3
Premodern slaveholding was justified as a form of national domination over “foreigners” or as property. By the nineteenth century slaveholding was increasingly defended by claims that slaves were naturally inferior.1 Bondage encouraged racial distinctions and reinforced discrimination, whether or not it preordained specific post-abolition racial orders. The legacy of slavery was consequential.
South Africa has not figured prominently in comparative analyses of slavery, for slavery was there both somewhat limited and abolished relatively early. The Dutch East India Company, blocked from trading with West Africa by the Dutch West India Company, instead imported slaves from East Asia to supplement their labor needs after the indigenous population diminished.2 By the end of the eighteenth century, slavery was a major fact of life, with Europeans in the wine-growing Cape outnumbered by and dependent on their 26,000 slaves.3 By 1821, slaves formed 35 percent of the population of Cape Town.4 Despite widespread manumission during the seventeenth century, decreasing thereafter, slaves were deprived of “the right to marry, had no rights of potestas over their children, and were unable to make legal contracts, acquire property or leave wills.”5 Such harsh treatment, provoking a minor slave revolt in 1808, was reinforced by rules against conversion and religious justifications for the exploitation of heathens.6 British abolitionists condemned slavery, successfully pushing Britain to impose an end of the slave trade in 1807 and legal abolition in 1833 (leading to emancipation by 1838), several generations before the end of colonialism. This foreign-imposed, early abolition arguably diminished the relevance of slavery for later race relations. That many of South Africa’s slaves were drawn from Asia further suggests that their treatment did not predetermine subsequent relations with Africans. And that early abolition did not lead to later racial tolerance in itself suggests that legacies of slavery are not straightforward. For all its significance in South Africa, the later implications of slavery are better assessed through those instances in which slavery was maintained longer, carrying its legacy more directly forward.
European powers engaged in transporting slaves out of Africa from 1500 on, bringing more than ten million African captives to the New World. Between one and two million died en route, succumbing to disease and exposure proportional to the length of the middle passage.7 Upon their arrival in the colonies, African slaves were indispensable to the production of various products, including cotton, “the chief raw material for the industrial revolution.”8 Modernization was thus dependent on slavery, nowhere more so than in Brazil and the British colonies in North America, “the two largest slave societies of modern times.”9
Analyses of the legacy of slavery have often focused on comparison of Brazil and North America. According to Frank Tannenbaum, Brazil accepted “the doctrine of the moral personality of the slave .. . [producing] a friendly, an elastic milieu . . . [making] possible the gradual achievement of freedom” and less conflictual post-abolition race relations. In North America, by contrast, “the slave was denied recognition as a moral person and was therefore considered incapable of freedom . . . the law and the mores hardened and became stratified, and their historical outcome proved to be violence and revolution.”10 But was Brazilian slavery any less harsh than that in the British colonies that later became the United States?
The Myth of Brazil’s “Humanitarian” Slavery
Portugal had a relatively small home population, was reluctant to send settlers overseas, and was initially wary of the expense of transporting Africans to its colonies. Enslaving the indigenous population appeared to be the most promising available means to ensure a labor force for the Brazilian colony. But experience found these people to be “reluctant” laborers.11 As Freyre describes them,
the Indian, ill adapted to the needs of the new form of agrarian labor, became enveloped in the sadness of the introvert, and it was necessary that his place be taken by the Negro, who with his youthfulness, tense, vigorous energy, his extroversion and vivacity, stood in marked contrast to the American savage.12
Freyre characteristically overlooks the violence of this process. The native population was in large numbers exterminated, decimated by diseases and intermixture. An Indian population of 800,000 in 1570 was reduced to 360,000 by 1825.13 Given the Portuguese propensity for finding positive interpretations of damaging fact, marginalization of the Brazilian Indians was instead hailed as a “replacement” with less “reluctant” Africans.
Portuguese importation of slaves from Africa to Brazil began in 1549. This trade peaked at 1.6 million during the nineteenth century, and by the end of the slave trade 3.5 million people had been forcibly brought to Brazil. Because slaves in Brazil were overworked and subject to tropical desease, they did not reproduce their numbers as they did in North America. Massive continued importation was necessary to maintain sufficient slave labor. Portugal’s dominance over the slave trade, and the relative proximity of Brazil to Portugal’s African colonies, diminished masters’ incentive to encourage slave reproduction and ensured a ready supply of replacements.14 By 1798 Brazil’s population of 3.25 million included a majority of African descent, including 1.5 million slaves and 400,000 freed slaves. Slaves and ex-slaves were dispersed nationally, constituting no fewer than 27 percent of the population in any single region by 1819.15 Each of Brazil’s economic booms, based on the production of gold, diamonds, tobacco, cotton, and sugar in the North and coffee in the South, depended on massive slave labor. For instance, by 1600 up to 40 percent of Brazil’s slaves were working to produce sugar, feeding Europe’s sweet tooth.16 Black slaves labored furiously; “no one else seemed to labor at all.”17 Rio de Janeiro became the greatest slave city in history, comparable only to Rome at the height of its empire.
Colonial Portuguese policies regarding African slavery had the appearance of ambivalence. Slaves were freed in 1761 in Portugal, where “the easy transferability” of slave property did not fit into “a feudal society, with its limits on place and tenure.”18 However, this abolition deliberately excepted the much greater number of slaves in Brazil, from which Portugal profited greatly. While the Portuguese crown issued early edicts against the mistreatment of slaves in Brazil, it also directly licensed the slave trade, with its high level of mortality en route.19 But once the slaves arrived in Brazil, according to Tannenbaum, they were treated as though their bondage was the result of “misfortune” rather than inferiority, and therefore “carried no taint.”20 The image of the well-treated house slave, akin to “an ordinary Brazilian but for his bare feet – slaves were forbidden to wear shoes,” pervades historical descriptions, even though such domestic bondsmen were a minority.21 Even in urban areas, slaves were not subject to legal segregation. According to Roberto da Matta, “in Brazil there can be intimacy between masters and slaves, superiors and inferiors, because the world is ordered according to a hierarchy.”22
The image of a benign form of Brazilian slavery rests, in part, on an assumption that “the Catholic doctrine of the equality of all men in the sight of God” encouraged a more humanitarian treatment of slaves in Brazil.23 The hierarchy of the universalistic Catholic Church also purportedly militated against an exclusive biracial divide. Consistent with this argument, the Church did condemn the slave trade, “insisted on the baptism of slaves, favored manumission, [and] encouraged marriage of slaves.”24 Such religious incorporation had the side effect of encouraging obedience.
Historical fact mitigates the argument about the effects of Catholicism, cutting against the doctrine of inclusion. The Church’s insistence on fair treatment did imply acceptance of the institution of slavery; the Church raised no objections to how slaves were treated before 1822, and saw no contradiction in allowing slaves to be baptized at the same time they were branded.25 The Catholic “unity of faith” and strict hierarchy served to reinforce the inferiority of heathen Africans, with religious intolerance used early on as a substitute for racism, as a justification of slavery.26 More concretely, the Church itself practiced discrimination in appointments, held slaves, and condemned miscegenation.27 Such practice was consistent with the Church’s earlier role in the Crusades, the Inquisition, and support of colonialism. Even if these historical contradictions are ignored, it is unlikely that the Church could have enforced better treatment or an end to slavery even had it so desired. The Church remained subordinate to the Brazilian colonial state, for which it relied on funding, and it aligned itself with large landholders. Even Tannenbaum is forced to acknowledge that the Church was not effective in pressing for reforms.28 Of course, questioning the intent or ability of the Church to push for better treatment of slaves leaves unresolved the actual nature of such treatment.
Brazil’s purportedly comfortable arrangement between slave and master was inscribed in officially “humanitarian” policies, though the reality of social practice contradicts such an interpretation. Slaves were permitted to marry each other or a free person, “even against the will of their master,” though in reality slave marriage was rare.29 Until 1869, masters could forcibly separate slave families.30 The one or two days per week slaves were permitted to grow their own food provided barely enough for their subsistence without depleting the reserves of the master. Slaves were often trained in a wide variety of skills and gained some benefit from their work, but the result was to enable and motivate slaves to work throughout the economy to profit their masters.31 Bans on masters’ killing or injuring their slaves were largely ignored, and laws against the pervasive whipping of slaves were enacted only two years before abolition, after two slaves died upon receiving 300 lashes.32 To prevent escape, slaves were locked in at night. To free their parents for work, some children of slaves were buried up to their necks during the day.33
Given the harsh treatment of slaves, the most important argument for a more humanitarian practice of bondage was the prospect of manumission. According to policy, “slaves in Brazil, by reimbursing the original purchase price, could compel their masters to free them.”34 As early as 1639, slaves banded together in “Black Brotherhoods” to save collectively to buy their freedom.35 Though official guarantees of slaves’ right to buy their freedom were enacted only in the 1880s, by the time of abolition in 1888 “there were three times as many free Negroes as slaves,” including a disproportionate number of mulattoes.36 Such large-scale manumission certainly eased the process of abolition. And Tannenbaum argues that such manumission indicates that Brazilian slavery was effectively “contractural,” rather than being based on images of innate and inescapable inferiority.37 As further evidence of the greater significance of legal status rather than race, freed blacks (and Indians) were often used as slave catchers. Some even came to own their own slaves.38
The significance of Brazilian manumission has been contested, not only because of its belated guarantee. Until 1871, savings with which slaves might buy their freedom were subject to seizure, and freed slaves were often treated as though they remained in bondage.39 Particularly in rural areas, slaves could not save enough to buy their freedom, and if freed remained subject to reenslavement if they could not prove manumission.40 Most often, masters freed the “ill, the crippled, the aged, in order to escape caring for them,” and demanded continued labor from former slaves, who were generally illiterate and unable to advance economically.41 Under such conditions, and given the general hierarchical nature of Brazilian society, manumission did not threaten the social order and freed blacks were often left worse off than slaves.
A last piece of evidence used to defend the idea of slave rights in Brazil is the extent to which slaves were permitted to retain aspects of African culture. “Tribal units were not deliberately broken up, as in Jamaica and the United States, and the Negro was thereby able to preserve and to transmit to his children a considerable portion of his African heritage,” including “religious and magical rights and beliefs.”42 Rather than indicating greater tolerance, this persistence of African culture was the result of Brazil’s greater reliance on continued slave trade, with newly imported slaves replenishing collective memory and heritage. Once the slaves arrived, kinship and language groups were inevitably dispersed and subject to assimilation. But continued importation, high concentrations of slave populations, and persistent cultural practice gave the appearance of greater tolerance, which “cannot reasonably be attributed to a supposed benevolence . . . nor to [Brazilian] character and culture being any less racist.”43
Arguments for and against Brazil having had a humanitarian form of slavery are inconsequential in light of the overriding fact that slavery in Brazil was astonishingly deadly. All told, Brazil imported ten times the number of slaves brought to North America; a steady supply of new African slaves was needed to compensate for high mortality rates.44 Brazil’s slave population lived under conditions that made reproduction of their numbers impossible. Brazilian slaveholders unable to keep their slaves alive benefited from Portugal’s dominance of the slave trade to import new slaves cheaply in large numbers.45
Disease, affecting whites as well, decimated the slaves. Masters accepted this attrition as the price of doing business, working their slaves even harder to gain a return on their investment before losing it to death. Slaves in the mines lived for an average of only seven to twelve years.46 “Mortality among slave children was at least eighty percent . . . Labor . .. was so cheap that no one cared what became of the offspring.”47 Only after the forced end to the slave trade in 1850 led to a trebling of slave prices in 1855–75, did slave owners attempt to protect their investments by improving slave living conditions enough to encourage reproduction.48 Given the role of disease, continued high slave mortality cannot be fully attributed to harsh treatment. But under such circumstances, importation was itself harsh. And to ignore high mortality requiring continued slave importation, instead projecting an image of early tolerance, can only be described as cynical at best.
Brazil’s slaves, watching their fellows and children dying off from disease and overwork, were themselves not fooled by any claims of humanitarianism. Inspired by the energy and rebellious spirit of the recently imported and their large numbers in urban areas, slaves responded to their conditions with an unequaled history of revolts.49 As early as the seventeenth century, slaves seeking to escape both bondage and their use as cannon fodder in the war against the Dutch fled inland to form runaway communities, or quilombos. Most notably, Pal-mares included 20,000 runaways and was strong enough to force a peace treaty with the Portuguese in 1678 before being destroyed by an army of 6,000 by 1695.50 News of the massive slave rebellion begun in 1791 in Haiti fed well-founded white fears of further unrest.51 In Bahia, mulattoes rebelled in 1798 and slaves revolted at least eight times between 1807 and 1844, with the largest such revolt in 1835 “close to becoming another Haiti,” leaving seventy Muslim slaves dead.52
Brazil’s slave revolts not only are indicative of the harsh treatment slaves suffered, but also contributed to the pressure for abolition. Brazil’s elites feared that “racial assertiveness . . . seemed to have the potential to destroy society all together.”53 By 1837 and especially after the U.S. Civil War, elites were increasingly debating how to avoid conflict and reduce revolts, including the possibility of expelling all blacks from the country.54 Indeed, masters came to see slavery as a costly diversion of capital and as a constraint on attracting immigrant laborers wary of slave competition; resulting conflict was regarded as an impediment to further economic growth or to attracting foreign investment.55 Poorer regions in the North gradually pushed for abolition as their slaves were sold South, while Southern coffee planters gradually supported abolition of slavery with the arrival of cheap immigrant replacement labor.56 Elites came to believe that continued slavery would produce further conflict, thereby threatening the basic social hierarchy, the preservation of which was judged to be more important and achievable only through gradual, orderly abolition and socialization of blacks. Brazil’s “leaders preferred abolition to social revolution.”57 Immigration further eased the transition. And as slavery had been nationwide, abolition was not regional in impact. Its prospect provoked little regional conflict, nor an extensive racist ideological defense of slavery.
International influences also contributed to the pressure for abolition. Most notably, the British were eager to end the slave trade, due to both commitments at the Congress of Vienna and concern that cheap slave labor elsewhere diminished the competitiveness of British industry. The British used their significant influence with the emperor, quietly negotiating treaties calling for the end of the slave trade. Nonetheless, the trade continued illegally from 1831 to 1848, during which up to half a million more slaves entered Brazil. Exasperated with such violations, in 1850 the British navy seized slaving ships entering Brazil, finally ending the largest slave trade in history.58 As reduced importation was not replaced by domestic reproduction, the viability of continued bondage decreased.59 Then the Paraguay War in 1865–70 added further pressure. Not only were 20,000 slavesfreed in return for their military service, but that service led the Bra-zilian army thereafter to favor abolition and reform, and to refuse tohunt runaways.60 These pressures, together with the awkwardness ofbeing the last major slave power in the hemisphere, had a cumulativeeffect.
Growing fears of revolt, economic interests, immigration, and international influences all contributed to an emerging consensus for abandoning slavery, much more than did pressure from a distinct abolitionist movement. Brazil’s abolitionists were notably moderate in tone, careful to take cognizance more of the interests of slaveholders than of those of former slaves, and eager to align their cause with the nation’s prosperity. They advocated gradual abolition and the replacement of blacks with white immigrant labor, condemning slave revolts and largely ignoring the post-abolition fate of blacks.61 Despite such moderation and pandering to white racism, the relatively small number of abolitionists were still marginalized as “anti-Brazil,” and remained significantly less influential than their U.S. counterparts.62 Brazilian abolitionists managed to organize mass meetings and to declare the northeastern state of Ceará free of slavery only four years before total abolition was enacted, and long after Brazil was already committed to a gradual end to slavery.63 The abolitionists in effect were swimming with a rising tide of liberalism that favored free labor and immigration over slavery.64
The actual process of legal abolition was gradual and orderly. Indicative of the typical slaveholder’s interest only in bondsmen at the peak of their labor capacity, slave children were freed in 1871. But these children remained obligated to work for their former masters during their most productive years, until the age of twenty-one. In 1885 slaves over sixty, by then too old to work, were liberated.65 With the final “Golden Law” of abolition in 1888, Princess Isabel “issued a law that ended an institution that was already dead,” freeing 600,000 remaining slaves.66 This “gift” of abolition was celebrated with music and street festivals, but in retrospect, blacks would find little to celebrate, for the 1888 law included no discussion of the transition to freedom nor any allowance for ex-slaves’ welfare.67 For whites, however, there was much to celebrate. Slavery had run its profitable course despite significant slave revolts. Abolition had been achieved gradually and with no violent conflict among whites, and in the end with almost no opposition. Final “emancipation was thus an act of continuity rather than of revolution.”68 This feat of peaceful abolition demonstrated the continued unity and stability of a ruling elite and social order able to finesse even a dramatic transition elsewhere achieved only with massive bloodshed.
Two conclusions emerge from this history of Brazilian slavery. The image of a “humanitarian” form of slavery in Brazil is largely fiction. The “myth of the friendly master” was just that, a myth. The use of slaves throughout the economy reflected their large numbers more than tolerance. Official rights for slaves were late in coming and often ignored in practice. Enslavement was “severe, barbarous . .. coercive” and deadly, provoking significant revolts.69 If Tannenbaum was correct in arguing that post-abolition race relations were determined by the form of slavery, then Brazilian slavery was certainly harsh enough to have prefigured formal racial domination and to have fomented significant subsequent conflict. The relative lack of such domination and conflict, as discussed later, suggests that Tannenbaum’s thesis of direct historical determinacy was overdrawn.
What remains is that the tragedy of Brazilian slavery was ended without additional tragedy for whites. Brazil’s colonial inheritance of a strongly unified state provided an institutional center capable of managing a potentially explosive transition. The center held, and moved. The slave trade was abolished and then slavery itself was phased out without significant opposition or open conflict, though with the legacy of inequality firmly entrenched in society. Afro-Brazilians emerged greatly damaged; the Brazilian state and its ruling elite were not. By surrendering an archaic form of labor coercion, it maintained a larger social order that it continued to control. In accord with a popular aphorism, Brazilians concluded it was “better to give up the ring to save the hand,” celebrating peaceful abolition with a wave of flower and song.
Slavery and Abolitionism in the United States
Slavery in North America was infamously brutal. Later U.S. racial segregation was also brutal, and so there is little debate about slavery’s legacy for the subsequent racial order, unlike the case in Brazil. Still, assessing slavery in North America helps to specify its implications for abolition, subsequent race relations, and nation-state building.
As in Brazil, North American colonists found the indigenous population did not meet labor needs. The Indians were too sparse, vulnerable to disease, knew the territory well enough to escape, and could use their “tribal” loyalties for resistance. To provide a pool of labor to replace an also insufficient supply of white indentured servants, the colonists turned to the importation of slaves.70 Africans were first brought to the North American colonies in 1619, almost a century later than in Brazil. Unlike Brazil, slavery in North America would become regionally concentrated. By the late eighteenth century, slavery was concentrated in the upper South, with two-thirds of all slaves held in Virginia and Maryland. Relatively few blacks lived in the North, where they were subject to discrimination as slavery there diminished.
Slavery proved highly profitable for cotton production concentrated in the deep South, where the slave population then exploded beyond that of the upper Southern states. By the mid-nineteenth century, one-quarter of white Southern families owned slaves, though the majority of slaves were held by a smaller minority of whites. On the basis of slavery, those Southern planters with available land developed a large plantation economy producing cotton, tobacco, sugar and rice. Per capita income for all Southern whites rose steadily, at levels only slightly lower than those in the more industrial North.71 As a result, most nonslaveholding whites came to support slavery as the basis of growth. Bondage thus also encouraged white regional unity, with the nonslaveholding white majority proud to be “associated . . . with the masters.”72
Slavery in the United States was distinguished from that in Brazil not only by its regional concentration, but also by less reliance on continual imports. Throughout most of the eighteenth century, “approximately one third of the British merchant fleet was engaged in transporting fifty thousand negroes a year to the New World.”73 However, the higher price of importing slaves the greater distance from Africa to North America rather than to Brazil, with high mortality en route, discouraged reliance on the trade. Domestic mortality rates roughly half that of Brazil (for whites as well as blacks) reduced the need for imports, so that though North America imported a fraction of the number of slaves brought to Brazil, the total slave populations in the two locales remained comparable.74 The proportion of foreign-born slaves fell steadily, while the descendants of native-born slaves remained in bondage for generations.
Reproduction fed a pervasive image of Southern paternalism toward its slaves. As in Brazil, the experience of better-treated house slaves was held up as an example of white generosity and intimacy, ignoring the more prevalent experience of field hands. Where Freyre had spread the myth of the friendly master for Brazil with his writings in the 1930s, Ulrich Phillips spread the same myth applied to North America. Masters were not Simon Legrees, but simply took “the place of the accustomed chiefs” of Africa. Slaves were purportedly made content by the granting of rewards, gifts, fields to cultivate, and animals.75 The 10 percent of slaves who lived in urban areas were often provided with skills and hired out, and during these periods lived away from their masters and sometimes were even given a share of their wages.76
The image of American paternalism and tolerance toward slaves was a lie, as it was in Brazil. While North American slaves were less subject to disease, lived longer, and reproduced more than their Brazilian counterparts, official policies denying slaves’ rights were particularly harsh. As described by Du Bois:
slaves were not considered men. They had no right of petition. They were divisible like any other chattel. They could own nothing; they could make no contracts; they could hold no property, nor traffic in property;... they could not control their children; they could not appeal from their masters; they could be punished at will.77
Rape of a slave was not a crime. Slaves were legally forbidden to learn to read and write, and at the same time their ancestral traditions and languages were eroded by suppression, fading memories, and the relative lack of newly imported Africans.78
Most significantly, possibilities of manumission were steadily foreclosed through the early 1800s, and in South Carolina voided altogether in 1841.79 Even freed blacks were continually under threat of heartbreaking reenslavement, or at least expulsion from the South.80 Limiting manumission was consistent with masters’ interest in reproducing the slave population and in avoiding unrest by those slaves hoping for or having gained freedom. Slave owners were eager to keep their slaves alive and in bondage, “confirming the blacks in perpetual slavery . . . making it possible for them to accept their fate.”81
North American slaves did not simply accept their bondage. They prayed for abolition and often resorted to subtle forms of everyday resistance such as “malingering at their work,” arson and theft.82 On occasion, their anger exploded. Up to one hundred South Carolina slaves revolted in Stono in 1739. Inspired by the slave revolt in St. Dominique, up to five hundred New Orleans slaves revolted in 1811, and seventy joined Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831.83 These episodes raised white fears of another Haiti, though in North America there were few such revolts and few comparable in size to those in Brazil. This difference has generally been ascribed to the lower influx of more rebellious Africans, for the loss of “African mental furnishings” and ties over time did diminish the prospect of collective action.84 The lower proportion of slaves in urban areas also lessened chances of revolt, as compared with Brazil where urban concentrations allowed for conspiracies. Those slaves in Southern cities were under tight control, for instance needing passes to go out at night.85 And because North American slavery was regional rather than national, some slaves did manage with great difficulty to flee to the North rather than fight or form local quilombos.
Unlike in Brazil, regional tensions over slavery were exacerbated by a much more vibrant abolitionist movement. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison first published his Liberator, launching “a crusade almost quasi-religious in its liturgy.” By 1852, with the abolitionists strongly organized, the unprecedented sale of 300,000 copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrated and expanded the breadth of the movement’s appeal.86 With few blacks and no slaves in the region, Northern abolitionists could afford to demand racial justice, pressing the Republican Party toward this goal and even advocating the end of segregation in the North.87
Alongside of and often opposed by the abolitionists, there emerged a more moderate movement in favor of returning slaves to Africa.88 The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, used federal government and other support to found Liberia and to transport 13,000 blacks there.89 Lincoln himself advocated this approach, convinced that the “physical difference between the white and black race .. . will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality,” and that the necessarily inferior position of blacks was inconsistent with American values.90 Better they should leave. Lincoln even used the term “nigger,” which would come into even greater usage after emancipation.91
In response to abolitionism, explicitly racist imagery and ideology forcefully emerged in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century as further justifications for continued slavery. By contrast, in Brazil abolition was more consensual and racist ideology to defend slavery less developed. According to Fredrickson, in the United States, “prior to the 1830s . . . open assertions of permanent inferiority were exceedingly rare. It took the assault of the abolitionists .. . to force the practitioners of racial oppression to develop a theory that accorded with their behavior.” Black inferiority was projected as a rationale for subordination as “the destiny of the blacks.”92 Publication of Gobineau’s racist theory in 1856, and interpretations of Darwin as suggesting that “blacks were a degenerate race with no future,” would add scientific legitimacy to rising racism.93 Full-blown racist ideology, however, would develop even further after emancipation, when continued domination of blacks without the institution of slavery required further justification. And only then would further formal rules of segregation be encoded. Such a “mechanism for maintaining social distance and control, was for the most part unnecessary and almost meaningless in the period when most Negroes were slaves, for slavery was very effective segregation – at least in the mind, where it counted.”94
While racism was emerging, the regional divide of slavery shaped the American process of abolition, much as it had shaped state structures. The framers of the American Constitution had postponed the end of the slave trade to after 1808; American involvement in the slave trade to Brazil and elsewhere was outlawed in 1800. But because of reproduction – birth rate at least equal to the death rate – the end of the slave trade did not threaten slavery itself, as it did in Brazil. Meanwhile, power was carefully distributed between central authority and the states, appeasing Southern states, which used their power to protect the institution of slavery. Alexander Hamilton’s calls for more centralized power had been rejected in part because Southerners viewed such a construction as threatening to slavery.
America’s great invention of federalism was an offspring – or at least a stepchild – of America’s great tragedy of slavery. And the issue of the federal balance of power continued to be calibrated according to the ongoing dispute over slavery. The South insisted upon and used “states’ rights” to protect slavery, and in 1850 gained a federal commitment that fugitive slaves anywhere would be returned to their masters. Abolitionists in the North sought to turn federal power away from support of slavery. They eventually “abandoned their commitment to states rights and adopted an unqualified unionism, once it became apparent that this would further the anti-slavery cause.”95
The emerging conflict between Northern abolitionist supporters of federal power and Southern proslavery states’ righters became the fundamental political issue in the nation. On this score, the United States were not all that united. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster had to use all of their powerful rhetoric and political skill to preserve the Union with compromises on slavery. With westward expansion, “the exclusion of slavery in the territories offered [to the North] a constitutional, perhaps peaceful, strategy for taking control step by step of the federal apparatus.”96 The South resisted, asserting its interests in Washington. In the attempt to preserve the constitutional balance and slavery, compromises allowed for the extension of slavery within the Louisiana Purchase, across the Mississippi, and into Texas.
With the nomination of Abraham Lincoln for the presidency in 1860, this regional conflict was solidified into party politics. Southerners vilified Lincoln’s faction as “the Black Republican Party.”97 Lincoln himself was steadfastly committed to preserving the Union, reinforcing common practices within “a nation, not a league of sovereign states,” and ending slavery, albeit gradually.98 Lincoln’s electoral victory, based on Northern support, made it evident that the fundamental regional conflict could no longer be deferred by compromise.99 The South saw the federal apparatus as having been captured by Northern interests, and this loss of balance rapidly eroded Southern willingness to remain in the Union.
The implications of this overview of American slavery and abolitionism can be briefly summarized. The treatment of slaves was harsh, evident in their absolute lack of rights and the virtual foreclosure of manumission. This treatment was somewhat offset by slaveholders’ interest in keeping their human property alive, productive, and reproducing, so as to avoid costly purchase of replacements. The relatively small number of slave revolts is similarly inconclusive. But arguing that the lack of revolts demonstrates acceptance by slaves ignores the important role of repression. What is not ambiguous is the degree to which slavery and its defense encouraged images of black racial distinctiveness and inferiority, providing the foundation on which the post-abolition racial order would be built.
American slavery was shaped and most distinguished by its regional focus. The North’s insistence on ending the slave trade pushed up the price of slaves, resulting in greater interest within the South in slave reproduction and in precluding manumission and flight so as to avoid purchasing replacements. Regional conflict was further exacerbated by debates over the westward extension of slavery. By the mid-nineteenth century, the fate of slavery became fully enmeshed in a regional conflict between Southerners seeking to reinforce states’ rights to protect slavery, and Northerners pushed by abolitionists to use federal power to end it. The form, and even the survival, of the Union came to be inextricably tied to the future of slavery. This conflict gave rise to explicitly racist rhetoric and ideology used by the South to defend its institution under threat and then later to justify post-abolition racial domination.
Comparing Slavery and Its Implications
Brazilian slavery was not “humanitarian,” nullifying such an explanation for the later lack of official racial domination there. The Catholic Church was itself ambivalent on the issue of slavery and, regardless of its predilections and practices, had only limited influence over Brazilian slave codes. Those codes did include some rights to own property, marry, and to buy freedom, which created a large group of freed blacks accepted by whites as such, easing the transition to abolition. But all of these rights were encoded only very late in the history of Brazilian slavery, by which time the entire edifice was crumbling, and they were often ignored in practice. By then racial discrimination and inequality had spread with extensive slavery.
Brazil’s particular slave practices were part and parcel with slaveholders’ replenishing their human stock via cheap new imports. Allowing slaves to buy their freedom after their peak years of labor freed the masters to buy new, more vigorous slaves and to enjoy being paid by their victims for the privilege. More importantly, most slaves did not live to take advantage of this official possibility, for slave owners could not keep their slaves alive and had little incentive to try. By contrast, manumission was less likely in North America but slaves were less subject to disease and more likely to survive. Slave stocks were replenished through reproduction rather than by replacement. Brazil’s continued reliance on the slave trade to counter the astonishingly high mortality rate for slaves suggests that in its most fundamental sense, Brazilian slavery was at least as heinous as its counterpart to the north.
The different forms of reproduction of slave labor in Brazil and North America relate to the legacies of Portuguese and British colonialism. Tannenbaum argued the case for a Portuguese legacy of tolerance and humanitarianism, but its chief legacy was Brazil’s access to a cheaper and extended slave trade to offset high mortality in the tropics. Alternatively, Tannenbaum argues that the British colonial legacy was one of harsh treatment. But Britain’s opposition to the slave trade, which eventually forced its end even in Brazil, encouraged better treatment for slaves in the United States and later in Brazil. Britain’s early expulsion from its American colonies actually reinforced slavery; “separation from England . . . liberated a plantation slave regime in the South. With the threat of British interference removed and a relatively weak central government to contend with, the road to regional power lay open before the slaveholders.”100 The more liberal influence of Britain is further indicated by its earlier role in abolishing slavery in South Africa.
Brazilian slavery, with its reliance on constant replenishment, was doomed by the British-enforced end to the slave trade. Abolition was also furthered by the dramatic history of revolts by slaves who faced the prospect of likely death, found themselves concentrated in large numbers, and had no chance to escape to a free region. Eventually, believing themselves faced with a choice between slave revolution and abolition, the Brazilian elite opted for the latter, thereby hoping to preserve the basic social order and hierarchy.
What then can we conclude about the direct legacy of slavery? Bondage took different forms in Brazil and North America, though plantations made much use of slaves in both. Myths of paternalism were embraced by defenders of slavery in both countries, but this commonality would not lead to comparable later treatment. And the realities of slavery in Brazil and North America were comparably harsh. Post-abolition racial orders, whether explicitly segregationist as in the United States (and South Africa) or not, as in Brazil, would develop in this context. Slavery reinforced the pattern of discrimination, even if it did not directly determine specific post-abolition racial orders. And arguably, if slavery did determine later outcomes, it did so in the opposite manner to that generally argued. More extensive slavery in Brazil entrenched inequality and discrimination, the legacy of which helped to preserve the racial order without later legal action or racial labor restriction. By contrast, less extensive slavery and earlier abolition in South Africa may have given further impetus to legally entrench later segregation and apartheid. The United States would fall between the two extremes.
What does emerge is the centrality of regional conflict, or lack thereof, in shaping the North American and Brazilian slave systems. In the United States, slaveholders were isolated in the South and deprived of continued slave imports by the North. In Brazil, where Portuguese rule had imposed a stronger unified state and spread slavery throughout the country, much less regional distinction in slavery emerged. Nor was there comparable regionalized pressure to help force an end to the slave trade.
The regional or national spread of slavery is also of fundamental importance in accounting for the different paths to abolition. In the United States, the fate of slavery was imbedded in an unresolved regional conflict over the distribution and use of federal and state power. In the end, compromise and negotiation failed, leading to the massive violence of the Civil War, during which emancipation was proclaimed by military edict. In Brazil, where slavery was widespread, the question of abolition and race relations “did not become the plaything of regional politics.”101 Slave-owning Brazil remained more united, facing no threat of regional secession and experiencing neither a significant abolitionist movement nor an opposing movement among slave owners to protect their property. As one American noted upon witnessing Brazil’s flower-bedecked passage of an act toward gradual abolition in 1871, “I am going to send these flowers to my country to show how a law is passed in Brazil which caused the shedding of so much blood in the United States.”102
Brazil’s colonial legacy of a greater degree of unified control was distinguished from the legacy of decentralization in the United States. The resolution of slavery in the two countries was shaped by the same contrast. That earlier abolition had exacerbated ethnic conflict in South Africa suggests a greater similarity of this case with that of the United States, for in both resistance to abolition fed racist ideology. But the more limited and distant legacy of slavery in South Africa, and its later enactment of extensive segregation, further undermine the argument that more extensive slavery preordained more extensive racial domination. In Brazil, this connection between prior extensive slavery and later “legal treatment” was also indirect, if not reversed.