60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Totalitarianism and Slavery
37
flight. Sharp (1976, 153, 170), writing about the Chocó area in Colombia,
asserted that freed persons did not leave the White communities because of a
shortage of arable land, but because they desired freedom from Spanish
authority, domination and law. Flory (1979, 123) pithily observes,
“Contemporaries realized that there were more things in Brazil for a Black
man to flee from than slavery.” He also advises researchers not to be too ready
to translate the term negros fugidos as “runaway slaves”, since it equally incorporated
free Blacks who had fled to Maroon communities, and others
engaged in gold or diamond transactions or other trading activities that the
authoritarian state deemed illegal. Elsewhere, he (1979, 130n32) notes that a
pejorative description of the quilombos in the early nineteenth century categorized
them as consisting of “creoles, vagrants, the superstitious, thieves,
criminals and the sickly, gathered to engage in dancing, religious fanaticism,
sartorial excess, and gluttony”.
In the fabricated social order of the enslavers, freed persons would have
had to establish settlements housing more than a few struggling, straggling
individuals to ensure the integrity and viability of their communities.
Lockhart and Schwartz (1983, 402–3) point out that in Brazil the development
of the plantation economy led to
the growth of a free rural population of humble people who were for the most
part of mixed racial origin. ...In São Paulo and the south they were often small,
independent subsistence farmers, living a rustic life in tiny villages. In the northeast
they were more often moradores, a new rural category, juridicially free but
usually attached to a plantation or ranch. . . . Impoverished, landless, and politically
insecure, the moradores, who were in the main pardos, free Blacks, and
caboclos, were socially well below the cane growers, who tended to be whites.
Droughts periodically drove many of these people into the coastal cities, where
they swelled the ranks of the urban poor. In either city or countryside this group
had benefited little from the economic boom of the late colonial period.
Increasingly, the merchant-planter elite and its spokesmen perceived this class as
a threat to the existing social order.
What was true of Brazil was basically true of most of the highly developed
plantation societies, where the majority of free Coloureds and free Blacks
were socially at just one remove from enslaved persons. Many of them were
targets for revolution, and sometimes they led or became involved in social
unrest, as happened in Venezuela in 1795, Brazil in 1798 (Lockhart and