“MONSTROUS AND ILLEGAL PROCEEDINGS”: LAW ...

Uruguayan notaries. These included requirements that former slaves’ declarations had to be
taken independently of their masters to guard against undue coercion. 73 The efforts to
reform peonage contracts aimed directly at consolidating Uruguayan control over the
borderlands by demanding that Brazilian ranchers fully respect national laws. In this sense,
they again revealed how conflicts over slave citizenship in the borderlands combined with
broader concerns over sovereignty and order to promote a campaign to harden the
boundaries around citizenship. If Uruguayan authorities permitted elements of imperial
private law to nullify internal definitions of legal rights and citizenship, national sovereignty
would be little more than a chimera.
Deepening Conflicts
Reformers like Poyo, Lamas and Berro recognized that the combination of weak
legal institutions and factional conflicts threatened national sovereignty. They struggled for
the authority to determine and police the boundaries of the political community, itself, as
well as the rights and obligations governing it. Working through state institutions like the
courts, slaves connected their own freedom to these broader concerns over sovereignty and
order. They developed collective legal strategies to blunt attempts by their purported
Brazilian masters to extend slave laws across the borderlands. They called upon the state to
protect the legal and social rights associated with Uruguayan national identity. In doing so,
they demanded more crystalline sovereign boundaries to separate them from the slave
system in Brazil. In this manner, definitions of citizenship and social rights blended with
efforts to clarify national boundaries and impose order within their geographic extent.
Through their micro-level actions, slaves worked to propel these disparate aspects of
73 Ibid., 141-43.
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