In April 1849, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, public prosecutor Antonio Pedro Francisco Pinho filed charges against Manoel Pereira Tavares de Mello e Albuquerque for the crime of reducing to slavery the parda Porfíria and her two sons, Lino and Leopoldino, aged eight and four respectively.Footnote ¹ The case, in the form of a “sumário crime” (summary criminal procedure), was based on Article 179 of the Brazilian Criminal Code, which punished with three to nine years of imprisonment and a fine those found guilty of “reducing to slavery a free person who is in possession of his liberty.”Footnote ² Slavery in Brazil coexisted with a sizable free population of African descent, a result of historically high rates of manumission. After independence from Portugal in 1822, the constitution deemed all free and freed people born in Brazil, regardless of color, Brazilian citizens.Footnote ³ Years later, lawmakers sought to protect free people from enslavement by targeting the practice in the Criminal Code of 1830. As the case of Porfíria and her two sons demonstrates, the enforcement of the measure evoked legal and political challenges.

In many ways, the case of Porfíria and her two sons can be seen as a manumission transaction gone wrong. Some time before the criminal case was filed, the three had been the objects of a transaction between Albuquerque and their former master, Joaquim Álvares de Oliveira. Oliveira had received two enslaved persons in exchange for Porfíria and her sons; Albuquerque apparently wanted to marry the woman to his brick foreman in order to keep him at his job. In her testimony, Porfíria alleged that Oliveira had given her a letter of manumission at the time of the exchange, and this was confirmed by one of the witnesses. The defendant Albuquerque, however, denied this allegation, presenting documents to show that Porfíria’s manumission was conditional on the payment of a certain sum by her future husband. Witnesses for the case were questioned to clarify Porfíria’s status and condition, and she conceded under questioning that she had all along been “under the dominion and captivity” of Albuquerque until she fled for fear of being sold.Footnote ⁴ In filing a criminal case, the judge deemed her free and a victim of illegal enslavement.

The case of Porfíria was by no means exceptional. In the catalog of nineteenth-century criminal cases related to slavery held in the Public Archives of Rio Grande do Sul, sixty-eight cases relate to accusations of “reducing a free person to slavery” based on Article 179 of the Criminal Code.Footnote ⁵ The uncertainty of Porfíria’s status was not unique either, and a sizable number of the criminal proceedings as well as many civil actions involved disputes over the status of the person in question. Significant archival documentation exists on the enslavement of free people. And yet, although historians have recently drawn some attention to the subject, it nonetheless remains a neglected topic in the study of Brazilian criminal justice in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶

Some of the most innovative works in the field of Atlantic slavery in recent years focus on the frontiers of enslavement. First, attention was given to geographic frontiers. Since colonial times, even before abolition appeared on the horizon, individuals who sought freedom made use of frontiers; they served native Indians as well as enslaved Africans and their descendants. The benefits of entering foreign territory could compensate for the risky journey, because it was a way to put oneself far from the reach and grip of masters and local authorities. The transit of people through frontiers not only gave rise to a transnational runaway movement but also created, from at least the early eighteenth century forward, an array of diplomatic incidents, given that requests for repatriation were exchanged and limits had to be negotiated.Footnote ⁷ During the Independence Wars and the movement for slave emancipation in the Americas, however, the transit of slaves through frontiers gained a new status: state formation meant the creation of elaborate legal and diplomatic protocols to guarantee free soil and slave soil. The Brazilian Empire was one of the most powerful American states forged in part to defend slavery.Footnote ⁸

Besides geographic frontiers, historians have lately turned their attention to the conceptual frontiers of enslavement – that is, to the changes in what was considered legal and legitimate bondage. Studies of legal cases have made it clear that, in different places and in varying circumstances, the illegal enslavement of certain groups was questioned long before the nineteenth-century movement for the abolition of the slave trade and slavery in the Americas.Footnote ⁹ A closer analysis of freedom lawsuits in Brazil has allowed historians to identify the circumstances that favored or allowed (re)enslavement and to consider the relationship of enslavement to the physical and social vulnerability of its victims, as well as the institutional response to particular cases.

Working within this historiographical framework, with the intention of furthering the discussion about the precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil, we will consider here how cases that involved the enslavement of free people were criminalized and brought to court in Brazil throughout the nineteenth century. The cases give an overview of the patterns of enslavement and the varying applications of Article 179 of the Criminal Code. We have divided the cases into three groups, according to the circumstances of enslavement: Africans who were brought illegally after the 1831 ban on the Atlantic trade (along with their descendants); freedpersons who lived in vulnerable conditions; and, lastly, free people of African descent or freedpersons who were kidnapped and/or sold as slaves. Although the number of potential victims of enslavement from illegal trafficking or from ploys of re-enslavement was much greater than the number of people subjected to abductions, these latter cases were brought to justice more often. The most notorious of these were cases involving free people who were physically abducted on the border with Uruguay and sold as slaves in Rio Grande do Sul. Our hypothesis is that the distorted relationship among the number of occurrences, the number of cases filed, and their outcomes points to political choices that influenced the application of Article 179 of the Criminal Code and the law of November 7, 1831, that prohibited the Atlantic slave trade.

The Criminal Code of 1830 and the Crime of Reducing a Free Person to Slavery

The Brazilian Criminal Code of 1830 was seen at the time as an important step toward the modernization of criminal law. Codification was a crucial initiative for a newly independent country that aspired to position itself within the so-called civilized nations. The deputies and senators responsible for drafting the Code took into consideration two bills prepared by José Clemente Pereira and Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos, elements of civil codes and statutes from other countries, and debates held in Parliament in 1830.Footnote ¹⁰

The bill presented by Deputy Bernardo Pereira de Vasconcelos included an article against the enslavement of the “free man, who is in possession of his freedom,” proposing a sentence of imprisonment with forced labor for a period of five to twenty years.Footnote ¹¹ This was something new, as the Philippine Code, the Portuguese legislation in force in Brazil during the colonial period, did not have a specific provision for the crime of enslaving free people. Indeed, the opposite was the case: legislation at the time allowed for the possibility of holding individuals in captivity if a master wished to revoke manumission granted to former slaves or questioned whether they should live as free people. These cases were regulated by the Philippine Ordinances under the heading “Of Gifts and Manumission That Can Be Revoked Because of Ingratitude,” which applied to freedpersons.Footnote ¹² Interestingly, here, re-enslavement was not only legally possible but also based on the premise that enslavement was the natural condition of Africans and their descendants, rendering their freedom always temporary and questionable. All the same, this heading of the Philippine Ordinances applied only to those who had been enslaved, not to just anyone.Footnote ¹³

Although the Philippine Ordinances sanctioned these instances of re-enslavement, even prior to 1830 there were cases of enslavement of free people that were considered illegal. At least three situations could lead to this: the enslavement of the descendants of Indigenous people (in many cases, the children of Indigenous mothers and Africans or descendants of African fathers), which had been illegal since 1680;Footnote ¹⁴ the enslavement of children who were born free, meaning the sons and daughters (who often did not even know they were free) of free women; and disregard for the charters (alvarás) of 1761 and 1773, which prohibited bringing enslaved Africans into the Kingdom of Portugal. Although this last prohibition referred specifically to the Kingdom, there are indications that it was enforced in the African colonies as well.Footnote ¹⁵ These three types of offenses led to judicial inquiries. In her analysis of cases of re-enslavement in the cities of Mariana (Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Lisbon from 1720 to 1819, Fernanda Domingos Pinheiro found fifty-four cases that addressed illegal captivity in Mariana alone.Footnote ¹⁶ In contrast with the prosecutions against illegal enslavement after 1830, however, these earlier instances were civil cases, not criminal. Although it was possible for someone to contest their illegal enslavement through freedom suits, the practice of enslavement itself was not considered a punishable crime. Thus, before 1830, the only consequence for a slaveholder was the loss of his or her alleged property.

By the time the Criminal Code of the Brazilian Empire was being discussed, the context had changed radically: the lines between slavery and freedom were being redrawn as the country prepared for the abolition of the slave trade. Theoretically, as newly enslaved Africans could no longer be brought into the country, new slaves would come only from natural reproduction. Article 7 in Vasconcelos’ bill was intended to guarantee the freedom of those who were born free, and we cannot assume that it was meant to protect the newly arrived Africans from enslavement.Footnote ¹⁷

It is interesting to note that the final version of the article reverses the premise of earlier legislation, which presumed that enslavement was the natural state of Afro-descendants in Brazil. By making it a crime against individual liberty “to reduce to slavery a free person who is in possession of his freedom”Footnote ¹⁸ – and thus placing such an action in the same category as undue arrestFootnote ¹⁹ – the bill treated enslavement not only as an illegal act but as a violation of the fundamental rights of personhood, which were as inherent in Afro-descendant people as they were in anyone else.

According to Monica Dantas, Vasconcelos probably drew inspiration from the Livingston Code, the Criminal Code proposed in Louisiana in the 1820s.Footnote ²⁰ Indeed, Article 452 of the Louisiana Code states: “If the offense be committed against a free person for the purpose of detaining or disposing of him as a slave, knowing such person to be free, the punishment shall be a fine of not less than five hundred dollars nor more than five thousand dollars, and imprisonment at hard labor, not less than two nor more than four years.”Footnote ²¹

There is, however, a significant difference in wording between the two Codes. In the proposed Louisiana Code, enslavement was illegal if the perpetrator was aware of the freedom of his victim (which, in a way, always allowed for the defense to claim that the act was based on ignorance of someone’s status), even in cases when the person was living under someone’s dominion. In the Brazilian case, the situation was different. First, it did not matter whether or not the perpetrator had information about the victim’s freedom. Second, enslavement was only criminalized if the victim was living as a free person. The terminology here is particularly important, since it defined the circumstances of the crime and made the assertion of the “possession of freedom” central to legal arguments in lawsuits about enslavement in Brazil. The possession of freedom was the condition that separated illegal from legal enslavement and would serve throughout the nineteenth century to determine whether captives could claim legal protection.

The Prohibition of Trafficking Africans and the Expansion of Illegal Enslavement

The law of November 7, 1831, which aimed to abolish the international slave trade to Brazil, referred to Article 179 of the Criminal Code for prosecution of those accused of trafficking. In other words, legislators chose to charge those involved in the financing, the transportation, and the arrival of Africans, as well as those who purchased newly arrived Africans, with the crime of reducing a free person to slavery.Footnote ²² This interpretation of the law extended the protection afforded by the provisions of Article 179 to newly arrived Africans, whose “possession of freedom” at the time of enslavement was impossible to determine. A decree of April 1832 regulated the procedures, specifying that traffickers should be tried in criminal court, while the status of Africans should be addressed as a civil matter.Footnote ²³ This asymmetrical treatment of criminals and victims often led to confusion because the focus on a victim’s status (which, as a general rule, was uncertain) tended to divert attention away from the circumstances of the crime and to minimize the possibilities of punishment.

The law of 1831 became known in Brazil as legislation “para inglês ver” (for the English to see), an expression that, while highlighting British pressure to abolish the slave trade, came to imply in popular usage that the Brazilian government had never intended to apply it. In the last decade, however, research has shown that the uses and meanings of this law varied widely in the nearly sixty years between its adoption in 1831 and the abolition of slavery in 1888.Footnote ²⁴ Despite attempts by the Brazilian government to enforce the law, particularly between 1831 and 1834, the smuggling of enslaved Africans resumed and slowly increased in volume, giving political strength to groups advocating amnesty and impunity for those involved. Between the early 1830s and the passage of the second law abolishing the slave trade in 1850, at least 780,000 Africans were smuggled into the country and held illegally in captivity, a status which was then extended to their children.Footnote ²⁵

Rio Grande do Sul, although not the site of frequent clandestine landings, was nonetheless an area with significant illegal enslavement. Most likely, the labor supply for the charqueadas (dried meat plants), the cattle ranches, and the towns was met through the internal slave trade between provinces. Tracing the actions of the authorities responsible for repressing the illegal trade and the enslavement of free persons in the province brings to light contradictions and variations that existed throughout the country: repression and collusion coexisted with compliance with guidelines from Rio de Janeiro as well as with attempts to challenge those same guidelines in the courts.

A slave landing on the coast of Tramandaí, in Rio Grande do Sul in April 1852, is a good example of varying legal strategies involving “illegal” Africans, strategies in which slaveowners and authorities colluded in order to deflect prosecutorial attempts to enforce the regulations. After having crossed the Atlantic, the ship ran aground in the town of Conceição do Arroio, a district of Santo Antônio da Patrulha, in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. Hundreds of Africans – later estimated between 200 and 500 – were quickly unloaded from the ship. Provincial authorities tried to capture the Africans, but most were claimed by coastal residents, and many were then sent “up the mountains.”Footnote ²⁶ Twenty Africans who were taken into custody by the authorities were emancipated in July and handed over to the Santa Casa de Misericordia in Porto Alegre to fulfill their obligation to provide services as “liberated Africans.”Footnote ²⁷ They had been seized separately, in small groups. Three African boys found in Lombas (a town in the Viamão district) as part of a mission ordered by the vice-president of the province on April 27 were most likely among this group. Authorities rescued the three newly arrived Africans and also arrested Nicolau dos Santos Guterres and José Geraldo de Godoy, who owned the lands where the boys were found.Footnote ²⁸

Historians, long focused on the fate of enslaved people and assuming that the 1831 law was only para inglês ver, have rarely examined the repressive actions of the local authorities or judicial responses to criminal accusations involving illegal enslavement. The cases concerning the Africans who arrived in Tramandaí in 1852 illustrate some of the contradictory measures enacted against such suspects. The two owners of the lands where the three African boys were found, when interrogated by the acting chief of police, claimed that they were unaware of the landing on the Tramandaí coast and that they did not know the people who brought the Africans to the area and offered them for sale. The two did not claim possession or ownership over the Africans, and the authorities did not ask them about how the captives had been acquired. The witnesses who were called to testify could not appear, and the few who spoke about the case said little, simply confirming that the Africans were found on the defendants’ lands. Although the prosecutor characterized the accused men’s actions as a crime against “art. 179 of the Criminal Code, pursuant to the Law of November 7, 1831,” within ten days the interim judge and police chief, Antonio Ladislau de Figueiredo Rocha, dismissed the case for lack of evidence and ordered the two defendants’ release.Footnote ²⁹

Ten years later, the rescue of Manoel Congo, another African man who had landed in Tramandaí, again placed in question the willingness of the Imperial justice system to punish those involved in illegal enslavement. According to Manoel Congo’s account from 1861, someone captured him after the landing, kept him in hiding, and sold him “up the mountains” after a few months. Aware that he was free, he fled from his first master and headed to the Santa Casa of Porto Alegre. But on the way he encountered Captain José Joaquim de Paula, who dissuaded him from going to the authorities, promising him lands in exchange for his labor. Yet a complaint brought against Paula many years later, when Manoel was discovered and rescued from Paula’s property in São Leopoldo, made clear that this promise had been a deception. Not only had been Manoel been baptized as a slave despite one vicar’s refusal to cooperate, but around 1854, in an attempt to forge documents that would legitimize Manoel Congo’s enslavement, Paula had falsified a document attesting that he (Paula) had purchased Manuel from another supposed “owner,” promising Manoel freedom after eight years of labor.Footnote ³⁰ Seized in 1861, Manoel was sent to the Santa Casa de Misericórdia in Porto Alegre where, according to the records, he worked as a “liberated African.” Paula, in turn, was accused of an offense against Articles 167 and 265 of the Criminal Code, which addressed deceit and the use of falsified documentation to exploit a person. In addition to not being accused of the crime of reducing a free person to slavery, Paula was able to appeal his eventual conviction on charges of deceit, which suggests that he may have gone unpunished, despite the fact that the case had garnered significant publicity.Footnote ³¹

During the preliminary police inquiry, Deputy Gaspar Silveira Martins addressed the Provincial Assembly to criticize the police chief’s handling of the case, specifically alleging that the chief had not ordered the arrest of José Joaquim de Paula or insisted on obtaining evidence to corroborate Paula’s version of the facts. Martins’ fellow assembly members, however, defended the provincial authorities, based largely on their belief in Captain Paula’s good faith. The principle of good faith was used regularly to exculpate those who owned Africans illegally. Silveira Martins responded by proposing to shift the burden of proof from the enslaved to the enslaver: Paula should prove that he had acquired the African legally (by donation, inheritance, exchange, purchase, or other legal means of property transfer) and show that he did not know, and could not have known, that it was an illegal sale: “Paula claims in his defense that he purchased this African from one Agostinho Antonio Leal, and if this is true, he should prove the purchase with a rightful title, and prove further that Agostinho could legally possess this slave.”Footnote ³² Silveira Martins insisted that the document of manumission was falsified, that there was no record of the master having paid the regular sale tax, and that these facts, together with the testimony of the African, should serve as evidence of the crime. He even accused the chief of police of criminal prevarication, insinuating that he was protecting the captain because he was a person of power and a second-tier elector in Brazil’s two-tier electoral system.

Gaspar Silveira Martins had received his law degree from São Paulo in 1856 and had been a municipal judge in Rio de Janeiro since 1859, in addition to being provincial deputy from Rio Grande do Sul. He came from a family of large landowners on the border region with Uruguay, “of the farroupilha liberal tradition,” and in the late 1860s was involved in the Radical Club of Rio de Janeiro, one of the first republican associations in the country.Footnote ³³ The young lawyer and deputy, like other radical lawyers and judges, interpreted the 1831 law to mean that Manoel Congo should have been free since landing in Brazil, and therefore Captain José Joaquim de Paula had reduced a free person to slavery. The Ministry of Justice, however, only recognized the right to freedom of Africans rescued at sea or soon after landing on the mainland, thus informally guaranteeing the right to property acquired by smuggling and protecting the holders of illegal slaves from the criminalization of their acts.Footnote ³⁴

A supposed “threat to the public order” was another justification often used to avoid the emancipation of Africans who were being held in illegal captivity. In 1868, other Africans from the 1852 Tramandaí landing turned to Luiz Ferreira Maciel Pinheiro, the public prosecutor of Santo Antônio da Patrulha, to plead for freedom. In Conceição do Arroio, an investigation based on the procedures indicated in the Decree of 1832 was led by the judge, who prepared to “liberate a large number of people from slavery.” The putative owners intervened and instigated a debate about the value of the victims’ testimony. They complained that the Africans in question “had high stakes in the outcome”; therefore, their depositions could not be taken into account. Prosecutor Maciel Pinheiro, in turn, accused “the masters of these and of other Africans” of being criminals who sought to block the actions of the judiciary. But the voice of the putative owners was more powerful than the judicial proceedings, and Pinheiro, under pressure from the provincial president to terminate the case, resigned.Footnote ³⁵ A young graduate from Paraíba who was trained in Recife Law School and had been a colleague of the abolitionist poet Castro Alves, Pinheiro was one of the new voices in the legal field who challenged the policy of collusion in cases of illegal enslavement.

Re-enslavement of Freedpersons

Although it is practically impossible to quantify, there is no doubt that the practice of re-enslaving freedpersons was a frequent occurrence in nineteenth-century Brazil. Several factors contributed to this. First, it was possible until 1871 to legally revert manumission. Although the procedure was complex – the only motive contemplated in the Philippine Code was ingratitude – and the number of cases decreased significantly in the second half of the century, this masters’ prerogative might have enabled other ways of retaining dominion over freedpersons. Secondly, conditional manumission was very common and implied a “legal limbo” that put people’s freedom in peril. Did the freedperson start to enjoy the benefits of freedom at the time of manumission or when certain conditions were filled? This uncertainty was particularly damaging to freedwomen, since it cast doubt on the status of their children. Finally, the precariousness of life in freedom, which forced freedpersons to seek protection from higher-status patrons and made it difficult for them to differentiate themselves from slaves, also facilitated re-enslavement. In general, those victims who managed to get their cases to the courts did so through civil suits, which were denominated ações de liberdade when victims had actually been re-enslaved and ações de manutenção de liberdade when they simply ran the risk of re-enslavement. These cases rarely generated criminal proceedings.

The criminal case involving Porfíria in 1849, with which we began this chapter, stands out, shedding light not only on the mechanisms of re-enslavement but also on how the judicial system addressed these crimes. In suits like Porfíria’s, the central legal question was the definition of “possession of freedom,” and the jurists involved were far from reaching a consensus on the matter.

Manoel Pereira Tavares de Mello e Albuquerque called himself the “master and possessor” of Porfíria and her sons; he sought to demonstrate that she lived under his rule and that she was considered a slave in Porto Alegre, so much so that she had collected alms to pay for her manumission. The procedural discussion and the examination of witnesses revolved around whether Porfíria and her children actually possessed their freedom or not. The police chief, who was also a municipal judge, dismissed the complaint against Albuquerque, having concluded that Porfíria and her children were not in “possession of freedom,” which implied that they were not under the protection of Article 179 of the Criminal Code. Moreover, the chief/judge determined that “the right of the mother and her children is not a given,” meaning that he doubted their status as free persons, which led him to send Porfíria to a civil court so that her status could be determined before the criminal investigation moved forward.

All of this revealed that even the legal definition of possession was complicated at this time. The variety of meanings conferred on the notion extended back to Portuguese medieval law; until at least the middle of the thirteenth century, the words “possession” and “property” were designated by a single expression, iur (from the Latin ius), which shows that they were imprecise and confusable terms. In this context, it was possible for a person to obtain ownership of a thing, be it a farm or a person, after possessing it, even if only for a few years. Over time, the concepts of possession and property came to be dissociated, thus increasing the time it took for a possession to be considered property. Yet, even though the right of ownership of some property was contested, possession was still guaranteed to the possessor in the absence of contrary proof, as jurist Correia Telles emphasized in 1846:

This last sentence illustrates how difficult it was to deal legally with cases based on Article 179. For example, how were the courts to handle cases of conditional freedom – quasi-possession, in legal terms – which was the liminal status of many freedpersons at that time?

Pinho, the public prosecutor in Porfíria’s case, thus tried to recast the issue when he appealed the decision to the Municipal Court. Doubting the validity of the documents presented by the defendant and insisting on Porfíria’s right to freedom, he directed the legal debate to the moment when manumission took effect. He attached to the records a letter of conditional manumission given to Porfíria and her children by their first master, which had been ignored when they were sold. Pinho claimed that Albuquerque could not “deny them this possession, because freedom is not a material object to be held on to, but rather, it is a right acquired by the person to whom it is transmitted or granted, from the moment in which it is granted.” Pinho thus argued that Porfíria and her children possessed civil liberty even though they did not have the material possession of the manumission letter. He reasoned that freedom was granted in the act of manumission and did not depend on the realization of autonomy or the end of the alleged master’s domain over Porfíria. In the end, the case was decided against Porfíria, since the judge in charge of the case rejected the prosecutor’s appeal.

This question of when a freedperson would be considered legally free occupied multiple jurists and even resulted in a discussion at the Brazilian Bar Institute (Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros – IAB) in 1857, eight years after Porfíria’s case was first opened. As noted earlier, this was a particularly sensitive issue for women, since their status determined that of their children. In the case discussed at the IAB, manumission had been granted in a will, conditional on the provision of services after the death of the master. Jurist Teixeira de Freitas, then presiding the IAB, defended the minority position, according to which the freedperson would be considered free only after fulfilling the conditions, which implied that the children born in the interval between manumission and the fulfillment of the conditions would be born slaves. By contrast, for jurists Caetano Alberto Soares and Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro, freedom was granted in the will, even though the freedperson would only enter into the full benefits of freedom when conditions were fulfilled. Under this interpretation, which was the official position adopted by the IAB, any children that the freedwomen gave birth to in that interval would be free. This decision preserved the principle of seigneurial will, so dear to defenders of property, while simultaneously opening a space for the interpretation of freedom as a natural right and for manumission as the restitution of freedom, principles that would guide gradual emancipation in Brazil.Footnote ³⁷

Kidnapping and the Enslavement of Free People

The original focus of Article 179 of the 1830 Criminal Code was the enslavement of persons already recognized as free, whose cases would not have raised the same doubts regarding admissibility as did cases involving conditionally manumitted persons or newly arrived Africans. Still, the proceedings reveal the limits to criminalizing the common practice of illegal enslavement, which intensified around 1850 with the closing of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of the price of slaves.Footnote ³⁸

Although the enslavement of free people has not been systematically investigated, scattered studies give evidence of the profile of the victims, who were most often children or young people of African origin, especially boys, or Afro-descendant women of childbearing age.Footnote ³⁹ In Rio Grande do Sul, the border with Uruguay was decisive: most of the victims were kidnapped from “beyond the border,” an expression used by Silmei de Sant’Ana Petiz to describe escapes to Uruguay and Argentina in the first half of the century.Footnote ⁴⁰ This geographic detail turned cases of illegal enslavement in the province into diplomatic issues, adding a new layer of complexity to the analysis of how authorities reacted when faced with calls to crack down on these activities.

Although enslaved individuals were being smuggled across borders long before the criminalization of illegal enslavement, the act took on new significance with the independence movements and the gradual abolition of slavery in the former Spanish colonies of South America, which included the enactment of legislation forbidding the slave trade and declaring freedom of the womb. Illegal kidnappings could then be considered, in fact, an expansion of the frontiers of enslavement, much like that identified by Joseph Miller in Angola, in which people were illegally enslaved outside areas where enslavement, even if not always legal, was accepted by local authorities. The profile of the victims – predominantly children – also coincides with Benjamin Lawrance’s characterization of nineteenth-century illegal trafficking in Central and West Africa.Footnote ⁴¹

In this context, the border between Uruguay and Brazil constituted a region particularly prone to illegal enslavement. Fully integrated to the agrarian economy of Rio Grande do Sul, it was an area of extensive land holdings and low population density. Most landowners in the north and northeast of Uruguay were Brazilian, and in several of these locations slaves made up one-third of the total population, similar to the figures in Rio Grande do Sul at that time.Footnote ⁴² Especially in the 1840s, the troubled situation in Uruguay and the political instability of the province of Rio Grande do Sul contributed significantly to the increase in the number of people crossing the borders. The Farroupilha Revolution (1835–1845), the Gaucho separatist movement against the Brazilian Empire, and the Guerra Grande (1839–1851), a civil war between the Blancos and Colorados in Uruguay, provoked significant social unrest in the border region, with military incursions on both sides, cattle and horse theft, and the appropriation of slaves to enlist as troops. The tensions in the border area became even more heightened when, desperate for men for its defensive troops, the Colorado government of Montevideo, of which Brazil was an ally, proclaimed the abolition of slavery in 1842. The Blanco government of Cerrito followed with a proclamation in 1846. Aggravated further in the early 1850s with the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, these factors contributed to a situation which made the Afro-descendants north of the Negro River easy prey to a new form of human trafficking organized on the border of Brazil and Uruguay that lasted from the mid-1840s until at least the early 1870s.Footnote ⁴³

It is difficult to ascertain how many of the free people who were victims of kidnapping managed to report the crimes. Probably few. At any rate, unlike the cases of newly arrived Africans and re-enslaved freedpersons, evidence suggests that the Imperial authorities began to seriously address the enslavement of persons recognized as free as of 1850. The problem, clearly not contained to Rio Grande do Sul, was raised in the reports of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Indeed, the trafficking of free Uruguayans went all the way to Rio de Janeiro.Footnote ⁴⁴ The frontiers of enslavement also expanded into the Brazilian interior, and in 1869 the minister of justice monitored three cases of illegal enslavement of free persons: two involving minors in Bahia and Pernambuco, the third involving a family of Africans in Minas Gerais.Footnote ⁴⁵

At a moment when Brazil was suspected of turning a blind eye to the illegal trafficking of slaves, cases involving other countries were taken even more seriously, as the Brazilian government was concerned about negative international repercussions. The abduction of the minor Faustina, analyzed in detail by Jonatas Caratti, is a good example of this situation. In February 1853, the president of the province of Rio Grande do Sul asked the chief of police of the southern city of Pelotas to investigate the whereabouts of Faustina, who “as a free person, was seized by a Brazilian and sold as a slave in that town.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A few days later, the Uruguayan authorities demanded the extradition of Faustina, arguing that she was Uruguayan and free. The complaint seems to have had an effect: in an attempt to obtain more information about Faustina, her father, having informed the authorities of her daughter’s abduction, was interrogated in Melo, Uruguay; her baptismal record was also located and sent to Brazil. While this was happening, Loureiro, the judge in charge of the case, expedited the order to arrest Manoel Marques Noronha, accused of the crime, on the “presumption of guilt.” Noronha was found, arrested, and questioned. The judge concluded that he was in fact guilty, finding that the complaints and documents were sufficient evidence to prove the girl’s free status.

Faustina was released and taken home to Uruguay, but the case did not stop there: because of the seriousness of the accusation, the Noronha trial was brought to a jury, made up of the “good citizens” of Pelotas. Noronha defended himself, arguing that he was suffering political persecution. He further alleged good faith, accusing Maria Duarte Nobre, from whom he had bought Faustina, of being the real culprit. The jury accepted the defendant’s arguments and acquitted him, and by September 1854 he was already free from prison. Maria Duarte Nobre was convicted of the crime; however, as she had never been arrested and was not imprisoned during the trial, she remained free. In the end, nobody paid for the crime of Faustina’s enslavement. Her release, however, allowed the Brazilian authorities to demonstrate their commitment to suppressing the illegal slave trade and preventing illegal enslavement. Two years later, Manoel Marques Noronha was again accused of kidnapping; this time the victim was twelve-year-old pardo Firmino. Of the many cases of kidnapping and illegal enslavement of free people on the border of Brazil and Uruguay, Noronha was the only person convicted. He was condemned and sentenced to three years of prison and the payment of a fine, but, as he brought his case to the Court of Appeals in Rio de Janeiro, it is not known whether he actually ever served his prison sentence.

In this same year, the African Rufina and her four children had a fate similar to Faustina’s. Abducted in Tacuarembó, Uruguay in 1854, they were taken to Brazil and sold there. Somehow, Rufina managed to report the crime to the Brazilian police. It became a lawsuit that caught the attention of journalists and the Uruguayan and British consuls in Porto Alegre. At the time, British Foreign Minister Lord Palmerston wrote to Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs, Paulino José Soares de Souza, requesting energetic measures against this “new form of trafficking” taking place on Brazilian borders. Rufina was not only freed but also reunited with her family and returned to Uruguay. None of the kidnappers, however, were convicted. They alleged that they were trying to recover escaped slaves and were unaware of the free or freed status of those kidnapped, and the jury acquitted them all.Footnote ⁴⁷

The conclusion here is somewhat obvious: because of the diplomatic attention they received, cases of enslavement from “beyond the border” reached the courts more frequently than other cases. In the early 1850s, the Brazilian government was forced to take a stand, and it thus pressed the local courts to prosecute captors who imported slaves into Brazilian territory.Footnote ⁴⁸ But already in 1868, during the Paraguayan War, when the Brazilian military depended largely on the mobilization of the Gaucho troops, the minister of justice decreased the pressure on slaveowners on the southern border, stating that the alleged owners of anyone brought from Uruguay to Brazil and illegally enslaved should only be prosecuted under Article 179 if they refused to admit the victim’s right to freedom.Footnote ⁴⁹ Nonetheless, the central government did not support the practices of enslavement by masters on the borders in Rio Grande do Sul in the same way or on the same scale, as it overlooked cases involving the illegal enslavement of freedpeople or turned a blind eye to the large-scale enslavement of newly arrived Africans.

Conclusion

In late 1851 and early 1852, a major popular revolt against a civil registration law erupted in the backlands of Northeast Brazil. The people who protested against the new law had one recurring concern: to protect their freedom, as they understood that the mandatory civil registration was actually a strategy to enslave free people of African descent after the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade. They probably feared that civil registration would make official the threats of illegal enslavement they observed in their daily lives.Footnote ⁵⁰ Hardened and cynical from decades of forced military recruitment and severe physical punishment equivalent to that of slaves, they did not trust local authorities to generate vital records or to secure their status.Footnote ⁵¹

Although there were no reports of this type of manifestation in southern Brazil, it is plausible that the free population there would have had the same fears. The general picture outlined in this chapter, although preliminary, suggests that the practice of illegal enslavement was recurrent and was met with a variety of legal responses, depending on the victims and the context. Of the 2,341 criminal cases listed in the catalog of crimes related to slavery in Rio Grande do Sul in the years between 1763 and 1888, sixty-eight, or about 3 percent, were related to reducing free persons to slavery.Footnote ⁵² Thirty-five of those cases refer to illegally enslaved persons, and twenty-nine of those were “beyond the border,” confirming that it was the politically and diplomatically charged cases that were most criminalized. Almost all such cases took place in the 1850s and 1860s. Of the sixty-eight cases, the outcome of five was inconclusive (because of trials records with no final verdict, missing pages, etc.). In twelve cases, the decision called for the release of the enslaved victims. None of the defendants in these cases were punished, even though the determination of freedom constituted, in practice, an acknowledgment of the crime. In forty-eight of the cases, the accusation against the slavers was dismissed or they were acquitted. In only three of the sixty-eight cases were the defendants convicted under Article 179 of the Criminal Code, and in two of those it is not known whether they were actually ever imprisoned. In one case, from 1856, the defendant appealed to the Court of Appeals of Rio de Janeiro, and the final verdict is not known; in the other, which occurred in Encruzilhada do Sul in 1878, the defendants were convicted but then released when the guilty verdict was dismissed. Apparently only Joaquim Fernandez Maia, who was prosecuted for beating and enslaving a nine-year-old, João, was sentenced to prison based on Articles 179 and 201 of the Criminal Code. It is important to note that the three cases that led to convictions referred to free or freed people enslaved by a third party.Footnote ⁵³

The early 1870s brought about changes. It had already long been impossible to legally enslave Africans, and after 1871, with the establishment of Free Womb Law, the enslavement of newborn children was prohibited as well. The law of 1871 also created a mandatory slave registry that, for the first time, would generate a record of who was held in slavery and by whom, definitively closing the borders of enslavement. This mechanism, however, also had the role of legalizing the slave status of those Africans who had been smuggled into Brazil or otherwise illegally enslaved.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is true that among the stipulations of the Free Womb Law and subsequent decrees was a prohibition on registering as a slave a person who had been conditionally manumitted, which subjected anyone who did so to the penalties provided for in Article 179.Footnote ⁵⁵ Of the twenty-four cases in Rio Grande do Sul between 1763 and 1888 that involved conditionally freed persons, twelve of them were brought to court precisely in this period, in the 1870s and 1880s. Extending protection to conditionally freed persons implied that they counted, at least for the legislators, as free people in possession of their freedom. However, this was not the understanding that prevailed in the courts. Most commentators of the Criminal Code, when discussing the application of Article 179, indicate that by 1860 the possession of freedom had become a mandatory requirement in cases that would be tried by the jury.Footnote ⁵⁶ This indicates that the judiciary came to limit the criminalization of illegal enslavement to only those cases where the victim was undeniably free. This approach had important consequences: as they were not viewed as criminal offenses, cases of illegal enslavement would be brought to court as civil suits (ações de liberdade), thus increasing the load on the civil courts. Moreover, the enslavers, even if they lost the slaves, went unpunished.

The existence of court proceedings refutes the conclusion that there was a general collusion between the authorities of the judiciary, legislative, and executive branches – at all levels of power – with illegal enslavement. The cases analyzed here suggest that the prosecutors played an important role in identifying the mechanisms of illegal enslavement and defending the victims. Yet they were overrun by judges who declared the cases inadmissible, by juries that acquitted the defendants, and by superior courts that decided in favor of property even if it was illegally acquired. It is clear that criminals were rarely brought to trial even in the 1880s, when engaged lawyers and judges succeeded in expanding the chances for liberation through freedom lawsuits. In practice, the Brazilian judiciary allowed for the liberation of individuals through civil cases and made it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue any criminal conviction. After all, the liberation of particular individuals through freedom lawsuits had a impact (albeit limited) on the dynamics of nineteenth-century slavery in Brazil, but this would not be true of criminal offenses. If the enslavers were punished for the crime of illegal enslavement, the potential impact would have been much greater and could even have jeopardized the very survival of master–slave relations, especially after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. Faced with this situation, by guaranteeing impunity to the enslavers at each new phase of the relations among slaves, masters, and the Imperial government, the Brazilian judiciary supported a pact that maintained slavery.

Introduction

The transatlantic slave trade to Brazil became illegal after November 1831. Yet as many as a million African slaves came to the country between 1831 and the early 1850s, when the Eusebio de Queiroz Law finally extinguished the trade. Ineffectiveness did not, however, imply impotence: the 1831 ban still had a profound impact on Brazil’s economy, politics, and society. It forced the trade to shift its physical operations from conspicuous ports in the Empire’s principal coastal cities to natural harbors and beaches controlled by provincial landowners, many of whom were also the slave trade’s avid customers. The trade’s new geography and clandestinity spawned important new business opportunities: scores of people were employed in the trade – guiding the slave ships as well as landing, feeding, healing, guarding, and distributing the contraband survivors of the middle passage – and the 1831 law also consolidated the already existing articulation between slave smuggling and cabotage, responsible for a thriving slave trade among Brazil’s coastal areas since colonial times. These new economic networks grew embedded in local and provincial politics; in Brazil, as in Africa, the imperatives of Britain’s high seas antislavery campaign had to be weighed against the complex internal structures that fortified the slave trade. Multitudes of traders, plantation owners, bureaucrats, and small-time slaveowners depended on slavery and did all within their power to prolong it. The continuous contraband of slaves after 1831 was visible enough to all Brazilians, but the trade’s profitability and centrality to national political and economic structures meant that top governmental officials – including members of several Imperial cabinets – were more than willing to favor power over the letter of the law in the two decades between 1831 and the early 1850s.

Needless to say, the people involved in the contraband of African slaves to Brazil tried to hide their participation. Investigating the process is thus difficult: one must face omissions in the sources and ferret out the secrets kept by those who took part in, condoned, and benefited from an illegal business that involved some of the richest and most powerful men in the country. This chapter will uncover some of those secrets by focusing on the illegal slave trade to the province of Pernambuco between 1831 and the 1850s. This focus is significant for two reasons. First, while there is a wide literature about the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil after 1831, we still know little about how it actually operated – its logistical unraveling on Brazil’s remote beaches – or how the adjustments it engendered influenced both the nature of the trade and the evolution of local networks of economic and political power. Second, although Pernambuco’s slave trade was in some ways singular, the province was Brazil’s third and the Americas’ fourth most important destination for enslaved Africans: 854,000, or 8.1 percent of those who came to the Americas between 1501 and 1867, arrived in Pernambuco.Footnote ¹ Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the province lagged only behind Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Jamaica. Regardless, and surprisingly, what David Eltis and Daniel Domingues da Silva claimed a decade ago still remains true: the slave trade to Pernambuco is less investigated than those to Cuba, Haiti, and the United States, locations that received far fewer African people.Footnote ²

In the following pages I will discuss how Pernambuco’s slave trade adapted to the new circumstances created by the 1831 ban. Landing sites shifted to beaches adjacent to plantations. British anti–slave trade squadrons noted the growing use of smaller vessels, which were cheaper, faster, easier to hide, less visible to the British navy, and more capable of entering hidden natural harbors and creeks in both Brazil and Africa. The 1831 law also probably spurred a significant rise in the number of adolescents and children forcibly brought to Pernambuco from West Central Africa. As Herbert Klein has observed, children were usually a distinct minority in the trade before the eighteenth century.Footnote ³ This changed in the 1800s. Children were frequently forced onto nineteenth-century slave ships;Footnote ⁴ despite slave-dealers’ reluctance to trade in them, there was a widespread and significant increase in the importation of people from five to twenty years of age to Brazil between 1810 and 1850.Footnote ⁵ While Klein and others have argued that this transformation reflected changes on the African supply side, the timing and geography of the change suggest it could also have had much to do with the 1831 law. Briefly put, the ban created new logics for profit within the slave trade, especially valorizing agility and subterfuge. Although the slave trade to Pernambuco was less capitalized than that to Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, the trip’s short duration drastically reduced the human and monetary risk of voyages undertaken in the tiny, overcrowded vessels that could promise clandestinity. Traders could reap abundant profits if they were willing to use small ships, pack them with the compact bodies of children and adolescents, and forge active partnerships with the complicit plantation owners who controlled the coast, roads, and towns around surrounding Brazil’s natural harbors. In encouraging these new and brutal economic logics, the 1831 ban deeply impacted both the social demographics of Pernambucan slavery and the political and economic networks that structured the province.

Camilo’s Story and the Networks of the Clandestine Trade

The 1831 law presented slave traders with abundant challenges, all of which required strong local networks to overcome. Traders had first to find a proper harbor or beach to land their human merchandise; although the Brazilian coast is gigantic, a slave ship could not stop just anywhere. Once an adequate harbor was found, a human network had to be constructed to facilitate clandestine trade on potentially perilous shores. Systems of signs were devised to communicate with slave ships, including bonfires that were lit at nightFootnote ⁶ to guide incoming ships.Footnote ⁷ In Pernambuco, fishermen also used jangadas, locally made catamarans, to reach distant slave ships, guide them to the beaches, and help to disembark.Footnote ⁸ At least one slave ship was captured off Pernambuco at the moment its captain was riding a jangada to the Cabo de Santo Agostinho beach.Footnote ⁹ Once on land, there was need for security, water, and food. Plantation owners, who controlled local lands, roads, and towns, were essential in providing these goods and guaranteeing that the trade would remain an open secret.

It was at a beach adjacent to a sugar plantation that an African boy, who would later be named Camilo, disembarked, enslaved, sometime after 1831. Camilo believed that he was in his forties in 1874, when he filed a civil suit to gain his freedom before the judge of Itambé, Pernambuco.Footnote ¹⁰ He could not state exactly how long he had been in Brazil: twenty-seven to thirty years, he said. Supposing he was right about his age, the Congolese boy probably disembarked in Pernambuco in the early 1840s. He did not remember the name of the vessel; to him, it would have made little difference. Perhaps the boy was too terrified to pay attention, for he was only “nearly seven years of age” when he faced the middle passage. When he first filed his freedom suit with a notary, Camilo said he did not know the name of the beach where he landed. But when he spoke to the judge later the same day, he claimed to have landed at “Itapuí,” probably Atapus, one of the continental beaches surrounding Itamaracá Island near Catuama, an important natural harbor north of Recife frequently used for slave smuggling. He was taken from there – at midnight, he said – to “Major Paulino’s” Itapirema plantation, where he was imprisoned for a few days in the casa de purgar (the building where the plantation’s cane syrup was boiled) along with “ninety” other Africans.Footnote ¹¹ We do not know their ages, but they were certainly his malungos – that is, fellow captives who were brought to Brazil on the same slave ship.Footnote ¹²

After a few days, Camilo said, he was bought by a man named Rochedo (later identified as Joaquim de Mattos Alcantilado Rochêdo) and taken to the house of the “Portuguese” Manoel Gonsalves in Goiana, then the second most important town in the province (smaller only than Recife in terms of population). The boy walked there with four other captives, who had died by the time Camilo filed his freedom suit. The judge asked if the other slaves had remained at Itapirema´s casa de purgar; Camilo answered that, when he left for Goiana, some others had likewise departed, also in small groups at night, but that half of his fellow captives remained. Once in Goiana, Camilo and his four companions were baptized in the lower room of a sobrado (a large townhouse) belonging to Manoel Gonsalves. According to Camilo, the priest (whose name he could not remember) was white and tall. His godfather was “Agostinho de tal” (de tal meaning that Camilo did not know the man’s last name), whom the clerk described in parentheses as a “natural” son of the sobrado owner. It was at this point in his life that the seven-year-old Congolese child became Camilo: the records did not preserve his African name.

After Camilo and his malungos Abraham, Manoel, Luis, and Justino were baptized, they were returned to Manoel Gonsalves, the owner of the sobrado where the baptism was performed. After a few days’ pause for rest and recovery, Camilo, Luis, and Justino were sent to Perory, a sugar plantation in the same county owned by Manoel Gonsalves’s legitimate son, Major Henrique Lins de Noronha Farias. Abraham and Manoel stayed in Goiana. Camilo thus came to serve a planter family that lived in the same county he had landed in; when the judge asked him where Agostinho, his godfather, lived, Camilo said he also lived at Perory, “Major” Henrique’s plantation. This provides a revealing clue about those plantation owners´ family arrangements; as was relatively common in Brazil at the time, members of the same extended family occupied different social classes according to the nature of their parents’ relationship. Major Henrique, the legitimate son, owned the plantation, whereas Agostinho, the “natural” son, lived there as a dependent of his half-brother. We do not know if they shared the same skin color, but Agostinho was certainly a free man. Camilo survived his first masters only to serve another generation of the same family; after Major Henrique’s death, Camilo told the judge, he was inherited by Belarmino de Noronha Farias, Major Henrique’s son and Manoel Gonsalves’ grandson.

Camilo’s odyssey was repeated by countless African children who were smuggled into Brazil after the 1831 anti–slave trade law. Young people, mostly teenagers but sometimes even children, constituted common cargo on slave ships. That seven-year-old African boy renamed Camilo was one; two others were Maria and Joaquim Congo, who testified in a freedom suit filed by Maria in 1884. Maria and Joaquim were around fifty in 1884, but like Camilo they had been just children when they disembarked in Pernambuco “some forty-something years” earlier, in Joaquim Congo’s words. Joaquim’s recollections were confirmed by Narciso Congo, an older African, aged fifty-six, who worked as a “water carrier” on the streets of Recife. Narciso Congo and Joaquim Congo were witnesses for Maria in her suit; they were also malungos, for they had all arrived on the same ship. Joaquim clearly stated he was no longer a captive at the time he testified and that the claims he had made to be freed could be extended to Maria. He said he was granted freedom “for having proved” that he was illegally smuggled to Brazil after 1831. In 1884, he was a whitewasher (caiador) living in Santo Amaro das Salinas, a parish of Recife that was home to many freedmen and women.

Narciso Congo also stated that he was no longer a captive in 1884, and he too had a story to tell. He said he landed with Maria and Joaquim at the beach of Porto de Galinhas. Unlike Maria, Joaquim, or Camilo, Narciso Congo was around sixteen years of age when he arrived in Brazil. He was soon baptized in the town of Cabo, located at a very traditional plantation area south of Recife, where several plantation oligarchies were based, including that of the Baron of Boa Vista, president of the province of Pernambuco between 1837 and 1844. We do not know any more details about the circumstances of Narciso´s baptism. But soon thereafter he ran away. Narciso did not talk about his escape route in his statement, except to note that he was “caught in Recife.” He was then sent to work at the Arsenal de Marinha, the headquarters of the Brazilian navy in Recife. This is an important detail, because fugitive slaves with known masters were generally sent back to them after capture. The Arsenal, in contrast, was the place “liberated Africans” were taken to and put to work; Narciso’s presence there reinforced his claim of free status.Footnote ¹³ Narciso stressed the fact that he was brought to Brazil on the same slave ship as Maria and confirmed she was just a “girl” (menina) when she arrived.Footnote ¹⁴

Camilo, in his forties in 1874, and Maria and Joaquim, aged fifty in 1884, had been about the same age when they disembarked in Brazil sometime in the 1840s; they might all have arrived around the same time, perhaps even in the same year, when the Baron of Boa Vista was president of Pernambuco. Nevertheless, they definitely came on different voyages, for Camilo landed on one of the beaches near Goiana, north of Recife, while Maria, Joaquim, and Narciso arrived at Porto de Galinhas, south of Recife. They were all baptized in important towns in plantation counties, which proves that the local clergy condoned the illegal slave trade; one witness even identified the “white and tall” priest who baptized Camilo as one “Father Genuíno.” Apart from the teenager Narciso – virtually an adult at age sixteen – the others were just enslaved children who fell from the Congolese slave trade networks into the web of transatlantic smuggling. They should have been freed immediately after reaching Brazilian soil. Or at least that is what the 1831 anti–slave trade law stated. Instead, they were given Portuguese names and remained enslaved.

Children and the Material Calculus of the Middle Passage

Louis François de Tollenare, a French cotton merchant who spent a few months in Recife between 1816 and 1817, witnessed one of those slave ships full of boys and girls docking at the port in 1817. The trade of “Congo” captives (those captured south of the equator) to Portuguese America was then still legal. In Tollenare’s words, only one-tenth of the slaves in the transatlantic slave trade to Pernambuco were full-grown men. No more than two-tenths were young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The rest of the human cargo, 70 percent, comprised children of both sexes.Footnote ¹⁵ Perhaps Tollenare exaggerated when he generalized this particular observation to the transatlantic slave trade as a whole. According to José Francisco de Azevedo Lisboa, a slave trader on the Pernambuco route, a very young cargo was not the most profitable one. In February 1837, Lisboa authoritatively instructed employees at a slave trade feitoria (outpost)Footnote ¹⁶ by the Benin River that it was very important to know how to choose among the slaves offered by the African nobility and middlemen under the suzerainty of the king of Benin. Older people, who were rejected at African fairs, should be rejected by the Portuguese as well, unless they were “women with full breasts” (negras de peito cheio). The most valuable merchandise for the “country’s taste” (gosto do país) were young twelve- to twenty-year-olds.Footnote ¹⁷ So Narciso, who was sixteen, was more valuable than boys and girls like Camilo, Joaquim, and Maria.

All the same, even if the resale value of children below twelve years of age was lower, they were still good merchandise, and improvements in shipping speeds rendered them a better value still in the nineteenth century. At the pinnacle of the slave trade in the eighteenth century, when the business was still legal, child slaves were assessed lower taxes in the Americas and toddlers were usually exempt. But high mortality rates signaled the frailty of such young human cargo.Footnote ¹⁸ By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, however, the slave trade moved on faster voyages and resulted in lower mortality rates. It therefore became easier to transport pre-adolescent children, and in the nineteenth century they would become ubiquitous in the transatlantic slave trade. According to Eltis, the child ratio in slave ships steadily increased after 1810.Footnote ¹⁹

Captain Henry James Matson had long experience combating the slave trade when he told the British Parliament that the trip from the African coast to Cuba took as long as three months, whereas the route to Brazil was half as long and much simpler, requiring much smaller crews, which meant that old or low-quality vessels could be used. For this reason, Captain Matson asserted, Brazilian smugglers could afford to lose three or even four out of five slave ships and still make a profit, an equation that was impossible for ships heading for Cuba.Footnote ²⁰ And of all the slave smuggling destinations in Brazil and the Americas, Pernambuco enjoyed the quickest access from West Central Africa, because of the Benguela current and the Atlantic winds. Inferring from Captain Matson’s logic, smugglers could risk overloading slave ships sailing to Pernambuco, because shorter voyages meant reduced time for the spread of diseases in the hold or on deck, as well as fewer deaths from starvation or dehydration. Smaller, more vulnerable children were especially good merchandise if the trip was short.

In 1839, the British consul at Recife wrote that the crossing from the Portuguese possessions in Africa to Pernambuco could take as little as fifteen days, which led smugglers to overload their vessels.Footnote ²¹ When he described the slave trade to Pernambuco in 1817, Tollenare said the journey from Africa was very fast and that he had heard tell of a vessel that crossed the Atlantic in thirteen days, resulting in a nearly zero mortality rate.Footnote ²² The brief duration of the trip would have made it possible to bring scores of children in the slave ship that Tollenare described.

Perhaps the British consul and Tollenare exaggerated. But some voyages were indeed very fast. The schooner brig Maria Gertrudes, listed in Table 2.1, took no more than twenty days to bring 254 live captives from Angola to Recife in 1829. The ship was named after the wife of the slave trader Francisco Antonio de Oliveira, the man who brought the largest number of African slaves to Pernambuco in the 1820s.Footnote ²³ Experienced slavers like him were able to cross the Atlantic very quickly. The Jovem Marie took only eighteen days to travel from Cabo Verde islands to Recife, although we do not know if it brought any slaves to the province. In 1831, the brig Oriente Africano and the schooner Novo Despique sailed only nineteen days from Angola to Recife.Footnote ²⁴ The fastest documented trip after 1831 was the 1840 journey of the schooner Formiga, which sailed from Luanda to Recife in just seventeen days.Footnote ²⁵

We do not know how many Africans were aboard the Novo Despique and the Formiga, but the brig Oriente Africano brought fourteen freed Africans and eight captives owned by the captain himself.Footnote ²⁶ The case of the Formiga is intriguing, because – although we have no direct evidence of human cargo – the goods within the ship suggested participation in the illegal trade. The Formiga arrived in Recife from Luanda in 1840, with only three Portuguese passengers. It was consigned to Pinto da Fonseca e Silva, probably a well-known Rio de Janeiro slave dealer who had contacts in Pernambuco.Footnote ²⁷ Apart from its few passengers, the ship carried only palm oil, wax, and mats, which were not nearly valuable enough to justify the trip. This was a very typical cargo for slave ships during the era of the illegal slave trade, when vessels left their more precious human cargo at natural harbors on the coast and proceeded to the major towns of Brazil in order to make repairs and organize subsequent voyages to Africa or elsewhere. The Formiga’s seventeen-day journey suggests that Tollenare and the British consul in Recife may not have been too far from reality when they claimed that a slave ship could arrive in fifteen days or less.

Similarly, in their study of the slave trade to Pernambuco, Daniel Domingues da Silva and David Eltis estimated that it was possible to arrive there in less than thirty days. On the basis of large samples for Bahia and Rio de Janeiro but data from only three voyages to Pernambuco, Eltis and Richardson concluded that, between 1776 and 1830, a slave ship took on average 40.9 days to reach Rio de Janeiro, thirty-seven days to Bahia, and only 26.7 days to reach Pernambuco.Footnote ²⁸ The sample in Table 2.1, drawn from research in the daily newspaper Diário de Pernambuco between 1827 and 1831, shows almost the same average: 26.1 days from Central-West Africa to Recife, although, as we have just seen, it was occasionally possible to make this trip in less than twenty days.

The Advantages of Illegal Child Trafficking

Such quick voyages to Pernambuco clearly made the trade of captive adolescents and children from Angola and Congo easier: it is thus unsurprising that it became more common in the nineteenth century. The presence of children entered the vocabulary of the slave trade early on. Moleques, mulecões, and mulecotas recur in slave trade-related sources and express common Brazilian understandings of age. Yet it is worth highlighting that these words were not originally Portuguese. According to Joseph Miller, their root derives from muleke, “dependent” in Kimbundu, one of the major languages of West Central Africa.Footnote ²⁹ Assis Júnior translated mulêKe as a “young man, boy, servant.”Footnote ³⁰ In contrast, Valencia Villa and Florentino stated that the expression moleques, in the plural, probably originally referred to children of any sex below twelve years of age.Footnote ³¹ These possibilities are not necessarily contradictory. Many captive adolescents and children were male dependents, “servants” in West Central Africa, who were frequently sold in different markets before ending up in the web of the Atlantic slave trade. But other categories of captive children were also frequently sold elsewhere in Atlantic Africa, and the word moleque thus gradually lost its conceptual and geographical specificity and came to include young people from the Gulf of Guinea. By 1640, when Portugal separated from Spain, the term had entered the Portuguese language, according to Miller, and it still appears frequently in Brazilian Portuguese.Footnote ³²

From the cold-blooded perspective of slave merchants, there were some advantages to buying children. They were relatively defenseless and therefore less able to effectively rebel in the middle passage. They ate and drank less.Footnote ³³ They abounded at sales points in West Central Africa in the nineteenth century and were less expensive than adults. In Africa, children were more vulnerable than adults, both to razzias (slave raids) and natural catastrophe; they could also more easily be kidnapped and were subject to tributary systems and debt relations that eventually justified their enslavement.Footnote ³⁴ From the beginning of the slave trade, there were social, economic, and political trapdoors that caught children and threw them into slavery.Footnote ³⁵ It is thus little wonder that Captain James Matson, one of the most iconic characters of the British squadron that patrolled the coast of Africa to combat the Atlantic slave trade, said that 1,033 of the 1,683 captives he seized from slave ships were children.Footnote ³⁶

This was further aggravated by the turn of the nineteenth century because the overwhelming volume of the eighteenth-century slave trade put pressure on the supply side of this most lucrative type of business. West Central Africa was much less populated than West Africa, and adults were better able to defend themselves. Soon, new forms of enslavement emerged, endangering children whose parents, close relatives, or lineages could not effectively protect them. Even in places where there were no wars, razzias, or kidnappings, defenseless children could still be enslaved. Children could be given as security for debts, and Roquinaldo Ferreira and Mariana Candido have observed that West Central African legal tribunals, backed both by Portuguese authorities and by African middlemen and nobility, often ratified the enslavement of dependent people (servants, retainers, and their children), who could easily fall prey to the Atlantic slave trade networks and end up in one of the slave ships bound for the Americas.Footnote ³⁷

After 1831, when the trade to Brazil became illegal, there was yet another advantage to trading captive children. This was revealed in a letter from Augustus Cowper, the British consul in Pernambuco, to the Count of Clarendon on November 3, 1855, regarding the capture of an unnamed pilot boat at the Barra de Serinhaém (about 80 kilometers south of Recife). This episode embarrassed Brazil’s Imperial government, for the ship was seized with enslaved captives aboard five years after the 1850 Eusebio de Queiroz law, which had been passed by the Brazilian government under heavy British pressure in order to put an end to the contraband of African slaves.Footnote ³⁸ After 1850, the Brazilian government tasked its navy and local coastal authorities with ending the trade. However, some ships still evaded detection. One of them was the unnamed pilot-boat that came to Serinhaém in 1855, the last one seized in Brazil with captives inside its hold. The boat was only 30 tons but contained 250 captives when it arrived in Santo Aleixo island, facing the beach of Serinhaém – adjacent to Porto de Galinhas – on October 10, 1855. A vessel’s tonnage measures volume, not weight. In the early nineteenth century, when the transatlantic slave trade was legal, a slave ship was allowed to carry up to five captives per 2 tons, according to Article 1 of the notorious 1813 alvará (decree) that regulated the matter.Footnote ³⁹ The British consul in Recife found it absurd that so many people could fit inside a 30-ton schooner that, according to the tight rules of the 1813 alvará, should have carried only seventy-five slaves. He inferred those captives must have come from some larger vessel far away in the ocean. Indeed, perhaps that was the case; slave traders sometimes used that strategy. But very small slave ships packed with Africans also crossed the ocean toward Pernambuco after 1831. This may very well have been the case here, for the ship was not overloaded with adults. According to the British consul, of the 250 captives thirty were women, and all the rest were just boys. The consul explained that this could have indicated a new strategy that involved bringing only “untattooed boys” to Brazil.Footnote ⁴⁰ The consul may have used the wrong word, for he probably meant that the boys had no scarifications, the diacritical marks of African populations who were subjected to the Atlantic slave trade. Those boys, in other words, were so young they had not been yet initiated in their original African communities. They did not bear what Brazilians called “nation marks” (marcas de nação) and could thus easily pass as crioulos (Brazilian-born enslaved people, not subject to the 1850 law).

Consul Cowper was probably mistaken when he said that ship was the first one intentionally filled with captives lacking scarifications. Until the Brazilian government decided to fight slave smuggling on the Brazilian mainland in the early 1850s, smugglers were very successful in cheating the British navy and going about their business as usual. That strategy was not new in 1855, for there were children inside slave ships before; kids like Camilo, Maria, or Joaquim were also so young that they were probably unmarked. In this sense Consul Cowper´s account is precious, for it explicitly reveals a critical advantage to bringing children to Brazil after the 1831 anti–slave trade law: they could more easily pass as crioulos (Brazilian-born slaves) and therefore be sold anywhere in the presence of authorities without suspicion.

This case also shows that, as brutal as it was, bringing children on small vessels was quite normal from the slave traders’ perspective. Tiny ships could more easily cheat the British navy, for they were harder to spot. And bringing children as cargo allowed traders to make the most of their limited cargo space. It is even likely that some ships were built with precisely that idea in mind. According to Lieutenant R. N. Forbes – the commander of the Bonetta, one of the British vessels that patrolled the African coast – nothing was done without reason in the slave trade. In his reports, Lieutenant Forbes praised the beauty of some slave ships, but he also stressed their exiguity, expressed especially in cramped corner spaces that were only 14 to 18 inches high, specifically designed to carry children. According to Forbes, some ships were virtually built for that purpose. In his words, the Triumfo (sic), a tiny 18-ton yacht seized in 1842, was one of these “hellish nurseries.” In addition to a crew of only five Spanish seamen, the vessel carried a fourteen-year-old girl and 104 children aged between four and nine.Footnote ⁴¹

Lt. Forbes’ reference to “hellish nurseries” suggests that the British consul may have been mistaken in 1855, when he found it somehow absurd that a small 30-ton vessel could carry 250 people, even if 220 were children so young that they had not been initiated in their original communities. Perhaps Consul Cowper simply could not imagine that the small boat in Serinhaém was just one of those hellish nurseries that Lt. Forbes spoke of, crowded with children from West Central Africa.

The slave ship commander Theodore Canot wrote in his memoirs about a similar episode involving a tiny boat with only two sailors and a pilot, which escaped the British navy and fled to Bahia with a cargo of thirty-three boys. According to him, this grotesque yet successful adventure encouraged other smugglers to repeat it.Footnote ⁴² Pastor Grenfell Hill narrated his journey from Mozambique to Cape Town on a slave ship that carried 447 people, which was seized by the British in 1843; forty-five were women and 189 were men, few more than twenty years old. The rest of the human cargo was composed of 213 boys.Footnote ⁴³ According to Manolo Florentino’s calculations, the hold where those people were piled up was no bigger than 70 square meters (about 750 square feet).Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Robert Harms, the British had a word for such tight packing of people: “spooning,” for it resembled the stacking of spoons.Footnote ⁴⁵

The brutal way children were confined caused the death of at least sixty of them on a small slave ship that landed in Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, in 1844. During its entire voyage from Africa, according to British Consul Cowper, 160 of its captives died “from the leaky state of the vessel and other causes.” There had been rumors that the thirty-year-old ship was originally bound for Rio de Janeiro, but the ship’s sailing master, a near relative of the man who took charge of the surviving slaves in Recife, decided in collusion with the first mate to come to Recife. The second mate – “it is said” – “resisted and was thrown overboard at sea.” Consul Cowper did not note the age of the slave trade victims in this episode. He claimed, however, that sixty people, all children, “were drowned or killed by a heavy lurch of the vessel when she first grounded.” The 130 survivors, in a “weakly state,” were rushed from the ship to be sold in Recife.Footnote ⁴⁶

Lieutenant Forbes’ logic should not be overlooked. Traders did not bring children simply because they had no other choice, either because they lacked capital or because children were the only merchandise available to them on the African coast. Children could fit anywhere, and they were chattel just as adults were, albeit less valuable. Our contemporary notions of infancy did not apply to enslaved children at that time; on the contrary, minors were considered more pliant and flexible workers, and their tiny bodies made it easier to pack them in, just as E. P. Thompson has argued for British mines.Footnote ⁴⁷ If Forbes was right, the vessels themselves were designed to meet the demand for children on the part of buyers who plied the African coast. Those overcrowded ships that came to Brazil may have been full of children so young that they had no scarifications, the diacritical marks of their original ethnic groups in Africa that might otherwise have betrayed them as contraband.

The Daily Routines of Child Smuggling in Africa and the Atlantic

Data produced by the British show that, besides schooners and brigs, small yachts were also used in slave smuggling to Pernambuco and other parts of Brazil. The Portuguese consul in Recife – who was not generally very concerned with the slave trade unless it was practiced by Portuguese citizens – confirmed the use of very small ships by Brazilian-born slave dealers. In December 1844, he said that yachts were used to enter West African harbors such as Onim, Benin, and Whydah to buy slaves. At least six of them had successfully landed captives in Pernambuco that year.Footnote ⁴⁸ British consular agents did not always report the tonnage of those smaller vessels or note how many people they carried, but they occasionally provided sound information. The yacht Mariquinhas, for example, was just a 45-ton boat when its human cargo disembarked in December 1843 near the mouth of the Una River, about 120 kilometers south of Recife, almost at the border with the Province of Alagoas. Based on the regulations of the aforementioned 1813 alvará – which specified the brutal terms of the legal slave trade and allowed for very restricted food and water supplies – the Mariquinhas should not have held more than 110 to 115 captives. It is hard to imagine how was it possible to fit 203 people into the Mariquinhas, unless much – perhaps most – of the human cargo was composed of children like Camilo, Maria, or Joaquim, who also came to Pernambuco in the 1840s. Two people died during the transatlantic crossing of the Mariquinhas, and 201 disembarked alive.Footnote ⁴⁹ The voyage of the São José had that same scale of brutality. It was an 83-ton vessel and was managed by a crew of thirteen men. It left 340 captives in Catuama in December 1841.Footnote ⁵⁰ Given such crowded conditions, the Mariquinhas and the São José may well have been two of those “hellish nurseries” Forbes spoke of.

Boys and girls, likely under twelve years of age, also appear in the sources about the slave ships Camões and Veloz, seized by the British squadron on the Benin River in West Africa, when they were preparing to embark with a load of captives bound for Pernambuco in 1837. The ships belonged to the firm run by José Francisco de Azevedo Lisboa in Recife; the feitoria in the Benin River where the two ships operated was one among his many business enterprises. Neither the Camões nor the Veloz had captives aboard when they were captured by the British schooner Fair Rosamond. The slaves were on the beach, waiting to embark. The British officer who apprehended the two slave ships on the river decided to take the captives to Sierra Leone at his own risk. Yet at that time, only ships with slaves within their holds were fair game for the British squadron. So the captain of the Fair Rosamond decided to load the human cargo inside the Camões in order to justify the ship’s apprehension and transport to Sierra Leone (the Veloz was badly damaged). Of the 138 Africans forced on board, seventy-one were boys and girls. The commander of the Fair Rosamond noted that thirty-eight of the boys were healthy when they were embarked, while seven were ill. Twenty-five of the girls were healthy, while one was sick. Of those 138 people, sixty-seven subsequently died, twenty-two during the trip to Sierra Leone and forty-five after landing. This very high mortality rate happened in a ship that had been loaded with slaves by a British commander who was nominally concerned with their fate.Footnote ⁵¹

Several employees worked in that feitoria by the Benin River. One of them, Antonio Candido da Silva, was in charge of the captives that would be sent to Pernambuco. The appropriate handling of his tasks was crucial to the success of the business. His correspondence with his superiors at the feitoria suggests that there were often children among the slaves bought from the African nobility and middlemen. Children were certainly less threatening than adults, but they also demanded a lot from Antonio Candido da Silva, who had to keep them alive, well supervised, and clean. He had to cut their hair, to prevent lice; at least once he ordered his subordinate, a Spanish seaman, to scrape the teeth of the “moleques” to prevent scurvy.Footnote ⁵² Children could also die before embarking, like a poor girl who passed away from diarrhea, whom Antonio Candido described in a note to his manager at the Benin factory, João Baptista Cezar. On occasion, boys tried to escape; Antonio Candido wrote that he had once counted the children twice before lunch, but after the meal he noticed a “moleque” had disappeared. The boy was eventually captured and punished with the help of a local African “queen” (rainha).Footnote ⁵³

The presence of enslaved children in the feitoria was considered absolutely normal. It is thus not surprising that the captain of the Fair Rosamond, who captured the company’s ships, embarked them to Sierra Leone without much concern; the lawsuit at the British and Portuguese Mixed Commission Court in Sierra Leone that eventually resulted from the incident of the Veloz and the Camões in Sierra Leone did not even mention that it had involved children. Captives were just captives, both for the British and for African and Brazilian slavers – so much so that children were even included among the gifts that the head of operations at the feitoria, João Baptista Cezar, intended to send to his family in Recife. Although José Francisco de Azevedo Lisboa was the general manager of the firm, Cezar ran most of the operations on the Benin River, including negotiations with the African nobility over slave purchases. Antonio Candido, the man who took care of the captives, made very clear in his correspondence that Cezar was a strict boss whom Antonio Candido tried hard to please. But two undelivered letters to his wife, seized by the British navy, also indicate that Cezar was a caring and loving husband and father. Writing on successive days, Cezar addressed his wife as “Josephina, cara esposa do meu coração” (“Josephina, dearest wife of my heart”) and “Josephina, caro bem da minh’alma” (“Josephina, dearest love of my soul”). In those letters, he wrote that the commander of the Veloz, Joaquim Pedro de Sá Faria, had several gifts to deliver to her. In addition to “panos da costa” (the famous Benin cloth), three “esteiras finas” (reed mats), two parrots, and three “dentes de cavalo marinho” (seahorse teeth [sic]), he mentioned that he was also sending gifts to his “filhinhos” (small children): to “Henriquetinha” (“Little Henriqueta”), a “very pretty” “molequinha” (a little African girl); to “meu Joãozinho” (“my little João”), a little goat to play with and a “molequinho” (a little African boy). Both those slave children were marked with an “O” on their left arms in order to be easily distinguished among the cargo of captives on the slave ship.Footnote ⁵⁴

On one occasion, the king of Benin – who sold people to the feitoria – decided to send one of his young slaves – whom João Baptista Cezar referred to as a “moleque escravo do rei” (“king’s slave boy”) – to Pernambuco to learn to “lidar com gente do mar” (“deal with seamen”). He was probably meant to become a cabin boy. Cezar recommended he should be especially well cared for; guaranteeing his safety was very important, because any incident could interfere with the good commercial relationship that Cezar had established with the African nobility who sold him slaves.Footnote ⁵⁵ Because of the British Navy’s raid against the feitoria, we do not know if the “moleque escravo do rei” ever actually made the voyage, though he could have eventually done so on another of the firm’s ships.

Contraband and Local Power in Pernambuco

Whatever that particular young African’s destiny, other ships came to Pernambuco after 1837; one of them brought Camilo in its hold. His 1874 statement gives us a few other clues about the logic of slave smuggling at the other end of the voyage, on the beaches of Pernambuco. Camilo testified that, after disembarking, he was imprisoned for a few days in a casa de purgar with ninety other captives. A few days later, they were sent to Goiana. This part of his statement resembles that of Mohammah Gardo Baquaqua, who also landed in Pernambuco in the 1840s.Footnote ⁵⁶ Once he landed, Baquaqua said that he stayed at a plantation before being resold. The same happened to Camilo, who was taken to the Itapirema plantation and probably sold from there, along with other four captives, to Manoel Gonsalves, whose grandson would eventually become Camilo’s last master. It seems that Camilo’s and Baquaqua’s shared narrative was probably the general rule in the province after 1831: captives disembarked at beaches bordering plantations, where they were kept to recover from the voyage before either being sold or being sent to work on the plantations themselves. One former Brazilian slaver, called before the British Parliament as a witness, said that captives needed about three months to recover from the transatlantic crossing.Footnote ⁵⁷ His experience, however, was with longer routes than the one between Congo/Angola and Pernambuco, and so the time of recovery was thus probably greater than it might have been for other voyages. Investigating reports by Africans who disembarked in Bahia after 1831, historian Ricardo Caíres Silva has shown that many of them stayed several days or sometimes even months near the disembarkation location, during which time they recovered from their journey and learned Portuguese, which increased their price.Footnote ⁵⁸

It is interesting to note that Baquaqua did not disembark very far from Atapus, the location where the slave ship that brought Camilo from Congo arrived. Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy have suggested that Baquaqua may have hypothetically arrived in 1845. According to the British consul in Recife, Augustus Cowper, the only ship that came to Pernambuco in that year landed at a place called “Macaro.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Consul Cowper probably meant the Santo Antonio Macaro parish, on the coast a few miles north from Catuama and Atapus, according to a map from the mid-1800s.Footnote ⁶⁰ Camilo and Baquaqua thus came to Brazil through the same slave smuggling network and perhaps even lived close to each other until Baquaqua was sold and moved away from the province.

The British consul in Recife virtually repeated Camilo’s and Baquaqua’s testimony when he narrated the case of the Feiticeira, which landed in Porto de Galinhas in 1835. That vessel had previously made other slaving voyages to Pernambuco. In 1835, it brought 300 Africans who were taken from the beach to the town of Nossa Senhora do Pilar, where they spent the night. The next morning, they were taken to the Conceição plantation. Finally, they were “distributed among buyers.”Footnote ⁶¹ In Pernambuco, where the transatlantic voyage was shorter and slave smuggling beaches were located in the limits of large plantations, the captives did not have to wait long in order to be sold, for the main market for them was right there on the sugar plantations themselves. The entire operation thus depended on plantation owners: they were the customers, and the locations where slave ships disembarked bordered their plantations or towns subjected to their sphere of influence. For that reason, it was very important for slave ships to arrive at the exact beach where they were expected. Slave ships that got lost and ended up at the wrong beach had to pay expensive bribes or risked having their cargo stolen by landowners who were themselves the authorities in charge of the local police and the National Guard. The commander of the ship that brought Baquaqua to Pernambuco had to give eleven slaves as bribes to local authorities.Footnote ⁶²

There was thus a need for a very well-knit articulation between transatlantic traders and plantation owners who controlled the best natural harbors. In Pernambuco, it is virtually impossible to separate the slave smuggler from the plantation owner who controlled land access. In his Corografia Brasílica, originally published in 1817, Aires de Casal wrote that Pernambuco was perhaps Brazil’s best province in terms of distribution of natural harbors, although most could only receive small vessels.Footnote ⁶³ But those harbors were virtually all located in the sugarcane production region on Pernambuco’s coast. Even slave ships that stayed at sea disembarked at beaches on the borders of plantations. Slave smuggling was only possible with the help of those who controlled the beaches within the limits of their lands – and thus also the roads and paths that led to other plantations and to towns in the interior.

Many of Pernambuco’s most prominent plantation owners took part in these transactions. In 1817, Louis François de Tollenare visited the Salgado plantation near Cabo de Santo Agostinho. According to that French traveler, Salgado had a harbor that could receive ships of up to 150 tons. Tollenare was curious why the plantation owner, José de Oliveira Ramos, did not send his sugar directly to Europe. Ramos replied that the harbor was blocked by ships sunk in the war against the Dutch (1630–1654). Yet when Tollenare asked around, he found out that this was not true: the harbor was clear. Because he became friends with “Mr. Ramos,” Tollenare attributed the mistake to the planter’s naiveté.Footnote ⁶⁴ But Mr. Ramos in fact seems to have known very well how to use his natural harbor. He was a major slave trader, responsible for bringing at least 5,186 captives to Recife on his slave ships before 1831.Footnote ⁶⁵ We do not know how many more he smuggled directly into his own plantation.Footnote ⁶⁶ Nearly thirty years later, August Cowper, as British consul in Pernambuco, became an “intimate friend” (in his words) of Ramos’ son, also named José Ramos de Oliveira, who was then a very successful businessman and the first president of the Commercial Association of Pernambuco. The consul paid him a tremendous compliment for the way he managed his 180 captives: “an experience with free labor,” he said. Mr. Cowper also mentioned that the younger Ramos’ father had been a slave merchant.Footnote ⁶⁷ According to the British consul, the younger Ramos claimed that he had left the trade. However, archival evidence suggests that the son himself was in fact still involved in illegal slave trafficking. At least two ships that left Recife to trade in Angola were consigned to the younger Ramos: the Leal Portuense in 1835, and the Eugenia in 1837 and 1839. The most incriminating evidence, however, derives from his wife´s posthumous inventory, which indicated that the couple owned the lands that bordered Porto de Galinhas, adjacent to the Engenho Salgado (Salgado sugar plantation). Several slave ships landed there after 1831, including the one that brought Narciso, Maria, and Joaquim from Congo. On the list of slaves of the Engenho Salgado in 1848, there was even one fourteen-year-old Congolese boy, João Baú, worth 400 mil réis who had not even been born when the trade was banned in 1831.Footnote ⁶⁸

Plantation owners like Mr. Ramos de Oliveira knew very well what they were doing and made sure they did not leave explicit traces of their illegal business. But sometimes their names emerge in the sources. A brother of one of the region’s most prominent leaders, the Baron of Boa Vista – who was president of Pernambuco province when Camilo, Maria, Joaquim, and Narciso came to Brazil – was himself directly involved in at least one case of slave trading. The episode was brutal. In 1843, the 381-ton barque Temerário set sail from Africa with 913 people imprisoned in its holds. Only 816 survived the voyage to Catuama, a natural harbor north of Recife. According to the British consul, the devastation continued on land, where at least another 300 Africans passed away from dysentery, four days after they reached shore. According to the British consul, a relative of the Baron received 10,000 réis for each captive he harbored in his property before sending them to Recife.Footnote ⁶⁹

Conclusion

What, ultimately, became of the children whose stories have helped open a window on Pernambuco’s nineteenth-century trade in illegally enslaved children? Maria won her case because her mistress said in court that she considered Maria a freedwoman already. Camilo also won his case in Itambé, thanks to the witnesses. His lawyer argued he could not have come before 1831, simply because he was forty years old in 1874. Therefore, he should be a “liberated African.” His master’s lawyer, however, argued Camilo had arrived in 1830. One of the witnesses who favored Camilo was Agostinho, the “natural” son to the father of Camilo’s first master, Manoel Gonsalves. Agostinho said he was fifty-seven years old in 1874 and just eighteen around the time Camilo arrived at his father’s home, which meant that Camilo had been brought around 1834, when the slave trade was already illegal. We don’t know if Agostinho acted against the wealthy branch of his family because he resented his condition as a lower, “natural” son, or if he just acted in favor of Camilo because the African was his godson. Maybe both. Camilo’s master, however, did not accept the sentence and appealed to a higher court in Rio de Janeiro. I was not able to trace the final outcome of this case.

In Pernambuco, nineteenth-century plantation owners often portrayed themselves as debtors and therefore as victims of slave dealers. However, it was impossible to maintain the slave trade after 1831 without their full participation. They owned the beaches where the Africans were illegally enslaved, and those beaches faced towns dominated by large plantation owners, who controlled the justices of peace, the National Guard, the juries, and all posts at the local town council. They were also the ones in charge of the trade’s repression until the 1850 anti–slave trade law gave the Brazilian navy jurisdiction over everyone involved in the contraband, including those who received and harbored slave ships and captives inland. Through their political networks, plantation owners ruled an entire hierarchy of local authorities, and it is thus little surprise that ships were only seized in cases of conflict, most often when a slave vessel mistakenly ended up on a beach controlled by a rival network. But even in those cases, the captives did not become “liberated Africans.”Footnote ⁷⁰ They were simply enslaved by people who originally had no part in the slave ship’s voyage. In Pernambuco, plantation owners whose lands bordered the beaches of the province were directly complicit in the contraband trade.

The literature on the slave trade emphasizes how overcrowded slave ships became after 1831. Is seems likely that these overcrowded ships were not packed with adults but rather mostly with small children, who were the only people who could have fit in such numbers inside the tiny ships that plied Pernambuco’s coast. We cannot know the precise number of enslaved African moleques who arrived in Brazil before the age of twelve. But the evidence suggests that much of Pernambuco’s nineteenth-century plantation wealth was generated by a trade in very young people – unmarked children who ate and drank little, rarely rebelled, and were easy to pack like spoons into a slave ship’s dank hull. Once they reached Pernambucan shores, such children easily melted into the crioulo masses whose enslavement remained the law of the land until 1888.

This chapter discusses the existence and reproduction of enslaved families in coffee’s “agrarian empires” during Brazil’s second slavery.Footnote ¹ It does so through a case study of the Guaribú fazenda (plantation), located in the Vassouras region of Rio de Janeiro’s Paraíba Valley, which was at the time the world’s most productive coffee region. Guaribú’s history allows us to advance three arguments. First, we demonstrate the ways in which the concepts of “agrarian empires,” “plantation communities,” and “slave neighborhoods” can help us to understand both familial relationships and those that developed between slaves and masters. Second, we show that slave families living on large plantations had better chances than those who lived on smaller estates of remaining together across generations in stable family formations. And finally, we argue that this familial stability enabled Brazil’s “mature slavery,” during which positive birth rates ensured the preservation of enslaved labor even after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850.Footnote ²

The Paraíba Valley in the Context of Second Slavery

The Paraíba Valley was the economic center of the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889). At the end of the eighteenth century, the region was virtually unexploited by the Portuguese, serving mainly as a transit point to the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais. The valley was home to many Indigenous peoples, and landholders ran subsistence farms and a few sesmarias that produced sugar and spirits. Between 1810 and 1840, however, the region’s profile changed significantly. Virgin forest was cleared, most of the Indigenous people were decimated or “tamed,” and almost all property holders began to cultivate coffee with enslaved Afro-descendant labor. This rapid transformation was a consequence of multiple factors. Increasing international demand fueled rising coffee prices; turbulent politics pushed former coffee-producing areas such as Saint Domingue into steep decline, creating new market openings; the region already enjoyed good access to road and harbor infrastructure first constructed to distribute the products of Brazil’s eighteenth-century mining boom; and the valley’s extensive virgin forest reserves and proximity to the slave trade operating out of the port of Rio de Janeiro provided raw materials and labor.Footnote ³ Thanks to all of this, the Paraíba Valley emerged in the 1830s as the largest coffee exporter in the world, creating tremendous wealth.

The coffee plantations of the Paraíba Valley were characterized by highly concentrated land tenure and by patterns of production that privileged extensive slave ownership, to the detriment of smaller producers. Coffee slavery in the Paraíba Valley was from its origins directed toward mass agricultural production to meet high demand within the European and North American industrial consumer markets. It was what Dale Tomich called “second slavery,” differentiated from colonial slavery by its quick pace, high levels of labor exploitation, and close relationship to the international market and industrial capitalism.Footnote ⁴ In Brazil, the same master class that provided the Empire with its dominant source of political, economic, and intellectual support implemented second slavery even as it helped consolidate the Brazilian Imperial State.Footnote ⁵ The backbone of the master class comprised large slaveholding landowners, and especially those who commanded hundreds of slaves in the Paraíba Valley.

Many coffee planters owned several fazendas, as well as other related businesses such as commission houses, mule train operators, railroads, and agricultural banks. Furthermore, their power extended to regional and national politics, where the owners’ protégés or relatives held positions as city councilors, local police authorities, senators, civil magistrates, chief police officers, members of the National Guard, etc. Large land-and slaveowners forged extra- and intra-class identities, sharing a slavocratic habitus and valuing European patterns of consumption and behavior.Footnote ⁶ The city of Vassouras could itself be said to symbolize the master class. Its luxurious built heritage flaunted the power of the region’s leading families; its mansions, like the Big Houses of the coffee fazendas, were often designed by foreign architects and decorated with imported European materials.

The hundreds of thousands of slaves whose labor supported this world had been imported in massive numbers from Africa since the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Atlantic slave trade dictated both the dynamics of master–slave relations and the demography of the slave population until 1850, when the trade was definitively abolished. Even though the number of imported African slaves fell considerably after the 1831 law that officially prohibited the Atlantic traffic, the trade was again strengthened – this time illegally – in the late 1830s and 1840s, due to political pressure from large coffee planters from the Paraíba Valley. The 1831 law was never revoked, but the contraband African trade was openly practiced, with the collusion of Imperial authorities. To give some idea of the scale of this illicit traffic, between 1821 and 1831 some 580,000 enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil, and some 65 percent were destined for the Brazilian Southeast, especially the region’s burgeoning coffee zones. Between 1831 and 1850, the period in which the trade was illegal but still active, this number grew to some 900,000 Africans, of which 712,000, or 79 percent, were destined for the Southeast.Footnote ⁷ Because of this, the Paraíba Valley would become the Brazilian region with the highest concentration of slaves during the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Case of the Fazenda Guaribú

In order to analyze the slave family in the coffee-based agrarian empires of the central Paraíba Valley, this chapter will focus on the Fazenda Guaribú, which belonged to the former Pau Grande sesmaria, one of the first to be granted in Rio de Janeiro province’s stretch of the Paraíba Valley (see Figure 3.1). Two key factors justify this focus. First, Guaribú is one of the oldest properties of the region, with coffee production dating back to the eighteenth century, when it was still part of the Pau Grande sesmaria.Footnote ⁸ Second, the Fazenda Guaribú was officially appraised five times during the nineteenth century: first in the postmortem inventories of Luís Gomes Ribeiro (1841), of his wife Joaquina Mathilde de Assunção (1847), and of their son and heir, Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar (1863); and then later when Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar’s brothers contested their parents’ will and Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar’s share of the total estate was reassessed in 1874 and again in 1885.Footnote ⁹ Analysis of this documentation allows us to trace how the slave family, in all of its different forms, changed over time and space within the same plantation structure, from its establishment in the 1840s until the crisis of Brazilian slavery in the 1880s.Footnote ¹⁰

Figure 3.1 Fazenda Guaribú, Vassouras.

Picture from the 1970s, INEPAC archive.

The owners of the so-called Casa do Pau Grande were the Portuguese brothers Antônio dos Santos, José Rodrigues da Cruz, and Antônio Ribeiro de Avellar. The property comprised seventeen sesmarias – five within Pau Grande, five at Ubá, and seven at Guaribú – and was part of a large business complex that included several fazendas in the Valley and outposts in the commercial centers of Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and Portugal. In 1797, the family company Avellar & Santos was dissolved and the lands were divided. José Rodrigues da Cruz founded the Ubá fazenda. The inheritance of Antônio Ribeiro de Avellar, deceased in 1798, was left to his widow Antônia, who kept the sesmarias located in Pau Grande. Luís Gomes Ribeiro, António Ribeiro de Avellar’s nephew and son-in-law, acquired the lands that had belonged to Antônio dos Santos and José Rodrigues da Cruz in the area known as Guaribú. In 1811, the partnership between Luís Gomes Ribeiro and his mother-in-law Antônia Ribeiro de Avellar ended, and he went to live in Guaribú with his wife Joaquina Mathilde de Assumpção and their two eldest sons.Footnote ¹¹

Luís Gomes Ribeiro began to acquire slaves exactly at this time (in 1811); thirty years later, in 1841, his postmortem inventory listed 411 slaves in all his properties. The Fazenda Guaribú alone had 244 slaves, 119,000 coffee trees, two residential homes, one storage shed for coffee, a barn, a kiln to make tiles, and various mills to process sugar, manioc, and coffee. Shortly before drafting his will, in 1829, Luís Gomes Ribeiro, aiming to expand the coffee plantation, acquired the Sítio dos Encantos, a relatively small coffee plantation adjacent to Guaribú.Footnote ¹² In 1841, Encantos had over 103 slaves, as well as 109,000 coffee trees, a residential house, a barn, a water mill, a fan to dry coffee beans, a mill with pestles, and a mill that ground manioc flour, powered by a water wheel. These properties together formed a large coffee complex – an agrarian empire – that expanded in step with Rio’s Paraíba Valley, the world’s main coffee producer during second slavery and the accelerated rise of global capitalism. In the 1840s, coffee was already Brazil’s most important export, with 100,000 tons exported annually, a figure that doubled in the next decade.Footnote ¹³ During that same period, the number of slaves disembarked in Brazil went from 34,115 captives in 1810 to 52,430 in 1830.Footnote ¹⁴ The vast majority of these forced laborers were destined for the coffee plantations up the mountains from their ports of entry.Footnote ¹⁵

In 1841, when his postmortem inventory was initiated, Luís Gomes Ribeiro’s 411 slaves lived in seven senzalas (slave quarters), which were “spread out from one another, tiled, with windows and a kitchen.”Footnote ¹⁶ The senzalas housed slaves from both Guaribú and Encantos. Although they spoke different languages and belonged to different cultural systems, most of these slaves forged family bonds, networks of kin and fictive kin, and various forms of solidarity in order to survive the grueling experience of captivity. The postmortem inventory lists thirty-five slave couples, thirty comprised of Africans and five comprised of Africans and crioulos (Brazilian-born Afro-descendants). The slave families were preserved even after the deaths of Luís Gomes Ribeiro (in 1839) and his wife, Joaquina Mathilde de Assumpção (in 1847). It is interesting to note that the family’s strategy for dividing family assets facilitated this preservation: Ribeiro and Assumpção’s son, Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar, who would become Baron of Guaribú, inherited the bulk of slaves from both Guaribú and Encantos, receiving fifty-six from his father and (years later) another seventy from his mother.Footnote ¹⁷ Such continuity, which the historiography indicates was quite common in plantations, provided great stability for many slave families in the Paraíba Valley.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1863, when Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar’s postmortem inventory was initiated, forty-eight couples were recognized and listed for Guaribú, seven at Encantos, and forty at the Sítio das Antas and Boa União, which were new properties acquired by Claudio Ribeiro de Avellar. The inventory also listed various descendants of slaves who had inhabited the fazenda since 1841.

This evidence shows that the slave family was a reality within the rural settings where most Brazilian slaves lived during the nineteenth century. Moreover, they indicate that the slave family had a significant presence in the large coffee plantations. The meaning of this phenomenon has been contested within Brazilian historiography. In the 1990s, the debate became polarized. One view held that the slave family was the product of resistance, a hard-won achievement that allowed captive Africans and crioulos to maintain their social and cultural practices across generations, creating a slave identity that was molded in opposition to the master class.Footnote ¹⁹ Another view held that the slave family was a concession, an instrument that allowed slave masters to guarantee peace in the slave quarters and exercise greater control over their captives.Footnote ²⁰ We argue that any approach that aims to produce a single, unitary view of the slave family’s historical meaning may lead to false dichotomies. The slave family could have signified both resistance and coercion. Slave families were nested within broader, extremely unequal configurations of power that disfavored enslaved people; they developed in the midst of structural conditions that facilitated a mode of what we might call slavocratic domination. Yet those families and their meanings varied enormously, depending on a constantly shifting socioeconomic, cultural, and political conjuncture. Broader contexts – such as Brazil’s degree of national political stability or instability, the extent to which international actors actively condemned and combatted slavery, or the volume of the Atlantic slave trade – could influence relationships between masters and slaves, thus transforming the signification of the slave family.

More immediately, the economic cycles of Rio’s Paraíba Valley – and the point at which any particular plantation found itself in the evolution from initial planting to expansion to greatness and decline – had a similar impact on the master–slave relationship.Footnote ²¹ In the end, master–slave relations and the meanings of the slave family came down to the concrete world shaped by a particular master and by the particular people he or she enslaved. But we cannot lose sight of the broader conditions that shaped those actors’ lives, even when that context was beyond their immediate understanding.

Agrarian Empires in the Coffee-Producing Paraíba Valley

The postmortem inventories of the municipality of Vassouras during the nineteenth century revealed patterns of slave property-holding at once dispersed and very concentrated. Since the end of the 1990s, new research has deepened our knowledge of the coffee-growing area in the Paraíba Valley. These new findings diverge methodologically from previous historiography, which generally divided slave properties into only three categories: small, medium, and large, with the latter generally described as less important because it was numerically the minority.Footnote ²² In Vassouras, a more complex pattern prevailed. There were farmers who owned between one and five slaves, most of whom did not own the land they cultivated and lived together with their captives. Some of those small-time slaveowners had once themselves been captives, before being freed by their former masters. At the other extreme of the pyramid, there were slaveowners with hundreds of slaves, who owned two, three, four, or more plantations. Altogether, our analysis of the collection of 921 postmortem inventories stored in the former Historical Documentation Center of the University Severino Sombra uncovered five categories of owners. Without considering the 2 percent that did not own slaves, the estates can be classified as in Table 3.1.

As we can see in Table 3.1, based on this sample, large and mega owners owned 70 percent of the slaves in Vassouras, which indicates a high concentration of both land and enslaved labor in the region. And these properties determined the conditions in which most captives formed their families.Footnote ²³ This fact, as we will see, has important consequences when it comes to analyzing master–slave relationships in Brazil’s most important slave region during the nineteenth century.

Luís Gomes Ribeiro and his son Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar, Baron of Guaribú, were two of these mega owners. The Baron of Guaribú was in fact the largest of all. With 835 slaves and four farms when he died, in 1863, he built the biggest agrarian empire in the municipality of Vassouras. By agrarian empire, we mean an individual or familial domain – or some combination of both – made up of large landholdings, wherein slaves and land made up more than 60 percent of the proprietors’ wealth. The fortunes of mega-owners were unmatched within their municipalities, their provinces, and even the Brazilian Empire as a whole.

Historian William Kauffman Scarborough coined the expression “agrarian empire” when analyzing the slave-owning elite in the US South, based on nineteenth-century agrarian censuses.Footnote ²⁴ Scarborough used a minimum of 250 slaves to define an agrarian empire in the antebellum United States. In the context of second slavery, however, the forms of concentrated wealth varied from one slave regime to the next, and we thus resolved to elevate Scarborough’s original floor for Rio’s Paraíba basin. Based on the profile of seventy-one mega-proprietors whose postmortem inventories were conducted in Vassouras between 1829 and 1885, we established which among them were at the very top of the slaveholding hierarchy, based on the size of their slave holdings. Forty-seven mega-owners owned between 100 and 199 captives, seventeen held between 200 and 350, and only twelve claimed more than 350.Footnote ²⁵ It thus makes sense, based on the Vassouras inventories, to set the floor for an agrarian empire in the region at 350, though preliminary studies from adjacent regions of the Paraíba Valley such as Piraí, Valença, and Cantagalo suggest that this floor may need to be raised further still. In general, in this coffee-producing area, ownership of an agrarian empire indicated an owner’s extreme wealth and power. Many were made up of several large fazendas, each with between 100 and 300 slaves.

In Vassouras, the following owners could be said to preside over agrarian empires: the Baroness of Campo Belo, the Baron of Guanabara, Ana Joaquina de São José Werneck, Luís Gomes Ribeiro, Manoel Francisco Xavier, Elisa Constança de Almeida, Anna Joaquina de São José, Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck, and the Baron of Capivary. These owners or patriarchs were true rural potentates, with great power and influence both locally and across the province of Rio de Janeiro. Although they were mostly dedicated to the administration and control of their domains, they often used bonds of family, friendship, and political alliance to extend their influence to the rulers of the Empire. Regardless of whether their partisan political leanings were conservative or liberal, they supported the monarchical regime. They formed the core of a dominant class of large slaveholders and landowners, traders and financiers, who linked their social and economic interests to the Imperial political elite, which in turn governed in accordance with the planters’ interests. Together, the political elite and the planter class comprised a new Brazilian aristocracy attached to the Imperial dynasty. Some members of this new aristocracy were granted nonhereditary noble titles. Through this complex network, the new South American Empire depicted itself as the representation of European civilization in the New World.Footnote ²⁶

This agrarian civilization was centered in the large rural plantation houses and their surroundings. Typically, the Big House overlooked one or more rectangular courtyards, where recently harvested coffee beans were left to dry. Initially those courtyards were simply empty patches of earth, but technological advancements led eventually to stone or macadam pavement. The senzalas (slave quarters), usually single-story buildings arranged in lines or squares, were grouped adjacent to the courtyards. The coffee hulling mill, pigsties, animal pens, slave infirmary, and other buildings were also in the so-called functional quadrilateral of the fazendas. The whole complex, and especially the Big Houses – which became more and more refined after the mid-nineteenth century – symbolically expressed the master’s power.

The configuration and nature of agrarian empires were not always the same. They varied over time, depending on where they found themselves in the cycle of economic establishment, development, and decline; their fortunes also fluctuated according to the regional conjuncture and Brazil’s broader economic, social, political, and cultural contexts. Figure 3.2 shows that variation. On a scale of 0 to 900, each dot represents the total number of bondsmen owned by the seventy-one mega-proprietors found in the postmortem inventories of the county of Vassouras during the nineteenth century.

Figure 3.2 Distribution of owners of 100+ slaves in Vassouras, according to their number of slaves, 1820–1888.

Source: Postmortem inventories, Iphan-Vassouras Archive.

The first mega-proprietor’s inventory for our sample appeared at the end of the 1820s. The estate belonged to Felipe Ferreira Goulart, owner of 102 slaves, whose assets were inventoried in 1829, along with those of his wife, Caetana Rosa de Leme. Mega-proprietors started to become more numerous in the 1830s and 1840s, when the first agrarian empires with more than 350 slaves appeared. A good example is the agrarian empire belonging to Manoel Francisco Xavier, whose inventory was completed in 1840 and listed 446 slaves in his four properties. Manoel Francisco’s fazendas were the site of a famous slave revolt led by Manoel Congo in 1838.Footnote ²⁷ The concentration of slave property in mega-estates reached its apex during the 1860s, with some estates holding over 600 slaves. Among those, besides Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar and his 835 slaves inventoried in 1863, we also find Claudio’s uncle, Joaquim Ribeiro de Avellar, Baron of Capivary, deceased that same year, who owned the Pau Grande sesmaria and 698 slaves. Claudio Avellar’s brother-in-law, Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck (Baron of Paty do Alferes) also counted in this elite group when he died in 1862, holding six fazendas in Paty do Alferes and 645 slaves. Such data show that Claudio built his individual holdings within the broader empire of the Ribeiro de Avellar clan, based in Paty do Alferes, where he divided local power with his relatives from the Lacerda Werneck clan.Footnote ²⁸ The maximum number of slaves found in postmortem inventories dropped below 400 in the next decades, except for the disputed inventory of Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar.

Inventories are appraisals of assets, carried out at the time of an individual’s death. For that reason, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of inventories reflected moments when a person’s businesses were already well-established, at a plateau, or even in decline.Footnote ²⁹ But this was not always the case. Aside from premature death, which was unusual, an individual’s life cycle could diverge from that of their businesses. This is exactly what we can observe in the inventory of Luís Gomes Ribeiro, the first patriarch of the agrarian empire of Guaribú, whose businesses were still on the rise during the 1840s, when coffee was in growing demand on the international market.

In the 1850s, Luís’ son Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar’s lands, which were almost contiguous to one another, totalled 3,156 hectares, equivalent to 31.5 million square meters, or 7,795 acres. In comparative terms, his empire was equivalent – both in relation to land area and to number of slaves – to that belonging to John Burnside, Louisiana’s biggest sugar producer in 1858. At that time, Burnside’s agrarian empire consisted of five contiguous plantations, totaling 7,600 acres of land, with a labor force of 1,000 slaves.Footnote ³⁰

Returning to Figure 3.2, we can see that only four inventories indicated possessions greater than 350 slaves in the 1870s and 1880s. Two of them were the aforementioned reassessments of the Baron of Guaribú’s estate, which remained in dispute until the 1890s. His legacy continued to represent the largest concentration of slave property in the region. In 1874, his estate’s 621 slaves far exceeded the 353 slaves listed among the properties of Eufrásia Correia e Castro, Baroness of Campo Belo (who died in 1873), and the 372 slaves in the 1875 inventory of José Gonçalves de Oliveira Roxo, Baron of Guanabara. In 1885, the 462 slaves bequeathed by the Baron of Guaribú were still unparalleled. This information matters because it shapes our analysis of the slave family, which was circumscribed within a specific form of property accumulation (involving wealth, land, and labor) that occurred in the southern Paraíba river basin, typified by the region’s agrarian empires.

Plantation Communities

As we have seen, most slaves in the Paraíba Valley lived on large fazendas that were part of mega-properties or agrarian empires. On those fazendas, a larger number of slaves entailed a greater proportion of enslaved women and a more even gender balance, which made it easier for slaves to pair off and create families. Because so many slaves belonged to the same owner, and because they were often able to establish bonds and lines of communication among contiguous fazendas, enslaved people could establish a wide spectrum of social ties, which also made family formation more viable. Furthermore, after the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1850, an increase in the proportion of enslaved women and the need to produce new laborers within the plantations encouraged masters to strategically promote slave families.

For slave families, the senzala was a foundational space. On large fazendas, senzalas were single-story wattle and daub houses, with thatched roofs that were often converted to tile after 1850, an adjustment that greatly reduced their temperature and humidity. Their floors were mostly beaten earth, though they could sometimes have finished flooring. Most were divided into cubicles of 9–12 meter square. Each cubicle had a door that opened onto the courtyard, and a rare few had windows. Ventilation was generally provided by wooden-barred openings at the juncture of the walls and roof. Each cubicle housed a family or a group of same-sex slaves. In some cases, especially in fazendas with numerous slaves, the senzalas could themselves form a three- or four-sided enclosure, as was the case on the fazendas Santo Antônio do Paiol and Flores do Paraíso, both in Valença.Footnote ³¹ Slave families formed in such spaces, and there they lived, under the daily oversight of foremen, supervisors, and masters.

Daily conflicts and negotiations between slaves and masters were an inherent and permanent feature of the slave system. As part of this process, enslaved people forged identities and carved out spaces for autonomy, which were sometimes expansive and sometimes more constricted; in these ways, enslaved people left their mark on Brazil’s imperial culture and society. Some historians use expressions such as slave communities or senzala communities to describe the relationships forged among slaves, their nuclear families, and their extended relatives. This denomination aims to highlight slave autonomy and the sense of common identity that slaves created within captivity, in clear opposition to their masters’ domination.Footnote ³² According to Flávio dos Santos Gomes, such slave communities communicated with other senzala communities, freedpersons, peasants, mocambos (runaways), and quilombolas (inhabitants of maroon communities) creating what he has designated a “Black countryside.”Footnote ³³

Yet this focus on autonomy, which was the hallmark of the historiography of Brazilian slavery written in the 1980s and 1990s, should not obscure the fact that these autonomous spaces were forged within structures of power and political, social, economic, and cultural conjunctures that were highly unfavorable to slaves.Footnote ³⁴ These structures, which changed considerably over time, set the limits of slave agency. Such boundaries were determined, for example, by the greater or lesser presence of Africans among a given slave population; by the size of the property where slaves lived and worked; or by the manumission practices that were the norm within any given property or region. The class relationships between slaves and owners were thus elastic and turbulent. Without underestimating the importance of the bonds created among slaves or their struggles for autonomy and liberty, we argue that such spaces of agency were circumscribed by the slave regime.

In order to understand the structural asymmetry of master–slave relationships at the local level, we propose in this chapter that the expression “plantation community” is more useful than “slave community” or “senzala community.” In doing so, we not only contest the notion of a community as a harmonious group; we also conceive of slaves’ actions as inevitably connected to their masters’ dominion. By taking into account only the agency and resistance of the slaves, the “slave community” concept loses some of its analytic capacity. The “plantation community” concept also usefully captures the integration of slaves’ workspaces and their living environments. Slaves did not themselves organize the senzalas, which were contiguous to the rest of the plantation and ordered according to its larger needs and structure. The formation of plantation communities in the coffee-producing areas of the Paraíba Valley was essential to the process through which any given group of slaves was transformed into a collective labor force, creating a structure of domination that endured for many decades.

In the coffee production zone of the Paraíba Valley, plantation communities were a sine qua non for high productivity and profit. From the toll of the morning bell before sunrise to the final count and slave inspection at the end of a day’s toil, the captives’ work was mixed with various social activities – meals, rest, chatting, singing, dancing, praying – that could result in new forms of organization, sociability, and family. Enslaved people also usually had Sundays and holidays free, time they spent raising small animals and vegetables to consume or sell to their masters. Work, family, and community were not separated spheres: the result was a dense net of social relations with the slave family at its core. Effectively, the largest slave cohorts – even those recently trafficked from Africa – were never simply groups of people brought together to work. They comprised a plantation community, involving forms of sociability, cultural links, spiritual encouragement, and family life that went well beyond the strict mandates of commodity production. Slave labor could only reach its full productive capacity if it was part of such a plantation community, in which the slave family played a fundamental role. This was true even at the height of the international slave trade, when the high number of men among newly imported Africans produced a significant gender imbalance among slaves. Even under these adverse conditions, the few African and crioula women who were present anchored stable relationships and families within the plantations’ borders. After 1850, when the international slave trade was abolished, a more equal gender balance among the slaves facilitated family formation.

In short, the concept of a plantation community aims to break the false dichotomy that has dominated the historiography of the slave family in Brazil, which imposes an unnecessary choice between viewing family formation as an act of slave agency and resistance or viewing it as a form of slavocratic oppression. This does not mean that we should for a moment ignore the profound contradictions that placed masters and slaves in opposition, evident in the slaves’ many acts of resistance. If slave revolt had not been endemic to the world of slavery, that world would not have been what it was. In situating the slave family as a component of a plantation community, we instead wish to accentuate the slave family’s contradictory character and that fact that it was – like other aspects of fazenda life, in all their specificity – subject to a constantly shifting balance of power between masters and slaves, both locally and globally.

Nothing demonstrates this asymmetrical balance of power better than the masters’ postmortem inventories. These express and expose all of the slave–master relationships’ various temporalities and dimensions: the juridico-political norms that consecrated and legitimated slave property; the intimate life of masters and their families; the spiritual and affective realm evident through requests for mass to be said for the souls of family members, godchildren, and slaves; and a material world that included objects, assets, lands, animals, and (inevitably) slaves. Slaves appear in inventories with names, ages, origins, skills, behaviors, family ties, and material appraisals. At one point we might see a reference to an old man, broken and worthless; later we encounter a woman appraised with her newborn baby or child. Further on, we find a note about so-and so, son of such-and-such, appraised individually but listed right below his parents, in implicit recognition of the unity of the slave family. This listing order was common to the majority of inventories and expressed the contradiction inherent in the slave family: enslaved people were joined together by recognized ties, but each was also marked with an individual market value.

The masters’ inventories, as snapshots of their time, allow us to perceive gradual mutations and shifts in the slave family, which was shaped by the conditions of each historical period. The Guaribú case is especially valuable in this sense, because it grants us access to so many slave appraisals in a single site. Let us shift, then, to setting the scene of the Guaribú plantation community in the time of Luís Gomes Ribeiro.

The Slave Family in the Plantation Communities of the Fazenda Guaribú

The second patriarch of Guaribú, Claudio Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar, began acquiring slaves even before he inherited the Fazenda Guaribú and the Sítio dos Encantos. In 1831, he was already among the recipients of the assets of his father, Luís Gomes Ribeiro, and he insisted in receiving his payment in lands and slaves, indicating that he was already established as a landowner-capitalist by the time he was around thirty years old. The list of 835 slaves included in his 1863 postmortem inventory indicates that Claudio depended heavily on illegal slave traffic between 1831 and 1850 to expand his businesses; many slaves were from a wide range of African ports, and they were too young to have come before 1831. But that was not enough: the Baron of Guaribú also made heavy use of the internal slave trade to stock his fazenda workforce, listing slaves from Bahia (thirty-four), the city of Rio de Janeiro (eleven), Iguaçu (one), and Minas Gerais (three). He also benefitted, of course, from the natural growth allowed by the establishment of stable families during the mature stage of coffee slavery.Footnote ³⁵

Among the 618 slaves whose provenance was listed (75 percent of the total), 52.2 percent were crioulos (Brazilian-born) and 47.8 percent were Africans. Among the Africans, 15 percent were women, 32.5 percent of whom were married. Among the 85 percent of Africans who were men, 31.2 percent had spouses. Among crioulos, the marriage rate dropped for both men and women; each gender had only five married people. The average age of crioulos, however, was much lower than that of Africans, and many were too young to marry. The African women were between forty and seventy-one years old; the African men were between forty-seven and seventy-one. Among crioulos, the youngest were one year old, the oldest woman was sixty-one, and the oldest man was fifty-nine. All in all, 24.1 percent of the estate’s slaves were married. On the basis of this evidence, we can consider Guaribú a mature plantation community in the early 1860s.

In order to analyze family structures on these properties, we have defined any link that appears on the inventory lists as a familial tie. Our intention was to accommodate the full range of ways in which enslaved people organized their families. Yet it is important not to forget that the number of slave families would be much higher if the inventories had included informal unions, which were unregistered and unsanctioned but quite common in the daily life of plantation communities.

Among the slaves listed in Luís Gomes Ribeiro’s 1841 inventory, 243 lived and worked in the Guaribú property and 168 in the Sítio dos Encantos. Between the 1820s and the 1840s, when the demand for slave labor to structure the coffee economy in the Paraíba Valley was very high, large slaveholders generally preferred African-born slaves between sixteen and forty years of age, who were esteemed for their physical strength and aptitude for work. This created a great imbalance between male and female slaves and led to a very unstable period for slave families. Even so, as was noted earlier, an analysis of slave families on the Fazenda Guaribú under Luís Gomes Ribeiro’s administration indicates the existence of thirty-five slave couples, five comprised of African and crioulo partners and thirty comprised exclusively of Africans. Among the unions recognized in Ribeiro’s inventory, thirteen couples had parented a total of twenty-one crioulo children, ranging in age from newborn to eight years of age, which suggests that a policy of encouraging family formation had existed for at least a decade in Guaribú. Such a policy could have taken many forms: masters might have set aside cubicles within the senzala for family use, held collective Catholic weddings for slave couples, or simply acknowledged extant stable unions.

One of the crioulo–African couples on Luís Gomes Ribeiro’s plantation was made up of Francisca, an eighteen-year-old crioula, and Custódio, a twenty-four-year-old from Rebolo, who were the parents of three-year-old Brás and three-month-old Cândida. African couples included José Maria from Calabar, forty, and Felizarda from Mozambique, nineteen, who were the parents of seven-year-old Ignês; and Romualdo, thirty-five, and Thereza, twenty, who were both from Mozambique and the parents of five-year-old Philismina and one-year-old Sebastião. The oldest married man was eighty (Francisco from Benguela), and the oldest woman was sixty (Ana, also from Benguela). The youngest married men and women were twenty-four and sixteen respectively, which suggests that enslaved women married at a younger age. It did not seem, however, that the older African men in our sample enjoyed any special privileges when it came to family formation.

On both the Guaribú and the Encantos properties, we found a significant number of African boys and girls with no known family connections. This suggests that they were separated from their families, whether when taken captive in Africa, during the middle passage, or at the point of sale on Brazilian territory. Such were the likely histories of Simplício from Cabinda, ten, and Bernardo from Congo, nine, who were placed at the Sítio dos Encantos, and also of Ninfa from Angola and Aleixo from Congo, both eleven, who worked at the Fazenda Guaribú. Even in these cases, however, a lack of blood relations did not necessarily preclude slave children from forging affective familial ties or other forms of solidarity within the plantation community. Over twenty years later, in 1863, the Baron of Guaribú’s slaves were distributed in the following manner: 441 slaves at the Fazenda Guaribú, 315 at the Sítio Antas, seventy-three at the Sítio dos Encantos, and six at Boa União.Footnote ³⁶ These numbers, when compared to those found in the inventories of the Baron’s parents, suggest that Guaribú and Antas were very productive properties. With regard to slave families, there were eighty families at Guaribú, fifty-two at Antas, seven at Encantos, and none in Boa União in 1863. Much of the family life that these men, women, and children experienced played out in the space of the senzala. To shelter the largest concentration of slave labor in the municipality of Vassouras, the Baron had two senzalas in Guaribú, one with twenty-five cubicles and another with twenty-four, as well as a separate senzala for household slaves; he also had a senzala with twenty-two cubicles in Encantos, as well as five senzalas in Antas and Boa União, divided into between three and twenty cubicles.

The figures in Table 3.2 indicate that Guaribú, Antas, and Encantos had a stable plantation community, because they show three generations of family members living together. In Guaribú and Antas, the slave family was at the base of this stability, especially if we take into account the large number of slaves who lived amidst relatives and the children who were born in captivity, who were numerous enough to result in a natural increase in Guaribú’s enslaved population.

Other features reinforce the impression that these properties functioned as a plantation community. First, families were long-lasting. In the 1863 inventory, there were three families in their third generation, which means that at least twenty-eight children were living with their grandparents in captivity. In the 1874 appraisal, after the Baron of Guaribú had been deceased for more than a decade and the buying of new slaves had almost ceased, there were six third-generation families with fourteen third-generation children. A family’s longevity could extend to a fifth generation. Nazário and his crioulo son Venceslau, for example, worked on the Sítio dos Encantos. In 1863, Venceslau was married to Fortunata from Monjolo. He was father to Emília, Teolinda, Ventura, and Alexandrina, as well as grandfather to Emília’s children, Fortunata and Faustino. The family probably lived in one or two of the Encanto senzala’s twenty-two cubicles. In 1885, Nazário had died, but his great-granddaughters Fortunata and Alexandrina had already given birth to five free children, Manoel, Cecília, Maximiliano, Felisberta, and Ludovica.

Secondly, family structures varied across time, and slave households often generated new family units. This process reinforces the impression that these were stable families but also suggests that the slave family was a dynamic structure, in constant transformation. Enslaved people recognized the family units among them and sought to ensure their permanence through internal mechanisms of control, such as those that prohibited incest and infanticide or protected orphans. Finally, the advanced age of many of the African-born slaves was a clear sign that the plantation community was well established and had become a stable space where enduring relationships could be forged among slaves, freedpersons, free workers, and masters.

The family of Romualdo and Thereza, both from Mozambique, allows us to explore this dynamic. As was mentioned earlier, Romualdo was thirty-five and Thereza was twenty in 1841, when they were listed as Luís Gomes Ribeiro’s property. They had two children, five-year-old Felisbina and one-year-old Sebastião. The family remained together even after Ribeiro’s death, as seems to have been common in estates with large concentrations of slave property.Footnote ³⁸ Twenty-two years later, in 1863, the couple had had another son, Marcelino, who had been born one year after his brother Sebastião. Romualdo had already died, but his forty-two-year-old widow Thereza was the grandmother of Daniel (eleven), Cândida (nine), Bernardino (nine), and Romualdo (three), who was his grandfather’s namesake. Unfortunately, the inventory did not reveal those children’s parentage. Nonetheless, it is clear that this family, like many others within that plantation community, remained together for over forty years (1841–1885), having moved from Guaribú to Antas sometime between 1874 and 1885.

The resilience of slave family dynamics in this plantation community emerges when we use postmortem inventories to trace the fates of children who lost their mothers. Anselmo, from Mozambique, remained with his crioulo children Helena and Anselmo after the death of his wife. Nazario, also widowed, raised his son Venceslau, who later married Fortunata. They had four children, Alexandrina, Emília, Theodora, and Ventura. When Alexandrina gave birth to Faustino and Fortunata, Nazario’s great-grandchildren, a family that had once been reduced to father and son extended to a fourth generation. The estate appraiser’s annotations in the Baron of Guaribu’s will suggest that the stability of the slave family was understood as an organizing principle, not only among slaves but also among slaveowners and legal representatives: he listed the crioulos João (twenty-seven), Idalina (twenty-five), Rosa (twenty-three), and Raphael (twenty-one) as orphans despite the fact that they were adults, in clear recognition that they were siblings who belonged to the same family and ought to be kept together when the estate was partitioned among its heirs.

Significantly, plantation communities within the same agrarian empire were not isolated from one another. The curtailment of free circulation was of course a constitutive element of enslavement and an important instrument of control in the hands of slaveowners. But there was still carefully monitored movement among properties that were part of the same coffee complex. Archival documents such as the journal of the Viscountess of Arcozelo, for example, indicated that slaves often moved among properties in order to carry out specific tasks during periods when work rhythms were most intense.Footnote ³⁹ Similarly, slaves with specialized skills were sometimes temporarily reassigned to the raw labor of coffee cultivation. Slaves were frequently sent on errands, carrying messages and goods or making purchases; they were also sometimes permitted to date or to attend parties, baptisms, or collective weddings. The Baron of Guaribú’s will, drafted on August 26, 1863, a few days before his death, shows us that the movement within a coffee complex could involve an entire family, lending further support to the argument that the family was the basis for labor stability and a sense of common purpose in plantation communities. Claudio Ribeiro de Avellar noted:

Claudio Ribeiro de Avellar’s instructions were clear: after finishing their tasks at Guaribú, the slaves should return to their place of residence, the Antas plantation community. Regarding slave mobility, the Baron of Guaribú also included another interesting directive: he asked that his sons Manoel, Luís, and João Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar, heirs of the Antas and Boa União properties, also select 120 slaves from Guaribú as part of their inheritance. In his own words: “I leave to Manoel Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar and his two brothers, Luís and João, one hundred and twenty slaves from the Fazenda Guaribú, which Manuel shall choose at his discretion.” The order was carried out, and three Guaribú families were inventoried at the Fazenda das Antas in 1885. The case of Matheus Moçambique (fifty-one years old) and Feliciana – parents to Manoel Lino (sixteen), Emerenciana (eleven), the twins Magdalena and Helena (nine), and Feliciana (three) – stands out. In 1885, when he was listed as part of Antas’ enslaved property, Matheus was eighty-five, and the siblings Manoel Lino and Helena were the only relatives who were no longer part of the family unit. We cannot say why or at what moment between 1863 and 1885 the family was transferred. But when Matheus was chosen by the Baron’s heirs he was certainly very elderly. The will did not require that the heirs respect family units in choosing their 120 slaves. Nevertheless, Matheus was sent along with his family, despite the fact that he was no longer able to work and had virtually no market value, a fact that highlights the importance of the slave family within the plantation community.

Whether they were sent to another fazenda to work or to participate in religious celebrations, funerals, or collective slave baptisms, the fact is that captives’ spatial experience extended far beyond the boundaries of the plantations where they lived. Even when moves were permanent, like those previously described, the slaves and families we could follow in Gomes Ribeiro de Avellar’s inventories were transferred from one community to another but did not go to an entirely unknown or indecipherable space (though this could and did happen in other sales or when slaves ran away). Whether or not their masters recognized it, enslaved people who moved among properties that formed part of the same agrarian empire created webs of solidarity and ties of love and marriage, and they also experienced intrapersonal conflict. In this way, they created every day what Anthony Kaye has referred to as “slave neighborhoods.”Footnote ⁴¹ Yet Kaye’s concept of a “slave neighborhood” rejects the prima facie assumption of slave autonomy and harmonious collaboration, seeking also to take into account the slave–master relationship; there is no slave neighborhood without a larger neighborhood largely controlled by masters. Slave neighborhoods were at once individual and collective creations; they were places of work and of leisure, of dispute and of collaboration, of spiritual encouragement and of brutal exploitation, which expanded and contracted depending on both internal and external factors. Slave neighborhoods were home to a wide range of relationships among their social actors, which included field slaves, domestic slaves, masters, free workers, and more. We argue in this chapter that the concept of the slave neighborhood also has an important territorial dimension; its various spatial components – including roads, forest paths, neighboring fazendas, nearby cities, escape routes, and ritual spaces – were always interspersed within and enveloped by a master’s neighborhood.

Conclusion

The analysis of the family ties established by slaves in the Baron of Guaribá’s agrarian empire between 1840 and 1880 allows us to reflect more broadly on the importance of the slave family in creating plantation communities in the Paraíba Valley’s coffee regions. The profile of the slave family changed significantly with the end of the Atlantic slave trade, when a more even gender balance allowed for considerable growth in the number of slave families. This denser family formation was a fundamental characteristic of “mature slavery” in Brazil, which we define as the point at which plantation structures were well established and stable and when slavery came to be sustained through natural increase without a need for imported slaves. Within plantation communities, slave families – with their forms of sociability, religious beliefs, affective ties, disputes, and quarrels – were fundamental to the process through which slaves became an effective collective labor force. The fact that the same families stayed together on the same plantation over many generations demonstrates their structural importance to the slave system as a whole. What is more, slaves’ integrated spatial experiences were not limited to plantation communities; they also participated in Kaye’s larger “slave neighborhoods,” the fluid boundaries of which extended the unequal symbiosis inherent in the plantation community to broader regional geographies.

In this well-known description, Gilberto Freyre – one of Brazil’s most important twentieth-century intellectuals – highlighted Brazilian wet nurses’ ability to adapt themselves to the Brazilian patriarchal family. For Freyre, Black culture, characterized as affectionate, creative, and docile, seeped into the intimate domestic relationships of Brazil’s plantation houses and urban mansions, helping to forge a master–slave relationship that allowed many Blacks to be seen as part of their masters’ family.Footnote ²

Understood in its original context, Freyre’s writing constituted a counter-discourse, both opposed to racist theories that were still fashionable in the 1930s and meant to recover and exalt Afro-descendants’ role in forging Brazilian culture and national identity. In Freyre’s view, two decisive forces had shaped Brazilian society: patriarchal domination, which encompassed not only the family but also slaves, lesser masters, and free men; and the scarcity of white women during Brazil’s first centuries of colonization, which allowed for high levels of intimate sociability between the dominators and the dominated. Freyre understood the kindness that purportedly characterized Afro-descendants as emblematic of the Brazilian slave–master relationship, a notion that fomented the so-called myth of racial democracy that gained importance in Brazil between 1920 and the 1950s.Footnote ³

Since then, however, historians have repeatedly interrogated and challenged Freyre’s notions of docile slavery. In the 1980s, inspired by the women’s history movement, Maria Odila Leite Dias and Sandra Lauderdale Graham foregrounded the role of female resistance in the households of nineteenth-century São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro; their work was crucial in placing the relationships between masters and domestic servants – and especially wet nurses – at the center of Brazilian studies of slavery and abolition.Footnote ⁴ In recent years, these topics have received ever more attention.Footnote ⁵ Scholars are unanimous in emphasizing the hierarchical nature of domestic slave labor, and they also stress the place of the wet nurse at the summit of this hierarchy.Footnote ⁶

All the same, there is still much to be done. This chapter will argue that, while the relationships between masters and slaves in the private sphere did involve affection, dedication, and loyalty, they were also gestated in an environment of abuse, humiliation, and physical and symbolic violence, all of which were essential features of slavery as an institution. Interactions that might be read initially as paradoxical or ambiguous were in fact constitutive of slavery’s ideology of domination, experienced and enacted in various ways by both masters and slaves within Brazil’s Big Houses and mansions.Footnote ⁷ What is more, the figure of the wet nurse and the practice of relegating breastfeeding to enslaved women – which was generalized among Brazil’s dominant classes during the Empire – helped to forge a slavocratic habitus, a kind of second nature, in which future masters experienced the social relationships of slavery within their intimate circles and everyday lives from a very tender age.Footnote ⁸ This chapter analyzes these domestic and extremely conflictual interactions as an integral part of the slave system, critical to the symbolic and social reproduction of Brazil’s master class.

The study of enslaved wet nurses allows us to explore the limits of a private dynamic that distilled the myriad sentiments that constituted the slave–master relationship in the domestic sphere.Footnote ⁹ A wet nurse was allowed to live and participate in her masters’ intimate social world, but without ever overcoming her status as property or escaping the physical and symbolic violence to which every slave was subject. Her body remained commodified: her task was to breastfeed the master’s child and care for his or her hygiene and physical education, keeping the child’s body healthy until early childhood, when the nurse’s nurturing services would no longer be needed. Breastfeeding and childcare were sometimes a wet nurse’s only duties, but often wet nurses were often charged with other chores as well. In most cases, wet nursing implied the “silencing” of a woman’s own motherhood: enslaved women were forced to give up the feeding of their own children in order to nurture their mistresses’ babies. After her infant charge matured, a wet nurse could become an ama seca (literally “dry nurse” or nanny), be assigned to another service in the big house, or be returned to the sphere of productive work outside the home (which was especially common when a nurse served her owners’ children or relatives). If a wet nurse was rented out – as was frequently the case in urban environments – she would be returned to her master and might never again see the child she had raised.

Contrary to Gilberto Freyre’s description, “everyone” did not fulfill the wet nurses’ “whims.” The intimacy inherent in the nurse’s work may have allowed many captives to live a bit better within the system that oppressed them every day; they might have enjoyed better clothing, food, and shelter than field slaves or escravos de ganho (those whose services were rented to third parties).Footnote ¹⁰ But the fact remained that the wet nurse’s task necessarily involved the silencing of an enslaved woman’s own motherhood; both her owner’s will and social customs dictated that she would lose the right to live with her own child, even in the baby’s first days of life. In that sense, when we consider enslaved wet nurses’ living conditions – and the practices of power that such women were subject to – we can understand how slavery operated at the heart of human nature, seeking to negate an enslaved person’s humanity and build a slavocratic habitus that would naturalize the hierarchical relationships that structured Brazilian slavery.Footnote ¹¹ And not only that: the slavocratic habitus extended beyond the dominant classes, becoming in a certain sense hegemonic.Footnote ¹² As newspaper advertisements attest, the use of enslaved wet nurses – along with other dominant practices – became widespread among other social classes, who devised a variety of contractual methods and price points to meet their perceived needs.

In analyzing slave agency through the figure of the wet nurse, this chapter takes a relational approach.Footnote ¹³ After all, the use of enslaved wet nurses – and the broader market that was created for nursing services – depended on slaveowning women’s belief that the decision not to nurse one’s own children was a form of social distinction. Unlike their North American counterparts, Brazilian historians have largely neglected this inseverable link, shying away from considering the role of white mistresses in the widely disseminated practice of enslaved wet-nursing.Footnote ¹⁴

“For Rent: A Good Wet Nurse”: The Negation of Maternal Breastfeeding as a Social Practice in Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, it was common practice among wealthy European women to avoid breastfeeding. For much of this long period, the Catholic Church condemned maternal nursing; this stance was based largely in the philosophy of Saint Augustine, who believed that children were beings crushed by the weight of original sin and saw breastfeeding as a “voluptuous practice” that encouraged vice in newborns and their mothers alike.Footnote ¹⁵ Although some doctors and theologians exalted breastfeeding, believing it was God’s will or nature’s calling, their views had scant impact. Thus, from the thirteenth century forward, aristocratic families commonly hired “internal” wet nurses, who lived in until an infant was weaned. Beginning in the seventeenth century, bourgeois families followed suit; by the 1700s, the practice had spread to the middle classes in countries like France, Italy, England, and Portugal, where the women were referred to as saloias.Footnote ¹⁶

Upper-class women declined to nurse their babies for physical, moral, and sexual reasons: nursing was thought to deform a woman’s breasts and body and to be harmful to women’s naturally delicate health; the act of breastfeeding signaled a lack of modesty that was beneath the dignity of a lady, stimulating excessive sensuality and desire; and it was thought that sexual activity would contaminate a woman’s milk and had to be curtailed for as long as she nursed. Little by little, outsourced breastfeeding, which was originally recommended only in cases where a mother died or was physically incapacitated, came to be understood as a mark of social distinction and a safeguard of feminine morality.Footnote ¹⁷ Despite some criticism, Brazil’s wealthy classes hired women to work in their homes, which allowed them to exercise more control over their children’s health and daily life.Footnote ¹⁸

In Brazil, this social practice found legal grounding in the Philippine Code (a body of law that structured Brazilian law for more than two centuries after its publication in 1603), which “recognized that some women, because of their rank – that is, their high social status – might not wish to breastfeed their children.”Footnote ¹⁹ And while European wet nurses were generally white, in Portuguese America enslaved Black women generally nurtured their masters’ children. The arrival in Rio of the Portuguese Royal Court in 1808 catalyzed this practice, greatly expanding the market for enslaved women who had just given birth. For the nineteenth century, wet nursing by enslaved women is amply documented in travel narratives, personal letters, lithographs, and photographs, as well as in countless specialized journal articles and classified advertisements for the purchase, sale, and rental of wet nurses and their services.Footnote ²⁰

In Europe, outsourced breastfeeding was done by peasant women who did not have to abandon their own babies; in Brazil, by contrast, wet nurses were generally not allowed to nurture or care for their children. We can discern this norm in the first advertisement quoted here, which leaves the purchase of the wet nurse’s child to the buyer’s discretion, with no concern for the three-month-old infant’s fate should the mother be sold alone. In the other ads, the enslaved women’s children are not even mentioned; it was quite uncommon for mothers and babies to be obligatorily sold together.Footnote ²¹ Research into the Jornal do Commeércio’s classified ads for the months of April, August, and December in 1840, 1850, and 1871 ratifies studies that have already shown that the hiring of wet nurses was common practice in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro and its provincial territories.Footnote ²² It was part of the system that reproduced the slavocratic habitus, fomented as much by those who made a business from reaping wet-nursing profits as by families who hired wet nurses out of necessity or a desire for social distinction.

Most wet nurses, in both urban and rural homes, were asked to perform other domestic tasks at the same time that they cared for newborns – thus the mention in classified ads of nurses who were “skilled” or “perfect housemaids.” In the wealthiest households, wet nurses could dedicate themselves exclusively to a baby’s care, but all the same most sellers advertised a nurse’s other virtues and skills – “devoted in the household arts,” “she knows how to iron, launder, and sew perfectly,” “demure,” “modest,” “good at ladies’ hairdressing,” “a good cook” – in order to convince buyers that the women would be useful in the household during and after their period of lactation. In terms of price, a comparison of the 1840s and the 1850s shows that the cost of wet-nursing increased after the end of the slave trade in 1850, along with the general rise in slave prices (especially those of enslaved women). In that decade, the quantity of ads also increased considerably, suggesting that there was a general market valorization of pregnant or lactating slaves. The sale or rental of enslaved wet nurses was an important and profitable economic activity in the major cities of the Brazilian Empire and would remain so in subsequent decades. In the 1870s, however, the wet-nursing labor force seems to have diversified considerably, with the entry of free women of color and poor white women, many of whom were immigrants.Footnote ²³

Most wet nurses were hired by families with newborn babies or nursing children. But nurses were also hired to care for orphans in institutions such as the roda dos expostos, or “baby wheel,” which had been founded in Brazil in the eighteenth century in order to protect abandoned babies and save their souls, providing baptism, food, and care until they were old enough to work.Footnote ²⁴

Historian Luiz Carlos Soares has argued that many masters obliged enslaved women to abandon their babies in the roda dos expostos because childless women’s services fetched a higher price. In doing so, they opted for the certainty of immediate profit, as any earnings that a baby might have produced if he or she survived early childhood were quite uncertain.Footnote ²⁵ Historian Maria Elizabeth Ribeiro Carneiro has shown that the overwhelming majority of wet nurses employed by the Casa da Roda (Rio’s public “baby wheel”) between 1847 and 1888 were enslaved.Footnote ²⁶ Their masters – the men who profited from their work – were counselors of state, barons, priests, judges, doctors, and other members of the slaveowning class. Both Soares and Carneiro show that infant abandonment and the selling or rental of wet nurses were interlinked social practices in nineteenth-century Brazilian society. They were rooted in the open social acceptance of the exploitation of women’s bodies in the slavocratic Empire.

In intense conversation with their Continental counterparts, Brazilian doctors and educators translated European manuals on early childhood education, seeking to guide families in their choice of wet nurses and advise them on their children’s moral and physical instruction.Footnote ²⁷ Excerpts from these manuals were published in women’s weeklies or “instructional and recreational” magazines, with or without alterations that catered to Brazil’s slavocratic reality:

When it came to choosing wet nurses on the basis of health and hygiene concerns, Brazil’s slaveholding upper and middle classes depended to a certain extent on literal translations of European manuals. But their content was resignified in the context of slavery. The enslaved nurse took the place of the European peasant. The appropriation of an enslaved body, justified as an exercise of property rights and a confirmation of the slavocratic habitus, took the place of free labor. A comparison of the imported normative literature with newspaper advertisements shows that this resignification was accomplished quite successfully. The characteristics most valued among wet nurses in Rio de Janeiro’s slave markets were: youth (buyers preferred women between the ages of fifteen and thirty); good health; a childbirthing history that included only one delivery; the ability to produce abundant, good-quality milk; demonstrated “good behavior,” which meant the woman was modest and home-bound; and possession of a “good temperament,” most frequently defined as being calm, affectionate, peaceful, patient, and friendly to children. Beyond this, parents were advised to regulate a wet nurse’s diet, consumption of alcoholic spirits, and sexual life in order to guarantee that their children consumed good-quality milk: experts recommended that it be “white and evenly colored, without yellow shadows, with a sweet taste and a substantial consistency.”Footnote ²⁸ Such recommendations were very close to those detailed in European manuals, but Brazilian classified ads also included descriptions such as parda, crioula, preta, and preta da nação, designations of color and status that both clearly marked the border between slavery and freedom and allowed potential buyers to identify which captives they might wish to acquire. Unlike mucamas (housemaids) and pagens (valets), whose physical beauty was heavily promoted, wet nurses were valued for their health, age, and ability to produce abundant milk.

Breastfeeding by enslaved wet nurses was a widely disseminated practice among Brazil’s wealthy classes until the late nineteenth century. Yet from 1850 forward, the custom attracted increasing criticism. Under the influence of Rousseau’s Emile, medical and scientific discourse condemned “mercenary” breastfeeding in Europe and Brazil.Footnote ²⁹ This emergent vision held that breastfeeding was a mother’s highest function. To not perform it was an act against feminine nature, an impediment to the nascent love between a mother and a child, a denial of a woman’s most important calling. The only acceptable reasons for a woman to bow out of the full realization of her maternity (which began with breastfeeding) were illness or death. In the new medical discourse, breastfeeding by nurses would only be accepted in order to guarantee a newborn’s survival in the event of a mother’s absence or incapacitation. This ever-strengthening narrative advocated a new vision of the mother, who was now understood as the central protagonist in the education and instruction of the Empire’s future citizens; it also reimagined every role within Brazil’s nineteenth-century aristocratic families, placing increasing value on childhood, women’s education, and men’s patriarchal leadership.Footnote ³⁰

The debate over breastfeeding sparked a war of opinions in the press that extended well past slavery’s abolition.Footnote ³¹ Some doctors, such as Antônio Ferreira Pinto, believed that enslaved wet nurses were superior to free ones, because the former lived “in hopes of bettering their condition … stirred by the expectation of social distinction, friendship, food, compensation or even freedom on the part of their masters or the parents who rented their services.”Footnote ³² Such arguments reinforced slavocratic discourse and resonated widely. Yet periodicals such as O Constitucional and A Mãe de Família argued the contrary, summarily disqualifying enslaved women:

Notwithstanding the intense battle fought out in the press, in the medical theses of Brazil’s Imperial Academy of Medicine, and in early childhood education manuals, enslaved wet-nursing endured among families of the seigneurial class who could continue to afford the costs of renting or buying nurses even as the slave system entered into crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. The new familial ideals prescribed that mothers should bear the greatest responsibility for their children’s care and education, in which breastfeeding played an important role. But in the private sphere, the slavocratic habitus – regulated by discretionary, authoritarian, and hierarchical relationships – spoke louder. There, despite normative medical discourse, white women’s exemption from breastfeeding persisted as a sign of social differentiation and symbolic reproduction of the dominant class. In debate with strong scientific criticism, some ads in the Jornal do Commercio between 1878 and 1880 offered clients the opportunity to send a nurse’s milk for examination before she was hired, thus guaranteeing her cleanliness and hygiene. In this way, as historian Ilmar Mattos has observed,Footnote ³⁴ the “house” resisted the transformations that the “street” desired, incorporating only those elements that were deemed convenient: a woman’s role as educator, the valorization of childhood, closer parent–child relationships, the importance of extended family, and the patriarch’s organizing role. Newspaper ads, travellers’ accounts, letters exchanged between relatives, and images of wet nurses preserved in family collections and public and private archives throughout Brazil all bore witness: the new familial order would not sacrifice the slavocratic habitus.

For Love and the Right of Ownership

My Dear daughter,

Like your mother, you were born in Brazil and a slave [Julia Monjola] gave you her milk to drink … She asked, in tears, as if you could understand, that you never forget the one who held you in her arms and put you to sleep at her bosom every day. And that if some day you became rich, you might buy her so that she would be only yours.

(letter from Charles Expilly to his daughter Martha, Paris, June 1863)Footnote ³⁵

The production of nineteenth-century narratives about wet nurses was quite unequal. Those most easily found by historians were produced by the dominant class, which exercised greater control over the production of discourse. The historian’s challenge, then, is to give voice to subaltern groups by way of documents that sought not to erase but rather to silence them.Footnote ³⁶ Such is the case of Epilly’s letter to his daughter, as well as many other private family documents; such too was the case of the many photographic portraits of enslaved wet nurses commissioned by wealthy Brazilian families during the Empire.

Portraits were the most ubiquitous genre of photography in the nineteenth century. The custom of sitting for and collecting photos spread quickly among the seigneurial class beginning in the 1860s, when the carte de visite format arrived in Brazil.Footnote ³⁷ Under the reign of the portrait, social groups distinguished themselves from others, constructing their social identity through visual markers. The portrait, which involved choosing the best possible pose for the mise en scène of the photographic studio, signaled the adoption of a particular lifestyle and social standard. In this way, such images enabled the dominant class’s self-representation and circulated through mutual exchanges among family and friends. Research in a number of portrait albums indicates that the great majority of portraits (both male and female) were individual.Footnote ³⁸ Children, however, could pose alone, in groups, or in pairs, often accompanied only by their wet nurses or nannies. The main motive for any child’s trip to the photographer’s studio was a desire to perpetuate the memory of family and childhood.Footnote ³⁹ Yet portraits such as those in Figure 4.1 also had a pedagogical function: the scene aimed to eternalize slavery and its power relations through the figure of the captive nurse, and thus help to construct and perpetuate the slavocratic habitus.

Figure 4.1 Carte cabinet, Antonio da Silva Lopes Cardozo, National Archives, Bahia, 1868; carte de visite, Carneiro e Gaspar, private collection, Roberto Meneses de Moraes, Rio de Janeiro, 1866–1975.

The images in Figure 4.1 reveal the interdependence between the family order and the slave order in nineteenth-century Brazil. They are part of a still-tiny group of photos of enslaved wet nurses that have been located in private and public archives by Brazilian researchers.Footnote ⁴⁰ Captured in different moments and spaces, the wet nurses are always accompanied by children, who are usually held on the wet nurses’ laps. This is how we see the nurse of the young Antonio da Costa Pinto, son of the Baron of Oliveira and Maria Rita Lopes da Costa Pinto, important members of the Bahian sugar aristocracy; and Vitorina, nurse to a girl named Maria Eliza, part of the Pereira da Silva Porto family, which made a living in the 1860s from the exploitation of slaves for hire in Rio but had made its fortune through international slave trafficking until the trade became illegal in the early 1830s.Footnote ⁴¹ The poses chosen for such portraits were usually similar and resembled those that were standard among free women, reinforcing the nurse’s closeness to the children. All the same, it was clear from the photo’s slavocratic visual grammar that the women were captives rather than mothers. The women’s beautiful garments were part of a Brazilian ethos unveiled by Expilly: “Among the wealthiest families, possessing a wet nurse was a question of honor and self-regard, as well as an indication of the household’s prosperity and wealth.”Footnote ⁴²

The first image, with its African shawl and turban, ratified the importance of African customs in the care of infants. The second, by contrast, incorporated contemporary medical critiques, instead projecting the ideal of a hygienic and morally elevated nurse: Vitorina’s hair was carefully bound, and her well-cut dress framed her décolletage.Footnote ⁴³ Both images represent a modest nurse, like those described in so many classified ads. In spite of a medical-scientific discourse that opposed enslaved wet-nursing, the families who ordered these portraits showed the extent to which the practice was entrenched in familial habit – rooted in love, affection, property rights, or a slavocratic habitus that by its own logic was capable of folding all of those things into one. All the same, the photos of nurses and children reveal “a union grounded in love and past violence: a violence that cracked the slave soul, opening an affective space that is being invaded by the child of her master.”Footnote ⁴⁴

As artifacts, the wet nurse portraits legitimated a slavocratic habitus that placed pedagogical value on the figure of the loyal, dedicated slave, who lived in hope of winning a master’s concessions. In exhibiting well-dressed nurses photographed in expensive, award-winning photography studios such as Carneiro & Gaspar or Lopes Cardoso, the portraits also served as a mark of social differentiation within and between classes. Beyond this, they emerged from families’ genuine desires to create memories and immortalize affective ties, even as they also separated subjects from one another in ways that visually reproduced the hierarchies inherent to Brazilian slave society.

These photographs only circulated in private and familiar spheres, where they signified the regard a slave had earned within a family. Yet such esteem originated in that same family’s claim to own a wet nurse as property. The enslaved woman was thus fixed in a gray space between a family’s affection and the violent fact of having been forcibly separated from her child. This ambiguous emotional position was not necessarily understood as contradictory; affection, violence, and loss were constitutive elements in the slavocratic habitus that was shared within so many of Brazil’s big houses and mansions. The images immortalized a nurse’s favored position in the eyes of her owner, while silencing the real and symbolic violence inherent in separating her from her child and snuffing out her maternal rights.

The “freedom letters” that families sometimes granted to wet nurses – especially powerful documents because they made the dream of freedom concrete – can be read from this same interpretive perspective.Footnote ⁴⁵ Take, for example, the case of a Black woman named Custódia, wife of Pedro, who was manumitted by Antoinio Rodrigues Barbosa “for having (as a slave) raised my son Luis.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Or that of all of the nurses who breastfed the children of Florinda Maria da Silva and Caetano Alves de Oliveira, owners of the Barra Limpa and Ribeirão Frio coffee plantations in the part of the Paraíba Valley that sat within the Province of Rio de Janeiro. Their will stated:

I emancipate my slaves Bento (from Congo) and his wife Claudina (parda); José Maria (from Benguela); Diogo (from Angola); Vitorino (from Congo) and his wife Feliciana (from Cabinda); Ana (crioula), who nursed my son Francisco; Cristina (from Congo), nurse to my daughter Rita; and Joana, the aged nurse of my daughter Joaquina. And as it is my intention to free from slavery all of the nurses who cared for my children, who were already divided among some of my heirs, I authorize the executor named below to pay, at fair value, compensation to whichever of my heirs who might have this right, so that they can arrange to grant those slaves letters of freedom, and I beg my heirs to respect my request.Footnote ⁴⁷

The master clearly delineated who would ascend to the status of freedperson and why. Among his 683 captives, Caetano Oliveira granted freedom to only twelve, less than 2 percent. Ana (crioula), Cristina (from Congo), and Joana (already aged) were explicitly named; the captives Rosa (from Cabinda) and Joaquina (from Benguela), who had been given away as part of the dowry of Caetano’s daughters Maria Florinda Alves and Helena Severina de Oliveira Ferraz, had their manumissions paid for by the estate. In all of these cases, freedom letters were granted only after the patriarch’s death, in recognition of good service to the family.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus understood, manumission reinforced the slave system by legitimizing the image of the “good master” and alleviating the internal tensions of a society where the majority was Black and African.Footnote ⁴⁹

It is important to note that the inherent violence of a system that deprived enslaved women of the right to feed and care for their children was also an explicit part of the patriarchal playbook. Like the children of Caetano and Florinda Alves de Oliveira, the sons and daughters of Mariana and Joaquim Ribeiro de Avellar, Viscountess and Viscount of Ubá, were also cared for by wet nurses. Owners of more than 700 slaves, the couple also loaned lactating captives to close relatives. In 1862, an African woman from Cabinda named Felisberta was sent to care for Maria Izabel, the Viscountess’s niece, after having breastfed her mistress’s own children, Júlia and Luísa. Four years later, it fell to an African woman from Mozambique named Bernarda to go to Rio de Janeiro to serve the infant Mariana, the second heir of the Viscountess’s brother José Maria (also called Juca) and his wife Carolina. In a letter to his sister, Juca sent news about the new wet nurse:

Bernarda is fulfilling her duties very well, she is meeting all of our expectations and making us very happy. She is very respectful and thanks you with gratitude for all the constant good news that you send to her through me about her son, she thanks you very, very much for all of the care you bestow on Feliciano. If Bernarda continues this way, as I hope, I will be at ease.

Please send us news of our dear friend Felisberta, we never tire of remembering her seriousness and dignity, and the tokens of concern and friendship that she gave us while she was caring for Maria Izabel, what a lovely creature! Please send her our warm regards and tell her that we always remember her with pleasure. …

Your brother and sincere friend,

José MariaFootnote ⁵⁰

Despite Juca’s elation about his family’s harmonious and cordial relationship with Bernarda and Felisberta, in practice those ties were generated by a situation of extreme violence. From the sequence of letters, based on the birthdates of the children she served, we can calculate that Felisberta had given birth at least four times: in 1857, 1858, 1862, and 1866. In Bernarda’s case, given very high rates of infant mortality, the chances that she would reunite with her son Feliciano when she returned to the provinces were very slim. Yet if she had resisted the post of wet nurse that her mistress offered to her, she would have sparked a conflict that could strip her of the hard-won privileges of a “house slave.” Her only option was to do Viscountess Mariana’s bidding and implore her to look out for the health of the son she had left in the care of other plantation slaves.

In seigneurial discourse, the praise directed at Felisberta and Bernarda wove together notable elements; competence in the tasks they carried out, good behavior, gratitude, a desire to please, subservience, and recognition of the master–slave hierarchy. In exchange, Juca and Mariana engaged in the “politics of favor” instituted by the slavocratic habitus. Cases like Felisberta’s and Bernarda’s point to the borderlands that existed within the master–slave relationship. Just like the nurses who were manumitted or depicted in family portraits, these women, through long years of intimate coexistence, came to experience affectionate bonds such as those expressed by Juca, Carolina, and Marica Izabel, who even refered to Bernarda as “mãe [mother] Beta.”Footnote ⁵¹ All the same, those affective ties were constructed through the coercion, oppression, and violence that necessarily grounded all slave–master relationships.Footnote ⁵²

Like Viscountess Mariana, the Viscountess of Arcozelo (Maria Isabel de Lacerda Werneck) – who lived at the Monte Alegre fazenda (coffee plantation) and also owned two other fazendas in Paty do Alferes (Rio Province) – also received a request for an enslaved wet nurse, this time to serve her granddaughter. In her journal, she explained: “The infant is voracious” (December 21, 1887). In response to the request, she visited her various senzalas (slave quarters) in order to find the best nurse. She chose Agostinha, mother of Guilherme, who had been born some six months before on June 25. Viscountess Maria Isabel noted in her diary: “I think she will do” (December 22, 1887). Two days later, before Agostinha left the plantation for Rio de Janeiro, Maria Isabel gave her 42$000 réis as a tip and wrote: “Agostina was pleased.” But at the end of the 1880s, when methods of seigneurial control were wearing thin, Maria Isabel was soon frustrated by the news that her plantation administrator, Pedro Celestino, had liberated Agostina and another slave named Inez, in exchange for a payment of 1,326$000. Maria Isabel vented: “I am going to send for Agostinha, who has gone to nurse my little grandchild, and send another nurse in her place. It always shows that Pedro is Black and was once a captive” (December 28, 1887). Her account reveals more than simple dissatisfaction that Agostinha had been manumitted; it was clearly based in the notions of Black inferiority that characterized relations of dominance in Brazilian Imperial society.

Humans participate in history as actors and narrators.Footnote ⁵³ This chapter argues that the visual and written narratives of Brazil’s master class sought, through multiple practices of power, to construct a vision of the “good wet nurse” and the “generous master” capable of effacing the violence inherent in forcing a woman to nurse another family’s baby. In so doing, they sought also to render invisible the violence of slavery itself. The sentiments and affections generated between wet nurses and their white children were a constitutive element of Brazil’s slavocratic discourse. Even in a society where slavery was ever more condemned in moral terms, enslaved wet-nursing endured because of its critical pedagogical function in the slavocratic order: it taught future masters to put aside their sentiments in order to exercise control. Affection and violence were thus two complementary faces of a practice that contributed to the construction and reproduction of the slavocratic habitus that was also so precious to the master class as a form of symbolic and social distinction.

Competing with seigneurial discourse, most doctors and educators complained about enslaved wet nursing, alleging that slave women had poor hygiene and that no one could control their inferior temperaments, alimentary habits, and customs, which would inevitably harm a baby’s health and moral education. The masters’ narrative emphasized the good sentiments that grew from intimate coexistence, thus reviving the figure of the “good master” and seigneurial discourse more generally. Yet the medical narrative was based in a deep suspicion of the enslaved nurse. It cannot, therefore, be said that doctors were opposed to slavery, much less champions of enslaved women. They intended to promote medical knowledge at the expense of popular curative knowledge, to reassert white women’s roles as educators, and to promote maternal breastfeeding for the sake of babies’ health and family hygiene.Footnote ⁵⁴ Despite their differences, masters and medical professionals converged in silencing and neutralizing the voices of enslaved women. In various spheres where enslaved women had exercised expertise and influence during the nineteenth century (including healing practices, medicine, childbirth, and child-rearing), Black women’s contributions were attacked, criticized, and gradually replaced by occidental medicine and the ideal of the “civilized” white mother.

Enslaved women, however, expressed their suffering through their actions, often quite unexpectedly. This was the case of an enslaved woman studied by Maria Helena Machado, Ambrosina, who suffocated her master’s son with a rag doll, killing him. In her deposition, Ambrosina claimed her innocence and revealed that she had been compelled to favor the master’s son over her own; both boys were named Benedito. She also endured nights without sleep, suffering from overwork and extreme exhaustion. Her testimony revealed the suffering of a woman divided between “two Beneditos,” a state that was always denied in the seigneurial discourse.Footnote ⁵⁵ So too was the case of Julia Monjola, who, in saying goodbye to the young Martha Expilly, implored in tears that the girl return to purchase her after she grew up, out of gratitude for the services the nurse had rendered – an appeal, in truth, that was directed more to the adult Expillys, parents to the still-infant child. Julia Monjola sought arguments that might lead to her manumission in the slavocratic primer, finding recourse in the gratitude that the family might have felt during the time she cared for the baby girl. Julia likely feared the fate she might suffer in the hands of another master, but her pleas – like those of thousands of other wet nurses – fell on deaf ears. The boundaries between love and property rights became well drawn, and property rights held the advantage whenever it became necessary to choose between them.

Day had hardly broken on August 4, 1864, when José Antonio Saraiva, a Brazilian special envoy in Montevideo, delivered an ultimatum to the Uruguayan government: President Atanasio Aguirre would have six days to heed the requests of Brazilians living in his country, who were demanding compensation for the damage that had been caused to their properties over more than a decade. If he failed to comply, Brazilian troops would attack Uruguay. The response came quickly: the document was returned to Brazil’s representative, having been deemed so entirely “inadmissible” that it was unworthy to even “remain in the nation’s archives.”Footnote ¹

In less than three months’ time, Brazil would invade northern Uruguay. This Brazilian attack would be crucial in deposing Aguirre, the head of the Blanco government. Venancio Flores, a Colorado, took his place, putting an end of the civil war that had wracked the country for over a year. Nobody might have been aware of it just then, but this would be the beginning of the largest armed conflict in the history of South America. The Paraguayan War, the Guerra Grande, or the War of the Triple Alliance dragged on for nearly six years, leaving hundreds of thousands of civilian and combatant casualties.Footnote ²

From the start, the Paraguayan War would be the object of intense controversy among politicians, historians, and scholars in general. The first books on the conflict, many containing copies of important diplomatic documents, were published as early as the 1870s. In 1894, José Antonio Saraiva – a Liberal Party member who had pursued a long political career in the Brazilian Empire after the end of his mission in Uruguay – would defend himself publicly against accusations leveled by a Uruguayan colleague, Jose Vasquez Sagastume, that it had been he, Saraiva, who had failed to arrive at a successful deal and thus caused the war. The Brazilian was aided in his defense by fellow party member Joaquim Nabuco, who declared in his masterful book Um estadista do Império (1898) that it was thanks to Saraiva that Brazil had been able to secure alliances with Argentina and the Colorados in Uruguay, forming the Triple Alliance, which was to play “the role of a selfless representative of civilization and liberty in South America.”Footnote ³

This is an odd statement, coming from one of Brazil’s most renowned abolitionists: when the war began, although slavery still remained to a limited extent in Paraguay (it was abolished in 1869), Brazil was the only truly slaveholding country in the region. Over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many interpretations would emerge regarding the causes for the conflict and the motivations of the countries involved (Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, and, to the eyes of some, England). While not all mention slavery, they hardly corroborate this alleged Brazilian interest in promoting civilization and liberty.

This chapter does not seek to provide a detailed examination of the historiography of the Paraguayan War. Since the 1990s, historians have cast the war as part of the “process of the construction and consolidation of the national states in the Platine region,” and that will be the jumping-off point for this analysis. Poorly defined borders, disputed navigational rights along the rivers in the region, the cultivation of yerba mate near the border, Paraguayan access to the Río de la Plata estuary, and cattle smuggling on the Brazil–Uruguay border are seen as the major causes for the start of the conflict, exacerbated by long-harbored expansionist aims and scuffles over local political hegemony.Footnote ⁴

Nevertheless, the reasons that led Brazil to occupy the north of Uruguay in October 1864 have, strangely enough, not been closely examined. Most interpretations tend to attribute the Saraiva mission’s failure to avoid the conflict to the impossibility of satisfying the demands of both sides. In broad terms, those demands had to do with attacks on property and the security of Brazilians living in Uruguay, and Brazilians’ disrespect for Uruguayan sovereignty and legislation, which was the source of constant friction in the area. But what were Brazilians and Uruguayans complaining about, specifically? And why were those complaints so important that they led Brazilians to invade Uruguayan territory?

In line with a different interpretive strain, I will argue that, for a full understanding of the driving forces behind the complaints lodged by both countries – and, hence, behind the start of the war – we must consider the tensions around the abolition of slavery in Uruguay and the definitive ban of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, which took place in the 1840s and 1850, respectively. These tensions were at play in the disputes over the consolidation of local nation-states and are central to an understanding of the historical process that fed into the Paraguayan War.Footnote ⁵

The abolition of slavery in Uruguay was proclaimed in 1842 and 1846 by the Colorados and the Blancos, respectively, amidst the civil war that was waged from 1839 to 1851. It created a free-soil territory, land on which there were officially no slaves, immediately adjacent to the largest slave territory in South America: the Brazilian Empire.Footnote ⁶ From that time onward, the borders that had once been disputed by the Spanish and Portuguese Empires took on a new meaning, at least in the letter of the law (and the letter of the law carried great weight). Whoever crossed the border from Brazil into Uruguay would no longer be a slave, nor could they be reenslaved if they returned to Brazilian soil, under the terms of that country’s 1831 ban on the slave trade.

I hope to make clear that this factor served to heighten the many tensions between Brazilians and Uruguayans in the border region from the late 1840s onward. By the early 1860s they would reach a point of no return, leading to the Brazilian invasion of the north of Uruguay. In making this argument, I will use documents and methods from both traditional political history and social history. Beyond the undeniable importance of the acts of the so-called great men, we must reflect on the meanings of the actions of ordinary men and women living in the border region. It is in this sense that I hope to make a contribution to the renewal of the field of the history of international relations. In dialogue with two approaches, working on the border between social history and political history, it strikes me as fundamental that we forge a social history of international relations.Footnote ⁷

This approach makes it possible to understand the importance of the busy flow of individuals across the border, the flight of enslaved people, violent recruitment for Uruguayan and Brazilian armies and militias, attacks on communities of free and freed Blacks, and above all the vulnerability of Afro-descendant borderland residents, subject as they were to the daily threat of kidnapping and enslavement. It is true that this was not a new development in the 1840s, when slavery was abolished in Uruguay. But the combination of abolition and the fast-approaching end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil – where the institution of slavery itself remained unquestioned – created a completely different regional dynamic, catapulting local conflicts and tensions onto the international stage.

Slavery on the Borders of the Río de la Plata Region

The political borders of the Platine region were the result of a long process of colonization and disputes between Portugal and Spain over the region of the so-called Continent of Rio Grande and the Plata river basin, dating back to the founding of the Colônia do Santíssimo Sacramento in 1680. The eighteenth century would see Portugal and Spain lodging warring claims, beginning with the Treaty of Madrid in 1750. Diplomatic efforts at the time were ultimately insufficient to avoid the wars that, interspersed with brief periods of calm, were waged through the late 1860s.

Here, as everywhere else in the Americas, colonization brought slavery. In the Platine region in the second half of the eighteenth century, the rising demand for furs and jerky, to be sold on the Andean and Brazilian markets, led to a steady increase in the number of enslaved workers on local ranches. At the same time, slaves were already around 30 percent of the population in the Brazilian captaincy of Rio Grande do Sul. By the last decades of the century, the integration of the Rio Grande do Sul and Platine economies into Rio de Janeiro’s orbit led to more and more enslaved Africans being forcibly brought to the region.Footnote ⁸

It remains peculiar that the Platine region began to see a greater influx of enslaved Africans precisely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as the international slave trade was starting to be seriously questioned, due to both British action and burgeoning independence movements in the Spanish colonies.

This phenomenon was even more peculiar in the region that would later become Uruguay, as it was situated in an area that had historically been claimed by both the Portuguese and the Spanish. After all, even after the founding of the city of Montevideo by the Spanish in 1726, the Banda Oriental (so called because it lay on the eastern bank of the Río de la Plata) remained Portuguese until 1777, when the Treaty of San Ildefonso granted Spain the southern half of modern-day Uruguay. By the terms of the treaty, Portugal held onto the north and the lands that would become the provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, and Paraná.

The first quarter of the nineteenth century was shaped by struggles between Portugal and Spain over control of the region. In 1801, Portugal agreed to exchange Colônia do Sacramento for the Sete Povos das Missões (or the Misiones Orientales). After the British invasions of Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806 and 1807 and the 1808 arrival of the Portuguese Court in Brazil, the Portuguese government decided to take back the left bank of the Río de la Plata just as independence movements in the region were arising – the result being the independence of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, led by Buenos Aires. In 1815 Montevideo was part of the territory controlled by the Argentine general Artigas, but in 1816 it passed over to Portugal again and was dubbed the Cisplatine Province. From then on, the area would be at the heart of struggles against Argentina’s presence. In 1825, in what would be called the Cisplatine War, Uruguay began the process of breaking away from Brazil – by, among other things, passing a law that put an end to the slave trade and decreeing that slaves’ wombs were free. That movement would come to fruition in 1828.Footnote ⁹

There is evidence that, at least as early as the mid-eighteenth century, slaves were crossing the borders between the Portuguese and Spanish Empires in both directions. By that time, the Reales Cédulas (Royal Decrees) of 1773 and 1789 had extended the right of asylum in Spanish lands, traditionally limited to the free population (especially Christians and Indigenous peoples), to slaves, granting freedom to those who fled to Spanish soil.Footnote ¹⁰

In 1801, the Spanish cartographer and naturalist Félix de Azara referenced these runaway slaves, complaining that the Spanish – who, according to him, treated slaves better than the Portuguese did – should never return them to their owners, “for their flight was a rightful means to achieve liberty, founded in natural law, against which no human convention could stand.” Writing a short while later, in 1821, the French traveler Augustin Saint-Hilaire would also reference the slaves fleeing Brazil for the Río de la Plata; he affirmed that “the protection that Artigas granted the slaves who had run away from the captaincy [of Rio Grande do Sul] was the ostensible motive for the outbreak of the war” between the Spanish and Portuguese over the Banda Occidental (Argentina), which had begun in 1811.Footnote ¹¹

The movement of slaves along Brazil’s southern border was clearly a source of concern for Portuguese authorities. In 1813, a year after the ban on trading slaves to the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, the Portuguese government could be found complaining about the decree that granted freedom to “any and all slaves of foreign countries who enter this territory, by virtue of the simple fact of having set foot on it,” as we read in the “request from the Portuguese government that slaves having fled from Brazil to the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata be turned over.” In it, the Portuguese also expressed their unease about the large numbers of slaves running away from the captaincy of S. Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul toward the territories of the United Provinces; Portugal threatened to go back on the armistice of May 26, 1812, in which it had committed to retreating from the left bank of the Río de la Plata.Footnote ¹²

The matter had already been the subject of correspondence between Portugal and Lord Strangford, the British ambassador to the Portuguese Court. Strangford had written to the government of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, requesting that the runaway slaves be returned immediately and the “disastrous effects” of the decree be undone.Footnote ¹³ In the face of these threats from both governments, Buenos Aires responded by revoking the decree, but not before emphasizing that the declaration of liberty for all slaves brought from foreign territories was an internal order and thus could not “be the cause of any complaint or offense on the part of any foreign government.”Footnote ¹⁴ In February of the following year, the government of Buenos Aires would return to the subject, emphasizing that the decree referred not to slaves who might happen to flee Brazil (such individuals should be returned to their masters) but to those who had been “introduced, by means of trade or sale, in violation of the provisions prohibiting the slave trade.”Footnote ¹⁵

In the twenty years that followed this discussion, the Atlantic slave trade would be banned in Brazil, as well as in Argentina and Uruguay, but enslaved Africans would continue to be brought illegally into the region. Negotiations between England and the recently created Brazilian Empire (1822) over the end of the slave trade were opened when England set about recognizing Brazil’s independence. In 1826, the convention between Brazil and England on the slave trade – shaped by Robert Gordon, the British ambassador to Brazil, and the Marquis of Inhambupe, minister of foreign affairs, and signed by D. Pedro I – stipulated that it be abolished within three years. The anti–slave trafficking agreement between the two countries was already in effect when a Brazilian law was approved on November 7, 1831; in addition to banning the introduction of further slaves into the country, it freed all Africans brought illegally into Brazil, although it stopped short of considering slave-smuggling to be piracy, as the English had wanted. Even so, the law held traders, ship commanders and other crew members, intermediaries, and purchasers of enslaved Africans all criminally responsible. In keeping with the terms of the convention of 1826, seized slave ships would be subject to the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission Court.

Though it would go down in history as the law “for the English to see” – a Brazilian expression meaning “just for show” – today there is sufficient evidence to demonstrate that, as of 1826, it was commonly believed that the slave trade would be brought to an end in the near future. Hence the rush to enslave Africans and sell them in Brazil, the spike in the price of slaves, and the increase in the number of slave ships landing at ports up and down the coast between 1826 and 1830.Footnote ¹⁶ The number of Africans brought in as slaves did in fact diminish drastically after the passage of the law, but the trade itself was never interrupted; by the mid-1830s, while it had become contraband, trafficking was again on the rise.

In Uruguay, the slave trade to the Río de la Plata region had been under attack since 1812, when the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata banned it.Footnote ¹⁷ Nevertheless, Africans continued to be introduced into the territory throughout the Luso-Brazilian occupation of the region, from 1817 to 1828. During the Cisplatine War, the provisional Uruguayan government banned slaves from being imported into the territory in 1825, albeit unsuccessfully; the measure had no effect in Montevideo or Colônia do Sacramento, which were still occupied by the Portuguese and Brazilians. Uruguay’s 1830 constitution would ban the slave trade and establish the principle of the liberty of slaves’ wombs, following the trend set by other Latin American republics, and from then on, 1812 and 1830 would be considered watersheds in Uruguay’s abolition process – even though, in practice, the illegal trade continued at full bore.Footnote ¹⁸

In the 1830s, on the eve of the Farroupilha Revolution (1835–1845; the separatist movement that would struggle for ten years to establish Rio Grande do Sul as a republic independent of the Brazilian Empire) and the Guerra Grande (1839–1851; the Uruguayan civil war between the Blanco and Colorado parties), the population on the Brazil–Uruguay border was made up of many Brazilians and a large number of enslaved individuals who crossed the border on a daily basis, normally to work, often at the behest of their masters.Footnote ¹⁹ The so-called Banda Norte region of Uruguay, broadly integrated into the agrarian economy of Rio Grande do Sul, was also an area of sizable territories and low demographic density. Although there were Brazilians among the landowners ranging down as far as Montevideo, the majority lived in northern and northeastern Uruguay, often on farms that straddled the border. In many of these places, such as Tacuarembó, slaves were as much as a third of the local population – the same proportion as in Rio Grande do Sul.Footnote ²⁰

This concentration of Brazilians caused countless diplomatic problems for both countries. The Uruguayan government complained of Brazilian interference in local politics; Brazilians who traded in dried meat pressured the government of Rio Grande, objecting to the presence of farmers who might take cattle over to the Uruguayan side. These complaints led to both an increase in the flow of people across the border and a tightening of the not-always-successful restrictions on cross-border cattle transfer, which also affected the movement of enslaved workers from Rio Grande do Sul to Uruguay.Footnote ²¹ If political instability on both sides of the border was already a significant factor in heightening local tensions, subsequent proclamations of the abolition of slavery in Uruguay would transform the region into one massive powder keg.

The Guerra Grande and the Abolition of Slavery in Uruguay

The civil war over political control of Uruguay between the Blancos, led by Manuel Oribe, and the Colorados, who followed José Fructuoso Rivera, exacerbated the sense of social disorganization around the border. There were military incursions in both directions, cattle rustling, and slaves being appropriated right and left to fight on one side or another. In mid-1842, with Rivera retreating and Oribe advancing toward Montevideo, the Colorado government, which had allied with Brazil, soon became desperate for men to shore up its defense. At one point, the Uruguayan government ordered that there be a lottery of slaves to be selected for military service; the masters of selected slaves would be given 300 pesos for each, and the enslaved individuals would immediately be granted manumission, conditioned to the obligation of serving in the army for four years. Perhaps finding this measure insufficient, perhaps due to internal pressures, the Colorado government would ultimately abolish slavery altogether in December 1842.

Masters and slaves, Brazilians among them, were notified straightaway of the new abolition law, which called up all able-bodied men for military service. Since the measure mainly affected Brazilian slaveowners with properties in the Banda Oriental, it provoked a stream of complaints from that quarter; these masters acted to remove their slaves from the country altogether, helped by farmworkers from the province of Rio Grande do Sul and by the Brazilian government, which hid slaves on the Brazilian navy’s ships.

Rivera wasn’t the only authority to resort to recruiting slaves. As soon as he had consolidated his presence in eastern Uruguay and set up a government in Cerrito, Oribe also began forcibly enlisting slaves to flesh out his army. The 1846 abolition law does not explicitly mention recruitment, but it was designed to that end. A few days after the proclamation, authorities in Cerrito scrambled to incorporate the newly minted freedmen into the Blanco troops before masters could return their slaves to Brazilian soil. The owners were promised compensation “in due time,” but in 1847 complaints from Brazilians demanding the return of their slaves began to pile up. Most of these owners never received satisfactory answers from the Cerrito government, which went so far as to refuse to hand over the runaway slaves serving in its army.

In spite of the humanitarian rhetoric of the two abolition proclamations – from the Colorados in 1842 and the Blancos in 1846 – it is impossible to understand them outside the context of war. In both cases, abolition was the only means by which governments at war were able to add more men to their armies’ ranks; Uruguayan and Brazilian slaveholders alike stood against the recruitment of slaves, even with promises of compensation. To the eyes of the Brazilian government and Brazilian slaveowners, recruitment provided a clear incentive for slaves to flee from Rio Grande do Sul. And as if that weren’t enough, rumor had it that the Uruguayan government planned to encourage the British ambassador to send ships to seize the Brazilian vessels that were concealing slaves. Rumor or not, the fear that it cast into the heart of Brazil’s chargé d’affairs in Montevideo was undeniable. In December 1842, just after abolition, wary of “insults” from the English, who were increasingly engaged in repressing the Atlantic slave trade, and with an eye to saving slaves belonging to subjects of the Empire, the corvette Sete de Abril transported more than 200 slaves to the Brazilian province of Santa Catarina.Footnote ²²

The same would happen in 1846. Once again, the Brazilian government insisted that the Uruguayan decree encouraged slaves to run away. This was, in fact, the case. The Uruguayan government’s proclamation – that “the negro has been transformed from a thing to a man by those with the power to change his condition; and he may not return to a state of slavery unless a great injustice is perpetrated” – was understood perfectly by slaves on the border, who, having become aware of what arriving in Uruguay would mean, began running away much more often.Footnote ²³

Complaints about runaway slaves from authorities in Rio Grande do Sul picked up in 1848, when the president of the province requested that officers of the police in communities near the border calculate the number of runaways so as to formally request their return by the Uruguayans. The provincial president’s request included several lists of missing slaves, drawn up using masters’ responses to the police inquiry. In 1850, according to official estimates, around 900 slaves were reported as having fled to Uruguay. Despite vehement complaints, no returns were made. Amidst the chaos of the Guerra Grande, some of the fugitives apparently joined Black communities in northern Uruguay, while others volunteered to serve with the Uruguayan police or military so as to guard against a forcible return.Footnote ²⁴

The Blancos’ abolition decree was especially troubling to Brazilian slaveowners on the border. Since their properties were situated in the territories of the Cerrito government, many were unable to keep their slaves from fleeing or being confiscated by the Blanco troops. This state of affairs lasted until at least the end of the civil war and helped to worsen diplomatic relations between Cerrito and the Brazilian Empire, which became increasingly hostile at every fresh report of seized land, cattle, or slaves.Footnote ²⁵

Blanco enmity swelled as Brazilians began interfering in the civil war in favor of the Colorados. Brazilian action was crucial to the eventual Colorado victory in 1851 – and it was likewise decisive in consolidating Brazil’s hegemony in the region, as expressed in the five treaties it imposed on Uruguay: the “Treaty of the Perpetual Alliance,” which established Brazil’s right to intervene in internal Uruguayan conflicts; the “Treaty of Commerce and Navigation,” by which Brazil was allowed to navigate along the Uruguay River and its tributaries, and which waived customs fees to Brazil when exporting dried meat and live cattle; the “Treaty of Aid,” in which Uruguay recognized its debt to Brazil; and the “Treaty of Bounds,” by which Uruguay gave up its territorial claims north of the Quaraí River and gave Brazil the exclusive right of navigation on the Mirim Lagoon and the Jaguarão River, which are natural borders between the two countries. On top of these agreements, there was the treaty by which Uruguay agreed to extradite criminals and runaway slaves.

While the treaties as a whole were broadly rejected by the Uruguayan public – not least because they went into effect without being approved by the legislature – the provision on the return of slaves came in for particularly harsh criticism. The agreement stipulated that enslaved persons who crossed the Brazil–Uruguay border without their masters’ consent could be reclaimed by either their masters or the Brazilian government and returned to Brazilian soil.Footnote ²⁶ It would even motivate an open complaint from Andrés Lamas, Uruguay’s plenipotentiary consul in Brazil, to his friend Paulino José Soares de Souza, the future Viscount of Uruguai. In practice, the treaty amounted to Brazil’s flouting Uruguayan abolition laws – which had, precisely in opposition to Brazil, been incorporated into the foundation of Uruguayan nationality.Footnote ²⁷

Uruguay was not the only power with which Brazil would attempt to strike treaties for the return of runaway slaves. Similar agreements were signed with Peru in 1851 and Argentina in 1857 (likewise not approved by the legislature), and there were additional negotiations with Bolivia, Venezuela, and even Ecuador in the late 1850s and early 1860s. Striving to defend its hegemony in the region, the Brazilian Empire wholeheartedly accepted an “active presence” in diplomatic relations in South America.Footnote ²⁸ In all these treaties, the governments of South American republics were called upon to recognize the principle by which slaves belonging to Brazilian subjects who had crossed the border against their masters’ wishes had to be returned. Both parties committed to not employing deserters from other countries, precisely to keep slaves or recruited freedmen from running away.Footnote ²⁹ Unlike existing slave-extradition treaties between the colonial empires, these were struck between Brazil – a slaveholding nation – and countries that had already abolished slavery. This clearly demarcated a swath of slaveholding territory, standing against the free soil created by its republican neighbors.

The concept of free soil was evidently not a nineteenth-century invention; it has a much longer and more complex history. As Max Weber observed, medieval cities in continental Europe developed customs under which serfs could win their freedom by virtue of the principle stadtluft macht frei (city air makes free).Footnote ³⁰ Since 1569, slavery had been seen as inconsistent with British law; in the Cartwright case, a serf imported from Russia was judged to be free by the authorities because “England was too pure an aire for slaves to breath in.”Footnote ³¹ Cartwright became an important precedent and would be used as an argument in cases concerning slaves brought to England from its colonies in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century. At the end of the century, the discussion over the status of a runaway slave from Jamaica named James Somerset provided a definitive answer to the matter by establishing that, in the absence of positive laws regarding slavery, all people who set foot on English soil should be considered free.Footnote ³² In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, the courts also followed the understanding that “all persons are free in this kingdom; and as soon as a slave has arrived at the borders of this place, being baptized, he is freed.”Footnote ³³ When the Parisian courts found themselves charged with determining the fate of slaves brought by their masters from the French Caribbean, they ultimately freed hundreds of enslaved people as they arrived in the capital.

In the United States, meanwhile, 1857 would see free soil rejected in the Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case.Footnote ³⁴ Instead of accepting that free states in the Union had created free-soil regions – thus denaturalizing the concept of slavery – the United States chose to institutionalize the concept of race as an essential element of American citizenship. Once tied to race, slavery was cast not as a condition that might be modified but as a characteristic that individuals could not hope to shed. South American interpretations of this principle tended to be quite different. Having recognized the premise that a territory may create rights, the South American republics instituted criteria for citizenship by which citizens were defined by their place of birth, not by attributes such as color or ancestry.

In the specific case of Uruguay, the abolition of slavery and the subsequent definition of its national territory as one of free soil, even in the context of the ongoing civil war, ultimately became defining elements of its national sovereignty, in opposition to what was seen as Brazil’s expansionist, slaveholding presence.

Brazilian Landowners’ Interests in Uruguay and the Ban on the Slave Trade to Brazil

The signing of the treaties between Brazil and Uruguay on October 12, 1851, inaugurated a new phase in terms of how slavery was understood by the two countries. The extradition treaty focused specifically on slaves who had come to Uruguay without their masters’ permission. Later that year, even as it continued to recognize Brazilian subjects’ claim over runaway slaves and ban the entry of enslaved individuals from Brazil, the Colorado government refused to authorize searches for slaves in its territory, unless they fit the terms of the treaty, as stipulated in this December 6 circular:

• 1st. It is absolutely prohibited to introduce, under any pretext at any place in the Republic, any individual lacking a letter of manumission, until the Legislative Body has met and adopted the resolution it finds most fitting on this score.

• 2nd. Runaway slaves who entered the territory of the Republic after November 4 [of the past year] will no longer be returned.

• 3rd. Complaints will be seen to when made by the President of the Province of Rio Grande do Sul, for slaves belonging to Brazilian subjects settled in said Province; by the master of the slave; or by the duly authorized representative of said … .

• 4th. Complaints must be accompanied by titles or documents that, in keeping with the laws of Brazil, prove the ownership so claimed.

A year later, the Uruguayan government was stating that individuals considered fugitive slaves in Brazil who had entered Uruguay before the October 1851 treaty had been ratified should not be considered fugitives. Even if they were, they would not be returned. The same document indicated that masters could no longer invade Uruguayan territory to capture their alleged slaves, whether in person or by sending anyone on their behalf.Footnote ³⁵ These insistent reminders of the rules of the treaty are a clear demonstration of how frequent these invasions were – and they would continue throughout the 1850s and into the early 1860s. Not only did Brazilian masters keep on flouting the law, but they were also often aided by the open complicity of the Brazilian authorities, who were given to interpreting the treaty in ways that suited their interests and who could be heard to argue that, if they were to bend to Uruguay’s laws, they would be left without any manpower.

Complaints from both sides would lead to an agreement signed by the two governments a few years later. It held that Brazilians could take their former slaves as hired workers into Uruguay, as long as they had letters of manumission (the so-called freedman’s certificate). José Maria da Silva Paranhos, the Brazilian ambassador in Montevideo, would praise his own work years later and argue that the work contracts used on Uruguayan soil were a brilliant maneuver, for they

Paranhos’ allegedly brilliant solution was ultimately rather inefficient. Questions sent from Brazilian authorities on the border to their superiors are evidence that the legal status of workers in the area was still a matter of confusion – and that attempts to interpret the law in favor of Brazilian masters persisted.

This was the case with the parish inspector in Sant’Anna do Livramento, a small Brazilian town on the border with Uruguay, who sent a letter to Manuel Vieira Tosta, the president of the province of S. Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul and the future Baron of Muritiba. The inspector wanted to know whether slaves who crossed the border “by any chance circumstance” were to be considered free – if, say, they had been chasing down some animal that had strayed into Uruguayan territory. The question also applied to slaves who lived on farms that straddled the border, as well as those who, once hired in Uruguay, were subsequently transferred to the province of Rio Grande do Sul.

Tosta’s interpretation was that, given the town’s proximity to the border, slaves who crossed the line while carrying out domestic tasks should not be considered freed. Those who tried to take advantage of crossing to claim their freedom would be considered not freedmen but fugitives. In general, the provincial president concluded, slaves might only be freed when forced by their owners to work on the other side of the border, not in cases when they happened to be there momentarily against their master’s wishes – these being exceptional circumstances, falling outside the principle that the soil frees the slave that touches it. Tosta also wrote that slaves living on properties that straddled the border were likewise not to be freed: “as in this case, the continuity of territorial property signifies the continuity of a domestic jurisdiction.” Only slaves serving as hired laborers or on errands authorized by their masters on the other side of the border, and who subsequently returned to Brazil, would be considered free.Footnote ³⁷

In line with the interests of landowners on the border, the provincial president’s interpretation as to the legal status of those crossing the line between slave soil and free soil was quite simple: when in doubt, keep the individual a slave; slavery holds out. The problem was that, as everyone in the south was well aware, in Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Brazilian Empire, things were interpreted differently.

This comes through in another letter, this time to the Council of State, sent by Eusébio de Queiroz, then the chief justice of the Court of Appeals of Rio de Janeiro. The judge wanted to know “if a slave living in a foreign country may enter the Empire and be not only maintained in slavery, but also delivered to his master by the authorities of his country.” The query was in response to the case of a slave who had committed a crime and whose master lived in Uruguay. The Council of State’s opinion, in a decision which was considered remarkable at the time, drew the following conclusions:

• 1st. That the law of November 7, 1831, did not only seek to do away with the trade in new negroes, but also to diminish the number of slaves in Brazil, and hence those freed by law as well;

• 2nd. That its disposition would inevitably apply to the case of a slave who had, with the consentment of his master, entered a foreign country and subsequently reentered the Empire.Footnote ³⁸

The decision was met with vehement criticism from slaveowners in the province of Rio Grande do Sul. As they saw it, in failing to consider the characteristics of the border region, the Imperial authorities were setting a highly dangerous precedent for expropriation. Far away, in Rio de Janeiro, the members of the Council of State had judged that it was important to confirm the principle accepted in international law by which slaves setting foot on free soil gained the right to freedom. Despite the protests of slaveowners and the provincial president, the 1856 decision not only stood but was reaffirmed in 1858, after a new query was posed by the president of the province of Rio Grande do Sul to the Council of State.

This time, the case had to do with enslaved persons being taken by their masters to Uruguayan territory, in particular those slaves who were being used as guarantees against debt in Brazil. To the fury of slaveowners on the border, the opinion, signed by the minister of foreign affairs and approved by the emperor, read as follows:

How to understand the stance taken by the authorities of the Brazilian Empire? To judge from these decisions, the Empire not only did not endorse the decisions taken by the president of the province of Rio Grande do Sul but also went so far as to condemn the actions of local proprietors – who, for their part, saw themselves as the defenders of Brazil’s southern border. For a better understanding of this apparent paradox, we will have to return to the Brazilian political context in the 1840s and 1850s.

Since the mid-1840s, Brazilian diplomatic rhetoric on the conflicts in the Río de la Plata region had centered on a defense of Uruguay’s independence and sovereignty. Once the Cisplatine Province had been lost, it became imperative to ensure that Uruguay would not join the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. After all, in the eyes of those responsible for shaping Brazilian foreign policy in the region, Brazil had played a crucial role in asserting the independence of both Uruguay and Paraguay in the face of alleged Argentine expansionism.Footnote ⁴⁰

The problem was that a large part of Uruguay’s sovereignty was founded on the principle of freedom, as manifest in its abolition of slavery in the 1840s – or, rather, founded on the deliberate contrast between Brazil, the slaveholding empire, and Uruguay, the republic of freedom. A failure to recognize this would mean agreeing with the accusation (commonly heard around Montevideo) that the 1851 treaties had turned Uruguay back into Brazil’s Cisplatine Province. In this context, it hardly seemed wise for Brazil, with its aims of diplomatic dominance in the Platine region, to officially intervene in the internal matters of another nation. Andrés Lamas, Uruguay’s plenipotentiary consul in Rio de Janeiro, was well aware that the Brazilian authorities could hardly keep on criticizing Argentine expansionism if they were also being accused of expanding the bounds of slavery beyond their geographical borders – especially because, when it came to Brazilian diplomatic relations in the early 1850s, there was no topic more sensitive than the slave trade.

Although Brazil had been pressured by England to effectively stamp out the slave trade ever since it had illegally resurfaced in the 1830s, it was only in 1845, with the Slave Suppression Act (or the Aberdeen Act), by which the English granted themselves the right to board any ship suspected of transporting enslaved Africans on the Atlantic, that the transatlantic slave trade came under more aggressive control. In 1849, England transferred a part of its fleet to Brazil. As a result, January 1850 saw the highest number of seizures of slave ships in Brazil since the policy’s inception. Over the months to come, British warships attacked suspicious vessels along the northern coast of Rio de Janeiro and near Paranaguá, off São Paulo’s southern coast. In early July, reports arrived in Rio of clashes between the British, who had torched two ships, and the Brazilians, who, fearing a search and seizure, opened fire and then sunk their own vessels. It was said that the British navy wouldn’t flinch at attacking the capital itself. Although a variety of interests contributed to the Brazilian government’s eventual decision to ban the trade in enslaved Africans, it is undeniable that the unrest provoked by British action in the region played a key role in obtaining Brazil’s September 1850 commitment to abolishing the trade.

This was why the government at Rio de Janeiro needed to demonstrate respect for and make a point of obeying international agreements – not only so that Brazil could take on the long-coveted mantle of regional conflict mediator, but also in order to defend the country’s national sovereignty against England, which was rightfully skeptical of the Brazilian government’s commitment to putting an end to the Atlantic slave trade. The correspondence between the British and the Brazilians after the passage of the law of September 4, 1850, shows that the English were afraid that, just as in 1831, this act would become a dead letter. And they weren’t wrong: at least through 1855, there were still constant attempts to unload Africans in bays and coves along the Brazilian coast.Footnote ⁴¹

As the Brazilian authorities were only too well aware, this tense situation only revealed the Empire’s international vulnerability. It was impossible, in the context of the international abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and a wave of emancipation proclamations, for a country to aspire to regional hegemony while it continued to meet the demands of its slaveowners (including requests to return fugitive slaves from neighboring nations).

In this light, the Brazilian government seemed to be at a crossroads: on the one hand, there was the need to ensure respect for international treaties and laws, especially in relation to the slave trade, which Brazil was continually accused of disrespecting; on the other hand, it was impossible to forget that the nation’s borders in a strategic region were being controlled and protected by precisely the people who were calling for the expansion of slavery beyond those borders.

As if that weren’t enough, all this took place in the shadow of the Farroupilha Revolution, in which a significant portion of the population of Rio Grande do Sul had risen up against the Empire and declared the Rio-Grandense Republic in 1836. While the movement was defeated in 1845, dissatisfaction remained among those who were now forcibly reincorporated back into the Brazilian Empire. Since many believed that the Empire wouldn’t defend their interests, they felt entitled to take matters into their own hands. In incursions known as californias, even major landowners would invade Uruguayan territory in search of lost cattle and slaves.Footnote ⁴²

Uruguay had been a destination for fugitive slaves since its dual emancipation proclamations; in the 1850s it would also be raided by bush captains in search of people to enslave and sell in Rio Grande do Sul. The situation couldn’t have been more favorable: the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850 had driven up slave prices, which had been rising since the 1820s. There was no sign that demand for slaves had dwindled; far from it.Footnote ⁴³ A new slaving frontier – this is what Black communities in northern Uruguay became for slaveholders and slave catchers in the border region.Footnote ⁴⁴

The New Slaving Frontier

In late 1853, Juan Rosa, his wife Juana Rosa, and their daughter Segundina Marta, who was about four years old, went to the Uruguayan consul in the city of Rio Grande to ask for help and report that they had been kidnapped by Laurindo José da Costa. Laurindo and his accomplices had shown up at Juan Rosa’s house, saying that they had orders from the Uruguayan government to “gather up all the men of color and those who were married, with wives and children,” which is why they let themselves be tied up and led away. As they traveled, Laurindo continued to kidnap people and murder those who resisted. When they arrived in Pelotas, Juan Rosa, Juana Rosa, and Segundina Marta were sold to a Frenchman, but they were able to flee and make it to the Uruguayan consulate.Footnote ⁴⁵

A year later, an African woman named Rufina and her four children would suffer a similar fate. They were kidnapped by the same group in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, taken to Brazil, and sold there. Rufina was able to get the attention of the Brazilian police and report the crime, which would be covered and debated by journalists in Porto Alegre and Uruguayan and English consuls. During the process, Paulo José Soares de Souza, then Brazil’s minister of foreign relations, received word from his English counterpart, Lord Palmerston, requesting that action be taken against this “new form of trafficking” that was being practiced on Brazil’s borders. Rufina was not only let go but also reunited with her family and returned to Uruguay.Footnote ⁴⁶

Since 1852, people had sought out the Brazilian police, Uruguayan consuls, and even English consular representatives with the same complaint: they had been kidnapped in Uruguay to be sold as slaves in Brazil. According to available documentation, most were women and children. This followed the pattern of illegal enslavement as practiced in other regions over the same period.

Authorities in Rio Grande do Sul were well aware of this new form of trafficking. Between 1849 and 1853 alone, the provincial justice system would see seven cases of this kind, all reported by Uruguayan consuls.Footnote ⁴⁷ The crimes of the members of Laurindo José da Costa’s gang were public knowledge, as we see in an article published in 1854 in the newspaper O Rio-Grandense – which, for its part, had copied the report from the Correio do Sul. This was the second time that the papers had referenced a crime committed by the group.Footnote ⁴⁸ Andrés Lamas had written to Brazilian minister Limpo de Abreu about the case of Rufina and her children, saying that he hoped that the Brazilian authorities would do their part, in keeping with “international laws and conventions, the law of the Empire, and the particular laws against piracy and the abominable trafficking and importing of slaves.”Footnote ⁴⁹

At the same time as Lamas’ complaints were heard in Brazil, the Atlantic slave trade was continuing, illegally, in the province. In April 1852, hundreds of Africans were hastily unloaded on the coast near Tramandaí after the ship on which they had been carried ran aground.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some two years later, Henry Vereker, the English consul in Porto Alegre, would alert the provincial president, João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu, that a new load of Africans might have been dropped off along the coast of Rio Grande do Sul. While the latter insisted that it was simply a rumor, the consul seemed unconvinced; Sinimbu then wrote to the minister of foreign affairs, assuring him that nothing of the sort had happened and reiterating that he would stop at nothing “to spare the government the displeasure of seeing this province [Rio Grande do Sul] host to a crime so contrary to Law and Civilization, and which the government itself has striven to punish.”Footnote ⁵¹

A look at the correspondence between the multiple English consuls in Brazil and the Brazilian authorities in the early 1850s reveals that the issue of slavery was far from settled. As far as the English were concerned, the sale of Africans brought to Brazil after 1831 (reports of which accounted for much of the 1854 correspondence between Howard de Walden, the British consul in Rio de Janeiro, and Limpo de Abreu, the Brazilian minister of foreign affairs), along with the attempted landings of Africans on the Brazilian coast and the kidnappings of Black people along the southern border, all meant one thing: the continuation of the illicit trade in people.Footnote ⁵² It was no coincidence that, later that year, Vereker would write in his annual report to Lord Clarendon, the British minister of foreign affairs:

Diplomatic correspondence and complaints were often reproduced in the Brazilian foreign minister’s reports, evidence of the government’s care to recognize the existence of these cases and, especially, make their efforts to curb offenses known. In 1859, for example, the minister of foreign relations would allude to Uruguay’s complaints of the “theft of people of color in order to be sold” in Rio Grande do Sul. In one of the cases in question, a house was allegedly raided by two Brazilians who carried off a three-year-old child; in another, it was said that “two minors of color were stolen in the region of Aceguá and then sold as slaves in Rio Grande” and that relatives were now demanding “their rescue and return.” The minister wrote: “This report was verified in part, and one of the minors, who had been sold under the name Domingos and declared that he was called João Serapio, was judicially deposited in the town of Piratini.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1860, the report from the minister of foreign relations recounted:

Year after year, as slaveowners and bush captains operated increasingly frequently on the border, the tone of English and Uruguayan complaints became increasingly harsh. As José Vasquez Sagastume, representing the department of Tacuarembó, would write: “[Uruguayan] citizenship is being snuffed out north of the Río Negro: against all that is written in the Constitution of the Republic and established by the liberality of our laws, slavery is a fact in certain areas. … In this, such an important place of the Republic, one may say that there is no more Uruguay: the habits, customs, language, way of life, all is Brazilian: one might say, a continuation of Rio Grande do Sul.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Andrés Lamas echoed this sentiment: “At the moment at which, for any reason whatsoever, it so happens that the owner of a person of color conveys that person across the border – and, once across, lets fall the brazen, false disguise with which the laws of the Republic have been flouted – the forsaken victim returns to his public condition as a slave.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Just as with the fugitive slaves, the Brazilian Empire responded to these accusations by doubling down on repression of any attempt to get around the ban on the slave trade. In his 1861 report, the Brazilian foreign minister emphasized that “the Imperial government has called the attention of the president of the province of São Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul to the theft of minors of color in Uruguay, to be sold in Rio Grande as slaves.”Footnote ⁵⁸ What’s more, he assured, in every case of illegal slaving, “the Brazilian authorities have pursued [accusations] and taken several of the guilty parties to the courts of this country.”Footnote ⁵⁹

This was a half-truth. While officials across a number of municipalities in Rio Grande do Sul had indeed prosecuted certain individuals accused of the crime of “reducing free people to slavery,” a look at the sixty-eight cases in the Rio Grande do Sul state archives reveals that almost none of the defendants were convicted. By claiming that they were trying to recover runaway slaves, or that they were unaware that the person they had kidnapped was free or a freedman, all but a scant few were absolved by local juries.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, even though in a few cases the British consul Howard was apparently convinced of Brazil’s efforts to rein in trafficking and kidnapping, in 1855 he wrote to Clarendon – then the minister of foreign affairs – that it seemed quite unlikely that Brazil’s rhetoric had convinced the Uruguayans of the efficacy of their endeavors.Footnote ⁶¹ In a complaint to the Viscount of Manguarape in 1857 – a long list of reports of incidents over the past three years – the Uruguayan minister didn’t flinch at saying that the Brazilian kidnappers were ensconced in their impunity, sure that the authorities would cover up their crimes; for this very reason, he was requesting that the Brazilian government act swiftly to repress this “organized piracy, carried out on a remarkably large scale.”Footnote ⁶²

Tensions Rise

The years that followed were to bring a gradual rise in the volume of complaints on both sides, now including attacks on the life and property of Brazilians in Uruguay. By the time José Antonio Saraiva arrived in Montevideo in May 1864, the complaints and accusations being tossed back and forth had become positively deafening. In April of the previous year, in opposition to Bernardo Prudencio Berro’s Blanco government, the Colorado general Venancio Flores and allies had landed at Rincón de las Gallinas, a Uruguayan hamlet on the border with Argentina, sparking a new civil war. Although the government in Rio had recommended that Brazilian owners respect their nation’s neutral stance, the owners immediately supported Flores and began providing horses, provisions, and money to the rebelling troops. Feeling abandoned by their own government, Brazilian landowners on the border saw the Colorado leader as a chance to free themselves of the Blancos, put an end to the “murders, attacks, and thefts” in the region, and – last but not least – do away with the restrictions on the ways in which they were allowed to use their workers on Uruguayan soil.

Indeed, since 1861 the number of Brazilian complaints had been on the rise, as registered in the reports from the minister of foreign affairs.Footnote ⁶³ The situation had become so drastic that, in November 1863, General Antonio de Souza Neto, a leader in the region since the Farroupilha Revolution, went to Rio de Janeiro to warn the government that it was “not prudent to leave Rio Grande to its own devices,” with locals taking it into their own hands to aid their kin. The threat was clear. “The Imperial government must not ignore,” Neto went on, “the consequences of an independent stance on the part of the Rio-Grandenses; the rallying cry of some hothead will be enough for thousands of men to take up arms and seek to impress upon the [Uruguayans] the respect due to a powerful neighbor; this will be done, if not in the name of the government, certainly in the name of Brazil.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Neto’s speech was soon to echo in the Chamber of Deputies: in the April 5, 1864, session, a number of deputies took the general’s complaints to heart and argued that the “Imperial government should take the necessary means to bar the slaughter of Brazilian citizens” in Uruguay.Footnote ⁶⁵ The debate in Rio also resonated in the south: while in Montevideo word had it that D. Pedro II wanted to reannex the former Cisplatine Province, in Rio Grande do Sul landowners believed that the Empire would not ensure its subjects’ “security as to a safe and peaceful existence.”

It was out of fear of fresh political turmoil in Rio Grande do Sul that the Imperial government decided to send Saraiva to Montevideo on a special mission to negotiate the Brazilian government’s demands with the Blancos. The mission, described in Brazil as “entirely peaceful,” was accompanied by the distribution of troops along the frontier and the arrival of five warships, anchored in the Río de la Plata basin to “support the negotiations.”Footnote ⁶⁶

In his instructions, Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs, João Pedro Dias Vieira, had explained to Saraiva that he ought not to abandon the official neutrality that had so long characterized Brazilian action in the Platine region. He would be charged with defending the life, honor, and property of Brazilians in Uruguay who had suffered the “atrocious, barbaric crimes so incessantly practiced there from 1851 to the present, to say nothing of more distant times.”Footnote ⁶⁷

And so Saraiva did, knowing that the Uruguayans in Montevideo would have no sympathy for the Brazilians on the border. Even contemporary accounts openly favorable to Brazilian intervention underscored that lawyers and journalists in the capital were interested in seeing a “democratic levelling,” so as to make “these landowners, in their aristocratic isolation, aware that in a republic there can be nothing but the absolute equality of rights.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Accordingly, upon his arrival in Uruguay, instead of delivering the latest ultimatum, Saraiva went first to the minister of foreign relations and asked that the Uruguayan government respect the nature of a situation which “the Imperial government cannot foresee, nor may it be able to avoid the aftermath, if the Republic does not move frankly and decisively to remove the causes in question.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This was a veiled threat. The letter was accompanied by details of sixty-three formal complaints lodged by the Empire against the Uruguayan government over the previous twelve years. They included attacks on properties, murders, cattle theft, and attempts to force Brazilians into military service.

Juan José Herrera, the Uruguayan minister of foreign relations, reacted sarcastically: with a population of approximately 40,000 Brazilians living in northern Uruguay, what were sixty-three complaints over twelve years? If Brazilians were suffering so terribly in Uruguay, why hadn’t they gone back to the Brazilian Empire? Even though he judged them to be equally “inopportune recriminations,” he argued that the forty-eight Uruguayan complaints were more relevant, since they had come out of a population of hundreds, not thousands.

As Herrera saw it, the complaints on both sides couldn’t justify Brazilians’ support for the Colorado invasion led by Venancio Flores, since his supporters didn’t live in Uruguay but in Brazil. The reason for the Brazilian “border pirates’” support for Flores had a name: the californias, the raids which continued to happen in the north of the country. It was the chance to loot Uruguayan territory that motivated this “barbaric caudillismo,” the “heedless lord and master of these territories, the center of a permanent threat to civilization,” which evidently had not spared the properties of Brazilians in the region.Footnote ⁷⁰ By defending Neto and his accomplices, Herrera charged, the Brazilian Empire was choosing to abandon its own subjects in Uruguay. At the end of his long letter to Saraiva, Herrera also included a detailed list of the forty-eight Uruguayan complaints against the Empire of Brazil – none of which, he claimed, had been attended to, and some of which had been left entirely unanswered. Of the total, thirty-three concerned the kidnapping of Black people, mostly women and children, to be sold as slaves in Brazil. Between 1853 and 1863, dozens of families were carried off by Brazilian gangs, most of them known to local authorities. Several complaints specifically mentioned Laurindo José da Costa. The Uruguayans described the incidents in detail, naming the cities where the victims had been taken and, in some cases, the buyers’ names.Footnote ⁷¹

Offended by Herrera’s reply, Saraiva wrote a confidential report some days later to the government in Rio de Janeiro, saying that the Uruguayan government had surprised him with “harsh recriminations and inexact characterizations of events, with a dearth of benevolence and tact in the way in which it presented its alleged complaints against the Empire.” And he concluded: “It is urgent that we organize and distribute our forces along the border.”Footnote ⁷²

We know how the story ended. After a period of negotiations in Buenos Aires in which he sealed the alliance with Argentina and the Colorados, overseen by Edward Thornton, the British government’s representative in the Río de la Plata region, Saraiva returned to Montevideo. On August 4, 1864, he gave Herrera the ultimatum that he had been carrying since April, giving Uruguay six days to meet Brazil’s demands. At Aguirre’s refusal, Saraiva judged his mission complete and left the country. Just over two months later, Brazilian troops would invade northern Uruguay. As Joaquim Nabuco would write a few years later: “from the war with Uruguay came the war with Paraguay, and from the latter came the Triple Alliance.”Footnote ⁷³

Conclusion: “One Cannot Discover That Which Is Not a Secret”

I believe I have made the central argument of this chapter clear: namely, it is impossible to fully understand the Brazilian invasion of Uruguay in 1864 and the war that followed without considering the tensions and diplomatic incidents that followed the abolition of slavery in Uruguay. This is not to say, of course, that a conflict of this magnitude can be boiled down to a single cause, nor is it to ignore the friction around taxes on cattle ownership, border demarcation, and the larger dispute for political hegemony in the Río de la Plata region. In broad terms, the arguments I have developed here confirm the thesis that the Paraguayan War was motivated by the construction and consolidation of nation-states in the Platine region.

This silence from authorities and in the historiography on the topic is intriguing. José Antonio Saraiva, Brazil’s special envoy, was so offended by the list of Uruguayan complaints that he refused to discuss them and failed to even mention them in his correspondence with Rio de Janeiro. The content of the complaints was never repeated directly by Brazilian politicians, not even by those who, like this clerk under Minister of Foreign Affairs João Batista Calógeras, were harshly critical of the conclusion of the Saraiva mission:

I can hazard a few reasons for the silence around slavery. The first has to do with the formulation of the official narrative about the outbreak of the war, which was written in the immediate wake of events. For the rest of his political career, Saraiva would have to fend off those who called his mission a failure and claimed that he had been unable to avoid the start of the conflict. To this end, two notions would have to be established: first, that it was only thanks to his diplomatic intervention that negotiations with Argentina went successfully, leading to the formation of the Triple Alliance; and second, that the war had actually begun with Paraguay’s invasion of Mato Grosso, not Brazil’s invasion of Uruguay. By dissociating these conflicts as if they were truly separate, not only Saraiva but the whole of the Brazilian government sought to shrug off responsibility for sparking the catastrophe that was the Paraguayan War.

Only in light of these narrative constructions can we understand Nabuco’s affirmation that Brazil played “the role of a selfless representative of civilization and liberty in South America.” What’s more: to his eyes, Saraiva “was truly the bearer of the new message of peace and goodwill between Brazilians and Argentines. As fate would have it, war … was the necessary consequence of Paraguay’s despotic saber-rattling and would have exploded sooner or later, whenever López’s delirium was to manifest itself. … The origins of the Paraguayan War are, happily enough, beyond doubt.”Footnote ⁷⁵

The political motivations driving Nabuco to frame this version of history are understandable. He was a liberal monarchist and a personal friend of Saraiva’s who had helped to build a positive image of the Empire’s recent past shortly after the establishment of the Republic (1889), a panorama that included a vision of abolition as the fruit of the abolitionist movement and the Brazilian royal family. It is harder to understand the myopia of Brazilian historiography; many analyses of the period seem uninterested in venturing beyond that nineteenth-century narrative to explore the causes of the conflict between Uruguayans and Brazilians and the rising tensions on the border.

Until recently, historians may have been overly reliant on authors like Luiz Schneider, adviser to the Prussian kaiser and a correspondent for the Nova Gazeta Prussiana, as well as the author of A Guerra da Tríplice Aliança contra o governo da República do Paraguai (1864–1870), which was published in 1875 with notes by José Maria da Silva Paranhos Junior, the Baron of Rio Branco. Schneider suggested that no period of prolonged war, such as that which “sprang from the complications involving [Uruguay,] demands such painstaking examination of diplomatic correspondence as this beginning, which was, shall we say, the preamble or pretext for the great struggle which was to follow.”Footnote ⁷⁶ There is no mistaking the documentary importance of Brazilian diplomatic correspondence. But if we focus on it exclusively, without examining the letters exchanged between politicians and consular officials from Uruguay, Brazil, and even England, we will only have a partial version of events. To deepen our understanding of events, we must do precisely the opposite: move beyond national narratives.

In the case of Brazil, one of the consequences of the commonly held national narrative is the framing of two fronts of action for the country’s foreign policy in the nineteenth century – relations with England and relations with the Río de la Plata region – as completely separate realms. In this telling, the slave trade was the chief issue in the first area; once it had been overcome, Brazil was able to turn to the second front. Now, as we have seen, nothing could be farther from the truth. Not only did the slave trade remain a sore spot for Brazil and England throughout the 1850s and into the 1860s, but it was also a key element shaping international relations between Brazil and its neighbors in the Río de la Plata region – if not all of South America. The debates over the ban on the trade in Africans and the abolition of slavery do indeed connect these two areas, to the point that one is only comprehensible in light of the other.

However, in order to understand the centrality of slavery in all aspects of Brazilian international relations in the nineteenth century, we must take our investigation beyond the diplomatic correspondence. After all, that which is revealed by diplomatic missives and reports is also that which is hidden. In 1864, diplomatic relations with England having been severed precisely because of over a decade of Brazilian attempts to resist the ban on the international trade in enslaved Africans, Uruguayan reports of the kidnapping of Black people and illegal slaving were not to be mentioned. And, indeed, nobody was mentioning them – not even the Brazilians with some interest in the international public debate, nor the group behind Venancio Flores, the Colorado who rose to power in 1865 with Brazilian aid and helped to construct the official version of the Uruguayan narrative. Indeed, the Uruguayan complaints seem to have gone down with Berro’s Blanco government.

But the complicit silence of ministers, ambassadors, and other major figures in international political history cannot withstand the reading of documents produced in the thick of everyday events. As many other Uruguayan and Brazilian historians, many of them hailing from the border region, have shown in recent years, combing through local correspondence between governors, provincial presidents, and consular officials, lists of runaways, baptismal records, newspapers, estate inventories, and criminal proceedings, it is evident that slavery-related issues were so present and so recurrent that they were no secret for anyone living then. After all, “one cannot discover that which is not a secret.”Footnote ⁷⁷ By turning our gaze to the everyday lives of women and men on the border between Brazil and Uruguay, we may be only discovering now something that was entirely evident to them.

From this angle, it is undeniable that the actions of those who fled, resisted kidnappings in the border region, and made themselves heard at police stations and in the courts had a tremendous impact. In that context, their voices would be heard at a great distance, all the more powerful because they articulated the experiences of so many others who were unable to escape enslavement, disappeared without leaving a trace, and would never see their life stories preserved in the archives.