Graham1991 Slavery's Impasse

Slavery's Impasse: Slave Prostitutes,
Small-Time Mistresses, and the

Brazilian Law of 1871
SANDRA LAUDERDALE GRAHAM
University of Texas at Austin
In March 1871 the young slave woman Honorata went to police in the Rio de
Janeiro parish of Sacramento to complain formally that her mistress had
forced her into prostitution from the age 12.' She testified that she was sent on
various occasions to houses of known ill-repute "to be at the window receiv-
ing visitors." At other times her mistress arranged the assignations herself,
instructing Honorata to dress and go with a client. Between these stints at
brothels, and sometimes at the same time, she was hired out as a domestic,
usually as laundress or cook. The court record described Honorata as nineteen
years old, black, a Creole born in the province of Bahia, and brought to Rio
de Janeiro by her mistress some years earlier, unmarried and a domestic
servant.
Honorata was but one of dozens of slave women encouraged by police to
come forward to tell their stories and to make audacious bids for freedom as
part of a crackdown against procuring slaveowners during the late summer and
early autumn of 1871. Because prostitution in Rio de Janeiro was neither
illegal nor regulated, no routine police or medical sources exist from which
we might construct a general account of prostitution. We have instead a rare
but abundant crop of court proceedings and notarial records that a police
investigation into the distinctive practices of slave prostitution involving more
than two hundred women generated in one parish.2
The use of these rich and perhaps unique sources nevertheless requires
A Mellon Faculty Fellowship from the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of
Texas in 1987 enabled me to complete research in Rio de Janeiro. With special thanks I acknowl-
edge the precise and cogent criticisms offered by Inga Clendinnen.
1
Unless otherwise indicated, Honorata's story is drawn from Juizo do Supremo Tribunal de
Justica, Revista Civel, defendant, Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, Rio de Janeiro, 1872,
Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Secao do Poder Judiciario, Caixa 10.965 [new cataloguing],
especially fls. 3, 3v-4, 5v, 6, 14, 14v, 17, 18-18v, 63, 63v-65v, 66-66v, 67-68, 69v-70, 71v,
73v, 75, 76v, 77-92v, 106- 106v, 110, 133, 135 [hereafter cited as ANSPJ; court cases on second
and subsequent citation are cited by name of defendant and date].
2
The free women who counted among the prostitutes of the city are outside my concern here;
on the total number, slave and free, see note 7, below.
0010-4175/91/4223-2371 $5.00 © 1991 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History
669
67O SANDRA LAUDERDALE GRAHAM
some caution. In Brazil a trial consisted of reviewing written evidence and

arguments that the lawyers of the case submitted to a judge or judges of the
court. Hence no courtroom confrontation between accuser and accused took
place; no social drama was played out before a jury in which a surprise
statement by witness or lawyer could have effect. Although a judge might call
parties for further questioning, a police commissioner took the initial testi-
mony and prepared the charges.3 By these rules a roster of questions and
responses recorded in the third person fixed the content and ordering of
testimony. Lost then are the nuances of the slave's recitation of her own story
through characteristic speech, initial descriptions that included repetitions and
digressions, moments of hesitation or emotion, or hints of gesture or
demeanor.
Despite this flattening and diminishing of actuality when rendered into
legal language, we can assemble from the testimony a substantial and per-
suasive, although circumstantial, body of evidence that affords a look at the
everyday practices and social relations of a commercial sexuality that traded
in slave women.4 In this way, we are able to draw closer to one usually
obscured possibility of what it could mean to be female and slave in the setting
of the city.5 And of course not only slaves testified. As owners—particularly
female mistresses—responded to the charges brought against them, we learn
something about poor free women, typically immigrants, unmarried and illite-
rate themselves.
But I want to go beyond the marketing of slave sexuality to make sense of
the campaign within the context of that uneasy year. By prosecuting owners
and removing their slave property, officials publicly and seriously threatened
to undermine the premise of private ownership on which slaveholding relied.
Their actions can be seen to reflect the dilemma similarly faced by legislators
3
The procedure had its origins as early as the sixteenth century, see Candido Mendes de
Almeida, comp., Codigo Philippino; on Ordenacoes e leis do reino de Portugal, recopilados por
mandado d'el-rey D. Philippe I. 14 ed. segundo a primeira de 1603 e a nona de Coimbra de
1824. Addicionada com diversas notas . . . (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. do Instituto Philomathico,
1870), Liv. 3, Titulo XX.
4
The phrase is Alain Corbin's, "Commercial Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France: A
System of Images and Regulations," Representations, 14 (Spring 1986), 209-19.
5
In 1872 Rio de Janeiro was larger than New Orleans or Havana and had the largest remaining
slave population of any city in the Americas: More than 37,000 slave women and men (in nearly
equal numbers) accounted for 16 percent of the city's total urban population of 228,743. Another
54,000 free mulattos and blacks brought the colored population to more than 91,000 or about 40
percent of the total. Of all blacks and mulatta women (45,012), slaves accounted for nearly 42
percent. See Brazil, Directoria Geral de Estatistica, Recenseamento da populacdo do Imperio do
Brazil a que se procedeu no dia 1" de agosto de 1872 (Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger, 1873-76),
Municipio Neutro, pp. 1-33. Historians have only begun to identify the complex and often
ambiguous life situations of slaves in urban Brazil, see Mary Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de
Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Joao Jose Reis, Rebeliao
escrava no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986); and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and
Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
SLAVERY AND THE BRAZILIAN LAW OF 1871 67I
as they urgently and uncertainly debated the regulation of slavery that winter.
In both cases the perception formed that slaveholding authority was in jeopar-
dy; and in both cases strategies for defense led to impasse. Historians of
nineteenth-century Brazil have been tempted to understand Parliament's de-
bate and the resulting law that freed the children subsequently born to slave
women as belonging with a sequence of decisions that progressed neatly (if
tardily) to the abolition of the institution of slavery in 1888. I want to empha-
size instead how their decision offered no such satisfying or predictable reso-
lution for contemporaries. The campaign to rid the city of forced prostitution
affords us a revised understanding of their apprehensions.
PROSTITUTION
The accounts by slaves and owners provide a discernable typography of the
routine conduct and practiced euphemisms of enforced prostitution. Cheap
prostitution belonged to the notoriously rough part of the city that ran west
and south of the docks, stretching from rua Uruguay ana to the Campo de
Santa'Anna and into the Cidade Nova, bounded on its northern edge by the
rua Larga de Sao Joaquim and to the south by the Praca da Constituic.ao.
Corresponding more or less with the parish of Sacramento, the area had
become a densely settled place of poorly constructed commercial buildings
indiscriminately juxtaposed with narrow-fronted private houses and was
crowded, humid, noisy, and smelly.6 The "worst class of women," including
slaves, had concentrated there at least since 1845, when one young doctor
submitted his thesis on prostitution to the Faculty of Medicine. In 1873, Dr.
Francisco Ferrez Macedo published a census of prostitutes. Although he did
not distinguish between slave and free women, he confirmed that of the four
parishes he investigated, Sacramento alone accounted for 1,059, or about 90
percent, of all public women.7
Concentration into a single geographic zone facilitated a fairly tight, al-
though informal organization of the business. The established presence of
slave dealers in the area meant that slave women arriving from other provinces
aboard ships of the coastal slave trade and marked for prostitution could be
conveniently handled by intermediaries like the firm of Duarte, Fonseca and
6
Luiz Gonc,alves dos Santos (Padre Perereca), Memorias para servir a historia do reino do
Brasil, 2 vols., annotated by Francisco Agenor de Noronha Santos (Sao Paulo: Editora Itatiaia,
1981), I: 99, 101, 103, 120-1, 126, 136-7.
7
Herculano Augusto Lassance Cunha, Dissertacdo sobre a prostituicao, em particular na
cidade do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Impartial de Francisco Paulo Brito, 1845), 19,
cited in Luiz Carlos Soares, Rameiras, ilhoas, cocotes, polacas e bagaxas: A prostituicao no Rio
de Janeiro do seculo XIX (Sao Paulo: Atica, forthcoming [pp. 26, 47 of typescript], and kindly
lent to me while the book was in press; the total number was 1,171, in Francisco Ferrez Macedo,
Da prostituicao em geral, e em particular em relacao a cidade do Rio de Janeiro: prophylaxia da
syphilis (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Academica, 1873), 136-45; on the spatial distribution of prostitu-
tion in Paris, see Bronislaw Geremek, The Margins of Society in Late Medieval Paris, Jean
Birrell, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 87-94, 211-41.
672 SANDRA LAUDERDALE GRAHAM
Company.8 A few went directly to a waiting mistress who personally arranged

purchase or transportation through an agent in a distant port. One woman
traveled alone from Bahia on an English steamship carrying the forged papers
of a free person. Still other women ended up at consignment houses in which
they might remain for weeks or even months. At least one dealer made no
secret of the specialized nature of his business: He said that when he learned a
certain madame regularly bought slaves to "expose at the window," he ar-
ranged to be her supplier.9 All manner of brothels catered to the market,
ranging from the colegios described as being of "ample dimensions and
regular architecture, decently furnished and decorated," in which the "patroa
was older and usually knowledgable about venereal disease," through the less
imposing houses that retained the outward appearance of respectable resi-
dences with two or three women as "tenants," to the shabby zungus, or
tenements of low reputation.10
The slave women knew them all. On the infamous rua da Conceic,ao,
Genuina Moreira de Castro operated a "magnificent two-story house . . .
always brilliantly illuminated at night." A few doors down stood the great
brothel popularly known as the Bordel da Barbuda, in which "a legion of
unfortunate slaves destined for the immoral commerce of men" could be seen
at any hour of the day, but especially from afternoon until "two or three in the
morning." In order to gain admission, a man needed "money and only mon-
ey." One slave there charged the owner, Anna Valentina da Silva, with "gain-
ing great wealth from this libidinous commerce . . . impelled by a horrible
greed." Anna Valentina coolly defended her establishment as a colegio
(school), saying she employed slaves in "dressmaking and making sweets."11
Writing in 1906 about "perversions and inversions of the genital instinct,"
one doctor recalled that Barbuda's brothel was among the most famous and
she was a "black woman, about 55 or 60 in 1878, relatively fat and of
medium height, who possessed a thick moustache and almost a goatee,"
hence her nickname, Barbuda, meaning bearded. He titillatingly described
her brothels as ones of "high luxury," where she "lined up extremely beau-
tiful little mulatta slaves, whom she bought without haggling over price and
8
Juizo do Comercio da I" Vara Civel, defendant, Duarte, Fonseca & Cia., Rio de Janeiro,
1881, ANSPJ, Maco 3149, N. 4530.
9
Juizo de Direito da 2" Vara Civel, Acc,ao de Liberdade, defendant, Cleria Leopoldina de
Oliveira, Rio de Janeiro, 1871, ANSPJ, Maco 855, N. 3837, fls. 2, 1 lv; Juizo de Direito da 2"
Vara Civel, Acc.ao Summaria de Liberdade pela parda Felicianna por seu curador, defendant,
Leonarda Maria da Conceicao, Rio de Janeiro, 1871, ANSPJ, Caixa 1611, N. 2577, fls. 37, 14;
Juizo de Direito da 2" Vara Civel, Libello de Liberdade pela escrava Corina por seu curador,
defendant, Anna Valentina da Silva, Rio de Janeiro, 1869, ANSPJ, Caixa 1624, N. 2781, fl. 69v.
10
Macedo, Da prostituiqao, 74, 79; the Diccionario da Lingua Portugueza, 8th ed., rev., 2
vols. Antonio de Moraes Silva, comp. (Rio de Janeiro: Empreza Litteraria Fluminense, 1889-
91), defined zungu as a place renting small rooms for a low price to "persons of infamous
condition, serving also as a refuge for wrong-doers, vagabonds, etc."
11
Anna Valentina da Silva, 1869, fls. 3, 70v, 71, 74, 109v.
SLAVERY AND THE BRAZILIAN LAW OF 1871 673
soon freed conditionally, all of them more or less light-skinned, more or less
lovely, but all young, almost fledglings, hence they were exhibited in short
dresses and bloomers."12 Other encounters began at a mistress's tenement
room and wound up later at a hotel such as the Amazonas (where rooms
evidently rented by the hour). Simplicia regularly met her customers in her
owner's own house. 13
Honorata figured among the many women posted at the windows of less
showy houses to attract customers from the men who casually passed by.
Whether at the house next to the pharmacy on the rua da Alfandega, or later
on the rua Uruguayana, or at the Spanish woman's place, regular customers
knew to look for Honorata at the window. A witness explained that Honorata's
fancy clothes were expressly provided for her appearance there. "At the
window" was a precisely coded phrase that referred to public women or
women who were kept indoors and did not walk the street. The distinction
mattered. Women at the window could neither be arrested as vagabonds with
no fixed residence or as runaway or abandoned slaves, nor would they be
questioned by police as slaves out after hours. At one remove from the street,
these women could lean provocatively from unshuttered windows, announc-
ing themselves for hire with the crude acts "typical of a prostitute."14
By contrast, those indifferently sent to walk the streets or linger at street
corners were labeled as being in public prostitution, the easiest and cheapest
women and those most vulnerable to arrest. Most owners did not take such
risks with their slaves. But those who did had to grant them de facto freedom,
for as one prosecuting lawyer argued, "it is not possible for a woman to be
employed in such prostitution without enjoying her freedom," a freedom he
later described as "licentious liberty conferred on the slaves by their senhoras
in a contract of evident [moral] lethargy."15 The slave Brasilia demonstrated
that she lived independently, as if free. Giving her address, she produced rent
receipts made out to Brasilia Leopoldina de Oliveira (she had taken her
owner's surname) for a period of several months. The inspector of that quarter
agreed that she was known in the neighborhood as a "free person," adding
that she "had good behavior." Cleria Leopoldina de Oliveira, insisting that
Brasilia was her slave for whom she had not yet received the papers of
ownership, described her as living "outside my house . . . at the house of a
12
Jose Ricardo Pires de Almeida, Homosexualismo (a libertinagem no Rio de Janeiro): estudo
sobre as perversoes e inversoes do instincto genital (Rio de Janeiro: Laemert, 1906), 72, cited in
Soares, A prostituicdo no Rio de Janeiro [p. 51 of typescript].
13
Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, 1872, fl. 69v; Juizo de Direito da 2" Vara Civel,
defendant, Rosalina Bandeira, Rio de Janeiro, 1871, ANSPJ, Mac.o 813, N. 17802, fl. 3v.
14
Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, 1872, fls. 3, 18-18v, 67, 68, 69; Leonarda Maria
da Conceic,ao, 1871, fls. 44, 44v, 13v.
15
Macedo, Da prostituicdo, 74; Juizo de Direito da 2" Vara Civel, Liberdade pelo Traslado,
defendant, Julia Catharina Coital, Rio de Janeiro, 1871, ANSPJ, Caixa 5802 [new cataloguing],
fls. 20v, 33.
butcher who, it is said, already has a concubine . . . [and] returning [money

which] she says she earns ironing clothes." The prosecuting attorney present-
ed her as a free woman who "lives in her own house . . . with free men who
share her bed." 16
In the case against her mistress, Honorata charged neglect. Instead of the
culturally prescribed relationship in which the owner provided at least basic
material maintenance to the slave, Honorata described the terms of a purely
cash relationship.17 By hiring Honorata out and taking a specified amount
from her daily earnings, Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque gained an
income. Honorata was on her own to provide herself with clothes, even food.
Not only did Maria Elenteria not supply medicines, as a correct mistress
should, but she punished her slave when ill. Having become "sick in the
chest," Honorata left one house to ask her mistress for treatment. An angry
Maria Elenteria instead ordered her beaten (by whom, Honorata did not say).
From another place where Honorata was expected to "wash and iron by day
and receive visitors at night," she defiantly walked out, turning her earnings
over to her mistress and announcing that she could not work all day and be
exposed at the window at night. That time she was reprimanded and sent
back. Maria Elenteria disregarded the nightly curfew when all slaves were
supposed to be recalled to their owners' jurisdiction. Honorata frequently
returned late. At Bebianna's house the police commissioner had had to ad-
monish the madame for keeping her at the window after ten o'clock. Maria
Elenteria even permitted Honorata to live with a Brazilian boy [mo§o] at his
place in exchange for cash. For a time Jose Motta took care of Honorata and
met "the demands of her senhora." But when his "circumstances changed
[and] he could no longer pay as he had," the mistress quickly called her slave
home.
Other women magnified charges of neglect into ones of sustained and grave
abuse. The prolonged medical care provided for the slave Corina by the
owner-madame of one glittery bordel was cited as proof of maltreatment. Dr.
Luiz Delfino dos Santos of the Rio de Janeiro Faculty of Medicine reported
that Corina suffered from a syphilitic-scorbutic ulcer on one leg, festering
scrofulous tumors on the upper, inside parts of the thighs, adenitis, an inflam-
mation of the lymph glands, and, two years earlier, virulent syphilides, skin
eruptions indicative of the first infectious stage of syphilis, which he believed
had "yielded to a prolonged and rigorous treatment." His evidence gave
weight to the prosecuting attorney's charge that Corina's "health [had been]
completely endangered . . . by . . . illnesses acquired in such vile com-
16
Leonarda Maria da Conceigao, 1871, fl. 44v; Cleria Leopoldina de Oliveira, 1871, fls. 10,
llv-18v. The distinction mattered, for once freed a person could not legally be reduced to the
condition of slave.
17
For discussion on the culturally required duties toward slaves, see Lauderdale Graham,
House and Street, 3, 91-96.
merce."18 Corina further accused the brothel owner of depriving her of her
child born in June 1870, shortly after the syphilis treatments. According to
Corina the child was left on the wheel at the public orphanage so that instead
of nursing her child, she would again be able "to provide her services days
after the delivery."19
Remarkably, among a sample of approximately 150 young women of child-
bearing age, I find only two who are mentioned as having children. Yet
childbirth and the hurry to get women back to work was evidently frequent
enough for the Chief of Police to make the accusation that "by dint of cold
[compresses] they are forced to stop the vaginal discharges that follow child-
birth." Nor was a menstruating slave excused for she, as the elliptic charge
went, "has to receive anyone who turns up, even if nature demands
abstinence."20
As presented by Honorata's lawyer, Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquer-
que was summoned before the court to account for the "poor condition and
rough treatment" of her slave. Because prostitution was not illegal, the for-
mally stated charge necessarily remained oblique: the "illicit and immoral use
of property." It meant of course prostitution. The concrete charges were that
Honorata "lived as if she were a free person, dressed in luxury, passing the
night away from home . . . and sought at her mistress's house for dishonest
pleasures." With these carefully phrased allegations the lawyer argued that the
owner had abandoned Honorata by consigning her slave to prostitution, thus
doubly violating her duties and responsibilities as owner. By so arguing he
relied on the view that an abandoned slave had no effective master and thus
was free by default.21 By law a person once free could not be reenslaved.
18
Anna Valentina da Silva, 1869, fls. 3-3v, 10, 11, 17, 20v, 7 1 , 74, 109v.
19
Anna Valentina da Silva, 1869, fls. 10, 20v. The roda or wheel was the base of a rotating
cylinder on which goods or an infant could be placed from the street, then turned and received by
someone inside without either party being visible to the other. Common at the convents of
cloistered orders, the wheel became in Brazil a social institution, see Jose Vieira Fazenda, "A
roda (casa dos expostos)," Revista do Institute Hislorico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro Tomo LXXI,
vol. 118, pt. II (1908), 155; Ubaldo Soares, O passado heroico da Casa dos Expostos (Rio de
Janeiro: Fundac.ao Romao de Matos Duarte, 1959), 228; Lauderdale Graham, House and Street,
84.
20
Carta de Liberdade (hereafter cited as CL), Rio de Janeiro, 1 March 1871, ANSPJ, Cartorio
do Primeiro Oficio, Registro Geral, Liv. 77, 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 , fls. 108v-109 (hereafter cited as ANSPJ,
CPO); Julia Catharina Cortal, 1871, fls. 27-30v, 2 1 , 22v; Francisco de Faria Lemos, Chefe de
Policia, "Relatorio do Chefe de Policia da Corte," in Brazil, Ministerio da Justic.a, Relatorio
(1871), 2 1 - 2 2 ; a translation of the main portion of the report appears in Robert E. Conrad,
Children of God's Fire: A Documentary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1983), 130-2 [translations from the original report are mine].
21
Juizo de Direito da 1" Vara Civel, defendant, Honorata, crioula, Rio de Janeiro, 1873,
Mac,o 2385, N. 2088, fl. 5v. On abandoned slaves, see Brazil, Laws, statutes, etc., Colecdo das
Leis do Brazil, Decreto 2433, 15 June 1859, Cap. IV, Art. 8 5 , "Sao bens do evento os escravos,
gado, ou bestas, achados, sem se saber o dono a quern pertencao" (hereafter cited as Leis do
Brasil); and commentary by Decio Saes, A formacdo do estado burguis no Brasil, 1888-1891
(Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985), 1 4 2 - 3 .
Then came his concluding shot: The owner's actions had compromised her
authority and had "weakened the tie of respect and obedience that ought to
connect her" to her slave. On grounds that the owner had invalidated all moral
claim to custody of the slave, he asked the court to grant the slave her
freedom.
Although not one woman appeared as a witness for Honorata, three loyal
clients supportively swore to her prostitute status. A retired army sergeant and
two casual laborers, all Brazilians, aged between twenty-four and thirty-nine
years, one married, corroborated and elaborated her charges. They recalled
following Honorata from house to house "where she received visitors for
dishonest pleasures" or arranged "amorous meetings" in the presence of her
mistress; they described paying her extra money behind her mistress's back so
that she would have "a few coins" to keep for herself. The young coachman
who picked her up each afternoon about six o'clock and ferried her back home
at night reported that he heard her scolded repeatedly for always bringing back
too little money. Sometimes he lent her money to make up the amount she was
supposed to turn over. All agreed that Honorata dressed luxuriously. Some
said she could buy fancy clothes "because those who liked her paid her
more." The sergeant described her clothes as being of "wool, silk, and fine
muslin." She wore "flowers in her hair, gold jewelry, and gloves." The
coachman merely remarked that she "dressed in the manner of luxury of that
life."
Their testimonies speak to the small regularities of an irregular life. But
they also present us with a puzzle: Why, with such allies to count on, had
Honorata not fled her mistress long ago? Perhaps she calculated that the
difficulties of escape were too many despite the frequent opportunities af-
forded by casual movement around the city or the scores of free mulattos and
blacks into whose camouflaging presence a runaway might vanish. If she
slipped beyond the boundaries of neighborhood she would lose the support
needed to make escape workable, yet if she remained on those familiar but
crowded and open-shuttered streets where little went unnoticed, then she
risked recognition and recapture. A few tried: Felicianna, for instance, man-
aged for a time to "evade the vigilance of everyone" only to be apprehended
eventually. At first Honorata walked away from what seemed to her intolera-
ble working conditions before finally going to the police to testify, but she did
not run to escape enslavement until the judgment in favor of her freedom was
withdrawn. Even then she vacillated, going only as far as the rua Matta Porcos
on the far side of the Campo de Sant'Anna, which was still dangerously
within the circle of previous addresses where she was known.22
22
On the numbers of free blacks and mulattos, see n. 5 above. Leonarda Maria de Conceiijao,
1871, fl. 14; Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, 1872, fls. 3, 18, 67v; Honorata, 1873, fls.
25, 27-27v.
In reply to the charges, Maria Elenteria de Albuquerque put up a deter-

mined fight, pleading ignorance. She acknowledged that she sometimes hired
out her slave but only as a domestic and only to "decent persons, in commerce
or to honorable families" and at the standard domestic wage. She explained
that she once sent Honorata to a house of prostitution on the mistaken under-
standing that it was a seamstress's workshop where she would sew, cook, and
iron. On another occasion Maria Elenteria's companion, Carlos Luiz, dis-
covered her slave at the house of the free black Bebiana where, the owner
insisted, Honorata had hired herself on her own account as a prostitute—an
act of deliberate deception and disobedience, she claimed, for which she
immediately ordered Honorata home and punished her. She described Honor-
ata's clothes as neat and clean. She went about barefoot, as a slave would.
Maria Elenteria provided Honorata with some clothes as she supposed her
other employers also did. She said she did not ask where Honorata got the
rest.
Beyond a lack of knowledge, the widowed Maria Elenteria insisted on the
innocence of respectability. She denied having ever taken earnings from "im-
moral or indecent acts" and protested that she herself lived "honestly, with
modesty, having order, respect, and decency." She produced a series of mod-
erately respectable witnesses—landlords, skilled laborers, businessmen—
who portrayed her as exercising a just authority over her slave: They agreed
that Honorata was well treated; the relationship between Maria Elenteria and
Honorata was familiar but correct, "as between mistress and slave"; the slave
had always "rendered the obedience of a slave," was not punished, and had
been promised eventual freedom. She tangibly weakened any claim to re-
spectability, however, by naming a succession of tenement addresses and
lovers—an Englishman, a Brazilian, a Frenchman, and a Portuguese—indic-
ative of a disreputable life to contemporaries.
Why then, we can ask, would such a woman wage a full-scale court battle?
Why not let the slave go? Caught uncertainly between a barely attainable
respectability and undisguised sordidness, Maria Elenteria made a bid for
respectability. She knew how to present herself as the properly responsible
and modest mistress: calling her slave home for the weekly blessing, provid-
ing a few clothes, caring (some said) for the slave when she became sick,
relying on her when she herself was ill. Through court testimony we watch the
deliberate construction of the persona of the poor but decent widow, against
which is threatened the image of a woman desperately extracting a living from
the sale of her slave in a traffic generally regarded as vile. For women such as
Rozalina Bandeira, who confessed to prostituting her slave, or Julia Catharina
Cortal, accused of prostitution herself, the pretense at decency could scarcely
be maintained, while the professional brothel keepers, having surrendered any
serious claim to acceptability, could at most attempt to present themselves as
generous, charitable, or fair. With only one slave and no house of her own,
Maria Elenteria could make a plausible case. But more than reputation was at
stake, for in fact Maria Elenteria needed the income. Living as she said "from
the earnings of her black and from washing clothes" and despite shuffling
Honorata from place to place, she barely managed to eke out a living. The
loss of her slave would mean a serious loss of income.23
In September of 1871, the judge delivered his decision in favor of Honor-
ata. He spoke of "immoral abuse" and the "moral degradation committed"
against her. The plaintiff, he concluded, "is declared free of captivity and
restored to her natural liberty." As it turned out the judgment would not stand.
Her mistress quickly appealed, getting the decision against her reversed.
Honorata then countered and lost. In December 1872, her appeal denied,
Honorata who had lived as a free woman for more than a year was ordered to
return to her owner. She evidently refused, for in February 1873, Maria
Elenteria produced before the court two men who reported seeing her at a
tenement where she lived in room number 4. The judged ordered that she be
"found and apprehended." Whether Honorata finally eluded her mistress and
how she earned her keep, we do not know.24
Consider briefly a second but contrasting case in which again the complain-
ant sought to prove she was a prostitute.25 Belmira, a mulatta who described
herself as single and "17 years, more or less," recounted that for a month she
had been at Julia's house where she received visits from several men.26 She
did not know their names; she merely went with whomever Julia told her to. A
doctor testified that during that time, Belmira came to him on several occa-
sions, "suffering from diarrhea and lung congestion." Her lawyer asked that
she be freed on grounds that her master, abusing his dominion over her, had
forced her into a life of prostitution from which he "drew a considerable
pecuniary sum."
Although summoned, no witnesses for Belmira appeared. The owner's
23
She was not the only one. Alexandrina Roza de Jesus had the judge himself summoned for
"an excess of authority" that "deprived [her] of possession . . . of the mulatta slave
Anna . . . and her daily earnings" (see Juizo de Direito da 1° Vara Civel, Protesto, defendant,
Miguel Jose Tavares, Rio de Janeiro, 1871, ANSPJ, Mac.o 5 8 1 , N. 4399, fls. 2, 6; see also Juizo
Municipal, 1" Vara Civel, Autos de Requerimento, supplicante, Fortunee Levy, Rio de Janeiro,
1871, ANSPJ, Caixa 7.286 [new cataloguing]; Julia Catharina Cortal, 1871, fl. 9).
24
Juizo de Direito da 2" Vara Civel, Execuc,ao de Sentence, defendant, Honorata, crioula, Rio
de Janeiro, 1873, ANSPJ, Maco 2385, N. 2088, fls. 23, 26, 2 7 - 2 8 .
25
Although the case dealt only with the slave woman Belmira, initially she is listed as one of
six female slaves bringing suit against their owners—two women and four men—for their liberty.
Belmira's story is drawn from: Corte de Apelagao, Acc,ao de Liberdade pela Belmira por seu
curador, defendant, Francisco da Veiga Abreu, Rio de Janeiro, 1872, ANSPJ, Caixa 11.158 [new
cataloguing], esp. fls. 2, 4v, 11, l l v , 12, 20, 2 1 , 21v, 22, 32, 33, 33v, 35v-37v, 39v, 40, 41v,
44v, 4 5 , 46v, 47 v, 60v.
26
She was variously described by others as mulatta, cabrinha (literally little goat), ovfula.
Fula, once used for blacks originating in or descended from Africans of Guinea whose hair was
frizzy and reddish-yellow in color, came to mean simply mestizo, someone descended of black
and white or black and mulatto parents (see Novo Diciondrio da Lingua Portuguesa, comp.
Aurelio Buarque de Holanda Ferreira [Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1975]).
defense came more easily: forty-eight years old, married, a man of commerce
who resided in a comfortable section of town, Francisco da Veiga Abreu had
inherited the slave from his parents five years earlier, employing her since
then as a domestic, to do shopping or sell fruits and vegetables door to door.
He thought it improbable that she would be a prostitute he said, for "besides
being well behaved, she is weak and has a bad appearance." But if she were,
"it was not by [my] consent." Three of Abreu's neighbors—presented as
thoroughly credible, literate, male shopowners—recalled seeing Belmira out
on the street in the routine of household work, taking Abreu's daughter for
strolls or running errands. They agreed that Abreu's "high character" would
make it impossible for him to send his slave into prostitution. They too
described her as "ugly, weak, and sick," "nearly always in treatment for the
illnesses [from which she] suffers," scarcely material for a successful pros-
titute. In this case a judge ruled that Belmira had failed to prove the alle-
gations. A year later her appeal reached the High Court, and again she lost.
Her case closed, she would remain a slave.
THE CAMPAIGN
From these two cases emerges an initially baffling counter allegation of con-
spiracy. A landlord testifying on Maria Elenteria's behalf had asked with
exasperation why Honorata would make accusations against her mistress,
"taking advantage [of the law] as other slaves are doing." Abreu had also
claimed that the charges against him were a setup. Because Belmira fre-
quently left the house to do shopping, he argued, "it was likely that on one of
those outings she was persuaded by someone of malevolent intent to get
herself arrested as a prostitute." His lawyer described Belmira as a "smarty,
and well-coached," someone who "lent herself to manipulation in order to see
herself freed at no cost." And behind it all, he charged, was a "network
established by the police commissioner to free slaves at their owners'
expense."
Certainly we are led to wonder why cases concerning the lowliest of wom-
en would occupy the highest court of the land for two years—Honorata's case
alone ran to more than 300 manuscript pages. Why were both cases initiated
in the same year, 1871? Why were slaves being allowed to testify when the
law denied slaves legal personality? Further, lawyers in both cases based their
accusations on the principle of Roman Law that a master who abused domin-
ion over slave property should lose his slave.27 Strikingly, Miguel Jose Tav-
27
The coincidences pile up: On the same day Honorata fled to the police to make her
statement, the six slaves identified in Belmira's case were removed from the custody of their
owners; the trustee appointed for Honorata also acted for one of the six slaves in Belmira's case;
and the defense lawyer for Maria Eleneria de Albuquerque also defended other slaveowners.
Francisco da Veiga Abreu, 1872, fls. 11, 43-43v, 46; Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque,
1872, fls. I4-14v, 81, 105v-106v.
ares served simultaneously as judge for the Second Municipal Court and
police commissioner for the city's second district, including the parish of
Sacramento. As occupant of the dual post, Tavares had solicited testimony
from the slave women, then heard and decided their cases. 28 Abreu's lawyer
had got it partially right: The police commissioner-judge was behind it all.
But what the defense identified as conspiracy, Tavares and his supporters
understood differently. In a letter to the chief of police for Rio de Janeiro dated
18 March, Tavares described his strategy to rid the city of the practice of
consigning slave women to an immoral life in full swing at that moment.
Supplied by neighborhood police with a list of all slave women "placed at the
windows for a price" and aided by the police chief, he proceeded to get legal
counsel appointed to present their testimony and then defend them before the
court in an attempt to secure their freedom. According to Tavares, guilty
owners had begun to free their slaves rather than risk prosecution after the
resulting newspaper publicity: In a two-month period the extraordinary
number of 150 letters of manumission had been registered in the notary offices
of the city. Tavares calculated that more than 200 slaves were bringing legal
charges, adding that he had already gained the freedom of 186 women.29
The letters of manumission, witnessed and recorded by notary publics in
large, numbered books to which Tavares referred, were not in themselves
wholly unusual. Such letters typically conveyed the reward of freedom to
older, favored slaves, frequently in language that expressed affection or regard
or simply acknowledged cash payment for the slave's freedom.30 But from
mid-February until the end of March 1871, the bulk of the letters departed
28
Tavares' position was consistent with the law. Since the 1840s police and judicial functions
overlapped, granting police considerable power. Not until September 1871 did a law reforming
judicial procedure separate their functions. From November when the law went into effect, a
judge could no longer simultaneously act as police commissioner. By October Tavares had been
replaced as judge, whether in early compliance with the law or because his tenure of office had
ended is not clear. See Lei no. 2033, 20 September 1871, Leis do Brasil, Art. 1, pars. 4, 5, 6;
Decreto no. 4824, 22 November 1871, Leis do Brasil, Arts. 7 and 9.
29
For the text of the extraordinary letter sent to the minister of justice and included in his
annual report to Parliament, see Miguel Jose Tavares, Municipal Judge, 2" Vara, to Francisco de
Faria Lemos, Chefe de Policia, Rio de Janeiro, 18 March 1871, in Chefe de Policia, "Relatorio,"
in Brazil, Ministerio da Justica, Relatorio, 1871, 2 1 ; for further correspondence, see Miguel Jose
Tavares to Francisco de Faria Lemos, Rio de Janeiro, 18 February 1871; Offcio do Chefe de
Policia da Corte ao Ministro e Secretario dos Negocios da Justiga, Rio de Janeiro, 20 February
1871; and Chefe de Policia, Francisco de Faria Lemos to Juiz Municipal da 2° Vara, Rio de
Janeiro, 18 January 1871, all in Documenta^ao nao catalogada (5B-511), 17.4 Instituticoes
Policiais/Poh'cia da Corte, ANSPJ.
30
Standard letters of manumission are abundant; for specific examples, see CL, Rio de
Janeiro, 3 February 1871, 23 February 1871, 18 April 1871, ANSPJ, CPO, Registro Geral, Liv.
77, 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 , fls. 9 5 v - 9 6 , 103-103v, 122; CL, Rio de Janeiro, 9 January 1871, ANSPJ, Cartorio
do Segundo Oficio, Registro Geral, Liv. 107, 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 , fl. 133v (hereafter cited as ANSPJ,
CSO); CL, Rio de Janeiro, 5 January 1871, 12 January 1871, and 16 January 1871, ANSPJ,
Cartorio do Terceiro Oficio, Registro Geral, Liv. 32, 1 8 7 0 - 7 1 , fls. 69v, 7 1 , 7 4 - 7 4 v (hereafter
cited as ANSPJ, CTO).
SLAVERY AND THE BRAZILIAN LAW OF 1871 68l
radically from the customary and culturally appropriate statements. Again and
again the slaves being freed were young women, aged between twelve and
twenty-eight years, not blacks but mulattas, invariably single, and when occa-
sionally assigned an occupation, it was always that of domestic service. Many
had been sold south to Rio de Janeiro from the provinces of Bahia, Pernam-
buco, Ceara, or Maranhao as young adults. They hardly resemble the locally
born "slaves of the house" raised from infancy and kept by a single family,
who could count on the complex ties of duty, care, or gratitude formed over
years of proximate living. But what persuasively links this otherwise largely
circumstantial body of evidence to the practice of prostitution and Tavares'
assertion that women were being freed in exceptional numbers was the fact
that female slaves of prime working age were freed gratuitously—without
payment to their owners.31 That owners would surrender their capital or
source of income made sense only under the pressure of Tavares' public
pledge to prosecute those who maintained their slaves in prostitution.
The identities of those who freed the slaves are telling. The owners were
mainly (although not exclusively) women who were themselves illiterate (re-
lying on others to sign for them), poor (sometimes indicating an occupation
such as laundress, which was either an accurate statement or the only plausi-
ble one, but in any case difficult to verify, for washing meant having a various
and changing clientele), unmarried (able to transact property without a
spouse's legally registered consent), and often immigrants either from Europe
or other parts of Brazil (that is, socially vulnerable women who had to make
their way in a self-consciously ranked society that assigned position by family
name and blood connections more than wealth). According to the addresses
they gave, all lived within the area of Sacramento well known for its bordels.
The letters of manumission—and I can account confidently for 100 and
possibly as many as 121 of the 150 Tavares referred to—provide convincing
evidence that an active trade in prime female slaves existed between distant
provinces and the capital, in which small-time owners consigned them to
prostitution.
The French immigrant woman Fortunee Levy learned too late that Tavares
would make good his threat. By the time she moved to rid herself of her
young, mulatta slaves (the youngest being fourteen years), hastily freeing
three on the same day in three different notary offices and without payment,
three others, as she acknowledged in their letters of manumission, had already
been "taken into public custody by order of the judge of the Second Municipal
31
For the months of January through April, see Registro Geral, ANSPJ-CPO, Liv. 77, 1870-
71, fls. 89-124; CSO, Liv. 107, 1870-71, fls. 131v-178v; CTO, Liv. 32, fls. 68v-98v, and Liv.
33, 1870-71, fls. 10-24; those in February and March of 1871 clearly contrast with ones from
the same period in the previous year, when most of the slaves freed were older and many were
men (see Registro Geral, ANSPJ-CPO, Liv. 74, 1868-70, fls. 155-185).
Court, so that he could deal with their [cases for] freedom."32 She had no
choice but to concede them "full and general liberty from today for ever" or
face prosecution. She nevertheless dared to add: "and this I do of my very free
will." 33 Alternatively, some—as many as seventeen—saw the advantage of
granting conditional freedom. At once avoiding prosecution they retained the
services of the women long enough to recover the purchase price and perhaps
some profit. Maria Magdalena de Jesus freed five slaves with the stipulation
that they would continue in her custody for a period ranging from two years
for Christina, a twenty-year-old mulatta, to four years for the sixteen-year-old
Joana. Having registered a letter of manumission for a third slave in February,
only two months later did she sign the contract obliging the slave to repay over
five years an amount that exceeded by a third the standard price for a female
her age. 34
As the campaign gathered momentum, public reaction to Tavares varied.
From the start powerful men had backed him. Chief of Police Francisco de
Faria Lemos, in his report the previous year, had reserved special mention for
Tavares' dedication to duty. Privately, Lemos defended him to the minister of
justice against accusations made in the press, explaining that although certain
individuals had put out the rumor that the judge mishandled cases, they did so
because "his activities, independence, and energy [are] a great hindrance to
[their] commerce." When the campaign was anticipated although not yet off
the ground, the influential and respected president of the Board of Public
Hygiene, Jose Pereira Rego, officially expressed the hope that Tavares' "mea-
sure^] can produce beneficial effects."35 Approving letters appeared in the
newspaper, and hundreds of citizens paraded with music and flags to celebrate
Tavares on his twenty-fourth birthday. They cheered him for confronting the
"sordid interests and villainy of these avaricious ones" and paid soaring
32
CL, Rio de Janeiro, 23 February 1871, ANSPJ, CPO, RegistroGeral, Liv. 77, 1870-71, fl.
103v; CL, Rio de Janeiro, 23 February 1871, ANSPJ, CSO, Registro Geral, Liv. 107, 1870-71,
fl. 158; CL, Rio de Janeiro, 23 February 1871, ANSPJ, CTO, RegistroGeral, Liv. 32, 1870-71,
fl. 90.
33
CL, Rio de Janeiro, 28 February 1871, ANSPJ, CPO, Registro Geral, Liv. 77, 1870-71,
fls. 108-108 v.
34
CL, Rio de Janeiro, 22 April 1871, ANSPJ, CPO, Registro Geral, Liv. 77, 1870-71, fl.
122v; Escriptura de locac.ao de services, Rio de Janeiro, 24 April 1871, ANSPJ, CPO, Escrip-
turas, Liv. 315, fls. 34v-35. Conditional freedom was effected by a notarized and legally binding
agreement that either could be registered separately, once the woman was freed, or included in her
letter of manumission. Such an arrangement left slaves with a highly ambiguous status.
Agostinho Marques Perdigao Malheiro argued that from the date of the contract freedom could
not be revoked and the slave could not be mortgaged or sold but had only a future right to full
freedom, see A escraviddo no Brasil: ensaio historico-juridico-social, 3 parts in 1 vol. (Rio de
Janeiro: Typ. Nacional, 1866-67), par. 1 1 2 - 3 , pp. 1 4 4 - 5 ; par. 125, pp. 160-72.
35
Brazil, Ministerio da Justic.a, Relatorio (1870) 6 1 ; Francisco de Faria Lemos, Secretaria de
Policia da Corte to Ministro da Justice, Rio de Janeiro, 25 July 1870, Confidencial, Arquivo
Nacional, Sec,ao do Poder Executive I J - 6 , 518, Secretaria de Policia da Corte, Offcios com
anexos, 1870—73; Jose Pereira Rego, "Relatorio do Presidente da Junta de Hygiene Publica,"
Anexo H, p. 7, in Brazil, Ministerio da Justic.a, Relatorio (1870).
SLAVERY AND THE BRAZILIAN LAW OF 1 8 7 1 683
tribute to his poverty, honesty, youth, and wisdom.36 Predictably, however,

not everyone agreed that Tavares deserved the "brilliant career" that now
assuredly was his. Some thought he had set in motion new excesses that
merely replaced those he sought to end, criticizing him for a high-handed use
of authority that openly transgressed rights of property. They asked anxiously
what he would do next.37
That was the campaign. How, then, should we make sense of its unprece-
dented and dramatic maneuvers. To answer that question I want to pull back
from immediate actions and first consider what it was not. The campaign was
not directed principally at the regulation of prostitution, although Brazilian
doctors followed their European colleagues in concerning themselves with the
medical dangers of prostitution. Addressing fellow doctors and public offi-
cials in 1869 on measures they might adopt against the "propagation of
venereal diseases," Luiz Correa de Azevedo, who understood syphilis as
spreading by "contact and hereditary infection" and who linked infant mor-
tality with the "syphilitic virus," saw syphilis combining with "our miasmatic
infection" to produce a morbid type that attacked "on a grand scale all social
classes." He thought the special circumstances in which Brazilians found
themselves with regard to "race, locale, customs, habit, climate, and mercan-
tile connections" compounded the spread of infection. Although he acknowl-
edged that family men might pass the virus to unsuspecting wives, he concen-
trated on women, especially the increased number of prostitutes, as the
transmitters. Azevedo concluded that the standard and severe regimens for
treating syphilis, such as arsenic taken internally every six hours, extract of
belladonna, tinctures of opium or morphine (administered to slave women, as
court cases reveal), were ineffective and imposed acute risks of their own. He
preferred the "warm baths and easy to digest foods" of homeopathic treat-
ments which, he said, if not a cure, at least did not further destroy the body.38
Like other Brazilians before and after him, however, Azevedo resisted
calling for a law that would make prostitution illegal. Instead he called for
places—just as there were public urinals for "bodily eliminations"—in which
the "organism could relieve itself of these discharges of sensuality and licen-
tiousness which vice engenders and weak precepts of social life do not suc-
ceed in restraining." Prostitution, recognized as necessary, was to be circum-
36
Jornal do Commercio [hereafter cited as JC], 16 February 1871, "Gazetilha," p. 1, col. 2;
26 February 1871, p. 1, col. 3; 12 March 1871, p. 1, col. 4; 26 March, p. 1, col. 5.
37
JC, 19 February 1871, p. 3 , col. 5; 21 February 1871, p. 2, col. 4, 22 and 23 February
1871, p. 1, col. 6; 6 March 1871, p. 1, col. 6; 24 March 1871, p. 3 , col. 3; Didrio do Rio de
Janeiro, 27 February 1871, p. 1.
38
Luiz Correa de Azevedo, "Da prostituic,ao no Rio de Janeiro," Anais Brasilienses de
Medicina, 21:6 (November 1869), 2 1 0 - 2 , 2 1 5 - 6 , 222, 2 2 3 - 4 . Catharina Cortal (1871), fls. 2 7 -
30v, 2 1 , 22v.
scribed and sanitized. Rather than waiting for the "filth of prostitution" to
work its consequences, he called for measures that would regulate its practice
by "applying hygiene . . . to these unfortunate women." Following the Euro-
peans, he advocated intervention to halt the spread of syphilis. The police,
aided by doctors, should organize prostitution by registering and giving medi-
cal examinations to the women; regulatory laws should be passed.39
What matters here is that in Brazil such recommendations had no result.
Despite an expressed sense of scandal and moral outrage, a perceived offense
to public decency, and the fear of disease, the few attempts at regulation
collapsed so that no law or ordinance was passed. In 1871 the chief of police
recalled his own failed attempt in 1869 and that of his predecessor in 1867 to
persuade the city council to legislate against the consigning of slave women to
prostitution. Unwilling to grant police the necessary powers of enforcement or
assume the costs, the council backed off. A subsequent police chief in 1875
soundly opposed legal measures as meddling attempts to register women that
would "give place to injustices, treating as prostitution that which is no more
than a simple offense against modesty, confusing whores with women of
equivocal life." According to Brazilian law, he argued, prostitutes could at
most be required to "sign an oath of good behavior."40 And there the question
of prostitution was left.
The contrast of the Brazilian case with other places on the matter of state
regulation is worth noting. Since 1802 under Napoleon, French officials had
sought to define and contain prostitution as a problem of public health, first by
requiring medical examinations of the prostitutes, then registration, and
eventually with a morals squad to enforce local ordinances and arrest women
who refused to comply. In Italy in 1860, similar measures—medical examina-
tions, registration with the police, compulsory confinement of infected wom-
en in special venereal disease hospitals—were among the scores of regula-
tions through which the prime minister attempted to consolidate power in the
newly unified nation. England's Contagious Disease Acts, enacted in the
1860s as an effort to protect sailors and soldiers in port and garrison towns
from the debilitating effects of syphilis and gonorrhea and so to protect the
39
Azevedo, "Da prostituigao," 212, 225-6. For recent discussions on the discourse of control
and zones in which promiscuous, explicit sexual behavior could be allowed because it was
contained and sanitized, see Luis Carlos Soares, "Da necessidade do bordel higienizado: tenta-
tivas de controle da prostituicao carioca no seculo XIX," and Magali G. Engel, "O medico, a
prostituta e os significados do corpo doente," in Historia e sexualidade no Brasil, Ronaldo
Vainfas, ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1986), 143-68, and 169-90; Magali G. Engel, "A cidade, as
prostitutas e os medicos," Revista do Rio de Janeiro, 1:3 (Agosto 1986), 31-39.
40
[Proposal], Rio de Janeiro, [1879], Arquivo Geral da Cididade do Rio de Janeiro, Pros-
tituic.ao, Projectos . . . da Junta Sanitaria Policial baseados nas deliberacoes da Assemblea Leg-
islativa, 1878, 1879, 1884, Cod. 4 8 - 4 - 5 9 , fls. 3, 4, 11, 16; Brazil, Ministerio da Justica,
Relatorio (1875), 184; as late as 1883, Joaquim Nabuco wrote that masters could still employ
their female slaves as prostitutes without danger of losing their property (O Abolicionismo [1883;
rpt. Recife: Fundac.ao Joaquim Nabuco, 1988], 130).
strengths of the British military, stated that any woman identified by police as
a prostitute could be examined for venereal disease and placed in a separate
hospital ward for treatment. In all three countries the reach of the state had
been extended into new spheres of conduct.41
State intervention posed a particularly difficult predicament for a slave
society. Slavery in Brazil had long meant the private, personal, and domestic
exercise of authority by one class of persons over another, so the state's
extension into the regulation of daily life was seen as competing with and thus
eroding that authority. Surveillance as such was not new. Masters had long
claimed that prerogative over slaves, but these masters were disturbed by the
assignment of new investigative powers to such public officials as police,
doctors, neighborhood inspectors. Elite Brazilians preferred the risk of dis-
ease to any solution enabling the state to limit or, as they saw it, intrude
against the will of individual householders. Tavares' efforts were not then
directed at regulating prostitution as an issue of public health.
Should we instead understand the campaign as an early experiment in
abolitionist strategy? Although individual lawyers referred to emancipation,
there is no sustained evidence that the lawyers or judges most directly in-
volved on behalf of the slave women had volunteered as spokesmen for
nascent abolitionist interests. On the contrary, it was up to Tavares to locate
lawyers willing to serve. In his letter to the chief of police, he expressed relief
that of the lawyers asked to prepare cases for the slave plaintiffs, "two or three
alone excused themselves, few fortunately."42 Yet by October another judge
noted wearily that the lawyers of "these unfortunate women . . . delay the
suits [or] neglect them altogether."43 Among those who presented cases in
41
Most useful for comparison of the details of state regulation are, Jill Harsin, Policing
Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Mary
Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860—1910 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 1986), especially 1 3 - 2 3 ; and Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Wom-
en, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alain Corbin, Women
for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, Alan Seridan, trans. (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1990). According to Richard Evans ("Prostitution, State and Society in
Imperial Germany," Past and Present, 70 [February 1976], 106—29), concern was over the
corrupting influence of an industrializing, urban environment. On the United States, see Mark T.
Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1980). For examples of two societies in which legalized prostitution was at issue,
see Mary Elizabeth Perry, "Deviant Insiders: Legalized Prostitutes and a Consciousness of
Women in Early Modern Seville," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27:1 (January
1985), 138-58; and Donna J. Guy, "White Slavery, Public Health, and the Socialist Position on
Legalized Prostitution in Argentina," Latin American Research Review, 23:3 (1988), 6 0 - 8 0 . The
Brazilian police chief's fear that ordinary women would be casually arrested did in fact occur in
England and France, causing reformers to mobilize against the regulations, see Harsin, Policing
Prostitution, and Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society.
42
Chefe de Policia da Corte, "Relatorio do Chefe de Policia," in Brazil, Ministerio da
Justic,a, Relatorio (1871), 2 1 .
43
Juizo Municipal da 2" Vara da Corte to Chefe de Policia, Rio de Janeiro, 17 October 1871,
and Chefe de Policia to Ministro da Justic,a, Rio de Janeiro, 19 October 1871, Confidencial, both
in ANSPE, I J - 6 , 518, Secretaria de Policia da Corte, Oficios com anexos, 1 8 7 0 - 7 3 .
1871, I can identify none who became prominent enough as abolitionists for
their names to be remembered. The single exception was Joaquim Saldanha
Marinho, who in 1879 became a founding member, along with the celebrated
Joaquim Nabuco and Andre Rebougas, of the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society.
But in 1871 Saldanha Marinho declined to continue the one case in which he
briefly appeared.44 At the time he was known as one of the republicans who in
the previous December had published a manifesto in which they notoriously
avoided any mention of slavery, but whose advocacy of federation implied that
each province should be allowed to decide the slavery issue according to local
convictions.45 The political views and subsequent career of Chief of Police
Francisco de Faria Lemos remain obscure, but the more visible Minister of
Justice, Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayao Lobato, to whom Lemos and
Tavares enthusiastically reported their early successes and who offered at least
tacit support, has been described by a recent historian as a "defender of
slavery."46 The young and energetic Tavares remains enigmatic, for despite
the promise of a stellar career after 1871 he disappears from our view. All that
can confidently be said is that throughout 1871 nothing in his public delibera-
tions identified him as an abolitionist.
If the campaign was not a push for either public health regulation or
abolition, then what did it signify? Briefly but plainly Tavares tells us: By
exposing and cleaning up the "vile dealings" of owners who prostituted their
slaves, he aimed to "moralize" society. By moralizar he would have under-
stood not only morality in our sense of ethical or right conduct but something
closer to moral suasion or legitimacy as distinct from a reliance on force. We
have only one reflective statement from him made in October when his tenure
as judge had ended and the campaign had petered out: "I believe I did public
morality a service." His early appeal to recognize the "modesty and decency,
to which every woman has a right, even if she is a slave" was not prelude to a
call for abolition but a reassertion of moral authority within a slave society.47
And it is here that we can discover what the campaign meant.
44
Rebecca Baird Bergstresser, "The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in Rio de Janeiro,
Brazil, 1880-1889" (Ph.D. Disser., Department of History, Stanford University, 1973), 101,
104-5; Cleria Leopoldina de Oliveira, 1871, fls. 2, 3.
45
Americo Brasiliense de Almeida Mello, ed., Os programas dos partidos e o 2° imperio.
Primeira parte: exposicao de principios (Sao Paulo: Seckler, 1878), 59-88; Sergio Buarque de
Holanda, "O Manifesto de 1870," in Historia geral da civilizacdo brasileira, tomo II: O Brasil
mondrquico, vol. V: Do imperio a republica (Sao Paulo: Difusao Europeia do Livro, 1972), 2 5 6 -
70; Jose Maria dos Santos, Os republicanos paulistas e a abolicao (Sao Paulo: Livraria Martins,
1942), 4 5 - 7 1 , 98-105.
46
Paula Beiguelman, Formacao politico do Brasil, vol. I: Teoria e acdo no pensamento
abolicionista (Sao Paulo: Pioneira, 1967), I, 120.
47
Termo de declarac.ao feito por Romualda Maria da Gloria perante o Chefe de Policia,
Francisco de Faria Lemos, Rio de Janeiro, 10 October 1871, and Segunda Delegacia de Policia,
Miguel Jose Tavares to Chefe de Policia, Francisco de Faria Lemos, Rio de Janeiro, 11 October
1871, ANSPJ, IJ, 518, Secretaria de Policia da Corte, Ofi'cios com anexos, 1870-73; Brazil,
Ministerio da Justica, Relatorio (1871), 22.
Writing about nineteenth-century France, Alain Corbin presents us with the

image of the prostitute as sewer: filth entered and was then evacuated through
her thus putrid and stinking body. Her body symbolized and incarnated infec-
tion, threatening to contaminate society.48 It is an image appropriate to the
nineteenth-century Paris in which hygienist Parent-Duchatelet first reformed
both the sewerage system and then the regulation of prostitution as matters of
public hygiene.49 The sewer-body image is useful here precisely because it
brings into focus the contrasting features of the Brazilian slave case. The slave
prostitute, rather than being blamed as depraved or wantonly promiscuous and
hence the cause of prostitution, was instead identified as victim. Forced to
lewd acts by the "damned greed" of her owner, her syphilis-riddled body was
cited not as evidence of bodily contamination or moral pollution, but as proof
of the excessive abuse that others inflicted on her.50 As slave, at once a piece
of property and a moral being deprived of the liberty to make moral choices,
she had been forced to an immoral life. That assignment of responsibility
shifted attention away from prostitution and its regulation to slavery. The
slaveowner, not the prostitute, became the central figure in the attempt by
Tavares and his supporters to rescue decent master-slave relations from the
damaging image caused by a loathsome few.
To moralize society Tavares had shrewdly gone after the sleaziest and most
vulnerable owners of slaves. He might have chosen to publicize the condition
of male slaves—the porters, for example, whose knee or hip joints became
crippled after six or seven years of carrying 132-pound sacks of coffee from
warehouse to dock or one such as Sebastiano whose master had "laid open his
back" for insolence.51 To have done that would have been to attack slavery at
its core, exposing wealthy and prominent landowning families whose rural
48
Corbin, "Commercial Sexuality," 210-2. Laura Engelstein ("Morality and the Wooden
Spoon: Russian Doctors View Syphilis, Social Class, and Sexual Behavior, 1890-1905," in The
Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Gal-
lagher and Thomas Laquer, eds. [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 169-208)
argues for an ambivalent view, for although syphilis was thought to originate in cities with
prostitutes, rural people believed the disease was spread by the sharing of drinking cups. In 1845
Cunha, Dissertacdo sobre a prostituicao, 24-33, cited in Soares, Prostituicao no Rio de Janeiro
[p. 17 of typescript], characterized wet-nurses as seductive, generating moral corruption and
hence a cause of prostitution, a view that apparently did not persist into later decades (see
Lauderdale Graham, House and Street, esp. 117-36).
49
For an informative discussion of Alexandre-Jean-Baptiste Parent-Duchatelet's works on
sewers and prostitutes, both published in 1836, see Harsin, Policing Prostitution, xv-xvi, 9 6 -
130.
50
Chefe de Policia, "Relatorio," in Brazil, Ministerio da Justice, Relatorio (1871), 21.
51
Daniel P. Kidder and James C. Fletcher, Brazil and the Brazilians Portrayed in Historical
and Descriptive Sketches (Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson, 1857), 29-30, 135; Thomas
Ewbank, Life in Brazil: or a Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm (1856; rpt.
Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1971), 117-9; Francisco Peixoto de Lacerda Werneck (Barao do
Paty do Alferes) to Bernardo Ribeiro de Carvalho, Fazenda Monte Alegre, 31 March 1856,
Arquivo Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, Sec,ao de Arquivos Particulares, A Famflia Werneck, Cod.
112, vol. 3, Copiador 1, fl. 352.
slaves, as Minister of Justice Sayao Lobato put it, "constitute the most pre-
cious capital of Brazilian agriculture, the most indispensable for stimulating
industry, for producing and sustaining the family and the state." 52 It was safer
(and not inaccurate) to cast the small-time female owner as the exemplary
violator of the correct performance of authority.
By so doing Tavares drew on a salient prejudice against the outsider. Al-
though dark-skinned Brazilian women figured noticeably among those who
traded in slave sexuality, public disgust quickly fixed on the immigrant wom-
en. Aureliano Candido Tavares Bastos, a relentless critic of slavery, com-
mented in his notes in February 1871 that the "Portuguese were much in-
volved" in the speculation in slave prostitutes persisting in Rio de Janeiro.
Even a newspaper published by foreigners, the Anglo-Brazilian Times, in
March described the trade as run "only [by] foreigners, of two nationalities
alone," meaning Portuguese and French immigrants.53 So common was that
conviction that writers to the newspapers asked that honest Portuguese like
themselves be distinguished from the others who "shame us." 54 There is no
way to know confidently which women or how many women among the
traffickers were immigrants, but the accumulation of small pieces of informa-
tion threaded through the evidence lends credence to local opinion. As poor
Europeans crowded into Brazil through the port of Rio de Janeiro, competing
in commerce and causing the slums to multiply, their presence became unset-
tling. As outsiders who made money from slavery but refused to abide by the
informal rules regulating it, Portuguese women (like their earlier male coun-
terparts in the trans-Atlantic slave trade) became the scapegoats, at once
contemptible and dangerous.
Although intended to weed out unscrupulous dealings in a single parish, the
campaign bore weightier implications. As argued by prosecuting lawyers,
cases first put before the municipal court tested the principle derived from
Roman law that prostitution of a slave so violated rightful dominion as to
require the state to withdraw ownership.55 If the judgments of the lower court
52
Speech of Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayao Lobato, 9 September 1871, in Brazil,
Congresso, Discussdo da reforma do estado servil na Camera dos Deputados e no Senado, 1871,
2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Typ. Nacional, 1871), II, 3 4 6 - 7 .
53
Arquivo de Tavares Bastos, Escravidao, vol. IV, 1870, fl. 97, and the newspaper clipping
on fl. 9 8 , Biblioteca Nacional, Secao de Manuscritos, 11, 1, 17. In the United States, the stigma
of foreignness was associated with the prostitutes, not their managers (see Egal Feldman, "Pros-
titution, Alien Women and the Progressive Imagination, 1910-1915," American Quarterly, 19
[Summer 1967], 192-206; and Lucie Chaeng Hirata, "Free, Indentured, Enslaved: Chinese
Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, 5:1 [Fall 1979], 3-29).
54
JC, 26 February 1871, p. 3, cols. 2 - 3 .
55
The lawyer for Honorata, Jose Antonio de Azevedo Castro, drew on the argument of jurist
Perdigao Malheiro, based on Roman law, that in some cases slaves ought to be freed even against
the will of their senhores, Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, 1871, fl. 14v. See Perdigao
Malheiro, A escravidao noBrasil, I, Secao 3°, "Terminacao do Cativeiro," Art. Ill, par. 9 5 , no.
8, nota 507. Citations in Leonarda Maria da Conceicao, 1871, fls. 47, 48 include: Lei, 18 agosto
1769, which "replaced Roman L a w " ; Constituicao [of Brazil, 1824]; Cod[igo Criminal ?], Liv.
had stood, they not only would have imposed the severest sanction against
owners convicted of immoral use of their slaves, but more profoundly they
would have set a precedent permitting governmental authority to intrude into
the sacrosanct exercise of personal and private power over slave property.
Although Tavares ruled openly in favor of the slave plaintiffs, subsequent
higher court judges who reviewed the cases reversed or qualified his judg-
ments. They thus impeded the use of manumission as a punitive measure and
cut short any reading of the court's actions as support for state regulation of
slavery. Further, their rulings made clear the official position on the inflam-
matory issue of indemnification. In cases that had resulted in an initial conces-
sion of freedom, an appellate judge consistently required that the owner be
indemnified even when prostitution had been admitted or convincingly
proven. The disposition of the High Court stated emphatically that emancipa-
tion without indemnification would not be endorsed. In order to protect repu-
table owners from the compromising practices of a few, Tavares had ended by
undercutting the rights of the very owners he sought to protect. With his
attempt to confiscate slave property and his stand for outright freedom sound-
ly defeated by the appellate court, Tavares' efforts to moralize society
foundered.
During the same fall and winter of 1871, however, another and related
controversy engaged the attention of the nation. Members of Parliament as-
sembled to face grimly what they perceived as a crisis over the management of
slavery. Their discussions centered precisely on the same two issues of proper-
ty and regulation—indemnification and emancipation—that had confounded
Tavares and his associates. Because the campaign discloses the dilemma over
slavery, it provides instructive commentary on the debate then underway in
Parliament. When viewed close up and in the context of local decisions, the
law passed in September eludes any tidy characterization as the next step
toward abolition.
THE DEBATE
However disquieting the questions of emancipation and indemnification were
in 1871 when Brazilians still relied on the labor of one and a half million
slaves, they were scarcely unfamiliar.56 Throughout the 1860s, Parliament,
the emperor, and his life-term advisers in the Council of State had grappled
erratically with the question of slavery. As early as 1863, the jurist Agostinho
Marques Perdigao Malheiro proposed an "emancipation of the womb" to free
the children subsequently born to slave women, a plan calculated to appease
6, tit. 7, pa. 4; Ord[enacoes Philippinas], Liv. 4, tit. 11, pa. 4; the latter is most usefully
consulted in the 1870 edition because the extensive notes relate applicability of the law to
contemporary Brazil: Almeida, comp., Codigo Philippino, 1870, Liv. 4, tit. 11, pa. 4, n. 1.
56
The estimate appears in the speech of Agostinho Marques Perdigao Malheiro, 12 July 1871,
Brazil, Congresso, Camara dos Deputados, Anais, 1871, III, 121-2.
69O SANDRA LAUDERDALE GRAHAM
with gradual emancipation both those who feared losing their labor as well as
those, including slaves, who insisted on a wider freedom. A series of piece-
meal reforms followed: The government declared freed the emancipados or
Africans captured aboard ships attempting to bring them illegally into Brazil
after 1831; slaves could no longer be publicly whipped; some government-
owned slaves were freed; and from 1869 slaves could no longer be sold at
public auction nor slave families legally split up by sale. 57 At the emperor's
request, Jose Antonio Pimenta Bueno drafted and presented in 1866 proposals
to serve as a basis for the first discussions in Council of State on ending
slavery. But no sooner had the emperor raised the issue of emancipation in his
opening speech to Parliament in 1867, a gesture that signaled approval by
members of the ministry and Council of State for Parliament to take up the
question, than they shifted support away from reform and instead supported
those on whom the government counted in the costly and bloody war that
dragged on against Paraguay—that is, men who unswervingly opposed any
tampering with the structures of slavery.58 The government had decided not to
chance dissention during wartime.
In early 1871, as Tavares began his sweep, Parliament anticipated and
prepared the agenda for the next session. With the Paraguayan War finally
ended and peace restored, energies were released to take up once again the
profoundly contentious question of emancipation as it swayed over an uncer-
tain nation. The emperor opened the way in March by forming a new ministry
with Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, visconde do Rio Branco, as prime minis-
ter. Rio Branco would prove an astute choice, for as a Conservative he could
be trusted by those who saw peril in emancipation while gaining the confi-
dence and compromise of Liberals who chafed for decisive measures that in
their view were essential in saving the nation from ruin. Within the powerful
Council of State he could count on the long-rehearsed arguments of Pimenta
Bueno. 59 In May, in his speech from the throne, the emperor declared that
"reform of the legislation on the servile condition should not continue to be an
indefinite and uncertain national aspiration. It is time to resolve this ques-
57
Decreto no. 1695, 15 September 1869, Leis do Brasil, especially Arts. 1 and 2; although
focused on the role of Jose Thomaz Nabuco, the most comprehensive history is Joaquim Nabuco,
Urn estadista do imperio (1897-99; rpt. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Aguilar, 1975), especially
606-746; Beiguelman, Formacdo politico, 110-7; in English a useful consideration of these
measures is Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-88 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1972), 73-76.
58
Paula Beiguelman, "O Encaminhamento politico do problema da escravidao no imperio,"
in Historia geral da civilizacao brasileira, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, ed., tomo II: O Brasil
mondrquico, vol. Ill: Reacoes e transacoes (Sao Paulo: Difusao Europeia do Livro, 1969), 205;
Beiguelman, Formacao politico, I, 110-1; 113-7; Jose Maria da Silva Paranhos, barao do Rio
Branco 2°, O visconde do Rio Branco (Rio de Janeiro: "A Noite" Editora, n.d.), 175-80; Jos6
Maria dos Santos, A politico geral do Brasil (Sao Paulo: J. Magalhaes, 1930), 101.
59
Paranhos, O visconde do Rio Branco, 194-7; Beiguelman, Formagdo politico, pp. 117-21;
Joao Camillo de Oliveira Torres, O Conselho de Estado (Rio de Janeiro: Edic,6es GRD, 1965), 44.
SLAVERY AND THE BRAZILIAN LAW OF 1871 69I
tion." Nine days later the minister of agriculture introduced in the chamber of
deputies a bill calling for emancipation of the children subsequently born to
slave women. And by the end of the month the emperor departed for an
extended trip to Europe, leaving his daughter Princess Isabel as regent; and by
his absence he assured politicians that the current ministry would not be
replaced.60 Thus empowered, the prime minister and Parliament proceeded.
To our ears more than 100 years later, the apprehensions—and the vocabu-
laries used to express those apprehensions—on both sides were so identical in
the discussions which followed that they sound scarcely like a debate at all.
All agreed that not only property, but safety and social order were in jeopardy.
The question was how best to deal with the threat. Those who opposed
emancipation—and all understood that emancipation meant a gradual ending
of slavery by freeing particular groups of slaves rather than an immediate or
complete abolition of the institution—saw it as carrying the country to "com-
plete ruin." With such measures, said a rural landowner and deputy from the
coffee planting district, "discipline, the only moral bond that ties the slave to
the master, [and] respect, which enforces his superiority, naturally weaken."
How can the planter, he asked, maintain his establishment once "these bonds
of subordination slacken and break?" 61 Perdigao Malheiro, reversing his
position of nine years earlier as the author of the first "emancipation of the
womb" proposal, spoke forcefully against this one. Fazendeiros, he said, did
not oppose freedom as their actions demonstrated: They freed slaves every day
and had voluntarily given slaves to the nation as soldiers during the war. What
they feared, according to Malheiro, was that without the guarantee of law they
would become vulnerable through a "loss of moral strength." Such an
"abrupt and violent breaking" of the master's authority would result in the
"immediate disobedience of the slaves." He bleakly predicted that insurrec-
tion could spread through adjoining provinces "like fire in a dry field."62
Supporters of the plan did not deny that they faced deeply troubling times.
"We know," said Pimenta Bueno, "what insurrection is and also how many
assassinations are committed annually, depriving landowning families of their
chefes and many times ruining their fortunes." But calling slavery "a violence
that cannot be maintained except by violence," he saw in freedom the thin
hope of security and order. He shared with the minister of justice the in-
terpretation that "far from being a plan for abolition," the bill was "truly a
measure intended to protect the agriculture of the country and maintain the
60
Dom Pedro II, "Fala do trono na abertura da Assembleia Geral, 3 maio 1871," in [Brazil,
Congresso], Falas do trono desde o ano de 1823 ate o ano de 1889 (Sao Paulo: Melhoramentos,
1977), 397; Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1 July 1871, p. 149; Beiguelman, Formcao politico, I, 121.
61
Speech of Joao de Almeida Pereira, 2 August 1871, Brazil, Congresso, Camara dos Depu-
tados, Amis, 1871, IV, 25, 31-32.
62
Speech of Agostinho Marques Perdigao Malheiro, 10 July 1871 and 12 July 1871, Brazil,
Congresso, Camara dos Deputados, Anais, 1871, HI, 52, 122.
organization of labor."63 They expressed a collective longing for an eventual

end to slavery by a "peaceful revolution" through the use of means that would
be effective but not "disturbing to our society."64
At the same time everyone understood what no one voiced: the chilling
realization that restless slaves were increasingly demanding their individual
freedom. The threat of defiance was so feared that even the discussion of
dismantling slavery seemed explosive. In 1867, Sayao Lobato thought the
issue so grave that it should be debated only in closed session to avoid what he
termed "the disastrous consequences that necessarily would result from reck-
less and dangerous publicity."65 In 1871 their language was elliptical: They
spoke of "insurrection" or "disorganization of labor" without using the word
slave. But if contemporaries shrank from naming the object of their dread,
that does not explain why historians have omitted to examine what lay behind
those muted fears. Only Warren Dean dismissed the usual explanations that
historians have advanced—the "personal political struggles of the parliamen-
tary chiefs, the altruism of the emperor, or tangential issues such as region-
alism," the belief that free labor was more productive, or abolitionist no-
tions—and Dean has argued that what had changed most were the slaves
themselves. As the channels of manumission for individual slaves became
blocked and more Creole and mulatto slaves ambitiously and aggressively
sought their freedom, they effectively questioned the legitimacy of their bond-
age. 66 It was exactly this fact of slaves as authors of their own actions,
influencing their own condition, that men of Parliament refused to acknowl-
edge in their debates but were required by fear to accommodate in the bill they
finally passed.
What they got at the end of five months of tempestuous and impassioned
debate became known as the Rio Branco Law or Law of the Free Womb. By
ambiguously freeing the children henceforth born to slave mothers and
providing for an emancipation fund from which to sponsor a limited man-
umission of adult slaves, the law deepened more than it resolved existing
tensions. The bill simultaneously yet paradoxically sought to buttress the
position of landowners and to placate a restless, rural labor force by making
individual freedom more accessible. The bill's various provisions included
establishing a slave's right to accumulate savings and fixing a slave's value
and the maximum number of years that he or she must work to pay off the
63
Speeches of Jose Antonio Pimenta Bueno and Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayao
Lobato, 9 September 1871, in Brazil, Congresso, Discussao da reforma do estado servil, II,
3 3 0 - 1 and 345.
64
Candido Mendes de Almeida, in Brazil, Congresso, Discussao da reforma do estado servil,
II, 522.
65
Quoted in the speech of Francisco de Paula de Negreiros Sayao Lobato, 31 May 1871, in
Brazil, Congresso, Discussao da reforma do estado servil, I, 44.
66
Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820-1920 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1976), especially 124-30; on regionalism, see Conrad, The Destruction of
Brazilian Slavery, especially 9 0 - 1 0 5 .
price of freedom.67 Although provisions of the bill carried over to urban

slaves, they were never the principal preoccupation of the senators and depu-
ties, who voted 93 to 39 for its passage.68 Inspired by fear, the Law of the
Free Womb satisfied neither conservatives who braced themselves for its
consequences nor liberals who thought it did too little, too late.
As with the Tavares campaign, nothing here suggests that legislators under-
stood passage of this law as a further step in a steady move toward the
abolition of slavery. Instead, they recognized the law as an inconclusive, even
divisive, attempt to grapple with what they nonetheless agreed was a grave
crisis in relations between masters and slaves. And like Tavares, members of
Parliament reached an impasse. In order to defend the organization of labor by
affirming the moral authority and hence the legitimacy of property owners,
they had cautiously made freedom available for certain categories of slaves.
As lawmakers of the nation, and with the approval of the emperor and the
Council of State, they, unlike Tavares, possessed the power to circumscribe
the authority of slaveowners. They did not, however, give teeth to the law by
providing for its effective enforcement, so that the carrying out of the law
remained in the arbitrary hands of the planters. They had found it necessary to
go so far; they refused to go further.
Despite the ways in which judicial language reduces and distorts actual
experience, we gain a revised understanding of female slave experience
through these legal records. Besides the overwork, the illness, or the painful
loss of children, we see how commercial relations could produce bonds be-
tween prostitutes and clients. Honorata's story demonstrates solidarities built
on the commonalities of race and class even more than sex. Against the risk of
certain punishment, Honorata appears as an acting, determined woman, able
to call on male allies when needed. Her immediate and unequivocal enemy
remained her female owner.
The Tavares campaign differently reveals the particularities of a slave soci-
ety. Officials who attempted to clean up slave prostitution inverted the stan-
dard European accusation: Instead of blaming prostitution on the uncontrolled
sexuality of the women, these Brazilians identified slave prostitutes as victims
of their owners' greed. By "immoral abuse" such owners not only damaged
their slaves but threatened to undo the "tie of respect and obedience that ought
to connect" owner and slave, thus jeopardizing the legitimacy of all
67
Lei no. 2040, 28 September 1871, Leis do Brasil, especially Art. 1, Art. 4, pars. 1, 2, 3.
An English translation of the complete text taken from the British and Foreign State Papers, LXII
(1871-72), 6 1 6 - 2 0 , appears in Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, Appendix II, 3 0 5 -
9.
68
Buarque de Holanda, Historia geral, tomo II: O Brasil mondrquico, vol. V: Do imperio a
republica, 144.
slaveowners.69 We witness Tavares' struggle to affirm correct behavior in

daily conduct and discover the cultural ways by which he was directed to do
so.
The episode of the campaign mirrors, but in reverse, the debates in Parlia-
ment. Whereas Tavares and his associates attempted to punish a band of
disreputable slaveowners for an unconscionable use of their slaves, in Parlia-
ment prominent men sought to defend powerful slaveowners against restive
slaves. Threaded through their apparently contrary actions, however, ran
identical concerns: a determined conservation of moral order together with a
deep ambivalence over public regulation in a society that continued to rely on
the private ownership of slaves.
69
Maria Elenteria Borges de Albuquerque, 1872, fls. 14-14v.

Graham1991 Slavery's Impasse

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Graham1991 Slavery's Impasse

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Slavery's Impasse: Slave Prostitutes,

Small-Time Mistresses, and the

some caution. In Brazil a trial consisted of reviewing written evidence and

Company.8 A few went directly to a waiting mistress who personally arranged

butcher who, it is said, already has a concubine . . . [and] returning [money

In reply to the charges, Maria Elenteria de Albuquerque put up a deter-

tribute to his poverty, honesty, youth, and wisdom.36 Predictably, however,

Writing about nineteenth-century France, Alain Corbin presents us with the

organization of labor."63 They expressed a collective longing for an eventual

price of freedom.67 Although provisions of the bill carried over to urban

slaveowners.69 We witness Tavares' struggle to affirm correct behavior in

You might also like