“Legal Property within Legal Property, and in Spite of It”: A Comparison of Enslaved Savings and Self-Purchase in the Cities and Plantations of Rio De Janeiro Province, 1871–88

In August of 1871, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies approved Article IV of the Rio Branco Law, which would issue enslaved persons the legal right to possess savings for the purpose of purchasing their freedom. Well known for its free womb provisions, the Rio Branco Law went into effect on September 28, 1871, marking the beginning of Brazil’s troubled attempts at the gradual abolition of slavery. Granting legal property rights to the enslaved, Article IV carried potential to radically alter relations between enslaved persons and slaveowners, but it proved largely ineffective in changing the status quo. This paper addresses one reason for the provision’s futility by arguing that lawmakers failed to account for geographic disparities in enslaved persons’ customary ability to acquire monetary surpluses. Historians have identified the difference of manumission rates in nineteenth-century Brazil’s urban and rural areas, but there has yet to be a comparative model for analyzing this disparity as a cause for the problems with executing the Brazilian Government’s plan for gradual abolition. Through examinations of slave registers, planter manuals, letters of freedom, and travel diaries, I compare patterns of enslaved persons’ independent work time, meeting subsistence, and saving for self-purchase following the passage of the Rio Branco Law in two fundamentally different socioeconomic environments: the rural municipality of Vassouras, Rio de Janeiro and the city of Rio. This research is part of a dissertation on enslaved persons’ savings, property rights, and pursuit of emancipation during the process of gradual abolition in Rio de Janeiro.