In this brief but thoughtful book, Celia Azevedo compares the abolitionist movements of the United States and Brazil—or at least their intellectual histories, for Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil is an account of ideas rather than social movements. Yet rather than focusing on the transnational vision abolitionists in Brazil and the United States may have shared, Azevedo relies on a limited but representative sample of antislavery ideology in the two largest slave societies of the nineteenth century.
North American abolitionists drew inspiration from evangelical Christianity, and thus wed the antislavery cause to moral perfectionism and an immediatist politics of redemption. Their Brazilian counterparts, Azevedo claims, imbued more with secular enlightenment rationality, pursued a pragmatic course based on the politics of “expediency” (xxi). Thus, she concludes, “at the root of American abolitionism one finds a growing belief that the kingdom of God will become a reality in the near future,” while “at the root of Brazilian abolitionism one perceives an increasing desire for social balance” (13-14).
Partly a matter of timing (American abolitionist thought reached its apogee during the years 1830-65, its Brazilian counterpart between 1860 and 1888), this contrast between perfectionism and pragmatism was compounded by the sectional character of North American antislavery. Northern abolitionists condemned southern slaveholders from afar, while Brazilian abolitionists, many of them profoundly implicated morally and financially in slavery, attacked the institutions as insiders. As a result, American abolitionists portrayed the enslaved as a brother human being oppressed by cruel slaveholders; Brazilians who opposed slavery often regarded slaveholders as benign if misguided patriarchs and saw instead the slave as “a domestic enemy to the slaveholder” (p. 49), and indeed to the nation as a whole. “For American abolitionists the slaveholder was evil, while for Brazilian abolitionists the slave was evil” (p. 60), Azevedo bluntly concludes.
Azevedo’s most original comparison describes the two abolitionisms’ relationship with black allies. In North America, the small free African American community constituted a crucial component of the antislavery coalition, and the struggle for black rights became an integral part of the cause. By contrast, in Brazil white abolitionists deemed Afro-Brazilians either incapable of or unwilling to struggle for their freedom and failed to build similar “intellectual bridges” (p. 80) with them. Afro-Brazilian abolitionists, it appears, were assimilated into the small Luso-Brazilian elite and shared their contempt and fear of the “Africanized” majority surrounding them.
At times the comparative method reveals its weaknesses. Azevedo frequently sacrifices subde shading to her single-minded effort to draw sharp contrasts, exaggerating the degree of cohesiveness in each antislavery movement. It is easy to find Brazilians who posed slavery as a moral, not just practical problem, or American abolitionists who regarded the slave as a dangerous savage rather than a redeemable brother. Indeed, the shared racial ambivalence of the two antislavery movements perhaps gave them an affinity more striking than some of their differences.
Of course, the antislavery movement itself used the comparative method. Abolitionists in each country relied upon mirror-image myths, each for their own purposes: “The intertwined ideas of the American racial hell and the Brazilian racial paradise are not of recent invention,” (p. 41) Azevedo suggests. Yet despite frequent allusions to a cross-national approach that might illuminate how the antislavery movement in each nation drew on what it observed in the other, Azevedo’s evidence for this “comparative discourse” (p. 21) remains thin. Much more, for example, could be learned from the Brazilian abolitionist response to the transplantation of American slaveowners (the colonatos) to Brazil after the Civil War, or the impact of the Bahian slave revolts of the 1830s on American abolitionist thinking, to name but two examples mentioned in the text but not fully explored.
Yet to pose these questions is merely to suggest the need for deeper research in manuscript sources and a refinement of the comparative method. Azevedo has broached a topic of enormous importance in the study of the Atlantic world and provided a provocative framework for further investigation.
