Slave Law and Citizenship in the Courts

The role of slaves and free persons of color in propelling the process of abolition forward, as well as shaping the meaning of their own freedom and social rights, has developed into one of the dominant themes in the literature on slavery and emancipation. Classic accounts of the demise of slavery by Eric Williams and David Brion Davis tended to stress structural shifts connecting abolition to the rise of capitalism.Footnote ⁵ Despite the importance of these narratives for understanding the end of the slave labor system, a number of scholars increasingly have pointed to the role slave resistance played in shaping the abolition process.Footnote ⁶ Working in the Brazilian context, scholars such as João José Reis and Sidney Chalhoub in particular have persuasively argued for more nuanced accounts of slave resistance, moving beyond revolt or flight to include day-to-day negotiations and legal strategies as part of the possible range of options available to slaves in challenging the conditions of their bondage.Footnote ⁷ In a similar vein, Keila Grinberg demonstrated through her study of the numerous slave freedom petitions in the Corte de Apelação in Rio de Janeiro how persons of color actively used the courts in an effort to gain social rights.Footnote ⁸ Collectively, these authors have revealed how cumulative acts of individual defiance in a number of settings played a critical role in gradually undermining the viability of the slave system. As historians such as Rebecca Scott and Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro have moved beyond questions about the causes of abolition to focus on post-emancipation societies and the shifting meanings of freedom for former masters and slaves, they have equally called for a more dynamic understanding of not only how structural constraints shaped the possibilities of individual agency, but also of how differing types of individual choices could modify those barriers over time.Footnote ⁹

Scott's analysis points to the importance of understanding the context in which choices are made and strategies adopted. This is particularly true because the Río de la Plata borderlands was not the only region in the Atlantic World where sharp debates over the geographic extent of slave laws meshed together with demands by persons of color for freedom in legal proceedings. Scott, for example, has explored how the revolutionary upheavals ending slavery in Saint-Domingue triggered legal conflicts that radiated across the Caribbean, and eventually into the Louisiana courts, as free persons of color moved through that region's aquatic borderlands. Focusing on one family's struggle to avoid re-enslavement, Scott examined the difficulties in resolving legal questions regarding whether property rights survived not only the physical presence of persons of color in emancipated territories, but also temporally through periods of legal “freeness.”Footnote ¹⁰ The United States Supreme Court faced similar questions regarding the geographic reach of slave laws and citizenship claims in the 1857 Dred Scott case. In its decision, the Court concluded that Dred Scott, along with all persons of African descent in the United States, regardless of their status, were not citizens and were therefore ineligible to bring legal actions demanding freedom on the basis of their physical presence upon Northern “free soil.”Footnote ¹¹

As judges in the United States worked to close off legal challenges by persons of color to the slave system, courts that were physically more distant from colonial slave-labor systems reached starkly different conclusions. In England, Lord Mansfield concluded in Somerset v. Stewart that in the absence of positive law governing the subject, all persons setting foot on English soil were legally free.Footnote ¹² Similarly, Sue Peabody has explored how ancien régime French courts recognized the freedom of slaves entering European French territories.Footnote ¹³ As Daniel Hulsebosch has pointed out, in many ways these decisions, occurring within imperial structures that were heavily dependent upon slave labor, aimed above all to emphasize juridical divisions between the imperial core and its colonial periphery, embodying in this sense the geographic and juridical realities of the eighteenth and nineteenth century trans-Atlantic empires.Footnote ¹⁴

This glimpse of the diverse sets of cases on both sides of the Atlantic reveals the multitude of thorny legal problems confronting judges and legal scholars as they sought to define property rights over persons in the context of mobile populations, as well as shifting sovereign and legal boundaries. These same questions equally swirled around courtrooms in the Uruguayan and Brazilian borderlands as persons of color sought to preserve their own freedom from Brazilian slavery in the Uruguayan courts by emphasizing their citizenship and with it the Estado Oriental's sovereign right to determine its contours within the limits of its presumably free territories. Viewed from this comparative perspective, therefore, a careful examination of the resistance to enslavement in judicial processes in the specific circumstances in the Brazilian and Uruguayan borderlands during the middle decades of the nineteenth century helps to clarify the relationship between structural constraints and individual actions, offering a new perspective on how the macro-level processes of state formation and abolition connected to micro-level disputes over legal and social rights. To paraphrase Ricardo Salvatore, it permits us to link the “text” of legal proceedings with context.Footnote ¹⁵

Two important contextual elements operated in disputes over the status of persons of color in the Brazilian and Uruguayan borderlands that distinguished them in part from other examples in the Atlantic World. First, the vacuum of power in Uruguay, which served initially as a resource for persons of color fleeing Brazil, equally provided a means for Brazilian masters to extend imperial laws across the border. In the process, however, contests over the social rights of Brazilian subjects were displaced into the Uruguayan courts. As a result of the cross-border nature of these legal proceedings, questions of national sovereignty, citizenship, and social status intertwined together. Second, in resolving these questions, persistent factional divisions within Uruguay created spaces for persons of color to challenge cross-border assertions of property rights. Within this framework, Uruguayan citizenship offered a powerful form of resistance, serving as a rhetorical and juridical wedge with which slaves, free persons of color, and their descendents could stimulate national and factional divisions to gain legal rights.

The strategic choices of fugitive and former slaves to turn to citizenship in contesting attempts by their putative masters to re-enslave them in turn had important and previously overlooked consequences for emerging state projects in the region by exacerbating conflicts over sovereign boundaries. In recent years, scholars have focused a great deal of attention on the role slaves and other subaltern groups in shaping processes of state formation.Footnote ¹⁶ Innovative studies by Marixa Lasso, Peter Blanchard, and Peter Guardino among others have examined the ways in which subalterns exploited elite conflicts in the decades following independence to compel their inclusion within emerging national political communities and “use state institutions for their own ends.”Footnote ¹⁷ These works have also observed the important role institutions such as the military played in providing a venue for subaltern citizenship claims. As the uncertainty in the decades following independence gave way to more established state structures and systems of elite domination, however, these groups have tended to disappear from narratives of citizenship and state formation.

The practice of persons of color like Pedro utilizing citizenship as part of legal strategies demonstrates a pressing need to include courtrooms in the list of arenas in which popular actors actively asserted their rights as citizens and influenced the broader processes of state formation from below by inserting themselves into elite conflicts. As Sarah Chambers has noted, although courts were important sites for historians of the colonial period, post-independence studies have generally neglected them as arenas in which subalterns and the state negotiated the meanings of honor, citizenship, and freedom. Chambers persuasively argued that the courts were critical arenas in the struggle to define the social rights at the heart of emerging national projects in the wake of independence.Footnote ¹⁸ Other scholars such as Lauren Benton have also returned to the courts in order to understand how states gradually clarified sovereign boundaries by addressing prickly questions of foreign status and identity within the national political community. Benton's work in particular explores how the legal demands of the large Brazilian population in the Uruguayan borderlands triggered reforms that led to the consolidation of state-centered sovereign models.Footnote ¹⁹

However, even these highly sophisticated studies have tended to view the courts in rather passive terms. That is to say, they have seen the courts as places where pre-existing notions of rights, citizenship, and state borders are articulated. What they have neglected is the active role courts played in shaping the content of social relations by framing the types of arguments advanced to secure social rights. Courts demanded that actors evoke a legal personhood in accessing its justice, but equally provided access to the vocabulary of the state. In this sense, therefore, asserting citizenship in the courts permitted former slaves and their descendents not only to claim their rights to state justice, but also to connect their personal aims to national discourses. By framing their own cases in terms of ongoing abuses of Uruguayan citizens, putative slaves not only could challenge the attempts by Brazilian masters to enslave them, but also could signal the profound limitations on the Uruguayan state's sovereign authority to determine the boundaries of its own community and the rights associated with it. By focusing on the courts as active spaces that blended collective claims to social rights with efforts to forge national boundaries and identities, we can better understand how the disparate strands of the state formation process intertwined in the lived experience of individual actors.Footnote ²⁰

Bringing the courts back into the story also reveals how constructing or contesting the citizenship claims of Uruguayans of color in the borderlands involved cross-border networks of both propertied and subaltern groups. These webs of relationships, which proved so critical in forging legal rights in proceedings such as Pedro's, equally unsettled political boundaries, as competing states throughout the Río de la Plata vied to impose their own sovereign models on the borderlands. Ultimately, conflicts over borders, as well as the political and social rights that they theoretically represented, shifted from borderlands courtrooms to the battlefield. In turn, as the massive military conflicts in the Triple Alliance War resolved disputes over national borders, they equally opened up new uncertainties regarding the boundaries between slaves and freed persons in the accelerating process of Brazilian abolition and new possibilities for resistance. This article seeks to explain how slaves, former slaves, and their descendents experienced and influenced this passage from one conjuncture in processes of abolition and state formation to another following the war.

Slave Law and Borderlands Conflicts

Throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Río de la Plata basin witnessed nearly constant political upheaval. The Uruguayan Republic won its permanent independence from Brazil in 1828. For decades, however, Uruguayan domestic affairs remained engulfed by factional conflicts in both Argentina and Brazil. In the Argentine provinces, disputes between Federalists and Unitarists over the political and economic structure of that still-forming country threatened to spill across the Uruguay River and into the Estado Oriental. To the north, Farapos rebels in Rio Grande do Sul entered into a decade-long civil war against the Brazilian Empire in 1835, destabilizing Uruguay's northern borderlands. By 1838, Fructuoso Rivera, the caudillo head of the colorado faction (a reference to the red or colorado sashes his followers wore in battle), drew upon connections with the Brazilian rebels to lead an insurrection against President Manuel Oribe's government in Montevideo. In response, Oribe and his blanco allies (referring to their corresponding white battle emblems) sought assistance from Juan Manuel de Rosas and the Federalists in Buenos Aires. After Rivera's attempt to defeat Oribe and Rosas through an invasion of Entre Ríos province failed, Oribe's blancos and their Federalist allies swept across the Uruguay River. By 1843, Oribe had lain siege to Montevideo. For the next 9 years of the “Guerra Grande,” Uruguay possessed two factional governments, with the colorados controlling Montevideo's port and walled city, and the blancos controlling the countryside.Footnote ²¹

The chronic instability engendered by these conflicts not only devastated the region's ranching economy, but also fundamentally threatened the slave labor system.Footnote ²² For decades, Brazilian slaves had used trans-border movement as a resource in the struggles against their masters. As violence engulfed the borderlands in the 1840s, slaves streamed across the border into Uruguay and the Argentine provinces to enter the military, work as contract laborers, or join with other relatives who had already crossed Brazil's porous borders.Footnote ²³ The problem of slaves crossing the border became more acute as Rivera turned to manumission to meet the demands for adequate manpower to conduct his campaign.Footnote ²⁴ As early as 1841, the colorado general engaged in the widespread recruitment of both Uruguayan and fugitive Brazilian slaves into his forces.Footnote ²⁵ By 1842, military reverses led the colorado legislature to abolish slavery in the Estado Oriental altogether.Footnote ²⁶ Rivera immediately incorporated some 1,400 newly freed slaves into his forces defending the Uruguayan capital.Footnote ²⁷ As Oribe's army swept across the Uruguayan countryside, they followed a similar path to that of their colorado enemies in incorporating slaves into their ranks to meet the ever-pressing demands for manpower. In 1846, blanco leaders joined their colorado rivals in abolishing slavery.Footnote ²⁸ With this declaration, born of military necessity, the Uruguayan border with Brazil became a juridical boundary separating ostensibly free- and slave-labor systems, and labor discipline in the borderlands became even more difficult to maintain.

As Brazilian slaves exploited Uruguay's prolonged factional conflicts to cross borders and move toward freedom, their masters faced an increasingly acute crisis. By the late 1840s, Brazilian ranchers in the southern borderlands regularly denounced the “enormous difficulties and harms” caused by slaves fleeing into neighboring countries.Footnote ²⁹ The end of the international slave trade in 1850 only heightened tensions, as the cost of slave labor began to rise precipitously. In particular, increasing internal demand for slaves in the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro region, the dynamic core of the developing Brazilian coffee plantation economy, made borderlands slaves valuable sources of labor and capital.Footnote ³⁰ These escalating pressures motivated riograndense masters not only to pursue fugitive slaves across the border, but also to work to enslave free persons of color to satisfy the seemingly insatiable demand for labor throughout the Brazilian Empire.

At the same time, relieved of the intense pressure from the British in connection with the slave trade, Brazilian officials could turn their attention to the southern borderlands. Imperial officials had looked on nervously as the Guerra Grande progressed through the Río de la Plata region in the late 1840s, particularly fearing that Rosas could strengthen Argentine control over Uruguay through his ties with Oribe's blancos. Brazilian ranchers and their colorado allies played upon these fears, actively courting imperial intervention in the borderlands to maintain their cross-border economic system and their access to the slave labor necessary to operate it. The colorados and their Brazilian allies in Uruguay also opened up negotiations with Justo José de Urquiza, the powerful military commander and governor of Entre Ríos, to break with Rosas. Urquiza himself had grown increasingly disaffected with Rosas's dominance over the Argentine Confederation and sought to check his power by placing the Republic on a new constitutional footing. Ensured of Urquiza's military support, the Brazilian army, along with Urquiza's forces from the Argentine littoral, streamed across the border, defeating Oribe and ending the Uruguayan conflict in just a few short months.Footnote ³¹

Although the colorados had triumphed, they did so by surrendering substantial elements of Uruguayan sovereignty to the advancing Brazilians. In exchange for imperial support, the colorado government acceded to a host of demands from Brazilian ranchers by ratifying five treaties in October of 1851. The treaties established a permanent alliance between the two countries, provided loans to the Uruguayan government and harsh conditions for their repayment, guaranteed free commerce and navigation across the border, fixed national boundaries between the two countries, and ensured the return of fugitive Brazilian slaves to their masters. The treaties further gave the Brazilian government the right to intervene in Uruguayan affairs in order to maintain order and ensure that factional conflicts did not undermine the legal government.Footnote ³²

The 1851 treaties represented an unequivocal triumph for the Brazilian ranchers in the borderlands, effectively ensuring Brazilian political and economic dominance over its smaller neighbor.Footnote ³³ This is to say, Brazilian ranchers redrew sovereign lines around the borderlands political community to secure their economic rights and ensure labor discipline. However, their success did not spell the end of debates over the boundaries of Brazilian slave law. Such disputes shifted from the battlefield to borderlands courtrooms over the next two decades as slaves and former slaves renewed efforts to forge their freedom in a series of legal cases in which citizenship, sovereignty, and factional conflicts tightly intertwined.

“When [we] Returned to Brazil, he Treated [me] Like a Slave”

With the end of the Guerra Grande bringing renewed assertions of imperial influence over the borderlands, fugitive and former slaves had to confront new and aggressive arguments that Brazilian slave laws followed them into Uruguay, rendering their flight to freedom and military service meaningless. At the same time, the economic devastation caused by the war and the constant threat of Brazilian intervention (and even annexation) led Uruguayan leaders to embark on a concerted effort to end factional violence and channel conflicts into legal venues. In the borderlands, these attempts to “fuse” the blanco and colorado factions together to promote a unified, national identity combined with the Brazilian guarantees of order to succeed in ending factional conflicts, ushering in a “prolonged period of peace” in the 1850s.Footnote ³⁴

Throughout borderlands courtrooms, however, tensions welled up from below over these efforts to define the boundaries around the Uruguayan political community. Returning to Pedro's claims to Uruguayan citizenship described in the Introduction, we can see the efforts of slaves and free persons of color to emphasize national divisions in the borderlands. We can equally see how the response of Pedro's erstwhile Brazilian masters, the Azambujas, promoted an erosion of Uruguayan sovereignty and lent further support to efforts to check Brazilian dominance.

In asserting Uruguayan citizenship, Pedro emphasized how important the border, despite its innate porosity, was for his legal rights. He noted that he had frequently crossed the border with his alleged master in the late 1840s and early 1850s in order to assist in removing cattle from his properties in the Estado Oriental. Each time, Geronimo's treatment of him changed as they traveled across national and juridical boundaries: “He paid [me] when we were on this side of the frontier line, during which time he treated [me] well, but afterwards when [we] returned to Brazil, he treated [me] like a slave.”Footnote ³⁵ The practice continued until blanco officials intercepted one of Geronimo's convoys and charged the Brazilian rancher with contraband. Rather than face the charges, Geronimo fled to Brazil. Pedro quickly took advantage of his situation, enlisting in Tacuarembó's police forces. After serving there for 6 months, he grew dissatisfied with his commanding officer, whom he described as an “extremely fat pardo” and left his post. He then traveled to Salto, where his brother also worked as a police officer, to attempt to find a similar position there.Footnote ³⁶

Pedro's service in the Uruguay police forces in Salto and Tacuarembó formed the first part of his strategy to establish his Uruguayan citizenship in the eyes of authorities there. Mirroring strategies of Brazilian slaves entering the armed forces, Pedro immediately embedded himself in the Estado Oriental through service to the country. Brazilian slaves in the borderlands used military service to secure their freedom by forging clientelistic alliances with local elites.Footnote ³⁷ Similarly, Pedro's police service created vertical allegiances between himself and his commanders that he could then draw upon in order to check attempts to re-enslave him. The image of Pedro actually policing the border is quite striking. Through his service, he could establish his own citizenship and the connections necessary to support it.

Pedro's family also played a key role in establishing his Uruguayan citizenship. Pedro took advantage of familial connections to gain work in the Salto police force, utilizing his brother's position to locate new potential elite allies and better economic opportunities in the process. Pedro also described in his testimony how his family had saved him when the Azambujas had forcibly abducted him from his home in the Uruguayan portion of the borderlands in order to sell him to another master in Brazil. Pedro's father had “gone to look for him,” ultimately preventing Cándido and Geronimo from selling him, but failing to obtain his return to the Estado Oriental.Footnote ³⁸ Given both Pedro's father's willingness and ability to cross the border, and the relative success of his mission, we can speculate that Pedro's father must have possessed social and familial connections on the Brazilian side of the frontier as well. These cross-border networks of solidarity played a critical role in forging some limited rights for slaves and other marginal groups as they moved throughout the borderlands space. We can see vividly how this worked at Pedro's trial when his mother and other family members in Tacuarembó offered testimony regarding Pedro's baptism in Uruguay. Pedro's mother, Catarina, had not only retained possession of Pedro's baptismal records, but was also in a position to bring this written evidence to the Salto courts.Footnote ³⁹

In this sense, the construction of Pedro's citizenship was a collective enterprise undertaken by his family.Footnote ⁴⁰ The family spent resources, both in crossing borders and producing evidence in court, to protect Pedro's status as a free Uruguayan. Pooling resources from across the borderlands to forge legal rights made sense. As persons of color living in the borderlands, the family no doubt understood the perilous proximity of the Brazilian slave system. Pedro's own testimony indicated that his former masters had attempted on several occasions to enslave other members of his family in Uruguay. Facing a collective threat to its freedom, the family had to develop a cohesive strategy to check the power of Brazilian masters to extend the slave system across the border. This strategy revolved around emphasizing their own identity as Uruguayan citizens and their right to legal protection from their own government against foreign incursions.

Pedro's case in Salto presented a critical test for the family's long-term project to solidify its claims to Uruguayan citizenship and freedom, and they appeared well prepared for juridical conflict. In the face of legal documents establishing Pedro's citizenship, testimony from family members, and records of his service in the frontier police, Cándido had to backtrack. He now conceded that Pedro had been baptized in Uruguay, but continued to claim that he had been born in Brazil and was therefore properly a slave. He then asked for a delay in the proceeding until he could produce additional evidence to establish his claim. With Cándido seemingly off balance, a judicial finding that Pedro was a free Uruguayan citizen seemed imminent.

However, as Pedro's family worked to erect boundaries around his nationality to protect him from slavery, Cándido drew upon his own social alliances and networks to stress cross-border connectivity and reciprocity in order to extend his property claims across the frontier to reach the former slave. Cándido did this by presenting a letter from João Xavier de Azambuja, indicating that he had sold Pedro to his son, Geronimo, in 1847. Azambuja admitted that the two had not registered the original sale, using only a “private document,” which “had been lost.”Footnote ⁴¹ Now that the slave had fled his son's custody, however, he offered up the letter as proof of his son's property rights over Pedro. The letter, written in full awareness of the ongoing litigation, seemed to offer fairly weak evidence of actual ownership. The fact that the Azambujas’ petition was to Diego Lamas, a prominent blanco military commander in the borderlands, also indicated that the documents would not be sufficient to support their claims. Throughout the Guerra Grande, Lamas had fought against the incursions of Brazilian ranchers into the Estado Oriental and had consistently demanded respect for Uruguayan laws from Brazilian officials.

However, if we view Cándido's actions not from the perspective of challenging the validity of Pedro's claims to Uruguayan citizenship but as an attempt to emphasize and cement cross-border connections between his family and Lamas, the documents become much more powerful. Specifically, João Xavier de Azumbuja, the letter's author, possessed long-standing social and economic connections with the Uruguayan commander. By presenting the letter to Uruguayan officials, Cándido emphasized these cross-border associations and the borderlands porosity underpinning them. Put differently, the personal connections between the two elite men trumped the sovereign divisions upon which Pedro's family depended for their freedom.

We can see how Lamas had availed himself of these connections with João Xavier in another lawsuit in Alegrete, Brazil in 1854. In that proceeding, Jeremias José Nunes, a landowner in Uruguaiana, Brazil sought the recovery of a number of cattle from the heirs of Liberato Guterres pursuant to a contract between the two men. According to Nunes’ petition, the contract stipulated that Guterres gained the rights to market all of Nunes’ cattle located across the border in the Estado Oriental. In exchange, Guterres agreed to pay Nunes some four pesos per head of cattle, less any “tax” payments he made to Diego Lamas for the right to extract the cattle from Nunes’ lands. Guterres then allegedly removed 502 head of cattle from the Estado Oriental without making payments to either Lamas or Nunes. When Guteres subsequently died, his heirs refused to honor the agreement, claiming that the cattle in question belonged to the family and were not subject to the contractually mandated payments.Footnote ⁴²

In short, for Lamas to recover his tax payments under the agreement, Nunes had to establish that the cattle Guterres extracted from the Estado Oriental were his. João Xavier de Azambuja appeared in support of Nunes’ claim, detailing the negotiations that had led up to the original agreement between Nunes, Lamas and Guterres. João Xavier testified: “[I]t was true what [Nunes] claimed . . . for the reason that the convention was negotiated in his presence, and even more so because said Colonel Diego Lamas, with whom the witness [João Xavier] had friendly relations would not consent for [Nunes] to enter into possession of his lands without payment to remove the embargo on them, paying that quantity of four contos pesos in taxes, on whose part [divida] the deceased Liberato Guterres was obligated.”Footnote ⁴³

João Xavier's testimony reveals a number of things about his connections with Lamas. Azambuja openly testified as to his friendship with the Uruguayan commander. This friendship proved instrumental in orchestrating the transaction in question. An 1850 report detailing the losses suffered by Brazilian landowners in Uruguay during the Guerra Grande makes clear that Lamas was occupying Nunes’ lands, using them to supply his troops.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the time of the report, Brazilian officials claimed that only 500 head of cattle remained out of the original 2,000 on the tract. Interestingly, the same document indicated that João Xavier remained in possession of both his lands and cattle in the Estado Oriental.Footnote ⁴⁵ This fact alone suggests that João Xavier's claims to personal friendship were not merely passing statements in his testimony, but real and capable of influencing his commercial opportunities on both sides of the border. With Lamas in complete control of Nunes’ lands, João Xavier likely used his friendship with the blanco frontier commander to arrange a mutually beneficial transaction to market a portion of Nunes’ cattle through Guterres. When Guterres’ heirs attempted to back out of the deal, João Xavier further testified in support of Nunes’, and by proxy Lamas’, claims.

Given this background, Cándido's letter invoked much more than basic documentary evidence of Pedro's ownership. Rather, the letter represented a direct response to Pedro's attempts to erect a permanent juridical division between himself and the Azambujas in Brazil, emphasizing a long-standing and continuous cross-border relationship between Lamas and João Xavier cemented by commercial dealings, reciprocity, and mutual assistance in litigation. What is striking is that the letter called upon Lamas, a committed blanco , to reject slave appeals to Uruguayan sovereignty and instead treat the borderlands as a single, integrated space. In the process, the letter implicitly asserted the limits of state-centered institutions while at the same time turning to them to ensure labor discipline.

And it worked. Lamas promptly ordered officials to conduct further investigations into Pedro's citizenship claims. Authorities questioned a number of other residents in Tacaurembó, obtaining testimony establishing that although Pedro was baptized in the Estado Oriental, he had in fact been born across the border in Brazil as the Azambujas claimed. Having successfully undermined the written evidence supporting his Uruguayan citizenship, officials turned to his familial connections. Specifically, upon questioning several witnesses, the investigators obtained evidence from members of Pedro's family that the former slave was not Catalina's son, but in fact her stepson, having been born in Brazil to another woman and then moving to the Estado Oriental with his Brazilian father.Footnote ⁴⁶ The testimony was certainly damning, particularly so given that Brazilian officials maintained the position that regardless of other evidence, the nationality of the father exclusively determined that of his children.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is less clear whether it was truthful. With authorities now questioning individual family members from an admittedly vulnerable minority, it is entirely possible that officials used threats or even violence to construct the record they wanted. Moreover, it technically should not have mattered. Because Pedro had fled Brazil prior to the 1851 invasion, he was not covered under the terms of the Extradition Treaty and, therefore, was legally free. Regardless, in the end, the renewed investigation had effectively pried Pedro from his web of familial connections, rendering him isolated and vulnerable to re-enslavement. Based on this evidence, local officials ordered Pedro returned to Cándido as a Brazilian slave.

Pedro's case reveals the complex manner in which the citizenship claims of persons of color along the border and borderlands state formation processes intertwined. Pedro and his family developed sophisticated strategies to assert their membership in the Uruguayan political community and clarify its boundaries. However, by attempting to propel the process of state formation and national identification in the borderlands forward in the service of personal freedom, they invited a response from their putative Brazilian masters that resulted in the further erosion of Uruguay sovereignty in favor of cross-border connections and the extension of Brazilian slave laws across the borderlands. In this sense, the legal strategies by both slaves and masters in Pedro's case exposed the inability of borderlands legal institutions to define and police Uruguay's sovereign boundaries, both in the sense of national borders and the legal rights they purported to delineate.

The ambiguities of citizenship were particularly problematic because they threatened internal order. Whereas Brazilian masters might emphasize cross-border connections to blunt slave efforts to claim Uruguayan citizenship, fugitive and former slaves proved equally adept at exploiting the tensions flowing from these complex webs of connections in their efforts to escape Brazilian bondage. A series of cases surrounding Fermin Ferreira offers an example of the importance of factional conflicts in creating the necessary space for persons of color to win their freedom. It also shows the potential for these strategies to engender further violence.Footnote ⁴⁸ The case began in October of 1856 when José da Asumpção Ferreira, a Brazilian subject, appeared before local officials in Salto, Uruguay, seeking Fermin's return as a fugitive slave. The police in Salto acted quickly, arresting Fermin that same day. Under questioning, Fermin readily admitted that he had been a slave in Brazil. He testified that Emilio Manuel Moreira, a resident in the city of Rio Pardo in central portion of Rio Grande do Sul, originally owned him. In either 1836 or 1837, he traveled with his master from Brazil to the Estado Oriental, where he served as Moreira's ranch foreman (capataz).Footnote ⁴⁹

Factional violence quickly transformed Fermin's and his master's relationship. In 1837, forces loyal to Rivera sacked Moreira's property and forced Fermin into military service. Fermin served in the colorado army for approximately a year. He then deserted, seeking refuge with his former master. By this point, Moreira had himself sought the protection of Manuel Ferreira, taking up residence on the latter's ranch near Mataojos in the vast open countryside between Salto and the Brazilian border.Footnote ⁵⁰ As the conflict along the Uruguayan frontier intensified in the late 1830s, Fermin took full advantage of his master's weakness in advancing his own status. Facing declining economic prospects and likely fearing for his safety, Moreira fled the Estado Oriental sometime in the late 1830s. According to Fermin's testimony, although Moreira “wanted to bring him to Brazil,” he refused, preferring to remain in Manuel Ferreira's service in the Estado Oriental.Footnote ⁵¹ Facing little choice in the matter, Moreira crossed the border without his slave, subsequently selling Fermin to Manuel Ferreira in an attempt to recoup some of his losses. In effectively forcing his sale, Fermin proved adept at locating and then exploiting the divisions between two Brazilian slave owners in order to remain in Uruguay as a “free” laborer.Footnote ⁵² Fermin had also effectively gained access to his new patron's connections to the colorado faction. These factional ties served as a platform from which Fermin could pursue further rights, and would prove critical as he mobilized social resources to protect his claim to free status under Uruguayan law.

Much as Pedro had worked to construct networks of solidarity throughout the borderlands, Fermin also actively worked to enhance his social alliances in Salto by assisting other persons of color fleeing from bondage. For example, Silmei Petiz describes an incident in which another Brazilian slave, Maria, fled from Bernadina Maria Ferreira, Manuel Ferreira's wife, to Salto in the early 1850s.Footnote ⁵³ BernadinaFootnote ⁵⁴ complained bitterly to Brazilian officials that Uruguayan police had delayed arresting the slave, demanding additional documentation in order to establish ownership. By the time Bernadina could provide sufficient proof of her rights to Maria, she had disappeared. Bernadina alleged that Maria remained “hidden somewhere in village of Salto.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Although the letter made no reference to Fermin, we can speculate that his presence in Salto provided a reason for Maria to flee across the border to that city, as well as protection from her Brazilian masters after she arrived there. By again adeptly exploiting borderlands instability, Fermin appeared to have created the necessary space for other slaves to move toward freedom. In the process, he tightened webs of connections that he could employ in any potential conflicts over his free status. As with Pedro, Fermin's membership in the Uruguayan political community was becoming a collective project.

Fermin also undoubtedly ratcheted up the pressure on his erstwhile Brazilian masters as their valuable economic assets disappeared across the border to join him. Renewed conflict over Fermin's continued presence in Uruguay loomed. The 1851 Brazilian invasion provided Fermin's alleged masters with an opportunity to test his carefully constructed relationships. Manuel's death immediately prior to the Brazilian campaign further ensured that Fermin would once again be swept up in these factional and international conflicts. A dispute quickly erupted between two of Manuel's sons, Joaquim and José, over Fermin. José aligned himself with his brother Lucio and his mother, Bernadina, in claiming that Fermin properly belonged to her as a slave and should be returned to Rio Pardo in Brazil. José probably had good reason to do this: he owed Joaquim and other creditors money.Footnote ⁵⁶ José further faced accusations in the Brazilian courts that he had defrauded several prominent officials in city of Alegrete just across the border, ultimately resulting in his arrest in 1852.Footnote ⁵⁷ By retaining Fermin for his mother, José likely could obtain access to a valuable asset, bettering his economic prospects and his ability to pay his debts.

José acted quickly to secure his alleged property, entering into a contract with David Canabarro, the Brazilian general leading the imperial forces occupying the northern portions of the Estado Oriental. The contract purported to rent Fermin to the Brazilian general in order to serve his forces in the 1851 campaign.Footnote ⁵⁸ José's contract with Canabarro for Fermin's services needs to be understood in the context of the factional conflict between Canabarro and his factional rivals, Bento Manuel Ribeiro and his son Severino. The Ribeiro faction controlled Alegrete's courts where José faced criminal charges. Moreover, José's brother, Joaquim, possessed growing commercial connections to the Ribeiros and their allies in the Estado Oriental. At the heart of these ties was his commercial partnership with Agustin Sañudo, a colorado attorney in Salto. There, Sañudo was close to a number colorados in the local government who could assist him in his efforts to enforce the partnership's commercial contracts, collect debts, and protect its dealings. Through these ties, Sañudo and Joaquim developed a cross-border business supplying commercial wares to their ranching allies.Footnote ⁵⁹ With Joaquim drawing closer to the Ribeiro faction, José likely turned to Canabarro in order to secure a powerful ally in his criminal trial in Alegrete, as well as advance his own claim to Fermin, and with it his ability to repay his brother.

Facing little choice, Fermin once again found himself in the army. The following year, José then granted a power of attorney to Lucio, authorizing him to submit a formal request to Canabarro for the return of Fermin. Canabarro agreed to José's request. Lucio then seized Fermin and prepared to bring him back to Brazil.Footnote ⁶⁰ In response, Fermin quickly moved to counter José's efforts by seeking out his factional and familial rivals. While traveling with Lucio to Brazil, Fermin fled and took refuge with Joaquim at his estancia along the Brazilian border in Santana do Livramento. Within weeks, he was back in the Estado Oriental under Joaquim's protection and out of José's reach. He remained so until his arrest in Salto in 1856. Once again, however, Fermin drew upon his network of factional connections to blunt José's efforts to return him to Brazil. Not only did Joaquim appear on his behalf in the proceeding to testify as to his free status, but Agustin Sañudo represented him in the matter. Facing conflicting evidence from two Brazilians and a former slave with legal representation, local officials likely opted for the status quo ante and released Fermin. His free status in Uruguay was again secure.

Digging deeper, however, we can see how Fermin's success in reaffirming the national legal divisions separating him from his former masters in Brazil opened up deeper divisions between rival factions that ultimately exploded into violence. The case also demonstrates, yet again, how in this renewed conflict, citizenship quickly re-emerged as a central element in disputes over property rights. At the time of his arrest in 1856, Fermin was carrying papers concerning a pending commercial litigation between Agustin Sañudo and José over the latter's debts to Sañudo's partner, Joaquim.Footnote ⁶¹ Sañudo sought to garnish José's assets located in Salto, Uruguay to compel payment on substantial debt to the partnership. In response, José appears to have first wanted to seize Fermin, perhaps hoping to “sell” him back to Joaquim to satisfy the debt. When this failed and the court declared Fermin to be free, José then offered to make payment by assigning Sañudo a negotiable instrument from David Canabarro for a roughly equivalent amount owed him. Sañudo flatly refused to accept the note, arguing that “the documents [José] Ferreira has presented do not have any value in the present matter, nor do I have anything to do with them.”Footnote ⁶²

The reasons for Sañudo's concern flowed directly from the nature of his own alliances across the border in Brazil. Like his related commercial enterprise, Sañudo's legal practice in Salto relied heavily on ties to the Ribeiros and their allies on both sides of the border. By the 1850s, the colorado attorney had developed a burgeoning practice protecting the Ribeiro faction's legal rights and commercial assets. By way of example, Sañudo served as Manuel Ferreira Bica's lawyer in numerous legal proceedings in Salto, ultimately acting as the executor of Bica's will and trustee of his estate upon his death in 1876.Footnote ⁶³ Bica was the brother-in-law of one of Bento Manuel Ribeiro's sons and a close ally of the faction across the border. He was also a personal enemy of Canabarro, with the two men harboring deep personal animosities against one another dating back to the Farrapos War. Given Sañudo's association with the Ribeiros, obtaining payment from their political enemy (not to mention one who was a powerful Brazilian general) or his allies appeared next to impossible.

Sañudo therefore challenged the payment in court, arguing that there was no way to ensure that the documents in question “were real,” or “whether the signature appearing on them actually was that of a Notary Public.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The Salto court agreed, finding José's proposed method of payment unacceptable and ordering his embargoed goods to be auctioned off to satisfy his debts to Sañudo. José appealed, but the courts in Montevideo upheld the judgment. Sañudo appeared to have won. Rather than settle matters, however, the judgment instead produced a new round of factional violence as José sought to escape the verdict and his creditors by tapping into his own network of political allies. On May 15, 1858, police sergeant Francisco Peralta entered José Abadie's pulpería outside of Salto, where Joaquim and several other men had gathered.Footnote ⁶⁵ There is only vague testimony as to what specifically transpired in Abadie's business, but at some point Peralta shot and killed Joaquim. What is clear, however, is that immediately following the killing, José, along with the police commissioner Leon Piris and several other men with close political ties to the acting head of the department, Lucas Piris, seized Joaquim's assets and records. Paulino Aguirre, a justice of the peace along the frontier, then upheld the men's actions as a valid embargo of estate property. José had violently regained control of the assets he had lost in his litigation with Sañudo.Footnote ⁶⁶

In response, Sañudo returned to the courts, appearing before Judge José Chirif on behalf of Joaquim's widow, Felizberta da Mota, in order to challenge the seizure.Footnote ⁶⁷ Chirif was Sañudo's political ally, supporting the colorados locally in Salto.Footnote ⁶⁸ To that end, Chirif had resigned his position on Salto's Economic and Aministrative Counsel in 1856 in protest over political disputes between the two factions in connection with that year's national elections.Footnote ⁶⁹ By 1858, however, he was back in a judicial post and ready to help Sañudo defend his partnership's assets from José.

In connection with the new litigation, Sañudo returned to the language of citizenship to defend his property rights against violent, factional incursions. Da Mota, probably speaking through Sañudo, wrote a letter detailing the events following her husband's death. In it, she emphasized her status as both a woman and a foreigner in warranting protection from the court: “Weak and defenseless by the nature of my sex, I seek [busco] the protection of the laws of this country under which I am living as a foreigner, along with the security that the Constitution accords my person and my interests.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Not surprisingly, the national divisions she invoked were much hazier than her letter implied. Da Mota (and Sañudo) drew upon her foreign status to protect her estate from the violent conduct of her Brazilian brother-in-law and his local allies. She further did so in order to protect the commercial assets of Sañudo, a Uruguayan citizen. Everyone involved in the litigation understood these ambiguities. However, by framing her position in terms of citizenship, da Mota effectively nationalized her family's cross-border dispute. In making this move, da Mota and Sañudo once again situated their own conflict as part of a broader narrative of confiscation of Brazilian property by Uruguayan officials. This was a typical colorado refrain, echoing their support for appeals, nearly a decade earlier, by Brazilian ranchers to imperial officials to protect their property across the border and in the process intervene to weaken the blancos then controlling the countryside.

This new proceeding presented another opportunity for Sañudo and his factional allies to not only protect their commercial interests, but also to attack their blanco rivals by again linking them to violations of the rights of Brazilian residents. Not surprisingly, Judge Chirif seized the chance Sañudo presented him. He ordered the estate assets returned to Sañudo as da Mota's trustee. The new order, however, still did not resolve matters. The justice of peace along the frontier, Paulino Aguirre, responded that he could not execute the request. Enraged, Sañudo complained that the court should not tolerate a response from Aguirre “as brutal as it is stupid.”Footnote ⁷¹ Chirif then issued a second order demanding that the justice of the peace comply with the decision and eject the trespassers. Aguirre continued to drag his feet, and it appeared that the two Uruguayan judicial officials might come to blows over the property dispute. The file then suddenly ends, perhaps indicating that Sañudo and Chirif finally succeeded in enforcing their rights, or, more likely, grew tired of litigating them.Footnote ⁷²

Sañudo's and Fermin's respective uses of citizenship to support their positions revealed how much of a threat debates over the boundaries of citizenship could be for internal order. As Fermin attempted to protect himself and other Brazilian slaves from the slave system across the border, he disturbed cross-border economic connections and produced new rounds of factional violence. Faced with a violent appropriation of his property, Sañudo equally turned distinctions between citizen and foreigner to articulate a basis for legal protection. In doing so, however, he opened up the possibility that local factional conflicts could spill across borders as Brazilians called upon their government to protect their property rights. The ambiguities about national categories and sovereign boundaries flowing from citizenship cases and their fallout remained at the center of borderlands storms.

As persons of color like Fermin and Pedro sought to secure their freedom by appealing to national and factional divisions in the borderlands, their masters deployed their own cross-border connections to blunt those arguments. In the process, masters and slaves reopened both the factional wounds and sovereign debates that plagued the borderlands. Specifically, by provoking conflicts over the boundaries of citizenship and legal rights, slaves, freedmen, and their descendents successfully placed the Brazilian labor discipline practices developed in the wake of the Guerra Grande directly at odds with Uruguayan sovereignty. Buffeted by threats to national sovereignty on the one hand and factional violence on the other, Uruguayan legal reformers increasingly found it necessary to harden boundaries around citizenship and convert borderlands slaves into members of the political community as a basic condition of national independence.

Slaves, Sovereignty, and Order

In a fiery 1857 article in the Montevideo newspaper “El Nacional,” Juan Carlos Gomez, one of the most ardent opponents of the Brazilian influence in the northern borderlands asked following the 1851 treaties, “what remained of Uruguayan sovereignty?” The author's answer was “tutelage” to Brazilian masters.Footnote ⁷³ In another article, he called upon Uruguayans to remember the blood spilled in resisting Brazilian imperialism, declaring that “we are more than anything Orientales .”Footnote ⁷⁴ Gomez's invocation of Uruguayan identity in response to foreign oppression reflected a growing body of reformist literature focused on the pressing problem defining citizenship posed for Uruguayan sovereignty, particularly given the large population of Brazilian ranchers who owned nearly one-third of Uruguay's territory by 1860.Footnote ⁷⁵ As persons of color invoked Uruguayan citizenship to secure their own rights in borderlands courtrooms, they tapped into these growing concerns over Uruguayan sovereignty, linking their personal fates to that of the national political community. As the examples of Pedro's and Fermin's cases revealed, the erosion of Uruguayan sovereignty threatened not only the rights of her citizens in the borderlands, but internal order. Conflicts over the citizenship claims of persons of color in particular could destabilize cross-border economic relations, touching off new rounds of factional conflict. To solve the dual problems of sovereignty and order, Uruguayan reformers had to resolve the problem of citizenship.

Even before the end of the Guerra Grande, Uruguayan diplomats had expressed concerns that the routine practice of Brazilians enslaving Uruguayans of color threatened the country's sovereignty. For example, Juan José Poyo, the Uruguayan counsel for the coastal city of Rio Grande in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, drafted a sharp letter to the colorado government complaining of the continual enslavement of black Uruguayan soldiers by Brazilians in the borderlands. Poyo wrote: “we have seen disgraced blacks covered with the wounds of [the battles of] Arroyo Grande, the Yí, and India Muerta, infamously sold by their supposed masters to other masters still yet more cruel and greedy.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Poyo argued that the Uruguayan government had to act to curb these abuses, lest it surrender its own rights as a sovereign nation to protect its citizens. He wrote: “If the government believes that all these cases are trifles that do not merit its attention, and that do not offend the dignity of the laws of the Republic, the best thing it can do is dismiss all of her diplomatic agents and counsels in the Empire as superfluous.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Poyo drafted the letter in the connection with an ongoing dispute over his own credentials, likely influencing his thinking on the role of diplomatic officials. Nevertheless, his comments reflected a growing connection between the protection of black citizens, particularly those who had served the country in battle, and the broader fate of Uruguay. Simply put, the country had to retain the power to define and police the boundaries of its own political community, or it forfeited its basic rights as a sovereign nation.

Throughout the 1850s, demands by persons of color that their Uruguayan citizenship be respected continued to vex diplomatic officials concerned with Uruguayan sovereignty. An excellent example of this is Andrés Lamas's complaints that Brazilian officials in the borderlands routinely disregarded citizenship certificates issued to Uruguayans. Lamas himself had ample experience in dealing with questions of citizenship. He served as the plenipotentiary envoy to the Brazilian government from 1840 until 1876, negotiating, among other things, the 1851 Treaties that figured so prominently in frontier and national politics during the 1850s and 1860s.Footnote ⁷⁸ In this diplomatic capacity, Lamas had maintained correspondence with Poyo, requesting detailed information on several incidents involving the enslavement of Uruguayan persons of color, carrying those protests directly to the imperial court.Footnote ⁷⁹

Lamas used his diplomatic capacity to draft a series of letters to imperial statesmen in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1850s, upbraiding authorities, primarily in Rio Grande do Sul, for impressing Uruguayan citizens, in large measure persons of color residing in the borderlands, into the Brazilian military.Footnote ⁸⁰ Echoing the arguments previously mentioned in Pedro's case regarding his own citizenship claims, Brazilian authorities justified the practice by claiming that under Brazilian law the father's citizenship determined the citizenship of his children, regardless of the place of birth or their subsequent conduct. In advancing this argument, riograndense leaders,in essence, conceptualized citizenship as permanently adhering to Brazilian subjects regardless of their conduct as they crossed national frontiers. This had the obvious advantage of foreclosing the types of strategies employed by fugitive and former slaves, such as Pedro and Fermin, to construct juridical barriers between themselves and the Brazilian slave system across the border.

For Brazilian leaders, the ability of “fugitive slaves” to assert Uruguayan citizenship had to be limited to maintain social order. By way of example, Roger Kittleson describes how angry legislators in Rio Grande do Sul responded to one slave's assertion that her Uruguayan citizenship exempted her from re-enslavement in Brazil by arguing that linking freedom and place of birth together constituted an “anarchic doctrine” that had to be rejected.Footnote ⁸¹ Although the specific case cited by Kittleson occurred after the outbreak of the Triple Alliance War, it accurately reflected the prewar position of Brazilian elites in the borderlands on the question of citizenship, as well. Once born into the slave system, they remained subject to its jurisdiction. Blood trumped borders.Footnote ⁸²

It also offered a geographic conception of Brazilian sovereignty that Lamas found completely unacceptable. In his letters, Lamas argued that riograndense authorities sought to “denationalize Oriental citizens against their will, violently.”Footnote ⁸³ He argued that pursuant to the 1830 Uruguayan Constitution and the country's national laws, citizenship hinged on birthplace, not lineage, and the individual's desire to become or remain a member of the Uruguayan polity.Footnote ⁸⁴ He pointed out that Brazilian law did not recognize the right of any foreign nation to determine the scope of Brazilian citizenship. He noted that Uruguay had always respected Brazilian sovereignty toward its subjects in this regard, even when it was against her own interests to do so. This flowed from a basic principle of sovereign government: each nation possessed absolute authority to determine the processes by which foreigners could become citizens. As a sovereign nation of equal rank, Uruguay was entitled to respect for its particular path to citizenship, whether it suited the political and economic interests of Brazilian masters or not.Footnote ⁸⁵ For Lamas, the touchstone of this reciprocal respect between nations was the recognition of certificates of citizenship issued by Uruguayan officials. Lamas argued that it was a basic element of national sovereignty for counselor officials to “recognize, declare, document, and sustain” legitimate claims to Uruguayan citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁶ In exercising this function, the certificate of citizenship issued by duly constituted officials served as “complete proof of oriental nationality.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Failing to respect these legal declarations constituted a fundamental assault on Uruguayan sovereignty and the principle of the rule of law along the frontier. Lamas continued: “The man that presents [a certificate of citizenship] has become oriental; and as Brazilians have the liberty to naturalize themselves as orientales, one cannot fail to recognize, contradict, or nullify that act without attacking the constitutional liberty of such men [and] without attacking the law [derecho] of the nation that recognizes it and admits him as its son.Footnote ⁸⁸

Brazilian complaints that such certificates were issued without the requisite legal proof were of no import. Rather, Lamas argued respect for national sovereignty demanded absolute adherence to the consular infrastructure each nation had mutually established in the borderlands.

Such respect was also fundamental to ensuring order throughout the borderlands. Lamas argued that it was in the mutual interest of both the Brazilian Empire and the Uruguayan Republic to delineate juridical boundaries and sovereign divisions clearly in order to avoid continual conflicts that produced the borderlands caudillos that plagued both countries. He wrote: “What the Republic does not want, what the Imperial government does not want, is confusion, contradiction, abuses and violence . . .”Footnote ⁸⁹ By recognizing the sovereign acts of counselor officials issuing certificates of citizenship, authorities in the borderlands could reduce the confusion around citizenship claims and correspondingly diminish the opportunities for conflict over its content.

By the early 1860s, renewed warfare across the border in Argentina made these efforts to clarify sovereign boundaries even more pressing. The new blanco government under Bernardo P. Berro warily looked on as the protracted war between the Bartolome Mitre's Unitarist forces in Buenos Aires and Urquiza's Federalist confederation in the interior threatened to spill across Uruguay's borders. Building upon the reformist concerns over its own sovereignty, Berro embarked on a concerted campaign to “nationalize” the northern borderlands in order to ensure order and preclude sovereign conflicts behind its borders from touching off a new round of international warfare.Footnote ⁹⁰

Reflecting the government's concerns over its sovereign authority over its own territory flowing from the slave cases, a central portion of the Berro government's strategy focused on reigning in Brazilian labor practices flaunting Uruguayan manumission laws. One area of particular concern was the Brazilian usage of peonage contracts to ensure that persons of color still under their control in the Uruguay remained effectively in bondage. The contracts required “emancipated” Brazilian slaves essentially to work for a number of years, typically 25, in order to indemnify their masters for their manumission. For Brazilian landowners confronting abolition, therefore, such contracts effectively served as a proxy for continued slavery by ensuring the fixed labor supply they needed.Footnote ⁹¹ They further represented a mechanism by which Brazilian masters could extend elements of imperial sovereignty across the borderlands using mechanisms of private law. Masters typically drafted the documents across the border in Brazil in highly coercive and informal proceedings. They then had the documents notarized in the presence of Uruguayan officials, effectively obtaining judicial approval for the continued use of the labor from their now “former” slaves.

Arguing that these peonage contracts were an affront to Uruguayan sovereignty, the Berro government worked to restrict their practice. The government limited the length of the contracts to 7 years and imposed a number of restrictions on their registration with Uruguayan notaries, including guarantees that former slaves’ declarations had to be taken independently of their masters to guard against undue coercion.Footnote ⁹² The efforts to reform peonage contracts aimed directly at consolidating Uruguayan control over the borderlands by demanding that Brazilian ranchers fully respect national laws. In this sense, they again revealed how conflicts over citizenship claims combined with broader concerns over sovereignty and order to promote a campaign to harden national law boundaries in the borderlands. If Uruguayan authorities permitted the elements of imperial private law to nullify internal definitions of legal rights and citizenship, national sovereignty would be little more than a chimera.

Conclusion: Toward New Conjunctures of Sovereignty and Citizenship

Reformers such as Poyo, Lamas, and Berro recognized that the combination of weak legal institutions and factional conflicts threatened national sovereignty. They struggled for the authority to determine and police the boundaries of the political community itself, as well as the rights and obligations governing it. Working through state institutions such as the courts, persons of color connected their own freedom to these broader concerns over sovereignty and order. They developed collective legal strategies to blunt attempts by their purported Brazilian masters to extend slave laws across the borderlands by emphasizing their Uruguayan citizenship and calling upon the state to protect the legal and social rights associated with Uruguayan national identity. In doing so, they demanded more crystalline sovereign boundaries, calling for political and juridical borders to separate them from the slave system in Brazil. In this manner, definitions of citizenship and social rights blended with efforts to clarify national boundaries and impose order within their geographic extent.

Through their micro-level actions, persons of color, such as Pedro and Fermin, worked to propel these disparate aspects of Uruguayan state formation forward in the borderlands in a concerted effort to improve their own social standing. As they deftly exploited national and factional tensions troubling elites throughout the borderlands, they brought debates over the geographic extent of Brazilian slave laws to the fore of political discourse. To do so, they drew upon webs of relationships cemented by family ties, military service, and reciprocity, turning borderlands courts into collective arenas of struggle over fundamental issues of Uruguayan and Brazilian sovereignty. In this sense, their cases permit debates over national boundaries and the boundaries of citizenship to be rescaled and understood through the neglected lens of persons of color, revealing their influence on the often-tortured conflicts over these dual aspects of sovereignty away from the borderlands.

However, the very interconnected nature of national boundaries and social rights that were so central to Pedro's and Fermin's strategies to secure their freedom rendered attempts to define each inherently unstable. As elites, slaves, and former slaves turned to cross-border networks to assert their rights in borderlands courts, their conflicts over categories such as citizenship and property increasingly implicated persistent disputes over nebulous national divisions. By the early 1860s, rival state formation projects in Argentina and Brazil, and the tensions over national boundaries they engendered, provided factional enemies in the borderlands with the opportunity to articulate starkly different conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship through their webs of borderlands connections.

In Argentina, following their military triumph over the Federalists, Mitre and the Unitarists in Buenos Aires had established a new Argentine republic in 1862. Almost immediately, Mitre began a prolonged process of consolidating the authority of the national government over the rebellious provinces in the interior. As he embarked on an aggressive campaign against his internal enemies, his close association with Venancio Flores, the colorado general and ally of the Brazilian ranchers in the borderlands, provided him with a ready-made opportunity to eliminate a potential base of operations for his Federalist rivals by intervening in local conflicts in the Estado Oriental. In 1863, Flores crossed the Uruguay River, occupying Uruguay's northern borderlands.Footnote ⁹³

As Uruguay's colorado faction increasingly linked its own power to that of the emerging centralized Argentine state under Mitre, their Brazilian allies worked to connect their legal rights in the borderlands to the imperial efforts to solidify its own power along its southern and western peripheries. Brazilian ranchers demanded imperial action against the Uruguayan government to protect their property from unlawful confiscations by the blanco government. By 1864, the imperial government already was planning its campaign against Paraguay in order to ensure rivertine access to the empire's vast interior. Appeals from ranchers such as Antonio de Souza Neto connected with this growing nationalist sentiment that Brazil should aggressively extend its frontiers into the Río de la Plata, linking borderlands property rights of Brazilians to dreams of imperialist expansion.Footnote ⁹⁴

These tactics of simultaneously creating domestic instability within Uruguay, while linking both Argentine and Brazilian interests with those of the borderland ranching community and the colorado faction, succeeded in paving the way for another imperial invasion of the Estado Oriental. Brazilian forces quickly overwhelmed the blanco government. Correctly sensing that the Uruguayan campaign was merely the first phase in the Brazilian effort against it, the Paraguayan government under Francisco Solano López responded by invading Brazil and the Argentine Littoral in the hopes of gaining support from the blancos and their federalist allies.Footnote ⁹⁵ Although initially anticipating a rapid victory, the war quickly devolved into a brutal siege. In Argentina, the conflict largely turned inwards, as Mitre fought a civil war with his regional rivals.Footnote ⁹⁶ With Brazilian forces bearing the brunt of the fighting, forging an imperial army became a truly national project for the first time in the Empire's history. Imperial elites blended forced recruitment of freed persons of color and slaves with patriotic appeals to national service, explicitly linking participation in the Paraguayan enterprise with the growing recognition of social rights and freedom. The imperial government made these policies explicit in 1866 by granting freedom to any slaves serving in the army.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although only a relatively small number of slaves ultimately received their freedom under the law, the growing use of the rhetoric of national citizenship, particularly in connection with black military recruitment, produced a new consciousness of social rights and status as persons of color could now point to their service to the state during the war in levying increasing demands, bringing debates over legal rights and national citizenship to the forefront of Brazilian politics. Among other things, this process directly resulted in the rise of an abolition movement among freedmen throughout the Brazilian Empire for the first time.Footnote ⁹⁸

The conclusion of the war ushered in a new conjuncture in both the processes of state formation in the borderlands and abolition in Brazil. On the one hand, the war accelerated the consolidation of national boundaries. At the same time, as borders started to settle in the 1870s, the social tensions provoked by the war meant that the lines demarcating slave from freed peoples became even more blurred. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, the Brazilian abolition movement gathered momentum, ratcheting up the pressure on elites to reform the now antiquated labor system and modernize the nation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Brazilian slaves began to link their own freedom to these efforts to create a “modern” Brazil, demanding citizenship in the new empire in lieu of attempting to escape it.

Through their collective legal strategies in the borderland courts during the decades between the Guerra Grande and the Triple Alliance War, fugitive and former slaves played an active role in the passage from one era of state formation to the next. The strategic choices of persons of color to turn to Uruguayan citizenship propelled efforts to clarify national boundaries and identities forward. At the same time, as rival state formation projects in Argentina and Brazil developed in the 1850s and 1860s, factional conflicts, in part over the citizenship claims of persons of color in the borderlands, provoked renewed conflicts over Uruguay's sovereign borders. In this way, they presaged the imperial government's own use of citizenship and nationalist rhetoric to win popular support for its growing military campaign against Paraguay. What remained constant, both before and after the war, was that slaves, former slaves, and their descendants could make creative use of citizenship, nationalist appeals, and elite conflicts over their meaning to improve their social standing, finding new avenues in each sovereign conjuncture to make demands on states to recognize their freedom.