The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  13. Slavers, however, who made up a distinct constituency within the guild, complained about this corsair contribution, arguing that it in effect restored a tax on the slave trade that had been earlier abolished by the Crown (José María Mariluz Urquijo, El virreinato del Río de la Plata en la época del Marqués de Avilés (1799–1801), Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1964, pp. 78–88).

  14. Agustín Beraza, Los corsarios de Montevideo, Montevideo: Centro de Estudios Históricos, Navales, y Maritimos, 1978, p. 43; Falcao Espalter, “Hipolito Mordeille”; Arturo Ariel Bentancur, El puerto colonial de Montevideo (I). Guerras y apertura comercial: Tres lustros de crecimiento económico (1791–1806), Montevideo: Universidad de la Republica, 1997, pp. 322–41.

  3. A LION WITHOUT A CROWN

  1. See throughout, Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History, New York: Penguin, 2008.

  2. Andrews, Afro-Argentines, p. 31; Johnson, Workshop, 38; Susan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 84, 132. The Nymph of the Sea, a Portuguese bark, had recently delivered 276 Africans from Kilwa, Tanzania. The Susan, registered in the United States, came with 90 Gambians. The Spanish El Retiro de Buenos Aires had just gotten back with 130 captives from an unnamed place on the “coast of Africa.” The San Ignacio, a brig from Rio de Janeiro, carried honey, rum, coffee, cotton, and slaves. Semanario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio, vols. 1–2 (facsímile), Buenos Aires: Junta de Historia y Numismátic, 1928, p. 151; AGN (Buenos Aires) Sala IX Comercio y padrones de Esclavos; Escribano de la Marina, 49.3.2; Registro de Navios 10.4.7; The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces; Elena F. S. de Studer, La trata de negros en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo XVIII, vol. 2, Montevideo: Libros de Hispanoamérica, 1984.

  3. María Díaz de Guerra, Documentación relativa a esclavos en el Departamento de Maldonado, Siglos XVIII y XIX, Montevideo: Imprenta Cooperativa, 1983, pp. 30–32; AGN (Montevideo), Fondo Archivo General Administrativo, libro 15 A, “Libro de acuerdos que dio principio en abril de 1800,” Acta del Cabildo, March 28, 1803, f. 87. See also Gesualdo, “Los negros,” for a rise in master patricides.

  4. Johnson, Workshop of Revolution, pp. 177–78.

  5. Revista de la Biblioteca Pública de Buenos Aires, vol. 3, Buenos Aires: Librería de Mayo, 1881, p. 475; AGN (Montevideo), Fondo Archivo General Administrativo, libro 15 A, “Libro de acuerdos que dio principio en abril de 1800,” Acta del Cabildo, March 28, 1803, ff. 87–89; Carlos Rama, Historia social del pueblo Uruguayo, Montevideo: Editorial Comunidad del Sur, 1972, p. 22; Lincoln R. Maiztegui Casas, Orientales: Una historia política del Uruguay, vol. 1, Montevideo: Planeta, 2005, p. 28; Oscar D. Montaño, Umkhonto: Historia del aporte negro-africano en la formación del Uruguay, Montevideo: Rosebud Ediciones, 1997, p. 151; Agustín Beraza, Amos y esclavos, Enciclopedia Uruguaya, vol. 1, Montevideo: Editores Reunidos y Arca, 1968, p. 165–66.

  6. W. L. Schurz, This New World: The Civilization of Latin America, New York: Dutton, 1954, pp. 180–81; Leslie Rout, The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 149; Mariselle Meléndez, “Visualizing Difference: The Rhetoric of Clothing in Colonial Spanish America,” in Latin American Fashion Reader, ed. Regina Root, New York: Berg, 2006, p. 25. The following sources are related to the Albany fire discussed in the footnote: For the fire and the subsequent hanging of accused arsonists, see Albany Register, November 25, 1793; New-York Daily Gazette, November 25, 1793; Albany Register, March 17, 1794; Albany Register, January 27, 1894; Albany Chronicles: A History of the City Arranged Chronologically, from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time; Illustrated with Many Historical Pictures of Rarity and Reproductions of the Robert C. Pruyn Collection of the Mayors of Albany, Albany: J. B. Lyon, 1906, p. 384; George Rogers Howell, Bi-centennial History of Albany: History of the County of Albany, N.Y., from 1609 to 1886, vol. 1, Albany: W. Munsell, 1886, p. 302; “Examination of Bet Negro Female Slave of Philip S. Van Rensselaer, Esquire,” New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections; Alice Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany: Dutch Patricians in the Upper Hudson Valley, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1969, pp. 80–107. See also Oscar Williams, “Slavery in Albany, New York, 1624–1827,” Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, vol. 34, 2010 (accessed online July 6, 2012). For the fear that the arsonists were inspired by Haiti, see Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour du Pin Gouvernet, Journal d’une femme de cinquante ans, vol. 2, Paris: Chapelot, 1912, p. 18. For Pomp, see Collections on the History of Albany, vol. 2, Albany: J. Munsell, 1867, p. 383. The Evening Journal is the undated source given for the description of Pomp, probably the Albany Evening Journal.

  4. BODY AND SOUL

  1. For the king’s “pious mind,” see Ildefonso Pereda Valdés, El negro en el Uruguay, pasado y presente, Montevideo Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1965, p. 230; Archivo General de la Nación, Acuerdos del extinguido cabildo de Montevideo, vol. 17, annex, Montevideo, 1942, pp. 230–31. For descriptions of the “village,” see Isidoro De-María, Tradiciones y recuerdos: Montevideo antiguo, Elzeviriana, 1887; Archivo General de la Nación, Revista del Archivo General Administrativo, vol. 6, book 11, Montevideo: El Siglo Lustrado, 1917, p. 78; Karla Chagas, Natalia Stalla, and Alex Borucki, “Uruguay,” in UNESCO, ed. Sitios de memoria y culturas vivas de los afrodescendientes en Argentina, Paraguay y Uruguay, Montevideo: UNESCO, 2011, pp. 112–53. For the treatment of slaves as a problem of the state, see Salmoral, Regulación, part 1, pp. 183–207.

  2. AGI (Seville), Gobierno, Indiferente 2826, ff. 286–395. Urquijo, in El virreinato del Río de la Plata, p. 361, describes the high mortality of the Portuguese slaves. See also Joseph Calder Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.

  3. Falconbridge, Account, pp. 24–25.

  4. In 1798, for example, the Rhode Island slaver, Ascensión, purchased 283 slaves in Mozambique, 33 of whom fell ill with smallpox and were quickly unloaded before leaving Africa. Thirty-three died on board. Once in Montevideo, four more died and the remaining healthy ones sold for, on average, over 200 pesos each. Eight “sickly” ones, though, were disposed of for 90 pesos, a risky investment with a potentially high payoff for the buyer: there was a good chance they wouldn’t survive, but if they did, their immunity would make them that much more valuable. See the unsigned, undated account record of trade, Slavery Collection, [1798?], series I: Samuel and William Vernon, New-York Historical Society. That the ship was the Ascensión is indicated by other documents in the collection. Regarding the use of slaves to disseminate the smallpox vaccine, see the following documents in the AGI (Seville), Cuba, legajo 1691, December 4, 1806; Indiferente General, legajo 1558-A, June 14, 1804 (for Balmis buying and selling Cuban slaves); Chile, 205 (“Correspondencia de Presidente Luis Muñoz de Guzmán”), November 9, 1805, for transporting the vaccine, “arm to arm of the blacks.” For the African women who carried the vaccine to Buenos Aires, see Congreso de la Nación, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados, vol. 1, 1903, p. 398; see also Guillermo Fúrlong Cárdiff, Historia social y cultural del Río de la Plata, 1536–1810, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Tipográfica Editora Argentina, 1969, p. 346; Diego Barros Arana, Historia general de Chile, vol. 7, Santiago: Rafael Jover: 1886, pp. 265–71; Gonzalo Vial Correa, El Africano en el Reino de Chile, Santiago: Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 1957; José G. Rigau-Pérez, “The Introduction of Smallpox Vaccine in 1803 and the Adoption of Immunization as a Government Function in Puerto Rico, Hispanic American Historical Review 69 (August 1989): 393–423. For Humboldt’s observations, see Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. 1, New York: Riley, 1811, p. 87.

  5. For an extensive examination of this in the United States, see Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from C
olonial Times to the Present, New York: Doubleday, 2007; see also Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834, London: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  6. For the Rôdeur, see Ritchie, Travelling Sketches on the Sea-Coasts of France, pp. 76–82, which contains a translation of a firsthand account, and “Le cri des Africains contre les Européens, leurs oppresseurs; ou Coup-d’oeil sur le commerce homicide appelé Traite des Noirs,” Journal des voyages, découvertes et navigations modernes; ou Archives géographiques et statistiques du XIX siècle 36 (October–December 1821): 323–24. Sébastien Guillié’s study of the case, “Observation sur une blépharoblénorrhée contagieuse,” Bibliothèque ophtalmologique; ou Recueil d’observations sur les maladies des yeux faites à la clinique de l’Institution royale des jeunes aveugles 1 (1820), was published before these two sources. For Guillié, see Zina Weygand, The Blind in French Society: From the Middle Ages to the Century of Louis Braille, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. The case of the Rôdeur was cited by abolitionists in France and Great Britain, including Benjamin Constant and William Wilberforce.

  7. AGN (Buenos Aires), División Colonial, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, legajo 94, 26.2.3; also Studer, La trata, pp. 311–14.

  8. For Alzaga’s fear of egalitarianism, see Johnson, Workshop of Revolution, pp. 157–78; the quotation is on p. 164.

  9. Miguel de la Sierra y Lozano, Elogios de Cristo y María: Aplicados a quarenta sermones de sus fiestas, Zaragoza: Pedro Verges, 1646, p. 61; Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana, Madrid, 1783; “On Hypochondriasis,” Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, January 1, 1850, p. 3; G. E. Berrios, “Melancholia and Depression during the 19th Century: A Conceptual History,” British Journal of Psychiatry 153 (September 1988): 298–304. Protestants, and at least three of the five surgeons on the Joaquín commission were Protestant, might identify Catholics, grimacing and groveling before their icons, as prone to the condition, betraying the “low thoughts they had of the divine nature”; see Anthony Ashley Cooper, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, J. J. Tourneisen and J. L. Legrand, 1790, p. 103.

  10. Thomas W. Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 176–77.

  11. Manuel Hurtado de Mendoza, Antonio Ballano, and Celedonio Martínez Caballero, Suplemento al diccionario de medicina y cirugía, 1823.

  12. For Redhead, see José Luis Molinari, “Manuel Belgrano: Sus enfermedades y sus médicos,” Historia, Buenos Aires, 1960, 20 pp. 88–160, p. 130.

  13. Johnson, Workshop of Revolution, pp. 39–43, 151–54. To compare Montevideo with other urban slave experiences, see, for Mexico City, Herman Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003, and “Genealogies to a Past: Africa, Ethnicity, and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” in New Studies in the History of American Slavery, ed. Edward Baptist and Stephanie Camp, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006; for Buenos Aires and Lima, Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Emeric Essex Vidal visited Buenos Aires in the early 1800s and observed, in his Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video, London: R. Ackermann, 1820, p. 30, that “slavery at Buenos Ayres is perfect freedom compared with that among other nations,” a contradiction in terms that, even as it discounted the hardship and suffering of many of the city’s residents, still captured their relative autonomy. See Tomás Olivera Chirimini, “Candombe, African Nations, and the Africanity of Uruguay,” in Sheila Walker, ed., African Roots / African Cutlure: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001, and Mansilla, Mis memorias, pp. 132–33. For a comparison with New Orleans, see Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, Chicago: Review Press, 2009; for a comparison with Albany, see Sterling Stuckey, Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African-American Art in History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 53–80. For complaints, see Gesualdo, “Los Negros,” p. 34; also Vicente Rossi, Cosas de negros: Los orígenes del tango y otros aportes al folklore rioplatense, Buenos Aires: Aguilar, 1926. For “sociedad de la nación moro,” along with the many other “naciones,” see Miguel Rosal, “Aspectos de la Religiosidad Afroporteña, siglos XVIII–XIX,” available online at http://www.revistaquilombo.com.ar/documentos.htm.

  14. Manuel Nuñez de Taboada, Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 1825.

  5. A CONSPIRACY OF LIFTING AND THROWING

  1. Paul Lovejoy, Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora, London: Continuum, 2003, p. 289; Elizabeth Allo Isichei, Voices of the Poor in Africa, Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2002, p. 287; Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006, p. 288; Falconbridge, Account, p. 30; Estebán Montejo, and Miguel Barnet, eds., The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, New York: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 63–64. Byrd, Captives and Voyages, pp. 20–30, discusses the many meanings of the term Igbo.

  2. The case of the Santa Eulalia is described in the documents cited earlier regarding the Neptune and in AGN (Buenos Aires), División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Guerra y Marina, 9.24.4/1806, legajo 36. See also AGN (Lima), notary record, José Escudero de Sicilia, Escribano del Tribunal del Consulato, 1805. Cristina Mazzeo de Vivó was kind enough to send me a draft of her essay on the voyage, “Vivir y morir en alta mar: La comercialización del esclavo en Hispanoamérica a fines del siglo XVIII,” which contains additional sources and has been subsequently published in Homenaje a José Antonio del Busto Duthurburu, ed. Margarita Guerra Martinière and Rafael Sánchez-Concha Barrios, 2 vols., Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, 2012.

  3. Vicente Osvaldo Cutolo, Nuevo Diccionario Biográfico Argentino (1750–1930), vol. 5 (N–Q), Buenos Aires: Editorial Elche, 1978, p. 649; AGN (Montevideo), Protocolos de Marina (1803–4), Registro corriente de Entradas de Marina del año de 1805 (“Fianza: Señor Antonio Pérez por el depósito de los Negros del Bergantín Diana y Polacra Ligera de Mordelle”). One of Mordelle’s prizes, the Diana was also known as the Dolores; see Departamento de Estudios Históricos Navales, Historia marítima argentina, vol. 4, Buenos Aires: Departamento de Estudios Históricos Navales, 1993, p. 323.

  4. Jacques Duprey, Voyage aux origines françaises de l’Uruguay: Montevideo et l’Uruguay vus par des voyageurs français entre 1708 et 1850, Montevideo: Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay, 1952, p. 182.

  INTERLUDE: I NEVER COULD LOOK AT DEATH WITHOUT A SHUDDER

  1. For Thoreau, see his Political Writings, ed. Nancy Rosenblum, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 26–27. For Melville’s use of slavery as a metaphor for bondage in general, and vice versa, see Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. For an example of a “bondman” who “enjoyed the liberties of the world,” see White-Jacket’s Guinea. Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, vol. 1, 1819–1851, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, p. 147.

  2. Moby-Dick, pp. 798, 1094, 1216–19.

  3. John Griscom, A Year in Europe: Comprising a Journal of Observations in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Switzerland, the North of Italy, and Holland, New York: Collins, 1823, p. 30.