Bridging the Historiographies of Slave Emancipation and Political History
On March 25th, 1884, euphoric crowds gathered in city squares across Brazil reacting to the news that the northeastern province of Ceará had pronounced itself the nation’s first ‘free’ territory. The unprecedented declaration of freedom marked a watershed in the Brazilian struggle for slave emancipation; thereafter, slaves and slaveowners alike, as well as the whole of civil society, employed new vocabularies and pursued a variety of novel strategies to accelerate, as well as, obstruct the course of final abolition. The transformative effect of the March 25th development was palpable in a letter written by the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco to a counterpart in Ceará: “this hardly yet signifies a free Brazil,” he reflected, “but it does profoundly modify a slave Brazil.”
This paper utilizes an analysis of the March 25th (1884) commemorations as a conduit to explore the intersections between the historiographies of slave emancipation and political history. In focusing on the celebrations and their own role in the making of a national abolitionist movement, the larger aims, then, become to think about not only the role of collective mobilization, which encompasses the actions of slaves and that of broad segments of society, within the ending of slavery, but also to consider how this distinct political form—the social movement—fits within historiographical frameworks of nineteenth-century Brazilian politics. A focus on abolitionism, therefore, entails a reckoning with citizenship, race, the public sphere, gender, and nation, all themes that have been productively reworked and incorporated in the new political histories of nineteenth-century Latin America.
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