Slave Society in Nineteenth-Century Rio de JaneiroIssue Title if Available

In nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, two enslaved men from West Central Africa came into regular contact with each other on a plantation in a burgeoning inland county of Rio province called Vassouras. The collection of post-mortem inventories now archived at the Museu da Justiça do Rio de Janeiro/IPHAN-Vassouras show both to be twenty-five years old and Cassange, from West Central Africa. Both spoke the same language and shared memories of a common homeland, foodways, rituals, and history. They shared a sense of tremendous loss, having been taken from their homes, families, and friends. As Africans in the largest and most enduring slave society of the Americas, both had survived an arduous Atlantic crossing in the stinking, crowded bowels of a slaving vessel. The same vessel? Available post-mortem inventories do not  make that known, but linked open data that looks across many records and record types one day might.

Knowable from any number of sources is that the enslaved Africans worked long days under a hot sun of tropical southeastern Brazil. And like so many Africans landed in the region as the legal transatlantic trade closed and the clandestine trade exploded, these two men had been baptized and given new names—Joaquim and Ricardo. Joaquim’s monetary value to his enslavers was about the average for his age and gender. Ricardo’s was low because he had an incurable sore on his leg, which surely left him in constant pain and meant that his productivity was lower than that of others his age. In their daily lives on the plantation in Vassouras, the men came into constant contact with other enslaved people born in Africa and with the enslaved children of Africans—crioulos—born in Brazil. 

These are just two of thousands of intertwined biographies that I contemplated as I dug deeply into the datasets presented in the latest issue of the Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation, focusing on the city and province of nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. To be sure, due to the nature of the source material, the data available in each of the six datasets presents only fragmentary details about the life of any one individual. But the data, in any given dataset and across the suite of datasets, does provide glimpses into how named and unnamed individuals, some enslaved and some liberated, labored, suffered, and made new lives for themselves under wretched conditions of rural and urban bondage that were not of their own choosing. And when taken in the aggregate, the data allows for quantitative analyses of broader populations of enslaved and liberated people.

This issue contains six datasets and accompanying data articles generated from a range of types of historical sources created in the capital city of the Brazilian empire and the booming coffee zone of the Paraiba River Valley. The issue brings together the fine work of Brazilian and American scholars at all levels of the academy, from undergraduates to advanced-career faculty. Flávio Gomes extracts data from registries of deceased enslaved and freed Africans interred in the São Francisco Xavier Cemetery, located adjacent to Guanabara Bay in a Rio neighborhood called Cajú. From the dataset, one can glean information about the names, occupations, marriage partners, ages, identities (including “nations” or ethnolinguistic descriptors linked to African places and polities), and causes of the deaths of the deceased. Like several of the datasets that focus on Rio city, the dataset is rich in very specific geolocational information, especially a street address. Even in a study about death and burial, Gomes reveals how the enslaved lived. We see how individuals and families fit into a complex society where color, birthplace, class, and age both opened and limited opportunities. In crafting studies of the broader Atlantic World, scholars could make comparisons to data presented by Stephen Berry in “Database of Coroners’ Inquisitions Taken Over the Bodies of Enslaved, Formerly Enslaved, and Free Black Peoples in the U.S. South, 1840s-1890s” (JSDP vol. 1, no. 2). 

Keila Grinberg, Marina Muaze, and a group of history undergraduates at the Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) make available a dataset focused on the year 1840 with information extracted from a very different set of historical sources—fully transcribed advertisements in a popular Rio-based commercial daily, the Jornal do Commercio. From the advertisements, they extract information about the sale, purchase, rental, auction, flights, and disappearances of enslaved persons and Free Africans, or formerly enslaved people who had been liberated from slaving vessels and given a unique status, which made them apprentices for fourteen years under what were often harsh labor conditions. The data has fascinating overlap with that of Gomes and other contributors since it includes information about identities, ages, and occupations. And from the data, important conclusions can be drawn about the propensity of people to flee or disappear based on a variety of characteristics and occupations.

Kari Zimmerman’s dataset provides valuable points of comparison to that of Grinberg, Muaze, and their students. Zimmerman also constructed a dataset from the Jornal do Commercio, selectively sampling between the years 1850 and 1880. Alongside her Brazilian counterparts, Zimmerman has developed a database about enslaved persons in which the large majority of those persons go unnamed. Zimmerman is interested in the gendered work of escravos de ganho, or enslaved people who were rented out by their enslavers to perform work for others. The dataset illustrates the tremendous range of skills enslaved people had and how these skills often differed according to sex, age, and place of birth. As in Gomes’s dataset, the attention to African versus Brazilian origins or birth among the various Brazilian provinces provides important information into the significance of place in identity, lived and imputed. The dataset also makes clear how critical enslaved people were to the functioning of Rio city, as they undertook a tremendous number of jobs central to the economy of the Brazilian capital and its environs.

Ricardo H. Salles offers a dataset created from inventories of real estate, personal belongings, and enslaved human capital recorded after the deaths of estate owners in Vassouras, a county located in the large coffee zone that followed the Paraíba do Sul River. It is from this dataset that I learned about Joaquim and Ricardo and named individuals whose shared experiences can be partially constructed from the fragments of normalized data. Its attention to names of the enslaved (and their enslavers) facilitates the possibility for future biographical work. Salles’s work will be especially valuable for historians interested in the valuations and family structure of enslaved peoples, as well as their identities (including African nations), average ages, gender ratios, and much more. Salles’s data and description of his methodology could also be compared to my own in the “Maranhão Inventories Slave Database, 1767-1831” (JSDP vol. 1, no. 1) and to Stacy Ashmore Cole’s in “They had Names: Representations of the Enslaved in Liberty County, Georgia, Estate Inventories, 1767-1865” (JSDP vol. 1, no. 2). 

Finally, Daryle Williams publishes two datasets that highlight the life arcs of Free Africans and those who oversaw them between 1835 and 1863. The first is from advertisements in three dailies in Rio from 1835 to 1863 about the disappearances of Free Africans. Like Williams’s other dataset, it contains a wealth of information about people of African descent, including their nations in Africa. The dataset also makes clear how arduous life was in Rio. The data reveal that for Free Africans, especially the young or newly arrived, the possibility of being kidnapped and illegally sold into bondage was real. Further, the dataset says much about African agency, documenting Free Africans choosing flight in response to life under oppressive apprenticeships. 

For his second contribution Williams extracted information from a unique document, a registry of all Free Africans in Brazil who were still assigned to private individuals in 1860. The registry came almost thirty years after the Brazilian government passed legislation abolishing the importation of enslaved Africans, reinforcing the terms of an anti-trade treaty with the British Crown signed in 1826 that took effect in 1830. That treaty and the national legislation that followed had very few immediate results; perhaps three-quarter million enslaved Africans would be clandestinely disembarked in Brazil between 1831 and the mid-1850s. Just a small fraction were rescued by anti-slaving patrols and granted Free African status. Nonetheless, these Free Africans were exceptionally well documented in the historical record, especially in nominal registries. t Williams masterfully took one such registry and cross referenced it to the Free Africans of Brazil Dataset to identify individuals by unique identifier and cohorts from the early 1830s to the Africans enumerated in 1860. The work sheds light on the lives of some who endured an “illegal” forced migration across the Atlantic, were technically freed from enslavement, and lived life under a unique legal category that existed alongside that of “slave” well into the second half of the nineteenth century. 

As the datasets that comprise this issue show, the nineteenth century was a unique one in Rio de Janeiro’s long history of being one of the most African and most Black of all Atlantic cities. The legal categories under which Africans lived became complicated with Free Africans such as Dionizio, a Nagô from Africa’s Upper Guinea Coast (Williams), living near enslaved Africans such as Antonio, a Congo from West Central Africa, and beside enslaved crioulos, such as Ignacio, who was one, two, three, and more generations removed from the continent of Africa (Grinberg, Muaze, et al.). Rio’s population and economy were also growing and expanding in new ways; Africans and crioulos were central to this expansion. They were increasingly rented out to serve the needs of an urban elite who hired mostly enslaved women for household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and ironing (Zimmerman). And the enslaved continued to work in fields producing crops for domestic consumption and export (Salles). But no matter how much Rio was changing, life remained tenuous for most Africans and crioulos. Accounts of wounds, missing eyes and limbs, and “broken bodies” are documented in several datasets in this issue. And those who read closely will learn of horrific tragedies—such as an unnamed infant girl who died shortly after her mother, the enslaved woman Theresa, gave birth in Vassouras—which bring to light the tremendous loss that all who were enslaved suffered. Across datasets, readers will also encounter enslaved and liberated people who lived very long lives—lives marked by much suffering, to be sure, but lives that brought with them meaningful connections made visible in data. For example, Florinda Maria da Conceição was a sixty-eight-year-old widow from Mozambique who died in 1874, and Marianna Roza do Nascimento was a sixty-five-year-old married woman from Congo deceased in 1875 (Gomes). 

What is promising about this issue’s compilation of data from the same region of Brazil is that linked open data might reveal much more about the intersections of Florinda and Roza’s lives with those of others who are made known through other datasets published in this and future issues of the JSDP. Linked open data allow us to see more broadly how women’s work was described and valued in everyday commerce and permits inquiries into the demographic trends of the dead and dying in Rio city and Vassouras. Finally, the tools of Enslaved.org might enable researchers to discover how a Free African who went missing in the 1840s reappeared in the 1870s and was laid to rest. The issue takes us into the lives of thousands of named individuals who negotiated, made, and remade lives for themselves in a city that was central to global commerce and culture.  

Editor’s Addendum 
On behalf of the entire Enslaved.org team, I am pleased to announce that the datasets published in volume 2 of the JSDP are the first to be mapped to Version 2.0 of our controlled vocabularies (CV). In the inaugural version of the Enslaved.org, launched to the public on December 1, 2020, we defined controlled vocabularies to “facilitate searching and browsing within Enslaved.org's corpus of records by standardizing the terminology we use.” Almost immediately, we received feedback on those initial CV terms. Some users found “slave” and “master” to be neither useful nor appropriate for discoverability. As new datasets came in, the team also recognized that the first version of the CV fell short in grappling with the historical heterogeneity and recent historiography on the slave trade and slave societies, especially terms related to gender, sexuality, family, and reproduction. An example of what now strikes us as a painfully obvious omission in Version 1.0 is that we failed to document many of the occupations held by enslaved women and provided no concrete examples of women’s work in the broad category “Domestic Service.”

A terminological shift from “slave” to “enslaved” as well as “owner” to “enslaver” in the CV could be readily implemented for a team that had already admired the linguistic turns advocated by the Colored Conventions Project and Montpelier's African American Descendants' Project, among many others. Adding new terms like “Wet-nursing and Midwifery” was well within the realm of the doable. However, the upheavals of 2020 prompted much deeper introspection that, in turn, catalyzed new conversation among the project’s historians and information scientists about the CV, past and future. Team members tasked themselves with an honest, direct engagement with the evolving scholarship on anti-racist classification and terminology in information studies and black digital humanities. From this fitful, fruitful work,Version 2.0 presents a more expansive and textured terminology on EVENT, PLACE, and SOURCE and a more intentionally gendered, anti-racist categories of PERSON that should facilitate searching and browsing across the heterogeneity, liminality, and contingency of enslaved persons, families, and descendants. Alongside a new Statement of Ethics, developed in a series of collaborative team conversations that centers the voices and contours of black life matters, Enslaved.org positions itself as an ally, participant, and a leader in the elevation of black digital humanities in the rigors of academic scholarship and the urgency of social justice action. 

Daryle Williams, Editor