Fronteiras da liberdade: escravidão, hierarquia social e alforria no extremo Sul do império brasileiro (província do rio grande de são pedro, alegrete, 18 29-1888)

Abstract

This dissertation analyze the process of going from slavery to freedom, via manumission, on the Southwest border of the province of Rio Grande de São Pedro, focusing on the municipality of Alegrete. For this we will use a number of sources, such as post-mortem inventories, criminal proceedings, population censuses, records of baptisms, deaths and marriages, various notarial records, documents from the municipal council, the classificatory list of slaves to be emancipated and, especially, the letters of manumission. The analysis attempted to comprehend the continuities and breaks suffered by the system of slavery during the 19th century through one of its main characteristics, granting manumission. The focus is to understand changes that were taking in process of freedom, looking for patterns and trends across different historical contexts. Likewise, we discuss the freedoms achieved by payment with animals, which reveals the importance of the main economic activity in the region, livestock raising, in the life of the captives, as well as those related to life in a frontier area. For this purpose, there will be a constant variation in the scale of analysis, comparing aggregated data to individual histories. The theoretical-methodological inspiration of the research is based on the Italian micro-history – thence the idea of a dense investigation of the sources, so much the more when we are dealing with a social group, slaves, whose lives were less documented than those of other historical agents of that period. Only in this way was it possible to reconstruct fragments of the history of some individuals, which showed that it is not possible to understand the slaves’ behavior by their legal situation alone, but rather – and this is possibly even more important – by the social position they occupied, even as slaves.