Sousa Dantas

Early life and career He earned a degree in law from the Faculty of Law of Recife in 1851. Foreign Affairs and President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) (1884).

Prime minister Manuel Pinto de Sousa Dantas organized and presided over the 32nd Cabinet, governing the country from 1884 to 1885. He was at the same time Minister of Finance as well as, temporarily, Foreign Minister. The main achievement of his government was the great impulse he gave to abolitionism, an idea that went beyond the simple manumission of slaves. It embraced a wider agenda of social reform, agrarian reform, and the democratization of education.

In 1884, faced with demands for more decisive action in slavery, emperor Pedro II appointed Dantas to seek a solution. The senator had the friendship and talent of deputy Ruy Barbosa, whom he invited to join the new cabinet. The Constitution, however, determined that, as a deputy, when Barbosa gave up his seat in the Assembly, he had to submit to a new election and, if defeated, he would lose his term and his portfolio. In conflict with the slave owners and the Church, Barbosa could not be sure of re-election and was left out of the ministry. However, he continued to collaborate with Sousa Dantas, with whom he had started his legal career. Sousa Dantas commissioned Barbosa to write "Bill48 A", which became known as the Dantas Bill, based on the senator's ideas.

The Dantas Bill The Dantas Bill began by defining some guidelines for emancipation: by the age of the slave; for the omission of registration; and for the transfer of the slave's legal domicile. By setting an upper age limit of 60 for slaves, without providing any type of compensation to owners, whose slaves were then emancipated, it unleashed a wave of protests even before the bill was presented to the Chamber. Basing emancipation on the omission of enrollment was apparently harmless. But, in fact, by forcing all slaves to be re-registered and identified in detail within a year, it would represent the almost immediate release of all those under the age of fourteen based on the "Law of the free womb". Those brought to Brazil after the prohibition of trafficking in 1831, or who were the children of smuggled slaves, were also to be declared free.

Bill B of 1887 In June 1887, after leaving the position of President of the Council of Ministers, Dantas drafted a bill to free slaves. Bill B of 1887, as it became known, would have provided for the settlement of families of ex-slaves along the railways of the Empire, as part of a process of agrarian reform. The bill drew heavily on the Dantas Bill of 1884 and was signed jointly with 12 other liberal senators,