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An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America

2011; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 32; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2011.604922

1743-9523

Bianca Premo,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Abstract There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary ‘right’. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, who admitted slave cases. High court minister Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla considered two legal issues that made slavery distinctive in the region: the right to self-purchase and grants of conditional liberty. In a 1746 letter, the judge rendered a relatively liberal opinion on slaves' legal rights by reading Creoles' own political ‘liberty’ into freedom suits. But as Lima's slaves increasingly entered the secular court system, his judicial philosophy would contract. Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Rebecca Scott and Herman Bennett for their critical engagement with the ideas presented here, and Renzo Honores and Trey Proctor for being so generous with their expertise. Research was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellowship at the Newberry Library and the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Grant (SES-0921681). Notes ‘Autos seguidos por Tomasa Rayo, negra libre, con Doña Inés de la Barrera sobre que se le otorgue Carta de Libertad’, Archivo de la Nación del Perú, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, Legajo 108, Cuaderno 914, 1748. M.C. Mirow, Latin America Law: A History of Private Law and Institutions in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 27; Richard Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Early Modern Castile (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 27; Charles Cutter, The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700–1810 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 36, 130. In 1768, the Spanish king reaffirmed this legal tradition and expressly forbade judges from explaining sentences. Abelardo Levaggi, ‘La fundamentación de las sentencias en el derecho indiano’, Revista de Historia del Derecho 6 (1978): 45–73. José Pedro Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, Colección legal de cartas, dictámenes, y otros papeles de derecho (Lima: Los Húerfanos, 1761). Scholars have portrayed the judge as everything from a Francophile peacock to a proto-nationalist, from a typical colonial casuist to an example of new criticism. See Margarita Eva Rodríguez García, Criollismo y patria en la Lima ilustrada (1732–1795) (Buenos Aires: Miño y Dávila, 2006), 101–121; Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector's Exposé (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 297, passim; Guillermo Lohmann Villena, ‘Criticismo e ilustración como factores formativos de la conciencia del Perú en el siglo XVIII’, in Problemas de la formación del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica, ed. Inge Buisson, Klaus Müller, and María Jesús Rodero (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984), 24; Pablo Macera D'Orso, Tres etapas en el desarrollo de la conciencia nacional (Lima: Ediciones ‘Fanal’, 1955), esp. 23–32. This 1746 opinion is the only one he was able to rescue from his home after Lima suffered a devastating earthquake in 1748 that destroyed most of his papers. José Pedro Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, ‘Al que leyera’, in Colección legal, 2; José Antonio de Lavallé y Arias de Saavedra, ‘Don Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla (apuntes sobre su vida y sus obras)’, in Estudios históricos (Lima: Gil, 1935), 185–186. My phrasing invokes cartas de libertad, the Spanish equivalent of ‘free papers’. The term coartación comes from the reflexive verb coartarse or cortarse (to cut oneself [free]) and was in use in the seventeenth century. Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Su único derecho: los esclavos y la ley’, Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004): 56. While I use this term loosely, Bravo de Lagunas's approach shared common elements with the resurgent philosophical eclecticism employed in the natural law theory of the German Enlightenment School of Thomasius and ‘court philosophy’ of its monarchies. See Knud Haakonssen, ‘Christian Thomasius (1655–1728)’, in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, Nihilism to Quantum Mechanics, ed. Edward Craig (New York: Routledge, 1998), 376–379; Damiano Canale, Enrico Pattaro, Paolo Grossi, Hasso Hoffman, and Patrick Riley, eds., introduction to A Treatise of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, vol. 9, A History of the Philosophy of Law in the Civil Law World, 1600–1900 (New York: Springer, 2009), 9. Scholars of Cuban slavery have formed the vanguard of this trend. See, for example, Rebecca J. Scott and Michael Zeuske, ‘Le “droit d'avoir des droits”: les revendications des ex-esclaves à Cuba (1872–1909)’, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2004): 521–545. For a fascinating study of what might be called ‘Atlantic jurisprudence’ on slave rights, see Rebecca J. Scott, ‘“She … Refuses to Deliver up Herself as the Slave of Your Petitioner”: Émigrés, Enslavement and the 1808 Louisiana Digest of Civil Laws’, Tulane European and Civil Law Forum 24 (2009): 115–136. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (1947; New York: Beacon Press, 1992). For a fine summary of the debate, see Michelle A. McKinley, ‘Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Legal Activism, and Ecclesiastical Courts in Colonial Lima, 1593–1689′, Law and History Review 28, no. 3 (2010): 749–790. On the continued resonance of Tannenbaum's thesis, see ‘Forum: What Can Frank Tannenbaum Still Teach Us about the Law of Slavery?’, Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004), particularly Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited’, 339–369, and María Elena Díaz, ‘Beyond Tannenbaum’, 371–376. My reference to ‘agency’ takes into consideration the incisive critiques of scholars like Walter Johnson, who points out that the concept itself is ‘saturated in liberalism’ and ‘smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of selfhood’. Walter Johnson, ‘On Agency’, Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 115. Yet, rather than focus on how scholars make ‘modern’ liberal categories today, this article examines how slaves, together with legal agents, created these categories in their own times. See José Ramón Jouve-Martín, Esclavos de la ciudad letrada: esclavitud, escritura y colonialismo en Lima (1650–1700) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005); Michael Zeuske and Orlando García Martínez, ‘Notarios y esclavos en Cuba (siglo XIX)’, Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004): 127–170. The same is true even within the study of the history of Latin American law. See Javier Barrientos de Grandón, who calls for the need to study the sources cited in the opinions of fiscales: ‘Derecho común y derecho indiano en el Reino de Chile’, in Memoria del Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Historia del Derecho Indiano, vol. 1 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995), 158–159. De la Fuente, ‘Su único derecho’, 15. Theoretically, more recent Castilian law such as the Leyes de Toro (1505) was privileged in the order of Spanish law, but the medieval Siete Partidas was the most widely used in civil cases throughout the empire. Mirow, Latin American Law, 49–50. Alan Watson, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 46; Javier Barrientos Grandón, La cultura jurídica en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993), 72–74. See, especially, Herman L. Bennett, Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), chap. 6. Technically, freedom suits were to be heard by the Audiencia, but slaves nonetheless used the Inquisition courts creatively. See Frank Trey Proctor, ‘Afro-Mexican Slave Labor in the Obrajes de Paños of New Spain, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Americas 60, no. 1 (2003): 33–58; Brian Owensby, ‘How Juan and Leonor Won Their Freedom’, Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 1 (2005): 39–79. On customary law in the development of modern law in Latin American countries, see Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, El poder de la costumbre: estudios sobre el derecho consuetudinario en América hispana hasta la Emancipación (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 2001). Also see Ricardo Levene, ‘El derecho consuetudinario y la doctrina de los juristas en el desarrollo del derecho indiano’, Hispanic American Historical Review 3, no. 2 (1920): 144–151. See Mirow, Latin American Law, 51. On costumbre criollo (‘Creole customary law’), see Antonio Dougnac Rodríguez, Manual de historia del derecho indiano (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 259. Tau Anzoátegui, El poder, 11. See, for example, Herbert Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 194. María Elena Díaz here stands as an exception: she argues that the practice of coartación originated in Cuba, and traces it to a 1673 Crown law issued for the island. See María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre: Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 175, 361n2. Still, it also is notable that this royal law was not used as proof of the legality of coartación in the courts of Lima. For this historiography in Peru, see 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), 184; Fernando de Trazegnies, Ciracio de Urtecho: litigante por amor (Lima: Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1981); Peter Blanchard, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992), 41–42; Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 118, 7. Also see Seth Miesel, ‘The Fruit of Freedom: Slaves and Citizens in Early Republican Argentina’, in Slaves, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America, ed. Jane Landers and Barry M. Robinson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), 273–306. Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 34; Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 11; Sherwin K. Bryant, ‘Enslaved Rebels, Fugitives, and Litigants: The Resistance Continuum in Colonial Quito’, Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 2 (2004): 9–10. Also see McKinley, ‘Fractional Freedoms’. Bryant, ‘Enslaved Rebels’, 9. By my count, in the Real Audiencia Causas Civiles series of the Archivo de la Nación del Perú, slave cases against owners number five out of 291 for the years 1735–1749, 18 out of 727 during the period 1750–1775, and 54 out of 508 for the period 1791–1804. On slaves as ‘miserables’, see Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), esp. chaps. 1 and 7. Also see Lyman Johnson, ‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect: Slaves and Their Masters in the Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires’, Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 631–657. A few cases based on testamentary liberty were aired in secular courts prior to the 1770s, but they, along with sevicia cases, were primarily a late eighteenth-century phenomenon. See Frank T. Proctor III, ‘Damned Notions of Liberty’: Slavery, Culture, and Power in Colonial Mexico, 1640 – 1769 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2011), chap. 6. It should be remembered that the overall number of slaves able to gain freedom through legal challenges over issues such as sevicia or contractual obligations related to coartación would remain quite small, even if their significance was great in shaping the legal culture of slavery in Spanish America. See Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860 – 1899 (1985; Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 14, 74–77. On the Enlightenment in slave cases, see Bernard Lavallé, Amor y opresión en los Andes coloniales (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1999), chap. 7; Camila Townsend, ‘“Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved”: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era’, Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 105–128; Johnson, ‘Lack of Legitimate Obedience’; Renée Soludré-La France, ‘“Los esclavos de su magestad!”: Slave Protest and Politics in Late Colonial New Granada’, in Landers and Robinson, Slaves, Subjects and Subversives, 175–208; Pierre Tardieu, El negro en la Real Audiencia de Quito (Ecuador): ss. XVI–XVIII (Quito: IFEA, 2006), 318–320. See Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Los códigos negros de la América Española (Alcalá: Universidad de Alcalá, 1996). On other Bourbon reform legislation affecting the lives of peoples of African descent, see Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 198, 202. The code is reprinted in Richard Konetzke, ed., Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493–1810, vol. 3 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1962), 643–652. For slaves and expressions of loyalty to Spanish royalty, see Bennett, Colonial Blackness, 31n21; Díaz, Virgin, 14, passim. On the innovations in the 1789 ‘Real Instrucción’, see Premo, Children, 216. For repeal, see Lucena Salmoral, Los códigos negros, 21, 112–123. Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘La esclavitud, la ley y la reclamación de derechos en Cuba’, Debate y Perspectivas 4 (2004): 42; Alejandro de la Fuente, ‘Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel’, Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 663. De la Fuente, ‘Slaves and the Creation’, 661. José Pedro Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, in Colección legal, 194–195. Lavallé, ‘Don Pedro’, 147–194. On the growing penchant for electing state functionaries to prestigious chairs such as the ‘Cátedra de Primas Leyes’, see Ruben Ugarte del Pino, Historia de la Facultad de Derecho (Lima: Universidad de Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1968), 20–21. There is a discrepancy in the sources concerning the date when Bravo de Lagunas was appointed as a supernumerary judge to the Audiencia. Guillermo Lohmann Villena has him appointed in 1746 and taking possession of the office in 1747 in Los ministros de la Audiencia de Lima (1700, 1821) (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1974), 18. Lavallé claims he was named in 1742 but took the office in 1745, in ‘Don Pedro’, 154–155. Alfredo Moreno Cebrián, ed., Conde de Superunda, Relación de gobierno, Peru (1745–1761) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1983), 231, 248, 256, 259. Lavallé, ‘Don Pedro’, 184. During this period, he also might have ghostwritten the Viceroy Conde de Superunda's ‘Relación de gobierno’, according to Alfredo Moreno Cebrián in the introduction to Conde de Superunda, 135. Rodríguez García, Criollismo, 120. Lavallé, ‘Don Pedro’, 194. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 199. Ibid., 197. Manuel de Gorena, in Bravo de Lagunas, Colección legal, 2. See Rogelio Pérez Perdomo, Latin American Lawyers: A Historical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 12; Alejandro Guzmán Brito, ‘Mos italicus y mos gallicus’, Revista de Derecho de la Universidad Católica de Valparaíso 2 (1978): 11–40; Maximiliano Hernández-Marcos, ‘Conceptual Aspects of Legal Enlightenment in Europe’, in Canale et al., Treatise of Legal Philosophy, 87–88. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 196, 197. For a study of the rise of modern notions of legal ‘systems’ in Spanish America, see Víctor Tau Anzoátegui, Casuismo y sistema (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Investigaciones de Historia del Derecho, 1992), 184–201. Mirow, Latin American Law, 53; Barrientos Grandón, La cultura jurídica, 111. Cf. Pérez Perdomo, Latin American Lawyers, 12–13. On custom and casuistry in the colonies, see Francisco Tomás y Valiente, Manual de historia del derecho español (1979; Madrid: Tencos, 1986), 328–329. Rodríguez García, Criollismo, 112. Macera also underscores Bravo de Lagunas's affinity for the works of Pufendorf and especially Hugo Grotius, whom he openly cited despite an Inquisition ban. Macera, Tres etapas, 25. ‘All creatures of the world love and desire liberty’, Siete Partidas 4:22:1; Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 204. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 203. Ibid., 226–227. Ibid., 222. His somewhat strained logic for this was that if the laws always favoured liberty, there would be no need for the slave to appeal to the judge to influence an owner in the first place (ibid.). On casuistry and equity, see Tau Anzoátegui, Casuismo y sistema, 530. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 226. Recopilación de las leyes de Indias 7:5:6. The original edict was issued in 1563. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 228. Siete Partidas 4:22:11. Corradini was referring to a practice that took place during the Spanish Habsburg rule of Naples, which ended in 1714 when the Bourbon dynasty assumed the throne in Madrid. On the meaning of ‘town liberty’ and local municipalities' appeals to the Habsburg kings for autonomy, see Helen Nader, Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516 – 1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Also see Francisco José Aranda Pérez, who notes the tension in the binary of ‘monarchy’ and ‘municipal republic’ in ‘“Repúblicas ciudadanas”: un entramado político oligárquico para las ciudades castellanas en los siglos XVI y XVII’, Estudis 32 (2006): 7–48. As we shall see, for Bravo de Lagunas, that tension would be resolved in 1758 in favour of the king. Barrientos Grandón, La cultura jurídica, 73. Paola Volpini, ‘“Por la autoridad de los ministros”: obsevaciones sobre los letrados en una alegación de Juan Bautista Larrea’, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 30 (2005): 63–84. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 234. Ibid., 236. See the arguments of a slave who claims his first owner's will and testament, which left him free, had been destroyed in the earthquake, in ‘Autos seguidos por Lorenzo de Aguilar contra D. Manuel de Orejuela, sobre su libertad’, 22 f. Archivo de la Nación del Perú, Cabildo, Causas Civiles, Legajo 17, Cuaderno 80, 1755. Domingo Jose´ de Orrantia in Bravo de Lagunas, Coleccio´n legal, 2. In 1769, Peru's enlightened viceroy banned mention of probabilism in courses on theology at the University of San Marcos and closed the Jesuit colleges, replacing them with an institution named for the Bourbon king. Felipe Barreda y Laos, ‘La universidad en el siglo XVII’, in La universidad en el Perú: historia, presente y futuro, vol. 2, La época colonial, ed. Jaime Ríos Burga (Surco: Asamblea Nacional de Rectores), 718–719. See Elisa Luque Alcaide, ‘Reformist Currents in the Spanish-American Councils of the Eighteenth Century’, Catholic Historical Review 91, no. 4 (2005): 743–760; Victor Ruíz de Peralta, ‘Las razones de la fe: iglesia y la ilustración en el Perú, 1750–1800’, in El Perú en el siglo XVIII: la era Borbónica, ed. Scarlett O'Phelan Godoy (Lima: Instituto Riva Aguero, 1999), 177–204; Pablo Macera D'Orso, ‘El probablismo en el Perú durante el siglo XVIII’, in Ríos, La universidad, 805–842. The case does not appear to have survived to be housed today in the Archivo de la Nación del Perú, but Bravo de Lagunas quotes verbatim from the lawyer's closing argument (auto de vista). José Pedro Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, ‘Carta en que se trata: si lo que nace de la statulibera, sea libre, o esclavo; y si pueda ser statulibera la manumitada desde cierto tiempo’, in Colección legal, 107–112. Ibid., 115. Domingo José de Orrantia, in Bravo de Lagunas, Colección legal, 2. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta … si por el favor de la libertad’, 202. Bravo de Lagunas, ‘Carta en que se trata … statulibera’, 143. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBianca PremoBianca Premo is Associate Professor of Latin American History, Florida International University, University Park, Miami, Florida 33199, USA.