“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

In doing so, however, he opened up the possibility that local factional conflicts could spill
across borders as Brazilians called upon their government to protect their property rights.
The ambiguities around national categories and sovereign boundaries flowing from the slave
citizenship cases and their fallout remained at the center of borderlands storms.
As slaves like Fermin and Pedro sought to secure their freedom by appealing to
national and factional divisions in the borderlands, their masters deployed their own cross-
border connections to blunt those arguments. In the process, masters and slaves reopened
both the factional wounds and sovereign debates that plagued the borderlands. Specifically,
by provoking conflicts over the boundaries of citizenship and legal rights, slaves successfully
placed the Brazilian labor discipline practices developed in the wake of the Guerra Grande
directly at odds with Uruguayan sovereignty. Buffeted by threats to national sovereignty on
the one hand and factional violence on the other, Uruguayan legal reformers increasingly
found it necessary to harden boundaries around citizenship. They would seek to convert
borderlands slaves into members of the political community. This became a basic condition
of national independence.
Slaves, Sovereignty and Order
In a fiery 1857 article in the Montevideo newspaper “El Nacional,” Juan Carlos
Gomez, one of the most ardent opponents of Brazilian influence in the northern
borderlands, asked “what remained of Uruguayan sovereignty?” The author’s answer was
“tutelage” to Brazilian masters. 55 In another article, he called upon Uruguayans to remember
the blood spilled in resisting Brazilian imperialism. He declared that “we are, more than
55 Juan Carlos Gomez, Juan Carlos Gomez: Su Actuación en la Prensa de Montevideo, vol. 2
(Montevideo: Imprenta Artística y Encuadernación de Dornaleche Hermanos, 1921), 298-
300.
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