Free Colored in a Slave Society: Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais in the Early Nineteenth Century

Brazil was traditionally depicted as a plantation economy dominated by slaves and slave owners. However, all recent studies have denied the picture painted so ably by Gilberto Freyre over a half century ago of a dichotomous society dominated by the plantation; in fact, most scholars have stressed that Brazil looked more like the United States than the West Indies in the relative weight of slaves and slave owners in the population. ¹ Our survey of São Paulo indicates that on average roughly a third of the population were slaves and roughly a third of the free population were slave owners. These figures are representative of most of Brazil, and compare favorably with those ratios in the United States in the nineteenth century. ²

Although nineteenth-century Brazilian slave society differed little from the contemporary southern United States in terms of the size and relative weight of slaves and their masters, it differed substantially in the color of its free population. Whereas the free population was over 95 percent white in the United States, whites tended to be less than half the free population in most of Brazil. ³ By the early nineteenth century, Brazil had the largest free colored population of any slave society in the Americas. At the time of the first national census in 1872, some 16 years before final abolition of slavery, the free colored--all of them had slave origins--numbered 4.2 million persons, compared to just 1.5 million slaves. These free colored were, in fact, the largest single racial/status group within Brazil itself. ⁴ In sharp contrast to the United States where less than one percent of all slave owners were non-white, Brazilian freed persons of color were well distributed throughout all the provinces of the Brazilian empire, as much urban as rural in their settlement pattern, and a significant number of them were heads of slave-owning households. ⁵ Yet that was a time when the slave-based coffee economy was reaching its maturity and the price of slaves was on a long-term rise. ⁶

Despite their importance in Brazilian slave society, few of all the recent investigations of African slavery in Brazil have focused on the economic and social role of the free colored population within Brazil before the end of slavery. ⁷ Brazilian society like all other American slave regimes was by its very nature racist and the white elite discriminated in various ways against its free persons of color, even as it permitted a very active level of manumission. But how effective and important was that discrimination in controlling economic and social mobility? We have had little sense of how these free persons of color were integrated into the world of free persons and the market economy: Were the free colored largely cut off from normal avenues of economic and social mobility through legal means, as occurred among the free colored in the United States? ⁸ Or were the barriers to mobility largely economic? Were free non-whites able to respond to market incentives and integrate themselves into the larger free society despite the white elite's racist expressions of hostility to blacks? ⁹ In Brazil there were no legal constraints to geographic or economic mobility, but to what extent did the free non-whites succeed in maintaining the skills they acquired as slaves, or compete with whites for land or slaves.

Though we cannot fully answer these questions, our analysis of 2 major counties (municípios) in Minas Gerais and 15 counties in São Paulo provides a reasonable picture of the role of these free colored people within early-nineteenth-century society. Like the rest of Brazil, a majority of the population in these provinces consisted...