237, 239–40, 250; military coup and, 242; Paulino and, 236; political power, 40–43; Rebouças and, 66, 169, 238, 261; reformism, 42, 55, 237, 250–51; return to Brazil (1888), 232, 234–35; Saraiva and, 113, 125; Saraiva cabinets and, 156–57, 162; support of abolition, 97, 107, 113, 126, 144, 146, 155–57, 247, 283n16; support of Dantas reform project, 129–30, 132, 134, 135–36, 155. See also Cabinet (Council of Ministers) Peixoto, Floriano de, 241, 251, 260 Pelotas, viscount de, 180–81, 239, 314n30 Pena, Eduardo Spiller, 2 Penal colonies, 209, 210, 212 Penedo, baron de, 69, 91–92, 102, 131 Pequena África (little Africa), 15, 31, 252, 328n46 Perdigão Malheiro, Agostinho Marquês, see Malheiro, Agostinho Marquês Perdigão Pereira, Costa, 204, 209, 215–16, 221 Pereira, Francisco Maria Sodré, 127 Pereira, Jerônimo Sodré, 60–61, 69, 127, 284n22 Pereira, Lafaiete Rodrigues, 113–14, 125, 126, 128, 147 Pernambuco province: Abolitionist movement, 123, 198, 248; deputies from, 61, 69, 91, 138–41, 149, 158, 162, 168, 203, 204; oligarchies, 68; planters, 68. See also Northeast region Petrópolis: Abolitionist events, 122, 209; abolition of slavery, 213; imperial family in, 149, 155, 192, 197; Rebouças in, 119, 206–9, 215–16, 222, 260

Piauí province, rural colonies, 210–11 Pimenta Bueno, José Antônio, see Bueno, José Antônio Pimenta Plantations: immigrant labor, 118, 185–86; labor needs, 52, 58, 61, 118, 185–86, 188–89, 215. See also Agriculture; Coffee; Slaves; Sugarcane Planters: agricultural congresses, 57–58, 61, 118, 188; debt, 58, 183, 187, 315–16n35; economic decline, 187–89, 315–16n35; negotiations with slaves, 182, 186, 188, 249; opposition to abolition, 123, 125, 131–32, 145, 146; in parliament, 46, 146; paulista, 64, 182, 183, 185–86, 240, 251; Republican Party and, 64, 235, 237, 238. See also Elites; Slaveholders Police, 167, 168, 172, 196–97, 256 Politécnica, see Escola Politécnica Political parties: Afro-Brazilian mobilization in elections, 28; changes in roles and discipline, 229–31, 238; leaders, 39–40, 42– 43, 293n74; origins, 39; Party of Order, 39, 88; use of abolition reform, 123. See also Brazilian political structure; Conservative Party; Liberal Party; Patronage; Progressive League; Republican Party Pompeia, Raúl, 106 Poor: Afro-Brazilian, 25, 32, 245, 246, 254; economic crisis and, 61; immigrants, 15; mutual aid societies, 34–38; political participation, 89; racial groups, 152, 254; urban, 59, 254; whites, 15, 152. See also Popular mobilization; Social mobility; Working class Popular mobilization: in 1885–1887, 148– 49, 150–55, 168–69, 171–72, 174–75, 182, 184, 198–99; by abolitionist press, 3–4, 245, 247; crowd sizes, 133–34, 139, 150, 171–72, 174–75, 304n21; by Dias, 134, 150–51; elite reactions, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154–55, 247; as factor in parliamentary debates, 148–49, 150, 247; fundraising, 30; history in Rio, 150; impact, 99–100; importance, 116, 198; mass meetings, 139–40, 158–59; methods, 245; Nabuco on, 153–54, 155, 246; for Nabuco’s arrival in Rio (1885), 142–43; Paulino on, 153, 155; police restrictions and repression, 172; potential violence, 148–49, 154; press coverage, 247; public demonstrations, 30, 106, 107, 133–34, 157, 158, 216, 217–18; racial and class makeup of crowds, 84–86,

Index 151–54, 245; by Republicans, 238; in support of Dantas, 144, 148–49, 150, 153–54, 157, 158–59. See also Afro-Brazilian mobilization Popular mobilization organizers, 109, 245, 247. See also Dias, Miguel Antônio (dispatcher); Patrocínio, José Carlos do Portela, Manuel do Nascimento Machado, 141, 181–82, 195 Porters, 9–10, 13, 18 Portugal: Brazilian independence from, 11, 39; colonial policies, 11; immigrants from, 15, 25, 26, 27, 152, 170, 245; Nabuco’s visit, 91 Port workers, 256, 328–29n46 Positivists, 179–80, 238–39, 241, 251, 252 Postabolition society: in Americas, 115, 205; racism in, 249, 252–57. See also Rural reform proposals Poverty, see Poor Prado, Antônio da Silva: abolition proposal, 185–86, 188, 199–200, 208, 209, 213– 15, 227, 249, 321–22n18; in cabinets, 175, 180, 203–4, 206–7; João Alfredo and, 191; political career, 234; Rebouças and, 206–7, 208–9; in Senate, 182–83; support of abolition, 182–83, 190, 207, 257; support of Sexagenarian Law, 160 Prado, Martinho, 185 Press, see Abolitionist press; Newspapers Princess regent, see Isabel, Princess Procópio, Mariano, 67 Progressive League: abolition issue and, 44– 45; cabinets, 42, 43, 44–45, 48, 75, 126, 127, 226; opposition to Conservatives, 60; politicians, 42, 43, 54, 59 Propaganda, abolitionist: by Associação Central Emancipadora, 83; by Dias, 120, 290n57; increase in, 89, 247; Nabuco’s pamphlets, 171, 174; in “new phase,” 117; by Patrocínio, 109, 159; racial solidarity in, 244; by Rebouças, 80, 83, 115, 117, 130, 159, 169, 222, 244, 263 Property rights of slaveholders, 45, 49, 145, 156 Prostitution, forced, 75–76, 290n57 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 71 Public events, see Conferências; Popular mobilization Queirós, Eusébio de, 21, 217 Quilombos (fugitive-slave settlements), 73, 172, 173, 184, 211, 248, 249

357

Race: absence from constitution, 28, 37, 254; absence from political discourse, 28–29, 38, 151; meanings in nineteenthcentury Brazil, 15–17, 25, 32; in military, 28; mixed-race individuals, 16, 151; terms used, 16, 151–52, 244–45. See also Afro-Brazilians; Mulatos; Whiteness Racial etiquette, 16, 85, 151, 244–45, 256 Racial identity: of Afro-Brazilians, 8, 32–34, 38, 85, 243, 249; complexities, 16, 151– 52; of freed slaves, 32, 33; mobilization based on, 38; social status and, 16, 25, 33, 75, 85, 151–52, 254, 256 Racial solidarity, Afro-Brazilian: Nabuco on, 161; Patrocínio on, 180, 243–44, 245; in Rebouças family, 66; Rebouças on, 140; role after Abolitionist movement, 252–53; role in Abolitionist movement, 8, 38, 76–77, 85, 151, 232, 246–47 Racism, 38, 249, 252–57, 286–87n35 Radicals, 39. See also Liberal Party; Republican Party Railroads, 20, 24, 117, 119, 172–73. See also Underground railroads Railway stations, 31, 74, 262 Rapa côco, see Bastos, João Coelho Reactionaries, see Conservative Party; Regresso Rebouças, André Pinto: in Abolitionist organizations, 82, 114, 119, 299n34; abolition law draft, 209–10, 212, 215–16, 322n22; abolition proposals, 67; activities, 119; Agricultura nacional, 110, 115, 118, 232–33; antislavery views, 66–67; in Britain, 102–3, 104–5, 109–10, 117; on Cotegipe cabinet, 202; count d’Eu and, 66, 67, 194, 195; death, 258, 261–62; “Decalogue,” 169; Dias and, 75–76, 78, 102, 110, 119–21, 150–51, 206, 308n51, 312n14; education, 65–66, 169–70; engineering career, 65–66, 67, 103, 110, 117–18, 287n38; experience of racism, 255; on fall of Dantas, 155; family, 65, 66, 169, 296n13, 328n45; Gazeta da Tarde direction, 117; health, 102, 104– 5, 261; immigration support, 117–19; imperial family and, 66, 261; importance in Abolitionist movement, 83, 98, 111, 117, 262–63, 299n34; later career, 260–61; lobbying of João Alfredo and Prado, 206–11, 212, 214, 215–16, 233; meetings with Abolitionist leaders, 159,

358

Index

308n51; meetings with Dantas, 135; Nabuco and, 79, 101–2, 103, 104, 110–11, 122, 124, 169, 217, 263; Patrocínio and, 98–99, 104, 111, 116–17, 119–20, 125, 169, 206, 246; portrait, 271 (fig.); propaganda, 80, 83, 115, 117, 130, 159, 169, 244, 263; racial identity, 66, 286–87n35; on racial makeup of Abolitionist movement, 84, 85; radicalization, 169–70; reactions to abolition, 222–23; residences, 206; return to Brazil, 110–11; role in Abolitionist movement, 70, 73, 91, 102, 110–11, 112–13, 116–17, 245, 247, 257, 308n51; Saraiva and, 128; Serra and, 110, 209; slaves freed by, 67; solidarity with Afro-Brazilians, 244; support of Dantas reform project, 130, 132, 133, 134, 143; view of monarchy, 169, 238. See also Rural reform proposals Rebouças, Antônio Pereira, 65, 66, 67 Rebouças, Carolina Pinto de, 65, 66 Recife: Abolitionist movement in, 87, 138, 172; deputies from, 138, 139–41, 181– 82; Nabuco’s visits, 159, 258 Recréio Dramático, see Teatro Recréio Dramático Regency, of Isabel, 184, 191, 193–95, 197, 228 Regency (1831–1840), 26, 27, 36, 39, 41 Regresso (Reaction), 26, 39, 40, 43, 59 Reis, João José, 2 Religion: antislavery views influenced by, 67, 72; creolization, 33–34; Islam, 27; public religiosity, 29–31; Umbanda, 33. See also Catholic Church Religious Question of 1872–1875, 55 Republican Party: abolition issue and, 64; Abolitionist movement and, 82, 143, 237–38; coup conspiracy (1887) and, 180–81, 239; decentralization policy, 240; deputies, 92, 141; divisions, 327n36; founders, 240; growing strength, 237, 240; military and, 241, 242, 243; military coup and, 238, 251; planters and, 64, 235, 237, 238; radicalism, 61, 237; regimes, 251; supporters, 64, 70. See also Patrocínio, José Carlos do Revista Illustrada, 83, 265–70 (fig.) Revolta contra Vacina, 252 Revolta do Vintém, see Vintém Revolt Rio Branco, baron do, see Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, Júnior, baron do Rio Branco

Rio Branco, viscount do, see Paranhos, José Maria da Silva, viscount do Rio Branco Rio Branco cabinet, 46–50, 54, 55. See also Law of the Free Womb Rio Branco Law, see Law of the Free Womb Rio de Janeiro: abolition of slavery, 111, 212–13; architecture, 259; as capital, 6, 11, 26; central political role, 6; City Council, 31, 169, 175, 180, 212–13, 238, 239; climate, 13; early development, 12; economic activity, 14, 24; effects of end of slave trade, 24–25, 35–36; elite residential areas, 14, 15; geography, 10–14; immigration, 25; maps, xiv, xv; mixed population, 15; parishes, 12–14; police, 167, 168, 172, 196–97; politics, 26–28; popular mobilization, 150; port, 11, 12, 24, 220, 256, 328–29n46; quilombos, 172–73; religiosity, 29–31; Revolta contra Vacina, 252; slave markets, 14, 220; slave trade, 11, 167, 220; social structure, 16, 24, 83–84, 154; trade, 11; urban violence (1888), 195–97, 205, 206; Vintém Revolt, 61–62, 63, 64, 69, 116, 246. See also Cidade velha Rio de Janeiro province: Abolitionist movement, 160, 166, 198, 310n71; climate, 13; deputies from, 204; freed slaves, 232; geography, 10–11; manumissions, 213, 214; planters, 131–32, 183, 186, 187–89, 315–16n35; presidents, 92; provincial assembly, 189; slavery, 19, 124, 167, 232; taxes on slave trade, 87. See also Campos region Rio Grande do Sul province, 118, 123, 179, 248 Rio News, 80, 83, 85, 88, 89, 168, 172, 211 Rio Novo, countess do, 106, 107, 108 Rodrigues, José Carlos, 103, 117, 208–9 Rohan, Luís de Beaurepaire, 196 Rural reform proposals of Rebouças: in Agricultura nacional, 110, 115, 118, 232–33; democratic reforms, 117, 208, 209, 210–11, 232–33; immigrant settlements, 117–19; labor, 110, 118–19, 210; penal colonies, 209, 210, 212; promoted to João Alfredo cabinet, 207–8, 209, 210–11, 212, 214, 249–50; “Rural Services,” 209 Sacramento parish, 14, 15 Saint Domingue, 19, 27

Index Sales, Campos, 251, 259, 314n30 Salles, Ricardo, 23 Salvador, 11, 16–17, 27 Santana parish, 14, 15, 31, 77–78, 79. See also Campo de Santana Santa Rita parish, 14, 15, 72 Santos, José Américo dos, 103, 110, 120 Santos, quilombos in, 172, 173, 184, 248, 249 São Clemente, viscount de, 213 São José parish, 13, 14, 72 São Paulo: Abolitionist movement, 100, 108, 124, 172, 173, 207; abolition of slavery, 192, 231–32; race relations, 254 São Paulo Academia do Direito, 80 São Paulo province: Abolitionist movement, 198, 199–200, 248–49; abolition of slavery, 183, 186–87, 231–32; coffee exports, 240; deputies from, 160, 240; immigrant labor, 185–86; planters, 64, 182, 183, 185–86, 240, 251; republicanism, 240; slave escapes, 173, 182–83, 184, 186, 198, 211, 232, 248–49; slavery, 19, 20, 160; slave uprisings, 108; taxes on slave trade, 87 São Vicente, marquis de, see Bueno, José Antônio Pimenta , marquis de São Vicente Sapucaí, marquis de, 36–37 Saquaremas: in cabinets, 46, 54, 60; ideology, 43; leaders, 217, 218–19; opposition to abolition, 47; Paulino and, 48, 54, 136; relations with Pedro II, 42, 54; in Rio de Janeiro province, 92. See also Conservative Party Saraiva, José Antônio: Abolitionist movement and, 104, 128, 157; abolition proposal, 148, 157, 158, 159–62; cartoon depicting, 266 (fig.); electoral reforms, 88, 89; Nabuco and, 128, 130–31; Pedro II and, 113, 125, 126, 236–37, 239, 242. See also Sexagenarian Law Saraiva cabinets: of 1880–1882, 62–63, 67–68, 81, 82, 87, 92–93, 95, 105, 127; of 1885, 149, 155, 156–57, 161–62, 163, 166; abolition debates and, 67–68, 69–70, 79, 81, 82, 87, 92; electoral reforms, 62 Second Reign, 26, 28, 242–43. See also Pedro II Sena, Emiliano Rosa de, 70–71, 89, 288n48 Sena, Ernesto de, 106, 107, 260 Sena, Maria Henriqueta de, 70–71

359

Sena Madureira, Antônio de, see Madureira, Antônio de Sena Senate: abolition debates (1888), 219; abolition supporters, 171, 174, 175, 176, 178, 182–83, 185, 219; building, 31; Cotegipe cabinet and, 175, 180, 181; electoral reforms and, 62; legislative powers, 225; members appointed by emperor, 41; Paulino as president, 235; Paulino’s maiden speech, 144–45, 153, 163, 187; Saraiva reform project and, 161–62; Sexagenarian Law passage, 167. See also Parliament Serpa, João Ferreira, Júnior, 107 Serra, Joaquim: at Gazeta da Tarde, 98, 99, 102; meetings with Abolitionist leaders, 159; Nabuco and, 101, 103–4, 171, 238, 257; on Paranaguá, 97; Patrocínio and, 98–99, 102, 104; Rebouças and, 110, 209; support of Dantas reform project, 130, 134 Serra Acima, 10, 12, 20, 92 Severo, Federico, 106 Sexagenarian Law (1885): alternatives to, 185, 227; Black Regulation, 167, 171, 174–75; goals, 198, 227; lack of enforcement, 167, 175, 211; passage, 161–62, 163–64, 167, 186, 187, 211; proposals, 129, 131, 159–62, 185–86, 187; reforms proposed, 182–83, 228 Silva, Pereira da, 220 Silva, Rodrigo Augusto da, 181, 182, 189, 204, 209, 217, 221, 323n28 Silva, Vieira da, 236 Sinimbu, José Luis Vieira Cansanção de, 57, 62, 126 Sinimbu cabinet, 56–58, 60–63, 69 Slave escapes: in Campos, 186; captures, 167; encouraged by Abolitionists, 199; hunts for, 184; mass, 173, 182–83, 184– 85, 198, 214, 232, 248–49; quilombos (fugitive-slave settlements), 73, 172, 173, 184, 211, 248, 249; in São Paulo, 173, 182–83, 184, 186, 198, 211, 232, 248– 49. See also Underground railroads Slaveholders: Afro-Brazilian, 1, 256; patronclient relations, 18; political power, 39, 53, 87, 92; property rights, 45, 49, 145, 156. See also Manumissions; Planters Slave markets, 14, 220 Slave revolts, 17, 27, 52, 108–9, 168, 173, 183 Slavery: economic importance, 11, 19–20, 22, 45; as economic oppression, 328n46. See also Abolition

360

Index

Slaves: communities, 10, 16, 17, 18; domestic, 18; floggings, 176–77, 183, 249; freeborn children (ingênuos), 23–24, 52; gender balance, 22–23, 276n24; as loan collateral, 183, 315–16n35; longevity, 22, 23; manumission potential, 17–18, 24, 32, 49; musical performances, 9; natural reproduction, 22, 23, 281n77; occupations, 1, 15, 18, 24; origins, 9–10, 16–17, 32; population in Brazil, 23, 50–51, 232, 276n24; population in Rio, 25, 32, 63–64, 124, 232, 278n41; prices, 17, 24; as private property, 45, 49; religiosity, 28, 29, 31, 33; in Rio, 9–10, 13, 15, 18, 24, 31, 123–24; sexual exploitation, 75–76, 290n57; strikes, 169; violence against, 166–67; wageearning, 15, 18, 24; working conditions, 23. See also Afro-Brazilians; Freed slaves; Plantations Slave trade: Eusébio de Queirós Law of 1850, 21; interprovincial, 87, 89, 105, 167, 179; in Rio, 11, 167, 220; taxes, 87, 105. See also Atlantic slave trade Soares, Carlos Eugênio Libano, 2 Soares, Israel, 150, 151, 288n48, 294n87 Socialists, 73, 257 Social mobility, of Afro-Brazilians, 24–25, 32–33, 35–36, 74–75, 253, 254–55 Social status: conservative classes, 251; of creoles, 16, 33; of masses, 152, 153; relationship to race, 16, 25, 33, 75, 85, 151–52, 254, 256, 328–29n46; of whites, 152. See also Afro-Brazilians, social status; Elites; Poor; Urban middle class; Working class Sociedade Acadêmica de Emancipação, 87, 179 Sociedade Beneficiente da Nação Congo, 34–38 Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão: banquet, 87; founding, 82, 86; leaders, 82, 98, 101, 103, 110, 116, 117, 120, 150–51; meetings, 111; members, 82, 98, 114; Nabuco and, 94, 104, 116; periodical, 86, 91; role, 83; support of Dantas reform project, 130, 133–34 Sociedade Brasileira de Imigração, 119 Sociedade Cearense Libertadora, 87 Sociedade Central de Imigração, 119 Sociedade Libertadora Bahiana, 87 Sociedade Libertadora e Organizadora do Trabalho, 186

Sociedade Promotora de Imigração, 185–86 Sodré, Lauro, 180, 239, 252 Sodré Pereira, Jerônimo, see Pereira, Jerônimo Sodré Solidarity, see Racial solidarity Sousa, Belisário Augusto Soares de, 189 Sousa, Francisco Belisário Soares de, 136– 37, 202 Sousa, Paulino José Soares de (filho): abolition debates (1871), 47, 48, 54, 56; abolition debates (1884), 135; abolition debates (1885), 142, 144–45, 160, 187; abolition debates (1888), 192–93, 215, 219, 227–29; abolition proposal (1887), 183, 188–89, 191, 206, 208, 227; in cabinet, 45–46, 47; car­toon depicting, 268 (fig.); Cotegipe and, 136–37; as Con­servative leader, 48, 54, 56, 92; as deputy, 46; family, 46, 187; illness, 190; independence, 190–91; João Alfredo and, 192–93, 203, 204, 235; Pedro II and, 190–91; on popular mobi­lization, 153, 155; power, 235, 236–37; republic accepted by, 243, 251; Rio Branco and, 54, 55–56; in Senate, 144–45, 153, 163, 187, 235; support of Sexage­narian Law, 160, 164, 187 Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, viscount de Uruguai, 22, 45, 54 Sousa, Pedro Luís Soares de, 219–20, 236 Sousa, Vicente de, see Sousa, Vicente Ferreira de Sousa, Vicente Ferreira de: in Abolitionist organizations, 81, 82, 89, 90, 295–96n5; conferências, 80, 109, 288–89n49; labor movement and, 72–73, 78–79, 252, 256; life of, 73; public demonstrations, 106, 107; racial identity, 85, 152; role in Abolitionist movement, 91, 106, 109, 111, 114–15, 123, 245, 256–57; support of abolition, 237, 328n46 Southeastern region: agricultural congress, 57–58, 61; economic growth, 87; slaveholders, 23, 105; slavery, 11, 19–20, 52–53 Spain: colonies, 11, 44; Nabuco’s visit, 91 Spanish American War (1898), 259 Speech from the Throne, 44, 60, 66, 113, 157, 216, 250 Stein, Stanley J., 232 Streetcar tax, 61–62, 63

Index Sugarcane, 11, 19, 23, 57–58, 92, 213. See also Plantations Taunay, Alfredo Maria Escragnolle de, viscount de Taunay, 118–19, 236, 260–61 Taunay, viscount de, see Taunay, Alfredo Maria Escragnolle de, viscount de Taunay Tavares, Miguel, 290n57 Taxes: for indemnification of slaveholders, 159–60; on slave trade, 87, 105; streetcar, 61–62, 63 Teatro Imperial, 80 Teatro Politeama, 120, 123, 172 Teatro Recréio Dramático, 90, 107, 108, 120 Teatro São Luís, 80, 84 Toplin, Robert Brent, 2, 65 Torres, Joaquim José Rodrigues, viscount de Itaboraí, 45, 46, 50, 67 Trovão, Lopes, 80 Typesetters, 72, 288–89n49. See also Clube Abolicionista Gutenberg Umbanda, 33 Underground railroads: in Brazil, 124, 169, 172–73, 183, 198, 213; in United States, 115, 172 United States: Brazilian ambassador to, 259; coffee imports, 20; elites, 231; emancipation of slaves, 44, 86–87; minister to Brazil, 86–87; racial discrimination, 253–54, 255; slavery, 22; underground railroad, 115, 172 Urban middle class: Abolitionist leaders from, 8, 86; Afro-Brazilians, 8, 25, 35, 65, 85, 140, 151, 152, 244–45; army officers from, 178; conferências attended by, 82–83, 84; economic crisis and, 61; growth in nineteenth century, 24, 59–60; political participation, 89; potential support of abolition, 64; roles in Abolitionist movement, 8, 65, 86, 90, 152, 237, 238; support of political reforms, 64. See also Social mobility; Social status Uruguai, viscount de, see Sousa, Paulino José Soares de, viscount de Uruguai Uruguay, 22. See also Paraguayan War

361

Veríssimo, José, 256, 297n13, 328n45 Viana, Antônio Ferreira, 135, 204, 214, 229, 237 Viceroyalty of Brazil, 11 Vintém Revolt (1880), 61–62, 63, 64, 69, 116, 246 Virgin of the Rosary, see Church of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict Voting rights: of freed slaves, 18, 28–29, 37, 89; literacy requirements, 88, 137, 305n30; property-owning requirements, 88, 89; restricting mass participation, 88– 89, 137. See also Elections Wage labor, see Labor Wanderley, João Maurício, baron de Cotegipe: abolition debates and, 47, 48, 136–37, 142, 145, 175, 182–83, 187, 219, 227–29, 233, 234; abolitionist policies, 136–37, 142, 162; in cabinet, 55, 56, 136; cartoons depicting, 267 (fig.), 268 (fig.); corruption, 56, 97, 164–65; death, 235; Isabel and, 193–94, 195, 197–98, 204–5, 216–17; João Alfredo and, 203; leadership of Conservative Party, 56, 136–37, 164, 165; Pedro II and, 96–97, 126, 136, 162, 164–65, 175; personality, 97, 164, 183, 194; political power, 54, 286–87n35; Rebouças family and, 286– 87n35; reform proposals, 55; Rio Branco and, 164–65; in Senate, 219; support of Dantas reform project, 165. See also Cotegipe cabinet War of the Triple Alliance, see Paraguayan War Whites: in Abolitionist movement, 84–85; freed slaves seen as, 32, 33, 244–45, 277n27; military units, 28; poor, 15, 152; roles in Abolitionist movement, 8, 65; social status, 152. See also Immigrants, European; Race; Racial identity Working class: abolitionist organizations, 90; economic crisis and, 61; immigrants, 245; political participation, 89; roles in Abolitionist movement, 90, 152, 153–54, 245; urban, 59; whites, 152. See also Freed slaves; Labor; Popular mobilization Youle, Stanley, 110

Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e, 44, 57, 61, 75

Zacarias, see Vasconcelos, Zacarias de Góis e