Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (32 page)

In some notable cases, slaves responded directly in kind to
violence used against them, despite the grave risks of such action. In 1789,
some of the 300 or so enslaved workers on the Engenho Santana in Ilhéus, south
of Bahia, revolted and murdered their overseer. Fleeing the plantation for the
forest, they resisted a number of attempts to recapture them over the next
several years before entering into negotiations with their owner, Manoel da
Silva Ferreira, over the conditions under which they would agree to return to
work. They sought limits on certain tasks as well as guaranteed access to
independent garden plots, the produce of which they would fully control. They
also made noneconomic demands such as time to “play, relax, and sing without
needing permission,” insisting on their right to enjoy the full range of human
experience.  It was perhaps their desire to choose their own overseer that most
vexed their owner, however. After pretending to accept their proposals, he
shipped them off to a buyer in the Amazon region as soon as they returned to
the plantation. In the end, the cards were stacked firmly against these rebels,
but both the revolt and subsequent negotiations reveal that they were
determined to shape their own fate to the extent possible in the unfavorable
circumstances in which they lived.

They were not alone. Escape was a common response to
plantation life in Brazil almost from the moment the Portuguese began growing
sugar there. A Jesuit cleric’s description of the enslaved population of Bahia
in 1619 contained the following observation: “this people has the custom of
fleeing to the woods and joining in hideouts where they live by attacks on the
settlers, stealing livestock and ruining crops and canefields . . . [and] in
these attacks they seek to carry off their male and female relatives to live
with them like gentiles.”  The most common English term for an escaped slave
living in such a community is
maroon,
from
cimarrón,
a word first
applied by Spaniards to wild cattle in the Caribbean and later to their escaped
slaves. Meanwhile, the term usually applied to a settlement of escaped slaves
in Brazil was
mocambo,
or “hideout” in the Angolan language Kimbundu,
spoken by many of the Africans brought to Brazil during the 17th century.
Mocambos were generally established in relatively inaccessible and easily
defended forest areas, although usually not too far from plantations or towns,
given the difficulties of survival in the remote interior for all but the
native population. Roughly three dozen mocambos are known to have existed at
one time or another in Bahia alone between 1614 and 1826, including at least
one with several hundred inhabitants. But few survived more than a year or two.
They were weakened by their dependence for supplies and new residents,
especially women, on the very plantation world they wished to escape, often
returning again and again to raid nearby farms and villages. Give this
circumstance, colonial authorities were generally quick to organize an assault
force under the command of a
capitão do mato
who could eliminate the
threat such a community posed.

Palmares

One settlement of escaped slaves, located northeast of
Bahia in the remote interior of Alagoas, stands out from all the rest in terms
of size, longevity, and symbolic importance. Palmares, known by the Kimbundu
term for “war camp” as a quilombo, was composed of a series of interconnected,
fortified villages. It contained at least 10,000 inhabitants at its height.
Founded early in the 17th century, it survived for nearly a hundred years,
fending off repeated assaults by both Dutch and Portuguese forces. It
eventually fell in 1694 to Paulista bandeirantes, those masters of native-style
warfare, after a two-year siege. The final battle left roughly a thousand of
the remaining defenders either dead or captured. In a last act of defiance,
some 200 were reported to have committed suicide rather than give themselves up
to the representatives of the colonial state.

While it lasted, the economy of Palmares was based on a
combination of agriculture, trading, and raiding, similar to that of the
typical mocambo if on a far grander scale. Society was hierarchical, governed
by a succession of rulers known as kings who ruled with the assistance of a
council of subordinate village headmen. Much of the labor, meanwhile, was done
by slaves captured from Portuguese-controlled territory. Palmares thus
resembled Portuguese colonial society in many respects, while drawing at the
same time on West Central African precedents owing to the preponderance of
residents with roots in Angola or the kingdom of Kongo. Life appears to have
been strictly regimented, hardly surprising in view of the persistent military
threat faced by the inhabitants. Even in defeat, Palmares continued to stand as
the most important symbol of African resistance to the Portuguese slave system
in Brazil. For at least 50 years after its final destruction, fugitive slaves
continued to flee to the site in search of refuge.

Spanish American Maroons

Colonial Spanish America also witnessed the establishment
of numerous communities of escaped slaves. These outlaw settlements were often
known in Spanish American territory as
cumbes
or
palenques.
Circumstances
were especially favorable for the emergence of such settlements during the
early colonial era, when forced African migration to the Spanish American
mainland was relatively high and Spanish control over the more remote areas to
which Spain laid claim was weak or nonexistent. In the Veracruz region near the
Gulf Coast of New Spain, fugitive slaves under the leadership of a West
African–born ruler, Yanga, maintained their independence for several decades in
the late 16th and early 17th centuries before successfully negotiating the
transformation of their outlaw settlement into a formally recognized town, San
Lorenzo de los Negros, around 1618. Similar communities also rose and fell in
marginal areas of Central America, New Granada (Colombia), Ecuador, Venezuela,
and the Spanish Caribbean.

Like Yanga’s followers, the inhabitants of these
communities sometimes achieved freedom and legal status by compelling colonial
authorities to make treaties with them. Most of the small number of free black
communities formally established in Spanish America during the colonial era had
their origins in such treaties. But many Spanish American maroon bands were
ultimately unable to resist defeat and destruction. Among the latter were some
20 residents of a small settlement of escaped slaves that survived for about
eight years in the Pacific lowlands of Guatemala before falling to militiamen
in 1611. These outlaws built a well-ordered community of nine huts and a small
storehouse in which to collect the corn, cotton, chiles, plantains, squashes,
and sugarcane that they planted and harvested in nearby plots. However, as in
many similar cases, their need to trade with outsiders for certain essentials
like steel implements made them vulnerable to betrayal, while their success in
stealing enslaved women in the interests of achieving gender balance and
sustaining the community’s African character ensured that slave owners would
seek their capture. Their value as property kept them all alive after their
return to “civilization,” although the individual identified as their captain
and another rebel were killed in the militia ambush that led to their defeat.
But when one of the band’s former members escaped again a year later, he was
tracked down and swiftly executed. According to his wife’s testimony, he told
her they “didn’t have to serve anyone,” a dangerous sentiment indeed in a
hierarchical colonial world. 

Slave Rebellion in Mexico

Outright slave rebellion, in which slaves rose up in arms
against their owners rather than simply escaping them, was relatively rare.
This rarity is largely explained by the savage repression that greeted
rebellion; captured leaders invariably earned a painful death. Conspiracies to
rebel, suffocated prior to explosion, were apparently more frequent, although
the evidence for them must be considered in light of masters’ perpetual fears
that their slaves were plotting against them. In the 17th century, these
conspiracies shared common themes such as the election of a king and queen who
were often selected from among the African-born individuals in the slave
population, the massacre of Iberian men, and the enslavement of Iberian women.
One such conspiracy was uncovered in Mexico City in 1612, when local
authorities claimed to have preempted a Holy Week uprising planned by a black
cofradía
whose members had chosen an Angolan couple as their king and queen. The
response was decisive: 35 presumed rebels, 28 men and 7 women, were quickly
hanged.

The Haitian Revolution and Its Impact

By far, the most important slave rebellion to occur during
the colonial era, and one that terrified slave owners throughout the Americas,
was the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). During this epochal event, tens of
thousands of slaves rose up against their masters in the world’s wealthiest
colony, French Saint Domingue, the sugar-producing western third of the island
of Hispaniola. Throwing off the shackles of bondage, these rebellious ex-slaves
eventually dissuaded French, English, and Spanish troops from their attempts to
re-impose control by a European power. This massive and prolonged uprising led
to the establishment of Haiti, the second independent republic in the Americas
and the first one dominated by a citizenry of African ancestry.

The outbreak of the Haitian revolution was followed by an
uptick in rebellions or conspiracies by both slaves and free people of African
ancestry in Cuba, Colombia, Louisiana, and Venezuela. The last of these places
had seen the arrival of thousands of African laborers during the 18th century
as cacao plantations expanded around Caracas, transforming the region into the
most important destination for the reduced numbers of slaves landed in mainland
Spanish America after 1640. In 1795, free blacks and slaves briefly revolted in
the coastal Venezuelan town of Coro in favor of the “French Law,” the abolition
of slavery by revolutionary France the previous year. That abolition, the first
by a European power, was short-lived, as Napoleon Bonaparte soon overturned it
in the course of a failed bid to suppress the Haitian rebels and reconstruct
the slave-based plantation economy they had destroyed. One of the first acts of
an independent Haitian government in 1804 was to abolish slavery once and for
all, the first place in the Americas to do so.

An image made during the final
phase of the 13-year war for freedom by the ex-slave rebels of Saint Domingue
(Haiti), showing Napoleon’s French forces under assault by rebel combatants in
1802.

Meanwhile, the pernicious influence of both French and
Haitian revolutionaries was suspected by slave owners well beyond Coro and
other centers of unrest around the Caribbean. The 1798 “Tailors’ Conspiracy” in
Bahia involved demands for a republic based on the ideals of
liberty,
equality,
and
fraternity
that French rebels had begun proclaiming in
Paris nearly a decade earlier. These principles were strikingly reflected in
the composition of the 49 people arrested for participation in the conspiracy.
The majority were free
mulatos,
including the leader, João de Deus do
Nascimento, but the group included 11 enslaved individuals and 10 whites as
well. Evidence of actual planning for an armed revolt was thin, with possession
of revolutionary literature translated from the original French being one of
the more serious charges. Nevertheless, a number of the alleged rebels were
militiamen from local regiments of color. This circumstance was sufficiently
alarming to the authorities that 4 of the alleged rebels, including Nascimento,
were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

These and other examples of insurrectionary activity
frightened members of elite creole minorities in plantation regions everywhere,
despite the fact that many had their own grievances against the colonial
authorities. The resentment of American-born “Spaniards” toward their overseas
rulers had increased particularly sharply during the later 18th century. A wave
of Enlightenment-influenced reform began to restrict the freedom with which
they had previously flouted unpopular royal legislation, a development that
bore similarities to the one experienced by American-born “Englishmen” in the
13 colonies of British North America around the same time. Beginning in the
1750s, Spanish American creoles found themselves increasingly marginalized by a
set of economic, administrative, and military reforms aimed at strengthening
Spain’s control over its colonies and recapturing and expanding the economic
benefits of empire. The most unpopular measures were aimed at eliminating
smuggling, enforcing the systematic collection of sales and other taxes, and
replacing creoles in colonial administrative and judicial posts with presumably
more trustworthy peninsulares. These Bourbon reforms, so called for the royal
dynasty that replaced the Habsburgs on the throne of Spain after 1700, were
echoed in many respects in Portugal’s realms by the Pombaline reforms, which
were named after the key royal minister who spearheaded their adoption during
the later 18th century, the Marquis de Pombal.