Freedom Read online

  The anti-colonial wars, inspired by the revolutions first of 1776 and then of 1789, pointed the way towards black freedom. Slaves in North America had fled their bondage to join the British, in anticipation of freedom. (In the event, it proved a bitter-sweet decision, with thousands shipped onwards – free but impoverished – to Nova Scotia, to London and some to Sierra Leone.) But the Haitian revolution had put an end to slavery there, and thereafter, across the Americas, slaves and slave owners were left in no doubt that attacking European colonialism was to attack slavery.

  We need to note, however, that Spanish slavery was relatively small-scale. In 1820, there were about 250,000 slaves across Spain’s American empire; the most condensed area was Venezuela, where the number of slaves totalled 87,000. By comparison, the slave population of the Caribbean was 1.3 million, with 1.5 million in the US South and 1.2 million in Brazil. Attacking Spanish slavery was an easier, more manageable target than the massive slave populations elsewhere in the Americas. What undermined Spanish slavery were the wars for colonial independence in the 1810s and 1820s.[6] In Caracas, Simón Bolívar led the charge to independence from 1810, banning the slave trade (partly to keep the abolitionist British on their side) but accepting the existence of slavery itself. The restoration of the Spanish monarch, Ferdinand VII, in 1814 after the defeat of the French, led, however, to an imperial counter-attack and a war against colonial independence. Spain had some temporary success in its military efforts against colonial rebels in Chile, Peru, Gran Colombia (consisting primarily of present-day Colombia and Panama) and Venezuela. But as the wars dragged on, both sides needed to find manpower. Just as in Haiti earlier, both royalists and patriots turned to slaves to bolster their military ranks.

  In the subsequent wars of independence, both sides promised freedom to the slaves involved in return for military service. Recruiting slaves to fight for an ideal – colonial independence – was clearly fraught with dangers. A fight for freedom was no mere abstraction for enslaved soldiers – as Simón Bolívar himself recognised: ‘It seems to me madness that a revolution for freedom expects to maintain slavery.’[7] Though other forces were also at work edging Spain’s slaves towards freedom, warfare and colonial independence proved corrosive of Spanish colonial slavery.

  The fierce arguments about slavery and the slave trade taking place in Spain were soon reported in the colonies. Slaves inevitably learned that their fate was being discussed, but in what was, by then, a common pattern, what they heard was garbled and inaccurate – but always tempting. Many simply believed that Spain had freed them, but that freedom was being withheld by colonial officials and planters. Officials in Puerto Rico and Cuba, for instance, reported numerous examples of local slaves openly discussing – and even celebrating – their freedom. The truth was painfully different.

  The new Spanish Constitution of Cadiz in 1812 had confirmed the importance of colonial slavery. Under pressure from Cuban planters, all criticism of slavery and the slave trade was suppressed. (Cuba was on the cusp of a massive expansion of slave-cultivated sugar.) The Constitution specifically excluded Africans and their descendants from citizenship, and strengthened Spanish control and power over the slave colonies. Large sections of the population – touched by African heritage – were excluded from a raft of political and social rights. Spain was building a rod for its own imperial back by driving alienated colonial classes into the company of the slaves. Both sides could see no future in continuing colonial Spanish rule. The independence movement across Spanish America now appealed to a majority of local people – slaves and people of colour.[8]

  In the years after independence, the new South American republics legislated against slavery. In Chile and Mexico, where it had already declined substantially, it was ended immediately. Where it remained important (Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and parts of what became Argentina), slavery lingered on into the 1850s. In places, slavery remained resistant, and some independent governments even reneged on their promises of slave freedom. Even slave trading continued in some areas, with Africans infiltrated over the borders from Brazil. Some Spanish American slave owners managed to resist emancipation; often they proved too strong, too politically powerful, too tenacious in their control of slaves to relinquish and concede black freedom. For many slaves, full freedom had to wait a full generation after the wars of independence. But wherever we look, there we find slaves taking matters into their own hands. Ex-soldiers and their families demanded their freedom. Others simply fled. Some rose up and some were even able to purchase their own freedom. In Colombia, sympathetic friends provided money for slaves to buy themselves out of slavery. Where land was abundant, ex-slaves simply squatted and made it their own, while the anonymity of growing towns naturally attracted slaves anxious to escape; they simply walked away from bondage and blended into the wider labouring community.[9]

  Warfare was the coup de grâce for slavery in Latin America. The independence wars against Spain, and later the conflicts between Latin American nations, unleashed violence which loosened the bonds between masters and slaves, and enabled slaves to shake themselves free. Most disruptive of all, slaves joined the fighting as an escape route from slavery. (It is surely revealing that so many risked the dangers of combat rather than remain as slaves.) People who had been combatants, especially for the cause of colonial freedom, were unwilling to return to the world of slavery when the fighting stopped. What had happened in South America in the early nineteenth century was a reprise, across the immensity of Spanish America, of the pattern that had unfolded in Haiti. What had emerged was a potent social and political mix: of anti-slavery ideals (derived originally from the revolutionary turmoil in France and her colonies) and the urge towards independence from Spain.

  Throughout this entire story in Spanish America there lurked the presence and influence of the British, lending support to local abolitionists, applying diplomatic muscle to new and inexperienced states, and making commercial and naval threats when necessary. The British approach to the new South American republics was simple, often brutal and sometimes illegal, but it worked – and helped to destabilise slavery in South America. It sapped the will of slave owners to cling to a declining system. The last Spanish country on the mainland to abandon slavery was Paraguay – forced to do so by Brazil in the war in 1869.[10]

  A fear that haunted slave owners everywhere from their very first settlements in the Americas was the danger posed by armed and resistant slaves. Yet the South American conflicts found both sides recruiting slaves to their cause. For slave holders and those seeking to maintain slavery, arming slaves involved much more than simply bolstering their military ranks. It was a step fraught with dangers. Armed slaves, their defiance more focused and disciplined by the rigours of military command, posed very great risks. Who knows what organised and disciplined armed slaves might do? Yet in the revolutions that eventually destroyed Spain’s American empire, both sides (Spain and the revolutionary independence movements) had turned to slaves for military manpower, despite both sides knowing that the slaves would recognise the significance for their own condition. For the slaves, freedom from a colonial power was little different from escaping from an oppressive slave owner.

  Many South American slave holders dug in, hoping to cling to their source of labour. But they faced growing resistance from the slaves themselves, who fled, notably to the relative safety of generally welcoming cities. Some cities even held lotteries that slaves might enter and win their freedom; others set up special funds for slaves to use to buy freedom. Throughout the new South American republics, abolition established itself as a major political issue; the more liberal a local party, the more likely it was to advocate slave freedom. The wars against Spain had spawned a broad ideology of freedom: freedom from Spain, freedom from the traditional world of social privilege, and freedom from the old tyranny of racial hierarchies. A sense of ‘racial harmony had been at the heart of the independence conflicts and, as Bolivar had intimated, in the wake of South Americ
an independence it proved increasingly difficult to justify slavery.[11]

  Travellers in the Americas were struck by the sharp contrast between the South American republics and the US South. While cotton strengthened the growing power of US slave holders, the South American republics were travelling in a different direction. Having set out to be independent, freed from the shackles of imperial Spain, they were anxious to establish freedom for all their people. Local slave owners were fighting a rear-guard (and a losing) action. Slavery everywhere was being undermined by the politics and conflicts of independence, by the ending of the Atlantic slave trade and, crucially, by the actions of the slaves themselves – by their recalcitrance, their flight and their open defiance.

  The South American republics were also distinguished from North America by their growing attachment to racial equality. Although the pattern was uneven, the republics emerged from the wars generally anxious to cleanse themselves of the stains of the old regime. That meant an affirmation of racial equality. With some notable exceptions, the language of fraternity entered the political vernacular of the hemisphere. The major exceptions were Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean.

  In Cuba and Puerto Rico, slavery and racial inequality not only survived, but, thanks to a massive revival of sugar and tobacco plantations, thrived as never before. Cuban sugar (and slavery) were sustained by major US investments, and the slave-grown Cuban produce flowed into the expanding consumer market of North America. It was a matter of great concern to Spanish and British abolitionists that, despite their best efforts, slavery flourished in those islands.

  This new Cuban slave system was also a modernised industry. The first Cuban railway lines, for example, were built in 1837 to link Havana to the nearby sugar plantations. These new transport systems encouraged a major expansion of sugar cultivation, linking plantations to large central factories for sugar production, thence to the ports for export. Yet in this same period of modernisation, Cuban slave owners worked their slave labour force harder than ever, augmenting their gangs by bringing in enormous numbers of slaves via internal and coastal slave routes, where conditions often replicated the miseries of the Atlantic crossings. Sugar plantations in Puerto Rico were on nothing like the scale of Cuba’s (or Brazil’s), and when the Atlantic trade ended, planters there were able to force an impoverished local peasantry onto sugar estates in conditions that looked unnervingly like slavery. The centre of slavery in Spanish America was now Cuba. And it was increasingly dominated by Africans.

  Cuban slavery had already developed its own distinct features. There was, for example, an important tradition in the island of slaves buying their own freedom, and they had the right to register their price with an official and make a down payment, becoming coartados: slaves en route to freedom. They could even demand the right to change owners. Cuban slaves had their own long-established political, religious and military organisations, which were often based on African and ethnic links. These established customs clashed, in the nineteenth century, with the tightly managed disciplines of Cuba’s new plantations and they were also disrupted by the large-scale arrival of new African slaves. In 1812 these frictions came to a head with the discovery of an island-wide slave plot intended to end slavery. It was led by José Antonio Aponte, who may have been spurred on by the growing colonial mistreatment of those of African descent following the arrival of mass numbers of new African slaves. He was a free man of colour who, like his father and grandfather, belonged to one of the Yoruba-based mutual aid societies (cabildos de nación) famous for enabling Africans to enjoy traditional African social rituals. Such social gatherings were the perfect opportunity for assembling – and plotting. Aponte added an extra, unusual ingredient to this potentially disruptive mix: he distributed a book of pictures of Haitian revolutionary figures and monarchs thought to be sympathetic to the slaves.[12] For slave owners, there seemed to be no escape from the shadow of the years of revolution, from memories of Haiti and the ever-present worry about slave insurgency.

  The Aponte rebellion – more a series of revolts and plots than a single attempted revolution – involved slaves and free people of colour who sought an end to slavery and to Spanish colonial rule. Revolts flared across Cuba, but especially in the west of the island, home of the new sugar industry. They were suppressed with characteristic violence – Aponte was captured, hanged and beheaded, and his severed head was displayed outside his house as a warning. But the rebellion proved merely the start of a succession of slave upheavals. The problem was located in the island’s booming sugar industry.

  The massive levels of Africans arriving in Cuba transformed the island in the early nineteenth century. Although Cuba’s slaves were not restricted to the sugar plantations, it was the emergence of a revitalised sugar industry that fuelled the expansion of Cuban slavery. In 1774 there had been 44,000 slaves on the island. That had risen to 83,000 by 1792. By 1827, however, the slave population stood at 287,000 – and it grew to 324,000 in 1846. At mid-century almost half of Cuba’s population was enslaved. By then a third of all Cuban slaves worked in sugar, overwhelmingly in the west of the island. (By contrast, Puerto Rico’s slave population – again dominated by sugar – was only 46,923 in 1854.)[13] Between 1800 and 1866, more than 700,000 Africans were landed in Cuba, and the British were right to see the slave trade as the lifeblood of Cuba’s slave system.[14]

  Thanks to these massive African arrivals, slavery strengthened its grip in Cuba, despite a number of abolition treaties signed between Spain and Britain (1817, 1835, 1845),all of which were effectively ignored by Spain. The surviving Spanish Caribbean slave colonies were isolated, and Cuban sugar planters developed that laager mentality so familiar throughout the slave islands in the eighteenth century, fearing both revolt by their own slaves and the largely unsympathetic attitude of the imperial homeland. Neighbouring islands had now turned their back on slavery and were not to be trusted either. Both Haiti and Jamaica seemed to Cuban slave owners like enemies at the gate, while, to the north, the growing power of the USA (and the rise of abolition sentiment there from the 1830s) cast an abolitionist shadow across the entire region. There were even fears that southern US planters and their allies were contemplating a military takeover of Cuba to add to their beleaguered world of slave owners. Geographically more distant, but even more troubling because more intrusive, were the British, led by an aggressively abolitionist Foreign Office and the Royal Navy, both nibbling away at Spain’s slave trade.

  Following the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833, Spanish politicians turned their back on earlier concessions granted to Cuba, and determined to rule their colony in a more draconian fashion. Caribbean representatives were removed from parliament, and the Spanish Captain-General of Cuba was granted new powers to rule the island as he saw fit. The pretext was fear of Haitian-like revolt. Colonial government and sugar planters lived in a climate of anxiety, and the slightest hint or rumour of threatened slave insurrection – or invasion from Haiti – was promptly relayed back to Madrid.

  The shadow of Haiti produced some confusing effects in Cuba. While it clearly inspired hope and optimism among slaves everywhere, it also served to worsen their oppression, because slave holders and their political supporters regularly used the Haitian example as a justification to control the slaves harshly, and to punish any slave resistance with severity. Most of Madrid’s efforts to ameliorate colonial slavery via new laws and codes were deflected by Cuba’s planters and their friends, who preferred to impose their own rules and punishments. And that involved the violence and arbitrary behaviour towards slaves familiar throughout the history of American slavery. Their concerns were exacerbated by the inexorable increase in Africans arriving in Cuba. Like their counterparts in Brazil and the US South, Cuba’s old colonial order was worried that Africans would not only become numerically dominant but would rise to social and political dominance.[15] But who were behind the African arrivals? The people who feared the Africans were the very group insisting that the sugar
industry could not survive without them.

  Cuba’s slaves, meanwhile, instead of benefiting from the largely ignored reforms from Madrid, found themselves on the receiving end of an increasingly heavy-handed and brutal management by sugar planters and their friends. Cuba in the early nineteenth century was looking more and more like the sugar islands of the eighteenth century: plantation economies that seemed to thrive on severe management of the labour force. Plantation violence was commonplace, with murders of hated managers and suicides among desperate slaves. The verdict of one prominent planter was, ‘their state of servitude should be considered as the main cause of their suicides’. Small-scale slave uprisings regularly broke out on plantations, often led by Africans, but wider conspiracies were more threatening.[16]

  As the nineteenth century advanced, slave insurgency in Cuba ‘became larger, more frequent, and more sophisticated’. There were more Cuba revolts ‘than any other place in the Atlantic world’.[17] And they broke out in the sugar region where Africans were arriving in such large numbers. Those rebellions were essentially African, and many of the rebel leaders were from the recently overthrown bellicose Oyo Empire in west Africa. In 1825 (Guamacaro), 1833 (Guanajay) and twice in 1843 (Bemba and La Guanábana), slave revolts were led by slaves from the old Oyo Empire. It was clear enough to contemporaries – especially to sugar planters – that slave resistance was African, and it would continue as long as the slave ships delivered fresh batches to the island.