¹ The term philosophy is used in the broad sense as a system of general beliefs shared by society or by powerful elements within society. The importance of cultural value patterns and the link between them and the legitimization of the normative structure is suggested by Parsons, Talcott, Societies: Evolutionary and Cormparative Perspectives (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), pp. 5–29.Google Scholar

² Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York, 1963), p. 103.Google Scholar The continuous process of myth making and breaking stimulated by Tannenbaum, is succinctly reviewed by Octávio Ianni, ‘Escravismo e. Racismo’, Anais de Histdria, Ano 7 (1975), pp. 66–94.Google Scholar

³ An overview is presented by Mörner, Magnus, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, 1967).Google Scholar For the Portuguese world, see Boxer, Charles R., Race Relations in the Portuguese Colonial Empire 1415–1825 (Oxford, 1963).Google ScholarGoulart, Mauricio, Escravidão Africana no Brasil (São Paulo, 1950), provides a general view of the institution in Brazil, and Vicente SalIes, O Negro no Pará (Rio de Janeiro, 1971) offers details on slavery in the north.Google Scholar

⁴ Knight noted that urban slaves within a plantation economy could not be considered the norm; their treatment as well as access to social instruments to change their status was abnormal.Knight, Franklin W., Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1974), p. 60. In contrast, in Bahia the rate of manumission did not appear to differ between rural and urban areas.Google ScholarSchwartz, Stuart B., ‘The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684–1745’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 54, No. 4 (11 1974), pp. 603–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar An explanation may be the extent to which plantation society was a self-contained and isolated mini-society. Constant movement between the countryside and the city, for economic or other reasons, may have created an integrated region that cannot easily be divided into rural and urban. For example, the collecting industry in the Amazon drew Indians into Belém on a regular basis, introducing them to a more complex society, and eventually stimulating urbanization. Primitive and labor intensive transportation systems force familiarity with the city. MacLachian, Cohn M., ‘The Indian Labor Structure in the Portuguese Amazon, 1700–1800’ in Alden, Dauril (ed.), Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), pp. 227–8.Google ScholarThe ability of slaves in unstable occupations, such as mining, to take advantage of the situation to purchase their freedom has been interestingly presented by Boxer, Charles R., The Golden Age of Brazil: 1695–1750: Growing Pains of a Colonial Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), especially Chapter 7, pp. 204–26.Google ScholarThe same phenomenon is observed by Sharp, William F., ‘Manumission, Libres, and Black Resistance: The Colombian Chocó 1680–1810’, in Toplin, Robert Brent (ed.), Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, Conn., 1974), pp. 89–111.Google Scholar

⁵ Individual clerics spoke out against cruel treatment, but accepted the legality of the institution, Father Antonio Vieira, for example, preached a sermon in 1657 against abusive treatment, and on other occasions affirmed the basic equality of blacks and whites, yet suggested introducing African slaves into Maranão. Costa, Emilia Viotti da, Da Senzala à Colônia (São Paulo, 1966), pp. 332–3. Bishop Azeredo Coutinho (1742–1825), a product of the age of enlightenment, described slavery as a lawful and necessary business, on which the prosperity of the Portuguese Empire depended. In his Analyse sobre a justiça do Commercio e do resgate dos escravos da Costa da Africa (1798), he defended slavery while condemning cruel treatment. Azeredo Coutinho has been characterized as two-thirds traditional, and one-third modern, a Senhor de engenho in clerical garb. Sonia Aparecida Siqueira, ‘A escidāo negra no pensamento do bispo Azeredo Coutinho: Contribuiçāo ao estudo da mentalidade do último Inquisidor’,Google ScholarRevista de História, No. 57 (1964), p. 175.

⁶ William, C. R. noted in Tour through Jamaica (1823) that slaves knew their rights and protested vigorously when a fellow slave was illegally punished or oppressed. Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development, and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica (Cranbury, N.J., 1969), p. 77.Google Scholar

⁷ Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966), p. 438. Anti-slavery writers in British North America argued the connection between the rights of the colonists and the rights of the Negroes.Google ScholarZilversmit, Arthur, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago, 1967), p. 95.Google Scholar

⁸ The process is described by Jordan, Winthrop D., White over Black: Development of American Attitudes towards the Negro, 1507ndash;1812 (Chapel Hill, 1966).Google Scholar

⁹ Rocha's work is well known, while the pamphlet has been rescued and brought to public attention by Boxer who provides a summary in his Race Relations, p. 104.

¹⁰ For the importance of the trade in Maranhāo, see Cohn M. MacLachlan, ‘African Slave Trade and Economic Development in Amazonia, 1700–1800’, in Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, pp. 112–45.

¹¹ Both cases are in the Arquivo Histórico Ukramarino, Lisbon, caixa 73 (Maranhão).

¹² MacLachlan, ‘African Slave Trade’, p. 122.

¹³ Ordenações, e Leys do Reyno de Portugal, Confirmadas, e Establecidas Pelo Senhor Rey D. Joāo IV novamente Impressas… Por Mandado do Muito Alto e Poderoso Rey D. João V (Lisbon, 1747), Livro, Titulo II.

¹⁴ Las Siete Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso El Sabio cotejadas con varios Codices Antiguos por la Real Academia de la Historia, 3, Titulo 22 (Madrid, 1972), p.521. The Siete Partidas defined liberty as a natural attribute in all Creatures in the world, before proceeding to justify the social structure that placed individuals at different levels. Liberty thus serves as the natural basis on which all else rests.

¹⁵ Schwartz, Stuart B., op. cit., pp. 632–3.Google Scholar Some of the economic factors governing the type and frequency of manumission arc suggested by Mattoso, Katia M. de Queirós, ‘A Propósito de Cartas de Alforria: Bahia 1779–1850’, Anais de História, Ano 4 (1972), pp. 23–52.Google Scholar

¹⁶ The phrase is in section 4, ‘E porque em favor da liberdade são muitas coisas autorgadas contra as regras geraes’. As used by the judges it would appear to be slightly out of context. They obviously stretched the point in their desire, to have some legalistic base to stand on. Ordenações e Leys, Livro 4, Titulo II, part 4.

¹⁷ Friedrich, Carl Joachim, The Philosophy of Law in Historical Perspective (2nd ed., Chicago, 1963), pp. 30 and 40.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Foriers, Paul and Perelman, Chaim, ‘Natural Law and Natural Rights’, Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Wiener, Philip P. (ed.), 3 (New York, 1973), p. 14.Google Scholar

¹⁹ The Marquis of Pombal cannot be considered a philosophe. His censors proscribed the works of Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot. Reforms were designed to strengthen the political economy, and lessen Portugals dependence on the British. Pombal's actions did not draw upon an enlightened philosophical base. Livermore, H. V., A New History of Portugal (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 236–7.Google Scholar

²⁰ Somerset, a slave from Virginia, arrived in England with his owner in 1769 where he deserted only to be apprehended and placed aboard a ship bound for Jamaica. Mansfield ruled that the act of restraint was so high an act of dominion that it must have a legal basis in positive law. Cover, Robert M., Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, 1975), p. 17.Google Scholar

²¹ Burns, E. Bradford, ‘Concerning the Transmission and Dissemination of the Enlightenment in Brazil’, in Aldridge, A. Owen (ed.), The Ibero-American Enlightenment (Urbana, 1972), p. 265. It is possible that Portuguese magistrates, because of close economic and political ties with Britain, also reflected British influences in the question. From 1750 onward English law caine to grips with slavery. Blackstone (1769), influenced by Montesquieu, noted that slavery was repugnant to reason as well as the principles of natural law.Google Scholar Cover, op. cit., p. 15.

²² Manoel Cardozo, ‘The Internationalism of the Portuguese Enlightenment: The Role of the Etrangeirado, c. 1700-C. 1750’, The Ibero-American Enlightenment, p. 207.

²³ The success rate of late eighteenth-century slave suits against free individuals is diflcult to judge. The few examples available indicate a bondsman could expect impartial treatment when the issue was clear Cut. In less than simple disputes the benefit of the doubt might well rest with the free individual. A number of cases involving the judicial freeing of slaves are presented by Kiernan, James Patrick, ‘The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Paraty 1789–1822’, Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1976.Google Scholar

²⁴ Bureaucrats, nevertheless, resented being pushed by the judiciary. For example, the reluctance of the Overseas Council (Conselho Ultramarino) to establish a separate High Court (Relação) in Pernambuco was justified by the argument that it was unwise to increase the number of letrados in Brazil where soldiers, not lawyers, were needed. In the case of the only High Court in Brazil, bureaucratic hostility led to understaflng, ironically at a time when even more responsibilities were demanded of the judges. Schwartz, Stuart B., Sovereignty and Society in Colonial Brazil: The High Court of Bahia and its Judges, 1609–1751 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1973), p. 250.Google Scholar

²⁵ Judges respond to a wide variety of intellectual and institutional variables, and may introduce their own sense of what ‘ought to be ’ without committing the law to broad doctrinal advances or retreats. Cover, op. cit., pp. 6–7.

²⁶ It is interesting to note the role of the Brazilian judiciary in the actual abolition of slavery. The last decades saw greater use of the courts to free those illegally held. One lawyer on a single occasion secured the freedom of 716 slaves who had been imported after the legal end of the trade in 1831. The magistrates, aware that slavery had arrived at the point of collapse, attempted to move towards an orderly liquidation of the institution. Graham, Richard, ‘Actions and Ideas in the Abolitionist Movement in Brazil’, in Mörner, Magnus (ed.), Race and Class in Latin America (New York, 1970), p. 67.Google Scholar

²⁷ Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (New York, 1961), p. 43.Google ScholarWhile Williams correctly noted the importance of economics, he ignored other factors. His ‘decline theory’, used to explain the end of the British slave trade, has been challenged seriously. See the convincing discussion by Dresher, Seymour, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, 1977).Google Scholar

²⁸ Temperley suggests that the spread of the belief in nineteenth-century England that freedom and prosperity went together, as supported by the British experience itself, helped move public opinion towards the abolition of West Indian slavery in spite of the economic damage that ensued. Such a philosophy eliminated support for the institution by promising even greater economic benefits than those already attained, if slaves became free to invest their energies to pursue the highest rewards. The task of convincing people that this was so could not be accomplished easily. Temperley, Howard, ‘Capitalism, Slavery, and Ideology’, Past and Present, No. 75 (May 1977), p. 108.Google Scholar

²⁹ José Honório Rodrigues noted the spasmodic, and apparently contradictory, action of the monarchy in extending privileges to men of color then revoking them only to re.extend them once again. Yet the trend, including the decree of 1693 permitting blacks and mulattoes to serve as mayors and law oflcers and that of 1773 which made them eligible for all public honors and posts, continued towards more social privileges and status. ‘The apparent contradictions that aimed through compromise to save the essentials’ were in effect necessary adjustments. Rodrigues, José Honório, Brazil and Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1965), p. 60.Google Scholar

³⁰ Charles R. Boxer, in his Race Relations (p. 104), noted that ‘humanitarian feeling was presumably a reflection of ideas’. For changes affecting free blacks and mulattoes in the eighteenth century, see Russell-Wood, A. J. R., ‘Colonial Brazil’, in Cohen, David W. and Greene, Jack P. (eds.), Neither Slave nor Free: The Freedman of African Descent in the Slave Societies of the New World (Baltimore, 1972), pp. 84–133. An interesting reaction to changing times is provided by the Marqués de Lavradio, Viceroy of Brazil (1769–79). A lukewarm patron of Rio de Janeiro's Scientific Society, which met to discuss botany, history, and other useful elements of the new knowledge, the Viceroy also demonstrated an irrational dislike for blacks and mixed groups. At a time when Brazil's defense depended to an increasing extent on racially mixed or black militia soldiers, he refused to allow colored officers to offer their personal respects. He also considered ‘lawyers to be greedy parasites, apothecaries common robbers, taverners custodians of dens of iniquity, and ecclesiastics sowers of intrigue and discord’. To what extent he mirrored general attitudes or personal neurosis is difficult to determine.Google ScholarAlden, Dauril, Royal Government in Colonial Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 483.Google Scholar

³¹ Russell-Wood identified the period as one of intense ideological change during which ‘for the first time in Bahia a social conscience was born’. Yet in the era of transition one element remained constant, and that was the prejudice of the whites towards the blacks and excessive concern with racial purity. Russell-Wood, A. J. R., Fidalgos and Philanthropists: The Santa Casa da Misericórdia of Bahia, 1550–1755 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 355. A strong resort to racial prejudice was an indication of just how far traditional justification for slavery had been eroded, and in the social context of Bahia could also be an attempt to deny the obvious miscegenation that made any claims of racial purity doubtful. Intense ideological change may produce negative as well as positive effects.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Maxwell, John Francis, Slavery and the Catholic Church (Chichester and London, 1975), presents a concise and enlightening discussion of the Churchs historical position on slavery.Google Scholar

³³ Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. 1770–1823 (Ithaca, 1975), p. 164.Google Scholar

³⁴ E. Bradford Burns noted that the Revolt of the Tailors provided proof that the ideas of the Enlightenment could trickle down to the masses. ‘Concerning the Transmission and Dissemination of the Enlightenment in Brazil’, p. 279.

³⁵ Davis, op. cit., p. 82.

³⁶ Warner, Oliver, William Wilberforce and His Times (London, 1962), pp. 42 and 44–5.Google Scholar

³⁷ Davis, op. cit., pp. 215 and 201. Conrad noted that the absence of Protestant groups in Brazil meant that organized religion never developed an anti-slavery mission, and protest, when it came in the 1860s, was emancipationist as opposed to abolitionist. Conrad, Robert, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), pp. xiii–xiv. Abolitionists such as Luis Anselmo Fonseca found it difikult to forgive the Brazilian church's lack of abolitionist fervor.Google Scholar See his bitter A scravidão, o Clero e o Abolicionismo (Bahia, 1887).

³⁸ The intellectual weakening of slavery as an institution engendered by the Enlightenment forced major contradictions and fear on the leaders of the American Revolution. John Adams subsequently commented in correspondence with Thomas Jefferson on these, as well as the ability of evangelical religion emotionally to spotlight them. ‘If I were drunk with enthusiasm as Swcdenborg or Wesley, I might probably say I had seen armies of Negroes marching and countermarching in the air, shining in armour.’ Quoted in Kaplan, Sidney, ‘The “Domestic Insurrections” of the Declaration of Independence’, The Journal of Negro History, 61, No. 3 (07 1976), p. 255.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁹ Bonifáio posed the intellectual contradiction between slavery and the new ideas with the question of how long Brazil could have a liberal constitution with a population of brutal and hostile slaves. At the same time he made it clear he did not wish immediate abolition. de Sousa, Octávio Tarquinio (ed.), O Pensamento Vivo de José Bonifácio (São Paulo, 1961), pp. 47–77.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Dom Pedro's governing style was passive. He waited for a consensus to develop rather than press events by exercising leadership. His attitude is demonstrated by the Imperial Government's response to a French Emancipation Committee that urged him to use his powers, observing that the problem was a question of form as well as opportunity. He remained unwilling to make his own beliefs a matter of public policy. Toplin, Robert Brent, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York, 1975) p. 43.Google Scholar