Brazilian Slavery Re-Examined: A Review Article

Brazilian Slavery Re-Examined: A Review ArticleAuthor(s): Richard GrahamSource: Journal of Social History, Vol. 3, No. 4 (Summer, 1970), pp. 431-453Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3786303 .

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RICHARD GRAHAM

BRAZILIAN SLAVERY

RE-EXAMINED:

A REVIEW ARTICLE

Slavery is of major interest to North American historians today. The civil rights movement and the subsequent demands on the

part of black people for some voice in the power structures of the United States have doubtless had much to do with the growing attraction this topic has exerted.

It is also because of present-day social tensions and current controversies that Brazilians have become increasingly interested in their own history of slavery and abolition. The belief that social revolution lies ahead for Brazil has drawn attention to the lower classes there, more of whom are black than those who now hold power. The increasingly evident social injustices and class rigidities of that country also find an echo from the past in the slave system, just as, finally, the demands for social change today resemble in some respects the efforts of nineteenth-century abolitionists.

For example, the emergence during the 1950s and 1960s of land- reform as a vibrant national issue may well have encouraged the study of that earlier "basic reform," abolition of slavery. In both the abolitionist campaign and that on behalf of land-reform, structural changes and development were the ultimate goals at least for some. In both cases students took an active part in thrusting the issue into the forefront. As the debates developed momentum, society at both times became polarized: political parties were divided as were families and local communities, for neutral ground was no longer tenable. In both cases those who opposed change pointed first of all to the "right of property." The slaveowners, like the landowners today, insisted that the unprivileged were really happy until stirred up by unscrupulous demagogues. Then, as now, it was charged that the government itself was participating in subversive activity. The conservatives at last offered alternatives: first progressive taxation;

RICHARD GRAHAM is in the department of history of the University of Utah.



journal of social history

then compensation in cash; finally, in the case of slavery, compensation in bonds. But slavery was abolished without compensation, and it may soon be too late for gradual land reform. In the end the biggest problem has been, then and now, to mobilize the potential benefici- aries themselves; in the nineteenth century the result of this difficulty was that the fruits of victory went to others. It may be so again.

Whether or not this parallelism has been a factor drawing attention to abolition, the study of slavery has consciously been used to help smash the establishmentarian view of the Brazilian reality. The "mystifications" which characterize older historical writings about Brazil are a constant target of the new authors. "Brazil, the land of racial harmony"; is that phrase not a means of covering up deep racial divisions within the country? One historian now insists that "the idealization of slavery, the romantic idea of the suavity and gentleness of slavery in Brazil, the picture of the loyal slave and the benevolent master, friend of the slave-interpretations that ended up prevailing in our literature and our history-were some of the myths forged by a slave society to defend a system which it considered essential." And what about the "gaucho democracy" supposed to have worn away the harsh protrusions of slavery in southern Brazil? Is that not a slogan to cover up the violence, the inequities, the rigid norms of domination-subordination that still characterize life in that region ? One modern writer maintains that the myth of cameraderie on the ranch between master and slave played an important part in the elaboration of the white man's view of the black man, tending as it did to "glorify the white master, so magnanimous toward the Negro" and simultaneously to imply that blacks were "really not just socially inferior," since any punishments administered to slaves were only those they deserved.2

The center for these new investigations of slavery in Brazil has been the University of Sao Paolo. It has been without question the leading university in that country and one of the most important in Latin America, yet it is a very new university, created only in the 1930s. One of the reasons it has forged ahead so rapidly is the hot- house atmosphere in which it was nurtured during its early days

1. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Da senzala a colonia, Corpo e Alma do Brasil, no. 19 (Sao Pa6lo, 1966), p. 280. 2. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Capitalismo e escravidco no Brasil meridional: 0 Negro na sociedade escravocrata do Rio Grande do Sul, Corpo e Alma do Brasil, no. 8 (Sao Pablo, 1962), p. 125.

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BRAZILIAN SLAVERY RE-EXAMINED

when the natural rhythms of light and dark that usually mark institu- tional growth were replaced by the constant presence of radiant and excited young French professors on government fellowships. Among those Frenchmen who taught at the university were the sociologist Roger Bastide and the historian Elmile-Guillaume Leonard.

Bastide encouraged the creation of a vigorous and ambitious sociology department and participated in training many students, among them Florestan Fernandes. Bastide's interest in social psy- chology and the sociology of religion led him to an examination of religious survivals of African culture in Brazil.3 That prompted the study of racial attitudes in the city of Sao Paolo. In 1951 he joined his expupil, Fernandes, in proposing a research program to be carried out under the official auspices of the University of Sao Paulo. Before much had been done about this proposal, the directors of a UNESCO project to study comparative aspects of race relations asked Bastide and other scholars to undertake studies in various centers in Brazil. With financing thus assured, the project got under way. Historical background would have to be provided for the racial relations of the city of Sao Paolo, and since up to then historians had done very little along these lines, the sociologists would have to do it. Fernandes was picked to perform this task. The results of this investigation were presented in a series of articles during 1953 and were published in book form two years later.4 A revised edition appeared in 1959; its historical chapters by Fernandes are among the works reviewed in this article.5

Fernandes meanwhile proceeded to organize his own cadre of "graduate students" and set them to work on larger studies of race relations in various areas with special attention to historical aspects. Of these only two seem to have been concluded; one is by Octavio Ianni and concentrates on the state of Parana (immediately to the south of Sao Paolo), and the other is by Fernando Henrique Cardoso who studies slavery in the southernmost state of Rio Grande do Sul.6

3. E.g., Roger Bastide, Les religions africains au Bresil: Vers une sociologie des inter- penetrations de civilisations (Paris, 1960). 4. Bastide and Fernandes, "Relag6es raciais entre negros e brancos em Sao Pa6lo," Anhembi 10 (1953): 433-90, 11 (1953): 14-69, 242-77, 434-67, 13 (1953): 39-71, and RelacOes entre Negros e brancos em Sao Paolo (Sao Paolo, 1955). 5. Brancos e Negros em Sao Paolo (Sao Paolo, 1959). Fernandes' subsequent and more detailed study on the process through which the Brazilian Negro entered a class society is available in English: The Negro in Brazilian Society (New York, 1969). 6. lanni, As metamorphoses do escravo: Apogeu e crise da escravatura no Brasil meridional, Corpo e Alma do Brasil, no. 7 (Sao Paolo, 1962), and Cardoso, op. cit.; also see

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Meanwhile historical studies at the University of Sao Paolo had also been progressing rapidly. Inspired by the French professors, younger men such as Euripides Sim6es de Paula began to provide national leadership to the profession. Rigorous historical method- ology stood in sharp contrast to the sloppy amateurishness of the bulk of those who up to then had cultivated the historian's garden. They now critically examined the sources and made careful use of contemporary printed and manuscript materials. But all this was not allowed to cloud the historian's larger task of interpreting the past as well as recording it. Indicative of this spirit was the appointment to the department of Sergio Buarque de Holanda, despite the fact that the influences upon him, although broadly European, were not strictly academic-historical; rather this action reflected the high regard in which his Raizes do Brazil (1936) was held as a pensive examination of the roots of Brazilian national character.7 Not that Holanda had

any less regard for "original" sources than his new colleagues, but his specific contribution was to see the forest and the trees.

The result of this combination has been the training of several tough and imaginative historians who have isolated for investigation important issues in Brazilian social and economic history. Emilia Viotti da Costa is one of the products of the department; her study of the nineteenth-century coffee planters' desperate search for an

adequate labor force and what this effort meant for slavery and abolition is one of the most important works to emerge from the Sao Paolo school. Her thesis, which first appeared in photo-offset in 1964, has since been published in book form.8 And it is not out of

place to link her name with that of Fernandes, Ianni, and Cardoso, for their influence upon her work is obvious.

This yeasty atmosphere at the University of Sao Paolo has naturally provoked lively controversies. The political scientist Paula Beiguel- man, a student of the structure of politics in the nineteenth century and something of a political theorist, has turned her attention to the

question of slavery and its abolition and effectively questioned many

Cardoso and Ianni, Cor e mobilidade social em Florianopolis; aspectos das relacoes entre

Negros e brancos numa comunidade do Brasil meridional, Brasiliana, no. 307 (Sao Paolo, 1960). A study of Minas Gerais was also apparently undertaken but never published. 7. Documentos Brasileiros, no. 1 (Rio de Janeiro, 1936). 8. The thesis is Escravidao nas dreas cafeeiras: Aspectos economicos, sociais, e ideo- 16gicos da desagregaVao do sistema escravista, 3 vols. (Sao Paolo, 1964); subsequent references to Costa refer to the book, Da senzala, n. 1 above.

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of the basic premises underlying the work of these other writers.9 Although her positive contributions are less impressive, her work demands attention in any examination of current work on slavery being done at the University of Sao Paolo.

Of the works here surveyed, the best ones are those by Costa and Cardoso. The last half of Costa's study is the most thorough examination of slavery and abolition in Sao Paolo yet to appear, and it will be from it that later, more detailed studies will proceed. It is well written and straightforward in its argument. Cardoso's book is done with almost as much attention to method as Costa's but is bolder, more imaginative, and more theory oriented. It is also more artistic in its construction, for Costa's book leaves the reader with the feeling that another chapter or two are needed on later immigration to complete its examination of the attempt to resolve labor scarcity. Cardoso's work is also more evidently sensitive to the covert-in addition to the overt-dehumanizing forces at work in a slave society. On the other hand, Costa is more sharply aware of the ambiguities of human experience and the danger, for instance, of easy assump- tions about the consistency of or fixed congruence between class position and point of view.

Least satisfying but still important are the studies by Beiguelman and Fernandes. Beiguelman's work is curiously constructed: the second volume consists of 181 propositions or theses propounded in Thomistic fashion and unintelligible without the use of the narrative contained in the first volume. Fernandes' is nevertheless the most opaque style of them all, and only persistence and forbearance can lead one finally to understanding and appreciation. He begins a train of investigation regarding a crucial institution within the Brazilian past and sets out a constellation of ideas regarding it that have not yet been superseded.

As to method the works represent a steady progression. Fernandes' approach is to place equal emphasis upon sources of very different value. In a country where historical works have not been carefully elaborated from "primary" sources according to the best standards of historical usage, there are serious dangers in the practice of indiscriminate use of "secondary" works. Probably one of the most influential Brazilian historians has been Caio Prado Junior. I respect

9. Formacao politica do Brasil, vol. 1: Teoria e acao no pensamento abolicionista; vol. 2: Contribuicdo d teoria da organizacao politica brasileira (Sao Paolo, 1967).

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436 journal of social history

his broad vision, his ability to grasp the main trends of Brazilian history, and especially his keen sensitivity for the importance of economic factors in shaping the entire superstructure of Brazilian society in its various historical phases. But when his work is used to buttress dogmatic assertions about the nature and meaning of slavery at particular moments in Brazil's past, some hesitancy is in order. On the other hand, the very absence of much historiographical production may force the historical sociologist to look directly in the archives for raw material. Ianni does this less successfully than Cardoso and is frequently forced to conclude that evidence is insufficient regarding certain crucial areas of the subject.10 Cardoso, on the other hand, presents convincing evidence from the original documents themselves to support his points of view. Costa is the most impressive in her extensive use of local government archives, newspapers, govern- mental reports, legislative debates, travelers' accounts, and contemporary pamphlets. Unfortunately she is sometimes a bit ambigu- ous about the specific source of her information on particular points.

Both Cardoso and Ianni are naturally aware of how nonsensical it must appear to study areas where there were relatively few slaves and try to arrive at an understanding of Brazilian slavery as a whole (for instance, see table 1).11

TABLE 1 BRAZIL'S SLAVE POPULATION IN THE EARLY 1870S

STATE OR PROVINCE NUMBER OF SLAVES

Rio de Janeiro 304,744 Minas Gerais 235,115 Bahia 173,639 Sao Paolo 169,964 Pernambuco 92,855 Rio Grande do Sul 69,366 Parana 10,560

Ianni in fact does protest too much that even though slavery never came to "dominate the totality of the productive system," it nevertheless was as "important" in Parana as in other areas.12 At first he suggests that the slaves' relative number was large although abso-

10. P. 40. 11. Costa, p. 399, and lanni, p. 118. Bahia and Pernambuco were the old, sugar- producing areas where the slave system was at its height during colonial days. Note the pointed barbs aimed at lanni and Cardoso in Beiguelman, 2:16-17. 12. Pp. 8, 9.




lutely they were few. But the proportion of slaves to the total population of sparsely settled Parani was still only about half that found in the rest of Brazil, and in the urban center of Curitiba it was actually less than one-third.13 At one point Ianni suggests that it is precisely the differences between Parani and the rest of Brazil that justify its study, but he draws very few comparative points from the evidence.14 Finally he argues somewhat more convincingly that the slave system left an indelible mark upon the entire society regardless of the number or the proportion of slaves: "The slave regime was a basic institution toward which the utilization of the labor force always tended." Furthermore " the labor system which produced the slave in the sugar region [of the northeast], in the mining area [of Minas Gerais], and in the coffee zones [of Sao Paolo], was the same system as that which spread out and became dominant, though modified, in the cattle raising economy [and] in the mate processing plants. ... [Thus] it is possible to understand [through the latter] not only the slave-colored society of Curitiba, but also the nature of slavery in Brazil."15

Cardoso is also aware that his area of study provokes skepticism. Like Ianni he contends that the comparative possibilities attracted him, but he does very little to exploit them. However, he is on much surer ground when he turns to the importance of slavery in the economy and society of that area, both in numbers and in effects on the essential quality of regional life.

Fernandes, Ianni, and Cardoso are all very naturally concerned with questions of social theory-structuralism, functionalism, and dialectical materialism-and their knowledge of Weber, Mannheim, Durkheim, and Parsons, not to mention Marx, is apparent. It is not however, to these aspects of their work that I intend to devote attention. Theory, to be sure, defines their historical vision, but it is clear, as Cardoso himself points out, that it is possible to bypass the complex theoretical expositions and still benefit enormously from the historical discussion per se.16

But there is another dimension to their work that must be dealt with at length before turning to the question of how slaves were treated in

13. Pp. 10, 127; also see pp. 87, 90, 120. Ianni is specifically studying the county of Curitiba, but he never indicates its limits or to what degree it may be considered co- terminous with Parana, which was created as a separate province from Sao Paolo in 1854. 14. P. 10. 15. Pp. 44, 270, 272; also see pp. 10, 65, 75-76. 16. Pp. 9-10.

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Brazil. The study of slavery is an exciting one not only because of its present parallelisms and demystifying role, as indicated above, but also because, as a key feature of the socioeconomic background, it can serve as an entering wedge to an understanding of the broad Brazilian reality. The state of Brazilian historiography is such that the knowledge which we have had until recently regarding the Brazilian past has been sketchy, patently formal, and deeply dissatisfying. It is virtually impossible to make sense even out of small segments of its history without first constructing on one's own, and without much help from other studies, a general framework within which to place them. The point here is not only that the general economic and social history that these authors-especially Costa and Cardoso-have written is a major contribution to the historiography of certain regions. It is also that revolving around slavery are some of the most important questions regarding the meaning of the Brazilian past and the explanation of its present condition. Is the country just now emerging from a feudal past or is it already approaching a proletarian revolution? What are the historical roots of social injustice? Why are relations today so shot through with covert violence? Where did the values of the Brazilian come from? What does it mean to be a Brazilian? And what is Brazil's future ?

It is in what they say about such questions that these works are most important. First of all since feudalism-capitalism had already been discarded as a conceptual framework inappropriate for understanding Brazil, there had to be some way of schematizing the real differences that separated the old regime from the subsequent reality. The forces that moved to end slavery, for instance, were essentially capitalistic, urban, entrepreneurial. What, then, should be made of the preexisting economic and social system ?

The attention of both Florestan Fernandes and Emilia Viotti da Costa is caught by the export-oriented economy of Sao Paolo, with its concentration upon the production of primary commodities, and they settle for the phrase "colonial economy" to describe the old regime. Fernandes points out that as Sao Paolo turned its attention away from its earlier role as a secondary economy-supplying the mining regions of Minas Gerais with foodstuffs-and shifted its focus to the production of coffee, there emerged "the structure of a new social universe." 7 Costa implies that the typically colonial

17. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 23.

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situation in which the presence of profitable resources is combined with relatively scarce manpower leads inevitably to slavery or semi- slavery. Naturally the political condition of being a colony or not has little to do with the real nature of this system; what is important was its rural, tropical, latifundiary, monocultural, export-oriented basis.18

Neither of these authors fails to see the difficulty of this inter- pretation when it is reversed: if slavery was the result of a colonial economy, how is it that the colonial economy persisted until today while slavery ended in the nineteenth century? Or how is it that Great Britain took such a leading position in forcing the end of the slave trade when it was the chief colonial power? Costa gets around this latter question with facile allusions to the "contradictions" of British policy a la Eric Williams.19 With reference to the first one, she suggests that the problem is one of degree and that, as the colonial economy was threatened to some extent, slavery was almost the first of its institutions to give way.

Cardoso and Ianni are naturally less satisfied with the word "colonial" as a device for characterizing the old regime, since the economies of the areas with which they are concerned were clearly secondary to the export economy during most of the period studied. They do not discard the term, but they use it sparingly and are never clear whether the colonial status of Rio Grande do Sul and Parana derived from the overall colonial position of Brazil or from the colonial relationship between these particular areas and the Sao Pa6lo- Rio de Janeiro center.20

Ianni also raises a point that would equally have been applicable to the coffee region of Sao Pa6lo. The system for the production of mate--which became the chief source of wealth in Parana during the nineteenth century-was not a "colonial economy in the strict sense" for it was not "connected to sources of capital foreign to the country or region" but rather to capital raised locally either because of shifts from other forms of production (cattle raising) or from the ploughing back of profits derived from mate production itself by owners who were local residents. Thus in the mate economy "a part of the profits remained in the area" and could be invested either in the further development of mate production or in other activities such as

18. Pp. 11, 28, 71, 456, 457. 19. P. 12. 20. Cardoso, p. 81, and lanni, pp. 83, 211.

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lumbering, or craft shops, or even manufacturing.21 Thus the phrase "colonial economy" is found wanting, and slavery is still left without a satisfactory conceptual matrix.

So Ianni prefers to characterize the system as a "slavocracy." According to him "the way in which labor is crystallized into a pro- duct of value through a certain type of connection with the means of production defines the slavocratic system as a particular form of economic system, giving rise to an historical-social configuration." The slave system like any socioeconomic system tends inevitably to expand and absorb the entire society and to "totally define the economic and socio-cultural system as slavocratic."22 There is a basic distinction between a slave system and a free labor one: the specificity of labor itself; in the slave system labor and the man are one, while in the other labor is a commodity separable from the man. In the slave system man alienates not only his work but his body.23 Thus "slavocracy" comes to lie outside the polar field set up by "feudalism" and "capitalism" and becomes itself either the antonym of capitalism, or in a formulation that remains frustratingly implicit, a form of capitalism distinct from and preceding free-labor capitalism.

It is symptomatic that none of these works pays much attention to the apogee of the slave system. Each has chosen areas in which slavery was, so to speak, on the way out from the very beginning. As Fer- nandes early notes, the expansion of export agriculture in Sao Paolo coincided with the collapse of the slave system.24 The area of longest slave dominance of course was the sugar-producing northeast, which is not studied by these writers nor others of their sophistication. There an initially capitalistic mentality had found no contradictions within the slave system, nor did the development of that economy produce those contradictions.25 The explanation of course is to be found in the configurations of the international economy and society, but this would suggest that it is those forces and not the

21. P. 111. 22. Pp. 80, 132. 23. P. 129. Insofar as Ianni deals with the causes for the dependence upon slavery, he seems to prefer a sort of "frontier thesis" in which the availability of land and the scarcity of labor made free labor impractical, pp. 36, 81-82, 191. 24. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 38. A brief study of slavery in the sugar economy of Sao Pa6lo at the very beginning of the nineteenth century appears in Maria Thereza Schorer Petrone, A Lavoura canavieira em Sao Paolo: Expansao e declinio (1765-1851), Corpo e Alma do Brasil, no. 21 (Sao Paolo, 1968), pp. 110-28. 25. Eugene Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York, 1969), argues that, on the contrary, northeastern Brazil was a hybrid society of feudal and slavocratic elements.

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internal ones-which all these authors emphasize-that basically explain the decay of the slave system.

This decay is the second major conceptual challenge to be faced. No key word is repeated more often in these works than desagregaado, literally, "the coming unstuck" of the slave system. Underlying all these works-except Beiguelman's of course-is the conviction that slavery was ended not because of political forces or humanitarian concerns but because its very development brought its insufficiencies out into the open. Attention is still paid to the abolitionist movement, but it is given a new meaning.26

Fernandes initially points to the end of the slave trade in 1850, combined with the high mortality of slaves, to suggest that the main problem was numerical inadequacy. The maintenance of the slave system required enough newly imported slaves to compensate for the deaths of the older ones and enough to keep up with the labor needs of an expanding economy-an expansion made possible by slave labor itself-plus enough slaves so that a few could be freed to perform tasks for which slaves were unsuited. For as the economy grew it became more diversified and there was an increased need for artisans and other workers over whom constant supervision was self-defeating.27

In this formulation are found in embryo the basic points elaborated by the other writers in this group. The latter, however, place much less emphasis on the numerical aspects. Ianni puts the matter this way: "the construction or revival of the slavocratic system always leads to the establishment or development of pre-capitalist institutions; there comes a time, however, when the very capitalist system in which colonial slavocratic systems are imbedded no longer supports this coexistence. Then that which had been essential in the process of capitalist accumulation becomes an impediment to the further expansion of this system. That is the reason why capitalism, acting both within and without, destroys slavery." Cardoso is more succinct: "Whereas slavery made economic expansion possible in an early stage when labor was scarce, it then acted as an obstacle to the generaliza- tion of the mercantile system of capitalist production," a system that depended upon the separation of labor from the worker.28

26. See the discussion of abolition in Ianni, pp. 207-32, Cardoso, pp. 236-68, and Costa, pp. 331-455. 27. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, pp. 131-32. 28. Ianni, p. 94, and Cardoso, p. 168; also see Cardoso, pp. 310-11.

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This last point is central: the continued growth of the economy allegedly depended on putting an end to slavery. Cardoso argues that the employer could get more work out of the free worker than the master could from the slave. In any case slavery is said to have been an obstacle to the division of labor and to specialization, for when the skilled slave had completed his task for one master he could not easily be put to work by another. So instead he was given another job to do for which he was less suited. Thus to "save labor" in a slave system meant exactly the opposite of what it means in a free labor system.29

lanni explains that the mate processing plant adopted hydraulic or steam power to which slavery was inappropriate. With the development of the mate export sector, the economy depended increasingly on technological improvement and a free labor force.30 The need for the "professionalization of the worker in a mate processing plant, [that is] for a bookkeeper, for a carpenter, etc., ... is irreconcilable with the dominance necessary to maintain the slave worker."31

Costa is somewhat more specific in describing changes in the labor necessities of the coffee plantation after about midcentury. Up to then planters demanded the year-long employment of large numbers of unskilled workers who could be shifted around from clearing to planting to weeding to harvesting to transporting and cleaning, all without specialization. But after 1850 and especially after 1870, the increasing use of machinery and the improvement of transportation methods (especially the introduction of railroads) made possible increased labor specialization and increased productivity. This meant there were times when fewer workers were needed, but those who were needed had to be more skilled.32 In short, " rapid transportation, fewer losses in storage and shipment, better quality-all this meant increased productivity, more possibilities for the rationalization of production, the release of some capital previously tied up, and the freeing of labor."33 The increasing cost of slaves because of their scarcity drove the planters in the same direction. Planters then began to "renounce slave labor as the slave system revealed itself insufficient and came unstuck." 34 The end result would be abolition.35

29. Pp. 190, 194, 197, 198. 30. Pp. 105, 106, 109. 31. P. 129. 32. Pp. 98-100, 181-82, 219. 33. P. 199. 34. P. 296. 35. Pp. 275-76, 464.

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Beiguelman is skeptical of this whole approach. First of all she insists on a point that the other writers never exactly deny: that modern slavery is capitalistic; she thus sees no possibility that the rise of capitalism could destroy slavery. She also looks more closely than Costa at the coffee planters of west-central Sao Paolo and points out that there was an important division among them. Some were working brand-new lands in the 1880s and thus did indeed require large levies of immigrant labor to which the existence of slavery posed an obstacle. But the planters of the older regions of that area (in Campinas, Amparo, or Itu) were still interested in maintaining the slave system. Yet it is these men that are usually referred to as "entrepreneurial" in their values for they were the ones who invested in railroads and industry and led the way in mechanizing their operations. Meanwhile the landowners in the older northeastern area of Brazil, generally regarded as lacking entrepreneurship and certainly not caught up in capitalistic expansion, joined those who urged abolition. Beiguelman feels that this was done as a way of cutting the coffee areas down to size politically; the northeast had few slaves left to lose.36

The alleged incompatibility between slavery and manufacturing clearly demands more research. The argument of Fernandes et al. tends to limit itself to the deductive conclusion that it must have been onerous to employ slaves instead of free workers. The arguments of abolitionists to this effect are then quoted. Finally some statements by a few industrialists are produced expressing a dislike for slave labor. The overall conclusion is then derived that the specialization of labor required by industrialization meant slavery had to be eliminated. This despite the fact that the prevalence of slaves in manufacturing activities is fully recognized.37 An understanding of the problem would surely benefit from a comparative approach, since evidence already gathered on American slavery may possibly contradict assertions of these authors. Certainly the profitability of slavery on the plantation seems to have been proved in the American case.

Costa does not place as much emphasis on industrialists as do Ianni and Cardoso but rather points to the entire complex of urban groups. The rise of such groups, separated from rural interests and caught up by new ideas, was the principal force that ended slavery.

36. 1:1-35 and 2:17. 37. Costa, pp. 121,145, 146, 181-82, 230, 231, and Ianni, p. 109.

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These groups-made up of teachers, lawyers, newspapermen, doctors, engineers, insurance agents, manufacturers, retailers, public employees, free artisans, coachmen, railroad workers, stevedores, typesetters, stonemasons, and contractors, some of them freedmen and free Negroes and mulattoes-were also joined by the immigrants. And it was, she says, these urban groups not directly tied into the slave system that took the leadership in ending bondage.38 Thus "the abolitionist movement is essentially urban." 39

I myself have emphasized the importance of the urban sector in an article published simultaneously with Costa's book when I was still unaware of her work.40 In it I gave special emphasis to the role of urban groups in fostering the mass flight of slaves which in turn forced the planters to seize upon abolition as a last resort to safe- guard their otherwise increasingly tenuous hold upon rural workers.

Paula Beiguelman has criticized this "urban thesis" by arguing that the specific connection between economic interest and abolitionist opinion has not been proved. She finds it impossible to bypass the fact that the urban groups were tied to the landowners. She feels that only vague presuppositions regarding the relationship between beliefs, policies, and economic structure have been proposed to fill the many gaps between interest, ideas, and action. This causative drive-chain, she properly suggests, reveals several weak links.41 True, I do emphasize the degree to which slavery was thought to stand in the way of "progress," and Cardoso stresses the same point.42 But the criticism is not yet rebutted. Until specific studies have been made of the abolitionists and their "connections," no defensible con- clusions can be drawn up.

On the other hand Beiguelman's own explanation seems narrow and superficial. According to it slavery was just one tool employed by the Emperor Pedro II as he skillfully manipulated the planter elite so as to keep himself in unquestioned power. The maintenance of a two-party system into which landowners were divided served his

38. Pp. 291, 296, 428, 434, 437, 462; also see Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, pp. 43-45, 102, and Ianni, pp. 207-20. Ianni notes that the growth of Curitiba in the latter half of the nineteenth century led to the appearance of "a new type of personality and urban ways of thinking, acting, and feeling" (p. 137). 39. P. 433. 40. "Causes for the Abolition of Negro Slavery in Brazil: An Interpretive Essay," Hispanic American Historical Review 46 (1966): 123-38. 41. 2:17 and passim. 42. Cardoso, p. 187; also Fernandes, p. 133, and Costa, p. 366.

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purpose perfectly; as the parties jockeyed for imperial favor, they took up issues that would discredit their opponents, apparently without regard for their own offended interests. The emperor in effect made deals with first one party and then the other, offering them power in exchange for concessions, in this case a steady weakening of the slave institution. Finally the abolitionists hastened the moment of crisis and forced the Crown to mediate its solution. As for them-the abolitionists-it was not their economic interests, either individually or as a class, that made them abolitionists but rather political oppor- tunity and the chance to increase their power.43

If it is these broad questions that are of most interest within the context of Brazilian historical writing, it is the treatment of slaves that attracts the interest of the comparative historian. And in this regard the works I am reviewing do a great deal to correct misimpressions regarding the Brazilian institution. Gilberto Freyre must bear some responsibility for these misimpressions although by no means all. Indeed a careful rereading of his masterpiece, The Masters and the Slaves, will hardly encourage the view that the life of the slave in Brazil was ever a bed of roses.44 Even the sexual relations between master and slave to which he gives so much attention-and to which his readers have perhaps given even more attention-evidently reflect a basically inhuman relationship between masters and slaves. And the author is well aware of this; after all, the main point raised by Freyre is that what poisoned the Brazilian heritage was neither the Negro nor miscegenation but slavery. On the other hand, he does toss out several comparative assertions according to which the lot of the slave in Brazil was much better than that in other areas of the world. This thesis was then uncritically taken up by some American writers and became imbedded in the literature. Unfortunately no one has yet dealt with slavery in the northeast during colonial days with the same methodological thoroughness or the same theoretical precision that the Sao Paolo writers have brought to bear upon the slave systems of nineteenth-century Sao Paolo, Parana, and Rio Grande do Sul. But I suspect that when that is done northeastern slavery will turn out to have been very harsh indeed.

It is especially surprising how widespread the myth of benevolent Brazilian slavery became in the United States in view of the avail-

43. Passim, esp. 1:95-96, 115, 124, 141, 185, and 2:32, 41ff. 44. (New York, 1946).

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ability for more than ten years of a thorough and sensitive appraisal in English of nineteenth-century slavery in the state of Rio de Janeiro. I have in mind Stanley J. Stein's pioneering study of a coffee county published in 1957.45 He devotes much attention to the quality of slave life, and the reader can only conclude that the treatment of the slave in Brazil was harsh and cruel, devoid of saving graces, and lacking any trace of humanity.

Nor do the legal rights of slaves in Brazil contradict this conclusion. The first point that occurs to anyone familiar with Latin-American culture is that laws there do not have the same importance in indica- ting actual practice as they may have elsewhere. Laws are there conceived of as statements of ideals. Latin Americans often condemn the Anglo-Saxon tendency to avoid passing a law simply because it cannot be enforced: "it may not be enforceable but it is still right," they say. Second, since the slave could not complain on his own behalf, any provisions for his protection were derisory. This situation was changed only when an abolitionist movement-anxious to discredit slavery-turned its attention to exposing violations of the law. Third, the legal protections of the slave in Brazil were minimal and very late in being enacted. A comprehensive examination of the legal status of slaves has not yet appeared and will be fraught with

difficulty since the Portuguese, with characteristic good sense, never found the time to codify the laws regarding bondsmen. There were instead a multitude of royal edicts, municipal ordinances, judicial precedents, administrative decisions, and regionally applicable regulations, some of which were apparently contradictory and of which no systematic collection has ever been made.46 Furthermore most of the legal provisions that are usually cited to demonstrate how the slave was protected were not apparently on any books until near the very end of the slave era.47

If it were not for the myths about the legal status of slaves in Brazil, it would not be necessary for the Sao Paolo writers to insist so much on what must be obvious points: the slave was not a citizen and was denied the right to bear arms, to rent or own property, to wear certain

45. Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee County: 1850-1900, Harvard Historical Studies, no. 69 (Cambridge, Mass.). 46. Notwithstanding the work of Agostinho Marques Perdigao Malheiro, A escravidao no Brasil: Ensaio historico-juridico-social (Rio de Janeiro, 1866). 47. Costa, p. 284; lanni, p. 143; Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 89. Fernandes is rather contradictory as to whether or not the laws were observed; cf. p. 92 with p. 101.

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clothes, to ride streetcars, to remain out at night, to assemble, and to practice all the little freedoms that define the life of free men. The same crime would lead to much harsher punishment for the bondsman than for others. And runaway slaves were mercilessly hunted down.48

As for the physical conditions surrounding slave life, they were marked by "coercion, repression, and violence."49 The slave quarters were virtual prisons into which slaves were simply heaped. Their work was the hardest and most degrading; slaves were used as beasts of burden. The hours of work were extremely long. On coffee plantations the slaves were miserably clothed despite the cold which periodically characterizes the highlands during the three months of winter. Only one change of clothing per year was usually provided. The slaves' food was inadequate to their needs, and some planters fed them beans once a day and nothing more. Cardoso graphically de- scribes the grinding work demanded of the slaves in the charqueadas or meat-salting plants of southern Brazil. Obviously the conditions of life for artisan-slaves, most often seen and described by foreign observers, could have been very different. But the rural worker was harshly exploited.50

Slave punishments included the stocks, metal neck rings with long hooks or chains, the cat o' nine tails, thumbscrews, handcuffs, ball and chain, the tin mask, and incarceration. Floggings were sometimes purposefully spread over several days to reopen wounds and leave deeper scars. Owners branded their slaves until well into the nineteenth century. Violence knew no end. In 1880 the press reported one slave death caused by a flogging that exposed the bones of the victim and cut up his genital organs, while earlier wounds in his legs were found filled with maggots. In the end the pressure of the abolitionists forced some cases to court, as in the instance of a slave girl horribly burnt by boiling fat thrown upon her by her mistress. And it was only after 1870, more or less, that the price of slaves became such as to encourage a more humane treatment in the interests of profitability.51

48. lanni, pp. 143, 145-46; Costa, p. 231, 232; and Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 92. 49. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 109. 50. Ibid., p. 89; Ianni, p. 77; Costa, pp. 228, 229, 230, 242, 243, 246; and Cardoso, pp. 146, 149n, 157. 51. Costa, pp. 204, 274-75, 282, 286-90, 293, and Ianni, p. 145.

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Demographic statistics regarding slaves may be somewhat mis- leading for many reasons. Statistics for the time and place are un- reliable. The decline of the population may be ascribed to the fact that so few slave women were imported from Africa. One must also ask whether the decline of the slave population was not partially due to the frequency of private manumission, not to mention the effect of the manumissory laws of 1871 and 1885.52

Nevertheless it is clear that mortality among slaves was very high, and I suspect that we will eventually conclude it was greater, even when compared to the mortality of Brazilian whites, than it was in the United States. In the crowded slave quarters epidemic disease easily decimated the slave population. Work went on regardless of weather conditions; in addition to the inadequacy of clothing and food, liquor sapped the strength of the slaves; and so it was in a weakened condition that they had to deal with sanitary conditions which were rudimentary for all classes. Stillbirths and abortions resulted from the excessive work of the expectant mother. Women died at child- birth for lack of adequately instructed midwives. The rate of infant mortality would be unbelievable if not compared (as Costa does) with the figures for today in the northeastern part of Brazil. Mothers lacked milk for their children because of poor food for themselves and because they were forced to return to work during the lactation period. Some planters managed to raise to manhood only a quarter of the slaves born on their properties. One slaveowner later said that in the 1870s his slave property diminished by five percent a year (but this was due at least in part to the fact that he owned only one slave woman for every five males). Then there were the many slaves who died upon arrival from Africa as a result of the rigors of the crossing.53

The system was marked by a vicious circle: slaves' misbehavior led to violent punishments which led to more misbehavior. Violent reactions of slaves to their treatment were evidently more frequent in Brazil than has been thought. Poisonings, murders, small revolts, and mass flights were characteristic. So was suicide. And these actions seem to have become more frequent as abolition approached.54

But the physical condition of the slaves could have been the best imaginable, and the system would still have been disgustingly inhuman. For the slave was still a slave, and "good masters" and "bad

52. Costa, pp. 10, 259, 267. 53. Costa, pp. 256-59. 54. lanni, pp. 199-205; and Costa, pp. 277, 293, 304, 309.

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masters" were all still masters. Cardoso is especially effective in suggesting the adverse psychological impact of the condition of slavery upon a slave's personality. The effect of being considered a thing was devastating for his self-vision: the slave "would come to think of himself as a not-man."55 Thus the possibility of a slave seeing himself as a social agent able to carry out his own purposes was continu- ally eroded thanks to the process of "socialization" within the slave system. He could even be made not to desire freedom.56 Ianni puts it all too academically when he defines "the personality-status of the slave [as] a system of actions-and-expectations organized according to a system of actions-and-expectations of the master who [thus] maintains the principal mechanisms of controlling the behavior of the bondsman."57 How difficult it would later be for the freedman to escape this psychological bondage!58

Paternalism itself was dehumanizing. Not only was it a means of control, but it tended to expose the essential contradictions of the system. For the humanity of the slave emerged whenever the master wanted the slave to perform more demanding, more human tasks, whenever the slave was observed in day-to-day contact as a domestic servant, whenever the master engaged in sexual relations with the slave and possibly even came to love her as a human being, or whenever the paternalistic master developed any form of human relationship with the slave. If children of masters and slaves played together, or if the white child loved his mammy, or if whites even came to participate in slave festivals and religious rites, these things did not lessen the inhumanity of slavery but merely made that inhumanity more evident and the plight of both slave and master all the more poignant.59

On few questions are these writers more disappointing than on the question of manumission and the frequency with which it was practiced. Those who would exalt the blandness of Brazilian slavery have alleged that voluntary manumission was a common experience, that slaves could purchase their freedom with ease, and that government, church, and society viewed the sacrifice of this kind of property with marked approval. But about these matters we have before us

55. P. 155; also see pp. 133, 138, 145, and Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 104. Of course satisfactory proof that this was the internal psychological effect of slavery is still lacking. 56. Ibid., pp. 154, 155, 159, and Ianni, p. 255. 57. P. 168. 58. P. 254. 59. Ianni, pp. 160-61, 165; Costa, p. 245; and Cardoso, pp. 165, 270-72.

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only vague and contradictory assertions. Ianni writes that only "exceptionally" did a slave receive his freedom at the death of his master. Slaves that were freed, says Costa, were often the old, the halt, the blind, the sick, or the leprous. But Fernandes maintains there existed "the custom" of freeing all or some of one's slaves at death.60 And Costa cites voluntary manumission as one of the obstacles to calculating slave mortality.61 Evidently more research remains to be done on this question.

As for the frequency with which slaves purchased their own freedom, Costa affirms that with the exception of the craftsmen it was "difficult" for a bondsman to gather enough money to do so.62 Fernandes suggests that this practice became more prevalent only as the masters sought to stimulate higher productivity with monetary rewards, that is, when the system was already showing signs of decay. The little money that slaves might have, says Costa, was often spent quite naturally on short-term pleasures, baubles, and drink rather than on the long-term and improbable effort to buy freedom.63 One wonders anyway where the rural slave would have put his cash or how any slave could prove he had not stolen it, once the occasion arrived to use it.

Official actions to foster gradual emancipation were apparently not crowned with much success. During the war with Paraguay (1865-70) the Brazilian government decreed that slaves who fought would be freed, even if they had run away to join the ranks. But no estimates are given as to the numbers who enjoyed the privilege of risking their life for their exmasters' country. Costa is sure that the law passed in 1871 to free the children of slaves born thenceforward was widely violated through fraudulent registrations. And at least one master threw a newborn baby into the street to die after the passage of this law. Certainly a good deal of foot-dragging characterized efforts to

provide freedom at government expense to adults.64 The closest anyone gets to citing figures is Costa, who, basing her

statement on a contemporary newspaper, asserts that between 1871 and 1879 25,000 slaves were given their freedom voluntarily by their masters. Abolitionists stated that between 1873 and 1883 58,000 were

60. Ianni, p. 141; Costa, p. 263; and Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 117. 61. P. 259. 62. Pp. 230, 240, 247, 259. 63. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 91, and Costa, p. 247. 64. Pp. 259, 396-98, 401, and Cardoso, p. 151n.

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similarly freed plus another 12,000 whose freedom was purchased by the government. Another sort of numerical evidence is provided by Ianni who points out that as early as 1800 there were 1,336 free Negroes and mulattoes in the county of Curitiba and only 676 slaves. In 1854 there were 2,167 Negroes and mulattoes in the state of Parana, but of these only 578 were slaves; in 1873 the comparable figures were 47,937 and 10,560.65

How often were the children of slave masters by slave girls freed? Fernandes says that fathers "frequently" freed their illegitimate children.66 Costa cites the curious case of the master who freed his son by a slave girl and willed his property to him, including his slave mother; the son refused to free his mother. Ianni suggests that even when sexual relations were undertaken for the purpose of producing additional slaves (a gratuitous accusation since there were plenty of male slaves), "even so the moral cosmos which surrounded and absorbed the members of the community could not fail to affect them: values attached to paternity and to the child sometimes pursued the masters or members of their family forcing them so far as to grant privileges to the mulattoes over against the other slaves, or even freedom itself." 67 My own observations in Brazil would lead me to agree that Brazilians may have been more affectionate toward their illegitimate children than North Americans but to doubt whether this difference was sufficient to affect significantly the number of children thus freed. It would probably have been more common in the most stable situations where not only paternity was involved but the gradual cementing of affectionate relationships created by the constant proximity of the father to the child during his early years-a stability that was presumably more common in the colonial northeast than in the more recently developed south. Yet Ianni suggests that the moral sanctions for freeing slaves only emerged when the system was already in decay, that is, after 1850 or even 1870.68

The next important question is how freedmen, free Negroes, and free mulattoes were treated during the days of slavery. Were they

65. Costa, pp. 399,400, and Ianni, pp. 90, 104, 118. The contrasting figures for this last 20-year period may be as much an evidence of the precarious reliability of all demographic statistics for Brazil in the nineteenth century as a reflection of rapid regional growth. 66. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, p. 115. 67. Costa, p. 273, and Ianni, p. 174. 68. P. 221.

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really accepted as equals and allowed freely to rise within the social system as older writers would have us believe?69 One test then as now was marriage. Fernandes is somewhat contradictory. First he asserts that only endogamous relations were tolerated when it came to actual marriage as contrasted with sexual relations. Then he allows that in times of financial stringency upper-class whites would seek out wealthy Negroes and mulattoes to marry their very white but im- poverished daughters.70 Next he returns to the image of a "caste system" in which "prohibitions against interracial marriage secured ... the social integrity of the dominant racial group."71 Sexual relations, he asserts, did not threaten this dominance since the resul- ting children remained in the caste of their mothers; nevertheless he later refers to the freeing of such children and the possibility of the free mulatto acquiring wealth and with it status. Fernandes attempts to extricate himself from these contradictions by speculating that when a black man did acquire wealth it was felt that the safest thing to do to protect the system was to coopt him into the white establishment. Lastly he argues that then as now the free mulatto could only be accepted by the whites if he were whiter than the majority-thus conforming to the white norm of beauty-and also wealthier.72

Finally the heritage of bondage remained very much with the freedman. Before 1888 he was legally defined as an exslave.73 Restrictions were placed upon him until the end of the slave system, and sometimes these were even more stringent than for the slave, since the freedman was said to be "more insolent."74 He was specifically denied most political rights. In the law of 1885 which sought to speed up the process of government-financed manumission, there was a vagrancy clause specifically applicable to the freedman. And regardless of legal conditions blacks were presumed slave unless there was evidence to the contrary. Thus one Englishman observed that when a white man needed the services of blacks, he did not bother to inquire whether they were slave or free but ordered them about as if certainly the former. Not only did the freedman have less security than

69. Mary Wilhelmine Williams, "The Treatment of Negro Slaves in the Brazilian Empire: A Comparison with the United States of America," Journal of Negro History 15 (1930): 335. 70. Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, pp. 84, 85. 71. Ibid., p. 86. 72. Ibid., pp. 122, 128, 129. 73. Ibid., p. 118. 74. Ianni, p. 149.

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the slave and generally become the dependent of his exmaster, but he was often used in the most dangerous work where the masters feared to trust their slaves.75

Certainly abolition did not resolve these difficulties. The first thing the exslaves did was to "purchase" leisure; Cardoso sensitively notes that they didn't work because first they had to destroy themselves as things before they could rebuild themselves as men. Nor could the exslave escape the "socialization" to which he had been subject.76 Cardoso concludes that only with the greatest difficulty could he recover "the relationship between one and oneself":

The culture of the African groups had been systematically and deliberately destroyed by the white masters; the forms of being of the Negroes had been reduced to the standards-whether in feeling or in action-that the whites had created the better to exploit them and socialize them. Thus the Negroes had [subsequently] to undertake the slow reconstruction of themselves as persons taking as a model the existent and the possible. That is, the ideal personality for the freedman was the reproduction in himself of the omnipresent image of the white man. No greater alienation could be possible: they accepted the image of "Negro" and the ideology of interracial harmony developed by the white man and adopted as a goal... the whitening of themselves.77

The fact that today in Brazil the poor are predominantly black and most black people are poor is the modern heritage of an alienating and dehumanizing past, an alienation and a dehumanization which are all too much a part of Brazil's present.

75. Costa, pp. 29, 278-79; Ianni, p. 156; Cardoso, p. 142; and Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros, pp. 81, 120, 121, 123. 76. Pp. 275, 279; see also Ianni, p. 196, and Bastide and Fernandes, Brancos e Negros p. 52. 77. P. 290.

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Brazilian Slavery Re-Examined: A Review Article

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