Chapter 6 further documents and analyzes slaves’ criticism of early republican principles and antislavery policies. Antioquia slave leaders emerged as vanguard abolitionists in 1812, folding critical antislavery conventions from the judicial forum into emerging anti-Spanish, egalitarian, and republican doctrines. They proposed that the liberation of slaves should be an immediate purpose of the new republic, and suggested that slaves fully belonged in their homeland of Antioquia – a critique of limited republican citizenship. But republican leaders paid no attention to this exegesis of liberty, claiming that the slaves’ immediate liberation would bring about chaos. This tension would be inherited by the Republic of Colombia’s manumission law of 1821, which closed the possibility of immediate abolition. Still, powerful Popayán masters, denounced by the former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen as “aristocrats,” continued to defend inequality and bondage. They undermined even limited antislavery legislation on the groundless notion that setting slaves free from their masters would unleash a war of black against white and paralyze gold mining.

This chapter explores the judicial forum as a political space relatively free from censorship in which some lawyers and litigants scrutinized aspects of the social order under Spanish rule. Some expressed their dislike of slavery and their aspirations for change. The chapter looks at litigation and intellectual culture in Popayán, where the lawyer Félix José de Restrepo asserted that slaves were people with dignity who deserved judicial compassion. The government, he argued, should facilitate slave emancipation, a trademark of prudent legislation. The former slave Pedro Antonio Ibargüen even argued that all vassals of the king, rich and poor alike, deserved equal protection from the magistrates. With a political crisis shattering the viceroyalty in 1810, political revolution had new implications for these positions. Some patricians who sympathized with independence now criticized the viceroyalty’s “pact” with Spain as "slavery." Pushing the boundaries of this metaphor, some slaves in Popayán saw their own freedom as a necessary extension of the freedom from Spain demanded by their masters. A few patricians now began to discuss a formal plan to reform slavery through legislation.

The slaves of Antioquia, studied in this chapter, experienced a constant tension between captivity and geographic mobility. Many easily and frequently talked to other slaves and to free people, sharing their hopes that an end of slavery was possible. Slave leaders tried collectively to press for the end of their enslavement. After Antioquia’s transformation into a republic devoted to individual freedom in 1812, slave leaders emerged as the first critics of the founding documents and legal principles of this new polity. Felix José de Restrepo and other members of Antioquia’s independent government partially listened to those criticisms. They amalgamated experiences and perspectives that were first developed in Cartagena and Popayán, inviting revolutionary colleagues to consider that legislators and forward-looking governments had an obligation to favor freedom over slavery. Antioquia passed Colombia’s first antislavery law in 1814. Based on the free womb principle, the law was correctly understood by slaves as a legal act with limitations and ambivalences. But the Spanish Restoration of 1816 halted this law and all other antislavery and anti-Spanish initiatives.