From Soldier to Shopkeeper and Slaveowner: Francisco Da Silva Barros in Independence-Era Bahia, Brazil

From 1809 to 1828, Francisco da Silva Barros, a pardo (mixed-race) man, kept a diary about personal and public events in the city of Bahia (modern-day Salvador), Brazil. While the document has been known for almost a century, and was published in 1938, its authorship was unknown until recently and no historian has attempted to study this unique source. This paper examines Francisco’s social connections as documented in the diary and in parish records, notarial records, and wills and inventories of people connected to him. They show how this natural son of a Portuguese shopkeeper and a black woman, who served for a dozen years in the army, strategically used social connections to gain a not insignificant degree of economic stability in the turbulent independence years. These included client-patron relations with the family of a wealthy Portuguese merchant, a close friendship with a slave trade ship captain, and a marriage into a family of pardo militia officers. Literate, Francisco apparently had a knack for business and appears to have been someone on whom his many relatives could rely. The economic context of a booming slave trade enabled him to enter the slave-owning class by 1818, and over the course of the period of his life that can be documented, he owned at least six enslaved people; the manumission of one of them, in November 1837, is (at this point in the research), the last documented reference to Francisco. This paper is one of the chapters of a biography of Francisco, which analyzes the life and times of this man of color.