Africanos e crioulos no banco dos réus: justiça, sociedade e escravidão em Oliveira, MG 1840-1888

Abstract

Histories of some slaves lives and crimes from Oliveira city, interior of southwest of Minas Gerais, in the XIX century, were reconstructed and analyzed. Information from inventories, crime process with guilty slaves against lords, administrators, and respective familiars, and other complementary documents were crossed. It was traced the social profiles of these slave guilties, Africans and natives through the use of a kind of micro-history methodology in which their relationships were analyzed, as like inside the family place with their families and with their lords, administrators, aggregates, other slaves and their familiars; as outside of the production unit, where they relate themselves with not-blood relatives like godfathers, other free men and their slaves. Analyzing the varied narratives of the guiltys crimes, they were being studied like the justice re-constructed and judged these profiles, sometimes respecting the law, sometimes attending to moral values of the effective social culture and to common interests from social groups. This way, slave profiles that lived very closed to freedom were founded in the same time that some aspects of the regional paternalism (paternalismo regional) rose up how it was identified in the context of Minas Gerais social culture and how the slaves participate in its trams.