Some of the most innovative works in the field of Atlantic slavery in recent years focus on the geographic and conceptual frontiers of enslavement. Working within this historiographical framework, with the intention of furthering the discussion about the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil, we will consider here how cases that involved the enslavement of free people were criminalized and brought to court throughout the nineteenth century. The uneven results of these cases suggest that political choices limited both the application of Article 179 of the Criminal Code (which prohibited the enslavement of free people) and the law of November 7, 1831 (which prohibited the Atlantic slave trade).

With these words, Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis described May 13, 1888, the day that ended legalized slavery in his country. Brazil was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery; it had also been the largest and the most enduring slave society in the Americas. For more than 350 years, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century until abolition, slavery shaped Brazilian history across nearly every region of its continental geography. Over those centuries, nearly five million enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil, more than 45 percent of the total number of persons forcibly brought to the Americas. In the years that followed that sunny May 13 of abolition, Machado de Assis himself would be witness to the brevity of its joy and to the immense challenges of Brazilian freedom. The scale of those challenges was such that, a scant decade after abolition, Machado de Assis’ friend Joaquim Nabuco would write: “Slavery will long remain Brazil’s defining national feature.” Well over a century later, the power of those words persists: slavery and its legacies remain Brazil’s most formative elements.

This chapter uses documents and methods from both traditional political history and social history to argues that the origins of the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) can be identified in tensions surrounding the abolition of slavery in Uruguay in the 1840s and the definitive ban of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850. These tensions were at play in the disputes over the consolidation of local nation-states and are central to an understanding of the historical process that fed into the Paraguayan War. By the early 1860s they would reach a point of no return. This argument places slavery and Black agency at the center of Brazil’s nineteenth-century international relations, breaking a silence carefully constructed by statesmen and diplomats of the Brazilian Empire.

With these words, Brazilian novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis described May 13, 1888, the day that ended legalized slavery in his country. Brazil was the last nation in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery; it had also been the largest and the most enduring slave society in the Americas. For more than 350 years, from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the early sixteenth century until abolition, slavery shaped Brazilian history across nearly every region of its continental geography. Over those centuries, nearly five million enslaved Africans arrived in Brazil, more than 45 percent of the total number of persons forcibly brought to the Americas. In the years that followed that sunny May 13 of abolition, Machado de Assis himself would be witness to the brevity of its joy and to the immense challenges of Brazilian freedom. The scale of those challenges was such that, a scant decade after abolition, Machado de Assis’ friend Joaquim Nabuco would write: “Slavery will long remain Brazil’s defining national feature.” Well over a century later, the power of those words persists: slavery and its legacies remain Brazil’s most formative elements.