Para o bem e fielmente, sem dolo, nem malícia: Ações de Liberdade em Canguçu (1868 – 1887).

Abstract

The text entitled “Para o bem e fielmente, sem dolo, nem malícia” is a research that is based on the enslaved lawsuits in the city of Canguçu, in the last three decades of the imperial period. The phrase refers to a brief oath taken by the social agents who were participating in the processes and who sometimes had other interests within that situation.These lawsuits were an alternative that enslaved people found to seek their freedom status before the law or the national state. The procedure occurs, in many cases, after an attempt to conquer freedom by everyday and routine means, by means of an agreement with your masters or your heirs. Or even after a legal uncertainty about his fate due to the death of an old man or a direct confrontation with him.These documentary sources are deposited in the Centralized Archive of the Judiciary of Porto Alegre / RS and for the first time they receive academic treatment. With regard to its judicial character, this type of document brings some peculiarities, such as the need for paleographic transcription, as it is an older Portuguese, in addition to also presenting legal discourses that hold even another way of thinking about writing, because the language used is specific and technical, which makes the vocabulary and its content more dense. The city of Canguçu is located in the Serra dos Tapes, which forms together with the Serra do Herval, the Rio Grande do Sul region of the Serras do Sudeste, these mountains divided by the Camaquã River, which limits the municipality to the north. The lands of Canguçu, like those of other districts located in the mountains of Tapes and Herval, are the oldest in Rio Grande do Sul, since they constitute the most ancient soils of the state, as part of the Rio-Grandense Shield, of formation in the Archean Period. Just as the material is unprecedented, the development of these processes contains much of a reality that has not yet been visited. They are enslaved people as social agents, subjects who use the most varied means to achieve the goal of freedom. The actions of freedom demonstrate many moments of resistance, when one observes the history of struggles of the black Brazilian population, a collective memory of the search for rights. They show the activity of society via the state towards these people. Thus, through these documents one can see the strategic choices of those who resisted. And the interaction of these people with devices that did not have the skills to do so. These actions are a result of an environment that produced them according to the power relationships that held power, in this case, the power of masters versus people who were being used as captive labor.