PÉREZ MORALES, E. - Manumission On The Land, Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century Mompox (Colombia)

Manumission on the Land: Slaves, Masters,
and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century

Mompox (Colombia)
EDGARDO PÉREZ MORALES
In the mid-1700s, the town of Mompox flourished in the Spanish viceroy-

alty of the New Kingdom of Granada, today part of the Republic of
Colombia. Built on the banks of the northern Magdalena River, an impor-
tant waterway connecting the Andean interior with the Caribbean Sea,
Mompox constantly buzzed with travelers and trade alike. Mompox was
home to a community of merchants who profited handsomely from both
legal trade and smuggling, their networks reaching places as far away as
Lima in Peru and Cádiz in Spain. These merchants were frequently also
slaveholders and landowners. On haciendas outside of town, slaves culti-
vated the land and tended large herds of cattle. They gathered wood and
resins and hunted for game and jaguars ( panthera onca) that preyed on
livestock. Along with free people of color, slaves also worked as artisans,
journeymen, and oarsmen on boats transporting goods and people up and
down the river1 (see Figure 1).
1. David J. Robinson, ed. Mil leguas por América. De Lima a Caracas 1740–1741.
Diario de viaje de don Miguel de Santisteban, (Bogotá: Banco de la República, 1992),
170–76; Diego de Peredo, “Noticia historial de la provincia de Cartagena de las Indias
año 1772,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 6–7 (1971–1972):
148; Alexander von Humboldt, En Colombia: Extractos de sus diarios preparados y
Edgardo Pérez Morales is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the

University of Southern California <perezmor@usc.edu>. The author thanks
Rebecca J. Scott, Jean M. Hébrard, Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, María Eugenia
Chaves, Adriana Chira, Eric Schewe, Carly Steinberger, and the anonymous
reviewers for Law and History Review for their valuable help and suggestions.
Law and History Review May 2017, Vol. 35, No. 2

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512 Law and History Review, May 2017
Figure 1. Mompox and other urban settlements in the New Kingdom of Granada.
Source: Illustration by Eric A. Schewe.
In 1799, the slaves of the San Bartolomé de la Honda hacienda, one of

the biggest rural estates controlled from Mompox, rebelled against the heirs
of their late master, Juan Martín de Setuaín. The uprising was at least a year
in the making. The slaves had slowed down work beginning in May 1798.
In April 1799, most of them refused to work altogether, asserting that their
master had set them free in his last will and testament and expelled their
overseer. Over the next 3 years, the alarmed executor and heirs of the estate
tried their best to re-enslave the members of this community. The former
slaves, in turn, fought hard to ensure their freedom, struggling to do so
while remaining on the land. They aspired to obtain manumission, but
they also imagined building a free community in La Honda itself under
the authority not of masters and overseers, but of a priest and a magistrate.2
presentados por la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales y la

Academia de Ciencias de la República Democrática Alemana (Bogotá: Flota Mercante
Grancolombiana, 1982) “Diario VII a y b” (1801); and William Duane, A Visit to Colombia,
in the Years 1822 & 1823, by Laguayra and Caracas, Over the Cordillera to Bogota, and
Thence by the Magdalena to Cartagena (Philadelphia: printed by Thomas H. Palmer, for the
author, 1826), 597–601.
2. “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra alcalde ordinario de la villa de Mompox dirige testimo-
nio de la solicitud de Juan Nepomuceno Surmay albacea testamentario de don Juan Martín
de Setuaín, sobre la reducción y pacificación de los esclavos de la hacienda de San
Bartolomé de la Honda; para la providencia que haya lugar,” Colonia, Negros y Esclavos
Manumission on the Land 513
Important evidence has survived about this uprising, affording the
opportunity to study the interdependence of slavery, freedom, settlement
patterns, and legal culture in eighteenth-century Mompox. This evidence
includes correspondence, account books, inventories, legal claims and
criminal and civil proceedings. In this article, I draw on these and other
documents to explore the complexities of the former slaves’ legal imagina-
tion. Their claim to freedom was inseparable from their understanding of
the nature of the bond tying them to their master. Their desire to continue
to live in the estate under the authority of church and crown representatives
was inseparable from a corporatist understanding of their community. The
people of La Honda seem to have hoped to transition from being slaves
under an absentee master into free vassals of the king living in state of
policía (densely settled and in an orderly fashion, both civic and reli-
gious).3 The goal of achieving manumission on the land had specific
legal and social underpinnings.
First, testamentary manumission—the freeing of slaves after a master’s
death as promised in his or her last will and testament—was an avenue
to freedom, albeit one difficult to traverse. Testamentary manumission is
most usually associated with cases of individual slaves or single families,
very often women and their immediate relatives living in urban areas who
struggled to gain their freedom after their masters had died.4 By contrast,
the events of La Honda involved several rural slave families claiming
de Bolívar, vol. 3, doc. 5, Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá, Colombia (hereafter

AGN). On labor control and settlement patterns, see German Colmenares, “El tránsito a
sociedades campesinas de dos sociedades esclavistas en la Nueva Granada. Cartagena y
Popayán, 1750–1850,” Huellas 29 (1990): 8–24.
3. Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World: 1493–1793 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2000), 19–44; and Tomás A. Mantecón Movellán and Ofelia Rey
Castelao, “Identidades urbanas en la cultura hispánica: policía y cultura cívica,” in
Identidades urbanas en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI–XVIII), ed. Ofelia Rey
Castelao and Tomás A. Mantecón Movellán (Santiago de Compostela: Universidad
Santiago de Compostela, 2015), 17–41. On vassalage and political belonging in the
Spanish world, see Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early
Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
4. See, for example, Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil:
Bahia, 1684–1745,” Hispanic American Historical Review 54 (1974): 603–35; Lyman
L. Johnson, “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 59 (1979): 258–79; Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad. Los esclavos
de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud. 1821–1854 (Lima: Pontificia Universidad
Católica del Perú, 1993); Loredana Giolitto, “Esclavitud y libertad en Cartagena de
Indias. Reflexiones en torno a un caso de manumisión a finales del período colonial,”
Fronteras de la Historia 8 (2003): 65–91; Rosemary Brana-Shute and Randy J. Parks,
Paths to Freedom. Manumission in the Atlantic World (Columbia: The University of
South Carolina Press, 2009); and Michelle A. McKinley, “Till Death Do Us Part:
manumission, and doing so not before the local magistrates but by taking
their freedom by force. In spite of this, the leaders seem to have expected
that magistrates in Mompox and Santa Fe (present-day Bogotá), the vice-
royalty’s capital, could deem their claim legitimate, sparing them further
enslavement or prison sentences.5
Second, the leaders of La Honda claimed that they had had an agreement
with their late master. In exchange for their obedience while awaiting
deliverance from slavery, the master would guarantee a reliable supply
of basic necessities, including time for prayers and religious holidays.
Their master, however, had breached this pact. Supplies had become
scarce, the slaves went naked, and religious practices were disrupted.
The master’s failure became an important element to further legitimize
the uprising and the expectation of lasting freedom. When these types of
arrangements took place, their dynamics shifted along with changes in
the balance of power between slaveholders and those in bondage. Some
slaves, under the right circumstances, tried to hold masters accountable
to the negotiated terms by complaining, making legal claims before mag-
istrates, or open rebellion.
Third, after the uprising, some members of this community expected to
peacefully live under the authority of a priest and a magistrate, forming a
partially independent settlement. The people of La Honda understood their
small society to be a corporate community with aspirations to municipal
privileges and duties approved by the authorities. The idea that former
slaves could aspire to form their own town was not far-fetched.
Beginning in the 1740s, royal agents and Catholic clergymen had resettled
people in Spanish-style towns—ideally built with a plaza and a church as
their center of gravity—in an effort to bring dispersed rural dwellers under
political control, religious orthodoxy, and fiscal oversight. Throughout the
province of Cartagena de Indias, where Mompox was located, free people
of color and sometimes runaway slaves had become residents of these
towns and hamlets.6 If authorities recognized the people of La Honda as
Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery & Abolition 33

(2012): 381–401.
5. In accordance with legal practice in the eighteenth-century New Kingdom of Granada, I
will avoid the expression “tribunal” and “court case” when referring to Mompox. In towns
such as Mompox, legal proceedings took place through paperwork exchanges pushed by
magistrates and their assistants.
6. Marta Herrera Ángel, Ordenar para controlar. Ordenamiento espacial y control
político en las Llanuras del Caribe y en los Andes Centrales Neogranadinos. Siglo XVIII
(Bogotá: Academia Colombiana de Historia, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e
Historia, 2002); Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 18–41; and Hugues
a formal community, then the former slaves could enjoy both political and
social stability on the basis of obedience to the king and the Holy Mother
church, maintaining possession and use of the land.
The ways in which magistrates, military personnel, and priests dealt with
urban and rural commoners, and the echoes of individual cases’ outcomes,
could shape slaves’ notions of, and expectations from, the legal system.7
Acting magistrates embodied the king’s authority and were expected to
showcase the monarch’s wisdom and prudence.8 Some slaves carefully
considered recent events and the potential reactions of both putative mas-
ters and local authorities before they set out to rebel, to complain before a
magistrate, or to combine these and other means of struggle. For most
slaves, however, judicial action against their master and physical resistance
to their enslavement remained difficult to accomplish.9
Further questioning what Michelle A. McKinley has called the “unilat-
eral narrative of testamentary manumission,”10 this article argues that
although masters could use the promise of freedom as a tool of social con-
trol, slaves interpreted those promises in light of their own understandings
and specific knowledge of the local dynamics of bonded labor, the actual
practice of manumission, the corporatist nature of society, and the connec-
tions between life in policía and political stability. In a society in which
R. Sánchez Mejía, “De arrochelados a vecinos: reformismo borbónico e integración política

en las gobernaciones de Santa Marta y Cartagena, Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1740–1810,”
Revista de Indias 75 (2015): 457–88.
7. This formulation is owing to Michael C. Scardville, “Justice by Paperwork: A Day in
the Life of a Court Scribe in Bourbon Mexico City,” Journal of Social History 36 (2003):
987–91. On dynamics of social interdependence, see Norbert Elias, On the Process of
Civilization: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Dublin: University College
Dublin Press, 2012 [first published 1939]); Norbert Elias, The Court Society (Dublin:
University College Dublin Press, 2006 [first published 1969]); and Norbert Elias and
John L. Scotson, The Established and the Outsiders (Dublin: University College Dublin
Press, 2008 [first published 1965]).
8. Juan Solórzano Pereyra, Política Indiana (Madrid: Fundación José Antonio de Castro,
1996 [first published 1647]), 3:2002–4.
9. In addition to having logistical difficulties, slaves in Mompox had to carefully navigate
local feuds. Undermining a master’s authority over his or her slaves became a tactic of con-
frontation among bitterly quarreling elites. Orlando Fals Borda, Historia doble de la costa.
Tomo I. Mompox y Loba (Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1980), 99B–102B; Carlos
Eduardo Valencia Villa, Alma en boca y huesos en costal. Una aproximación a los contras-
tes socio-económicos de la esclavitud. Santafé, Mariquita y Mompox 1610–1660 (Bogotá:
Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, 2003), 100–105; Helg, Liberty, 108–20;
and Vladimir Daza Villar, Los marqueses de Santa Coa. Una historia económica del
Caribe Colombiano, 1750–1810 (Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e
Historia, 2009), 247–86.
10. McKinley, “Till Death,” 384.
free individuals and families achieved social belonging only through their
membership in corporations (brotherhoods, guilds, parishes, cities), for the
community of La Honda to successfully achieve freedom and legal stand-
ing depended not on manumission alone, but also on forming a social body
with specific political privileges, however limited.11 The alternative was
the dismemberment of the community, social exclusion, and economic
insecurity. To sketch a coherent picture of the legal imagination of the peo-
ple of La Honda, I must therefore build from the ground up, first examining
the world of slavery that they tried so hard to change.
The Land and the Slaves
The distance between Mompox and La Honda was relative. Located on an

anabranch of the Magdalena River, the main artery of transportation in the
region, La Honda was an 8 day riverine trip upriver from Mompox. For
those traveling from the hacienda to town, however, the trip downriver
took three days. Goods and people—and along with them news and
rumors—leaving from Mompox took about a week to reach the hacienda.
Word of what transpired in La Honda, however, was quick to reach the
masters in town. These dynamics of distance and communication shaped
the rhythms of contact between both places.
La Honda had a long history before the late eighteenth century uprising,
as surviving records dating back to the late 1600s illustrate. Mompox’s
local Jesuit college had bought the estate in 1695, but the Jesuits did not
hold on to it for very long. José de Mier, an up-and-coming patrician
who established one of the largest fortunes in Mompox, purchased the
estate in 1728. At this time, forty slaves worked in La Honda, which
11. On corporatist society, see Beatriz Rojas, ed. Cuerpo político y pluralidad de dere-
chos. Los privilegios de las corporaciones novohispanas (México: CIDE, Instituto Mora,
2007). For a useful synthesis on issues of law, slavery, and legal activism in the Spanish
world, see Michelle McKinley, “Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and
Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689,” Law and History Review 28 (2010):
752–61. For a detailed bibliographical review with special emphasis on the history of the
United Sates up to 2001, see Ariela Gross, “Beyond Black and White: Cultural
Approaches to Race and Slavery,” Columbia Law Review 101 (2001): 640–90. On various
slaves societies in the Americas, see the special issue on “Law, Slavery, and Justice” of Law
and History Review 49 (2011): 915–1095. For the case of Brazil see Jean Hébrard,
“L’esclavage au Brésil. Le débat historiographique et ses racines,” in Brésil. Quatre
siècles d’esclavage. Nouvelle questions, nouvelles recherches, ed. Jean Hébrard (Paris:
Karthala, CIRESC, 2012), 7–63 (available in English translation as “Slavery in Brazil:
Brazilian Scholars in the Key Interpretative Debates,” Translating the Americas 1 (Fall
2013): 47–95.
boasted 10,000 cacao trees. Mier, however, had plans to transform the
property. He soon purchased neighboring lands for expansion and
improvement, beginning the transition from cacao to sugar cane cultiva-
tion.12 Either Mier himself or his heirs eventually sold the improved prop-
erty to Juan Martín de Setuaín. It remains difficult to ascertain when this
happened, although by the time of the uprising, Setuaín had clearly been
master of the estate for several years.
By the 1790s, the hacienda’s physical and social landscape had changed
dramatically since the time of the Jesuit owners. Only 1,500 cacao trees
remained, whereas fifteen large plots of land were now planted in sugar
cane. La Honda was now home to 101 slaves. Buildings, trees, and garden
plots were located on a swath of land at the center of the property. Slave
social life as well as production activities took place in this central
space, known as the ranchería. On this hamlet, there were nineteen houses
for the workers and a thatched-roof chapel for the celebration of mass and
religious festivities, which was equipped with gold and silver utensils, reli-
gious icons, and bells. Finally, the trapiche, the grinding mechanism
for the extraction of sugar cane juice and its annexed boiling house,
was located at the very heart of the ranchería. A road connected the
ranchería with a landing place on the river, where boats constantly loaded
and unloaded people, produce, and supplies.13 With a church and a plaza-
like space, this hamlet already resembled formally incorporated towns
where free people of color lived.
Life at La Honda moved at the pace of the agricultural calendar. Things
revolved around the molienda, a word that expresses both the harvest time
and the action of grinding the cane. Unlike the zafra in Cuba or the safra in
Brazil, which took place once a year and extended for several months, the
molienda took place every 4 months and lasted for a few weeks.14 Over the
course of the molienda, slaves rushed to cut and grind the cane, and then
boiled its juice in copper cauldrons, slowly turning the liquid into miel.
12. Act of Sale, Gabriel de Aguilar to José de Mier, Mompox, February 16, 1729,
“Propiedad de la hacienda de La Honda que dejó don Martín de Setuay [sic] a sus herederos
José Emeterio y María Isabel de Mier y Setuayn en 26 de noviembre de 1798 por el último
codicilio,” ff. 4r–7v, Archivo Anexo III, Real Hacienda-Cuentas, Tierras de Bolívar, vol.
2883 c, AGN; and Germán Colmenares, Haciendas de los jesuítas en el Nuevo Reino de
Granada (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1969), 63.
13. Inventory and estate appraisal, San Bartolomé de la Honda, May 10, 1802, “Propiedad
de la hacienda,” ff. 12r–13r.
14. Fray Juan de Santa Gertrudis, Maravillas de la naturaleza (Bogotá: Biblioteca Banco
Popular, 1970), 1:78.
Miel, the thick syrup obtained from boiling sugar cane juice, was finally
packaged in barrels and transported to Mompox on river boats.15
The harvest cycle was short, but the slaves kept busy year round. In
addition to sugar cane-related work, slaves repaired buildings and tools
on the property; took care of more than 2,000 plantain trees as well as sev-
eral coconut, orange, lime, and other trees; and tended horses, pigs and cat-
tle. Situated in a particularly fertile corner of the region, La Honda offered
a landscape of sugar cane fields, garden plots, grasslands, and forests abun-
dant in game and wood. Limestone deposits complemented the resources
of this land. The hacienda had three furnaces in which slaves turned this
sedimentary rock into quicklime for construction and other purposes.16
In spite of this seeming abundance, social activities and agricultural
work at La Honda could not be sustained without supplies from
Mompox. From town, the master had to send boatloads of provisions
including salt, spices, wine, clothes, fabric, tools, candles, shot, and gun-
powder. In addition to material goods, the master had to supply slaves
with some medical care, as well as “spiritual goods,” an amalgam of
objects and rituals as important as food and shelter. This included religious
objects and time for mass and prayer, both daily as well as periodically on
Catholic holidays. Occasionally, a priest sent by Setuaín performed the rit-
uals of the sacraments, which required candles, wine, incense, and other
religious paraphernalia. Transportation upriver was slow and costly, but
the master had to keep the estate supplied.17
The reproduction of the labor force relied heavily on the slave families in
the hacienda. With just over 100 slaves, La Honda was an unusually large
estate.18 Slaves at La Honda were organized into family units, generally
including parents, children, and, sometimes, grandparents. Although its
riverfront location offered some possibilities for escape, slaves’ family
ties, the threat of violence from overseers, and the difficulty of establishing
a new life elsewhere deterred most residents from taking this risky step.19
15. Inventory and estate appraisal, San Bartolomé de la Honda, May 10, 1802, “Propiedad
de la hacienda,” ff. 12r–16v.
16. Ibid.
17. Deposition of José María Rodríguez, Mompox, July 1, 1799, “Don Gabriel Martínez
Guerra,” ff. 788r–789r. On “spiritual goods,” see Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History:
Latin America’s Material Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 122.
18. Haciendas in the province of Cartagena rarely had 100 slaves. See Jaime Jaramillo
Uribe, “Esclavos y señores en la sociedad colombiana del siglo XVIII,” in Ensayos de his-
toria social (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2001 [first published 1963]), 16–17, 61–62;
and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Hacienda colonial y formación social (Barcelona: Sendai, 1988),
45–58.
19. Palenques (maroon settlements) were not very common in this region during the
1700s. Runaway slaves often blended into small communities formed by free people of
Juan Martín de Setuaín, owner of the land and master of the slaves, was both
an important property holder and a prominent merchant in Mompox. He was
known in town for financing the construction of the bell tower of the Santa
Bárbara Church, which still stands today.20 With the help of his proxies and
slave drivers, Setuaín controlled his rural estate from Mompox. In spite of his
rapidly deteriorating health, this absentee owner stayed at the helm of his affairs
throughout the 1790s. On August 20, 1796, Setuaín contracted to supply the
local royal distillery with 400 cántaras of miel every year for the next 5 years.
This was equivalent to more than 6,000 liters. A valuable raw product for the
distillery, miel was transformed into aguardiente, a popular form of white
rum. The production and trade of aguardiente was a monopoly of the state.21
Moving the miel downriver to the distillery in town was relatively easy.
Boats transported the sugar cane syrup from La Honda to Mompox in a few
days. Manuel de Herrera, the administrator of the royal distillery, received
the shipments and paid Setuaín or his proxies. By the end of April 1798,
Setuaín had delivered almost 600 cántaras. Bartolomé Gallardo, another
one of Setuaín’s proxies, had sold this produce for 900 pesos. However,
although on each visit Gallardo usually brought to the distillery more
than 100 cántaras, on May 31, 1798 he brought only 25 cántaras.22
Work routines and the balance of power seem to have dramatically
changed in the estate at this point. Possibly anticipating the death of their
master, the slaves had slowed down production. As the ailing Setuaín slowly
lost his agility as a manager, the slaves seem to have exercised increasing
autonomy, inching closer to the achievement of de facto freedom. When
Setuaín died in town on April 9, 1799, news of his death traveled to La
Honda. The slaves stopped working altogether, openly defying their over-
seer.23 Word of this development soon made it back to town.
color. Herrera Ángel, Ordenar, 203–48; and Orián Jiménez Meneses and Edgardo Pérez
Morales, La Mojana. Medio ambiente y vida material en perspectiva histórica (Medellín:
Imprenta Universidad de Antioquia, 2007), 40–70.
20. Daza Villar, Los marqueses, 56.
21. “Libro de compras de simples de la Real Fábrica de Aguardiente de Mompox para el
año de 1798,” ff. 1r–2r, Archivo Anexo III, Real Hacienda-Cuentas, Aguardientes, vol.
2299, AGN; General inventory of slaves, Hacienda de La Honda, June 25, 1795; and
Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, May 25, 1801, “Don Gabriel
Martínez Guerra,” ff. 831v–833v. On aguardiente, see Gilma Mora de Tovar, Aguardiente
y conflictos sociales en la Nueva Granada durante el siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 1988); and Felipe González Mora, Reales fábricas de aguardiente
de caña en el Nuevo Reino de Granada. Arquitectura industrial del siglo XVIII (Bogotá:
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2002).
22. “Libro de compras,” ff. 5v–9v.
Guerra,” ff. 782v–795v; Daza Villar, Los marqueses, 55–56.
By July 1799, it had become evident that production at the hacienda
would not begin again any time soon. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, the
executor of Setuaín’s last will and testament, approached the royal distill-
ery with a request to cancel the late Setuaín’s contractual obligations.24 The
distillery administrators, however, made it clear to Surmay that they
expected La Honda to keep supplying their shop with sugar cane syrup.
Surmay was facing a difficult situation. The surviving records of La
Honda reveal no major conflicts between masters and slaves before
1798. Now, however, slaves expressed open discontent and refused to
work. They further thought that they were entitled to their freedom,
which they asserted that their late master had promised to them.
Promises of Freedom
Masters seem to have, at times, effectively used promises of freedom as a

means to foster slave acquiescence, as freedom was potentially the most
coveted goal of people in bondage. Although masters seem to have thought
that providing food and shelter for slaves and allowing them to form fam-
ilies would help avoid sickness, premature death, negligence, and rebellion,
they also understood that the prospect of freedom could keep the balance of
power to their favor. This was not a mechanistic process. Masters had to
constantly elicit obedience and reiterate their promises, and slaves expected
masters to keep their word.25
Promises of freedom often took the form of testamentary manumission,
the prospect of legally sanctioned liberty deferred until after the master’s
death. It is the promise aspect of this dynamic that should be emphasized.26
Masters reiterated their intentions of granting freedom; however, the time
of delivery almost always remained unclear. Even when they were lucky
enough to be included in a testamentary clause ordering manumission,
slaves had to wait for an unknown period of time, hoping that the testament
remained unaltered, while obediently continuing to perform their duties.
Moreover, a master’s word did not guarantee manumission. Even after
24. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Alcalde Ordinario [Martín Ribón], Mompox, n.d., “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 804r–805v.
25. For a discussion of “negotiation and conflict” among slaves and masters in Brazil, see
João José Reis and Eduardo Silva, Negociação e conflito. A resistência negra no Brasil
escravista (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989). The idea of masters eliciting accom-
modation from their slaves seems particularly valuable to describe what happened in La
Honda. See K. R. Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire. A Study in Social
Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 139–43.
26. McKinley, “Till Death,” 381–401; and Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 81–112.
years of loyalty, slaves could find themselves fighting for their promised
freedom against tenacious and litigious creditors and inheritors. The last
wishes of a deceased master could easily disappear in the thicket of
legal action.27
Setuaín seems to have repeatedly promised freedom to prevent slave
unrest. An expectation of freedom existed among the families of La
Honda before Setuaín’s death on April 9, 1799. The slaves had taken
their master for his word, remaining attentive to news and rumors on his
health. When news of Setuaín’s death finally materialized, people in La
Honda assumed themselves manumitted and expelled their overseer;28
however, they did not go away, instead taking control of the land and its
resources. Surmay, the executor of Setuaín’s last will, immediately dis-
patched a man named Francisco Javier Monteros to order the now alleged
slaves to return to the fields. Monteros arrived in La Honda on May 11,
1799. He quickly returned to Mompox with bad news for Surmay: self-
assured and now regarding themselves as free people, the men and
women of La Honda had declared that they had no master other than
God.29 They remained in control of the estate.
The former slaves claimed that Setuaín had repeatedly pledged to man-
umit them. More specifically, in June 1799, some of the former slaves
claimed that Setuaín had promised to set them free after a period of 10
years of faithful labor. They further claimed that, on a different occasion,
Setuaín had told them that they would earn freedom after his death.30 In
early 1800, some of the former slaves even claimed that their former master
had written a clause granting their freedom into his last will and testament.
A white man, they claimed, had read the document and related this impor-
tant information to them. Unfortunately, they had also learned that some-
one had burned the document.31
27. Hermes Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa se forma una hoguera: esclavitud,
insubordinación y liberación (Tunja: Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de
Colombia, 1992), 24–25; and McKinley, “Till Death.”
28. Even when no promises of freedom existed, some slaves monitored changing circum-
stances around them. The replacement of an overseer, the death of a master, or internal feuds
among slaveholders sometimes prompted slaves to seize the moment and push for conces-
sions or freedom. Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa, 31–39.
29. Deposition of Francisco Javier, Mompox, July 2, 1799, “Don Gabriel Martínez
Guerra,” ff. 795v–801r.
31. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 15, 1800; and
Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 29, 1800, “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 821r–824r.
As soon as the master died, the people of La Honda took matters in their
own hands and aggressively asserted their freedom. Although an alterna-
tive course of action would have been to petition the magistrates in town
to substantiate Setuaín’s words, the community of La Honda chose to
understand his promises as having self-executing potential. This tactic
was crucial, as the slaves had never been promised to receive ownership
of the estate but now aspired to live as free people on this very land. It
remains difficult to elucidate how they extended the claim to freedom to
a claim to freedom on the land. However, it is clear that defending the ter-
ritory and defending their newly gained freedom became one and the same.
After the slaves claimed their own freedom, Surmay moved to regain
control of the land and the people. He hired José María Rodríguez to
visit La Honda, spy for him, and try to convince the alleged slaves to return
to work. Rodríguez arrived in La Honda on the night of June 25, 1799. He
had received a set of written instructions from Surmay, ordering him to
send the leaders of the movement to Mompox or to Morales, a town on
the other side of the river not far from La Honda. Rodríguez was further
instructed to gather information on the movement and figure out whether
it seemed necessary to request help from the royal authorities in order to
retake control of the property. Faced with resistance and confusing circum-
stances, Rodríguez found his tasks difficult to execute.32
Unable to accomplish his goals, Rodríguez returned to town and gave an
account of his encounter and conversations with individuals from La
Honda. On arriving at the ranchería, Rodríguez had requested lodging
and food from a man named Carlos, who seemed amiable enough. Soon,
however, six or seven men armed with pikes and machetes surrounded
Rodríguez, demanding to know the reasons behind his visit to La
Honda.33 Rodríguez told his interlocutors that he had simply travelled
there to buy supplies (it was common for people to visit haciendas to pur-
chase maize, plantains, and pigs) and to talk to one Father Melchor, per-
haps the priest who regularly visited La Honda during these years. After
further inquiry on the part of the armed men, Rodríguez told them that
he meant no harm, as he had showed up without a “stick” in his hands.
He further told them that he would leave the estate if they wished him
to. In turn, the armed men told Rodríguez that he could stay, but that
they were “resolved and determined to give up their heads before serving
32. Instructions by Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to José María Rodríguez, Mompox, June
13, 1799, “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 774r–778v.
Guerra,” f. 784r–v.
any white man or consenting to having any white man come to the
hacienda.”34
Just when Rodríguez thought he could sleep over, however, a different
group of armed men showed up. They told Rodríguez to leave, because
they no longer wanted any white man at the hacienda. Rodríguez then
took to the road, but as he approached the landing, he was again invited
by Vicente, a former slave who had held overseeing responsibilities, to
spend the night. In spite of the confusing circumstances, Rodríguez did
stay that night and spent some hours talking to the former slaves
Antonio, Ascención, Valerio, and Vicente. They turned out to be eager
for news from Mompox and Cartagena de Indias, the provincial capital
and an important port town on the Caribbean coast.35
Unwritten Pacts
After deciding to stay at La Honda over the night of June 25, 1799,
Rodríguez provided his interlocutors with their desired news, taking the
opportunity to convince them of the futility and dangerousness of their
course of action. Rodríguez mentioned how revolts, battles, and sieges
had recently shattered the world in dramatic ways, perhaps referencing
the turbulent 1790s, a decade of turmoil marked in the Caribbean by the
Haitian Revolution, a major slave uprising beginning in August 1791.36
Rodríguez tried to link the events at La Honda with the events that had
unfolded recently in the outside world, telling the former slaves that even
free men “found themselves in unhappy servitude, worse off than slaves
for defending their Law and their King.” He suggested that the community
of La Honda could not keep their enemies at bay forever, and that
armed struggle was an act of sheer folly even for the most legitimate of
Guerra,” ff. 784r–785r.
Guerra,” ff. 785r–787r. On Cartagena de Indias during the 1700s, see Haroldo Calvo
Stevenson, ed., Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVIII, (Bogotá: Banco de la República,
2005).
36. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). On the reverberations of the Haitian
Revolution abroad, see Julius S. Scott III, “The Common Wind: Currents of
Afro-American Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (PhD diss., Duke
University, 1986); David Patrick Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in
the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); and Ada Ferrer,
Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014).
causes.37 Although never specifically mentioned in the La Honda records,
it was against the backdrop of at least three episodes of slave unrest that
this conversation took on a serious significance.
People in Cartagena, Mompox, and Santa Fe kept abreast of the upris-
ings in the neighboring French Caribbean, especially in Saint Domingue
(Haiti) after 1791. Bureaucrats thought that the revolutions abroad could
spark upheavals in the viceroyalty.38 In Mompox, the memory of an alleged
plan to burn the town to the ground remained fresh. In January 1793, a series
of roaring fires had consumed more than 400 houses in town. Patricians
feared that the fires had resulted from a “conspiracy” involving slaves and
free people of color.39 Perhaps even more importantly, the events at La
Honda took place in alarming synchrony with an alleged conspiracy in the
city of Cartagena, one that seemed to prove that slave revolution had indeed
arrived from abroad. Authorities believed that “French Negroes”—an
expression denoting people of African descent with alleged or real ties
with the troubled slave colonies in the French Caribbean—had plotted to
take over the city. News of this alleged conspiracy broke out on April 1,
1799, just a few days before the uprising at La Honda.40
Although information of slave action elsewhere may have encouraged peo-
ple in La Honda to shake off their own enslavement, people in bondage in
Mompox and its area of influence had previously risen against their masters
regardless of external triggers.41 The conversation between Rodríguez and
the former slaves Antonio, Ascención, Valerio, and Vicente suggests that La
Honda’s leaders had specific grievances against Setuaín that they expressed
through an idiom of interdependence and mutual responsibilities. Rodríguez
directly asked the alleged slaves why they refused to work. In addition to men-
tioning that their late master had repeatedly made promises of freedom to them,
they also justified their refusal to work based on their belief that Setuaín had
unfulfilled his Christian and civil obligations as a master.42
Guerra,” f. 787r–v.
38. Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter AGI), Estado, 52 N.76. Helg,
Liberty, 39, 42, 248–53.
39. Joaquín de Cañaveral to José de Ezpeleta, Cartagena de Indias, January 29, 1793 and
Juan Nepomuceno Berrueco to Joaquín de Cañaveral, Mompós, January 22, 1793, AGN,
Colonia, Milicias y Marina, vol. 84, f. 102r–v, 104r–105v. Another fire was reported on
March 19. See Matías Ruíz and José Feliciano Cassado to José de Ezpeleta, Mompós,
April 19 1794, AGN, Colonia, Milicias y Marina, vol. 127, No. 105, ff. 880r–881r;
AGN, Colonia, Juicios Criminales, vol. 139, doc. 1.
40. AGI, Estado, 53, N.76 and N.77.
41. Tovar Pinzón, Hacienda, 58.
Rodríguez’s interlocutors suggested that they had offered their loyalty
and hard work expecting that they would receive enough food and cloth-
ing, and, eventually, freedom. Although they had worked for many
years, from dawn until dusk and even into the night, keeping their part
of this unwritten pact, Setuaín had failed to provide for the basic needs
of his slaves. The master’s slow physical decline seems to have hindered
the timely delivery of supplies to La Honda, a costly and time-consuming
task that was apparently disrupted by early 1798. When supplies were not
forthcoming, it was not unusual for slaves to rise up or protest against their
masters.43
The former slaves further elaborated on Setuaín’s failure to keep his
obligations, mentioning the master’s failure to provide for their spiritual
needs. Antonio, Ascención, Valerio, and Vicente told Rodríguez that
they had not only lacked food and clothes but also candles, which were
essential for religious practices, especially for praying the rosary at
night.44 The master’s failure to provide the community with spiritual com-
fort could be depicted as a grave fault not only against the slaves but
against Catholicism itself, a fundamental tenet of society embodied in
prayer.
The former slaves’ religious practices became a crucial part of their
arguments. Their remarks on this issue highlighted the master’s failure
to fulfill his obligations and deployed their own understanding of commu-
nal life at La Honda before and after the uprising. The families who lived
in the hacienda, Rodríguez’s interlocutors suggested, had “entrusted them-
selves to the Virgin” in hope that their plans of freedom would come to
fruition. They explained how they had offered her a chanted mass every
month, celebrating her feast every year and devotedly praying the rosary
on a regular basis. Their cause had a religious dimension, and their com-
munity was headed by a patron saint (the specific advocation remains
unclear). Now that they had successfully kept outsiders at bay, they
planned to serve God and the local priest, whom they said that they
much esteemed.45
Members of the community of La Honda who spoke to Rodríguez fur-
ther explained that they had never planned to shake off their religious obli-
gations. According to Rodríguez’s testimony, the former slaves told him
that they had requested a priest to come to the estate. Therefore, they
43. Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa, 59, 62; and Reis and Silva, Negociação, 7–12, 18–19,
66–68.
Guerra,” ff. 788v–789r, 792v.
claimed, their actions were not an uprising at all. In exchange for the pres-
ence of a priest in their community they intended to pay primicias (first
fruits of the harvests, tithes), estipendios (the priest’s salary), and other
ecclesiastical dues (presumably on account of sacraments and ritual accou-
trements).46 Although priests had visited the hacienda before the uprising,
community members now aspired to have a man of the cloth permanently
living in La Honda. By suggesting that they would pay for his services, the
former slaves indicated their loyalty to the Spanish polity, as a clear differ-
entiation between church and state did not exist. The crown, through the
privilege of patronato real, governed ecclesiastical appointments and man-
aged church revenues in the Spanish Indies. By suggesting that La Honda
could have its own priest, the former slaves declared their intention to
become a legally incorporated settlement, which implied submission to
both majesties, spiritual and temporal.47
Inhabitants of Spanish-style towns were usually keenly aware of the
legal identity of their municipalities, and the people of La Honda knew
this well. They did not hope to become a ciudad (the highest ranking
form of settlement, with a town council, at least one parish, common
lands, and rural dependencies). But they seem to have aspired to become
a formally incorporated submunicipality. This could happen by becoming
an anexo (usually a small settlement subordinated to a larger town), a sitio
(usually a hamlet dense enough to have a name and maybe a church, but
also subordinated to a larger town), or even a vice-parroquia or parroquia
(a town robust enough to rank as vice-parish or parish and, therefore, to
pay for its own priest and have a certain degree of independence).48
These types of settlements were prevalent throughout the province of
Cartagena de Indias.
Over the course of the decades between 1740 and 1790, the Spanish
government had authorized several campaigns of territorial reorganization
in the province of Cartagena. Families scattered throughout wooded areas
had been settled on new towns. People living in existing hamlets deemed
too small or out of the way had been moved to other, larger settlements.
Built according to Spanish notions of policía, these new towns had
churches in small plazas and their streets, although few in number, were
laid out with a grid pattern in mind (often hard to follow because of the
location of the settlements on river banks). Although several of these
Guerra,” ff. 788v–790v. Abundant information on tithes collection in the New Kingdom of
Granada is available in AGN, Colonia, Diezmos.
47. On patronato real, see Juan Solórzano Pereyra, Política, vol. 2, Libro Cuarto.
48. Herrera Ángel, Ordenar, 86–94.
Figure 2. Urban and rural settlements in the vicinity of San Bartolomé de La

Honda, c. 1799. Source: Illustration by Eric A. Schewe.
new settlements failed or were only occupied for a few months each year,
they were legally incorporated as parishes, vice-parishes, or anexos.
Within the jurisdiction of Mompox, downriver from La Honda, several
new settlements had been founded, including El Banco, Tamalamequito,
and San Sebastián de Loba. Some of these resembled the central hamlet
at La Honda. Morales, the closest settlement to La Honda, predated the ter-
ritorial reforms. However, authorities modified its municipal status, making
it an anexo to the city of Simití. Described by the bishop of Cartagena in
1772 as a “vice-parish” of “free people,” Morales had a church and cus-
toms officers, but it was subordinated to the authorities and the parish
priest in Simití49 (see Figure 2).
49. Robinson, Mil leguas, 167–68; de Peredo, “Noticia,” 149; Pilar Moreno de Angel,
Antonio de la Torre y Miranda. Viajero y poblador. Siglo XVIII (Bogotá: Planeta, 1993),
63–169; Herrera Ángel, Ordernar, 79–116; and Helg, Liberty, 18–79.
Although it was Spanish authorities who had sparked the creation or
reform of these towns, often forcing people to settle down and abide by
the orders of priests and magistrates, on at least one occasion, escaped
slaves negotiated a governing agreement with provincial and diocesan
bureaucrats. Not far from the city of Cartagena, in a mountainous and
wooded area known as the Montes de María, runaway slaves had formed
their own community beginning in the late 1500s. In the early 1700s,
Cartagena’s bishop Antonio María Casiani negotiated an agreement with
the “maroons.” In exchange for turning away new runways seeking refuge
in the town and adjacent woods, authorities recognized the community’s
free standing. Incorporated as San Basilio, the settlement obtained the priv-
ilege to select its own authorities (who reported to the governor directly)
and was given parish status.50
People at La Honda expressed the desire to achieve similar recognition.
Once they took control of the estate they regarded themselves as free, and
insisted on their religious and political zeal, expressing their hope to have
their own priest as well as their aspirations to come to an agreement with
temporal authorities. In the conversation with Rodríguez, Valerio men-
tioned that they would eventually allow a magistrate from Morales or
Simití to hold formal authority over their community. La Honda’s leaders
planned to enter into a new pact, one that would transform them into vas-
sals of the king first and foremost. Although they were determined to pre-
vent “white” people from entering the estate, Surmay was welcomed to send
someone to collect the remaining tools and cattle. However, they told
Surmay that he should be aware that they were no “fools” and had enough
men and arms to defend themselves from his attempts to “enslave” them.51
50. Antonio Maria Cassiani to the King, Cartagena de Indias, December 25, 1713, Gabriel
Martinez Reyes, ed. Cartas de los obispos de Cartagena de Indias durante le periodo
Hispánico. 1534–1820, (Medellín: Academia Colombiana de Historia Eclesiástica, 1986),
389–93; and de Peredo, “Noticia,” 140.
Guerra,” ff. 789v–790v, 792r–v. People at La Honda referred to outsiders as whites (blan-
cos). Terms such as blanco, negro, and mestizo did not have fixed, unchanging meanings.
The use of such expressions was contextual, changing according to specific power relation-
ships and social dynamics. In this case, the word blanco seems to have served to highlight
the tension with Setuaín’s heirs and those who worked for them (would-be masters and their
free employees). By contrast, priests, although free and of presumable Spanish ancestry,
seem to have been outside of this category, perceived by the former slaves mainly as men
of the cloth. Deposition of José María Rodríguez, Mompox, July 1, 1799, “Don Gabriel
Martínez Guerra,” ff. 787v–788r, 784r–v. On the use of racial categories, see Joanne
Rappaport, The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New
Kingdom of Granada (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2014), esp. 3–20.
The claim to manumission became inseparable from the control and
transformation of the land and the social interdependence between its
inhabitants and outsiders. The former slaves’ understanding of this trans-
formation can be inferred from yet another episode from Rodríguez’s
visit. As he prepared to leave the hacienda on the morning of June 26,
Rodríguez was approached by a man named Juan Clemente, one of the for-
mer slaves. Juan Clemente ordered Rodríguez to leave La Honda at once.
When Rodríguez boarded his boat, a former slave on the wharf reached out
to cut the rope tying the small vessel to the dock. The pilot of the boat (a
man under Rodríguez’s orders) said that the rope did not belong to the
hacienda and should not be cut. Some former slaves in turn answered
that “this was not a hacienda anymore, and that he should be careful not
to come back with any white people because he would have a bad
time.”52 A hacienda existed, in the former slaves’ perspective, not so
much as a physical space but as a dynamic relationship of power. The
undoing of the unwritten pact binding together master and slaves had
brought about the end of the hacienda.
Defending the new social order in La Honda meant not only protecting
the town from outsiders and re-enslavement, but also developing an alter-
native to slave agriculture. During slavery, people in the estate had to rely
on supplies from Mompox, as they were expected to devote most of their
energy to sugar cane planting. Soon after the 1799 uprising, the community
abandoned the cane fields and instead devoted more time to garden plots.
They also began to freely travel to nearby places up and down the river,
including Río Viejo, Regidor, San Martín de Loba, Norosí, and Morales,
where they traded for supplies that they could not produce on their
own.53 Freedom of movement and economic engagement with neighboring
settlements were now the rule, not the exception.
This transformation entailed great risk for the families living in La
Honda. Their gains could be thwarted from the outside if Setuaín’s exec-
utor and heirs managed to retake the hacienda themselves or with the
help of local authorities. However, the former slaves seem to have hoped
that the authorities in Mompox might come to favor their cause and recog-
nize them as a free community. Even though they expected to come to an
agreement with the magistrates of Morales or Simití, this would never hap-
pen without the consent of the magistrates in Mompox, whose political pull
Guerra,” ff. 792v–794v.
53. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Alcalde Ordinario [Martín Ribón], Mompox, n.d., and
Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, January 5, 1800, “Don Gabriel
Martínez Guerra,” ff. 765v, 811v–812r.
and physical power were significantly more substantial. To better under-
stand the expectations of the former slaves, I will now turn to the pre-
existing dynamics among magistrates, slaves, and masters in Mompox
over the years leading up to 1799.
Tribuni Plebis
In the New Kingdom of Granada, slaves did on occasion reach local

authorities, magistrates, and viceregal authorities. Civil and criminal
records show that some slaves protested when their masters breached
agreements or treated them with violence and abuse. They also complained
about the lack of clothing and food and the elimination of their garden
plots, and they even made legal claims against executors who failed to ful-
fill the wishes expressed by masters in their last wills and testaments.54
Slaves in the countryside had to overcome more difficulties to bring
their complaints before magistrates than did slaves in urban settings,55
but communication between towns and rural estates was constant.
Intensely connected with Mompox throughout the 1700s, the inhabitants
of La Honda seem to have been aware of slaves engaging with the local
authorities in town.
Among the very few slaves who could read and write, some directly
engaged with magistrates and royal bureaucrats. A case in point is
Francisco Javier de Mier, a slave who had worked in the “exercise of
the quill” for one of the richest men in Mompox, Juan Bautista de Mier
y la Torre, the first marquis of Santa Coa. After the death of his master
in 1750, Mier had become the slave of Field Marshal José Fernando de
Mier y Guerra. Determined to change his master, whom he accused of
54. Jaramillo Uribe, “Esclavos,” 28–37; Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa, 59, 62; Helg,
Liberty, 111–18; María Eugenia Chaves, Honor y libertad. Discurso y recursos en la estra-
tegia de una mujer esclava. (Guayaquil a fines del período colonial) (Gothenburg:
University of Gothenburg, 2001); Jean-Pierre Tardieu, El negro en la Real Audiencia de
Quito (Ecuador) ss. XVI–XVIII (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2006), 317–30; Sherwin Bryant,
Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito,”
Colonial Latin American Review 13 (2004): 7–46; Marcela Echeverri, “‘Enraged to the
limit of despair’: Infanticide and Slave Judicial Strategies in Barbacoas, 1788–1798,”
Slavery and Abolition 30 (2009): 403–26; and Orián Jiménez Meneses and Edgardo Pérez
Morales, Voces de esclavitud y libertad. Documentos y testimonios. Colombia 1701–1833
(Popayán: Universidad del Cauca, 2012), docs. 22 and 23, 163–257.
55. The same was true for free women pursuing legal action, though on occasion people
from the countryside managed to reach urban authorities by traveling or proxy. See Bianca
Premo, “Before the Law: Women’s Petitions in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2011): 272–76, 288.
cruel treatment, the slave-scrivener filed a lawsuit in 1758. In a letter writ-
ten in 1760 while he was in prison pending the final decision of his case,
Javier de Mier reported to the viceroy that someone had assaulted him, tak-
ing away his “trunk of papers” with the documents pertaining to his legal
undertakings.56 Physical violence could disrupt the plans even of those
slaves who seemed best positioned to defend themselves.
Slaves who could not write or had little understandings of legal proceed-
ings drew on the services of lawyers, notaries, and papelistas—scribes with
informal legal training—who sold their services and wrote letters and peti-
tions on behalf of others following common legal standards.57 These work-
ers of ink and paper were active throughout the Spanish world and seem to
have been common in the thriving Mompox of the 1700s.58 Growing com-
merce necessitated new institutions and practices relying heavily on literacy
and scribal skills. By 1799, there were more royal bureaucrats, literate cler-
gymen, and secular bookkeepers in Mompox than anywhere else in the prov-
ince, except for Cartagena de Indias, the provincial capital.59 Slaves could
learn which scribes were willing to write on their behalf.
56. Francisco Javier de Mier to José Solis Folch de Cardona, Mompox, December 24,
1760, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos de Bolívar, vol. 9, doc. 16, AGN.
57. “Pretensión del esclavo José Antonio Moya sobre su libertad, perteneciente que dijo
ser a la causa mortuoria del difunto señor marqués de Santa Coa don Julián Trespalacios
Mier,” 1770–1776, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos de Bolívar, vol. 2, doc. 18, AGN; and
“Autos sobre la libertad de Fermín, y su hija Norberta esclavos de la testamentaría del
señor marqués de Santa Coa don Julián de Trespalacios Mier,” 1772–1773, Colonia,
Negros y Esclavos de Antioquia, vol. 6, doc. 10, AGN.
58. Primary sources on informal scribes seem to be scant, but some historians have come
across disparate traces. See Premo, “Before the Law,” 271–73; Judy Kalman, Writing on the
Plaza. Mediated Literacy Practice Among Scribes and Clients in Mexico City (Cresskill:
Hampton Press, 1999), 22–28; José Ramón Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada.
Esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650–1700) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos, 2005), 91–97; Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial
Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 132–35; Sandra Lauderdale Graham,
“Writing From the Margins: Brazilian Slaves and Written Culture,” Comparative Studies
in Society and History 49 (2007): 615–19; María Eugenia Cháves, “‘Nos los esclavos de
Medellín.’ La polisemia de la liberated y las voces subalternas en la primera república
antioqueña,” Nómadas 33 (2010): 44–45.
59. Silvestre Trillo, José Andrés de Urquinaona and José Antonio Maldonado to the
Viceroy, Santa Fe, n.d [June 1790], Colonia, Milicias y Marina, vol. 35, doc. 7, AGN;
Fals Borda, Historia doble, 75B–126B; Helg, Liberty, 80–84, 90; Alfonso Múnera, El fra-
caso de la nación: región, clase y raza en el Caribe colombiano (1717–1821) (Bogotá:
Banco de la República, 1998), 188–91; Renán Silva, Los ilustrados de Nueva Granada,
1760–1808. Genealogía de una comunidad de interpretación (Medellín: Banco de la
República, Universidad EAFIT, 2002), 83–90, 459–60; Armando Martínez Garnica and
Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, eds., Quién es quién en 1810. Guía de Forasteros del Virreinato
de Santafé (Bogotá: Universidad del Rosario, 2010), 62, 115; and Daniel Gutiérrez
Some slaves in and around Mompox apparently familiarized themselves
with specific magistrates, local notables, and the quarrels among them.60
Detailed knowledge of local circumstances could enable slaves to better
plan when and how to make a legal claim. This was a world of small pro-
portions (approximately 15,000 people dwelled in Mompox in 1801)
where individuals either lived in close physical proximity to their peers
and superiors, or were able to easily keep abreast of relevant developments.
The best-informed slaves might have even known which specific magis-
trates had shown a tendency to favor slaves in their rulings. Relying on sev-
eral sources of jurisprudence, some jurists in the New Kingdom of Granada
expressed sympathy for slaves.
When settling issues of slavery and freedom, magistrates usually relied
on the Siete Partidas, the medieval legal code of Castile and the fundamen-
tal source of Spanish and Spanish American jurisprudence. The code
regarded slaves as human beings subjected to a wretched condition, as
opposed to chattel pure and simple. Under certain circumstances, therefore,
slaves could claim entitlement to means for ameliorating their lives or even
acquiring their freedom,61 but the road was not easy. Masters and magis-
trates often ignored or violated the norms and principles contained in the
Siete Partidas. From time to time, however, the law prevailed.62 Most
importantly, when this happened, the information “spilled” outside of mag-
istrates’ bureaus.63 Presumably, the outcomes of specific cases became
known to nonlitigating slaves, who in turn tried to press their own claims.
As different magistrates held different opinions, knowledge of potentially
sympathetic men of letters could spread quickly among slave communities.
Although the evidence is fragmentary, it is known that some local mag-
istrates expressed sentiments of commiseration toward slaves. The lawyer
José Ignacio de San Miguel, who held the office of corregidor, the highest
authority in the district of Mompox, on one occasion wrote that “most
laws” tended to protect slaves, whom he considered wretched individuals
Ardila, “Las querellas de Mompox: subordinación estratégica, erección de junta provincial e

invención historiográfica de la independencia absoluta, 1805–1811,” Historia y Sociedad 23
(2012): 113–15.
60. Helg, Liberty, 88–91, 108–20.
61. Robert I. Burns, S.J., ed. (Translation and notes by Samuel Parsons Scott), The Siete
Partidas, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), Part III, Tit. XXIX,
Laws XXIII–XXV, 3:847; Part IV, Tit. XXI, Law VI, 4:979.
62. Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannembaum
Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22 (2004): 339–69; and Alejandro de la Fuente,
“Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 87 (2007): 659–92.
63. Premo, “Before the Law,” 279–80.
who had lost their freedom. San Miguel expressed that the written laws
offered protection to slaves, but that nonetheless masters in Mompox
treated their slaves “with little humanity,” scarcely providing them with
food and clothing. According to San Miguel, who seems to have been him-
self an owner of slaves, this was a clear affront to the principles of “human-
ity” and “good government.”64
San Miguel had ruled in favor of the slave Gregorio José Cevallos in
1777. Master potter at the brickworks owned by José Antonio de Bros y
Arango, Cevallos complained against his owner and requested a new mas-
ter. His master, Cevallos argued, gave him too much work to do and pro-
vided him with little food and clothing. The potter added that his master
beat his slaves for the slightest of mistakes. San Miguel gave Bros y
Arango 3 days to provide Cevallos with papel, a document authorizing
him to go about town looking for someone willing to buy him from his
current master. Ordered to sell his most skillful slave, Bros y Arango
appealed to the Real Audiencia in Santa Fe, the instance of last resort in
the viceroyalty.65
Pablo Sarmiento, Bros y Arango’s attorney in Santa Fe, argued that
compelling slave owners to allow slaves to find a new master was illegal.
Sarmiento was relying on the principles of property expressed in the Siete
Partidas, although his direct source was not the code itself, but rather a
treatise by a minister of the Council of the Indies, a prominent jurist
who had also been oidor (judge) in the Real Audiencia of Lima, Peru.
Sarmiento never mentioned the jurist by name. An extant handwritten
copy of the treatise is missing some pages, making it difficult to ascertain
the identity of its author.66
Among the Mompox and Santa Fe magistrates, however, sources of
jurisprudence were not limited to the Siete Partidas. Lawyers sympathetic
to slaves and litigant slaves themselves pushed the terms of litigation into
the arena of local practices. Some slaves, for example, relied on the terms
negotiated with their masters when making their claims. In his allegations,
most likely crafted with the help of a scribe, the slave potter Cevallos
argued that masters paid slaves when they were sent to work on holidays.
However, claimed Cevallos, his master did not follow this costumbre
64. “Don José Antonio Ambros [sic] de Arango sobre la venta que se le quiere precisar de
un negro esclavo,” 1777, f. 703v, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos de Antioquia, vol. 1, doc. 23,
AGN; and Victor M. Uribe–Uran, Honorable Lives. Lawyers, Family, and Politics in
Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 42.
65. “Don José Antonio Ambros,” ff. 701v, 703v, 704r, 705v, 706r, 711r–712r.
66. “Don José Antonio Ambros,” ff. 713v–714r. Untitled document, n.d., f. 656r–667v,
Archivo Anexo I, Esclavos, vol. 3, AGN. Burns, The Siete Partidas, Part. V, Tit. V, Law
III, 4:1027–28.
(custom). Cevallos further stated that slaves who gathered firewood were
usually not ordered both to cut and to carry it to the brickworks. In spite
of this, and with disregard for his old age (Cevallos was 60 years old),
his master had required him to perform both tasks.67
Portraying work-related agreements and local practices as customary
could play to Cevallos’ advantage. The idiom of custom had significant
weight in Spanish legal tradition, becoming an important tool of litigation
beyond the Iberian peninsula.68 The word “custom” could convey different
meanings for different magistrates, but once litigants successfully por-
trayed a process or situation as belonging to the realm of custom, regard-
less of its actual prevalence across time, magistrates tended to assume that
such custom had evolved with the tacit consent of the monarch.69
Bros y Arango did not reject the use of the notion of custom, and based
his own assertions on local practice. He admitted that he gave little food to
his slaves. But he argued that once they completed their tasks, slaves
received cash and free time as compensation. He claimed even to allow
slaves to gather their own firewood and to use the kiln at the brickworks
to fire their own pottery, which they could later sell for a profit. The slaves
themselves had agreed to this, claimed Bros y Arango, who suggested that
if they required more food, they should work full time instead of following
a task system. This reciprocal arrangement, which Cevallos portrayed as
customary, shaped the dynamics of slave labor at the brickworks. While
both the master and the slave likely accommodated their petitions to
their own needs, their arguments must have been crafted within the limits
of plausibility.70
Although it is difficult to ascertain to what extent reciprocal arrange-
ments were prevalent in Mompox, the sources suggest their presence in
both town and country into the early 1800s. In La Honda, the men and
women refusing to work seem to have made this decision based on a prin-
ciple of reciprocity between masters and slaves. Soon after the uprising, the
former slaves talked about the failure of the ailing Setuaín to supply them
67. “Don José Antonio Ambros,” f. 701v.

68. Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jean-Frédéric Schaub, ed., Lois, Justice, Coutume.
Amérique et Europe latines (16e–19e siécle) (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences
Sociales, 2005); and Yanna Yannakakis, “Costumbre: A Language of Negotiation in
Eighteenth-Century Oaxaca,” in Negotiation Within Domination: New Spain Indian
Pueblos Confront the Spanish State, ed. Ethel Ruíz Medrano and Susan Kellogg
(Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010), 137–71.
69. Juan Solórzano Pereyra, Política, 1:366, 2:984.
70. “Don José Antonio Ambros,” ff. 704v–705r. On plausibility and legal truth in the
early modern world, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and
Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
with food, clothing, and candles for religious services. Their claim of free-
dom on account of manumission promises was also reinforced by the mas-
ter’s failure to respect the terms of the arrangement.71
Different idioms and legal strategies were thus available to slaves,
masters, and magistrates during litigation, some of which emanated from
written legislation. Although the medieval Siete Partidas remained of par-
amount importance in legal practice, litigators also drew on more recent
written codes and sources. A case in point is the 1789 royal decree contain-
ing instructions on the “education, treatment, and occupations of slaves” in
the Spanish Indies.72 Although pushback from slaveholders led to the
repeal of the decree, in the New Kingdom of Granada some slaves and
magistrates continued to appeal to the clauses contained in the document.
Against the wishes of authorities in Spain, this code remained in use well
into the 1800s.73
Magistrates sympathetic to slaves bringing legal cases further drew on
legal manuals and commentaries by legal glossers. In 1804, acting as pub-
lic attorney for the slave María Magdalena Soto, a woman seeking her free-
dom, Mompox magistrate Melchor Sáenz de Ortíz quoted verbatim from
the Spanish jurist José Marcos Gutiérrez. On his annotations to a very pop-
ular handbook for notaries, Gutiérrez remarked how easy it would be to
demonstrate that “no men are slaves but in the legal codes, and in the inhu-
manity and insensibility of other free men.” According to Gutiérrez, nature
itself could not allow the wrong of slavery. Sáenz de Ortíz shared
Gutiérrez’s wish to see the words serf, servitude, slave, and slavery utterly
banished from all legal codes.74 Expressing contempt toward forms of
forced labor was not very common, but some magistrates did on occasion
72. “R. Instrucción sobre la educación, trato y ocupación de los esclavos,” Aranjuez, May
31, 1789, in Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social
Hispanoamericana. 1493–1810, ed Richard Konetzke (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, 1962), vol. III, 2 (1780–1807), doc. 308, 643–52. See also
Manuel Lucena Salmoral, ed., Los códigos negros de la América Española, (Alcalá de
Henares: Ediciones Unesco, Universidad de Alcalá, 1996), 95–123.
73. Helg, Liberty, 114–17; and Echeverri, “Enraged,” 415–20.
74. “Don Melchor Sáenz de Ortíz contra don Francisco de la Barcena Posada sobre la lib-
ertad de una esclava,” 1803–1804, f. 265r–v, Colonia, Negros y Esclavos de Bolívar, vol. 9,
doc. 3, AGN; Febrero reformado y anotado, o librería de escribanos que compuso don
Joseph Febrero Escribano Real y del Colegio de la corte, y ha reformado en su lenguaje,
método, estilo y muchas de sus doctrinas, ilustrándola y enriqueciéndola con varias notas y
adiciones para que se han tenido presentes las Reales Órdenes modernas, el Lic. D. Joseph
Márcos Gutierrez: Obra no solo necesaria á los escribanos sino tambien utilísima á todos
los jueces, abogados, procuradores, agentes de negocios y á toda clase de personas. Parte
II. De inventarios, tasaciones y particiones de bienes, y de los juicios ordinario, ejecutivo y
mention their opposition to slavery. The evidence is fragmentary, but the
words of Sáenz de Ortíz might be indicative of early antislavery sentiments
springing among some learned individuals in the Spanish world of the mid
to late 1700s.75
Lawyers did not lead an antislavery campaign; however, debates on
slavery, freedom, and the privileges and obligations of slaves and masters
took place among magistrates in Mompox and Santa Fe as a matter of
course. It remains impossible to ascertain whether echoes of legal debates
or news of the 1789 decree reached the community of La Honda before or
after 1799. Nevertheless, families in La Honda hoped to shake off the yoke
of slavery without shaking off submission to both majesties. This may indi-
cate that they expected certain magistrates to eventually favor their cause.
However, the people of La Honda might have also been aware that slave-
holders could easily use lawyers and legal documents to thwart their plans
and re-enslave them.
The Documents of Slavery and Freedom
Most slaves knew well the “efficacy of ink on paper,” the potential of for-
mal and legal documents to produce tangible consequences on their lives.76
They often saw masters and bureaucrats establishing or reaffirming their
servile status with the help of written documents. Notaries formalized
the sale and purchase of slaves by writing down the transactions in
their books. After baptizing the children of enslaved women, priests
usually certified the sacrament in a book set apart for slaves. Scribes
drafted inventories of estates, duly listing slaves as property. During lit-
igation, these documents had probative value. After the uprising of
1799, the inhabitants of La Honda tried hard to prevent the drafting
of a new inventory of the estate, one that would list them back into
the category of “slaves.” The former slaves knew that documents
could either help or hurt their cause.77
de concurso de acreedores, como tambien del criminal que faltaba y se añade á esta obra,
2nd. ed. (Madrid: Imprenta de Villalpando, 1802), III:211.
75. Research on this topic remains scant. See Emily Berquist, “Early Anti-Slavery
Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765–1817,” Slavery & Abolition 31 (2010):
181–205.
76. I borrow the expression “efficacy of ink on paper” from Rebecca J. Scott and Jean
M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 26.
77. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Alcalde Ordinario [Martín Ribón], Mompox, n.d, “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” f. 765v.
For Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, the executor of Juan Martín de Setuaín’s
last will and testament, the drafting of a property inventory was particularly
important. As the first order of business in all probate proceedings, execu-
tors had to list and appraise all assets left by the deceased individual. An
important legal instrument, the inventory was crucial for the partition of the
property among heirs and creditors.78 In July of 1799, Surmay instructed
José María Rodríguez to take on the role of overseer, to send “slaves”
peacefully back to work and to summon priest Melchor de la Vega to
the hacienda. But Rodríguez also had another important task to perform:
he had to draft the inventory for the settlement of the estate. The former
slaves, however, successfully prevented Rodríguez from doing so.79
By December 1799, almost a year and half since work had slowed down
at La Honda, the former slaves had achieved autonomy, refusing to follow
orders and refusing to be inventoried. Norberto Aconcha, one of the men
hired by Surmay to try to restore order to La Honda, wisely advised
Surmay that he should be very cautious when drafting the inventory of
the estate. Hacienda inventories included all the names and ages of
enslaved people. Aconcha assured Surmay that once they see an outsider
counting them and writing down their names as part of the estate’s assets,
the people on the estate “will know that they are slaves.”80
The former slaves strategically opposed the drafting of an inventory. On
January 8, 1800, Aconcha recognized that drafting the inventory would be
counterproductive, or at any rate a hard task to complete. For the slaves
“are all armed against me,” wrote Aconcha, and “they say I am their
enemy, and they have taken arms twice to come to my house to insult
me.”81 People in La Honda allowed Aconcha to recover some of the live-
stock as well as some tools, but convincing the former slaves to return to
subordination seemed impossible. The ex-slaves had already sold some of
78. Burns, The Siete Partidas, Part. III, Tit. XVIII, Law C, 4:745; Part. VI, Tit. X,
5:1258–60; Thomas de Palomares, Estilo nuevo de escrituras públicas, donde el curioso
hallará diferentes géneros de contratos, y advertencias de las leyes, y prematicas destos rey-
nos, y las escrituras tocantes a la navegación de las Indias, a cuya noticia no se deven negar
los escrivanos (Madrid: En la Imprenta Real, 1656), 81–82; and Joseph Juan y Colom,
Instrucción de escribanos, en órden a lo judicial: utilísima también para procuradores, y
litigantes, donde sucintamente se explica lo ritual, y forma de proceder en las caufas civiles,
y criminales, afsi en la theorica, como en la practica, fundada sobre las leyes reales, y eftilo
de tribunales ordinarios (Madrid: En la Imprenta de Antonio Marín, 1761), 255–300.
79. Instructions by Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to José María Rodríguez, Mompox, June
13, 1799, “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 777r–778r.
80. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, December 15, 1799, “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” f. 809r.
81. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, January 8, 1800, “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” f. 812v.
their former master’s belongings and had entirely abandoned their work on
the cane fields. Jaguars had begun to prey on the unguarded livestock.82
A few of the former slaves, however, did try to negotiate with their
would-be masters. Some of them visited Aconcha, who was based in the
town of Morales, trying to broker a new understanding. However, the
former slaves Ybiricu, Carriazo, and Luis, who enjoyed positions of lead-
ership in the community, refused to negotiate, much less return to bond-
age.83 Carriazo, whose given name was Antonio, had been a capitán or
slave foreman, according to a 1795 slave inventory.84 The social promi-
nence granted him by his slave duties made him a natural leader. Most
people in La Honda seem to have supported his rank and opinion.85
Surmay also tried to find a negotiated solution, although he only offered
a return to the pre-1798 state of affairs. On February 23, 1800, following
Aconcha’s advice, Surmay wrote and sent a letter to those he called his
“beloved slaves.” Firm and paternalistic in its tone, the letter offered par-
don to the former slaves on condition that they return to work on the
cane fields and abandon their intentions to become free. Surmay also
sent a letter to Aconcha asking him to draft the inventory. Three months
later, however, the former slaves had not given up and no one had managed
to retake the estate or draft an inventory. Aconcha himself insisted that as
long as no fresh inventory existed, the workers would continue to claim
that they were not slaves but free people.86
Exasperated by the situation at La Honda, Surmay filed a criminal and
civil lawsuit against the alleged slaves in July 1801.87 He held them
responsible for all the damages caused to the late Setuaín’s assets.
Furthermore, he stated that the rebels had defied both God and the king,
82. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, December 8, 1799;

Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, January 25, 1800; Norberto
Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 5, 1800; and Norberto
Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 9, 1800, “Don Gabriel
Martínez Guerra,” ff. 807r–v, 815r, 816r–817r, 817v–818v.
83. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 15, 1800 (two
letters), “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 820v, 821r–822r.
84. General inventory of slaves, Hacienda de La Honda, June 25, 1795, “Don Gabriel
Martínez Guerra,” f. 833r.
85. On the organization and distribution of labor in haciendas around Mompox, see Fals
Borda, Historia, 118B–123B.
86. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Mis amados esclavos de la hacienda de la Honda,
Mompox, February 23, 1800; Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Norberto Aconcha, Mompox,
February 23, 1800; and Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, May
25, 1800, “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 827r–831v.
87. Juan Nepomuceno Surmay to Alcalde Ordinario [Domingo López], Mompox, n.d.,
“Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” f. 837r.
setting a bad example for obedient slaves elsewhere. The “slaves” of La
Honda were “lazy,” Surmay argued, and they refused to be “subjected to
the servitude in the toils of their master, and the obligations that they
have on account of their social station.” He also stated that these individ-
uals had chosen violence over reason, arrogance over humility, vice over
virtue, and the “debauchery of all passions” over modesty and honesty.88
In short, Surmay accused the former slaves of crime and sin.
Surmay designed his rhetoric on the basis of religion and social order,
the very basis on which the people of La Honda had crafted their own argu-
ment. Whereas the slaves looked back in time to the errors of their late mas-
ter, Surmay couched his argument within the present moment and potential
future consequences of the actions of those who had risen up against author-
ity. The former slaves, Surmay suggested, not only lacked Christian cardinal
virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude) but also acted in ways
that would negatively impact the dynamics of property and obedience. The
people of La Honda defied “natural” and “civil” law, he further argued, and
they showed no respect for the “written laws” and total contempt for the
“new code” governing slavery (the 1789 decree).89
Perhaps hoping to appeal to magistrates of different sentiments and incli-
nations on the issues of slavery and freedom, Surmay cast a wide net in his
written accusation.90 Although the workers of La Honda had taken direct
action instead of appealing to the magistrates in Mompox, they remained
able to file for manumission. With some luck, the alleged slaves could
prove that their master had offered them freedom in exchange for their
faithful services. If they managed to produce the rumored manumission
clause in Setuaín’s last will and testament while resisting the drafting of
a new inventory, the odds might be in their favor.91 In any case, by bring-
ing this affair to the authorities, Surmay had risked encountering magis-
trates with sympathy for freedom claims or antipathy to the inheritors he
represented.
For reasons that remain unclear, local authorities proved to be slow and
indecisive in this case. Surmay sought to get the magistrates’ assistance in
thwarting the uprising. No action against those on La Honda, however, was
forthcoming until late 1801 or early 1802,92 but action eventually did
88. Ibid., f. 836v.

89. Ibid.,ff. 836v–837r.
90. Ibid., ff. 837v–838r.
91. Deposition of José María Rodríguez, Mompox, July 1, 1799; and Norberto Aconcha
to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, February 15, 1800, “Don Gabriel Martínez Guerra,”
ff. 787v–788r, 821v.
92. Gabriel Martínez Guerra to the Viceroy, Santa Fe, n.d. [c. October 1, 1801], “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” ff. 845r, 846r.
occur: On May 10, 1802, a general inventory of the hacienda was finally
drafted. After a process of “pacification,” in reality a small but costly
war on the rebel community on which little evidence survives, Surmay
had regained control over the land. The basis for the plan to achieve semi-
municipal status that the former slaves had harbored had been effectively
eroded, but the violence of the so called “pacification” had also eroded
the basis on which Surmay expected to rebuild the hacienda.93
Extant inventories shed light on the transformations La Honda under-
went following the 1799 uprising. Whereas in 1795 the property had
held just over 100 individuals as slaves, the 1802 inventory lists 13 slaves.
Two of them were very old and four were younger than 15 years of age.
Thirty-one fighters who had been captured during the “pacification,”
including the leader Antonio Carriazo and his wife Paula, had been sold
as slaves to José Martínez Troncoso, a local patrician. A few who had
taken to the woods came back and agreed to relocate to town, presumably
as slaves once again. Still, the labor force was not robust enough to resume
production. More than fifty people remained at large. They continued
to assert their freedom, leaving La Honda for nearby woods and
settlements.94
Two of the slaves who remained at La Honda managed to partially nego-
tiate the terms of what may have seemed an inevitable re-enslavement.
Juan Florencio, a 60-year-old man, had shown his opposition to the upris-
ing and had convinced some of the runways to return from the woods. In
the new inventory, he was listed with a value of 25 pesos. With such a low
valuation, Juan Florencio may have hoped eventually to purchase his own
freedom. The low value was granted to him under the condition that he
stayed on the hacienda as an overseer. He was also allowed to have his
own garden plot. Carlos José Mier, 48 years old, had also helped to
bring back some of the fugitives. He made a similar deal for his
re-enslavement. By way of contrast, another slave by the name of José
Ignacio, 22 years old, was fully appraised at 150 pesos. He was offered
no special privileges.95
As most of the people were not re-enslaved, the legal proceedings
against them continued for some years after 1802. By 1808, the case
had reached the Real Audiencia, where the claim that the people of La
93. “Propiedad de la hacienda,” f. 35v; Colonia, Miscelánea, vol. 117, doc. 3, f. 952r,
AGN; Colonia, Juicios Criminales, vol. 59, doc. 17, f. 880r, AGN.
94. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, January 8, 1800, “Don
Gabriel Martínez Guerra,” f. 813r; Inventory and estate appraisal, San Bartolomé de La
Honda, May 10, 1802, “Propiedad de la hacienda,” ff. 15r–v, 35v.
95. Inventory and estate appraisal, San Bartolomé de La Honda, May 10, 1802,
“Propiedad de la hacienda,” f. 15r–v.
Honda had pressed proved to be quite realistic. The tribunal granted free-
dom to all members of the community, including those who remained at
large. Although the records of the Real Audiencia proceedings have disap-
peared, there is reliable evidence on this decision.
Two letters from 1807 and 1808 mentioned a ruling favorable to the for-
mer slaves. These documents were written by Setuaín’s heirs, who insisted
on the illegitimacy of this ruling.96 On July 23, 1808, María Isabel and
José Emeterio de Mier y Setuaín, Setuaín’s godchildren and inheritors,
addressed the Real Audiencia. They were appealing a recent decision in
which that tribunal had decreed the “freedom of all the negroes of La
Honda.” María Isabel again addressed the Real Audiencia in a second letter
dated September 13, 1808. This time, she conceded that Setuaín had
indeed pledged to set his slaves free. This concession strongly suggests
that the Real Audiencia had granted manumission based on the existence
of legal evidence of this promise.97 However, a favorable decision
would have been nearly irrelevant to the now dismembered community
of La Honda. For those who survived, freedom now had to be envisioned
anew, and aspirations to political belonging re-evaluated and detached
from the land.
***
Although the slaves of La Honda set out to gain their liberty through rebel-
lion rather than first appealing to the local magistrates, the evidence on how
they understood their claim to freedom affords a glimpse of the interdepen-
dence among their legal imagination, the ways in which magistrates dealt
with issues of slavery and freedom in Mompox and Santa Fe, and the polit-
ical and religious culture permeating settlement patterns in the province of
Cartagena. The people of La Honda understood the potential of manumis-
sion not merely as liberty from the bonds of slavery, but also as represent-
ing collective political belonging within the Spanish municipality regime.
The leaders of the movement that began in 1798 justified their uprising
by insisting on their master’s failure to fulfill both his material obligations
and his religious duties to them. By contrast, they had worked intensely
without abandoning their obligations to God. Because the master’s failures
had in effect broken an existing pact between master and slaves, some
slaves assumed the self-executing nature of the freedom promise at the
heart of this pact. They sealed their freedom by expelling their overseer;
96. María Isabel and José Emeterio de Mier y Setuaín to Real Audiencia, Mompox, July
13, 1807, ff. 951r–952r, Colonia, Miscelánea, vol. 117, doc. 73, AGN.
97. María Isabel de Mier y Setuaín to Real Audiencia, Mompox, September 13, 1808, ff.
317r–318v, Colonia, Miscelánea, vol. 132, doc. 45, AGN.
however, they perfectly recognized that defending their gains was a matter
of force, something perhaps best achieved by holding onto the very land
where they had been enslaved for generations.
Staying put in the nucleated settlement of La Honda had a strategic
potential that went beyond keeping would-be masters at bay. The people
of La Honda contemplated the possibility that the authorities would
favor their cause, aspiring not only to have their freedom recognized, but
also to be incorporated into a semimunicipal unit, living under a priest
and a magistrate. They already inhabited a relatively dense hamlet with a
church at its center, where they prayed and celebrated their own patron
(the Virgin Mary), to whom they had entrusted their cause. These could
be solid foundations to achieve corporate status and a condition of
subjecthood.
The ways in which free people organized themselves (or were forcibly
organized by authorities) and settled the land informed the decisions and
aspirations of those seeking to transition from slavery to freedom.
Although scholars seldom pay attention to the interdependence between
municipality regimes and the choices available to people with tenuous
claims to political belonging, the status of the settlements in which people
lived was of paramount importance in corporatist societies. Different priv-
ileges and obligations attached to different types of settlements, and few
could claim protection by the monarch outside of a legally incorporated
town or its jurisdiction.
There seems to be a set of cross-purposes at the center of this story: a
community in open rebellion whose members expected that physical resis-
tance would lead to an agreement with local authorities by which freedom
would be formalized and political status granted. Understanding this para-
dox remains a matter of interpretation. One will never know the full details
of their plans and notions. From the records, however, one can infer the
existence of a legal logic among the leaders, one based on awareness of
the corporate potential of their community and the enormous challenges
of litigation; however, it was not abstract ideas of the law what guided
their thinking and actions. Rather, it was the potential reactions of magis-
trates and the existing dynamics of litigation, authority, and settlement pat-
terns that people in this community seem to have most carefully considered
as they crafted their project of manumission on the land. Potential legal
redress was not the end, but merely the beginning of life after slavery.
Judicial action, lawyerly debate, and everyday life experience shaped the
horizons and social worlds of slaves in ways that we still do not fully com-
prehend. Further research on collective claims to freedom in urban and
rural contexts should allow understanding of issues of slavery and freedom
in their various legal dimensions, including before, during, and after
litigation. And if archival evidence continues to be uncovered while schol-
ars carefully listen to what remains of the voices of those held in slavery, it
may begin to be seen how those with the least legal standing came to influ-
ence decisions made by those with the greatest legal authority.

PÉREZ MORALES, E. - Manumission On The Land, Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century Mompox (Colombia)

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PÉREZ MORALES, E. - Manumission On The Land, Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century Mompox (Colombia)

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Manumission on the Land: Slaves, Masters,

and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century

EDGARDO PÉREZ MORALES

In the mid-1700s, the town of Mompox ﬂourished in the Spanish viceroy-

Edgardo Pérez Morales is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the

Law and History Review May 2017, Vol. 35, No. 2

In 1799, the slaves of the San Bartolomé de la Honda hacienda, one of

presentados por la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales y la

de Bolívar, vol. 3, doc. 5, Archivo General de la Nación, Bogotá, Colombia (hereafter

Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru,” Slavery & Abolition 33

R. Sánchez Mejía, “De arrochelados a vecinos: reformismo borbónico e integración política

The Land and the Slaves

The distance between Mompox and La Honda was relative. Located on an

Masters seem to have, at times, effectively used promises of freedom as a

Figure 2. Urban and rural settlements in the vicinity of San Bartolomé de La

In the New Kingdom of Granada, slaves did on occasion reach local

Ardila, “Las querellas de Mompox: subordinación estratégica, erección de junta provincial e

67. “Don José Antonio Ambros,” f. 701v.

The Documents of Slavery and Freedom

82. Norberto Aconcha to Juan Nepomuceno Surmay, Morales, December 8, 1799;

88. Ibid., f. 836v.

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