Plantation systems were central to the development of slavery, but enslaved people all over the Americas also worked in cities and towns.
This type of urban slavery was a critical element of slave societies as well as in societies where slavery existed but played a secondary economic role. Soon after his arrival in Brazil in 1845, African-born Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was made to perform heavy work that included transporting stones to build a house for his owner.
As he learned to speak Portuguese, however, he was sent to sell food in the streets, like many enslaved men and women working in urban areas. As he recounted, “One day when I was sent out to sell bread as usual, I only sold a small quantity, and the money I took and spent for whiskey, which I drank pretty freely, and went home well drunk, when my master went to count the days, taking in my basket and discovering the state of things, I was beaten very severely.â€1 Baquaqua’s account underscores the fact that enslaved people working in the streets had relatively greater autonomy and even opportunities to escape, making it a profoundly different context compared with plantation settings. Nevertheless, even when toiling in the cities, bondspeople performed arduous work and were often victims of the brutality of their owners.Many observers during this period, including European travelers, commented extensively on the significant presence of enslaved, freed, and free Black men and women in the cities of Latin America, the West Indies, and the US South, especially in the nineteenth century. Despite the racist views of their authors, European travelogues provide a wealth of information that helps us understand the living and working conditions of enslaved people in many cities of the Americas. Through text and images, these travelers described how slavery shaped the urban landscapes with its sites of physical violence and suffering, such as whipping posts and slave markets, and its refuge spaces, such as the churches housing Catholic Black brotherhoods.
Urban slavery emerged much earlier than the rise of slavery in the Americas. It existed in slave societies such as ancient Greece and Rome as well as in several cities of the Iberian Peninsula before and during the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. In Latin America, slavery in urban areas inherited features that had been well established in these otherwise distant times and places. For example, in Brazil’s largest cities, such as Salvador, freed and free Black residents along with bondspeople made up more than half the population. For example, in 1849, when the city of Rio de Janeiro took the first census of its population, 41.2 percent were African-born enslaved people, and 13.2 percent were bondspeople born on Brazilian soil, making the total enslaved population 54.4 percent.2 This huge number of urban slaves made Rio de Janeiro the city with probably the largest proportion of enslaved people in history, as even in cities such as ancient Rome at the summit of the empire, the proportion of bondspeople likely never reached even 40 percent of the total population. This context led nineteenth-century observers to describe Salvador and Rio de Janeiro as Black cities. The work provided by enslaved people supported the existence of several other inland and coastal cities throughout the Americas, such as Recife, Mariana, Baltimore, Bridgetown, New York City, Havana, Lima, Puebla de los Ãngeles, Cartagena, Quito, Charleston, and New Orleans.
In these urban settings, enslaved men had a variety of jobs—coachmen, dockers, sellers, porters, barbers, wigmakers, gardeners, shoemakers, surgeons, healers, carpenters, tailors, craftsmen, blacksmiths, hatters, and silversmiths. Enslaved Black women could often outnumber men in urban areas, especially in Brazil but also in other cities of Latin America, where Indigenous women in the workforce became increasingly scarce. As we will see in more detail in chapter 9, this greater presence of Black bondswomen is associated especially with the demand for domestic workers in urban households, as in these patriarchal societies women were the ones who provided this kind of work.
Other enslaved women worked in convents and shops and were also prostitutes, nannies, wet nurses, cooks, washerwomen, seamstresses, and street vendors.The city was also a space for bondspeople moving through plantation and mining regions. Enslaved men and women from plantations on the outskirts of urban areas would regularly travel to cities looking for opportunities to sell products and offer their services. Urban spaces offered enslaved people a wide range of opportunities for acquiring skills, hiring their work, building networks, and eventually obtaining money to purchase their freedom. But as Baquaqua’s story attests, cities were far from safe havens. They were also sites where bondspeople were confined and were closely controlled by public authorities and slave owners. Balancing these two aspects, this chapter underscores the importance of urban slavery in the Americas and shows how the institution of slavery shaped the urban landscape and the lives of Black populations in several important cities in the Western Hemisphere.