Title: Quando falha o controle
Description: This paper regarding the social history of slavery studies crimes committed by slaves against their masters in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil. It tries to understand who were those slaves and what were the motivations they used - or were assigned to them - to justify their actions. This analysis allows us to understand the relationship between master and slave which culminated in the murder. But it also allows seeing the horizontal relationships betweens those slaves and their partners, their affective and social connections which could influence their behavior. I focus primarily in two types of documents created by these arguments: the criminal prosecution installed by the legal authorities, such as the police and magistrates, and the inventory of the goods the master possessed and that would be shared by the heirs.^

When analyzed together, these two documents can shed light on the routine of the property, informing not only how the crime occurred, what were its motivations and how the defendant slave justified his actions to the State authorities, but also how he related to other slaves, what was his occupation, his skills, what items were produced in the property, what was the financial situation of the master, if it made him demand to expand the production, through an intensification of work pace from his slaves that would justify an uprising. At first, the analysis focuses on the late 1840's, when sugar plantations were being surpassed by coffee and a high percentage of slaves had African origin. Then, three homicides took place on sugar, coffee and tea plantations and four African slaves were tried and condemned to death, according to the law of June 10th 1835. Afterwards, five crimes that occurred in the 1870's will be explored. They happened in coffee, cotton and food plantations.^

Fourteen slaves were prosecuted, some of them were absolved, while others were condemned to face various punishments, but none of them were condemned to death - although the law of 1835.
Subjects: Slaves, Social conditions, Slavery, History, Master and servant, Emancipation, Crime, Administration of Criminal justice
Places: Brazil
Time periods: 19th century