GRINBERG 2016 Two Enslavements of Rufina

Hispanic American Historical Review
The Two Enslavements of Rufina: Slavery

and International Relations on the Southern
Border of Nineteenth-Century Brazil
Keila Grinberg
Abstract As the Atlantic slave trade came to an end in Brazil in the 1850s, a new form of trafficking began
across the borders of Brazil and its neighboring countries. Free persons—mainly women and children living
in small communities in Uruguay and Argentina—were kidnapped to be sold as slaves in Brazil. By analyzing
the illegal enslavement of the African Rufina and her family along the border between Brazil and Uruguay in
1854, this study argues that Brazilian catchers opened up a new frontier of enslavement, kidnapping free
persons in countries where slavery was already abolished. The kidnappings and the diplomatic problems that
they generated brought tensions to the development of international relations between Brazil, Uruguay,
Argentina, and Britain in the 1850s and 1860s.
The Imprisonment of Rufina
O n May 22, 1854, in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul
province in the Brazilian empire, a black woman named Rufina and her
daughter Francisca were brought to the police deputy’s residence, where
Laurindo José da Costa had already been questioned on what, at the time, was
nothing more than a suspicion. The day before, the provincial president had
received a complaint that a boat crossing the Jacuı́ River to Porto Alegre was
carrying a man who identified himself as the master of Rufina and her two
children—the 13-year-old Francisca and son Brum, who was about 6 months
Translated from the Portuguese by Kristin McGuire.—eds.
Previous versions of this essay were presented at the University of Chicago’s Latin American
History Workshop, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, College Park, the
University of Michigan, and the Universidade de São Paulo. I would like to thank Anita
Almeida, Ira Berlin, Sueann Caulfield, Brodie Fischer, Jean Hébrard, Iris Kantor, Herbert
Klein, Maria Helena Machado, Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Hebe Mattos, João José Reis,
Ricardo Salles, Claudia Santos, Lilia Schwarcz, Rebecca Scott, Mariza de Carvalho Soares,
Mauricio Tenorio, Barbara Weinstein, Daryle Williams, and the journal’s anonymous
readers for their useful comments and suggestions.
Hispanic American Historical Review 96:2

doi 10.1215/00182168-3484173 Ó 2016 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press

260 HAHR / May / Grinberg
old and not yet baptized—who were accompanying him. Suspected of not
being their master, Laurindo was arrested.
Laurindo José da Costa was a 40-year-old literate white man. The son of
Francisco José da Costa and Emerenciana Maria da Conceição, he was born in
Rio Grande do Sul and currently resided in the district of Canguçu. He told
police that he was bringing the slave Rufina and her children from his home to
São Leopoldo, where a relative was going to buy them. He claimed that he had
bought Rufina and her children in Bagé, on the eve of his departure, from a
certain Captain Fermiano Favilha, who had supposedly obtained them from the
late João José Cabral in Uruguaiana, in the very south of the Brazilian empire.1
Laurindo claimed to have left the papers of sale proving his lawful possession of
the slave at home, but that João Lourenço Torres, his cousin and Rufina’s future
owner, could guarantee his rightful conduct, if necessary. It was not. Laurindo
José da Costa was allowed to leave the prison to retrieve the documents, with the
promise that he would return with them. Some time later, the provincial
president explained that the police deputy had only let Laurindo leave because
“he was not aware of this new type of trafficking.”2
Laurindo left, but Rufina, Francisca, and the baby stayed. Interrogated in
the absence of their alleged master, mother and daughter told a very different
story from Laurindo. Rufina claimed to reside in Passo Pereira, a town in
Uruguay on the coast of Rı́o Negro near Tacuarembó, on the border with
Brazil. She lived with a man named Matheus and her six children, including
Francisca and Brum. She said that she was freed and that her freedom papers,
like those of her whole family, were in the hands of Batista de Castro, her friend
and neighbor with whom she had left two of her other children, Ignacio and
Catharina. She reported that she and Matheus, with whom she had lived for
many years, had been slaves of Lieutenant Colonel João José Cabral and his wife
Francisca, but that when those two died, Rufina and her family considered
themselves freed. As the master’s sons lived in Montevideo and wanted nothing
to do with the former slaves—slavery was illegal at that point in Uruguay—
Rufina and her family went to live nearby, at the house of Manoel Cardoso, and
worked for a Brazilian named Marcos Leiva. She never would have left there,
Rufina said, if she hadn’t been kidnapped.
1. The narrative of Rufina’s case is based on Relatório; criminal case no. 3368, 1855,
Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre (hereafter cited as APERS),
First Civil and Criminal Court, Bagé (hereafter cited as FCCCB), packet 88; O Rio-Grandense
(Porto Alegre), 14–15 June 1854; Diário do Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro), 5 Sept. 1854.
2. Relatório, 8–9.

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 261
Rufina remembered that it was a March night (she wasn’t sure of the exact
day) when her ranch was invaded and she, Matheus, Francisca, baby Brum, and
two other small children, Maria do Pilar and Pantaleão, were caught by a group
offour Brazilian men, led by a white man called Fermiano. This was the captain
Fermiano Favilha, whose real name, they later learned, was Fermiano José de
Mello.3 Two Indians and a mulatto were with him, all of whom spoke Portu-
guese. The Brazilians forced them to walk all night. At dawn, they crossed the
Tarariras (or Traı́ra) stream and continued on a path so narrow that they had to
crawl through the branches. At the end of that road, one of the four men, the
Indian Jacinto, departed from the group, taking Matheus with him. The other
three continued with Rufina and her four children. After three weeks of walking
at night and hiding in the bushes during the day, they reached Canguçu, where
they were delivered to a man named Joaquim da Silva Soares. Two months later,
Captain Fermiano arrived with Laurindo José da Costa, to whom Rufina,
Francisca, and Brum were sold; Maria do Pilar and Pantaleão ended up in the
town of Piratini.
Realizing that Rufina’s story was more plausible than Laurindo José da
Costa’s, Porto Alegre’s police deputy issued an arrest warrant for Fermiano José
de Mello. He also issued an order for Rufina’s two children to be located, as they
too had surely been sold into slavery. The deputy sent Rufina and her children
to the orphans’ judge the day after the interrogation, emphasizing that their
statements “clearly show that the said blacks are freed,” and left it to the judge
to determine their destiny.4 The judge submitted a petition that was accepted
and referred for trial, opening the Brazilian court’s criminal case against Fer-
miano José de Mello for the crime of reducing a free person to slavery, outlined
in Article 179 of the Criminal Code of the Brazilian Empire.5
In this essay, I analyze kidnappings of people who, like Rufina, lived in the
border area between Brazil and Uruguay by slave catchers who brought them by
force to Rio Grande do Sul to be sold as slaves in Brazil. Although this had been
happening since at least the mid-eighteenth century, in the 1840s, with
increasing restraints on the Atlantic slave trade (which had been illegal in Brazil
since 1831), these events began to draw the attention of the authorities, causing
extensive negotiations and diplomatic conflicts between Brazil, Uruguay,
Argentina, and Britain. Starting with the illegal enslavement of Rufina and her
3. When first asked, Fermiano said that his real name was Fermiano José de Mello,
but he was called Fermiano Faviela (or Favilha, as it appears in some documents). Criminal
case no. 3368, APERS, FCCCB, packet 88, fol. 4v.
4. Police deputy to the orphans’ judge, 23 May 1854, copied in ibid., fol. 9.
5. Brazil, Coleção.

children, I argue that these crimes were an attempt to set up a local network of
trafficking in human beings as a counterpoint to the Atlantic trade in Africans,
which had been banned by the Brazilian government again in 1850 and defin-
itively brought to an end in the second half of that decade.
The existence of this network on the Brazil-Uruguay border was possible
not only because of the clear historical connections between these two countries
but also because of the different ways that the processes of independence and
abolition took place in the Brazilian empire and the Spanish republics of South
America. Slavery was deeply embedded throughout Brazil and Spanish America
in the early nineteenth century. In Brazil, the expansion of the coffee economy
increased the demand for slaves, and masters were ready to pay high prices for
captive Africans. At the same time, after the revolution of Saint-Domingue at
the turn of the nineteenth century and the end of the slave trade in the North
Atlantic in 1808, the arrival ports in South America became even more
important; in cities such as Montevideo and Buenos Aires, at the entrance of the
Rı́o de la Plata, African slaves were sold and then sent to places such as the
mining areas of Peru.
But the early 1800s, when the largest number of African slaves was cir-
culating across the border between the Portuguese and Spanish empires, also
marked the beginning of the independence movements in South America. Soon
after Argentina’s first attempt to gain independence in 1811, Argentines sought
to abolish slave trafficking and declared that all those born in the new country
would be free, even if they were children of slaves. Even though this decision
was reversed, it was clear from the beginning of the independence process in
Spanish America that despite the opposition of masters and merchants, inde-
pendence sooner or later would mean the abolition of slavery. By 1825, almost
all countries of Spanish America had banned the importation of slaves from
Africa and had approved emancipation laws, whether gradual or immediate.6
As we know, the opposite happened in Brazil. Independence did not bring
speeches calling for slavery’s abolition; indeed, the coffee production boom in
the Paraı́ba Valley spurred a considerable expansion of slavery. Despite British
opposition to the slave trade, 2.5 million enslaved Africans were brought to
several Brazilian ports during the first half of the nineteenth century. This
meant that Brazilian authorities—especially those in Rio Grande do Sul, whose
physical border with Uruguay and Argentina was easily crossed—saw each
proposal or measure related to slave emancipation in any South American
6. On independence movements in connection with the abolition of slavery in South

America, see Andrews, Afro-Latin America.

country as a threat. Governing authorities and masters had reason for concern:
slaves had already been escaping from Brazil to neighboring countries in the
late eighteenth century, but with the abolition of slavery in Uruguay in the
1840s (by the Colorados in 1842 and the Blancos in 1846, during the Uru-
guayan Civil War) and in Argentina in 1853, this movement increased.
Thus, primarily between the 1840s and 1860s, several families of slaves and
freedpersons lived in the border area between the Empire of Brazil and the
republics of Uruguay and Argentina, in a double and ambiguous situation. To
the governments of Uruguay and Argentina, they were free, because they had
stepped on free soil by crossing the border, an action sufficient to ensure a
change of legal status. However, in the eyes of Brazilian authorities and mas-
ters, they were runaway slaves who should be returned to Brazil. This situation
was compounded by the existence of conflicting laws and attitudes in Brazil.
On the one hand, there was the law of November 7, 1831, the first to ban the
slave trade to Brazil, which established that “all slaves who enter the territory or
ports of Brazil from outside are free,” with the exception of runaways. How-
ever, throughout the 1850s, judges deciding cases based on this law tended to
regard captives who had left the country, even without a master’s consent, as
freedpersons.
But crossing the border did not always mean obtaining freedom: after
1850, with the definitive end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil, the border area
was frequently invaded by slave catchers who kidnapped so-called “people of
color,” especially children, to be baptized in Rio Grande do Sul as slaves and
then sold.7 These people, like Rufina, were not necessarily themselves fugitives
from Brazil or descendants of fugitives; often the families kidnapped had been
established as free in Uruguay or Argentina for generations.
The crossing of slaves over borders in the Americas—flights “beyond the
border,” to use the expression coined by Silmei de Sant’Ana Petiz—has received
considerable attention in the historiography of slavery in the Americas, in part
because of the number of robberies and kidnappings involved.8 Recent studies
show that the movement of enslaved people on the borders of the Brazilian
empire was part of a much broader transnational movement found throughout
the Americas wherever people were being held in slavery. Studies of Brazil’s
northern border in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries show that there
were so many captives who had escaped, especially from Pará to French Guiana,
that a treaty was signed between Portugal and France for the reciprocal
7. Brazil, Coleção.
8. Petiz, Buscando.

extradition of slaves.9 Escape across borders was also common in the Caribbean
when one island was divided between two different powers. Throughout the
eighteenth century in Saint-Domingue, for example, French colonial author-
ities established troops comprised of former slaves to recover runaway slaves
fleeing to Santo Domingo, a Spanish colony on the same island. Years later, in
1791, the revolution of Saint-Domingue displaced refugees initially to Santo
Domingo and then to Cuba and New Orleans. In cases like these, escape across
the border meant not only distance from a master but also the pursuit of free
soil, which could engender a legal change in status from slave to free or freed.10
The passage of slaves across borders throughout Spanish America was thus
nothing new in the nineteenth century. The political and social turmoil, along
with rivalries between powers, deeply influenced the movement of slaves and
how slaves were received in various locations. But with the beginning of
independence and the consequent drive for abolition in those countries, this
movement across borders gained new meaning and importance. It was no
longer possible, as it was during the colonial period, to address this primarily as
a rivalry between the Portuguese and Spanish empires. The conflict was now
between those consolidating territories of freedom and those trying to main-
tain, if not strengthen, territories of slavery, of which Brazil was one of the
Americas’ strongest defenders.
In the historiography of slavery in the nineteenth-century United States,
scholars have paid significant attention to slaves who escaped in order to achieve
freedom. In large part, this is due to the popularity of stories about the
Underground Railroad, which emphasize not only the passage of slaves to US
states and Canadian provinces free from slavery but also the risks and dangers
of reenslavement and sale to the South.11 Slave escape across national borders,
9. On slave escapes “beyond the frontier” of north Brazil in the colonial period, see
Gomes, “ ‘Safe Haven’ ”; Acevedo Marin and Gomes, “Reconfigurações coloniais.” On
indigenous people crossing the border during the colonial period, see Almeida and Ortelli,
“Atravesando fronteras”; Bezerra Neto, “Ousados”; Caldeira, “À procura.” For similar cases
on the southern border, see Grinberg, “Slavery”; Grinberg and Caé, “Escravidão.”
10. There are many studies on the transnational history of slavery in the Caribbean,
especially for the late eighteenth century; the following list is by no means exhaustive. See,
for example, Ghachem, Old Regime; Geggus and Fiering, World; Geggus, Impact; Dubois,
Colony; Landers, “Spanish Sanctuary”; Scott and Hébrard, Freedom Papers; Ferrer, Freedom’s
Mirror. On similar cases in other regions, such as the United States, Angola, and Spain, see
the articles in Peabody and Grinberg, “Free Soil.”
11. The historiography on the Underground Railroad is extensive. For a
historiographical overview and analysis, see Foner, Gateway. Research on escapes,
kidnapping, and illegal slavery in the United States gained broader public prominence

by contrast, has not received the same attention in works on slavery in Brazil and
neighboring republics. This article is a contribution to research on this topic, in
particular focusing on the impact of legal cases such as Rufina’s on relations
between the countries involved. In this sense, the article aligns with current
work by a number of historians who have looked at border areas, most of them
in Rio Grande do Sul, in order to make arguments about microhistory, political
history, and international relations.12
The Second Enslavement of Rufina
The kidnapping of Rufina in 1854 was her second enslavement. A few days after
her detention, under the care of the orphans’ judge and in the presence of
guardian Dr. João Capistrano de Miranda e Castro, Rufina claimed that her
partner, Matheus, was “from Mina coast” and that she herself was Mina.13 In all
the documents about Rufina, spread across a number of archives, this is the only
mention of her African origin. Yet even though we have no further information
about her arrival to the Americas, it is possible to make some inferences based
upon the experience of slavery in nineteenth-century Brazil and the broader
Atlantic world.
It was not particularly unusual to find Africans on the Uruguay-Brazil
border in the mid-1850s, but it should have been. It was there that Rufina came
under the power of her first and only master, the lieutenant colonel of the
Colorado Party, João José Cabral, at a time when the slave trade had already
been made illegal. We don’t know Rufina’s exact age; neither the police deputy
nor the orphans’ judge asked her this, perhaps to avoid facing the issue of
Africans’ unlawful entry into the country.14 We can assume, however, that if
with the release of the film Twelve Years a Slave (2013), based on the book by Solomon
Northup. Other works on the topic include, among many others, Schafer, Becoming Free;
Wong, Neither Fugitive; Lubet, Fugitive Justice.
12. Monsma and Fernandes, “Fragile Liberty”; Grinberg, As fronteiras; Lima, “ ‘A
nefanda pirataria’ ”; Caratti, O solo; Palermo, “Secuestros y tráfico.”
13. Criminal case no. 3368, 1855, APERS, FCCCB, packet 88. According to the
lawsuit, Rufina, Francisca, and Brum were entrusted to a “person of confidence.” It is
reasonable to assume that this was the court-appointed guardian João Capistrano de Miranda
e Castro, a lawyer who graduated from the Faculty of Law at the Universidade de São
Paulo in 1834 and who, since 1836, was on a list for the orphans’ judge. In addition to his legal
work, he held several public positions, including deputy, prosecutor, and director general
of public instruction. He was vice president of Rio Grande do Sul several times and
temporarily assumed the presidency in 1848 and 1870. See Franco, Porto Alegre.
14. On the illegality of slaves’ entry into Brazil after 1831, see Mamigonian and
Grinberg, “ ‘Para inglês ver?’ ”; Mamigonian, “O estado nacional.”

Francisca, Rufina’s eldest child, was 13 or 14 at the time that they were kid-
napped, then Rufina must have been at least 30 years old and perhaps no more
than 35, as the youngest of her six children was only 6 months old in 1854.
Rufina was thus likely born between 1820 and 1825 and was between 15 and 20
years old when she gave birth to Francisca. Given that she told the orphans’
judge that she remembered being purchased by Cabral when she was “still a
kid,” at “the time when there was slavery in Uruguay”—that is, before the
1840s—it is likely that she arrived to America sometime in the early 1830s.15
As Rufina referred to herself as Mina, she probably embarked from
somewhere on the coast of West Africa, probably Lagos, the main port for
exporting Africans from the region after 1825.16 In other words, she embarked
just north of the equator, where the slave trade had been banned since 1815 by
agreements that resulted from British pressure on Portugal and Spain during
the Congress of Vienna.17 Her place of birth, however, is difficult to determine.
Among the various African ethnic denominations, the term Mina is especially
complex, as its meaning has varied over time and from region to region in the
Americas. In Brazil (and probably in Uruguay as well, since the slave trade
routes in both countries were controlled by the same network), Mina is asso-
ciated with Africans coming from the Bight of Benin. In the eighteenth century,
it usually referred to speakers of Gbe languages; in the nineteenth century, the
term could also be used for those who spoke Yoruba.18
Even without knowing her mother tongue and thus her birthplace, if
Rufina embarked from Lagos, we can attribute her enslavement to the social
disruption resulting from the various wars in the region between the late
eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century. There was constant belligerence as
the Oyo Empire, at the time the main supplier of slaves to the Atlantic market,
fell into decline and the city of Ilorin took over as the leading source for slaves.
These conflicts led to the illegal enslavement of thousands of people who were
15. Interrogation, 30 May 1854, copied in criminal case no. 3368, 1855, APERS,
FCCCB, packet 88, fols. 9–10.
16. During the last decade of the transatlantic slave trade, Uidá and Lagos were the
exit ports for nearly 90 percent of Africans who embarked from the Slave Coast; with the
decline of Uidá in the first half of the nineteenth century and the increased presence of
Brazilian dealers in Lagos, this latter port became the region’s largest exporter of slaves. Eltis,
“Diaspora,” 25.
17. To the south of the equator, the region that supplied slaves to the Portuguese and
Spanish Americas, the trade continued. See Bethell, A abolição; Berbel, Marquese, and
Parron, Escravidão.
18. Soares, Rotas atlânticas, 17; Soares, “From Gbe to Yoruba”; Reis and Mamigonian,
“Nagô and Mina”; Hall, “African Ethnicities.”

the victims of kidnappings, raids, and banditry. We can be quite certain that
Rufina’s experience of being kidnapped in Uruguay differed little from the
reality that she had known from an early age in Africa.19
Although we also don’t know the exact route that Rufina took to reach
northern Uruguay, there were limited possibilities: she could have landed in
Brazil and from there been taken to Montevideo; she could have arrived directly
in Montevideo; or, though unlikely, she could have landed in some Brazilian
port and been taken to Rio Grande do Sul, where she would have been bought
by Cabral. What makes the first two hypotheses more plausible is the fact that
since 1791, with the opening of the ports on the Rı́o de la Plata to the slave trade,
Montevideo merchants built strong relationships with Portuguese Brazilian
traders, who were the most experienced in the slave trade in the South Atlan-
tic.20 Even if the Montevideo merchants had as strong relations with the traders
at the Rio de Janeiro market as with those in Rio Grande do Sul, it is unlikely
that Rufina first arrived in Rio de Janeiro province, because this would mean
that she would have had other masters before being sold to Cabral, which she
said was not the case.21 According to data collected by Alex Borucki, 712
voyages were made between 1777 and 1812 on the route connecting Brazil,
Africa, and Montevideo, bringing at least 70,000 Africans to the Rı́o de la Plata
basin.22 Only 160 of these ships did not stop in Brazil. Apparently traders,
buyers, and authorities deliberately ignored the 1751 decree by the Portuguese
court prohibiting the export of slaves from the Portuguese empire.23
19. Curtin, “West African Coast,” 203–8; O’Hear, “Enslavement”; Reis, Rebelião
escrava. While I do not discuss the issue here, it can be argued that the kidnappings and
slave expeditions that occurred in the north of Uruguay and Argentina, close to the border
with Brazil, resembled the processes of enslavement happening in West and West Central
Africa. The Brazilian border with these countries could thus be considered a new frontier of
slavery, a term defined by Joseph Miller and often used in Africanist historiography. See
Miller, Way of Death; Lovejoy, A escravidão; Candido, “Enslaving Frontiers.”
20. Although it was established in 1791 that Montevideo would be the only port of
entry for slaves into the Rı́o de la Plata, Buenos Aires also continued receiving Africans;
however, they came through connections with merchants who controlled the routes in Chile
and Peru. Borucki, “Slave Trade”; Adelman, Sovereignty; Elliott, Empires.
21. Osório, “Esclavos”; Berute, “Dos escravos.”
22. The arrival of these Africans to the Rı́o de la Plata, according to Borucki, was
the most important demographic event in the region since the beginning of Iberian
colonization. Montevideo’s total population increased 119 percent between 1791 and 1810,
while the slave population increased 486 percent. Borucki, “Slave Trade.”
23. Alvará para que se não levem negros dos portos do mar para terras que não sejam dos
domı́nios portugueses (law, 14 Oct. 1751).

Given the many conflicts in which the region was involved between 1812
and 1828, it is impossible to determine the ports to which slaves arrived. But
after the proclamation of Uruguayan independence, relations between Brazil-
ian and Uruguayan traders were once again strengthened, just as the slave
trade became illegal in both countries. The negotiations between Britain and
the newly created Empire of Brazil on ending the slave trade began with the
former recognizing Brazilian independence. In 1826, an agreement—written
by Robert Gordon (British ambassador to the court) and the Marquês de
Inhambupe (minister of foreign affairs) and ratified by Dom Pedro I—called
for slavery’s abolition in three years. The law approved on November 7, 1831,
prohibited slaves’ entry into the country and granted freedom to Africans
illegally enslaved after that date; the law did not, however, make the sale
of contraband slaves a crime of piracy, as the British wanted. Still, the law
held merchants, commanders, and other workers on slave ships, as well as
intermediaries and buyers of enslaved Africans, criminally responsible for
their actions. As already established in the 1826 convention, seized slave
ships were subject to prosecution and trial by a joint commission from Brazil
and Britain.24
Thus starting in 1826, people began to believe that the slave trade would
soon be stopped. As a result, a rush ensued to enslave Africans and sell them in
Brazil; the general price of slaves increased, and slave ships more frequently
arrived between 1826 and 1830 in various regions of the country.25 Although
the number of Africans imported as slaves had diminished dramatically after the
law’s enactment, by the mid-1830s trafficking of enslaved Africans, now
transformed into smuggling, was again on the rise.
In Uruguay, the slave trade to the Rı́o de la Plata basin had been under
attack since 1812, when it was banned by the Provincias Unidas del Rı́o de la
Plata (which at that time consisted of Argentina and Uruguay).26 However,
during the Luso-Brazilian occupation of the region, from 1817 to 1828, Afri-
cans continued to be brought into the country. Then, in 1825, during the
Cisplatine War (which resulted in Uruguay’s independence), the provisional
government made the Atlantic slave trade illegal. This measure was without
much success, however, since it was not valid in Montevideo or Colonia del
Sacramento, which were still occupied by the Portuguese and Brazilians. In
24. Bethell, A abolição.

25. Ibid.; Conrad, Tumbeiros; Florentino, Em costas negras; Parron, A polı́tica;
Mamigonian and Grinberg, “ ‘Para inglês ver?’ ”
26. Borucki, “Slave Trade.”

1830, the Uruguayan constitution banned the slave trade and established the
Law of the Free Womb, following other Latin American republics.27
While it is impossible to dissociate Uruguayan independence from the
beginning of the emancipation of the slaves, it is also impossible to ignore the
connection between actions toward abolition and the resumption of slave
trafficking in the 1830s. It was precisely in these years, when the slave trade was
already illegal in Brazil, that the ties between Brazilian and Uruguayan traf-
fickers were strengthened. Brazilian traffickers started to stop in Montevideo on
outward or return journeys in order to avoid any references in the official
Brazilian records to arrivals and departures from Africa and to throw off the
British. Thomas Hood, the British consul in Montevideo, highlighted the
arrival of 18 Portuguese or Brazilian ships to the city between November 1832
and March 1835. The consul’s complaints did nothing, however, because
trafficking continued. Alex Borucki estimates that 12 percent of all Africans
who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in the 1830s went through Montevideo.28
At the same time, slaves who arrived in Uruguay in the 1830s were brought
in small groups from Brazil—data from Rio de Janeiro shows that at least 201
slaves were sent to the province via Montevideo between 1830 and 1833—or, in
even greater numbers, directly from Africa by Brazilian merchants.29 Between
1832 and 1834, as a way to get around the constitutional provisions prohibiting
the slave trade to Uruguay, the Uruguayan government hired a group of Bra-
zilian merchants to bring “African colonists.”30 This practice was so common
that of the ships seized and tried by the joint Brazilian-British commission in
Rio de Janeiro during this period, six captains used this excuse, declaring that
they were not participating in the slave trade but rather bringing Africans to
Uruguay as settlers. Even when this contract with Brazilian merchants was
terminated in early 1835 with Manuel Oribe’s ascent to power, Africans con-
tinued to be brought into Uruguay; in 1834 alone, 566 Africans arrived as so-
called settlers.31 Between 1835 and 1842, 4,540 Africans (2,740 men and 1,800
27. The slave trade was only prohibited again in 1839 and ratified for the Anglo-
Uruguay treaty of 1842. Borucki, “ ‘African Colonists’ ”; Andrews, Blackness.
28. Borucki, “ ‘African Colonists.’ ” The scale of Montevideo’s slave trade continued
to be noted by the British until at least the 1850s. See Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla,
Esclavitud, 27. On the illegal traffic in Brazil, see Reis, Gomes, and Carvalho, O alufá Rufino.
29. Sometimes, the number of slaves being brought over from Africa was very small, as
during a journey made by a particular master’s company, which was not necessarily
prohibited. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, “Abolición.”
30. Borucki, “ ‘African Colonists.’ ”
31. Ibid., 436.

women) arrived; of these, only 220 were recorded by the Montevideo police as
colonists. The others were sold into slavery. This would be the last generation
of Africans to arrive in Montevideo.
It is not a stretch to imagine that Rufina was among them. According to the
contract between Uruguayan officials and Brazilian merchants, African settlers
could not be older than 16. The agreement appears to have been respected,
although surely not for the sake of legality, which was not a major concern for
anyone involved. But in the final period of the slave trade, there were by far
more child slaves than in any other period. The slave ship Aguila I, which set sail
in October 1833 with 141 Africans, carried 124 children between the ages of
eight and nine. On the Delfina, which arrived in Montevideo in 1835, 70 percent
of the Africans were between 8 and 12 years old, exactly the age of Rufina, if our
conjectures are correct. On one of the last trips of the Rı́o de la Plata ship, which
was confiscated by the British navy in 1834, 85 percent of the 522 African
survivors were children, including 179 girls. This supports the research of
David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, and Paul Lovejoy, who show that from 1820 the
number of children sold as slaves rose sharply in all regions of the Americas
where slaves were imported from Africa. From 1825, 36 percent of the enslaved
Africans shipped from the Bight of Benin were children.32
Faced with such significant numbers of Africans in the region, it is no
wonder that, 20 years later, we find freed African couples living in Uruguay with
their creole children, adapted to local daily life. Rufina and Matheus were
different, as both came from West Africa, he coastal and she Mina. Almost all
the last Africans to arrive in Uruguay came from the central-western region of
Africa, especially Angola, due to Luso-Brazilian trafficking connections. Of the
49 ships that participated in the Africa-Brazil-Uruguay triangle in the 1830s, 40
came from Angola, 5 from Mozambique, 1 from São Tomé, and 2 from Cape
Verde, where the traffic was also prohibited.33
There were Minas in Uruguay, however. Alex Borucki estimates that for the
period from 1777 to 1812, 7,100 Africans arrived to the country from the Bight
of Benin via Brazil.34 Although we have no further information on how Rufina
and Matheus arrived in Uruguay, the fact that they were slaves of the same
32. Ibid. Paul Lovejoy combines his own research data with that of David Eltis and
Stanley Engerman, according to which 46.1 percent of all the Africans who came as slaves
between 1810 and 1867 were children. Lovejoy, “Children,” 200; Eltis and Engerman,
“Fluctuations.”
33. The origin of the last vessel is not known. Data from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic
Slave Trade Database, accessed 1 Feb. 2012, http://www.slavevoyages.org.
34. Borucki, “Slave Trade.”

master suggests that the two might have traveled together on the same ship and
been bought together, or that the current estimates misjudge the actual number
of Minas. Regardless, it is interesting to note that, with so many possibilities,
Matheus and Rufina originated from the same region, lived together for many
years, and had a number of children, the last of which was unusual for Mina
women.35
Very few of these suppositions about Rufina can be definitively proven.
Playing with the relations between text and context, we can link the first 30 years
of Rufina’s life to the broader historical processes connecting Africa to South
America in the nineteenth century. The evidence is insufficient for anything
beyond conjecture. We can imagine where Rufina may have been born, but we
cannot know the exact location; we know what languages may have been her
mother tongue, but not which one it in fact was. We know how children were
enslaved in West Africa but not exactly how she was. We do not know from
where she set sail for the Americas, in which ship, where she arrived, or who sold
her to her first and only master.
But even with so many doubts, one thing is certain: while the second
enslavement of Rufina was certainly illegal, a fact immediately recognized by
Brazilian authorities, the first enslavement was too, in every aspect. In the West
African region from where she came, marked by war and social disruption, the
seizure and sale of people into slavery occurred in violation of local law. Her
transport to the Americas was illegal because international law prohibited the
slave trade north of the equator. Whether to Brazil or Uruguay, Rufina arrived
illegally and was sold illegally because both countries had banned the impor-
tation of Africans. According to the law, Rufina should never have lived as a
slave, yet she was one among thousands of Africans in this very situation. In
Uruguay, Rufina was once again illegally enslaved because of a presumption
that she was not free, a presumption made of all Africans and their descen-
dants in the Americas.36
“This New Type of Trafficking”
It is noteworthy that the authorities in Porto Alegre believed Rufina’s story and
quickly concluded that she and her daughter were indeed freed. The manner in
35. Mariza de Carvalho Soares and Sheila de Castro Faria show that, in several regions
of Brazil, many African couples came from the same nation; it is likely that this also happened
in southern Brazil and Uruguay. Unlike Rufina, however, the Mina women studied by
these historians generally had few or no children. Soares, Devotos; Faria, “Sinhás pretas.”
36. On racialization in Brazil in the nineteenth century, see Mattos, “Racialização”;
Chalhoub, “Precariousness.”

which authorities pursued the case suggests that it did not take them by surprise.
No one in 1850s Rio Grande do Sul, and certainly not the police or judicial
authorities, ignored issues relating to the passage of Africans and their
descendants across the border with Uruguay, the region where Rufina said that
she lived. As mentioned earlier, Rufina and her family resided on a ranch in
Passo Pereira, on the bank of the Rı́o Negro near Tacuarembó. This area, the
Banda Norte, included the territories north of the Rı́o Negro (made up of the
current departments of Artigas, Tacuarembó, Rivera, Cerro Largo, Salto, and
Paysandú). Largely integrated into the agrarian economy of Rio Grande do Sul,
this area contained expansive lands and was sparsely populated. Although there
were some Brazilian landowners on Montevideo’s outskirts, most of them lived
in the north and northeast of Uruguay, often on estates that spanned both sides
of the border.37 In many of these locations, including Tacuarembó, slaves made
up one-third of the total population, similar to the numbers in Rio Grande do
Sul at this time.38
Not surprisingly, the conflicts that characterized the Rı́o de la Plata basin
since the early nineteenth century profoundly affected the lives of its inhabi-
tants, including enslaved Africans such as Rufina. After all, since the beginning
of the struggles for independence in the region in 1811, slaves fled from Brazil,
motivated by promises of freedom in return for joining the military (many also
believed, however, the risk too high to justify attempting to escape).39 The
Farroupilha War (1835–1845) and the Uruguayan Civil War (1839–1851)—
which pitted the Blancos, led by Manuel Oribe, against the Colorados, led by
Fructuoso Rivera—caused continual displacement across the border, both of
runaway slaves and Brazilian masters seeking to protect their properties by
37. Palermo, “Secuestros y tráfico.” Brazilians made up 69.4 percent of Tacuarembó’s

population in 1830 and 59.7 percent in 1840. In 1860, 50 percent of local cattle was owned
by Brazilians. In the early 1850s, according to an imperial government census, there were
1,181 Brazilian landowners on the Brazil-Uruguay border, who owned 9 million hectares
populated with more than a million head of cattle. The other departments along the border
containing Brazilians were Cerro Largo, Minas, and Rocha. Palermo, “Los afro-
fronterizos,” 190–91; Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud, 162–63.
38. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud, 218; Osório, “Esclavos.” Thiago Araújo
documented 13,013 slaves in the border region in 1857 and 1858, about 30 percent of the
total population. Araújo, “Novos dados.”
39. Uruguayan independence was proclaimed in 1826, as part of the Cisplatine War
with Brazil. Before this, slaves and freedpersons also engaged in the independence struggles
in Argentina. Telesca and Mallo, “Negros de la Patria”; Aladrén, “Experiências.” See also
Menegat, “O tramado”; Carvalho, “Nas margens.”

removing their slaves from areas heavily affected by the conflicts.40 The wars—
which brought military incursions on both sides, cattle and horse rustling, and
the widespread appropriation of slaves for troops—resulted in great social
disorganization in the border region. But even greater tension developed when
the Colorado government in Montevideo, an ally of Brazil, abolished slavery in
1842.
In the middle of the Uruguayan Civil War, in desperate need of troops to
defend Montevideo against Oribe’s efforts to restore the Blanco government,
Rivera’s Colorado government called for the abolition of slavery. At the time,
abolition was considered the only effective way to enlist blacks; earlier attempts
to enlist slaves and freedpersons had not worked. Masters and slaves were
notified immediately of the new law, and the attendance was requested of
anyone eligible for military service. It seems, however, that Brazilian owners
were faster: on the evening of December 12, 1842, the very day when the
abolition law was passed by the Uruguayan General Assembly, Brazilian resi-
dents in Montevideo boarded their slaves onto Brazilian warships.41 Likewise,
the Blancos’ urgent need for more troops, with Oribe’s conquest of part of the
Uruguayan territory and subsequent establishment of the Cerrito government
(1843–1851), also generated debate about the abolition of slavery. The aboli-
tion law of 1846 did not explicitly mention recruitment, as the 1842 law did, but
it was still the goal. A few days after the law’s promulgation, Cerrito authorities
rushed to incorporate blacks, now freed, into the Blancos’ troops before Bra-
zilian masters could cross back into Brazil with their slaves.
The two laws abolishing slavery in Uruguay, the Colorado law of 1842 and
the Blanco law of 1846, thus cannot be understood outside this military context.
In both cases, abolition was the only way for governments at war to recruit
Africans and their descendants, even though both Uruguayan and Brazilian
owners were opposed to enlisting slaves, even with promises of indemnity.
Indeed, the 1846 abolition decree greatly affected Brazilian masters along the
border, who had emerged relatively unscathed from the recruitment attempts in
Montevideo four years prior. As their properties were located within the ter-
ritories of the Cerrito government, many were unable to prevent their slaves
from fleeing their fields or being confiscated by the Blancos.42
40. On the Farroupilha War, see Pesavento, “Uma certa”; Guazzelli, “O horizonte.” On
the Uruguayan Civil War, see Maiztegui Casas, Orientales.
41. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud, 221.
42. There are indications that slaves continued to escape until the 1880s, only
ceasing with the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Petiz, Buscando; Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla,
Esclavitud, 129.

This situation lasted until at least the end of the Uruguayan Civil War in
1851 and contributed to worsening diplomatic relations between the Brazilian
empire and the Cerrito government, which became increasingly hostile with
each new grievance about the confiscation of land, cattle, and slaves at the
border.43 Complaints from authorities in Rio Grande do Sul about runaway
slaves intensified so much in 1847 that, the following year, the provincial
president asked the municipalities’ police chiefs to calculate the number of
escaped slaves for a formal complaint about their return to Montevideo
authorities.44
With Oribe’s defeat, achieved thanks to Brazil’s military and financial
support of the Colorados, the imperial government signed several treaties with
Uruguay, on October 12, 1851, that established borders, alliances (“a perpetual
alliance” guaranteeing Brazil’s support if Uruguay’s independence was ever
threatened again and Uruguay’s support if Rio Grande do Sul again rebelled
against the empire, as it had in the Farroupilha War), subsidies by Brazil for
Uruguay, rules for trade and shipping, and the extradition of criminals,
deserters, and runaway slaves.45 The Uruguayan public in large part rejected
the treaties, enforced without the legislature’s approval, wholesale, but they
especially criticized the sections stating that those who crossed the Brazil-
Uruguay border without their masters’ consent could be reclaimed by both the
Brazilian government and masters and returned to Brazil. As they had never
been compensated for property confiscated during the conflicts in Uruguay and
there had been no responses to the formal complaints made by Rio Grande do
Sul’s president about runaway slaves, many masters believed that they had the
right to take action on behalf of their own property. Even large landowners
invaded Uruguayan territory in so-called califórnias (armed incursions) seeking
to recover lost cattle and slaves.46
Rufina and her family, however, were not running from anyone. Con-
firming accusations that had begun to circulate around 1848, they were
43. For a general framework of international politics in the Rı́o de la Plata region in this
period and of diplomatic relations between Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and the Blanco
and Colorado governments of Uruguay, see Ferreira, O Rio da Prata.
44. Petiz, Buscando, 53–54.
45. On the treaties of 1851 and the political circumstances preceding them, see Ferreira,
O Rio da Prata. On the question of borders specifically, see Golin, A fronteira.
46. In 1850, Francisco Pedro Buarque de Abreu, the Barão do Jacuı́, organized the
largest califórnia to retrieve cattle and goods in Uruguay, having recruited a small army of
about 300 men paid at his expense. Reclamaciones, xiii; Ferreira, O Rio da Prata, 116–17;
Torres, O Visconde, 79–85.

kidnapped by Brazilians who wanted to enslave them and sell them in Rio
Grande do Sul.47 The circumstances, after all, could not have been more
favorable. The end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil in 1850 caused a great
rise in the price of slaves, even higher than the rises that had been occurring
since the 1820s, and there were no signs that the demand for slaves had
decreased.48 The blurring of boundaries between Brazil and Uruguay and the
social disorganization caused by frequent wars, runaway slaves, and Brazil’s
superior economic, political, and military position after Uruguay’s civil war
created a situation in which the black population north of the Rı́o Negro was
seen as easy prey for a new form of trafficking in persons on the Brazil-Uruguay
border, as Rafael Peter de Lima, Jônatas Caratti, and Eduardo Palermo have
shown.49 Although the president of Rio Grande do Sul denied it, the province’s
authorities were well aware of this new form of trafficking. Between 1849 and
1853 alone, the provincial court dealt with seven cases relating to it, all origi-
nating from complaints made by Uruguayan consuls.50 And many of the kid-
nappings were the work of one person: Laurindo José da Costa, the very one
who had tried to bring Rufina and her children to São Leopoldo in August 1854.
At the end of 1853, Juan Rosa, his wife Juana Rosa, and their daughter
Segundina Marta (who was about four years old) arrived at the Uruguayan
consulate in Rio Grande do Sul to ask for help. They had been kidnapped by
Laurindo José da Costa, who with his cronies had appeared at the Rosas’ home
claiming to have orders from the Uruguayan government to “gather all men of
color and those who were married with their women and children.” As they
traveled, Laurindo kidnapped others, murdering those who tried to resist.
When they arrived in Pelotas, Juan Rosa, Juana Rosa, and Segundina Marta
were sold to a French man, but they managed to escape to the Uruguayan
consulate.51 In April of the following year, in a raid in the Durazno region,
Laurindo José da Costa kidnapped Regina, a black woman, with her two-year-
old daughter and Francisco Mollano, a twelve-year-old black child.52
It is therefore not surprising at all that police and provincial authorities
believed Rufina’s story; Laurindo José da Costa was already a known criminal.
What is incredible, if not suspicious, is that after all this, they let Laurindo go.
47. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud, 149–50.

48. Florentino, “Sobre minas”; Salles, E o vale.
49. Lima, “ ‘A nefanda pirataria’ ”; Caratti, O solo; Palermo, “Secuestros y tráfico.”
50. Stelmach Pessi and Souza e Silva, Documentos.
51. Reclamaciones. This case is also cited in Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud.
52. Regina appears in archival files as “Reina Rodrigues.” Criminal case no. 2914, 1854,
APERS, First Civil and Criminal Court, São Leopoldo.

His exploits were already public knowledge, as demonstrated by a notice about

him published shortly after his release in the newspaper O Rio-Grandense and
reprinted in Correio do Sul. And this was the second time that the newspapers had
reported on Laurindo as the leader of a kidnapping.53 Yet since Rufina and
Francisca’s story was so clearly true, the authorities acted quickly: after being
questioned by the orphans’ judge and the trustee, both Rufina and Francisca, as
well as the baby Brum, were put in the hands of a person in Porto Alegre for
safekeeping while police tried to locate Pantaleão and Maria do Pilar, who had
been in Piratini and then sold into slavery in Camaquã. They were brought
three months later, in August, to Porto Alegre, where the provincial president
himself hosted the family reunion in his palace.54 About Matheus, there was
no news.
A few months later, Rufina and her four children were escorted back home.
In November, they sailed in the ship Fluminense, which brought them as far as
Jaguarão. From there, Lieutenant Francisco José Gonçalves da Silva Jr.
accompanied the five to the other side of the border and placed them in the care
of Cipriano Gaetano, commander of the village of Artigas. On November 18,
1854, Gaetano sent a letter to Manuel Pereira Vargas, commander of the border
and the Jaguarão garrison, saying that he had received Rufina and her four
children; he took the opportunity to “congratulate and thank the Government
of that State for such philanthropic conduct.”55
An Unhappy Ending
The story of Rufina’s misadventures in Brazil could end here. It would be an

atypical happy ending, since so far no records have been found showing any
others who were kidnapped and later returned to their homes across the border.
Yet we cannot come to this ending without asking why the Rio Grande do Sul
authorities acted so quickly and effectively in this case. This was not the norm.
Reading through the cases in the Rio Grande do Sul archives involving slaves, it
is clear that both the courts and the police often acted very slowly, if they
pursued such cases at all.
53. O Rio-Grandense (Porto Alegre), 15 June 1854. Lima, “ ‘A nefanda pirataria,’ ”

145–46, also references this notice.
54. Letter of 27 Aug. 1854, Arquivo Histórico do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre
(hereafter cited as AHRS), Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no. 32.
55. Cipriano Gaetano to Manuel Pereira Vargas, 18 Nov. 1854, Archivo General de
la Nación, Montevideo (hereafter cited as AGN), Fundo Legação, caja 106. On Rufina’s
return journey to Uruguay, see also AHRS, Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no 32.

It turns out that Rufina’s kidnapping was different. This African woman
was at the center of a series of international pressures that, if ignored, would
have left Brazil in a very uncomfortable situation.
On July 8, 1854, when Rufina had already been recognized as free and
Laurindo José da Costa had long ago escaped, Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu
(1793–1883), future Viscount of Abaeté and minister of foreign affairs of
Brazil, wrote to the president of Rio Grande do Sul, João Lins Vieira Cansansão
de Sinimbu, about what he had just learned through Andrés Lamas, minister
plenipotentiary of Uruguay in Brazil.56 On April 14, a Friday evening, 11
Brazilian men, led by Fermiano José de Mello, seized several people of color in
Tacuarembó, intending to enslave and sell them in Brazil. The kidnappers were
bolder than in earlier attacks and injured anyone who resisted accompanying
them. Fermiano’s group kidnapped more than ten people but left behind two
persons, Antonio Peneiro and his wife, Mary, who, respectively 70 and 60 years
old, were too old to be sold. They were the ones who reported the raid to
Tacuarembó’s political leader, who in turn sent a letter to the delegate of Bagé
and another to Uruguay’s minister of foreign affairs.57
In early July, Lamas learned of the episode and immediately communicated
to Limpo de Abreu his hope that Brazilian authorities would do their part, in
accordance with “international laws and conventions, the law of the Empire,
and the particular laws against piracy and the abominable trafficking and
importing of slaves.” To Lamas, the crime was so serious that it could only be
understood as an attack on the republic’s honor and on the rights and security of
its inhabitants.58 Lamas knew what he was doing by getting tough with Limpo
de Abreu. Even though Uruguayans were subservient at this time to Brazil,
which had been sustaining Uruguay since the end of the Uruguayan Civil War
(Lamas himself was accused by many Uruguayans of being more loyal to the
court in Rio de Janeiro than the one in Montevideo), Uruguay held the higher
moral ground when it came to slavery and the slave trade. After all, Brazil’s
justifications for intervening in the Rı́o de la Plata basin in the late 1840s and
early 1850s centered around the defense of Uruguay’s independence and sov-
ereignty. And Uruguay’s sovereignty was based on, among other things, the
abolition of slavery. Not recognizing this would confirm the accusation that the
56. Limpo de Abreu was named viscount on December 2 of that same year. See
Magalhães, O Visconde.
57. “Notices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” 1854–58, AHRS, Ofı́cios Reservados
B29, doc. 1 (this document is unpaginated).
58. Andrés Lamas to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, 8 July 1854, AGN, Fundo
Legação, caja 106, no. 70.

1851 treaties had made Uruguay a Cisplatine province. Even though Brazil did
openly pressure for the approval of these treaties, especially the part concerning
the extradition of slaves, it was not in good taste for a country that wanted to call
the diplomatic shots in the region to intervene in the internal issues of another
country, especially Uruguay.59
The architects of Brazil’s policy in the Rı́o de la Plata basin in the early
1850s emphasized their country’s role in securing the independent existence of
both Uruguay and Paraguay against the alleged expansionism of Argentina’s
Juan Manuel de Rosas.60 Lamas was well aware that Brazilian authorities could
not sustain their criticism of Argentine expansionism if they themselves were
charged with expanding the borders of slavery. This was primarily because, in
terms of Brazilian diplomatic relations in the early 1850s, there was no issue
more sensitive than the slave trade. Although Brazil had been pressured to
suspend the slave trade since its reopening in the 1830s, in 1845 Britain began to
crack down more directly on the arrival of Africans to Brazil. After securing its
interests in the Platine region, Britain transferred part of its South American
squad to Brazil, in 1849. As a result, January 1850 was the most successful
month for the British navy since they had begun to seize slave ships. Even
though the Brazilian government was already discussing measures for abol-
ishing the slave trade, the unrest caused by Britain’s actions was certainly
essential to Brazil’s commitment to finally abolish trafficking in September
1850, as was maintaining the rationale for their influence in the Platine region.
It was thus essential for the Brazilian government to publicly demonstrate its
commitment to abolishing the slave trade.61
It was for this reason that Lamas, after hearing about Rufina’s story, wrote
to Lord Howard de Walden (“Mr. Howard,” Britain’s consul in Rio de Janeiro)
to inform him about the case and the frequent Brazilian raids into Uruguayan
territory. Howard de Walden subsequently asked Henry Vereker, his colleague
in Rio Grande do Sul, to pay attention to looters who had entered Uruguay to
kidnap black people and sell them in Brazilian markets.62 Vereker replied that
he was aware of what was happening to Rufina and of several other crimes
committed by these organized gangs. All this was transmitted to Lord Clar-
endon, Britain’s minister of foreign affairs, who was also informed of the
59. Although outside the scope of this article, it is interesting to note that Brazil also
made claims to Britain, as in the case of protecting sailors who were runaway slaves. See
Mamigonian, “José Majojo.”
60. Ferreira, O Rio da Prata, 226.
61. Bethell, A abolição.
62. Baron Howard de Walden to Henry Vereker, 17 Aug. 1854, National Archives, Kew
(hereafter cited as TNA), Foreign Office 84, codex 943.

instructions sent from Rio de Janeiro to Sinimbu on the need to end these
crimes. In October of that year, Clarendon thanked Howard de Walden for
sending the correspondence and informed him that “the government of His
Majesty [in Britain] approves the representation made by Mr. Limpo de Abreu
concerning the looters coming to kidnap blacks in the state of Uruguay to sell
in Brazil.”63
Clarendon’s letter certainly would not have been well received in Brazil’s
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Brazil was in the midst of a period—one that lasted
nearly another decade—of difficult conflicts with Britain over the slave trade.
Even Brazil’s approval of the Euzébio de Queiroz Law in 1850 prohibiting the
slave trade did not eliminate British suspicion that trafficking continued in the
country. And there were reasons for this. In the early 1850s, there was ample
evidence that the slave trade would continue if it were not actively suppressed.64
In the same month that Lamas complained to Limpo de Abreu about Rufina’s
kidnapping, Vereker, then British consul in Porto Alegre, called Sinimbu’s
attention to a possible landing of Africans on the coast of Rio Grande do Sul.
The provincial president believed that it was nothing but a rumor, but the
consul did not seem as convinced. Sinimbu thus wrote to Limpo de Abreu to
assure him that there had been no landing (though he left it unclear whether one
had been attempted) and to reiterate that his administration would do every-
thing “to avoid the government’s displeasure about such crime being carried out
in this Province [Rio Grande do Sul], a crime totally opposed to Law and
Civilization, and that the government itself strives to punish.”65 All the cor-
respondence in the early 1850s between various British consuls in Brazil and
Brazilian authorities shows that for the British, the issue of trafficking was far
from resolved.
For the British, the sale of Africans brought to Brazil after 1831 (a number
of such complaints about which appeared in the 1854 correspondence between
Howard de Walden and Limpo de Abreu66), attempts to disembark Africans on
the Brazilian coast, and kidnappings of black people on Brazil’s southern border
all meant the same thing: the continuation of illicit trafficking of people. Even
before knowing about Rufina, Vereker had written in his annual report to Lord
Clarendon that
63. Lord Clarendon to Baron Howard de Walden, 28 Oct. 1854, TNA, Foreign Office
84, codex 941.
64. Bethell, A abolição; Parron, A polı́tica.
65. João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, 27
Aug. 1854, AHRS, Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no. 31.
66. See TNA, Foreign Office 84, codexes 942–44.

It should be recognized that the laws of Brazil, in their present state,

are completely inadequate to prevent what can be called the illegal
domestic slave trade, by which I mean the sale into slavery of black
people who are not slaves according to Brazilian law. To show that this
trafficking exists, it would seem necessary only to refer to the fact that,
comparatively, few of the black people brought from Africa since the
enactment of Brazilian laws stating that these people should be
considered free have actually had their freedom recognized; it is also
well known that slaves are often stolen from their owners to be sold; it
seems clear that if Brazilian laws were effective in preventing the
internal slave trade, the overwhelming majority of blacks who have
been imported into Brazil since 1831 would have obtained their
manumission, and the sale of slaves by people who were not their
owners . . . could not take place, let alone the kidnapping offree people
to be sold as slaves.67
Given this situation, Rio de Janeiro had to pressure the president of Rio Grande
do Sul to prevent such border kidnappings from turning into an even greater
international problem. This was not easy, since, as the Brazilian incursions
themselves demonstrated, border control was the responsibility of those very
people violating the laws.
As Rufina’s case had already been resolved when Sinimbu received Limpo
de Abreu’s letter, the provincial president cited it to exemplify how the border
situation was already under control and that any such cases were being inves-
tigated and their perpetrators punished. Responding in August 1854 about the
departure of the ship Good Friday, captained by Fermiano José de Mello,
Sinimbu reassured Limpo de Abreu that “the authorities of this province will
not fail to do their duty.”68 And, as Sinimbu made a point of reaffirming, Brazil
was already working in this direction. He spared no adjectives in communi-
cating to Limpo de Abreu, Lamas, Vereker, and Howard de Walden that Rufina
and her two children were safe and that an arrest warrant had been issued for
Fermiano.69 On August 27, “thanks to the energetic measures” taken by the
provincial authorities, “this whole black family has been rescued”:
67. Henry Vereker to Lord Clarendon, 30 June 1854, TNA, Foreign Office 84, codex
944, fols. 136–37.
68. João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, 2 Aug.
1854, AHRS, Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no. 28.
69. Ibid.

By the enclosed letter from the Chief of Police, Your Excellency will see
that the two children of the black woman, Pantaleão and Maria do Pilar,
who were sent for after having been stolen in Piratini, were taken by the
police of this township and delivered to the provincial president, who
made them bring the children to this very palace, near Rufina. This poor
family is missing only the black Mathias [sic; Matheus], whose fate
remains unknown. The black person in reference wanted to return to
Uruguay in the company of people who would protect them, and at the
very first occasion they were provided transportation to Jaguarão,
conveniently arranging a peaceful arrival at their destination.70
Sinimbu continued that inquiries were being made into “those responsible for
this kidnapping” and that Limpo de Abreu could be sure that their punish-
ment was critical, as “it was necessary to make an example and discipline the
criminals.”71
Sinimbu’s performance regarding the outcome of Rufina’s case was crucial to
building the reputation that Brazil would not condone the crimes committed by
its citizens in Uruguay or the reopening of the slave trade. Such a reputation was
crucial for the architects of Brazil’s foreign policy at that moment, both for their
relations with Britain and their policy in the Platine region. It is not surprising,
then, that in one of his letters, Sinimbu reassured Limpo de Abreu that
Your Excellency can rest assured that, as Your Excellency

recommended, I have renewed efforts to reflect the full rigor of the laws
on all of those who participate in trafficking to take away free people of
color of this State. . . . And to give further evidence that the police are
tireless in pursuit of these criminals, I am putting into the hands of Your
Excellency the original of a letter that the Chief of Police gave me
yesterday, communicating in detail the measures that have been taken,
leading them beyond what happened to the black Rufina, to the Colony
of São Leopoldo to meet another black kidnapped from that state,
named Rosina [sic; Regina] Rodrigues, held by an individual Felisbino
José da Costa, a Creole named [illegible], and a German called Guirino
Kray: who are already arrested and in trial; and we are keeping up our
efforts to discover others, who have escaped until this point.72
70. João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu, 27
Aug. 1854, APERS, Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no. 32.
71. Ibid.
72. João Lins Vieira Cansansão de Sinimbu to Antônio Paulino Limpo de Abreu,
24 Sept. 1854, AHRS, Ofı́cios Reservados A2-10, no. 36; Reclamaciones. Guirino, or Querino,

The strategy seems to have worked for Brazilian authorities, even if only
for a short time. In a memo to Clarendon the following year, Howard de
Walden wrote that “the Brazilian Government, the representative of the
Minister of Montevideo, did not hesitate to take action to prevent the kid-
napping of free men of color in the Banda Oriental by traffickers of Brazilian
slaves, and through the power of the provincial president of Rio Grande do Sul
these poor people . . . have been discovered and have had their freedom
restored.”73 But it perhaps worked best for the traffickers Fermiano José de
Mello and Laurindo José da Costa. Mello had been arrested and tried in early
1855, yet despite overwhelming evidence that he was the leader of the traf-
ficking gang, he was acquitted by the jury.74 By February 1855, he was back on
the streets. Costa, who had already gotten away in the case of Rufina, was finally
processed, along with his brothers Leandro and José Francisco, for the kid-
napping of Regina Rodrigues and her children, who had been also taken to São
Leopoldo in mid-1854. All were acquitted.75
It was difficult to convince Andrés Lamas that the Brazilian authorities
were effective in repressing the kidnapping of black people in Uruguay,
although he praised the work of Sinimbu and Limpo de Abreu in Rufina’s case.
In a complaint addressed to Viscount Maranguape in 1857, Lamas lamented
that Laurindo was so sure that the Brazilian authorities would do nothing with
him that he even counted on them to cover up his crimes. Listing all the
complaints and cases that had occurred since 1854, Lamas asked for the Bra-
zilian government’s prompt action to suppress this “piracy, organized and
exercised on a large and amazing scale.”76 Yet this never happened. The British
shared Lamas’s opinion that the Brazilian government did nothing to hinder the
slave traffickers; in 1855, after the landing of more than 200 Africans at Sir-
inhaém, Pernambuco, the British suspected anew that Brazilian authorities
Kray and José da Costa, Laurindo’s brother, were defendants in another case in 1854 for
“reducing free people to slavery.” Criminal case no. 2916, 1854, APERS, First Civil
and Criminal Court, São Leopoldo.
73. Baron Howard de Walden to Lord Clarendon, 30 June 1855, TNA, Foreign Office
84, codex 969.
74. Criminal case no. 3368, 1855, APERS, FCCCB, packet 88.
75. Criminal case no. 2914, 1854, APERS, First Civil and Criminal Court, São Leopoldo.
The trials of virtually all cases involving trafficking in persons tried on the border of Rio
Grande do Sul with Uruguay occurred between the 1850s and 1860s; to date 35 cases, filed in
the Arquivo Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, have been analyzed. Of these, three
defendants were convicted. In the remaining 32 cases, the defendants were acquitted or the
cases were dismissed for lack of evidence. Stelmach Pessi and Souza e Silva, Documentos.
76. Andrés Lamas to Viscount Maranguape, 9 Oct. 1857, in Reclamaciones, anexo 11.

were involved in trafficking. The Brazilian opposition party, the Liberals,

accused the Saquaremas, the political party in power, of reacting only “to the
sound of the British cannon” and otherwise not taking any measures to arrest
major slave traffickers.77
It is difficult to speculate on the impact that the events of 1854 had on the
lives of our story’s main characters. Ignacio and Catharina, the children left
behind when their family was kidnapped, certainly were happy to have their
mother and siblings back. Rufina and Francisca perhaps thought that they were
lucky to be home. Many of their neighbors and friends never returned, however,
so maybe when they arrived home there was no celebration. After all, they were
without Matheus, about whom there never was any further news.
Conclusion
The dossier on the case of Rufina’s enslavement is now held in the Arquivo
Público do Estado do Rio Grande do Sul, where there are at least 66 others for
the same crime of reducing free people to slavery, almost all of them occurring
on the borders with Uruguay and Argentina between the 1830s and 1870s.78
This is not the place to start a discussion about the number of enslavements on
the Empire of Brazil’s southern border. There is no doubt, however, that for
every failed attempt at enslavement that generated action from the authorities
and opened a trial, numerous people were taken to the border, baptized, sold as
slaves, and then lost in Brazil, leaving no records. Although the scale of this
trade cannot be measured against the trafficking in Africa, it is clear that there
was a movement to expand the boundaries of enslavement in nineteenth-century
Brazil, incorporating people who lived in another jurisdiction under another
sovereignty.79 This movement was undertaken by a criminal network ironically
strengthened by the ending of both the slave trade from Africa to Brazil and
slavery in Uruguay and Argentina.
Although there is still much work to do on the connections between the
actions of ordinary people, like Laurindo José da Costa and Fermiano José de
Mello, and those performed by ministers of state, such as Andrés Lamas of
77. Parron, A polı́tica, 250; Bethell, A abolição, 420–22. On Sirinhaém, see Drummond,
Breve exposição. In response to Liberals’ complaints about the Saquaremas’ involvement
with the slave traders, Commander José Joaquim de Souza Breves—a member of the Liberal
Party—was arrested in 1853 on the charge of illegally importing Africans. See Lourenço, “O
Império”; Carvalho and Câmara, “A Insurreição Praieira.”
78. “Documentos da escravidão,” APERS.
79. See Benton, “ ‘Laws.’ ”

Uruguay, Paulino José Soares de Souza in Brazil, and Lord Clarendon in

Britain, it is undeniable that cases such as these contributed to worsening
relations between all countries involved. Every crime of kidnapping and
enslavement committed by Brazilians and denounced by the consular author-
ities of Uruguay and Britain led to increased strains in diplomatic relations
between the three countries. In 1861, in large part because of denouncing, for
more than a decade, Brazilian attempts to circumvent the ban on the interna-
tional slave trade, the British ambassador William Christie left the country and
returned to Britain. Diplomatic relations between the two countries resumed
only in 1865. In May 1864, the Uruguayan government published the book
Reclamaciones de la Republica Oriental del Uruguay contra el Gobierno de Brasil,
listing all the unmet claims of the Uruguayan government to Brazil in a 12-year
period. The book names more than 30 people kidnapped and enslaved by
Brazilians in Uruguayan territory, including Rufina and her children. The
document was a response from the Uruguayans to the Brazilian government’s
claims concerning the treatment of Brazilian masters living in Uruguay. A few
months later, Brazil supported the overthrow of President Anastasio Aguirre of
Uruguay, a key episode in starting the so-called Paraguayan War, which
involved Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay and lasted until 1870,
leaving hundreds of thousands dead.80 It is not an exaggeration, then, to say that
the biggest armed conflict in South America included among its various and
complex dimensions the Brazilian addiction to slavery.
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Keila Grinberg is Associate Professor of History at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de
Janeiro and a researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development.
She has been a visiting professor at Northwestern University and the University of Michigan, and a
Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. Her book O fiador dos brasileiros: Cidadania,
escravidão e direito civil no tempo de Antonio Pereira Rebouças (Civilização Brasileira, 2002) is
currently being translated into English. She has authored, coauthored, or edited ten books and
dozens of articles, in Portuguese, English, and French. Her new project examines nineteenth-
century cases of kidnapping and illegal enslavement on the southern Brazilian border and their
larger effects on the making of South American international relations.

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GRINBERG 2016 Two Enslavements of Rufina

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Hispanic American Historical Review

The Two Enslavements of Rufina: Slavery

The Imprisonment of Rufina

Translated from the Portuguese by Kristin McGuire.—eds.

Hispanic American Historical Review 96:2

Published by Duke University Press

260 HAHR / May / Grinberg

Published by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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6. On independence movements in connection with the abolition of slavery in South

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Published by Duke University Press

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The Second Enslavement of Rufina

Published by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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24. Bethell, A abolição.

Published by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

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Published by Duke University Press

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 271

“This New Type of Trafficking”

Published by Duke University Press

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37. Palermo, “Secuestros y tráfico.” Brazilians made up 69.4 percent of Tacuarembó’s

Published by Duke University Press

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 273

Published by Duke University Press

274 HAHR / May / Grinberg

Published by Duke University Press

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 275

47. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud, 149–50.

Published by Duke University Press

276 HAHR / May / Grinberg

His exploits were already public knowledge, as demonstrated by a notice about

The story of Rufina’s misadventures in Brazil could end here. It would be an

53. O Rio-Grandense (Porto Alegre), 15 June 1854. Lima, “ ‘A nefanda pirataria,’ ”

Published by Duke University Press

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 277

Published by Duke University Press

278 HAHR / May / Grinberg

Published by Duke University Press

The Two Enslavements of Rufina 279

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It should be recognized that the laws of Brazil, in their present state,

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The Two Enslavements of Rufina 281

Your Excellency can rest assured that, as Your Excellency

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282 HAHR / May / Grinberg

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The Two Enslavements of Rufina 283