Escravidão, família e criminalidade no sul do Brasil (Piratini–RS, 1810-1871)

Abstract

The present research aims to analyze slave crime in nineteenth-century Brazil, taking as the locus of analysis the location of Piratini, between 1810-1871. The lead to this objective was an attempted insurrection by enslaved Creoles, peasants in the municipality in 1865, in a period in which there was a substantial increase in crimes in the locality. The sources used in the chapters of the thesis range from lists of breeders and other economic activities, which present a space for a subsidiary and agricultural economy; the post-mortem inventories, baptismal records, which present the profiles of slaves in Piratini, which followed the trend in other regions of the Brazilian Empire of many enslavers with few enslaved people. When cross-referenced, the documentary sources present a context in which the enslaved people of Piratini were inserted, in a society in which 40% of the population was non-white, contesting the classic Azorean view of the location. Piratini had a strong impact from the Atlantic trafficking in which there was a babel of African heterogeneity, which with antitrafficking laws increased the importance of natural reproduction in the locality. This work highlights the importance of the slave family and how this experience made the memories of fathers and mothers highlighted by the enslaved in the face of the State's forces of repression. The consequences of anti-slave trafficking laws in that slave society will be analyzed, and how this social functioning generated tensions in the relationships between enslaved people and their slave owners and third parties. It is in this scenario in which enslaved campeiros from the locality such as Thomé, Casemiro and André were indicted as defendants in the attempted insurrection and escape to the Eastern State.