The nationalization of abolitionism came about when slavery returned to the institutional agenda in 1878, thanks to the full implementation of the free-womb law and the change of government. After a decade of demanding reforms in the public space, the Liberals were in power. The abolitionists seized the opportunity to step up their protest. A new generation, in part benefiting from the educational reforms of the 1870s, joined the mobilization. Among them was the black journalist José do Patrocínio, who joined Rebouças in founding an abolitionist association and started the “concert-conferences”, an expansion of Abílio Borges´s civic conferences. Held in theaters, with poetry rrecitations and operas, these events ended with the presentation of manumission certificates and a shower of flowers over the freed slaves.This was the preferred abolitionist strategy in the following years, a pacific style of mobilization, which conferred public legitimacy upon the campaign in the large cities and allowed women to enter the campaign. Numeric growth, geographic expansion, tactical variety, and the social diversity of the activists allowed the movement to become national.

The crisis led, in June 1884, to the appointment of a new Prime Minister, the Liberal Manuel de Souza Dantas, committed to a moderate abolitionist reform. The Abolitionist Confederation coordinated abolitionists nationwide to endorse the government and helped draft a proposal for gradual emancipation and conceiving rights to freed people, presented to Parliament in July 1884.The alliance government movement triggered a pro-slavery political backlash, with the creation of civil associations (Plantation Clubs) against the Dantas reform, while the caucus worked to obstruct it in parliament. Dantas then dissolved the House and called new elections. Joaquim Nabuco returned to Brazil to be the star of the coalition abolitionist movement/government, that stood candidates for parliament, in a nationwide abolitionist electoral campaign. The freedom soil campaign continued at the same time. The pro-slavery political faction managed to control the results of the election.The Dantas government fell and the gradual emancipation project was thwarted.

By the end of 1887, the political process of abolition entered its final phase. Afraid of a civil war, sectors of the political and social elite moved to support abolition. The army’s decision to support abolition in October 1887 was decisive, stripping the state of its capacity to keep quashing the movement by force. In February 1888, the Crown and a dissident faction of the Conservative Party followed suit. The new balance of power dismantled the confrontation between the proslavery countermovement and the abolitionists and produced a compromise. Abolition came in May 1888, without indemnification to slave owners, just as the abolitionists had wanted. However, the pro-slavery countermovement managed to block all their other demands, such as social protection and land for former slaves.