4

The Regime of Personal Service

“In Brazil,” observed Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus, “where to all was given freely more land than they needed and in such quantities as colonists requested, no one ever needed to work another’s property, obligating themselves to the payment of annual rents.” However, he continued, “in this State he who does not engage in trade or lacks slaves lives in the greatest indigence; and furthermore, for someone to be rich, it is not enough to possess many slaves, for these are of no use to their masters if the latter are not industrious themselves, and do not personally oversee the said slaves.”1

Abundant lands and a concomitant need for slaves, with these optimally under the personal supervision of their master: this formula certainly had much do to with the making of colonial Brazilian society. However, it falls short of a satisfactory explanation of the evolution, dynamics, and economic viability of a slave society. After all, it is important to remember that the origin of slavery in Brazil – Indian and African – was found in the articulation of a colonial system that sought to create and expropriate agricultural and extractive surpluses to be transformed into commercial wealth. Nonetheless, Frei Gaspar’s observations should not be taken lightly, because in addition to constituting a set of relations of production, slavery represented a pervasive way of looking at the world, one which often functioned independently of the dictates of the Atlantic economy. In every corner of Brazil, slavery became the measure of society.2

In discussing the Paulista version of colonial slavery, one faces the additional task of explaining why and how Indian slavery developed into the dominant form of production. Inevitably, this set of questions leads to at least implicit comparisons with African slavery in Brazil, which is better documented and has been more fully studied. In making these comparisons, historians have focused on the profound cultural differences between Amerindians and Africans while neglecting the basic commonality, which was, of course, slavery.3 Seen from the latter perspective, the basic structural features of colonial society in São Paulo do not seem so distinct from those of the sugar-producing zones.

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, in seventeenth-century São Paulo, Indian slavery grew out of the same sources as African slavery on the coast and revolved around similar kinds of economic exploitation. However, because of existing legal and moral restrictions on Indian slavery, the Paulistas had to go to much greater lengths than their Bahian and Pernambucan counterparts in attempting to rationalize and justify their dominion over their captives. Employing increasingly elaborate arguments, the Paulistas came to demand under the law that which they already exercised in fact: absolute control over Indian labor and personhood. However, this was no easy task, for in addition to confronting the hardened opposition of the Jesuits, whom they eventually expelled from the captaincy, the Paulistas also had to carry out a series of diplomatic entreaties aimed at convincing the Crown to uphold and preserve a peculiar form of slavery.

The Creation of a Pro-Slavery Worldview

From the beginnings of Portuguese colonization, the development of Indian slavery as a minimally stable institution faced serious obstacles. The stubborn resistance of indigenous peoples, the unyielding opposition of the Jesuits, and the ambiguous position of the Crown on the Indian question: all stood in the way of the settlers’ access to Indian labor. Step by step, the colonists of the São Paulo region confronted and overcame these obstacles, gradually shaping a well-articulated system of production based on Indian servitude. The first obstacle fell in the sixteenth century, with the decimation of the local Tupi population and the expulsion of the Guaianá and Guarulhos from areas of projected European settlement. The second would fall in the first half of the seventeenth century, when pro-slavery interests prevailed over those of the Jesuits, as a series of smaller conflicts culminated in the tumultuous expulsion of the priests in 1640. Only the third was never fully overcome by the Paulistas, as the Crown maintained its somewhat ambiguous position in the formulation and execution of Indian policy. Yet even in this sphere, through a well-crafted political and legal struggle, the Paulistas succeeded in outlining the institutional contours that would legitimize Indian slavery.

The elements of conflict between competing colonial interests, which had already surfaced in the sixteenth century, began to assume greater intensity as that century came to an end and the flow of new captives to the plateau increased. What was fundamentally at stake was the fate of Indians brought from the sertão. The Jesuit position was that these Indians should be incorporated into mission villages, after which their labor would be distributed to individual settlers on a contractual basis. On the other hand, the settlers – who, after all, had introduced the vast majority of Indians at their own expense – sought to appropriate for themselves the right of direct administration over these Indians, using the powers of the Municipal Council of São Paulo to attain this objective.

Initially, however, the Council wavered on the question of how newly arrived Indians should be administered. Thus, for example, in 1587, after an expedition led by Domingos Luís returned to the town with a large number of Tupinaé captives, the councilmen thought it best to send the Indians to a mission village, in spite of settler pleas to the contrary. Their decision, however, was not a verdict on the settlers’ economic interest in captive labor. Rather, it responded to the question of how best to defend the colony, as the town was threatened by indigenous groups who were resistant to conquest and enslavement.4 Only in the 1590s, when the Portuguese presence was more secure, would the Council adopt an explicitly pro-slavery position on the Indian question, which placed it in opposition to the mission-village project and, by extension, against the Jesuits themselves.

An important factor in aggravating conflicts over the Indian question in São Paulo was an increase in the meddling of the Crown and its local representatives. In 1592, the arrival of a new governor of the captaincy of São Vicente exacerbated existing conflict. The position taken by Governor Jorge Correia diverged completely from those of his predecessors, who, of course, had encouraged offensive war and Indian slavery, as was clear in the case of Governor Jerônimo Leitão in the 1580s. In fact, shortly after setting foot in Brazil, Jorge Correia ordered that the Indians be turned over to the Jesuits, which provoked an immediate, vehement response from the principal settlers of São Paulo, who called a public meeting before the Municipal Council. In this meeting, while initially excusing the governor “for being newly arrived from the kingdom and not having grasped the way of the land and its needs,” the settlers did not shrink from demonstrating their displeasure. Though willing to accept that the Jesuits might continue to “indoctrinate and teach [the Indians] in the way that they always have,” the settlers objected to the prospect of rigid and exclusive Jesuit control over the working population, “in view of it being very harmful to the community and not in the service of his majesty.” According to the settlers, the Indians themselves “are not pleased that possession of them should be given to said priests nor any other person if they are not to live as they have been living until now.” Though a few voices were raised in favor of the Jesuits, the main thrust of the meeting was a clear warning that any Jesuit interference in settler control of Indian labor would be met with serious opposition.5

The royal decree of July 26, 1596 attempted to resolve this conflict by defining the role of the Jesuits more clearly. According to this decree, it would fall to the priests to bring uncontacted groups from the interior to areas closer to Portuguese settlements, where they would perform the task of “domesticating” the Indians in segregated villages. The Indian, in turn, would “be master of his own property” and could serve the settlers for no more than two months at a time in exchange for a just salary for his labor. In addition, the position of the Judge of the Indians (juíz dos índios) was created, with jurisdiction in both civil and criminal law.6 In sum, the decree of 1596 merely formalized the mission-village project, seeking to bolster a set of arrangements that was already clearly in decline, particularly in São Paulo.

In spite of the Crown’s efforts to guarantee a Jesuit monopoly on access to Indian labor, the colonists were able to circumvent these measures through the Municipal Council. Indeed, the settlers proved adept at negotiating questions of jurisdiction inherent to the administrative structure of the colony. These jurisdictional questions emerged in conflicts between the Crown bureaucracy and proprietary privilege, on the one hand, and between royal authority and municipal autonomy, on the other. In this context, the Municipal Council of São Paulo little by little gained a stronger position in the struggle over Indian labor. In 1600, for example, the Council determined that the Judge of the Indians designated in the 1596 decree only had jurisdiction over Indians brought from the sertão by the Jesuits, as a selective reading of the decree could restrict its application to the Indians residing in the mission villages of São Miguel, Pinheiros, and Conceição dos Guarulhos, who were already a minority of the indigenous population of the region. At the same time, the Council reaffirmed the authority over Indians exercised by “ordinary judges” (juízes ordinários) chosen from among the councilmen and by the bairro captains they also named, reaffirming the privileges laid out in Martim Afonso de Sousa’s charter of 1534.7 Three weeks later, the Council allotted some Indians to João Fernandes, “because he was a poor man,” an action that ran unmistakably counter to the royal disposition of 1596.8

As the settlers increasingly appropriated control over the incoming population of indigenous captives, they also sought institutional legitimation for the relations of domination that underlay their exploitation of Indian labor. Indeed, they hardened their view of the necessity of forced native labor after 1600 as they came to realize the scale of the challenges they would face in achieving even modest economic growth on the plateau, challenges that were far more daunting than the Jesuits’ arguments in favor of Indian liberty. Lacking capital and access to credit, the settlers recognized that the large-scale importation of African slaves would be impossible. At the same time, they came up against the rugged Serra do Mar, which made transport difficult and costly, especially for the relatively low-value commodities that were to issue from the rural properties of the plateau. In short, for the Paulistas to participate in the larger colonial economy, they would need to produce and transport a marketable surplus so cheaply that its low sale price on the coast would still make the enterprise a profitable one. The solution, as we have seen, lay in the relentless exploitation of thousands of Indian field hands and porters brought from other regions.

No one at any point doubted that Indians would form the principal base of all colonial production in São Paulo. Nonetheless, the question of where formal authority over the Indian population lay was not so easily resolved, despite the settlers having triumphed over their adversaries in practical terms, establishing as a matter of fact that they could and would create, control, and sustain the labor force. On ideological and legal grounds, however, their position vis-à-vis Jesuits and the Crown was far less secure. As long as moral or legal objections to forced native labor existed, the reproduction of the relations of production upon which the settlers depended faced the continual threat of disruption from extra-economic forces. Therefore it was of supreme importance that the settlers constantly justify before the Crown the absolute need for and positive benefits of the personal service of the Indians, which they linked to the very survival of the colony.

Evidence of the Paulistas’ distinctive viewpoint on the Indian question appears here and there in different types of seventeenth-century documentation, above all in wills. However, the most coherent, yet concise statement of the settlers’ outlook appears in a report compiled in the 1690s by Bartolomeu Lopes de Carvalho, a Crown representative who visited the southern captaincies to gather information “especially about the Indians conquered and reduced to captivity by the residents of S. Paulo.”9 Drawing on what the colonists told him firsthand, Carvalho ended up providing a faithful rendition of how they regarded their society and economy, and even of how they perceived their past.

In his report, after recalling that the Paulistas had performed “many great services to God and Your Majesty, may whom God save, in the conquest of the Indians,” Carvalho turned to explaining the historic rights that the Portuguese had to Indian lands in Brazil. He claimed that at the time of the Portuguese arrival in the New World the Indians were “the true lords and owners” of the land, but after contact, “with them peace and friendship were established by pact in which they gave us the right that we have today over their lands.” This right, enhanced by the fact that the Europeans had a “rational politic” and a superior religion, was justified by the dissemination of the Catholic faith, seen as sufficient recompense for the appropriation of Indian land and labor, a belief manifested time and again in settlers’ wills. This benevolent spirit was exemplified, according to the report, by the occupation of São Vicente, where the first settlers had lived in “calmness, friendship, and ease” with the “tame” Indians brought from the interior by the Jesuits.

For the settlers, it was the rupture of this friendly and tranquil situation by hostile Indians that elicited the practical need and moral justification for slavery. “Wild” Indians had begun to attack Portuguese settlements because of the hatred they harbored for the “tame” Indians allied to the Portuguese and “in the exercise of their savagery for being accustomed to continuous wars in order to capture people and butcher them for their sustenance.” The whites, set upon from all sides and unable to peacefully convert these peoples to the Christian faith because of “their great savagery and brutality,” found it necessary to subdue them by force of arms, as well as “to enslave some of these heathens whom they brought to [areas of] settlement and made use of in their farming, instructing them as Catholics for them to be baptized as they always did.”

Enslavement was thus justified by the traditional practice of subjugating infidels who consciously rejected the Catholic faith, a point of key relevance in that it adhered to the principles of just war set down by Catholic kings and popes. Therefore, the “barbarous nations,” equated to infidels because they were up in arms against Christians, had to be subdued by force. At the same time, even the “tame” Indians,” those who “by their free will sought the bosom of the church,” would have to labor on behalf of the settlers, not as legal slaves but “for their interests.”

In Carvalho’s account, the moral and historic justifications for the emergence of forced native labor serve only as a preamble to the presentation of the deeper reasons for Indian slavery. Invoking the Paulistas’ services to the Crown, Carvalho indicated “that none of these things could have been accomplished without the service of these heathen as with them they crossed the backlands and with them they discovered minerals and made use of the labor with which they sustained all of Brazil with wheat and manioc flours, meats, beans, cottons and many other goods on which they paid Your Majesty’s tribute.” In short, the author argued that without Indian labor there would be no reason for São Paulo’s existence as a colony. Presenting a valuable summary of the crux of the Indian question in São Paulo, he concluded:

Sir, all that I say is that those Captaincies are in great need of these same heathen, whether free or captive, because without them neither will Your Majesty have mines nor any other fruit of those lands, for such is the character of that people, that he who has no heathen to serve him lives as a heathen, without a house but one of straw, without a bed but a hammock, without a trade or tool other than canoe, fishing lines, fish hooks and arrows, arms with which they live to sustain themselves while forgetting all else, with no appetite for honors for esteem nor increase of households for the conservation of his heirs.

Here the fundamental link between Indian labor and colonial production becomes clear, both in the mentality of the Paulistas and in the eyes of outside observers. Without the Indians to hoe their fields, to plant their crops, and to carry their produce, the Portuguese settlers of São Paulo would work barely enough to keep themselves and their families alive, such was their disdain for manual labor. Anticipating the position later taken by Frei Gaspar, Carvalho sought an explanation for this disdain in the structure of colonial society:

If Your Majesty ordered those lands to be peopled by the most robust and rustic folk to be found in your kingdom, within four days they would be reduced in the same way as the Paulistas, because it is certain that in those parts there has not yet been seen a servant who comes from Portugal with his master who does not soon aspire to be more than him, and for all of the reasons common to all of Brazil there should be many Guinea negroes or native heathen there, as without these people no fruit can be extracted from Brazil because everything there is sloth itself as is verified by D. Francisco Manuel in the book he wrote, Preguiça do Brasil [“Brazil’s Sloth”].10

In sum, for Carvalho and for many of his contemporaries, the absolute necessity of forced labor lay in the convergence of settler attitudes toward work and the drive for wealth that animated Portuguese colonialism. The Paulistas could not be deprived of their Indians, he argued, not only because it would put an end to the contributions the captaincy made to the Portuguese empire, but also because it would reduce the colonists themselves to an uncivilized state in which they would be compelled to live in the manner of the Indians, a condition already observed among the poorest stratum of settlers. Thus, the question of Indian slavery went well beyond the moral debate over the legitimacy of captivity. In fact, slavery touched the very nerve center of Portuguese colonialism, where reasons of state and private interests combined to produce mutual benefits at the expense of Amerindian and African peoples.

The Custom and Practice of the Land

The Portuguese Crown, more interested in the development of the colony than the liberty of the Indians, ended up giving tacit consent to the widespread use of forced native labor in São Paulo. Indian slavery as a formal, legally constituted institution, however, existed only in a restricted sense. After all, the only legitimate captives were those taken in just wars, which experience proved to be an inadequate way of acquiring slaves. Nonetheless, isolated cases appear in the inventories of probated estates. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Tamoio, Tupinikin, Biobeba, Pé Largo, and Goiá slaves – taken as captives in the conflicts of the second half of the sixteenth century – figured among the holdings of some Paulistas.11 Limited numbers of captives taken in the Bahian campaigns appear as slaves in estate inventories from the 1670s, while the early eighteenth-century inventory of an important landowner from Parnaíba listed one Ana of Pernambuco, evidently brought back from the Bárbaro War, “who even though parda [i.e., Indian] is a slave and as such was worth 300-some drams of gold.”12 Finally, in 1730, a Paulista mentioned a few Goiá and Kayapó slaves in his will, fruits of the just wars carried out against those peoples during the settlement of Goiás.13 Yet these few cases seem insignificant when set against the far greater numbers of illegitimate Indian captives listed in seventeenth-century inventories. Legal slaves were so exceedingly rare that the executor of Antonio Pedroso de Barros’s estate fell into obsessive redundancy when declaring the value of a “slave of the slave heathen of Bahia at one hundred patacas [32 milréis] for being a slave,” as if to eliminate any doubts regarding the captive’s status.14

The rarity of legitimate Indian slaves did not impede the development of the ideological apparatus of Indian slavery in São Paulo over the course of the seventeenth century. In fact, the introduction of thousands of Indians demanded the creation of an institutional structure that would regulate relations between masters and slaves. Despite the legal impediments to the forced labor of native peoples, the Paulistas were able to skirt these juridical obstacles and create institutional arrangements that permitted the reproduction of master-slave relations. By assuming the role of private administrators of the natives – who were considered to be incapable of administering themselves – the settlers produced an expedient allowing them to exercise complete control over the persons and property of the Indians without their appropriation being characterized as slavery in juridical terms.15

In São Paulo, the enslavement of the vast majority of the Indian population assumed a certain degree of legitimacy through the evolution of this parallel regime of personal service. For their part, the Paulistas did not spare words in attempting to justify their right to exploit the labor of the Indians that they themselves had “descended” from the wilderness. To cite one example, Domingos Jorge Velho, in the well-known letter he wrote to King Pedro II during his campaign against the escaped-slave redoubt of Palmares, declared:

and if after [the subjugation of the Indians] we use their services in our fields; we do them no injustice; for it is as much to sustain them and their children as it is ourselves and our own; and this [is] far from enslaving them, rather we do them an invaluable service in teaching them how to till, plant, harvest and work for their livelihood, something that before the whites taught them, they did not know how to do.16

This position was not only adopted in correspondence with the Crown. Rather, it was also reaffirmed repeatedly in other kinds of documentation. For example, Diogo Pires excused Indian slavery thusly: “I declare that the heathens that I have from the land, I brought them by force yet it is to the good that they later became Christians.”17 Anna Tenoria, emphasizing the paternalistic aspect of private administration, declared: “I have some pieces of heathen of the land who number more or less fourteen or fifteen who are free and as such my heirs should consider them, giving them all good treatment as such [while] using their services as is right and teaching them good customs.”18 It is worth pointing out that in both these cases – drawn from wills – the dying masters asked that these “free” Indians be divided fairly among their heirs, a clause appearing in almost every seventeenth-century Paulista will.

The apparent contradiction between the explicit illegality of Indian slavery and the widespread practice of holding Indians as slaves derived only in part from the inefficacy of royal authority in a remote territory of the Portuguese empire. From a legal perspective, the question was far more complex. If, on the one hand, the Crown codified an idealized and vague legislation for the colony, on the other, colonial authorities – including the municipal councils – developed legal and administrative procedures that better reflected the practical needs of the settlers and the conflicts generated by local conditions. Oftentimes, such procedures contradicted the very letter of the law, as in the case of Indian slavery.19 The settlers themselves recognized this paradox. In their joint will, composed in 1684, Antonio Domingues and Isabel Fernandes expressed the consensus view when they declared that the ten Indians in their possession “are free by the laws of the Kingdom and only by the practice and custom of the land are they compelled to serve.”20 Similarly, another slaveowner, Inês Pedroso, stated in her will that “the heathen that we have are free by the law of the Kingdom and as such I cannot compel them to servitude,” while adding, “I have used their compulsory service like the other residents and thus I leave them.”21

These two examples, among many other similar cases, show how the settlers perceived their right to maintain control over the Indians. This right was based ideologically on the justification that the settlers lent an inestimable service to God, the King, and the Indians themselves in bringing the latter from the wilderness to European settlement – or, in the language of later centuries, from barbarism to civilization – and was confirmed juridically in the appeal to “practice and custom.” As the century wore on, this perception of the law hardened, becoming – so to speak – tradition.

Even so, the ambiguity of the Indians’ situation never ceased to show through, above all in the drafting of seventeenth-century wills, which were considered by critics of the Paulistas to be evidence of their moral weakness. For example, Manuel Juan de Morales, one of the few non-Jesuit defenders of Indian liberty in São Paulo, observed in a letter to the King of Spain and Portugal: “Here many wills are made, and at the hour of judgement they take to be truth that which the fathers of the Company teach, the dying one declaring that his Indians are free … and leaving them free on paper, they are captive by judicial authority, [and] divided among the relatives of the deceased, so that they can serve them in the way that at the hour of death had been judged unjust.”22 He may well have been referring to the will of Lourenço Siqueira, penned by a Jesuit:

I declare that I have some pieces of heathen of Brazil who by the law of His Majesty are unbound and free, and I as such leave them and declare, and I ask them forgiveness for any force or injustice I have done them, and for not having paid for their service as I was obligated to, and I ask them, for the love of God and for that [love] I have for them, I want them to stay all together and to serve my wife, who will pay them for their service in the manner that is customary in the land, [but] will not be able to separate or sell any person among them, thus I say, and I ask of His Majesty’s justices that in order to clear my conscience they do uphold this last wish and disposition.23

Notwithstanding the weight on some settlers’ consciences, the legitimation of Indian slavery at the local level developed rapidly. In inventories from the first decade of the seventeenth century, “free” Indians appear regularly alongside legitimate captives in lists of “pieces,” and were divided among heirs in the same way. This practice was submitted to judicial review on a few occasions during the long period in which Indian slavery was customary. In 1609, for example, after promulgation of the law declaring the unconditional liberty of all Indians, Hilária Luís submitted a petition to the governor asking if the Indians captured by her recently deceased husband could be divided among his heirs. The governor’s response was curt and direct: Indians could not be listed on inventories because they were free by the laws of Portugal. The probate judge, however, was also asked to weigh in. He asserted, “it is practice and custom to divide free pieces among heirs for their sustenance and service and not for them to be sold.” Unsatisfied with this response, the governor requested the opinions of the Judge of the Indians and of a Crown magistrate, both of them, it is worth noting, holders of captive Indians. The former reaffirmed that such was indeed the “practice and custom” of the land, while the latter added that without their inheritance the heirs “would become paupers begging for alms.” In the end, the governor backed down, authorizing the inclusion of free Indians in the inventory.24

This case probably had little influence in a general legal sense, although it did demonstrate the willingness of colonial authorities to leave the guardianship of Indians to private settlers, even if this practice had all of the characteristics of slavery. Given the Crown’s unwillingness or inability to clearly define the rights of native peoples, the settlers were able to claim that they should be responsible for the administration of the Indians. Thus, Maria do Prado, who owned large numbers of Indian slaves, stated in her will: “I declare that I do not possess any slave or captive but that I only possess as is customary practice ninety souls of heathen of the land whom I always treated as [my] children and in the same formality I leave them to my heirs.”25 Another example of this position may be found in the will of Lucrécia Leme:

I declare that I own nine pieces of the heathen of the land, and one child, whom I always treated as free, which they are by their nature; for being incapable of governing themselves, I administered them with that Christian care, making use of their service in order to feed them, and in this same order shall my heirs govern them, not as inheritances, but as minors in need of governance, not neglecting their doctrine, and ordinary service until the King should decide otherwise.26

Minors in need of governance, children: it was in this sense that the settlers’ paternalist discourse approximated the Indian policy of the Crown, despite so many other areas in which the two sides clashed. If the Indians required tutors, why could the role not be played by individual colonists? Confident that right was on their side, the settlers came to adopt the role as exclusively theirs, particularly once they defeated the Jesuits.

Settlers and Jesuits: The Decisive Battle

In a general sense, the settlers’ pro-slavery outlook did not clash with either Crown or even Jesuit perspectives on the labor question in Brazil. But since it included a stubborn insistence on illegal Indian bondage, it placed the settlers on a collision course with the Jesuits. After all, the Jesuits derived a good measure of their power and prestige from their energetic defense of Indian liberty, which did not entail the actual freedom of the Indians, but rather opposition to illegal captivity.27 The alternative they presented was the limited freedom of the missions, which had the effect of withdrawing Indians from circulation in the colonial labor market. The Jesuits thus had good reasons to criticize the Paulistas, who acquired most of their Indians through illegal means; at the same time, the settlers opposed the Jesuits, claiming that they were retarding the development of their economic activities.

The confrontation was sustained at two distinct levels. At the local level, colonists opposed the control that the priests maintained over the mission villages in the vicinity of São Paulo. In the intercolonial sphere, the Paulistas came to confront the energetic protests of Spanish Jesuits stemming from Paulista attacks on the missions in the provinces of Guairá and Tape. These irreconcilable differences prompted shows of force on both sides. Faced with Jesuit demands on Crown government and the Vatican, which led to the enactment of new measures attacking Indian slavery, the settlers responded with violence, forcibly expelling the fathers from the captaincy of São Vicente.

It is important to note that the local dimension erupted into violence at two points before the fateful expulsion of 1640. In 1612, the colonists threatened to expel the Jesuits from the mission village of Barueri, alleging that the priests were making access to Indian contract labor exceedingly difficult. Twenty years later, irate neighbors of the same mission village, including Antonio Raposo Tavares, invaded Barueri and expelled the Jesuits. To a certain degree, this incident can be seen as a local expression of the intensified search for native labor; after all, if the Paulistas could destroy Jesuit missions in Guairá, why not reprise this activity closer to home? More specifically, though, this outbreak of violence emerged from competition between the more prosperous colonists of the settlements west of the town of São Paulo and the Jesuits, who were accumulating increasingly greater amounts of property and larger numbers of laborers. Meanwhile, the uncertain legal status of the mission village of Barueri added fuel to the fire.

Barueri lay in the midst of one of the principal wheat-growing areas in the region, near the bairros of Cotia, Quitaúna, and Carapicuíba, as well as the town of Santana de Parnaíba. By the 1630s, the Jesuits had established themselves as the principal landowners in the area, and controlled a disproportionate part of the Indian labor force. In addition to their preferential access to mission-village Indians, who numbered around 1,500 in Barueri alone, the College of São Paulo had inherited two enormous estates in the area along with their large populations of captive Indians. The first bequest, from 1615, was the donation by Afonso Sardinha and his wife Maria Gonçalves of their estate, Nossa Senhora da Graça, along with a sizeable number of Guarulhos Indians, “as well as of other nations.” In the second, in 1624, Fernão Dias and Catarina Camargo bequeathed their estate, Nossa Senhora do Rosário, and around 600 Carijó that Dias had captured in the south. These properties, though they functioned as agricultural estates in the seventeenth century, would become the mission villages of Embu and Carapicuíba, respectively.28

The Jesuits thus represented much more than an obstacle to settler access to the labor of mission-village residents, which, in any case, had been a long-standing grievance of the Paulistas. From the settler point of view, the fact that the priests were developing a considerable stake in the Paulista economy as producers and landowners was even more troubling. The colonists also claimed that the Jesuits took undue advantage of their control over the mission villages, cultivating and even renting out land designated for the use of the villagers to the benefit of the College. Similar conflicts had already arisen in other captaincies, where colonists watched with apprehension as the Jesuits came to control some of the most productive lands and the most valuable urban properties, often acquired through royal donations.29

Faced with the advance of such a formidable adversary, the colonists turned to the only administrative body that could represent them, the Municipal Council. Following the incident of 1632 in Barueri, the settlers began to demand the removal of the Jesuits, making accusations that not only sought to demoralize the priests, but that also provided substantive evidence of the abuses and illegal activities of the Jesuits of São Paulo. In 1633, the colonist João da Cunha, a landowner in Cotia, protested that the Jesuits had stolen the Indians that he had received from his father-in-law as a dowry, taking them to Barueri. Apparently unsatisfied with the simple return of the Indians, Cunha requested that the Council “order [the Jesuits] out of the villages and to have nothing to do with the Indians outside of their church.” During the weeks that followed, the Council heard complaints that the Jesuits were monopolizing the lands of Cotia and Carapicuíba, not allowing the settlers to cultivate the soil. Finally, the principal residents of these bairros went before the Council and issued an ultimatum: if the Council would not remove the Jesuits from Barueri, they and their Indians would expel the priests by force, which is what they did.30

It is worth remembering that the settlers were able to take such radical measures in this case in part because of the peculiar legal status of Barueri. Similar conditions existed in the areas surrounding the other three mission villages of São Paulo; indeed, another 3,000 or so Indians were under Jesuit control in São Miguel, Conceição dos Guarulhos, and Pinheiros. Yet these three mission villages had been founded by Jesuits in the sixteenth century, and most settlers recognized the rights of the Society of Jesus over them. Barueri, however, was established in the first decade of the seventeenth century by Dom Francisco de Sousa and became the object of a three-way legal struggle between Dom Francisco’s heirs, the Jesuits, and the Municipal Council of São Paulo, each claiming rights to its administration. In the 1630s, the Jesuits exercised control over Barueri. However, as the colonists saw it, the Jesuits were there by order of the provincial of the Society, and not of the Crown, and thus it was their right to expel the priests and restore the administration of the village to the Municipal Council, which had supposedly received the privilege from Dom Francisco himself. In the end, following the settlers’ attack on the mission village, the Council took control of Barueri, setting a precedent for its actions in 1640, when it appropriated the administration of the remaining villages, calling them “royal villages” (aldeias reais) and managing them in its capacity as the loyal and legitimate local representative of the Crown.31

With tensions already running high, the conflict entered its decisive stage when the Spanish Jesuits of Paraguay began legal proceedings against the Paulistas, seeking to put an end to the slave-hunting expeditions that were laying waste to the missions. Counting on the support of their Jesuit colleagues in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, Fathers Simon Maceta, Justo Mansilla, and Francisco Díaz Taño first brought their case to the Governor-General of Brazil – who handed down a sharp but ineffectual ban on slaving expeditions – and then to the King of Spain and Portugal, and finally to the Pope. They conducted an impressive campaign against the Paulistas, portraying them – perhaps accurately – as a fearsome band of disorderly ruffians and outlaws. The Bishop of Río de la Plata also took the side of the Jesuits and, making use of some of the distortions characteristic of the larger campaign, wrote to the Pope in 1637, affirming: “In Brazil there is a city [sic] (subject to a prelate that is not a bishop) that is called São Paulo, and in it there have assembled a large number of men of different nations, Englishmen, Dutchmen, and Jews who, in league with those from the land, like rabid wolves cause great damage to Your Worship’s new flock.”32 The Jesuits also used religious rhetoric in attempting to guarantee their exclusive access to the Indians of the interior, lamenting “that the sertão that they call Patos is open to every Moor, Jew, Black and White, tall and short, who wishes to go there to attack and conquer and capture the Indians to later sell them where and to whom they please.” Were it not for the Jesuits, they argued, the Indians would be left “in the mouth of the devil and in the claws of the Whites.”33 The Crown, clearly distracted by the conflicts that were to culminate in the Restoration of 1640, in which royal authority over Portugal passed from the Spanish Habsburgs to Dom João IV of Braganza, did not respond very energetically to Jesuit appeals. The Vatican, however, was more decisive, pressuring the settlers with the publication of the Papal Brief of December 3, 1639, which essentially upheld the Bull of 1537 that had proclaimed the liberty of the Indians of the Americas. In mid-1640, the Jesuits began to divulge the contents of the Brief, provoking unrest in São Paulo, Santos, and Rio de Janeiro. Shortly thereafter, in June, representatives of the municipal councils of the captaincy of São Vicente met to discuss the matter. Under pressure from the principal residents of the town of São Paulo, they decided on the unconditional expulsion of the Jesuits, the confiscation of their properties, and the transfer of the power of administration of the mission villages to local authorities.34

After the expulsion, the settlers developed elaborate arguments to justify so brash an action. Writing to the recently coronated João IV, the Municipal Council of São Paulo explained that with the publication of the Papal Brief the Jesuits had attempted “to take away, deprive and usurp from said residents the immortal and ancient possession, which was theirs from the founding of this State to the present.”35 The defense of these dubious historical rights was bolstered by widely shared anti-Jesuit sentiment. In Santos, for example, a rumor circulated among the settlers that it was permissible to raid Jesuit mission villages and properties because the fathers of Pernambuco had allegedly persuaded their Indians to side with the Dutch. It was also rumored that the Brief was a Jesuit forgery and that one could now enslave Indians of any “nation.”36

In addition to the Municipal Council, members of the religious orders that remained in São Paulo – notably the Franciscans – also assembled arguments to justify the expulsion of the Jesuits. Thus, in 1649, amid bitter litigation between the Franciscans and the Jesuits, Crown justices received a list of eight “causes” of the expulsion identified by settlers: (1) the Jesuits were becoming too rich and powerful; (2) the Jesuits forced the heirs of Afonso Sardinha, Gonçalo Pires, and Francisco de Proença to make enormous concessions (presumably of land and Indians); (3) they took lands from poor farmers through lawsuits; (4) they pressed a suit against Antonio Raposo Tavares and Paulo do Amaral (probably for their slave-hunting activities); (5) they won all of their legal actions because of their enormous wealth; (6) “They make greater use of the service of the Indians than the residents in their wheat fields, sugar mills, flour mills, and [the Indians] even carry them on their backs”; (7) “They take advantage of Indian lands and grants, trading and selling them, and putting their cattle on them”; (8) the Indians indoctrinated by them had proven rebellious and seditious in Cabo Frio, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco.37

Despite the mutual hatreds and recriminations unleashed by the expulsion, the Jesuits were permitted to return to the captaincy thirteen years later. In an agreement hammered out by the principal settler factions and a Crown judge, the colonists made clear the conditions under which the priests would be allowed to return. First, the Jesuits would have to abandon any litigation challenging the original expulsion and give up asking for damages suffered in the incident. As far as the Indian question was concerned, the Jesuits were to desist from attempting to execute the Brief of 1639 or any other legal instrument aimed at defending Indian liberty. Moreover, the Jesuits were to refuse to harbor Indians who fled their masters. Finally, in a conciliatory tone, the colonists agreed to assist in the reconstruction of the College, which was completed in 1671.38

The expulsion, together with the conditions that were set for the return of the Jesuits, decisively removed the Jesuit obstacle to unfettered settler access to the Indians. The Jesuits, for their part, continued to be important landowners, once their properties in Embu and Carapicuíba were restored, to which were later added the donations of the Santana estate and the extensive Araçariguama property, which lay in the townships of São Paulo and Santana de Parnaíba, respectively. However, despite this undeniable economic power, the Jesuits had lost control over the mission villages, and their voice of opposition to Indian slavery had been muted. According to one father, writing at the end of the century, the situation was such that the Jesuits could never touch on the subject of Indian slavery in their sermons or in any other public statements. Nonetheless, he observed with some pride that they made use of “industrious dissemblance” in private conversations, ever trying to make the settlers see the errors of their ways. However, “the residents of that town were so firm[ly convinced] that the Indians were slaves that even if the Eternal Father came down from heaven with Christ crucified in his hands to preach to them that the Indians were free, they would not believe it.”39

Slaves or Wards?

In the second half of the seventeenth century, the struggle over the legal status of the Indian captives of São Paulo reached another stage. In spite of their convictions, the colonists still faced the legal paradox that was the administration system. The regime of personal service differed little from slavery, which did not escape the attention of the Crown or of Jesuits working outside the region. According to a historical account from the early nineteenth century, it was little more than a matter of terminology: “The Paulistas, although they did not call the domesticated Indians captives, or slaves, but only administrados [wards], nonetheless used them as such, giving them in dowries and to their creditors in payment of debts.”40 In fact, practically every seventeenth-century dowry for which there is a record includes at least one “black of the land.” Moreover, “pieces of heathen of the land” figured as collateral in loans and mortgages, and were sold on various occasions to satisfy debts or for other purposes. In 1664, for example, the executor of Antonio de Quadros’s estate sold a young Indian girl for 18 milréis so that the proceeds could be lent out at interest, “as is the practice and custom.”41

Two routine practices reveal with particular clarity the real status of Indians under this ambiguous regime. First was the sale of Indians, which despite falling beyond the legal bounds of personal administration, was frequent in the seventeenth century. However, when sales appear in the documentation they are almost always accompanied by some kind of justification. Thus, João Leite felt compelled to sell Paula because of “her threats and the distress she caused him.”42 In other cases, the sale of Indians provoked serious legal conflicts, which always brought to light the fundamental contradiction of a regime of thinly disguised slavery. In 1666, for example, João Pires Rodrigues accused João Rodrigues da Fonseca of the illegal sale of a captive, a transaction that was registered at the office of the notary. In Fonseca’s defense, his counsel developed the argument that the contractual sale of property outweighed any consideration of Indian liberty.43 Later in the century, when a widow attempted to sell Indians that had been left to heirs who had not yet attained their majority, the executor retroactively barred the sale, alleging that “pieces were sold that should not have been sold, [for the] reason that no honorable and property-owning man has died in this land and had his pieces sold for such a low price as it appears [como consta] those that were left to the aforesaid your charges [seus curados, i.e., minor heirs] have been sold…”44

The second practice that betrayed the essential identity of slavery and the regime of personal service was manumission. The two principal means by which captives might escape the shackles of personal service were by obtaining a letter of freedom that would then be registered by the notary’s office or through a provision in their master’s will. As we will see in greater detail in the final chapter, the uncertain status of captives presented a theoretical and practical problem in colonial jurisprudence, particularly once some Indians began to claim freedom for themselves under colonial legislation.45

The controversy over Indian freedom began to heat up again in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Pressures came initially from Rio de Janeiro, in the 1670s, when the newly created bishopric attempted to impose an ecclesiastical tax of 160 réis for each “heathen brought back” from the wilderness. Soon thereafter, the governor of Rio de Janeiro proclaimed the unconditional liberty of all Indians. These developments immediately affected the Paulistas, who were nominally subordinate to the civil and ecclesiastical authority of Rio de Janeiro and who therefore felt threatened by the new measures. Their greatest fear was that their Indians might flee the captaincy of São Vicente en masse in order to live in freedom in Rio de Janeiro. Insecure once again, the Paulistas sought to reaffirm their control over the labor force, first through the now-traditional demonstration before the Municipal Council and then in negotiations.46

Yet again, the conflict centered on the settlers’ right to administer Indians brought from the sertão, which had been the principal driver of the Indian question in São Vicente since the sixteenth century. However, the colonists proved somewhat more conciliatory than in 1640, though there appears to have been at least an attempt at expelling the Jesuits once again in early 1685. Tempers having cooled, they began a long process of negotiation with royal authorities. Mediated by the Jesuit Provincial, Alexandre de Gusmão, these negotiations sought a solution that would satisfy all parties, except for the Indians, of course. As was to be expected, two diametrically opposed positions emerged: the settlers, reaffirming the absolute need for forced native labor, sought to reassert their right over the Indians they had brought from the wilderness “with the pretext of bringing them into the bosom of the Church,” while the Jesuits proposed to revive the mission-village project and its “repartition” of contracted Indian labor.47

The settlers could never accept the Jesuits’ proposals, however, because along with raising questions regarding the social control of the laboring population, they threatened the entire material basis of Paulista society. In 1692, the settlers drew up a list of sixteen “doubts” that would have to be resolved if a satisfactory agreement was to be reached.48 Their concerns centered on four basic issues, all of them, in one form or another, having to do with the definition of Indians as property. These four issues were runaways, remuneration, inheritance, and alienation. First, the settlers wanted to make sure that the Indians under their administration could not flee to freedom, a question raised by the prospect of mass flights to Rio de Janeiro. Their second concern was more controversial, since the proposed freedom of the Indians was intimately associated with the question of the wages they were to be paid. According to the settlers, food, clothing, medical care, and spiritual indoctrination was just and sufficient compensation for the labor the Indians provided. The third problem, inheritance, struck at the core of the system. On the one hand, inheritance provided the principal mechanism for the transfer of the administration of Indians. On the other, it clearly defined the Indians as partible property. Both the mechanism and the definition were stubbornly defended by the settlers. Fourth, on the issue of alienation, the colonists sought legal ways to transfer administration from one colonist to another by means of sale, proposing a set of hypothetical situations in which such a sale would be permissible. Finally – and here the issue of property was also at stake – the settlers questioned whether creditors could demand the services of Indians who were put up as collateral for debts.49

The doubts expressed by the colonists summarized the position of the Paulistas in favor of Indian slavery. Antonio Vieira, when asked to comment on the matter, set down perhaps his last great diatribe against the institution.50 In his striking rhetorical style, he asked himself the question of what the Indians of São Paulo were, then answered:

They are thus the said Indians, those, who living free as natural masters of their lands, were torn from them with great violence and tyranny, and brought in irons with the cruelties that the world knows, dying naturally and violently on trails of many leagues until reaching the lands of São Paulo, where the residents used their services and use their services as slaves. This is injustice, this is misery, this is the present state, this is what the Indians of São Paulo are.

According to Vieira, the Indians could not be slaves, because they had not been taken in just wars. Furthermore, in a set of salvos aimed at the principal arguments of the Paulistas, Vieira reaffirmed the explicit illegality of administration by pointing to some of its most basic characteristics: runaways were restored to their masters through the use of force; administration was transmitted through inventories and dowries; and, finally, what was listed as the value of Indians’ service bore no relation to any wage rate, but rather was equivalent to slave prices.51

This last point was crucial to the controversy over the formulation of Indian policy. Vieira rejected the settlers’ proposal that providing food, shelter, clothing, and conversion constituted acceptable “payment” for Indian labor; on the contrary, administrators should pay a just wage. In their “doubts,” the Paulistas justified not paying salaries with the allegation that the Indians were lazy. To this Vieira retorted: “But very practical and trustworthy people of that land affirm that the Paulistas usually use the services of said Indians from morning to night, as is done with the Blacks of Brazil.” In short, the Indians of São Paulo suffered the most complete expropriation of their liberty, “such that nothing of him or of his remains that is not for all his life subject to the administrators; and not only as long as these live, but even after their deaths.”

In spite of the charges of such a formidable opponent, the Paulistas got the better end of the agreement that was reached in 1694. Infuriated, Vieira criticized the Jesuits who participated in negotiations and signed the accord, claiming that they had no experience with Indians and did not even speak the lingua geral. He referred specifically to the “foreign” priests Jacob Roland and Jorge Benci, the latter “an Italian who never set eyes on an Indian and only listened to the Paulistas.” For his part, Roland was the author of “Apologia pro paulistis,” which according to Vieira was so hypocritical that the general of the Company of Jesus ordered it incinerated.52 In fact, the Apologia upheld many of the Paulistas’ most basic propositions, particularly with regard to the Christian mission that they executed in bringing Indians from the wilderness to civilization. What upset Vieira most, however, was the manipulation of his own ideas and statements, twisted to support the colonists’ side: “The fables make believe that the wolves made peace with the sheepdogs, and now the sacred apologia wants the same wolves to be the pastors of the sheep.”53

Indeed, even the Jesuits were unable to resolve the fundamental contradiction that characterized Indian labor in São Paulo. That is what is suggested by a report on the economic activities of the College of São Paulo by the padre visitador, or Jesuit inspector, Luís Mamiani.54 In his report, Mamiani showed how the Jesuits themselves, though they professed loftier principles, in fact treated their Indians little differently than did the colonists they so criticized. Written at the end of the seventeenth century, Mamiani’s perceptive comments captured several of the fundamental issues that needed rethinking in the face of ongoing controversy. The income of the College, Mamiani began, came from the output of agricultural laborers and artisans, “the greater part of it earned with the sweat and toil of the Indians of our administration.” On its estates, no distinction was made in the division of labor among the 300 or so Indians administered by the Jesuits and the few dozen African slaves who worked alongside them. The priests distributed tasks to slaves and Indians alike on working days: males were sent to the fields, workshops, and corrals, while women were charged with weaving. Both slaves and Indians sustained themselves with the subsistence plots they cultivated on Saturdays and holidays. Finally, African slaves and Indian wards received equal “remuneration” in lengths of cotton cloth. The only difference detected by Father Mamiani was that the Indians, unlike the Africans, were supposed to be free and, as such, should have been compensated for their labor.

This last question – of just compensation for the labor of free persons – was central to the controversy. While he recognized that a certain degree of unremunerated labor was legal, Mamiani argued that it was immoral. Legitimate or not, the conditions under which the personal service of Indians was permitted were very specific: “some hold as licit the forced personal service of the Indians, either in their capacity as administrators or parish priests, since the Indians are obligated to pay either some tribute or the pension of their parish priest, and if they do not have the means to pay this, they can be forced to pay in personal service.” Mamiani emphasized, however, that “the service can never be greater than the obligation.”55

According to Mamiani, the abuse of compulsory labor on the Jesuit estates was the basic flaw in the regime of personal service. It was a strictly economic question, as Mamiani calculated the savings generated by “personal service” and revealed that around 80 percent of the income of the College derived from Indian labor. Even if the College were to pay an exceptionally low daily wage while continuing to make use of compulsory Indian labor at an appropriate level, its expenses would more than double. In short, the College would be unable to pay for Indian labor and still support its resident priests and other ecclesiastical activities.

Obviously, these contradictions were never resolved, and the outcome of the process of negotiation between settlers, Jesuits, and Crown was the royal decree of 1696. In spite of the law of five years earlier and its proclamation of Indian liberty, the new decree recognized the settlers’ rights to the administration of Indians, thus legitimating a form of forced labor that was slavery in all but name.56 Indeed, the distinction between the two kinds of labor was a mere formality, as a nineteenth-century governor of the province of Amazonas, Francisco José Furtado, would assert more than 160 years later: “The history of the Indians is the opprobrium of our civilization. Despite so many laws proclaiming their freedom and proscribing their slavery, the latter endures almost in fact!”57

Notes

1.Gaspar da Madre de Deus, Memórias, 82–83.

2.The role of the slave trade and of African slavery in the making of Portugal’s New World colony inspired lively historiographical debate in Brazil, epitomized by two seminal works: Fernando A. Novais, Estrutura e dinâmica do antigo sistema colonial, 5th edn. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986 [1974]), and Jacob Gorender, O escravismo colonial, 4th edn. (São Paulo: Ática, 1985 [1978]). New perspectives on the subject have been provided by the work of Luiz Felipe de Alencastro; see, for example, his important essay, “O aprendizado da colonização,” Economia e Sociedade 1 (Aug. 1992): 135–162.

3.A notable exception is Gorender, O escravismo colonial, 468–486, in which the author incorporates Indian slavery into his general argument in favor of the idea of a colonial slave mode of production, albeit while considering it to be an “incomplete” institution (in comparison with African slavery).

4.CMSP-Atas, 1:333–334, Nov. 18, 1587.

5.CMSP-Atas, 1:446–447, Sept. 20, 1592.

6.Alvará of July 26, 1596, in Leite, História, 2:623–624, and Thomas, Política indigenista, 225–226.

7.CMSP-Atas, 2:70–71, Jan. 16, 1600.

8.CMSP-Atas, 2:75–76, Feb. 6, 1600.

9.Bartolomeu Lopes de Carvalho, “Manifesto a Sua Magestade,” n.d., Ajuda, cód. 51-IX-33, fols. 370–373v.

10.The author Dom Francisco Manuel de Melo was well known in seventeenth-century Iberian intellectual circles. In citing him, Carvalho likely refers to the text Descrição do Brasil, which is among the works of Melo that have been lost. The subtitle of this work – Paraíso dos mulatos, purgatório dos brancos e inferno dos negros (“a paradise for mulatos, a purgatory for whites, and a hell for blacks”) – became a popular saying in the second half of the century, though it was only recorded in 1711, by André João Antonil, in his Cultura e opulência do Brasil, facs. edn. (Recife: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, 1969 [1711]). On Dom Francisco’s life and work, see Edgar Prestage’s excellent book, D. Francisco Manuel de Mello, esboço biographico (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1914).

11.See IT, esp. vols. 1–3.

12.Inventories of Manuel de Lemos, 1673, AESP-INP, cx. 13; Feliciano Cardoso, 1674, AESP-INP, cx. 7; Antonio Pedroso de Barros, Parnaíba, 1677, AESP-INP, cx. 14; João de Almeida Naves, Parnaíba, 1715, AESP-IPO, 14.758.

13.Inventory of João Leite da Silva Ortiz, 1730, IT, 25:383–441.

14.Inventory of Antonio Pedroso de Barros, Parnaíba, 1677, AESP-INP, cx. 14.

15.For discussions of the legality and legitimacy of Indian slavery in colonial Brazil, see José Vicente César, “Situação legal do índio durante o período colonial, 1500–1822,” América Indígena 45/2 (1985): 391–426; Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Sobre a escravidão voluntária,” in her Antropologia do Brasil: mito, história, etnicidade (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), 145–158; Elizabeth Madureira Siqueira, “O segmento indígena: uma tentativa de recuperação histórica,” Leopoldianum 33 (1985): 129–141; and Perrone-Moisés, “Índios livres e índios escravos.”

16.Domingos Jorge Velho to the Crown, July 15, 1694, quoted in Ernesto Ennes, As guerras nos Palmares: subsídios para a sua história (São Paulo: Nacional, 1938), 77. Domingos Jorge Velho’s letter is printed in full, in an approximation of its original orthography, as an appendix to Ennes’ book. See ibid., 204–207.

17.Will of Diogo Pires, Parnaíba, 1642, IT, 28:264.

18.Will of Anna Tenoria, 1658, IT, 12:449.

19.It is worth pointing out that Indian slavery was not the only juridical issue over which seventeenth-century royal officialdom and settler-dominated institutions differed. The interest rate in São Paulo was generally kept at a robust 8 percent per annum, higher than the 6.75 percent permissible under Catholic usury codes. When pressed on the matter in the early seventeenth century, the Municipal Council of São Paulo defended the local rate as “practice and custom of the land.”

20.Joint will of Antonio Domingues and Isabel Fernandes, Parnaíba, 1684, AESP-INP, cx. 18 (my emphasis).

21.Will of Inês Pedroso, 1663, AESP-INP, cx. 11.

22.“Informe de Manuel Juan de Morales de las cosas de San Pablo y maldades de sus moradores,” 1636, in Mss. de Angelis, 1:189–190.

23.Will of Lourenço de Siqueira, 1633, IT, 13:9.

24.Petition of Hilária Luís, Nov. 3, 1609, in the inventory of Belchior Dias Carneiro, 1607, IT, 2:163–165. For a fascinating discussion of the coexistence of positive law and customary law in reference to slave manumission, see Cunha, “Sobre os silêncios da lei,” in her Antropologia do Brasil, 123–144.

25.Will of Maria do Prado, 1663, AESP-INP, cx. 7.

26.Will of Lucrécia Leme, Itu, 1706, IT, 25:215.

27.Leite, História, vol. 2, chap. 4.

28.Copies of these donations may be found in DI, 44:360–370.

29.For a similar conflict in Rio de Janeiro, see letter of Pedro Rodrigues, Sept. 16, 1600, ARSI Brasilia, 3(1), fol. 193.

30.CMSP-Atas, 4:160, 171–173, Mar. 12, June 18, and Aug. 20, 1633. See also CMSP-Atas, 4:121–122, May 22, 1632, and Francisco Ferreira, “La causa del Brasil estar en el triste estado en que está son las injusticias notables que se hacen contra los indios,” n.d., ARSI-FG, Missiones 721/I.

31.CMSP-Atas, 4:172–175, Aug. 20 and 21, 1633. In 1657, witnesses testifying in a royal inquest affirmed that Barueri indeed was founded by Dom Francisco and that the Jesuits had no legitimate claim to the administration of the village. “Inquirição de testemunhas,” Aug. 28, 1657, Biblioteca Pública de Evora, cód. CXVI/2–13, doc. 17. Many historians, following the dubious account of Simão de Vasconcelos, S. J., written at the time of the controversy, have asserted that it had been founded by Anchieta or João de Almeida as a mission village. Vasconcelos, Vida do p. Joam d’Almeida da Companhia de Iesu na provincia do Brazil (Lisbon: Officina Craesbeeckiana, 1658); Duarte Leopoldo e Silva, Notas de história ecclesiástica, vol. 3: Baruery-Parnahyba (São Paulo: Augusto Siqueira, 1916), 25ff.; Camargo, História de Parnaíba, 87.

32.Bishop of Río de la Plata to the Pope, Sept. 30, 1637, in Mss. de Angelis, 3:281–282. From its founding in 1560 until 1711, São Paulo was a town (vila) rather than a city (cidade), a formal distinction that had jurisdictional significance.

33.Anon., “Resposta a uns capítulos,” ARSI-FG, Collegia 202/3, doc. 2, fol. 11; anon., “Razões por onde não convém nem é lícito largarmos as aldeias dos índios no Brasil,” ARSI Brasilia, 8, fols. 512–512v. José Gonçalves Salvador has taken these and other accusations quite literally in trying to show the strong presence of Jews and new Christians in the southern captaincies. See his Os cristãos novos.

34.The standard account of the expulsion, supposedly written by Pedro de Moraes Madureira in the late seventeenth century, is “Expulsão dos jesuitas e causas que tiveram para ella os paulistas desde o anno de 1611 até o de 1640, em que os lançaram fóra de toda a capitania de São Paulo e S. Vicente,” RIHGSP 3 (1898): 57–123. This document, the basic source for the interpretation of Pedro Taques de Almeida Paes Leme, includes the interesting suggestion of a link between the expulsion of the Jesuits and the restoration of the Portuguese Crown. Settlers of both principal factions supported the ouster of the priests, though the Pires were less enthusiastic about it and more willing to discuss their readmission. Curiously, one of the accusations the settlers levied against the Jesuits was that they supported the Sebastianist movement in Portugal and were spreading this atavistic political movement among the Indians of the backlands of Brazil. It is not entirely implausible, then, that some connection existed between the expulsion of the Jesuits, the restoration of the Portuguese Crown, and the acclamation of Amador Bueno, despite the efforts of Taunay and Aureliano Leite to invalidate this interpretation. In any case, it is clear that the basic motive underlying the colonists’ actions was the Indian question. For a good discussion of the larger context of the expulsion, see Boxer, Salvador de Sá, chap. 4. It is worth recalling that the São Paulo conflict was hardly an isolated case, as similar conflicts emerged in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, while in Maranhão the colonists expelled the padres on two occasions, in 1661 and 1684 (Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento”). Interesting, too, is that the Spanish settlers of Paraguay also expelled the Jesuits on various occasions (Melià, “Las siete expulsiones,” in his El Guaraní conquistado, 220–234).

35.Remonstrance of the Municipal Council of São Paulo to the Crown, n.d., in RIHGSP 3 (1898): 98–104.

36.Anon., “Relação do que se sucedeu nesta vila de Santos sobre a publicação das bulas,” ARSI Brasilia 8, fol. 558v. See also, “Representação da Câmara Municipal,” Apr. 15, 1648, AHU-SP, doc. 14.

37.“Causas que os moradores de São Paulo apontam da expulsão dos padres da Companhia de Jesus,” 1649, BNRJ II, 35.21.53, doc. 2.

38.CMSP-Atas, 6:24–26, May 12, 1653.

39.Visita of Padre Antonio Rodrigues, Jan. 25, 1700, ARSI Brasilia 10, fol. 2v.

40.Manuel Ayres de Casal, Corografia brazilica, ou, relação historico-geografica do reino do Brazil, composta e dedicada a Sua Magestade fidelissima por hum presbitero secular do gram priorado do Crato, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Impressão Regia, 1817), 1:223. He also remarked: “The Paulistas of today pass for good folk; but their ancestors certainly were not” (1:222).

41.Inventory of Antonio de Quadros, 1664, AESP-IE, cx. 4. This practice was contested in an early eighteenth-century lawsuit: José de Sousa Araújo v. Catarina da Cunha, 1721, AESP-AC, cx. 9, doc. 136. For an analysis of the debt issue, see Muriel Nazzari, “Transition Toward Slavery: Changing Legal Practice Regarding Indians in Seventeenth-Century São Paulo,” The Americas 49/2 (Oct. 1992): 131–155.

42.Will of Isabel Rodrigues, 1661, AESP-INP, cx. 6.

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

44.Inventory of Miguel Leite de Carvalho, IT, 22:88–89.

45.The question of the juridical status of Indians and slaves came up with some frequency in colonial Brazil. See, for instance, “Carta dos desembargadores da relação da Bahia ao Conselho Ultramarino,” May 10, 1673, AHU-Bahia, doc. 2531. In São Paulo, Indians were usually equated to African slaves in civil and criminal proceedings. See AESP-AC, various cases, as well as CMSP-Atas, 6a:253, Nov. 26, 1661, where masters are held responsible for infractions of municipal ordinances committed by their Indians. See also “Dúvidas que se oferecem pelos moradores da vila de São Paulo à Sua Magestade, e ao senhor governador de estado, sobre o modo de guardar o ajustamento da administração na matéria pertencente ao uso do gentio da terra, cuja resolução se espera,” n.d., in Leite, História, 6:328–330.

46.CMSP-Atas, 6:447–448, June 22, 1677.

47.CMSP-Atas, 7:275–276, Mar. 8, 1685; see also CMSP-Atas, 7:309–310, Sept. 18, 1686. The Jesuit proposal was similar to the arrangement that was being worked out in Maranhão at the time. On Maranhão, see Dauril Alden, “Indian versus Black Slavery in the State of Maranhão during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Bibliotheca Americana 1/3 (1983): 91–142; José Oscar Beozzo, Leis e regimentos das missões: política indigenista no Brasil (São Paulo: Loyola, 1983); and Monteiro, “Escravidão indígena e despovoamento.”

48.“Dúvidas que se oferecem pelos moradores…,” in Leite, História, 6:328–330.

49.For a different approach to this issue, see Nazzari, “Transition Toward Slavery.”

50.“Voto do reverendo padre Antonio Vieira sobre as dúvidas dos moradores da cidade [sic] de São Paulo acerca da administração dos indios,” July 12, 1692, IEB, Coleção Lamego, 42.3 (nineteenth-century manuscript transcription).

51.In the second half of the seventeenth century, inventories came to indicate the appraised value (alvidração) of the services of “heathen of the land,” principally to facilitate the division of estates among heirs, but also to pay off debts. This frequently resulted in the illegal sale of “pieces” under the pretext of exchanging their “service” for its appraised value.

52.However, the Apologia was not burned, for it still exists in the Biblioteca Nacionale Centrale Vittorio Emanuele in Rome. Jacob Roland, “Apologia pro paulistis,” n.d., BNVE-FG, 1249/3 (2278). See also Leite, História, 6:344.

53.Vieira to Manuel Luis, July 21, 1695, in Vieira, Cartas, 3:666–669.

54.Luís Mamiani, “Memorial sobre o governo temporal do Colégio de São Paulo,” 1701, ARSI-FG, Collegia 1588/203/12. A similar discussion emerged among the Jesuits of the Río de la Plata region at around the same time. It is analyzed in Nicholas P. Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial Argentina, 1650–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 110–114.

55.When the Jesuit estates were expropriated in 1759, the new administrators of these properties sought to maintain certain labor practices that reveal the continued influence of this concept of mutual obligations. The Indians “were obliged to provide three days of the week in service to the estate, and in return the padres gave them quarters [senzalas, literally, “slave quarters”] in which to live and lands on which to plant foodstuffs.” See “Relações dos bens aprehendidos e confiscados aos jesuitas da capitania de São Paulo,” DI, 44:353–354.

56.Royal decrees of Jan. 26 and Feb. 19, 1696. For a general discussion of this legislation, see Agostinho Marques Perdigão Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil: ensaio histórico-jurídico-social, 2 vols., 3rd edn. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1976 [1866–1867]), 1:147–249; and Perrone-Moisés, “Legislação indígena colonial.”

57.Report of the President of the Province of Amazonas, Francisco José Furtado, 1858, cited in Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, Os indios bravos e o sr. Lisboa (Lima: Imprensa Liberal, 1867), 45.

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