On these terms, the Afro-Brazilian journalist, educator, and law-school graduate Felipe Neri Collaço (1815–1894) launched the abolitionist newspaper O Homem. The opening line, in all its original rhythmic verve, put the northeastern city of Recife on notice: “There is a time to keep silent, and a time to speak up. The time for silence has passed, it is now time to speak up.”Footnote ¹ It conveyed an emboldened and, to many, a dangerously unencumbered Collaço. The well-known sixty-year-old appeared unconstrained by the decades-long relationship he had kept with the ruling Conservative Party. More frightening, perhaps, to the governing class, Collaço’s introductory article immediately brought to light the struggles afflicting Recife’s “men of color.” These ranged from the administration’s expunging of prominent Afro-descendants from public posts to the police’s dispersal of a meeting where men of color had gathered to sign a petition.Footnote ² In denouncing and linking together what may have otherwise been regarded as separate incidents, and in redefining these events as unconstitutional affronts on Recife’s “men of color,” Collaço deliberately broke with the entrenched code of keeping silent on race. Indeed, the process of suppressing racial discord in public life had long been integral to the preservation of slavery. O Homem thus strove not only to rally Recife’s “men of color” around these recent examples of exclusion but also to fundamentally render the call for racial solidarity in abolitionist terms. In arguing that slave emancipation was necessary for the fulfillment of racial equality, Collaço effectively sought to transform both the politics of the category “men of color” and the implications of abolitionism. Not surprisingly, a public anti-Black backlash followed. It was neither the first time that Collaço had personally encountered such type of racialized response, nor the last instance where the interracial abolitionist movement would be caricatured in anti-Black tropes. As such, this critical reexamination of O Homem’s aims, and of the racialized reactions that the paper elicited, offers a fresh perspective on how the ferment of the abolition debates set in motion important shifts in racial subjectivities.Footnote ³

In probing Collaço’s interventions in public life, this chapter also highlights the wider importance that the practices of silencing race held in structuring power in nineteenth-century Brazil. Collaço appears here as illustrative of a subgroup of Brazil’s large free population of color that attained notable success.Footnote ⁴ In Recife, as across most cities, free Afro-descendants comprised about 40 percent of the population and gained access to spaces of influence through recognized social practices such as joining religious brotherhoods and civil associations and participating in partisan and professional networks. For the most part, these dynamics transpired in contexts free of legal exclusions based on race. Better yet, a shared cultural understanding prevailed that race was not to be discussed. This silencing of race, then, proved salient to the ordering of a nation that at once held the largest free Black and largest slave populations in Latin America.

Historians agree that official efforts to preclude debates on race were, in fact, critical to the construction and reproduction of racialized hierarchies. In working with parliamentary debates and state memoranda from the early 1820s, Márcia Berbel and Rafael Marquese have demonstrated that the “absence of race” in the definitions of legal citizenship strategically enabled Brazilian-born Blacks and mulattos to feel invested in a national project dependent on African slavery and the slave trade. Berbel and Marquese maintain that Brazilian political leaders, seeking to prevent any repeat of the dynamics that contributed to the outbreak of the Haitian revolution, worked to minimize racial hostility aimed at free Blacks.Footnote ⁵ Likewise, Sidney Chalhoub’s work with the records from the Council of State, an advisory board to the emperor and the ministers, reveals the extent to which the government avoided using racial language to enact race-laden legislation. Chalhoub charts, for instance, the council’s deliberations on what to call the newborns of slave mothers who were freed by the gradual emancipation law of 1871, knowing full well that to use the term “freed” would imply a lifetime of social stigma and yet to actually “free” them of this background would also enhance their political rights and significantly increase the Afro-descendant share of the voting population. The state’s goal, Chalhoub argues, was to proceed carefully, and with “prudence,” recognizing that “the best rule is not to talk about this [racial difference].”Footnote ⁶ Ultimately, Chalhoub contends, political leaders opted for a race-neutral term for the newborns – but then attached a literacy requirement to an electoral law implemented ten years later that, in effect, purged large numbers of Afro-Brazilian males from the voting rolls. Nevertheless, we must also remember that the processes of silencing racial discourse were not exclusively top-down. Hebe Mattos’ research shrewdly captures how former slaves purposefully suppressed references to their slave pasts in their interactions with the legal system.Footnote ⁷ This silencing, she argues, should be understood as part of their assertions for autonomy and recognition as equal members of society. For Mattos, this “ethics of silence … reflected the full weight of racialization and racism in Imperial Brazil, rather than its nonexistence.”Footnote ⁸

Taken together, these references offer rich points of entry into the literature on racial silence. Certainly, the works immediately help us better appreciate the extent to which Collaço’s opening declaration – “começou o tempo de falar” (it is now time to speak up) – signaled a sharp break with the status quo.Footnote ⁹ In addition, this sampling of the scholarship also permits us to consider how a deeper reckoning with Collaço’s O Homem can productively spark new questions related to race, abolition, and silencing. For example, if historians have mostly, and successfully, explained the policy objectives and consequences of silencing race, there is more to discover about the cultural facets of this process.Footnote ¹⁰ That is, questions abound about how this code of not talking about race worked publicly, outside of official, legal contexts. For example, how did the crossing, and also the policing, of these lines of “keeping silent” in turn shape the access and representation that Afro-Brazilians had in public life? And, relatedly, how were disputes over public discussions of race, as happened between O Homem and other newspapers, linked to ongoing processes of racial and abolitionist formations? It is to these questions that we now turn, beginning in the next section with a detailed analysis of the political and intellectual environment from which Collaço’s O Homem emerged. In two further sections, we scrutinize what Collaço’s “breaking the silence” entailed, both in terms of his racial project for Recife’s “men of color” and in relation to the anti-Black backlash that left a lasting imprint on public discourse.

Collaço’s Recife, ca. 1876

O Homem burst onto the scene of a dynamic provincial capital. The third-largest city in Imperial Brazil, Recife was the principal port of Pernambuco and home to some 115,000 people. It featured one of the nation’s two law schools, several theaters, a bustling press, associations and religious brotherhoods, and distinguished historical and literary institutes. It had been a site of global contact since the beginning of colonization, shaped by native, African, and European traditions. In the mid-seventeenth century, Pernambucan sugar paced world production, fueling both imperial rivalry and the expansion of African slavery. This age of sugar, which sparked the Dutch occupation of the Brazilian northeast (1624–1655), captivated nineteenth-century intellectuals. Specifically, Collaço and an array of playwrights, novelists, and visual artists exalted the multiracial forces that expelled the Dutch and rendered that history as emblematic of Brazil’s strong interracial heritage.Footnote ¹¹ Effectively, the Pernambucan past stoked the national imaginary, its long history of slavery notwithstanding.

An entrenched seigneurialism also pervaded the rules and customs of Recife, a slaving port since the sixteenth century. Social conventions, including the silencing of race, ensured the continuing importance of slavery as an institution that created order, even as the number of people that were actually enslaved decreased over Collaço’s lifetime.Footnote ¹² For example, urban slaves dropped from about 25 percent of the overall population in the late 1840s to approximately 15 percent in the 1870s.Footnote ¹³ This decrease, however, was in line with broader changes in Brazilian slavery, where slave populations were largely reconcentrated in plantation settings from about the 1830s onward.Footnote ¹⁴ In Pernambuco, if the sugar planters of the late nineteenth century no longer wielded the global might of their seventeenth-century forebears, they still defended slavery and the sugar economy as interrelated matters. They still clung to the slave system, even though so-called free workers were widely available.Footnote ¹⁵ In the 1870s and 1880s, rural political associations formed to safeguard the “interests” of the sugar economy, which invariably centered on constraining all processes related to emancipation. At this point, the vast majority of the province’s slave population toiled in the sugar belt, and virtually half of those laborers (48 percent) were well within prime working age (between sixteen and forty years old).Footnote ¹⁶ Hardly, then, an institution without deep roots, slavery in Recife and Pernambuco – and across the greater northeastern region, for that matter – held firm on the basis of history, law, and tradition. The fact that announcements for runaway slaves appeared in virtually every major daily in the country up until a handful of newspapers stopped publishing them in the 1880s hints at the cultural ways that slave power was inscribed and reinscribed in public life.

O Homem’s publication in 1876 thus emerged in a context where the legitimacy of slavery remained intact; where it was still more honorable to own people than to call that system into question. Altogether, the weekly ran for three months, reaching twelve issues. Its transformative character – its redefining of a “men of color” identity around the principle of abolitionism – becomes more visible when we take into account the state of the abolition debate in the mid-1870s. In Recife, the issue had become debatable among a wider segment of the population about a decade earlier. Prompted by the confluence of different national and international events in the late 1860s – the Paraguayan War, the US Civil War, and the then-recent struggles of liberated Africans – activists took to the press, theater, associations, the courts, and local political bodies to portray slavery as an offense to national ideals.Footnote ¹⁷ Slaves’ pursuits of freedom, through the courts and in conjunction with associational funding-freedom practices, took on new meaning and further politicized the growing civic campaigns. In general terms, then, the movement included Afro-descendants and whites and invented a nationalist narrative of antislavery.

More specifically, abolitionist politics in Recife stemmed in part from local institutions (the law school and the press) and in part from political developments across the country. As in other places, whether it was São Paulo city or Porto Alegre, local abolitionists in Recife imagined their actions on a national scale. However, for most of the 1860s and 1870s, the decentralized form of Brazilian abolitionism remained just that, and most interprovincial and interregional connections were largely symbolic. In the years after O Homem’s publication, however, the operation of “underground railroads,” the circulation of abolitionist theater troupes, and the more pronounced role of abolitionism in the national capital (Rio de Janeiro) helped fasten ties between local publics. It was also the case that the intensification of Brazil’s interprovincial slave trade in the 1870s fueled interprovincial abolitionism.

The abolition debate acquired an intense register rather early in Recife, and activists in São Paulo, Salvador, Fortaleza, and Rio de Janeiro recognized it as an important site of action. In the first comprehensive, national-level study of abolitionist associations, Angela Alonso noted Recife among the places with the largest number of abolitionist events between 1867 and 1871.Footnote ¹⁸ Also, the provincial assembly of Pernambuco created state emancipation funds in 1869 and 1870. It attributed these measures to intensifying local pressure and to the example of similar funds being created in other provinces. In short, a snapshot of Brazilian abolitionism as it consolidated into a national phenomenon in the late 1860s reveals that Recife occupied as important a place as any city in the national picture. To date, however, we have not found traces of Collaço within this specific milieu, although he had been long active in the press, associations, and the legal arena.

The 1871 Free Womb Law changed the nature of the slavery debate, setting a course for the eventual ending of slavery. Just as important, it galvanized a proslavery reaction. In establishing a “free birth principle,” the state ensured that all children born to enslaved mothers after September 28, 1871, would one day (after turning twenty-one) become free. Notably, this law signaled the state’s willingness to supersede the owner’s authority on how and when to free “someone’s property.” On the issue of manumission, whereas before the owner had the power to consent (or not) to a slave’s request to buy themselves out of bondage, they were now obliged to accept the said person’s freedom as long as they provided the requisite compensation. And it was clear that such legal changes immediately resonated among the enslaved, as a woman printed a notice in the Diário de Pernambuco asking for a specified sum to buy her freedom.Footnote ¹⁹ This happened only weeks after the law, illustrating the new ways that the “public” could now participate in this issue. The advertisement, which appeared alongside rows of slave-runaway notices, demonstrated that the points of reference for engaging the abolition debate were changing because of the 1871 law; it also captured the press’s role in stretching the political field.

Yet it was not long ago that historians quickly dismissed print culture as a site of critical inquiry, either because Brazilians supposedly did not read or because written culture was considered a domain of the small white elite. Nevertheless, since the early 2000s, a slew of studies about the nineteenth-century press, with most emerging in the Brazilian academy, are changing our view of this phenomenon.Footnote ²⁰ These current researchers are not only amassing a more complex view of public life – finding over 140 women’s periodicals for the nineteenth century, for example – but also revisiting the underlying assumption that only 15 percent of the population was literate. The 15 percent statistic is in fact reflected in the 1872 national census; however, in and of itself, it obscures as much as it reveals when scholars do not sufficiently contextualize it. For Recife, when one calculates the literacy rates for the three most populated and “urban” districts, this number almost triples; for Rio, a similarly closer look at the urban geography puts the city’s literacy rate at nearer to 50 percent.Footnote ²¹ The bottom line is that contemporaries recognized the importance of the press, saw in it a space for participating politically, and disseminated information through public collective readings. To brand it a “white” space is to profoundly misunderstand how involved Afro-descendants were as printers, journalists, and readers in the world of print.

Through the press, various constituencies politicized the implications of the 1871 law, essentially reigniting the abolition debates. And it is important to remember that, from the perspective of contemporaries, this law had resolved – that is, settled – the question of abolition. It was not intended as a first step, and the gradualist narrative that has come to define it is mostly the result of later political and historiographical making. Six new, republican abolitionist papers surfaced in the early 1870s. From 1872 to 1875, A Republica Federativa and A Luz were among the most visible in denouncing slaveowners who continued selling their newborns, despite the prohibitions of the 1871 law. Notably, the papers were rather explicit in this, naming names.Footnote ²² Meanwhile, and in response to both the 1871 law and the reemergent abolitionism, Pernambuco’s sugar planters launched their own association – the Society to Aid Agriculture in Pernambuco (SAAP) – in 1872. For effect, they organized their inaugural meeting on the first anniversary of the 1871 law. The SAAP was an association of national profile, convening two important congresses in 1878 and 1884. At both, the issue of slavery in general, and the question of how to proceed with the children of the 1871 law in particular, remained a point of anxiety and debate. It was thus upon this immediate context that O Homem surfaced: where mobilizations for and against slavery vied for public opinion.

Collaço’s appreciation of politics and local power dynamics more generally stemmed from his close contact with the city’s important institutional structures. Born into a family with deep roots in Pernambuco – his great-grandfather José Vaz Salgado was considered the richest merchant in the mid-eighteenth century – he was raised in comfortable surroundings, if not amidst the same levels of wealth that those of earlier generations had enjoyed. His Portuguese-descended father inherited sugar plantations and owned slaves, while his mother was Brazilian, parda, and from modest origins. Their marriage, however, left his father estranged from his family. And for Collaço, the fourth of six children, the split from his more affluent family meant a loss of important support.Footnote ²³

We know that for almost a decade, beginning in the mid-1840s, Collaço was a copy editor of the Diário de Pernambuco. From then until O Homem in 1876, he edited a wide range of literary, religious, political, scientific, and women’s newspapers. For his role in the print arena, Collaço was recognized as a “dignified representative of Guttenberg” at a national exposition in 1866. In addition, from 1847 through the 1870s, he served as a juror, playing a part in legal matters and showing himself an honorable man of the community. Relatedly, he earned a law degree in 1853, and his knowledge of constitutional matters is on full display in O Homem. A devout Catholic, Collaço also belonged to a brotherhood and built extensive ties to church leaders. Still, a significant part of his public profile grew from his role as an educator; for over two decades, Collaço taught at Recife’s famed secondary school, the Ginásio Pernambucano. His expertise spanned the subjects of Algebra, Geometry, Philosophy, French, English, and Physics; notably, two of his textbooks were adopted for general use in Pernambuco’s education system.Footnote ²⁴ These different capacities (he also contracted as a surveyor and an engineer with the municipality) therefore put Collaço at the intersection of powerful entities and influential people. Not surprisingly, a paper he edited in 1859 provided some of the most riveting and detailed coverage of Dom Pedro II’s visit to Recife.Footnote ²⁵ His place within the patronage networks of the Conservative Party also in part explains his long and successful hold of public posts. In the early 1870s, however, the relationship with Conservatives began to fray, and not long after he was controversially driven from the Ginásio Pernambucano. At that point, through O Homem, he railed openly against racial discrimination; and, in joining the abolitionist chorus led by republican newspapers, he posited that only the abolition of slavery could ensure “men of color” the promise of equality enshrined in the constitution.

Of “Men of Color” and Abolitionism

O Homem unfurled its banner of equality on the masthead. The words “liberty, equality, fraternity” encased the full title of the journal: O Homem: realidade constitucional ou dissolução social. For emphasis, Collaço affixed quotes from the constitution and the Bible to illustrate these guiding concepts. Below “equality,” for example, Collaço inserted two clauses from the famed article 179, which in its entirety reads like a veritable bill of rights. One clause defended all (male) citizens’ eligibility for civic, political, and military posts, and a second reiterated that those considerations must rest on “talent and merits alone, irrespective of other differences [read: race].”Footnote ²⁶ Interestingly, in analyzing O Homem’s constitutionalist language, historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto noted that a Rio de Janeiro Black paper from the 1830s had also used article 179 as a basis for political action.Footnote ²⁷ At the very least, this suggests the importance of rights-based discourse to the history of Black political formations. Collaço, meanwhile, also placed a verse from the gospel under “fraternity,” which warned about the “darkness that blinds the paths of those who hate their brothers.”Footnote ²⁸ These referents established the legal, national, and moral foundations of the paper.

O Homem’s specific objectives came into focus toward the middle quadrant of the page. Collaço presented them in bullet-point-like fashion, using the first three to articulate his vision for racial solidarity. The first stated that the paper “aimed to promote the unity, education, and moral growth of Pernambuco’s men of color.” The second stressed that it “would advocate on behalf of the men of color’s legitimate and political rights, demanding that the constitution apply equally to everyone.” The third promised to “publicize all wrongs committed against us so that the perpetuators would be exposed and feel the same oppression and persecution that their actions bring on others.”Footnote ²⁹ In these few lines, O Homem shattered the long-held custom of not discussing racial problems. It showed, moreover, that this process of “breaking the silence” went hand-in-hand with projecting, if not inventing, a “men of color” subjectivity. It was thus toward this project – of defining the terms of what this category should imply – that the paper focused its next several issues. O Homen’s abolitionist turn became more explicit later, in what turned out to be the paper’s last issues; for reasons still unclear to us, the weekly stopped after a three-month run. Nevertheless, we note that, from its first numbers, Collaço drew readily from US examples to suggest that Black equality and success could only flourish in a post-emancipation context.

O Homem’s project to “unify Pernambuco’s men of color” drew on Collaço’s vast intellectual repertoire. It featured religious and legal articles on equality, a regular column called “The Illustrious Men of Color” that recovered the life stories of prominent Afro- and Native Brazilians, and a pointed abolitionist platform. Together, these pieces served not only to rebut the string of recent firings of Afro-descendant public officials but also to trouble the code of racial silence. Reviewing the standing context of January 1876, the article explaining the journal’s impetus iterated that “in the last year, six men of color have been pushed out from their jobs … and that without faith or the rule of law … a lasting peace cannot exist.”Footnote ³⁰ This reality extended a deepening political crisis, as Collaço reminded readers that “men of color” had been excluded from Recife’s municipal council for the last twenty-eight years, since the late 1840s.Footnote ³¹ It was thus to religion and science that Collaço turned early in the paper to counter the charges that “society does not want, nor accept, men of color in public posts.”Footnote ³² Attributing these words to the provincial president, he invokes several “we are created equal” passages from the Bible before seamlessly paraphrasing French naturalists who also argued for humankind’s common origins. In confronting – disproving, really – ideas about innate racial differences, Collaço pivoted to the issue of political rights, for the violent dispersal of the public meeting, where notable men of color had gathered to sign and send off a petition to Parliament, illustrated the unequal treatment they endured. The incident encapsulated the disregard for their constitutional rights, he argued, which they had to fight together to reclaim. The incident also revived anxieties over legislation from the year before that placed restrictions on where free and enslaved men of color could hang signs.Footnote ³³ Collaço believed essential a “unified” response to strengthen the political capital of this “class of people, the most numerous and hardest working in Brazil.”Footnote ³⁴

O Homem’s process of racial formation required a smoothing over of class and gender distinctions, as it strove to rewrite the political handbook for Pernambuco’s “men of color.” The newspaper form allowed Collaço a unique means to string together an unending series of “we’s” and “our’s” when referring to the “men of color” that, when juxtaposed with the “they’s” and “them’s,” gave the impression that oppositional, racial dialectics indeed shaped political dynamics. In fact his trajectory offers a different view of political networks. Though race, of course, shaped social networks of all kinds, the stories of Brazil’s prominent Afro-descendants are also stories of interracial collaborations. Furthermore, the “we’s” also seemingly glossed salient class differences within a heterogeneous, free, Afro-descendant male population. This “class,” in Collaço’s words, encompassed carpenters and stonemasons in addition to law-school graduates and influential businessmen.Footnote ³⁵ Clearly, the “men of color” invoked in the paper referred to the latter, a small but accomplished and visible group. The gendered nature of the racial category is also explicit in the journal’s title. The universalizing form of “man” feeds and reflects extant gendered discourses of power and can be read as part of a discernible nineteenth-century phenomenon of trying to preserve a “masculine” identification with the political arena.Footnote ³⁶ For Collaço, who earlier in his career had edited “women’s” and “family” newspapers, this contentious entry into public debate required adhering to, and reinscribing, the gendered codes of discussions about political rights.

Historical narratives figured as a source and form of establishing a “men of color” tradition. The recurrent “Illustrious Men of Color” column, for example, accomplished several interrelated objectives. It first provided a context, a “historical” basis from which to establish the legitimacy of the current generation’s successes. This tradition of achievement doubtless responded to charges of Afro-descendant inferiority; it used historical biography of past leaders of color to affirm the political rights of the contemporary community. Additionally, the sketching of some figures – like the famed Afro-Bahian jurist Antonio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880) – also opened the chance to introduce antislavery as a topic that was important to this group. In fact, the paper’s first issue carried with it an insert of Rebouças. Collaço extolled Rebouças “for his virtues and service to the patria since its beginnings” and reiterated his national standing by pointing to a recent book published in Rio that contained Rebouças’ parliamentary speeches from 1830 to 1847.Footnote ³⁷ Collaço also emphasized Rebouças’ role in presenting a bill to Parliament in 1837 that called for an enforcement of the prohibition on the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote ³⁸ Through this specific column, Collaço not only created an antislavery lineage that was important to abolitionist activists in the 1870s writ large; he also made a “man of color” central to this process.

As part of a project of reasserting a historical memory, the “Illustrious Men of Color” articles were instrumental in establishing the key qualities of this group. Whether the biographies focused on known men like Rebouças and Henrique Dias or on lesser-known figures like the musician Elias Lobo, they emphasized personal sacrifice and contributions to the nation. The articles, however, also decried the historical neglect of Afro-descendant achievements, which could have well reflected Collaço’s own anxieties about his legacy. These columns also revealed that Indigenous men belonged in Collaço’s “of color” category. That is, though the paper’s justification stemmed from recent developments involving Afro-descendants, Collaço also wrote about Felipe Camarão, the Indigenous leader who led a native battalion against the seventeenth-century Dutch occupation. Camarão exemplified the national-hero narrative. Collaço also invoked, if in exaggerated fashion, the triumphs of natives across the Americas in order to make the point that “non-white populations enjoyed equal rights in other societies, including in the United States, and in Mexico, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru … . In Mexico, as is well known, a full-blooded Indian [sic] was elected president.”Footnote ³⁹ These references, including that to Benito Juárez in Mexico, painted Brazil in a comparatively unfavorable light for its inability to consider the talents of the “men of color.” This Juárez mention, specifically, foreshadowed a later tendency among Brazilian abolitionists to celebrate the Mexican political leader; an officer of a radical abolitionist association in Ceará, for example, used “Juárez” as his nom de guerre in the early 1880s.Footnote ⁴⁰

The racial project of O Homem acquired a distinctive register when it explicitly embraced abolitionism. The editorial of the fourth issue read: “we want the realization of constitutional equality for all Brazilians … we want our constitutional rights respected by the rule of law, not granted as an extension of personal favors … and we want the complete extinction of slavery in Brazil.”Footnote ⁴¹ The racialized “we” here became defined by its call for abolition. In part, Collaço’s abolitionism arose from ties maintained with other newspapers in the print milieu. We know that he traded issues with, and reprinted articles from, A Luz, the fiery republican abolitionist newspaper printed in Recife in the early 1870s.Footnote ⁴² Antislavery developments abroad also factored into Collaço’s thinking. The US context, for example, loomed large. He hailed the enthusiastic reception that Uncle Tom’s Cabin enjoyed in Europe, whereas in Brazil theatrical adaptations of the story had been all but prohibited up until that point.Footnote ⁴³ In the last issue, Collaço most imaginatively created a shared US-Brazilian abolitionist storyline. In an extended two-page article, he invited readers to dream a scenario where the emperor’s upcoming trip to Philadelphia, to participate in the US centennial celebrations, would occasion further action in the legislature to end slavery once and for all (with, it should be said, a provision for indemnity). O Homem argued that this was a plausible scenario given that the 1871 law had also been passed while Dom Pedro II was out of the country and that, therefore, his presence abroad, especially in the context of this big event in the United States, would allow Brazil to show itself favorably on the world stage. Returning to the domestic context, the article then emphasized that this discussion about abolition was also transpiring in the national capital, via the O Globo newspaper. As opposed to O Homem, however, the Rio journal was actually adamant in rejecting any and all provisions for slaveowners’ compensation. The larger point, O Homem stressed, was that the press “worked to bring public opinion around to this perspective” and that in due time the larger dailies across the country would also stoke this debate. “Could this all just be a dream, what we’ve just described?” asked O Homem rhetorically. “Only time will tell,” the article closed.Footnote ⁴⁴

Though it ended rather abruptly, Collaço’s newspaper nonetheless calls attention to Afro-descendants’ sometimes quite prominent place in public life. Recent research has, in fact, analyzed the relationships between several prominent “men of color,” public figures who used newspapers and literature as platforms for also “breaking the silence” on racial matters and on slavery. Historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, for example, probed and connected the works of José Ferreira de Menezes, Luiz Gama, Machado de Assis, José do Patrocínio, Ignácio de Araújo Lima, Arthur Carlos, and Theophilo Dias de Castro, who in different ways combined forces to make the issues of race, slavery, Black equality, and citizenship all worthy of public discussion.Footnote ⁴⁵ Their concentration in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro played a part in this recognizable explosion in collaboration and activism. While aware, undoubtedly, of this abolitionist and race-consciousness ferment, Collaço did not align O Homem with these contemporaneous developments. His relative isolation may have been because he was historically aligned with men in Conservative networks, while most of these other leaders emerged from Liberal and Republican backgrounds; it may have been because of a generational difference and his lack of contact with this younger cohort of public figures; it may have also been because of his comparatively more recent turn to abolitionism. More work, to be sure, remains to be done on the wider resonance of O Homem beyond Recife.

Reaction and Anti-Black Subjectivities

O Homem animated racial subjectivities. However, it was not only Pernambuco’s “men of color” that it stirred; it also generated an anti-Black response, showing that racialized discourse indeed played a part in shaping Brazilian power relations. These public airings of anti-Blackness, however, drew on traditions of racial silence instead of deviating from them. In analyzing the policing of these spaces of public discourse, we are able to better understand the contentious terms through which Afro-descendants engaged powerful dimensions of public life, such as the press. José Mariano’s daily, A Provincia, for example, welcomed the new journal into the public arena. Mariano – the popular, ascendant leader of the Liberal Party – even praised the new organ, lauding its banner of “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” Mariano hailed the paper for strengthening Brazil’s tradition of a free press and iterated that it would refrain from weighing in on its racial politics until it better understood the paper’s objectives. Nevertheless, in its initial observations of the paper, Mariano’s A Provincia disingenuously questioned whether a public existed for a paper of O Homem’s nature and used the ambivalent phrase “mulatos em cena” (mulattos on the scene) to sum up, and spoof, its debut.Footnote ⁴⁶ To be sure, the “mulattos on the scene” phrasing conjures up the mocking and racist spirit of jokes about “uppity” Afro-descendants, jokes that are intended to delegitimize all sorts of broader claims-making.

The following day, despite its earlier assurances that it would reserve judgment until it saw more from O Homem, A Provincia unleashed a blistering, front-page attack on the new paper. It called O Homem “impolitic” and “unnecessary.”Footnote ⁴⁷ And it affirmed that Brazilian citizens already coexisted easily, without distinctions in color and opportunities. Until this point, it mostly repeated the familiar tropes associated with racial silencing; that is, arguing that legal equality already existed for the entire free population. Yet, while deliberately disregarding O Homem’s complaints and justifications, A Provincia went further and criminalized them. It accused the new paper of fostering racial divisions, of the sort that “would tear the country apart.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The portrayal of O Homem’s mission as racial, as opposed to political or legal, was itself part of a campaign to delegitimize the paper. This line of attack resonated precisely because of the cultural understanding that it was wrong to discuss racial problems in public. A paper like O Homem was simply unprecedented in Recife. Thus, A Provincia warned it to “defend the theses and arguments that you wish, but do not call for separate spheres … for you are as free and enterprising as those of the Caucasian race” (emphasis in original).Footnote ⁴⁹ With some condescension, Mariano tried to reset the framework in which to engage O Homem’s claims for broader political rights. Curiously, however, though Mariano was white and Collaço Afro-descendant, Mariano’s exploits and reputation up until that moment in 1876 had not matched Collaço’s standing. His fame would, of course, far surpass Collaço’s in the ensuing decade and in popular memory. As is well-known, Mariano went on to play a prominent role in the national and regional histories of abolitionism. As an elected deputy to parliament in the 1880s, he formed part of, and vigorously defended, the small abolitionist wing of the Liberal Party. He supported measures to halt the interprovincial slave trade and backed an early, radical version of what became the 1885 Sexagenarian Law. He went against the status quo in that latter instance in supporting the immediate and uncompensated freeing of elderly slaves. Because of his abolitionist commitments, however, he lost a reelection bid in 1886. Locally, Mariano allied with the most militant abolitionist societies. After ceremoniously freeing his own slaves in 1882, Mariano acted as an interlocutor for an interracial association that helped enslaved people flee north to the province of Ceará. He was a fiery orator at large, public meetings. And his place in abolitionist lore was enshrined in the popular dramatic representation of “May 13,” where he was the protagonist that announced news of the abolition law to cheering crowds. Doubtlessly, the charismatic Mariano changed the course of local politics, including how the debates over abolition unfolded.Footnote ⁵⁰

Yet, from the vantage point of 1876, Mariano’s response to O Homem showed that an anti-Black rant carried little to no political risks. The rising Liberal in his twenties clearly did not feel intimated by taking on the accomplished Collaço, a man twice his age. The reverse scenario, however – of a younger Afro-descendant challenging a white man as established as Collaço was – is virtually impossible to imagine. Still, the anti-Black response did not register as a “break” with the code of racial silence. Nor, certainly, did it register that this language informed its own process of racial formation, where, if whiteness was not explicitly touted as the ideal, blackness definitely signaled inferiority. Mariano’s defense of unified rather than “separate” spheres rested on the belief that indeed all males had equal opportunity to succeed – that what historians have referred to as the “precariousness of Black freedom” did not exist.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, it is important to situate Mariano’s critique of the “separate spheres” within the context of contemporary abolitionism, for A Provincia had also been involved with this discussion since its founding in 1873. Yet the paper operated on a largely partisan basis, mobilizing the abolition issue in order to instrumentally undermine Conservative power. Such was the case, for example, when it denounced slaveowners’ abuse of the 1871 Free Womb Law. Like Republican antislavery journals, it publicized instances of owners illegally selling young children; it made an even bigger issue of the province’s slow implementation of the national emancipation fund, which was also tied to the 1871 law. Yet in printing runaway slave ads on the back pages of all its issues, and in targeting Conservative rather than Liberal slaveowners, the paper underscored its partisan and contradictory facets. Throughout, its antislavery politics remained bound to an imagined raceless ideal of liberal freedom. In short, the clash between O Homem and A Provincia demonstrated how their contentious interactions, which at heart rested on who got to determine whether race was silenced in public discourse, played a key part in shaping racial subjectivities. For as much as the “we’s” in O Homem worked to mold a narrative about what it meant to be “of color,” the “we’s” in A Provincia similarly worked to set the terms for opposition to the presentation of race-specific claims. The terms for the latter project evolved part and parcel with the sarcastic and insulting references to the “mulattos on the scene.”

Notably, another paper, the Catholic journal A União, also joined the anti-Collaço chorus. Its editor, however, was a “man of color,” which furnished a unique perspective on the tensions surrounding O Homem.Footnote ⁵² The argument between the two Afro-descendant editors produced some of the most charged anti-Black discourse seen in the late-nineteenth-century Recife press. Like A Provincia, A União initially attacked O Homem on the grounds “that it was an unnecessary paper because between us, no one pays attention to a man’s color; once he displays merits, he is able to ascend the social hierarchy.”Footnote ⁵³ It silenced race by shifting to a discussion about merit. Thereafter, A União’s editor proceeded to ironically and disparagingly invoke Collaço’s own trajectory in order to support his position. It stated that O Homem’s editor “is proof of what we believe, that despite being black-skinned [sendo de cor preta], he still holds a degree from the law school; he still holds various public posts, and is currently enjoying retirement as a teacher from the secondary school” (italics in original).Footnote ⁵⁴

This provocative statement stung Collaço on several fronts. First, it brought up Collaço’s controversial and racially fraught dismissal from a prestigious secondary school, a circumstance that we will turn to shortly. In so doing, it prompted Collaço to not only refute that characterization of him enjoying a comfortable retired life but also to call his removal an actual “firing.” Still clearly reeling from those recent events, Collaço nonetheless warned this now-rival editor that he “could also be displaced from his position, just like I was, given that we are both of the same color, even if you are a little fulinho [lighter-skinned]” (italics in original).Footnote ⁵⁵ Both men’s attacks, then, featured a comment about the other’s African heritage. They asserted their power in prying open the other’s blackness. Collaço’s insult – and it was an insult to highlight someone’s African descent in this context – did interestingly hint at a “we” regarding their circumstances: a “we” Collaço forged out of an imagined common struggle as “men of color.” This construct lay at the heart of O Homem’s classed and gendered racial project to unify men of influence. Yet, it was ultimately a fleeting “we,” for Collaço reached deeper in order to upset the other man. He followed the comment on his “light skin” by asking “the owner of the União if he remembers seeing slaves even lighter than him in the houses he enters,” because, Collaço continued, “I can assure you that in the kitchens there are slaves that light, as was the case in my parent’s house.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Collaço purposely collapsed the socioracial distance that ostensibly differentiated a professional, light-skinned man of color from an enslaved person. Though written to offend, this last matter actually brought out O Homem’s larger point that only the abolition of slavery could ensure a meaningful measure of honor and equality for Afro-descendants. Meanwhile, the rather casual reference to the light-skinned slaves Collaço was raised among shows that slaveowners were still not stigmatized at this point in the 1870s. In fact, the allusion to his upbringing – perhaps ironically – lent Collaço a degree of credibility and power with which to debase the other editor.

In contrast to the initial polemic with A Provincia, the confrontation with A União pointed to and revived Collaço’s recent clashes with the provincial government. As everyone knew, those clashes derived from an infamous punch he threw at a colleague during a school function, from the legal battle that ensued, from his subsequent firing, and from the racist overtones that were used to describe the process in the press. In other words, by the time A União appeared to take Collaço on, it had been long deemed acceptable to racially slight him. The school incident happened about a year before O Homem was published, at a teacher’s meeting where a colleague of Collaço’s sang the praises of an outgoing administrator. Protesting the glorification, Collaço asked to speak, which prompted the administrator, who was present, to leave the room because he knew the criticism that he awaited. Tensions escalated among the teachers, according to the official account of the afternoon. To resolve matters, the organizers simply ended the meeting. Witnesses reported, however, that the bickering continued, and the speaker told Collaço that his “slandering of the outgoing administrator was as black as his own skin” – in reply to which the accomplished editor, mathematician, and law-school graduate simply decked him on the chin.Footnote ⁵⁷ Collaço was immediately placed under house arrest, and his actions were reported to the provincial president, who ordered a legal investigation. Little question remained that he would be indicted, but – whether because of Collaço’s legal acumen or because of the powerful political allies he still preserved – he beat the charges twice, including on appeal.Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile, the partisan press also took up the incident, using the case as a means to defend or support the administration. While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to delve into those details, we can now more clearly appreciate how it was through O Homem that Collaço was finally able to exert his own voice on the situation.

In a most fundamental way, the paper enabled him to make racial discrimination the key problem. And this was not a point that he took for granted. He had endured racial taunts in public for years, long before the incident at the school and despite the norms of racial silencing. The worst, perhaps, happened in 1874, after he returned to the school he taught at from a disputed leave of absence: a note appeared in the city’s paper of record, taunting him, asking if “he was ready to obey his superior.” Despite this loaded insult, the statement hints at the degree to which Collaço had previously unsettled the so-called order of things. Overall, though, the note surely meant to return him to “his place,” a “place” of subordinated blackness. The author signed off, “Vicente, the overseer,” so as to leave clear how centrally the reality of slavery shaped the way people exercised racial power.Footnote ⁵⁹ Neither the author, who was presumably tied to the school, nor the editor of the city’s most important paper balked at using such language as “overseer” in relation to one of the country’s most talented citizens. It was not, then, that race was completely silenced in public discourse. In fact, research on Afro-descendant editors in the Brazilian southeast has shown that they, too, were publicly taunted and referred to as “slave-like.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Such examples iterate that anti-Black language shadowed Collaço’s public interventions; that the strategy of turning a political grievance into a discussion about race allowed those in power not only to deflect attention from systemic problems but also to further extend their levels of surveillance over public discourse. The anti-Black responses in effect represented an act of policing public life, an act of constituting racialized normativity. Furthermore, these instances of trying to stigmatize Collaço must be seen as related to ongoing processes of relegating blackness to the political margins of the nation. And this was not lost on Collaço. He wrote that “the outspokenness against my paper comes from voices interested in preserving the actual state of things.”Footnote ⁶¹ He also went to extraordinary lengths to respond to criticism lobbed against him in equally racialized terms. His was a rare voice that mocked whiteness, referring to those who chided him as “the pretentious descendants of the Caucuses.”Footnote ⁶² While the “pretentious” part of the slight probably weighed more than referring to someone as a “descendant of the Caucuses,” the conjoining of the two destabilized ingrained assumptions about white superiority. He actually also appropriated the insulting line – “mulattos on the scene” – for the name of a column that he maintained to describe his paper’s evolving political stance. In so doing, Collaço signaled the fearlessness that made him appear threatening: “Whatever direction the storm comes from, it no longer scares or bothers us. We are already used to swallowing our pride, calmly and without reacting. This has been the daily bread of our existence.”Footnote ⁶³

Conclusion

This chapter represents the first in-depth analysis of Collaço and O Homem to appear in English. Many more questions than answers remain about Collaço’s life, especially about the period following O Homem. We have also yet to learn much about his children beyond the reference to them that appeared in his obituary. Still, this initial foray into the newspaper and its editor’s biography highlights some salient aspects of the process of slave emancipation: its public nature, the importance of the press, and the racialized political responses that responded to the rise of abolitionism. Clearly, the abolition debates bore upon the practice of politics, and their consequences were felt both immediately in the mid-1870s and in the longer term.

Most uniquely, O Homem’s story calls attention to the important nineteenth-century history of racial silencing, which was an ideology and cultural process that shaped power relations. Collaço’s paper illuminated the racialized work that this ideology did in suppressing debates on hierarchy and politics and, by extension, slavery. It also helps us better understand how the “breaking of this silence” sparked noticeable shifts in racial subjectivities. O Homem argued that patterns of racial discrimination existed and that the select prominent Afro-Brazilians occupying public posts were being subjected to an extralegal campaign of removal. Collaço’s own controversial dismissal from the secondary school doubtlessly drove this perception. These actions, he insisted, violated the constitutional ideal of legal equality and required Pernambuco’s “men of color” to respond accordingly and in a coordinated manner.

The newspaper thus represented a bold means of rewriting the racial narrative. Collaço proceeded through a variety of columns on history, the law, religion, science, and contemporary affairs. Notably, he also embraced the abolition of slavery as integral to his project and, for the first time in almost a decade of local abolitionist struggle, linked the debates about abolition to considerations about Black belonging and rights. In so doing, O Homem provoked even a publication like A Provincia – which was ostensibly on the antislavery side of the political spectrum – to lash out. This racialized response revealed a pervasive ambivalence about blackness, including in circles presumably committed to abolitionism. These contradictory, racist strands of abolitionist discourse endured within the broad reformist coalition. But rather than dismissing this history as exceptional, it is important to situate these anti-Black responses as part of a long and troubling history of anti-Black racialized politics. A Provincia’s and A União’s interactions with O Homem, for example, skirted discussions about power, and in this case public jobs, by generating a polemic around race. These new polemics cleverly and disingenuously changed the focus from racial discrimination and political patronage to whether it was even legitimate for “men of color” to present their grievances in such terms. In a sense, the responses were about a normative construction of an “us” that was strategically portrayed as not being about race, which enabled the perpetuation of Black political exclusion.

In terms of the history of racial silence, then, this chapter points to the public arena as an important site where this ideology operated. It highlights the prevailing discourses used to enforce such “silence,” which in the end revealed the rather open nature of racialized language in the press. When one takes into the account the plethora of runaway-slave ads in Brazilian newspapers for most of the nineteenth century, it is clear that both slavery and race were indeed quite regular features of public life. However, the controversies surrounding O Homem make it clear that it was not that race could not be discussed but instead that Black empowerment remained too threatening an issue; such discussions endangered not only social relations among the free population but also the slave-based foundation of the national order. The policing of Black political discourse, which we saw practiced by rival white and Afro-descendant editors, also signaled a mechanism through which to constrict how Black politics were articulated and debated. The comparatively small number of avowedly nineteenth-century Black newspapers in Brazil should thus not be seen as reflecting a lower degree of Afro-racial consciousness but perhaps as more a reflection of the dominant modes of public politics.

There remains yet one last consideration to highlight in terms of the effects of anti-Black racialization in political discourse, and that pertains to how former slaveholders in the post-emancipation era depicted the wider abolitionist movement in racialist language to discredit the legitimacy of popular political action. In the months following emancipation, it was not unusual to find articles in the press about “disorderly Black gangs” disrupting procedures on election days or, worse, instigating conflicts to shut down the electoral process altogether.Footnote ⁶⁴ These sentiments, for example, surfaced quite prominently during the last election cycle of the empire (August/September 1889), some eighteen months after the abolition of slavery, and aimed to stoke anti-Black fear and sideline popular, including Black, political participation. Collaço’s story, then, especially in terms of O Homem, should be understood as connected to this larger period where anti-Black discourse emerged as a response to political contestation. His experience illustrates that within the struggle over abolition, a related, fiercely disputed process unfolded in the press over the place of blackness in public life; that the deep-seated tradition of “silencing race,” in effect, set in motion anti-Black racial subjectivities.

In 1955, Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) published a brief article in the magazine of the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia (IGHBa).Footnote ¹ By then, Freyre’s best-known work, The Masters and the Slaves (Casa grande e senzala), was already an editorial success in Brazil and in the United States, and Freyre was among Brazil’s most renowned intellectual interpreters.Footnote ² The IGHBa magazine was celebrating the centenary of engineer Teodoro Sampaio (1855–1937), and Freyre lamented that the occasion had not inspired “any scholar of national questions” to study Sampaio, “that almost forgotten embodiment of a Brazilian from Bahia, who also found a partial place in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.” Freyre’s complaint was justified. Sampaio’s essays on topography, fluvial navigation, sanitation, Brazilian history, and Indigenous languages and cultures were (and still are) little known among Brazilian scholars.Footnote ³ This lack of interest, Freyre argued, was a sign of the degree to which Brazil’s mid-twentieth-century intellectuals were depriving themselves of “valuable contributions that would allow them to understand and clarify many shadowy areas of the Brazilian past,” which had been expressed in the publications and research notes of the man Freyre called the eminência parda of Brazilian letters.Footnote ⁴

Eminência parda was the term Freyre chose to convince the readers of the IGHBa magazine that the engineer deserved a place among the great interpreters of Brazilian society. Freyre was very careful in his use of this expression, placing it in quotation marks and suffusing it with ambiguity and possible double meanings. In Brazilian Portuguese, eminência parda is the most common translation of éminence grise, the French term used to describe someone who exercises great and determinate influence over those in power without holding any official position of authority. But the word parda was also a category of skin color in Brazil, which meant that eminência parda could also be read as “dusky eminence,” with all of the ambiguous racial connotations that designation would have carried in early-twentieth-century North America. In using this term, Freyre aimed to highlight Sampaio’s position as an influential and lettered pardo who had been forgotten by the Brazilian intellectual class.

But this chapter does not spring solely from a desire to explore the gallery of forgotten Brazilian intellectuals. It aims instead to examine the impasses, conflicts, and agreements that shaped Teodoro Sampaio’s life trajectory, thus opening an analytic window on the possibilities for social transformation that were available to a man of color during and after the crisis that led to Brazilian abolition. Teodoro Sampaio lived through a time when the dismantling of slavery coincided with a racialization of social status, justified by the postulates of scientific racism. His trajectory thus illuminates how a free, educated son of a freed mother could make his way through a society that was reinventing socioracial hierarchies even as slavery lost its legitimacy. Placing his story in the context of Brazil’s broader social history, this chapter aims to elucidate the intricate network of relationships and endeavors engendered by a pardo, born on a large slave property, who managed to become an engineer and manumit his three brothers, who were enslaved on the same plantation where Sampaio himself was raised free. Based on Sampaio’s autobiographical texts, books, articles, and private correspondence – as well as on what his contemporaries wrote about him – this chapter will reflect on what we can learn from Teodoro Sampaio’s life about what it meant to be a free, lettered pardo man during the dismantling of Brazilian slavery.

Teodoro Sampaio and Slavery

Sampaio was born on January 7, 1855, at the Engenho Canabrava sugar plantation. The property belonged to Manoel da Costa Pinto, the Viscount de Aramaré. Costa Pinto was an important land- and slaveowner in Santo Amaro, a municipality in the famous Recôncavo Baiano, at the core of the slave-driven economy that then thrived across the Americas. Until the first half of the nineteenth century, the region reliably produced the abundant exports of sugarcane that enriched the slave-owning elite of the Atlantic World.Footnote ⁵ Teodoro Sampaio was born to a freedwoman named Domingas da Paixão do Carmo. His paternity is much disputed. One biographer wrote dramatically that the subject was shrouded by “dense mystery.”Footnote ⁶ The most common version of the story attributes Sampaio’s paternity to Father Manoel Fernandes Sampaio, who supported Teodoro’s schooling and bequeathed his surname. In a brief autobiographical sketch requested by Donald Pierson in 1936, Sampaio claimed to be the son of a modest family. He described his mother as “a Black woman, a person of notable beauty among her race,” and he claimed that his father was “a white man, an educated gentleman from a family of agriculturalists, or senhores de engenho, from Santo Amaro.”Footnote ⁷ One year later, when Sampaio wrote his will, he omitted his father’s name, making it clear that he did not want any controversy about the subject.Footnote ⁸ His discretion was understandable, given his ostensible father’s clerical status, although Freyre himself had already noted in The Masters and the Slaves that such family arrangements were common in the sugarcane regions, where the children of priests were “treated kindly” and raised in “more favorable circumstances than in any other Catholic country.”Footnote ⁹ Along these same lines, it was common for men, even if they were priests, to have children with enslaved women; while they might not have been faithful to Church doctrine, they were certainly attentive to Brazilian society’s patriarchal logic.

Teodoro Sampaio died on October 15, 1937. In a small departure from his father’s discretion, José Teodoro Sampaio (Teodoro Sampaio’s son and the executor of his estate) identified Teodoro as pardo on his death certificate and named Joaquim Fernandes Sampaio and Domingas Sampaio as Teodoro’s parents. In this way, José Sampaio conferred legitimacy on the relationship between Domingas and a certain Joaquim, who was probably a relative of Father Manoel, although I have not been able to find any traces of him in the notarial archives.Footnote ¹⁰

There is yet another version of Teodoro’s paternity, related by members of the Costa Pinto family, who owned the Engenho Canabrava. In a letter addressed to the biographer Arnaldo Lima in the 1980s, João Gabriel da Costa Pinto said that it was a commonplace in family lore that Teodoro Sampaio was the son of Major Francisco Antônio da Costa Pinto, the Count of Sergimirim and brother of the Viscount of Aramaré; this was a narrative tradition, he claimed, that had “began with his [Sampaio’s] birth and was passed down through subsequent generations.” Costa Pinto did caution, however, that Sampaio “maintained complete discretion in this regard, perhaps because he was resentful that he had never been recognized by his father, who died a single man.” Major Costa Pinto did, in fact, die single in 1863, without recognizing or naming as heirs any natural or illegitimate children.Footnote ¹¹ Yet if the major had by chance had children, it would have been relatively uncommon for him – as a well-off nineteenth-century gentleman – to have omitted them. Brazilian historiography is full of studies that show that it was common for men on their deathbeds to recognize their paternity during the time of slavery.Footnote ¹² Perhaps this supposed kinship was nothing more than a twentieth-century desire on the part of the Costa Pintos, who may not have bequeathed any of their wealth to the son of one of their slaves but wanted nonetheless to inherit his prestige. For even though Freyre was correct in complaining about the general lack of academic interest in Sampaio, the engineer did enjoy fame among some Brazilian intellectual circles for being a son of a slave who had succeeded in the white world. The magazine issue devoted to him by the IGHBa was in this sense emblematic.

Regarding Domingas da Paixão, we know that she was a captive and that she worked as a nanny and housekeeper at the Big House and sacristy of the Engenho Canabrava.Footnote ¹³ Although we lack precise information about her manumission, it is reasonable to suppose that her freedom letter resulted from domestic negotiations, in which her dependent position vis-à-vis her former owners would have been evident. Maria Helena Machado’s recent research, some of which is included in this volume (see Chapter 6), does much to clarify the customary conditions that delimited freedwomen’s autonomy in the 1800s. Sampaio’s biographers from the 1950s, in an attempt to construct a romanticized genealogy for a man they termed a “mulato laden with color,” described Domingas as a woman of irresistible femininity.Footnote ¹⁴ She was, wrote Arnaldo Pimenta da Cunha, “graceful and intelligent,” the color of “purple cypress or ebony,” a woman who “embodied the beauty of those almost regal Black women.” “With a truly beautiful face, she had an elegant figure and was very well dressed,” demonstrating an “enchantment of posture and elegance” that “attracted and seduced whoever came near” that “daughter of Jeje Africans.” Thus Pimenta da Cunha, a biographer and personal friend of Teodoro Sampaio´s, went overboard in adhering to the much-contested tendency to rhetorically subsume masters’ sexual violence against female slaves in order to celebrate the racial mixture that was – at the end of the day – the supposed legacy of men of Teodoro Sampaio’s status. Descriptions such as his were not mere rhetorical devices; it is apparent from the recent historiography that essentialized representations of Black and mulata sensuality had broad social and political significance.Footnote ¹⁵

Pimenta da Cunha described Father Manoel as a “worshipper of muses”; for that reason he could not keep his vow of chastity. The lapse of this cultured, religious man was justified: he simply could not adhere to the demands of the priesthood in the face of the physical attributes of the crioula (Brazilian-born Afro-descendant woman). The daughter of Jeje Africans compelled the priest’s sins.Footnote ¹⁶

The sexual appetites of the Big House, the masters’ desire for the bodies of enslaved women, and the vast numbers of pardos who came to populate Brazilian society are all central to Gilberto Freyre’s analysis of the formation of Brazilian society and culture. In Freyre’s interpretation, “there is no slavery without sexual depravity. Depravity is the essence of such a regime.”Footnote ¹⁷ From that perspective, the sexual violence carried out by masters entranced by the latent sexuality of African and crioula women produced generations of glorious bastards, like the “illegitimate son of the master,” who “learned to read and write sooner than did the white lads, leaving them behind as he went on to higher studies. Rural traditions tell us of many such cases … of crias [dependent children raised to serve in families other than their own] who made their way upward, socially and economically, by making good use of the instruction that was given them.”Footnote ¹⁸ In this Freyrean sense, Teodoro Sampaio was indeed an eminência parda, the son of a priest gestated in the archaic traditions of Brazil’s Northeastern sugar country. Through Freyre’s lens, Brazilian society was racially and socially defined by its mestiço character, which made the borders between masters and slaves – and whites and Blacks – more plastic, more porous, and less perverse.

This interpretation, which has long been contested in Brazilian academia, was already widespread even before The Masters and the Slaves became a bestseller in the 1930s. During the post-abolition period, Sampaio was often exalted by the IGHBa as a successful emblem of miscegenation. Social scientist Thales de Azevedo noted that in 1922 a panel of seventy-nine notable Bahians had been created to commemorate the centennial of Brazilian Independence. One of the most distinguished among them was Teodoro Sampaio, who was by Azevedo’s classification a “dark mulato.”Footnote ¹⁹

If Teodoro Sampaio was reserved when referring to his father, the same was not so in relation to the short time that he lived in the Engenho Canabrava. In the autobiographical text that he wrote for Donald Pierson, he boasted about having a grand slave plantation for a cradle. In telling his story, Sampaio took pride in the master’s power and the mistress’s “generosity”:

Though it does not appear among the postmortem inventories of the Recôncavo Baiano’s great properties, the Engenho Canabrava, in Bom Jardim, belonged to a wealthy landowner named Manoel da Costa Pinto.Footnote ²¹ The Costa Pinto clan was part of the select group that dominated the social, economic, and political life of Bahia in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. According to the historian Eul-Soon Pang, in 1880 the Viscount de Aramaré, a “notable agriculturalist,” was a founding partner of the first industrial sugar mill in Bahia, which was located in Bom Jardim.Footnote ²² Francisco Antonio de Costa Pinto, Antonio da Costa Pinto Junior, and Manuel Lopes da Costa Pinto comprised the “patriarchy of agrarian modernization in the nineteenth century.” A list of their main undertakings includes everything from the founding of Bahia’s Imperial Institute of Agriculture (Imperial Instituto Baiano de Agricultura) to their tenacious lobbying of the Imperial and Provincial governments to create the Santo Amaro Railroad Company (Companhia de Estrada de Ferro de Santo Amaro).Footnote ²³

The Costa Pinto family was innovative when it came to modernizing sugarcane production but conservative in their politics. They were among the funders of the Society for Agriculture, Commerce and Industry of the Province of Bahia, which mobilized large land- and slaveowners from the Recôncavo Baiano against the abolitionist movement.Footnote ²⁴ Freyre visited the Costa Pintos when he was in Bahia in the 1930s and expressed his gratitude to his hosts, whose kitchen served up the “the most delicious flavors from the traditional cuisine of the Big House.”Footnote ²⁵ Even long after abolition, the sugar aristocracy preserved the flavors of northeastern slave society.

During the time of slavery, Domingas da Paixão occupied herself with the culinary traditions of the Big House at the Engenho Canabrava: it was there that she would have experienced both Teodoro’s departure to study in the Imperial capital and the daily plantation routines of her three enslaved sons, Martinho, Ezequiel, and Matias. At the age of ten, father Manoel arranged for Teodoro Sampaio to leave behind his early education at the engenho and attend boarding school at the Colégio São Salvador, in Rio de Janeiro. The year was 1865, a time when the interprovincial slave traffic was radically reorganizing the regional demography of Brazilian slavery. The expansion of coffee cultivation in western São Paulo and southern Rio de Janeiro was absorbing an increasing proportion of Brazil’s enslaved workforce, which had previously been concentrated in the old plantation zones.Footnote ²⁶ Robert Conrad estimates that Bahia’s slave population dropped from 300,000 to 76,838 between 1864 and 1887.Footnote ²⁷ This decrease was substantially impelled by the interprovincial slave traffic. But Teodoro Sampaio migrated to Rio de Janeiro for other reasons and with another destiny. After seven years at the Colégio São Salvador, he enrolled at the Escola Central (the Central School, which would later become the Escola Politécnica) in December 1871. He claimed to have been taught by many great men of science, including André Rebouças – the subject of Hebe Mattos’ Chapter 12 in this volume – and the Viscount of Rio Branco, who were both also from Bahia.Footnote ²⁸ José Pereira Rebouças was part of Sampaio’s graduating class in 1876.Footnote ²⁹

During those years the Imperial capital was roiled by debates and proposals about the so-called servile question. The Viscount of Rio Branco, Sampaio’s sometime teacher and a conservative chief of the Imperial Cabinet, in fact called the shots in the emancipation process. The 1871 Free Womb Law, which would grant the incrementally free status of ingênuo to all children born of slave mothers from that point forward, was in the process of being approved. As the historian Sidney Chalhoub emphasizes, in the midst of a tense political and judicial debate, the 1871 law also formally recognized many entitlements that had already been hard-won in practice by the captive population, such as the right to accumulate savings to purchase letters of manumission. At the same time, however, the Rio Branco Law preserved many rituals of subordination; it remained the masters’ prerogative, for example, to personally hand over a freed person’s manumission letter, thus reaffirming freedom as a favor conceded by the master, which reinforced his or her power over the person they had once held as property.Footnote ³⁰ Even so, large slaveowners such as the Costa Pintos still rebelled against what they understood as state interference in their private business and state compromises with those who yearned for their freedom; in their view, the law ran the risk of compromising the “moral force” that the owners wished to continue to deploy.Footnote ³¹ Among the most daring Liberal ranks, meanwhile, defenders of the “slaves’ cause” such as André Rebouças acted vigorously to enforce the captives’ rights through the press, the Parliament, and the courts.

When recalling his youth, Teodoro Sampaio commented that “we used to run from the Polytechnic School to the legislative sessions, trading a physics class for one in parliamentary oration.”Footnote ³² In the midst of such effervescence, however, there is no record of Sampaio’s involvement in either side of the slavery dispute. He did, throughout his five years of engineering study, maintain regular correspondence with members of the Costa Pinto family.Footnote ³³ It seems likely that, in exchange for his frequent updates about his studies and the life of the Imperial Court, news reached him about the repercussions of the Free Womb Law in the red-soiled heart of seigneurial power.Footnote ³⁴ When Teodoro Sampaio returned to Bahia in 1877 with his engineering degree, the economic and political scene was highly unfavorable for the gentlemen of the Recôncavo. Sampaio’s visit was brief and had a single clear objective: to negotiate the manumission of Martinho, one of his brothers, who was still captive at Canabrava. This suggests that Sampaio had a plan to manumit all of his brothers, Domingas’ sons. Nearly a year later, Sampaio returned to Bahia to finalize his purchase of Martinho’s manumission letter. Very soon thereafter, he assumed the post of second-class engineer at the Imperial Hydraulic Commission, which had been created by the Liberal minister João Lins Vieira Cansanção de Sinimbu, the Visconde of Sinimbu, in order to study Brazil’s interior ports and navigational conditions.

It was at that juncture, according to the autobiography that he wrote for Donald Pierson, that Sampaio claimed to have suffered from “race prejudice.” In a rare recognition that he had been touched by prejudice, Sampaio broke what Hebe Mattos has termed “the ethic of silence” that surrounded his ambiguous social position. The act of discrimination occurred after he was nominally appointed to the Imperial Hydraulic Commission but then summarily excluded from the official list after an employee of Minister Sinimbu’s Cabinet deemed it improvident that a “man of dusky hue” should be among an entourage led by the North American engineer W. Milnor Roberts. “Hence I was excluded and experienced for the first time the sting of prejudice,” Sampaio lamented, though he quickly clarified that the incident was rapidly reversed, thanks to the personal mediation of Senator Viriato de Medeiros, who informed Minister Sinimbu of the situation in time for it to be put right.Footnote ³⁵

The attention Sinimbu gave to this incident reveals much about the political alliances that worked in favor of the Costa Pinto family’s interests and by extension protected the young engineer. The Viscount de Sinimbu was president of Bahia province between 1856 and 1858, a turbulent period during which he had to confront rebellious multitudes up in arms over the high cost of food and other necessities.Footnote ³⁶ Before an attempted assassination that sent him back to Rio de Janeiro in fear for his own life, Sinimbu frequently visited the engenhos of the Recôncavo, overseeing provincial public works and planning others that might facilitate the flow of sugarcane production, especially in Santo Amaro. He was an engaged administrator and an enthusiast of projects intended to modernize the sugar sector in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁷ It is thus easy to imagine the future Viscounts of Sinimbu and Aramaré, between visits to the cane fields and dinners in the Big House, having opportunity and motive to seal alliances that would end up benefiting Teodoro Sampaio in the 1870s. The clientelistic political culture that structured relationships among the Empire’s political leaders would have been useful in undoing the damage done to Sampaio by that “rare” example of “social prejudice” that nearly excluded him from his professional debut on the Hydraulic Commission. The rapid and satisfactory resolution of the problem fit within the paternalistic logic of the day. This “incident,” this jabbing “thorn of prejudice,” did not even lead Sampaio, in the end, to recognize the existence of any form of racial distinction in Brazil. In 1919, analyzing Brazil’s slave past, he pondered that “because of their mild ways, Brazilians never experienced the ferocity of [racial] prejudice.”Footnote ³⁸

At that point in his life, it was clear that Teodoro Sampaio, like so many intellectuals of his age, tried to downplay Brazilian racism; in his view, it only caused jabs, small discomforts, which did not render professional relationships between Blacks and whites unviable.Footnote ³⁹ Because of this, he made use of another strategy of distinction, extolling his own professional capacities and affirming his status as a free and loyal man. In his autobiography he noted that, as soon as he joined the team of North American technicians on the Hydraulic Commission chaired by W. Milnor Roberts, “the cloud of prejudice” was quickly dissipated, thanks to the “value of his work,” and Sampaio had “honor of winning their friendship and esteem,” which “proved with the passing of the years to be very beneficial and served me well in the profession that I adopted.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In this way, the mark of his color was rendered invisible by his excellent engineering attributes. Such was the strategy that Sampaio and so many others chose in order to navigate the minefield that was Brazilian society during the crisis of slavery: it was best to simply snuff out one’s racial condition by recourse to exceptional professional talents and skills.

At the same time, Sampaio showered praise on those who showed him “esteem and friendship.” One example involved the North American geologist Orville Derby, whom Sampaio met when they worked together at Brazil’s Museu Nacional (National Museum) in 1875. Using the racialized vocabulary of the time, Sampaio recognized in the geologist “a sweet and well-grounded soul, with the phlegmatic calm that is characteristic of his race.”Footnote ⁴¹ Thus, even as Sampaio sought to make his own racial condition invisible and to free himself from any “cloud of prejudice,” he classified Derby’s “sweetness” and “phlegmatic calm” as characteristics of the “race” of the North American man whose admiration Sampaio had earned. Race was not a relevant attribute when Sampaio described himself, but positive racial characteristics were useful when it came to recognizing the condition of whiteness in others.Footnote ⁴²

Even as Teodoro Sampaio grappled with racial identities shaped by the scientific thinking of his day, he strove to realize two great endeavors: the consolidation of his own career and the manumission of all of his brothers. Both tasks required precision and meticulousness, qualities that were also important in his profession, all the more so because he was a man of color who aspired to some form of social distinction. Entangled in a web of favors, protection, and mutual recognition, both Sampaio’s employment on the Hydraulic Commission and the purchase of his brother Martinho’s manumission letter (finalized in 1878) were woven from threads that linked Sampaio to his family’s old masters, the Costa Pinto family. For as long as the Empire endured, Sampaio made use of the family’s political connections in order to navigate around his professional obstacles. In truth, recourse to webs of fictive kin and favors was part of the organizing logic of Imperial politics, whether the issues involved were great questions of state or everyday jockeying for employment and prestige among engineers and other professionals, who were extremely dependent on government jobs and resources.Footnote ⁴³ For those who depended on governmental decisions to exercise their professions, it was critical to cultivate good relationships with people in positions of power and learn to make effective use of clientelism. For Brazilian engineers in the late nineteenth century, the best opportunities were in grand public works projects such as the expansion of the railway network, the development of the water supply, and the improvement of urban sanitation.

Teodoro Sampaio knew well that without strong relationships, difficulties would emerge. After the Hydraulic Commission’s work was finished in 1880, at a time when Brazil’s Liberal Party was determined to prevail in the complex internal politics of the Empire, Sampaio lamented:

Researcher Arnaldo do Rosário Lima interpreted this document as evidence of the obstacles imposed upon the engineer by his racial condition.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet the reasons Sampaio himself gave for his professional annoyances were conjunctural and partisan. His professional difficulties resulted from “injustice on the part of the men who govern us in these times of Liberal rule.” The year was 1880. The 1878 cabinet, led by the aforementioned Liberal Viscount of Sinimbu, who was quite close to the emperor, had dissolved because of dissension within the Liberal ranks and the instability provoked by the Vintém revolt in Rio de Janeiro. The political atmosphere was turbulent on the streets and confused in the legislature, and governmental control was hotly disputed among Liberal leaders of various stripes, giving rise to the impasse that hampered Sampaio.

Finally, on March 28, 1880, José Antônio Saraiva, who had been born in Bom Jardim, another district in Santo Amaro, established a new Cabinet, which opened space in the government for two other Liberal Bahians, Conselheiro Manoel Pinto de Sousa Dantas and Rui Barbosa.Footnote ⁴⁶ Ironically, the good times that the engineer so eagerly awaited came with the rise of these Liberals, who had long been committed to the end of slavery and were thus the sworn adversaries of landed elite families such as the Costa Pintos. In this new scenario, Sampaio’s employment difficulties were resolved, and he was named to the position of first-class engineer by the provincial government, charged with prolonging the Bahian railway to the São Francisco River Valley region. This new position suited the Costa Pintos as well: they had recently begun operations at the new Bom Jardim sugar mill and were more eager than ever to facilitate the outflow of their sugar production. This was just the opportunity that Sampaio needed to rescue another of his brothers from captivity. In 1882, it was Ezequiel’s turn to become a freedman. In a letter addressed to the Viscount of Aramaré, the engineer justified his efforts and appealed to the seigneurial grace of his brother’s owner as follows:

After paying his respects and explaining his financial limitations, Dr. Sampaio proceeded to present the Viscount with a choice in forms of payment (cash or bonds), as if he were already certain of a positive response. He made a point of demonstrating that he only had limited savings but that he would willingly make them available, given the importance of the purchase. In such a situation, seigneurial “protection,” “friendship,” and “generosity” were presented as indispensable. Sampaio was playing with cards from the old paternalistic deck, disregarding the new rules of the game that had been laid down by the abolitionist movement.

After the Free Womb Law of 1871, enslaved people gained the right to buy their freedom, and both they and free abolitionists tenaciously defended that right in the courts and on the streets.Footnote ⁴⁸ As historian Maria Helena Machado has indicated, by the early 1880s the abolitionist movement occupied public plazas to delegitimize slavery in a “turbulent and popular tone.” In those years, historian Elciene Azevedo has added, enslaved people’s own agency effectively combined with the strategies pursued by lawyers, journalists, and judges who favored “the cause of liberty,” amplifying in the courts the growing public dissatisfaction with masters who impeded their slaves’ manumission.Footnote ⁴⁹

The abolitionist wave also advanced among the senzalas (slave quarters) of the Recôncavo, in plantations that had held large numbers of slaves since colonial times. The bankruptcy of slavery and the grave crisis of sugar production increasingly preoccupied slave masters, who sought ways to guarantee not only their profits but also their supposed “moral force,” which had been viscerally compromised by slavery’s delegitimization.Footnote ⁵⁰ In response, they employed strategies such as declaring themselves in favor of abolition or advertising their own supposed benevolence and charity vis-à-vis their slaves. In 1881, the push for freedom gained still more popular support as residents looked forward to the visit of José do Patrocínio, one of abolitionism’s most important Black leaders, to the city of Salvador. Patrocínio, who was famous for his intransigent defense of abolition and his passionate speeches, once told the emperor himself: “When this cursed arid soil cracks, after drinking for three centuries the sweat and tears of millions of men, doesn’t Your Majesty worry that your throne might be one of the ruins? … There is only one serious issue in this country: the abolition of slavery.”Footnote ⁵¹ Invited by the Gazeta da Tarde to meet with Bahian abolitionists, José de Patrocínio met with a large and attentive audience.Footnote ⁵² Right after his visit, the Sociedade Libertadora Bahiana (Bahian Liberation Society) was founded; it would go on to become the province’s most important abolitionist society. Among the most progressive Liberals, the mood was festive. Abolitionist Clubs proliferated in various cities and filled the streets with pamphlets advertising abolitionist rallies and parties to raise funds for “the slave’s cause.”

Yet despite this ferment, Teodoro Sampaio followed his plans – without politicizing the purchase of his brother’s freedom, and without transforming into a right what he could gain from subtly exploiting a wobbly but still pervasive slavocratic logic. In this “game of dissimulation,” those involved – and not only Sampaio – showed that they were skilled at negotiating issues of freedom in ways that did much to shape and restrict the place people of color would occupy in a rapidly evolving social order. Elsewhere, I have used the term “game of dissimulation” to describe the interplay of dispute, conciliation, and dissension that surrounded socioracial identities in the context of abolition.Footnote ⁵³ The argument is that the flagrant racialization of the actions, political choices, and cultural practices of people of color was integral to the disputes that raged during Brazil’s drawn-out emancipation process. Yet the game was never explicit; for Brazil’s slaveowning class, it was as important to hide the racial criteria that guided decisions of state as it was to ensure the continuity of social hierarchies inherited from slavery. Teodoro Sampaio, it seems, had mastered the rules of this game.

It was not by chance that the task of delivering the letter negotiating Ezequiel’s freedom fell to Sampaio’s mother, Domingas. She had once herself been enslaved to the powerful Viscount of Aramaré: because of that, the very act of approaching him with a request saturated with reverence and appeals to his seigneurial generosity demonstrated Domingas’ respect for the conceptual construction of manumission as a gift. At the same time, she was probably the person to whom Teodoro Sampaio had promised that he would purchase Ezequiel’s freedom, spending his savings with “heartfelt goodwill.” Because Sampaio had left Canabrava at the age of ten and returned only recently to his birthplace, the freedwoman Domingas would have been the main link between Sampaio and the brothers who had remained on the plantation. Domingas was thus much more than the mere bearer of the letter. According to Robert Slenes, one of Brazil’s foremost authorities on the history of the slave family, the purchase of manumission in the nineteenth century was usually a family project engendered by women.Footnote ⁵⁴ By mediating with her ex-master the purchase of her enslaved son by another who had risen to become a doutor (doctor), Domingas may have sought to reconstitute in freedom the family ties that slavery had rendered fragile.

In his letter, Teodoro Sampaio noted that he was beginning “to establish” his “household and family.” This was his way of noting that he had recently married and begun a new job. On January 18, 1882, only two months before he began to negotiate Ezequiel’s freedom, he had married Capitolina Moreira Maia, his cousin, a twenty-four-year-old woman of colorFootnote ⁵⁵ – thus the need to establish a household in Alagoinhas, where Sampaio had begun to work on Bahia’s railroad line. Not by chance, that same line was used to circulate news about abolitionist agitation across Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁶ Ezequiel’s manumission, paid for with Teodoro Sampaio’s savings, became reality with little fanfare in 1882; it was, in the end, a negotiation for freedom carried out within the domestic sphere of the Engenho Canabrava. The recent historiography of Brazilian abolition has noted the degree to which manumission became a public spectacle in the 1880s.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet our engineer closed this chapter of his family saga far from the agitation of the streets, without entering in judicial disputes, distant from the diatribes of abolitionist journals that recounted serial histories involving persistent slaves, engaged lawyers, and slavocratic masters. Sampaio’s brother Matias was now the only one whose freedom was yet to be attained.

A Negotiated Freedom

On June 6, 1884, Manoel Pinto de Souza Dantas, leader of the Liberal Party in Bahia, took office as president of Brazil’s Council of Ministers, inaugurating the so-called Dantas Cabinet. On June 15, his son, legislator Rodolfo Dantas, presented an emancipation proposal to the Chamber of Deputies. The bill’s most controversial provision was an article that would free all slaves over the age of sixty, with no indemnity to their masters. By the wee hours of the following morning, any demonstration of sympathy for the “slave’s cause” was met with harsh criticism. At a party on the grounds of Rio’s Polytechnical School, for example, a demonstration of support for the abolitionist movement provoked one conservative deputy and staunch slavocrat to give an inflamed speech in which he railed against the “social anarchy” that had gained resonance in the Dantas project.Footnote ⁵⁸ Councilor Dantas rushed to the tribunal to defend himself and clarify that he was an emancipationist; that is, that he favored the gradual elimination of slavery, carried out under state control, and was not an agitator, a revolutionary, or even an abolitionist. He was a peacemaker, given that “the extinction of the servile element was a national aspiration, in the face of which one cannot retreat, halt, or act precipitously.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Yet not even the Parliament was appeased. Historian Jailton Brito has noted that in 1884, the masters’ protests against the project were forceful in the Bahian Recôncavo and especially in the Costa Pintos’ Santo Amaro stronghold.Footnote ⁶⁰

The sugarcane aristocracy’s first reaction was to fly the abolitionist flag while at the same time declaring themselves averse to “revolutionary agitation.”Footnote ⁶¹ Mindful of the growth of the abolitionist movement, plantation owners sought to reinforce the notion that freedom was a gift, an act of charity on the part of benevolent masters. In presenting themselves as last-minute converts to emancipationism, and in condemning the abolitionists’ “revolutionary agitation,” the masters exposed the degree to which the crisis of slavery reinforced their desire to racialize freedom. This explains why the Viscount of Aramaré arranged Matias’ manumission as soon as the Dantas project came up for discussion on the legislative agenda. In registering the manumission letter of Sampaio’s last captive brother, the Viscount wrote:

This time, Teodoro Sampaio had no need to bargain. It would have been misplaced: at that point, with slavery in its death throes, the Viscount of Aramaré was not going to charge him a penny for Matias’ freedom. His seigneurial profit would take another form. The viscount thus justified his act with the customary rationale: the freedom letter was payback for or recognition of the “good qualities” of the captive or his relatives. If we follow the Viscount of Aramaré’s logic, this act was also an honorable escape from the embarrassment that a captive brother could provoke, not only for a successful engineer like Teodoro but also among the Viscount’s allies in the “agricultural and commercial classes” who had recently converted to emancipationist politics. At the same time, Teodoro Sampaio’s status as a reputable engineer in charge of the expansion of Bahia’s railway line served them as a good example of how seigneurial tutelage was a sure path for men of color.

Matias’ manumission was officially registered on September 28, 1884, the anniversary of the 1871 Free Womb Law. There was no more opportune occasion for such an act of lordly charity. During the age of abolition, Brazilian newspapers were full of manumissions that had been sponsored by masters on that same exact date. Their ample distribution of freedom letters was widely publicized by the Bahian press, celebrated in the legislative chambers, and displayed in the public plazas and theaters of various cities. Such performative generosity was part and parcel of the owners’ reaction to the Dantas Bill’s progress. The masters sought to convince the public that the Free Womb Law was already gradually extinguishing slavery, while the Dantas project only generated social chaos and produced “anarchists.” The conservatives’ complaints about the project’s subversive qualities were exaggerated, but they were still useful, because they reaffirmed the notion that freedpeople could not live in an orderly way if freedom meant escaping from the masters’ tutelage. Teodoro Sampaio was also convinced that the 1871 law was the definitive solution to the problem of servitude. In 1916, already quite distant from the orbit of the Costa Pinto family, he wrote:

Teodoro Sampaio thus maintained the rationalizations of the slaveowning class even long after abolition, which demonstrates the political relevance of the defense of the 1871 law. As historian Joseli Mendonça has noted when analyzing the political dynamics of the 1880s, the gradualism laid out in the 1871 law served the cause of “prudent emancipationism,” which sought to perpetuate a system of “domestic agreements”: the sorts of freedom negotiations – like those undertaken by Teodoro Sampaio – that had been resolved in the living rooms of the Brazil’s Big Houses since colonial times.Footnote ⁶⁴ Matias’ manumission, like so many across the country, was thus motivated by seigneurial self-preservation and informed by the reigning logic of paternalism.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this way the manumission letter, understood as a “gift,” simultaneously freed another of Sampaio’s brothers, brought one of his life’s greatest endeavors to a successful conclusion, fulfilled Domingas’ desires, and buoyed the spirits of the Recôncavo’s master class.

In the meantime, the defenders of the Dantas project tried to reorganize after the emperor dissolved the Chamber of Deputies on September 3, 1884. On the other side, as soon as the new elections were called the great slaveowners began to envision the survival of the seigneurial world that they so valued. In Bahia, the failure of the Dantas endeavor was already foretold when Rui Barbosa, an important abolitionist, lawyer, and Liberal leader, was defeated in the new elections for the Chamber of Deputies. Bahia’s place in the Chamber was occupied instead by Conservative Inocêncio Marques de Araújo Góis Júnior, who had the full support of Santo Amaro’s Liga de Lavoura and Commércio (League of Agriculture and Commerce). The League, which counted the Costa Pintos as members, had been created in 1884 with the principal objective of placing a brake on the abolitionist locomotive.

The game had turned in favor of Viscount de Aramaré and his allies. It had been a tough fight, but the slaveowners came away stronger, expounding on the consequences of broad freedom for slaves – even sexagenarian slaves – with heated arguments grounded in scientific racism.Footnote ⁶⁶ On August 10, 1885, Deputy Lacerda Werneck firmly attacked the Dantas project, envisioning the future as follows:

Incapable, ignorant, stripped of any notion of justice, and governed only by the instincts of his race; such was the freedperson who populated the speeches of the Dantas project’s opponents. Thus represented – constructed as beings who would heap shame on the history of emancipation with their vices – Brazil’s sexagenarian slaves came to bear not only the weight of their years in captivity but also the burden of racial stigma. The liberty of sexagenarian slaves would encumber them and their nation. There was no shortage of those willing to maintain that, given the vices of their race and the scars of captivity, sexagenarian slaves could not do without the generous protection of their masters. In the end, despite abolitionist efforts to counter this assault, the legislature rejected the Dantas project on the grounds that it provided no state indemnity to slaveowners.

Teodoro Sampaio himself was an apostle of the notion that elderly slaves were best off in benevolent captivity. In “Um Engenho de Cana de Açucar de Santo Amaro,” he described thus the “life of elderly slaves” at Canabrava:

And it was in Santo Amaro, this “slave paradise,” that he and Domingas must have witnessed the ceremony in which the Viscount of Aramaré presented Matias with his manumission letter. For everyone involved, this was the successful outcome of a plan for freedom. In only six years, Teodoro’s family – taking advantage of the political context and the “humanity” of the Big House – fulfilled their collective ambition for liberty. Because she had been a “good-quality” slave, Domingas thus had the chance to reconstitute her family, outside of the gates of the Engenho Canabrava but still within the Costa Pinto family’s seigneurial domain. In this she seems to have succeeded: when Matias died on September 11, 1911, he lived in the same house as Teodoro Sampaio, on Misericórdia Street in the Bahian capital of Salvador.Footnote ⁶⁹

As Domingas began to recreate her family, the abolitionist movement tried to remake itself. And Teodoro Sampaio, for his part, ratcheted up new professional conquests. In 1886, Orville Derby, who was then the director of São Paulo’s Geographic and Geological Commission, invited him to lead the team charged with São Paulo province’s geological mapping. He recounted for Donald Pearson that, as head engineer, he was once required on short notice to present the visiting Emperor Dom Pedro II with blueprints, sketches, maps, and calculations regarding the navigability of the Parapanema River. During the impromptu audience, the emperor sat Sampaio on his right-hand side and showed much interest, not only in the land-use studies but also in the customs and languages of São Paulo’s Indigenous peoples. Pedro II, Sampaio emphasized, was not even uncomfortable with the engineer’s field uniform. The emperor’s interest convinced Teodoro Sampaio that Pedro II thirsted for knowledge, loved science, and had an “utter lack of class or color prejudice.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The emperor’s interest and relaxed attitude had redeemed Sampaio from the sting of prejudice that he had experienced at the beginning of his career.

The time of captivity ended on May 13, 1888, when Princess Isabel decreed that, from that day forward, Brazilian slavery would be extinct. The emperor and the monarchy itself quickly gave way as well, after a long reign. Not even the patriarch of the Engenho Canabrava survived those turbulent times. The Viscount of Aramaré passed away from a stroke in 1889, just days after the Republic was proclaimed; an eager proponent of sugar modernization, the Viscount only saw the first rays of the new era that dawned after abolition. In 1905, Teodoro Sampaio commented nostalgically on the end of slavery:

Teodoro Sampaio’s complaint echoed those of the Recôncavo’s slaveowners at the time of abolition. It was imprudent to have ended slavery without indemnifying the masters; doing so killed all refinement and generated social decadence. At the same time, without the old socioracial rules of deference that Sampaio had manipulated so well, and without any new laws that obligated freedmen to work, the defects of the enslaved race were left exposed. If on the one hand the engineer viewed slavery as a structure that had deformed Bahian customs by making the Big House dependent on captivity, he also believed that the inhabitants of the slave quarters were incapable of navigating freedom without the tutelage of their ex-masters. More importantly still, Sampaio recognized in the “nature” of ex-slaves a tendency toward “laziness and idleness,” befitting the race that Sampaio himself bore the mark of.

Conclusion

This was the complex character, forged by the crisis of slavery, in whose story Gilberto Freyre recognized the marks of prejudice in 1955. This was why Freyre took such pains to spell out the debt that national memory owed Sampaio, whom he referred to, with clear double entendre, as an eminência parda. The debt that Brazilian intellectuals owed to Sampaio was compounded, Freyre emphasized, by the refusal of the Academia de Letras to accept Sampaio’s request to become a member. When his candidacy was rejected, Freyre insisted, a “man of letters” who had done “enormous service to Brazil’s intellectual life” suffered the “bitter disillusionment of not receiving the glory and recognition he deserved.” In Freyre’s view, this was another stumble on the part of the Academy, which did not realize the degree to which “that elderly Brazilian of African origin was worthy of representing the Brazilian intelligentsia along with men of letters who were more European in blood and spirit.”Footnote ⁷² From a typically Freyrean perspective, in failing to take in a man of letters born of Africa, the Academy had failed to miscegenate the core of Brazilian intellectual life. The Brazilian Academy of Letters had shirked the commitment to racial reconciliation that Teodoro Sampaio had believed Brazilian society capable of.

I do not believe that Teodoro Sampaio would have been flattered to be referred to as a “Brazilian of African origin.” Yet Freyre’s insistence in characterizing him by his racial attributes helps bring to the surface the pitfalls that marked the engineer’s life story. The rest of the authors who honored Sampaio in the IHGB’s 1955 tribute only briefly mentioned the fact that he was born of slavery before going on to detail Sampaio’s intellectual achievements. They portrayed a successful engineer and first-rate intellectual who did honor to the Bahian Institute of Geography and History, thus silencing or minimizing the difficulties he experienced as a Black man in the era of abolition. Judging from his autobiographical writings, Sampaio himself would probably have preferred the script that his IGHBa colleagues adopted. But Freyre managed in only a few pages to suggest another biographical path, portraying an “eminência parda” and a “Brazilian of African origin” who had been frustrated by the refusal of the Brazilian Academy of Letters to seat him and forgotten by Brazil’s twentieth-century scientific and academic communities. These two contrasting scripts force us to the abolition-era crossroads where racism and the question of freedom intersected. In this way, Teodoro Sampaio’s life trajectory helps us to understand the array of political strategies that could be constructed by a lettered man of color, born on a large plantation, who sought to consolidate his professional career and manumit his siblings even as slavery’s demise brought with it a profound racialization of Brazilian social relations.

On September 23, 1898, Rio de Janeiro’s Presidente Barroso Street was graced with the birth of future poet and samba musician Heitor dos Prazeres. Prazeres was the son of Eduardo Alexandre dos Prazeres, a joiner by trade and a clarinetist in the band of Brazil’s National Guard. His mother was Celestina Gonçalves Martins, a seamstress. Prazeres’ birth alone was enough to make a street of questionable social prestige one of Rio de Janeiro’s most important cultural reference points. But the Prazeres family was not alone: in fact, the neighborhood was made up of many other interesting people, brimming with history. The so-called Cidade Nova, centered around the famous Praza Onze in central Rio, was characterized at the end of the nineteenth century by its expressive Black presence. It counted among its residents the well-known tias Baianas (literally, “Bahian aunts,” Black female migrants from the state of Bahia known for their elaborate dress and protagonistic role in Afro-Brazilian religion, music, and street commerce), as well as their counterparts from Minas Gerais and the province of Rio de Janeiro. They, together with many Black families of freed- and free people who called Cidade Nova home, transformed the region into a Pequena África (Little Africa), which eventually extended into the neighborhoods of Saúde, Gamboa, Estácio, and Santo Cristo.Footnote ¹

Through their everyday practice, these people found ways to affirm themselves as legitimate residents of the city. On May 13, 1888 – the day of Brazil’s final abolition of slavery and ten years before the Prazeres family would celebrate Heitor’s birth – their neighbors at Presidente Barroso #36 welcomed a group of twenty-three “residents of the Cidade Nova and descendants of the Black race who, having already formed an incipient familial nucleus,” discussed the formation of the Sociedade Familiar de Dança Prazer da Violeta (Violeta’s Pleasure Family Dance Society). The society’s inauguration was set for June 29, 1888, the day on which Princess Isabel – who had signed the abolition decree – would celebrate her birthday. With this decision, those gentlemen and ladies, who claimed famed Black abolitionist José do Patrocinio as their “leader and undefeated liberator,” demonstrated “their jubilation in the face of this brilliant culmination of Brazilian Independence,” which allowed them to “today consider [their] Brazil – with joy, glory, flowers, and smiles – confrère of the great land redeemed by Abraham Lincoln.”Footnote ² The list of signatories, now mostly unknown, included Agostinho José Alves, Severino de Sousa Júnior, Julio Antonio de Miranda, Guilherme Ferreira Alves, Afonso Gil da Mata, Adão de Oliveira Costa, Francelino Satyro de Alcantara, Damasio Ernesto da Fonseca, Alfredo Eloy Cardoso, Virgilio da Silva Gurgel, Raphael Guillobel, José Joaquim de Oliveira, Antonio Felix Vieira da Silva, Elisario Luiz dos Santos, Cecilia Maria do Rosário, Joana Baptista, Augusta d’Oliveira Alves, Lucia Geraldina da Silva, Anaysa da Conceição, Justina Camila dos Santos, Maria Francisca Vaz, Antonia Maria da Penha, and Leopoldina Lauriana Rodrigues.

Cognizant of the moment’s significance, these “descendants of the Black race” – some darker, some lighter, but all free – did not waste the opportunity to present themselves to society, as soon as possible after abolition, in terms that they understood as befitting the status of respectable citizens. They formed a union of families, they shared an interest in consolidating a space of healthy recreation for members of their socioracial group, and they showed themselves to be tuned in to the connections Brazil was establishing with other nations. Against the grain of the racial stigmas that emerged with new force after slavery’s end and tended to limit freedom’s universalization, the Sociedade Familiar de Dança Prazer da Violeta, from its base in the Cidade Nova, sought to break with a series of racial stereotypes.Footnote ³ At the same time, the Society did not conceal the side they took in the political dispute surrounding the survival of Brazil’s monarchy, distancing themselves from republican partisans and thus – as we shall see – attracting another set of problems.

In this way, despite general goodwill, the group was vulnerable – so much so that, whether due to obstacles created by public security agents, the princess’s state of health on her birthday, some internal disarticulation, or subsequent lack of interest on the part of the newspaper, this was the only time that the society’s activities appeared in the press.Footnote ⁴ All the same, historians must work with such gaps, and the society’s absence from the newspapers should not be taken as proof of the dissolution of the project that had motivated its founding. The practices of sociability that had for decades brought together free people, freedpeople, and the enslaved – practices that continued throughout the region at the time of the society’s founding – bear witness to the fact that the Prazer da Violeta was not an isolated phenomenon.Footnote ⁵ The trajectory of Julio Antonio de Miranda (a member of the Prazer da Violeta who had also been secretary of a group of Cucumbi dancers in the 1880s and became a typographer for the abolitionist newspaper Cidade do Rio in the 1890s and 1900s) provides just one example of how Black people were involved in a wide variety of associative practices, within and beyond Black organizations.Footnote ⁶

This rapid snapshot of the activist context that surrounded the publication of the abolitionist daily Cidade do Rio invites further attention to the possibilities for action that were then available to free and freed Black people, as well as a re-examination of conceptual categorizations that can be used to legitimize problematic discourses involving the Brazilian racial experience.Footnote ⁷ Along those lines, this chapter is a counterpoint to generalizations established by historian José Murilo de Carvalho and others with regard to the participation of Black and poor populations in the political arena during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Such interpretations – which minimize the political significance of Black associative life – have exercised much influence over the ways in which multiple generations of historians have interpreted the trajectories of free Afro-descendants. On the basis of information uncovered about a group of Black organizations that were active in the immediate post-abolition period in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, this chapter aims to analyze anew the articulations among various efforts organized by Afro-descendants in defense of their citizenship and status as free people.Footnote ⁸

I will meet these objectives by problematizing the similarities and differences that existed among political organizations exemplified by the Liga dos Homens de Cor (League of Colored Men); the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra (Cooperative Society for the Black Race); the Guarda Negra (Black Guard); and the Club Repúblicano dos Homens de Cor (Black Men’s Republican Club); as well as A Pátria – Orgam dos Homens de Cor (a newspaper). All of these operated in Rio and São Paulo between 1887 and 1889 and had significant historical repercussions. Significantly, the name of the Black journalist and abolitionist José do Patrocínio (1853–1905) is a common (if not always sympathetic) reference in documentation related to all of these entities. In general, these organizations did not simply orient themselves around the political controversies that absorbed public attention in their day; their leaders were committed to broader projects such as maintaining Black workers’ place in the free labor market, promoting the literacy of their fellow Afro-descendants, and occupying an ever-broader array of social spaces.

It is worth emphasizing that neither these broader projects nor their proponents were elevated to the status of protagonists in the republican political sphere that dominated Brazil after 1889. It is true that Black political projects continued to exist, but they figured as an empirical demonstration of the limitations of democratic possibility in Brazilian society, and their leaders were recognized at most as third-rate supporting players. For this reason, the third section of this chapter returns to a consideration of the impossibility of Black people’s equitable participation in Brazil’s post-abolition polity.

The Liga dos Homens de Cor

In 1887, the majority of Black people was already free or freed and the legality of slavery seemed sure to be broken soon. Given that, a group of Black individuals in Rio took the initiative to create the Liga dos Homens de Cor, in order to assure that all could enjoy the conditions necessary to fully exercise their citizenship. With the aim of “raising the moral level of men of color, and endowing them with the cooperation, mutualism and solidarity needed to enter as equals in the elaboration of wealth and the Brazilian future,” José do Patrocínio, Antonio Luiz do Espírito Santo Castro, Geraldo José Alexandre das Mercês, Agostinho José Alves, Antonio Honorato de Santa Rosa, Assindino Seveliano José Gomes, and Flávio José de Andrade – among others – assumed the challenge of moving the mission forward.Footnote ⁹

This would not be the first or last time that a good portion of these individuals would involve themselves in associativism. Geraldo das Mercês, the Liga’s first secretary, had participated in carnival groups since at least the early 1880s, was on the board of the workers’ mutual aid society “Associação de Socorros Mútuos Auxílio Operário” in 1883, and proposed the foundation of the “Sociedade Recreativa e Instrutiva” (an educational and recreational society) in 1896.Footnote ¹⁰ Assindino Gomes, who took over Geraldo’s post in 1889, had been the interim secretary of the Irmandade de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e São Benedito (a Catholic brotherhood) in 1881 and would be part of the board of the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra, founded in April 1888.Footnote ¹¹ As noted earlier, Agostinho Alves, who also acted as Liga secretary, became one of the founders of the Sociedade Familiar de Dança Prazer da Violeta in May 1888.Footnote ¹² Flávio José de Andrade also participated in the Centro Tipográfico Treze de Maio (a typographer’s union named after abolition day) around this same time.Footnote ¹³

As impressive as these associative connections are for their density and variety, this glimpse of these actors’ presence in the aforementioned spaces only captures a small segment of their trajectories. Their lives were full of intricacies, and the influences they absorbed from their presence in spaces of religion, recreation, education, and work were not mutually exclusive. Divergent paths produced distinct individuals with varying profiles. Yet in some ways these men were not so different after all – so much so that, in that historical moment, what brought them together was a shared racial identity. That is, the environment that nurtured class identities was the same one that stimulated the construction of racial identities, to such an extent that they came to underpin political platforms. What is more, this gesture toward politicizing race came as a surprise to no one. So far as I can tell, no one sought out the press because they were surprised by or wished to oppose the existence of these or other Black organizations as they emerged. Slavery was collapsing, but the practices of racialization continued to be naturalized, even as they were re-ordered. By force of habit, individuals and groups oriented themselves by racial categories. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

To a certain extent, there seems to have been support for Black people to speak out in this new context. This stands in contrast with earlier eras, when initiatives of this kind had received no support from authorities. Sidney Chalhoub has recounted the cases of the Sociedade de Beneficência da Nação Conga, the Protetora da Sociedade do Rosário e São Benedito, the Sociedade de Beneficência da Nação Conga Amiga da Consciência, and the Associação Beneficente Socorro Mútuo dos Homens de Cor in the 1860s and 1870s. These, like other Black entities, could exist informally but were condemned by the Imperial Council of State when they sought to legalize their activities, on the grounds that their members sought to organize themselves politically and economically on the basis of race and ethnicity.Footnote ¹⁴

In any case, returning to what was distinctive about the Liga dos Homens de Cor: in addition to the men noted earlier, we should also note that the Liga’s president – Antonio Luiz do Espírito Santo Castro – resembled José do Patrocinio in his outstanding trajectory. Thanks to a solicitation made by Liberal Party Deputy Sebastião Mascarenhas in August 1888, we know that Espírito Santo Castro enjoyed enough prominence to receive the title of commander (an important Imperial honorific). It so happens, however, that the deputy spoke up not in support of Espírito Santo Castro but rather because he considered the title an absurdity and decided to seek its annulment on the grounds that such an honor did not befit a man who was, by profession, a mere barber.

When he learned of this attack, José do Patrocínio, editor of the Cidade do Rio, used one of the journal’s premier columns to critically and ironically opine the opposite, presenting details on Espírito Santo Castro’s public trajectory. Right at the start, Patrocínio placed Deputy Mascarenhas’ position in check, thus cornering the Liberal Party as a whole. For Patrocínio, there was a “manifest contradiction between [Mascarenhas’] solicitation and the aspirations of his party, which promises us a Democratic Monarchy. Beyond this, the solicitation is also unconstitutional, because the supreme law of the State does not distinguish among citizens except by knowledge, merits, and virtues.” Patrocínio then went on to identify Espírito Santo Castro as “Black,” reiterate the value of the profession of barber, and again recognize his unjustly maligned colleague as “one of the most important Liberal influencers of the second district of the freguesia [parish] of Sacramento.” Espírito Santo Castro had always been a parish elector, had been elected a justice of the peace by popular vote in 1879, and was voted the first substitute for justice of the peace in the most recent municipal elections – “despite everything and especially despite his abolitionist views” – eventually assuming the post when the winning candidate resigned. Patrocínio pointed out that Espírito Santo Castro had been president of the Imperial Sociedade dos Artistas Brasileiras for five years; had served as a councilor of the Imperial Sociedade Auxiliadora das Artes Mecânicas e Liberais e Beneficientes for ten years; and was at the time the president of the Liga dos Homens de Cor. Remaining in the sphere of conflictual race relations, Patrocínio emphasized, finally, that “the citizen Espírito Santo Castro only refrained from exercising the functions of subdelegado [local police chief] during the Liberal era because he understood that his color might serve as the pretext for painful injustices, and he preferred obscurity to moral suffering brought on by a love of ephemeral positions.”Footnote ¹⁵ Could this slight have been one of the motivations for organizing the Liga? Probably.

Along these same lines, while José do Patrocínio is already well known in studies of nineteenth-century Brazil, he still merits attention here. With the symbolic capital that he accumulated from the press and from abolitionist and republican clashes, he was another founder of the Liga dos Homens de Cor and helped to bring visibility and political relevance to the initiative. It is not unreasonable to deduce that Patrocínio’s prestige contributed to the friendly, though discreet, reception given to the Liga by some newspapers. Beyond the backing received from the Gazeta de Notícias, which published a series of notes and announcements about the association’s activities, the Diário de Notícias – which received a copy of the Liga’s statutes along with all of the city’s main press outlets in April 1888 – saw fit to praise the initiative:

Energy to promote such goals was not lacking among the other Liga participants, above all because they themselves created a context that was favorable to such agitation. In coordination with Patrocínio, Liga members participated in public and private meetings in which they were privileged interlocutors, even in the company of big shots. Admittedly, there are few registers of this activity in the newspapers. All the same, if the opportunity existed to expose their desire to “raise the level of their race through commerce, industry, instruction, and hard work” in an event such as the founding of the Guarda Negra (Black Guard) at the editorial office of the Cidade do Rio in September 1888, it is more than probable that they had been present in meetings called to resist the onslaughts of slavocrats and republicans after May 14.Footnote ¹⁷

Curiously, José do Patrocínio did not remain in the Liga for long. An acclaimed personality, he was chosen to hand the honorific insignia “Hábito da Rosa” to the Liga’s President (Commander Espírito Santo Castro) in October 1888. Yet by the time Espírito Santo Castro died in May of the following year, Patrocínio had resigned because of “growing opposition to him within the Liga.”Footnote ¹⁸ The explanation for this dissention has been lost in speculation involving vanities, uncertainties, and the troubled trajectory of the Guarda Negra itself.

It is important to document that the activities of the Liga dos Homens de Cor were not limited to participation in external events. They also maintained headquarters – open every afternoon – on the Rua do S. Pedro, a street in the Cidade Nova that later gave way to the Avenida Getúlio Vargas in a massive urban renewal campaign. The space was frequently used for debates, as well as for educational and training activities. According to newspaper announcements, the Liga eventually came to hold Sunday conferences on “subjects of general interest to our society,” in which the associates themselves were charged with taking turns as orators.Footnote ¹⁹

With the advent of May 13, this routine was somewhat disrupted, as Liga members were called to meet other demands. They resolved, for example, to accept Deputy Domingos Jaguaribe Filho’s suggestion that they lead a public subscription campaign to raise a statue to Freedom. As part of the unfolding of that campaign, the Diário de Notícias reported on the formalization of the request on May 15, 1888. Two days later, when a commission representing societies of descendants of the Black race convoked the community to celebrate slavery’s end, the Liga dos Homens de Cor would send a message to its associates asking that they report to the headquarters to discuss “urgent business.”Footnote ²⁰

Another notable aspect of the experience of the Liga dos Homens de Cor was the way in which it sought to guarantee its existence. As was signaled by the late payment reminders sent out by treasurer Antonio Honorato de Santa Rosa, it was the society’s member contributions that allowed it to develop its activities.Footnote ²¹ Consequently, extra incentives were necessary to make sure that such collective collaboration in fact occurred. One strategy deployed in order to reach stragglers was the periodic convening of general assemblies, to which members had to appear armed with their up-to-date passbooks.Footnote ²²

Apparently, this insistence met with some success. At the end of July 1888, under a new administration elected after Espírito Santo Castro’s death, information circulated about fully functioning night classes, aimed at primary education “for associates and male members of their families.” The students could count on classes in Portuguese, arithmetic, and geography. It should not go unnoted, however, that this was a society administered exclusively by men, and the commitment to the advancement of communities “of color” was structured exclusively around male empowerment.Footnote ²³ Unfortunately, this effort to advance Black men’s education, which was renewed in the beginning of 1890, was the last action I was able to find connected to the Liga dos Homens de Cor.Footnote ²⁴

The Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra and the Networks of Black Politics

Returning to 1888: even before the Liga’s printed statute was ready, the city of Rio de Janeiro received notice of the foundation of the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra on April 8. Its board of directors included Estevão Roberto da Silva (president), João José Tavares Júnior (vice-president), Lourenço Izidro de Siqueira e Silva (first secretary), Martinho dos Prazeres (second secretary), Manoel Fernandes Tupper (general treasurer). Striving to be a well-structured organization, it also had a council comprising Francisco Paula de Oliveira Veado, Francisco José de Lemos Magalhães, Mizael Gomes da Silva, Jorge Fortunato Martins, Assindino Seveliano José Gomes, João Guedes de Azevedo, Manoel Wenceslau do Valle Porto, Luiz Antonio Ribeiro, Manoel Justiniano de Oliveira, and Manoel Frontino.

The Sociedade emerged with three rigorously defined objectives. Priority number one was to “place the descendants of the African race on the path to work, creating for this purpose “a register where unemployed people will be listed along with their professions and as much information as can be collected about them.” A second front was opened to “promote primary, commercial, artisanal, and agricultural education.” Finally, touching on mutual aid activities, they would found a “beneficent fund and a funeral fund with 15 percent of their income.”Footnote ²⁵

The fact that the Sociedade championed employment guarantees and technical capacitation for “descendants of the Black race” immediately stands out. It is also apparent that the Sociedade did not share the belief that Black people, in the abstract, were incapable of acting competently in the autonomous and competitive capitalist labor market. While a lack of education and training was an obstacle for a subset of the group, the constitution of the Sociedade was in itself evidence that another subset suffered unemployment due to deliberate exclusion. Among them were men who could certify defined trades and provide witnesses to attest their qualifications. In other words, even without access to unemployment data disaggregated by race or color, these men met to protest the devaluation of Brazil’s Black workers, defend their racial belonging, speak up for their own cause, and oppose white immigration policies that received strong support from Brazil’s national elites.

The scenario these men faced had slightly different characteristics than those experienced by free Black men in other eras, who could conceivably diminish their exposure to prejudice by avoiding confusion with the enslaved and distancing themselves from family ties to slavery. In effect, what Hebe Mattos observed in the rural world of southeastern Brazil largely held true for urban spaces as well. As a consequence of slavery’s ruin, “sociocultural categories and identities suddenly stopped making sense. Slave owners, slaves, and men who were born free or had become free no longer existed.”Footnote ²⁶ On the other hand, the targeting of the Sociedade’s pedagogical work suggests that it prioritized the aspirations of specific professional categories, such as artisans and those linked to commerce or agriculture, even as it acknowledged the need for general primary instruction. The articulation of mutual aid practices and vocational defense was implicit.Footnote ²⁷

In the face of such details, a simple question seems appropriate: what kinds of experiences inspired these men of color to constitute an organization that was so centered on a commitment to work and technical education? Considering the ideological profile adopted by the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra, it might be logical to assume that it had some external influence, perhaps from the US Black leader Booker T. Washington, who had become well-known after assuming the direction of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which had a heavy emphasis on industrial education. It so happens, however, that the Afro-American leader would only rise to national fame in the United States after 1895, and his international influence would only become consolidated in the early twentieth century.Footnote ²⁸ So that hypothesis must be discarded.

Does the explanation, then, have local origins? Bingo! In search of information about the Sociedade’s president, Estevão Roberto da Silva, I found a substantial cache of evidence that explains many of the group’s choices. The first indication takes us to the year 1876, an era in which da Silva stood out among the students of the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes (the Imperial Academy of the Arts, Brazil’s most prestigious Arts school) and received silver medals for his course performance. Born free in 1848, the son of Victor Roberto da Silva, at twenty-eight Estevão was single and an elector of the freguesia (parish) of Sacramento. He knew how to read and exercised the trade of painter, earning an annual income of 500 mil reis.Footnote ²⁹

This same man, known as the first Black student to distinguish himself at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes, eventually became one of the institution’s most important representatives and a professor at the Liceu de Artes e Ofícios (Rio’s most important vocational high school), noted for his still-life paintings. Writer Artur de Azevedo nicknamed him the “Black Diamond.”Footnote ³⁰ Yet before this all happened, various episodes defined his trajectory. One of the most impactful ones happened between 1879 and 1880. At the prize ceremony for students who had distinguished themselves in the Academia de Belas Artes’ General Exposition, attended by Emperor Pedro II, Estevão da Silva was regarded unofficially by those in the know as the author of the “best work of historical painting.” He himself believed that he would be given the gold medal after years of resigning himself to silver or lesser prizes. Yet the medal once again went to another man. Upon seeing himself deprived of the honor he deserved, da Silva protested emphatically.Footnote ³¹ According to the memoirs of his colleague Antonio Parreiras:

Unable to claim that Estevão da Silva’s work was inferior and did not deserve first place, the professors alleged that they did not award it to him for reasons of seniority. The explanation did not convince those who followed the case. All the same, the faculty did not retreat and, “taking into account as an attenuating circumstance the intellectual poverty of the delinquent student, punished Estevão da Silva with a one-year suspension, while noting that there had been a desire to expel him immediately.”Footnote ³³ At risk of not completing his education, Estevão da Silva sought out the aid of friends. José do Patrocínio was one of those who responded to the call. In August of that year, he donated his earnings from a public speech to “assist the painter Estevão Roberto da Silva, so that he can go to Europe and complete his studies.”Footnote ³⁴

That voyage, however, never happened: Estevão maintained steady residence at the Rua do General Camara 283 (another Cidade Nova street destroyed by the Avenida Getúlio Vargas) for the entire decade. That address, beyond serving as his home, was also his workshop, where he deployed his skills in carpentry, cabinetry, and portrait and landscape painting. Based at that address, Estevão da Silva was even block inspector for the second district of the freguesia de Sacramento.Footnote ³⁵ Clearly, the event at Belas Artes did not interrupt his work as an artist and an artisan. Indeed, sometime later he became a professor at the Liceu de Artes e Oficios, an institution that was maintained by the Sociedade Propagadora das Belas Artes (an independent beneficent society frequented by many men from the Academia).Footnote ³⁶

A dedicated painter, Estevão Roberto da Silva also devoted a great deal of his time to the activities of the city’s artisans and workers. In May 1878, he took his place on the board of the Sociedade Beneficente dos Artistas do Arsenal da Marinha da Corte (a beneficent society for artisans employed by Rio’s Navy). The following year, he ran for director of the Sociedade dos Artistas Brasileiros Trabalho União e Moralidade, a mutual aid society for artisans that da Silva was affiliated with until his death in 1891.Footnote ³⁷ In the course of the 1880s, he was part of the board of directors for the União Operária in 1881 and a professor at the free school maintained by the Congresso Operário de Beneficência between 1886 and 1888.Footnote ³⁸

Estevão Roberto da Silva was hard-working and well-connected; he could have continued in this line of associational activism and everything would have worked out relatively well. In his individual and collective tasks, he shared his life with people who were similar to him, either because they faced difficulties linked to their lack of wealth or because they could not help but show their Black skin. All kinds of people were there, Black and white, free and freed, although the proportions varied from case to case. Together they had constructed spaces to defend the rights of the working classes. Yet it so happened that, in the course of this process, slavery’s end evidenced – or accentuated – the fragilities that threatened men of color. Added to this, the expectations created around the declaration of civil equality for all Brazilians catalyzed Black and popular political agitation. It matters little that the version of history that later emerged prioritized the abolitionist activity of the elite in the lead-up to abolition. The masses who occupied the streets and appeared in public rallies in those years behaved as protagonists. The moment summoned everyone to take a stand. This is what the men who founded the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra in April 1888 were doing.

Once the Sociedade came into being, it followed a mold already established in abolitionist activities, seeking adherents through public events, during which the association’s basic agenda was presented. On Sunday, April 15, the Sociedade inaugurated a series of talks, in which the orators developed theses about the “necessity and expediency of work and the benefits that result from it” and the “utility of instruction.”Footnote ³⁹

Their intentions were certainly not frustrated; with the arrival of May, on the eve of the passage of the Lei Áurea on May 13, the Sociedade had enough backing to take the lead in coordinating Black organizations promoting their own celebrations of the Imperial government’s decision. An interesting detail is that they only sought out the city’s mainstream newspapers to transmit what had already been decided in their assembly, which leads one to assume that they counted on other communication tools to keep their interlocutors informed. Thus we see a notice that was printed in the Gazeta de Notícias and in the Diário de Notícias:

For anyone who wished to see it, this was evidently the action of a Black network that had been publicly established on the basis of the experience of Black freedom. In historical accounts shaped by the myth of racial democracy, this network could not even be glimpsed as part of the social subsoil. Yet for an attentive researcher, every new archival path reveals its presence, never far from the surface. As difficult as it is to access the intricacies of these intragroup collaborations among Black activists, we must take as a starting point their existence and their importance in the lives of many people. Such acceptance can help us to deconstruct yet again the arsenal of dogmas that have traditionally shaped our approaches to the formation of Brazilian social classes. It can also give more consistency to the innovative perspectives that are currently taking shape in Brazilian historiography.

The Guarda Negra

To set the parameters for this intellectual project, it is useful to place information about Rio’s Black networks in conversation with what we know of Brazil’s famous Guarda Negra, which was long portrayed simply as a horde of mindless thugs manipulated by opportunistic monarchists. Despite the profusion of individual activists, groups, and public activities involving the Liga dos Homens de Cor and the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra, it was the Guarda Negra that received the most political and press attention in the nineteenth century. This was also the group that has been portrayed as the fullest expression of freed and free-born Black Brazilian activism in the majority of historical narratives about the immediate post-abolition period. In the words of Flávio Gomes: “The racial question, which had apparently been made invisible during the abolitionist campaign, emerged crystal-clear from the actions of the Guarda Negra.”Footnote ⁴¹ Except that, instead of emerging as part of a continuum of popular struggles, the Guarda Negra has often been interpreted as evidence of Black people’s inclination to use violence to further their personal interests and defend those of the Princess Regent and the Empire – none of which, of course, signified even a minimal capacity for autonomous thought. As Clícea Maria Miranda has observed:

In the nineteenth century, similar perceptions served both to nurture prejudices about the universalization of freedom and citizenship among all Brazilians and to sell the idea that the installation of a Republic would be the remedy for all of the ills created by the monarchy.Footnote ⁴³ As we shall see …

The first meeting called to deal with the creation of the Guarda Negra da Redentora (Black Guard of the [Female] Redeemer) took place on July 9, 1888. It was left to the Cidade do Rio to inform the public that the encounter would take place in the home of Emilio Rouède and to list the names of the freed Blacks who would be present (unfortunately without reference to their surnames): Hygino, Manoel Antonio, Jason, Aprigio, Gaspar, and Theocrito. The occasion led to the following resolutions:

1. 1. To create an association with the goal of presenting material resistance to any revolutionary movement hostile to the institution that just liberated the country.

2. 2. Only freedpeople who are willing to follow the orders of a Directorship, elected by simple majority in a vote that will be carried out at an opportune moment, can take part.

3. 3. Effective membership is restricted to those who consider the memorable act of May 13 to be a happening worthy of general admiration rather than a motive for declaring war on the humanitarian princess who brought it about.

4. 4. To ask for the support of the Confederação Abolicionista [Abolitionist Confederation] so that its activities have ramifications throughout the Empire.

5. 5. To ask the press to promote this sentiment with its valuable cooperation.

6. 6. Finally, to advise in every possible way the freedmen of the interior to only work on the fazendas [plantations] of those who have sworn not to make war on the Empire.Footnote ⁴⁴

The organization’s presumed membership would, once again, consist of Black men. Yet this time priority was given to freedmen, leaving no space for those among them who might have republican sympathies. With this announcement made, the second public register of the Guarda Negra’s existence appeared when they bestowed the Rosa de Ouro (Gold Rose) on Princess Isabel, in homage to her “liberating action.” As multiple historical narratives reiterate, on the night of September 28, the founding of the Guarda Negra was formalized during an editorial meeting of the Cidade do Rio, attended by abolitionists such as André Rebouças, João Clapp, Patrocínio himself, and representatives of the Liga dos Homens de Cor.Footnote ⁴⁵ In December, the Guarda Negra returned to press prominence because of the birthday celebrations of the president of the Imperial Council of Ministers, Afonso Celso. The Diário de Notícias was one of the papers that reported that the Guarda Negra, “in five streetcars, appeared at the residence of His Excellency, accompanied by musical bands from the Tenth Battalion and from the police force of the Court. Sr. Clarindo Alves orated in his name.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The Guarda Negra became notorious because of a famous melee involving men accused of being part of the Guarda and defenders of the republican cause during a political rally for republican advocate Silva Jardim in the Sociedade Francesa de Ginástica, located near the Praça Tiradentes in central Rio. That event happened on December 30, 1888. But – a curious fact – republicans sought out the pages of papers such as Novidades, O Paíz, and the Província de São Paulo well before that to accuse the Guard of being a “body of thugs” composed of “capoeiras” who were “enticed” by the government to secure the princess’s throne.Footnote ⁴⁷ Assuming reports are true, this allegation was responsible for contemporary rumors and subsequent memoirs such those of Antônio da Silva Jardim and José Joaquim de Medeiros e Albuquerque, who both had an interest in defending an image of republican bravery in the face of great risk.Footnote ⁴⁸ A comment in the Gazeta de Notícias motivated by the December incident also feeds this suspicion. Lacking any evidence of the Guarda Negra’s violent nature, the author, probably the paper’s owner Ferreira de Araújo, weaves his comments as though the launch of the Guarda Negra were quite similar to that of the Liga dos Homens de Cor and the Sociedade Cooperativa da Raça Negra:

Indifference, according to the editor of the Gazeta de Notícias, best characterized these occurrences. It was thus only after the meeting at the editorial offices of the Cidade do Rio that the Guarda Negra began to cause discomfort. It is interesting to note that this process developed in parallel with a series of intrigues surrounding José do Patrocínio. Taking for granted and highlighting Patrocínio’s influence on the society of freedmen, these schemes serenely accessed the whole racist catalog to condemn both the man himself and the freedmen’s collective action. Patrocínio, as usual, was not intimidated by such outrages and reacted in kind, leveling a volley of insults at republican politicians Quintino Bocaiúva and Rangel Pestana. The following passages capture the tenor of his words:

It was no secret that Patrocínio was seen as a reference by many Black men in Rio. What was new was the fear and near panic that emerged with the prospect that such protagonism might be channeled into more incisive interventions or provoke a civil war. Comic or tragic, Brazilian history is full of events forged by the fusion of racism and speculation.

In the last two weeks of December 1888, the tension deepened further still. According to the Cidade do Rio, on December 23 “a group of five citizens of black color” who were taking a meal at the hotel Petit-Console were attacked with rocks and gunshots by republican activists because they had shown support for the Crown. According to reports, Clarindo de Almeida, head of the Guarda, sought to dissuade his people from any retaliation, arguing that public disorder was exactly what the neo-republicans wanted. “Our calm is yet another sacrifice made for the government that on May 13 created a homeland large enough to contain both our gratitude and the ignominy of the flunkies of slavocracy who now mascarade as republicans.”Footnote ⁵¹

Yet even when published in the papers, such words did not impede the grave confrontation that occurred seven days later near the Sociedade Francesa de Ginástica. In an attempt to diminish the racial weight of the conflict, an editorial in the Cidade do Rio transmitted a lament that was a bit out of sync with what Patrocínio had written just days before:

All the same, the tough accusations that weighed ever more heavily on the Guarda continued be guided by the racial origin of its members, a situation that led several of its supporters to go to the papers to defend the group.Footnote ⁵² Apart from José do Patrocínio and Emilio Rouède, Clarindo de Almeida himself would write:

Black Republicans

The existence of the Guarda Negra and the eruption of the December conflict gave impulse to the republican campaign in general, as Maria Tereza Chaves de Mello has observed.Footnote ⁵⁴ But they also gave Black individuals and groups greater political visibility in the anti-monarchist political scene. Beginning in January 1889, the Gazeta da Tarde and the Tribuna Liberal began to reprint news (mostly from the province of São Paulo) about Black demonstrations in favor of the Republic, which served as a kind of counterweight to the Guarda Negra. This was another route through which Black subjects made themselves visible in post-abolition political struggles.

One of the first affirmations of this sort to be reproduced in the Rio press documented an agitated gathering that was promoted in São Paulo’s capital on January 7, 1888. The document produced at the end of the assembly read:

Days later, as news first printed in the Tribuna Liberal resonated in the capital, the press offered more details about another meeting among men of color opposed to the Guarda Negra, which brought together somewhere around 500 people on January 13 in the quilombo (maroon community) of Jabaquara, formed in the early 1880s in the vicinity of the port city of Santos, São Paulo, and led by Black abolitionist Quintino de Lacerda.Footnote ⁵⁶ Famous abolitionists from the region were among those present at the 1889 gathering, and Lacerda maintained his leadership role. “The monarchy,” he said, “is responsible for the preservation of slavery for three centuries; the monarchy is responsible for the bullets that it ordered shot at some of those present here on the famous Cubatão expedition.” Eugênio Wansuit, whom the Gazeta da Tarde referred to as “a very intelligent Black man, a military veteran who spent four years in the Paraguay campaign,” also gave a speech, in which he opposed the forced military recruitment that the Imperial government had just announced and “incited his comrades to revolt against yet another enslavement.” At the end they passed a motion, supported by around 300 signatories, which – beyond reiterating previous points – protested “against those who entice the brothers of our race, forming a true farce that they call the ‘Guarda Negra’ wherever it is found, because they can see in that infamy the beginnings of a civil war produced by hatred between two races.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In February, Black republicans from Mogi-Mirim and Campinas (also in São Paulo Province) took their turn to hold meetings. In Campinas, the gathering occurred during the Festival of São Benedito, right after the mass. The final document also positioned itself against forced recruitment and the creation of the Guarda Negra, speaking out against “racial hatred.” Still, according to a notice published in the Diário de Rio Claro, one speaker went so far as to state that “those Blacks who belong to the Guarda Negra deserve the stocks, shackles, and the whip.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In June 1889, the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor (Republican Club of Men of Color) emerged in Rio as part of the scene generated by this dynamic. Its guiding principles were stated as follows:

1. 1. To combat the reigning institutions in every conceivable terrain.

2. 2. To attend all of the political gatherings that take place in this city and fight in their favor.

3. 3. To institute a mutual aid fund and night courses.

4. 4. To recognize as head of state the man elected by the Federal Council.

5. 5. To promote their political cause among the Black race and make this same race believe that they are being victimized by the Crown.Footnote ⁵⁹

This was, then, a kind of republican version of the Guarda Negra. The founding meeting took place on June 2, 1889, at the residence of José Pedro Ferreira de Souza Coelho, on his initiative and that of his fellow republican proselytizer Deoclesiano Martyr. “Fifty-five men of color” were present, with the common mission to “politically promote republican ideas, in opposition to the reigning institutions.”Footnote ⁶⁰ According to the Gazeta da Tarde, Augusto Xavier de Mello assumed the presidency of the board; José Martins Pereria assumed the vice-presidency; the office of first secretary was left to Anacleto Alves de Freitas and that of second secretary to Rodolpho Gomes; Sinerio Alves was treasurer; and Francisco Alves de Freitas would be attorney.Footnote ⁶¹

The notice in the Gazeta da Tarde brought names to the forefront that had previously slipped under the radar in commentary about abolitionists and Black political agitators. It is important to note from the start that I found no evidence that would permit me to state that the two men who hosted the meeting were Black. In truth, the fact that they were not incorporated into the club’s board at the end of the meeting and the lack of direct or suggestive comments on the topic lead me to believe that they did not understand themselves to be Black (or were not considered as such). What stands out in the various documents I consulted are the ties both men had to the republican cause. Martyr, what’s more, would gain quite a lot of notoriety years later for his intense Jacobin political activism.Footnote ⁶²

The comments on the members of the board, in contrast, pointed in another direction. Aside from the repeated mention of the presence of more than fifty men of color at the reunion, there are documents that inform us of some of their phenotypes. In particular, there is no doubt about Anacleto de Freitas, who in the beginning was first secretary but soon became the Club’s principal public representative, eventually assuming the post of president.Footnote ⁶³ Evaristo de Moraes, for example, noted that Anacleto de Freitas had been a Black ally to Silva Jardim: “In the heart of the working class, Silva Jardim also had fervent supporters, and the dedication of some men of color from humble backgrounds was especially significant. Accompanying Anacleto de Freitas, they fought in the streets for him against the Guarda Negra.”Footnote ⁶⁴

On the basis of that platform, the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor would make itself present in Rio’s political scene during its first year of existence. Already in the beginning of July, they emitted a call in the Gazeta da Tarde directed to “the republican electorate of men of color”:

Such mobilization, when reported in São Paulo, received intense support from another society for republican men of color. The crew of the newspaper A Patria, São Paulo province’s first Black paper, did not spare praise in reaction to their coreligionists from Rio. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Ignácio de Araújo Lima deployed his ink with care to show the proximity of the two experiences:

As we can see, the republican side also fostered its network of informational exchange, which advanced both private and general interests related to the recognition of its members’ social legitimacy. Seeking to widen their visibility in spaces that brought together men of letters and politics, the Club continued to participate in various public events.

On the hundredth anniversary of the French Republic, on July 14, the Club’s members organized themselves both to stage a procession and to give speeches at the commemorative session that took place at the Brazilian Congress, in an event promoted by the Centro Republicano Lopes Trovão. But their interventions were not characterized solely by moderation and restraint. It is practically impossible not to suspect that, on that same day, the Club’s members had also been involved in a series of fights that took over the main streets of the city (Ouvidor, Uruguaiana, Gonçalves Dias), which resulted from clashes between monarchists and republicans. Just as had occurred in December, those who narrated the facts were incapable of specifying which group initiated the verbal and physical attacks. Many “long lives” to the monarchy and others to the Republic were heard, soon accompanied by brawls. Among the wounded were at least two men of color: Aristides, “pardo [brown], 15 years old, a butler, resident at Formosa Street #13 and wounded in the foot”; and Pedro Justo de Souza, “Brazilian, 24 years of age, single, an employee of the sweet shop on Estácio de Sá Street and resident on the largo de Catumbi #72,” who declared that he was a member of the Guarda Negra.Footnote ⁶⁷

The public recognition of this event cemented still more the end of José do Patrocínio’s ties to the Guarda Negra. In a feature article entitled “To Men of Color,” Patrocínio (still editor of the Cidade do Rio) expressed his disillusion with the paths taken by the group. Showing a somewhat utilitarian understanding of the Guarda Negra’s legitimacy, he ended up reproducing various accusations that he had contested over the previous year. The arguments he employed, however, bordered on nonsense. The first established a relationship between the restitution of D. Pedro II’s health and the security of the Empire:

He thought it strange, for this reason, that the Guarda Negra had continued and, what’s more, “been diverted from its noble and generous end by individuals who sought to use it as a ladder for positions.” As if this weren’t enough, with the aim of explaining the reasons behind this easy distortion, Patrocínio ratified the opinion that freedpeople lacked their “share of education,” which left them “more at the mercy of conspiracies that serve the interests of individuals who, calling themselves friends of the Blacks, take advantage of their courage and selflessness.” That is to say, there was no vestige here of the erstwhile conscientious citizens of May 13. Finally, Patrocínio called on “men of color with more instruction” to “convince their less fortunate brothers that they would soon be condemned to a form of captivity even worse than yesterday’s; that of public hatred.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Once Patrocínio wrote that, it was no use for him to take up the subject again five days later with the pretext of recalling how laudable the initial phase of the Guarda Negra had been.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Guarda was already condemned in the eyes of the community. This break, in turn, seems also to have been decisive in relation to Patrocínio’s ties with other Black organizations with a clearly political character.Footnote ⁷⁰ He was disaffiliated from the Liga dos Homens de Cor in the first half of 1889.

If the good health of D. Pedro II was not enough to cause the dissolution of the Guarda Negra, the proclamation of the Republic was also not understood as a cue for the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor to disperse. In March 1890, its members appeared at the reception that marked Foreign Relations Minister Quintino Bocaiúva’s return to Rio. Their internal affairs also functioned smoothly.Footnote ⁷¹At that point, names of new associates beyond the original board members began to appear, such as Thomaz José da Silva, Antônio José Ferreira, Joaquim Euclides de Miranda, Vitor Gustavo da Paixão, and Ezequiel Alves da Silva.Footnote ⁷²

Lamentably, though, in line with the tendency that had been reinaugurated with the 1889 Liberal cabinet of Afonso Celso, the interest that political and media big shots had taken in the actions of both republican and monarchist men of color were in frank decline. Specifically, the republicans who rose to power with the coup of November 15 1889 had no reason to care about what the “Black and mestiço [mixed-race] men” who fought against the Guarda Negra and the monarchical government wanted or did not want.

All the same, one month after the first anniversary of the Republic’s proclamation, Anacleto de Freitas sought out the Gazeta da Tarde to extend an invitation to “all men of color to appear tomorrow, at 4 in the afternoon, in the Largo de Santa Rita, in order to deal with a matter pertaining to your well-being.”Footnote ⁷³ Something tells me that, clinging to his truer dreams, Anacleto nurtured some hope of seeing his expectations attended to by the First Republic’s donos do poder (men who controlled power). This must have been what allowed the activity surrounding the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor to exist for a bit longer, even with the deepening of the marginalization they underwent after 1891. In 1892, for example, Anacleto and other associates of the Club were accused of being involved in a street disturbance motivated by ethnic and racial conflicts.Footnote ⁷⁴

After that episode, news about the Club becomes even more sporadic in the papers, even as reports increased of Anacleto de Freitas’ imprisonments and involvement in street brawls. He was then accused of being a capoeira and of making fun of army battalions, even though he seems himself to have been a military man, having once been identified as a sergeant of the army’s First Artillery Battalion.

But even with all of this mess, Anacleto de Freitas would work hard to reactivate the organization in August 1893.Footnote ⁷⁵ Some setback, however, seems to have forced him to change his plans, to the point that he presented a public manifesto breaking politically with the republican government.Footnote ⁷⁶ Unlike other times, Anacleto did not share the Jacobinism that Deocleciano Martyr manifested in his defense of Marechal Floriano (a leader of the republican faction that defended military nationalism). This lack of connection, plus the absence of Silva Jardim as a possible source of support beyond his ties to militarism, severely reduced Anacleto’s chances for legitimate participation in that political environment. Here perhaps lies part of the explanation for his ostracism.

In light of this series of mishaps, it was painful to discover evidence of one final act undertaken by the members of the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor in 1893, when they offered “to their worthy President, citizen Anacleto de Freitas, a gold mechanical pencil in celebration of November 15.”Footnote ⁷⁷ I write that it was painful because everything indicates that this event, on the anniversary of the Republic, did not create a glorious reversal of fortunes for the Club. I could not find any further archival trails.

Conclusion

It does not seem appropriate to close a chapter that is grounded in the potential of available archival sources with such a sensation of lost perspective. The likely demise of the Club Republicano dos Homens de Cor was not a door that slammed shut. More than representing the end or failure of a general collective experience, the Club’s history reinforces the need to perceive voices that, while often stifled in their own times, still produce echoes in the archival documentation. These echoes, if taken seriously, lead us to other Black experiences, daily affirmations of esteem for life and desires for a future that was different than the present tense with which they struggled. This attentiveness to the analytic possibilities of echoes and silences is a defining trait of the investigative paths through which the study of freedom and post-abolition has consolidated itself in Brazil. In a country that is still majority Black, investment in the possibility of finding Black people’s trajectories in the most varied contexts – far beyond slavery – has spurred a profound renovation in Brazilian historiography and an amplification in its appeal, especially among those who are themselves the subjects of this history.

This chapter seeks to illuminate the development of racialized subjectivities as a historical problem in nineteenth-century Brazil. To that end, I will analyze the letters and writings of the Afro-descendant engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças (1838–1898), with special attention to the role of racial silence in Rebouças’ personal diary and in the edited papers of his father, lawyer and statesman Antônio Pereira Rebouças (1798–1880).Footnote ¹

The Rebouças men were members of the best-known family of Black intellectuals in nineteenth-century Brazil. In personal and political terms, the history of the Rebouças family was shaped by the new opportunities that arose with Brazilian Independence (1822) and the approval of a liberal constitution (1824). The family’s first politically prominent member, Antônio Pereira Rebouças, was one of four sons of an Afro-descendant woman and a Portuguese tailor who took part in Independence struggles in the province of Bahia between 1821 and 1823. Brazil’s Independence struggles allowed Antônio to attain social and political recognition as a leading expert in civil law. He was decorated by the Brazilian emperor, D. Pedro I, was twice elected to the Parliament, was chosen as conselheiro (counsel) to Emperor D. Pedro II, and was eventually recognized throughout Brazil for his work as a lawyer. Antônio’s brothers also gained prominence in careers formerly prohibited to men “of color”: Manoel Maurício Rebouças graduated from medical school and became a member of Imperial Academy of Medicine, and José Pereira Rebouças became a composer and conductor of the Imperial Orchestra.Footnote ² Antônio Pereira Rebouças married Carolina Pinto, the daughter of a wealthy merchant from Salvador. Little is known about her or her family, but according to family memory she was darker in complexion than her husband.Footnote ³

Their sons, Antônio and André Rebouças, enjoyed a first-rate education. They graduated in military engineering from the Praia Vermelha School (Escola de Aplicação da Praia Vermelha) in 1860, and in 1861 Antônio financed a stay in Europe to complement his sons’ professional training. Eventually known as the Rebouças brothers, they were among Imperial Brazil’s most important engineers, and to this day they maintain a strong presence in Brazil’s national memory: streets and public works projects throughout the country bear their names. Antonio Rebouças Filho would die in 1874, already a notable engineer. André would become famous as a social thinker and abolitionist leader.Footnote ⁴ After abolition, André became an increasingly cosmopolitan intellectual who followed with interest not only the technological innovations of the industrial world but also transnational struggles against slavery and other forms of unfree labor “in Europe, the Americas, Asia or Africa,” as he wrote in a letter of 1895.Footnote ⁵

André left behind an extensive diary and many unpublished writings; he also served as editor for the published version of his father’s papers. He will be our guide as we reflect on the construction of Black subjectivities in nineteenth-century Brazil. In particular, this chapter aims to understand how and why André Rebouças broke through his previously color-blind self-narrative in the letters he wrote during his one and only voyage to the continent of Africa (1891–1893) and in the articles he wrote and published during this period.Footnote ⁶ In exploring this transformation, I also discuss the deep intellectual consequences of André’s brief two-week visit to the United States in 1873, which were registered through posts in his personal diary. André Rebouças’ transnational experiences, I argue, were directly related to his decision to break the ethic of racial silence that prevailed in his earlier writings.

On the Ethic of Silence

The social historiography of Brazilian slavery, a body of work that inspires many of the chapters in this volume, is centrally concerned with the question of social agency – among captive and freed persons, but also among broader categories of individuals who found themselves in a subaltern social position. The theoretical references for this work, from E. P. Thompson’s cultural Marxism to the micro-historical methodologies of Fredrik Barth, emphasize the relational and political meanings of collective identity formation, as well as the relationship between normative structures and social agency. They valorize the role of shared experience and the collective production of hierarchical categories in shaping individual social action and conditioning the impact of individual endeavors on broader historical processes. In this sense, social history research has used individualized trajectories to continuously rewrite the history of slave societies and shed new light on the political and cultural meanings of actions taken by enslaved and freed people and their descendants, as well as the broader significance of the collective processes of identification and classification that have formed them as historical agents.Footnote ⁷

This historiography does not, however, generally problematize questions of subjectivity and of the processes that condition it. Historians (myself included) have, for good reason, been wary of the anachronism inherent in many attempts at interdisciplinary exchange with the fields of psychology or psychoanalysis. Social history as a field has also generally tended to turn away from deeper engagement with theoretical work in philosophy or communication studies (influenced by Spinoza and most fully realized in texts by Foucault and Deleuze), even though these works offer broader possibilities for theoretical exchange.Footnote ⁸

This tendency has, however, been partially modified by the relatively recent consolidation of subfields involving the history of memory (and specifically the memory of Black slavery), which is itself related to the advance of postcolonial studies. This consolidation has paralleled a growing consciousness of the degree to which history – and especially the history of slavery – has constructed the Black subject in the West on the basis of racist frameworks inherent in the received memory of slavery. As Michel Rolph Trouillot postulated in Silencing the Past, historical experience is inseparable from historical narrative, especially (though not only) when it comes to the history of slavery.Footnote ⁹ Understanding subaltern social agency should also allow us to problematize subaltern subjects’ formation as self-narrators, whose accounts merit careful analysis.

To understand André Rebouças’ self narration, and especially the role of racial silence within it, it is useful to begin with broader historical incongruities. In nineteenth-century Brazil, racism and the experience of slavery shaped each other within the contradictory context created by Brazil’s political independence (1822) and first constitution (1824). The independent Empire – like the US slave republic or the slave empires of France and Britain – formally committed itself to interrupting the Atlantic slave trade and blocking other forms of new enslavement. Yet slavery was maintained in the name of property rights, supported by an illegal slave trade that operated with tacit Imperial consent. As a constitutional monarchy, Brazil explicitly recognized the civil rights of all Brazilian citizens except slaves, but it excluded freed Africans from the possibility of naturalization.

Despite those limits, the majority of Brazil’s new citizenry was comprised of freeborn people of African descent, and the Brazilian Constitution of 1824 rendered unlawful colonial regulations that had barred so-called free people of color from civil and military positions.Footnote ¹⁰ Article 179 recognized a wide array of civil rights for all Brazilians, banned torture and degrading punishment, and abolished the hereditary privileges of the Portuguese ancien régime.

Political rights were nonetheless restricted, as they were in the contemporary constitutional orders of England, the United States, and France. The 1824 Constitution limited full citizenship on the basis of income and property ownership and excluded African-born former slaves even when they fulfilled these requirements. Brazilian-born freedmen could vote in local elections but could not be elected, even if they met minimum income requirements. Yet their descendants’ political rights were in no way blocked, and liberals of the time maintained that Brazilians were divided into only two categories, slaves and citizens. Brazil’s new subjects and citizens “of color” pushed the limits of these constitutional contradictions, and their demands for fuller incorporation into Brazil’s incipient modern nation became a crucial political issue in the tumultuous early decades of the independent Empire. To some degree, those demands met with political success: an ethic of racial silence established itself in situations of formal equality. Yet denominations of color continued to label Afro-descendants with the stigma of slavery, shaping the experiences of racism among free Afro-Brazilians.Footnote ¹¹

This was the context within which André Rebouças edited his father’s handwritten autobiography, based on a manuscript written in 1837/1838 and other personal accounts and published in 1879.Footnote ¹² In the original, unpublished manuscript, Antonio Pereira Rebouças began the story of his public life with his participation in Bahia’s Independence struggles (which ended on July 2, 1823) and recounted many experiences of racial discrimination. Among others, he noted an episode that took place in 1823, after the end of war, as he travelled from Salvador, Bahia, to Rio de Janeiro. Antonio Pereira Rebouças – who wrote about himself in the third person – explained that he was almost “hindered from continuing his journey” and was only authorized to proceed by order of the municipal judge because “they were already familiar with his name and became convinced of his identity when he expressed personal knowledge of [Brazil’s] most notable patriotic episodes and showed professional expertise on juridical legislation.”

The autobiography remained unpublished until after the end of Conselheiro Rebouças’ life. When André Rebouças finally facilitated its publication in 1879, he edited out all mention of discrimination. André Rebouças’ personal diary was shaped by the same preference for color-blind narrative. Those choices reflected the broader ethic of silence that surrounded the question of color throughout nineteenth-century Brazil. The decision to muffle his father’s experience of racial discrimination was in keeping with a personal political decision to construct his and his father’s self-narratives in a language of universal citizenship.Footnote ¹³

“The East River Looks Like the Paraná”

In 1871 – as Brazil enacted the Free Womb Law, the most important legal measure against slavery taken after the end of the Atlantic slave trade – André Rebouças was an established engineer and well-known businessman in the Imperial Court, dedicated, in partnership with his brother Antônio, to modernizing the docks of Rio de Janeiro and building a railroad in the state of Paraná. In 1873, in the midst of a business conflict over the Rio dock project, André Rebouças traveled to Europe and also to the United States to acquaint himself with technological innovations in his field. He spent two weeks in the USA, traveling along the East Coast from New York City, in the midst of Reconstruction (1865–1877) and just a few years after the end of the US Civil War and the abolition of US slavery. The supposed equality of political rights among Blacks and whites in the United States did not prevent Rebouças from experiencing problems at hotels, on trains, and in restaurants “because of his color”; he indicated as much in his diary, though descriptively and without comment.

He depended upon his friends, especially the Brazilian national José Carlos Rodrigues, to facilitate his movement around the country. José Carlos Rodrigues was the editor of O Novo Mundo, “an illustrated periodical of the progress of the era,” published monthly between 1870 to 1879 for circulation in Brazil from an office in the New York Times building in New York City. After his trip, André became one of the newspaper’s regular contributors, as well as a coeditor of the Revista Industrial, which was regularly published as an insert in the newspaper. The writings about race and slavery in O Novo Mundo offer clues that allow us to understand the ways in which André Rebouças’ personal views about these issues changed as a result of his interactions with José Carlos Rodrigues, as well as how this new perception would shape Rebouças’ subsequent personal narratives.

One of O Novo Mundo’s missions was to “furnish Brazil with detailed news about the political, moral, literary and industrial life of the United States of North America.”Footnote ¹⁴ The paper also sought to offer Brazilian readers news from other parts of the world. The processes through which nations around the globe were emancipating slaves and serfs figured among the paper’s topics of interest and were clearly understood as relevant to Brazil’s destiny.

An editorial in the paper’s first edition, on October 24, 1870, associated Dom Pedro II’s famous 1867 speech (“fala do trono”) advocating the abolition of Brazilian slavery with the end of American Civil War. The author argued that D. Pedro’s declaration that he would take measures to “abolish the subservient element as quickly as possible,” made only one year after the conclusion of the American conflict, created the expectation that Brazil would finally accept “the lessons of the US war” and free the slaves. The editorial lamented that Brazil had chosen to become the last in the Americas to reform its labor regime, “trailing even Spain.”Footnote ¹⁵

The following year, the paper celebrated the ratification of the Free Womb Law on September 28, 1871, albeit with some reservation: “in reality, very little was done here to emancipate the slaves: that little, however, was the most that could be expected of Brazil.”Footnote ¹⁶ Articles in O Novo Mundo attempted to demonstrate to Brazilian slaveowners that they needed not fear deeper reforms. The pieces reported good outcomes for Russian agriculture after the emancipation of the serfs and equally favorable prospects for the plantations of the old South after full emancipation in the United States. According to the newspaper, “after Russia freed its serfs, it has taken on a quiet strength, entirely new in its history,” without its “nobles” having become “ruined.”Footnote ¹⁷ So it was in the United States as well, where increasing cotton harvests – combined with the “progress of the negro,” signaled that planters were achieving the best of both worlds.Footnote ¹⁸ The newspaper attempted to convince Brazilian landowners that even “removing negras from the workplace,” which had occurred across the American South after the Civil War, had been essentially positive: “emancipation entitled the freedmen to houses, and houses need to be maintained and governed.”Footnote ¹⁹ “Liberals,” another article declared, “need not fear freedom.”Footnote ²⁰

The March 1872 issue carried a lengthy article about the closure of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the US agency that regulated the rights of former slaves, emphasizing its positive achievements. The article recognized the closure’s justification as valid: “free men cannot be held under tutelage.” But it also lamented the demise of a proposal that had called for each new citizen to receive up to “40 acres of land” in abandoned areas, paying the state 6 percent of the valuation annually in compensation. The article noted with enthusiasm the number of schools established by the Bureau, most of which were being maintained autonomously by the freedmen themselves despite much opposition. According to the newspaper, “racial prejudice” was the worst enemy of universal education among Blacks in the United States. The text noted the role that accusations of misappropriated funds against Bureau director General Oliver Otis Howard had played in hastening the decision to close the Freedmen’s Bureau, but it firmly asserted that those allegations were unfounded.Footnote ²¹

During the early part of the 1870s, optimism and abolitionism continued to color the publication’s editorials with regard to the issue of slave emancipation around the world. “Spain and the Slaves” was the title of a January 23, 1873, editorial.Footnote ²² “Egyptian Slaves,” which lamented the spread of domestic and female slavery in Egypt, appeared in a March 24, 1873, issue.Footnote ²³ The June 1872 issue returned to Brazil, transcribing an article from the Bahian newspaper O Abolicionista that harshly criticized the restrictions of the 1871 Law and concluded:

Two pages into that same issue, the newspaper published a review of a short story by Bernardo Guimarães, Uma História de Quilombolas (A History of Maroons), which had been published in the book Lendas e Narrativas (Legends and Narratives). The story was portrayed as a realistic record of the mocambos (fugitive slave communities) in the state of Minas Gerais. In conclusion, the editor expressed his hope that the story of the quilombos will someday be part of the past: “When will we be able to read Histórias de Quilombolas as past histories of a civilization that has already died off?”Footnote ²⁵

But the paper’s 1872 run also referred to a series of pessimistic reports published in the New York Times about freedmen’s labor in the United States. O Novo Mundo reported the problems identified by the Times but insisted on contextualizing them. According to the paper, vagrancy among freedpeople was a temporary problem brought on by their desire to migrate from the plantations where they had been enslaved. Furthermore, a minority of the freedpeople had clearly improved their lot, and, despite claims to the contrary, Southern landowners were already unanimous in proclaiming the superiority of free labor.Footnote ²⁶

In the July 1873 edition, a month after André Rebouças’ US visit, one article noted the results of the most recent US census. According to the article, “one of the principal emblems of the life of a people or race is their spirit of migration … . The search for foreign lands indicates intellectual vigor and wish to seriously shoulder life’s hardships.” For the writer, the US Black population’s demographic growth was an important indicator of the freedmen’s “vitality” and “love of free labor.” The author further noted the freedmen’s preference for cultivating cotton and again praised the expansion of education among former slaves and the removal of freedwomen from the workforce.Footnote ²⁷

José Carlos Rodrigues served as a great interpreter of the United States for André Rebouças, whose brief US sojourn began after more than a year spent traveling through Europe. Upon his arrival in New York on June 9, Rebouças was shocked when several different hotels refused him a room. Only after various failed attempts did he understand that he had been refused hospitality on account of the “color difficulty” (sic).

“I obtained the address for the Brazilian Consulate and headed there in a special carriage,” Rebouças wrote in his diary. He was received “very kindly by the Consul’s son,” who was also an engineer, and was then able to secure “a room at the Washington Hotel on the condition that [he] take meals in his room rather than in the restaurant.” He was initially given a “very dirty little room” on the third floor and was then moved to a bedroom with a sitting room that opened directly to Broadway, which meant that he never had to cross paths with the other guests. According to Rebouças’ diary, the establishment – which had “the honor of once welcoming the immortal Washington” – was “in fashion for many years” but had since become “a third-class hotel.”Footnote ²⁸

After he finally settled in, André Rebouças returned to the consulate to await José Carlos Rodrigues, with whom he had spent the previous evening visiting the docks, since, according to his diary, “color prejudice impeded [him] from attending the show at the Grand Opera House.”Footnote ²⁹

André Rebouças was well-received by engineers of the New York Pacific Railway but spent most of his first days in the United States with José Carlos Rodrigues.Footnote ³⁰ As a way to explain the foreigners of the United States to his Brazilian visitor, Rodrigues talked about illustrious non-whites: “the mulato [Frederick] Douglass, an old friend of President Grant and very influential in his reelection, had been turned away recently from several hotels in Washington, DC; this fact led to controversy in the newspapers and a motion in the US Senate.”Footnote ³¹

Rebouças had a few other friends in the city, including the Lidgerwood brothers, engineers with whom he met up on June 11. One of the Lidgerwoods agreed to accompany Rebouças on his excursion to various ports along the East Coast “in order to avoid problems of color prejudice.”Footnote ³² José Carlos Rodrigues saw him off on the steamer Providence.

The East River reminded Rebouças of the Paraná River. Always in the company of John Lidgerwood, he visited “magnificent cotton mills” and continued to Boston, eating his meals in public places without any further racial aggravation. On the way to Buffalo, however, when the train stopped for a meal, he was again harassed by a restaurant owner, at which point “John Lidgerwood had to make a point of revealing my nationality, and refer[red] to me constantly as ‘Doctor.’”Footnote ³³ From then on, with each new stop there was a new complaint. Even so, Rebouças marveled at Niagara Falls and the tourism industry that surrounded it, which was like nothing he had seen in Europe. He especially noted the “Yankee audacity” of the ferry and the beauty of the suspension bridge to Canada. In Buffalo, he wrote that all the hotel staff members were “mulatos and creoles.”Footnote ³⁴

The next day Rebouças visited the “Oil-Creek” oil fields. The progress he observed there astounded him and brought him hope. He firmly shared the optimism of his friend Rodrigues:

On Rebouças’s return trip, however, the “color prejudice” at the train stops caused him to go two days “without food.” All the same, he was impressed, visiting factories, mines, bridges, docks, and shipyards. They traveled by train from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in a sleeping car, and, as at the hotel, “he was served by negros and mulatos.” When they returned to New York City on June 18, at 11 p.m., there was again no hotel for Rebouças, a problem they finally resolved at the “State House” at 760 Broadway, where he shared a room with John Lidgerwood.Footnote ³⁶

The next day, José Carlos Rodrigues put Rebouças in a room adjacent to his own at French’s Hotel, and on June 20 Rebouças received his passport to return home from the Brazilian consulate. Before his departure, Rebouças visited the family home of the Lidgerwood brothers and made additional technical visits to the outskirts of the city. On June 23, two weeks after his arrival in New York, he embarked on the Corvette Niterói for his return to Brazil.Footnote ³⁷

Rebouças’ journey had been made amidst challenges to his rights as operator of the docks of Rio de Janeiro. The death of his brother Antônio, in 1874, would eventually lead him to abandon his business dreams. In a way, his failure as a businessman would also mark the beginning of his path as an abolition activist.Footnote ³⁸ From then on, he became known for his advocacy of social reform projects, which specifically included the abolition of slavery and the democratization of land ownership, both projects clearly inspired by the Yankees.

As previously stated, André Rebouças was eventually one of O Novo Mundo’s principal contributors. Among his numerous articles, he wrote his brother’s obituary and a tribute to his father, Counselor Antônio Pereira Rebouças, which was published along with a full-page portrait on the cover of the February 22, 1875, edition.Footnote ³⁹ It was during this same period that André Rebouças edited his father’s memoirs. The newspaper also published Rebouças’ articles in a special insert called the Revista Industrial.Footnote ⁴⁰ These included three pieces about coffee, cotton, and sugar that made proposals about those crops’ future in Brazil.

The coffee article focused on the prizes that Brazilian beans had received at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876, held in Philadelphia. To maintain the crop’s excellence, Rebouças stated, coffee would have “to undergo a critical progressive evolution from slave to free labor.”Footnote ⁴¹ For this purpose, his proposal called for the industrialization of coffee processing and the democratization of agricultural production, to be achieved by leasing or selling small plots of land to freedmen and immigrants. That was also the basis for his proposal for sugarcane production: industrialization combined with the democratization of land tenure and the mechanization of agricultural production, a model he called “rural democracy.”

The article on cotton, however, is especially interesting for the purposes of this chapter, because it paired proposals for Brazilian agriculture with an interesting analysis of the US post-emancipation scenario.Footnote ⁴² According to Rebouças, 1876 was a year of “crisis and decadence in the cotton culture in this [Brazilian] Empire … yet one of prosperity and great victory for cotton in the admirable Anglo-American Republic.” The article’s objective was to explain why. For the author, the answer was simple: “slave labor here, free labor there: an incessant experimental demonstration that constitutes practical proof of the sublime axiom: liberty is the supreme prerequisite for rational and progressive labor.” To prove his point, he presented figures for the post–Civil War cotton harvest and the growth of the textile industry in the US South. The harvest of 1875/1876, as already been reported in O Novo Mundo, had been nearly identical to the largest harvest ever reported during slavery:

Despite his optimism, Rebouças followed the inclinations of O Novo Mundo in being attentive to Southern accusations about the political activities of Northern “adventurers.” Those Southern critiques were part and parcel of a strategy to undo Reconstruction and impose racist restrictions on African Americans and would culminate in the fully institutionalized suppression of Black voting rights in the Southern states. But that was still in its early stages in the late 1870s. And André Rebouças, despite his trying experience in the “great Northern republic,” as he referred to it, was an optimist when it came to the free movement of goods (which he advocated in the article) and the triumph of free labor around the world.

In addition to closely monitoring the results of the various experiments in emancipation across the Americas, Rebouças was increasingly aware during this period of Black economic activity in Africa, noting:

The friendship between André Rebouças and José Carlos Rodrigues would survive the end of O Novo Mundo. It would even be maintained when Rebouças decided to accompany the deposed Brazilian emperor into exile in 1889, just as his friend decided to end his own exile in the United States and return to Brazil. These contrary choices both stemmed from the same cause. On May 13, 1888, Brazil’s Princess Regent signed the bill that abolished slavery, without compensating slaveowners and after massive flights of the last enslaved workers. A year and a half later, with the full support of discontented slaveowners who came to be known as the “14th of May republicans,” a military coup ended the monarchy and instituted Brazil’s first Republic.

José Carlos Rodrigues, son of coffee farmers from Cantagalo, was an early republican, who converted to Protestantism and willingly left Brazil to live in exile in the United States, after being accused of corruption by the royalist government while working as a public servant. The republican regime brought Rodrigues back to Brazil, although only for a few years; he would become owner of the Jornal do Commercio, one of the most important newspapers in Rio de Janeiro. André Rebouças, as a Liberal monarchist and personal friend of Dom Pedro II, decided to accompany the Imperial family into exile. He was firmly convinced that the republican coup had been fueled by resentment on the part of the old slave-based oligarchies, who feared the implementation of reforms that could lead to a “rural democracy,” which, as conceived in Rebouças’ articles in the 1870s, would have eliminated large landed estates and complemented the work of abolition. Rebouças never returned to Brazil, but neither did he break his epistolary ties with the friend he had met in the United States.

Breaking the Silence

In exile, André Rebouças stopped keeping a diary. From that point on, however, he began to save copies of the letters he wrote in his correspondence notebooks. In these letters, written first in Europe and then in Africa, a small revolution took shape in Rebouças’ self-narration. It was in a letter to the former owner of O Novo Mundo, written as he awaited Dom Pedro II’s death in Cannes in October 1891, that Rebouças referred to himself for the first time as “the negro André.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Judging from his letters, Rebouças’ final years in exile were marked by deep melancholy. Leo Spitzer is the only biographer who emphasizes this stage of Rebouças’ life, arguing that it underscored the sense of marginality that characterized him.Footnote ⁴⁶ The fact that Rebouças narrated this melancholy as an acute awareness of his African origins, however, suggests that it reflected more than the personal difficulties he confronted.

In Spitzer’s reading, Rebouças’ anguish at the end of his life is a psychological reflection of the “social anomaly” to which he was condemned as a mulato in a white world. From this standpoint, Rebouças’ social agency is obscured by an interpretive model that presents racial identities as immutable categories, tragically pitting individual freedom against social structure. Without disregarding the tragic dimension of André Rebouças’ trajectory and the richness of certain aspects of Spitzer’s analysis, my intention is to capture the dramatic dimension of Rebouças’ correspondence. Rebouças’ letters dwell significantly on Africa, allowing us to see the sinister edifice produced by European scientific racism and colonialism. His narratives illuminate the multiple actors present in assembling this social drama, including Black diasporic figures like himself.Footnote ⁴⁷

In fact, much of what André Rebouças wrote about Africa after Brazil’s abolition suggests familiarity with the US thinkers whose ideas would later contribute to Pan-Africanism. Rebouças’ perception, expressed in his letters from Africa, was that the Atlantic Blacks were also Africans, that they shared the “soul” of their brothers from the “Martyr Continent” and should contribute to the mission of Christianizing and civilizing Africa.Footnote ⁴⁸ Even if US intellectuals did not directly influence Rebouças’ thought, it is worth pondering the ways in which the growing importance of race in Western scientific thought after 1870 – and especially after Brazilian abolition – might have led Rebouças to reflect upon the theme in much the same way as Black intellectuals in the United States.

In his self-imposed exile, Rebouças continued to be an active and well-informed intellectual who wrote constantly and published numerous articles in the Brazilian press. His letters discussed a wide array of issues that plagued Brazil and the world. His first article on Africa, O problema da África (The Problem of Africa), was written on November 7, 1890, while he was still in Lisbon, and published in Brazil’s Revista de Engenharia the following year.Footnote ⁴⁹ In it, he sought to reflect upon the relationship between slavery and racism:

At that point, Rebouças was still optimistic about the presence of Christianity in Africa, both Protestant and Catholic, and especially about the churches’ role in the fight against slavery, which was still thriving on that continent. He praised Cardinal Lavigerie in Algeria (whom he saw as an opponent of Muslim proslavery advocates) and the Black Protestant missionaries in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

Recognizing European and American responsibility for what he referred to as the “African problem,” which derived in Rebouças’ view entirely from slavery, he counted on the civilizing efforts of Europeans and Americans to repair centuries of African suffering. In the wake of 1888, he firmly believed that Brazil should play a role in a new colonization of the African continent.

In the best tradition of proto-Pan-Africanism, Rebouças proposed the establishment of a steamer route from Europe to the Pacific, which would pass along the Western coast of Africa and continue to Brazil before rounding the tip of South America. With the death of Pedro II in Paris in early December 1891, Rebouças decided to begin the undertaking himself. He traveled from Cannes to Marseilles in order to seek employment on the Luanda-Ambaca Railroad “or in any company in Africa.”Footnote ⁵⁰

In letters from this period, he described in detail an anticipated expedition to Africa, the primary goal of which was to fight slavery on that continent. He planned to leave on the packet ship Malange, “with his friend João Nunes Lisboa,” and to visit ports along Africa’s East Coast, producing a detailed report of local conditions and possible improvements; he also planned at various points to “take a steamship from Lourenço Marques [the pre-1976 name for Maputo, in present-day Mozambique] to the East Coast,” to “set up residence in Ambaca or any other high point along the Railroad,” and to “work to develop rail traffic by introducing coffee cultivation to the adjacent areas.”Footnote ⁵¹

In a long letter to the abolitionist writer Alfredo Taunay, his closest friend and correspondent, he wrote of his desire to be in the “forests of Africa”Footnote ⁵² and his plans to write a book during his time in Africa entitled “Around Africa,” of “Tolstoyan” inspiration.Footnote ⁵³ In his self-imposed exile, Rebouças openly assumed his Blackness, making reference to his “Portuguese and African grandparents.” And he also became a diligent reader of Leo Tolstoy, whom he repeatedly quoted in his letters. Only ten years younger than the novelist, André Rebouças became “Tolstoyan” when the Russian writer was only beginning to gain followers in Europe, advocating a stoic and anti-institutional religiosity, aligned with a new sense of pacifism. For Rebouças, attention to Russia and the United States was part of a larger effort to think about post-slavery societies and their potential for modernization. At the same time, Rebouças sought – “Tolstoy-like,” as he liked to say – to morally and intellectually resist the advance of racism in the Western world, an evil that was bolstered by the very “science” in which Western thinkers so believed.

In 1892, André Rebouças finally traveled to the continent of Africa through the Suez Canal. By May he had settled into Lourenço Marques (Maputo). His first impression was one of amazement with the natural landscape and with the new array of languages, religions, and human beings. He felt happy “mingling with all human races; having as enemies only those who monopolized the land and enslaved men.”Footnote ⁵⁴ He spent some time there before embarking on the steamship Tinguá to South Africa. His stay was long enough, however, to change his initial point of view:

In finding that slavery continued in Lourenço Marques, and that he was powerless to fight it, Rebouças experienced the first disappointment of his trip. Ongoing slavery was not something he was unaware of before arriving, but its dimensions and intensity rendered his plans to fight it unworkable. But by May 26, he was in South Africa, confident of Britain’s capacity to repress slavery and the slave trade.

Rebouças settled in Barberton, which he denominated the “African Petrópolis.”Footnote ⁵⁷ He established himself in South Africa as an admirer of the humanitarian sentiment of the British, who were then consolidating the imperialist occupation of the region in the name of “civilization” and the fight against slavery, which had been abolished throughout the British Empire in 1838. The year 1892 was, for Rebouças, one of intense intellectual work. Upon arriving in Barberton, he had “a number of ‘idylls’ written or ready to write,” for which he repeatedly claimed Tolstoyan inspiration.

He sent Taunay a piece entitled “New Propaganda – Dressing 300,000,000 African Negroes,” in hopes his friend would facilitate its publication in Brazil.Footnote ⁵⁸ Part of it, – the sixth of his African “Idylls,” written in Barberton on May 30, 1892 – was published in the newspaper A Cidade do Rio, owned by abolitionist José do Patrocínio, on February 4, 1893. One of the article’s central questions foreshadowed W. E. B. Du Bois’ seminal The Souls of Black Folk (1903):Footnote ⁵⁹

Rebouças spent all of 1892 working diligently on the book he had planned to write while still in Europe. Although he finished the book, entitled Around Africa 1889–1893: Abolitionist propaganda – Socio-economic life – Anthropology – Botany – Comparison of Brazilian and African Flora – Astronomy, Meteorology, etc., the manuscript has not yet been located among Rebouças’ papers.Footnote ⁶⁰

In late May 1892, shortly after arriving in Barberton, Rebouças still felt optimistic about the possibilities of South Africa under British rule. From his standpoint, “the Africans needed to be taught how to read and write … it should be absolutely clear that the only thing Africans ask for is fundamental justice; equality in payment …, a bit of land … . To deny this is a diabolical evil.”Footnote ⁶¹

With the acceleration of the South African gold rush after 1886, however, the Boers from the Republic of Transvaal became a majority. The Republic of Transvaal or South Africa Republic was an independent state until the British defeated it in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Rebouças was crushed by the racist practices of the Boers and the return of the specter of proslavery sentiments. Abruptly, in a passage that was not foreshadowed in his previous correspondence, he wrote to Nabuco and Taunay:

Rebouças once again felt powerless in the fight against African slavery. In Cape Town, which remained under British rule, he managed to channel his personal resources from Portugal and Brazil through the Bank of South Africa in order to maintain what he defined as an “anti-slavery and scientific mission.”Footnote ⁶³ But before long, even his illusions about the British rule in the Cape faded away. Racial discrimination, which was not legalized but was informally tolerated by the British, began to affect him. In a dramatic letter to Taunay dated December 19, 1892, he cataloged the list of horrors that British colonialists had allowed or engaged in the once idealized “South Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁴ According to him, the British insisted on:

1. 1. Withholding land ownership from the Africans – What a disgrace!? Africans cannot own property on their own continent of Africa!

2. 2. Refusing voting rights to Africans; subjecting them to barbaric laws; judging them in ad hoc courts; using and abusing the atrocious practice of whipping.

3. 3. Employing the brutal Yankee practice of refusing negros and mulatos hotel rooms, and even making it difficult for clothing stores and toiletry shops to serve them.

All of this was in addition to what happened “in the heinous Republic of the Transvaal, where “former landowners claimed compensation for the formal abolition of slavery by the British,” the trading post system “[stole] wages from the African,” and settlers practiced violence against entire classes of workers. In 1892, Rebouças witnessed a “horrendous event” that caused him to leave the Granville Hotel in Barberton: the lynching of Africans on the streets, which brought to mind “the Yankee cannibals of Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri.”

Rhetorical references to Europeans and Americans who engaged in actions that were perceived as pure savagery as “cannibals” recurred in Rebouças’ writings. Aside from this, his disappointment with British rule in Africa began to diminish his will to fight. For Rebouças, it was becoming increasingly clear that the problem of racism went much further than the Republic of Transvaal. To Rebouças’ great disappointment, British colonization of South Africa allowed “the African [to remain] completely naked, unabashed and with no shame, in the company of his family, among the women and his own unmarried sons”; it did not teach Africans “English or Dutch or any other language,” because colonists spoke to domestic servants in “a gibberish of Savage, Dutch and Portuguese.”Footnote ⁶⁵ He concluded, astonished, by saying that “The London Graphic depicted a half-naked African, serving as nanny in Barberton, carrying a small child and leading the older sister along by the hand!!!!!!”Footnote ⁶⁶

Rebouças’ enthusiasm for the Protestants likewise ended. His Christian mysticism, like that of Tolstoy, held that all religions, without exception, had a nefarious influence on progress and civilization. To him, all missionaries were theocrats who fostered the caste system (“eminently caste-ish”). “The missionaries in Africa teach the Zulu language instead of English or any other civilized language!”Footnote ⁶⁷

Rebouças’ letters, especially those to Taunay, made it clear that he himself was no longer immune to segregationist practices, even in Cape Town. All the same, a few more months had to pass for him to give up on his “scientific and anti-proslavery mission” and decide to leave South Africa. In April 1893, he wrote:

The letters of André Rebouças are a dramatic self-narration, as well as a testament to the contradictions and disillusions of antiracist liberal ideas in the process of European colonization of Africa. According to Paul Gilroy’s foundational work (2001), Black critical thought comprised the first “counterculture of modernity,” produced by divided subjects defined by a “double consciousness” that at once constituted them as modern and excluded them from modernity because of their race. André Rebouças was, without any doubt, a significant figure in this mold.Footnote ⁶⁹ In his last letter from Cape Town to his friend Taunay, Rebouças narrated his journey in terms of Greek mythology, announcing his departure from Cape Town as a “new chapter in the Odyssey of this miserable African Ulysses.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In June 1893, André Rebouças considered his book Em torno D’Africa “dead,” “faced with the impossibility of publishing it in Cape Town.” At the same time, “the civil war in Brazil’s south” left him with no will to go home.Footnote ⁷¹ He decided instead to go to Funchal, on the Atlantic Island of Madeira, where some of his Portuguese friends had epistolary contacts. There, he briefly considered the possibility of returning to the “Martyr Continent” so he could experience its Western coast:

With the historian’s magical hindsight, we know that he carried out none of the options. Still in Funchal, Rebouças fell to his death off of an Atlantic cliff in 1898. The self-narratives he left to the posterity are nonetheless powerful testimonies to the significance of transnational politics for universalist Black intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World. The arguments set forth in this chapter have sought to illuminate the racialized subjectivization engendered by the stigma of slavery and to portray the ways in which its politicization was shaped by a collective transnational experience.