“For Her Freedom, She Offers me a Slave”: Manumission by Substitution in Bahia, 1800-1850

alforrias por substituição na Bahia, 1800-1850

Abstract

The article discusses manumission by substitution, in which a slave bought his/her freedom giving another slave in exchange, thus becoming, temporarily at least, an enslaved slaveowner. The data derives from more than 400 letters of manumission registered by public notaries in Salvador, making the city a leader in this type of manumission in Brazil. The article relates substitutions to the volume of the transatlantic slave trade, to urban slavery, and access to slave trading networks by the slaves who acquired captives. A possible explanation for the phenomenon is that in the part of Africa where most Bahian slaves originated, possession of slaves by other slaves was a common practice. But in Bahia master-slave relations gains center stage. The concession of manumission was the master’s prerogative, and so was permission for a slave to amass savings and use them to buy another slave. Negotiations between masters and slaves are discussed on the basis of concrete cases. Among other quantitative findings, the article also traces the ethnic (predominantly Nagô) and gender (predominantly female) profiles of both the substitutes and those they substituted, linking the results to both the direction of the slave trade and the dynamics of urban slavery.