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“A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect”: Slaves and Their Masters in the Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2007-038

1527-1900

Lyman L. Johnson,

History of Emotions Research

In Buenos Aires, on October 26, 1759, Don Alonso Isidro Rodriguez de la Peña replied in writing to the charge that he held the parda Francisca Marigorta in illegal bondage. After fleeing from his household, Francisca had found temporary refuge with a sympathetic neighbor, Don Bernardo Quiroga. The neighbor had then written to the defensor general de pobres, indios y esclavos (the defender of the poor, Indians, and slaves), Don Pedro Gonzalez Cortina, to lay out Francisca's claim that she was a free woman held illegally as a slave. According to this unofficial advocate, Francisca had been born to a free mother in the interior city of San Juan and was therefore free from birth.Francisca claimed that she had come to Buenos Aires from her native San Juan as a free servant in Rodriguez de la Peña's household. Once relocated in Buenos Aires, however, her employer began to "treat [her] as a slave, subjecting [her] to harsh punishments and confining [her] to the house." When she protested, Rodriguez de la Peña had put her in chains. Because Francisca was "poor and miserable," the defensor took up her case. He immediately requested that Rodriguez de la Peña produce proof of her condition or stop harassing her. In response, Rodriguez de la Peña admitted that he could not provide a bill of sale for Francisca because, he claimed, she had been part of a contested inheritance still unresolved by the courts. His claims therefore rested on his self-interested assertion that "Francisca has been in my power for years" and "has served me and my family as a slave" without protest. That is, she was a slave because she had acted like one. Almost one year to the day after her initial appeal to colonial authorities, the court recognized Francisca's freedom and ordered Rodriguez de la Peña to leave her in peace.1This article analyzes three types of late colonial court cases found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina: individuals held as slaves who disputed their legal status, slaves who demanded the right to purchase their freedom or the freedom of family members, and slaves who demanded the right to seek new masters because of abuses suffered at the hands of their present owners.2 This last process, papel de venta, gave a slave a set term, usually a month, to find a more congenial owner willing to pay the assessed price. Most commonly the defensor — an advocacy position usually filled by one of the cabildo's regidores, or occasionally an alcalde — represented the plaintiff.3 A small number of cases were brought directly to higher authorities: the audiencia, the captain general, or the viceroy (after 1776). All these files contain a full statement of the complaint, often amplified in response to the counterclaims of masters or others, as well as the record of all actions initiated by the defensor. Most cases also note the court's final resolution.4Cases such as Francisca's reveal three central characteristics of slavery in late colonial Buenos Aires. First, even though a majority of slave plaintiffs failed to win their cases, the courts did provide slaves with significant leverage in disputes with owners. The legal process could drag on for years, during which time the courts often permitted slaves to live and work away from an owner's direct supervision and control. Therefore, even when an owner prevailed in court, the victor had often been deprived of all or a part of a slave's labor or income while simultaneously being forced to bear significant court costs (often exceeding 25 percent of a bozal's market value or 40 percent of the annual income earned by a slave journeyman).5 In some cases owners or purported owners simply gave up the legal battle rather than accept these costs. Slave plaintiffs, on the other hand, generally did not incur legal costs, since their costs were routinely subsidized or paid in full by the defensor. Even when slaves were forced to remain in the hands of an oppressive master, the experience of close supervision by court officers and related court costs could force an owner to improve conditions. For many slaves, compelling even a small adjustment in the behavior of an abusive owner must have been viewed as a victory.Second, slaves often found allies outside the slave community in their contests with masters, as Francisca's case demonstrates. These allies might include local officials and other members of propertied and influential groups. In nearly every case examined here, slaves' claims were supported by the testimony of propertied Spaniards and creoles, many of whom condemned the behavior of particularly cruel masters like Rodriguez de la Peña. Francisca's case was brought to the attention of the defensor by a sympathetic neighbor who also resisted Rodriguez de la Peña's efforts to seize her. Moreover, the ultimate success of Francisca's case depended on the testimony of two Spanish witnesses in her native San Juan, who rejected the claims of Rodriguez de la Peña as cruel and untrue, specifically excoriating him for his misrepresentations. Finally, Pedro Gonzalez Cortina, the Buenos Aires defensor, demonstrated again and again a healthy skepticism about the self-serving testimony of Francisca's self-professed master, emphasizing in his statements to the court the grave injustice of imposing slavery on a free person.Third, the documents make clear the deeply personal nature of these conflicts over legal status and treatment. The testimonies illuminate the complex fabric of deference, dependence, affection, loyalty, guilt, animus, and disgust that held masters and slaves together or propelled them apart, sometimes violently. When pursued systematically, the language of the claims and counterclaims reveals the emotional, as well as legal, landscape within which masters and slaves sought to impose their wills.6 The slave plaintiffs generally knew their masters well. In some instances they had dressed them, bathed them, and prepared their meals. Some had had sex with their masters. Many worked with them shoulder to shoulder every day. When these slaves came to see their bondage as an intolerable injustice, they knew exactly who was at fault. They did not view injustice as the abstracted characteristics of a cruel institution; they instead viewed it as the result of specific actions by the masters with whom they lived in close proximity. As a result, these documents are filled with the white heat of emotion — allegations of betrayal, lies, and physical abuse march across our line of sight. Although slaves often received harsh punishments, many remained unbowed in the face of abuse. A minority found, in the frustration and bitterness generated by a master's violence and lies, the strength to pursue redress in court. The testimony offered to the court in these cases suggests that relations between slaves and masters in late colonial Buenos Aires had a sharp edge.The slaves' testimonies present few expressions of deference, and even those few were constrained, limited in reach, and formulaic in nature, suggesting they were offered narrowly to satisfy the expectations of lawyers and judges. It was more common for slaves, once under the thin protections of the courts, to express contempt, not deference, toward their masters, describing them, for example, as "belligerent," "cruel," "filled with pride," or "filled with hate" for the slave.7 Free blacks attempting to gain the manumission of a relative were even less constrained, although they worried that their actions or words might provoke an assault on a loved one. One aunt, frustrated by a master's effort to extract the maximum economic benefit from her niece's manumission, reported to the defensor that the child was "mistreated brutally because of the hatred this man has for me."8 Francisca, our initial case, demonstrated little fear of the man who claimed to be her master, despite his use of corporal punishment and chains to control her. She fled from his authority, found a safe refuge, and then filled her letters to authorities with angry denunciations of Rodriguez de la Peña's character and behavior. After reminding the court of the "many cruelties" she had suffered, she demanded that "perpetual silence" be imposed on "this Peña."Francisca's words, and the heat with which they were expressed, suggest that historians need to pay more attention to the emotional, and not just evidentiary, content of these cases. I am not suggesting that our ongoing effort to illuminate the nature and functioning of the institution of slavery be replaced by a serial examination of individual disputes between masters and slaves; I am suggesting, however, that we might better grasp the lived reality of this condition, at least in urban settings, if we recognize the personal and sometimes intimate nature of these conflicts. The evidence demonstrates that these were not abstracted arguments about the place of slavery in society; they were, instead, conflicts between and among human actors disputing claims of authority, power, obligation, duty, honor, and affection.9Slaves saw the courts as a venue in which to seek redress for the violence and mistreatment they had suffered. Many used their sworn testimonies to place an owner's most embarrassing behaviors and shameful actions before the public. Although testimonies were taken privately outside the court, slaves knew that these stories often circulated in the wider society. Slaves embittered by their bondage seldom focused their testimonies narrowly on the legal issue brought to court. Instead they freely discussed the sexual misconduct, debts, physical disabilities, and even incontinence of masters, pushing these embarrassing revelations into the public realm. The satisfaction that slaves could take from performing their anger and frustration to this broader public helps us better understand why slaves pursued these unequal legal contests.10This also helps explain why masters responded with such anger to what they took to be the aggressive language and rebelliousness of their servants. The words and tone of slave testimonies led both masters and judges to complain of "a lack of legitimate obedience and respect due a master." Many masters seemed genuinely shocked to find themselves in court defending actions they assumed were essential to maintaining discipline and order in their households. Faced with her slave's demand for a papel de venta, Doña Feliciana Duarte complained that Juana had left her house without permission to file the complaint and that the slave's testimony "defamed my reputation and honor."11 Yet, despite the fact that many of these cases were widely discussed, owners often appeared unprepared for the formal complaint and resulting legal process that enveloped them. Rodriguez de la Peña, for example, expressed his frustration that his "scrupulous and decent treatment" of Francisca had been rewarded by allegations that challenged his "honor" and damaged his reputation. He was not alone. Masters nearly always condemned the testimony of their servants as scurrilous and defamatory, but these complaints seldom gained traction with judicial officers.12Typically, disputes over legal status entered the judicial process through the intervention of defensores. The incumbents were usually laymen serving as regidores of the cabildo, selected to serve an annual term. They were almost never lawyers.13 Not only were defensores uncompensated; they were also required to bear most of the costs associated with these cases. To limit these expenses, in 1786 defensores were relieved of the burden of advocating for slaves in civil cases.14 Surviving cabildo records do not suggest that defensores were selected because of some demonstrated interest in or commitment to the plight of slaves, Indians, or the poor in general. The widespread assumption within the culture seems to have been that these were the predictable concerns of Catholic Christians. In practice, incumbents varied significantly in their willingness to pursue the complaints of slaves.15 Some expressed a strong belief that both God and Natural Law were inclined on the side of freedom and that slavery could be imposed only within strict limits.16 One defensor expressed this sentiment expansively when arguing for the right of a freeman to purchase his son's freedom, beginning his appeal with "Oh! Sweet liberty!"17 On occasion, a defensor even found the resources to gain a slave's freedom outside the judicial process.18 On the other hand, some defensores never took up a single case on behalf of a slave during their terms.19While only a small percentage of those held in bondage in late colonial Buenos Aires were involved in such cases, it is clear that both slaves and slave owners discussed and remembered the courts' decisions, the relative efficacy of slaves' strategies, and the authorities' responsiveness to specific complaints (or lack thereof). As in the case of Francisca, slaves often made their case for freedom or protested abusive treatment in very public ways. From the moment that Francisca was protected behind the door of a neighbor's home, her dispute with Rodriguez de la Peña was performed directly for various audiences: for her protector's household, which included three slaves; for the defensor; and for neighbors and even for strangers passing in the street. We must also suspect that her grievances were then circulated through the conversations of witnesses with their friends and acquaintances. The accumulated effect of these cases and the protests and complaints that surrounded them, therefore, broadly influenced the experience of slaves in Buenos Aires, far beyond the record of episodic and sometimes unreliable advocacy by defensores.20In late colonial Buenos Aires, disputes over legal condition almost always occurred in one of two circumstances. In the first (as in the case of Francisca), relocations broke patterns of established routine, separating slaves and free blacks from family, friends, and neighbors who "knew" where they fit in the social order. Once removed from well-established patterns of command and subordination or, alternatively, patterns of independence and autonomy, some slaves chose to challenge the authority of masters. Conversely, some free blacks found their freedom threatened when separated from those who could vouch for their legal status. In the second set of circumstances, the death of a slave owner often led to conflict when the dying owner's promise of freedom was contested by heirs or a disputed inheritance forced the transfer of a slave to a new master. These two contexts were pregnant with the potential for conflict and ambivalence, suggesting that the effective boundaries of slavery were maintained not only by laws and institutions but also by a dense web of human attachments and habitual experiences. In cases where established relations of obedience and subordination were loosened, even temporarily, legal status could be challenged. Here at the margins of slavery we can see revealed the institution's essential character, a character roiled continuously by the refusal of those held in bondage to consent to their condition.As slavery expanded rapidly in the Río de la Plata after 1780, large numbers of slaves were on the move. Thousands of Africans carried to Montevideo and Buenos Aires by the slave trade were sent to the interior, even to distant Alto Perú and Chile. Although thousands more remained in Buenos Aires as laborers, artisans, and servants, even among this more settled population many were moved back and forth from Buenos Aires to the countryside by seasonal labor demands. We also know that many free blacks moved from place to place seeking better prospects, leaving Montevideo for Buenos Aires or Buenos Aires for Córdoba, for example.21 The fact that former slaves often experienced their freedom most fully through physical mobility helped to promote these patterns of relocation. Putting distance between themselves and former masters helped create new beginnings, away from the experience of close control and supervision.Nevertheless, while the forced movement of slaves facilitated escape for some, the physical mobility of freed blacks entailed real dangers, as well as the promise of new opportunities. If their legal status was challenged in a new location, as was the case with Francisca, distance made it difficult to produce documents and witnesses to substantiate claims to free status. Maritime routes that crossed colonial boundaries could be particularly treacherous. In the complex geopolitical environment of the late eighteenth century, when Spain was engaged in a series of wars with European rivals, the capture of vessels by privateers and warships nearly always put in question the legal status of free black passengers and crew.22 Two cases involving privateers illustrate the risks.In 1799 a French privateer put into Montevideo with a Portuguese prize captured along the coast of Brazil. The captain sought to sell the ship and its cargo, including an African-born woman, Rosa María, who claimed to be free. When local officials sought to determine the legitimacy of her claims, the captain quickly sold the captured ship and its cargo, then put to sea with Rosa María on board. Spanish naval authorities intercepted the French ship in international waters and liberated the woman.23 In a 1802 case, the defensor in Buenos Aires intervened in a similar case. When the locally owned privateer Pilar anchored off Buenos Aires with a Portuguese prize vessel, the Pilar's owner, Don Gerónimo Merino, announced the sale of the captured cargo, including nine black men purported to be slaves. Before the sale could be arranged, the nine Portuguese-speaking blacks aboard found a way to contact the defensor. Three asserted that they were free passengers, while the other six claimed to be crew members, "all manumitted or born free" — a claim the owner of the privateer denied24 While he investigated these claims and counterclaims, the defensor removed all nine from Merino's control. The three passengers were freed almost immediately when the captain of the captured Portuguese ship and another passenger testified that the manumission papers of these individuals had been thrown overboard by Merino following the capture of the ship. The other six were forced to work in a local panadería while the case proceeded.25 In the end, they were also freed when the pay records of the Portuguese vessel confirmed that they had all served as wage-earning crewmen during the voyage.26Two things are clear from these cases. First, the legal status of free blacks, whether born free or manumitted, was conditional and vulnerable in ways that separated Africans and their American-born descendents from other plebeians. In a world where the future labor value of slaves could be quickly converted to cash through sale, the most unscrupulous, greedy, and ruthless members of society could capitalize on any ambiguity in the legal status of a free black to impose slave status.27 And second, free blacks resisted attempts at such subterfuge, with the help of their families, the defensores, and other colonial judicial authorities who sought to defend the legal boundary between slavery and freedom.28Since nearly every defensor in Buenos Aires during the late colonial period owned slaves and benefited from a social hierarchy that privileged European culture and light skin color, their willingness to confront members of their own class must have been rooted in a broadly established belief that imposing slavery on a free person was a grave injustice. The nine free Brazilians of color captured by the Pilar certainly found in the defensor a reliable ally willing to frustrate the privateer's attempt to extract maximum financial benefit from his prize.29 More significant still was the fact that nine Portuguese-speaking foreigners were so quickly appraised of local law and put in contact with the defensor, a process that indicated that the slave community of Buenos Aires had not only harvested experiences and lore from the courts but also stood ready to disseminate this information to captive strangers in ways that could prove determinative in the local courts.These records also demonstrate that even without the special circumstances that resulted from war and privateering, free blacks separated from their homes and families could find their freedom threatened. The pardo Manuel Francisco Arias traveled from his native Rio de Janiero to Buenos Aires in April 1778 to look for work. After disembarking, he agreed to carry to shore the bags and equipment of a Spanish artillery officer, Captain Vicente de Reyna Vásquez, who had arrived on the same ship. Arias had further agreed, for a small fee, to carry the captain's baggage to a residence some seven blocks from the riverfront. After being paid, the captain extended an apparently generous offer of a place to sleep for the night. The next morning, Reyna Vásquez informed Manuel that he was now his slave and threatened violence if he attempted to leave. Although now held captive in a strange city with no friends or relatives to aid him, Manuel managed to contact the city's defensor, Don Cecilio Sánchez de Velasco, and ask his intervention.30 We can only speculate on the process that brought notice of Manuel Francisco's plight to the defensor, but certain assumptions seem justified. First, the Buenos Aires slave community shared a practical knowledge of colonial institutions and legal practices.31 And second, as was true in the case of the Pilar captives and other similar cases, a recently arrived, foreign-born, Portuguese-speaking black laborer like Manuel Francisco could access this knowledge and find allies to carry his case to authorities in a matter of weeks.32As in the case of Francisca's purported master, Captain Reyna Vásquez was unable to produce evidence of ownership when challenged by the defensor, asserting instead that Manuel had "served him like a slave" while onboard. As was also true in Francisca's case, the self-serving cant of a well-placed Spaniard — in this case a military officer — was demolished by a defensor who relentlessly collected the evidence that established Manuel Francisco's freedom. The artillery captain's pretensions were undermined initially by the testimony of a pair of Spaniards who had traveled from Rio on the same ship with Manuel Francisco. Final vindication, however, awaited copies of documents sent from Rio de Janeiro, which showed that that Manuel Francisco's parents were free at the time of his birth. While the potential of defensores to protect the fragile freedom of men and women like Francisca and Manuel Francisco is demonstrated, the eight-month ordeal in which a free man was forced to live under the control of this false master also forces us to recognize that the courts were not only interested in protecting the boundary between slavery and freedom but were also zealous guardians of property rights.33The death of a master could also raise questions about legal status. It was not uncommon for slave owners in Buenos Aires and other Spanish colonies to free slaves in their wills. We should assume that it was even more common for slave owners to promise freedom as a device for controlling or manipulating their servants, as the following case suggests.34 Doña Bernardina Lemus had been pressed repeatedly for manumission by her slave Gregoria. In the end Doña Bernardina told Gregoria that as a reward for her loyalty she was "now half slave and half free." When Gregoria went to court to clarify the status of her two sons born soon after this pledge, she asked the judge, "How can my sons be absolutely slaves when I am half free and half slave?"35 While only a very small percentage of slaves were manumitted through wills, the practice was sufficiently common and well known by slaves that they often pressured their masters to promise manumission.36 Evidence suggests that these negotiations were initiated most predictably and pursued most intensely when the balance of power between master and slave was altered by changes in an owner's health, financial resources, or family circumstances.37 Desperately ill masters, dependent on the care given by their servants, often found the promise of manumission a useful tool.After a long and painful illness, Don Manuel Basavilbaso, a powerful colonial official, died in 1799. His slave Félix soon complained in a letter to the recently arrived Viceroy Gabriel de Avilés y del Fierro, marqués de Avilés, that although he had been freed during his master's long illness, he was still being forced to endure slavery by the heirs.38 According to Félix, "I have sacrificed my own health to care for Don Manuel Basavilbaso." Once the matter had been passed on to the defensor, Don Miguel Azcuénaga — a politically connected and wealthy merchant married to Basavilbaso's daughter and chief heir, Justa — he immediately rejected Félix's claim. Azcuénaga acknowledged that Basavilbaso had promised manumission on numerous occasions in front of witnesses, including family members and his confessor. However, Félix's desperately ill master had signed no papers, and therefore, Azcuénaga asserted, Félix was not free.39As the case proceeded, relations between Félix and Azcuénaga became deeply embittered and then violent. It is clear in the documents that Félix expressed his contempt for Azcuénaga in various settings, including during the reading of Basavilbaso's will. Living in Azcuénaga's household, subordinated to his will, and forced to demonstrate deference was more than Félix could bear. His situation was complicated by the fact that his wife and daughter had been inherited by Azcuénaga's wife.40 After months without legal resolution, Félix heatedly asked the defensor to provide his "carta de libertad" or place him "in deposit" in another household immediately "to prevent violence and extortion" by Azcuénaga.The local alcalde serving as judge of first instance attempted to find a middle ground. He found that Basavilbaso had clearly and unambiguously promised Félix his freedom but acknowledged that this intention had not been formalized legally. Félix, he stated, was undeniably the slave of Doña Justa Basavilbaso. But because the decedent's repeated promises had created the expectation of freedom, the alcalde ordered that Félix be permitted to purchase his freedom and that of his wife and daughter at an assessed fair-market price. Azcuénaga rejected this compromise, forcing the judge to agree that his order had not followed required procedures. In his successful effort to force the alcalde to back down, Azcuénaga explained that he refused to compromise because "Félix lacked the legitimate obedience and respect due a master." Pushed beyond endurance, Félix fled to a neighbor's house.Félix's flight, his persistence with authorities, and his use of confrontational language were provocations that Azcuénaga, a prickly, self-important man, could not accept without being shamed. As a result, Azcuénaga recruited a client, the militia captain Melchor López, who owed him money, along with an enlisted man from the same regiment, to drag Félix home from his temporary refuge. The two soldiers severely beat Félix with a wooden chair and left him chained to a post in the patio of Azcuénaga's house. Despite this terrible beating, Félix refused to end the litigation. Once the case reached the audiencia on appeal, Azcuénaga's wealth and political connections controlled the outcome. The audiencia judges, including two of Azcuénaga's close friends, dismissed the case and, after condemning what it saw as the intemperate language of Félix's testimony, repeated almost verbatim Azcuénaga's demand that "the slave Félix begin to give the obedience and respect due the authority and dominion of his owner."41It seems unlikely that Félix followed this trajectory of escalating confrontation in a coldly calculated effort to gain freedom. There is little likelihood that the defensor or other court officials signaled approval of his heated words or confrontational manner. Instead, it appears that Félix conducted his dispute in public places or in front of court authorities to satisfy his need for revenge. By forcing Azcuénaga's friends, clients, and family members to testify to the narrow greed and selfishness that had thwarted his deceased master's desires, Félix gave voice to his anger in ways that challenged the public character and asserted virtue of his powerful master. Given the beating administered earlier, we must presume that similar cruelties awaited Félix at the end of his legal appeals. Nevertheless, we must suspect that forcing Azcuénaga into this extended contest, with all of its attendant embarrassments, would have provided significant compensation for Félix. The fact that so many of his confrontations with Azcuénaga occurred in front of witnesses from outside the household or in public places seems to clearly indicate that one of Félix's primary objectives was to injure the reputation of this proud and cruel man.Don Antonio José de Escalada, defensor in 1780, was among the handful of incumbents who combatively sought justice for the enslaved. Illegitimate son of a wealthy merchant, Escalada eventually became one of the city's most successful merchants in his own right, holding various positions in both the cabildo and consulado.42 In April 1780, Escalada filed a brief on behalf of María Josefa, the 22-year-old slave of the recently deceased Doña Juana Estela. As was clear in the will of Doña Juana, María Josefa had been granted the right to purchase her own freedom and that of her infant son for the generously low sum of two hundred pesos. As explanation, Doña Juana Estela's will spoke of María Josefa's "loyalty and love" during her long final illness.Following Doña Juana Estela's death, Don José Atan