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  Full, formal freedom granted to the slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 was legal recognition of what they had been struggling towards since time out of mind. The defeated South, however, had lost everything it had fought for. The British had given their slave holders £20 million compensation for the loss of their slaves: American slave owners received nothing.

  Southerners gradually drifted into a strange mood of cultural amnesia, coming to regard their defeat as a result of the North’s numerical and industrial power. In time, the South looked back to its pre-war Golden Age, but in doing so it forgot the centrality of slavery in the entire story. A popular southern culture evolved – ultimately secured and propagated in movies of the twentieth century (and even shored up by a number of eminent historians) – which effectively erased slavery from the historical narrative of the coming of the Civil War. Today, it is difficult to grasp how this happened, but, bit by bit, slavery was marginalised in the southern understanding of the origins of the Civil War. The historical disputes continue, of course, but today slavery and emancipation are accepted as the essential elements in provoking and resolving the Civil War. Equally – and no less important – without that war, slavery in the USA would likely have continued to provide the economic rewards that had inspired its initial establishment in North America two centuries earlier.

  The slaves had been basic to the remarkable success of the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they were also the country’s most obvious victims. Yet they had struggled against their bondage throughout, subverting it as best they could, denouncing it from first to last, campaigning against it and abandoning it whenever possible. Finally, during the conflict itself, they fled from the plantations in their thousands. Their mass flight helped to undermine the vital prosperity the South required to fight the war. Slaves’ defiance was corroding slavery itself: the system that had been built on their own sweat over the past two centuries. Four million former slaves were now free people – but their freedom was to be beset by a multitude of problems, and the shadow of slavery was to lie heavy on the subsequent history of the USA. In 1865, however, freedom itself seemed enough. Here at last was something to celebrate.

  8

  The End of Slavery in the Spanish Empire

  SPAIN HAD BEEN the first European country to introduce Africans into the Americas, and Spanish colonies clung to slavery longer and more tenaciously than all others lands apart from the former Portuguese colony of Brazil. Like all European colonial powers in the Americas, imperial Spain made great use of African slaves, although, unlike others, it did not become a major Atlantic slave trader. Instead Spain relied on other nations’ trading and maritime expertise for its supply of Africans.

  Spain conquered, or claimed, vast areas of South America and the Caribbean islands. ‘New Spain’ embraced Puerto Rico, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico and Central America, and Spanish Peru consisted of the entirety of South America with the exception of Brazil. Slavery spread unevenly across so huge a landscape. Spain’s mainland American colonies absorbed slightly more than a quarter of a million Africans. At the most southerly tip, Río de la Plata, only 67,000 Africans arrived as slaves. In the Caribbean, 26,700 Africans went to Puerto Rico, but by far the largest number – more than three-quarters of a million – were taken to Cuba, most of them during that island’s boom years in the nineteenth century. Compared to the millions poured into Brazil, these numbers seem small, but this does not diminish the importance of slavery to Spanish colonisation in its American empire.

  Unlike Portugal and Britain, Spain developed only a marginal role both on the continent of Africa and in the Atlantic slave trade. Partly as a result, it was widely thought both that slavery was peripheral to Spanish history, and that the Spanish version was also more benign than other slave systems. (This was a view sustained by twentieth-century Spanish politics.) It is now broadly accepted that this analysis was wrong and, on the contrary, African slaves were basic both to the establishment and to the development of Spanish America. Equally, Spanish slavery was no less harsh than slavery elsewhere. Older arguments that imperial law and church practices served to temper Spanish slavery have been replaced by the awareness that slavery was propelled by the dictates of plantation labour. And that involved the harsh exploitation of African slaves, especially in Spain’s sugar and coffee industries. Spain’s initial slave system in the Caribbean faded as Spain turned its attention away from the islands and towards the rich potential of Mexico, Central America and the wealth of the Andes, but it revived in the nineteenth century.

  Although the numbers of Africans taken to Mexico and Central America were small compared to other regions of the Americas, the impact of slave labour was vital across the region. The background was the disaster that befell indigenous Indian populations in the wake of the European invasions. The impact of alien diseases imported by Europeans was catastrophic, with native peoples suffering massive population losses: in places, upwards of three-quarters of their pre-conquest levels. Indeed population collapse seems ‘to have been the rule across Spanish America in the aftermath of conquest’.[1] From the first, Spanish settlers had needed labour, but Indian people fled, fell ill or died.

  Long before the European invasions, forms of slavery had existed among indigenous people of the Americas, and the Spanish conquerors used Indian slaves on an enormous scale across Mexico and Central America, developing its own important slave trade in Indian people. Hernán Cortés, who led the Spanish colonisation of Mexico in the early sixteenth century, himself owned more than five hundred slaves in his mines and for sugar cultivation. This enforced movement of Indian slaves had its own dire consequences. The trade from Honduras and Nicaragua, for example, was a major factor in the massive drop in the local population there. Wherever Spain used Indian slaves, it was characterised by a savage brutality. Indeed, the excesses of this system caught the attention of Bartholomé de las Casas, the Bishop of Chiapas, who later bore the official title ‘Protector of the Indians’. Partly because of his efforts, a new law of 1542 outlawed the enslavement of Indians, which, although it was widely ignored (especially in frontier regions), hastened the drive to seek alternative labour – and that meant African slaves. But who was to deliver the Africans?

  Spain had initially acquired African slaves from Portuguese traders through Asiento de negro agreements – in which the Crown gave the traders a monopoly on the supply of African slaves to its territories – following the unification of Spain and Portugal in 1580 and the development of the Portuguese Atlantic slave trade. Portugal shipped Africans to Spanish America, mainly to Veracruz, from Portugal’s main African slave-trading base at Luanda in Angola. By the time that agreement ended in 1640, 70,000 African slaves had been transported. After 1640, the Atlantic trade opened up to other European trading nations, and increasing numbers of Africans arrived in Spanish America via other slave-trading entrepôts. The British, for example, transhipped large numbers of Africans to Spanish America via Jamaica. The changes within the slave population of Spanish America changed the slave trade. A rough balance emerged between enslaved men and women, with the result that the slave populations of Spanish America increased by natural growth, rather than via the importation of yet more Africans. Long before slave societies in the Caribbean and North America began to increase naturally, Spain’s mainland slave system could survive without the Atlantic slave trade.

  In the hundred years following the Spanish conquests in the first half of the sixteenth century, almost one-half of all the Africans landed in Spanish America were transported to Mexico. There they were used in every conceivable enterprise. They worked at a huge range of jobs in the urban areas that quickly evolved in Spain’s empire. Slaves worked in domestic service, as street vendors, as porters and in all forms of urban tasks. They also worked in the sugar fields and sugar mills, though sugar in Mexico and Central America was a small-scale industry, primarily for the local market. Slaves also worked alongside free labourers on cattle ranch
es and in crop cultivation, and formed an important labouring presence in Mexico’s textile workshops. More brutally, they were used in Mexico’s important mining industries (notably in silver). But wherever they lived and worked, the enslaved had to devise means of coping with life as slaves. That involved the development of complex forms of resistance.

  African slaves were very rarely a dominant presence. By the late seventeenth century, local-born (creole) slaves outnumbered Africans; a century later, most slaves in mainland Spanish America were not only mixed race (rather than African), but were now hugely outnumbered by the massive expansion of free people of mixed race.

  Part of the reason for the number of freed slaves and their mixed-race descendants was that manumission in Spanish America was more commonplace than in the slave colonies of other European powers. In addition, by marrying free women (of colour, or Indian women) many slaves married out of slavery – a process which led to a rapid ‘lightening’ of the overall population. These were fundamental demographic changes, which made slavery become a much less striking, less visible feature of life across Mexico and Central America by the late eighteenth century.

  The massive expansion of the local population created large numbers of free labourers, so more and more masters rid themselves of their slaves. Many slaves simply took matters into their own hands – and fled. The end result was that slavery was simply withering away and by 1810 there were perhaps only 10,000 slaves in Mexico, and only half that number throughout Central America. Where it lingered on, slaves sought to escape (many in the north of the country headed for the USA), while others joined the fight for Mexican independence. Indeed, throughout Spain’s colonies in the early nineteenth century, there were important links between the fight for independence from Spain and the campaign against slavery. How could a conflict that turned on questions of colonial liberty, freedom and rights not have consequences for slavery? In Mexico, independence in 1821 was the death knell for slavery, which was finally abolished in 1824, though by then it had effectively vanished, and its people had blended into the population at large.[2]

  As Spanish conquistadors had moved south, along the Pacific coast, fighting and settling as they destroyed the Incas, they were accompanied by African slaves. Here again, in the wake of Spanish settlement, the decline of the indigenous populations created a need for an alternative labour force. To work the mines and the newly established plantations, and to safeguard the much-diminished Indian peoples, Spain encouraged the importation of African slaves. After all, Spain was already using African slaves (on a small scale) in the Caribbean. A regular traffic developed, with Africans landing in Cartagena and thence onto Lima. From there, Africans fanned out across the enormity of Spanish settlements. When, by the late eighteenth century, the British and French had come to dominate the North Atlantic slave trade, Africans were being shipped to Spanish America via Caribbean islands. It was along these immense sea routes, followed by protracted and exhausting overland journeys across South America, that Africans were settled in what became Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay, Venezuela and Ecuador. It was an astonishing enforced diaspora of African people.

  African slaves worked and lived alongside indigenous peoples, and the mixed-race descendants of Indians, Europeans – and Africans. And though they did not dominate the local labour force, wherever they settled African slaves were regarded as essential: in mining and in various branches of agriculture. The largest single slave owner in Spanish America was the Catholic Church: Jesuits were notable for the huge numbers employed on their extensive properties.[3] Spain faced the persistent problem of how to control their slaves in South America. This became a particular problem when significant numbers settled in urban areas, many living away from their owners. One regular ploy was to tempt slaves with the prospects of emancipation, hoping to secure loyalty and hard work by the promise of freedom. The Catholic Church also played its part in maintaining slave stability via the social organisations they formed for slaves, and by specific instruction at worship, all aimed at maintaining the delicate balance between master and man across Spanish America. When all failed, when slaves rebelled or flared up, Spanish slave owners resorted to the universal armoury of slave holders across the Americas: informal and legally sanctioned repression and violence. Whippings, banishment, executions – the full array of slave society’s punishments were available when slaves in Spanish America stepped out of line.

  One recurring fear of Spanish authorities was that slaves and local Indians might join forces against them. In practice that rarely happened. In fact, slaves were frequently used to suppress troubles and uprisings among Indians, while for their part, Indians seldom went out of their way to help the slaves. Both sides seemed to exist in mutual distrust of each other and saw no reason to unite to confront their common oppressors. Things were different at a social level. African and Indian peoples mingled, settled down with and married each other, adopted each other’s languages and customs, and produced a variety of creole cultures that were a complex blend of Indian, African and European.

  Like other European slave empires, Spain’s imperial capital dictated important features of colonial slavery. When the Bourbons determined to restore Spain’s fading power in the mid-eighteenth century, they tried to revitalise the colonial economies. An obvious target was the Jesuits, whose colonial wealth (including their slaves) was absorbed by the Crown. This was accompanied by a major renewal of importations of African slaves by the opening up of the Atlantic trade to outsiders. With a more open slave-trading market, substantial numbers of Africans began to arrive – notably in the Caribbean, in Cuba, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. This was to become important after the collapse of the Haitian sugar economy and the expansion of Spanish sugar production in the early nineteenth century. These reforms by the Spanish Crown effectively extended and revitalised colonial slavery, with major repercussions throughout Spanish America. But the Crown also began to sell off its own slaves, who were often moved huge distances to new owners and workplaces in far-flung regions. This, mirroring the experience of other slave societies in the Americas, involved the widespread break-up of slave families. The much-hated and destructive internal dispersal of slaves was accompanied by the arrival of Africans, fresh from the Atlantic slave ships, all with their own agonies of enslavement and prolonged upheaval. Spain’s colonies thus became home to deeply disaffected slaves: many torn from families in distant parts of the colony, and Africans wrenched from their various African homelands. It was a recipe for trouble.

  Not surprisingly, slave trouble flared across Spanish America, with uprisings, resistance and general slave belligerence taxing Spanish colonial life throughout the late eighteenth century. The Spanish Crown hoped to stabilise the situation by imposing the Código Negro (Black Code) in 1789. Unlike earlier codes, this was an attempt to reform African slavery throughout the Spanish Empire, stipulating that masters should provide adequate food and clothing, and imposing working regulations – which allowed days off. Masters were now expected to have slaves instructed in the Catholic faith. New restrictions were placed on masters; they could only punish a slave with a maximum of twenty-five lashes, for instance.

  The slave owners tended to view the new code as yet another attempt to impose Bourbon absolutism on the colonies. Slaves, of course, viewed it differently. From what they gleaned via angry gossip among their owners, it seemed clear to them that efforts were being made, in distance European palaces, to safeguard slaves’ interests against the resistant wishes of slave owners.[4] The idea took root in the slaves’ minds that monarchy was on their side.

  Some of the problems facing the Spanish Empire in the late eighteenth century had their origins in British imperial issues. The American War of Independence and the loss of Britain’s North American colonies created a volatile problem across the enslaved Americas. For slave owners everywhere that conflict was all the more worrying because both sides, American and British, had used slaves and ex-slaves
to bolster their military strength (a pattern repeated in South America in the 1820s). The USA confirmed its commitment to slavery in 1787, and especially after 1800 and the rise of King Cotton.[5] These initial concerns about slavery were as nothing compared to the tumultuous events that followed the French Revolution of 1789. In common with all other slave colonies, the Spanish Empire was shaken to the core by the revolutionary tremors and ideals flowing first from Paris and then from Haiti. The language of freedom, already promoted and advocated by Enlightenment writers before 1789, was quickly translated into Spanish.

  Slaves in Spanish America, like their contemporaries elsewhere, were soon alert to the revolution in St-Domingue (especially those in neighbouring Santo Domingo). It was news that exacerbated local frictions and proved to be the start of prolonged slave troubles for Spain. It also formed the origins of the campaign for colonial independence. Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian peninsula in 1807 threw both Spain and Portugal into turmoil. The Portuguese court fled to exile in Brazil – escorted by the Royal Navy – where they stayed until 1822, and where they presided over a booming slave economy. The Spanish monarchs, Charles IV and his heir, Ferdinand VII, were less fortunate and were imprisoned by Napoleon. The French occupation of Spain unleashed a savage war for liberation, which lasted from 1807 to 1814 (and is best recalled perhaps in Francisco Goya’s series of prints, The Disasters of War). To resist the French occupation and to devise a new system of government in the absence of the King, the Spanish Cortes were convened, first in Seville, then in Cadiz. With deputies from the Spanish colonies in attendance, the Cortes opened up a wider debate about the links between Spain and her colonies. The absence of the monarch also raised the fundamental question of political legitimacy. In Caracas, Buenos Aires and Cartagena local elites declared that political power had, in the absence of the monarch, devolved to them. This marked the start of the struggle for independence, and the break-up of the massive Spanish Empire in the Americas, which in its turn was to lead to the end of slavery.