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Slavery in Brazil: A Case Study of Diamantina, Minas Gerais1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Donald Ramos
Donald Ramos*
Affiliation:
Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio
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Extract

The study of slave mortality and morbidity in Brazil has been very difficult because of the extreme paucity of sources. Techniques which have been useful in studying the lives of free men and women seldom are useful for analyzing their slaves. The use of parish records such as baptism and death registers is not possible because of the custom of listing only the slave's first name and the unimaginative choice of names which resulted in large numbers of Joãos, Josés, Manuels, Antônios, Antonias, Joanas, and, of course, Marias. Equally important, the types of plantation records available to students of U.S. slavery have seldom been found for Brazil.

This essay is an examination of an isolated slave register, which, for a series of idiosyncratic reasons, provides information permitting a glimpse at mortality and morbidity in a distinct and carefully controlled slave population. Because the slaves involved were used in diamond mining under horrendous conditions it is probable that the conclusions reached in this essay represent a worst case scenario. Rather than typical, this is a special case where work and living conditions were probably worse than in plantation zones and certainly worse than in urban areas. It is this situation which makes the conclusions of this essay quite startling.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , July 1988 , pp. 47 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1988

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Footnotes

1

The author is Associate Professor of History and First College, Cleveland State University. Research for this article was conducted while on a grant from the Graduate College of Cleveland State University. The author would like to express his appreciation to Professor Robert A. Wheeler for his comments on an earlier version of this essay.

References

2 Gutman’s, Herbert The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976)Google Scholar is an excellent example of the use of plantation records.

3 dos Santos, Joaquim Felico, Memorias do distrito diamantino, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Edições O Cruzeiro, 1956), p. 72.Google Scholar

4 Santos, pp. 86–87.

5 Santos, pp. 88–89.

6 Santos, p. 89.

7 Additional hundreds and possibly thousands of slaves were employed in auxiliary activities such as road building and food production. It seems likely that some of these slaves were occasionally diverted to covert mining although the costs of discovery included loss of slaves.

8 This manuscript is catalogued as Delegacia Fiscal 1077 (old series, Documentos Avulso, No. 77), Arquivo Publico Mineiro, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gérais. The title page reads as follows: The Dr. Intendente of Diamonds shall stamp this Book at the beginning and end and number the pages according to Style; which shall Serve to list the negroes of the future contract which shall begin on the first of January of 1753 and whose Administrator is Jose Alvares Maciel. Tejuco on the 2 of December, 1752.

9 “During their work, all the slaves walk around naked except that they are permitted to wear a g-string, tanga, which is a piece of cloth wrapped around the waist.” “Dos descobrimentos dos diamantes e différentes methodos que se tem praticado na sua extraccao,” fol. 43 quoted in Boxer, C.R. The Golden Age of Brazil: 1695–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), p. 407.Google Scholar

10 Luna, Francisco Vidal and da Costa, Iraci del Nero, “Algumas características do contigente de cativos em Minas Gérais,” Anais do Museu Paulista 29 (1969): 79–97.Google Scholar Allowing for differences in nomenclature, the authors’ conclusions can be summarized as follows: Sudanese and Gold Coast slaves and especially Minas predominated during the growth period of gold mining in Minas Gérais while Bantu slaves predominated during the period of decadence. The latter is not defined although the data presented implies a shift from Sudanese and Gold Coast slaves to Bantus in the period after 1769.

11 First Slave Matriculation, Vila Rica County, 1738, Cod. 73 (Delegacia Fiscal Series), Arquivo Público Mineiro.

12 Each slave was numbered and, in many of those cases where a slave died, a second slave is added under the same number. Thus slave number 24, Francisco, a Lada, aged 15 years in 1753, died on August 4, 1753 after a series of four hospitalizations. Marcos, a Dagome, aged 26, then appears in his place. Marcos, in turn died on August 13, 1758. Slave Matriculation, Delegacia Fiscal 1077, fol. 12.

13 In fact, the entire issue of slavery in Brazil has typically been marred by the tendency to view slavery as a monolithic institution over long periods of time. Generally the dynamic nature of slave demography and its relationship to shifting economic fortunes has been ignored.

14 Simonsen, in his calculation of slave profitability uses an average life expectancy of seven years for slaves. Simonsen, Roberto C. Historia econômica do Brasil, 6th ed. (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1969), p. 134.Google Scholar

15 Two estimates made using different approaches resulted in rates of 30.0 and 28.2. Glass, D.V. “Population and Population Movements in England and Wales, 1700 to 1850,” in Glass, D.V., and Eversley, D.E.C., (eds.), Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965), p.241.Google Scholar

16 Cushner, Nicholas P., “Slave Mortality and Reproduction on Jesuit Haciendas in Colonial Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 55:2 (May, 1975): 196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 Reis, Jaime, Abolition and the Economics of Slaveholding in Northeast Brazil. Occasional Paper. (Glasgow: Glasgow University, 1974), p. 12.Google Scholar

18 Royal Ordinance, 18 June 1725, quoted in Afonso de, A. Taunay, Historia geral das bandeiras paulistas (São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial, 1948): 9:301.Google Scholar

19 Entry for December 31, 1772, Diario da Real Extracção dos Diamantes, 1772–1788, Delegacia Fiscal 2090, APM.

20 Entry for December 31, 1786 irr Diario da Real Extracção, fol. 285v.

21 Entry for Domingos Banguela, Matricula de escravos, fol. 363.

22 The proportion of time missed through illness was considerably higher in Diamantina than that reported for United States plantation slave society. Fogel and Engerman, for example, report an average of only 12 days missed among a sample of 545 field slaves. Fogel, Robert W. and Engerman, Stanley L., Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 126.Google Scholar

23 Domingos Bastos Viana owned thirty-one, Joào da Costa Cameiro held four and Antonio dos Santos Pinto owned twelve, Matricula dos escravos, fols. 363 passim, 197 passim, and 201 passim.

24 Jõao Carneiro da Silva, resident of Rio de Janeiro, Matricula dos escravos, fol. 177 passim.