“Reform or Be Devoured”: US Reconstruction and the Brazilian Plan for Black Disfranchisement, 1867–81

This paper explores how and why U.S. Reconstruction shaped the Brazilian approach to the problem of black suffrage after slavery. Building on Ferraro’s paper, it demonstrates how Brazilian and Cuban slaveowners faced the same revolutionary constitutional crisis after the U.S. Civil War. In both nations, planters enacted gradual emancipation laws as political concessions to the enslaved. Unlike Cuban planters, however, Brazilian slaveowners left the question of the franchise deliberately unresolved. For the next ten years, these men closely observed the democratic revolution unfolding in the United States as thousands of ex-Confederates fled to Brazil. These Confederados warned Brazilian elites that Black political enfranchisement in the U.S. South had resulted in a violent “race war” that paralleled the Haitian Revolution. Simultaneously, Brazilian elites began to fear that a race war was possible in Brazil. By the late 1870s, economic transformations wrought by the gradual emancipation act had devastated small-scale slaveholders across the Brazilian empire. For decades, free Afro-Brazilians had been a small but critical element of this social class. Their rapid dispossession undermined the material basis for solidarity among free Brazilian men. As a result—and for the first time in their nation’s history—elite white Brazilians felt profoundly threatened by the prospect of mass political mobilization along racial lines. They became convinced that it was imperative to disenfranchise Afro-Brazilians without fomenting racial divisions. The result was the passage of Lei Saraiva in 1881, which established direct elections in Brazil in which only 400,000 people out of 8.4 million could participate due to new literacy and voter registration requirements. Nearly all Afro-Brazilian people were barred from voting. I conclude by suggesting that the Lei Saraiva assumed an increasingly global significance as North American and Cuban elites embarked on similar exclusionary projects over the next two decades.