Slavery and Antislavery in Spain's Atlantic Empire by Josep M. Fradera Christopher Schmidt-Nowara†

Author:Josep M. Fradera, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara† [Josep M. Fradera, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara†]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, Caribbean & West Indies, Spain & Portugal, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780857459343
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

Blanco versus Arango

Blanco inflected the Letter by drawing upon personal experience in an effort to illicit Spanish sympathies for African captives. He more thoroughly rewrote it by focusing on the specific historical dimension of the Cuban slave trade, at the core of which was the fierce polemic with the most vocal defender of Cuban interests, Francisco de Arango y Parreño (1765–1837).20 Arango was a Cuban planter who also held key administrative posts on the island and in the metropole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He was the highest-profile Cuban advocate of a deregulated slave trade to the island. Spanish officials had contemplated such a reform of the colonial economy since the Seven Years’ War as a way of bolstering revenues that would pay for more robust imperial defenses against the rapacious British foe. After several years of gradual measures, the Crown finally threw open the trade in 1789 and recommitted to the policy soon thereafter.21 Arango lobbied Madrid and wrote eloquently on how a robust plantation economy would benefit not only his class but also the imperial regime by promoting trade and enhancing revenues. Cuban planters thus held considerable influence in Spain during this period but during the resistance to the French occupation of the peninsula they encountered an unexpected rival: Spanish and Spanish-American advocates of abolishing the slave trade and of gradual measures against slavery itself, openly debated in the Cortes of Cadiz in 1811. These debates drew a swift response from Arango, who penned a ringing defense of the slave traffic on behalf of the Havana planter class. His Representación was effective, as it quelled further debate in Cadiz. Indeed, the Constitution of Cadiz ratified the following year was completely mute on the question of abolition.22

As editor of El Español in his London exile, Joseph Blanco White frequently received communications and documents from Spain and from the Spanish colonies. Among these was a manuscript copy of Arango’s 1811 Representación. His rebuttal to it was at the core of the Bosquexo.

In responding to the challenge from Cadiz, Arango emphasized the centrality of Cuba’s booming plantation economy to the imperial regime’s well-being. Tampering with it would be disastrous not only for the planters but also for Spanish coffers at an especially delicate moment. With rebellion raging in Venezuela and Mexico and metropolitan control weakened throughout the Americas, Spain was now more dependent upon Cuban productivity and the largesse of the planters. This was leverage that Arango knew how to use well. He also argued at length that Cuban planters should not be punished for taking advantage of policies put in place by the Spanish crown. Slaves were property, and property was sacred, its “inviolability one of the great objects of any political association.”23

Arango went beyond the question of political and economic interest and spelled out why the slave traffic was a means of rescuing and civilizing Africans, the section of his argument that would draw Blanco’s sharpest retort. The Cuban author expressed outrage that when the Spanish

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