Sociedade, indenização e liberdade precária

Abstract

Between September and October of 1885, two women from the village of São Francisco do Conde, from Recôncavo of Bahia, used an article of the law of 1871 to protest against the liberation process through the Emancipation Fund. Some of the accusations made to the authorities were that slaves were classified as ill and with exaggerated price, favoring relatives from the organization created to promote the processes of emancipation of slaves and of the "influential" landlords, exclusions of ex-slaves without communication to their owners and without processing of any complaint. The accused to commit this faults the accused were members of the local elite, which acted in legal, military and political power stations of the village, as the collector of taxes, the public prosecutor and the mayor. Based on these denunciations and crossing with other documents, such as inventories, wills, administrative resources, newspapers, among others, and with the aid of the bibliography, I analyzed the actions of owners, slaves and their relatives in the process of appropriation of the Emancipation Fund. During the research, I pay special attention to the strategies of the landlords for securing reparations and maintaining dependency bonds with freedmen ("libertos"). As for slaves and exslaves ("forros"), the focus was to understand the different forms of mobilization for the conquest of freedom, such as marriages and the "nest egg" to buy freedom, and the struggle, after overcoming the captivity, for occupy a better place in the nineteenth century Brazilian society. The thesis is that they have acquired a precarious freedom. The emancipationist experience in this Bahia municipality is interpreted in connection with the international process of the ending of slavery.