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  • Slavery in Brazil: A Case Study of Diamantina, Minas Gerais1
  • Donald Ramos

The study of slave mortality and morbidity in Brazil has been very difficult because of the extreme paucity of sources. Techniques which have been useful in studying the lives of free men and women seldom are useful for analyzing their slaves. The use of parish records such as baptism and death registers is not possible because of the custom of listing only the slave’s first name and the unimaginative choice of names which resulted in large numbers of Joãos, Josés, Manuels, Antônios, Antonias, Joanas, and, of course, Marias. Equally important, the types of plantation records available to students of U.S. slavery have seldom been found for Brazil.2

This essay is an examination of an isolated slave register, which, for a series of idiosyncratic reasons, provides information permitting a glimpse at mortality and morbidity in a distinct and carefully controlled slave population. Because the slaves involved were used in diamond mining under horrendous conditions it is probable that the conclusions reached in this essay represent a worst case scenario. Rather than typical, this is a special case where work and living conditions were probably worse than in plantation zones and certainly worse than in urban areas. It is this situation which makes the conclusions of this essay quite startling.

Diamantina, or Tejuco as it was called in the eighteenth century, was the center of the diamond mining district of Minas Gerais. The discovery of diamonds in the 1720s along the Jequitinhonha River provoked an unusual response on the part of the Portuguese authorities. As with the earlier discovery of gold in Minas Gerais, the discovery had precipitated a chaotic situation with all sorts of miners pouring into the forbiddingly harsh region [End Page 47] around Tejuco. The resulting flood of diamonds into Portugal forced a drastic drop in prices. The royal authorities acted quickly to protect diamond prices by banning all diamond production in 1734 in order to restrict the supply of diamonds in Europe.3 The following year the drastic step was taken of replacing the traditional royal authority, the ouvidor or royal judge, with a specially appointed Intendente, who was given extraordinary powers over the diamond district. In 1739, the Portuguese crown took the even more drastic step of making diamond mining into a royal monopoly with the actual mining entrusted to a single contractor or consortium. The contractor was authorized to employ no more than six hundred slaves in very precisely defined geographic locations for a limited period of time.4 The crown obviously hoped that, through these tight restrictions on production, the problems of the gold-mining district resulting from inadequate control over production could be avoided.

Concurrent with the implementation of the contract system, a series of edicts reiterated restrictions on the rights of residents in the district. Those who had no obvious trade or occupation were required to leave, and entrance or exit from the district was tightly controlled by several companies of dragoons supplemented by capitães do mato, slave catchers or bush-wackers.5 The contractor could also force the expulsion of anyone from the district on the basis of an accusation of mere suspicion of smuggling.6 Moreover, the dragoons were authorized to conduct searches of house or person at will. In sum, the Portuguese authorities had converted the diamond district into a tightly policed area where even the minimal rights of colonial Brazilians were virtually nonexistent.

Six contracts were granted. Five of these went to a single family. The first and second contracts were given to João Fernandes de Oliveira in partnership with Francisco Ferreira da Silva and the final three were issued to Oliveira’s son, also named João Fernandes de Oliveira. The third contract was issued to the Caldeira Brandt brothers.

Because of the legal restriction to limit the slave work force to six hundred people, the authorities took extraordinary precautions in identifying each slave.7 Slave lists were kept for each contract. One of these slave [End Page 48] rosters has been preserved. It pertains to the fourth contract, that of João Fernandes de Oliveira...

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