Creativity under constraint: enslaved Afro-Brazilian families in Brazil's cacao area, 1870-1890.

On the nineteenth of August, 1889, freed man Jose Pedro de Calasans "humbly and respectfully begged" the governor of the Brazilian state of Bahia to grant him and his family free passage on the next steamship to the coastal city of Ilheus, the gateway to the growing cacao region in the southern part of the state. (1) He needed the government's assistance, the professional letter writer explained on his behalf, because, in the previous fourteen months he had exhausted his resources searching the neighboring state of Sergipe for members of his extended family "who had benefited from the Golden Law of May 13, 1888," in other words, slave emancipation. Despite his efforts, he had "only" managed to locate thirteen descendents, including three sons, a daughter, a daughter-in-law and eight grandchildren, whom he had struggled to bring on foot as far as the state capital, Salvador, about half way between Sergipe and his farm. He had no funds remaining, however, to pay for the journey by steamship from Salvador to Ilheus, and, nearly destitute, he was appealing for help. Should His Excellency take pity on them, Calasans promised that his children and grandchildren would "throw themselves into the daily grind of labor," and following his example, develop an appreciation of "the value of hard work and of morality." (2) The notion of ex-slaves congregating in Salvador's slums terrified Bahian authorities in 1889 and so the governor granted Calasans' request. The next day, the newly free and reunited family caught the steamship to the port of Ilheus, from which they found a ride in a canoe up the Cachoeira River to the woods near the small family farm. (3)

Calasans' moving story becomes particularly poignant if we explore his family history a bit further. He and his wife Maria were born in Sergipe in 1831 and 1836 respectively on one of the province's few large sugar plantations, and, at some later point had married and began a family. By the mid 1860s, when their owner died, they were the parents of at least three young children, Henrique, Antonio and Florinda, the eldest of whom was probably born in the mid-1850s. By 1870, they and their children had been separated, however, because the process of settling the owner's estate left the children belonging to one branch of Sergipe's powerful Bittencourt Calasans clan and the parents to another. The children remained on the sugar plantation where they had been born, but Jose Pedro and Maria along with a number of other adult slaves were forced to move to a new property hundreds of miles away in Ilheus when their new owner's father purchased an enormous, but largely undeveloped, plantation there. The documents reveal nothing about the emotions parents and children experienced at being torn apart, but Jose Pedro's determined search after decades of separation make clear that they were powerful. (4)

In Ilheus, Jose Pedro and Maria struggled to shape lives for themselves within the confining constraints of a system that they did not control. They did not, however, turn to violence or flight to do so. Rather they focused on avoiding further transfers and freeing themselves. New laws introduced as part of gradual abolition helped, but the internal economy of slavery emerged as the cornerstone of their efforts. (5) Shortly after new Brazilian laws freed all children born to enslaved women and then prohibited owners from separating enslaved parents from their children under age twelve, Maria gave birth to another child, Sara. At about the same time, she and Jose Pedro also planted a small cacao grove in the free time that their owner allowed them. In 1882, the year that the law would have allowed their owner to separate them from Sara, Jose Pedro and Maria used the proceeds from their cacao grove to buy his freedom and put a deposit on hers. In doing so, the enslaved couple guaranteed their protection from sale, her ability to remain on the plantation with Sara, and his ability to devote all of his time to their farm. The family spent the last years of slavery thus partly free and partly enslaved, but safe from further separation and working at assuring their livelihood in freedom. Then in 1889, after emancipation freed all of them, Jose Pedro brought the children who had been left behind so many years before from Sergipe to the farm in Ilheus. He was 59, Maria was 54, and Sara was 16. Reuniting the family had required more than twenty years, all of their money, most of the parents' adult lives and all of Sara's.

Maria and Jose Pedro Calasans were not unique. Historians of Brazil once dismissed the possibility that the enslaved in Brazil developed extensive family ties and that those ties could remain important across time and space. They did so, largely, for very good reasons. While the African slave trade was functioning, enslaved men frequently outnumbered women on Brazilian plantations and farms by as much as two to one, at least in very prosperous areas, living conditions were quite difficult and death rates were very high. According to most historians, few enslaved men and women enjoyed circumstances under which they might survive, let alone reproduce and raise healthy children within stable marriages. (6) Several saw sexual activity outside of marriage, especially women's sexual activity, and the low rates of formal marriage within the enslaved community as evidence of promiscuity. (7)

In the last three decades, however, new generations of historians are beginning to show that, despite the difficulties, enslaved men and women frequently developed close bonds, both fictive and biological, and organized themselves into both nuclear and extended families formalized in Roman Catholic marriages. This new research indicates that many slaves did form families, but that the ability to do so depended upon property size and the economic conditions of the regions in which they lived and labored. Those on medium or large properties in prosperous areas had more opportunities to form stable families than did those on small properties in regions in economic decline. (8)

For all the value of this new research, it remains quite limited in scope. Most of it has focused on the Brazilian center-south--Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. Very little has addressed enslaved families in the northeast of Brazil, the center of agricultural slavery for most of Brazilian history. The limited amount of research that has been done on the northeast has focused on sugar plantations of the Bahian Reconcavo in the colonial period or the capital city of Salvador in the nineteenth century. (9) Given the complexity of the emerging vision of the northeast, as a region of small, medium and large estates, rather than simply a region of large plantations, this gap in the literature is especially glaring.

In the northeast in the second half of the nineteenth century, enslaved men and women on small, medium and large properties developed families, but few of them were particularly stable. Not only did disruptions in the owners' family, like death or bankruptcy, contribute to the breakup of enslaved labor forces, and therefore families, as we saw with Jose Pedro and Maria Calasans, but after the close of the slave trade, Brazil developed an internal trade in slaves that wrenched tens of thousands of men and some women from family and friends in the northeast, and shipped them to new regions in the expanding Brazilian center-south. (10) While studies have shown that this trade began slowly, by the 1870s, some argue that as many as 10,000 slaves were entering Rio de Janeiro's port per year, sold away from cities and towns in the northeast. Neither Bahia's plantations, nor its farms appear to have been the sources of most of these slaves, but the enslaved men and women on Bahia's large estates and small and medium farms could hardly have escaped knowing that owners could sell them far away if they chose." (11)

Although enslaved men and women in the northeast knew that they or their loved ones could be sold away, we know little about the meanings of these processes for the men and women caught up in them or the ways in which they responded to them. Several studies of slavery and emancipation in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have shown how traumatic this process could be for the young men who were the prime targets of this internal trade, and hint at the efforts that they would make to reconnect with loved ones. (12) Yet we know almost nothing about the impact of such transfers on the people left behind, or the fear of sale on members of the enslaved communities of the northeast, or about the impact on men and women, boys and girls of smaller moves that did not involve the Middle Passage or sale to the other end of Brazil but nonetheless left children without parents and parents unable to fulfill their responsibilities to children. (13) Did the men and women, boys and girls of Brazil's northeastern cities and towns who might be subject to separation accept it as the inevitable cost of enslavement? Or did they strive to protect themselves and those that they loved from such trauma? If the latter was the case, how did they do so?

In the following pages I address these questions through the experiences of the enslaved people of the southern Bahian county of Ilheus, an agricultural region that was just beginning to expand economically in 1850 when the Atlantic slave trade closed, and where there were more small farms than medium and large estates. The article first reconstructs the demographics of the enslaved labor force there in the latter decades of slavery, then outlines the construction of enslaved families and, finally looks at the ways in which family members strove to protect themselves from separation. In doing so, I interrogate the significance of family and freedom for enslaved men, women and children in the last decades of slavery in Brazil. (14)

Sources for this study in Ilheus are unusually complete. The parish of Sao Jorge de Ilheus, the only one serving the territory discussed in this article, preserved several baptism and marriage registers for the nineteenth century, including the original register of slaves born free under the 1871 Law of the Free Womb. Local and regional state governments in Bahia also prepared and kept numerous important documents. The slave register prepared in Ilheus in conjunction with the Emancipation Fund established in the 1870s is intact and housed in the Public Archive of the State of Bahia, which also holds an extensive collection of nineteenth-century wills, postmortem inventories and court cases for the county of Ilheus. That archive also houses the correspondence between local elites, government officials and the president of the province, as the heads of provinces were known in nineteenth-century Brazil, and other miscellaneous documents relating to the region. (15)

The "Classification of the Slaves to Be Liberated by the Emancipation Fund," a slave register mandated by the 1871 Law of the Free Womb to reimburse owners for the loss of their laborers to emancipation is, in many ways, the most important of these documents from Ilheus. Scholars are unanimous that the Emancipation Fund freed almost no one, but the registers created under the law were one of the few systematic lists of a community's slaves. (16) The Ilheus register, for example, lists more than 850 enslaved individuals, their names, sexes and ages, as well as more than 250 unnamed minor children, by family group. It is, there-fore, a very precious document. Such registers are, nonetheless, quite rare today: The Public Archive of the State of Bahia has only one in its immense repository, that for Ilheus. (17)

This document, and indeed all civil or ecclesiastical registers, are challenging to use to discuss enslaved families because they reflect elite sensibilities and concerns. While such documents regularly establish connections between enslaved women and their children, they rarely outline those between enslaved men and their loved ones. This is, in part, because baptismal registers were legal documents which verified an owners' control of enslaved or ingenuo children through the connection to an enslaved mother. The identity of enslaved fathers was, in Brazilian law, irrelevant to the question of ownership of the child. Moreover, although Brazilian ecclesiastical and civil officials recognized that consensual unions were very common in Brazil among the enslaved, free and freed, they had no way to officially register them or the relationship of men to the children born as a result of them. Officials referred to men and women living in consensual union, whether they were enslaved or free, as single in the records. Only men and women who had been married in a Roman Catholic ceremony--the only one recognized in nineteenth-century Brazil--received the title married, or widowed in the event that their spouse had died. Children born to single mothers officially had no fathers. As one nineteenth-century commentator wrote: "Those who are born outside the conjugal union belong only to their mothers." (18) Men could recognize their children if they chose, or could afford to do so, but otherwise their presence in their families were not officially recorded. Nineteenth-century Brazilian regulations offered no way for officials to record the realities of social practice, even if they wanted to. (19)

This tension between official practice and daily life means that historians wishing to reconstruct families using government and ecclesiastical documents must look beyond the prejudices of the record keepers of nineteenth-century Brazil. They cannot assume that all the women listed as single in the Emancipation Fund register, or the ecclesiastical registers, actually considered themselves to be so. Doing so overemphasizes the role of single women in enslaved families and underemphasizes the role of men, and adopts nineteenth-century elite visions of family relationships among the enslaved. Slaveowners had no interest in recognizing the patriarchal roles of fathers and husbands in places like Ilheus, where small properties outnumbered large ones and planters and farmers alike enjoyed limited resources. Yet the failure of elites to recognize those ties consistently in the documents does not mean that they did not exist. Using a methodology nicknamed "crossing data," to combine data from ecclesiastical and civil registers with that from other sources such as probate documents, purchase and sale agreements, or court cases allows us to capture brief glimpses of a more complex picture. (20) We are still left with only a glimpse into the totality and the complexity of family life among the enslaved, but that view is no less precious for its limitations.

Slavery on Late Nineteenth-Century Ilheus Plantations and Farms

The Bahian county of Ilheus had a small but demographically complex enslaved population in 1872 when the district judge reported the presence of "a force" of more than 1,000 slaves. (21) According to census takers that "force" actually numbered 1,051 people, 35 percent of whom were children under fifteen, 17 percent of whom were adults over 41, and less than half of whom(48%) were between 16 and 40. (22) Women and girls outnumbered men and boys, and, overall, more than half of all enslaved people (53%) were female. Consequently, less than 25 percent of the population fell into the class of workers that Brazilian planters and farmers traditionally considered the optimal part of the labor force--men and boys between 16 and 40. (23)

In previous decades the African slave trade had been an essential factor in the creation of this labor force, as the presence of Africans (14%) among the enslaved population over 35 attests. By 1872, however, natural reproduction was more important than purchase or other types of transfers in shaping it, despite the presence of enslaved men and women like Jose Pedro and Maria Calasans who had been born elsewhere. By far, most of the enslaved people in Ilheus had been born there and even the Africans had spent upwards of 20 years in the county.

These enslaved people lived in a variety of circumstances. Only about two dozen planters--several of whom had bought their properties with the proceeds from inherited shares of sugar plantations in Bahia or Sergipe--could boast that they owned more than 25 people. Most Ilheus farmers had access to very little capital, and so owned only a few slaves. Only 17 percent of slaves, therefore, lived in groups of more than 50 people. (24) More than half (58%) of them lived in groups of 25 people or less, while just over one third (36%) lived in groups of nine or fewer slaves. (25)

As the following chart demonstrates, the largest groups of slaves included men, women and children, although not necessarily in equal proportion. Those on Jacarecica, Almada Plantation and Saint Anthony of the Rocks--the owners of which were members of wealthy sugar-planting families based in the Bahian Reconcavo--most closely approximated traditional Bahian sugar plantation labor forces, with adult men outnumbering enslaved women and children rather significantly on all three of them. The enslaved labor forces on the plantations belonging to members of the extended Sa clan, on the other hand, had relatively equal numbers of enslaved men and women and greater numbers of children. Indeed the number of children on such properties is surprisingly large. (26)

The smaller groups of laborers were much more varied demographically. (28) In these five examples together, there were only nine adult men, but fourteen adult women and twenty-two children. In other words, children actually outnumbered all adults on these properties, and adult men were by far the smallest enslaved group. Few small farmers in Ilheus could afford to purchase many young adult men, who were by far the most expensive laborers to acquire in nineteenth-century Brazil.

The living arrangements on these plantations and farms varied depending upon the size of the property and the composition of the labor force. On the large plantations, slaves enjoyed separate living quarters in buildings, called senzalas in Portuguese. These were either independent thatched-roofed cabins built out of wattle and daub, with a door and perhaps a window in the front, or, alternatively, "stable-like" structures of three or four residences joined together. (29) The farms, however, reflected a variety of housing options as diverse as the groups of laborers on the properties. On some of the larger, more well-established farms, like the one belonging to the Farias family, there was a multi-residence senzala, but on the poorer, smaller farms there were no barns or outbuildings whatsoever, so slaves must have slept either in slave quarters within the owner's house, on the owner's kitchen floor or in hammocks outside it.

Socially, enslaved people on large properties enjoyed more contact with peers from other properties than did those on small farms. The large properties sat in enormous clearings near busy ports on the county's three major rivers, and were the transfer points for regional produce leaving Ilheus and manufactured goods coming in. They were regional social and political centers, as well, on which stood stores, chapels and cemeteries that drew in free and enslaved residents of the broader countryside for celebrations and funerals as well as to buy and sell goods. Small farms, on the other hand, hid in the forests next to small streams, where travelers might pass from time to time but not regularly. Slaves on a large property enjoyed the company of other slaves on the property, and could reasonably expect to get to know a wide variety of the enslaved and free poor people in the surrounding region; those who lived on isolated farms had very little regular access to people outside of the owner's family.

Work could vary in several respects between the larger and smaller properties. While all slaves worked "in the general service of the fazenda [farm/plantation]," participation in a larger labor force allowed enslaved men and women to develop specializations such as cooking or carpentry, which would occupy their time except during the harvest. On farms, slaves were rarely able to concentrate on one task: there, domestic slaves worked in agriculture and agricultural slaves worked in the house. Similarly, slaves on large plantations worked under the supervision of an overseer, often an enslaved man himself, and rarely saw the owner during the work day--or in a few cases from one end of the year to the other. On the small farms, however, the enslaved worked under the direct supervision of their owner and, sometimes, alongside him or her, depending upon the number of laborers and the size of the farm. (30)

Whether on a large or a small property, however, by 1874 enslaved men, women and children in Ilheus shared the experience of laboring in cacao. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, large estates in Ilheus focused primarily on timber and sugar, while small ones had been devoted to cultivating cassava and other food crops for sale in the markets of the state capital. By 1874, almost all planters and farmers were devoting increasing amounts of land to cacao, the tree crop that served as the basis for the emerging industrial chocolate that was taking Europe and North America by storm. The region continued to produce some sugar and cassava in the second half of the century, but every decade after 1850 saw the amount of cacao being exported double or triple. (31)

Cacao was well suited to this labor force. Once the heavy labor of clearing the land was complete--something that coincided with the lucrative local logging economy--women and children could handle most of the work without difficulty. As a local government official commented in the 1860s:

  When the slaves go to harvest [the cacao] the farmer's family should
  accompany them and take part in the joyful and easy work completed in
  the shade of the cacao tree; an enslaved woman carries pruning knives
  and one or more baskets that are suspended .... in the heaviest-laden
  tree; next to it, they deposit the cacao in a big pile. Then a few
  enslaved women and their children, the housewife and even the farmer
  himself, go breaking up the pods, etc ... (32)

In other words, cacao was neither difficult nor onerous to harvest, and the combination of one man, a few women and some children, or even several women and children could take care of all the work required. Granted, the report's author was painting a romantic vision of the cacao harvest, but his description nonetheless points to the potential of nearly every enslaved person on an Ilheus plantation or farm in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Whether they lived on a large plantation or a small farm, every enslaved person over the age of about eight was a valuable part of the labor force in 1870s Ilheus. The number of slaves without professions listed in the 1872 census for Ilheus corresponds almost exactly to the number of children under age five and about half of the children between six and ten. (33) In other words, somewhere between age six and age ten, enslaved children began to work on the plantations and farms on which they lived and neither old age nor infirmity excluded anyone. Obviously, children and the elderly might not be the best laborers, frequently being described by their owners as having little aptitude for work, but agricultural slaves in their 40s and women in general were much more useful on a cacao property than on one devoted to sugar. (34)

By 1887 the demographic profile of the enslaved population of Ilheus had changed. Enslaved women seem to have continued to outnumber enslaved men, and the group as a whole was more heavily Brazilian than ever, since many of the Africans had died. Moreover, all adults over 60 and boys and girls under 16 were free as a result of gradual abolition laws. Brazilian-born enslaved men and women in the 16 to 40 age group, therefore, now represented almost 100 percent of the total enslaved population.

The plantations and farms were not, however, devoid of younger or older laborers. Many older slaves who had obtained their freedom through a law freeing slaves over the age of 60, remained on the plantations and farms as free workers as they had nowhere to go after a lifetime of slavery. (35) On the other hand, most slaveowners treated the 559 children born to enslaved mothers--known as ingenuos--between 1872 and 1887, as slaves. Although they were technically free, the law required that they remain "wards" of their mothers' owner until age 21. (36) Those owners had the choice of renouncing their guardianship either at birth, or when the child turned eight, but only one or two owners ever did. The ingenuos, therefore, constituted a group of unfree people living on plantations and farms, and by 1879 the eldest among them were already beginning to work in the cacao groves or the drying balconies. In 1887, the year before the abolition of slavery was finally declared in Brazil, the eldest of them moved into the highly valued group of laborers age 16 to 40.

Enslaved Families on Ilheus Plantations and Farms

The enslaved men, women and children who lived and worked on Ilheus plantations and farms in the last two decades of slavery in Brazil were not isolated individuals; they were members of nuclear and extended families. These families involved men, as well as women and children, and in some cases several generations. We know too little about the ways in which African notions about kinship and marriage may have influenced the choices of first, second and third generation descendants to understand how that may have shaped notions about family for enslaved men and women in Ilheus. Nevertheless, the documents do allow us to see patterns of social interaction and explore some specific cases in detail.

These families had their roots in partnerships between women and men. (37) Physical attractions and other personal characteristics surely influenced choice about such partnerships, but the documents remain silent on those topics. They do show that slaves first sought relationships with men or women on their own or nearby properties, giving precedence to people from plantations and farms connected through their owners' family ties or the district's commercial networks. In that way, when owners visited or sent them to carry out tasks for others, enslaved men and women could visit their own loved ones. Women valued men capable of providing comforts not usually available to slaves: Those "extras" might be as little as a sheet for a bed, given by an African man on Jacarecica Plantation to the enslaved woman Eulalia from the Boa Vista Farm in 1871, or as much as freedom, as in the case of enslaved African Luiza Francisca de Gusmao whose husband, freed African Verissimo Batista Lappa purchased her freedom just before he died. Some enslaved men sought connections with women who could be depended upon to help them work toward freedom, who could be constant and affectionate, although others competed for the attention of women involved with well-respected enslaved men, as was the case when Joao from Jacarecica began courting Eulalia, even though she already lived with Boa Vista's enslaved overseer. (38)

Given the small size of most properties, enslaved men and women frequently had to look beyond the borders of the properties on which they lived to find a partner. Doing so appears to have presented little difficulty. The largest plantations were social, cultural and commercial centers that drew planters and farmers from surrounding districts to sell agricultural products and buy supplies, to participate in religious ceremonies, saint's days celebrations, or to attend parties. On such occasions, owners brought slaves with them, allowing the enslaved to meet, see friends and family and establish new relationships. "Little" Pedro and Theresa met in just this way either on the Almada or the Castello Novo plantations in 1874 or 1875. She belonged to a member of the Sa Bittencourt Camara clan, owners of Castelo Novo and other properties on the south bank of the Almada River, and he belonged to the Cerqueira Lima family, the owners of the Almada Plantation directly across the river to the north. The enslaved men and women on the Boa Vista Farm met those on the Jacarecica Plantation when they brought their own produce, or that of their owner, to the larger property for sale. Several enslaved men from Saint Anthony of the Rocks Plantation and Rosario Farm formed a close bond when their owners joined together to form a construction crew that worked throughout the district. In the process, the men also developed ties to enslaved people on at least two other properties. (39)

The decision to begin a sexual relationship was yet another expression of autonomy. Whether living on the same or different properties, enslaved men and women had little difficulty consummating flirtations. All properties--large and small--offered dark corners where lovers might enjoy enough privacy for sexual intercourse. The same business transactions and social events that allowed them to meet also allowed them to see one another thereafter. The practice of allowing enslaved men and women a day to themselves each week during which they might work a small plot of land also provided the possibility of weekly conjugal visits. Alternatively, sneaking off after work to visit a lover was relatively easy on a cacao farm, even during the harvest season, as long as the visitor was careful. With the exception of a brief period in 1875, no local or provincial militia patrolled the trails or rivers that linked plantations and farms, and the forests and cacao groves that covered the county offered numerous excellent hiding places in the event of the appearance of someone in authority. Arriving on another property visitors needed to be discrete, so that, in the words of one enslaved man on the Farias farm "the white guy won't hear," but as long as both enslaved lovers were present and accounted for when work began in the morning, owners remained unaware of what had happened or unwilling to provoke problems. (40) Several months later when women involved in these relationships began to show the unmistakable signs of pregnancy, owners could not avoid recognizing that something was going on beyond his or her control, but at that point there was little to be done.

Formalizing such relationships offered much more difficulty. On many properties, the enslaved could share a cabin without the owner's permission, but those who lived on separate properties could not do so. Nor in Ilheus could enslaved couples easily marry. According to the Emancipation Fund, slaveowners registered only 14 enslaved married couples and another 14 widows and three widowers in 1874. According to this document, only 17 enslaved men and 28 enslaved women in Ilheus were married or had ever been married. This small number of married slaves does not reflect a mistake on the part of the authorities creating the register: the 1872 census as well as the ecclesiastical records and probate documents all confirm it. (41) The enslaved men and women of Ilheus rarely married legally.

The low incidence of marriage among the enslaved has several explanations. Oral tradition among Brazilian elites tells us that it was often because enslaved women were involved with their owners, who were already married. Several enslaved women certainly gave birth to children who were lighter in complexion than themselves, suggesting that Euro-Brazilians lurked in the child's family tree. (42) Despite the lurid images of masters entering slave cabins, these relationships were not the norm. According to census takers, few of the enslaved in Ilheus exhibited the outward signs of racial mixing in 1872. At that time they classified only 12.5% of the population as pardo or mixed. (43) Such labels grew out of elite perceptions, and genetics do not guarantee that enslaved children would immediately show clear evidence of a white parent. Still, biologically, Europeans and white Brazilians appear to have had only a limited influence on the enslaved people living in Ilheus. Involvement with the local elite does not, therefore, explain the low incidence of marriage among the enslaved.

Stuart Schwartz found that the high cost of childbearing and childrearing among slaves helped to explain the low incidence of marriage on sugar plantations in the colonial period, including on one in Ilheus, but that does not appear to have been the case in the period after 1850. (44) The Emancipation Fund recorded the presence of 320 minor children in town in 1874, and a variety of sources indicate that those children had been born to women in the county. After 1874, enslaved women gave birth to more than 500 babies born free under the Law of the Free Womb. (45) These numbers seem to suggest that slaveowners made little or no effort to prohibit sexual contact between the enslaved men and women on their own or neighboring properties. Enslaved women in Ilheus were bearing and raising children despite their failure to marry.

The limited financial resources of most planters and farmers in Ilheus and the small size of their properties did influence the low incidence of marriage among the enslaved there. Only a few properties were large enough to allow enslaved men and women to find partners among the group with which they lived. In such circumstances, finding a partner meant looking to other plantations and farms. Yet, the plantations and farms were not close together enough for an enslaved man or woman to live on one property and work on another, as might have been the case in an urban setting like Salvador. For many Ilheus slaves, living as a family unit within slavery would have required convincing owners to acquire new slaves on the basis of the wants and needs of those he or she already owned, violating the basic tenets of slavery even in the unlikely event that these planters and farmers had the financial resources to do it. From an owner's perspective, enslaved men, women and their children were property, to be bought, sold or moved at the convenience of the owner, not people with families, feelings and needs which the owner should attempt to accommodate.

Cultural factors also played into planter opposition to marriage. Marriage was a religious sacrament that conveyed on male-female unions the blessings of a God and a religious faith in which both the enslaved and the owner purported to believe. In such circumstances, separating family members meant violating religious and cultural norms. Encouraging or allowing marriage, therefore, meant that slaveowners were voluntarily giving up some of their power over their captive workers. Those owners found it easier to believe that the enslaved were promiscuous, with no interest in long-term, stable relationships than to relinquish any of their control over the people they owned.

By the 1870s legal restrictions on slaveowner treatment of married slaves reduced any interest that small and medium-sized planters and farmers might have in allowing the men and women they owned to marry. Marriage bound men and women together legally, as well as religiously, and baptism of children born to married parents recognized patriarchal ties between father and child. Marriage also gave rights as heads of household to married men, yet the slaveowner was the head of any household composed of enslaved people. After 1869, separating legally married couples and their children under 15 (later 12) became illegal, and while enforcing such laws might have been difficult--after all Jose Pedro and Maria Calasans could not use the law to reunite their family--they were nonetheless another complicating factor for slaveowners. (46) In southern Bahia where small slaveowners might need to buy or sell someone to raise funds, or where numerous heirs had claims to the relatively small number of slaves owned by parents or grandparents, owners had no interest in encouraging legal ties between enslaved men and women.

Finally, we must consider that the low incidence of marriage reflected a lack of interest in such legal and religious ties on the part of the enslaved. Here the evidence is mixed and circumstantial. On the one hand, many enslaved adults had been born in Africa or had grown up in the company of Africans as their first or second generation Afro-Brazilian descendents. Such people might realistically have little use for an institution valued by the society that enslaved them, especially since the monogamous Roman Catholic marriage differed dramatically from the marriage and kinship practices from which most Africans originated. (47) The Emancipation Fund Register does not help settle the question, but the census indicates that some Africans valued Brazilian marriage ceremonies: one fourth of all married enslaved men and women had been born in Africa, and just under one third of free Africans were married. Most married slaves had been born in Brazil, as we might expect, but some had been born on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean in vastly different circumstances. (48) That they married does not necessarily mean that they had adopted Brazilian social and cultural norms: some enslaved Africans in Ilheus had originated in Luso-African territories where they had been baptized Christians and learned Portuguese. They could well have been raised with religious and cultural notions similar to those common among Afro-Brazilians whose families had been in Brazil for generations. (49)

Whether they were unable to marry or chose not to, enslaved men and women most frequently came together in consensual unions. While owners could prohibit legal and Roman Catholic recognition of relationships among enslaved couples, they could not stop them from developing. Indeed, such unions were widespread among the enslaved in nineteenth-century Brazil, and they demonstrate the limits of slaveowners' power to control the intimate lives of the people whom they held captive. (50) In other words, the master-slave relationship was not the only one, or even necessarily the most important one, that enslaved men and women developed. (51)

These consensual unions may have responded to logic different from that of monogamous Christian marriage. First, they reflected the real and difficult circumstances under which enslaved men and women lived. Those enslaved on small properties were forced to find partners beyond the boundaries of the property where they lived and labored, as were some slaves on larger properties. Slaves unable to live together because they belonged to different properties were subject to especially difficult conditions for maintaining stable relationships. Those challenges were complicated by sale away or other forced moves, which effectively terminated any relationship with the man or woman left behind. In such cases, forming then maintaining a monogamous and stable relationship with a male or female lover was nearly impossible.

On the other hand, consensual unions may have represented efforts to develop Brazilian versions of relationships that enslaved Africans remembered from childhoods in Africa, or that their children and grandchildren had learned about from parents and grandparents. (52) We know too little about where the enslaved of Ilheus originated in Africa, and what family and marital relationships were like during those time periods to make any clear label possible, but slavery must have complicated any effort to retain notions of matrilineal or patrilineal descent, let alone families based on gathering large numbers of women and children around a man of significant resources. Finally, men and women who had been wrenched from one side of the Atlantic and sent to another, or who had been dragged from one part of Brazil to another, must have suffered traumas that would have complicated redeveloping long-term relationships.

Although the consensual unions were not formalized in Roman Catholic marriage, they could represent strong bonds of love and affection. When freed African Chrispim Couto died, he left the share of his property normally reserved in Brazil for husbands or wives to an enslaved African woman, in recognition of the way that she had helped him "to work with all the constancy and affection possible" even though they had never married or brought children into the world together. (53) In Antonia, Couto found a partner for life--a person whose feelings for him and his for her went far beyond those of work mates or dehumanized victims of the slave trade and slavery. We do not know how they found each other. We do know that they had both experienced the terror of crossing the ocean in the hold of a slave ship. That experience, however, did not prohibit them from establishing a relationship on the basis of mutual respect, affection and hard work.

Children and Family

Enslaved women in Ilheus frequently gave birth. As the Emancipation Fund document shows, half of women and girls between 14 and 56 were the mothers of minor children. Parsing the data further reveals that enslaved women rarely became parents before the age of 20 or had children after they turned 40. More than half of all women in their twenties and thirties were the mothers of minor children in 1874. By the time women reached their forties, the likelihood that they would have minor children was dropping, while women in their 50s had minor children only rarely. (54) Presumably by that time, their children were now adults.

The Emancipation Fund register did not include data on all the mothers and children in Ilheus. The law required only that owners indicate the connections between living minor children, their mothers and their fathers--when their parents were married. Children who had died or had reached adulthood were not included in the list; nor were teenaged children who had been sent or sold far way. Their mothers were recorded as childless. These practices, as well as slaveowners' failure to register stillborn infants or infants who did not thrive, leave us with a gross underestimate of both the numbers of mothers and children in the register and the connections between them. In practical terms, the way the register was created meant that Maria Calasans appears in its pages as the mother of no children, although she had at least four in Sergipe at the time. Maria Felicia is listed as the mother of two minor children, which was true, but she had four children altogether: Barbara, born in 1852, Joao born in 1857, Theresa born in 1859, and Dina born in 1862. Barbara was too old to be included in the register, but Joao should have been there. Registering him, however, would have acknowledged that his owner had illegally taken him away from his mother and sent him to work as a domestic in the Ferreira Bandeira mansion in Salvador. (55)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

While many enslaved women gave birth to children, enslaved families did not include very large numbers of children, as free families sometimes did. (56) Figure 3 makes clear that few enslaved women had five or more minor children at any one time and never more than eight. Again, looking at the data according to women's ages provides more clarity, and Figure 4, confirms that women in their thirties and forties sometimes had five or more minor children, but that women in their twenties almost never did. Married couples may have had more children, but the data are not conclusive, as the mothers of the largest families in the record were women identified as single. The cases of the two women whose children we know were underrepresented in the register seem to underscore the validity of the trend that the register suggests, despite the limitations of the document that we have already discussed. They had five and four total children respectively. Their experiences, then, support the wider trend that the register suggests. Indeed enslaved families of more than five children seem to have been quite unusual in Ilheus: Fernando Steiger at Victoria certainly thought so. He gave prizes to women on his plantation who gave birth to six or more children, but even with such incentives only one of his slaves had such a large family in 1874. (57)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

The late onset and early end of pregnancies, and the small number of children among enslaved women requires explanation. Certainly, poor nutrition, hard work and lack of rest undoubtedly delayed puberty and reduced fertility, in part explaining the trends, but the existence of several enslaved mothers in their teens and others who were older suggests that at least some young and older women were perfectly capable of conceiving and bringing pregnancies successfully to term. Thus, we must consider the possibility that enslaved women attempted to avoid pregnancy at various points in their lives, if not entirely. In other words, the data suggest that they were trying to control their reproductive lives. Methods of doing so ran the gamut from sexual intercourse without penetration to abortion. At least one abortionist lived in Ilheus in the 1870s. She was free, but her practice certainly relied on knowledge of the medical uses of the Atlantic forest that covered southern Bahia, something that long-term local enslaved residents or recent arrivals from Africa may have shared. One enslaved woman, Theresa, seems to have relied on some of that knowledge to terminate a pregnancy that her partner suspected had resulted from her previous relationship. (58)

As the conflict between Theresa and her partner suggests these children had fathers, most of whom numbered among the 320 enslaved men recorded as single in the Emancipation Fund register or the 1,000 or so men of the free poor noted in the census. Determining who all of those fathers were, how many men fathered children, and how many they may have fathered remains completely impossible because of the prejudices against unmarried partners imbedded in the records. There are some hints, however, about the number of children that slave men fathered with their wives and partners. The eight married men with minor children in the documents were the fathers of between three and eight children each. From other sources we know that Chrispim Domingos Couto had three children, while Jose Pedro Calasans had four, and "Little" Pedro from Almada had at least five. These numbers would seem to correspond to the number of children to whom enslaved women were giving birth. In other words, although we cannot know for certain, enslaved men also seem to have had a limited number of children.

Although there is much that we cannot know, there are many hints about paternal relationships in the record. Cultural markers sometimes provide clues. For example, in the 1870s, two enslaved men named Pedro lived on Almada Plantation, owned by Pedro Augusto Cerqueira Lima. Clearly both had been named for the owner, but the eldest, nicknamed "Big Pedro" was nearly twice as old as the younger, "Little Pedro," and they were the only two men on the property whom the owners considered to have "a great deal of aptitude for work." (59) Perhaps, these names and the comment indicate that "little" Pedro was the older man's son, and that the boy had been named for his father, in whose company he had grown up. In the process, the father had taught his son his skills and his work ethic as Jose Pedro Calasans hoped to do with his children and grandchildren. (60)

Common residence suggests other possibilities. Fernando Steiger, the owner of the Fazenda Vitoria, bragged that he encouraged his slaves to marry as early as possible in "a ceremony over which he presided" and that he allowed married slaves to live together, although he never identified the couples he married or the fathers of the children born to those unions in official documents of any kind. (61) According to the Emancipation Fund, only one married couple and four widows lived on his plantation in 1874; like most other enslaved people in the record, those on the Steiger plantation appear to have been single. Yet if we take Steiger at his word, and examine the age and sex distribution of the enslaved people on his farm, we can tease some information about the presence of enslaved men in families there out of the documentary record. The plantation labor force was quite equally divided between men (34) and women (30) over 18, who, we can speculate, constituted a group of couples recognized by the owner and their peers, but not the Brazilian state or the Catholic Church. Eighteen of those 30 women, between the ages of 28 and 51, were the mothers of 48 minor children on the property; presumably the fathers of those children numbered among the property's 33 men, and particularly among the 19 men from age 27 to 51. (62) Clearly we are looking at a minimum of 18 nuclear and a smaller number of extended families, but exactly which men and women constituted the adult bases for those groups of kin is impossible to tell from the record.

The geographic proximity of plantations and farms sometimes points to paternal ties. In 1874 the labor force on the Farias farm Fazenda Embira, owned by Joao Theodoro de Farias and his wife America Brasileira Mello e Sa, included six women, ten children and no men. The fathers of those children were clearly not enslaved men on that property. While members of the free poor might have fathered these children, enslaved men on other plantations might also have done so. Embira sat close to several larger properties, at least two of which--Almada and Saint Anthony of the Rocks--had labor forces with more men than women. (63) It is not too far of a jump to surmise that the fathers of some of the children on Embira belonged to Almada or Saint Anthony. Certainly at least two children on Embira had a father who lived on Almada in 1887. (64)

Finally, we can connect some specific individual men to their children and their partners through mention in documents other than the Emancipation Fund Register or the ecclesiastical registers. Almada's "Little" Pedro revealed his relationship with Theresa and their five children when he was called to testify at the inquest into the cause of her death. Freed African Crispim Domingos Couto, on the other hand, used his will to clarify his connections to his daughters, their mothers, and the woman who shared his life when he died. (65) Jose Pedro Calasans described three generations of his family when trying to bring them to Ilheus. These documents, revealing relationships about which we would otherwise have no clue, offer rare glimpses into the family ties of enslaved Africans and Brazilians on Ilheus plantations and farms.

The failure of the dominant society to recognize the ties between enslaved men and their children or spouses did not mean that enslaved men did not feel affection for or responsibility toward their families. Our opening vignette about Jose Pedro Calasans' efforts to reunite family makes that clear. Yet his story is not the only one that the documents provide. Freed African Crispim Domingos Couto provides us with another. As he lay dying, he outlined his relationships to his three enslaved children, Angela born in 1860, Paulina in 1865 and Belmira in 1866, all of whom lived in Ilheus. He did not leave any property to their mothers, the enslaved African woman Josefa and the enslaved Afro-Brazilian Maria da Pena, but he passed shares of his small farm to each of the girls, in addition to the third he left to Antonia, the woman he considered his wife when he died. (66) Couto was not required to recognize his ties to any of these women or girls. All of his relationships had been based on consensual unions and none of the girls' baptismal registries includes any mention of him. Neither he, nor his daughters or their mothers had ever lived together since they belonged to different people. Yet Couto clearly took his responsibilities to his children and Antonia seriously. He was trying to protect them beyond the grave, by leaving them property which the girls might use to free themselves and with which Antonia might support herself. (67)

Enslaved men and women in consensual unions could develop strong, long term bonds. "Little" Pedro and Theresa, for example, remained together for 12 or 13 years, despite never living on the same property. When they met, she lived on a Sa property and he belonged to Almada. Luckily for them, he remained on Almada, because, as we have seen, she was sold twice in subsequent years. At 15 she went to work as a domestic for the Adami de Sa family in the city of Ilheus, where, at 17, she gave birth to their first child, Maria. She and Pedro were able to see each other when the Adamis attended family functions on Castelo Novo Plantation, and in those years they conceived two more children. Those three children died in infancy, however, which must have been particularly difficult for Theresa, given that neither Pedro, her mother nor any of her siblings lived with her or near her. She lived with other enslaved women, but she had spent the first twelve years of her life among biological kin, including her mother and three siblings, and reacted badly when her mother was sold away from her according to her original owner. She must, therefore, have felt the absence of her biological family strongly when her own children died. She and Pedro stayed together, however, even though there were other potential partners living near both of them. Then when she was in her early 20s, she was sold again, this time as an agricultural slave, to the Farias de Sa family, whose Embira Farm lay across the river from Almada. Pedro could now visit at night and on weekends, and so she gave birth to two other children and conceived another in the eight or nine years that she lived there. It was not until 1887, when she was over 30, that she left him for another man. The man she chose lived on the same property that she did, and had been importuning her for months before she agreed to leave Pedro. Pedro was furious when he discovered what had happened, and he moved on to another relationship, but he continued to see his children after the breakup and considered them part of his family. (68)

Child Mortality, Separation and Sale in Enslaved Family Life

These family relationships did not constitute the nuclear and extended family valued among elites, but they responded to the possibilities available to the enslaved within the confines of slavery. Enslaved couples and families faced the same kinds of challenges that free couples and families did, but they also endured a series of challenges specific to their conditions as slaves that made life together particularly difficult.

Child mortality struck all families, but seems to have been particularly serious among the enslaved. Carrying a successful pregnancy to term and raising a healthy child could be extraordinarily difficult, and enslaved parents could expect to fail more than once. The enslaved woman Maria Felicia had four children who survived to adulthood, but a five year gap between her first two children suggests that she miscarried or lost a child between 1852 and 1857. (69) Three of "Little" Pedro and Theresa's children died as babies, so Maria Felicia lost three grandchildren even if all her own children survived. Another enslaved woman, Archanjela, had only three surviving children in the twenty three years after she turned 19, out of a total of at least four and possibly more pregnancies. She lost her youngest child around 1875, but a ten year gap in the 1860s between the birth of her first and second children suggests the loss of others. (70) Even Maria Calasans, whom we met in the opening pages of this article, may have lost a child or children. We know that she and Jose Pedro had at least three children in Sergipe before being taken to Ilheus, but they may have had more, since he seemed disappointed in the number of children he found in his post-emancipation search. (71)

Life as property also challenged enslaved family members. Disruptions in the owner's family, such as death, relocation or financial problems brought difficult changes to many enslaved men and women in Ilheus. That is what happened to Maria and Jose Pedro Calasans and their children after their original owners died, as well as to the people who constituted Fortunato Pereira Gallo's inherited share of a Reconcavo sugar plantation in the mid-1840s. Several of those slaves, including a woman named Ephigenia and her young daughter Marinha das Virgins, had originally belonged to Gallo's father and, when he died, become part of the son's inheritance. When Gallo sold his share in the family sugar plantation in the Reconcavo and purchased a plantation on the Ilheus frontier, he took the enslaved people whom he had inherited with him when he moved, breaking up families and friendships. Something similar had probably happened to the enslaved men and women on Jacarecica, since the owners of that plantation had also inherited shares of plantations elsewhere. (72)

Some enslaved men and women, boys and girls experienced such transfers and separations more than once. Maria Felicia and her four children were among them. She grew up as an agricultural slave either in Salvador or in the Reconcavo, where she established a union or unions and gave birth to the three eldest of her four children. She and her children were sent to Ilheus after Pedro Fer-reira Bandeira's wife died and he married a girl from the Sa Bittencourt Camara clan there. Whether Maria Felicia's partner(s) and the father(s) of her children went with them the documents do not say, but he(they) may well have been left behind, since the death of the first Mrs. Ferreira Bandeira had divided the family's slaves among various people. In Ilheus, Maria Felicia and the children technically belonged to Jose Ferreira Bandeira, Pedro's son by his first marriage, but as Jose was a minor, they continued to live under the control of his father, Pedro Ferreira Bandeira. In Ilheus, Maria Felicia gave birth to another child, Dina, although whether on the basis of a new or an old union the documents do not say. We do know that Jose Ferreira Bandeira died in the 1860s and a new inheritance process left Maria Felicia to his father while her children passed to his half-sister from the second marriage, Trifina Bandeira e Sa. As the girl was a minor, her father continued to administer her estate, including her slaves. When Maria Felicia was about 36, in 1874, he sold her for the equivalent of 1,000 cacao trees. (73) At the time, Barbara was 20, Joao was 15, Theresa was 12 and Dina was 10. Mother and children never lived together again, and the siblings remained together for only a brief time: three months later, Ferreira Bandeira sold Theresa; at around the same time he sent Joao to Salvador to work in his mansion in the capital. Dina and Barbara remained with Trifina Sa in Ilheus until she died, after which their fate is unclear.

Enslaved parents and their daughters could assume that the girls would be sold when they reached working age simply because they were in demand. Januaria was sold illegally in 1871, when she was only seven, to Manuel Francisco Dunda who put her to work on his farm with two other slaves, Antonio, aged 45 and Pompeu, aged 12, neither of whom appear to have been related her or to each other. Three years later, at 10, she was sold again. Her owners attempted to obscure their illegal actions by changing her age in the notarial records of the second sale, but they make clear that she may have been sold twice before she was 11 and had definitely been sold twice before she was fifteen, the second time at public auction. (74) Maria Felicia's daughter Theresa was sold at 15 and Archangela's eldest daughter Archanja at 16, as were another four girls between 11 and 15 whose family relationships were not detailed in the documents. (75) Two boys, Antonio and Manoel, were listed only as mocos or boys at their sale, but the price paid for the two of them, 800$, suggests that they had not yet reached their teens. (76) Still, girls made up 61 percent of the children 15 and under living without their parents on Ilheus plantations and farms. (77) Luckily for them, demand was local or they might have ended up in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo.

Owners took advantage of the close ties among their enslaved workers to enforce discipline, using sale or other types of transfers to punish actual or perceived infractions. Egidio Luis de Sa transferred the African woman Eulalia who became involved in a messy love triangle on the Boa Vista Plantation in 1866 to another family property a day's travel time away from her home. (78) The widow Bemvinda Vianna sold the enslaved woman Archangela and her two young children because she believed Archangela had developed a sexual relationship with her husband. Pedro Ferreira Bandeira traded 13-year-old slave girl Theresa for another because, "well, he was fed up with her!" (79) In 1872 Jose Antonio Bastos put Aprigio up for sale because he had attacked a neighboring planter, Fortunato Pereira Gallo. Two years later everyone assumed that the enslaved men who attacked Gallo again would be sold in punishment. (80) All eight of the fugitive enslaved men living in the woods between Ilheus and Barra do Rio de Contas were sold away to Rio de Janeiro at the behest of state government officials when they were caught. (81)

Enslaved men and women, boys and girls reacted powerfully, if not always violently, to these separations. Maria and Jose Pedro Calasans could not forget the children they left behind, nor apparently could the children forget them. Theresa behaved so badly in the three months after her mother was sold that her owner got rid of her. (82) The breakup of her family seems a plausible explanation for her behavior. (83) Maria Felicia kept watch over her children to the best of her ability, forcing the authorities to investigate her daughter's death after Theresa died in 1887--15 years after they were separated. Joao Gomes, an unmarried African enslaved on Saint Anthony of the Rocks, may have confessed to a crime he did not commit, at least in part to keep an enslaved man, young enough to be his son, from being sold away. What combination of factors left the Brazilian enslaved man Jose do Amparo, so desperate to remain in Ilheus that he would jump off the steamship taking him to Rio de Janeiro, we do not know, but he was not attempting suicide. He reached land and eluded the authorities for twenty four hours before eventually being captured. (84)

Through all of these trials and tribulations, men and women struggled to protect each other and their children. They had few options available to them to do so. Flight, revolt and any sign of open hostility brought transfer or sale away. Laws designed to keep young children with their parents did not work when slaveowners really wished to sell someone. Requests to obtain custody of children--even children born free under the Law of the Free Womb--usually ended in failure, as Almada's "Little" Pedro discovered. We might assume that under such dire circumstances, that enslaved men and women would give up, but they did not.

Creativity Under Constraint 

Members of enslaved families in Ilheus ultimately saw freedom as the only way to protect themselves and each other from separation. As they began to try to free themselves and the people they loved, they turned to the internal economy of slavery, the system through which slaveowners in Ilheus, like their counterparts elsewhere in Brazil and indeed in the Americas, allowed their enslaved laborers to grow crops, raise chickens, or make household items which they could use themselves or sell. (85) The practice was common among all Ilheus slaveowners, as one of the Abreu sisters commented in 1860. According to her,

  Everyone knows that planters and farmers of all sorts permit even
  their own slaves to plant things that are theirs to tend on certain
  and designated days ... (86)

In other words, Ilheus planters and farmers commonly allowed their slaves regular time off during which they might plant a bit of land and grow crops of their own.

Traditionally in Bahia, enslaved men and women used these plots, known as rocas, to grow household provisions, particularly manioc, to supplement their diet and to sell in local markets. (87) In Ilheus, they also did so, but they found an additional opportunity as well in growing cacao. Slaveowners saw cacao as a way to make a profit on the basis of the labor force that they owned; the enslaved, on the other hand, saw cacao as their ticket to freedom, family stability and prosperity. Nothing stood between enslaved men and women and freedom, except the ability to establish a cacao grove and bring it to production.

Nineteenth-century documents show a number of enslaved men with cacao groves. When German immigrant Joao Segismundo Cordier died, among the improvements on his land were 84, ten-year-old cacao trees, belonging "to the slave Joao of that same fazenda." (88) When he died Sabino, the enslaved overseer of the Boa Vista Farm, was growing corn and beans both to provide food and to shade the delicate new cacao saplings in his grove. (89) In the 1870s Jorge, an African slave belonging to Felipe Wense, and the slave Fortunato da Encarnacao, both had groves of cacao. (90) These groves were all planted on land belonging to the slaveowners, but by custom the trees themselves belonged to the slaves who had planted them.

Enslaved men and women who could plant cacao groves were developing a valuable piece of property. Well-tended cacao trees in production were worth about 1$ each between about 1865 and 1888, making a half-hectare grove of 500 well tended trees in production worth 500$ and a full hectare of 1,000 well-tended trees worth 1:000$. Evaluators considered new trees not yet in production at about half of that value, or 500$ per tree, 250$ for a grove of 500 trees and 500$ for 1,000 trees. (91) In other words, in the 1870s and 1880s, a well-tended cacao grove of 1,250 trees was worth about the same as a healthy enslaved adult man or woman, usually valued at about 1:250$ at the time, and the smaller ones or the newer ones were equivalent to the value of an enslaved child or an older slave.

Given the demand for labor and the difficulties in acquiring it in the latter years of slavery in Ilheus, one might reasonably wonder why owners would allow their slaves to develop such valuable rocas. After all, with such a piece of property, slaves might acquire their freedom. The explanation lies both in the scarcity of labor and in the difficulties of bringing cacao groves into production. Allowing slaves to plant their own cacao groves increased the amount of cacao on a planter's or farmer's land without any cost to the planter or farmer. In the five years or so that cacao trees required to begin to produce, the groves were the responsibility of the slaves. Thus, for slaveowners who could not obtain all of the labor they needed or wanted, slaves who would plant cacao on the owner's land on their own time were a blessing. Cacao growers had no problem, therefore, allowing their enslaved workers to plant cacao on a designated piece of land.

That does not mean that they allowed the enslaved to plant wherever and whenever they wanted. Ilheus, and indeed southern Bahia in general, were the location of a valuable timber trade based on tropical hardwoods that still dotted the landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century. Landowners valued those hardwoods more than any agricultural crop that they might grow, and took out only as many as they could realistically process and sell in a given season. Given that southern Bahia had no clear rainy or dry season, doing so was quite difficult and time consuming because the ground remained damp throughout the year. Landowners were not yet interested in allowing slaves, free workers, squatters, plantation administrators or anyone else to clearcut land for crops. (92) The enslaved were, therefore, limited in both the amount of land and the location of the land that they could plant. They could only use land that had already been cleared of its valuable timber, which often meant that it had already been in production and was no longer at the peak of fertility, or that it was located in an area where valuable hardwoods didn't grow. Low lying valleys or the sides of steep hills, in other words, lands that were relatively marginal, were those that planters usually allowed their slaves to farm. Consequently, those slaves could not plant very much at one time, and what they did plant did not produce very well.

Even under optimal circumstances, which no enslaved cacao farmer enjoyed, the development of a grove with 1,000 cacao trees in production--in other words, a grove worth the equivalent of a healthy adult man or woman--could take as much as a decade. Planting 1,000 trees that would thrive meant clearing a minimum of a hectare of land of all but the largest trees--which could be used to shade the understory tree crop that served as the basis for chocolate. Clearing land was a slow, laborious process even if the largest trees were allowed to remain. Then, for the first two or so years the delicate saplings required weeding and shade, the latter usually provided by manioc or other food crops, which could be eaten or sold when mature. By the third or fourth years, the trees could be allowed to grow with little attention, but the food crops could no longer be planted, creating problems for farmers who depended upon the food or the cash those crops could provide. The trees would only produce their first fruit five or six years after they had been planted, and the best production might not begin until the tenth year. (93) Unless they were prepared to turn the grove over to the owner at that point, they had to wait a number of harvests before they could sell enough cacao to pay for someone's freedom.

The free time available to the enslaved slowed the speed at which they were able to establish such groves. Owners allowed them one day a week and holidays to work their own fields, which was not a great deal of time to devote to their cacao. If an enslaved man or woman had to tend their grove themselves, the amount of land that they could clear or plant at any one time was severely reduced. Perhaps that was why the enslaved man Joao on the Cordier farm had been able to bring only 84 cacao trees into production. (94)

Like other small farmers, the enslaved depended upon family for help with planting, weeding and harvesting. Men and women, young and old, healthy and inform could all help out with the family cacao grove, just as they could with the one belonging to the owner. That was why Almada's "Little" Pedro wanted custody of eight-year-old Alberto and why Jose Pedro and Maria hoped to bring children to live with them. When those family members lived on another plantation or farm, or were too young or old to easily walk to the family grove, the loss was not only emotional and psychological, it was also economic. A family member who was far away could not help to tend the farm, and could not help the family work toward freedom. No wonder Couto appreciated Antonia so much that it took Jose Pedro and Maria so long to put together the funds to free themselves and find their children.

From this perspective, child mortality, the sale of children and the refusal to release ingenuos takes on new meaning. Enslaved farmers with cacao groves lost laborers with each child who died, was sold or could not live with his or her parents. One of Jose Pedro and Maria Calasans children and all of their grandchildren were ingenuos, as were all of Theresa and Pedro's children as well as the other 559 children born to enslaved mothers after 1871 and before May 13 of 1888. While the youngest of those children might not be expected to help out in the groves, by 1879 some of them certainly were.

Owners treated ingenuos like slaves. (95) Indeed, in the early months after the law took effect, some slave owners did not even acknowledge that the children were free, informing the Emancipation Fund authorities that they were enslaved even though they had been baptized free. Owners did not seem to be able to conceive of the children of their slaves as anything but slaves. (96) Owner attitudes toward ingenuos complicated family life when parents achieved their freedom or when the mother died and the father lived on another property. Enslaved children could be purchased; free children could not be. Parents who managed to purchase their own freedom found themselves at the mercy of owner/guardians who refused to allow their children to accompany them when they left the plantation. Enslaved fathers residing on other plantations or farms ran into the same problem if they asked to raise children after a mother had died. It was a serious problem that free parents never faced.

Ingenuous became a particular source of tension between parents and the owner of the mother. Thirty-seven year old "Little" Pedro tried to remove his eight-year-old ingenuo son Alberto from the Farias farm when he turned eight, and was eligible for the first time to leave his mother's company and the "wardship" of her owner, but Farias refused to release the boy. Alberto, claimed Farias, was providing valuable service to the fazenda, "turning over the cacao in the drying balconies and could not be spared." The owner maintained his position until the boy's mother died, and he finally allowed the couple's two surviving children to go and live with their grandmother in Ilheus. He did not do it, however, until the grandmother retained a lawyer to force his hand. (97)

Given the difficulties, we should not be surprised that owners allowed slaves to plant cacao nor that most of the groves belonging to enslaved men and women were quite small or poorly developed. The African man on the Cordier farm had only managed to bring 84 trees into production when his owner died. In 1871, Fortunato da Encarnacao had sold his cacao grove to his owner, but did not receive a price for it that was high enough to purchase his freedom. Perhaps he used the money to pay the purchase price of a less valuable family member. In 1874, the enslaved man Jorge Wense was able to exchange a cacao grove for his freedom and in 1876, 26-year-old slave Joaquim, purchased his freedom with 500$ in cash and a cacao grove that he had planted, presumably of less than 1,000 mature trees or a larger number of new ones. (98) The prices paid for some of the others suggest that they contained no more than 500 or 600 trees.

Cacao groves like these undoubtedly provided the funds with which a number of slaves purchased their freedom in the last two decades of slavery. Two freed African couples living in Ilheus in the late 1860s, both had groves of 1,250 trees, each of which was worth the equivalent of a healthy adult enslaved man. Rather than trade their trees for freedom, they appear to have used the income from them to underwrite the costs of freedom and kept the trees to support themselves after their emancipation. Perhaps others had done so as well: Sixty-nine year old Theresa freed herself from owner Joao Francisco Eca e Castro in 1869; Bruno paid 300$ to Candido Narciso Soares for his freedom in 1870; Francisca, the 31-year-old enslaved mixed race mother of two purchased her freedom for 210$ in 1876 and the agreement to work for the family of her owner, Antonio Alves Cerqueira; 54-year-old, black, single agricultural slave Floriza paid Cris-tiano Manoel Sa to free herself with 250$ in 1879. Maria Calasans paid 250$ for her freedom in 1882. (99) In 1882, Fernando Steiger sold freedom to Lina, the 52-year-old mother of at least one child, who "bought herself with the product of her labor and her economies ..." (100) The internal economy of slavery was certainly the source of this income.

By the 1880s, hundreds of other enslaved men and women were in the process of saving the money necessary to purchase themselves. Shopkeeper Aristides Francisco Vasconcellos Gusmao did a substantial amount of business with enslaved clients. His father-in-law owned the plantation store at Rosario Farm, and whether because Gusmao bought and sold cacao or other agricultural products himself through the store, or because he traveled around to local farms buying produce from planters who otherwise might have had no outlet, he had dozens of slaves on his books when he died. Among them were six men and women "belonging to Juca Sa," Diogo and Taurino belonging to Farias, Antonio belonging to Dona Roza and four men and women belonging to Evaristo [Mello e Sa]. (101)

These efforts to acquire freedom meant that, in the last decades of slavery, many extended families in Ilheus included free, freed and enslaved people. In 1874 there were at least a dozen couples that combined enslaved and free people and the number of such couples appears only to have increased in the 1880s. In other cases, a parent or parents became free while the children remained enslaved, or wards of the mother's owner. Couto and Antonia had managed to free themselves, but all three of his daughters remained enslaved until 1888 despite the legacies he left them. Their mothers also remained enslaved. (102) Maria Felicia obtained her freedom and moved to town, but all of her children remained in slavery until death or abolition set them free. (103) Jose Pedro Calasans bought his freedom, and then his wife's, but we do not know if Sara was able to leave the plantation where she had been raised. Certainly her siblings in Sergipe remained enslaved until May of 1888.

Conclusion:

This article began by outlining whether or not the enslaved in southern Bahia had been able to form families, and clearly there, as in other parts of Brazil in the second half of the nineteenth century, the answer was yes. Although they lived on a few large estates and a large number of small ones, enslaved men and women in Ilheus created social and affective ties even though they were not necessarily formalized by Roman Catholic marriage and crossed boundaries of various agricultural properties. Those families did not conform either to notions of the Brazilian elite about what family should be like--sometimes because owners made that impossible--or to African patterns unmitigated by the transatlantic slave trade. Rather, enslaved men and women from Africa or of African descent, created family relationships within the confines of what was possible for them within enslavement.

The enslaved men and women of Ilheus were neither the promiscuous slaves of the earlier historiography nor the members of stable families of more recent studies of Sao Paulo. Rather, they were men and women who adapted over and over again to the circumstances in which they found themselves. They were neither free of the impact of slavery on their behavior, nor completely broken by it. Rather, they were human beings who demonstrated both strengths and weaknesses in the face of enormous obstacles to maintaining family ties.

While these families might not have conformed to elite ideals, they were nonetheless important to the peoples involved in them. Enslaved men and women felt strongly about each other and about their children; enslaved siblings cared deeply about each other and their parents. These ties could provide solace and support in times of trouble, but they were also the source of significant anxiety and pain, as lovers, parents, children and siblings were often unable to live in family groups and all feared that their loved ones might be transferred, sold away or otherwise taken away from them. If some succumbed to the temptation of developing new relationships when old ones proved difficult or unworkable, that is hardly surprising given the circumstances in which they lived. Doing so, however, did not imply forgetting ties to children born to previous relationships, nor affection for previous partners.

In such a social and cultural context, enslaved men and women saw the internal economy of slavery as more than an opportunity to supplement the food supply offered by an owner or a source of an amorphous autonomy--it became a concrete way for them to work for freedom for themselves or those whom they loved. In doing so, they were working toward family stability--for the family members who were freed could not be sold or moved away from loved ones.

Department of History

New Britain, CT 06085

ENDNOTES

The research for this paper was made possible by the generous support of several institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Brazilian Fulbright Commission, Central Connecticut State University, the American Association of University Professors and the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Notre Dame. Barbara Weinstein, Joseph Miller, Alejandro de la Fuente, Peter Beattie, Walter Fraga Filho, Louise Williams, Susan O'Donovan, Cynthia Pope and Prescott Fogg provided valuable comments and criticisms on earlier versions of this paper. Isabel Reis kindly made available a copy of the Classificacao dos escravos document. Paul Altieri provided vital technical support. All translations are my own.

1. Brazil went through significant political changes during the period covered in this article. Between 1822 and 1889, it was an Empire, and its major administrative districts were provinces run by presidents. After 1889, Brazil became a republic and its provinces became states run by governors. For the sake of continuity and clarity, in the text of this article the terms state and governor will be used, while the actual terminology will be used in the footnotes for ease of location, following common practice among historians of Brazil. A further note about naming is in order: Bahia is a northeastern Brazilian state roughly the size of the European nation of France. Brazilians frequently use the term Bahia to refer to both the northeastern state of Brazil by that name and the city, Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos, which is its capital. In this article, however, Bahia refers only to the state, and Salvador is used for the capital, in order to distinguish between the capital city and the rest of the state. Bahia and its counties, cities and towns went through extensive redistricting during the period covered by this article. Of most importance to readers of this text, the name Ilheus referred to a wide variety of administrative districts over the course of the 500 years of Brazilian history. More specifically it refers to the town (city after 1882) of Ilheus located on the Atlantic coast of Brazil at the confluence of the Engenho, Cachoeira and Fundao Rivers, in addition to varying amounts of settled and unsettled countryside to the north, west and south. In this text, Ilheus refers both to the urban settlement on the coast and to the surrounding countryside that now forms part of the cities of Ilheus, Itabuna, Urucuca, Itajuipe, Lomanto Junior, and Buerarema. Most of that territory was, however, unsettled forest during most of the period discussed in this article. It does not refer to the entirety of the territory labelled Ilheus prior to 1850.

2. Jose Pedro Calasans to the Governor of Bahia, 19 August, 1889, Arquivo Publico do Estado da Bahia (hereafter APEB), Seccao Historica (hereafter SH), maco 5025.

3. Policia dos Portos, Livro de registro de saidas do porto de Salvador, 1899, APEB, Secao Republicana (hereafter SR).

4. Classificacao dos escravos para serem libertados pelo Fundo de Emancipacao, Ilheus, 1874-1884 (hereafter Classificacao dos escravos), APEB-SH; Inventario (hereafter Inv.) No. 02/749/1215/3, Dr. Pedro de Calazans, 1875, APEB, Seccao Judiciaria (hereafter SJ); Apelo: Dr. Pedro de Calasans v. Anizio Leite de Bittencourt Calazans et. al., 1873, Arquivo Publico do Estado do Sergipe (hereafter APES), Segundo Officio da Vara Civil, Caixa 70(557) Documento no. 2.

5. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB, SH.

6. Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1985), 135; Stanley Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850-1900, The Role of Planter and Slave in a Plantation Society 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1985); Stuart B. Schwartz. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Slavery (Cambridge, 1985) pp. 364-378.

7. Historians and social scientists with otherwise little in common shared such assumptions. See the discussion in Robert Slenes, "Black Homes, White Homilies: Perceptions of the Slave Family and of Slave Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil," in David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. (Bloomington, 1996), pp. 127-28. That is not to say that the enslaved family and sexual relations among the enslaved was the focus of the research of all of these historians and social scientists. Gilberto Freyre explored those questions, especially as regards relationships between enslaved women, the masters and their families most extensively. Gilberto Freyre. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samual Putnam, 2nd. English-language ed. (Berkeley, 1986). Emilia Viotti da Costa, Florestan Fernandes and Roger Bastide, on the other hand, were most concerned with documenting the violence of enslavement and the crushing weight that it had placed on the enslaved, both before and after emancipation, in the process of "burying once and for all the notion of a 'bland' or a 'benign' Brazilian slavery." Robert Slenes, Na Senzala umaflor: esperancas e recordacoes na formacao da familia escrava, Brasil Sudeste, seculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 1999), p. 28. For these authors the difficulties in creating and maintaining family relations emerge as a reflection of the negative impact of enslavement on the people who suffered it. Emilia Viotti da Costa, Da Senzala a Colonia (Sao Paulo, 1966); Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Cultures, trans. Helen Sebba (Baltimore, 1978); Florestan Fernandes, A Integracao do Negro na Sociedade de Classes (Sao Paulo, 1965).

8. Early explorations of the enslaved family in Brazil include: Richard Graham, "Slave Families on a Rural Estate in Colonial Brazil." Journal of Social History (Hereafter JSH) 9, no. 3 (1976): 382-402; Katia Maria de Queiroz Mattoso, "Slave, Free, and Freed Family Structures in Nineteenth-Century Salvador, Bahia," Luso-Brazilian Review 25, no. 1 (1988): 69-84; Stuart B. Schwartz, "Opening the Family Circle: Godparentage in Brazilian Slavery," in Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery. (Urbana, 1996), 137-160. The most important studies of the enslaved family are: Slenes, Na Senzala uma flor; Manolo Florentino and Jose Roberto Goes, A paz das senzalas: familias escravas e trafico atlantico, Rio de Janeiro, c 1790-c. 1850 (Rio de Janeiro, 1997); Hebe Maria Mattos, As cores do silencio: Os Significados da Liberdade no Sudeste Escravista--Brasil, Sec. XIX, 3rd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, 1998); Sheila Faria de Castro, A colonia em movimento. Isabel Christina Ferreira Reis is in the process of completing a Ph.D. dissertation in history at Unicamp, entitled "A familia negra no tempo da escravidao: Bahia, 1850-1888" which will substantially expand our understanding of enslaved families and the meanings that they had for slaves in Bahia in general and Salvador in particular. The best and most complete discussion of the historiography of the enslaved family in Brazil is to be found in Portuguese in Slenes, Na Senzala uma flor, pp. 27-43. In that text Slenes discusses the historiography on the topic in both Brazil and the United States. An earlier version of the discussion, available in English, can be found in Slenes, "Black Homes, White Homilies."

9. Graham. "Slave Families"; Schwartz, "Opening the Family Circle." An exception to the focus on sugar plantations is Linda Wimmer, "Ethnicity and Family Formation among Slaves on Tobacco Farms in the Bahian Reconcavo, 1698-1820," in Jose C. Curto and Paul E. Lovejoy, Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil During the Era of Slavery (New York, 2004), pp. 149-162; An important look at family relationships in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia is Mattoso, "Slave, Free, and Freed Family." Isabel Reis' work will be an important new development in this regard when it is complete. Reis, "A familia negra." Katherine Holt has explored sexual relations and marriage for the population of Santiago do Iguape, Bahia, as a whole--including the enslaved population--and as they compared to those of people in Sabara, Minas Gerais. See Katherine Holt. "Intimate Bonds: Slavery and the production of social relationships in the nineteenth-century Bahian Reconcavo and Sabara, Brazil." (Ph.D. dissertation: Princeton University, 2005). Kathleen Higgins examined female slaves' social and sexual relationships in a path breaking study "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region (University Park, PA, 1999).

10. Richard Graham. "Another Middle Passage? The Internal Slave Trade in Brazil," in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the Americas. (New Haven, 2005), pp. 291-324; Robert W. Slenes, "Brazil's Internal Slave Trade, 1850-1888," in Johnson, The Chattel Principle, pp. 325-370; Emilia Viotti da Costa. The Brazilian Empire, Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1985) 145-157.

11. Graham, "Another Middle Passage?".

12. Graham. "Another Middle Passage?"; Slenes, "Brazil's Internal Slave Trade,"; Sidney Chaloub Visoes da liberdade: Uma historia das ultimas decadas da escravidao na Corte. (Sao Paulo, 1990); Mattos, As cores do silencio.

13. This topic is only just receiving the attention it deserves. For pathbreaking work in U.S. history on the topic see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, 1999); for attempts to extend Johnson's work to the wider study of the Americas, see Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle.

14. Several scholars, most notably Rebecca Scott, have urged historians to explore the meanings that freedom could have to slaves and free or freed blacks. In relation to the postemancipation period, see especially Rebecca J. Scott "Exploring the Meanings of Freedom: Postemancipation societies in comparative perspective," in Hispanic American Historical Review. 68:3 (1988); Rebecca J. Scott. Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, 2005); for Brazil, see Mattos, As cores do silencio; Chaloub, Visoes da liberdade; and Walter Fraga Filho, Encruzilhadas da Liberdade: historias de escravos elibertos na Bahia (1870-1910) (Sao Paulo, 2006).

15. Livro de Registro dos Batismos, 1823-1843 (hereafter Batismos 1); Livro de Registro dos Batismos, part of a book, c. 1870-1876 (hereafter Batismos II); Registro dos Nascimentos dos filhos d'escravos que tiverem occorrido de 28 de septembro de 1871 em diante, conforme a lei 2040 d'aquella data, (hereafter Registro dos Nascimentos); Livro de Registro dos Casamentos, 1856-1884 (hereafter Casamentos I), Curia de Ilheus, Parochia de Sao Jorge dos Ilheos; Livro de Registro dos Casamentos, 1884-1888 (hereafter Casamentos II), (Hereafter CI-PSJI); Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; colecao dos inventarios, Ilheus, APEB-SJ; Governor of Bahia (Presidente da Provincia), correspondencia dos juizes, Ilheus, 1850-1888, APEB-SH; processos crimes, APEB-SJ; livros de notas, Ilheus, 1854-1888, APEB-SJ; Livro de Registro dos Obitos do Escrivao Ilheus, No. 1, Firmino Pereira Caldas escrivao, 1889-1895, APEB-SJ.

16. Martha Abreu, "Slave Mothers and Freed Children: Emancipation and Female Space in Debates on the 'Free Womb' Law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871," Journal of Latin American Studies, 28:3 (1996) pp. 568.

17. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

18. Mendes da Cunha in Linda Lewin. Surprise Heirs: Illegitimacy, Inheritance Rights, and Public Power in the Formation of Imperial Brazil, 1822-1889 (Stanford, 2003), 273.

19. The best discussion of trends in this area is Lewin Surprise Heirs.

20. Taking all the sources together, however, allows us to link records and capture individuals in different phases of their lives. For another example of the benefits of record linkage see Walter Fraga Filho. "Encruzilhadas da Liberdade," (unpublished Ph.d. dissertation, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2004); Batismos I and Registro dos nascimentos, CI-PSJI; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH, collection of postmortem inventories, APEB-SJ.

21. "It is my responsibility to report to you the existence of a force in this town.... More than 1,000 slaves reside in this municipality ..." Virgilio Silveira de Farias to presidente da provincia, 1 June 1875, APEB-SH, maco 2402; Brazil. Diretoria Geral de Estatistica. Recenseamento da populacao do Brazil a que se procedeu no dia 1 de agosto de 1872, "Parochia de Sao Jorge dos Ilheos, Populacdo considerada em relacao a nacionalidade brasileira; Populacao considerada em relacao a nacionalidade estrangeira." 21 vols in 22. (Rio de Janeiro, 1873-76) microfilm, Vol. 3: 278. (Hereafter Recenseamento 1872).

22. Recenseamentto, 1872, "Parochia de Sao Jorge dos Ilheos, Populacao considerada em relacao as idades," 3:278-9.

23. Livro de Notas, Ilheus, No. 12, 4/12/1852 to 24/4/1854, Escrivao Hostilio Tullo de Albuquerque e Mello, (Hereafter Livro de Notas, Ilheus, No. 12), APEB-SJ; Inv., No. 02/786/1253/06, Maria Jose Scola del Rei and Josefina Carolina Scola del Rei, 1861, APEB-SJ; Recenseamento, 1872.

24. Early work on Brazilian agricultural history emphasized the existence of large estates to the exclusion of small farmers in what Barickman terms the "plantationist view." In recent years an important corrective has emerged to this view of Brazilian history, developed by historians based in Brazil, the United States and Mexico. See especially Maria Yedda Linhares. Historia do abastecimento: Uma problematica em questao. (Brasilia, 1979); Thomas Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in Sao Paulo, 1886-1934 (Chapel Hill, 1980); Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro, Ao sul da historia (Sao Paulo, 1987); Mary Ann Mahony "Afro-Brazilians, Land Reform, and the Question of Social Mobility in Southern Bahia, 1880-1920," in Luso-Brazilian Review 1997 34 (2): 59-79; B.J.Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the Reconcavo 1780-1860 (Stanford, 1998).

25. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; calculations of the author.

26. Inv. No. 02/786/1253/06, Maria Jose Scola del Rei and Josephina Carolina Scola del Rei, 1861, APEB-SJ; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

27. This sample of the number of enslaved adults and children on Ilheus plantations and farms was selected in order to show the variety of different demographic patterns found there. It is not a random sample, nor is any one plantation or farm meant to represent a certain percentage of the whole.

28. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

29. Maximilian 1, Emperor of Mexico. "Mato Virgem" in Recollections of My Life. 3 vols., new ed., with a preface (London: 1868) Vol 3:358.

30. For a discussion of another example of such blending of family and enslaved labor, and the theoretical implications it presents, see Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 151-152.

31. Fuller discussion of this argument can be found in Mary Ann Mahony. "The Local and the Global: Internal and External Factors in the Development of Bahia's Cacao Sector," in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy 1500-2000 (Durham, NC, 2006).

32. Joaquim Rodrigues de Souza, Memoria sobre a lavoura de cacao e suas vantagens principalmente na Bahia por Joaquim Rodriguez de Souza atualmente juiz de direito da comarca da Valenca. (Bahia: Typographia de Carlos Poggetti, Rua d'Alfandega, #57, 1852) p. 9.

33. Recenseamento, 1872, APEB-SH.

34. See Classificacao dos escravos for the most comprehensive listing of owner notions of slave aptitude for work.

35. Brazil had no laws requiring freed people to go elsewhere as were passed by several southern U.S. states in the last decades of slavery there. Indeed, such laws made no sense in the Brazilian context as there were no "free" states in Brazil. On U.S. freedpersons' problems remaining close to friends and family after slavery see Loren Schweniger, ed., Race, slavery, and free Blacks: Petitions to southern legislatures, 1777-1867. [microform] (Bethesda, MD, c1998).

36. Batismos, I, CI-PSJI; Ilheus, Livro de Notas, No. 12, APEB-SH; Inv., No. 02/786/1253/06, Maria Jose Scola del Rei and Josefina Carolina Scola del Rei, 1861, APEB-SJ; Recenseamento, 1872.

37. In this I do not mean to suggest that heterosexual partnerships were the only ones that existed. The documents are quite clear about those, while silent on the subject of homosexual relationships.

38. Antonio Gomes Villaca, juiz de direito to the Governor of Bahia, 20 December 1871, APEB-SH, maco 2402; Inv., Ilheus, No. 021751/1217/03, Crispim Domingues Couto, 1878; Inv., Ilheus, No. 03/1270/1739/07, Verissimo Baptista Lappa, 1868, APEB-SJ.

39. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; Processo Crime No. 21/748/9, Joao Gomes, slave, African, 1875, APEB-SJ.

40. Processo Crime, No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ.

41. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SJ; Recenseamento, 1872.

42. Examples of such relationships can be found in: Inv. 02/749/1215/01, Manuel Antonio Vianna, 1875; Inv. 02/738/1203/12, Jose Antonio Guimaraes Bastos, 1875, APEB-SH.

43. Recenseamento, 1872.

44. Schwartz. Sugar Plantations, 354-355.

45. Livro dos Nascimentos, CI-SJI; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

46. Slenes, Na Senzala uma flor, 101, 106.

47. Certifying the type of marriage and "family" relationships to which the enslaved might have been accustomed in Africa is impossible without a great deal more information about where enslaved Africans originated and when they were brought to Brazil, as those institutions varied significantly across time and space. It is possible to assert, however, that outside of the sphere of European influence on the African coast, those practices would have been quite different from those idealized through the Roman Catholic sacrament of marriage. For a discussion of the complexities involved see especially Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone, "The History of the Family in Africa: Introduction, "Journal of African History 24:2 (1983): 145-161; Anne Hilton, "Family and Kinship among the Kongo South of the Zaire River from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries," Journal of African History 24:2 (1983): 189-206; Sandra Greene. Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe. (Portsmouth NH, 1996).

48. Recenseamento, 1872.

49. On the influence of Christianity on pre-colonial Africa, and especially Kongo and Angola peoples see John K. Thornton. "Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500-1700," Linda M. Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 71-90 and Linda M. Heywood, "Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures," in Heywood, ed., Central Africans and Cultural Transformations, pp. 91-113.

50. According to Linda Lewin, such consensual unions were not limited to the enslaved population in the nineteenth century, but were common among the free population as well and covered a range of arrangements. Lewin, Surprise Heirs, Chapter 3.

51. This is not to suggest that master-slave relations are irrelevant to the study of the experiences of the enslaved, but simply to indicate that they were not the only relationships slaves had nor the ones that meant the most to them.

52. Historians of Africans and of Africans in the Americas are moving away from search for "vestiges" of African cultures among Africans and Afro-Americans, broadly interpreted. Rather, they have begun to look at the ways in which captive Africans might draw on aspects "from their former lives in Africa they recognized as relevant to forging new senses of community in the Americas, with others of different backgrounds enslaved alongside them, under specific challenges of surviving that varied enormously throughout the continents and over the centuries." Joseph C. Miller, "Central Africa during the Era of the Slave Trade, c 1490s-1850s," in Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations, 21.

53. Inv., Ilheus, No. 021751/1217/03, Crispim Domingues Couto, 1878, APEB-SJ.

54. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

55. Maximilian I, "Mato Virgem," 358-59; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

56. For examples of free families with large numbers of children see Inv.No. 02/753/1219/6, Florencia Dias dos Santos, 1879; Inv. No. 02/153/1219/7, Guilhermina Euzebia da Assuncao, 1879, APEB.

57. Maximilian I, "Mato Virgem," 358-59.

58. Processo Crime, No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ.

59. Classificacao dos Escravos, APEB-SH.

60. Jose Pedro Calasans to the Governor of Bahia, 19 August, 1889, maco 5025, APEB-SH.

61. Maximilian, "Mato Virgem," 3: 358.

62. Livros de Notas, Ilheus, No. 12, APEB-SJ; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; Foro Epaminondas Berbert de Castro, Primeiro Oficio da Vara Civil, (Hereafter FEBC-POVC), Acao de demarcacao, Fernando de Steiger e outros v. Coronel Albino Francisco Martins, 1911.

63. Classificacao dos Escravos, APEB-SH.

64. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ.

65. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887; Inv., Ilheus, No. 021751/1217/03, Crispim Domingues Couto, 1878, APEB-SJ.

66. Inv., Ilheus, No. 021751/1217/03, Crispim Domingues Couto, 1878, APEB-SJ.

67. For an introduction to the notions about family and property that Africans who came into Brazil might have brought with them, see John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 1998).

68. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887; Inv. 03/1372/1841/18, Luiz Adami, 1883, APEB-SJ; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; Livro de notas, Ilheus, No. 20, 3/07/1873-08/01/1879, Escrivao Hostilio Albuquerque de Mello (hereafter Livro de notas, Ilheus, No. 20), APEB-SH.

69. Classificacao dos Escravos. APEB-SH.

70. Registro dos Nascimentos, CI-PSJI; Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH; Inv. 02/749/1215/01, Manuel Antonio Vianna, 1875; Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ.

71. Jose Pedro Calasans to the Governor of Bahia, 19 August 1889, Salvador, maco 5025, APEB-SH.

72. Casamentos, I, CI-PSJI; Inv. No. 03/1356/1825/21, Fortunato Pereira Gallo, Sr., 1830-1846; No. 7/3150/4, Rosendo Pereira Gallo, 1867-1873; Testamento, No. 02/750/1216/02, Fortunato Pereira Gallo, 1878, APEB-SJ.

73. Inv. No. 03/753/1219/03, Christiano Manoel Sa Bittencourt Camara, 1879; No. 03/1298/1767/07, Trifina Bandeira e Sa, 1884, No. 03/1372/1841, Luiz Adami, 1883, APEB-SJ; SH, Livro de Notas No. 20, Ilheus, Escriptura de troca, 09/11/1872, APEB-SJ.

74. Inv., Ilheus, 02/737/1202/18, Manuel Francisco Dunda, 1873, APEB-SJ.

75. Inv., Ilheus, 02/749/1215/01, Manuel Antonio Vianna, 1875, APEB-SJ.

76. Livro de Notas, Ilheus, No. 19, 08/07/1868-04/07/1872, Escrivao Hostilio Tullo Albuquerque de Mello (Hereafter Livro de Notas, Ilheus, No. 19) APEB-SJ.

77. Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

78. Antonio Gomes Villaca, juiz de direito, to the Governor of Bahia, 20 December 1871, maco 2402, APEB-SH.

79. Ilheus, Livro de Notas, No. 20, Escritura de troca da escrava Theresa, 09/11/1872, Pedro Ferreira Bandeira and Luiz Adami, APEB-SJ.

80. Processo Crime No. 21/748/9, Joao Gomes, slave, African, 1875, APEB-SJ.

81. The tendency to sell wrongdoers should not be taken to mean that Ilheus slaveowners did not physically discipline their slaves. They did. Joao Gomes had been beaten just prior to his escape, for reasons that, according to him, were completely unjustified. A woman on the Bastos plantation who claimed that she had been reenslaved showed authorities the scars from whippings on her back. Joao Theodoro Farias beat Theresa badly, perhaps causing her death in 1887. Fernando Steiger told Prince Maximilian of Austria that he regularly castigated his slaves by identifying the ringleaders and making examples out of them. Processo Crime No. 21/748/9, Joao Gomes, slave, African, 1875, APEB-SJ; Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887; Maximilian I, "Mato Virgem," III:350.

82. Ilheus, Livro de Notas, No. 20, Escritura de troca da escrava Theresa, 09/11/1872, APEB-SJ.

83. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio Diogo escrava, 1887, APEB-SJ; Jose Pedro Calasans to the Governor of Bahia, 19 August, 1889, maco 5025, APEB-SH

84. Plinio de Sa Bittencourt Camara to the Governor of Bahia, 31 August 1877, Assuntos Escravos, maco 2894, APEB-SH.

85. There is an extensive literature on the internal economy of slavery usually referred to as the "peasant breach" in slavery in the Brazilian literature. Robert Slenes recently argued forcefully, however, that the term in most frequent use in studies of Caribbean and U.S. slavery, the internal economy of slavery, is the most appropriate for use in studies of Brazilian slavery as well. Slenes, Da senzala uma flor, 197-208. The best discussion of that literature in English, and documentation on the peasant breach in the 19th century Reconcavo, is to be found in B. J. Barickman, "A Bit of Land, Which They Call a Roca": Slave Provision Grounds in the Bahian Reconcavo, 1780-1860," HAHR, 74:4, 1994, 649-683; for published contemporary references to the internal economy of slavery in Ilheus see Maximilian, "Mato Virgem," 361.

86. Inv., No. 03/1270/1739, Jose Francisco de Abreu, 1863, APEB-SJ

87. Barickman, "A Bit of Land," 680.

88. Inv., 02/754/1220/14, Joao Segismundo Cordier, 1849, APEB-SJ.

89. Antonio Gomes Vilhaca juiz de direito to the Governor of Bahia, 20 December 1871, maco 2402, APEB-SJ.

90. Ilheus, Livro de Notas No. 22, APEB-SJ.

91. For examples of cacao trees valued at 1$ (1 milreis) per tree, see Invs. No. 03/1270/1270/1730, Verissimo Baptista Lappa, 1868; No. 02/740/1205/11, Tito Galiao, 1871; No. 02/740/1205/03, Ermelina de Figueiredo de Pedra Branca, 1871; No. 02/750/1216/08, Maria Cleofa de Menezes Souza, 1878; No. 02/759/1225/2, Bernardo Jose Demetrio, 1883; No. 02/762/1228/6, Rita Victoria Alves, 1885; No. 03/1298/1767/09, Antonio Nunes Melgaco; for examples of trees worth more than 1$ see Inv. No. 02/737/1202/15, Luis Adami Jr., 1874 APEB-SJ; on slave values see Classificacao dos escravos, APEB-SH.

92. The evidence for late nineteenth-century Ilheus suggests that Dean and Miller were overly pessimistic in their arguments that Brazilians were completely destroying the Atlantic Forest of Bahia in the colonial period. Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. (Berkeley, 1995); Sean Miller, Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber, (Stanford, 2000).

93. On cacao's agricultural needs see Mahony, "The Local and the Global,"

94. Inv., No. 02/795/1220/14, Joao Segismundo Cordier, 1849, APEB-SJ.

95. "Classificacao dos escravos," APEB-SH.

96. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ; Freedwoman Belmira to the Governor of Bahia, 24 August 1885, APEB-SH, maco 2897.

97. For examples of children working in agriculture see: Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887; Freedwoman Belmira to the governor, 24 August 1885, APEB-SH, maco 2897.

98. Ilheus, Livro de notas No. 20, APEB-SJ.

99. Invs., No. 02/760/1226/04, Jose Lopes da Silva, 1888, No. 03/749/1215/06, Antonio Alves Cerqueira, 1876, No. 03/1270/1739/01, Candido Narciso Soares, 1870/1, No. 03/753/1219/02, Christiano Manoel Sa Bittencourt Camara, 1879, APEB-SJ.

100. Inv. No. 02/759/1225/4/1883, Egydio Luis de Sa Bittencourt Camara, 1885, APEB-SJ.

101. Inv., No. 02/762/1228/9, Aristides Francisco Vasconcellos Gusmao, 1886, APEB-SJ.

102. Inv., Ilheus, No. 021751/1217/03, Crispim Domingues Couto, 1878, APEB-SJ.

103. Processo Crime: No. 06/182/15, Homicidio, Diogo, escravo, 1887, APEB-SJ.

By Mary Ann Mahony

Central Connecticut State University

Figure 1 Enslaved Men, Women and Children on Selected Ilheus
Plantations and Farms

                     Men      Women    Boys/Girls  Children  Children
Property      Total  over 18  over 18  9 to 17     Under 8   Unknown age

Vitoria       112    34       30                             58
St. Anthony/   72    37       21                             14
  Rocks
Castelo Novo   65    16       16       10          13
Almada         37    17       13                              7
Jacarecica     34    18        9                              7
Ribeiro        19     5        8                              6
Farias         15              5                             10
Whyrtzmun       6     1        1                              4
Mendes          3     1                 1           1
Wense           2     2

Sources: APEB, SJ, Inv. No. 02/786/1253/06, Maria Jose Scola del Rei and
Josephina Carolina Scola del Rei, 1861; APEB, SH, Classificacao dos
escravos. (27)