SUGAR AND BLOOD: SLAVERY IN TWO WORLDS
BY: ROLANDO CASELLA

    Between the early 1790s and the early 1820s, there was a difference in the way that slaves from the US and Brazil were treated. The slaves developed lawsuits against their masters in which, they argued for their right to be free.  This essay will talk about three consistent themes from those arguments of the freedom suits: First, the urban slaves who sued their masters in the two countries sharing the common concepts of justice, freedom, and rights.  Second, that Brazilian and U.S. lawyers both used Roman lawyers and Roman laws concerning slavery to defend slaves. Even though slavery did not undergo in most parts of Europe after the decline of the Roman laws, capitalist desires there encouraged and grew in other areas in thrill like the U.S. and Brazil.  Third, the ways that slaves were treated in different situations in both Brazil and the U.S.  Slavery involves the legal state of existing rights to the norm of property rights over things.  The laws in the U.S. and Brazil were different from each other and the people were treated differently.
    In the U.S., only planters and private individuals owned slaves.  In Brazil, besides the planter class, large plantations were owned by such religious orders as the Benedictine and Carmelite friars, who treated theirs really well. Also, there were slaves that belonged to the government.  Brazilian slavery was everywhere, instead of in a few small places.  In Brazil the sale of slaves from one master to another apparently was not as common as it was in the US. Brazil was known to have an extensive slavery system.
    Slavery in North America was very different than slavery in the rest of the Americas. In the first place, far fewer slaves were brought into what became the United States.  Only around 500,000 slaves were brought in, compared to around 12 to 13 million that were imported into the Caribbean and South and Central America. Most of these slave imports to North America ended by 1770, except for a burst of activity by a few southern states after the American Revolution. Secondly, the fact that the English people had little experience with slavery in comparison to the Spanish and Portuguese, mainly said that they really didn't have any past experience. Initially, the first slaves in the Virginia colony were looked upon as workers rather than as property, and some of them were treated much like white indentured servants. The enslaved Africans often worked along side the indentured European laborers in the tobacco fields of the Chesapeake region. The Africans weren’t especially valued, either. It was cheaper in the early years to bring in white laborers from England as indentured servants than to pay for slaves. And most whites looked upon Africans as morally and intellectually inferior, in any case.
    Brazil’s African slaves were treated as inferior to the white man, whether they were servants or free.  Slavery was involved as a legal status, it reflected and included this same act as a part of its essence, which white men had practiced against Africans all along and before any statutes, had decreed it.  There were at least three major traditional safeguards, which tended to protect the free Negro against being treated as an inferior.  In the U.S. the Negro slaves were treated as products not human beings.  Even if a black man or woman were free they would still be treated as if they were slaves.  On the eve of the Civil War, the Jim Crow idea was one of many stereotypical images of black inferiority.  A white southern man who saw a crippled, elderly black man dancing and singing created Jim Crow. Thomas Rice created Jim Crow, and he charcoaled his face and sang a song and danced.  Jim Crow was the stereotype of a black man described in a nineteenth century song-and-dance act.
In the United States, State legislations such as the Labor Laws continued attempts made by workers to improve their positions in society, yet dismantled previous federal attempts to improve African-Americans positions through the Black codes and Grandfather laws. Between 1874 and 1896 a number of Labor Laws were passed to lessen working hours, regulate wages, and lessen the amount of women and child laborers.  In Brazil’s Congress they passed variants of a constitutional amendment that would permit federal authorities to seize land from slave owners.  The law prohibited landowners from holding workers’ documents or using control over their transportation to and from remote farms to imprison them.
    In the United States there were two types of slavery, one the storied domestic slavery of the towns, and the southern country seat, where the Negro was usually feeling kindly treated and loved as though one of the family.  This type of slavery was most common along the Mason-Dixon line.  The other type was determined by the large-scale enterprises in the cotton and rice fields in the “southern” South, where absentee ownership was often the rule. People become slaves because they are poor, vulnerable
and their basic rights are not protected. Lack of access to work, land, education and lack of enforcement of laws prohibiting the holding of people in bondage result in slavery.  Slavery provides ‘employers’ with a form of extremely cheap labor, which they will fight, to hold onto. The only option is to pledge their labor to repay their debt. Some resort to selling one of their children.  People who are enslaved are usually unaware that they have legal rights to freedom or are unable to take action to defend their rights, because of the threat of violence.  In Brazil there is 4 different types of slavery, bonded labor, forced labor, child labor, and sexual misuse of children.
Brazil never had anything similar to the Black Code and other legal prohibitions of contacts of races by marriage and intermarriage such as were very frequent elsewhere in the U.S. “It takes a new look at the meanings slaves and masters drew from formal wedding ceremonies and celebrations, and examines marriages between slaves and free blacks as well as marriage between slaves”(Will).  In Brazil a slave who wished to marry first had to learn the requisite number of prayers, understand the confession, and receive the sacraments.  Having received consent from Master, he is to be married by the vicar.  In the U.S. a slave might marry a freeman.  If husband was free and wife was a slave, their child would be a slave; but a slave father and a free mother produced a free child.  Sacredness of marriage was more highly regarded in Brazil than the U.S.  In the U.S. it was illegal for a slave to marry, own property, appeal to court, or be a witness. Black slaves and free blacks alike could not vote, testify in court against a white person, or marry a white person. Slaves were allowed neither to carry arms nor to leave their homes without written permission. The Brazilian slaves’ marriage was sanctified, had legal rights, and could appeal to court, own things, make money, and could buy freedom.  The religious feeling has also favored crossbreeding, and it was very common among the colonists.  The legislation and the strength of the public opinion in Brazil with reference to marriage and intermarriage is also important. In the U.S., the slave might marry on the plantation, but the very next day be sold, and separated from his wife and parents.
    In both countries, there were certain religions that the slaves had to follow.  Many people in Brazil gave emphasis to the religion of Catholicism with its doctrine of essential equality of mankind and its estimation of racial principle that tends to hinder action.  Many Protestant countries influenced by modern missionaries have adopted this position of Catholicism.  The Church insisted that the marriage ties of the slave be respected, and that the master never forget the slave’s status as a human being with an immortal soul.  That paralleled the concern of the Church by the active interference of royal officials in matters of slave welfare.  In the U.S., the Protestants had eradicated the slaves’ old religions, to control and rationalize them.  It was always about race and saying the slaves were inferior.  The lack of civil law slave code did not mean that the church exercised authority in the regulation of slavery.  The 1705 Law stated that all blacks, mulattoes, and Native Americans, and all non-Christian persons brought into the colonies as servants (even if they converted to Christianity later) and were considered slaves.  In Brazil state and religious bodies owned slaves.  “The Catholic Church tried to Christianize the blacks, looking for extirpating a tradition milenar. Even so, the black resisted to the domain of the white culture maintaining their faith, and adapting their rituals and transforming their religion in a contemporary reality”(PARAÍSO).  The Catholics in Brazil treated the slaves better since they thought their souls were equal.  They believed that all people could and should receive sacraments, marriage, host, and blessings and also allowed African traditions to continue.  Religion was a vital factor in slave life.  In the Old South, religion was at first discouraged among the slaves.  There was a reason for this, for masters knew that nowhere in Christian teachings were there provisions for enslaving Christians.  Sometimes the Negroes were allowed to worship under the same roof as their white superiors, but they usually had to steal away to some secret place for this purpose.  In Brazil, however, Christianization of the slaves was an essential.
    In master-slave relationship, intimacy, cordiality and the master’s protection of the slave were maintained as long as the slave stayed in his ‘place’.  In the absence of individual juridical status, the slaves exercised their social identity through their relationship with the master, attempting to negotiate, within the context of white power, individual or collective spaces of autonomy or social promotion, or even their freedom.  His master could liberate him during his life.  In the U.S. the ultimate controlling factor, that is, in every relationship between white men and black will be the black man’s status as property.  Hypodescent is the practice of determining what ethnicity a child of mixed race is, by assigning it the ethnicity of the minority parent.  It has always been the cornerstone of the U.S. racial classification system.  Hypodescent does several things necessary for the maintenance of strict and rigid racial division.  First, it has effectively arranged the U.S. into easily discernable racial groups – no middle ground.  Second, it eliminates African ancestry from the white population – African ancestry that in secret makes its way into the white population is unacknowledged.  Third, it discourages intermarriage.  This is not to say that interracial sex can involve use or simple pleasure – it does not necessarily mean respect or friendship.  “It is said that the Jews and the black slaves had a secret relationship in Brazil, though it has been ignored by both”(Levin).
    The women in both Brazil and the U.S. were treated differently.  In the U.S. the owners raped the women.  In Brazil, the women were raped but there was also a lot of marriages between Africans and whites.  “What he labels sexual, she labels harassment”(Baldwin).  The black slave women really couldn’t say anything the people would only believe the white man.  There was a shortage of white women so there was a lot of mixing. Besides the heavy work, the women slaves were forced to assist sexually with the master”(Florentino).  If a Negro woman had brought 10 children into the world by virtue, her tenth child would become free.  Because of their interests in the physical reproduction of human capital, slave-owners intervened in even the most intimate of slave family ties.
    America and Brazil had very different ways to become free.  It was easier to become free in Brazil, and the liberation of slaves was widely practiced. There were different rules to become a free citizen.  Among the legal restrictions placed on free blacks, there was the 1717 Connecticut Law that required aspiring black business owners to get official permission to open shop.  During the Reconstruction period, reconstituted southern state governments passed "black codes" that shortened the rights of the newly freed slaves.  259,000 free persons represented 9% of Brazil’s total free population. “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude. Slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4).
In 1696 the comprehensive code outlined severe penalties for a variety of offenses committed by blacks and excused any whites that caused the death of a slave while carrying out a punishment.  Legal standing of African Americans in North America has changed over time, varying according to history and place. As black laborers gradually replaced white indentured servants as the principle source of agricultural labor during the second half of the 17th century, laws were being introduced, reducing slavery as a race-based system to a code.  For elderly blacks, this practice benefited the company for whom older slaves were a liability rather than an asset.
    During the turn-of-the-century, the South was funding for education. Education there had been at rock bottom and whites were fiercely opposing African-American schooling.  By 1867, schools had been set up in even the most remote counties of each of the confederate states.  Most children never had the opportunity to attend school with any regularity, since they begin working in the fields around the age of ten or twelve. “A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled”(Baldwin).  Girls were more likely to get a formal education than boys were, because of the greater demand for male field labor. African-Americans have had a respect for education since the first communities of black slaves were established in this country. Slaves and their teachers assumed frightening risks when they created secret schools where a few blacks could learn to read.  By the 1830s, it was a criminal offense in most Southern states to teach a slave to read or write.  “Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black”(Baldwin).  There is an unbroken historical link between the newly freed slaves who fought for universal state-supported public schools in the South and the black mothers and fathers who from the 1950s through the 1980s sent their children in search of a better education on foot and in school buses into the teeth of hostile and sometimes violent white resistance.
    In the 20th century, most blacks in the South remained bound to whites as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Few blacks owned, or even managed to rent land, so they remained poverty-stricken and propertyless, both dependent on and subordinate to whites. Even then, complained one planter, sharecropping "is wrong policy; it makes the laborer too independent; he becomes a partner, and has a right to be consulted."  In Brazil, some of the slaves were able to own their own land.  When blacks were freed in America, they really didn’t have much to do since all they knew was to work in the fields.
    Much more research needs to be done concerning the concepts of race, laws and ethnicity in the United States and Brazil.  Research, which ignores the class-like properties of racial classification and definition, overlooks a significant part of the social landscape of Brazil and the U.S.