ABSTRACT
Coartado people were the slaves who had a contract predicting a payment in installments in exchange for their freedom, and therefore they found themselves in an uncertain zone between slavery and freedom. While they were coartados, many of these people “lived as freed people,” but some of them faced challenges to keep their social condition as well as their expectation of changing their judicial status in a short term. The revocation of a contract of coartação for non-payment or disobedience of another clause in the agreement could result in a lawsuit against slaves with the purpose of re-slavement. In order to avoid re-slavement, to reverse it or to put it into effect, sometimes masters sometimes slaves in process of being coartado recurred to the Court of Mariana to solve their conflicts. This article discusses these feuds between masters and slaves through dozens of Civil Actions in the Court of Mariana city between the beginning of the 18th Century and the first decades of the 19th century. The goal is to analyze the conditions of validation or revocation of lawsuits of coartação, relating different strategies of litigants to dismiss, sustain, or reach a favorable verdict according to their interests. It is in the middle of these disputes for or against re-slavement that emerged customary practices that shaped the processes of coartação, and consequently, that also shaped the possibilities and constraints faced by coartado people in their daily lives.
Keywords
Coartado People; Freedom; Re-enslavement; Court of Justice; Portuguese America