The March of the Confessed Defendants

Slave Resistance, Criminal Justice, and Capital Punishment in Brazil, the United States, and Cuba During the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The article investigates the actions of enslaved people who committed capital crimes, abandoned plantations and turned themselves into justice. The phenomenon was frequent in Brazil, but there were similar cases in Cuba and the United States during the slavery crisis. The first part of the article analyzes the making of criminal justice systems and the relationship between slave resistance and the death penalty in the Age of Revolutions. The second part of the article is divided into three sections that analyze the strategies of slave resistance and criminal courts in the Paraíba Valley, the Mississippi Valley and Matanzas during the last decades of slavery. This investigation develops a method of incorporated comparison to explain the reasons that made the march of the confessed defendants an episodic phenomenon in the United States and Cuba and, at the same time, endemic in Brazil.