Why did Rui Barbosa order Brazil’s slavery records burned?

An order from the new Republic

Brazil abolished slavery on May 13, 1888, and became a republic on November 15, 1889. The provisional government’s finance minister was Rui Barbosa (also spelled Ruy), a lawyer from Bahia who would become one of the country’s most famous jurists. On December 14, 1890, just over a year after the Republic was proclaimed, he signed an order to burn the papers on slavery held by the Ministry of Finance.

The order gave its own reason. It spoke of erasing the “traces” of slavery “for the honor of the Nation.” The idea was that a country newly free and newly republican should not keep the paperwork of captivity.

A law with no compensation

To see what else was at stake, go back two years. The Lei Áurea, Brazil’s abolition law, freed about 700,000 people in two sentences and paid nothing to anyone. The freed received no land, schooling or reparation. The former masters, for their part, went to the government demanding to be compensated for the people they had lost as property. They got nothing, and many planters abandoned the monarchy in anger, which earned them the nickname republicanos de 14 de maio, the “May 14 republicans.” What the freed people faced in those years is told in What happened to formerly enslaved people in Brazil after abolition?.

The aim historians point to

Historians point to a second target behind the bonfire: those compensation claims. Official records of who had owned whom were the kind of evidence such a claim could rest on. Without them, the former masters’ case was harder to make. The two motives do not cancel each other out. An order can speak of national honor and still close a door.

How thoroughly the order was carried out, and how much was actually lost, is still debated among historians. What is certain is the order itself, its date and the reason it gives.

The history that did not burn

Whatever went up in smoke, the history of slavery did not turn to ash. The order reached one ministry’s papers, not the whole country’s memory. Notaries kept their books of sales and letters of freedom. Churches kept their baptism registers. Courts kept the files of freedom suits, the cases in which enslaved people sued for their liberty, which historians such as Sidney Chalhoub have studied in depth. Ship records scattered across archives on both sides of the Atlantic let the SlaveVoyages database estimate how many Africans were brought to Brazil: see How many enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil?.

Those records are in the archives to this day, and they are the reason historians can answer the questions the order might have buried: who was enslaved, by whom, and how they fought their way out.