Notarized and Baptismal Manumissions in the Parish of São José do Rio das Mortes, Minas Gerais (C. 1750–1850)

As regards the slave societies of the Americas, it is hard to imagine a more palpable example of social mobility than manumissions. The fact that exslaves were able to carve out a space for themselves within the larger slave societies attests to their resilience—a resilience that must have played a role in obtaining freedom in the first place—and demonstrates that a considerable measure of social and racial flux existed in at least some of those societies. Manumission and miscegenation, independently or in association with one another, decisively contributed to the sometimes explosive growth of colored and mestizo populations, which came to characterize large parts of Latin America. Few better examples exist than Brazil, where it was not at all uncommon for ex-slaves to become slaveholders in their own right.

As will be seen, over the past three decades or so scholars have paid increasing attention to manumission practices, as well as to the incorporation of freedmen and freedwomen into the slave society of Portuguese America and the Brazilian Empire. In fact, a certain degree of consensus has developed regarding a number of questions, such as what environment was most conducive to the liberation of bondsmen, which slaves were most likely to receive grants of manumission, and what kinds of slaveholders were most generous in conceding freedom to their slaves. Not all aspects of the phenomenon of manumission are conducive to consensus, however. At the same time, while consensus may serve as a platform upon which scholars can elaborate more complete historical interpretation, in some cases it evokes challenges from new evidence or from further reflection about primary sources and the evidence they yield. For the moment, scholars of Brazilian manumission and the manumitted need therefore to concentrate on case studies which focus on well-defined regions and reasonably extended time periods.

That is precisely what we shall attempt to do here. Yet again we turn to the parish of Santo Antônio, vila of São José. Located just to the south of the central mining districts of the captaincy/province of Minas Gerais, from very early on, the vila and especially the nine outlying chapels¹ that made up the parish were more oriented to ranching and farming than to gold mining itself. Indeed, by the time our investigation begins, in about 1750, the diverse products of São José were finding their way to markets, not only in the mining centers, but also in the burgeoning city of Rio de Janeiro, and from there, to other markets along the coast. Moreover, the region’s better off farmer/merchants had established themselves as pasturers and intermediaries in the distribution of cattle from all over Minas to the all-important market at Rio. For the century or so covered by our set of São José manumissions, the parish as a whole enjoyed an enviable prosperity thanks to this domestic market orientation. Largely due to the extremely dynamic growth of the neighboring urban center of São João del Rei, and to increasing migration to rural areas, the vila of São José itself would enter into a secular decline that was not reflected in the rest of the region.²

Manumission acts and the manumitted are found in a number of primary sources, most of which span the entire slave period. Nominal lists, for example, although turning up mostly from the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, are especially useful in that they allow for an examination of various aspects of the freed segment within the context of the entire population. While an important overview is provided, nominal lists do not, however, tell us much about how individuals managed to obtain their freedom.

For the Parish of São José, scholars are lucky to have available two nominal list censuses, one elaborated at the very end of the eighteenth century and the other during the early 1830s. The first is an ecclesiastical roll of church...