In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).Footnote 1 Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. The Jornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements.Footnote 2 Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to write Direito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens (1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade.Footnote 3 More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário (1853)—that parsed key aspects of Uncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom.Footnote 4 This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza.Footnote 5 In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after the Opúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.”Footnote 6 If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.
This article draws on recent literature on the public sphere in nineteenth-century Latin America to consider how the representations of slavery that surrounded and influenced this Brazilian iteration of Uncle Tom's Cabin shaped the terms of access and power in public life.Footnote 7 It focuses on print culture because of its central role in constructing narratives about slavery—narratives that were both entwined with and generative of a wide array of social and political formations. It insists that these two processes—print culture and slavery—shaped each other and that the former should not just be seen as a source for the latter. In building on but also reinterpreting and reorienting Jürgen Habermas's view that “the public sphere in the political realm evolved from the public sphere in the world of letters,” this article also maintains that political and literary discourses were mutually constitutive, interdependent, and overlapping in shaping public concerns.Footnote 8 A few notable exceptions aside, it is interesting that the histories of Latin American slavery and of the public sphere have generally been treated separately, despite the important fact that the expansion of the press, associations, electoral politics, and of the literary and theatrical spaces to which scholars of the public sphere have called attention, all happened amid a wider Atlantic context wherein racial bondage flourished.Footnote 9 In turning to the Brazilian case more specifically, we can regard the moment when “Páginas” appeared as linked to both the expansion of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s—the height of the “second slavery”—and to a period characterized by a dynamic public sphere.Footnote 10 To be sure, we are cognizant that people participated in public life on unequal terms, especially in such a place as Rio, which had the largest urban slave population in the Americas—and a tradition of a free press. The enslaved were not only the subjects of articles and advertisements but also toiled in the print industry.Footnote 11 Similarly, the fact that editors and subscribers of the Rio newspapers, and a sizeable swath of the middling population in general, owned slaves surely influenced how slavery was discussed in the press. Accordingly, the focus on the public sphere in this article follows the Latin American literature that situates the terms of participation in public life as inextricably bound up with social processes of contestation and differentiation.Footnote 12
Approaching a study of the reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin through questions about the public sphere takes current discussions on Floresta and Stowe's other Brazilian interlocutors in new and exciting directions. To begin with, studies of Floresta herself are woefully inadequate to the scope of her writings and their resonance in Brazil and Europe, where she lived the last 29 years of her life. Called the “most outstanding Brazilian woman intellectual of the period,” she wrote also in French, publishing travelogues, novels, and essays.Footnote 13 It is true that since the 1990s especially, literary critics have reexamined Floresta's writings as part of a longer genealogy of Brazilian feminism. The title of Constância Lima Duarte's well-regarded 2005 biography, Nísia Floresta, a primeira feminista do Brasil, exemplifies this perspective.Footnote 14 Still, only a handful of scholars have written about the unpublished “Páginas,” Floresta's thoughts on African and indigenous slavery more generally, or, more specifically, on Floresta's dialogue with Stowe.Footnote 15 This article, then, invigorates this last line of inquiry by analyzing “Páginas” in relation to contemporaneous public narratives about Brazilian slavery.Footnote 16
Accordingly, the article posits a set of political questions from which to engage “Páginas” and Lusophone adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin more generally. Certainly, we must begin by acknowledging that it has been only very recently—in the 2010s—that a few scholarly articles, coming mostly from the Brazilian academy, have taken a specific interest in Uncle Tom's reception.Footnote 17 I am unaware of like studies coming out of Portugal or other parts of the Lusophone world, though César Braga-Pinto notes that A mãe dos escravos, first staged in Lisbon in 1863 and also an adaptation of Stowe's story, was later performed in Brazil.Footnote 18 Largely, these recent works have returned to the intellectual influences that shaped the first Portuguese translations of the novel, and have also sought to pinpoint Stowe's imprint on the Brazilian antislavery literature of the 1860s and 1870s.Footnote 19 Doubtlessly enriching, these separate streams of scholarship, with the first focused mainly on Floresta as a feminist writer and the second on Uncle Tom's Cabin's influence on abolitionism, have demonstrated a Brazilian familiarity with Stowe's story.
Differently, however, this study demonstrates that a look at the early reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin will prove useful for better understanding how representations of slavery formed part of public life, and by extension, the history of slavery's lasting power. This is of consequence for showing more convincingly that the public sphere was integral to the history of slavery, forcing us to see print culture as constitutive of cultural processes that helped slavery persist as long as it did. Proceeding in three parts, we begin with a critical reassessment of the historiography on print culture to emphasize that the history of the press and literacy, on the one hand, and the history of slavery and Rio de Janeiro, on the other, need to be considered as mutually constitutive. The second section turns to “Páginas” and attends to the various registers in which the Uncle Tom story reached Brazil through the press and through translations of the novel. In the last section, I broaden the focus to consider the wider array of representations of slavery that appeared in two of the city's main dailies, the Jornal do Commercio and the Diário do Rio de Janeiro, in the months prior to, during, and following the publication of Floresta's story, that is, from January through August of 1855. With this perspective, I contend that a central tenet of Floresta's story—her searing critique of seigniorial exceptionalism—is exceptionally useful for illuminating the extent to which this notion pervaded public discourse on slavery. Indeed, we will see that this idea of a “milder form of Brazilian slavery” also found expression in antislavery writings, attesting to its familiarity, if not its implicit acceptance.Footnote 20 In effect, this article works towards a reconsideration of how we conceive of the enduring nature of Brazilian slavery by analyzing it as a public process.
This entry into the Brazilian matrix of Uncle Tom's Cabin also deepens scholars’ awareness of how Latin Americans shaped this global phenomenon.Footnote 21 The story's circulation through theatrical representations, serialized adaptations in the press, and translated books generated great excitement. It captivated audiences from Mexico City to Bogotá and Lima, from La Paz to Buenos Aires and Montevideo.Footnote 22 Uncle Tom's Cabin also registered in the Caribbean, where we know that important thinkers in Cuba, Haiti, and Trinidad responded to it critically.Footnote 23 Notably, the Canary-Island-born Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, who translated the novel into Spanish in 1852, referred to his experiences in Cuba, where he had lived and from which he was banished, and his earlier travels in the United States as critical to his engagement of Stowe's novel.Footnote 24 The first Portuguese version of Uncle Tom, A cabana do Pai Thomaz, ou, a vida dos pretos na América (1853), also drew inspiration from personal connections of the translator, Francisco Ladislau Álvares d'Andrada, to Latin America. Andrada had published Portuguese-language newspapers in 1830s Paris that also circulated in Brazil.Footnote 25 Thus, he confidently envisioned that his translation would “reach those countries, where, more or less, one could find the same interesting scenes that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe describes in such vivid colors.”Footnote 26 Clearly, then, both Latin American slavery and intellectual life shaped how the story entered into Spanish and Portuguese, influencing how Uncle Tom spread in parts of southern Europe. This process of Uncle Tom's circulation in Latin America is thus not a unidirectional history but one of transatlantic cultural exchange. We would also be remiss if we did not recognize Uncle Tom's rousing success in Britain, France, Italy, Germany, and Spain and how those successes fanned interest in the story in Rio. The popular-culture sensation that it became in Europe, even more so than its significance in the United States, fueled its popularity in Latin America.Footnote 27 This article points to the fact that Stowe's Latin American interlocutors, like Floresta, not only formed part of this global phenomenon, but also changed it through their creation of new protagonists, storylines, and themes. These important, if still largely unexplored, Latin American repertoires of Uncle Tom's Cabin add to the already rich insights we have on the multiple ways that Latin American and Iberian thought shaped Atlantic processes of democracy, liberalism, and antislavery in the nineteenth century.Footnote 28
Print Culture and Slavery
The Uncle Tom story reached Brazil in book, pamphlet, and serial form, revealing the contours of a multifaceted print arena and its publics. At mid-century, five dailies circulated in Rio, alongside dozens of shorter-run publications.Footnote 29 Hendrik Kraay has noted that the “variety of articles published in them [newspapers] increased,” implying a growing role for journalism in public culture.Footnote 30 An 1855 anecdote from the Diário do Rio de Janeiro describes (and creates) an excitement surrounding the publication of its daily editions:
In mounting anticipation every daybreak, people crowd together, jockeying and elbowing for access along the shops of the Rua do Ouvidor, waiting for the paper to be announced: public functionaries, justice officials, vagrants, men, women, and essentially the whole social spectrum, from the coachman to the highest public servant, gather, waiting for it come off the press. Once in people's hands, all parts of the capital release a collective cheer. The nation is saved.Footnote 31
Although this description is doubtlessly the newspaper's own projection of its wide import, it nonetheless furnishes us with an image of a reading public, even in its sharply differentiated terms. It points to how different levels of society connected to, and began filtering, the spread of print information.
The press also helped constitute Rio's mid nineteenth-century literary arena, which in turn wove deeper the connections between journalism, literature, and politics. Sixteen shops advertised books of all varieties, and at least eight reading salons sprouted on and around the same Rua do Ouvidor.Footnote 32 This period also saw the crônica become a mainstay of newspapers, making literature and the arts germane to urban sensibilities. In the 1840s and 1850s, Rio's papers turned to French literature—the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Eugene Sue, in particular—to heighten the crônica's literary profile.Footnote 33 Appearing at the bottom of the newspaper's front page, the crônica helped foster a more popular style of journalism, and increasingly encompassed thoughts on theater, the city, and, at times, politics.Footnote 34 The nineteenth-century intellectual Sílvio Romero synthesized these connections: “Literature is steered towards the press, and the press towards the political arena … the writer is [thus] a journalist and an orator, and also a politician.”Footnote 35 This emergent genre, which the literary critic Antônio Candido regarded as “having a decisive influence on the creation of new literary genres in the nineteenth century,” afforded Floresta both a style and a space in the newspaper from which to develop “Páginas.”Footnote 36
Any reckoning with print culture in nineteenth-century Brazil must deal with issues of literacy. In fact, it is especially necessary to do so in Brazil, a highly stratified slavery-based society, in which the 1872 national census documented a literacy rate of only 16 percent. Before trying to square such a figure with the reality of a rapidly expanding world of newspapers, books, and pamphlets, it is useful to consider how analyses of print culture in the hemispheric Americas can offer generative starting points for our own discussion.Footnote 37 For example, William Acree's incisive study of nineteenth-century Río de la Plata demonstrated that a focus on print culture goes beyond questions about reading and writing, and is necessarily entangled with concerns about “social behaviors, individual and collective values, economic transactions, political decisions, state institutions, and ideologies.”Footnote 38 Likewise, in work on both nineteenth-century Peru and Mexico, scholars turning to print culture are rearticulating how public spaces are constituted, regional identities are constructed, and prophecy narratives are fashioned.Footnote 39 It is thus this explicitly relational aspect of print culture that turns this analysis of Uncle Tom in Brazil into a broader exploration of cultural and political formations.
To interrogate further the apparent paradox between the expanding print arena and the lingering impression that Brazilians did not read much, we must pay attention to the spate of studies coming out of the Brazilian academy that fundamentally reappraise how we situate the press in relation to other dimensions of public life. In the last two decades alone, some 20 scholarly monographs and edited collections (to say nothing of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and master's and doctoral theses) have collectively broadened the horizons of the cultural and social history of the press. Perhaps because many of these works are emerging from communication, education, and literature departments, historians within, and to a larger extent, outside of Brazil, have yet to fully absorb the implications of this scholarship.Footnote 40 A 2016 historical guide to women's newspapers, for example, has shed light on the distribution of over 140 periodicals throughout the nineteenth century. These papers reflect the “tip of the iceberg,” in the editor's words, of the significantly more prominent nature of women's print activity than what was previously imagined.Footnote 41 Of course, as the ongoing digitization of archives promotes a new era of study of the newspapers, pamphlets, and books of imperial Brazil, we will be better able to contextualize the often-invoked low national literacy rate. We already know, however, from detailed analyses of Rio and Recife—the nation's largest and third-largest cities, respectively—that literacy levels in the urban cores reached nearly three times the national rate. Furthermore, we are also in a moment in which groundbreaking research on slave literacy is emerging. These findings are sharpening our understanding of popular reading practices, and of their role in galvanizing slaves’ networks.Footnote 42
From the premise, then, that the press played a salient role in urban life, we are less surprised to learn that Brazilians encountered the Uncle Tom story in the front, middle, and back pages of newspapers. Advertisements for Portuguese-language translations of the novel confirmed its national circulation, despite knowledge that copies of the work had been confiscated by authorities at Brazilian ports.Footnote 43 An American traveler, George Dunham, who walked the streets of Bahia on a September Sunday in 1853, noted the following in his journal: “I have seen a Brazilian who can read English reading a book that he appeared very cautious about anyone seeing the title of, but I saw on the cover, Uncle Tom['s] Cabin.”Footnote 44 Dunham's observation about Stowe's novel, which dominated his journal entry that day, is curiously as rich for what it reveals about the Boston-based Dunham's own literary horizons—we cannot forget that the novel was first printed in Boston—as for its commentary on the story's familiarity in Brazil.
As in Dunham's journal, it is quite striking that most references in the press to both the character Uncle Tom and Stowe herself appeared in passing comments with no explanation or identification, as if it were assumed that newspaper readers already knew about them. One article from 1854, for example, simply lamented the absence of a “Brazilian Stowe” to write about the illegal slave trade.Footnote 45 Another, from 1857, mentioned a story from an Indianapolis newspaper that had announced the death of the “real” Uncle Tom, “the 110-year-old, Thomaz [sic] Magruder.”Footnote 46 In the early 1860s, references to “Stowe” appeared, likewise without commentary, in articles on the US political crisis. Later, during Brazil's own slavery debates in 1871, one politician mentioned the influence of “Stowe's thoughts” on another's stirring, sentimentalist speech.Footnote 47 In 1876, when a black abolitionist newspaper in Recife commented on Uncle Tom's popularity in Europe, editors did not elaborate. Uncle Tom was as familiar an antislavery reference as any.Footnote 48
Over time, the story reached even wider audiences; in the 1870s and 1880s, theater troupes performed versions of the Uncle Tom story across the nation. In the early 1900s, a film version popularized it further, and in the late 1960s it aired as a telenovela, albeit in a notoriously short run. The production never recovered from the disgraceful decision to cast a white actor, in blackface, as Tom, a decision that triggered public protests.Footnote 49 More recently, Brazilian publishing houses have reprinted new editions of the novel, including one in 2012.Footnote 50 As such, “Páginas” represents a particular moment within the long and still-unfolding history of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Brazil, evoking a specific period (the 1850s and 1860s) in which the press most shaped the story's reception and circulation.
Meanwhile, there is still much to glean about the history of slavery from thinking about it in relation to the history of print culture. Both expanded in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the transatlantic slave trade a critical factor in Rio's transformation into a major Atlantic hub.Footnote 51 The port of entry for the overwhelming majority of African slaves arriving in Brazil in the nineteenth century, Rio's population doubled from the 1820s to the 1850s, reaching just over 200,000 in 1849; of these almost 40 percent, or an estimated 78,000 people, were enslaved. This was a staggering number: Rio's slave population exceeded the combined slave population in the ten largest cities of the US South.Footnote 52 Urban life, writes historian Jeffrey Needell, “was pervasively contoured and textured by Africans in sound, in smell, in its work and in its daily ways.”Footnote 53 As we know, people from across the social spectrum owned slaves, and the prevailing notions of citizenship and national belonging did not challenge slave-owning.Footnote 54 It was pervasive.
The press, nonetheless, played a still underappreciated role in how the history of the illegal slave trade unfolded. Between the law that prohibited the traffic in November 1831 and the second more substantively enforced ban of September 1850, more than 700,000 Africans entered Brazil. More African people were brought to Brazil in the 1830s and 1840s than during any other 20-year period of Brazil's notoriously long participation in the slave trade.Footnote 55 Astonishingly, about 315, 000 people were disembarked “illegally” on Rio's shores in the 1840s alone, with most taken to the surrounding coffee regions.Footnote 56 Surely, Floresta's use of the African-born Domingos as the protagonist in “Páginas” was not an abstract reference. The trade, moreover, persisted openly, and Brazilian historian Alain El Youssef makes the compelling argument that newspapers helped normalize this activity. He demonstrates that though Rio's pro-slavery sectors were ultimately unsuccessful in repealing the prohibition of 1831, their public discussions legitimized the illicit trade, and, just as importantly, quelled dissenting opinion.Footnote 57 In a related development, the slave trade fueled press activity that aligned editors, subscribers, and members of certain partisan factions who together successfully promoted pro-slavery interests as “national” interests. Following the 1850 ban on the international slave trade, pro-slavery politicking continued most successfully through parliamentary and diplomatic channels. This effort thwarted antislavery discussions in parliament, and promoted immigration as a complementary—not just a replacement—labor force. It also demanded a broader defense of slaveholding interests by signing reciprocal treaties with surrounding republics to ensure the return of runaway slaves.Footnote 58
Already a public issue, the process of slavery remained enmeshed with the press throughout the 1850s. For example, an antislavery organ, O Philanthropo, published from 1849 to 1852, aimed to make the slave trade and slavery debatable. Partially funded by the British government, the paper mobilized what was then the longest-running abolitionist association.Footnote 59 In this context, the secretary of the association, Manoel da Cunha Galvão, aired his own plan of abolition in the mid 1850s. It ran during the same months as Floresta's story and stood out for its pragmatic approach. Cunha Galvão proposed several directives, including a prohibition on foreigners and the clergy owning people, the creation of high taxes for slave ownership in coastal cities, the freeing of newborn slaves in these same littoral regions, and finally, the designation of slave-free zones across the country.Footnote 60 These were the multidimensional measures necessary to “root out the country's inveterate habits, those buried deep because of slavery,” Cunha Galvão wrote.Footnote 61 His statement, appearing in the wake of O Philanthropo’s run in the early 1850s, show the press also at the center of antislavery formulations. Even though antislavery articles appeared in a space dominated by advertisements and cultural discourses that largely legitimated slavery, as we will see in the third part of this article, these writings illustrate a public sphere that is important to processes that tried to both extend and curtail the history of slavery. As such, in turning to an analysis of the reception and adaptation of the Uncle Tom story, we can also ask questions about how literary depictions of slavery played off existing public norms.
Domingos and “Damnation to All Owners”
“Páginas de uma vida obscura” built on, deepened, and reshaped Brazilian understandings of Uncle Tom's Cabin. It appeared in O Brasil Ilustrado, a literary journal in the national capital that exchanged issues with the Mercantil de São Paulo and A Ilustração Francesa (Paris).Footnote 62 “Páginas” came out three years after the publication of Stowe's novel in 1852, two years after it was translated into Portuguese, and also a couple of years after a prominent Rio newspaper enthusiastically reported on Stowe's publicity tour through Europe. We remember that “Páginas” also followed Floresta's initial reflections on Stowe, which were first printed in the Opúsculo humanitário. These references thus offer a Luso-Brazilian context from which to situate Floresta's short story and also to analyze further one of the work's most salient qualities: its rendering of slavery and of the domestic slave trade as problems of national importance. This is a crucial distinction of Floresta's engagement of Uncle Tom's Cabin, as when the story is iterated around the world, it nearly always focuses on social life in the United States. In nationalizing the story, moreover, Floresta achieves something else: to undermine a fundamental pillar of Brazilian slaveholding—the “benevolent slave-owner” ideology. Pro-slavery sectors developed this notion by contrasting Brazilian and US slavery, and insisting on the former's “milder” and “more humane” nature. In fact, this comparative trope had been recently (mid 1840s) deployed in the press to defend a Brazilian, as opposed to a British, solution to the problem of the illegal slave trade.Footnote 63
Floresta wrote “Páginas” with the intent of revealing a true Christian, an honorable man who despite a lifetime in captivity, did not lose “his soul to the spirit of revenge.”Footnote 64 An extended synopsis follows, in part because Floresta's story is largely unfamiliar, and also because my grappling with Floresta's work takes seriously the inner dynamics of the plot. In this respect, I take inspiration from historian Zephyr Frank's recent call to regard the social problems described in literature as generative, and not just reflective, of historical processes.Footnote 65 Enslaved at age 10, Domingos is trafficked to Rio in 1810. A “benevolent” owner from Minas Gerais purchases him, and roundly lauds his diligence, to the extent that the new owner promises to eventually free him.Footnote 66 As with Tom's fate in Stowe's novel, however, Domingos's chance for freedom vanishes with the owner's sudden death. Ownership passes to a “cruel” next of kin, and the ensuing interactions reinforce Domingos's standing as “the true Christian.” Despite the worsening treatment, Domingos remains loyal, going so far as to accept blame for a murder the owner commits. In so doing, he spares the man from vigilantes and is himself imprisoned. This sets up Floresta's striking comparison between the “heroic black man's actions [and] that of a character named J. C. [Jesus Christ].”Footnote 67 Through these allusions, Floresta presents Domingos, and by extension other Brazilian slaves, as virtuous, but without noting that such a quality is implicitly defined from a white perspective, and premised on the slave's performance of loyalty.
The domestic slave trade undergirds the latter part of Floresta's story. The action first swings to the Brazilian south, where Domingos was sold after being imprisoned. He lands in Porto Alegre, a city familiar to Floresta from her experiences as a teacher there in the 1830s. Domingos's new owner, a Frenchman, admires him for not stopping to mingle in the public square when walking the man's son to the school convent every morning. He did “not stop to socialize with other Africans, like most slaves did,” Floresta writes.Footnote 68 Although intended to affirm Domingos's “diligence,” the statement also invokes the familiar trope of the “idyl African” (in contrast to the exceptional Domingos) to make the point. Domingos's performance of respectability, it appears, depended on his breaking ties with other “Africans,” who at the time were readily depicted as “uncivilized” in the press.”Footnote 69 The exceptionalizing of Domingos's character thus does little to counter extent perceptions of Africans, who totaled two-thirds of the enslaved population in Rio.Footnote 70 Nevertheless, Domingos's seemingly “fortunate” tie to the French family also ends abruptly, as they have to return to Europe. Though it is not explicit in “Páginas,” this development may have added to an antislavery critique then running in the press about foreigners who owned slaves only while abroad, but retreated from it when in Europe.Footnote 71 Still, the family's departure left Domingos in a situation both perilous and preposterous. As a supposed “sign of gratitude,” the family allowed Domingos to choose his next owner. For the record, this was now the second “benevolent” owner who did not consider freeing him. Not surprisingly, Domingos's new owner also exemplified the “best” of Brazilian slaveholding ideology, artfully blending mastery and paternalism.
Yet, it was in the context of this new relationship that Floresta allows for the first perceptible rebuttal of the “good owner” narrative. In appreciating, out loud, the qualities of this new master, Domingos is interrupted by a man sitting nearby who categorically objects to his insinuation that “ordinarily, it is the slaves’ own fault for the maltreatment that they receive.” Enraged, the man, a slave, replies, “Damnation to all owners, who can only see us as those that their God has condemned, as capable of living and dying only under these brutal conditions.” The slave decries the fact that he has been bought and sold eight times, reminding Domingos that the words “patience” and “generosity” are “meaningless to our class.” Granted, the man's words did not reach the level of resistance witnessed in Stowe's fugitive slave George Harris, who shot at authorities, but they still refuted the “benevolent owner” idea.Footnote 72
Stricken, Domingos realizes that this was “the first time he had discussed family separation in as much detail.” The slave-to-slave interaction lends Domingos a new view “of this cruel reality that profoundly affected Brazil,” and from that point forward Floresta's storyline develops slaves’ horizontal, as opposed to just vertical, relationships. For instance, while still in southern Brazil, Domingos falls in love with Maria, “a tall and beautiful black woman, who would have truly shone had she the opportunity of an education.”Footnote 73 Here, Floresta's commitment to women's education appears boldly, in the suggestion that an enslaved woman deserved, and would have thrived with, an education. When political pressures force Maria's “family” to Rio, however, a despondent Domingos promises to “work harder” so that his owner might one day buy her and reunite them—not as free people, but as a slave couple. A year later, and in the face of a ravaging epidemic, Domingos and his owner also leave for Rio. There he finds Maria, who is sick, a shadow of her exuberant self. She dies soon after, sending Domingos into a prolonged downward spiral. The pain abates years later with the birth of a son, Ephraim, whose mother was nevertheless immediately sold away. In another devastating blow, Ephraim dies young. These mounting circumstances prompt an inconsolable Domingos to begin speaking of slavery in raw terms: “The only woman I loved died because of slavery; and the mother of my son was sold away; and now, he who was my joy is also dead!”Footnote 74
Slavery, in other words, left Domingos hollow, destroying the relationships he once imagined he could protect by exemplifying model behavior. In the penultimate chapter, Floresta pivots directly back to Uncle Tom's Cabin to strike at the comparativist trope that sustained the idea of Brazil's “benevolent” slavery: “Unlike the thoughtless St. Clare who died leaving Tom at the hands of speculators, the life of the Brazilian Tom, who experienced more hardships and yet still showed more loyalty than his counterpart from the United States, would be of much greater interest to the reader had it been penned by Mrs. Stowe.” The reference makes clear that Domingos's “loyalty” and adherence to the “rules of non-resistance” did not, in fact, translate into a less brutal life—the Brazilian system did not prove less savage than the market-driven order of the United States. And, because of the much-commented and racist ending to Uncle Tom's Cabin, which allowed African colonization as a solution to the “problem of black freedom,” it bears clarifying that Floresta's story ended with Domingos staying in Brazil. Domingos never returned to Africa, dying in Rio “on May, 11 1854 … in the silence of obscurity.”Footnote 75
In Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, Floresta found not only a form for fictionalizing slavery, but also a means of making the US and Brazilian slave realities appear much more similar than how Brazilians discussed it at the time. To be sure, the patterning of Domingos after Stowe's Uncle Tom entailed a reproduction of a recognizably “passive” symbol of the enslaved. Domingos rarely if ever contemplated his situation outside the framework of slavery. In effect, unlike Tom who at a late point in Stowe's novel refused to whip another slave, Domingos never wavered in his deference to authority. His characterization incorporated aspects of the minstrel tropes that filled Stowe's novel, and yet his behavior was also supposed to counter prevailing assumptions about Africans’ supposed lack of honor.
When we consider “Páginas,” however, in relation to existing public discussions of Uncle Tom, we note its importance in making local matters more debatable. Three different instances show that the Brazilian press had already summoned the international import of Stowe, and produced its own narratives about Uncle Tom's Cabin. The first instance occurred in reports of Stowe's trip to Europe in 1853.Footnote 76 British newspapers, and by extension the Brazilian journals that gleaned the significance of world events from British periodicals, narrated an enthusiastic storyline for Stowe's transatlantic journey.Footnote 77 Her departure from New York en route to Scotland, for example, garnered space on the Correio Mercantil’s second page. For effect, it emphasized that Stowe's novel had already yielded “twenty-thousand dollars, or twenty-six [Brazilian] contos in just nine months”—the amount required for buying the freedom of 25 people in Rio.Footnote 78 In another story about the trip, the Diário do Rio de Janeiro celebrated the 26 volumes of antislavery petitions presented to Stowe on behalf of British women, petitions that totaled around a half -million signatures.Footnote 79 In Switzerland, meanwhile, another kind of festivity occurred: residents of Geneva organized a collection for Stowe to help free slaves upon returning home.Footnote 80 The practice of raising funds to free slaves was long familiar in Brazil, and the article made sense to readers; it is beside the point that Brazilian-style manumission campaigns were at that time, in the 1850s, virtually nonexistent in the United States. This string of articles used the European excitement surrounding Uncle Tom to expand Stowe's profile in Brazil. None, curiously, mentioned the spirited reactions and counter-reactions to the Uncle Tom phenomenon in the United States, perhaps because the nation was seen as “an economic, and increasingly political influence in the region,” but as still lacking a “literary tradition.”Footnote 81
The second string of public reflections occurred in reaction to the publication of excerpts of Floresta's Opúsculo humanitário. Here, we have the first critical engagement of Uncle Tom, with the schoolteacher proposing a feminist reading of Stowe. Published upon her return to Rio after a three-year stay in Europe (1849–52), the Opúsculo reflected Floresta's involvement in European discussions of women's rights. Her leading biographer put her in the same circles as Victor Hugo, Auguste Comte, and Alexandre Herculano. It is likely that Floresta herself first read Uncle Tom's Cabin in serialized form; Parisian newspapers printed such three versions of it before the book appeared, at the end of 1852.Footnote 82 Two of the Opúsculo's 62 chapters deal with Uncle Tom's Cabin. In them, Floresta stresses that Stowe's novel reflected the powers of “American education, and particularly, the intellectual development of its women.” She insists that Stowe personified “the Anglo-Saxon race, [which in] loving the truth, has through [this book] waged war on this great falsehood [of slavery].” Here, and elsewhere in the Opúsculo, Floresta implies that Anglocentric cultural influences enabled Stowe's antislavery thinking, making whiteness appear normative. Uncle Tom's Cabin was a book that Floresta envisioned having “our children memorizing its most salient passages—with the hope that this coming generation would put an end to the horrible crimes committed by the current generation against the African race!”
The “salient passages” that Floresta thought children would memorize center on “St. Clare, Senator Bird and his wife, Mrs. Shelby, the Quaker Rachel, the celestial Eva and her sublime loving spirit, and especially, the young George.”Footnote 83 All of the main characters were white. The two children featured in the book, Eva and George, represented the antislavery future that Floresta hoped to inspire in Brazil. Doubtless, these characters served to “whiten” antislavery ideology. The choices precluded a consideration of the fugitive slave George Harris, whose pursuits of freedom drew on his dreams of family reunification. Floresta's choices, however, did include a range of white women who challenged the norms of slavery, and, by extension, their socially prescribed roles as guardians of the patriarchal slave system. In highlighting Senator Bird's wife and the Quaker Rachel, Floresta established models of white virtuosity for Brazilian women to emulate. The decision not to single out Eliza, the enslaved mother who famously carried her young son across the Ohio River with slave-catchers on her heels, again showed Floresta's penchant for articulating antislavery sentiment through white characters. In important ways, then, we can see how Floresta's comparatively more balanced characterization of slave characters in “Páginas” stands in relation to her earlier analysis of Stowe's book. Though she deemed the white characters central to the story of slavery in the United States, she chose the story of Domingos and his family for her Brazilian rendering of the slavery problem.
The third phase of public reflection occurred with the Portuguese translation of Stowe's novel, which also emphasized specific themes. Translated by the Portuguese journalist, Francisco Ladislau Álvares d'Andrada, A cabana do Pai Thomaz (1853), was quite simply a product of the “furor,” as he put it, of the Uncle Tom phenomenon that swept Paris.Footnote 84 It was in the French capital where Andrada lived and learned of the novel's enthusiastic reception in Germany, Britain, Italy, and Spain.Footnote 85 In an otherwise literal translation, Andrada, who lacked a literary reputation, used most of the preface to reproduce essays about Stowe's novel by the prominent French author George Sand (pseudonym of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, 1804–1876). He was not alone in turning to Sand for a voice of authority and influence: both the National Era, the Washington DC antislavery paper that originally serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Lima's El Comercio also reprinted Sand's essays on Stowe's novels.Footnote 86
The famous opening line of the Sand essays—“This little book, in a few hundred pages, contains all the elements of a revolution”—projected a book of rippling effects. It was simultaneously celebrated as an antislavery manifesto and a women's-rights achievement. As Sand perceptively reminded Parisian readers, “At the pulpit, in the courts, in books and newspapers, in all countries and in all languages, eloquent voices have denounced the crime of slavery,” adding that it was a “woman's cry, a mother's cry, the cries of strangers, that have been the loudest and most powerful voices!” The gendered emphasis in her analysis goes beyond the matter of antislavery. It suggests a place for women's voices in public discourse, and at the same time elevates Stowe's sentimentalism by arguing that it “not only speaks to reason, but also to our eyes and hearts.”Footnote 87 In this sense, the emotive structures of the novel extend far beyond how one reads the plot—it attempts to render anew the conventions of political commentary, and, of course, to rethink the gendered definitions of “revolutionary.”
Sand (and Andrada) highlighted the ways in which Stowe's characters openly questioned entrenched customs, and sometimes even acted against them. She noted three examples: the “Senator from Ohio, who had voted for the Fugitive Slave Law, but ultimately obeyed his conscience, and helped the fleeing slaves”; the “beleaguered St. Clare, a generous and noble man who in the end was a victim of his own indolence”; and “the white slave, George, who triumphantly reunites with his wife in free lands, and is able, with her, to truly call their son ‘theirs’!”Footnote 88 Each of these characters and their actions represented entry points into Uncle Tom's Cabin with which readers in France, and later in Brazil, would become quite familiar. Sand argued that they revealed Stowe's commitment to the “eternal and inalienable right to freedom.”Footnote 89 In signaling the novel's themes, the issue of antislavery was front and center.
These four sets of texts (in chronological order here) mediated the early Brazilian reception of Uncle Tom's Cabin:): newspaper articles about Stowe's trip to Europe, excerpts from Floresta's Opúsculo humanitário, Andrada's Portuguese translation, and “Páginas.” Together, they provided a concrete basis from which to appreciate the extent to which Floresta had adapted the story, and highlight Brazilian realities such as the internal slave trade, the separation of slave families, and the reproduction of Brazil's seigniorial slaveholding ideology. The Uncle Tom story helped make Floresta's concerns intelligible and turned the cultural and legal premises of African slavery into more debatable propositions. Finally, from these four early engagements with the Uncle Tom story, we can see how it began to circulate in Brazil; to the point that when the more famous male Brazilian writers such as José de Alencar, Bernardo Guimarães, and Joaquim Manoel de Macedo all drew on Uncle Tom's Cabin in their own antislavery writings during the 1850s and 1860s, we can assume that their successes partly depended on the public's existing familiarity with Stowe's work.Footnote 90
Slavery and the Public Sphere
Clearly, “Páginas” strove to reorient public understandings of slavery. At the time, most references to slavery in the press presupposed its legitimacy. Newspapers, despite their prominent role in spreading the Uncle Tom phenomenon, were part of a political and economic order built on slavery. Yet, rather than regarding representations of slavery in the press as solely reflections of slaveholders’ power—the notion that slavery was visible in the press only because of its economic importance—we can also consider them as representative of cultural processes that constructed and projected ideals about slaveholding. In this way, we can draw on themes from Floresta's story to best situate the sensibilities of the time. With these themes in mind, we can begin to think more generally about how her story's representations of slavery and antislavery influenced the norms of public discourse, including the conventions of the press.
The back pages of newspapers, especially, offer a starting point for thinking about the cultural repertoires of slavery.Footnote 91 If only through sheer repetition, the torrent of announcements regarding the buying and selling of people, escaped persons, and new businesses (like insurance companies) that capitalized on the slave economy contributed forcefully to the production and reproduction of a normative slaveholding ideology.Footnote 92 That is, the publicizing of these different facets of slavery went beyond the practical matters of commercial transactions. People could have bought domestic workers, learned of slave auctions, and hired slave-catchers without advertisements, just as they presumably had done a half-century earlier, before the arrival of the printing press. But, it was meaningful to openly avow an investment in the institution; placing such an advertisement, in effect, asserted one's place in the social order. You had to imagine yourself as “someone” to place such announcement, and we know that not every case of slave flight made it to the press. The runaway ads, moreover, carried their own irony: although they ostensibly revealed that an enslaved person had successfully escaped, the ads somehow managed to turn the owner's apparent humiliation at having been outmaneuvered by a worker—a slave, no less—into a public display of power. They amounted to the ultimate projection of slaveholders' authority over a situation over which, in truth, they had lost control of; to boot, a good number of ads appeared up to two to three times over the span of a single week—somehow lessening the perception of the slaveholder's weakness, and all the while reaffirming that these cases should be regarded as matters of public interest. For decades, since at least the 1820s, this open forum for slave-owner business worked to ingrain the notion that people's rights were tied to their participation in the slave economy. We can only wonder how different the public narrative about slavery and freedom might have been had legal advocates, the formerly enslaved, or even newspaper editors published notices about lawsuits in which slaves sued for their freedom with half the regularity with which the runaway ads appeared. What would it have meant to have seen notices of freedom lawsuits run two or three times a week with descriptions not of runaway slaves but of the different methods of illegal enslavement?
The elaborate notices for slave auctions, in turn, perpetuated gendered occupational structures, and called attention to the public spaces where these ritualistic spectacles transpired.Footnote 93 As if to sharpen the connection between the discursive world of the press and the material realities of slavery, one auction ad called people to the Rua do Ouvidor, where several print shops were located.Footnote 94 It was against the pervasive notion that the business of slavery was inextricable from the rhythms of everyday life that Floresta's critiques of the domestic slave trade in general and of the benevolent Brazilian slave-owner in particular appear particularly potent. Narrating the experiences of human commodification through the story of Domingos's life represented a powerful counter-perspective on issues that were virtually taken for granted. In this respect, the Uncle Tom story, with its own focus on the trade, helped Floresta key in on these aspects of slavery, which, as we will see shortly, were not necessarily the focus of other antislavery writings.
The normalization of slaveholding ideology also happened in the newspaper's front pages, where specific ideas crystallized about the supposedly “more benign” features of Brazilian slaveholding. Primarily, this notion was presented in articles that drew comparisons between Brazilian slavery and slavery elsewhere, usually in the United States. To work convincingly, these pieces had to elide the everyday violence of slavery. In one example, the Jornal’s weekly crônica reflected on the “humanizing” effects of Catholicism on national culture, including slavery.Footnote 95 The observations came from a cronista who had witnessed an Afro-Brazilian devotion and concluded that religion played an important role in fostering the comparative inclusion of free blacks in Brazilian public life. The comparativist trope shapes the description of the São Benedito devotion:
[Benedito], is a black saint who is popular in this land of Africans and Afrodescendants … whose devotion reveals ancient customs. [There is a] Benedito in the sky and an Henrique Dias among the nation's heroes; they complement each other, and are a unique product of this slavery. … Imagine a Benedito procession in New Orleans, or an Henrique Dias as a symbol of their [United States] republican pride. How would these icons challenge the absurd and oppressive beliefs that structure their social relations? Among us, the slave has always been a member of the family, as in the age of the [Old Testament] patriarchs. Through our laws and traditions, there exist means for his redemption. Honor the Catholic religion: it is an inspiration for humanitarian progress against this regretful reality [of slavery].Footnote 96
The passage, even if ultimately urging readers to imagine a future without slavery, was nonetheless premised on contrasting “Catholic” and “Protestant” patterns of social relations. Thus, decades before it gained currency in Brazilian abolitionist thought, Brazilian writers participated in this comparative exercise, which essentialized their own seigniorial culture. This occurred decades before Joaquim Nabuco would write in his famous 1883 book O abolicionismo—“Our slavery has produced an incomparably more elastic society than the race-based system of the US South”—and almost a century prior to Freyre's and Tannenbaum's well-known historiographical formulations.Footnote 97 Here, the Benedito procession and the national reverence for Henrique Dias, the fabled black militia leader of the seventeenth century, represented the best of Brazil's own “laws and traditions.”Footnote 98 The crônica, then, brought out how notions of Brazilian slavery's exceptionalism were essential to understandings of popular culture and religion. It also exemplified how the reproduction of the seigniorial ideology worked, to the point where the comparison between the two societies effectively prevented any consideration of the centuries-long history of Iberian-Catholic slavery in its own right. It also buried any and all considerations of the bodily violence and family separation that were routinely featured in advertisements in the Brazilian newspaper's back pages.
The milder image of Brazilian slavery also shows up in other writings that tried to foster antislavery sympathies. During the months in which “Páginas” was serialized, for example, Rio's two major dailies translated several essays from the British and Foreign Antislavery Society (BFASS). Between them, and even though coverage was sometimes overlapping, the Diário and the Jornal printed five antislavery articles.Footnote 99 For context, these articles reflected the growing relationship between Rio's abolitionists and their British interlocutors, which strengthened in 1852 when John Chandler and Wilson Burgess visited the imperial capital on behalf of British Quakers and met with several dozen men of a Brazilian abolitionist society. Thereafter, Chandler remained an enthusiastic advocate of Brazil's chances of abolishing slavery and presented several reports in this regard to the British and Foreign Antislavery Society.
Chandler's representation of Brazil to the BFASS, and by extension the representations of Brazil made by the Brazilian press to its own readers, cultivated the narratives of “innocence” and “humanitarianism.” As to the former, Chandler proclaimed a certain Brazilian “innocence” in its recent participation in the international slave trade, arguing that it was a holdover of the colonial past, preserved to safeguard the interests of a powerful bloc of Portuguese traders living in Rio. “Rio's Portuguese residents had monopolized the trade, and enriched themselves from it,” he wrote, but “had [it] been up to the Brazilian government the African traffic would have been abolished much earlier.”Footnote 100 If clearly at odds with what locals knew to be true, Chandler's explanation permitted the idea that slavery was against Brazil's national character. It also tapped into existing strains of Lusophobia that ran through public discourse in postcolonial Brazil and inflamed a number of protests and rebellions across the country.Footnote 101 Moreover, it conveniently glossed over the state policies and cultural mores that had enabled the expansion of slavery in the nineteenth century.
Chandler's letter also made explicit comparisons to the United States. Regretful though he may have been about an antislavery bill that had been recently thwarted in the Brazilian parliament, Chandler nonetheless affirmed that “Brazil's legislative body showed itself more willing to hear the clamors for justice than the different states in the US South where slavery still existed.” Brazil was a place, Chandler reminded his British fellows, where “there are laws in place for a slave to seek a magistrate to determine his value, and to then work for his freedom. … Furthermore, the concentration of the slave population makes it in the owner's interest to treat them sufficiently well to prevent insurrections.”Footnote 102
Not unlike the cronista's description of the Benedito processions, the articles from the British and Foreign Antislavery Society attempted to stir antislavery sentiment. Yet, it is striking that the common starting point was to push for further reform based on Brazil's comparatively more “amenable,” more “humane” mode of slavery. And, we must remember that these were not just ideas about Brazil tailored for a British public in the British press. They were articles were being reprinted in Portuguese for Brazilian audiences. Interestingly, abolitionists in the United States also invoked Brazil's “milder type of bondage” in political discourse.Footnote 103 The underlying acceptance of this premise, and just as critically its ongoing reproduction, extended well beyond circles traditionally associated with pro-slavery interests. The ideology of exceptionalism was ambiguous enough to mean different things to different people, all the while entrenching the notion of a non-violent, “Brazilian” way forward for ending slavery. This was an insidious ideology that hemmed public thinking about slavery around questions of national and religious character.Footnote 104 To be certain, much work remains to be done on the cultural and intellectual trajectory of this discourse in imperial Brazil.
Rio's important dailies, in running such stories on their front pages, and printing slave advertisements in their back pages, were working out how discussions of slavery related to power dynamics. Rather than inviting us to parse the abolitionist or pro-slavery dimensions of every last article about slavery, these references are useful for gauging what was considered permissible at this point in time; for understanding the rules of the public sphere; and thus for giving us a richer perspective on the implications of Floresta's adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In an unusually blistering tone, for example, the Jornal printed an article about one José de Souza Velho. A Portuguese national and steamship captain, Souza Velho was roundly denounced for his recent participation in the African slave trade. However, the point of contention may have had more to do with his position as the Portuguese captain of a Brazilian steamer: the reader was reminded along the way that the “law maintained that such ships had to be commanded by Brazilians.” Outraged, the author asked “the public to evaluate the situation.” The piece identified Souza Velho as the captain of a ship that had been apprehended at Rio in 1851 on suspicion of trafficking slaves. In light of this “scandalous fact,” it insisted that authorities remove Souza Velho from his [current] post.Footnote 105 On the surface a controversy over a specific person, or perhaps the business practices of the steamship company that had hired him, the article demonstrated how one's ties to the slave trade could be marshaled to draw out further scrutiny of a situation. Of course, this article sparked neither a litany of similar exposés on other traders, nor a more a general condemnation of Rio's slave owners, who overwhelmingly benefitted from this recent trade. Yet, in selectively naming names, and in openly excoriating this foreigner, the polemic allowed the complainant an entry into the public arena.
Interestingly, as “Páginas” approached the fourth of its eight installments, the Diário ran its own antislavery story—“The Fugitive Slave”—offering us yet another vantage point on the interplay between the press and literature, and between literature and public reflections on slavery. Presented as anonymous, though its relative length (3200 words) suggested the work of an established writer, the story spanned the entire front page of the Saturday, April 21, 1855, edition.Footnote 106 Set on an unnamed plantation in 1850, it revolves around a white mistress's marriage to Dionísio, a successful merchant whose hidden slave past hangs over the narrative. Controversy erupts when Dionísio's rival, Augusto, the scion of a landed family, takes interest in an ad seeking the return of a runaway slave who had fled from the neighboring province of Minas Gerais 18 years earlier. His subsequent response to the announcement thickens the plot, creating a climate of suspicion around Dionísio. His own father-in-law grows mistrustful of him. Soon, though, the former owner's arrival from Minas Gerais leads to a string of powerful revelations, beginning with Dionísio's desperate attempt to “settle the situation” at once by offering the man “ten to twenty slaves and a sizeable amount of money” for his freedom.
In a twist, we learn that the owner's underlying motive was actually to locate Dionísio in order to free him—to make amends for something that his late brother (and Dionísio's birth father) never did. To do so, the owner draws up two documents. The first is a letter of freedom for Dionísio's mother, Luiza, who died while giving birth to him. The thinking is that in establishing her free status, Dionísio's own free birth could be ensured. For added security, the second document is a birth certificate that lists Dionísio as the owner's “natural” son. These new relationships, his owner and newly proclaimed father tells him, “may not bring you fortune, but it does give you the family lineage needed to protect your freedom.”Footnote 107 But even though he is legally protected, Dionísio never fully regains his footing. A stroke debilitates and then kills him, just a short time later.
Positioned on the front page of Rio's oldest daily, “The Fugitive Slave” repeats certain themes and introduces others to provoke an ongoing public reflection on slavery. It illustrates how fiction—including “Páginas,” of course—broadened the terms for discussing the slave trade in particular.Footnote 108 We still need a better understanding of how it did so, but it is evident that the recent history of the slave trade also influenced literary sensibilities and left its mark on the press as well. Notably, both authors set their stories in contemporary times, choosing 1850 in the case of “The Fugitive Slave” and the longer nineteenth century in Floresta's, to flesh out their respective themes. Future research on these and other serialized stories about slavery could probe deeper into any number of common points, like the characterization of the enslaved and of the “benevolent owners,” who despite their “best intentions,” never really freed the Domingos and Dionísios from bondage. The recurring trope of the vanishing and the vanished enslaved women from these stories is also striking, given women's prominent roles in urban freedom struggles all across Brazil.Footnote 109 More broadly, though, these stories illuminate a cultural process whereby the fictionalizing of slavery gained visibility for the institution in the press. Although it may not have directly weakened the institution, it did contribute to making literary representations of slavery a more conventional feature of newspapers and thus keeping slavery under public attention .
Conclusion
On one level, this reexamination of “Páginas,” and the surrounding Brazilian responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin, have established that Latin American interlocutors, and Iberian interlocutors with ties to Latin America, were integral to producing this global cultural phenomenon. In centering on the Congo-born Domingos, for example, Floresta's adaptation made visible one of the millions of Africans who was central to the narratives of Atlantic modernity, but who was excised from it. It added new dimensions to the already complex and multivalent transatlantic debates about Stowe's novel, discussions that were casting fresh views on topics ranging from antislavery to colonialism to women's education. Yet, in a popular New York City monthly of the time, the prevailing sentiment was that the “Aztecs, Gauchos, or Brazilians” had yet to be “Uncle Tomitized.”Footnote 110 Beyond providing a factual corrective to this rather racialized projection about who was thought capable of having a place in the literary developments of the day, this article demonstrates that slavery was a subject matter and a historical process that connected Latin America to the cultural and intellectual currents of the Atlantic world and beyond.
On another level, this article shows that asking questions about the public sphere, that is, about the terms through which slavery was represented, can lead us to appreciate new points of convergence between the histories of the press and of slavery—and from there raise fresh questions about the long-term nature of Brazilian slavery. This line of inquiry moves us to historicize not only the processes of antislavery expression, but also the character of the slaveholding ideologies that enabled the institution to appear “natural” and embed it in local customs. In part, then, the comparatively late rise of Brazilian abolitionism, so often mentioned, becomes less relatable to a lack of civic culture or even democratic practices (such as the free press, abolitionist associations, or regular elections), and more about understanding how slaveholding interests were articulated through such spaces.Footnote 111 The press, as such, emerges as an arena from which to continue exploring the intersecting trajectories of Atlantic slavery and liberalism in the nineteenth century.
