BRAZIL 227
on the sertanejos (inhabitants of the interior), poor
whites and mixed-race people, who lived on the
fringes of the plantation economy. Another factor
in the decline of the slave population in the north-
east was the great drought of 1877–1879, which
caused many of the region’s wealthier folk to sell
their slaves or abandon the area, taking their slaves
with them. Where native and mixed-race workers
vastly outnumbered a few black slaves, provinces
like Amazonas and Ceará abolished slavery within
their borders in 1884. By contrast, the coffee plant-
ers of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais,
joined by northern planters who traffi cked in slaves,
selling them to the coffee zone, offered the most te-
nacious resistance to the advance of abolition.
The abolitionist movement produced lead-
ers of remarkable intellectual and moral stature.
One was Joaquim Nabuco, the son of a distin-
guished liberal statesman of the empire, whose
eloquent dissection and indictment of slavery, O
abolicionismo, had a profound impact on its read-
ers. Another was a mulatto journalist, José de Pa-
trocinio, a master propagandist noted for his fi ery,
biting style. Another mulatto, André Rebouças, an
engineer and teacher whose intellectual gifts won
him the respect and friendship of the emperor, was
a leading organizer of the movement. For Nabuco
and his comrades-in-arms, the antislavery strug-
gle was the major front in a larger struggle for the
transformation of Brazilian society. Abolition, they
hoped, would pave the way for the attainment of
other goals: land reform, public education, and po-
litical democracy.
Yielding to mounting pressure, parliament
adopted another measure on September 28, 1885,
which liberated all slaves when they reached the
age of sixty but required them to continue to serve
their masters for three years and forbade them to
leave their place of residence for fi ve years. These
conditions, added to the fact that few slaves lived
beyond the age of sixty-fi ve, implied little change
in the status of the vast majority of slaves. The
imperial government also promised to purchase
the freedom of the remaining slaves in fourteen
years—a promise that few took seriously in light
of their experience with the Rio Branco Law. Con-
vinced that the new law was just another tactical
maneuver, the abolitionists spurned all compro-
mise solutions and demanded immediate, un-
conditional emancipation. By the middle 1880s,
the antislavery movement had assumed massive
proportions and a more militant character. Large
numbers of slaves voted for freedom with their feet;
they were aided by abolitionists who organized an
underground railway that ran from São Paulo to
Ceará, where slavery had ended. Efforts to secure
the return of fugitive slaves encountered growing
resistance. Army offi cers, organized in a Club Mili-
tar, protested against the use of the army for the
pursuit of fugitive slaves.
In February 1887, São Paulo liberated all
slaves in the city with funds raised by popular sub-
scription. Many slave owners, seeing the hand-
writing on the wall, liberated their slaves on the
condition that they remain at work for a certain
period. By the end of 1887, even the diehard coffee
planters of São Paulo were ready to adjust to new
conditions by offering to pay wages to their slaves
and improve their working and living conditions;
they also increased efforts to induce European im-
migrants to come to São Paulo. These efforts were
highly successful; the fl ow of immigrants into São
Paulo rose from 6,600 in 1885 to over 32,000 in
1887 and to 90,000 in 1888. As a result, coffee
production reached record levels. With its labor
problem solved, São Paulo was ready to abandon
its resistance to abolition and to even join the abo-
litionist crusade.
On May 13, 1888, Brazil fi nally abolished slav-
ery, but contrary to a traditional interpretation,
this decision was not the climax of a gradual proc-
ess of slavery’s decline and slave owners’ peaceful
acceptance of the inevitable. The total slave pop-
ulation dropped sharply only after 1885, as a re-
sult of abolitionist agitation, mass fl ights of slaves,
armed clashes, and other upheavals that appeared
to threaten anarchy. In effect, abolition had come
not through reform but by revolution.
The aftermath of abolition refuted the dire
predictions of its foes. Freed from the burdens of
slavery and aided by the continuance of very high
coffee prices all over the world (until about 1896),