American Mirror

The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation

Roberto Saba

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691205359
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

How slave emancipation transformed capitalism in the United States and Brazil In the nineteenth century, the United States and Brazil were the largest slave societies in the Western world. The former enslaved approximately four million people, the latter nearly two million. Slavery was integral to the production of agricultural commodities for the global market, and governing elites feared the system's demise would ruin their countries. Yet, when slavery ended in the United States and Brazil, in 1865 and 1888 respectively, what resulted was immediate and continuous economic progress. In American Mirror, Roberto Saba investigates how American and Brazilian reformers worked together to ensure that slave emancipation would advance the interests of capital.Saba explores the methods through which antislavery reformers fostered capitalist development in a transnational context. From the 1850s to the 1880s, this coalition of Americans and Brazilians—which included diplomats, engineers, entrepreneurs, journalists, merchants, missionaries, planters, politicians, scientists, and students, among others—consolidated wage labor as the dominant production system in their countries. These reformers were not romantic humanitarians, but cosmopolitan modernizers who worked together to promote labor-saving machinery, new transportation technology, scientific management, and technical education. They successfully used such innovations to improve production and increase trade.Challenging commonly held ideas about slavery and its demise in the Western Hemisphere, American Mirror illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism.

PART I

A New World Unchained

A Hand-Mirror

Hold it up sternly—see this it sends back, (who is it? is it you?)

Outside fair costume—within, ashes and filth,

No more a flashing eye—no more a sonorous voice or springy step,

Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,

A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, venerealee’s flesh,

Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and cankerous,

Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,

Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,

Words babble, hearing and touch callous,

No brain, no heart left—no magnetism of sex;

Such, from one look in this looking-glass ere you go hence,

Such a result so soon—and from such a beginning!

—WALT WHITMAN, 1855

1

Distant Slave Empires

IN MAY 1844, Secretary of State John C. Calhoun sent detailed instructions to the newly appointed US minister to Brazil, Henry A. Wise. If the British Empire ever managed to destroy the slave system of either Brazil or the United States, Calhoun speculated, “it would destroy the peace and prosperity of both and transfer the production of tobacco, rice, cotton, sugar and coffee from the United States and Brazil to [the British] possessions beyond the Cape of Good Hope.” Hence, Calhoun commanded, “you will avail yourself of the occasion to impress on the Brazilian government the conviction, that it is our policy to cultivate the most friendly relations with all the countries on this continent, and with none more than with Brazil.”¹ Despite Calhoun’s wishes, neither Wise nor any other Southerner would be able to build a proslavery coalition with Brazil, the second largest slave society in the Western world in the nineteenth century.

The problem of slavery polarized the United States during the 1840s and 1850s. The Mexican War reopened questions about the balance between free and slave states that the Missouri Compromise had kept at bay. A new compromise was forged in 1850, but it failed to stem the conflict. As the 1850s progressed, slaveholders’ imperial voracity intensified: they now wanted to take Kansas, increase their influence in western territories, and promote filibustering expeditions in the Caribbean and Central America.² The Republican Party emerged as a response to aggressive proslavery expansionism. Confronted by fire-eaters, Republicans put their foot down: slavery was not to expand beyond the South.³ The United States was on the brink of civil war.

The institution of slavery also shook Brazil by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Pressured by the British Empire, the Brazilian government had made the importation of African slaves illegal in 1831. But the law was disregarded, and with the cooperation of influential Brazilian politicians, the traffic only increased thereafter. The British government renewed its pressure and, in 1845, unilaterally gave the Royal Navy the right to intercept and search any Brazilian vessel suspected of carrying slaves.⁴ In addition to the instability that slavery generated, Brazil got involved in border skirmishes that became a full-blown war against Argentinians and Uruguayans between 1851 and 1852. Although Brazil did not increase its territory, it flexed its imperial muscle with little reservation in South America.⁵

The geopolitical agitation of the era bred friction between the United States and Brazil. The involvement of American merchants and sailors in the illegal transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in the 1840s provoked a negative reaction from Henry A. Wise, who became embroiled in heated disputes with Brazilian authorities and threatened to attack Rio de Janeiro. As relations between the two countries were still shaken by the early 1850s, the expansionist projects of American proslavery ideologues aggravated Brazilians once again. The Brazilian elite now feared Matthew Fontaine Maury, a Tennessee slaveholder and superintendent of the American Naval Observatory, who nurtured plans to explore and settle the Amazon Valley, repeating the process of Anglo-American conquest successful in Mexican Texas. An empire of its own, Brazil forcefully opposed Southern impositions.

As the secession crisis escalated in the United States, however, Southern fire-eaters tried to make Brazil a client of the emerging Confederacy. But a missionary and writer from Indiana named James Cooley Fletcher, acting as an agent of Northern entrepreneurs and abolitionists, formulated a competing approach. He not only established strong ties with the Brazilian elite but also elaborated a compelling narrative about their progressive character, which he then used to criticize proslavery Southerners. All the while, Fletcher fostered commercial exchanges with Brazil by exhibiting the industrial prowess of the American North to Brazilian audiences.

Rejecting an older approach that regarded slave societies as precapitalist,⁶ scholars now emphasize the great power that slaveholders acquired in the nineteenth century. Historians of American slavery posit that Southern cotton planters were audacious capitalists who elaborated successful expansionist projects reaching well beyond North America.⁷ In turn, historians of Brazilian slavery assume that Southerners’ success helped stabilize the institution in Brazil, where the local elite embraced proslavery ideology.⁸ The study of US-Brazilian relations in the 1840s and 1850s, however, reveals that, no matter how boastful Southern slaveholders had become, they could not establish an effective foreign policy in defense of slavery or promote it as a viable system for the future of capitalism. The South failed to convince Brazil, a country that held some two million slaves, to embark on a proslavery crusade. The Northern approach, on the other hand, seemed quite appealing to Brazilians willing to modernize their economy and slowly reform their institutions. By the end of the 1850s, American antislavery reformers had planted the seeds of a transnational cooperation that would isolate the slave South and set the stage for a transition to free labor in Brazil.

Filthy Business

Henry A. Wise, a slaveholder and politician from Virginia, had been elected six consecutive times to the House of Representatives, serving from 1833 to 1844 and gaining notoriety as a staunch proslavery advocate. All in all, he seemed like the perfect candidate to foster closer relations between American and Brazilian slaveholders.⁹ Yet as soon as Wise arrived in Rio de Janeiro, he made clear that a binational proslavery alliance would not be as easy to build as John C. Calhoun’s instructions had implied.

By the 1840s, the British Empire had coerced the major players in the transatlantic slave trade—Spain, Portugal, and Brazil—to permit the Royal Navy to police their ships. The United States was the only exception. Hence, the American flag was widely used to cover up the illegal slave trade to Brazil.¹⁰ As Wise put it in one of his first reports to Calhoun, “Our flag alone gives the requisite protection against the right of visit, search and seizure; … in fact, without the aid of our citizens and our flag it [the slave trade to Brazil] could not be carried on with success at all.”¹¹

Americans living in Brazilian coastal cities could make easy profits by obtaining sea letters from US consulates and fitting out vessels for slavers. As slave prices soared due to British policing, traffickers organized several shipments of goods such as arms, gunpowder, iron, rum, tobacco, and cloth to Africa. American ships were fast, American seamen had expertise, and American merchants had access to these goods. More important, American traffickers had few reasons for concern. Despite the existence of harsh anti–slave trade legislation in the United States, the Department of State and the Navy usually acted leniently toward slavers as long as they did not land in American ports.¹²

Unlike some of his compatriots, Wise had many reasons to abhor the African slave trade. As a white Virginian, he identified the influx of Africans to the Americas with the threat of slave rebellion. Since the time of Thomas Jefferson, “Africanization” reminded Virginians of the Haitian Revolution.¹³ Moreover, memories of Nat Turner’s Rebellion were still fresh.¹⁴ Yet more important, born in 1806, Wise came to adulthood at a time when his native state had established itself as an exporter of slaves to the cotton regions of the United States. Like his fellow Virginians, he feared that a new increase in the African slave trade would encourage Mississippi Valley planters to overthrow the 1807 act banning the importation of slaves into the United States, thus disrupting Virginia’s lucrative domestic business.¹⁵

An enemy of abolitionism, Wise also believed that American involvement in the African slave trade could open a door to a British assault on American slaveholders. “In immediate connection with this subject of the slave trade,” Wise advised Calhoun in January 1845, “is that of interference by Great Britain with the domestic slavery of the United States.” A consternated Wise told his superior that the same British abolitionists who were attacking the African slave trade to Brazil were seeking information about slavery in the United States.

They not only inquire about population, about the importation of slaves against our own laws in our own jurisdiction, about the laws for the protection of slaves, about the civil capacities and disabilities of slaves by law, about their relative increase or decrease, about the melioration of laws in respect to them, about their general relative condition, but they pry into the treatment of the slaves by their private owners, into their food and raiment, into the disposition of masters to manumit them, and into the existing extent and influence of private societies or parties favorable to the abolition of slavery among us.

If American merchants and seamen continued to participate in the African slave trade to Brazil, Wise reckoned, the British would persist in their “impudent and dangerous intrusion,” threatening “the very sanctity of our private lives and of our private rights.”¹⁶

Vexed by the ease with which traffickers acted in Brazil, Wise decided to demonstrate force. In late 1844, he received intelligence that an American brig called Porpoise, whose crew was composed of American and Brazilian seamen, had been chartered by Manoel Pinto da Fonseca, a powerful Portuguese slaver and resident of Rio de Janeiro. Fonseca placed one of his agents, a Brazilian named Paulo Rodrigues, in command of the Porpoise and sent it to the coast of Africa, where, according to Wise, it supplied Fonseca’s slave factories “with cachaça, (agua ardente, or the white rum of this country,) with muskets and fazendas, (or dry goods and groceries,) and with provisions, sailing from port to port, the captain and crew seeing the slaves bought at various times and places, and shipped on board of other vessels, and lending her boats and ship’s crew from time to time to assist in shipping slaves.” When the Porpoise was completing its trip back to Brazil in January 1845, Wise commanded the USS Raritan to capture it within the harbor of Rio de Janeiro.¹⁷

Outraged by the assault on Brazilian sovereignty, the Brazilian minister of justice promptly asked Wise to order the release of the Porpoise. What followed demonstrated how much esteem Wise had for the country that Calhoun viewed as an important ally. “I decided in my own mind to go on board of the Raritan,” Wise reported, “and proposed that, if the minister of justice would send an officer to take Paulo [Rodrigues] and the other [Brazilian] passengers into custody for trial under the laws of Brazil, I would interpose for their release.” The vessel and the American citizens, Wise determined, would remain detained by the captain of the Raritan until the Brazilian government agreed to extradite them.¹⁸

The Brazilian minister, appalled by Wise’s insolence, ordered gunboats of the Brazilian Navy to surround the Raritan. Wise complained that this demonstration of force was done “in a very rude and insulting manner” and insisted that he was going to extradite the detained American citizens with or without the permission of Brazilian authorities. Yet the captain of the Raritan did not concur with such a confrontational proposition. The Porpoise and its crew were handed to the Brazilian Navy, but not without more haranguing from Wise. “Allowing Fonseca to walk aboard with impunity,” he ranted, “releasing Paulo [Rodrigues] and his companions, … and, finally, sheltering all the criminals on their return under the protection of [Brazil’s] sovereign jurisdiction” was an insult that “could not be submitted to by the United States, as far as their flag and citizens wer...