Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in The Spanish South American Gradual Abolitionist Process (1810-1870) - Magdalena Candioti

Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in the Spanish South American Gradual Abolitionist Process
(1810–1870)
Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in the Spanish

South American Gradual Abolitionist Process (1810–1870)
Magdalena Candioti, CONICET, Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1026
Published online: 22 November 2022
Summary
Between 1811 and 1870, policies of gradual abolition of slavery were deployed in Hispanic South America. They
consisted of two fundamental measures: the prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade and the enactment of free
womb laws that prevented the enslavement of newborn children. These antislavery policies were adopted in
contemporary Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay in an implicit and explicit
Interamerican and Atlantic dialogue as well as with strong doses of experimentation. The processes also unfolded
as the second slavery expanded in Brazil and the Caribbean.
A first set of antislavery policies was deployed between 1811 and 1830, and the wave of definitive abolitions
occurred mostly in the 1850s. There were exceptions to this periodization with very early examples of complete
abolition (such as Chile in 1826) or very late examples of gradual abolition (Paraguay in 1842). In any case, a
common feature in these processes was the extension of the dependency of persons of African descent through the
creation of different kinds of freedmen’s status, tutelages, or patronatos. Laws declared the right to freedom but
established conditions that extended unfree labor and subjection for years and even decades, othering and
stigmatizing the free and freed offspring of the African diaspora in Spanish South America.
Keywords: Spanish South America, abolition of slavery, gradualism, free womb laws, free soil
Subjects: History of Northern and Andean Spanish America, History of Southern Spanish America, Afro-Latin History
Gradual Abolition Policies in Spanish South America
In the South American republics created after the break of the colonial bond with Spain, elites
very early discussed alternatives and designed institutions to deal with the possibility of
abolishing slavery. They deliberated over the legitimacy of the institution, pondered whether
immediate or gradual emancipation would be preferable, and worried about the need to control
the emancipated slaves to ensure their industriousness and to prevent them from becoming a
social burden. Should the masters be compensated for slave emancipation? Who should pay for
these eventual compensations? Moreover, was it possible and desirable to integrate liberated
people of African descent into society on equal terms, or was it necessary to design mechanisms
to ensure their control and education?
These deliberations unfolded in South America in the era of revolutions. A context where enslaved
and free Afrodescendants were playing a crucial role in the wars of independence and elites were
rehearsing the organization of new republics in the territories of the collapsing Viceroyalties of
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(1810–1870)
Peru (Peru and Bolivia), the Río de la Plata (Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay), New
Granada (Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, a separated Captaincy General since 1777), and the
governorship of Chile. It is crucial to reconstruct the institutional responses thought and
experimented in those new countries.
The antislavery policies designed there had different impacts on regional economies depending
1
on the size of the enslaved population and the roles that captive labor performed there. But,
unanimously, they affected the daily lives and the possibilities of freedom of thousands of
Africans and Afrodescendants by regulating their living conditions and rights. Using,
manipulating, or contesting these norms, enslaved, freed, and free people were able to dispute
margins of autonomy and to design strategies for citizen integration into the new republics. This
does not mean that the antislavery laws determined a unilinear path to freedom, but they did
create frameworks on which Africans and Afrodescendants could build their strategies of
emancipation and citizenship.
The concentration on Spanish South America as a unit of analysis is important for several
reasons. First, this area belonged to the same empire and therefore had shared norms and
institutional models for centuries. Second, jurists and legal experts had shared manuals and
training centers where they became familiar with a common legal and political culture. Third, in
the context of the Bourbon reforms and, in particular, in the era of the revolutions, these elites
read and discussed multiple pamphlets and newspapers containing news of the decisions made in
the rest of the newborn republics. They built networks and exchanged correspondence where they
discussed, among other topics, the end of slavery. The public circulation of these debates was
diverse in each context and rumors also played an important role. As a result, although the
policies and laws regulating the end of slavery were decided at regional or national levels, they
cannot be interpreted as exclusively local products. They were conceived, designed, and applied in
an implicit or explicit dialogue with contemporary Atlantic debates as well as with the deep-
rooted Roman and Spanish legal tradition of regulation of slavery. So far, most analyses have
been produced on each of the national cases but not always having in consideration what was
occurring in the rest of the South American contexts. There have also been comparative analyses
at the Latin American level, but they have spotlighted the cases of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Brazil,
paying little attention to Spanish South America. This region requires a more careful and joint
consideration since also their armies carried out an interconnected process of emancipation from
Spanish rule. War and political strategies as well as laws of gradual abolition were interrelated in
the subcontinent.
By analyzing the specific gradual abolition policies considered and implemented in Spanish South
America, the article will demonstrate, first, the inseparable character between these antislavery
policies and a set of strategies for the control of the emancipated. In this sense, it argues that the
status of “freedperson” (liberto) was a key legal figure used and (re)actualized in the processes of
gradual abolition since it enabled the patronage and control of the lives and work of enslaved
women’s children. Second, it will reconstruct some of the inter-American and Atlantic dialogues
in order to discuss two widespread ideas about South American abolitionism. On the one hand, it
questions the assumption of a unidirectional, almost radial, circulation of abolitionist ideas,
expanding from Great Britain or Europe to the world, in this case to South America. On the other
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(1810–1870)
hand, it also breaks with the tendency to study abolition exclusively on a national scale,
pondering local actors and disregarding regional dialogues. Unlike those emphases, this article
will highlight both the need to widen the camera’s angle of view to capture the regional examples,
discussions, and borrowings that modulated national antislavery decisions and the strong
experimentation deployed by Spanish South American elites, who were not mere recipients of the
British pressure. Finally, it will account for the final immediate abolitions decided mostly in the
1850s but with some previous and later exceptions.
Revolution and Abolition
In the process of Latin American independence, slavery became a metaphor for colonial rule
under Spain. However, some actors slowly gave way to criticism of the institution of African
slavery. After the example of Haiti and the propaganda unleashed around it, elites in Spanish
South America had determined that if slavery was to be abolished it would need to happen
2
gradually. With this logic, two laws emerged as the most suited for that purpose: the prohibition
of the transatlantic slave trade—to put an end to the new influx of Africans—and the enactment
of free womb laws—to put an end to the hereditary reproduction of the slave condition. Both
types of provisions had two complementary rules that could extend or limit their scope. These
were two. On the one hand, the introduction of “free soil” policies (or principle of freedom) that
meant that enslaved persons would be declared free as soon as they set foot on a certain soil. This
principle was stablished together with slave trade bans. On the other hand, the extension of the
dependency of the children born after those free womb laws, through the creation of freedmen’s
3
status, tutelages, or patronatos.
At different times, South American republics adopted those policies. George Reid Andrews
summarized them in the table below, and here I add minor refinements in the parentheses.
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Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in the Spanish South American Gradual Abolitionist Process (1810–1870)
Table 1. Laws of gradual and total abolition in Spanish South America 1811–1869.
Country Slave trade ban Free womb Law Total abolition
Argentina 1812 1813 1853 (1860)
Bolivia 1840 1831 (1826) 1861
Chile 1811 1811 1823
Colombia 1821 1821 (1814) 1852
Ecuador 1821 1821 1851
Paraguay 1842 1842 1869
Perú 1821 1821 1854
Uruguay 1825 (1813–1838) 1825 1842 (1846)
Venezuela 1821 1821 1854 (1851)
Source: Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 57.
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(1810–1870)
How were these two kinds of policies discussed and adopted in Spanish South America? Next to
the development of local antislavery sensibilities linked to the Spanish theological-legal
tradition, the French Enlightenment, the American Revolution, and British authors and activists,
a key milestone for the dissemination and debate of gradualist policies in South America was the
activity of the Spanish constituent courts set up in Cádiz in 1810.
In April 1811, the Peninsular and American deputies, gathered in the Cortes, discussed the
possibility of introducing gradual modifications to the slave regime in the colonies. The person
who made the first proposals was José Miguel Guridi Alcocer. He put forward a plan, consisting of
three elements, for the gradual abolition of slavery: the immediate prohibition of the slave trade,
4
the freeing of newborns, and the improvement of the conditions of enslavement. The proposal
did not reach the plenary session of the Cortes. Instead, the Asturian Agustín Argüelles
5
introduced a bill to abolish the “infamous traffic.” Argüelles said he remembered “the
memorable night of February 5, 1807, when I had the sweet satisfaction of witnessing in the
House of Lords the triumph of light and philosophy; when the Bill for the abolition of the slave
6
trade was passed.” He made it clear that his motion did not seek to “manumit the slaves of the
American possessions, a matter that deserves the utmost circumspection, in view of the painful
7
example that occurred in Santo Domingo.” This clarification was key and the sensitivity that this
issue could provoke was evident in the motion of the Cuban deputy, Andrés Jauregui, who
requested “prudence” and asked that the question not be discussed in public lest they disturb the
8
peace on his island. Thus, the most radical solutions were relegated, and the Cádiz constitution
sanctioned in 1812, far from abolishing the traffic, actually imposed particularly burdensome
conditions on the citizenship of free Afrodescendants.
These Cádiz debates, whose circulation slaveholders’ representatives tried to restrict,

nevertheless, resounded in Spanish America and fed the ongoing process of re-thinking slavery
and abolition in the region.
Gradual Abolition Policies in Spanish South American Countries
How were abolitionist policies discussed and adopted in the Spanish South American republics?
What kinds of regulations for the emancipated did they create? What other experiences did they
have in mind? This section will trace the gradual abolition laws enacted country by country,
highlighting the regional articulations and dialogues.
The abolitionist debates that were intended to be restricted to Cádiz nevertheless quickly reached
the remote Chilean soil. In April 1812, La Aurora de Chile published excerpts of Argüelles’s speech
against slave trade. News of the antislavery debate could be openly discussed in Santiago (unlike
Buenos Aires, for example) because, in October 1811, the recently organized Chilean National
Congress, then dominated by the most radical sector, had agreed, in a single decree, to end the
slave trade, to free enslaved women’s wombs, and to render enslaved peoples’ “condition
tolerable.” In La Aurora de Chile, Camilo Henríquez wrote: “In the United States of America, in
Spain, in Chile, it has been noticed that the slavery of the unhappy race of blacks was
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(1810–1870)
9
incompatible with the feelings of free peoples.” North American and peninsular debates on
abolition were meaningful for Chilean elites, and Chilean gradualist abolition laws had a
significant impact on other nascent republics.
As soon as the Chilean law was sanctioned, the Gaceta de Buenos Aires published a “Summary of
the providences of the government of Chile.” It was a diatribe urging social supports for the
revolution. The “Summary” interpellated the slaves, calling them a “precious but unhappy
10
portion of humanity.” The piece exonerated the new republic from the stain of the “nefarious
commerce,” noting that “our ships never took your progenitors from Africa . . Your posterity is
11
already free. Chile is the first country in Spanish America to proclaim this natural right.”
This kind of antislavery discourse was accelerating also in the Río de la Plata around 1812 and that
May the governing body (Triumvirate) banned the transatlantic slave trade after clashing with
the city council (Cabildo) on which of the two authorities expressed the more radical antislavery
sentiment. Some months later, a Constituent Assembly, convened to dictate the political and legal
organization of the former Viceroyalty, enacted a free womb law and added the principle of “free
soil” to the slave trade decree.
The implementation of a free womb law in Argentina would be quickly followed by a so-called
“Regulation for the education and exercise of the freedmen.” This bylaw changed the words from
“free” to “freed” persons and that variation proved to be far from casual or innocuous: it was
deliberate and harmful for the lives of enslaved women’s children. Under the new law, “freed”
children would be put under the patronato of their mothers’ masters and would not fully enjoy
their freedom until their mature age. Their juridical status was comparable in many ways to
slavery since patronato gave masters the right to demand free services from the freedpersons.
These services could be sold and inherited so the minors, after turning two years old, could be
12
separated from their mothers.
Also in the former Viceroyalty of New Granada, the future of slavery was questioned in 1812. There
had already been an initiative to end the traffic in 1810 by the Junta of Caracas. British and
Spanish debates on slavery circulated via the pen of the Neo-Granadian deputy in Cádiz, Antonio
Villavicencio, who developed his own proposals on abolition and shared news of the European
13
debates with those close to him, among them José Felix de Restrepo. At the same time, in
Cartagena, for example, the Argos Americano reproduced excerpts from El Español—edited by José
María Blanco White—which not only commented on the Cádiz discussions on citizenship but also
reflected on the intellectual capacities of blacks, referring to the writings of William
14
Wilberforce. In this climate of agitation, which was not restricted to the elites, the Constitution
15
of Cartagena (1812) prohibited the slave trade and introduced protective norms for slaves.
A little later and to the north, Juan del Corral, dictator president of the State of Antioquia (a state
separated from the metropolis and the viceregal capital since 1810), requested that the Congress
adopt abolitionist policies and proposed to take the Chilean decree as an example. In his message
of December 12, 1813, he stated: “Already the foreign papers announce to us that the liberal
Government of Chile has filled itself with glory declaring free the childbirths” of enslaved
16
mothers. The occasion to adopt these policies would come in the following April when the
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(1810–1870)
House of Representatives of the Antioquian People passed a law that included both the “freedom
of childbirth” and the prohibition of trafficking. One of the ideologues of these abolitionist
initiatives was none other than José Félix de Restrepo. He would also be a key figure when the
representatives of the different provinces of Gran Colombia met in Cúcuta in 1821 and passed a
17
free womb law with a broader regional scope.
The speech read before Congress by Restrepo in 1821 was an erudite and sophisticated piece that
showed a detailed knowledge of the legal, theological, economic, social, and philosophical
arguments for and against the institution of slavery. Not only did he convey theoretical
arguments (from Wilberforce to Abbé Henri Grégoire, from Guillaume Raynal to Gaetano
Filangieri), but he also mentioned examples of contemporary abolitionist policies to be avoided or
emulated. He argued that “Chile and Buenos Aires have declared the freedom of wombs, and this
declaration deserved the praise of enlightened and virtuous writers.” He also praised regional
laws: the Pennsylvania law that abolished slavery without counting on the will of the “other
states of the republic of which it is part” and the law of “A province of the confederation of New
Granada [Antioquia, that], using its particular sovereignty, declared the freedom of wombs” with
18
happy results. As María Eugenia Chaves points out, Restrepo, though believing that slavery
contradicted natural law and religion, also acknowledged its economic role which nuanced his
19
radicalism. As he then proposed, the constitution banned the slave trade, declared “free
childbirths” (libertad de partos), and established manumissions for adults. At the same time, it
deployed a determination to control black freedom by subjecting freed children to their parents’
owners until the age of 18; it established a tax on wills and urged the formation of “manumission
boards” for the administration of such funds and for the vigilance “over the conduct and
procedures of the aforementioned young people, in order to promote . . [that] they be assigned to
useful trades and professions.” Finally, a more dangerous disposition was included: the possible
20
sale of minors until they reach their mature age The territories of modern-day Colombia,
Venezuela, and Ecuador—that formed by then the Great Colombia—were governed by these
decisions made in Cúcuta. The laws were protected and even requested by their common
21
liberator, Simón Bolívar.
Eighteen twenty-one was a key year for the dismantling of slavery not only in the former
Viceroyalty of New Granada but also in Peru. There, after the arrival of the patriot armies from the
Río de la Plata and Chile, José de San Martín—in his role as Protector—adopted gradualist and
wartime antislavery measures. On August 12, 1821, he took a step towards the “pious reform” of
an institution that regarded some persons “as interchangeable items and” had subjected them
22
“to the calculations of a criminal traffic.” San Martín was aware that the dismantling of the
institution required time and that it was not possible to “attack this ancient abuse at a stroke.”
He, therefore, leaned towards policies such as free womb and free soil laws that could reconcile
“the interest of the owners with the vote of reason and humanity.” To guarantee their
enforcement, he stated that baptismal records will be proofs of “the restitution of this right” to
23
newborns and that captains of the ports will inform arriving slaves of their right to freedom.
The law included a set of duties to freedmen cast in the mold of the Argentine “Reglamento.”
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(1810–1870)
San Martín imagined himself taking a fair and, above all, moderate decision. But it would be
judged differently by Peruvian landowners who, a few years later, would accuse him of exceeding
his duties, usurping sovereignty, and advancing on a delicate issue that nobody but the Peruvians
could decide on. José María Pando—a representative of that group—identified Bernardo
Monteagudo as the author of the laws and claimed that “his harmful influence, his power and the
24
ambition to show off philosophical principles” had instigated them. After San Martín’s
departure, these provisions suffered multiple setbacks.
Shortly after Peru, Uruguay followed suit with its own gradualist abolition policies in 1825. After
the successful expulsion of the Portuguese-Brazilian occupation, the prohibition of the slave
trade and the freedom of wombs were discussed in the Chamber of Representatives of the so-
called Oriental (Eastern) Province. The latter policy, in fact, had been in force since 1813 in the
territories under the control of José Artigas, who recognized the decision of the Provinces of the
25
Río de la Plata’s Constituent Assembly of 1813. In 1830, the constitution sworn prohibited slave
trade and declared enslaved women’s children free. At the General Constituent Assembly and in
the public sphere, whether it was necessary to regulate the forms of subjection of the new free
black generations was also discussed. A deputy brought up the example of Buenos Aires “where
the Regulation of Freedmen stopped the abuses that could be generated after the free womb law”
26
but this kind of policy was not accepted. Possible regulations for freedmen continued to be
publicly discussed but would not be sanctioned. A very similar policy of unfree labor, though,
would later be agreed on in the case of the so-called “African colonists.” Who were these
colonists? Between 1832 and 1838, Brazilian traffickers arranged permits with the Uruguayan
government to bring in African “colonists,” minors under the age of 16. Circumventing the slave
trade ban, these “contracts” forced the “colonist” to work in order to “repay” the expenses of
27
their maintenance and relocation. Their conditions of dependency were very similar to those of
freedmen under Free Womb laws. A similar status would be assigned in the Argentine
Confederation to freed Africans captured in corsair operations during the war against Brazil
28
(1825–1828).
Upper Peru, the territory of present-day Bolivia, had been especially a scenario of jurisdictional
disputes since the wars of independence. In spite of being part of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la
Plata at the time of the revolution, the policies of the “Assembly of the year XIII” were not
applied there. Instead, San Martín’s decrees issued in Lima in 1821 came into force. After
independence was declared in 1825, Bolívar proposed a constitution that included the
emancipation of slaves. His radical proposal was debated and approved but was substantially
reframed because, as soon as the news of the possible freedom became public, numerous slaves in
La Paz left their masters’ homes, causing alarm among the elites. Consequently, the text
sanctioned in 1826 was more moderate and declared that hereinafter slaves “will be free, by right”
but “will not be able to leave the house of their former masters, except in the way that a special law
29 30
determines it.” A clear distinction between “de jure” and “de facto” freedom was drawn. In
the Bolivian case, the exact distance between “rights” and “facts” was fixed by December by a
regulatory law that also foresaw a unique form of masters’ compensation: it had to be personal
and not governmental. Article 1 established that “the slaves declared free” were to remain “in the
service of their present masters in the class of mere debtors, as long as they compensate their
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(1810–1870)
value with their labor.” The amount of the debt equaled the cost of their last sale or a price
determined by “fair appraisal.” Until that sum was paid off, they were to receive food and shelter
as well as an annual remuneration, which would actually be deducted from their “debts.” At 55 or
50 years of age, male and female slaves would be free whether they could pay off their debt or not.
Finally, the slave trade was banned, a “free soil” principle was included, and freedom was
granted to those born before January 1, 1813. The choice of this date as the starting point for the
freedom of enslaved mothers’ children suggests that Bolivian authorities could have considered
significant the decree of the Río de la Plata provinces that had established almost the exact date
31
(January 31, 1813).
The law declared the right to freedom but established conditions that extended unfree labor and
subjection for years, even decades. Either way, slave masters paid little heed to the law and by
1830 it had become ineffective. The succession of constitutional laws were less ambitious in the
face of slavery. The constitutions of 1831, 1834, and 1839 (article 155) only declared: “No one has
been born a slave in Bolivia since August 6, 1825. The introduction of slaves into its territory is
32
prohibited.” With a different phrasing but in the same sense, both principles would be upheld in
the constitution of 1843.
In 1842, a few decades after the rest of the neighboring republics, gradual abolition laws were
enacted in Paraguay. A Free Womb law and a slave trade ban were sanctioned that year under the
33
impulse of Carlos Antonio López and under pressure from British authorities. As in the rest of
the republics, freedmen were obliged to serve their mother’s masters—who would be termed
patrons—until the age of 25 years, and freedwomen until 24 years of age. The clauses of the law
combined articles similar to the Argentine “Regulations” for freedmen with the Uruguayan rules
for “African colonists.” Freedmen would be termed Libertos of the Republic and, in the years to
come, would be recruited for the war.
The Cycle of Gradual Abolition Laws: An Overview
With this multiplication of free womb laws and slave trade bans, the first cycle of gradual
abolition policies came to an end in present-day Chile, Argentina, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador,
Venezuela, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These policies came into effect against the backdrop
of the daily struggles, extraordinary or routine, of thousands of enslaved people traying to gain
freedom. They were also forged in the heat of many fires: the humanist flare of the French
Enlightenment, the intimidating blaze of the Haitian experience, the contagious flames of British
anti-trafficking campaigns, the old candle of the Spanish theological and legal tradition, the
Cádiz bonfires, and the multiple connected torches of experiments and discourses all over the
Americas. In the midst of the challenge of building new republics, putting an end to African
slavery had become a moral imperative. Politicians and letrados produced laws, debates, and
elaborate discourses that were articulated regionally and globally. The English discourses and the
North American examples mobilized the Chilean imagination. The Chilean antecedent had been
important for the Río de la Plata and Colombian abolitionists. The kickoff of the Peruvian gradual
abolition process was given under Argentine inspiration, while that of the Bolivian case was
started by Neo-Grenadian leaders based on their experiences. The Uruguayan process took its
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(1810–1870)
own paths while intensely debating Argentinean measures and with porteño emigrates actively
intervening in the public sphere. Newspapers, correspondence, and books in Spanish America
communicated the new policies and experiments under way in the continent and across the
Atlantic. In the whirlwind of these circulations, abolition policies were adopted locally but
thought of in a regional and global dialogue.
In these gradual abolition processes in Spanish South America, an ad hoc institution took form
and had a decisive impact: the status of “freedmen” attributed to the children of slaves, the
patronato given to their mothers’ masters, or different rules to govern and limit freedpersons’
freedom. These legal provisions, with their various names (patronato, guardianship, tutelage, and
dependency) were key because it was through them that the effective emancipation of
generations of African descendants was postponed and controlled. In the case of the Río de la
Plata, the patronato would continue until the child was 16 years old in the case of women and 20
years of age in the case of men. In Peru, for both sexes, tutelage would be extended to 21 years of
age, and in 1830, it was decreed that the children of enslaved women would be considered
“slaves” up to that age. At the end of 1839, the age of service for Peruvian freedmen was raised to
50 years. In Colombia, tutelage would originally last until the child was 18 years old, but its
extension would be repeatedly proposed and in 1842 it would be set at 25 years old. In Venezuela,
already separated from Colombia, a new Manumission Law, which extended the age for freeing
the children of slaves up to 21 years, was passed in 1830, and ten years later, another law added
four additional years of “apprenticeship” that were compulsory before they could leave the
34
master’s house or hacienda.
In all cases, these kinds of measures were allegedly intended to protect minors, to prepare them
for a free life, and also to compensate the masters for the expenses of raising them. In practical
terms, though, these conditions guaranteed a continuous provision of unwaged labor and created
a very fragile status for children born of enslaved mothers. The crucial character of these
measures can be perceived in the importance that two opposite social actors gave them: on the
one hand, the patrons, who fought for extending the years of freedpersons’ control; on the other
hand, freedmen, their families, and “philanthropic” elites who denounced abuses and informal
35
enslavement.
Among those asking for an extension of the patronato system was the Colombian Senator Joaquín
Mosquera, who proposed the suspension of the free womb law and the “establishment of a board
of manumission with the task of working out the regulation . . most suitable to improve as much
as possible the moral and social education of the slaves; to make them capable of being useful
36
citizens of the Republic.” Declaring himself opposed to slavery but also pessimistic about the
effects of abolition, he argued that the law, as formulated, “deprives the citizen of a legal
37
property without just compensation.” As proof of it, he attached a calculation of the costs of
raising the offspring of slaves. Also, in Cartagena, a group of slaveholders asserted that the
feeding of the freedmen was not compensated for the 18 years they had to serve their patrons, so
they proposed to extend their control for 45 years since “the freedom of a few should not be
38
placed above the interests of the general welfare.” In Venezuela, pro-slavery newspapers, such
39
as El Cometa, published permanent complaints about these laws. In Peru, in 1833, José María
Pando presented the already-mentioned complaint where he also proposed that freed children
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and men “be obliged to remain in their respective farms or houses of their masters, as settlers or
apprentices, earning from the time they reach the age of 24 years a moderate wage to be fixed by
40
law.” In the Río de la Plata, some provinces, such as Mendoza, increased the number of years
necessary for the emancipation of freedwomen under the guise of trying to control their “decent”
41
behavior.
Throughout Spanish South America, landowners and slave owners expressed skepticism that the
sons and daughters of slaves could exercise their freedom properly; they also argued that they
should pay for their freedom. After all, patronato was for them an important guarantee of a
continued supply of captive labor rather than a measure of protection and a period to educate
freed children.
On the other hand, some letrados and jurists openly criticized this slippage of the institution.
Pedro Somellera, law professor at the University of Buenos Aires, argued that it was an abuse to
consider these children as “freedmen,” as manumitted persons who owed their freedom and,
42
therefore, free labor to their mothers’ masters. Another critique was raised in Uruguay. In 1850,
a young student from Montevideo made a careful assessment of the tutelage of freedmen and
argued that the practice of alienating “the right of tutelage is equivalent to making of it a
disguised slavery; it implies the denaturalization of the patronato, the complete violation of the
43
objects of this institution and of those of the laws that created it.” In a very similar sense, five
years later, the Peruvian jurist Santiago Távara y Andrade took stock of the gradual laws of his
country and pointed out that “the most humanitarian institution of society [the guardianship of
the freedmen] became a means of slavery because that guardianship mercifully established . .
44
served to give it 21 years of duration over the following generations.”
These micro-regulations establishing the freedmen status, the time of unpaid service, and the
age of full liberation were substantive. They generated both expectations and protests. That
proofs their significance and the wide resonance of antislavery debates and policies. Supposedly
minor, these ancillary rules had a deep impact on the daily lives and experiences of enslaved
persons and their freed children. The legal history of slavery and abolition offers the opportunity
of repositioning them as the spaces of contention that they were. Its study allows us to fully
calibrate the graduality of the abolition process, the fragility of the emancipated persons’ status
and its possible reversibility,. Those regulations created longstanding controls over free
45
Afrodescendants’lives after emancipation.
Towards Final Abolitions
Local experiments and Atlantic and inter-American dialogues did not end with the cycle of
gradual abolitions. Instead, around the 1850s, the debates reopened and final abolitions were
adopted in most of these countries. There was only one exception to this sequence: Chile officially
abolished slavery in 1823. This policy was the most radical legal emancipation in South America,
not only because of its early nature but also because of the absence of compensation for the
masters. Already in 1811, the free womb law was unique there because it did not foresee any
46
control or dependency for the children of the slaves, who were in fact called “ingenuous”. This
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law lost its validity during the Spanish reconquest, but once the patria nueva was (re)instated, the
pro-emancipation laws were reaffirmed. In that context, debates on slavery resurfaced. In June
1823, Chilean Senator José Miguel Infante—after reporting serious transgressions to the free
womb law and the cruel treatment of slaves (and not only during the “tyranny”)—made a motion
in Parliament to “declare all existing slaves free” immediately and without compensation for the
47
masters. The Senate approved it, but the Supreme Director objected to this last point and asked
that “all rights and interests” be reconciled. The Senate insisted on the original wording, stating
that the treasury should not “recognize upon itself a debt over a servitude that it has
disapproved.” That was a clear-cut abolitionist statement. So, despite the executive power’s
resistance and some public opinion’s opposition, the law was promulgated on July 24 as voted by
the Senate. The law consisted of three articles: two reaffirmed the free womb law and the slave
trade ban and a third declared that “[t]hose who until today have been slaves, are absolutely free
from the publication of this agreement.”
The scope of the law was revolutionary while the responses were reactionary: alleged collective
supplications of slaves requesting to continue as such, petitions from “mothers of families”
against abolition, and newspaper articles warning about the inevitable misery and idleness of
those who were “taken out of an apparent slavery to be delivered to the real one of vice and
48
begging.” These anxieties coincided with those expressed by Supreme Director Ramón Freire,
who believed it was necessary to establish not only indemnities but also a mechanism to control
the industriousness of the emancipated. Opposed by the Senate, the Director compromised and
placed limits to the radicality of the law by resorting to a bylaw authorizing the police to issue
certificates of free status only to male “slaves” who could prove they were “engage[d] in some
honest exercise, and . . fit for it” and female slaves who could prov“the honesty of the house
49
where they were going to live.” Without this certificate, the freed person would be put under the
patronato of their former master. Once again, in the wake of emancipation laws, small regulations
were drawn up with the purpose of controlling ex-slaves.
Abolition by law was later replaced by article 11 of the constitution which, sanctioned in 1823,
provided that “[i]n Chile there are no slaves: whoever sets foot in its territory for one calendar
50
day shall be free.” With minor modifications, the article would be repeated in successive
Chilean constitutions and its wording would be present in other South American constitutions:
the Uruguayan, the Argentinean, and the Paraguayan.
Unlike the aforementioned gradualist and immediate abolition laws (strongly inspired or at least
justified by “philanthropic” ideas), another set of abolitionist policies, born out of a more
interested goal, were taken: military recruitments. From the beginning of the wars of
independence, royalist and patriotic armies resorted to the forced or voluntary enrolment of
slaves. As a result, as Christopher Schmidt-Nowara has stated, military mobilizations were the
51
strongest “solvent of slavery.”
War and shortage of military staffs were the principal motivations for the immediate abolition
declared in Uruguay in 1842. Two parallel governments were fighting for control of the country:
the so-called government “de la Defensa” headed by Fructuoso Rivera in Montevideo, and the
government “del Cerrito,” installed on the outskirts of that city and controlling the rest of the
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territory. Following an established tradition, the “Colorado” government, the one in Montevideo,
resorted to abolition as a means to immediately recruit soldiers en masse. The Honorable
Assembly approved the decision by acclamation and without debate. Males would go on to serve
in the army while minors, women, and men unfit to fight would continue as pupils of their former
52
masters. Being under tutelage meant a severely limited freedom. When Manuel Oribe’s
government passed its own final abolition law in 1846, it did not include the forced enlistment of
slaves in the text, although the regulatory decree did provide for it.
Almost a decade later in Peru, military recruitment was also a key factor behind a decision to
declare immediate emancipation. Needing soldiers, José Rufino Echenique offered freedom to
slaves who joined his army for two years. The “grace” would be “extended” to their legitimate
53
wives. Although there was antislavery agitation in the previous years, it was the uprising of
caudillo Ramón Castilla that prompted Echenique to promise slave emancipation and masters’
54
compensation in November 1854. He declared that “supreme and saving measures” were
necessary and conciliable “with other social demands, whose remedy is demanded by humanity
and the progress of the century.” So, if there was opportunism, better to hide it behind the
accomplishment of a social demand: abolition. Castilla’s reaction was also prompt. Less than a
55
month later, from Huancayo, he decreed immediate abolition as “a duty of national justice.”
Conflicts among the government and slaveholders arose, and a compensation of 300 pesos for
each of their emancipated slaves was agreed in the years to come.
In the Neo-Granadian republic, slaves also were recruited during the “war of the
Supremes” (1839–1842). Strong social agitation was produced by slaves’ enlistments and their
following demobilization. This agitation was at the origin of the elites’ project of exporting
(insubordinate) slaves to Peru and their resistance to immediate emancipation of this active
56
masses.
Outlawing slavery was a sensitive point in the confrontation between conservatives and liberals
and was the subject of a broad public debate and social mobilization, not limited to the enslaved.
In the heat of this debate, president José Hilario López decreed in 1851 the abolition of slavery
with compensation. Far from settling opponents, the payment of manumissions and the future of
the emancipated opened a cycle of hostility and even armed resistance to the liberal government.
In Ecuador, the abolition of slavery emerged in the context of a similar dispute between liberal
and conservatives, highland and coastal oligarchies. Under the impulse of the liberal government
of José María Urbina, the end of slavery was declared in 1851. The articles of the law established
the creation of slave registries, compensation for masters, and taxes to collect the necessary
57
funds. Emancipations were gradually undertaken and they were not completed until 1854.
In Venezuela, from 1849 to 1853, one project a year to end slavery was presented but none was
approved. Finally, on March 23, 1854, the Senate and the House of Representatives of the Republic
approved the Law on the Abolition of Slavery. It was praised by many representatives (as
consistent with the Bible, natural rights, and humanism) and endorsed by President General José
58
Gregorio Monagas. The 16 articles not only declared slavery “forever abolished in Venezuela”
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but explicitly put an end to “the manumisos’,legal obligation of rendering services, leaving them
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in full enjoyment of their freedom . . as ingenuous.” Compensations to the masters and taxes to
finance those payments were stipulated.
Unlike the multiple declarations and self-praising of the Venezuelan representatives who exalted
the necessity and incontestable value of their decision, in Argentina, when the constitutional
delegates agreed to abolish slavery in 1853, they did so with unanimous but silent support. The
drafting commission proposed an article declaring that “In the Argentine Confederation there are
60
no slaves” and that a subsequent law would regulate compensation. In the plenary, the article
was approved without anyone taking the floor either to applaud or to question the decision. After
the promulgation of the constitution, no newspaper would take note of the vital article. The
constitution was not sworn by Buenos Aires so slavery remained legal there until 1860 when the
province agreed to join the Confederation and accepted the carta magna after some reforms.
If the abolition of slavery declared in Chile was exceptional because of its early date,
emancipation in Paraguay was exceptional because of its late date. In the aftermath of the tragic
war against the triple alliance (1864–1870) and in the midst of the Brazilian occupation, the
constituent congress of Paraguay abolished slavery, repeating word for word article 15 of the
Argentine constitution. With this abolition, slavery was legally ended in the whole of Spanish
South America.
“Hercules in the Cradle”: Abolitionism and Republic
In the process of breaking colonial rule and creating new republics, Spanish South American
elites began to use and abuse the metaphor of slavery to think about their political subjection.
Within different rhythms and participating in and articulating various abolitionist traditions,
some of those elites started to criticized the legal institution that had allowed them to own and
subject the persons who served in their homes, plowed their fields, or died in their mines.
Most of the scholarship on abolition in the Western hemisphere has emphasized North Atlantic,
Circum-Caribbean, and Luso-Brazilian processes. It is necessary to bring Spanish South America
into that conversation by both unravelling the local skein of antislavery and tracing the yarns that
wove its interconnections. The direct and indirect Spanish South American dialogues and the
legal experimentation that led to the end of slavery in this region have received comparatively
little scholarly attention and need to be integrated into the historiography of global abolition (as
historically it was).
Antislavery laws were but one dimension of the process. Abolitions did not happen by the mere
force of decrees. The extraordinary and daily struggles of the enslaved were also key. In judicial
battles, enslaved and freed persons tried to turn those antislavery decrees into a reality. Those
normative frameworks had a crucial impact because, as E.P. Thompson pointed out, they created
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obligations also for those who issued them, even if they did not intend to respect them.
Page 14 of 23
(1810–1870)
Spanish South American political leaders committed to abolition declared themselves devotees of
freedom but respectful of property, philanthropic but cautious, and opposed to an institution
condemned by the “civilized world” but skeptical about the convenience or the abilities of the
enslaved to be free citizens. The option for gradualism built a bridge between these conflicting
convictions. In the process, freedoms with adjectives were born: conditional, postponed,
supervised freedoms. The status of freedpersons, the patronato, and the tutelage systems are the
result of these tensions. Through them, these new republics created special citizen statuses and
regimes of controlled freedoms for the emancipated while rhetorically committing themselves to
the idea of racial harmony (as Marixa Lasso has pointed out well). After the complete abolitions,
this type of mechanism was multiplied in the form of specific controls for freedmen or general
provisions for vagrants.
Finally, abolitions played a key symbolic role in the creation of these new republics. Antislavery
policies carried national prestige, portraying these countries as participants in the progress of
humanity by leaving behind an institution they described as inherited, despotic, and inhuman.
José Felix de Restrepo summed up this feeling well: “Hercules in the cradle drowned snakes, and
the Congress of Colombia in its first meetings destroyed the greatest monster that has ever raised
its head above the globe.” Argentine elites shared this feeling. In 1835, a young jurist and future
diplomat claimed that Argentina was “inscribed in the catalog of free and civilized nations” since
62
it is “a country that prohibited in its infancy this opprobrious trade.” By portraying themselves
as abolitionist pioneers, these elites played a crucial role in the construction of national
63
narratives of “modern,” color-blind, and liberal republics.
Discussion of the Literature
The development of abolitionism in most Spanish South American countries has already been
studied, more or less systematically. The first works had a national scope, a descriptive emphasis,
64
and (usually) an attentive consideration of the British influence on local antislavery policies. In
the last 30 years, new perspectives have emerged. One body of research emphasizes the role of
war and military recruitments as a privileged path to freedom and some of them elaborate
65
regional analysis. Another group of scholars has looked beyond the elite’s protagonism and
66
instead highlighted the role of the enslaved as “agents of their own freedom.” Scholarship in
Spanish is increasing, but more multidirectional dialogues with the Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese,
and French scholars are needed.
Alongside nationally centered analyses, some regional approaches have been deployed. While the
field of legal comparisons on slavery in Latin America is rich (driven by the pioneering and
debatable work of Frank Tannenbaum), comparative studies on abolition is more an emerging
67
field. Hebe Clementi’s book La abolición de la esclavitud en América Latina was the sole work for a
long time. She focuses on national cases, but when she analyses slave trade bans, she establishes
a regional periodization, distinguishing stages that correlated with British policies in the region.
Other comprehensive studies on slavery and the African diaspora in Latin America have dedicated
chapters to emancipation in a broad sense and have featured the cases of Brazil and the
Caribbean. A few years ago, more systematic contributions were made. Schmidt-Nowara
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addressed the legal and illegal strategies of the enslaved to achieve freedom in Latin America and
the processes of gradual and definitive abolition. Later, together with Josep Fradera, Schmidt-
Nowara edited a volume that links three centuries of traffic, slavery, and abolition in the Spanish
Atlantic empire and a predominant thematization of the slave trade, Iberian abolitionism, and the
68
Cuban case.
Meanwhile, important scholarship has been made on the daily and extraordinary fights deployed
by the enslaved themselves and their families which were a crucial and more constant way of
69
eroding the peculiar institution.
In the early 21st century, the study of abolition in Spanish America is receiving growing attention
and five lines of inquiry stand out: the emphasis on the region as such and its connections with
Atlantic and Interamerican debates and processes (where the research projects of Marcela
Echeverri, Alejandro Gomez, and Candioti coalesce and enrich one another); the articulation of
abolitionism from above and below (stressing black activism and integrating microhistory and
social history with political, diplomatic, and cultural approaches); the analysis of frontier zones
and interjurisdictional conflicts where slavery was at stake; the inextricability of African slave
labor and Indian labor; and the importance of gradualist policies and the study of the ambiguous
70
legal status that emerged from them. Those in-between statuses complicate the binary views of
slavery and freedom and uncover wider and more complex relations of dependency.
Acknowledgments
I am especially grateful for the comments and suggestions from Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Clément Thibaud, Marcela
Echeverri, Lloyd Belton, and Celso Thomas Castilho as well as from the anonymous referees of the article.
Primary Sources
For the study of the history of abolition in Spanish South America, it is possible to consult different official documents,
parliamentary debates, newspapers, private correspondence, and books. Several Latin American newspapers and
edited official documents can be accessed through National Libraries Digital collections (see “Links to Digital
Materials” section). There are also governmental websites where collections of laws and decrees can be consulted.
Some National Archives offered digital repositories of primary sources, mainly in Colombia (Negros y Esclavos fund)
and Bolivia. In the different national and regional archives, it is possible to access slaves’ petitions and civil and
judicial records where the legal battles of enslaved persons can be traced. Another repository preserves important
sources on the politics of abolitionism in the Spanish Atlantic world: the Archivo General de Indias and other regional
archives which can be consulted through PARES.
For microhistories of antislavery activists, parochial records (baptisms, marriages, and deaths, which are available
online on the Family Search website) and notarial records are useful.
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(1810–1870)
Links to Digital Materials

PARES | Bicentenario de las Independencias Iberoamericanas <http://pares.mcu.es/Parlamentarios/catalogo/
portada>
Hemeroteca Luis López, Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Banco de la República en Colombia <https://
www.banrepcultural.org/biblioteca-virtual/colecciones-digitales/hemeroteca-historica>
Biblioteca Digital de Tratados <http://tratados.cancilleria.gob.ar/>
Biblioteca Virtual del Bicentenario <http://www.biblioteca.uach.cl/biblioteca_virtual/libtexcom_bvbicentenario.htm>
Amanda Labarca Hubertson (1886-1975) <http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-channel.html>
Publicaciones y multimedia de la Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno <https://www.bn.gov.ar/colecciones-digitales/

publicaciones>
Buscador Interno de Artistas y Autores Paraguayos del PortalGuarani.com <http://www.portalguarani.com/index.php>
The Free Womb Project <https://thefreewombproject.com/>
Further Reading
Andrews, George Reid. Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Barragan, Yesenia. Freedom’s Captives. Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Blanchard, Peter. Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of Independence in Spanish South America.
Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2008.
Borucki, Alex. Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la fundación republicana (1829–1853). Montevideo:
Biblioteca Nacional-UdeLaR, 2009.
Candioti, Magdalena. Una historia de la emancipación negra. Esclavitud y abolición en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo
XXI Editores, 2021.
Castilho, Celso Thomas, and Marcela Echeverri. “Los ecos Atlánticos de las aboliciones hispano-americanas,” Historia
Mexicana 69 (2019): 2.
Chaves, Eugenia, ed. Los “otros” de las independencias, los “otros” de la nación. Participación de la población
afrodescendiente e indígena en las independencias del Nuevo Reino de Granada, Chile y Haití. Medellín: Universidad
Nacional de Colombia, 2015.
De la Fuente, Alejandro, and George Reid Andrews, eds. Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: a History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009.
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(1810–1870)
Gallego, José Andrés. La esclavitud en la América española. Madrid: Encuentro, 2005.
Helg, Aline. Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2019.
Mosquera, Claudia, Mauricio Pardo, and Odile Hoffman, eds. Afrodescendientes en las Américas: trayectorias sociales e
identitarias: 150 años de la abolición de la esclavitud en Colombia. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002.
Perez Morales, Edgardo. Unraveling Abolition. Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia. Cambridge:
Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2011.
Scott, Rebecca. Slave Emancipation in Cuba. Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
Tardieu, Jean Pierre. El decreto de Huancayo. La abolición de la esclavitud en el Perú. Lima: Editorial del Congreso del
Perú, 2005.
Notes
1. For a panorama on the weight of the Black population in the region through the years, see George Reid Andrews,
Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
2. On this circulation, see Clément Thibaud, Federica Morelli, Gabriel Entin, and Alejandro Gómez, L’Atlantique
révolutionnaire. Une perspective ibéro-américaine (Bécherel, France: Les Perseides, 2013); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror:
Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Julius Scott, The Common
Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018).
3. On “free soil,” see Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal
Principle <https://10.1080/0144039X.2011.588468>,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 3 (2011): 331–339, as well as the rest of
the special issue; and Sue Peabody, “There Are No Slaves in France”: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in Ancient
Regime (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
4. Jaime del Arenal Fenochio, “La utopía de la libertad. La esclavitud en las primeras declaraciones mexicanas de
derechos humanos,” Anuario Mexicano de Historia del Derecho 6 (1994): 3–24.
5. Diario de sesiones de las Cortes de Cádiz, no. 185 (April 2, 1811): 811; Manuel Chust and Ivana Frasquet, eds., Los
colores de las independencias iberoamericanas. Liberalismo, etnia y raza (Madrid: CSIC, 2009); and Heraclio Bonilla,
ed., Indios, negros y mestizos en la independencia (Bogotá: Planeta–Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010).
6. Diario de sesiones de las Cortes de Cádiz, no. 185 (April 2, 1811): 811.
7. Diario de sesiones, 811.
8. Diario de sesiones, 811. Likewise, French planters tried to avoid the circulation of news in the colonies; see David
Geggus, “Racial Equality, Slavery and Colonial Secession during the Constituent Assembly,” American Historical Review
94, no. 5 (1989): 1290–1308.
9. Aurora de Chile, no. 12, April 30, 1812.
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10. Gaceta de Buenos Aires, no. 11, December 10, 1811.
11. Gaceta de Buenos Aires.
12. The Siete Partidas—the most significant legal body produced by the Spanish monarchy—was inspired by Roman
law and embraced those principles and divided “Persons” into “slaves” and “freemen.” Among the latter, it
differentiated “ingenuous” (free born) from “libertos (freedpersons).” Freedmen were considered to be persons
“redeemed” from a “just servitude” (that is, manumitted persons who had a debt with their former masters). These
patrons’ rights over their former slaves were called patronato. See Magdalena Candioti, “Free Womb Law, Legal
Asynchronies, and Migrations: Suing for an Enslaved Woman’s Child in Nineteenth-Century Río de la Plata,” The
Americas 77, no. 1 (2020): 73–99.
13. Antonio Villavicencio, Propuesta a las Cortes de Cádiz sobre la abolición de la esclavitud (Biblioteca Nacional,
Bogotá: Fondo Antiguo, RM, ufdul), 345, ff. 2–6; and Roger Pita Pico, “El debate sobre la abolición del comercio
internacional de esclavos durante la independencia y la temprana República en Colombia,” Diálogos Revista
Electrónica de Historia 16, no. 1 (2015): 241–267. On Villavicencio see, Edgardo Perez Morales, Unraveling abolition.
Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022), 79-83.
14. Marixa Lasso, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism during the Age of Revolution, Colombia 1795–1831
(Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 50, ss; Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, “Wilberforce Spanished:
Joseph Blanco White and Spanish Antislavery, 1808–1814,” in Slavery and Antislavery in Spain’s Atlantic Empire, ed.
Josep Fradera and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (New York and Oxford: Berghan, 2013), 158–175; and Emily Berquist,
“Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765–1817,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 2 (2010): 181–
205.
15. Dolcey Romero Jaramillo, “El fantasma de la revolución haitiana esclavitud y libertad en Cartagena de Indias
1812–1815,” Historia Caribe 3, no. 8 (2003): 19–33.
16. Juan del Corral to Presidente del Supremo Proder Ejecutivo de la Unión, Antioquia, December 12, 1813, Memorias
del General O’Leary (Caracas: Imprenta de la Gaceta Oficial, 1881), vol. 13, 493–494.
17. María Eugenia Chaves, “El oxímoron de la libertad. La esclavitud de los vientres libres y la crítica a la esclavización
africana en tres discursos revolucionarios,” Fronteras de Historia 19, no. 1 (2014): 174–200.
18. José Felix de Restrepo, Discurso sobre la manumisión de esclavos pronunciado En el soberano congreso de Colombia
reunido la Villa del Rosario Cúcuta a 1821 (Manuscrito, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, 1822), ff. 90–91.
19. Chaves, “El oxímoron.”
20. Yesenia Barragán, Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
21. Bolívar’s changing attitude towards slavery, especially from his contact with Alexander Pétion and the Haitian
revolution, is well studied. See Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
22. Quoted in Santiago Távara, Abolición de la esclavitud en el Perú (Lima: Imprenta del Comercio, 1855).
23. Quoted in Távara, Abolición de la esclavitud.
24. José María Pando, Reclamación de los vulnerados derechos de los hacendados de las provincias litorales del
departamento de Lima (Lima: Imprenta Rep. de J. M. Concha, 1833), 31–32. Monteagudo was a radical figure of the
Rioplatense revolution.
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25. Ana Frega, “Caminos de libertad en tiempos de revolución. Los esclavos en la Provincia Oriental Artiguista,
1815-1820.” in Seminario Estudios sobre la Cultura Afro-Rioplatense. Historia y Presente, ed. Arturo Bentancur, Alex
Borucki and Ana Frega (Montevideo: Depto. de Publicaciones de la Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la
Educación, 2004), 45–66.
26. El Patriota, April 10, 1832, quoted in Alex Borucki, Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo tras la
fundación republicana (1829–1853) (Montevideo: Biblioteca Nacional-UdeLaR, 2009), 47.
27. Alex Borucki, “The ‘African Colonists’ of Montevideo: New Light on the Illegal Slave Trade to Rio de Janeiro and the
Río de la Plata (1830–42),” Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (2009): 427–444.
28. Liliana Crespi, “Negros apresados en operaciones de corso durante la guerra con el Brasil (1825-1828),” Temas de
Asia y África 2 (1994): 109–133.
29. “Ley de 19 de diciembre de 1826,” Compendio de leyes de 1825–2007, CD made by the Library and Archive of the
Honorable National Congress.
30. A very similar “de jure abolition” without change in the “state of things” was declared by the Congress of
Angostura of the Republic of Colombia in 1820. “Ley dictada el 11 de enero de 1820 por el Congreso de Angostura
sobre manumisión de los esclavos,” in Pita Pico, op. cit, Anex 2, 211–212.
31. “Ley de 19 de diciembre de 1826,” Compendio de leyes de 1825–2007.
32. Compendio de leyes.
33. Jerry W. Cooney, “Abolition in the Republic of Paraguay: 1840–1870,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 11,
no. 1 (1974): 149–166.
34. Documento Núm. 53, “Ley de 2 de octubre de 1830, reformando la de Manumisión de 1821,” Materiales para el
estudio de la cuestión agraria en Venezuela (1810–1854). Mano de obra: legislación y administración Vol. I, Tomo 4, 104.
35. On the problems this institution generates among freed children in Choco, see Barragán, Freedom’s Captives; and
Marcela Echeverri, “Esclavitud y tráfico de esclavos en el pacífico suramericano durante la era de la abolición,”
Historia mexicana 69, no. 2 (2019): 627–691.
36. Joaquín Mosquera, Memoria sobre la necesidad de reformar la ley del Congreso Constituyente de Colombia de 21 de
julio de 1821, que sancionó la libertad de los partos coman manumisión, y abolición del tráfico de esclavos y bases que
podrían adoptarse para la reforma (Bogotá: F.M. Stokes, 1825).
37. Mosquera, Memoria sobre la necesidad.
38. Cited in Alonso Valencia Llano, “Integración de la población negra en las sociedades andinas 1830-1880,” in
Historia de América Andina, vol. 5, ed. Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, Manuel Burga, and Margarita Garrido (Quito:
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, 2003), 158
39. David Bushnell, El régimen de Santander en la Gran Colombia (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo, 1966), 197.
40. Pando, “Reclamación,” 65.
41. Manuel de Ahumada, Código de las Leyes, Decretos y Acuerdos que sobre la Administración de Justicia se ha dictado
en la Provincia de Mendoza (Mendoza, Argentina: El Constitucional, 1860), 109–111.
42. Pedro Somellera, Principios de Derecho Civil (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales, 1939 [1824]).
43. Adolfo Rodríguez, Tesis sobre la tutela de los libertos, presentada a la Universidad de la República para obtener el
grado de doctor, por Adolfo Rodríguez (1850) (Montevideo: Imprenta Francesa, 1973), 15–16.
Page 20 of 23
(1810–1870)
44. Távara, Abolición de la esclavitud, 6.
45. For a balance on the legal history of slavery, see Alejandro De la Fuente and Ariela Gross, “Comparative Studies of
Law, Slavery, and Race in the Americas,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6 (2010): 469–485.
46. Magdalena Candioti, “Regulando el fin de la esclavitud Diálogos, innovaciones y disputas jurídicas en las nuevas
repúblicas sudamericanas 1810–1830,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas 52, no. 1 (2015): 149–172; Thomas
Mareite, “Slavery, Resistance(s) and Abolition in Early Nineteenth-Century Chile,” Journal of Global Slavery 4, no. 3
(2019): 372–403; and Carolina González Undurraga, “La esclavitud en los registros judiciales y en las leyes de libertad.
Chile, 1810–1823,” in América en Diásporas: Esclavitudes y Migraciones Forzadas (siglos XVI–XIX), ed. Jaime Valenzuela
Márquez (Santiago de Chile: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, RIL Editores, 2016), 113–129.
47. Senado Conservador, Sesión 37, del 23 de Junio de 1823. Sesiones de los cuerpos legislativos de la República de
Chile (1810–1845), Valentín Letelier Ed, Tomo VII-1823 (Santiago de Chile, Imprenta Cervantes, 1889), 222.
48. El Tizón Republicano, no 15, 23 June 1823.
49. Archivo Nacional Histórico. Fondo Ministerio del Interior. Vol. 32. f. 268-268v.
50. “Constitución Política del Estado de Chile” (1823), Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional.
51. Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), 104.
52. Borucki, Abolicionismo y tráfico.
53. “Decreto del Presidente de la República, José Rufino Echenique del 18 de noviembre de 1854,” in Colección de
leyes, decretos y órdenes publicadas en el Perú desde el año de 1821 hasta 31 de diciembre de 1859, tomo XIII, ed. Juan
Oviedo (Lima: Felipe Bailly Editor, 1865), 369.
54. 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), 297–298.
55. “Decreto del 3 de diciembre de 1854 concediendo la libertad a todos los esclavos existentes en la república,” in
Oviedo, Colección de leyes, 370–371; and Carlos Aguirre, Breve historia de la esclavitud en el Perú (Lima: Fondo Editorial
del Congreso del Perú, 2005).
56. Alonso Valencia Llano, Entre la resistencia social y la acción política. De bandidos a políticos (Cali: Universidad del
Valle, 2014); María Camila Díaz Casas, Salteadores y cuadrillas de malhechores: una aproximación a la acción colectiva
de la “población negra” en el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada, 1840–1851 (Popayán: Universidad del Cauca, 2015);
and Echeverri, “Esclavitud y tráfico.”
57. Llano, “Integración”; and Rocío Rueda Novoa, “Desesclavización, manumisión jurídica y defensa del territorio en el
norte de Esmeraldas (siglos XVIII-XIX) <https://doi.org/10.29078/rp.v0i43.590>,” Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de
historia no. 43 (2016): 9–35.
58. Manuel Landaeta Rosales, La libertad de los esclavos en Venezuela (Caracas: Imprenta Bolívar, 1895).
59. Landaeta Rosales, La libertad; José Marcial Ramos Guédez, “José Antonio Páez: Esclavitud y abolición en
Venezuela, 1830–1854,” in 1854–2004: 150 años de la Abolición de la Esclavitud en Venezuela ¿Presente y pasado de una
misma realidad?, ed. Hernán Lucena Molero and Julio César Tallaferro (Mérida: Universidad de los Andes, 2007), 43–
54.
60. “Constitución de la Confederación Argentina,” 1853.
61. Edward P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act (London: Penguin, 1992).
Page 21 of 23
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62. Demetrio Rodríguez Peña, “Disertación,” Manuscript in Biblioteca Nacional, Colección Candioti, Tesoro, no. 143
(1834).
63. Magdalena Candioti, Una historia de la emancipación negra. Esclavitud y abolición en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Siglo
XXI Editores, 2021).
64. Guillermo Feliú Cruz, La abolición de la esclavitud en Chile: estudio histórico y social (Santiago de Chile, Ediciones
de la Universidad de Chile, 1942); Rafael M. Cayetano Sáenz Cavia, “La abolición de la esclavitud en las Provincias
Unidas del Río de la Plata (1810-1860),” Revista de Historia del Derecho 9 (1981): 155–157; Alberto Crespo, Esclavos
negros en Bolivia. Estudios sociohistóricos de la raza negra en Bolivia (La Paz: Academia Nacional de Ciencias, 1977);
Cooney, “Abolition”; Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, El negro en el Uruguay. Pasado y Presente (Montevideo: Revista del
Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1965); Harold A. Bierck, “The Struggle for Abolition in Gran Colombia,”
Hispanic American Historical Review 33, no. 3 (1953): 365–386; and John V. Lombardi, “Los esclavos en la legislación
republicana de Venezuela,” Boletín Histórico IX, no. 25–27 (1971), 43–67.
65. Carmen Bernand and Alessandro Stella, eds., D’esclaves à soldats: miliciens et soldats d’origine servile, XIIIe-XXIe
siècles (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006); Peter Blanchard, Under the Flags of Freedom: Slave Soldiers and the Wars of
Independence in Spanish South America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008); Silvia Mallo and Ignacio
Telesca, eds., “Negros de la Patria” Los afrodescendientes en las luchas de independencia en el antiguo virreinato del
Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Ediciones SB, 2010); Clément Thibaud, Repúblicas en armas: Los ejércitos bolivarianos en
la guerra de Independencia en Colombia y Venezuela (Bogotá: Institut Français d’Études Andines, 2003); Marcela
Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes,
1780–1825 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Hugo Contrera Cruces, “Artesanos mulatos y
soldados beneméritos. El Batallón de Infantes de la Patria en la Guerra de Independencia de Chile. 1795-1820,”
Historia 1, no. 44 (2011): 51–89.
66. Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad; Camilla Townsend, “En busca de la libertad. Los esfuerzos de los esclavos
guayaquileños por garantizar su independencia después de la independencia,” Procesos. Revista Ecuatoriana de
Historia (1993): 73–85.; Christine Hunefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom, Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves,1800–
1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru
(Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1992); Borucki, Abolicionismo y tráfico; Jorge Andrés Tovar and Hermes Tovar, El oscuro
camino de la libertad. Los esclavos en Colombia, 1821–1851 (Bogotá, Universidad de Los Andes, 2009); Miguel Ángel
Rosal, Africanos y afrodescendientes en el Río de La Plata. Siglos XVIII- XIX (Buenos Aires: Dunken, 2009); Roger Pita Pico,
La manumisión de esclavos en el proceso de intendencia de Colombia: realidades, promesas y desilusiones (Bogotá:
Kimpres, 2014); and Maribel Arrelucea and Jesús Cosamalón, La presencia afrodescendiente en el Perú: siglos XVI-XX
(Lima: Ministerio de Cultura, 2015).
67. See Christopher L. Tomlins, “Forum: What Can Frank Tannenbaum Still Teach Us About the Law of Slavery,” Law
and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 339–387; and Keila Grinberg, “Alforria, direito e direitos no Brasil e nos Estados
Unidos,” Estudos Históricos 27, no. 1 (2001): 1–21.
68. Hebe Clementi, La abolición de la esclavitud en América Latina (Buenos Aires: La Pléyade, 1974); Herbert Klein and
Ben Vinson III, Historia mínima de la esclavitud en América Latina y el Caribe (México: El Colegio de México, [1986]
2011); Andrews, Afro-Latin America; Robert Cottrol, The Long Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American
Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013); and Schmidt-Nowara, Slavery.
69. See, for example, Hunefeldt, Paying the Price; Richard Price, ed., Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the
Americas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), Part One: “The Spanish Americas”;
Rachel Sarah O’Toole, “‘In a War against the Spanish’: Andean Protection and African Resistance on the Northern
Peruvian Coast,” The Americas 63, no. 1 (2006): 19–52; Celia L. Cussen, “La ardua tarea de ser libre: manumisión e
Page 22 of 23
(1810–1870)
integración social de los negros en Santiago de Chile colonial,” in Huellas de África en América: perspectivas para Chile,
ed. Celia L. Cussen (Santiago de Chile: Universitaria, 2009), 109–136; Carolina González Undurraga, Esclavos y esclavas
demandando justicia, 1740–1823 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 2014); Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold,
Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press,
2014); Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Movilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Paola Revilla Orías, “La libertad conquistada: Consideraciones sobre
manumisión, gratitud y coerción en Charcas colonial (siglos XVI-XVIII),” Revista Paginas 13, no. 33 (2021), 1-20.; Mallo
and Telesca, Negros; Frega, “Caminos”; Arrelucea and Cosamalón, La presencia; and Candioti, Una historia.
70. For emergent regional approaches, see Alejandro Gomez, “Socio-Racial Sensibilities towards Coloured Subaltern
Sectors in the Spanish Atlantic,” Culture & History Digital Journal 4, no. 2 (2015); Candioti, “Regulando el fin”; Emily
Berquins, “Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 1765–1817,” Slavery and Abolition 31, no. 2
(2010): 181–205; Celso Thomas Castilho, “La cabaña del Tío Tom (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), la esclavitud atlántica y la
racialización de la esfera pública en la ciudad de México de mediados del siglo XIX,” Historia mexicana LXIX, no. 2
(2019): 789–835; and Marcela Echeverry, “Slavery in Mainland Spanish America in the Age of the Second Slavery,” in
Atlantic Transformations: Empire, Politics, and Slavery During the Nineteenth Century, ed. Dale W. Tomich (New York:
SUNY University Press, 2020), 19–44. For abolitionism from below, see Lloyd Belton, “Emiliano F. B. Mundrucu: Inter-
American Revolutionary and Abolitionist (1791-1863),” Atlantic Studies 15, no. 1 (2018): 62–82; Lloyd Belton, “‘A Deep
Interest in Your Cause’: The Inter-American Sphere of Black Abolitionism and Civil Rights <https://doi.org/
10.1080/0144039X.2020.1860651>,” Slavery and Abolition 42, no. 3 (2021): 589–609; and Caitlin Fitz, “Latin America and
the Radicalization of U.S. Abolition,” Journal of American History 108, no. 4 (2022): 701–725. On inter-jurisdictional
conflicts, see Keila Grinberg, “Emancipación y guerra en el Río de la Plata, 1840-1865: hacia una historia social de las
relaciones internacionales,” Historia mexicana 69, no. 2 (2019): 693–742; Keila Grinberg, “Slavery and International
Relations in 19th-Century Brazil <https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.814>,” Oxford Research
Encyclopedia of Latin American History. 2020; Echeverri, “Esclavitud y tráfico”; María Camila Díaz Casas, “Desde el
norte hacia el sur: esclavizados fugitivos en la frontera texano-mexicana,” Alteridades 28, no. 56 (2018): 23–34; Alice
Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2020);
and Candioti, “Free Womb Law.” On freedmen status, see Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); Magdalena Candioti, “‘El tiempo de los libertos’: conflictos y litigación en torno a
la ley de vientre libre en el Río de la Plata (1813-1860),” História (São Paulo) 38 (2019), 1–28. ; Barragán, Freedom’s
Captives; María Eugenia Chaves and Juan José Espinal Palacio, “Los usos de las leyes de libertad de vientres de 1814 y
1821 entre los esclavos antioqueños. Ejemplos e indicios para una hipótesis de trabajo,” Memorias: revista digital de
historia y arqueologia desde el Caribe 16, no. 41 (2020): 81–103; and Imilcy Balboa Navarro, “Libertos, vagos y
bandoleros: La reglamentación del trabajo tras la abolición de la esclavitud (Cuba, 1886–1895).” Relaciones. Estudios
de historia y sociedad 32, no. 127 (2011): 87–11.
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Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in the Spanish South American Gradual Abolitionist Process

Interamerican Dialogues and Experimentations in the Spanish

Gradual Abolition Policies in Spanish South America

Revolution and Abolition

Country Slave trade ban Free womb Law Total abolition

Argentina 1812 1813 1853 (1860)

Bolivia 1840 1831 (1826) 1861

Chile 1811 1811 1823

Colombia 1821 1821 (1814) 1852

Ecuador 1821 1821 1851

Paraguay 1842 1842 1869

Perú 1821 1821 1854

Uruguay 1825 (1813–1838) 1825 1842 (1846)

Venezuela 1821 1821 1854 (1851)

Source: Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 57.

These Cádiz debates, whose circulation slaveholders’ representatives tried to restrict,

Gradual Abolition Policies in Spanish South American Countries

The Cycle of Gradual Abolition Laws: An Overview

Towards Final Abolitions

“Hercules in the Cradle”: Abolitionism and Republic

Discussion of the Literature

Links to Digital Materials

Biblioteca Digital de Tratados <http://tratados.cancilleria.gob.ar/>

Biblioteca Virtual del Bicentenario <http://www.biblioteca.uach.cl/biblioteca_virtual/libtexcom_bvbicentenario.htm>

Amanda Labarca Hubertson (1886-1975) <http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-channel.html>

Publicaciones y multimedia de la Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno <https://www.bn.gov.ar/colecciones-digitales/

Buscador Interno de Artistas y Autores Paraguayos del PortalGuarani.com <http://www.portalguarani.com/index.php>

The Free Womb Project <https://thefreewombproject.com/>

Gallego, José Andrés. La esclavitud en la América española. Madrid: Encuentro, 2005.

7. Diario de sesiones, 811.

9. Aurora de Chile, no. 12, April 30, 1812.

10. Gaceta de Buenos Aires, no. 11, December 10, 1811.

11. Gaceta de Buenos Aires.

19. Chaves, “El oxímoron.”

23. Quoted in Távara, Abolición de la esclavitud.

31. “Ley de 19 de diciembre de 1826,” Compendio de leyes de 1825–2007.

32. Compendio de leyes.

37. Mosquera, Memoria sobre la necesidad.

40. Pando, “Reclamación,” 65.

44. Távara, Abolición de la esclavitud, 6.

48. El Tizón Republicano, no 15, 23 June 1823.

52. Borucki, Abolicionismo y tráfico.

60. “Constitución de la Confederación Argentina,” 1853.

Beyond Slavery: Abolition and Post-abolition in Brazil

The Legacies of British Slave Ownership

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