Seeds of Insurrection: Domination and Resistance on Western Cuban Plantations, 1808-1848

5 Slaves’ Use of the Colonial Legal Framework

Slaves’ Use of the Colonial Legal Framework 85 were able to save over months of hard work.2 as a result, espinosa was fined twenty-five pesos and ordered to give better treatment to his slaves. In this respect, the daring action of José María was a great success. However, he was denied his request to find a new master and was sent back to espinosa. Disappointed with the final outcome of the process, he killed himself on the morning of august 29.3 criminal proceedings against cruel slave owners like Vicente espinosa were common in colonial cuba, particularly after the turn of the nineteenth century.4 Some slaves, especially those already habituated to plantation life, learned to use the law in their favor and tried to claim the few rights to which they were entitled. In a few cases, they were rewarded with partial or total success. On most occasions, however, they were defeated and humiliated by the colonial authorities, who usually tilted the balance of justice in favor of the masters and overseers. In this chapter, I look at colonial slave laws and how they were used by those slaves who were aware of the few advantages the laws offered them. I carefully selected the cases discussed in this chapter from among hundreds of other representative cases that are not as well documented. 5 although I have tried to include an equal number of cases involving african-born and creole slaves, the predominance of the latter is apparent, not only in this sample but also in the archival material that I had the opportunity to consult. Slaves and Slave Law in the NewWorld From the beginning of the establishment of slave societies in the americas, social norms were used to restrain the slaves imported from africa and their descendants.The legal corpus regarding slavery remained disorganized and often outdated, however, throughout the first centuries of european domination . In general, authorities and slave owners treated slaves according to local or regional practices and rules, rather than following properly instituted laws. 6 The first serious attempt to devise a comprehensive code of rules to govern slaves took place 169 years after the arrival of columbus in the new World. The slave code for the english colony of Barbados, the act for the Better Ordering and Governing of negroes, was signed and proclaimed at the end of September 1661. It consisted of twenty-three clauses, in which measures were adopted to maintain the slaves under strict control. 7 Some 86 Seeds of Insurrection of the act’s clauses are illustrative of the daily life of slaves on Barbadian sugar plantations. clause 5, for example, recommended that overseers search the “negro houses for runaway negroes,” which suggests that seventeenthcentury Barbados’s maroons tended to find shelter on plantations, a common occurrence in the plantation societies of the newWorld. It is clear that “runaway negroes” were the main target of the 1661 act, which gives the impression that authorities in Barbados were obsessed with the runaway slave population of the island. 8 The British were also concerned to regulate other forms of slave resistance, and they took care to explain the many ways in which resistance could be averted by masters, overseers, and their neighbors . The act addressed slaves’ working hours, clothing and feeding, and punishment. contemporary european (mostly British) legislation deeply influenced the slave code of 1661. Proclaimed a year after charles II was crowned king of england, it reflected the unsettled character of British law and the resulting need for order and stability, which the crown attempted to impose not only in Barbados but also in england. 9 The Barbados slave code remained the only systematic attempt to institute slave laws for the next twenty-four years. Then, in March 1685, King louis XIV of France issued a slave code for the French colonies in the new World. The code noir (Black code), as it was popularly known, aimed to control the large number of slaves in the French West Indian colonies. The code noir stressed the importance of slaves’observance of roman catholic precepts of obedience. Several issues received judicial attention for the first time, including slave marriages, burial practices, access to weapons and alcoholic beverages, assemblies, alimentation, manumissions, and the slaves’ position vis-à-vis colonial institutions and laws. 10 In the following years, the Danish, Spanish, english, and Portuguese also reviewed their slave laws,which became...