Hemispheric Reconciliation: North American Abolitionists and the Struggle Against Black Suffrage in Brazil

This paper examines the role of North American abolitionists in Brazilian debates over the future of Black citizenship after slavery. Following two elite, white members of the U.S. Republican Party—Henry Hilliard and Andrew Lamoureaux—it demonstrates that these men, while working in Rio de Janeiro during the 1870s and 1880s, advocated for both immediate emancipation and the restriction of Black suffrage in Brazil. Ten years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, they remained convinced that emancipation was a moral imperative. But they also saw universal male suffrage as a terrible mistake. When the Brazilian Parliament began to debate the future of the franchise in 1879, Hilliard and Lamoureaux began arguing publicly—and passionately—against the extension of suffrage to Brazilian freedmen. “It would not only be folly, but it would be positively criminal to suddenly free a million or more ignorant slaves, and at once endow them with the privilege of voting,” Lamoureaux wrote in his English-language newspaper, The Rio News. In the United States, he claimed, the Fifteenth Amendment “led to huge evils; and to an almost utter demoralization of the whole country.” Elite Brazilian abolitionists, including the President of the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society, Joaquim Nabuco, paid close attention to these arguments. In 1880, Nabuco invited both men to the inaugural meeting of his anti-slavery society and even hosted a banquet in Hilliard’s honor. At that banquet, Hilliard condemned U.S. Reconstruction and insisted that “wise statesmen” must continue to govern Brazil. This paper thus illuminates the hemispheric dimensions of the process of “reconciliation” after the U.S. Civil War. As the Republican Party abandoned freedpeople to violence and terror across the U.S. South, its representatives abroad reinterpreted the history of U.S. emancipation to demonstrate the folly of extending political citizenship to Black people across the hemisphere.