The Spectacle of Emancipation: Brazilians and Cubans at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition

Philadelphia, 1876: After facing a decade-long crisis of secession, civil war, and reconstruction, the United States opened its doors to the world. The Centennial Exhibition featured the most advanced industrial technology the world had ever seen alongside an abundance of commodities originating from extractive and agricultural industries. Members of slave societies, Brazilians and Cubans were enthralled. Although the Union still faced destructive political quarrels—which would very soon culminate in the Republican Party officially abandoning Reconstruction—its economic recovery was astonishing. By 1876, the South not had only recovered but already surpassed the levels of cotton production from before the Civil War. Moreover, its economy diversified, now producing lumber, turpentine, phosphates, minerals, and more – all of which fueled industrial production in the North. The Northeast itself had jumped forward thanks to the war itself: cities like New York and Boston had become almighty financial center in addition to concentrating innumerable sweatshops; smaller centers of manufacturing, like Rochester and Lowell, now became industrial behemoths; Philadelphia turned out locomotives and machines, Pittsburgh was becoming the capital of steel, Cincinnati was then known as Porkopolis thanks to its booming meatpacking industry. What impressed visitors most, however, was the great—and expanding—West: from Chicago to San Francisco, the development of the West seemed like the work of a powerful conjurer. Cubans and Brazilians encountered these regions and their wealth in the form of a nationalist spectacle at the Centennial Exhibition. This paper traces their reactions to and creative appropriations of the postemancipation story told in Philadelphia in 1876. It inquires into the importance of that event and its symbols of progress to the (re)making of antislavery reform movements in Brazil and Cuba. It ultimately addresses how antislavery and pro-capitalist forces from the United States helped to shape slave emancipation in Latin America.