Slaves and the creation of legal rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 87, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 659-692

  De La Fuente, Alejandro ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649562838     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2007-039     Document Type: Review

References (106)

1. Doña Carlota Dascar, May 3, 1856, Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter ANC), Intendencia, leg. 960/3, "Expediente sobre la coartación, 1853-62."
2. For a few significant examples, see Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud 1821-1854 (Lima: Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1993)
3. Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800-1854 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994)
4. Camilla Townsend, "'Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved': The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era," Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 105-28
5. Other aspects of slaves' lives were regulated in the Siete Partidas and in subsequent civil and religious regulations, some of which I mention later on. The Partidas were not just a collection of abstract legal principles, but a code that was invoked by legal actors and the courts well into the nineteenth century. See Norman A. Meiklejohn, "The Implementation of Slave Legislation in Eighteenth-Century New Granada," in Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), 176-203
6. Olga López Vera, "La esclavitud en la jurisprudencia civil del Tribunal Supremo" (PhD diss., University of Navarra, 2001)
7. and Alejandro de la Fuente, "Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited," Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 339-69
8. For studies of slavery and the law in Cuba, see Gloria García, La esclavitud desde la esclavitud (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2003)
9. Jean-Pierre Tardieu, "Morir o dominar": En torno al Reglamento de Esclavos de Cuba (1841-1866) (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003)
10. Manuel Barcia Paz, Con el látigo de la ira: Legislación, represión y control en las plantaciones cubanas, 1790-1870 (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2000)
11. Scott, Slave Emancipation
12. Verena Martínez-Allier, Marriage, Class, and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974)
13. Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 121-36
14. Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1989)
15. Fernando Ortiz, Los negros esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975)
16. de la Fuente, "Slave Law and Claims-Making."
17. On the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1998), 8
18. For some critiques, see Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2003), 14-15
19. Sherwin K. Bryant, "Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito," Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 1 (2004): 36-37, n. 11
20. Bryant, "Enslaved Rebels," 21
21. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 13, n. 20
22. de la Fuente, "Slave Law and Claims-Making."
23. See also Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 78-84; L.1, T. 18, L. 7 of the Novísima Recopilación
24. Older studies concentrated primarily on Spanish legislation and on the prescriptive aspects of the law. Important contributions include Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (1946; Boston: Beacon Press, 1992)
25. Ortiz, Los negros esclavos
26. Luis M. Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico (1493-1890) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1953)
27. Carlos Larrazábal Blanco, Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: J. D. Postigo, 1967)
28. and Javier Malagón Barceló, Código Negro Carolino (1784) (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1974)
29. Scholars of derecho indiano have continued this tradition. For a recent overview of colonial law, see M. C. Mirow, Latin American Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2004)
30. and José Andrés Gallego, ed., Nuevas aportaciones a la historia jurídica de Iberoamérica (2000)
31. Bryant, "Enslaved Rebels," 7-46
32. Renée Soulodre-La France, "Socially Not So Dead! Slave Identities in Bourbon Nueva Granada," Colonial Latin American Review 10, no. 1 (2001): 87-103
33. Brian P. Owensby, "How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom: Litigation and Liberty in Seventeenth-Century Mexico," HAHR 85, no. 1 (2005): 39-79
34. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico
35. Kris Lane, "Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayán," The Americas 57, no. 2 (2000): 225-46
36. Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad
37. Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom
38. María E. Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670-1780 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2000)
39. See also the contributions in Su único derecho: Los esclavos y la ley, special issue, Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004)
40. For Brazil, see Sidney Chalhoub, Visẽes da liberdade: As últimas décadas da escravidão na Corte (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1990)
41. Hebe Mattos, Das cores do silêncio: Os significados da liberdade no Sudeste escravista - Brasil século XIX (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1998)
42. Keila Grinberg, "La manumisión, el género y la ley en el Brasil del siglo XIX: El proceso legal de Liberata por su libertad," Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004): 89-103
43. Women represented 60 percent of the slave population of Havana in 1792 and 50 percent in 1817 and 1861. Their proportion in the island as a whole in those same years was 44, 38, and 41 percent respectively. In 1855, women represented 53 percent of Cuba's urban slaves, compared to 36 percent among rural slaves; calculated from Comité Estatal de Estadísticas, Los censos de población y vivienda en Cuba (Havana: Instituto de Investigaciones Estadísticas, 1988), 1:2, 71, 73, and 112
44. Kenneth F. Kiple, Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774-1899 (Gainesville: Univ. Press of Florida, 1976), 61
45. See also Knight, Slave Society, 79
46. Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 124, 128-31
47. As numerous studies confirm, women represented between 55 and 68 percent of slaves manumitted across Latin America. Given that about two-thirds of imported Africans were males, women's manumission rates were in fact much higher than those of males. For a recent contribution that summarizes previous findings, see Frank "Trey" Proctor III, "Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain," HAHR 86, no. 2 (2005): 309-36
48. For a useful overview, see Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), 227
49. For early colonial Havana, see my "A alforría de escravos em Havana, 1601-1610: Primeiras conclusões," Estudos Económics 20, no. 1 (Jan.-Apr. 1990): 139-59
50. Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005), 211
51. In addition to the cases in this article, see Townsend, "Half My Body Free," 105-28
52. Camilla Cowling, "Negotiating Freedom: Women of Colour and the Transition to Free Labour in Cuba, 1870-1886," Slavery and Abolition 26, no. 3 (Dec. 2005): 377-91
53. On manumissions as a gendered process, see also Proctor, "Gender and the Manumission"
54. and Kathleen J. Higgins, "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Gold-Mining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Sabará, Minas Gerais (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1999)
55. The best empirical research on coartación during the nineteenth century is Bergad et al., The Cuban Slave Market, 122-42
56. Leví Marrero, Cuba: Economía y sociedad, 15 vols. (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1975-1992) 13:163-68
57. Rafael Duharte emphasizes the economic advantages of coartación for the masters; El negro en la sociedad colonial (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1988), 53-61
58. Bergad et al., The Cuban Slave Market, 123
59. The other testimonies are from Mojarrieta, Esposición, 19, 23; Representation del Regidor de Santiago Ruperto Ulecia Ledesma
60. I am grateful for this point suggested to me by Stanley Engerman. Eugene D. Genovese makes a similar statement concerning runaway slaves; Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 598
61. I have used here the English translation of the Partidas edited by Robert I. Burns, Las Siete Partidas, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 4:979
62. For a useful analysis of this regulation, see López Vera, "La esclavitud," 99-101
63. Here the law of Castile followed precedents from Rome, where city prefects heard slaves' allegations of starvation. See Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 100
64. These regulations are reproduced in Malagón Barceló, Código Negro, 134, 141, 225-29
65. Compare articles 22 and 23 of the Ordinances of Santo Domingo of 1528 and article 34 of the Ordinances of 1535 with articles 60 and 61 of the Cáceres ordinances of 1574. The language Cáceres uses is almost identical to a report he had issued four years earlier about sugar slaves in Santo Domingo. See Cáceres to Juan de Ovando, Santo Domingo, 1570, in Colección de documentos inéditos, relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y organización de las antiguas posesiones españolas de América y Oceanía, 42 vols. (Madrid, 1864-84), 11:55
66. and Barcia Paz, Con el látigo, 85-94
67. Expediente sobre haberse presentado al capitán de Macurijes ocho negros del ingenio San Miguel, 1846, ANC, Gobierno Superior Civil (hereafter GSC), leg. 944, no. 33303; Barcia Paz, Con el látigo, 57; Criminales por sevicia al negro Pablo del ingenio Caridad, 1865, ANC, M.E., leg. 2851, no. J
68. See Alexander von Humboldt, Ensayo político sobre la isla de Cuba (Paris: J. Renouard, 1827), 279
69. Robert F. Jameson, Letters from the Havana during the Year 1820 (London: J. Miller, 1821), 41
70. Edward Mullen, ed., The Life and Poems of a Cuban Slave: Juan Francisco Manzano, 1797-1854 (Hamdem, CT: Archon Books, 1981), 98
71. Cirilo Villaverde, Cecilia Valdés, quoted by Ortiz, Los negros esclavos, 350
72. See ley 45, tít. 5, p. 5, in Burns, Siete Partidas, 5:1045
73. For the evolution of this legal practice, see Manuel Lucena Salmoral, "El derecho de coartación del esclavo en la América Española," Revista de Indias 59, no. 216 (May-Aug. 1999): 357-74
74. Watson, Slave Law in the Americas, 51
75. Lucena Samoral, "El derecho de coartación," 358
76. García, La esclavitud, 42-43
77. Mojarrieta, Esposición, 19
78. The 1826 report is quoted by Marrero, Cuba, 13:166. The statement of síndico José Morales Lemus in ANC, Intendencia, leg. 760/3
79. I used here Richard Madden's translation as it appears in Mullen, The Life and Poems, 201
80. For examples, see Expediente en que la negra Tomasa Amaya se queja de su amo, 1854, ANC, GSC, leg. 948/33533; Expediente promovido por el Síndico de Sagua la Grande en consulta de introducir mejoras en la compra de esclavos coartados, 1877, ANC, ME, leg. 3946/Ar. See also José I. Rodríguez, "La coartación y sus efectos," Revista de Jurisprudencia 1 (1856): 355
81. In Puerto Rico this custom was formalized in a circular issued by the governor in 1849. See Lucena Samoral, "El derecho de coartación, " 372
82. Marrero, Cuba, 13:165; El moreno Pedro Pascasio sobre su libertad, 1835, ANC, GSC, leg. 937/33074
83. López Vera, "La esclavitud en la jurisprudencia," 107-8, 116-20
84. See also Tardieu, "Morir o dominar"
85. Robert Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1988), 77-80
86. Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio, 2:83-90
87. Gloria García, Conspiraciones y revueltas: La actividad política de las negros en Cuba (1790-1845) (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2003
88. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St. Domingue and Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1971), 55-57
89. Gabino La Rosa Corzo, Runaway Slave Settlements in Cuba: Resistance and Repression (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2003)
90. On the lasting impact of Haiti on Cuban slave society, see María Dolores González-Ripoll, Consuelo Naranjo, Ada Ferrer, Gloria García, and Josef Opatrný, El rumor de Haití en Cuba: Temor, razay rebeldía, 1789-1844 (Madrid: CSIC, 2004)
91. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood, 77
92. On the varying political fortunes of the planters and their relationships with the state, see Josep M. Fradera, Gobernar colonias (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1999), 95-120
93. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833-1874 (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 1999), 16-17
94. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba/España, España/Cuba: Historia común (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1995), 165-69, 190-98
95. Gerónimo de Valdés, Bando de gobernación y policía de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1842), 4, my emphasis. I have used Knight's translation in Slave Society, 127, for the second quote
96. The best study of the conspiracy is Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood. See also Daisy Cué Fernandez, "Plácido y la conspiración de la escalera," Santiago 42 (1981): 145-206
97. José L. Franco, Plácido: Una polémica que tiene cien años (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1964)
98. and in Marrero, Cuba, 13:193-95
99. Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Los códigos negros de la América española (Madrid: Ediciones UNESCO, 1996), 140-59
100. See also Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman, "The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Comparative Perspectives," American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (1983): 1201-18
101. Bachiller y Morales, "De la coartación y sus efectos," Revista de Jurisprudencia 1 (1856): 426-30
102. N. Azcárate, untitled entry, Revista de Jurisprudencia 1 (1856): 363
103. Azcárate, "Réplica al Señor don Antonio Bachiller y Morales," Revista de Jurisprudencia 1 (1856): 477-81
104. Rodríguez, "La coartación y sus efectos," Revista de Jurisprudencia 1 (1856): 353-62, quote on 355
105. See also, in the same issue, José Cintra, "Coartación, " 474-76
106. The consejo included the most important civil, military, and religious authorities in the colony. On its composition, see Julio A. Carreras, Historia del estado y el derecho en Cuba (Havana: MES, 1981), 81-84