The Politics of Ambiguity: Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850s-1888)

Abstract

Although it seems that slaves in Brazil in the nineteenth century had a better chance of achieving freedom than their counterparts in other slave societies in the Americas, studies also show that a significant proportion of manumissions there were granted conditionally. Freedom might be dependent on a master's death, on a master's daughter marriage, on continued service for a number of years, etc. The article thus focuses on controversies regarding conditional manumission to explore the legal and social ambiguities between slavery and freedom that prevailed in nineteenth-century Brazilian society. Conditional manumission appeared sometimes as a form of labor contract, thought of as a situation in which a person could be nominally free and at the same time subject to forms of compulsory labor. In the final crisis of abolition, in 1887-1888, with slaves leaving the plantations in massive numbers, masters often granted conditional manumission as an attempt to guarantee the compulsory labor of their bonded people for more years.