Edgardo Pérez Morales provides a fascinating study considering the overlapping histories of antislavery and political revolution in late colonial New Granada and early national-era Colombia, with specific focus on the districts of Antioquia, Cartagena, and Popayán. He opens our reading toward the end of the chronological scope, in the midst of constitutional negotiations around abolition laws within a newly formed Colombia, giving attention to lawyer and politician Felix Jose de Restrepo. These debates reveal the various gradations of abolitionist positions (almost all falling short of completely abolishing slavery) and the philosophical and moral contradictions therein. Continuing through the book, the reader finds that notions of liberty, the acceptability of slavery, and slavery’s relationship to revolutionary ideas that underpinned independence were consistently negotiated by slaves, slaveholders, jurists, and politicians. Rather than finding these debates in the “usual” places of the burgeoning print world or in abolitionist churches, Pérez Morales discovers that the discussions resided most often in the court.
Starting in the first two chapters, Pérez Morales ties together the local Comunero Revolution and the wider contexts of the French and Haitian Revolutions, revealing hopes of freedom, both individual and collective, among slaves of New Granada. As elite fears of enslaved uprisings increased, the enslaved “legal imagination” treated strategic legal appeal as more fruitful for manumission than armed action. There is significant attention given to the stereotypes that evoked the most fear from Colombian administrators and slave owners alike. Those with any ties to France, and the radical ideas it was producing, were to be closely watched. Slaves who had been labeled prone to uprising and intent on violent resistance were also feared. But the legal record, including litigation inspecting possible rebellion, reveals slaves expected abolition to arrive by decree not by bloodshed. One example shows the people of the rural hacienda La Honda, who insisted on their freedom after manumission and correspondingly noted that they would abide under the authority of “both majesties” -- God and king. They, like many others cited, were willing to submit petitions and pay taxes. Violent massacres claimed by slave owners were more often than not an invention.
While other authors have noted how French political treatises were by default suspicious and to be feared, Pérez Morales shows exactly how localized interpretations homed in on specific authors and their (perhaps imagined) effects on local events. If officials saw the ideas from France as the main source of infection, Pérez Morales points readers’ attention to the ways that local conditions and lived experiences most often informed the positions of enslaved people in New Granada (35).
In chapter 3, the author provides insight into the logic at work in Restrepo’s legal career and his later political advocacy. In his legal practice, he regularly represented slaves, despite being a slave owner himself, in cases where they sought their freedom. Consistent in his legal arguments was the “natural dignity” of enslaved people and his insistence that the balance of justice should always tip in favor of the slaves (64–67). He and others even saw freeing of slaves as the primary goal of new liberal governments. Within these same cases and others, enslaved litigants made arguments for equality as king’s vassals. But as independence discourse became more prevalent, they also made claims for liberty in keeping with philosophical principles of equality. This argument became easier to make as independence leaders invoked the imagery of enslavement that colonies needed to break free from Spanish chains to embrace national movements.
As regional independence movements increased, arguments for abolition shifted toward natural law, addressed in chapter 4. Pérez Morales notes this call to natural law was not altogether new, citing the familiar passage from the Siete Partidas that acknowledged enslavement was “contrary to natural reason” (92). These arguments shaped discussions on how legal cases should even be adjudicated: written law, commentaries, or natural law. A potentially major move to abolition in the region took the form of a free womb law in the state of Antioquia that ensured no further persons would be born into slavery, but made no change to the status of current slaves. But Pérez Morales’ analysis of lawmakers’ debates and further law-making demonstrates their “commitment to equality proved less central to their politics” (124). In the final body chapter, the author presents the conception of the “exegesis of liberty,” in which enslaved litigants more directly connected freedom from Spain with freedom for the enslaved. Yet, the counter-exegesis and the upholding of the social hierarchy and pursuit of economic prosperity prevented the power brokers from embracing, and in some cases even considering, full-scale abolition.
The book is wonderfully written. While rigorously analyzing litigation and political changes, Pérez Morales still dedicates time to specific actors, including enslaved litigants and influential politicians, ensuring the reader sees them as more than lines in a petition. The chronological argument makes for easy tracking and keeps the close tie between abolition and independence movements. The author has chosen to limit the historiographical and theoretical conversations within the text, which makes for a fluid narrative. But the reader will need to closely read the notes for connections to the wider scholarly conversation and the work’s placement within current debates. As a contribution at the intersection of political and legal history, scholars of abolition and decolonization in other contexts will find this work useful. For Latin Americanists specifically, the complexity and nuance brought by Pérez Morales to an era that has already received significant attention is laudable.
