Marrying and the Catholic Church in the Americas

In colonies such as Jamaica, official marriages were uncommon even among white people. Present in small numbers in the colony, white male settlers, among whom mortality was also high, rarely married white women.

Beginning in 1663, Bermuda prohibited English colonists from marrying people of African descent regardless of their legal status.²⁷ Likewise, the General Assembly of Maryland in 1664 passed an act imposing lifetime service sentences on white women who married Black enslaved men.²⁸ Marriages among enslaved people existed in English colonies of West Indies, but these unions were not officially recognized. As we already discussed in previous chapters, it was not unusual for couples and their children to be sold separately. But despite these obstacles and the unfavorable demography for the formation of enslaved couples, in which bondsmen outnumbered bondswomen, during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, a large set of records shows the active role of some enslaved men as fathers and husbands in Berbice (in present-day Guyana), a Dutch colony until 1815, after which it was ceded to the United Kingdom and in 1831 became part of British Guiana.²⁹

In the French colonies of the Americas, there were early attempts to prevent slave owners from having children with enslaved women. Article IX of the French Code noir (Black Code) of 1685 established that a married freeman who had one child or several children resulting from “concubinage” with a bondswoman had to pay a fine of two thousand pounds of sugar, and if he was the owner of the enslaved woman and the children he fathered, both the mother and the offspring would be confiscated.

These legal provisions are related to the predominance of Catholicism in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies of the Americas, in contrast to the prevalence of Protestantism in the English colonies of the West Indies and North America.³¹ Roman law and the Catholic Church shaped the Siete partidas (1251–65), a Castilian code that inspired slavery legislation in the Spanish Americas, as well as the Code noir (1685) in force in the French colonies in the West Indies and the Louisiana Code noir (1724) that specifically regulated slavery.³² Roman law and the Catholic Church also shaped Portuguese and Brazilian laws that normalized slavery. Despite the absence of codes specifically regulating the work and daily lives of its enslaved population, as had occurred in the French colonies, volumes 4 and 5 of the Portuguese Ordenações filipinas (1603) and later the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia (1707) contained articles addressing slavery.³³

Notwithstanding these varying legal regimes, all colonies of the Americas immediately or gradually embraced the partus sequitur ventrem doctrine, which established that the legal slave’s status was inherited through the mother. The Spanish Americas through the Siete partidas and Brazil through the Ordenações filipinas also adhered to this principle even though these two compilations of laws remained extremely vague regarding partus sequitur ventrem. The French Code noir of 1685 and the Louisiana Code noir of 1724 also incorporated the doctrine, according to which if the mother was enslaved, regardless of the father’s status, the newborn would bear the mother’s legal status.³⁴ In the early period of colonization of the Americas, English common law established that the slave’s status was transmitted through the father (partus sequitur partem), but starting in 1662 the civil law principle of partus sequitur ventrem was also adopted in Virginia and therefore in other English colonies.³⁵ In Latin America, as the institution in charge of performing marriages, the Catholic Church condemned the separation of enslaved married couples.

Therefore, although not always encouraged, marriage among enslaved persons was allowed in Brazil and in the French and Spanish colonies of the Americas. In most of these regions, enslaved people also could marry freed and free individuals. The application of the law in the diverse regions of the Americas varied and changed over time. Slave owners were told to baptize and instruct enslaved people in the faith of the Roman Catholic Church, but they did not always follow these recommendations. Slave owners also often refused to respect other measures favoring enslaved people.³⁶ Moreover, priests were scarce in several regions of Latin America, especially in the rural areas. In colonial Colombia, for example, priests visited some large estates and mines only once a year or even less often.³⁷

Despite the power of the Catholic Church in a colony such as Brazil, many free men and women shared the same roof and had children without having received the sacrament of marriage. With the enslaved population, things were often no different. As early as 1619, two Jesuit priests who visited farms and plantations in Bahia reported that because slave owners created numerous obstacles, most of the existing enslaved couples were not formally married. Their findings were certainly accurate.³⁸ Italian Jesuit priest Giorgio Benci arrived in Brazil in 1683. After his return to Europe in 1700, four of his sermons given in Bahia were published as a book in 1705. Like any other Jesuit of his time, Benci defended slavery. But he also criticized the treatment slave owners imposed on enslaved people. Among other criticisms, he denounced slave owners’ failure to ensure that enslaved persons who were nearing death received the last sacrament (Viaticum) mandated by the Roman Catholic Church.

The priest likewise denounced slave owners who distributed additional rations of food to the enslaved women who provided them with sexual services and condemned slaveholders who lived in concubinage with bondswomen as the most abominable scandal. He also attacked the slave owners who coerced enslaved women “to consent in this sin” and then penalized them “when[,] disgusted,” the women rejected “this offense to god.” Benci went as far as to defend the judicial punishment of slave owners who raped enslaved women: “Shall we say that in addition to the eternal penalty, with which the masters who thus violate and force their slaves to sin deserve to be punished in the afterlife, they still deserve temporal death, which is imposed by common law and special laws of Portugal upon all those who violently or otherwise coerce and force women of whatever quality to sin... [?]”⁴⁰ Despite the Jesuit priest’s compelling defense of Catholic marriage among enslaved people and his condemnation of extramarital sex between slave owners and enslaved people, until the last decades of the eighteenth century, as already discussed in chapter 10, some Catholic priests themselves engaged in sexual relations with enslaved women and men, going against the church’s doctrine. In the late seventeenth century, Bahian residents denounced the behavior of João Calmon, the diocese’s vicar general and son of a powerful sugar estate owner. The priest was accused of living in concubinage with a woman, in addition to have an illicit relationship with a nun, and with BrĂ­gida, one his enslaved women.⁴¹ Despite this scandalous misconduct, Calmon became the officer of the Bahia’s Inquisition three years later.

Still, in both Angola and Brazil, regions under Portugal’s jurisdiction in the seventeenth century, male and female slave owners imposed spouses on their enslaved property. Bondspeople who attempted to resist these pressures could face serious consequences. Consider the example of the seventeenth-century enslaved woman PĂĄscoa, whose story was recorded by the Portuguese Inquisition.⁴² PĂĄscoa was born in Massangano, a West Central African village nearly 100 miles southeast of Luanda, in today’s Angola, in approximately 1660.⁴³ Before being conquered and colonized by the Portuguese, Massangano was part of the Kingdom of Ndongo (also known as the Kingdom of Angola or Ngola). PĂĄscoa’s parents and her maternal grandparents were enslaved in the same estate and owned by the same family as she was. PĂĄscoa’s first owner was the Portuguese-born widow Domingas Carvalho, a member of a family of Luso-Africans, a category of mixed-race individuals discussed in chapter 3. As Massangano was not on the coast and priests were not always available, as in Brazilian remote rural areas, slave owners took advantage of a priest’s visit to organize collective ceremonies to baptize and marry bondspeople of neighboring estates.

In a ceremony gathering enslaved persons from various plantations of Massangano’s surrounding areas, PĂĄscoa, then sixteen or seventeen years old, married Aleixo, an enslaved shoemaker also owned by Carvalho. As slave owners played a decisive role in the selection of spouses for their enslaved property, we can assume that PĂĄscoa and Aleixo were not given much choice in the matter. Performed by a Italian capuchin priest, the ceremony of the arranged marriage essentially consisted of exchanging wedding rings. The ritual may have also been performed in Latin, Italian, or Portuguese, languages that most bondspeople did not understand.⁴⁴ From this first marriage, PĂĄscoa conceived two children, who did not survive their childhood.

PĂĄscoa landed in Salvador, Bahia, in 1687. Unlike many newly arrived African captives, she was already baptized, spoke Portuguese, and belonged to the third generation of her family living in slavery.⁴⁵ Once in Bahia, she became the property of the notary Francisco Álvares TĂĄvora and his wife Domingas Vieira, from whom she took the last name Vieira.⁴⁶ According to PĂĄscoa’s own testimony, upon her arrival, she started having sexual encounters with her owner’s son and with another African-born enslaved man named Pedro Arda, an ethnonym referring to the Kingdom of Ardra or Allada, in the Bight of Benin, as previously noted in chapter 6. She then quickly added that she had one child with Pedro, and because they were having sex, she decided to marry him.⁴⁷ The marriage was celebrated on May 2, 1688. Later in her testimony, we learn that she had two children with Pedro, including the one born before their marriage.

We will never know PĂĄscoa’s motivations to accept this second marriage less than one year after her arrival in Bahia. The wedding may have been her owner’s attempt to discourage the contact between PĂĄscoa and his son. The hypothesis that her owner’s son was the father of her first Brazilian-born child is not to be discarded either. Moreover, it would not be surprising if PĂĄscoa’s owner had put pressure on her and Pedro to formalize their union, as they were already in a relationship and living under the same roof. Perhaps the couple genuinely liked each other, and the marriage was their choice. More likely, more than one of these considerations influenced their decision to marry.⁴⁸

Whatever the motivations of the various interested parties, bigamy was a crime in the eyes of the Catholic Church, hence PĂĄscoa’s second marriage put her on the Inquisition’s radar.⁴⁹ Africans and Brazilians constantly traveled back and forth between Bahia and West Central Africa while trading goods and human beings. The news about the marriage reached Massangano. In 1692, a cousin of PĂĄscoa’s owner arrived in Bahia from Angola, bringing the news that the enslaved woman was already married in Massangano, information that had escaped the Catholic Church’s investigation which authorized the marriage. In an attempt to separate the couple, PĂĄscoa’s owner reacted to the news by selling her husband Pedro to another owner. In 1693, the owner denounced PĂĄscoa to the Portuguese Inquisition, a move that ignited the usual long investigation. PĂĄscoa and Pedro objected to the accusations and took all possible measures to avoid being separated, including calling witnesses on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who curiously testified that the enslaved woman was never married. Although initially successful in maintaining their marriage, the enslaved couple’s efforts were eventually defeated. Upon her arrest by the Inquisition authorities in 1700, PĂĄscoa was emancipated by her owner. She was transported to Lisbon as a freedwoman to face trial for the crime of bigamy and was eventually sentenced to three years of penal exile in a town in southern Portugal. Very ill, she petitioned to reduce her sentence to a few months and was successful. She then demanded to return to her former owner in Brazil, probably in an attempt to see her husband and perhaps reunite with her children. Ultimately, PĂĄscoa’s tragic story reveals that enslaved Africans resisted or adhered to the Catholic Church’s ideas of marriage, depending on the circumstances.

Impediments to marriage among enslaved people continued during the eighteenth century because in 1707, the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia (1707), a compilation of norms intended to be Brazil’s first clerical legislation, reaffirmed bondspeople’s right to marry enslaved and free individuals in Brazil. This ecclesiastical code also reiterated that slave owners could neither prevent bondspeople from marrying nor sell an enslaved woman or an enslaved man in order to separate members of married enslaved couples.⁵⁰ Undoubtedly, slave owners were still preventing enslaved men and women from marrying at the time of the code’s promulgation.

In 1708, Antonio de Brandolini, another Italian Jesuit priest, sent to the pope a letter along with a memorial written by the enslaved members of a Bahia Black Catholic brotherhood in which they complained that slave owners constantly attempted to prevent them from marrying.⁵¹ In his treatise published in 1711, Jesuit missionary Antonil noted that slave owners prohibited bondspeople from marrying each other in Brazil. He underscored that when they allowed enslaved people to marry, slave owners selected the spouses, as had happened with PĂĄscoa in Massangano in the seventeenth century. Moreover, he added that when slaveholders judged it convenient, they did not hesitate in separating these couples.⁵² Decades later, obstructions certainly persisted because again, in a treatise published in 1758, the Portuguese priest Manoel Ribeiro Rocha, who spent most of his life in Bahia, repeated the words of the Constituições Primeiras do Arcebispado da Bahia (1707) by emphasizing that enslaved people had the right to marry and slave owners could not prevent them from marrying.⁵³

When enslaved people were baptized in the Catholic Church in Latin America, priests recorded the names of the parents, regardless their marital statuses. Of course, there were instances when the name of the father was recorded as unknown, including when the father was the enslaved mother’s owner, who did not legally recognize the newborn.⁵⁴ Although bondsmen and bondswomen could marry in Brazil, the number of enslaved couples varied depending on the region and period. Based on more than three thousand baptism records from three parishes in Bahia, one historian concludes that during the seventeenth century nearly 90 percent of the parents of baptized enslaved children were not formally married because their names were not even listed in these parish documents.⁵⁵ Likewise, a large sample of eighteenth-century Rio de Janeiro’s baptism records suggests that less than 10 percent of the parents of newborns were formally married.⁵⁶

In Rio de Janeiro, as in Mexico City during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and Bahia during the eighteenth century, African-born enslaved persons tended to marry within the same provenance group. Although most enslaved couples in Brazil did not have a formal Catholic marriage between the end of the eighteenth century and during the nineteenth century, parish records reveal higher numbers of enslaved children whose parents were legally married than in previous centuries. Yet, regardless of growing rates, in most regions of Brazil, groom and bride still needed to request the Catholic Church’s permission to marry for most of the colonial period.⁵⁷ For example, in 1811, Alexandre Francisco, a Brazilian-born freedman who resided at the Jacuipe do Brito sugar mill in Bahia, petitioned the church to marry Joaquina Maria do Sacramento, a Brazilian-born enslaved woman who resided and worked in the same mill. Despite opposition from the bride’s mother, who wanted her daughter to marry an enslaved man who like her was African-born and a Yoruba speaker, Francisco’s request to the church received a positive answer.⁵⁸ Overall, during the nineteenth century alone, historians estimate that nearly one-third of the enslaved population in Brazilian sugar and coffee plantations was married, especially in the estates with large slaveholdings.⁵⁹

Travelers who sojourned in Brazil during the nineteenth century documented enslaved people’s Catholic weddings. In his famous illustrated travelogue, French artist Jean-Baptiste Debret included a lithograph (figure 11.1) based on his watercolor representing the wedding ceremony of three enslaved couples owned by a rich family in Rio de Janeiro. The setting is a Catholic church building’s interior. The lithograph features a wooden floor covered with numbered graves where prestigious members of Catholic lay brotherhoods were buried, a practice discussed in chapter 5. The image features a priest in the center of the composition blessing the first couple of enslaved persons, whereas in the background, between the priest and the bride, the head of the altar boy is also visible. In addition, two other enslaved couples are featured in the midground and the foreground. The brides are wearing sophisticated long white and pastel petticoat dresses, delicate shoes, huge earrings, necklaces, and bracelets. They also wear elaborate braided hairstyles decorated with tiaras, ribbons, and laces. Likewise, the grooms are elegantly dressed, wearing shoes, striped pants, white jabot shirts, and pastel striped smoking jackets, and are also holding bowler hats, confirming their respectable ranks. On the right side, happily watching the sacrament, stands the godfather. A coachman elegantly dressed in bright blue, he holds an elaborate hat and wears shoes with attached spurs. However, Debret’s explanation of the engraving emphasizes that brides and grooms were not ordinary couples but belonged to a rich household. Although Debret’s visual representations were usually more accurate than his words, he made some interesting observations about marriage among enslaved people in Brazil. He emphasized that in rich households it was a matter of “decency and good tone” to have enslaved women marry, “without opposing too much their inclination in the choice of a husband.” Although Debret lived in Rio de Janeiro between 1816 and 1832, far after the first observations by Jesuit priests who denounced Brazilian slave owners for preventing enslaved people from marrying in the late seventeenth century, he subtly suggests that, in the nineteenth century, slave owners still influenced enslaved women’s choice of husbands. He also added that usually the bride and groom were part of the same household and that allowing bondswomen to select their spouses was not a benevolent act but rather a custom intended to “attach them more to the home.” But in the text explaining the lithograph, Debret also subtly suggested that despite being married, enslaved women continued to provide sexual favors to their owners: “a remarkable fact is that the negress, gifted to an extraordinary extent with the ardor of the senses, although faithful and chaste in the bond of marriage, does not resist the desire to conquer the love of her master through careful care and the gracious expression of her touching affections, which she carefully veils under the appearance of humility; and this maneuver, it must be said, succeeded in all conditions.” In other words, as part of a paternalistic set of attitudes, slave owners also used Catholic marriage to control enslaved people, contain insurgent behavior, and yet still sexually exploit enslaved women.⁶⁰

Figure 11.1. Mariage de nègres d’une maison riche (Marriage of Slaves of a Rich Household), in Jean-Baptiste Debret, Voyage pittoresque et historique au BrĂ©sil, 3 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot Frères, 1834–39), vol. 3, plate 15.

But despite Debret’s example, several other cases show how slave owners clearly imposed spouses on enslaved women. Caetana, a seventeen-year-old enslaved woman, lived and worked in a ParaĂ­ba Valley coffee plantation in São Paulo, Brazil. Her owner imposed on her an enslaved husband named CustĂłdio, also owned by him. The couple married in October 1835. There were multiple reasons that led Caetana’s owner to force her to marry. Yet it is not difficult to infer that with the rise of the coffee production, marriage would lead her to give birth to new enslaved children, therefore increasing her owner’s enslaved property. Moreover, as in Rio de Janeiro’s rich household, marriage and children would deepen the links of Caetana and CustĂłdio to the plantation. Still, this story had an alternate ending. After the wedding ceremony, Caetana refused to have sex with her husband, escaped back to her owner’s house, and eventually was successful in convincing him to petition the church to nullify her forced marriage.⁶¹

In Latin America, urban areas could offer more opportunities to enslaved couples to cohabitate. When both members of the couple were enslaved, marriage provided some level of protection, as legal codes in the various colonies of the region included provisions preventing the separation of enslaved couples, as already noted. In the Spanish Americas, enslaved people wishing to marry had to obtain authorization from their owners, who in theory, as in Brazil, could not deny their right to marry. But in plantation settings, when the two members of the couple had different owners and lived and worked in a distinct estate, slave owners often created obstacles preventing marriages. Still, when this rule was not respected, bondspeople living in urban areas could use the courts to contest their owners’ refusal to allow them to marry. But in rural areas, challenging the will of slave owners through legal means was rarely an option. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in several regions of Brazil, slave owners prohibited formal marriages of enslaved men and women belonging to different owners and between bondspeople and free people.⁶²

Michelle A. McKinley shows that in Lima’s largest parish, enslaved people “married at higher rates than Spaniards” during the seventeenth century.⁶³ Moreover, nearly one thousand couples in which one of the spouses was enslaved petitioned to marry as well. But despite these formal unions among enslaved men and women, there were circumstances in which slave owners attempted to sell or effectively separate husband and wife. In urban areas such as Lima, in contrast with plantation and rural areas, enslaved people had much more access to the courts. Dozens of enslaved spouses petitioned the ecclesiastical court to avoid being temporarily separated or sold apart during the seventeenth century. Although many bondspeople may have not objected to separation, the large number of marriages among enslaved persons in seventeenth-century Lima suggest that most slave owners respected these unions.⁶⁴

In various parts of the Americas, African-born and locally born enslaved people married and created families, even though the development of these blood or virtual ties was more common in plantation settings with larger slaveholdings than in urban areas, and also depended on the specific demographic elements of each region. In Brazilian mining regions and cattle ranching areas, enslaved women were present in very small numbers in comparison to large contingents of enslaved men, making the formation of enslaved family unities harder.⁶⁵ In large sugar estates with sizable slaveholdings, sex imbalance and the dreadful working conditions along with low life expectancy were barriers that prevented bondswomen from having children and consequently hindered the formation of families among bondspeople. During the first half of the nineteenth century, enslaved men continued to greatly outnumber bondswomen in Brazilian coffee plantations with large slaveholdings.⁶⁶ Working conditions in these coffee plantations were better than in sugar estates. Moreover, properties with larger slaveholdings provided more opportunities to enslaved women to choose their partners, therefore increasing the number of marriages sanctioned by the Catholic Church and favoring family formation.