Conditionally Freed: “Future Libertos” and Claims-Making in Late Colonial Rio De Janeiro

Focusing on conditional manumission in colonial Rio de Janeiro, this paper explores the connections between the “interior lives” of people of African descent, their legal and political imaginaries, and the claims they made before slave owners, notaries, and judges. In the late eighteenth century, one of every three manumissions conferred in that port city and its hinterlands was conditional; that is, legal freedom was conferred with an explicit condition or obligation attached. Conditional manumission placed legal freedom upon an uncertain horizon over a broader landscape of customary practices, informal bonds, contractual obligations, and personal, often intimate, expressions of power. In some cases, legal freedom assumed immediate effect, so long as newly freed persons honored the wishes of and obligations to their former masters, which included maintaining honorable marriages, performing masses for the salvation of their master’s soul, paying down debts, or training new slaves. The most common condition, however, obligated slaves to labor until their master’s death, when their legal freedom would become valid. This latter condition created a group of individuals neither entirely free nor entirely enslaved who notaries called “future libertos.” This paper explores how “future libertos” confronted their liminal status with inventive notarial and judicial strategies that inscribed their own understandings of slavery and freedom, and countered the coercion intrinsic to manumission. Exploring their praxis of claims-making enables us to understand how claims to limited rights and privileges among the conditionally freed evolved from the “interior lives,” concerns, and priorities of people of African descent, their kin, and their community. As they negotiated rations of food and medicine, access to clothing and shoes, and defined the limits of mastery, enslaved people moving from slavery to freedom confronted the precarities engendered by manumission. In doing so, they revealed glimpses of their imagination and conception of freedom.