The Other Slavery (23 page)

While Haro y Monterroso managed the campaign from above, lower-level officials fought a difficult public relations war in western and northern Mexico. In the province of Sinaloa, for instance, they fanned out into towns and villages to inform the public of the liberation orders. In
San Felipe y Santiago, the provincial capital, the alcalde Miguel Calderón himself read aloud the royal decrees on a Sunday morning, immediately after mass as the throng was filing out of church: “From now on all male and female Indians of this province are free.” Over the next three weeks, the determined alcalde and his entourage visited the pueblos of Nío, Guasave, Tamazula, and others, “informing them about Her Majesty’s commands” and emphasizing both in Spanish and Nahuatl (through translators) that no soldier or friar had a right to make the Indians work without pay.
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Predictably, the campaign bred suspicion and hostility. The Jesuits of Sinaloa, for instance, felt unfairly accused and used their influence to blunt the crusade. “The Indians began to lose all sense of shame and became so restless that they killed some cattle that belonged to the padres,” one irate missionary reported, “and the ministers are heartbroken to see that the Indians are losing respect and may not attend [church] as it is their obligation.” At the same time, the Jesuit fathers attempted to discredit the principal leader of the antislavery crusade in the province, the
protector de indios
Francisco Luque, by questioning his motives. The Society of Jesus had previously accused him of living in concubinage with an Indian woman. The dominant opinion among the Jesuits was that Luque was no beacon of freedom but an opportunist who, on learning of his impending imprisonment on account of his concubinage, had latched onto the antislavery cause to strike back at the Society of Jesus. Soon enough, a series of accusations and counteraccusations made their way to the Audiencia of Guadalajara. In addition to the Jesuits of Sinaloa, the military commanders and other prominent residents closed ranks against the crusade. Haro y Monterroso struggled to keep the campaign alive, but in the end the opposing coalition proved much too strong in Sinaloa.
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The antislavery crusade also affected the notorious traffic of New Mexican Indians to the silver mines. Slavers engaged in this trade were so active and brazen that in the 1650s and 1660s, they had actually used the royal carriages—meant to keep New Mexico supplied with manufactured goods and foodstuffs—to transport their captives, in complete and even mocking disregard of the royal regulations. From time to time,
colonial authorities in Parral and elsewhere cracked down on such activities. For instance, in 1662 the governor residing in Parral, on learning of the impending arrival of 120 New Mexican slaves, posted notices forbidding the buying or selling of Indians “according to the royal orders and wishes of His Majesty.” Any offender risked losing his slave. When the Indians finally arrived in Parral, the governor had them brought out to the central plaza. In plain view of everyone and with the help of an interpreter, he told them that they were free to go wherever they wished and could not be bought or sold by anyone. It must have been a perplexing moment for both the slaves and the slaveholders.
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These early crackdowns failed to stop the Indian slave trade, however. Residents continued to buy Indians clandestinely, and slavers continued to supply them. But the crusade certainly made life more difficult for the traffickers. Shortly after this episode in Parral, Juan Manso, a former governor of New Mexico and a prominent trafficker, found himself on the road leading a caravan with more than seventy Indian captives. Heading to the town of San Juan Bautista, in the province of Sonora, Manso sought to prepare the ground by writing to the alcalde, who happened to be an old acquaintance of his, reportedly asking “as a friend to receive permission to enter the town to sell the Indians and as a reward he would deliver to the
alcalde
two or three pieces.” The alcalde refused. Manso and his colleagues found similar problems elsewhere. In the mining town of San Miguel, they had to contend with Fray Alonso de Aguilera, a friar known for preaching that Indian slavery was “a grave sin” and for refusing entrance to the church to anyone connected with the traffic of Indians, particularly “the man from New Mexico who sold the Indians.”
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Queen Mariana and her ministers were outraged when they discovered that the royal carriages had been used to carry New Mexican Indians to the mining centers. Via the Audiencia of Guadalajara and the tireless Haro y Monterroso, the queen ordered that all slave owners of Nuevo León, Nueva Vizcaya, and New Mexico relinquish their Indians within three days. Slaveholders released 202 Indian slaves in Parral and 72 in Zacatecas, and they promised to release more in the future. The
queen’s orders also brought down the number of Indian slaves exported from New Mexico.
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Although the Spanish campaign garnered some successes in places such as Trinidad and northern Mexico, it also underscored the very real limitations of monarchical authority. It worked in places where determined officials such as Governor Roteta and audiencia member Haro y Monterroso upheld the royal decrees. However, in many areas of the empire, the very officials charged with freeing the Indians were also in collusion with the slavers.

In Chile, where slavery had been legal between 1608 and 1674, the links between crown officials and slavers were extremely close—so close that royal and ecclesiastical authorities had become the very guarantors of the slave markets. In the southern town of Concepción, for example, a Jesuit named Pedro de Soto was the man in charge of examining the captives brought into town to determine whether they could be legally enslaved. On December 30, 1668, a raiding party rode into Concepción and presented its human cargo, including a twenty-year-old woman named Coypue and her baby son. Father de Soto pronounced the captives “lawfully enslaved” and issued “the usual certification.” A few weeks later, Governor Bernardo de Monleón Cortés, residing in Valdivia, issued a second certification declaring Coypue “to be a slave in perpetuity” and her son “to be subject to
esclavitud de servidumbre
[temporary enslavement] until turning twenty at which time he would be set free.” There was nothing unusual about these certifications. Quite the opposite, their formulaic, businesslike tone makes clear that they circulated widely. Setting aside the possible kickbacks implied in these documents (I could find no evidence that Father de Soto or Governor Monleón Cortés received any fees for their certifications, although it is likely that they were somehow compensated for their time and effort), they reveal the absolute complicity of religious and civil authorities in the traffic of Indians.
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Such was the state of affairs when Queen Mariana proscribed all forms of Native enslavement in Chile on December 20, 1674. Understandably, Governor Juan Enríquez remained unmoved. In an unusually frank letter to the king, Enríquez wrote that the royal order posed great
inconvenience to the owners, depriving them of their slaves and cheating them out of “the great sums of money” they had spent acquiring them. For instance, the decree directed slave owners to seek compensation for their lost property from the sellers. The governor found this provision entirely counterproductive, as it would give rise to “a seedbed of lawsuits and unrest,” all of which would be futile, because in the end “the Indians and soldiers who took the slaves” would be held accountable, and they “do not have property with which to pay.”
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But the governor’s most serious objection was over security. He reasoned that since there were “many more slaves than Spaniards,” the entire province would be in grave peril: “Having set them free, they would convene gatherings and conspire with the natural hatred that they profess toward the Spaniard . . . and our enemy would derive such an overwhelming advantage that it would lead to our total ruin.” Governor Enríquez added sententiously that “the fields will remain fallow and the colonists will not be able to sustain themselves, nor will the ecclesiastics derive their rents and tithes, and everything will collapse, and together with the horror of the enemy, the extreme need and poverty will compel everyone to leave.” The tenor of the governor’s letter was defiant, but it was consistent with a medieval legal tradition that can be summed up in the curious dictum
“Obedezco pero no cumplo”
(I obey but do not comply). In a vast empire such as Spain’s, royal officials used this response to show both their respect for royal authority and the inapplicability of a decree or order to a particular kingdom.
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Governor Enríquez used every means at his disposal to avoid compliance. He delayed making public the abolition decree of 1674. When the Audiencia of Santiago required Enríquez to follow through, he responded that “it was up to him [when] to publish and explain the said decree,” adding that as governor and captain general of Chile, he was responsible for the security of the kingdom, which had already been threatened by rumors that had prompted some slaves to flee. In the meantime, the governor put in practice what seemed to him a more promising strategy. He ordered all owners to register their Natives, who would no longer be called “slaves” but would merely be held “in deposit.” The members of the Audiencia of Santiago believed that this
change would render the abolition decree completely ineffectual, “because the Indians thus deposited would remain with their masters and owners in the same terms as before and even worse because they no longer would have access to the Audiencia.”
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In his 1679 comprehensive ban of all Indian slaves in the hemisphere, Charles II recounted how much his mother had done on behalf of the Indians of Chile and specifically stated that notwithstanding the arguments advanced by Governor Enríquez, he must set the Indians free. The governor refused even then. He clung to the belief that freeing the slaves was tantamount to losing Chile, a kingdom that had been ravaged by a long war with the Mapuches but that nonetheless was necessary to keep because it was “adjacent to the Strait of Magellan which is the best passage to the South Seas [the Pacific Ocean].” The governor had taken the
Obedezco pero no cumplo
dictum as far as it could go, and the Indian slaves in Chile remained in limbo.
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The backlash against the campaign to free the Indians was strongest in the Philippines. The royal order of June 12, 1679, specifying that “no native could be held as a slave under any circumstance” and that “all Indians enslaved up to now are hereby set free as well as their children and descendants” caused a great deal of turmoil in Manila. As in Chile, the first recourse in the Philippines was to stall using the traditional formula: “This
cédula
[royal order] is of the kind that must be obeyed but not complied with,” observed the members of the Audiencia of Manila, “and we must write back to the Prince so that better informed he could send us his orders.” Their displeasure was patent. “When royal orders are so far apart from the natural law, they cannot be executed,” wrote an irate audiencia member to Charles II, “and with all due respect, even less so when that natural law is for the benefit of those who have been vanquished in war, for the victors would have a right to take their lives but only choose to take away their liberty.”
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Yet even in the distant Philippines, there were some courageous crusaders. While waiting for the king’s reply, the audiencia’s attorney prodded his reluctant colleagues to make public the emancipation decree. The immediate result was a flood of requests: “So many were the slaves who crowded around this Royal Audiencia to claim their liberty that we
could not process the multitude of their papers, even when being extracted in brief and summarily.” Many slaves around the capital abandoned their masters, who were left “without service,” as the archbishop of Manila, Felipe Pardo, observed.
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It was in the provinces that the situation became truly critical. Native Filipinos faced total ruin, as they had most of their wealth invested in their slaves. Moreover, the slaves supplied much of the rice and other basic foodstuffs of the islands, and now “agitated and encouraged by the recent laws setting them free [they] went to the extremity of refusing to plant the fields.” The greatest threat of all was that “by setting these slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia; and in the island of Mindanao, the malcontent Caragas and Subanos might well join forces with the Muslim insurgents there.”
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In Chile the governor had taken the lead in opposing the Spanish campaign, but in the Philippines all branches of the imperial administration, including the governor, the members of the audiencia, the city council of Manila, members of the military, and the ecclesiastical establishment beginning with the archbishop, sent letters to Charles II requesting the suspension of the emancipation decree. Among the petitioners were Native Filipinos, for whom slavery had been a way of life since time immemorial. “When a principal native walks around town or visits a temple,” observed a Spanish chronicler, “it is with great pomp and accompanied by male and female slaves carrying silk parasols to protect their masters from the sun or rain, and the
señoras
go first followed by their servants and slaves, and then come their husbands or father or brothers with their own servants and slaves.” The emancipation decree came as a great annoyance to these Native slave owners. Those of Pampanga, a province on the northern shore of Manila Bay, in central Luzon, resolutely opposed the liberation of their slaves, whom they regarded as “the principal nerve and backbone of our strength.” They wrote a long letter to the king of Spain explaining how the Spanish galleons were built in the nearby shipyards of Cavite with teak and mahogany supplied in part by slaves: “And while our women together with our slaves plant the seeds, we men are up in the hills cutting wood for the
royal yards.” By emancipating the slaves of Pampanga, the empire stood to lose its ships.
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