Slavery and Abolition Across the Revolutions

Comparing the fate of slavery across revolutions reveals sharply different timelines. Haiti abolished it during its revolution. In Spanish America, independence leaders needed soldiers and sometimes promised freedom for military service, and several countries passed 'free womb' laws freeing children born to enslaved mothers, such as Gran Colombia in 1821. Chile abolished slavery in 1823 and Mexico in 1829, but Venezuela and Peru did not fully abolish it until 1854.

The United States abolished slavery only with the 13th Amendment in 1865, after a civil war. Brazil and the Spanish colony of Cuba, which did not have independence revolutions in this period, kept slavery until the 1880s. The pattern suggests that revolutionary wars weakened slavery where armies needed recruits and where slaveholders were less dominant, while elites protected slavery where plantation economies remained powerful.