Slavery in the Spanish New World colonies

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Slavery in the Spanish colonies began with the enslavement of the local indigenous peoples in their homelands by Spanish settlers. Enslavement and production quotas were used to force the local labor to bring a return on the expedition and colonization investments. Slavery was rampant and abusive during the first decades of the colonization, costing many thousands of indigenous lives through forced labor in mines, and depopulating the West Indies of their native population in a matter of decades. This made colonists require a new source of labor sparking the transatlantic slave trade.

After decades of pressure, primarily from priests and friars who argued that slavery was incompatible with Christianity, the Council of the Indies, mandated to protect the Native People in the Laws of the Indies, stopped the encomienda system and the enforced slavery of the natives. It did not however stop forced labor in the Spanish colonies which took on a new guise under the repartimiento.

Indigenous people enslaved by the Spanish

Spanish colonization of the Americas began with the capture and subjugation of local Indigenous peoples of the Americas, first of the Native Caribbean people by Columbus on his four voyages. Initially, enslavement represented one means by which the Columbus and other Castilians (Spaniards) mobilized native labor and met production quotas. Unlike the Portuguese slave trade, los Reyes Católicos were religiously against developing that for Castile and Aragon with the slaves of Columbus, ordering many of the survivors returned to their Caribbean homelands. The papal bull Sublimus Dei of 1537, to which Spain was committed also officially banned slavery. However, other forms of coerced labor used were the Indian Reductions method, the encomienda system, repartimiento, and the mita.

However after the issuing of the 1542 New Laws the encomienda system saw its power greatly restricted. Later, the 1550 Valladolid debate and the resulting issuing in 1573 of the new statutes within the "Ordinances Concerning Discoveries" forbade slavery and gave strict regulations on the treatment of the local population, such as the implementation of the "protector de indios", an ecclesiastical representative who acted as the protector of the Indians, and represented them in formal litigation.

Later in the 17th century, in the northern New Spain Sonoran Desert Sonora y Sinaloa Province, the nomadic Indigenous people near the Sonoran missions were forcibly relocated and under the excuse of being educated, were enslaved to hard work as underground miners. Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino worked to relieve the conditions as proscribed by the Laws of the Indies (Leyes de Indias), for the rights of the various indigenous Sonoran tribes and their individual members. He successfully opposed the Slavery and compulsory hard labor in the silver mines that some Spaniards tried to force on native people.

The Franciscan Spanish missions in California practiced Indian Reductions of the Californian Native Americans with forced relocation and labor to support the mission industries. The enslavement was not by purchase but military enforcement. This was repeated in other Spanish colonies and provinces upon the Native residents as locally sourced slaves.

Africans during the Spanish Conquest

The enslavement of Africans in the Spanish Americas began in 1502 and was finally outlawed in 1820 in all colonies with the exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico, where it remained in a semi-legal state until it was finally abolished 1866 and 1863 respectively. Native slavery was prohibited during the first half of the sixteenth century, although some enslavement continued under the guise of just war. Most of the earliest black immigrants to the Americas were born in Spain and were not slaves, men such as Pedro Alonso Niño^{[citation needed]}, a navigator who accompanied Christopher Columbus on his first voyage, and the black colonists who helped Nicolás de Ovando form the first Spanish settlement on Hispaniola in 1502. The name of Nuflo de Olano appears in the records as that of a black slave present when Vasco Núñez de Balboa sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Other blacks served with Hernán Cortés when he conquered Mexico and with Francisco Pizarro when he marched into Peru.

Estevanico, one of the survivors of the unfortunate Narváez expedition from 1527 to 1536, was a black slave. With three other survivors, he spent six years traveling overland from Texas to Sinaloa and finally Mexico City, learning several Native American languages in the process. Later, while exploring what is now New Mexico for The Seven Cities of Gold, he lost his life in a dispute with the Zuñi.

Juan Valiente, another black person, led Spaniards in a series of battles against the Araucanian people of Chile between 1540 and 1546. He was rewarded with an estate near Santiago and control of several Native American villages.

José de Rodríguez was another prominent Black Spaniard who served as a buccaneer during the 17th century in the Caribbean waters at Spain's service. He was known for his brutality against British and Dutch prisoners.

Spanish enslavement of Africans

Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) recorded the effects of slavery on the Native populations. Following what many of his contemporaries were suggesting, he initially preferred to replace Natives with African slaves to alleviate their suffering. However, he later spoke against African slavery as well once he saw it in action.

In 1502 the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, granted permission to the colonists of the Caribbean to import African slaves. Opponents of their enslavement cited their weak Christian faith and their penchant for escaping to the mountains. Proponents declared that the rapid diminution of the Native American population required a consistent supply of reliable work hands, since the Spanish population at the time was far too low to carry out all the manual labour needed to assure the economic viability of the colonies as the first years of Spaniard presence in America were marked by a terrible outbreak of a tropical epidemic flu in the Caribbean that decimated the populations of local natives and Spaniard explorers. In 1518 the first shipment of African-born slaves was sent to the West Indies. The Spaniards, although purchasers of slaves, mostly from the Portuguese and the British, did not engage on slave trade on the African coast themselves, and the number of African slaves in their colonies was sensibly inferior to those of Portuguese or British.

While enslaved Africans were vital to the initial conquest and colonization of Spain's American colonies, they were also employed in the empire's defense. Originally the Crown relied on private initiative and resources to protect colonial shipping and settlements. In some cases they were hired out or "donated" by residents or purchased outright by the Crown. All of these projects used enslaved African labor in some measure. Up through the end of the seventeenth century, however, those enslaved by the state itself were a smaller portion of the enslaved employed in defense works.¹

The slave populations were extremely low on Cuba and Puerto Rico until the 1760s, when the British took Havana, Cuba, in 1762. During this time more than 10,000 slaves - a number that would have taken 20 years to import on other islands - were brought in to the port. This change is almost directly related to the opening of Spanish slave trade to other powers in the 18th century, specially the contract between Spain and Great Britain created in 1713 that dealt with the supply of African slaves by the British to which the Spaniards replied by outlawing most of the slave trade of Africans.

While a larger focus has been placed on the production of sugar on plantations by enslaved workers in nineteenth century Cuba, the crucial role of the Spanish state before the 1760s has been largely obscured. In regards to Cuba, the Spanish colony ultimately developed two distinct but interrelated sources using enslaved labor, which converged at the end of the eighteenth century. The first of these sectors was urban and was directed in large measure by the needs of the Spanish colonial state, reaching its height in the 1760s. The second sector, which flourished after 1790, was rural and was directed by private enslavers involved in the production of export agricultural commodities, especially sugar. The scale and urgency of defense projects after 1763 forced the state to recruit and deploy many of its enslaved workers in ways that were to anticipate the work regimes on sugar plantations in the nineteenth century. Another important group of workers enslaved by the Spanish colonial state in the late eighteenth century were the king's enslaved laborers who worked on the city's fortifications.¹

Perhaps due in part to the Spanish colonies' late discovery of the money to be made on slave production of sugarcane, particularly on Cuba, the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean were among the last to make any moves to abolish slavery. While the British colonies abolished slavery completely by 1834, Spain abolished slavery in Puerto Rico in 1863 and in Cuba in 1866. Mainland America saw the abolition of slavery along the 18th century although some countries like Peru re-legalized it for some decades after declaring independence from Spain.

Spanish liberation of British slaves

Since the beginning of the 18th century Spanish Florida was attracting a large number of Africans slaves who escaped from British slavery in North America. The slaves, once they made it to Florida, were given freedom after they converted to Roman Catholicism. Most of them settled down in a community called Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, the first settlement of free slaves in North America.

Those African slaves also found refuge among Creek and Seminole Native Americans who had established settlements in Florida at the invitation of the Spanish government. In 1771, Governor John Moultrie wrote to the English Board of Trade that “It has been a practice for a good while past, for negroes to run away from their Masters, and get into the Indian towns, from whence it proved very difficult to get them back.” When British government officials pressured the Native Americans to return the runaway African slaves, they replied that they had "merely given hungry people food, and invited the slaveholders to catch the runaways themselves."

Ending of slavery

The influence of European demands for the abolition of slavery and the example of the French Revolution were increasingly in evidence in slave unrest. Later slave revolts were arguably part of the upsurge of liberal and democratic values centered on individual rights and liberties which accompanied the transition to capitalism in Europe. As emancipation became more of a concrete reality, the slaves' concept of freedom changed. No longer did they seek to overthrow the whites and re-establish carbon-copy African societies as they had done during the earlier rebellions; the vast majority of slaves were now creole and envisaged their freedom within the established framework of the existing society.²

The Spanish American wars of independence emancipated most of the overseas territories of Spain, and divided it in many different countries. Although slavery did not influence the war, the war was influenced by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment and economic affairs, which also led to the reduction and ending of feudalism. It was not an unified process, and some countries like Peru and Ecuador reintroduced slavery for some time after the independence.

In the treaty of 1814, the king of Spain promised to consider means for abolishing the trade; so, referring to this promise the king states in the treaty of September 23, 1817, with Great Britain that "having never lost sight of a matter so interesting to him and being desirous of hastening the moment of its attainment, he has determined to co-operate with His Britannic Majesty in adopting the cause of humanity." The king bound himself "that the slave trade will be abolished in all the dominions of Spain, May 30, 1820, and that after that date it shall not be lawful for any subject of the crown of Spain to buy slaves or carry on the slave trade upon any part of the coast of Africa." The date of final suppression was October 30. The subjects of the king of Spain were forbidden to carry slaves for any one outside of the Spanish dominions, or to use the flag to cover such dealings.³

The Assembly of Year XIII of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata declared the freedom of wombs. It did not end slavery completely, but emancipated the sons of slaves. Many slaves gained emancipation by joining the armies, either against royalists during the War of Independence, or during the Civil Wars. The Argentine Confederation ended slavery definitely with the sanction of the Argentine Constitution of 1853.

References and notes

1.Shepherd, Verene A., ed. Slavery Without Sugar. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002. Print. 2.Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society. London: James Curry Ltd, 1990. Print. 3.Aimes, Hubert H. A History of Slavery in Cuba 1511 to 1868. New York, NY : Octagon Books Inc, 1967. Print.

See also

• Atlantic slave trade
• European colonization of the Americas
• Slavery in the British and French Caribbean