Ironies of Brazilian slave society: African freedwomen, freeborn, and freed Afro-descendent women and their slaveholding, c. 1750 - c. 1850

Recent scholarship on Brazilian slave society has paid special attention to the broad dissemination of slave property, particularly in the Southeast during the first half of the nineteenth century. As a corollary of the remarkable frequency of manumissions in Brazil, studies have uncovered widespread slaveholding among African and crioulo freedmen, as well as their descendants, thus revealing an important component of middling groupings that participated in and actively supported the slave system up to the 1850s. I would argue that this conjuncture of widespread slave ownership dated back to the mid eighteenth century and perhaps earlier and that it was characteristic of urban centers and some rural areas beyond the southeastern region. The intention here, however, is to focus on slaveholding women in São Jose do Rio das Mortes from 1750 to 1850, specifically Africans and those of African descent. Available sources allow for estimating the dimensions of female slave ownership, taking into account racial/color identities of “single” and widowed slaveholders, as well as the participation of wives in the common chattel property of formally married couples. Having established those dimensions, further and more detailed analysis will be carried out using a sample of African and crioula mistresses and their slaves. The idea is to develop a profile of these women that should elucidate various aspects of their insertion into local slave society, whether in terms of social standing, participation in community affairs, or economic activities and to trace generational trajectories of slave ownership and its social repercussions.