Again, I find myself posting old class assignments as blog posts. This one is a short assignment for a history class on slavery in the Atlantic World.
Caribbean Colombia and the French
colony of Guadeloupe demonstrate comparable cases of the development of
republicanism and citizenship tied to emancipation. Although the process of
slave emancipation in these locations differed, both Guadeloupe and Colombia
exemplify republicanism’s emancipatory trajectories in which citizenship was
equated with military service, masculine virtue, and fealty to the state.
Indeed, Laurent Dubois’s evocative argument pertaining to the appeal of
republicanism to people of African descent in Guadeloupe finds undeniable
resonance in the works of Marixa, Lasso, Aline Helg and Jason McGraw on
Afro-Colombians. The two areas also exhibit the dilemma of a citizen-soldier
model for emancipation and political rights in a republican government as well
as illustrating the importance of national independence in these settings.
Republicanism’s equation with
abolition began in Guadeloupe during the course of the French Revolution.
According to Laurent Dubois, enslaved insurgents in Guadeloupe expressed
themselves by acting uninvited in the name of France.[1] For example, in 1793, a
slave revolt at Trois-Rivières was justified by its participants in the name of
the French Republic, defending it against royalist planters.[2] Steadily, French
Republican officials in Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe began to rely even
further on slaves and free men of color as soldiers in order to preserve the
colonies, a development that favored the ascension to higher military ranks for
men of African descent while disrupting the plantation economy.[3] This notion of a
citizen-soldier fighting in defense of France was tied to republican virtues of
masculinity and part of the justification for citizenship or political rights.
Dubois describes emancipation in this context as a transition from slavery to
manhood, to become Republican husbands and soldiers.[4]
In
return for emancipation and the rights of citizenship, former slaves were
expected to fulfill the labor needs of a plantation colony, leading to coercive
labor policies in both Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe. Influenced by Condorcet
and Enlightenment thought, Victor Hugues and his successors prevented
democratic rule in the colony, justifying it on the debt of former slaves to
France to learn the value of work and produce commodities necessary for the
colonial economy.[5]
Indeed, administrators assumed freedpeople were degraded by slavery and lacking
the skills necessary to participate in elections until a period of tutelage
through service and labor on the plantations prepared them to enjoy the
political rights contained in citizenship.[6] Accordingly, attempts by
freedpeople to avoid plantation work were perceived as ungrateful and
undeserving behavior of citizenship, and racialized cultural explanations
adopted by Hugues to explain his lack of success in restoring the plantation
economy revealed the persistence of racial discrimination.[7]
In
Caribbean Colombia, a region in which people of African descent comprised the
majority of the population, Marixa Lasso argues for a similar dynamic in which
citizenship and emancipation are irrevocably tied with the republican nation.
The prominence of men of African descent in the wars of independence in the
region provided a path to emancipation while the wartime economic disruptions
created opportunities for enslaved people to escape bondage.[8] Pardo or Afro-Colombian
men were included in the Colombian national body because the Spanish Cortes of
1810 refused to grant them citizenship, creating an ideological wedge between
Creole elites and Spain that favored the wars of independence as white Creoles
and people of African descent pushed for an inclusive national body in
opposition to the tyranny of Spanish colonial rule.[9] Resembling the French
Republic’s emancipation and extension of rights for men of African descent who
joined their cause against royalists and the British, Afro-Colombians joined
white Creoles in the wars of independence because of opportunities for freedom
and rights not recognized by Spain. In so doing, Creoles and pardos came to define
the republic with liberty, emancipation, and racially inclusive legal
practices, bestowing citizenship rights to men without regards to color. In
fact, Afro-Colombians such as prominent veteran of the wars of independence
Padilla envisioned a racially harmonious republic in which service to the
patria was the main criterion of status rather than the legacy of racial
hierarchies from the colonial past.[10] The nationalist character
of Colombia’s republicanism also acted as a safeguard for Afro-Colombian’s
political rights because the state was required to, at least rhetorically,
support racial equality and commit to emancipation, albeit often through a
gradualist approach such as free womb laws. This important distinction aided
Afro-Colombians while people of color in Guadeloupe saw a reversal once France
restored slavery. Intriguingly, like the eventual leaders of Haiti,
Guadeloupe’s soldiers of African descent also considered national independence
as a method of ensuring their rights.[11] This may be suggestive of
the importance of nationalism for consolidating republican discourse’s promise
of racial equality. McGraw argues persuasively for this association of equality
in the Colombian context of public manumissions blending civic and religious
holiday characteristics.[12]
Public
manumission ceremonies and rituals became increasingly important ways to assert
the connection between republican liberty and slave emancipation.[13] Concurring with Lasso,
McGraw contextualizes public manumissions of the 1840s and 1850s in conceptions
of republicanism, arguing that these public manumissions sought to create
rituals of civic participation and embody the egalitarian rhetoric of citizenship
in which all Colombian men were to enjoy.[14] Similar to revolutionary
France’s emancipation of slaves, freedpeople were expected to show gratitude to
the gift of the state.[15] Likewise, these rituals
of citizenship after the 1848 decree of president Mosquera privileged the
strongest and youngest slaves for freedom, tying masculinity, virility, and
republican virtue of industry to freedom.[16] Besides identifying
republicanism with emancipation, industry, and Colombian independence, public
manumissions also served to include free people of color while simultaneously
demonstrating that those who behaved honorably and obeyed authority would be
guaranteed their rights.[17] Subsequently, emancipation
in Colombia was also tied with a new liberal democratic conception of
citizenship during the presidency of José Hilario López, achieving complete
abolition and universal male suffrage.[18]
Whereas
the final emancipation of slaves in Colombia did not occur until the 1850s,
Guadeloupe’s former slaves were reenslaved from 1802 until 1848. Despite these
differing paths to emancipation, a shared convergence of republicanism with
emancipation and inclusion of men of African descent connects the two regions
to broader patterns of emancipation. In both cases, a republicanist discourse
of freedom excludes women from becoming citizen-soldiers capable of embodying
masculine virtues, thereby justifying the removal of women of color from formal
political participation. Similarly, a shared condescension from the Colombian
state to the emancipated, displayed by their minimizing of the agency of
Afro-Colombians in resisting slavery, imposed a specific meaning of freedom
from above. The same dynamic emerges in Guadeloupe, where enslaved insurgents
appropriated the discourse of republicanism and the French Revolution to assert
their own rights, but still faced state attempts to monitor and control their
labor, movement, and exercise of aforementioned republican rights. For
Afro-Colombians, enduring discrimination contradicted the promise of racial
equality embedded in Colombian independence and official discourse of racial
harmony, although the wars of independence and other measures ensured the
majority were already free before the final 1851 emancipation decree.
In
addition, the predicament of governing a racially mixed and diverse population
arose both in Guadeloupe and 19th century Colombia. While espousing
liberal values and sentiments, Bolivar’s attempts to institute a semi-monarchical
constitution exemplify the persistence of racial fears, especially poignant in
light of the recent Haitian Revolution. Skepticism of republicanism’s applicability
in a racially mixed population illustrate what Aline Helg alludes to as the
fear of a black political power and race war, or pardocracia.[19] Lasso refers to this as a
concern stemming from white Creoles’ reading of Rousseau’s views on factional
politics. Thus, the need to unify an ethnically diverse population led to the
development of mestizaje as an ideal. Additionally, white Creoles such as Bolivar
endeavored to change the constitution due to aforementioned racial concerns.[20] In Guadeloupe, Hugues
also justified his autocratic rule of Guadeloupe on the grounds of its diverse
population of whites, blacks of various African ethnic origins, and people of
color, each group allegedly opposed to the other.[21] Mestizaje was not a goal
of state policy in Guadeloupe, but a similar concern with the inapplicability
of republican principles in a heterogeneous society in which whites were a
minority ties revolutionary-era Guadeloupe to Colombia’s paradoxical
association of republicanism with racial equality.
In
summation, republicanism predicated on the aforementioned citizen-soldier model
in which the state identifies itself with emancipation resulted in
contradictory practices. Men of African descent were able to lay claim to political
rights on the grounds of their military service and manhood. However, it failed
to ensure access to equality in practice while perpetuating patriarchal
conceptions of society. Concerns among white elites or politicians regarding
the participation of blacks in the exercise of authority or the specter of race
war further restricted the meaning of freedom by weakening explicit racial
grievances or pushing gradual emancipation in Colombia. In Guadeloupe, where a
nationalist struggle did not materialize, the metropole’s decision to revoke
emancipation led to re-enslavement. Afro-Colombians, however, were able to justify
their demands for racial equality and freedom in accordance with national
republican notions, though white elites, as well as gender and social
limitations of Afro-Colombian military veterans’ could weaken attempts to
express their grievances as a racial group.
Bibliography
Dubois, Laurent. A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave
Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2004.
Helg, Aline.
"Simón Bolívar and the Spectre of "Pardocracia": José Padilla in
Post-Independence Cartagena." Journal
of Latin American Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 447-71.
Lasso, Marixa.
"Race War and Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena,
1810–1832." The American Historical
Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 336-61.
McGraw, Jason.
"Spectacles of Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and
Citizen Mobilisation in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia," Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011):
268-288.
[1] Laurent Dubois, A Colony of
Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 89.
[3] Ibid, 148.
[4] Ibid, 162.
[5] Ibid, 185.
[7] Ibid, 198.
[8] Marixa Lasso, "Race War and
Nation in Caribbean Gran Colombia, Cartagena, 1810–1832." The
American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 353.
[9] Ibid, 344.
[10] Aline Helg, "Simón Bolívar
and the Spectre of "Pardocracia": José Padilla in Post-Independence
Cartagena." Journal of Latin
American Studies 35, no. 3 (2003): 453.
[11] Dubois, 387.
[12] Jason McGraw, "Spectacles of
Freedom: Public Manumissions, Political Rhetoric, and Citizen Mobilisation in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Colombia," Slavery & Abolition 32 (2011): 272.
[13] Lasso, 348.
[14] McGraw, 280.
[15] Ibid, 281.
[16] Ibid, 280.
[17] Ibid, 282.
[19] Helg, 455.
[20] Lasso, 350.
[21] Dubois, 286.
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