Entangled Coercion by Paola A. Revilla Orías

Author:Paola A. Revilla Orías
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-01-18T00:14:56.744000+00:00

Manumission by Coarctation as a Possibility

Conditioned manumissions were complex without, practices managed between masters and slaves before notaries. They were agreements involving more than liberations per se, since they did not imply a freedom charter, until certain obligations were fulfilled by the slave, generally committing them to serve a third party for some years or during their whole life. These agreements could be dissolved in time; either because the master changed his mind, or because his heirs refused to comply with his posthumous will. In either case, no absolute guarantee was available for the slave, unless he obtained the document to prove his new condition as a free person. A slave could even commit to pay an amount of money. This practice was not a gracious manumission, but an inappropriate work methodology with sources may take historians not only to mistake them, but to eclipse the real extent of this phenomenon of manumission by restriction.

Access to legal freedom by restriction was a consuetudinary right of slaves.41 It involved paying the amount of their value to the master, who in exchange was obliged to give them a freedom charter.42 Part of historiography that studies this topic usually states that few slaves could afford to pay for their own price and this type of manumission is little documented in Charcas. In fact, Alberto Crespo has found no cases in Charcas of slaves who urged their masters to pay for their freedom, or even less that they managed to buy them out.43 This, however, is an imprecise statement.44 If, besides reviewing the general descriptions given by archivists for deeds of manumission that have been systematized in the notarial fund, anyone takes the time to consult their texts for a sufficiently long period, it becomes clear that not all freedom charters are products of gracious manumissions. For example, a notarial minute of 1587, shows that Pedro Álvarez granted a freedom charter to his black slave Juana, for his brothers’ sake.45 But when reviewing the whole document, it presents a clarification that Juana “pays 600 pesos in assayed silver for her liberty”. Thus, some charters are evidently gracious manumissions while others are the product of previous agreements (verbal or written) for freedom conditioned by the payment of an individual’s price. In 1586, when a resident named Catalina Zurbarán granted a freedom charter to her slave Lucía from Bran lands, who had served her for more than 50 years, she states that she does it for good service and because the slave had paid 300 pesos.46

Likewise, in the analyzed sample alone at least half of the 38 % (63 systematized cases) of conditioned manumission agreements registered in the notarial deeds in La Plata between 1560 and 1630 show a slave committing to pay a certain amount to his master. Thus the realizing of a freedom charter was followed by payment of such an amount. In 1566, Diego de Salazar clarifies this in the agreement signed with his 35-year-old female slave named Guiomar, as he refers to the

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