"Born Under The Cruel Rigor of Captivity, The Supplicant Left It Unexpectedly by Committing A Crime": Categorizing and Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830-1897

â€œBorn Under the Cruel Rigor of Captivity, the Supplicant Left
it Unexpectedly by Committing a Crimeâ€•: Categorizing and

Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830â€“1897
Peter M. Beattie
The Americas, Volume 66, Number 1, July 2009, pp. 11-55 (Article)
Published by The Academy of American Franciscan History

DOI: 10.1353/tam.0.0143
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tam/summary/v066/66.1.beattie.html
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The Americas
66:1 July 2009, 11-55
Copyright by the Academy of American
Franciscan History
“BORN UNDER THE CRUEL RIGOR OF CAPTIVITY,

THE SUPPLICANT LEFT IT UNEXPECTEDLY
BY COMMITTING A CRIME”:
CATEGORIZING AND PUNISHING
SLAVE CONVICTS IN BRAZIL, 1830-1897*
No presídio [de Fernando de Noronha] o bandido [Zé Moleque] criara

fama de boa pessoa, de trabalhador. Os seus roçados de farinha eram
sempre os maiores e nunca estivera em cela, nunca dera o que fazer aos
diretores.1
José Lins do Rego, A Usina, 1936
I
n José Lins do Rego’s 1936 novel, A Usina (the sugar refinery), the penal
colony of Fernando de Noronha Island emerges as an incongruous utopia.
The novel’s young black protoganist Ricardo serves a three year sentence
there as a result of his involvement in a Recife labor strike. Upon his return,
he is disillusioned by what he finds on the mainland. He recalls his penal-
colony stint with a mixture of nostalgia and shame, especially the tender rela-
tionship he had had with the former black bandit Zé Moleque, the respected
convict in the citation above. The island, some 220 miles off Brazil’s north-
east coast, initially appears to be an exotic criminal community of dishonored
men, the antithesis of life on the mainland. But, as the plot progresses, it
becomes a bucolic foil with which the author highlights hypocrisy, injustice,
indifference, and corruption on the modernizing Brazilian mainland of the
* I thank B. J. Barickman, Daina Ramey Berry, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Celso Castilho, Elizabeth
Anne Kuznesof, José Luiz Ribeiro, James Sanders, Erica M. Windler, and two anonymous reviewers who
revealed their indentities, Linda Lewin and David McCreery, for their insights, corrections, and sugges-
tions that improved this manuscript. I also thank the members of the editorial board for their comments,
particularly Mary Karasch and Barbara Sommer. I demand full credit, however, for any mistakes. I also
thank Fulbright CIES, Michigan State University’s Intramural Research Grant Program, the Department
of History, and International Studies and Programs for the funds and leave time that made it possible to
research and write this article.
1
“In the presidio, the bandit became known as a good person, a worker. His manioc fields were
always the most productive and he was never jailed, never gave the prison administrators trouble.” José
Lins do Rego, A Usina , 4 ed. (Rio: José Olympio, 1956 [1936]), pp. 17-18.
11
12 CATEGORIZING AND PUNISHING SLAVE CONVICTS IN BRAZIL
1920s. Although fictional, Lins do Rego’s depiction of Zé Moleque, a homi-

cide convict who became a respected penal colony worker, is not fanciful. On
a distant Atlantic island frontier where a small garrison watched over far more
numerous convicts, well-disciplined inmates who worked hard could become
respected community members and even trusted convict administrators.
This article focuses on a group of Zé Moleque’s nonfictional precursors,

slave convicts who served their sentences on Fernando de Noronha in the
nineteenth century. Slave convicts presented the imperial Brazilian penal
justice system (1822-1889) with dilemmas. How should this class of bonded
human beings who did not enjoy citizenship be punished under a constitu-
tional monarchy with liberal airs? Persistent ideas of social, gender, and
racial hierarchy, erected in part to buttress slavery’s legitimacy, clashed with
liberal ideals of broad enfranchisement, equality before the law, penal reha-
bilitation, and uniform sentencing. Law made slaves pariahs in the imagined
and tangible national community, but it also afforded them accommodation,
not the least of which on Fernando de Noronha. Since the island gathered
slave, free civilian, and military convicts from almost every province, it
offers a unique panarama of imperial crime and punishment.2
The prosecution of slave crime has received attention in regional studies,

but none have followed Brazil’s slave criminals into prisons to examine in
detail how authorities enforced their sentences.3 In 1881, the Justice Min-
istry ordered the penal colony’s director to conduct a detailed survey of the
2
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism,
Rev. Ed. (New York: Verso, 1991).
3
See, e. g., Maria Helena P. T. Machado, Crime e escravidão: Trabalho, Luta, e resistência nas
lavouras paulistas, 1830-1888 (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987); Patricia Ann Aufderheide, “Order and
Violence: Social Deviance and Social Control in Brazil, 1780-1840” (PhD diss., Univ. of Minnesota,
1976); Bryan Daniel McCann, “The Whip and the Watch: Overseers in the Paraíba Valley, Brazil,” Slav-
ery and Abolition 18:2 (Aug. 1997), pp. 36-37; Sidney Chalhoub, Visões de liberdade: Uma história das
últimas décadas de escravidão na Corte (São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1990); Thomas Holloway, Policing
Rio de Janeiro: Repression and Resistance in a Nineteenth Century City (Stanford University Press,
1993); Leila Mezan Algranti, O feitor ausente: Estudos sobre a escravidão urbana no Rio de Janeiro—
1808-1822 (Rio: Vozes, 1988), pp. 193-198; José Antônio Soares de Souza, “Os escravos e a pena de
morte,” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 313 (1976), pp. 5-19; Alexandre K.
Brown, “‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation:’ Slavery, Punishment, and the Politics of Death in Nine-
teenth-Century Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 37:2 (2000), pp. 95-121; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in
Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton University Press, 1987), chap. 5; Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira, Sen-
hores de poucos escravos: Cativeiro e crime num ambiente rural (1830-1888) (São Paulo: Ed. UNESP,
2005); Elione Silva Guimarães, Violência enter parceiros de cativeiro: Juiz de Fora, segunda metade do
século XIX (São Paulo: Anna Blume, 2006); Adriana Pereira Campos, “Crime e escravidão: uma inter-
pretação alternativa,” in Nação e cidadania no império: Novos horizontes, Org. José Murilo de Carvalho
(Rio: Civilização Brasileira, 2006), pp. 209-235; and João Luiz Riberio, No meio das galinhas as baratas
não tem razão: a Lei de 10 de Junho de 1835, os escravos e a pena de morte no império brasiliero (Rio:
Renovar, 2005).
PETER M. BEATTIE 13
island’s slave convicts. The director interviewed 264 slave convicts and
recorded data that, along with other records, make it possible to sketch their
collective biography and assess their place in the mostly decentralized impe-
rial penal system.4 A simultaneous qualitative interrogation of survey cate-
gories explores the “ideological assumptions and political concerns” that
prison authorities “brought to bear in enumerating, classifying, and order-
ing” a slave convict population.5 The survey itself became part of a bureau-
cratic struggle over how to punish slave convicts on this Atlantic archipel-
ago. This struggle is the focus of the next section which analyzes the fates
of slave convicts during the tumultuous 1880s when slavery was abolished
and an army coup promulgated a republic. Like José Lins do Rego, I employ
Fernando de Noronha in my conclusions as a foil to explore life, death, seg-
regation, and injustice on Brazil’s mainland and other parts of the slave-
holding Atlantic world.
SLAVE CONVICTS, FERNANDO DE NORONHA,

AND BRAZIL’S PENAL JUSTICE SYSTEM
One might assume that slave criminals, especially murder suspects, would
have been summarily executed. There is anecdotal evidence of Brazilians
4
The slave convict survey referred to throughout this article is Capitão Antonio Gracindo de
Gusmão Lobo, “Relação nominal de escravos sentenciados,” Fernando de Noronha, 27 Oct. 1881,
Arquivo Público de Pernambuco Jordão Emerenciano (hereafter APPJE), Livro FN-21, no folha (f.)
nos [hereafter Gusmão Lobo, “Relação” APPJE]. Other sources provide information on convicts that
I coded in a data base. Two books of inmate guias (official court letters that identified prisoners, their
crimes, and sentences) record data on inmates in the 1830s and 1850s, Livro de guias, Serie Justiça,
Código do Fundo ND, Seção de Guarda Codes, Fernando de Noronha, 1829-1837, Arquivo Nacional
do Rio de Janeiro (hereafter ANR), livro IIJ 7 91, and Ibid., 1853-1861, livro IIJ 7 2 [hereafter Livro
de guias, 1829-1837, and Livro de guias, 1853-1861]. I surveyed the entire book of guias for the 1830s
and one in five from the 1850s. Two matriculation books recorded data on convicts from the 1860s
through the 1890s, Livro da matricula geral dos sentenciados com declaração de todas as circum-
stancias desde sua chegada a este presidio, e sua retirada, conforme determina o regulamento man-
dado executar pelo decreto no. 3.403 de 11 de Fevereiro de 1865, Fernando de Noronha, ANR, Seção
de Justiça, livro IIJ 7 94. Livro da matricula geral . . . mandado executar pelo decreto no.9.356 de 10
de Janeiro de 1885, Fernando de Noronha, ANR, Seção de Justiça, livro IIJ 7 6 [hereafter Livro de
matricula, 1865, and Livro de matricula, 1885]. Matriculation books yielded data on 1,092 prisoners.
I also used a detailed overview of the island’s population: “Relatório do Director Joaquim de Gusmão
Coelho ao Cidadão Desembargador José Antonio Correia da Silva,Governador do Estado de Pernam-
buco,” Fernando de Noronha, 1 Jan. 1891, APPJE, livro FN-30, f. 2-10 [hereafter “Relatório . . . de
Gusmão Coelho,” 1891, APPJE].
5
Here I borrow language from B. J. Barickman’s “Reading the 1835 Parish Censuses from Bahia:
Citizenship, Kinship, Slavery, and Household in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” The Americas 59:3
(2003), pp. 287-323. Barickman follows paths blazed in the qualitative readings of Latin American cen-
suses by Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, “Ethnic and Gender Influences on “Spanish” Creole Society in Colo-
nial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 4:1 (1995), pp. 153-201 and Muriel Nazzari,
“Vanishing Indians: The Social Construction of Race in Colonial São Paulo,” The Americas 57:4 (2001),
pp. 487-524.
lynching suspected slave criminals, but the available data indicates it was not
widespread. Law accorded slave defendants the right to a trial by a regular
jury of citizens whose members certainly did not consider themselves the
peers of bondspersons. Given the cruel methods needed to maintain the disci-
pline of the slave labor regime, it would be startling if law and practice did not
make substantial distinctions between slave and free convicts. The punish-
ment of slave convicts provides insight into the lengths that Brazilian author-
ities went to sustain these distinctions and how they changed over time.6
Brazil’s 1824 Constitution forbade courts to punish free citizens con-

victed of crimes with physical castigations (with the exception of military
enlisted men), but law allowed courts to sentence slaves to be flogged.
Regional studies indicate that flogging was the most common sentence
courts awarded to slave convicts, even when the crime was homicide.7 In
6
There is no study of lynching in Brazil perhaps due to its infrequency and the difficulty of finding
adequate sources. The most promising way to research lynching would likely be through periodicals, but
the lack of indexation makes it a daunting task. A penal expert noted two slave lynchings in Leopoldina,
Minas Gerais in 1876 and Itu, São Paulo in 1879. Conselheiro André Augusto de Padua Fluery, Parecer
sobre o presídio de Fernando de Noronha (Rio: Imprensa Nacional, 1880), p. 15; The abolitionist José
de Patricínio noted that slave lynchings occurred in Itu, Rio Bonito, Resende, Rio do Peixe, Madalena,
and Rio de Janeiro to prevent Pedro II from commuting their sentences. Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 29
Apr. 1889. The U.S. Ex-Consul General of Brazil C.C. Andrews notes rising slave criminality and planter
violence to counter it in the 1880s in Brazil: Its Conditions and Prospects (New York: D. Appleton and
Co., 1889), pp. 316-317; Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira offers rare data on slave suspects denounced in
Franca, São Paulo where in more than 100 cases from 1830-1888 only 18 percent stood trial. Most cases
never went to trial either because the defendant died or escaped, the master illegally sold the slave to a
distant market, or the court absolved the defendant. In 66 cases, Ferreira found that 45. 5 percent of slave
defendant’s were never formally processed, 21.2 percent were named as defendants but never prosecuted,
and in 25.5 percent of the cases, they were absolved. Only 7.6 percent were tried and condemned. Fer-
reira, Senhores de poucos escravos, pp. 92-96. The low conviction rates were common to the Brazilian
jury system. Thomas Flory, Judge and Jury in Imperial Brazil 1808-1871 (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981). Recent studies indicate that slave lynchings were more common in the antebellum United
States than previously supposed. William Fitzhugh Brundage, Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the
South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 98.
7
Brasil. Constitução política do Império do Brasil (Rio: n.p., 1824) art. 179, paragraph 19; Suely R.
R. Queiroz, Escravidão negra em São Paulo ( Rio: José Olympio, 1977), pp. 53-55. Maria Helena P. T.
Machado found that in Taubaté, São Paulo from 1850-1888 no jury sentenced slave convicts to hang; 16,
to galés; and 82, to be flogged. In Campinas from 1830 to 1888, Machado found that juries sentenced 12
slaves to hang; 16, to galés; and 82, to be flogged. Her data does not distinguish the crimes for which the
slaves were convicted, but a separate table does note that slaves perpetrated 84 homicides in Campinas
that victimized 18 masters and 23 overseers. In Taubaté, juries convicted 37 slaves for homicide in which
six victims were masters and eight overseers. Machado, Crimes e escravidão, pp. 39-40, 53. In Franca,
São Paulo, Ricardo Alexandre Ferreira found that of 20 slaves convicted from 1830 to 1888, one was
executed; three had capital sentences commuted to galés perpetuas, one was sentenced to galés perpet-
uas, and 15, flogged. Ferreira, Senhores de poucos escravos, p. 96. In Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Elione
Silva Guimarães found from 1850-1888 that of 16 homicides where a slave killed another slave, two
were sentenced to galés perpétuas; 12, to be flogged; and two sentences were unknown. Silva Guimarães,
Violência, p. 114.
PETER M. BEATTIE 15
this way, Brazilian law preserved old regime penal practices with the intent
of punctuating the distinction between slave and free criminals. Given the
horrendous conditions in Brazil’s prisons, however, one is tempted to con-
template whether slave convicts got the lighter sentence. For masters, flog-
ging was the preferred punishment. Even though it damaged and could kill
their human property, owners stood a chance to recover their slaves after
they suffered the prescribed torture and paid the state for its punitive serv-
ices.8 With luck and expenditures for medical care, badly battered slave con-
victs might still labor for their masters for years to come, and the state saved
incarceration costs. Many officials believed that imprisonment was an inap-
propriate punishment for slaves. As Senator Paulo de Souza put it, “Will the
slave who lives bowed under the weight of his labors by any chance have a
horror of being incarcerated in a prison where he can abandon himself to
laziness and drunkenness, the favorite passions of a slave?” Article 60 of the
Código Criminal specified that all slave sentences that were not galés
(prison at hard labor) or capital punishment be reduced to flogging, but this
directive was not always followed.9
The sentence of galés meant that some slave convicts ended up laboring
on Fernando de Noronha’s agricultural penal colony located on the main
island of an archipelago which measures some 18 square kilometers, 3.5 in
width and 10 in length. The Portuguese had founded the colony after they
removed a small French settlement from the island in the 1730s. Unable to
attract settlers, the crown sent penal exiles and soldiers from Brazil to
occupy it and build its infrastructure. After independence in 1822, Brazil
claimed the island and continued to remit convicts from across its territory
to labor there. Army troops guarded the convicts, and the colony’s com-
manders were usually commissioned army officers who served one-year
stints. Most convicts worked in agriculture and lived in wattle and daub
houses of their own construction, though a minority slept in a barracks-like
building in Remédios, the main village. A handful of employees and a
number of vendors lived alongside the inmates who were held in cellular
isolation only if they committed new crimes on the island.10
8
For a sense of how authorities regulated the flogging of slaves in Rio de Janeiro, see Série Justiça,
Fundo ND, Seção de Guarda Codes, Rio, 1857-1858, ANR, livro IVJ 7 2. The entries note slaves who
were jailed and include offenses, number of lashes applied, as well as expenses for whippings, food, and
medicine.
9
Paulo de Souza originally cited in José Honório Rodrigues et al, eds., O parlamento e a evolução
nacional (Brasília: Senado Federal, 1972), v. 2 pp. 345-346. The citation of de Souza was translated and
cited by Aufderheide, “Order and Violence,” pp. 308-309; On improper sentencing, Bandeira, Infor-
mações, p. 21.
10
Fleury, Parecer, pp. 6-9.
While many took comfort that slave convicts had to labor, if not on Fer-
nando de Noronha, then in military arsenals or public works, Parliament felt
the need to further distinguish the sentences of slaves.11 It enacted an addi-
tional law on June 10, 1835, soon after the Malê Revolt’s outbreak in Sal-
vador, Bahia, where slaves and black freemen, inspired by Muslim teachers,
plotted a rebellion to overthrow the rule of white masters. Parliament had
debated the measure before the Malê Revolt’s outbreak, but the fear it
inspired hastened its passage. The new law specified that a slave convicted
of killing her or his overseer, master, or an owner’s family member receive
a capital sentence with no right to appeal. An 1837 imperial decision limited
the law’s scope by extending the right to petition for clemency from the
imperial judicial section on the basis of the emperor’s constitutional moder-
ating power. Still, the law gave governors the power to act in the emperor’s
stead if they felt a heinous crime demanded immediate reckoning.12
João Luiz Riberio shows that the number of convicts sentenced to the gal-
lows, both free and slave, spiked when regional revolts and slave uprisings
challenged the central government from 1835 to 1850. In extensive research
on the imperial judicial section’s records and local periodicals, Ribeiro
counts 199 slave convicts executed between 1833 and 1876, as well as
another 135 who were condemned to die, yet whose executions he could not
confirm. In contrast, Ribeiro finds that between 1833 and 1860 authorities
executed 39 free or freed civilian convicts and 13 imperial military enlisted
men, but he could not corroborate the execution of another 30 civilian con-
victs condemned to die. Ribeiro systematically researched cases for the
provinces of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and the Capital Dis-
trict where more than two thirds of slave executions took place in the 1830s
and 1840s. Ribeiro acknowledges that more executions likely took place in
other provinces, but he is confident that he has counted the majority of legal
hangings based on centralized records in Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps more sig-
nificantly, Ribeiro found that 523 slaves and 120 free citizens and manu-
mitted slaves had their death sentences commuted to galés perpétuas (liter-
ally, perpetual galleys) between 1833 and 1889. The slave Francisco was the
last man legally executed in Brazil on April 28, 1876 in Pilar, Alagoas.13
11
For a harrowing description of prison labor on Rio’s dikes, Cypriano José Barata de Almeida
[attributed], “Dissertação abreviada sobre o horrível masmona—Pressiganga—existente no Rio de
Janeiro,” Rio de Janeiro, May 26, 1929, Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro, Lata 48, doc. 12.
12
João Luiz Riberio, No meio das galinhas, ch. 1 and 2; João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil:
a história do levante dos Malês (1835) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003); Brown, “‘A Black
Mark on Our Legislation,’” p. 107.
13
The numbers given above are adjustments upward from those cited in João Luiz Riberio’s No meio
das galinhas, pp. 296-298, 314-315. These numbers are based on research subsequent to his book’s pub-
lication, and the count draws on reported executions found in a variety of sources from provinces across
PETER M. BEATTIE 17
TABLE 1
INMATES ON FERNANDO DE NORONHA ISLAND PENAL COLONY ON
NOV. 16, 1881 BY CLASSIFICATION AND SENTENCE
Free Civilians ___________
___________ Slaves Foreigners
___________
Sentence Male Female Male Female Male Female Military Totals
Galés Perpétuas 260 3 243 1 8 1 128 644
Prisão Perpétua 8 10 3 5 0 0 0 26
Galés Temporária 75 0 3 0 17 0 0 95
Prisão com trabalho 41 0 0 0 1 0 160 202
Prisão simples 486 12 5 0 2 0 0 505
Penas capitais 3 0 2 0 0 0 0 5
Sentenças ignoradas 90 0 0 0 0 0 0 90
Totals 963 25 256 6 28 1 288 1,567
Source: Director Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao Presidente José Antonio de Souza Lima “Estado
actual de sentenciados existentes,” Fernando de Noronha, 16 Nov. 1881, APPJE, livro FN-21, no f. nos.
By 1881 it had been a long time since even the Portuguese had sent con-
victs to row in naval galleys, but the sentence galés perpétuas hints at the
mix of traditional and modern juridical principles that permeated Brazilian
law and its reliance on Portuguese precedent.14 The sentence of galés was
distinct from new liberal sentences like “prison with work” or “simple
imprisonment” in that it required a convict to work in fetters, a potent man-
ifestation of captivity in a slave society. The use of irons had an old regime
flavor more appropriate to a slave society than a leveled citizenry. Juries also
sentenced many free convicts to galés, not just slaves. No less than 492 (38
percent) of free and military convicts on the island had been sentenced to
galés, slightly less than the number for “simple imprisonment,” but Brazil-
ians strongly associated the sentence with slave status. As one penal expert
pithily put it in 1880, “The sentence of slaves is galés. . . .”15
Brazil. Given the difficulty of surveying this topic on a national level, it is not surprising that Ribeiro’s
research was more extensive in one region. In an Oct. 27, 2008 email communication, Ribeiro affirmed,
“O número de execuções que consigno em No Meio das Galinhas não é de modo algum o total de exe-
cuções no Brasil, no período entre 1833 e 1876, pois só fiz pesquisas sistemáticas nas fontes do Rio, de
Minas [Gerais] e de São Paulo. Mas é sem dúvida a maioria.”
14
On the Brazilian state’s reliance on Portguese jurisprudence especially in the area of family law
see, e.g., Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs, 2 vols. (Stanford University Press, 2003).
15
Conselheiro André Augusto de Padua Fleury, Parecer sobre o presídio de Fernando de Noronha
(Rio: Imprensa Nacional, 1880), p. 15; On improper sentencing, Dr. Antonio Herculano de Souza Ban-
deira Filho, Informações sobre of presídio de Fernando de Noronha (Rio: Imprensa Nacional, 1880), p.
21. Two scholars suggest that courts did not sentence free convicts to galés, but Table I clearly shows that
this was not the case. Brown, “‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation,’” p. 104; and Auderheide, “Order and
Violence,” p. 307.
The state dispossessed owners of slaves sentenced to death or imprison-

ment in Brazil without compensation. Here, the law limited an owner’s pri-
vate property rights based on de facto expectations of seigniorial responsi-
bility to discipline one’s family and dependents, including one’s slaves. One
draft of the June 10, 1835 law included a provision for the state to compen-
sate masters when juries sentenced their slaves to galés or death, but law-
makers struck this language. In British America, by contrast, courts usually
compensated owners for slaves sentenced to death or transportation. In 1831
an American navy officer visiting Rio de Janeiro observed fettered convict
slaves at labor in the street; he then asked an Austrian friend and long-time
resident of Brazil why masters of slave convicts were not compensated. He
answered, “They say it is a just punishment for not having taught the slave
better.” The astonished American then observed, “Taking away life is a pun-
ishment hardly known in Brazil.” After the June 10, 1835 law, however,
gruesome public hangings became more common.16
Why, despite the June 10, 1835 law, were relatively few slaves executed
compared to the much larger number who had their capital sentences com-
muted to galés perpétuas? In 1890, when Brazil’s new republican govern-
ment proudly scrapped both the sentences of galés and capital punishment,
the deposed Emperor Pedro II carped in his memoirs that he was not being
given his due. Then in exile, he wrote that he had de facto ended capital pun-
ishment in Brazil by commuting all capital sentences in the past thirty years.
Pedro overstates the time frame as the last legal public execution had
occurred in 1876, but he had greatly reduced executions and then brought
them to a halt in the 1870s. As early as 1853, Pedro ordered legal procedures
changed to insure that he had the final say on all capital sentences. Since he
opposed the death penalty, he began to commute most capital sentences to
galés perpétuas, especially after 1860.17
Most slave convicts on Fernando de Noronha were living testaments to

Pedro’s actions. In 1881, 264 slave convicts (more than half of the 523
whose death sentences were commuted in Ribeiro’s count) lived alongside
1,256 free civilian and military convicts. Slave convicts constituted almost
17 percent of the prison population, compared to military convicts, 18 per-
16
W. S. W. Ruschenberger, Three Years in the Pacific Including Notices of Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, and
Peru (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Blanchard, 1834), p. 28; Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, p. 58.
17
In his diaries, Pedro II noted his opposition to the death penalty. Hélio Vianna, ed., “Diário de
1862,” Anuário do Museu Imperial 17 (1956), pp. 19, 76; Diary entries for May 31, 1890 and June 15,
1890 in the Arquivo Histórico do Museu Imperial, Coleção Pedro d’Orléans e Bragança, Catalogo B,
Maço 35, Doc. 1,057. I thank Roderick J. Barman for sharing these sources on Pedro II’s opinions of the
death penalty.
PETER M. BEATTIE 19
TABLE 2
PROVINCES THAT SENTENCED SLAVE CONVICTS ON FERNANDO DE NORONHA,
1881
Province # Rough % Province # Rough %
Amazonas 1 0.4 Espírito Santo 1 0.4
Pará 4 1.5 Rio de Janeiro 24 9.1
Maranhão 12 4.6 Corte 3 1.1
Ceará 10 3.8 São Paulo 47 17.8
Piauí 0 0.0 Minas Gerais 33 12.5
RGN 3 1.1 Paraná 1 0.4
Paraíba 9 3.4 Santa Catarina 1 0.4
Pernambuco 64 24.2 RGS 17 6.4
Alagoas 2 0.8 Mato Grosso 1 0.4
Sergipe 4 1.5 Goiás 0 0.0
Bahia 19 7.2 No information 8 3.0
Totals 264 100.0
Source: “Relatório . . . de Gusmão Lobo,” APPJE, 1881.
cent, and civilian convicts, 65 percent. Only 31 of the 1,567 convicts were
women (2 percent), and 6 of them were slaves. Slave convict numbers need
to be viewed against the backdrop of Brazil’s shrinking bonded population.
When the state began to enforce its own laws against the international slave
trade in 1850, nearly one third of the nation’s inhabitants were slaves.
Brazil’s bonded population depended on imports to sustain it, however, and
their proportion of national population diminished to less than one in seven
inhabitants by 1872. Brazil’s 1872 census counted approximately 4.2 mil-
lion free black and mixed race inhabitants (44 percent), 3.8 million whites
(40 percent), and 1.5 million slaves (16 percent).18
Authorities remitted slave convicts to Fernando de Noronha from all five

of Brazil’s major regions, but most arrived from the Southeast (40.9 percent)
and Northeast (46.6 percent). The Southeast’s percentage reflected the con-
centration of slaves on the coffee frontier via Brazil’s continuing internal
slave trade after 1850. Even so, northeastern provinces did retain slaves, and
their proximity to the island meant that authorities there could more conve-
niently and cheaply ship convicts to the penal colony. Most convicts en route
to Fernando de Noronha passed through the jails of Pernambuco’s main port
and capital, Recife, before transfer to the island. Thus, the war minister
18
Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística [IBGE], Estatísticas históricas do Brasil, 2nd ed.
(Rio: IBGE, 1990), pp. 31-33.
TABLE 3
SLAVE CONVICTS ON FERNANDO DE NORONHA IN 1881 BY REGION
Region Number of Convicts Percentage of Total Convicts
North 5 1.9
Northeast 123 46.6
Southeast 108 40.9
South 19 7.2
Central West 1 0.4
No Information 8 3.0
Totals 264 100.0
Source: “Relatório . . . de Gusmão Lobo,” APPJE, 1881.
shared in the penal colony’s administration with Pernambuco’s governors, as

the latter was the most proximate authority and oversaw the supply of the
island. In 1877, Parliament moved the penal colony’s administration from the
War to the Justice Ministry. Even so, the War Ministry continued to play a
role in running the penal colony as it provided troops to guard convicts, and
commanders (renamed directors after 1877) continued to be commissioned
army officers.19 Not surprisingly, overlapping jurisdictions between the War
and Justice Ministries and the governors of Pernambuco led to disputes.
Brazil’s 1824 Constitution required provincial governments to fund and

build their own penitentiaries, and the 1830 Penal Code obliged the con-
struction of penitentiaries capable of carrying out the new sentence of
“prison with labor.” Under the empire, only the Capital District, Bahia, Per-
nambuco, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo built penitentiaries, and even
these did not consistently provide conditions to fulfill the sentence of prison
with labor.20 While the new prisons added capacity, they could not keep up
with growing penal populations and Fernando de Noronha accepted some of
the overflow. By the 1860s, Fernando de Noronha became known as Brazil’s
“central deposit for civilian convicts” as it loosely wove a patchwork of
provinicial jail systems into an imperial entity. Its inmate population grew
19
Evaristo de Morais, Prisões e Instituições Penitenciárias no Brasil (Rio: Liv. Ed. Conselheiro C.
de Oliveira, 1923), p. 35.
20
On the relative size of penal populations, Peter M. Beattie, “Conscription Versus Penal Servitude:
Army Reform’s Influence on the Brazilian State’s Management of Social Contral, 1870-1930,” Journal
of Social History 32:4 (Summer 1999), pp. 847-878; For example, the Warden of Recife’s Casa de
Detenção noted, “Without the help of public funds, I mounted some workshops and gave work to hun-
dreds of prisoners who distracted themselves and found means for an honest life.” But after four years,
he could no longer afford to support these efforts and they ceased. Rufino Augusto de Almeida, Estado
actual das prisões da província de Pernambuco (Recife: Typ. De M. Figeroa, 1874), pp. 11, 40-41.
PETER M. BEATTIE 21
TABLE 4
PROVINCIAL REPRESENTATION OF CONVICTS ON FERNANDO DE NORONHA,
1872 AND 1890
Province 1872 % 1891 % Province 1872 % 1891 %
Amazonas 0 0 0 0 Espírito Santo 0 0 2 0.1
Pará 16 1.3 4 0.3 Rio de Janeiro 42 3.3 12 0.9
Maranhão 38 3.0 28 2.2 Federal Capital — — 63 4.9
Ceará 63 5.0 17 1.3 São Paulo 100 7.9 10 0.8
Piauí 3 0.2 5 0.4 Minas Gerais 90 7.1 18 1.4
RGN 21 1.7 8 0.6 Paraná 0 0 3 0.2
Paraíba 91 7.2 6 0.5 Santa Catarina 0 0 4 0.3
Pernambuco 485 38.2 492 38.3 RGS 91 7.2 119 9.2
Alagoas 23 1.8 6 0.5 Mato Grosso 0 0 11 0.9
Sergipe 5 0.4 0 0 Goiás 0 0 0 0.0
Bahia 35 2.7 14 1.1 Paraguay 0 0 20 1.6
Uruguay 0 0 5 0.4 No Information 166 13.0 439 34.1
Totals 1,269 100.0 1,286 100.0
Source: Relatório, Fernando de Noronha, Jan. 1, 1872, APPJE, livro FN-15, f. 329-361; “Relatório. . . de
Gusmão Coelho,” APPJE, 1891.
rapidly from 187 convicts in 1844 to 333 in 1850 to 1,678 by 1865. Its num-
bers fell during the Paraguayan War (1864-70) to 1,257 in 1869 when Par-
liament liberated scores of convicts to fight at the front, but quickly climbed
back to 1,688 in 1881; and shrank back to 1,286 by 1888.21
A March 5, 1859 decree limited Fernando de Noronha’s penal colony to

three types of inmates: free convicts sentenced to prison with work, coun-
terfeiters, and slave convicts with capital sentences commuted to galés per-
pétuas. It seems that war ministers and Pernambucan governors largely
ignored these rules. When the Justice Ministry asked in 1879 how many of
the 1,673 prisoners then in the colony fit the 1859 decree’s prescriptions, the
director responded that there were 281 free prisoners sentenced to prison
with labor, 24 counterfeiters, and 188 “slaves condemned to die whose sen-
tences were commuted to perpetual galleys.” 22 The director reported that it
21
Tenente Coronel Comandante José Maria Ildefonso Jácom de Viega Pessôa ao Presidente José
Ildefonso de Souza Ramos, Fernando de Noronha, 1 Setembro 1850, APPJE, livro FN-4A, f. 263. Data
for 1844 found in Gláucia Tomaz de Aquino Pessoa, Cardernos de pesquisa: Fernando de Noronha, uma
ilha-presídio nos trópicos (Rio: Ministério de Justiça Arquivo Nacional, 1994), p. 17; For 1865 see
Morais, Prisões, p. 35; Relatório da Repartição dos Negócios do Ministério da Guerra Apresentado ao
Parlamento (Rio: Imprensa Nacional, 1870); “Relatório . . . de Gusmão Coelho,” APPJE, 1891.
22
Alexandre de Barros e Albuquerque ao Adolpho de Barros, Fernando de Noronha, 3 Sept. 1879,
APPJE, livro FN-19, f. 293.
would be necessary to remove 1,180 convicts from the colony to comply

with the 1859 decree, but as the numbers cited in the previous paragraph
indicate, a large transfer of convicts back to the provinces did not occur
under the empire.
Most penal colony inmates came from Pernambuco’s courts. In 1881, 492
of the free inmates on Fernando de Noronha hailed from Pernambuco or
nearly 40 percent of the 1,256 civil and military convicts. Pernambuco’s
governors took advantage of their administrative role to dump a large
number of convicts onto imperial ledgers. As one penal expert complained
in 1880, Fernando de Noronha had become a “complementary prison of
Recife’s House of Detention.”23 Corroborating data culled from matricula-
tion records from 1865 to the 1890s confirms that of 960 inmates (slave and
free) Pernambuco remitted 366 (38 percent). Pernambuco’s northeastern
neighbors contributed another third (362) and the Southeast, a little more
than one-in-ten convicts (108).24
Many slave convicts who were sentenced or who had capital sentences
commuted to galés ended up on Fernando de Noronha because authorities
wanted slave convicts to be forced to work. The rigor of the penal colony’s
work regime, however, was dubious. Frank D. Y. Carpenter’s 1884 novel
Round About Rio narrates an American family’s travels in Brazil. Although
fictional, Capenter’s narrative showed that he was familiar with Brazil and
possessed a good grasp of Portuguese. In it, the narrator observes that slaves
in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1880s were aware that a slow process of abo-
lition was afoot, and they had become “idle with impunity” because they
knew that their master’s instruments of torture were destined for a “museum
shelf.” The narrator claims that in the interior, overseers treated plantation
slaves with brutality, but the mistreated bondspersons often murdered their
overseers in revenge. This act bettered their lives because “capital punish-
ment did not exist in the Brazils [sic].” Instead, “The murderer is transported
to the penal colony on the island of Fernando de Noronha; but since the con-
vict’s work is lighter and his fare is better than the slave’s, his last state is
better than the first. In this ocean resort [my emphasis] the slave sees a pre-
mium for crime, and, in consequence, a man might as well be a tax-gatherer
in Ireland as an overseer in Brazil.”25
23
Souza Bandeira noted that authorities in Recife’s Casa de Detenção sent prisoners to Fernando de
Noronha to releave overcrowded cells without the authorization of imperial authorities in Informações,
18.
24
Livro de matricula, 1865; Livro de matricula, 1885.
25
Frank D. Y. Carpenter, Round About Rio (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Company, 1884), pp. 328-
329. I thank Tracy Alexander and B. J. Barickman for sharing this citation.
PETER M. BEATTIE 23
This off the cuff comparative sociology of oppression inflated the dan-
gers faced by overseers in Brazil and tax collectors in Ireland. Still, the
image of impunity for slave convicts on Fernando de Noronha had
become a part of master-class folklore, a colorful story to regale upon a
foreigner that an American author used to draw out dubious moral equiv-
alencies between two empires’ dealings with restive subjugated popula-
tions. The anecdote reveals the growing fears surrounding the decline of
slavery and seigniorial authority. Many masters blamed Pedro II’s aver-
sion to execute slaves sentenced to hang for this decline. An 1881 news-
paper headline from Minas Gerais fumed that a slave “Matou para ser
galés” (Killed to be sentenced to galés). Senator José Inácio Silveira da
Mota warned in 1879, “If you do not want the violence of the death
penalty, then abolish slavery. . . . The slave that kills his master counts on
a commutation of his sentence and that he will have his provision ground
(roça) to work on Fernando de Noronha.” Some slaves reportedly did
murder their masters or overseers and turned themselves over to authori-
ties declaring: “I killed to serve the king! I killed to escape captivity!” In
response to Pedro’s clemency, some members of the master class took
justice into their own hands. A jury in Campinas, São Paulo in 1879
denied against clear evidence that a slave defendant had infringed the
June 10, 1835 law to sentence him for a lesser crime so that he would be
flogged and returned to his owner who would render “the law of Lynch.”
These slave lynchings appear to have been less common before the
emperor brought about a de facto moratorium of the death penalty. Brazil-
ian observers mostly criticized lynchings as misguided savagery, and ref-
erences to the law of Lynch carried unflattering comparisons to the prac-
tice so widely associated with the United States.26
THE 1881 CONVICT SLAVE SURVEY
Just how true or exaggerated were the assertions of Carpenter and others
about the behavior of slaves and their attitudes toward Brazilian penal jus-
tice? The 1881 slave convict survey provides a means to access them. It also
permits an interpretation of what the survey categories and contents reveal
about authorities’ perspectives on the status of slave inmates and their place
in the penal colony.
26
Journal do Comércio, Rio, May 20, 1879; Arauto de Minas, São João d’el Rey, July 14, 1881;
Observations about slave lynchings originally cited in Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, 285-86, 292, 303,
304, 308; Fleury referred to slave lynchings as “acts of sedition and barbarism” in Parecer, 15; David
Brion Davis, From Homicide to Slavery: Studies in American Culture (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1988), p. 22.
The 1881 survey’s first category listed the slave convict’s name. Like
slaves on the mainland, most bonded convicts only had a first name. Among
those with surnames, sixteen (6 percent) indicated ethnic or geographic
African origins: “Benguella, Nagó, Cabinda, Congo, Muçambique, Man-
jollo, and Mina.” It is possible that convicts without these names had been
born in Africa, but the consistency of their use appears fairly uniform in the
documentation.27 Only 28 (10 percent) had second names that indicated
Brazilian birth: 19 Crioulos, 7 Cabras, one “Antonio Caboclo,” and one
“José Cantagalo” (tried in Cantagalo, Bahia); five second names referred to
color, three pardo (brown) and two mulatto; and one appears to refer to age
(Joaquim Novo). For prison officials, these naming practices maintained
distinctions between African- and Brazilian-born slaves, and apparently they
obviated the need for a separate category on birthplace in the survey.
The importance of African birth denoted in a convict’s name is amplified

by the fact that the names of Brazilian-born slaves did not systematically
classify their place of birth. The only issue of origin treated as a survey cat-
egory was the province where the slave convict had been tried. For bureau-
crats, a slave’s judicial origin was important, but their birth place, if not
African, remained a mostly unmarked category of Brazilian-born. In a sep-
arate table, officials listed prisoners by status and sentence, but they grouped
African-born slaves with Brazilian-born slaves. They excluded the African-
born from the tallies of “foreign-born” convicts whose origins were Euro-
pean, Spanish American, or North American (see Table 1). In this instance,
slave status trumped foreign birth.
Perhaps the 1881 survey’s most intriguing element was the expression
“ex-escravo de” (ex-slave of) or “que foi escravo de” (who was a slave of)
which prefaced the former owners’ names. The phrase in this and other doc-
uments emphasized the state’s confiscation of human property. These con-
victs escaped slavery without finding liberty; they traded captivity for incar-
ceration. As the slave convict Antonio Ferreira’s 1890 petition for pardon
succinctly put it, “. . . being born under the cruel rigor of captivity, the sup-
plicant left it unexpectedly by committing a crime.”28 The phrase “ex-slave”
set them apart from freedmen and located them somewhere between the
slave and the manumitted, though their convict status may have caused
many Brazililans to see them beneath the status of law-abiding slaves. Since
27
Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao Pres. José Manoel de Freitas, Fernando de Noronha, Apr. 20,
1884, APPJE, livro FN-23, no f. nos.
28
Ao rogo do supplicante Antonio Ferreira [por Liberalino Rodrigues Machado] ao Generalíssimo
Chefe do Governo Provisório dos Estados Unidos do Brasil (hereafter EUB), Fernando de Noronha, 20
May 1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 197.
PETER M. BEATTIE 25
some employees and even a few prisoners brought slaves to the island, the
distinction between slave and ex-slave (slave convicts) was not entirely
eclipsed there.29 A slave who committed a crime underwent yet another
counterintuitive legal and status transformation. As the respected jurist
Perdigão Malheiro wrote: “Under penal law the slave as a[n] . . . agent of a
crime is not a thing. . . . He is a human, a man, equal by his qualities to other
free men whose qualities he shares. He is therefore responsible personally
and directly for the crimes he commits.” According to this gendered analy-
sis, slaves condemned to death or galés both escaped slavery and became
“men.” Slave victims of crime, however, remained “things.”30 This legal
transformation could create confusion about the status of slave convicts and
their children. For instance, in 1868 the commander wrote Pernambuco’s
governor that Josepha Maria de Espírito Santo and Joaquim José de Santa
Anna, “both slave convicts,” had a daughter living in their company named
Asra. The commander wanted to know whether or not to consider Asra
“free.” The governor passed the question onto authorities in Rio de Janeiro,
and I did not come across an answer to this query, but because Josepha and
Joaquim were “ex-slaves,” it would seem that Asra was born free.31
Despite escaping slavery and becoming “men,” slave convicts’ legal identi-
ties continued to be linked to their former owners and vice versa. Two hundred
and twenty of the 264 entries included the ex-owner’s name, and it was often
the only way to distinguish among many slave convicts who shared the same
name. Eleven owners are listed as dead or murdered (finado, falecido, or assas-
sinado), and another seven are listed as the former property of the owner’s
heirs. Rather than a separate survey category, this was extra information
crammed in the boxes for owners’ names. Why would penal colony scriveners
who were not the most zealous of public servants (indeed, some were convicts
themselves) include this extra information? It seems likely that they recopied it
from the convict’s guia: the paperwork that was supposed to accompany all
29
Slave convict and ex-slave in this case study are one and the same. To limit confusion, however,
I privilege the term slave convict in the text, but “ex-slave” appears in citations and some analysis. In
1875, a report indicated that four male and female slaves were resident on the island. ‘Relação,” Fer-
nando de Noronha, 1 Jan. 1876, APEJE, FN-17, f. 145-179.
30
[Agostinho Marques] Perdigão Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil: ensaio histórico, jurídico,
social 2 vols. 3rd ed. [1st ed. 1867-69] (Petropolis: Vozes, 1976), I, pp. 17-75, 95, 181-183; II, pp. 123-
124; The citation was translated into English in Robert E. Conrad, Children of God’s Fire: A Documen-
tary History of Black Slavery in Brazil (Penn State University Press, 1994), pp. 237-245.
31
Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao Presidente Conde de Baependy, Fernando de Noronha, 16
Sept. 1868, APEJE, livro FN-13, f. 380.
32
One inspector observed that convict scriveners copied vital information from guias which they
could manipulate. He complained that records were often imcomplete. Souza Bandeira, Informações, pp.
11, 13.
transferred prisoners.32 The authors of these documents went out of their way
to inform readers that those slave convicts had murdered their former owners.
This and other evidence shows that Pedro II’s opposition to the death penalty
led him to commute the sentences of scores of slave convicts who had realized
the slaveowning class’ most dreaded fear, what one might term mastercide.
The ex-owners’ names and titles illuminate their status. Only one master
with a noble title appears on the list, the Visconde (Viscount) de Suassuna,
although the Baronice (baroness) de Itu is listed as the owner of a slave in a
separate petition.33 Twenty-three ex-owners were women and fourteen of
their names were prefaced with the honorary title Dona which suggests the
respectability of marriage and membership in the comfortable, propertied
class. Fourteen former owners had military ranks, two were priests, one was
a Doutor (graduate of a law or a medical faculty), and one had the honorific
title Dom. The statuses and occupations of ex-owner’s reflect the democratic
patterns of slaveholding characteristic of Brazil and indicate that the state
confiscated the slave property of even prominent citizens.
The next survey category records literacy among slave convicts. Only
nine (4 percent) were literate. Why did authorities include this category?
Likely it was a clerical habit as so many official documents asked whether
or not a prisoner, a soldier, a witness, and others were literate. A small penal
colony night school offered literacy training to convicts, and to the chagrin
of prison inspectors, literate criminals often wrote politicians and newspa-
pers on the mainland about conditions and events on the island.34
The slave convict’s provincial origins reveal once again the preponderance
of Pernambuco which accounted for 64 slave convicts, nearly one quarter of
the total, but this proportion was much lower than the province’s 38 percent
share of free prisoners. The province’s lower share of slave convicts likely
reflected the fact that the Northeast’s share of slaves nationwide had dimin-
ished, particularly by the 1870s when the internal slave trade reached its
peak. After Pernambuco, three southeastern provinces, where the slave pop-
ulation was being reconcentrated after 1850, contributed the most slave con-
victs: São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro. Perhaps more surprising
is that Rio Grande do Sul, with its comparatively small slave population, con-
tributed almost as many slave convicts to the penal colony’s 1881 population
as Bahia, the former northeastern hub of the international slave trade. Though
33
The slave João Bras is listed as the former slave of the Bronice de Itu in an 1889 petition. Joaquim
Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao Presidente Innocencio Marques d’Araujo Góes, Fernando de Noronha,
5 Jan. 1889, APPJE, livro FN-28, f. 94.
34
Fleury, Parecer, p. 15.
PETER M. BEATTIE 27
only small numbers of slave convicts came from frontier provinces, all but
two are represented in the slave community: the sparsely populated and
remote provinces of Goiás and Piauí (Table 2). Fernando de Noronha was in
this sense not only Brazil’s “central prison,” but also a national institution in
composition, probably outdone in this regard only by the Brazilian army.35
The 1881 survey did not list the towns in which inmates were tried, but many
matriculation records did. These records show that only 38 out of 203 slave
convict trials took place in Brazil’s most populated cities. Most slave convicts
lived in or near small rural municipalities like Bananal, São Paulo; Oliveira,
Minas Gerais; and Codó, Maranhão, where they mainly performed agricul-
tural labor. This geographic pattern accords well with the novelist Carpen-
ter’s depiction of mostly rural field slaves escaping slavery by killing their
overseers for a better life on Fernando de Noronha.36
Upon establishing judicial origins, the survey turns to the slave convicts’
crimes which were invariably homicide, with the exception of one who com-
bined this crime with robbery. This uniformity makes one wonder why the
administrators even bothered to include it as a category. Then again, homi-
cide was the crime of most free convicts on the island, but that population
possessed many nonhomicidal convicts such as counterfeiters, thieves,
“deflowerers,” and deserters. In contrast, slave convicts had to be convicted
of murder to make it to Fernando de Noronha.
The convict’s crime is coupled with his or her sentence. Here there was
greater variation, but 252 slave convicts (95 percent) had either been sen-
tenced to galés perpétuas or had had a capital sentence commuted to galés
perpétuas. Only two slave convicts who had been sentenced to death had not
yet received a commutation, but the fact that officials went to the expense to
ship them to Fernando de Noronha indicates that they fully expected them
to be spared. Most slave sentences that were not galés perpétuas identified
women and minor defendants. Only one of six slave women was sentenced
to perpetual galleys compared to three of twenty-five free convict women.
In deference to gender, most juries sentenced slave women to prisão perpé-
tua (life imprisonment). Courts condemned eleven slave males to galés tem-
porário, prisão perpétua, or prisão simples. Even though the latter two sen-
35
Peter M. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood: Army, Honor, Race, and Nation 1864-1945 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001), chapter 7.
36
Matriculation books show that convicts were tried in more than 270 municipalites across Brazil.
Only 133 of 1,058 cases came from provincial capitals and the national capital, and more than half of
these (72) came from Recife. Many small towns contributed only one convict to the colony’s population,
but some smaller Pernambucan towns produced many: Pão de Alho (30), Bonito (20), Limoeiro (19),
Goiana (15), Victoria (15), and Escada (14). Livro de matricula, 1865 and Livro de matricula, 1885.
tences did not comport with the Criminal Code’s directives, juries appeared
to prefer these sentences for slave minors. In these small ways, courts made
slight distinctions among slave criminals, but their sentences were much
more homogeneous than their free counterparts (Table 1).37
Since the sentence of galés required work, it is only appropriate that the
survey catalogued their work “company.” In most instances, a trusted con-
vict “sergeant” headed each of 15 work companies flanked by two convict
“corporals.” Only 20 slave convicts lacked information on their designated
company. Sixty-six of the slave convicts were listed as invalids, most of
whom were elderly or suffering from debilitating conditions, while 194 were
able bodied. Most of them performed agricultural labor, but some worked in
specialized companies. One company of cobblers produced shoes, while
another of skilled laborers comprised men who practiced a variety of trades
(capentry, masonry, etc.) necessary for the penal colony’s upkeep. Another
company organized the inmate servants of the administrators, officers, and
employees, and still another served as the colony’s convict police force.
The census shows that 191 slave convicts were clearly designated to a
work platoon. The smallest concentratation was three slave convicts in one
company, and the largest, 22. Ironically, one of the largest concentrations of
slave convicts in a work platoon was in the serviço de ronda, or the convict
police company, where they worked to prevent crime, disturbances, and
escapes. Another 20 served as lookouts who watched over buildings where
valuables were stored or beaches where escapes on improvised rafts were
common. This data vividly demonstrates that penal colony authorities con-
sciously integrated slave convicts into all companies. Work details deter-
mined where a convict lived to a large extent, so this practice also meant that
slave convicts spent their leisure time with free convicts. Administrators and
free inmates likely continued to view slave convicts as inferior in status, but
directors sang their praises as the best behaved group of convicts. Laconic
sources make assessments of how free inmates viewed slave convicts diffi-
cult, but some escapes on flimsy rafts and criminal activities in the penal
colony included free and slave convicts, indicating substantial collaboration
and trust among some of them.38
37
Confusion over one minor’s sentence is telling. While his prison record noted that he had been
sentence to perpetual galleys, the commander confirmed that “because he was a minor he was sentenced
to 20 years imprisonment.” Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao Presidente Pedro Vicente de
Azevedo, Fernando de Noronha, 22 Sept. 1887, APPJE, FN-26, f. 278; Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas,
pp. 525-530.
38
Free and slave convicts did conspire together. The slave convict Marçal escaped with five free
inmates in 1884. Brigadeiro Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao Presidente José Manoel de Freitas,
PETER M. BEATTIE 29
Many slaves brought valued skills to the colony that the director enumerated
clearly. Indeed, a central factor directors considered in assigning convicts to
work companies was the occupational skills (ofício) they brought with them.
Eighty-five slave convicts had no skill listed, but 104 were listed as agricultural
field workers. In addition, there were also ten masons, eight cobblers, and two
cowboys. Convict slave women worked washing clothes and linens for the hos-
pital and infirmary, an occupation “appropriate to their sex” as officials often
noted. Other trades with only one slave convict represented included fisher-
man, baker, leather worker, carpenter, lumberjack, and arsenal worker.
The slaves’ disciplinary record (good, regular, or bad) constituted the next
survey category. The director designated only seven slave convicts’ com-
portment as “bad,” none were regular, 222 had good behavior, and 35 lacked
an entry. Compare this to Justice Ministry inspectors in 1879 who reported
that of 1,678 convicts only 196 had good behavior; 1,001, regular; and 481,
bad behavior.39 The director’s ranking of slave convict behavior put his work
to discipline and reform prisoners in a positive light, but he had other
motives to emphasize their good behavior.
Because a number of slave convicts were unable to work, the survey

recorded illnesses and disabilities. Two hundred and forty slave convicts had
no health problems, but nine suffered from hernias, a common ailment given
the heavy lifting required of slaves, and four suffered from mental illness.
Three were blind, while three more suffered from lung diseases, and three
others from “various ailments.” One slave was ill with beriberi and another
expired while the survey took place; his illness is listed as “dead.”40
There was no category giving a specific age for each slave convict, an
odd omission given that other prison records commonly included it, but the
Fernando de Noronha, 22 Apr. 1884, APPJE, FN-23, no f. nos.; for another escape of free and slave con-
victs, Ibid., Tenente Coronel Sebastiao Antonio do Rego Barros ao Presidente João Pedro Carvalho de
Moraes, 23 Set 1875, FN-16, f. 469-470; another Commander noted that three prisoners plotted crimes
together and terrorized other convicts. One of them was “Sebastião, known as Kangaroo, ex-slave of
Pedro Antonio de Sá Cavalcante” and the other two were free men. One of the free men, Vicente de Assis
Tavares, wrote a petition asking to be liberated from one of the island’s few prison cells. He wrote,
“Igualdade e fraternidade deve ser a bandeira existente entre os sentenciados.” Ibid., Director Luiz
Paulino de Hollanda Valença ao Presidente Manoel Alves de Araujo, 6 Nov. 1889, FN-28, f. 466; Ibid.,
Do sentenciado pobre Vicente de Assis Tavares ao Director Luiz Paulino de Hollanda Valença, 2 Nov.
1889, FN-28, f. 467-8. Slave and free convicts also figured among the main conspirators in a suppressed
1854 inmate uprising, Tenente Coronel Commandante José Antonio Pinto ao Presidente José Bento da
Cunha Figueredo, Fernando de Noronha, Jan. 29, 1854, APEJE, FN-6, f. 26.
39
Souza Bandeira, Informações, p. 25.
40
This is why the director refers to 263 ex-slave convicts, but based on all entries, this article refers
to 264.
survey did record the age of slave convicts over age sixty. While life in the
colony was tough, a few slave convicts lived to a ripe old age for the era.
Thirty-nine former slaves were in their sixties; two had reached their seven-
ties; and one was in his eighties. It seems age sixty had come to define what
contemporary Brazilians refer to as the “terceira idade,” or the age of retire-
ment when prison authorities stopped requiring older slave convicts to per-
form rigorous work. This concept would be confirmed by Parliament later in
the decade with the passage of the 1885 Sexagenarian Law that provision-
ally freed slaves age sixty and older.41 In April 1889, the presidio’s director
noted that some 300 convicts were elderly and incapable of performing even
moderate labor. He suggested that the emperor invoke his power of
clemency to pardon them which would result in “great savings to public cof-
fers.”42 The motivation behind some of the pardons granted to slave convicts
in the 1880s may have been to rid the colony of unproductive mouths to care
for and to feed.
The survey also recorded when slave convicts had been sentenced and
when they arrived at the penal colony. Some, especially those from Per-
nambuco, were sentenced and transported to the island in the same year. But
many, especially those from distant provinces, spent years in traditional jails
before being transferred. Lorenço José, for example, had been sentenced in
Pernambuco in 1837. He arrived at the penal colony in 1848 making him the
slave convict with the most time on the island, while Antonio Cabinda, who
had been sentenced in São Paulo in 1834, arrived in 1871, making him the
prisoner with the longest span of time incarcerated. On average, slave con-
victs spent eight years in traditional provincial jails before they were sent to
the penal colony. This fact casts doubts on assertions by Carpenter and
others that slaves who murdered their overseer could soon expect to be tend-
ing a provision ground on Fernando de Noronha.
Most slave convicts arrived on the island between 1868 and 1877. The
peak year was 1876 when 41 slave convicts disembarked, followed by 1868
when 40 arrived. Earlier records indicate that before the 1860s, slave con-
victs formed a smaller minority of inmates. From 1835 to 1850, slave con-
victs were more often executed, but as Pedro II slowed and finally ended
capital punishment, slave convicts began to crowd provincial jails. Minas
Gerais’ governor complained in 1873 that his jail in Ouro Preto was over-
41
The Sexagenarian Law freed slaves over 65 immediately, but it required that slaves 60 to 64 con-
tinue to provide service until they reached age 65.
42
J. Dos Passo Queiroz ao Innocencio Marques d’Araujo Goes, Fernando de Noronha, 20 Apr. 1889,
APPJE, livro FN-28, f. 261.
PETER M. BEATTIE 31
crowded with 400 prisoners, including some 100 sentenced to galés. Many
of these “were slaves who had killed their masters or overseers.”43 Slave
convicts from these distant provinces arrived in numbers through coordi-
nated shipments. In 1871, 16 slave convicts arrived from Minas Gerais,
while 1868 saw 14 arrive from Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo remitted
42 slave convicts in nearly equally divided annual groups from 1871 to
1874. The liberation of scores of convicts to fight in the Paraguayan War
opened space for slave inmates in the late 1860s.44 Calculating the total
number of slave convicts that served time on the island during the empire is
complicated by incomplete records. A ball park figure of 300 to 400 slave
convicts would be a conservative estimate.45
The survey’s final column was reserved for sundry comments on slave
convicts, a space used to add information to 23 entries. The first such entry
noted that Luduvico, “the ex-slave of the assassinated Domingo Pereira de
Azevedo Terra,” was the “the infirmary’s coffee roaster.” It is unclear why
this fact deserved comment other than to recognize the apparent importance
of coffee for medicinal purposes, or maybe this was a charitable service con-
tributed by Luduvico. The second comment recorded that the “ex-slave
Agostinho Primeiro,” who had been sentenced in Sergipe in 1853, “Per-
formed the great service of denouncing a plot for rebellion by convicts in the
days when Colonel Luiz José Monteiro commanded the island [in 1865].”
Other comments noted if a convict had petitioned for a pardon or the date
when a capital sentence had been commuted.
Comments on a few slave convicts, however, showed that they did not
contribute to security. José, the “ex-slave of the Visconde de Suassuna,” and
Sebastião, the “ex-slave of Pedro Theotonio de Sá Cavalcante,” both com-
mitted new murders in the presidio. In José’s case, he had received a second
sentence of perpetual galleys. Based on his record, it would be hard to argue
that slave convicts had good disciplinary records because they feared the
gallows. Overall, however, the 1881 survey went out of its way to empha-
size the good behavior and services of the vast majority of slave convicts.
The penal colony director’s use of survey categories reveals much about
how he enumerated, valued, and classified slave convicts, but what the
survey did not record is also illuminating. For instance, color was not a
survey category, a trait included in most convict guias and matriculation
43
Guias . . . 1830-1837; Ribeiro, No Meio das galinhas, p. 284.
44
Beattie, The Tribute of Blood, chapter 6.
45
Guias . . . 1830-1837; This estimate is quite conservative as Souza Bandeira Filho noted that there
were 300 slave convicts on the island when he visited it in 1879. Souza Bandeira, Informações, p. 17.
TABLE 5
COLOR OF CONVICTS ON FERNANDO DE NORONHA ISLAND
Matriculation and Guia Records,
Director’s Report Jan. 1, 1891
________________________________ 1830s-1880s
______________________________
Color # % Color # %
Brown 565 44.0 Brown 413 41.0
Black 325 25.3 Black 267 26.6
White 264 20.6 White 196 19.6
Semi-White 55 4.2 Light Brown 67 6.7
Cabocla** 52 4.0 Indigenous 54 5.4
Mameluca** 24 1.9 Cafuz** 7 0.7
Mestiça** 1 *
Totals 1,284 100.0 1,004 100.0
*Less than 0.1%
**Caboclo generally indicated indigenous heritage whereas mameluco and mestiço implied a mixture of
European and indigenous forebears. Cafuz designated persons of African and Indigenous heritage.
Source: The sources for Table 5 are found in footnote #5 of this article. While the 1891 terms are those
of the Director, other records used diverse terminology that I recategorized for analytical purposes: White
(branca); Light Brown (semi-branca, parda clara, morena, trigueira, mulata clara); Brown (parda,
parda escura, cabra, mulata, cabra escura, alaranjada); Black (preta, fula, crioula, crioula fula); Cafuz
(cafuz, cafuz crioulo); Indigenous (Cabocla, Índia, mameluca, cabocla clara). Obviously, these are inter-
pretations of interpretations, but most categories were dominated by one widely used color descriptor:
preta, cabocla, parda, cafuz, and semibranca. Thus, even if one takes issue with my classifications, it
would not significantly alter the broader percentages presented.
books. These documents often provided a description of the prisoner which

included color, height, size, eye color, lip size, hair type, and so on. Because
the 1881 survey only targeted slave convicts, authorities felt that they could
assume their color, even though some of their legal names refered to their
“brownness.”46 Color was reliably found in penal colony documentation
from the 1830s through the early Republic, unlike the court records analyzed
by Hebe Maria Mattos in Brazil’s Southeast, where references to the color
of witnesses began to disappear after 1850. Color remained a valued
descriptor in convict records because of the need to describe prisoners if
they escaped.47 Data from a number of sources confirms a consistent distri-
46
Similarly, a list of slaves who entered a Rio de Janeiro prison in 1857 and 1858 did not include a cat-
egory for color. Série Justiça, Fundo ND, Seção de Guarda Codes, Rio, 1857-1858, ANR, livro IVJ 7 2.
47
Hebe Maria Mattos, Das cores do silêncio: Os significados de liberdade no sudeste escravista—
Brasil século XIX 2nd Ed. (Rio: Nova Fronteira, 1995), pp. 96-103; Another study on color and public
documentation is Olivia Gomes da Cunha, Intenção e gesto: pessoa, cor e a produção da (in)diferença
no Rio de Janeiro, 1927-1942 (Rio de Janeiro: Arquivo Nacional, 2002). One inspector complained that
penal colony authorities had no description of an inmate who escaped on a raft. Souza Bandeira, Infor-
mações, p. 13.
PETER M. BEATTIE 33
bution of color attributions under the empire. As one might expect given the
heritage of slavery, men of color are overrepresented in the penal population
whereas whites are underrepresented.
Another silence in the survey is marital status, a category unswervingly

found in the colony’s convict matriculation books. Married convicts enjoyed
an advantage over their single counterparts in the penal colony because they
could petition to have their wives and dependents join them on the island, a
significant recognition of poor patriarchal privilege and responsibility for
dishonored criminals. An American journalist who visited the island in 1875
reported that upon arrival, authorities required convicts to live in a barracks-
like building, the aldeia (village). “If well-behaved, they may afterward live
outside [the aldeia], build their own hut and cultivate their own garden, Gov-
ernment giving all, whether in prison [the aldeia] or out, a certain allotment
of food. If especially well behaved, particularly if married, they may sooner
live outside, a boon granted by the Governor on application.”48 Data from an
unusually detailed 1891 director’s report classed 383 convicts as married,
and it counted 112 convict wives on the island. This meant that as many as
29 percent of married men had been accompanied by their wives, but the
percentage was probably lower because some inmates married after arriving
at the colony. Nearly one in ten inmates lived with a wife and about half that
many (44) lived with a consensual lover (amaziado).49
Even though the 1881 survey intentionally targeted only slave convicts,
one wonders why officials left out marital status. They probably adhered to
the stereotype that slaves were “not of family” or that they did not marry,
head households, and maintain family ties. One penal expert Conselheiro
André Augusto de Padua Fleury gave voice to this stereotype in 1882 when
he criticized the policy of Rio’s police chief who sent street urchins to work
on plantations because it would expose the boys to “pernicious contact with
slavery, that is to men without family, without religion, without morals, bru-
talized by ignorance, violence, and the stupor (embriaguez) of vices.”50
Fleury would play a key role in a debate over how to punish slave convicts
in the 1880s.
48
“Fernando Noronha: The Penal Settlement of Brazil,” Scribner’s Monthly (Feb. 1876), p. 538. I
thank Dain Borges for sharing this source with me.
49
The report also notes that 44 women lived in consensual unions (“amaziadas”) with convicts, but
it does not inform whether they were amaziadas with widower, married, or bachelor convicts. “Relatório
. . . Gusmão Coelho,” APPJE, f. 2.
50
Conselheiro Fleury cited in Morais, Prisões, pp. 79-80; On “vices” and slavery, Peter M. Beattie,
“The Disputed Sale of the Slave Silvestre: Mental Health, Sexuality, Corporal Punishment and ‘Vices’ in
Recife, Brazil, 1869-1878,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y El Caribe 16:1 (2005), pp.
41-65.
Unlike the 1881 survey which did not include marital status, general
matriculation records did. In these sources, 198 of 205 slave convict entries
include information on marital status. Of these, 31 slave convicts were mar-
ried, and three were widowed. Since guia records were prepared locally, I
assume that only convicts married in a Church ceremony would be legally
identified as such. Since some single men and widowers did remarry on the
island, the local priest would check a convict’s guia to verify their eligibil-
ity. Almost 17 percent of the sample had formed a family before their con-
victions. Since most slaves married other slaves, it is not surprising that I
found no evidence that authorities permitted slave convicts to bring spouses
and dependents to the island. Penal colony officials encouraged marriage
among convicts, and a minority of free inmates served their time with their
families, while a privileged few married on the island, like the free murder
convicts Miguel Angelo de Lucena and Senhorinha Maria de Jesus who
wedded in 1876 as unimpeded widower and widow.51 The fact that many
slave convicts had married before their conviction reflects what we now
know from numerous regional studies that show high rates of slave marriage
in southeastern Brazil, though these rates were lower in the Northeast. This
data also indicates that marriage did not necessarily create the subservience
and restraint among slaves that some masters attributed to the practice.
Indeed, as scholars of the slave family have argued, marriage could give a
slave new reasons and resources to commit a crime.52
A bondsman’s rights as a married man were limited. Take the 1854

appeal of the slave Caetano condemned to hang in Rio Claro, São Paulo.
Caetano had informed his owner that his senhor moço (master’s son) main-
tained armorous relations with Caetano’s slave wife. When the owner asked
his son about the complaint, he denied the allegation. With that, the owner
51
Padre José Esteves Viana to the Presídio Commander, Fernando de Noronha, 20 June 1876,
(recopied June 25, 1881), APPJE, livro FN-21, no f. nos; Marcos Paulo Pedrosa Costa, “O Caos ressur-
girá da ordem: Fernando de Noronha e a reforma prisional no império” (Dissertação, Universidade Fed-
eral de Paraíba, 2007), Ch. 2.
52
Robert W. Slenes, Na Senzala uma flor:Esperanças e recordações da família escrava—Brasil,
sudeste século XIX (Rio: Nova Fronteira, 1999), pp. 86, 148-180; B. J. Barickman, “A Bit of Land,
Which They Call ‘Roça’: Slave Provision Grounds in the Bahian Recôncavo, 1780-1860” Hispanic
American Historical Review 74:4 (Nov. 1994), pp. 649-687; José Flávio Motta, Corpos escravos, von-
tades livres: Posse de cativos e família escrava em Bananal (São Paulo: ed. Anna Blume, 1999), pp. 209-
225, 289-354; Manolo Florentino, A Paz das senzalas: famílias escravas e trafico atlântico, Rio de
Janeiro, c.1790 - c.1850 ( Rio: Civilização Brasileira 1997), pp. 147-178; Sheila de Castro Faria, A Colô-
nia em movimento: Fortuna e família no cotidiano colonial (Rio: Nova Fronteira, 1998), pp. 312-322;
Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia 1550-1835 (Vol. 22
of Cambridge Latin American Studies) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 382-394; and
Dain Edward Borges, The Family in Bahia Brazil, 1870-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1992), p. 64.
PETER M. BEATTIE 35
ordered another slave to bind and whip Caetano for two days. Later, Cae-
tano took his revenge. He killed his young master and the slave who
flogged him. In the opinion of one member of the emperor’s judicial sec-
tion, “the defendant is a slave and a slave, despite being married in the same
way as free man. . .only the latter have rights [the slave exercises] pátrio
poder and other rights of family that the master permits him. The law does
not give the slave husband means to exercise these rights.” He concluded
therefore that the sentence be carried out because Abyssus Abyssum (the
abysm invokes the abysm). Even so, the Minister of Justice José Tomás
Nabuco de Araujo signed an order that commuted the double murder’s cap-
ital sentence to galés perpétuas.53
The 1881 slave convict survey is distinct from the 1835 census of
Iguape, Bahia examined by B. J. Barickman. The latter encompassed the
local free and slave population who were organized by household units.
As Barickman noted, there were two visions of society expressed in the
Iguape census: one of the individual and the other of households. The ten-
sion that exists between these two visions is not present in the 1881 slave
convict survey. By default, it implies that slave convicts are without
family. As Barickman observes of the Iguape census, “in no instance does
a slave senzala rank as a ‘fogo’ (household).”54 Nor does the 1881 survey
hint at the possibility that slave convicts headed households. The only
evidence of family association in the survey is expressed in owners’
names; twelve groups of slave convicts shared a former master. The omis-
sion of marital status as a survey category accords well with the logic of
Brazil’s patriarchal society. As Barickman and others argue, being head
of a household entailed privileges and responsibilities that were incom-
patible with slave status.55
Other documents belie the 1881 survey’s silence and show that some
slave convicts founded households and had children on the island. For
53
Parecer, Rio de Janeiro, Nov. 6, 1854, Arquivo do Visconde de Uruguai, pasta Recurso ao Poder
Moderador, Instituto Histórico Geografico Brasileiro, Rio de Janeiro. Cited in Soares e Souza, “Os
escravos e a pena de morte,” p. 17. On slave marriage, Perdigão Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil, I,
pp. 59-61.
54
Barickman, “Reading the 1835 Parish Censuses,” p. 318.
55
In imperial Brazil, the right to vote hinged on whether one was a head of household (unless one
held a commissioned military officer’s rank or an advanced degree). The law assumed that household
dependents lacked the liberty to vote their conscience. Barickman, “Reading the 1835 Parish Censuses,”
pp. 318-319; Similarly, the law shielded married heads of household who provided for and protected their
wives and dependents from coercive military recruitment, a duty that police officials often used to punish
free poor patriarchs who did not live up to their marital obligations. Slaves were legally exempt from mil-
itary impressment because they were the private property of citizens, but they sometimes ran away and
joined the military posing as freemen. Beattie, The Tribute of Blood, ch. 2.
example, the director forwarded an 1884 petition for pardon for “Luis, the
ex-slave of Joaquim Theodoro Teixeira.” Luis’ matriculation record shows
that he had been born in Rio de Janeiro but was sentenced in Campinas, São
Paulo in 1865 and arrived on Fernando de Noronha in 1871. Luis practiced
carpentry, which may have won him a favorable recommendation from the
director. His color is described as Fula or dark black, and by 1884, he was
nearly fifty years old. In favor of his petition, the director mentioned that
Luis had a long record of good behavior and that he “has family and is old
and poor.”56 Luis’ matriculation record shows that he was a bachelor upon
his conviction, but the director’s petition for pardon indicates that he had
married or maintained a consensual union since his arrival on Fernando de
Noronha. While the petition failed to win Luis a pardon immediately, he was
among a large group of slave convicts released on February 19, 1891. Sim-
ilarly, an 1890 ship manifest that listed slave convicts who had been par-
doned recorded that children accompanied some of them: “Januario
Clementino ex-escravo de João Nepumuceno de Mello who brings with him
five children” and “Benedicta, ex-escrava de Manoel Ferreira da Rocha,
brings two children.” The matriculation records of Benedicta and Januario
show them to have been single when convicted, so they must have formed
families while prisoners. This piecemeal evidence indicates that a few slave
convicts formed consensual heterosexual unions or married, and others
formed same sex partnerships, like Ricardo and Zé Moleque in José Lins do
Rego’s A Usina.57
The 1881 survey’s silence on marriage and color as well as the categories
it delineated illuminates the liminal position of slave convicts as “ex-
slaves.” Subsequent correspondence shows the vulnerability of their posi-
tion as the Justice Ministry intended to use the survey to support reforms
that the penal colony’s directors opposed.
NEW ORDERS
In 1879 Justice Ministry inspectors Conselheiro Padre André Augusto de

Padua Fleury and Dr. Antonio Herculano de Souza Bandeira Filho arrived
56
Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao Sancho de Barros Pimental, Fernando de Noronha, 13 Dec.
57
“Director Joaquim de Gusmão Coelho ao Cidadão Desembargador José Antonio Correia da Silva,
Presidente do Estado de Pernambuco, Relação nominal dos sentenciados, sentenciadas, e deportados que
seguem a bordo do vapor Beberibe,” Fernando de Noronha, 19 Nov 1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 381-
2; References to same-sex “marriages” among convicts on Fernando de Noronha date to at least 1797.
See, e.g., Carta de Bernardo Luis Ferreira Portugal ao Illmo. e Exmo. Dom Francisco de Souza Coutinho,
Pará, Dez. 26, 1797, Biblioteca Nacional Rio de Janeiro, Seção de Manuscritos, código 07-04-041.
PETER M. BEATTIE 37
on Fernando de Noronha. Fleury, whose gripes about the insidious influence

of slaves are cited above, had served short terms as the governor of several
provinces. He was named director of São Paulo’s prestigious Law School in
1883 and elected a deputy for his home province of Mato Grosso in 1885.
His colleague Souza Bandeira was born in Recife and worked as a lawyer,
diplomat, and essayist. Both Fleury and Souza Bandeira had made trips to
Europe to study prison systems. The Justice Ministry charged these highly-
educated and well-regarded men with making recommendations to improve
the penal colony’s administration, productivity, and reformative capacity.
To these honorable observers, life in the penal colony seemed a burlesque

of mainland norms. According to the inspectors, slave inmates and other con-
victs worked only from 9:00 AM to 2:00 PM each day, and to their dismay,
slave convicts labored unimpeded by the fetters mandated by the sentence of
galés. The inspectors noted that numerous free convicts sentenced to galés
were not shackled, but they, especially Fleury, focused on applying the rigor
of galés to slave convicts. Souza Bandeira observed that galés represented ten
of 15 company sergeants and 16 of 30 corporals, but he does not clarify if any
of these galés were slave convicts. The interpretation of the inspectors’ reports
is complicated by the fact that they often use the term galés as a synonym for
slave convicts. For instance, Fleury wrote: “Besides establishing a harsher
regimen for galés, where the condition of being a criminal slave is not supe-
rior to the condition of an innocent slave, [the penal colony should] provide
for hygiene, apply the rule of silence, prohibit correspondence, ban the use of
tobacco and alcohol, require work for 12 hours a day, and furnish religious
instruction with an appropriate system of rewards for improvement and other
measures to lessen the evil of impunity that these malfactors enjoy.” The
inspectors grimly warned that if news of the relative ease of a slave convicts’
life on Fernando de Noronha spread to the mainland, it would give slaves an
incentive to commit heinous crimes to escape the rigors of slavery.58
Among the inspectors’ suggestions for reform were requirements that

slave convicts labor for at least 12 hours per day and, unlike free convicts,
be subject to corporal punishments. The flogging of prisoners had been
regulated in 1865 to avoid “frivolous” abuses of the “gameleira” (a term
that referred to the tree whose root was used to castigate prisoners), but the
rule was often observed through its breach. In 1871, for instance, Pernam-
buco’s governor urged that corporal punishments on the island be applied
with greater moderation. According to an American who visited the island
in 1875, “This lash is quite often and freely used in the square, and every
58
Souza Bandeira, Informações, pp. 19, 23, 29; Fleury, Parecer, p. 15.
convict must be present to see it administered. For laziness they get from
fifty to one hundred strokes, but sometimes from 150 to 300. Very recently
1,500 were administered to a Brazilian convict for stabbing his wife.” In
May, 1879, the Justice Ministry banned corporal punishment (even for
slave convicts), much to the inspectors’ chagrin. The inspectors approv-
ingly reported that after five “atrocious” murders in the months following
the ban on flogging, the director began flogging again despite Ministry
provisions against it.59
By abolishing flogging and other measures, the Justice Ministry sought to

put a new civilian stamp on the penal colony’s administration which they had
assumed in 1877. They drafted regulations and sent special instructions for
handling the slave convicts on the island, which required the director to enforce
the sentence of galés for slave convicts. They were to be fettered and isolated
from the free prisoners in two slave convict work companies located in outly-
ing villages, where they would perform the most unpleasant and arduous work
on the colony. Thus, the Justice Ministry hoped to discourage “mastercide” by
making slave convict punishment distinctive and more disagreeable.
The Justice Ministry officials hoped the 1881 survey would support their
plans, but the presidio’s director opposed them, and this bureaucratic con-
flict had shaped how the director constructed the survey. In response to the
director’s new orders, he wrote that “the ex-slave convicts here number 263,
21 are artisans, 57 invalids, and others are of advanced age, including three
who are blind and five, insane, leaving only 185 able-bodied field workers.”
Thus, the survey on slave convict health and skills served the director as an
instrument to limit who would be affected by the orders. The director
reported that he had sent the able-bodied slave convicts to work and to live
in isolation from free convicts in the rural settlements of Sueste and Sam-
baquixaba, which were distant from the main village, Remédios. He then
noted that “most of these prisoners [slave convicts], with rare exceptions,
are those with the best discipline records, and there are many who have per-
formed good services, including . . . Agostinho, who denounced a plot for a
general uprising by prisoners in August, 1865 in time for it to be quelled.”
Here, the director repeated findings in his own survey to argue against the
Justice Ministry’s reforms.
59
Souza Bandeira, Informações, pp. 12, 28-29; Fluery, Parecer, pp. 8-9, 16. The governor’s concern
arose after abusive flogging of free convicts were highlighted in the opposition press. See, “Ilha de Fer-
nando,” O Liberal Recife Sept. 28, 1871 (newspaper clipping found in APPJE, livro FN-15, f. 253); “Fer-
nando Noronha,” Scribner’s Monthly, p. 538; A list of convicts flogged and their infractions can be found
in Antonio de Campos Mello ao Manuel do Nascimento Machado Portela, Fernando de Noronha, 23 Oct.
1871, APEJE, livro FN-15, f. 253.
PETER M. BEATTIE 39
The director declared, moreover, that he had not complied with orders to
fetter slave convicts because these would impede productivity. He noted that
his predecessors had “never” shackled the “unhappy slave,” nor separated
them from their “comrades in the expiation of punishment, be one sentence to
perpetual galleys or simple temporary imprisonment.” He waxed on, “. . . how
could this be in our beloved nation whose destiny is guided by a state that
maintains liberty, having at its head a magnaminous monarch, who combines
wisdom and virtue, and the least favored class, the most tortured in its jails,
where only a misfortune put them there, and just when the whole country is
uniting to fight for the liberty of their brothers in captivity?” He concluded that
“the absolute separation of the slave convicts from other prisoners is not
proper nor is their shackling . . . neither would improve discipline in the pre-
sidio.”60 Here, the director stressed that the segregation of slave convicts was
not only morally wrong but also dangerous.
An 1881 petition from a slave convict is a telling testament to the rela-

tively undifferentiated treatment given to slave inmates on Fernando de
Noronha before the Justice Ministry’s reforms. Gregorio Pereira Leite peti-
tioned the justice minister and the governor of São Paulo to send docu-
mentation to prove he was a freedman when he had been sentenced to galés
in Areias, São Paulo in 1861. Gregorio had arrived on Fernando de
Noronha in 1871, so for more than ten years, he felt no need to have his
official status as a slave convict on the island corrected. When the director
sent slave convicts to serve in segregated companies, however, he had
reason to have his freedman status recognized. A response confirms that his
letter of liberty arrived on Mar. 2, 1882 relieving Gregorio from his life of
penal segregation.61
In 1884 a new director reiterated warnings about the danger and prejudice
of the Justice Ministry’s new policies. First, the director argued that many
slave convicts were excellent skilled workers, and the new policy meant that
the penal colony would go without their valuable skills, which undermined
productivity. More pointedly, he stressed the dangers of their isolation which
“segregates and unifies them [slave convicts], like a race of vile pariahs,
60
Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao José Antonio de Souza Lima, Fernando de Noronha, 11 Nov.
1881, APPJE, livro FN-21, no f. nos. The argument that authorities only shackled men as punishment
for criminal infractions is confirmed by an American journalist who reported: “The only fettered man
on the island was here a large boned, flabby, ungainly, scowling individual, evidently despised by his
fellow prisoners for having murdered a man in his sleep.” “Fernando Noronha,” Scribner’s Monthly, pp.
538-539.
61
Francisco Joaquim Pereira Lobo ao José Antonio de Souza Lima, Fernando de Noronha, 11 Nov.
which awakens in them amor proprio (egotism) and resentment, even more
so because this island is a presidio in which comportment was always the
only distinction made among prisoners.” In the director’s depiction of the
island’s history, authorities enforced a true penal meritocracy among con-
victs. Furthermore, he argued that the policy was an injustice to slave con-
victs who have for “ten, twenty, or more years [in the presidio] always main-
tained good comportment, demonstrating themselves to be always
subordinate and true elements of order.”62 The policy did mean real hard-
ships, as many veteran slave convicts had to leave homes they had built in
the main village of Remédios for less comfortable quarters and may have
lost access or the time to cultivate provision grounds. Thus, many slave con-
victs lost privileges earned through years of good behavior. In the text, the
director depicts the policy as backward when he states, “the mere fact that
because they were slaves they will suffer from an improvised reform, such
a transcience—transcience of a kind that finds itself diametrically opposed
to generally accepted modern principles.” Here, he seemed to refer to the
liberal principal of equality before the law, and he emphasized the irony of
such a measure in “an era [in which] the voice of emancipation raises itself
up in every corner of the empire.” Like his predecessor, he refused to
enforce orders to fetter slave convicts. He noted that since “primitive times,”
galés on the island were not fettered; this [penalty] having been reserved as
a punishment for prisoners who committed new crimes. For the director,
precedent seemed more important to maintain order and production than the
harsh punishments prescribed by outdated, cruel laws.63
The views expressed by the two penal colony directors reflected broader
political and social trends in Brazilian society in the 1880s, most notably the
rise of the abolitionist cause. In 1884 the provinces of Ceará and Amazonas
abolished slavery, and by 1886, the abolitionist movement’s popularity
threatened slavery nationally. Parliament finally abolished slavery without
compensation throughout Brazil on May 13, 1888. Abolitionism had
stronger purchase in certain regions and sectors of society. Factions of the
army’s commissioned ranks in particular had become vocal proponents of
abolition, so it is not surprising that two directors questioned the justice of
punishing slave convicts differently from their free counterparts. Tensions
between military officers and Justice Ministry employees regarding Fer-
nando de Noronha may have been exacerbated by fractious civil-military
relations in the 1880s that came to a head during the so-called Military
Question of 1883. Some officers were arrested for publishing editorials crit-
62
“Relatório,” Fernando de Noronha, 1 Jan. 1884, APPJE, livro FN-23, f. 22-24.
63
Ibid.; “Fernando Noronha,” Scribner’s Monthly, pp. 538-539.
PETER M. BEATTIE 41
ical of civilian politicians without obtaining approval from the war minister.
Officers protested this censureship and referred disparagingly to civilian
politicians as casacas (frock coats).64
The efforts to maintain segregation between slave and free convicts

lasted for only a few years. Orders to shackle all slave convicts were never
implemented. For most of its history as an imperial penal colony, slave con-
victs performed comparable work and lived in similar conditions to the
majority of their free counterparts. While Justice Ministry officials had
implemented some policies that laid out clear distinctions between the pun-
ishment of slave and free convicts in the early 1880s, by the end of the
decade, slave convicts turned the tables. In 1878, new rules dropped
requirements that indigent convicts who desired to petition for a pardon or
commutation buy imperial stamps to register their missives. This made
filing a petition much less onerous for most convicts, and they began to
petition with greater frequency.65
In 1885, the slave convict Josepha, whose capital sentence was com-
muted to perpetual imprisonment in 1862, petitoned for a pardon. In her
favor, the director remarked that Josepha had a record of good conduct in
the 19 years since she had arrived on the island, and in addition to her work
as a laundress, she served as a midwife and earned the gratitude of the pre-
sidio’s inhabitants. For these reasons and the many years she had served on
the island, the director felt that her petition should be granted. A reply on
the petition indicated that she was pardoned on Feb. 4, 1889, but her
matricula record shows that she was returned to the mainland on June 17,
1889, only a few months before a bloodless coup ended Brazil’s constitu-
tional monarchy.66
Similarly in 1885, José, “ex-slave of João Matheus,” petitioned for

pardon. The director noted that he had had a good disciplinary record since
arriving at the presidio in 1864. Furthermore, José had applied himself to
his work with much “subordination.” The director added that it was true
what the slave alleged in his petition, that he had murdered to defend the
64
Robert E. Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850-1888 (Berkeley: University of Cal-
ifornia Press, 1972); Beattie, The Tribute of Blood, pp. 95-98.
65
One report noted 59 petitions from 1884 to 1888 from free and slave convicts. Joaquim Agripino
Furtado Mendonça ao Ignacio Joaquim de Souza, “Mapa de recursos de graças,” Fernando de Noronha,
18 Feb. 1888, APPJE, livro FN-27, f. 36-40; On stamps, Commandante Alexandre de Barros e Albu-
querque ao Presidente Adolpho de Barros, Fernando de Noronha, 26 Junho 1878, APPJE, FN-18, f. 227.
66
Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao João Rodrigues Chaves, Fernando de Noronha, 12 July
1885, APPJE, livro FN-24, no f. nos; Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao Barão de Souza Leão, Fer-
nando de Noronha, 15 June 1889, APPJE, livro FN-28, f. 322.
honor and dignity of his young mistress, who was also his owner. Free hus-
bands who murdered their wives for reputedly engaging in adulterous
affairs most commonly employed the defense of honor plea in court, and
many juries exonerated them from murder charges. In this case, we find a
slave convict exculpating his crime as a valiant defense of his mistress’
honor. If the assertion was true, as the director believed it was, the jury who
condemned him was not willing to grant a slave such leniency, but their
clemency might have been hampered by the restrictions of the June 10,
1835 law. Perhaps his overseer had made unwanted advances toward his
mistress, but unfortunately, the petition does not reveal these details. José
was pardoned, and he returned to the mainland on the same ship as
Josepha.67
A few slave convicts were pardoned and freed before slavery’s abolition
on May 13, 1888. Authorities did not return these slaves to their former
owners, a fact which highlights the finality of the state’s confiscation of pri-
vate property and the defendant’s liberation from slavery upon conviction.
On May 20, 1887, the director wrote that he had “embarked Frederico
Cabinda who here served a sentence of perpetual galleys . . . because he was
pardoned . . . on April 10, 1887.”68 In Frederico’s case, his African birth did
not seem to be an impediment to his pardon and ultimate release. But
because of his African birth, he would not be a citizen under the laws of the
empire, since he was still considered a foreigner who would have to be nat-
uralized to become a Brazilian citizen.
Petitioners and the directors who evaluated them emphasized a few key
elements to support their cases for pardon. On the one hand, they stressed
good behavior, obedience, subordination, and dedication to work; on the
67
Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao João Rodrigues Chaves, Fernando de Noronha, 20 May
1885, APEJE, livro, FN-24, no f. nos; Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao Barão de Souza Leão,
Fernando de Noronha, 15 June 1889, APEJE, FN-28, f. 322; Another letter shows that the slave convict
Marçal Correia was pardoned and returned to Recife on 13 May 1889. Director Luiz Paulino de Hollanda
Valença ao Presidente Manoel Alves de Araujo, Fernando de Noronha, 17 Nov. 1889, APEJE, livro FN-
28, f. 479.
68
Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao Pedro Vicente de Azevedo, Fernando de Noronha, 20
May 1887, APEJE, livro FN-26, f. 156; Similarly, Pedro pardoned the slave Cesário on 23 April 1886 as
published in the Diário Official according to Director Gonçalvez Pereira Lima ao Vice Presidente Igná-
cio Joaquim de Souza Leão, Fernando de Noronha, 13 May 1886, APEJE, livro FN-25, f. 167;“Con-
stando do Diário Official numero 94 de 5 de Abril ultimo que forão perdoados os sentenciados Manoel
Francisco dos Santos conhecido por Gongó, Antonio Justino Riberio, e Francisco Angola os quaes nesta
data faço embarcar.” Joaquim Agripino Furtado Mendonça ao João Rodrigues Chaves, 20 May 1885,
APEJE, livro FN-24, no f. nos; Also see pardon for João Marques, Copia do Guia do Sentenciado João
Marques, escravo que foi dos Frades Benedictos de Olinda, Fernando de Noronha, 2 Julho 1878, APEJE,
livro FN-18, f. 255.
PETER M. BEATTIE 43
other, they stressed the many years that the petitionors had already suffered
imprisonment. They also mentioned whether petitioners were attentive to
the needs of families: be it their own, those of their owners, or in the case of
Josepha, those of the broader community.
The years 1888 and 1889 saw what had been a trickle of slave convict
petitions for pardon become a stream. There is no doubt that the abolition of
slavery stimulated many slave convicts to capitalize on the demise of
bondage. The promulgation of a republic also brought swift change to the
colony; a little over a month after the army coup that promulgated Brazil’s
Republic, a new director named by the provisional government had assumed
command of Fernando de Noronha.69 These transitions also influenced the
petitions slave convicts wrote to support their cases for pardon. Despite abo-
lition and the promulgation of a republic, the title “ex-slave” and the names
of former owners continued to accompany their petitions for clemency.
In 1890, a scrivener wrote the former slave Francisco de Assis’ petition

which implored the “Imminent Chief of the Provisional Government to . . .
pardon him—recognizing that 16 years of rigorous privations sufficient for
his complete repentance for an act committed in a delirious state in which
he found himself, due to his captivity.”70 Similarly, the former slave convict
Manoel de Miranda had a scrivener write in 1890, “This citizen [my empha-
sis] supplicant who beyond being one who had been subject to cruel captiv-
ity, finds himself condemned to serve a sentence of 17 years.” These peti-
tions and others make a parallel between time served as a slave with that
served in prison to emphasize that the convict had suffered punishments that
were not commiserate with his or her crime. Manoel ended by noting his
good disciplinary record, and then in a patriotic flourish he asked, “in the
name of justice and the two most glorious dates for Brazil, the 13th of May
[slavery’s abolition] and the 15th of November [the republic’s promulga-
tion], I ask for your clemency and mercy for my sufferings.”71 This convict
boldly assumed the title of citizen as a sign of slavery’s abolition and the
dawn of a republic, but he embraced the fact that he had been subject to the
cruelty of slavery and the old regime’s unjust laws. A slave past had become
an exculpatory factor and a justification for clemency.
68
Director Justino Rodrigues da Silveira ao Cidadão General Governador do Estado de Pernambuco
(no name given), Fernando de Noronha, 17 Dec. 1889, APPJE, livro FN 28, f. 496.
70
Ao rogo do Supplicante Francisco de Assis (por Sobel Henriques de Miranda) ao Cidadao Chefe
do Governo Provisorio dos EUB, Fernando de Noronha, 21 May 1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 268.
71
Carta de Manoel de Miranda ao Cidadão Generalissimo Chefe do Governo Provisório dos EUB,
5 May 1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 189; Director Justino Rodriguez da Silveira ao Cidadão Marechal
Governador Provisório dos EUB, Ibid., 20 May 1890, f. 188.
A few slave convict petitions went into great detail to describe their
crimes. Perhaps the most moving was the slave convict Damião’s. The
1890 petition mentions that his “ex-senhor” João Beserra Chaves esteemed
Damião who, “with the proper humility and submissiveness of his captiv-
ity of the time, performed all the duties that were demanded from him.”
Here Damião’s scrivener plays on the idyllic image of the good master, his
dedicated slave servant, and then adds the stereotype of the cruel overseer.
“One day the savage overseer pitilessly castigated his [Damião’s] mother in
front of him and beyond not listening to her son’s pleas to stop brutalizing
his mother . . . the barbarian overseer then attacked him with the deliberate
intention of giving him the same beating meted out to his unhappy mother.
It was on this occasion that destiny led the slave Damião to become a mur-
derer, and the spontaneous desperation generated by the castigations
inflicted on his mother, to whom he dedicated the most exteme love of a
son (amor filial), caused temporary insanity as would identical circum-
stances affect any child in his position.” He then noted that “his nation’s old
laws” and his jury had not taken into account the attenuating circumstances
that had driven him to kill. He then appealed with the “greatest submission”
to the “most distinguished functionary of his country and to the most cele-
brated citizen among his generation for his glorious deeds which will never
be forgotten by succeeding centuries. Great citizen pardon the miserable
ex-slave and galés, for him show clemency for your glory, your posterity,
and your deeds.”72
Damião’s appeal is fascinating because it plays on so many registers. It

certainly appeals to guilt over the horrors of slavery. In this, it echoes other
slave convict appeals which counted slavery as a punishment pre-dating
conviction and an attenuating circumstance for crime. It resonates with one
of the main themes of abolitionist literature, the disagragation of the slave
family.73 This missive praises the enlightened laws of the new republic and
contrasts them to the injustice of the empire. Even so, it also couches this
critique in the language of “submission” and praise of the great patron Pres-
ident Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca. In the past, similar petitions appealed to
Pedro II’s wisdom and mercy. Damião seems to be the model of the urban
legend that Carpenter described in his travel novel, a rural slave who killed
his abusive overseer and subsequently came to live a better life in Fer-
nando’s penal colony. Damião’s petition, however, indicates that life on Fer-
72
Cadete João da Costa Medeiros Sobrinho ao Cidadão General e Chefe do Governo Provisório dos
EUB, Fernando de Noronha, 8 Jan. 1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 4.
73
Paul Gilroy, Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1993), pp. 27-28
PETER M. BEATTIE 45
nando was no substitute for freedom. He and most other slave convicts
struck for their freedom as soon as the political winds shifted.
The maneuvering was ultimately successful as most slave convicts were

pardoned or freed because of the sentencing rules approved by the new
republican government. The 1890 Penal Code spelled out new uniform sen-
tences with 30-year maximum sentences in the case of aggravated crimes.
New laws set guidelines that limited most homicide convictions to sentences
that varied from ten to twenty years. This rule benefited many slave convicts
who had already served years in jail or in the penal colony. By 1892 most of
those who had survived the decade following the 1881 survey had been
returned to the Brazilian mainland as free citizens. In 1894 the republic’s
federal charter moved Congress to close Fernando de Noronha as a national
prison, though it continued to be a jail for the state of Pernambuco. In 1897
a navy ship returned prisoners who had been convicted in states other than
Pernambuco to the jurisdictions where they had been convicted.74
The petitions for pardon show how quickly slave convicts adapted their
appeals to the changing political environment. Pedro II and Princess Isabel
may have been popular in the black and brown communities of Little Africa
in Rio de Janeiro because of the passage of the Golden Law of May 13, 1888
that abolished slavery, but among slave convicts on Fernando de Noronha,
the Republican era was welcomed with patriotic elocutions. 75 In less than a
decade, the status of slave convict on Fernando de Noronha had moved from
being a liability to an advantageous argument for a pardon or commutation.
CONCLUSIONS
The history of slave convicts illuminates the importance of moving

beyond statistics on arrests, trials, convictions, and sentences to examine
how slave and free individuals faired in prison. Unlike the penal colony
directors of the early 1880s, I do not argue here for what one might term a
74
Of 205 ex-slave convicts found in matriculation records, the emperor had pardoned some 30 slave
convicts before the Nov. 15, 1889 coup. 34 other slave convicts died on the island between 1887 and 1891
on Fernando de Noronha. Livro da Matricula . . . 1865; Livro da Matricula . . . 1885. Correspondence
shows that while some slaves returned to the continent in 1889, larger numbers began to return in 1890,
and continued to return into 1892. See, e.g., Director Joaquim de Gusmão Coelho ao Cidadão Desembar-
gador José Antonio Correia da Silva, Presidente do Estado de Pernambuco, Fernando de Noronha, 19 Nov
1890, APPJE, livro FN-29, f. 386; Ibid., “Relação nominal dos sentenciados, sentenciadas, e deportados
que seguem a bordo do vapor Beberibe,” 19 Nov. 1890, f. 381-2. Other slave convicts who had served
only a brief part of their sentences continued in the colony. Pessoa, Cadernos, p. 54.
75
On the popularity of the monarchy with Brown and Black cariocas, Eduardo Silva, Prince of the
People: The Life and Times of a Brazilian Free Man of Colour (New York: Verso, 1993), ch. 7.
“democracy of civil condition” among penal colony convicts, much less a

racial democracy. However, it is significant that slave convicts were not
treated as differently as the law and their sentences would lead one to
believe. Penal colony authorities balked at Justice Ministry reforms that
treated slave convicts distinctively from their free inmates. In the 1880s,
abolitionism’s popularity gave directors a new rationale to defend practices
of integration regardless of civil condition, let alone color, which began
decades earlier when practical considerations of discipline and production
on a dangerous island frontier led army officers to adopt them.
Given these findings, how accurate is the novelist Carpenter’s portrayal

of growing slave violence? The Justice Ministry’s actions lend some credi-
bility to Carpenter’s account in that its representatives felt it necessary to
segregate, fetter, and make slave convicts work longer hours to deter slave
crime. Still, even these efforts were only partially implemented and
ephemeral. A few slaves may have killed their overseer or master in the
hopes of improving the quality of their lives on Fernando de Noronha as
some newspapers claimed. However, if most slaves believed this, one would
expect considerably more murders and trials given the 1.5 million slaves in
Brazil in 1872. The relatively low number of slave convicts prosecuted
under the June 10, 1835 law (some 857 according to João Luiz Ribeiro’s
count) indicates that few slaves believed that murdering a master or an over-
seer would guarantee a ticket to Fernando de Noronha and a provision
ground.76 Once on the island, usually after spending years in a fetid,
crowded jail cell, slave convicts might congratulate themselves on their rel-
ative good fortune. As soon as the opportunity to strike for freedom arose,
however, most slave convicts did not hesitate to petition for their release
from what Carpenter dubbed their “ocean resort.”
Pedro II’s stance against the death penalty shows that the roots of the
Brazilian Republic’s prohibition of capital punishment lay deep in the
empire. This disposition against the death penalty came about not only
because politicians began to find public executions uncivilized, but also
because, like their counterparts in Argentina, they worried that public exe-
cutions and floggings could inspire further disorders. Slavery would con-
tribute an additional discomfiture, however, in a way that distinguished
Brazilian attitudes toward capital punishment from nations like Mexico,
Colombia, Argentina,Venezuela and most saliently, the United States.77
76
Riberio, No meio das galinhas, pp. 314-315; Personal communication with Ribeiro, 27 Oct. 2008.
77
Brown, “‘A Black Mark on Our Legislation,’” p. 103; Ricardo Salvatore, “Death and Liberalism:
Capital Punishment After the Fall of Rosas” in Crime and punishment in Latin America: Law and
PETER M. BEATTIE 47
In the United States capital punishment continued to be practiced after

abolition in most states, despite a brief national respite from 1972 to 1976
resulting from a Supreme Court decision. Conversely, the Brazilian state
and public have never seriously wavered in their legal repudiation of the
death penalty since the 1890 Penal Code. One must wonder about the
origin of such a stark contrast in attitudes toward the death penalty. The
answer cannot be laid at the feet of a history of slavery, but I argue that it
lies primarily in their different paths to abolition and their legal and cul-
tural traditions.
As the result of a devastating Civil War, the Union abolished slavery and
after Reconstruction, tolerated formal and informal practices of disenfran-
chisement and segregation based on color, particularly in southern states.
Southern whites wrestled power away from black Republican Party repre-
sentatives and their allies through violence, including illegal lynchings and
legal executions, while outside this region, former slaves and their descen-
dents were usually marginalized in more subtle ways. The crime of lynch-
ing became so internationally associated with the United States that Mark
Twain comically referred to it as the “United States of Lyncherdom.”78
The Brazilian Empire and Republic, conversely, were not renowned for
lynching slaves, former slaves, or free born men. No doubt, there were plenty
of assassinations in Brazil for economic, political, and personal reasons, and
many slaves died at whipping posts and suffered cruel tortures that resulted
in their deaths, but ritualized lynching was not a prominent part of Brazil’s
cultural grammar of popular justice. Moreover, Brazil’s free population of
color enjoyed, at least on paper, legal equality with most of the free poor
white population. Even Brazilian-born freedmen could vote, if they met elec-
Society Since Late Colonial Times, eds., Ricardo Salvatore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert Joseph (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 342-358; In Mexico, a contingent abolition of the death penalty for
political crimes became part of the 1857 Constitution. Patrick Timmons, “Seed of Abolition: Experience
and Culture in the Desire to End Capital Punishment in Mexico, 1841-1857” in The Cultural Lives of Cap-
ital Punishment, eds., Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005),
pp. 69-91. Columbia’s 1863 Constitution abolished capital punishment for political crimes, Charles
Berquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), pp. 11-
12. In these Spanish American cases, slavery was abolished before political violence and instability
spurred legislation to limit the death penalty. Venezuela was the first nation to abolish the death penalty
in all instances in 1863, but it had moved to limit the death penalty in 1849 five years before it abolished
slavery. Arlene J. Díaz, “Vicenta Ochoa, Dead Many Times: Gender, Politics, and a Death Sentence in
Early Republican Caracas,” pp. 31-51, Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America since Indepen-
dence, eds., William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss (Lanham, MD: Roman Littlefield, 2006).
78
William Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Cam-
pagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 1; Gilles Vandal, Rethinking Southern Violence:
Homicides in Post-Civil War Louisiana, 1866-1884 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000).
toral requirements which were not overly restrictive (even after the 1881
electoral reforms), but their votes were indirect. Voters selected “electors” (a
privilege that required free born status and an income twice that of a voter).
Electors then cast ballots for candidates to offices such as provincial or impe-
rial senator or deputy. Freedman could hold some lower-level government
posts such as alderman and noncommissioned ranks in the imperial Army,
Navy, or National Guard.79 Despite their ability to participate to a limited
extent in politics, former slaves in Brazil did not form an influential voting
block, nor did nonwhite Brazilians form color or race-based political parties
until the 1930s, long after abolition. Such color-based political activism
could have triggered “white” violence to prevent them from organizing as it
did in Cuba in 1912. Unlike black Republican politicians under Reconstruc-
tion, Brazilian men of color were rarely elected to high public offices, and
when they were, they did not win election as representatives of “nonwhite”
or former slave constituencies. The corrupt, oligarchic, and state-based polit-
ical party system of Brazil’s Old Republic (1889-1930) apparently discour-
aged the organization of color-based political parties.80
In Brazil, the abolitionist movement progressed gradually and much more

peaceably than in the United States, but it also occurred much later, which
isolated Brazil as the only independent nation in the Western hemisphere to
tolerate slavery after 1865. Brazilian intellectuals did not produce a moral or
racial defense of slavery in the tradition of the U.S. South; rather, many
rationalized it as a lamentable economic necessity.81 Embarrassment over
Brazil’s continued use of slave labor pushed leaders, intellectuals, and
Emperor Pedro II to find other ways to demonstrate their refinement and
civilization as world opinion turned against the brutality of slavery and
harsh punishments.
Opposition to the death penalty and even abolitionist sentiment offered

arenas for the emperor and others in his circle to showcase Brazil in a more
favorable light to foreigners, despite its isolation as a slaveholding nation. It
is telling that in 1866, the emperor persuaded his cabinet to make a surprise
response to an abrasive letter from the French Committee for the Abolition
79
On freedman and slave rights in imperial Brazil, Perdigão Malheiro, A escravidão no Brasil, I, pp.
17-75, 95, 181-183; II, pp. 123-24.
80
George Reid Andrews, Blacks & Whites in São Paulo, Brazil, 1888-1988 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 146-156; Kim Butler, Freedoms Given Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in
Post-Abolition San Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998), pp. 88-128;
Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 193-220.
81
On the Southern moral defense of slavery, Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor and Slavery (Princeton,
N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 87-114.
PETER M. BEATTIE 49
of Slavery signed by some of Gaul’s most respected intellectuals. In this

missive, the cabinet wrote that after the War of the Triple Alliance (1864-
1870), Brazil’s leadership would prioritize the issue of slavery’s abolition.
Pedro duly used his influence to press Parliament’s passage of his version of
the 1871 Free Womb Law, which became law while he happened to be trav-
eling in Europe for the first time. During a second trip to Europe in 1876,
Pedro met with major French figures who opposed capital punishment and
slavery such as Adolphe Franck and Victor Hugo. Pedro and Adolphe
Franck had a conversation about the death penalty which contributed to his
decision to end capital punishment that year.82 Pedro and those in his polit-
ical circle consciously sought to impress influential foreign figures with
their concern for penal reform and abolition, but eliminating the death
penalty was much less contentious than bringing and end to slavery. The
1878 novel Mota Coqueiro ou a pena de morte (Mota Coqueiro or the death
penalty) pleased Pedro, because it assailed the death penalty without directly
attacking slavery. Authored by the “Tiger of Abolition,” José do Patrocínio,
the novel narrated the trial and execution of Mota Coqueiro, a “white”
landowner condemned for murdering a sharecropper family. Years after
Mota Coquiero’s execution, another man confessed that he committed the
crime. This novel, which was based on a true story, popularized opposition
to the death penalty in Brazil.83
The emperor did not have to take this stance against capital punishment,
which earned him the ire of many slaveowners. Still, the deep roots of
Brazilian opposition to the death penalty anchored in the discomfiture of
being the last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, a laggard
in the competitive race among nations to outdo one another in the advance-
ment of human rights. If Brazilians could not beat the United States or even
the Spanish Caribbean in a race to abolish slavery, they could be out in front
on the death penalty’s de facto abolition.84
82
Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, p. 278; Roderick J. Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the
Making of Brazil, 1825-91 (Stanford: University of Stanford Press, 1999), pp. 210-240; On Brazilian
elite embarrassment over slavery, Célia Maria Marinho de Azevedo, Abolicionismo: Estados Unidos e
Brasil, uma história comparada: século XIX (São Paulo: Annablume, 2003), pp. 147-162; Jeffrey D.
Needell, The Party of Order: The Conservatives, State, and Slavery in the Brazilian Monarchy, 1831-
1871 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 233-234.
83
Nancy Priscilla Naro, “Fact, Fantasy or Folklore? A Novel Case of Retribution in Nineteenth-Cen-
tury Brazil,” Luso-Brazilian Review 53:1 (1996), pp. 59-80; Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, p. 302.
84
The deep roots of Brazil’s myth of racial democracy or the belief that in Brazil race alone was not
a significant hindrance to social mobility and acceptance for persons of color, sprang from this same soil
of discomfiture, expecially when Brazilians compared themselves to the United States. Thomas Skid-
more, Black into White: Race and Nationality in Brazilian Thought 2 ed. (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1992); Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire Myths and Histories (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2000), ch. 9.
The Brazilian case contrasts starkly with the punishment of convict slaves
in the ante- and postbellum American South. Like Brazil, most southern
states did give slaves accused of capital offenses the right to a trial by jury,
although many required it to be composed of slaveowners.85 In Virginia, the
state fully compensated owners whose slaves were executed based an
appraiser’s assessment. Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana,
Texas, Delaware, Maryland, and Kentucky offered different forms of partial
compensation to owners. Similarly, slave law in the British Caribbean
empowered juries to determine just compensation for the owners of slave
convicts sentenced to death or transportation. These courts offered compen-
sation as an incentive for masters to turn over slave suspects and to discour-
age owners from selling them to buyers in other states or territories to avoid
financial loss.86 The French in Louisiana taxed slaves to create a fund to
compensate owners whose slaves were executed or exiled. The Spanish
established the concept of compensation for slaves sentenced to death in the
1768 Black Code of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, but in practice Span-
ish courts did not compensate owners for executed slaves.87 In this sense,
laws in much of the slave-holding Americas were more respectful of private
property than Brazilian law.
85
Virginia, South Carolina, and Louisiana were exceptions. In the latter two states, a judge would
call on three to five respected free holders (often selected by the prosecutor himself) to pass judgement
on slave trials. In Virginia, five justices of the peace judged slave cases without recourse to a jury; the
only form of appeal was that the governor could order the slave to be sold and transported from the state
rather than executed. George M. Stroud, A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States
of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Kimber and Sharpless, 1827); Daniel J. Flanigan, “Crim-
inal Procedure in Slave Trials in the Antebellum South” The Journal of Southern History vol XI, no. 4
(Nov. 1974), pp. 537-564.
86
Jenny Bourne Wahl, The Bondsmen’s Burden: An Economic Analysis of the Common Law of
Southern Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 259, n. 157; Bertram Wyatt-
Brown, The Shaping of Southern Culture: Honor, Grace, and War, 1760s-1880s (Chapel Hill: Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 152; Alexander Barclay, A Practical View of the Present State of
Slavery in the West Indies (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1827); David Barry Gaspar, Bondsmen and
Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1985), pp. 192-202.
87
Harriet C. Frazier, Runaway and Freed Missouri Slaves and Those Who Helped Them, 1763-1865
(Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004), p. 87; Thomas N. Ingersoll, “Slave Codes and Judicial Practice in
New Orleans, 1718-1807,” Law and History Review vol. 13, no. 1 (Spring 1995) pp. 23-62; Quince
Duncan, Contra el silencio: Afrodescendientes y racismo en el Caribe Continental Hispánico (San José:
EUNED, 2001), p. 79. In a personal communication, Professor Jane Landers stated she had never seen a
case in which Spanish courts compensated slave owners for executed slaves in the archives of Ecuador,
Mexico, Cuba, Colombia, or the Dominican Republic. On Spanish Florida, Landers, Black Society in
Spanish Florida (Champagne-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 183-201. Ruth Pike found
that in the late eighteenth century Spanish authorities resorted to capital punishment for heinous crimes,
preferring to use most convicted criminals as penal labor. Pike, “Penal Servitude in the Spanish Empire:
Presidio Labor in the Eighteenth Century,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 1
(Feb., 1978), pp. 21-40.
PETER M. BEATTIE 51
Phillip J. Schwarz shows that to defray the costs of compensation, Vir-

ginia’s leaders began to commute most capital sentences for slaves destined
for sale out-of-state in the nineteenth century. While Fernando de Noronha
similarly served as a site of penal exile for slave convicts, the Brazilian state
did not resell them but forced them to work, if they were physically able.
Despite the strong financial disincentive, Virginia’s courts still executed
more slaves than Brazil’s did. If Ribeiro’s count of 199 slave executions
across Brazil from 1830-1876 is accurate, it seems rather low when com-
pared to Virginia’s record for a comparable span of years from 1820-1864 in
which 388 slaves were executed. Even if one includes the 135 cases where
Ribeiro found a capital sentence but could not confirm an execution, Vir-
ginia, a single American state, still put to death more slave convicts than all
of Brazil’s provinces combined.88
This difference is also linked to divergent imperial legal legacies. The

Portuguese crown was loath to use capital punishment because of its small
population relative to competitors in the struggle for supremacy among
seaborn empires. The Crown preferred to use convicts as penal exiles to
maintain a strategic presence, especially in less attractive colonial frontiers
like Angola. A telling indicator that execution was not a fully accepted prac-
tice in Brazil was the difficulty authorities had in finding men, even among
convicts, willing to serve as executioners. Officials had to send the few will-
ing to perform this duty to distant locations to realize executions in the com-
munities where the crimes had been commited. This slowed down and
increased the costs of executions considerably. One slave convict claimed to
have served as hangman for 87 executions across Minas Gerais and Rio de
Janeiro. He had to be jailed in isolation because he was once stabbed by
other prisoners who found his work repugnant.89 In more populous Britain,
authorities grew quite comfortable executing convicts in the late eighteenth
century, even for relatively minor crimes against property, until transporta-
tion to Australia and the construction of modern penitentiaries afforded less
lethal alternatives. In Britain, executions were a much more common and
vibrant part of popular culture, as indicated by the euphemism “Tyburn Fair”
for Tyburn gallows.90
88
Data drawn from Phillip J. Schwarz, Slave Laws in Virginia: Studies in the Legal History of the
South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. 68; Alexandre K. Brown, “‘A Black Mark on Our
Legislation,’” pp. 101-103; José António Soares de Souza, “Os Escravos e a pena de morte,” pp. 5-19.
89
Ribeiro, No meio das galinhas, pp. 301, 316.
90
Peter Linbaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (New
York: Verso, 2003); J. M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London 1660-1750: Urban Crime and the
Limits of Terror (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Some U.S. states experimented with the milder
punishment of castration for slaves convicted of rape, see Diane Miller Summerville, “Rape, Race, and
Luso-Brazilian and Anglo-American law also differed in the degree to

which they embraced the individualism of liberal jurisprudence. The Brazil-
ian state’s confiscation of slave property without compensation held owners
partly responsible for their bondsperson’s crimes. This reflected patriarchal
cultural expectations that held a head of household responsible for the
actions of his or her dependents. This differs from the more individualistic
Anglo-American policy of compensating owners for slaves sentenced to
death or transportation which, to a much greater extent, uncoupled master
and slave culpability.91
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Brazilian courts did not execute slaves for
rape or crimes against property, but reserved the death penalty for homicide
and rebellion. American fears of racial miscegenation and rape distinguished
it from Brazil where intellectuals embraced race mixture as the means to
“whiten” the national population in the late nineteenth century. It seems that
privileged Brazilian white men remained secure that their dalliances with
women of color would be the norm, not the inverse, so the policing of a
sexual color line was not as potent a cultural anxiety. In the U.S., whites
often lynched or legally executed black men who stood accused of the rape
or attempted rape of white women. By contrast, the observed cases of slave
lynching in Brazil was a response to the emperor’s resolve to commute cap-
ital sentences.92
Another glaring contrast with the United States that this case study high-
lights is the palpable differences in attitudes about segregation on the basis
of condition and color. In the U.S. South after the Civil War, the penitentiary
projects embarked on by most southern states were abandoned in large part
because, under Reconstruction, they would have led to the integration of
white and black convicts. Instead, most southern states opted for convict
Castration in the Colonial and Early South,” pp. 74-89, in Sex and Race in the Early South, eds., Cather-
ine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Timothy J. Coates, Con-
victs and Orphans: Forced and State-Sponsored Colonizers in the Portuguese Empire, 1550-1755 (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Gerald J. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and
the Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Executions were rare enough that Brazilian
school masters gave their students holidays on the day of their occurrence so they could witness the spec-
tacle. Similarly, business owners excused their cashiers, and masters their young apprentices. A. J. de
Mello Morais Filho, Festas e tradições populares do Brasil. rev. ed. (Rio: H. Garnier, 1901 [1888]), pp.
355-366; Raimundo Magalhães Jr., Deodoro: A Espada contra o Império. 2 vols. (São Paulo, Cia. Ed.
Nacional, 1957), I, pp. 115-116.
91
Douglas Hay, “Afterward: Law and Society in Comparative Perspective,” pp. 415-430, in Crime
and Punishment in Latin America: Law and Society Since Late Colonial Times, eds., Ricardo D. Salva-
tore, Carlos Aguirre, and Gilbert Joseph (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
92
Skidmore, Black into White; Riberio, No meio das galinhas, 303, n. 8.
PETER M. BEATTIE 53
lease systems, followed by chain gangs and state farms. These new penal
labor systems mostly maintained racial segregation as a guiding principle.93
On Fernando de Noronha, authorities preferred to integrate slaves in con-

vict companies to bolster their control over a penal population, which, like
Brazil’s larger population, was mostly non-white. Even the colony’s inmate
police company included slave convicts responsible for enforcing rules
against far more numerous free inmates. Directors warned in 1881 and 1884
that the policy of segregating slave convicts would create a common bond
among them as members of a “pariah race.” One might mistake these words
on the dangers of segregation for flourish or see them as a result of unique
conditions on an isolated penal colony island, but following the lead of nov-
elist José Lins do Rego, I employ Fernando de Noronha as a foil. Mainland
Brazilian prison authorities did not consistently segregate slave convicts from
free ones, much less worry whether convicts of color lived and worked along-
side white convicts. Similarly, the army integrated mostly dragooned brown,
black, and liberto soldiers in the second half of the nineteenth century. The
Brazilian Army’s great patron hero, the Duke of Caxias, oversaw the dis-
banding of the all black volunteer Zuavo units from Bahia and Pernambuco
at the Paraguayan front in 1867. In addition, the government bought and
owners sold or donated hundreds of slaves to fight at the Paraguayan front.
In turn, the state awarded mobilized slaves with conditional letters of liberty.
Both Zuavos and freedmen soldiers were intentionally integrated, not segre-
gated, in army units.94 It seems more than probable that the officers who
developed the penal colony’s practices drew on their experience of disciplin-
ing and motivating often unruly and decidedly motley Brazilian enlisted men.
93
Edward L. Ayers, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th Century American
South (New York: Oxford University Press U.S., 1984); There were exceptions. Apparently French and
Spanish legal traditions distinguished Louisiana and to a lesser degree Missouri from other states. Ante-
bellum Louisiana courts commonly sentenced slaves to lengthy jail sentences and incarcerated them
alongside free black and white convicts, something most other southern states avoided. In 1860,
Louisiana’s penitentiary held 96 slaves, 11 free colored men, and 236 whites. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips,
American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Deter-
mined by the Plantation Regime (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966 [1918]), p. 391;
Harriet C. Frazier, Slavery and Crime in Missouri, 1773-1865 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001); Judith
Kelleher Schafer, “Slaves and Crime: New Orleans 1846-62,” pp. 53-91, in Local Matters: Race, Crime,
and Justice in the Nineteenth Century South, eds., Christopher Waldrep and Donald G. Niemann,
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001); David M. Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm
and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Mary Ellin Curtin, Black Pris-
oners and Their World: Alabama, 1865-1900 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2000).
94
Hendrik Kraay, “Patriotic Mobilization in Brazil: The Zuavos and Other Black Companies,” pp.
61-80, I Die with My Country: Perspectives on the Paraguayan War 1864-1870, eds., Hendrik Kraay
and Thomas L. Whigham (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Beattie, The Tribute of Blood,
ch. 2.
Compared to the United States, Brazilian authorities demonstrated much

less enthusiasm and did not expend comparable resources to defend the priv-
ileges of free birth status, let alone “whiteness,” among the ranks of poor
Brazilians. As on Fernando de Noronha, integration stemmed from practical
considerations as well as evolving perceptions of slave status, color, race,
morality, and modernity. These attitudes may have derived to a considerable
extent from the much larger size of Brazil’s non-white population, which
made the costs of protecting the honor of poor whites through policies of
segregation too costly or impracticable after 1850. When a Brazilian of color
ascended the social scale and assumed putative “whiteness,” however, social
barriers and jocular references to one’s racial forebears could surface to con-
tain or obstruct that mobility.95
In the United States, government, business, and labor union leaders

worked much harder and went to considerable expense to police the evolv-
ing borders of whiteness. U.S. authorities in the states even preoccupied
themselves with the dignity of dishonored white convicts by maintaining
segregation in penal institutions well into the twentieth century. Even at the
federal level, “white” soldiers remained segregated from black troops until
the Korean War (1950-1953).96 The disposition of Brazilian and U.S. author-
ities toward integration in basic institutions reveal different assumptions
about how to manage the transition of an economy heavily dependent on
slavery to one based on “free” labor.
These reflections shine a light on a poorly illuminated legal corner in the

on again, off again debates of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen
(1946). In no way do I endorse the concept of milder Ibero-American slav-
ery, which any invocation of Tannenbaum risks, but this case study takes a
different tact. Generally, Tannenbaum’s critics show that laws protecting
slaves in Ibero- and Franco-America did not shield them from the abuses of
95
A rare analysis of whiteness in Brazil can be found in Linda Lewin, “Who Was ‘O Grande
Romano?’ Geneological Purity, The Indian ‘Past’ and Whiteness in Brazil’s Northeastern Backlands,”
Journal of Latin American Lore 19:1-2 (Summer-Winter 1996), pp. 129-179; see the cartoons of Presi-
dent Nilo Peçanha (1909-1910) that depict him as a capoeira in an unsubtle reference to his partial
African ancestry. Isabel Lustosa, Histórias de Presidentes: A República no Catete (Petrópolis, Vozes,
1989), p. 56.
96
David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Lousiana and Cuba After Slavery
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2005), 166-171; Ann Laura Stoler demonstrates similar comparisons
could be extended to European colonial communities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America where authori-
ties expended energy and treasure to define and defend the lower bounds of national identity and “white-
ness.” Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Intimate Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2002), pp. 29-40.
PETER M. BEATTIE 55
their masters or other more powerful actors. In this case study, however, the
law is harsher than the actual punishment rendered in most instances. Does
this mean that Brazilian slavery was milder or that masters were more com-
passionate than their counterparts in Protestant America? Certainly not, but
it does highlight the importance of different legal and cultural traditions sur-
rounding capital punishment and institutional segregation linked to diverg-
ing paths toward slavery’s abolition.97
Michigan State University PETER M. BEATTIE

East Lansing, Michigan
97
Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992
[1946]); See the Forum “What Can Frank Tannenbaum Still Teach Us About Slavery,” in Law and His-
tory Review. The forum centers on an article by Ariel de la Fuente, “Slave-Law and Claims Making in
Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22:2, (Summer 2004), pp. 339-369;
María Elena Días, “Beyond Tannenbaum,” Law and History Review 22:2 (Summer 2004), pp. 371-376,
and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Still Continents (and an Island) with Two Histories?” Law and His-
tory Review 22:2 (Summer 2004), pp. 377-382; Ingersoll, “Slave Codes”; Keila Grinberg, “Alforria, dire-
ito e direitos no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos,” Estudos Históricos no. 27, vol. 1 (2001), pp. 1-21.

"Born Under The Cruel Rigor of Captivity, The Supplicant Left It Unexpectedly by Committing A Crime": Categorizing and Punishing Slave Convicts in Brazil, 1830-1897

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“BORN UNDER THE CRUEL RIGOR OF CAPTIVITY,

No presídio [de Fernando de Noronha] o bandido [Zé Moleque] criara

1920s. Although fictional, Lins do Rego’s depiction of Zé Moleque, a homi-

This article focuses on a group of Zé Moleque’s nonfictional precursors,

The prosecution of slave crime has received attention in regional studies,

SLAVE CONVICTS, FERNANDO DE NORONHA,

Brazil’s 1824 Constitution forbade courts to punish free citizens con-

The state dispossessed owners of slaves sentenced to death or imprison-

Most slave convicts on Fernando de Noronha were living testaments to

Authorities remitted slave convicts to Fernando de Noronha from all five

shared in the penal colony’s administration with Pernambuco’s governors, as

Brazil’s 1824 Constitution required provincial governments to fund and

A March 5, 1859 decree limited Fernando de Noronha’s penal colony to

would be necessary to remove 1,180 convicts from the colony to comply

THE 1881 CONVICT SLAVE SURVEY

The importance of African birth denoted in a convict’s name is amplified

Because a number of slave convicts were unable to work, the survey

books. These documents often provided a description of the prisoner which

Another silence in the survey is marital status, a category unswervingly

A bondsman’s rights as a married man were limited. Take the 1854

In 1879 Justice Ministry inspectors Conselheiro Padre André Augusto de

on Fernando de Noronha. Fleury, whose gripes about the insidious influence

To these honorable observers, life in the penal colony seemed a burlesque

Among the inspectors’ suggestions for reform were requirements that

By abolishing flogging and other measures, the Justice Ministry sought to

An 1881 petition from a slave convict is a telling testament to the rela-

The efforts to maintain segregation between slave and free convicts

Similarly in 1885, José, “ex-slave of João Matheus,” petitioned for

In 1890, a scrivener wrote the former slave Francisco de Assis’ petition

Damião’s appeal is fascinating because it plays on so many registers. It

The maneuvering was ultimately successful as most slave convicts were

The history of slave convicts illuminates the importance of moving

“democracy of civil condition” among penal colony convicts, much less a

Given these findings, how accurate is the novelist Carpenter’s portrayal

In the United States capital punishment continued to be practiced after

In Brazil, the abolitionist movement progressed gradually and much more

Opposition to the death penalty and even abolitionist sentiment offered

of Slavery signed by some of Gaul’s most respected intellectuals. In this

Phillip J. Schwarz shows that to defray the costs of compensation, Vir-

This difference is also linked to divergent imperial legal legacies. The

Luso-Brazilian and Anglo-American law also differed in the degree to

On Fernando de Noronha, authorities preferred to integrate slaves in con-

Compared to the United States, Brazilian authorities demonstrated much

In the United States, government, business, and labor union leaders

These reflections shine a light on a poorly illuminated legal corner in the

Michigan State University PETER M. BEATTIE

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