7

The Final Years of Indian Slavery

Through the first half of the seventeenth century, the economic activities of the settlers of the São Paulo region rested on the firm base provided by ample numbers of Indian slaves, captured on the Paulistas’ frequent expeditions to the wilderness. A constant influx of captives, which reached its peak at mid-century, supplied the estates and smaller farms of the plateau region, while at the same time providing surplus labor employed mainly in the transport of local products bound for the coastal market. This central relationship between abundant labor and commercial agriculture defined the contours of Paulista society in the seventeenth century and, at the same time, integrated São Paulo into the larger colonial economy.

Beginning in the second half of the century, the acquisition of Indian labor through slave-hunting became increasingly difficult, as expeditions came up against little-known stretches of wilderness, greater distances, and increasing Indian resistance. The resulting decline in the profitability of expeditions provoked a serious crisis in the Paulista economy. Most rural producers, now with limited access to Indian captives, ceased to produce for the market, while the few who had managed to maintain control of considerable numbers of laborers began to shift their resources toward other activities. Some introduced African slaves on their estates in a deliberate effort to make up for the decline in the population of Indian captives. Others began to raise pack animals to replace Indian porters. There were still others, such as Fernão Dias Pais, who sunk their hopes and their resources in the search for mineral wealth.

Nevertheless, in spite of obvious signs presaging the decline of Indian slavery, it remained deeply rooted in São Paulo when gold was discovered in the 1690s in what were then the northern reaches of the captaincy. In this period, some slaveowners continued to have holdings of more than a hundred slaves at their disposal. On the institutional plane, the viability of Indian slavery appeared to get a second wind with the agreement between colonists, Jesuits, and the Crown that was reached in 1696, which assured the colonists of their rights to the personal service of the Indians.

Even so, the gold rush deepened the crisis of Indian slavery in several ways. Many Paulistas, especially those with smaller slaveholdings, departed for the mines, taking their slaves with them, the cumulative result of which was a considerable exodus of local laborers, which became the subject of correspondence between Crown officials as well as of meetings of the municipal councils of the region. Indeed, one can observe in local documentation, especially estate inventories, a precipitous decline in the overall concentration of Indian labor in the region.

The problem of labor supply was made more acute by the fact that the economic opportunities presented by the mining boom led the Paulistas to practically suspend the slave-hunting activity that had been fundamental to the reproduction of Indian slavery.¹ Some captives from the areas surrounding the mines were brought to São Paulo in the early eighteenth century, but they were few in number, since much of the Amerindian population of the region had been displaced by the impact of slaving expeditions in the region beginning in the 1660s.² The few indigenous groups remaining in the immediate environs of the mines soon disappeared, decimated by epidemic disease or forced to flee in the face of white settlement.³

By the early eighteenth century, the process of domination that had characterized Luso–indigenous relations since the late sixteenth century had left deep and lasting impressions on Paulista society. The master–Indian relationship defined the framework of a larger structure of domination, thus laying the bases of a distinct slave society. Meanwhile, the unequal distribution of captives, which only worsened with the crisis in slave-hunting, established stark distinctions between a small minority of wealthy colonists and the vast majority, which found itself ever more deeply submerged in a state of rural poverty.

Paths to Freedom: Manumission

As the gulf between the rural poor and a handful of wealthy land- and slave-owners widened, the proximity between poor whites and Indian slaves became increasingly evident. In a certain sense, the social distance between Indians and whites in São Paulo had always been relatively narrow, as even the greatest slaveowners and those who considered themselves to be the nobility of the land could not hide a tinge of Indian ancestry in their genealogies.⁴ The fact that São Paulo was a heavily mixed society, in which illicit unions and illegitimate births occurred on a large scale, meant that masters and Indians were enmeshed in furtive social relations that were cloaked by patterns of domination. Moreover, with the development of slavery, ethnic proximity gave way to distinctions based on social position and the relations of production. The importance of these distinctions to the slaveholding class is clear in the attitude of Amador Bueno da Veiga, the master of more than one hundred Indians and a few dozen African slaves, who became disgusted with his half-sister, a mamaluca born to an Indian woman, when she agreed to wed one of his Indian slaves.⁵

As the case of Amador Bueno’s half-sister demonstrates, slavery itself produced situations that revealed the uncomfortable proximity between white masters and Indian slaves, the distinction between them diluted by the existence of a wide stratum of persons of uncertain condition. The will of Antonio Nunes reveals a fascinating detail in this respect: “I declare that I have a young man among the heathen of the land of my administration who is my uncle, the brother of my mother, married to an Indian of the mission village and for the good services he has rendered to me … I leave him free and unbound.”⁶ Another slaveowner observed in her will that one of the Indians in her holdings was not to appear in the inventory lists, since her son Antonio Varejão “ransomed the mulato Polinário with his own money for being his brother.”⁷ In an equally bizarre case, also involving siblings, one Domingas Mamaluca sued for her freedom, claiming that she had been sold by her brother, who had inherited her from their father. The defendant, who had purchased her from her brother, saw nothing out of the ordinary in these circumstances, because “it has been the custom and practice of these captaincies ever since they were first settled to buy and sell people of one’s administration.”⁸ A more dramatic case emerged in Sorocaba: on April 17, 1722, Antonio Moreira exchanged a young woman “of the heathen of the land” for Maria, property of Captain Gabriel Antunes Maciel. According to the bill of sale, Maria was none other than Antonio Moreira’s mother. Several months later, on September 30, Moreira issued a writ manumitting Maria.⁹

If the incorporation of former slaves into free society became more commonplace in the late seventeenth century, its broader effects were to hasten the decline of Indian slavery and swell the ranks of the rural and urban poor.¹⁰ The parish records of Santo Amaro, for example, display a very high incidence of illegitimate births to Indian and bastarda mothers in which the father was not identified during the years 1686–1725.¹¹ In cases in which paternity was acknowledged, the children were always considered to be free, in spite of the legal disposition of partus sequibus ventrum (that is, that the child’s status follows from the mother’s). Some of the more prominent fathers of such children cleared up any doubts by granting freedom to these children’s mothers, sometimes giving them land and slaves. For example, Pedro Vaz de Barros, the founder of the great estate of Carambeí and the chapel of São Roque, sired fourteen bastards with six different slaves, all of whom were freed and showered with landed property and Indians upon his death.¹²

Beginning in the final years of the seventeenth century, newly freed Indians contributed to the growth of a population of uncertain status, between slavery and freedom.¹³ Manumission was practiced throughout the period of Indian slavery, but, with the decline of commercial agriculture and the resulting impoverishment of many settlers, masters seem to have become more willing to concede freedom to their Indians. In this sense, it is important to distinguish between wills that declared the freedom of Indian servants as a general principle and those that went further and actually set Indian servants free. It was most often the case that masters, on their deathbeds, would admit to doubts about the legitimacy of Indian captivity, in a sort of paternalistic last gasp, while also guaranteeing that their “free” Indians would be divided up among their heirs. The crucial difference came in cases in which wills included an additional stipulation freeing the Indians of any service obligations following the death of their master, which occurred much less frequently.

Freedom so conceded in a last will and testament, sometimes reiterated in a letter of manumission filed with a notary, was considered irreversible, despite occasional lawsuits pursued by recalcitrant heirs. Inês Pedroso, for example, upon freeing Generosa and Custódia “for [their] good works,” emphasized that the two “would remain free and unbound by any obligation of servitude whatsoever not to son nor to daughter and they may go to the mission village or to wherever they see fit.”¹⁴ In another case, Madalena, an Indian woman set free in similar circumstances by her mistress, Luzia Leme, had to resort to the law in order to guarantee the freedom granted her, as an heir to Luzia Leme continued to hold her in captivity. In his sentence, the judge issued a fine of 20,000 réis, the approximate value of the Indian woman, against the person “who impeded her.”¹⁵ Unwilling to place his faith in the law alone, another master took a different approach to protecting a woman he freed, prohibiting her exploitation by his heirs under threat of their coming “under my curse.”¹⁶

In São Paulo, conditional manumission was the most common means of passage from slavery to freedom. Masters often stipulated that Indians would have to serve their heirs, manumission only taking effect upon the death of the latter. From the point of view of the master, this act had the dual advantage of alleviating their conscience as they were facing death while guaranteeing some labor or income to their heirs. For Indian slaves, this kind of conditional freedom was practically meaningless, except in cases in which the heir in question was an aged spouse. For most, however, resigned to serve the offspring of their “benevolent” master, freedom remained a distant prospect, except in very rare cases in which heirs actually executed their parents’ wishes and issued definitive letters of manumission. For example, Captain Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida filed a letter of manumission with the notary of Parnaíba, conceding freedom to the couple João and Isabel, both of them bastardos, together with their children, thus carrying out the letter of his mother’s will, which had given the family its freedom on the condition that its members serve her heirs.¹⁷

Other conditional manumissions stipulated specific tasks or terms of service. For example, the letter of manumission granted to the Indian slave Paulo, an artisan or skilled worker of some sort, outlined a complicated arrangement. According to its terms, Paulo would be allowed to spend one week each month with his wife, a slave living on another property, in exchange for teaching eight young Indian slaves the secrets of his craft. After six years, he was to be freed unconditionally.¹⁸

Such conditions could cause some confusion, as in the case of the bastardas Mônica and Felipa. Margarida Gonçalves, owner of the pair, found it necessary and just to revoke the manumission that had been conceded to them, as the two girls went straightaway to the town of São Paulo, thinking that they were already free instead of awaiting her demise, as laid out in their letter of manumission. Gonçalves justified this action by observing that the two “were ungrateful and were her slaves, as they are daughters of her black woman.”¹⁹ José Mamaluco, son of a white man and a Tememinó woman, met a similar fate. His master, Father Antonio Rodrigues Velho of Jundiaí, had issued a letter of manumission in his name in 1672, but revoked it nine years later “for ingratitude.”²⁰

Unconditional manumissions were much rarer. In one case, the “black of the land” Maria secured her immediate freedom upon depositing 32,000 réis, her market value, in the hands of the heirs of Luzia Leme.²¹ In a similar case, Sebastiana de Oliveira granted freedom to an Indian woman named Páscoa upon receiving 200,000 réis, “which she gave me out of gratitude for my leaving her free and unbound.”²²

In general, masters sought to keep freed slaves on their properties, even in cases of unconditional manumission. Oftentimes, certain members of a family would be manumitted, while their spouses or children would remain in the condition of “compulsory services.” For example, Gaspar Favacho granted freedom to several Indians in his will, but all of them would have had to remain on the estate in order to keep their families intact.²³ Throughout the period of Indian slavery, it was common to find freed slaves as part of the labor force on Paulista estates, either to be with their families or because they were subject to coercion.

In any case, the choice between leaving or staying on the lands of the former master depended, in the final analysis, on the opportunities for survival in the economic and social context of colonial São Paulo. Thus, perhaps because of a lack of alternatives, the ten former slaves of Maria de Lima Barbosa opted to remain on her son’s property after she died.²⁴ But some slaveowners showed some concern with the fate of their former slaves, giving them tools, land, and even money to help them in their new lives. Ângela de Siqueira, for example, gave 20,000 réis to a bastarda “who assists in my house … for good services.”²⁵ Ambrósio Mendes, when he freed all of his Indian slaves, provided each couple with two hoes, a scythe, and an axe, “so that they have with which to better their lives.” This bequest, according to Mendes, would compensate the Indians “for them having served me.”²⁶

Paths to Freedom: The Law

Few Indians could count on the goodwill of their masters to guarantee their freedom and survival. If poor economic conditions softened the temperaments of some masters, it hardened others, who responded to the commercial crisis by intensifying the demands they made on their slaves. Consequently, many Indians found they needed to fight for their autonomy and freedom, making use of legal as well as illegal means. This meant that, even as running away became more common, so too did Indians increasingly turn to litigation as a path to freedom.

In the early eighteenth century, Indians became increasingly aware of the advantages offered by access to Crown justice, particularly with regard to the question of freedom. This was made possible, in large part, by administrative reforms that were put into effect beginning in the 1690s. This reform movement, though it achieved only partial success, was intended to subordinate the region to the authority of the Crown in the context of the gold strikes in the northern reaches of the captaincy, which would later become the separate captaincy of Minas Gerais. The most direct method of effecting this subordination was the Crown’s interposition in relations between colonists and Indians. Though the Crown would not effectively abolish Indian slavery – “abolition” had been proclaimed innumerable times by that point – the increasing involvement of royal officialdom in the Indian question in São Paulo during these years did accelerate the process of its dissolution.²⁷

Beginning in 1698, the new governor of Rio de Janeiro began to act energetically, particularly with respect to the mission villages, immediately appointing a representative for Indian affairs in São Paulo. The new advocate of the Indians, Isidoro Tinoco de Sá, produced surprising results – if his reports are to be believed – returning to the mission villages many Indians who had been held by the colonists as personal servants. At the time of his arrival in the town of São Paulo in 1698, he counted a mere 90 Indians in the four mission villages of the region, but only two years later he proudly reported that the villages were now home to 1,224 Indian residents. According to Sá, the colonists had responded quickly to the threat of fines and returned these Indians to the mission villages voluntarily.²⁸

Such measures, however, created more problems than they solved. On the one hand, the mission villages, lacking adequate croplands and effective economic organization, could not sustain this population. On the other, the delicate question of Indian labor and freedom, which had supposedly been resolved by the royal decree of 1696, was reopened with new intensity, placing the colonists in an uncomfortable position, squeezed between their material interests and their loyalty to the Crown. However, the Paulistas’ resentment of the encroachment of external authority on their carefully guarded affairs became the prevailing sentiment, earning São Paulo its reputation as an anti-absolutist bastion. Indeed, several of the settlers’ actions during this period – an attack on the royally sanctioned salt monopoly at Santos and the attempted murder of a Crown magistrate, among other violent acts – by striking directly at royal authority, reinforced this reputation.²⁹ And when it came to the specific issue of the mission villages, the colonists feared that the Crown and the Jesuits had hatched a plot aimed at depriving them of their Indians.³⁰

One direct result of the increasing reach of royal authority was greater access to Crown justice in disputes over the status of the Indians. For the first time, royal authorities opened a channel through which legislation concerning the freedom of the Indians could be invoked in the defense of their freedom. During the seventeenth century, attempts at making existing labor relations meet the conditions prescribed by law failed in the face of insuperable contradictions. The colonists, backed by local judicial authority, which rested with the municipal councils, forged the institutional contours of personal service as a matter of rights acquired in the past, that is, as stemming from “practice and custom.” In a notable case from 1666 – a lawsuit over ownership of some captives – this right to property was given precedence over the Indians’ right to freedom, in spite of exhaustive citation of legislation prohibiting the enslavement of the natives.³¹

This pattern began to change with the intromission of royal justice in the region, particularly with the arrival of the first Crown magistrate to be based in São Paulo, in the final years of the seventeenth century. From then on, the Indians themselves became frequent litigants, suing for their freedom based on the specific wording of the relevant legislation. By the letter of the law, after all, the enslavement of Indians was notoriously illegal.

An illuminating example of this process unfolded in Itu in the early eighteenth century. Here, in a township on the western edge of Paulista settlement, Micaela Bastarda had been manumitted in 1703 by Gonçalo de Pedrosa, who left her “free of all servitude and administration so that she may live as a free person with whomever she may like.” Pedrosa’s will, however, did not ensure Micaela’s freedom and so in 1721 she sued the Carmelite prior, who forced her to work in the convent of São Luís while claiming that she was one of a number of Indians that her late master’s widow had bequeathed to the friars. This case should have been beyond dispute (Pedrosa had predeceased his wife, and his will had thus freed Micaela before she could be passed on to any possible heirs), but the prior nevertheless argued in defense of the convent’s interest that it was “practice and custom for more than 150 years [that colonists be] served by heathen, mamalucos and bastardos” and, what is more, “to pass the administration of some to others, from parents to children.” In response, Micaela’s legal representative argued that “practice and custom cannot have a place where there is law to the contrary and also against freedoms there is not nor could there be such a prescription much less an immemorial one.” After many hearings, the ordinary judge Claudio Furquim de Abreu handed down a sentence favorable to Micaela, guaranteeing her freedom and forcing the Carmelites to pay back wages for the twelve years and seven months during which she was “unjustly and violently” exploited. The friars never paid the indemnity they owed the “miserable pauper,” but after nearly twenty years of uncertainty, Micaela gained her freedom, while also opening a precedent for the other Indians held by the convent.³²

In this context of decisions favorable to the complainants, Rosa Dias Moreira brought a suit against her master, Francisco Xavier de Almeida, of Jundiaí, alleging her enslavement was illegal because she was a descendant of “carijós.” In a similar case, two “descendants of Carijós” sued José Pais on the same grounds.³³ By testifying to their Indian ancestry – consubstantiated in Carijó identity – these Indians sought to guarantee their status as free persons, which was legally established by the laws of the kingdom of Portugal. In some instances, they sought to back up their case by alleging poor treatment or unjust captivity in order to characterize their condition as equivalent to slavery.

As an alternative strategy, some slaves sought refuge in the mission villages of the region, then fought in court for the right to remain in these communities. For example, in 1723, the widow Maria Leme do Prado appeared before a judge to justify her rights of administration over the “mulata” Marta. Marta’s mother, enslaved on an expedition to Guarulhos territory by João da Cunha some forty years earlier, had been sold to Pedro Fernandes Aragonês, Maria Leme’s father. At the time of the suit, Marta was “fugitive” in the mission village of Conceição dos Guarulhos, alleging that she belonged there by virtue of her Guarulhos ancestry. After hearing testimony, the judge returned Marta to the custody of Maria Leme do Prado.³⁴

In another case, with a different outcome, the Indians Vicente, José, Inácio, Joaquim, Romana (Joaquim’s mother), and Marcela de Oliveira (his wife) presented a petition accusing the colonist Antonio Pedroso of holding them “with [the] rigorous treatment of slaves.” Alleging that they were descendants “of the old inhabitants of the mission villages,” these Indians obtained a favorable verdict that stated that they were to be restored to the village of Pinheiros. Despite this verdict, however, one of the men was pressed into service to fight the warlike Paiaguá of the upper Paraguay River basin and the elderly Romana was returned to Antonio Pedroso to serve him in exchange for a bond deposited against his use of her labor.³⁵

Taken together, the litigation brought by “descendants of Carijós” delineates the process of disintegration of Indian slavery and illuminates the question of the ethnic identity of the local population. Litigants who received favorable sentences – most of them, at least – came to join the most numerous stratum of Paulista society, composed of smallholders and nominally free tenants (agregados), the precursors of the “caipira society” that would be studied so thoroughly in the twentieth century. By the same token, only a minority of manumitted Indians “reintegrated themselves” into the mission villages of the region as stipulated by the Indian policy of the early eighteenth century. Thus, the major trend in this process was an increase in the distance separating the local poor from their indigenous pasts and Indian identities.

Meanwhile, masters proved obstinate in defense of their privileges, seeking to retain their Indian slaves at all costs. For example, Francisco Dias and his wife Úrsula, Indians of the village of Escada, “free by birth,” alleged that their daughter was being held by Marcos da Fonseca of Mogi das Cruzes, who treated the girl as if she were a slave. They asked the judge to restore the girl to their village, where she could enjoy the freedom that was hers by right. The case was investigated by the town captain of Mogi das Cruzes, who determined that Fonseca was treating the girl well and recommended that the case be dismissed.³⁶ Thus, there were circumstances in which the judicial system could serve the interests of masters rather than Indian litigants.

Indeed, the masters themselves increasingly turned to the law to resolve issues regarding Indian labor. The records of a lawsuit over a rural chapel provide interesting insight into the questions of Indian liberty and access to Indian labor during this period of transition, in which Indian slavery was a dying institution. On the face of it, the suit was a conflict over the administration of the chapel of Bonsucesso, founded and legated haphazardly by Francisco Cubas Preto in the 1670s. But what was truly at stake was control over the thirty-four Indians who remained attached to the chapel, a considerable labor force at that time, particularly in the poor bairro of São Miguel. In 1710, Francisco Cubas’s last daughter, named Brígida Sobrinha, died. At that point, control over the chapel and its Indians lay in the hands of Amador Bueno da Veiga, the owner of a neighboring property. What emerges from the proceedings is that Amador Bueno, who was already rich in lands and Indians, had wanted to use the chapel’s Indians, who had remained idle under the careless administration of the property by the last direct heiress. While the exact details remain somewhat obscure, it would seem that Amador Bueno, with Brígida Sobrinha’s consent, had assumed management of the property, rebuilding the chapel and reorganizing its productive base.

With Brígida’s death, however, administration of Bonsucesso passed to her niece, married to João dos Reis Cabral, who immediately secured an eviction order served to Amador Bueno da Veiga. Unsatisfied with eviction alone, Cabral also requested an indemnity for the use of the Indians’ labor, calculated at 200 réis per day per Indian for the eighteen months in which Bueno had benefited from their service.

Obviously shocked with the prospect of having to pay more than 4,000 milréis for Indian labor that he had enjoyed free access to up to that point, Amador Bueno’s first impulse was to recalculate the wage bill, deciding that 160 réis per day was fair, as “some pieces provide fewer services than others and are less useful.” He then discounted forty days per year from the previous tally “because of the rains,” as well as eighty-three Sundays and religious holidays, during which the Indians did not work. This brought him to a new sum that amounted to only half of the original one but which still seemed exorbitant, and so Bueno’s attorney resorted to a complex legal argument intended to prove that the Indians did not work for Amador Bueno, but only for the chapel, which they were obligated to serve. In addition, he argued, Amador Bueno incurred losses, providing the Indians with food while they restored the chapel, rebuilt a bridge leading to the property, and cleared plots of land for their own sustenance. Citing the royal decree of 1696, the defense attorney added that “the service of the Indians belongs to the Indians themselves and that their administrators are to pay them.” Contending that Amador Bueno had never been the administrator of the Indians, the attorney sought to show that the defendant owed nothing. Summing up, he alleged that “the labors rendered by said Indians were of no profit at all” to Amador Bueno, but rather were to the benefit of the chapel.³⁷

In any case, even if he had profited from the labor of these Indians, Amador Bueno da Veiga could not have agreed to pay such a high wage bill, in spite of his wealth, for it would undermine the fundamental logic of the regime of personal service. For the Paulistas, Indian labor was incompatible with Indian freedom. If they could not avail themselves of Indian slaves, they would be forced to seek alternative sources of unfree labor or, still worse, to work the land on their own.

A Transition to African Slavery?

At first glance, one solution to the crisis of Indian slavery would be to replace the Indians with African slaves, a solution taken up by all of the wealthiest Paulistas in the early eighteenth century. According to some historians, the increased presence of African captives in São Paulo in the context of indigenous population decline indicates that a transition to African slavery was underway. To be sure, small numbers of black slaves, clearly distinguished from the Indians by the terms “heathen of Guinea,” “pieces from Angola,” or, most often, “tapanhunos” – a Tupi term used to designate an African slave – had been present in the captaincy from its earliest years, but they represented a tiny fraction of the overall labor force, made up almost entirely of Indian workers. Only in the final quarter of the seventeenth century and particularly after 1700 did larger numbers of African slaves begin to transform the lodges of Indian servants (tijupares) into Afro-Brazilian slave quarters (senzalas).

But to refer to a transition, at least in the sense of the replacement of Indian captives in agricultural work, would be premature: during this period it remained an incomplete process that would be completed only in the late eighteenth century, when the expansion of sugar cultivation revitalized the Paulista economy.³⁸ In the early decades of the century, high demand for slave labor in the mines suddenly raised the prices of African captives throughout Brazil. In São Paulo between 1695 and 1700, the price of an adult male slave jumped from 45$000 to 180$000, reaching 250$000 in 1710.³⁹ Few Paulistas possessed sufficient resources or had access to sources of credit that would allow them to import large numbers of African slaves. Therefore, the use of Africans in Paulista agriculture was limited to some of the newest units of commercial production that managed to overcome the difficulties imposed by the decline of Indian slavery, most of which were found in the rural bairros to the west of Santana de Parnaíba and to the north of the town of São Paulo.

In this sense, the expansion of African slavery in São Paulo in the early years of the eighteenth century more than anything else reflected important changes in the economic organization of the plateau, which were intrinsically linked to the emerging mining economy of Minas Gerais. At that point, African slavery assumed two distinct, though complementary forms. On the one hand, the trade in African slaves, as merchandise bound for the mines, contributed to São Paulo’s transformation into a commercial entrepôt. On the other, some black slaves were introduced on the large rural estates of the region.

These two faces of African slavery are evident in the composition of slaveholdings during these years. The preference for adult males, most of them African, and the near-complete absence of children, is clear in the demographic profile of the holdings of slaves by merchants who did business in the mining region. On large agricultural properties, the profile was very different. On rural estates, the makeup of the African slave population corresponded to the pattern established for Indian slavery in the seventeenth century, with greater balance between the sexes, considerable numbers of children, a preference for slaves born in the colony, including mestiços, and high rates of intermarriage or informal unions, now involving partners of African and Indian origin (see Tables 13 and 14).

Table 13Composition of Captive African Population on Agricultural Properties, São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba^*

Owner (no. of Indians)	M	F	C	T	Date/Source
Domingos da Rocha (92)	13	10	1	24	1661
					IE, cx. 6
Francisco de Camargo (58)	5	3	8	16	1672
					INP, cx. 10
Marcellino de Camargo (124)	3	7	4	14	1684
					IT, 21
Jerônimo Bueno (55)	1	10	0	11	1693
					IT, 21
Pedro Vaz de Barros (47)	10	12	2	24	1697
					IT, 24
Maria de Mendonça (“many”)	24	15	13	52	1700
					IPO, 14.563
Salvador Jorge Velho (81)	15	5	0	20	1708
					IPO, 14.518
Maria Bueno (54)	6	7	12	25	1710
					IPO, 13.909
João Pereira de Avelar (27)	14	7	3	24	1713
					IPO, 14.151
Gaspar de Godoi Colaço (57)	12	4	5	21	1714
					IPO, 14.091
Baltasar de Godoi Bicudo (52)	18	12	23	53	1719
					IPO, 14.676
Amador Bueno da Veiga (92)	11	11	23	45	1720
					IPO, 14.962
Total	132	103	94	329

^*M = adult men, F = adult women, C = children, T = total slaves of African origin.

Table 14Composition of Captive African Population in Estates Involved in Mining or Mercantile Activity, São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba^*

Owner (no. of Indians)	M	F	C	T	Date/Source
Antonio da Rocha Pimentel (28)	19	5	0	24	1709
					IPO, 13.919
Potencia Leite do Prado (“few”)	29	15	3	47	1710
					IPO, 14.853
Luzia Bueno (15)	17	1	0	18	1711
					INP, cx. 24
Martinho Cordeiro (2)	10	3	0	13	1711
					IPO, 14.900
Francisco B. de Brito (19)	22	4	5	31	1712
					IPO, 14.448
Ana Proença (0)	11	1	1	13	1713
					IPO, 14.217
Maria Lima do Prado (20)	15	3	3	21	1715
					INP, cx. 26
João de Almeida Naves (15)	27	9	8	44	1715
					IPO, 14.758
Pascoa do Rego (9)	12	2	1	15	1716
					INP, cx. 26
João Francisco Duarte (11)	13	1	1	15	1716
					IPO, 15.927
Isabel Barbosa da Silva (0)	24	7	2	33	1717
					IPO, 14.068
Miguel Gonçalves Medeiros (“few”)	17	4	11	32	1717
					IPO, 14.340
Bento Amaral da Silva (21)	25	10	11	46	1719
					IPO, 14.308
Domingos Dias da Silva (12)	30	16	8	54	1725
					IPO, 15.086
Total	271	81	54	406

*M = adult men, F = adult women, C = children, T = total slaves of African origin.

Summing up, these two faces of slavery reflected important new developments in the Paulista economy involving a handful of wealthy merchants and rural producers. The first group was made up primarily of immigrants from Portugal, some of whom married into the local elite, to a certain extent easing potential conflicts between the two groups.⁴⁰ By introducing greater commercial capital and linking the region more closely to the Atlantic economy, the economic activities of these merchants represented a major break with the period before the discovery of gold. It was through the trade in African slaves, among the most sought-after commodities in the mining region, that the bases of Paulista society were transformed.

The second group – that of the rural producers – was made up of settlers who had prospered from the exploitation of Indian labor and had the resources that allowed them to import African slaves. At first glance, it may seem that this transition was limited to simply inserting African captives into the existing structure of Indian slavery, which would indicate significant continuity, not only in terms of the organization of production, but also in the context of the internal commercial circuit that had prevailed through the preceding century. However, a thorough analysis reveals a profound shakeup of the economy and society of the plateau. Due to their close relationship with the market provided by the mines, the great estates of the region assumed characteristics that were clearly new at the dawn of the eighteenth century.

During this period the great rural estates began to specialize in the production of a few commodities to meet the needs of the growing market of the mining zones in the north of the captaincy. While in the seventeenth century the largest Paulista properties produced foodstuffs – especially wheat – for the coastal market, during the era of the gold boom Paulista agriculture contributed little to the market of the mining zones, in spite of massive inflation in the prices of corn and beans.⁴¹ According to commercial records from the period, most transactions with the mining region involved sugar-cane brandy, slaves, and, notably, cattle.⁴² This makes sense when one considers transport costs, which were the major obstacle between Paulista producers and the market of Minas Gerais. We have already shown how the settlers resolved the problem of transport in the seventeenth century, by mobilizing large numbers of Indian porters who journeyed to the coast burdened with goods. The gold mines, however, demanded a far longer voyage of up to two months, “with laden saddle animals and blacks,” as a Paulista complained in 1700.⁴³ It was one thing to send an Indian to Santos carrying 30 kilograms of grain or beans, on a two-to-four-day trip; a journey of two months was another, one that would represent certain death for most porters.

Two options were left to the Paulistas. The first, as we have indicated, lay in the reorientation of production to goods of sufficiently high value to cover steep transport costs. The second was to establish agricultural properties closer to the mines. It seems likely that the latter option was the solution preferred by most Paulistas, as is shown in the values of tithes collected during the first half of the eighteenth century, which grew spectacularly in Minas do Ouro (Minas Gerais), while showing more modest growth in São Paulo. In 1710, when the tithe contract for the mining district was separated from that of the rest of the captaincy, the value of the tithe contract for São Paulo fell from 15:210$000 to a mere 3:934$000.⁴⁴ At mid-century, whereas the contract for São Paulo had increased threefold, reaching 10:600$000, the contract for Minas Gerais had jumped to 92:038$000.⁴⁵ These figures certainly reflect the enormous demographic growth of Minas Gerais, which was made a separate captaincy in 1720, but at the same time they demonstrate the feeble response of Paulista agriculture to the enormous market provided by the mines.

In fact, by the early eighteenth century, Paulista agriculture had suffered a reversal of fortune. Whereas São Paulo had once been the primary site of wheat production in Brazil, in 1724 Governor Rodrigo César de Meneses found it necessary to request shipments of flour from other captaincies because of a serious shortage in the region.⁴⁶ His successor was more explicit when it came to the failure of Paulista agriculture, blaming it on the diminished size of sesmarias granted by the Crown, which had been reduced in an effort to avoid the concentration of vast tracts of lands in few hands in Minas Gerais. According to the governor, the new sesmarias were unsuited for wheat production, as the primitive techniques of the colonists – slash and burn, or swidden, agriculture – constantly demanded new tracts of land, a situation made still worse by the tendency to plant small stands of cane for the production of sugar-cane brandy and by the ravages of the cattle that were squeezed onto these small properties.⁴⁷

In the end, the opening of the mines affected the agrarian organization of the plateau in at least two important ways. First, due to prohibitive transport costs and the increasing scarcity of Indian labor, the leading producers who remained on the plateau reoriented their commercial production, transforming their wheat fields into pastures, planting sugar cane, and building stills. Second, intense migration of much of the Indian labor supply to the mining zone and the concentration of what remained on the largest properties relegated the vast majority of rural colonists to a marginal, poverty-stricken existence. Many men abandoned their modest properties to seek their fortunes, a few of them striking it rich in the distant mines of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Goiás. But for the families that remained, the era of the gold boom meant the deepening of rural poverty, a process underway since the rapid decline of Indian slavery that began in the mid-seventeenth century and accelerated thereafter.⁴⁸

Ultimately, as Frei Gaspar and other chroniclers of local decline observed so well, the Paulista farmer of the eighteenth century was but a shadow of the large slaveowner who dominated the rural landscape of the previous century. Responding to the opportunities offered by the presence of abundant lands and Indians, no Portuguese settler moved to the interior with the intention of becoming a peasant; in the words of the discerning observer Bartolomeu Lopes de Carvalho, “it is certain that in those parts there has not been seen until today a servant who comes from Portugal with his master who does not soon aspire to be more than him…”⁴⁹ But an impoverished peasantry was what remained after the rapid destruction of so much land and so many Indians.

Notes

1.For a detailed description of the changes that occurred in the first half of the eighteenth century, Boxer’s Golden Age of Brazil remains indispensable. As far as Paulista historiography is concerned, this is considered to have been a transitional period. See Alfredo Ellis Júnior, Resumo da história de São Paulo (São Paulo: Rothschild Loureiro, 1942) and, coauthored with Myriam Ellis, A economia paulista no século XVIII: o ciclo do muar, o ciclo do acúcar (São Paulo: Universidade de São Paulo, 1950), among other works. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras, treats the gold rush with a certain amount of caution, associating it with the simultaneous expansion of muleteering and riverine transport (monções), essential steps in the accumulation of capital for subsequent agricultural expansion, thus providing a link between the frugal backwoodsman of the past and the rich planter of the future. In my view, both portrayals mischaracterize seventeenth-century Paulista society by denying the existence of commercial agriculture and ignoring the dynamics of Indian slavery.

2.For example, João Pedroso Xavier, one of those to strike gold at Sumidouro, settled about twenty Indians from the mining region on his estate in Parnaíba during the first decade of the eighteenth century (AESP-INP, cx. 24); see also “Coleção das notícias dos primeiros descobrimentos das minas na América” (Cód. Costa Mattoso), Biblioteca Municipal de São Paulo, fol. 14. Other documents on the discovery of gold deposits may be found in Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay (ed.), Relatos sertanistas (São Paulo: Comissão do IV Centenário, 1953).

3.The Costa Mattoso codex, cited extensively by Boxer in Golden Age of Brazil in other contexts, contains valuable information on the Indians of what would become the captaincy of Minas Gerais, as well as of other regions of Portuguese America.

4.On the formation of a noble identity among the Paulistas, which was intrinsically linked to the origins and growth of bandeirante“mythology,” see Katia Maria Abud, “O sangue intimorato e as nobilíssimas tradições (a construção de um símbolo paulista: o bandeirante)” (tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, 1985); see also Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds.), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton University Press, 1987), 15–50. In this context, one must return to the well-trodden ground of Paulista historiography dealing with the role of interethnic mixture (mestiçagem) in the making of Paulista society and its elites. Two classic interpretations, radically different in their theoretical approaches and assumptions, are Alfredo Ellis Júnior, Os primeiros troncos paulistas e o cruzamento euro-americano, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Nacional, 1976 [1936]), which – as Ellis himself confessed – was a re-edition of his Raça de gigantes: a civilisação no planalto paulista. Estudo da evolução racial anthroposocial e psychicologica do paulista dos séculos XVI, XVII, XVIII e XIX, e das mesologias physica e social do planalto paulista (São Paulo: Helios, 1926); and Holanda, Caminhos e fronteiras. Finally, the little-known book by Edmundo Zenha, Mamelucos, approaches the subject by way of a larger study of the enslavement of the Guarani.

5.Fonseca, Vida de Belchior de Pontes, 109–110.

6.Will of Antonio Nunes, IT, 38:19.

7.Will of Catarina de Mendonça, 1671, AESP-INP, cx. 12. The term mulato, in this context, refers to the son of an African father and an Indian mother.

8.Domingas Mamaluca v. Bernardo de Quadros, Itu, 1700, AESP-AC, cx. 2, doc. 28.

9.“Lançamento de um escripto de venda e troca,” Apr. 17, 1722, and “Carta de liberdade a Maria Carijó,” Sept. 30, 1722, AESP-Notas Sorocaba, cx. 6020-1.

10.While the focus here is on rural areas, it is important to keep in mind that a similar process was underway in the towns. For example, the will of Ana Bastarda offers a rare glimpse of a woman who fought to survive as a poor, single mother, facing a world that tended to to classify her as a slave: “I declare that I am a poor unmarried woman free and unbound and I was never married, the daughter of Eliador Eanes and Simoa [an Indian woman], and I have a son by the name of Mateus and a daughter by the name of Mariana; the son is of Inácio do Prado, his father having gotten him and taken him to his house, and the daughter, I ask for the love of God, that the Reverend Father Vicar shelter her in his house in company of the lady, his sister, Leonor Gomes to teach her and indoctrinate in her the love and service of God and I also ask the Reverend Father Vicar, for the love of God, to agree to be my executor so that some small mercy before God may be found for my soul…” Will of Ana Bastarda, 1676, in AESP-AC, cx. 3, doc. 44. The document refers to her suit for the freedom of Mariana, who was being held as a slave by the municipal judge (juíz ordinário) Francisco de Godoi.

11.Of the 318 children born to Indian women and bastardas who were baptized in Santo Amaro in the late seventeenth century, 169 (53 percent) were listed with the descriptor “unknown father,” while 139 (44 percent) were registered as the children of stable couples. See Table 8. AMDDLS, 04-02-23, Batizados, Santo Amaro, livro 1.

12.Will of Pedro Vaz de Barros, 1674, in inventory of Brás de Barros, AESP-INP, cx. 22.

13.While the question of the freedom of the Indians has been amply discussed in the historiography, especially in its juridical aspects, the issue of manumission has hardly been touched upon. A noteworthy exception, based on evidence from Maranhão, is David G. Sweet, “Francisca: Indian Slave,” in David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (eds.), Struggle and Survival in Colonial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 274–291.

14.Will of Ignez Pedroso [Ines Pedroso], 1632, IT, 8:365.

15.Petition of “a india Magdalena,” June 18, 1634, IT, 9:9.

16.Will of Francisco Pinto Guedes, 1701, AESP-IPO, 13.998.

17.Letter of manumission, 1690, AESP-Notas Parnaíba.

18.Letter of manumission by José Ortiz de Camargo to Paulo, 1663, Cartório do Primeiro Ofício, Jundiaí, Notas, 1663, fol. 35.

19.“Reclamação de uma alforria,” Mar. 1, 1681, AESP-Notas Parnaíba, 1680.

20.Letter of manumission, July 28, 1672, and writ revoking manumission, Jan. 11, 1681, Livros de Notas de Jundiaí, Cartório do Primeiro Ofício, Jundiaí.

21.Letter of manumission, Feb. 8, 1700, AESP-Notas Parnaíba, 1699.

22.Will of Sebastiana de Oliveira, 1713, AESP-INP, cx. 25.

23.Will of Gaspar Favacho, 1681, AESP-INP, cx. 16

24.Inventory of Maria de Lima Barbosa, 1715, AESP-INP, cx. 26.

25.Will of Angela de Siqueira, 1728, AESP-INP, cx. 32.

26.Will of Ambrósio Mendes, 1642, IT, 13:481.

27.Paes Leme, Nobiliarquia paulistana, 3:19, asserts that Indian slavery was extinguished throughout Brazil around 1732. This assertion is mistaken, as the event to which Paes Leme refers is the proclamation by Governor Sarzedas that demanded that all Indians be relocated to the mission villages so that adult male Indians could be used in the wars against the Paiaguá of the upper Paraguay River basin. This error was repeated by many authors.

28.Artur de Sá e Meneses to the Crown, May 5, 1700, AHU-Rio de Janeiro, doc. 2513.

29.These issues are discussed in greater detail in Monteiro, “Sal, justiça social e autoridade colonial.”

30.Antonio Rodrigues, “Carta de missão,” Jan. 25, 1700, ARSI Brasilia 10, fol. 1v.

31.João Pires Rodrigues v. João Rodrigues da Fonseca, 1666, AESP-AC, cx. 1.

32.Micaela Bastarda v. Prior do Carmo, 1721, AESP-AC 1700–1800, cx. 15, doc. 320; civil ruling in favor of Micaela Bastarda, 1724, AESP-AC, cx. 13, doc. 190; Domingos Lopes de Godoi v. Convento do Carmo, 1730, AESP-AC, cx. 25, doc. 428.

33.Listing of criminal petitions, various dates (eighteenth century), AESP, cxs. 437–479.

34.Justification of Maria Leme do Prado, 1723, AESP-AC, cx. 12.

35.Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Boletim do Departamento do Arquivo do Estado 7 (1947): 37–38, 61.

36.Departamento do Arquivo do Estado de São Paulo, Boletim do Departamento do Arquivo do Estado 5 (1945): 17–18.

37.Francisco Cubas de Miranda v. Marta Miranda del Rei, 1721, AESP-AC, cx. 9, doc. 133.

38.Maria Theresa Schorer Petrone, A lavoura canavieira em São Paulo (São Paulo: Difusão Européia do Livro, 1968), remains the best work on the expansion of commercial agriculture in the late eighteenth century. See also Ellis Júnior and Ellis, A economia paulista no século XVIII.

39.The prices cited here are from estate inventories, which – together with parish registers – provide the most solid evidence of the growth of the African and Afro-American population of São Paulo. This material awaits a more systematic treatment. It is noteworthy that slave traders showed some enthusiasm regarding the prospect of supplying the market of the mining region through São Paulo, particularly once the Municipal Council of São Paulo petitioned the Overseas Council for permission to establish direct trade between Santos and Angola. However, the idea was opposed by the captains of the ships involved in the trade, who alleged that their ships would have to depart Santos with empty holds, because of the lack of worthwhile merchandise at the principal port of the captaincy of São Paulo. See AHU-SP, docs. 56 (Feb. 12, 1700) and 60 (1700).

40.Boxer, Golden Age of Brazil, provides abundant examples of conflicts between agriculturalists and merchants, as well as between Portuguese and Brazilian-born colonists, which became more intense during this period in various corners of the colony. While much of the historiography has focused on the struggle between Paulistas and Emboabas – the colonists from São Paulo who made the first strikes of gold and the newcomers drawn to Minas Gerais thereafter, respectively – the documentation features constant complaints of abuses by forestallers, monopolists, usurers, and royal officials from the opening of the mines onward, sometimes resulting in significant outbreaks of violence. As far as the assimilation of Portuguese immigrants in Paulista society is concerned, it reached the point by mid-century that a Crown magistrate urged the Overseas Council to suspend the privileges granted the Pires and Camargo families, who succeeded one another at the head of the Municipal Council, given the growth of the Portuguese-born population of the town of São Paulo. AHU-SP, doc. 1820, Jan. 20, 1749.

41.The best description of the inflation that struck the mining districts is in Antonil, Cultura e opulência do Brasil, esp. 139–143. See also Boxer, Golden Age of Brazil, 54–56 and 187ff.

42.There are two important studies of the provisioning of the mining zone: Mafalda P. Zemella, O abastecimento da capitania de Minas Gerais no século XVIII, 2nd edn. (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1990 [1951]), and Myriam Ellis, Contribuição ao estudo do abastecimento das áreas mineradoras do Brasil no século XVIII (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1961). These two studies are based primarily on documentation regarding monopoly contracts and rights to passage. Beyond the official sphere, estate inventories provide numerous examples of commercial relations with the mining zone, but these activities are best illustrated in the account book of Father Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida, published in the Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 58 (1960): 491–579, and in his 1710 will, filed in AESP-INP. Father Pompeu owned large estates in Parnaíba and Itu, with a labor force of approximately 300 Indian and African slaves. Upon his death in 1713, his properties passed to the Jesuit College of São Paulo, part of them becoming the immense estate of Araçariguama. The account book is analyzed along with unpublished and little-known documentation in Herbert Cahn, “Padre Guilherme Pompeu de Almeida e suas atividades comerciais, 1686–1713” (tese de doutorado, Universidade de São Paulo, 1967). In a curious attempt to hew to the conventions of Paulista historiography, Cahn asserts that Father Pompeu’s acquisition of African slaves – like that of other Paulistas in this period – was a matter of conspicuous consumption rather than obtaining productive labor (see p. 9).

43.Pedro Taques de Almeida to Governor Lencastre, Mar. 20, 1700, Ajuda, cód. 51-IX-33, fol. 450. On conditions of travel and transport to the mining zone, see also Cód. Costa Mattoso, fol. 21.

44.Timoteo Correia de Gois to Conselho Ultramarino, Sept. 8, 1710, AHU-SP, doc. 83.

45.Lyra, “Os dízimos.” For a more general discussion of tithes in Minas, see Manoel Cardozo, “Tithes in Colonial Minas Gerais,” Catholic Historical Review 38/2 (July 1952): 175–182.

46.Governor Meneses to Governor Saldanha, Mar. 8, 1724, AHU-SP, doc. 371.

47.Governor Pimentel to Conselho Ultramarino, Apr. 18, 1730, AHU-SP, doc. 760.

48.The spread and scale of poverty resulting from the growth of mining are well explored in the interesting works of Mello e Souza, Desclassificados do ouro, and Volpato, A conquista da terra no universo da pobreza.

49.Bartolomeu Lopes de Carvalho, “Manifesto a sua magestade,” n.d., Ajuda, cód. 51-IX-33.