Celso Magalhães e a justiça infame: crime, escravidão e poder no Brasil Império

Abstract

The thesis examined representations of elites about the slave in the second half of the 19th century and, equally important, the interference of political factors on the imperial Judiciary. The research proposal passes through the understanding of the organization of the national legal system after brazilian independence and along the 1.800, with emphasis on the regulation of formal treatment given to slaves and freedmen in this context. Appreciates also the study of (re)production of discourses constructed by a socially elite white and slave owner, legitimized to sign up their speech in court proceedings. It also seeks to understand the subject and the mechanisms of that policy which, in the monarchy period, entangled the judiciary in the dynamic game of interests that marked the relationship between the imperial court and local political groups. The research was developed from the life trajectory of Celso Magalhães (1849-1879) and more particularly the role of this young man of letters and jurist in the so-called “crime da baronesa de Grajaú”, occurred in São Luís, in 1876. The role of the character in charge of defendant, Ana Rosa Viana Ribeiro, helped to compose a case without precedent in the history of the judiciary of Maranhão, in which a lady married to a rich and influential politician was arrested and placed in the defendant’s chair by the fact of having killed a child slave. In this way, the research is related to the fight in the legal and political fields carried out from the criminal charges here. In the legal sphere, the process that judged Ana Rosa contributes to the analysis of the production and circulation of discourses of elites on the legal quality of the slave in the judiciary. With regard to relations of power, gravitated around the “crime da baronesa” part of the political atmosphere of the province of Maranhão, who took that criminal prosecution and the exposure of the characters in it involved as stage for a long clash caught between liberal and conservative factions. In this regard, the study sought to think about justice and politics in the Empire from a peripheral location, without much expression in the national context, but inserted in the tense relations between the Court and the regional elites. Apart from the Centre-South of the country, Maranhão stressed the rules designed for the Empire, printed peculiar traits to the bureaucratic frame thought for the nation and certainly invented various forms of corruption of the 19th-century institutions.