The Crime of Illegal Enslavement and the Campaign for Immediate Abolition in Brazil, 1880s

Addressing the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies in 1879, abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco denounced the Saint John D’El Rey Mining Company of holding hundreds of laborers under illegal enslavement at the Morro Velho mine. The move, calculated to have effects both in Brazil and in Great Britain, was planned by Nabuco and the British and Foreign and Anti-Slavery Society. The Company and its administrators were defendants in a freedom suit filed in Minas Gerais, in which the laborers claimed they were free since the 14-year lease contract between Morro Velho and Cata Branca companies expired in 1859. And yet, they had been registered as slaves in the national slave registry of 1872. Like them, hundreds of thousands of Africans or people of African descent were held in illegal bondage when the abolitionist movement decided to defend immediate abolition rather than gradual emancipation. They were African men and women brought to Brazil after the prohibition of the slave trade, or their offspring; free-born people who had been kidnapped and sold as slaves; or yet freed people reenslaved through various means. A few, considering their numbers, took their cases to court, usually in civil suits. Yet illegal enslavement was a crime under the Brazilian Criminal Code of 1830, and defendants faced prison and fines for holding free people in bondage. Based on press repercussion of cases of illegal enslavement, as well as on a selection of judicial cases, this paper will explore how radical abolitionists, besides moral arguments, raised the issue of illegal enslavement during the abolitionist campaign in the 1880s. The strategy to undermine slaveholders’ authority and delegitimize property rights attained limited results as very few faced trial and the vast majority managed to avoid penalties related to this large-scale crime.