MASTERS AND SLAVES 133
low rate of reproduction among slaves and frequent
suicides speak volumes concerning their condition.
Many slaves ran away and formed quilom bos—
settlements of fugitive slaves in the bush. The
mostfamous of these was the so-called republic of
Palmares, founded in 1603 in the interior of the
north eastern captaincy of Alagoas. A self-suffi cient
African kingdom with several thousand inhabi-
tants who lived in ten villages spread over a ninety-
mile territory, Palmares was exceptional among
quilombos in its size, complex organization, and
ability to survive repeated expeditions sent against
it by colonial authorities. Not until 1694 did a
Paulista army destroy it after a two-year siege. But
the quilombos continued to alarm planters and
authorities, and as late as 1760, complaints about
the threat posed by quilombos around Bahia were
common.
Manumission was another way that slaves
achieved freedom. Slave owners, in their wills or at
a slave’s baptism, frequently freed favored slaves or
children (sometimes their own) who were reared
in the Casa Grande (Big House). Sometimes slaves
bought their own freedom by combining the re-
sources of family and friends. The grant of freedom
might be conditional on assurance of further ser-
vice of one kind or another. Thus, in a variety of
ways, combining economic, cultural, and religious
motives, a class of freedmen and their descendants
arose and by the eighteenth century had achieved
a certain importance in the economic and social
life of colonial Brazil.
Slavery played a decisive role in the economic
life of colonial Brazil and placed its stamp on all
social relations. In addition to masters and slaves,
however, there existed a large free peasant popula-
tion of varied racial makeup who lived on estates
and in villages and hamlets scattered throughout
the Brazilian countryside. Some were small land-
owners, often possessing a few slaves of their own,
who brought their sugar cane for processing or sale
to the senhor de engenho (sugar-mill owner). Their
economic inferiority made their independence pre-
carious, and their land and slaves tended to pass
into the hands of the great planters in a process
of concentration of landownership and growing
social stratifi cation. The majority, however, were
lavradores, moradores, or foreiros (tenant farmers
or sharecroppers) who owed labor and allegiance
to a great landowner in return for the privilege of
farming a parcel of land. Other free peasants were
squatters who in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries pushed out of the coastal zone to settle in
the backcountry where they were regarded as in-
truders by the cattle barons and other great land-
owners who laid claim to those lands.
Other free commoners were the artisans, in-
cluding many black or mulatto freedmen, who
served the needs of the urban population. An im-
portant group of salaried workers—overseers, me-
chanics, coopers, and the like—supplied the special
skills required by the sugar industry.LARGE ESTATES AND COLONIAL TOWNS
The nucleus of Brazilian social as well as economic
organization was the large estate, or fazenda, which
usually rested on a base of black slavery. The large
estate centered about the Casa Grande and consti-
tuted a patriarchal community that included the
owner and his family, his chaplain and overseers,
his slaves, his obrigados (sharecroppers), and his
agregados (retainers), free men of low social status
who received the landowner’s protection and as-
sistance in return for a variety of services.
In this self-contained world, an intricate web of
relations arose between the master and his slaves
and white or mixed-blood subordinates. No doubt,
prolonged contact sometimes tended to mellow and
humanize these relationships and added to mere
commercial relationships a variety of emotional ties.
The protective role of the master found expression
in the relationship of compadrio(godfathership), in
which the master became sponsor or godfather of
a baptized child or a bridal pair whose marriage he
witnessed. The system implied relations of mutual
aid and a paternalistic interest in the welfare of the
landowner’s people. But it by no means excluded
intense exploitation of those people or the display of
the most ferocious cruelty if they should cross him
or dispute his absolute power.
In the sugar-growing northeast, the great
planters became a distinct aristocratic class, pos-
sessed of family traditions and pride in their name