On 7 November 1831, an imperial law declared that Africans brought into Brazil from abroad would be free and penalized those involved in the traffic. The law followed the 1826 treaty, but the state largely failed to enforce it; traffickers continued landing Africans, and authorities often treated illegally imported people as enslaved. The law’s history therefore records both a formal right and the government’s complicity in its mass violation. Later generations called it a law “for the English,” but the people it purported to free were real individuals.
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What did the 1831 Feijó law declare?
The law declared Africans brought from abroad free, though enforcement was largely evaded.
The Feijó law declared Africans newly imported from abroad free.
That is the law’s central provision, though it was widely evaded.