“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

anchers, like that of local Uruguayan caudillos, directly challenged the national legal order
Lamas wished to construct.
In his diplomatic capacity, Lamas had maintained correspondence with Poyo. He
had taken a particular interest in the incidents Poyo cited in his letters. Lamas requested
detailed information on several cases allegedly involving the enslavement of Uruguayan
blacks. He carried those protests directly to the imperial court. 61 Lamas also drafted a series
of letters to imperial statesmen in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1850s. In them, he upbraided
authorities primarily in Rio Grande do Sul for impressing Uruguayan citizens into the
Brazilian military. 62 Echoing the arguments we saw in Pedro’s case, imperial authorities
justified the practice by claiming that under Brazilian law the father’s citizenship determined
the citizenship of his children. This was so regardless of their place of birth or subsequent
conduct. In advancing this argument, riograndense leaders in essence conceptualized
citizenship as permanently adhering to Brazilian subjects. This had the obvious advantage of
foreclosing the types of strategies employed by fugitive slaves like Pedro and Fermin to
construct juridical barriers between themselves and the Brazilian slave system across the
border. For Brazilian leaders, slave citizenship claims had to be limited to maintain social
order. By way of example, Roger Kittleson described how angry legislators in Rio Grande
do Sul responded to one slave’s assertion that her Uruguayan citizenship exempted her from
reenslavement in Brazil. The provincial deputies argued that linking freedom and place of
61 Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud y Trabajo, 150.
62 Carta del Legación Oriental del Uruguay en el Brasil (April 14, 1857), reprinted in Andrés
Lamas, "La Nacionalidad de Los Hijos de Brasileños Nascidos en la República," Revista
Histórica de la Universidad I, no. 1 (1907): 202-12. Although Lamas did not make direct
mention of the race of the soldiers in these particular letters, it was well understood by all
parties that the practice at issue was the capture and enslavement (or impressments) of black
soldiers in the borderlands. Borucki, Chagas, and Stalla, Esclavitud y Trabajo, 149-51.
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