Freedmen in a slave economy: Minas Gerais in 1831

There is little question that Brazil by the early 19th century had the largest free colored population of any slave society in America. By the first national census of 1872 the free colored - all of whom came from slave origins - numbered 4.2 million persons, compared to just 1.5 million Afro-Brazilian slaves. Moreover these free colored were the largest single racial/status group within Brazil itself.(1) Yet this was a time when the slave coffee economy was reaching its maturity and the price of slaves was on a long term rise.(2) There is also little question that Brazilian society, like all other slave regimes, was racist and that the white elite in various ways discriminated against its freedmen, even as it permitted a very active level of manumission.(3) But until now we have little sense of how these freedmen were integrated into the world of the free market. Were they cut off from normal avenues of economic and social mobility, as occurred for example, among the free colored in the United States?(4) Or were they far more integrated than well known cases of racism would seem to suggest? In fact, can Brazil's long resistance to black consciousness and its self-perception as a racially harmonious society be related to the experience of these numerous Afro-Brazilian freedmen long before the abolition of slavery?

We will argue in the following essay, that in fact, the free colored population, except at the elite level, were to be found in all the occupations practiced by their contemporary white neighbors and experienced much of the same social and demographic organization as their non-slave-originated peers. It will also be shown that whether they lived among predominantly Afro-Brazilian populations or among predominantly white ones, there was little difference in the patterns of work and social organization for the free colored from those of their white neighbors. Finally, we will show that freedmen were even significant slave owners in their own right.

Surprisingly, for all the recent studies of African slavery in Brazil, there is almost nothing on the life of the free colored population.(5) It is our aim to analyze this neglected class of colored Brazilians through the same sources that have recently been exploited to study slavery in Brazil. For many years Brazilian economists and historians have been exploring the theme of slavery in early 19th-century Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais by using the previously unpublished and un-analyzed "mappas" or censuses of population and production which were carried out in both regions with some regularity from the 1770s until the early 1840s. These extraordinary censuses have enabled scholars to revise previous visions of rural society and the slave system in these economically dynamic Brazilian regions. Instead of a hegemonic large plantation system as assumed in the seminal work of Gilberto Freyre, it turns out that most of Brazil in the 19th century consisted of small slave estates imbedded in a largely free labor economy. In these two regions, for example, slaves themselves never exceeded a third of the total work force, and slaveowners never were more than a third of all households.(6) In short, the size and relative weight of the slave population and their masters in Brazil differed little from those in the contemporary southern United States.(7)

But where Brazil did differ substantially from the United States is in the race of its free population. Whereas the non-slave households were over 95% white in the United States, they tended to be less than 50% white in Brazil.(8) Freedmen also were to be found as heads of slave-owning households in quite significant numbers, again in sharp contrast to the United States where less than 1% of all slave owners were non-white. But despite their importance, freedmen have been neglected in the recent research.(9)

For this initial study of the freedmen, we have decided to examine the largest province of Brazil in terms of total population, slaves and free colored, that of Minas Gerais. Within this province we have selected two unpublished 1831 censuses from two major municipios,(10) that of Campanha in the southwestern part of the province, and Sabara in the central zone near present day Belo Horizonte. Both regions are roughly similar in the structure and size of their population and in their dedication to agricultural and artisanal activities. Although some mining activity still occurred in Sabara (gold mining had made the region famous in the 18th century but had declined after 1750), it was no longer the predominant sector of the local economy. By the end of the 18th century the province of Minas Gerais bad become a very complex agricultural, proto-industrial and mixed mining economy of which gold production was a minor element. The Minas Gerais economy with its exports of sugar, cane alcohol, food staples and low quality woven cotton cloth, more resembled the economy of neighboring Sao Paulo than it did its former colonial self.