Did Princess Isabel end slavery in Brazil?

The Redeemer, and the other reading

Brazil tells the end of its slavery in two ways. In one, Isabel is a Redentora, the Redeemer, and many of the people freed in 1888 truly revered her. In the other, her law only recognized a victory won from below, by runaways, quilombos (communities of people who escaped slavery), lawsuits and protests in the streets. The evidence supports both facts at once: the signature was hers, and the pressure came from many.

What the princess did

Isabel was the daughter and heir of Emperor Pedro II, and she governed as regent whenever he traveled abroad. She had done it before at a key moment: in 1871, as regent, she signed the Free Womb Law, which declared newborn children of enslaved women free. In early 1888 her father was in Europe for his health. When the cabinet of the Baron of Cotegipe fell in March, Isabel chose João Alfredo to form a new government, and that government sent parliament a bill abolishing slavery with no delay and no compensation.

Her part was real, but it was not solitary. The Lei Áurea itself opens by stating that the General Assembly decreed it and the regent sanctioned it. The Chamber of Deputies had voted 83 to 9; the Senate voted on the same Sunday she signed. On May 13 she signed with a gold pen set with precious stones. That same year Pope Leo XIII awarded her the Golden Rose. Eighteen months later the monarchy fell, and she died in exile, at Eu in France, in 1921.

The pressure from below

Long before that Sunday, slavery was losing ground, pushed by many hands. Luiz Gama, sold into slavery by his own father at age 10, later won freedom in court for more than 500 people, by his own count. In 1881 the jangadeiros, the raft fishermen of Fortaleza, refused to carry enslaved people out to ships bound for the South, and in 1884 the province of Ceará declared all its enslaved free. In Rio’s theaters, abolitionists handed out letters of freedom on stage.

The decisive blow came from the farms themselves. In 1887, enslaved people walked off the coffee plantations of São Paulo by the thousands. Antônio Bento’s caifazes, an abolitionist network, hid them on trains bound for Santos and the Jabaquara quilombo. In October the Military Club asked that the army not be used to hunt runaways. Many masters began freeing people just to keep them working. By March 1888, when the cabinet fell, the plantations were emptying.

Not machines, not immigrants

A third explanation also circulates: that slavery ended because machines and European immigrants had already made it unnecessary. The evidence does not back it up. The coffee planters of the Paraíba Valley defended slavery to the very end. It collapsed under mass flight, the abolitionist campaign and the army’s refusal, while immigrants arrived in São Paulo in large numbers mostly afterward, as the historians Angela Alonso and Boris Fausto show.

So the honest answer has two halves. The signature was Isabel’s, and many freed people revered her for it. The pressure that brought the bill to her desk came from thousands of others. For the law itself, see What was the Lei Áurea?; for why Brazil now also marks November 20, see Why is Brazil’s Black Consciousness Day on November 20?.