Epilogue: The Wider
Extensions of Iberian Slavery

The long history of slavery in Iberia from ancient to modern times has unfolded in this book, beginning with the Romans, passing through the Visigothic period, viewing the Islamic and Christian portions of the peninsula during the Middle Ages, and tracing developments in the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal well into the early modern period and to the end of slavery in Iberia. Some experiences of the people who lived as slaves in those periods remained constant: they were owned, their personal and working lives were at the command of their owners, and many of them sought freedom though not all attained it. Complexity, nonetheless, is the key to full understanding of the lives of slaves. The conditions of their lives and their responsibilities varied widely, depending on the period and its politics, their location, the occupations and inclinations of their owners, and the skills they had or could acquire.

Many enslaved people were domestic servants, a fact that led a number of scholars to assume that role to be the predominant and almost exclusive assignment for slaves in the Mediterranean world. That assumption in turn led to a line of argument that Old World slavery was not a particularly harsh system but one in which slaves were part of extended families and occupied places and roles in the household not too different from those of its free servants, who were also governed paternalistically by the (usually) male head of the household.¹ Such a positive image persisted, despite the many challenges it brought forth. One critical voice was that of Iris Origo, presented in a classic article now well over a half century old.² Origo’s title tells it all: “The Domestic Enemy.” Her concept of domestic enemies stressed the tensions among the free and unfree members of the household and notably between the master’s wife and the women slaves. Slaves and masters frequently lived with tension and dread. Slaves feared the masters’ extensive powers to bully, coerce, and punish. Masters, despite their ostensible power, were still uneasy in the knowledge that they could be attacked or even killed by their discontented slaves. Households with slaves were seldom happy homes.³

The older emphasis on domestic slavery was mistaken on other grounds as well. By no means were all slaves in Iberia domestic workers, nor did they all live in the same household as their owners. Throughout the entire historic span, many slaves lived outside the owners’ homes. Examples included the shepherds and mine workers in Roman times; the business agents found frequently in Roman Hispania and Islamic al-Andalus and in much smaller numbers in Christian Iberia; and slaves rented out by their owners as seasonal agricultural workers, as artisans in skilled crafts, and as wet nurses. Slaves such as these could live independently, communally with their fellow slaves in rural or urban spaces, or in the households of those who rented their labor. Even those slaves who resided in their owners’ households could work in any number of non-domestic tasks within or beyond the home.

Two major means produced slaves. Children born to slave mothers were slaves, with some notable exceptions discussed earlier. Natural increase by itself did not replenish or even maintain the ranks of slaves; new slaves had to be brought into the system if the numbers were to remain steady or to grow. We saw the usual methods by which free people became slaves: capture in raids or in warfare. If these captives fell victim to martial actions in or near Iberia, they were traded locally. Others arrived in Iberia via routes of the slave trade, over which they were taken for long distances from their homelands and from the point of their enslavement. We have looked at other means by which free people fell into captivity and servitude, including debt slavery, self-sale, or the sale of free children by abductors or even by their own parents. These other means, I have argued, produced relatively few slaves. Most slaves were born into their status or enslaved through violent actions.

Enslaved people lived subjected to the dictates of their owners, who legally had extensive leeway in how they treated and employed their slaves, in the punishments they could inflict upon them, and in the ways they could sell or otherwise transfer their ownership. Women slaves, who were a majority in most places and in most periods, had special risks and occasionally special opportunities. Masters controlled their slaves’ sexual lives and often impregnated the young women they owned, thus exposing them to multiple risks. Pregnancy and childbirth are always fraught with danger for the mother and child, more so in the pre-modern world lacking effective sanitation and medical care. Other dangers lurked. Masters might be pleased or displeased by having a child with their own slave, and masters’ wives were often furious to find out about the sexual dalliance of their husbands and could make life even more difficult for the slave woman during the pregnancy and following the birth. Yet we have seen the complexity of such situations and a few examples in which producing a child of the master placed the mother in an improved situation, even at times making her and her child free.

For many slaves, their insertion into family life gave them a minor place in the society in which they found themselves. They learned to speak the language of their masters, to adopt new norms of dress and behavior, and to adapt to the local social patterns. Membership in religious societies gave many late medieval and early modern slaves the companionship of people in similar situations and the collective support—moral, economic, and legal—in many of the difficulties they faced in their lives.

We can readily assume that freedom was a dream all slaves shared, though by no means all achieved it. Some tried to flee their masters and live free lives, usually by crossing religious frontiers. Many obstacles blocked safe passage for the fugitives, as we saw. There is no way to quantify the number of successful flights to freedom, as almost all the documents produced at the time and preserved for modern scholars relate to the recapture of the fugitives. Iberia and the Mediterranean world as a whole offered no space for communities of runaway slaves to exist.

Manumission was the sure route to the freedom that many slaves sought and a number achieved. The owner always remained in charge and could agree or refuse to manumit a slave, save in a few situations. The numbers of cases in which political or religious authorities intervened to free a slave without a master’s permission were always quite limited, mentioned in the law codes but seemingly more theoretical than real. The owner, then, decided on manumission, and in the documents of manumission issued during his or her lifetime or in the last will and testament usually emphasized motivations such as goodwill toward the slave and the owner’s own religious piety. We should not totally disregard such motivations, for some surely were accurate depictions of the attitudes of the owner, but attaining their freedom frequently cost the slaves dearly. They usually had to pay the owner a fee in cash or on installments, a sum that was often more than the going price for another replacement slave. Freed slaves still owed the master and his family courtesy, deference, and often an additional period of service. As we have also seen, the master could use the possibility of manumission as a tool to ensure good behavior by the slaves who sought to be free. Slaves could assume they would improve their chances for freedom by conforming to the masters’ expectations of proper comportment. Not all conformed, and we have seen numerous examples of misdeeds and the punishments that transgressions brought forth.

Those who did attain freedom and their descendants blended into the host society, though this is a subject not yet fully studied. Slavery in Spain and Portugal remained important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but declined in the eighteenth, when slaves in Europe in the same period were increasingly marginal in an economy in which free labor was the norm and the rising local population filled the necessary jobs.

Slaves from many origins were present in Iberia over the ancient and medieval periods. The situation changed in the fifteenth century as sub-Saharan Africans increasingly became prominent in the trade to Iberia, even though they were always relatively few in numbers. The most recent estimate put the number of black slaves imported by the Portuguese and other Europeans into Europe and the islands of the eastern Atlantic at some 156,000 by the second decade of the sixteenth century.⁴ The trade in slaves from Africa to Europe declined after the early sixteenth century, as slavery in the Christian societies of the Mediterranean became less significant. In the colonies across the Atlantic, by contrast, from the 1490s onward the numbers of slaves in the European colonial areas grew exponentially and their economic importance increased. Recent well-informed estimates for the total trans-Atlantic slave trade put the numbers of slaves who departed for the Americas between 1501 and 1867 at some 12,500,000. Those who survived the Middle Passage and reached the Americas in the same period were estimated to have been some 10,700,000.⁵ Old World slavery provided the background for the systems of slavery that developed on the western side of the Atlantic, using several long- and short-term traditions present in the peninsula by 1492, as we will mention later.

Colonial development in the Americas required strenuous efforts to subdue and assimilate the native population, to mine the mineral wealth of the continents, and to produce commercial crops that could be sold in the European markets. The model the Spaniards used was based in part on the experience of their own reconquest of the Muslim lands in southern Spain, during which they had distributed the newly acquired lands among the leaders of the conquering armies. In part it rested on their experience in the Canary Islands, where they had subdued the natives and used the new lands for agriculture. The Portuguese in Brazil followed similar patterns developed in Portugal and its early Atlantic island colonies.

This is not the place for a full discussion of Latin American slavery. This book, after all, is the story of slavery in Iberia. The scholarship on slaves and slavery in colonial Latin America is rich and deep.⁶ Slavery in the Americas developed from a need for labor that could be filled by neither indigenous nor European sources. It became racially based, with black Africans becoming predominant in American slavery. Why did that occur? Was it due to inherent racism among Europeans? Was racism present in late medieval and early modern Iberia? Even addressing what seem to be simple questions gives rise to many others, and we risk falling into the abysses of anachronism if we apply contemporary definitions of racism to the distant past. One line of argument postulates that Iberians, especially those of Andalusia, picked up and appropriated the disdainful views of black Africans present in medieval Islamic society. That interpretation is most closely associated with the work of Bernard Lewis, who charted many negative expressions about black Africans in medieval Islam, and James H. Sweet, who argued that the late medieval Spanish Christians followed the patterns the Muslims had set earlier. For Fredrick Fredrickson, however, only precursory elements were present in late medieval Iberia, and full-fledged racism only emerged much later and elsewhere.⁷

Various Christian Iberians certainly were conscious of sociological and physical differences among peoples and made a first and primary distinction on the basis of religion. They customarily characterized people as Christians, Muslims, Jews, or as converts from Judaism to Christianity (conversos) and from Islam to Christianity (Moriscos).⁸ Beyond that, we saw that notaries in sale documents carefully indicated skin color from white to black, with variations in between such as membrillo or membrillo corcho. Descriptions of features of face and hair also appeared in the documents, as did tattoos, scarification, old wounds, and marks from branding. For sub-Saharan African slaves, distinctions were made according to their level of acculturation: ladinos had learned a Romance language; bozales had not and were assumed to have arrived in Iberia only recently. Literary works through the sixteenth century contained disparaging descriptions of the use and pronunciation of language by people of African descent. Such works very likely reflected popular attitudes of the dominant society.

Were popular attitudes influenced by observations of somatic and cultural differences? Almost assuredly they were. Did all this add up to racism? The answer to this is still unclear, and reaching a satisfactory set of answers no doubt will be the task of the next generation of scholars. Was racial slavery in the Americas a product of these attitudes? To put it a bit differently: did black Africans become the main source of slave labor in the Americas because Iberians were racists? The answer here is no. Slavery followed the Iberian conquerors and colonists into the Americas and later was reinforced by the slavery practiced in other European colonies—English, French, and Dutch among others. Slavery or social forms similar to it were present in the indigenous societies that the Europeans encountered. Quickly, however, slavery was based primarily on the exploitation of sub-Saharan Africans. Was that an inevitable development? Probably not, as all European colonial enterprises tried first to secure alternative sources of labor.

What about indigenous labor? Here the story involves two large and interrelated factors. First was the sharp decline of the native populations that fell victim to the inadvertently introduced diseases—most notably smallpox, but many others—that were common in Europe, Africa, and Asia and that hit the previously unexposed Amerindian population hard. People of all ages became ill, while no one knew how to treat the unprecedented afflictions or how to ease the suffering. There were other causal components in the decline in numbers. Populations were moved by force from familiar surroundings, they were put to work in unaccustomed and often demanding occupations, and members of the affected groups suffered from cultural despair.

The second factor was the concern of the home governments. In the Spanish case from early on, the government of Fernando and Isabel defined who its subjects were, and those so defined could not ordinarily be enslaved. They followed practices defined in the reconquest and refined in the Canary Islands. As we saw in a previous chapter, indigenous groups in the Canaries had choices. Those who accepted Castilian rule by signing treaties could not be enslaved. Only those groups who resisted and refused to sign treaties or who later broke agreements contained in the treaties were legally liable to enslavement. Similar laws and procedures applied in the Spanish American colonies, where native slavery became illegal in 1542.⁹ Such laws did not totally do away with the enslavement of indigenes, as the colonial areas were far from Spain and vast, and there were never sufficient numbers of administrators to spot and stamp out violators. By the seventeenth century, however, indigenous slavery had declined, and labor in colonial Spanish America generally rested on a base of the wage labor of native workers, mestizos and mulattoes, and on the slave labor of the blacks.

Could Europeans be used? That was highly unlikely. The population of Europe was still recovering from the unprecedented demographic losses of the mid-fourteenth century, when a third or more of the Western European population died in epidemics in a short four-year period. Europe still lacked sufficient labor in the first century of empire building in the Americas. This was especially true for Portugal, a small country of about a million people that struggled throughout its colonial history to staff its overseas ventures. The Spanish kingdoms had a larger population than Portugal, perhaps six or seven million, but still could not provide labor from their own population for arduous tasks in the mines and the sugar plantations. The British colonies developed later, but even their early experiments with indentured British subjects proved unsatisfactory, and British colonists in the Caribbean and North America turned to the use of imported slaves.

Given the declining native population and the rapidly expanding need for labor in the colonies, Spaniards in the Indies very quickly began to question the excessive reliance upon native labor and to report the high death rate the natives were suffering. Bartolomé de las Casas was one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the plight of the Amerindians, and in 1516 he suggested that white and black slaves be imported as laborers to relieve the burdens shouldered by the natives.¹⁰ The intellectual and ecclesiastical attacks on the exploitation of native laborers coincided with the insistence of the Spanish colonists that Amerindians were unsuited for intensive labor and that Africans, perceived to possess a much higher capacity for work, should replace them.

In these circumstances, Spaniards and Portuguese and later other Europeans turned to Africans from south of the Sahara, who happened to be the only available large supply of slaves and potential slaves. Early in the Middle Ages, as we saw, many slaves came from central and eastern Europe, particularly from the Slavic populations. The Slavs and their neighbors had become Christian during the later Middle Ages, and as Christians, they could no longer be legally enslaved by other Christians. The Muslims of North Africa frequently ended up as captives and slaves if not ransomed, but Spanish royal rules specifically prohibited Muslims or even converts from Islam from being transported to the new American colonies. This also included Muslims from West Africa. The prohibition was not totally effective in preventing individuals and groups of Muslims from reaching the Americas and in time forming Muslim communities.¹¹

If Europeans could not effectively use Amerindian labor, if eastern European or Muslim slaves were out of the question, and if free or semi-free European labor was not available, that left the non-Muslim black Africans. They were available in African Atlantic ports (and later ports of the Indian Ocean), where the Portuguese traded with local rulers, exchanging European goods for slaves and tropical goods. The Portuguese had a delivery system in place, developed over the second half of the fifteenth century to move those slaves and goods to the Canaries and other Atlantic islands and to Portugal and then elsewhere in Christian Europe. It could easily be adapted to serve the trans-Atlantic trade, which grew rapidly after 1513, when the licensing system for legalized slave trading was introduced. Merchants who secured a license and paid a fee could ship slaves to the Indies. The royal government in this fashion could satisfy part of the colonial demand for labor and at the same time provide itself another source of income.¹² Portuguese merchants secured Spanish licenses to transport slaves to the Spanish American colonies and later to their own areas of colonization in Brazil. Latin American slavery first grew from the availability of African slaves and from the Portuguese expertise as slave merchants and transporters.

Sub-Saharan Africans, in addition to their availability, offered several advantages.¹³ Many came from societies that practiced extensive agriculture and were accustomed to the labor discipline inherent in such pursuits, unlike many Amerindians. Many also knew metal working, especially in iron, a field of endeavor alien to the native Americans, who used metal primarily for decorative rather than productive purposes. Black slaves were not covered by the restrictions on exploitation that the colonial powers established for the native Americans. Epidemiologically, there was an advantage to the use of Africans, who had been born in a region that shared a pool of several diseases with the Europeans and were less susceptible to the European-borne diseases that were devastating the native population of the Americas and to malaria and other tropical diseases. The fateful choice—that Africans were to be preferred to Indians as laborers—assured the development of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas.

New World slavery developed in part because of traditions present in the Old World. One was the persistence of the legal regulations governing slavery, present from Roman times and ratified in medieval law codes. Another was the common practice of centuries of slavery. There was also the existence of sugar-cane agriculture and sugar refining, both in the peninsula and in the Canaries and Madeira. In the islands the connection between sugar and slavery had been established, just as had the custom of importing black African slaves, though the Canarian and Madeiran establishments were far smaller than later plantations on the other side of the Atlantic. As techniques for sugar production crossed the ocean, the demand for slaves expanded. Slavery became an important social and economic institution in the Iberian American empires and lasted well into the nineteenth century. Slaves and slavery were connected in colony and metropolis, even though slavery became much more important in the colonial setting. A huge new market for slaves opened in the European colonies in the Americas, and the transatlantic slave trade expanded to fill the demand. It is likely true that more African slaves than European colonists crossed the Atlantic during the first century of the colonial enterprise. The vast numbers of Africans who crossed the Atlantic transformed the social and physical complexion of the Americas. This was so much the case that two of the commonly cited five examples of slave societies were Brazil and Caribbean islands.

What emerged in the Americas relied on Old World roots but developed distinctive American features. Philip D. Curtin, one of the founders of the modern school of studies of slavery, described the changes that slavery as an institution underwent as it developed on the American side of the Atlantic.

The old European slavery, in short, . . . suffered a sea change. Whatever its precedents in the Old World, the reality by the beginning of the eighteenth century was actually another kind of institution, not borrowed from the European past, nor yet an institution found in some overseas society and adapted to European use. It had roots in Europe, but was nevertheless so profoundly modified through time that it became a new invention, devised for a new situation—the highly specialized plantation society.¹⁴

Robin Blackburn years later took up the same theme as Curtin. He argued that the slave systems of the New World, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese, were different from what had gone before, even though slavery in the Americas made ample use of the Old World precedents. It was difficult to theorize, because an older form of labor organization gained new vigor in a changed economic environment as capitalism developed in a context of increased trade in lucrative commodities such as sugar. Blackburn asserted that the American “slave systems were . . . radically new in character compared with prior forms of slavery, yet they were assembled from apparently traditional ingredients.”¹⁵

Just as the relations between the metropoles and the colonies influenced colonial development, the connections between the European and the American versions of slavery remained important and mutually influential. Spanish governments from the time of Fernando and Isabel tried to maintain close control on American developments as the Spanish empire came into being. The same was true for the later development of Portuguese Brazil. Yet the great distances separating metropolitan Spain and Portugal from their colonies limited what could be done. Officials in the home countries directed the slave trade, issued licenses for the movement of slaves, and had control over the movement of those slaves, some of whom came through Lisbon, Seville, or Cádiz before crossing to the Americas. There was a constant movement of individual slaves back and forth at the orders of their masters, as we saw in previous chapters.

Two systems of slavery were apparent as the Spanish and Portuguese colonies matured. One was small-scale slavery, an outgrowth of the history of slavery in medieval Iberia, in which there were typically only a few slaves per owner, serving as domestic servants, artisan helpers, and additional agricultural workers on small operations. The other—large-scale or gang slavery—was an outgrowth of previous patterns that underwent a new development as plantation agriculture, based at first on sugar cane, and mining operations resulted in large concentrations of slaves. The first was a continuation of the tradition of acquiring slaves as supplemental laborers and domestics that was practiced in the medieval Christian states of the Mediterranean; the second stemmed from a different pattern of gang slavery that can be seen in the ancient Roman world and in some examples in the Islamic world in the Middle Ages. The plantation system lasted through to the end of slavery, and the virulent growth of gang slavery eclipsed the small-scale version over the course of the colonial centuries. This was a major change from the medieval European experience with slavery.

A few free blacks and black slaves accompanied the Europeans from the beginning. A free black population thus developed early on and grew as some black slaves won their freedom. For over a century, people of African descent—both slave and free—served as companions for the Spaniards and served in intermediary roles between the European elite and the mass of the indigenous populations. Conditions were changing by the early seventeenth century. Small-scale slavery persisted but began to become less important. There were more European settlers. The indigenous population had declined, and a complex set of rules and regulations prevented the uncontrolled exploitation of the remaining Amerindians. There was by then a sizable free mixed-race population. They filled the intermediary roles that some black slaves and free blacks had previously occupied. At the same time, large-scale slavery expanded. After the middle of the seventeenth century, Spaniards imported African slaves almost solely for their labor value, for the work they could do in the plantations, mines, and other large-scale establishments. New World slavery became more exclusively gang slavery; the transition was first in Brazil and only later in the Spanish Caribbean islands. The same sort of demand for gang laborers was also found in Brazil and in the English colonies in the Caribbean and North America, which imported more and more slaves from the late seventeenth century onward.

Even though the plantation complex employed the greatest number of slaves, there were numerous varieties of positions that slaves occupied in the Latin American world. Some of these occupations were similar to roles some slaves filled in the home countries; examples include slaves used for prestige purposes, such as butlers and footmen, and slaves owned by civil and religious institutions. Other patterns developed from local conditions in the Americas, such as the use of armed slaves in urban militias and guards units. In the last lands of the Americas, with uninhabited or sparsely settled areas, communities of fugitive slaves could develop, flourish, and in some cases recapitulate African social and political patterns.

The end of slavery in Latin America was long in coming; it lasted well into the late nineteenth century in places such as Brazil and Cuba. Nonetheless, the emergence of attitudes favoring better treatment for slaves and for the abolition of slavery often came from figures based in Iberia and in the Iberian colonies. Their attitudes had application to slavery on both sides of the Atlantic and reflect the emerging cohesion and interconnections of the Atlantic world of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Voices of Spaniards and Portuguese in support of the slaves began to be raised from very early after the transatlantic trade began. They were few at first but gained in number and volume as the slave trade grew. One of the earliest came in a surprising source: Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish Dominican frequently called the apostle of the Indians. It is well known that he proposed that slaves, either African or European, should be taken to the Indies to replace the Indians in the hardest and harshest labor. What was not widely known for centuries is that he subsequently changed his opinion and wrote that slaves should be spared from the arduous work just as the free subjects of the empire were. His views appeared in a few pages of his major work The History of the Indies, a book was not put in print until the late nineteenth century.¹⁶

Other sixteenth-century figures challenged the legality and morality of slavery and anticipated many of the arguments of the more famous abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet most of these critics of aspects of slavery accepted some forms of slavery as legitimate; they were not complete abolitionists. Tomás de Mercado (1525–1575), who had the experience of living in both Spain and Mexico, considered that prisoners of war, children sold by their parents, and those convicted of crimes whose penalties were enslavement could be considered validly enslaved, but others not. Slavery, after all, had been accepted in world societies for millennia and was still flourishing in the Mediterranean and neighboring societies. Elements of slavery and the lives that slaves endured found critics as a number of Spaniards and Portuguese began to object to abuses within the system. Francisco de Vitoria (ca. 1483–1546) accepted enslavement in just war but considered that enslavement that resulted from purchases was morally wrong. Whatever the source of their slaves, Vitoria argued, masters should treat them well. In Mexico, the friar and law professor Bartolomé de Albornoz argued that the acquisition of slaves in West Africa should be considered illicit and immoral and that the slaves’ greater access to Christianity as slaves could not compensate. These Spaniards were joined by Fernão de Oliveira, a Portuguese military officer and writer who suggested in his Arte de Guerra no Mar (1555) that European demand for slaves was motivating African rulers to obtain slaves as prisoners of war in needless and unjustified conflicts and even to kidnap others. The Spanish Dominican Domingo de Soto, who had been a student of Francisco de Vitoria, echoed Oliveira’s views in 1557, when he wrote that it was morally wrong to buy and use people enslaved in these fraudulent ways. Another Spanish Dominican, Alonso de Montúfar, the second archbishop of Mexico, argued in a letter to King Felipe II in 1560 that “we do not know of any just cause why the [Africans] should be captives any more than the Indians.” Martín de Ledesma, still another Spanish Dominican, wrote in the same year that slaves produced by such unjustified means should be freed. The Portuguese Amador Arrais (1530–1600) wrote against the abuses of the slave trade and the impossibility of justifying it on moral grounds.¹⁷

Alonso de Sandoval (1576 or 1577–1652) was another Spaniard with firsthand knowledge of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the suffering of its African victims. Born in Seville, he accompanied his bureaucrat father to Peru, where he received his education in Lima at the Jesuit Colegio de San Pablo and was ordained in that order. Sent to Cartagena de Indias in 1605, he spent most of the rest of his life ministering to the physical and spiritual needs of the newly arrived Africans in what was a principal center of the slave trade into Spanish America. Based on his years of questioning and conversing with the new arrivals and on then current racial theories, he wrote a treatise on slavery, first published in Spanish in Seville in 1627 and later published in an expanded Latin edition in Madrid in 1647. No abolitionist, Sandoval accepted slavery as a given fact but argued for better treatment of the enslaved peoples. He also offered sometimes accurate ethnographic details on the captives and their societies in western and southeastern Africa regions, in large part as guidelines and aids for their conversion to Christianity.¹⁸

Not until later in the seventeenth century can we find full-formed abolitionists in the Spanish Indies. Two of the earliest were Francisco José de Jaca (1645–c. 1689) and Epifanio de Moirans (1644–1689). Jaca was a Capuchin friar and priest from Aragon. Sent by his order to work in Caracas, he made a stop in Cartagena de Indias, where he saw at first hand the horrors of the slave trade and the suffering of those who survived it to arrive in South America. When he reached Caracas, he began a career as an advocate for the Indians, the African slaves, and the missionaries who worked among them. He advocated emancipation for the slaves and excommunication for those who oppressed them. Due to the opposition of slave owners and officials, he was ordered back to Spain. Stopping in Havana on his way, he encountered another Capuchin, the Frenchman Epifanio de Moirans, who shared his views and his commitment to abolition. Jaca delayed his return to Spain and with Moirans preached his message in Havana and other places he visited during this time. Both men preached and both wrote. Jaca’s message was contained mainly in letters to his clerical superiors and to Spanish officials. Moirans wrote Servi liberi seu naturalis mancipiorum libertatis iusta defensio (Free Servants or a Just Defense of the Natural Liberty of the Slaves). After their forced return to Spain, both faced questioning and occasional imprisonment, despite support from important clerical officials in Spain and in Rome. Bureaucrats in the Council of the Indies were unprepared to accept their message and refused to allow them to return to the Americas.¹⁹

In Brazil, too, long-time observers began to question slavery and the slave trade. Jorge Benci and Giovanni Antonio Andreoni, both born in Italian cities but with lengthy residences in Brazil, published works in the early years of the eighteenth century condemning the ill treatment that African slaves received in the colony. Manuel Ribeiro Rocha wrote a treatise in 1758 outlining the horrors of the slave trade and slavery and advocating the end of both.²⁰ With the period of Rocha, we are approaching the point at which attitudes in the Western world began slowly to change, though slavery still had a long time to run in colonies throughout the Americas.

Anti-slavery sentiment had been building over the course of the eighteenth century, fostered by the thought of the Enlightenment and the fervor of radical Protestantism. Both movements had come to focus in England, and the British navy emerged as the main enforcer of the expanding bans on the slave trade. Britain ended its own slave trade in 1794 and abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834. In France, the revolutionary government declared French slaves to be freed in 1794, but once in power Napoleon Bonaparte reestablished slavery, which did not officially end until 1848.

Few slaves in metropolitan Spain remained to be freed in the late eighteenth century. Slavery was a colonial matter by then and died a slow death in the colonies, with long debates and relatively few dramatic moments. The government of Carlos III in 1785 issued a law code for the colonies that improved the lot of the slaves but did not abolish slavery. Although treaties with England in 1814 and 1817 specified an end to the slave trade everywhere in Spanish territory, in the colonies the slaves and their descendants remained in servitude, and the treaties themselves had to be restated and strengthened on several occasions.

The process of ending slavery in Spanish America unfolded in a complicated pattern. With Spain’s Bourbon monarch under house arrest in France and with Napoleon’s brother Joseph precariously occupying the Spanish throne, the constitutional convention of Cádiz considered the question of slavery. In the spring of 1811, two delegates, José Miguel Guridi Alcocer from Mexico and the Spaniard Agustín de Arguëlles, proposed abolishing the institution. Their views did not persuade a majority of the delegates, and slavery remained legal. With the movements of independence in the Americas, Spain lost most of its American possessions, while sovereign republics developed from Mexico to Chile. In the course of time, all abolished slavery. Only Puerto Rico and Cuba, as well as the Philippines in Asia, remained within the Spanish empire. Not surprisingly, slavery lasted longest in those places where it was most significant to the economy. In the Spanish world, that meant Cuba more than Puerto Rico. For the Portuguese world, as we will see a bit later, that meant Brazil.

In the still important remnants of the Spanish American empire, one of the first measures limiting slavery was the royal order of March 1836 directing that slaves from the colonies could no longer be brought to Spain.²¹ In 1840 the Catholic church, in De Nigritarum Commercio, endorsed the abolition of the slave trade. In 1866 a royal decree provided freedom for any slave reaching Spanish soil. The colonial slaves, however, as well as their descendants, remained enslaved. In 1868 a liberal government proposed a law providing for all children born to slave mothers to be free, but opposition from the elite of Cuba, who threatened to declare their island’s independence, meant that the law was not passed. A similar law did take effect in 1870. This was the Law of Moret, which gave freedom to the children of slaves born thereafter and to all slaves over the age of sixty-five. Even then there were concessions to the slave owners in the colonies. The most important provision was that children of slaves did not receive full freedom. They were to work as apprentices for their former owners at no salary until they were eighteen, then at half salary until they were twenty-two. Only then would they be free. And, of course, the Law of Moret left adult slaves in their working prime still in servitude. Even though there were strong elements in Spain and the colonies condemning slavery, the authorities were reluctant to order complete abolition in Puerto Rico and Cuba, mainly because of continuing fears that those islands would also break away from Spain. Anti-slavery attitudes finally prevailed, and slavery was abolished in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1880. In Cuba the slaves freed in that year still had to work for their former masters to compensate them for the price of their freedom. In 1886, finally, the last remaining Cuban quasi-slaves received unconditional freedom.²² Thus the institution of slavery in the Spanish American possessions came to an end in a less than dramatic demise.

The process was equally lengthy in Brazil. Brazil separated from Portugal in 1822 while large numbers of slaves still were being brought to the newly independent country. Laws restricting the slave trade began to appear in 1831, and in 1850 the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil was declared illegal. Freedom for some slaves had to wait until 1871, when the Free Womb Law stated that children subsequently born to slave mothers would be free, although remaining under the control of the master while minors. Finally, full freedom for all Brazilian slaves came in May 1886.²³

When its colonial history is taken into account, Iberia’s experience of slavery was as persistent as that of any European region. We have seen the continuation of slavery in Iberia itself from Roman times to the eighteenth century, despite major religious, political, and economic changes over that period. That experience helped set the conditions for the system of colonial slavery that lasted in the Iberian American possessions from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. It was a logical outcome of patterns existing in Europe, the Near East, and Africa for over a millennium and a half. It had its antecedents in the Old World from Roman times onward and drew also on cultural traditions from the Christian world, the world of Islam, and sub-Saharan Africa. Slavery’s peculiar development in the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is due primarily to the emphasis on the plantation system and its reliance on gang slavery during that period. Regardless of real or perceived differences between the systems of the various European groups in the Americas, slavery there in the two centuries before its final abolition was as harsh a system as the world has known. Slavery of any variety is abhorrent, but the particularly grueling conditions that the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New World slaves endured came primarily from the significance and dominance of gang slavery.

Slavery in Iberia and the Spanish and Portuguese colonial extensions persisted for centuries and ended only in the comparatively recent past. Some of those who were born as slaves in the second half of the nineteenth century in Cuba or Brazil lived on into the mid-twentieth century. Even in the early twenty-first, legacies of slavery’s long history are still apparent throughout the Americas.