Negro Slavery in Latin America

By Rolando Mellafe

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520337916

Rolando Mellafe

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NEGRO SLAVERY

IN LATIN AMERICA

NEGRO SLAVERY

IN LATIN AMERICA

Rolando Mellafe

translated by J. W S. Judge

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1975, by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-02106-1

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-170720

Printed in the United States of America

TO MARIA TERESA, ALEJANDRA,

AND CAROLINA

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE THE INTRODUCTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF NEGRO SLAVERY

CHAPTER TWO DEVELOPMENT AND FORMS OF THE SLAVE TRADE

CHAPTER THREE SOURCES, ROUTES, AND MARKETING OF SLAVES

CHAPTER FOUR COLONIAL ECONOMIC STRUCTURE AND NEGRO SLAVERY

CHAPTER FIVE SLAVERY AND SOCIETY

CHAPTER SIX ABOLITION AND ALTERNATIVES TO SLAVERY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Latin America is a combination of racial groups that vary in degree of integration in each of the different republics. Some countries are highly homogeneous, others more or less integrated, while a number are markedly differentiated according to color variations which approximately correspond to the range of social and economic status. Given such circumstances, the institutional, economic, and social implications of more than three centuries of Negro slavery cannot be other than pertinent. The forms that slavery took in Latin America, the extent of its development in the various regions, and the specific ways in which it came to an end, are all basic to a clearer understanding of Latin America and its culture. This study is intended to give an idea of the problem first by the briefest possible summary of its historical development, and second by the inclusion of a relatively full, though select, bibliography.

The institution of Negro slavery, because of related social and economic issues, gave rise to a voluminous mass of archival source material in both America and Europe. Some of the archival sources have been included in the bibliography. Besides documentary material of this nature, many people, beginning with those on Columbus’ first voyage, have written on the subject with differing interests and aims. In this Introduction I shall refer to the most important works, from a historical point of view, written in both the Old and the New World. The first to deal with Negro slavery in America was the Historia de las Indias of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas.1 He was also the first person to question, in fiery condemnation, the legitimacy of the methods of European colonization in America. He was primarily interested in the Indians, and it was because of both their rapidly dwindling numbers in the Antilles and their weakened position as a labor force on the mainland that Negro slavery was brought to America.

Immediately after Las Casas, however, attention became almost exclusively centered on the practical problems of productivity and shortage of labor. Slavery was taken completely for granted as an ancient tradition with its roots in classical and medieval times. The local town councils, regional high courts, governors, administrators, representatives of the crown, writers, thinkers, and historians of the times all referred in one way or another to African slaves, generally with the motive of increasing the supply of slaves or of seeking a reduction or removal of the customs duties and taxes to which the slave trade was subject. These are points that will also be taken up in the text. Here, as a good example among the mass of available documents and books, one may cite the two petitions made by Antonio de León Pinelo, one of the best-known treatise writers and jurists of the seventeenth century. He presented his petitions to the king in 1623 and 1624, and in them he strongly urged the importation of more slaves on behalf of several colonial towns of the time.²

A very important work was the De Instauranda Aeth- iopum Salute by Alonso de Sandoval published in 1627. It was written at the height of the trade in Cartagena, one of the major slaving ports on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. One of Sandoval’s leading disciples was St. Peter Claver, who became known as the Saint of the Slaves in Latin America. Besides dealing with the problem of the evangelization of recently arrived Negroes, Sandoval attempted to investigate their African tribal origins and customs, their artistic interests, and their forms of social organization. Perhaps without explicitly intending to do so, he left to posterity one of the most significant ethnographic studies of black culture now available.3

In the eighteenth century, the change of dynasty in Spain, its attendant political struggles and wars, the attempts at economic recuperation, and the new ideological principles of the Age of Enlightenment gave rise to a huge quantity of books, petitions, and opinions on Negro slavery. Included were such works as the Voto consultivo by Pedro Bravo de Lagunas; the Representación de los hacendados by Mariano Moreno; and the heavy, erudite articles, typical of the eighteenth century, which appeared in El Mercurio Peruano of Lima between 1791 and 1795.4

Except in a few cases where there was contemporary interest in presenting accounts of events occurring in the colonies, many years were to elapse before interest in Latin America would cease to concentrate on the exclusively pragmatic aspects of the political and economic circumstances of slavery, and turn to the more analytic approaches of the social sciences. It was no coincidence that when the change came it occurred in two of the countries where slavery was most important and where it lasted the longest—Cuba and Brazil. In Cuba the attractive polemic nature of Antonio José Saco (1797-1879) produced the first contemporary historical study of the institution of slavery. It was his Historia de la escalvitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días, published posthumously in Havana in 1893, that traced the general history of slavery from the earliest times. He had spent some 30 years on research in order to write the work. It is still fundamental. Approximately a third of it comprises a complete coverage of slavery in Latin America.5 While Saco’s work was being published in Cuba, in Salvador da Bahia the eminent Brazilian, Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, was beginning a series of studies on African cultures in both their place of origin and in the New World within a context of cultural contribution and interchange.6 His work has been of primary importance in Brazil and has given rise to an extensive literature of the finest quality, with an analytical approach derived largely from the methods of the comparative study of cultures of social anthropology, which were very different from what was at the time called historical method. The studies produced by those who have continued his methods are now absolutely indispensable to any further work on Negro slavery, even for those who are interested mainly in historical development and perspective. Such studies comprise, for example, Arthur Ramos’ series O problema do negro no Brasil and the work of Gilberto Freyre and others, many of whom have been publishing in the Biblioteca de Devulgação Científica. At the present time, there is still being produced a brilliant series of studies on the Negro in Brazil from a purely sociological or from both a historical and sociological point of view by such research workers as Florestan Fernandes, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Octavio Ianni.7 The same type of work has also been done by the sociologist Fernando Ortiz for Cuba and the Antilles.8 A similar impact in the field of social anthropology and comparative culture studies has come from a group of research workers of all nationalities through work commenced a little later, with like aims and methods, on the contribution of Negro cultures in other parts of America where they are still very much a living reality. Particularly important are such books as The Myth of the Negro Past by Melville Herskovits, first published in 1941, and the studies of Pierre Verger, George E. Simpson, Alfred Métraux, Sidney Mintz, and Roger Bastide.9

As history, Saco’s work did not produce any immediate result. The attention of Latin American historians was still too concentrated upon general national histories and the biographies of the heroes associated with the struggle for independence from Spain. Philosophical and ideological changes, slow and confused in many respects, from Neoclassic to Romantic norms and concepts of history and finally to a Uberai and radical Positivism, made very little difference to the themes of the historians. It was only after many years, when attention became centered on a study of institutions, that the problem of Negro slavery began to undergo revision and new works on the subject began to appear. The key study in this is Georges Seelie’s La traite négrière aux Indes de Castille, published in Paris in 1906. It is still a basic work. From the year of its publication up to the almost complete renewal of interest in the theme, which began in Latin America in the 1940s, one can discern the development of three major factors which are directly or indirectly relevant to research on the place and importance of the Negro in America.

1. From 1935 up to the present time there has been a consistent study of Spanish institutions in America. This has been useful specifically in clarifying many of the legal aspects of slavery on the one hand, and its exact place within the various institutions on the other. Particularly significant has been the work of Silvio Zavala, José María Ots Capdequi, Charles Verlinden, and José Miranda.10

2. A little later, the development of an ever-growing interest in economic history first, and more recently in social and demographic history obviously had to take cognizance directly or indirectly of the pertinence of slavery to such studies. The pioneering work in this respect was the important contribution to aspects of economic history made by Earl Hamilton and Clarence Haring. Following after them were the patient and laborious studies of Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Charles Boxer, and others. Such Latin American writers as Ricardo Levene, Manuel Moreyra Paz-Soldán, Guillermo Lohmann Villena, and Eduardo Arcila Farias soon joined in studies of this kind. In social and demographic history the general studies of Angel Rosenblat and Magnus Mömer are extremely useful, as indeed are also the specialized studies of Lesley Byrd Simpson, Sherburne F. Cook, and Woodrow Borah.

3. The formation and development of national archives and the publication of the classic collections of documents of the second half of the nineteenth century had an important role in revitalizing historical research. Here and there in Latin America were published the records of the proceedings of the most important colonial town councils, followed by other, more specialized documents based on historical material from various colonial repositories. Some of those who have been responsible for this publication are Silvio Zavala, Manuel Moreyra Paz-Soldán, Richard Konetzke, Eduardo Posada, and Carlos Restrepo Canal.11

Such developments in historical methods, research, and making sources available could not have been otherwise than directly significant to the study of African slavery in Latin America, especially in the context of the growing interest in Negro cultures. A large number of studies devoted to aspects of Negro slavery in Latin America continued to be published in Europe, America, and even Africa. In Europe, after the works of Arthur Helps and Georges Scelle, there appeared various studies by Gaston Martin, León Vignols, Charles Verlinden, Antonio Dominguez Ortiz, and Frédéric Mauro. In the United States since 1916 the Journal of Negro History has been an extremely useful publication for those interested in Negro history and cultures. Later Frank Tannenbaum’s book, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas came to be widely read and discussed. This and the studies of James Ferguson King, particularly, drew attention to the problem of the Negro in Latin American history. In recent years the theme has become the center of lively controversy and intense research. North American historians have taken up a number of different specializations which seem to give excellent results. Herbert Klein has concentrated on comparative studies, Eugene Genovese on an interpretation of the place of slavery in the development of capitalism, Philip Curtin on the numbers of slaves involved in the trade, and James Lockhart on the Negro groups in the colonial society of Peru. The results of other research associated either directly or indirectly with slavery have been published in different monographs or geographical studies: Richard Graham and Stanley Stein in relation to Brazil (Graham, abolition; Stein, coffee in Vassouras), Arthur Corwin for Cuba (abolition), and John Lombardi for Venezuela (slaves in the Wars of Independence and in society in the early period of the republic, and manumission). For their part each Latin American country has one or several historians who have made vital contributions through significant studies of their own areas. Such are Diego Luís Molinari, Elena Scheuss de Studer, and Carlos Sempat Assodourian in Argentina (various details of the trade and its operation); in Brazil Mauricio Goulart (a very useful history of Brazilian slavery) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (slavery and capi talism in the south); and in Colombia Jaime Jaramillo Uribe (slaves and society in the eighteenth century and attitudes toward manumission). Others are Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez and Manuel Moreno Fraginals (the economic and social implications of sugar production) in Cuba; in Mexico, Gonzalo Aguirre Beltran (Negro population, the slave trade, the role of Negroes in Independence); in Puerto Rico, Luis Diaz Solar (history of local slavery); Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, Eugenio Petit Muñoz, and Paulo de Carvalho-Neto in Uruguay (various aspects including culture and anthropological studies, and questions of legal, social, and economic status); and in Venezuela, Miguel Acosta Saignes (life of slaves there, the trade, and the cimarrones, or fugitive slaves.)

All the above writers and many others whom it has been impossible to cite have been fundamental to the writing of the brief work which follows. It is the author’s hope that the summary he has undertaken will center even more interest on the problems and implications of Negro slavery in Latin America.

1 Las Casas (1474-1566): The Historia was begun in 1527 and completed in 1561, but it was not until 1875-76 that the manuscript was published by the Real Academia. Las Casas has been variously called the Apostle or Protector of the Indians, as well as denigratory names as the result of his policies and the ways by which he advanced them. Undoubtedly his major contribution to the betterment of the lot of native peoples lay at court rather than in his work in the Indies. He unceasingly attacked the forced labor of Indians either by enslavement or as the de facto result of granting allotments of Indian labor to leading settlers (the encomienda system), albeit the object of the latter, in theory, was to Christianize and protect them in return for the right to exact labor and payment of tribute. Las Casas is regarded as largely responsible for the enactment of the New Laws of 1542-1543, which attempted to suppress the encomienda system gradually and to eliminate Indian slavery. See Henry R. Wagner and Helen R. Parish, The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (Albuquerque, 1967) (for the New Laws, see pp. 108-120); Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949); and also Hanke’s Introduction to the Historia (see Section 2 of Bibliography »under Las Casas, 1951).

2 See Bibliography. The 1623 petition, for example, was made to Philip IV on behalf of the imperial seat of Potosi, of the City of La Serena, the Kingdom of Chile..., for permission and license for entry … of slaves from Guinea.

3 See Bibliography. Sandoval: 1576 (Spain)-1652 (Cartagena). He went to Peru with his family when still very young. There he entered the Jesuit order and was in due course sent to Cartagena. An earlier, lesser-known work with similar preoccupations, and also basic to a knowledge of African slaves, was his Naturaleza sagrada y profana, costumbres, ritos y supersticiones de todos los Etiopes (1627). His De Instauranda Aethiopum Salute was published in 1641. By his reference to Ethiopians he simply means Negroes.

St. Peter Claver: 1580 (Spain)-1654 (Cartagena). He was sent by the Jesuits in 1610 to Cartagena, where he met Sandoval. He was very much concerned with the conditions in which the slaves arrived. He was canonized in 1888.

4 The last of the Spanish Hapsburgs was Charles II (1665-1700), who named Philip, Duke of Anjou of the French house of Bourbon, to succeed him. The latter’s coming to the throne as Philip V (1700-1746) brought about a period of greater French influence in Spain and the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1713).

For Bravo de Lagunas, see Bibliography. For Mariano Moreno, see under Diego Luis Molinari, 1939, in Section 2 of the Bibliography. See also Idea de las congregaciones publicas de los negros bozales in the Biblioteca Peruana de Historia, vol. Vili, Lima, 1864. How far the principles and writings of the Enlightenment had practical results will be considered in the text.

5 On Saco and his work see Bibliography, under Saco, and Jorrih, 1944; and Corbitt, 1944.

6 Raimundo Nina Rodriques began the publication of his analytical studies in 1896 in the Revista Brasileira. Essential, for example, are his Os africanos no Brasil, 1935a, and O animismo fetichista dos negros bahianos, 1935b.

7 See Bibliography, under Ramos, 1943; Freyre, 1966 and 1970; Fernandes, 1971; Cardoso, 1962; and Ianni, 1962.

8 Ortiz, 1951.

9 Verger, 1953 and 1954; Simpson, 1941 and 1955; Métraux, 1958; Mintz, 1960a; and Bastide, 1967.

10 For these writers and most of those named in the following paragraphs, see Bibliography.

11 For Konetzke, Posada, and Canal, see Section 2 of Bibliography.

CHAPTER ONE

THE INTRODUCTION AND

ESTABLISHMENT OF NEGRO SLAVERY

The first Negro slaves made their appearance in the New World very early, almost immediately after the discovery of America, when only a few islands of the Caribbean and odd stretches of the mainland beaches were known. They were certainly present long before the European newcomers began to form any comprehensive idea of the vast continent they had discovered.

Slavery was a well-known social and economic institution from the earliest times. It initially consisted of the enslavement of conquered peoples and captives of war. Later, individuals who had performed meritorious services were rewarded by the granting of slaves or the permission to have slaves. In the precapitalist framework of society in the European late Middle Ages, it was a simple case of the outright ownership of one human by another, to be acquired and disposed of according to circumstances. It would be more exact if we said, at the point when the great discoveries and European expansion in the world were beginning to take place, that the institution of slavery was not only well known but also time honored. It was the American experience that was to add new dimensions to it.

The effectiveness of slavery in production and economic stability had been well established in classical times,