Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68

Abstract

Drawing on thirty freedom suits from nineteenth-century eastern Cuba, this article explores how some slaves redefined slaveholders' oral promises of manumissions by grace from philanthropic acts into contracts providing a deferred wage payout. Manumissions by grace tended to reward affective labor (loyalty, affection) and to be granted to domestic slaves. Across Cuba, as in other slave societies of Spanish America, through self-purchase, slaves made sustained efforts to monetize the labor that they did by virtue of their ascribed status. The monetization of affective work stands out amongst such efforts. Freedom litigants involved in conflicts over manumissions by grace emphasized the market logics in domestic slavery, revealing that slavery was a fundamentally economic institution even in such instances where it appeared to be intertwined with kinship and domesticity. Through this move, they challenged the assumption that slaves toiled loyally for masters out of a natural commitment to an unchanging master-slave hierarchy. By the 1880s, through court litigation and extra-judicial violence, slave litigants and insurgents would turn oral promises of manumission by grace into a blueprint for general emancipation. Through their legal actions, enslaved people, especially women, revealed the significance and transactional nature of care work, a notion familiar to us today.

Manumission, custom, and the laws of slavery and freedom in Latin America

“…In the 19th century, in the Americas, when custom was invoked, the speakers did not always refer to a deep past. Rather, they pointed to recent precedents, accepted behaviors, the witnesses' and litigants' moral standing, expectations for how contracts should be drawn, moral values (Premo, 2014; Chira, 2018). Elites and non‐elites across Latin America fought to control its content into the Age of Emancipation.…”

Ampliando los significados de Sevicia: Los reclamos de protección corporal de los esclavos en Santiago de Cuba (1810-1870)

“…En general invocaban dos motivos principales. Muchos afirmaban que ya habían pagado por su libertad en efectivo o en servicios, pero que sus dueños se habían negado a expedirles una carta de manumisión (Chira, 2018). Un número cada vez mayor de peticionarios se quejaba también de que sus esclavizadores los habían sometido a una violencia excesiva (sevicia), y que por ello se les debía permitir cambiar de dueño o comprar su libertad a un precio relativamente bajo.…”