Freedom for Too Few: Slave Runaways in the Brazilian Empire

Conditional Freedom

“…That same year, the Cámara de diputados reasserted Mexico's commitment to free-soil policy in its correspondence with the federal Foreign Ministry. 19 During subsequent years, a couple of aborted constitutional projects reasserted the asylum policy, before the publication of the Bases Orgánicas de la República Mexicana in June 1843. Article 9 of this centralist Magna Carta -enforced until the fall of the Centralist Republic in August 1846 and the re-implementation of the 1824 federalist constitutionprohibited slavery and explicitly placed foreign slaves under the "protection of the laws".20 Moreover, Mexico and Great Britain concluded a treaty for the suppression of the slave trade on 24 February 1841, an activity legally designated as piracy on 8 August 1851.…”

“…As Ian Read and Karl Zimmerman have pointed out for runaway slaves in nineteenth-century Brazil, another heart of the Second Slavery, slave flight was frequently the result of a "lucky configuration of position and skills within a sharply gendered and hierarchical society". 19 In sum, while the prospect of slave flight to Mexico could appeal to enslaved people for a wide range of reasons, the concrete opportunity to do so was less widely available. Indeed, this testifies to the increasingly hermetic nature of the Second Slavery in the US South.…”

“…Self-liberated bondspeople in Mexico's Northeast offer a precious reminder of the extent to which emancipation from the Second Slavery came from enslaved people themselves. 19 In order to explore how enslaved freedom-seekers fared between the expanding fronts of free soil and the Second Slavery in the US-Mexico border area, Conditional Freedom builds upon the distinction laid out by Damian Pargas between spaces of informal, semi-formal and formal freedom for self-emancipated slaves from the US South. While the northern states and Canada have long been considered as the unique locus for freedom in the Age of Revolutions, this categorization does justice to the multiplicity of geographical spaces in which enslaved freedom-seekers worked out their emancipation.…”

“…by the end of the decade, borderlands military and civilian officials were wary not to host burdensome settlers in eastern Texas, displaying concern that the arrival of slave refugees might economically destabilize the always-fragile settlements 19. In Nacogdoches though, by January 1808, all the enslaved freedom-seekers were employed for wages hovering around eight to ten pesos per month.…”

Dinâmica comparada: fluxos dos escravizados africanos em São Paulo, Minas Gerais e Maranhão (1804-1848)

“…Ainda é necessário considerar as seguintes evidências em relação aos nossos pressupostos: a mortalidade dos africanos recém-chegados ao Brasil nos primeiros anos superava a dos nascidos em terras brasileiras para uma idade idêntica, em virtude de maus tratos e violência desde a captura na África até o transporte para a América, aqui chegando muito debilitados e às vezes doentes; além disso, entre os escravizados fugidos prevaleciam, na primeira metade do século XIX, os homens, porém não existe clara distinção entre africanos e nascidos no Brasil (AMANTINO, 2006;AMANTINO, 2012;COSTA, 2013;READ;ZIMMERMAN, 2014). 13 Sabendo-se que esse comportamento divergente aos nossos pressupostos acerca da alforria, mortalidade e fugas ocorria de modo semelhante para as três regiões, efetuamos uma análise comparativa para mitigar os efeitos.…”