May 13, 1888: Golden Law
Slavery in Brazil, as we know, was only abolished on May 13, 1888 through the Golden Law, that is, the Imperial Lawnumber 3353, signed by Princess Isabel at the time she exercised power in Brazil, in the absence of D. Pedro II.
Brazil, among the countries of the American continent, was the last to end slave labor, which had harmful consequences for the formation of our nation. This happened because a State program that planned for the black population an adequate transition from the condition of captives to that of free subjects was not put into practice.
Absence of a project to transition from slavery to free labor
Even with the laws that were enacted before the Lei Áurea, the Empire could not devise a reasonable project to gradually assimilate the ex-slaves into society. Laws such as Eusébio de Queirós Law, from 1850, which put an end to the slave trade, the law of the free womb, of 1871, which prevented the enslavement of children born to slaves from that year onwards, and Sexagenarian Law, from 1885, which gave freedom to slaves over 60 years of age, only granted freedom, but not the means to deal with this new condition.
Before the Empire was consolidated, in 1823 – a year after the Independence –, one of the ministers of D. Peter I, called José Bonifácio de Andrade e Silva, proposed a project to transition from slavery to free black labor in Brazil. This project was presented at one of the meetings of the Constituent Assembly of 1823 and had as objectives, gradually:
End the slave trade in a maximum of five years;
Facilitate conditions for the purchase of manumission by slaves;
End physical punishment;
Grant small swaths of land so that freed blacks (by purchase of manumission or by other means) could produce and prosper, etc.
These gradual measures would prepare the ground for definitive abolition, which, for Bonifácio, would take place long before 1888. However, the aforementioned Constituent Assembly was dissolved by D. Pedro I and Bonifácio were exiled. The project was never approved.
Consequences of lack of planning
A portrait of the consequences of this lack of planning for the transition of blacks from slave labor for free work can be read in the following excerpt from one of the main books dealing with subject matter: Houses and Mucambos, by Gilberto Freyre:
“Freedom was not enough to give better knowledge, at least physically, to the lives of runaway blacks who simply managed to pass for free in the cities. Dissolving into the mucambo and tenement proletariat, their standards of living and eating were often lowered. Their livelihoods became irregular and precarious. Housing ones sometimes degraded. Many former slaves, thus degraded by freedom and living conditions in the urban environment, became a wharf rogue, capoeira, thief, prostitute and even murderer.” (FREYRE, Gilberto. Sobrados and Mucambos – Decay of rural patriarchy and urban development. Global: São Paulo, 2013.)
There was not, neither before nor after 1888 (with the advent of Republic), not even a single state project that would promote the assimilation of freed blacks into society and the Brazilian economy at the time. Many blacks continued to serve their masters in exchange for food and shelter. Others threw themselves into all kinds of activities, living in tenements and mucambos (straw huts), making up a population that would live on the margins of large Brazilian urban agglomerations for a long time.