The government presents a gradual emancipation bill

Council of State deliberations continued over a proposal that would break the inherited rule that a child followed the enslaved status of the mother. That principle made enslaved women’s...

In a further session on the emancipation project, councillors confronted whether children born to enslaved women could be treated as free without compensating owners. The dispute exposed slavery’s...

Council members continued examining the draft that later informed the Free Womb proposal. The reform’s design tried to reconcile a claimed future of freedom with the protection of property and labor...

Decree no. 1,695 of 15 September 1869 prohibited selling enslaved people at public auction with a public cry and exhibition. The rule curtailed one degrading public practice but did not ban private...

Deputy Jerônimo José Teixeira Júnior questioned the government’s position on slavery after the imperial address failed to set out an emancipation plan. His intervention represented a political...

The parliamentary record identifies sessions on 23 and 24 May as part of the Chamber’s renewed discussion of emancipation. The proposed change questioned the legal inheritance of enslaved status,...

Debate continued over a measure that would declare future-born children free while allowing owners to retain their services through adolescence. The issue was not an abstract legal puzzle: it...

On 30 June 1871, a Senate commission issued a report on the government’s proposal concerning the “servile element.” Committee work translated abolitionist pressure and imperial political calculation...

The parliamentary annals for this session record discussion of the proposed reform and its terms. The state’s approach promised that slavery would end in the future, but the future-born children could...

In a Chamber of Deputies speech dated 12 July 1871, abolitionist jurist and deputy Perdigão Malheiro criticized the government’s gradual emancipation proposal. The debate was not a simple division...