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Family Bonds and the Bondsman: The Slave Family in Colonial Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

David L. Chandler
David L. Chandler*
Affiliation:
Brigham Young University
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There has been much controversy over the nature of the institution of slavery, the relative humanity or lack of it in those slave holding nations which practiced it, and its benign or baleful effects upon the blacks on whom it was inflicted. Much has been said about the harshness of Anglo-American slavery and the relatively mild nature of Spanish American slavery, which respected a slave's basic humanity and rights of person, property, and family. Yet little has been done to quantify and document how those attitudes applied in practice. We have had little precise information about the slave family as it existed in the Spanish American colonies and the extent or use of slave property, or about the slaves' access to the legal system that might protect and defend his person, his property, or his family. New sources and methodology have begun to challenge long-held assumptions about both Anglo-American as well as Spanish American slavery. If any conclusion is warranted, it may be that slavery varied widely from place to place and was influenced perhaps as much by differing economic circumstances as by differences in cultural attitudes.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , 1981 , pp. 107 - 131
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Norman Meiklejohn, “The Implementation of Slave Legislation in Colonial New Granada,” in Robert Brent Toplin, ed., Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), pp. 180–82.

2. Data on which this paper is based come from slave inventories of some sixty haciendas and eighty mines—inventories originating from probate cases, property suits, and seizure of property for debts or taxes—and from the inventories and account books of some fifty-two former Jesuit estates among those administered by the Junta de Temporalidades after the Jesuits were expelled in 1767. The inventories were made by appraisers representing each of the interested parties plus a knowledgeable, disinterested person, often the alcalde, all of whom jointly listed the slaves, usually by name, sex, age, marital status, and the fair market value, upon which the appraisers mutually agreed. These lists, appraising over eleven thousand slaves, provide a sampling both in time and place. The lists date from 1661 to 1826, though 70% of them are from the eighteenth century. Except for the age-sex profiles, all calculation and analysis are based on lists dated after 1750.

We cannot be sure of the bias of the sample, but it seems to be reasonably representative with regard to size and geographic region. No data come from the provinces of Panamá, Río Hacha, Santa Marta, or Tunja, but these were not major slave areas. According to the census of 1776, these combined provinces accounted for only 25% of the total slaves (56,750) in the colony. In the major slave holding areas (of New Granada plus Popayán Province of Quito), the Pacific lowlands, Antioquia, and the Cauca and Magdalena valleys, inventories made between 1700 and 1800 list 5,791 slaves, a number equal on the average to 18% of the number enumerated in these areas in the 1776 census (31,371).

These records have some advantages over other demographic records in that they were often more carefully recorded and witnessed since they usually dealt with rather sizeable investments and mutually agreed upon prices. Yet many slaves must not have known their ages, and neither did their owners. Ages, especially for adult slaves, sometimes tended to be estimated, rounded, or clustered in five-year increments. Whatever the case regarding age, however, the inventories represented a kind of consensus that the individual slave was the age stated, or at least that the owner and others were willing to accept him as that age and back their judgment with a considerable financial stake. For young children in the age group 0–4 and 5–9 years, where statistics are often most unreliable in Latin America, records seemed to be fairly accurate. Some estates kept birth records and even genealogies of their slaves for four generations or more, and in the case of the old Jesuit estates administered by the Junta de Temporalidades, from which about 40% of the data come, rather extensive accounting procedures were followed. Moreover, for young children, the memory of parents and owners and the physical stature of the child also worked for accuracy. The same was somewhat true for the 10–14 year age group, where physical development, especially the onset of puberty, would provide at least rough age guidelines, even in the absence of other aids.

These inventories list 11,206 slaves, of which 2,172 are duplicated on inventories made from one to ten years later. Although a case might be made for including these duplicated slaves due to high turnover of slaves on estates because of death and sale, they were not included. In the case of these duplicated lists, only the inventory that provided the most complete data was used. That left a sample of 9,034 slaves for which the data are not of equal completeness. The sex is noted for all slaves; the sex and marital status for 8,071 (90%); the sex, marital status, and age for 7,227 (80% of the total sample and 54% of the 1750–1826 subpopulation); the sex, age, marital status, and type of work for 5,554 (60%) of the 1750–1826 subpopulation and a considerably larger percentage for the total sample. In most cases the inventories do not record births or deaths or movement of slaves, so that vital rates are not readily determinable. Persons interested in a more precise documentation are referred to the author's Ph.D. dissertation, “Health and Slavery: A Study of Health Conditions among Negro Slaves of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and Its Associated Slave Trade, 1600-1810” (Tulane University, 1972).

3. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Colombia (hereafter AHNC), Miscelanea 74, fol. 22 (1714); Negros y esclavos de Santander 5, fol. 934–37 (1809).

4. AHNC, Impuestos Varios—Cartas 23, fol. 801 (1770); Minas del Tolima 2, fol. 840–41 (1790); Negros y esclavos de Panamá 2, fol. 312–48 (1803).

5. Archivo Histórico Nacional del Ecuador (hereafter AHNE), Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Caja 198, “Joaquín Aguiar y Venegas en nombre del Cabildo, de la Ciudad de Barbacoas contra el Sr. Obispo, Dn. Luís López de Solis,” fol. 16 (1805).

6. AHNE, Minas del Cauca 4, fol. 371 (1801).

7. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Caja 143, “Visita de la Ciudad de Caloto obrada por el Gobernador de la Ciudad de Popayán, Dn. Pedro Vecaria,” fol. 43 (1786).

8. University of North Carolina, Southern History Collection, Popayán Papers, Box 9, “Instrucciones para el manejo de las Minas de Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, San José y Santiago” (1810). Courtesy of William F. Sharp.

9. AHNC, Minas del Cauca 5, fol. 347–48 (1804).

10. For some that have been done, see Richard Graham, “Slave Families on a Rural Estate in Brazil,” Journal of Social History 9 (Spring 1976):382-403; B.W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807–1834 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 80–98; Michael Craton, “Changing Patterns of Slave Families in the West Indies,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 10, no. 2 (Summer 1979):1–35 and “Jamaican Slavery,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 253. For other contemporary studies see, in the same work: Peter H. Wood, “More Like a Negro Country: Demographic Patterns in Colonial South Carolina, 1700–1740,” and Richard Sutch, “The Breeding of Slaves for Sale and the Westward Expansion of Slavery, 1850–1860.” Also useful is Jack E. Eblen, “New Estimates of the Vital Rates of the Black Population during the Nineteenth Century,” Demography 11 (May 1974).

11. See especially Jack E. Eblen, “On the Natural Increase of Slave Populations: The Example of Cuban Black Population. 1775–1900,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 211–47.

12. Craton, “Changing Patterns,” p. 7; Higman, Slave Population, p. 168; Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 298; Frederick P. Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 256.

13. William F. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Chocó, 1680–1810 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976), pp. 184–87.

14. Ibid., pp. 140–41.

15. The model life table selected is Model South, Mortality Level 7 (which seemed to be plausible for the demographic experience of this population) in Ansley J. Coale and Paul Demeny, Regional Model Life Tables and Stable Populations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 740.

16. Wood, “More Like,” pp. 161–62.

17. Craton, “Jamaican Slavery,” p. 269. The imbalances between the sexes reflected the demand for men for heavier work, such as clearing land, in the early years of settlement and also the influence of the slave trade in which the general policy was to try to import slaves in a ratio of five males to three females (a sex ratio of 166).

18. Slave import records for Colombia are spotty, but the cargo of seven ships of the Grillo Assiento Company arriving at Cartagena between the years 1663 and 1674 average 69 percent male, or a sex ratio of 222.5. A century later (1755-88), in Portobello, some forty vessels arriving during the period of this study delivered 67 percent males, or a sex ratio of 202.5.

19. Sharp, Slavery, pp. 142–43, 154.

20. Notaría Primera de Buenaventura, Libro de Protocolo, 1743–98. Unnumbered pages (very incomplete).

21. For a comparison of the several studies of slave manumissions, see Lyman Johnson, “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776–1810,” Hispanic American Historical Review 59 (May 1979):258-79, esp. p. 262. The rate of manumission in Buenos Aires during the same period was between 0.4 and 1.37% of the slave population annually.

22. Meikeljohn, “The Implementation,” pp. 182–83.

23. Ibid. In the 1780s, humanitarian motives and desires to promote the economic production and the wealth of the empire inspired abortive attempts to enact and enforce more systematic slave codes. They had little effect in Colombia, however.

24. Bowser, The African Slave; Colin A. Palmer, Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570–1650 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976); Leslie B. Rout, Jr., The African Experience in Spanish America, 1502 to the Present Day (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

25. Sharp, Slavery, pp. 141–42.

26. Gobernación de Popayán, Esclavos, AHNE, Legajo 4, exped. 1, “Autos seguidos por Ramón Chacón de Mendoza con Dn. Francisco Paula Villavisencio sobre su libertad,” fol. 3 (1809).

27. Pedro Fermín de Vargas, Pensamientos políticos y memoria sobre la población de Nuevo Reino de Granada (Bogotá, 1953), p. 53.

28. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Caja 125, “Autos de recurso del Dr. Dn. Juan de las Cruz Díaz del Castillo sobre que ponga la regla conveniente para precaver el perjuicio con que se libertan algunos esclavos de las minas” (1782).

29. Archivo Histórico Departmental de Antioquia (hereafter AHDA), Colonia 33 (Esclavos), doc. 1059 (1799); 29 (Esclavos), doc. 955 (1759); 35 (Esclavos), doc. 1188 (1809); 32 (Esclavos), doc. 1039 (1790).

30. AHNC, Negroes y esclavos de Cundinamarca 9, fol. 341–43 (1759), 566–67 (1758).

31. AHNC, Temporalidades 8, fol. 905–59 (1768); Aquiles Escalantes, El negro en Colombia (Bogotá, 1964), p. 127; Roberto Rojas Goméz, “La esclavitud en Colombia,” Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades 14 (May 1922), p. 102.

32. Notaria Primaria de Cali. Protocolos, 1716, 1772–73, 1775, 1779–82, 1785–86, 1789, 1795, 1798. Cali was in the heart of the Cauca Valley, one of the major centers of slavery in colonial Colombia. Of the two notaries with colonial records, the first notary had the most complete set of surviving documents. Many of the records of the second notary were destroyed, and relatively few, sparse, and incomplete records remained. We attempted to sample systematically the records of the first notary between 1750 and 1800 by choosing every fifth year when available or combining years where necessary to get a statistically significant sample of fifty or more transactions. The year 1716 was also included because it was virtually the only complete year of records remaining from the first half of the century. The sample included all notarial transactions dealing with slaves (bills of sale, gifts, self-purchases, purchase of enslaved relatives, and freedom letters) in the years indicated.

33. Notaría Primaria de Buenaventura. Protocolo 1743–98.

34. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Esclavos, Legajo 4, exped. 2, “Antonia Delgado, Esclava de Dn. Manual Marmol, pide protección en virtud de la real cédula que manda que los señores procuradores sean los defensores de los esclavos” (1806).

35. AHDA, Colonia 34 (Esclavos), doc. 1122 (1803).

36. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Caja 125, “Autos de recurso del Dr. Dn. Juan de la Cruz Diaz del Castillo …, ” fol. 1–9 (1782).

37. A good example is found in AHDA, 34 (Esclavos), doc. 1134 (1804).

38. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Esclavos, Legajo 4, exped. 2, “Antonia Delgado, …,” fol. 1 (1806); Legajo 3, exped. 29, “Autos formados por Bonafacia Godoy, negra esclava de Dn. Felipe Ramón de Algeria, contra Dn. José Mariano Godoy sobre que devuelva el exceso de la cantidad en que la vendió” (1785); exped. 45, “Autos de Dorotea Rubio, negra de los bienes del Dr. Dn. Manual Rubio, con Dn. Pedro Buendia sobre la nulidad de la venta hecha por Dr. Josepha Rubio” (1779); exped. 28, “Autos de Juan Fernandes y Bernanda Oñate, mulatos, con Dr. Juan Ruis sobre el valor de sus personas” (1782).

39. For one or many examples, see AHDA, Colonia 34 (Esclavos), doc. 1124.

40. Bowser, African Slave, pp. 255–71.

41. Bogotá, Notaria Primera, 1600–01, 1619–20, 1640–41, 1660, 1680, 1700, 1720–21, 1727, 1740–41, 1760, 1780, 1794, 1800, 1810, 1820. Quito, Notaria Primera, 1600–01, 1640, 1680, 1720, 1740, 1760, 1780, 1800. We took all slave transactions for every tenth year (as far as possible).

42. For other studies of freedmen, see Johnson, “Manumissions,” and Frederick P. Bowser, “The Free Person of Color in Mexico City and Lima: Manumission and Opportunity, 1580–1650,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 331–63.

43. AHNE, Real Audiencia, Gobernación de Popayán, Esclavos, Legajo 5, exped. 1, “Josefa Velasco sobre que Dn. Juan Paz vende a su hijo” (n.d.).

44. Ibid., Legajo 4, exped. 3, “Nolberta Quiroga sobre que Dn. Thomas Villanos venda a su hija nombrada Martina” (1801).

45. AHDA, Colonia 30 (Esclavos), doc. 970 (1769).

46. AHNC, Negros y Esclavos de Bolívar 6, fol. 1053–80 (1808).

47. For an actual license see AHDA, Colonia 33 (Esclavos), doc. 1076 (1799). See also 34 (Esclavos), doc. 1138 (1804).

48. AHDA, Colonia 33 (Esclavos), doc. 1107 (1802).

49. AHDA, Colonia 34 (Esclavos), doc. 1139 (1806).

50. Sharp, Slavery, pp. 140–41.

51. Meiklejohn, “Implementation,” p. 194.