“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

anchers operating throughout the borderlands, labor discipline became even more difficult
to maintain.
As Brazilian slaves exploited Uruguay’s prolonged factional conflicts to cross borders
and move towards freedom, their masters faced a crisis. By the late 1840s, Brazilian ranchers
in the southern borderlands regularly denounced the “enormous difficulties and harms”
caused by slaves fleeing into neighboring countries. 12 The end of the international slave
trade in 1850 only heightened tensions as the cost of slave labor began to rise precipitously.
In particular, increasing internal demand for slaves in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the
dynamic core of the developing Brazilian coffee plantation economy, made borderlands
slaves valuable sources of labor and capital. 13
Relieved of the increasingly intense pressure from the British in connection with the
slave trade, elites in Rio de Janeiro could also turn their attention to the southern
borderlands. Imperial officials had looked on nervously as the Guerra Grande progressed
throughout the Río de la Plata region in the late-1840s. The decade-long Farrapos
Revolution had already threatened to topple the empire. Deep tensions remained. The
empire engaged in a vigorous effort to secure the tenuous loyalty of the powerful riograndense
ranching community by aggressively pursuing their complaints against Oribe’s blancos. Old
sovereign frictions with the Argentine provinces also played a role in encouraging imperial
intervention. Elites in the imperial core feared that Rosas could strengthen Argentine
control over Uruguay through his ties with Oribe’s blancos. Brazilian ranchers and their
12
AHRGS. Correspondência da Câmara Municipal de São Borja. Lata 258, Maço 333
in Petiz, Buscando a Liberdade, 64.
13
Robert W. Slenes, "The Brazilian Internal Slave Trade, 1850-1888: Regional
Economies, Slave Experience and Politics of a Peculiar Market," in The Chattel Principle:
Internal Slave Trades in the Americas, ed. Walter Johnson (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2004), 325-75, Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud y Trabajo, 148-49.
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