FREEDOM AND DOMINATION

the policy of manumission and the reproduction of slave relations in Minas Gerais (São João del-Rei, fir st half of the 19th century)

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the different meanings that masters and slaves people attributed to freedom.  When we scrutinize the serial set of letters and deeds of liberty, registered in the notary office of the 1st and 2nd Notary Public Office of São João del-Rei, between the years 1830 and 1860, it can be seen that these documents expressed a ideology marked by the policy of mastery over their dependents.  In this sense, the act of manumission was affirmed as a manorial prerogative, always manifested as a benefit, a gift granted to enslaved people for their qualities and good services.  On the other hand, for captives, the notion of freedom was not always limited to changing their legal status.  A large part of the sleves, even without any guarantee of obtaining their freedom, conceived freedom by associating it with the small achievements of everyday life, through which they sought to expand their spaces of autonomy within the limits of slavery.  This, of course, is not to say that the sleves did not seek and struggle to negotiate freedom with their masters.  Reducing the scale of observation and following the methodological assumptions of microhistory, we were able to follow the trajectory of some slaves in their processes of overcoming the barriers of captivity, relating such processes to a conjunctural dimension of reproduction of the logic of slavery.  Likewise, we sought to analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the nature of the conditions imposed by the masters for the concessions of manumission and the motivations that led them to manumit their slaves.  In view of the dynamics and changes of these processes, we consider that the manumissions were profoundly marked by asymmetrical power relations, which contributed to reinforce and reproduce the prevailing social hierarchies and preserve the vitality of the slave order itself