African Voices in Manumission Records: Freedom Certificate Data Extracted from livros de notas and livros de alforrias (Mariana, Brazil, 1711-1807)

Rodrigues, Aldair. "African Voices in Manumission Records: Freedom Certificate Data Extracted from livros de notas and livros de alforrias (Mariana, Brazil, 1711-1807)." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 4 (2023): 45-55. https://doi.org/10.25971/ywwf-1c82. African Voices in Manumission Records: Freedom Certi cate Data Extracted from livros de notas and livros de alforrias (Mariana, Brazil, 1711-1807) Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article Article Authors Aldair Rodrigues, UNICAMP Dataset Creators Aldair Rodrigues, UNICAMP Contributors Caroline Cunha, UNICAMP Franceline Galdino, UNICAMP Juliana Soares, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto Leonardo Leoz, UNICAMP Lucas Samuel Quadros, Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto Lyandra Amaral, UNICAMP Natã Freitas, UNICAMP JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 45 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article Pedro Gericó, UNICAMP Renata Diório, University of São Paulo Victor Sampaio, UNICAMP _________________________________________________________________________________________ Description This dataset contains information about 3,260 freed people who lived in Mariana (Captaincy of Minas Gerais), in the Brazilian mining region, during the eighteenth century. The data were extracted from two archival series belonging to Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana. Most of it comes from 92 livros de notas (notary book of notes); the first códice dates back to 1711, when the town was founded, and the last one documents information from 1770.1 These sources are complemented by two livros de alforrias (freedom certificate books) registering manumissions. The register livros de notas were used by the Crown official notary to record a variety of contracts and deeds, ranging from trading partnerships to bills of sale for land, enslaved people, gold mines, etc. Our objective is to facilitate access to data about manumissions that are not registered in dedicated codices and therefore are scattered across multiple types of documents and not cataloged . Headings that indicate a manumission in livros de notas include: escritura de alforria e liberdade (deed of manumission and freedom), escritura de liberdade (deed of freedom), carta de liberdade (letter of freedom), papel de liberdade (freedom paper), and escrito de liberdade (freedom writing), among others. Douglas Lima explains that each type of freedom certificate and their bureaucratic details had specific implications in the lives of Black people shaped by power relations and social control strategies.2 Despite these variations, the core of their legal impact tends to align. The documents provide the similar basic information that became variables in our spreadsheet, such as the name of the manumitted person, his or her origin, enslaver who granted the manumission, type of concession, and payment and justification for the act of manumission. Unfortunately, we were not able to extract data from livros de notas beyond 1770 (although they continued to be used until the end of the eighteenth century) due to lack of resources. In order to still somewhat allow researchers to access information about the late 1700s, we compiled data from two codices dedicated only to record manumission – livro de alforria 2 (1740-1794) and livro de alforria 3 (1792-1808). Those are the only codices explicitly about manumission for the timeframe 1740-1808. Pairing data from two different kinds of notary documentation, which This period coincides with the timeframe of a larger project dedicated to examining the knowledge production about the origins of Africans who lived in Minas Gerais. 2 Douglas Lima, Libertos, patronos e tabeliães : a escrita da escravidão e da liberdade em alforrias notariais (Belo Horizonte, MG: Caravana, 2020), chap. 2. 1 JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 46 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article chronology partially coincide (1740-1770), allows researchers to evaluate how representative livros de alforrias are. It would be possible, for instance, to check if a freedom document Fig. 1: carta de alforria (freedom certificate). Source: Livro de Notas, n. 9 (1717), Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana. registered in livro de notas is also registered in livro de alforrias. The logic underlying the registrations is not clear, since the livros de alforrias tend not to repeat the freedom certificates found in livros de notas. In summary, we do not recommend statistical use of this dataset without taking into consideration these limitations in the archival sources. It could risk producing distortion in the perception of its general trends. Our ultimate goal is to disseminate qualitative information containing biographical data on freed people centered on their name. The dataset can shed new light on the demographics and JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 47 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article agency of Africans and their descendants who became freed people in colonial Brazil, documenting their name, origins, and important aspects about the negotiation process that culminated in their new legal status. It can also reveal how the blurred lines between enslavement and freedom permeated their experience within the African diaspora. Fig. 2: Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century. Source: Claudia Fonseca, “Urbs e civitas: a formação dos espaços e territórios urbanos nas minas setecentistas,” Anais Do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 20, no. 1 (2012): 84. Reprinted with permission of the author. Dates of Data Collection 2014-2021 Dataset Languages Portuguese, English JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 48 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article Geographic Coverage Minas Gerais, Mariana, Pernambuco, Bahia, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, Portugal, Madeira, Itália, Argel, Mandinga, Guinea, Cabo Verde, Costa da Mina, Chamba, Bight of Benin, Dahomey, Alada, Savalou, Nigeria, Bight of Biafra (Calabar, Carabali), Congo, Loango, Angola, Luanda, Massangano, Quiçama, Benguela Temporal Coverage 1711-1807 Document Types Emancipation certificates Notary records Sources Livros de Notas. Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana. Mariana, Brazil. Cartas de Alforrias. Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana. Mariana, Brazil. Methodology The project’s first step was the digitization of 92 livros de notas and two codices titled cartas de alforrias (manumission letters) in the Casa Setecentista de Mariana archive. We next trained a team of students to collect data in a spreadsheet, which was subsequently assessed and revised by the dataset coordinator. The main challenges faced by the team at the beginning was, first, acquiring the paleography skills to read eighteenth-century Portuguese manuscripts. Second, we had to deal with material conditions of the documents. When part of the document was damaged, illegible, or missing, we compiled the remaining information into the spreadsheet, indicating the lacking variables as “corroído” (eroded) between square brackets; sometimes most of it was added, making it impossible to consider the record in our dataset. Some códices have a hole in the middle of the pages, probably bored by dripping water. Fortunately, though, the vast majority of the series livros de notas are in good condition in terms of material preservation. Each row in the spreadsheet corresponds to a person and displays their information organized in columns (one for each variable, as explained below). The same letter of manumission could emancipate more than one person, such as a mother and her children or spouses. In such cases, we created a new row for each person, repeating the information pertaining to all of them in each corresponding record. JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 49 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article The rationale behind the spreadsheet design was shaped by two main objectives: a) first, to enable researchers to recover names and fragmented biographical information regarding the agency and voices of the enslaved person who was being freed; b) second, make it possible to trace someone’s trajectory through further research in colonial archives, either for academic purposes or for broader public usage, such as genealogical inquiry. That is why special attention has also been given to designing the spreadsheet to facilitate further disambiguation strategies using origin and enslaver name. This project might contribute to Brazilian citizens of African descent finding answers to where they came from. In most manumission records, we find only the first name of the person being manumitted. Later they would adopt a surname, which tended to be acquired from their former owner’s family name, following the Roman patronage traditions observed in the Portuguese settings. Their Christian given name would be accompanied by origin information (nação, nation), such as Maria Mina or Maria Angola, or skin color associated with social status (qualidade), like João pardo or Ana mulata, etc. Searches by name can be therefore ambiguous. A recommended strategy to overcome this would be referencing first name along with origin and/or with the enslaver’s name who granted the manumission. It is worth noting that the ambiguous results from name-based searches come about when enslaved people are digitally represented in spreadsheet cells. In the colonial context of the eighteenth century, however, each person’s place in the social relations of the parishes in which they lived and their physical characteristics would easily distinguish them; enslavers, overseers, neighbors, companions, and friends would easily differentiate one person from another. Few elements of these social relations were recorded in the documents. One must be aware, therefore, that a dataset enables the retrieval of only fragments that characterized a person in the wider social fabric in which they lived. Though fragments, they are absolutely crucial to the historical understanding of those realities and enslaved peoples’ lives. We believe that the digital treatment of loose threads and traces left by those experiences in the colonial archive enhances the possibilities of interrogating that reality. Origin descriptor, denoting nation and qualidade (social status), is the most complicated variable in the dataset. First, there were several ways of classifying African origins and their spelling. Second, a notary could use crioulo as nation to refer to Brazilian-born people or to people who came from other parts of the Portuguese empire, such as crioulo de Angola, crioulo da Madeira, or mulato de Portugal. The clerk would write, in these cases, nação crioulo or nação crioula. Third, notaries often substituted nation with social status (“qualidade”) in documents pertaining to mulatos and pardos, equating origin with skin color categories. Fourth, the variable also included indigenous background, especially in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Indigenous people appear as gentio da terra (gentile of the land, meaning native Brazilian indigenous) or gentios do cabelo corredio (gentiles with straight hair), as opposed to gentio da guiné (gentile from Guinea, meaning African-born). To compile the origin variable, we considered the contemporary logic that would lead a clerk to insert these various types of information with someone’s first name. That is why they occupy the same column of the spreadsheet. To further JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 50 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article complicate matters, a clerk could also use two different terms to talk about someone’s ethnicity or race, applying, for example, mulato in one part of the document and switching to pardo in another mention in the same manumission record; in such cases, we kept both. There were multiple layers of meanings related to nation (nação) when used to talk about African origin. Sometimes it designates toponyms of the macro-areas of organized slave trading on the African coast, ports of shipment, polities, identities connected to political affiliations; other times it designates ethnonyms referring to more specific ethnic identities. Depending on the moment of someone’s biography and the context in which a person was described, nation could vary between a subgroup and broader generic descriptor. The spelling of the African origin nomenclature also varies, even when it refers to the same person. We chose to keep the original form in a first field (Origin/Nation) exactly as it appears in the documents, and created a second column to standardize nations and enable their serialization and possible encoding. The methodological reason for maintaining the nomenclature variations are their historical relevance, especially to ethnolinguistics. They may encapsulate multiple dynamics and interactions between slave trade agents and the narratives of Africans themselves about their origins (kingdoms, ethnolinguistic designation, lineage, etc.). They could designate their conception of belonging based on ancestry and territoriality, since several terms clearly reflect African pronunciations of the lexicon that described their origins. As new terms being incorporated into the colonial world, scribes often tended to write them down as they listened but adapting terms to Portuguese characters. More specific terms of African origin appeared concurrently or overlapped with more generic descriptors attributed by merchants, such as "Mina" meaning Costa da Mina in West African Coast. In terms of demographic features underlying the documents’ production, we are learning about a high density of people from the same African region. During the Brazilian gold rush of the first half of the eighteenth century, the urban setting of the Minas Gerais mining region became home to one of the largest concentrations of people from the Bight of Benin in the Americas. Most of them were men who had been enslaved during the wars related to the expansion of Dahomey kingdom, which advanced from the Abomey plateau to the Atlantic, encompassing the ancient kingdoms of Alada in 1724 and Whydah in 1727.3 Many individuals could be and were described with the same combination of first name and the origin descriptor. One telling example from these documents is the origin of the "Ladano" nation. It is probably the Portuguese transliteration of Alladahonu, which in the Gbe area of West Africa meant people from Alada.4 It connotes the political affiliation of the subjects of the old kingdom of Alada, in the southeast of current Benin. The spelling of this term oscillated between "Ladano" and Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550-1750: the Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 4 Luis Nicolau Parés, O Rei, O Pai e a Morte: A Religião Vodum na Antiga Costa dos Escravos na África Ocidental (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2016), 48; Anatole Coissy, "L'arrivée des 'Alladahonou' à Houawe,'" Études dahoméennes 13 (1955): 33-34. 3 JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 51 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article "Ladana," a gendered adaptation to the Portuguese language. All these variations were recorded in the spreadsheet to digitally maintain the layers of this historical process. In the case of Ladano Ladana, the fluctuations were updated to "Alada," which was the most common term used in the European world to designate that political unit.5 The variable origin can offer important insights on slave trade dynamics and routes, within the African continent and routes that dislocated crioulos, pardos, and mulatos from Pernambuco, Bahia, and Rio to fulfill the gold rush’s demand for labor. Upon these methodological reflections, we keep these original forms in one field ("origin/ nation") and in a second field control them as follows: a) standardize variations of the nomenclature for the term according to current African forms, when it can be established; b) update it to contemporary Lusophone spelling, when these words are still used; c) or, if the two options above are not possible, to standardize oscillations for the most recurring term in the documentation. ORIGINAL SPELLING VARIATIONS Ladá, Lada, Ladano, Ladanu, Ladana Anagô, Anagó, Anago, Anagonu, Naguno, Nagono Fom, Fono, Fona, Fon Sabarú, Sabará, Sabalu Courá, Courano, Courana Xambá, Chambá Cravari, Crabari, Craballi, Caravali, Carabali Engola, Engolla, Angolla, Angola Banguela, Banguella, Benguella, Benguela STANDARDIZED VERSION Alada Nagô Fon Savalou Courá Chambá Carabali Angola Banguela The variable “payment” is important because it reveals nuances about the agency of enslaved people who acquired freedom. The ways of obtaining alforria can be grouped into two main strategies: free or paid. In the first case, the enslaved did not have to offer pecuniary payment for his or her freedom. Data about this process can be observed in the field “Reason for the manumission concession.” Alternatively, we found multiple ways to achieve freedom through purchase, either by enslaved persons themselves or by third parties, such as partners, mothers, godparents, etc. Robin Law, The Kingdom of Allada (Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, 1997). These aspects related to Minas Gerais are further contextualized and analyzed in Aldair Rodrigues, “‘Com Duas Gejas Em Cada Uma Das fontes’: escarificações e o processo de tradução visual da diáspora jeje em Minas Gerais durante o século XVIII,” Afro-Ásia 63 (June 2021), https://doi.org/10.9771/aa.v0i63.38662. 5 JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 52 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article Manumission could be purchased using cash, gold, or another enslaved person. In the first two means, it could be paid in installments (quarterly, quartação) or all the amount at once. The Portuguese terms vary from cortado/cortada to quartado/quartada, all deriving from the verb quartar (to divide in quarters, though in reality the installments were not exactly a quarter). Eduardo França Paiva and Andrea Lisly Gonçalves emphasize that quartação was one of the most common ways of self-purchasing manumission in the urban settings of Minas Gerais.6 We either transcribed or summarized the details regarding this process in this field in order to reveal the agency of enslaved people in their quest for freedom. In the context of Brazilian urban slavery, an enslaved person could hold ownership over another enslaved person, especially when they lived as escravos de ganho (slaves for hire), paid for various services they provided for different people. João Reis, who thoroughly examined this complex phenomenon in the Bahian context, defined this kind of arrangement as alforria de substituição (substitution manumission).7 In this dataset, a small percentage of manumissions were paid with another enslaved person: 35 cases. We transcribed the information about the person being used as payment in this field. It is not always clear if the person being manumitted acquired the enslaved only for the purpose of substituting lost human property. In some cases, the enslaver clearly indicates that the person being manumitted held ownership of the person while being enslaved himself for a long time, specifying that they either used that person as payment or to make clear they were allowed to keep that enslaved person after themselves being freed. Other times, they simply mentioned that the manumitted possessed an enslaved person, regardless of them being used as payment. Understanding this complicated phenomenon requires further research in additional documents, especially those that provide more qualitative information, such as testamentos (wills) or court proceedings. We should bear in mind that the information collected from the colonial archive was generated amid social relations that defined who could speak in the notary’s office.8 The catalogs of the colonial archives replicate the centering of the agency of slave owners and the ways they created and organized information. A simple indication of that is provided by the archival series registros de testamentos (testament wills register), where we can read documents in which the voices of freed Africans prevail, despite the colonial filter of the official scribes that permeated them. We found 99 testament wills belonging to freed people. The same person had a Eduardo Paiva, “Coartações e alforrias nas Minas Gerais do século XVIII: as possibilidades de libertação escrava no principal centro colonial,” Revista de História (USP) 133 (1995): 49-57; Andréa Lisly Gonçalves, As margens da liberdade: estudo sobre a prática de alforrias em Minas colonial e provincial (Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço, 2011). This practice was also widespread in the Spanish empire, as observed in Cuba. See: Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, Becoming Free, Becoming Black : Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 105-114. 7 João José Reis, “Por sua liberdade me oferece uma escrava”: alforrias por substituição na Bahia, 1800-1850,” Afro-Ásia 63 (June 2021), https://doi.org/10.9771/aa.v0i63.43392. 8 This discussion is inspired in part by Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” Archival Science 20, no. 1 (2022): 87-109. 6 JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 53 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article manumission certificate registered in livros de notas or livros de alforrias in only eighteen cases. 9 That preliminarily indicates that the majority of their manumission certificates were not recorded in notary registers (livros de notas or livros de alforrias). Further research on documentation produced by their enslavers could reveal how it was processed in terms of legal effects. We found evidence in this documentation about three freed persons who contested information about the content of their manumission certificate (carta de alforria). One of them is Maria de Meira, from Costa da Mina (Bight of Benin, Slave Coast). In 1751, she insisted that it was not true her freedom had been given free of charge by her former owner Manoel Marques, as stated in the notary archive. She claimed instead that her freedom was purchased: "I paid him two pounds of gold, as shown in the receipts that I have kept along with my letter of manumission. Though it says the letter is given free of charge, I owe nothing to my mentioned master."10 Unfortunately, we have not found her carta de alforria in livros de notas, but this example demonstrates the importance of cross-examining information on the same person from different angles in order to shed light on power relations underlying the production of legal information in slave society archives. Although thorough, this dataset does not encompass all the manumissions granted in Mariana during the period covered by this project. First, it does not necessarily include freedom given in testament wills or in baptismal records, which were legally valid despite not being recorded and kept in the livros de notas or de alforrias. Only cross-examining data collected in wills or parish records with livros de notas will reveal the percentage of coincidence of the records belonging to the same person, which is beyond the scope of this article and dataset. Finally, one should be conscious that the vast majority of Africans brought to Brazil died enslaved. Dataset users should read critically the information it contains considering it was produced in a context of a slave society that commodified and racialized Africans and people of African descent through derogatory terms equating skin color, social and legal status. That can be seen, for instance, in words like mulatinho, mulatinha, crioulinho, crioulinha, cabra, cabrinha, etc. Any use of this kind of terminology today should be accompanied with a contextualizing explanation. In this data article we have worked to provide information to that end. Notes on transcription and extraction: ● Blank: Blank cells are used when the expected information is not available in the primary source. Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana, Registros de Testamentos, códices n. 50, 53, 57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 69, 65, 67, 71, 72, 73. 10 Original in Portuguese: “me quartou em duas Libras de ouro que lhe paguei como consta dos recibos que tenho do dito junto a minha carta de alforra que suposto a dita carta está passada gratuitamente não devo nada ao dito meu senhor”. Arquivo Histórico da Casa Setecentista de Mariana, Registros de Testamentos, 1751, Livro 71, fl. 121v. 9 JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 54 Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation - Freedom Certificate Data, Mariana, Brazil Peer-Reviewed Dataset Article ● ● ● Eroded [corroído]: This indicates when information is in the document but we cannot read it due to material deterioration of the codice. Illegible [ilegível]: Some words could not be read due to several factors, such as faded pen ink, undecipherable handwriting, bleedthrough, etc. In these cases, we inserted the word [ilegível] (illegible) between square brackets. Use of square brackets: When we are not sure about the manuscript transcriptions, we put the word or part of phrases between square brackets [ ]. Date of Publication September 2023 Data Links Dataset Repository: Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/L9TWHK Linked Data Representation: Enslaved.org Acknowledgments Prêmio Capes AUXPE 0382/2016, 23038.009186/2013-63 CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) - Bolsa Produtividade Processo 309752/2021-3 FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) - 2014/23508-2 UNICAMP/ Serviço de Assistência Social/ Bolsa Auxílio Social UNICAMP/ FAEPEX 3201/16 (Auxílio Início de Carreira Docente) CECULT (Centro de Estudos sobre História Social da Cultura) Cite this Article Rodrigues, Aldair. "African Voices in Manumission Records: Freedom Certificate Data Extracted from livros de notas and livros de alforrias (Mariana, Brazil, 1711-1807)." Journal of Slavery and Data Preservation 4, no. 4 (2023): 45-55. https://doi.org/10.25971/ywwf-1c82. Copyright © 2023 Aldair Rodrigues. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction provided the original creator and source are credited and transformations are released on the same license. See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/. JSDP (ISSN 2691-297X) 4: 4 (2023) 55