This article discusses the spread of gambling in lotteries, during the last decades of the nineteenth century in Brazil. In particular, the first drawing out of São Paulo's Lottery, whose aim was to raise funds for the construction of the Ipiranga Monument, in 1880. In a second moment, discusses the efforts of slaves betting in lotteries as a means to raise funds to finance their own freedom. The paper describes the trajectory of a group of workers from Pelotas who was awarded the first prize of Ipiranga's Lottery, whose extraction occurred in February 1881 and analyzes the consequences, brought by their luck in the lottery, in the lives of those winners. They were a mixed group of eight workers, separated by color, gender and social status, including four men and four women; four white and four African descendents, five free, one freed and two captives. Despite these differences, their stories had some resemblance, regarding the use of money and the way they were treated by society at the time.
Lottery; freedom; slaves; Pelotas
