José do Patrocínio

José Carlos do Patrocínio was born on the ninth of October 1853 in Campos dos Goytacazes in the province of Rio de Janeiro, the son of João Carlos Monteiro — a Catholic vicar and slaveholding planter — and Justina Maria do Espírito Santo, a free Black market woman whom the vicar refused to recognise. His mother raised him alone until at fourteen he secured a place at the Hospital da Misericórdia in Rio, working as an apothecary's assistant while studying for the entrance examinations of the Faculty of Medicine.

He completed the medical degree in 1874 but never practised. Recruited as a journalist by the Gazeta de Notícias, he found within four years his vocation as the most consequential abolitionist editorialist of nineteenth-century Brazil. In 1881 he took over the editorship of the Gazeta da Tarde — converting it into the principal organ of the radical abolitionist movement. With Joaquim Nabuco and André Rebouças (placed in this archive) he co-founded the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão in 1880.

His campaign from the Gazeta da Tarde and from his subsequent paper Cidade do Rio — sustained through the 1880s and built upon his organisation of the Confederação Abolicionista — was decisive in the final phase of the Brazilian abolitionist movement. He coined the term caifaz for the underground militants who smuggled fugitive slaves out of the coffee plantations of the Paraíba valley. On the thirteenth of May 1888, when Princess Isabel signed the Lei Áurea, she handed him the pen — a recognition of his role that he refused to renounce even after the Princess and her father were deposed.

He died of tuberculosis in Rio on the twenty-ninth of January 1905, at fifty-one.

He is honored here as the journalist whose pen helped end Brazilian slavery.