Freedom Read online

  Despite the economic dominance of the major plantations – sugar initially, then coffee in the nineteenth century – the typical Brazilian slave was part of a small group owned by people of limited means. Even freed slaves owned slaves: at mid-century, 22 per cent of freed slaves possessed slaves of their own. Brazilians of all sorts and conditions were, then, deeply attached to slavery. Most perplexing of all to modern eyes, we know of Brazilian slaves who themselves owned slaves. One of the slaves working for a Benedictine order in Pernambuco owned eight slaves himself.[8] From the grandest of coffee planters downwards, there were, then, large numbers of people spread throughout Brazilian society who saw no reason to heed the anti-slavery chorus, nor to listen to the demands of the slaves themselves.

  This deeply entrenched and widespread diffusion of slavery in Brazil made the task of ending slavery more complex than we find in other societies. Where slave ownership was more concentrated and where the demarcations between slave and free were starker and less porous than in Brazil, freeing the slaves posed a very different problem. In Brazil, however, there was a fierce attachment to slavery in all corners of society. Despite domestic and external pressures, Brazilian support for slavery remained largely secure because it was valuable to so many people.

  In the years immediately prior to Brazil’s formal (but ineffective) abolition of the slave trade in 1831, slave prices were low due to the huge numbers of Africans flooding in, and people hurried to acquire as many as they could afford. Thereafter, and as coffee boomed, slave prices rose and ever more slaves became concentrated in the hands of bigger planters. Poorer slave owners now sold off their slaves to richer planters – often making a good profit in the process. The big planters, with large numbers of slaves, were the bedrock of the unreconstructed slave system. And it was here, on the plantations, that slaves endured the harshest of conditions and where they struggled to secure improvement, let alone freedom.

  There were nonetheless growing numbers of Brazilians prepared to consider ending the slave trade: people well stocked with slaves, for instance, could manage comfortably without further supplies of Africans. Moreover, the value of their human property would likely increase if the trade were banned. Many others, however, notably slave traders and planters on recently settled frontier properties, simply could not imagine an economic future without prospective slave purchases. And that meant freshly imported Africans. But when a new Brazilian law finally imposed serious (and effective) measures against Atlantic slave trading in 1850, the Brazilian trade declined.[9] Unable to buy fresh Africans, many planters finally came to accept the need to improve slave conditions. Better care for their enslaved labour force seemed the only way of ensuring a normal and healthy increase in slave numbers.

  Nonetheless, even then the lives of plantation slaves, especially on frontier properties, was stark and brutal. Work was hard and unrelenting, they lived in miserably crude accommodation, clothing was rough and minimal, food simple and monotonous, though sometimes supplemented by homegrown produce and alcohol. Inevitably, the commonplace ailments of poor people were ever-present in the slave quarters: so too were the epidemics that periodically swept across the country. Formal Western medicine was usually far away, and slaves relied on the folk cures and healings which had accompanied them from their African homelands. When Western and folk medicine failed, slaves turned to their sacred beliefs, their saints and spiritual saviours. They needed all the help they could get in a world that offered them very few rewards save for a complexity of personal and communal dangers. Slaves living in the towns generally enjoyed better conditions. There were many more opportunities for slaves to help themselves – to get by – and even improve themselves. In some towns they were helped by city authorities who enforced minimum standards and imposed fines on wayward slave owners. Such regulations had no relevance for the armies of slaves living in remote rural settlements, who endured the lives of beasts of burden.

  It seems curious that the arrival of such huge numbers of Africans did not lead to a natural increase of population. Was their inability to increase a consequence of the damage done on the slave ships or perhaps because of the arduous nature of slave life in Brazil? Brazilian planters regularly testified to the high mortality, especially high infant mortality, among their slaves, and though we now know that levels of mortality were not as high as contemporaries claimed, it was more than enough to outweigh the slaves’ birth rate. Despite great regional variations, Brazil’s slave demographic patterns seem clear enough. The numerical imbalance between male and female slaves, their low fertility and high mortality rates – all helped to undermine the prospects for natural increase, and these basic facts were publicised by planters in order to continue the Atlantic slave trade. Their case was simple: if slaves could not reproduce as required, their owners needed slave labour from Africa.

  One problem seemed to be the slave family. Critics (both Brazilian and visitors) often remarked on the slaves’ apparent reluctance to form monogamous families. At the end of Brazilian slavery in 1888, only 10.6 per cent of the country’s slaves were listed as married (again with great regional variations).[10] What confused observers, however, was the informality of slave family ties. Slaves often married according to their own conventions, creating family arrangements that outsiders failed even to recognise as families. The historians’ search for monogamous slave families is often misleading, because marriages were informal and were often not sanctified by priests or officials (though that increased after a decree of 1869 ordered that married couples and their children should not be sold separately).

  We know that slaves struggled to protect and safeguard their families. They worried that being defiant might bring punishments on their entire family, and their greatest dread was family break-up, with loved ones sold and scattered to distant owners, sometimes hundreds of miles away. Slaves would sometimes flee to avoid this and we even know of tragedies where mothers killed their children, then killed themselves, to avoid separation.[11] In Brazil (as in the US South), the real proof of slave attachment to family lay in the fear of separation – and in the efforts to prevent it – not in the formality of marriage documents. Slaves’ attachment to loved ones was calibrated by the widespread anguish when slaves were sold and separated from relatives. Parted from families, sold elsewhere and shipped to new locations, slaves howled in distress about their loss and about the heartbreak suffered by everyone involved. If we want to gauge the importance of slave families, we need to look not so much at marriage documents as at the grief-stricken outcries triggered by separation.

  For all that, there was also contradictory evidence of kindness and benevolence between masters and slaves; even, at times, of close intimate affection. Children, both enslaved and free, grew up together; devoted nurses and carers; lifelong slave lovers of slave owners; enslaved offspring of master and slave – all and more created a complexity of colours and a confusion of affectionate relationships throughout Brazilian life. That said, the existence of such relationships, and the undoubtedly genuine affection that developed between individuals, cannot mask or deflect the harsh reality of slavery itself. It was a brutal system and most of its millions of victims were not the fortunate beneficiaries of paternal kindness and affection. They remained, from childhood to the grave, items of trade – things – whose purpose was to work for their owners at whatever task the owner specified, in the fields or the bedroom.

  Once again, Brazilian slavery raises a problem that continues to perplex modern-day students. How was it possible for such huge numbers of Africans, fresh from the horrors of the slave ships, to be kept in brute plantation subjugation, under such oppressive conditions, for so long? Why did the slaves not overthrow their tormentors? It would be wrong to imagine that upheaval and violent overthrow (on the pattern of Haiti) was the only means available to slaves to challenge or resist their bondage. Like elsewhere, slaves devised a variety of personal and collective strategies to subvert slavery – or simply to cope with what
life threw at them. Many of their tactics challenged, weakened and undermined slavery itself. But as we have seen, slave resistance came with great risks and dangers.

  Brazilian masters, like slave-ship captains and slave owners everywhere, had their own ways of controlling the enslaved and dealing with their recalcitrance. The challenges facing slave masters differed greatly between people who owned a mere handful, and who often lived cheek by jowl with their slaves, and planters on remote plantations who looked across their land to a village packed with hundreds of defiant Africans. The most common tactic was physical threats and punishment. Slaves were whipped, beaten and struck for numerous shortcomings and failings. Bad time-keeping, shoddy work, foot-dragging, insubordination and insolence: all and more could prompt an angry outburst and assault. Slaves were also permanently at the mercy of the personal quirk and mood of their master or mistress. Slave owners generally disapproved of excessive punishment (and of excessive leniency), knowing that both caused trouble for everyone involved. What they feared above all else was the contagion of slave unrest. In an ideal world, they would have liked to persuade slaves to accept their worldly lot, and they tried anything that might bring that about. Perhaps religion might help?

  Britain’s planters had been traditionally hostile to converting their slaves to Christianity, but the Brazilian experience was very different. Even before the Portuguese settlement of Brazil, Catholicism had taken root among Africans in Portuguese Angola, though the pattern was for Africans to absorb Catholicism into their own indigenous African beliefs. In Brazil, Catholic missionaries (always in short supply) – notably the Jesuits, who were active among African slaves – faced immense obstacles. There was the simple problem of language, but more fundamental was the chasm in cosmologies between African beliefs and practices and Catholicism. The idea of the Sabbath posed a special problem. On the day when they were free from work, slaves were often reluctant to spend it worshipping as their masters sometimes ordered: they wanted the Sabbath to be a day of rest and recreation.

  The Catholic Church felt duty-bound to uphold the world of the slave masters, and its priests sought to inculcate lessons of obedience and application among the slaves. This became especially important after the Haitian slave upheavals. What emerged in Brazil was a range of religious beliefs and practices that blended African and Catholic observances, but all shaped and suited to the slaves’ interests and purposes. The structure of worship, from communion to relics, the insignia of Catholic worship, the assortment of saints and holy figures – all and more were absorbed into old African beliefs to produce unique patterns of worship and faith among Brazilian slaves. The result was a distinctly Afro-Brazilian Catholicism’.[12] One of the most important practical outcomes was the development of lay brotherhoods, fraternal organisations, which worked to help black people in general, in sickness and death, and in times of stress. The brotherhoods provided slaves with practical help and an escape from the plantations and their owners: a means of meeting other people away from the masters’ control. They provided an alternative to the oppression of slaves’ labouring lives.

  Slaves’ beliefs and practices emerged from particular African ethnic groups and were, in effect, a form of African ethnic politics and solidarity transplanted into Brazil. New Africans arriving from the slave ships could find in such gatherings recognisable faces, languages and symbols. In a sense, Africans were at home, even though they were on the wrong side of the Atlantic. But many slaves became Christian, forming churches and holding services with their own preachers. What was preached, and the nature of the prayers offered up by enslaved worshippers, often totally mystified Catholic missionaries and priests. Creolisation took place among all slave communities throughout the Americas, but in Brazil it remained doggedly African in format and expression. Over a period of four centuries, to the mid-nineteenth century, Africa was kept alive through all this by the continuing flow of African slaves into Brazil, which made Brazilian slave religions seem more African, less Catholic, than other forms of Christianity we find elsewhere in the Americas at the same time.[13] It was through such religious groups and customs that slaves in effect entered a world of their own making.

  The nineteenth-century waves of Africans consolidated the established patterns of Afro-Brazilian religious culture, but augmented them with the beliefs of new arrivals, notably with the Vodun of Gbe speakers, the Yoruba peoples’ Orisa, and the Islam of people drawn from Islamic Africa. In Brazil this became Candomblé (a blend of Vodun and Orisa beliefs). By the mid-nineteenth century, Candomblé had spilled out from slave communities and even local white people turned to it for spiritual sustenance, for practical, everyday support, for medical care and for general wellbeing. These distinctive Brazilian beliefs and practices first took root where Africans landed (Bahia, most notably), but they subsequently migrated, on the back of the country’s internal slave trade, to other parts of the country, wherever Africans lived and worked.[14] These nineteenth-century migrations of Africans and their beliefs gradually undermined the influence of the older black brotherhoods, and, though the brotherhoods survived, they lost their importance, undermined too by the growing strength of the Catholic Church, which had begun to exercise a greater influence in the country.

  Brazil became notable in the nineteenth century not only for its massive African population but also for the growing number of people who had been freed from slavery. The country had a higher proportion of manumitted slaves than any other slave society in the Americas, largely because manumission was encouraged by the availability of relatively cheap slaves from the slave ships and the natural increase of the population of freed people. (Women and children were freed more commonly than men, local slaves more than Africans.) The outcome, by mid-century, was that there were more freed people of colour than slaves in Brazil. The country’s first census in 1872 revealed 4.2 million free blacks and mestiços, 3.8 million whites and 1.5 million slaves.[15]

  Manumission, however, sometimes came with strings attached, the most common being the obligation to serve a master until his death. Other slaves bought their freedom, in cash or in kind (proof of the way slaves were able to acquire money and produce during their time free from their masters’ demands). Freedom, though, did necessarily bring prosperity. Some freed slaves did indeed improve themselves and some (bizarre as it now seems) prospered by buying slaves of their own. Most freed slaves, however, remained poor, and all freed slaves – poor or prosperous – did not enjoy the social and political rights of other Brazilians. They were not granted citizenship and were rarely treated as equals by other Brazilians: they could not vote or be elected. Even the Brazilian-born had limited social and political rights, in addition to whatever restrictions were imposed on freed people by local authorities (notably on buying property). Being freed from slavery did not bring full social and political equality in mid-century Brazil.

  The promise of freedom was often used by slave owners as a means of encouraging slaves to be obedient and work hard: toe the line, work diligently and, who knows, freedom might be yours. When freedom came to many Brazilian slaves, it was often bestowed as a reward for years of compliance and industry. Sometimes, though, freedom was conditional, and even rescinded, with the wretched person being plucked back from freedom and once more consigned to the ranks of the enslaved. Freedom was both an ambition for the enslaved and a device in the slave owners’ management handbook.

  Freed slaves could rarely escape the dangers posed by living in a slave society. Slave masters were often powerful men locally who could bend or defy the law and ignore informal agreements. As long as the slave system survived, the dangers of seizure, capture, re-enslavement and re-sale remained the freed person’s perennial nightmare. The system of freeing slaves was not fully secured until the 1871 Free Womb Law. Until then, freed people remained vulnerable and needed to be alert to safeguard their freedom.[16]

  Slave masters played cat-and-mouse games with freed slaves, but despite their obvious power, the
y could rarely dispel their own anxieties about the risks and dangers of living in the company of so many slaves, especially on remote plantations. Brazilian masters regularly resorted to physical punishments of their slaves, and had a tariff of penalties and punishments, with execution and the chain gang at one extreme, the stocks and public whipping at the other, all in addition to whatever punishments were doled out away from the public gaze. It is true that nineteenth-century legislation sought to protect slaves from the worst excesses of arbitrary punishments, but such rules were, generally, in the hands of people and communities for whom violence – the whip hand – was essential and largely approved.

  The expansion of Brazil’s large population of Africans, and its dispersal to newly opened distant lands, brought a fresh urgency to the perennial problem of slave management. At every point of the Brazilian compass, slave masters were confronted by large numbers of recalcitrant Africans, all of them reluctant workers, and all keen for an escape from bondage. Slave resistance periodically flared across Brazil. It differed from one place and occupation to another, but whatever the nature of their work, slaves devised their own means of resisting and coping, seeking freedom at best, or some form of less demanding accommodation with the system. Everywhere, they struggled to improve their lives, and to safeguard their families.