Mulattoes who were free were ranked above freedmen of pure ancestry. The former were generally considered as white, for as a rule in Brazil a man passed as white if he contained a fair degree of white blood in his veins. These free mulattoes had a regiment of their own with their own officers, as was the case with the blacks. Many wealthy planters at Pernambuco were men of color. Many of the Creole blacks in this region were mechanics, who sent out their slaves to do odd mechanical jobs for the owner's profit. The best church and image painter at Pernambuco was black. One of three commanders of the Brazilian forces against the Dutch in the seventeenth century was Henrique Diaz, a Negro.
All told, race prejudice, as a vast problem, was a peculiar complement of the Anglo-Saxon new world colonies' slave problem, for in virtually no other country has slavery ever so viciously contributed to race discord. Brazil, then, may pride herself upon emerging from a slave sustained society, free from the sores of a hideous race conflict.
An Afterthought
In brief, it seems that the Brazilian institution of slavery was softer, far less brutal than the United States system. On the other hand, the United States slave system was probably more efficient, for the inefficiency of the management of the plantations of sugar in Brazil allowed the West Indies in the eighteenth century to take the lead in the sugar, rum, and molasses exports. The United States, under the slave system, secured pre-eminence in the production of the world's greatest textile staple, cotton.
It is to be regretted, of course, that slavery has persisted so long, and still thrives in certain Mohammedan lands. It stands today outlawed in the new world, but it will always be a source of regret to progressive citizens of the United States that their country clung to the institution up to within the memory of many yet living, and that she did not relax her tight grasp upon the slave until forced to immediate action in the stress of a fratricidal war. To humane thinkers of Brazil, it will ever be a source of sorrow that their nation has only been slave ridden within the present generation, and even then, egged on to emancipation by the reproaches of an at last awakened world.
Slavery must have differed in details in one country from that in another, but after all, it was shameful in Brazil, shameful in the United States, just as it is shameful at any other spot underneath the blue sky.
Herbert B. Alexander
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Keller, Albert Galloway, Ph.D., Colonization, Boston, Copyright, 1908, p. 145.
[2] DuBois, William Edward Burghardt, The Negro, New York, 1915, p. 164.