The Brazilian government abolished slavery gradually in the course of the nineteenth century, with a minimum of social and economic disturbance. In the northeastern sugar area of Pernambuco, for example, where slave labor has predominated on the plantations in the independence period, by the 1870s free labor had become the most important form. By quantifying and comparing the effects of various pressures limiting and reducing the Pernambuco slave population one comes to appreciate the gradual nature of the conversion to free labor. Summarizing the various modes of free labor employment brings the realization that abolition did not change the high dependency of most of the rural proletariat on the planter class.1
During the second decade of the nineteenth century, a planter needed at least 40 able slaves; large estates used 100-150, and the largest plantations worked as many as 300.2 In the early 1840s, the average number of slaves on 331 plantations was 55.3 A decade later, a survey of 532 plantations reported an average labor force of 20 slaves and 6 free workers; and in 1857 a police chief counted an average of 70 slaves and 49 free individuals, the latter between the ages of 18 and 50, on 46 plantations in Jaboatão, one of the province’s richer sugar districts.4 In the entire province in the 1840s, the slave population represented between one-fifth and one-fourth of the total population (Table I).
Provincial censuses of 1829 and 1842 indicate that between 41% and 54% of the slave population were born in Africa.5 This high proportion reflects the fact that the planters did not replenish their slave labor force through natural reproduction, but through constant imports from Africa. During the years 1839-1850, for example, Pernambuco annually imported at least 1,100 slaves, and in some years as many as 3,000.6
Natural reproduction did not satisfy the demand for slaves for two reasons. First, males had always predominated in the Atlantic slave trade. The strenuous work on sugar plantations led planters to prefer male laborers, which kept the sex distribution among African imports skewed in favor of males, and the resulting relative scarcity of slave women inhibited reproduction (Table II). Secondly, slave women tended to bear children about half as frequently as free women, as suggested by fertility ratios for 1829 and 1842; this relative infertility was attributed by nineteenth century observers to insufficient care for pregnant women and newborn infants.7 Even when the African slave trade stopped and children born of slave mothers were declared free, slave fertility remained low. Thus records kept on slave children after 1871 indicate that annual births averaged 2,300, or 30.6 per thousand in an average slave population of 74,000 between 1873 and 1887. Since general mortality in Recife never fell below 27 deaths per thousand, usually ranged between 29 and 35 per thousand, and slaves notoriously died more frequently than free people, the slaves must have suffered a negative rate of natural increase.8
As long as planters could depend upon fresh imports from Africa, they could maintain the size of the slave force. When that supply was cut off, however, the planters felt the first of several pressures that were to deprive them of slaves. As early as November 7, 1831, the Brazilian government had ordered the liberation of all slaves thereafter entering Brazil. For a variety of reasons, the 1831 law had remained largely unenforced. In 1850, however, in order to prevent British men-of-war from sailing into Brazilian harbors to arrest slave traders, the Brazilian emperor approved Law no. 581, also known as the Eusebio de Queiroz Law. Implicitly backed by the British Navy, this law, which stipulated penalties for infractions of the 1831 law, won general compliance.9 While some smugglers attempted to land slaves in Pernambuco in the early 1850s, the last reported African imports occurred in 1855.10
The effective abolition of the international slave traffic so curtailed supply that nominal slave prices in Pernambuco more than tripled by 1860 (Table III). Part of this increase can be ascribed to inflation in the later 1850s, a result of increased emissions by banks sometimes funded by capital formerly employed in the trade.11 But even in terms of 1852 prices, the value of slaves increased 50% by 1860, and nearly doubled by 1870.
In the south central coffee-producing province of Rio de Janeiro, nominal slave prices also rose quickly after 1850, and reached a peak in the late 1870s at a level nearly four times above that of the early 1850s.12 This greater increase in slave prices resulted from the greater relative prosperity enjoyed by the coffee sector; coffee dominated Brazilian exports after 1830, while sugar prices fell steadily during most of the nineteenth century. Thus coffee planters were able to buy labor from sugar planters, and after 1850 Pernambuco exported slaves to the south.
This interprovincial slave trade flourished for three decades, 1850-1880. The sugar planters sold their slaves in small lots of a few each year to cover debts held by their factors in Recife, and a total annual average of 760 slaves legally left the province (Table IV).13 Because the slave owner had to pay an exit tax of 100$ooo per slave after 1852, and 200$000 per slave after 1859, many slaves were smuggled south; the actual number exported probably ranged between 1,000 and 1,500 per year.14 The interprovincial trade reached its peak in the late 1870s, when severe droughts in the northeast forced liquidation of fixed assets such as slaves. The volume of slaves shipped south after 1876 was so great that the major slave-buying provinces of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais imposed prohibitively high slave import taxes in 1880 and 1881. These taxes were intended first to prevent the drain of all the slaves from the northeast, thereby disposing those provinces to support abolition, and second to encourage European immigration. The taxes practically ended the interprovincial slave trade, which was formally abolished in 1885. Over the thirty year period the interprovincial slave trade removed between 23,000 and 38,000 slaves from Pernambuco, depending upon whether one accepts the legal annual average or the average of estimated total shipments.15
Two other laws of gradual abolition also limited the Pernambuco slave population. Law no. 2040 of 1871, popularly known as the Rio Branco or Free Womb Law, freed children thereafter born of slave mothers, with certain qualifications. The children would remain wards of their mother’s master until age 8, when the master had two options. He could free the 8-year old and receive state indemnification, or he could keep the child until age 21, when freedom would be granted without compensation. The Law also created an emancipation fund based on tax revenues, lotteries, and fines.16
Between October 1881 and the end of 1887, a total of 37,000 children born to slave mothers were reported.17 Because the planters generally refused the small indemnity offered when the child reached age 8, and others simply abandoned the children, few enjoyed the freedom promised by the law.18 The Imperial Emancipation Fund freed 2,600 young slaves in Pernambuco by May 1888.18 A Provincial Emancipation Fund created in May 1883 liberated only 150 slaves.20
The last imperial anti-slavery law before final abolition, Law no. 3270, the Dantas-Saraiva-Cotegipe or Sexagenarian Law of 1885, freed all slaves age 60 or older. Like the Free Womb Law passed exactly 15 years previously, however, the Sexagenarian Law qualified its already mild provisions by obliging elderly slaves to continue serving their former masters for another three years, or until they reached age 65 whichever came first. The Sexagenarian Law freed no more than 9,600 slaves in Pernambuco.21
The Golden Law of Abolition, Law no. 3353 of May 13, 1888, freed all remaining slaves in Brazil. In the early months of 1888, a few Pernambuco towns and parishes had anticipated the Golden Law by freeing slaves within their jurisdiction. These 1888 laws affected some 41,000 slaves (Table I).
In addition to legal restrictions, deaths removed individuals from the Pernambuco slave population; in fact, deaths depleted that population far more than any other cause. The worst cholera epidemic of the century ravaged the province in 1855-56, nearly tripled the minimum Recife death rate of 27 per thousand, and killed at least 3,300 people, including “a vast quantity of slaves.”22 Yellow fever epidemics raged in the early 1860s, along with cholera, and killed many slaves, “that portion of the population whose habits and mode of life rendered them the earliest victim.”23 Yellow fever reappeared in 1871 and 1873, when the capital’s death rate ranged between 37 and 41 per thousand; smallpox struck during the unhappy drought years of 1878 and 1879, killing 2,500 in Recife, and again in the late 1880s, when it killed 2,200.24
Without complete vital statistics, accurate age distribution data, and details on age and sex of slaves exported and manumitted, it is difficult to quantify the net impact of all causes of death. Certainly slaves died at least as frequently as free people. Thus, in the average slave population between 1850 and 1873 of 126,368, the minimum Recife death rate of 27 per thousand would have taken at least 3,413 slave lives annually. Between 1871 and 1887, the average slave population of 73,679 would have sufferd a minimum loss of 1,989 annually.
Manumissions also removed individuals from the slave population. According to Brazilian law, slave owners were required to grant freedom under certain circumstances.25 It is doubtful, however, that these laws were regularly enforced; at least one competent nineteenth-century observer specifically stated that he found little compliance in Pernambuco.26 Beyond these legal obligations, sugar planters were known to free certain favored slaves on important occasions such as birthdays, weddings, and deaths. Manumission did not always reflect disinterested sentiments; by freeing sick and aged slaves for example, an owner could reduce maintenance costs. Especially in the last years of slavery, as abolitionism gained favor, manumissions occurred more frequently and gained wider publicity.27 A total of 6,800 private manumissions were reported between October 1873 and June 1886, an annual average near 600. In the final years of slavery, the manumissions rate rose sharply: the Diário de Pernambuco reported 700 manumissions in the first four and one-half months of 1888.28
Over the period 1850-1888, as many as 21,000 slaves were manumitted in Pernambuco, if the average for 1873-86 can be generalized. But one should note that some 40% of these manumissions entailed obligations on the part of the ex-slave, such as that he continued “offering services” for two or three years thereafter, or that he pay his owner his current value. Probably less than 21,000, therefore, gained real independence from their former masters.29
While available data do not allow quantifying the number of slaves who fled their owners after 1850, we cannot agree with recent interpretations that these flights, and wide-scale manumissions, were largely responsible for the rapid decline in slave population in the 1880s, or for precipitating final abolition. In Pernambuco, at least, neither the press nor the authorities reported mass flights such as occurred in São Paulo.30 Nor can manumissions, which certainly attained sizable proportions in the 1880s, explain the abrupt fall in slave population between 1886 and 1887.31 Rather that fall can best be attributed to inaccuracies in slave population estimates. The provincial governments received quotas from the Imperial Emancipation Fund on the basis of reported slave population. Hence exaggerating the number of slaves in the later 1870s and early 1880s would permit those governments to reimburse slave owners more generously. The only careful slave population counts after 1872, moreover, were made in 1873 and 1887, the registers stipulated by the 1871 Free Womb Law. Estimates for intervening years depended upon simple deductions of recorded slave deaths and exits from the 1873 register. The imperfections of these latter records allowed overestimates.32 Thus the actual decline of the slave population in Pernambuco between 1873 and 1887 was probably greater in the early years and less violent in the post-1886 period than suggested by the data in Table I.
We can now summarize the effects of various pressures reducing the size of the Pernambuco slave population after 1850 (Table V). High slave mortality, final abolition, and the end of the African slave trade were the most important factors. The interprovincial slave trade and manumissions were the next most important pressures. Least important were the Free Womb Law, the Sexagenarian Law, and the official emancipation funds.
Before 1880, these pressures resulted in an annual depletion of at least 3,500 slaves; in the later 1880s, the annual rate may have risen to 6,400 slaves. If one assumes that all these slaves came from sugar plantations, which numbered around 1,500 in 1872, then each plantation lost an average of between 3 and 5 slaves per year.33
This slow labor drain did not hinder sugar production, which doubled from an annual average of 61,000 tons in the late 1840s to 136,000 tons in the late 1880s. The increase resulted in part from capital-intensive technological improvements; but another part of the increase, and certainly the maintenance of production levels, derived from the expanded use of free labor.
The increased employment of free labor did not entail new free groups such as the European immigrants whom coffee planters subsidized in São Paulo. Instead, the sugar planters used ex-slaves and other elements of the free rural population. Many ex-slaves remained on the plantations, not from any strong affection for their former owners, most likely, but rather for lack of alternative employment opportunities elsewhere; sugar was still the province’s leading industry, and sugar plantations still monopolized land in the coastal area, the most densely populated region.34 These ex-slaves found employment as squatters (moradores) or wage workers. Squatters had long been a numerous free element on the plantations, and their role has been adequately characterized elsewhere.35 We need only add that nineteenth-century observers agreed that a squatter’s lot was not a happy one:
He cannot be sure of awakening in the same place he lay down to sleep. He shelters himself in a miserable thatched hut built on someone else’s land and conceded to him as a gift. He does not live there as long as he behaves himself and pays the price stipulated in a written rental contract, but only as long as he wants to subject himself to serve as an instrument for lust, for private vengeance, for political hatreds and rivalries, and to help the landowners fight electoral battles for a cause not his own.36
Ex-slaves could also find employment as unskilled or seasonal workers earning daily wages. This group planted and cultivated sugar cane and performed routine maintenance in the mill. During the harvest season, September through March, the demand for unskilled labor increased, and free men could find work as cane cutters, drovers, bagasse workers, boiler and furnace stokers, and turbine workers (Table VI). But when the harvest ended, the planters released most of these employees, who had difficulty finding steady employment for the rest of the year.
In addition to ex-slaves and free rural workers, a special group, the corumbás, migrated annually from the dry backlands to work four or five months in the sugar zone. During peak harvest months, these migrants may have comprised as much as 45% of the plantation work force. As soon as news arrived that rain had fallen in the backlands, however, the migrants returned to their own farms to care for the crops.37
Salary-earners represented a very small fraction of the plantation work force. In the early nineteenth century, Tollenare had noted that the master-refiner, the doctor, and four others were paid annual salaries.38 In the 1870s and 1890s the situation was identical: on three plantations described, only six workers in relatively skilled and responsible positions earned annual salaries (Table VI).
The unskilled wage earners suffered a decline in real earnings in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Table VII). Real wages reached a peak in the 1860s and early 1870s. But then the later 1870s droughts drove many thousands of people from the parched backlands into the sugar zone, and their desperation obliged them to accept low wages.39 Wages continued low in the 1880s due to the increasing numbers of ex-slaves entering the labor market. From 1888, when overnight some 40,000 ex-slaves became potential wage-earners, to 1902, real wages dropped below levels attained in the 1850s. Notwithstanding the highest nominal wages of the century in the mid-1890s, inflationary monetary policies and the rising cost of living of the early Republic wiped out any real gains for wage earners.
The small group of salary earners, on the other hand, appears to have received real increases during the same period. In several jobs, reported real salaries doubled between 1876 and 1896 (Table VI). But this group included so few individuals, and undoubtedly even fewer ex-slaves (who had not received the education necessary to discharge these functions), that the increases were negligible to the rural proletariat.
The last form of employment possible for free workers was share-cropping. Sharecroppers (lavradores) grew sugar cane on the planter’s land and transported it to the mill at a designated time. In return they received one-half the sugar produced from cane supplied, and the right to live on the plantation. The mill owner kept the rest of the sugar and all the molasses, rum and bagasse.40
Sharecroppers constituted a small but important part of the plantation work force. Tollenare counted between two and three sharecroppers per plantation, usually Brazilian whites each owning six or seven slaves. Three decades later, in the 1840s, two independent counts estimated that sharecroppers owned an average of 9 to 12 slaves each, or approximately 11% of the total slave population on plantations surveyed. In the 1850s, sharecroppers grew the cane for 42% of the sugar produced in Jaboatão.41
Sharecropping was relatively riskless for the planters, who usually owned large uncultivated areas which could be assigned to these tenants at no cost42 But the sharecropper himself, despite his small capital of slaves, livestock, and a few tools, enjoyed little security. He received no contract specifying the terms of his tenure; he had to accept loans at usurious rates and false weights on his cane from the planter; and he was not allowed to mill his cane with another planter, nor could he afford it given transport costs. If a sharecropper protested, the planter could refuse to mill his crop, which if not ground within 48 hours after cutting lost much of its sugar content, or he might even evict the recalcitrant tenant and send squatters or day workers to bring in the cane.43
The most important modes of free employment during the period of transition from slavery to free labor were squatting and wage-earning. Few rural workers or ex-slaves qualified for salaried jobs or had the minimum capital necessary for sharecropping. The insecure subsistence and the poorly-remunerated, unsteady employment of most wage-earners meant that the free worker enjoyed little material advantage over the slave. The slave lacked, of course, the freedom to choose how and where he would subsist, and how he would use his time; and he was probably subject to more corporal punishment than the free worker. While he lived, however, he at least had guaranteed food, shelter, and clothing.
I wish to emphasize, in conclusion, not only that most free workers in the sugar zone lived no better than slaves, but also that the transition from slavery to freedom benefited the planters far more than the group freed.44 With free workers, planters could rationalize costs by eliminating maintenance expenses for unnecessary workers; they could remunerate many workers with tenancy on parcels of land, a low cost factor to the planter, and many others with increasingly cheaper wages. The gradual nature of the abolition process guaranteed a smooth transition, and the employment modes permitted the planters to retain their traditional control over the rural proletariat.
I claim no originality on this point. Other writers on Brazilian slavery have reached similar conclusions. See, for example, Emília Viotti da Costa, “O escravo na grande lavoura,” in Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (ed.), História geral da civilização brasileira, II:3, O Brasil monárquico: reações e transações (São Paulo, 1967), 187; and Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveowners Made (New York, 1969), p. 91. This interpretation, however, is not universal. Robert B. Toplin has affirmed that uprisings and violence accompanied the final years of slavery in São Paulo: “Upheaval, Violence and the Abolition of Slavery in Brazil: The Case of São Paulo,” HAHR, 49:4 (November 1969), 639-655. J. H. Galloway recently argued that “the end of slavery had a profound impact on the structure of plantation society,” “The Last Years of Slavery on the Sugar Plantation of Northeastern Brazil,” HAHR, 51:4 (November 1971), 604.
Henry Koster, Travels in Brazil (Philadelphia, 1817), II, 138-139, 218, 223. L. F. Tollenare, Notas dominicais tomadas durante urna residência em Portugal e no Brazil nos anos de 1816, 1817, e 1818, parte relativa a Pernambuco, transi. Alfredo de Carvalho (Recife, 1905), pp. 71, 74, 93.
Jerônymo Martiniano Figueira de Mello, Ensaio sôbre a statística civil e política da província de Pernambuco (Recife, 1852), p. 263.
Relatório que à Assembleia Legislativa Provincial de Pernambuco apresentou no dia da abertura da sessão ordinária de 1854 o Excellentíssimo Sr. Conselheiro Dr. José Bento da Cunha e Figueiredo, Presidente da mesma Província (Pernambuco, 1854), table. “Uma Estatística,” Diário de Pernambuco (Recife), December 15, 1857.
Figueira de Mello, Ensaio sôbre a statística, pp. 202, 208.
J. H. Galloway, “The Sugar Industry of Pernambuco during the Nineteenth Century,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 58:2 (June 1968), 297, summarizes official British statistics. Cowper to Aberdeen, Pernambuco, August 4, 1843, in Great Britain, Parliament, Parliamentary Papers, 1844, House of Commons by Command, 49, Accounts and Papers, 18, 363, 368-369, made higher estimates. Hereinafter this latter source will be cited only as Parliamentary Papers, year, HCC, volume, AP, volume, pages.
Relatório da Commissão dirigida por Joaquim d’Aquino Fonseca, apresentado ao Excellentíssimo Sr. Conselheiro Dr. José Bento da Cunha e Figueiredo em 10 de janeiro de 1856 (Pernambuco, 1856), pp. 28-30. An English plantation manager reported that only on estates run by monks, and on another directed by three old women and a priest, did natural reproduction maintain the labor force. Presumably these plantation owners were more considerate with their slaves. Koster, Travels in Brazil, I, 258; II, 217-222.
Relatório com que o Excellentíssimo 1° Vice-Presidente Dr. Ignácio Joaquim de Souza Leão passou a administração da Província em 16 de abril de 1888 ao Excellentíssimo Presidente Desembargador Joaquim José de Oliveira Andrade (Recife, n.d.), p. 19. Our calculation of average population is the mean of figures in Table I. The reported figure for infant deaths, 8,545, among the total newborn children of slaves after 1871, 36,807, yields a very high infant mortality rate of 232 per thousand, well above the highest age specific rate reported for Recife. Octavio de Freitas, O Clima e a mortalidade da cidade do Recife (Recife, 1905), pp. 62-63. Tollenare, Notas dominicais, p. 76, had estimated a negative rate of natural increase between 2% and 5%.
The steadily increasing slave fertility rate in Table II should not be interpreted as indicating the existence of a slave-breeding industry, which no Pemambucan source consulted ever mentioned. Rather the increase can be ascribed to a regressive underenumeration of slave children. For hypotheses as to why such a slave-breeding industry never appeared, see the author’s forthcoming book-length study (University of California Press).
Paula Beiguelman, “O encaminhamento político do problema da escravidão no império,” in Buarque de Holanda, História geral da civilização brasileira, II: 3, 189-201. Robert Conrad, “The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil, 1831-1845,” HAHR, 49:4 (November 1969), 617-638. Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge, England, 1970), p. 284. João Pandiá Calogeras, A History of Brazil, translated and edited by Percy Alvin Martin (Chapel Hill, 1939), p. 189.
Cowper to Clarendon, Pernambuco, October 20, 1856, November 18, 1856, and January 24, 1857, in Parliamentary Papers, 1857, HCC, 44, AP, 20, 247-264. F. A. Pereira da Costa, Anais Pernambucanos (Recife, 1951-1966), IX, 389-390
João Pandiá Calogeras, A Política monetária do Brasil, transl. Thomaz Newlands Neto (São Paulo, 1960), chapters 7-8. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), p. 52. Our data contradict J. H. Galloway, who found slave prices in the Northeast remained high after 1880, “The Last Years of Slavery,” p. 590.
Stein, Vassouras, p. 229. Stein did not calculate real slave prices.
Henrique Augusto Milet, “Informe,” in Falla com que o Excellentíssimo Sr. Dr. Adolpho de Barros Cavte de Lacerda, Presidente de Província, abrio a sessão da Assembléia Legislativa em 19 de Dezembro de 1878 (Recife, 1879), p. 30.
Sebastião Ferreira Soares, Notas estatísticas sôbre a producção agrícola e carestia dos gêneros alimentícios no Império do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1860), pp. 135-136, calculated that the central and southern provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Rio Grande do Sul alone imported a total of 5,500 slaves per year from the north. If Pernambuco’s share of this total equaled Pernambuco’s share of the total recorded decline in slave population in the northern and north-eastern provinces between 1873 and 1883, then 18.5% of Ferreira Soares’ total, or 1,020 slaves, would have left Pernambuco annually. For 1873 and 1883 slave populations by province, see Stein, Vassouras, p. 295. Cowper to Clarendon, Pernambuco, January 24, 1857, in Parliamentary Papers, 1857, HCC, 44, AP, 20, 261, estimated 1,500 slaves exported annually from Pernambuco.
Report by Walker, May 29, 1878, in Parliamentary Papers, 1878, HCC, 75, AP, 30, 10. Emilia Viotti de Costa, Da senzala à colônia (São Paulo, 1966), pp. 208-209. Ciro T. de Padua, “Um capítulo da história econômica do Brasil,” Revista do Arquivo Municipal (São Paulo), 11:100 (January-February 1945), 180-182. Herbert S. Klein, “The Internai Slave Trade in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: A Study of Slave Importations into Rio de Janeiro in 1852,” HAHR, 51:4 (November 1971), 569, implies the possibility that the interprovincial trade continued until 1888 despite taxes and laws to the contrary. If this traffic occurred, then the totals exported from Pernambuco would range between 38,000 and 57,000.
“Lei 2040,” Colleção das Leis do Império do Brasil de 1871, 31:1 (Rio de Janeiro, 1871), 147-151.
Relatório com que o Excellentíssimo 1° Vice-Presidente Dr. Ignácio Joaquim de Souza Leão passou a administração da Província em 16 de abril de 1888 ao Excellentíssimo Presidente Desembargador Joaquim José de Oliveira Andrade (Recife, n.d.), p. 19.
“Já é tempo,” O Brazil Agrícola (Recife), April 13, 1882, p. 121. “Breves considerações sôbre agricultura no Brasil,” Diário de Pernambuco, April 27, 1876.
“Libertos pelo fundo de emancipação,” Diário de Pernambuco, March 23, 1888, reported 2,579 slaves freed by December 1887. I project this rate until May 1888 to reach the estimated total.
Annaes da Assembléa Provincial de Pernambuco de anno de 1883 (Recife, 1883), p. 21. Fallo que à Assembléa Legislativa Provincial de Pernambuco no dia de sua installação a 2 de março de 1887 dirigio o Excellentíssimo Sr. Presidente da Província Dr. Pedro Vicente de Azevedo (Recife, 1887), p. 79, reported 105 slaves freed, and I have projected this rate into the remaining months before abolition.
“Lei 3720,” Colleção de Leis do Império do Brasil de 1885, 22:1, (Rio de Janeiro, 1886), 14-20. “Libertos sexagenarios,” Diário de Pernambuco, September 20, 1887. I calculate the sexagenarians freed in 1887 and early 1888 by presuming that all slaves counted between ages 44 and 45 in 1872, i.e., 15% of the presumably evenly distributed age 41-50 cohort, survived until 1888, when they would have passed age 60. The presumptions are obviously unlikely, and the total freed by the Sexagenarian Law was therefore really less than 9,600.
Freitas, O Clima e a mortalidade, pp. 56, 82-83. Cowper to Clarendon, Pernambuco, December 19, 1855, Parliamentary Papers, 1856, HCC, 42, AP, 25, 245
Report by Hunt, August 18, 1864, in Parliamentary Papers, 1865, HCC, 13, AP, 24, 348.
Freitas, O Clima e a mortalidade, pp. 56, 82-83.
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, the Negro in the Americas (New York, 1946), pp. 91 ff. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago, 1959), pp. 27 ff. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), pp. 222 ff.
Koster, Travels in Brazil, II, 192, 197. Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White. Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (New York, 1971), pp. 40-42, notes that Brazilian manumission was often optional and even revocable.
Koster, Travels in Brazil, I, 194, 197; II, 217. Herbert H. Smith, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast (New York, 1879), p. 470, observed that “the emancipation spirit is very strong” in Pernambuco. Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, translated by Samuel Putnam, (New York, 1946), pp. 438-439.
“População escrava de Pernambuco,” Diário de Pernambuco, January 29, 1886. The plausibility of this figure is suggested by a brief calculation. The richest sugar planters and their wives composed an oligarchy owning 15% or 225 of the province’s sugar plantations in 1889. If these oligarchs could afford to free three slaves per year, i.e., one for each of the owners’ birthdays and another on their wedding anniversary, then the planters alone would be freeing 675 slaves per year. For a description of the Pernambuco sugar oligarchy, see the author’s forthcoming study cited above.
For individual examples of post-manumission qualifications, see Diário de Pernambuco, October 13, 19, 1887; November 15, 1887; and April 3, 1888.
Toplin, “Upheaval, Violence, and the Abolition,” pp. 643-644.
J. H. Galloway accepts the statistics at face value and hypothesizes heavy manumissions and flights to account for the sudden fall, “The Last Years of Slavery,” p. 589.
Decreto 5135, November 13, 1872, in Luiz Francisco da Veiga, Livro do estado servil e respectiva libertação contendo a Lei de 28 de Setembro de 1871 e os decretos e avisos expedidos pelos Ministérios da Agricultura, Fazenda, Justiça, Império e Guerra desde aquella data até 31 de Dezembro de 1875 (Rio de Janeiro, 1876), p. 52. I am grateful to Robert Conrad for this reference, and to Robert Sienes for pointing out the weaknesses of the interim estimates.
The 3,500 slaves represent the rounded total of annual averages of the interprovincial slave trade, manumissions, imperial emancipation fund, and natural decrease after 1871. The 6,400 slaves represent the rounded total of annual averages of imperial and provincial emancipation funds, the Sexagenarian Law, manumissions, and natural decrease. Report by Doyle in Parliamentary Papers, 1872, HCC, 58 AP, 23, 634, gives the number of plantations in 1872.
Other slaves fled the plantations to cities or into the interior, Sociedade Auxiliadora da Agricultura de Pernambuco, Boletim Fascículo n° 1 (1882), pp. 30-31. Cohen to Salisbury, Pernambuco, August 14, 1889, in Parliamentary Papers, 1890, HCC, 74, AP, 33, 118. But many of these ex-slaves, after a period of absence from the plantations, returned “defeated by misery, to the protective shadow of the plantation Big House.” José Maria Bello, Memórias, (Rio de Janeiro, 1958), p. 12. Samuel Cameiro Rodrigues Campello, Escoda e Jaboatão (Recife, 1919), p. 16, states that all the moradores of one of the richest planters in the major sugar district of Escada were ex-slaves.
Galloway, “The Last Years of Slavery,” p. 592. This author asserts, without giving specific proof, that squatters constituted the principal mode of free labor employment, ibid, p. 601.
Luiz de Carvalho Paes de Andrade, Questões econômicas em relação à Província de Pernambuco (Recife, 1864), p. 65. Paes de Andrade was a provincial customs official. For a similar description of squatters by a provincial president, see Falla recitada na abertura da Assembléa Legislativa Provincial de Pernambuco pelo Excellentíssimo Presidente da Província Conselheiro Diogo Velho Cavalcante de Albuquerque no dia 1° de março de 1871 (Recife, 1871), p. 36.
Antonio Gomes, “Agricultura—A Lavoura e o Projecto n° 7,” Diário de Pernambuco, May 19, 1893. Manoel Correia de Andrade, A terra e o homem do Nordeste (2nd ed., São Paulo, 1964), pp. 93-94, provides excellent descriptions of migrants and other free laborers at the end of the nineteenth century.
Tollenare, Notas dominicais, pp. 75-76.
Report by Hughes, November 5, 1879, in Parliamentary Papers, 1880, HCC, 23, AP, 24, 497, estimates 62,000 drought refugees. “A secca,” Diário de Pernambuco, December 7, 1887, and a speaker in Sociedade Auxiliadora da Agricultura de Pernambuco, Trabalhos do Congresso Agrícola do Recife em outubro de 1878, (Recife, 1879), p. 166, estimate 200,000 drought refugees.
Ibid., pp. 323-325. J. H. Galloway affirms that some sharecroppers owned their own lands, but neither of the two sources he cites supports this affirmation. “The Last Years of Slavery,” p. 592.
Tollenare, Notas dominicais, p. 93. Figueira de Mello, Ensato sôbre a statística, p. 263. Report by Alfred De Mornay cited in Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, (London, 1949-1950) II, 357-359, and translated in part in Fernando da Cruz Gouvea, “Os De Mornay e a Industria Açucareira em Pernanbuco [sic],” Brasil Açucareiro, 35:70 (August, 1967), 82-84. “Uma Estatística,” Diário de Pernambuco, January 4, 1858.
The planters’ enthusiasm for the sharecropping system is expressed by Antonio Venancio Cavte de Albuquerque, “Agricultura ou a questão da actualidade,” Diário de Pernambuco, April 5, 1877; Ceresiades, “Agricultura em Pernambuco, IV,” ibid., June 22, 1878; Francisco do Rego Barros de Lacerda, “Ao Sr. Palladius,” ibid., September 14, 1881; and Sociedade Auxiliadora da Agricultura de Pernambuco, Trabalhos do Congresso Agrícola, p. 220.
Tollenare, Notas dominicais, p. 93. Sociedade Auxiliadora da Agricultura de Pernambuco, Trabalhos do Congresso Agrícola, pp. 323-324. Thus the sharecropper lived “an almost nomadic life, roaming from plantation to plantation,” Tollenare, Notas dominicais, pp. 96-97. Correia de Andrade, A Terra e o homem, pp. 93-94.
Gilberto Freyre has emphasized the former conclusion. “There is no doubt that there was more aid to the worker under the patriarchalism of the old engenhos than in the great majority of today’s usinas.” “Prefacio,” in Júlio Bello, Memórias de um senhor de engenho (Rio de Janeiro, 1938), p. x. For similar sentiments, see Jovino da Raiz, “O trabalhador negro no tempo do banquê comparado com o trabalhador negro no tempo das uzinas de açucar,” Estudos afro-brasileiros, Trabalhos apresentados ao 10 Congresso Afro-Brasileiro, reunido no Recife, em 1934 (Rio de Janeiro, 1935), pp. 191-194. Diêgues Júnior, “O Banguê em Pernambuco no Sáculo XIX,” Revista do Arquivo Público (Recife) anos 7-10: nos. 9-12 (1952-1956), 17, 29.
Author notes
The author is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. This article is a revised version of papers presented in 1969 to the Latin American Studies Program at Indiana University, Bloomington and the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Brazil at Columbia University; and in 1970 to the American Historical Association meetings. I have benefited from criticism by participants in these programs; comments by Stanley J. Stein and Herbert S. Klein have been especially useful. I am also grateful to Betsy Kuznesof and John Knodel for aid in analyzing censuses.
