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AbstractAlthough it seems that slaves in Brazil in the nineteenth century had a better chance of achieving freedom than their counterparts in other slave societies in the Americas, studies also show that a significant proportion of manumissions there were granted conditionally. Freedom might be dependent on a master's death, on a master's daughter marriage, on continued service for a number of years, etc. The article thus focuses on controversies regarding conditional manumission to explore the legal and social ambiguities between slavery and freedom that prevailed in nineteenth-century Brazilian society. Conditional manumission appeared sometimes as a form of labor contract, thought of as a situation in which a person could be nominally free and at the same time subject to forms of compulsory labor. In the final crisis of abolition, in 1887–1888, with slaves leaving the plantations in massive numbers, masters often granted conditional manumission as an attempt to guarantee the compulsory labor of their bonded people for more years.

SummaryOne of the main features of slavery in Brazil was that slaves had a better chance of achieving freedom than was the case in other slave societies. However difficult freedom may have been to obtain, significant rates of manumission resulted in a high percentage of free and freed people of color in the population of the country throughout the nineteenth century. This article analyzes facets ofthe structural precariousness of freedomin nineteenth-century Brazil. It deals with such themes as the constitutional restrictions on the political rights of freed persons; the masters' interdiction of their slaves' learning how to read and write; the practice of granting conditional manumissions; the masters' right to revoke liberties; the illegal enslavement of free people of color; and police profiling of free and freed blacks under the allegation that they were suspected of being slaves. The idea is to highlight situations which often blurred the distinction between slavery and freedom, therefore rendering insecure the condition of free and freed people of African descent.

Por ocasião da Independência (1822) e em anos subsequentes, a demanda por trabalho escravo para a produção de açúcar, algodão e café intensificou o tráfico negreiro e consolidou o comprometimento do Império brasileiro com a instituição da escravidão. No entanto, em decorrência de compromissos internacionais decorrentes do reconhecimento da Independência do país, o parlamento brasileiro aprovou uma lei de abolição do tráfico africano de escravos em 7 de novembro de 1831. O principal objetivo deste artigo é explorar algumas conseqüências políticas e sociais do não cumprimento da lei de 1831, em especial quanto a práticas cotidianas destinadas a dar aparência de legalidade à propriedade escrava adquirida ao arrepio da lei.English:During the times of Brazilian Independence (1820s), the high demand for slave labor for the production of sugar, cotton and coffee brought with it the intensification of the African slave trade and consolidated slavery as a core institution pertaining to the new nation. Nonetheless, as a result of international agreements associated with the recognition of Independence from Portugal, the Brazilian parliament enacted a law abolishing the slave trade on 7 November 1831. In this article I seek to explore some political and social consequences of the non fulfillment of the law of 1831, especially regarding daily practices intended to give the appearance of legality to slave property acquired by contraband.

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During the first half of the nineteenth century, as cholera and yellow fever epidemics ravaged the Old and the New World alike, Brazil seemed to enjoy the reputation of being a remarkably salubrious country. In spite of its geographical position, its climate and the abundance of those elements that prevailing medical wisdom considered conducive to the more aggravated forms of disease, the fact was that Brazil long remained free of the two most visible scourges of the times.