Slavery & Abolition

A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies

ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20

‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery

and race relations in the eyes of American
abolitionists, 1812–1888

William E. Skidmore II

To cite this article: William E. Skidmore II (2018) ‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery and
race relations in the eyes of American abolitionists, 1812–1888, Slavery & Abolition, 39:1, 147-168,
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2017.1284459

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1284459

Published online: 14 Feb 2017.

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SLAVERY & ABOLITION, 2018
VOL. 39, NO. 1, 147–168
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2017.1284459

‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery and race

relations in the eyes of American abolitionists, 1812–1888
William E. Skidmore II

ABSTRACT
This article examines how American abolitionists educated
themselves about Brazilian slavery and race relations.
Beginning with the Iberian–American Revolutions and ending
with James Redpath’s 1867 influential exposé on Brazil, this
article explores how American abolitionists viewed Brazil and
how their understandings about Brazilian slavery and race
relations changed over the course of the nineteenth century.
These changes were not a progressive march by abolitionists
toward a deeper and better understanding of Brazil but,
instead, reflect how antislavery writers emphasized various
aspects of Brazilian slavery and culture at different periods in
order to further their own ideological and political agendas.
At the same time, these agendas led abolitionists to pioneer
some of the earliest methods for the comparative study of
slavery on a global scale.

In 1867, American abolitionist and journalist James Redpath penned eight scho-
larly essays on ‘Slavery and Slave Life in Brazil’, which appeared in the National
Antislavery Standard and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter. In these
articles, Redpath criticized ‘the opinion of the majority of educated Americans’
for their belief that the abolition of slavery in the United States meant that all
other systems of slavery would be ‘swept from the Western Hemisphere in
less than a dozen years’. He argued that Brazilian slavery was a dangerous
threat to the post-emancipation world, and showed no signs of decline. Red-
path’s essays also undercut two other mainstream American antislavery beliefs
about Brazil. The first characterized Brazilian slavery as ‘a milder type of
bondage’ than American slavery.1 The second portrayed Brazil as a racial para-
dise, where whites and blacks lived harmoniously. Although he disagreed vehe-
mently with these mainstream views, Redpath used the same set of sources that
his antislavery predecessors employed to make their misguided arguments about
Brazil. In his first essay, for instance, Redpath proudly proclaimed to have read
‘almost every important book of travel and of reference on Brazil’, which he
argued provided evidence, to prove beyond a doubt, that Brazilian slavery was
just as inhumane as American slavery.2

CONTACT William E. Skidmore II wes3@rice.edu History Department, Rice University, 6100 Main MS-42,
Houston, TX 77005-1827, USA
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
148 W. E. SKIDMORE II

During the first half of the nineteenth century, American abolitionists

believed that Brazil had a relatively mild system of slavery and progressive
race relations. These ideas started to take shape shortly after the Haitian Revolu-
tion when Atlantic slavery underwent significant changes as the United States,
Brazil, and Cuba emerged as powerful slaveholding societies that produced
the lion’s share of the cotton, coffee, and sugar consumed around the world.3
It was not until the 1830s, however, that American abolitionists started to
study and examine Brazilian slavery. This developing interest occurred for
several different reasons. First, American abolitionists recognized that Brazil
had one of the largest slave populations in the Atlantic World.4 Second, Brazil
also had one of the largest and most prosperous free black populations in the
Americas. Many African-American abolitionists used the example of Brazil to
argue for racial and political equality in the United States. Third, the globaliza-
tion of the antislavery movement also encouraged American abolitionists to
investigate and study Brazilian slavery, race relations, and culture. American
abolitionists investigated foreign systems of slavery by conducting fact-finding
missions, exchanging correspondence with trusted allies and experts, interview-
ing foreign emissaries, and consulting relevant published materials. Anglo-
American abolitionists constructed a broad body of knowledge about slavery,
which they used to guide their transnational activism and shape the strategies
they used in their campaign for the universal and peaceful end of slavery.5
Despite these various intellectual efforts, however, American abolitionists
struggled to secure reliable and accurate information about Brazilian slavery
and race relations. Unlike their British colleagues, American abolitionists
never sent agents to Brazil, primarily because they lacked the funds, network,
and time needed to conduct such a successful mission. The late development
of the Brazilian Antislavery Movement prevented American abolitionists from
expanding their networks of communication and support into this South Amer-
ican country.6 The information that American abolitionists collected about
Brazil came from different sources such as official reports made by the govern-
ment, newspaper accounts, public lectures, and personal narratives from Brazi-
lian emigrants. Unfortunately, these sources proved difficult to verify and often
did not provided the detailed information that American abolitionists most
desired to know about Brazil.
In response, American abolitionists turned to Brazilian travel literature
because it offered a broad range of information on Brazilian society and
culture, and it proved much easier to evaluate because abolitionists could
compare these travel accounts with other travel narratives and Brazilian refer-
ence books. For a relatively low price, travel accounts provided abolitionists
with a wealth of knowledge, especially when compared to the high costs associ-
ated with conducting antislavery fact-finding expeditions in foreign lands. Like
contemporary historians today, American abolitionists used travel narratives to
educate themselves about Brazilian slavery and race relations. One of the most
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 149

popular works read by abolitionists came from Robert Walsh, a British traveler,
historian, minister, and medical doctor. In 1830, Walsh published his two-
volume Brazilian journal, under the title Notices of Brazil. American abolitionists
trusted this work because Walsh was an experienced traveler who had been for-
mally educated and supported the antislavery movement. Walsh’s text also
offered detailed descriptions of Brazilian race relations, which black abolitionists
used to advance their campaigns for racial equality. Walsh’s background and
antislavery leanings gave his work an added layer of authenticity in the eyes
of most American abolitionists as it quickly became one of the most trusted
sources on Brazil for American abolitionists in the antebellum period.
Although modern historians have used travel journals to understand the
worlds of Brazilian slaves, free people of color, and slaveholders, few scholars
have examined how nineteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic audiences responded
to these texts and, more specifically, how they used them to fashion their
views about Brazil.7 Over the last several years, moreover, historians of Brazilian
abolition and emancipation have examined how discussions of American slavery
and race relations shaped the Brazilian process of abolition, but few scholars
have discussed how conversations about Brazil influenced the development of
slavery and antislavery in the United States.8 Like recent historians who have
compared the American Slave South to what Peter Kolchin calls ‘other
Souths’, American abolitionists analyzed American slavery in relation to other
systems of labor found throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.9 In
other words, American abolitionists became some of the earliest historians of
comparative slavery.
Despite all that has been written about American abolitionism and the trans-
atlantic antislavery movement, historians still know very little about how aboli-
tionists investigated and acquired information concerning the systems of slavery
in the foreign and distant lands they so often wrote about.10 Using the case study
of Brazil, this essay sheds light on how American abolitionists collected and dis-
seminated information about Brazilian slavery and race relations.11 Beginning
with American antislavery writers and reporters during the Iberian–American
Revolutions and ending with James Redpath’s influential exposé on Brazil,
this article explains how and why abolitionists shifted their views about Brazilian
slavery and race relations over the course of the nineteenth century. These chan-
ging attitudes and perspectives do not represent a progressive linear march by
American abolitionists toward a better and deeper understanding of Brazil
but, instead, reflect how antislavery writers emphasized different aspects of
Brazil at different points in time in an attempt further their ideological and pol-
itical agendas.
In the early nineteenth century, American abolitionists spent little time trying
to understand how one system of slavery differed from the next in Latin
America.12 During the Spanish and Portuguese-American Revolutions, for
example, antislavery writers were convinced that all of Latin America would
150 W. E. SKIDMORE II

soon adopt republicanism and abolish slavery.13 Although abolitionists reveled

in the fact that these revolutions followed in the footsteps of the United States,
they also grew anxious over the idea that they would soon become the only
republic with slavery in the Americas.14 Many abolitionists felt that an indepen-
dent Latin America meant the end of European despotism and slavery in this
region of the world. This assumption had a significant influence on how aboli-
tionists wrote and interpreted these revolutionary events. Abolitionists
approached this area in holistic terms, and often turned their conversations
about the revolutions inwards as they lamented about how the United States
remained a republic with slavery.
Even when discussing Brazil, American abolitionists maintained the idea that
this empire would, sooner rather than later, embrace republicanism and eradi-
cate slavery.15 These sentiments appeared consistently in American antislavery
newspapers such as Benjamin Lundy’s The Genius of Universal Emancipation.
‘The United States will be the last foothold of the “accursed system”, on the
American Continent’, one article began. ‘The remnant of Portuguese power is
fast waning in Brazil’, the editorial continued, ‘and that fine country will soon
be on a footing with the rest of the Southern American Republics, “FREE
AND INDEPENDENT” – not merely by name, as our boastful, hypocritical,
and tyrannical government is – but, CONSISTENTLY so’.16 Another editorial
argued that outside of Brazil, Latin America was the ‘exclusive abode of free
men’. But then the article suggested that even in Brazil, ‘the nurslings of
freedom and equality are cherished there; and the tender brood is watched by
the genius of Bolivar’. Like other American antislavery writings of this period,
the essay turned the discussions toward slavery in the United States:
Of the latter (my own native land!) what shall I say? The elder sister of the American
republics, who has pompously and ostentatiously styled her domain ‘the cradle of
liberty’, and ‘an asylum for the oppressed of all nations’, appears likely to be ‘last on
the list’ of those who practically support the genuine principle of rational liberty.17

The future of Latin America seemed all but certain in the eyes of abolitionists
and, in an interesting role reversal, the American pioneers of liberty and repub-
licanism now held themselves accountable to the antislavery standards set by
their Latin American brethren.18
In these discussions, American abolitionists did not spend as much time
checking their information as they would in later periods. Instead, they built
their ideas from newspaper accounts, word of mouth, and official reports
coming out of Central and South America. For this reason and others, American
antislavery newspapers passed over such events as the public trial and conviction
of Venezuelan Admiral José Prudencio Padilla-López, who planned a rebellion
against elite white Venezuelans, or the growing resistance in the republic of
Colombia toward any plan for emancipation.19 Although there were plenty of
warning signs that pointed toward the political and social instability of the
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 151

region, it was not until after the dissolution of the republic of Colombia and the
sudden and unexpected deaths of revolutionary and antislavery leaders Simón
Bolívar and Manuel de Mier y Terán in the early 1830s that American abolition-
ists started to question their assumptions about this region of the world.20
In the early 1830s, American abolitionists started to search for answers as to
why abolitionism worked in certain parts of Latin America, but not others. This
period also witnessed a broader societal emphasis on literacy and new printing
technology, which had a dramatic influence on how abolitionists searched, gath-
ered, and interpreted information about slavery in foreign lands. Between this
decade and the 1850s, the number of published newspapers grew fourfold,
American printers became more active, and literacy steadily rose across class
and gender lines. Americans viewed the printed word as vehicles for self-
expression and the diffusion of knowledge. These changes, coupled with a
growing desire to better understand slavery in Latin America, explain why
American abolitionists turned to travel literature and other printed texts for
information on the different systems of Latin American slavery.21 From these
works, abolitionists found that the size of the slave population and its relation-
ship to the economy played an important role in the success of abolitionism in
Latin America. More specifically, countries with smaller slave populations such
as Mexico and Chile had an easier time ending slavery compared to Venezuela,
Colombia, and Brazil, whose national economies were reliant on a large slave
labor force.
The 1830s also marked an important period of transition in the history of
Brazilian slavery. Brazil slavery expanded significantly during this period as
coffee production boomed in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. As
Brazilian coffee dominated the global market, Brazilian coffee planters called
for more slaves, which led to the continuation of Brazil’s involvement in the
transatlantic slave trade.22 This decade also witnessed the consolidation of
proslavery alliances in the Brazilian Parliament, which ushered in several initiat-
ives that protected slavery for the next 50 years.23 Although these changes and
the fact that Brazil remained a constitutional monarchy would appear to be
the reason behind American abolitionists’ growing interest in Brazil, this intel-
lectual curiosity developed for another reason.
Brazilian race relations fascinated both white and black American abolition-
ists, particularly when they compared it to the racism and oppression that free
blacks faced in the United States. During the early 1830s, American abolitionists
became convinced that Brazil not only had one of the mildest systems of slavery
in the Americas, but also this country also enjoyed interracial equality. In the
1850 Annual Report of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society
(AFASS), the leadership committee made reference to a ‘commercial paper’
that cited a lengthy article published in the North American Review, entitled
‘The Empire of Brazil’.24 Directly quoting from the article, the committee
found that Brazil had ‘seven millions comprising the entire population’, and
152 W. E. SKIDMORE II

more than ‘three millions are estimated to be negro slaves’. Although the AFASS
found such numbers horrifying, the issue of Brazilian slavery became oversha-
dowed by the topic of Brazilian race relations. The Annual Report declared,
‘The blacks have access to all, and are in possession of many offices of honor
and trust … the white race and the black meet on terms of perfect equality in
social intercourse’.25 The idea that Brazil had peaceful race relations can be
traced back to the information gathered from travel narratives and, in this
case specifically, the travel accounts examined by the North American Review.26
Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil (2 volumes, 1830), became a particular favor-
ite among abolitionist circles across the Anglo-Atlantic world. Most abolitionists
found Walsh’s work to be the most accurate account of Brazilian slavery and
culture. This attitude had a lot to do with Walsh’s impressive résumé as a
noted historian, chaplain, and physician, but it also did not hurt that he
expressed strong antislavery sentiments in his writings. In 1842, for example,
the BFASS praised Walsh in their widely read tract, An Epitome of Anti-
Slavery Information. Focused on providing the most up-to-date facts on the
slavery found throughout the Atlantic, their information about Brazil came
directly from Walsh’s travel journals. They commended his work, which
offered evidence that proved Brazil had one of the largest slave populations in
the world ranging between ‘2,500,000 and 3,000,000’.27 Travel accounts such
as Walsh’s Notices of Brazil provided important sources of knowledge for aboli-
tionists, especially considering that many of these activists would never visit the
distant lands that they often wrote about.
Although travel writings offered extensive amounts of information, some-
times taking up multiple volumes, they were also read in myriad different
ways, which created contentious debate. To guard against criticism from slave-
holders and proslavery intellectuals, antislavery writers often went to great
lengths to establish the credibility and trustworthiness of the travelers they
endorsed. Consider the remarks of Lydia Maria Child, one of the most influen-
tial and prolific American white female antislavery writers of the nineteenth
century:
I am aware that much prejudice exists with regard to the remarks of foreign travellers;
and it is undoubtedly true that those who come from monarchical countries are often
rendered unfit, by their education and habits, to judge fairly of our institutions.

However, she continued, ‘If they really speak truths, do not let us … be angry
with every one that refuses to call us “the celestial nation”’.28 Abolitionists
embraced this view and went to significant lengths to establish the credibility
of the travelers they trusted.
Often times, credibility came down to two critical factors: the ‘respectability’
of the writer and the source(s) of their knowledge. The Dublin Literary Gazette,
for example, proclaimed that Walsh’s Notices provided one of the most insight-
ful texts on Brazil. They believed that such topics could only be observed and
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 153

discussed ‘by men of character above any suspicion of unworthy motives’, which
they found Walsh to be.29 Antislavery writers also did not avoid pointing out
sources that they found unbelievable or embellished. The Philadelphia antislav-
ery newspaper, the American Quarterly Review, which published a lengthy
review of Walsh’s narrative, had no problem criticizing other accounts it
found to be substandard. The reviewer called Andrew Grant’s History of
Brazil (1809) ‘meagre and unsatisfactory’, while stating that Brockwell’s
History of Portugal and Brazil (1726) ‘scarcely deserves mention’.30 However,
it was French historian Alphonse de Beauchamp and his work entitled Histoire
du Brésil (1815) that received the harshest criticism. The reviewer accused Beau-
champ of ‘plagiarism’ and called his work ‘one of the most barefaced impostures
ever attempted’. The commentator found the work ‘laughable’ and brought up
the fact that Beauchamp ‘did not even understand the Portuguese language’.
After berating Beauchamp, the writer encouraged his readership to only buy
works by travelers of ‘laudable zeal, and untiring industry’.31 And, of course,
Walsh’s pedigree as a physician, historian, and chaplain, mentioned on several
occasions, lived up to such standards. The review concluded that Notices of
Brazil was ‘the most satisfactory, as it is undoubtedly the most important
book of travels which has appeared in for a long time’.32
William Lloyd Garrison’s influential newspaper the Liberator also applauded
Walsh’s travel journals. In the summer of 1831, immediately after Walsh pub-
lished his volumes, Garrison praised him as a respected traveler who was ‘well
known to the reading public’ for his journeys across Europe. Garrison assured
his readership that Walsh’s book gave ‘full and accurate information’ about
Brazil. Garrison mentioned that Walsh gave a strong ‘declamation against
slavery’ supported by ‘multitude of facts’, but he did not want ‘to make any
analysis of Mr. Walsh’s remarks on Slavery’. The article did, however,
mention that ‘one statement … is so interesting we cannot refrain from repeat-
ing it’. Like other American antislavery newspapers and periodicals reviewing
Walsh’s work during this period, the Liberator turned its attention toward
race relations in Brazil. The review read, ‘[Walsh] informs us that the conduct
of the free people of color in Brazil has been so exemplary, as to have led to
serious proposals for the enfranchisement of slaves’. Garrison hoped that free
blacks in the United States would ‘reflect upon this circumstance, and aim by
their own good conduct to produce a similar state of feeling among the slave-
holding States’.33 Garrison’s treatment of Walsh’s narrative provides a
window into how antebellum abolitionists selectively focused on certain
aspects of travel narratives to further their political and ideological agendas.
In this case, Garrison wanted to draw attention toward Brazilian race relations,
which he believed would have a positive influence on American race relations.
Throughout the nineteenth century, African Americans faced racial hostility
and violence as white communities rejected the claims for social and political
equality. In the 1830s, African-American abolitionists started to employ Brazil
154 W. E. SKIDMORE II

in their class and argument for racial equality and full citizenship.34 In the North
Star, for example, Frederick Douglass talked about Brazilian slavery and race
relations, but his argument concentrated less on slavery and more on the
status of free blacks in Brazil. ‘In Brazil’, he wrote, ‘there are more than two
millions of slaves. Yet some of the highest offices of state are filled by black
men. Some of the most distinguished officers in the Brazilian army are blacks
and mulattoes’.35 Douglass acknowledged the existence of Brazilian slavery
but quickly moved beyond this so that he could talk about how free blacks in
Brazil proved that people of color could be responsible and productive citizens.
The same ideas were also found in black abolitionist newspapers such as The
Colored American, which circulated widely among free black communities living
on the northern seaboard. In a review of Walsh’s travel account, authored by
white Quaker abolitionist Augustus Wattles, the newspaper used Brazil as evi-
dence to support the campaign for racial equality in the United States.
Wattles lauded Walsh for the detailed information he gave on the free black
communities in Brazil and how his work proved reliable and credible. He
began with a broad statement about how the Brazilian population was made
up of about ‘six hundred thousand enfranchised persons, either Africans, or
of African descent, who were either slaves themselves, or the descendants of
slaves’. Wattles did not concentrate on the fact that Brazilian slavery continued
to thrive and, instead, turned his attention to the status of free blacks in Brazil.
He discussed how Walsh showed that all free blacks in Brazil were ‘well con-
ducted and industrious persons, who compose, indiscriminately, different orders
of the community’.36 Like Garrison, Wattles used Walsh’s work to support his
argument that blacks could become productive citizens of the United States.
In fact, Wattles went to great lengths to establish Walsh as a reliable and credible
source of information. He compared Walsh’s Notices of Brazil to other Brazilian
traveler narratives. ‘Mr. Kester [sic]’, Wattles noted, ‘an Englishman living in
Brazil, confirms Mr. Walsh’s statements’.37 Wattles meant Henry Koster’s
Travels in Brazil (1816), which made similar comments about the Brazilian
free black population.38 White and black abolitionists viewed Walsh’s text as
one of the most reliable sources of information, which provided irrefutable evi-
dence that the free blacks prospered as equal citizens in Brazil.
African-American abolitionists also used Brazil during their lecture tours in
Great Britain and continental Europe. While speaking in London, African-
American abolitionist Alexander Crummell compared the United States with
Brazil. He explained how ‘it might be supposed that in the United States a
free man would be a free man. But unfortunately it was not so if he happened
to have a black face’. Crummell then discussed how ‘in Brazil, in the Levant,
in the French West Indies &c., when a negro became relieved from the yoke
of slavery, he rose immediately to the condition of equality, and to the attain-
ment of an unrestrained manhood’.39 Black abolitionist lecturer William
G. Allen made a similar argument during his antislavery tour in Leeds. After
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 155

outlining the problem of American racism, Allen concluded, ‘This feeling was
generated entirely by American slavery, and did not exist even in Brazil,
where some of the most distinguished officers of the Government were of
African blood’.40 Black abolitionists developed their ideas about Brazil from
travel literature such as Walsh’s Notices of Brazil. They found evidence in
these texts that led them to believe that Brazil was a racial paradise, which
they used to advance their arguments for racial equality in the United States.
The way that white and black abolitionists used Walsh’s text provides one
window into how many American abolitionists constructed an image of Brazil
that helped them advance their personal antislavery and reform agendas. Although
Walsh’s popularity among American abolitionists occurred for many different
reasons, his detailed description of the free black communities in Brazil was one
of the biggest reasons. Throughout his work, Walsh described many of the liberties
and rights enjoyed by free people of color. While touring the interior of Brazil, he
mentioned how a ‘very considerable number’ of free blacks achieved advanced
social and civic standings in society. He characterized these individuals as ‘well-
conducted and industrious’, and highlighted how they made up ‘different orders
of the community’, including ‘merchants, farmers, doctors, lawyers, priests, and
officers of different ranks’.41 Walsh’s account supported the mainstream American
antislavery view of Brazilian race relations. Black and white abolitionists celebrated
reports about how Afro-Brazilians served in public office, wrote for newspapers,
voted in local and national elections, joined the military, and became active partici-
pants in religious and communal associations. This vision of Brazil helped Amer-
ican abolitionists advance their campaigns for racial equality, but the social reality
of Brazilian citizenship and race relations proved to be much more complicated
than these abolitionists suggested.
Accounting for almost one-third of the total population in Brazil, free blacks
enjoyed many privileges that free blacks in the United States did not have. These
privileges, however, also helped protect and consolidate Brazilian slavery.42 As
Celso Castilho argues, ‘The liberal Brazilian citizenship pact entailed defending
the ideal of legal equality among the free population to diffuse any racial tensions
that could in turn call slavery into question’.43 As Castilho and other historians
show, however, the social reality of this liberal interracial citizenship proved to
be much more complicated than what American abolitionists presented in their
writings. Free blacks born in Brazil, for example, did enjoy some electoral rights
and political agency, but they could not vote for all elected offices. Freed Africans
living in Brazil, however, had it worse because they were not considered citizens
and were systematically excluded from any formal participation in the national
community.44 This social reality escaped the attention of American abolitionists
who wanted to construct an image of Brazil that would help them advance their
antislavery agendas.45
Outside of newspapers and periodicals, Brazilian travel narratives also influ-
enced other types of American antislavery writing. Lydia Maria Child, for
156 W. E. SKIDMORE II

instance, relied upon Brazilian travel accounts in her well-known publication,

An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1831). She
used Walsh’s Notices and Henry Koster’s Travels in Brazil to talk about the
lives of Afro-Brazilians. Like other abolitionist writers, Child established
Walsh’s background as a medical doctor and chaplain and went to great
lengths to prove his credibility as a reliable and authentic source of knowledge.
For instance, Child crosschecked Walsh’s description of slave ships coming into
Rio de Janeiro with ‘the evidence given, at various times, before the British
House of Commons’. She found that both descriptions matched, and therefore
concluded that Walsh’s account ‘is by no means exaggerated’.46
Child also used Brazilian travel narratives in her fictional story of the Brazi-
lian slave named Malem Boo, published in her edited collection, The Oasis.47
Child helped pioneer the genre of antislavery fiction, which she first started in
her children’s magazine, The Juvenile Miscellany. The story of Malem Boo,
however, was one of her earliest attempts to write adult antislavery fiction,
and she relied heavily on travel accounts to provide a realistic narrative. This
tragic story begins in Africa when European slave traders kidnap Malem
Boo’s stepson. Boo makes a daring attempt to rescue the boy during which
the slave traders capture him as well. Both are then transported to the slave
market in Rio de Janeiro. Initially, Malem Boo and his stepson are separated
in the market, but after several days of protest and resistance, the traders
reunite the two. Eventually, a ‘benevolent’ slaveholder buys Malem Boo and
his stepson, and promises to manumit both of them after they ‘pay the price
of their own bones and sinews’.48
In an effort to construct a narrative that accurately depicted the horrors of the
slave trade, Child drew heavily on Walsh’s Notices. She described the Rio slave
market with almost the exact same language as found in Walsh’s account. She
wrote that the slaves were ‘yoked to drays; some chained together by the neck
and legs; some carrying heavy weights on their heads, singing in a most inarti-
culate and dismal tone’.49 Walsh recorded a very similar scene: ‘Some of these
beings were yoked to drays, on which they dragged heavy burdens. Some were
chained by the necks and legs, and moved with loads thus encumbered …
their heads, chattering the most inarticulate and dismal cadence’.50 Although
Child’s fictional narrative was dramatized to pull on the heartstrings of her read-
ership, she also devoted significant time to studying Brazilian slavery and the
slave trade so that she could write the most accurate narrative.
Travel narratives helped change the way American abolitionists viewed Bra-
zilian slavery and culture. Abolitionists gathered information from these texts,
but also selectively focused on specific aspects that would help forward their pol-
itical and antislavery agendas. Travel accounts provided countless examples of
the horrors associated with Brazilian slavery and the slave trade, which James
Redpath would later draw upon in his work. Antebellum abolitionists,
however, were less interested in writing about these anecdotes and, instead
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 157

emphasized the details that made Brazil appear to be a racial paradise in hopes of
using the example of this country to advance their crusade for interracial
equality.
In the 1850s, American and British abolitionists did express concerns about
American slaveholders annexing Brazil.51 In a letter to Elizabeth Pease
Nichols, for instance, American abolitionist Wendell Phillips lamented that
American slaveholders ‘shall have Cuba in a year or two, Mexico in five’. His
biggest fear, however, was that American slaveholders would incorporate
Brazil into their slave empire. ‘The future seems to unfold’, Philips complained,
‘a vast slave Empire united with Brazil & darkening the whole West – I hope I
may be a false prophet, but the sky was never so dark’.52 Although this unifica-
tion would never come to fruition, Brazil consistently found its way into conver-
sations about American slavery and society.
The American Civil War and the advent of white southern migration to Brazil
served as an important turning point in how American abolitionists viewed this
empire. By mid-1865, the value of Confederate currency had plummeted, while
southern fears of imprisonment and northern reprisal had escalated. Souther-
ners looked abroad in their search for a new home, and many felt that Brazil
offered a level of cultural similarity to their antebellum lifestyles, especially in
regard to agricultural production and slavery. Economic opportunities produced
by a Brazilian cotton boom during the Civil War encouraged this migration.
This cotton-growing explosion in Brazil had been driven by President Lincoln’s
blockade of Southern ports during the war, which led English manufactures such
as the Manchester Cotton Supply Association to search for new sources of raw
cotton.53 The Manchester Association sent seeds and cotton gins to Brazil,
Egypt, and India in hopes of encouraging production. By the war’s end, Brazilian
planters had nearly doubled their output of raw cotton and showed further room
for expansion.54 For these reasons and others, thousands of white southern
families sold their property and moved to Brazil in an attempt to recreate
their antebellum slaveholding lifestyles.55
Historians have debated how many southerners left the defeated South for
Brazil in what later became known as the Confederado Migration.56 Nevertheless,
by September 1865, American abolitionists were under the impression that thou-
sands of southerners were prepared to migrate. Reports appeared throughout
popular newspapers that Southern colonization groups had sent agents to
examine possible migration sites. The New York Herald, for example, stated
that Southern agents left for Brazil to ‘make an examination of Dom Pedro’s
dominions’, and they remarked that their ‘correspondent estimated that
upwards of fifty thousand of our Southern country men are now ready to emi-
grate’.57 The New Orleans Daily Picayune reported that General William
Wallace Wood and his associates had explored parts of Brazil and found, ‘The
peculiarities of its climate gives the planter the great advantages in the cultivation
of cotton, sugar, tobacco and other staples of the Southern States’.58
158 W. E. SKIDMORE II

Many abolitionists interpreted this migration as proof of Brazilian slavery’s

strong vitality, and this created anxiety that one day these expatriates would
return to the United States and re-establish slavery. It was the maverick refor-
mer, James Redpath, who recognized this concern and set out to change aboli-
tionists’ attitudes toward Brazil in the post-bellum era. Redpath was a respected
antislavery writer, and he either bore witness to or acted in some of the most
influential events in the mid-nineteenth-century United States.59 He worked
as a news correspondent and later fought in the ‘Bloody Kansas’ conflict,
aided those who were involved with John Brown’s raid, lobbied for official rec-
ognition of Haiti by the U.S. government, served as a Union news correspon-
dent, and took up many other causes during his lifetime.60 As a close friend
wrote shortly after Redpath’s death: ‘Every ethical breath or cause seemed to
draw him … what a lot of service, according to his light, he rendered’.61
Although Redpath’s diverse reform interests left him penniless, his name
carried weight in abolitionist and reform circles across the Atlantic, and when
he wrote his scholarly articles on Brazilian slavery and race relations, abolition-
ists listened.
Like his antislavery predecessors, Redpath fashioned his vision of Brazil from
travel writing. In fact, he used the same travel narratives as the antislavery
writers before him but came to very different conclusions. Redpath set out to
undercut the notion that ‘slavery in Brazil is a milder type of bondage than
the system which existed in our Southern States’. Although he admitted no
one denied or expressed doubt about ‘this universally accredited opinion’, he
maintained ‘a little reflection will cause any one … to pause and investigate
before giving new currency to this belief’.62 Like his predecessors, Redpath
emphasized specific aspects of the travel narratives to help forward his antislav-
ery agenda, which centered on preventing southerners from recreating the ante-
bellum slaveholding lifestyles in other parts of the world.
Redpath believed that to understand slavery one had first to come to terms
with its relationship to the population. ‘There is no authentic census of Brazil
in existence’, Redpath lamented. He, therefore, turned to travel writings and
British parliamentary papers to find out how many slaves lived in Brazil.
After examining an ‘English Parliamentary Report’, William Dougal Christie’s
Notes on Brazil (1865), and a ‘laborious and well-informed writer in the
Revue des Deux Mondes’, Redpath concluded, ‘At least every other person in
Brazil is a slave’.63 The next issue Redpath raised was the idea that Brazil did
not have racial antipathies. He drew on an article published in the Boston
Daily Advertiser to make his point that most educated individuals believed
that racial prejudice did not exist in Brazil. He quoted the newspaper,
‘Though in Brazil a slave is indeed a slave, yet a negro is not, in the American
sense a negro’. Redpath mentioned that this language in the Boston Daily Adver-
tiser came from ‘a well-informed English author’.64 Redpath also took issue with
the idea that Brazil was a land of ‘numerous Canadas’. Similar to Canada’s
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 159

providing a haven for American fugitive slaves, many believed that the Brazilian
hinterland offered runaway slaves the same protection.65
Redpath wanted to dispel these three myths and others, which he felt, misre-
presented Brazilian slavery. ‘This doubt can only be resolved’, he declared,
through a ‘careful examination of all the evidence to be found in the books of
travellers in Brazil; for here and there, in the newspapers of the day, an
occasional paragraph give one the hint that all is not gold that glitters in the
Empire’.66 Redpath spent the next several months, while also working as a free-
lance reporter for the New York Tribune in the South, investigating the travel
narratives, which previous abolitionists had used to present Brazil as a racial
paradise with mild slavery. Redpath wanted to uncover evidence in these
accounts that would prove beyond a doubt that Brazil should be considered a
grave threat to the post-emancipation world and, like his predecessors, filtered
the information he drew from these texts to achieve this goal.
Redpath used several different Brazilian travel narratives, but two points need
to be mentioned about his research. First, he did not engage with Robert Walsh’s
Notices on Brazil, which was the work that most American and British abolition-
ists used to fashion their ideas about Brazil. This omission by Redpath was most
likely not accidental but, instead, a conscious decision to avoid using works that
argued a strong proslavery or antislavery creed. In other words, Redpath, unlike
previous antislavery writers, did not find Walsh’s text more credible or objective
because he espoused antislavery leanings. Second and closely related to the first,
Redpath devoted most of his attention to Henry Koster’s Travels in Brazil.
Koster was a ‘thorough-bred planter’ who wrote about slavery with ‘candour’.
Koster spent most his adult life in Brazil, where he eventually bought slaves
and became a successful planter. Redpath relied on this work because Koster
wrote ‘without any contrition, that he bought, worked, and punished slaves’.67
He also had credibility among Anglo-American reading audiences because he
was born in Portugal and spoke fluent Portuguese.68 In other words, Koster’s
text offered a perspective of slavery in Brazil that Redpath found to be the
most accurate.
For example, Redpath named one section of his review of Koster’s work
‘Legree in Brazil’, an apparent reference to one of the most recognizable
works of antislavery fiction of the time: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852).69 Redpath highlighted an anecdote from Koster’s text that dealt
with an overseer trying to control his slaves. Upon asking a slave about his invol-
vement in an incident, the slave remained silent. The slave driver then ‘shot
down the negro’ without remorse. Redpath used this example to demonstrate
that Brazilian slaveholders were just as sadistic and cruel as the fictional charac-
ter Simon Legree.70
Redpath also used Koster’s work to broach the complex issue of race relations
in Brazil. Whereas earlier antislavery writers viewed Brazil as a land of racial
harmony, Redpath found anecdotes that suggested otherwise. Koster, on
160 W. E. SKIDMORE II

several occasions, mentioned the fluidity of people of color moving from one
social class to the next. Some blacks were doctors, lawyers, and tax collectors,
while others worked as indentured laborers and slaves, a point previously
made by abolitionist societies such as the AFASS and antislavery reporters
such as Augustus Wattles. Redpath, however, used Koster’s observations to
show that race relations were not as peaceful as initially indicated. In particular,
Redpath focused on an anecdote that involved a free black man challenging the
white ‘lords of the plantation’.
The story began when a free black man encountered several white slave-
holders on his way home from the market. After passing the individual, one
of the white men returned and ‘struck [the mulatto] with his cane, and cried
out, “Why don’t you take off your hat when a white man appears”’? In response
to the violent assault, the ‘mulatto drew his knife and sheathed it in the groin of
his assailant’. The young man then ran away and left the slaveholder to his fate.
On his deathbed, the slaveholder requested that the ‘murder should not be
pursued’ and admitted that he had ‘provoked his fate’. Redpath concluded,
‘They manage these things different down South’, but he also highlighted that
Brazilian slaveholders ‘exercised feudal powers’ over people of color and those
incidents ‘might have happened in any Southern State’. Redpath stressed the
complex nature of Brazilian race relations, which was both unique and similar
to what was found in the United States. On the one hand, elite whites in both
countries treated people of color with vindictiveness and prejudice. On the
other hand, free Afro-Brazilians enjoyed greater social freedoms than African
Americans. This anecdote, nonetheless, showed that Brazil was not the racial
paradise previously described by abolitionists.71
Brazilian travel narratives could be read in many different ways as demon-
strated by the different conclusion drawn between antebellum abolitionists
like Garrison or Wattles and post-Civil War activists like Redpath. Using the
same source base, Redpath found examples that expressly demonstrated the
inhumanity of Brazilian slavery, whether it was the ‘the slave cutting his
throat at a dinner table’, or the ‘urban slaves’ who were forced to work
‘twenty hours out of the twenty-four’.72 Redpath found these stories and
others in the journals of Spix and Martius, Maria Graham, Daniel Kidder,
George Gardner, Dr Alp Rendu, Thomas Ewbank, and C.S. Stewart, the same
narratives used by previous antislavery writers. Like abolitionists before him,
Redpath filtered the information from these narratives for his own ends.
Before the Civil War, abolitionists were concerned with not only ending Amer-
ican slavery but also with the status of African Americans outside of slavery.
Writers such as Garrison, Douglass, and Wattles believed that people of color
could be productive citizens, and used anecdotal evidence from Brazilian
travel narratives to support this argument. Redpath, however, wrote after the
American Civil War and had different concerns which, in turn, changed how
he read travel narratives and what parts he emphasized.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 161

In 1888, Brazil abolished slavery, becoming the last country to do so in the

Americas. For American abolitionists, Brazil was a land of intrigue, wonder,
and horror. Their ideas of Brazil took on many different forms over the
course of the nineteenth century. In the 1820s, Brazil was viewed as just
another part of independent Latin America. As abolitionists watched the revo-
lutionary events in Latin America and its aftermath unfold, their vision started
to change. With the advent of new printing technologies and the explosion of
information in the 1830s, antebellum abolitionists developed a new vision of
Brazil, one that downplayed the fact that Brazil had slavery and characterized
it as a land of racial harmony. This discourse of exceptionalism, moreover, did
not only define how mid-century American abolitionists wrote about Brazilian
slavery but it also framed how academics and historians conceptualized Brazi-
lian and American slavery for the next 150 years. Scholars such as Gilberto
Freyre, Frank Tannenbaum, and Carl Degler maintained the idea that the
horrors of Brazilian and other Latin American slaveries paled in comparison
to the evils found in American slavery.73 In fact, modern comparative
slavery scholarship still draws on the methods first pioneered by abolitionists.
Like the writings of Benjamin Lundy or James Redpath, modern historiogra-
phy often uses comparisons to either indict or exculpate a particular system
of slavery.
Following the Civil War, white southerners started migrating to various parts
of Latin America, including Brazil. The Confederado Migration fostered antislav-
ery fears that these expatriates would one day return to the United States and
bring slavery with them. In response, James Redpath played on these concerns
and used the same travel accounts as previous antislavery writers to fashion a
new understanding of Brazilian slavery, which presented this Empire as the
greatest threat to the post-emancipation world. For almost 50 years, American
abolitionists studied, analyzed, and filtered the information they read about Bra-
zilian slavery and race relations to fit their own needs.

Notes
1. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1, 1867, vol. 15,
no. 6: 121–4; ‘Slavery and Slave-Life in Brazil’, National Anti-Slavery Standard, March
30, 1867, 23.
2. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 123.
3. For these changes, see Dale Tomich and Michael Zeuske, ‘The Second Slavery: Mass
Slavery, World Economy and Comparative Microhistories’, Review (Fernand
Braudel Center) 30, no. 2 (2008): 91–100; Dale Tomich, Through the Prism of
Slavery: Labor, Capital, and World Economy (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield,
2004); Rafael Marquese, Tâmis Parron, and Márcia Berbel, Slavery and Politics:
Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016),
262–4.
4. During this period, American and British abolitionists concluded that Brazil had the
largest slave population in the Americas. In 1842, the British and Foreign Anti-
162 W. E. SKIDMORE II

Slavery Society (BFASS) published a report that stated that Brazil had around
‘2,500,000–3,000,000’ slaves while the United States only had ‘2,483,536’. In their cal-
culations, the BFASS used the 1841 Census for the United States and a variety of
sources for the Brazilian slave population, including Robert Walsh’s Notices of
Brazil. See The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, An Epitome of Anti-Slavery
Information or a Condensed View of Slavery and the Slave Trade (London: T Ward
and Company, 1841), 5 (general population statistics), 6 (detailed report of the
United States), 8 (detailed report for Brazil.
5. This article is part of my dissertation project, currently entitled ‘The Problem of Infor-
mation in the Age of Global Slavery, 1833–1890’, which examines how American,
British, and French abolitionists studied, viewed, and wrote about systems of slavery
outside of their domestic interests, especially in non-western territories. My disser-
tation also traces how this body of knowledge directly shaped the development of
the transnational antislavery movement during the second half of the nineteenth
century.
6. In the historiography of Brazilian slavery and abolition, the traditional narrative of
Brazilian abolitionism begins with the ‘immediatist’ stage of the Brazilian Antislavery
Movement, which started roughly in the 1870s. Celso Castilho’s recent work on slave
emancipation challenges this periodization and offers a longer periodization that
begins in the late 1860s. Even with this longer periodization, American abolitionists
would continue to struggle to identify reliable and trustworthy correspondents in
Brazil. In fact, Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho argue that the first
contact between Brazilian abolitionists and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society came when their secretary, Charles Allen, wrote to Joaquim Nabuco on 8
January 1880. This letter was then followed by a series of exchanges between both
men about the formation of the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society. See Celso Thomas Cas-
tilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 11; Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de
Carvalho, eds., Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Brazilian
Slavery, Correspondence 1880–1905 (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas,
2009), 8–10.
7. See for example: Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian
Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Mieko
Nishida, Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–
1888 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 12; Leslie Bethell, The Abolition
of the Brazilian Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 90; Robert
Edgar Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery (Malabar: Krieger, 1993), 12–13;
Carl Degler, Neither White Nor Black: Slavery and Race Relations in the U.S. and
Brazil (New York: Macmillan Publications, 1971), 32, 49, and 249; Célia Azevedo, Abo-
litionism in the United States and Brazil: A Comparative Perspective (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1995), chapters 2 and 3.
8. For a few representative works see Azevedo, Abolitionism in the United States and
Brazil: A Comparative Perspective; Seymour Drescher, ‘Brazilian Abolition in Com-
parative Perspective’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 68, no. 3 (August
1988): 429–60; Marquese, Parron, and Berbel, Slavery and Politics. For an alternative
perspective, see David Hellwig, African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Para-
dise (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992).
9. Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative
Perspective (Baton Rough: Louisiana State University, 2003), 75; Also see David
Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 163

University Press, 1967); Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Sla-
veholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
10. An emblematic example of how historians have written about American abolitionists
who thought about slavery in an Atlantic context is W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem
of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists & Transatlantic Reform
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
11. This article complements the work by Brazilianist Luciana da Cruz Brito on African
Americans’ views of Brazilian slavery and race relations. See Luciana da Cruz Brito,
‘Abolicionistas afro-americanos e suas interpretações sobre escravidão, liberdade e
relações raciais no Brasil no século XIX’ in Tornando-se Livre: Agentes Históricos e
Lutas Sociais no Processo de Aboliçäo, ed. Maria Helena Machado and Celso Castilho
(São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 2015), 429–74; Luciana da Cruz
Brito, ‘A Nation of Blended Colors: African-American Abolitionists and their Perspec-
tives on Race Relations in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, in Another Black Like Me: The
Construction of Identities and Solidarity in the African Diaspora, ed. Elaine Rocha et al.
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 174–84.
12. It should be noted that in 1822, a young William Lloyd Garrison (at the age of 16)
wrote three critical essays about the independent South American republics in the
Newburyport Herald, under the satirical pseudonym ‘An Old Bachelor’ or ‘AOB’. I
have not included these essays in my article because, as Caleb McDaniel shows, Gar-
rison wrote little about slavery before 1828. As a young federalist, Garrison expresses
his skepticism about the success of these revolutions, while maintaining his belief in
the cultural superiority of the United States over South America. For an excellent over-
view of these essays, see Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age
of American Revolutions (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016), 133; McDa-
niel, The Problem of Democracy, 132–3.
13. For more on the response to Spanish and Portuguese–American wars of independence
in the United States see Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics, 1–14.
14. This American antislavery vision of Latin America intensified with Simón Bolívar’s
rise to power as ‘the Liberator’ of Spanish America. After successfully moving his
army across the Orinoco River and into New Grenada, Bolívar became the recognized
face of Andean independence. In 1819, at the first Congress of Angostura, Bolívar pro-
posed the formation of the Republic of Gran Colombia, uniting Venezuela, New
Grenada (present-day Colombia), and the Presidency of Quito (present-day
Ecuador) under a single government. At this gathering, Bolívar laid out his republican
project. He wanted Gran Colombia to be ‘based on the sovereignty of the people, the
division of power, civil liberty, proscription of slavery, abolition of monarchy and pri-
vileges’. See Simón Bolívar, An Address of Bolivar at the Congress of Angostura (Feb-
ruary 15, 1819). Reprint Ordered by the Government of the United States of
Venezuela to Commemorate the Centennial of the Opening of the Congress. Translated
by Francisco Javier Yánes (Washington, DC: Press of B.S. Adams, 1919), 26.
15. Unlike the republics of Spanish America, Brazil achieved independence peacefully but
remained unified under a monarchy, when Pedro I, the son of Dom João VI of Portu-
gal, was crowned the Emperor of Brazil on 1 December 1822. See Robert Cavaliero,
The Independence of Brazil (London: The British Academic Press, 1993), 157–8;
Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho, ‘Brazil from Independence to the
Middle of the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed.
Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), vol. 3, 679–746.
16. ‘Brazil – “Going, Going!”’, Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 1832, vol. 2, no.
8: 125.
164 W. E. SKIDMORE II

17. ‘The Triumph of Philanthropy, or Political Regeneration of America’, Genius of Uni-

versal Emancipation, May 1825, vol. 4, no. 8: 116–117.
18. See also: ‘Presidential Election’, Genius of Universal Emancipation, March 1824, vol. 3,
no. 11: 130–1; ‘Ominous’, Genius of Universal Emancipation, October 1824, vol. 4, no.
1: 8–9; ‘South American States’, Genius of Universal Emancipation, December 1824,
vol. 4, no. 3: 36–7.
19. This is most noticeable in the coverage of Simón Bolívar’s attempt to abolish slavery in
Gran Colombia. American antislavery newspaper did not mention that Bolívar faced
stiff resistance from Gran-Colombian slaveholders who were neither willing to pay
higher taxes for compensated emancipation nor give up the rights they had just
won in a bloody revolutionary war. In fact, opposition to gradual emancipation
forced Bolívar to decree four separate anti-slavery resolutions in 1822, 1823, 1827,
and 1828, which gained little ground in the movement towards total emancipation.
For more on the struggles for abolition in Gran Colombia, see Harold A. Bierck,
‘The Struggle for Abolition in Gran Colombia’, The Hispanic American Historical
Review 3, no. 33 (August 1953): 365–8; Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis
Gates, Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African American Experience, 2nd
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 567–8; Fernando-Lopez Alves, State
Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900 (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 196–201.
20. Manuel de Mier y Terán not only played a leading role in the Mexican independence
movement, but he was also considered a leading candidate for the presidency of
Mexico. Terán died in July 1832, when he committed suicide in eastern Mexico at
the age of 43. Throughout his political and military career, he remained concerned
and dedicated towards keeping Texas as part of Mexico. See Fitz, Our Sister Republics,
240–3.
21. On the changes in literacy and their effects on the American Antislavery Movement,
see Richard Newman, The Transformation of American Abolition: Fighting Slavery in
the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 12–15;
Patrick Rael, Newman, and Philip Lapsansky, eds., Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology
of Early-American Protest Literature, 1790–1860 (New York: Routledge Press, 2001),
1–30; John Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in
Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 33–
6; Trish Loughran, The Republic In Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nationalism
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 108–9, 328–30.
22. For more on this development, see Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade,
72–6.
23. Marquese, Parron, and Berbel, Slavery and Politics: Brazil and Cuba, 1790–1850, 158–
60.
24. In a footnote, the AFASS committee identified the ‘commercial paper’ as the Journal of
Commerce. American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, The Annual Report of the
American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, Presented at New York May 7, 1850,
with the Addresses and Resolutions (New York: Published by the A.& F. Anti-
Slavery Society, 1850), 132. For the North American Review article on Brazil see
‘The Empire of Brazil’, The North American Review LXVII (April 1849), pp. 314–47.
25. AFASS, Annual Report of 1850, 132.
26. The North American Review’s article examined two Brazilian travel narratives in their
article ‘The Empire of Brazil’. These two narratives were Daniel P. Kidder’s Sketches of
Residence and Travels in Brazil (1845) and George Gardener’s Travel in the Interior of
Brazil (1845). ‘The Empire of Brazil’, The North American Review, 314.
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 165

27. British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, An Epitome of Anti-Slavery Information or a

Condensed View of Slavery and the Slave Trade (London: T Ward and Company,
1841), 8.
28. Lydia Maria Child, ‘Opinions of Travellers – Collected by the Editor’, in The Oasis, ed.
Lydia Maria Child (Boston, MA: Benjamin C. Bacon, 1834), 214. Lydia Child’s publi-
cation ranged from popular fiction to antislavery tracts, including novels such as
Hobomok (1823) and the children’s magazine The Juvenile Miscellany. Child also pub-
lished best-selling advice manuals like The Frugal Housewife (1829) and The Mother’s
Book (1831), but her most radical views were expressed in her anti-slavery writings.
For more on Child, see Carolyn Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural
Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 1–15.
29. ‘Notices of Brazil’, The Dublin Literary Gazette, April 24, 1830, no. 17, 264 and 66.
30. ‘Art. VI. – Brazil: 1. – Travels in Brazil, in the years 1817–1820, undertaken by
command of his Majesty, the King of Bavaria’, The American Quarterly Review, Sep-
tember 1, 1831, vol. 10, no. 19, 128 and 126. For more on the antislavery views of the
American Quarterly Review, see Ralph M. Aderman, ‘Contributors to the “American
Quarterly Review”’, Studies in Bibliography 14 (1961): 163–76.
31. The American Quarterly Review, ‘Art. VI – Brazil’, 128.
32. The American Quarterly Review, ‘Art. VI – Brazil’, 130.
33. ‘Notices; Brazil; Constantinople’, The Liberator, July 9, 1831, vol. 1, no. 28: 111. For
Walsh’s travels across Europe see Robert Walsh, Narrative of a Journey from Constan-
tinople to England (London: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828).
34. For an excellent overview of early nineteenth-century racism against free blacks, see
Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and ‘Race’ in New
England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). For how black aboli-
tionists fought racial prejudice at home and abroad, see Timothy Patrick McCarthy
and John Stauffer, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abo-
litionism (New York: New Press, 2006); Richard Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall:
Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
35. ‘Prejudice of Color’, The North Star, May 5, 1848, vol. 1, no. XIX: 1.
36. Augustus Wattles, ‘Brazil’, The Colored American, April 12, 1838, vol. II, no. 12: 48.
37. Ibid, 48.
38. It should be noted that this exact line is also found in Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in
Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, MA: Allen & Ticknor, 1833),
93. ‘Brazil’, The Colored American, 48. For Koster’s work see Henry Koster, Travels in
Brazil (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), chapter VI.
39. No. 54, ‘Speech by Alexander Crummell Delivered at the Lower Hall, Exeter Hall,
London, England, 26 May 1853’, in Black Abolitionist Papers. Volume 1: The British
Isles, 1830–1865, ed. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Car-
olina Press, 1985), 349–50.
40. No. 57, ‘Speech by William G. Allen Delivered at the Stock Exchange, Leeds, England,
29 November 1853’, in Black Abolitionist Papers. Volume 1: The British Isles, 1830–
1865, ed. C. Peter Ripley et al. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
1985), 369. A part of this quote also appears in Luciana da Cruz Brito, ‘A Nation of
Blended Colors: African-American Abolitionists and their Perspectives on Race
Relations in Nineteenth-Century Brazil’, 178.
41. Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (Boston, MA: Richardson, Lord &
Holbrook, 1831), volume 2, 201.
166 W. E. SKIDMORE II

42. Celso Castilho provides one of the best overviews of how Brazil’s commitment to the
liberal interracial citizenship ideal both helped free people of color advance their social
standings, and also consolidated and strengthened the institution of Brazilian slavery.
Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship,
1–5. See also Richard Graham, ‘Free African Brazilians and the State of Slavery
Times’, in Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, ed. Michael Hanchard (Durham,
NC: Duke University, 1999), 30–1; Eduardo Silva, Dom Obá d’África, O príncipe do
povo: Vida, tempo e pensamento de um homem livre de cor (São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 1997), 112–49; Herbert Klein, ‘The Colored Freedmen in Brazilian Slave
Society’, Journal Of Social History 3, no. 1 (Fall 1969): 30–52; Márcia Regina Berbel,
Rafael de Marquese, and Tâmis Parron, Escravidão e politica: Brasil e Cuba, 1790–
1850 (São Paulo: Editora Hucitec, 2009).
43. Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship, 4.
44. See Yuko Miki, ‘Slave and Citizen in Black and Red: Reconsidering the Intersection of
African and Indigenous Slavery in Postcolonial Brazil’, Slavery and Abolition 35, no. 1
(2014): 1–22.
45. For an excellent overview of how African Americans engaged with Brazil in their argu-
ments for social and political equality Brito, ‘A Nation of Blended Colors’, 174–84.
46. Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, 7. It should also
be noted that Child also relies upon Henry Koster’s travel narrative to test Walsh’s
descriptions of Brazilian slavery and slave trade. See Child, An Appeal, 93; Henry
Koster, Travel in Brazil and On the Amelioration of Slavery (London, 1816), 313.
47. For more on this publication, see Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic, 205–7.
48. Lydia Maria Child, ‘Malem Boo: The Brazilian Slave’, in The Oasis, ed. Lydia Maria
Child (Boston, MA: Benjamin C. Baker, 1834), 39.
49. ‘Malem Boo’, The Oasis, 35.
50. Robert Walsh, Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 (Boston, MA: Richardson, Lord &
Holbrook, 1831), vol., 82.
51. For more on American southerners’ interests in expanding slavery into neighboring
countries, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the
Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 14–16 and 299–302;
Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the African Slave
Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 6–37.
52. ‘No. 106 Wendell Phillips to Elizabeth Pease Nichols’, in Clare Anderson, British &
American Abolitionists (George Square: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 407.
Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison,
1805–1879: The Story of His Life (New York: The Century Co., 1889), vol. 3, 411;
also quoted in Horne, The Deepest South, 4.
53. See J.G.T., The Cotton Famine (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge,
1863), p. 1–4, British Library, Rare Books, 8138.h.1.(76); No Author, Free Labour
Cotton: It Can Be Had (London: Jarrold and Sons, 1863), 1–4, British Library, Rare
Books, 8138.h.1 (74).
54. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014),
261–8; Sven Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web
of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War’, American Historical
Review 109, no. 5: 1405–38; Arthur Redford, Manchester Merchants and Foreign
Trade (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1965), vol. 3, 12. For more on
the sociopolitical context of why southerners moved to Brazil, see Cyrus B. Dawsey
and James M. Dawsey, ‘Leaving: The Context of the Southern Emigration to Brazil’,
in The Confederados: Old South Immigrants in Brazil, ed. Cyrus B. Dawsey and
 SLAVERY & ABOLITION 167

James M. Dawsey (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 11–23;

Blanche Henry Clark Weaver, ‘Confederate Emigration to Brazil’, The Journal of
Southern History, 27, no. 1: 33–53.
55. Historians have argued over the number of confederados who migrated to Brazil. Some
scholars have estimated only a few hundred families traveled to Brazil, while others
have suggested that around 10,000 migrants moved to Brazil. Cyrus and James
Dawsey, ‘Leaving: The Context of Southern Emigration to Brazil’, The Confederados,
18; Alan Tigay, ‘The Deepest South’, American Heritage 49, no. 2:84–95; William
Clark Griggs, The Elusive Eden: Frank McMullan’s Confederate Colony in Brazil
(Austin: University of Texas Press), 16–27.
56. For more on this debate, see William C. Griggs, ‘Migration of the McMullan Colonists
and Evolution of the Colonies in Brazil’, The Confederados, 50–65; Griggs, The Elusive
Eden: Frank McMullan’s Confederate Colony in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas,
1987), 15–27; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil, and the
African Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 4; Guterl, American
Mediterranean, 79–113; Ballad S. Dunns, Home for Southerners (New York, 1866),
240.
57. ‘Trial of Wirz’, New York Herald, September 3, 1865, no. 10, 4.
58. ‘From Brazil’, New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 6, 1866, 4.
59. For more on James Redpath’s career as journalist and abolitionist, see John McKivigan,
Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).
60. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand, 19–42; 77–8; and 84–97.
61. James P. Pond, Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the
Platform and Stage (New York: G.W. Dillingham, 1900), 538.
62. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, June 1, 1867, vol. 15, no. 6, 121.
63. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 122.
64. Ibid; ‘Pilgrim Father; Alabama; Providence; Mobile; Brazil’, Boston Daily Advertiser,
December 1, 1865, vol. 106. no. 131, 2.
65. For Canada and as a safe heaven for fugitive slaves, see Benjamin Dew, ed., The
Refugee: of the Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada. Related by themselves with
an Account of the History and Condition of the Colored Population of Upper Canada
(Boston, MA: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856); ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-
Slavery Reporter, 122.
66. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 122.
67. Ibid, 123.
68. For more on Koster see Leslie Bethell, Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 21.
69. Although Stowe’s novel helped shape this section, Redpath’s decision to mix antislav-
ery fiction with the social realities of slavery could also be viewed as an informal
acknowledgement of Lydia Maria Child’s ‘Malem Boo’, one of the few works that
acknowledged the inhumanity of Brazilian slavery, though Child focused more on
the slave market than on the institution of slavery. It should be noted that in
Child’s An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1831), she
examines Walsh’s Notices of Brazil in detail. Child compared Walsh’s description of
slave ships coming into Rio de Janeiro with ‘the evidence given, at various times,
before the British House of Commons’. She found that both descriptions matched,
and therefore concluded that Walsh’s account ‘is by no means exaggerated’. She also
compared Walsh’s Notices to Henry Koster’s narrative. See Child, An Appeal in
Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, 7 and 93.
168 W. E. SKIDMORE II

70. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 123; For more on Simon Legree’s vicious-
ness see Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (Phila-
delphia, PA: Henry Altemus Company, 1900), 288–90.
71. ‘Slavery in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 124.
72. ‘Slavery and Slave Life in Brazil’, The Anti-Slavery Reporter, February 1, 1868, vol. 16,
no. 2, 28–9.
73. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 1–12; Gilberto de
Mello Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1945), chapter 2,
especially 40–2; Gilberto de Mello Freyre, Casa Grande & Senzala: Formação da
Família Brasileira sob o Regime da Economia Patriarcal, 20th ed. (Rio De Janeiro:
INL-MEC, 1980), 5–8, 59, and 335–40; Degler, Neither White Nor Black, 224–50.

Acknowledgements
This author would like to thank the many people who provided feedback over the course of
this article’s development, especially Maria Montalvo, Andrew Johnson, David Ponton and
Professors Jim Sidbury, Caleb McDaniel, Celso Castilho, Richard Huzzey, Lora Wildenthal,
Alida Metcalf, and Kerry Ward.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
William E. Skidmore II is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department, Rice University,
6100 Main MS-42, Houston, Texas 77005-1827, USA. Email: wes3@rice.edu