The (Re)Making of Class and Race in the Postemancipation Americas: Brazil, Cuba, and the United States, 1787–1912

This paper offers a transnational history of constitutionalism, race, and citizenship in the Americas during the long nineteenth century. It begins by demonstrating that the Haitian Revolution inaugurated a wave of emancipations in the Americas and, at the same time, a second age of bondage in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil. People of African descent resisted captivity and disenfranchisement throughout the hemisphere, yet slavery and racialized citizenship prevailed in these three societies. The emergence of new slaveholding classes influenced the making of constitutions in Brazil, the Spanish Empire, and the United States. Despite the specificities of each political regime, they shared one Atlantic constitutional experience and learned from one another. Statesmen from these nations legitimized slavery and established qualifications for citizenship that preserved and reinforced social and racial hierarchies. These constitutions created political regimes that overrepresented slaveholding elites and made citizenship a privilege of class and race.

In the late nineteenth century, abolitionists and enslaved people radicalized their struggle for emancipation across the Americas. This new age of abolition was an opportunity to remake constitutional regimes in the United States, Brazil, and Cuba. Yet the end of slavery marked the beginning of a new form of bondage. For Black men and women, freedom and citizenship were not the same. This was especially true after the end of Reconstruction in the United States and the 1912 Massacre of the Partido Independiente de Color in Cuba. In the early twentieth century, most African descendants in the hemisphere suffered from poverty, marginality, and disenfranchisement. Meanwhile, planter classes reinvented themselves under new political regimes. They shared one Atlantic experience during the Age of Abolition and learned from one another to preserve political rights as their privilege of class and race in Cuba, Brazil, and the American South.