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The Manumission of Slaves in Brazil in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Katia de Queirós Mattoso
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Freedom was, quite naturally, a dream cherished by every Brazilian slave. The desire for manumission - a more reliable route to freedom than the path of flight or revolt - was based on the experiences of other slaves in Brazil, a country open to all sorts of social adaptation practices. Consequently, the charters of liberty granted by masters and registered in notarial records have proved a rich source for the study of certain aspects of slavery itself. The similarity between the title of the present article and that of the 1979 work To Be a Slave in Brazil reflects the fact that since the publication of that book, other authors have added to the bibliography on the subject of manumitted Brazilians, thus confirming the important role of this social group whose close connections with the slaves themselves were described in my previous study. In their experience of life, the manumitted slaves regularly encountered pitfalls that served as constant reminders of their skin color. Moreover, the daily lives of African blacks on the market, who at the time were merely African captives shipped to Brazil in various stages of youth and various degrees of adaptation to their slave status - along with the experiences of creole slaves (that is, those born in Brazil), of free-able slaves in the process of attaining freedom, of freed slaves, of children and grandchildren of manumitted slaves (who were therefore born free) - must all be understood not only in the context of their legal status but also and especially in the light of their subtly nuanced lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 45 , Issue 179 , September 1997 , pp. 117 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

Notes

1. Present studies are for the most part focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the two preceding centuries, it is virtually impossible to find positive corroboration. The earliest research began with the period 1750-1850. See Katia de Queirós Mattoso, A propósito de cartas de Alforria: Bahia, 1779-1850, A.H. 4 (São Paulo, 1972) pp. 23-52.

See also Stuart Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684-1745,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54, 4 (1974), pp. 606- 635. The conclusions reached in Schwartz's study remain valid.

2. To Be a Slave in Brazil, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Rutgers University Press, 1986). For the French edition: Etre esclave au Brésil, XVIe-XIXe siècles (Paris, 1979; 2nd ed., 1995); for the Brazilian edition: Ser escravo no Braxil, trans. James Amado (São Paulo, 1982).

3. Katia M. de Queirós Mattoso, O filho da escrava (em torno da lei do ventre libre), R.B.H./ANPUH 8, 16 (1988): pp. 37-55.

4. Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Das cores do silêncio. Os significados da liberdade no sudeste escravista. Brasil sec. XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 1995), pp. 191-227.

5. On the problems encountered in research on Brazilian demography, see for example: for São Paulo: Maria-Luiza Marcilio, La ville de São Paulo. Peuplement et population, 1750-1850 (Rouen, 1968); for Bahia: Katia de Queirós Mattoso, Bahia, século XIX, uma provincia no Império (Rio de Janeiro, 1992), pp. 67-119; A propósito de cartas de Alforria: Bahia, 1779-1850 (see note 1 above); on the price paid by slaves to purchase their freedom: A carta de Alforria como fonte comple mentar para o estudo da rentabilidade da mao de obra escrava urbana (1819-1888), in A Moderna Historia Econômica, coord. Carlos Manuel Pelaez e Mircea Buescu (Rio de Janeiro: APEC, 1976), pp. 149-163.

6. One among countless examples concerns the supposedly automatic manu mission of the enslaved wife of a free man: out of the 16,403 charters of free dom examined in Bahia, we have not encountered one referring to the payment of a charter to free an enslaved husband. In only a few cases does a husband free his enslaved wife: in 1806, Pedro Alexandrino de Souza Portu gal, the owner and master of the sugar mill Engenho Sao Gonçalo, freed his creole slave Felipa, “because of her marriage to Bartolomeu de Costa Pinto, a mulatto man, a manumitted slave, who will sacrifice his salaries, earned in his double capacity as manager and accountant of his sugar mill, in order to give 60,000 reales per year for two years …” This payment was in violation of the law, which was supposed to manumit the spouse of a free man automatically. Is it because the “free” man was himself a manumitted slave?

7. Luis Lisanti, Della Importazione degli Schiavi nel Brasile coloniale (1715), paper presented at the 2e Symposium d'Histoire Economique et Sociale de l'Amérique Latine, Xle Congrès International des Américanistes (Rome, September 1972). For more recent revisions of these figures, see Pedro Carvalho de Mello, Esti mativa da longevidade de escravos no Brazil na segunda metade do século XIX, REE 13, 1 (1983) pp. 151-179; or Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford, 1987) and also his recent clarification in “La traite atlantique: nouvelles interprétations,” forthcoming in Traites et esclavages (Paris, 1997).

8. For a history of Brazilian revolts and rebellions, see, for example, Decio Fre itas, Palmares, a guerra dos escravos (Porto Alegre, 1973); José Alipio Goulart, Da fuga ao suicídio: aspectos da rebeldia dos escravos no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1971).

9. Katia de Queirós Mattoso, Testamentos de escravos libertos na Bahia no século XIX. Uma fonte para o estudo de mentalidades (Salvador, 1979).

10. Katia de Queriós Mattoso, Farnilia e sociedade na Bahia do século XIX (São Paulo, 1988).

11. This example has been corroborated by studies of other regions. For example, for Minas Gerais, see Iraci del Neroda Costa, Minas Gerais: Estructuras popula cionais tipicas (São Paulo, 1982); for Bahia, see Maria Ines Cortes de Oliveira, Oliberto, o seu mundo e os outros (São Paulo, 1988).

12. Returns to Africa were rare but not unheard of: see Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Negros estrangeiros. Os escravos libertos e sua volta à Africa (São Paulo, 1985); and the fine novel by Antonio Olinto, Mâe d'Agua (Rio de Janeiro, 1982).

13. João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, translated by Arthur Brokel (Baltimore, 1993).

14. The clandestine practice of Afro-Brazilian cults has not yet been studied in and of itself. For Bahia, the first record of these practices comes to us from a police report dated 1785; see J. J. Reis, “Magia jeje na Bahia: a invasao do Calundu do pasto de Cachoeira, 1785,” in Revista Brasileira de História 8, 16 (1988) pp. 57-81. However, newspapers published in the nineteenth and twen tieth centuries, as well as police reports, contain plentiful data on these prac tices, formerly considered superstitious and barbaric.

15. As the end of the twentieth century approaches, Brazilian society shows a ten dency toward “blackening.” Population projections predict a white minority starting in 2010. See, for example, George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil (Madison, 1991).