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Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil Stuart B. Schwartz Colonial Brazil, based as it was on the coerced labor of Indians and Africans, was continually threatened by various forms of resistance to the fundamental institution of slavery.1 Throughout the Americas wherever slavery was a basic institution, slave resistance, the fear of slave revolt, and the problem of fugi- tive slaves plagued colonists and colonial administrators. This resistance took a number of forms and was expressed in a variety of ways. Day to day recal- citrance, slow downs, and sabotage were probably the most common forms of resistance, while self-destruction through suicide, infanticide, or overt at- tempts at vengeance were the most extreme in a personal sense. In Brazil, the most dramatic examples of collective action were a number of slave revolts that took place in Bahia in the early nineteenth century, but actions like the Malê rebellion of 1835 were truly extraordinary events.2 By far, the most com- mon form of slave resistance in colonial Brazil was flight, and a characteristic problem of the Brazilian slave regime was the continual and widespread exis- tence of fugitive communities called variously mocambos, ladeiras, magotes, or quilombos. There was a time when Brazilian historiography ignored this aspect of Brazil’s past, but work during the past half century, especially on the great Source: Schwartz, Stuart B., “Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992, 103–136. Copyright 1992 Board of Trustees. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. 1 This chapter has appeared in Portuguese as “Mocambos, Quilombos, e Palmares: A Resistência escrava no Brasil colonial,” Estudos Econômicos 17 (1987), 61–88. It includes portions of my earlier article, “The Mocambo: Slave Resistance in Colonial Bahia,” Journal of Social History 3 (Summer 1970), 313–33. 2 The series of slave revolts in Bahia between 1807 and 1835 has been studied by João José Reis in “Slave resistance in Brazil, Bahia, 1808–1835,” Luso-Brazilian Review 25:1 (Summer, 1988), 111–44. See also Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society (New York, 1985), especially Chapter 17: “Important Occasions: The War to End Bahian Slavery,” 468–88. On the Malês see João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil (São Paulo, 1986). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/97890043466��_04� Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance In Colonial Brazil 1295 fugitive community of Palmares, has considerably changed this situation.3 Still, in many ways, the topic of slave flight and resistance in Brazil has been treated as a deceptively simple one, and analyses of it have often been based on a limited set of questions to which common sense answers have been made: Why did slaves flee? To escape slavery. Where were runaway communities lo- cated? Far from possible white retaliation. Why did fugitives attack white so- ciety? To liberate their fellows and because they hated slavery. Was there class solidarity among slaves? Of course. What kind of societies did fugitives create? More or less egalitarian ones based on African traditions. Noticeably missing from the study of marronage in Brazil has been concern with some of the is- sues that have preoccupied students of this phenomenon in other American slave societies or solid evidence that would illumine some of the more intrac- table questions about ethnic solidarities, political goals, and strategies, as well as variations in form. For example, distinctions between the petite marronage of slaves who absented themselves for short periods and those who fled to escape slavery altogether has rarely been made in Brazilian historiography.4 Maroon intentions have preoccupied much writing in Jamaica and Haiti, but 3 For a general overview of the subject see Clovis Moura, Rebeliões da senzala, 3d. ed. (São Paulo, 1981), and his Os quilombos e a rebelião negra, 2d. ed. (São Paulo, 1981). See also, José Alipio Goulart, Da fuga ao suicídio. aspectos de rebeldia dos escravos do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1972). There has been a considerable development of the regional historiography of the quilombos. For example, on Pará there is Vicente Salles, O Negro no Pará (Rio de Janeiro, 1971); on Rio Grande do Sul, Mário José Maestri Filho, Quilombos e quilombolas em terras gauchas, (Porto Alegre, 1979); on Minas Gerais, Waldemar de Almeida Barbosa, Negros e quilombos em Minas Gerais (Belo Horizonte, 1972); on Bahia, aside from the above mentioned article by Schwartz, there is much material contained in Pedro Tomás Pedreira, Os quilombos brasileiros (Salvador, 1973). Many other works dealing with slavery in general at the local or regional level contain information on quilombos. See, for example, Ariosvaldo Figueiredo, O Negro e a violência do Branco (Rio de Janeiro, 1977) on Sergipe. The classic works on Palmares remain Edison Carneiro, O quilombo dos Palmares (São Paulo, 1947) and M. M. de Freitas, O reino negro de Palmares. 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro, 1954), to which should now be added Décio Freitas, Palmares: a guerra dos escravos (Porto Alegre, 1973). 4 The distinction between mocambo resistance and “petite marronage” was recognized in Brazil. In December 1698 the crown, in response to a petition from the town council of Olinda, ordered that slaves who fled from one plantation to another could not be imprisoned like those who fled to Palmares. (AHU, Conselho Ultramarino, cod. 257, f.1). See the discus- sion in Gabriel Debien, “Le marronage aux Antilles Françaises au xviiie siécle,” Caribbean Studies 6:3 (1966), 3–44, a portion of which appears in Richard Price, Maroon Societies (New York, 1973), 107–34; and the classic account of Yvan Debbasch, “Le marronage: essai sur la désertion de l’esclave antillais,” L’Année Sociologique (1961), 1–112; (1962), 117–92. Gerald W. [Michael] Mullin, Plight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Century Virginia .
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