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of the skin is reckoned no ground of distinction.” He said he saw Negro army officers over white soldiers.⁷

      Robertson reported similarly of Rio de Janeiro in the 1830’s: “So great is the preponderance of the colored population over the white that in the streets you can scarcely believe you’re not in a colony of blacks and mulattoes.”⁸ Gardner said that when he entered Rio in the 1840’s, “scarcely a white face was to be seen. The shops … seemed to be attended by mulattoes, or by Portuguese of nearly as dark a hue.”⁹

      The Jesuits, who were once a power in Brazil, and had great plantations and mines, tried to establish racial lines but were severely reprimanded by the King of Portugal who ordered them to abandon their high-flown ideas of superiority. The plantations of these priests were more systematically conducted than those by the laity and the slaves were by all accounts better treated. In the matter of cohabiting with the Negro woman, however, the clergy was of no better morality than the rest. The Benedictine and Carmelite monks on the great slave estates had many mulatto children. They were, as Erasmus might have remarked, fathers by name and fathers in deed. Henry Koster wrote, “The conduct of the younger members of the communities of regular clergy is well known not to be by any means correct; the vows of celibacy are not strictly adhered to. This circumstance decreases the respect with which these men might otherwise be treated upon their own estates and increases much the licentiousness of the women.”¹⁰

      Caldcleugh says similarly, “The conduct of the clergy, as more is expected from them than the other classes, is certainly the most reprehensible.

      One of them, a Padre Canto, had four mulatto sons, who following the mother, according to the custom of the slave countries, were slaves. He sold two of them and the others performed the pleasant filial act of carrying their father about in a sedan chair.”¹¹

      As regards the clergy in the mining districts, he said they lived “very dissolute lives … generally their conduct to their slaves is sensual to the extreme to one sex and cruel to the other … They pursue a system of unrestrained licentiousness.”¹²

      Koster reported that he saw “many light-colored mulattoes” on the plantations owned by the priests but that such were usually married to “a person of darker hue” to prevent the slave from becoming too white.

      Later when the white woman came to Brazil, there were in the interior many independent planters, who lived like feudal lords on great estates, rearing families of white and mulatto children. Mathison who visited Brazil in the 1820’s saw many such, and Walsh tells of visiting the home of a white Brazilian in the interior, whose family “consisted of two mothers, a black and a white, and twelve children of all sizes, sexes, and colors; some with woolly hair and dusky faces, some with sallow skin and long black hair,” the members of which “exhibited in their dances painful indications of licentious habits.”¹³ Families thus mixed were far from rare. Incest of the white master with his attractive mulatto daughter was not uncommon either. Sometimes when the master died, his white widow, alone in the woods, took a capable Negro or mulatto as her “paramour and partner.”¹⁴ Walsh also says that he saw a woman with triplets one of which was white, one brown, and the other black.¹⁵

      Codman tells of a poor Frenchman, one Expilly, who solved his economic problem thus: Having only two slaves, a man and a woman, he, himself, had a child by the Negro woman, while he made his white wife have a child by the Negro man, then selling the two mulatto children he used the money to set himself up in business.¹⁶

      One Englishman, finding that his children by black women turned out well and fetched a good price set himself up as a stallion, having as many as he could then selling his own offspring as soon as they were old enough to leave their mothers.¹⁷

      On the estates, the mulatto children of the white master ate at the same table with the white legitimate ones. They were taught by the same priests, and received the same respect from the slaves as the white children. In the interior, the only female companion of the white wife, was often the Negro woman to whom she gave her children to be nursed. However, some of the white wives grew exceedingly jealous of the black concubines and knocked out their teeth, had them lashed, and even had their breasts torn out or burnt with hot irons.

      The slave in Brazil, had by unwritten law, many of the rights of a freeman. He could educate himself, and was urged to do so. He could defend himself against his master, or any white man; he had little fear of being separated from his family. He had every chance of becoming a free man, and it is said that he could take himself before the courts, have himself valued, and then offer to buy himself, which could not be refused. This latter, however, is denied by certain writers, who say it was merely a custom. Finally, he could be legally married, and could defend his wife’s chastity against a white man.¹⁸

      “The slaves of Brazil,” said Burton, “are regularly married according to the forms of the Catholic Church; the banns are published in the same manner as those of free persons. The masters encourage marriages among the slaves for it is from these lawful connections that they can expect to increase the number of their creoles.” They were given the sacrament at marriage, also.

      Socially, an unmixed black was in the lowest caste, but he was free to marry any color of woman he wished. A mulatto or an octoroon were regarded as his superior but if the latter were slaves, even though they were indistinguishable from white, he could buy them. Ewbank wrote of the slaves he saw at one sale. “They were of every shade from deep Angola-jet to white, or nearly white, as one young woman facing me appeared. She was certainly superior in mental organization to some of the buyers. The anguish with which she watched the proceedings, and waited her turn to be brought out, exposed, examined, and disposed of, was distressing.”¹⁹

      As for mulattoes they were often regarded as white. Sir Richard Burton wrote, “Here all men, especially free men, who are not black, are white; and often a man is officially white, but naturally almost a Negro. This is directly opposed to the system of the United States, where all not unmixed white, are black.”²⁰

      As regards marriage between colored and white there were no legal restrictions whatever, and few social ones. Henry Koster, who lived in Brazil in the 1800’s, says, “The colonists married the women of mixed caste, owing to the impossibility of obtaining those of their own color; and the frequency of the custom, and the silence of the laws upon the subject, removed all idea of degradation in thus connecting themselves. Still the European notions of superiority were not entirely laid aside and these caused the passing of some regulations by which colored persons were not to enjoy certain privileges …” But these laws were never observed. Koster adds that while “the degraded state of the people of color in the British colonies is most lamentable, in Brazil, even the trifling regulations which exist against them remain unattended to. A mulatto enters into holy orders or is appointed a magistrate, his papers stating him to be a white man, but his appearance plainly denoting him the contrary. In conversing on one occasion with a man of color who was in my service, I asked him if a certain Capitam-mor (a high rank usually held by the nobility) was not a mulatto; he answered, ‘he was, but is not now.’ I begged him to explain when he added, ‘Can a Capitam-mor be a mulatto?’ ”²¹

      Marriage between an upper-class white man and colored woman was considered unusual only when the woman was black, or nearly black, but not with the intent of lowering the man in the estimation of others. “Indeed, the remark is only made if the person is a planter of any importance and the woman of color is decidedly of dark color, for even a considerable tinge will pass for white; if the white man belongs to the lower orders the woman is not accounted as being unequal to him in rank unless she is nearly black. The European adventurers often marry in this manner, which generally occurs when the woman has a dower. The rich mulatto families are often glad to dispose of their daughters to these men although the person who has been fixed upon may be in indifferent circumstances; for the color of the children of the daughters is bettered and from their well-known prudence and regularity of this set of men, a large fortune may be hoped for even from small beginnings… .

      “Still the Brazilians of high birth and large property do not like to intermarry with persons whose mixture of blood is very

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