It was close to two in the afternoon on a bright and sunny Monday, November 25, 1833, when the captain of the British sloop Snake, William Robertson, spotted the white masts of the Maria da Gloria floating above the turquoise waves of the Atlantic Ocean ninety miles south of Rio’s harbor. Robertson quickly ordered the bow up for the Snake and chased the Maria da Gloria, positioning the left side of the sloop to cut off the wind from the suspected slave vessel. The Maria da Gloria resisted the Snake’s onslaught for five hours by speeding ahead. At 238 tons, the Maria da Gloria was a medium-sized ship, but in the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean it resembled weightless paper. The bark sighted both Rio and its southern shore at Ilha Grande, where pristine waters gleamed under the shining sun. Since 1831, the idyllic region was Rio de Janeiro’s newest slave market. The Snake finally caught up with the Maria da Gloria at seven that evening, fifty-eight miles south of Rio’s harbor. Mooring the Snake to the Maria da Gloria, Robertson boarded the slaver, where he verified that it carried 423 slaves, 75 men, 34 women, 220 boys, and 94 girls below deck. He noted in the Snake’s logbook that the slaver had sailed from São Paulo de Loanda to Rio de Janeiro.Footnote ¹

Robertson’s apprehension of the Maria da Gloria belongs to the routine activities of the British navy in the Atlantic Ocean as naval officers and sailors participated in the global campaign to end human trafficking. The Maria da Gloria sailed into Rio’s harbor as a prize vessel during a crucial moment when Brazilian postcolonial lawmakers and liberal reformers were intensely debating how to govern the social order of a constitutional monarchy in the largest slave society in the Americas, one where slave ships disembarked their human cargo along its borders in well-known spots of the illegal slave trade continuously until 1850. In the decade following Brazilian independence in 1822, the future of the slave trade figured prominently in lawmakers’ objectives to define Brazil as a modern empire loosely premised on the idea of liberty in an antislavery era that cast slavery and human trafficking as the antithesis of modernity and progress. While the slave ship embodied the symbol of bondage, violence, suffering, and corporal punishment in the global marketplace of abolitionist ideas, the penitentiary simultaneously emerged as a potent signifier of freedom, progress, modernity, and a crucible for imagining free labor in the Atlantic World.

In this global context, Brazilian liberal reformers debated the meaning of citizenship, the status of enslaved men, women, and children as property or as persons, as well as the punishment of slave criminals in the empire. They reckoned with the impact of the slave trade on the future of race and nation in this Latin American country. In their visions of postcolonial progress, they viewed the penitentiary as a signifier for effecting broader transformations of Brazilian society under slavery to civilize the racially heterogenous free poor into law-abiding citizens of a prosperous empire, a prosperity that significantly hinged on the enslavement of Africans, the subjugation of the native population, and the replenishing promises of the slave trade. The slave ship and the penitentiary figured prominently in debates about what constituted Brazilian modernity, its challenges, and how to place the country on the path to progress.

This chapter explores how postcolonial reformers attempted to reconcile the country’s dependence on slavery and the slave trade within a nation-building project that emphasized Brazil as an empire of law, order, and liberal citizenship. I do so by discussing Brazil’s transition from a colony to a postcolonial nation, and by analyzing the antislavery ideas of liberal and conservative reformers who played important roles in laying the ground for building the penitentiary in Rio as a crucible for modernizing the empire. By 1831, these postcolonial reformers converged around a philanthropic organization known as the Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independencia Nacional (Society for the Defense of Freedom and National Independence) whose objective was to modernize Brazil’s political institutions from colony to nation. The organization targeted abolition of the slave trade to Brazil and reform of the country’s criminal justice system as two of its main objectives to anchor the empire on the path to progress, order, and economic prosperity.

Brazil’s reputation as the last country to abolish slavery in the Americas has led to the perception that it did not participate in the conversations about the “problem of slavery” as it was articulated in the English and French Atlantic during the Age of Revolution. Historiographic discussions of antislavery discourse in the immediate postindependence period highlight its limitations and ultimate failure to stem the tide of the illegal slave trade between 1831 and 1850.Footnote ² A focus on British pressure to abolish the slave trade to Brazil largely supports the reigning consensus that antislavery ideas were weak, marginal, and inconsequential in the Latin American country.Footnote ³ However, as historian Jaime Rodrigues has argued, discussions of the problem of slavery were not marginal in Brazil but were part of broader debates on postcolonial nation building. Antislavery discourse in the postcolonial era reflected anxieties about slavery’s effects on the Brazilian population and its significance as the source of the country’s “social ills.”Footnote ⁴ Brazilian antislavery ideas, Rodrigues demonstrated, were part of a “diversity of solutions” that reformers considered against the “evils” of slavery and the problems that enslaved Africans posed to “public security.”Footnote ⁵

Analyzing the debates on the abolition of the slave trade, legal reforms, and citizenship in the postindependence period demonstrates that they were fundamental to the adoption of the penitentiary in Brazil. Social reformers and antislavery advocates linked the abolition of human trafficking to the control of intractable segments of society, especially the multiracial free poor. They viewed the prohibition of trafficking as significant to resolving debates about race, nation, and citizenship in postindependence Brazil.Footnote ⁶ Antislave trade activists, such as Leopoldo Cezar Burlamaqui whose memória sobre a escravidão (essay on slavery) was written in response to a contest by the Sociedade Defensora on “the necessity to abolish the slave trade,” portrayed the slave ship as the vehicle that supported Brazil’s agricultural economic expansion in the early nineteenth century through access to servile labor, while denouncing it as the vile instrument that introduced Africans as an “internal enemy” into the country.Footnote ⁷

The slave ship became synonymous with Rio’s crowded pestilential dungeons, another highly critiqued space of confinement that reformers attacked as an incubator of epidemic diseases and criminality that spread to the rest of society. In contrast, the penitentiary, as a transatlantic disciplinary idea and a sanitized novel architecture, embodied for Brazilian reformers the possibilities of future national progress. By probing the influence of the Sociedade Defensora on antislavery ideas and the role of the organization in the construction of the Casa de Correção in Rio de Janeiro, this analysis brings emergent studies on prison building in Brazil in conversation with the expanding literature on the simultaneous development of penal reforms with abolitionism in the Atlantic.Footnote ⁸ As other scholars have observed, the building of prisons in postemancipation societies occurred under slavery, where they played an important role in shaping the meaning of freedom for slaves and freed people.Footnote ⁹

Slavery and the Racial Politics of Citizenship

Colonized since the sixteenth century through the captaincy system, whereby the Portuguese crown granted native land and privileges to private colonists, Brazil evolved by the early nineteenth century into an economy rooted in the exploitation of native and African labor. Independence came in 1822 with very few changes in the social and economic structures of the former colony, but generated intense debates about slavery, race, and citizenship through the elaboration of enduring legal codes that maintained the power of the slaveholding elite in a constitutional monarchy, as well as contestation from below for political rights and economic justice. The events leading to Brazilian independence in 1822 pale in comparison to the dramatic antislavery and anticolonial wars of the Atlantic where republican nation-states supplanted European rule.Footnote ¹⁰ The 1820 liberal revolution in Portugal had profound repercussions in Brazil, where the Portuguese crown had resided since 1808. The revolution called for a constitutional monarchy. Under mounting pressure, the Portuguese ruler in Brazil, Dom João VI, agreed to organize elections to send representatives to the Lisbon Cortes where its members would vote on a constitution.Footnote ¹¹

Among the officials who drafted instructions for the Brazilian delegates to the Cortes was José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva. Originating from the province of São Paulo and from a slaveholding family, José Bonifácio was educated in Europe, as were sons of the Brazilian elite. He was well versed in the ideas of the Enlightenment that provided ideological foundations to challenge colonialism and royal absolutism in the Atlantic World. He was elected to the junta governativa (governing board) of São Paulo, whose members represented Brazil at the Cortes. José Bonifácio assumed the leadership of the regional junta along with his brothers, Antonio Carlos Ribeiro and Martim Francisco, who became important in the Brazilian government after independence. He instructed the delegates to defend Brazil’s status as co-kingdom with representation at the legislative assembly in Portugal and to affirm equality between Brazilian and Portuguese nationals in the future constitutional monarchy.Footnote ¹²

The Portuguese liberals, however, had other designs and aimed to restore Brazil to its former colonial status by calling for the relocation of the royal family to Lisbon. Dom João returned to Portugal with his courtiers in 1821 and left his son Pedro in Brazil, after instructing him to secure the monarchy for the Bragança dynasty in the Americas. Pedro, who immigrated to Brazil with the royal court in 1808 when he was 9 years old, had made Brazil his home by 1821, and through his personal correspondence and publications in the press demonstrated that he identified with Brazilian interests rather than those of Portugal.Footnote ¹³ As Prince Regent, Pedro selected José Bonifácio as the leader of his cabinet of ministers and ruled in his father’s absence before declaring independence in September 1822, which transformed the conflict between Portugal and Brazil into an open decolonial war. One of the first challenges that confronted the independence leader – his coronation took place in December 1822 when he assumed the title Pedro I – was securing Brazil’s territorial integrity, as Portuguese military forces were still active in the northern provinces of Bahia, Piaui, Maranhão, Grão Para, and the Cisplatine territories south of Rio.Footnote ¹⁴ The authorities in these regions either favored remaining under Portuguese rule or had yet to recognize the imperial government in Rio, and many harbored separatist tendencies toward republicanism.Footnote ¹⁵

Continuing with José Bonifácio as the head of his government starting in January 1823, Pedro I called for a legislative assembly to draft the country’s first constitution. Members of the constitutional assembly were elected from the provinces and originated from the literate class of bacharel – that is, holders of university degrees, especially in law and medicine – but most were heirs of the planter elite from the sugar and coffee economies of the northeast and the Paraíba Valley. Politically, the assembly included members who supported José Bonifácio’s vision of a strong centralized constitutional monarchy that would lead Brazil to gradually abolish the slave trade and slavery in a distant future, while upholding its territorial unity and prosperity. The second faction constituted of supporters of royal absolutism and the maintenance of their old-regime privileges. This group included both Portuguese nationals and Brazilians who were elected to the constitutional assembly. The third group were liberal federalists who challenged José Bonifácio’s policies and championed a monarchy in name only. They favored federalism and a weak monarchy as well as the continuation of slavery.Footnote ¹⁶ The constitutional assembly began deliberations in May 1823.

Using Rio’s nascent political press, Pedro I published articles in the city’s newspapers under various pseudonyms to disseminate his political ideas on Brazilian independence, challenge his critics, and address important problems facing the new nation.Footnote ¹⁷ In one of his first publications where he recounted under a pseudonym the events leading to the declaration of independence, he projected himself as the embodiment of a racially inclusive Brazil. The emperor boldly asserted that while he was acclaimed as the country’s liberator (see Figure 1.1), he knew that his “blood was of the same color as that of the black slaves,” a reference to racialized slavery and an appeal to free people of color, who were an important constituent of the new nation.Footnote ¹⁸ For example, Antonio Pereira Rebouças, a prominent Afro-Brazilian lawyer whose mother was a free black woman of direct slave ancestry, had lent his voice to the cause of independence in the northern province of Bahia. He became an important defender of the right to equal citizenship enshrined in the 1824 constitution as well as the rights to free speech and property.Footnote ¹⁹ Pedro’s allusions to race and racism would appeal to people like Rebouças or the heirs of the 1817 revolution in Pernambuco who, despite their personal achievements, suffered from racial prejudice in their interactions with the Brazilian elite.Footnote ²⁰

Figure 1.1 Dom Pedro I’s acclamation as the Emperor of Brazil in Sant’anna square, Rio de Janeiro

Source: Thierry Frères. Acclamation de Don Pédro 1er. Empereur du Brésil; au camp de Stª. Anna, à Rio-de-Janeiro. Paris [França]: Firmin Didot Frères, 1839. 1 grav, litografia, col, 22 x. Acervo da Fundação da Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil.

Continuing his appeal to the Brazilian populace and bearing the banner of Brazilian nationalist sentiments, Pedro I published an anonymous letter in the press in May 1823 where he identified himself as an “ultra-Brazilian Brazilian.”Footnote ²¹ As the constitutional assembly deliberated the legal foundation of Brazil, he published a revealing article on the necessity of abolishing the slave trade, which identified more squarely his socioeconomic and political vision for postcolonial Brazil.Footnote ²² The emperor viewed the issue as fundamental to Brazil’s political and economic development. Identifying himself as “a philanthrope,” Pedro I asserted that he was motivated to expose his “ideas about the slave trade, which, in [his] opinion, is one of the reasons Brazil lagged behind as a nation.” He declared that “few people ignored that slavery was the cancer that corroded Brazil and that it was important to extinguish it.”Footnote ²³ Slavery, the emperor continued, brought great evil to Brazil and the dependence on slave labor ruined the national character, instilled vices, discouraged industrialism, and led to despotism. Slavery created a class of idle people because slaveowners were not motivated to improvise, create, and work since they could always rely on their “slaves, ordering them to earn a living” on their behalf. The statement was a reference to the ganho system in urban places like Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, or Bahia, which is the practice whereby enslaved people sold food and/or exchanged their services on the market on their enslavers’ behalf.Footnote ²⁴ The emperor argued that slavery was costly because every ten slaves required a feitor – that is, an overseer to supervise their work with violence – and that unrecovered fugitive slaves were an economic loss to their enslavers. He outlined steps for the abolition of the slave trade and a gradual emancipation, accompanied by subsidized immigration of Portuguese immigrants to replace the captives with free workers.Footnote ²⁵

Correspondingly, in 1823, José Bonifácio wrote a dossier to the constitutional assembly where he outlined his ideas on establishing a national politics on slavery, the slave trade, and the indigenous population, which he considered to be the most significant issues facing the nation. He called for the gradual abolition of slavery, the promulgation of a law to end the slave trade, legislation on state regulation of planter violence on the enslaved, and establishing a path to freedom through disciplining a free labor class out of slavery. If Brazil were to establish its foundation as a constitutional monarchy and a nation of laws, he asserted, it could not continue its participation in human trafficking, which introduced a foreign population and an internal enemy within the nation.Footnote ²⁶ The slave trade, José Bonifácio contended, had a negative effect on the formation of race and nation in Brazil because it resulted in an ethnically heterogenous population of diverse legal status. Slavery posed a challenge to establishing a liberal criminal justice system. He proposed subsidized immigration of Portuguese laborers to replace the African slave population, whose culture he viewed as antithetical to the Brazilian national character. His antislavery project touched at the core of anxieties about the tension among race, nation, and citizenship in Brazil. While the project promoted the end of the slave trade and the gradual emancipation of slavery, it ultimately sought to lessen these conflicts and to produce a free white working class over time.

José Bonifácio and Pedro I’s utilization of Rio’s political press to disseminate antislavery ideas and proposals for the transition to free labor was significant, because they were among the first to bring slavery and human trafficking into open discussion as a matter of national interest in the nascent Brazilian political press.Footnote ²⁷ They were also writing in the context of the fifteen years of bilateral treaties among England, Portugal, and Brazil to abolish the traffic. British diplomats aimed to secure Brazil’s commitment to honor these treaties as it became an independent nation. Meanwhile, Pedro I and José Bonifácio’s government imposed strict censorship on the press to ensure that only ideas that were aligned with their projects were published and to suppress rebuttals from proslavery advocates.Footnote ²⁸ The objective may have been, as Alain Youssef argued, to prepare public opinion on the question of slavery and postcolonial nationhood ahead of parliamentary debates on the constitution. There, Brazilian citizenship became an important issue of contention.

The legislative assembly began discussions on the draft of the constitution in September 1823. The constitutional draft defined Brazilians as “all free men living in Brazil and born in it,” which included libertos (freed people) and Portuguese nationals living in Brazil before October 12, 1822. However, only libertos born in Brazil could exercise the right to vote, which itself depended on property and income levels.Footnote ²⁹ The constitutional project affirmed slaveowners’ rights and the patriarchal basis of the slave society by establishing the “inviolability of property” among the rights that Brazilian citizens could enjoy, an important, though indirect, allusion to chattel slavery. This tacit upholding of slaveowners’ property right was made explicit in article 265, which declared that “the constitution recognized the contracts between masters and slaves.”Footnote ³⁰ José Bonifácio’s ideas on slavery, its gradual emancipation, and native colonization were articulated in article 254, which declared that the government should “create establishments for the catechism and civilization of the Indians, the slow emancipation of the slaves, their religious and industrial education.”Footnote ³¹

The legislative assembly almost immediately began debating who could be considered Brazilian given the country’s heterogenous population.Footnote ³² Senator Vergueiro, of the Vassouras plantation town in Rio de Janeiro’s hinterland, called on the assembly to amend the title of the section of the constitution on Brazilian citizenship. Vergueiro suggested replacing the phrase “on the members of the society of the Empire of Brazil” with “on the citizens of the Brazilian Empire.”Footnote ³³ Although Vergueiro’s amendment was originally defeated, it was brought back to discussion by senator Montezuma from Bahia in the northeast, who argued that it was important to debate the “difference between Brazilians and Brazilian citizens,” as the term “members of the empire” in the constitutional draft was too vague.Footnote ³⁴

At issue was the reality that Brazil’s population consisted of slaves and free people as well as the indigenous population, some of whom lived in frontier regions. In addition, there were libertos of Brazilian birth, but also others who were born in Africa. The discussion on citizenship was multilayered and engaged whether Brazilian-born libertos and the indigenous population could become citizens. Montezuma argued that “to be Brazilian, is to be a member of Brazilian society,” but that not all Brazilians should enjoy equality of rights as some could be active citizens and others passive citizens.Footnote ³⁵ Senator França then brought to the floor the reality that Brazil had a racially and legally diverse population. França inquired into how to define who were Brazilians and who were citizens, and whether birthplace was an important benchmark. For example, he argued, “the children of the enslaved – filhos dos negros – as well as those Brazilian born slaves – crioulos – though born in Brazil could not be considered Brazilian citizens.”Footnote ³⁶ He called for defining Brazilians as people born in Brazil and identifying Brazilian citizens as those who “had civil rights.” He also declared that although the native population “who lived in the woods are Brazilians,” they were “not Brazilian citizens, for they do not embrace our civilization.”Footnote ³⁷ For the indigenous population citizenship would come only through conquest and colonization.

França’s intervention touched squarely on the tensions of slavery, race, and citizenship as well as their entanglement with the colonization of the native population. There were overlapping arguments about the inclusion or exclusion of native people and libertos in Brazilian citizenship that scholars of the Brazilian constitution have argued resulted in a liberal defense of slavery and a remarkable “absence of race” in the constitution.Footnote ³⁸ The discussion on the inclusion or exclusion of the native population and libertos as citizens was deeply shaped by racialist ideas, because both populations were seen as threats to Brazil due to their alleged lack of culture, industrialism, and their existence outside the bounds of the nation-state.Footnote ³⁹ Montezuma rebutted França’s argument about slaves born in Brazil – crioulos captivos – and the native population on the grounds that the discussion on citizenship only applied to those who “constituted Brazilian society” and could have rights. He asserted that the native population was hostile to the idea of the Brazilian nation, with which they “live in constant war.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Montezuma contended regarding Brazilian-born slaves – crioulos captivos – that slavery was a “black mark on our political institution” of which Brazil needed to purify itself, not out of ethical opposition to servile labor but through concerns for its racial legacy.Footnote ⁴¹

Certainly, discussions on Brazilian-born slaves and citizenship was only addressed in the eventuality of them becoming libertos through manumission. Thus, legislators debated whether libertos could become citizens given their slave past and framed the issue in terms of the deleterious legacy of slavery in Brazil. Legislator Rocha Franco argued that citizenship was not just a matter of birth and residency but also of property, because to be a citizen it was “necessary that one participates” in the life of society through property ownership.Footnote ⁴² Senator Almeida e Albuquerque then asserted that because of their slave past, libertos could not become citizens. Though they were self-emancipated, he declared, they “had not acquired [Brazilian] customs” and had “not achieved some degree of civilization.Footnote ⁴³” Citizenship then for libertos, as it was for the native population in different but overlapping ways, was a matter of worthiness and civilization, which were code words for racial difference in the parliamentary discussions. There was not a parallel discourse on Portuguese nationals living in Brazil at the time of independence. All that was required of Portuguese nationals was allegiance to the new postcolonial state to receive the benefits of Brazilian citizenship.

The racial and cultural legacy of slavery on Brazilian institutions and its population became a point of commonality between antislavery and proslavery voices in the constitutional debates. Deputy Costa Barros expressed this view bluntly when he argued that he “could never consent to giving the title of Brazilian citizen indistinctly to every slave who had achieved manumission.” He declared that “uncivilized Blacks – negros buçaes – without skills or merit are not … worthy of this honorable prerogative.” He regarded them “as harmful members of society” and “a burden on the nation.”Footnote ⁴⁴ He thus suggested that the constitution’s article on Brazilian citizenship should stipulate that in addition to securing manumission, only “slaves who have employment and a skill” could be eligible for citizenship.Footnote ⁴⁵ Senator Cunha Carneiro rejected Costa Barros’ statements as unfounded and critiqued the idea that libertos were unskilled, reminding the assembly of their skilled and specialized occupations during slavery and their achievement of self-liberation through their own arduous work.Footnote ⁴⁶

However, it was left to senator Silva Lisboa to emphatically reject the burden of employment and wage-earning skills as a precondition for citizenship for libertos. He warned the assembly that the exclusion of libertos from citizenship on various thresholds could lead to a disastrous situation for the nation, as had happened in St. Domingue (1791–1804). The events of the Haitian Revolution and the abolition of slavery in the French colony by the enslaved were still fresh in the mind of Brazilian lawmakers as they debated Brazilian citizenship and the future of its slave economy. Silva Lisboa argued that African birth should not prevent libertos from achieving citizenship once they were declared manumitted in Brazil. He strikingly identified the objections of citizenship for African libertos as racially motivated and an expression of anti-African sentiments that were not applied to other groups.Footnote ⁴⁷

Discussions on the constitutional draft ended abruptly in November 1823 when Pedro I dissolved the assembly. He nominated a committee to write a new constitutional text, which was promulgated in March 1824 and imposed on parliament unilaterally. The constitution extended citizenship to “anyone born in Brazil regardless of being ingenuos or libertos.” Ingenuos identified Brazilians of free birth, while the term libertos identified ex-slaves.

Scholars of the 1824 constitution argued that it was distinctive for the “absence of race” in its definition of Brazilian citizenship. As these studies posited, members of the constitutional assembly concurred that to deny Brazilian-born libertos citizenship, as the United States did to US-born freed people, could shatter the economic foundation of the empire, as events in revolutionary France and St. Domingue had shown.Footnote ⁴⁸ I would argue that race was ever present in framing citizenship for free nonwhite people born in Brazil as a slave society. Citizenship was racialized because the work of race embedded in notions about worthiness for freedom through demonstrating gainful employment that were important in the parliamentary debates infused the nation’s penal laws and punitive apparatus, from local ordinances to the 1830 criminal code and the 1832 code of criminal procedure.Footnote ⁴⁹ The 1824 constitution observed a tense silence on the existence of enslaved persons in the empire, which complicated how equality before the law would be implemented in practice for free people of color. That silence laid the ground for debates over the struggle for civic equality, race, and citizenship in articulating a penal system to discipline the enslaved as well as the free population, an issue that could not be glossed over as occurred in the 1824 constitution.Footnote ⁵⁰

Punishing the Enslaved and the Racialized Free Poor in an Empire of Law

The call to reform Brazil’s colonial prison system originated from the constitution’s mandate for “clean, secure, and well-organized prisons” as well as casas de correçãos to discipline vagrants, beggars, and convicts.Footnote ⁵¹ As discussed previously, an annual income of 200 milréis was an important prerequisite for citizenship in the constitutional debates. It was not a huge sum, as ganhadores, for instance, made much more than that.Footnote ⁵² Reforming Brazil’s colonial dungeons and building modern prisons to discipline the poor into law-abiding citizens instigated penal reforms after the promulgation of the 1824 constitution. An 1828 law authorized municipal chambers to nominate commissions of local citizens to visit the empire’s dungeons and to report on their conditions.Footnote ⁵³ The results of these commissions’ visits revealed that Brazil’s prisons were overcrowded, insecure, and without organization or a regular record-keeping system of detainees.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rio de Janeiro had two civil prisons, the Aljube and the Calabouço. The government held political prisoners in military fortresses and in old ships around the city’s harbor, especially during the turbulent independence period.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Calabouço was a slave dungeon situated in an old military fortress. The Aljube was a colonial jail located on the side of Conceição Hill at the eastern entrance of the city. Originally designed to hold a dozen or so ecclesiastical prisoners, the Aljube became a notoriously overcrowded dungeon after 1808 when it was turned into a civil jail. The 1828 report from the commission on prisons described the Aljube as a fetid dungeon where prisoners, poorly covered in filthy rags, begged for mercy and death at the same time. It was called a school for criminals and a “hellish den where everything was disorganized” and where “the most vicious criminal shared the same cell with those merely accused.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The worst section of the prison was a lower room suggestively called Guinea – Guiné – where slaves and free prisoners indiscriminately slept on the dungeon’s humid floor. The term referenced the racial composition of the inmates, but also the disease-ridden hold of the slave ships that brought enslaved Africans to Brazil. The 1828 commission counted 85 prisoners in the Guiné section of the Aljube and 390 detainees overall, an incredibly high number considering that the jail was originally designed to hold 12–20 individuals.Footnote ⁵⁷ The jailers assured the members of the commission that a great number of prisoners died from poor ventilation, especially during the heated summer months.Footnote ⁵⁸ Prisoners in the upper section of the Aljube begged for food from passers-by through the dungeon’s opening onto the streets. By 1830, there were more than 500 prisoners at the Aljube, which prompted the government to transform a fortress on Snakes’ Island – Ilha das Cobras – into a civil prison to receive excess detainees. The Calabouço overflowed with slave detainees in 1830, with a reported 200 slaves, many of them abandoned by their owners or brought to the dungeon for rigorous flogging.

When a new legislature was elected in 1826, it was filled with lawmakers who were opposed to Pedro’s leadership, especially in the chamber of deputies. The senate was mostly controlled by Pedro I, who selected the lawmakers from the list of elected officials from the provinces.Footnote ⁵⁹ Tensions between the legislature and the emperor fed liberal opposition to his rule in parliament and the nascent political press.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1826, Pedro I signed a convention with England that committed Brazil to end its participation in the slave trade in three years based on the 1810–1817 antislavery treaties. In that same year, Pedro I deployed the Poder Moderador to overturn a death penalty sentence of an enslaved man in Pernambuco, which added to the rift between parliament and his government. The case involved an enslaved man who was convicted of multiple homicides of his enslaver’s family.Footnote ⁶¹ Although the 1824 constitution banished the stocks and corporal punishment, it did not abolish capital punishment. When Pedro I protested the sentence, he was informed that there was widespread popular support for the public hanging as it involved slave violence and rebellion. The execution proceeded despite Pedro I’s opposition to the enforcement of the death penalty. In retaliation, the emperor passed a law of exception in September 1826 that gave him the authority to “pardon or reduce sentences,” a measure that conformed with article 101 of the constitution. The article gave the emperor special prerogatives through the Poder Moderador to “pardon and reduce penalties” of convicted criminals.Footnote ⁶²

The September 1826 law stipulated that the enforcement of the death penalty would “not be executed, without prior notification to the emperor,” who retained the authority to “pardon or lessen sentences or issue amnesties.”Footnote ⁶³ The law identified the emperor as the ultimate arbiter in the criminal process, particularly in matters relating to slave crimes that opposed the enslaved to their enslavers. By superseding the powers of the court, the judge, and the jury system, who in effect represented property holders, Pedro I sought to impose a monopoly on the deployment of violence to punish the enslaved.Footnote ⁶⁴ The third article of the 1826 law allowed the convict to appeal a death penalty sentence within eight days of the verdict. The law ordered the court rapporteur to forward the copy of the sentence and court records to the Council of State.Footnote ⁶⁵ The death penalty became a controversial issue in the debates to draft the 1830 criminal code, but the opposition to Pedro’s rule intensified in the buildup to promulgating the code.

The opposition against Pedro in parliament was divided between radical liberals – exaltados – and moderate liberals – moderados – and included politicians like Evaristo Ferreira da Veiga, who became the editor of the popular Aurora Fluminense and one of the founders of the Sociedade Defensora da Liberdade e Independencia Nacional, together with Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão, who became minister of justice; Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, the brother of José Bonifácio who had written the 1823 constitutional draft debated in parliament; and Antonio Pereira Rebouças, an Afro-Brazilian jurist committed to liberal jurisprudence.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other lawmakers who joined the liberal moderate front in opposition to the emperor were Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcellos, the scion of a slaveholding family from Minas Gerais; Antonio Ferreira França, a deputy from Bahia who participated in the 1823 constitutional assembly; and Luis Francisco de Paula Cavalcanti de Albuquerque, who was elected to the 1823 legislature from Pernambuco. Some of these legislators owned important newspapers in Rio de Janeiro that they utilized to publicize their opposition to the emperor.Footnote ⁶⁷ The political press became very active during this period and disseminated pro- and antislavery ideas while reflecting on the challenges of Brazilian citizenship in a slave society with a racially heterogenous population.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Aurora Fluminense, created in 1827 and edited by Evaristo da Veiga, was among the city’s most prolific newspapers. It represented along with the Diário Fluminense the views of moderate liberals in parliament. Both newspapers were at the forefront of disseminating ideas against the slave trade and the moderados’ call for a strong constitutional monarchy that shied away from absolutism to protect order. In 1826, when Brazil signed the convention with England to end human trafficking by 1830, it was widely publicized and championed in both newspapers.Footnote ⁶⁹ The radical liberals – exaltados – were represented by the Luz Brasileira, A Nova Luz Brasileira, O Tribuno do Povo, and O Repúblico. The exaltados were middle-class public functionaries who did not hold high government positions. They championed radical liberalism and popular sovereignty. Their movement benefited from wide popular support cross-racially.Footnote ⁷⁰

Legislative deliberations on the 1830 criminal code revealed the fault lines between the liberal jurisprudence of the era and the reformist ideals of punishment to discipline enslaved lawbreakers. Legislators were all very aware that thousands of enslaved Africans entered the country’s ports. The majority of the enslaved were canalized to the coffee fields of the Paraíba Valley, but were perceived as an internal inimical force within the nation. In 1830 when the code was promulgated an estimated 38,000 slaves entered Brazil through its southeastern ports, foremost through Rio’s harbor, and more than 7,000 arrived in Salvador Bahia.Footnote ⁷¹ Enslaved workers and free people of color were, therefore, very visible in the Brazilian capital and coastal cities, where legislators deliberated the criminal code and decided on budgets to reform the country’s dungeons. The constitution called for “clean and secure prisons” as well as casas de correçãos to reform vagrants, beggars, and convicts. Article 179 established the legal basis for building penitentiaries in important provinces and elaborating the criminal code.Footnote ⁷² Parliamentary debates on the criminal code revealed what was at stake as postcolonial legislators of pro- and antislavery leanings sought to devise stringent punishment for the enslaved and the free poor.

There were two criminal code projects presented to parliament, one written by José Pereira Clemente, and a second written by the moderado Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos. Both authors were linked by family ties to the slaveholding elites of the Paraíba Valley. The Vasconcellos draft of the criminal code was hotly debated in parliament, especially for its adoption of the death penalty.Footnote ⁷³ The draft recommended the sentence of “prison with labor” for crimes ranging from vagrancy to homicide, and “simple imprisonment” or incarceration without the requirement to work, and finally galé (the punishment to public works with chains). It defined crimes as activities defined as such by the law and was overall influenced by the liberal jurisprudence of the era. It prescribed the sentence of “prison with labor,” and recommended the building of penitentiaries. At the same time, the Vasconcelos draft maintained the death penalty as a punishment for homicide and other crimes.Footnote ⁷⁴ The death penalty was challenged by lawmakers who saw the sentence as antithetical to Christian ethics and anticonstitutional. There were two factions on the issue. José Pereira de Vasconcelos, who represented Minas Gerais province, defended the death penalty, while others opposed the sentence.

Opponents of the death penalty, such as the Afro-Brazilian jurist Antonio Pereira Rebouças, the editor of the Aurora Fluminense Evaristo Ferreira da Veiga, Ernesto Ferreira França and his father Antonio Ferreira França, as well as Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, argued that the sentence was unconstitutional, was opposed to natural law, and was ineffective at deterring slaves from committing serious crimes. They contended that capital punishment was in fact an escape from slavery for slaves whose life was already miserable.Footnote ⁷⁵

Supporters of the death penalty referred to slave violence and rebellion against slaveholders as the basis for their support for the death penalty and the sentence of hard labor or galé as deterrence for slave crimes. Deputy Alburquerque e Cavalcante advocated adopting the death penalty and galé as punishment in the 1830 criminal code and argued that Brazil differed from Europe because of the existence of slavery within its borders and its largely uncivilized population. Supporters of the death penalty contended that only the threat of execution or hard labor in public works served as potent deterrents against slave resistance and rebellion. One deputy supported the abolition of the death penalty for political crimes, but argued that it needed to apply for homicides and to “regulate slavery as it was the only penalty that could control it.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Another deputy suggested amending the preliminary text of the code to include the death penalty for homicide and for the leaders of insurrections, while another proposed a separate penal code for slaves. The first proposal won most of the votes and subsequent discussions on the death penalty and galé divided supporters and opponents of the two sentences. Deputies who supported the death penalty and the sentence of galé argued that they were necessary to punish not just slaves but also the racially heterogenous free poor.

Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, who defended his inclusion of the death penalty in the draft of the criminal code, argued that slaves were not the only problematic group in Brazil. Vasconcellos championed the interests of the powerful slaveholding clan of the coffee-producing southeast provinces.Footnote ⁷⁷ He asserted that in addition to slaves who posed a constant threat of rebellion, Brazil possessed more than three million free people who were all “capable of death,” and that the free population represented a pressing challenge to social order. The moderado lawmaker claimed that experience had shown that whenever the government enforced the death penalty in colonial times, homicides and other violent crimes diminished. Capital punishment, he contended, was necessary to control not just slaves but also a “class of individuals whose habits were very much like those of slaves.” Brazil required strong and harsh laws to restrict not only the violence of slaves, but also disorder from the free poor. Vasconcelos argued that port cities in Brazil were particularly vulnerable to crimes from the accumulation of “vicious foreign elements that circulated through them.”Footnote ⁷⁸

The discussions about the death penalty addressed the necessity to build penitentiaries in Brazil to effect the reform of prisoners. Supporters of the death penalty contended that Brazil did not have prisons to discipline its criminal population and that incarceration would be an escape from slavery for the enslaved. Opponents of capital punishment called for prison constructions to reform the criminal population, though they agreed that the solution could not be applied to slave convicts. Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada, for example, asserted that capital punishment was a contradiction in civilized nations and that modern societies had shown the utility of reforming criminals to combat crimes. He emphasized the significance of the prison as a site to effect this transformation, just as psychiatrists had shown the significance of the asylum to reform the insane. The penitentiary, Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada asserted, was the site for curing criminals through solitary confinement, silence, a rigorous work regime, and the enforcement of Christian morality. He contended that the separate system of solitary confinement and labor implemented in Philadelphia had shown the benefits of imprisonment instead of the death penalty. Antonio Rebouças agreed with Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada and critiqued supporters of the death penalty for deploying Brazil’s lack of modern prisons to justify including the punishment in the criminal code. He suggested that the government build modern prisons as the solution against crimes by the free poor and slaves, rather than enforcing capital punishment in a liberal monarchy.Footnote ⁷⁹

Proponents of the death penalty counterargued that incarceration had little effect on slave criminality, as slaves were already deprived of freedom. Ribeiro de Andrada responded that on the contrary, simple imprisonment – that is, incarceration without the requirement to work – would be an effective punishment for enslaved convicts, as it was well known that “men who were habituated to work died from being deprived of it.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Both Ribeiro de Andrada and Rebouças referred to penitentiaries and correction houses – casas de correçãos – in their discussions to highlight the cruelty of the death penalty. They compared it to galé, the punishment to public works in chains that had deep roots in Brazil’s colonial past and the Portuguese punitive regime. Legislators who opposed capital punishment were also against galé, which they viewed as an ineffectual sentence. Rebouças argued that the sentence did not reform convicts and served as schools for criminals. He argued that the punishment of hard labor in fetters was not as terrible as the death penalty, but called for its elimination because it caused the physical and moral degeneration of the criminal.Footnote ⁸¹

The promulgated version of the criminal code created parallel punishments for the enslaved and the free. The law established “prison with labor” as the most common punishment for crimes ranging from vagrancy, mendicancy, homicide, theft, and burglary, among others. The criminal code maintained the old-regime penalty of galé and the death penalty primarily for enslaved convicts, but also for legally free criminals who were guilty of sedition and rebellion, while reserving “prison with labor” largely for convicts of free status. The first two penalties embodied parallel systems of punishment rooted in the old regime and deploying corporal punishment – chains and hard labor in public works – to correct and humiliate the convict, while “prison with labor” focused on reforming the prisoner into a law-abiding citizen through seclusion and labor in a modern prison. Galé was a sentence applied primarily to enslaved prisoners, while prison with labor aimed toward disciplining Brazil’s free poor. The disciplining objective encapsulated in the sentence of “prison with labor,” however, could not be implemented without modernizing Brazil’s prisons and building penitentiaries. The Sociedade Defensora became prominent during the crisis that culminated in Pedro I’s abdication in April 1831. The organization, which assembled in its ranks a disparate group of lawmakers who were identified as moderados, placed itself at the vanguard of modernizing Brazil through building modern penitentiaries for the maintenance of public order.Footnote ⁸²

The Sociedade Defensora, Public Order, and Disorder in Rio de Janeiro

A coalition between radical liberals – exaltados – and moderates – moderados – in parliament and in the press led to the emperor’s abdication in April 1831.Footnote ⁸³ Pedro I left behind his 5-year-old son, Pedro II, under the tutelage of selected regents. Following Pedro’s abdication, a third political faction identified as caramurus gained prominence and demanded the return of the emperor to Brazil. The abdication crisis gave rise to unprecedented political activism, which was expressed through the formation of political organizations and factions and an increase in the number of newspapers published in Rio de Janeiro. The crisis played out in the streets and heightened elite anxieties about public order and disorder from the city’s enslaved and free population. On March 13, 1831, during the so-called Noite das Garrafadas, the “Night of the Bottle Blows,” radical liberals and Portuguese supporters of Pedro I confronted one another on Rio’s streets with little interference from the police. Fearing that Rio would be attacked from within and without, especially with the entry of armed men and soldiers into the capital from other provinces, the minister of justice took provisions to uphold security in the city and to prevent anyone from entering the capital with weapons.Footnote ⁸⁴ He ordered the police to close the roads and avenues leading to the Campo da Acclamação, a central square in the capital where the populace often assembled to acclaim the emperor. He directed the police and the navy to patrol Rio’s port and coastline to prevent factions from entering the city by sea.Footnote ⁸⁵ Elements of the working class, free blacks, and mulattos participated and interjected their own expectations about race, nation, and citizenship into the unstable political climate. Rio was the center of the political crisis and the theater of liberal policies to enforce the constitutional monarchy in the aftermath of Pedro I’s abdication. But the immediate postcolonial period also witnessed regional movements that mirrored liberal dissent in Rio or challenged the imperial capital’s leadership. These sociopolitical movements and rebellions – for example the Cabanagem in the north and the Sabinada in Bahia – were often cross-racially organized and chafed at enduring social hierarchies between masters and slaves, whites, free people of color, and the native population. None of these movements, however, preached the end of slavery and some only marginally criticized the slave trade. The central government utilized violence persistently to quell these regional eruptions of revolution that could portend an imagined slave rebellion. Authorities’ reactions against political dissent were forever shaped by the memory of the slave revolution in St. Domingue.Footnote ⁸⁶

The Sociedade Defensora rose to prominence as the most influential political faction in the aftermath of Pedro I’s abdication. Created in the southern province of São Paulo in March 1831, the organization spread through the rest of Brazil to influence politics at the local, provincial, and imperial levels. It augured a liberal period in Brazilian politics that lasted until 1837. Adherents to the moderados faction founded a branch of the Sociedade Defensora in Rio by May 1831. The association assembled among its ranks both supporters and opponents of the slave trade. Both groups agreed that Brazil required a penal system to reflect its reality as a slave society and to restore public order.Footnote ⁸⁷ The association succeeded in preserving Brazil’s constitutional monarchy under the pressures from radical liberals – exaltados – who advocated republicanism, and the caramurus who championed the restoration of the monarchy.Footnote ⁸⁸ The membership file of the Sociedade Defensora consisted of a list of prominent Brazilian politicians, doctors, lawyers, regents to the young emperor, public functionaries, officers of the army, and cabinet members. Many of the legislators who debated and wrote the 1830 criminal code became its members. They were the Brazilian political elite for the most part and included justice minister and regent Antonio Feijó, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, the journalist Evaristo da Veiga, Martim Francisco Ribeiro de Andrada who wrote the 1823 draft of the constitution, ministers of justice Honório Hermeto Carneiro Leão and Aureliano de Souza e Oliveira Coutinho, Eusébio de Queiroz Mattoso da Camara who became Rio’s police chief by 1834, and Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres of the Navy, among others. Of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, 38 percent were members of the Sociedade Defensora’s Rio branch during the 1830–1833 period. A contemporary historian argued that the Sociedade Defensora’s prominent representation in the Brazilian parliament allowed it to govern Brazil for four years. The association functioned as “a state within the state” because of its unique influence at all levels of government and particularly in the parliament and the regency’s cabinet of ministers.Footnote ⁸⁹

A provisional statute of the Sociedade Defensora published in 1831 declared that “the organization would assist the action of public authorities for the sake of order and authority.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Members of the Sociedade Defensora in parliament oversaw the passing of the November 7, 1831 law that banned the slave trade and declared free all slaves who disembarked in Brazil thereafter. The law punished slave traffickers with incarceration for three to nine years and fined them the cost of reexporting the emancipated Africans back to their homeland.Footnote ⁹¹ The official 1832 statute of the Sociedade Defensora likewise prohibited individuals who were involved in the “abominable commerce” that “introduced blacks to Brazil” from becoming members of the organization. Slavery, the 1832 statute asserted, was “contrary to the laws and interests of Brazilian society.”Footnote ⁹² Significantly, the statute included the “improvement of prison conditions” and the establishment of “their penitentiary status” as concrete objectives to achieve the restoration of public order in the Brazilian capital.Footnote ⁹³ Between 1831 and 1833, the Sociedade Defensora’s newspapers – notably the Aurora Fluminense and O Homen e a America – published extensively about the necessity for prison reforms. The Sociedade organized a fundraising campaign to finance the building of the penitentiary in Rio. In October 1833, the organization secured government approval to build a “correction house” – casa de correção – in Rio. A few months before the Maria da Gloria sailed into Rio de Janeiro’s harbor, the Sociedade Defensora purchased a farm in Catumby, a rustic neighborhood just outside Rio’s colonial center, to build Latin America’s first penitentiary.Footnote ⁹⁴ The entrance of the slave vessel into Rio’s Guanabara Bay corresponded with an order to transfer sixty convicts from a prison on the harbor to Catumby to work on the construction of the Casa de Correção.Footnote ⁹⁵

The Sociedade Defensora’s preoccupation with upholding public order reflected the regency’s concern about controlling the criminality of Rio’s slaves and the free poor, which reached new heights in 1831 in the aftermath of Pedro I’s abdication. To stem the tide of disorder, parliament swiftly approved the law of June 6, 1831, which gave the government extensive power to define and maintain public order. The law punished violators of article 285 in the criminal code with three to nine months of imprisonment. The article prohibited the assembly of three or more people suspected of the intent to commit a crime.Footnote ⁹⁶ The law banned night assembly of five or more people on the streets, public squares, and highways, and established a prison term of one to three months for violators. The regulation made imprisonment the punishment for petty violations such as illicit assembly, which the criminal code had previously penalized with a fine of 200 milréis. It transformed Rio de Janeiro into a city of suspects because it empowered the justice of the peace to maintain surveillance on the population, particularly slaves and free people of color.Footnote ⁹⁷ The 1831 law restricted some of the liberal protections that the 1824 constitution and the 1830 criminal code had established. It eliminated the right to post bail for prisoners caught in the act of committing common crimes. The law authorized the justices of the peace to act as both police and judge by giving them the power to indict and pronounce sentences for petty crimes and infractions against municipal codes of conducts.

In an analysis of arrest records from May to June 17, 1831, historian Thomas Holloway documented that violent crimes and property-related infractions were not as significant as proponents of the June 1831 law claimed. Most of the people whom the police arrested during this period committed victimless public order offenses, such as disturbing the peace or insulting a person of authority. In addition, the majority of those accused of public order offenses were enslaved people who circulated through the city’s streets. The findings, he argued, showed that the police focused on curbing activities that challenged the Brazilian social hierarchy, which rested on the domination and subordination of the enslaved population and the free poor.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Sociedade Defensora’s focus on public tranquility and its demand to reform Brazil’s prisons expressed the liberal elite’s anxiety that political instability could unravel the social order and lead to slave rebellion and insurrections.

The law of June 6, 1831 had profound implications for the government’s ability to find prisons to confine lawbreakers and criminals in Rio. Before the law, Rio’s two civil prisons, the Calabouço and the Aljube, were notoriously overcrowded. The June 1831 law promised to worsen the prison crisis by establishing imprisonment as a sentence for common crimes instead of the fines of the 1830 criminal code. Minister Feijó addressed this crisis when he reported in 1831 that prisoners’ efforts to break out of the jails had increased. He argued that these attacks on prisons throughout the empire increased because detainees knew that prison escape did not constitute a crime and that there was little hindering their attempts.Footnote ⁹⁹

By 1832, Justice Minister Carneiro Leão, a member of the Sociedade Defensora, asserted that the criminal code’s sentence of prison with labor was unenforceable until Brazil had available penitentiaries. He argued that the criminal code suffered from serious defects since Brazil did not have a single establishment destined for the sentence.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Carneiro Leão proposed applying the prison with labor mandate through the construction of penal agricultural colonies, thereby bridging the gap between the colonial criminal justice system, where penal exile constituted an important mode of punishment, and the criminal code, where the imprisonment and reform of prisoners were a pillar of the disciplinary project. He viewed penal agricultural colonies as less expensive and more practical for the administration of justice. Penal exile and labor at an agricultural colony would achieve the disciplinary objective of “prison with labor” without building expensive penitentiaries.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Carneiro Leão’s critique of the 1830 criminal code reflected ongoing discussions in the Sociedade Defensora about restoring public tranquility in the aftermath of the abdication crisis and the June 6 law. Using its influence in the government, the Sociedade Defensora succeeded in getting construction initiated on Rio de Janeiro’s Casa de Correção in October 1833. The Sociedade Defensora’s decision to build the Casa de Correção aimed to resolve the gap between the criminal code and the reality of penal practice in Brazil by building a penitentiary in the imperial capital. In October 1830 parliament had passed a law that called for the construction of casas de correçãos in each of the counties of the empire based on Jeremy Bentham’s principles in matters of civil and penal legislation. Provincial governments would finance their respective casa de correção, but permitted any individual or private companies to invest in the building of penitentiaries.Footnote ¹⁰² The 1830 law and the 1824 constitution, which called for “clean, secure, and well-organized prisons,” provided the basis for the Sociedade Defensora’s intervention to build the penitentiary in Rio in 1833. The organization envisioned the penitentiary as essential to Brazilian postcolonial nation building and progress. Official publications of the Sociedade Defensora argued that the Casa de Correção was a necessary institution to cultivate the love of work among Brazil’s free poor, “who were given to idleness and immersed in vice and poverty.” The Casa de Correção would transform these men “into industrious citizens of good habits.”Footnote ¹⁰³

The preponderance of African-born slaves in the population preoccupied law enforcement officials and the members of the Sociedade Defensora active in government. Police agents were constantly on the lookout for runaway slaves and would break up assemblies by the public fountains to squash the first wind of riots and other disturbances. The city’s slaves were a continual threat to public order, especially because they were vital to Rio’s economic function as an Atlantic port city. Authorities feared not only the threat of a slave rebellion, but more common everyday violations associated with a free circulating slave population in the Brazilian capital. The police oversaw the identification and arrest of runaway slaves. Others were brought to the Calabouço by their enslavers to be flogged. Conscious of erecting the basis of liberal jurisprudence in matters of slave punishment, the government intervened to limit the flogging of slaves to fifty lashes a day at the Calabouço and to limit their custody to a month in the dungeon. Justice minister Feijó argued that “slaves were also men and the laws also applied to them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With this decision, the moderado-led government expanded the state’s punitive authority onto Brazil’s enslaved population, seeking to regulate planter sovereignty under state control.

Legislators, slaveowners, and the political elites argued that daily threats, disobedience, and insubordination coming from the popular masses and the city’s slaves could unravel the social and racial hierarchies of the slave economy. The presence of slave ships along Rio’s harbor heightened problems of security on land after the November 1831 prohibition of the traffic. The entry into Rio’s harbor of British navy ships and their prize crews were also cause for alarm, because they embodied antislavery as an imperial project and a threat to national sovereignty. In addition, enslaved Africans at times sought refuge aboard British navy ships in their attempt to claim freedom.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The quarantine of apprehended slavers in the harbor sought to stem the spread not only of infectious disease, but also of equally dangerous ideas about black freedom in a land of slavery.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Africans liberated from the traffic constituted an even greater threat to public security. In 1831, writing about public order in the Brazilian capital, Justice Minister Feijó qualified enslaved Africans brought by slavers through the illegal slave trade as contributing to the issues with beggars and vagrants in the city. He highlighted the problem that “gangs of thieves” posed to law enforcement in the Brazilian capital. They “infested the city and its surroundings.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Feijó’s focus on gangs of thieves and slave thefts reflected his preoccupation that the victims of kidnappings in the city were new slaves. They were particularly vulnerable, he asserted, because they lived in a foreign land without the protection of families and political authorities.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He worried that they would be “perpetually reduced … to slavery” despite the abolition of the slave trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In 1832, Justice Minister Carneiro Leão highlighted a particular difficulty of policing the city’s slaves. African slaves were not just “property,” he claimed. “This property cannot be restrained,” he argued, because it “circulated through the streets.” Slaves were therefore particularly vulnerable to theft as living commodities that could participate in their dispossession, which potentially rendered them both victims and perpetrators of property crimes. Much of slave theft represented schemes by the enslaved to flee or change masters.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By 1834, Justice Minister Manoel Alves Branco qualified liberated Africans as “an ever-dangerous population.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Liberated Africans were particularly subversive after they had “become acculturated and circulating with the opinion of free men among slaves.”Footnote ¹¹² The intense framing of slave crimes and the circulation of liberated Africans as a matter of public security reflected the resurgence of the traffic after it had become virtually extinct in 1831–1832.

By 1833–1834, the illegal slave trade was becoming a tolerated practice by supporters of the slave trade, who began to secede from the moderados faction to form the reactionary party that ascended in Brazilian politics after 1835. On the one hand there was Evaristo da Veiga, who represented a faction of the Sociedade Defensora who opposed the traffic and viewed its termination as essential to modernizing Brazil. On the other hand, prominent politicians like Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos who were related through family ties to the slaveholding elites of Rio de Janeiro province, owners of coffee plantations that depended on slave labor, began to defend the continuation of the slave trade as an illegal practice. Vasconcelos and others united with some of the members of the restorationist party to form a reactionary party after 1834 to enforce a strong centralized state, which led a centralized Brazilian state that facilitated the expansion of the illegal slave trade.Footnote ¹¹³

The Sociedade Defensora and Ending the “shameful trafficking of human flesh”

The entry of the slave ship Maria da Gloria into Rio’s harbor in November 1833 was significant for the Sociedade Defensora. The Maria da Gloria crystalized for the antislavery reformers of the Sociedade Defensora the problems that slavery and the slave trade posed to Brazilian modernity and territorial control after independence. When Robertson boarded and seized the Maria da Gloria in November 1833, he did so empowered by more than fifteen years of bilateral treaties among England, Portugal, and Brazil, which abolished the slave trade north of the equator.Footnote ¹¹⁴ First, in 1810, Portugal and England signed a treaty of free commerce between their nations. In 1815, Portugal signed a second treaty with England that committed the empire to cooperate with England to gradually end the slave trade north of the equator. Most of the slave trade to Brazil, however, occurred in the South Atlantic during this period. In 1817, the two countries signed a third treaty that established a specific timeline for ending the traffic, organized a bilateral court at Rio to adjudicate the case of enslaved Africans rescued from slave ships, and authorized the British navy to seize Portuguese vessels engaged in the traffic. Despite its more effective language on prohibiting the slave trade, the 1817 decree allowed ships manned by Portuguese subjects to engage in the slave trade south of the equator, a distinction that had significant legal repercussions on the adjudication of apprehended slave vessels. The South Atlantic was precisely where most slaves were embarked on the African coast to be sold in the slave markets along the Brazilian coast between 1810 and 1817 (Figure 1.2). Through the 1817 treaty, Britain established mixed-commission courts in Africa and the Americas, notably in Sierra Leone, Havana, and Rio de Janeiro, to adjudicate slave ships caught in the illegal zone for slave trading. Following adjudication, if the court found a confiscated ship guilty of slave trafficking, the judges condemned the vessel, emancipated the enslaved Africans, sold the slave ship, and distributed the products of its sale among the crew that captured it.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Figure 1.2 A view of the slave market in Rio de Janeiro before the 1831 law.

Source: Thierry Frères. Boutique de la Rue du Val-Longo. Paris [França]: Firmin Didot Frères, 1835. 1 grav, litografia, col, 17,5 × 25,5. Acervo da Fundação da Biblioteca Nacional – Brasil.

Each court employed two judges, one British and the other representing the nation where the judicial body was established, to assess the legality of apprehended vessels. The courts also hired translators including African interpreters, a medical doctor, and a registrar to administer the process of adjudication and liberation. The courts were not vested with the authority to condemn the owners, the master, or the crew of a seized vessel, who were to be handed to their government for trial and punishment following the successful condemnation of an apprehended vessel. The goal was for the arbitration of a slaver to last no more than 20 days. However, at Rio’s court, it took an average of 135 days between November 1833 and April 1838 for slaves to be declared “free and liberated” from the traffic following the opening of proceedings of the court in adjudication cases.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Robertson, therefore, did not doubt the legality or the judiciousness of apprehending the Maria da Gloria. Only a few months earlier, in August 1833, Britain had expanded its opposition to the traffic by abolishing slavery in its colonies, albeit after a period of apprenticeship by the ex-slaves.

In the context of the legal reterritorialization of slavery and the traffic, Robertson did not reflect on the finer points of contradictions in the Anglo-Portuguese or Anglo-Brazilian treaties that could challenge the legality of the confiscation of the Maria da Gloria. The apprehension of the slaver would contribute to the British global campaign to end the slave trade, but would also result in rewards for him and the prize crew of the Snake. The intricacies of the law were superseded by the exigencies of the moment, British naval superiority, and the expectations of the Snake’s crew for “rewards for their exertions.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Robertson was aware that since the passage of the November 7, 1831 law, the warehouses that held and auctioned African slaves had disappeared from the streets around Rio’s harbor. He was cognizant that slave traders had shifted their zones of action and delivered enslaved Africans to Brazil through less policed ports and hideaways south of the Brazilian capital.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Two weeks earlier, on November 15, 1833, another British cruiser, the Satellite, had apprehended a brig sailing under the Portuguese flag, the Paquete do Sul, south of Rio de Janeiro, where the Maria da Gloria had been headed.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Though the two-masted vessel did not have slaves onboard, the commander of the Satellite concluded that it had just unloaded its human cargo at one of the islands based on the presence of “tools specific to the traffic” onboard, such as “neck irons, shackles, fetters, and a large boiler,” which were used to cook for the slaves.Footnote ¹²⁰

With the recent example of the Paquete do Sul in mind, Robertson and his crew brought the Maria da Gloria to Rio’s port for adjudication before the mixed court. Brazilian naval authorities immediately quarantined the vessel as a slave ship while it awaited arbitration. The adjudication of a slave ship in a city that thrived on the labor of enslaved African men and women was a cause for alarm.Footnote ¹²¹ Slave ships were seen as carriers of infectious diseases and germs that could spread to the hinterland and attack the freeborn population with yellow fever, smallpox, and cholera, among other fatal ailments.Footnote ¹²² Apprehended slave vessels and the British prize crews that accompanied their entrance to Atlantic harbors where slavery was the basis of the economy were the embodiment of imperial encroachment on sovereignty and potent antislavery challenges to the local slave economy. In addition, adjudicated slave vessels were often the victims of attacks by traffickers, who kidnapped the enslaved Africans and smuggled them into slavery.Footnote ¹²³ While the Maria da Gloria stood in Rio’s harbor, land traffickers kidnapped ten slaves. The death toll of the slave ship also highlighted the epidemiological threat of the traffic. The mortality rate of the slaves onboard the Maria da Gloria vividly depicted the human cost of the traffic, which figured prominently in the Sociedade Defensora’s publications on the “odious commerce.”

The Maria da Gloria was one of forty-five slave ships on which the Anglo-Brazilian mixed-commission court adjudicated in Rio de Janeiro in 1821–1845. It was one of fifteen ships restored to their owner, the Portuguese national and Rio resident Anastácio José Ribeiro, on March 16, 1834 with 309 surviving Africans.Footnote ¹²⁴ The controversial arbitration of the slave ship raised intense patriotic sentiments in Rio’s liberal press, especially in the Aurora Fluminense, the newspaper that was the mouthpiece of the Sociedade Defensora.Footnote ¹²⁵ The court decided in late December 1833 that it did not have jurisdiction to condemn the Maria da Gloria for slave trafficking because it was a Portuguese-owned ship. The Brazilian and British judges referred the case to the mixed-commission court in Sierra Leone, where it sailed on January 4, 1834.Footnote ¹²⁶

Two weeks after the restoration of the Maria da Gloria by the Sierra Leone court, on April 9, 1834, the Brazilian government ordered Anastácio Ribeiro to “depart from Brazil in fifteen days.”Footnote ¹²⁷ The Aurora Fluminense vigorously applauded the decision as one that demonstrated Brazilian sovereignty in the prohibition of the traffic. Signed by justice minister Aureliano de Souza e Oliveira Coutinho, an active member of the Sociedade Defensora, the edict emphasized Ribeiro’s Portuguese nationality to contrast it with the antislavery principles of Brazil’s constitutional monarchy. The order accused Ribeiro, a “foreigner,” of having delivered thousands of slaves along Rio’s coast and of having “violated Brazilian laws” against the traffic. The edict concluded that Ribeiro engaged in a “commerce that was harmful to the Empire” and “opposed to [Brazil’s] free institutions.”Footnote ¹²⁸ The editors of the Aurora Fluminense reproduced the deportation mandate and highlighted Ribeiro’s Portuguese nationality as a threat to Brazilian sovereignty. According to the paper, the Portuguese national “abused Brazilian hospitality” and “utilized his capital and entrepreneurship” to introduce enslaved Africans to Brazil, a country that had declared independence from Portugal more than a decade earlier.Footnote ¹²⁹ Despite their attribution of slave trading to Portuguese nationals, few officials could deny that the slave trade was on the ascent in Brazil by January 1834 when the Maria da Gloria sailed north of the equator to the mixed court at Sierra Leone.

Map 1.1 Map of Brazil and the southern Atlantic World where the slave trade thrived in the nineteenth century.

Source: Annelieke Vries, Cartographic Studio, Netherlands; and the International Review of Social History.

On February 16, 1834, the Sociedade Defensora advertised in Rio’s newspapers an essay contest on the abolition of the slave trade in Brazil. The publication of the contest in early 1834 was not a coincidence: it was a direct reaction to the controversial adjudication of the Maria da Gloria in Rio in late December 1833. The association promised a prize of four hundred milréis for the essay that best “demonstrated the odiousness of the traffic, refuted the sophistries which its apologists used to defend it” and “made known the harmful influence which the introduction of African slaves exercised upon [Brazilian] customs, civilization, and freedom.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Participants in the competition would elucidate how Brazil could remain economically prosperous without the continuing influx of slaves. The essays would evaluate various strategies to curtail slave labor in Brazil, including European immigration and the introduction of machinery in agriculture and mining. In an essay that promoted the 1834 contest, the Sociedade Defensora asserted that the “shameful trafficking of human flesh” was a “challenge to national progress, the development of Brazilian civilization, and the improvement of customs and liberty.”Footnote ¹³¹ The contest aimed to galvanize public opinion against the slave trade through the publication of pamphlets on the topic.

The Sociedade Defensora’s double-pronged project to build a penitentiary in the Brazilian capital and to promote discussions on the abolition of the traffic were rooted in the debates about the problem that slavery posed to Brazilian postcolonial nationhood, which were discussed in the legislative debates leading to the promulgation of the 1824 constitution and the discussions on the country’s 1830 criminal code. The Maria da Gloria left Rio for Sierra Leone on January 4, 1834, with 390 enslaved captives onboard. Twenty-three of the original slaves aboard the ship had died in Rio’s harbor during the adjudication proceedings.Footnote ¹³² Forty-five other slaves perished during the reverse middle passage to Sierra Leone, where the vessel arrived on February 19, 1834.Footnote ¹³³ By the time the mixed court in Sierra Leone restored the Maria da Gloria to its owner, twenty-six of its human cargo had succumbed to heat, exhaustion, the toll of confinement in a tight space, disease, and dehydration. Although there is no report of rebellion on board the vessel, it is likely that many of the enslaved chose death during their ordeal. The survivors hung onto life, however, and the Sierra Leone court restored 309 surviving slaves to Cordonis. The ship’s captain gifted sixty-four of the enslaved Africans to officials in Sierra Leone because they would not survive the second voyage to America, and returned to Brazil with 245 slaves onboard.

A British corvette named Perija spotted the Maria da Gloria near Bahia province in Brazil’s northeast, on May 11, 1834, with 230 slaves.Footnote ¹³⁴ Captain Broom of the Perija brought the slave vessel to the Bahian authorities to attempt to liberate the slaves once again. Emancipation of the slaves aboard the Maria da Gloria would have only necessitated the application of the Brazilian November 7, 1831 law. Broom asserted in his letter to Admiral Seymour in Rio that the president of Bahia was “desirous of condemning” the vessel, but he was not hopeful that it would be sentenced, an indication that the powerful slave trade lobby would overpower the leader’s authority and the law. Effectively, Bahian officials released the Maria da Gloria, and Cordonis once again recovered the ship’s human cargo. Significantly, the captain general of Bahia (capitão do porto), a police authority, “dispatched a cruiser with the Maria da Gloria” to steer the vessel “as far as the extreme limit of his authority” and to prevent Cordonis from unloading the slaves “within his jurisdiction.” Cordonis eventually landed 90 surviving slaves in Cabo Frio, a littoral municipality north of Rio de Janeiro.Footnote ¹³⁵ The circulation of the slave vessel to and from the Atlantic and its ability to deliver the enslaved at some landing point along the Brazilian coast highlighted the weakness of the central government in policing the Brazilian territory.

The case of the Maria da Gloria illustrated the definite resurgence of the illegal slave trade to Brazil by 1834 and the problem that the continuous entry of African slaves posed to public security. The fear of the impending abolition of the traffic in 1826 and 1831 sent slave traders and Brazilian planters into a heightened demand for African slaves. The expansion of coffee plantations in the Paraíba Valley between Rio and São Paulo fueled the market for slaves and increased their prices. In 1826, when Britain and Brazil ratified the convention to end the traffic, an estimated 40,000 slaves, 10,000 more than the previous year, disembarked at Rio de Janeiro’s port, from where traffickers smuggled them to the coffee plantations of the hinterland. By 1829, nearly 53,000 slaves disembarked in the Brazilian capital. The number of slaves entering Rio’s port dropped to short of 39,000 in 1830, on the eve of the deadline for the ending of the slave trade according to the 1826 convention.Footnote ¹³⁶

When the November 7, 1831 law took effect, the volume of the traffic dropped precipitously in Rio and in all other Brazilian ports.Footnote ¹³⁷ A little over 1,200 slaves disembarked on Rio’s coastline in 1831, from nearly 39,000 slaves who disembarked in the city’s harbor in 1830. The total number of slaves sold to Brazil in 1831 was 6,600 men, women, and children. However, by 1834, it was evident to both British and Brazilian authorities that the traffic had entered an aggressive illegal phase that escaped imperial control. The volume of human trafficking to Rio increased consistently to 5,000 in 1832, 11,200 in 1833, and more than 17,000 by 1834. The observation that the contraband slave trade was becoming more prominent occupied the reports of the Ministry of Justice between 1833 and 1835. In 1833, Justice Minister Aureliano de Sousa Oliveira, a prominent member of the Sociedade Defensora, reported that the Brazilian navy was actively policing Brazil’s coast to capture slave vessels. He noted that slave traffickers often left the Brazilian coast for the African continent while claiming Montevideo in Uruguay as their destination.Footnote ¹³⁸ Official reports from the Brazilian government acknowledged “receiving denunciations” from the public of ships leaving for the African coast. According to these reports, witnesses were unwilling to come forward to corroborate the information, and efforts to investigate these vessels failed because of fear of retaliation from traffickers and corrupt local judges.Footnote ¹³⁹

These official reports also revealed that slave traffickers drained the capacity of the Brazilian navy to secure the national territory. On October 9, 1833, the president of São Paulo province, Rafael Tobias de Aguiar, informed the minister of the navy, Joaquim José Rodrigues Torres, that there were sightings of a slave vessel at Ilha do Abrigo, a small island at the entrance to the town of Cananeia southeast of São Paulo city. The vessel disembarked and transferred a partial cargo of enslaved Africans to the towns of Paranagua and Curitiba in São Paulo’s hinterland. Aguiar requested that the navy send a warship to patrol the coastline between the city of Campos, which lay to the north of Rio de Janeiro, and the port of Santos, in the southeast of São Paulo province.

Aguiar argued that sightings of other vessels by the populace suggested that the city had become an entry point for the contraband trade. Still in October 1833, authorities received news that another vessel “circled aimlessly” around the beach in the locality of Conceição town and Manduba Point with a cargo of slaves. The ship at times approached the coastline, where it raised the Portuguese flag while giving two shots of large-caliber pieces to alert the population to its location. Navy minister Rodrigues Torres responded to Aguiar’s request by ordering the schooner Fluminense, which was in the port of Santos farther north, to cruise the southern coast to capture the slave vessel. However, the Fluminense had already left Santos and was sailing to Campos.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Even while requesting the navy’s assistance to curb the traffic, Tobias Aguiar, a member of the Sociedade Defensora in São Paulo, doubted that the government could fully succeed in turning the tide of the illegal slave trade. Aguiar concluded that local authorities were powerless to restrict the traffic because of the extensive Brazilian coastline and the collusion of corrupt local judges, particularly police officers, and elements of the population with traffickers. Once slaves landed on the Brazilian coast, it was difficult to pursue the perpetrators in the vast hinterland and through the mountainous regions that extended from the shoreline. These episodes highlighted the permeability of the Brazilian territory and weakness of the national government to secure the coastline.

The Maria da Gloria also underscored how successful slave traffickers were at evading conviction by the mixed-commission courts in Rio and on the African coast. Cordonis and Ribeiro skillfully exploited the edges and contradictions of the antislavery treaties by claiming to be Portuguese and by asserting that British officials captured the Maria da Gloria in the South Atlantic where the traffic was legal. In Rio and Sierra Leone, the traffickers claimed that Robertson did not carry a copy of article four of the 1817 treaty aboard the Snake, a requirement of the convention to justify lawful confiscation of slave ships. Slave traders like Ribeiro and Cordonis exploited the overlapping jurisdictions and uneven sovereignty between Brazil and England as well as the significance of the Atlantic Ocean as a contentious territory.

The case ultimately demonstrated the lack of decisive interventions by Brazilian authorities to impose the country’s laws. Admiral Seymour, a British naval officer stationed in Rio, convincingly argued in December 1833 that Brazilian authorities could condemn the Maria da Gloria because its owners, regardless of their nationality or citizenship, blatantly violated local laws, notably the 1831 law.Footnote ¹⁴¹ The law required the Brazilian government to negotiate with local authorities in Africa for asylum for the liberated Africans.Footnote ¹⁴² At any point during the adjudication of the Maria da Gloria in Rio, Brazilian authorities could have intervened and subjected the vessel and its cargo to the 1831 law. They did not, as Seymour observed. The Brazilian judge at the mixed-commission court concurred with George Jackson, the British commissioner in Rio, to refer the vessel to Sierra Leone based on the 1817 Anglo-Portuguese convention.

A previous case of enslaved Africans rescued from the traffic in 1833 elucidates this question. In January 1833, the president of Pernambuco, Manoel Zeferino dos Santos, informed Justice Minister Honório Carneiro Leão, a member of the Sociedade Defensora linked to the Paraíba Valley planters through family ties, that a cargo of enslaved Africans had reached his territory and remained in custody while he awaited additional instruction on their reexportation to the African coast. Dos Santos requested a swift resolution from imperial authorities in Rio.Footnote ¹⁴³ Carneiro Leão clarified that the regency (1831–1840) had not yet reached an agreement with African authorities on the slaves’ reexportation.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ He suggested returning the “now captured [Africans] back to the points from whence they came or to that place in Africa which may be most convenient.” This very general guideline, which in effect relegated policing the traffic to regional authorities consistent with moderados’ call for a decentralized monarchy, demonstrated the lack of imperial resolve to enforce the November 7 law by 1833. It also confirmed to George Jackson, the British commissioner in Rio, that the imperial government lacked the resources to implement the antislavery law.

The story of the liberated Africans in Pernambuco showed the effectiveness of slave traffickers in reenslaving liberated Africans, often with the collusion of petty officials, by disembarking those Africans in well-known spots of the illegal slave trade after 1831.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Pernambuco’s president reported in April 1833 that slave traders kidnapped most of the emancipated Africans from their custody location. They “carried off by stealth” thirty slaves in the night from the “house in which they were deposited.” The local custody official sold hundreds of other emancipated Africans to traffickers. Buyers went straight to the house of the “very person who brought the first lot, and whose name, residence, and property [were] well known.” Pernambuco’s governor concluded that this blatant corruption made it impossible for him to govern his territory. “If I am to govern with such ministers, I cannot govern at all,” he concluded.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Commenting on the case, George Jackson, the British commissioner, observed that it demonstrated the “demoralization” that the continuation of the illegal traffic caused to Brazilian institutions.

The Pernambuco case and the events surrounding the adjudication of the Maria da Gloria indicate that imperial authorities were increasingly uncommitted to suppressing the slave trade. In reporting the incident and commenting on the 1831 law, Jackson worried about its overlap with the Anglo-Brazilian treaties. The 1831 law required Brazilian authorities to return liberated Africans to the African continent. Jackson criticized the exportation mandate of the 1831 law as impractical and in contradiction with the 1826 convention. The treaty, he clarified, bound Brazil to subject liberated Africans to fourteen years’ apprenticeship before declaring them “fully free.”

A conversation with the Brazilian minister of foreign affairs in 1833 confirmed to Jackson that the preoccupation of the constitutional monarchy was to “no longer allow the introduction of Africans into” the national territory.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Since the preoccupation of Brazilian authorities was to prevent the entry of African slaves, they readily embraced Ribeiro’s argument that the Maria da Gloria’s adjudication belonged to the jurisdiction of the Sierra Leone mixed court. Returning the slave ship to Africa also released the government from the responsibility of emancipating the enslaved and setting them loose in the population as free men and women. The referral of the ship to Sierra Leone in effect repatriated the Africans at no cost to the local government. When the Maria da Gloria circled the Brazilian coast again in May 1834 with its cargo of Africans, the local authority consistently pushed it toward the high sea. This quarantine policy attempted to seal off the Brazilian territory from the traffic and restricted it to international waters. Paradoxically, when Cordonis was finally able to land an estimated ninety surviving Africans, there is nothing to suggest that authorities prevented their reenslavement on land. In fact, illegal trafficking expanded after 1834 with the tacit support of Brazilian authorities, consistent with the rise of the reactionary party in Brazilian politics. The question was how to control the “foreign,” “enemy” population within Brazil and how to resist British antislavery pressure thereafter.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

The ascent of reactionary lawmakers in the government led to the implementation of their policies on slave control, national sovereignty, and the protection of the slaveholding economy against subversive resistance from the enslaved and the free poor.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ A series of slave rebellions and the expansion of the slave trade during this period heightened planter vigilance. In June 1835, the Brazilian parliament approved a law that condemned slaves’ violent acts against enslavers and their kin to the death penalty. The law reduced the rights of slave defendants who were accused of capital crimes against their masters and overseers as well as their families. It accelerated the judicial procedure to enact the death penalty. Although the death penalty was included in the 1830 criminal code, the 1835 law targeted the leaders of slave rebellions. Brazilian jurists, ambivalent about the broad reach of the law, referred to it as the “law of necessity.” The 1835 law was promulgated a few months after the January 1835 Malê rebellion in Bahia, which raised the alarm against the presence of enslaved Africans in the population.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The law signaled that hanging and public executions would chastise the enslaved to protect the slave order in the empire. The death penalty was a wedge issue in the elaboration of the 1830 criminal code. The legal reforms culminating in the 1830 criminal code and the 1835 “law of necessity” can only be appreciated within the context of the rising tide of the slave trade despite its prohibition in 1831. The promulgation of the 1835 law reflected the tense resolution of protracted debates about capital punishment for the enslaved, but also the increasing influence of supporters of the expansion of slavery in Brazilian politics. Members of the reactionary party deeply tied to the slaveholding elite rose in Brazilian politics at all levels to transform the state to ensure the continuation of the illegal slave trade and the expansion of slavery in the constitutional monarchy.Footnote ¹⁵¹

The rise of the reactionary party occasioned the dissolution of the Sociedade Defensora after 1835, when news reached Brazil that the former emperor, Pedro I, had succumbed to tuberculosis in Europe. Pedro’s passing eliminated the threat of the restoration, which was one of the factors that united the members of the association. The organization had politicians like Evaristo da Veiga who opposed the slave trade, but also other prominent politicians with family ties to the landowning elites in Rio de Janeiro province and the northeast of Brazil. For example, Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcellos, a member of the organization, was a scion of prominent mining and slaveholding families in Minas Gerais province, where a slave uprising erupted in 1833 that threatened the slave economy. He became a strong supporter of the slaveholders’ interests in parliament, where he defended the continuation of the slave trade and the death penalty for slave rebels.Footnote ¹⁵² His counterpart was Diógo Antonio Feijó, the illegitimate son of a prominent family in the coffee province of São Paulo, and a liberal reformist and monarchist. Feijó supported restraining planter authority in matters of slave punishment to bring slave discipline under state control. He ascended to the position of minister of justice and regent, where he pursued a political program that liberals tied to the plantation elite resisted.Footnote ¹⁵³

Moderate members of the Sociedade Defensora who were tied directly or indirectly to the Brazilian slaveholding elite joined members of the restorationist caramuru faction to form the reactionary movement that became identified with the Party of Order in 1837. Members of the reactionary party ascended to important local and national posts throughout Brazil to support a politics that defended the expansion of slavery through illegal enslavement under a strong centralized state. Adherents of the Party of Order included Eusébio de Queiroz Mattoso da Camara, who was a member of the Sociedade Defensora and later served as Rio’s police chief (1833–1844) and became the minister of justice (1848–1852). Other prominent members were Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, also a member of the Sociedade Defensora but a strong defender of the slave trade and the death penalty. Vasconcellos led a conservative ministry in 1837 that oversaw the expansion of the slave trade and the deployment of social control institutions such as the police and the prison system into bodies that enforced slavery and planter control on the city’s slaves.Footnote ¹⁵⁴

The rise of the reactionary party was accompanied by an attack on the November 7, 1831 law that prohibited the slave trade, which they argued was unenforceable. In 1836, the reactionary lawmaker Felisberto Caldeira Brant Pontes, the Marquis of Barbacena, defended a bill through the Brazilian senate that would in effect abrogate the 1831 law. The Barbacena bill argued that Africans who had been enslaved and sold to Brazil after the November law were legitimate chattel once they were disembarked on Brazilian soil as opposed to on the high seas.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The senator contended that the continuation of the contraband trade showed that Brazilian authorities were unable to recover enslaved Africans once they had landed in Brazil, and that by law these captives belonged to whoever had purchased them. This interpretation of the law fit the equivocal politics of the Brazilian government in 1833 on the Maria da Gloria, which was quarantined at sea by authorities in Pernambuco. Once the slave traffickers reached unguarded areas of the Brazilian coast, they were able to disembark the captives, who were sold as slaves to Brazilian slave owners.

As the reactionary position strengthened between 1835 and 1837, supporters of the slave trade resurrected and published an 1821 essay by Domingos Alves Moniz Barreto against abolishing the traffic.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Barreto advised Dom João, then the prince regent in Brazil, to resist British pressure to stop the slave trade in 1821 on the grounds that it would be detrimental to Brazil’s economic development. Abolition of the traffic would deprive Brazilian agriculture of the “necessary hands to plow the land.”Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He concluded that Brazil could gradually curtail the slave trade in a manner that benefited the country rather than harmed its economic interests.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Once the traffic ended, Brazil could begin the slow process of dismantling slavery by facilitating self-purchase among the enslaved. Barreto recommended the promulgation of laws to facilitate slave emancipation and policies to promote their biological reproduction. The ex-slaves and freed children would become the basis for a free working class that would facilitate the country’s transition to free labor. Barreto’s proposals to form a free labor class encompassed the indigenous population and the free poor. Engendering a free working class necessitated a policy to pacify the native population and promote European immigration. He advocated enacting laws to control “idleness, the mother of all vices” among the poor. Defining idleness as “the plague of nations,” Barreto claimed that it caused the destruction of families, which ultimately affected Brazil’s ability to develop into a prosperous nation. The author identified beggars, vagrants, and drunkards as problem populations in need of discipline to transform them into workers.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Barreto suggested employing beggars and vagrants in the service of the navy arsenal where they could learn a trade.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Barreto proposed reforming Brazil’s laws to accommodate the incoming transition to free labor that would result from the end of the traffic. He argued that galé convicts prematurely succumbed to the labor that they performed in public works, shackled to one another while carrying heavy loads. He advocated redeploying the sentence to reform convicts rather than leading to their early death, which had no utilitarian social value. Barreto also proposed sending galé convicts to the navy and military arsenals for training as future artisans.Footnote ¹⁶¹

The publication of Frederico Leopoldo Cezar Burlamaqui’s Memória sobre a escravidão in 1837 reflected increasing tensions between anti- and proslavery voices in the Brazilian parliament regarding the slave trade. Burlamaqui was a member of the Sociedade Defensora and had written the Memória as a response to the 1834 contest on the abolition of the slave trade.Footnote ¹⁶² Barreto’s suggestions of social control policies to compel the poor to work in the aftermath of abolition appeared in Frederico Burlamaqui’s antislavery pamphlet. Burlamaqui’s Memória consisted of four major sections, which reflected the Sociedade Defensora’s call for essays that demonstrated the odiousness of the slave trade, the harmful influence of the introduction of African slaves on Brazilian customs, and the benefits of labor produced by free men and women over slave labor. The fourth chapter discussed slavery’s effects on Brazil’s underdevelopment. Burlamaqui called for the slave trade’s immediate prohibition followed by slavery’s gradual abolition in Brazil. Among the solutions to stem the traffic, Burlamaqui suggested the introduction of European colonists to work as sharecroppers paid for by private interests, the use of machinery to simplify agriculture and mining, the improvement of slave treatment in Brazil, and finally the relocation of slavery from coastal cities to rural regions.

Burlamaqui placed the continuation of the traffic at the centrality of debates about whether Brazil would join the ranks of civilized nations or fall back into barbarism, a familiar trope used by the postindependence elite in Latin America to address the racial challenge of postcolonial nation building in their respective countries.Footnote ¹⁶³ While Barreto discussed Brazilian progress in mostly economic terms, Burlamaqui assessed Brazil’s national development in primarily cultural terms. Writing when Brazil was a co-kingdom in the Portuguese empire and during rising slave demands to fuel coffee’s expansion in the Paraíba Valley, Barreto suggested European immigration as a replacement for slave labor. He did not view European workers as culturally superior to African slaves.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In fact, Barreto’s project of transition to free labor considered pacifying the native population and disciplining free people of color into a free laboring class.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Writing in the postcolonial period, Burlamaqui framed European immigration as a solution to Brazil’s incoming labor problem and an exit from its descent into barbarism. The 1835 Muslim slave uprising in Bahia was a potent reminder to Burlamaqui of the danger that Africans represented in Brazil. The Bahian slave rebellion heightened existing fears of slave rebellion and disobedience throughout Brazil and especially in Rio, the port of entry for most slaves to the coffee plantations of the southeast. The African leadership of the insurgency – and its rank and file as only Africans joined the rebellion – led to increasing fear of African-born slaves as particularly dangerous and as internal enemies in Brazil.Footnote ¹⁶⁶

Burlamaqui viewed slavery as a plague that hindered Brazilian development and bastardized its institutions. The traffic threatened Brazil’s “existence as a nation” and slavery would leave “lasting ills” on the national character.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Burlamaqui considered slavery and the slave trade as “deadly diseases” from which Brazil had to cure itself. Transforming Brazilian mentality about the necessity of slave labor was pivotal to ending the traffic. The mere sight of poor Africans sold as slaves to Brazil, Burlamaqui asserted, should convince anyone that slavery was harmful because it “demoralized” the national character and customs.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Burlamaqui focused on the contradiction that slavery represented in postcolonial Brazil.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ The country could not claim to be an independent nation founded on the rule of law while holding a large slave population within its borders. He emphasized that slavery was contrary to liberal principles, an argument that he supported by quoting the Guatemalan Constitution, which prohibited slave traders from citizenship.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Slavery, Burlamaqui contended, was a legacy of Portuguese colonialism with which Brazil wrestled because it was the basis of economic production. In an allusion to the violence of the Haitian revolution and the 1835 Malê uprising, Burlamaqui compared slavery to a “volcano that continuously threatened” the country with destruction.

The presence of slaves in Brazil was antithetical to Christian morality, Burlamaqui asserted. He emphasized the impossibility of preaching Christian social and sexual moralism in a slave society. Slaves could not form families in obedience to Christian norms because their condition subjected them to the will of their owners, regardless of matrimonial or filial bonds. Christian morality subjected a woman to her husband’s authority. Since civil law reflected Christian influence, it made it impossible for a married slave woman to obey an order from her husband when it contradicted a directive from her owner. Burlamaqui contended that it was useless to state to a slave that “the word liberty was in contradiction with the existence of slaves or that religion was opposed to slavery” when he could clearly see that compassion, altruism, and brotherly love were hollow words in a country that was divided between the oppressors and the oppressed.Footnote ¹⁷¹ Slavery stripped slaves of honor and dishonored enslaved women because female slaves did not have protection against their master’s sexual demands. The routine sexual exploitation of female slaves challenged the bounds of marriage, and caused widespread moral decay and violence from all members of free society. By showing how violence permeated relations between slaves and their owners and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women that resulted from their condition, Burlamaqui sought to demonstrate the necessity for a strong state to legislate relations between masters and slaves.

Burlamaqui expanded this argument by demonstrating how slavery “devalued all industrious professions.”Footnote ¹⁷² Slavery prevented the development of an industrious spirit through which men could conquer nature and submit it to their will. If slavery favored slave owners, it did so by allowing them to control over other people, but it fundamentally stunted the development of the skills to domesticate nature. On the topic of industrialization in Brazil, Burlamaqui was an expert. He dedicated himself in later years to transferring the knowledge of agricultural mechanization to Brazil by publishing a book on the significance of technological innovation as a path to the transition to free labor.Footnote ¹⁷³

Slavery’s greatest casualty was the free working poor, who were neither masters nor slaves but who were bereft of opportunities to work and to provide for themselves because of its devaluation of labor. In Brazil, Burlamaqui argued, “a man ceases to work as soon as he acquired one or two slaves.”Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Even artisans used slave labor in their workshops rather than hiring free men or women. Free artisans could not flourish because they competed with slaveowners who utilized skilled slaves. The constrained labor market reduced the unskilled free poor to live a life of vagrancy and a final descent into criminality.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ Skilled workers, on the other hand, only earned half of what a leased slave earned for the same work.

Slavery, Burlamaqui demonstrated, challenged Brazil’s ability to guarantee freedom for its citizens because it limited access to honest means of subsistence.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ Burlamaqui compared Brazil to the United States to exemplify what awaited the country if it did not rid itself of slaves, or at least restrict slavery to specific regions within the empire. He contrasted the continuation of slavery in the American south, which was poorer and less industrialized, with freedom in the industrialized north, where a thriving free working class manufactured goods purchased by southern slaveholders.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Since slavery expanded on the entire Brazilian territory, Burlamaqui argued, it limited the availability of work and social mobility for the free poor. The author implied that this was especially so in urban centers such as Rio where slave artisans were numerous.

Slavery also deprived Brazil of a viable population upon which to build a new postcolonial nation. Burlamaqui argued that it was notorious that poor nutrition, the sex imbalance ratio of the traffic, and planters’ abuse of their slaves negatively affected the biological reproduction of slaves. Since maintaining the availability of slave labor depended on the traffic, Brazil’s slave population was overwhelmingly African, thus constituting a foreign element in society. In a plantation of 400 or 500 slaves, he asserted, one could barely find 40–50 Brazilian-born slaves, and descendants of three to four generations.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ The free poor also tended not to have big families, since they lived a life of scarcity. Brazil was severely underpopulated, and without a people there could not be a nation. Burlamaqui proposed improving slave conditions to produce a creole or Brazilian-born slave population. Legal reforms should submit slaveowners to state sovereignty and reduce planter violence against the enslaved. The law should chastise excessively violent slaveowners by depriving them of their slaves.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ Burlamaqui’s proposal included establishing a special police force to oversee the treatment of slaves by their masters.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ The government should also intervene to change the nature of slavery in Brazil by redrawing the geography of slavery and restricting the utilization of slaves exclusively to agriculture, while limiting it in the service sector. This policy would “unclog the cities of this horde of miserable beings.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ His suggestion to restrict slavery to rural regions would ensure that coastal cities such as Rio supported a thriving wage-earning free urban working class. A politics of immigration then would encourage European workers to immigrate to Brazil as colonists to replace the slave population in the countryside.

Burlamaqui’s argument that slavery challenged Brazilian postcolonial nationhood and progress closely echoed José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva’s dossier to the legislative assembly in 1823, which was published in 1825.Footnote ¹⁸² José Bonifácio played an important role in the independence movement and was a member of the Sociedade Defensora, along with his brother Martim Francisco de Andrada e Silva. Bonifácio’s project defined the indigenous people and the slave population as two challenges to liberal rule in postcolonial Brazil.Footnote ¹⁸³ He opposed the slave trade because of its incompatibility with Brazilian progress. Slavery challenged Brazil’s cultural and ethnic homogeneity.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Bonifácio had also already elaborated on Burlamaqui’s main critique of slavery: that by preventing an appreciation of work and causing idleness and vagrancy among the poor, the institution stunted industrialization and corrupted the Brazilian character.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Even small-scale slaveowners, he stated, lived off the daily wage – jornal – that their leased slaves earned for their services throughout the city. The free population learned idleness, which was the cause of all vices and the gateway to criminality.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Bonifácio critiqued the suggestion that European immigration was essential to replace slave labor and argued that slavery would quickly corrupt foreign colonists upon arriving in Brazil. There, they would summarily acquire one or two slaves to work on their behalf and abandon themselves to vagrancy and slothfulness.Footnote ¹⁸⁷

Bonifácio outlined a legal structure to protect slaves from excessive planter violence and mistreatment while implementing policies for gradual emancipation.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Only by ending the slave trade and slowly outlawing slavery could Brazil transform into a society with “useful, active, and productive citizens.”Footnote ¹⁸⁹ Bonifácio’s project hinged on creating legal provisions to protect slaves from violent slaveowners and to transform them into a free working class. Thus, it was up to the Brazilian state to make the slave population “worthy of freedom” – dignos da liberdade.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Transition to free labor depended on policies that compelled the ex-slaves to work through antivagrancy laws.Footnote ¹⁹¹

Bonifácio’s project encompassed twenty-two provisions for the transition from slavery to freedom. The most prominent requirement was a general slave registry to allow for greater government oversight of chattel slavery. These conditions included requiring slaveowners to sell their captives if the latter made an offer of purchase, and other terms to prevent the sale of sick slaves. Article 10 envisioned distributing land to free people of color to transform them into a working class attached to the land by ownership. It advised stripping slaveowners of the authority to flog their slaves by requiring them to procure a license from the police. Corporal punishment of slaves should occur under police supervision at the whipping post – pelourinho – in the nearest town to reduce planters’ excessive use of force against their bondsmen.Footnote ¹⁹²

How can we understand the extensive similarities in thought between the writings of proslavery and antislavery advocates on the social control of the free poor? Barreto, writing while Brazil was still under Portuguese dominion, was most concerned about the economic consequences of abolishing the slave trade. Burlamaqui and Bonifácio’s writings, however, were primarily concerned with the sociolegal and cultural implications of a slave population in postcolonial Brazil. The authors’ common preoccupation with the social control of the poor was a result of the moderado preoccupation with the problems of population, race, and nation among supporters and opponents of the traffic.Footnote ¹⁹³ Jorge Henrique Rebello’s Memoire and Considerations on the Brazilian Population, published in 1836, articulated this preoccupation clearly. Rebello’s treatise wrestled with Brazil’s challenge with underpopulation. Population was the cornerstone of nation building.

Rebello’s treatise was neither in support of nor against the traffic. He was remarkably lucid about the paradox that the expansion of slavery in Brazil represented while it receded in the North Atlantic. The cultural and racial consequences of the forced immigration of Africans to Brazil preoccupied Rebello.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Brazil lacked a homogenous population because of the colonization process and the slave trade.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ Rebello supported ending the traffic by enforcing the 1831 law, which, he argued, had worsened the inhumane condition of the traffic. Brazilian authorities, he asserted, had to evaluate whether the slave trade benefited population expansion against the economic needs of agriculture for a mass labor force. While slaves were essential to economic production, Rebello considered Africans as an undesirable addition to the Brazilian population because of their condition. He argued that “increases in individuals” did not produce civilized societies, which depended on the number of “citizens” in each population.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Therefore, the slave trade did not benefit Brazil because it introduced slaves rather than citizens into the country. Rebello lamented that Brazil lacked skilled workers, soldiers, and artisans, while the demographic consequence of the traffic meant that the future bedrock of the nation necessarily originated from the “unfortunate Africans.” Colonization and slavery presented Brazil with the challenge to forge a nation out of a population bereft of culture and civilization.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Rebello advocated repatriating the slaves to the African continent because they were not good material for a future Brazilian nation. Rather, German, Swiss, and other European colonists could free Brazil from the need for slaves and put the country on the path toward civilization.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ He also suggested a land reform program that would incentivize colonists to work in agriculture and prevent their descent into vagrancy and petty criminality.

The debates about the problem of freedom in postindependence Brazil incorporated economic, cultural, moral, class, and racial critiques of human trafficking. Despite their differences, both sides were preoccupied with the problem that the traffic presented to Brazilian liberal institutions and the progress of the nation. The views of proslave trade advocates tended to reflect the influence of the planter elite and focus on the economic necessity of slavery. Antislavery reformers, however, highlighted the cultural and legal implications of slavery in a constitutional monarchy, while stressing that the continuation of the slave trade and slavery challenged Brazil’s future. Supporters and opponents of the traffic alike, however, argued for strong social control policies to repress slave resistance and rebellion and to discipline the free poor into workers. The penitentiary stood as the site to concretize these ideas. Members of the Sociedade Defensora who served as elected officials between 1830 and 1834, reflecting both supporters and opponents of the traffic to varied degrees, shaped the penal reforms that defined institutions of social control for the rest of the nineteenth century.

Conclusion

The Sociedade Defensora’s opposition to the slave trade ultimately failed to curtail the “odious commerce,” which makes the organization’s antislavery program and its relation to building the penitentiary seem like a footnote in the history of antislavery discourse in Brazil. The organization’s role in the construction of the Casa de Correção remained mostly in obscurity. The official record announcing the construction of the prison in 1833 did not even mention the Sociedade Defensora as the architect of the project. Written at the time for an audience of lawmakers, many of whom were members of the Sociedade Defensora, the announcement would have been understood then as the organization’s brainchild and the discursive ties between building the penitentiary and antislavery ideas and their significance to national progress would have been self-evident. Instead, the rapid explosion of the slave trade after 1837 and the inauguration of the Casa de Correção in 1850 under a conservative cabinet have overshadowed the origins of the penal complex in antislavery ideas that aimed to create a free laboring class for postcolonial progress. Yet, significantly, the first inhabitants of the Casa de Correção were predominantly enslaved men and women in the process of being “liberated” from the traffic, along with a minority of convicted criminals. Thus, there was a direct passageway between the slave ship in Rio’s harbor and the penitentiary at the city’s edge as illegal slavery expanded in Brazil in the nineteenth century.