6 Land Access in a Slave Society: The Case of Maranhão Province, Northern Brazil

Matthias Röhrig Assunção

Introduction

Ownership of land and the control over coerced labour have often been seen as mutually exclusive. According to Domar, free access to land could not exist in a society that combined a landed property class with free labour.¹ But, in a slave society based on coerced labour, nothing would prevent access to land being “free.” In this sense, many historians have commented on the “ample availability” of land in colonial Brazil, without questioning the concrete forms that land appropriation took. On the other hand, many authors have also emphasized the almost exclusive predominance of large landholdings in Brazil. Alberto Passos Guimarães, for example, entitled his classic study Four Centuries of Latifundia, implying total control of land access by the landed elite.² This perspective did not leave any room for independent producers or peasants. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda had already set the tone when he asserted in his seminal study that, “with very few exceptions, the very word ‘village,’ in its most common sense, as well as the word ‘peasant,’ indicating a man rooted to his place of origin through countless generations, do not correspond in the New World to any reality.”³ The crucial point to emphasize here is that slaves never constituted the only labour force in the Portuguese colonies in the Americas, and neither did they in imperial Brazil. To what extent, then, was “free” access to “available” land really possible? Research in the case of Southeast Brazil has shown that the reality of appropriation was much more complex. The case of the northern province of Maranhão also suggests a messier picture, where subsistence agriculture and communal ownership or possession competed with cotton and rice plantations relying primarily on enslaved labour and other forms of agrarian enterprise.

The aim of this chapter is to analyze land access in Maranhão—ownership as well as de facto possession and use—during the first half of the nineteenth century, or from the end of the colonial period and its sesmaria system (1822) to the aftermath of the new land legislation of 1850.⁴ In other words, I will try to disentangle the process through which land use and land ownership were re-codified in the post-colonial (and to a large extent neo-colonial) framework of the Brazilian Empire, and question their relation to plantation slavery and other forms of labour. Moreover, the various forms of land possession to be found at that time document the existence of a peasantry that developed in the interstices of the plantation economy. This social group and the various forms of land access peasants established endured long after the collapse of the cotton export sector and the abolition of slavery in 1888, until late twentieth-century modernization reframed the land question anew in the region.

The agrarian history of Maranhão displays a significant number of features and practices that can be subsumed under the very broad category of common land use. As Alfredo Wagner wrote,

The diverse forms of common land use are a frequently ignored aspect of Brazil’s agrarian structure. Analytically, they describe situations in which the control of basic resources is not exercised freely and individually by a group of small domestic producers directly or through one of its members. Such control is carried out through specific norms established in addition to the existing legal code and incorporated, by consensus, in the intricacies of social relations formed between different family groups, who make up a social unit. They may express not only stable access to land, as in former colonial areas, but they also reveal relatively transitory forms intrinsic to regions of recent occupation.⁵

In order to analyze these various forms of land use, it is necessary to first get a better understanding of the formal rules of land appropriation, which provided the framework and boundaries for other more informal means to develop in its interstices.

The Consolidation of Private Land Ownership in Brazilian Legislation: From Colonial Sesmarias to the 1850 Land Law

Sesmarias were originally an institution created in Portugal in response to the agrarian crisis that followed the Reconquista in the fourteenth century. To reactivate farming, town and city councils distributed unproductive land for cultivation. In colonial Brazil, in contrast, sesmarias were used to encourage the development of export agriculture and animal husbandry. The Portuguese king initially entitled the aristocratic “donatary captains” to distribute sesmarias, or land grants, to predominantly white male settlers in their captaincies (colonial provinces), and they were only allowed to reserve about 20 per cent of the land for their own use.⁶ This function was later taken over by the governors, administrators nominated by the Crown. In theory, the subjects applying for a sesmaria had to make a convincing case that they were settlers able to set up some form of agricultural enterprise. A small, but significant number of sesmarias were also granted to monastic orders such as the Jesuits or to the Indigenous inhabitants of mission villages. The sesmaria could hence be part of a strategy to consolidate territorial control and to recompensate Indigenous groups for accepting colonial domination, which implied detribalization and Catholic conversion.

The Ordenações do Reino provided that the sesmeiros had to cultivate the granted land within five years, a period that could be extended by the king. Once this requirement was met, and assuming the sesmaria was not claimed by others, the land became the property of the sesmeiro and his heirs. The sesmaria concession thus represented a right of use that could be transformed into a property title. However, even when complying with the requirements of the law, the property was still limited by a series of restrictions. The sesmeiro had to take care of the “royal woods” in his concession and make them available to the Portuguese Navy for the construction of vessels. If a river flowed through his sesmaria, he needed to provide a boat for the use of passers-by and reserve a riverbank for public use. He also had to grant free access to bridges and mines and take responsibility for the maintenance of public roads that ran through his sesmaria. He furthermore had to reserve an area for the foundation of villages and sometimes for common pastures (logradouros).

The size of granted sesmarias was usually of 1, 2, or 3 léguas by 1 légua (1 légua = 6.6 kilometres). In other words, sesmeiros were granted huge areas of thousands of hectares of land, but we have to remember that sesmarias were also granted in areas that had not yet been colonized, and which eventually escaped Portuguese effective control. A further complication after 1795 was that sesmarias had to be “confirmed” by the Crown, another bureaucratic process that only some sesmeiros could or wanted to go through.⁷ Where sesmeiros managed to get physical control of the granted land and were able to invest in the development of their estates, they became part of the tiny class of powerful landowners who also were prominent in local affairs.⁸ As homens bons, they could sit in town councils or serve as officers in the militia, while also allowing landless poor to settle on parts of their land in exchange for rent or personal services, thus creating a class of rural dependants.

The landowners’ power was enhanced with independence, in 1822, when they were allowed to vote for their representatives in the new parliament (Cortes) and mobilize their dependants with voting rights to also do so. At the same time the new independent state decided to no longer grant sesmarias. This was largely to meet the demands of a growing number of owners of estates (fazendas) that had occupied public land known as terra devoluta without formal sesmaria grant. The colonial sesmaria legislation was to be replaced by a new law, which, for a variety of reasons, was only adopted in 1850, in precisely the same year the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil was definitively abolished (slavery itself was only abolished in 1888). If informal occupation of land had already been common in the colonial period (sometimes, but not always, followed by sesmaria grants), this became the rule after 1822. New land on the agrarian frontier could only be occupied informally, as no other legal mechanism existed. These posseiros, as informal occupants of land are called in Brazil, were of different social origins and occupied anything from a small plot to vast latifundia. Almost thirty years later the distinction between lawful sesmaria and informal possession was even less congruent with the opposition between big landowners and small posseiros. There now existed an important group of elite planters and cattle ranchers who possessed vast amounts of land without formal property title based on a sesmaria grant or a legitimate proof of purchase. This explains, in part, the heated debates that preceded the passage of the 1850 Land Law. The powerful group of wealthy posseiros wanted their rights recognized and managed to ensure that lands that had been “peacefully occupied” (“posse mansa and pacífica”), not being claimed by others, could be registered as well.

Hence in 1850 the gap was closed, and subsequently public land had to be acquired by purchase—at least in theory; in practice occupation of terras devolutas continued as before. In that respect the land law of 1850 certainly was a failure. Yet the law became an important reference for future land conflicts, which in many ways superseded the colonial sesmarias.⁹

Private Landownership in Eastern Maranhão: A Case Study

The 1850 legislation was followed by a decree in 1854 stipulating that all landowners had to register their property in a special book, in possession of the local parish priest, until June 1857, a deadline later extended to December 1858. Given the conflicts over the text of the law, and its interpretation, there was resistance in some quarters to registering. Some landowners feared that registration could be used against them, especially in cases of previous land conflicts. It also meant that the declarations made were not very uniform. Some landowners provided relatively precise information about the location, size, and origin of their properties, while others only registered their claims but omitted many details. This may also be due to the fact that the registration tax to be paid was calculated according to the length of the declaration (2 reais per letter). Attitudes certainly varied enormously across the different provinces. Márcia Motta, comparing lists of planters in the 1858 Almanaque Laemmert with land registers of parishes from a coffee-producing area from Rio de Janeiro Province, concluded that, in this territory of frequent land conflicts, as many as 40 per cent of these landowners may not have registered.¹⁰ Warren Dean calculated that in the municipality of Rio Claro, in São Paulo, 150 smallholders failed to register their land, compared to 450 who did.¹¹ I am not able to provide a comparable figure for the Maranhão register, although these registers do reveal that many small landowners and posseiros did not make a declaration, as we see below.

Admittedly the 1854–8 land registers are incomplete, and the data are not very coherent, yet they still provide, I would argue, fundamental clues about the structure of land ownership as well as the process of land appropriation. They also quickly became an important basis for future land claims and for settling land conflicts. When I first consulted them in Maranhão, in the 1980s, they were kept not in the state archives (Arquivo Público do Estado do Maranhão) but in an institution called COTERMA (later ITERMA), which was created to register, administer, and eventually redistribute public land in the state.¹² At that time, they were still controversial, some people basing their land claims on them, while others dismissed them as inauthentic, even seeking actively to destroy them.

Given my interest in the eastern part of Maranhão, which was the main theatre of the Balaiada rebellion, I chose to work with the registers of the twenty parishes that were part of the four judicial districts (comarcas) of that area (see map 6.1).¹³ However, less than a dozen of these twenty had survived, and only nine of the books were in a state that one could decipher them. The register of these nine parishes thus forms the basis of my data set, treated with SPSS.

Right from the beginning a methodological problem needed to be solved. A number of declarations were signed by more than one person. Some declarations mentioned various pieces of land. And some owners made various declarations in the same parish, or even in other parishes. Thus, the number of cases in the data set varies according to what constitutes the unit of comparison: properties, owners or groups of owners, in one or all parishes (table 6.1).

The first observation one can make from these registers is that the 1850 law was applied to a reality that only in part conformed to the categories defined by it, and which presupposed private and individual property. Almost 24 per cent of the 3,106 declarations (counting properties/owners) informed that their land was “undivided” (indivisa) or possessed “in common.” Another relevant figure is that 19 per cent, almost a fifth of all owners, were women, against 75 per cent male owners, with the rest constituted by various forms of collective or corporate propriety (table 6.2). Fully 38 per cent of owners declared they had inherited their land, against 23 per cent who indicated they had purchased it, with 37 per cent not providing any information about the origins of their property—maybe for good reasons!

To measure the concentration of property, I divided owners into four groups (<50 hectares [ha], 50–250 ha, 250–1,000 ha, >1,000 ha) according to the size of (a) single plots and (b) aggregated slots per owner. The register reveals that concentration varies quite substantially from parish to parish. There are two main reasons for this. Because the soils underneath the Amazonian tropical rainforest are generally very poor, plantation agriculture in Maranhão went through a relatively short cycle from opening up the land, expansion, and boom to exhaustion of soils and reconversion to subsistence agriculture and pastures. At the same time, Portuguese and then Brazilian inheritance laws allowed for the systematic subdivision of land among inheritors, resulting in the dividing up of big properties.¹⁴ This is clear from the figures of the parishes of the Itapecuru Valley. In Codó, the newest parish the farthest up the river, big landowners represent 63 per cent of the declarants, and only 1 per cent owned less than 50 ha. In contrast, Rosário, the eldest parish near the estuary, big landowners represent only 21 per cent of declarants, while small owners make up 18 per cent. In the former Indian mission village of São Miguel, small landowners represent 28 per cent. The parish of Itapecuru-Mirim, situated in between, also displays an intermediate pattern of property (figure 6.1). In the Parnaiba Valley (figure 6.2) the situation is slightly different, as here plantation agriculture was not that dominant. At the time of the register there were some very big estates (in part successors of the former Jesuit estates on the coast, the Jesuit order having been expelled in 1759) and a much more significant number of medium-sized properties (between 50 and 250 ha; see tables 6.3 and 6.4, as well as map 6.1).

* Includes declarations that only indicated one dimension of the property (frente), but omitted the depth (fundos), because of the sesmaria standard of 1 légua, which is hence taken here as a standard value.

These statistics need of course to be contextualized and complemented with other data (for instance population), but I believe they show the logic and the particular dynamic of land appropriation in a plantation economy. It needs to be pointed out that the trend toward subdivision among inheritors, women included, coexisted with a trend toward concentration, as some wealthy owners tried to bundle properties by acquiring various bits of land in a parish or neighbouring parish. The reorientation toward subsistence agriculture or of non-export foodstuffs like manioc is documented by the data on agricultural production by micro-region. The contrast between the intensive plantation economy of Itapecuru Valley and the more mixed economy on the coast and in Paraiba Valley is confirmed by the population statistics. The 1838 figures display a greater proportion of enslaved people in the lower Itapecuru Valley and a greater proportion of the free non-white population in the lower Paraiba Valley (map 6.2).

Formal landownership, however, offers only one perspective on land access; it needs to be complemented and contrasted with the real appropriation of land on the ground. This is already clear from the register. Owners were supposed to declare the names of their immediate neighbours, but in many cases these confrontantes did not make a declaration themselves. It is striking, for example, that many landowners claim their land was contiguous with that of “the Indians [índios] of São Miguel.” The latter, however, did not make a register of the former Indian sesmaria granted collectively to the inhabitants of the mission village.¹⁵ Similarly, a number of freed or poor people of colour are only cited as neighbours but did not make a declaration on their own:

—“Camilo, freed black”;

—“Cecília, free brown woman”;

—“Dorotéia, free black woman”;

—“João Francisco Mendes da Silva and other inheritors and freed people”;

—“Land of the freed people of the deceased Maria Rita Gomes Belfort”¹⁶

By not submitting a declaration to the parish priest, these people—freed people—were opening the gates to subsequent usurpation of their land.¹⁷ At this stage it is not possible to quantify how many were left out by these rule changes, but I suspect quite a significant number.

Informal and Collective Access to Land

Land access through informal or even illegal forms of appropriation (the situations known in Brazil as posse), as well as through rent and leases, constituted the basis of peasant production all over Brazil since the colonial era. In Maranhão more specifically, peasant production was based on a variety of forms of land access, from informal posse (informal appropriation) to the use of collective property of corporations and townships (municípios). Two distinctions need to be made here. The first is between the judicial form and the concrete practice, because the same legal form could contain distinct modes of land use. The systems of common land use, rediscovered by social scientists as typical forms of peasant production in the 1980s, were based on a broad range of different formal ownership situations. Secondly, it is useful to separate direct and indirect access to land. The former refers to situations where peasants have obtained at some point in history a kind of legal recognition, such as collective property title, which may be challenged later on as they do not possess the means to legalize that property or maintain its register during changes to the legal framework of land legislation. The latter refers to situations where peasants use land that they recognize as belonging to others. Even if in practice that distinction may not always be entirely clear (for example, when peasants use land they recognize as belonging to a saint), it will help my exposition here and hopefully clarify the various situations.

Posseiros Big and Small

Even though it was not part of the Portuguese Crown’s plans, land access without a formal sesmaria title was a frequent practice during the colonial period. It was a rather precarious appropriation, because a new sesmaria grant could attribute the same land to another person, which eventually resulted in a number of conflicts. However, possession was the only possibility for land access for settlers without the means to pay the costs of registering and confirming a sesmaria. It was certainly the most frequent form of appropriation on the agrarian frontier. Many squatters also occupied the interstices between sesmaria grants. The Crown, perfectly aware of these practices, tried to avoid concessions of land already occupied by other settlers in this regard, especially toward the end of the colonial period. Several authors have argued that this meant a legal recognition of possession.¹⁸ But the golden age of informal land appropriation or posse certainly were the years between 1822 and 1850, when there was no legal barrier to the appropriation of unclaimed land. As the 1850 Land Law offered the possibility of legalizing “peaceful and gentle” possessions, many squatters registered their lands, the first step to becoming full owners. Even though the peaceful posse was legal, only one proprietor in the nine parishes of the 1850 land register in Maranhão openly declared such an appropriation, which I believe shows that even big landowners preferred to play it safe, by not indicating the origins of their property claim.

The opposite process also occurred: A property of sesmarial origin could be transformed into an insecure possession, if the formal legalization had not been followed up, as had already happened in the case of unmeasured and unconfirmed sesmarias during colonial times. In other words, the distinction between ownership and possession is not a simple one in this transitional phase in the nineteenth century, because the boundaries between the two were imprecise and subject to change and redefinitions. The informal appropriation (posse) of planters as well as peasants were most common on the agrarian frontier. In the early nineteenth century, a substantial part of the province in fact still escaped control of the neo-colonial state and provided the territorial basis for a number of Indigenous groups. This fringe territory has been highlighted by Otávio Velho as the space where peasants could thrive, if only momentarily.¹⁹ In the case of Maranhão, a respectable number of runaway slaves formed communities beyond the frontier to set up their subsistence agriculture or even gold mining.

Collective Land I: Terra de Índio

Undivided plantation lands were the result of the fragmentation of initially individual ownership, where local and “traditional” arrangements replaced the absence of formal boundaries for individual plots. The collective landownership examined in this section, in contrast, was collective right from the start, and legally enshrined.

Historically the first type of collective ownership were the Indian sesmarias. The term “Indian” needs to be contextualized here. During the late colonial period the Portuguese Crown distinguished several stages of acculturation. Indigenous peoples were classified as Indians, or “heathens” (gentio), and considered barbarians. Once they had submitted to colonial rule and settlement they were called “tamed Indians” (índios domésticos). Finally—at the end of a “civilizing process” lasting several generations—the descendants of the Native Brazilians could now be considered “civilized,” and were called caboclos in many parts of Brazil, especially in the Amazon. It was in this intermediate stage between barbarism and civilization that, in the eyes of the Crown, the allocation of land to the “tamed” Indians as a collective was justified to help in their transition to the desired state of civilization. For this reason, the concession was always accompanied by a series of requirements, and lands were preferably granted to communities, controlled by missionaries. The decline of the mission villages, especially after the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1759, was often accompanied by the usurpation of their lands by third parties.²⁰ Yet in some cases the surviving descendants of Indigenous people secured the land of the former Indian sesmaria, or parts of it. São Miguel, on the Itapecuru River just above Rosário, is an example of this. The usurpation of most of the colonial Indian sesmarias was already well under way after independence, and in the 1980s community leaders complained about a renewed effort by grileiros (land grabbers or deed falsifiers) to expel them from their collective land. At the time, the remaining land of the community was still reallocated periodically to each family, as is the case in other collectively owned land in Maranhão.

Collective Land II: Terras de Preto

One of the most prevalent forms of communal land use in modern-day Maranhão are the lands known until recently as terras de preto (Black people’s lands). Depending on the definition, this category could include a hundred, or even hundreds, of different situations in the state.²¹ Due both to the requirements of the 1988 constitution, which only recognizes communal land ownership rights of “remnants of quilombo communities that are occupying the land,” as well as to the dynamics of the new social movement that aims to protect terras de preto from land grabbers, the term quilombo was re-semanticized by activists in the 1990s to denominate these lands.²² Also influenced by the debate on slave resistance and the consecutive expansion of that category to cover a much broader range of actions, including non-violent measures, quilombo has now come to designate a number of situations in which a Black community defends its rights to a territory, way of life, and values against broader Brazilian society, which had so far denied them. As a result, all currently existing terras de preto can be considered quilombos in the modern sense, even if, historically, they cannot be directly traced to territories occupied by groups of fugitive slaves. In fact, most terras de preto in Maranhão resulted from the breakup of plantations and the occupation of part of the land by former slaves after nationwide abolition in 1888.²³ Even the first communities to join the struggle to legalize their land with the state, such as Frechal and Jamary, originated from a similar process.²⁴

However, there were several cases in which, long before abolition, land was collectively adjudicated to groups of freed slaves by private owners. Even if these cases are now a minority among the currently existing terras de preto, they are important for two reasons. First, they show the loopholes in the slave system and that the enslaved made use of them. In that sense they provided an important exception to Tania Murray Li’s racialized state/land concepts on landowners’ “worthiness.”²⁵

Furthermore, they introduced a practice that became widespread after abolition. I believe that this pre-emancipation experience was important in terms of creating precedents—models that were more easily adopted in Maranhão for that reason; and could explain why, more than in other states, planters in Maranhão agreed to allow former slaves to settle on their land in exchange for goods or services.

To this day, in eastern Maranhão, there are at least three situations involving terras de preto that date back to the early nineteenth century. The oldest is probably Bonsucesso, a village now located in the municipality of Mata Roma. A genealogy painstakingly recollected by the elder Simão, in 1982, traced his ancestry back over eight generations. According to the community’s oral history, Brigadier Feliciano Henrique Franco established a plantation with twelve enslaved families in that part of the Rio Preto Valley. Following the brigadier’s death in Europe, his son, Anacleto Henrique Franco, is believed to have gone to Maranhão to liquidate and close down the estate. Given that his father had been in debt to merchants in Parnaíba and São Luís, he offered the slaves land and liberty in exchange for the repayment of debts worth 30,000 milréis, to be paid off in a maximum period of twelve years. The enslaved managed to repay the debt in ten, “working day and night,” and thereby gained the land and their freedom.²⁶ I have not been able to find the original donation document, but Brigadier Anacleto Henrique Franco (here, the oral history seems to have confused the father’s name with that of the son) also appears in other sources. He was a colonel in the regiment that led the failed expedition against the Axuí quilombo in 1794. A sudden voyage to Portugal was due to the fact that, accused of stealing within his regiment, he was sent under arrest to Lisbon, where he managed to convince the judges of his innocence, returning to Maranhão with the rank of brigadier.²⁷ Through further investigation, Joaquim Shiraishi located, if not the original document, at least the transcript of the brigadier’s will in the records of the adverse possession claim filed by the freed people’s descendants in the 1950s. According to the transcript, the area was acquired through a donation to the enslaved ancestors of the community, made by order of a last will and testament in the town of Icatu, which transferred the area on condition that they pay off their debts and manumission in ten years.²⁸

There are many similarities between this case and the origins of the Rampa community in the municipality of Vargem Grande. According to their oral history, the Portuguese priest Antônio Fernandes Pereira owned a plantation in Pirapemas, on the banks of the Itapecuru River. When Brazil became independent, he decided that leaving the province was the prudent thing to do, so he gave his slaves land and their freedom on condition that they paid him one-third of the income from the donated land for the rest of his life. The donation letter shows that the priest was concerned about organizing the life of the community and avoiding future problems, such as members from the community selling individual plots to outsiders.

In the case of Rampa, the land was in a remote area in the rainforest, a centro, and not one of the main parcels of land of the priest’s plantation. However, it was densely forested, with a spring that “never dried up,” thereby sparking envy in outsiders and making it—like Bonsucesso—the focus of fierce struggles in the twentieth century. Finally, it should be noted that in both cases, the donation was a business transaction, and was not made “free and clear,” out of the goodness of the heart of a philanthropic slaveowner. Indeed, the 30,000 milréis the slaves of Bonsucesso are said to have raised to pay the brigadier’s debts were worth more, at the time, than the purchase price of the twelve or fourteen enslaved families and the land of Bonsucesso together.

The terras de preto in Saco das Almas are a very different case, because the donation was made to reward services rendered outside the master-slave relationship. According to oral history, the military commander of the comarca de Brejo, Severino de Carvalho, learned of an imminent attack on the town during the Balaiada. The rebels had even threatened to make Severino’s daughters dance naked before his soldiers.²⁹ In desperation, Severino turned to an elderly Black man, Timóteo, for help. Timóteo mobilized his large family and set up an ambush, managing to fight off the feared attack. As a reward, he is said to have been granted ownership of the land and the rank of captain. The oral history does not say whether, by then, Timóteo was a slave or freedman. Severino de Carvalho was an infamous military commander during the end of the colonial era, who was appointed chief of police of the whole area in 1838. Hated by the poor of the lower Parnaíba micro-region, he and his family were subjected to various attacks from the Balaio rebels during the 1838–41 civil war, and his mother was killed.

In the case of Almas, we do not know if the “donation” was accompanied, at the time, by legal registration. It may not have been, because, according to Januária Patrício, squatters began encroaching on Timóteo’s land long before abolition.

The case of Almas helps us see that the relationship between the slaveholding latifundio and peasant lands was more complex than at first appears. If an alliance with a powerful individual made it possible for Black freed people to gain access to land, a change in the local political leadership could pose a threat to their recently acquired ownership. In other words, the real situation of land ownership depended on title deeds and power relations between social actors at the local level, particularly in a period of transition, such as the middle of the nineteenth century, when the 1850 Land Law was attempting to re-establish the boundaries between full ownership, with all the rights it entailed, and what was considered merely posse or squatting. We can thus identify several ways through which present-day Black communities historically gained access to land: through services, sharecropping, military service, as well as concubinage.³⁰

Indirect Access to Land

The “Peasant Breach”

The issue of food supply was addressed in a variety of ways in plantation societies in the Americas: The planter could either purchase foodstuffs for enslaved workers or have them cultivate fields on his own estate. A third option was to allocate to slaves individual plots so they could feed themselves. In the case of Maranhão, there is evidence for all three of these options.

Robert Hesketh, the British consul in São Luís in the 1830s, mentions provision grounds of the enslaved, which according to him was common only on the large plantations.

Other contemporary sources, such as F. Brandão Jr., son of a planter from the Itapecuru Valley, even consider that this concession to slaves of plots they were allowed to work on Sundays and holidays was the overall rule.³¹

Brandão, despite his social origins, was an advocate of gradual emancipation and did not tend to paint the lives of the enslaved in particularly rosy colours. It is therefore difficult to get a precise idea of the importance of what historians have called, following Lepkowski’s work on Haiti, the “peasant breach” in the slave system.³²

The oral memory of the descendants of slaves in Maranhão also mentions provision grounds on plantations, cultivated by the captives under the surveillance of the overseer (feitor). In many cases the enslaved managed to keep these provision grounds after emancipation, often in exchange for their labour. This is in fact by far the most common situation regarding the origins of land access of hundreds of Black communities in the northern part of the state. Due to the modernization waves of the last decades (e.g., the Carajás mining project) the land they occupied for generations has been under threat, if not already lost, a process facilitated by the lack of formal property titles.

Renting Communal Land

Although sesmaria legislation stipulated that each town should dispose of communal land to finance their expenses, in practice that depended very much on the historical moment vilas were created, as well as how much the town council looked after its property. Not all towns in Maranhão owned significant amounts of land, but a number of them did own plots ranging in size from hundreds to a couple of thousands of hectares. For example, Itapecuru-Mirim, founded in 1818, owned over 2,200 ha, and Codó received 174 ha on its creation, in 1833. Both were grants from rich landowners in all likelihood happy with the creation or “emancipation” of their respective town. Much more significant, though, were the communal lands in Icatu and Tutóia, on the coast. Here poor soils seem to have made the Crown inclined to give away bigger areas. Tutóia, a former Indigenous mission village, was granted the sesmaria of the extinct mission on its creation, in 1760, of 26,000 ha.³³

Icatu, the third-oldest town in the captaincy, was given more than 25,000 ha. The majority of its free poor population were tenants (foreiros) of the lands belonging to the municipality. There were 355 registered foreiros in 1825. With their families they certainly amounted to more than a thousand people, while the parish counted, in 1821, only 7,265 inhabitants in total, including slaves.

A third type of this kind of land access existed in Maranhão: church lands (usually belonging to a monastic order) rented out to families of peasants. During times of slavery, the Carmelite order in Rosário rented out most of their lands even though tenants (foreiros) were not always paying their rent. Some of these situations have endured in the eastern part of Maranhão, where they are known as terras de santo. Finally, there are indications that some private owners also rented out their land in the nineteenth century. I have not found enough sources documenting this to be able to assess its importance. Contrary to the foreiros, this group, called agregados, were pressed into a relationship of personal dependency, had to hand over a substantial part of their harvest to the owner, and on top of that put their labour at his service. This relationship became very important in the interior of Maranhão and other provinces after the abolition of slavery.³⁴

Using Commons

In addition to the lands granted at their foundation, the town councils also gained control over the realengos in 1833, assigned to them by the imperial government during the liberal Regency (1831–40). The realengos were defined as the land strip of fifteen braças (thirty-three metres) from the seashore, at the highest tide, in a straight line inland. The revenues from the leases of the realengos were also to feed the coffers of the municipalities located by the sea.

In Maranhão, due to the enormous difference in sea level between low tide and high tide, these fifteen braças could cover great stretches of land. At low tide, these realengos thus extended for hundreds of metres in width. They included extensive mangroves on land regularly flooded by the tide or andiroba trees that grew on higher ground, flooded only occasionally, both of which were of great economic importance. The mangroves supplied the population with timber and represented hunting and fishing grounds. Andiroba was used to make soap and oil, the latter used both as medicine and for lighting. The harvesting and processing of andiroba was, along with fishing, the main activity of what town councillors called the “poverty” (pobreza) in the borough (termo) of Icatu. The cutting of andiroba trees was prohibited by the council during the colonial period, and free access to the forests was guaranteed as a customary right: “The Munim [River valley] abounds in these trees [andirobeiras], whose forests belong to the people.”³⁵

In the 1830s the andiroba forests were the theatre of a multi-layered conflict. Neighbouring landowners started to push their property claims toward the shore and tried to prevent the “poverty” from accessing the realengos. I believe this was not convenient for the merchants who bought the oil and soap from the latter, so it was reported to the governor of the province. The provincial government in return wanted the municipal council to rent them out to generate income. Therefore, the council decided to levy a “modest” amount. Unsurprisingly this led to conflict with the andiroba gatherers, who defended their ancestral rights to free use.³⁶

The andiroba was only a relatively minor sector of the provincial domestic economy, whose production involved hundreds of families in a limited area. Yet this conflict announced bigger struggles over the appropriation of resources some actors considered to be held in common: rivers, lakes, and even forests. The appropriation of the coconuts of the native babaçu palm, for instance, which was the most common secondary vegetation on the soils of the former rainforest, became a source of permanent tension in the latter half of the twentieth century, when owners tried to prevent poor peasants from collecting them on their land, or land they considered theirs.

Conclusion

The interaction of Portuguese legal frameworks, local circumstances, and struggles over resources resulted in the agrarian structure of Maranhão—characterized, since colonial times, by great inequality of access to land. The colonial rationale aimed to create a class of wealthy landowners dominating colonial subjects not only through forced labour, but also by controlling access to land. Contra-colonial agents, however, managed to carve out spaces in the interstices of the plantation system in unoccupied areas beyond the agrarian frontier, such as inaccessible riverheads in the then dense rainforest or territories not yet colonized. Peasants also made use of resources in plain sight of colonial authorities, sometimes backed up by existing Portuguese legal traditions. The latter had found their way into colonial legislation to facilitate strategical alliances of the Portuguese Crown with Indigenous peoples, or to favour the demographic occupation in order to stabilize the colonial project in its early stages. These legal traditions consisted of communal land granted to “pacified” Indian communities or to tenants on municipal land (foreiros). The continuous subdivision among inheritors also led to establishment of minifundia, or territories that were communally owned (terra indivisa). Yet the informality of many of these occupations led to instable and precarious land access for Maranhão peasants or caboclos, jeopardized further as almost none of them managed to register their land according to the 1850 law. This resulted in systematic usurpation of peasant land ever since.

The 1988 constitution at least recognized the rights of “traditional people” and of the descendants of quilombos, which had for such a long time been excluded from Brazil’s legislation and ignored by public policies. The developments in the agrarian sector in the last thirty years have shown how many communities living on “traditionally occupied land” were able to capitalize on these modest policy changes. Their activism and capacity to mobilize other, especially state actors, helped them react against growing encroachments by grileiros (land grabbers) or agrobusiness and advance their cause toward formal recognition of their rights.

Hence the interest in examining the formation of these “traditional” land uses and appropriations back in time to illuminate our understanding of peasant mobilization then and now. Back in the 1830s, even though there were quite a number of sporadic land conflicts, some of which have been mentioned here, land was not the common denominator able to mobilize the different subaltern groups of a slave society. There were just too many different situations of land access that prevented an objective common interest.

Notes to Chapter 6

1. 1 Evsey Domar, “The Causes of Slavery and Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30, no. 1 (1970): 18–32.

2. 2 Alberto Passos Guimarães, Quatro séculos de latifúndio, 3rd ed. (Paz e Terra, 1963).

3. 3 Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Raízes do Brasil, 17th ed. (José Olympio, 1984 [1st ed., 1936]), 56. Author’s translation.

4. 4 Material informing this chapter, including maps, tables, and a more extensive bibliography, can be found in Matthias Röhrig Assunção, De caboclos a Bem-te-vis: Formação do campesinato no Maranhão, 1800–1850 (Annablume, 2018), chaps. 2–4. For an English translation, see Matthias Röhrig Assunção, Peasant Rebellion in a Slave Society: The Balaiada in Maranhão, Brazil, 1800–1850 (Routledge, 2024).

5. 5 Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, Traditionally Occupied Lands in Brazil (PGSCA-UFAM, 2011), 123.

6. 6 Manuel Diegues Júnior, “Land Tenure and Use in the Brazilian Plantation System,” in Plantation Systems of the New World: Papers and Discussion Summaries of the Seminar Held in San Juan, Puerto Rico (Pan-American Union, 1959), 14; José da Costa Porto, Estudo sôbre o sistema sesmaria (Imprensa Universitária, Universidade Federal do Pernambuco, 1965), 26–7; Jacob Gorender, O escravismo colonial (Ática, 1978), 364–8.

7. 7 Research by Carmen Alveal has shown that only a small number of sesmarias were confirmed by Lisbon between 1521 and 1777. See Alveal, Senhorios coloniais: Direitos e chicanas forenses na formação da propriedade na América portuguesa (Ed. Proprietas, 2022), 311.

8. 8 There is not yet reliable data on the total number of sesmeiros in the territory that constituted Maranhão in 1822.

9. 9 For a more detailed discussion of the land law of 1850, see Warren Dean, “Latifundia and Land Policy in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 51, no. 4 (1971): 606–25; José Murilo de Carvalho, “Modernização frustrada: A política de terras no Império,” Revista Brasileira de História 1 (1981): 39–57; Emília Viotti da Costa, Da Monarquia à República: Momentos decisivos, 3rd ed. (Brasiliense, 1985), 131–61; Lígia Osorio Silva, Terras devolutas e latifundio: Efeitos da lei de 1850 (Editora da UNICAMP, 1996); Márcia Maria Menendes Motta, Nas fronteiras do poder: Conflito e direito à terra no Brasil do século XIX, 2nd ed. (EdUFF, 2008).

10. 10 Motta, Nas fronteiras, 176–7.

11. 11 Dean, “Latifundia,” 621.

12. 12 See “Sobre o ITERMA,” Govern do Maranhão, accessed 25 April 2021, http://www.iterma.ma.gov.br/iterma-institucional/.

13. 13 Administrative divisions in nineteenth-century Brazil were organized according to three separate, although connected, sectors of the imperial state. In political terms, the empire consisted of provinces, which were divided into the termos (territories) of towns and cities, which in turn were divided into districts (distritos). In judicial terms, each Court of Appeal was responsible for a number of judicial unities (comarcas) presided by professional judges (juizes de fora). The comarcas in turn were subdivided in districts under the responsibility of a justice of the peace, later substituted by police chiefs and ordinary judges. In ecclesiastical terms, the empire consisted of archdioceses and dioceses, which in turn were divided into parishes. Political and judicial divisions usually (but not always) overlapped and were also—given that Catholicism was the official religion—congruent with ecclesiastical divisions.

14. 14 Alida C. Metcalf, “Fathers and Sons: The Politics of Inheritance in a Colonial Brazilian Township,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66, no. 3 (1986): 455–84.

15. 15 In the 1980s, the descendants of the mission still owned collectively a slot of land, but according to their testimony, the size of it had diminished substantially since the nineteenth century.

16. 16 See 1854–7 land registries of São Miguel (nos. 44, 62); Rosário (nos. 3, 4, 33, 38, 39); Itapecuru-Mirim (no. 208), Public Archive of the State of Maranhão, São Luís.

17. 17 It is important to remember that a small but significant number of enslaved people succeeded through various ways in obtaining freedom throughout the three and a half centuries of slavery in Brazil. Since freed people had much higher reproduction and survival rates, the free population of colour in Brazil started to outnumber enslaved people during the nineteenth century. Final abolition of slavery in 1888 therefore only freed a relatively small percentage of the total population.

18. 18 Motta, Nas fronteiras, 123–5.

19. 19 Otávio Guilherme Velho, Capitalismo autoritário e campesinato (Um estudo comparativo a partir da fronteira em movimento) (Difel, 1976).

20. 20 For example, in the case of the former villages of Vinhaes on the island of São Luís, or Barbados on the Itapecuru River. See Relatório do Presidente da Província do Maranhão, Eduardo Olímpio Machado (I. J. Ferreira, 1855), 29–30.

21. 21 Projeto Vida de Negro, Terras de preto: Quebrando o mito do isolamento, Levantamento preliminar da situação atual das chamadas Terras de preto localizadas no Estado do Maranhão (Sociedade Maranhense de Defesa dos Direitos Humanos, 1989).

22. 22 Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, “Quilombos: Tema e problema,” in Jamary dos Pretos: Terra de mocambeiros, ed. Projeto Vida de Negro (Sociedade Maranhense de Defesa dos Direitos Humanos, Centro de Cultura Negra do Maranhão, Associação Rural de Moradores do Quilombo Jamary dos Pretos, 1998), 13–25.

23. 23 Alfredo Wagner Berno de Almeida, “Terras de Preto, Terras de Santo, Terras de Índio—Uso comum e conflito,” Cadernos do NAEA 10 (1989): 172.

24. 24 For the Jamary case, see Luis Antonio Câmara Pedrosa, “Petição de regularização das terras, in Projeto Vida de Negro, Jamary dos Pretos, 91; for Frechal, see Projeto Vida de Negro, Frechal, Terra de Preto: Quilombo reconhecido como reserva extrativista (Sociedade Maranhense de Defesa dos Direitos Humanos, Centro de Cultura Negra do Maranhão, Associação de Moradores do Quilombo Frechal, 1996), 125.

25. 25 See foreword to this volume.

26. 26 For more details, see the testimony of Simião and others in Matthias Röhrig Assunção, A Guerra dos Bem-te-vis: A Balaiada na memória oral, 2nd ed. (EdUFMA, 2008 [1st ed 1988]), 132–7. Also see Benedito Souza Filho, “Bom Sucesso: Terra de Preto, Terra de Santo, Terra Comum” (MA thesis, Universidade Federal do Pará, 1998).

27. 27 “Poranduba Maranhense ou Relação histórica da Província do Maranhão . . . (1820),” Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 54, no. 83 (1891): 117.

28. 28 Joaquim Shirashi Neto, “Prática de pesquisa judiciária para identificação das denominadas Terras de preto nos cartórios do Maranhão” (MA thesis, Universidade Federal do Maranhão, 1998), 11.

29. 29 See the testimony of Januária Patrício in Assunção, A Guerra dos Bem-te-vis, 122. For another version of the same episode, see Celecina de Maria Veras Salas, “Os descendentes de Timóteo: Lutas camponesas e interferência do Estado numa terra de preto em conflito, no Baixo Parnaíba, Maranhão,” in Cadernos de Práticas de Pesquisa (São Luís: UFMA, 1998), 14–15.

30. 30 For more details, see Assunção, A Guerra dos Bem-te-vis, 113–25.

31. 31 F. A. Brandão Junior, A escravatura no Brasil precedida d’um artigo sobre a agricultura e colonisação no Maranhão (H. Thiry-Vern Buggenhondt, 1865), 42.

32. 32 Tadeusz Lepkowski, Haiti, 2 vols. (Casa de las Américas, 1968).

33. 33 For more details and references regarding communal land, see Assunção, De caboclos, 140–4.

34. 34 According to the diary of a fazendeiro from the lower Parnaiba, the aggregates could only sell their surplus to the owner. This diary is from the beginning of the century (it was written between 1918 and 1932), and the author was born in 1877. See Lena Castello Branco, Arraial e Coronel: Dois estudos de história social (Cultrix, 1979).

35. 35 “Poranduba,” 143.

36. 36 For more details and references, see Assunção, De caboclos, 157–8, 172–3.