Along with the urban bourgeois groups, Northeastern sugar barons were left with a legacy of longstanding grievances against the "paulista" coffee oligarchs of the South. Northeastern landowners opposed Washington Luís' 1930 discontinuance of the drought relief projects of his predecessor. The decay of established sugar oligarchies of the Northeast had begun dramatically with the severe drought of 1877. The rapid growth of coffee-producing São Paulo state started at the same time. After the abolition of slavery in the 1880s, Brazil saw a mass exodus of emancipated slaves and other peasants from the Northeast to the Southeast, thus ensuring a steady supply of cheap labor for the coffee planters.