Many enslaved people lived in Brazilian cities. In those cities, bondspeople had vastly more opportunities for politics, access to litigation, and emancipation. Black and brown people, enslaved, freed or free, composed the majority of the population of Brazil’s largest cities such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador during the entire period of slavery. Slavery existed in urban areas of the US too, but that was an exception to the 19th-century trend that saw slavery in the US growing more Southern and more rural.
Slavery in Brazil also offered more opportunities for freedom than slavery in the US. Brazilian slave-owners did not free their enslaved property out of any generosity, but because manumission, or the act of emancipating an enslaved person, was shaped by deep customs of Roman law and Catholicism. To prohibit slave-owners from emancipating their enslaved property would have required intervening civil legislation.
The historian James H Sweet and others have shown that slave owners manumitted enslaved people in Brazil mainly in the urban areas, with preference to women, children and those born in Brazil. In cities like Salvador, Recife and Rio de Janeiro, bondsmen and bondswomen performed all kinds of activities in the streets, as porters, street vendors and domestic workers. Cities gave enslaved people more opportunities to hire out their services, a practice Brazilian custom allowed, and to keep part of their income. As a result, most of these manumissions were profitable to slave-owners because enslaved people, and especially bondswomen, purchased their own freedom paying their owners their market price, and these owners could in turn then buy other slaves. More enslaved women worked in the cities, especially as street vendors and domestic workers, than men, who predominated on the agricultural estates.
Manumission, or self-purchase, existed in the US too, where it was also more likely to be available for enslaved people working in the cities or urban areas. But it was never as widespread a practice as it was in Brazil. Indeed, some of the American colonies and states actually made it illegal for slave owners to free their enslaved property. Such restrictions never existed in Brazil, or in Latin America as a whole.