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On the Imminence of Emancipation: Black Geopolitical Literacy and Anglo- American in Nineteenth-Century

Isadora Moura Mota

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the

Department of History at Brown University

Providence, Rhode Island

May 2017

!

© Copyright 2017 by Isadora Moura Mota

! This dissertation by Isadora Moura Mota is accepted in its present form

by the Department of History

as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Date______

James N. , Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______

Roquinaldo Ferreira, Reader

Date______

Michael Vorenberg, Reader

Date______

Sidney Chalhoub, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______

Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii! ! ! Curriculum Vitae

Born and raised in , Brazil, Isadora Moura Mota completed a B.A. in History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 2003 and a Master’s Degree at the Center for the Social History of Culture at the State University of

(UNICAMP) in 2005. After relocating to the , she received a Master’s

Degree from Brown University in 2012. Her dissertation has been supported by an International Dissertation Research Fellowship conferred by the Social Sciences

Research Council (SSRC) and funding from the Center for Latin American and

Caribbean Studies, The Cogut Center for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of

Slavery and Justice at Brown University. Her research interests have resulted in several publications focusing on slave activism in nineteenth-century Brazil, the role of Anglo-

American abolitionism in the history of Brazilian emancipation, Afro-Brazilian literacy, as well as on comparative and emancipation in the Atlantic World.

iv! ! !

For Dudi (in memoriam) and Chloe

v!! ! Acknowledgements

This dissertation is the product of many years of research in Brazilian archives sustained by a sincere interest in the past and future of Brazil. On very basic terms, it embodies my search to understand how enslaved people managed to make the most of their lives and wage war on a system that denied them any reasonable measure of autonomy and wellbeing. I hope the pages that follow convey the belief that history writing needs to be grounded in a deep sense of empathy, both for the actors we study and for the readers who learn from the stories we tell.

This project would have been impossible without the support of staff members and librarians who, like me, spend a great part of their lives in Brazilian archives. This time, as I navigated the manuscript collections of the Arquivo Nacional and the Arquivo do Itamaraty while pregnant, they were invaluable. I would like to thank all at both institutions for so kindly guiding me towards the materials that brought this dissertation to life. Back in Providence at Brown University, I am most thankful to Julissa Bautista,

Mary-Beth Bryson, and Cherrie Guerzon for their assistance at every stage of the and, moreover, for filling my trajectory at the university with laughter and joy.

I received funding from the Department of History, the Thomas Skidmore Fund, the Joukowsky Research Fund, the International Travel Fund, the Center for Latin

American and Caribeean Studies (CLACS), and the Cogut Center For the Humanities, all at Brown University. The Social Sciences Research Council awarded me an International

Dissertation Research Fellowship, providing support for a whole year of research in

Brazil. Finally, a fellowship from the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at

vi! ! ! Brown University gave me precious writing time. I am profoundly grateful to all these institutions.

The emotional and intellectual debts I have incurred while writing this dissertation are now almost impossible to trace back but deserve that I at least try. I have been fortunate to count on the cheerful guidance of my advisor James N. Green, whom I thank for encouraging and preparing me to embrace the many challenges that made this work possible. My heartfelt thanks also go to my dissertation committee, whose generosity and steadfast support I will never be able to adequately recognize. It has been an honor to benefit from the insights and experience of Michael Vorenberg, Roquinaldo

Ferreira, and Sidney Chalhoub, my models as I continue on an academic trajectory. I would also like to thank my previous orientadores in Brazil, Flávio dos Santos Gomes and Robert W. Slenes, whose advice continue to challenge and inspire my work. To my professors at Brown University, I extend my gratitude for allowing me the opportunity to learn so much. I would like to thank especially Cynthia Brokaw, Amy Remensneyder,

Seth Rockman, Tara Nummedal, Naoko Shibusawa, Françoise Hamlin, Douglas Cope, and Linford Fisher.

I am also indebted to my friends and family, who are sometimes hard to distinguish. At Brown, I was lucky enough to have met Justina Hwang, a sister from

Taiwan I didn’t know I had. Muitíssimo obrigada for standing by me all these years, for keeping me young at heart, and for never letting me give up. To my comadre Lillian

Guerra, gracias for all the loving support and encouragement that have made me feel less of a foreigner in this strange land. And, most of all, thank you for bringing sweet Tato into my life. To my parents, Rose and Moacir, my sisters Isis and Isabela and my in-laws

vii! ! ! Leo and Renan, I am grateful for the generosity of spirit that have kept me strong even when I am an ocean away from home. Thank you for encouraging my goals and for so many words of wisdom. “You write about oppressed people,” said my mom once, “so the work has to honor their plight.”

Finally, I thank my partner Tim, whom I credit for so much of my personal and professional curiosity. It has been a joy to share every word of this dissertation with you and to benefit from your sustained intellectual energy and generosity. Not to mention your direct support with our energetic toddler, Chloe. She was born and blossomed alongside this dissertation, sometimes literally coloring its drafts and giving it a larger sense of purpose. I dedicate this work to her and to my querida Dudi, the mother I lost in the of writing this work but whose intelligence and laughter continue to guide me.

I stand on the shoulders of these two generations of strong women and hope to make them proud.

viii! ! ! Table of Contents

Introduction: Imagining Emancipation 1

1. “Viva os ingleses, viva a liberdade:” British Presence and Black Abolitionism in Brazil 18 The “English Question” 28 Emancipation or Freedom? The Curious Status of Liberated Africans 41 The of Montes Áureos 66 Conclusion 77

2. Of Ships and Freedom 79 The Brazilian Theater of the 87 Waterfront News: Slaves Get Word of Emancipation 108 “Running away with the ”: Union Whalers in 115 Conclusion 131

2. A War in Print: Liberalism, Afro-Brazilian Literacy, and the U.S. 133 Civil War The Brazilian Style of Liberal Anti-Slavery 142 Writing About the War: O Jequitinhonha 151 Abolition Now: Afro-Brazilian Literacy and the Geopolitical Imagination 162 Newspapers and in the Amazon 175 Conclusion 185

4. Different Borders of Belonging: The Place of Free(d) Africans in Brazil 188 The Limits of Brazilian Citizenship 194 “Nossos amigos Yankies se querem descartar de seus negrinhos” 200 The 1831 Law and African American Emigration to Brazil 213 At the Crossroads of Deportation and Re-Enslavement 220 Conclusion 236

Conclusion 239

Bibliography 243

ix! ! ! Introduction: Imagining Emancipation

On September 1861, a Brazilian slave named Agostinho shared the excitement with his fellow Afro- that a massive armed slave rebellion was at hand. He knew it to be true because a North American warship called the Sumter had arrived at the port of São Luís, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian province of Maranhão. In response to the news, several enslaved workers fled sugar and cotton plantations or refused to work for their masters in Anajatuba, a rural village ninety miles from the coast, having proclaimed themselves free in anticipation of armed support from North America.

What makes this story seem odd to us today is that the Sumter was a ship belonging to the

Confederate States of America, the proslavery in rebellion against the United

States since April 1861. Moreover, it had , a notorious proponent of

Southern expansionism abroad and a trader in slaves himself, at her helm. So why did

Agostinho think that the Sumter’s arrival in São Luís heralded the end of slavery in

Brazil?

Agostinho understood that his prospects of emancipation were directly intertwined with the future of bonded labor in the Atlantic world. Imagining the U.S.

Civil War as a transnational struggle for freedom that also played itself out in Brazil, he claimed alliances that spoke of a specific political worldview developed in the context of black communication networks. Agostinho had learned about the conflict from free blacks in São Luís to whom, in 1861, a clear distinction between Northern and Southern wartime ideologies was still in the making. Afro-Brazilians filtered news of the Civil War into a notion that the U.S. and, therefore its ships, were in favor of abolition and were fighting against slave owners who wanted to continue the institution elsewhere in the Atlantic.! 1!! ! The Anajatuba rebellion was just the first of many insurrections to sweep Brazil during the . When intelligence about the American Civil War reached the country via the sea, print, and interpersonal contact, it infused debates about slave emancipation with a great sense of urgency. On the one hand, lawmakers, slaveholders, and politicians rushed to discussions about the need to avoid a race war and control eventual changes to

Brazilian slavery. On the other, however, the enslaved acted on the very idea of armed conflict, and took advantage of a historical juncture in which British pressure against the slave trade had already enlivened black activism in Brazil.1 Thus, as slaves like

Agostinho rebelled across the , they put their geopolitical imagination to the test, revealing the existence of a radical version of abolitionism that combined a belief in

North American and British support of Atlantic emancipation with calls for a “war against the ” in Brazil.

This dissertation examines the world of communication that made Atlantic antislavery ideas a part of black struggles for emancipation in imperial Brazil (1840-

1889). Traversing connections along the , I trace the development of a geopolitical imagination among people of African descent – both enslaved and free - in the context of Great Britain’s crusade against the slave trade and, especially, the

American Civil War.2 In the pages that follow, we witness Afro-Brazilians work and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Matt Childs, “Master-Slave Rituals of Power at a Gold Mine in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” History Workshop Journal 53:1 (2002), 43-72; Flávio dos Santos Gomes, A Hidra e os Pântanos: Mocambos, 2 My examination of Afro-Brazilian geopolitical literacy in Brazil owes a great deal to the works of social geographers and historians concerned with the issues of power in the production of space. See: Julius Scott, “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era of the ” (Ph.D. diss., University, 1986); David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Sep., 1990), 418-434 and “The Sociological and Geographical Imaginations,” Int Journal Polit Cult Soc (2005) 18: 211–255; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed : Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (: Beacon Press, 2000); Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods, eds, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (Toronto & Cambridge, 2!! ! rework their own situation during the mid-nineteenth century in light of transformative new knowledge, which flowed through networks of grapevine communication, practices of collective reading, community-building, and informal economic exchanges.3 I argue that ideas of emancipation with in the Atlantic world were a source of empowerment for blacks during the process of nation building in Brazil without necessarily constituting an alternate form of nationalism. Across the empire, blackness functioned as a concept capable of a range of notions of identity, and often challenged liberal notions of selfhood and national citizenship championed by Brazilian elites. By radicalizing their geopolitical knowledge and framing their own borders of belonging,

Afro-Brazilians offered a radical interpretation of the Age of Emancipation for an era of antislavery pluralism, directly influencing the origins, meanings, and legacies of

Brazilian emancipation.

Repopulating the Historiography of Abolitionism

Brazil remains surprisingly underrepresented in studies about the history of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MA: South End Press, 2007) and McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Philip Troutman,“Grapevine in the : African American Geopolitical Literacy and the 1841 Creole Revolt,” in: Walter Johnson, ed, The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 203-33; Susan E. O’Donovan, “Trunk Lines, Land Lines, and Local Exchanges: Operationalizing the Grapevine Telegraph” (Unpublished paper presented at the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University, December 2006). 3 When writing about networks, I refer broadly to circuits through which people of color voluntarily circulated information and, as they did so, nurtured and reflected a sense of shared purpose among their members. Transcending geographical and legal boundaries, these networks expanded Afro-Brazilians’ imagination in the process and led them to rethink their social and political spaces in new ways. They formed the forums where the sharing of news took place and sprung from the personal and community ties that shaped people’s daily lives. See: Frederick Cooper, “Networks, Moral Discourse, and History,” in: T. Callaghy, R. Kassimir, and R. Latham (eds.), Intervention and Transnationalism in (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 23-46 and Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods, and Capital in the British World, c. 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

! 3!! ! international abolitionism.4 Existing scholarship has tended to consider antislavery as an

Anglo-American phenomenon or cast it into existent national narratives of parliamentary reform, revolution, independence, and civil wars. Hemispheric connections have been muddled either by the segmentation of African descendant populations in the continent or by an Atlantic history paradigm that does not take intra-American exchanges as part of its canon.5 Nevertheless, abolition, as much as slavery, was at once a domestic and an international project, which integrated a wider debate on race, labor, and geopolitics that straddled both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Considering the Black Atlantic from a southern perspective, this study offers a transnational outlook on the world from within slavery that interacts with but goes beyond the English-speaking Atlantic.6 It does so by approaching abolitionism as a multifaceted movement that encompassed the views and actions of Afro-Brazilians as much as those of diplomats, liberal activists, and religious reformers.

An analytical framework rooted in the human traditions of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 David Brion Davis, : The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New : Oxford University Press, 2006) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); Seymour Drescher, Abolition: A and Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: a History of Abolition, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016. 5 In the last decades, studies centered on a diasporic approach have broken away from the confines of nationalism and developed innovative ways of understanding the making of race in . George Reid Andrews wrote the foundational text on the matter: Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 Historians of Africa have offered insights into a more inclusive concept of the Atlantic diaspora, which goes beyond networks of imperial dominance and the geographies of the slave trade to also include African trajectories. See, among others: Toby Green, “Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans from Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World,” Past Present 2016, 230 (1): 91-122; Boubacar Barry, Elisee Akpo Soumonni, and Livio Sansone, eds, Africa, Brazil, and the Construction of Trans-Atlantic Black Identities (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008); Alice Bellagamba, Sandra E. Greene and Martin A. Klein, eds, African Voices on Slavery and the Slave Trade, two volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 & 2016); Mariana P. Candido, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Roquinaldo Ferreira, Cross-Cultural Exchange in the Atlantic World: and Brazil during the Era of the Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Rebecca Shumway, Fante and the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2011).

4!! ! allows for a shift in perspective when it comes to the place of Brazil in the Atlantic world. Afro-Brazilian renderings of British anti-slavery and American abolitionism bring to light a longer narrative of black activism that places the country at the center of the political struggles of the time. Therefore, the chapters that follow envision Brazil as an

Atlantic battlefront of the U.S. Civil War. As Union and Confederate ships clashed along the Brazilian coastline and newspapers brought word about African American emancipation, people like Agostinho joined the ranks of those who viewed the conflict as a war against slavery and connected it to the inner-workings of slave resistance in Brazil.

The belief that certain territorial domains abetted black freedom claims, for instance, was central to Afro-Brazilian geopolitical knowledge.7 As Brazilian laws of slavery came into conflict with laws of freedom adopted by other countries, slave resistance impacted international diplomacy and blurred the lines distinguishing slave flight, illegal kidnapping, and legal rendition of fugitive slaves across borders. So Brazilian slaves ran away to British and North American ships claiming the principle of free soil, crossed the borders of South American neighboring in search of freedom, some like

Mohammah Baquaqua escaped Brazilian slavery in New York, and others rebelled against their masters in Maranhão, , Santa Catarina, and Pará in response to the American Civil War.8

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 7Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle,” Slavery & Abolition, 32:3 (2011), 331-339. 8 As we will discuss in chapter two, the West African Baquaqua ran away from enslavement on a Brazilian ship while it delivered a cargo at the port of New York in 1847. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Robin Law, and Paul E Lovejoy, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage From Slavery to Freedom In Africa and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). 5!! ! Brazil hardly occupies the place it deserves in the most recent accounts of the transatlantic ramifications of the U.S. Civil War.9 Much has been written about how the conflict rearranged transnational exchanges on a global scale – especially when it comes to cotton production – and even about how it influenced anti-slavery legislation in Cuba and Brazil.10 However, a deeper analysis of its reverberations on all corners of the

African Diaspora is still missing. For African descendants everywhere slavery still existed, the U.S. Civil War meant more than the reconfiguration of American imperial interests or a shift in politics in the last slave societies of Latin America. It signified a turning point in the history of emancipation as Atlantic slaves dared to imagine the consequences of the liberation of more than four million .

Thus my research engages with the social historiography of and the United States to explore abolition as an international and conflicted process, which started in earnest at a time when slavery was actually resurgent in Brazil, Cuba, and the

U.S. South. It is no coincidence that the imminence of emancipation became apparent to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 The turn to “transnational” or “global” history among American historians is not necessarily new, but the work of reconsidering the significance of the Civil War in the Atlantic World is far from done. Steve Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World In an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910 (New York, Viking, 2016); H. Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the American Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015); Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” The American Historical Review, 105:5 (2004), 1405-1438, and The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014); W. Caleb McDaniel and Bethany L. Johnson, “New Approaches to Internationalizing the History of the Civil War Era: An Introduction,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2:2 (June 2012), 145-150. For a narrative of the U.S. Civil War rooted in the history of the Black Atlantic that, however, only includes the Caribbean, see: Edward B. Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: State University Press, 2008) and “Slave Rebels and Abolitionists: the Black Atlantic and the Coming of the Civil War,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 2:2 (June 2012), 179-202. 10 Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “The Civil War in the United States and the Crisis of Slavery in Brazil,” paper presented at the conference: American Civil Wars: The Entangled Histories of the United States, Latin America, and Europe in the 1860s (University of , March 19-21, 2014); David T. Gleeson, and Simon Lewis, eds, The Carolina Lowcountry and the Atlantic World: The Civil War As Global Conflict: Transnational Meanings of the American Civil War (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2014); Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833– 1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).! 6!! ! slaves in the midst of a new cycle of expansion of forced labor. In Brazil, slave activism intensified in the face of what historian Dale Tomich has described as the moment of a

“second slavery.” 11 Tomich argues that British industrialization in the early 1800s sparked a reformulation of political economies and slave relations in the Americas, shifting economic gains from old colonial slave zones like Saint Domingue to Cuba, the

U.S. South and Brazil. The world of “second slavery” was one full of contradictions, as production of new commodities hit unprecedented quantities through a combination of slave labor and industrial technology in regions formerly marginal to the Atlantic economy. Moreover, it was a world in which direct political domination of colonial riches ceased to represent the obvious path to global dominance. In a mostly postcolonial context, the most powerful nations of the globe sought economic control over the flow of commodities and had to respond to struggles over the organization of work and labor discipline on New World plantations rather than to independence movements.

This study assumes that the concept of “second slavery” can illuminate previously unexplored aspects of the history of slavery in Brazil. With ready access to growing

European markets, Brazilian sugar, coffee, cotton, and diamond economies propelled slave labor to a remarkable scale and level of profitability, which not only continuously financed capitalist industrialism and anticipated some of its business-like management logic, but also sparked slave activism along with the tightening of work regimes.12 Put simply, economic modernization tied to dependence on slave labor offers the background

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 11!Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Boulder, Co: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Rafael de Bivar Marquese e Tâmis Peixoto Parron,"Internacional escravista: a política da Segunda Escravidão," Topoi, v. 12, n. 23, jul.-dez. 2011, 97-117; Márcia Regina Berbel, Rafael de Bivar Marquese, and Tâmis Parron, Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790-1850 (Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 2016).! 12 Daniel Rood, “Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865” (Ph.D. diss, University of California at Irvine, 2010). 7!! ! to Afro-Brazilians’ imaginings of the age of abolition.

Throughout the manuscript, I remained committed to telling stories shaped by the

African diaspora, in the hope that they can shed light on black emancipation politics as a purveyor of forms of belonging, alternative sociabilities, and engagement with racial logics of exploitation.13 Extensive criminal records and official correspondence produced by the prosecution of slave rebels, newspapers, and governmental debates over the future of slavery in Brazil from 1850 to 1870 form the core of the documentation analyzed here.

When read together against the grain, these sources offer a window into the political meanings of the Afro-Brazilian geographic imagination, especially to what I call the

“expectation of print,” i.e., the idea that emancipation would come in written form and was validated by printed discourse. Criminal records are ironically full of information about black networks of communication and shed light on a twenty-year-period whose importance has yet to be acknowledged by historians of Brazil. The era between the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade to the country and the passage of the first emancipationist law by the Brazilian Parliament marked a turning point in slaves’ understanding of the future of bondage in the Atlantic world.

An Afro-Brazilian Atlantic

The historiography of African slavery in Brazil has come a long way since the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 13 Lisa A. Lindsay, and John Wood Sweet, Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Beatriz G. Mamigonian, and Karen Racine, The Human Tradition In the Black Atlantic, 1500-2000 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes e Marcus Joaquim de Carvalho, O alufá Rufino: tráfico, escravidão e liberdade no Atlântico negro, 1822-1853 (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 2010); Rebecca J. Scott, and Jean M Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey In the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012); João José Reis, Divining Slavery and Freedom: The Story of Domingos Sodré, an African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

8!! ! early twentieth century, when anthropologists, sociologists, and historians first turned to the study of African-descendants as part of larger projects of national self-discovery. This scholarship flourished especially in Brazil and Cuba, emerging from debates about the character of the institution and the best methodological approach to tackle its meanings.14

Scholars have often tried to find the right balance between “structure” and “agency” in their narratives, i.e., between broad historical forces that dictated people’s choices and the choices people made that changed history. In so doing, they have offered starkly different portraits of slavery, varying from a benign system of social relations to a violent labor regime that negated slaves' humanity and, more recently, to a multifaceted phase in the

African diaspora. Historians now tend to agree that slavery constituted both a labor form and a social and cultural system; that paternalism and violence were complementary forms of social control; and that slaves played an important role in shaping the world they lived in.

Understanding the role of Afro-descendants in shaping Brazil’s past involved overcoming accounts that revolved around the progress from slavery to freedom. Studies of how slaves lived, worked, and resisted subjugation have proliferated since the 1980s, doing much to read slaves into the narrative of abolition in Brazil. If, traditionally, historians framed their accounts of emancipation around the timeline of parliamentary reforms or the rise of an urban abolitionist movement modeled after the Anglo-American experience in the late 1870s, recent historiography has tended to center on the political meanings of slave resistance. Scholars such as Maria Helena Machado, Célia Marinho de

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 See, for example, Gilberto Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala: Formação Da Familia Brasileira Sob o Regimen De Economia Patriarchal (Rio de Janeiro: Schmidt, 1938, First ed., 1933); Arthur Ramos, O negro brasileiro (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1935); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1947); Fernando Ortiz, Los Negros Esclavos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975, First ed., 1916). 9!! ! Azevedo, and Sidney Chalhoub, for instance, have shown that abolitionism was not simply the story of elite reformists such as or even of urban middle- class reformists such as André Rebouças. Their accounts include a growing fraction of the nameless urban middle class as well as urban and rural captives themselves.

Moreover, they highlight the cumulative effect of slaves’ continuing challenging of the legal basis of their enslavement, alongside defiance in the form of open rebellion or more subtle forms of resistance pursued in daily life.15

Thus, far from a transformative event, abolition has come to be defined as a contentious sociopolitical process. Previously an expression of the progressivism of an enlightened and coffee planters, it now belongs to the political turmoil and social unrest that marked the emergence of Brazil as a nation-state.16 This dissertation engages with this historiography through the examination of slave rebellions influenced by knowledge of international events. I strive to write a kind of counternarrative of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 15 For a sample of the Brazilian historiography regarding the process of emancipation in the nineteenth century, see: Celso , Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press, 2016); Angela Alonso, Flores, Votos e Balas: O Movimento Abolicionista Brasileiro (1868-88)(: Companhia das Letras, 2015); Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado and Celso Thomas Castilho, Tornando-Se Livre: Agentes Históricos e Lutas Sociais No Processo De Abolição (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2015); Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery In Havana and Rio De Janeiro (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Sidney Chalhoub, A Força da Escravidão: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 2012); Dale Torston Graden, From Slavery to Freedom In Brazil: , 1835-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); Célia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, Onda negra, medo branco: o negro no imaginário das elites, século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1987) and Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil: A Comparative Perspective (New York: Garland, 1995); Elciene Azevedo, O Direito Dos Escravos: Lutas Jurídicas e Abolicionismo Na Província De São Paulo (Campinas, SP: Editora Unicamp, 2010); Keila Grinberg, O Fiador Dos Brasileiros: , Escravidão e Direito Civil No Tempo De Antonio Pereira Rebouças (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2002); Maria Helena Machado, O plano e o pânico: Os movimentos sociais na década da abolição (Rio/São Paulo: UFRJ/Edusp, 1994); Hebe Maria Mattos, Das cores do silêncio: os significados da liberdade no sudeste escravista, Brasil século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1998); Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas. Mocambos e comunidades de senzalas no Rio de Janeiro - séc. XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 1995) and A Hidra e os Pântanos. 16 Barbara Weinstein, “The decline of the progressive planter and the rise of subaltern agency: shifting narratives of slave emancipation in Brazil,” in Gilbert Joseph, ed., Reclaiming the Political in Latin America: Views From the North (Duke: Duke University Press, 2001).! 10! ! ! abolition centered on the agency of slaves, freedpeople, liberated Africans, and runaways during the 1850s and 1860s. In that effort, I join historians like Flávio dos Santos Gomes and João José Reis in investigating the ways in which the ‘infrapolitics’ of slavery informed how slaves and free blacks circulated intelligence among those considered trustworthy in their communities. For Afro-Brazilians, Brazil was an important part of an

Atlantic world in which slavery was disappearing thanks to sustained black grassroots activism. The radicalism of black antislavery is an important trait of the long history of

Brazilian abolition that should not be discarded for not being the victorious road to emancipation.!!

Navigating the Archives: A Word About the Many Meanings of Literacy

The archive – along with its shortcomings and rewarding surprises – matter greatly in this work. Ironically, the research presented here is the product of several years of pursuing black voices in Brazilian repositories organized primarily around a project of nation-building that did not include them. In the nineteenth century, record keeping was part of the exercise of master rule in Brazil, a time when slaves were not supposed to represent themselves in writing and operated in legal contexts under constant threats of and death. 17 Thus the documents that survived the next century and its chronic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 The scholarly debate about the archive of enslavement is broad and deeply international. Some voices in these debates are: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Carolyn Hamilton, ed., Refiguring the Archive (, South Africa: David Philip, 2002); Ada Ferrer, “Talk about : The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” In: Doris L. Garraway, ed., In Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 21-40; Ana Lucia Araújo, Living History: Encountering the Memory and the History of the Heirs of Slavery (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2009); Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114 (2009): 1231–49; Jane Landers, ed., “New Sources and New Findings For Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World,” Special issue, Slavery & Abolition 36, no. 3 (2015); Laura Helton, Justin Leroy, Max A. Mishler, Samantha Seeley, and Shauna Sweeney, eds., “The Question of Recovery: Slavery, 11! ! ! lack of adequate resources for conservation speak mostly of black subjugation. Afro-

Brazilian lives figure on paperwork created either by the very process of enslavement or by state authorities in charge of repressing individual and collective acts of resistance. So, given the scarcity and mediated nature of sources available, what kind of recuperative work is needed to write the history of the enslaved in Brazil? And how does one locate black imaginings that gesture towards different conceptions of belonging in collections defined by the logics of race and the nation state?

Reconciling the fact that Afro-Brazilians rarely left behind a trail of documents of their own making with the impetus to insert them into the process of Brazilian emancipation is the challenge that has moved me to write. Over time, I came to realize that part of the answer to the recovery questions that have long occupied scholars - and are in no way supposed to be settled here - is to treat the archive not just as a source, but also as a subject of permanent interrogation. As Simon Gikandi has suggested, I chose to carry out a symptomatic reading of my sources “as a means of displacing the archive, depriving it of the claim to be a of signs that will lead us to the event itself, and thus also exposing it as a series of stories told to account for a set of events whose meaning was contested then and now.”18 To claim that Brazilian documents completely erase slave voices is as false as to hold that masters’ authority was infallible – slave resistance exists to prove otherwise. Fortunately, historians can found some solace in the fact that nineteenth-century Brazilian authorities spent most of their time chasing “bad talk” and recording every piece of evidence of political attentiveness among slaves and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Freedom, and the Archive,” Special issue, Social Text 125, 33:4 (2015). 18 Simon Gikandi, “Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement,” Early American Literature, Volume 50, Number 1 (2015), 100. 12! ! ! free people of color.19 Thus, when writing about what they imagined slaves would do, masters and authorities let much about black motivations bleed through the records.

This dissertation stems from the critical reading of the kind of secondary text that can often be found between the lines of official accounts. To counter the intermittent silence of the archive, I immersed myself in the world slaves and freedpeople lived in, finding in individuals with similar experiences the key to answer questions posed by my protagonists’ biographies. Familiarity with the archives of enslavement has also taught me that lens of slavery produced a broad conception of community activism among those who lived through it. Since bondage purported to control all aspects of a slaves’ life, it generated a more holistic form of activism, that encompassed claims that varied from the enjoyment of breaks from work on religious holydays, maintenance of customary access to garden plots and participation in the local economy to pleas against the separation of black families and the right of assembly, for example. When taken as a whole, these attempts at a measure of independence amount to an archive of the political visions of

Afro-Brazilians, which are the subject of the chapters to come.20

The experience of navigating the sources of enslavement not only required a specific kind of informational literacy but also prompted me to expand my understanding of literacy as an important social practice among Afro-Brazilians. During research, I confronted the fact that the “texts” I studied did not fit standard definitions of “the literary”: black voices appear on letters, judicial testimonies, conversations reproduced at police stations and then rendered into writing, emancipation petitions, and amulets.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 Here, paraphrasing historian Robert Darnton, who was writing about early modern , not Brazil. Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks In Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 3. 20 Thulani Davis, “Recovering Fugitive Freedoms,” Social Text 125 (December 2015), 62. 13! ! ! Therefore, I understood quite early on that a black transnational imagination could only be mapped if I changed the questions I asked of the documents and the way I conceived of slave literacy in imperial Brazil. The majority of Brazilian slaves, it is true, dwelled on the margins of literacy. However, even if unable to literally read and write, they were influenced by their proximity to literate culture. Slaves gleaned information, for example, by listening to literate blacks read aloud from books and newspapers. Acts of collective reading then led them to imagine themselves as part of the community of the paper’s readers, with whom they shared the knowledge about far-flung events regarding abolition. The lived experience of newspaper reading transformed information into news and enabled slaves or freed persons to become teachers of other enslaved people.

The study of black literacies requires an ethnographic eye for they were an essential element of meaning making in the Age of Emancipation. Their relationship to collective social action in Brazil has led me to consider together historiographies that are not usually in conversation. I borrow insights from the scholarship on the history of ,21 the field of New Literacy Studies,22 as well as from studies of

African American literacy and print culture.23 Grey Gundaker’s emphasis on the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 Márcia Regina Terra, “Letramento & letramentos: uma perspectiva sócio-cultural dos usos da escrita,” DELTA, São Paulo, v. 29, n. 1 (2013): 29-58; Ângela Kleiman, org., Os significados do letramento (Campinas: Mercado das Letras, 2005); Magda Soares, Letramento: um tema em três gêneros (: Autêntica, 2003). 22 Martyn Lyons, Sofia Kotilainen, Ilkka Mäkinen, eds., Journal of Social History, Special Issue, “The Functions and Purpose of Vernacular Literacy,” vol. 49, n. 2, 2015; Martyn Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe, c. 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); David Barton, Mary Hamilton & Roz Ivanič , eds., Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context (London & New York: Routledge, 2000). 23 Janet Duitsman Cornelius, ‘When I Can Read My Clear’: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1991); E. Jennifer Monaghan, “Reading for the Enslaved, Writing for the Free: Reflections on Liberty and Literacy,” PAAS108 (2000): 309-341; Jeffrey H. Richards, “Samuel Davies and the Transatlantic Campaign for Slave Literacy in Virginia,” VMHB 111 (2003): 333-378; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: The University 14! ! ! interactions between literate and vernacular literacy practices within the African diaspora is of special importance.24 Gundaker contends that old divides such as oral-versus-literate do not account for the complexity of slave life and mask the existence of different avenues of expression among African Americans. Tracing networks of communication among slaves, he explains, is only possible if one pays attention to vernacular practices such as reading and writing linked to divination, body marks or writing in charms, among other examples. Drawing from Gundaker, I argue that, in the hands of slaves, artifacts of literacy became seminal instruments of change in the years leading up to abolition in

Brazil.

The Chapters

My point of departure is an analysis of black subversive renderings of British abolitionism in the aftermath of the 1850 ban on the slave trade to Brazil. In Chapter One,

“Viva os ingleses, viva a liberdade:” British Presence and Black Abolitionism in Brazil,”

I demonstrate that slaves transformed what authorities and slaveholders perceived as imperialist advances tantamount to a threat to Brazilian sovereignty into an argument for their own freedom. British gunboat diplomacy and defense of illegally enslaved Africans spilled out of the diplomatic channels onto the public scene, pushing liberated Africans to seek protection from re-enslavement at British consulates; slaves to escape to British ships acting on the principle of “free soil;” and entire black communities to swear allegiance to the British when a war against Brazil seemed plausible in 1863. In so doing,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! of North Carolina Press, 2005), 7-66; Anthony T. Bly, ‘Pretends he can read:’ Runaways and Literacy in Colonial America, 1730–1776," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 6 no. 2 (2008): 261-294; Christopher Hager, Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). 24 Grey Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora, Diaspora of Signs: Literacy, Creolization, and Vernacular Practice in African America (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).! 15! ! ! they disrupted British anti-slavery policies in Brazil, expanding British advocacy against the slave trade to signify a decisive alliance for the abolition of slavery in the empire.

The resistance politics of enslaved communities continue to drive the chapters that follow, providing the context in which an often-told American story can also be understood as part of the history of Brazilian emancipation. Chapter Two, “Of Ships and

Freedom,” examines the intersections between the Lusophone and Anglophone Atlantic by envisioning Brazil as one of the theaters of operations of the American Civil War. I take a two-pronged approach to connect to a growing body of scholarship on the global impact of the U.S. war. Firstly, in Chapter Two, I map the enactment of sectional hostilities between Union and Confederate vessels along the Brazilian coast, and show how they inspired black rebellions contingent upon the landing of Union troops as well as sustained slave flight to New England whalers en route to the Pacific.

Secondly, in Chapter Three, “A War in Print: Liberalism, Afro-Brazilian Literacy, and the U.S. Civil War,” I trace how wartime events unfolding in the United States filled the pages of Brazilian newspapers, leading many Afro-Brazilians to rebellion. Literate slaves, in particular, took to reading the papers out loud for their peers to listen, sparking massive slave uprisings in Maranhão (1861), Minas Gerais (1864) and Pará (1865) rooted in the belief that the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation had also freed Brazilian bondspeople. Thus this section is also an exploration of the power of literacy as a means for social bonding and political participation in nineteenth-century Brazil, a modest attempt at suggesting how to include the enslaved in any kind of social history of ideas for this period.

The manuscript culminates with an examination of how a ban on the emigration

16! ! ! of freed Africans to Brazil directly influenced the legal construction of sovereignty and citizenship in the empire. Chapter Four, “Different Borders of Belonging: The Place of

Free(d) Africans in Brazil,” delves further into the kind of historical geographies that defined different ways of knowing and acting upon a world defined by slavery. It chronicles how Brazilian authorities enforced the 1831 abolition law to close the empire’s borders to African Americans and all other foreign-born freedpeople. Despite its liberating meanings to blacks worldwide, U.S. emancipation drove the imperial state to retrench in the face of widespread fear of slave unrest, Union plans of black colonization of the Amazon, and Confederate projects of relocating their slaves to Brazil. In drawing attention to how national identity and citizenship depended directly on the status of

Africans, this section reveals that the government of Pedro II enforced a notion of racial frontier with lasting implications for the enfranchisement of blacks in Brazil.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

17! ! ! CHAPTER ONE

“Viva os ingleses, viva a liberdade:”25 British Presence and Black Abolitionism in Brazil

In February 1863, just before Carnival festivities commenced in Campinas, a town in the heart of São Paulo’s coffee-producing belt, slaves of Antônio Januário Pinto

Ferraz hosted an evening of music and dancing on the plantation grounds. It was the first

Saturday before Lent and Ferraz had traveled with his entire family to enjoy the holiday in the city, leaving his property under the care of a slave overseer. In addition to his slaves, at least sixteen others from a neighboring plantation attended the batuques and tambaques that evening.26 As the night wore on, the crowd grew and, despite the informal atmosphere filled with music and chatter, tensions started to seep into the air. Long a slave at Ferraz’s plantation, Benedito arrived at the gathering in great distress. He barely dismounted his horse before announcing to whoever wished to hear that he intended to kill master Ferraz on his return from Campinas. The motivation for murder would have been know to most attendees: Benedito’s body still carried the scars left by twenty-five lashes.

Benedito vented out his frustration over the cruelty of his master in the expectation of support from his peers. After all, Ferraz had flogged him for what many would consider a minor offence. Benedito had recently broken into the plantation’s main residence with the intention of “entertaining libidinous purposes with a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 25!“Hail the English” and “Hail freedom.”! 26 Arquivo Nacional do Rio de Janeiro (henceforth ANRJ), IJ1-518, 23 February 1863. Copy of a letter from Vicente Ferreira da Silva Bueno to the president of the province of São Paulo, Vicente Pires da Mata. 18! ! ! woman”27 who lived and worked there. His fellow slaves, however, rushed to contain his outburst, pleading with Benedito to change his mind. They feared the killing of Ferraz would derail the insurrection they had been planning for the Holy Week. As Benedito finally gave up his plan, slaves in Campinas broke into cries of “viva os ingleses” and

“viva a liberdade,”28 revealing how the latest crisis in Anglo-Brazilian relations had kindled their hopes for emancipation. The two had just severed diplomatic ties following the escalation of the British naval campaign against the illegal slave trade to

Brazil and public criticism of the country’s handling of liberated Africans. In the slaves’ eyes, a war between the largest South American slave society and the self-proclaimed global antislavery power loomed near.29

The exchange of ideas about black freedom and British solidarity at Ferraz’s plantation would have passed unnoticed had a carapina (mixed-race man) who played the viola that night not relayed the conversation to an acquaintance, who in turn informed the local sheriff. Stories of slave unrest travelled fast through the channels of everyday life in the 1860s, evoking grandiose repression schemes from public authorities and private citizens. In a matter of days, the police canvassed Ferraz’s property and all adjacent plantations, locking up several slaves and freedmen at the Campinas jail. Although most prisoners staunchly refused to tell authorities “what they talked about in their conversations,” one slave confessed under torture “that the plan concocted was for them to rise up during the Holy Week, raid the plantations, plunder the money, and teem up to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 ANRJ, IJ1-518, 23 February 1863. Letter from the substitute Sheriff of Campinas, Francisco Antônio Pinto, to Vicente Pires da Mata. 28 “Hail the English” and “Hail freedom.”ANRJ, IJ1-518, 23 February 1863, Bueno to Mata. 29 Between 1808 and 1867, the Royal Navy intercepted more than 1,600 slave ships carrying close to 160,000 bound for the Americas. Richard Burroughs and Richard Huzzey (orgs), The Suppression of the : British Policies, Practices, and Representations of Naval Coercion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 8. 19! ! ! raid the City, since they were sure to count at this time on the English.”30 Accepting the

“sayings of slaves” as sign of an imminent uprising, Sheriff Francisco Antônio Pinto ordered that all the armament available at the Campinas’ military headquarters be repaired as a precaution since he anticipated having to confront dozens of slaves and free people of color from the counties of Campinas, Belém, Amparo, , and

Indaiatuba.31

In nineteenth-century Brazil, investigations into the likelihood of slave uprisings always involved violence but became tinged with hysteria when events seemed to invoke the transatlantic dimensions of abolitionism. On the suspicion of incitement by foreign agents, authorities conducted their inquiries with the aid of torture, threats to the liberty of freedpeople, and the presence of armed citizen’s militias. In 1863, the Campinas police allowed local magistrate Vicente Ferreira da Silva Bueno to take part in the suppression efforts. Having sat in on all the interrogatories carried out at the Campinas jail, Silva

Bueno summarized his conclusions in a letter to Vicente Pires da Mata, the president of the province of São Paulo. Although he doubted the outbreak of a full-flung black rebellion, the judge strongly suggested that Campinas planters forbid “communication among slaves, guard every farming tool, to take away all arms that slaves eventually possess, not to leave their plantations in the hands of slaves during the Holy Week, not to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30ANRJ, IJ1-518, 23 February 1863, Bueno to Mata. Slaves all over the Atlantic world routinely plotted uprisings during religious holidays, as these corresponded to days when they did not have to work and could meet without raising widespread suspicion on the part of masters and police authorities. Ricardo Pirola has examined another slave rebellion plotted in Campinas for the Holy Week of 1832. Ricardo Figueiredo Pirola, Senzala insurgente. Malungos, parentes e rebeldes nas fazendas de Campinas, 1832 (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2011). 31 ANRJ, IJ1-518, 23 February 1863, Letter from the Sheriff of Campinas, Francisco Antônio Pinto Pinto to Mata. 20! ! ! allow those latoeiros (tinsmiths), peddlers, jewelers who can well be emissaries, for the

English Government shall not send Englishmen.”32

Like the black disenfranchised workers of Campinas, Silva Bueno had long pondered the consequences of an eventual standoff between Great Britain and Brazil. His

Anglophobic feelings echoed the outrage demonstrated by other citizens who proudly claimed Brazilian identity in the face of Britain’s position as the dominant foreign power in South America. By the 1860s, Britain was Brazil's largest economic partner and the most visible agent of gunboat diplomacy directed at enforcing the ban on the transatlantic slave trade. British ships had first reached Brazilian ports in 1810, shortly after the Royal Navy guaranteed the safe arrival of the Portuguese Crown fleeing

Napoleonic invasion in Europe. Trade agreements signed with then provided

Britain with a privileged status that lasted throughout the nineteenth century. Up to 1850,

England supplied Brazil with 50% of its imports - especially but not solely textiles - ranking the empire as the third biggest foreign market for English goods in the world.

British commercial houses established primarily in Rio de Janeiro fielded a great part of the Brazilian agricultural production abroad, exporting, for example, at least half of the coffee grounds harvested by Brazilian slaves to the United States and Europe. Britain also played an important role as the prime financer of the Brazilian public debt. Loans contracted in London funded the development of mining, early industrialization efforts,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 32 Ibid. 21! ! ! and the construction of Brazilian railways such as the one linking the coffee-producing hinterland of São Paulo to the , also known as A Inglesa (the English).33

Thus British influence in Brazil was both a legacy of the country’s colonial experience and a liability to its newfound independence declared in 1822. Brazil had secured its political autonomy from Portugal by extending a privileged economic position to the British, together with the promise in 1826 to abolish the slave trade in the next four years. Since 1817, Britain held the right to search ships suspected of involvement in the illegal trade to Brazil and mixed commission courts in Rio de Janeiro, the Cape of Good

Hope, and regulated the works of abolition by adjudicating sentenced vessels.34 Authority over the emancipation of illegal captives consistently put Britain and

Brazil at odds, as first the Portuguese and later the Brazilian government evaded enforcement of bilateral treaties and often protested seizures of Brazilian slave ships performed by the British squadron.

When rising to power in the , Pedro II and his government inherited this spiky legacy of unfulfilled promises and scandalous evasion of an 1831 abolition law aimed at suppressing .35 By the time the 1850 Eusébio de

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 Britain’s political and economic influence in Brazil has even led some historians to ask whether the empire could be considered part of the British “” during the nineteenth-century. Some like Leslie Bethell, for instance, partially agree with this assertion, describing the end of the slave trade in 1850 as the product of British political intervention in Brazil. Leslie Bethell, “O Brasil no século XIX: parte do ‘império informal britânico,” In: José Murilo de Carvalho e Adriana Pereira Campos, Perspectivas da cidadania no Brasil Império (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011), 15-36 and “O Brasil no mundo” In: et alli, A construção nacional: 1830-1889 – HISTÓRIA DO BRASIL NAÇÃO – VOL. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Objetiva, 2012), 131-177. 34 Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press, 1970). 35 On the cessation of the African slave trade to Brazil, see: Bethell, The Abolition; Robert E. Conrad, World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986) and The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Sidney Chalhoub, "The Politics of Disease Control: Fever and Race in Nineteenth Century Rio de Janeiro," Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 3 (1993): 441-63; Dale T. 22! ! ! Queiroz Law finally prohibited the importation of slaves to the empire, Brazil had logged years of experience as a country legally bound to prevent the smuggling of Africans yet socially shaped by widespread contraband and illegal enslavement. It is believed that close to 760,000 Africans arrived in Brazil between 1831 and 1856 as a product of illegal trade.36

In 1863, Anglo-Brazilian tensions reached a new level after disputes broke out over the criminal investigation of two incidents involving British citizens in Brazil.

Named after the British ambassador to Rio de Janeiro, William D. Christie, the so-called

Christie Affair encapsulated a series of reprisals carried out by the Royal Navy against

Brazilian vessels within national territorial waters.37 Although emerging within the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Graden, ‘An Act ‘Even of Public Security’: Slave Resistance, Social Tensions, and the End of the International Slave Trade to Brazil, 1835–1856,’ HAHR 76:2 (1996), 249–282; Manolo Florentino, Em costas negras: uma história do tráfico de escravos entre a África e o Rio de Janeiro (séculos XVIII e XIX) (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 1997) and Tráfico, cativeiro e liberdade. Rio de Janeiro, séculos XVII-XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2005); Jaime Rodrigues, O Infame Comércio: Propostas e experiências no final do tráfico de africanos para o Brasil (1800–1850) (Campinas, SP: Editora da UNICAMP, 2000); Jeffrey D. Needell, “The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade in 1850: Historiography, Slave Agency and Statesmanship,” Journal of Latin American Studies 33 (2001), 681-711; Beatriz Mamigonian, “In the Name of Freedom: Slave Trade Abolition, the Law and the Brazilian Branch of the African Emigration Scheme (Brazil–British West Indies, –1850s),” Slavery and Abolition 30:1 (March 2009), 41–66. 36 Beatriz G. Mamigonian, “O direito de ser africano livre: os escravos e as interpretações da Lei de 1831,” In: Sílvia H. Lara e Joseli Mendonça, eds., Direitos e Justiças: Capítulos de História Social do Direito no Brasil (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2006), 130. On the general non-compliance with the 1831 law in Brazil, see also: Azevedo, O direito dos escravos; Keila Grinberg, “Slavery, and the Law in Nineteenth- Century Brazil: Reflections on the Law of 1831 and the ‘Principle of Liberty’ on the Southern Frontier of the Brazilian Empire,” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 16 (2009), 401-11; Sidney Chalhoub, A força da escravidão. 37 On the Christie Affair and Anglo-Brazilian relations during the nineteenth century, see: Richard Graham, “Os Fundamentos da Ruptura de Relações Diplomáticas entre o Brasil e a Grã-Bretanha em 1863. A ‘Questão Christie,’” Revista de História 24: 49 (Jan–March 1962), 117–137 and 379–400; Bethell, The Abolition of Brazilian Slave Trade; Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, and World of Sorrow; João Eduardo Finardi Álvares Scanavini, Anglofilias e anglofobias: percursos historiográficos e politicos da questão do comercio de africanos (1826-1837) (Dissertacão de mestrado, Unicamp, 2003); Beatriz Mamigonian, “A Grã-Bretanha, o Brasil e as ‘complicações no estado atual da nossa população’: revisitando a abolição do tráfico atlântico de escravos (1848-1851),” trabalho apresentado no 4o Encontro Escravidão e Liberdade no Brasil Meridional (, 2009) and "Building the Nation, Selecting Memories: Vitor Meireles, the Christie Affair and Brazilian Slavery in the 1860s." (Unpublished Paper, Yale University: 2010).

23! ! ! usually secretive field of diplomatic relations, the international crisis attained great notoriety across the empire. Insisting on the defense of national honor, the Brazilian central government mustered quite an outpouring of popular support, embodied in street parades, inflamed speeches, and favorable press coverage of the emperor’s rebuke of

British diplomatic complaints.

People like Campinas magistrate Silva Bueno responded to the Christie Affair with more caution than glee. Resolute to avoid any disruption of the social order, he channeled his patriotism through pragmatism. Following “the occurrences in Rio de

Janeiro with the British Minister,” Silva Bueno helped the creation of the Sociedade

Patriótica Campineira.38 Described as an urban militia, the Sociedade aimed to provide civilian armed support to Brazilian authorities in case of war. Its members protested that both the Brazilian military and the National Guard suffered from a permanent scarcity of manpower and unusable armament, and wondered if any troops would be left to guard

Campinas if a war against the British actually broke out. In a letter to the president of the province of São Paulo, Silva Bueno explained the intentions of the Sociedade Patriótica, conjuring up a valuable map of the world of slave communication in Campinas.

After the Sociedade was created, rumors started to emerge here and there with regard to these slaves and at this shop about those, and from that road they said this and that, and on the bridges, water supplies and fountains where they usually gather, and they were overheard talking (it is said) whatever it is about a revolt, the Englishmen, etc., for it is a fact that they either count on their protection, or at least there is founded reason to fear some hostile manifestation on the part of the slaves in case there is a breaking off with England.39

Shops, roads, bridges, and water fountains. These were some of the places buzzing with rumors about emancipation in the hinterlands of São Paulo. They were the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 38 ANRJ, IJ1-518, 23 February 1863, Pinto to Mata. 39 Ibid. 24! ! ! connecting nodes of black circuits of information through which ideas about Great

Britain in Brazil circulated. Silva Bueno correctly noted the importance of such casual conversations, for they were not inconsequential chatter. Quite the contrary, they conveyed a black critique of enslavers’ power that amounted in effect to an alternative story about what British abolitionism meant. Slaves in Campinas contributed a version of resistance politics centered on the immediacy of abolition to an era of antislavery pluralism, in which abolitionism took chaotic and plastic forms all over the Atlantic based on different understandings of morality, race, labor, and political self- determination.

Once in possession of tangible information about a regional uprising in 1863, the

Sociedade Patriótica Campineira made curtailing slave unrest in Campinas its principal mission. The means of carrying out such a calling, though, was up for discussion. One of the members filed a motion with the Directory requesting the creation of an urban guard of 50 to 100 men in uniform; other associate advocated for the creation of a voluntary armed brigade. Acting as their consultant, Silva Bueno advised the Sociedade to trust instead an expanded National Guard presence in Campinas, whose resolve to fight would be boosted by the granting of a monthly bonus in the amount of 15$000 to 20$000 réis coming from the Sociedade’s treasury.

In March, a month before the Holy Week holidays, São Paulo’s Chief of Police,

Luís José de Sampaio, declared the slave rebellion crushed in Campinas. Nevertheless, hopes of imminent emancipation continued to flourish among slaves.

It has not been proven that on the part of the slaves there had been the employment of any material means to bring an insurrection about, but it is certain that in general they did not hide their hopes of having their freedom restored through the intervention of the English, whom they were willing to aid as soon as the war started, which they considered to be soon (…) I have been advising Planters to redouble vigilance on their plantations, and

25! ! ! moreover not to agree to the smallest communication of their slaves with people from the outside, who could instill suspicions, as well as foreign peddlers, and their very neighbors’ slaves…40

Sampaio echoed the concerns first voiced by Silva Bueno about the source of emancipatory ideas in Campinas. Both men denied black agency in interpreting the latest news, fearing instead that “people from the outside” were giving slaves access to the unfolding stories of the Christie Affair. Nevertheless, the English entered the cognitive world of the enslaved through the same channels of public political life that mobilized patriotic responses to a possible war with Britain. In , a town approximately 39 miles to the west of Campinas, local deputies organized street rallies to discuss possible responses to English aggression as soon as they heard about them in the beginning of

1863. Shortly thereafter, a locally appointed commission also circulated notices of a financial subscription to support the imperial government in case of armed conflict. As the crowds attending such public events grew, rumors about slave rebellions started to surface.

In a letter to the Correio Paulistano titled “The exalted slave insurrection and the

Anglo-Brazilian question” published in March of 1863, a planter from Piracicaba denounced the harmful effects of public discussion of the Christie Affair.41 He commented on a public meeting held in town, in which representative Costa Pinto openly mocked those who believed that Brazil could ever fight a war against Britain, the world’s greatest maritime power. Pinto recommended, instead, that citizens come together to help arm the National Guard, “for what we have to fear is the enemy who lives amongst us…

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 40 ANRJ, IJ1-518, 6 March 1863. Letter from the, Chief of Police of São Paulo, Luís José de Sampaio, to the president of the province, Vicente Pires da Mata. 41 In the original: “A decantada insurreição de escravos e a questão Anglo-Brasileira.” Correio Paulistano, 12 March 1863. 26! ! ! [here the orator lowers his voice] we should fear and prevent a slave insurrection!” A debate with Captain Bento Francisco de Mattos ensued, for the latter argued that Brazil could very well emulate the United States in its glorious victory over England in 1776.!

Meetings like the one in Piracicaba prompted slaves to “entertain themselves with speculations over the possible consequences of a war against the English,”42 causing the deployment of dozens of troops and National Guards in the policing of Rio Claro,

Constituição, Piracicaba, and Campinas.43 The story line offered by newspapers and local authorities speak only of fears of slave unrest in 1863, yet taking such versions literally strips the past of much of its explanatory power. Understanding black narratives of emancipation at the time requires shifting the perspective of our documentary evidence, so that a little known facet of abolitionism in Brazil can emerge.44 While authorities resented the British government’s interference in domestic affairs and masters perceived most Englishmen as a threat to their property rights, Afro-Brazilians generated broad political meanings from their encounters with the British and stepped up their challenge to slavery from within.45 This chapter charts how enslaved and free people of color found opportunities to negotiate their place in Brazilian slave society when confronted with the many faces of British antislavery in the second half of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 42 O Constitucional, 18 March 1863. 43 Diário do Rio de Janeiro, 17 March 1863.! 44 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Walter Johnson, “Agency: A Ghost Story,” In: Richard J. Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: the Problem of Freedom In the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 8-30; Gikandi,“Rethinking the archive of enslavement;” Brown, “Mapping a Slave Revolt. “ 45 Brazilian slaves were not the only ones to develop an image of the British as liberators. In his narrative published in 1861, the American slave J. H. Banks explained: “So far as the slaves know anything about England, and know that the cotton, sugar, and rice which they raise is consumed so extensively in the British market, they almost believe that England will eventually have something to do with setting them free. They hear it said that although England was the first to introduce slavery into America, she has abolished it in the West Indies; they, therefore, look upon her as the friend of the colored race. It is a common opinion among the slaves that slavery will be terminated by a war between England and the United States.” J. W. C. Pennington, ed, A Narrative of Events of the Life of J. H. Banks, an Escaped Slave, from the Cotton State, , in America (: M. Rourke Printer, 1861). 27! ! ! I argue that Brazilian slaves expanded British advocacy against the slave trade to signify a decisive alliance for the immediate abolition of slavery in the empire.

The “English Question”

Resistance to British involvement in Brazilian matters had been a trope of nationalist discourse at least since the country’s independence in 1822. In 1831, the

Brazilian government finally passed the country’s first piece of legislation targeted at suppressing the importation of African slaves to Brazil. The November 7th law stated that all slaves entering Brazil would henceforth be legally free and determined reshipment abroad as the ideal solution to deal with the influx of so many unwanted immigrants. The second article of the 1831 law required that slave traders pay for the expenses regarding the “re-exportation” of slaves illegally introduced in Brazil “to any part of Africa; re- exportation to be made effective by the Government as soon as possible, contracting with

African Authorities to provide them asylum.” Article seven completed the sealing off of

Brazilian borders by forbidding any who was not Brazilian to disembark in the country’s ports under the penalty of immediate re-exportation.46

Although the imperial government lauded the 1831 law as a milestone in the process of terminating the slave trade to Brazil, subsequent disregard for its provisions transformed the law into an endless source of Anglo-Brazilian hostilities. Failing to define how the re-exportation of slaves should be carried out, Brazil claimed jurisdiction over a growing number of recaptured slaves in spite of the shared mandate of the mixed commission courts. Instead of returning to Africa, liberated Africans were subjected to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 46 Coleção das Leis do Império do Brasil (1808 - 1889). Portal da Câmara dos Deputados, http://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/legislacao/publicacoes/doimperio (accessed Jan 30, 2016). 28! ! ! the administration of the Ministry of Justice, which first housed them at the House of

Correction in Rio de Janeiro and then distributed their services to private hirers and public institutions across the empire.47 Moreover, the 1831 law did not extinguish human trafficking to Brazil, becoming known popularly as a policy enacted only “for the English to see.”48 Brazilian ships continued to trade under the Portuguese or American while both the West African and South American squadrons set up by Britain lacked the necessary number of ships to curb the influx of slaves into Brazil.49

In 1845, when the 1817 regulations for the mixed commissions expired, the

Brazilian government decided to break free from compliance with bilateral agreements and terminated Britain’s right to search suspected slave ships. Britain responded with the

Aberdeen Act, an act of parliament authorizing one-sided Admiral Courts to clear up ship seizures and adjudicate those believed to participate in the illegal trade.50 Brazil considered the act a hostile governmental measure in times of peace and turned up its rhetoric in defense of national sovereignty. Nevertheless, the empire’s inability to uphold the 1831 law placed the country in a quite uncomfortable position, as its reproach of

British interference on matters related to the slave trade translated into the impunity of far too many slave traders and the silent endorsement of slaveholders’ customary rights to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 47 “Aviso de 29 de outubro de 1834, com Instruções relativas `a arrematação dos Africanos ilicitamente introduzidos no Império.” Cited by Beatriz Mamigonian, “To Be A Liberated African In Brazil: Labour And Citizenship In the Nineteenth Century” (PhD Diss., University of Waterloo, 2002), 300. 48 “Para inglês ver.” The expression refers to any law or rules that are not meant to be followed in practice. Dossiê “Para inglês ver? Revisitando a lei de 1831,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, Ano 29, n. 1/2/3, jan-dez. 2007. 49 David Eltis “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade, 1644-1867: An Assessment,” Civil War History, Volume 54, Number 4 (2008), 347-378; Leonardo Marques, “A participação norte-americana no tráfico transatlântico de escravos para os Estados Unidos, Cuba e Brasil,” História: Questões e Debates (Curitiba) 52 (jan./jul. 2010), 91-117 and “Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of the Early Republic 32 (Summer 2012), 233-60. 50 Graham, “Os Fundamentos da Ruptura, 119. 29! ! ! bonded labor.51

Amidst increased British pressure following the Aberdeen Act and a dramatic spike in illegal trafficking, a Brazilian parliament dominated by the Conservative Party passed the country’s second abolition law in August of 1850. After months of political discussions held mostly in secrets sessions, the law named after the conservative Minister of Justice Eusébio de Queiroz centered on repressing contraband at sea and the landing of

Africans on the Brazilian coast. Decried by Liberals as the product of British pressure rather than conservative humanitarianism, the 1850 law did not directly address the problem of widespread illegal enslavement, disregarding criminal acts on the ground as if counting on the continued failure of Brazilian authorities to enforce the 1831 law. The new abolition legislation assigned Navy Auditors to judge the ships apprehended and maintained that Africans captured aboard slavers were to be reexported in the near future at the expense of the government. In the meantime, liberated Africans were to be distributed to public institutions and frontier projects across the empire. In other words, the 1850 law prohibited concessions of liberated Africans to private hirers and refrained from setting up a concrete scheme to deport them back to the African continent, keeping

Africans under direct state control.

As the British escalated their naval campaign by seizing even smaller vessels employed in the Brazilian from 1851 on, popular discontentment soared. Many Brazilians – Africanistas or slave traders included - seemed to resent especially the military component of British suppression activities, deeming England’s conduct as imperious and arbitrary. In port cities like , Salvador, Santos, and Rio !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 51Chalhoub, A Força da Escravidão; Thâmis Parron, A política da escravidão no Império do Brasil, 1826-1865 (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011).

30! ! ! de Janeiro, British patrolling the Atlantic coast had become part of the urban landscape, bringing visibility and publicity to every challenge of Brazilian sovereignty. In

June of 1850, for instance, hundreds of people watched British war vessels force entry past the fort that guarded the entrance of the city of Cabo Frio, in the province of Rio de

Janeiro, firing at Brazilian guards who denied passage to armed British officials.52 Soon, news of the conflict gained the streets of the imperial capital, causing the Chief of Police to warn minister Eusébio de Queiroz against the perils of popular unrest. According to

Antônio Simões da Silva, the “whole City” of Rio de Janeiro knew that “in the afternoons of the 6th and 7th day of this month, after news of the facts carried out by English cruisers spread, a kind of resentment manifested, because they were considered insults to our

Nationality, then some groups of people armed with sticks went to the Largo do Paço,

Cais Pharoux (…)”53. Some gathered at the front of the British Consulate during the evening, yelling at British sailors and throwing stones at their ships docked in the port.54

Animosity against the British was not, however, a consensus. For slaves, freedpeople and free persons of color in Brazil, the “English question” opened up opportunities to fight bondage with the support of powerful allies. Brazilian slaves shared a long tradition of fleeing to British vessels, which they regarded as integral parts of transatlantic routes to freedom.55 Brazilian authorities and masters knew of such history

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 52!ANRJ, IJ1-452, 27 June 1850. Official letter from de Almeida Roiz, Sheriff of Cabo Frio, to Joaquim José Batista da Motta, Chief of Police of the Province of Rio de Janeiro. 53 ANRJ, IJ1-998, 26 July 1850. Official letter from the Chief of Police of the Province of Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Simões da Silva, to the Minister of Justice, Eusébio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso Câmara. 54 ANRJ, IJ1-998, 14 July 1850. Letter from the Parish Inspector, Manoel Vianna, to the Sheriff of the Freguesia of São José, José Maria dos Anjos Esposel.!! 55 On the role of sailors as carriers of information and the challenges they posed to the legitimacy of slavery in the Atlantic world, see: Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant, Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700- 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Daniel Vickers, Young 31! ! ! far too well. The ubiquity of slave flight drew British influence inland, linking, for instance, the British-built Pedro II Railway in Rio de Janeiro to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa. On March of 1856, thirty-two proprietors of slaves employed on the port of Rio sent a representation to the capital’s Chief of Police expressing outrage at the latest

“attacks on property rights,” committed locally by people who seduce slaves “no doubt with promises of freedom only to throw them into harsher captivity.”56 As evidence, slaveholders offered the example of José Luís da Silva, first signer of the petition, a businessman established at the Ilha das Cobras, who had three slaves run away before

Christmas. It was said “one of them had sailed to Jamaica on an English brig and the two others on the English schooner Kat directed to the Cape of Good Hope.” The proprietors pleaded with the police to unveil the names of the British shipmasters’ true allies, who enabled them to construct such a plot “against Brazilian fortune.”

Bento Congo and Antônio Benguela, two of slaves who disappeared from the Ilha das Cobras, had just been found hiding on the British ship Danube, which transported construction materials from England to the Pedro II Railway. The ship captain, Robert

Sandys, claimed to have given order for the slaves to leave, but the Brazilian police arrested him anyway on the charge of “seducing slaves to run away.”57 It was unclear if these were the slaves mentioned on the petition. Later that year, the Brazilian consular agent in the Cape of Good Hope would let imperial authorities know that two fugitive !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Scott, “The Common Wind:;” Beatriz G. Mamigonian, “José Monjolo e Francisco Moçambique, marinheiros das rotas atlânticas: notas sobre a reconstituição de trajetórias da era da abolição.” Topoi 11(2010): 75-91; Walter Hawthorne, “Gorge: An African Seaman and his Flights from ‘Freedom’ back to ‘Slavery’ in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Slavery & Abolition 31:3 (2010): 411-428; Ferreira, Cross-cultural Exchange in the Atlantic world. 56 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 4 March 1856. Representation of slave owners residing “in the vicinity of the sea” to João Luís Vieira Cansasão de Sinimbu, Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro. 57 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 19 January 1856. Annex to the 21 January circular sent by José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the Minister of Justice, José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo.! 32! ! ! slaves from Rio de Janeiro, supposedly those claimed by José Luís da Silva, had been found on board of the English schooner Agatha. Once again, the event prompted the

Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Maria da Silva Paranhos, to reiterate his appeal to the

British Legation in Rio de Janeiro, asking that action be taken to “prevent captains of merchant vessels of your nation from giving asylum or taking aboard slaves owned by

Brazilian subjects or people residing in this empire.”58

As eyewitnesses to the slave trade, slaves with experience at sea were often the most likely sources of information about British advocacy in support of emancipation. In

1858, news about direct British intervention energized black networks of communication in the Brazilian south. In Antonina, province of Paraná, a man called João Ferreira Dério told slaves that they were about to become free. He claimed that the Brazilian Crown had signed the order for their manumission, and that such order would arrive in a month and a half aboard a British ship. As soon as Antonina’s authorities got word of it, they started to prepare against a slave insurrection that they feared would break out during the feast of

Saint Benedict, widely celebrated by the local black population. Slaves interpreted

Dério’s words in their own fashion, accusing the local sheriff of withholding the Crown’s edict. According to sheriff Alves d’Araújo, Antonina slaves only waited for the arrival of a British ship that was already on its way to offer them protection.59

By the 1860s, indignation at what the Brazilian government viewed as the British

Navy's persistent violation of national sovereignty was at an all-time high. Two otherwise unremarkable events ended up pushing the two countries towards the breaking point,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 58 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 18 September 1856. Official letter from José Maria da Silva Paranhos, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the Minister of Justice, José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo. 59 ANRJ, IJ1-541, 23 January 1859. Letter from Luiz Francisco da Câmara Leal, Chief of Police of Paraná, to the president of the province, Francisco Liberato da Mata. 33! ! ! aided by the unsympathetic intervention of British ambassador in Brazil, William Dougal

Christie. In June of 1861, the British ship Prince of Wales sank off the coast of Albardão, in the province of . The local population plundered the cargo that washed ashore and the English consul residing in the city of Rio Grande, Henry

Prendergast Vereker, immediately conveyed to Christie his suspicions about who could have been responsible for the crew’s disappearance. Based on the reigning animosity against the British, the diplomats insinuated the Prince of Wales crew had been murdered instead of disappearing into the ocean. Christie demanded reparations from the Brazilian government, which denied the British a leading role in the investigations of the wreck. 60

Later in June 1862, the police arrested three British naval officers of the

Forte when off-duty in Tijuca, Rio de Janeiro. Their imprisonment for disorderly conduct prompted William Christie to issue an ultimatum to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign

Affairs in December, demanding sizable financial reparations and an official apology.

Brazil’s refusal to comply immediately led to naval reprisals. On the first days of January

1863, British cruisers apprehended five Brazilian merchant ships and instituted a six-day naval blockade of Rio de Janeiro’s port.61 Outraged locals surrounded the British Consulate in the imperial capital again, in a display of discontentment that amounted to rarely seen popular support to the government of Pedro II.

Although the Brazilian government’s continuous rebuke of British pressure in the long run protected the ownership rights of slaveholders, it also enlivened slave resistance, forcing emperor Pedro II’s administration to refine the terms on which its defense of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60 Graham, “Os Fundamentos da Ruptura,” 128. 61 According to Christie, Rio inhabitants reacted with indignation, reminding him of the days following the passage of the Aberdeen Act. The Emperor Pedro II himself would have talked to them in person in different parts of the city, reassuring his subjects that national honor would be defended at all costs. See Graham, “Os Fundamentos,” 328. 34! ! ! slavery lay.62 It did so in nationalist terms, carefully fleshed out in 1863. Contrasting with widespread displays of patriotism that included even donations of monthly wages to the national treasury as contribution to face the foreign threat, however, blacks did not speak a language of nationalism. Oral networks of story and rumor about the diplomatic crisis quickly fed plans of slave insurrection all over Brazil. In the beginning of 1863, the

Christie Affair deeply unsettled slaves in places as varied as Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio Grande do Sul. In the city of Pelotas, at the immediate vicinity of where the

Prince of Wales had wrecked, the police arrested the free man of color Sebastião Maria on accusations of inciting a regional black insurrection. He was said to have participated in “gatherings of many other blacks,” where he insulted emperor Pedro II and disseminated ideas of an upcoming British invasion, also “inviting and enticing blacks, both free and enslaved to take the side of the English in case of a war between Brazil and

England, on the grounds it was that nation they should help, because they are the protectors of the class of the black folk.”63

Africans’ and Afro-Brazilians’ positive perceptions of the British had obvious roots in the constant demonization of these “foreigners” by slaveholders but, more importantly, sprung from their experiences with the British both at sea and in the hinterlands of Brazil. Many were seafaring slaves themselves or had met the British as interceptors of slave ships headed to the empire. In the many maritime provinces of

Brazil, slaves encountered Englishmen as they escaped to ships about to sail away to lands without slavery. Or else, they encountered them at “public houses” and taverns alongside the docks. Inland, slaves toiled for British masters in gold mines or shared their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 Mamigonian, "Building the Nation,” 4.! 63 Case cited by Beatriz Mamigonian in “Building the nation,” 15-16. 35! ! ! geographical knowledge of the Brazilian countryside with British engineers and industrial experts engaged in the construction of railroads.64

That is not to say, however, that abolition was the cause of every British subject living in the tropics. Throughout the nineteenth century, British citizens and companies not only held slaves all over Brazil but were also the unlikely protagonists of scandals over the illegal enslavement of African recaptives. The St. John D'el Rey Mining

Company operation in Morro Velho, Minas Gerais, is a case in point. The largest British slaveholding organization in Brazil endured a lengthy court battle in 1879 for unlawfully holding 300 liberated Africans as slaves for twenty years.65 Taken up by Brazilian abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, the case forced the St. John D'el Rey Mining Company to elaborate on a justification in true slaveholding fashion. The company revealed that its silence about the slaves’ right to emancipation had roots in the fear of a general insurrection in the mines of Morro Velho.66 Ironically, despite all diplomatic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 64 This was the case of James Brunlees and Daniel Mackinson Fox, for example, civil engineers enlisted by the Barão de Mauá to serve in the construction of the São Paulo Railway (later Estrada de Ferro Santos- Jundiaí) in 1856. Martin Cooper, Brazilian Railway Culture (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). On the British economic and cultural presence in nineteenth-century Brazil, see: Gilberto Freyre and Donald Warren, Ingleses No Brasil: Aspectos Da Influencia Britânica Sobre a Vida, a Paisagem e a Cultura Do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1948); Richard Graham, A British : Rio Four Mills, 1886-1920 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1966); Britain and the Onset of Modernization In Brazil 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Douglas Cole Libby, Trabalho Escravo e Capital Estrangeiro No Brasil: O Caso De Morro Velho (Belo Horizonte: Editora Itatiaia, 1984), Transformação e Trabalho Em Uma Economia Escravista: Minas Gerais No Século XIX (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1988), and “Protoindustrialização em uma Sociedade Escravista: o caso de Minas Gerais,” In: Tamás Szmrecsányi e José Roberto do Amaral Lapa (orgs), História econômica da Independência e do Império (São Paulo: Hucitec/Edusp/Imprensa Oficial, 2002), 237-280; Marshall C. Eakin, British Enterprise In Brazil: The St. John D'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989); Luciana de Lima Martins, O Rio De Janeiro Dos Viajantes: O Olhar Britânico, 1800-1850 (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2001); Louise H. Guenther, British Merchants In Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Business, Culture, and Identity In Bahia, 1808- 50 (Oxford: University of Oxford, 2004). 65 Matt Childs calculates the St. John D'el Rey Mining Company held around 1,700 slaves at the mines of Morro Velho in 1867. Childs, “Master-Slave Rituals of Power.” 66 Ibid, 30. See also: Antônio Penalves Rocha, Abolicionistas brasileiros e ingleses: A coligação entre Joaquim Nabuco e a British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (1880-1902) (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2008). 36! ! ! disagreements, the British in this case shared with the Brazilian government the view that emancipation should be a process controlled by the slaveholding classes.

Still in March of 1863, Rio de Janeiro’s Chief of Police Luís Pinto Miranda de

Montenegro ordered the flogging of three slaves from the capital’s Carmo Parish “for having said publicly in conversation with other comrades, that the English were resolved to free the slaves of Brazil, and that they should help her on the ground.”67 Chief

Montenegro lauded the citizens who took part in peaceful mass gatherings all over the province, sometimes even offering “themselves and their wealth in defense of independence and National Sovereignty,” yet dreaded the danger the Anglo-Brazilian conflict posed to regional security.68 Still in March, rebellion plans uncovered in Mar d’Espanha, county on the border of the provinces of Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, prompted Chief Montenegro to check on the possible outbreak of slave revolts in

Petrópolis, Magé, Cantagalo, do Sul, Nova Friburgo, and Estrela. In February, more than 300 slaves had run away from the plantations of José Eugênio Teixeira Leite and Simplício José Ferreira da Fonseca to the vicinity of the suspension bridge that connected Rio and Minas in Sapucaia. Anticipating the insurgents’ intention to eventually cross the bridge into Rio, local citizens decided to guard the entrance on their side of the

Paraíba do Sul River, organizing evening patrols to catch the slaves who they knew to be armed.

Brazil and Great Britain submitted their grievances to the arbitration of the king of Belgium, Leopold II, who finally decided Brazil had not committed any offense

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 ANRJ, IJ1-465, 18 March 1863. Letter from the president of the province of Rio de Janeiro, Policarpo Lopes de Leão, to the Ministry of Justice, João Luís Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu.! 68 ANRJ, IJ1-465, 26 March 1863. Annual report of the Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro, Luís Pinto Miranda de Montenegro. 37! ! ! against the British Navy. William Christie asked for his passport and returned to England in March of 1863, citing Brazilian negligence in the case of the Prince of Wales and the

Brazilian government’s deaf ears to his pleads for guarantees to the freedom of liberated

Africans as causes for his departure. Only in November of 1865, did diplomatic relations between Brazil and Britain resume after the mediation of the King of Portugal and official British apologies presented to Pedro II in Uruguaiana.

Just as the two nations rekindled relations, William Christie published his famous treatise on the decades-long work of British diplomats in combatting the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil. His Notes on Brazilian Questions was written as a corrective to the cloud of misrepresentation in which the British reprisals of January 1863 seemed to be involved.69 The former British ambassador blamed both the Brazilian press and government for poisoning public opinion against him, by conjuring up a misleading portrait of British diplomacy overseas. Depicted by newspapers such as the Daily News and the Jornal do Commercio as an adversarial figure, the unreasonable paladin of exorbitant British claims on an independent country, Christie - no doubt, a controversial character - became the symbol of British undue interference in Brazilian affairs over the nineteenth century. His account of facts, however, serves as a reminder of what was actually at stake at the time.

Christie’s critique of the inability of the Brazilian government to curtail the slave trade and passionate defense of liberated Africans right to emancipation document the resilience of slavery in Brazil on the eve of a government-controlled turn toward gradual emancipation. In the 1860s, Brazil was far from set on an irresistible march towards

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 69 William Dougal Christie, Notes on Brazilian Question (London, Cambridge: MacMillan and Co, 1865). 38! ! ! abolition and the advent of free labor.70 As historians Beatriz Mamigonian and Daryle

Williams have argued, the importance of the so-called Christie Affair resides on its unleashing of the disruptive potential of defending slavery in the Age of Emancipation.71

Confronted with a British ultimatum in 1863, emperor Pedro II was forced to elaborate on the nature of the state he strove to consolidate. Slavery was to remain as the of social order in Brazil for years to come, even if its terms had to be constantly renegotiated internally and abroad.

In 1869, Britain finally repealed the Aberdeen Act, the measure that had upheld for so long Brazilian claims against the British crusade for the cessation of the African slave trade. The action, however, offered no closure to Anglo-Brazilian diplomatic disagreements for anti-British sentiment in the South American empire sprung from much more than a sense of wounded patriotism. It had deeper roots in the history of

Atlantic slavery. Well into the 1870s, for instance, slave flight to British vessels docked in Brazilian harbors remained a point of contention between the two countries. The problem was so widespread that, on August 10, 1876, the British Foreign Office released a final version of the “Instructions respecting reception of fugitive slaves on board Her

Majesty’s Ships” to the Secretary of the Admiralty. Addressed to all commanders, captains, and commanding officers of the Queen’s ships and vessels, the Fugitive Slave

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 70 The economic trajectory of slavery in Brazil was not that different from its fate across the in that the slave economy was not in decline when antislavery activities took central stage. Writing about Britain, Seymour Drescher notes that abolition in British territories was not a function of the advance of capitalism. Quite on the contrary, he argues that Britain committed “econocide,” attacking an institution that was viable, flexible, and profitable in the early 1800s. Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery. British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (North Carolina: University of Chapel Hill Press: 2010), and Abolition. 71 Mamigonian, "Building the Nation;” Daryle Williams, "Study of the Christie Affair: Revisiting the Anglo- Brazilian Question, 1861-1865," Terceiro Congresso Internacional do PRONEX: Dimensões e fronteiras do Estado brasileiro no século XIX, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, November 5-7, 2012, unpublished paper. 39! ! ! Circular was a new iteration of the instructions originally published on July 1875 and soon revoked after igniting fierce criticism on the part of the British abolitionist press.

The circular is worth quoting in its entirety:

The following instructions are to be considered as superseding all previous instructions as to the receipt of fugitive slaves: 1. In any case in which you have received a fugitive slave into your ship and taken him under the protection of the British flag, whether within or beyond the territorial waters of any State, you will not admit or entertain any demand made upon you for his surrender on the ground of slavery. 2. It is nor intended, nor is it possible, to lay down any precise or general rule as to the cases in which you ought to receive a fugitive slave on board your ship. You are, as to this, to be guided by considerations of humanity, and these considerations must have full effect given to them whether your ship is on the high seas or within the territorial waters of a State in which slavery exists; but in the latter case you ought, at the same time, to avoid conduct which may appear to be in breach of international comity and good faith. 3. If any person, within territorial waters, claims your protection on the ground that he is kept in slavery contrary to treaties with Great Britain, you should receive him until the truth of his statement is examined into. This examination should be made, if possible, after communication with the nearest British consular authority, and you should be guided in your subsequent proceedings by the result. 4. A special report is to be made of every case of a fugitive slave received on board your ship.72

Departing from an earlier cautious tone dubbed by abolitionists as being too lenient on the face of “the vested interests of slavery,”73 the 1876 circular allowed full protection to fugitives on British vessels. Captains could receive aboard slaves within territorial waters of other states independently of danger to life and refrain from accepting ownership demands of local masters at face value. Once the new text of the instructions reached Brazil, the imperial government reacted with great discontentment. The State

Council advised the emperor to directly protest the measures and recommended that a ground police force be created to prevent slave flight. Such police force, however, was to be summed up only after the first British attack on Brazilian sovereignty as the measure !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 72 BRASIL, O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1875-1889) (Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2009), 181-82. 73 The Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 20, n. 2, April 1, 1876, 25.! 40! ! ! was bound to become dangerous. Ground patrols, pondered the councilors, would

“awaken or advert slaves” to the refuge they could find aboard British ships. It was clearly too late for that. The Councilors’ tentative rhetoric was off touch with reality, culminating almost a century of intersections between British abolitionism and slave activism in Brazil.

Emancipation or Freedom? The Curious Status of Liberated Africans

Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of Africans captured as victims of illegal trafficking had their futures regulated by Brazil and Great Britain.

Perhaps more than anything else, liberated Africans embodied British involvement in the daily realities of slavery in Brazil.74 Known as africanos livres in Brazil, emancipados in

Cuba or “prize negroes” elsewhere in the Atlantic World, they integrated a larger group of marginalized people freed from slave ships since the passing of the British Abolition

Act of 1807.75 Although first created by the British, the peculiar legal category was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 74 The literature on the experience of liberated Africans in Brazil had expanded greatly since the publication of Robert Conrad’s classic work: “Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818-1868,” HAHR 53.1 (1973): 50–70; Jaime Rodrigues, “Ferro, trabalho e conflito: os africanos livres na Fábrica de Ipanema,” História Social, n. 4-5, 1998, 29-42; Jorge Luiz Prata de Sousa, “Africano Livre Ficando Livre: Trabalho, Cotidiano e Luta,” (Tese de Doutorado, USP, 1999); Mamigonian, “To Be A Liberated African” and “Conflicts over the Meanings of Freedom: The Liberated Africans’ Struggle for Emancipation in Brazil (1840s–1860s),” in Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Sparks, eds, Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC.: Univeristy of South Carolina Press, 2009), 235–264; Enidelce Bertin, “Os Meia-Cara: Africanos Livres em São Paulo no Século XIX,” (Tese de Doutorado, USP, 2006); Daniela Carvalho Cavalheiro, “Caminhos negros: vida e trabalho dos africanos livres na construção da Estrada de Magé a Sapucaia (c.1836-c.1864),” Revista Ars Historica,, nº 7, Jan./Jun. 2014, 41-59; Henrique Espada Lima, “No baú de Augusto Mina: o micro e o global na história do trabalho,” Topoi, v. 16, n. 31, 571-595, jul./dez. 2015. 75 On the history of liberated Africans in the Atlantic world, see: Nigel Worden and Clifton C. Crais, Breaking the Chains: Slavery and Its Legacy In the Nineteenth-Century Cape Colony (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994); David Northrup, “Becoming African: Identity formation among liberated slaves in nineteenth-century Sierra Leone,” Slavery & Abolition, 27:1 (2006), 1-21; Rosanne M. Adderley,"New Negroes From Africa": Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement In the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Jenny S. Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 41! ! ! eventually adapted by other slave powers to suit local needs. In Brazil, an 1817 Anglo-

Portuguese treaty brought the africanos livres into existence, and a Brazilian 1831 law tied their emancipation to the condition of fourteen years of apprenticeship. Over time, they became a source of permanent conflict between Britain and Brazil, as the latter routinely circumvented the provisions designed to uphold African emancipation. Free yet involuntary laborers, liberated Africans often struggled to define the exact meaning of their freedom in Brazil, confronting a legal system that deemed every black individual a slave until proved otherwise. As they labored and lived alongside slaves, these nearly

11,000 liberated Africans personified the expectation that freedom should be extended to all bondpeople in Brazil and that the British could be of assistance.

The uneasy partnership between the two nations embodied in legislation rarely enforced to the letter cast liberated Africans into a nearly impossible position.

Emancipated yet bound to work for terms that resembled indentures, recaptives labored alongside slaves, formed families whose status were even less clear than their own, and lived under the permanent threat of being racially profiled as captives. Their terms of apprenticeship frequently expired without a change in their condition and, when change did occur, Africans were thrown into a society that denied them citizenship. In Brazil, liberated Africans were constant reminders of the contradictions of the Age of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2012); Dale T. Graden, Disease, Resistance, and Lies: the Demise of the Transatlantic Slave Trade to Brazil and Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2014); Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo, “The Diaspora of Africans Liberated From Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of African History 55:3 (November 2014), 347-369; Jennifer Nelson, “Apprentices of Freedom: Atlantic Histories of the Africanos Livres in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro,” Itinerario 39 (2015), 349-369; Céline Flory, De l’esclavage `a la liberté forcée: histoire des travailleurs africains engages dans la Caraibe française au XIX siècle (Paris: Karthala, 2015); Colleen A. Vasconcellos, Slavery, Childhood, and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788-1838 (Athens and London: the University of Press, 2015).

42! ! ! Emancipation, showing repeatedly that the eradication of bondage per se failed to address the country’s dependence on several forms of unfree labor.76

In the 1850s, when the second Brazilian law to abolish slave trading finally took hold, the africanos livres (free Africans) in Brazil could be officially divided into two groups: those taken by the British at sea and emancipated by Anglo-Brazilian mixed commissions in Rio de Janeiro before 1845 and those apprehended by Brazilian authorities and manumitted by Brazilian judicial procedures. Much more numerous than those, however, were the Africans brought to Brazil in contravention of the 1831 law yet never caught by either British or Brazilian authorities. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, blurring the lines between slavery and freedom all over the empire. Whichever their status, Africans in Brazil were at once a symbol of British abolitionist ideals and evidence of the limitations of an emancipation process controlled by states committed to racial domination.77

Up to 1864, there was simply no legislation in Brazil bestowing upon liberated

Africans the unconditional right to freedom. Both the 1831 and 1850 abolition laws predicated emancipation on the condition of re-exportation and the 1853 decree that declared free all liberated Africans who had completed fourteen years in the service of private hirers determined that manumission was not automatic. The unresolved nature of liberated Africans’ freedom fuelled tensions between Britain and Brazil during the entire decade, prompting British diplomats to shower the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 76 David Brion Davis defines the Age of Emancipation as reaching from the 1780s and the post- revolutionary emancipationist impulse in the United States to the 1880s and the abolition of slavery in Brazil. See: Davis, The Problem of Slavery.! 77 Dawne Y. Curry, Eric D. Duke, Marshanda A. Smith, eds, Extending the Diaspora: New Histories of (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Brana-Shute and Sparks, eds, Paths to Freedom. ! 43! ! ! with formal complaints regarding the illegal detention and enslavement of recaptured

Africans.

English advocacy in support of liberated Africans’ liberty in Brazil increased noticeably in the late 1840s. The notorious and mostly frustrated attempt of British consul to Rio de Janeiro Robert Hesketh to compile a register of recaptives under tutelage of the

Brazilian government between 1849 and 1851 is emblematic of the dead ends produced by the Brazilian bureaucracy. After a denied request for reliable statistics, Hesketh invited Africans to either come to the presence of British diplomats or send information through fellow recaptives:

Not having access to any official record of their names, I was limited to the means afforded by notifying to the Africans, through their comrades, to present themselves at this Consulate. This has been a tedious process, especially as many could only come by stealth, and some not at all, bending instead what particulars they could. (…) From the statements made by those who appeared at the Consulate, an opinion can be formed of their unprotected condition, and of the unjustifiable treatment to which a portion of them have been doomed. It will also be seen that several of the women have had offspring, and that a portion of these children have either been baptized as slaves or their births withhold from parish registration, and in all probability few reported to the Curator. Some of the Africans who presented themselves gave the names of their deceased comrades, in a few instances stating that they perished from barbarous treatment.78

In 1851, Hesketh finally produced a list of 854 people, a dismal fraction of the total of liberated Africans in Brazil. The methods he employed to compile his inventory, though, left a lasting impression among liberated Africans who continued to seek British protection in the years ahead. Just in 1850 alone, as the Brazilian parliament debated the ban on the slave trade, more than 500 Africans walked through the doors of the British consulate. Many believed the British were their last hope of achieving any meaningful

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 78 Christie, Notes on Brazilian Questions, 36-7. 44! ! ! form of freedom, and some had hope of being transferred to British colonies throughout the Atlantic as part of the British African emigration scheme.79

British consuls repeatedly challenged the Brazilian government for its inability to secure the emancipation of liberated Africans and slowly built up a considerable danger to the legitimacy of slavery in Brazil by upholding a radical interpretation of the 1831 law. The threat had been foregrounded in Cuba by the conspiracy of La Escalera. In

1844, Cuban colonial authorities claimed to have uncovered a wide uprising connecting slaves, free people of color, and white abolitionists in Matanzas. Officials accused British consul and Superintendent of Liberated Africans David Turnbull of inciting a movement that, if nothing else, launched one of the bloodiest clampdowns on Cuba’s population of color in the nineteenth century. Turnbull became a target for the projection of the anxieties generated by a slave society grappling with Atlantic antislavery and U.S. annexationist interests over the 1840s. To our purposes, it is interesting to notice that the

British consul had already stirred up controversy well before the rebellion for trying to force Cuba to respect Spanish-British Treaties to abolish the slave trade in 1817 and

1835. Upon closer scrutiny, therefore, his conviction points to the existence of powerful alternative ideologies of resistance among Cuban slaves, who imagined a British commitment to their own freedom in a world where many of them had secured emancipation with the help of English diplomats, navy authorities, and abolitionists.80

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 Mamigonian, “A Grã-Bretanha,” 8. Mamigonian estimates that up to 1849, 767 Africans had been sent from Rio de Janeiro to the British colonies of Guiana and Trinidad. 80 Robert Paquette wrote the classic work on La Escalera. In his interpretation, Turnbull was more a symbol than the moving force behind the rebellions, for he embodied the contradiction between the growth of bourgeois-liberal ideology, born of the French Revolution and the British industrial revolution, and the brutal system of slave labor at work in Cuba. Robert Paquette, Sugar is Made With Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press; Scranton, Pa.: Distributed by Harper & Row, 1990). For a revision of the 1844 conspiracy more focused on the political views of rural black people in Cuba, see: Aisha K. Finch, Rethinking Slave 45! ! ! Back in Brazil, following on Hesketh’s footsteps, another British ambassador to

Rio de Janeiro, Henry Howard, emerged as a fierce critic of Brazilian policies toward the victims of human trafficking. In 1854, Howard wrote extensively about the ways in which the imperial decree of 28 December of 1853 fell short of ameliorating the situation of liberated Africans in Brazil. His criticism centered on the fact that the measure did not address those Africans who worked for the state, and that it required all Africans to request their emancipation formally, that is, through the proper legal channels and incurring all financial expenses involved. On a note to the Brazilian Minister of Foreign

Relations, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, Howard offered the example of Cláudio, an

African man who had sought assistance from former British consul Westwood to leave

Rio de Janeiro on a British ship. We don’t know what arguments Cláudio used to convince him, but Mr. Westwood soon located a British captain who accepted to take

Cláudio on his ship. Cláudio then forged ahead and requested his emancipation from the

Curator of Liberated Africans, M. H. Figueiredo, who in turn asked him to prove that he had sufficient means to travel abroad. Cláudio then got a letter from Mr. Westwood attesting that a British captain was willing to accept him aboard. Figueiredo did not accept the letter, though, and asked Cláudio to get an affidavit signed by the ship captain and authenticated by the British consul.

After spending several weeks working to produce the necessary documentation,

Cláudio finally received a freedom certificate from Curator Figueiredo and applied for a passport at the Foreign Relations Ministry. Henry Howard remarked that Cláudio had to spend a sizable amount of money to finally become eligible for travel and that this !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Rebellion In Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

46! ! ! amount did not come from compensation due to him for labor as a liberated African. In the words of Howard, Cláudio had displayed “more perseverance and energy than generally found among Africans,” but his case showed clearly that the 1853 decree still posed too many obstacles for liberated Africans intent on enforcing their legal freedom.81

Howard’s repeated pleas for official explanations forced Limpo de Abreu to elaborate on what he thought better be left unsaid, that is, that the narrowness of the 1853 decree should be credited to the need to contain liberated African unrest in Brazil.

“According to Your ’s explanation,” wrote Howard, the bureaucratic loopholes kept untouched in 1853 followed “considerations about the public order, on what I very much agree with Your Excellency, with the goal of preventing the inconveniences that could occur in the event of the sudden and tumultuous emancipation of a large mass of Africans…” That did not explain, however, why the imperial government continued to avoid promoting the gradual emancipation of Africans. In

Minister Limpo de Abreu’s view, Consul Howard failed to understand the contradictory situation of liberated Africans because he could not grasp the distinction upon which their status rested. Echoing what had been implicit in the imperial government’s handling of the end of the slave trade to the country, Limpo de Abreu reminded Howard that emancipation and freedom were two different concepts. In Brazil, Africans had the right to the first, i.e., to a life under the “tutelage” of the state, a condition comparable to that of orphans, colonists, soldiers, and sailors.82 The British consul could not disagree more.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 81 ANRJ, IJ-999, 3 March 1854. Copy in Portuguese of a note sent by the British Consul in Rio de Janeiro, Henry Howard, to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu. 82 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 23 March 1854. Confidential dispatch from the Justice Department to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu. 47! ! ! Any contracts made with a colonist are done of his own free will, and generally, I believe, for a certain period of time and, even if when he leaves his home country he is resolved not to come back, not rarely does he do so. The period within which an orphan reaches legal age is defined and fixated by law. The soldier and the sailor either signs up or is recruited, according to the legislation of the country he belongs to, for a limited number of years, expiring which they enjoy full freedom.

But what is the condition of an African in the position of those employed in public departments?

He was dragged out, years ago, from his home country and transported to a distant foreign land. There, having been declared free is in all else a slave, and his emancipation is postponed and dependent upon reexportation. One can reasonably wonder if this reexportation will ever take place, when one considers that close to 23 years have gone by since the intention of exporting the Africans illegally introduced in the empire was announced in the 7 November 1831 law…83

Despite Limpo de Abreu’s fierce criticism, Consul Howard’s understanding of

Brazilian law was quite accurate and actually closer to what liberated Africans themselves wished to advocate. In the 1850s, as they watched their terms of apprenticeship start to expire for the first time with no transformation in sight, Africans increasingly labored to escape enslavement through their own means. Their activism was met by the tightening of state control following the elimination of concessions to private hirers. The imperial government combined the concentration of African recaptives under the controlled environment of public works with their scattering around the empire to engage in the economic development of the Brazilian hinterlands. In a country of continental proportions whose population had been concentrated on the Atlantic coast since colonial times, work in provincial projects meant harsh conditions for Africans and lack of accountability for the renters of their services.

In 1851, the president of reported on the safe arrival in the province of 98 Africans assigned to the Mining Society of Mato Grosso. Although the journey !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 83 ANRJ, IJ-999, 25 July 1854. Copy in Portuguese of a note sent by the British Consul in Rio de Janeiro, Henry Howard, to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu.! 48! ! ! from São Paulo to the “almost empty and hardly healthy backlands” of the Vila do

Diamantino had taken eleven months, the president remarked that the Africans seemed to had been treated well since only two had died of disease on the way there. For such a trying enterprise, the government had commissioned a soldier, the only “trustworthy person” who accepted the job, eventually making him the “Guard of liberated Africans” in the mining operation in Mato Grosso. The president thought that military discipline would come in handy and only worried about “the behavior of the Society’s subaltern employees toward the cited Africans, and moreover about their flight, either spontaneous or stemming from cajolement, or even theft.”84

Apart from ill treatment carried out by abusive superintendents and unhealthy working conditions in the mines of Mato Grosso, liberated Africans eventually faced the challenge of proving their case for emancipation in the face of poorly kept records. On

March 10, 1864, seventy-four liberated Africans along with eleven slaves from the Mato

Grosso Mining Society seized the opportunity to rise up when summoned to attend the inauguration of the new Agente (administrator) in the town of Vila Maria. Sent inland from the company headquarters in Rio de Janeiro, Bartolomeu Bossi prided himself of being a close friend to the Barão de Mauá, one of the company directors. The new director planned to take charge of local affairs by transferring the Africans from the harvesting of poaia85 back to the exploration of diamond mines in the Vila do

Diamantino.

Reproducing the disciplining ritual often performed for the gaze of administrators, the Africans lined up in front of Bossi’s house and demanded to talk to him. Custódio, a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 ANRJ, IJ1-679, 30 June 1852. Letter from the president of Mato Grosso, Augusto Leverger, to the Minister of Justice, Eusébio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso Câmara. 85 Root indigenous to Mato Grosso, known for its medicinal properties. 49! ! ! middle-aged man from Cabinda, acted as their spokesperson, insistently demanding “their alforrias (freedom letters) or emancipations:”

(…) on the occasion of being handed over according to orders he, the interrogated, and his companions decided not to accompany the new Director to Diamantino, because they understood their contracts to be concluded, and thus to no longer be subject to serve the Company. On this occasion, he, the interrogated, and his companions also told the new Director Bossi that, if they were slaves, he should give them order to go find their masters and, if they were africanos livres, that they requested their emancipation.86

The Africans refused to acknowledge Bossi’s authority because they saw themselves as workers whose terms of labor had been contracted with the Brazilian government. They argued that they had been hired to work for ten years, even though more than twelve had already gone by. These were the same men transported from São

Paulo to the Vila do Diamantino in 1851, who thirteen years later were not even sure whether they were being held legally as slaves or indentured workers. Local authorities at

Vila Maria immediately deemed the incident an insurrection attempt and had a police official and two soldiers escort the Africans to the capital Cuiabá to be interrogated by the provincial Chief of Police.

At the police station, Firmo José de Matos strongly reprimanded the Africans for halting the transference of power within the Mining Society. He interrogated at least four men and two women, all of whom were either of Cabinda or Congo nations. All of them mentioned the expiration of their “contract with the Government” as motivation to act, citing also rumors about Bossi’s cruelty and bad work conditions. The women complained bitterly of their constant dislocations, declaring that they were tired “of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 86 ANRJ, IJ1-684, 22 March 1864. Interrogatory of Custódio Cabinda at the police station in Cuiabá, Mato Groso. The incident is reminiscent of the well-known petition for emancipation drafted in 1846 by liberated Africans employed at the Royal Iron Factory of Ipanema. In the letter addressed to the Judge of Orphans of Sorocaba, they argued that they had been contracted to work for the Government for the period of ten years, however sixteen had already gone by. Jaime Rodrigues, “Ferro, trabalho e conflito.” 50! ! ! always walking with packages on their backs.”87 Matos ended up arresting two liberated

Africans, Custódio and Porfírio, as heads of what Bartolomeu Bossi had called a

“revolution of liberated Africans that can have an echo among the slaves,” before sending the remainder back with the agent to the Mindáo mines at the Vila do Diamantino.88 On their journey to the mines, protest broke out again. One African demanded the return of his two comrades held in prison in Cuiabá and incited the others to halt the trip if Bossi did not succeed in bringing them back. Known for his cruelty, Bossi punished his rebel worker with one hundred lashes and received the avowal of the president of Mato Grosso.

According to President Alexandre Miguel Albino de Carvalho, the insurgent

Africans did not yet have the right to freedom based on the 1853 decree. Having been assigned to the Mining Society on 28 December of 1851, their fourteen-year terms expired only on 16 August 1865. The Minister of Justice, Zacarias de Góes e

Vasconcelos concurred, and recommended that the Africans be kept by the Mining

Society under the supervision of a new government official.89 Defying the odds, however, the liberated Africans soon took their fates on their hands again. In October of 1864, fifteen of them ran away from the mines of Diamantino and handed themselves over to the Chief of Police. Perhaps aware of the new decree that declared all liberated Africans in the empire free, they requested their emancipation and protested agent Bartolomeu

Bossi’s vicious disciplining methods, which included shooting some of their fellow workers for suspicion of rebellious behavior. Chief Firmo de Matos actually ordered

Bossi’s prosecution for attempted murder and sent the fugitive Africans to the War and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 ANRJ, IJ1-684, 23 March 1864. Interrogatory of Teresa Cabinda at the police station in Cuiabá, Mato Grosso.! 88 ANRJ, IJ1-684, 17 March 1864. Report of events sent by Bartolomeu Bossi to Alexandre Miguel Albino de Carvalho, president of the province of Mato Grosso. 89 ANRJ, IJ1-684, 16 July 1864. Dispatch of the Minister of Justice, Zacarias de Góes e Vasconcelos. 51! ! ! Navy Arsenals of Cuiabá. The liberated Africans’ activism – or state of complete anarchy, as denounced by Bossi – contributed to the demise of the Mining Society of

Mato Grosso, which did not survive the chaos provoked by mismanagement and the loss of its main labor force.90

Sent away from the coast, other liberated Africans faced a constant danger of reenslavement inland. In 1852, the president of Maranhão described the situation of recaptives in his province as being worth of the emperor’s clemency. Private hirers to whom they had been assigned rarely paid for their services, and mistreatment was rampant by such concessionaries “who are rarely of good condition and do not distinguish them from the way they treat their slaves.” In a rare comment from a government official, President Alves recommended nothing less than the full emancipation of Africans because he identified their incomplete sense of autonomy as the root of their rebelliousness. “Aware of being free,” explained Alves, “they subject themselves of ill will to the work to which they are forced, and here it follows that either their concessionaries abandon them for not being able to take advantage of them or they punish them and they run away.”91 In the same year, the president of Piauí apprehended two liberated Africans at the event of their illegal sale and pleaded with the government to either remove them to the capital or to a different province. “Taken by ideas of freedom,” wrote president Saraiva, Africans refused to work in the provincial institutions and usually ran away only to be enslaved again.92

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 90 On this episode and the history of the Mining Society of Mato Grosso, see: Zilda Alves de Moura, Dos sertões da África para os do Brasil: os africanos livres da Sociedade de Mineração de Mato Grosso (Alto Paraguai-Diamantino, 1851-1865) (Tese de Doutorado, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, 2014). 91 ANRJ, IJ1-221, 20 July 1852. Letter from the Presidente of Maranhão, Manoel de Souza Pinto de Alves to the Minister of Justice, José Idelfonso de Souza Ramos. 92 ANRJ, IJ1-244, 29 March 1852. Letter from the Presidente of Piauí, José Antônio Saraiva, to the Minister of Justice, Eusébio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso Câmara. 52! ! ! Reenslavement was a risk even to those liberated Africans in government custody.

In 1850, rumors circulated in Rio de Janeiro stating that the president of São Paulo was handing out freedom letters to slaves in his province. The rumors had their root in

Vicente Lins da Mata’s conduct in the case of five africanos boçais (slaves born in

Africa) apprehended at the Freguesia do Ó and kept at the São Paulo’s jail. Motta sent three of them to work at the Botanic Gardens and set the other two up with private hirers.

Upon news of the arrangement, an individual claimed the Africans as his slaves yet no official petition to the government was filed. Three months later, Mata resented that four of the five Africans had already run away or been stolen by their alleged master.93 Since emancipation did not mean much, it was common to find recaptured Africans in maroon communities across the empire. In 1854, Manoel ran away from work at the road being built in Paraibuna, in the province of Minas Gerais, and was later arrested at a in the outskirts of São João Del Rey. Authorities sent him to the Botanic Gardens where they thought Manoel would be better disciplined.94

Other Africans did not run away but raised daily challenges to labor arrangements that curtailed their autonomy after their apprenticeship terms expired. Francisco da Rosa

Quintanilha, an experienced hirer of liberated Africans, considered Maria Luiza Rebolo a rebel while she preferred to describe him as someone who was stealing her labor.

Emancipated from the ship Angélica, she had been working for Quintanilha as a washerwoman since1836 and decided to petition for her emancipation after 21 years of service.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 93 ANRJ, IJ1-507, 13 February 1850. Letter fromVicente Lins da Mata, presidente of São Paulo, to the Minister of Justice, Eusébio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso Câmara. 94 ANRJ, IJ1-618, 30 April 1854. Letter from the president of Minas Gerais, José Ricardo do Sá Rego, to the Minister of Justice, Eusébio de Queiroz Coutinho Mattoso Câmara. 53! ! ! (...) her behavior in the last six years has been really bad, beyond the superlative, inasmuch as she goes out at any time of the day, comes when she sees fit, without reverence or any justification, and if anyone says anything about that, she goes to the kitchen screaming so loud that I can very well hear, all kinds of things spring out of her mouth, giving me the epithet Thief of her services, and I know she does so in whichever tavern he goes to, about what, given my age and consummate prudence, I have not done what she deserves: she works more for herself than for the household, that is, to iron and starch the clothes, for what she makes good bucks; I have already thought about doing the same I did with another African named Marçal, whom Your Excellency may remember well, dropping her off at the House of Correction, requiring a waiver for her services (…)95

Quintanilha further explained that he hadn’t given up Maria Luiza’s services yet because her two sons had been raised as if they were part of his family. The oldest,

Firmino, had been tutored by Quintanilha’s son, priest Francisco do Coração de Jesus

Quintanilha, who “taught him the Christian Doctrine,” had Firmino assist with mass, and had recently bound him up as an apprentice to a master tailor. Doing away with Maria

Luiza would apparently destroy the ties of affection and deference Quintanilha had created with the two boys. His experience with their mother, though, threatened Maria

Luiza to end up like Marçal, the other liberated African cited by Quintanilha, whom he sent to the House of Correction under accusations of theft and alcoholism.

Liberated Africans usually had to petition for their emancipation more than once and their success often rested on their ability to uncover the strategies used by hirers to secure their services beyond fourteen years. In 1857, Dionísia Angola submitted an angry plea for her emancipation after her hirer Joaquina de Almeida submitted “false information” to the Chief of Police the first time. “Ungrateful for the good services”

Dionísia had provided for sixteen years, Joaquina had sworn to be poor and to need the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 95 ANRJ, GIFI 6D-136, 22 July 1857. Letter from Francisco da Rosa Quintanilha to the Sheriff of Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Roiz da Cunha. See also Maria Rebola, Petição de Emancipação, 17 June 1857.

! 54! ! ! money Dionísia made every day as a washerwoman in Rio de Janeiro. On her second try,

Dionísia explained that Joaquina had five slaves of different ages and complained about unacceptable conditions of work, as her hirer did not clothe or feed her and forced

Dionísia to go out to work even when it was raining or when she was sick.96

Victorina hardly needed to explain how her alleged mistress had managed to keep her as a slave for nearly fifteen years when she walked naked into the city of Jaicós, province of Piauí, in March of 1860. Victorina had just run away from the Tamanduá plantation and showed signs of excruciating punishment in the hands of Honória Maria de Jesus Lima. Scars left by a scourge and worms covered Victorina’s skinny body head to toe, her fingernails swollen and torn after being hit repeatedly with a ferule. One could still see blood and the obvious consequences of starvation.97 Upon her entrance in Jaicós,

Victorina bumped into an “old woman” who suggested she go seek the protection of the local Curator of Orphans and Judge, Captain Belisário José da Silva Conrado. Judge

Conrado immediately requested a physical examination and recommended that she be kept under judicial custody.98

Victorina had been kidnapped off the coast of Angola and unlawfully brought to

Salvador, Bahia, in 1845. There, slave traders dressed her as a man and forced her to accompany them to the backlands of Piauí. Victorina’s fate would have been a quite common one for Africans illegally imported into Brazil at the time if it wasn’t for what happened next. Once in Piauí, motivated by their “gold thirst,” the traders sold Victorina to a slave of Constância Maria de Jesus, who immediately gave Victorina up to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 96 ANRJ, GIFI 6D-136. Dionísia Angola, Petição de Emancipação, 1857. 97 ANRJ, IJ1-713, 21 March 1860. Confidential letter from Belizário José da Silva Conrado to the president of the province of Bahia, Diogo Velho Cavalcante de Albuquerque.! 98 ANRJ, IJ1-713, 4 July 1860. Victorina Angola, Petição de Emancipação. 55! ! ! Constância as payment for her manumission. Baptized as a twelve-year-old creole or

Brazilian-born slave on November 1st, 1845, Victorina became a slave in the eyes of the law the first time. Following Constância’s death, her status was again upheld during the execution of her will, in which Victorina was priced at 300$000 réis as a creole slave and designated as Honória’s property.99

“This woman, Sir, who just has the appearance of a human being, crossed for my having the fragility of giving birth to a child from one of her brothers, applied to me the most barbarian and atrocious punishments,” stated Victorina on her petition for imperial protection. Victorina had arrived pregnant at Jaicós and necessitated the intercession of an elder citizen to break the resistance of Curator Conrado to place her under someone else’s care. Seeing her body covered in worms, the Curator had denied her help at first sight. Aside from Victorina’s “deplorable state,” Belisário Conrado feared the consequences of taking her up under his protection in a county where most wealthy families owned Africans imported illegally into Brazil after 1831. Planters from the

Ribeira do Canindé - including relatives of the authorities responsible for judging

Victorina’s case – had threatened to resort to violence if their “slaves” were manumitted.

Those “improvised masters,” as Victorina called them, worried that word about her right to emancipation would inspire other Africans in the same circumstances to seek legal protection.100

After much commotion, Curator Conrado sent Victorina to the house of Priest

Claro Mendes de Carvalho. Pregnant as she was “from the brother of that beast,”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 99 Ibid. 100 ANRJ, IJ1-713, 2 April 1860. Letter from Belizário José da Silva Conrado to the president of the province of Bahia, Diogo Velho Cavalcante de Albuquerque.! 56! ! ! Victorina ended up suffering an abortion as a result of Honória’s chastisement.101

Conrado vowed to criminally persecute Honória for abuse and causing an abortion but his actions were halted at every step by the networks of patronage that had protected slaveholders in Piauí. On a last bid for her freedom, Victorina had appealed to the imperial government all the while cognizant of the hurdles she faced in Jaicós. “How will

I be able to prove in view of such documents that I am a free African if the individuals who own my hapless brothers belong to the Family of Judges supposed to decide over my cause?” The African, however, received no sympathy from higher authorities and the result of her petition for emancipation is unknown. In August of 1860, a dispatch from the Ministry of Justice revealed with rare clarity that, ten years after the abolition of the slave trade, the government still aired on the side of caution in cases of illegal slavery, choosing to uphold the customary rights of slaveholders:

Regarding the judicial declaration, about the proposed action for the freedom requested, I think that the Government will find it dangerous to set a precedent to protect any suitor. I find it beyond doubt that a Government action that animated and prodded the Judiciary to enter in such causes would be impolitic in the country’s current circumstances – and due to the fact, in case the Supplicant deserves special protection from Your Imperial Majesty, the only existent resource to free her from the atrocities that await her in the hands of her mistress, would be to secretly have her, and through Police intervention, manumitted for the amount of 300$000 in which she was appraised.102

Despite all documents presented by Victorina and the fact that people in Jaicós somehow seemed to recognize her as African, the Ministry of Justice recommended that the buy her out of slavery rather than go through the motions of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 101 ANRJ, IJ1-713, 4 July 1860. As of 1860, Victorina already had five children whose status is unclear. According to the law, they were supposed to be free (“ingênuos”), but since Victorina had been baptized as a slave, their children were probably also kept in bondage. The denial of emancipation to a female liberated African meant the enslavement of generations of free people of color. Romualdo, Ana, Balbina, Jerominha, and Francisco appear in judicial documents as being in the hands of (“em poder de”) two planters in Jaicós. Victorina Angola, Petição de Emancipação. 102 ANRJ, IJ-713, 20 August 1860. Dispatch to the Ministry of Justice signed by Fernando Fernadez. 57! ! ! emancipating Victorina for being a victim of slave trading. It was apparently safer to reaffirm her as a slave than to give weight to abolitionist legislation. Yet, she proceeded as if aware of her rights as a liberated African in Brazil. Victorina ran away from the plantation where she worked as soon as she completed fourteen years of service and pleaded with the government more than once to look into the situation of her “brothers” also held in bondage.

Policies regarding the suppression of the slave trade to Brazil gained a different interpretation in the hands of those concerned. Liberated Africans borrowed from them tools to secure their emancipation or arrange for a more autonomous life during their apprenticeship terms. Both in 1853 and 1864, following the two imperial emancipation decrees, waves of slaves claiming liberated African status took the fight to the courts, petitioning for freedom on the terms of the law. Neither free nor slave, others struggled for autonomy at the places where they worked, employing slaves’ notions of resistance and negotiation.103 For several Africans, their special status meant the entitlement to claim certain rights, with the expectation that benevolent higher authorities would act as their protectors. With that in mind, João knocked on the door of the British Legation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro on the evening of March 19, 1854. Having just escaped from Antônio Luiz da Costa’s house, he still showed signs of severe flogging and the tight grip of iron shackles on his ankles when he requested to see ambassador Henry

Howard. To Howard’s surprise, João addressed him in perfect English, saying that he was a free man for British authorities had granted him emancipation at the Cape of Good

Hope some years ago.

Language was an important tool of identification and social control in nineteenth- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 103 Conrad, “Neither Slave nor Free,” 50-70. 58! ! ! century Brazil. Since the 1832 decree that regulated enforcement of the 1831 abolition law, authorities used knowledge of Portuguese as a criterion to distinguish newly arrived

Africans (Africanos boçais) from those already acclimated to the country (Africanos ladinos) and, therefore, suspected of being slaves. The measure served abolitionists and those keen on enslaving black laborers, for even scarce knowledge of Portuguese could qualify an African as a captive.104 In his interview with ambassador Howard, João recounted that he was originally from Benguela, a port-city located on the central coast of present-day Angola, where he was kidnapped as a child and embarked on a to

Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil, João became Joaquim, the slave of Antônio Augusto de

Oliveira. In 1837, his master, a transatlantic slave trader himself, took João back to Africa aboard the merchant ship Congresso. Before Oliveira could reach the intended destination, however, a British intercepted the Congresso on the African coast and hauled it all the way down to the adjudication tribunals of the Cape of Good Hope.105

The question of naming brought liberated Africans’ experiences even closer to those of slaves. In the case of João, who didn’t get his emancipation until later in life, his renaming probably occurred when he was baptized as a slave in Brazil during the 1830s, as this was a typical way for masters to assert ownership over Africans illegally brought into the country. Other liberated Africans usually received Portuguese names at the moment of their first emancipation after capture on a slave ship, from either the clerk who recorded their signs or the priest who presided over their Christian baptism. Their

African names were never officially recorded and, as in the examples discussed in this

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 104 “Decreto de 12 de abril de 1832 – regulamenta a lei de 7 de novembro de 1831,” Coleção de Leis do Império do Brasil, 1832, 100-1; Laura do Carmo, and Ivana Stolze Lima. História Social Da Língua Nacional 2: Diáspora Africana (Rio de Janeiro: Edições Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2014). 105 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 20 March 1854. Copy in Portuguese of a note sent by the British Consul in Rio de Janeiro, Henry Howard, to the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu. 59! ! ! section, only resurfaced when Africans themselves asserted their old identities when interrogated by the Brazilian police. Several liberated Africans used multiple names throughout their lives, sometimes to evade identification and pass as free persons.

Records containing lists of the victims of the slave trade resemble inventories of slaveholders; liberated Africans were listed by only their first names, gender, age, their place of origin in Africa, a registration number, the ship from which they were rescued, physical description, and the names of their hirers/masters or their places of work.

João emerged into “liberated African” status at the Cape colony via the decision of the British Admiralty Court that found the Congress to be in violation of international conventions for the abolition of the slave trade. He became a legally free yet involuntary laborer who was forced under the tutelage of employers for a fourteen-year period of apprenticeship. As João joined the new labor force that helped abate the impact of British abolitionism in the Cape colony, he worked for several British authorities.106 He recalled especially the eight years spent at the houses of Judge Mansell and Mr. Ker Hamilton. In

1851, João told ambassador Howard, he decided to search for work in Rio de Janeiro and took a placement on the British ship Black Squall.

Despite the Brazilian 1831 law that prohibited importation of slaves into Brazilian territory, João did not enjoy life as a free man upon entrance in the empire. Once back in

Rio de Janeiro, a “comrade” stole his freedom certificate and shortly thereafter he ended

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 106 C.C. Saunders, “Between Slavery and Freedom: The Importation of Prize Negroes to the Cape in the Aftermath of Emancipation,” Kronos, 9 (1984), 36-43 and “Liberated Africans in the Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 18:2 (1985), 223- 39; R. L. Watson, “Prize Negroes and the Development of Racial Attitudes in the Cape Colony,” South African Historical Journal, 43 (Nov 2000), 138-61; Patrick Harries, “Slavery and Abolition: Cape Town and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” Slavery and Abolition, 34:4 (2013), 579-97. 60! ! ! up arrested as a fugitive slave.107 The city police did not give any credence to João’s account of his trajectory, and placed him with Antônio Luiz Costa, a friend of his former master Oliveira. Strangely, Costa took no time in deciding to sell João away from the capital of Brazil. He soon sent his alleged slave to Arrozal, a town 120 kilometers away from Rio, in the company of a slave trader. Nevertheless, the sale came to an unexpected halt. During the auction, João declared to be free, talked to prospective buyers about his past in the Cape, and demonstrated fluency in English as proof of his status. Exposure of his story finally resulted in the flogging that prompted João to seek British protection in

Rio de Janeiro.

Contrasting with the police handling of the case, Ambassador Howard believed

João’s story from the outset - Mr. Ker Hamilton, one of João’s employers at the Cape of

Good Hope, was coincidently an acquaintance of his. Soon after Howard met João that evening, the consul wrote a note to the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs demanding explanations. Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu responded with the summoning of the

Rio’s Chief of Police, José Mattoso de Andrade Câmara, to head further investigations.

Antônio Luiz da Costa’s version of João’s trajectory was, of course, quite different from what Mr. Howard had learned to be true. In his deposition before Rio’s Chief of Police,

Costa recalled having purchased “Joaquim” from his friend Antônio Augusto de Oliveira

Botelho in 1837. Joaquim was said to have ran away from him shortly thereafter, returning to his house only two years prior to the deposition by the hands of a pedestre108

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 107 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 20 March 1854. Copy of note from British Consul Henry Howard to Minister Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu.! 108Companhias de Pedestres were military legions organized in the Brazilian provinces with the utmost purpose of apprehending fugitive slaves. Its members wore uniforms and carried arms resembling regular infantry troops, and generally worked under the supervision of the Chief of Police in capital cities. José Alípio Goulart, Da Fuga ao Suicídio (Rio de Janeiro: Conquista, 1972). 61! ! ! to whom Costa paid 60$000. In this occasion, Joaquim allegedly told Costa he had escaped on a ship headed to England, later returning to Rio’s port on a different vessel.

One evening, “pedestres” must have found Joaquim sleeping in a shipwreck on the Praia da Saúde, and arrested him on the presumption that he was a fugitive slave. Since then, affirmed Costa, Joaquim had sunk into alcoholism, and thence his attempt to sell him away at Arrozal.

Costa accused João of having spoiled his sale in Arrozal because he wanted to remain in Rio. After the failed auction, he brought Joaquim back to the capital and punished him for disobedience. Fifteen days later, however, Joaquim ran away again, this time to seek asylum at the British Legation. Only after that, Costa added, did he learn that

Joaquim saw himself as free “due to having been to England and traveled on English ships,” something he contradictorily swore to ignore.109 Despite all his claims to ownership, though, Costa was never able to produce Joaquim’s bill of sale and ended up complying with the Chief of Police’s demand to sign a document giving up his alleged property rights over Joaquim.

The Judge of Orphans of Rio de Janeiro granted João his definitive freedom certificate in that same year of 1854. João’s case can be counted among the few that enjoyed a quick turnout in the hands of Brazilian authorities all the while integrating the long list of never prosecuted accusations of illegal enslavement. The Brazilian Minister of Justice, José Tomas Nabuco de Araújo, decided in August not to indict Antônio Luís da Costa for keeping a liberated African in bondage. Nabuco considered Costa’s culpability dubious, since “there was no law in Brazil that rendered free those African

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 109 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 5 April 1854. Deposition of Antônio Luís da Costa before Rio’s Chief of Police, José Mattoso de Andrade Câmara. 62! ! ! slaves who had fled to a foreign country and then returned” to the empire. Therefore, although cognizant of João’s testimony, Nabuco preferred to believe Costa’s version that he was a fugitive slave rather than a recaptive freed on British soil.110

The Brazilian government’s final decision on the case outraged Ambassador

Henry Howard, who condemned the lack of indictment as a grave flaw in the process of combatting the illegal slave trade to Brazil. By the time João’s story came to light,

Howard had already gotten used to filing complaints with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over dozens of similar cases of illegal enslavement. Sam’s trajectory is another case in question. Originally from Sierra Leone, Sam became Benjamin in Brazil. Like João, he sought British help to escape bondage. In June of 1856, he requested to see Henry Walter

Orendon, the consular official assigned to Maranhão. Contending to be a British citizen,

Sam told Mr. Orendon that he had been stolen off the coast of Africa in 1841 when working on the English ship Desert. Two men called Caetano and Honório had snatched him away from the ship on the way from Sierra Lione to Bissau, and forced him to embark along with many other Africans to the northeast of Brazil.

In Maranhão, Sam was sold to Captain Josué Jansen Muller, who had him work

“in the City” of São Luís for many years until Sam spoke to the British consul for the first time. When Muller discovered that Sam had contacted the British, he dragged him to the countryside where he was stationed during the Balaiada Revolt. Only after Muller’s death did Sam return to São Luís under the orders of his new mistress Theresa, Muller’s wife, who employed him as a hire-out slave. British consul Orendon found Sam’s account

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 110 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 30 August 1854. Copy of a letter from José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo, Minister of Justice, to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Similar decisions were made regarding the case of free blacks from and captured on the border and sold as slaves in Brazil. Keila Grinberg, “The Two Enslavements of Rufina: Slavery and International Relations on the Southern Border of Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” HAHR 96:2 (2016), 259-290. 63! ! ! trustworthy from the onset, for his English, “although not pure, shows that he spoke it before learning Portuguese, as well as that he has forgotten his native language.”111

Orendon’s complaint to the Imperial Government prompted the intervention of

Maranhão’s Chief of Police in Sam’s case. Interrogated in São Luís, Sam and Theresa

Jansen Lima Muller offered different understandings of his life with the Mullers. Theresa described her slave Benjamin as an incorrigible runaway who had never put his training as a ship caulker to good use. Instead of taking advantage of his occupation, Benjamin often escaped to work as a stevedore on the ships of a man called Sampaio, alongside other blacks “who like Benjamin also spoke English.”112 According to Theresa, Benjamin already spoke Portuguese when her husband bought him. Sam, on the other hand, remembered everything about his capture in Africa and denied knowing Portuguese upon his arrival in Maranhão. People “from his homeland” knew him as Sam. Before setting foot on the coast of Brazil during the administration of “President Lima”, he remarked, he had never been a slave.113 Quite on the contrary, he had worked for wages on many

British ships, having traveled to the ports of “London, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dublin, and other places in England and the coast of Africa.” 114

Theresa Muller did not have a bill of sale to prove ownership of Sam. All she was able to produce was the inventory of her deceased husband, in which a slave named

Benjamin had been bequeathed to her. The documentation from the Ministry of Foreign !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 111 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 4 July 1856. Memorandum received by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from Henry Walter Orendon, British Consul in Maranhão. 112 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 18 October 1856. Testimony of Theresa Jansen Lima Muller to the Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Marcelino Nunes. 113 Sam probably refers here to Luís Alves de Lima e Silva, President and Commander-in-Chief of the in Maranhão during the Balaiada. The future Duque de Caxias was nominated by the Regency Government to quench the liberal revolt in the province, where he arrived in 1840. 114 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 16 October 1856. Testimony of Benjamin/Sam to the Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro, Antônio Marcelino Nunes. Sam’s experience is reminiscent of the trials of Rufino depicted in Reis, Gomes e Carvalho, O alufá Rufino. 64! ! ! Affairs does not provide us with a final decision on this case but it is reasonable to imagine that Sam got his emancipation based on the time he had worked for the Mullers.

According to the British diplomats involved in his case, if Sam had ever been to any

British territory he was therefore entitled to freedom.

British pressure to guarantee the liberty of Africans like João and Sam continued even after a September 24, 1864 imperial decree liberated all Africans in Brazil at the fourteen-year anniversary of the 1853 decree. Despite its sweeping provisions - which abolished the payment of procedural fees and included even runaway freedpeople who were supposed to be summoned through the press to receive their emancipation letters - the measure just remedied an already unsustainable situation. In 1868, British

Ambassador George Buckley Matthew notified the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs of yet another case of illegal enslavement. The sheriff of Jaguari, a small town in the province of Minas Gerais, had been holding an African couple and their three children in bondage since 1849.115 Likewise, in his yearly report, the Brazilian Minister of Justice painted a dim picture of the experience of liberated Africans who had survived that far into the century. “It still has not been possible to destroy the dreadful effects of the slave trade with the emancipation of all liberated Africans,” mused José de Alencar. Of 11,008 free Africans listed by a government survey “of little importance” carried out during the

1860s, more individuals had died (3,871), than received freedom letters (2,534). An additional 191 Africans were marked as missing and a stunning 3,308 were unaccounted for. As we have seen, it was difficult to prove the identities of African freedpeople due to their many names, lack of proper recordkeeping on the part of authorities, and frequent

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 115 ANRJ, IJ1-1004, 15 October 1868. Confidential letter from George Buckley Matthew to José Maria da Silva Paranhos. 65! ! ! transfers among different private renters. The 1868 report also pointed to the failure of the imperial government’s old project of sending recaptives back to Africa: a total of only

748 individuals had been repatriated.116

The Quilombolas of Montes Áureos

The gold-bearing lands of Maranhão looked nothing like Rio de Janeiro, the city from where so many British representatives broadcast their protest against the enslavement of African freedpeople. Located on the eastern extreme of the , on the border of the province of Pará, they housed some of the largest in nineteenth-century Brazil. Known since colonial times, the area of dense equatorial forest spread along three river systems, known as the Gurupi, the Maracassumé, and the

Turiaçú. The rivers originated in the low hills of central Maranhão, the ancient native land of the Urubú Indians, and flew north some 180 kilometers to empty into the Atlantic

Ocean. In their course, nature-carved groves and hamlets attracted African-descended people escaping from slavery mostly from riverine sugar and cotton plantations.117

Runaway slaves coming especially from West Africa were the first ones to extract gold from the riverbeds of Turiaçú in the seventeenth century.118 European explorers and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 BRASIL, Relatório do Minstério da Justiça do Anno 1868 Apresentado `a Assembléa Geral Legislativa na 1a Sessão da 14a Legislatura pelo Respectivo Ministro e Secretário de Estado José Martiniano de Alencar, Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Progresso, 1869. 117 C. Marques. Dicionário Histórico-Geográfico da Província do Maranhão (Maranhão: Typ. do Frias, 1870). 118 Historian Flávio Gomes has written extensively about the long history of settlement of the province of Maranhão by runaway slave communities. See: Gomes, A Hidra e os Pântanos. On the history of slavery in nineteenth-century Maranhão, see also: Maria Januária Vilela dos Santos, A Balaiada e a Insurreição De Escravos no Maranhão (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Ática, 1983); Matthias Röhrig Assunção, “Quilombos maranhenses,” In: João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes. Liberdade Por Um Fio: História Dos Quilombos No Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 1996); Manoel dos Santos Neto, O Negro No Maranhão (Sao Luís, Brasil: Clara Editora, 2004); Mundinha Araújo, Insurreição De Escravos Em Viana, 66! ! ! later a diverse group of Brazilian miners repeatedly tested their luck in what is today the region of Montes Áureos, yet their mining attempts never really prospered in the middle of a closed jungle castigated by seasonal rains and populated by peoples hostile to encroachment by outsiders. As elsewhere in Brazil, in Maranhão had to contend with the pressures of inland colonization and the permanent risk of re-enslavement. Over the nineteenth century, they carefully balanced the development of economic ties along the rivers with the need for military readiness, as planters and local authorities launched successive expeditions to eliminate their settlements. In the long term, however, familiarity with the terrain became the greatest source of protection for the quilombos encircling the “mines of Maracassumé.” Knowledge of the location of gold deposits, escape routes, and the lines of informal trade through the forest gave them leverage to create networks extending into slave quarters, the outskirts of urban areas like Santa

Helena and Viana, and, as we will see, even to into the headquarters of robust mining enterprises.119

Despite their numbers, the creative act of forming settlements at a mineral-rich frontier of the Brazilian empire placed maroons and indigenous peoples at constant danger. In the 1850s, the quilombos of west Maranhão had assumed such importance that the provincial president thought it necessary to enlist the imperial government’s help. In

1853, Eduardo Olympio Machado petitioned the Ministry of Justice for funds to support a military expedition to extinguish the Quilombo of Paraná, the “new ” established between the Gurupi and Turiaçú rivers. “It is certain that these quilombos not

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1867 (São Luís: Edição AVL, 2006), 433-466; Marcelo Cheche Galves, Yuri Costa, and Agostinho Júnior Holanda Coe, O Maranhão Oitocentista (Imperatriz, MA: Ética; São Luís, MA: Editora UEMA, 2009). 119 Yuko Miki, “Fleeing into Slavery: The Insurgent Geographies of Brazilian Quilombolas (Maroons), 1880-1881,” The Americas, 68:4, April 2012, 495-528. 67! ! ! only threaten the security of two Provinces but also the properties of a great number of

Your Majesty’s subjects. It is, therefore, an issue that belongs more to the General

Government, than to the Provincial.” Machado went as far as to compare maroon activity in the hinterlands of Maranhão to the history of marronage in Surinam, warning minister

José Idelfonso de Souza Ramos of the dire consequences of state negligence. “For not having taken into proper consideration subject of such magnitude in a country where slavery exists,” remarked Machado, the Dutch Government found itself forced “to recognize as independent republics the runaway slave colonies of Suca, Sarameca, and

Cotica, in the proximity of our northern border.”120

Thus, more than the threat to public order, authorities and plantation owners in the

Gurupi resented runaway slave communities for effectively laying a claim to that portion of Brazilian territory. Their topological and mineralogical knowledge had opened a vast area of the Amazonian jungle to economic exploitation without the assistance of the state.

Later in 1853, Machado decided to tackle the problem head-on by sending Santa

Helena’s sheriff, Captain Guilherme Leopoldo de Freitas, to destroy the “quilombo of the mines or of Maracassumé.” Freitas led the Infantry Battalion in a battle against more than two hundred slaves armed to their teeth, killing ten maroons and gravely injuring many more.121Although partly successful, the raid did little to make the Gurupi safer for state- led development. More than sixty maroons evaded capture by disappearing into the jungle and Machado was convinced they would settle in again on a different site. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 120 ANRJ, IJ1-221, 7 February 1853. Letter from the president of Maranhão, Eduardo Olympio Machado, to the Minister of Justice, José Idelfonso de Souza Ramos. Machado is referring here to the treaty signed by the Saramaka maroons with the Dutch Crown in 1762, which recognized them as free persons and granted them political sovereignty over the lands they inhabited. Slavery was only abolished in Surinam in 1863. Richard Price, First Time: The Historical Vision of An Afro-American People (Baltimore: Johns Hopskins University Press, 1983). 121 ANRJ, IJ1-221, 19 September 1853. Letter from the president of Maranhão, Eduardo Olympio Machado, to the Minister of Justice, Luís Antônio Barbosa. 68! ! ! Marronage, after all, thrived on movement and flexibility. The quilombos of Maranhão had resisted extinction for centuries by temporarily disbanding only to later reconstitute themselves as stronger communities in new locations.

Weakened but not defeated, the quilombos of Gurupi also inspired other subjugation strategies. In November 26, 1853, an imperial decree created the Military

Colony of São Pedro de Alcântara, one among twenty-one military colonies established across the country during the 1850s. As a hub for domesticating the Brazilian heartlands, the colony was exemplary of the imperial government’s early efforts to secure Brazilian borders and claim authority over the country’s peoples. 122 In 1867, at the height of its occupation, the Colony of Gurupi housed 224 colonists who lived in isolation under military discipline.123 Thus smaller than most of the surrounding quilombos, the Colony would prove to be a failure, but served president Machado as one more argument to convince outsiders to invest in the development of western Maranhão during the 1850s.

Hence, it was no coincidence that formal investment in the gold reserves of

Montes Áureos was concurrent with a crackdown on slave flight and maroon economies in Maranhão. In 1854, the mines of Marassumé finally attracted the attention of the Baron of Mauá, one of Brazil’s most renowned capitalists. With the blessing of provincial president Machado, he sent a commission of technocrats to Montes Áureos to evaluate is mining potential. Headed by the German engineers Jorge Henrique Crammer and

Augusto Schrammer, the commission proceeded to the Gurupi under military protection, and was impressed by the scale of local maroon peasant economies. Crammer and

Schrammer’s optimistic rendering of the economic possibilities of the Gurupi prompted !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 122 Regina Helena Martins de Faria, “Civilizar e desenvolver: duas faces da intervencão military em áreas internas do Brasil. Séculos XIX e XX,” CLIO: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica 29:2 (2011). 123 Gomes, A Hidra e os pântanos, 275. 69! ! ! Mauá to form the Companhia de Mineração Maranhense.124 The company employed black slaves, Portuguese, and Chinese immigrants to work the gold mines at Montes

Áureos, creating a semi-industrial operation with steam engines brought from afar.

Rumors also circulated more than once about the use of contraband African slaves.

The enterprise fell short of turning out a huge profit. The reasons for the company’s disarticulation are unclear, but the death of president Machado in 1855, mismanagement and, moreover, remarked activity on the part of quilombolas and indigenous peoples in Maracassumé seemed to have played a part. In the end of 1857, the

Companhia de Mineração Maranhense sold one third of its mineral rights to Montes

Áureos to a public company listed on the London Stock Exchange, the Montes Aureos

Gold Mining Company.125 The Barão de Mauá invested in the seven-year venture, and

English mining engineers soon arrived in Turiassú to coordinate the importation of machinery and the construction of two earth damns to provide the mines with a reliable water supply.126

To direct its operations in Brazil, the Montes Aureos Company hired German engineer Gustavo Julio Guther, who was no newcomer to gold-bearing lands in the tropics. He had amassed vast experience surveying the dense forests of Nova Granada,

Venezuela, , and Africa in past mining ventures. After spending two years in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 124 Rood, “Plantation Technocrats.” 125 On the history of British mining investments in Brazil, see: João Pandiá Calógeras, As Minas do Brasil e sua Legislação (Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional, 1904-1905); Graham, Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil; W. Culver and C. Greaves, eds, Miners and Mining in the Americas (London, Dover, NH: ManchesterUniversity Press, 1985); Libby, Transformação e trabalho, 257-333 and Trabalho escravo e capital estrangeiro;” Eakin, British Enterprise in Brazil; Aires da Mata Machado Filho, O negro e o garimpo em Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte:Ed. Itatiaia; São Paulo: EDUSP, 1985); Childs, “Master- slave rituals of power;” Richard Francis Burton, Explorations of the Highlands of the Brazil: With a Full Account of the Gold and Diamond Mines. Also, Canoeing Down 1500 Miles of the Great River São Francisco, From Sabará to the Sea (London: Tinsley brothers, 1869) and Viagem Do Rio De Janeiro a Morro Velho (Brasília: Senado Federal, 2001); Evans, “Brazilian Gold, Cuban Copper;” Campbell, “Making Abolition Brazilian.”! 126 David Clearly, Anatomy of the Amazonian Gold Rush (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990), 36-7.! 70! ! ! Maranhão mapping gold deposits in Turiaçú, the strength of Gunther’s report convinced the British to lease the mines of Maracassumé. The mounting of operations was challenging from the outset. The construction of roads to the mines on the margins of the rivers Sapucaia and Maracassumé, for example, required the creation of 24 wood bridges over smaller water springs. Additionally, just to keep the Maracassumé open for navigation and make way for the machinery arriving from Britain, slaves had to clear the river from wood debris annually.

Among all the difficulties, though, superintendent Guther resented the presence of runaway slaves the most. In the view of the administrator, fugitive slaves could be considered a threat to both the security and the profitability of Montes Áureos, for their small-scale mining in the Turiaçú was the equivalent of “subtracting gold” from company lands.127 Nevertheless, instead of declaring war on the nearby quilombos, Guther decided to bring slaves to his side. In his wanderings through the forest in the early 1860s, the

German engineer encountered “escaped blacks” from the quilombo of São Vicente do

Céu several times. Although the maroons walked in groups of six or eight, boasting rifles, spears, and knives, Guther approached them tactfully, laying his weapons down on the ground before initiating any conversation.

Guther introduced himself to the maroons as someone who searched for information, a scientist, and only after being shown some gold dust did he “advise” and

“exhort” them to forgo their clandestine way of life. On one occasion, slaves revealed that they had never approached the company at Montes Áureos because they were constantly being chased by authorities and had lost many of their peers as a result. Guther stayed clear from discussing state policy, instead offering maroons to contact their !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 127 Ibid. 71! ! ! masters in the interest of avoiding punishment upon their return to the Turiaçú plantations.128

According to Guther, most slaves eventually accepted his offer on the condition that they not be forcefully given back to their masters. With the acquiescence of

Maranhão’s government, Guther went on to write to local planters and negotiate the transfer of ownership rights. As long as the British spared provincial coffers from squandering money in more failed military expeditions, the government was willing to give carte blanche to the Montes Áureos Gold Mining Company in their dealings with the quilombos.129 There were, however, unintended consequences.

The maroons of west Maranhão placed their interactions with the Montes Áureos company in the context of Anglo-Brazilian relations in the nineteenth century. In May of

1863, the director of the Military Colony of Gurupi wrote to the president of Maranhão about the surfacing of “extravagant ideas” among slaves regarding “the latest English

Question.”130 Altino Lelles de Moraes Rego believed fugitive slaves who lived in quilombos located between the Colony and the mines operated by the British were convincing other slaves that the English would soon emancipate them.131 Referring to the recruitment carried out by Guther, Rego explained:

Slaves who were found this way, communicated in person with others still in the plantations and with whom they carried out commerce in secret so that they be provided in their needs. This communication produced the effect of, in a very short span of time,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 128 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 9 May 1863. Letter from Antônio Salles do Rego, Diretor of the Military Colony of São Pedro de Alcântara do Gurupi, to Antônio Manoel Campos de Mello, President of the Province of Maranhão. 129 “Relatorio que á Assemblea Legislativa Provincial do Maranhão apresentou o 2.o vice-presidente da provincia, desembargador Miguel J. Ayres do Nascimento, por occasião da installação da mesma Assemblea no dia 3 de maio de 1864” (São-Luís, Typ. Constitucional de I.J. Ferreira, 1864), 40. 130 ANRJ, IJ1-230, 11 May 1863. Letter from the president of the province of Maranhão, Antônio Manoel Campos de Mello, to the Ministry of Justice, João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu. 131 ANRJ, IJ1-228, 23 September 1861. Letter from the president of the province of Maranhão, Francisco Primo de Souza Aguiar, to the Ministry of Justice, Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayão Lobato. 72! ! ! enticing the escape of more than forty slaves from plantations in Turi and Santa Helena, whom certainly adopted the same expedient to attain the indult of freedom that was promised to mocambeiros and it is said that they contacted the establishment but, Your Excellency, I guarantee that some recently escaped slaves have already returned to their masters, although the largest part is still absent and unaccounted for, of what I have surmised that they do not find from the Montes Áureos Administrator the misguided protection they thought they had the right to; nevertheless, I know through informants that some savvier crioulos say that since Brazil in war with England, these fugitives have to present themselves at the Company to take up arms.132

In 1863, the Montes Áureos Gold Mining Company employed two Germans, seventeen Englishmen, twenty-nine Brazilians, and 179 slaves.133 Guther predicted the need to increase the work force soon and consulted the provincial government about acquiring a license to bring foreign hands to the mines. It is impossible to determine how many of the slaves listed were former maroons, but authorities in Maranhão insisted that several slaves from the quilombo of São Vicente do Céu worked at the mines, probably informally. The situation was so notorious that Rego recommended the provincial government station between 30 and 40 troops at the quilombo so as to create a new hub for military expeditions into the Turiaçú hinterlands.134

In 1864, the mines of Montes Áureos continued to attract dozens of slaves in search of a different future. For many, working for the British became an alternative route to purchased manumission. Local authorities like sheriff Joaquim Simpliciano Nunes

Lisboa firmly disagreed with the provincial government’s assessment of British intentions and again blamed English presence for the decadence of agriculture in the

Turiaçú region.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 132 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 9 May 1863. 133 “Relatorio que á Assemblea Legislativa Provincial do Maranhão apresentou o 2.o vice-presidente da provincial (…), 1864, 39. 134 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 9 May 1863. Rego viewed the São Vicente do Céu as a perfect location to house soldiers, given the abundance of flour and fruits left behind by the maroons. ! 73! ! ! I would not doubt being prone to believe that the introduction of these Englishmen on those lands would be in the future a calamity for this Province, granted their ambitious and evil predispositions against Brazil; what most leads us to believe on their criminal intentions is the consummate fact of their proposing and doing for the amount of their choosing the purchase of fugitive slaves, who pretend to be seeking asylum in one quilombo that is still said to exist in the vicinity of Montes Áureos (…)135

Slave flight had developed into a transformative force that destabilized the plantation economy of Maranhão. It was so widespread that even a priest from the neighboring Province of Pará submitted his grievances to the government of Maranhão.

Luís da Anunciação, vicar of the town of Viseu, accused the British of inciting both indigenous peoples and slaves to rebel. So was the case of the latest insurrection of indigenous peoples of the Alto Gurupi, who rose up against persons who traded with them on the border with Pará. On both sides, eight people were killed. After this “first massacre,” Anunciação decried, “misunderstandings continued between them and others, resulting as always in many deaths, like the ones said to have happened some days ago at

- Pedras de Anular – where three murders took place, being one of an Indian, and the others of Christian people who were surprised.”136

Moreover, referring directly to the Christie Affair, Anunciação feared British imperial ambitions in Maranhão.

Can’t the deplorable facts of which the English are accused in the criminal history of the English government be reproduced in Brazil and in the backlands of Gurupi? Didn’t the arrest of disorderly civilians and the shipwreck in the deserted coasts of Albardão serve as a pretext to unheard-of attacks and exorbitant demands made by the English Government against us? (…) May God allow that this plot of land so imprudent (if not treacherously) sold to the English do not become a fortress soon, that it not take over one or two provinces, demanding on top of that an indemnization.137

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 135 ANRJ, IJ1-755, 24 September 1864. Copy of a letter from Joaquim Simpliciano Nunes Lisboa, Sheriff of the County of Turiassú, to Sebastião José da Silva Braga, Chief of Police of the province of Maranhão.! 136 ANRJ, IJ1-755, 2 September 1864. Copy of a letter from priest Luis da Anunciação to the president of the province of Maranhão. 137 Ibid. 74! ! ! Another Turiaçú sheriff, Henrique José dos Reis, concurred that the British were destroying the local economy, for slaveholders could not counter the “seducing” efforts of hydraulic engineer Gustavo Júlio Guther. Reis complained especially about the

“extraordinary whispering among slaves” generated by British presence in Maranhão:

Having the Englishmen established the said mining operation at a location where there were many maroon slaves, they set off to call them little by little for purchase, it is said with the promise of manumission after a set years of service, and that not only are they getting some maroons, but also others, who with the news of freedom are running away.”138

Sheriff Reis actually added more color to Guther’s recruitment efforts. He accused him of “seducing” maroons with the “news about their freedom,” making them work for some time only to discover the provenance of every slave and then write letters to their masters offering a low price for their purchase. According to him, Guther had written to Antônio Elias Mendes, for instance, a Turiaçú planter who in 1864 had already lost nine slaves to Montes Áureos. By the same token, a female slave of Raimundo

Paranará from the town of Santa Helena had recently been arrested as she joined a

Montes Áureos miner on the road that lead to the company.139 In November of 1864, the

Ministry of Justice finally designated the issue a crime.140 Authorities could do little contain slave flight on the fertile margins of the Gurupi and Turiassu rivers, though. “A very sad business for slaveholders and a good one for the English,” concluded the

Turiassu sheriff.141

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 138 ANRJ, IJ1-755, 7 October 1864. Copy of a letter from Henrique José dos Reis, Sheriff of the County of Turiassú, to Sebastião José da Silva Braga, Chief of Police of the province of Maranhão.! 139 Ibid. 140 ANRJ, IJ1-755, 16 November 1864. Confidential dispatch of the Ministry of Justice regarding “the proceedings of the English company in Montes Áureos.” 141 ANRJ, IJ1-755, 7 October 1864. 75! ! ! The case of Maranhão is emblematic of the impossibility of constructing the nation without slavery in the 1860s. Local planter society resented the British for the threat they posed to slavery not as abolitionists, but as appropriators of the greatest source of national wealth: the slaves themselves. That is why Turiaçú slaveholders interpreted as an attack on property rights what the Montes Áureos Gold Mining Company described as an inventive managerial solution to curb slave flight in the area. By tapping into the underground networks that allowed maroon communities to thrive in Maranhão, the

British somehow acknowledged slaves’ claim to carve out a more autonomous existence, even if it meant nothing more than choosing a different master. !

As we have seen, however, Turiaçú slaves aspired for more than moderate work regimes in west Maranhão. In any case, most of them already lived in independent communities and expected nothing less than their de facto freedom. It is unclear if any of the runaways who sought British support at Montes Áureos ever attained their manumission. Actually, the very dismantling of British operations in Turiaçú after the expiration of their lease in 1867 has been only partially documented. What we know is that the British remained the subjects of fierce speculation in the mineral-rich hinterlands of Brazil during the remainder of the nineteenth century, fuelling slaves’ hopes of manumission and white fear of black rebellion.

As sailors in coastal Brazil or liberated Africans dispersed across the empire, the maroons of Turiaçú acted as privileged carriers of information about “the English” throughout the region, thus playing a vital role in shaping the political climate in

Maranhão. Their webs of commerce and routes of escape functioned as channels of communication through which news of special interest to slaves and free people of color

76! ! ! circulated. In so doing, they challenged plantation discipline, foiled state attempts at internal colonization, and asserted their claim to a remote portion of the Brazilian territory exactly by linking it to the larger Atlantic world.

Conclusion

A historiographical emphasis on national sovereignty masks what was at stake for the Brazilian imperial state in its clashes with the British during the nineteenth century, that is, the fact that maintenance of the social order and state consolidation depended on the survival of slavery. Anglo-Brazilian disputes exposed the contradictions of the

Brazilian liberal ideology to its own people. When Brazil achieved independence from

Portugal in 1822, the national elite adopted a liberal as the system that was most likely to maintain social stability, hierarchical privilege, and control over an agro-export economy dependent upon slave labor. On paper, however, the liberal

Constitution of 1824 championed formal equality before the law without ever mentioning the existence of slavery. Brazil’s emancipationist legislation over the course of the century borrowed from this tradition of liberal rhetoric in misstep with a society held together by political patronage, economic exploitation, and illegal enslavement. Slaves and free people of color seized the gap as space for contests over the meanings of freedom and citizenship, re-signifying the scope of British abolitionism in practice.

Britain pursued an activist, antislavery foreign policy in the mid nineteenth-century but it never intended to incite slave rebellion in other countries. Subversive renderings of

British antislavery such as the cases of Campinas and Montes Áureos discussed in this chapter were the product of black interpretations of history and geography rooted in the

77! ! ! realities of Brazilian slavery. Such perceptions of Englishmen provided the contextual background to black encounters with American history in Brazil, to which we now turn our attention.

78! ! ! CHAPTER TWO

Of Ships and Freedom

On September 19, 1861, as warfare raged across the United States, the Union steam frigate Powhatan arrived at the port of São Luís, the capital of the northeastern province of Maranhão, Brazil. Commanded by captain David Porter, the vessel was in pursuit of the Sumter, the first Confederate cruiser to escape the federal blockade at the mouth of the River. Porter had word that, after having passed by Cuba,

Trinidad, and Surinam, the Sumter now navigated through the waters of Maranhão, fully equipped for war and with nearly two hundred men on board.142 The Union captain was so adamant about seizing the enemy vessel that he almost provoked a diplomatic crisis with Brazil. To the outrage of local authorities protective of Brazilian sovereignty, Porter publicly threatened to “capture the Sumter and drag it away under the purview of

Brazilian fortresses and war ships.”143

Despite his bravado, Porter was soon dismayed to find out that the Sumter had already drawn away to sea, leaving behind only an unfavorable welcome to the

Powhatan:

We found a curious state of affairs existing in Maranham [sic], the people, from the down, being Sumter mad, and politics running as high as they ever did in the South. The Brazilians sympathize almost to a man with the secessionists, under the impression that the South was fighting the battle of Brazil – fighting to protect their property in slaves.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 142 American Consul William Grath reported that the Sumter had quite an international crew, “the greater portion being Portuguese, Spaniards and English,” and was armed “with four rifled and one ten inch Columbiad of pirot gun,” having already secured eleven prizes. Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (henceforth AHI), 25 September 1861. Letter from William Hill Grath, American Consul in Maranhão, to U.S. Secretary of State Henry Seward. On the passage of American war vessels in Brazil during the 1860s, see: McPherson, War On the Waters. 143 Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (henceforth AHI), 233-3-11, 19 November 1861. 79! ! ! Addresses were made by Captain Semmes to the Governor and people of Maranham, in which he used the most specious arguments to prove that after the North had abolished slavery in the Southern States she would turn her attention to abolishing slavery in the Brazilian empire. Of course the arrival of the Powhatan was looked upon with distrust, and a reward of five hundred dollars (made by an American) to any one who would knock a hole in her bottom, so that she could not follow the Sumter, was received with great favor, the government taking no steps to put a stop to such proceedings.144

Porter reported accurately on Raphael Semmes’ declarations in Brazil. A veteran from the Mexican War born to a slave-holding family in Maryland, Semmes was himself a slave master residing officially in Mobile, Alabama.145 He had received his letter of marque from the very hands of President , and set out to sea in 1861 with a firm conviction that, in order to win the war, the South needed to internationalize the conflict by attacking the Northern merchant navy abroad. Self-aware within a larger master class with pronounced hemispheric connections, Semmes sought to cut across state foreign policies and appeal to a sense of slaveholding solidarity in Brazil. He knew that the fate of slavery in the U.S. South was intertwined with its future elsewhere in the

Americas.146

The Sumter had arrived on the roadstead outside the port of São Luís on

September 6th, 1861, where Semmes was greeted with a formal protest penned by the

U.S. consul William. H. Grath. Unhindered by accusations of piracy, he immediately requested a personal interview with the president of Maranhão. In a meeting held during the commemoration of Brazilian Independence Day, the Confederate captain asked for safe passage with the purpose of obtaining coal and the necessary supplies to complete

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 144 The New York Herald, 10 November 1861. 145 Semmes rented out slaves to cut timber and owned three domestic servants in his home in Mobile. McKenna, British Ships in the Confederate Navy, 19. 146 On the pan-American imaginary of Southern slave masters, see: Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008). 80! ! ! his trip. Semmes told Francisco Primo de Aguiar that he possessed military patent and sailed as a commissioned officer of the Confederate States of America (CSA), and even offered to salute the Brazilian flag upon entrance in the bay. Aguiar granted the request for entry but “delicately insinuated” that he would prefer that the Sumter not salute the

Brazilian flag on Independence Day, a gesture that could be interpreted as a formal recognition of the Confederacy as a friendly nation.147 The president of Maranhão was mindful of the imperial government’s recent declaration of neutrality in the American war, which sought to align Brazil with the European policy of respecting Lincoln’s blockade yet conferring the status of “belligerent” to the Confederates.148

The two primary goals of Confederates - securing the sovereign independence of their new government and perpetuating slavery – were high on Semmes’ mind when he communicated his views on the sectional war to Brazilian authorities. He recalls explaining to a “sympathizing” president Primo de Aguiar that the war “was in fact a war as much on behalf of Brazil as of ourselves, and that if we were beaten in the contest,

Brazil would be the next one to be assailed by Yankee propagandists.”149 Playing on the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 147 “Opinion of Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, Advisor to the Minitry of Foreign Affairs,” 25 October 1861. José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, José Maria da Silva Paranhos Rio Branco, and Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo, Pareceres Dos Consultores Do Ministério Dos Negócios Estrangeiros (Rio de Janeiro: Centro de História e Documentação Diplomática, 2006), 233. 148 Howard Jones, Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009) and Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 149Raphael Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter (New York: Carleton, 1864), 36. Semmes’ pro-slavery beliefs gained full sway both in discourse and practice. On board of the Sumter, he had the black slave Ned serve him as a valet and cook since the start of the trip in . Although described as a happy and docile crewman, Ned ran away from the Confederate cruiser a day before she left Surinam in the direction of Maranhão. When Ned disappeared ashore in the midst of the population of color of Paramaribo, Semmes blamed the interference of the U.S. consul in town, voicing once again his distaste for the presence of “Yankees” throughout the Atlantic. “On the morning of her proposed departure the captain’s negro servant went on shore as usual for the day’s marketing, when he was waylaid by the worthy Yankee and persuaded indefinitely to postpone his return. Poor fellow! If his fate was anything like that of the thousands of others “set free” by their so-called friends of the North, he must have long ere this most bitterly repented his desertion. There was no time, however, to spare for searching after the runaway, so after a brief conference with the authorities, who were apparently not over anxious for his arrest, the 81! ! ! weight that the Confederate commitment to bondage carried abroad, Semmes acted as a quasi-diplomat, broadcasting Southern ambitions of an alliance with Brazil that could strengthen the South against both Northern and British abolitionism.150

Following the audience, the Sumter finally hoisted the Confederate flag above

Brazilian waters. The privateer lingered in São Luís for nine days, securing close to one hundred tons of coal and three months worth of supplies before sailing north to St.

Thomas, in the Danish West Indies. In six months (July 1861-january 1862) at sea, the

Sumter captured eighteen Union merchant ships before being finally blockaded at

Gibraltar. It was just the beginning of the career of captain Raphael Semmes, who would come back to Brazil in 1863, this time at the helm of the CSS Alabama, the most famous

Confederate raider to cruise South American waters.

News about the presence of American warships circulated fast on the northeastern shores of Brazil, attracting the attention of local black populations.151 Arriving in a country whose lifeline had always depended on slavery, they sparked hopes of emancipation as soon as they set anchor. Enslaved Africans and Brazilian-born blacks had geopolitical cause to favor the Union, but their interpretations of the U.S. conflict not always showed such nuances. In the eyes of Brazilians, the open and notorious involvement of New England shipbuilders and captains in the African slave trade made it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sumter got up steam and once more proceeded in the direction of Maranham.” Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter, 55. See also, Stephen Fox, Wolf of the Deep: Raphael Semmes and the Notorious Confederate Raider CSS Alabama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 150 On the role of slavery in diplomatic relations during the Civil War, see: Gregory Louis Mattson “Pariah Diplomacy: The Slavery Issue in Confederate Foreign Relations” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1999); Robert E. Bonner, “Slavery, Confederate Diplomacy, and the Racialist Mission of Henry Hotze,” Civil War History 51:3.(2005), 288-316; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South. 151 Brazilian newspapers had been tracking the Sumter since it broke ’s blockade of Southern ports in April of 1861. The Jornal do Commercio, for instance, the paper of choice among most merchants and authorities in Rio de Janeiro, reported on the Sumter’s voyage across Cuba, where the Confederate vessel was said to have captured eight federal ships full of sugar produced in the Spanish colony. Jornal do Commercio, 4 September 1861. 82! ! ! difficult to distinguish between Northern and Southern wartime ideologies. State officials were certainly better versed in notions of a war raging between a pious abolitionist North and the Slave South, but such divisions were more diffuse among the population of

Atlantic seaports.

Thus, over the 1860s, blacks in Brazil often followed the war with hope, picturing the Americans as their all-powerful allies, undivided, in the struggle for liberty at home and abroad. Knowledge of the U.S. Civil War developed in the context of communication networks that connected seafaring trade routes all over the Atlantic, combining black lived experiences and imagined landscapes into a narrative that spoke as much of enslavement as of American and Brazilian history. In September of 1861, the anchoring of the Sumter and the Powhatan in Maranhão prompted rumors of an uprising in Santa

Maria de Anajatuba, a rural village located on the right margin of the River Mearim, about sixty miles from the provincial capital. Soon after the arrival of the vessels, black freedmen formed clubs all over São Luís, in which they met with slaves to discuss what to expect from the Americans, whom they presumed to be abolitionists.

The slave Agostinho, accused of leading the movement, learned about the docking of the Sumter at one of these “clubs” and promptly alerted his fellow slaves in the village of Anajatuba to the fact that freedom was on the way, for “they only waited for the war steamer to disembark her troops.”152 Several enslaved workers then fled sugar and cotton plantations or refused to work for their masters, having proclaimed themselves free in anticipation of American armed support. The threat of a massive slave revolt in

Maranhão materialized as the rebels secured allegiance from runaway communities !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 152 ANRJ, IJ1-754, IJ1-17 October 1861. Copy of a letter from the president of the province of Maranhão, Francisco Primo de Souza Aguiar, to the Minister of Justice, Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayão Lobato. 83! ! ! located in the westward counties of Viana and Guimarães. Nevertheless, as slave activism burgeoned, repression followed suit. Provincial troops and civil militias soon descended upon Anajatuba, arresting slaves like Agostinho, whose crime had been to provide blacks in Brazil with a new subversive language inspired by the Civil War.

The assumption that radical change hinged upon an ability to form strategic bonds with the Americans - even if they were temporary and rooted in uneven power relations - lied at the heart of black politics in Brazil during the 1860s. Another example comes from the province of Santa Catarina, thousands of miles to the south of Maranhão, where slaves found opportunities for flight in the constant docking of New England whalers en route to Pacific fishing grounds. Although escapes to American ships predated the sectional war, they escalated once news of the conflict reached the Brazilian seaside.153

Throughout the decade, a steady stream of fugitives left masters in Santa Catarina to

“embark with the Americans” in search of freedom.154 Some found new lives as seamen aboard whalers, others reached free soil in the United States, and many more met servitude under new masters elsewhere in the Atlantic.

Stories of American naval incursions in South America expose the Atlantic roots of the U.S. Civil War.155 For no conflict over the boundaries of bonded labor could ever be solely national as long as slavery still flourished elsewhere. The American war spilled

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 153 In 1857, for instance, the American ship Timor departed from Rio de Janeiro to New Orleans with a large cargo of coffee trade. Three days into the trip, when the ship approached , the captain found “a black” hidden on board and warned the American consul Alexander H. Clement, who handed the slave over to a Navy official in Recife. ANRJ, IJ1-328, 23 January 1857. Letter from the American Consul, Alexander H. Clement, to the president of Pernambuco, Sérgio Teixeira de Macedo. 154 ANRJ, IJ1-1003, 21 May 1866. Interrogatory of the fugitive Ignácio, slave of Manoel Pacheco in Desterro, Santa Catarina. 155 For works that take an Atlantic approach to American history, see: Davis, Inhuman Bondage; Drescher, Abolition; Karp, This Vast Southern Empire; Robin Blackburn, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation, and Human Rights (London: Verso, 2011); Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union; McDaniel, “Our Country Is the World;” Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation. 84! ! ! out of its borders into Brazil since its very start in 1861, traveling abroad especially on the decks of Union merchant vessels and Confederate privateers involved in the politics of wartime. These ships connected the Brazilian seaside to the transnational networks of commodities, people, and knowledge that formed the Atlantic world. In the sway of events they sparked, local blacks entered the domain of nineteenth-century abolitionism.156

Hemispheric connections between Brazil and the United States, however, have long been muddled either by the segmentation of African descendant populations throughout the Americas or by transnational paradigms that do not take intra-American exchanges as part of their canon. U.S. historians have too often elevated the sectional conflict to the category of national myth, and chosen to emphasize the centrality of the war to the process of nation building. Scholars of the African diaspora, on the other hand, have preferred to end their stories of oceanic integration with the Age of Revolutions or limit the scope of their analysis to the legacies of African cultures in the Americas.

Historians of Brazil have long narrated the process of emancipation as a national story.

Although frequently alluding to the migration of Confederate planters to the country after defeat in the war -- estimates range from eight to twenty thousand migrants – they have

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 156 On the extensive historiography of slavery and abolition in Brazil see, for example: Castilho, Slave Emancipation; Alonso, Flores, Votos e Balas; Machado and Castilho, Tornando-Se Livre; Cowling, Conceiving Freedom; Chalhoub, A Força da Escravidão; Graden, From Slavery to Freedom In Brazil; Azevedo, Onda negra, medo branco and Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil; Machado, O plano e o pânico; Mattos, Das cores do silêncio; Gomes, Histórias de quilombolas and A Hidra e os Pântanos. 85! ! ! paid little attention to the importance of black diaspora networks connecting Brazil to

North America.157

This chapter traverses a less beaten path of Atlantic history, that is, the connections along the axis North-South in the Americas, to understand the U.S. Civil

War as part of the history of emancipation in Brazil. By charting naval incidents involving Union and Confederate ships as well as slave readings of the war in Brazilian port-cities, I start to explore the place the United States occupied in the Afro-Brazilian geopolitical imagination. Approaching Brazil as one of the war’s theaters of operations, I argue that slaves interpreted it as a transnational struggle for freedom, bringing together the trajectories of Latin America and the Anglophone Atlantic. 158 Looking north from

Brazil, the Civil War invites scrutiny as an important chapter in the century-long struggle over slavery bracketed on both sides by events taking place in the Atlantic: the Haitian

Revolution on one end and the final abolition of human bondage in Brazil in 1888 on the other.159

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 157 Eugene C. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985); William Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan's Confederate Colony in Brazil (Austin: University of Press, 1987), Cyrus B. Dawsey, The : Old South Immigrants in Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995); Sharon Hartman Strom, Confederates in the Tropics: Charles Swett's Travelogue of 1868 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011). 158 Here I am mindful of the critique of European-centered narratives offered by recent work on settler , which has embraced bi-directionality in studies of the formation of the state, national identity, and the stakes of public life. See, for example, Zoe Laidlaw and Alan Lester (eds), Indigenous Communities and : Land Holding, Loss, and Survival in an Interconnected World (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People In America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010); Michael Adas,"From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon: Integrating the Exceptionalist Narrative of the American Experience into World History," The American Historical Review 106, no. 5 (2001): 1692-720. 159 On the international repercussions of the U.S. Civil War, see: Hahn, A Nation Without Borders; Doyle, The Cause of All Nations; Gleeson, and Lewis. The Carolina Lowcountry; Robert E. May, The Union, the Confederacy, and the Atlantic Rim (Gainesville: University Press of , 2013); Douglas Egerton,“Rethinking Atlantic Historiography in a Post-Colonial Era: The Civil War in a Global Perspective,” The Journal of the Civil War Era 1:1 (March 2011), 79-95; Matthew J. Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation; Beckert, 86! ! ! The Brazilian Theater of the American Civil War

As early as of September 10th, 1861, controversy regarding Confederate presence in Brazil gained the floor of the Provincial Assembly of Maranhão. The local political opposition rushed to discredit Primo de Aguiar for having allowed entry to the Sumter, accusing the president of violating the neutrality recently declared by the Brazilian government in the American Civil War.160 Liberal deputy Gentil Braga, the group’s most vocal spokesperson, contended that the flying of the Confederate flag in São Luís for more than 24 hours equaled an official acknowledgement of the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. His interpretation of the issue of neutrality stemmed from the equivocal terms set forth by an imperial circular in June of 1861. Brazilian policy spoke of the need to reconcile impartiality “with the duties of hospitality demanded by humanity,” which were in no extent understood to be synonymous to recognizing the Confederacy as an autonomous political entity.161 Thus the June circular forbid provincial to admit American warships carrying prisoners or intent on acquiring arms in Brazil yet provided for the entrance of vessels from any partiality in case of emergency. In the name of “hospitality,” the Brazilian government repeatedly refused to comply with demands from the Union to treat Southern ships as “pirates.”

In effect, deputy Gentil Braga’s opinion on matters of international law echoed the position of the Washington Foreign Office. Brazil was the only nation in South !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Emancipation and Empire;” Harold Melvin Hyman, and H. C Allen, Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War (New York: A. Knopf, 1969); David M. Potter, “The Civil War in the History of the Modern World: A Comparative View,” in The South and the Sectional Conflict, ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968), 290–93; Philip Van Doren Stern, When the Guns Roared: World Aspects of the American Civil War (New York: Doubleday, 1965). 160 Publicador Maranhense, 10 October 1861. 161 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 1 August 1861. Copy of the June circular sent by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benevenuto de Magalhães Taques, to Brazilian Provincial Presidents. 87! ! ! America to declare a position of neutrality, which in practice meant recognizing the belligerency of Confederate states in spite of Washington’s wishes.162 Other countries such as Argentina and Colombia remained more firmly within the Union’s sphere of influence yet also refrained from recognizing Confederate ships as “pirates.” When the

Civil War broke out in 1861, the Latin America to which the United States had paid little attention before became a weakness in the Union’s plans of defeating the Confederacy.

Although publicly upholding the privileges of Brazil as a neutral nation, Secretary of

State William Seward never ceased to urge the country to display a firmer attitude toward the Confederacy. The ministers sent out to Brazil – and, especially, Jason Watson Webb,

Washington’s envoy to Rio de Janeiro - remained attentive to Brazil’s affinities with the insurgent states and worked to curb Confederate piracy throughout the South Atlantic.

Outside political chambers, the American Civil War quickly became a popular subject of conversation in northern Brazil. Captain Semmes commented repeatedly on the

“excited imaginations of the townspeople” of São Luís, marveling that “the whole town is agog discussing our affairs.” 163 In the neighboring province of Pará, the Jornal do

Amazonas reported on a similar state of excitement regarding the arrival of an American

“separatist ship” in São Luís.

Great commotion caused in this port by the arrival of the war vessel Sumter, Captain Semms [sic], with manifest and flag of the Confederation. It brought news of Paramaribo, Surinam, where it was chased by two federal cruisers; says also that, before arriving in Cuba, it had taken and destroyed eight American ships, and three more after leaving Cuba. To everybody’s awe here, it is very comfortably obtaining coal before continuing on pirating. It is said that the same ship is ready to capture the Maria, which awaits, consigned to Mr. Moran, but should arrive at this port first.164

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 162 Nathan L. Ferris, "The Relations of the United States with South America during the American Civil War" The Hispanic American Historical Review 21: 1 (1941): 51-78. 163 Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter, 88. On the Sumter, see also: Charles G. Summersell, The Cruise of the CSS Sumter (Tuscaloosa: Confederate Centennial Studies, n. 26, 1964). 164 Jornal do Amazonas, n. 211, 16 September 1861, 2. 88! ! !

The newspaper referred to the brig Maria, outfitted in New York, which was expected to deliver cargo to a Portuguese merchant residing in São Luís. The Sumter sailed off port for two days in search of that ship, finally leaving Maranhão on September

15th.

Rumors about the existence of two Union warships waiting for the Sumter near the Santana light kept Captain Semmes watchful while ashore in São Luís. Lodged at the

Hotel do Porto, he routinely ran into Brazilian representatives who enjoyed talking about the subject of war during his short stay in town. Semmes found sympathetic ears in

Deputy Marques Rodrigues, the Speaker of the Deputies of Maranhão, to whom he spoke at length about ‘the wave of fanaticism’ that had swayed the U.S. North and led to . To another politician of more liberal leaning - probably deputy Gentil Braga -

Semmes defended the presence of the Sumter at São Luís’ harbor, contesting the idea that president Aguiar had ordered him to haul the Confederate flag down.

The Confederate captain carefully navigated the Brazilian political world, which he rightfully assumed had much in common with the U.S. South. In the 1860s, the

Brazilian political system worked to neutralize the abolitionist threat through an!alliance between state and capital that would have looked quite familiar to Semmes. Accordingly, he reached out to potential allies by tapping into pro-slavery arguments that had long been circulating in the Atlantic world. Slaveholders’ belief in the insurrectionary danger of abolitionism, for example, was a theme sure to mobilize advocates fearful of black

Republicans in the U.S. South or of British abolitionists in Brazil.165

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 165 Semmes was a product of what historians Rafael de Bivar Marquese and Tâmis Peixoto Parron have characterized as the “Proslavery International,” i.e., the integrated and unified response (a kind of proslavery compact) formed by the U.S. South, Brazil, and Cuba in response to the internationalization of 89! ! ! Union captain Porter and Confederate officer Semmes wrote colorful accounts of their time in Brazil, documenting the repercussions of the American Civil War abroad through the lens of the parties at war. Both sides viewed Brazil as a society defined by slavery, and only tentatively neutral when it came to a battle over the future of that institution in the United States. Over the years, as the Union remained unwilling to concede the rights of foreign governments to aid the Confederacy, a flurry of maritime incidents triggered hostilities with Brazil and spread fear that Emperor Pedro II’s granting of belligerent status to the Confederacy would transition into recognition of Southern independence and a pro-slavery alliance that could also include Cuba.166

Washington and Richmond were understandably suspicious of Brazil’s positioning. Neutrality remained a contested notion in a country where slavery thrived without much regulation. Still in 1861, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benevenuto

Augusto de Magalhães Taques, elaborated on the Brazilian stance during wartime in a speech given before the Brazilian Parliament. Casting the country as a mere spectator of events, Taques viewed as imperative that consular attachés stationed at dissident

American states stay neutral and that Brazilian maritime provinces follow certain procedures while the conflict unfolded via the sea. He explained that imperial policy specifically forbid piratical ships or war vessels with prizes to entry Brazilian ports, determined that the country’s harbors should not be used as bases for war operations or !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! British and American abolitionism from the 1830s up to the end of the Civil War. Facing increasing abolitionist pressure, planter classes in these three locales not only reinvented their place in the Atlantic economy with renovated reliance on slave labor, but also solidified their grip on structures of political power, as to assure the profitability and political survival of slavery through the mid-nineteenth century. Marquese e Parron,"Internacional escravista;” Berbel, Marquese, and Parron, Slavery and Politics. 166 Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 1817– 1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); Seymour Drescher, “Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective,” Hispanic American Historical Review 68 (August 1988): 429– 60; Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery; Laird W. Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 90! ! ! for the seizure of prizes; and allowed for trade with the belligerents but recommended that federal war vessels be helped in every way possible, except for the provisioning of ammunition and war articles.167

All these measures, however, did not impede Brazilian involvement in the enactment of sectional hostilities in South America. Nor did they preclude Brazil from becoming a theater of operations of the American Civil War. The controversy around the

Sumter was just the first in a stream of naval incidents involving Confederate and Union ships on Brazilian shores. Outraged by President Primo de Aguiar’s lenience with regard to the Sumter, Washington ambassador James Watson Webb demanded successive personal interviews with Minister Taques, in which he conveyed his government’s views on what Brazilian neutrality should look like. Webb contended that the Confederate raider deserved no treatment as a “Man of War” since it was in fact a piratical cruiser and warned Brazil that rebel sailors had license from their commanders to attack Union ships in international waters and could expect money prizes for the capture of Union citizens.168 Hoping for compliance, Webb insisted on reminding Brazilian authorities that the United States was one of the most powerful nations in the world, and that the Union consumed more than half of Brazil’s coffee production.

Ironically, coffee was one of the commodities that linked the Union to the center of the Brazilian slave economy - the Paraíba Valley – a fact that was lost on Webb’s discourse.169 In the mid-nineteenth century, Brazil sold indeed most of its coffee to the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 167 Brasil. Ministério das Relacões Exteriores. Ministro Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques. Relatório do Anno de 1861 Apresentado `a Assembléa Geral Legislativa na 2a Sessão da 11a Legislatura, 1862. Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Progresso, 1863. 168 AHI, 280-1-06, 1 November 1861. “Nota da Legação dos Estados Unidos ao governo imperial.” 169 Rafael Bivar Marquese and Dale W. Tomich, “O Vale Do Paraíba escravista e a formação do mercado mundial do café no século XIX,” in Grinberg and Salles, eds., O Brasil imperial; Michelle Craig McDonald and Steven Topik,”Americanizing Coffee: The Refashioning of Consumer Culture,” in: Alexander 91! ! ! United States, importing some cotton textiles and codfish from New England, wheat flour from Maryland and Virginia, and American charcoal. Historian Daniel Rood has shown that the commercial ties between Brazil and the United States were much more salient than accounts of British primacy in South America have yielded. After England, France and Cuba, Brazil was the fourth most important source of U.S. imports in the antebellum period as well as a node in the circuit of knowledge production that linked especially the

Upper South to the Brazilian southeast. Industrial experts hailing from the South, like

Virginians Richard Morton and , played a major role in early railroad projects in Brazil, helping to integrate new coffee-growing areas to the burgeoning global industrial modernity.170 The transnational political economy of

Atlantic slavery challenged the longstanding dichotomy drawn between an industrial

North and a rural Slave South.171

U.S. nationals also played an important role in keeping slavery alive in Brazil as shipbuilders. As abolitionist pressure mounted in the 1840s, Brazilian and Portuguese slave traders increasingly relied on them for the provisioning of ships, crews, capital, and a safe flag to sail by. In 1839, the British Parliament passed the Palmerston Act, allowing

British officers unilateral rights to search slave ships flying the Portuguese flag and take crews for trial at British courts. Six years later, the Aberdeen Act enforced similar rules with regard to Brazilian vessels. The United States, however, remained outside the treaty system Britain established to suppress the slave trade until 1862, giving slavers ample

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Nützenadel, and Frank Trentmann (eds), Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics In the Modern World (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2008). 170 Rafael Bivar Marquese, “Capitalismo, escravidão e a economia cafeeira do Brasil no longo século XIX,” SAECULUM, Revista de História 29, João Pessoa, jul./dez. 2013, 315. 171 As Rood interestingly puts it, “it was men from the Slave South who brought industrial know-how and Northern Yankees who imported African slaves to Brazil.” Rood, “Plantation Technocrats,” 131-132. ! 92! ! ! opportunity to hide their activities behind the American flag.172

Leonardo Marques estimates that US-built vessels accounted for around one thousand voyages or 58.2 per cent of all 1789 slave voyages organized during the during the entire period of the contraband slave trade in Brazil, that is, the nineteen-year period between 1831 and 1850.173 (208) Those figures mean that more than half of all slave disembarkations in Brazil at the time took place with some form of US participation, a rarely told spin-off tale from the golden era of the North American shipbuilding industry.

With a presence in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. merchant houses Maxwell, Wright & Co. and

James Birckhead sold and chartered many vessels that were employed on slaving voyages to Africa before the 1850 abolition of the slave trade to Brazil. Following passage of the

Eusébio de Queirós law, U.S. companies turned their attention to Cuban markets and U.S. individual brokers filled in the gap. Men like Joshua M. Clapp - the ‘go-between of the man-stealers of Rio de Janeiro', as defined by a British consul - and George Marsden then took up the sale of vessels to be engaged on the African-related trade.174 The careers of the Mary E. Smith, W.H. Stuard, Vickery, and Manchester, active well into the 1860s, have been well documented.175 In the early half of the decade, of 170 slave-trading

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 172 On the Lyons-Seward treaty of 1862, see Matthew Mason, “Keeping up Appearances: The International Politics of Slave Trade Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 66:4 (2009), 809-832. 173 U.S. involvement in the illegal trade to Brazil was not carried out without opposition.!Henry A. Wise, U.S. Minister to Brazil, and George William Gordon, U.S. Consul to Rio de Janeiro, famously labored to eliminate the U.S. flag from the contraband trade in the 1840s. They detained a large number of captains suspected of aiding and abetting the slave trade and sent them to trial before U.S. courts. Leonardo Marques, “The United States and the Transatlantic Slave Trade to the Americas, 1776-1867 “ (PhD dissertation, Emory University, 2013), 208. 174 Leonardo Marques, "The Contraband Slave Trade to Brazil and the Dynamics of U.S. Participation, 1831-1856," Journal of Latin American Studies 47:4 (November 2015), 680.! 175Dale T. Graden, “O envolvimento dos Estados Unidos no comércio transatlântico de escravos para o Brasil, 1840-1858,” Revista Afro-Ásia, n. 35, 2007; Marques, “A participação norte-americana no tráfico transatlântico de escravos para os Estados Unidos, Cuba e Brasil.” 93! ! ! expeditions carried out in the Atlantic, at least 117 are believed to have sailed from

American ports to feed the contraband markets in Brazil and Cuba.176

Union participation in the Brazilian slave economy, though, did not prevent

Ambassador Webb from requesting a remonstrance from the imperial government in the

Sumter’s case. In so doing, he warranted Seward’s fear that Brazil could eventually recognize the CSA:

I hardly need say that the proceeding at Maranham is an occasion of great surprise and deep disquiet to the United States. That we have supposed that Brazil and every other state on the American Continent has an interest second only to our own in the stability of the American Union, the downfall of which would, in our belief, inevitably be followed, sooner or later, by the decline and fall of every independent nation on this continent, which must, in that case, become once more a theatre for the ambition of European Powers.177

Although always a notch above average, Webb’s imperious attitude toward Brazil typified the general tone of Washington diplomats in their dealings with South American governments. On instructions from Secretary Seward, men like Webb sought to convince other nations that the magnitude of the Union cause resided on its combined defense of the end of slavery, the preservation of democratic principles, and the protection of the

Americas from foreign intervention.178 Whenever possible, Union representatives played up the threat posed by Southern filibustering and the possibility of European intervention

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 176 Horne, The Deepest South, 8. 177 AHI, 280-1-06, 13 Novermber 1861. Letter from William Seward to James Watson Webb, American Ambassador in Rio de Janeiro. 178 Diplomats referred especially to the threat of British invasion, echoing their concern with regard to the United States. The complexity of British views on slavery and race surfaced during the American Civil war: its government was never entirely pro-Union or pro-emancipation, prompting fears of intervention on both sides of the conflict. British antislavery sentiment was tempered with commercial considerations relating to free trade and imperial expansionism in the Atlantic world. R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2001); Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire In Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012); William Mulligan, and Maurice J Bric, eds, A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics In the Nineteenth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, U.K., 2013). 94! ! ! in Latin America, as exemplified by the French invasion of Mexico and Spain’s capture of Santo Domingo in 1861.179

During the 1860s, the threat of a French was especially real in

Ecuador. In 1864, Peru almost went to war with Spain after seizure of the Chincha

Islands while ’s Solano Lopez courted European support of his imperial ambitions in the Plata region before the War of the Triple Alliance broke out in 1865, involving Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The Lincoln administration adopted a more cautious policy around the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Colombia, and

Bolivia, as it did not want to set any precedent that might open way for the recognition of the Confederacy. Facing unstable political situations, Secretary Seward worked to disavow foreign governments established by armed outbreaks by recalling U.S. ministers abroad or waiting for revolutionary governments to establish firm holds on power.

Ironically, Confederate officials would also count on the vibrancy of South American nationalist traditions formulated in the course of wars for independence to find allies for their struggle for sovereignty.180

Union anti-slavery and democratic arguments did not hold much sway in Brazil, though. Webb’s depiction of the “southern rebellion” as a movement to create another slave country had but a slim chance to resonate with Brazilian authorities presiding over an empire built on the enslavement of Africans. In Brazil, the threat of political revolution could hardly be greater than the menace of mass slave rebellion. Over the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 179Ferris, Op. Cit. See also: Harry Bernstein, “The Civil War and Latin America,” in: Hyman, ed., Heard Round the World, 299-326. 180 On American filibustering, see: Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny's Underworld: Filibustering In Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Thomas R. Hietala, Manifest Design: Anxious Aggrandizement In Late Jacksonian America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).! 95! ! ! duration of the Civil War, the Brazilian imperial government combined the defense of slavery with staunch denial when accused of collaboration with the Confederates. By the

1860s, Brazil had already embraced political liberalism, but its features did not directly resemble the original European blueprint. Landed oligarchies involved in the export economy tailored liberalism to fit a social world organized around clientele and patronage networks, slavery, and conservative politics. That is how the Liberal and Conservative

Parties were able to alternate in power for the entirety of Emperor Pedro II’s 49 years of rule without ever proposing reforms that fundamentally altered the socio-economic structure of country. In Brazil, liberalism was first and foremost a promise to be fulfilled elsewhere.181

Over time, the Sumter incident reverberated over diplomatic relations between the

Union and Brazil. As James Webb had done, the Brazilian envoy to Washington, Miguel

Maria Lisboa, also talked with Secretary Seward in length about the controversy. Seward accepted Lisboa’s explanations about Brazilian neutrality, but remarked that the U.S. government still considered injurious the acts of any foreign government (here referring especially to Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, and France) that recognized the Southern insurgents as belligerents and that he did not acquiesce in them.182 In April of 1862,

Seward even insinuated that all maritime nations who gave insurgents belligerent rights were somehow conspiring against the United States, but soon retreated from his harsher stance on Brazil.183 Copious correspondence between General Webb and the Brazilian

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 181 Emília Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).! 182 AHI, 233-3-12, 15 March 1862. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 183 Ibid, 7 April 1862. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 96! ! ! foreign office over the Sumter incident extends into 1863 despite the fact that the

Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs approved the conduct of the president of Maranhão and considered the controversy resolved in 1862.184

After the passage of the Sumter, Confederate vessels continued to head to Brazil in search of harbors of refuge from which to launch attacks on Union merchant ships.185

In April of 1863, the steamers Georgia, Alabama and Florida made way to Bahia, and the C.S.S. Mohican docked first in Santos and then in Santa Catarina on the lookout for

New England whaling ships. Wherever they stopped, Confederate raiders were always allowed to refit and gather supplies, sometimes beyond the limits determined by their belligerent status. Among them, the CSS Florida and the CSS Alabama were the most successful both in naval warfare and in diverting Union warships from blockade duty to commerce protection in the Atlantic.

Anticipating Washington claims of breaching of neutrality, the president of Bahia,

Antônio Coelho de Sá e Albuquerque, sent an envoy to Rio de Janeiro with all the dispatches documenting the Georgia and the Alabama passage by Salvador. He hoped to convince the Minister of Foreign Affairs that “all had gone well so that we are neither committed to the English nor to the Americans from North or South.”186 Commanded by

Raphael Semmes with the aid of veteran officers from the Sumter, the Alabama turned

Brazilian waters into her privileged hunting grounds in 1863. Built in Liverpool, the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 184 See also the opinions of advisors to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that approved Primo de Aguiar’s handling of the Sumter incident. Bueno, Rio Branco e Macedo. Pareceres Dos Consultores Do Ministério Dos Negócios Estrangeiros, 232-241.! 185 AHI, 233-3-13, 18 November 1863. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to Minister of Foreign Affairs Marquês de Abrantes. Events in Brazil were actually reminiscent of what was happening in the Caribbean coast. Still in 1863, for instance, the U.S. federal cruiser Montgomery captured the steamer Blanche in Cuba, under the allegation that, although she sailed under a British flag, the ship belonged to American citizens. 186 ANRJ, XM-544, 24 May 1863. Letter from the provincial president of Bahia, Antônio Coelho de Sá e Albuquerque, to the Ministry of Navy. 97! ! ! Confederate warship sailed with British canons and several British crewmembers.187

Reaching the empire in mid-March, the Alabama captured and burned at least eleven

Union ships off Brazilian territorial waters.188

After stopping in Bahia, the Alabama veered towards the island of Fernando de

Noronha, off the coast of Pernambuco, with the intention of meeting her tender the

Agrippina for refueling. Carrying the Louisa Hatch in tow, the ship made port in the island on April 9th, 1863, and spent five days in the of Noronha to complete coaling and stock up on fresh provisions. At the end of his stay, Semmes burned two whalers, the Laffayette and the Cory, setting off next to Bahia, with eighty-four prisoners on board.189 This time, once informed of the assistance provided to the Confederate brig in Noronha, the Brazilian government promptly fired its commanding officer on the island.190 The Alabama continued on her raiding, though, burning the Union and the

Boston clipper Sea Lark in the waters of Bahia.

The passage of the Alabama through Pernambuco brought to light important implications of a war fought throughout the Atlantic. American seamen were imprisoned, if only temporarily, in Brazil. In their public ordeals between ship gallows, prisons, and consulates, these seafarers – many of whom were African Americans – disseminated accounts about a war over the future of slavery in the Americas. In May of 1863, acceding to a request from the Washington consul in Recife, the president of Pernambuco

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 187 John DeWitt, Early Globalization and the Economic Development of the United States and Brazil (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002), 119. 188 Among the captures were federal whalers and ships loaded with coal: Morning , Kingfisher, Charles Hill, Nora, Louisa Hatch, Kate Cory, Laffayette, Nye, Dorcas Prince, Union Jack, and Sea Lark. The Alabama is said to have amassed a total of sixty-five prizes in two years at sea. Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama. 189 John M. Taylor, Semmes: Rebel Raider (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 2004), 73. 190 Lawrence F. Hill, Diplomatic Relations Between the United States and Brazil (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univesity Press, 1932). 98! ! ! allowed the crews captured by the Alabama and Florida to be kept at the storehouses of the Pina Island. Shortly thereafter, the sailors waited for transfer on the streets of the capital Recife, causing great commotion among the local population:

At the Rua do Trapiche, in the vicinity of the American consulate, it looked like a refugee camp. They were the prisoners of the Confederate vessels coming from the Maranguape, from the island of Fernando, and who waited for their fates to be decided. There were people from all nations, Americans, Portuguese, Spanish, Malaise, Indians, and even Brazilians, sons of Santa Catarina. Some were lying down, others sat up, others yet stood on their feet, each in the position he thought convenient, among piles of boxes, mattresses, bundles and bags of clothes, making for a fascinating sight, in which groups of narrators here and there were the highlight, surrounded by a growing crowd of curious passersby, who listened with wrapped attention perhaps to tall tales [contos da Carochinha] which nevertheless did not please them less.191 Although Brazil officially forbid acceptance of prizes on its ports, concessions were often made to the landing of prisoners by Confederate vessels. In April of 1863, as it passed by Bahia, the Alabama sent eighty-four prisoners to shore from the Union ship

Oneida, and the Georgia twelve men from the ships Anice and Clarence, along with their baggage, provisions, and stories. All prisoners were said to have been made beyond the league from the land. Captain Semmes was amused to see how news of the war circulated by word of mouth in Recife. He related “the landing of so many prisoners amid so small a population has created a very great stir, and the excitable Brazilians are discussing among themselves and with the Yankee captains the question of the American war with great vehemence.”192

The Florida anchored off Fernando de Noronha a day after the departure of the

Alabama for Bahia on April 28, 1863. Captain John Maffitt landed thirty-two prisoners from his latest captures but soon received an ultimatum from the commanding colonel at the island’s fort, Antônio Gomes Leal, to withdraw from Brazilian waters in twenty-four

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 191 Diário do Rio de Janeiro, 19 May 1863. 192Semmes, The Cruise of the Alabama, 180. Ambassador James Webb also complained that the Florida crew had sold clothes, jewelry and even family heirlooms stolen from Union sailors in the streets of Recife. ! 99! ! ! hours. Maffitt met with the president of Pernambuco, João Silveira de Souza, and was surprised by “his undisguised fear of the Federal Government.” President Souza anticipated the arrival of three Union cruisers in a matter of days and pled with Maffitt to leave because he could not offer him protection from acts of violence. Maffitt laughed at

Souza’s fears, remarking that the Confederates did not need Brazilian protection and that

“although the United States influence is very great here, yet I think that the majority of the citizens sympathize with the Confederacy.”193 The Florida eventually got permission to set anchor in , the capital of the province of , in June 1863, where it disembarked her remaining eleven prisoners. Once out in the high seas, the brig finished its first trip to Brazil with the capture of the bark Clarence, which sailed with a cargo of coffee from Rio de Janeiro under captain Brown, a Northerner “full of biblical lore on slavery.”194

In May of 1863, the Alabama went back to Bahia, where she sent more prisoners to safety “under the official wings of the American consul.”195 Allowed liberty in the streets of Salvador, Confederate officers enlivened the waterfront promenades with their uniforms, being closely observed by local shop owners and passersby. While in port, the

Alabama witnessed the arrival of the CSS Georgia, led by captain Lewis F. Maury, and received news that the C.S.S. Florida was also on her way to the Bay of All Saints. For one of Semmes’ crewmembers, the moment was nothing short of historical:

We can straighten up now and put on airs, boast of the “Confederate squadron of the South American station,” and await the arrival of any vessel of the enemy’s navy in perfect security. Herein the ludicrous side of the picture presents itself. The Alabama is supposed to be dodging the United States cruisers; yet now the Georgia is in port with us, and the Florida within telegraphic communication and two days steaming, it would be !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 193 Emma Martin Maffitt, The Life and Services of John Newland Maffitt (New York; Washington: The Neale Publishing Company, 1906), 293. 194 Ibid, 289. 195 Arthur Sinclair, Two Years in the Alabama (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1896), 123. 100! ! ! tough luck for the enemy should one of his cruisers happen to stumble in. We cannot avoid the feeling of pride and satisfaction that our struggling little Confederacy has actually been able to overmatch the enemy in cruisers, at least for the time being, and put them on the defensive so far as the Brazilian coast goes. We were much gratified that the fact was commented on by both the Brazilian and English naval officers. It was at this time that our hopes for foreign intervention were brightest, and it pleased us that the South was presenting no mean showing in the cruiser line. 196

This rhetoric of victory pointed to Confederate hopes of success in the war abroad early in 1861. During its time in Brazil, however, the Southern navy also experienced internal discontent. The Alabama master-at-arms, for example, a James King, of

Savannah, deserted the ship while in Bahia despite antecedents “proving his devotion to the Southern cause”.197

The presence of so many “piratical vessels” on Brazilian shores prompted

American ambassador James W. Webb to fiercely protest the conduct of the Brazilian government. The Brazilian State Council, an advisory board to emperor Pedro II, took up the issue on June 4, 1863, in response to a motion filed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarding Webb’s protest and accompanied by all the correspondence exchanged over the hostilities involving the Sumter, the Georgia, and the Alabama in Brazil.198 Councilors

Eusébio de Queirós, Marquis of Maranguape, and Viscount of Uruguai ruled that

Confederate vessels should be treated according to the law of nations as belligerents and not as pirates, being therefore allowed entry for the peaceful and humanitarian purposes

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 196 Ibid, 125.! 197 George Townley Fullam, “Diary of George Townley Fullam, May, 1863,” in Our Cruise in the Confederate State's War Steamer Alabama: the Private Journal of an Officer (London: A. Schulze, 1863), 64. See also: William Stanley Hooley, Four Years In the Confederate Navy: the Career of Captain John Low On the C. S. S. Fingal, Florida, Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and Ajax (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 1964); Charles M. Robinson, Shark of the Confederacy: the Story of the CSS Alabama (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1995). 198 Composed by lifelong members nominated directly by the emperor, the State Council made influential recommendations on public policy. It held no power but, in practice, examined petitions about the most diverse issues and issued opinions with wide-ranging implications. The councilors were experienced politicians whose stature added weight to opinions drafted as guidelines. 101! ! ! of gathering supplies, making repairs, and escaping life-threatening situations. The

Marquis of Abrantes, however, wondered about the lack of a proper treaty or Brazilian law regulating rights of asylum or simply the use of neutral territories by vessels of war.199 As guidelines, the Councilors reaffirmed the principles contained in the 1861 circular, which equated corsairs and war vessels, giving both the same right of entry and supplying in Brazilian waters.200

The State Council deemed Webb’s request for the capture of the Alabama in

Bahia “inadmissible,” yet recognized that the provincial president should never have allowed entry to a ship that had violated Brazilian territorial rights so many times. The

Councilors invoked the authority of American and French experts in international law to base their decisions on the jurisdiction of neutral states, citing especially Henry Wheaton and L. B. Hautefeuille. Eusébio de Queirós was the only magistrate to differ slightly from his colleagues, recommending that Brazil establish a cap for coal provisions to

Confederate ships because fuel should be considered an article of war. All in all, the State

Council made an effort to minimize the payment of reparations to the United States, and said nothing in favor of either party at war. “The section fears that, unfortunately, this struggle of the United States will end up being very expensive to us. Let’s see if, at least, it can be rendered cheaper.”201 In 1864, the Alabama ended its career near the harbor of

Cherbourg, France, where it sank after a battle with the Union war vessel Kearsage.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 199 BRASIL. O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1863-1867) (Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2007, 18-37). 200 BRASIL, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Circular of 1 August 1861. The 1861circular extended hospitality to foreign cruisers with their prizes for a period of 24 hours but stated that they could not dispose of them while in Brazil. 201 BRASIL. O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império, 31. 102! ! ! The naval incident of greatest importance for American-Brazilian relations occurred in 1864, when the Union gunboat Wachusett captured the Confederate brig

Florida in the waters of Bahia after months of tracking it down the waters of the West

Indies.202 The Brazilian government’s version of facts has that the Wachusett had been lying several days in the port of Salvador when the Florida set anchor in the offing on

October 4, 1864. Coming from Tenerife, Commander Charles M. Morris asked for authorization to procure coal, supplies, and have repairs made to her machinery at the

War Arsenal. Morris had stopped in the Bay of All Saints in his way to rounding Cape

Horn, from where he intended to launch an attack on the federal Pacific whaling fleet.

Considering it to be his duty, “in the name of humanity,” to aid a vessel that was running very low on supplies and whose engine was severely compromised, the President of Bahia, Antônio Joaquim da Silva Gomes, fixed the term of forty-eight hours for the

Florida to refit and repair. After obtaining Captain Morris’s assurance that no attack on the Wachusett would be attempted in Brazil, president Gomes sent a Brazilian engineer on board to inspect the engine. Additionally, anticipating the possible breakout of hostilities between the two American vessels stationed in Salvador, he ordered the

Florida under the cover of the artillery of the Brazilian corvette D. Januária.203

The Union consul in Bahia reacted in disbelief. Thomas Wilson soon addressed a dispatch to President Gomes reinstating his government’s censures over the admittance of

Confederate privateers by neutral nations and reminded the imperial official that the

Florida had burned down the Union bark Mandamis less than 3 miles away from

Fernando de Noronha in 1863. Consul Wilson then sent letters to Captain Morris, stating

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 202 On the incident, see: AHI, 233-3-13 and 233-4-01 (1864). 203 McKenna, British Ships in the Confederate Navy, chapter two ‘Florida.’ 103! ! ! that the Florida was not a ship from a recognizable belligerent state but rather from a group of insurgents and challenged her to fight the Wachusett. About dawn of October

7th, exactly when the forty-eight-hour period given to the Florida was about to expire,

Commander Collins of the Wachusett decided to attack his adversary. On passing across the bows of the Brazilian corvette D. Januária, Collins was hailed from on board that he must anchor. Notwithstanding this intimation, he continued to approach the

Florida, firing a gun and some musketry.

The impending attack prompted the Commander of the Brazilian Naval Division to threaten the Wachusett with opening fire from the ships and forts under his power, but

Captain Collins moved on to take the Florida when most of her crew and Commander

Morris were on shore. Under the cover of darkness, the Wachusett rammed into her hull with the intention of sinking the enemy boat. As the Florida stayed afloat, Collins decided to haul it off in tow by means of a long cable. A boarding party secured the surrender of twelve officers and fifty-eight men as well as all of the ship’s cargoes, though not without a fight. According to the Brazilian press, the fight that ensued on the waters of Bahia left many casualties, especially on the Confederate side:

Among the dead, some say is the room officer, who was killed with a bullet on his chest and then hung; that officer Stone, after killing more than six and finding himself surrounded in such a way as to make resistance impossible, shot himself in the mouth, dying immediately; and that another official, leaping aboard the Wassuchet (sic), repeatedly stabbed six men, ending up killed by the blows of pistol butts. Four of fifteen mariners who jumped overboard into the sea escaped for being rescued by merchant ships anchored in the vicinity. The other eleven were shot dead by the enemy, who fired at one of them nine times! 204

Among the Northerners, officer Walter Delany died of friendly fire coming from the

Wachussett as he was held prisoner on board of the Florida. The Brazilian steamers D. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 204 A Coalição, 22 October 1864. Reprint of news published in the Jornal da Bahia. 104! ! ! Januária, Paraense, and Rio de Contas soon set off seaward to pursue and overhaul the

Wachussett, going even beyond national waters, but were not able to stop her journey north to St. Thomas. Along with her prize, the Union ship also offered refuge to Consul

Wilson who decided to abandon his post in Salvador.205

The imperial government immediately appealed to the Union for redress for considering the seizure of the Florida a violation of its territorial jurisdiction, worth the right of reparation. Brazil demanded a solemn and public declaration on the part of the

Union government condemning the actions of the Wachusett, the firing of Captain

Collins, the freeing of the Florida crew, as well as the return of the vessel to Brazilian authorities so that the empire could restitute the Confederates. Secretary Seward responded with care, only admitting that the capture had been “an unauthorized, unlawful and indefensible exercise of the naval force of the United States, within a foreign country, in defiance of its established and duly recognized Government.” 206 He acceded to part of

Brazil’s claims: a Naval court-martial eventually found Napoleon Collins guilty of

“violating the territorial jurisdiction of a neutral power.”207 Consul Wilson lost his post, and the was offered the honors reserved to friendly nations. More importantly, perhaps, Brazil’s reclamations pushed Seward to elaborate on his critique of the country’s friendly attitude towards the Confederacy:

The Government disallows your assumption that the insurgents of this country are a lawful naval belligerent, and, on the contrary, it maintains that the ascription of that character by the Government of Brazil to insurgent citizens of the United States, who have hitherto been, and who still are, destitute of naval forces, ports and courts, is an act of intervention, in derogation of the law of nations, and unfriendly and wrongful, as it is manifestly injurious, to the United States. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 205 AHI, 233-3-13, 12 December 1864. Note from Ignácio de Avelar Barbosa da Silva, Brazilian envoy to Washington, to Secretary of State William Seward. 206 AHI, 233-3-13, 26 December 1864. Note from U.S. Secretary of State William Seward to Ignácio de Avelar Barbosa da Silva, Brazilian envoy to Washington. 207 AHI, 233-4-01, 10 July 1865. Ibid. 105! ! !

So, also, the Government disallows your assumption that the Florida belonged to the aforementioned insurgents, and maintains, on the contrary, that that vessel, like the Alabama, was a pirate, belonging to no nation or lawful belligerent, and, therefore, that the harboring and supplying of these piratical ships and their crews in Brazilian ports were wrongs and injuries for which Brazil justly owes reparation to the United States, as ample as the reparation which she now receives from them.208

The incident enjoyed great notoriety in both countries. The Times of New York reveled on the Union’s “daring naval achievement”209 in Brazil whereas the local

Chamber of Commerce applauded the action taken by Captain Collins. The Courier des

États Unis reported that the Richmond Congress had even recommended the Confederate government to send an agent to Brazil to talk about the case of the Florida and asked that the issue be taken to the arbitration of European powers.210 The presence of Confederate ships in Brazil finally elicited a comment from President Abraham Lincoln himself during his 1864 message to the U.S. Congress:

It is possible that if it were new and open question the maritime powers, with the lights they now enjoy, would not concede the privileges of a naval belligerent to the insurgents of the United States, destitute, as they are, and always have been, equally of ships of war and of ports and harbors. Disloyal emissaries have been neither less assiduous nor more successful during the last year than they were before that time in their efforts under favor of that privilege, to embroil our country in foreign wars. The desire and determination of the governments of the maritime states to defeat that design are believed to be as sincere as and cannot be more earnest than our own. Nevertheless, unforeseen political difficulties have arisen, especially in Brazilian and British ports and on the northern boundary of the United States, which have required, and are likely to continue to require, the practice of constant vigilance and a just and conciliatory spirit on the part of the United States, as well as of the nations concerned and their governments.211

In the capital of Bahia, news of the American naval skirmishes on provincial territory spread like fire in 1864, provoking outrage among the population. The Bahian !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 208 Ibid. 209 The New York Times, 11 November 1864. 210 Courier des États Unis, 12 December 1864. 211 Abraham Lincoln, Fourth Annual Message, 6 December 1864. Available online at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29505 (consulted on March 31, 2017). 106! ! ! Chief of Police ordered his troops to monitor any threat to the public order, given that

“emotions were running high after the unqualified insult to Brazilian Nationality by the

War Steamer of The United States of America.”212 Despite police efforts, a group of people gathered in protest at the American consulate located on top of the Ladeira da

Conceição, pulling the national arms down from the building and rendering it into shreds.

In front of the customhouse, some Florida sailors tried to take hold of the Union , but outraged Brazilians refused to surrender it to them.

Despite Brazilian reclamations, the Florida was never returned to the empire, having sunk off the coast of Hampton Roads, VA, in late November of 1864. The Union government reported that the steamer collapsed after being struck by a transport carrier, yet contemporaries seemed to agree that the had sunk the Florida to prevent it from going back to Confederate hands. In June 6, 1865, as the American Civil War came to a close, the Brazilian government sent out a dispatch to its bureaucrats communicating that the Confederate states should no longer be given the status of belligerents.213 Emperor Pedro II was lenient, though, and fixed a period of four months to make his decision known to Confederate ships that continued to come to Brazilian seaports.214

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 212 ANRJ, IJ1-413, 8 October 1864. Letter from Antônio Joaquim da Silva Gomes, President of Bahia, to the Minister of Justice, Francisco José Furtado. 213 AHI, 233-4-01, 6 June 1865. Letter from the Ministry of Justice to the Brazilian Legation in Washington. 214 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 6 June 1865. Circular from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva, to the presidents of Brazilian provinces. 107! ! ! Waterfront News: Slaves Get Word of Emancipation

Much of the Brazilian authorities’ hesitant attitude when engaging with American representatives during the Civil War can be explained by the agency of actors whose voices were entirely absent from diplomatic discussions: the enslaved people of Brazil. In

1861, the president of the province of Maranhão, Primo de Aguiar, considered the slave insurrection organized in Anajatuba as a matter of utmost gravity. Black hopes of emancipation, he told the Minister of Justice, had been rekindled by “the entrance in this port of two warships, one from the United States of America, and another from the States wishing to constitute a separate confederation.” 215 Minister Francisco de Paula Sayão

Lobato could not agree more and immediately took to alerting the presidents of neighboring provinces about the danger of slave insurrection.

As the C.S.S. Sumter and the U.S.S. Pohwatan cruised Brazilian waters in 1861, slaves like Agostinho of Anajatuba embodied the disruptive potential of American naval warfare abroad. His awareness of recent history was not an exceptional tale of individual achievement but rather a product of networks of communication and contact operating far beyond state control. At a time when bondage labor was coming under attack all over the

Atlantic World, the United States became part of the conceptual maps of slavery and freedom that Brazilian slaves like him applied to navigate the empire’s political landscape. Agostinho’s story takes us back into the world of storytelling and daily politics that developed on the Brazilian waterfront, as ships and crews acted as endless sources of information about the future of slavery in the Americas.

Agostinho belonged to the retired elementary teacher and cattle rancher Cristóvão !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 215 ANRJ, IJ1-913, 21 January 1862. Minister Sayão Lobato sent a circular to the presidents of Pará, , and on December 13, 1861. Letter from the president of Sergipe, Joaquim Jacinto de Mendonça, to the Minister of Justice.! 108! ! ! de Santiago Vieira, who resided in downtown Anajatuba. In 1861, the village had only

3,205 residents, of which 24% were slaves, yet bondage remained the bulwark of social order as much as everywhere else in Brazil.216 Sugar and cotton plantations dominated the region, where a partnership between slaveholders and the state nurtured an interesting relationship with the U.S. South. In the 1850s and 1860s, the government of Maranhão actively sought support American support to disseminate training and new agricultural technologies in the province. Between 1858 and 1859, for instance, the planters Antônio

Joaquim Lopes da Silva and José César Machado were sent on a tour of southern plantations to learn about new cotton spinning technologies and buy “newly-invented machines.”217 Four years later, the provincial government also contracted the American engineer John Wetson to supervise fifteen modernized sugar mills [usinas] that operated with steam turbines in 1863.218

Agostinho never mentioned the American South when arrested by request of his master in Anajatuba. After punishment under police custody, he confessed “he had told his peers that they would all be free, for he had heard so from several blacks at the capital,” and they only waited for troops to come ashore. 219 It is possible that Agostinho could read and was forming his opinion about the Americans through what he was able to glean from the newspapers. At the very least, we know that he worked alongside older

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 216B. de Mattos, Almanak Administrativo, Mercantil e Industrial do Maranhão para o Anno de 1862 (São Luís: Typ. Do Progresso), 33. ! 217“Relatorio com que o Exm. Snr. João Silveira de Souza, presidente desta provincia, abrio a Assembléa Legislativa Provincial no dia 3 de maio de 1860” (Maranhão: Typ. de J.M.C. de Frias, 1860), 22. 218 “Relatorio que á Assembléa Legislativa Provincial do Maranhão apresentou o conselheiro presidente da provincia, Antonio Manoel de Campos Mello, por occasião da installação da mesma no dia 3 de maio de 1863” (Maranhão: Typ. do Frias, 1863), 23. 219 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 17 October 1861. 109! ! ! literate slaves who had access to press coverage of the Sumter incident.220 In August of

1862, for instance, his master Cristóvão Vieira offered a good reward to whoever returned the slave Raimundo, who was so skilled with words as to try to pass as a lawyer:

In around 1855, a slave named Raimundo, known as Surrão ran away, an old mulatto, regular height, kinky hair already going gray, bald, with beard, one eye askew, works as a tailor, wishes to pass as white saying that he has patent because he knows how to read and write, presents himself as a lawyer, likes spirituous beverages, is very talkative, modest arm, has scars of a beating.221

Like Raimundo, Agostinho resisted bondage by constantly challenging his condition and probably spent more time in jail than at work for Vieira. After his arrest for inciting a rebellion in 1861, he was jailed at least three more times in the next six years, on accusations of being drunk, violating the evening curfew, and of taking part in fights.222

From their epicenter in the capital São Luís, rumors about the Civil War quickly extended further to Viana and Turiaçu counties, where slave rebels counted on the support of some of the oldest runaway settlements (quilombos) in Maranhão.223 News traveled fast from boatmen on the shore to provincial hinterlands through muleteers, drivers, peddlers, artisans, maroons and other mobile workers – enslaved or not - who carried back and forth supplies, people, and ideas considered vital to the operation of the local economy. In the end of 1861, several slaves reveled again in the certainty of freedom in the outskirts of São Luís, “a liberty that had been granted to them by an

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 220 The discussions about the Sumter held at the Provincial Assembly of Maranhão in the beginning of September found their way to the newspapers in November, as the Publicador Maranhense published the transcripts of legislature sessions. See, for example, Publicador Maranhense, 4 November 1861. 221 A Coalição, 7 August 1862. 222 Publicador Maranhense, 13 June 1865, 26 December 1866, and 7 May 1867. 223 Viana was larger than Anajatuba, with a population of 8,397 inhabitants and a similar ratio of one slave for every four free persons. C. Marques, Dicionário Histórico-Geográfico da Província do Maranhão (Maranhão: Typ. do Frias, 1870), 555. 110! ! ! American warship that, not being able to free them the first time, will be back soon, and then freedom will be posted by announcement on the door of the church.”224 Local authorities continued to complain about slaves who held regular evening meetings in their quarters or street alleys. Collective flight from plantations and gold mines soon turned the impotence of the police visible to all. In 1862, some slaves welcomed the year with new plans of insurrection in the town of São Bento, still inspired “ by news of the events in

America.”225

In the urban centers of Brazil, it was common for slaves and free black men and women to meet in secluded wooded areas in the outskirts of towns, be it for religious purposes, to share a meal, nurture extended kinship relationships, or even discuss a way out of slavery. Self-hired slaves added to the group of mobile workers who represented a common feature of urban life in Brazil. The so-called hire-out or ganho system required that slaves contracted with masters a reasonable amount of money they would hand in by the end of the day or by the end of the week as the result of their labors. Such arrangement allowed slaves to keep any amount that exceeded what they owed to their master. Therefore, escravos ao ganho had much more control over their daily living than their peers in the plantations, and often confused authorities who could hardly differentiate them from free people of color.226

Mobility, therefore, may have given slaves the conceptual ability to counterpoise themselves to dominant groups. Physical mobility exposed hired-out slaves to a vast

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 224 ANRJ, IJ1-754, 4 November 1861. Letter from the substitute sheriff of Viana, José Cândido Nunes, to the Chief of Police of Maranhão, Júlio César Berenguer de Bittancourt. 225 Ibid.! 226 About hire-out slaves, see: Mary Karasch, Slave Life In Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); João José Reis, “De olho no canto: trabalho de rua na Bahia na véspera da Abolição”, Afro-Ásia, no 24 (2000), 199-242; Richard Graham, Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (Texas: The University of Texas Press, 2010). 111! ! ! array of opinions, and widened the scope of their experience. They interacted with persons of varied social positions, reaching across geographical, social, and cultural boundaries. Along with runaway slaves, they were often the initiators of the streams of conversations and exchanges of information that reached far into the Brazilian hinterlands. In a society in which inland roads were rugged and impassible during the rainy seasons and telegraph lines were sparsely strung, news circulated mostly through face-to-face interactions. That is how one can find slaves in the backlands of Maranhão talking about the U.S. Civil War. Plantations close to the Atlantic coast were not isolated bastions of planter power, but rather landed estates directly connected to larger urban systems. In the case of Maranhão, sugar and cotton had to be transported from the countryside to São Luís for shipping or sold along with manioc and corn to local food suppliers enmeshed in local networks of market relations. Furthermore, slaveholders had their economic base in the country, but their social ties bound them to the city, where they usually maintained a second house. Planters strove to secure a presence in town to assure participation in local politics and the formation of militias from which their prestige emanated. They rarely lived in the country all-year-round, and the servants who accompanied them to and from the city became valuable sources of news to their peers.

In 1861, the quilombo of São Vicente do Céu stood as the greatest focus of insurrection in Maranhão, a province ablaze with talk of a war over slavery in the United

States. Located on the margin of the Tury River, it was a settlement born of the community chased out of the gold mines of Maracassumé in 1856. Over four hundred maroons were said to inhabit the quilombo, which authorities reported as having many

“branches” in western Maranhão. The Santa Bárbara plantation, for instance, property of

112! ! ! the Barão de Turiassú, functioned as the maroons’ main base of operations, as it sat midway between the quilombo and the town of Viana.

In January of 1862, fear of a black rebellion inspired by American naval presence pushed provincial authorities to raid “the formidable quilombo situated beyond the

Maracassumé River.”227 A force of fifty-two soldiers and fifty National Guards, all under the command of Lieutenant Máximo Fernandes Monteiro from the Military Colony of

Gurupy travelled on foot to the woods of Viana and ransacked the settlement after killing two fugitives who resisted the siege. When Lieutenant Monteiro and his troops finally arrived at the quilombo, however, they found the place empty, the maroons having been forewarned about the raid by local trading partners.

Lieutenant Monteiro described the community of São Vicente do Céu as a

“colossal settlement” located on top of a hill, stretching 601 yards deep and 216 yards wide.”228 It was probably comparable to the village of Anajatuba, a modest town of only four streets. The quilombo had seventy-eight residential houses, one sugar mill, six ovens for the processing of manioc flour, one weaver’s cottage, and a big house of worship, decorated with a large cross and flowers. As they ransacked the settlement after days in the woodlands without enough provisions, soldiers found over one thousand chickens, forty-six dogs, sixty-nine pans to mine gold and fifty cauldrons along with harvests of manioc, cotton, rice, and tobacco.

Although the raid of the quilombo of São Vicente do Céu ended with the burning of all residences – soldiers mindful of their Christian God were careful to leave the cross in the house of worship intact, though – it produced very few prisoners. The maroons !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 227ANRJ, IJ1-754, 22 February 1862. Report sent by Lieutenant Máximo Fernandes Monteiro to the Sheriff of Viana, Raimundo Benedito Muniz. ! 228 Ibid. 113! ! ! relocated to other smaller quilombos, keeping rumors of rebellion alive in northern

Brazil. In the end of February 1862, minister Sayão Lobato warned the neighboring province of Pará that slave rebellions such as the ones feared in Maranhão could take place elsewhere, “since the two partialities at war in the United States unfortunately continue to debacle.”229 By the same token, the new president of Maranhão, Antônio

Manoel de Campos Mello, assumed his post a month later with the promise of definitely extinguishing the Viana quilombos as the paramount measure to enforce law and order during the course of the American Civil War. “I take this matter seriously,” pondered

Campos Mello, because the slave population “upon which the denouement of the war of the South of the American Union is bound to make an impression is still large, since just the coming of the Sumter and the evilness or imprudence of some propagated dangerous ideas.”230

“Running away with the Americans”: Union Whalers in Santa Catarina

As we have seen, American ships in transit along the Brazilian coast made the

Civil War palpable to Brazilian slaves in many ways. They were visible reminders of the contests over the issue of slavery raging the Atlantic, and actual parts in armed hostilities that challenged the position of neutrality assumed by Brazil. Moreover, ships and their crews were the purveyors of news from otherwise distant lands. Seafarers with as diverse experiences as David Porter, Raphael Semmes or his slave Ned offered maritime communities regular access to the unfolding stories of the U.S. conflict. Knowledge of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 229 ANRJ, IJ1-792, 28 February 1862. Reply from the provincial president of Pará, Francisco Carlos de Araújo Brusques, to the Minister of Justice, Francisco de Paula de Negreiros de Araújo Sayão Lobato. 230ANRJ, IJ1-754, 12 March 1862. Letter from the presidente of Maranhão, Antônio Manoel de Campos Mello, to the Minister of Justice, Francisco de Paula Sayão Lobato. 114! ! ! the war eventually transformed American vessels into an attractive destination for those in search of liberty, leading to mounting maritime slave resistance in Brazil.

Over the 1860s, enslaved blacks escalated their challenge to captivity by acting on the notion of “free soil” and boarding Union merchant ships docked especially along the

Brazilian southern coast. In so doing, they joined a transatlantic tradition that shaped abolitionist politics everywhere slavery existed since the Age of Revolutions.231 In the case of Brazil, the principle of free soil achieved greater significance in the context of

Atlantic emancipations, as slaves who took to the sea in flight directly embroiled the empire in the international politics of abolition. Slave runaways claiming foreign ships as safe havens from enslavement turned the Brazilian coast into an international border shaped by the asymmetric nature of laws concerning slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world. In that environment, their political struggles attained immediate transatlantic dimensions, which resonated back into the urban and rural hinterlands they had left behind.

Narratives of blacks freed upon crossing into North American territory had already gained currency in Brazil before the advent of the war. The northern United

States had long been part of Atlantic seafaring escape routes, linking underground railroads all over the hemisphere, as the story of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua illustrates.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 231 Historians of Caribbean slavery have explored this phenomenon as maritime marronage: Gad Heuman, ed, Out of the House of Bondage: Runaways, Resistance and Marronage in Africa and the New World (London: Franc Cass, 1986) and Julius S. Scott, “Crisscrossing Empire: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century,” in: Stanley L. Engerman and Robert L. Paquette (eds), The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996), 128- 143; Jessica Vance Roitman, “Land of Hope and Dreams: Slavery and Abolition in the Dutch Leeward Islands, 1825–1865,” Slavery & Abolition, 37:2 (2016), 375-398. See also: Charles Foy, Ports of Slavery, Ports of Freedom: How Slaves Used Northern Seaports’ Maritime Industry to Escape and Create Trans- Atlantic Identities, 1713-1783 (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers University, 2008); Eddie L. Wong, Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Peabody and Grinberg, “Free Soil.” 115! ! ! Baquaqua jumped ship in New York when the Brazilian merchant vessel in which he was engaged as a slave reached that port in 1847. His narrative of survival resulted in the only known biography written by a former slave from Brazil during the nineteenth century. 232

Born into a Muslim merchant family from in the early , Baquaqua was kidnapped into slavery in the Sokoto , and embarked at the port of Ouidah on a

Portuguese vessel engaged in the illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1845. He completed the

Middle Passage to Recife, Pernambuco, where he was sold first to a baker and then to

Clemente José da Costa, a ship captain from Rio de Janeiro engaged in the domestic coastal trade.

In 1847, Costa signed a contract to deliver a consignment of Brazilian coffee to

New York, and took Baquaqua on board the ship Lembrança as his cabin steward.

Enduring many hardships along the way, Baquaqua soon learned about New York from an Englishman at sea:

The first words of English that my two companions and myself ever learned was F-r-e-e; we were taught it by an Englishman on board, and oh! how many times did I repeat it, over and over again. This same man told me a great deal about , (he could speak Portuguese). He told me how the colored people in New York were all free, and it made me feel very happy, and I longed for the day to come when I should be there. The day at length came, but it was not an easy matter for two boys and a girl, who could only speak one word of English, to make their escape, having, as we supposed, no friends to aid us. But God was our friend, as it proved in the end, and raised up for us many friends in a strange land. 233

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 232 Robin Law, "Individualising the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua of Djougou (1854)," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002): 113-40 and “Freedom Narratives’ of Transatlantic Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 32:1 (2011), 91-107; Allan Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York and London, 1997). On Brazilian slave narratives, see also: Robert Krueger, “Brazilian Slaves Represented in their Own Words,” Slavery & Abolition, 23:2 (2002), 169-186 and Robert Edgar Conrad, Children of God's Fire: a Documentary History of Black Slavery In Brazil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 233 Baquaqua, Robin Law, and Lovejoy, The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, 54. In Portuguese, the first translation dates back to 1997: Robert Krueger (trans.), “Biografia e narrativa do ex- escravo afro-brasileiro Mahommah G. Baquaqua” (Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1997). 116! ! ! Upon arrival in New York, a delegation from the New York Vigilance Committee spotted the Lembrança on the harbor and went on board to check on the condition of blacks. Formed in 1835 by a group of African Americans that included David Ruggles, the Committee functioned as a fugitive aid society, receiving, assisting, and transporting runaway slaves as part of the larger network.234 The visit of black abolitionists to a vessel flying the flag of a slaveholding empire inspired Baquaqua to escape captivity and brought to light contests over the geographies of enslavement and freedom:

(…) a great many colored persons came aboard the vessel, who inquired if we were free. The captain had previously told us not to say that we were slaves, but we heeded not his wish, and he, seeing so many persons coming aboard, began to entertain fears that his property would take in their heads to lift their heels and run away, so he very prudently informed us that New York was no place for us to go about in--that it was a very bad place, and as sure as the people caught us they would kill us. But when we were alone we concluded that we would take the first opportunity and the chance, how we would fare in a free country.235

Captured by a watchman when he came ashore, Baquaqua was jailed and later taken for questioning at New York City Hall. Under the watch of the Brazilian consul, he then became the object of a lengthy legal dispute between the American abolitionists and

Clemente José da Costa. In the case argued during the months of July and August of

1847, the Vigilance Committee chose not to argue the illegality of Baquaqua’s enslavement in Brazil (he was imported in contravention of the 1831 abolition law) and invoked instead a 1840 state law which determined that slaves brought to New York by their owners would henceforth be considered free.236 Nevertheless, two judges finally

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 234 The First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance for the Year 1837, Together With Important Facts Relative to Their Proceedings (New York: Pierce & Reed Printers, 1837), 10. 235 Ibid, 56. 236 The weekly newspaper of the American Anti-Slavery Society, The National Anti-Slavery Standard, publicized Baquaqua’s trial on its edition of 2 September 1847. 117! ! ! upheld Clement José da Costa’s argument, declaring Baquaqua a deserting crewmember of the Lembrança rather than a runaway slave. Although affirming publicly that he would never go back to slavery, Baquaqua was subsequently sent to prison in lower Manhattan and had to be smuggled out of jail in order to avoid extradition to Brazil. Conductors took him to Boston and then arranged a trip to Haiti, where Baquaqua faced a very different experience on American hands.237

After a tough start, the Muslim and Hausa Baquaqua eventually befriended

Reverend William Judd from the American Baptist Free Mission Society in Haiti. As the head of his church’s mission in Port-au-Prince, Rev. Judd assisted the former slave in his conversion to and employed Baquaqua with the aim of later engaging him as an interpreter or guide to a mission in Africa. Baquaqua then came back to the United

States in 1849 and enrolled in a Free Mission’s educational institution, the Central

College in McGrawville, New York. Despite his efforts, the American Baptist Free

Mission Society never delivered on its promise to send a to Africa. Baquaqua eventually became disillusioned with the United States, where race discrimination trumped his experience as a free man. Fearing recapture under the Fugitive Slave Law of

1850, he moved to in 1854 and arranged to publish his biography as the last

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 237 Ironically, Baquaqua endured severe physical punishment in the hands of an African American employer in Port-au-Prince. Baquaqua, The Biography, 58. 118! ! ! resort to raise funds for his return to Africa.238 After a period in Canada, Baquaqua spent the rest of his life in England, where he disappears from the historical record around

1857.

Baquaqua’s biography is of interest here because he personifies the intertwined nature of black struggles for emancipation in the Atlantic. To my knowledge, he is the only slave from Brazil to have his passage through the American Underground Railroad documented in print. His story illuminates one of the ways Africans lived through slavery in the Age of Emancipation, that is, by adjusting their expectations of emancipation as they moved amongst slave and free soil. As Baquaqua experienced dislocation as the main trope of being black in the Atlantic, he produced different senses of place, recasting the meanings of slavery’s geographic terrain.239 He learned about New York as a space free of slavery but never really identified with a reconstituted community in the North and eventually grew disenchanted with the scope of his liberty in the United States. As most of his fellow freedmen, Baquaqua displayed above all a keen awareness of skin color without ever talking in the language of nationalism. His world was not one of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 238 Written in Ghatam in collaboration with white Unitarian minister Samuel Moore and published across the border in Detroit under the title “An Interesting Narrative: Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua,” the work uniquely documents his life in Africa, the experience of slavery in Brazil and the precarious freedom achieved in the United States. Baquaqua’s narrative raises questions about the author’s control over the production of the text and its reliability. Despite Moore’s intervention, though, the latter part of Baquaqua’s life or his experience as a free man is heavily documented by sources other than his own narrative which corroborate the content of his book. See: Law, “Individualising the Atlantic Slave Trade;” Vincent Carreta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an Eighteenth- Century Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition, 20 (1999), 96-105; Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Biography as Source Material: Towards a Biographical Archive of Enslaved Africans’, in Source Material for Studying the Slave Trade and the African Diaspora, Papers from a Conference of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirling, April 1996, edited by Robin Law (Centre of Commonwealth Studies, University of Stirlig, 1997), 119–140; James H. Sweet, “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora,” American Historical Review (2009): 279– 306. 239 Another interesting example of an Atlantic quest for freedom in which individual nationality and formal citizenship were blurry concepts can be found in the journey of the Tinchant family through the Caribbean, United States, and Europe. Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers. 119! ! ! unwavering borders and well-defined political entities; it was rather one in which blackness dictated the meanings of belonging or lack thereof.

As Baquaqua’s life story exemplifies, blacks advanced and manipulated the notion of free soil according to varying historical contexts. Where to go and how to get there were some of the most important pieces of information to circulate through the covert networks of communication maintained by them. In the 1860s, the outbreak of the

Civil War extended the blanket of freedom to the holds of Union ships docked on

Brazilian seaports. Slaves took to the sea by stealing canoes, small boats, or counting on the assistance of sympathizing ship captains. Over time, their shipboard getaways made them qualified sailors and nodes in wide networks of fugitives that extended inland.

In practice, slaves expected to acquire free status as soon as they stepped on

American territory, despite the fact that Brazilian law never ceased to classify them as runaways. In August of 1857, for example, Portugal passed a decree freeing all the slaves either embarked on Portuguese vessels or belonging to foreign ships entering Portuguese ports, including its possessions in India. Shortly thereafter, a slave ran away from a

Brazilian vessel docked in the Portuguese city of Porto. Brazilian diplomats demanded that the slave be returned to his master, to what Portuguese authorities agreed as an exception based on the “lack of use or obscurity” of that the August legislation. 240 Quite often, the strength of seigniorial rights trumped the law.

Slave flight to Union whalers shortened the distance between New England and

Santa Catarina in the mid-nineteenth century. This southern province was the center of

Brazilian offshore coastal whaling. It housed commercial whale-oil factories often !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 240 BRASIL “Relatório da Repartição dos Negócios Estrangeiros Apresentado `a Assembléa Geral Legislativa na 2a Sessão da 10a Legislatura Pelo Respectivo Ministro e Secretário de Estado, Visconde de Maranguape (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Universal de Laemmert, 1858), 23. 120! ! ! operated by slaves and provided for the illumination of several Brazilian provinces.241!

American whalemen had hunted sperm whales on the coast of Brazil at least since the early 1800s, when Portugal permitted foreign countries to fish on Brazilian waters.

Sailing out of New England, they procured the South Atlantic for oil and baleen

(whalebone), following the migrations of whale populations that commonly reached

Brazilian waters between June and September. From the 1850s on, American mariners certainly benefited from Virginian Matthew Maury’s mapping of whale migrations in their trips to Brazil. His 1853 whale chart, after all, stood at the time as the first quantitatively grounded description of whale distribution in South America, detailing both sightings and catches.

As other commercial vessels, American whalers also stopped along the coast of

South America for replenishments, emergency repairs or for the discharge of injured sailors. While anchored, some whale fisheries hoping to cut costs actively took Brazilian slaves on board as they recruited crewmen from the transient population that crowded imperial ports. Facing high rates of desertion and deaths or starting off with just enough men to make it to killing grounds, American captains often signed on entire international crews, paying foreigners less than American sailors earned.242 Strict shipboard discipline, dangerous conditions of work, and low rates of compensation made for a high labor turnover in the whaling industry. The regular crew was paid a “lay,” i.e., a part of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 241 Herbert S. Klein, African and the Caribbean (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). See: Wellington Castellucci Junior, “Histórias conectadas por mares revoltos: uma história da caça de baleias nos Estados Unidos e no Brasil (1750-1850),”Rev. hist. comp., Rio de Janeiro, v. 9, n. 1, 2015, 112. 242 Margaret S. Creighton, Rites and Passages: The Experience of American Whaling, 1830-1870 (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 121! ! ! voyage’s profit, and percentages dwindled according to occupations on board. In vessels from New Bedford, dark-skinned Portuguese seamen recruited on the way were common.

Complaints about American whalers facilitating the flight of slaves in the

Brazilian coast accompanied the history of American fishery abroad. As early as in 1820, authorities in Santa Catarina denounced American whalers for “allowing the flight of

243 slaves from the people.” The fate of escaped slaves from Brazil probably resembled more that of men without previous experience at sea who signed on as unskilled hands, cooks or stewards in return of clothes or board. Sometimes, though, passage on a whaling ship could mean a way back into the world of the Atlantic slave trade in the years before the Civil War. Gerald Horne has shown that many whalers sailing south from New

Bedford, Nantucket Island, New London, and Sag Harbor were engaged in slaving voyages and served as a disguise to deceive British cruisers.244

The American whaling industry enjoyed its peak during the 1850s but wartime conditions in the next decade made fishing exploits more hazardous. Confederate cruisers like the Alabama and Florida deliberately targeted Union whalers in the high seas, sinking, burning or hauling ships along as prizes. Between March and May of 1863, for instance, captain Raphael Semmes of the Alabama captured the whalers Kingfisher, Kate

Cory, Laffayette, and Nye off the coast of Pernambuco. Reminiscing with pride on the taking of a good cargo of sperm and whale oil from the Nye, a New Bedford whaler returning home after a cruise of thirty-one months in the Pacific, Semmes later wrote on his journal:

The fates seemed to have a grudge against these New England fishermen, and would persist in throwing them in my way, although I was not on a whaling ground. This was !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 243Castellucci Junior, “Histórias conectadas,” 112. 244 Horne, The Deepest South.! 122! ! ! the sixteenth I had captured---a greater number than had been captured from the English by Commodore David Porter, in his famous cruise in the Pacific, in the frigate Essex, during the War of 1812.245

As news of the U.S. war reached Brazil, many slaves started to conflate the

Americans with the British for, not only did they speak the same language, but they were also described as dreaded antislavery powers by slaveholders and politicians. In Santa

Catarina, Union merchant ships opened new circuits of information exchange based on transient travellers with connections with the sea and sparked slave flight. Faced with the loss of valuable human property and a precedent they feared would just encourage more slave to flee, local slaveholders resorted to the press. Fugitive slave advertisements routinely publicized escapes to national and foreign ships and directed warnings at ship captains not to assist runaways.246 In 1865, masters from the provincial capital of

Desterro conveyed their concerns with rare clarity in a letter published by the newspaper

O Despertador:

An abuse of grave nature is gaining such proportion that it is bound to incur great losses among Slave owners, if the government does not come to their assistance. We have long heard complaints of slaves escaping on American ships docked at the port of Santa Cruz; and the slave who escapes on such ships is lost for his master.

On June 20th, a barge from a North American ship anchored in Santo Antônio; and, leaving at night, two slaves disappeared along with her. A creole named Fructuoso, slave of João José da Cunha e Silva, and the Joaquim, slave of Theodozio Machado; both slaves used to maritime work, the first having declared long ago that he would run away with the Americans. (…)

The treatment received by those slaves, who could pass for free, is proof that just the desire to travel and go around the world, led them to abandon their masters. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 245 Raphael Semmes, Memoirs of Service Afloat, During the War Between the States Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & co., 1869, 611. 246 These advertisements were common in all of Brazilian maritime provinces. In 1850, for instance, a slaveholder from Pernambuco published an ad on the Jornal do Recife to look for his slave Bernardo, a 40- year-old shoemaker. Following a detailed physical description of the runaway, his master pleaded “it is asked from ship captains who take slaves out of the city that they meticulously examine those (slaves) who present themselves, not being among them this one wanting to escape (…).” The ad was followed by others referring to slaves embarked on ships such as the Niterói and the Inca. ANRJ, IJ1- 324, April 1850. 123! ! !

Being the case serious, we ask whoever is in charge to take precautions, recommending the most immediate and fierce vigilance over such ships, by sending some guards aboard to keep watch on the last days of each stay; otherwise, whoever possesses slaves who miss traveling, will not be able to sleep in peace.247

The grievances of slaveholders in Santa Catarina were reminiscent of a longstanding black tradition of fleeing enslavement by seeking berths on ships. In Rio de

Janeiro, slaveholders suspected British cruisers of smuggling their human property; in the

Northern provinces, propertied men demanded that the police scour vessels headed to

Peru in search of their bondsmen.248 The province of Santa Catarina, however, was uniquely positioned to serve as a privileged seafaring escape route for slaves. Through its ports passed ships en route to the busy markets of Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and

Buenos Aires, as well as American merchant vessels headed towards the Pacific Ocean.

In the late 1840s, the province received a great influx of U.S. nationals on their way to the gold mines of California. American ships traveled west by going around Cape Horn, often stopping first in Rio de Janeiro and then at the village of Desterro. Solely in 1849, eighty-six California ships passed by the Brazilian southern coast.249

American whaling ships that managed to reach Brazilian ports brought with them stories of war and rumors foretelling immediate emancipation.250 More than a ticket to the harsh world of maritime work, Union whalers offered enslaved men a means of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 247 O Despertador, n. 256, 27 June 1865. About slave flight to American ships in Santa Catarina, see: Martha Rebelatto, “Uma saída pelo mar: rotas marítimas de fuga escrava em Santa Catarina no século XIX,”Revista de Ciências Humanas, Florianópolis, EDUFSC, n. 40, (Outubro de 2006), 423-442 and Walter F. Piazza, A escravidão negra numa provincial periférica (Florianópolis: Garapuvu, 1999). 248 In 1865, the Chief of Police of Pará filed a long complaint with the provincial government regarding Peruvian ships navigating the , which constantly took in deserters as well as runaway slaves who looked for freedom and a labor contract with the government of Peru. ANRJ, IJ1-208, 3 January 1865. Letter from the Chief of Police of Pará, José de Araújo Damim, to president José Vieira Couto de Magalhães. 249 Horne, The Deepest South, 13. 250 Keletso Atkins, “The 'Black Atlantic Communication Network': African American Sailors and the Cape of Good Hope Connection,” Issue: A Journal of Opinion 24:2, African [Diaspora] Studies (1996), 23-25. 124! ! ! passage to freedom or, in the very least, a way out of Brazil. Requiring large boarding parties to seize control of enemy ships and prize crews, privateer captains during wartime were willing to engage inexperienced blacks on their steamers. Hiring fugitive slaves and deserters enabled them to preserve their best sailors and officials from enemy weapons.

In the 1860s, Santa Catarina slave owners had reached the limit of their endurance with American whalers. They claimed that slaves were escaping daily from the port of

Santa Cruz and that authorities were not doing enough to prevent American captains from acting as fugitive smugglers. The allure they exerted on the Southern seaports of Brazil is illustrated by an episode that took place again in Desterro, shortly after the publishing of the letter from slaveholders of Santo Antônio.

In May of 1866, five other slave owners petitioned provincial president Adolfo de

B. Cavalcanti de A. Lacerda for the return of six of their slaves who had run away in the

American ship Marcella. The whaler had entered the port on April 4th and was soon accused of seducing slaves on shore with “the perspective of being rid of bondage.”251

The below signed residents of the City of Desterro have just been victims of the most revolting and scandalous act practiced by the American bark Marcellus from New Bedford, in the United States, Captain Henry B. Chase.

This ship, Your Excellency, employed on the fishing of whales on the coast of the Empire came to our port in search of refreshments, and anchored close to the Santa Cruz Fortress, there with scandalous petulance enticed slaves to come serve them on board with promises of emancipation in their country, until it left on the seventh of this month taking the slaves in the list attached. It is also known by the below signed that Your Excellency being aware of a similar conduct by the American barks Spartan and Triton that left some days later, took action to prevent the theft of other slaves in one of these, who had been equally enticed by the respective Captains.252 ! !

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 251 ANRJ, IJ1-1003, 21 June 1866. Letter from the president of Santa Catarina, Adolfo de B. Cavalcanti de A. Lacerda, to the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva. 252 Ibid, 21 May 1866. 125! ! ! The Desterro planters demanded that the imperial government force Commander

Henry B. Chase to either return their slaves or pay reparations in the sum of 1:200$000 réis per each in case he anchored again in a different Brazilian port. Along with the petition, they sent a list with the characteristics of the six male slaves allegedly recruited by the Americans as sailors. Francisco, Luiz, Jacinto, Floriano, João and João were young slaves, all between 19 and 30 years of age, at the peak of their working life. President

Lacerda immediately wrote to the American consul in Santa Catarina, Benjamin Lindsey, asking for a crack down on the bad behavior of his nation’s whaling ships. Lacerda argued that American captains had made a habit of coming to Desterro to take along with slaves “with the intention of changing their condition.”253

Consul Lindsey, himself a native of New Bedford and editor of the whaling industry’s weekly newspaper The Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, promised to comply with the president’s terms yet admitting no wrongdoing on the part of American skippers. In order to prove his point, president Lacerda commented on the information given by two National Guards of the São Miguel Battalion who had recently traveled on the American ship John Dowbrou. The guards reported having met three slaves from Desterro on board. When disembarking on the island of Cape Verde,

Celestino José Machado watched the slaves achieve freedom or new forms of servitude ashore. Of the three Brazilian fugitives, one became a cook at a local hospital, another hired himself out as a shoemaker to an exile, and another slave started work as carpenter

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 253 Ibid, 13 June 1866. Letter from the president of Santa Catarina, Adolfo de B. Cavalcanti de A. Lacerda, to the American Consul, Benjamin Lindsey. 126! ! ! but soon decided to leave Cape Verde on a Spanish vessel headed to the Rio de la

Plata.254

In their 1866 complaint against the ubiquity of slave flight to ships in Desterro, slaveholders reminded president Lacerda of the successful measures employed against the American brigs Spartan and Triton. In early May, the police of the Island of São

Miguel had captured fugitive slaves before they could embark on the said ships that waited for them in the outside anchorage of the port of Santa Cruz. Among the arrested were three field workers from Tijuquinha, who had reportedly fled to Caieira with the intention of boarding “an American ship.” When asked about why he had run away, José, a creole slave of João Florêncio Pereira, explained he had planed his escape upon meeting “the fugitive black called Ignácio in the Inferninho backlands where he lives.”

Ignácio was the slave of Manoel Pacheco, and had been away from his master for four months “in search of a different master.”255 After some conversation, José asked Ignácio

“to procure him a spot to embark with the Americans,” and was advised to go to Caieira in pursuit of someone who could negotiate it.

At Caieira, “after some asking around,” José learned that Carlos Americano, a resident of the Estanislau Beach, was the person who sheltered and distributed blacks and to American ships. Carlos promptly agreed to help José, and even enticed him to bring along whoever he wanted after swearing “all who went aboard would soon be free.”

José went back to his master’s property in Tijuquinha to invite Ignácio and the slave

Vicente to join him on the escape. They then went back to Carlos Americano’s house,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 254 Ibid, 21 May 1866. Interrogatory of Celestino José Machado, passenger on the North-American ship John Dowsen.! 255 Ibid, 16 May 1866. Interrogatory of the preto Ignácio, slave of Manoel Pacheco.! 127! ! ! where they boarded Carlos’ canoe at midnight after paying him four thousand réis and surrendering their personal knives.256

José, Vicente, and Ignácio arrived that same night by canoe on “a fishing ship with three masts” docked at the port of Santa Cruz. After speaking “in a language they could not understand,” Carlos Americano handed them over to the ship captain, who hid the slaves behind barrels and lumber. Passed two days, the same captain sent them to the

Praia do Pontal in anticipation of a visitation by local authorities, promising to come back for the slaves in a few nights. Ignácio described the Pontal as a place akin to a quilombo, crowded with runaway blacks waiting for an opportunity to sail away from slavery in

Brazil. Since captain Henry B. Chase never returned to land, Ignácio, Vicente, and José set off on their own to , and ended up arrested by the police. A man from the port of Santa Cruz had tipped the officers off, mentioning his encounter with the slaves by the docks, where they professed to be out fishing shrimp.257 It seemed that the vigilance of authorities had finally paid off after months of raids aimed at uncovering black networks of communication organized around Santa Cruz’s eateries, lodge houses, and drinking parlors.

Nevertheless, as the provincial Chief of Police disparagingly phrased, there was little hope of preventing American whaling vessels from seducing slaves along the coast

“when they could offer the lure of freedom.”258 In 1867, a party sent by him aboard an

American vessel anchored again in the port of Santa Cruz arrested the “pardo” Adriano dos Santos, for suspicion of being a slave of the Cassão & Paranhos firm from Rio de

Janeiro. After interrogations, authorities discovered that Adriano was in fact a freedman !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 256 Ibid, 19 May 1866. Interrogatory of the pardo José, slave of João Florêncio Pereira. 257 Ibid, 16 May 1866. Interrogatory of the preto Ignácio, slave of Manoel Pacheco. 258 See Rebelatto, “Uma saída pelo mar,” 437. 128! ! ! who had deserted from the .259 In May of 1868, the slaves Estevão, Paulo,

Joaquim, Geraldo, Domingos, Gregório e Manoel escaped on the whaler Highland Mary of Sag Harbor, N.Y., a ship that ran the blockage of southern ports, sailing under the

English colors. The ship had put into the vicinity of the Santa Cruz Fortress for a month and, since her arrival, elicited fears among local slaveholders. Estevão’s mistress, Marial

Luiza Sabino, posted several ads on Desterro newspapers in the beginning of May, publicizing his escape and anticipating Estevão’s plan to “embark as free in one of the

North-American ships that usually put in at the Santa Cruz Port.”260

Authorities finally learned about the slaves’ plan from a Portuguese seaman named João Cardoso Jacques who had abandoned service on board the Highland Mary after being harshly punished by captain A. B. French. Jacques revealed that the captain’s involvement in the recruitment of Brazilian bondsmen went as far as engaging the fugitive Frutuoso in trips to the Santa Catarina shore to invite his comrades to join the whaler’s crew. Fructuoso, the slave claimed by João José da Cunha in 1865, as we have seen, had run away from Santo Antônio via the sea three years earlier and boarded the

Highland Mary in the United States in the middle of the American Civil War.

When he got word about the flight, President Lacerda sent the Brazilian warship

Henrique Dias in pursuit of the Highland Mary but the American whaler successfully left the port of Santa Cruz shortly before her arrival. The incident sparked outrage in the local press, which ran to condemn Brazil’s weakness in face of the American Navy:

It is not the first time that such an act takes place and the fishing ships of the abovementioned nation [United States] have always been accused of such criminal abuse. (…) We cannot believe the imperial government fears this great power so much as to not !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 259 O Mercantil, 19 September 1867. 260 See examples on O Mercantil, 3 and 7 May 1868. 129! ! ! even muster the courage to tell its government that the Slave Owners of Santa Catarina have their interests subverted by its subjects.261

This time, despite never returning to Brazil, captain A. French was prosecuted for slave theft.262

It is impossible to ascertain if any among the Brazilian slaves embarked on New

England whalers ever received their de facto freedom, but the stories analyzed in this section point to them finding at least more choices at sea. Some fugitives like the ones traveling aboard the John Downsen became authentic Atlantic wanderers. Greater mobility, however, did not guarantee slaves a new status and escapees found on

American ships did not enjoy any claim to emancipation according to Brazilian law.

Their situation was quite different, for example, from that of liberated Africans captured by British cruisers. With their manumission never formalized, Brazilian fugitives faced the perils of re-enslavement or even legal prosecution for past crimes whenever back to their homeland. That was the case of the slave Fructuoso who, despite having spent three years out at sea including a passage by the United States, had to hide aboard a Union vessel to escape capture by police officers from Santa Catarina.

The agency of Brazilian blacks in advancing international ship holds as free soil points to how they constantly redrew their political maps of the Age of Emancipation.263

The Atlantic was then not a transparent, readily knowable space for all of its inhabitants.

In times of rapid change, it was for blacks a category of social and spatial struggle, a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 261 O Despertador, 15 May 1868. 262 O Mercantil, 21 May 1868.! 263The free soil principle was formulated in several historical contexts, being contingent upon the social actors who advanced it. Whereas European nations used it to distinguish their legal spaces from those of their American colonies, slaves and free blacks championed it as a liberating mechanism. By crossing borders, as Keila Grinberg and Sue Peabody contend, they “voted with their feet,” that is, advanced a claim to a state-sanctioned free status and rights. Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg (eds), Free Soil in the Atlantic World (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 2-3. 130! ! ! place in constant need of evaluation. In the 1860s, despite the massive presence of

Confederate privateers and Union slavers disguised as whalers on the coast of the

Brazilian empire, North American vessels became a heavily sought-after refuge for those escaping captivity in Brazil. Instead of thinking from the vantage point of stability, insurgent blacks envisioned the Atlantic as a place under construction, full of dangers and possibilities. In their experience, the geography of domination put in place by transatlantic slavery was powerful yet porous, ready to be reinvented by those who knew it best. For geography referred not only to a sense of physical materiality; it also denoted different ways of knowing the world.264

Conclusion

Extending into Latin America via the sea, the American Civil War invites us to rethink the historical geographies at play in the late nineteenth century. Scholars have started to show how the conflict rearranged transnational exchanges on a global scale, informed the restructuring of labor systems in the Americas, and influenced anti-slavery legislation in Cuba and Brazil. Less has been done, however, to trace how it reverberated on all corners of the African Diaspora. As the examples coming out of Brazil demonstrate, the U.S. conflict changed the context in which slave resistance took place by opening up opportunities for new alliances throughout the Atlantic. Black encounters with Union and Confederate forces in Maranhão, Bahia, Ceará, Pernambuco, Santa

Catarina, and Rio de Janeiro led Afro-Brazilians to reevaluate the conditions of their enslavement while also forcing planter elites to position themselves more clearly with

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 264McKittrick and Woods, eds, Black Geographies and the Politics of Place and McKittrick, Demonic Grounds; Troutman,“Grapevine in the Slave Market.”! 131! ! ! regard to the future of slavery in the country. When we place the diaspora of ideas and people into an intra-continental context encompassing Brazil and the United States, we find that blacks in Brazil were not merely reactive or derivative in their approach to

Atlantic abolitionism. On the contrary, we discover that slave unrest inspired panic among Brazilian elites, prompting officials and diplomats to combine their defense of neutrality in the American war with police prevention of the “contagion of ideas” of emancipation among enslaved people. In the next chapter, we will move from the

Atlantic coast inland, to further examine how Brazilian slaves used the American war as a strategy of mobilization over the 1860s. Contingent upon the movement of ships and the people aboard them, the circulation of the printed and spoken word triggered rumors that exercised a powerful influence on the politics of slavery in the empire.

132! ! ! CHAPTER THREE

A War in Print: Liberalism, Afro-Brazilian Literacy, and the U.S. Civil War ! ! International currents of abolitionism reached the southeastern province of Minas

Gerais, Brazil, in the first days of May 1864. Fireworks illuminated the narrow streets of the old colonial downtown of Diamantina, a city at the heart of Brazil’s richest diamond mines, as locals attended three-day-long festivities to celebrate the consecration of their new bishop. While most people took part in the revelries that coincided with the Holy

Spirit Annual Festival, slaves in the neighboring town of Serro gathered in secret to discuss an escape plan. In a meeting held at the school of the Sesmaria plantation, property of Francisca de Araújo Padilha, they congregated around the blacksmith Nuno, who relayed the latest news reported by the papers of a “war about the freedom of the slaves” taking place in another country. Nuno thought the time was right to run away but suggested it would be even better “for them to make a mess at the city of Serro with their pals.” 265

Nuno had probably been reading O Jequitinhonha, the only newspaper printed in the Serro County in the early 1860s. The liberal-leaning periodical had been reporting regularly on the American Civil War and broadcasting the impressions of its editors through articles like the one suggestively titled “The United States and Slavery.”266 On the pages of O Jequitinhonha, one could learn that the “heinous chancre” of bondage had caused the conflict on U.S. soil and now threatened Brazil with a similar future if the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 265 Joaquim Bernardino Pereira de Queiroz’s testimony, 24 October 1864. ANRJ, “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” Corte de Apelação, cx. 3700, maço 5014, 66. For an in-depth analysis of the 1864 Serro and Diamantina rebellion, see: Isadora Moura Mota, O 'vulcão' negro Chapada: rebelião escrava nos sertões diamantinos (Minas Gerais, 1864) (Master’s Thesis, UNICAMP, 2005). 266 O Jequitinhonha, 13 July 1863.! 133! ! ! imperial government persisted in its reluctance to address the evils of the system. Bold words in print such as these carried great authority among marginally literate Afro-

Brazilians. In 1864, they inspired Nuno to call upon his fellow slaves to “wage war against the whites with the goal of becoming free” because “an order for the freedom of the slaves had already arrived but the whites were hiding the order” from them.267

The enslaved stonemason José Cabrinha and the tailor Demétrio, two of Nuno’s most attentive listeners at the Sesmaria plantation, had additional news to share with the group. “According to their reading of the newspapers,” said Cabrinha, “they saw that

Liberals were tending to the issue of the emancipation of the slaves and, therefore, they

(the slaves) should seek to acquire it with their own hands.” 268 As they articulated the meanings of what they had read to the audience, Cabrinha, Nuno, and Demétrio invited their fellow slaves into the literate culture where political representation seemed to take place. Cabrinha referred to projects then in debate at Brazil’s National Assembly.

Introduced by politicians from the Liberal Party like Senator José Inácio Silveira da

Motta, the bills were aimed at purging Brazilian slavery from its most visible and abject aspects -- such as the sale of slaves in public auctions and the separation of slave families

– yet without ever calling for abolition. These emancipationist projects channeled the most progressive sentiments Brazilian political elites had to offer in an era dominated by concerns with property rights and public order.269

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 267 Ibid, 30. 268 Ibid, 24. 269 On the politics of slavery in the Brazilian empire, see: Parron, A política da escravidão; Berbel, Marquese e Parron, Escravidão e Política: Brasil e Cuba; Jeffrey D. Needell, The Party of Order: the Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian monarchy, 1831-1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006); José Murilo de Carvalho, A Construção Da Ordem: A Elite Política Imperial; Teatro De Sombras: a Política Imperial (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2003). 134! ! ! José Cabrinha and Nuno seemed to understand the nuances of the liberal version of antislavery that had started to insinuate itself into the realm of Brazilian mainstream politics. Instead of expecting white politicians or slaveholders to hand freedom down to slaves, they envisioned having to secure it through war. Newspapers had unleashed their minds to foresee a victorious black insurrection in the midst of the U.S. Civil War and domestic debates over slavery all the while compelling them to scrutinize the complexities of emancipation. When Cabrinha and Nuno deciphered the words on the printed page, they developed a storyline to mobilize the future into the present and compel their peers to consider their enslavement under a new light. Emancipation is imminent, they figured, so it was worth risking their lives to overcome their masters’ resistance to the spirit of the times.

Convinced of the favorable political moment, Serro slaves carried on with the preparations for a rebellion. Under the leadership of José Cabrinha, they enlisted the help of the enslaved tailor Adão and his freed brother Herculano to spread the word from

Adão’s shop in Serro. At first, Adão hesitated when hearing from Cabrinha that his pals at the Sesmaria “had formed a plan to achieve their freedom, for they had been reading the papers and, through them, realized that all slaves were free but that the whites were hiding the fact so that it would not come to the attention of the slaves”. Unconvinced,

Adão decided to ask around about the war in town, where he was able to confirm the existence of “a war for the freedom of the slaves in another country.” 270 He then became the rebel’s most avid recruiter in Serro and regularly communicated the progress of his efforts to Cabrinha by notes sent through Leonel, a domestic slave at the Sesmaria plantation. Serro rebels also exchanged letters with David and Francisco, urban slaves !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 270 Adão’s third testimony, 21 November 1864. ANRJ, “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” 75. 135! ! ! from Diamantina, who promptly took to saving money and purchasing weapons. José

Cabrinha was by far the most prolific author of letters that shortened the distance between the Sesmaria and the Liberdade plantation, property of the Serro’s sheriff, where Nuno worked and lived.

Last but not least, the 1864 rebels also contacted maroons scattered throughout the Jequitinhonha Valley, covering a five-mile radius from the epicenter at the Sesmaria plantation. Many fugitive men and women from the Quilombo dos Ferreiros swore allegiance to the rebellion and armed themselves with swords in anticipation of the uprising. Shortly before the planned outbreak in October, the movement organized by

Brazilian-born artisans counted on the support of over four hundred Africans and their creole descendants in Serro and Diamantina. As the African slave Faustino spoke metaphorically to a group of fellow slaves: “the chicken was dead and ready, and only waiting to be roasted.”271!!

Faustino was right. It was only a question of time before a black uprising inspired by the American Civil War was about to sweep white elites off their feet in Minas Gerais.

Urban and rural bondsmen together with runaway slaves, black freedmen and even some

“men wearing ties” planned to convene on the last Sunday of October in front of the

Church of the Rosary in downtown Serro.272 The bulk of the rebels, as the leaders of the rebellion hoped, would come from the Barro and Duro diamond mines in Diamantina where more than three hundred slaves worked. From the Church of the Rosary, they

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 271 Ibid, 21 October 1864, 9. Brazilian historian Clóvis Moura interpreted Faustino’s statement differently. According to Moura, it constituted a code created by the rebels to coordinate the actions of urban slaves and maroons on the day they would rise up. On October 30th, the rebels should say that “João Batista Vieira’s people were ready while we are still waiting; the chicken was dead and ready, and only waiting to be roasted.” I found no substantial evidence, however, to corroborate Moura’s hypothesis. Clóvis Moura. Os quilombos e a rebeldia negra (São Paulo: Ed. Brasiliense, 1981), pp. 99-100. 272 José Cabrinha’s first testimony, 24 October 1864. ANRJ, “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” 24. 136! ! ! envisioned setting the homes of all diamond traders on fire before occupying the National

Guard headquarters to acquire enough weapons to kill all white residents.

In the first days of October 1864, however, the silence was broken by the slave

Vicente’s shaky voice. Although invited to take part in the uprising, he decided instead to tell his owner about the “bad consequences” he expected from the movement. According to Vicente, self-purchase was the only honorable means to achieve manumission.273 His testimony then prompted Serro’s sheriff, José Maria Brandão, to summon the honored citizens of Serro and coordinate an offensive against the rebels. Authorities immediately called in cavalry and infantry troops from Minas’ provincial capital, Ouro Preto, but military reinforcements faced large resistance from local slaves. A long and costly repression campaign ensued, engaging private and public forces for two months as rebels consistently waged guerrilla warfare in the Diamantina diamond mines.

The 1864 slave rebellion in Minas Gerais draws attention to an underexplored facet of black emancipation politics in Brazil. In the lively political atmosphere of the

1860s, despite dismal official literacy rates, slaves and free blacks were reading about freedom in the newspapers. They used literacy in its multiple forms to pursue intelligence of the world and educate those usually excluded from the expanding culture of print in nineteenth-century Brazil. Obscured from the view of contemporaries who condemned and feared the education of the enslaved, black literacy activities happened everywhere.

José Cabrinha and Nuno, for example, turned the Sesmaria plantation into a site for the dissemination of news and parliamentary speeches in 1864. That is how the American

Civil War found champions in the diamond backlands of Minas Gerais, who invoked the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 273 Ibid,18. The white population of Serro, grateful for Vicente’s denunciation, ended up freeing him after raising money through a subscription to pay his master. 137! ! ! authority of print to shape a black uprising aimed at bringing about the same emancipation enjoyed by African Americans.

One year later, in 1865, this time in the Amazonian province of Pará, slaves belonging to the Carmelite Convent of Belém did the same. Believing that Brazilian slaves had been freed by the U.S. Emancipation Proclamation as reported in the newspapers, they killed their overseer at the Pernambuco plantation and rose up hoping for government support of slave emancipation in Brazil. Under the influence of Carmelite rebels, enslaved communities all over Pará took to accusing the provincial president, José

Vieira Couto de Magalhães, of hiding their manumission letters, while others decided to cross the border with the Amapá territory in search of freedom. The situation was of the utmost gravity, Magalhães lamented, for “the Carmelite slaves also have newspapers.”274

Wherever the rumor arrived that abolition was a reality in the United States,

Brazilian slaves took up arms in defense of their own emancipation. They understood that the war abroad compromised the sovereignty of their masters and recognized the centrality of slavery to the political disputes involving Liberals and Conservatives in

Brazil. In many cases, they trusted the newspapers in determining their chances of success and elicited panic from authorities who had always viewed black literacy as a threat to white society. Emancipation, most Afro-Brazilians believed in the 1860s, was a measure soon to be delivered in written form, yet by no means inevitable. Their activism was required to force the issue onto the public sphere and reverse the official rhetoric of gradualism and resistance to foreign pressure so typical of the imperial state. For slave

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 274 ANRJ, IJ1-792, 10 July 1865. Letter from the president of the province of Pará, João Vieira Couto de Magalhães, to the Archbishop of Pará, Antônio de Macedo Costa. 138! ! ! rebels, immediate abolition was the only solution suitable to the times of international upheaval.

This chapter examines how the circulation of print increased the opportunities for slaves to familiarize themselves with the political currents of the Atlantic world over the

1860s.275 Using the U.S. Civil War as a main case study, I analyze how international abolitionism impacted both the antislavery views of Brazilian liberal elites and the more radical strains sustained by Afro-Brazilians. While the latter passed on news of the U.S. war with freedom on their minds, the former could not help but act in the name of slavery. I take black uprisings in Brazil as formative, though, not derivative of Atlantic currents of abolitionism.276 Following Laurent Dubois’ analysis of the political and intellectual contributions of the Saint-Domingue’s slave revolution to what we came to call the Enlightenment, I examine slave insurrections as "zones of engagement and debate with broader debates," that is, as spaces of integrated intellectual production that decisively shaped nineteenth-century history.

In recent decades, Brazilian historians have paid special attention to the importance of the U.S. conflict for the launching of political discussions that culminated

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 275 For studies on the history of slave literacy in Brazil, see: Maria Cristina Cortez Wissenbach, “Cartas, procurações, escapulários e patuás: os múltiplos significados da escrita entre escravos e forros na sociedade oitocentista,” Revista Brasileira de História da Educação, n. 4, jul./dez., 2002, 103-122; M. V. A Fonseca, A educação dos negros: a nova face do processo de abolição da escravidão no Brasil (Bragança Paulista- SP: EDUSF, 2002); Sandra L. Graham, "Writing From the Margins: Brazilian Slaves and Written Culture," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49:3 (2007): 611-636. 276 On the Caribbean as a generative space of discussions on rights and citizenship, see: Laurent Dubois, "An Enslaved Enlightenment: Rethinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic," Social History, 31:1 (2006), 1-14 and Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Hilary Beckles, “Caribbean anti-slavery: the self-liberation ethos of enslaved blacks,” Journal of Caribbean History, XXII, 1 & 2 (1988), 1–19; Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Dememara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion In Cuba; Ernesto Bassi Arevalo, Between Imperial Projects and National Dreams: Communication Networks, Geopolitical Imagination, and the Role of New Granada in the Configuration of a Greater Caribbean Space, 1780s--1810s (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California – Irvine, 2012). 139! ! ! in the passage of the country's Free Womb Law in 1871. Eduardo Spiller Pena and

Sidney Chalhoub have shown that the international isolation of the empire prompted by

Northern victory encouraged the Brazilian state to take charge of the abolition process in the 1860s, if only by looking at ways to prevent the kind of bloodshed observable in the

United States.277 Tâmis Parron and Rafael de Bivar Marquese have studied the interconnections between the Brazilian and American antebellum economies to argue that the war sustained a fatal blow to the pro-slavery politics carefully crafted by the Brazilian conservative political leadership (saquaremas) in the aftermath of the 1850 ban on the slave trade.278 They chronicle the emergence of the Brazilian modern state during the nineteenth century as a story of political elites who bet on the future of slavery in the age of abolition. For Parron, the emergence of a conservative political leadership connected to the “Regresso” (saquaremas) in 1837 occupies a central role in this process. As !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 277 Luiz A. Moniz Bandeira was probably the first Brazilian historian to establish a link between the U.S. Civil War and the 1871 Free Womb Law: Luiz A. Moniz Bandeira, Presença dos Estados Unidos no Brasil, (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1978), 155-161. For other mentions of the war and its impact on Brazil, see: Robert Brent Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 41-4; Célia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, “Irmão ou inimigo: o escravo no imaginário abolicionista dos Estados Unidos e do Brasil,” Revista USP (dezembro/fevereiro, 1995/1996), 28: 96-109, and Abolicionismo: Estados Unidos e Brasil; Eduardo Spiller Pena, Pajens da casa imperial: jurisconsultos, escravidão e a lei de 1871 (Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2001), especially chapter 3; Sidney Chalhoub, , Historiador (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2003), 139-142, and A força da escravidão, especially chapter 8; Ricardo Salles, E o Vale era o escravo: Vassouras, século XIX. Senhores e escravos no coração do Império (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2008), 79-110; Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Brazil Through The Eyes of William James: cartas, diários e desenhos, 1865-1866 (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2010); Luciana da Cruz Brito, “Impressões norte-americanas sobre escravidão, abolição e relações raciais no Brasil escravista” (Tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, 2014); Clícea Maria Miranda, “Repercussões da Guerra Civil Americana no debate politico sobre a abolição no Brasil, 1861- 1888,” Texto apresentado no 7º Encontro Escravidão e Liberdade no Brasil Meridional, Curitiba (UFPR), de 13 a 16 de maio de 2015. 278Parron, A política da escravidão; Marquese, “The Civil War in the United States and the Crisis of Slavery in Brazil.” A similar position is held by Alain El Youssef, “A guerra civil norte-americana e a crise da escravidão no império do Brasil: o caso da Lei do Ventre,” Paper presented at the 7th Encontro Escravidão e Liberdade no Brasil Meridional (Curitiba (UFPR), May13 -16, 2015). On the ascension of the so-called Party of Order to power in Brazil, see also: Needell, The Party of Order. Needell argues that Emperor Pedro II may have been concerned about the larger significance of the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s but not because it suggested slavery’s potential for national division. Given the general Brazilian acceptance of slave labor, a violent regional struggle would have seemed a distant possibility. For Neddell, the emperor would have been more concerned with Brazil’s reputation as a slave empire among the “civilized” states of the world after the Emancipation Proclamation. 140! ! ! adamant critics of the 1831 law that abolished slave trafficking, the saquaremas stimulated a revival of the contraband slave trade in the country and formulated the strongest argument against foreign pressure in the late 1830s and 1840s.

Although arguing that British intervention forced the imperial government to abolish the contraband slave trade in 1850, Parron shows that the saquaremas were able to reinvent pro-slavery arguments in the aftermath of the law. The American Civil War, however, disrupted the conservative agenda by eliminating the United States as a model of white , natural growth of the slave population, and as a powerful pro- slavery interlocutor in the international arena. In other words, the conflict reinstated debates over slavery in the Parliament, laying the ground for the first disjunction between slaveholding classes and the imperial state enshrined in the passage of the 1871 law. For

Marquese, the Civil War was instrumental in turning the crisis of Brazilian slavery into a systemic matter, even before the conflict with Paraguay dealt it another blow by challenging slaveholders to muster a national army.279 If it were not for the Civil War, he speculates, slavery in Brazil would probably have survived well into the twentieth century.

The role of the U.S. Civil War in catalyzing discussions over the future of slavery in Brazil is not in dispute here. The conflict clearly destabilized the general inertia of the

Brazilian government with regards to emancipation, giving Liberal politicians the moral high ground to steer reform along a moderate path. The impact of the war on black

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 279 On the role of the War of the Triple Alliance in weakening the Brazilian slave system, see: Ricardo Salles, Guerra do Paraguai: escravidão e cidadania na formação do Exército (Rio de Janeiro: Paz & Terra, 1990); Wilma Peres Costa, A Espada de Dâmocles. O Exército, a Guerra do Paraguai e a crise do Império (São Paulo: Hucitec-Ed.Unicamp, 1996); Vitor Izecksohn, Slavery and War In the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building In the United States and Brazil, 1861-1870 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). 141! ! ! emancipation politics, however, still deserves careful scrutiny, for the conflict helped

Afro-Brazilians keep the issue of immediate emancipation alive in the public eye. Black perspectives on the Civil War also reveal that slaves relied on a multifaceted literacy as a means to derive meaning from the Age of Emancipation and fight for abolition in Brazil.

If understood as a learning process and social practice applied by Afro-Brazilians in critical ways to examine their surroundings, literacy can function as a way to glimpse into the world of black political thought where the written word pushed slaves to imagine solidarities beyond national boundaries.280 Thus this chapter invites us to move further in conceptualizing abolitionism as a historical process that encompassed multi-sited and multidirectional narratives of historical change. Although rooted in the experience of enslavement in Brazil, the slaves’ version of antislavery was transnational, a narrative constructed in the movement between lived, imagined, and contested worlds.

The Brazilian Style of Liberal Anti-Slavery

“On December 31, 1899 all shall be free, thus slavery can already see its end; there is already a ray of hope at least for the youngest and strongest.”281 These were the words of Senator José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, future Marquis of São Vicente, one of the most influential liberal emancipationists of the 1860s. The abolition of slavery with full compensation to slaveholders on the last day of the nineteenth century was a key part of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 280 Writing about radical weeklies circulating in nineteenth-century England, Kevin Gilmartin makes an interesting suggestion about the role of newspapers in shaping political discourse: “The radical pattern of collective reading about public matters, with an eye towards political intervention, suggests at least the rudiments of an alternative phenomenology of the newspaper, one that is more active, communal, and synthetic.” Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition In Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104. 281 José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo e José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, Trabalho sobre a extinção da escravatura no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Tipografia Nacional, 1868), 6. 142! ! ! Pimenta Bueno’s reform project, drawn up in 1866 at the behest of Emperor Pedro II. As many politicians privy to the highest echelons of power in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil, the senator would have liked to see the end of slavery come about without any measure of social disruption and, preferably, from a natural death. However, well into the 1860s, the times seemed to be conspiring otherwise, and a decisive turn toward emancipation in the

United States suggested the need to regulate a way out of a race war.

Abolition in Brazil, politicians of all stripes believed, was still impossible.

However, bloody images of African American freedom called for emancipation policies suitable to the needs of the empire. In that task, Senator Pimenta Bueno, Deputy

Aureliano Tavares Bastos, and jurist Perdigão Malheiro were Emperor Pedro II’s most prominent interlocutors, advocating a version of antislavery that revolved firmly around the sanctity of property rights, the primacy of public order, and the need to protect

Brazil’s agricultural economy and national unity. As the planter class continued to stand at the foundations of the Brazilian political system, legislation to respond to changing world conditions found many obstacles. In his 1866 project, for instance, Pimenta Bueno could foresee emancipation only as part of the lives of a new generation of Afro-

Brazilians still to be born. To his contemporary slaves, all he had to offer were “rays of solace and of hope.”282

As the suspension of diplomatic relations with Great Britain after the Christie

Affair in 1863 had signaled, rooted as it was in Brazil’s refusal to secure the freedom of liberated Africans, the imperial government showed no particular disposition to bring slavery to an end in the early 1860s. Its most significant steps so far still addressed problems raised by the abolition of the slave trade back in 1850, including the1864 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 282 Ibid. 143! ! ! decree freeing liberated Africans who had completed their fourteen years of apprenticeship. In January of that year, Emperor Pedro II brought the American Civil

War to the attention of his newly formed Liberal cabinet for the first time:

Events in the American Union require us to think about the future of slavery in Brazil, so that what occurred in respect to the slave trade does not happen again to us.

The measure which seems to me the most efficacious is that of freeing the children of slaves who are born a certain number of years from the present.

I have been thinking about the means of carrying out this plan. It is, however, one of those that needs implementing with a firm hand, and the ills that it will inevitably cause must be remedied as the circumstances permit.

I recommend to you the various dispatches from our envoy in Washington, in which some very sensible observations are made on this subject.283

Dom Pedro II placed his understanding of the U.S. war in the context of Anglo-

Brazilian confrontations over the end of slave trafficking to Brazil. He feared that international pressure could once again influence the sway of events in the country, this time by forcing Brazil to abruptly emancipate its slaves. This scenario figured certainly as the ultimate nightmare for someone who thought freeing slaves still to be born in an indefinite future was the only responsible way forward. The emperor’s message reveals little about his views on the United States, yet they acquire more colorful tones if we consider the material Pedro II offered to the scrutiny of Zacarias de Góes e Vasconcelos and the fellow members of his cabinet.

From the beginning of the U.S. war, diplomat Miguel Maria Lisboa kept the

Brazilian government abreast of developments on the ground. Stationed in Washington, the future Baron of Japurá started his mission in 1859 after a long stint as imperial envoy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 283 “Dom Pedro II, Draft Recommendations, 14 January 1864,” quoted in: Roderick Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825-91, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 195. 144! ! ! to several South American countries. Lisboa monitored carefully the rising animosities that brought about the war, defining it as “a struggle between principles” that pitted

“abolitionist agitators” on one side against “the exaggerated defenders of the slave system” on the other.284 In the end of 1860, cognizant of imperial orders determining all

Brazilian consuls and diplomats in the United States to observe strict neutrality in the conflict, Lisboa wrote his first confidential letter to Minister of Foreign Affairs, João Luís

Cansasão de Sinimbú. According to Lisboa, a dispute over the issue of African slavery could hardly be inconsequential to the empire:

Since the end of last year, when the reckless attempt of John Brown on Harper’s Ferry took this Republic by surprise, and, especially, since the thorny question between the Northern states and the Southern states regarding African slavery started to be floated, bringing the American Union to the edge of an abyss of calamities and blood of which it is not yet safe; all Brazilians who are friends of their nation should have understood the need to be on alert to avoid the contagion of ideas that can so seriously affect our interests. All of us know the power with which the opinion which claims the abolition of African slavery has developed in Europe and the progress that this opinion has made over the last 25 years in the United States; all of us should expect that the triumph of such ideas north of the continent will without failure be the precursor of new attempts to put them into practice also in the island of Cuba and in the …285

Summarizing with these words the “evil that threatened Brazil from afar,” Miguel

Maria Lisboa called the attention of Emperor Pedro II to the significance of the election of Abraham Lincoln, which created great momentum among Northern abolitionists, now emboldened to deny “the just nature of Southern complaints.” Lisboa commented on conversations he had recently entertained with British and French diplomats, who concurred that the U.S. crisis was bound to bring about the abolition of slavery. In order to support his claims, Lisboa offered Minister Sinimbú a copy of the latest presidential

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 284 AHI, 233-3-09, 6 February 1860. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to João Luís Cansasão de Sinimbu, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 285 AHI, 233-3-09, 7 April 1861. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to João Luís Cansasão de Sinimbu, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 145! ! ! message to Congress and a letter from the U.S. Secretary of War and future Confederate

General, John B. Floyd. Floyd described in detail the danger already posed by slave insurrection in the American South, as well as the formation of vigilante groups targeting

“any man suspected of abolitionism.”286

In his reports to the Brazilian government, Lisboa judged American society from a clear pro-slavery standpoint. Confronted with a profusion of political and military news at the very theater of war, he sighted the details of relevance for a country whose elites were not yet ready for abolition. His main concern at the outset of the war revolved around the propagation of “abolitionist fanaticism” throughout the Americas. Although cautious to recognize that if the South managed to prevail, Brazil would become an easy target for filibusterism, Lisboa contended that the most auspicious outcome for the empire would be the preservation of the American Union after some reform of the 1787

Constitution.287 If the Union could only give Southern states “sufficient protections regarding slave ownership,” he reasoned, the nation would be able to survive intact.

Assuming Minister Sinimbú’s sympathy for the maintenance of slavery, Lisboa pondered that a war would bring about the abrupt emancipation of more than four million slaves, isolating Brazil in the fight against international abolitionist propaganda. “Such a war will be more atrocious than any of those which have devastated Spanish America for over

50 years,” contended Lisboa, and will certainly result in the extermination of the white race in the American South.

The outbreak of the war in 1861 confirmed Lisboa’s predictions of bloodshed and enactment of emancipation by Northern abolitionists. In 1862, the abolition of slavery in !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 286 Ibid. 287 AHI, 233-3-10, 19 December 1860. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to João Luís Cansasão de Sinimbu, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 146! ! ! the District of Columbia came as the first sign of concrete implications to Brazil. The

Brazilian diplomat then wrote at length about Union plans of African American colonization in Central and South America. In April, he conveyed his reservations to the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques:

Every time the issue of emancipation is discussed in Congress, ideas about sending away emancipated blacks surface, as well as projects to transfer them not only to , and Haiti, but also to Costa Rica, or some point of South America where the federal government could find support. As it is possible that it suggests sending them to Brazil, it dawned on me to ask preventively that Your Excellency take the matter into consideration, and give the orders you think appropriate in this case. Your Excellency will recall that when 10 years ago the issue of the navigation of the Amazon River was floated, the American press argued that that river’s valley was destined to be the repository of the superabundant African population of the United States.288

The emigration of African Americans to Brazil aroused Lisboa’s greatest racial fears. As we will discuss in the next chapter, the diplomat channeled the prevailing opinion among Brazilian elites that liberated Africans “demoralized” by decades of enslavement should not be allowed into the empire, for they would strike a deadly blow on Brazilian public order and economic prosperity.289 When confronted with Lincoln’s

Emancipation Proclamation in the end of 1862, Lisboa could only think of the threat it posed to white families in the Americas. “Violent and abrupt emancipation” combined with the arming of African Americans in the South loomed over Brazil as a telling tale of ultimate doom.290

Lisboa’s reports arrived in Brazil bimonthly and were carefully tailored for

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 288 AHI, 233-3-12, 8 April 1862. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 289 On American plans of African colonization abroad, see: Maria Clara Sales Carneiro Sampaio, “Não diga que não somos brancos: os projetos de colonização para afro-americanos do governo Lincoln na perspectiva do Caribe, América Latina e Brasil dos 1860” (PhD Dissertation, USP, 2013). 290 AHI, 233-3-12, 25 September 1862. Confidential letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to Benevenuto Augusto de Magalhães Taques, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 147! ! ! secrecy. The diplomat’s frank tone changed somewhat as he got news of the creation of the Diário Official do Império do Brasil, the official journal of the Brazilian federal government.291 Aware that his words would now be considered “under public light,” he vowed to adopt the cautions tone “convenient to articles.” His words offer a window into the nature of the imperial administration’s careful handling of news about the American

Civil War. According to Lisboa, “(…) from now on, I will appropriately modify the redaction of the said report, abstaining not only to make allusion in it to any confidential issue, but also refraining to wound the susceptibilities of the Government and of the country’ inhabitants, which during the crisis it endures are excitable to the extreme.”292

President Abraham Lincoln did not make much of an impression on Miguel Maria

Lisboa. Described as the head of Northern abolitionism, Lincoln’s plans were sometimes portrayed with irony. Lisboa regarded with contempt Lincoln’s hopes that the South would agree to plans of slave emancipation with compensation and spoke with disdain about the Emancipation Proclamation and the acceptance of emancipated blacks in the

Union Army and Navy. 293 The diplomat feared that the repercussions of the war in Brazil were now “infallible,” yet refrained from making any suggestions:

Among us the same elements of conflict have not yet emerged (at least this is what I can ascertain from the distance from which I write), but conceding as a probable thing that, once enacted, the emancipation of slaves in the United States, will turn eyes of the Apostles of abolitionist propaganda, in America and in Europe, to Brazil, I do not fail to consider that they will find natural allies in a numerous class of our population, that by transforming a question of foreign influence into a problem of internal policy can cause us grave embarrassment if the friends of the country are not prepared to give this wave a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 291 The Diário Official do Império do Brasil, later Diário Oficial da União, was founded by imperial decree on 1 October 1862. It is still in press today as the primary vehicle of publicity for administrative acts of government in Brazil. Before its creation, the Jornal do Commercio covered state affairs. Nelson Werneck Sodré, História da Imprensa no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad Editora, 1998), footnotes of pages 258–259. 292 AHI, 233-3-12, 21 October 1862. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Marquis of Abrantes, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 293 Ibid, 4 December 1862. 148! ! ! convenient direction.

That the federals are working actively to put into practice their plan of complete abolition, countless facts offer irrefutable witness. In the South, and especially in Louisiana and South Carolina, the Government has taken to task to organize as free laborers recently-freed blacks; in the North, that is, in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Maryland, it acts through indirect, abusive, and odious yet effective means to undermine slavery in such a way that, once the war is over, it will not exist there as a matter of fact. One of such means is to send recruitment parties to those states’ plantations, above all to Maryland, who without any respect to property rights seduce and entice slaves to enlist as soldiers, offering compensation only to the masters able to attest to their loyalty to the Union.294

Thus at the end of 1863, Miguel Maria Lisboa’s concerns extended to the status of emancipated blacks in a post-war society, mostly because the “proletarian population” of

Brazil was so reminiscent of that of the U.S. South. As he terminated his appointment as imperial envoy in 1864, the social implications of slave emancipation would become the main subject of analysis of his successor Inácio de Avellar Barbosa da Silva, as we will see in the next chapter. Lisboa’s dramatic rendition of the U.S. conflict explains Emperor

Pedro II’s cautious tone when bringing up the issue of emancipation before his cabinet in

1864. The emperor seemed to embrace Lisboa’s ideas about the need to act, however with no haste or radicalism, in response to slave emancipation in the powerful neighbor to the north. In this spirit, Pedro II asked Senator and also member of the State Council

José Antônio Pimenta Bueno in 1865 to look into prospective legislative measures regarding gradual emancipation in Brazil. Pimenta Bueno then submitted the first emancipationist project to be considered by the State Council in 1866, very inspired by the proposals penned earlier in the decade by Senator Silveira da Motta.!!

Pimenta Bueno’s project described slavery as a “repugnant, odious, and barbarous” institution, opposed to Christian values, and responsible for the moral !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 294 AHI, 233-3-13, 9 November 1863. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Marquis of Abrantes, Minister of Foreign Affairs. 149! ! ! and slow economic progress of Brazilian society. Offering “the waves of blood that soaked the ground” in the United States as food for thought to Brazil, Pimenta

Bueno recited the history of international abolition as a telling tale to the only independent country that still held slaves in the Americas. Contrasting to Miguel Maria

Lisboa or the emperor himself, Pimenta Bueno also mentioned slaves themselves (the

“volcano”) as internal enemies from whom the population could expect nothing. In his view, external and internal pressures justified emancipationist measures that should be taken by the government, not the individual. The senator urged the administration to take preventive action in order to avoid responding to an infallible and irrepressible crisis, which included the prospect of “the unhappiness of the freedpeople themselves.”295

For Pimenta Bueno, gradual emancipation with terms of apprenticeship and monetary compensation to masters in 1899 was the right direction for the Brazilian empire for Pimenta Bueno. He suggested a total of five reformist measures to the State

Council: the immediate freeing of slaves’ offspring and the ones owned by the government in five years; the creation of an emancipation fund and slave registry; the enforcement of manumission by purchase; and the gradual emancipation of slaves owned by convents.296 He believed that, with the end of bondage in sight, Brazilian slaves would love their offspring more and be less dangerous to the society at large. Pimenta Bueno’s project, though, could not gain the favor of the Marquis of Olinda, the conservative chief of Zacarias’ cabinet, in the context of generalized fears that even gradual emancipation would bring disruption to a country fighting a war of unseen proportions with Paraguay.

One more time, the conservative elite or “saquaremas” were able to secure Brazil’s !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 295 Pimenta Bueno, “Trabalho sobre a extinção,” 8. 296 Paula Beiguelman, A formacão do povo no complexo cafeeiro: aspectos políticos (São Paulo: Edusp, 2003), 51. 150! ! ! commitment to slavery despite the winds of abolition that had brought down the institution of slavery in the United States.

Writing About the War: O Jequitinhonha

As the process of ending slavery in the United States traveled an uneven road, it lent itself to multiple interpretations in Brazil. When it comes to the realm of official politics, the meanings of the Civil War evolved along with the crisis of the Brazilian slave system: from an important element of the reformist rhetoric of liberal emancipationists in the 1860s, it went on to shape the terrain in which political actors finally approved Brazil’s first emancipation laws in the 1870s, and then reappeared in the work of Brazilian abolitionists like Joaquim Nabuco as a cautionary tale against the radicalization of abolitionism in the 1880s.297While still unfolding, the U.S. conflict reshaped debates about emancipation all over Brazil via print. Brazilian newspapers often provided an editorial platform for liberal leaders who maintained that the press had a duty to watch over society’s institutions and expose problems that should be addressed by the government.

This was the case of O Jequitinhonha, which as previously mentioned was the only periodical to circulate in Diamantina, province of Minas Gerais, during the 1860s.

As the 1864 slave rebellion that opens this chapter shows, the paper was instrumental in transforming the Civil War into a popular topic of conversation in the province of Minas

Gerais. Although O Jequitinhonha catered to a white literate leadership able to afford a subscription, collective reading practices and oral communication extended the reach of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 297 Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, “Os abolicionistas brasileiros e a Guerra de Secessão,” In: Martha Abreu e Hebe Mattos (orgs), Caminhos da Liberdade: histórias da abolição e do pós-abolição no Brasil (Niterói: PPGHistória – UFF, 2011). 151! ! ! its news far into the slave quarters, where published content easily gave shape to rumors about abolition in Brazil. Thus, a brief analysis of its trajectory can shed light on the breadth of information available to those in Brazil who intended to keep themselves abreast of the fate of slavery both on American soil and in lands closer to home.

News about the latest battles fought in the United States arrived in Diamantina, a town encrusted in the Espinhaço Mountains at 3,654 feet above sea level, each time a trading ship docked at the Rio de Janeiro harbor to transport Minas’ diamonds to Europe.

Founded in the mid-eighteenth century following the discovery of alluvial gold and diamonds by the Portuguese Crown, Diamantina was still the largest producer of raw diamonds in the world during the 1860s, but its economy had grown to include a domestic market for dietary food staples and manufactured goods. 298 Slaves, particularly in the twin city of Serro, cultivated sugar, corn, beans, and manioc for local consumption in medium-size diversified plantations like the Sesmaria, the epicenter of the 1864 uprising.299

O Jequitinhonha, provided ample coverage of the U.S. war since 1861. As it was common elsewhere in Brazil, the paper reprinted information gathered by Brazilian diplomats abroad or accounts sent in by correspondents in London, who in turn collected news from American and European newspapers. With no reporting on the ground, O

Jequitinhonha often published op-ed pieces signed by one of its founders, Joaquim

Felício dos Santos. Writer, lawyer, professor, and journalist, Felício dos Santos had

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 298 Larry Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720-1888 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 252; Anuário Estatístico do Estado de Minas Gerais, 1921 (Belo Horizonte: Oficinas Gráficas da Estatística, 1921), 16, 25. 299 Joaquim Felício dos Santos, Memórias do Distrito Diamantino. (Petrópolis: Vozes; Brasília: INL, 1978); José Moreira de Souza, Cidade: momentos e processos. Serro e Diamantina na formação do norte mineiro no século XIX (São Paulo: ANPOCS/Marco Zero, 1993); Robert W. Slenes, “Múltiplos de porcos e diamantes: a economia escravista de Minas Gerais no século XIX,” Cadernos IFCH/UNICAMP, 17 (1985). 152! ! ! graduated from the São Paulo Law School and returned to his native Diamantina in 1850.

In 1860, in partnership with Giraldo Pacheco de Mello, he assumed the position of public intellectual by founding O Jequitinhonha, where he published essays of political, social, and literary interest. In its weekly column titled “Pages of Brazilian History Written in the Year 2000,” for instance, Felício commented on current politics through imagined conversations between a viscount and an emperor. Influenced by the work of liberal politician Teófilo de Ottoni (1807-1869), Felício remained always critical of Emperor

Pedro II and, in 1871, openly declared his newspaper’s republican sympathies.300

In the pages of O Jequitinhonha, the Civil War figured as a dooming reminder of the need to reform slavery in Brazil. Mineiro Liberals followed in the footsteps of their peers at the national level and favored the gradual abolition of slavery as the only mechanism to prevent a race war.301 Even though they believed the final end of slavery was decades away, they still encouraged their colleagues to debate how best to transition from chattel to free labor in Brazil. Diamantina’s residents, meanwhile, accompanied all the debates on the printed page, as O Jequitinhonha quoted in great length the speeches and proposals of representatives from the Liberal Party.

O Jequitinhonha started coverage of the American conflict in April 1861 with news brought directly from the United States by ships arriving in Rio de Janeiro. An editorial from 22 June set the tone of the reporting, linking the war abroad to the rejection of a bill presented in the National Assembly by Senator Silveira da Motta. A year before,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 300 Maria de Lourdes Costa Dias, Imprensa em Tempo de Guerra: O Jequitinhonha e a Guerra do Paraguai (Dissertação de mestrado, PUC-RS, 2002); Júnia F. Furtado, Chica da Silva: A Brazilian Slave of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Silvana Motta Barbosa, “A imprensa e o Ministério: escravidão e Guerra de Secessão nos jornais do Rio de Janeiro (1862-1863)”. In: José Murilo de Carvalho e Adriana Pereira Campos (orgs.), Perspectivas de cidadania no Brasil Império (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2011), 139-141. 301Célia Azevedo. Onda negra, medo branco, 62-67. 153! ! ! Senator Motta had submitted for debate a decree concerning a ban on the sale and purchase of slaves in public auctions. He proposed that such an enduring symbol of the practice of slavery in Brazil be substituted for written sales to be adjudicated by local judges. O Jequitinhonha denounced the rejection of the bill as a government attack on religion and civilization, and compared the dismal state of debate over the issue of slavery in the empire with its central role in the crisis that ravaged the United States:

The United States is currently enduring a calamitous crisis motivated by the clash of the interests that Southern states have in slavery and the noble and humanitarian sentiments of the North: a struggle in which it seems the sentiments of religion and humanity will be victorious. In Brazil, however, instead of improving the condition of slaves, it has on the contrary gotten worse (…). Receive our praise, nonetheless, Your Excellency Mr. Senator Silveira da Motta, for your noble sentiments towards this great number of Brazilians, who consist of around one third of our population (…)!302

The newspaper approached the U.S. conflict as a weapon to boost its attacks on the passivity of the government of Emperor Pedro II on the issue of slavery. On a first- page editorial titled “Slavery in Brazil” and published in November of 1861, the paper voiced its concern about the seemingly unlimited power enjoyed by masters over their slaves in the country. More specifically, it called for the repeal of the draconian law of 10

June 1835 that shortened trial and sentencing procedures while increasing the number of slave crimes that were subject to mandatory in Brazil. 303 It is imperative to “consider the slave as a man” and not as “thing,” brandished the editors, by extending to him some degree of legal protection. Nothing less than the “principle of civilization” was at stake: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 302 O Jequitinhonha, 21 June 1861, 1. 303 On the 1835 law, see: Ricardo Figueiredo Pirola, Escravos e rebeldes nos tribunais do Império: uma história social da lei de 10 de junho de 1835 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2015). 154! ! ! It seems that the time has come to start sweetening the miserable luck of our pariahs. It is time to call the attention of the Government and of our lawmakers to slavery in Brazil. When in all civilized countries a crusade against this institution from the pagan era is being set up, Brazil crosses its arms, and with a stupid gaze glances at the large struggle taking place in the United States, and do not see anything other than a struggle around material interests, right where a principle contrary to such interests develops, it does not see that it is time, that it symbolizes the human spirit, or civilization itself…304

Editorials like this commonly aroused criticism among conservative forces in

Serro and Diamantina. Especially during electoral seasons, public figures like deputy

Cruz Machado called on liberal writers to answer accusations of preaching the end of slavery in print. Nevertheless, O Jequitinhonha carried on unabated in its campaign to prepare Brazil to “inevitable historical changes.” In December of 1861, responding to accusations of inciting slave rebellions, the paper affirmed its commitment to the maintenance of slavery in Brazil along with its desire to reform the institution:

We want abolition, it is true, but may it advance prudently, as should all stable and lasting progress; we want that, in its march, it follows the state of the country; for we acknowledge that such a blow would not take effect without a great sacrifice that our finances would not be able to withstand, because the only means through which to achieve this end is expropriation, which would deplete the Treasury, impoverish the nation, and, thus, delay the march of civilization, which is a direct product of the State’s wealth.

Slavery is, therefore, for now a necessary evil yet we should not cross our arms and remain inactive. It is imperative that we lay down the foundations of the machine that in a near future will destroy the evil, and these foundations are, as we have said in another occasion, legislative measures aimed at improving the condition of slaves. 305

In synchrony with the dominant antislavery currents of the time, O Jequitinhonha went on to advise readers about the need to prepare slaves for freedom, lifting them up from the “moral degradation” of bondage that threatened the society at large. Its editors

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 304 O Jequitinhonha, 30 November 1861, 1. 305 Ibid, 19 December 1861, 2. 155! ! ! suggested, for example, a new law to encourage the religious education of slaves and even the granting of manumission to enslaved women who, after giving birth to many children, “distinguished themselves in the zealous fulfillment of maternal duties.”306

Newspapers in mid-nineteenth-century Brazil were arenas for political controversies that very often revolved around slaves but counted on their exclusion from the public sphere to take shape. They were, after all, a recent phenomenon that dated back only to the

307 beginning of the century. The enslaved were present on the printed page mostly as protagonists of runaway advertisements, as commodities announced for sale, and as law breaking individuals involved in a variety of crimes.308

During the year of 1862, O Jequitinhonha followed with interest debates held in the U.S. Congress concerning the emancipation of slaves. It was believed at that point

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 306 Ibid. 307 The Portuguese Crown prohibited printing in Brazil until it moved to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. It did so precisely out of fear of the subversive potential of news. The debate over the circulation of newspapers had been political since its inception, for Portugal expected to avoid the spread of information about the American, French and Haitian Revolutions that could inspire anticolonial movements in Brazil. However, that is exactly what happened in the Inconfidência Mineira in 1789, the Tailors’ Revolt in Bahia, in 1798, and, perhaps more importantly, in the Muslim slave revolt of 1835 in Salvador. Reis, Slave rebellion in Brazil; Mariza Lajolo, “The Role of Orality in the Seduction of the Brazilian Reader: A National Challenge for Brazilian Writers of Fiction,” Poetics Today 15:4, Loci of Enunciation and Imaginary Constructions: The Case of (Latin) America, I (Winter, 1994), 555. 308 Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Retrato Em Branco e Negro: Jornais, Escravos e Cidadãos Em São Paulo No Final Do Século XIX (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1987); Gilberto Freyre, O Escravo Nos Anúncios De Jornais Brasileiros Do Século XIX (Recife: Imprensa Universitária, 1963). On the extensive Brazilian historiography about the development of the Brazilian press during the nineteenth century, see, for example: Tânia Maria Tavares Bessone, Gladys Sabina Ribeiro, and Monique de Siqueira Gonçalves, O Oitocentos Entre Livros, Livreiros, Impressos, Missivas e Bibliotecas (São Paulo: Alameda, 2013); Gladys Sabina Ribeiro and Tânia Maria Tavares Bessone, Linguagens e Práticas Da Cidadania No Século XIX (São Paulo, SP: Alameda, 2010); Isabel Lustosa, Insultos Impressos a Guerra Dos Jornalistas Na Independência, 1821-1823 (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000) and Imprensa, história e literatura (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2008); Juliana Gesuelli Meirelles, Imprensa e Poder Na Corte Joanina: A Gazeta Do Rio De Janeiro (1808-1821) (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2008); Marco Morel, Cipriano Barata Na Sentinela Da Liberdade (Salvador: Academia de Letras da Bahia, 2001) and As Transformações Dos Espaços Públicos: Imprensa, Atores Políticos e Sociabilidades Na Cidade Imperial, 1820-1840 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 2005); Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, A Primeira Gazeta Da Bahia: Idade D'ouro Do Brazil (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2005) and A Gazeta Do Rio De Janeiro, 1808-1822: Cultura e Sociedade (Rio de Janeiro: EdUERJ, 2007) and Diário Constitucional: Um Periódico Baiano Defensor De D. Pedro - 1822. (Salvador: EDUFBA, 2011); Eliana de Freitas Dutra and Jean-Yves Mollier (orgs), Política, Nação e Edição o Lugar Dos Impressos Na Construção Da Vida Política: Brasil, Europa e Américas Nos Séculos XVIII-XX (São Paulo: Annablume, 2006). 156! ! ! that the war would influence at least the passage of a law declaring free Southern slaves who managed to cross into the Northern states.309 In June, the periodical published the latest news about emancipation in the District of Columbia, praising the Union Senate for having coupled such measure with the monetary compensation of masters and the distribution of funds for African Americans wishing to emigrate to Haiti or Liberia. “It would be great if the Brazilian government followed this example,” opined the editors, and outlawed slavery at least in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the empire, while it “could not honor the calls of humanity and of reason, which it continues to violate with draconian slavery laws.” 310 As the war progressed, president Abraham Lincoln also became a regular feature of the news, receiving ever-growing praise for his disposition of stopping the expansion of slavery on Southern territories acquired during the conflict. 311

News of the American conflict were often conflated with discussions about slavery in Brazil and the portraits of the mining history of Diamantina. Joaquim Felício was an enthusiast of the mechanization of Brazilian mining, which he often praised as a solution to cut down on Brazil’s dependence on bonded labor. In the 1860s, Diamantina’s diamond mines functioned as laboratories for the deployment of new technology.

Felisberto Ferreira Brant, owner of the Barro mines, for instance, pioneered the use of

British steam engines, which pumped water from nearby rivers and divert all of that hydraulic power for the draining of riverbeds. The use of steam allowed him to increase the pace of work and keep his mines open all-year long, even during the previously prohibitive rainy season.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 309 O Jequitinhonha, 1 March 1862, 3. 310 Ibid, 21 June 1862, 3. 311 Ibid, 23 August 1862, 3. 157! ! ! Modernization efforts, however, did not diminish Brazilian miners’ reliance on slave labor as Joaquim Felício pointed out in the pages of O Jequitinhonha.312 Diamonds were to be found 90 feet into the ground and only after human hands had removed all the sand and gravel off-site. Each step of the mining process required direct supervision from overseers, especially if the owners wished to avoid thefts or the recurrence of fatal work- related accidents.313 Mechanization altered production routines and regimes of labor control, often triggering slave resistance like in 1864. New ways of working meant new ways of surviving as a slave. It is no coincidence that some of the most significant slave rebellions of the 1860s took place where machines were pushing even further the productivity of the enslaved. These were also the spaces where the American Civil War found more resonance among Brazilian slaves.314

At times, O Jequitinhonha published quite bold statements on the issue of emancipation, revealing the genealogy of its liberal views that traced back to the tumultuous decades of 1820s and 1830s. Although always fearful of the leveling potential of ideas of popular sovereignty and representative government, some Brazilian elites argued at the time of independence that slavery weakened the Brazilian economic system and exerted a destructive influence over the newly emancipated social body. O

Jequitinhonha, always critical of the centralization powers of the monarchy, used the language of liberalism to affirm its commitment to natural rights and religious philanthropy in an editorial commemorating Brazilian Independence in 1862:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 312 O Jequitinhonha, 20 January 1861, 2. 313 Libby, “Protoindustrialização em uma Sociedade Escravista: o caso de Minas Gerais,” 249. 314 The phase of heightened exploitation of slave labor decribed by Dale Tomich as the moment of a “second slavery” was also an era of revived slave resistance. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery. 158! ! ! September 7th is a more memorable day for D. Pedro’s dynasty than for the nation; it extolled a family to a new empire, however, when it comes to Brazilian emancipation, it was an incomplete act; its rights as a national day are debatable.

Emancipation should have been extended to all of the oppressed who then found themselves on Brazilian soil, but this did not come to pass. More than one third of its inhabitants continue to withstand a yoke a thousand times heavier and more ignominious than the one we suffered from Portugal.

If the ethos of liberty and dignity of men had prevailed and directed our political regeneration, and not the interests of one family or one party, surely all Brazilians would have been invited to this fraternal communion that does not recognize master and slave. (…)

It is our opinion that in the act of independence we should also have proclaimed the emancipation of all Brazilians to be coherent with that great principle; (…) The least we should have done was to declare free every womb, to declare free every man who came to see the light of day for the first time on Brazilian soil.315

The mineiro newspaper’s call for action resonated in liberal circles beyond Minas

Gerais. In October 1862, the Actualidade, an oppositional periodical published in the imperial capital of Rio de Janeiro, transcribed Joaquim Felício’s article to again equate

Brazilian political emancipation to abolition and decry the silence that had so far characterized the imperial government’s response to the upheavals taking place throughout the Atlantic. Anticipating the arguments of conservative critics suspicious of any debate over the issue of slavery in the press, the editors brandished: “Do not be afraid, though. We do not want to see slavery decisively abolished between today and tomorrow. (…) We want respect for masters’ rights, but also respect to the human rights represented by the poor slave. We call, therefore, for the slow and gradual emancipation of slaves.”316

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 315 O Jequitinhonha, 20 September 1862, 1. 316 Actualidade, 14 October 1862, 1. The case is discussed by Silvana Barbosa in: “A imprensa e o Ministério.” 159! ! ! Rio de Janeiro’s newspapers like the Actualidade had reported on the U.S. war and the diplomatic positions of England and France since 1861. Coverage continued as the conflict progressed but press commentary eventually waned after 1862 under government pressure and censorship. Since the Civil War required journalists to touch on the issue of slavery even in the dullest of news reports, it forced periodicals to position themselves with regards to emancipation, undoubtedly a dangerous proposition in Brazil.

Slavery’s proponents preferred to ignore controversial issues and were intent on silencing critics of the institution who continued to attack it with their words. They feared that incendiary accounts would filter down to their slaves and incite them to rebellion. The conservative press was especially good at suppressing news accounts of slave revolts, turning newspapers like the Jornal do Commercio complicit in the idea that they held absolute power over their slaves.

Silvana Motta Barbosa has shown that liberal newspapers like the Correio

Mercantil, Diário do Rio de Janeiro and Actualidade, champions of the cause of the

North, had to thread carefully as they fashioned their reflections on the war as critiques of the conservative imperial cabinet.317 In 1862, liberal newspapers at the court spoke openly of governmental attempts to control news coverage of the U.S. war referring, for example, to a press release published on the first page of the conservative Jornal do

Commercio on January 30th. Penned most probably by Justiniano José da Costa, the piece criticized the Correio Mercantil’s defense of Northern emancipationism, highlighting the hypocrisy of Brazilian liberals whose fortunes still depended on slave labor, and of U.S. abolitionists, who defended emancipation after having profited enough

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 317 Ibid. 160! ! ! from selling their slaves to Southern states. Brazilian conservatives defended, above all,

Brazil’s neutrality regarding the fratricidal war.

The Emancipation Proclamation made its first appearance on the pages of O

Jequitinhonha as a prospective measure in the end of November 1862 yet curiously did not generate much commentary until mid-1863. In a two-page piece published in June of

1863, titled “The United States of America and Slavery,” Joaquim Felício explained with clarity the implications of the American Civil War to Brazil. Caused by the stubborn upholding of the doomed institution of slavery, the war was to serve as a warning about the dangers posed by inaction. The editors equated the horrors of Southern slavery with the reality of bondspeople in Brazil, whose masters insisted on treating them as

“irrational property.” Their conclusive policy prescription, however, was gradualist and respectful of property rights, differing sharply from the interpretation it gained amongst

Serro and Diamantina slaves in 1864.

This is such a delicate question that the press often finds itself embarrassed by public susceptibilities when it presents a complaint for the good of humanity: the writers’ words are regularly misinterpreted and have their meaning inverted. One by one, they receive commentary by those searching for a hidden significance. May some abuses be prevented; may some degrading spectacles among us be forbidden; may the terrain for the time of complete regeneration be prepared; may each one of us make a small sacrifice; let us not horrify the foreigner that steps on our soil; in one word, may some personality be given to things: this is what we ask for, this is what we demand in the name of humanity and reason. 318 O Jequitinhonha’s coverage of the Civil War ended in November of 1863 amidst an overhaul of the newspaper prompted by the election of Joaquim Felício dos Santos to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. The last word on the conflict was that separatist forces were close to exhaustion, and had thus resorted to the “organization of a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 318 O Jequitinhonha, 13 June 1863, 3. 161! ! ! formidable army of blacks.”319 Before its demise, the periodical reported with vivid colors on a murder committed by runaway slaves in the locality of Pinheiro, on the outskirts of Diamantina. The editors’ tone left nothing to the imagination when it came to their racial perceptions: the crime represented nothing less than “a photograph of heinous types. It is the infernal project of enslaved Africans” who had no empathy toward hardworking white families. The “perverted maroons,” blinded by their “savage instincts” and “cannibal ferociousness” were, in their view, a flagrant symbol of how slavery was corroding Brazilian society from the inside.320

During its short existence over the 1860s, the paper vocalized a strand of anti- slavery that viewed emancipation as a political idea to be pursued through legal intervention. Its stance in favor of a positive agenda for policy in Brazil was colored by racial prejudice, which deemed blacks unsuitable for life as freemen unless educated for citizenship by the ruling elites. Even among progressive liberals, anti-slavery had nothing to do with racial egalitarianism; it was rather, a question of principle, a tool used to influence the debate over the political future of the country.

Abolition Now: Afro-Brazilian Literacy and the Geopolitical Imagination

Newspapers like O Jequitinhonha printed considerable material of interest to slaves. From the pages they read or heard about long after the original publishing date, men and women in bondage could glean a sense of impending possibility based not only

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 319 Ibid. Only two more editions of the newspaper circulated after that, respectively on 12 and 14 February of 1864. O Jequitinhonha would be reissued in 1868 as a voice for the emerging republican movement in Brazil. 320 O Jequitinhonha, 17 October 1863, 3. 162! ! ! on news of Atlantic emancipations but also on the rhetoric that sudden changes in the condition of slaves in Brazil would turn the world up-side-down. For Afro-Brazilians, warnings that immediate abolition would destroy Brazilian agricultural organization, that abolitionist propaganda compromised property rights, or that gradualism was all the

Brazilian state could afford in the face of a war over slavery in the United States easily translated into hope of great changes to come. Their version of anti-slavery, therefore, was quite different from what actually transpired in the press. It embodied alternative visions of the world that radicalized printed discourses and claimed self-determination for blacks.321

In 1864, such an understanding led José Cabrinha, Nuno, and Adão to recruit more than four hundred slaves from farms, shops, and mines in the mineiro towns of

Serro, Itambé, Milho Verde, São Sebastião das Correntes, Rio do Peixe, Diamantina e

São João da Chapada.322 From the papers they had obtained from their owners or other sources, they surmised that Brazilian slaves had been granted freedom and were being unjustly held in bondage by their masters in Minas Gerais. This was a common belief among Afro-Brazilians in the 1860s and evidence of the development of a political

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 321 On the role of slaves and their descendants in the development of and literate practices in Brazil, see: Carmo, and Lima, História Social da Língua Nacional. 2, and Cores, Marcas e Falas: Sentidos da Mestiçagem No Império Do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Arquivo Nacional, 2003). 322 Diamantina was by far he largest urban center in northern Minas Gerais. In 1856, it had a total population of 17,000, while Serro had only 10,584. Two decades after the abolition of the slave trade, Brazilian-born slaves (creoles) were the clear majority within the black population of both counties. In Serro, 60% of the slaves in 1840 were creoles. In Diamantina, however, African slaves were more numerous, roughly 23% of the slave population, since the economic strength of the city’s mining sector kept the influx of slaves from the Congo alive well into the nineteenth century. “Mapa das Freguesias, Distritos, Fogos, Populações parciais e geral do Município do Serro elaborado pelo delegado de polícia Bento Carneiro,” Serro, 1856, Arquivo Público Mineiro (henceforth APM), Seção Provincial, Presidência da Província, cx. 50, doc. 24. For an analysis of natural slave reproduction in Minas Gerais, see: Bergad, Slavery and the Demographic History of Minas Gerais, especially chapters 3 and 4. On the significance of the African slave trade to Minas, see: João Luís Fragoso, “Alegrias e artimanhas de uma fonte seriada. Os códices 390, 421, 424 e 425: despachos de escravos e passaportes da Intendência de Polícia da Corte, 1819- 1833,” in História quantitativa e serial no Brasil: um balanço, ed. Tarcísio Rodrigues Botelho (Goiânia: ANPUH-MG, 2001), 239-278.! 163! ! ! narrative among them that aligned freedom aspirations to the notion that the war to the north was a transnational struggle intended to set all Atlantic slaves free. By claiming the authority of print, law, and government, Serro slaves reached out to the established bearers of political power and projected legitimacy over their claims.

In the beginning of October, though, the slave Vicente denounced the revolt first to his master and then to the Serro Sheriff, José Maria Brandão. Once confronted with the prospect of rebellion of such a vibrant black community, sheriff Brandão did not shy away from expressing his fear. “Individual security in this city and surrounding areas,” he told the Chief of Police of Minas Gerais, “is in imminent danger; we stand on top of a volcano that is about to burst and decimate peaceful citizens, women and children.”323

The image of a volcanic eruption was not that phantasmagoric. Some of the incarcerated slaves testified on their plan to attack the city of Serro with torches, swords, and firearms.

Once fully armed, the rebels believed they would be invincible. Not even recalcitrant slaves they planned to spare. To disloyal partners, José Cabrinha promised nothing but death.324

As news of the rebellion circulated, Provincial Deputy José Joaquim Ferreira

Rabello blamed it on the lack of vigilance on the part of local slaveholders. One of the rebels’ intended targets, Rabello wrote to the president of Minas Gerais, Antônio

Cerqueira Leite, to warn him about the involvement of free blacks, and bitterly recalled slaveholders’ carelessness in the face of the war unfolding in the United States:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 323 APM, Seção Provincial, maço 1047, 10 October 1864. Letter from José Maria Brandão to the Chief of Police of Minas Gerais. 324 “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” Serro, 28 Oct. 1864, ANRJ, Corte de Apelação, cx.3700, maço 5014, 33. 164! ! ! We have reasons to believe that this revolt is being instigated by free people of color, members of the low classes, who perhaps guided by the horrible hope of profiting in lootings and armed robberies do not fear to drown themselves in their fellow citizens' blood. Unfortunately, several circumstances that passed unnoticed during the peaceful and quietness in which we lived become today vehement indications. Being it the education of some slaves who read about the development of the Civil War in the United States only to pass the news on to those who don't know how to read; purchasing of firearms by the more daring ones; the state of agitation among them, the meetings and groups of four or more individuals, and the figurative and enigmatic conversations. We have few or no means of stopping these.325

The education of local slaves was Rabello’s biggest source of concern.326 Their disposition to listen to the news and pass on the word did not go unnoticed. In Rabello’s account of what had transpired, black communication was to be criminalized and severely punished. President Cerqueira Leite, on the other hand, did not see any reason for alarm. He believed the revolt would be crushed in a matter of days, if not hours. With that goal in mind, he sent roughly 160 cavalry and infantry troops to meet National Guard soldiers in Diamantina.327 As arrests and interrogations progressed, however, it became clear that the rebellion presented a real threat. Authorities grew increasingly fearful after uncovering that literacy had played indeed a central role in the organizing and recruitment of the black population.

Among the nine slaves singled out as leaders of the 1864 rebellion, five had some familiarity with the written word. Adão, José Cabrinha, Demétrio, and David testified to their ability to read and write, while Sebastião affirmed that he was “barely able to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 325 Ibid, 10. 326 On white fear of black literacy in Brazil, see, among others: Marcus J. M. de. Carvalho, “‘Fácil é serem sujeitos de quem já foram senhores’: O ABC do Divino Mestre”, Afro-Ásia, (Salvador-UFBA), vol. 31, nº 1, 2004, 327-338; João José Reis, “Nos achamos em campo a tratar da liberdade’: a resistência negra no Brasil oitocentista,” In: Carlos Guilherme Mota (org.), Viagem incompleta. A experiência brasileira (1500- 2000) (Formação: histórias. São Paulo: Senac, 2000) and Slave Rebellion in Brazil. 327 ANRJ, IJ1-628, 20 October 1864. Letter from the president of Minas Gerais, Pedro de Alcântara Cerqueira Leite, to the Minister of Justice, Francisco José Furtado. 165! ! ! read.”328 The freedman Herculano , Adão’s brother, revealed “he could read and write badly.”329 Police officials established that a high number of letters had circulated widely among slaves during the months leading up to October, most of them drafted by José Cabrinha in Serro and delivered by domestic slaves as far as to the Barro mines in Diamantina. Such set of facts fanned heated debates among local whites who feared the extent to which the slaves were becoming aware of current discussions over the issue of slavery.

With few exceptions, all the leaders of the Serro rebellion had been born in Minas

Gerais and worked for the same masters since birth. Among the forty slaves identified in the criminal records, twenty-one revealed their place of birth: one was from Africa, sixteen were from local villages and four were generally described as creoles. Police officials did not fail to classify the slaves in racial terms: there were eight cabras, eight creoles, three pardos or mulattoes, and one preto or black. Within the local racial hierarchy and shades of blackness, cabras were the most denigrated people in part because of their unclear ancestry in between blacks and native Brazilians. The creoles, unlike the pardos, were often the sons and daughters of African-born slaves, and possessed a darker skin than the racially mixed pardos.

The cabras José Cabrinha, Nuno e Adão, despite their low status within the local racial hierarchy, rose to leadership positions thanks to their mobility and literacy abilities.

They belonged to a class of skilled artisans employed in various trades and who circulated widely between Serro and Diamantina. Among the 1864 rebels, there were five tailors, three domestic slaves, two stonemasons, two muleteers, two miners, one

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 328 ANRJ, “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” 33. 329 Ibid, 7. 166! ! ! blacksmith, one shoemaker, one joiner, and one carpenter. The predominance of artisans in the movement sprang in part from the high esteem to which field slaves held them.

Some of the participants described the artisans-turned-into-rebels as “the most capable of motivating” people to rise up in protest.330 They probably referred to the ability of man like Cabrinha to create political knowledge by placing rumors, snippets of conversations overheard at masters’ houses, and the news into an interpretive context that spoke to the conditions of their peers’ enslavement and cultures.

Masters and authorities, on the other hand, routinely denounced slaves’ geopolitical literacy as the product of the feeble imagination of Afro-Brazilians. The

“figurative and enigmatic conversations” highlighted by Deputy Rabello in Serro spoke of a perennial white fear of black communication, often materialized in the metaphor of disease. During the 1860s, white elites labored intensely to halt “the contagion of ideas” of emancipation that, misinterpreted by an “inferior race,” could lead to bloody strikes against the slave system.331 Blacks, however, functioned within a culture of expectation that, against all odds, also allowed for the construction of a new world. Their expectations of freedom played a deeply political role in shaping a version of abolitionism that created legitimacy for rebellion and left material and discursive effects.

This is not to say that white and black cosmologies in nineteenth-century Brazil did not overlap. Both shared the belief, for example, that slavery was somehow a constant state of war, bound to end catastrophically. They differed sharply, though, as insurgent slaves

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 330 Ibid, 66. 331 As we discussed in the beginning of the chapter, these were exactly the words used by Brazilian Minister to the United States, Miguel Maria Lisboa, to describe the repercussions of the American Civil War in Brazil. 167! ! ! envisioned an interpretive alterable world in direct contrast with the unwavering contours of the slave system imagined by planters and authorities.

Partly because of their literate status, repression fell heavily over those slaves who dared fight for the immediate abolition of slavery in 1864. Police officials tortured and almost killed captured slaves during interrogations in Serro and Diamantina.

Notwithstanding the complaints of slave owners who condemned the trials for their lack of severity, nine slaves were sentenced in November of 1864 to excruciating amounts of corporal punishment. No rebel was sentenced to death, and for reasons still unknown, none of the Diamantina slave miners were indicted. The stonemason José Cabrinha, who the police considered to be the leader of the plot, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor (galés). Nuno, Demétrio, Adão, Leonel and Sebastião were all submitted to public floggings. After receiving from 200 to 900 lashes each, they wore a heavy iron rack around their neck for periods varying from two months up to a year. The slave miner

Antônio and the maroon Vitória were scheduled for trial, but somehow escaped from the

Serro’s city jail. Alexandre, José Cabrinha’s brother, the freedman Herculano Manoel de

Barros, and Faustino, the only African slave ever interrogated, were all acquitted. The tailors David and Francisco, who had been recently sold from Serro to Diamantina, testified, but only David was forced to serve in the army.

The 1864 Serro rebellion ushered in a cycle of slave revolts in Minas Gerais.

Apprehensive slave owners now faced with a war against Paraguay that threatened to spread into their own territory aborted twenty-five slave conspiracies in 1865 alone. This number included new plans of rebellion uncovered by the Serro police in May and

August. Slaves continued to talk about “freedom, Lopez of Paraguay and many other

168! ! ! dangerous things,” rising up in their hometowns every time they had decided not to run away or rather join the ranks of Brazilian armed forces with hopes of obtaining their emancipation as compensation for their patriotism.332 In the end, these many rebellious acts informed local and national debates on slavery in Brazil, and sparked a set of struggles for land and social justice at large in modern Minas Gerais.

Additionally, the 1864 rebellion in Minas Gerais demonstrates that the same newspapers that supplied information and basic themes of the Civil War to an elite readership trying to steer a gradual, moderate course to abolition fed a bolder vein of antislavery developed by Afro-Brazilians. José Cabrinha, Nuno, and Adão were probably reading O Jequitinhonha and passing on the word about the war to their peers in Serro and Diamantina. In the midst of widespread fear of radical social change and disregard for racial equality, they found hope in the newspapers and, in acting upon it, strove to align Brazilian history with their expectations of freedom. Several more Afro-Brazilians did the same. It is not a coincidence that, solely between 1860 and 1864, the Brazilian

Ministry of Justice counted the outbreak of sixty-three slave rebellions in Brazil.333

At first sight, Afro-Brazilians’ antislavery views can elude us in the written archive. Those searching for written treatises or leaders proclaiming a full-blown defense of black freedom will conclude as masters once did that slavery eliminated dissent.

However, a closer look at the evidence commonly used to criminalize black actions of protest in nineteenth-century Brazil reveals that slaves and freedpeople lived out different geographies and alliances than the ones imagined by whites debating the future of bonded

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 332APM, Seção Provincial, cód. 1095, Caeté, Minas Gerais, 15 September 1865. Letter from Caeté’s Sheriff, Caetano de Souza Telles Guimarães, to the Chief of Police of Minas Gerais. 333 “Estatística Criminal”. Biblioteca Nacional: Relatório do Ministério da Justiça de 1865 referente ao ano de 1864, 1. 169! ! ! labor in closed-door meetings. Evidence of the slaves’ political narratives come to us mostly as testimonies given by them at various trials, as fragments detailed in newspaper reports, as confessions extracted through torture by police officials intent on uncovering black rebellions, as rumors registered by authorities engaged in chasing “bad talk”334 and even as images drawn by journalists and cartoonists of the Brazilian empire. When considered together, they show that slaves literally read the history of international abolition in a different light. !

But how could black literacy and collective social action have been so intertwined at a time when most Afro-Brazilians were illiterate? Let’s consider the numbers. Brazil’s first national census carried out in 1872 estimated that only one in every one thousand enslaved women and two in every one thousand men could read and write. In total, solely

15.75% of the total Brazilian population (including slaves) was said to be literate.335

Thus, in the nineteenth century, the majority of Brazilians – black and white - lived in a world where orality not only intersected with the written word, but also predominated in everyday life. For the majority of nineteenth-century slaves, knowledge of the past was communicated orally. They depended on what they had heard and seen to create a narrative of their lives and projects for the future. Information circulated from generation to generation of black workers through spoken words.

Illiteracy figures have led historians to brazen conclusions. By most accounts, the enslaved in Brazil had, as a result, no intellectual history. However, beneath the surface, they sent letters, read newspapers, wrote amulets in support of faith and war, copied books, and educated others. They recognized and, more importantly, used, the power of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 334 Expression used by Darnton in Poetry and the Police. 335 Chalhoub, “The Politics of Silence, 82. 170! ! ! literacy as a means for social bonding and political participation. It is important to note that the expediency of slave communication did not depend necessarily on the ability to remember things – like newspaper words, for instance -- in any exact form.336 For oral sectors of literate cultures, perfect linguistic communication over distance simply did not exist. Every time a slave read newspapers aloud to his peers, he compelled the formation of new meanings by his listeners. Therefore, the difficulty of understanding how slaves connected events recorded in writing to concrete struggles for freedom arises from the misconception that, once printed, news carried an unequivocal message.

The historical invisibility of black readers and writers owes a great deal to the prevalence of analytical approaches centered on the primacy of literate culture and to the difficulty of contemporaries to capture in writing a culture that was mostly oral and nurtured in secret. However, if we broaden our definition of literacy, much can be unveiled from traditional data on slave resistance. When referring to black literacy, I do not necessarily refer to complete mastery over conventional Roman script.337 Instead, I approach it here as a learning process and continuing social practice applied by the enslaved to examine their surroundings and history; as a key component of a version of

“critical literacy” that positioned blacks to emerge as a dangerous political force in mid- nineteenth-century Brazil.338

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 336 In this respect, Jack Goody interestingly points out that the notion of verbatim recall is not ineludibly valued in oral cultures. Quite the contrary, the practice becomes significant only with schooling and the decontextualization of knowledge. Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). 337 My understanding of slave literacy owes much to studies of African American print culture. See: Cornelius, ‘When I Can Read My Title Clear;’ Monaghan, “Reading for the Enslaved;” Richards, “Samuel Davies;” McHenry, Forgotten Readers; Williams, Self-Taught; Hager, Word by Word. 338 Here I refer to the terminology of educator , who viewed the critical reading of reality as the centerpiece of his pedagogy of liberation aimed at adult education of underrepresented classes in twentieth- century Brazil. Freire described critical literacy as the consciousness nurtured through dialogue about the issues that really mattered in his students’ lives. Literacy, in this sense, is grounded in a critical reflection 171! ! ! In order to understand the intersections between literacy and black abolitionism, one has to leave behind linear and progressive notions of cultural process as the right way to conceptualize literacy and learning. Old divides such as oral-versus-literate do not account for the complexity of black life and mask the existence of different avenues of expression among slaves and freedpeople, such as reading and writing linked to divination, body marks or writing in charms.339 Afro-Brazilians encountered the written word in its many forms: as newspapers, books, letters, bills of laden, and, most importantly, letters of manumission.340 The society they lived in was paradoxically a legalist and semiliterate world, where slaves shared news mostly through grapevine communication, a form of social interaction based on specific skills that they acquired at great cost.341 Nineteenth-century Brazil inherited a deeply notarial culture from the

Portuguese colonial state, one in which even ordinary people learned to seek authentication and recording of all kinds of mundane transactions. Thus for most slaves, the written word seemed to carry the weight of an official document.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! on the cultural capital of the oppressed and cannot be understood outside of relations of power. “Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. (...) For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process.” Paulo Freire and Donaldo P. Macedo, Literacy: Reading the Word and the World (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1987), p. 35. See also: Ben Schiller, “Learning their letters: Critical literacy, epistolary culture, and slavery in the antebellum South,” Southern Quarterly, 45:3 (2008), 11-29. 339 Gundaker, Signs of Diaspora. On different forms of communication based on cultural coded diferente from alphabetic literacy, see also: Joanne Rappaport, and Tom Cummins, Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies In the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Gabriela Ramos, and Yanna Yannakakis, Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture In Mexico and the Andes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 340 Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Women’s Stories From a Brazilian Slave Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xxi. On the Iberial juridical culture, see: Angel Rama, and John Charles Chasteen, The Lettered City (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 1996); Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power In Colonial Peru (Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press, 2010). 341 Anthony Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Susan E. O’Donovan, “Trunk Lines, Land Lines.” 172! ! ! An example from the province of Pernambuco can shed further light on the intricacies of slave literacy. In 1862, escaped slaves belonging to the engenhos (sugar mills) Guararapes, Conceição and Recreio in the county of Muribeca, not very far from the capital Recife, decided to organize an uprising. The rebels planned to set the boiling house at the Guararapes mill on fire, kill its owners, and then proceed armed to the surrounding sugar plantations urging slaveholders to acknowledge their free status.

Muribeca slaves “were persuaded (…) that the Government would also support them.”342

One day, however, the Muribeca police discovered the slaves’ hideout. National

Guard troops and slave-hunting militias immediately placed the quilombo established in the woods of the Guararapes mill under siege, burned all the houses they found, and arrested the rebels. Authorities then discovered that Muribeca slaves had met repeatedly at local fábricas or factories, as the mills and boiling houses where sugar was refined were known. In one of those meetings, Januário Rebolo from the Engenho Conceição learned that the rebels expected to “march” over to other plantations carrying a “flag,” which would signal to masters that the slaves only wanted their emancipation. Januário had joined in the rebellion because local slaves had been saying that “all of them had been freed by the Government, and that their masters had to pass on their letters.” Such

“freedom ideas” shared by the insurgents, he explained, “had been published (sic) by blacks who read newspapers out loud for others to listen.”343!

Joaquim, a Brazilian-born slave, confirmed Pernambuco’s slaves’ interest in the printed news. In his own words, “due to the newspapers that were read to many slaves by

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 342 ANRJ, IJ-332, 20 February 1862. Letter from the Chief of Police of Pernambuco. 343 Ibid, Interrogatory of Januário Rebolo, 15 February 1862. 173! ! ! people whose names he did not know, the news spread that they were all free.”344

Nevertheless, Joaquim refused to take part in the 1862 revolt because “since it is the

Government who would make us free, the order for their emancipation should come from

Recife (the provincial capital).” Geraldo, another Brazilian-born slave, concurred with

Joaquim, and revealed that slaves planned to “gather by the Formoso River with the purpose of obtaining their freedom, because Miguel, Constâncio and David read a newspaper and told them that the Government would protect them in their action.”345

As the example from Pernambuco shows, Afro-Brazilians clearly equated the printed news with legality and governmental action. In March of 1866, Pernambuco slaves again organized an uprising around the need to make authorities produce their manumission papers. Rebels of the Engenhos Belém, Condado and Ora, in partnership with maroons from the county of Pau d’Alho took up arms to “take part in a war to shout out the freedom of the slaves.” They planed to “yank the Freedom paper” from the hands of Lieutenant Luís de Albuquerque Maranhão, who they accused of keeping it from the slaves.346 Agents of government served as a gathering point for demands for abolition because slaves understood that the state could act as a counter-weight to the power of their masters.347

Then and now, few counted slaves as readers and yet readers they were. For them, literacy connoted an alternative kind of logic, a specific examination of power relations !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 344 Ibid, Interrogatory of Joaquim pardo, 15 Feb 1862. 345 Ibid, Interrogatory of the black slave Geraldo (preto escravo), 4 March 1862. 346 ANRJ, IJ1-336, 8 March 1866. “Auto de perguntas feitas ao mulato de nome Leandro, escravo do Capitão Jacinto Gomes Borges Uchoa, pelo delegado Cristóvão dos Santos Cavalcante.” 347 On the development of a transnational imagination among slaves and the working poor, see: Peter Linebaugh,“Todas as montanhas atlânticas estremeceram,” Revista Brasileira de História, ANPUH-Marco Zero, n. 6, set.1983; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra; Scott, “The Common Wind;” David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Reis, Gomes e Carvalho, O alufá Rufino; James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares. African Healing and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). 174! ! ! rooted in the contingencies of everyday life. As the Serro rebellion and many others demonstrate, the enslaved were both interpreters of text and political actors engaged in the pursuit of alliances and support through writing. By listening to others who could read or engaging in information circuits in which literate blacks read written documents aloud for the edification of others, Afro-Brazilians developed a sense of trust on the written word and infused news with specific meanings around which practical opposition to enslavement could coalesce all over the Brazilian empire. Collective reading practices prompted them to emerge decisively as interlocutors in the process of emancipation, and as actors with whom planters and politicians would have to reckon in the 1860s.!

Newspapers and Slave Rebellion in the Amazon

Wartime events in the United States continued to open up new spaces for the political imagination of slaves as news about emancipation appeared in newspapers all over Brazil. On July 4th, 1865, slaves from the northern province of Pará struck out for freedom in hopeful anticipation of great changes to come. They lived and worked at the

Pernambuco plantation, an estate located upriver from the capital Belém and managed by the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel or Carmelites.

On the morning of the 4th, the overseer lined up the plantation’s almost two hundred slaves for inspection. As he ordered the punishment of some, other slaves intervened and forced him to leave the property on a canoe under the vigilance of four insurgents.

Rowing directly to the Carmo Convent in Belém, the overseer met with his superior, Friar

175! ! ! Francisco da Natividade Azevedo, who reacted with great distress to the news of a slave rebellion in a plantation notorious for its unruly workers.348

At the start of the 1865 rebellion, Friar Azevedo thought it fair to tell the provincial president of Pará that Carmo slaves “had been in possession of a de facto liberty, indolence, and demoralization for so many years that it was even hard to describe it.”349 When alerted about the uprising, president José Vieira Couto de Magalhães sent a confidential report directly to the Ministry of Justice. He judged the sedition to be “of some importance” because “the war in the United States” had spread the “belief” among

Pará slaves “that they will all be emancipated.”350 Slaves throughout the Amazon region actually believed that President Magalhães had already signed an emancipation decree but refused to pass it along to their masters. Initially optimistic about the quenching of the uprising, the provincial government sent a steamship from the Companhia do Amazonas with eighty soldiers to lay siege to the Pernambuco plantation and capture slaves in flight.

The troops had orders to arrest all male slaves between 12 and 60 years of age and bring them to the jail in Belém.351 They succeeded in bringing twenty slaves to the capital, to which Friar Natividade de Azevedo soon added other fifty captured by private parties, but the movement grew as Pernambuco slaves evaded the plantation and reached local quilombos.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 348 BRASIL. Relatório do Ministério da Justiça Apresentado `a Assembléa Geral Legislativa na 4a Sessão da 12a Legislatura pelo Respectivo Ministro e Secretário de Estado José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo, 1865 (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Universal de Laemmert, 1866), 8 and 9. 349 ANRJ, IJ1 792, 5 July 1865. Letter sent by the Carmo Convent Prior, Manoel da Natividade de Azevedo, to the President of the Province of Pará, José Vieira Couto de Magalhães. 350 ANRJ, IJ1 792, 8 July 1865. Letter sent by President José Vieira Couto de Magalhães to the Minister of Justice, Nabuco de Araújo. 351 ANRJ, IJ1-208, 8 July 1865. Letter from the President of the Province of Pará, José Vieira Couto de Magalhães, to the Minister of Justice, Nabuco de Araújo. 176! ! ! Written accounts of the war in the United States brought to the surface underlying tensions about labor rights that existed on Carmelite properties all over Brazil. In 1864, slaves from the Gaecá sugar plantation in São Sebastião, province of São Paulo, and the

Capão Alto cattle-raising ranch in Castro, in Paraná, rose up to avoid being rented out to

Paulista coffee-growing regions. At the latter, according to Maria Thereza Brito de

Lacerda, slaves actually had long taken charge of managing the property and declared loyalty only to Nossa Senhora do Carmo, whom they called their mistress.352 In Pará, slave resistance had also long been a problem, as it relied on long-lasting alliances between the enslaved and riverine maroon communities. In 1865, Amazonian quilombos supplied insurgents with food, arms, horses, and a place to retreat during police raids.

For years, Friar Azevedo had been unable to enforce discipline among his slaves, who intermittently refused to work, disappeared in the rainforest, or resisted even his direct orders. In his words, at least since 1838, the plantation had been “more a heaven of deserters and assassins than an agricultural establishment”.353 His opinion reflected the state of decay in which many properties of religious orders found themselves in mid- nineteenth-century Brazil. Once one of the richest orders in the Brazilian Empire, the

Carmelites had lost great part of their assets by the 1860s, due to mismanagement, debt,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 352 Maria Thereza Brito de Lacerda, “Paulistas e Paranaenses no caminho das tropas,” in: José Guilherme Cantor Magnani (org), Fazenda Capão Alto. Cadernos do Patrimônio, Série Estudos 1, Curitiba: Sece, 1985, 26/7.! 353 Friar Azevedo probably referred to black participation in the Revolt, one of Brazil’s largest liberal insurrections involving peasants and the urban poor in the early national period. Historians believe that around one quarter of the population of Pará was killed in confrontations between 1835 and 1840. The term Cabanagem refers to the “activity of the people who live in cabanas, the region’s poorest housing – palm and wood huts. These inhabitants were called cabanos, the designation carrying associations of backwardness, poverty and sedition.” Mark Harris, Rebellion on the Amazon: The Cabanagem, Race, and Popular Culture in the North of Brazil, 1798-1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 5. 177! ! ! and, as some bishops noted, the “secularization of friars,” more involved in the economic upkeep of the brotherhood’s assets than in religious activities.

In 1860, at the conclusion of an Apostolic Visitation to the diocese of Pará, Friar

Joaquim José da Silva Costa, bemoaned the state of the three plantations administered by the Carmelites in the vicinity of Belém. By then, the Pernambuco, Engenhoca, and

Cabresto estates together had 203 slaves, even though their output was barely enough to provide for the basic needs of such a robust labor force. The Order’s dire economic situation along with lax discipline made for dangerous conditions on convent lands:

“generally, the slaves do not offer blind obedience, like the ones in the south of the

Empire, and work because they want to, and because of the resources and wild fruits they can find in the forest, in the quilombos, and neutral nations on the frontier, which meet them as if they were free; there is no way to discipline them; the Public Force cannot capture them; so the solution is to live fraternally with them, being even more convenient to liberate them.” 354

Fearful that Pernambuco slaves could become “the nucleus of a general slave uprising” in the province of Pará in 1865, President Magalhães dispatched a second military expedition to the plantation on July 10th, under the command of Lieutenant José Geraldo

Barroso da Silva. He left Belém again on board of the steamer Tabatinga, anchoring the next morning in the Carmelites’ property. Carrying orders to raid all the quilombos he could find along the River Guamá with assistance from the National Guard, Barroso set up an encampment outside the embattled plantation. From this base of operations, the commander dispatched several search parties into the woods hoping for sightings of the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 354 Sandra Rita Molina, “A morte da tradição: a Ordem do Carmo e os escravos da Santa contra o Império do Brasil (1850-1889),” (PhD dissertation, USP, 2006), 184.! 178! ! ! rebels, as well as to other nearby plantations administered by the Carmelites, where slaves were providing aid to the insurgents.355

In a week, the troops gathered enough intelligence to conduct raids in the quilombos of Maracanã, Guajarámirim, and Jacareconha. Soldiers burned a total of nineteen dwellings and several ovens used in the fabrication of manioc flour in Jacareconha, along with the fourteen slave huts existent at the Pernambuco plantation.356 Following the destruction of the quilombos, many fugitive slaves turned themselves over to Lieutenant Barroso, affected by starvation and fear of further reprisals. Of fifty-four fugitive slaves, two were shot dead when an expeditionary force attacked the quilombo of Jacareconha and twelve remained at large.

Despite the large repressive campaign involving guerrilla warfare and the deployment of almost two hundred men, the propertied classes of Belém still feared for their lives at the end of July. After the steamer Tabatinga returned to the capital, several merchants moved out, carrying everything they had on board of ships docked at the Belém harbor.357 The specter of a provincial rebellion hovered over Pará so menacingly that president Couto de Magalhães petitioned the imperial government in August for a special line of credit to fund the crackdown on slaves. He described the rebellion at the

Pernambuco plantation as “a bad example rooted in the spirit of the greater part of the bondsmen in the Province, who envision their impending emancipation due to the facts taking place in the United States.” The Ministry of Justice soon obliged and authorized the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 355 Authorities raided the Engenhoca and Cabresto plantations, both owned by the Carmo Convent, where they found slave rebels in hiding. ANRJ, IJ1-792, 24 July 1865. Report from Lieutenant José Geraldo Barroso da Silva. 356 ANRJ, IJ1-792, 29 July 1865. Letter from the President of the Province of Pará, José Vieira Couto de Magalhães, to the Minister of Justice, Nabuco de Araújo. 357 ANRJ, IJ1-792, 27 July 1865. Letter from the President of the Province of Pará, José Vieira Couto de Magalhães, to the Minister of Justice, Nabuco de Araújo. 179! ! ! allocation to Pará of 10$000 réis from the so-called “secret appropriation funds,” that is, an emergency account usually reserved for wartime conditions.358

Pernambuco slaves were so well known for their activism that the imperial government had already suggested their sale back in 1854.359 The 1865 slave rebellion, though, was representative of a larger regional phenomenon. In the beginning of 1864, authorities in Codó, Maranhão, received a complaint about the fact that at “a dinner organized by slaves, in which some free men participated, “they gave vivas to the

Republic, to Freedom, and to the American war.”360 Later in 1865, the situation previewed in Pará led local authorities to stock arms and ammunition in anticipation of insurrections all over the province of Maranhão. In Viana and Turiaçu, they expected nothing short of “an invasion” by maroons. Their fears materialized in 1867, when a slave insurrection of great proportions in Viana, with roots in the Quilombo of São

Benedito do Céu, put the inconvenience of slavery in focus. Once aware of the raid that destroyed the quilombo, one of the advisors of the Ministry of Justice concluded “The civilization of the country clamors against the existence of quilombos, already acknowledging in these and other consequences of the servile element the moral convenience of a society composed only of individuals of free condition.”361

Taken to the jail in Belém in 1865, the prisoners from the Pernambuco plantation were instantly indicted; their presence giving rise to rumors that President Magalhães was about to auction them off. The Jornal do Amazonas publicized the story, fuelling a lengthy

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 358 ANRJ, IJ1-208, 7 and 25 August 1865. Dispatches of the Ministry of Justice. 359 In 1856, for instance, twelve slaves ran away from the Pernambuco plantation as Reverend Manuel Maria D’Anunciação agreed to rent them out for the construction of the road between Bragança and Belém. Treze de Maio, 4 January 1856. 360 Gomes, A hidra e os pântanos, 218. 361 ANRJ, IJ1-233, 21 August 1867. Dispatch of the Ministry of Justice. On the 1867 rebellion, see: Gomes, A hidra e os pântanos and Araújo, Insurreição De Escravos Em Viana, 1867. 180! ! ! dispute between secular authorities and the over the placing of rebel slaves. The Bishop of Pará, Antônio Macedo da Costa, contested the provincial government’s authority to dispose of the sacred property of a religious corporation, claiming that the slaves – as all other Church assets - belonged and should benefit firstly

God and the poor. Invoking the rulings of the Trent Council and the role of Emperor Pedro

II as patron of the Catholics in Brazil, he fiercely criticized President Magalhães through the press, all the while depicting the Carmelite friars as excellent slave masters.362

Newspaper coverage of slave rebellions had always been a source of controversy in Brazil.363 Most often, editors considered insurrections as such grave matters that silence prevailed on the printed page. Especially in the case of the conservative press, when coverage of slave uprisings did occur, it happened through the publication of official correspondence relaying successful repression efforts. Veils of secrecy and minced words on slave activism clearly signaled press connivance with slaveholders in promoting the maintenance of slavery and public order. In August of 1865, a newspaper in the neighboring province of Maranhão relayed with care the news about the rebellion in Pará brought by the steamship Paraná. One could only be reassured to read: “At the

Fazenda Pernambuco, belonging to the Carmo Convent, a small insurrection manifested itself but was immediately suffocated.”364 No word about the American Civil War.

Nevertheless, the cycle of silence was at times broken by party politics. In 1865, standing in opposition to the government of Pará, the Jornal do Amazonas reported on

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 362 ANRJ, IJ1-792, 10 July 1865. Letter from the Bishop of Belém, Antônio Macedo da Costa, to President José Vieira Couto de Magalhães. 363 On newspaper coverage of slavery during the Brazilian empire, see: Marco Morel and Mariana G. M. de Barros, Palavra, imagem e poder: o surgimento da imprensa no Brasil do século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2003) and Marco Morel, “Imprensa e escravidão no Brasil do século XIX” In: Isabel Lustosa (org.), Imprensa, história e literatura (Rio de Janeiro: Casa de Rui Barbosa, 2008). 364 Publicador Maranhense, 2 August 1865. 181! ! ! the rebellion at the Fazenda Pernambuco as a means to highlight the state of general disarray in the province. Aside from publishing letters from President Magalhães and

Bishop Costa, the newspaper also amplified public conversation about possible events on the ground by mistakenly reporting on the murder of the commander of provincial troops.365 This case is emblematic of the role of the press all over the Brazilian empire during the nineteenth century. Newspapers did not always convey hard facts; instead, they pieced together incomplete accounts from a myriad of sources and opened them to embellishment by many narrators.

In an outraged response to Bishop Costa over his rant published on the Jornal do

Amazonas, President Magalhães again criticized the Catholic Church’s lax treatment of its slaves. Slaves of Carmo-owned properties were notorious for their indiscipline all over the empire. Defending his initial reaction to the uprising at the Pernambuco plantation,

Magalhães remarked: “if instead of giving order to sell the slaves exchanging their value for bonds, I gave order for them all to be freed, Your Excellency would respond with the thunderbolt of !”366Moreover, delving deeply into the role of the press in fomenting discontent in Pará, President Magalhães warned the bishop about the cumulative nature of the problem at hand:

Your Excellency cited a Daily Paper, you may then allow me to suppose that Your Excellency have seen what the press has said about the terrible state in which slaves are currently found, and how it strongly urges the Government to take action. Stroke by fear, the population witnesses with increasing terror the theft of a police canoe and flight of 20 slaves on May 9th, and flight of other 20 from Lieutenant Coronel Lima on June 24th, and finally the insurrection of those from the Carmo Convent on the 4th of this month; in this progression against which I struggle in the midst of such difficult circumstances as the current one, you would advise me to reach out to the only means I had to destroy this terrible den that responds by the name of Pernambuco Plantation. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 365 See, for example, the text sent to the paper by President Magalhães in order to reassure the population of Belém of their safety. Jornal do Amazonas, 10 July 1865. 366 ANRJ, IJ1 792, 11 July 1865. Letter from President José Vieira Couto de Magalhães to the Bishop of Belém do Pará, Antônio Macedo da Costa. 182! ! !

It weighs on me, Mister Bishop, the terrible responsibility of ensuring public security and tranquility. (…) It is believed among the bondsmen of Pará, and those belonging to the Carmelites play in it the greatest part, that they have all been recently freed, and that I am the one who withholds their emancipation Decree. The Carmo slaves also have newspapers.367

Slave rebels in Pará had found in the local press reason to believe that their emancipation could very well have become a historical imperative. The threat posed by black literacy had deep roots in the Brazilian past. In the 1860s, many people still remembered the 1835 Malê rebellion in Salvador, Bahia, which brought together a group of African Muslim slaves and free people of color in a massive urban uprising against slavery. In their investigations, the police soon had to reckon with the role played by a literate creed in facilitating slave protest. At some of the rebels’ houses, they confiscated written talismans, instructions for the revolt, ABCs, and several copies of the . In the wave of repression that followed the uprising, Bahian authorities deliberately opted to deprive the black community of Salvador of its literate members by deporting them back to Africa.368 Words held so much power that, in 1835, the two newspapers of largest circulation in the court of Rio de Janeiro, the Jornal do Commercio and the Diário do Rio de Janeiro, did not report at all on the 1835 rebellion.

In 1865, coupled with mounting unrest in provincial plantations and maroon communities, the U.S. war spoke of the political urgency of slaves’ cause and the plausibility of victory. Slaves residing between Pará and Amapá, a territory disputed by

Brazil and France, had also heard the message. More than four thousand of them, “ill- inspired since the war of the United States,” stood in danger of running away to Amapá

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 367 Ibid. 368Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil; Jack Goody, “Writing and Revolt in Bahia,” Visible Language 20 (1986), 318-43. 183! ! ! in the hopes of crossing over to freedom at the French Guiana.369 This was the path taken by more than seventy of them who had escaped in May in police canoes, as president

Magalhães mentioned in his letter to the Bishop of Pará. Also utilizing stolen canoes, another forty-four slaves along with sixteen freedmen escaped from the district of Cintra to Amapá in August of 1865.370 While they waited for an opportunity to reach Cayenna, fugitives made incursions into Pará, inviting their peers to leave and fuelling fears of a province-wide rebellion.

At the end of the year, the vice-president of the province of Maranhão, José

Caetano Vaz Júnior, described the danger posed by black literacy in vibrant colors:

In this capital, there are free blacks who know how to read badly, and to whom the ideas expressed lately in favor of the emancipation of slaves are not new. Similar ideas have been propagated in a confusing and vague manner among slaves in the capital and in the interior; and, according to my informants, these poor people apparently believe that the current war has some kind of affinity with the cause of their emancipation. (…) Recently, some facts augmented such apprehensions and caused even a state of panic terror among the population. All slaves fled from two estates located in the village of Codó (Alto Mearim).371

As Vaz Júnior’s words indicate, the white elite in Brazil feared the implications of blacks’ reading ability at a time when abolitionism had gained space in the press and political circles. Two months later, this same fear led the Brazilian Minister of Foreign

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 369 ANRJ, IJ1-977, 20 February 1866. Letter from José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo to the Minister of the Navy, Francisco de Paula da Silveira Lobo. 370 ANRJ, IJ1-977, 12 August 1865. Letter from the Chief of Police of Pará, José de Araújo Roso Dassim, to President José Vieira Couto de Magalhães. The issue of slave flight from Pará to Amapá reached the State Council in the begining of 1866, prompting an interesting response from councilors José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, Viscount of Uruguai, and Viscount of Jequitinhonha. Reflecting on the aid to fugitives allegedly provided by the French government, they mused: “Slavery is an amoral institution, and the state who has the infelicity of possessing it should not count on the assistance from those who do not have it. Evasion shall progressively increase on the borders of Brazil it is one among many symptoms of fermentation that this disgraceful institution reveals, and which no doubt requires vivid attention from the Government.” ANRJ, State Council Dispatch, 29 January 1866. 371 ANRJ, IJ1-230, 13 September 1865.Confidential letter from the Vice-president of the Province of Maranhão José Caetano Vaz Júnior, to the Minister of Justice, José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo. 184! ! ! Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva, to censor the publication of articles from The New York

Times and The New York Herald in Brazil for containing mentions to President Lincoln’s defense of slave emancipation.372 It was clear by then that, in the view of Brazilian slaves, the U.S. Civil War signified nothing less than a transnational struggle for freedom.

Conclusion

Slave activism challenges preconceived notions of how Brazilian society must have worked in the late nineteenth century. Although denied citizenship under Pedro II

(1840-1889), slaves were not passive observers of Brazilian public life. Quite to the contrary, bondsmen like José Cabrinha and Nuno of Minas Gerais helped shape an increasingly contested political terrain in which the future of slavery as well as the terms of emancipation were at stake. Through use of their own channels of communication and reliance on literate slaves with access to newspapers, slaves educated themselves about the first emancipacionist projects discussed in the Brazilian parliament, and decided to press for immediate abolition through government action. Moreover, they could not tear their attention away from the political events that affected the Atlantic World in the

1860s. To the surprise of many, Brazilian slaves then took up arms at the very places where they worked just as their neighbors to the North had done. Their activism, I argue, drew as much from repressive labor conditions as from the knowledge of the declining credibility of the institution of slavery in the Americas.

Black literacy and the activism it spawned invite us to challenge a master narrative of abolition that emphasizes legislative landmarks and the boundaries of the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 372 AHI, 235-2-01, 3 November 1865. Letter from José Antônio Saraiva, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja. 185! ! ! nation-state. Scholars of Brazil have written the broad story of how the American Civil

War reshaped the debate over slavery within the Brazilian state but have rarely stopped to fully consider black agency as part of the narrative. They have, for example, thoroughly analyzed Pimenta Bueno’s project; mapped legislative debates over other emancipationist proposals written by Silveira da Mota and Tavares Bastos; interpreted Emperor Pedro II’s laconic responses to pleas for abolition coming from French and British abolitionist societies in the 1860s; as well as the more lengthy reflection of jurist Perdigão Malheiro about the meaning of the American war to Brazilian slavery.373 The rebellions studied in this chapter hopefully add to this account by populating the debate with different voices and calling attention to how Afro-Brazilians framed the issues at stake when it came to emancipation in Brazil.

Newspapers connected Brazilian slaves with the enslaved elsewhere in the

Atlantic world and helped them to navigate the country’s political landscape in the terms of a transnational citizenship. They projected slaves beyond their masters’ geography and enabled them to display affiliations that pointed to ideas of citizenship much broader than the one promoted by the Brazilian state. Afro-Brazilians’ expansive imagination involved notions of geography, time, and politics fundamentally different from the ones that inform traditional accounts of Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century. In other words, collective reception of newspapers reveals a distinctive narrative of emancipation produced by the enslaved, one that includes notions of impending abolition, of black !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 373 On these author’s original works, see: Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos, Cartas Do Solitario (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. da Actualidade, 1863); Perdigão Malheiro, A Escravidão No Brasil: Ensaio Histórico- Jurídico-Social (São Paulo: Edições Cultura, 1944), 2 tomos; Joaquim Nabuco, Um Estadista Do Imperio: Nabuco De Araujo, Sua Vida, Suas Opiniões, Sua época (Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1898). On the historiography on Brazilian emancipationism during the 1860s, see: Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, Barman, Citizen Emperor; Carvalho, A Construção Da Ordem and Teatro De Sombras; Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire; Bueno e Kugelmas. José Antônio Pimenta Bueno; Rocha, Abolicionistas Brasileiros e Ingleses. 186! ! ! solidarity, of different affective bonds, and of the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. In this narrative, the U.S. Civil War was part of the history of those still struggling for their freedom from the Minas Gerais’ backlands to the heart of the Amazon Rainforest.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

187! ! ! CHAPTER!FOUR! Different Borders of Belonging: The Place of Free(d) Africans in Brazil ! ! In October of 1865, the Brazilian imperial government learned about the intentions of an African American man from Alabama to immigrate to Brazil. Henry

Hunter petitioned the Brazilian Consul in New York for a passport, contending that he was willing to relocate to South America in pursuit of a better life. What did an African

American expected from coming to a slave empire? Perhaps Hunter was familiar with mythical images of Brazilian benign racial relations that had circulated in the United

States at least since the 1830s.374 Among others, black abolitionists like Martin Delany and often compared the experiences of colored men in both countries, singling Brazil out for allowing freedpersons access to political life and social mobility.375 The blending of races in Brazil or at least the prospect of enjoying a more significant measure of freedom now offered a tempting alternative to those struggling with the harsh realities of emancipation in the post-war U.S. South.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 374 On the circulation of ideas about Brazil’s racial paradise, see: David Hellwig, African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992); Azevedo, Abolitionism in the United States and Brazil; Luciana da Cruz Britto, “Abolicionistas afro-americanos e suas interpretações sobre escravidão, liberdade e relações raciais no Brasil no século XIX,” in: Maria Helena P. T. Machado e Celso Castilho, Tornando-se livre: agentes históricos e lutas sociais no processo de abolição (São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2015), 429-50. 375 Douglass broadcasted his views on the advantages enjoyed by freedpersons in Brazil at an address given in 1858 in response to the segregated nature of New York’s public transit system: “I doubt if there ever were a people more imposed upon, more shamelessly trampled upon, and despitefully used, than are the free colored people of these United States. Even the Catholic country of Brazil—a country which we in our pride stigmatize as semi-barbarous—— does not treat the colored people, either free or slave, in the unjust, barbarous and scandalous manner in which we treat them. The consequence of this difference is seen in the better condition of the free colored man there than here. The practice in that country is, that when a slave is emancipated, he is at once invested with all the rights of a man— made equal to all other subjects of the Empire. No relic of his past bondage clings to him. He is a freeman. His color and features are lost sight of in the blaze of his Liberty.” F. Douglass, “Citizenship and the Spirit of : An Address Delivered in New York, New York, on 11 May 1858,” in J. W. Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 2: 1847-54 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1979), 211-12. 188! ! ! In his dealings with the Brazilian Consulate, though, Hunter soon discovered that

Brazil was as racialized a society as the one he knew in Alabama. In stark contrast to the welcome extended to his white Confederate countrymen, Hunter was not cleared for travel. Consul Joaquim Thomaz do Amaral denied him a passport based on the provisions of the abolition law of 7 November 1831, which underscored a decades-old Brazilian policy of blocking foreign-born freedpeople from entering the empire. Although subtle about the racial grounds on which it was designed, the law was explicitly anti-Africanist, discriminating against and threatening with deportation those once openly trafficked to

Brazil on slave ships.376

Despite denying Hunter permission to travel in 1865, Consul Amaral had reason to believe that he would forcibly make his way to Brazil:

Having been requested at this Consulate General a passport for Henry Hunter, born in the state of Alabama, man of color, 35 years of age, and upon knowledge of him having bought his freedom some years ago, I denied such document with basis on the Circular of this Ministry from 27 January 1851 and on the letter of the Imperial Legation in Washington from 22 August 1862, however, I suspect he means to depart on the bark Ann and Lizzy from , even after having warned the ship’s captain that it was against the laws of the Empire…377

In his justification for the passport refusal, Consul Amaral summarized the legal framework that helped keep Brazilian borders closed to foreign blacks in the second half of the nineteenth century. Firstly, he mentioned the 1851 Circular issued in the aftermath of the ban on the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil. The document instructed Brazilian consular attachés to deny passports to all freed persons (libertos) intent on coming to

Brazil, exception made to those who presented passports showing that they had departed !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 376 Hebe Maria Mattos, “Racialização e Cidadania no Império do Brasil,” in José Murilo de Carvalho e Lúcia Maria B. P. Neves (orgs.), Repensando o Brasil no Oitocentos: Cidadania, Política e Liberdade (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2009), 349-391. 377 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 20 October 1865. Letter from the Brazilian Consul in New York, Joaquim Thomaz do Amaral, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva. 189! ! ! from the country as free persons or as creole slaves of Brazilian subjects. In the case of those who had left Brazil as members of the crew of a Brazilian ship, diplomats were to ask for a copy of their registration to prove so.378 Secondly, Amaral cited an 1862 letter of the Imperial Legation in the United States that addressed the issue of resettlement of

African Americans in South America. Written by Brazilian Attaché Miguel Maria Lisboa in the midst of the American Civil War, the letter showcased the diplomat’s doubts about the comprehensiveness of the 1831 law. Lisboa wondered about whether it constituted enough of a legal barrier “to the introduction in our country of such a prejudicial emigration” or if some “reform or addition that places the ban on the entrance in the

Empire of freed and demoralized Africans beyond any doubt” was necessary.379 The

Brazilian government answered Lisboa’s consultation with a firm endorsement of the

1831 law and the recommendation that diplomats stay vigilant to avoid the relocation of any foreign blacks to Brazil.

Henry Hunter’s impending trip in late 1865 unleashed the writing of a flurry of governmental circulars in Brazil. Only ten days after Amaral communicated his suspicion that Hunter was headed to the empire, the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, José Thomás

Nabuco de Araújo, dispatched orders to the Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro and the presidents of all other maritime provinces to prevent him from disembarking on Brazilian territory.380 Citing the strict disposition of Art. 7th of the Law of 7 November of 1831,

Nabuco de Araújo demanded nothing less than armed vigilance at Brazilian ports. On

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 378 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 27 January 1851. Circular to the Brazilian Diplomatic and Consular Corps issued by the Minister of Justice, José Thomás Nabuco de Araújo. 379 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 18 April 1862. Letter from to the Brazilian envoy to Washington, Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Benevenuto de Magalhães Taques. 380 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 1 November 1865. Dispatch of the Ministry of Justice. ANRJ, IJ1-232, 18 January 1866. Letter from the president of the province of Maranhão, Lafayette Rey Pereira, to the Minister of Justice, José Thomás Nabuco de Araújo. 190! ! ! December 9, 1865, the bark Ann & Lizzie finally set anchor in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of

Henry Hunter, the ship brought on board several prospective white American colonists to whom the Brazilian government had offered economic incentives. From Alabama, former state representative Charles Grandison Gunther and his four sons headed to the bountiful margins of the Doce River in Espírito Santo.381 Major Frank McMullan, Colonel William

Bowen, and Major S. S. Totten set out to São Paulo, beginning their quest to create a colony populated by relatives and friends from central Texas.382 !

Henry Hunter’s whereabouts remains unknown to this day. He fades from the historical record in the beginning of 1866 when Brazilian authorities considered the country safe from his attempt to emigrate. Hunter’s story is unique because it is the only recorded case of an African American who, on his own accord, officially petitioned to come to Brazil after the American Civil War. Other African Americans actually reached

Brazilian soil in the company of Confederate colonists yet only to be deported back to the

United States. Lampooned as destitute people incapable of managing their recently earned emancipation and as purveyors of antislavery agitation, African Americans presented a threat to Brazilian slavery. Miguel Maria Lisboa’s successor, Joaquim

Nascentes d’Azambuja, summarized the concerns of the Brazilian state as follows:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 381Dawsey, The Confederados, 58; Griggs, The Elusive Eden, 20. 382!Of the 154 Confederate families who came to Brazil from 1865 to 1875, 37 sprung from the state of Alabama. Settlers gravitated to the interior of São Paulo, in Southeast Brazil, following news of a familiar climate and plantation economy and direct incentives from the Brazilian government. During the 1850s, several Southerners visited Brazil and some like Reverends Daniel P. Kidder and James C. Fletcher extolled the country’s potential in the popular book Brazil and the Brazilians (1857). During the 1860s, Rev. Ballard Dunn, a Louisiana native, chaplain, and ordnance officer of the Confederate army, Major Robert Meriwether, and physician Hugh Shaw, also offered positive feedback about their visits to the empire conducted on behalf of the Southern Emigration Society of Edgefield, South Carolina. Harter, The Lost Colony of the Confederacy; Strom, Confederates in the Tropics. 191! ! ! Thinking about emigrating to the Empire, some inhabitants of the South meant to take in their company emancipated men of color, as it is surmised from several letters sent to this Legation and transmitted to the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works.

The Federal Government had, on the other hand, the interest of facilitating and sought even to promote their exit of these States to Brazil, the Antilles, and other American Possessions.

Four million individuals were thrown abruptly in the enjoyment of the most unbridled freedom, struggling against misery for lack of occupation and antagonizing their former masters.

Still not used to the habits of their new condition, they would hardly be able to provide for their subsistence.

In these circumstances, since my arrival in this country, I feared that either by self- impetus or by political calculations, a part of this bastard population would refer to Brazil, ignoring its laws and in the hopes of finding there better chances of prosperity.383

As Azambuja suggests, those in charge of state affairs in Brazil considered

African American emigration against the complicated background of Union plans to send emancipated slaves abroad, Confederate dreams of extending their empire of slavery southward, and black activism in the face of Atlantic emancipation.384 Over the 1860s, authorities continued to resist North-American plans of black colonization of the

Amazon, scrutinized Confederate immigrants who intended to bring African Americans with them to Brazil, and followed closely the process of Reconstruction in the United

States. By relying on the 1831 law and an extensive legal tradition that promoted – if not always enforced – the deportation of freed Africans, Pedro II’s government reinforced the racist nature of Brazilian foreign policy without ever having to talk about race.385

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 383 ANRJ, IJ-1085, 17 March 1866. Letter from Brazilian envoy Joaquim Nascentes d’Azambuja to the Minister of Justice, José Thomaz Nabuco de Araújo. 384Karp, This Vast Southern Empire; May, Slavery, Race and Conquest In the Tropics; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams; Horne, The Deepest South; Nícia Vilela Luz, A Amazônia para os Negros Americanos: Origens de uma controvérsia internacional (Rio de Janeiro: Saga, 1968). 385 Producing silence on questions of race seemed to be the corollary of imperial policy in Brazil. The idea was that what was not stated positively did not have to be dealt with politically. Just as the 1824 Constitution never mentioned slavery directly, the question of race would also remain sublimated, as historian Sidney Chalhoub has shown. Similarly, Wlamyra de Albuquerque argues that a dissimulation 192! ! ! Officially, the civil condition and foreignness of Africans defined the impossibility of embracing them as part of the emerging nation-state.

This chapter explores the ban on the emigration of foreign-born people of color to

Brazil as an important element of the history of emancipation during the 1860s. From the point of view of the Brazilian state, closing the borders to freed Africans was an imperative to survive abolition in the Americas and grapple with the issue of having a substantial free black population in a slave society. Accommodating liberal notions of citizenship and the survival of bondage was no easy task and demanded Brazilian authorities to thread carefully a maze of cases of re-enslavement, deportation, and contested relocations of Africans to Brazil. The U.S. Civil War fitted into this context, prompting state forces to retrench into a conservative position in the face of widespread fear that man like Henry Hunter would incite slaves to rebel.

For African descendants, though, the ban entailed specific ways of practicing politics and tracing borders of belonging throughout the Atlantic world. Black travellers suffered greatly from international policies targeted at their social networks, families, and livelihoods yet evidence of African diasporic agency in confronting state authoritarianism is abundant. This section concludes with a study of the strategies Afro-Brazilians developed to circumvent legal restrictions to their mobility in the mid-nineteenth century.

Their stories complicate our understanding of black geopolitical imaginations for not all

Africans desired to go back to Africa and not all claimed citizenship in Brazil. Some fought to make Brazil their permanent homeland and still others found in the empire a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! game defined Brazilian national politics in the nineteenth century and, more specifically, debates in the State Council, whose opinions always concealed their racial overtones. Chalhoub, “The Precariousness of Freedom;” Wlamyra Ribeiro de Albuquerque, O Jogo Da Dissimulação: Abolição e Cidadania Negra No Brasil (São Paulo, SP: Companhia das Letras, 2009). 193! ! ! renewed space of re-enslavement. I argue that their tactics are a testament to the makings of Afro-diasporic identities that at once overlapped and conflicted with elite notions of political and social order in Brazil.

! The Limits of Brazilian Citizenship

From the perspective of African-born freed persons in Brazil, citizenship was at best an impossible proposition in the nineteenth century. According to the 1824

Constitution, whose authoritarian origins went back to the dissolution of the Brazilian

Constitutional Assembly by Emperor Pedro I in 1823, only Brazilian-born freed persons were to be considered citizens. That meant that immigrants of African descent, even if enslaved and once freed in the empire, could never aspire to become part of the emerging

Brazilian national community. Emancipation in Brazil conferred no naturalization rights to former slaves as was the practice in other countries like neighboring Uruguay or the

French and English colonies.386 As Manuela Carneiro da Cunha has famously stated,

African freedpersons remained forever foreigners in Brazil. What is more, they were stateless, for they lacked protection from their places of origin. Freedpeople’s very ambiguous juridical standing transformed them into easy prey to the political whims of

Brazilian authorities and slave owners, opening up way to the perils of reenslavement, physical abuse, deportation, and poverty.387

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 386 Mamigonian, "Os direitos dos libertos africanos no Brasil oitocentista,” História, vol.34, n.2, 2015, 181- 205. Available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1980-436920150002000064 (acessed on 3 October 2016). Myriam Cottias, “Gender and Republican Citizenship in the French West Indies, 1848-1945,” Slavery and Abolition, v. 26, n. 2, 223-245, 2005; Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics In Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 387 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros Estrangeiros: os escravos libertos e sua volta `a África, 2a. ed. rev. ampl. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012). 194! ! ! Although borders had different meanings for each person crossing them, on the level of state building, the notion of frontier had clear racial overtones in nineteenth- century Brazil. In May 1859, Emperor Pedro II approved the latest State Council opinion on matters of citizenship in the country. Drafted by Eusébio de Queirós Coutinho

Mattoso Câmara, former Ministry of Justice and notorious conservative, the text was also signed by the two other elder statesmen who were members od the council’s Section for

Foreign Affairs: the Viscount of Maranguape, and the Viscount of Uruguai. Their report was written in response to a consultation from the Imperial Legation in over the delicate issue of whether black freed persons (libertos) born outside yet resident in

Brazil should be considered Brazilian citizens.388

Spanish American countries sharing borders with Brazil started passing Free

Womb laws in the 1820s and subsequently abolished slavery in their territories in the

1840s and 1850s. Brazilian slaves quickly learned about the changing geopolitics of freedom in South America and increasingly crossed borders in pursuit of emancipation.

In the 1850s, slave flight from Brazilian provinces to Uruguay and Argentina reached great numbers, transforming the into an area of conflicts around state building. Many escaped to neighboring free territories and returned to Brazil to advance emancipation claims based on the 1831 law, which established that all slaves entering the territory or ports of Brazil coming from outside would be considered free. Others simply absconded within free territories, prompting Brazilians slaveholders to stake their alleged right to recover fugitive slaves abroad. Uruguayan and Argentinian authorities, in turn, complained about Brazilian citizens who crossed the border to re-enslave laborers already !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 388 BRASIL, O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1858-1862), Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2005, 187-208. ! 195! ! ! working as free people on their lands. As Keila Grinberg has shown, cases of re- enslavement in Southern Brazil soared after the end of the slave trade, transforming regional borders into a new frontier of enslavement.389

Such diplomatic imbroglios brought the debate over the rights of freed persons in

Brazil to a transnational stage and caused the Brazilian Legation in Uruguay to ask the

State Council for guidance. As customary, the councilors resorted to the guidelines offered by the governmental office with expertise on the issue at hand. In his preliminary reflections, though, José Antônio Pimenta Bueno, then advisor to the Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, offered an unsettling interpretation of Brazilian constitutional history. Pimenta

Bueno’s argument surmised the rights of libertos from the implications of the constitutional mandate on the condition of slaves in Brazil. The future Marquis of São

Vicente admitted that no document positively determined the nationality of freedpeople in Brazil but suggested that principles of Roman Law, “rooted in good reason,” and article 6 §1 of the 1824 Constitution should stir the debate.390

Although the 1824 Constitution never acknowledged the existence of slavery, article 6 §1 legitimized the institution by indirectly classifying people in Brazil into two categories: free and enslaved. The text of the law established as Brazilian citizens “all those born in Brazil, either ingênuos or libertos, even if fathered by a foreigner,” given that the latter does not find himself in Brazil in the service of his mother nation.

Therefore, the Constitution normalized bondage by conferring citizenship to both those

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 389 Grinberg,”The Two Enslavements of Rufina and “Slavery, Manumission, and the Law.” See also: Rachel da Silveira Caé, “Entre a escravidão e a liberdade: casos da fronteira sul do Brasil e seu impacto nas relações diplomáticas com o Estado Oriental (1842-1858),” In: Martha Abreu e Hebe Mattos (orgs), Caminhos da Liberdade: histórias da abolição e do pós-abolição no Brasil. Niterói: PPGHistória – UFF, 2011, 178-192. 390 BRASIL, O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros, 1858-1862 (Rio de Janeiro, FUNAG, 2005), 190.! 196! ! ! born free (ingênuos) and those who had been born as slaves but were later manumitted.

Black freedmen, however, were not full citizens for article 94 § 2 of the 1824

Constitution denied them the right to become electors and, therefore, their access to public offices, which routinely required such quality in their vetting process.391

Since the 1824 Constitution did not recognize slaves as citizens even though they were born in Brazil, Pimenta Bueno reasoned that manumission was what bestowed any kind of nationality upon freed persons. Once freed in Brazilian territory, one – even a foreigner - was “truly born” to the nation:

Article 6 § 1 of the Constitution did not acknowledge slaves as Brazilian citizens, while slaves, even though born in Brazil, and, certainly, could not and should not have acknowledged them as such, because the slaves are primarily a form of property, however of an special nature, rather than people in possession of rights and, therefore, cannot be members of civil society, and, let alone, of political society; declaring them citizens would equal freeing them. So, from this we deduct the first consequence, which is that, no matter the place of birth, the slave, while a slave, has no nation or nationality; his place of birth is indifferent in relation to civil or political society, for he is not a member of it.

That said, we have that, on the other hand, this same § declared as a Brazilian citizen the one freed in Brazil (…)

Thus, we will conclude that, if the place of birth is indifferent to the question at hand; if, on the contrary, manumission is who confers civil and political life; if it is what recalls the freed person into the national association, it undoubtedly follows that it is also what determines his true nationality. Therefore, to a manumission obtained in Brazil corresponds the legal birth in its territory and, consequently, the quality of Brazilian.392

Pimenta Bueno’s thoughts on freed people’s rights to citizenship had radical implications. If he were right, then Africans manumitted on Brazilian soil should hold at least all the political rights afforded to Brazilian freedmen. His understanding of the wide scope of Brazilian citizenship derived from an equally inclusive interpretation of the birth of Brazil as an independent nation. Pimenta Bueno reminded his readers that Brazil used

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 391 Ibid, 188. 392 Ibid. 197! ! ! to form one kingdom along with Portugal and its African territories. Article 6 § 4 of 1824

Constitution addressed this fact by extending citizenship to all “Portuguese Africans”– either ingênuos or libertos – residing in Brazil during the 1820a, as long as they were loyal to the cause of independence.393 Therefore, he reasoned, it would be illogical to take away the privilege of liberty conferred upon them by the principles of humanity and civilization.

Finally, the slave in general or independently of his place of birth do not have a homeland per se (não tem pátria propriamente dita); as a slave follows his master as his property; then, at the moment of his manumission, he acquires a homeland or nationality and this cannot be any other if not that of the place in which he obtained his freedom and the social life that springs from it. (…) The freedom either offered by or acquired through Brazilian law is, at least, a naturalization letter of the most generous kind in any civilized nation, which only tolerates slavery due to necessity. Slaves, once freed, having long resided on our soil, perhaps already married according to our laws, in all ruled by them, under no other personal statute, do not have any other homeland; and, on the other hand, did not work less than the colonists who are favored with Brazilian citizenship.394

The scathing denial of Pimenta Bueno’s doctrine by State Council members illustrates with rare clarity how slave emancipation and the construction of the Brazilian nation-state were imbricated. The councilors unanimously disagreed with Pimenta

Bueno’s opinion and Eusébio de Queirós actually accused him of “cheapening” the quality of Brazilian citizenship when suggesting that it could be extended to all libertos living in the empire. The State Council’s report was a concise indictment of any liberal reading of the Brazilian constitution. According to Queirós and the two viscounts, the national Magna Carta established quite straightforwardly on article 6 that freedmen born outside of Brazil were only eligible for citizenship through naturalization. It sufficed to read the article in reverse for it to become clear. When it came to the argument that freed !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 393 Ibid, 189. 394 Ibid, 190.! 198! ! ! persons born in Portuguese Africa had been freed in 1824, the councilors countered that slaves could never have met the condition then required for citizenship. They could never have pledged allegiance to the cause of Brazilian independence simply because slaves

“do not possess free will.”395 Next came the most revealing part of the councilors’ report:

(…) the Section understands that the country would gain nothing by cheapening the quality of Brazilian citizen by offering it to libertos not born in it and that did not want to ask for naturalization.

The Section should further ponder that, one more time, the Imperial Government thought it convenient to deport these libertos to somewhere outside of the Empire, sometimes in large quantities, like it happened in Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. Now, surely, this procedure would be untenable if libertos born outside of the country could be admitted in the quality of Brazilians.396

As we see, the statelessness of freed Africans constituted official policy of the

Brazilian imperial state. An African captive, when freed, acquired civil rights (such as making contracts and acquiring property) but remained a foreigner, thus eligible for citizenship only through naturalization. He could not seek qualification to vote in the elections or run for public office at any level. Freedwomen, on the other hand, were completely written off the political life of the country.397 The exclusion of freed Africans from Brazilian citizenship dovetailed nicely with re-exportation policies supported throughout the entire nineteenth century. Therefore, rather than the land of benign slavery

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 395 Ibid, 191. 396 Ibid. 397 Following Perdigão Malheiro’s thoughts on the legal aspects of slavery in Brazil as laid out in his widely read study in the 1860s, Sidney Chalhoub has explained the extent of freed persons’ political and civil rights: “In the electoral system established by the Constitution, with two principal stages of citizenship rights mainly on the basis of wealth, freedmen could vote in primary or local elections. They could vote for and be elected to the municipal council, but they were not allowed to participate in the following stage, the election of provincial deputies, general deputies, and senators. Since citizenship rights also served as criteria for the occupation of jobs in the state bureaucracy, a freedman could not be appointed a justice of the peace, ranked police officer, attorney, judge, diplomat, or bishop – they were even barred from serving as jurors in jury trials. They could be admitted to the National Guard, but not as officers.” Freedmen could also serve in the army and in the navy. Chalhoub, “The Precariousness of Freedom,” 413-4. 199! ! ! or easy access to manumission, Brazil was in the vanguard of political discrimination based on race (disguised as civil condition) in the Atlantic World.

“Nossos amigos Yankies se querem descartar de seus negrinhos”398

Over the 1860s, when evaluating the possible emigration to Brazil of African

Americans like Henry Hunter, Brazilian elites employed the kind of rationale affirmed by the 1859 State Council decision. On their minds, though, there was more than the idea that freed blacks had no legitimate claim to the privileges of full-blown Brazilian citizenship. Brazil often occupied the receiving end of North American plans of black colonization and had to face the reverberations of an American process of emancipation that was accompanied by the military defeat of a powerful class of slaveholders. As it bred fears of black revolution in Brazil, the Civil War lent weight to the ban on the relocation of African Americans to the country.

As the State Councilors remarked in 1859, the specter of a sweeping slave uprising was not new in Brazil. The empire had survived the spreading influence of the

Haitian Revolution in the beginning of the nineteenth century and, partly thanks to the deportation previsions of the 1831 law, repressed the massive black Muslim rebellion of

1835 in Bahia. Thus, the threat posed by African Americans fit within a longer Brazilian history of dealing with the international geopolitics of slavery and freedom. The

American Civil War only pushed Brazil to further refine its racialist response to the age of abolition.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 398 “Our friends, the Yankees, want to rid themselves of their Negroes.” AHI, 233-3-12, 3 26 August 1862. Letter from the Brazilian Envoy to the United States, Miguel Maria Lisboa, to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 200! ! ! Plans of relocating Africans Americans to Brazil emanated from both sides at war in the United States. As discussed in earlier chapters, Southern dreams of a South

American empire of slavery preceded the sectional conflict. Maria Helena P. T. Machado claims that the idea that the future of the Southern slave economy was imbricated with the colonization of the Brazilian Amazon appeared for the first time in 1842, on the pages of the Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine and Commerce Review.399 In the next decade, colonization of the Amazon gained notoriety in the work of American Navy officer

Mathew Fontaine Maury.400 Born in Virginia, Maury is often remembered as an oceanographer, but his role as a pro-slavery imperialist brings him closer to the history of

Brazil. Later a staunch Confederate during the sectional war, Maury saw in the Amazon’s mineral riches, potential for agricultural development, and ease of hydrographic communication a perfect destination for Southern capital and a plausible solution for its social and racial troubles. “That valley is a slave country,” wrote Maury about the

Amazon in 1852, after learning about the results of the expedition conducted by his brother-in-law in Brazil.401 The Amazon lurked as the perfect ground for the extension of

Southern political representation and a safety valve for U.S. dependence on the slave trade dominated by the North.

Opening the Amazon River for international navigation remained a controversial issue during the nineteenth century, as Brazil fought off American and European imperialist invectives. In 1862, the colonization of the Amazon came back into vogue !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 399Later, the idea spread further through print, being republished in several Southern newspapers and journals such as the DeBow’s Review. and Machado, Brazil Through the Eyes of William James and “Os abolicionistas brasileiros e a Guerra de Secessão.” See also: Luz, A Amazônia para os Negros Americanos; Sampaio, “Não diga que não somos brancos.” 400 Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Amazon and the Atlantic Slopes of South America (Washington: F. Taylor, 1853); Johnson, River of Dark Dreams. 401 William Lewis Herndon, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1851-1852. (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1952). 201! ! ! through the American envoy to Brazil, James Watson Webb. This time, Webb voiced

Union colonization interests in connection to his grave misperception of Brazilian racial relations and political institutions. He suggested a treaty between the two countries, “by which all the freed Negros of the United States” should be endowed with land by the

Brazilian government,

(…) and as the expiration of term of years, become citizens of Brazil, with all the rights and privileges of the free Negro population of the Empire, all of whom by the Constitution are recognized equals of the white man, and equally eligible with him to the highest offices of the Empire; and where already the social distinction between the white and Black races, which once existed, had nearly been eradicated.402 Webb’s remarks were in line with discussions entertained by the Union government. The deportation of African Americans figured in President Lincoln's political calculations as a means to counter opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln first targeted for repatriation the slaves who sought refuge at Union camps, but soon moved on to including free people of color as well. In 1862, as the president suggested that Congress appropriate funds for black colonization, Brazil became in truth an option for Union prospects of full racial separation.403 Gerald Horne has argued that the reluctance of nations like Brazil to receive African Americans as the Civil War unfolded explains much about why U.S. blacks ended up remaining in North America.404

As the American Civil War wore on, concern about the migration of slaves alongside their masters from the Confederate States of America started to develop in

Brazil. Since the early 1860s, Southern planters expected to count on the hospitality of another slave country to elude damages to their seigniorial rights and economic stability.

As tensions with the North flared up in 1860, H. B. Wood, a planter from the state of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 402 Dispatch from James Watson Webb to Secretary of State William Seward, 10 May 1862. As cited by Maria Clara Carneiro Sampaio in “Não diga que não somos brancos,” 94. 403 Michael Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization,” Journal of Abraham Lincoln Association, Vol. 14, Issue 2 (Summer 1993), 22-45. 404Horne, The Deepest South. 202! ! ! Texas, wrote to the Imperial Legation in Washington to inform Brazilian Envoy Miguel

Maria Lisboa “of the desire manifested by several of his fellow citizens to emigrate to

Brazil with their slaves.” 405 Lisboa promptly responded to Wood’s inquiry, stating that free foreigners were always welcome in Brazil if they wished to establish themselves for peaceful purposes. Their bondsmen, however, would not be allowed in. Citing a circular from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dating back to 11 May 1835, Lisboa explained to

Wood that “effective laws prohibited the commerce in slaves, and police restrictions affected the entry of foreign-born (não-ingênuos) men of color in Brazilian territory.”406

Wood’s query reveals that Brazilian concerns about the emigration of African

Americans long preceded the imperial declaration of neutrality in the American Civil

War. In 1861, the empire finally decided to stand as a neutral party yet displayed clear sympathies for the Confederacy and enough resolve to resist filibustering invectives as well as African American emigration coming from either North or South. Moreover,

Wood’s consultation led diplomats like Lisboa to question the adequacy and sufficiency of the Brazilian legal infrastructure passed some three decades before to contain the relocation of African Americans. To the Minister of Justice, Lisboa confided that he did not even possessed a copy of the 1831 law in 1860:

The very special circumstances in which this country finds itself, where the conflict between Northern and Southern interests have caused a decrease in the price of slaves and alarm among their owners, it may be convenient to issue less vague and more detailed measures about this matter than the ones contained on the cited circular. (…) In this Legation’s archives, I did not find other base upon which to justify my answer, if not the cited circular and the law n. 581 of 4 September of 1850; the very 7 November 1831 law does exist here.407

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 405 AHI, 233-3-09, 3 December 1860. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Minister of Justice, João Luís Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu. 406 Ibid. 407 Ibid. 203! ! ! In April 1862, the passing by the U.S. Congress of the District of Columbia

Emancipation Act elevated Brazilian concerns to a new level. After all, the act not only freed slaves but also appropriated a $100,000 credit to promote the expatriation of newly emancipated African Americans to Haiti, Liberia, or some other country beyond the borders of the United States. In June 1862, Minister of Justice João Lins Vieira

Cansansão de Sinimbu responded to the news by taking direct measures to avoid emigration of U.S. free blacks to Brazil. He ordered provincial presidents “all vigilance to prevent the admission of these libertos in Brazilian territory” and exchanged extensive correspondence with Miguel Maria Lisboa in New York.408

Almost two years after he first conveyed his doubts about his ability to prevent the transfer of American slaves to Brazil, Lisboa now echoed the Brazilian government’s fears about the danger posed by free blacks:

The law of 7 November 1831 is undoubtedly explicit, as are the circulars of 11 May 1835 and 27 January 1851, when they forbid entrance in the Empire of foreign-born men of color. However, the dangers it tried to stave off and the spirit with which I think it was dictated require, in my view, something else in this country’s current circumstances, since a numerous class of individuals of color, imbued with dangerous ideas and whose entry in Brazil I suppose is not in any way desirable, is not included in its provisions for having been born free. (…) I will offer a warning that to this class of descendants of freeborn Africans belong the individuals who on the 14th were invited to a conference with the President, and who he plans to make leave the country.409

Lisboa referred to Abraham Lincoln’s hosting of a “Deputation of Free Negroes” at the White House, shortly after having made his first public statement in favor of colonization on his annual message to the American Congress n 1862. The delegation was composed of five men and led by the Reverend James Mitchell, commissioner of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 408 AHI, 301-2-02, 29 June 1862. Letter from the Minister of Justice, João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu, to the Minister Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 409 AHI, 233-3-12, 3 20 August 1862. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 204! ! ! emigration for the Interior Department. The meeting marked the first time Washington ever summoned African Americans to discuss colonization efforts abroad. Lincoln invited the commission as he searched for volunteers to resettle in the Isthmus of

Chiquiri, in present-day Panama.410 For Lisboa, the meeting spoke of the levity with which the U.S. government treated the issue of emigration, signaling that Lincoln’s administration showed little respect for other countries’ wellbeing. Minister Abrantes addressed Lisboa’s concerns with a forceful statement:

The Imperial Government decisively aims to deny the entry in the Empire of individuals of such condition.

This is the duty imposed upon it by the Law of 7 November 1831, according to whose provisions there is no doubt that any project put forward by the Government of those States to direct to our ports the exportation of such individuals implies the flagrant violation of Brazilian law.411

The Marquis also reminded Brazilian consuls to refrain from issuing passports to freedpeople, remaining vigilant about Union plans to send African Americans to

Brazilian ports.

Throughout the 1860s, Lisboa continued to receive petitions from prospective

Southern colonists who intended to bring former slaves to Brazil. Still in 1862, Mr.

Anderson from Tennessee asked to be hired by the Brazilian government as a cotton grower and offered to bring to the empire “fourteen serfs of the African race that he has in his family.”412 Lisboa welcomed his request and even recommended settling in one of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 410 The delegates included black intellectual Edward Thomas; Oberlin-educated teacher John F. Cook Jr. who ran a church-affiliated school; Benjamin McCoy, a teacher and the founder of an all-black congregation; black Freemason John T. Costin; and Cornelius Clark, a member of the Social, Civil, and Statistical Association, a black social and civic organization opposed to emigration. Kate Mansur, “The African American delegation to Abraham Lincoln: A reappraisal,” Civil War History, 56(2), 2010, 117- 144; Vorenberg, “Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Black Colonization.” 411 ANRJ, IJ1-1002, 7 June 1862. Letter from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marquis of Abrantes, to the Brazilian envoy to Washington, Miguel Maria Lisboa. 412 Ibid. 205! ! ! the Brazilian northern provinces where the cotton industry flourished. Nevertheless, he again enforced the 1831 law, conveying to Mr. Anderson the orders received from the imperial government to forbid entry in Brazil to foreign freedmen. In a note written in haste and sent in person to the Marquis of Abrantes through José Nascentes de

Azambuja, Lisboa bluntly spelled the threat at hand. “I am not mistaken when I predict that our friends the Yankies [sic] want to free themselves of their Negroes by making them a gift to us. It is necessary that we stay on alert.”413

Shortly thereafter, Miguel Maria Lisboa obtained through a “personal favor” a circular issued by Secretary of State William Seward on October 2nd to North American agents abroad. He then confidentially conveyed the circular’s contents to Minister

Abrantes for the document referred to Washington’s plans to negotiate the repatriation of

African Americans with governments “located in the tropics.” Lisboa informed Minister

Abrantes about Costa Rica’s resistance to black colonization of the Chiquiri territory, a campaign led by Minister Molina, representative of Costa Rica and Nicaragua in the

United States. Attentive to the danger black colonization posed to Brazil, Lisboa made a point of also sending Minister Abrantes the Nicaraguan decree that, “like our law of 7

November of 1831, has the goal of preventing the emigration of freedmen from other countries to the Central American territory.”414

In his considerations about Washington’s plans, Lisboa noted that if any country in Central America were to admit African Americans, neighboring countries in South

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 413 In the original: “(…) não me engano quando suponho que estes nossos amigos Yankies se querem descartar de seus negrinhos, fazendo-nos presente deles. É preciso que estejamos alerta: é melhor prevenir os males do que remediá-los.” AHI, 233-3-12, 3 26 August 1862. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 414!AHI, 233-3-12, 19 October 1862. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 206! ! ! America would become vulnerable to “their invasion and contagion.” The Ministers of

Guatemala and El Salvador remained firmly against Union plans of colonization, but

Lisboa feared that New Granada would not be able to stop Washington’s advances. He also suspected that the Peruvian government was inclined to populate its frontier with the

Brazilian province of Amazonas with African Americans, a measure that threated Brazil closely.415

During the course of the sectional war, Miguel Maria Lisboa doubled his efforts of implementing the 1831 law with reporting “on the effect of federal policy upon the

African population of the South.” The issue was of great interest to Brazilian authorities.

Lisboa regularly chronicled the transformations in the condition of slaves, the management of the so-called emancipated refugees, and the spread of what he deemed as

“abolitionist fanaticism.”416 He carefully read all federal government’s publications, sending copies, for example, of the Preliminary Report Touching the Condition and

Management of Emancipated Refugees elaborated by the American Freedmen's Inquiry

Commission in 1863.417 His successors, Joaquim Maria Nascentes d’Azambuja and

Inácio de Avellar Barbosa da Silva, carried on this tradition, painting their reports on the effects of the U.S. war with similar spite for Northern abolitionism and the political and economic future of African Americans.

In 1864, Azambuja decided to second his diplomatic efforts with more direct action. Writing directly to the president of the United States and Brazil Mail Steamship

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 415 Ibid. 416 AHI, 233-3-12, 9 November 1863. Letter from Miguel Maria Lisboa to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Marquis of Abrantes. 417 “Preliminary Report Touching the Condition and Management of Emancipated Refugees elaborated by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission to the U.S. Secretary of War,” 30 June 1863. Available online at: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000338223 (consulted on March 13, 2017). 207! ! ! Company, he required enforcement of the 1831 law, as dictated by art. 14 of the contract signed on 24 June of that year.418 In other words, he asked that no African American be allowed to come to Brazil aboard the company’s ships. Inácio de Avellar Barbosa da

Silva, on the other hand, dwelled on the issue of the implications of outright emancipation. In his 1865 letters, Avellar described in detail the difficulties faced by the

Union government after having conceded sudden freedom to African Americans,

“without review or study.” The Brazilian Envoy could only hope that Brazilian authorities would prevent the same developments in Brazil.

It has been necessary to make use of violent means to avoid that slaves – now free, completely abandon the plantations.

In the South, they live amidst frightful hardship: the men leave women and children behind and pursue vices and misery in an idle life.

On the other hand, a petition signed by some thousands of blacks – former slaves, who ask for the right to vote, has been presented to the Government; and Congress, constituted mostly by abolitionists, no doubt will accept it.

It is necessary to notice, however, that the ingrained prejudice existent in the North against the African race continues basically unchanged.

Recently, during President Lincoln’s inauguration, the men of color like they are called by here (colored men) were excluded from the ceremonial hall, and they are not yet generally admitted in public cars.419

Brazilian consuls painstakingly attached newspaper clippings to their correspondence, often including commentary, for example, of the issues of British The

Anti-Slavery Reporter. Sometimes, they requested that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs republish articles in the Diário Oficial for wider dissemination of foreign views about

Brazil. When it came to news about the U.S. war on slavery, however, the imperial

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 418 AHI, 233-3-12, 24 January 1866. Letter from Brazilian envoy Joaquim Nascentes d’Azambuja to José T. Navarro.! 419 AHI, 233-4-01, 22 May 1865. Letter from Inácio de Avellar Barbosa da Silva to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, João Pedro Dias Vieira. 208! ! ! government intermittently resorted to censorship. Asked to reproduce articles from the

Times and the Herald from New York in late 1865, Minister of Foreign Affairs José

Antônio Saraiva cautioned Azambuja, stating that he would not do so because the clippings:

(…) contained the development of the idea, lightly and indirectly touched upon by the President, with regard to the emancipation of slaves.

This emancipation is in the natural orders of things and shall be enacted opportunely; but it should be a spontaneous act from Brazil. In this matter we should not accept foreign pressure. Still today we suffer the consequences of the easiness with which, abstaining from proceeding through a legislative act, we submitted to the requirements of a foreign government over the abolition of the slave trade. Emancipation will complement what has already been put under way.420

Alert to the hemispheric implications of American emancipation, the imperial government strove to close Brazil’s borders to foreign influence. As a result, it clearly distinguished between the implications of white and black emigration from post-war

United States. Minister Saraiva worked hard with his consuls to stave off the liberating spirit coming from the North and did not appear to mind that Confederate relocation might strain Brazil’s relations with Washington:

The triumph of Washington’s government resolves in American territory the important question of slave emancipation and can motivate the more or less numerous emigration of the vanquished. This emigration, if headed to Brazil, will create relationships of a new kind between the two Countries; and emancipation should also create the tendency for a new pressure leading us to issue it as well.

It is already possible to notice indications of both things, and Your Excellency ought to follow their development with attention.

Emigration can be very advantageous to the Empire and, with some prudence, it will not be difficult to avoid the embarrassments it will entail to our relationship to Washington’s government.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 420 AHI, 235-2-01, 3 November 1865. Dispatch from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva, to Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja. 209! ! ! Brazil should arrive at emancipation, but it can be the object neither of foreign propaganda nor of official requirements. It is an internal question, which should be internally and opportunely resolved.421

Minister Saraiva addressed more than Azambuja’s concerns in his comments about the need to resist foreign pressure on the issue of slave emancipation. In March of

1864, the Brazilian Envoy to London, Francisco Xavier da Costa Aguiar de Andrada, had hosted a delegation from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society who carried a representation addressed to Emperor Pedro II. The British petition directly linked emancipation in Brazil to the measures already adopted by Denmark, France, Portugal,

Holland, and, moreover, the United States.422 “Originated in slavery alone,” read the document, the Civil War constituted a “warning which wise rulers value, and, foreseeing the evil, will guard against a similar calamity.” To Brazil, the lesson was clear, for U.S. emancipation was due to come and “it appears to the Committee that the time is not far distant, when circumstances will bring the question of emancipation most forcibly to the attention of the Brazilian Government, as is already the case with Spain, in relation to the slaves in Cuba.”423

Thus, it is no surprise that Brazil turned into the most sought-after slave empire by Confederates angry at the U.S. Government and disenchanted with Reconstruction, even though some colonists soon came to resent Catholicism and the position that free blacks occupied in Brazilian society. For the Brazilian state, Confederates represented a valued source of white immigration, whose economic and racial potential had been

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 421 AHI, 235-2-01, 19 June 1865. Dispatch from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva, to Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja. 422 AHI, 217-3-15. Confidential letter from the Brazilian Envoy to London, Francisco Xavier da Costa Aguiar de Andrada, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Antônio Saraiva. 423 AHI, 216-3-11, 23 March 1864. Copy of the petition from the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society addressed to Emperor Pedro II. 210! ! ! established years before as the country experimented with colonization projects by Swiss,

German, and Italian laborers. To African Americans, however, the country’s door remained closed.

As the American Civil War neared its end, the Imperial Legation in the United

States was flooded with letters from prospective Confederados. Solely in the year of

1865, seventy-five inquiries emanating especially from the states of Virginia and

Kentucky reached the Brazilian Consul’s desk. Individuals representing families or entire prospective colonies (some talked of groups of ten thousand immigrants) demanded more information on how they could prosper as colonists in Brazil. Most were planters from

Southern states but there were also mechanics, engineers, carpenters, and evangelical ministers among those interested in learning more about the concession of land grants, financial incentives, and the laws of the country concerning slavery.424

The Brazilian Consul in New York, Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja, described the letters with enthusiasm as he sought to follow the Imperial Government’s recommendation to take advantage of the sympathies of Southerners towards Brazil and aid white immigration to the country. According to Azambuja, Southern people remained resolute to leave because “the shock suffered by the inhabitants of the South was of a rude nature; there are still many discontented who will hardly resign themselves, having lost all of their fortune and having been forced to live, once Masters and slaveholders, in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 424 AHI, 233-4-02, 24 January 1866. “Relação das cartas recebidas pela Legação e Consulado Brasileiro em o ano de 1865 de Habitantes dos Estados Unidos que depois da Guerra tem manifestado o desejo de emigrar para o Império.” 211! ! ! the midst of these who today are their equals and measuring up in all pleasures, rights, and social prerogatives.”425

Several prospective colonists clearly stated their desire to come to Brazil in order to enjoy the possibilities offered by an economy built on the work of slaves. Henry M.

Price, Captain of the Confederate Army from Scottsville, Virginia requested some land on the margins of the Amazon River, where he planned to “employ slave arms for believing that slavery is sanctioned by God and in accordance to scripture.”426 Others like

Robert C. Campbell from Huntsville, Walker County, Texas, and J. W. Dunklin from

Collirene Lowes County, Alabama, inquired directly about the price of slaves and the possibility of importing black freedmen from the U.S. South to Brazil. William B.

Gordon from Lewisburg, Tennessee, even believed that the Brazilian government was willing to offer land and slaves as incentives to colonists wishing to devote themselves to agriculture. Others like Beardsley from East Creek, New York, wished to ascertain if slavery was supposed to last in Brazil, as well as to acquire knowledge about the conditions of emancipation in the empire. Confederate migration to Brazil was a logical historical outcome of the hemispheric importance of Atlantic slavery.427

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 425 AHI, 233-4-02, 24 January 1866. Letter from Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Antônio Francisco de Paula e Souza. 426 Ibid. 427 Laura Jarnagin, A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). 212! ! ! The 1831 Law and African American Emigration to Brazil

In the end of 1866, John Abraham Cole, a planter from Mississippi, arrived in Rio de Janeiro aboard the ship Guiding Star.428 Having bought land in the province of São

Paulo on an earlier trip, Cole now planned to start farming in the company of a “black woman” and her two daughters. Before embarking in New York, Cole requested a passport for this “colored woman many years in his service” and her offspring at the

Brazilian Consulate but to no avail. The Consul denied them the document stating that colored persons were not allowed entry in Brazil despite being presented with a circular issued by the very Brazilian Legation in the United States in which one could see that the prohibition extended only to slaves.429

Once in Rio, J. A. Cole contacted the Brazilian Agent of Colonization in the hope of avoiding any obstacles to his trip by sea to Santos. In a matter of days, Cole’s case came to the attention of Rio’s Chief of Police and even the Minister of Justice, for the free circulation of an African American woman in Brazil was considered a problem of utmost gravity. Although the unnamed woman declared herself to be free, Cole could not prove so. He argued all the same, though, that a free woman of color could not be included in the ban established by the law of November 7, 1831. Cole went as far as saying that the 1831 law mentioned only men and could not prevent him from taking the woman to his properties in Campinas.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 428 According to the U.S. Census, Cole possessed twenty-four slaves in 1860. Célio Antônio Alcântara Silva, Capitalismo e escravidão: a imigração confederada para o Brasil, PhD thesis, UNICAMP, 2011, 210. 429 ANRJ, Consultas do Conselho de Estado, Cod.0.306, vol. 35 (1866-67), 30 November 1866. Cópia de parecer relativo `a consulta da Seção de Negócios da Justiça ao Conselho de Estado sobre a imigração de norte-americanos. De M. Dantas, da 3a. Diretoria de Terras Públicas e Colonização sob o Ministério dos Negócios da Agricultura, Comércio e Obras Públicas, para Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada. ! 213! ! ! Cole’s case elicited very interesting commentary on the part of Brazilian authorities. In his dispatch to the State Council’s committee assigned to deliberate over the issue in 1866, M. Dantas, the Brazilian Agent of Colonization, elaborated on the purpose of article 7 of the 1831 law. In his opinion, when stating that any freedman born outside of Brazil was prohibited from entering the empire under threat of deportation, the law certainly referred to both men and women. Moreover, it made use of the expression libertos not in the terms of the Brazilian Constitution – which distinguished between free

(livres) and freed persons (libertos) – but as a generic term, so as to refer to the antithesis of the slave. Dantas reproduced the rationale long established by the State Council decision of 1859, contending that the 1831 law was applicable to all non-slave men and woman of color and had the dual purpose of halting the preponderance of the African race in Brazil as well as preventing the smuggling of slaves disguised as freedpeople.430

Recommending the immediate deportation of the black woman that accompanied

J.A. Cole to Brazil as well as the firm upholding of the 1831 ban on black immigration,

Dantas directly described African Americans as a security threat to the Brazilian empire:

The difficulty of knowing if the immigrants that arrive are free or freed is obvious. The Justice Section feels the duty to ponder, Your Imperial Magesty, the public security threat that would ensue if the immigration of men of color from the United States was admitted: as slavery still exists amongst us, contact with this newly-emancipated people who come back from war still with the enthusiasm of victory cannot fail to be a great conflagration. (…) There could be some diplomatic difficulty if the free men of color of the United States already enjoyed political equality, if they were citizens: this, however, is still an open question today. In all effect, the right to national sovereignty would be uncontestable as an argument to deny receiving in its territory these people who can threaten public security.431

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 430 Ibid. 431 Ibid. 214! ! ! Dantas claimed the primacy of national security to stave off black immigration to

Brazil, an argument as old as the country’s efforts to resist British abolitionist endeavors.

Two cases from the late 1850s illustrate this Brazilian tradition. In July of 1856,

Domingos José Martins, a Brazilian pardo (mixed race) who lived in Porto Novo, Ouidá, petitioned the president of Bahia to let his family immigrate to Brazil. Martins had left

Bahia years before under suspicions of murder and now planned to send his “eight sons born of African women and their mothers”432 to Brazil. British agents at work on the

West African coast, though, doubted his intentions and immediately warned the Brazilian

Consulate that Martins was trying to “introduce free persons as slaves in Brazil.” Given the empire’s long history of dependence on the transatlantic slave trade, which extended beyond the official bans of 1831 and 1850, international authorities frequently pictured

Brazil as a land of re-enslavement. The British Consul of Lagos went as far as to affirm that Martins intended to make the Africans a gift to a provincial employee in Bahia.

After launching an investigation into the matter, the government of Bahia discovered that Domingos Martins had already been acquitted of all murder accusations by Brazilian tribunals and was now a wealthy merchant in West Africa thanks to a close friendship with the King of . Authorities dug deep into their records to uncover his trajectory for they had no interest in welcoming back freed blacks who had emigrated to West Africa, the so called retornados (returnees).433 In 1858, Martins’ family was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 432 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 21 November 1857. Letter from the Vice-President of Bahia to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu. 433 Lisa A. Lindsay, “To return to the bosom of their fatherland:’ Brazilian immigrants in nineteenth- century Lagos,” Slavery & Abolition 15:1 (April 1994), 22-50; J. Michael Turner, “Identidade étnica na África Ocidental: o caso especial dos Afro-brasileiros no Benin, na Nigéria, no Togo e em Ghana nos séculos XIX e XX,” Estudos Afro-Asiáticos, no. 28, 1995, 85-99; Milton Gurán, Agudás: Os "brasileiros" Do Benim (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1999); Robin Law, “The Evolution of the Brazilian Community in Ouidah,” Slavery & Abolition 22:1 (2001), 3-21; Luis Nicolau Parés, The Formation of Candomblé: Vodun History and Ritual In Brazil (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 215! ! ! finally allowed entry in Bahia, with the condition that all free Africans sign a warrant containing their physical description and place of residence. The police was to keep watch on Martins’ women and children for, in the eyes of Brazilian authorities, their provenance and color made them suspicious. Thus, even when born free and cleared for immigration, Africans suffered a degree of scrutiny that placed them only a few steps away from slavery in Brazil.

In 1858, again in Bahia, the Portuguese national José Maria Correa Brandão disembarked from the ship Providência coming from Dahomey. Contending that he needed to give his offspring some education before continuing on a trip to Europe,

Brandão arrived in the company of his “African servants” César and Francisco, the negra

(black) Maria and their daughter Leonor, a two year-old parda.434 The party immediately caught the attention of the Bahian Chief of Police, Policarpo Lopes de Leão, who threatened to “re-export” all of them back to Africa. Brandão, however, carried a passport issued by the French manager of the Vidal Fort of Ouidá, in West Africa, stating that all the Africans who traveled with him were livres (free) and not libertos (freed). Evidence of their free status indeed guaranteed their permanence in Brazil. Brandão agreed to visit the police station in Salvador every first day of the month and to never change residence without prior police authorization. Like Domingos Martins’ family, Francisco, César,

Maria, and Leonor had their ages, origins, and physical marks inventoried on documents that resembled runaway slave advertisements.435

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2013); Lisa Earl Castillo and Luis Nicolau Parés,"Marcelina da Silva: A Nineteenth-Century Candomble Priestess in Bahia," Slavery & Abolition. 31, no. 1 (2010): 1-27; Toyin Falola, and Matt D. Childs, The Yoruba Diaspora In the Atlantic World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 434 ANRJ, IJ1-1000, 14 July 1858. Dispatch of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. 435 Ibid, 3 July 1858. “Termo de obrigação.” 216! ! ! The unnamed black woman who accompanied J.A. Cole enjoyed a very different treatment, most probably, due to the context of sectional war in the United States. Her example, though, influenced imperial decisions in similar cases during the 1860s. In

1867, Councilors José Thomás Nabuco de Araújo and the Viscount of Jequitinhonha examined the circumstances around the disembarking of Brown, a black sailor of British nationality, who had arrived in Rio de Janeiro on board of the Argentinian merchant ship

Luisita coming from Buenos Aires. Once port authorities got word of Brown’s presence, they boarded the ship and compelled the Luisita’s captain to vouch for his whereabouts, place bail for his release, and commit to re-exporting Brown within a set period of time.

All in name of the good old law of 7 November 1831. The Argentinian Legation, however, disapproved of Brazilian intervention and lodged a complaint with the Brazilian

Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Argentinian authorities argued that the 1831 law had fallen

“in disuse” and, as such, did not apply to Brown’s case.436

The Argentinian Envoy had stepped onto mined territory. The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded to his appeal with a vibrant defense of the validity of the

1831 law, pondering that individuals of color could come to Brazil as sailors as long as they stayed on board of their ships and left the country with them. He then cited J.A.

Cole’s case:

The Justice Section of the State Council, in a dispatch from 30 November (1866) regarding a woman of black color who had come in the company of a North-American emigrant, resolved that the Imperial Government should prevent the disembarking of men and women of color coming from abroad, free or freed; being convenient to establish a reasonable deadline for the re-exportation of the said woman…437

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 436 This incident has been discussed by Sidney Chalhoub in: A Força da Escravidão, 221-224.! 437 José Próspero Jeová da Silva Caroatá. Imperiais Resoluções tomadas sobre Consultas da Seção de Justiça do Conselho de Estado. Desde o ano 1842, em que começou a funcionar o mesmo Conselho até hoje (Parte II) (Rio de Janeiro: B. L. Garnier, 1884), 1378. 217! ! ! Not satisfied with the answer, the Argentinian Envoy replied that the 1831 law was not applicable to Brown because it only included libertos, and Brazilian authorities could not prove that Brown had ever been enslaved. Additionally, he contended that the legislation referred to newcomers to Brazil and Brown already resided in the empire, having left to Buenos Aires and returned home. To the Brazilian Minister’s dismay, the

Argentinian Envoy went as far as affirming that the 1831 could not be taken seriously because it was frequently transgressed by the country’s authorities, as individuals of color consistently arrived in Brazil on board of imperial warships.438 A list with the names of

Argentinian individuals of color and the names of the ships that introduced them into

Brazil was also provided.

Argentina’s defiant interpellation finally prompted the Brazilian Minister of

Foreign Affairs to clarify Brazil’s official position on the matter. “Libertos,” the Minister contended, were “the antithesis of slaves.” 439 Like the woman that accompanied J.A.

Cole, Brown “was ingênuo (born free) and of black color,” and, therefore, subject to deportation like all other foreign-born freed persons. Upon further investigation, the

Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro located no Argentinians of color yet charged the

Brazilian warships Tonelero and Iguassú with introducing freedmen in the empire. The

Chief of Police also took the liberty to remind the Minister that, up until Cole’s case, ingênuos had been allowed entrance in Brazil.

The controversy surrounding the application of the 1831 law remained current for many years to come. In 1869, the Brazilian Consulate in Lisbon was so overwhelmed by daily difficulties in enforcing the imperial ban on African travel to Brazil that it asked !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 438 Ibid, 1379. Brazilian warships were, in fact, the only ones not subjected to inspection by the Brazilian port police. 439 Ibid.! 218! ! ! Brazilian police authorities to start issuing individual passports to “all blacks” leaving the country, containing highly detailed information about their condition and place of birth.440 Intent on preventing “doubts and injustices” in the determination of nationality,

Consul Manoel de Araújo worried especially about the reenslavement of ingênuos (free-born blacks) upon their return to Brazil.441 The ubiquity of such crime led him to suggest that a special document be attached to their passports as soon as they arrived in the country, as a means of protection to themselves and their families. “Now that we look more seriously to the fruits of slavery,” pondered Porto Alegre, it was imperative to combat new frontiers of enslavement.442

In the documentation kept by the Brazilian government, the issue was interestingly labeled as “passports to men of black color.” The Brazilian Ministry of

Justice answered Consul Porto Alegre’s plea in its usual legalistic fashion, sounding quite dismissive as if trying to hide the problem reenslavement actually posed to authorities.

The imperial government chose to highlight instead one of the greatest ironies of the

1831 law: the preferred instrument to bar the Africanization of Brazil also conferred freedom to slaves entering the empire.

Wlamyra Albuquerque recounts that, in 1877, the State Council resurrected the case of J.A. Cole one last time to justify its enduring refusal to accept African American workers in Brazil. Brazilian entrepreneurs interested in temporarily hiring free “colored

North-Americans” filed a petition with the government and a consultation about its merit

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 440 According to Brazilian law, up to 1868 people of color could leave the empire without a passport, except in the case of slaves. Decree 4176 from 6 May 1868 enforced the requirement that slaves always carry written authorization from their masters when traveling out of Brazil. 441 ANRJ, IJ1-1004, 11 August 1869. Letter from the Brazilian Consul in Lisbon, Manoel de Araújo Porto Alegre, to the Barão de Cotegipe. 442 Ibid, 6 July 1869.! 219! ! ! reached the councilors. Nevertheless, the case was summarily dismissed before any discussion could take place, on the grounds that the 1866 decision had already “expressly prohibited the disembarking in the Empire of men and women of color coming from the

United States” and that “importation” of the said workers favored that country but was of

“no use” to Brazil.443

At the Crossroads of Deportation and Re-Enslavement

Brazil's violent history of repression of black freedom struggles added to the woes suffered by African freedpersons. Especially after the Malê Rebellion of 1835 in Bahia,

West Africans lived under constant surveillance for rebellious behavior, subversive uses of literacy, and accusations of witchcraft.444 In 1862, Benedito got caught in the webs of the Brazilian police apparatus and its litany of stereotypes regarding freed Africans.

Benedito’s former master, the trader Joaquim Pereira Marinho, petitioned the Chief of

Police of Bahia for his deportation as the only means to halt his losses and Benedito’s

“pernicious influence” over the slaves involved in the coastal salted meat trade from

Salvador to Rio Grande do Sul. Described as the head of “a gang of thieves” operating at the Cais Dourado in the City of Bahia, as Salvador was known at the time, Benedito had recently been arrested for stealing salted meat from the sloop Marinho, property of his former master. He possessed a saveiro, the dhow-like sailboat commonly employed in the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 443!Cited!in!Albuquerque,!O"jogo"da"dissimulação,!73<74.! 444 In Bahia, municipal laws compounded restrictions to African mobility, autonomy, and political participation already codified in the 1824 Constitution and the Procedural Code of the Brazilian Empire. Tax regulations, for instance, incurred serious financial losses on African freedpersons who walked the streets after dark without written consent from a Brazilian citizen. João Reis discusses these discriminatory regulations in detail in: Divining Slavery and Freedom. See also: Legislação da Província da Bahia sobre o negro, 1835-1888 (Salvador: Fundação Cultural do Estado da Bahia/Direção de Bibliotecas Públicas, 1996) and Araújo Filqueiras Júnior, Código do Processo do Império do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Eduardo & Henrique Laemmert, 1874), 33. 220! ! ! ferrying of merchandise from ships stationed in Bahia, and acted as the key person in the distribution of goods stolen by slaves to the city.

Authorities felt aggravated by Benedito’s case for many reasons, including the fact that he insisted on occupying a sector of the labor market that had been closed to

African-born freedpersons since 1850.445 Freed Africans were not welcomed as independent entrepreneurs in the city of Bahia and restrictions targeting their participation in urban life were so significant that, in 1857, they culminated on a ten-day general strike led by hire-out black workers.446 Despite this background of tensions surrounding African libertos, Benedito did not stay long in prison. In a matter of days, he was released without any pending charges. Outside the door of the police station, a following of more than one hundred black men and women waited, and celebrated his dismissal on the streets from the parish of Santo Antônio all the way to the Cais

Dourado.447

In his petition, trader Joaquim Marinho requested Benedito’s banishment as a last resort, the ultimate punishment for a life devoted to crime. Urging the police to review its archives where so many references to Benedito’s past criminal behavior should be found,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 445!In 1850, president Francisco Gonçalves Martins, famous for leading the repression of the 1835 Malê rebellion as the provincial Chief of Police, prohibited enslaved and freed Africans from working on the saveiros that unloaded ships in the port of Salvador. It is believed that 750 men were immediately put out of work by the measure. Harbor masters consistently enforced the ban during the 1860s, arresting many freed Africans who tried to work as rowers. Cunha, Negros Estrangeiros, 74-100. 446 Workers for hire, mostly Africans, contested high taxes and registration requirements imposed by a municipal ordinance in 1857. João José Reis, ‘The Revolution of the Ganhadores’: Urban Labor, Ethnicity, and the African Strike of 1857 in Bahia, Brazil,” Journal of Latin American History 29, no. 2 (1997): 355- 393.! 447 ANRJ, IJ1-715, 9 February 1863. Letter from Joaquim Pereira Marinho to the Chief of Police of Bahia, João Antônio de Araújo Freitas Henriques. 447 Ibid, 2 May 1862. ! 221! ! ! Marinho asked the Chief of Police to extradite the African as “dangerous and incorrigible.”448

To move away from this land to afar such a dangerous guest who, without having capital or industry that can benefit the Country, is, on the contrary, the corruptor of other people’s slaves, teaching them the tricks and ruses in which he excels, and calling them to this place of immoral recreation, where besides catching vices and storing the product of their thefts, they consume their time, which should be productively employed in services to their Masters; it is surely an act of rigorous justice and general utility.449 Thus Marinho referred to Benedito as an unwanted immigrant who had nothing to offer his adopted homeland, ignoring the fact that the African had actually been forcibly trafficked to Brazil as a slave.450 Despite his financial losses, Marinho’s greatest concern was Benedito’s ascendance over the African community – enslaved and free - of the parish of Pilar. He was feared by local authorities, possessed his own sailboat to distribute stolen merchanside, and was famous for hosting “affluent blacks” at his house.

Benedito’s standing in the community had actually been worth his freedom. In 1861, slave sailors at the Cais Dourado ran a subscription to raise money for his manumission, which Benedito purchased from Marinho for the amount of 2:700 réis. Marinho gladly acquiesced to the deal in the hopes of protecting his slaves from Benedito’s subversive influence but soon regretted it after learning that slaves had raised the money to free

Benedito “because they wanted to have an agent and commissary for their thefts on land.”451

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 448 Ibid. 449 Ibid. 450 Benedito’s story was contemporaneous with that of freedman Domingos Pereira Sodré, brought to light by João José Reis. Sodré was also arrested in 1862 on the grounds that he was receiving stolen goods from slaves in exchange for his divining services in the parish of São Pedro. Sodré was an influential Candomblé priest and authorities did consider his deportation, as they often did when confronted with the possibility of disrupting African religious communities in Brazil. Reis, Divining Slavery and Freedom. 451 ANRJ, IJ1-715, 9 February 1863. Letter from Joaquim Pereira Marinho to the Chief of Police of Bahia, João Antônio de Araújo Freitas Henriques. 222! ! ! Benedito’s freedom, therefore, consolidated what the Bahian Chief of Police João

Antônio de Araújo Freitas Henriques called “an association of African thieves and dissolutes.”452 Apart from “immoral and incorrigible,” Benedito was accused of being too wealthy and trying to pass for a celebrity by “becoming the protector of his slave compatriots, whom he always advised against the interests of their Masters.”453 Despite

Joaquim Marinho’s bitter complaint and the support of both the police and the administration of the province of Bahia, however, the Minister of Justice was not convinced that removing Benedito was the best strategy to deal with slave unrest. In June of 1862, he denied his extradition to Africa, stating “it is not deportation, but punishment what is convenient in this case.”454

Thus a year later, Benedito still walked the streets of Salvador. Although known by the police for picking fights with slaves over the division of stolen goods at the Cais

Dourado, Benedito had managed to avoid prosecution by working at night and relying on the connivance of his partners at the port. During the day, he continued to lead what the police viewed as a “depraved” life, amidst “orgies and rackets” carried on in the company of other black seamen. In order to appeal the deportation denial, other traders involved in the salted meat trade to Rio Grande do Sul and the Rio de la Plata sent a petition to the local police in February of 1863. Noting that several freed Africans made their living from distributing in land goods stolen by slaves from their ships, they singled Benedito

Marinho out as “the boldest and most daring among them.” His ascendance over slave

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 452 Ibid, 6 May 1862. Letter from the Chief of Police, João Antônio de Araújo Freitas Henriques, to the presidente of the province of Bahia, Joaquim Antão F. Leão. 453 Ibid, 16 March 1863. Letter from the Chief of Police, Sebastião do Rego Barros de Lacerda, to the Minister of Justice, Antônio Coelho de Sá e Albuquerque. 454 Ibid, 10 June 1862. Dispatch of the Ministry of Justice. 223! ! ! sailors had become so dangerous that masters had had to severely punish their slaves or even sell them away.455

The choir of voices against Benedito tried to convey to authorities that, in his case, regular penalties were not enough. In March of 1863, the new Bahian Chief of

Police, Sebastião do Rego Barros de Lacerda, pleaded with the Minister of Justice one more time, arguing that Benedito’s extradition was a case of “public convenience.” “It is my duty to insist on the idea of deportation,” said Lacerda, “which realization will be the only means to rectify the African Benedito, serving at the same time as an example to others who try to disrespect the country, and plant among slaves the seed of insubordination.”456

The outcome of Benedito’s case is unknown. From reading all the documentation pertaining to Joaquim Marinho’s petition, one can only surmise that the imperial government denied Benedito’s extradition for believing that he should be made an example to defiant Africans in Brazil. His story is of interest, though, because it sheds light on the precariousness of the freedom enjoyed by Africans in nineteenth-century

Brazil. Even three decades away from the 1835 Malê rebellion in Bahia, whose repression amounted to a direct condemnation of all freed Africans as enemies of

Brazilian political existence, men like Benedito grappled with the threat of deportation.457

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 455 ANRJ, IJ1-715, 3 February 1863. Representation signed by the traders Godinho Paulo Barbosa, Bernardo Rodrigues de Almeida, Antônio Alves Fernandes e Joaquim da Costa Sol. 456 Ibid, 19 March 1863. Confidential letter from the Bahian Chief of Police Sebastião do Rego Barros de Lacerda to the Minister of Justice, Antônio Coelho de Sá e Albuquerque. 457 One of the most famous measures discussed by the Provincial Assembly of Bahia in the aftermath of the 1835 rebellion was the deportation of freedpeople suspected of inciting slave revolt. The provision was included in the law of 13 May 1835. Luciana da Cruz Brito, “A legalidade como estratégia: africanos que questionaram a repressão das leis baianas na primeira metade do século XIX,” História Social, n. 16 (2009), 17. About Bahia, see also: Maria Inês C. Oliveira, O liberto. Seu mundo e os outros, Salvador 1790-1890 (Salvador; São Paulo: Corrupio, 1988); Reis, Slave rebellion in Brazil; Cunha, Negros Estrangeiros. 224! ! ! Neither citizens nor foreigners, they endured a perpetual condition of statelessness and were left to their own devices when it came to eluding Brazilian elites intent on linking the control of the political system to the maintenance of public order.

Benedito proved successful in securing an independent life in Salvador despite the anti-Africanist sentiment so widespread among authorities and the white population of

Bahia. Another exceptional case, this time involving a liberated African scheduled for deportation and her creole daughter in 1854, can shed more light on the strategies utilized by freed Africans in pursuit of their de facto freedom. In May of 1854, Leocádia – then

12-years old – drafted a letter to Joaquim Luís Soares, a Portuguese businessman in Rio de Janeiro from whose service her mother Marcelina Benguela had just been emancipated. Here is the letter in the original:

Meu querido Senhor,

estimarei que tenha pasado bem e todos de casa. Meu querido Senhor peso pur favor que fasa com que não vai pra casa com minha Mai pur que Eu ido com ella prala ela não vorta mas praca. pelo bem que quer sua mai fasa com que não vai aquilo que eu falei onte voçucei não fasa caso por que voçucei bem sabe Eu sou criança pur que Eu mi aripidí por bem voçucei queria a ifuto a Sinhora pur que minha Mai fas e gosto Eu vai com ella

esta sua escrava Leocadia d’Almda Soares458

Making use of all the tropes of conventional letter writing, Leocádia addressed

Soares as “My dear master,” and opened her note with greetings to him and his family. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 458 ANRJ, IJ1-999, May 1854. Letter from Leocádia d’Almeida Soares to Joaquim Luís Soares. Translation by the author: “My dear Master, I hope you and everybody in the house are doing well. My dear Master, I ask you to please make sure I don’t go home with my Mother because if I went with her there, she does not come back here. For the good you wish your mother make sure don’t go; you don’t pay attention to what I talked about yesterday because as you very well know I am a child, because I regret it, for the good you wished the deceased Mistress, because my Mother is fond of Me going with her. Your slave, Leocadia d’Almda Soares.” 225! ! ! Then, in a deferential yet direct tone, she moved on to her reason for writing. Leocádia pleaded with Soares to prevent her mother from taking her away from his house for she had recently learned that Marcelina was about to sail back to Africa. Leocádia knew that this time the trip meant that they would be gone forever from Brazil (“eu indo com ela pra lá ela não volta mais pra cá”). “For the love you have for your mother,” Leocádia wrote first, and later “for the love you had for the deceased Mistress,” please do not let me go. Representing herself as a helpless youngster, the girl went on to ask Soares to forget she had mentioned the day before that she intended to accompany Marcelina. “You very well know that I am a child,” Leocádia added, signing her letter with her guardian’s last name as “your slave, Leocádia de Almeida Soares.”459

Leocádia carefully tailored her note to convey the emotional urgency of her predicament. This was not an inconsequential appeal from a young teenager at odds with her mother’s authority. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Leocádia was the daughter of an africana livre, that is, a recaptive from a slave ship apprehended in Brazil who was entitled to freedom following the prohibition of the slave trade. Well, freedom is the term most

Africans would have used but Brazilian authorities preferred to talk only about emancipation. According to a series of Anglo-Brazilian treaties, an 1831 and an 1850 law, those Africans illegally imported into the empire were only emancipated on the condition of fourteen years of apprenticeship in the service of private hirers or public institutions as well as the commitment to eventually return to Africa. Brought to Brazil in

1839, Marcelina petitioned for emancipation upon completion of her term of service in

1854 and was about to go back to West Africa by way of Bahia when Leocádia wrote her

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 459 Ibid. 226! ! ! letter. In other words, Marcelina’s state-mandated deportation was costing the woman her family, for her daughter did not want to leave the world she knew.

That Leocádia was able to craft a message to her mother’s hirer in writing at a time when very few black men and women had access to literacy in Brazil would be surprising enough. That she purposefully played on paternalist sentiment to negotiate her way out slavery, however, is even more so. Born from a free womb, as nineteenth- century Brazilians would say, Leocádia became a slave when Soares had her baptized as an infant. Illegal enslavement was, as we have seen in chapter one, a rather common practice at the time. Liberated African women like Marcelina had only limited custody over their children and sometimes had to petition for their emancipation even if they had been born free. In 1854, when Marcelina finally packed her belongings to leave Brazil, she denounced Soares to the Rio de Janeiro police for the crime of illegally enslaving a free person. Only then did the businessman surrender his alleged seigniorial rights and baptized Leocádia again, this time as a free person, to avoid further prosecution.

Supposedly free, the girl then went home with Marcelina but soon regretted her choice.

Resolved to stay in Rio de Janeiro and faced with Soares’ refusal to take her in after the police intervened, Leocádia felt the need to write again. This time, she resorted to a strategy very common among slaves. The girl penned a note to the liberal senator from Santa Catarina José da Silva Mafra, an old friend of Joaquim Luís Soares, urging him to advocate for her return to Soares’ house.460 Marcelina, by then convinced that it

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 460 Born in the city of Desterro, province of Santa Catarina, in 1788, Senator Mafra joined the Imperial Parliament in 1844, after a career in the military – he commanded the Fortaleza de Santa Cruz in Desterro – and terms as Vice-President of Santa Catarina. Mafra and Joaquim Luís Soares had been friends for years. In 1852, the Senator even helped Soares to secure the concession of twelve liberated Africans to work at the Imperial Hospital de Caridade in Desterro. Brasil. Annais do Senado do Império de Brasil, vol. 3, session of 5 July 1871; Maysa Espíndola Souza, “Africanos livres em Desterro: tutela, trabalho e liberdade,” Monografia, UFSC, 2012, 30-31. 227! ! ! would be better for her daughter to stay in Brazil despite the ambiguity of her status, handed the note in person to senator Mafra:

Meu Querido Senhor do Coração

estimarei que tenha passado bem que minha Senhora Da. Luiza e todos doçura. Meu Senhor mando li pedir Para Vmce falar com o Senhor para eu ir para la Porque minha Mai vai para a Bahia porque Senhor ontem me entregou a ela porque eu não quero Hir com ela porque tenho estimasão a Meu Senhor Ontem ele veio buscar eu e minha Mai e la me perguntaram se eu queria ir com Minha Mai Para Bahia eu disse que sim depois deu sair de la Por que eu miarrependi me alembrou do Meu Senhor Agora me alembrei de minhas tias agora me indo la Pedir a Senhora ou o Senhor por bem que queria A difunta Senhora para pedir ao Senhor para Eu ir para a casa de Meu Senhor lembranças Minhas e de Minha Mai

Sua muito estimada, Leocadia Dealmeida Soares461

Again, Leocádia employed in writing all the codes of negotiation she had learned from a life between slavery and freedom. Addressing Mafra as “my dear master of my heart,” she recounted the whole imbroglio with Soares, insisting that she no longer wanted to travel with Marcelina to Bahia because she held her master and his family in the highest esteem. On her letter, Leocadia mentioned the senator’s wife and her sentimental attachment to the white women in Soares’ household, as if implicating them

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 461 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 20 May 1854. Letter from Leocádia d’Almeida Soares to Senator José da Silva Mafra. Translation by the author: “My Dear Master of my Heart, I hope you and my Mistress Da. Luiza have been well, to others kindness. My Master, I send for you to ask that you talk to Master for me to go there; Because my Mother is going to Bahia; because Master handed me down to her yesterday, because I don’t want to go with her because I am fond of My Master; yesterday he came to pick me and my Mother up and there they asked me if I wanted to go with My Mother to Bahia; I said yes after I left; because I lamented it as I thought of My Master; now, I thought of my aunts having gone there to Ask Mistress or Master, for the fondness you had for the deceased Mistress, to ask Master for me to go to My Master’s house, regards from Me and My Mother, Your Very Cherished, Leocadia deAlmeida Soares.” 228! ! ! in the resolution of her case.462 Leocádia’s preferred tactic was to actually cast herself as part of Soares’ family, hoping to cultivate a sympathetic audience to her claims.

Desperate to make her plan work, she subsequently ran away to senator Mafra’s house with the help of a free black woman that worked for him. That is how Leocádia finally managed to secure her stay in Rio. In May 8, 1854, her mother Marcelina, now married to a freed African called José Manoel, sailed to Bahia after leaving the girl at Soares’ house.463

José Manoel was a Mina African who had to navigate the same kind of bad reputation endured by Benedito in Bahia. 464 Details about his life are unclear but we know that José Manoel was arrested in Rio de Janeiro during Leocádia’s case, probably due to the active role he played in denouncing the girl’s illegal enslavement by Joaquim

Luís Soares. José Manoel was beaten up and summoned to the police station in 1854 to respond to an accusation of withholding money from a black woman called Liberata but was soon released after no proof of ill-doing was found. José Manoel then married

Marcelina a few days before their trip to Africa, perhaps as a last attempt to stay in

Brazil. Marriage was a recurrent strategy among liberated Africans willing to fight their state-mandated deportation after emancipation.465

The story of Leocádia survived time for integrating the long history of British pressure against the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil. Following passage of Brazil’s second slave trade abolition law of 1850, British diplomats frequently addressed the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 462 Ibid. 463 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 19 de maio de 1854. Letter from the police sheriff Antônio da Cunha to the Chief of Police of Rio de Janeiro, José Mattoso de Andrade Câmara.! 464 Mary Karasch has argued that, in the 1840's, "Mina" had taken on a special meaning in Rio de Janeiro. It denoted the "proud, indomitable, and courageous -speaking Muslims, who were literate, intelligent, skilled, and energetic slaves and who worked hard to buy their freedom." The stereotype owed much to the West African character of the Malê rebellion in Bahia in 1835. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro,, 26. 465Bertin, “Os Meia-Cara,”197-209.! 229! ! ! Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs with complaints regarding the illegal detention and enslavement of recaptured Africans and their offspring. In 1854, Henry Howard, British ambassador to Rio de Janeiro, wrote to minister Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu about

Leocádia, using her case to criticize the scope of the imperial decree of 28 December of

1853, which determined the emancipation of Africans who worked for private hirers but just as long as they requested it formally, that is, through the proper legal channels and incurring all financial expenses involved.466!

British intervention prompted the Rio de Janeiro’s Chief of Police to open an investigation about the enslavement of Leocádia following Marcelina’s departure to West

Africa. When summoned into the police station to be cross-examined, Joaquim Luís

Soares and Leocádia placed literacy at the center of the her struggle for self- determination, however with very different purposes. Soares handed in the letters written by Leocádia in order to escape prosecution, that is, as proof of his good will in raising the daughter of a liberated African to whom he was not obliged by blood. He swore that his old governess had baptized Leocádia as a slave by mistake during his absence and that he had publicly declared Leocádia to be free many times. Moreover, Soares added, the girl had always been given good clothes and shoes, and he had even sent her out to learn how to read and write. In order to prove his case, the businessman also handed in an affidavit signed by four distinguished gentlemen in support of his character as a humanitarian guardian.467

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 466 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 10 May 1854. Note n. 67 from British Envoy Henry Howard to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs. 467 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 22 May 1854. The affidavit carried the signature of Manoel Paranhos da Silva Vellozo, a judge in the Relação da Corte, the engineer Jerônimo Francisco Coelho, and the trader José de Araújo Coelho. 230! ! ! On her testimony, Leocádia upheld the image of Soares as a benevolent father figure, somehow reaffirming the content of her letters. She contrasted him to José

Manoel, affirming that the latter used to greatly mistreat her and her mother. When asked how she knew to be free, Leocádia answered that as such she had always been treated at home and by Master Soares, who lost many nights caring for her when she was sick and young. She added that Soares made sure she learned how to read and write, always gave her good clothes and shoes, and had even sent her out to a private school when she was little.468 Leocádia’s testimony singled out the elements of her experience that could be seen as attributes of freedom: after all, slave children were not supposed to be cared for by their masters; they did not wear shoes; sometimes enjoyed just two changes of clothes per year and, moreover, slaves were almost always illiterate.

Here, in the role of literacy, lies the key to a very important if underappreciated feature of black politics in nineteenth-century Brazil. Slaves and free people of color experimented literacy as a set of cultural and social practices that helped them navigate the country’s political landscape and advance claims for emancipation. Although she had received just fragments of an education, Leocádia learned enough to state her personal protest. Her argument was embodied not only in the content of her messages, but also in her lapses of spelling and punctuation. Composed by someone with a unique perspective on writing, her misspelled words and strained sentences resembled the transcription of a live conversation. Leocádia strung sentences together as if enumerating thoughts in person, expressing herself to an imagined audience that perhaps included multiple

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 468 ANRJ, IJ1-999, 20 May1854. “Auto de perguntas feito `a crioula Leocádia.” In her original testimony in Portuguese, Leocádia said: “que como tal foi sempre tratada em casa e pelo Senhor Soares que muitas noites perdeu com ela quando se achava doente, e era pequena, e que lhe mandou ensinar a ler e escrever, trazendo-a sempre bem vestida e calçada, e mandando-a até a Colégio, ou Escola particular quando era mais pequena.” 231! ! ! readers.469 The trait of literacy, in her case, was in itself a symbol of freedom. For sure,

Leocádia was a novice writer for whom setting pen to paper was not effortless. It was rather a means of empowerment, a tool of self-assertion that helped her straddle the border between slave and free.

Letter writing, though, was undoubtedly a rare phenomenon among free people of color. Yet, one should not assume that Leocádia’s command of literacy set her apart from the workings of slavery into which her experience was embedded. Leocádia’s letters open a window into the vibrancy of black abolitionism in imperial Brazil. The 12-year-old girl used the power of literacy to carve out a more autonomous life in a country still structured around the power of slaveholders’ customary rights. Her success in resisting indirect deportation to Africa rested directly on her prowess in reading her social landscape. At first sight, the deferential tone of the letters to Joaquim Luís Soares and

Senator Mafra seems to indicate her resignation to the domestic realities of patriarchy and bondage. Why else would a black girl address someone who had taken away her freedom in terms of affection? It may be that Leocádia did so to implicate both men in a certain understanding of slavery as a system of reciprocity. In addressing her guardian as a protective father, she employed the same domestic language used by slaveholders to assert mutual rights and obligations with the black and white member of their households.

Leocádia included Soares in her larger sentimental community because she understood how her life was entangled with his and by doing so the girl conveyed the standard by which she expected to be treated.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 469!Igor Sacramento e Leticia Cantarela Matheus (orgs), História da comunicação: experiências e perspectivas (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2014);!Jack Goody, The Power of the Written Tradition and The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).! 232! ! ! Dislocation and separation from locality and loved ones was a trope of black life in Brazil. Beatriz Mamigonian examined another rare example of the complicated family lives of liberated Africans that found expression in writing. Like Leocádia, the liberated

African Cyro set to paper the narrative about struggles for freedom. Rescued from illegal enslavement at a Bahian sugar mill in 1835 alongside many other men from the West

African Mina Coast, Cyro spent fourteen years at the Navy Arsenal of Salvador before being transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1848.470 Dionísio Peçanha, a high-ranking bureaucrat of the Ministry of the Navy, earned the concession of Cyro’s compulsory services, and employed him as a hire-out muleteer in the capital’s coffee trade. In 1854,

Cyro leaned about the decree of 28 December 1853 that freed liberated Africans hired by private parties and petitioned for his final emancipation. Dionísio Peçanha, however, was not amenable to his request and got the Ministry of Justice to deny Cyro’s appeal on the grounds of his alleged rebellious behavior.

Like Marcelina, Cyro had formed a family during his stay in Rio de Janeiro.

Married to Luiza, a freedwoman also from the Mina Coast of Africa, he had two sons:

Gregório, 6-years-old, and the toddler Pedro of 3 years of age. After the first denial of his emancipation, Cyro filed another petition in 1856 and finally succeeded. As he waited the delivery of his official letter of emancipation after having served almost twenty years as an apprentice, though, Cyro fell prey to Peçanha’s ill will. Thanks to his contacts among the high echelons of the imperial bureaucracy, Peçanha got Cyro arrested once again and sent away to the Navy Arsenal of Rio. The location was not as removed like the province of Amazonas of even Africa, Peçanha’s first intended destinations, but it suited the hirer’s purpose of barring Cyro’s influence over other liberated Africans. At the time of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 470Mamigonian, "Do que 'o preto mina' é capaz,” 89-91. 233! ! ! his arrest, Cyro was already a widow and was forced to witness his two orphaned sons be put under the tutelage of the House of Corrections in Rio de Janeiro.471

For Cyro, separation from his sons was an untenable arrangement. He then wrote a defiant letter to Dionísio Peçanha, a true ultimatum that was the third in a series of three letters, in which he threatened to show Peçanha “what a Mina is capable of” if the hirer didn’t see to his sons’ release in the next three days. Using a language quite similar to

Leocádia’s when acknowledging Peçanha’s family, Cyro looked for no compromise and deployed the stereotype so commonly used to discredit West Africans in his favor.

Signing as “your slave, Chiro Pisanjes, Africano livre (liberated African),” he closed his ultimatum with a deferential tone, perhaps already anticipating Peçanha’s irate response to his plea.

Not even a handwritten note from Cyro was able to dispel Dionísio Peçanha’s degrading view of Africans as illiterate savages. “This African is resentful and vindictive, as those of his race are in general,” wrote Peçanha in his response to the Ministry of

Justice. He further claimed to see “his existence in danger and exposed to the treacherous knife of a barbarian African, fierce and savage with no morals nor religion, an illiterate, who only breathes vengeance.”472 Despite Peçanha’s appeals, the imperial government ended up granting Cyro his emancipation, noting that he deserved the guardianship of his sons since he had even managed to send Gregório to school.

The stories of Cyro, Leocádia and Marcelina reveal the juridical and social precariousness of the condition of freedpeople in Brazil. Even in the case of liberated

Africans who succeeded in petitioning for their final emancipation, the process was

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 471 ANRJ, Diversos SDH - cx. 782 pc. 2-3, 22 March1855. Cyro Mina, Petição de emancipação, 472Mamigonian, To Be A Liberated African, 254-255. 234! ! ! tortuous, sometimes multigenerational, and subject to the webs of patronage that guaranteed white privilege in the country. If she had not convinced Joaquim Luís Soares to welcome her back into his household, Leocádia could very well had ended up at the

House of Corrections like Cyro’s sons, deprived of her family and of her freedom.

Leocádia mastered the elements of the paternalist logic that framed her relationship with her mother’s white hirer, transforming tutelage into protection when she found herself at a crossroads. More than examples of ordinary communication in a slave society, her letters were emotional objects in themselves, artifacts whose materiality defied the racial stereotypes that defined her illegal enslavement.473 If literacy was the quintessential symbol of rationality and racial superiority in nineteenth-century Brazil, in the hands of

Leocádia, it became an irrefutable proof of her humanity.474

Quite literally, Leocádia succeeded by saying the right thing in the right way to the right people at the right time. She appealed to the emotional bonds of family when writing to the man that enslaved her not because she ignored his intentions but precisely because she understood them far too well. By asserting emotional values that deportation denied her and Marcelina, Leocádia sought to override the limitations that slavery imposed on their lives. In the hands of people like Leocádia, artifacts of literacy became seminal instruments of change in the years leading up to the abolition of slavery in Brazil.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 473!Philip Troutman, “Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Slave Market Revolution,” in: New Studies in the History of American Slavery, Edited by Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 211-242.! 474 On slaves and writing in Brazil, see: Marialva C. Barbosa, Escravos e o mundo da comunicação: oralidade, leitura e escrita no século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Mauad, 2016); Carmo and Lima, História Social Da Língua Nacional 2; Itacir Marques da Luz, “Alfabetização e escolarização de trabalhadores negros no Recife oitocentista: perfis e possibilidades,” Rev. bras. hist. educ., Campinas-SP, v. 13, n. 1 (31), jan./abr. 2013, 69-93; Graham, "Writing From the Margins,” 611-636; Christianni Cardoso Morais, “Ler e escrever: habilidades de escravos e forros? Comarca do Rio das Mortes, Minas Gerais, 1731-1850,”Revista Brasileira de Educação, v. 12, n. 36, set./dez. 2007; Wissenbach, “Cartas, procurações, escapulários e patuás,” 103-122; Fonseca, A educação dos negros. 235! ! ! There was nothing more challenging than “being a child,” to paraphrase Leocádia, in a country where the threats of enslavement and deportation cast Africans and their descendants in a perpetual liminal space between slavery and freedom.475

Conclusion

When ending slavery is not an option in the age of abolition, racial frontiers can emerge as national security policy. Closing its borders to free(d) Africans was one of

Brazil’s responses to the growing problem of shielding its slaves from transnational experiences of freedom. Fuelled by the fear of conspirational black plots from within and without, the Brazilian imperial government combined resistance of African and African

American emigration with the expulsion of freed Africans from the empire whenever possible. Throughout the nineteenth century, African deportees crisscrossed the Atlantic

Ocean as the sentence of repatriation seemed to satisfy the penal, racial, and political goals of Brazilian elites: public order, de-Africanization, and limited citizenship to all people of color who managed to stay in the country.

To some extent, Brazilian efforts to enforce the law of 1831 paralleled many other bans on the general circulation of free people of color throughout the Atlantic world.

Legislation aimed at curtailing black mobility and the spread of subversive ideas existed in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and, of course, the United States, enacted as a response to events as varied as the Haitian Revolution, Denmark Vesey’s 1822 revolt, the British Abolition of

Slavery Act of 1833, and the 1844 La Escalera conspiracy in Cuba.476 West Indian emigration schemes sponsored by British colonial authorities and American attempts at !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 475Chalhoub, A Força da Escravidão.! 476 Michelle Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth- Century Atlantic World (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 72-3. 236! ! ! black colonization complete the picture. Steadfast opposition to African emigration to

Brazil, however, reveals that anxieties triggered by the foreign slave trade still were very vibrant in the second half of the nineteenth century because free(d) blacks were directly engaged in the political struggle against slavery and .

Thus, in the 1860s, Brazilian authorities considered African American emigration dangerous and undesirable. Its timing could not have been more inconvenient. Starting in

1865, Brazil engaged in a war against Paraguay and soon carried out the first debates over gradual emancipation in Parliament and the State Council. Caricatured as blacks corrupted by war, emancipated without apprenticeship, and racially inferior, African

Americans could not be welcomed in a country still committed to slavery. As the

Confederados made their way to Brazil, they brought along a compatible slaveholding mindset, but had to leave their former bondspeople behind.

Free yet by no means equal to , free(d) persons enjoyed varying degrees of legal liberty, and had to navigate a complex web of limitations to their autonomy and mobility in Brazil. The success of people like Leocádia in halting relocation to Africa exposes the costs endured by black communities faced with the prospect of exile. As distrust regarding emancipated Africans’ bad influence on slaves persisted throughout the nineteenth century, Brazilian government policies disrupted black social networks, families, and economic ties. Leocádia’s rejection of relocation turned upon an implicit rejection of state laws designed to deport freed Africans as well as of the power of the Brazilian state to shape the fate of her family. Africa occupied as complicated a space as did Brazil itself in the Afro-Brazilian imagination. As free(d) people made the case for black freedom, they also offered a critique of slaveholding,

237! ! ! disfranchisement, and racialized renderings of Africa as the origin or final destination of all blacks. Leocádia’s efforts to challenge deportation, therefore, joined Atlantic currents of abolitionism. Acts of resistance were the stuff black abolitionism was made of.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

238! ! ! Conclusion ! ! A world in motion is the site and the story of African descendants in late nineteenth-century Brazil. Whether rooted in Brazil or cast into the Atlantic world, they negotiated the harsh realities of disenfranchisement, territorial displacement, and occupational banning to achieve some measure of autonomy within societies born out of the slave trade. Essentially mobile during a historical juncture in which slavery was being contested and yet freedom did not reach far, black people in diaspora faced a formidable challenge. Emancipation in its many iterations was a reality in most of the Americas but full political integration of people of color into the monarchies, republics, and colonies that developed alongside processes of abolition was not. As African descendants came out of the reified and stateless status that enslavement bestowed upon them, where did they belong? How did they position themselves in relation to the most potent concepts that structured the Age of Emancipation: citizenship and nationality? Exception made to the case of Haiti, Afro-Americans were unwanted as citizens in the countries where they lived yet still needed to find a place in the emerging arrangement of nation-states conceived by white elites. No doubt their sense of geography and belonging was unique.

Afro-Brazilians are would-be tellers of a competing version of abolition in imperial Brazil. They subscribed to alternative mental maps and admitted several geographical readings designed by their own hemispheric networks of communication.

The stories of Victorina, Agostinho, José Cabrinha, Leocádia, and so many others throughout this manuscript suggest that, from the point of view of African descendants, the chronological boundaries of Brazilian emancipation reached early into the nineteenth century. The experiences of liberated Africans and unfulfilled treaties with Great Britain,

239! ! ! for instance, profoundly shaped black emancipation politics, for they made clear that emancipation and freedom were not synonyms and that the Brazilian imperial government would always play a key role in dispensing with them. Especially from the

1830s on, the British continuously brought recaptives under the purview of bilateral treaties and abolition laws that Brazil preferred to ignore. When consuls like Henry

Howard confronted the Brazilian government on matters of emancipation, however, they performed not only in the name of British imperialist foreign policy. British diplomats fought illegal enslavement in Brazil because Africans continuously pushed them to take action as they knocked on the doors of consulates and ran away to British ships.

Africanos livres subverted British activism in Brazil, expanding it to its most radical meaning as part of black struggles for emancipation.

Afro-Brazilian activism during the 1850s and 1860s invites us to challenge the master narrative of abolition in Brazil. More than the product of acts of government and popular mobilization in the 1880s, Brazilian emancipation was a prolonged and contested process, a legal and political movement also shaped by black struggles that intensified in the mid-nineteenth century. In the 1860s, mounting black resistance impelled the

Brazilian imperial state to wipe out entire insurgent communities like the ones in Minas

Gerais and to enforce a ban on the emigration of African Americans to the country during the American Civil War. Fearful that a race war could also take place in Brazil, Emperor

Pedro II’s government intervened to speed up the enactment of gradual emancipation as a way to slow down the process of abolition. In so doing, the Brazilian empire modeled itself after the example of Spanish Cuba and closed its doors to subversive renderings of

North American abolitionism.

240! ! ! Inspired by a specific social geography and reading of the newspapers, Afro-

Brazilian abolitionism was quite different from what actually transpired in government cabinets and in the press. It embodied alternative visions of the world that radicalized geopolitical knowledge and claimed self-determination for blacks. From the perspective of the enslaved, the American Civil War announced that freedom in Brazil was imminent.

Their activism challenged a foundational idea of nineteenth-century Brazilian liberalism, that is, that Afro-Brazilians had no role in the political life of the country for they were first and foremost racial subjects deemed incapable of even ruling themselves. As a result, slaveholders and authorities often dismissed as unrealistic any rumors of slave rebellion that conveyed a connection to Atlantic history.

Historians, however, have to do better and shift the reading of our documentary evidence to catch a glimpse of a black geopolitical imagination organized around everything the institution of slavery was supposed to deny Afro-Brazilians. Obscured from public view, their information networks followed the avenues of community building among slaves, political alliances beyond the plantation world, the circulation of printed media, and, yes, even the flows of Atlantic history, which was alive and well into the late nineteenth century. Based on them, Afro-Brazilians were able to contest legalized forms of black exclusion from public life, as in the case of the law of 7

November 1831. As notions of liberal freedom failed African descendants in Brazil, they shared space with alternative conceptions of social and political belonging.

Afro-Brazilian politics deserves a prominent place in the history of abolition because it reveals how the common experiences of enslaved communities framed the history of the Americas in ways invisible to those caught up in the idea of nation. As we

241! ! ! have seen in Chapter Four, attitudes toward foreign blacks directly influenced the legal construction of sovereignty and citizenship in Brazil. The lives of those cast between enslavement, deportation, and expatriation invite us to bring to the Black Atlantic a Latin

American perspective, that is, a deeply transnational angle that sheds light on varied concepts of blackness, that engages different temporalities, and that challenges linguistic borders produced by the existing diaspora canon. In Brazil, as slaves seized on British anti-slavery activities and the U.S. Civil War to wage battles for freedom all over the empire, they brought the trajectories of the Lusophone and Anglophone Atlantic together.

Moreover, their rebellions make it clear that, in the century-long struggle over Atlantic slavery that began with the Haitian Revolution, emancipation did not come as an invincible liberating wave. When we place the diaspora of ideas and people into a hemispheric context, we find that Afro-Brazilians had a formative, not derivative role in shaping Atlantic abolitionism.

! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

242! ! ! BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manuscript Sources

I. Arquivo Nacional (Brazilian National Archives, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) a) Corte de Apelação: “Processo de insurreição: José Cabrinha,” cx. 3700, maço 5014. b) Série Justiça:

• Ofícios de Presidentes de Província, IJ1, 1850-1875: Amazonas, 188-193; 691-693 Bahia, 405-421; 713-716 Ceará, 264-272 Espírito Santo, 431-440 Goiás, 663-672; 742-743; 925 Mato Grosso, 679-686 Maranhão, 220-235; 749-757; 1623 Minas Gerais, 617-623; 631-643; 771-781; 927 Pará, 205-211; 789-793 Paraná, 539-549; 806-809; 930 Pernambuco, 324-344; 826-834 Piauí, 243-250 Rio de Janeiro, 452-481; 865-869 Rio Grande do Norte, 840-843 Rio Grande do Sul, 577-582; 588; 934 São Paulo, 507-514; 521-528; 899-901 Santa Catarina, 558-570 Sergipe, 910-913

• Ofícios do Ministério da Marinha ao Ministério da Justiça IJ1-977 (1850s)

• Conselho de Estado – Consultas Cod.0.306, vols. 22 a 32 (1860-1865)

• Conselho de Estado – Atas Cod.0.307, diversos volumes (1857-1864)

• Avisos do Ministro dos Estrangeiros para o Ministério da Justiça IJ1-998 a1005 (1860-1876)

• Correspondência com a Legacão Brasileira nos Estados Unidos IJ1-1085

243! ! ! c) Série Agricultura, Terras Públicas e Colonização, IA6, 1860s: IA6-4 IA6-8 IA6-17 IA6-21 IA6-22 IA6-46 IA6-87 IA6-95 IA6-132 IA6-170

d) Série Interior: Estrangeiros, Legação do Brasil na Inglaterra, IJJ7-7 (1850-1872) Africanos-livres, IJ6-16, 520-525 (1850s, 1860s) e) Série Marinha, 1851-1867: VM 188 VM 201 VM 216 XIM 68 XIM 101 XVII M 4283 XM 544 f) Série Relações Exteriores, IR: IR1-6 IR3-5 g) GIFI 4J-74 5H-361 4R-061 5H-367 5B-207 5H-368 5B-285 5H-370 5B-330 5H-371 5B-344 5H-0363 5B-345 6D-18 5B-360 6D-67 5B-370 6D-091 5F-433 6D-108 5F-416 6D-130 5H-192 6D-136 5H-211 6J-125 5H-248 6J 5H-360

244! ! ! II. Arquivo Histórico do Itamaraty (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) Códices: • Brazil-Great Britain: 216-3-08 a 216-3-12. Missão Diplomática Brasileira em Londres, ofícios, 1850s & 1860s. 217-3-10 a 217-4-01. Missão Diplomática Brasileira em Londres, ofícios reservados, 1856-1868. 284-4-10/11. Legação Britânica no Brasil, 1860-1863. 285-3-12. Legação Britânica no Brasil, 1859-1873.

• Brazil-United States of America: 233-3-09 a 233-4-02. Missões Diplomáticas Brasileiras, ofícios, 1859 a 1866 (Washington, EUA). 235-2-01. Missões Diplomáticas Brasileiras, despachos, 1855 a 1866 (Washington, EUA). 258-3-06/8. Repartições Consulares Brasileiras, ofícios, 1826 a 1899 (Nova York, EUA). 278-2-06. Notas de governo a governo, Brasil-Estados Unidos (1822-1899). 280-1-06 a 280-1-09. Representações Diplomáticas Estrangeiras no Brasil, notas recebidas, 1859 a 1867 (América do Norte). 280-3-10 e 280-3-12. Representações Diplomáticas Estrangeiras no Brasil, notas expedidas, 1844 a 1889/1859 a 1890 (América do Norte).

• Brazilian Government: 292-1-15. Superior Tribunal de Justiça e Supremo Tribunal Federal, 1830-1930. 301-2-02 a 301-2-03. Ministério da Justiça, ofícios, 1861-1865. 302-2-01 a 302-2-03. Ministério da Justiça, minutas, 1859-1870. 303-3-03. Polícia, várias autoridades, 1860-1869. 312-1-07. Ministério da Justiça, correspondência particular recebida, 1863-1871. 316-3-06. Ministério da Justiça, diversos Interior/Exterior, 1863-1868.

III. Arquivo Público Mineiro (Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais) Seção Provincial: “Mapa das Freguesias, Distritos, Fogos, Populações parciais e geral do Município do Serro elaborado pelo delegado de polícia Bento Carneiro,” Serro, 1856, Presidência da Província, cx. 50.

Ofícios, maço 1047, 10 October 1864. Letter from José Maria Brandão to the Chief of Police of Minas Gerais.

245! ! ! Códice. 1095, Caeté, Minas Gerais, 15 September 1865. Letter from Caeté’s Sheriff, Caetano de Souza Telles Guimarães, to the Chief of Police of Minas Gerais.!

Printed Sources

I. Newspapers: • United States: The Anti-Slavery Reporter, vol. 20, n. 2, April 1, 1876. The New York Herald, 10 November 1861. The New York Times, 11 November 1864. Courier des États Unis, 12 December 1864

• Brazil, 1860s: A Coalição O Despertador Diário do Rio de Janeiro O Mercantil Jornal do Amazonas Jornal do Commercio Publicador Maranhense O Jequitinhonha: folha política, literária e noticiosa O Voluntário

II. Brazilian Government: • Anais do Senado do Império do Brasil, 1860s. • Anais da Câmara dos Deputados, 1860s. • Consultas do Ministério dos Estrangeiros ao Conselho de Estado:

BRASIL. O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1858-1862). Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2005.

BRASIL. O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1863-1867). Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2007.

BRASIL. O Conselho de Estado e a Política Externa do Império. Consultas da Seção dos Negócios Estrangeiros (1875-1889). Rio de Janeiro: CHDD; Brasília: FUNAG, 2009.

• Legislação da Província da Bahia sobre o negro, 1835-1888. Salvador: Fundação Cultural do Estado da Bahia/Direção de Bibliotecas Públicas, 1996.

246! ! ! • Relatórios provinciais, Maranhão, Minas Gerais e Pará, 1860s.

• Relatórios ministeriais, Justiça e Negócios Estrangeiros, 1850s & 1860s.

• Coleção das Leis do Império do Brasil (1808 - 1889).

III. North-American Sources:

The First Annual Report of the New York Committee of Vigilance for the Year 1837, Together With Important Facts Relative to Their Proceedings. New York: Pierce & Reed Printers, 1837.

Lincoln, Abraham. Fourth Annual Message, 6 December 1864. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29505

“Preliminary Report Touching the Condition and Management of Emancipated Refugees elaborated by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission to the U.S. Secretary of War,” 30 June 1863. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000338223

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