A Senate committee reports on the gradual emancipation bill

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...

On 12 May 1871, the government’s proposal on the “servile element” entered the Senate’s legislative process. The bill proposed that children born to enslaved women after enactment be declared free,...

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...

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...

The agriculture minister discussed emancipation funds and the proposed free-birth measure. The fund offered a route to individual manumission, but it made freedom dependent on state quotas, valuation,...

Visconde do Rio Branco argued for a gradual measure that would keep the process within state institutions. His proposal answered pressure for change while seeking to limit disruption to...

This Chamber session addressed the implications of the proposal for children born to enslaved women. Later law would recognize a limited path for mothers to redeem children’s services, but it left...