Suchergebnisse

Thirty years ago Frank Tannenbaum in Slave and Citizen first catalogued the many occasions for the manumission of slaves in Latin America. He indicated that baptism was an important occasion of manumission. Any slave owner, motivated by generosity and religious sentiment or a minimal payment made by the parent or godparent of the child, could free his slave at baptism. Tannenbaum cited this as one of many instances where Catholic practice and ritual effected a more humane and hopeful existence for the slave in Latin America, denied to slaves held in Protestant colonies.The results of recent investigations of slave manumission in Brazil, however, have challenged the idea that slaves were frequently manumitted. Kátia M. Queirós Mattoso and Mary Karasch, in studies of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, found that only a small percentage of those who were freed were children. In addition, it was revealed that few infant slaves were freed at baptism. Stuart Schwartz found that for colonial Bahia "there is no evidence [in notarial records] that large numbers of children were given their liberty at the baptismal font." Arnold Kessler discovered that baptism was the occasion of manumission of only fourteen children, representing 2 percent of his sample of manumitted slaves (libertos) in nineteenth-century Bahia. For the small coastal town of Paraty in southern Brazil there was a similar pattern. Of the 325 slaves whose freedom was recorded in the notarial archive between 1789 and 1822 only six slaves, or 1.8 percent of the total sample, were infants freed at baptism.