Puerto Rico History - Slavery
By the arly 19th Century in places such as in Puerto Rico, where slaves constituted the majority of society, the mere idea of emancipating them frightened many, because the black population was numerous. This constituted a risk to the safety of slavers, because it was feared that the manumisers would take revenge on the grievances received. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, slavery was not widespread in Spanish America, except in some Caribbean islands such as Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico or Cuba. Slavery was abolished in the English colonies in 1838, in the French in 1848, in the United States in 1865, in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1886.
The original inhabitants – The Taino – died due to the introduction of new illnesses and the oppression of the conquerors. The Spaniards needed workers and used the slaves imported from the Atlantic slave trade as laborers. Dissatisfied with Indian labor, the conquerors sought the solution in Africa for their colonial enterprise. It all seemed to indicate that nature had decreed the destiny of Africa to be that of submission to other continents. Separated from Europe by the vast Sahara, the great mass of Africa remained for centuries isolated from the European course of history. Its inhospitable coasts and the absence of ports, the cataracts of its great rivers and its deadly tropical climate made exploration difficult and unattractive. And if, according to an ancient legend, in some corner of its dark interior were to be found limitless treasures, the difficulty in reaching them and developing trade in an impenetrable country with a primitive population repelled the European trade pioneers. To them, Africa was little more than a gigantic obstacle on the way to Asia.
Nevertheless the need for labor in order to exploit the potential wealth of the New World could not be ignored. Such labor was lacking in America. The Indians in the north were not ready to exchange their buffalo hunts for agricultural pursuits; the weaker southern Indians were unsuitable for hard labor. The same Portuguese tradesmen who had found something besides gold in Africa thought of an answer to the labor problem.
The initial shipment to Lisbon organized by the first European company for the exploitation of western Africa consisted of 200 black slaves ; if they could work in Portugal, they could also work in Brazil. Seen as simple minded and childlike creatures, hot-blooded but docile under the lash, adapted to the tropical heat, strong and coarse, the African slaves seemed created especially to meet the needs of the colonial planters, and it was neither difficult nor dangerous to obtain them. In fact, a slave could be more easily acquired and with greater profit than gold or ivory.
Thus, the dilemma was rapidly solved, as men, women and children of western Africa were transported across the ocean by the thousands and hundreds of thousands. It may well be said that the life of America was saved by virtue of a blood transfusion from Africa. The employment of slaves was certainly no novelty to the conquerors who, in order to supply labor to landowners of Andalucia and the southern part of the peninsula, had been importing black slaves from Africa since the middle of the 16th century. Soon afterwards they were taken to the Canaries, and in 1603 black slavery was introduced in Santo Domingo. No sooner had the colonization enterprise begun in Puerto Rico than it, too, became a destination for slave labor.
Nor did the African resign himself to the loss of his freedom and heritage; the result was rebellion in defense of his rights. In the face of defeat, he too sought refuge in the forest, uniting with Indian fugitives to establish "palenques" or protection quarters which soon became centers of "miscegenation" or ethnomorphosis.
Nevertheless, under the constant pressure of persecution and hostility, the African's fate, like that of the Indian, was to unite with the conquer. The latter, following the path of least resistance, continued his development of the lowlands, the starting point from whence he gained gradual access to the entire island. In the beginning most of the conquerors, headed by the military and the bureaucrats, paid scant attention to the cultivation of the land, as the extraction of gold was considered to be the quickest means of gaining wealth.
Throughout the island, north, and south, emphasis was placed on the mining of precious metal, the brunt of hard labor falling upon the Indian and the african. The tillers of the land faced greater difficulties and hardships. They not only had to redeem the land from the dense and exuberant forest in order that the soil might be made productive, but they had to plant and sow, a difficult and complicated task inasmuch as they lacked knowledge and experience as to what to plant in order to obtain a good yield - an adventure and an unpredictable risk for these pioneers.
The magnitude of the hardships and disappointments of the early farmers can be appreciated, given a decree of 1513 by which they were ordered to plant four trees of each variety of pomegranates, pears, apples, peaches, apricots, walnuts, and chestnuts within a period of two years. The failures must have been numerous; on frequent occasions, their reserve provisions exhausted, both farmer and miner were pressed to seek from the Indians the means of subsistence, until the arrival of ships with additional supplies of food and merchandise.
All in all, such experiences did not prove fruitless. Spurred on by necessity, profiting from the experiments carried out at the Granja Agricola in the lowlands of the Toa, and from an exchange of experiences with Indians and Africans, the farmer gained intimate knowledge of insular fauna and of the land, enabling him to grow different fruits from seeds which were brought from abroad, principally from Santo Domingo - an experimental station of plants and animals from Spain and other lands since the time of Ovando.
Commerce was developed by several individuals closely related to high officials in the peninsula, who became agents or representatives of the Spanish producers and who, in order to counteract the risks involved in the unlimited power of the Governor, obtained, in exchange for their support of the latter, personal immunity as well as protection for the wealth they had managed to amass.
The number of slaves in Puerto Rico rose from 1,500 in 1530 to 15,000 by 1555. In time, however, mineral production began to decline. Between 1528 and 1530, profits in mining virtually disappeared, creating a crisis in the economic structure which had been based on the mining industry of the colony. By 1570, the gold mines were declared depleted and no longer produced the precious metal. After gold mining came to an end in the island. The great disappointment of the gold seekers was matched by that of those who had come dreaming of the conquest of treasure-laden cities and of fabulous wealth from ransom payments of infidel captives.
Discouraged by a picture of reality so different from their expectations, many began the exodus to Peru, seeking the dazzling opulence of El Dorado. In the face of the desperate situation which had placed the colony in imminent danger of being wiped out, Governors don Antonio dela Gama and don Francisco Manuel deLando were persuaded by the King to confront the crisis by substituting a new agricultural base for the bankrupt mineral economy - a process full of alternatives and fluctuations which reflected the changes and transformation of the colonial policy of the metropolis.
In the years 1672 to 1810. Few slaves were brought in either from Africa or from elsewhere in the Americas to Puerto Rico, and the supply of these was erratic and limited. Curtin contends that the revival of labor-intensive agricultural production for the export sector began in the mid-1770s and that slave imports would have been greater in the subsequent years. He also posits that slave traffic to the island declined in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. See Philip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969): 32–34.
The Spanish decree of 1789 allowed the slaves to earn or buy their freedom. However, this did little to help them in their situation and eventually many slaves rebelled, most notably in the revolt against Spanish rule known as the "Grito de Lares“. The 1834 Royal census of Puerto Rico established that 11% of the population were slaves, 35% were colored freemen and 54% were white.
The Spanish government had lost most of its possessions in the New World by 1850. After the successful slave rebellion against the French in St Dominique (Haiti) in 1803, the Spanish Crown became fearful that the "Criollos" (native born) of Puerto Rico and Cuba, her last two remaining possessions, may follow suit.
Leaders of the Puerto Rican abolitionist movement, including José Julián Acosta, Francisco Mariano Quiñones, Julio L. de Vizcarrondo, Ramón Emeterio Betances and Segundo Ruiz Belvis, waged a long struggle to end slavery on the island. the original inhabitants – The Taino – died due to the introduction of new illnesses and the oppression of the conquerors. The Spaniards needed workers and used the slaves imported from the Atlantic slave trade as laborers. Amidst slave uprisings, on March 22, 1873, the Spanish National Assembly finally abolished slavery in Puerto Rico. The owners were compensated with 35 million pesetas per slave, and slaves were required to continue working for three more years.
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