Com a letra da lei e o espírito do legislador: projetos, atores e debates políticos na trajetória da Lei do Ventre Livre (1866-1871)

Abstract

The 19th century was marked in history as the period when countries were rethinking the use of enslaved labor and putting an end to slavery itself. In Brazil, this process took a little longer, especially from the second half of the 19th century, the Executive, together with Parliament, began to discuss a Law that aimed, in some way, to reform the structure of the slavery institution and promote emancipation. At least since 1866, such Law was being developed and discussed within the political institutions of the Empire of Brazil. With this in mind, this dissertation seeks to analyze how political institutions and the State acted in the course of discussions on the theme of the reform of the servile state, from its beginning in the State Council in 1866, until the approval of the Free Womb Law, in 1871. We are interested in meeting the people around the discussion, for or against, trying to understand which family / social networks they belonged to, how these networks and the institutions themselves influenced the changes that would happen in the proposal, what is the relationship between the discussion of the topic, nation building and progress, in addition to realizing how slavery was discussed in these places. To this end, in addition to using the minutes of the Council of State, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, we will also rely on personal letters from the politicians studied, pamphlets published in the period, reports from the provincial ministries, different bills and bills that addressed the issue of emancipation and which came to be discussed in the houses mentioned above, among other sources. Thus, the three chapters deal, respectively, with a contextualization of the anti-trafficking laws (1831 and 1850) - of how they passed through Parliament and what was the role of the Council of State in these initiatives - of the first discussions of womb freedom within the council itself, based on Pimenta Bueno's proposal, and debates in the Chamber and Senate. The text also has an epilogue that seeks to analyze the context of the Law after its approval in 1871 and the steps of the political career of visconde do Cruzeiro. In the end, we tried to understand what was the role of the State and its institutions in the progress of the Free Womb Law.