Brazil was one of the first colonies in the Americas in which enslaved Africans toiled on plantations and in the mines, and it was the last nation to abolish slavery. Brazil was also the largest slave society in the Americas. Approximately 40 percent of the estimated 12 million Africans enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade were shipped there. Yet, even in captivity, Africans and their descendants sought rights to “provision grounds” (small plots of land, known in Brazil as roças) and created their own internal economy of slavery (Barickman 1994; Schwartz 1977). The nexus of land and liberty stood at the center of the emancipation struggles throughout the Americas. In Brazil, enslaved women and men desired nothing less than to leave the plantations and mines, and to define the terms of their new freedom. Access to land, control over labor, and family connections were central to the struggles of ex-slaves to establish themselves as citizens in the post-emancipation period.