Eighty-Four Years Between First and Last
Unit 3 covered how the Haitian Revolution abolished slavery entirely, by military force, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence in 1804. It is tempting to treat that as the beginning of the end of slavery in the Americas. In reality, it was only the first of at least eight separate national abolitions, spread out over the next eighty-four years, each occurring under very different circumstances.
Here is the comparative sequence, focused on the countries and regions most relevant to this curriculum:
- 1804: Haiti. Abolished immediately and completely, by revolutionary military victory, as covered in Unit 3.
- 1823: Chile. Abolished essentially immediately after independence from Spain, with little internal resistance, in significant part because Chile's enslaved population had always been comparatively small.
- 1829: Mexico. Abolished by presidential decree under Vicente Guerrero, Mexico's second president, himself of documented African descent, as you learned in Unit 4, five years after Mexico's 1824 constitution had already begun the process at the state level.
- 1865: The United States. Abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, following the Civil War, more than four decades after Chile and Mexico.
- 1886: Cuba. Abolished by Spanish royal decree, following a lengthy transitional system, more than sixty years after Chile.
- 1888: Brazil. Abolished by the Lei Aurea (Golden Law), the very last country in the Western Hemisphere to end slavery, eighty-four years after Haiti and a full generation after the United States.
What Explains the Gap?
Notice a pattern: the countries that abolished slavery earliest, Chile and Mexico, were also countries where enslaved labor had never become central to the national economy. Chile's colonial economy relied primarily on Indigenous and mestizo labor in mining and agriculture, not large-scale plantation slavery, meaning abolition there cost the elite relatively little economically or politically.
The countries that abolished slavery latest, the United States (specifically its southern states), Cuba, and Brazil, were, not coincidentally, the three economies most thoroughly built around large-scale slave labor: cotton in the U.S. South, sugar in Cuba, and coffee and sugar in Brazil. This connects directly back to Unit 2's statistics: Brazil, which received roughly 45 percent of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, held onto slavery the longest of any nation in the hemisphere. The pattern is not a coincidence. The more central slavery was to a colony or nation's economic structure, the more powerful the political interests defending it, and the longer abolition took to achieve.
A Caution About This Timeline
It is important not to read this timeline as a simple ranking of moral progress, with early-abolition countries as somehow more enlightened than late-abolition ones. Chile's early, easy abolition happened in part because so few enslaved people lived there that abolishing slavery threatened almost no one's wealth or power, not because Chilean society had reckoned more deeply with racial injustice than Brazil had. In fact, as Unit 5 covered, Chile's relatively small Afro-descendant population became the basis for a much more thorough national denial that Black Chileans existed at all, a form of erasure arguably more complete than anything found in Brazil, where a large Afro-Brazilian population made complete erasure impossible even under the myth of racial democracy. Early abolition and genuine racial justice are two very different things, and this unit's later lessons and Unit 5's material on blanqueamiento should be read together, not as separate stories.
