ABSTRACT 
 
Title of thesis:    ENGENDERED EXPERIENCES OF FREEDOM: 
LIBERATED AFRICAN WOMEN IN RIO DE JANEIRO, 
1834-1864 
 
Ana Paula Nadalini Mendes, Master of Arts, 2020 
 
Thesis directed by:   Associate Professor Daryle Williams 
     Department of History 
 
 
 
?Engendered Experiences of Freedom: Liberated African Women in Rio de Janeiro 
(1834-1864)? investigates how gender differences in daily lives of liberated African women in 
Brazil shaped the way they experienced freedom. This research argues that gendered-based 
differences influenced their experiences of freedom in its various contexts, including their 
relationship to labor, their struggles for emancipation, and their approach to legal system. 
Moreover, this thesis follows the lives of particular liberated African women through their 
process of petitioning for emancipation twenty years after they got to Brazil. 
 Although the first half of the nineteenth century was marked by legal efforts to bar 
importation of slaves from Africa to Brazil, many slave ships entered Brazilian ports 
successfully. The Rio da Prata, however, was an exception. In November 1834, the British 
marine intercepted the vessel, that was halfway between Africa and South America.  The Anglo-
Brazilian Mixed Commission judged the case as a transgression of the Treaty of 1826, that 
forbade Brazil to participate in the slave trade, condemned the vessel to be a good-prize and 
liberated more than two hundred Africans. These Africans worked for private houses and public 
works in a probation system for at least 20 years when the decree 1303 of 1853 allowed them to 
access the legal system and request their final emancipation. This process lasted for ten years, 
when in 1864 the Brazilian government declared emancipated all liberated Africans 
This thesis intervenes in debates about bondage and resistance by considering liberated 
Africans women inside the context of slavery in Brazil. It argues that these women had a 
particular way of fighting for freedom, due, first, to their own capacity of resistance, second to 
their conditions of labor, and, third, to specificities of the Brazilian set of laws. From legal 
petitions of emancipation, police records, guardians? declarations, and newspapers 
advertisements the chapters follow lives of liberated African women from the Rio da Prata to 
show how they experienced freedom.  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
ENGENDERED EXPERIENCES OF FREEDOM: 
LIBERATED AFRICAN WOMEN IN RIO DE JANEIRO (1834-1864) 
 
by 
 
Ana Paula Nadalini Mendes 
 
Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the 
University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment 
of the requirements for the degree of 
Master of Arts 
2020 
 
 
 
 
 
Advisory Committee: 
 
Associate Professor Daryle Williams, Chair 
Professor Ana Lucia Araujo 
Professor Bryan McCann 
Associate Professor David Sartorius 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
? Copyright by 
Ana Paula Nadalini Mendes 
2020
To Andreza, Bonifacia, Clemencia, Dionizia, Eufrazia, Fabiana 
Guiomar, Justa, Justina, Michaella, and Narciza, liberated African  
women who taught me the meaning of their freedom. 
  
 ii 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
 
A Kite   
?I often sit and wish that I 
Could be a kite up in the sky, 
And ride upon the breeze and go 
Whichever way I chanced to blow. 
Then I could look beyond the town, 
And see the river winding down, 
And follow all the ships that sail, 
Like me before the merry gale 
Until at last with them I came 
To some place with a foreign name? 
Frank Dempster Sherman 
 
I am forever grateful to the people who crossed my life and encouraged me to develop 
this project. With immense pleasure and appreciation, I thank Daryle Williams, whose 
mentorship and empathy were fundamental for me to discover my path in grad school. I thank 
also Ana Lucia Araujo, Bryan McCann, and David Sartorius, who participated in my journey 
since before the beginning of the Master program and kindly agreed to be part of my committee 
providing invaluable feedback. The classes with Karin Rosemblatt, Alejandro Ca?eque, 
Christopher Bonner, Saverio Giovacchini, Paul Landau, Elsa Barkley-Brown, and John Tutino 
presented me with a series of questions that changed the way I faced history and will be forever 
 iii 
part of my historical concerns. I want to show my gratitude to Maria Henriqueta Gimenes 
Minasse, Carlos Lima, Linda Rabben, Bryan Taylor, Joe Jameson, Flavia de Azeredo Cerqueira, 
and Thayse Lima who helped me to start my academic life in the US and to Roquinaldo Ferreira, 
Mariana Dantas, and Okesi Otovo, who helped in the final stages of my thesis providing me with 
comments and suggestions. 
It would not be possible for me to take this program without the funding provided by the 
English Department and the Latin American Studies Center. I am extremely grateful not only for 
the financial resources but also for the environment to develop skills that I would never imagine 
learning. My special thanks to Zita Nunes, Karen Nelson, Britta Anderson, Merle Collins, and 
Eric Tomal? for the learning and professional growth. 
The friends that I made were priceless gains in my life. My gratitude and abra?os 
apertados to Nohely Alvarez, Jonathan Brower, Daniela Bulansky, Lisa Carney, Sarah Dowman, 
Sergio Garcia, Sabrina Gonzalez, Victor Hernandez-Sang, Marco-Polo Juarez Cruz, Danielle 
LaPlace, Ofelia Montelongo, Cara Snider, Kristofer Reed, Mariana Reyes, and Mari?ngel Villa 
Lobos. My life is better with you. My special thanks to Natalia Lucio Silva and Fernando Maeda 
who, more than friends, are part of our family. 
My last and most important thanks are to my family. I would not be here without the help 
of my parents Alair Nadalini and Paulo Nadalini, and my parents in law, Rose Mendes and 
Gesoel Mendes. My husband Gesoel Mendes and my son Heitor Nadalini Mendes were always 
with me in this journey. Thank you for being, amid so many hurricanes and storms, my ?merry 
gale.? 
 
 
 iv 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
Introduction ?????????????????????????????????1 
 
Chapter 1 ?????????????????????????????????...14 
?Are They not Free?? Debates over Liberated African Women 
 
Chapter 2 ?????????????????????????????????...36 
?Se Far? Justi?a:? Liberated African Women, Domestic Service, and the Judiciary System in 
Rio de Janeiro  
 
Chapter 3 ?????????????????????????????????...58 
Resistance and Precariousness of Freedom among Liberated African Women 
Conclusion ?????????????????????????????????90 
 
Bibliography ???????????????????????????????.....96 
  
 v 
List of Tables 
 
Table 1: Number of petitions in relation with the female and male population 
Table 2: Liberated African population decrease from 1835 to 1864 
Table 3: Deceased from the Rio da Prata in absolute numbers from 1835 to 1864 
Table 4: Number of petitions of the 30 men and 19 women from 1853 to 1864 
  
 vi 
List of Images 
Image 1: Detail of ?Prospecto da nova pra?a do pelourinho mandada fazer pelo governador e 
capit?o general D. Francisco de Souza Coutinho. Representa a sahida do novo bergantim de 
guerra n?1, que o mesmo fez construer? 17-- 
Image 2: Contemporary map showing the place of the interception of the vessel Rio da Prata 
Image 3: Detail of the nominal list of 1864  
Image 4: Detail of the list of fully emancipated in 1854 in Rio de Janeiro 
Image 5: ?Ama negra carregando crian?a nas costas? 188-  
 vii 
Introduction 
 
In late 1834, an African girl, later named Guiomar,1 arrived in Rio de Janeiro. She was on 
board of the slave ship Rio da Prata. On her identification papers that she received after being 
liberated, there is information about her name, gender, age, and nation - she was an eleven-year 
old girl de na??o Congo. A crucial information in this document was, however, her status of a free 
person.2 Guiomar and her shipmates were declared emancipated after the judgement of the case of 
the Rio da Prata, vessel caught trafficking Africans illegally.3 Despite her freedom, her 
identification document informs that she would serve her guardian Roza Maria da Concei??o in 
compulsory work. Guiomar only got her final emancipation in 1858, after twenty-three years of 
labor.4 Guiomar is one among thousands of cases of liberated Africans in Brazil, whose stories 
reveal labor, resistance, and struggle for freedom.5   
Guiomar?s identification document reveals also a larger context of transformations and 
controversies that Brazilian society was undergoing in the first half of the nineteenth century. In a 
society that experienced the simultaneous increase in the number of slaves coming from Africa to 
Brazil and multiple attempts to banish the slave traffic, Guiomar was an ostensibly free African 
who experienced both liberty and compulsory labor.  Slavery in Brazil continued in spite of the 
efforts to end the slave trade. The boom in coffee cultivation in southwestern provinces along with 
 
11 Guiomar, Congo, #180. Guiomar was the name that this liberated African received after her emancipation, soon 
after the judgement of the case of the Rio da Prata. Congo refers to the region of Africa from where she was 
original, or the slave port from where she left her region. The number ?180? refers to the matricula, a tool that the 
Brazilian government used to identify the liberated Africans. This identification will follow the reference of other 
liberated Africans, but only the first time they appear.  
2 Slaves, liberated Africans, and free blacks were identified by their African na??es. In Brazil, there was a 
reinvention of these na??es, which allowed group identification, and the formation of community. Juliana Barreto 
Farias, Soares Carlos Euge?nio Li?bano, and Gomes Fla?vio dos Santos. No Labirinto das Nac?o?es: Africanos e 
Identidades no Rio de Janeiro. (Rio de Janeiro: Preside?ncia da Repu?blica, Arquivo Nacional, 2005). 
3 Rio de la Plata, Voyage ID 1420. https://slavevoyages.org. 
4 Guiomar. Identification document. 11/20/1835. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, Caixa 782, Pacote 2. 
5 Beatriz Mamigonian, To be a Liberated African in Brazil: Labour and citizenship in the nineteenth century. (Ph.D. 
dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2002), 6. 
 1 
the continuation of slavery in other regions boosted the strength of slavery in Brazil. The internal 
traffic increased, and coffee planters purchased a large quantity of slaves from the northeastern 
region. Moreover, the number of slaves brought from Africa to Brazil expanded.6 In the same 
context, Brazil was also facing the pressure from England to restrict the international slave trade 
since the last years of the colonial period. The actions for shrinking the slave trade dated back to 
the Treaty of 1815 between Portugal and England, and a complementary act in 1817, plus a royal 
decree issued in 1818, that restricted the legal trafficking to Portuguese possessions south of  
Equator, and the establishment of the term of service of 14 years to those illegally imported to 
Brazil before the definitive emancipation.7 Additionally, when Brazil became independent from 
Portugal in 1822, the negotiations with England continued, resulting in the ban of the international 
slave trade in Brazil with the Treaty of 1826, which took effect in March 1830.8 This treaty also 
stablished the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission, which was responsible for judging cases of 
illegal traffic.  After that, the Feij? law, in 1831, declared free all Africans brought to the country 
after the approval of that act and established their reexportation.9 Because the exportation of 
liberated Africans happened only in isolated cases, the Brazilian government faced the expansion 
in the number of these Africans who increased the expenses of the public treasure and crowded 
public shelters. In 1834 and 1835, Brazilian government approved instructions to regulate the 
concession of these liberated Africans to work in public constructions and private houses.10 
 
6 James Naylor Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, eds. The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, 
Politics. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 165-6. Salve Voyages shows that from 1800 to 1850, more than 
1,700,000 entered Brazil. This number represents more Africans arriving in Brazil in these 50 years than the 
previous 250 years. https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/database#tables 
7 Great Britain and Lewis Hertslet. A Complete Collection of the Treaties and Conventions, and Reciprocal 
Regulations at Present Subsisting between Great Britain and Foreign Powers: and of the Laws, Decrees, and 
Orders in Council, Concerning the Same, vol II. (London: H. M. Stat. Off, 1841). 72-123. 
8 Great Britain and Lewis Hertslet. A Complete Collection, vol III, 33-40. 
9 Brazil, Lei de 7 de novembro de 1831 Cole??o de Leis do Imp?rio do Brasil, 1831. 
10 Brazil, Aviso de 29 de outubro de 1834, Cole??o de Leis do Imp?rio do Brasil, 1866. 
 2 
Liberated Africans, who kept arriving especially in the 1830s and 1840s, started their service 
without knowing for how long they should work. In 1850, after the enactment of the Eusebio de 
Queiroz Law that banished the slave trade and reaffirmed the 1831 Law, this group of Africans 
was still working without a stablished term.11 In 1853, however, the Decree 1303 instituted that 
liberated Africans who served for fourteen years or more for private concessionaires would have 
the right to plea for their definitive emancipation.12 Liberated Africans all over Brazil accessed the 
Brazilian legal system to file their petitions for their second emancipation until the Decree 3303 
of 1864 emancipated all liberated Africans.13 
Although this set of legal actions had an effect in the whole group of liberated Africans in 
Brazil, it shaped the experiences of the particular group of liberated African women in a unique 
way. After the approval of the instructions of 1834 and 1835, the Brazilian government directed 
most of the women to work in private houses where they performed tasks connected to the 
domestic service. 14 The work of domestic servant, performed both inside and outside the houses, 
provided these women with access to public and private spheres. A significant number of men, on 
the other hand, integrated the workforce in public institutions where their mobility was limited. 
These circumstances enhanced the chances of liberated African women of building community 
with other liberated Africans, slaves, and freed blacks. Moreover, when the Brazilian government 
enacted the decree 1303, it only contemplated the portion of the liberated Africans who worked 
for private houses, therefore favoring women to write their petitions and preventing most men 
from seeking final emancipation. This thesis argues that these conditions helped to create a mindset 
 
11 Brazil, Lei de 4 de setembro de 1850.  Cole??o de Leis do Imp?rio do Brasil, 1850. 
12 Brazil, Decreto de 28 de dezembro de 1853. Cole??o de Leis do Imp?rio do Brasil, 1853 
13 Brazil, Decreto de 24 de setembro 1864. Cole??o das Leis do Imp?rio do Brazil, 1864. 
14 This affirmation is valid until 1850, when the Brazilian government directed newcomer liberated Africans, both 
men and women, to public service. 
 3 
for freedom among liberated African women. Even though these women worked for some time 
with the uncertainty of how long they should serve ? which led them to compare their conditions 
of labor to the ones experienced by the enslaved population ? their ability to mobilize themselves 
and their community, conjoined with the relative mobility of their labor, and the benefits that the 
laws helped them to envision liberty. Their experiences of freedom appear in the petitions that they 
made to request their second emancipation. Through the investigation of the petitions made by the 
liberated Africans women from the vessel Rio da Prata, it is possible to observe that they 
connected themselves with a net of supporters and acquired information, which gave them tools to 
apply a variety of strategies to their cause.  
This thesis contributes to a literature that situates liberated Africans in the context of 
nineteenth-century Brazilian slavery, especially those focused on the tension between the pressures 
of the slave system and resistance. The group of laws, the conditions of labor, and the proximity 
of liberated Africans with enslaved people were inserted in a context where slavery supporters 
were seeking means to make slavery survive. For instance, in the 1970s Robert Conrad looked at 
the phenomenon of the liberated Africans as a group of ?legally free, but kept of de facto 
servitude.?15 In a similar avenue, Sidney Chalhoub argued that in general the Brazilian society 
treated liberated Africans as slaves, which was endorsed by official actions of the police and 
imperial government. For example, the police increased the imprisonment of free blacks, suspected 
of being fugitive slaves. In addition, the limitations of the 1831 Law, the working condition of 
liberated Africans that were similar to slavery, and the removal of the responsibility for slave 
owners to prove that their slaves were legally imported were other ways that the Brazilian 
government contributed to the continuation of slavery. Brazilian politicians worried about a black 
 
15 Robert Conrad, ?Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818-1868.? The Hispanic American 
Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1973): 51. 
 4 
insurrection, which could result in violence against the white society and the exhaustion of the 
slave system. In this context, recognizing the status and rights of liberated Africans could trigger 
a massive revolt. Acknowledging the full freedom of liberated Africans could help to spread the 
awareness that the law of 1831 liberated all the Africans transported to Brazil and disseminate the 
idea that even Africans slaves, if transported after the enactment of the law, should be free.16 
Beatriz Mamigonian agreed with Chalhoub in the argument that, when the Brazilian government 
restricted the Law of 1831 and limited liberation only for those African formally rescued from the 
slave trade and not to all of those illegally imported, it gave strength to the continuation of the 
slave regime. On the other hand, Mamigonian contended that even though liberated Africans had 
their rights restricted, their actions, especially their fight for emancipation, increased the awareness 
of the law and changed the scope of the notion of who should be included on the category of 
liberated African. She investigated the growth of cases of slaves that challenged their status, 
through escapes and suits for illegal enslavement. Added to that, she argued that the visibility 
caused by the diplomatic crisis between Brazil and England over the issue of liberated Africans 
increased the awareness over the subterfuges of the government to keep this group under 
conditions similar to slavery and boosted abolitionist movements.17 This thesis brings the gender 
focus to contribute to this debate. In the chapters that follow, the investigation of liberated African 
women shows an essential part for the understanding of the decline of slavery in Brazil as well as 
the spreading of ideas of freedom.  
The documentation from the liberated African women from the Rio da Prata provides 
information about their struggle toward emancipation. Guiomar?s case, for example, contains 26 
 
16 Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2012). 
17 Beatriz G Mamigonian, Africanos Livres: A Abolic?a?o do Tra?fico de Escravos no Brasil. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2017). 
 5 
documents including her identification registration, petitions for emancipation letter, declaration 
of her concessionaires, statement of the House of Correction, and requests of documents proving 
her years of service and her good behavior, which brings a rich set of information for this 
research. 18 Even though the documents present in the cases of other women from the Rio da 
Prata can vary, the petitions for full freedom, filed between 1854 and 1864, provided the 
scenario for a qualitative analysis of their experiences of freedom. They allowed a biographical 
approach for this investigation. In addition to these documents, there are nominal lists produced 
in three different times. The first was the register of the Africans upon their arrival, produced in 
1835. The second was produced in 1864 and contains the names of liberated Africans divided in 
existents, emancipated, and deceased. The last one was produced in 1865 and has a more detailed 
register of names, last concessionaires, and final destination. These lists served to the 
quantitative analysis of the population of the Rio da Prata that considered gender rate, number of 
deaths, and number and timeline of petitions. Moreover, the books Notes on Brazilian Question 
(1865), by William Dougal Christie, Cartas do Solit?ro (1864), by Aureliano C?ndido Tavares 
Bastos, and A Escravid?o no Brasil (1866-7) by Agostinho Marques Perdig?o Malheiro, gave an 
overview on how the issue of liberated Africans was treated in the 1860s and allowed assessment 
on women and their struggle. In addition, this research used advertisements and excerpts from 
1850s and 1860s newspapers as well as the information collected by the British Consul Robert 
Hesketh to access information on liberated Africans? flight or kidnapping, marriages, offspring, 
and domestic service. Furthermore, the consultation of the laws relative to slave trade and 
 
18 The British Minister William Dougal Christie listed 21 steps for the request of emancipation. These steps included 
a petition to the Imperial government, requests of information about time of service and behavior and the report 
containing approval or disapproval of the Minister of Justice. These procedures were intermediated by procurators, 
the judge of orphans, the chief of police, the House of Correction, and the Minister of Justice which caused the back 
and forth of documents. William Dougal Christie, Notes on Brazilian Questions, (London and Cambridge: 
Macmillan and Co., 1865). 
 6 
regulations of the liberated Africans was essential to understand the legal context of this 
particular group as well as the legislative transformation of slavery in Brazil. Lastly, this thesis 
drew on records from the ship, used to get information about the trip, the crew, and the decisions 
of the Mixed Commission that judged the case. 
 
The Rio da Prata: Brazilian Slave Trade in Montevidean Color 
 
 
Image 1. A brigantine depicted in the late eighteenth century.19  
 
The Brazilian experiences of the different liberated African women who appear 
throughout this thesis share much in common. Similar conditions of labor, a common fight for 
their rights, and familiar strategies adopted in the appealing to the Brazilian legal system were 
some of the aspects that shaped their lives in Rio de Janeiro. These live stories, however, were 
 
19 Detail of ?Prospecto da nova pra?a do pelourinho mandada fazer pelo governador e capit?o general D. Francisco 
de Souza Coutinho. Representa a sahida do novo bergantim de guerra n?1, que o mesmo fez construir.? [S.l.: s.n.], 
[17--]. Available at: http://objdigital.bn.br/acervo_digital/div_manuscritos/mss1255478.jpg.  
 7 
already tied together before these women stepped foot on Brazilian soil as emancipadas, forged 
on board of the brigantine Rio da Prata and the protracted period between the ship?s 
apprehension in the high seas and the declaration of the captive?s liberty, one hundred days later. 
Tracing the trajectory of the vessel is crucial to locate the individual narratives of these women 
in a transnational history of slavery that included not only Brazil, but also the West Central 
Africa, England, and Uruguay.  
The Rio da Prata (Voyage ID 1420) touched on the Brazilian mainland on December 15, 
1834.20 In its cargo, there were more than 500 Africans. If the Middle Passage ended that day for 
those Africans, it started four months before, with the first purchases of slaves in West Central 
African Coast.21 Brazilian slave traders, commanded by Captain Antonio Cardoso da Silva, went 
through the ports of Benguela, Novo Redondo, Luanda, and Ambriz, purchasing more than 550 
Africans, of which more than two-thirds were children.22  
This, however, was not the first trip of the Rio da Prata to the Coast of Africa. Earlier in 
1834, the Rio da Prata shipped 450 Africans to Maldonado, Uruguay, to work as indentured 
servants. In fact, Teodoro Villa?a, the owner of the Rio da Prata, was ?part of a twofold 
operation which brought slaves to Brazil and also disguised the shipments of Africans to 
Montevideo as ?colonists.??23 ?Colonists,? in this context, were supposed to be Africans younger 
than 16 years brought by their free will to Uruguayan Republic. It was, however, a way to bring 
slaves to countries like Brazil ? where slavery was allowed but the traffic was not ? and 
indentured servants to countries like Uruguay ? where slavery was forbidden. Villa?a, in 
 
20 Hesketh to Palmerston, 01/23/1835, FO 84/180 
21 Alex Borucki, The ?African Colonists? of Montevideo: New Light on the Illegal Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro and 
the R?o de la Plata (1830?42), Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3, (2009), 438. 
22 Information about the crew and number of African embarked on the Rio da Prata on 
https://www.slavevoyages.org. 
23 Alex Borucki, The ?African Colonists? of Montevideo. 
 8 
accordance with the Uruguayan government, had introduced colonists in Uruguay as early as 
1832, and continued to do so in 1834.24 The second trip of the Rio da Prata, on the other hand, 
did not succeed. On November 28, 1834, the English corvette Raleigh intercepted the vessel 
halfway between Africa to Brazil, close to the Island of Saint Helena. Under the accusation of 
illegal slave trade, the Rio da Prata followed the Raleigh to Rio de Janeiro to be presented by the 
Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission established under bilateral treaty. 
  
Image 2. Point of the interception of the vessel Rio da Prata on a contemporary map.25 
  
The case of the Rio da Prata disturbed the British officers in Brazil and Uruguay. In a 
letter to Foreign Secretary Palmerston, the chief British diplomat in Brazil Fox states that ?the 
circumstances attending the case of the Montevidean brig ?Rio de la Plata? have rendered it 
more clearly evident than before, that the foundation of a free black colony in the Uruguay has 
been a fraud from the beginning.?  In addition, he accused the Uruguayan government of being 
 
24 Alex Borucki. From Shipmates to Soldiers: Emerging Black Identities in the Ri?o De La Plata. (Albuquerque: 
University of New Mexico Press, 2015), 52. 
25 Map. Google Maps. Google. Aug 1, 2020. The exact coordinates of the interception of the Rio da Prata by the 
British Marine, 20? 58' South/ 17? 48' West was present in the condemnation sentence of the Rio da Prata, published 
on Correio Official, 03/03/1835. http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/749443/1991  
 9 
?all along aware of and participating in the fraud.?26 For the British, it was clear that the 
Uruguayan colony of free blacks was a subterfuge to the ?Brazilian Slave trade [to be] carried on 
under Monte Videan color.?27 The Mixed Commission?s sentence, executed in March 7, 1835, 
condemned the Rio da Prata, declared the vessel a good prize, and emancipated the surviving  
Africans who remained under the captor?s control. The main argument at trail for the accusation 
was a violation of the Treaty of 1826, that forbade Brazil from participating in trade of slaves 
from the Coast of Africa. The use of the Uruguayan flag, in this case, did not work, since the 
crew of the vessel was composed by Brazilians. The sentence also questioned the status of 
Uruguayan colonists and equaled them to slaves, based not only in the conditions of labor that 
they would face if they had got to Uruguay, but also the conditions of the transportation inside 
the vessel, which had few similarities with a trip of free people. The approximation of the 
colonists with slaves reinforced the argument of the illegality of their traffic.28 
While the sentence seemed evident for the British judges George Jackson and Fred Grigg, 
it was not clear for the Brazilian judge Jo?o Carneiro de Campos, the Brazilian member of the 
Mixed Commission. For Campos, the Rio da Prata did not qualify to be judged by the Anglo-
Brazilian Mixed Commission, since, as foreign vessel, it was not under the scope of the Treaty of 
1826. Campos also found support for his defense in the legality of the introductions of colonists 
in Uruguay, which would become illegal only in 1835. These were also the arguments of the 
Uruguayan government when looking for reparation in late 1835.29 
 
26 Fox to Palmerston. 01/20/1835, FO 84/179. 
27 Ouseley to John Backhouse. 01/10/1835, FO 84/179. 
28 The sentence is available on Jornal do Commercio, 04/21/1835. 
http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_02/6460 
29 Hood to Palmerston. 02/25/1835, FO 84. 
 10 
The continuation of the Brazilian slave trade through Uruguay was not the only aspect of 
the case of the Rio da Prata that concerned the British. The destiny of Africans who survived the 
trip was an urgent issue for English authorities working in Brazil. Some of the Africans had 
already spent four months inside the Rio da Prata in late November 1834 and they continued to 
wait for one more month before putting their feet on the shore of Praia Grande (current Niteroi). 
Their situation was precarious. The vessel was sinking, as a result of rat-holes. ?Many of the 
negroes were suffering from dysentery and from scorbutic ulcers,? Consul Robert Hesketh stated 
in his letter to Palmerston, and continued describing that ?the crowded state of the vessel, 
swarms of rats on board and the putrid provisions [occasioned] scenes of misery too disgusting 
to describe.?30 More than only dying of diseases, the Africans of the Rio da Prata were perishing 
of starvation. British doctors examined the Africans after the Brazilian government landed them 
and directed them to the barracks of Arma??o. The medical recommendation was to serve a 
?good morning meal, a midday meal of broth made of about a quarter of a pound of meat for 
each person and the usual evening meal in larger quantity than heretofore is absolutely necessary 
to preserve them alive.?31 In order to meet these requirements, the British Consul Hesketh 
declared that he had sent additional supplies of jerk beef, beans, and manioc meal to feed them. 
After three months, the British government had spent two hundred and eighty-eight pounds, four 
shillings and four pence half penny, the equivalent of today?s 25,000 pounds or 33,000 dollars.32 
Although the British authorities in Brazil defended the urgency of landing, in order to 
feed and assist the Africans on board of the Rio da Prata, they also saw the danger in doing it. In 
a letter to the captain of the British vessel Spartiate, Fox declared that he was aware of the ?great 
 
30 Hesketh to Palmerston. 01/23/1835, FO 84/ 180. 
31 Hammond to Hesketh. 01/13/1835, FO 84/ 180. 
32 Hesketh to the Duke of Wellington. 03/12/1835, FO 84/ 180. 
 11 
risk that would be incurred of the negroes being stolen away from any place in which they could 
be deposited.?33 In fact, almost 200 Africans of the Rio da Prata had been taken away on the 
night of January 7, 1835.34 Different sources describe the conditions of the kidnapping. Only 7 
British men guarded the barracks of Arma??o when a group of between 30 and 40 men, 
surrendered them and ?moved [the Africans] off in canoes, and a part led away into the country 
by land.? After their disappearance, the Brazilian government lost track of their lives, but the 
British authorities had ?little doubt that the stolen negroes [had] been carried into the interior of 
the country, and [were] placed far beyond the reach of any authority.?35 The stolen Africans 
integrated the Brazilian slave system and their lives were lost in the archive of illegality and 
deliberated forgetfulness. 
The history of the transoceanic voyage, intersection at sea, and condemnation of the Rio 
da Prata set up the scenario for the investigation of its human cargo. However, many of the 
details of these Africans? lives while held aboard the Rio da Prata is likely unknowable. The 
total of the population aboard of the vessel varied between 450 and 600, even in the same source. 
The sentence issued by the Mixed Commission, for example, started accounting for 520 Africans 
to then report 600 of them.36 The report that Hesketh presented Palmerston, on the other hand, 
accounted for 93 men, 38 women, 261 boys, and 111 girls, number that differs from other 
documents.37 The fluctuation of these numbers demonstrates first the focus of authorities on the 
crime of slave trade rather than on how many Africans lives were being transported, and second, 
their inability to keeping record of this great number of people. This difficulty contributed to the 
 
33 Fox to Hammond. 01/12/1835, FO 84/179. 
34 Jornal do Commercio, 01/15/1835. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_02/6135. 
35 Fox to the Duke of Wellington, 02/11/1835. FO 85 
36 Jornal do Commercio, 04/21/1835. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_02/6460 
37 Hesketh to Palmerston, 01/23/1835, FO 84/180 
 12 
disappearance of Africans, a common problem that Brazilian and British authorities had to face 
upon the arrival of ships on the Coast.38  
The history of the brigantine Rio da Prata is part of a greater history of slavery in Brazil 
during the period of the suppression of the slave trade. Information about the vessel, details 
about the trip, and the discussion about the subterfuges to the continuation of the slave trade are 
registered in correspondences, judicial sentences, and reports. This story is in the official records 
written by white men who had little to say about the actual experience of slavery, of the Middle 
Passage, of struggles for freedom. Liberated Africans of the Rio da Prata, on the other hand, can 
help scholars to understand these experiences. Liberated African women of the Rio da Prata 
narrated their wills, their losses, and most important their desire to be truly free. Their petitions, 
among other documents, shed light on experiences of work, formation of community, and the 
challenges of motherhood. Looking at particular lives, like Guiomar?s case, reveals both 
individual stories and shared experiences. Their stories demonstrate the coexistence of slavery 
and freedom. 
 
 
 
 
38 According to Daryle Williams, kidnappings of Africans waiting for trials happened frequently since 1834. ?The 
Broken Paths of Freedom? Spatial History Project, Stanford University 
https://web.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/page.php?id=129 
 13 
Chapter One 
?Are They not Free?? Debates over Liberated African Women 
 
 ?Enta?o eles na?o sa?o livres?? Deputy Casimiro Sena Madureira presented this question in 
the section of Brazilian Parliament in June 2, 1862. Following this rhetorical question, deputy 
Madureira condemned the recurring enslavement of liberated Africans in Brazil, criticized the 
circumstances of the decree 1303, and denounced the fact that liberated Africans were directed to 
the House of Correction when petitioning for their emancipation letter. The House of Correction, 
a prison in Rio de Janeiro, in principle intended to hold convicted criminals, was also the 
destination of liberated Africans since their arrival in Brazil. In Madureira?s view, however, the 
House of Correction was not the place for free people, category that included liberated Africans. 
In the same declaration, he proposed that the Minister of Justice proclaimed liberated Africans 
?truly free,? action that should happen regardless of whom their employers were and without 
petition processes.39 Madureira?s statement in the Parliament section brought the topic that was 
in the order of the day in the 1860s.  
The debate over liberated Africans was on the agenda of Brazilian and British politicians 
in the 1860s. This chapter considers the work of Agostinho Marques Perdig?o Malheiro, 
Aureliano C?ndido Tavares Bastos, and William Dougal Christie, authors who not only 
witnessed the process of final emancipation of liberated Africans but also historicized it. In other 
words, this chapter looks to these authors as both part of the historiography on the topic and as 
primary sources. The goal of this investigation is to understand the specificities of how these 
authors addressed the question to liberated African women. Even though gender was not the 
 
39 Anais do Parlamento Brasileiro, 1862, 06/02/1862, 13. 
 14 
 
 
focus of these authors, nor were they concerned about reporting particularities of female 
struggles for freedom, women appear in specific points of the work of these authors and reveal 
conditions of labor, questions of motherhood, and resistance, as well as issues caused by 
diplomatic problems and by the debates over slavery. In this sense, this chapter contributes to the 
understanding of the political debates that these authors were bringing, but also how they 
collaborated to the historiography about liberated Africans in Brazil. 
 
Christie, Tavares Bastos, and Perdig?o Malheiro: Historicizing the Liberated African 
Issue 
The British minister William Dougal Christie quoted Madureira?s speech in his book 
Notes on Brazilian Questions, published in 1865. He brought Madureira?s question  
?Are they not free?? to make the point that liberated Africans, already emancipated when 
rescued from the slave traffic, should get their full freedom. 40  His Notes, however, was not only 
dedicated to discussing the question of the liberated Africans. His book was a broad memoir of 
his mission in Brazil in which he addressed topics such as slavery, slave trade, and liberated 
Africans by commenting on Brazilian and British newspaper excepts and debating declarations 
and correspondence between British and Brazilian authorities. His book served as an account of 
what became known as ?the Christie Question,? a diplomatic crisis between England and Brazil.  
 
40 William Dougal Christie (1816-1874) was a British minister who worked in countries of South America such as 
Argentina and Paraguay. In his passage in Brazil (1859-1863), he was known for his ?intemperate nature? and the 
breaking of the diplomatic relationship between Brazil and England, also called the ?Christie Question.? Even 
though this diplomatic break had its start with the murder of the crew of a British ship in Rio Grande do Sul in 1862, 
the issue of liberated Africans and slaves emerged as the main question. Christie questioned the authority of the 
Brazilian government and raised the issue of the extension of the 1831 Law to all the Africans arrived in Brazil after 
its enactment. This generated great fear in pro-slavery Brazilians and even in those who defended a gradual 
emancipation of slavery. After his staying in Brazil, Christie retired. Maeve Ryan, ?British Antislavery Diplomacy 
and Liberated African Rights as an International Issue,? in Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 
1807-1896, ed.  Richard Anderson and Henry B Lovejoy. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2020), 
215-237. 
 15 
 
 
During his time in Brazil, Christie witnessed the pillage of the Prince of Wales - British 
vessel that had wrecked in Rio Grande do Sul ? and the imprisonment of British officials from 
the ship Forte in Rio de Janeiro. These episodes were the starting point of the diplomatic break 
between Brazil and England, which resulted in the closure of the port of Rio de Janeiro in the 
first days of 1863. Issues related to the slave trade, however, had been affecting the relationship 
between Brazil and England and were the main reason for the diplomatic crisis. Although the 
connection between Brazil ad England had never been suspended before, the continuation of the 
slave trade, even if illegal, was a point of contention to diplomatic relationship. For instance, the 
Brazilian government faced the Aberdeen Act ? as a threat to its supremacy. This act, enacted in 
1845 granted the right to the British authorities to arrest Brazilian vessels that were suspect of 
illegal slave traffic. 41 In addition, the issue of the liberated Africans was a major point of 
disagreement in the 1860s. For example, Christie complained about the difficulty of the British 
government in obtaining information about the liberated Africans and denounced the delay of the 
Brazilian government in providing the final freedom for this group. Christie defended that the 
decree 1303 of 1853, which allowed only liberated Africans who worked for private households 
to request their emancipation, should be extended to all liberated Africans. 
His book, however, has contradictions. Even though he explicitly endorsed the idea that 
all liberated Africans should have had access to their full freedom, in the specific chapters about 
this issue, Christie was concerned only with liberated Africans emancipated by the Anglo-
Brazilian Mixed Commission, active from 1830 to 1845. In these parts of his book, Christie 
avoided the issue of those Africans imported between 1845 and 1856, when the last ships 
 
41 Richard Graham, ?Os Fundamentos da Ruptura de Relac?o?es Diploma?ticas entre o Brasil e a Gra?-Bretanha em 
1863: ?a Questa?o Christie.?? Revista de Histo?ria 24, no. 49 (1962): 117. 
 16 
 
 
illegally transporting slaves were caught.42 Christie?s view of freedom was limited to those 
Africans emancipated over the British efforts to ban the slave trade.  
Even though the British constant presence over issues of the Brazilian slave trade was 
always a cause of discomfort, Christie?s ideas on Brazilian slavery concerned Brazilian 
authorities. In chapters dedicated to the debate on the Brazilian slavery, Christie contended that 
?every slave introduced into the Brazilian empire after March, 1830, when the importation of 
slaves became unlawful under the stipulations of the Convention of 1826, and by the law of 
Brazil, [was] illegally a slave and legally free.?43 The emancipation for all the Africans who 
arrived in Brazil after 1830, as well as for the children of these Africans, defended by Christie, 
would cause an irreversible damage in the institution of slavery in Brazil and was the main issue 
behind the diplomatic crisis. Although Christie openly campaigned for this idea in the 1860s, 
British diplomats had been on it since at least the 1850s. For instance, they kept record of ads 
selling and hiring of slaves when their age indicated that they had been a victim of the illegal 
slave trade. In cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they demanded investigation of 
the Brazilian police, responsible for the surveillance of possible crimes of illegal enslavement.44 
Brazilian authorities also feared the intervention of the British because of its direct contact with 
the black population. Liberated Africans, for example, looked for British authorities to report 
mistreatments, poor condition of health, and to complain about their right to freedom.45 Because 
 
42 About the last ship arrived in Brazil Yuko Miki, ?In the Trail of the Ship: Narrating the Archives of Illegal 
Slavery.? Social Text 138 (2019): 87?106. 
43 William Dougal Christie, Notes on Brazilian Questions, (London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865), 81. 
44 According to Sidney Chalhoub, when the police responded to these notes, they frequently found ways to interpret 
that there was no proof that the Africans investigated had arrived after 1830. One argument was that it was a 
common practice that slave owners decreased the age of the slaves they were selling in the newspapers advertised to 
call the attention of buyers, These Africans, were in fact, according to the police, much older than publicized, 
therefore could have arrived before 1830. Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume no 
Brasil Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012), 195-99.  
45 Daryle Williams, ?A Necessa?ria Distinc?a?o entre Liberdade e Emancipac?a?o:? Noc?o?es Africana, Inglesa e Brasileira 
do que ? ser Emancipado,? in Intitui??es Nefandas: o Fim da Escravid?o e Servid?o no Brasil, nos Estados Unidos 
 17 
 
 
of these interactions, when the Christie Question happened, many Africans had already had 
contact with the idea of emancipation for those arrived after 1830. This was particularly 
important to liberated Africans who saw the British as allies to support them in their request for 
emancipation. 
 Neither by Perdig?o Malheiro nor Tavares Bastos endorsed Christie?s ideas of 
emancipation. Aureliano C?ndido Tavares Bastos was a Brazilian lawyer and a member of the 
Liberal Party who, even though very critical of the Imperial government, was, above all, a 
defender of the law.46 Cartas do Solit?rio, firstly published in form of letters in the newspaper 
Correio Mercantil,  and re-published in 1863 in format of a book, was a demonstration of his 
familiarity with laws and acts related to the slave trade. More specifically, he historicized and 
explained the Brazilian legislature related to liberated Africans, analyzing acts and decrees since 
the 1810s until the 1850s. Instead of widening the idea of freedom to all Africans arrived in 
Brazil after 1831, - as Christie did - Tavares Bastos focused in defending the emancipation of 
liberated Africans after fourteen years of work.  
 His defense of final freedom for liberated Africans who worked for more than fourteen 
years starts, however, demonstrating the illegality of tis probatory system. While for Christie, the 
bilateral treaty between England and Brazil, enacted in 1826, was determinant for the discussion 
of the slave trade and the Africans illegally imported, Tavares Bastos put the law on 1831 on 
spot. Firstly, Tavares Bastos emphasized the inability of the Brazilian government in enforcing 
 
e na Russia, ed. Ivana Lima, Keila Grinberg, and Daniel Reis (Rio de Janeiro: Funda??o Casa Rui Barbosa, 2018), 
151-170.  
46 Aureliano C?ndido Tavares Bastos (1839-1875) was a Brazilian lawyer, journalist and politician affiliated with 
the Liberal Party. Published books in which he defended the end of slavery and the political decentralization of the 
estate. These ideas gave him the label of an extremist liberal. He was part of the Instituto de Advogados do Brasil 
(henceforth IAB) in the same period of Perdig?o Malheiro. Through the analysis of the Laws related to the 
prohibition of slave trade, Tavares Bastos criticized the Brazilian government concerning the question of liberated 
Africans and criticized concessionaires who hold liberated Africans for more than 14 years. Walquiria R?go, 
?Tavares Bastos: Um Liberalismo Descompassado,? Revista USP, no. 17 (1993): 74-85. 
 18 
 
 
it. Second, he highlighted two of its clauses to better explain the illegality of the work of 
liberated Africans: the first one was the obligation of the Brazilian government to free the 
Africans caught being transported illegally; and the second one was the establishment of their 
reexportation. For the author, the failure of exporting liberated Africans back to Africa was the 
crucial reason why the Brazilian government was unable to fully emancipate them, incorporating 
them in the Brazilian workforce. The numbers of liberated Africans grew constantly soon after 
the approval of the 1831 law. In five years, the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission had judged 
14 cases of ships suspected of illegal slave trade, from which 10 were condemned. The Brazilian 
government had to simultaneously deal with the kidnappings of liberated Africans, the increased 
expenses with basic needs to keep this population alive, as well as the overpopulation of the 
House of Correction and other shelters.47 The instructions of 1834 and 1835 that allowed the 
concession of their services was not only a solution for the problem of what to do with the newly 
emancipated Africans, and a reaction against the crimes against them, but it was also convenient 
for the government that profited from their labor and avoided further expenses with them. 
However, the decision of incorporating the labor of liberated Africans, even under the label of 
apprenticeship, was illegal for Tavares Bastos. The consequences of the instructions of 1834 and 
1835 were the delay in conceding full emancipation for liberated Africans and the negligence of 
the clause of reexportation.48  
For Tavares Bastos, the failure in exporting liberated Africans back to Africa was key to 
understand the unsuccess of the 1831 Law and the problem of liberated Africans in Brazil. 
Looking from the perspective of the 1860s, Tavares Bastos considered the decision of the 
 
47 Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2012), 54.  
48 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, (Rio de Janeiro: Typ da Actualidade, 1963), 91.  
 19 
 
 
Brazilian government in keeping the labor of liberated Africans instead of reexporting them a 
demonstration of selfishness, a disregard for their own law, and a way to encourage the 
maintenance of the slave trade.49 Tavares Bastos, by the time of the publication of his letters in 
the newspaper, had witnessed the problems caused by, in his view, the Brazilian bad 
administration of the liberated Africans. Moreover, he also had seen the transformation in the 
Brazilian slavery, the slave revolts spreading throughout Brazil, and the diplomatic crisis.50 
Moreover, the continuation of the use of African work force was a barrier to the development of 
free labor, item in the agenda of the Liberal Party, with which he was affiliated.51  
 His second argument for the defense of the final emancipation for those Africans who 
had fulfilled their probatory period was based on the clause 179 of the Criminal Code of 1830 
that considered a crime to reduce a free person to slavery. The consequence of maintaining 
liberated Africans in Brazil was, for Tavares Bastos, the distribution of their services ?to private 
guardians, who transform them in captives.?52 Although both Christie and Perdig?o Malheiro 
were concerned about the conditions of labor of liberated Africans, which they consider similar 
to slavery, only Tavares Bastos addressed these conditions in terms of the Criminal Code of 
1830. Thus, Tavares Bastos contributes to the historiography concerned about the re-
enslavement in Brazil. Authors like Sidney Chalhoub, Keila Grinberg, and Judy Freitas have 
largely studied the fragility of the freedom that black people experienced in the nineteenth-
century Brazil. They analyzed cases of freed slaves who had their manumission revoked, stories 
of kidnaps and selling of free people into slavery, examples of imprisonment of free people by 
 
49 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 90. 
50 Joa?o Jose? Reis ?Quilombos e Revoltas Escravas no Brasil.? Revista Usp, no. 28 (1996): 15?39. 
51 Bruno Gonc?alves Rosi. ?The Americanism of Aureliano C?ndido Tavares Bastos,? Almanak, no 19, (2018); 
Jeffrey D Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, the State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-
1871, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006). 
52 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 94. 
 20 
 
 
the police under the suspicion of being fugitive slaves, and cases of enslavement of free children 
of enslaved or free parents.53 Particularly Chalhoub lines up with Tavares Bastos in the argument 
that the State had a major role in the re-enslavement, or in the enslavement of free people, when 
it puts the burden of proving their freedom on the shoulders of black people, who needed to 
defend themselves of accusations of being fugitives, or had to prove their identity in order to 
escape from prison or sale.54  
The reexportation of liberated Africans, therefore, would have been the only way that the 
Brazilian government could have respected the 1831 Law. For Tavares Bastos, without the 
reexportation ?the law was torn apart, and the double crime against honor and the future of the 
country was permitted.?55 On the other hand, the law of 1850 brought some hope.56 Tavares 
Bastos stated that this law was successful against the slave trade, contrarily to the one enacted in 
1831. However, he made it clear that the 1850 law ?would be [also] vain, an insincere promise, if 
the Africans who served the state for a certain period would not be freed.?57 Tavares Bastos 
stresses the importance of not only obeying the decree 1303, of 1853, that provided the 
opportunity to liberated Africans serving private households for more than fourteen years to 
request for their full freedom, but also to expand this decree to all liberated Africans and to 
withdraw the requirement of petition.  
 
53 Keila Grinberg, ?Reescravizac?a?o, Direitos e Justic?a no Brasil do Se?culo XIX,? in ed. Lara H. Silva; Joseli 
Mendon?a, Direitos e Justi?as no Brasil. Ensaio de Hist?ria Social. (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2006), 101-28; 
Judy Bieber Freitas, ?Slavery and Social Life: Attempts to Reduce Free People to Slavery in the Serta?o Mineiro, 
Brazil, 1850-1871,? Journal of Latin American Studies 26, no. 3 (1994): 597?619; Sidney Chalhoub, ?Precariedade 
Estrutural: o Problema da Liberdade no Brasil Escravista (S?culo XIX), Hist?ria Social, no 19 (2010): 33-62. 
54 Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2012). 
55 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 91. Original in Portuguese: ?rasgou-se a lei, e sansionou-se um duplo crime 
contra a honra e contra o futuro do paiz.? 
56 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 114. 
57 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 97. 
 21 
 
 
Both Christie and Tavares Bastos considered the petition system a barrier. Christie, for 
example, listed twenty different steps through which the liberated Africans should go in order to 
petition for their second emancipation to then have, in some cases, their request denied.58 In 
accordance with Palmerston?s opinion, Christie declared that without emancipation for the entire 
group, the British failed the liberated Africans. Tavares Bastos, instead of addressing the 
emancipation as a closed issue, claimed for changes in the law. In other words, Tavares Bastos 
requested the revision of the decree 1303, for example, urging the government to emancipate all 
the liberated Africans without the requirement of petition and. Another aspect that needed review 
was the establishment of the place of residency of fully emancipated Africans. During the 1850s 
many of them were sent to places in the frontiers to work in the Navy Arsenals, in Amazonas, or 
Military Colony, in Paran? for example.59 Tavares Bastos criticized this attitude and classified it 
as abusive and demanded that Brazilian government worked together with the liberated Africans 
to match both the requirements of ?public safety? and the ?desire of the African? in order to 
choose their place to live.  
 Even though Tavares Bastos used a very critical tone to examine the problem of liberated 
Africans in his Cartas do Solit?rio, he made clear that he was not attacking the institution of 
slavery. In fact, the question of ending slavery was not an issue easily debated in 1860s and the 
abolitionist movement in Brazil started only in the 1870s. Tavares Bastos explicitly warned the 
readers that those letters were not ?a campaign against the acquired rights, neither against 
property, nor against the public order.?60 Tavares Bastos was a moderated politician and kept his 
analysis over the question of the liberated Africans restricted to its legal aspects. In one of the 
 
58 Christie, Notes, 4-5. 
59 Beatriz Mamigonian, ?To be a Liberated African in Brazil: Labor and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century? 
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2002). 
60 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 95. 
 22 
 
 
letters, he stated that he ?hoped to have had discussed the question of the liberated Africans in 
convenient limits? and that he ?made an effort to put this question in a neutral and calm 
terrain.?61 At this point he approximated his writings to Perdig?o Malheiro. 
Similar to and in conversation with Tavares Bastos, Perdig?o Malheiro also scrutinized 
the Brazilian laws and acts concerning slavery and repression of the slave trade and examined 
the circumstances of the liberated Africans in this legal context. Also, in convergence with 
Tavares Bastos, Perdig?o Malheiro defended the right to property, and public safety. Perdig?o 
Malheiro, however, is the least aggressive of the three authors. He built the sections on liberated 
Africans on the third volume of his book A Escravid?o no Brasil ? published in 1867 ? in format 
of a narrative, instead of the format denunciatory used by Tavares Bastos and Christie. A 
Escravid?o no Brazil is, among the three books examined in this chapter, the work that mostly 
resembles a history monography. The author utilized primary sources ? such as laws and treaties, 
as well as political discourses ? and bibliography to support his arguments. In fact, he was clear 
in his intentions of being part of the historiography on the theme when he named the book 
?Slavery in Brazil: Social-Historical-Legal Essay,? choosing his subtitle according to the 
approach that he offered in the book. Joaquim Nabuco, in this regard, acknowledged the 
importance of this book that influenced not only pollical decisions but also scholars of Brazilian 
history.62 Recent and early historiography on liberated Africans have resorted to the work of 
Perdig?o Malheiro as a primary source and a consultation book.  
The history that Perdig?o Malheiro was writing had precise goals. The conciliatory tone 
marked the his objective of keeping the political safety and economic tranquility, his priorities as 
jurisconsult and president and of the Brazilian Institute of Advocacy (IAB), organ closely 
 
61 Tavares Bastos, Cartas do Solit?rio, 107. 
62 Pena, Pajens da Casa Imperial, 266. 
 23 
 
 
connected with the Imperial government.63 The three volumes of his book, A Escravid?o no 
Brasil, were published in 1866 and 1867, by the order of Dom Pedro II, as an answer to the 
diplomatic crisis with England. After the closure of the Quest?o Christie and the emancipation of 
all liberated Africans, Malheiro explained in his book all the efforts that the Brazilian 
government did to keep the national peace, the diplomatic friendship with England, and the 
safety for liberated Africans. Even criticizing the enslavement of liberated Africans, Perdig?o 
Malheiro removed the responsibility of this situation from the government and transferred it to 
concessionaires. He also avoided mentioning the limited number of emancipation letters that the 
Brazilian government filed before 1864, when all liberated Africans were freed. Moreover, he 
was the most critical of the British pressure over the Brazilian politics. Malheiro found in the 
British the scapegoat to explain the weak points of the Brazilian endeavor to repress the slave 
trade.64    
The chapters of A Escravid?o no Brasil that focused on the liberated African question 
center the analysis on the 1850 Law. In addition to a detailed exam of the goals of this law, 
Perdig?o Malheiro listed its benefits, not only in the combat of the slave trade but also in the 
Brazilian economy. In response to a concern about the lack of force for the agricultural sector 
with the extinction of the slave trade, Malheiro provided extensive data on the increase on the 
 
63 Pena, Pajens da Casa Imperial. 
64 Agostinho Marques Perdig?o Malheiro (1824 ? 1881) was a Brazilian jurisconsult and politician connected with 
the Conservative Party. He was the president of the IAB from 1861 to 1866. He defended a gradual emancipation of 
the enslaved people in Brazil, which should start with the liberation of the sons and daughters of enslaved women, 
action which would lead Brazil into a mild transition to free labor economy. In 1863, amid the turbulent diplomatic 
break between Brazil and England, Malheiro made a speech as president of the IAB defending the gradual 
emancipation. This speech, even though it became known by its abolitionist tone, served to pacify the Brazilian 
politics and to retake international relations. Perdig?o Malheiro held the position of curator of the liberated Africans 
and in his book A Escravid?o no Brasil ? work that he did to answer the demand of the Emperor ? he offered a sense 
of closure to the liberated African question. In this book, he also detailed his ideas of gradual emancipation. Eduardo 
Spiller Pena, Pajens da Casa Imperial: Jurisconsultos, Escravida?o e a Lei de 1871, (Campinas: Editora da 
UNICAMP, 2001). 
 24 
 
 
production of coffee, sugar, cotton, mate, and cocoa.65 The Law of 1831, on the other hand, was 
far from the center of his discussion. Malheiro referred to this law only once in the chapters that 
considered the liberated Africans, and even then, to move forward to the debate of the 
Instructions of 1834 and 1835. These were, in his view, a thoughtful and altruistic step that the 
Brazilian government took to the protection and education of the liberated Africans. It was not 
the government?s fault, however, if private concessionaires were greedy and treated liberated 
Africans as slaves. According to Malheiro, the government provided all the conditions to the 
success of the apprenticeship programs, which included the creation of the position of Curador, 
?who would defend and take care of the liberated Africans,? and the incorporation of this group 
under the custody of the Judge of Orphans, ?who would, administratively, take care of them as 
quasi-minors.?66 
Although Perdig?o Malheiro accused concessionaires of treating liberated Africans like 
slaves, his view on the status of their freedom was that they were comparable to minors. This is 
also the view of Beatriz Mamigonian, at least when she refers to first laws that regulated the 
work of liberated Africans. For this author, the labor of liberated Africans approximated with the 
indentured servants and tutored workers such as indigenous people and children. This meant that 
the guardians of this type of workers did not possessed their bodies even though they could use 
their labor for a limited period of time. It also meant that children of liberated Africans would 
inherit their status of free people but not the necessity of probatory labor. Mamigonian also 
 
65 Agostinho Marques de Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil: Ensaio Hist?rico-Jur?dico-Social (Rio de 
Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1867), 60-2. 
66 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 64. 
 25 
 
 
compares the work of liberated Africans to quasi-minor because, as indigenous people and 
children, these Africans were also under the custody of the Judge of Orphans.67 
Perdig?o Malheiro, Tavares Bastos, and Christie debated over the question of freedom for 
liberated Africans. Taking different approaches, they took into consideration the law, the 
economy, the diplomatic relationships, the actions of the British and Brazilian governments to 
theorized about the question of in Brazil. While some issues were intentionally debated, others 
appeared in the periphery of their works. Even though the issue of liberated African women is 
one of these secondary themes, the brief mentions to it reveal the centrality of these women to 
the Brazilian developments of slavery. 
 
  Henriqueta and the Liberated African Women  
  
The case of liberated African woman Henriqueta, published in Jornal do Commercio, 
was also mentioned in Notes on Brazilian Questions. It was for Christie the perfect example to 
illustrate his critics to the Brazilian government. The anonymous author of the newspaper article 
?used the press to defend the rights of a miserable woman? who ?sick and helpless, waited the 
decision of her petition to be emancipated.?68  Christie referred to Henriqueta?s story in the last 
page of the part that he analyzed the liberated Africans. In the footnote where the story appears 
the only comment that Christie makes is that the case ?illustrated both past abuses and present 
difficulties [that liberated Africans suffered].?69 After accusations of ?abusing his authority? and 
enforcing a ?monstrous doctrine,? that Christie received in the newspaper Daily News from a 
 
67 Beatriz G. Mamigonian, Africanos Livres: A Abolic?a?o do Tra?fico de Escravos no Brasil. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2017), 130. 
68 Jornal do Commercio, 07/12/1864. http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/364568_05/7212.  
69 Christie, Notes, 50. 
 26 
 
 
British man who signed as ?the friend of both countries,? he constructed his narrative showing, 
first, that he was obeying orders of his superiors and simultaneously trying to keep friendly 
diplomatic relationships, and, second, that the Brazilian government had disrespected the treaties 
and agreements with England. In his defense against the accusations made by the ?friend of both 
countries,? he intertwined his own words with copies of correspondence exchanged among 
British authorities, Brazilian politicians, and himself. The selection of the correspondence and 
the chronological appearance of the letter in the book demonstrates that Christie worked hard in 
his defense and chose the exact arguments that we would apply. These letters scrutinized the 
precarious conditions of life of the liberated Africans in Brazil, their difficulties in getting their 
final emancipation, and the negligence of the Brazilian government about them. Christie made 
sure to show these letters in their entirety and did not spare pages when he needed to show that 
he was not alone in the issue of the liberated Africans. Perhaps because Christie had already 
gone over the problem of the Brazilian delay in providing emancipation letters, Christie limited 
to publish part of Henriqueta?s story with no to extra explanations. 
Although the question of liberated Africans was explored by Tavares Bastos, Perdig?o 
Malheiro, and Christie, specificities of liberated African women was not central in any of the 
works explored in this chapter. References to women, however, appear scattered throughout the 
three books. The report of individual stories is rare in all them, but by connecting Henriqueta?s 
case with the analysis provided by the authors, it is possible to examine liberated African 
women?s labor, maternity, and resistance in dialogue with their experiences of freedom. 
One way of experiencing of freedom that liberated Africans most waited for, the 
obtention full emancipation, could be a complex and slow process. It was late 1863 or early 1864 
when Henriqueta requested her emancipation letter, occasion in which she had to leave her 
 27 
 
 
concessionaire?s house to be incorporated in the population of the House of Correction. By the 
time of the publication of her story, she was waiting there for six months. The article leads to the 
understanding that her petition was approved by the Minister of Justice who had already 
prepared her letter of emancipation. The only step missing in order to Henriqueta enjoy her full 
liberty was to get her letter from the Chief of Police, who for some unknown reason, refused to 
give it to her. Christie approached the debate over the process of petition by mentioning 
Palmerston?s speech in the House of Commons in 1861, occasion that the Prime Minister 
declared that ?all the efforts we have made to obtain justice for these emancipados70 have 
failed.? Africans who petitioned for their full freedom had to wait for a process that encompassed 
at least twenty steps, according to Christie. Tavares Bastos contended that Africans waiting for 
their emancipation letter had two destinies, ?death or despair,? and continued explaining that 
?from the requirement to the Emperor to the information that they have to get from the head of 
the households where they served, or to the police declaration, the path was long, difficult, and 
expensive.?71 Even when the Africans had the means to afford all these steps and got all the 
documents needed, it was possible that the letter of emancipation remained ?buried in the great 
ocean of our departments,? similarly to what happened to Heriqueta. 72  
Christie debated not only the delay of the Brazilian government in handing emancipation 
letter, but also the limited number of letters that they filed. Although the number increased in 
1864, which Christie attributed to the British pressure, the Brazilian government endeavored the 
minimal distribution of emancipation as possible. According to Limpo de Abreo, cited by 
 
70 This is another word to refer to liberated Africans. As a noun, this word was used often by Christie and British 
authorities. Tavares Bastos and Perdig?o Malheiro frequently referred to this group as ?Africanos livres,? using 
sometimes ?emancipados? as an adjective.   
71 Tavares Bastos, Cartas, 95. 
72 Christie, Notes, 5-6. 
 28 
 
 
Christie, emancipados would continue to have the petition as a requirement, and the government 
would liberate them as gradually as possible, so the public order would not be jeopardized.73 
Brazilian politicians feared not only a collective uprising, but also liberated African individuals, 
who would work as ?sedutores,? spreading the word about liberty and the ways to get it. 
Combined with gradual releases of emancipation letter, the other way to avoid the ?sedutores? 
would be, after the emancipation, to remove them to a new place, where they did not have a 
community of support nor geographical knowledge.74  
In the newspaper article, however, there is no information the in Henriqueta?s letter was 
due to accusations of ?sedu??o.? In fact, the author of the article claimed to know Henriqueta, 
and attested that she was a ?criatura inofensiva ? harmless creature.?  However, it is clear that 
Henriqueta had connections. In addition to the figure of the Curator, who was supposed to 
defend the liberated Africans against abuses and frauds, Henriqueta had a white person willing to 
write in her favor in a newspaper. Africans like Henriqueta had their own community of other 
liberated Africans ? including their shipmates, ? slaves, and free blacks, in conjunction with 
partners in the British and Brazilian politics. In special, liberated Africans looked for British 
authorities to look for help during the emancipation process. Christie, for example, mentioned 
the case of the African Claudio, who looked for help in the British consulate in order to apply for 
a passport.75 Moreover, the British consul Robert Hesketh who was able to gather information 
about more than 800 liberated Africans without any help from the Brazilian government. From 
1849 to 1851, Hesketh sent notes to liberated Africans through their colleagues, inviting them to 
appear in the British consulate. The fact that Hesketh was able to spread the word among the 
 
73 Christie, Notes, 40. 
74 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres, 346-352. 
75 Christie, Notes, 42. 
 29 
 
 
group of liberated Africans shows that they had a community and that they recognized their 
particular legal status. Additionally, a large number of these Africans were willing to share their 
information and, specially, their complaints with the British Consul. Even though female and 
male liberated Africans were part of this community, women had an important role in the 
dissemination of information amongst the black community. They circulated in the city and 
made alliances.  
The domestic service for private concessionaire is related to the mobility of liberated 
African women had. The distribution of liberated Africans was marked by gender differences. 
The Instruction of 1835 provided the State with the priority to select those to work in public 
institutions, preferring those ?demonstrated love in their work.? In practice, the government 
chose the youngest and strongest African men to labor in public institutions, such as the House 
of Correction, and the Iron Foundry of Ipanema. The remaining population, which meant a great 
number of women, was directed to concession to private households. According to Beatriz 
Mamigonian, 5% of the women and 25% of the men rescued from the illegal traffic between 
1834 and 1838 worked for public institutions. The absolute number of women working for the 
government is even smaller, considering that liberated African women in this period composed 
only one third of the population. In the 1850, the Brazilian government prohibited the 
distribution of liberated Africans to private concessionaires, which changed the demographics. 
However, the remaining women continued to constitute a significant number in the work of 
private households. Henriqueta was one of them, a wet-nurse that still in the 1860s was ?always 
busy breastfeeding the children.?76 Women like Henriqueta performed the broad task of domestic 
service, which included cooking, sewing, wet nursing, and laundering.77 Although none of the 
 
76 Jornal do Commercio, 07/12/1864. http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/364568_05/7212.  
77 Mamigonian, ?To be a Liberated African.? 
 30 
 
 
authors examined gender differences in the division of labor of liberated Africans, they provided 
some information about their work. Tavares Bastos, for instance, stated that liberated Africans 
?crowded the markets, bought and sell food, vegetables, and items of the everyday 
consumption.?78 Even though he did not specify the gender of these peddlers, African women 
controlled the food-market in Rio de Janeiro.79 The domestic service, even though based inside 
the house, included tasks that required them to circulate. They did laundry in public fountains, 
carried containers of water, and sold food on the streets. The fact that they worked both in public 
and private spaces provided them with information coming from inside and outside the houses, 
and a certain level of freedom to make them circulate. 
In contrast, an elevated number of liberated African men ? and also some women ? who 
worked for public institutions had a limited mobility. In this regard, Christie mentioned in his 
book a communication from an anonymous Brazilian who asked: ?Does not all the world know 
that the lot of the Africans delivered to public departments is much worse, even in this capital, 
than that of those confided to private individuals??80 Not only the Africans working for public 
institutions had their petitions denied when requesting their emancipation, but also they had a 
strict routine of labor that allowed them less free time and less mobility. In addition, liberated 
Africans in public institutions complained that they had basic rights denied. Those in the House 
of Correction had a restricted mobility and no access to garden plots. The rigid routine of labor in 
the House of Correction was not an exception. In other public institutions, liberated Africans 
needed permission to go out and rarely circulated freely in the cities.81  
 
78 Tavares Bastos, Cartas, 98. 
79 Patricia Acerbi, ?Slave Legacies, Ambivalent Modernity: Street Commerce and the Transition to Free Labor in 
Rio De Janeiro, 1850-1925.? (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Maryland, 2010). 
80 Christie, Notes, 26. 
81 Martine Jean, ?Liberated Africans, Slaves, and Convict Labor in the Construction of Rio De Janeiro's Casa De 
Correc?a?o: Atlantic Labor Regimes and Confinement in Brazil's Port City.? International Review of Social 
History 64, no. S27 (2019): 175. 
 31 
 
 
Perdig?o Malheiro, however, disagreed with Christie about the brutality of public 
concessionaires. For Malheiro, liberated Africans in general, when distributed for private 
households suffered more punishments, received a larger workload than slaves, slept in improper 
places, and were more susceptible to diseases. Liberated African mothers had to endure, in 
addition, to have ?their sons and daughters abandoned in the foundling wheel, so their 
concessionaires could hire [them] as wet-nurses.?82 Even though the article in Jornal do 
Commercio does not mention Henriqueta?s offspring, it is possible that she had several children, 
for she was ?always busy breastfeeding the children.? It is uncertain if she was able to keep them 
during the time that she worked for her concessionaire, or while waiting for emancipation letter 
in the House of Correction.  
Motherhood for liberated Africans was marked by the fragility of control over their 
children, by the precarious conditions for living together, as well as by the reality of separation. 
Children, hired out per month, worked for families that lived far from their mothers. Many of 
them disappeared, victims of kidnaps to then be sold as slaves. Even though Christie denounced 
these problems with the children of the liberated African women, arguing that the Brazilian 
government had no control over these births, Perdig?o Malheiro insisted that the problem rested 
with the concessionaires.  Using his authority of having been a curator himself, he wrote about 
the abuses and crimes that concessionaires committed against those Africans.83 In addition to 
severe punishments, and the lack of food and education, Perdig?o Malheiro listed the use of 
liberated African women as wet-nurses as part of the misconducts.84 Malheiro declared that the 
Brazilian government, on the other hand, made efforts to control the abuses of private guardians. 
 
82 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 64. 
83 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 66. 
84 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 65. 
 32 
 
 
When describing the instructions of 1834 and 1835, Perdig?o Malheiro contended that Brazilian 
legislators, aware of possible abuses, designated appropriate guardians that should be capable of 
educating, clothing and feeding them to serve as concessionaires. Moreover, he stated that the 
Instructions of 1834 and 1835 determined the services of a curator, a person in charge of 
defending and protecting them. If the ?destiny of this miserable people was in fact similar or 
worse than of slaves,? it was not the law or the Brazilian government that should be blamed, but 
those who did not follow it.85   
Perdig?o Malheiro described the Brazilian government as supportive of the family of 
liberated Africans, and as promoters of reunions between mother and children, especially after 
the decree of 1864 that emancipated all liberated Africans.86 Although Perdig?o Malheiro was 
concerned in giving an answer to the diplomatic crisis and in putting end the issue of liberated 
Africans behind, he did not keep the discussion of motherhood restricted to this group. The 
Quest?o Christie and the British pressure over the Brazilian government throughout the 1860s 
caused the reconsideration over the institution of slavery and urged the necessity of its reform. 
Perdiga?o Malheiro, in conformity with the Emperor?s view on the topic, presented the plan of 
action for this reform, which was based in a gradual emancipation through the action of the free 
womb.87 The intervention of the State in the question of liberated African motherhood, making 
efforts to reunite families, was for Malheiro the first steps for the project of a partus sequitur 
ventrem law and for gradual emancipation that would preserve the monarchical power and would 
avoid violent transitions as the one happening in the United States. Individual cases of liberated 
 
85 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 64. 
86 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 67. 
87 Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, 238. 
 33 
 
 
African mothers do not appear in A Escravid?o no Brazil, but Perdig?o Malheiro brought the 
issue of motherhood as extremely important for the future of the country. 
 
The case of Henriqueta brings back the question that Casimiro Madureria proposed about 
the freedom of liberated Africans. Was she not free? Although a liberated African, she was kept 
in prison waiting for emancipation. These authors set a series of debates over the law, the actions 
of the Brazilian and British governments, and the conditions of life and work of liberated 
Africans. These debates influenced generations of scholars who based their analysis in 
arguments of these authors. While in the 1860s, these authors used as sources mainly the set of 
laws, political declarations, correspondence, and newspapers, contemporary scholars have been 
employing more sources related to the lives of liberated Africans. Some examples are: the 
petitions filed in the 1850s and 1860s used by Mamigonian, the nominal lists and death registers 
of the Africans of the ship Mary E. Smith employed by Yuko Miki, the quantitative data used by 
Daniel Domingues Silva for a transnational study of liberated Africans, and the British registers 
about individual stories of liberated Africans in Brazil collected by Daryle Williams.88 This new 
focus on the history of the liberated Africans, rather than to the liberated African issue, brings a 
new perspective on the struggles of the liberated Africans. Contemporary researchers, however, 
found basic questions already raised by Christie, Perdig?o Malheiro, and Tavares Bastos.  
The individual cases that Christie brought, for instance, launched the concern on personal 
experiences and opened to the question on how the liberated Africans faced their status, their 
freedom, their work in Brazil.  Considering these experiences is also necessary to a gender 
 
88 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres; Yuko Miki, ?In the Trail of the Ship.? Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 87?105; 
Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Philip Misevich, and Olatunji Ojo. ?The Diaspora of Africans Liberated 
from Slave Ships in the Nineteenth Century.? The Journal of African History 55, no. 3 (2014): 347?69; Williams, 
?A Necessa?ria Distinc?a?o? 
 34 
 
 
approach on the research of liberated African women. The gender approach is one of the avenues 
to the development of researches centered on the experiences of liberated Africans. The focus 
that Tavares Bastos brought on the Brazilian legislative system is essential to think about women 
related with the law and were affected by it. It is also important to analyze how the formulation 
of laws can change the division of labor and the access to the judiciary system, according to 
gender differences. The debate on motherhood, presented by Perdig?o Malheiro, opens the 
debate for the scholarship to think about issues of womanhood, family, citizenship, and the 
meaning of freedom for the liberated African children. 
 
 
 35 
 
 
Chapter Two 
?Se Far? Justi?a:? Liberated African Women, 
Domestic Service, and the Judiciary System in Rio de Janeiro 
 
This chapter will analyze the case of the vessel Rio da Prata in a quantitative approach. 
In face of the data that shows that liberated African women from the Rio da Prata had 
proportionally more petitions for full freedom than men, and more, that women requested their 
emancipation mostly in the earlier stage, this chapter argues that labor contributed for this 
scenario in a fundamental way.  First, women from the Rio da Prata worked mostly in domestic 
service, which provided them with information of the discussions about politics, abolitionism, 
and the legal possibilities of accessing the Brazilian legal system to become free. Second, the 
domestic service required that many chores to be performed outside the domain of the house, 
factor that gave these women mobility and contact with an external community. This community 
worked not only as a support group, but also to repository of information, including strategies of 
resistance. Lastly, the Rio da Prata contained a significant number of men working for public 
institutions, which restricted their right to write petitions to demand their final emancipation. 
Their emancipation came later, when in 1864, all liberated Africans got their full freedom.  
This chapter dialogues with a literature about slavery and gender to understand how the 
differences in the context of labor affected liberated African women?s access to justice. More 
specifically, it follows Beatriz Mamigonian?s argument that even though liberated African had a 
legal status that was different from slavery, they ?frequently adopted codes of resistance and 
negotiation used by slaves.?89 In the first part, this chapter dissects the demographics of the Rio 
 
89 Beatriz G Mamigonian, Africanos Livres: a Abolic?a?o do Tra?fico de Escravos no Brasil. (Sa?o Paulo, SP: 
Companhia das Letras, 2017), 156. 
 36 
da Prata.  It looks at liberated African women through a comparison of elements such as the 
total population, death rate, gender, number, and time frame of the petitions to have a better 
grasp on how these women faced and used the Brazilian legal system. In the second part, this 
chapter explores the relation between gender, labor, and the access to the legal system. The last 
part analyzes individual cases of women that composed the population of the Rio da Prata to 
understand individual and collective strategies in their search for freedom.  
 
Demographics of the Vessel Rio da Prata 
On June 22, 1855, the liberated African women named Michaella Congo, # 179, appeared 
for an interview with Antonio Rodrigues da Cunha, a police deputy of Rio de Janeiro. According 
to Joze? Pedro Febre, who documented the conversation, when Cunha asked her ?how she was 
called, where she was from, how old she was, her marital status, her occupation, and her 
address,? she answered that her name was Michaella, original from Congo. She was thirty-six 
years old, unmarried, and resident at Rua da Alf?ndega. She also declared that ?she worked in 
the domestic services.?90 Michaella?s interview was part of her process for requesting her second 
emancipation letter. Back in 1835, Michaella had been assigned to serve Rita C?ndido de Moraes 
Castro. Twenty years later she sought out Brazilian judicial and police authorities to secure her 
autonomy from Castro?s guardianship, and presumably, to live on her own as a domestic servant, 
her stated occupation. 
From the group of African rescued aboard the Rio da Prata, 49 second emancipation 
requests have been identified in the Brazilian archives, 19 from liberated African women and 30 
 
90 Michaella. Police Interview. 06/20/1855. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-39. Original in Portuguese: 
?Perguntada como se chamava, donde era natural, sua idade, estado, ocupac?a?o e reside?ncia? Respondeu chamar-se 
Michaella, de nac?a?o Congo, de trinta e seis anos d?idade, solteira, servic?o dome?stico e morar a ria da Alf?ndega.? 
 37 
from liberated African men. Considering this data, female petitions represented 39% of the total 
of solicitations identified to date. The minority pointed by the absolute number of petitions can 
be misguiding, though. Crucially, looking at the 222 Africans of the Rio da Prata who were 
rescued from the ship and were not kidnapped, the ratio of men and women was 3 to 1. As it is 
possible to see below, in Table 1, this information reveals that if compared to the total of women 
on the ship - the blue column in the left -  petitions made from liberated Africans women 
represented 35% - the orange column in the left - while compared to the male population ? blue 
column in the right -, petitions made from liberated African men represented only 19% - orange 
column in the right.91   
 
180
160
140
120
100
Count of Name
80 Sum of Petition
60
40
20
0
Female Male
 
Table 1. Number of petitions in relation with the female and male population. This table shows that even if 
the total of petitions filed by men was greater than those filed by women, the number of petitions filed by women is 
more significant if considered proportionally to the total number of women.  
 
 
91 This numbers were got cross-referencing the nominal list made in the moment of arrival with the petitions 
available. Carregamento do Brigue Rio da Prata. ANRJ-AM S?rie Justi?a IJ6-471  
 38 
 If the numbers already show that proportionally more women filed petitions than men 
examining the population of the Rio da Prata in 1835, they are conclusive when considering the 
population of the vessel in 1864. Mortality changed radically the demographics of the Rio da 
Prata during the 30 years that separated the arrival of the ship from the enactment of the decree 
3310 that emancipated all the liberated Africans in Brazil. Death started in the voyage from West 
Central African to Brazil and continued to reap ?the lives of those moved from the sea to land, 
from land to holding cell.?92 When the British vessel Raleigh capture the Brig Rio da Prata in  
November 28, 1834, the group of liberated Africans remained in barracks in Jurujuba waiting for 
trial. The documents from the period between the arrival of the vessel and the condemnation that 
happened in February 6, 1835, bring little information about its human cargo. The newspaper O 
Jornal do Commercio, however, reported that on January 6, 1835, a group of men attacked the 
British officers that guarded barracks, where the Africans were located, and kidnapped almost 
200 of the them.93 There is no information about deaths and the destiny of the stolen Africans, 
although the investigations on kidnappings of black people show that they would have been sold 
into slavery.94 For those who remained, death was a constant presence. On Table 2, it is possible 
to see how liberated African population decreased between 1835 and 1864, with focus on the 
gender differences.   
 
 
92 Yuko Miki, ?In the Trail of the Ship.? Social Text 37, no. 1 (2019): 89. 
93 Jornal do Commercio, 01/15/1835.  http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/364568_02/6135  
94 For the discussion on kidnaps, see: Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume No Brasil 
Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012). Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into 
Slavery and their Astonishing Odyssey Home. (New York: 37 INK, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2019). 
 39 
120
100
80
60 Sum of Percentage of
Male
40
Sum of Percentage of
20 Female
0
 
Table 2. Liberated African population decrease from 1835 to 1864. In 1864, the male population was 
equivalent of 55% and the female population was equivalent of 51% of the number that appeared in the register in 
1835. 
 
In the end of thirty years, the male population decreased 45% and the female population 
49%. 95 The years between 1835 and 1837 were crucial to the decline of the community of 
liberated Africans of the Rio da Prata, specially to the female population that lost more than 
23% of its total. In her article about the Mary E. Smith, the last ship of being captured illegally 
transporting Africans to Brazil, the historian Yuko Miki brought up the discussion of the 
proximity that those liberated Africans had with death before and after leaving the ship. If the 
trip from Africa to Brazil killed Africans with cholera, starvation, and scurvy, the life after 
disembarking was also threatened by the precarious conditions in which these Africans arrived, 
accentuated by the lack of treatment and poor conditions that they faced in land. In the case of 
the Rio da Prata, the vulnerable circumstances achieved women drastically in the first three 
 
95 Beatriz Mamigonian, To be a Liberated African in Brazil: Labour and citizenship in the nineteenth century. 
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2002). 
 40 
years after landing. Moreover, the fact that the female population was entirely composed by 
children must have influenced the death rate.96   
Guilhermina Songo, # 216, was the first women to die soon after the matriculation was 
made. She passed away in March 16, 1835, in the Santa Casa de Misericordia Hospital. So short 
was her life in Brazil that she had not had time to be designated to a concessionaire. Even though 
the cause of death is unknown, the case of Guilhermina fits in Miki?s description. Different 
factors, other than the poor conditions of hygiene and bad nutrition during the trip to Brazil, and 
the contact with infectious diseases in the New World, contributed to the high mortality of 
newcomer Africans. Justina Congo, # 160, for example, did not die in the first years, but her 
concessionaire Roberto da Silva dos Santos Pereira declared that ?right after arriving in [his] 
house, she got sick because of a self-managed abortion. [He] was forced to take care of her 
because of [his] sense of humanity and my duty under the law.?97 Justina?s pregnancy and 
abortion calls the attention not only because the violence and sexual abuse that these women 
suffered, but also because of the risk of death that they faced. Other concessionaires may not 
have been so ?humane? and ?attentive to the law? as Pereira and they might have neglected the 
illness that those liberated Africans under their protection might had been suffering. Moreover, 
harsh punishments and poor working conditions had always been a cause of death of Africans 
during slavery in Brazil. The progression of deaths can be followed in the table below. It shows, 
in absolute numbers, the deceased from the Rio da Prata from 1835 to 1864, divided by gender. 
 
96 In the register of the population of the vessel Rio da Prata, made in 1835, all the female population was indicated 
as raparigas, term that designates female children until 15 years.  
97 Roberto da Silva dos Santos Pereira. Declaration. 04/27/1861. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a. 6J-123. Original in 
Portuguese: ?logo que veio para a minha casa, foi doente por um aborto que teve, por ela promovido; sendo eu logo 
obrigado a tratal-a? ja? por humanidade e ja? por dever.? 
 41 
It is important to notice that, although men had died more in absolute numbers, as a percentage, 
women died as a larger rate than men. 
 
25
20
15
10
5
0
Male Female
 
Table 3. Deceased from the Rio da Prata in absolute numbers from 1835 to 1864.  
 
In the beginning of 1854, there were 37 living women and 115 living men. Reconsidering 
the number of petitions in proportion to this new data, a majority of 51% of women contacted the 
Brazilian legal system while only 26% of men petitioned.98 Connected with the data relative to 
gender differences of labor, this information serves to corroborate the argument that domestic 
service was one of the key reasons that helped women to access the Brazilian legal system. In 
addition, most of women made their petition right after the approval of the decree 1303, of 1853. 
According to table 4, 89% of women requested their emancipation letter in the first four years 
while petitions made by men summed 46% in the same period.  Moreover, from the 19 women 
 
98 These data take into consideration all living women, including those who had fled and those whose last registry 
information is unknown. They also include the 27 men who worked on the Iron Foundry S?o Jo?o de Ipanema, who 
would rarely have been able to petition for their freedom.  
 42 
who petitioned for their full freedom, 12 were emancipated before 1864 (63%), while from the 
30 men who petitioned, only 17 obtained their liberty (56%).  
8
7
6
5
4 Female
3 Male
2
1
0
1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1861 1862 1863 1864
 
Table 4. Number of petitions of the 30 men and 19 women from 1853 to 1864, totalizing 49 petitions.  
 
 
 
 
Finally, data relative to work found in documents of liberated Africans from the Rio da 
Prata reinforce the sexual division of labor as a valid argument to explain the large percentage of 
women petitioning for their freedom. From the nineteen petitions made by women, there is 
information concerning the occupation of fourteen of them. Thirteen of them indicated domestic 
service as their main occupation.99 Men, on the other hand, occupied different positions. When 
visiting the British Consul, Robert Hesketh, liberated African men from the Rio da Prata pointed 
their occupations as gardeners, blacksmiths, masons among others. It is crucial for this analysis 
the information that 27 of those 115 men who were alive in 1854, that is 23%, worked in the Iron 
Foundry Ipanema, which restricted their right of petitioning for their ?full liberty.? The decree 
1303 was limited to those Africans working for private concessionaires, and toilers of public 
institutions were not contemplated in the act. 
 
99 Petitions of emancipation letter, interviews in the police office, and FO 131/7 Hesketh's Return September 30, 
1851. 
 43 
The Africans working on the Iron Foundry Ipanema, however, had their own way to 
resist. Other than filing petitions for their emancipation letter, they rebelled and escaped 
individually or in groups of liberated Africans and slaves. The establishment received liberated 
Africans since 1834. In 1848, for instance, 240 liberated Africans worked in the Foundry in 
contrast to 166 slaves. This shows the relevance of the Africans from the Rio da Prata for the 
running of the factory. They worked as blacksmiths, careers, carpenter and masons in the 
manufacturing of small objects such as nails and ammunition and large machines like cane sugar 
mills.100 The increasing demand for liberated African hands was not a specificity of the Iron 
Foundry. It was a trend to direct them to work in public endeavors, rather than in private 
households. Following the pace of growth of the public works grew and multiplied, the Brazilian 
government provided them with and increasing number of liberated Africans.  To keep the flux 
of work, the government barred their access to the requirement of emancipation.101 
In this context, liberated African men and women drew apart regarding labor and justice. 
While men were increasingly preferred in public services, which limited their access to their own 
legal status of liberated Africans, women were almost pushed toward the domestic service in 
private households. Within these conditions, liberated African women navigated the legal 
system, mobilizing themselves individually or collectively, to demand their final emancipation. 
 
Gender, Labor, and Experiences of Freedom 
Gendered division of liberated African labor is a significant factor to explain how they 
sought for second emancipation as well as to justify the discrepancy on the number of petitions 
 
100 Jaime Rodrigues, ?Ferro, Trabalho e Conflito: Os Africanos Livres na Fa?brica de Ipanema.? Hist?ria Social, no 
4-5, (1997/1998), 29-42.  
101 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres.  
 44 
made by men and women from the Rio da Prata. Similar to slaves and freed blacks in urban 
settings, liberated African women often took on domestic service, which granted them more 
access to information, justice, and resources to afford the emancipation process. Specially in Rio 
de Janeiro, the demand for servants was a constant. In one single day, the newspaper Jornal do 
Comm?rcio had more than ten advertisements selling, hiring, and looking for black women ? 
including enslaved, free, and liberated African women ?  to perform domestic tasks.102 
According to Sandra Lauderdale Graham, domestic service allowed black women to have the 
knowledge of the internal routine of a private house - by definition a labor that belonged to the 
private sphere ? at the same time that these women had an extensive network and knowledge of 
external happenings, features that associated this occupation with the public sphere.103 Domestic 
service included ironing, cooking, taking care of the children, sewing, among other activities that 
women performed inside the houses. Domestic servants, however, did many tasks outside their 
employers? homes, such as laundry in public fountains or rivers, selling goods on the streets, and 
purchasing foodstuff in local markets. These activities provided them with social tools to create 
or keep networks and to exchange information on how to access the Brazilian legal system. 
The British consul Robert Hesketh104 registered that the liberated African woman 
Generosa Angola, # 181, worked as a cook. Her guardian Valeriano Jos? Pinto hired her to Jo?o 
Francez at 12$ per month105 to work ?from the arrival of the cow milk in early morning until the 
supper at nine or ten o?clock in the evening that ended the daily round of meals.?106 Domestic 
 
102 Jornal do Commercio, 05/17/1851. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_04/2142.  
103 Sandra Lauderdale Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth- 
Century Rio de Janeiro. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). 
104 Robert Hesketh was a British consul who lived in Rio de Janeiro in the end of 1840s and beginning of 1850s. He 
registered information about the conditions of liberated Africans in Brazil. Many of them voluntarily sought him to 
tell their experience as liberated Africans, which included information about their occupation, family condition, 
residency among other data.   
105 Hesketh's Return 09/30/1851, FO 131/7. 
106 Graham, House and Street. 
 45 
servants as Generosa became indispensable to their concessionaires, both for earning money to 
pay the jornales107 for their guardians and for accomplishing tasks inside and outside the 
houses.108 Generosa submitted her petition for full freedom on July 24 , 1855, after twenty years 
of labor.  
According to Lauderdale Graham, a cook like Generosa ?alternated between periods of 
hectic preparations and slacker times when she might tackle the other tasks.?109 Because 
domestic servants should perform a number of tasks, this service was considered a 
nonspecialized work, although it required knowledge and training. Graham, for example, 
described the skills needed to the preparation of a chicken: ?with a small, precise cut in the neck 
vein, a cook killed and quickly bled a chicken, singed and plucked its feathers, then dressed it for 
cooking.?110 Cooking had a larger connotation that involved many times taking care of the 
livestock until the final preparation that could be done on open-heart stoves, where the 
temperature was controlled only by experience.111 The classification of jobs in specialized and 
nonspecialized passes also through the gender bias.  
The chores of a cook could also include the management of the stock. Jornal do 
Comm?rcio on January 22, 1855, advertised a black woman to work as a dispenseira.112 This 
position, described by Bernard Moitt as ?conome,113 could be very time-consuming. The 
responsibilities were not limited to buy supplies. This job required the knowledge of all functions 
 
107 When the African was hired, this was the money he or she had to give to their master every day or every week, 
depending on how they accorded it.  
108 Ka?tia M. de Queir?s. Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550-1888. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. 
1986), 96.  
109 Graham, House and Street. 
110 Graham, House and Street, 47. 
111 Varnell Badgett, ?Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah.? Studies in Popular Culture 26 no.1 (2003): 39. 
112http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/docreader.aspx?bib=364568_04&pasta=ano%20185&pesq=boa%20dispenseira  
113 Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 
2001). 
 46 
of the house, for instance cooking, cleaning, fixing, and gardening, in order to buy the right 
supplies. Also, it required a strong connection the local businesses. If an important family would 
throw a big party, the dispenseira should articulate with the sellers a larger purchase than the 
usual. If the family would receive some guest, the dispenseira should recalculate the meals and 
prepare the special tableware. Moreover, African women were required to perform more than 
one task, differently from African men.114 The woman who took care of the purchases, many 
times had to cook, clean, do laundry, and watch the kids. According to Graham, these chores 
allowed black women to circulate in diverse spaces, both public and private ones. 
Other authors had also explored the fluidity of movement of black women, especially 
those living in the cities. Marisa Fuentes, for instance, described a situation in which, during one 
night, a slave boy dressed himself like a slave woman in order to have access to the house of the 
slave owner he desired to kill.115 This situation demonstrates that black women frequently 
circulated by public spaces of the city, including at night, and entered private spaces without 
being suspicious. In the episode described by Fuentes, the private space is related to the place 
occupied by white people. The houses of white wealthy families had structures that stablished 
the separation of what was restricted and what was common. A family that lived in a two-story 
house, for example, would dedicate the ground floor for public affairs, while the second floor 
would accommodate the family in intimate moments. Lauderdale described a mansion in Rio de 
Janeiro, where just wealthy families could afford living. She stated that in these mansions, the 
kitchen would be attached to the main house for convenience and supervision, being the space of 
 
114 Jornal do Commercio, 05/03/1854. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_04/6842. In this edition there were 
the following ads: ?Aluga-se uma preta que lava, engomma, coze e cozinha e faz todo o servic?o da casa? and ?Precisa-
se de um preto que seja bom cozinheiro?. 
115 Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. (Philadelphia: University of 
Pennsylvania Press, Inc. 2016), 71 
 47 
transition between public and private, for the next spot would be a patio or the servants room, 
considered part of public places.116 Poor families, on the other hand, particularly poor black 
families, lived in small houses with barely no divisions. Flophouses, slums, quilombos were 
characterized by the lack of privacy and the extension of the family to beyond the kin bonds.117  
If some black communities could cross different families, especially in urban spaces, in 
rural spaces one black family was commonly spread in different communities. Nikki Taylor 
pointed out to the difficulties of being a mother at the same time of being a domestic slave when 
she examined the case of Margaret Garner.118 The Garners lived in different plantations. While 
the husband, Simon, and his parents worked for James Marshall, the wife, Margaret, and the four 
kids lived in the Gaines?s farm. If on one hand, black mothers who were able to keep their 
children close to them were fortunate, on the other hand, the conditions for motherhood were far 
from ideal. The excess of work, the multi-tasks and the responsibility over the white children led 
the black women to have their kids separated from them for long periods. The liberated African 
Romana Congo, #187, had a son named Francisco. While her child worked as in a hired-out 
regime to a lady named Maria, Romana worked for Antonio Ribeiro dos Campos and 
accumulated the functions of cook and washerwoman.119  
It is possible, however, that the work of washerwoman facilitated some encounters 
between Romana and Francisco. If the child worked as a carrier, a message boy, a water 
 
116 Graham, House and Street, 15-6. 
117 Juliana Barreto Farias described the house number 114, on Sacramento Street, place where the black couple Emilia 
Soared do Patroc?nio and Joaquim Manoel Pereira lived for more than third years: it is impossible to know if it was 
?house with more than one bedroom or a tenement, but in this place different black men and women lived together, 
sometimes in different periods sometimes at the same time, and shared bonds of friendship and solidarity.? Juliana 
Barreto Farias, ?De Escrava a Dona: A Trajet?ria da Africana Mina Emilia Soares do Patroci?nio no Rio de Janeiro do 
Se?culo XIX.? Locus: Revista de Hist?ria 18, no 2 (2013): 22. 
118 Nikki Marie Taylor, Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. 
(Athens: Ohio University Press. 2016), 40.  
119 Hesketh's Return 09/30/1851, FO 131/7. 
 48 
collector, or had any other outdoor occupation, he might have been able to see his mother in one 
of the public fountains used to wash clothes.  Mary Karash informed that some of these places 
supported more than 200 women at the same time, who beat the clothes against the walls or 
rocks and stretch them in the floor to dry them out120. While waiting for the clothes to dry and be 
ready to be folded and taken home to be ironed, Romana could have used the time to play with 
her kid, to talk to other washerwomen about her activities, to hear an enslaved woman 
complaining about her owners, or to overhear a plan for escape. These women got, along with 
the relative autonomy resultant of the outdoor and unsupervised work, a net of solidarity capable 
of organize acts of resistance.121 Washerwoman connected house and street, the intimacy and the 
explicit. 
 
?Se Fara? Justic?a:? Liberated African Women and the Judiciary System 
Dionizia Congo, # 196, served her guardian Francisco Antonio de Azevedo Magalh?es 
since 1835, the year that liberated Africans from the Rio da Prata were distributed to 
concessionaires, until at least 1854, year of her petition for emancipation. Magalha?es ?always 
hired her for twenty thousand reis per month to work as wet nurse. The petitioner [Dionizia] is 
well behaved and tempered. She is tired of suffering vexations of every kind.?122 Through her 
petition, Dionizia was standing against daily harassments and ?oppression that has remained for 
nineteen years [in which she gave] the majority of the profits to her guardian."123 Liberated 
 
120 Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 288. 
121 Tera Hunter, To 'joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors After the Civil War. (Cambridge, 
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 
122 Dionizia. Petition. 05/27/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese: ?sempre a trouxe 
alugada por vinte mil reis por m?s como ama de leite, sendo a supplicante bem conduzida e morigerada, estando 
cansada de sofres vexa??es de toda esp?cie.? 
123 Dionizia. Petition. 05/27/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese: ?livrarsse da 
oppressa?o que tem permanecido a dezenove annos e dado a maioria dos lucros a seu arrematante.? 
 49 
Africans, like Dionizia, used the judiciary system as one strategy to stop these vexations and 
mistreatments, to resist bondage, get their definitive emancipation. 124 
Even though she succeeded in her emancipation process, Dionizia?s complaint is essential 
to understand the condition under which liberated Africans lived in Brazil. For more than 50 
years historians have been discussing about the status of liberated Africans. In 1973, Robert 
Conrad argued that these Africans were ?neither slaves nor free.? Through his article, Conrad 
pointed some circumstances in which being a liberated African was even worse than being a 
slave, for while slave owners had interests in protecting the value of their property, guardians 
had less responsibility over liberated Africans, considering them as ?cheap slaves.?125 The 
dubious status of liberated Africans approximated them with the slave population. To a certain 
extent, Mamigonian agrees with Conrad. In fact, she asserts that conditions of labor of liberated 
Africans and enslaved people were similar. She, however, disagrees with Conrad that these 
Africans could be approximated of enslaved people so closely, especially after the decree 1303. 
Liberated Africans had in fact a common identity, that featured them as the group of people who 
could petition for their freedom.126 Mamigonian?s point is fundamental for this research, since 
the community element is essential to understand how women were able to access the Brazilian 
legal system and request their final emancipation 
Keila Grinberg states that even though enslaved people took a significative number of 
cases to the courts, it was not easy for black people to access justice. It was possible to use the 
legal system only to accelerate a private agreement between slave and owner, as Liberata did in 
 
124 To read more on liberated African resistance, Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian, ?Do que preto mina ? capaz: etnia e 
resiste?ncia entre africanos livres.? Afro-?sia 24 (2000). 
125 Robert Conrad, ?Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818-1868.? The Hispanic American 
Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1973): 50-70. 
126 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres. 
 50 
her suit for freedom, but most of the slaves carried their cases as legal suits until the end. In order 
to start a legal case, slaves should have a white person to be their representative. This person 
would be able to request the help of the curator and be an ally against reprisal or punishments. 
Grinberg asserts that not every black person was able to take this first step and normally it was 
the urban black population, more independent than those people living in plantations, that was 
more successful in this requirement.127 For liberated Africans, even though the request of 
emancipation was different in many ways, the accessing the legal system was similarly difficult. 
 The population of liberated African that petitioned emancipation resided mostly in urban 
centers, as well as the majority of enslaved people who appealed to justice to obtain their liberty. 
Living in Rio de Janeiro, in particular, brought some advantages to these women, firstly, because 
it was a city with many resources, including the convenience of having a local court, secondly 
the presence of curators willing to accept representing black people, and finally the possibility of 
working by wages which allowed liberated Africans to afford the access to the legal system. 
Requesting the final emancipation letter was a long process that included preparing a petition, 
gathering support documents to prove the identity of the liberate Africans, in which vessel they 
arrived in Brazil, for how long they worked, who were their guardians, and finally a statement 
that they had learned how to be part of the society, in other words that they had regular behavior. 
It was a complex process and it took some time after the sanction of the Decree 1303 to liberated 
Africans to figure out how to organize all the requirements. 
If the access to the legal system might have been difficult to both enslaved people and 
liberated Africans, the latter had their right granted to seize the opportunity for emancipation. 
The aforementioned demographics of liberated Africans from the Rio da Prata show that 
 
127 Keila Grinberg, Liberata, a lei da Ambigu?idade: as Ac?o?es de Liberdade da Corte de Apelac?a?o do Rio De Janeiro 
no Se?culo XIX. (Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Relume Dumara?, 1994), 69-70. 
 51 
women, especially those who worked as domestic servants, made more petitions. Additionally, 
they were well succeeded, for most of their petitions were approved. This chapter claims that 
there is a connection between the work performed mostly by women and access to the legal 
system. Domestic service allowed women to have a net of contact that spread the information 
about the necessity of petitions, the steps of the process, and the possibility of final 
emancipation.  
 Mamigonian highlights the interaction among liberated Africans, enslaved people, free 
blacks, and whites.128 These relationships were part of the daily lives of cooks, laundry woman, 
water carriers, and dispenseiras. Clemencia Angola, #214, for instance, appeared in the police 
interview to verify her identity. When ?asked how she was called, where she was from, how old 
she was, her marital status, her occupation and her address,? she answered that her name was 
Clemencia, original from Benguela. She was thirty years old and unmarried. She lived at 3, Rua 
dos Ciganos, at Doctor Domingos de Azevedo Coutinho Duque-Estrada?s house, who was her 
guardian. She also declared that she worked in the domestic services. When asked a question 
about the authorship of her petition, she replied that even though she was the author of the 
petition, she was helped by Jo?o da Rocha Mazarem Filho.129 Clemencia had support of a white 
man, what is indicated by his name that counts with first name, family name. Also, the suffix 
Filho shows that this man had a known father, an indicative of probable wealth. In the Almanak 
Administrativo, Mercantil e Industrial da Corte Provincia do Rio de Janeiro,130 Jo?o da Rocha 
 
128 Mamigonian, Liberated Africans, 198. 
129 Clemencia. Police Interview. 08/25/1856. ANRJ. Caixa 782 Pacote 2. Original in Portuguese: ?Perguntada como 
se chamava, donde era natural, sua idade, estado, ocupa??o e resid?ncia? Respondeu chamar-se Clemencia, de na??o 
Benguella, de trinta d?idade, solteira, servic?o dome?stico e morar a rua dos Siganos numero tres, casa de seu 
concecionario Doutor Domingos de Azevedo Coutinho Duque-Estrada; Perguntado se fora ella quem andara fazer a 
peti??o para sua emancipa??o? Respondeu que sim e que fora feira por Joa?o da Rocha Mararem Filho? 
130 Eduardo Laemmerk, Almanak Administrativo, Mercantil e Industrial da Corte Provincia do Rio de Janeiro, para 
o anno de 1854. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_DN0WAQAAMAAJ_2  
 52 
was listed as inspetor de quarter?o, in the second district of Sacramento. This position was 
occupied by literate people who would be in charge of the surveillance of a determined space. 
Rocha appeared in another document in Clemencia?s process. It was him who required that ?the 
registrar of liberated Africans the information about the time when Duque-Estrada acquired the 
services of Clemencia.?131  
 Based only on these documents, it is impossible to know the precise details about the 
relationship between Jo?o da Rocha and Clemencia. Maybe Jo?o da Rocha visited Duque-
Estrada, and Clemencia served dinner to them. Another possibility is that, as inspector do 
quarteir?o, Jo?o da Rocha accompanied the outdoors activities of Clemencia. It is also possible, 
that Clemencia looked for Jo?o da Rocha to complain about mistreatments or punishments 
practiced by his guardian, and the inspector decided to intervene. For the information available, 
it is likely that Joa?o da Rocha participate in Clemencia?s process of emancipation as an active 
part. 
  Justina Congo also had external help. Different from Clemencia however, Justina had 
never said any names. It was her guardian, Roberto da Silva dos Santos Pereira, who stated: ?I 
am sure that it was not her idea alone to request her emancipation, but she must be under the 
influence of someone else. She did not request her emancipation; actually, she requested her own 
disgrace.? Even though the director of the house of correction affirmed that she had a regular 
behavior, Pereira barred her process of emancipation, declaring: ?since she was entrusted to 
 
131 Jo?o da Rocha Mazarem. Solicitation. 07/02/1856. ANRJ. Caixa 782 Pacote 2. Original in Portuguese: ?Diz Joa?o 
da Rocha Mazarem que necessita que (?) o escriv?o dos Africanos Livres, revendo os livros de matr?cula dos 
Africanos cujo servi?os est?o assalariados lhe passe por certid?o a epocha em que for?o confiados ao Doutor 
Domingos de Azevedo Coutinho Duque Estrada o servi?o da Africana livre Clemencia.? 
 53 
work for me, Justina did not have the worse behavior. However, it is not good either. She never 
takes into consideration my verbal warnings and she is very disrespectful.?132 
 Pereira was a very influential man. According to Hesketh, he was the guardian of twelve 
liberated African from the Rio da Prata. His words influenced the decision of denying her 
emancipation. Although the judge of orphans had already approved her emancipation, writing 
?se fara? justic?a? ? ?justice will be done? ? in her petition, the decision was revoked especially 
after the suspicion that Justina was being helped by someone became a fact. Pereira discovered 
that she ?escaped, and she is being kept hidden by her protectors.?133 
Justina worked as a washerwoman for more than twenty years. It is very likely that she 
had a network of intimate allies and casual acquaintances. Her second petition demonstrates that 
she and the community that supported her were aware of the arguments used in successful 
petitions. She built a set of arguments: she alleged being old and sick, claimed that her guardian 
did not justified his disapproval of her emancipation, she denounced mistreatments, and she 
underscored her good behavior. Another example that Justina knew other liberated Africans 
doing their petitions is that ?she does not understand why she was not answered, since so many 
Africans have been approved.?134  As a washerwoman, it is also reasonable that she had great 
knowledge of the streets of Rio de Janeiro to make easier to her to be hidden.  
 
132 Roberto da Silva dos Santos Pereira. Declaration 04/27/1861. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6J-123. Original in 
Portuguese: ?tenho a dizer que, desde que se me confiara?o os seus servic?os ate? agora, sua conduta na?o tem sido 
p?ssima: mas n?o boa;  Nunca atendeo as advert?ncias que eu lhe fiz, por outros motivos iguais; he bastante 
respondona e certamente induzida por algu?m, requereo, na?o a sua emancipac?a?o mas o princi?pio de sua desgrac?a? 
133 Roberto da Silva dos Santos Pereira. Declaration 04/27/1861. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a. 6J-123.  Original in 
Portuguese: ?Segundo me disseram os da casa (talvez seus protetores repentinos) se acha fugida; o que n?o acredito, 
mas sim escondida.? 
134 Justina. Petition. 04/08/1861. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6J-123. Original in Portuguese: ?Excmo Senhor, a 
suppe ignora porque foi desattendia havendo outros Africanos sendo favorecidos.? 
 54 
Many other liberated African women used rival geography to resist. 135 Escaping was a 
reality, not only for slaves but also for liberated Africans. In this sense, women from the Rio da 
Prata had also their names in newspapers advertisements when they fled, similar to those of 
runaway slaves. It is known that two of them, Eufemia and Romana, came back to their 
guardians, but the information if they were caught or returned by their own will is not available. 
Anna and Sebastiana, the other two, were never found. Some of the ads informed the 
circumstances in which these women run away. One of them had a tray full of treats, the other 
one was selling vegetables, the last one had one ceramic plate and one can of water with her 
when disappeared, meaning that all of them were in public spaces when they disappeared. There 
is no certainty, however, that these women really escaped, because the strong possibility that 
some of these women had been kidnaped. Nonetheless, the circumstance in which they were in a 
public space, unsupervised, and having support from other people favors the hypothesis of the 
escape.  
Many were the causes for the escape. Mistreatments and an abusive load of work were 
the most common of them. Perdig?o Malheiro noticed the abuse of power regarding the 
guardians and states that ?in general, they [the guardians] had in mind only the advantages of 
having the fruit of their [liberated Africans] work in exchange for an insignificant retribution that 
so many times they escaped of paying. They want to live from the African?s sweat similar to 
what they do with slaves. Even the best people are subject to greed and power abuse.?136 Some 
guardians went to the judicial system to get rid of the liberated Africans when these were 
 
135 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. 
Gender and American Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 
136 Agostinho Marques Perdig?o Malheiro, A Escravid?o no Brasil, vol 2. (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 
1867), 65-6. Original in Portuguese: ?No geral s? tinha?o em mira as vantagens leoninas a colher dos seus servic?os, 
por t?o miseravel retribui??o, que todavia deixav?o de pagar! queri?o viver do suor do Africano a semelhan?a do 
escravo. As melhores disposic?o?es era?o illudidas pelo espirito de ganancia, sempre fertil e propenso ao abuso.? 
 55 
considered  unable to participate in the society as free people accusing them of lack of moral 
sense, of being alcoholic or promiscuous. Some authors, however, analyzed drunkenness and 
other behaviors that masters and concessionaires frowned upon as acts of resistance.137 For 
liberated Africans of the Rio da Prata, the access to the legal system took twenty years to start 
being an option. Before that, they looked for alternative ways of resisting. 
Liberated Africans that chose to use the legal system had to use all their resources to fight 
against their servitude. Their pleas frequently took the form of hyperbolic requests. Michaella, 
for instance, was ?prostrated to the emperor?s feet and implored for the gift of emancipation.?138 
Eufrazia uses the same characteristic ?humbly, begging her emancipation to the Emperor, who 
works benevolently in favor of the oppressed humanity.?139 These women fought against 
bondage with many weapons and the legal system was one of them. Justice, however, was used 
through a net of contacts and solidarity.  
 
Sharon Romeo wrote about black women who used the judiciary system in Saint Louis 
during the Civil War period: ?women? ? in this case, she was referring to enslaved women ? 
?insisted that abuses and inequalities perpetuated by the institution of slavery were not just a 
domestic or state concern.?140 Liberated African women in Brazil also made the legal system to 
work in their favor with their petitions, documents, and interviews. Historically, these women 
were important, for they used a very complex resource, the legislative system, that was 
 
137 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom. 
138 Michaella. Petition. 05/05/1855. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49. Original in Portuguese: ?A Africana livre 
Micaela vem lan?ar-se aos pe?s de V. M. Imperial implorando a grac?a de sua emancipac?a?o? 
139 Eufrazia. Petition. 02/23/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese: ?vem umildemente 
implorar de V M I que exercitando t?o alta benevol?ncia concedida em o dito decreto em prol da humanidade 
oprimida, se digne fazer lhe a grac?a mandar que seja sua emancipac?a?o confirmada.? 
140 Sharon Romeo, Gender and the Jubilee: Black Freedom and the Reconstruction of Citizenship in Civil War 
Missouri. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 2. 
 
 56 
dominated by white, wealthy men. Moreover, they are black women who got their freedom and 
that is enough to be historically remarkable. Historiographically, these women are also important 
because they illuminate the studies of black people in Brazil. Through their petition, historians 
have a better grasp on the daily lives of domestic servants, and on servitude and freedom. 
Moreover, social scientists have more material to understand strategies of struggle of black 
people searching for liberty and citizenship.  
 57 
Chapter Three 
Resistance and Precariousness of Freedom among Liberated African Women 
 
Andreza Angola, # 169, requested her emancipation letter nine months after the 
enactment of the Decree 1303 of December 28, 1853. This decree declared that liberated 
Africans who served more than 14 years to private concessionaires dating from the 1831 Law 
could solicit their freedom through the legal system. Her petition, dated from October 14, 1854, 
had a straightforward narrative: ?Andreza declares that, by the attached document, she proves 
that she has worked for nineteen years, as a liberated African, entrusted to Caetano Pimentel do 
Vabo, and appealing to the Decree 1303 that announces that her services should last 14 years, 
she comes obsequious at the foot of the Throne of Your Imperial Majesty to place her 
supplication that Your Imperial Majesty send her emancipation letter.?141 This petition resulted 
in the consent of full emancipation from Joaquim Jos? Sequeira, the judge of orphans, who wrote 
on it with his typical words of approval ?se fara? justic?a? ? ?justice will be done? ? in November 
17, 1854. Her case also includes the police interrogation in which she indicates her own will in 
soliciting her emancipation and a letter from her guardian, the already mentioned Pimentel do 
Vabo, attesting to her good behavior and willingness to work. By looking at these documents, it 
is possible to see that Andreza was on the path to get her freedom after many years of labor. 
However, a document from December 11, 1854, in which she once again requested her liberty, 
 
141 Andreza. Petition. 10/14/1854. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese: ?Diz Andreza, que 
pelo documento junto mostra ter servido 19 annos, como Africana livre, confiada a Caetano Pimentel do Vabo, e 
mostrando o Decreto Imperial, que o praso de seus servi?os, seja de 14 annos, vem submissa, junto aos p?s do Trono 
de V.M.I. depositar esta sua supplica, para que V.M.I. se digne mandar que lhe seja dada a sua carta de emancipa??o  
pelo que  
P.a V.M.I.  
Haja por Effeitos de suprema bondade afirmo deferir? 
 
 
 58 
implies that although she had gone through all the steps to get her emancipation letter, her 
freedom was uncertain.    
That same year, in addition to Andreza, four other liberated African women from the ship 
Rio da Prata requested their emancipation. All types of difficulties came with inexperience in 
dealing with the new law. Andreza and the other petitioners had to discover the answers for 
questions such as:  What documents should they gather? Where did they need to go to file them? 
How much would the process cost? Who should write the petitions for them since most of them 
was were illiterate? Once they got the answers, they faced other concerns about how the scribe 
should formulate the petitions, whether the concessionaires would write a favorable declaration, 
or what the chance of success was, and how to proceed in case that their pleas were rejected. 
Andreza?s second request shows some of these concerns as well as the uncertainties related to 
her freedom. This document, elaborated with more complex arguments, says that along with the 
fact of having already served the amount of time necessary to qualify for emancipation, Andreza 
suffered from tuberculosis and hoped that her emancipation would give her ?the consolation of 
not dying in captivity.?142 The emphasis on the long wait for her emancipation papers and the 
additional information about her poor health as arguments to make her seem more entitled to get 
her definitive liberation reveal the anxiety that Andreza was experiencing. Being free was not 
only desired; it was urgent. 
The hurry in getting her emancipation letter, caused, according to her words, by the fear 
of death ? especially the fear of dying in bondage ? expresses the fragility of Andreza?s 
experience of freedom. This chapter aims to examine the requests for the definitive emancipation 
of the women from the ship Rio da Prata in the light of the concept of the precariousness of 
 
142 Andreza. Petition. 10/14/1854. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese: ?a consolac?a?o de que 
n?o morrer? no captiveiro.?  
 59 
freedom developed by the historian Sidney Chalhoub. This concept is used here to understand 
how the volatility of freedom of liberated African women helped them to shape their daily life 
and experiences of resistance. In A For?a da Escravid?o, Chalhoub argues that slavery in 
nineteenth-century Brazil was a key factor to the condition of a precarious freedom in the free 
and freed black population. 143 He scrutinizes a series of police records of the Casa de Deten??o 
da Corte describing black men and women arrested under the suspicion of being enslaved. These 
prisoners had to prove that they were free, and, in the case of failure, they could be sold as slaves 
in a public auction or forced to join the army or the marines. Through the analysis of these 
documents, Chalhoub states that public policies gave strength to slavery - even during the years 
of heightened abolitionist pressure - which limited experiences of freedom of the black 
population. In this sense, the danger of being sold into slavery ? or resold in the case of freed 
blacks ? went together with the constriction of other experiences of freedom. If the greater 
probability of black people being arrested or sold into slavery was a large part of his argument to 
demonstrate the precariousness of freedom in A For?a da Escravid?o, in an earlier article, 
Chalhoub claims that this precariousness of freedom was structural. It affected the black 
population at different levels, for example, by denying access to education, and limiting political 
and civil rights. More specifically on the context of liberated Africans, Chalhoub conveys the 
idea that the 1831 Law ? that forbade the international slave traffic and liberated Africans 
brought to Brazil illegally ? boosted illegal slavery, strengthened alliances among slave owners 
and the Brazilian authorities that overlooked crimes of illegal enslavement, and ?impacted the 
daily experience of freedom for people of African descent in general, since it caused insecurity 
 
143 Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o: Ilegalidade e Costume no Brasil Oitocentista. (Sa?o Paulo: Companhia 
das Letras, 2012). 
 60 
and rendered freedom precarious.? 144 In dialog with the concept of precariousness of freedom, 
the historian Beatriz Mamigonian points out how Chalhoub restricts the use of this notion to a 
legal precariousness and puts aside important themes such as the poor conditions of labor and 
resistance.145 Particularly, Mamigonian asserts the importance of bringing complexity to 
Chalhoub?s argument, considering together the fact that not all the authorities were in favor of 
the crime of illegal enslavement, and that ?the origin of the victim, the social position of the 
accused, the access to the authorities, the existence of a net of support, and the diplomatic and 
politic circumstances influenced the opening and success rate of the suits?146  Contributing to this 
dialog, I change the focus of Chalhoub?s precariousness of freedom and consider a new 
dimension for this concept. While Chalhoub focuses on how the law and politics restricted legal 
practices of freedom and therefore are the agent of the precariousness of freedom over these 
women, I argue that these women were, firstly, aware of their limited freedom and, secondly, 
used the precariousness of their freedom as an argument in their petitions and a means to get 
emancipated. In this sense, I add more nuances to Mamigonian?s view on how liberated Africans 
were able to resist. For this, I examine the circumstances of tension between the experience of 
freedom and its precariousness in a biographical approach to hear the voices of women in their 
struggle to resist.  
Along with Andreza?s story, in this chapter, I analyze in depth four other stories from 
women from the Rio da Prata. Bonifacia Angola, # 176, and Eufrazia Angola, # 195, bring their 
problems to get emancipated caused by bureaucratic problems with their identity. Dionizia 
 
144 Sidney Chalhoub, "The Precariousness of Freedom in a Slave Society (Brazil in the Nineteenth 
Century)," International Review of Social History 56, no. 3 (2011), 424. 
145 Beatriz Mamigonian, ?A Liberdade no Brasil Oitocentista,? Afro-?sia, no. 48 (2013): 395-405. 
146 Beatriz G Mamigonian, Africanos Livres: A Abolic?a?o do Tra?fico de Escravos no Brasil. (Sa?o Paulo, SP: 
Companhia das Letras, 2017), 419. 
 61 
Angola?s story ? #196 ? leads the reflection on wet-nurses and their experience of freedom. 
Lastly, Narciza Cassange?s case ? # 197 ? is examined to discuss issues of motherhood and 
gender. More than just showing cases of women whose freedom was circumscribed, in this 
chapter I show how precariousness of freedom helped to shape their strategies of resistance. 
Andreza?s case, in this sense, is a demonstration of this tension between the strength of slavery, 
which constantly denied her the complete experience of liberty, and the resistance that molded 
her fight against the slave system.  
In the documents from the mid 1860s, it is unclear if Andreza was successful in her 
petition. In the 1865 list, elaborated by the Brazilian government, the information about her final 
destination is missing, which could lead us to the belief that Sequeira ? the judge of orphans ? 
had changed his mind and overruled her request, or that her petition was not approved in the 
Ministry of Justice.147 The list of 1864, for example, elaborated by Reginaldo Muniz Freire by 
the request of the British official Lennon Hunt, divided liberated Africans into the categories of 
?existents,? ?emancipated,? and ?deceased.? As we can see in the image below, Andreza is 
located in the column of ?existents? rather than in the column of ?emancipated,? implying that 
she had not received her second emancipation.  
 
s  
 62 
 
Image 3. Detail of the nominal list of 1864 where Andreza - the last name of this image - appears as part of 
the existents liberated Africans148 
 
148 ANRJ-ZU Juizo Municipal 1? Vara do Rio de Janeiro Ma?o 646 N? 5473 ff. 7-9 "Reginaldo Muniz Freire,? 
March 1864, "Brigue Rio da Prata.? 
 63 
However, Andreza appears as emancipated in the document dated from December 22, 1854, 
which lists all the Africans whose petitions were approved that year.  
 
 
Image 4. Detail of the list of emancipated in 1854. Andreza ? the last name in this image ? appears as one 
of them.149 
 
This list comes accompanied with a letter from Jos? Thomas Nabuco de Araujo, at that time 
Minister of Justice, addressed to Sequeira, that reads: ?Your Majesty, the Emperor, grants 
freedom for the liberated Africans whose names are listed in the attached document. Your Honor 
should send the emancipation letters to the police station.?150 Looking at these lists together 
opens up to questions about Andreza?s destiny. Did she receive her emancipation letter? If she 
did not, what happened to her letter? If she was indeed emancipated why do the later lists have 
different information? More importantly, if there is a mistake in the lists of the 1860s, how could 
it have affected her freedom? Even though the documents available for Andreza?s case make it 
 
149 List of emancipated. 12/22/1854. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 5B-283. 
150 List of emancipated. 12/22/1854. ANRJ. Minist?rio da Justi?a, 5B-283. In Portuguese: ?s. M. o Imperador, 
attendendeo aos que representaram os Africanos livres constants na rela??o inclusa. Devendo V. Ex.a remeter as 
ditas cartas a repatic?a?o de policia.?  
 64 
impossible to be sure about her fate, her story opens up a discussion on how inconsistencies in 
legal documents reveal the precariousness of freedom.  
The nominal lists of the 1860s were product of the political tension of the time. With the 
decree of 1864 all liberated Africans were definitively emancipated. This was the result of 
Brazilian and British pressure, as well as the uncomfortable diplomatic relationship between 
Brazil and England.151 After 1864, the Brazilian government urged the closing of the case of 
liberated Africans by accounting for their lives and their destinies. The different lists had 
contrasting information, though. The 1864 list counted with 8673 names while the 1865 
inventory got to 10719 and remained incomplete. Moreover, the 1865 list contains columns with 
information about nationality, concessionaires, and final destination ? with many data 
unconcluded.152 Even though these documents bring valuable information about the liberated 
Africans all over Brazil, the lack of conclusive information about some of them points to the 
failure of the Brazilian government to keep track of them.  
The case of Bonifacia, one of Andreza?s shipmates, is one these cases. When Bonifacia 
arrived in Brazil, she received the name Maria. In 1835, Jos? Joaquim Ferreira became her 
concessionaire153 until 1852, after which she started working in the Gunpowder Factory in Rio 
de Janeiro. During these years, she preserved the name Maria, at least in official documents. By 
the time she was entrusted to Isabel Maria Mignon, her last concessionaire, she no longer 
answered to the name Maria, but to Bonifacia. This information is not available in the body of 
her petition, made in July 22, 1863, but in the comments in margins of the document, what 
 
151 Richard Graham, ?Os Fundamentos da Ruptura de Relac?o?es Diploma?ticas entre o Brasil e a Gra?-Bretanha em 
1863: ?a Questa?o Christie.?? Revista de Histo?ria 24, no. 49 (1962): 117?138; Richard Graham, ?Os Fundamentos da 
Ruptura de Relac?o?es Diploma?ticas entre o Brasil e a Gra?-Bretanha em 1863: ?a Questa?o Christie? (Ii).? Revista de 
Histo?ria 24, no. 50 (1962): 379?402. 
152 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres, 383-4. 
153 The decree enacted in 1835 regulated the concession of liberated Africans to private hirer. Their legal guardians 
were called concessionaires. 
 65 
shows that this information was not provided by the petitioner, but by the authorities evaluating 
the case. Their notes on the margins of the petitions can trace the path that the documents 
followed. It shows, for example, when the Minister of Justice required more information about 
the petitioners; or the Judge of orphans approved or rejected their request. In Bonifacia?s plea, 
Sequeira made two extensive comments expressing his concern about the identity of the 
petitioner. In the first comment, dated August 1863, he informs that Isabel Maria Mignon, 
Bonifacia?s concessionaire, had had another liberated African, a man named Francisco, who died 
prior to 1852. In this year, Mignon received Bonifacia as a replacement. He also informs that 
since then, Mignon had been trying unsuccessfully to register the exchange because of the 
difficulty in identifying Bonifacia among the group of liberated Africans. In a following 
comment, issued in December 1863, Sequeira states that Maria, the liberated African guarded by 
Jos? Joaquim Ferreira, was not the same person as the one petitioning for freedom. Bonifacia had 
her hands tied. At that point, Sequeira had determined that Bonifacia would not enjoy her 
freedom by the inability of proving her identity. 
Identity checking was a mandatory process in all cases of liberated Africans requesting 
emancipation. The way to verify whether the petitioners were truly liberated Africans was to 
trace the connection between them and the ships that got caught transporting them illegally. 
While the 1831 Law declared that the Africans arrived after its approval would be emancipated, 
Brazilian conservative authorities interpreted it restrictively; only those who got caught at the sea 
or at the entrance of the country would be considered liberated Africans, denying this status to 
those whose traders were more successfully in sneaking their importation and sale. Despite the 
pressure of liberals and the British campaign that tried to impose the interpretation that all 
Africans imported illegally had the right to be considered a liberated African and enjoy the right 
 66 
of emancipation, the 1853 Decree was attached to the conservative interpretation of the Feij? 
Law, which limited emancipation to fewer people. Freedom, in this context, belonged to a 
selected group and would not be a threat for the institution of slavery. Moreover, identity check 
would prevent slaves from using someone?s else identity in order to get free.154 The protocol of 
the identity checking would start with the director of the Secretaria do Estado dos Neg?cios da 
Justi?a requesting verification of the registers of matr?cula of the liberated Africans and the 
concession of their services to the guardians. A typical declaration proving their identities would 
provide name, number, and nation of the liberated African, date in which their services stared 
and the name of the concessionaire, and lastly the amount of years that the petitioner had 
worked.  
Authorities were unable to provide this information about Bonifacia until 1864, when 
Jos? Bernardo Figueiredo, curator of liberated Africans, declared in a letter to Josino do 
Nascimento Silva, director of the Secretaria do Estado dos Neg?cios da Justi?a, the following: 
?I should say to Your Honor that I once again checked against the Livro de Matr?cula of 
liberated Africans maintained by the Ministry  and I have acknowledged that there has been a 
mistake in the information given by the judge [of orphans],? referring specifically to Sequeira?s 
comment in the margin of Bonifacia?s document. In other words, Figueiredo asserts that despite 
the exchange of names, Bonifacia was in fact the liberated African who got to Brazil on board of 
the Rio da Prata and that Sequeira was wrong in affirming that Bonifacia and Maria were 
different people. Bonifacia might have received her letter through her petition or yet through the 
decree 3310 of 1864 that emancipated all liberated Africans.  Her fate, however, remains 
 
154 This is the case of Barbara Falero, Cuban slave who impersonate one of the Africans brought in the ship Dos 
Hermanos to Havana in 1795. Mari?a de los A?ngeles Merin?o Fuentes and Aisnara Perera Di?az, Del Tra?fico a la 
Libertad: El Caso de los Africanos de la Fragata Dos Hermanos en Cuba (1795-1837) (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial 
Oriente, 2014). 
 67 
uncertain. The nominal lists of 1860s fail once more in providing accurate information about the 
final destination of Bonifacia. 
 Even though this caused innumerable problems to Bonifacia, especially in her 
emancipation process, it is possible to interpret the change of name as an act of resistance. 
Shortly after landing, liberated Africans that got to Brazil participated in a ceremony of 
emancipation. In this ceremony, they received new names that along with their number of 
matricula, and their body features and marks served as the basis for the books of records of this 
population.155 Through the act of providing new names, Brazilian authorities not only kept a 
record of them but blurred their pagan past and old identities by renaming them with 
Portuguese Christian names. It is possible that Bonifacia did not identify herself with the name 
Maria and picked a new identity for her. If this is true, the act of changing names demonstrates 
that Bonifacia had some control over herself` ? if not over her body, at least over her identity. 
Additionally, it was common for West Africans like Bonifacia to acquire several names during 
their lives, based on important events they had experienced.156 Thus, Bonifacia resisted the 
invalidation of her culture and erasure of her identity by both choosing a new name and keeping 
the tradition of having a distinct name for a new phase of her life.   
Bonifacia was not the only liberated African from the Rio da Prata who altered her name. 
Eufrasia?s petition informs that her concessionaire called her Francisca. In contrast to Bonifacia 
however, Eufrasia did not employ the name Francisca as her signature. She demonstrates this in 
the phrase ?A rogo de Eufrasia.? Always found in the end of the petitions, the phrase ?A rogo 
de? followed by the name of the claimant means that the scribe wrote the document on behalf of 
 
155 Beatriz Mamigonian, ?Conflicts over the Meanings of Freedom,? in Paths to Freedom: Manumission in the 
Atlantic World. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 240. 
156 Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, "The Kimbundu Diaspora to Brazil: Records from the Slave Ship Brilhante, 
1838," African Diaspora 8, no. 2 (2015): 213. 
 68 
that specific African, due to her or his illiteracy. In other words, this phrase was in the place of 
her signature, and Eufrasia chose to sign with her first Brazilian name instead of Francisca. In 
other words, Eufrasia was the name with which she identified herself in the legal context, 
probably keeping Francisca for the domestic domain where she had no choice but to answer to 
the name which her concessionaire designated to her.  
It is difficult to imagine, however, that liberated Africans did not keep their original 
names among themselves. Daniel Domingues da Silva, for example, analyzing the ethnic 
composition of the Africans transported in the ship Brilhante, identified that most of them 
belonged to the same linguistic family.157 Even though, this did not necessarily promote the 
interaction among them, as Jennifer Nelson investigated in the same case of the ship Brilhante, 
having a group of people from the same linguistic family would have favored the maintenance of 
the language and facilitated adaptation in the new place.158 Moreover, Mamigonian asserts that 
there is no reason to believe that liberated African abandoned their old names.159 The Africans 
from the Rio da Prata got to Brazil four years earlier than the ones on board of the Brilhante. 
Departing from the same region, the presence of Africans from the same region as the ones from 
the Brilhante leads to think that they kept their African names as well. African names were not 
merely erased and must have been used among themselves in their daily lives. 
 The documents available did not keep register of how Eufrasia was called before 1834. It 
is possible to know, however, that she decided to maintain the name that she carried with her 
since her first days in Brazil instead of changing it to Francisca. The ceremony of emancipation 
 
157 Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, "The Kimbundu Diaspora to Brazil: Records from the Slave Ship Brilhante, 
1838," African Diaspora 8, no. 2 (2015): 200-219. 
158 Jennifer Nelson, ?Apprentices of Freedom: Atlantic Histories of the Africanos Livres in Mid-Nineteenth Century 
Rio De Janeiro.? Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 349?69. 
159 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres, 45.  
 69 
of the newly arrived Africans, although having other purposes than just to emancipate them, was 
the occasion on which they were declared officially free after the uncertain times amidst their 
kidnapping in Africa and the voyage on board the Rio da Prata. It is expected that some of the 
liberated Africans got attached to the names that they received that day. Moreover, Eufrasia was 
the name that provided her with the status of freedom. Thus, using the first name that she got in 
Brazil was a legal strategy to demand her final emancipation. Another possible reason for 
Eufrasia to keep her first Brazilian name is that her later name, Francisca, was probably 
associated with the world of labor and exploitation. Her life since she started her apprenticeship 
program was marked by instability. Unlike many liberated Africans who kept the same 
concessionaire for the entire time as apprentices, Eufrasia changed guardians three times. 
Francisco Caetano Martins, her first concessionaire, was the one who gave Eufrasia the 
nickname Francisca. At his house, she served a little more than one year, and was redirected to 
Maria Luiza da Concei??o in August 1836. After that, Eufrasia stayed for a period at the House 
of Correction when she finally was directed to Felicianno Firmo Monteiro, who was her 
concessionaire for more than 18 years. Monteiro, however, kept Eufrasia hired out to Martins ? 
her first guardian ? and his family. During her whole apprenticeship program, Eufrasia worked 
as a domestic servant. In a discussion about the work of liberated Africans, Mamigonian states 
that even though they had the judicial status of free people, they had few choices concerning 
labor. According to this author, the tasks performed by liberated Africans were much closer to 
the ones that slaves performed than to the ones that normally free or freed blacks used to work 
on. Crucially, she asserts that because of these similarities to slaves, liberated Africans believed 
that their freedom of work would come only when they finished their apprenticeship period, 
remaining as a temporary slave. In Eufrasia?s petition, it is possible to see that she approximated 
 70 
her work to slave labor, rather than to free people?s labor. She stated that she had worked 
?arduously, with no free Sundays, day that the Christian religion gives even to slaves to rest.? 160 
It seems reasonable that Eufrasia did not embody the name given by the family that treated her 
worse than a slave. 
 Liberated Africans had a dubious status both for themselves and their concessionaires. 
Robert Conrad describes the complex situation of this sect of the black population which, 
simultaneously, was legally free and worked under the same conditions of slaves.161 Conrad?s 
idea that liberated Africans were neither slaves nor free was further developed by other 
researchers.  In her investigation of the vessel Brilhante, Nelson corroborates with the idea that 
the conditions of labor amongst liberated Africans were similar to what slaves faced.162 On the 
government?s end, Chalhoub argues that authorities did not do much to clarify the status of the 
liberated Africans. Moreover, Brazilian authorities associated the newcomers with slaves as a 
protective measure to avoid rebellions from the illegally imported Africans who in fact became 
slaves. Mamigonian, on the Africans? end, states that even though the liberated Africans were 
aware of their different status, it was difficult to know to what extent this difference existed or 
was respected by Brazilian authorities. Analyzing petitions for emancipation, Mamigonian lists 
cases of liberated Africans who did not distinguish their condition from slavery, showing, for 
example, that they offered to pay the amount of their value in exchange of their letter of 
emancipation or that they stated should get freedom from captivity.163  
 
160 Eufrazia. Petition. 02/23/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. In Portuguese: ?mais rigoroso e assiduo 
servi?o sem rezerva do proprio Domingo, dia esse que pela religi?o Christ? deve ser dado mesmo ao proprio 
escravo.? 
161 Robert Conrad, ?Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818-1868.? The Hispanic American 
Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1973): 50?70. 
162 Nelson, Jennifer. ?Apprentices of Freedom: Atlantic Histories of the Africanos Livres in Mid-Nineteenth Century 
Rio De Janeiro.? Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 349?69. 
163 Beatriz Mamigonian. ?Conflicts Over the Meanings of Freedom,? 242. 
 71 
The ambiguity of the status of liberated Africans also appeared in newspapers 
advertisements that looked for fugitive liberated Africans. The readers of these newspapers, the 
white elite of large cities like Rio de Janeiro, saw in advertisements the similarities between them 
and enslaved people. One advertisement on Di?rio do Rio de Janeiro says: ?The liberated 
African Bazilia escaped or was seduced.? After giving information about her concessionaire, the 
ad described some physical characteristics ? regular height, oval face, large mouth, and gross 
lips? to finally offer a reward to the person who seized and brought Bazilia to the correct 
address.164  This ad demonstrates that liberated Africans had similarities with enslaved people 
not only in the conditions of labor but also with the control of their bodies and mobility. Bazilia, 
even though free, did not have the right to come and go, nor to leave her concessionaire. Another 
revealing feature of this advertisement is the use of the notion that a liberated African could be 
seduced.  This means that liberated Africans, as much as slaves, could have someone who helped 
them to escape, or oftentimes, that they could be kidnapped and sold into slavery.165 Legally, 
however, the crime of seducing a slave was different from seducing a liberated African. Slave 
stealing would be a crime against property and selling a liberated African into slavery would be a 
crime against individual liberty, more specifically, it would be ?reducing a free person to 
slavery.? 166 
The similarities between slaves and liberated Africans included punishments and 
mistreatments. The newspaper Diario do Rio de Janeiro brings a case of an unnamed liberated 
 
164 In Portuguese: ?fugio ou foi seduzida (?) a Africana livre de nome Brazilia (?) de estatura regular, rosto oval, 
boca grande e bei?os grossos.? Di?rio do Rio de Janeiro, 08/14/1843. 
http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/094170_01/26702  
165 Once more, Chalhoub has investigated this phenomenon. In the chapter ?O que os escravos sabiam,? he uses 
cases of slaves and free Africans who were seduzidos to discuss a net of communication among slaves, liberated, 
and free Africans. Sidney Chalhoub, A Forc?a da Escravida?o. 
166 Brazilian Criminal Code of 1830. Articles 257 and 179.  
 
 72 
African who went to the police in search of help. She claimed that the heirs of her concessionaire 
(supposedly deceased) hired her out illegally. Although part of her complaint was about her long 
due years of apprenticeship, the grievance that led her to the police was the harsh punishments 
applied of her by the person who hired her.167 Even though the possibility of contacting the 
police to denounce mistreatments implies that this African had a different status from a slave, it 
also reveals that punishments of liberated Africans were just as common as those given to 
enslaved people.  
Eufrasia from the Rio da Prata showed one aspect of the precariousness of her freedom 
when she declared that she was being treated similarly or worse than a slave.  As mentioned, she 
highlighted in her petition the years that she had already worked as an apprentice, without even 
the Sundays to rest, reason why she deserved to be freed. However, Eufrasia did not limit her 
argumentation to this. She appealed to the abilities acquired during the years of servitude as a 
strong reason for her emancipation. She declared that she would have been able to provide for 
herself with her skills in doing laundry and that she would have no problem in ?getting someone 
to testify about her good behavior.?168 In other words, she stated that she was qualified to live in 
the Rio de Janeiro without the possibility of becoming a criminal or a beggar. It is common that 
these two arguments - the one in which the liberated African woman compares the years spent as 
an apprentice to slavery and the one that she acquired enough skills in this period - appear 
together in the petitions. Dionizia, for instance, claimed to be well behaved and polite, essential 
qualifications to a liberated African woman who desires to be heard in her request for liberty. 
 
167 In Portuguese: ?Africana livre, que achando-se ao servi?o de terceiro, por cess?o illegalmente feita pelos 
herdeiros de uma Sra. a quem havia sido confiada, e tendo concluido o praso por que estav?o confiados seus 
servi?os, se apresenta a autoridade policial em consequencia dos maos tratos recebidos por parte do individuo em 
cujo poder se achava. Diario do Rio de Janeiro, 04/16/1851. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/094170_01/35790  
168 Eufrazia. Petition. 02/23/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. In Portuguese: ?na?o duvidando dar um fiador 
a sua conducta se V. M. I. assim o jugar mister.? 
 73 
Similar to Eufrazia, she showed how close to slavery her work was, complaining about all kinds 
of humiliation and oppression that she suffered while serving her guardian Francisco Antonio de 
Azevedo Magalh?es. Dionizia, however, centered the main argument of her petition on the 
monetary value of her service. She declared that her ?services were extremely important to her 
concessionaire, who always hired her out as wet nurse, service that generated 20 milreis per 
month to Magalha?es.?169 With this statement, Dionizia argued that she was useful to her 
concessionaire, and that she could be as useful to society when fully free. Dionizia demonstrated 
awareness of how her limited freedom helped the economic progress of her concessionaire and 
used it as argument for her emancipation.  
Dionizia seems to have understood perfectly well that her labor as a wet-nurse was one 
source of her guardian?s richness. Francisco Antonio de Azevedo Magalha?es was a businessman 
in Rio de Janeiro. His name appears many times in the local newspapers that registered his 
travels abroad. In these business trips, he bought goods to sell in auctions at his house at 
Marrecas street, in the heart of Rio de Janeiro. His name also appeared in the newspapers in the 
section ?slaves in the calabou?o,? used to report slaves who had been arrested. 170 The newspaper 
informs Magalh?es that his slave, Jorge Cabinda, waited for his master to rescue him. Magalh?es 
held, along with his slave (or slaves), two liberated African men, Hemenegildo and Acacio, and 
Dionizia, all three from the ship Rio da Prata. As mentioned above, Magalha?es hired Dionizia?s 
services as a wet-nurse, a practice largely used in Rio de Janeiro. One example of how 
widespread the use of wet-nurses was can be seen through the advertisements selling and hiring 
them. The Jornal do Commercio, for example, brought more than six thousand ads from 1850 to 
 
169 Dionizia. Petition. 05/27/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. In Portuguese: ?tendo prestado servic?os os 
mais importantes ao mesmo Magalha?es que sempre a trouxe alugada por vinte mil reis por mez como ama de leite.? 
170 Di?rio do Rio de Janeiro. December 9, 1854. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/094170_01/40714  
 74 
1859 of slave owners and concessionaires selling, hiring or looking for wet nurses, which 
indicates that this was not only a common source of income but also a highly required activity 
among the readers.171 
Recent historians highlighted the brutality of the work of a wet-nurse. Marcus Wood 
stated that when an African women worked as a wet-nurse ?the blood of fertile black women, 
turned into milk, built up the bodies of the white infants who had been propagated by the slave 
power.?172 The historian Okesi Otovo argues that the black population largely suffered because 
of poverty and diseases especially black mothers and their children. Brazilian m?es-pretas, 
meaning those who worked breastfeeding white infants during the period of slavery, transformed 
into m?es desamparadas ? in need of help ? in the post-emancipation period and continued to be 
affected by scarcity and poor conditions of health.173 Camilia Cowling brings to discussion a 
research that deals with the sentiment of grievance, trauma, and bereavement caused by 
mothering in bondage.174 Slave-owners forced wet-nurses throughout the Americas to leave their 
own babies, probably newborns, in benefice of white children. These relations were 
?characterized by paternalism and violence, which enveloped the emotional and the relations of 
power surrounding it in a tangle of simultaneously economic and sentimental motivations.?175 In 
Dionizia?s case, she chose to verbalize the economic part, and to silence the sentimental traumas 
 
171 Research on Hemeroteca Digital do Brazil. 
http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/docreader.aspx?bib=364568_04&pasta=ano%20185&pesq=ama%20de%20leite 
172 Marcus Wood, Black Milk: Imagining Slavery in the Visual Cultures of Brazil and America. (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2013), 2. 
173 Okesi Otovo. Progressive Mothers, Better Babies: Race, Public Health, and the State in Brazil, 1850-1945. 
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016). 
174 Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West. "Mothering Slaves: 
Comparative Perspectives on Motherhood, Childlessness, and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave 
Societies." Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 225.  
175 Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, "Between Two Beneditos: Enslaved Wet-Nurses Amid Slavery?s Decline 
in Southeast Brazil." Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (2017): 322.  
 75 
and sentiments. For her, the economic power of her body was evident and appears as central part 
of her argument. Her pregnancies and her offspring, on the other hand, were never mentioned.  
 
Image 5. Black nurse with white kid on her back. Her arms were free to make possible for her to take care 
of the kid and perform other domestic tasks.176 
 
 
176 ?Ama negra carregando crian?a nas costas.? [S.l.: s.n.], 188-.  Available at: 
http://objdigital.bn.br/objdigital2/acervo_digital/div_iconografia/icon1577126/icon1577126.jpg.  
 76 
Dionizia saw her guardian negotiating furniture, silverware, and her milk. If working as a 
wet-nurse was one of the most common occupations with which black women engaged, it was 
also ?a distinct aspect of enslaved women?s commodification.?177 Masters and concessionaires 
found an abundant source of money in hiring wet-nurses, activity that for masters required 
almost no expenses and did not need anything else except women that were pregnant or have had 
been pregnant in a recent past. It is possible to find, for example, newspapers? ads describing 
wet-nurses to rent or sell, who had had their children within less than a month, therefore still in 
their puerperal period. For these women, the only qualifications required were to be healthy and 
clean and to have good milk.178 In this context of exploitation of black women?s body, Dionizia, 
had her freedom limited by the commercialization of her motherhood, condition that enabled her 
to be a wet-nurse. Even though women in general in the nineteenth-century Brazil had few 
opportunities to control their bodies, the work of a wet-nurse controlled the female black body 
and forced it to breed and nurse for someone other than their own offspring. The authors that 
wrote about liberated Africans in Brazil in the 1860s, for instance, rarely talked about 
specificities of gender, but when they mentioned women was to connect them with motherhood 
and the capacity of wet-nursing.179 In order to navigate through Dionizia?s fragile experience of 
freedom, first it is useful to reflect about some questions. How many children did Dionizia have? 
How many of them survived? How many of them were the result of consensual sex? Was she in 
a stable relationship? How many kids did she breast-feed? Was she able to breast-feed her own 
children while doing it for her guardian? More broadly, what does the figure of a m?e preta like 
 
177 Emily West and R. J Knight. "Mothers? Milk: Slavery, Wet-Nursing, and Black and White Women in the 
Antebellum South." Journal of Southern History 83, no. 1 (2017): 37.  
178 Jornal do Commercio, 01/19/1850.  
http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_04/67?pesq=ama%20de leite  
179 Perdig?o Malheiro, Agostinho Marques Perdiga?o. A Escravida?o No Brasil: Ensaio Histo?rico-Juri?dico-Social - 
Vol. 3. (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1867).  
 77 
Dionizia reveal about gender and race in the Brazilian society of the nineteenth century? How 
does the case of Dionizia show racial relations influencing in motherhood? Additionally, how do 
these relations determine who was a mother, and more, who was a good mother? These questions 
are part of the inquiry of Dionizia?s life and experience with motherhood in a context where the 
sources only allow us to state that Dionizia was a liberated African mother because of her labor 
as a wet nurse. The silence of the sources, including her decision of not speaking about her 
children, deserves attention. Trying to understand Dionizia?s motherhood requires some 
speculation and sources that go beyond her petitions.  
 Following the name Dionizia in the newspapers, it is possible to trace a story. This is not 
the story of the liberated African Dionizia, Congo, #196, from the cargo of the vessel Rio da 
Prata. Very likely, this is not the story of a single woman, but a collective of Dionizias that had a 
little piece of their lives recorded in a newspaper. For the sake of the analysis, however, I will 
treat these women with the same name as one because this story can reveal, on the one hand, 
experiences of freedom and its precariousness, and on the other, can help us to think about the 
relationship of Dionizia from the Rio da Prata with motherhood in a slave society. 
Chronologically, the first part of this story appears in Correio Mercantil, in an advertisement 
looking for the liberated African Dionizia who disappeared on October 7, 1849.180 The ad 
describes her body features, her marks, and the faded striped dress that she took with her, and 
also offers a reward to whomever recovers her, but it does not mention whether Dionizia was 
kidnapped or if she escaped. In the year of the flight, Dionizia had already worked for 14 years. 
Reasons for her escape could be many. Hard punishments, hopelessness in being freed for 
institutional means, exhaustion from the work as a wet-nurse could be some of them. It is also 
 
180 Correio Mercantil, 10/09/1849. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/217280/2578?pesq=dionisia  
 78 
possible that one of the Dionizia?s children had just been born, and she had the urge to see him or 
her.181 Another possibility was the necessity of escaping from the extreme control over her 
mobility and her behavior that led her to become an absentee, to use the words of Stephanie 
Camp.182 If this woman who disappeared was the same Dionizia from the Rio da Prata, it means 
that she was indeed recovered, since she worked for five more years before requesting her 
emancipation.  
The next piece that appeared in the newspaper is a short reference to Dionizia?s marriage 
in the parish of Engenho-Velho, in Rio de Janeiro, in July 1856.183 This extract is particularly 
interesting, for Dionizia?s name, followed by her status of ?Africana livre,? is the only reference 
to a black person among the list of couples. Additionally, her husband, Jos? Guedes was 
supposedly white, since no other adjectives are attached to his name.184 Considering that 
Dionizia got her emancipation in 1854, which is likely since her documents do not show any 
possible problem detected by the authorities, this gave her two years to officialize her union. The 
historian Mary Karash mentions that many slaves, for example, waited until they got manumited 
to officiate their marriage that were sometimes the result of long relationships. The reason for the 
wait could be varied, including the fear of separation between couples.185 After almost twenty 
years serving families with her milk and care, Dionizia might have looked for some family 
stability. Jos? Guedes, mentioned as her husband in the newspapers could be her partner for long 
years or someone that she met after obtaining her freedom. He could be the father of Dionizia?s 
 
181 History of slavery brings many cases of mother who transgress rules to see their kids for a short period even 
risking being punished. Frederick Douglass?s mother, for instance, used to walk many miles a day to spend the night 
with him. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. (Boston: Bedford/St. 
Martin's, Mcmillan Learning, 2017). 
182 Stephanie M. H Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. 
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 
183 Correio Mercantil, 08/04/1856. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/217280/12196?pesq=dionisia 
184 This Dionizia was, in fact, a liberated African from the ship Especulador, which arrived in Brazil in 1836. 
185 Mary C Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 365. 
 79 
many children or his paternity could relate only to children after their marriage. Although she 
does not allude to her offspring during her time as an apprentice, and after emancipated this 
information would be even harder to obtain, there is a reference to the sixteen-month old boy 
?Isidoro, son of the African Dionizia,? in the obituary of May 30, 1863 of Correio Mercantil.186 
Once more, it is difficult to affirm that Isidoro was really the child of Dionizia Congo, from the 
Rio da Prata. It brings though the discussion of the mortality of black children and the 
experiences of black motherhood in Brazil, that was almost inseparable from the white families. 
Despite the incompleteness of this story, it brings a perspective over the lives of black mothers in 
Rio de Janeiro and sheds light on the experience of Dionizia from the Rio da Prata.  
Dionizia?s silence concerning her family and her children could have different reasons. 
Considering that Dionizia filed her request for emancipation in the beginning of 1854 ? only 
some months after the enactment of the decree 1303 ? her silence could be due to the fact that it 
was not clear yet what type of information would important in the petitions. In this case, she did 
not refer to her children because the relevant information was that she had already fulfilled her 
probatory period. It is conceivable, however, that Dionizia was more deliberate in her silence. 
Christine Hu?nefeldt, analyzing the reality of slave families in Peru, discusses the challenges of 
motherhood in an urban space.187 It was not rare having cases of women that went to labor far 
from their masters in order to give their children away to avoid their slave fate. In this regard, 
there is no information if Dionizia kept her offspring. Moreover, high mortality rates among 
slave children was a reality, and it could have affected one or more of Dionizia?s kids. Also, 
Dionizia and her descendants would have an uncertain future, even with her emancipation letter 
 
186 Correio Mercantil. 05/30/1863. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/217280/21947?pesq=dionisia   
187 Christine Hu?nefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800-1854. 
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).  
 80 
in hands and she might have preferred not to mention that when fully free she would have to 
provide not only for herself but also for a large family. Even if the reason for her silence might 
be unknow, reflecting on Dionizia?s life and family are an effort to understand the challenges of 
motherhood for a liberated African.  
 While Dionizia?s motherhood was implicit in her petition, Narciza?s motherhood is 
explicit. Narciza mentions her daughters in her pleas and use them as an argument to her 
emancipation. Narcisa is the liberated African from the Rio da Prata with the longest case. 
Between 1852 and 1857, Narcisa filed five petitions. In the third one, dated from 1855, Narciza 
says: ?Last year she [Narciza] petitioned for her emancipation and this February she was 
removed from Colonna?s house and directed to the house of correction, where she is for more 
than six months. The supplicant has two underaged daughters who need her mother?s support, 
and for this reason the supplicant asks Your Imperial Majesty to do justice.?188 Narciza served 
Pedro Maria Rom?o Colonna since March 1835, when the Brazilian government distributed 
liberated Africans from the brigantine Rio da Prata. The decree 1303 established that liberated 
Africans who had already accomplished the time of their apprenticeship could be removed to the 
House of Correction in order to wait for the decision of their requests for liberty. The historian 
Carlos Eduardo Moreira de Araujo explored the dynamic of labor in the House of Correction. In 
a brief reference to the liberated African women present in this institution, he mentions that when 
they were not doing laundry or cooking, tasks that allowed them to have connections with other 
people, they were kept locked to avoid contact with prisoners and liberated African men who 
 
188 Narciza. Petition. 07/24/1855. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49.  In Portuguese: ?tendo a supp.e servido 
duplicado tempo que a Lei prescreve requerio o anno passado a Governo de V. M. I. a sua carta de emancipa??o e 
em fevereiro deste anno foi removida da casa do dito Collona p.a a Casa de Corre??o onde se acha a seis meses: a 
supp.e tem duas filhas menores  e que carecem do apoio de sua mai, a vista do que com Justi?a alega a supp.da. P.a 
V. M. I. se digne mandar o que for de Justic?a.? 
 81 
also lived in the house.189 Under this policy, Narciza faced scarce opportunities to take care of 
her daughters. During the six months that she waited for the legal report on her case, she might 
have had limited or no contact with her underaged children.  
To understand Narciza?s focus on her offspring in her third attempt to emancipation, it is 
necessary to go back to her second petition. Narciza contacted the Brazilian legal system in 
October 1854, when she was still working at Colonna?s house. As usual, when authorities 
received petitions from liberated Africans, they contacted the concessionaire ? or the director of 
the House of Correction, if the liberated African was removed from the concessionaire?s house ? 
to request a written declaration that would testify about the time served by the petitioners and 
their behavior during these years. In his declaration, Colonna wrote: ?I declare that I acquired the 
services of the African Narciza Cassange, and having finished her period of her services, 
according to the decree of December 28, 1853, she requested to be emancipated and to be 
removed [from my house] to the House of Correction where she will accept to do services related 
to that place. I declare, however, that no one should hire her voluntary services, for she has 
someone who seduces her, and she is not well-behaved, very insubordinate, and disrespectful. 
Moreover, she has two underaged children that, because of her incapacity of raising them, were 
taken to be raised by some tutor who will be responsible for feed, clothe, and educate them until 
they come to age.?190 Colonna?s declaration reveals that not only Narciza?s freedom was in 
danger, but her motherhood too.  
 
189 Carlos Eduardo Moreira Araujo, ?Ca?rceres Imperiais: A Casa de Correc?a?o do Rio de Janeiro. Seus Detentos e o 
Sistema Prisional no Imp?rio, 1830-1861,? PhD dissertation. Universidade Estadual de Campinas. 2009, 200. 
190 Pedro Maria Rom?o Colonna. Declaration. 12/18/1855. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49. In Portuguese 
?Certifico que tendo arrematado os servic?os d?Africana livre de Nac?a?o Cassange de nome Narciza e findando-se o 
tempo da arremata??o requereo a dita Africana carta de emancipa??o na conformidade do Decreto de 28 de 
Dezembro de 1853 para ser recolhida a caza de corre??o afim de sugeitar-se aos trabalhos que lhe forem destinados; 
e por ella ter quem a sedusa, n?o ser de bom comportamento, ser muito insubordinada, e falta de respeito, n?o 
convem contractar os seus servi?os volunt?rios, e em consequencia de ter dois filhos menores, e pela sua 
incapacidade de os reger, foi necessario requer ao Ex.mo Senr Juiz dos Orf?os que por seu despacho, nomeasse tutor 
 82 
The ability to be a good servant and a good mother were interdependent in Colonna?s 
declaration. He started his argument stating that no one should contract her voluntary services, 
meaning that no one should give her a position if eventually she got her freedom. In the 
following part of his declaration, Colonna makes a warning for possible employers to be aware 
of Narciza?s bad behavior, irresponsibility, and her insubordinate personality. The definitive 
evidence for Narciza?s unsuitability to be emancipated was her incompetence in raising her 
daughters which is proved by the necessity of conducting them to the cares of a tutor.  
The fact that Narciza had someone to seduce her was a crucial evidence for Colonna?s 
argument of Narciza?s inability to be definitively emancipated. It was also an indication of the 
presence of a community. The word ?seduce,? as explored elsewhere in this chapter, means that 
she might had contact with other Africans in the context of Brazilian slavery. These other 
Africans were a threat for the explorers of black labor, commonly spreading the word about 
freedom, or helping slaves and liberated Africans to escape, or even participating slave stealing 
and sales of black people inside Brazil. In the context of Narciza?s case, having someone who 
seduced her meant that she had a community. It is difficult to know more about this network that 
Narciza built over twenty years living in Brazil. Mamigonian contends the idea a ?liberated 
African identity? was created with the particular legal status, which differentiated them from 
slaves and freed blacks.191 Nelson argues that liberated Africans an identity based on their 
shipmate bonds, creating a net of support.192 Fuentes and Diaz provided, in their study of the 
emancipados193 from the vessel Dos Hermanos, examples of a group of people who was 
 
para os ditos innocentes n?o ficarem ao desamparo, cujo tutor se obrigou de boa vontade a concorrer com tudo 
quanto fosse necessario para alimentos, vestuario, e educac?a?o dos sobreditos ate? maior idade.? 
191 Mamigonian, Africanos Livres, 329. 
192 Nelson, ?Apprentices of Freedom.? 
193 Emancipado was the equivalent term for liberated African, used in Cuba. 
 83 
?conscious of belonging to a community? and who ?demonstrated the close networks of 
reciprocity forget through the experience of travelling on the same ship.?194 They made efforts to 
keep families together, to support their shipmates, and more importantly to fight for freedom for 
themselves and their offspring. In Narciza?s case, this community could include other liberated 
Africans, Africans and Brazilian slaves and ex-slaves, and free people. Having a network of 
support might have given Narciza the opportunity of being aware of Brazilian laws. This 
community must have helped her to create a mindset of freedom that pushed her to contact the 
legal system five times. More specifically, this net could also have given her advice in how to 
proceed in face of her concessionaire?s declaration, especially because after Colonna?s 
declaration, her petition was denied. 
Colonna?s declaration demanded an answer. Narciza, at this point, more experienced in 
the nuances of the Brazilian legal system, and savvier on the context of liberated Africans in Rio 
de Janeiro, changed her male scribe for a female one. Maria Amalia Goulart was not only the 
first woman to write petitions for Narciza, but the only woman to be part of the group of scribes 
that provided their services to the liberated Africans from the Rio da Prata. Having a woman as a 
scribe could have had many effects on Narciza?s case. Narciza had the longest case among the 
petitioners from the Rio da Prata. As mentioned before, she had five petitions over five years. 
Her second request, dated from 1854, was approved at first, as the note ?se fara? justic?a? signed 
by Sequeira proves, to then be overruled after the Colonna?s declaration. Narciza might have 
considered giving up. In order to start her case again, she would have to gather money to pay 
once more to someone to write the petition for her. Moreover, she might have realized that facing 
Colonna would not be easy. He was a Portuguese man who arrived in Brazil in 1810, two years 
 
194 Aisnara Perera Di?az and Mari?a de los A?ngeles Merin?o Fuentes ?The African Women of the Dos Hermanos Slave 
Ship in Cuba: Slaves First, Mothers Second.? Women's History Review 27, no. 6 (2018): 896. 
 84 
later than the arrival of the Portuguese Court, to work in the Department of Navy and Overseas 
Dominions. The Portuguese treasure defrayed his and his family?s transfer to the Brazilian lands. 
After moving from Minas Gerais to Rio de Janeiro, Colonna worked in the War Ministry, organ 
from which he was retired by the time of Narciza?s petitions. He was also a knight from the 
Ordem de Cristo and had a close relationship with Eus?bio de Queiroz, Minister of Justice and 
author of the 1851 law that definitively prohibited the international traffic of slaves to Brazil, 
which implies his influence over the scene of Brazilian slavery.195 Narciza might have been 
hopeless after failing twice to get her freedom, especially because she was fighting against the 
men who took her kids away from her. Maria Amelia Goulart, also a mother of two kids,196 
might have given Narciza some confidence for petitioning again. Through the words of a woman 
who could more easily understand the situation that this African woman was facing, Narciza 
reentered in the battle for emancipation, now bringing her motherhood as the main argument.  
Precariousness of freedom affected not only liberated Africans but also their children. 
Although the sons and daughters of Africans workers like Narciza were Brazilian citizens, they 
carried the ambiguity of their status like their parents. Some of these children did not remain 
with their parents. Masters and concessionaires directed them to live with a tutor until achieving 
adulthood or hired them out to work as domestic servants or as toilers in local factories. In his 
records made between 1849 and 1851, the British consul Robert Hesketh registered names, ages, 
characteristics of liberated Africans? children. By looking at these notes, it is possible to notice 
that it was the women who often mentioned their offspring rather than the men. This is also true 
 
195 Some information about Pedro Maria Roma?o Colonna can be found here: Alan K. Manchester, ?The Growth of 
Bureaucracy in Brazil, 1808-1821? Journal of Latin American Studies, No. 1 (1972): 77-83; Diario do Rio de 
Janeiro, 03/04/1836. http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/094170_01/18012; Jornal do Commercio, 03/151836, 
http://memoria.bn.br/DocReader/364568_02/7522.  
196 Diario do Rio de Janeiro, 07/03/1854. http://memoria.bn.br/docreader/094170_01/40335.  
 85 
for the petitions. This information, although not surprising, brings the attention to a gendered 
experience of the precariousness of freedom.  
As Camillia Cowling explains in her research on black mothers in the Brazilian and 
Cuban legal system, women accessed justice appealing commonly to family ties.197 By analyzing 
cases of black mothers who contacted the legal system in those countries, the author 
demonstrates that these mothers frequently referred to the affective part of their relationship with 
their children in their pleas, even if this was not an argument that could be defended based on the 
law. Liberated African mothers also appealed for the affective arguments in their petitions, 
especially when talking about their children. Even though this was not an argument that was 
legally relevant, liberated African women appealed for the universality of motherhood. By 
analyzing the pattern of narratives in the petitions from the Rio da Prata, the legal arguments 
were always followed by further clarification, while the affective ones were taken as self-
explanatory. One example of this is the frequent explanation that followed the mention of the 
decree 1303, to avoid a possible misunderstanding concerning to which legal argument liberated 
Africans were basing their requests. The affective argument, on the other hand, was often 
implicit. Narciza?s petition brought the following phrase related to her children: ?the supplicant 
has two underaged daughters who need her mother?s support, and for this reason the supplicant 
asks that Your Imperial Majesty do justice.?198 There are no further details for this argument. In 
this sense, Narciza conveys the idea that motherhood could be easily understood.  
 
197 Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and 
Rio De Janeiro. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 
198 Narciza. Petition. 07/24/1855. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49.  In Portuguese: ?a supp.e tem duas filhas 
menores  e que carecem do apoio de sua mai, a vista do que com Justi?a alega a supp.da. P.a V. M. I. se digne 
mandar o que for de Justic?a.? 
 86 
Precariousness of freedom and motherhood are interconnected. Motherhood is where 
precariousness of freedom exacerbates, affecting not just liberated African women, but also 
circumscribing also the liberty of their offspring. Showing this precariousness in their petition, 
although did not have a legal validity, was a strategy to call the attention of judges and 
authorities. Through the mention of her children, Narciza showed to Brazilian authorities that her 
daughters ? who were Brazilian citizens ? were suffering because of their mother?s lack of 
freedom. In this sense, Narciza?s case adds the nuances of the liberated African conditions to 
Cowling?s analysis. While the cases that the author analyses are from mothers asking to recover 
children that were far from them, or to rescue them from slavery, liberated African mothers were 
petitioning for freedom for themselves and not for their children. In this sense, Narciza build her 
mothership as a narrative element that showed the limitations of her freedom and her daughter?s. 
It is possible to argue this because motherhood was not a constant feature in Narciza?s petitions. 
Exposing her condition of mother was a resource to defend her case vis-?-vis Collona?s 
declaration. 
 Collona?s declaration and Narciza? petition reveal unbalanced relation of power not only 
because it shows his advantageous position of a powerful white men over her disfavored place 
but also because his freedom in the production of his declaration versus the limitations of her 
petition. Colonna was literate and wrote his declaration without help of others. His declaration 
had no determined format. Petitions, on the other hand, were part of a set of legal documents that 
followed an established pattern. They carried generally the same type of information. Even the 
visual aspect of them, with all the text condensed to the right side of the sheet, demonstrated that 
there was a limited space for changes. Moreover, it is questionable whether the voices of the 
liberated Africans are present in these documents since they were written on their behalf. 
 87 
Illiteracy, which forced them to find someone to write their demands, worked along with a 
judicial system that, through the format of the document, already limited their possibility of 
making demands on their own.  
Records of police interviews were also standardized. Attending interviews in the police 
station of Rio de Janeiro was an additional step in the process of requesting for emancipation. In 
the station, liberated Africans provided the following information: their names, place of origin, 
age, marital status, place of residency, and occupation. They were also asked if their 
concessionaires had treated them well. Lastly, the police officer in charge also asked them if they 
were responsible for ordering the petitions. The answers to the police inquiries were also 
standard. For example, all the women stated that they were unmarried and domestic servants. All 
of them replied that they were responsible for the petitions. Moreover, all the women answered 
that they were well treated by their concessionaires in the police interviews. This is peculiar, 
because, as demonstrated in other parts of this chapter, many women had complained about their 
guardians in their petitions, either because of the harshness of the work, or because of the 
exceeding years that they had already worked. Police interrogatories however do not reveal these 
grievances. This set of documents could lead us to think that these women were truly silenced by 
the legal system. However, it is important to reflect on the conditions in which these 
questionings were carried out. These women who were already intimidated by the uncertainties 
of their cases, by the possibility of never getting emancipated, and by the necessity of fighting 
alone for their liberties, had to appear in the police station ? a space known for transforming 
black people in prisoners ? to give intimate information about their lives. They had to testify that 
they were who they claimed to be, liberated Africans pleading for their emancipation. 
Furthermore, a police station in the nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro was a place marked by 
 88 
masculine power, and, while answering to interrogatories was far from being a customary action 
for liberated African women, answering to a cohort of white policemen could be extremely 
frightening. It seems understandable that these women were not willing to expose their 
experiences in such a hostile environment.  Police interrogatories, nonetheless, are valuable 
documents to analyze the spoken and unspoken words. These documents evidence how gendered 
relations of power affected the experiences of freedom of these liberated African women. 
Moreover, men dominated the scene of the Brazilian legal system. Taking Narciza?s case 
again, it is possible to see that the only female figure was her scribe, Maria Amalia Goulart who 
wrote two petitions. The other three scribes who worked with Narciza were men. There is little 
information on how liberated Africans contacted these scribes. It is also difficult to find data 
about their work, how much they charged to the petitioner, or how much they knew about the 
Brazilian law. It is known, however, that Narciza looked for the scribe Jo?o da Costa Franco to 
start her struggle for emancipation even before the enactment of the decree 1303. In her first 
petition, dated from April 1852, Narciza says that she was ?entrusted to Mr. Pedro Maria Roma?o 
Colonna, having completed the years [of service required by the Law] and requests that Your 
Imperial Majesty gives her complete freedom. Because she cannot obtain it without your 
permission asks that You Imperial Majesty consent in deferring [her request].?199 Interestingly, 
this petition does not differ radically from the others made after the approval of the decree 1303. 
One assumption that is possible to make is that Narciza based her request on the Alvar? com 
for?a de lei de 26 de janeiro de 1818. This law prohibited the slave traffic from African ports 
 
199 Narciza. Petition. 04/03/1853, ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6J-127. In Portuguese: ?Diz Narciza, Africana que 
tendo sido confiado os seus servi?os ao Senhor Pedro Maria Colona e tendo ja completado os annos da Lei (como 
prova pelo documento junto), desejando que Vossa Majestade Imperial lhe concedesse a sua plena Liberdade, e 
como n?o possa obte-la sem a permiss?o de Vossa Majestade Imperial, por isso: p.a V. M. I. se digne mandar 
deferir?  
 89 
located north of the Equator and determined that Africans who were brought illegally to Brazil 
should work as liberated Africans for fourteen years. Narciza could have lived together with 
other Africans that also based their demands on this law. Additionally, Franco might have used 
this law as argument for other petitions. Narciza, however, was unsuccessful. 
Continuing with her petitions, Narciza had to deal with a whole set of white men. 
Curators, police, judges, ministers were all men. Other petitions show that she employed 
different strategies to get the attention of the authorities who would decide her future. In this 
case, she appealed to the most powerful white men in Brazil, the Emperor Pedro II, to whom the 
petitions were addressed, even though he was not the one who read them. One of her requests 
says that Narciza trusts in the Emperor?s ?extreme kindness and true justice.? It was not rare that 
liberated African appealed to the figure of the Emperor as the one whose rightful fairness would 
bring justice to their stories. For instance, in the final lines of her petition, the wet-nurse Dionizia 
supplicated to the Emperor Dom Pedro II that he ?provided the grace written in the law that 
grants and protected her freedom.?200 The Emperor was not just the head of the state; he was the 
state. When liberated Africans appealed to his name, they were trying to get the coherence from 
the man who was the embodiment of the Law. The concession of the letter of emancipation 
would be certainly a grace received from a superior and powerful figure, but it would also be an 
obligation since the decree 1303 was approved under his command. In those lines, Dionizia, 
although very respectful, had almost an exigent tone, stating that her freedom was already 
granted by the law. In other examples from the Rio da Prata, petitioners emphasized the 
discrepant relation of power between them and the Emperor. This is the case of Fabiana Congo, 
 
200 Dionizia. Petition. 05/27/1854. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-99. Original in Portuguese, ?P. a V. M. I. que se 
digne fazer a gra?a concedida por lei, pela qual reclama e respeitosamente implora a supplicante, victima da 
escravid?o, sendo a sua liberdade garantida e protegida pelas leis? 
 90 
#204 who merely ?begs that the Emperor do the grace of approving her supplication?201 or 
Michaella Congo, #179 who asked ?to Your Imperial Highness the grace that she begs 
reverently.?202 Justa Benguela, #159, however, used her unprivileged position to approach the 
figure of the Emperor in addition to the emphasis in the paternalistic characteristics with which 
he was depicted. Her petition says: ?The miserable African Justa prostrates before the august 
throne of You Imperial Highness, who has served for more than twenty-one years (?), Imperial 
Lord, and trusting in your august and paternal heart hopes that justice will be done according to 
the Decree #1303 and expects to be emancipated.?203 The dependency of white men to intercede 
in favor of the liberated Africans shows one more aspect of their precariousness of freedom. 
These women negotiated their freedom and their future in a relation of power that was 
disproportionately affected by masculinity and whiteness. The figure of the Emperor represented 
the culmination of the maximum dependency and subjugation be the white power. 
 
Taking into account the women considered in this chapter, it is possible to see that their 
resistance passed by their gendered experiences of labor and freedom. In this sense, freedom, 
even if precarious, set the basis to their pleas.  Narciza, Dionizia, Eufrazia, Bonifacia, and 
Andreza demonstrated that the strategies used in the petitions included aspects of their 
womanhood such as violence, death, mistreatments, family separation, and motherhood. 
 
201 Fabiana. Petition. 06/09/1855, ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49. Original in Portuguese: ?Implora a V. M. I. a 
grac?a de lhe deferir sua suplica.? 
202 Michaella. Petition. 05/05/1855. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, 6D-49.  Original in Portuguese: ?P.a V. M. 
Imperial a grac?a que reverentemente te implora.? 
203 Justa. Petition. 10/08/1856. ANRJ, Minist?rio da Justi?a, Caixa. 782 Pacote. 3. Original in Portuguese: :Ante o 
augusto Throno de V. M. I. se prostra a infeliz Justa, Africana livre que a mais de 21 annos se acha prestando 
servic?os (?), Imperial Senhor a supp.e fiada no Augusto e Paternal Corac?a?o de Vossa Majestade Imperial espera 
que lhe seja outhorgada a justi?a que ordena o Decreto n.o 1303 de Dezembro de 1853 pelo ent?o decreto no caso de 
ser emancipada.? 
 91 
Moreover, far from being isolated as Robert Conrad assumed in his article,204 these women were 
included in a community that gave them support and information, which help them to shape their 
arguments in their petitions.  
  
 
204 Robert Conrad, ?Neither Slave nor Free: The Emancipados of Brazil, 1818-1868.? The Hispanic American 
Historical Review 53, no. 1 (1973): 50?70. 
 92 
Conclusion 
 
 This thesis had the purpose of investigating the experiences of freedom of liberated 
African women. The examination of the liberated Africans from the Rio da Prata showed that 
the female shipmates were able to access justice and get final emancipation earlier and 
proportionally in larger number if compared with the male population. This was due to three 
characteristics that the female population had. First, because the Brazilian government preferred 
liberated African men rather than women to work in public institutions, liberated African women 
worked in its majority in private houses. Second, the work that they performed in the domestic 
service allowed them to have contact with information from both inside the house of their 
concessionaires and from their communities on the streets. Their concessionaires were in general 
connected to the Brazilian government and conversations inside the house might have given 
them the awareness of the political debate over the issue of liberated Africans. Their network out 
of the domain of the private house could have conferred them the sense of community and 
provided them with tools to access the Brazilian legal system and to file their petitions. This 
network was not composed only by liberated Africans, slaves, or free blacks. The British 
Consulate had also a role in the dissemination of information and in the creation of the ?liberated 
African identity.?205 Third, the decree 1303 of 1853 restricted the access to petitions to liberated 
Africans working for private concessionaires, which limited liberated African men to get their 
final emancipation. This decree, on the other hand, gave a better chance to liberated African 
women to obtain final emancipation. These conditions helped to create a mindset for freedom in 
liberated African women, which gave them tools to resist in varied forms. 
 
205 Beatriz Mamigonian, ?To be a Liberated African in Brazil: Labor and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century? 
(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2002), 203. 
 93 
 The documentation available for the case of the Rio da Prata showed that women from 
this particular population fought for their freedom using different strategies. Newspaper ads 
looking for liberated Africans showed that they flew out of the dominium of their 
concessionaires. Their petitions revealed that they used the legal system in their favor and tried 
different narratives in order to justify or speed their second emancipation. They used legal 
arguments based on the decree 1303 of 1853 as well as pieces of their biographies to give 
support to their claim of liberty. In these biographical excerpts, women expressed the limitation 
of their freedom as liberated African women such as the separation between them and their 
children and the abuse of their bodies and used them as evidences that their status of liberated 
Africans was not being respected, and, more importantly, that only the emancipation letter would 
give them full access to freedom. The documents generated around the petitions, such as 
declarations from concessionaires and authorities from the Brazilian government demonstrated 
that they had a community outside their houses. Through this network, they found, among other 
things, support for their flights and information about other forms to get their definitive 
emancipation.  
In comparison to literature that analyzed liberated African in Brazil, this study added the 
gender issue to investigate the specificities of liberated African women. While earlier researches 
based their arguments on the Brazilian legal context and the British correspondence, centering 
their study on the liberated African issue, more recent scholars have been adding more 
documents to their analysis. In the last ten years, historians have been investigating the 
documentation found in the vessels captured illegally transporting Africans to Brazil, the 
petitions filed after 1853, declarations of concessionaires, police records, and political debates in 
order to have a better grasp of the experience of liberated Africans in Brazil. Gender, however, 
 94 
has not been the focus of these studies. In this context, this thesis contributed to understand the 
experiences and limitations of freedom of the women from the Rio da Prata. Although restricted 
to one vessel, this research revealed a microcosm of the conditions of the liberated African 
women. Moreover, this thesis also dialogued with researches that tracked specific ships seized 
because of the prohibition of the slave trade. While these studies shed light on varied topics, such 
as the illegal introduction slaves in Brazil and the subterfuges used by the slave trader, the 
formation of bonds among shipmates, and the archive created because of the abundant 
documentation on liberate Africans, gender is not a main concern in most of them. Thus, this 
thesis also added to the investigation of the ships that transported Africans after the 1831 Law 
focusing on the specificities of the female population.  
 Further research should broaden the scope of the argument of this thesis. The expansion 
of the documentation could reveal how these women, pioneers in the search for freedom, 
influenced the group of liberated Africans and the group of slaves. The addition of 
documentation on other cohorts of liberated Africans could demonstrate more connections and 
different interactions made by this group. Moreover, a broader set of documents might give more 
information about the specific communities, for example among nation mates. Additionally, an 
exploratory map of the city of Rio da Janeiro with data on the addresses of liberated Africans 
could be used to demonstrated possible relationships among nations and shipmates. The date of 
arrival could also be a factor of influence, as well as the connection among liberated Africans 
from different vessels in the same household. Concerning the relationship of liberated African 
women with other slaves, the investigation of public fountains where women did laundry and 
common spots occupied by street vendors is fundamental to get a grasp on female black mobility 
and communication in Rio de Janeiro.  
 95 
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