“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

colorado allies played upon these fears. They actively courted an imperial intervention to
maintain their cross-border economic system and their access to the slave labor necessary to
operate it. Eventually, the Brazilian army, along with Urquiza’s forces from the Argentine
Littoral, combined to defeat Rosas and Oribe in just a few short months. 14
Although the colorados had triumphed, they did so by surrendering substantial
elements of Uruguayan sovereignty to the advancing Brazilians. In exchange for imperial
support, the colorado government acceded to a host of demands from Brazilian ranchers by
ratifying five treaties in October of 1851. Particularly important was the Extradition Treaty,
which guaranteed the return of “fugitive” Brazilian slaves to their masters. 15 Collectively, the
1851 Treaties represented an unequivocal triumph for the Brazilian ranchers. The
agreements effectively ensured Brazilian political and economic dominance over its smaller
neighbor. 16 The riograndense elite had once again redrawn sovereign lines around the
borderlands political community to secure their economic rights and ensure labor discipline.
Yet, the success of ranchers did not spell the end of debates over sovereignty or over the
boundaries of Brazilian slave law. Such disputes shifted from the battlefield to borderlands
courtrooms over the next two decades as slaves renewed efforts to forge their freedom in a
series of legal cases in which citizenship, sovereignty and factional conflicts tightly
intertwined.
“When [we] returned to Brazil, he treated [me] like a slave”
With the end of the Guerra Grande bringing renewed assertions of imperial influence
over the borderlands, fugitive slaves had to confront new and aggressive arguments that
14 Barrán, Apogeo y Crisis, 40-41.
15 Pivel Devoto and Ranieri de Pivel Devoto, La Guerra Grande.
16 Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, La Formación de Los Estados en la Cuenca del Plata:
Argentina, Brasil, Uruguay, Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Grupo Ed. Norma, 2006), 164.
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