Banca de DEFESA: DANIEL DE OLIVEIRA

IN “BREJO DAS BANANEIRAS”: LAW 2,040/1871 AND SLAVERY IN THE PROVINCE OF PARAÍBA (BANANEIRAS, 1850-1888).

Keywords: Slavery. Freedom. Family. Bananeiras-PB. Laws 2,040/1871 and 3,270/1885.

This research seeks to understand how enslaved people from the town/city of Bananeiras, located in the province of Paraíba, managed legislation in their favor, especially Law number 2,040 of September 28, 1871 and Law number 3,270 of September 28, 1871. 1885. In this way, the first created four important mechanisms that enabled other experiences of freedom studied in this thesis: liberation of the womb of enslaved women, Emancipation Fund, legalization of the nest egg and registration of slaves. While the second, paradoxically, demonstrated the strength that slavery still had, even if it was in agony; already evidenced its decline and its outcome in 1888. We highlight that this was only possible due to the resistance actions organized by the enslaved population in Brazil, in particular, those located in Bananeiras. Our documentation is made up of a varied corpus of documents such as donations of sesmaras, post-mortem inventories, registration lists, wills, freedom actions, separate documents from the Emancipation Fund, parish registers, newspapers, reports from the president of the province and the ministry of agriculture that allowed us to learn about Bananeiras-PB, the setting where our characters work, especially the enslaved people and their movements in search of experiences of freedom. To this end, we dialogue with the theoretical-methodological references of the Social History of Slavery and which have a great contribution from the reflections of the Englishman Edward Palmer Thompson. To do this, we go back a few moments to the second half of the 18th and first half of the 19th century to understand the process of colonization and economic production of Bananeiras, or rather, Paraíba. In other situations, to understand the ways in which freedom was obtained before 1871, we analyzed wills or inventories that mentioned the achievement of legal freedom by some enslaved person. Therefore, it was possible to identify that manumission was registered in a variety of documentation with due compensation such as wills, inventories, freedom actions, Emancipation Fund lists, etc. In view of this, we present the scenario of distribution of sesmarias based on the “strength” of cattle in the region that was Bananeiras at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century. We highlight that during the 19th century, other agricultural crops were introduced, such as sugar cane, cotton, cassava and coffee, which shared space with the farm. It is in this scenario of diversified economy that the enslaved population will be inserted, arranging in their favor and that of their families possibilities to purchase their legal freedom or that of their relatives through the various paths indicated before and after Law No. 2,040 of 1871. In this way , in addition to placing this work in the field of the Social History of Slavery in which collective actions are considered, it also values the unique agency of enslaved men and women who act politically according to their experiences and the historical process in which they are inserted.

Keywords: Slavery. Freedom. Family. Bananeiras-PB. Laws 2,040/1871 and 3,270/1885.