Whether the Teutonic races are superior to the Latin races is a mooted
question, subject to prejudiced points of view. However, there is no
doubt that there actually exists a great difference in the
institutions of religion, law, language, customs, fashions, and moral
precepts between, let us say, the Anglo-Saxon and the Portuguese. In
other words, the English nation has evolved an English way of living,
just as the Portuguese have adapted themselves to governing society,
attacking nature in their own way.
Now assume that these two nationalities with their unlike national
habits and traditions are planted in the new world. Assume the one as
living in a warm temperate clime, and the other under equatorial
conditions. Assume that the first nationality is self-sufficient to
establish a colony, and opposed to intermarriage with other races; and
then imagine the second case, where there exist a few colonists in
womanless settlements with consequent marriages between the native and
European common, and a large half-breed population as the result. With
such diversities in national character, in the make-up of the
individuals, in natural and social environment, could we expect the
two peoples to react similarly to a given social institution? No
wonder then, that slavery in the English colonies of North America was
very much unlike the institution as it existed in Brazil.
Brazil was being tilled by slave labor long before the settlement of
Jamestown, and still boasted of hordes of slaves on its plantations as
late as a quarter century after the Emancipation Proclamation in the
United States had been issued. As early as 1585, Pernambuco could
claim 10,000 African slaves and Bahia something like three or four
thousand,[1] whereas the first shipment of slaves to the English
colonies in America was introduced into Jamestown harbor by a Dutch
ship as late as August, 1619.[2]
In Brazil the slave trade received an impetus as a result of royal
restrictions and Jesuits' opposition to the enslavement of Indians,
thereby compelling the more law-abiding and docile settlers to turn
from exploiting the native labor and to seek its labor supply from
Africa.[3] The labor demands of the great sugar plantations, cotton
fields, tobacco lands, and later the mines, kept the slave poachers on
the Guinea and Angola Coast busy, so that by the middle of the
eighteenth century slaves were entering Brazil on a vast scale. From
1759 to 1803, according to Keller, the colonial registers give as
consigned from Angola to Brazil 642,000 Negroes. Thus, by 1800 fully
one half of the total Brazilian population of 3,200,000 was slave, and
by 1818 there were 1,930,000 slaves besides some 526,000 free Negroes
and mulattoes, in all about sixty-three per cent of the total.[4] By
the middle of the nineteenth century there was something like three
millions of slaves out of a population of seven and a half millions.
Lord Palmerston estimated the total number of slaves in the sixties as
being 3,000,000;[5] whereas a writer in the "Revue des deux Mondes"
puts the number between 2,500,000 and 4,000,000.[6] Dawson quotes the
number of slaves in 1856 as being approximately 2,500,000 or forty per
cent of the total population.[7] Apparently there is no actual census
available on the number of slaves for this period. Needless to say,
the slaves easily comprised from forty to fifty per cent of the
population, and if we add all those of mixed blood we have a majority
of the inhabitants of Brazil.
Now let us turn to the Old South. Slavery we know progressed somewhat
in the southern colonies, and to a negligible extent in the New
England colonies. The "Asiento" in 1713, by which Great Britain at the
close of the War of Spanish Succession secured the right to supply the
colonies of Spain with 4,800 slaves annually,[8] augmented the slave
trade throughout the new world. Negroes were in demand in the rice
areas, cotton fields, and tobacco plantations. In 1710 there were only
50,000 slaves in the United States, the number increased to 220,000 in
1750, to 464,000 in 1770,[9] until by the year 1790 they numbered
697,624.[10] This number constituted one-fifth of our total
population.
Slavery, however, was not a venerated institution in the Southland in
the eighteenth century. In fact, it was rather supported through the
force of habit and the fear of the results of emancipation. Then came
Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin. The South went cotton mad.
The United States now became the world's producer of raw cotton.
Henceforth, slavery was held "the indispensable economic instrument of
southern society."[11]
In the first half of the nineteenth century, then, American slavery
was at its height. By 1850 the slaves numbered 3,204,313, about a few
thousand less than Brazil, which at the opening of the century had so
far led it in the number of slaves held.[12] Blake, writing in 1857,
shows that by the last census, however, unlike Brazil, the proportion
of black to white was not great, being in the neighborhood of fourteen
per cent. However, taking the nation in sections, the ratio of black
to white in the South was one to two, whereas in the North it was but
one to sixty-eight.[13]
As to the extent of slavery in the two nations, in the United States
slavery was largely confined to the semi-tropical country south of the
Pennsylvania-Maryland line and the Ohio River. A slight form of
domestic slavery had existed in New England, and to a greater degree
in the Middle Atlantic Colonies, but was virtually unknown in the
mines and cattle ranges of the West. In Brazil slavery existed
practically everywhere the Europeans settled. There was no
geographical section, whose sentiment and economic interests were
antagonistic to slave holding. However, it was true that about the
plantations of Pernambuco and Bahia slavery existed on a far more
extensive scale than in the southern province of Rio Grande De Sul,
where slavery was practised at a minimum.
In both the United States and Brazil there were diversified products
of slave labor. In Brazil sugar was the great slave labor staple; in
America, cotton. Besides cotton, the American slave was the cultivator
of tobacco, rice, sugar, hemp, and molasses. In Brazil the other
products were tobacco, cotton, and cattle, in addition to some cacao
and rubber.
In the United States there were two types of slavery, one the storied
domestic slavery of the towns, and the southern country seat, where
the Negro was usually benevolently treated and loved as though one of
the family. This type of slavery was most common along the Mason-Dixon
line. The other type was determined by the large scale enterprises in
the cotton and rice fields in the "southern" South, where absentee
ownership was often the rule. Here frequently masters knew little
about their slaves, and the driving of the mobs of laborers gave
Harriet Beecher Stowe, no doubt, her concept of a Simon Legree.[14] In
Brazil slaves did every type of work. First of all, they furnished the
labor for the great sugar plantations of Pernambuco and also the
cotton districts of the north. In the provinces of the south of
Brazil, contrary to conditions in the United States, they were
employed on cattle ranches. In Minas Geraes they were utilized in the
mines. In the cities they carried on all the manual and menial work.
Henderson tells us of his observations of the African in urban
occupations during the first decade of the last century in Rio. He
relates that owners would send out slaves to do work for other
employers, and to turn over their wages to their idle masters. He
relates that masters sent slaves in pairs and threes, bearing baskets
on their heads, soliciting work. This type was called "Negroes de
ganho." Others bore great tubs on their heads with which they drew
water from fountains to supply the inhabitants. At dusk the street was
crowded with slaves carrying the refuse of the city to the dumps.
Slave labor removed the imported goods from the docks. Few had the
help of wagons. The English had tried to introduce carts to help the
toiling slaves at the wharves, but the custom house clerks would have
none of them, as they were making a "haul" on the city by hiring out
their slaves, and wagons would lessen the amount of work to be
done.[15]
In the United States slaves were owned by planters and private
individuals exclusively. In Brazil besides the planter class, large
plantations were owned by such religious orders as the Benedictine and
Carmelite friars, who treated their slaves with the greatest regard
for comfort and ease.[16] Furthermore, there were slaves belonging to
the government. As late as the outbreak of the American Civil War,
the annual report of the Brazilian minister of finance shows more than
1,500 government slaves.[17] One thing in favor of Brazil, however,
was that the horrible shortcomings of absentee ownership on large
plantations did not exist to any extent, since most of the proprietors
resided on their own respective estates.[18]
Summing up the general condition of the Negro slave in both lands, we
notice that (1) Brazilian slavery antedated and postulated American
slavery; (2) that there were a larger number of slaves and a greater
proportion to the total population in Brazil than in America; (3) that
Brazilian slavery received its impetus through the cutting off of the
native labor supply and the growth of sugar cultivation; whereas
American slavery was stimulated by the invention of the cotton gin;
(4) that in both countries slaves were engaged in diversified
occupations, except that in Brazil besides agriculture and domestic
pursuits, slaves were employed in almost every variety of unskilled
and semi-skilled labor; (5) that in Brazil slavery was homogeneously
distributed rather than in sectional patches; and (6), finally, that
both the state and religious bodies owned slaves in Brazil.