The 1869 decree that abolished slavery in the Portuguese empire, on paper

On the last day of 1868 King Luís signed a decree that ended slavery in the Portuguese empire with immediate effect. Every minister countersigned it. It was never promulgated, and without publication it was not law.1 source1 source

Its author was José Maria Latino Coelho, minister of the navy and overseas territories in the government of the Marquis of Sá da Bandeira. On 9 January 1869 he wrote to the 73-year-old marquis about what had happened. A disagreement inside the cabinet, he said, had blocked the text.2 sources2 sources

Eight weeks later, on 25 February 1869, a second text was signed at the palace. This one went through. It appeared in the Diário do Governo, the official gazette, on 27 February, signed by the king, by Sá da Bandeira and by five other ministers. Its first article took one line: “The state of slavery is abolished in all the territories of the Portuguese monarchy from the day of publication of the present decree.”2 sources2 sources

The second article explained what that meant. Every person of either sex who was enslaved on that day would pass to the condition of liberto, with the rights and duties already laid down for libertos in 1854. The third article said whom they would serve: the people who had been their masters. Their obligation would end on 29 April 1878.1 source1 source

In 1869 Portugal was a constitutional monarchy whose overseas territories lay mostly in Africa, from Cape Verde and Guinea to São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique, with smaller holdings in India and Macau. Almost all the enslaved people the decree covered lived in the African colonies.2 sources2 sources

In mainland Portugal slavery had begun to be wound down in the eighteenth century. A law of 19 September 1761, from the government of the Marquis of Pombal, banned the shipping of Black people from Africa, Asia or America to the kingdom and freed those who arrived. A law of 16 January 1773 declared free every child born in Portugal from then on, though most people already enslaved there stayed so. Both applied only to the kingdom, not to the colonies; a decree of 1832 extended them to the Azores and Madeira.2 sources2 sources

Historians still argue about Pombal's motives. The curators who wrote the text for the 2019 commemorative stamps say the 1761 law was meant to send the trade in captives to the mines and plantations of Brazil, and that this aim weighed more than the humanitarian concerns it also voiced.2 sources2 sources

The man behind most of the laws was Bernardo de Sá Nogueira, Marquis of Sá da Bandeira. Born in Santarém on 26 September 1795, he joined the liberal revolution of 1820 and served as minister for the overseas territories, on and off, from 1832 to 1870. In 1836 he put a bill to the upper house that would have banned the slave trade, freed all children born to enslaved mothers and forced owners to register their slaves. It did not pass.2 sources2 sources

He had one arm. In the civil war between liberals and absolutists he was military governor of besieged Porto, and on 8 September 1832, leading reinforcements at the Alto da Bandeira on the Gaia side of the Douro, he was hit by a bullet that shattered his right arm. He stayed in command until the attack was beaten off, and surgeons then amputated the arm. The title of baron of Sá da Bandeira, granted in April 1833, rewarded that day's fighting.1 source1 source

What survived was narrower. A decree of 10 December 1836 banned the export of slaves from all Portuguese territories, by sea or by land, but dropped the parts about freeing children and registering slaves. A treaty with Britain followed on 3 July 1842. Neither touched slavery itself inside the colonies.2 sources2 sources

The 1850s brought a burst of laws. The decree of 14 December 1854 ordered every slave to be registered within 30 days and freed, as libertos, all slaves owned by the state and anyone left off the register. A law of 24 July 1856 declared free the children born to enslaved women after its publication, but the deputies amended it so that those children had to serve their mothers' masters without pay until the age of 20.2 sources2 sources

In a few places slavery ended outright. It was abolished in 1856 in the newly occupied district of Ambriz and the rest of Angola north of the river Loge, and in Macau, where the owners had freed their slaves of their own accord. A decree of 10 March 1857 freed the handful of slaves on the Cape Verdean island of São Vicente.2 sources2 sources

Then, on 29 April 1858, a three-article decree set a deadline: slavery would end everywhere under Portuguese rule 20 years later, on 29 April 1878. Sá da Bandeira presented it to King Pedro V as a memento of his wedding, which took place in Berlin that same day. Owners who still held slaves in 1878 were promised compensation under “a special law”. Parliament never passed one.2 sources2 sources

Marques, who has studied how Portugal's parliament handled emancipation, reads the 1850s differently from the way Sá da Bandeira and later historians did. He calls the decade a capitulation, in which the abolitionists gave up their first aims and passed laws that suited their opponents. The title of his article calls the whole process from 1836 to 1875 “uma cosmética demorada”, a long-drawn-out cosmetic exercise.1 source1 source

Read beside the laws of the 1850s, the decree of 1869 moved the end date for nobody. A person enslaved in Luanda in January 1869 owed work to the same master until 29 April 1878, exactly as before. The only change was the word for that person's condition.2 sources2 sources

Marques argues that its main weight was diplomatic. It let Portugal say that slavery had formally ended on its territory, and in 1871 Lisbon and London signed an additional convention to the 1842 treaty that wound up the mixed commissions set up to judge captured slave ships. In practice, he writes, the new decree changed nothing.1 source1 source

Slave owners had fought even the idea. When Sá da Bandeira's abolition bill of 1865 was sent to the colonies for comment, the president of Angola's general council voted against it on 17 May 1865 and warned that it would bring Angola a ruin greater than the barbarian invasions had brought Europe. Four members voted with him. Luanda's commercial association called the captivity of the day “mild” and slavery an excellent way to give Africans a taste for work.1 source1 source

When the 1869 decree reached Luanda, a letter from the city dated 25 April reported that it had caused no upheaval at all. The decree did stir the Associação Comercial de Lisboa, the capital's chamber of commerce, which in 1872 published a pamphlet on the labour question in the African colonies, with special reference to São Tomé and Príncipe.2 sources2 sources

The question of compensation explains much of the design. Sá da Bandeira estimated that buying out the owners would have cost 3,000 to 4,000 contos, a sum he thought parliament would hardly vote given the state of the public finances. He explained the solution in a book published in 1873.2 sources2 sources

In other words, the enslaved paid for their own emancipation in years of work. Marques notes that emancipation laws in the Americas, from New York to Venezuela, often built in transitions of about 25 years for the same reason, and that Portugal followed that model while presenting itself as the equal of its European peers.1 source1 source

In 1874 Sá da Bandeira and the overseas minister Andrade Corvo proposed bringing forward the end of liberto status. The upper house approved the bill at once; the lower house passed it unanimously in March 1875. The law of 29 April 1875 had 39 articles. One year after its publication in each colony there would be no more libertos. They would be fully free, but “subject to public tutelage” until 29 April 1878.1 source1 source

Tutelage meant work. The former libertos, now called serviçais, were “obliged to contract their services” for two years, preferably with their old masters, and could be contracted to serve in another colony, which met São Tomé's need for labour. Anyone judged a vagrant faced up to two years of compulsory work. Compensation for the owners was deferred again and made to depend on strict inquiries, so in Marques's words the state carried out emancipation without spending anything.1 source1 source

The deadline of April 1878 did not end the system either. A regulation of 21 November 1878 kept its principles, including the rules on vagrancy, and it was under that regulation and the 1875 law that labour contracts were still being drawn up in Angola in the 1900s.2 sources2 sources

Sá da Bandeira knew the system was abused. In April 1873 he drew the upper house's attention to official reports of “inhuman treatment” of libertos on São Tomé, and to the duty of the authorities to give many of them the full freedom the law already owed them.1 source1 source

On São Tomé the historian Augusto Nascimento describes what happened next. Many of the newly emancipated refused to keep working for their former masters, and the authorities could not force them. The planters, including local landowners, turned instead to labourers brought from Angola. Nascimento judges that from the last decades of the nineteenth century until about 1910 the serviçais differed little from slaves.1 source1 source

Foreign visitors noticed. In 1897 Héli Chatelain, a former United States commercial agent in Luanda who had written grammars of Angolan languages, gave a lecture to the American Geographical Society on the slave trade inside Africa, illustrated with lantern slides. Scientific American printed a digest with his pictures, including one captioned as young enslaved girls in a trader's yard in Luanda.1 source1 source

Cocoa had made the plantations rich. Their cocoa exports grew fourfold in the ten years to 1901, from 3,597 tons to 14,914. The official returns of 1900, quoted by the British journalist Henry Nevinson, put São Tomé's population at 37,776, of whom 19,211 were serviçais, and Príncipe's at 4,327, including 3,175 serviçais. In 1901 another 4,572 arrived.2 sources2 sources

Nevinson travelled through Angola and to the islands between December 1904 and July 1905 for Harper's Monthly Magazine, and his reports came out as a book, A Modern Slavery, in 1906. He followed the labour route from the interior to the coast. At Benguela he watched the official ceremony that turned captives into contracted workers.3 sources3 sources

The contract form he copied declared that the worker came “of his own free will” under the law of 29 April 1875 and the regulation of 21 November 1878, for five years. Nevinson reckoned that a little under 4,000 people a year, not counting babies, were being shipped to the islands. On Príncipe, he wrote, citing British consular reports, 867 serviçais died in 1901, a death rate of 20.67 per cent. A plantation doctor on São Tomé put the yearly death rate on his estate at 12 to 14 per cent and named the main cause as anaemia brought on by “tristeza”, unhappiness.1 source1 source

Nevinson also tried to hear the workers themselves. He had learnt some Umbundu, the language of the central Angolan highlands, and as his ship anchored off São Tomé in June 1905 he questioned two sisters of about 15 or 16 from Bihé. They answered in whispers.1 source1 source

The scandal reached the British chocolate makers. Cadbury Brothers had bought São Tomé cocoa since 1886, and around 1901 the islands supplied 45 to 55 per cent of its beans, depending on the account. With other chocolate firms it sent an investigator, Joseph Burtt, whose report reached the planters in 1907, and it lobbied Lisbon and the Foreign Office rather than stop buying.3 sources3 sources

In September 1908 the Standard, a Conservative newspaper, accused the Quaker firm of hypocrisy. Cadbury announced a boycott of São Tomé cocoa on 19 March 1909 and sued for libel. In November 1909 a jury found for Cadbury but awarded damages of one farthing, a quarter of a penny.3 sources3 sources

Repatriation, the test of whether a contract was free, had existed in law for years. When William Cadbury visited Angola in late 1908, the Curador at Novo Redondo, the official in charge of contract workers, told him that ten men who had landed there from São Tomé on 4 December were the first ever repatriated. One of them, Bumba, carried 80 milreis, about £16, a little less than a five-year worker's repatriation fund owed him. The other nine had nothing.1 source1 source

Sá da Bandeira did not see any of this. He died in Lisbon on 6 January 1876, before the deadline he had set for 1878 arrived. With his will he left a short note on his life as a soldier: “I was wounded four times in the siege of Porto; in one I lost an arm. The country owes me nothing.”2 sources2 sources

Nascimento dates the shift on São Tomé to around 1910, after the fall of the monarchy, when the planters' arbitrary power over the serviçais began to recede. After that, he writes, contract labour and forced labour alternated or existed side by side on the plantations, depending on the group of workers and the politics of the moment.1 source1 source

International pressure returned in the 1920s, and in 1930 the International Labour Organization adopted a convention against forced labour. Portugal ratified it only in 1956, and a second convention, on abolishing forced labour, in 1959. Nascimento describes the 1930s on São Tomé, when planters kept Angolan and Mozambican workers beyond their contracts with the authorities' consent, as a kind of re-enslavement.3 sources3 sources

When forced labour ended is still disputed. Nascimento notes that some authors take 1960 as the end date on São Tomé, and he rejects as unscholarly the claim that it lasted in the Portuguese colonies until 1974. The Barrow Cadbury Trust's own history of the scandal says coerced labour continued until independence in 1975.2 sources2 sources

In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea the Estatuto do Indigenato, which denied Portuguese citizenship to most Black Africans and kept them under a separate “native” regime, was repealed on 6 September 1961, months after war broke out in Angola. All natives of the colonies became Portuguese citizens, at least on paper.2 sources2 sources

For a long time the end of slavery was told in Portugal as a national honour. A bill put to parliament in 1865 claimed that Portugal had been the first European nation to abolish slavery in some of its overseas lands, and Marques describes a country that wanted to be seen in the vanguard of abolition. The fuller record shows a state that set a date for freedom in 1858 and then spent two decades making sure that work on the plantations would not stop.1 source1 source

In 2019 the postal service CTT marked the 150th anniversary with two stamps, issued on 25 February. The images chosen for the issue include the decree itself, kept in the parliamentary archive, the Arquivo Histórico Parlamentar. The accompanying text, by the curators of Lisbon City Council's project on testimonies of slavery, places the decree at the end of a cycle that began in 1441, when Portuguese ships carried off the first Africans captured on the coast south of Cape Bojador.1 source1 source

Parliament also keeps online a navy ministry memoir of 1889 on the end of slavery and the slave trade, which lists the laws from Pombal to 1869 in the official version of the time.1 source1 source