A última Forca: uma história de resistência negra na Pilar Imperial

Abstract

This is challenging work, multifaceted and interdisciplinary, given its historical nuances, social, human and legal, where it is proposed to analyze one of the crimes most controversial events that occurred between the April 27th and 28th, 1874, with the murders João Evangelista de Lima Captain's and of your wife, madam Josepha Martha de Lima, by enslaved black people Prudêncio, Francisco and Vicente, from the city of Pilar, Province of Alagoas. This crime feeds the hypothesis, in the present study, to be much more than a simple and shocking case, double murder carried out by enslaved blacks against their masters but an attempt at a real uprising against the hardships of slavery black that population of Pilar experienced at the time. Therefore, proposes to reveal a detailed study, using paleography, legal interpretation and historiography operation’ applied to the process which culminated in the sentenced to death by hanging of the enslaved Francisco, revealing previously unexplored nuances about the case, constant analysis of the most relevant documentary source and until then, little studied: criminal process itself moved by Public Justice from the city of Pilar, against that. The importance of this historical fact transcends the land of the Kaetés, entering Brazilian historiography last execution by hanging of the Empire of Brazil. A crime that brings between the lines the slavery effects, that jettisons the human freedom, suffocates the soul and exposes macabre nudity of the entire structural and oppressive apparatus that reflected slavery and your octopus arms, which was worth not only of the oligarchic sugar society but of the law itself and of the Judiciary.