Introduction
That Cuba experienced a sugar revolution from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century is a fact with which almost every historian of the Spanish Caribbean is deeply familiar. This has been the case at least since the publication of Manuel Moreno Fraginals’s and Franklin W. Knight’s classic books, El ingenio (1964) and Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (1970) respectively.Footnote 1 One only has to consider the exponential increase in the number of enslaved Africans on the island to grasp the nature and extent of this sugar revolution. From about 44,333 enslaved Africans in 1774, the number rose to a whopping 436,500 in 1841.Footnote 2 Sugar exports followed a similar trend. In 1750, the island exported 4,969 metric tons of sugar; a century later, the island’s sugar exports rose to a remarkable 294,952 metric tons.Footnote 3 The fact that Cuba’s slave society emerged just as the Haitian Revolution and British abolitionism posed a significant threat to the institution of slavery across the Atlantic is all the more astonishing. As Ada Ferrer has aptly suggested, Cuba’s sugar revolution was “freedom’s mirror,” for the island’s increasing reliance on bonded African labor occurred in conjunction with its simultaneous decline elsewhere in the Atlantic.Footnote 4
While Cuba’s swift transformation into a plantation-based slave society was remarkable, it was not, in some ways, entirely surprising. Recognizing that the demand for sugar remained steady—or even increased—during the revolutionary upheaval of Saint-Domingue, which decimated its once-dominant sugar industry, the Cuban plantation-owning class quickly mobilized whatever resources it had at its disposal, political and economic, to replace Saint-Domingue as the main producer of sugar in the Caribbean, a process often associated with the emergence of “the second slavery.”Footnote 5 Moreover, beyond this moment of market opportunity, Cuba’s rather quick transition toward plantation slavery occurred because elites with relentless plantation aspirations had laid the political groundwork within the Spanish Empire years earlier. One man in particular stands out as the political and intellectual architect of Cuba’s sugar revolution: Francisco de Arango y Parreño. A member of the Cuban patriciate, Arango y Parreño was hired by the Cuban plantation elite as its apoderado (a proxy with power of attorney to lobby on behalf of a given interest group) to push for the liberalization of the slave trade, which the Cuban elite needed to bypass the burdens of the asiento (monopoly contract system) and streamline the importation of enslaved Africans to the island.Footnote 6 Starting in 1788 and stretching through the first half of the 1790s, Arango y Parreño presented a series of papers and proposals to ministers in the court, hoping to convince them that the liberalization of the slave trade was of vital necessity if Cuba were to improve its agricultural output.Footnote 7
By all measures, Arango y Parreño was exceptionally successful. He presented his first formal plan for the liberalization of the slave trade on February 6, 1789.Footnote 8 In record time, the Spanish Crown seemed to acquiesce to his demands, as it approved the first real cédula (royal decree) liberalizing the slave trade on February 28, 1789.Footnote 9 And while the 1789 Real Cédula de Su Magestad concediendo libertad para el comercio de negros only liberalized the slave trade to the ports of Havana, Santiago (though foreigners were not allowed in this port), Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Cabello (Venezuela) for a period of two years, Arango y Parreño—supported by a host of petitions from Caribbean elites—managed to convince the Junta de Estado (the empire’s cabinet of ministers) to extend the liberalization decree for two more years on February 20, 1791.Footnote 10 More significantly, on August 15 of the same year, the Junta de Estado liberalized the slave trade for a period of six years, counting the two years already granted on February 20, so that the liberalization decree would now expire in December of 1797.Footnote 11 Finally, on November 24, 1791, the Junta de Estado added additional ports to the liberalization decree, which now included Cartagena, Rio Hacha, Montevideo, Puerto Cabello, La Guaira, Maracaibo, Cumaná, Nueva Barcelona, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Havana.Footnote 12 While the latter concession to the Spanish American elite was not solely due to Arango y Parreño’s lobbying efforts—elites from New Granada and Río de la Plata also sent numerous petitions—it is clear that his success in 1789 opened space for a host of elite voices from other Spanish American territories.Footnote 13
The story outlined above is, of course, well known among specialists. What historians have failed to realize, however, is that, long before Arango y Parreño made his successful debut in the Spanish court, the Santo Domingo elite, which developed early and intense plantation dreams because of Santo Domingo’s proximity to and envy of its neighbor in Saint-Domingue, had already made a deliberate, sustained, and ultimately successful bid for important economic concessions geared toward erecting a plantation society in the eastern side of Hispaniola. In fact, the first liberalization decree was not in 1789 as most historians have assumed, but in 1786, when the crown issued the first liberalization decree for Santo Domingo.Footnote 14 And while the 1786 real cédula did not allow foreigners to sell enslaved Africans in Santo Domingo, only for the Dominican elite to purchase human cargo in foreign colonies, it, nonetheless, was a decisive moment in the crown’s move away from the asiento monopoly system for the provisioning of enslaved Africans in Spanish America.Footnote 15 In fact, Arango y Parreño himself acknowledged his debt to the Santo Domingo elite in a letter he wrote the crown in 1792, precisely when he presented his infamous and influential treatise titled “Discurso sobre la agricultura en La Habana y medios de fomentarla.” In this letter, Arango y Parreño insisted in a rather nonchalant way that the only thing he was requesting for Cuba was the same concessions the crown had already made to Santo Domingo in the real cédula of April 12, 1786, namely the unlimited right to purchase enslaved Africans from foreign colonies, for unlike the real cédula of 1789, which was granted for a period of two years, the 1786 concession to the Dominican elite did not have an expiration date.Footnote 16
This article centers the many efforts that the Santo Domingo elite made to secure the important concessions they received in 1786, which, in a fundamental way, prepared the way for men such as Arango y Parreño years later. While the Dominican elites had long harbored an interest in establishing a plantation-based slave society in Santo Domingo, it was in the 1760s that they began to make a deliberate effort to secure essential concessions from the crown, including tax exemptions, loans, freedom to import enslaved Africans, and the ability to export tropical commodities and cattle to foreign colonies. The petitions of the Santo Domingo elite were grounded in two main ideas. First, as the cradle of the plantation complex in the sixteenth century, local elites were convinced that Santo Domingo should recover its rightful place in the constellation of sugar colonies in the Caribbean.Footnote 17 And second, elites were convinced that the erection of a plantation complex in Santo Domingo was exceedingly feasible, considering that, with less territory and less fertile land than the Spanish, the French had accomplished something impressive in Saint-Domingue. The ultimate goal was to convince the crown that Santo Domingo had the potential to become the most productive sugar colony in the Americas. The project of the Dominican elites was a tall order, as the crown was not always on board. Be that as it may, their plantation dreams, unrealized though they remained, ultimately received important concessions with the real cédula of 1786, paving the way for what was to come in Cuba and the rest of the empire. In recovering this history, this article demonstrates that we cannot understand the origins of Cuba’s prolific, if lugubrious, sugar revolution without studying it in tandem with Santo Domingo’s unrealized plantation complex.
Santo Domingo’s Revived Plantation Dreams
On January 18, 1767, the governor of Santo Domingo, Manuel de Azlor, forwarded a petition from the Cabildo (town council) of Santo Domingo, along with a letter of support from the governor himself, to the minister of the Indies, Julián de Arriaga. The cabildo’s petition, similar to Azlor’s letter, insisted that Santo Domingo should recover its rightful place in the Caribbean as an important sugar colony, especially considering that the island was “the fertile mother of sugar.” By the latter expression, the governor and the cabildo were alluding to the fact that Santo Domingo was the New World’s first slave society as early as the first half of the sixteenth century, when it exploited enslaved African labor to produce sugar for external markets.Footnote 18 The cabildo knew its history, but it selectively failed to remark that one of the key reasons for the ultimate collapse of Santo Domingo’s early plantation complex was the proliferation of maroon communities; indeed, the act of escape itself slowly but surely rendered Santo Domingo’s early sugar industry uncompetitive and unprofitable.Footnote 19 Be that as it may, the selective historical memory of both the cabildo and Azlor is evidence of the confidence with which they often communicated with the crown. They were thoroughly convinced, in other words, that, if granted the right concessions and liberties, Santo Domingo would undoubtedly become the envy of the Caribbean, especially among those ruthless plantation entrepreneurs who were willing to go to great lengths, inflicting enormous human suffering along the way, to maximize profits by enslaving large numbers of Africans.
Their confidence notwithstanding, the crown had proven to be quite skeptical of the cabildo’s and the governor’s designs in previous years. In fact, the cabildo’s petition and Azlor’s letter from early 1767 were delivered to the Council of the Indies some years after Santo Domingo’s plantation dreams had suffered important blows from the crown. Already on October 18, 1760, Azlor had written the crown a letter with a peculiar proposal.Footnote 20 He began by complaining that a significant number of maroons from the neighboring colony of Saint-Domingue had fled to the Neiba Valley in the southwestern portion of Spanish Santo Domingo. He proposed that the crown should declare these maroons “bienes vacantes” (“abandoned assets”), authorizing the local colonial authorities to capture the runaway enslaved people and subsequently sell them to local hacendados (estate owners), thus empowering the latter to improve the colony’s agricultural output and earning the Royal Treasury some additional revenue along the way. Azlor’s proposal received a less enthusiastic response than he expected; it was examined in the Council of the Indies nearly four years later, on April 6, 1764. Rather than capturing maroons to sell them to local hacendados, the Council of the Indies insisted that the maroons of the Neiba Valley should be civilized in liberty, transforming them in the process into useful Christian subjects.Footnote 21 The king agreed with the Council of the Indies on April 8, 1764 and issued a corresponding real cédula on October 21, 1764. In a nutshell, the 1764 real cédula established that runaway enslaved individuals should not be returned to their previous owners, nor should they be re-enslaved in Spanish territories. Rather, local authorities should endeavor to educate and civilize them, with the goal of transforming them into free, useful, and Christian subjects.Footnote 22
While the 1764 real cédula was an important setback for Azlor and the Santo Domingo elite, the governor remained adamant about convincing the crown that it had made a mistake. On December 10, 1765, Azlor wrote another letter arguing that liberty for runaway enslaved people
is harmful because it makes it easier for them to maintain an idle life without applying themselves to work, which results in the vices to which they are destined, to the serious detriment of the common good. If the king publicizes this resolution, it will essentially annul the effects of slavery on all French slaves, who could escape to achieve freedom in the dominions of the king.
For this reason, Azlor was convinced that the 1764 cédula “would cause the ruin of that island.”Footnote 23 Disappointed and outraged by the 1764 cédula, Azlor also decided to reach out to the French authorities of Saint-Domingue and secretly confessed that, though the cédula prevented him from returning maroons to their rightful French owners, he would continue to return them as was commonly practiced before.Footnote 24 The crown learnt of Azlor’s defiant behavior, namely revealing state secrets to the French, on June 17, 1765 and proceeded to reprimand him somewhat sternly, suggesting that his retirement from the governorship was forthcoming.Footnote 25 However, this time around, the Council of the Indies admitted that, as Azlor had commented, the cédula of October 21, 1764, “would destroy slavery,” for which reason it cautiously recommended that Azlor should attempt to capture some of the maroons living in the Neiba Valley. The king approved this new measure on July 9, 1766.Footnote 26
Azlor took the new decision of July 9, 1766 as a sign that the council and the crown were finally coming to their senses.Footnote 27 Wasting little time, Azlor proceeded to organize an expedition to capture the maroons of Neiba, which he concluded on March 3, 1767. Azlor then informed the crown on March 26, 1767 that he had burnt the two maroon settlements he encountered during his expedition but was only able to capture seven people, even though he had taken 400 troops, a considerable number for a colony as small as Santo Domingo. Azlor seemed to have been surprised that maroons were well prepared. In fact, by building various traps, especially ditches, the maroons of Neiba had killed a considerable number of his troops. What is more, it was nearly impossible to locate them because they lived in “bejucos” (a vine used to build furniture, utensils, and structures) and “parapetos pequeños” (“small parapets”) that blended well with the forest. He confessed that after 40 days, his troops were “extremely fatigued,” which is why he decided to abandon the expedition at that point. Because of the difficulty of the task, he recommended for the crown to approve the formation of a small militia, which would be stationed in “puestos rayanos con aquellas montañas” (“posts adjacent to those mountains”), to capture the maroons of Neiba. Perhaps to Azlor’s disappointment, the council reverted back to the position it had held in the 1764 cédula, namely that maroons should not be captured by force or returned to their French owners. Rather, the council reiterated that the governor should “make sure to attract them [maroons] by all the gentle means available and if necessary by a pardon that in the name of His Majesty should be offered to them; once this goal is achieved, they will be reduced to settlement and a Christian life.”Footnote 28 Azlor lost this battle, but, as we shall see, he remained relentless in his conviction that Santo Domingo should become a slave society similar to its French counterpart on the western side of the island.
As should be apparent, Azlor’s letter to the crown on January 18, 1767—the letter in the beginning of the section—was but one instantiation of his years-long effort to erect a plantation complex in Santo Domingo, an effort that won him the support of the cabildo, which requested the extension of his governorship on January 9, 1767.Footnote 29 The support of the cabildo emboldened him and prompted him to collaborate more closely with the Santo Domingo elite. As we have seen at the beginning of this section, Azlor’s letter of January 18 was also accompanied by a petition from the cabildo. In this petition, the cabildo claimed that the main reason for which the colony had not been able to improve its agricultural output was that it lacked enslaved labor. Of course, purchasing more enslaved people would have been an easy solution, but the root of the problem was that the elites with plantation dreams lacked enough capital to purchase enslaved Africans. Consequently, they requested for the king to purchase 500 enslaved Africans on a yearly basis for a period of three years, for a total of 1,500 enslaved people. These enslaved Africans would subsequently be sold to Santo Domingo’s hacendados on credit. In turn, the cabildo promised that the local hacendados would repay the enslaved individuals they bought within a year. If, however, they did not manage to pay their debt within the stipulated year, the crown would be able to charge a 2.5% interest rate on the remaining balance until the debt was settled. In sharing this petition with the minister of the Indies, the governor wished to add political weight to the cabildo’s proposal. In fact, Azlor went beyond the original requests of the cabildo, arguing that, in addition to the 1,500 enslaved Africans, the crown should grant hacendados tax exemptions and, most importantly, the right to export the commodities they produced to foreign colonies, especially the neighboring colony of Saint-Domingue, whose insatiable appetite for cattle could offer an important economic boon to Santo Domingo.Footnote 30
That the Cabildo of Santo Domingo petitioned for a series of concessions was not an extraordinary event, as this is how imperial politics worked in the Spanish Empire. In fact, almost every single real cédula about the Indies started with a petition. Oftentimes, when the king granted the requests of a given petition, its language was copied almost verbatim in the corresponding real cédula.Footnote 31 The Council of the Indies was normally the first to receive petitions from Spain’s extra-European territories. Petitions were then sent for review to the fiscal (crown lawyer) of New Spain or Peru, depending on the provenance of the petition. In the case of Santo Domingo, the petitions would have been sent to the fiscal of New Spain. At least since the creation of the Contaduría General in the 1750s, petitions were also normally sent for review to the contador general (general accountant).Footnote 32 The contador normally wrote an informe (report), while the fiscal wrote a dictamen or respuesta fiscal (legal opinion), which were then sent to the Council of the Indies. Finally, the ministers of the council normally wrote a consulta (recommendation), which summarized the petition, the dictamen, and the informe before making a final recommendation to the king. More often than not, the king adopted the recommendations of the council’s consulta. The creation of the Secretarías de Estado del Despacho Universal (ministries of state) in the early eighteenth century reduced the competencies of the Council of the Indies.Footnote 33 Most significantly, the petitions would now normally land at the desk of the minister of the Indies, who could either decide to send them to the council or take them directly to the king. In spite of these changes, most of the petitions discussed in this article went through the review process in the Council of the Indies, for reasons that are not entirely clear.
In a detailed legal opinion, the contador general delivered his assessment of the cabildo’s petition on February 27, 1768, arguing that, as a whole, the petition and Azlor’s supportive letter were plagued by “falta de solidez y conocimiento” (“lack of solidity and knowledge”). While the contador seemed to agree with the idea of buying 1,500 enslaved Africans over a period of three years and then selling them on credit to local hacendados, he argued that unlimited tax exemptions were unjustified. Instead, he contended that the taxes for the importation of goods and enslaved people should be lowered, though not eliminated, for a period of ten years and only for new agricultural enterprises, as the goal was to incentivize new hacendados to improve the island’s agricultural output. As for the export of sugar to other ports within the empire, the contador thought that, as in the case of the island of Cuba, it should pay the 5% tax established in the comercio libre (free trade) decree of 1765, which was the first among a series of decrees that liberalized the empire’s internal, though not international, trade.Footnote 34 The fiscal of New Spain, who had submitted his legal opinion on July 9, 1767, was even more critical than the contador. While he concurred with the contador that the tax exemptions should only be granted for a period of ten years, the fiscal insisted that purchasing 1,500 Africans was too burdensome for the Royal Treasury. Rather than focusing on introducing a large number of enslaved Africans, the fiscal insisted that the governor of Santo Domingo had to focus on compelling the lazy and idle to work.Footnote 35
The consulta of the Council of the Indies, which was issued on March 22, 1768, began, as was normally the case, by tediously describing the succession of letters and legal opinions that preceded the council’s deliberations. To mediate between the opinions of the contador and the fiscal, the consulta recommended that the king lower, though not eliminate, taxes for exports to peninsular Spain for a period of ten years. It agreed to provide the 1,500 enslaved Africans on credit, as originally requested by the Cabildo of Santo Domingo, even though the fiscal had expressed serious reservations about this concession in his opinion of July 9, 1767. What is more, the consulta went beyond the petition and the legal opinions of the fiscal and the contador, suggesting that the king should encourage the settlement of Catholic subjects on the island to increase further Santo Domingo’s agricultural output. Additionally, the consulta recommended the erection of a Junta de Agricultura (Board of Agriculture) on the island—a recommendation that was finally formalized with the real cédula of 1786—to discuss, recommend, and implement measures to improve Santo Domingo’s agriculture. The king approved the consulta in its entirety on August 16, 1769, including tax reductions for ten years, 1,500 enslaved Africans on credit over three years, and the authorization to create the Board of Agriculture.Footnote 36
In parallel to the aforementioned petitions, the cabildo was also busy writing a “slave code” that sought to institute a host of rules and norms that facilitated Santo Domingo’s plantation dreams.Footnote 37 Drafted at some point in 1768, the slave code in question was specifically concerned with preventing enslaved people from becoming maroons. The code’s subtitle made this evident, stating that the goal was “the correction of the desertion of black slaves, as well as for their subjection and assistance.”Footnote 38 As evidenced in Article 1, one of the key goals of the code was to finance a specialized squad of nine officers and a captain to hunt down maroons across the island. To control their movement, Article 6 affirmed that enslaved people who left their plantations had to carry at all times a permission slip signed by the owner or overseer.Footnote 39 Article 24 established that free Black or mulatto people who hid runaway slaves would be subjected to a penalty of four pesos, fifty whip lashes, and the responsibility to pay retroactive daily wages to the owners.Footnote 40 The goal of capturing maroons was, as we have seen, one of Azlor’s main preoccupations since at least October 18, 1760, when he proposed the first plan to capture the Neiba maroons. And whether Azlor himself pushed the Santo Domingo elite to care about this or not, the fact remains that the elites, just as the governor, remained adamant about capturing maroons, which suggests that they were deeply committed to putting an end to the largest threat to their plantation dreams, namely formerly enslaved people living freely in the mountains.
So fixated on capturing maroons and keeping them enslaved were the elites who wrote the slave code of 1768 that, against the Spanish laws of the Siete Partidas and the tradition of coartación, by which enslaved people could purchase their own freedom, Articles 37 and 38 of the said code restricted enslaved people’s ability to secure manumission.Footnote 41 It also curtailed owners’ ability to manumit their own slaves, insisting that freed Black individuals were a source of crime across the island.Footnote 42 The 1768 code was perhaps the most stringent slave society anyone had envisioned until then in the Spanish Empire. To the Dominican elite’s chagrin, the code was never approved; Vicente de Herrera, the fiscal of the Audiencia (high court) of Santo Domingo, ordered, on May 23, 1768, that the code could not contradict any of the reales cédulas issued for the island stretching back to the sixteenth century.Footnote 43 Beyond the fact that this was an immense task, the Dominican elite knew it could not make the 1768 slave code compatible with the laws of the Indies, for it envisioned a legal slave regime that had never existed in the Hispanic world, including at the height of Santo Domingo’s plantation complex in the sixteenth century.Footnote 44 Even if they had continued to pursue approval from the Council of the Indies, there was very little chance their efforts would have succeeded, for the crown was not exactly interested in relegating Black people to plantation slavery. The crown also needed Afro-descendants to become useful subjects, whether that meant joining the Bourbon disciplined militias or maintaining the political and economic infrastructure of the empire.Footnote 45
The failure of the 1768 slave code notwithstanding, the Santo Domingo elite was relentless. Even before officially receiving significant concessions on August 16, 1769, which included import and export tax exemptions for ten years, 1,500 enslaved Africans on credit over three years, and the authorization to create the Board of Agriculture, they now requested exemptions from alcabalas (sales tax) on January 8, 1768.Footnote 46 An empire-wide sales tax, the alcabalas were an important source of revenue for the local royal treasuries.Footnote 47 Nevertheless, there was not an empire-wide alcabala rate, as each viceroyalty, captaincy-general, province, and kingdom could negotiate lower rates or temporary suspensions.Footnote 48 This kind of particularism was typical of Spanish imperial politics, and the Santo Domingo elite endeavored to exploit it to their advantage. They claimed that a series of hurricanes in 1765 and 1766 had left the inhabitants of the island even poorer than before. On January 31, 1769, the council and the king asked the governor and the audiencia to explain, with concrete numbers, how much this concession would cost the Royal Treasury.Footnote 49 On January 7, 1769, some days before the council requested more information, the Cabildo of Santo Domingo wrote the crown once again, insisting that they could not pay the alcabalas. This time they mentioned that they had already been relieved of alcabalas for a period of five years in 1762, but that the hurricanes and droughts of 1765 and 1766 prevented them from taking advantage of said concessions. It is not clear whether the report from the audiencia ever arrived, but the council examined the case once again on June 10, 1772. The council recommended suspending the alcabalas for ten years starting from when the previous suspension ended (1767), which meant that the island would be exempt from alcabalas until 1777. The king approved the recommendation on July 11, 1772.Footnote 50 In 1776, right before the temporary alcabala suspension expired, the Cabildo of Santo Domingo petitioned for another temporary suspension. The council and the king agreed to the request, extending the suspension of the alcabalas until January 1782.Footnote 51 This, of course, was a partial victory, but the Santo Domingo elite had more ambitious aspirations. In a word, they wanted more liberties and opportunities to import enslaved Africans.
The Liberalization of the Slave Trade in Santo Domingo
At an unspecified date in 1783, Juan Bautista de Oyarzábal took advantage of the series of concessions the crown had been granting to the Santo Domingo elite for at least a decade and a half to petition for a host of additional concessions for his own plantation business. A relative of Simón de Aragorri, the Marqués de Iranda, who was a sophisticated economic thinker and entrepreneur with business interests stretching from the Caribbean to the Philippines, Oyarzábal was an up-and-coming hacendado in Santo Domingo with ambitious plantation dreams.Footnote 52 In addition to requesting tax exemptions to import enslaved Africans, which had expired in 1782, Oyarzábal also asked for the crown to grant him exemptions to import tools and utensils that were necessary for sugar production. Attempting to revive the now defunct slave code of 1768, this ambitious hacendado also insisted on the need to write and implement a new “ordinance or code for the political and moral government of slaves.”Footnote 53
The petition was successful beyond Oyarzábal’s wildest dreams. While the fiscal and the contador, especially the latter, submitted rather ambivalent legal opinions of the petition, they, nonetheless, cautiously recommended that Oyarzábal’s requests should be granted to all hacendados of the colony.Footnote 54 The council then issued its consulta on November 17, 1783, recommending for Oyarzábal to be allowed to import 400 enslaved Africans directly from foreign colonies along with whatever tools and utensils he deemed necessary free of taxes for a period of ten years. The consulta also recommended exempting him from the diezmo (tithe) for ten years. What is more, the council, following the recommendations of the contador general and the fiscal, concluded that the issues raised by Oyarzábal’s petition should be discussed in the council in more detail, beyond the application to an individual. In other words, the council recommended a more extensive discussion on whether it would be beneficial to extend the aforementioned concessions to all subjects from Santo Domingo who wanted to erect new plantations.Footnote 55 The king agreed with the Council of the Indies, as he approved its recommendations on January 7, 1784 and determined that a more detailed conversation was necessary to assess whether it would be beneficial to apply these particular concessions to all subjects.Footnote 56
The most interesting legal opinion to arise from Oyarzábal’s petition was the contador general’s informe. With origins in the Canary Islands, Francisco Machado Fiesco, the contador general, collaborated closely with the minister of the Indies, José de Gálvez, in reforming the empire’s fiscal system starting in 1777, when he was appointed to the Contaduría General, a post he held until 1794.Footnote 57 Machado started from the premise that “the introduction of blacks to America was a very serious evil because it rendered work among Spaniards, who were previously industrious, and even among Indians disgraceful.” Be that as it may, there was no turning back, and Spain had to assume that slavery was there to stay. However, while enslaved Africans had sometimes been treated as mere “mercaderías” (“commodities”), in fact they were men, who, though “miserable because of a bad fortune dictated by Divine Providence,” were useful Christian subjects in the making who could help populate the empire and increase its economic output.Footnote 58 And yet, even though Machado seemed to agree with the Siete Partidas that slavery was in some fundamental ways against natural law and even though he expressed some reservations about the institution, he, nonetheless, opted for realpolitik. He insisted that the truth was that enslaved African labor was cheaper than free white labor, and Spain would be unable to compete with the French and the British unless it also imported enslaved Africans.Footnote 59 Indeed, Machado’s report captured the mood of the council and the court more generally: While slavery was morally indefensible, it, nonetheless, could not be dispensed with for competitive reasons.
Meanwhile, the slave code that Oyarzábal had recommended in his 1783 petition was already in the works, and by 1784, it had been drafted.Footnote 60 Similar to the 1768 code, the 1784 code represented the interests of the plantation elite. Be that as it may, in its consulta of November 17 1783, the Council of the Indies ordered the Audiencia of Santo Domingo to write the new code, perhaps to temper the enslaving fever of the local elites and to avoid the problem of the 1768 code, which completely disregarded Spanish law and the laws of the Indies.Footnote 61 The man selected for the job was Agustín Emparán y Orbe, an oidor (magistrate) at the Audiencia of Santo Domingo who had held the said position since 1779.Footnote 62 In contrast to the authors of the 1768 code, who consulted previous slave legislation only tangentially, Emparán seemed to have made a deliberate effort to examine Santo Domingo’s previous slave legislation before writing the new code, perhaps in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of the 1768 slave code, in particular its utter disregard of Spanish legal precedent. The fact remains, however, that the magistrates of the audiencia were almost always enmeshed with the local elites, whether it be through marriage, patronage, or business, which is why the 1784 code reflected, at its core, the Santo Domingo elite’s plantation dreams.Footnote 63
Perspicaciously, if also deviously, the authors understood that a code exclusively dedicated to policing the movement of free and enslaved people of color would likely face rejection by the Council of the Indies, which is why the 1784 code began by assuring that enslaved people were entitled to receiving a proper religious education.Footnote 64 This was a mere façade, however. The main goal of the code becomes evident in Law 4 of Chapter 3, which affirmed that, to erect a well-ordered slave society, “it becomes necessary to establish the most severe subordination and discipline of it [the population of free and enslaved people of color] toward the white population as the fundamental basis of the internal order of the agricultural colonies of the New World.”Footnote 65 More importantly, Law 6 of Chapter 3 clearly stated that Black people and first-generation mulatto people would not be allowed to receive any schooling, as their exclusive purpose should be to work in agriculture.Footnote 66 Laws 7–11 of Chapter 3 further stipulated that disrespect from people of color toward a white person of any status was punishable by whipping and other severe punishments.Footnote 67 Finally, Law 1 of Chapter 7 specified that “under the most severe penalties, no black or brown tercerón (a desecendant of white and mulatto parents with African features) could practice any art or mechanical profession, which must be reserved for white people, quadroons and mestizos, by preference to their color.”Footnote 68 Clearly, this slave code aspired to erect a new racial order where most people of color, no matter their status or wealth, would be completely subordinate to whites. To the Santo Domingo elite’s disappointment, the Council of the Indies never approved the 1784 slave code.Footnote 69
If the Santo Domingo elites never succeeded in convincing the crown to approve any of their slave codes, they nonetheless remained relentless in demanding manifold concessions to realize their plantation dreams. Aside from the petitions and the other internal bureaucratic efforts they had orchestrated for decades before, a theologian and jurist from Santo Domingo named Antonio Sánchez Valverde took it upon himself to write a full treatise, titled Idea del valor de la Isla Española, that forcefully argued for the erection of a slave society akin to Saint-Domingue in Santo Domingo. Published in 1785, Sánchez Valverde wrote the book while residing in Madrid in the 1780s, having been compelled to leave Santo Domingo following conflicts with the local colonial authorities.Footnote 70 And while Sánchez Valverde seemed to be of partial African descent and although he seemed to have more flexible and heterodox notions of race than Dominican sugar entrepreneurs, he was nonetheless fully on board with transforming Santo Domingo into a slave society, where the brutal exploitation of enslaved African labor would increase the colony’s agricultural output. The book started from the premise that Santo Domingo’s backwardness was not the result of creoles’ inherent laziness and lack of industriousness, as many Enlightenment thinkers had suggested.Footnote 71 Rather, the problem was that the right policies had not yet been instituted on the island.
To bolster his policy recommendation, namely the mass importation of enslaved Africans, Sánchez Valverde began with a historical narrative. After narrating the island’s economic history, from the height of its plantation complex during the first half of the sixteenth century to its eventual depopulation in the following century, Sánchez Valverde argued that the reason for France’s success and Spain’s failure was the persistence of political errors on the Spanish side.Footnote 72 First, the slow decline of Santo Domingo’s plantation complex in the late sixteenth century prompted Spaniards to depart to other Spanish colonies, leaving Santo Domingo underpopulated and vulnerable.Footnote 73 As this took place, foreign interlopers began to infiltrate various parts of the island, which led the Santo Domingo authorities to institute policies that depopulated the island even further.Footnote 74 And while Sánchez Valverde admitted that Santo Domingo recovered slightly in the eighteenth century, he insisted that it was only because the economic dynamism of the French side incentivized the production of crops and cow hides on the Spanish side.Footnote 75 This slight recovery notwithstanding, Santo Domingo’s economic performance paled in comparison with Saint-Domingue, and Sánchez Valverde was convinced that the reason for this discrepancy was simple: Saint-Domingue had a vastly greater number of enslaved Africans than Santo Domingo.Footnote 76 For Sánchez Valverde, the only way to ensure Santo Domingo’s prosperity was to facilitate and incentivize the importation of enslaved Africans by allowing foreign slave traders to sell them directly on the island.Footnote 77
The council met again to discuss Santo Domingo’s plantation dreams on June 8, 1785.Footnote 78 Oyarzábal’s and Sanchéz Valverde’s efforts paid off handsomely. The council recommended that the concessions granted to Oyarzábal in 1784 should now be extended to all hacendados from Santo Domingo. It also suggested that enterprising foreigners should be enticed to the island. Going beyond what Oyarzábal had requested in his original petition and drawing on a proposal the Junta de Agricultura of Santo Domingo had sent to the court on September 10, 1776, the consulta recommended a series of wide-ranging concessions.Footnote 79 Most importantly, the consulta recommended freedom to import enslaved Africans, although it did not go as far as the 1776 proposal of the junta, which would have required the state to purchase enslaved people to be sold on credit to hacendados, a concession that, as we have seen, the cabildo had previously obtained in 1769 for three years. In addition to recommending a series of tax exemptions, the consulta proposed a tax on enslaved people destined to work in domestic service rather than agriculture.Footnote 80 Furthermore, the council recommended the creation of a slave code, the reduction of mortgage rates to 3%, and the institution of measures that protected agriculture, as opposed to cattle ranching, which it did not deem very profitable or useful. On September 22, 1785, the king approved all the recommendations of the council. This formed the basis for the real cédula of April 1786, which while not allowing foreign merchants to sell enslaved Africans on the island, did authorize residents of Santo Domingo to purchase enslaved Africans in foreign colonies, opening the way for the liberalization of the slave trade in the Spanish Empire.Footnote 81
The concession to Santo Domingo was unprecedented and exceptional—a fact that did not escape the attention of the Cuban plantation elite. Similar to the Santo Domingo elite, the Cuban patriciate had been petitioning for the liberalization of the slave trade since the 1760s. In 1760, for instance, Nicolás Joseph de Ribera, a professor at the Real y Pontificia Universidad de San Gerónimo de La Habana, wrote a manuscript titled “Descripción de la isla de Cuba,” which, among other things, proposed the liberalization of the slave trade, in particular because, when “slaves abound,” so does “sugar, tobacco, and everything the island produces.”Footnote 82 A petition from the Cabildo of Havana followed suit in 1764, almost at the same time that Manuel Azlor and the Cabildo of Santo Domingo were busy negotiating concessions from the crown.Footnote 83 Next, in 1768, a military engineer stationed in Cuba between 1763 and 1771, authored a manuscript titled “Discurso político sobre necesidades de la isla de Cuba” that also called for the liberalization of the slave trade. Just as the authors of the 1768 slave code in Santo Domingo, Agustín Crame also visualized a harsh slave society with few opportunities for mobility for freed and enslaved people. In fact, he argued that enslaved Africans were “very useful machines for agriculture,” which is to say output-maximizing capital investments, whose only danger was their propensity to rebel.Footnote 84 And while the Cuban elite enjoyed de facto freedom to trade enslaved people between 1781 and 1785, when they bought enslaved Africans directly from Danish and Anglo-American slave traders, they never forgot just how exceptional the 1786 real cédula for Santo Domingo was.Footnote 85 As far as 1792, Arango y Parreño insisted that the concessions he was requesting were not that different from what the crown had already granted to Santo Domingo in 1786, with the added benefit that, unlike Santo Domingo, which was a “cadaverous” island, Cuba actually had potential.Footnote 86
Despite the enormous concession the crown made to the Dominican elite in 1786, on one point the crown remained uncompromising, namely on what to do about the maroons who lived in the Neiba Valley. Against the wishes of the governor and the plantation elite, the council insisted that maroons should be granted freedom and enticed to live a civilized life by soft means.Footnote 87 While the governor often conspired against the council’s wishes on this matter, the crown had some allies on the ground, namely the religious authorities of Santo Domingo. On October 25, 1784, Fernando Portillo, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, wrote a letter to the council, indicating that multiple governors (at least since Azlor in the 1760s) had made manifold attempts to capture the maroons of Neiba to no avail.Footnote 88 Rather than continuing with these futile efforts to capture or expel these maroons from the mountains, the crown should instead focus on “reducing” them to civilized life. This was especially the case considering that the maroons of Neiba had presented a proposal to the governor in 1783, assuring that they wanted to live a settled and civilized life, provided that they were granted freedom by the Spanish authorities.Footnote 89 This willingness on behalf of maroons had already paid off, the archbishop insisted, as the priest of the parish of Neiba, Juan de Bobadilla, had had success in reducing some maroons. In spite of this success, the authorities in Santo Domingo complained that Bobadilla had proceeded without previous authorization and ordered him to halt his activities.Footnote 90 The governor’s complaint notwithstanding, on May 24, 1785, the council encouraged the governor to take advantage of Bobadilla’s keen interest in reducing maroons. Instead, Governor Isidro Peralta y Rojas had already ordered someone else, a Catholic dean called Luis de Chavez, to take charge of the task.Footnote 91 The council accepted the governor’s appointment, but insisted, on June 20, 1785, that the maroons of Neiba should be granted freedom and enticed to live a civilized life.Footnote 92
While the maroons themselves seemed keener on negotiating with Spanish authorities, the governor’s representative, Luis de Chavez, had signed a treaty with the French authorities of Saint-Domingue on May 28, 1785. Among other stipulations, the treaty established that the “French” maroons who lived in the Neiba Valley would be reduced in Saint-Domingue, a deal that most maroons were unwilling to accept.Footnote 93 The council offered its recommendation on October 10, 1786, insisting that the maroons should be reduced on the Spanish side of the island and that Bobadilla, not the governor, should take charge of the process of “reducing” maroons to civilized life, offering them freedom along the way.Footnote 94 Soon thereafter, on January 22, 1787, the council met once again to discuss the issue. After considering the many letters the court had received from previous governors, specifically Isidro de Peralta and Joaquín García, the council proceeded to discuss a few letters the Spanish court had received from France on August 7 and September 5, 1786. The French court, similar to the governors of Santo Domingo, insisted that the best solution was for the colonial authorities of both sides of the island to come together in forming expeditions to capture the maroons of Neiba and return them to their owners on the French side. Once again, the council held its ground in its consulta of January 22, 1787, even when confronted by the French court. In a nutshell, Bobadilla, the parish priest who had been working to “reduce” the maroons of Neiba since 1784, was to continue his work, offering maroons freedom and enticing them to live a civilized life through soft and sweet means. The king approved the council’s recommendation on February 14, 1787.Footnote 95 Nonetheless, after receiving multiple complaints from the archbishop that the governor refused to comply with the king’s orders, the council had to discuss the issue once again on May 29, 1788, concluding, just as it had before, that Bobadilla was to continue with the task of civilizing the Neiba maroons.Footnote 96
If the Santo Domingo elite had won an important concession with the real cédula of 1786, their efforts to transform Santo Domingo into a stringent slave society were partially thwarted, as we have seen, with the issue of maroons. Confronted with an inability to convince the crown to capture and re-enslave the maroons of Neiba, the Santo Domingo elite retooled, finding an important advocate in an oidor of the audiencia named Pedro Catani, who had served as interim governor between March 25 and September 15, 1788.Footnote 97 The oidor wrote a report and project to the crown on November 15, 1788, suggesting that the 1786 real cédula was insufficient for one main reason: The freedom to import enslaved Africans was, of course, a good idea, but the vecinos (respected, land-owning residents/citizens) of Santo Domingo lacked the necessary capital to purchase the amount of enslaved Africans required to erect a slave society akin to Saint-Domingue.Footnote 98 Perhaps Cuba had such capability, but certainly not the subjects of Santo Domingo, whose only income came from selling meager quantities of tobacco, maize, cacao, cattle-derived products, and mahogany.Footnote 99 Another option, he continued, could have been to incentivize wealthy Europeans, Spanish and otherwise, to invest in setting up plantations on the island. Certainly, this would have been a boon to those wealthy European plantation owners, but not for the rest of the small hacendados of the island, who would be unable to compete with wealthy entrepreneurs with the capacity to purchase the most efficient tools available to increase productivity and lower their prices.Footnote 100 The solution, hence, was to empower the current petty hacendados of the island to increase their productions, which could only be accomplished by increasing the colony’s labor supply. If importing massive quantities of enslaved Africans was impossible, it was certainly possible to subdue the great number of monteros (mostly people of African descent who lived freely in the countryside hunting and engaging in small-scale agriculture) roaming across the island.Footnote 101
While the monteros were free, the Santo Domingo elite had long complained that these people were a barrier to the island’s economic improvement, for, among other things, they allegedly lacked the desire to work. Sánchez Valverde had echoed these sentiments in his book from 1785, and so did Catani now in 1788. But unlike Sánchez Valverde, who argued that the solution to Santo Domingo’s economic woes was the massive importation of enslaved Africans, Catani switched gears, arguing that, given how many free people of African descent lived in the mountains without work, Santo Domingo could do without importing great quantities of enslaved people. For starters, Catani suggested that five-sixths of the population of the colony consisted of free Black and mulatto people, most of whom lived as monteros because they were able to purchase their freedom too easily through the hiring-out system and the process of coartación. What is more, these people refused to work and often lived by stealing and enjoying the plentiful nature of Santo Domingo.Footnote 102 Catani proposed two solutions to this problem. First, colonial authorities should limit enslaved people’s ability to purchase their own freedom. Second, and most importantly, these monteros and future freed Black individuals should be reduced in villages of no more than one hundred households, where they would be granted land to cultivate.Footnote 103 A person of integrity would, then, be appointed in each of these villages; his main job would be to uphold justice and make sure that these people worked in agriculture, for “blacks are inherently soft, lazy, and undisciplined.”Footnote 104 As these reduced montero families grew, Catani assured, the local hacendados would now have a larger labor pool without having to purchase enslaved Africans.
Catani’s proposal was clever in at least two fundamental ways. First, it simply faced the reality that the hacendados of the island did not have enough capital to import enslaved Africans en masse. If the island were to improve its agricultural output, the authorities had to figure out alternative ways to increase the colony’s labor pool. Second, and most importantly, Catani used the same logic for monteros that the crown had been using until then for maroons: They should be “reduced” to civilized life, from where they would become useful subjects. Catani knew that this argument would have been fairly unobjectionable to the council, who had long made it clear that integrating people of African descent entailed civilizing and Hispanizing them, which, along with reducing them in towns and teaching them Catholic doctrine, also entailed transforming them into workers, tax payers, and members of local militias. To Catani’s chagrin, his November 15, 1788 proposal arrived in the court at an inopportune moment. By then, the infamous apoderado of the Cuban elite, Francisco de Arango y Parreño, was busy in the court convincing key ministers that the importation of enslaved African labor was of the essence for Cuba, and the Spanish Caribbean more generally. Arango y Parreño delivered his first serious proposal to the court on February 6, 1789; its main request was the liberalization of the slave trade. The court responded in record time, issuing a real cédula for the liberalization of the slave trade to Havana, Santiago, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Cabello on February 28, 1789. This real cédula of 1789 meant very little to Santo Domingo, as the island had received a similar concession in 1786. The 1789 cédula signaled, however, that the interests of the Cuban elite had by then taken center stage in the court, even if the efforts of governors and elites from Santo Domingo prepared the way for Arango y Parreño in 1789.
As in the case of Santo Domingo, perhaps even more so, the crown remained worried that, if given too much leeway, the Cuban elite would create a stringent society that prevented enslaved Africans from becoming useful subjects. Paradoxically, the crown now deployed one of the preferred tools of the Santo Domingo elite, namely the creation of a quasi-slave code. The result was the 1789 Real cédula de su Magestad sobre la educacion, trato y ocupaciones de los esclavos, which, because of the urgency with which ministers in the court, especially Antonio Porlier, endeavored to contain the enslaving exuberance of the Cuban elite, was approved by the Junta de Estado without the consent of the Council of the Indies on April 27, 1789.Footnote 105 Where the previous Santo Domingo slave codes of 1768 and 1784 were geared toward subduing maroons and preventing upward mobility for people of African descent, the mentioned 1789 real cédula emphasized enslaved people’s roles as potential useful Christian subjects, ensuring that it was of the essence for the king to assemble in one decree “what is convenient for their [enslaved people’s] education, treatment, and the occupation that their owners must give them, in accordance with the principles and rules dictated by religion, humanity, and the wellbeing of the state, thus making slavery and public tranquility compatible.”Footnote 106 Regulating everything from the treatment to education of enslaved people, the 1789 real cédula embodied the same civilizational discourses that undergirded the court’s efforts to “reduce” maroons throughout the eighteenth century. As should be expected, the Spanish American slave-holding elite, whose main interest was securing cheap, disposable labor, deeply disliked this decree, launching a successful campaign that culminated with its eventual repeal in 1794.Footnote 107
Conclusions
There is no doubt that Cuba’s sugar revolution from the 1790s through the nineteenth century is one of the most important, if disgraceful, historical processes in the history of the Caribbean. Consequently, the fact that scholars have paid so much attention to this period of Cuban history is certainly not unwarranted. Be that as it may, by remaining hyper-focused on Cuba itself, scholars have missed an essential part of the story, namely the role that the Santo Domingo elite played in laying the political groundwork for the Cuban elite in the late 1780s and early 1790s. In the eighteenth century, Cuba was not an exceptional colony, and in some ways, it was merely following in the footsteps of more adept, if ultimately unsuccessful, political players in Santo Domingo. Not only did the Santo Domingo elite manage to receive enormous concessions, including the liberalization of the slave trade with the real cédula of 1786, but it also designed a blueprint for battling the crown’s and the Council of the Indies’ ambivalence about erecting slave societies in the Caribbean. Similar to the Santo Domingo elite, who understood that they had to convince the crown both that a massive importation of enslaved labor was the only way to improve agricultural output in the Caribbean and that creating a harsh slave society with few opportunities for freedom and mobility among the enslaved was the only way to contain the rebellious spirit of humans in bondage, the Cuban elite expended enormous political capital in lobbying for their vision of empire. But, where Santo Domingo’s political success failed to materialize into a successful sugar revolution, the Cuban elite largely succeeded both because they had more capital to invest in plantation-building and because, in the long run, they benefited from unexpected political events in the Atlantic.Footnote 108
Santo Domingo’s failure and Cuba’s eventual success notwithstanding, the island of Hispaniola would once again become a key topic of discussion in the court in 1790, although for very different reasons; the beginning of the French Revolution and its reverberations in Saint-Domingue became an issue of intense concern, especially because many feared, rightly so, revolutionary spillover into Santo Domingo. The first letter of concern from Governor Joaquín García was sent to the court on May 25, 1790.Footnote 109 The issue was not yet the slave uprising that began in 1791, but the growing political commotion that was gaining steam in Saint-Domingue as a result of the demands for inclusion of gens de couleur (people of color). García subsequently decided to halt, without requesting authorization from the Council of the Indies, the practice of granting freedom to the maroons of Neiba on July 25, 1790.Footnote 110 Nonetheless, García seemed to have changed his mind on September 25, 1790, when he informed the court that he had agreed with the archbishop to allow Juan de Bobadilla to continue working with the maroons of Neiba, in particular because he seemed to be comforted by the fact that the events of the French Revolution had not yet resulted in political turmoil in Saint-Domingue.Footnote 111 Garcia’s change of mind was probably motivated by the fact that the king was fully committed to resettling the maroons of Neiba, even though, on March 29, 1790, the Junta de Estado had decided to cease granting freedom to runaway slaves who landed in Spanish territories.Footnote 112 That the Neiba maroons had broken the terms of the original resettlement agreement did not dissuade the king, as he issued a real cédula on December 18, 1793, offering an indulto (general pardon) for whatever crimes the maroons had committed.Footnote 113 As for the political commotions of Saint-Domingue, the governor’s peace of mind would prove to be fundamentally wrongheaded, when the uprising of the enslaved began in Bois Caïman in the summer of 1791.Footnote 114
Meanwhile, Arango y Parreño doubled down on his plantation dreams. On May 10, 1791, he presented a paper to the crown, requesting that the liberalization decree be extended for eight years beyond the two-year concession of 1789.Footnote 115 Arango y Parreño wrote again on June 17, 1791, insisting that two years of freedom in the slave trade was simply not enough.Footnote 116 Insistent as ever, Arango y Parreño wrote once again on August 9, just days before the Haitian Revolution began on August 14, 1791. Arango y Parreño made a spectacular miscalculation when he argued that the crown did not have to worry that a massive influx of enslaved Africans would risk rebellion, for Africans had no “ideas of restiveness,” especially considering that “these hearts of stone, these inhumane men who outrage humanity and who debase themselves to the point of making a miserable trade with their brothers, with men, are not what we should fear.” In fact, “their stupidity and greed have chained the faculties of their souls,” so much so that they were incapable of rising above a system of government almost entirely dedicated to the slave trade.Footnote 117 Even when the Haitian Revolution proved his theory wrong, Arango y Parreño never conceded his mistake, claiming on November 19, 1791, that the source of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was not enslaved Africans, but the French colonists, whose radical ideas had pushed the enslaved to rebel.Footnote 118 Finally, in what proved to be his most successful bid to erect a slave society in Cuba, Arango y Parreño presented his infamous “Discurso sobre la agricultura en La Habana y medios de fomentarla” on February 20, 1792, insisting that the Haitian Revolution was a moment of opportunity for Cuban hacendados and that the crown had to proceed expeditiously by implementing measures that facilitated Cuba’s transition to becoming a slave society.Footnote 119 Posterity proved Arango y Parreño right, as Cuba became the Atlantic’s preeminent sugar colony in the nineteenth century, producing massive suffering to the enslaved Africans who toiled in the sugar cane fields of Cuba.
From Santo Domingo, the picture looked different. Rather than doubling down on their plantation dreams over the course of the Haitian Revolution, as was the case with Cuban hacendados, the Santo Domingo elite tempered its plantation and enslaving appetite. This sudden tempering was not the consequence of a change of heart, but rather of the recognition that the Haitian Revolution had caused irrevocable changes on the island. The problem was not simply that the Spanish had collaborated with some Haitian revolutionaries, the so-called Black Auxiliaries, welcoming them to the Spanish side when they faced defeat from the French.Footnote 120 Rather, the fact was that the enslaved people of Spanish Santo Domingo had also begun to rebel by 1795.Footnote 121 Confronted by the reality that the plantation dreams that were concocted with great zeal by Azlor and the Cabildo of Santo Domingo in the 1760s were no longer possible, José Antonio de Urizar, a member of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, wrote a paper entitled “Discurso sobre modificación y limites de la esclavitud,” which, among other things, admitted that plantation slavery as imagined by hacendados was no longer viable in 1795.Footnote 122 After narrating the events that transpired in Saint-Domingue after 1789, the British Parliament’s abolitionist leanings in the 1790s, the origins and trajectory of the Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas, and Spain’s alleged ambivalent acceptance of slavery and the slave trade, Urizar suggested that slavery was against nature and thus illegitimate as positive law.Footnote 123 But, unlike the French, who offered freedom to everyone at once and without concern for the owners’ property, the Spanish king had to institute a gradual system of emancipation by which enslaved people could be freed once their work generated earnings greater than what their owners paid to purchase them. In addition to doing what was right by law, Urizar was convinced that, if implemented properly, his proposal would prevent insurrection and give enslaved people hope.Footnote 124
In the end, Santo Domingo’s sugar revolution remained unrealized, even in the extremely tamed version expressed in Urizar’s “Discurso” of June 25, 1795. The war with the French Convention since 1793 had been a disaster for Spain, which prompted the crown and the prime minister, the Duque de Alcudia (Manuel de Godoy), to sign the Treaty of Basel on July 22, 1795, which ceded Spanish Santo Domingo to the French. And while the French were not able to take over the island until 1802, Spanish authorities had already given up on the island. In a meeting of the Consejo de Estado on August 28, 1795, Godoy, who was later baptized the Príncipe de la Paz (Prince of the Peace), defended Spain’s decision to cede Santo Domingo, positing “how little or nothing we lose in the cession of the Spanish part of the island to the French Republic.”Footnote 125 Meanwhile, enslaved people in Santo Domingo continued to draw inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. In 1796, an important slave rebellion took place in Boca Nigua, ironically in the plantation of Juan Bautista de Oyarzábal, the man whose petition in 1783 gave impetus to the real cédula of 1786.Footnote 126
The Boca Nigua rebellion was quelled, but political changes across the island continued to thwart the plantation dreams reconstructed in this article. Most importantly, in 1801, Toussaint Louverture, the preeminent leader of the Haitian Revolution, took over the Spanish side and incorporated it to Saint-Domingue, which, according to the 1799 French constitution, would now be ruled by special laws.Footnote 127 Louverture wrote his own constitution for Saint-Domingue in 1801, hoping to banish slavery from the island forever while maintaining links to France.Footnote 128 To his disappointment, Napoleon sent French troops to take over the island and reinstate slavery in 1802, capturing Louverture in the process. While Haiti successfully declared its independence in 1804, the French held Santo Domingo until inhabitants from the eastern portion of the island launched a “reconquest” war that ended with the reincorporation of Santo Domingo to Spain, itself in the midst of a Napoleonic invasion and a political crisis, in 1809.Footnote 129 By then, very little remained of the plantation dreams that Governor Azlor and the Cabildo of Santo Domingo had dreamt in the 1760s. Be that as it may, the dreams were alive and thriving in Cuba, where the local elites and authorities were busy importing great quantities of enslaved Africans and recruiting former French plantation owners to erect a plantation complex.Footnote 130 Cuba’s great success in becoming a plantation-based slave society has typically been explained by alluding to the sagacity of men such as Arango y Parreño, but, as this article has demonstrated, the political blueprint of Cuba’s sugar revolution was first developed in Santo Domingo. This fact should convince us that it is time to do away with the myth of Cuban exceptionalism and Santo Domingo’s purported relative insignificance in the eighteenth-century Spanish Caribbean.
