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20 CHAPTER ONE The Emancipatory Moment The middle years of the nineteenth century brought to New Granada disease and death, turmoil and renewal. This much was known to the people “from the poorest class” of the Caribbean town of Sitionuevo, where they forced their mayor into flight one August day in 1849. The townsfolk, wracked by cholera, had demanded medicine to alleviate the distress of their families, and when they were met with official indifference, they flashed blades, broke into the homes of wealthy residents, and destroyed furniture. Men and women then turned to other targets, giving “machete blows to the doors of the tax collector’s house” and ransacking the town’s supply of tobacco, “shouting out that now it would be sold for one real per handful.” Troops soon arrived from surrounding districts led by Pascual Gutiérrez, a local jefe político, who upon entering Sitionuevo hailed the first man he met, “a black youth named Eusebio ‘La Pulga’ García, native of that city.” After Gutiérrez demanded that La Pulga submit to his authority, the youth allegedly attacked him with a machete, prompting the officer to shoot him in the leg. Although La Pulga and others were arrested , and a detachment of soldiers remained to help reinstate the ousted mayor, Pascual Gutiérrez remained apprehensive about the restoration of the old order. While the rioters had not physically harmed anyone, they had seized and destroyed a great deal of property. “If those in the uprising had had more time,” the jefe político warned, “who knows how far they would have taken their projects.”1 The protestors’ willingness to upend property and authority in assertion of their right to live free from misery was one instance of the dramatic transformation that swept across New Granadan society in the decade after 1848. Just four months before the Sitionuevo protest, a new national government had come to power in Bogotá under José Hilario López, a general, diplomat, and former governor of the Caribbean province of Cartagena . In its bid to establish legitimacy, the López administration turned back to the provinces, where demands for political change flourished after the election and where new alliances between national leaders and local groups produced significant shifts. In the law, liberals (and, on occasion, moderates and conservatives) pushed through a host of reforms over The Emancipatory Moment21 suffrage, marriage and religious rights, jury trials, and local autonomy in the name of equality and liberty. The formal expansion of citizenship rights, culminating in the 1853 constitution, encouraged further protests like those in Sitionuevo. And although legal changes could not alleviate the immediate hardship underlying such protests, they did often validate projects far beyond the letter of the law.2 The conditions that enabled reforms and popular mobilization under López and his successors were fortified by the imminent destruction of slavery. In New Granada, cimarrones (fugitive slaves) hollowed out institutionalized bondage through flight into the country’s backlands. By the time Congress passed the final emancipation act in May 1851, which went into effect on 1 January 1852, slavery was all but a dead letter, the political costs diminished by a national antislavery consensus and by the actions of the slaves themselves. Even as slaveholding faltered, liberal and democratic reformers of the López administration staged public manumission ceremonies before mass audiences to disseminate egalitarian citizenship and promote their faction’s legitimacy. The significance of these spectacles—freeing slaves to promote the López administration and its role in abolishing slavery—went beyond partisan calculus. The libertarian and egalitarian impulse behind slave emancipation became the basis of a new ethos that shaped law, governmental administration, and public interactions between citizens. The fusing of liberal citizenship to slave emancipation stamped the decade with a host of experiments in democracy, as citizens used legal freedom to challenge prevailing ideas of racial, marital, and economic status.3 Yet despite the consensus to end slavery, New Granadans reached little agreement over the consequences of legal freedom and civil equality. The attempt to sculpt citizenship out of emancipation quickly ran into disagreements over its content and beneficiaries. The mass mobilizations and ethos against discrimination built from abolitionism soon disrupted the tenuous compromise between the progovernment Liberals, their Conservative opponents, artisans, and enfranchised plebeians in the provinces. While some groups were apprehensive about the scope of change, many Caribbean citizens pushed for fundamental redefinitions of equality and authority not always anticipated by political leaders.4 Provincial...

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