220 CHAPTER 10 RACE, NATION, AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM, 1821–1888
historians have examined postcolonial elite deci-
sion making and concluded that abolitionism in
Latin America was largely driven by political and
military expediency rather than moral enthu-
siasm. According to this view, republican elites
mostly embraced the idea of abolitionism to recruit
black soldiers, counter royalist recruitment strate-
gies, or curry favor with foreigners like Haiti’s Al-
exandre Petion, who provided food and munitions
in exchange for Bolívar’s 1816 pledge to liberate
all slaves. Although this offered a more critical and
nuanced interpretation than Tannenbaum, it still
focused on elite ideas and actions, thereby effec-
tively silencing the voices of enslaved Africans and
their descendants.
More recently, however, a new generation of
historians, increasingly interested in recovering
this lost voice, have asked new questions and ex-
amined new archival collections. Although they
agree that elites mostly lacked the moral conviction
that slavery was wrong (or failed independently to
act upon it), they stress the active role of slaves and
free people of color in opposing slavery and forcing
reluctant elites to abolish it. Their study of Afro-
Latino culture, religion, and family life reveals that
slaves and free people of color pursued both legal
and extralegal strategies in their relentless search
for freedom. Court records, for example, show that
slaves, grounding their arguments in appeals to
republican laws, routinely petitioned the govern-
ment for their liberty. Still more frequently, how-
ever, slaves employed the strategy of what W. E. B.
Du Bois famously called “the general strike”: they
defi ed legal constraints, refused to work, escaped
to join maroon communities called palenques or
quilombos, engaged in social banditry, and, less
frequently, openly rebelled against the institution
of slavery. Taken together, this history of popular
resistance decisively shaped both the institutions of
government and citizen participation in the newly
developing nations.
In general, a new consensus on the origins
and implications of emancipation has emerged.
First, it is clear that independence did not imme-
diately produce the abolition of slavery. Second,
creole independence leaders vigorously debated
the morality of slavery and ultimately sought com-
promise that effectively prolonged its existence for
decades. This most commonly involved passage of
“Free Womb” laws that freed the children of slave
women, required slave owners to support them
(and control their labor) until adulthood and there-
after paid the slaveholders compensation for their
liberation. Third, slave owners only accepted abo-
lition after slaves and free people of color rebelled,
often violently, and threatened the long-term secu-
rity of private property rights in the new republics.
Elite fears of social revolution from below fueled
reform programs that gradually abolished slavery
but simultaneously established income and liter-
acy requirements that limited free people’s politi-
cal participation. Finally, decades of civil strife and
political mobilization of cross-class, multiracial
coalitions ultimately prepared the way for eman-
cipation, but the experience effectively silenced the
struggle for racial justice, as citizen activists aban-
doned the divisive idea of race in favor of the unify-
ing language of nation. As a result, emancipation
generally compensated slave owners for their
losses, and the newly emerging nations preferred
not to speak about the enduring racial inequalities
that remained for future generations of black and
mixed-race peoples.
Naturally, the specifi c historical experiences
of these nations varied, depending on local tradi-
tions, availability of land, proximity to transatlan-
tic markets, reliance on slave labor, the size of the
population of free people of color, and the infl uence
of foreign nations. A careful study of this complex
history therefore requires an examination of par-
ticular events in Peru, Gran Colombia, Cuba, and
Brazil, where slave populations were largest and
the iniquitous institution endured the longest.Brazil
Brazil took its fi rst major step toward independence
in 1808, when the Portuguese crown and court,
fl eeing before a French invasion of Portugal, ar-
rived in Rio de Janeiro to make it the new capital of
the Portuguese Empire. Formal national indepen-
dence came in 1822 when Dom Pedro, who ruled