Joaquim Nabuco

Joaquim Aurélio Barreto Nabuco de Araújo (19 August 1849 – 17 January 1910), known as Joaquim Nabuco, was a Brazilian abolitionist, diplomat, politician, historian, jurist, journalist, orator and writer. He was one of the leading figures of the Brazilian abolitionist movement, a member of the Chamber of Deputies for Pernambuco, one of the founders of the Academia Brasileira de Letras, and Brazil's first ambassador to the United States. Nabuco's book O Abolicionismo (1883), later translated into English as Abolitionism: The Brazilian Antislavery Struggle, became one of the central texts of the Brazilian antislavery campaign. In it, he argued that slavery was not only a labor system but a social, political and moral institution that distorted the whole life of the nation. After the abolition of slavery in 1888 and the fall of the Brazilian monarchy in 1889, Nabuco withdrew from partisan politics for a period, remained a monarchist, and turned increasingly to writing, history and diplomacy. His memoir Minha formação (1900), translated into English as My Formative Years, is regarded as one of the major autobiographical works of Brazilian letters. In diplomacy, Nabuco served in London and then in Washington, D.C., where he became a leading advocate of Pan-American cooperation and close relations between Brazil and the United States. He worked with Baron do Rio Branco, Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root, and helped shape the atmosphere surrounding the Third Pan-American Conference held in Rio de Janeiro in 1906.