The modern historiography of slavery in Latin America has repeatedly shown a tendency to go to extremes. In the 1940s Gilberto Freyre painted a multi-racial picture of Brazilian society that highlighted points of cultural contact between the races, and one result was an inclination by others to assess Brazilian slavery as a relatively benign form of human bondage. That myth had its national uses for Brazilians of the time, but it was also adopted by foreigners for analytical purposes. Outside Brazil, especially in the United States, historians searching for a context within which to understand their own country's slaveholding past readily adopted the genteel characterization of Brazilian slavery. Freyre's analysis supplied a comparative dimension, and the demands of argumentation within the comparative format tended again to emphasize the extremes of the two cases. The portrait of the friendly master in Brazil became a familiar stereotype, easily generalized into a universal myth about slavery in Latin America as a whole.1 Freyre's ideas, stripped of their richly suggestive internal contradictions and articulated as a whole thesis, survived until the 1960s when the momentum of reaction began to gather. A significant part of that reaction dwelt by contrast upon the harshness of slave treatment in Latin America, and although it rested substantively upon an increasingly refined and varied empirical foundation, it took a form of extreme revisionism that cannot be fully understood without ideological and emotional reference.2 The more the Freyre thesis was reevaluated in the light of new data on the treatment of slaves in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America, the more repellent it seemed. When they insisted that Brazilian slaves were relatively well-treated, Freyre and his interpreters did more than contradict an emerging body of facts. Inadvertently or not, they also seemed to deprive an oppressed group of the sympathy it had earned in bondage; perhaps they had also delayed the realization that Latin American blacks possessed a history of their own. And if this much was true, did it not follow that their work also tended to exonerate the slaveholders? The English title of Freyre's masterpiece, The Masters and the Slaves, seemed now to suggest that one might choose sides.3 In recent years new perspectives have been introduced. The old categories of harshness and mildness seem increasingly meaningless in the light of sophisticated new analyses, but their appeal has also faded precisely because they direct attention to the slaveholders. Among historians of Brazil an attempt is being made to write black history from a black point of view. The most popular new concepts