João Alfredo’s cabinet takes office as immediate abolition returns to the agenda

A Redempção argued that mass escapes and the “cleansing” of plantations had led enslavers to abandon claims over enslaved people. The editorial treats collective flight as a force that made the...

An A Redempção article argued that flight should no longer be treated as a crime. The claim contested the legal and police framework that made an enslaved person’s self-liberation punishable while...

A Redempção reproduced a resolution by farmers in Serra Negra declaring enslaved people free while requiring them to serve until 24 December 1889, with wages. This was conditional emancipation on...

The newspaper published “O crime da Penha do Rio do Peixe,” reporting the murder of police delegate Joaquim Firmino de Araújo Lima, who had sheltered two people in an emancipation process and joined...

A Redempção returned to the killing of Joaquim Firmino in an article titled “Penha do Rio do Peixe.” Repeated coverage made the murder a public indictment of the slaveholding order and its allies....

An editorial titled “Não se iludam os jornais” criticized proposals that would declare people free yet bind them to former owners’ labor. It described organized mass flight despite police blockades...

A later account cited in scholarship describes a major operation in Recife in which 119 enslaved people were embarked for escape toward the North. Their movement followed years of fugitives, free...

On 3 May 1888, Princess Regent Isabel opened the parliamentary session with a speech urging lawmakers to remove slavery from Brazilian law. The address framed abolition as a national aspiration and...

On 8 May 1888, Minister of Agriculture Rodrigo Augusto da Silva presented the government’s proposal for the complete abolition of slavery to the Chamber of Deputies. The bill moved rapidly in response...

On 10 May 1888, the Chamber of Deputies approved the proposal to abolish slavery. The rapid vote followed decades of Black resistance and a late-1880s surge in abolitionist mobilization. Parliamentary...