What was slavery like in Brazil?

This is a very broad question, there are whole books written about it. Like, “what was slavery like in the US” would also demand a very big answer. So, I’m going to try to sum it up.

Slavery in Brazil was very much like slavery in much of the Americas. It followed the plantation model, first established in Portuguese colonies in the islands of Madeira and Cape Verde. Most of the slaves were owned by elite farmers who had huge farms that mostly planted one thing, which was intended for export. The most important cash crops in these plantations were sugarcane, coffee, cotton and cocoa, but there were other crops as well (and in these plantations there were subsistence farms as well, mostly tended by the slaves themselves for their basic sustenance). Big mines also had slaves, and Brazil had many gold and diamond mines. Slaves were chattel property and could be disposed by the slavemasters as they intended, with some limitations. They would suffer severe forms of punishment if they refused to work and would be hunted by the police or armed forces if they tried to escape.

One example of the limitations the slaveowners had, they all had to follow the catholic religion. That meant worshipping other gods or other forms of Christianity was illegal. Some masters didn’t bother with that and Brazilian culture has a tradition of religious synchretism that exists to these day and goes back to slavery days, with African gods being disguised as Catholic saints. We also know that some slaves followed Islam (there are records of this and of their specific revolts, in which Arabic writing was used to plot it). But you couldn’t, as a slave master, try to convert your slaves to Protestantism or Umbanda (an African religion), for example. You were supposed to care about their souls and let the priests make sacraments. Slaves had their own churches in Minas Gerais, for example, but not their own priests.

Some slaves worked in their master’s house and some worked on their own. These had better lives than plantation slaves, as happened in the US. Domestic servants led a much similar life than the ones in similar positions in the US, so I’m going to try to explain the other kind. An example of the “self employed slave” would be the women that sold snacks and candies in Salvador, Bahia. They would bake these foods and sell them, with part of the profit going to their masters (they had to return each night to their masters house) and another part going to themselves. They’d later use these profits to buy their freedom (or at least try to).

Manumission was recognized by law and was much more common in Brazil than in the US. One census in Brazil showed that in the early 19th century 1/3 of the population was made up of slaves, 1/3 of freedpeople (former slaves ) and 1/3 of free people (who had never been slaves).

Most slaves worked in these plantations and work in Brazilian plantations was awful. By one metric Brazilian slaves were treated much worse than American slaves. In the US the slave population grew. The slave population in the US in 1790 was 700,000 and in 1860 it was 4,000,000. Total slave imports in British North America between 1701 and 1870 was 399,000. Most of that slave population growth was endogenous, i.e., it was slaves marrying and having kids that were slaves. Slave population growth was the same rate as that of free blacks or whites.

In Brazil the slave population was never able to grow by itself. The number of Brazilian slaves in 1798 is 1,582,000. Between 1800 and 1850 about 1,600,000 slaves were imported to Brazil. But the number of slaves in 1871 is 1,540,829 (yes, they counted each slave in the country at that time due to an abolition law). What happened is that the natural rate of growth of Brazilian slaves was negative, so it was necessary to always import slaves to keep the numbers stable. Brazilians didn’t have “stud farms” or “breeding farms” like they had in the US. They tried to copy it, there are documents of people trying to do it, but never succeeding. Apparently the treatment Brazilian slaveowners gave to the woman slaves and children slaves was awful due to negligence. It was always cheaper for a Brazilian slaveowner to try to buy a new slave rather than “grow” one. This kind of cultural attitude remained even when the supply of slaves was cut due to abolition of slave trade after 1850. The prices of slaves skyrocketed, but, as I said earlier, the experiments in slave breeding were unsuccessful, and the slave population started to diminish each year. One study by the government in Bahia showed that the slave population was diminishing by 5% each year in the 1860s.

This negative population growth happened only with the slaves. The freed slaves, for example, didn’t lead good lives on average but their population growth was the same as that of whites. Some freed slaves reached high place in society, but most of them didn’t, forming a mid strata of society but not a middle class. The cultural attitude in Brazil was that work, especially work in agriculture, was inferior, something only slaves did, so everybody tried to avoid it as much as possible. There wasn’t much middle class jobs as well in Brazilian colonial or imperial society.