Was Brazil the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery?

Last in line

The United States abolished slavery in 1865, with the Thirteenth Amendment, at the end of the Civil War. Cuba, still a Spanish colony, followed in 1886. Brazil came last, on May 13, 1888, with a law of just two articles signed by Princess Isabel, who was ruling as regent. Elsewhere in the world, legal slavery lasted well into the twentieth century in some countries, so Brazil was the last in the Americas, not the last on earth.

A country built on the trade

Why so late? Start with scale. No country took in more enslaved Africans: about 4.9 million reached Brazil alive between 1501 and 1866, by the estimate of the SlaveVoyages database, almost half of all who survived the Atlantic crossing. The numbers are broken down in How many enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil?.

Every cycle of the economy rested on that labor: sugar in the 1500s and 1600s, gold in the 1700s, coffee in the 1800s. By the nineteenth century the coffee estates of the Paraíba Valley, spread across Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, were the heart of the system, and their owners defended slavery to the very end. The slave trade was not only a Portuguese affair, either: merchants in Brazilian port cities ran ships of their own.

One law at a time

Instead of a single break, Brazil let slavery retreat step by step, almost always under pressure. In less than sixty years:

1. 1831: a law bans the import of enslaved Africans. Nobody enforces it, and more than 700,000 are smuggled in by 1850.
2. 1850: with the British navy, armed by the Aberdeen Act of 1845, seizing slave ships, the Eusébio de Queirós Law finally stops the trade.
3. 1871: the Free Womb Law frees children born to enslaved women, though they must work for their mother’s master until 21.
4. 1884: the province of Ceará declares all its enslaved people free.
5. 1885: the Sexagenarian Law frees those aged 60 or more, after three more years of service.
6. 1888: the Lei Áurea ends slavery outright, with no conditions.

Some of those steps were meant to slow things down. The government passed the 1885 law to rein in the abolitionist movement. Since so few enslaved people lived to 60, abolitionists saw it as a maneuver to put off the end.

What finally broke it

Ending the trade in 1850 did not end slavery. It made enslaved people more expensive, and coffee pulled them south: historians estimate that about 200,000 were sold away from their families in the Northeast to the farms of Rio, Minas and São Paulo. Slavery shrank, but it concentrated where the money was.

In the end it collapsed under pressure: mass flight, the abolitionist movement and the army’s refusal. In 1887, enslaved men and women fled the coffee farms of São Paulo by the thousands, and that October the Military Club asked that the army not be sent to hunt them down. With the plantations emptying, the cabinet of the Baron of Cotegipe fell in March 1888, and in May the abolition bill passed in five days. How it passed is told in What was the Lei Áurea?.