Lei Áurea — Abolition of Slavery in Brazil
Brazil abolished slavery on 13 May 1888, the last country in the Americas to do it, and the monarchy fell eighteen months later. Brazil had received some 4.9 million enslaved Africans, about forty per cent of the entire Atlantic trade and roughly ten times the number landed in North America, and slavery was woven through every part of its economy rather than confined to one region. Abolition came by stages under British pressure and internal campaigning: the trade banned in 1850, the Law of the Free Womb in 1871 freeing children born to enslaved mothers but binding them in service until twenty-one, and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 freeing those over sixty. Each stage was designed to postpone the thing itself. What forced it in the end was mass flight. Enslaved people left the plantations in numbers the state could not return, sheltered by abolitionists and by army officers who refused to hunt them, and the institution stopped functioning before it was repealed. The Golden Law is two sentences long. It declares slavery extinct and revokes contrary provisions, with no compensation to owners and no provision whatsoever for the 700,000 people it freed — no land, no schooling, no wages. Princess Isabel signed it as regent while her father was in Europe. The planters withdrew their support from the monarchy, and a military coup declared a republic in November 1889. Brazil then encouraged European immigration explicitly to whiten the population, and the day is still contested. Isabel is said to have remarked that she would have freed them all and lost the throne for it, which is roughly what happened. Brazil did not begin counting its population by race in a way that made the consequences visible until the twentieth century.
- Year: 1888 CE
- Category: Political
