Friday, August 11, 2017

Turning Slaves into Citizens: Revolutionary Guadeloupe and Caribbean Colombia

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.
[2] Ibid, 129.
[3] Ibid, 148.
[4] Ibid, 162.
[5] Ibid, 185.
[6] Ibid, 180.
[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.
[18] Ibid, 277.
[19] Helg, 455.
[20] Lasso, 350.
[21] Dubois, 286.

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