Brazilian attitudes toward slavery have shifted gradually.…

Brazilian attitudes toward slavery have shifted gradually.

Pedro II favors abolition, and during the Paraguayan War slaves serving in the military had been emancipated.

In 1871 the Rio Branco cabinet had approved a law freeing newborns and requiring masters to care for them until age eight, at which time they will either be turned over to the government for compensation or the owner will have use of their labor until age twenty-one.

In 1884 a law frees slaves over sixty years of age.

By the 1880s, the geography of slavery has also changed, and the economy is less dependent on it.

Because of manumissions (many on condition of remaining on the plantations) and the massive flight of slaves, the overall numbers decline from 1,240,806 in 1884 to 723,419 in 1887, with most slaves having shifted from the sugar plantations in the Northeast to the south-central coffee groves.

But even planters in São Paulo, where the slave percentage of the total population has fallen from 28.2 percent in 1854 to 8.7 percent in 1886, understand that to continue expansion they need a different labor system.

The provincial government therefore actively begins subsidizing and recruiting immigrants.

Between 1875 and 1887, about one hundred and fifty-six thousand arrived in São Paulo.

Meanwhile, the demand for cheap sugarcane workers in the Northeast is satisfied by sertanejos (inhabitants of the sertdo) fleeing the devastating droughts of the 1870s in the sertdo.