Slavery and printing in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro

Rodrigo Camargo de Godoi1

On Sunday June 22, 1862, around three o'clock in the afternoon, the creole2
slave Theodoro, estimated eighteen years old, left the address where he lived, at 65 Rua
do Ouvidor, elegantly dressed in jacket and white pants, to take a walk in the city.
The slave's tour, however, was not quite as we might suppose. It was evening, about
eight o'clock, when Theodoro was beaten and wounded by the freedman Jos
Rodrigues, known as Jos, the Shoemaker, near Rua da Cadeia. During the confusion,
Theodoro's white jacket got soiled and he had to return home to change clothes. Close
to the Largo da S, Theodoro found a friend, who he did not remember the name, and
spoke with him for a while and then continued walking towards the Rua do Ouvidor.
When he got close to the Rua dos Latoeiros, Theodoro stopped in front of a large door
and saw, at distance, a black falling mortally wounded on the sidewalk. The problem
was that witnesses present at the moment claimed that the offender would have been
Theodoro himself, who was promptly seized by the Portuguese Jos Antonio Machado
and handed over to Dr. Manuel Joaquim Fernandes Eiras, the first district of the parish
of Santssimo Sacramento police chief3.
On the next day, Theodoro was sent to the Casa de Deteno and waited there to
the end of a long process in which he was judged and condemned for the murder. There
is strong evidence against Theodoro in the lawsuit, a bloody pocket knife, Jose, the
Shoemaker, who was never found; and especially the fact that the young slave was a
capoeira already well-known to the police the reason why sometimes Theodoro had
been arrested and punished in the Casa de Correo4. Initially, Theodoro was sentenced
to life imprisonment, but such punishment was commuted in four hundred lashes by
Euzbio de Queiroz, the President of the Rio de Janeiro Court of Appeal. According to

1
PhD Student in Social History at IFCH-Unicamp, with financial support of Fapesp. E-mail:
rodrigocamargo21@hotmail.com.
2
Brazilian born slave.
3
Apelao criminal. A Justia, autor. Theodoro, crioulo escravo de Junius Villeneuve e Cia, ru. ANRJ,
Corte de Apelao, n. 1184, caixa, 160, Gal-C, 1863.
4
Fundamentals to slave capoeira in Rio de Janeiro are the Soares researches. The historian (Soares,
2004: 94) shows how during the time of King Joo VI in Rio de Janeiro (1808-1821) was remarkable the
number of assaults among slaves in the city.

1
the curator responsible for the Theodoros defense, Jos Calazans de Andrade, the right
to punish is a need for all of well-established society and the right of property is no less
greater. Hence, there was no sense disabling a slave, keeping him in lifelong
incarceration, at damage of his master. Theodoro was then harshly punished.
Theodoros master kept silence during all the process. He was no ordinary
person; but he was Junius Villeneuve and Co., company responsible for publishing the
Jornal do Commercio, the most important daily newspaper of Rio de Janeiro, perhaps of
the whole Brazilian Empire. There was chance Theodore was, himself, born in slavery
at the Jornal do Commercio, once his baptism certificate, transcribed in the lawsuit,
tells us that his mother, the slave Henriqueta, already belonged to Francisco Antonio
Picot when she gave birth in March 1844. Picot had assumed the newspaper
management as soon as its owner, Junius Villeneuve, returned to France after years
living in Rio5. Therefore, it is probable that, beyond the strokes of capoeira, Theodoro
learned to print at a young age. Furthermore, as Theodoro informed in his first
declaration, he was constantly punished because of the service. But if Theodoro
learned to print, even under blows, he did not learn to read or to write. Unlike the labor
of the typesetter or of the proofreader, the printer's labor, considered heavy (Vitorino,
2000: 39), did not require great skills.
Nevertheless, Theodore and quite possible his mother were not the only slaves of
Junius Villeneuve and Co. Max Fleiuss (Vitorino, 2000: 100) informed that the first
printer machine Alauzet employed in the Jornal do Commercio was moved by six
slaves, two of them were typesetters, craft which required reading and writing.
According to Vitorino (2000: 71, 99), among the founders of the Associao
Tipogrfica Fluminense, association of typesetters created in Rio de Janeiro, in 18536,
there was a captive typesetter owned by a priest.
African slaves were also used as printers in the lithography Rensburg & Heaton,
which was, in 1846, the largest lithographic establishment in Brazil, according to the

5
In 1832, in partnership with Mougenol, Junius Villeneuve bought from Seignot Plancher the Jornal do
Commercio and its typography. Two years later, Villeneuve bought the other half of the company
becoming its only owner. According to Macedo (1876, v. 2: 401-406), since then entered the large daily
newspaper in its period of greatest prosperity. Villeneuve rearranged the journal, improving its
commercial part, and mainly, publishing the parliamentary debates and French novels, the folhetins.
6
According to Artur Vitorino (2000: 71-72), when the Associao Tipogrfica Fluminense engaged in the
struggles of the typesetters, promoted cultural improvement of its members and intervened in technical
and economic problems of the printing industry, assumed political practices which recorded signals of a
transition from a mutual association for a labor organization of resistance.

2
American traveler Thomas Ewbank (1856: 193). In his book, Ewbank also described the
astonishment of Mr. Heaton hearing that in the United States lithographic pressmen
were paid from ten to fifteen dollars a week. Mr. Heaton had said that A mil ris (fifty
cents) a day [] is a good wages here, and the slaves do not cost us a quarter of that.
However, slave labor in the production of printed material in the Brazilian
Empire was not restricted to Rensburg & Heaton or to the Jornal do Commercio. The
Act 384, of October 16, 1844, allows us to infer that slaves were widely used in the
Brazilian graphic industry7. For the exception of the National Printing House, the Act
regulated the collection of an annual tax on the printing houses established there. The
tribute, called Patente, varied from one region to another, differentiating villages,
maritime cities, inner cities and the capital of the Empire, and was based on the number
of free workers or slaves employed in the establishments.
In the Brazilians inner cities, for instance, typographic establishments, which
employed up to fifteen free workers would pay 40$000 annually. If they employed
between sixteen to thirty free workers the tax would double, as well as to quadruple if
that number was exceeded. According to the article 3 of Act, for the slave laborers,
alone or together with the freemen, there was a 10% surcharge on the tax relating to
the free laborers. The law also defined that workers were the typesetters, printers,
beaters and learners, and that in the end of every fiscal year the owners of typographic
factory should send to the government full lists of all laborers, freemen and slaves,
employed in their establishments.
In Brazilian Empire it was usual the coexistence of freemen and slaves in several
industries, from Printing Houses to the major companies, as the shipyard of Ponta da
Areia8. From this perspective, the surcharge demanded by the Act 384, would certainly
not aim to restrict slave labor in the typographic factories. After all, as Mr. Heaton said
to Mr. Ewbank, just two years after the proclamation of that law, slaves were still a
great deal in Brazilian printing houses.

7
Decreto n. 384 de 16 de outubro de 1844. In: Coleo das Leis do Imprio do Brasil. Available in:
<http://www2.camara.gov.br>.
8
About slave labor in the industry of Rio de Janeiro see Karasch (2000), Chapter 7, and Soares (2007),
Chapter 6.

3
 Until the middle of the nineteen century Rio de Janeiro could still be considered
an African city. The 1849 census reveals that 80,000 of its inhabitants were slaves,
especially Africans, many illegally enslaved after 1831. Indeed, this numbers made the
capital of Brazil the largest slave city in the Americas (Karasch, 2000: 28). So the main
question of this paper is: what is the place of Africa, or better, what is the place of
enslaved Africans and their descendants in the process of cultural globalization
intensified from the eighteenth century? Beyond the captive pressmen in Rio the
Janeiro, there is evidence of slaves and freedmen who were also able to read and write
in Portuguese America since the middle of eighteenth century. It is doubtless, the
researches in that direction would reveal new perspectives for a possible social history
of reading, not only for Brazil, but for other slave societies.

References and sources:

Apelao criminal. A Justia, autor. Theodoro, crioulo escravo de Junius Villeneuve e Cia,
ru. ANRJ, Corte de Apelao, n. 1184, caixa, 160, Gal-C, 1863.

Decreto n. 384 de 16 de outubro de 1844. In: Coleo das Leis do Imprio do Brasil.
Available at: <http://www2.camara.gov.br>. Accessed: May, 30, 2012.

EWBANK, Thomas. Life in Brazil. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1856.
Available at: <books.gloogle.com.br>. Accessed: Jul, 27, 2012.

KARASCH, Mary C. A vida dos escravos no Rio de Janeiro (1808-1850). Traduo Pedro
Maia Soares. So Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.

MACEDO, Joaquim Manuel de. Anno Biographico Brazileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Typographia
e Lithographia do Imperial Instituto Artstico, 1876.

SOARES, Carlos Eugnio Lbano. A capoeira escrava e outras tradies rebeldes no Rio
de Janeiro (1808-1850). Campinas: Ed. Unicamp, 2004.

SOARES, Luiz Carlos. O povo de Cam na capital do Brasil: a escravido urbana no Rio
de Janeiro do sculo XIX. Rio de Janeiro: Faperj; 7Letras, 2007.

VITORINO, Artur Jos Renda. Mquinas e operrios: mudana tcnica e sindicalismo

grfico (So Paulo e Rio de Janeiro, 1858-1912). So Paulo: Annablume; Fapesp, 2000.