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 The search for a replacement for slave labor in Brazil
began in earnest in 1845 with the passage of the
Aberdeen Act, which allowed the British navy
to treat slave vessels as pirate ships.
By Kim Richardson
Brazil claims the position as the last country in the western hemisphere to abolish
slavery. When this country formally abolished slavery in 1888, the majority of its slaves
toiled in the southeastern region of Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais)
while less than half a century earlier the majority of the slaves resided in the
northeastern region (specifically in the states of Pernambuco and Bahia). Why did slaves
in nineteenth century Brazil migrate (were sold) from the Northeast to the Southeast? And
why did Brazil look to immigration to support slave labor?
By looking at works by Jeffery Lesser, Thomas Holloway, Douglas Cole Libby, Marshall
Eakin, and B.J. Barickman, all renowned historians on Brazil, we can better understand
this migration; slaves were sold to Southeastern Brazil due to the decline of the sugar
industry and the rise of the coffee industry, as well as the imminent demise of the
institution of slavery itself. By understanding why nineteenth-century slave owners
transferred their slave population from the northeast to the southeast, we can better
understand both slavery, migration, and immigration in Brazil.
Like other countries before it, Brazil also had to make the difficult transition from
slave to free labor. Brazil, however, found this a difficult challenge, as did foreign
companies operating in Brazil, who often relied more on slave labor en lieu of free. This
transition has been studied for the major sugar producing regions of the Northeast and
also for the coffee regions of the Southeast, particularly São Paulo. Yet with the
largest slave population throughout the nineteenth century, Minas Gerais has largely been
ignored by historians.
The search for a replacement for slave labor in Brazil began in earnest in 1845 with
the passage of the Aberdeen Act, which allowed the British navy to treat slave vessels as
pirate ships. Thus, for the most part, legal transatlantic slave trading ceased at this
time. In Brazil's northeastern provinces, the growing shortage of slave labor after 1850
worsened with the inter-provincial slave trade that transferred thousands of northeastern
slaves to southeastern Brazil, where production of coffee for export expanded rapidly.
Indeed, between 1853 and 1871, over 18,000 slaves were sent out of the province in Bahia
alone. Whereas in the 1850s over half of all slaves were Africans by birth, by the 1880s
only 7.6% were. The Aberdeen Act, then, decreased the number of African-born
slaves and inadvertently forced the slaves from the Northeast to the Southeast.
These slaves in the northeastern provinces of Brazil, particularly in Bahia and
Pernambuco, mainly worked in sugar production. During the first part of the
nineteenth-century, Bahia exported more sugar than any other captaincy in Brazil. Also
involved extensively in the tobacco economy, they exported nearly all their tobacco to
Europe. Pernambuco, much like Bahia, also had a large export market in sugar. Yet while
the Pernambucan sugar export continued to rise after the abolition of slavery, the Bahian
sugar economy collapsed. This is because Bahia depended much more so than did Pernambuco
on slave labor.
Bahia and the Northeast, then, saw a large decline in the slave population in the
mid-nineteenth century. A half-century prior to this ending of the Atlantic slave trade,
Bahia imported an increasingly large number of slaves. Thus this state continued to rely
on the large number of slaves for their labor source instead of investing in more
expensive machinery. Pernambuco, which also failed to invest large amounts of capital into
machinery, had less slaves to work the fields. The Pernambucan-type plantations were much
smaller and often consisted of free labor working alongside slave labor. In sum, Bahia
enlarged its slave population in the first half of the nineteenth-century, but Pernambuco
did not.
While Pernambuco did not have a surplus of slave labor, they did have an excess of free
laborers. These dwellers lived for the most part on unused portions of plantations. They
paid nominal rent in either cash or kind, and performed odd services for their planter
landlord in exchange for permission to live and grow subsistence crops on the land. With
the decline in the slave population in the second half of the nineteenth-century, many of
these planter landowners forced their free laborers to work increasingly harder in
exchange for permission to live on the land. By the early 1870s, free labor outnumbered
slave labor and these laborers slowly began to replace the slaves.
The number of free laborers in Pernambuco increased in 1877 when a disastrous drought
ravaged much of the interior of the Northeast. This drought lasted three years and
resulted in at least 2,000 deaths. Many free rural workers fled from the interior to the
coast and began working on these plantations. Thus, as we have stated, when abolition
arrived in 1888, Pernambuco had already made the transition to free labor, partly because
of this devastating drought and partly because of their smaller plantations.
In contrast to Pernambuco, however, Bahia did not succeed in making the transition from
slave to free labor. In Bahia, where the plantations were much bigger, slaves comprised
the field labor and the foremen and mechanics made up the free labor. Right up until the
end of slavery (1888), the Bahian sugar plantations continued to use slave labor. With the
end of slavery, however, the free labor refused to work for the low wages necessary to
permit revenue on the plantations.
This would signal the demise of three centuries of Bahian sugar. As one historian
explained it, "When abolition finally came in 1888, it resulted not only in the
`disorganization of labor', but also in the nearly complete collapse of the Bahian sugar
industry, which, for over three centuries, had served as the mainstay of the province's
export economy; from that collapse provincial production of sugar for export never fully
recovered." The economy in Bahia suffered a huge blow due to abolition.
In the Southeast region of Brazil, the states of São Paulo, Espírito Santo, Rio de
Janeiro, and Minas Gerais saw a tremendous increase in the rise of coffee plantations. As
a result, plantation owners transferred a large part of the slaves to this Southeastern
region. Because of the importation of immigrants and the influx of coffee, the situation
here became extremely unique in comparison to the Northeast. By looking at the importation
of immigrant-labor and also the rise of coffee as the region's most valuable commodity, we
can better understand the reasons for the slave migrations from the Northeast to the
Southeast.
With independence, foreigners were allowed to invest in industries. One example is that
of the St. John d'el Rey Mining Company, owned by the British. The labor needed for this
mine was similar to that needed for the sugar plantations of Bahia; monotonous and tiring
work of crushing the rocks to extract the gold. As a rule Europeans worked as the
department heads and supervisors, and slaves and free Brazilians worked as manual
laborers. In 1840, for example, slave labor comprised eighty percent of the work force.
Immigration played a large role in the affairs of State during the latter part of the
nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The government of São Paulo, from
the 1880s until the 1930s, spent $37,000,000 on the importation of immigrants. You can see
the importance of immigration with the demise of slavery in the revenues collected by the
government from 1892-1930, nearly ten times as much revenue from the coffee export taxes
as it spent on all phases of the immigration program. Thus we can see that the reason that
São Paulo and the Southeast successfully made this transition from slave to free labor
came from the large coffee revenues (and taxes paid) and the minimal investments required
(coffee didn't require steam-driven sugar cane crushers such as on Bahian sugar
plantations). The new coffee plantations did require, however, a large supply of laborers,
which they acquired largely through immigration.
In the coffee plantations of Brazil, then, the owners switched over to foreign labor as
soon as possible. Lúcio Kowarick from the University of São Paulo wrote in 1987 that
"after Abolition manpower was never lacking either in the São Paulo coffee region or
for the industrialization which occurred in this State. On the contrary, the rapid process
of economic expansion was able to draw on a vast supply of labor. This supply came
particularly from the voluminous entry of foreigners." Immigrants now became the
major labor source in the Southeast.
In summary, this article has looked at the reasons why the slaves of the Northeast
migrated (or were sold) to the Southeast and why foreign immigration played such an
important role in labor in the Southeast. While the decline in sugar and the rise in
coffee played a large role in this, slave owners also read the writing on the wall and
realized that abolition would soon arrive. As a result, they first turned to free
Brazilian laborers and then to foreigner labor. By understanding the reasons for the
transference of the slave labor source and importation of foreigners, we not only get a
better and more accurate view of Brazilian history, but we also can better understand what
Jeffery Lesser refers to as Brazil's "hyphenated identity"—African-,
Asian-, and European-Brazilians.
Kim Richardson is a graduate student studying Brazilian History at the
University of Texas at Austin. The author is currently working on immigration in Brazil
and can be reached at krichardson@mail.utexas.edu
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