Ada Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror:
With Spain now formally committed to the slave trade as a foundation for tropical commercial agriculture in its empire, and with the island on its way to becoming a slave society, slavery itself – and not just the slave trade – appeared to require some thought. Just three months after the free slave trade decree of February 1789, the king approved a second decree designed to regulate the treatment of slaves in his dominions. Predicting that the slave trade decree would result in a “considerable increase in the number of slaves,” the state found it imperative to lay down regulations to be “promptly observed by all the owners of slaves.” Existing regulations governing the treatment and education of slaves, said the new decree’s preamble, were scattered across many pieces of legislation, often dating from centuries earlier. Most contemporary masters and overseers therefore had little knowledge of the Spanish law of slavery and inadvertently committed abuses that violated existing legal principles. The imminent arrival of an unprecedented number of slaves urgently required the formulation of a coherent black code to clarify the obligations and rights of slaves, masters, and the state.
The decree approved by the king reiterated provisions already in effect, at least on paper: the prohibition of work on Sundays, the master’s obligation to feed and clothe his bondspeople; the fostering of marriage among the enslaved; and cumulative fines on masters who neglected the provisions of the laws. The law stated, of course, the slave’s obligation to obey and respect the master as a father, and it authorized punishment – by “imprisonment, shackles, chains, clubs, or stocks” – when he or she failed in that obligation. But the 1789 law also specified new and stringent limits on what that punishment could entail, expressly forbidding that the slave be placed upside down when receiving the punishment and specifying that whippings could not cause bleeding nor exceed twenty-five lashes with a soft instrument. Finally, the new law gave the town councils, its syndics, and members of the clergy the right to inspect and report on potential abuses of masters and overseers, and it protected the right of anonymity for denouncers of abuse. The regulation represented, opined its framers, a balance among the imperative to protect the minimum rights of slaves, to allow the expansion of agriculture, and to preserve public order and the security of the state.
Once the new law was issued, the engines of state circulated several hundred copies in Spain’s American colonies. Even before its arrival on the other side of the Atlantic, however, rumors of its drafting produced panic and resistance among slaveholders. In Santo Domingo and Louisiana, planters joined forces to resist its implementation. In Caracas, planters persuaded local authorities to suspend its application even before they had received or read it. Despite that, after it arrived, enslaved people apparently attempted to take advantage of its provisions, taking masters to court for infractions of the rules it prescribed. In Havana, the arrival of the decree prompted emergency meetings of the city council. In January, the city’s planters – identifying themselves as the “body of sugar planters of Havana” – wrote to the king to persuade him of the “sad consequences and irreparable harm” that would result from the application of the new slave regulations.
The brunt of their outrage was directed at the provisions that limited punishment. They objected, they said, not because they wished to exceed the limits established, but because knowledge of the provisions would lessen the fear and subordination of the enslaved, who would abandon their plantations and complain incessantly to the government. They continued, apocalyptically: “We see already our farms ruined, our families miserable, his Majesty’s treasury in incalculable arrears, the income from tithes destroyed, the commerce of our port annihilated, our countryside abandoned, the island overrun with calamities, and our slaves in rebellion.” The danger produced by its implementation, they argued, overshadowed any individual instances of abuse, for the majority of masters, they insisted, treated their slaves humanely.
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