Enslaved People in Brazilian Cities

The Brazilian cities of Salvador and Rio de Janeiro had substantial enslaved populations between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bondspeople, along with the freed and free Black urban residents, often outnumbered white residents.

During the eighteenth century, enslaved workers were visible in the streets of Salvador, but starting in the first decade of the nineteenth century, African-born enslaved persons made up nearly two-thirds of the city’s enslaved population.⁵⁴ The strong presence of enslaved workers in the streets of Salvador continued through the nineteenth century. The pages of Idade d’ouro do Brazil, the first newspaper of the province of Bahia, published biweekly in Salvador in the early nineteenth century, offered a lively picture of the activities performed by enslaved men, women, and children in the city. Between 1811 and 1823, the pages of the newspaper announced objects and real estate for sale side by side with ads selling one, two, or sometimes three enslaved persons. The ads contained the names of the male and female slave owners and also specified whether slaves on sale were born in Brazil (crioulo or crioula) or on the African continent. Ads selling African-born enslaved persons specified their nations or regions of provenance, covering three large areas corresponding to the Bight of Benin (Mina, Nagô, Jeje, Hausa, Benin, Borno, and Tapa), West Central Africa (Angola, Congo, and Cabinda), and Southeastern Africa (Inhambane and Mozambique).⁵⁵ Sometimes the ads indicated that captives for sale had arrived in Brazil as recently as six months prior.

The ads show that enslaved women were in demand to work as washerwomen, ironers, embroiders, lacemakers, seamstresses, cooks, and shopkeepers. Street vendors were also in demand. These enslaved women sold a variety of goods, primarily food but also other commodities, giving their owners a fixed amount of their earnings on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, as we will see in more detail in chapter 9. In several cases the ads specified that bondswomen could perform more than one of these tasks. Some advertisements announced the sale of enslaved women along with their newborns, underscoring that they had “milk of first womb,” a term indicating they were lactating from their first pregnancy. Other ads sought enslaved wet nurses to breastfeed white newborns. A few advertisements specified a preference for young mulatas, mixed-race women assumedly born in Brazil. The ads also show that residents of Salvador sold and sought enslaved men to work as barbers, bleeders, butlers, bricklayers, carpenters, sedan chair porters, coachmen, painters, coopers, bakers, blacksmiths, shoemakers, tailors, rowers, fishers, sailors, and shipbuilders. Although domestic service was mainly performed by enslaved women in Brazilian cities, a few announcements advertised enslaved men who were cooks and who could perform domestic activities, and in rare occurrences enslaved men for sale knew how to read and write. A few buyers sought enslaved children, and some announcements advertised shoemaker boys for sale. Announcements selling bondspeople were as numerous as ads searching for fugitives, especially African-born men, women, and children. Describing in detail their physical characteristics and temperament, these ads suggest that because Salvador was a city with a large Black population, it offered a relatively favorable environment to escape bondage, as we will explore in more detail in chapter 12.

In Salvador, bondswomen often worked as street vendors, sometimes living outside the houses of their owners, and bringing a fixed amount of their incomes to their owners on a regular basis. Enslaved men also worked as street vendors in similar arrangements. Slave owners made their bondsmen hire out their services transporting goods of all kinds and sizes. The bondsmen then paid their owners a fixed amount of their income from this work, keeping the rest for themselves. Salvador’s irregular street surfaces and the steepness separating the upper and the lower towns made it impossible to use carriages, thus making the work provided by enslaved male porters more crucial than in any other Brazilian urban center.⁵⁶

When missionaries Daniel Kidder and James Fletcher visited Salvador in the 1830s and the 1850s, they noted the presence of enslaved, and possibly freed, porters whom they described as “tall, athletic negroes... moving in pairs or gangs of four, six, or eight, with their loads suspended between them on heavy poles.”⁵⁷ In the anthill-like environment of the lower city, Black men shouted and sang while transporting heavy cargos. Others remained sitting weaving straw or lying in the alleys and corners while waiting to be called to work. According to Kidder and Fletcher, in every corner of Salvador’s lower city there were lines of sedan chairs whose porters offered their services to passersby by asking, “Will you have a chair, sir?”⁵⁸ In the late 1850s, French artist François-Auguste Biard, who spent two years in Brazil, and briefly visited Salvador, also noticed the large number of enslaved men transporting sedan chairs “covered with a dark blue fabric” in the narrow streets of the city.⁵⁹

In Salvador, African-born enslaved men and freedmen who hired out their services gathered themselves along ethnic lines associated with their African regions of provenance. They formed working groups named cantos, a Portuguese term referring both to the songs they sang while toiling in the streets and to the street corners they occupied while waiting to be hired.⁶⁰ Therefore, on June 1, 1857, the same year that Kidder and Fletcher published their travel account in the United States, nearly two thousand freedmen and enslaved men who hired out their services started a twelve-day strike that paralyzed the circulation of goods in Salvador.