The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth Century)

Abstract

SummaryOne of the main features of slavery in Brazil was that slaves had a better chance of achieving freedom than was the case in other slave societies. However difficult freedom may have been to obtain, significant rates of manumission resulted in a high percentage of free and freed people of color in the population of the country throughout the nineteenth century. This article analyzes facets of the structural precariousness of freedom in nineteenth-century Brazil. It deals with such themes as the constitutional restrictions on the political rights of freed persons; the masters’ interdiction of their slaves’ learning how to read and write; the practice of granting conditional manumissions; the masters’ right to revoke liberties; the illegal enslavement of free people of color; and police profiling of free and freed blacks under the allegation that they were suspected of being slaves. The idea is to highlight situations which often blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom, therefore rendering insecure the condition of free and freed people of African descent.