Freedom’s Horizon: Black Abolitionism in 19th-Century Brazil

This paper presents my new book Freedom’s Horizon, which is a transnational history of black abolitionism in Brazil. I argue that, in the last country to abolish slavery in the Western hemisphere, Africans and their descendants crafted their visions of liberation by thinking comparatively about the uneven spread of abolition across the Atlantic world. Between the 1840s and 1860s, they acted on the idea that the end of slavery anywhere placed freedom on the horizon in Brazil. Thus, they pursued alliances with British diplomats, rose in arms at the sight of both Union and Confederate warships off Brazil’s Atlantic coast, sought free soil at foreign consulates, ships, and quilombos or spread the call for immediate abolition for believing in the emancipatory nature of the wars reported in the newspapers. This study shows that through flight, marronage, rebellion, and literacy practices, enslaved and freedpeoples developed a geopolitical imagination in dialogue with the British campaign against the slave trade (banned in Brazil in 1850), French antislavery, the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865), and the Triple Alliance War (1865-1870) in South America.

Traditionally, historical research has focused on the 1870s and 1880s, when abolition emerged as Brazil’s first national mass political movement, ultimately leading to the outlawing of slavery in 1888. By turning attention to earlier decades and to the role of literacy in the associational lives of afro-Brazilians, this paper suggests that abolitionism was more than just the cause of North Atlantic reformers, Latin American modernizing elites, or middle-class advocates. It was a grassroots movement that originated in the social and conceptual worlds of the enslaved and connected to a hemispheric black radical tradition.