• The abolition of slavery in the Americas was a gradual process that involved pressure applied by slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionist politics practiced by powerful groups and individuals. We often learn about abolition by examining the legal actions and public proclamations of public leaders, like Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but this focus can distract us from the massive popular pressure applied against slave regimes. In his 1885 antislavery manifesto, Brazilian senator and wealthy landowner Joaquim Nabuco focuses on the top-down legislative debate over abolition. By contrast, São Paulo abolitionist Antônio Manuel Bueno de Andrada describes the manners by which slaves freed themselves.

Joaquim Nabuco, Abolitionism

“Only after slaves and masters are both liberated from the yoke that keeps them equally from free life can we apply ourselves to this serious program of reforms — among which those that can be passed into law, though of tremendous importance, are insignificant alongside those that we must achieve ourselves by means of education, fellowship, the press, through voluntary immigration, by a cleansed spiritual life, and through a new vision of the State. These are reforms that cannot be achieved all at once, in the public square, before a cheering multitude, but they must be executed in order to produce a strong, intelligent, patriotic, and free people, forged day by day and night by night, without fanfare, anonymously, in the privacy of our lives, in the shadow of our families, without applause or rewards other than an invigorated, moralized, and disciplined conscience that is equally vigorous and human. . . .

Compare the Brazil of today, with its slavery, to the ideal of the Fatherland that we Abolitionists uphold: a nation in which all are free; where, lured by the honesty of our institutions and by the freedom of our system, European immigration will bring to the tropics a ceaseless current of vibrant, energetic, and healthy Caucasian blood which we will be able to absorb without danger, unlike that Chinese wave with which the large property owners aspire to corrupt and debase our race even further; a nation that could labor with originality toward the good of humanity and the advancement of South America.”

Antônio Manuel Bueno de Andrada, On the Struggles for Freedom by Slaves

“A large group of slaves fled from the outskirts of Capivarí [in the state of São Paulo]. The large group included more than one hundred able-bodied men, women, old people, and children, led by a black man named Pio. They marched to the city of Porto Feliz. Police units surrounded them on the road, but the fugitive slaves resisted and fended off their attackers. They marched calmly through the city’s streets in the full light of day. Farther ahead, they prevailed in two or three more skirmishes with the police. His forces having been beaten, the police chief asked the Army to intervene. Under the command of junior officer Gasparino Carneiro Leão, fifty cavalrymen set out to surround and detain the resolute rebels. By this time the National Army refused to serve as “bloodhounds,” as slave hunters. The noble young Gasparino made no secret of his abolitionist sentiments. He set out on the shameful mission intending to not attack the unfortunate slaves. From atop a hill near Santo Amaro he spotted the slaves, who were descending the opposite side of the pass. The commander sent out a corporal who was also an abolitionist to urge the blacks to disperse into the forest. The corporal dismounted and set out on foot. The leader of the fugitives, the black man Pio, did not know the corporal’s humanitarian intentions, so he charged at the soldier and killed him with the blow of a scythe. The soldiers spontaneously responded with shots that killed the black man. Despite the moment’s agitation, the abolitionist officer did not allow the slaughter of the terrified fugitives. He returned to São Paulo to face a military tribunal that absolved him unanimously.

The slaves continued on their painful journey to the city of Santos. At the edge of the Serra do Mar, near the peaks where the Cubatão River flows [over 100 miles from Capivarí], they were hunted down like wild animals. The bush captains and police mercilessly killed men, women, and children. Fewer than twenty fugitives made it to Santos. The body of the black man Pio was taken to São Paulo and opened up at a police station. The coroner’s report showed that he had not eaten for more than three days!

The autopsy revealed that this black leader, who fought off organized forces, and who marched with a commanding presence through wealthy towns, suffered from hunger at the moment in which he gave his life for the freedom of his race.”

Sources: Joaquim Nabuco, O Abolicionismo (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1938), pp. 243–246; Antônio Manuel Bueno de Andrada, “A abolição em São Paulo: Depoimento de um testemunha,” O Estado de S. Paulo, May 13, 1918, p. 3. Both documents translated by Jerry Dávila.

QUESTIONS FOR ANALYSIS