Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870 by Vitor Izecksohn (review)

This book by Vitor Izecksohn, a historian at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, makes a new contribution to scholarship seeking to locate the Civil War in a comparative perspective. While previous scholars, beginning with David Potter, have examined the American conflict with reference to contemporaneous nationalizing or industrializing wars in Europe and Eurasia, Izecksohn focuses on the Western Hemisphere. He argues that Brazil’s experience in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–70)—although the war was an international conflict involving four countries, broke out over foreign issues (mainly, Paraguay’s aggressive policies in Uruguay, the home of many Brazilian expatriates), and was fought largely outside Brazilian borders—resembled the Union’s experience in the Civil War in terms of government centralization, uncompromising military objectives, and recruitment of black soldiers. But he concludes that the two recruitment crises had different consequences. U.S. policy “contributed powerfully to emancipation and reform in the defeated South,” whereas measures of Emperor Dom Pedro II backfired, gradually eroding monarchical legitimacy and representative parliamentary government (2).

In chapters that alternate between the North and South American conflicts, Izecksohn shows how the exigencies of national emergency pressured both governments to risk freeing and arming slaves. Although far more novel in the United States, this decision was risky for both regimes. They both insisted on unconditional surrender yet exercised authority in societies similar in their ephemeral war patriotism and hostility to large national (and poorly organized) armies. Readers of this journal familiar with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1862 decision to recruit free blacks and former slaves will be interested to learn how in Brazil manumitted slaves substituted for impressed white men from the outset of the War of the Triple Alliance, and by 1867 the Brazilian government was freeing its own slaves and buying slaves from private owners for military service. Enlistment of slaves thus became “a fundamental strategy for the defense of the Imperial state” (160). Of some 91,000 Brazilian wartime troops, about 4,000 were slaves (out of a slave population of 1.7 million, 14 percent of the total population of Brazil), recruited roughly proportionally from throughout the nation: about two-thirds came from the southeast region, including state-owned farms and factories in and around the capital Rio de Janeiro.

Although the Brazilian slave population, unlike that in the United States, was in decline at the time its war of national reconstruction erupted, free Brazilians fiercely debated slave enlistments, using the recent American emancipation as precedent. Izecksohn’s discussion of the weak indigenous Brazilian abolitionist movement illustrates Seymour Drescher’s observations of Latin America generally.¹ While an abolitionist adviser of Pedro II lobbied for his country, like the United States, to follow the classical examples of Greece and Rome and humbly call upon “their captives in time of trouble,” a critic of slave recruitment pointed out that American slavery’s regional, not national, location meant abolition had posed little immediate threat to the Union’s society or economy (154). Izecksohn emphasizes that this debate’s result in only a smattering of manumitted soldiers, and the postwar persistence of racism against black veterans and civilians alike, reflects how the War of the Triple Alliance created few long-term changes in Brazil’s social structure. Loopholes in the country’s Free Womb Law of 1871 enabled slavery to last until 1888, and a year later the Brazilian Empire was overthrown by a military coup d’état.

This conclusion is ironic, given that Izecksohn indicates his original interest in this topic arose to show “the ways in which American exceptionalism could be contested” (x). By emphasizing the differences between the two wars’ outcomes—essentially, citizenship for black Americans and continued disenfranchisement for black Brazilians—Izecksohn, as did Eric Foner a generation ago in a comparison of the political...