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Commerce in Children: Slavery, Gradual Emancipation, and the Free Womb Trade in Colombia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2021

Yesenia Barragan
Yesenia Barragan*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New [email protected]
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Abstract

In 1821, as the Wars of Independence drew to a close, officials of the newly created republic of Gran Colombia passed a national gradual emancipation law. At the center of it was a Free Womb law that declared legally free the children of enslaved women born after the law's promulgation, while bonding these children to their mothers’ masters until the age of 18. Yet, in addition to establishing a term limit on their legalized captivity, the law stipulated conditions for the commerce in Free Womb children, laying the groundwork for what I refer to as the Free Womb trade. This article presents the first detailed exploration of the origins, operations, and limitations of the Free Womb trade in Colombia, particularly at the level of one province: the northwestern Pacific coastal province of Chocó. I argue that the trade created distinctly bounded market geographies of Free Womb children, who were actively, if at times ambiguously, incorporated into Colombia's slave economy. As a general rule, the Free Womb trade placed captive families at the mercy of their masters; yet, as one extraordinary case reveals, the full extent of the local trade's legal power was not entirely secure.

Keywords

slaverygradual emancipationFree Womb lawchildrenColombia
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 229 - 257
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Academy of American Franciscan History

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Mark Bray, Sherwin Bryant, Celso Castilho, Marcela Echeverri, Anne Eller, Bethan Fisk, Nara Milanich, Ángela Pérez-Villa, Pablo Piccato, Caterina Pizzigoni, Joshua Rosenthal, Edward Rugemer, Brandi Waters, participants in the Race and Slavery in the Atlantic World to 1900 Working Group at Yale University, Keila Grinberg and participants in the Empire, Sovereignty, and Labor in the Age of Global Abolition Conference at the McNeil Center, the editorial board of The Americas, and two anonymous readers at The Americas for their invaluable feedback on this article and various versions of this work. Some of the material included in this article also appears in my book Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), specifically Chapters 3 and 4.

References

1. Piedrahita, Carlos Restrepo, El Congreso Constituyente de la Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, 1821 (Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 1996)Google Scholar; Restrepo Salazar, Juan Camilo, La hacienda pública en la Constitución de Cúcuta de 1821 (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Grupo Editorial Ibáñez, 2010)Google Scholar, 37, 40, 53. For an overview of the delegates at the Congress of Cúcuta, see Leopoldo Uprimny, El pensamiento filosófico y político en el Congreso de Cúcuta (Bogotá: Ed. Academia Colombiana de Jurisprudencia, 2010).

2. For more on legislation and measures adopted at the Congress, see Restrepo, José Manuel, Historia de la revolución de la república de Colombia en la América Meridional, Vol. 3 (Besançon, France: J. Jacquin, 1858), 227—248Google Scholar; Bushnell, David, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation In Spite of Itself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 51–55Google Scholar; Lynch, John, Simon Bolívar: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 152–164Google Scholar; Lasso, Marixa, Myths of Harmony: Race and Republicanism During the Age of Revolution, Colombia, 1795–1831 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 58–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helg, Aline, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 163–164Google Scholar, 171; and Castellanos, Jorge, La abolición de la esclavitud en Popayán: 1832–1852 (Cali, Colombia: Universidad del Valle, 1980), 24–36Google Scholar.

3. José Félix de Restrepo, “Discurso sobre la manumisión de esclavos pronunciado en el soberano Congreso de Colombia reunido en la Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta en el año de 1821,” 1822, Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia [hereafter BNC], Biblioteca Digital, 25, 28, https://catalogoenlinea.bibliotecanacional.gov.co/client/es_ES/search/asset/107382, accessed February 7, 2019; Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, El oscuro camino de la libertad: los esclavos en Colombia, 1821–1851 (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, 2009), 53. For the entire Antioquia law of 1814, titled “Proyecto de ley sobre la manumisión de la posteridad de los esclavos Africanos y sobre los medios de redimir sucesivamente a sus padres,” see Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Vida y escritos del doctor José Félix de Restrepo (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1935), 69–73. The 1814 law included other provisions, such as the forced re-enslavement of any former slaves who “abused” their freedom, and the refusal to grant full emancipation to Free Womb children who were deemed “immoral and full of vices” despite having reached the age of emancipation.

4. For the entire 1821 law, see Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 19, Libro de Actas, Act 84. The Free Womb provision of the gradual emancipation law was also referred to as the ley de libertad de los vientres (“law of the freedom of the wombs”). See, for example, Gaceta de Colombia, no. 291, May 13, 1827, 211.

5. For more on “partus sequitur ventrum” in the history of Atlantic World slavery, see Camillia Cowling, Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 53–59; Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrum: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe 22:1(55) (March 2018): 1–17; Martha S. Santos, “‘Slave Mothers,’ Partus Sequitur Ventrem, and the Naturalization of Slave Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century Brazil,” Tempo 22:41 (September-December 2016): 467–487; and Jerome S. Handler, “Custom and Law: The Status of Enslaved Africans in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Slavery and Abolition 37:1 (2016): 1–23.

6. Article 3 in the original reads: “Si antes de cumplir la edad señalada quisieren los padres, los parientes u otros extraños, sacar al niño o joven hijo de esclava, del poder del amo de su madre, pagarán a éste lo que se regule justo por los alimentos que le ha suministrado, lo que se verificará por un avenimiento particular, o por el prudente arbitrio del juez.” Article 5 in the original reads: “Ningunos esclavos podrán venderse para fuera de la provincia en que se hallen, separándose los hijos de los padres; esta prohibición sólo subsistirá hasta que los hijos lleguen a los años de la pubertad.” See Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 19, Libro de Actas, Act 84.

7. The 1821 gradual emancipation law did not place restrictions on the operation of the slave trade (as opposed to the Free Womb trade) between the provinces.

8. On slavery in southwestern and Pacific coastal Colombia, see Germán Colmenares, Historia económica y social de Colombia, Tomo II: Popayán, una sociedad esclavista, 1680–1800 (Medellín: La Carreta, 1979); Fernando Jurado Noboa, Esclavitud en la Costa Pacífica: Iscuandé, Tumaco, Barbacoas y Esmeraldas, siglos XVI al XIX (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1990); Sherwin Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Sergio Antonio Mosquera Mosquera, Don Melchor de Barona y Betancourt y la esclavización en el Chocó (Quibdó, Colombia: Universidad Tecnológica del Chocó “Diego Luis Córdoba,” 2004); Orián Jiménez Meneses, El Chocó, un paraíso del demonio: Nóvita, Citará, y el Baudó, siglo VIII (Medellín: Universidad de Antioquia, 2004); William Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Chocó, 1680–1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976); Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Kris Lane, “The Transition from Encomienda to Slavery in Seventeenth-Century Barbacoas (Colombia),” Slavery and Abolition 21:1 (2000): 73–95.

9. By “market geography,” I am referring to the spatial and particularly geographic dynamics of market formations and movements. For a classic geographical study of slavery, see Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

10. For example, see Cowling, Conceiving Freedom, and Castellanos, La abolición de la esclavitud en Popayán, 72–84. On Colombia (and Ecuador), see Castellanos, La abolición de la esclavitud en Popayán; Tovar Mora and Tovar Pinzón, El oscuro camino de la libertad; Eduardo Posada and Carlos Restrepo Canal, La esclavitud en Colombia, y leyes de manumisión (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1935); Dolcey Romero Jaramillo, Esclavitud en la Provincia de Santa Marta, 1791–1851 (Santa Marta: ICTM, 1997); Julio Tobar Donoso, “La abolición de la esclavitud en el Ecuador,” Boletín de la Academia Nacional de Historia 39:93 (January-June 1959): 5–30; Camilla Townsend, “In Search of Liberty: The Efforts of the Enslaved to Attain Abolition in Ecuador, 1822–1852,” in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean, Darién J. Davis, ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2007). On Cuban studies, see Cowling, Conceiving Freedom; Rebecca Scott et al., The Abolition of Slavery and the Aftermath of Emancipation in Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Empire and Antislavery: Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). On Brazil, see Celso Thomas Castilho, Slave Emancipation and Transformations in Brazilian Political Citizenship (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016); Dale Graden, From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006); and Robert Conrad, The Destruction of Brazilian Slavery, 1850–1888 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Robert Toplin, The Abolition of Slavery in Brazil (New York: Atheneum, 1972). On the northern United States, see Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998); Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016); David Nathaniel Gellman, Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006); James Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Paul J. Polgar, Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); and Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, The Arc of Abolition: The Children of Gradual Emancipation and the Origins of National Freedom (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press). On Argentina, see George Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980); Magdalena Candioti, “Abolición gradual y libertades vigiladas en el Río de la Plata. La política de control de libertos de 1813,” Corpus 6:1 (January-June 2016): 9–11; Diego Gonzalo Murcia, “La Asamblea del Año XIII y el problema de la esclavitud,” Aequitas 7:20 (2013): 23–26; and Paulina L. Alberto, “Liberta by Trade: Negotiating the Terms of Unfree Labor in Gradual Abolition Buenos Aires (1820s-30s),” Journal of Social History 52:3 (Spring 2019): 619–651.

11. On the political economy of Free Birth laws in the northern United States, see for example Robert William Fogel and Stanley J. Engerman, “Philanthropy at Bargain Prices: Notes on the Economics of Gradual Emancipation,” Journal of Legal Studies 3:2 (June 1974): 377–401.

12. See Article 5, section 2 of the 1871 Rio Branco Law, which in the original states: “Qualquer desses menores poderá remir-se do ônus de servir, mediante prévia indenização pecuniária, que por si ou por outrem ofereça ao senhor de sua mãe, procedendo-se à avaliação dos serviços pelo tempo que lhe restar a preencher, se não houver acordo sobre o quantum da mesma indenização.” For a digital collection of gradual emancipation laws in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic World, see www.thefreewombproject.com.

13. 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 - PUCP, Fondo Editorial, 1993). On the gradual emancipation law and related laws in Peru, see https://thefreewombproject.com/peru/.

14. Aviva Chomsky, “The Logic of Displacement: Afro-Colombians and the War in Colombia,” in Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Darién J. Davis, 168.

15. Caroline Williams, Between Resistance and Adaptation: Indigenous Peoples and the Colonisation in the Chocó, 1510–1753 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); Vicente Restrepo, Estudio sobre las minas de oro y plata de Colombia, 2nd ed. (Bogotá: Imprenta de Silvestre y Compañía, 1888), 22–23.

16. Anthony McFarlane, Colombia before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 74–77, 81–82; Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 21–22, 119–188; Germán Colmenares, “La economía y la sociedad coloniales, 1550–1800,” in Nueva Historia de Colombia, Tomo I (Bogotá: Planeta, 1989), 123–124; Sergio Antonio Mosquera Mosquera, “Los procesos de manumisión en las provincias del Chocó,” in Afrodescendientes en las Américas: trayectorias sociales e identitarias: 150 años de la abolición de la esclavitud en Colombia, Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé, Mauricio Pardo, and Odile Hoffmann, eds. (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2002), 99; Hermes Tovar Pinzón, Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora, and Camilo Ernesto Tovar Mora, Convocatoria al poder del número: censos y estadísticas de la Nueva Granada, 1750–1830 (Santafé de Bogotá: Archivo General de la Nación, 1994), 353–357.

17. Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 199.

18. It is difficult to assess the exact social strata of the slaveholders who composed the Cúcuta delegates. Nevertheless, some delegates were smaller to medium-sized holders. Restrepo, for example, once possessed 12 slaves. Another delegate, Francisco Pereira, claimed to only own one slave, while Domingo Briceño y Briceño claimed 14 slaves. See Edgardo Pérez Morales, “Itineraries of Freedom: Revolutionary Travels and Slave Emancipation in Colombia and the Greater Caribbean, 1789–1830” (PhD diss.: University of Michigan, 2013), 98; and Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of June 28, Libro de Actas, Act 56. Carlos Restrepo Piedrahita writes that the exact economic position of each delegate at Cúcuta is unclear, but notes that property ownership over 5,000 pesos or an annual income over 500 pesos was a requirement for election to the Congress of Angostura. See Restrepo Piedrahita, El Congreso Constituyente de la Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, 97.

19. On Corral, see Pérez Morales, “Itineraries of Freedom,” 10, 58, 96–105, 114–118, 181–182; and Ramón Correa, Biografía de don Juan del Corral (Medellín: Universidad Pontifica Bolivariana, 2009). For the entire 1814 Antioquia law, see Guillermo Hernández de Alba, Vida y escritos del doctor José Félix de Restrepo (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1935), 69–73.

20. For Restrepo's proposed law, see Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of May 28, Libro de Actas, Act 26, and for Restrepo's speech in which he proposed the national gradual emancipation law, see Restrepo, “Discurso sobre la manumisión de esclavos pronunciado en el soberano Congreso de Colombia reunido en la Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta en el año de 1821.”

21. Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 9, Libro de Actas, Act 69.

22. Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of May 28, Libro de Actas, Act 26.

23. Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 9, Libro de Actas, Act 69.

24. See Article 5 of Restrepo's proposed law in Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of May 28, Libro de Actas, Act 60. Puberty served as an important de facto marker in the individual lives of enslaved peoples. As Steven Mintz notes, former slaves in North America were initially confronted with the brutal labor of chattel slavery “before or around puberty.” See Steven Mintz, “Children in North American Slavery,” in The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, Paula S. Fass, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2013), 338.

25. The original read “fuera de la provincia en que se hallen.” Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 2, Libro de Actas, Act 60.

26. Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of July 19, Libro de Actas, Act 84.

27. Michael LaRosa and Germán R. Mejía, Colombia: A Concise Contemporary History (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2012), 19–21; Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, 50–73.

28. Gerónimo Torres, Observaciones de G. T. sobre la ley de manumisión del soberano congreso de Colombia (Bogotá: José Manuel Galagarza, 1822), BNC, 17; Archivo Central del Cauca [hereafter ACC], 1833, República CI-13mn 4316, fol. 39r. As a point of reference, the 1826 Consolidated Slave Law in the British Caribbean “demarcated age ten as the end of sexual innocence and the start of sexual maturity for enslaved girls.” See Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 216.

29. Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 28; Mary McAlpin, Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature (London: Routledge, 2016), 1; Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2009), 84–86.

30. McAlpin, Female Sexuality, 9.

31. I thank Elise A. Mitchell, Marcela Echeverri, and Brandi Waters for bringing this to my attention. For more on legal medicine and the category of puberty in the early modern world, see Diederik F. Janssen, “Puer barbatus: Precocious Puberty in Early Modern Medicine,” History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 76:1 (January 2021): 20–52.

32. For other gradual emancipation laws with Free Womb clauses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic World, see www.thefreewombproject.com.

33. For the Argentine stipulation, see Article 5, Reglamento para la educación y ejercicio de los libertos, 22. For the Portuguese stipulation, see Article 5, Lei de 24 de julho de 1856, declarando livres os filhos que nascerem de mulher escrava, in Relatorio do Governador Geral da Provincia de Angola, Sebastião Lopes de Calheiros e Menezes, Referido ao anno de 1861 (Lisbon: Impresa Nacional, 1867), 436.

34. See Article 2 of “Proyecto de ley,” in Actas de la H. Camara de Representantes, 1°, 2° y 3° Periodos de la General Legislatura y Prórroga Extraordinaria, Tomo III, Años 1837–1841 (Montevideo: Imprenta “El Siglo Ilustrado” de Turenne, Varzi y Cía), 1906. For more on the Free Womb law in Uruguay, see Borucki, Abolicionismo y tráfico de esclavos en Montevideo.

35. Cowling, Conceiving Freedom, 101.

36. For reports of slave auctions in Quibdó, see Notaría Primera de Quibdó [hereafter NPQ], 1813: 24v-26v, 28v-30v, 98r-99v; 1814: 12r-13r; 1831: 64r-66v; 1832: 86v; 1843: 88v; 1845: 99v-100v; 1846: 61v; 1847: 48r.

37. Two years (1830 and 1834) were missing when I consulted the NPQ records in 2010. Unfortunately, the NPQ also lost the records from 1820 to 1827. During the late 1840s and into the early 1850s, the slave trade practically fell out of operation in Quibdó.

38. For statistics on Santa Marta, see Dolcey Romero Jaramillo, Esclavitud en la Provincia de Santa Marta, 1791–1851, 63. On Cartagena, see Dianis Hernández Lugo and Sandra Taborda Parra, “De la esclavitud a la liberación: esclavos, manumisión y abolición en Cartagena 1814–1860,” Revista Cambios y Permanencias 4 (2013): unpaginated. On Bogotá, see Antonio José Galvis Noyes, “La esclavitud en Bogotá, 1819–1851,” Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades 67:729 (1980): 344.

39. These statistics were calculated by counting the sale of enslaved peoples in available records from the NPQ during the Independence period, including the years 1810, 1813-15, and 1818-19. Some of these records are incomplete due to damage.

40. NPQ, 1831: 45r.

41. In other records, like lawsuits, the Free Womb children are also explicitly referred to as property. For example, see ACC, 1835-1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 4r. The Free Womb children were also explicitly referred to as slaves (“dichos esclavos”) during the Congress of Cúcuta. See Article 4 of Restrepo's proposed law in Congreso de Cúcuta, 1821, Session of May 28, Libro de Actas, Act 60.

42. NPQ, 1835: 205v.

43. NPQ, 1837: 81v-82r.

44. Similar moves to treat Free Womb captives as property were evident in New Jersey as well, after implementation of the state legislature's gradual abolition law in 1804. See Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 99–100.

45. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 49.

46. ACC, 1845, República JIII 8em 4026, fol. 17r.

47. NPQ, 1827: 1v-3v.

48. ACC, 1832, República CI-13mn 4300, fols. 6v-11r.

49. ACC, 1833, República CI-13mn 4316, fol. 36r.

50. As Daina Ramey Berry notes, the “sale price [of a slave] was a different form of valuation than an appraisal. It reflected the market value of a person at a specific moment.” See Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017), 41.

51. ACC, 1837–1840, República CI-13mn 4385, fols. 8r-10v; ACC, 1844, República CI-13mn 4366, fols. 4r-6r.

52. NPQ, 1846: 89r. By the late 1830s and especially during the 1840s, Free Womb children were increasingly referred to as manumitidos or manumisos (manumitted slaves), terms dating from the colonial period.

53. NPQ, 1843: 99v-100v.

54. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 51.

55. ACC, 1844, República CI-13mn 4366, fol. 6v.

56. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition, 109, 112.

57. Alberto, “Liberta by Trade,” 633.

58. NPQ, 1833: 35r.

59. NPQ, 1847: 128r.

60. NPQ, 1839: 4v-5r. It is possible that María Rosa was the child of his slave, María Asención, who Palacios references further in his will, but this is not entirely clear. See NPQ, 1839: 5v. Typically, if individuals were related, especially mother and son, it was made explicit in the records, which is why it is likely that María Rosa was not the daughter of María Asención.

61. NPQ, 1844: 78r. Similarly, it is possible that Ubalda was Casimiro's mother, but this was not claimed in the record.

62. NPQ, 1848: 70v-71r.

63. NPQ, 1838: 14v-15v.

64. NPQ, 1844: 64r-v.

65. NPQ, 1841: 59r.

66. NPQ, 1844: 7v-8r.

67. NPQ, 1845: 35v-36r.

68. NPQ, 1829: 83v; 1835: 104r-105v.

69. NPQ, 1843: 24v-25v.

70. King, Stolen Childhood, 9.

71. NPQ, 1839: 94v. For more on Vetancur's father, see Mosquera Mosquera, Don Melchor.

72. Francisco U. Zuluaga R., “La guerra de los supremos en el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada,” in Las guerras civiles desde 1830 y su proyección en el siglo XX, Museo Nacional de Colombia, ed. (Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura, 2001), 31. For more on Obando and the War of the Supremes, see Alonso Valencia Llano, Dentro de la ley, fuera de la ley: resistencias sociales y políticas en el valle del río Cauca (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2008), 91–95; Fernán González, “La Guerra de los Supremos (1839–1841) y los orígenes del bipartidismo,” Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades (Bogotá), 97:848 (January-May 2001): 5–63; Álvaro Pone Muriel, La rebelión de las provincias: relatos sobre la Revolución de los Conventillos y la Guerra de los Supremos (Bogotá: Intermedio, 2003); Luis Ervin Prado-Arellano, Rebeliones en la provincia: la Guerra de los Supremos en las provincias suroccidentales y nororientales granadinas (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2007), 140–260; María Camila Díaz Casas, Salteadores y cuadrillas de malhechores: una aproximación a la acción colectiva de la ‘población negra’ en el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada, 1840–1851 (Popayán, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2015), 91–103.

73. Tovar Mora and Tovar Pinzón, El oscuro camino de la libertad, 48.

74. For the 1842 law, see Posada and Restrepo Canal, La esclavitud en Colombia, 425–431.

75. NPQ, 1846: 31v-32r.

76. Kevin Bale, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

77. Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 141.

78. NPQ, 1846: 71r-73v. After 1846, Fernández handled business in Quibdó only through legal representatives, thereby reflecting liquidation. See NPQ, 1849: 28v-29r, 1851: 19v-20r, 37v-38r, 67r, 72v.

79. According to census records, there were 2,674 enslaved women, about 13 percent of a total population of 21,194 in Chocó in 1835. See Archivo General de la Nación, 1835, Sección República, Fondo Gobernaciones Varias, leg. 44, fols. 181r-182r. Young children often accompanied and assisted their parents, typically their mothers, as they panned the gold-rich rivers of the Pacific lowlands. On Jacinto Alvares del Pino's slaveholdings, see NPQ, 1828: 25v, 1831: 121v, 1833: 61v; on his land and mine ownership, see NPQ, 1833: 65v; on his serving as the alcalde primero, NPQ, 1833: 108r-v.

80. On Nicolas Castro serving as del Pino's apoderado, see NPQ, 1835: 204v, 205v-206r, 214r-v, 215v, 1836: 18r. On his slaveholding, see NPQ, 1846: 38v.

81. NPQ, 1835: 204v.

82. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 10r. On Mercedes Ynser's slaveholdings, see NPQ, 1832: 27r, 29r, 1836: 18r. Mercedes Ynser appears to have had a special family relationship with the del Pino family, which may have facilitated her purchasing of María Brigida. This is reflected in the fact that the del Pino patriarch, Jacinto Alvares del Pino, served as one of the witnesses to Mercedes Ynser's huband's last will and testament, a position often reserved for trusted individuals. For the testament of her husband (José Joaquín Alarcón), see NPQ, 1832: 38r-43r.

83. By petitioning the court to make her case for family reunification, Juana del Concilio joined thousands of enslaved people, especially women, who used the law under slavery and gradual emancipation to seek better lives and conditions for themselves and their families across time and the Americas. For examples of this legal activism, see Kimberly M. Welch, Black Litigants in the Antebellum American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Michelle A. McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Cowling, Conceiving Freedom; and Magdalena Candioti, “Free Womb Law, Legal Asynchronies, and Migrations: Suing for an Enslaved Woman's Child in Nineteenth-Century Río de la Plata,” The Americas 77:1 (January 2020): 73–99.

84. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 5r.

85. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fols. 5r-v.

86. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 5v.

87. For more on this legal culture of interpretation in colonial and republican Colombia, see Mauricio García Villegas, “Apuntes sobre codificación y costumbre en la historia del derecho colombiano,” Precedente. Revista Jurídica 2003: 103; Francisco R. Barbosa Delgado, Justicia, rupturas y continuidades: el aparato judicial en el proceso de configuración del Estado-Nación en Colombia, 1821–1853 (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2007), 209. Ángela Pérez-Villa found that officials in early republican Colombia, particularly in the mid 1820s, sought to limit what she calls a culture of legal “arbitrariness” in the Colombian court systems, through the formalization of new courts and administration of legal proceedings. See Pérez-Villa, “Disorderly Love: Illicit Friendships, Violence, and Law in a Slave Society at War, Popayán-Colombia, 1809–1830” (PhD diss.: University of Michigan, 2017), 152–157.

88. On Manuel Díaz's slaveholding, see NPQ, 1835: 206v-207r, 1837: 144v-145r, 162v-163r. Manuel Díaz also appears to have helped to facilitate the purchasing of freedom papers for an enslaved man named Agustín in 1833. See NPQ, 1833: 88r-v.

89. NPQ, 1828: 40r.

90. During the colonial period, Nóvita was the official capital of Chocó. During the Wars of Independence, Quibdó was designated the capital of the province and remained so until 1842, when the liberals of Quibdó sided with the insurgents during the War of the Supremes (1839–42) and Nóvita was renamed the capital. In 1851, Quibdó was again renamed capital of the province after the Liberal Party won national elections. For more, see Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier, 14–16.

91. Restrepo, “Discurso sobre la manumisión de esclavos pronunciado en el soberano Congreso de Colombia reunido en la Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta en el año de 1821”; Gazeta de Colombia, no. 2, September 9, 1821; La Gaceta de Colombia, no. 64, January 5, 1823, no. 3, September 13, 1821, no. 12, October 14, 1821; Correo de la Ciudad de Bogotá, no. 158, August 1, 1822, no. 135, February 28, 1822.

92. La Gaceta de Colombia, no. 64, January 5, 1823. On the manumission juntas and public manumission ceremonies in early and mid nineteenth-century Colombia, see Jason McGraw, “Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia,” Slavery and Abolition 32:2 (June 2011): 269–288; Dolcey Jaramillo Romero, “Manumisión, ritualidad y fiesta liberal en la provincia de Cartagena durante el siglo XIX,” Historia Crítica 29 (January-June 2005): 125–147; and Fredy Enrique Martínez, “La fiesta de la Libertad. Celebraciones cívicas y manumisión de esclavos en la Gran Colombia,” Revista Colombiana de Educación 59 (2010): 246–263.

93. El Eco de Antioquia, no. 5, June 2, 1822; El Mundo Observador, no. 3, July 12, 1826; Correo del Orinoco, no. 116, October 13, 1821.

94. Based in Quibdó, El Indígena Chocoano was the first regional newspaper. Published in 1834, it was followed by El Constitucional del Chocó in 1835. Both papers folded within a year.

95. El Constitucional del Chocó, no. 6, October 10, 1835.

96. Gaceta Oficial, no. 1,226, May 21, 1851.

97. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 7r; my emphasis.

98. For the note of sale of the Free Womb child Petrona, see NPQ, 1835: 205v-206r.

99. ACC, 1835–1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fols. 9-9v.

100. ACC, 1835-1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 12r.

101. ACC, 1835-1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 13r.

102. ACC, 1835-1836, República JIV-6cr 3845, fol. 13v. This general legal disposition to side with the “spirit of the law” reflected the particular legal culture of the court systems of colonial and early republican Colombia. Similar language can be found in a later case from Quibdó involving a free black mother's legal quest to guarantee her child's Free Womb status in 1845. After a long and complicated case spanning several years, Popayán officials sided with the mother and cited, among other reasons, that “when there's doubt concerning a state of freedom or slavery of an individual, the judge should incline themselves in favor of freedom more so than slavery.” Similar to Juana del Concilio's case, the judge's antislavery “inclination” was cited as legitimate reason for rulings involving enslaved people. For more on this case, see ACC, 1845, República JIII 8em 4026, fol. 103v.

103. La Gaceta de Colombia, no. 169, January 9, 1825. The aristocratic Mosquera clan, who published powerful anti-abolitionist tracts throughout the 1820s, was most eminent among the anti-abolitionist families in Popayán. For more on the Mosqueras, see William Lofstrom, La vida íntima de Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, 1798–1830 (Bogotá: Banco de la República; El Áncora Editores, 1996); and Luis Ervin Prado-Arellano and David Fernández Prado Valencia, “La familia Mosquera y Arboleda y el proyecto bolivariano (1821–1830),” Memoria y Sociedad 14:29 (2010): 55–69.

104. Community pressure appears to have factored into the outcome of other legal cases involving Free Womb children in the Pacific lowlands. For a case from the early 1840s, see Yesenia Barragan's article, “Slavery, Free Black Women, and the Politics of Place in Chocó, Colombia,” Revista de Estudios Colombianos 47 (January-June 2016): 61–63.

105. Caitlin Rosenthal uses this notion to reframe how scholars should understand the final abolition of slavery. See Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery, 79.

106. ACC, 1845, República JIII 8em 4026, fol. 71r.

107. Slaveholders’ opportunities expanded outside the country's borders as well, after the adoption of a new law in 1843. This 1843 law repealed the 1821 law's prohibition of the international slave trade and authorized the international trade of Free Womb children, so long as they were not exported “against their parents’ will” and their bills of sale stipulated their Free Womb status. For more, see Carlos Restrepo Canal, ed., La libertad de los esclavos o leyes de manumisión, Tomo II (Bogotá: Imprenta Nacional, 1938), 3–16, 25–26; Kitchens, John W., “The New Granadan-Peruvian Slave Trade,” Journal of Negro History 64:3 (Summer 1979): 205–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Echeverri, Marcela, “Esclavitud y tráfico de esclavos en el Pacífico suramericano durante la era de la abolición,” Historia Mexicana 69:2 (2019): 627–691CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108. Castellanos, La abolición de la esclavitud en Popayán, 82.

109. Gaceta de la Nueva Granada, no. 1349, April 24, 1852.

110. On these post-emancipation economies in the Colombian Pacific lowlands, see Claudia Leal, Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018).