Barickman

Revisiting the Casa-grande: Plantation and Cane-Farming
Households in Early Nineteenth-Century Bahia

B. J. Barickman
Hispanic American Historical Review, 84:4, November 2004, pp. 619-659
(Article)
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I thank Elizabeth Kuznesof, Zephyr Frank, Marcus Carvalho, Dain Borges, Joo Reis, Luis
Nicolau Pars, Tercina and Jos Vergolino, Martha Few, Tracy Alexander, Donna Guy,
Suzanne Wilson, Lyman Johnson, and Miridan Britto Falci, as well as the two anonymous
HAHR readers, for their comments, suggestions, and help in locating sources. In the text
and notes, percentages, including those taken from other authors, have been rounded to
the nearest full percent. On the terms cane-farming and cane farmer, see n. 15 below. The
following abbreviations are used: APEB, Arquivo Pblico do Estado da Bahia, Salvador;
SH, Seo Histrica; SJ, Seo Judiciria; IT, Inventrios e testamentos; inv., inventory;
RET, Registros eclesisticos de terrras; reg(s)., registro(s); ARC, Arquivo Regional da
Cachoeira, Cachoeira, Bahia.
1. John Manuel Monteiro, review of Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de
Parnaba, 15801822, by Alida C. Metcalf, Hispanic American Historical Review 74, no. 1
(1994): 150; Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande & senzala: Formao da famlia brasileira sob o
regime de economia patriarcal, 43rd ed. (1933; Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2001); Freyre, Sobrados
e mucambos: Decadncia do patriarcado rural e desenvolvimento do urbano, 12th ed. (1936; Rio de
Janeiro: Record, 2000); and Freyre, Ordem e progresso, 5th ed. (1959; Rio de Janeiro:
Record, 2000). Monteiro ( p. 150) also asserts that, outside the limited circle of family
historians, Freyre currently holds little relevance for Brazilian scholars. Yet, all of Freyres
Hispanic American Historical Review 84:4
Copyright 2004 by Duke University Press
Revisiting the Casa-grande: Plantation
and Cane-Farming Households in Early
Nineteenth-Century Bahia
B. J. Barickman
A few years ago, a book reviewer described Gilberto Freyre as a favorite straw
man among scholars interested in the history of the family in colonial and
nineteenth-century Brazil. That may or may not be a true and fair statement.
But, if true, it merely indicates the lasting inuence of Freyres views and argu-
ments on the historiography. In effect, Freyres rst major work, published in
1933 with the title Casa-grande & senzala (literally, The Plantation Big House and
the Slave Quarters but translated into English as The Masters and the Slaves), and
its sequels remain basic points of reference for research not only on the family
in Brazil, but also on a whole range of other topics and issues in Brazilian
history.
1
This essay, which also takes Freyres work as a point of departure, uses rare
early nineteenth-century census materials from a major sugar parish in the
Northeastern province (now state) of Bahia to investigate the structure and
composition of households belonging to plantation owners and wealthy cane
farmers. It examines, in other words, the casa-grandeor planter household
that not only gures in the title of Freyres most inuential book but also holds
a central place in his and other interpretations of Brazils past. Indeed, for
Freyre, the family structures that would shape Brazilian society from the colo-
nial period into the nineteenth century were to be found within the casa-
grande. The social history of the Big House [casa-grande], he wrote in one of
his best-known passages, is the intimate history of practically every Brazilian,
the history of his domestic and conjugal life under a slaveholding and polyga-
mous patriarchal regime.
2
At least as they have been commonly understood in the secondary litera-
ture, Freyres arguments about the planter family and household closely matched
those put forward by Antnio Cndido in his 1951 essay on the Brazilian fam-
ily.
3
Scholars have often taken both authors jointly as the major source for
what might be called the traditional view of planter households and families
620 HAHR / November / Barickman
major works and some of his less well-known studies have been recently republished in
Brazil, where his arguments continue to receive considerable attention (and not merely
from family historians). See, e.g., Jos Geraldo Vinci de Moraes and Jos Marcio Rego,
Conversas com historiadores brasileiros (So Paulo: Ed. 34, 2002), 193, 346, 32223, 380;
Joaquim Falco and Rosa Maria Barboza de Arajo, eds., O imperador das idias: Gilberto
Freyre em questo (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks, 2002); and Manolo Florentino, O DNA
brasileiro, Jornal do Brasil, http://jbonline.terra.com.br/ (accessed 16 Feb. 2002). On
Freyre, see, e.g., Ricardo Benzaquen de Arajo, Guerra e paz: Casa-grande & senzala e a
obra de Gilberto Freyre nos anos 30 (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1994); Jeffrey D. Needell,
Identity, Race, Gender, and Modernity in the Origins of Gilberto Freyres Oeuvre,
American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (1995): 5177; and Thomas E. Skidmore, Razes de
Gilberto Freyre, Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 1 (2002): 120.
2. For direct quotations, I have relied on the English translation: Gilberto Freyre, The
Masters and the Slaves, trans. Samuel Putnam, 2nd ed. ( New York: Knopf, 1956), xliii. See
Freyre, Casa-grande, 56, for the original passage. Also note that Freyre may be responsible
for the now widespread use of casa-grande to designate the planters residence in the
historiography; as Sheila de Castro Faria points out, the expression does not appear in
colonial sources; Casa-grande, in Dicionrio do Brasil colonial (15001808), ed. Ronaldo
Vainfas (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2000).
3. Antnio Cndido [de Mello e Souza], The Brazilian Family, in Brazil: Portrait of
Half a Continent, ed. T. Lynn Smith and Alexander Marchant ( New York: Dryden Press,
1951), 291312.
oreven more broadlythe traditional view of the Brazilian family.
4
Ac-
cording to most scholars interpretations of that view, the plantation household
was dominated by a white male patriarch, the planter, and brought together
not only his immediate familywife and legitimate childrenbut also his
nonwhite mistress or mistresses (either free or, more often, slave women) and
their illegitimate offspring. It further included numerous extended kin, free
retainers of various sorts, and also, of course, slaves. The patriarchal casa-grande
household, in turn, supposedly had its origins in the pattern of large-scale
slave-based plantation agriculture that rst emerged in the sugar-producing
areas of colonial Northeastern Brazil and then later spread to other regions of
the country. In short, within this traditional view associated with Freyre, the
large, extended, complex, and polygamous patriarchal planter household best
typied the Brazilian family in the colonial period and during much of the
nineteenth century.
Since the late 1960s, however, the historical literature on family and
household in Brazil has undergone enormous expansion. Much of that expan-
Revisiting the Casa-grande 621
4. On both Freyre and Antnio Cndido as a common source for the traditional view,
see, e.g., Eni de Mesquita Samara, A famlia brasileira (So Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983), 1016;
Samara, As mulheres, o poder e a famlia: So Paulo, sculo XIX (So Paulo: Marco Zero, 1989),
1519; Jos Luiz de Freitas, O mito da famlia extensa: Domiclio e estrutura fundiria em
Jundia (1818), in Brasil: Histria econmica e demogrca, ed. Iraci del Nero da Costa (So
Paulo: IPE-USP, 1986), 205, 219; Ronaldo Vainfas, Trpico dos pecados: Moral, sexualidade e
Inquisio no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Campus, 1989), 10713; Mariza Corra, Repensando a
famlia patriarcal brasileira, in Colcha de retalhos: Estudos sobre a famlia no Brasil, ed.
Antonio Augusto Arantes et al., 3rd ed. (Campinas: Ed. da UNICAMP, 1994), 1719;
Sheila de Castro Faria, Histria da famlia e demograa histrica, in Domnios da histria:
Ensaios de teoria e metodologia, ed. Ciro Flamarion Cardoso and Ronaldo Vainfas (Rio de
Janeiro: Campus, 1997), 252; and Jos Flvio Motta, The Historical Demography of
Brazil at the V Centenary of Its Discovery, Cincia e Cultura 51, nos. 56 (1999): 447. Also
see Alida C. Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaba, 15801822
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1992), 1920, 215. Note that by no means do all the
authors listed here endorse the traditional interpretation.
At least for Southeastern Brazil, the works of (Francisco Jos) Oliveira Vianna are
sometimes also cited as a source of the traditional view, especially his Populaes meridionais
do Brasil . . . (1920; Braslia: Cmara dos Deputados, 1982). An emphasis on the patriarchal
character of the planter family also appears in other classics, such as Srgio Buarque de
Holanda, Razes do Brasil, 13th ed. (1936; Rio de Janeiro: Jos Olympio, 1979), 4950; and
Caio Prado Jnior, Formao do Brasil contemporneo: Colnia, 20th ed. (1942; So Paulo:
Brasiliense, 1987), 28993. But, perhaps because of their status within Brazilian academia,
the latter two authors are seldom mentioned as sources of the traditional view. For a useful
introduction to these authors (as well as Freyre), see Dain Borges, Brazilian Social
Thought in the 1930s, Luso-Brazilian Review 31, no. 2 (1994): 13750.
sion has come from research using late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century manuscript censuses, or household lists, from various districts in the
provinces of So Paulo and Minas Gerais in Southeastern Brazil. The newer
census-based research convincingly shows that complex extended households
were not the norm in that region. In most districts, on the contrary, a majority
of households were organized around a simple nuclear family unit or were
headed by a lone individual (in both cases, with or without slaves or free nonkin
dependents). It is not surprising, then, that households in those districts tended
to be small. Moreover, women (often unmarried mothers) headed a signicant
share of those households. Drawing on such ndings, scholars have challenged
the traditional plantation-centered view that the patriarchal family charac-
terized colonial and early nineteenth-century Brazil.
5
Yet, despite all its valuable contributions, the more recent revisionist liter-
ature has at least one major weakness: most of the census-based research fo-
cuses on So Paulo and Minas Gerais. Comparable studies dealing with North-
eastern Brazil are rare; as a result, little at present is known about household
structures in a vast and varied region that around 1820 sheltered nearly half of
Brazils population.
6
The lack of comparable studies on the Northeast repre-
5. On the more recent research and for references to many of the relevant works, see,
e.g., Motta, The Historical Demography, 44850, 45456; Faria, Histria, 25258;
Samara, A famlia; Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Sexuality, Gender, and the Family in
Colonial Brazil, Luso-Brazilian Review 30, no. 1 (1993): 12021; Donald Ramos, From
Minho to Minas: The Portuguese Roots of the Mineiro Family, Hispanic American
Historical Review 73, no. 4 (1993): 1, 1n1; Eni de Mesquita Samara and Dora Isabel Paiva da
Costa, Family, Patriarchalism, and Social Change in Brazil, Latin American Research
Review 32, no. 1 (1997): 21225; and the online bibliography maintained by the Ncleo de
Estudos de Histria Demogrca, http://historia_demograca.tripod.com.
6. Several recent studies have investigated issues related to family history in
Northeastern Brazil; e.g., Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian
Society: Bahia, 15501835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985), chaps. 1011 and 14;
Luiz R. B. Mott, Piau colonial: Populao, economia e sociedade (Teresina: Projeto Petrnio
Portella, 1985); Linda Lewin, Politics and Parentela in Paraba: A Case Study of Family-Based
Oligarchy in Brazil (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987); Anna Amlia Vieira
Nascimento, Dez freguesias da cidade do Salvador: Aspectos sociais e urbanos do sculo XIX
(Salvador: Fundao Cultural do Estado da Bahia, 1986); Katia de Queirs Mattoso,
Famlia e sociedade na Bahia do sculo XIX (So Paulo: Corrupio, 1988); Evaldo Cabral de
Mello, O nome e o sangue: Uma fraude genealgica no Pernambuco colonial (So Paulo: Comp.
das Letras, 1989); Mello, O m das casas-grandes, in Histria da vida privada no Brasil, ed.
Fernando A. Novais, 4 vols. (So Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 199798), 2:385 437; Dain
Borges, The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 18701945 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992); Mary
Ann Mahony, The World Cacao Made: Society, Politics, and History in Southern Bahia,
sents far more than a regional lacuna. In the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries, neither So Paulo nor Minas Gerais ranked as well-estab-
lished and major centers of plantation agriculture.
7
That most households in
So Paulo and Minas did not match the traditional model of the plantation
casa-grande reveals a great deal about regional and social diversity at the time,
but it tells us very little about household structures in Brazils main plantation
regions.
8
For that very reason, studies focusing on households in nonplantation
Brazil, 18201919 (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1996); Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva, A histria
da famlia no Brasil colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1998); James Wadsworth,
Agents of Orthodoxy: Inquisitional Power and Prestige in Colonial Pernambuco (Brazil)
(Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Arizona, 2002); Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, O feudo: A Casa da
Torre da conquista dos sertes independncia do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilizao Brasileira,
2002); and Marha S. Santos, Sertes temerosos (Menacing Backlands): Honor, Gender, and
Violence in a Changing World, Cear, Brazil, 18451889 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Arizona,
2004). Also see Sheila de Castro Faria, A Colnia em movimento: Fortuna e famlia no cotidiano
colonial (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1998), on the important sugar district of Campos
(Rio de Janeiro). Among older works, see [ Jos] Wanderley [de Arajo] Pinho, Histria de
um engenho do Recncavo . . ., 2nd ed. (1946; So Paulo: Comp. Ed. Nacional, 1982). These
studies, however, do not rely on manuscript censuses to investigate family or household.
The only exceptions are the works by Nascimento and Mattoso, both of which draw on
surviving fragments from an 1855 census to investigate urban households in Salvador, and
Motts study dealing with ranching areas in the backlands of Piau. Also see nn. 7 and 8
below.
7. A few studies have used manuscript censuses to discuss household size,
composition, etc. in the sugar-producing areas of So Paulo in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries; e.g., Maria Luiza Marclio, Crescimento demogrco e evoluo agrria
paulista, 17001836, with a preface by Stuart Schwartz (So Paulo: Hucitec / EDUSP,
2000); Peter L. Eisenberg, Os homens esquecidos: Escravos e trabalhadores livres, Brasil, sculos
XVIII e XIX (Campinas: Ed. da UNICAMP, 1989); and Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert
S. Klein, Slavery and the Economy of So Paulo, 17501850 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
2003). But So Paulo became a signicant producer of sugar only from the 1780s onward,
and Paulista plantations tended to be much smaller than those in the main Northeastern
sugar districts at the time. Moreover, Paulista plantations (unlike those in coastal Bahia and
Pernambuco) produced not only sugar, but also surpluses of foodstuffs (maize, rice, beans,
etc.); Klein and Luna, Slavery, 38 40.
8. Census-based studies of planter households are also lacking for the Paraba Valley
during the mid-nineteenth-century height of the coffee boom. But, for recent studies on
related issues (based mainly on other sources), see, e.g., Hebe Maria Mattos de Castro and
Eduardo Schnoor, eds., Resgate: Uma janela para o Oitocentos (Rio de Janeiro: Topbooks,
1995); Nancy J. Naro, A Slaves Place, a Masters World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil
(London: Continuum, 2000); and Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Caetana Says No: Womens
Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002). Also see
Jos Flvio Motta, Corpos escravos, vontades livres: Posse de escravos e famlia escrava em Bananal
areas can only indirectly challenge Freyres arguments or, more generally, the
traditional view of family and household in Brazil.
9
The lack of research on household structures in the Northeast stems, in
large part, from the extreme scarcity of manuscript censuses for the region.
Given that scarcity, the existence of an 1835 census of Santiago do Iguape, a
major sugar parish in the province of Bahia, presents a rare opportunity to
examine planter households and to revisit, so to speak, Gilberto Freyres casa-
grande. Obviously, a single census of one parish cannot sustain broad general-
izations about household structures in the main sugar-producing areas of
Northeastern Brazil during the more than three hundred years between the
start of colonial settlement and the abolition of slavery in 1888. Yet, the results
of the census of Santiago do Iguape are highly suggestive. In effect, a consider-
able degree of diversity characterized the households headed by sugar planters
and wealthy cane farmers in the parish. But, within that diversity, households
that displayed a complex structure and that included large numbers of ex-
tended kin and free retainers were the exception, not the rule. At least in this
regard, plantation and cane-farming households in Santiago do Iguape resem-
bled households in nonplantation areas of Southeastern Brazil far more than
might be expected.
10
It is, nevertheless, doubtful whether the ndings from the
(18011829) (So Paulo: Annablume, 1999); and Renato Leite Marcondes, A arte de
acumular na economia cafeeira: Vale do Paraba, sculo XIX (Lorena: Stiliano, 1998).
9. On this point, see Faria, A Colnia, 4752; and Faria, Histria, 25255. Even
Samara (A famlia, 7 40, 8284, and As mulheres, 16970) concedes that the research
showing that households in the Southeast differed signicantly from the typical model of
the extended family does not necessarily invalidate Freyres views on the patriarchal
family for the Northeastern sugar districts.
10. For source, see n. 11. Because the main unit of analysis here is the census-dened
domestic group (and for reasons that should become clear by the end of this essay), I have
generally tried to avoid using the term family, preferring instead to refer to household (or
fogo). Also note that revisionist scholars have not specied what proportion of households
would need to display an extended structure to make such households typical in a given
region and period. But implicitly they do argue that even a signicant minority would be
insufcient. E.g., Samara insists that the fact that no more than 26% of households in early
nineteenth-century So Paulo had an extended structure calls into question the
traditional view; A famlia, 17. In O mito, Freitas makes the same argument based on his
nding that only 31% of households were extended in Jundia (So Paulo) in 1818. Thus,
within the revisionist literature, empirical support for the traditional view would apparently
require showing that an extended structure characterized a clear majority, or at the very
least a near majority, of all (relevant) households. But see Iraci del Nero da Costa,
Revisitando o domiclio complexo, Estudos Econmicos 21, no. 3 (1991): 4017; and n. 53
below. Needless to say, because their arguments did not rely on quantication and for
other important reasons, neither Freyre nor Antnio Cndido took up this issue.
1835 census are truly incompatible with Freyres arguments and whether they
instead support revisionist interpretations. The doubts arise in part because
conceptual problems sometimes characterize the more recent census-based
scholarship and also in part because Freyre was vague in spelling out his views
about the composition of the casa-grande household and the patriarchal
planter family.
Santiago do Iguape: A Wealthy and Traditional
Northeastern Sugar Parish
The 1835 census of Santiago do Iguape is one of the few surviving results of a
failed attempt by the provincial government of Bahia to carry out a prov-
incewide population count. Organized by fogo (hearth, that is, household), the
census lists the parishs inhabitants, both free and slave, by name and provides
a range of information, such as birthplace, color (qualidade), age, legal status,
and so on, for each resident. The census thus makes it possible to examine both
household composition and individual household members.
11
Santiago do Iguape (or simply Iguape) represents, in many ways, an ideal
parish for testing arguments about planter households in Northeastern Brazil.
The parish was located on the western side of the Bay of All Saints, roughly 60
km from Salvador, Bahias capital, and, hence, in the region known as the
Bahian Recncavo. Like the Zona da Mata in Freyres native Pernambuco, the
Recncavo stood out, by the 1830s, as one of the oldest and best-established
centers of slave-based plantation agriculture in Brazil. Sugar production in the
Recncavo dated back to the mid-1500s and would remain a mainstay of the
regions economy for at least the next three hundred years. Indeed, the regions
engenhos (sugar plantations with mills for grinding cane) may have supplied as
11. Relao do Numero de Fogos, e moradores do Districto da Freguezia de
Sant-Iago Maior do Iguape, . . . da Villa da Cachoeira (1835), APEB, SH, 6175-1. The
other three surviving 1835 censuses are of the parishes of So Gonalo dos Campos, where
tobacco was the chief crop and where small and medium-sized farms predominated; So
Jos das Itapororocas, with a mixed tobacco/cotton/ranching economy; and So Pedro
Velho, an urban parish in Salvador. APEB, SH, 5683, 5684, and 5685. I discuss the
attempted 1835 population count in Reading the 1835 Censuses from Bahia: Citizenship,
Kinship, Household, and Slavery in Early Nineteenth-Century Brazil, The Americas 59, no.
3 (2003): 287323. Linking the census with baptismal and marriage registries would, of
course, complement the analysis presented here. But inquiries in 1992 and 1994 at the
Arquivo da Cria in Salvador revealed that Iguapes parish records had become too fragile
to be consulted. Also note that revisionist authors who work with household lists from
Southeastern Brazil do not rely on linking those lists with parish registries in developing
their arguments. On this point, see Faria, A Colnia, 40.
much as one-third of all the sugar exported from Brazil at the start of nine-
teenth century.
12
By then, Iguape (where the rst plantations were established
as early as the 1580s) had already won a reputation as one of the wealthiest and
most productive sugar parishes in the region.
13
According to the 1835 census, Iguape had 21 operating engenhos, each of
which was listed as a separate household. With an average workforce of ap-
proximately 123 slaves, those engenhos were among the largest sugar estates in
Bahia, and in Brazil as a whole.
14
Also living in the parish were more than 80
lavradores de cana (or simply lavradores)that is, sharecropping cane farmers.
15
Lavradores sometimes owned their own farms, but more often they cultivated
cane on land rented from a senhor de engenho (engenho owner; i.e., sugar
planter). In either case, they surrendered a portion of their crop (generally at
least one-half ) to a nearby senhor de engenho in exchange for having their
cane milled and manufactured into sugar. Stuart Schwartz, in writing about
early colonial Brazil, has described cane farmers as proto-planters, a group
drawn essentially from the same social origins as the plantation owners. Dur-
ing the rst centuries of settlement, as Schwartz shows, Bahias lavradores were
12. On the Recncavo and the Bahian sugar industry, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations;
and B. J. Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint: Sugar, Tobacco, Cassava, and Slavery in the
Recncavo, 17801860 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998).
13. See, e.g., Lus dos Santos Vilhena, A Bahia no sculo XVIII [c. 1799], annot. Braz
do Amaral, presentation by Edison Carneiro, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (rst published as Recopilao
de noticias soteropolitanas . . ., 1921) (Salvador: Itapu, 1969), 1:23132, 2:48384; Jos da
Silva Lisboa, Descripo da cultura da Bahia (1799), Anais da Biblioteca Nacional 36 (1914):
123; Jos Joaquim de Almeida e Arnizu, Memoria topographica, historica, commercial e
politica da Villa da Cachoeira . . . [1825], Revista do Instituto Histrico e Geogrco Brasileiro
25 (1862): 13334; Domingos Jos Antonio Rebello, Corographia . . . do Imperio do
Brasil (1829), Revista do Instituto Geogrco e Histrico da Bahia 55 (1929): 171.
14. Throughout this essay, I have taken the household as a unit of slave ownership.
Occasionally, some slaves present in a household may have legally belonged to free
household members other than the head, but the 1835 census only rarely provides
information on that matter.
15. Lavrador de cana might perhaps be translated as sharecropping planter. But, given
the diverse levels of wealth and status found among lavradores de cana by the early
nineteenth century, I have preferred to follow the precedent set by Schwartz (Sugar
Plantations, chap. 11) and translate the term as cane farmer. I also follow Schwartz (Sugar
Plantations, p. xvii and chap. 10) in using planter and plantation only to refer to senhores de
engenho and engenhos. Further note that lavrador by itself did not imply ownership of
slaves or involvement in export agriculture; in fact, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
sources sometimes use the term in describing small farmers (roceiros, etc.) who grew cassava
and other food crops.
predominantly white, often related by kinship or marriage to planters, and
generally owned slaves. But, by the early nineteenth century, cane farmers in
Bahia and elsewhere in the Northeast had become a far more socially hetero-
geneous group.
16
That was certainly true in Iguape, where, in 1835, free pretos
(blacks) and pardos (mulattoes), including ve freed slaves, headed 44 percent of
all cane-farming households. Likewise, more than one-fth (23 percent) of all
cane farmers in Iguape did not, according to the census, own a single slave. Of
those who did employ slave labor, nearly 17 percent owned fewer than ve
slaves. Nevertheless, the average holding among cane farmers who did own
slaves was slightly more than 14. That average reects the presence in the
parish of several well-to-do and even wealthy lavradores.
Iguape also displayed the highly concentrated pattern of landholding so
often associated with Northeastern sugar-producing districts. Although the
census provides almost no direct information on landholding, local records
from the 1850s indicate that a few dozen planters and wealthier cane farmers
owned nearly all rural property in the parish.
17
A high degree of land concen-
tration did not, however, preclude the presence of small farmers; on the con-
trary, in 1835, more than two hundred such farmers found room in Iguape
(generally on land owned by planters) to cultivate food crops such as cassava,
beans, and maize for home consumption and sale. A signicant number of free
artisans, shermen, and seamstresses, together with their families, also resided
in the parish.
The 1835 census records a total population of 7,410 inhabitants, more
than half of them (54 percent) African- and Brazilian-born slaves. Individuals
classied as whites accounted for no more than 8 percent of the parishs resi-
dents; the remainder consisted of freeborn and freed pretos, pardos, and cabras
(individuals of mixed preto-pardo ancestry). The census further indicates that
the parishs population was distributed among 966 inhabited fogos. The great
majority of those fogos (over 95 percent) belonged to small farmers, shermen,
seamstresses, poorer cane farmers, artisans, and the like, who more often than
not were classied as free pardos and pretos in the census. This essay sets aside
most of the parishs fogos to focus on a much smaller group of 37 households
headed by senhores de engenho and wealthier cane farmers.
16. Ibid., 295312 (303 for quotation); Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 11925,
146 47.
17. See Barickman, A Bahian Counterpoint, 11618.
Plantations and Larger Cane Farms in Iguape
The 37 households examined here include 15 of the 21 engenhos in Iguape.
When the census takers surveyed the parish, the other six lacked resident pro-
prietors. Among the six were the engenhos Vitria and Buraco, both of which
belonged to the recently deceased and never formally married Pedro Ro-
drigues Bandeira, whose estate still had not been settled. The owner of the
Engenho Acutinga lived elsewhere in the Recncavo, and the engenhos Caim-
bongo and do Desterro were rented to absentee tenants.
18
The sixth plantation
without a resident proprietor was the Engenho Santa Catarinaone of two
sugar estates owned by colonel Domingos Amrico da Silva, who lived at his
other estate, also located in Iguape. Thus, the 1835 census yields information
on the households of 15 resident sugar planters.
19
The number of slaves these planters employed on their estates varied con-
siderably, from 47 at the Engenho do Meio to 250 at the Engenho da Praia.
Nevertheless, of the 15 planters, all but 2 could count on the labor of at least 65
slaves, 5 owned 150 or more, and the average holding was just over 125. These
figures fall into perspective when compared with the results of Stuart Schwartzs
analysis of an 181617 slave registry from Santo Amaro and So Francisco do
Conde, the two most important sugar-producing townships in the Recncavo.
Schwartz shows that the average engenho in those townships employed 65.5
slaves, or roughly half the average for the 15 estates in Iguape. Likewise, while
only 15 percent of the engenhos in Santo Amaro and So Francisco do Conde
could claim more than 99 slaves, 8, or more than half, of the 15 plantations in
18. The Engenho do Desterro represents a special case and is discussed below. Also
note that the households corresponding to the engenhos owned by the recently deceased
Pedro Rodrigues Bandeira did not, according to the census, contain any free residents.
19. I have included in this group of 15 engenhos the household headed by lieutenant
colonel Manoel Ferraz da Motta, even though it is not specically identied in the census
as a plantation. The census lists Ferraz da Mottas occupation simply as proprietor; by
contrast, other planters generally have their occupation listed as proprietor of a specic
engenho. But other evidence from the census strongly suggests that Ferraz da Mottas
household was a sugar plantation. E.g., Ferraz da Motta owned 137 slaves, more than
enough to operate an engenho and far more than the number owned by even the
wealthiest cane farmers in the Recncavo. His household also included a free caixeiro (sugar
crater). Sugar craters, who supervised the weighing and packaging of nished sugar and
kept accounts of an engenhos output each harvest, represented one of the most common
categories of full-time free employees on Brazilian engenhos. On caixeiros, see Schwartz,
Sugar Plantations, 148, 318. Finally, the census reserves proprietor almost exclusively for
engenho owners. Even cane farmers who owned their own land were not classied as
proprietors.
Iguape employed 100 or more enslaved workers. We might also compare the
15 with the engenhos in Jaboato, a wealthy and well-established sugar parish
in the Zona da Mata of Pernambuco. In 1857, Jaboatos plantations averaged
only 50 resident slaves. Thus, by the standards of late colonial and early nine-
teenth-century Brazil, the 15 engenhos in Iguape ranked as large sugar plan-
tations.
20
The other 22 households selected for analysis belonged to lavradores, all
of whom could claim a resident workforce of at least 15 slaves.
21
If we measure
wealth by the number of slaves owned, then these 22 cane-farming households
ranked among the richest 5 percent of all fogos in Iguape. That the 22 house-
holds were wealthy, or at least quite prosperous, becomes even clearer if we
compare them with cane farms in Santo Amaro and So Francisco do Conde.
In 181617, only 14 percent of all slave-owning lavradores in those townships
had more than 19 slaves, fewer than 1 percent employed 40 or more, and the
average holding was 10.5. By contrast, 18 (82 percent) of the 22 cane farmers
examined here owned at least 20 slaves, 5 (23 percent) had 40 or more, and
the average stood at 28.6nearly triple the average in Santo Amaro and So
Francisco do Conde and more than enough slaves to operate a small or even
20. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 446, 450; Freguesia de Jaboato: Uma estatstica
(1857), reprinted in O Dirio de Pernambuco e a histria social do Nordeste (18401889), ed.
Jos Gonsalves de Mello, 2 vols. (Recife: [O Dirio de Pernambuco], 1975), 2:6079. Also see
the discussion of plantations in Campos (Rio de Janeiro) and Campinas (So Paulo) below.
Note that the average for the 15 estates excludes the slaves at the Engenho Santa Catarina
owned by colonel Domingos Amrico da Silva, who resided at the Engenho So
Domingos.
21. I have included in this group the household headed by Joo Felipe Rastelli, even
though the census lists his occupation as doctor in medicine. Rastellis household, located
in an area of the parish well suited for growing cane, included 23 slaves and a free feitor
(overseer), who were almost certainly not employed in his surgery. Given that the census
generally does not list multiple occupations, it would seem reasonable to assume that
Rastelli was both a doctor and a cane farmer who used his slaves in cultivating cane;
indeed, in the 1850s he registered as his property an engenho in the neighboring parish of
Saubara. APEB, SH, RET, 4809, reg. no. 5 do 2 prazo.
A holding of at least 15 slaves is, admittedly, a somewhat arbitrary minimum for
distinguishing wealthier from less wealthy cane farmers. But, in selecting 15 slaves as the
threshold, I have taken into account the mean number of slaves owned by slaveholding
cane farmers in Iguape: 14.5. Thus, all of the cane farmers considered here owned more
slaves than the average slaveholding cane farmer in the same parish. More important, as
pointed out below, they also possessed substantially more slaves than the average
slaveholding cane farmer in the two main Bahian sugar-producing townships in the early
nineteenth century.
medium-sized sugar plantation. That average, in fact, surpasses the 23 slaves
owned in 1785 by the typical senhor de engenho in the important sugar-
producing district of Campos (Rio de Janeiro).
22
Indeed, the 22 included cane
farmers with impressively large slaveholdings, such as Francisco dAmorim
Cavalcante and Manoel Estanislau de Almeida, who owned 46 and 64 slaves,
respectively. As a group, the 22 lavradores might therefore be equated with
the cane-farming proto-planters that Schwartz describes for early colonial
Bahia.
23
In brief, the 37 households examined in this essay were all headed by
wealthy, or at least quite prosperous, slave-owning agriculturalists in one of the
oldest and most important sugar-producing regions of Northeastern Brazil.
Planters and Wealthier Cane Farmers in Iguape
Perhaps the rst question of interest here is who headed those plantation and
cane-farming households. Table 1 provides basic demographic information
about the 37 household heads and shows that they often shared a number of
traits. For example, with the exception of three naturalized Portuguese immi-
grants, all were native Bahians.
24
They also tended to be middle aged (the aver-
age age of cane farmers was 45.1, while that of planters was 47.3). Thus they
22. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 446, 452; Faria, A Colnia, 248. The average for
Campos excludes the 2,434 slaves on estates owned by the Viscount of Asseca and the
Order of St. Benedict, but even when those properties are included, the mean number of
slaves owned by planters in Campos was only 35. Engenhos in Campinas (So Paulo)
averaged 22.3 slaves in 1809 and 38.8 in 1829. Eisenberg, Os homens, 362. Also see Luna
and Klein, Slavery, 36, 39, 45.
23. At least 2 of the 22 did become planters: Joo Felipe Rastelli (see n. 21 above) and
Incio Rodrigues Pereira Dultra, whose household was located near the Engenho da Cruz.
Through marriage and inheritance, Dultra had, by the late 1850s, become the owner of
that plantation and would later become the second Baron of Iguape. See APEB, SH, RET,
4712, reg. no. 10; and his inv. (1889), APEB, SJ, IT (Cachoeira).
24. Given patterns during the period, it might be expected that the three Portuguese-
born heads were former merchants. But, unfortunately, the census provides no information
about their previous activities. Moreover, one of the three was a woman and hence
presumably not a former merchant: dona Matilde Flora da Cmara Bittencourt e Chaby,
the owner of the Engenho da Ponta and the widow of Manoel Ferreira da Cmara (a native
of Minas). By contrast, one of Iguapes wealthiest Bahian-born planters, Pedro Rodrigues
Bandeira (the son of an immigrant merchant), was denitely involved in overseas trade
until his death shortly before the census was carried out. See Catherine Lugar, The
Merchant Community of Salvador, Bahia, 17801830 (Ph.D. diss., SUNYStony Brook,
1980), 23637.
tended to be old enough to have acquired wealth and to have built up their for-
tuneswhether through inheritance, their own efforts, or some combination
of the two. Likewise, more than 80 percent were either married or widowed.
By contrast, nearly half (48 percent) of all other household heads in the parish
were listed as single.
Color also distinguished the senhores de engenho and wealthier cane
farmers from the bulk of Iguapes free population. Although freeborn and freed
pretos and pardos made up the majority of all free inhabitants in the parish, all
but one of the 37 household heads were white. The sole exception was Fran-
cisco Marinho e Arago, a freeborn pardo cane farmer who owned 15 slaves.
Local inheritance records reveal that Marinho e Arago was the son of Ant-
nia Francisca Marinho and Feliciano Rodrigues Godinho. Feliciano Rodrigues
Godinho, in turn, was a freed pardo and fairly prosperous slaveholding cane
farmer. But the sources fail to reveal how Godinho had gained his freedom and
then established himself as a slave-owning cane farmer. He may have been the
Table 1. Demographic Characteristics of Heads of Plantation and Wealthy
Cane-Farming Households, Santiago do Iguape, 1835.
Plantation households Cane-farming households Total
(N=15) (N=22) (N=37)
Place of birth
Bahia 13 21 34 (91.9%)
Portugal 2 1 3 (8.1%)
Average age, in years 47.3 45.1 46.0
Marital status
Single 2 4 6
a
(16.2%)
Married 9 12 21 (56.8%)
Widowed 4 6 10
b
(27.0%)
Color (qualidade)
White 15 21 36 (97.3%)
Pardo 0 1 1 (2.7%)
Sex
Male 11 18 29 (78.4%)
Female 4 4 8 (21.6%)
Source: See n. 11 in the text.
Notes:
a
Includes one cane-farming priest (Fr. Francisco de Borja dos Santos) and one lavradora
(female cane farmer).
b
Three widowers and seven widows.
illegitimate son of a wealthy white male, perhaps a planter.
25
In any event, as
the examples of Marinho e Arago and his father demonstrate, slaveholding
was not an exclusively white privilege in the rural Recncavo of the early
nineteenth century. Free blacks and, far more frequently, free pardos in Iguape
and elsewhere in Brazil did, in some cases, own slaves. As slaveholders, they
might even achieve a measure of real prosperity.
26
Nevertheless, no free black
or pardo in the parish came remotely close to matching the wealth of the
largest planters, all of whom were listed as white. Marinho e Arago, with his
15 slaves, was in fact the wealthiest nonwhite slaveholder in Iguape. Clearly, the
uppermost ranks of local society in this sugar parish remained largely closed to
the free blacks and pardos who accounted for more than 80 percent of the free
population at the time.
Finally, table 1 also shows that men made up the majority of Iguapes
planters and wealthier cane farmers. Even so, 8, or more than one-fth, of the
37 households were headed by women. The 8 female-headed households
included some of the largest slave-owning fogos in the parish. Although, both
in the older historiography and in popular imagination, large rural slave own-
ers are almost always portrayed as male, it is not surprising that women headed
25. Inv. of Antnia Francisca Marinho (1831), ARC, IT (Iguape), which lists Godinho
as her husband and inventariante and Francisco Marinho e Arago as one of their sons and
as an heir. (I thank Luis Nicolau Pars for providing me with the list of heirs from the
document.) Although silent on Antnia Franciscas color and legal status, her postmortem
inventory indicates that the couple owned 15 slaves in 1831. But, by the time of the 1835
census, the household headed by the then 70-year-old Godinho included only 10 slaves.
The surnames here do suggest possible ties (especially on the maternal side) with local
white planter and cane-farming families. Of the 22 white cane farmers examined here, 2
had Arago as one of their surnames. Arago and Marinho were also among the surnames
borne by at least 5 planters in Iguape at the start of the nineteenth century, but only
Gonalo Marinho Falco de Arago bore both names. Matrcula dos Engenhos da
Capitania da Bahia . . . [180774], APEB, SH, 642, regs. nos. 39, 52, 280, 28283, 367.
According to their mothers inventory, one of Marinho e Aragos sisters had Falco as her
maiden surname, and one brother was surnamed Marinho Falco. Yet further information
would be needed to establish the possible links between Godinhos family and wealthy
white families in the parish. Not enough is currently known about how former slaves and
their descendants acquired surnames in Brazil, and, as should be clear from the examples
cited here, Brazilian naming practices were often inconsistent. (Marinho e Aragos other
brothers and sisters bore Rodrigues, Rodrigues Godinho, de Arago, and de Meneses as their
surnames.)
26. See, e.g., B. J. Barickman, As cores do escravismo: Escravistas pretos, pardos e
cabras no Recncavo baiano, 1835, Populao e Famlia 2 (1999): 759; and Luna and
Klein, Slavery, chap. 7.
a signicant share of Iguapes wealthy agricultural households. Recent research
has shown that, in various parts of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century Brazil, women headed anywhere between 10 and 45 percent of all
households. That research has also revealed that female-headed households
tended to be poor, which was also true in Iguape, where one-third of all house-
hold heads were women (often unmarried mothers). Roughly 80 percent of
those women were free pretas and pardas, most of whom did not possess even
a single slave.
27
Here, however, we are dealing with female headship within the
wealthiest segments of local society. The chief explanation for female-headed
plantation and cane-farming households in Iguape almost certainly lies in the
inheritance laws. In Brazil, widows generally retained one-half of the couples
joint property; the other half was divided equally among all surviving sons and
daughters. Nevertheless, widows, it would seem, were far more likely than
unmarried surviving daughters to nd themselves heading a large slave-owning
household. Of the eight women discussed here, seven were widows. Only dona
Francisca Maria Vitria das Mercs e Arago, a cane farmer in her mid-thirties,
was listed in the census as single.
28
Plantation and Wealthier Cane-Farming
Households in Iguape
The households headed by these 8 women and 29 men would, at rst view,
seem to be implausibly large: the 1835 census enumerates for them a total of
27. See, e.g., Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household Economy and Urban Development: So
Paulo, 1765 to 1836 (Boulder: Westview, 1986), 15863; Donald Ramos, Single and
Married Women in Vila Rica, Brazil, 17541838, Journal of Family History 16, no. 3 (1991):
26182; Avelino Jesus da Costa, Populao da Cidade da Baa em 1775, in Actas do V
Colquio Internacional de Estudos Luso-Brasileiros (Coimbra: [Grca de Coimbra], 1964),
246; Maria Odila Leite da Silva Dias, Quotidiano e poder em So Paulo no sculo XIX: Ana
Gertrudis de Jesus (So Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984), 10 43; Maria Luiza Marclio, Caiara:
Terra e populao: Estudo de demograa histrica e da histria social de Ubatuba (So Paulo:
Paulinas, 1986), 13233; Samara, As mulheres, 37; Metcalf, Family, 145; B. J. Barickman and
Martha Few, Ana Paulinha de Queirs, Joaquina da Costa, and Their Neighbors: Free
Women of Color as Household Heads in Rural Bahia (Brazil), 1835, in Beyond Bondage:
Free Women of Color in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine
(Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, forthcoming).
28. Dona Francisca Maria apparently never married. See her inv. (1840), APEB, SJ,
IT (Cachoeira). On inheritance laws, see Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs, 2 vols. (Stanford:
Stanford Univ. Press, 2003). On women as sugar planters and cane farmers elsewhere in
the Recncavo in the early nineteenth century, see Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 444 45.
2,701 residents. Thus, although they represented less than 4 percent of all
fogos in Iguape, they sheltered 36 percent of the parishs population. More
than two-fths (46 percent) of the 37 households claimed at least 50 members,
while 8 had between 100 and 258 members. The average size was 33 for cane-
farming households and just under 133 for plantations. These gures are in
some ways misleading, because they result directly from a census-taking con-
vention. In Iguape and elsewhere in late colonial and early nineteenth-century
Brazil, census takers listed slaves as members of their masters households.
Slaves, in fact, accounted for 93 percent of the residents in the 37 fogos.
Not surprisingly, if we exclude slaves for the moment and focus on the free
component in those fogos, household sizes change dramatically. Indeed, as
table 2 shows, the free component was not especially large. None of the 37
contained more than 12 free members. Less than one-sixth had between 9 and
12 free residents, while over half sheltered no more than 5. In fact, ve house-
holds (including three engenhos) had only one free resident. To be sure, the
households of senhores de engenho tended to be larger than those of cane
farmers; even so, fully 80 percent of the plantation households had fewer than
9 free residents, and one-third ranged in size from 1 to 5 free members. The
result is a fairly modest average of 6.2 free members for planter-headed fogos
and an even more modest mean of 4.3 for those belonging to cane farmers.
Table 2. Number of Free Residents in Plantation and Wealthy Cane-Farming
Households, Santiago do Iguape, 1835
Plantation households Cane-farming households
(N=15) (N=22) Total (N=37)
Number of free
residents Number % Number % Number %
1 3 20.0 2 9.1 5 13.5
25 2 13.3 13 59.1 15 40.5
68 7 46.7 4 18.2 11 29.7
Subtotal 12 80.0 19 86.4 31 83.8
912 3 20.0 3 13.6 6 16.2
Average 6.2 4.3 5.1
Note: Percentages may not sum to 100.0 due to rounding. Here and in the discussion of
household size and composition in the text, I have excluded from the free component two
nine-year-old freed slaves at the Engenho da Praia. The two were enumerated in the
second half of the list of the households residents, among the slaves employed at the
plantation, and their names immediately follow those of their still enslaved mothers.
These averages are roughly comparable to those found in various parts of
Southeastern Brazil. Donald Ramos, for instance, reports a mean of 4.4 free
inhabitants for fogos in ve districts in early nineteenth-century Minas Gerais.
Likewise, according to Elizabeth Kuznesof, the average rural household in the
municipality of So Paulo had 5.6 free members in 1802.
29
Thus, while the tra-
ditional view (and even some of the more recent revisionist literature) would
lead us to expect planter and wealthy lavrador households to be not only large,
but also much larger than fogos in nonplantation areas of Southeastern Brazil,
the 1835 census fails to bear that out. Moreover, by itself, the information on
household size (excluding slaves) also suggests that most planters and wealthy
cane farmers in Iguape did not permanently reside with large numbers of
extended family members and free retainers.
But that does not mean that more distant relatives, retainers, and other
free dependents were absent from their households. On the contrary, as table
3 indicates, such individuals numbered 84 and accounted for nearly 45 percent
of all free residents in the 37 fogos. Although extended kin gured among the
84 nonnuclear household members, they were not especially numerous. In
fact, they represented only 8 percent of the free population in those fogos. Free
employees were even less common; in Iguape, the great majority (86 percent)
of all free employees on sugar plantations and cane farms maintained their own
households.
30
Table 3 instead shows that the single largest group of nonnuclear
29. Donald Ramos, City and Country: The Family in Minas Gerais, 18041838,
Journal of Family History 3, no. 4 (1978): 365; Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, Household
Composition and Headship as Related to Changes in the Mode of Production: So Paulo,
1765 to 1836, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22, no. 1 (1980): 88. Other studies
also indicate averages of roughly 45 free members per household for various districts in
Southeastern Brazil. See, e.g., Marclio, Caiara, 131, 223; Marclio, Crescimento, 97;
Clotilde Andrade Paiva and Herbert S. Klein, Slave and Free in Nineteenth-Century
Minas Gerais, Slavery and Abolition 15, no. 1 (1994): 6; Metcalf, Family, 147 (for non-
slaveholding rural households); Luna and Klein, Slavery, 70, 90, 94. In the Bahian tobacco-
growing parish of So Gonalo dos Campos, households averaged 4.3 free members in
1835. (The average excludes the one engenho in the parish and fogos with absentee heads;
the mean size of slaveholdings was 6.5 in the parish, versus 18.6 in Iguape.) Relao do N
o
de Fogos e moradores do Districto da Freguezia de So Gonallo [dos Campos] da V
a
da
Cachoeira [1835], APEB, SH, 5683.
30. The percentage in the text is based on the 62 individuals in the census with the
following recorded occupations: engenho adminstrator, sugar crater, engenho employee
(servente de engenho, serventurio), overseer and head overseer, kettleman, sugar-master,
assistant sugar-master (banqueiro), nurse (ama, enfermeiro, enfermeira, ocupada do servio das
crias), molasses hauler (condutor de mel ), and stillman.
members consisted of 44 men, women, and children identied as domsticos (lit-
erally, domestics); they made up more than one-fth of the total free popu-
lation in the engenho and cane-farming households. The term domstico, which
is unusual in late colonial and early nineteenth-century Brazilian censuses,
requires some explanation. Although some domsticos may have done house-
work, they should not be confused with servants; rather, domstico served as a
local synonym for what was more commonly known as an agregado (someone
Table 3. Nuclear and Nonnuclear Free Members of Plantation and Wealthy
Cane-Farming Households, Santiago do Iguape, 1835
Plantation Cane-farming
households households Total
Categories of free
household members Number % Number % Number %
Nuclear
a
40 43.0 64 67.3 104 55.3
Nonnuclear kin
b
9 9.7 6 6.3 15 8.0
Employees
c
5 5.4 2 2.1 7 3.7
Domsticos, etc.
Domsticos 27 29.0 17 17.9 44 23.4
Children of domsticos 1 1.1 3 3.2 4 2.1
Agregados 0 0.0 1 1.1 1 0.5
Other apparently unrelated
members
Tenant and tenants
wife/children
d
5 5.4 0 0.0 5 2.7
Wards (tutelados) 1 1.1 0 0.0 1 0.5
No relationship
specied
e
5 5.4 2 2.1 7 3.7
Total 93 100.0 95 100.0 188 100.0
Note: Percentages may not sum to 100.0 due to rounding. Where the census does not
specify any kinship tie to the household head, I have regarded (free) individuals as nonkin
except in the rare cases where other evidence indicated that they were relatives. Some
individuals classied here as nonkin may have been more distant relatives of one sort or
another (although not listed as such in the census). Also see the note in table 2.
a
Heads, wives, and children.
b
Includes all kin except the wives and children of household heads.
c
Includes one nurse (ama), two sugar-craters (caixeiros), one overseer ( feitor), and three
engenho employees (serventes de engenho).
d
Only one tenant appears in the 37 households.
e
Includes four children of household members with no specied relationship to the head.
added on or attached to a household). The 1835 census takers in Bahia used
both terms, more or less interchangeably, as catchall categories to classify indi-
viduals who had become in some way dependent on a household head and
hence subject to the heads domestic authority.
31
Domsticos can therefore be
equated with the free retainers who, according to traditional interpretations,
inhabited, in large numbers, the typical casa-grande.
Doing so, however, tells us very little about the men, women, and children
whom planters and cane farmers brought into their households. The 44 do-
msticos did, in many cases, share common traits. For instance, with the excep-
tion of one widow, all were listed as single. That is perhaps not surprising since,
although the elderly could be found among their ranks (including one 90-year-
old domstica), they tended, as a group, to be young and often quite young:
over half (55 percent) were under 18, and nearly two-fths (39 percent) were
aged 10 or younger.
32
Most were also female (33 females versus 11 males). Fur-
thermore, regardless of age or sex, the majority were classied as pardos and
pretos (77 percent and 9 percent, respectively); the 38 nonwhite domsticos
included 21 freed slaves.
Despite those common traits, it is also clear that not all domsticos held
the same status within the household or, more broadly, in local society. Thus,
the six white domsticos would have ranked higher in the prevailing racial
hierarchies than their pardo and preto counterparts and certainly higher than
the 21 freed slaves. The six whites included the 19-year-old Benvinda de Cas-
tro, who lived in the plantation household headed by colonel Rodrigo Antnio
Falco. Not only was she listed as white, but also, and perhaps more important,
as dona Benvinda de Castro. The census takers, in other words, assigned to
Benvinda the same title of respect that they gave to colonel Rodrigos wife and,
as a rule, to the wives and daughters of the other planters and wealthy cane
31. My conclusion that domstico was synonymous, or nearly so, with agregado is based
largely on the internal evidence in the four 1835 Bahian censuses; use of one term or the
other seems to have depended on the preferences of individual census takers. Likewise,
without attempting a systematic search, I have identied one individual, Jos Garcia (a
freeborn pardo), who was listed as an agregado in an earlier partial census of Iguape and
then as a domstico in the same household in the 1835 census. (The household is not
among the 37 examined here.) Alistam
to
das pessoas q. habito desde o Sitio do Paraguassu
the o Eng
o
Velho [1825 or 1826], ARC, papis avulsos e encaixotados. Also see Barickman
and Few, Ana Paulinha. Studies of domestic agregados are scant, but see, e.g., Eni de
Mesquita Samara, Os agregados: Uma tipologia do m do perodo colonial, Estudos
Econmicos 11, no. 3 (1981): 15968; and Kuznesof, Household Economy, 15661.
32. The percentages cited in the text refer only to children classied as domsticos
and exclude the four children listed simply as sons and daughters of domsticas.
farmers. They also assigned that title to Maria do Nascimento, a 60-year-old
white domstica at the Engenho Maroim. Likewise, although most domsticos
would have had little or no personal wealth, in two instances, domsticos owned
their own slaves.
The catchall category of domstico may also hide other differences in sta-
tus. For example, census takers may have used the term as a discreet way to
classify illegitimate children born to planters and cane farmers by their mis-
tresses or concubines. That would not be an unreasonable explanation for the
15 pardo domsticos under the age of 15 found in male-headed plantation and
cane-farming households; 9 of the 15 were libertos and hence the freed sons
and daughters of slave women. But, about such matters, the census allows for
little more than speculation.
Along the same lines, some parda and preta domsticas may have been
concubines, whom the traditional view portrays as a typical feature of the casa-
grande household. That possibility deserves consideration because, in survey-
ing poorer households in the parish, the census takers did use the term doms-
tica to designate what were, in some cases, clearly consensual-union wives.
Nevertheless, no more than 7 of the 29 male-headed households contained
domsticas who might plausibly be regarded as concubines.
33
And even for
those 7 households, we cannot, without additional evidence, go beyond specu-
lation or dismiss the possibility that the women in question were simply
domsticasthat is, merely agregadas.
Indeed, in only two cases does the census, by itself, strongly hint at the
presence of a resident concubine. One of those cases involves Diogo Pereira do
Lago, a prosperous 60-year-old widowed cane farmer. The census lists Leonor
Maria da Piedade, a 45-year-old freed parda and the unmarried mother of
three freeborn children, as a domstica in his household. Among her three
children was an 8-year-old son named Diogo. That, of course, does not neces-
sarily prove that the Diogo Pereira do Lago was the father of Diogo and
Leonor Marias other two children. The coincidence in names does, however,
raise suspicions. Moreover, in 1857, the same Diogo, now bearing the surname
Pereira do Lago, as well as his brother and his sister, would appear in local notar-
ial records as heirs to their mothers estate, which included 27 slaves (some of
whom had belonged to the elder Diogo Pereira do Lago in 1835), the Fazenda
33. Here I have taken into account all single, nonwhite domsticas aged 1659
residing in the 29 male-headed households: nine pardas and one preta, including seven
freed slaves. The census lists only one white domstica in that age range in those
households: dona Benvinda de Castro.
Cassinum with its 124 tarefas (54 hectares) of good cane land, and a two-story
house in the village of Santiago do Iguape. All in all, her estate had a net worth
of more than 27 contos de ris (Rs.27:262$000, or 3,026 at current exchange
rates). If Leonor Maria was not the mistress or consensual-union partner of
Diogo Pereira do Lago (senior) and if he had not fathered her children, then it
is hard to imagine how she (a freed slave) could have possibly acquired such a
fortune and come to own his farm as well as several of his slaves.
34
The census hints at a similar relationship in the household of Jos Fran-
cisco Moreira, the 34-year-old unmarried owner of the Engenho do Meio. Jos
Francisco resided with Maria Joaquina das Mercs, a 28-year-old freeborn
parda and the single mother of four young children. The census does not clas-
sify Maria Joaquina as a domstica; in fact, it fails to provide any information
about her relationship with Jos Francisco as the head of the household. By
itself, the lack of information might represent an effort at discretion on the part
of either Jos Francisco, the census takers, or perhaps both. That did not, how-
ever, prevent the census takers from recording that one of Maria Joaquinas
sons was named Guilherme Francisco Moreira and that his older brother bore
the even more telltale name of Jos Francisco Moreira.
35
Thus, it would seem safe to assume that male planters and wealthy male
cane farmers in Iguape sometimes did maintain free mistresses within their
households. But, contrary to traditional depictions of the polygamous casa-
grande household, the census does not suggest that the practice was especially
widespread in the parish. Even if we give free reign to speculation, only 7 (24
percent) of the 29 male-headed engenho and cane-farming households in-
cluded a free concubine. It is also worth noting that the two most likely cases
involved a widower and a bachelor; in other words, neither involved a wife
sharing living quarters with a resident free mistress. Yet none of this means that
34. Partilha amigvel do esplio de Leonor Maria da Piedade (1857), ARC, IT
(Iguape); and, for exchange rate, Nathaniel H. Leff, Underdevelopment and Development in
Brazil, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982), 1:246. In the late 1850s, Diogo Pereira
do Lago and his younger brother, Manoel Jacinto (who by then also bore the surname
Pereira do Lago), registered as their property portions of the Fazenda Cassinum. APEB, SH,
RET, 4712, regs. nos. 30 and 37. Also note that Leonor Marias children were all born after
the death, in 1823, of the wife of Diogo Pereira do Lago (the elder): Antnia Maria de
Jesus. See her inv. (1824), ARC, IT (Iguape). (I was unable to locate the inventory of the
elder Diogo Pereira do Lago.)
35. The census does not list surnames for Maria Joaquinas other two children, both
of whom were daughters. Jos Francisco Moreiras household also included a 23-year-old
freeborn parda domstica.
male planters and cane farmers in the parish had adopted some form of puri-
tanical morality. On the contrary, it is quite probable that (like wealthy male
slaveholders elsewhere in Brazil) many of them had extramarital relationships
with their female slaves.
36
But, not surprisingly, the 1835 census provides no
direct information about such relationships.
In any event, although they made up more than two-fths of all free mem-
bers in planter and lavrador households, the 84 domsticos, extended family
members, and other free dependents were spread across 20 fogos. That trans-
lates into an average of only 4.2 nonnuclear members per household contain-
ing such individuals, or 2.3 nonnuclear members per household if all 37 house-
holds are considered. Both averages fall short of bearing out the traditional
view of the casa-grande brimming with large numbers of relatives and free
retainers.
37
In fact, 17 (46 percent) of the households did not contain a single
nonnuclear member. Most of those belonged to cane farmers, but ve were
headed by planters (one-third of all planter households). And in nearly half (47
percent) of all planter households, the census registered no more than two
nonnuclear members.
The 1835 census, then, suggests that planters and wealthier cane farmers
in Iguape generally did not preside over households that sheltered numerous
extended kin and free retainers. It also suggests that, on the whole, their house-
holds were neither particularly large (once slaves are excluded) nor complex.
Further evidence in that direction comes from table 4, which classies the 37
fogos by their core structure, or household type, and also takes into account
the presence of domsticos and other free dependents.
38
The rst thing that
36. Such relationships have perhaps been most extensively documented for colonial
Minas Gerais. See, e.g., Eduardo Frana Paiva, Escravos e libertos nas Minas Gerais do sculo
XVIII: Estratgias de resistncia atravs dos testamentos (So Paulo: Annablume, 1995); Jnia
Ferreira Furtado, Chica da Silva e o contratador dos diamantes: O outro lado do mito (So Paulo:
Comp. das Letras, 2003); and Kathleen J. Higgins, Licentious Liberty in a Brazilian Gold-
Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabar, Minas Gerais
(University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999).
37. Thus, when rounded, an average of 4.2 would allow for a hypothetical situation in
which, e.g., a plantation household included, as a nonnuclear members, only two
unmarried sisters of the head and two domsticos. Cf. Vainfas, who (summarizing the
traditional interpretation) refers to a copious number of servants, slaves, poor relatives, and
agregados (Trpico, 110, emphasis added).
38. Here, for reasons of comparability, I have classied the fogos by their composition
and structure, using a slightly simplied version of the scheme proposed by Peter Laslett in
his introduction to Household and Family in Past Time, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
stands out is the range of different domestic arrangements. At one extreme we
have households consisting of a single individual living without any kin, while
at the other we nd complex households, which in some cases included extended
family members. In between those extremes are households with a nuclear
core; and, in one instance, the domestic unit was organized around a brother
and his three sisters, all of whom were middle aged and single. Differences in
the marital status of household heads and the presence or absence of free
nonkin dependents (domsticos, employees, and other apparently unrelated
individuals) only added to the diversity of residential arrangements. Yet,
despite that diversity, three broad categories of household types account for
nearly all of the 37 households: solitary households, complex households, and
nuclear-core households.
As table 4 shows, 24 percent of the fogos were headed by individuals who,
on a daily basis, did not share their households with any resident kin. That per-
centage far surpasses the proportions of solitary households reported by Maria
Luiza Marclio for the township of Ubatuba in So Paulo in the early nine-
teenth century (12 percent in 1801 and 6 percent in 1831) and by Donald
Ramos for four rural districts in Minas Gerais in the early 1830s (514 per-
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972), 189, esp. 2832. Most authors who study household
composition using Brazilian manuscript censuses draw on Lasletts classicatory scheme.
See, e.g., Ramos, City and Country, 366; Marclio, Crescimento, 6165, 96103; Marclio,
Caiara, 13133; Samara, As mulheres, 2627; Motta, Corpos escravos, 39699; Mott, Piau,
8386; and Iraci del Nero da Costa, Populaes mineiras: Sobre a estrutura populacional de
alguns ncleos mineiros no alvorecer do sculo XIX (So Paulo: IPE-USP, 1981), 87. But the
modications that some authors make in adapting Lasletts general scheme are so great that
they impede direct comparisons. See Motta, The Historical Demography, 448. Also note
that, within Lasletts scheme (introduction, 2829, 3435), the presence of servants,
lodgers, etc., does not affect the classication of a household by its core structure. Yet,
because the presence of free retainers and other free nonkin dependents is important in
evaluating the traditional view of the plantation household, table 4 and the following
discussion take into account their presence (or absence). For the moment, I also exclude
slaves, which matches the procedures used by other scholars who work with Brazilian
censuses. On Lasletts scheme and his approach to family history, however, see, e.g., Lutz
K. Berkner, The Use and Misuse of Census Data for the Historical Analysis of Family
Structure, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 4 (1975): 72128; Steven Ruggles, The
Transformation of the American Family Structure, American Historical Review 99, no. 1
(1994): 10328; and Hermann Rebel, Dispossession in the Communal Memory: An
Alternative Narrative about Austrias Descent into the Holocaust, Focaal 2627 (1996):
170. Also see n. 53 below.
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cent). Only urban Ouro Preto, also studied by Ramos, had a higher proportion
of solitary households (49 percent in 1804 and 34 percent in 1838).
39
Five of the nine solitary heads, according to the census, lived entirely
alone (excluding slaves); that is, their households contained neither resident
kin nor free dependents of any kind. The ve included captains Francisco
Pereira de Macedo and Joaquim de Oliveira Guimares, who owned the en-
genhos Campina and Calemb, respectively. Both, according to the census,
were married. Presumably their wives and children resided elsewherein all
likelihood, in Salvador or perhaps in the nearby town of Cachoeira. It is impos-
sible to know, from the census, whether this represented a permanent or tem-
porary arrangement.
40
Also among the ve heads living entirely alone were two
women: dona Francisca Maria Vitria das Mercs e Arago, a 37-year-old sin-
gle lavradora who employed 22 slaves at her cane farm, and the 43-year-old
widow dona Maria de So Jos, owner of the Engenho dos Patos and its 73
slaves.
The census also registers complex planter and lavrador households that
come closer to conventional depictions of the casa-grande. Three households,
for example, contained extended kin. Another two included, beyond the heads
immediate family, at least one married couple and their children. One of these
was the Engenho Brando, owned by dona Francisca Rosa de Morais, a
60-year-old widow. Dona Francisca Rosa shared her household with her un-
married adult daughter andin an arrangement that seems to have been
uncommon in the Recncavowith a tenant cane farmer, Francisco Gil Gar-
cia, his wife, and their three young children. The second household of this type
represents, in some ways, an even more unusual case. The large Engenho do
39. Marclio, Caiara, 132; Ramos, City and Country, 366. In one rural district
studied by Ramos (Cachoeira), 22% of all households had solitary heads in 1801, but by
1831 that proportion had fallen to 14%. Work by Marclio (Crescimento, 100103) with
1798 and 1828 censuses of more than 30 townships shows that the proportion of solitary
households in So Paulo was generally 515%.
40. E.g., the wives may have been in the city with the children while they attended
school, a common arrangement by the early twentieth century; Borges, The Family, 59. Or
perhaps the planters had temporarily relocated their families for reasons of security.
Between 1807 and 1835, Bahia witnessed a series of slave uprisings and conspiracies that
included the 1835 Mals rebellion in Salvador and three revolts in Iguape in 1814, 1827,
and 1828. In the 1828 revolt, slaves attacked the Engenho Campina and an estate
neighboring the Engenho Calemb; Joo Jos Reis, Rebelio escrava no Brasil: A histria do
levante dos mals em 1835, 2nd ed. (So Paulo: Comp. das Letras, 2003), esp. 11011. Also
note that, according to the census, the planters families were not living in the village of
Santiago do Iguape.
Desterro belonged, by the early 1830s, to the heirs of Francisco Cavalcante e
Albuquerque. None of them were, it seems, interested in buying out the shares
of the other inheritors (or perhaps none had the necessary nancial resources).
The heirs were also apparently unwilling to divide the estate among them-
selves or to operate it jointly. In any event, in 1834, they rented it to an absen-
tee tenant, who hired an administrator to supervise day-to-day operations at
the estate. Under the unusual rental agreement, some of the heirs retained the
right not only to cultivate cane as lavradores at their own engenho, but also to
reside in Desterros main dwelling house. The result was a complex household
that brought together under one roof Manoel Rodrigues Mono, his wife, and
their daughter; Jos Francisco Lus, along with his wife and son; and nally the
unmarried dona Isabel Joaquina de Santanaall of whom were co-owners of
the plantation.
41
The case deserves attention, insofar as it shows how efforts to circumvent
partible inheritance could, under some circumstances, give rise to complex
households. But such households, it must be stressed, were not the norm in
Iguape, where only ve fogos belonging to planters and well-to-do lavradores
displayed a complex structure. Those ve represented a mere 14 percent of the
37 fogos, a substantially smaller share than the 24 percent headed by solitary
individuals.
Rather than being complex, the most common variety of plantation and
cane-farming household had a nuclear core; that is, it consisted of a married
couple with or without children or a widowed spouse living with children (as
well as, in some cases, domsticos and other free nonkin dependents). As can
be seen in table 4, such households accounted for 60 percent of the total.
42
The
table also shows that 11, or fully half, of the nuclear-core households did not
contain a single domstico or other free nonkin dependent; in other words, the
head together with his or her immediate family made up the entire free com-
ponent within those households. Cane-farming households were more likely to
be organized around a simple nuclear unit than those belonging to planters.
41. Livro de notas e escrituras: Santiago do Iguape, 18311845, ARC, fols. 1012
v
,
73
v
74
v
. Manoel Rodrigues Mono, Jos Francisco Lus, and dona Isabel Joaquina are
listed as lavradores in the census. Therefore I have classied the household as a cane-
farming fogo. The household headed by a fourth heir (Francisco dAmorim Cavalcante) is
also included among the 22 cane-farming households. Note that the hired administrator,
according to the census, lived in his own household.
42. The 22 nuclear-core households contained 115 free individuals (61% of all free
residents in the 37 households).
Nevertheless, even among senhores de engenho, nuclear-core households out-
numbered those with a complex structure by a ratio of two to one.
The heads of the 22 nuclear-core households included some of the wealth-
iest cane farmers and sugar planters in the parish. Among them was Manoel
Estanislau de Almeida, a lavrador who owned 64 slaves, or nearly four and a
half times more than the average slaveholding cane farmer in the parish. In
fact, in his day, Manoel Estanislau would have ranked as one of the wealthiest
cane farmers in the Recncavo. The labor of his 64 slaves would have more
than sufced to operate a decent-sized engenho in early nineteenth-century
Bahia. Yet, when the census takers visited his fogo, they did not nd anything
even remotely resembling the casa-grande household as commonly depicted in
the secondary literature. If we set aside the slaves he owned, then the 58-year-
old Manoel Estanislau shared his household with only his wife and their
unmarried adult son.
The census takers encountered an equally simple domestic unit at the
large Engenho da Cruz, where Captain Tom Pereira de Arajo employed 163
slaves. Despite his wealth, Captain Tom did not live surrounded by numerous
kin and free dependents; instead, he resided with his wife and their two young
daughters. The census does not list any other free household members. Colonel
Domingos Amrico da Silva was even wealthier than Captain Tom; he owned
not one, but two plantations: the adjoining engenhos So Domingos and Santa
Catarina, with a combined workforce of 237 slaves. But, once again, ownership
of a large number of slaves and, in this case, two engenhos did not result in a
complex household. At So Domingos, where he had his residence, Colonel
Domingos Amrico presided over a household that consisted of only his wife,
their children, and two freed domsticas.
Households such as those headed by Colonel Domingos Amrico da Silva,
Captain Tom Pereira de Arajo, and Manoel Estanislau de Almeida, which
were relatively small in size (if slaves are excluded) and simple in structure,
obviously stand in sharp contrast with the traditional image of the casa-grande.
But, perhaps equally important, the proportion of nuclear-core households
headed by planters and cane farmers in the parish roughly matches or, in some
cases, even surpasses the share of households with the same structure found in
some nonplantation areas of Southeastern Brazil. For instance, no more than
approximately one-third of all fogos in the city of So Paulo in 1836 were orga-
nized around a nuclear unit. The 37 households might also be compared with
those in the town of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, where Donald Ramoss re-
search indicates that only 38 percent displayed a nuclear core structure in 1801.
By contrast, that structure, it bears repeating, characterized 60 percent of the
households headed by planters and wealthy lavradores in Iguape.
43
Of course, such households were, in many cases, far more common in
rural areas of Southeastern Brazil in the early nineteenth century. Again, re-
search by Ramos offers a point of comparison; he has calculated that 78 percent
of all households in the farming community of Cachoeira, in Minas Gerais,
were organized around a nuclear core in 1831. Likewise, Maria Luiza Marclio
reports that the same domestic structure could be found in 75 percent of all
fogos in Ubatuba, So Paulo, in 1830. But even these much higher percentages
are roughly comparable to the 73 percent for the 22 cane-farming households
in Iguape. That is true despite the signicant differences in levels of wealth and
context. The average household owned only 7.5 slaves in Ubataba and fewer
than 2 in Cachoeira. The averages in both cases fall well below the mean of
28.6 slaves for the 22 cane farmers in Iguape. Moreover, neither Cachoeira nor
Ubatuba were well-established centers of plantation agriculture. Indeed,
although coffee production took root in Ubatuba in the rst decades of the
nineteenth century, Marclio describes the township as a mainly peasant and
shing community.
44
Notwithstanding the traditional image of the casa-grande, it is perhaps
not surprising that so few senhores de engenho and wealthy cane farmers in
Iguape headed complex multigenerational households or that nuclear-core and
solitary households accounted for nearly 84 percent of the fogos examined
here. On the one hand, those fogos, without exception, were headed by wealthy
(or, at the very least, quite prosperous) slave-owning agriculturalists in one of
the wealthiest sugar-producing parishes in Bahia. As such, those heads would
have had the resources to sustain large and complex domestic units that brought
together under one roof married sons and daughters with their spouses, grand-
children, and other extended kin, as well as numerous domsticos and the like.
43. Samara, As mulheres, 34, reports that 35% of all households in So Paulo were
nuclear in 1836, but her modications of Lasletts scheme allow for only rough
comparisons; Ramos, City and Country, 366. By 1838, the proportion of nuclear-core
households in Ouro Preto had grown to 55%, which still falls short of that found among
the 37 households in Iguape.
44. Ramos, City and Country, 36566; Marclio, Caiara, 105, 13233. (The
average for Ubatuba is only for slave-owning households.) Marclio (Crescimento, 1023)
shows that, in various districts in late colonial and early nineteenth-century So Paulo,
8085% of all households had a nuclear-core structure, clearly a higher proportion than
that found among the 37 households considered here but not dramatically higher than the
73% for lavrador households in Iguape.
Incorporating such nonnuclear members into the household could, in turn,
augment the pool of labor available to the domestic unit.
45
But Iguapes
planters and well-to-do cane farmers were not peasants; they did not need the
extra labor of adult children, more distant relatives, or retainers. After all, they
had slaves at their command: in all cases, at least 15 slaves and, far more often,
several dozen slaves. Whatever services domsticos or more distant relatives
may have provided, those services would not have been in any way crucial to
the survival of lavrador and planter households.
On the other hand (and for similar reasons), the married children of
Iguapes sugar planters and wealthy cane farmers would not have needed to live
with their parents after marriage. The Brazilian proverb Quem casa quer casa
(He who marries wants [or needs] a house) no doubt reects a widespread
desire among newlywed couples to set up their own households.
46
But doing so
would have required nancial resources. The resources needed to establish a
reasonably comfortable and productive household would have certainly been
available to the children of planters and wealthy cane farmers in the parish:
daughters could count on dowries and sons could request advances on their
inheritances. Indeed, in only one of the 37 households does the 1835 census
register the presence of an adult son and his children. In this rare case, a wid-
ower son resided with his widowed 64-year-old mother.
Concluding Remarks: Revisiting the
Casa-grande and Revisiting Freyre
At least at rst view, it would be possible to summarize the ndings from the
1835 census of Santiago do Iguape with a few brief and straightforward obser-
vations. The census indicates that, once slaves are excluded, the households
headed by sugar planters and wealthy cane farmers in the parish were not espe-
cially large, nor, as a rule, did they contain numerous extended kin, retainers,
and other free dependents. Likewise, a complex and extended structure did not
characterize the majority of the planter and lavrador households in Iguape. On
the contrary, more than 80 percent of the 37 households had at their core
either a nuclear unit or a solitary individual. Thus, far more so than would have
been expected, engenho and cane-farming households in the parish resembled
45. See Marclio, Caiara, 13031; Costa, Revisitando; Kuznesof, Household Economy,
15761; and Barickman and Few, Ana Paulinha.
46. See Lewin, Politics, 130; and Borges, The Family, 73 (who cite the same proverb in
different, but related, contexts).
those found in nonplantation areas of Southeastern Brazil in the late eigh-
teenth and early nineteenth centuries.
And, in line with arguments put forth by several scholars who have carried
out census-based research in Southeastern Brazil, the ndings from the 1835
census might be used to challenge the traditional view of the patriarchal
planter family and casa-grande household, which is so closely associated with
Gilberto Freyre. That view would seem to nd little support in the census of
this wealthy and well-established sugar parish in one of the oldest and most
important plantation regions of Northeastern Brazil. Apparently, then, it
would be possible to apply to the Iguapes plantation and cane-farming house-
holds the same conclusion that Maria Luiza Marclio reaches in one of her
many studies of family and household in colonial and early nineteenth-century
So Paulo. The widely held idea of the patriarchal and extended family in our
traditional societies, Marclio writes, does not hold up when the evidence is
examined more closely. That conclusion would, perhaps, gain even greater
strength if the focus of this essay were broadened to include the fogos headed
by shermen, seamstresses, small farmers, artisans, middling and poor cane
farmers, and the like, which accounted for more than 95 percent of all the
households surveyed in the parish. The 1835 census might, in that case, be
used to support Eni de Mesquita Samaras argument, based on studies using
late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century censuses from several districts in
So Paulo and Minas Gerais. Samara, who in this context refers explicitly to
Freyre, argues that those studies call into question the view that the extended
family was historically common in Brazil. Thus, for Samara, the ndings from
the census-based research make it difcult to conceive that the generic notion
of the patriarchal family can be applied to the various moments of our history
and to families of different social groups.
47
But matters may, in fact, be rather more complicated and less straightfor-
ward. To begin, Iguapes plantation and cane-farming households were small in
size only if slaves are excluded. Otherwise, those households were not merely
large, but, in fact, almost implausibly large, according to the 1835 census.
Scholars working with Brazilian manuscript censuses often exclude slaves in
their discussions of household size and composition for solid analytical reasons.
As Donald Ramos points out, it is reasonable to assume that in most cases
slaves were peripheral members of the household given their peculiar status.
48
47. Marclio, Caiara, 134; Samara, A famlia, 82; Samara, As mulheres, 169. In 1835,
the other 929 households in Iguape had, on average, only 3.5 free members.
48. Ramos, City and Country, 364.
That assumption would certainly apply to the plantation and cane-farming
fogos analyzed here. It is hard to believe that eld hands on estates in Iguape
with 30, 60, or, in some cases, more than 150 slaves had any regular close con-
tact with their masters and their masters families.
Yet, although useful and legitimate for certain analytical purposes, ex-
cluding slaves also entails introducing a denition of fogo, or household, that
Brazilian census takers did not themselves employ. They did not exclude slaves,
but instead counted them (even eld hands) as members of their owners
households. That means that census takers did not dene the fogo exclusively,
or even chiey, as a physical dwelling space where all resident members slept
under a common roof. Such a denition would no doubt t many of the
smaller and generally poor fogos listed in the census that this essay sets aside,
as well as most households enumerated in censuses of urban areas in South-
eastern Brazil. It would not, however, t the engenhos and cane farms under
consideration here. With the exception of a few house servants, slaves on larger
rural estates did not sleep in the casa-grande, described in local inheritance
records as the casa de morar (dwelling house) and occupied by the planter or
lavrador, his or her immediate family, and all or nearly all of the fogos other
free residents. Slaves, instead, slept in the senzalas, or slave quarters. On some
estates, those quarters were long rows (carreiras) with internal divisions, in
which different groups of slaves occupied discrete dwelling spaces. But often,
at least in the Recncavo, the senzalas consisted of a series of small huts. Post-
mortem estate inventories suggest that each hut typically housed two to ve
slaves.
49
For the census takers, however, slave huts did not, and could not, in them-
selves constitute independent households; rather, from their point of view, the
senzalas together with the casa de morar formed a single domestic unit a sin-
gle fogo under the authority of a slave-owning household head, who in the
49. Postmortem inventories often simply list senzalas without specifying their
number or the type of construction. But I was able to locate information on the number of
huts, etc., in 39 inventories of sugar planters and cane farmers, dated between 1780 and
1865, from Iguape and elsewhere in the Recncavo. The inventories (which list a total of
2,031 slaves) suggest an average of 3.4 slaves per senzala, which takes into account
subdivisions within single structures. APEB, SJ, IT; and ARC, IT. On senzalas in Bahia, see
also Schwartz, Sugar Plantations, 13536; and Esterzilda Berenstein de Azevedo,
Arquitetura do acar: Engenhos do Recncavo baiano no perodo colonial (So Paulo: Nobel,
1990), 15561; and, more generally, Robert W. Slenes, Na senzala, uma or: Esperanas e
recordaes na formao da famlia escravaBrasil Sudeste, sculo XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Fronteira, 1999), 149208.
cases studied here was either a planter or a cane farmer. Thus, at least for the
purposes of the census, slaves were integral (if by no means equal) members of
their masters households. The census, in this regard, matches Portuguese
usage at the time. Antnio de Moraes e Silva, the rst Brazilian-born lexicog-
rapher to publish a Portuguese dictionary, gave casa, ou famlia (house, or
family) as the denition of fogo (in the sense of household). In turn, his 1823
dictionary dened famlia as meaning, broadly, relatives and allies. But
Moraes e Silva also supplied a narrower denition of famlia: those persons
who make up a house and, more properly, those subordinated to the heads, or
pais de famlia. The expression pai de famlia, it should be noted, did not mean
simply father of a family; rather, it was the Portuguese equivalent of paterfa-
milias. Thus, subordination and hence authorityand, more specically, patri-
archal authoritywere seen as characterizing relationships within the house-
hold and the family. The overlapping denitions of fogo and famlia could, as
a result, be easily expanded to accommodate slaves as members of their masters
households. Indeed, Brazilians in the colonial period and the early nineteenth
century sometimes used famlia with the same meaning that ancient Romans
assigned to the Latin word familia: both terms could encompass not only imme-
diate kin, other relatives, and free servants, but also the slaves attached to a
household or rural estate. For instance, in 1807, Manoel Ferreira da Cmara, at
the time the owner of the Engenho da Ponta in Iguape, could publicly refer to
the expenses he incurred in supporting a family of more than 250 persons,
taking it for granted that his audience would understand that the majority of his
family consisted of slaves employed at his plantation.
50
50. Antonio de Moraes e Silva, Diccionario da lingua portugueza . . ., 3rd ed. (1789;
Lisbon: Typ. de M.P. de Lacerda, 1823), s.vv. familia, fogo, and pai; Raphael Bluteau,
Vocabulario portuguez, e latino . . . (Coimbra: Collegio das artes da Companhia de Jesu [sic] /
Lisbon: Ofcina de P. da Sylva, 171221), s.vv. familia, fogo, and pai; Antnio Houaiss et al.,
Dicionrio Houaiss da lngua portuguesa (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2001), s.vv. pai and pter-
famlias; M[anoel] F[erreira] da C[amara Bittencourt e S], Carta II [1807], in Joo
Rodrigues de Brito et al., Cartas economico-politicas sobre a agricultura e commercio da Bahia
(Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1821), 84, emphasis added. Also see, e.g., Srgio Buarque de
Holanda, preface to Thomas Davatz, Memrias de um colono no Brasil, trans. and annot.
Srgio Buarque de Holanda (1850; So Paulo: Livraria Martins, 1941), 2627; Richard
Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1990), 20; and, on Latin usage, P. G. W. Glare, ed., Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1972), s.v. familia; David Herlihy, Medieval Households (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1985), 23. In Reading, I discuss in greater detail the denition of
the fogo used in the 1835 Bahian censuses. Note that U.S. censuses also enumerated slaves
as members of their owners households. Margo Anderson, The History of Women and
the History of Statistics, Journal of Womens History 4, no. 1 (1992): 1720.
The practice of enumerating slaves as members of their owners fogos
therefore represents more than a simple census-taking convention; it reects
the patriarchal notions of household and family that were current in
Brazilian society in the early nineteenth century. Those notions made slaves an
integral part of their masters family and household, subordinating them to
their masters patriarchal and domestic authority. At least in this regard, the
census would seem to conrm, rather than refute, the traditional view of the
casa-grande household usually presented in the secondary literature.
51
There are, moreover, other difculties in trying to use the results of the
1835 census, or of any other late colonial and early nineteenth-century census,
to disprove the traditional plantation-based view that patriarchal family struc-
tures have historically characterized Brazilian society. Those difculties begin
with the notion that household composition and structure, as recorded in cen-
suses, can provide evidence for the existence or absence of patriarchy and the
patriarchal family. Like the 1835 census of Iguape, those from Southeastern
Brazil reveal a wide variety of domestic living arrangements. But, as Ronaldo
Vainfas has pointed out, it is altogether unclear what special relevance those
arrangements have for discussions of patriarchy. In commenting on the revi-
sionist census-based literature, Vainfas correctly notes that the diversity of
domestic arrangements in no way diminished the dominant patriarchal struc-
tures [o patriarcalismo dominante], unless one wishes to claim that, simply be-
cause they did not reside within the casa-grande, the so-called alternative fam-
ilies lived outside and beyond patriarchal power and patriarchal values.
52
Indirectly, Vainfass remarks also point to the conceptual confusion that
has sometimes marked the revisionist census-based literature on the Brazilian
family. That literature has tended to equate the patriarchal family with the
extended family, or, more precisely, with the extended family household. The
equation makes it relatively easy to disprove the existence of the patriarchal
51. But, even here, matters may be more complex. Some passages suggest that Freyre
saw the casa-grande and the senzalas as clearly distinct (although closely linked) residential
spaces: e.g., The two expressions that make up the title [casa-grande and senzala] . . . have
here a symbolic intention, the purpose being to suggest the social antagonism and cultural
distance between masters and slaves . . . as marked by the residence of each group; The
Masters, xvi (the passage is from the preface to the 1st English edition, which is not
reprinted in the 43rd Brazilian edition). See also Freyre, Casa-grande, 46, 49.
52. Vainfas, Trpico, 110. Also see Angela Mendes de Almeida, Notas sobre a famlia
no Brasil, in Pensando a famlia no Brasil: Da colnia modernidade, ed. Angela Mendes de
Almeida (Rio de Janeiro: Espao e Tempo, 1987), 5366; and Santos, Sertes temerosos,
chap. 4.
family by demonstrating that extended family households were not the norm in
a particular district. Yet patriarchy (which, at the very least, means the author-
ity and power invested in fathers and husbands over their wives and children)
has little, if anything, to do with the presence of extended kin within a house-
hold.
53
The conceptual confusion in some cases goes still further. Part of that con-
fusion appears in the contradictory conclusions reached in the historical liter-
ature on the family in Brazil. Elizabeth Kuznesof has noted that while some
scholars have afrmed the endogamous and highly extended character of the
Brazilian family, other authors, through their research, have proven that the
Brazilian family is and always has been small and conned to the nuclear
unit. But the contradictions, as Kuznesof points out, are more apparent than
real: in large part, they stem from different denitions of family and from the
failure to distinguish between family as a kinship network and family as a
coresidential domestic groupin other words, as a household.
54
Kuznesofs observations are pertinent, because much of the more recent
census-based literature has targeted its revisionist arguments at the notion of a
large, extended, patriarchal household or family as supposedly expounded by
Gilberto Freyre in Casa-grande & senzala and Sobrados e mucambos. Freyre most
denitely did refer to patriarchy (patriarcalismo) in those works; indeed, the
patriarchal family and its decline stand out as central themes in his interpreta-
tion of Brazilian history. But because Freyres method of developing his argu-
ments was often slippery and less than precise, those arguments are not always
easy targets to hit. For example, it is possible to read Casa-grande & senzala as
referring specically and only to the plantation regions of Northeastern Brazil,
53. On the tendency to equate the extended family with the patriarchal family, see
Mello, O m, 41213; Vainfas, Trpico, 10713; and Faria, Histria, 255. Also note that,
in dealing with extended-family households, the census-based literature on Brazil has
generally failed to consider Ruggless arguments (The Transformation) about the need to
ask not only whether such households predominate in a particular place and time, but also
whether they are the preferred domestic arrangement. Determining preference requires
controlling for demographic constraints (mortality, fertility, generation length, etc.) that
limit the potential number of multigenerational households. Thus, in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, only a small share of all U.S. households were extended. Yet,
by controlling for demographic constraints, Ruggles shows that most elderly parents who
could have lived with their adult children did so, suggesting a preference for that
arrangement. The available sources do not allow a replication of Ruggless analysis for the
households examined here, but I suspect that such an analysis would also suggest a
preference for simpler household structures among planters and lavradores.
54. Kuznesof, Household Economy, 5n11. Also see Metcalf, Family, 2021.
with a heavy emphasis on the sugar districts of Freyres native Pernambuco. Yet
the books subtitle (The Formation of the Brazilian Family) and some passages in
its preface suggest that Freyre intended his arguments to apply to Brazil as a
whole, or at least to major plantation regions throughout Brazil, including the
coffee districts in Rio de Janeiro and So Paulo in the nineteenth century. It is
also less than clear what chronological boundaries Freyre placed around his
arguments. The sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, and all the intervening
years, seem to blend together to form an almost timeless whole within the
book. If, however, Casa-grande & senzala is read in conjunction with its sequels
(Sobrados e mucambos and Ordem e progresso), then the book would seem to deal
primarily with colonial Brazil.
55
The problem of Freyres imprecision arises here because in neither Casa-
grande & senzala nor Sobrados e mucambos did he dene what he meant by
patriarchal family or, even more simply, by family. It is most certainly true,
as Dain Borges has noted, that, for Freyre, the identication between the
house and the family was overwhelming. Houses shaped and formed the lives
lived in them.
56
The titles of Casa-grande & senzala and Sobrados e mucambos
point in precisely that direction. Even so, it is quite possible that, just as he
slipped back and forth between different denitions of patriarchy, Freyre also
conceived of the family both as a coresidential domestic group and as a kinship
network that embraced more than one household.
57
Census materials, how-
55. See Arajo, Guerra e paz, on imprecision and ambiguity as recurring features of
Freyres mode of analysis. On Freyres chronological vagueness in a different context, see
Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Liberdade: Rotinas e rupturas do escravismo no Recife, 18221850
(Recife: Ed. Universitria da UFPE, 1998), 26. Note that, from the 6th edition onward
(1950), Casa-grande & senzala was published as volume 1 of a planned four-volume Histria
da sociedade patriarcal no Brasil, with Sobrados e mucambos and Ordem e progresso as volumes 2
and 3. Freyre never published the fourth and nal volume.
56. Borges, The Family, 4.
57. E.g., in summarizing his arguments for an English-speaking audience, Freyre
wrote, The family is a signicant fact even today in the Presidential Palace; it is not just
one individual who becomes important around him, it is an entire family, a whole gamut of
legal and consanguineous relationships ( parentela). The same thing happens when
governors, state ministers, and mayors are ofcially invested with fuller political power;
The Patriarchal Basis of Brazilian Society, in Politics of Change in Latin America, ed.
Joseph B. Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead ( New York: F.A. Praeger, 1964), 171. Also
see, e.g., Freyre, Sobrados, 402. On the notion of parentela, which does not imply
coresidence, see Lewin, Politics, chap. 3. In turn, Dain Borges (The Family, 4) points out that
at times Freyre used patriarchy to refer to the supposedly self-sufcient character of the
plantation and, in other contexts, to designate the power of the father over others in the
family: wife, daughter, and all women, sons, sons-in-law, and all younger men; servants,
slaves, and dependents.
ever, do not lend themselves readily to investigations of the family as a broader
kinship network; instead, they tend to focus the researchers attention on (census-
dened) coresidential units and can easily encourage the researcher to equate
those units with families.
58
Yet historians working with other sources have
amply demonstrated the importance of family as a kinship network in the
social, cultural, and political life of colonial, nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century Brazil. The family as a kinship network, it is worth noting, also falls
within one of the two denitions of famlia provided by Moraes e Silva in his
1823 dictionary: relatives and allies. That denition, as Sheila de Castro Faria
has pointed out, does not presume cohabitation or even consanguinity.
59
Moreover, we can safely assume that, insofar as Freyre identied the fam-
ily with the house, he did not have in mind the fogos, or census-dened
domestic units, that are analyzed here and in much of the more recent histori-
cal literature on household and family in Brazil. Even though Freyre has a
well-deserved reputation for mentioning and using what was for the time a
wide variety of sources, those sources did not include manuscript household
censuses. That should not come as a surprise. On the one hand, although com-
mon for So Paulo and Minas Gerais, such censuses are, as noted earlier, rare
for Northeastern Brazil. Indeed, to date, researchers have failed to uncover any
late colonial or early nineteenth-century manuscript household censuses of
sugar-producing districts in local archives in Freyres native Pernambuco.
60
On
58. Even if we set aside family as a broader kinship network, automatically equating
the census-dened household with family can prove problematic. The equation, for
instance, would lead to the conclusion that captains Francisco Pereira de Macedo and
Joaquim de Oliveira Guimares had no family, since at the time of the census they lived
alone at their estates. But the census indicates that both men were married, and notarial
records reveal that Captain Joaquim had not only a wife, but also a son and a married
daughter; partilha inter-vivos of his estate (1854), APEB, SJ, IT (Cachoeira). For a rare
attempt to use censuses to analyze cross-household kinship links, see Kuznesof, Household,
42 43.
59. Moraes e Silva, Diccionario, s.v. familia; Faria, A colnia, 41 43. On family as a
broader kinship network, see, e.g., Lewin, Politics; Borges, The Family; Graham, Patronage;
Wadsworth, Agents; Faria, A colnia; Joseph L. Love, So Paulo in the Brazilian Federation,
18891937 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1980), 155, 33738; Darrell E. Levi, The Prados
of So Paulo: An Elite Family and Social Change, 18401930 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press,
1987); Elizabeth Anne Kuznesof, A famlia na sociedade brasileira: Parentesco,
clientelismo e estrutura social (So Paulo, 17001980), Revista Brasileira de Histria 9, no.
17 (198889): 3763; and Zephyr Frank, Elite Families and Oligarchic Politics on the
Brazilian Frontier: Mato Grosso, 18821937, Latin American Research Review 36, no. 1
(2001): 4974.
60. I thank Marcus Carvalho for conrming this point. There is a published 1857
nominal census of Jaboato (cited in n. 20 above). Also see n. 69 below.
the other hand, scholars were apparently unaware that local archives in South-
eastern Brazil held a large body of such censuses until the late 1930s. It was
only in 1948 that Lucila Hermann published the rst major study drawing
heavily on late colonial and early nineteenth-century household censuses from
So Paulo. Hermanns study thus appeared more than a decade after Freyre
published the rst editions of Casa-grande & senzala (1933) and Sobrados e
mucambos (1936). It is entirely understandable then that he did not rely, in
either book, on work with manuscript censuses or refer to the household in the
sense of a census-dened coresidential group.
61
Perhaps even more important, in Casa-grande & senzala, Freyre never
spelled out in any clear way who, in his view, regularly lived within the typical
casa-grande. Obviously, the planter, his wife, and legitimate unmarried chil-
dren were part of the household; so too were house slaves and also, at least in
some cases, slave women who served as concubines and their children. The
reader can, to be sure, easily take away from the book the impression that the
patriarchal casa-grande household must have also sheltered large numbers of
extended kin and retainers. But, for the most part, that is merely an impression.
It is in fact difcult to locate, in either Casa-grande & senzala or Sobrados e
mucambos, any sustained discussion about the composition of the plantation
household. Likewise, although at scattered points both books do refer (almost
always in passing) to extended kin and retainers, those references receive no
special emphasis; indeed, quite characteristically, they are often ambiguous.
62
It
61. Lucila Hermann, Evoluo da estrutura social de Guaratinguet num perodo de
trezentos anos, Revista de Administrao 2, nos. 56, facs. repr. (1948; So Paulo: IPE-USP,
1986). Apparently the rst scholar to call attention to the censuses in Paulista archives was
Samuel Harman Lowrie, Bibliographical Sources Concerning Population Statistics in the
State of So Paulo, Brazil, Handbook of Latin American Studies (1937): 490501, and shortly
thereafter republished, in Portuguese, in Revista do Arquivo Municipal de So Paulo 54 (1939):
4356. Later editions of Casa-grande & senzala list Hermanns study in the bibliography.
But, in revising later editions of that book and of Sobrados e mucambos, Freyre did not
analyze the Paulista censuses. Moreover, in the introduction to the 2nd edition (1951) of
Sobrados e mucambos ( pp. 740 41 in the 12th ed.), he criticized merely quantitative
sociology, comparing it to merely chronological and descriptive history.
62. One of the very few explicit references in either book to extended family members
as residents of casa-grande occurs in a passage dealing not with household composition,
but with the architecture of the big houses: enormous kitchens; vast dining rooms;
numerous rooms for sons and guests; a chapel; annexes for the accommodation of married sons;
small chambers for the all but monastic seclusion of unmarried daughters; The Masters, xli,
emphasis added, p. 55 in the original. Other references tend to be ambiguous. See, e.g., the
passage in Sobrados, 68, on who ate meals in the casa-grandes dining room (discussed in
n. 68 below). Also see ibid., 402: [a] constelao familial ou patriarcal constituda pelo
patriarca e pela mulher, pelos lhos, pelos descendentes, pelos parentes pobres, pelos
is not that the presence of numerous extended kin and retainers as residents of
the casa-grande is incompatible with Freyres arguments, but rather that it is
altogether unclear that Freyre regarded their presence as dening characteris-
tics of the patriarchal plantation household.
63
By contrast, an apparently clear outline of who made up the patriarchal
household can be easily found in Antnio Cndidos 1951 essay on the Brazil-
ian family. The patriarchal family, he wrote, was composed not merely of
the married couples subordinated to the chief but included the householdthat
is, the servants, the retainers, the slaves, and the children of all, from whom
were recruited the occasional mistresses and the concubines of the white men,
and among whom lived the children born from such unions.
64
Scholars of
more than one persuasion have often cited Freyre and Antnio Cndido jointly
as the common source for the traditional view of the Brazilian family, some-
times melding together their arguments.
65
But it goes without saying that
Antnio Cndidos arguments cannot be ascribed to Freyre or vice versa.
agregados e pelos escravosem geral pessoas de casa ou da famlia do mesmo patriarca.
The expression constelao familial would seem to point to a broader kinship network
(rather than a coresidential group) over which the patriarch exercised authority; the last
part of the passage points in the same direction and suggests that not all those listed
necessarily lived within the patriarchs casa. Note that em geral pessoas de casa ou da
famlia do mesmo patriarca is translated simply and misleadingly as the patriarchal
household in Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil, trans.
Harriet de Ons ( New York: Knopf, 1963), 248. Other passages also suggest that Freyre did
not see retainers and the like as residents of the plantation household; e.g., a semi-feudal
society, with a minority of whites and light-skinned mulattoes dominating, patriarchally
and polygamously, from their Big Houses of stone and mortar, not only the slaves . . . in
the senzalas, but the sharecroppers, as well as tenants or retainers, those who dwelt in huts
of mud and straw. The Masters, xxix; p. 46 in the original. Note that tenants or retainers
corresponds to os agregados in the original.
63. On this matter, also see Vainfas, Trpico, 110; and Mello, O m, 41213.
64. Antnio Cndido, The Brazilian Family, 299300 (emphasis in the original).
Note that, since the essay was never published in Portuguese, it is unclear exactly what
Portuguese term corresponded, in Antnio Cndidos thinking, to household as used in the
translated essay. At least in part, it would seem to correspond to what he called the
periphery of the patriarchal family; ibid., 204, 300. Also see Vainfas, Trpico, 110.
65. See the authors listed in n. 4 above, esp. Samara, A famlia, 1116; and Samara,
Mulheres, 1522; none of whom cite any specic passage from Freyre referring to the large,
extended, and complex character of the plantation household or planter family. Instead,
they simply cite, without page references, Casa-grande & senzala and also, in some cases,
Sobrados e mucambos. Vainfas (Trpico, 110), a critic of the revisionist interpretations, does,
however, quote a passage from Casa-grande & senzala ( p. 137 in the 43rd Brazilian edition),
Indeed, perhaps the closest Freyre came in Casa-grande & senzala to
spelling out his views about the composition of the planter household is a fold-
out illustration by Ccero Dias included in the books front matter. The illus-
tration, which is based on the casa-grande of the Engenho Noruega in Per-
nambuco and which Freyre certainly approved, shows a household overowing
with individuals, both free and slave.
66
A chaplain, with a slave woman at his
side, rests in a chair in a bedroom located just off the plantations chapel, which
forms part of the casa-grande.
67
White women, accompanied by female slaves,
occupy other bedrooms. A dozen or so slaves are at work in the casa-grandes
two kitchens, while in another room two slave women are busy ironing clothes.
In the courtyard, other slaves slaughter chickens, sleep, and amuse themselves.
Two young white boys are at play in the same courtyard: one on a teeter-totter
with a slave boy, and the other, whip in hand, using another slave boy as a hob-
byhorse. Meanwhile, in the dining room, at least 20 individualsall of them
apparently whitesit around a large table with three slaves ready to serve them.
The illustration leaves no room for doubt; it portrays a bustling casa-grande
household, lled with both free and enslaved individuals. But it does not spec-
ify who the free individuals were, what relationship they shared with the
planter who headed the household, or even whether all of them lived perma-
nently within the casa-grande. Thus, we are left not knowing whether the illus-
tration was intended to represent an everyday scene or a special occasion ( per-
haps a feast day) that brought to the big house more distant kin, guests, and
neighbors.
68
in which Freyre remarked that, alongside the dominant patriarchal family, other forms of
family organization also existed historically in Brazil. Also note that some scholars (e.g.,
Borges, The Family, 56; and Kuznesof, Sexuality, 120) perceive signicant differences
between Freyre and Antnio Cndido in their views about the family in Brazil.
66. In the 43rd Brazilian edition, the illustration is attached to p. 9. I thank Dain
Borges for calling my attention, in this context, to the illustration and for suggesting that it
might portray a special occasion.
67. As in Pernambuco, chapels could be found on larger engenhos in the Recncavo.
See Azevedo, Arquitetura, 12526, 16970. Some wealthier Bahian planters did maintain
resident chaplains on their estates in the colonial period, but many did not. See Schwartz,
Sugar Plantations, 314. Indeed, the practice seems to have become rare by the early
nineteenth century. The 1835 Iguape census lists, beyond the parish vicar and two
presbyters, only two priests, and both headed their own households. One of them (Fr.
Francisco de Borja dos Santos) is among the 22 cane farmers considered here.
68. Even if the illustration is taken as representing an everyday scene, it does not
follow that all the free individuals depicted permanently resided in the casa-grande. In
discussing who took meals in the casa-grande dining room (Sobrados, 68, 246), Freyre did
By way of conclusion, it can be said that the 1835 census clearly indicates
that planters and wealthy cane farmers in Iguape did not, for the most part,
head large, extended households. But and perhaps far more important it is
unclear how, if at all, the results of the census truly challenge older interpreta-
tions that insist on the patriarchal character of the planter family and the casa-
grande household. The problem does not lie primarily in the fact that the nd-
ings presented here come from a single census of just one sugar-producing
parish. Without doubt, other censuses, if they can be found, would expand our
understanding of planter households in the sugar districts of Northeastern
Brazil.
69
Yet locating such documents would not solve the chief problem, which
is conceptual and hence also methodological. Solving that problem requires
dening more clearly notions such as patriarchy and family and specifying
more carefully, for analytical purposes, the relationship between the census-
dened fogo and family. It also requires grappling with the meanings assigned
historically, in Brazil, to terms such as family and household.
70
mention poor relatives, but, within a list that also includes travelers, peddlers, entire
families from other engenhos on day-long visits, and other guests, as well as
compadres, free plantation employees, and papa-pires and papa-jantares (i.e., self-
invited guests who simply showed up for meals). Thus, even in the case of the poor
relatives, it is not clear that they were members of the household rather than guests.
69. Although he does not provide a quantitative analysis, Evaldo Cabral de Mello
(O m, 468n27) cites the published 1857 census of Jaboato to argue that a nuclear
structure represented, at least in the nineteenth century, the predominant trait of the
aristocratic plantation family in Pernambuco. My preliminary work with a set of partial
censuses (dated 182526) of various districts in the township of Cachoeira in the
Recncavo also suggests that sugar planters generally did not head large, complex
households (once slaves are excluded). Also note that there are some indications that future
research in Portugal may locate late colonial household censuses of major sugar districts in
Pernambuco. See Marclio, Crescimento, 36n19. Likewise, a 1762 census of Oeiras in the
backlands of Piau, discovered in a Portuguese archive, has been recently transcribed and
published, with an introduction, by Miridan Britto Falci in A cidade de Oeiras do Piau,
Revista do Instituto Histrico e Geogrco Brasileiro 407 (2000): 25199.
70. On the meanings assigned historically to family, etc., and related matters, see, e.g.,
Graham, 1723, 20; Borges, The Family, 7981; Faria, A colnia, esp. 40 45, 35593;
Lewin, Politics, chap. 3; and Luciano Raposo de Almeida Figueiredo, Barrocas famlias: Vida
familiar em Minas Gerais no sculo XVIII (So Paulo: HUCITEC, 1997), esp. 15763. I
explore some of the issues raised above in Reading.
It should be stressed that this essay does not aim at rehabilitating Freyre or his
views about the supposedly mild character of slavery in Brazil or about racial democracy.
Rather, one of the main goals is to call attention to the methodological and conceptual
problems that characterize some of the more recent historical literature on family and
household in Brazil.
And, in the end, the ndings presented here are not necessarily incompat-
ible with Ccero Diass illustration of the casa-grande at the Engenho Noruega.
Wealthy planters in Iguape and elsewhere in the Recncavo did build impres-
sive casas-grandes on their estates, comparable to the big house that Dias
depicts. Today, for the most part, the plantation mansions of the Recncavo
have disappeared or exist only as ruins. But, from the descriptions of those
mansions found in postmortem inventories, from the mansions that have sur-
vived, and from accounts by nineteenth-century travelers and the like, it is not
at all impossible to imagine Iguapes senhores de engenho presiding over, in
patriarchal fashion, an elaborate feast-day meal that brought together, for the
occasion, a whole houseful of extended kin, neighbors, and other guests.
71
71. See, e.g., Anna Ribeiro de Goes Bittencourt, Longos seres do campo, ed. and annot.
Maria Clara Mariani Bittencourt, 2 vols. (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1992), 2:38 46;
Maximiliano de Habsburgo, Bahia 1860: Esboos de viagem, trans. Antonieta da Silva
Carvalho and Carmen Silva Medeiros, with a preface by Katia M. de Queirs Mattoso,
introd. and annot. Moema Parente Augel (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro / Salvador:
Fundao Cultural do Estado da Bahia, 1982), 19596; Julius Naeher, Land und Leute in der
brasilianischen provinz Bahia (Leipzig: Verlag von Gustav Weigel, 1881), 130, 157. Also see
Pinho, Histria, 43334. In Narrative of a Recent Visit to Brazil . . . (London: Edward Marsh,
1853), 5556, John Candler and Wilson Burgess described more intimate meals at the
Engenho Vitria in Iguape that brought together (beyond the two English travelers) only
the planter, his immediate family, and a hired European tutor. Their description of meals at
Vitria is also compatible with the ndings from the 1835 census. On the architecture of
casas-grandes in the Recncavo, see Azevedo, Arquitetura.

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Revisiting the Casa-grande: Plantation and Cane-Farming

Households in Early Nineteenth-Century Bahia

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