Exploring the Meaning of Freedom: Postemancipation Societies in Comparative Perspective

REBECCA J. SCOTT

The centennial of the final abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil has occasioned an exceptional burst of scholarly interest, perhaps in part owing to the moral weight that the questions of slavery and freedom continue to carry. Integrating a moral vision into scholarship on this subject, however, has remained problematic. The old notion of slave emancipation as a purifying, redemptive triumph of moral rightness over self-interest has receded, sometimes to be replaced by a more jaundiced view of emancipation as the trading of one master for another, or the relinquishing of explicit coercion and explicit protection for implicit coercion and no protection at all. The best recent work on emancipation has challenged these polarities, emphasizing the complexity of former slaves' initiatives in the context of the constraints placed on them.

As one attempts to formulate a research design for work on the aftermath of emancipation, the question arises: what exactly should one do with this insight about behavior, this realization that slave emancipation was neither a transcendent liberation nor a complete swindle, but rather an occasion for reshaping—within limits—social, economic, and political relationships? It is one thing to invoke the concept of multiple options and multiple constraints; it is quite another to show with any precision what processes and outcomes resulted from the interaction of initiative and context.

In this essay I will first discuss certain ways in which the articles that follow expand our understanding of emancipation and postemancipation society. My focus will be on questions that can be raised for a range of societies in the Americas, with particular attention to Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. I will then try to suggest several new directions in which inquiry might go, focusing on sources, methodology, and interpretation. In some instances, I will draw on work from the very different, but conceptually related, field of Latin American colonial history. Analyses of the transformation of indigenous societies in the aftermath of conquest can, on occasion, provide both practical and theoretical insights into the study of relations between former masters and former slaves.

The larger purpose of the essay is to suggest ways of studying the meaning of freedom. A comparative approach to emancipation has certain obvious advantages for the highlighting of crucial differences and the testing of hypotheses. Perhaps less obvious is the value of comparison in raising new questions and reshaping old ones. For comparison can juxtapose not only selected "cases," but also very different historiographies, each with a set of analytic presuppositions and accompanying questions. Out of the clash of those presuppositions and the careful application of some of the questions from one historical tradition to the evidence of another, new frameworks for analysis may emerge. Thus, for example, a close examination of several societies after slavery can pose a challenge to the conventional dichotomy of dependence versus autonomy for the former slave. At the same time, such a comparison may encourage us to expand our focus to encompass a wider range of social groupings, rather than attempting to isolate the interactions of former masters and former slaves.

Hebe Castro's essay, "Beyond Masters and Slaves," provides a précis of her larger work on the community of Capivary in the province of Rio de Janeiro during the nineteenth century. Her study is a model of the way in which the systematic exploration of new sources in a local context can force a reframing of central questions about the national experience. Three features of this work might be highlighted. First, Castro's study illuminates the lives of poor rural Brazilians, not as individuals "marginal" to a dominant society, but as participants in a lively economy complementary to both urban society and the coffee-growing activities undertaken by more prosperous residents of the region. Second, her portrait of Capivary adds to the complexity of our image of Brazilian slavery. Like Stuart Schwartz, Castro emphasizes the dispersed character of Brazilian slaveholding, and the small size of the units on which many slaves resided, even in the context of a highly concentrated pattern of formal landowning. Third, her work implicitly rejects a unilinear concept of proletarianization as the inevitable outcome of emancipation and the expansion of commercial agriculture. Whatever the aims of legislators and large-scale landowners, the poor of Capivary were not fully denied access to land. By retaining such access, they were able to escape transformation into a mere "rural work force."

Capivary, with its mixed population cultivating coffee for the internal market and manioc for consumption and for sale to the city, provides more than a simple community study. The presence of dispersed, small-scale, partially slave-based subsistence and commercial agriculture—characteristic not only of Capivary but of significant portions of the province of Rio de Janeiro—raises a question of crucial importance for the understanding of abolition. The question is: how does the precise class structure of a given slaveholding society affect the transition to free labor, both in terms of changing patterns of labor use and in terms of the development of pro- and antiabolition movements? Coincidentally, the same question emerges in Seymour Drescher's analysis from the opposite perspective—from the vantage point of a transnational comparison of the course of abolition.

Drescher's study, "Brazilian Abolition in Comparative Perspective," explores the dramatic regional variations in the significance of slavery within Brazil that emerged after the termination of the transatlantic slave trade, and explores the consequences for the development of abolitionism and antiabolitionism. He draws parallels with similar regional disparities—North/South and East/West—in the United States and Cuba, and notes the political risks to slaveholders of such divergence. In both the United States and Brazil, there seems also to have been a concentration of slaveholding within regions in the decades before abolition, as large-scale rural owners came to hold an increasing fraction of all slaves and the proportion of farmers owning no slaves grew.

The political outcomes in the United States and in Brazil, however, were very different. While planters in the U.S. South managed to forge a regional coalition to oppose abolition, planters in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo seem to have had only limited success in mobilizing opposition to the steps that were taken toward gradual emancipation in the 1870s and 1880s. Drescher comments on...