Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro

4 Exaggerated and Sentimental? Engendering Abolitionism in the Atlantic World

97 c h a p t e r f o u r Exaggerated and Sentimental? Engendering Abolitionism in the Atlantic World ^& The money he gave to the aforementioned ingênua [child born “free” after the 1871 Rio Branco law] was solely because he took pity on the misery she was suffering, considering his humanitarian principles [ . . . ] the minor Maria never received clothing from the Defendant but instead lived off the Plaintiff herself. —José Fernandes Braga Rodrigues, witness statement in support of Josepha Gonçalves de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, 22 September 1884. With these words, one of the neighbors of freedwoman Josepha Gonçalves de Moraes, who was seeking custody of her daughter Maria through the courts of Rio de Janeiro, explained why he had helped Josepha care for Maria when Josepha’s ex-owners allegedly neglected her. In so doing, José Braga Rodrigues helped Josepha make a moral case, as well as a legal one, that Maria should be handed over to her mother’s care. Josepha’s case, like those of many other women we have met as they approached courts and juntas in 1870s and 1880s Rio and Havana, made use of and helped expand new legal openings that had specific resonance for women and their children. Yet, as we saw in Chapter 3, their petitions also often invoked changing ideas about pity, charity, or maternity that were not simply legal but cultural and social. Where did these ideas come from? Why should the women making them, or the legal representatives who “translated” their demands for elite male consumption, think they would have any effect? This chapter explores how a changing set of ideas about women—enslaved and free— helped frame public imaginaries of slavery and antislavery in Brazil, Cuba, 98 / Seeking Freedom and the broader Atlantic World by the 1870s and 1880s. Slavery’s shocking separation of mothers and children, the link between femininity and emotion, or the question of whether all women were equally “maternal” or whether some were more motherly than others were all hotly debated topics within arguments about slavery and abolition. In the process, gendered imaginaries of what manhood and womanhood meant—whether for enslaved or free men and women—were debated and recast. The local circumstances of each city led to very different levels of antislavery mobilization. In Brazil, what Seymour Drescher has called an “Anglo-Americanvariant”ofantislaverydevelopedinthe1880s,asabroadbased abolition campaign sprang up across the country in response to the national government’s increasing recalcitrance on the slavery question.1 Havana was too much under colonial control for such overt or organized activity, but there were certainly limited spaces for abolitionist discussions —whether in some sectors of the press, among liberal intellectuals, or within the budding labor union movement. Beyond the island itself, Madrid was home to a lively abolition campaign since the 1860s, which drew its vitality from Puerto Rican as well as Spanish members via profound interconnections between metropolis and colonies. Meanwhile, whether in Cuba or in émigré groupings in New York or Florida, separatist voices presented a radical alternative to Spanish rule and gradual abolition. Yet the very different contexts of Brazil and Cuba were also linked in important ways. Discussions of slavery and abolition held in each were forged in an Atlantic intellectual crucible of which each was a part. Brazilian abolitionists and their counterparts in the Spanish imperial world drew much of their campaigning style from earlier Atlantic abolition campaigns , looking especially to the British.2 They also dialogued to a considerable degree with each other. At the same time, as they took cautious steps toward emancipation, the Brazilian and Spanish governments, as well as public commentators generally in each setting, looked toward one another, comparing and imitating.3 Antislavery commentators formulated their arguments within two broad, overlapping Atlantic intellectual matrices. The first led them to employ the language of equality, painting enslaved people as comparable or similar to their elite readers. The second led them to express deep fears about biological and moral corruption from nonwhite people in general and Africans in particular, drawn both from an older corpus of racist thought and the new “scientific” intellectual currents that reached Latin America by the 1870s. Although these two tendencies might appear contradictory today, they were each part of the intellectual toolkit of most Exaggerated and Sentimental? / 99 educated thinkers of the day and can each be found in the work of most contemporary...