The Cuban Slave Market, 1790-1880 (Cambridge Latin American Studies)

CAMBRIDGE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES GENERAL EDITOR SIMON COLLIER ADVISORY COMMITTEE MALCOLM DEAS, STUART SCHWARTZ, ARTURO VALENZUELA

79 THE CUBAN SLAVE MARKET 1790-1880

For a list of other books in the Cambridge Latin America Studies series please see page 247

THE CUBAN SLAVE MARKET 1790-1880

LAIRD W. BERGAD Lehman College and Graduate School and University Center The City University of New York

FE IGLESIAS GARCIA Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana

MARIA DEL CARMEN BARCIA Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY IOOI 1-421 I, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1995 First published 1995 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bergad, Laird W., 1948The Cuban slave market 1790-1880 / Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias Garcia, Maria del Carmen Barcia. p. cm. - (Cambridge Latin American studies ; 79) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-48059-0

1. Slave trade - Cuba - History. I. Iglesias Garcia, Fe. II. Barcia, Maria del Carmen, 1939— . III. Title. IV. Series. HT 1077.B47 1995 38o.i'44'o9729i-de 20 94-38288 CIP

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0-521-48059-0 Hardback

Contents

Tables and Preface and acknowledgments Glossary

figures

vii xi i i xvii

1

Introduction: Prices and the historiography of slavery

i

2

Sources and methods of data collection Sources Methods of data collection Nominal and "real" prices

15 15 17 22

3

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history

23

4

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880 Demographic characteristics of the Cuban slave market General price trends and statistical correlations Short-term fluctuations in slave prices Price differentials by sex Price differentials by origin Occupations

38 40 47 52 61 67 72

5

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos Slavery and the socioeconomic development of the Havana region The Havana slave market Slavery and the socioeconomic development of the Santiago region The Santiago slave market Slavery and the socioeconomic development of the Cienfuegos region

79 79 85 94 99 103

vi

Contents The Cienfuegos slave market

111

6

Coartacion and letters of freedom Coartados Letters of freedom Coartacion and manumission in comparative perspective

122 122 128 131

7

Conclusions and comparative perspectives

143

Appendix A: Nominal and real slave prices using international price indexes Appendix B: Statistical data base on the Cuban slave market Bibliography Index

155 161 233 243

Tables and figures

Tables 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7

Slave sales by sex, origin, age, and place, 1790—1880 page 40 Slave sales by origin, sex, and age, 1790—1880 41 Slave sales by origin, age, and time period 41 Slave sales by sex, age, and time period 41 Correlation coefficients between average prices for primeage slaves and selected variables 49 Average prices of slaves ages 15—40 by sex and origin, 1836-1868 69 National origins of African slaves sold, 1790—1880 72 Average prices of slaves by nationality, 1790—1868 73 Average prices of domestics, 1821—1835 7^ Average prices of domestics, drivers, and field hands of both sexes, 1836-1868 77 Price ratios of domestics/field hands; drivers/field hands; and drivers/domestics of both sexes for selected years, 1840—1863 (in percentages) 78 Slaves sold in Havana by sex, nationality, and age, 1790-1880 86 Age structure of the slave populations of Havana, Santiago, Cienfuegos, and Cuba, 1862 (in percentages) 98 Slaves sold in Santiago by sex, nationality, and age, 1816-1875 100 Slave sales by category for Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1830—1863 (in percentages) 111 Females as percentage of total slave populations of Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1846 and 1862 111 Slaves sold in Cienfuegos by sex, nationality, and age, 1830-1863 114 Comparative price ratios by category for slaves sold in

viii

Tables and figures

Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1844—1862 (in percentages) 5.8 Average prices and price indexes for slaves ages 15—40, Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1836—1863 (for indexes 100=price in Havana) 6.1 Coartados and slaves sold in Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos by category, 1790—1880 6.2 Letters of freedom issued in Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos by category, 1790—1880 6.3 Profile of manumissions in various slave-holding regions in various time periods (in percentages) A.i Cuban slave price indexes and U.S., British, and Spanish price indexes used to convert the Cuban nominal slave price indexes into "real" slave price indexes for slaves ages 15—40 A.2 Correlation coefficients resulting from comparing the Cuban slave price index with U.S., British, and Spanish general price indexes for varied time periods for slaves ages 15—40 B.i Average slave prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1790—1880 B.2 Average slave prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, 1790—1880 B.3 Average slave prices by sex, age, and nationality, Santiago, 1816—1875 B.4 Average slave prices by sex, age, and nationality, Cienfuegos, 1830—1863 B.5 Average slave prices by African nationality, Havana, Santiago, Cienfuegos, 1790-1880 B.6 Average slave prices by occupation, Havana, Santiago, Cienfuegos, 1790-187 5 B.7 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos, 1791—1880 B.8 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, 1791—1880 B.9 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Santiago, 1817—1866 B.io Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Cienfuegos, 1830-1863 B.i 1 Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Havana and Santiago, 1802—1877 B.i2 Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, 1802-1877

115

119 125 131 141

158

160 162 174 186 194 199 207 213 219 225 227 228 230

Tables and B.i3

figures

Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Santiago, 1826-1875

ix

231

Figures 3.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12

Slave imports to Cuba, 1790—1866 (in thousands) Slave sales by age group and time period, 1790—1880 (in percentages) Slave sales by origin and time period, 1790—1880 (in percentages) Slave sales by sex and time period, 1790—1880 (in percentages) Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40, 1790—1875 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40 compared with sugar exports, 1790-1875 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40 compared with slave imports, 1790-1866 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40 compared with sugar prices, 1800—1875 Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages, 1790—1871 Average prices for slaves ages 15—40 by sex, 1790—1880 Price ratios of Creole males to African males ages 15—40 in percentages, 1836—1865 Price ratios of Creole females to African females ages 15—40 in percentages, 1836—1862 Average slave prices by African nationalities, 1790—1868 Havana, percentage of slave sales by age, 1790—1880 Havana, percentage of slave sales by origin, 1790—1880 Havana, percentage of slave sales by sex, 1790—1880 Price ratios of Creole to African slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Havana, 1790—1865 Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Havana, 1790—1871 Havana, average price by sex, ages 15—40, 1790—1880 Havana, average price by origin, ages 15—40, 1790—1880 Havana, average price by age group, 1790—1880 Santiago, percentage of slave sales by age, 1835—1864 Santiago, percentage of slave sales by origin, 1835—1864 Santiago, percentage of slave sales by sex, 1816—1864 Price ratios of Creole to African slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Santiago, 1836—1855

27 42 42 43 48 49 50 50 62 63 70 70 75 87 87 88 88 89 89 90 91 IO1

101 102 103

x 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18 5.19 5.20 5.21 5.22 5.23 5.24 5.25 5.26 5.27 5.28 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 6.10 6.11

Tables and figures Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Santiago, 1836—1855 Santiago, average price by sex, ages 15—40, 1836—1855 Santiago, average price by origin, ages 15-40, 1836—1855 Santiago, average price by age group, 1836—1862 Cienfuegos, percentage of slave sales by age, 1845—1863 Cienfuegos, percentage of slave sales by origin, 1840-1863 Cienfuegos, percentage of slave sales by sex, 1840-1863 Price ratios of Creole to African slaves ages 15-40 in percentages for Cienfuegos, 1844—1862 Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Cienfuegos, 1844—1863 Cienfuegos, average price by sex, ages 15—40, 1844—1863 Cienfuegos, average price by origin, ages 15—40, 1844-1863 Cienfuegos, average price by age group, 1843-1863 Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos compared, average price for males ages 15—40, 1836—1863 Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos compared, average price for females ages 15—40, 1836—1863 Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos compared, average price for Creoles ages 15-40, 1836-1863 Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos compared, average price for Africans ages 15—40, 1836—1863 Percentage of coartado sales by sex, 1791-1880 Percentage of coartado sales by origin, 1791—1880 Percentage of coartado sales by age, 1791—1880 Average price for slaves and coartados ages 15—40, 1790-1872 Price ratios of coartados to slaves ages 15—40 in percentages, 1790-1872 Average prices of slaves and letters of freedom for ages 15-40 for selected years, 1796-1871 Price ratios of letters of freedom to slave prices for slaves ages 15—40, 1796—1871 Percentage of letters of freedom by sex, 1790—1880 Percentage of letters of freedom by origin, 1790—1880 Percentage of letters of freedom by age, 1790-1880 Prices for libertados in Salvador, Bahia compared with Cuban coartados, 1808—1878

104 IO 4 105 105 112 113 113 116 116 117 117 118 118 120 120 121 125 126 126 127 128 129 130 132 132 133 136

Tables and 6.12 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 A. 1

A.2

A.3

figures

Price ratios of male to female libertados in Bahfa compared with coartados in Cuba, 1808-1878 Slave prices for two U.S. slave markets for prime-age males compared with Cuba, 1795—1860 Slave prices for prime-age males in New Orleans compared with prime-age Cuban males, 1820—1862 Slave prices for prime-age males in New Orleans compared with prime-age Cuban males, 1804—1860 Slave prices for all slaves in Rio de Janeiro compared with all Cuban slave prices, 1835-1880 Slave prices for males ages 15—29 in Rio Claro compared with prime-age Cuban males, 1843—1880 Slave prices for male and female slaves ages 20—25 in Vassouras compared with Cuba, 1822-1877 Slave prices for male and female slaves ages 20—25 in Pernambuco compared with Cuba, 1852—1880 Nominal and real slave price indexes in Cuba calculated using U.S. price indexes for slaves ages 15—40, 1790-1860 Nominal and real slave price indexes in Cuba calculated using British price indexes for slaves ages 15—40, 1800—1872 Nominal and real slave price indexes in Cuba calculated using Spanish price indexes for slaves ages 15—40, 1812—1872

xi

137 148 148 149 150 151 152 152

156

157

157

Preface and acknowledgments

Archival research can be an exasperating and often daunting task simply because of the enormous volume of material available for consultation. On any topic, for any period, the possibility of examining all extant documents is limited by time, stamina, patience, funding, the volume of dust and debris, personal pressures, and a variety of other factors well-known to researchers everywhere. Authors of even the most lengthy and detailed books often remark on the vast documentation known to exist but which is not consulted because of such limitations. The project leading to this book began with a fantasy shared, we are certain, by many colleagues. It begins something like this: "If I only had a research team under my supervision . . ." The reader can customize the rest of this sentence to fit his or her version of its conclusion. During research breaks on many hot tropical summer afternoons between 1982 and 1987, Fe Iglesias Garcia and Laird W. Bergad often sat in the lobby of the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana. Both historians were working on long-term projects concerning various aspects of nineteenthcentury Cuban socioeconomic history, and their individual research inevitably involved Cuba's principal institution during the epoch — African slavery. The volume of documentation in the Archivo Nacional on slavery, the slave trade, and abolition is remarkable for its quality and quantity. A large portion is situated in collections which offer no hint as to precise contents, some of it is topically catalogued, but the greatest share of materials is uncatalogued. Iglesias and Bergad repeatedly discussed strategies for dealing with such a diverse and voluminous array of materials, and how the different topical concerns of historians who specialized on slavery in the Americas could be addressed by the various Cuban collections. In their conversations two related themes frequently recurred. The first revolved around a mutual interest in economic aspects of slavery in Cuba. How did slavery function economically from the vantage point of the great Cuban slave-based sugar plantations of the nineteenth century? Were slaves as productive as other forms of labor exploitation? What kinds of profit

xiv

Preface and acknowledgments

margins resulted from investments in slaves during the various periods of Cuban slavery? As abolition approached, why did the largest Cuban plantations continue to rely on slave or other forms of forced labor, despite the existence of a large free population? The historiography on Cuban slavery had addressed many of these themes, but as each work appeared, new questions emerged. Iglesias and Bergad discussed the many unknowns and kept returning to one central aspect of slavery in Cuba: the quantitative evolution of the Cuban slave market. Could they understand anything about the economics of Cuban slavery without first having a reliable series of prices which would permit them to trace fluctuations in the market value of Cuban slave labor? With the exception of scattered notations, or studies of very brief time periods, there were no systematically reliable data on slave prices they could utilize to understand Cuban slavery. It seemed that this could be a point of departure for analyzing other economic aspects of slavery and sugar production in nineteenth-century Cuba. The second focus of conversation flowed from the first. Both of them knew exactly where they could find documentation on the market value of Cuban slaves. The notarial archives of Havana and other Cuban localities recorded individual and collective slave sales, and every transaction contained detailed information on each slave bought and sold. However, the task of compiling a reliable data base sufficiently large enough to analyze trends in the Cuban slave market was impossible for any one or two historians. Not only were there literally thousands of volumes of protocol records, but every volume contained thousands of handwritten transactions, each of which had to be deciphered and the data extracted and transcribed.1 There were no short cuts, no nice neat lists of slave sales and corresponding prices. For two people the job would be long, tedious, and ultimately impossible to complete for any extended historical time frame simply for the sheer volume of materials to be examined. But "if we had a research team under our supervision. . ." The project leading to this book began with fantasy, and its research phase took some time to emerge. In 1986 a group of scholars specializing on Latin America and the Caribbean at various campuses of the City University of New York (CUNY) approached the CUNY central administration with a proposal to establish an academic exchange program with Cuban universities and research centers. This resulted in the creation of the CUNY-Cuba Scholarly Exchange Program.2 In 1987 Laird W. Bergad submitted a formal proposal from this program 1. In 1989 the Cuban Academy of Sciences prepared a guide to the notaries of Havana. See Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, Archivo Nacional, Indice de las escribamas de la ciudadde la Habana y sus escribanos

(Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, 1989). 2. This program has since been renamed the CUNY-Caribbean Exchange Program.

Preface and acknowledgments

xv

and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program of Lehman College, CUNY to the Cuban Institute of History suggesting that a joint research team be assembled to extract detailed quantitative information on the Cuban slave market between 1790 and 1880 from the protocol records of various regions in Cuba. This team would be composed of students from Lehman College and the University of Havana. It would be directed by Bergad and Iglesias Garcia, who would welcome other Cuban historians interested in the project. Through its various departments the Cuban Institute of History directs a large number of historical research projects. However, because this proposal involved students it was logically referred to the Faculty of Philosophy and History of the University of Havana, where Professor Maria del Carmen Barcia expressed her interest and became one of the project directors. Preparations were made in New York and Havana during early 1988. Thirteen students from Lehman College and twelve history majors from the University of Havana were recruited to form the research team, and in June 1988 the New York group arrived in Cuba to begin the research that led to this book. Written between 1989 and 1994, this book involved numerous joint meetings between its authors in New York and Havana. Chapter 3 was originally drafted in Spanish by Iglesias and Barcia. Chapter 2 and the section on the economic history of Cienfuegos in Chapter 5 were drafted in Spanish by Iglesias. The sections on the economic histories of Santiago and Havana in Chapter 5 were drafted in Spanish by Barcia. Bergad assembled and analyzed the quantitative data, composed the statistical tables, prepared the figures, wrote Chapters 1, 4, 6, 7 and the quantitative analysis of the regional slave markets in Chapter 5. To assure a fluidity in the writing and analytical style in English, Bergad translated, edited, and rewrote substantial portions of Chapters 2 , 3 , and 5, and made revisions after the book was copy edited. The final manuscript was discussed in meetings of all three authors. Although this book was written by three historians, it must be emphasized that the student researchers under our supervision extracted the data analyzed in this book. It would take still another book to relate many folkloric tales of their interactions and adventures in the Archivo Nacional, at the Hotel Machurrucutu where they were lodged in Havana in 1988, and during the Cuban students' visit to New York during February 1992. We salute these students not only for their meticulous work but also for their spirit of fraternity, cooperation, and humanism that transcended the narrow confines of nationality and politics. We owe them much more than the gratitude expressed here. This book is dedicated to Julio Cesar Gonzalez Pages, Jose Antonio Bedia Pulido, Jose Antonio Olmedo Soteras, Ania

xvi

Preface and acknowledgments

Leon, Omar Sixto Suarez, Carlos Tabraue Castro, Ana Cristina Perea Escalona, Nancy Regal Gomez, Pedro Rodriguez Gonzalez, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, Alfredo Alvarez Hernandez, Rafael Perez Fernandez, formerly of the University of Havana, and Elizabeth Botero, Victoria Colon, Mirta Noemi Cotto, Ingrid Domenech, Mercedes Guevara, Camelia Maldonado, Edwin Martinez, Evelyn Matias, Miguel A. Ortiz, Marisol Perez, Angel L. Rodriguez, and Camille Rosa, all formerly of Lehman College, CUNY. In Havana and New York there are many people who made this book possible. The authors would like to express their special appreciation to colleagues at the Cuban Institute of History, the Faculty of Philosophy and History at the University of Havana, at Lehman College, and at the CUNY central administration, who supported us in so many ways. The CUNYCaribbean Exchange Program is thanked for funding the major portion of this project. We also thank the staff at the Archivo Nacional de Cuba and the Hotel Machurrucutu for their patient cooperation while the research team was in Havana. We recognize the role that Joseph Murphy, former CUNY chancellor, played in the formation of the CUNY-Caribbean Exchange Program. We are grateful for the support given by the late Jorge Enrique Mendoza, President of the Cuban Institute of History, and Fernando Rojas Avalo, former chancellor of the University of Havana. Iraida Lopez and Rina Benmayor of the CUNY-Caribbean Exchange Program and Hunter College are singled out for gratitude. Iraida resolved many difficult details in arranging all trips to Havana and to New York; Rina's efforts were critical in the initial phase of the project. We thank Manuel Moreno Fraginals, who participated in early discussions about research methods in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba. We want to express our appreciation to Frank Smith of Cambridge University Press, who encouraged us through several rewrites of the original manuscript, and to Herbert Gilbert, who copyedited the manuscript and contributed significantly to its final form. Finally, we join the legions — or so it seems — of scholars working on slave studies who are indebted to Stan Engerman. There are few recent studies of slavery that have not benefited from his thoughtful suggestions. His meticulous reading of several drafts of this manuscript, his carefully considered lengthy handwritten criticisms and comments, and numerous telephone discussions with Bergad about technical and other issues, were indispensable in turning the very rough drafts into this book. The same recognition is due to Herb Klein. He read the original draft and made numerous and valuable constructive comments and recommendations. Herb's concern with comparative perspectives was especially useful and stimulating in the writing of Chapters i, 6, and 7.

Glossary

albanil

mason

alcabala

sales tax

alfarero

iron worker

arriero

mule tender or mule train driver

asientos

licenses granted to companies by the Spanish Crown for a particular period of time establishing a monopoly over slave trading

billetes

paper currency

caballeria

agrarian measure of 33.6 acres (in Cuba)

cafetales

coffee farms

calesero

carriage driver

cargas

cargo usually denned as the quantity of \ horse or mule could carry

carpintero

carpenter

carretero boyero

driver of an oxcart; cattle tender

carretillero

hod carrier

cartas de libertad

letters of freedom issued to a slave

Glossary

XVI11

cedulas

registration papers; decree

cimarroms

runaway slaves

coartacion

contract by which slave began to purchase his or her freedom in installments and by which the final price of freedom was fixed and unchangeable

coartado

legal classification designating a slave who had begun the process of self-purchase

corrales

circular extensions of land granted in usufruct and measuring one league in radius

costurera

seamstress

de campo

designation of a field slave

domestico

domestic worker or house servant

dotaciones

slave population of a particular plantation

encomienda

colonial term used to designate a grant of Indian labor and tribute rights bestowed to Spanish colonists

enfermero

nurse

esclavos horros

term used in the early colonial period in Cuba to designate slaves who had begun the process of self-purchase; an antecedent to the term coartado

escribania

the office of a notary public

escribano

notary public

estancias

small farms usually raising food crops in conjunction with other products

hatos

circular extensions of land granted in usufruct and measuring two leagues in radius

Glossary

xix

herrero

blacksmith

hornero

slave tending ovens

informe

written report

ingenio

sugar mill and surrounding plantation

jornalero

day laborer

ladinos

Hispanicized African slaves who had converted to Catholicism

libertades

letters of freedom

maestro azucar

the sugar master, sometimes a slave, who supervised the sugar production process at the mill

maquinista

mechanic

minero

miner

molinos

mills, usually referring to tobacco mills

mulecon

slave between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, but these ages could vary in different time periods

muleque

slave between the ages of ten and thirteen, but these ages could vary in different time periods

negros ganadores

slaves who earned small quantities of cash; negros de ganho in Portuguese

oficio

the office of a particular notary; the name of the office transcending the death of the founding notary

palenques

communities of runaway slaves baker

Glossary

XX

papeletas para el cobro de la alcabala

written records noting sales tax payments midwife

patrocinados

ex-slaves who were obliged to enter contractual work arrangements with masters according to the 1880 emancipation law

patronato

stipulation of the 1880 emancipation law which obliged emancipated slaves to enter into work contracts with ex-slaveholders

peon de almacen

unskilled laborer in a retail store

pieza potreros regidor

slave over the age of eighteen stock-raising farms official of municipal Cabildos

salinas

salt flats; or designation of slaves working on salt flats

sastre

tailor

sitios

small farms usually raising food crops and similar to estancias

sociedades anontmas

joint stock companies

tabaqueria

tobacco factory where raw tobacco was stemmed, sorted, and rolled into cigars

tabaquero

worker in a tobacco factory

tachas

defects; a term used to describe characteristics of slaves who had what masters termed "defects," such as the tendency to run away or habitual drunkenness

tachero

slave who worked on tachos, or large vats, where

Glossary

xxi

sugar cane syrup was initially boiled under an open fire talabartero

upholsterer

tasaciones

assessments of fixed or moveable property

tejero

worker in a brick works

tonelero

cooper

trapicbe

animal-powered small sugar mill

trata

the trans-Atlantic slave trade

vegas

tobacco farms

vegueros

tobacco farmers

zapatero

shoemaker

1 Introduction: Prices and the historiography of slavery

This book is about the price history of the Cuban slave market during the most intense period of slave-based sugar plantation growth in Cuban history. It owes its intellectual origins to general trends in economic history over the past three decades, evolving methodologies for analyzing slave societies in the Americas, and debates about the history of slavery in Cuba. Because commodity prices provide the basic economic reference points for peoples in most societies, understanding their trends over extended time periods is essential for interpreting economic history and can also provide important insights into noneconomic aspects of human behavior.1 Although data on prices may serve as valuable analytical tools, price history has only recently become important to Latin American and Caribbean historians despite the early publication of seminal works touching upon Latin America that have had a lasting impact on the historical profession. The most significant was Earl J. Hamilton's 1934 study of European price rises, their linkage to bullion flows from the Americas, and the role which American silver played in stimulating the process of capital accumulation leading to the industrial revolution.2 Hamilton demonstrated the potential of using price data to examine and interpret long-term historical processes at the regional and international levels. Nearly a quarter century would pass until Latin American price history began in earnest. This was heralded by the 1958 publication of Woodrow Borah and Sherburne Cook's study of prices in central Mexico; Guillermo Lohmann Villena's little known 1961 work on prices in Lima, Peru; and Ruggiero Romano's 1963 examination of commodity prices in Argentina 1. Because price changes can be affected by a wide range of factors, such as wars, natural disasters, and political decision making, price series data used for historical analysis must be supplemented by diverse economic and noneconomic data to make them intelligible. It is important to convert prices from dry meaningless numbers into important instruments for analyzing social, economic, and political history. 2. Earl J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1934).

2

The Cuban slave market 1-790—1880

and Chile.3 These pioneering works were followed by the widely acclaimed 1969 study by Enrique Florescano on corn prices and agrarian cycles in eighteenth-century Mexico.4 The publication of Florescano's book revealed how voluminous archival documentation, commonly found in primary source collections throughout the region, could be utilized to glean valuable quantitative data which had largely been ignored by prior generations of researchers, and how these data could be used to forge innovative interpretations of the past. Few students working at the graduate level in Latin American history were not exposed to Florescano's methodology in the 1970s and after. Interest in collecting statistical data among Latin American historians was additionally stimulated by the revolution in research methodology often referred to as econometric history, or "cliometrics," which entails the use of large data bases processed by computer to understand the past through scientific analysis of time-series data.5 This methodological revolution was international in scope and generally referred to as the "New Economic History." Quantitative analysis and data base research was further inspired by innovations in computer technology which permitted access to methods, machines, and constantly evolving software programs that prior to the 1970s had been the exclusive domain of specialists in the natural sciences or technical fields such as engineering. The results of the research and writing of the past two decades on Latin American price history have indicated methodologies for examining prices and have provided important foundations for further research. Current prices and price indexes for a wide array of commodities for Mexico and Peru, the two most important centers of the Spanish Empire during the colonial period; for various regions in Brazil; and for some of the independent nations in Latin America during the nineteenth century, are now available.6 3. Woodrow Borah and Sherburne F. Cook, Price Trends of Some Basic Commodities in Central Mexico, 1530-1570 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958); Ruggiero Romano, "Movimiento de los precios y desarrollo economico: el caso de sudamerica en el siglo XVIII," Desarrollo Economico 3, nos. 1—2 (1963): 31—43; and Guillermo Lohmann Villena, Apuntaciones sobre el curso de los precios de los articulos de primera necesidad en Lima durante el siglo xvi (Lima: Ediciones Solar/ Hachette, 1961). 4. Enrique Florescano, Precios del maiz y crisis agricolas en Mexico (IJO8—I8IO) (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1969). Florescano also published a state of the research article in 1968, Enrique Florescano, "La historia de los precios en la epoca colonial de hispanoamerica: tendencias, metodos de trabajos y objetivos," Latino-America: Anuario de Estudios Latinoamericanos (1968): 111—29. 5. The dissemination of knowledge on a broad scale about the methods of cliometricians within the historical profession dates from the publication of the controversial study of slavery in the United States by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics ofAmerican Negro Slavery (New York: Norton, 1974). The impact of this book will be considered below. 6. For a summary of the most recent work on the reconstruction of price series data for Latin America during the colonial period, see the essays in Lyman L. Johnson and Enrique Tandeter, Essays on the Price History of Eighteenth-Century Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery

3

It is within this general context of inquiry into historical prices that studies on the price history of slavery must be considered. Slave price data have played a crucial role in the debates over the economics of slave labor in the Americas raging since the 1960s, although until very recently few reliable time-series data on slave prices have been available for Latin American or Caribbean slave societies. The most detailed studies have focused on slavery in the U.S. South. These were pioneered by Ulrich B. Phillips who in 1918 published a path breaking book on slavery in the United States and subsequently wrote a number of books and articles elaborating the themes developed in American Negro Slavery.7 Phillips was the first historian to collect and analyze systematic time-series data from archival documents on the slave-based economy of the antebellum South. Among the many data sets developed by Phillips was the first complete series of slave prices for the principal slave markets of the United States: New Orleans, mid-Georgia, Virginia, and Charleston, South Carolina. These were based on probate and plantation records and bills of sale.8 Using his price data on slaves in conjunction with other information on the plantation economy of the southern United States, Phillips fashioned a powerful argument indicting slavery on economic grounds. Phillips contended that slave labor was generally inefficient and unprofitable, except in certain conditions of high soil fertility or where slaves were actively traded for profit.9 He developed analytical points of equal importance on 1989). An important article published after the Johnson and Tandeter book came out is Paul Gootenberg, "Carnerosy Chuno: Price Levels in Nineteenth-Century Peru" Hispanic American Historical Review 70, no. 1 (1990): 1—56. For Brazilian prices see the study by Mircea Buescu, 300 anos de inflagao (Rio de Janeiro: APEC, 1973); and Harold B. Johnson Jr., "A Preliminary Inquiry into Money, Prices, and Wages in Rio de Janeiro, 1763-1823," in Dauril Alden, ed., Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973) pp. 231—83. For Alto Peru during the colonial period see Enrique Tandeter and Nathan Wachtel, Precios y produccion agraria: Potosiy Charcas en el siglo XVIII (Buenos Aires: Estudios CEDES, 1984). 7. Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (New York: Appleton and Company, 1918). 8. Although most historians have recognized that the trends established by Phillips for the U.S. slave market were fairly accurate, there is general agreement that Phillips mishandled the raw data and produced distortions in slave prices approximately 20% higher than actual prices. Stanley L. Engerman, in an unpublished study of the New Orleans data used by Phillips, confirmed this to Prof. Bergad by graciously sending him a copy of his revised data set for inspection. Laurence J. Kotlikoff has confirmed this differential by analyzing the New Orleans data on 5,700 slave sales generated by Fogel and Engerman for Time on the Cross. See Laurence J. Kotlikoff, "Quantitative Description of the New Orleans Slave Market, 1804 to 1862," in Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract, Markets and Production, Technical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1992), pp. 31-53. 9. See Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: Evidence and Methods, a Supplement (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 168—247, for a complete discussion of Phillips's work and of the evolution of the historiography on U.S. slavery from 1865 through 1956. For the evolution of economic interpretations on U.S. slavery to the early 1970s see Stanley L. Engerman, "The Effects

4

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

the social, political, and cultural elements of slavery but these are beyond the scope of this consideration. The main point to emphasize is that Phillips was the first historian to systematically use slave prices as a tool for understanding economic aspects of slavery. His price series would be used uncritically for the next half century. The Phillips interpretations of slavery stood unchallenged for nearly forty years until Kenneth Stampp published The Peculiar Institution in 1956, which challenged Phillips's economic conclusions on slave labor, although Stampp developed his arguments without marshalling or analyzing significant quantitative data.10 The Phillips thesis on slave economics was further questioned in a 1958 article on the profitability of slave labor in the U.S. South by Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer.11 Conrad and Meyer began the process of reconsidering the economic dynamics of slave labor through the use of modern quantitative methods of statistical analysis and the application of economic theory to the study of slavery. They examined profits and losses and rates of return on investments in slaves, using the Phillips slave price series as one of the core data sets for their analysis. The Conrad and Meyer article stimulated further quantitative studies on slavery and was followed by the publication in 1962 of "The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 1830—1860" by Robert Evans, Jr. Evans took Phillips to task for his alleged erroneous use of data and furthered the Conrad and Meyer arguments pointing to U.S. slavery's economic viability. It is conspicuous however that, like Conrad and Meyer, one of the most important data sets used by Evans as a point of departure for his analysis was the Phillips slave price series.12 Upon the intellectual foundations provided by these studies and stimulated by the wide-ranging interest in slavery which developed in the United States during the 1960s, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman of Slavery Upon the Southern Economy: A Review of the Recent Debate," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2<J. series, vol. 4, no. 2 (1967): 71—97, reprinted in Hugh G. J. Aitken, ed., Did Slavery Pay? Readings in the Economics of Black Slavery in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 295-327. 10. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956). During the 1930s Lewis Cecil Gray began to marshall evidence challenging the conclusions of Phillips on the economic viability of slavery in the southern United States. See Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to i860, 2 vols. (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1958), originally published in 1933. 11. Alfred H. Conrad and John R. Meyer, "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South," Journal of Political Economy 66 (April 1958): 95-130. 12. Robert Evans Jr. "The Economics of American Negro Slavery, 1830-1860," in UniversitiesNational Bureau Committee for Economic Research, Aspects of Labor Economics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), pp. 185-243. The most important research into the economics of slavery in the United States prior to the mid-1960s is summarized in a series of excerpts from books and articles in Harold D. Woodman, ed., Slavery and the Southern Economy (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1966). Also see the essays in Aitken, ed., Did Slavery Pay?

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery launched the ongoing project which resulted in the publication of the controversial Time on the Cross (1974) and more recently of the four-volume Without Consent or Contract (1989).13 Although many of the conclusions of Time on the Cross were vigorously attacked in the immediate aftermath of its publication, it had a monumental impact on the study of slavery in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean and stimulated important research into the economics of slave labor.14 There was no graduate program in history in the United States, Europe, and much of Latin America during the 1970s that did not have its faculty and students actively consider and debate some aspect of Fogel and Engerman's work. In the broadest terms it drew international scholarly attention to econometric history and the possibilities of using archive-derived statistical data bases to analyze how slave-based economic systems functioned. In the case of Latin American historiography, which had already begun to address the importance of price history, those studying slavery were obliged to carefully consider the methodological possibilities so widely publicized by Time on the Cross. After its publication there was no study on slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean which did not include some reference to slave prices, attempts at determining profitability in one way or other, or the inclination to apply some kind of quantitative methodology, however rudimentary, to the study of slavery.15 However, studies on the internal economic aspects of slave labor in Latin American and Caribbean slave societies lag far behind the state of research on slave economics in the United States. There have been a number of studies utilizing the quantitative methods pioneered in the United States, most focusing on Brazil.16 But most of the research into slavery in the region has 13. Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton, 1989); Robert William Fogel, Ralph A. Galantine, and Richard L. Manning, eds., Without Consent or Contract: Evidence and Methods (New York: Norton, 1992); Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract: Markets and Production, Technical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1992); Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract: Conditions of Slave Life and the Transition to Freedom, Technical Papers, vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1992). 14. For one of most virulent attacks on Time on the Cross see Herbert B. Gutman, Slavery and the Numbers Game: A Critique of Time on the Cross (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975). Also see Paul A. David, Herbert G. Gutman, Richard Sutch, Peter Temin, and Gavin Wright, Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). 15. The literature on Latin American slavery will be carefully reviewed in the conclusion of this book, which will focus on the comparative aspects of slave markets in the Americas. 16. See, for example, Pedro C. de Mello, "Rates of Return on Slave Capital in Brazilian Coffee Plantations, 1871—1881" in Fogel and Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract, vol. 1, pp. 63—79; Pedro C. de Mello, "Expectation of Abolition and Sanguinity of Coffee Planters in Brazil, 1 8 7 1 1881," in Fogel and Engerman, eds., Without Consent or Contract, vol. 2, pp. 629-46; Pedro Carvalho de Mello, "The Economics of Labor in Brazilian Coffee Plantations, 1850—1888," Ph.D. diss.,

5

6

The Cuban slave market i ygo—i880

considered the important themes of slave demography, the slave trade, and abolition, largely due to the extensive availability and accessibility of documentary source materials.17 It has been noted that the United States historiography on the economics of slavery from Phillips on rested on a number of data bases, among which slave price time-series data were fundamental. It is nearly impossible to make the most basic calculations about slave economies without an understanding of labor costs and how they evolved. Stanley Stein, in his innovative and influential 1957 study on the coffee economy of Vassouras, Brazil, offered the first systematic look at slave price trends through an extended time frame (1822 to 1888) for a Latin American slave-based economy. However, his purpose was not to submit slavery to the kind of quantitative analysis, or to use the types of analytical techniques, employed by Conrad and Meyer and later Evans, Fogel, and Engerman in their studies cited above.18 Additionally, Stein's sample size that was used to determine slave prices was very small, a problem which has plagued many works on Latin American and Caribbean slavery. To date there have been few studies on slave economics which have employed quantitative time-series data bases on the magnitude of the Phillips or Fogel and Engerman data for the United States. Nevertheless, the historiography of Brazilian slavery in particular is impressive, and there have been all kinds of critical quantitative data derived from primary sources produced by a large number of innovative studies.19 University of Chicago, 1977; and Robert W. Slenes, "The Demography and Economics of Brazilian Slavery," Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1976. 17. The studies of slavery in the British West Indies by Barry Higman, and Phillip Curtin, Herbert S. Klein, and David Eltis for the slave trade in general are examples of this. Barry W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Barry W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807—1834 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Also see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and the collection of essays in Joseph E. Inikori and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies, and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992). Other important studies on the slave trade and slave economies are found in the essays in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); and in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic, 1979); and the monographs by Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975) and Seymour Drescher, Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). 18. Stanley Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850—7900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957)19. Some of these studies will be examined in the concluding chapter of this book. The de Mello contributions are a major exception. They offer a slave price series for selected years between 1835

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery

7

For the Spanish colonies and subsequent independent nations there has been much important recent research on African slavery.20 However, few studies have generated the systematic time-series data to address the issues and debates spawned by the study of slavery in the U.S. South, nor have they employed econometric historical analyses. William Sharp, in his study of Colombia's mining economy in the Choco, presented scattered data on slave prices for ten years between 1711 and 1798 and motivated by United States slave studies, examined the question of slave labor's profitability.21 But his study's economic orientation was an exception to most of the literature which has focused on other noneconomic themes of importance. For the non-Hispanic Caribbean, Higman's two works on Jamaica and the British West Indies stand out among research that has generated the most detailed data on the history of slavery, although the slave price information offered is scanty and not based on a large sample. Higman's purpose was not to explore the economics of slave labor, but rather to present an analysis of slave demography and slave-holding patterns. This is also true of A. Meredith John's examination of slavery in Trinidad.22 and 1887 for Rio de Janeiro based on large yearly samples extracted from the press, which probably implies a fairly significant margin of error. The Slenes Ph.D. dissertation also employs quantitative techniques on the model of Fogel and Engerman. The slave price series used is for the 1870s and 1880s. Among the most important additional studies which have utilized quantitative data bases to study Brazilian slavery are: Pierre Verger, Fluxo e Refluxo: Do Trafico de escravos entre 0 golfo de Benin e a Bahia de Todos Os Santos Dos Seculos XVII a XIX (Sao Paulo: Corrupio, 1987), originally published in French in 1968; Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), originally published in French in 1979; Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, Bahia: Seculo XIX: Uma Provincia no Imperio (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1992); Katia M. de Queiros Mattoso, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman, "Trends and Patterns in the Prices of Manumitted Slaves: Bahia, 1819-1888," Slavery and Abolition 7, no. 1, (May 1986), pp. 59—67; Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550—1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976); Peter L. Eisenberg, The Sugar Industry in Pernambuco, 1840—1910: Modernization Without Change (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974); Douglas Cole Libby, Transformagdo e Trabalho em uma economia escravista: Minas Gerais no Seculo XIX (Sao Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1988); Amilcar Martins Filho and Roberto B. Martins, "Slavery in a Nonexport Economy: Nineteenth Century Minas Gerais Revisited," Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 3 (1983): 537—68; Joseph C. Miller, "Slave Prices in the Portuguese Southern Atlantic, 1600—1830," in Paul E. Lovejoy, ed., Africans in Bondage: Studies in Slavery and the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 43-77. 20. For a summary of the literature on slavery in the Spanish colonies and nations see the bibliographical notes in Herbert S. Klein, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 21. William Sharp, Slavery on the Spanish Frontier: The Colombian Choco, 1680—1810 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976). See chapter 10, "Mining Economics and the Profitability of Slavery in the Choco," pp. 171—89. 22. See A. Meredith John, The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 1783-1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

8

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Three other works which discuss many aspects of the slave-based histories of British West Indies colonies and present much valuable statistical data but without the utilization of the quantitative methodologies employed by United States slave economic studies were written by Dunn, Sheridan, and Craton.23 More recently, however, the Barbados slave market has been studied by David Galenson. A reliable price series for slaves has emerged, and some aspects of the Barbados slave market have been compared with the U.S. data generated by Fogel and Engerman.24 For the French Caribbean colonies quantitative studies are scarce. There are no detailed economic analyses on the slave-based economy of French Haiti, as most of the historiography for so long has been centered on themes related to the mulatto-led revolt beginning in 1791 that turned into the legendary slave uprising.25 A recent well-researched work by Dale Tomich has generated a great deal of quantitative data for Martinique, including a list of slave prices. But it was not the author's purpose to analyze the economics of slavery.26 We now turn to the Hispanic Caribbean. For Puerto Rico, where slave labor was important for sugar production, several studies motivated by recent quantitative methodologies have appeared. The most notable are Francisco Scarano's work on the plantation zones of southern Puerto Rico; Andres Ramos Mattei's general consideration of the sugar hacienda system; and Jose Curet's micro-level examination of slave prices and economics for the south-coast region of Ponce for selected years after 1850.27 Curet's work 23. See Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624— 1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972); Richard B. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life inJamaica (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 24. See David W. Galenson, Traders, Planters, and Slaves: Market Behavior in Early English America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See especially chapter 3, "Slave Prices in the Barbados Market, 1673-1723," pp. 53-70, and chapter 4, "On the Order of Purchase by Characteristics at Slave Sales," pp. 71-92. 25. An exception is Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves aux Antilles franfaises (xviie-xviiie siecles) (Basse-Terre: Societe d'histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974). 26. Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit ofSugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830—1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Tomich's prices are based on very few transactions for most years, and trends in prices are not submitted to any quantitative analysis. 27. Francisco A. Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800—1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Andres Ramos Mattei, La hacienda azucarera: su crecimiento y crisis en Puerto Rico (Siglo XIX) (San Juan: CEREP, 1981); Jose A. Curet, "De la esclavitud a la abolicion: transiciones economicas en las haciendas azucareras de Ponce, 1845—1873," in Andres Ramos Mattei, ed., Azucar y esclavitud (San Juan: Tipograffa y Montaje Come-Set Type, 1982). This has been published in English as "About Slavery and the Order of Things: Puerto Rico, 1845—1873," in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp. 117-40.

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery

9

specifically addressed the question of slave profitability and found that slave labor was extremely lucrative for sugar production based on his series of slave prices. For the Dominican Republic new research on slave labor has been published, but again not at the level of quantitative expansiveness found in slave studies elsewhere.28 The historiography on Cuban slavery is the most developed in the Hispanic Caribbean. Even the oldest study, the 1907 book by Hubert Aimes, The History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511—1868, provides some data on slave prices, and these are repeated by Fernando Ortiz in his well-known book, Los negros esclavos. But the economics of slavery are treated as something mysterious at best, and slave prices are mentioned only as curiosities rather than data which could possibly be used for historical analysis.29 Indeed, there are few studies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuba which do not mention the cost of slave labor, but rather than pausing to consider the significance of changes in the slave market, there is a quick departure to other themes. It was in 1964 that Cuban historiography began to utilize some of the quantitative methods developed in Europe and the United States. This was heralded by the publication of Manuel Moreno Fraginals's influential study on the Cuban sugar economy between 1740 and i860, El Ingenio30 Moreno presented data on Cuba's slave-based sugar economy culled from a wide range of sources that had been long ignored, such as census reports and published production data, and he also made impressive use of manuscript sources located in Cuban and foreign archives. El Ingenio elevated the field of Cuban economic history to a new level of sophistication for its broad use of statistical data for historical interpretation rather than mere presentation. It built upon the earlier works of Julio LeRiverend and Heinrich Friedlaender, who had written general economic histories of Cuba; and Ro28. See Carlos Esteban Deive, La esclavitud del negro en Santo Domingo, 1492-1844 (Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 1980); and Ruben Silie, Economia, esclavitudy poblacion: ensayos de interpretation historica del Santo Domingo en el siglo XVIII (Santo Domingo: Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo, 1976). 29. We consider the Aimes data to be haphazard and unreliable. Ortiz added to the Aimes information by looking at newspaper advertisements for slaves, but as Juan Perez de la Riva pointed out in 1977, these advertisements were often for "coartados" (see discussion later in this book) or for slaves who were mortgaged. Perez de la Riva offered his own prices but these were for groups of ten slaves or more sold in auctions, a method of determining prices which we consider to be defective. See Hubert H. S. Aimes, A History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511—1868 (New York: Putnam, 1907); Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros esclavos (Havana: Revista Bimestre Cubana, 1916); and Juan Perez de la Riva, Cudntos africanos fueron traidos a Cuba? (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1977). 30. Moreno's study was originally published in 1964 and reissued in an updated three-volume edition in 1978. See Manuel Moreno Fraginals, El ingenio: complejo economico social cubano del azucar (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978).

io

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

land T. Ely, Leland Jenks, and Ramiro Guerra, who specifically examined aspects of the sugar economy.31 Neither of these authors had analyzed quantitative data bases in any systematic way nor were they interested in the specific economic elements of slave labor. El Ingenio stimulated historians of Cuba to collect and analyze quantitative data, something best exemplified by the multivolume history of Cuba published by Levi Marrero. These volumes make available some of the most important published data on Cuban history and include much statistical information derived from archival sources as well.32 One of the many important analytical conclusions developed in Moreno's work was the notion that slave labor in nineteenth-century Cuba reached a point of economic obsolescence by midcentury, that it was no longer highly profitable to the sugar economy, and that the continuation of slavery was not compatible with the generalized technological improvements in the Cuban sugar industry. For Moreno, slavery was doomed because of its economic irrationality, and abolition resulted from a series of internal contradictions within the Cuban sugar economy, among which the continued use of slave labor was the most critical.33 Although Moreno utilized a Marxist analytical framework, his conclusions on the economic aspects of slavery were conspicuously similar to those developed by Phillips in his analysis of the U.S. South a half century earlier. Moreno's economic arguments about why slavery allegedly "disintegrated" were broadly accepted and repeated by nearly every historian writ31. See Julio LeRiverend, Historia economica de Cuba (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1971), originally published in 1944; Heinrich Friedlaender, Historia economica de Cuba (Havana: Jesus Montero, 1944); Roland T. Ely, Cuando reinaba su majestad el azucar (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1963) and La economia cubana entre las dos Isabeles, 1492—1832 (Havana: Editorial Marti, i960); Leland Jenks, Our Cuban Colony: A Study in Sugar (New York: Vanguard, 1928); Ramiro Guerra y Sanchez, Azucary poblacion en las Antillas (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1976), originally published in 1944. Cuba had an old publishing tradition of presenting works which collected statistical data. See the nineteenth-century examples of Ramon de la Sagra, Historia economica, politica y estadistica de la isla de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta de las viudas de Araza y Soler, 1831); Jacobo de la Pezuela, Diccionario geografico, historico, estadistica de la isla de Cuba, 4 vols. (Madrid: J. Bernat, 1863—1865); Carlos Rebello, Estados relativos a la production azucarera de la isla de Cuba (Havana:

Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitanfa General, i860); Jose Garcia de Arboleya, Manual de la isla de Cuba. Compendio de su historia, geografia, estadistica y administration (Havana: Imprenta del Tiempo, 1859); and Felix Erenchun, Anales de la isla de Cuba. Diccionario administrativo, economico, estadistico, y legislativo, 3 vols. (Havana: Imprenta de la Antilla, 1855—7). 32. Levi Marrero, Cuba: economiay sociedad, 14 vols. (Madrid: 1983-92). 33. Moreno built upon the thesis that slavery's economic irrationality led to abolition, which was expounded by Raul Cepero Bonilla, Azucar y abolicion (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1971), originally published in 1948. Moreno developed these themes in a number of articles as well as in El Ingenio. See "El esclavo y la mecanizacion de los ingenios," Bohemia (June 13, 1969): 9 8 - 9 ; and "^Abolicion o disintegracion?" and "Plantaciones en el Caribe: el caso Cuba-Puerto Rico-Santo Domingo (i860—1940)," in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, La historia como arma y otros estudios sobre esclavos, ingeniosyplantaciones (Barcelona: Ed. Critica, 1983), pp. 50—5 and 56—117.

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery

11

ing on nineteenth-century Cuba during the 1960s and 1970s.34 Although he marshalled more quantitative data on the Cuban slave-based economy than any other prior historian and used economic arguments to sustain his thesis on slavery's declining viability, it is conspicuous that the internal dynamics of slave-based plantations were never examined. Systematic data on slave prices, a fundamental prerequisite for calculating profitability, were not presented. Nor was the Cuban sugar economy subjected to the kind of economic analysis utilized by Conrad, Meyer, Evans, Fogel, and Engerman to determine the economic characteristics of slavery in the antebellum U.S. South. In many ways, Moreno's widely accepted analytical arguments concerning economic aspects of slavery were circumstantial and based on theoretical interpretations of historical evolution, rather than on empirical evidence.35 Moreno's insistence that slavery was becoming an economic burden to the sugar economy was elaborated by Fe Iglesias Garcia, who also stressed the increasing incompatibility of slavery with sugar production after 1850. However, unlike Moreno's arguments, which saw technological innovation and slave labor as part of an irreconcilable contradiction, Iglesias Garcia emphasized that the continuation of slavery was an obstacle to a more economically productive division of labor. Slavery meant the need to tie up investment capital in slaves. From the vantage point of Cuba in the midnineteenth century, if a free labor market could develop, capital then could be devoted to investments in constantly changing processing and transportation technology which would increase overall efficiency and profitability.36 Maria del Carmen Barcia, in considering these debates on the economics 34. See Franklin Knight, Slave Society in Cuba During the Nineteenth Century (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), p. 183. Herbert S. Klein, in Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), did not address the detailed economic aspects of slave labor, but he did provide an excellent survey which underlined the varied slave experiences on the island owing to the diversity of Cuba's colonial economy. 35. Moreno's pioneering book, which provided so much information on Cuba's sugar economy, is flawed, however, in another way. There are many references to quantitative data presented in the book which are undocumented. Statistical tables are often referenced by "See statistical appendix," but when one combs the appendix for the references they are unavailable. Moreno also presents erroneous information as facts to support his interpretations of Cuban slave history. An example of this is his undocumented contention that slave prices tripled between 1800 and 1840 (see El Ingenio {1978}, vol. 2, p. 83). This is introduced as evidence to support the thesis of slavery's growing incompatibility with sugar production because it increasingly became more expensive and thus eroded profits. These kinds of statements have been accepted as fact by historians referring to the widely quoted El Ingenio. As this study shows, however, slave prices for slaves between 15 and 40 years old were 17 percent lower in 1840 than in 1800 (354 pesos in 1840 and 428 pesos in 1800)! In fact, between 1800 and 1850 slave prices were completely stable over the long term. 36. Fe Iglesias Garcia, "The Development of Capitalism in Cuban Sugar Production, 1860-1900," in Moreno Fraginals, Moya Pons, and Engerman, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor, pp. 54-76;

12

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

of slavery, pointed out the differences between analyzing the Cuban slavebased economy at the insular level and situating it within its broader international framework. She affirmed that slavery may indeed have been economically profitable at the moment of its abolition, but that for the international capitalist economy it was no longer politically or economically rational.37 Although both Iglesias Garcia and Barcia introduced much newly derived statistical data on Cuban slavery, neither attempted to analyze the internal economic elements of slave-based sugar production. It was not until the publication of Rebecca Scott's book in 1985, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, that the long-standing generalization regarding slavery's supposed incompatibility with continued sugar production was systematically challenged.38 Scott's purpose was not to analyze slavery from an economic point of view, and her book focuses principally on the theme of abolition. But she presented convincing arguments challenging Moreno's popularized interpretations on slavery's supposed structural incompatibility with advancing technology. These revolved around selected demographic aspects of slavery in Cuba during the epoch of abolition. Scott imaginatively used well-known nineteenth-century published Cuban census materials to demonstrate that it was precisely in the regions where sugar production was so technologically sophisticated that slavery remained so important to local economy and society even as final abolition approached. Reliable indicators of trends in slave prices in Cuba, the basic prerequisite for an economic analysis of slavery, first appeared in 1983 when Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman published a slave price study based on plantation assessments for selected years between 1856 and 1863. 39 Although the data was for a relatively short time frame, "Formacion del capitalismo en la produccion de azucar en Cuba (i860—1900)" (unpublished manuscript); and "Changes in Cane Cultivation in Cuba, i860—1900," paper presented to the Symposium on Caribbean Economic History, University of the West Indies, Jamaica, Nov. 7 - 8 , 1986, published in Social and Economic Studies 37, nos. 1—2 (March-June 1988). 37. Maria del Carmen Barcia, "La esclavitud de las plantaciones, una relacion secundaria," in Temas acerca de la esclavitud (Havana: Ed. Ciencias Sociales, 1986), pp. 96—116). Barcia also established the tendencies in slave prices between 1846 and 1879 utilizing the nineteenth-century Cuban press as a source. While market supplies of slaves could be gauged from her study, and the trends she set out to establish were ascertained, the problem of accurately charting real slave market prices was not overcome because of the source utilized. Additionally, because of the inflationary process Cuba experienced during the Ten Years' War (1868—78), prices quoted in paper currency {billetes) had little relation to gold values, which are the accurate measure of the slave market. See Maria del Carmen Barcia, Burguesza esclavista y abolicion (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987), and "Problemas en torno a la fuerza de trabajo y la plantacion esclavista de Cuba," Revista de la Universidadde la Habana, no. 223 (1984). 38. Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 39. Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Herbert S. Klein, and Stanley L. Engerman, "The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Some Comparative Perspec-

Introduction: Prices and historiography of slavery

13

this innovative article suggested possibilities for research into the economics of slave labor, as well as comparative approaches for the study of Cuban slavery. This was followed by Laird W. Bergad s 1987 examination of slave prices in the province of Matanzas between 1840 and 1875, which was based on buy/sell data found in the protocol records of various localities in this major Cuban plantation zone.40 This was the first Cuban-based study that looked to market place transactions as sources for determining slave prices. Bergad later used his slave price series, along with other statistical data derived from archival sources, to analyze slave-based sugar production from an internal economic point of view.41 His arguments for slavery's increasing profitability, even to the eve of abolition, complemented Scott's demographically based conclusions. Bergad also indicated how slave prices could be used in combination with other data for the quantitative analysis of Cuba's slave-based economy. The present study has two principle objectives, each related to the evolution of the historiography of slavery in the Americas schematically summarized above. First, we indicate how the changing demographic profile of slaves sold and fluctuations in slave prices over time can be utilized as valuable analytical tools for understanding both economic and noneconomic aspects of Cuban history. Second, we have produced a time-series data base on slavery which creates new possibilities for the study of Cuban economic history. As the historiography on slavery in the U.S. South so graphically demonstrates, it is impossible to analyze the economic characteristics of slave societies without an extensive and multifaceted empirical data base, and this begins with a reliable series of slave prices. We provide here a complete price series for Cuban slaves analyzed by age, sex, and nationality for the period between 1790 and 1880 derived from over 23,000 slave sales in three Cuban local slave markets: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos.42 As in all statistical studies based on large data bases, it is probable that an undeterminable margin of error exists for any given year. But because of the sources we utilized and the extensive size of tives," American Historical Review 88, no. 5 (1983): 1,201-18. It should be noted that the prices presented in this article, although indicating general trends, are considered to be highly inflated by the authors of this book. 40. Laird W. Bergad, "Slave Prices in Cuba, 1840-1875," Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 4(1987): 631-55. 41. Laird W. Bergad, "The Economic Viability of Sugar Production Based on Slave Labor in Cuba: 1859-1878," Latin American Research Review 24, no. 1 (1989): 9 5 - 1 1 3 , and Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1990). 42. The data and methods of data collection are discussed in Chapter 2.

14

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

the data base, it is likely that any statistical distortions are relatively small. We are certain that the prices presented here can be used with confidence by scholars examining the history of Cuban slavery and the island's economy during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

2 Sources and methods of data collection

Sources This study derives its quantitative data for Havana from the notarial protocol records stored in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana. These are the most reliable sources for the construction of an accurate and systematic slave price series, since notaries recorded actual sales of slaves in the market place. The notarial protocol collection stored in the Archivo Nacional emerged as the result of an 1873 law establishing the Archivo de Protocolos de La Habana.1 These records are catalogued by individual notaries {escribamas) or by more generalized offices {oficios) which employed numerous notaries. Often a collection of protocol records retained the name of the notary establishing an office, even after that particular escribano died. The Havana data used in this book were extracted from two notarial oficios for which yearly volumes were available. The principal collection was composed of the Galletti protocols, whose records are complete for the years between 1753 and 1900 and consist of 268 volumes. Each year's tomes in the Galletti archive contain numerous transactions involving slaves. However, in the decade of 1870s, as abolition approached, the number of slave sales decreased markedly. To increase our sample size in this decade we supplemented the Galletti records with those of the Fornari collection, which is complete from 1638 through 1892 and consists of 404 volumes. There was no mechanism for determining the social and economic characteristics of the clientele of the notaries whose records we perused. Havana notaries did not have offices in specific geographical districts whose class structures could be determined. Rather, every Havana escribano was located on the ground floor of the Palace of the Captain Generals from which business was conducted. There is no way to determine how slave purchasers 1. See Maria Teresa de Rojas, Indicey estractos del Archivo de Protocolos de La Habana (Havana: Ucar Garcia y Cia., 1947). Recently, a new index of Havana notaries was published by the Archivo Nacional. See Archivo Nacional de Cuba (hereafter ANC), Indice de las escribamas de la ciudad de ha Habana y sus escribanos (Havana: Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, 1989).

15

16

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

or sellers chose particular notaries to record their transactions. Thus, it is impossible to determine whether the purchasers of slaves were plantation owners or urban property owners or whether slaves were destined for rural or urban zones. This same situation prevailed in Santiago and Cienfuegos.2 The documentation utilized to examine the slave markets of Santiago and Cienfuegos was also derived from the protocol records of these districts, but indirectly. Each notary throughout colonial Cuba was required by law to remit detailed information to the colonial treasury each month to assure that a sales tax (alcabala) was paid on real property transactions. These records were processed and archived by the Administracion General de Rentas Terrestres, whose collection is conserved in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba under the title of Fondos de Administracion General Terrestre e Indice de Protocolos.3 This documentary collection is organized by administrative jurisdiction rather than by notary, as is the case with the protocol records. Each jurisdiction's records contain summaries of the transactions recorded by the notaries of the district. A fundamental question concerning this source revolves around its reliability since these documents were reported for tax purposes. It is well known that when tax collection was involved in every region throughout colonial Latin America, fraud was endemic. However, the documentation in this collection was forwarded to Havana authorities directly from the notaries, and the information was copied exactly as it appeared in the indexes of the protocol records. There would have been no differences if we had examined the protocol volumes themselves, and we are certain of the reliability of these data. These documents are not ideal, for they often omitted the kinds of details on slaves found in the complete protocol records. Yet, invariably the sex and price of the slave under consideration were noted, since these were basic data needed by the treasury to collect the alcabala, or sales tax. In the absence of the complete protocol records — lost, misplaced, or unavailable for consultation — these records were invaluable. Another collection used for this study was also related to tax documentation on property sales required by the colonial government. These were the papers for sales tax collection (papeletas para el cobro de la alcabala) which were gathered by the Intendencia General de Hacienda, or the colonial treasury department. These papers are stored in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba in the collection titled Miscelanea de Expedientes.4 This collection is 2. Not only were all Havana escribamas located at the Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, but the Real Colegio de Procuradores also conducted business there. They recorded nearly all of the colonial capital's wills, testaments, buy/sell contracts, powers of attorney, mortgages, and other legal transactions. Under the terms of the Ley Notarial del 29 de octubre de 1873 all of their records were to be deposited in the Fondo de Protocolos Notariales of the current Archivo Nacional de Cuba. 3. For a description of this, fondo see Joaquin Llaverfas, Historia de los Archivos de Cuba (Havana: Publicaciones de Archivo Nacional de Cuba XXIV, 2nda. ed., 1949), p. 280. 4. See Llaverfas, Historia de los Archivos, p. 280, for a description of this collection.

Sources and methods of data collection

17

catalogued haphazardly and the documentation utilized for this study was found by chance. Seven large bundles of documents were located with thousands of notations, principally from Santiago and to a lesser extent from Cienfuegos.3 These papers again were derived verbatim from the notarial protocols and contain the same kinds of reliable data found in the summaries provided to the Administracion General Terrestre.6 Methods of data collection In their transcriptions of legal transactions involving slaves, Cuban notaries recorded detailed information on specific characteristics of the slaves themselves. Invariably the slave's sex, nationality, and the purchase price were noted. Often, but not consistently, many other data were listed including the slave's age, occupation, state of health, personal defects which could influence the purchase price, marital status, specific nation within Africa from which the slave originated, and skin color. For some years all information was included, while for other years critical factors affecting the purchase price, such as age, were excluded for unknown reasons. The protocol records and the tax documentation discussed above contain many different types of transactions involving slaves. Not all of them were clear sales from seller to purchaser. Nor did all sales involve one slave at a stipulated price. We identified eight different types of slave transactions and recorded data on all of them. It is important to delineate them because each must be considered separately to accurately analyze the economic dynamics of the Cuban slave market. The transaction most frequently encountered in the documentation was the compra-venta real, which was a simple sale from one party to another.7 These were analyzed separately and were deemed to be the most reliable data to determine slave prices. Most of the statistical graphs and tables which are included in this book were prepared from these transactions.8 5. ANC, Miscelanea de Expedientes, 618/A, 619/A, 638/A, 639/A, 640/A, 641/A, 676/A. 6. The reliability of these tax record papers is confirmed by examining the comparative price curves for slaves in the three regions we studied, which are discussed in Chapter 5. If fraud was widespread and lower prices were reported to avoid paying the sales tax, then it would be reasonable to expect substantially lower slave prices in Santiago and Cienfuegos compared with Havana. This was not the case and supports our certainty that the tax records were reliable transcriptions of the actual sales recorded by notaries. 7. The types of sales discussed here were found in both the protocol records from Havana and the tax records from Santiago and Cienfuegos. 8. A great deal of care was taken to assure the accurate transcription of data from the documentation. Data from the compra-venta reales were only recorded when a clear price for each slave was noted. Often, there were multiple sales where a total price, rather than individual prices, were recorded. For example, a slave woman may have been sold with her children for one price. Or a slave gang made up of twenty slaves of different sexes and ages could have been sold at a total price. In these cases data were not recorded since a specific price per specific slave was not indicated.

18

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

The venta con pacto de retro, a sale which stipulated that the seller could buy back his slave at an agreed price was another type of transaction found in the protocol records. We recorded these sales but decided they were not reliable indicators of market values because of the many functions that these transactions may have fulfilled.9 The carta de libertad venta was a letter of freedom issued by a slave owner because the slave purchased his/her freedom. However, the price noted in these transactions may have been the final payment by a coartado (see Chapter 6) on his/her freedom and thus had no relation to the market value of the slave involved. These transactions were recorded to establish a profile of slaves able to complete the purchase of freedom, but they were not utilized for purposes of market price analysis. The venta de coartado was the sale of a slave who had entered into a coartacion contract at an earlier date.10 All slaves had the legal right of selfpurchase and could make a down payment on freedom at any time. At the moment of the first payment a slave's legal classification changed permanently to coartado and this was noted in all subsequent legal transactions involving that particular slave. This meant that the final price of freedom was fixed and that the slave could not be sold to another master at a higher price than was stipulated when he/she became a coartado. Coartados were often sold, but their sale prices did not reflect current market prices, but rather the price established when the process of coartacion was initiated. Thus, these data were analyzed separately and were not used to calculate the current market value of slaves. The tasacion was not a sale, but a list of slaves on a rural property whose value was determined by an independent assessor. These appeared in the notarial records when a property was inherited or sold with its slaves and equipment or was the object of some legal procedure such as foreclosure. These data were analyzed separately since they were not buy/sell transactions. Their values could have been influenced by a variety of factors, such as the bribing of assessors, which did not reflect conditions in the market place.11 Three other types of documentation in the protocol records noted slave values, but these also could not be used to determine the market price of 9. These ventas con pacto de retro were utilized to secure credit; to provide collateral in credit arrangements; to rent slaves with a legal guarantee of return; and in other informal arrangements between "buyer" and "seller." 10. For a general discussion of coartacion see Hubert Aimes, "Coartacion: A Spanish Institution for the Advancement of Slaves into Freedmen," The Yale Review 17 (1909): 412—31. n . Tasaciones were the sources used in the seminal article by Moreno Fraginals, Klein, and Engerman "The Level and Structure of Slave Prices on Cuban Plantations in the Mid-Nineteenth Century." We consider their values to be inflated, and although they are not analyzed in the text of this book, assessment values are indicated in statistical Appendix B in Tables B.i 1 through B.13.

Sources and methods of data collection

19

slaves and were analyzed separately. The carta de libertad coartado was usually the last payment made by a coartado on his/her freedom. The testamento, a last will and testament, recorded personal property values and among these were slave inventories. The initial coartacion contract was the process through which a slave became a coartado. These usually indicated the amount of the first down payment on freedom. Although all three types of documentation include important data on Cuban slavery, some summarized later in this work, none can be used with confidence to establish slave market prices. It was important to determine the health of slaves and their personal disabilities because these affected market prices. Indeed, in nearly every transaction there was a notation on the state of the slave's health and his/ her personal characteristics. However, it was rare to encounter transactions which actually stated that a slave was in poor health or had character debilities.12 Nearly all sales stated that the slave was in good health and without any undesirable traits, or tachas. It is our impression that these clauses were included in slave transactions as guarantees of the integrity of the slave sold, whether this was accurate or not. With the inclusion of this clause sellers could protect themselves from future financial claims for having sold "defective" slaves. If these notations were accurate, it is possible that few slaves in poor health or with personality disabilities were marketable. There was no documentation which permitted us to determine which interpretation to follow. We gathered information on the occupations of slaves when these were listed, because the skill level of a slave was a determining factor in establishing his/her market value. Unfortunately, occupational information was only noted for 2,535 slave sales and, although we analyzed these separately, it must be noted that the occupations of most slaves in our sample were unknown. All prices noted in this book reflect values in gold. This is an important factor to take note of, especially for the decade of the 1870s when the Spanish colonial government flooded Cuba with inflated paper currency {billetes) in a misguided attempt at financing the counterinsurgency effort during the Ten Years' War.13 Prices recorded in slave transactions usually indicated the type of currency utilized. We attempted to establish a ratio between paper and gold currency for each year during the 1870s, but in this regard the data were inconsistent and this was impossible.14 Thus, all transactions 12. Of over 32,000 transactions, only 75 slaves appeared who had some health problem and for whom a tacha was listed. 13. For a discussion of inflation in the 1870s see Fe Iglesias Garcia, "Azucar y credito durante la segunda mitad del siglo xix," Santiago, no. 34 (June 1979): 167-214. 14. The problem of currency was only manifest after 1870. Prior to that year all slave transactions were recorded in gold.

20

The Cuban slave market iygo—i 880

listed in billetes (a relatively small number) were discarded for purposes of analysis. The sample of slave sales analyzed here was extracted from documentary sources located in Cuban urban centers, and this implies a demographic bias reflecting the characteristics of urban rather than rural slavery. This is most clearly manifest in the sex distribution of our sample, which was heavily determined by the sale of female slaves who were purchased almost as frequently as males prior to 1850 and in a majority of all transactions after midcentury. This is hardly surprising since females slaves accounted for a slightly greater share of the Cuban urban slave population (51 percent) than males, but approximately 40 percent of the island's overall slaves as late as 1862.15 The critical question posed in our sample by this bias away from the general sex distribution patterns prevalent among all Cuban slaves is whether our price series represents market conditions for slaves in urban colonial Cuba exclusively or whether it indicates price characteristics of the overall Cuban slave market. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that our documentary sources yielded scant data on occupations, and almost no indication of whether purchased slaves were destined for labor in rural or urban zones. Because our sample of slave sales was extracted from Cuban urban centers, there is the strong likelihood that a significant majority of purchased slaves were destined for labor in urban occupations. Nevertheless, we consider the price series presented and analyzed in this book to represent general slave market conditions in colonial Cuba. This is because there was a national-level slave market on the island rather than a specific and detached urban slave market. Prices for slaves, whether field hands, domestic servants, drivers, coopers, or cooks, were determined by a series of constantly changing factors. Although price levels were never uniform throughout the island in any time period, macro-level changes in Cuba and beyond affected the prices paid for slaves regardless of their place of residence. Age, sex, occupation, health, and where slaves lived and worked were clearly factors determining price levels, but these were connected to islandwide levels of supply and demand for slaves which responded to changing internal economic and political conditions and the constantly shifting international situation. Finally, the reliability of our general price series is enhanced by the nature of our sample, which was derived from three disparate regions of colonial Cuba. The fact that the variations in prices between these re15. See, for example, Cuba, Centro de Estadistica, Noticias estadisticas . . . 1862, "Distribucion de la poblacion en los pueblos y fincas de la isla." This indicated that 51 percent of all Cuban urban slaves were females while 60 percent of all slaves were males. On ingenios, as to be expected, 64 percent of all slaves were males.

Sources and methods of data collection

21

gions was minimal, and that the long-term tendencies observed were exactly the same in all three regions, confirms the accuracy of the data used in this book. We felt that it was important to divide the analysis of our data base into specific time periods to better understand short-term factors affecting slave values. We discussed the criteria for these chronological divisions, including in our deliberations well-known political landmarks in the history of Cuban slavery, such as the first Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 designed to abolish the slave trade to Cuba or the beginning of the Ten Years' War in 1868. Ultimately, however, we decided to allow our data to dictate the time frames for consideration, while maintaining a broader perspective which would integrate political variables into our analysis. We divided the history of the Cuban slave market into the following six periods, each of which demonstrated specific trends in prices. 1. 1790—1800. This period in the history of the Cuban slave market was closely connected to the significant rise in prices for tropical products on international markets resulting from the Haitian Revolution and the European wars linked to the onset of the Napoleonic period. The Cuban slave market reacted with a sharp rise in slave prices after 1795. 2. 1801-20. The slave market stabilized after 1800 and entered into a twodecade period of normal market place fluctuations. There were often sharp short-term rises and declines, but we considered this period to be one of relative stability. It should be noted that the 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty, theoretically to be implemented in 1820, closes this period. 3. 1821—35. This period was marked by short-term fluctuations in the market value of slaves in Cuba, a sharp decline by 1833 when slave prices fell to levels prevalent in the early 1790s, but long-term stability. 4. 1836—50. Through these fifteen years there was general stability in slave values with no sharp fluctuations. By 1850, however, prices recovered to the peaks which had been established in the mid—1820s. 5. 1851—68. These years saw radical price fluctuations for slaves in Cuba. Prices skyrocketed through 1857, a year of high sugar prices on world markets. After 1857 prices fluctuated wildly, and this year marks the end of any secular stable trends in the history of slave prices in Cuba. This period closes with the onset of the Ten Years' War, which brought the issue of abolition to center stage in colonial Cuba. 6. 1869—80. This was the period through which the Cuban abolition process unfolded. A number of economic and political factors determined the fluctuations of slave prices on the island. Unless otherwise noted, all of the statistical tables and figures prepared in this book have been derived from raw data which was transcribed and later analyzed from the following sources: Archivo Nacional de Cuba,

22

The Cuban slave market ijyo—i880

Fondo de Protocolos Notariales, Galletti and Fornari, ventas reales de esclavos, ventas de coartados, cartas de libertad venta, cartas de libertad coartado, and tasa-

ciones for corresponding years; Miscelanea de Expedientes, 618/A, 619/A, 638/A, 639/A, 640/A, 641/A, 676/A; and Administracion General Terrestre. Some sales for Santiago were derived from the Fondo de Protocolos Notariales of the Archivo Provincial de Santiago de Cuba. Nominal and "real" prices

The prices used in this book are listed in nominal values as they appear in Cuban documentary sources. The Spanish peso was generally on a par with the U.S. dollar during the nineteenth century, until i860 when the U.S. temporarily abandonded the gold standard. All slave transactions analyzed here were listed in gold pesos. A disparity in the value of Cuban paper currency in relation to gold was not manifest until the early 1870s when the colonial government printed inflated billetes in an attempt to finance the counterinsurgency operations of the Ten Years' War. But even then transactions in slaves were always designated in gold, and if paper currency was used this was indicated. There are no general price indexes available for Cuba during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this makes adjustments of nominal prices into real prices, which account for inflation or deflation within Cuba, impossible. However, Cuba was closely integrated into the international economy, and the island's principal trading partners were the United States, Great Britain, and Spain. Price indexes are available for these three countries, and it has been possible to use these data to tentatively convert Cuban nominal slave prices into "real" prices as reflected on international markets. These are listed and discussed in Appendix A. The utilization of the U.S., British, and Spanish indexes are problematic in some ways because the Cuban economy had its own dynamic and there may have been local short-term departures from price movements in the North Atlantic world. Nevertheless, it is clear from our international index-based price conversions that the long-term trends in nominal prices indicated in this book are accurate. There were short-term discrepancies to be sure, but the secular patterns we found in nominal prices are confirmed by the U.S., British, and Spanish data.

3 The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history1

Slavery's evolution in colonial Cuba prior to the eighteenth century was conditioned by the diversity of the island's urban and rural regions. No one economic activity defined the slave experience, nor was there any great concentration of Africans and their descendants in any Cuban region other than in the city of Havana.2 Slaves labored in all occupations and were part of a broader Afro-Cuban culture which included an ever-increasing community of free blacks and mulattoes. Export agriculture was smallscale during the early centuries of colonial rule and not the engine of economic growth that it would become during the second half of the eighteenth century. Although agricultural demand for slave labor should not be minimized, urban occupations utilized significantly more slaves before 1750. The slave trade was sporadic, and the Crown's insistence on maintaining mercantilist monopolies in the form oi asientos limited the number of slave arrivals to Cuba.3 This panorama would all change decisively during the eighteenth century. Cuba could not remain immune to the pulls of European demand for tropical staple products which could only be produced by African slave labor owing to the absence of any internal free labor market. The English transformation of Barbados into a slave/sugar colony, their seizure of Ja1. The purpose of this chapter is to situate the evolution of Cuban slavery within the general patterns of Cuban economic development to better understand the demand for labor shaping the Cuban slave market. This chapter is not intended as a comprehensive social, cultural, political, and economic history of slavery in Cuba. Thus, many themes of importance to the history of Cuban slavery will not be considered. These are discussed in the works cited in footnotes, among others. 2. See Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 128-64, for a discussion of Cuba's colonial economy. 3. The best summary of the early slave trade to Cuba is contained in Jose Luciano Franco, Comercio clandestino de esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), chapter 1, pp. 7—23. Also see Fernando Ortiz Fernandez, Los negros esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987 edition), pp. 79-94; and Academia de la Historia de Cuba, Papeles existentes en el Archivo General de Indias relativos a Cuba y muy particularmente a la Habana (donativo de Nestor Carbonell) (Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XX, 1931); and Hortensia Pichardo, Documentospara la Historia de Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1971).

23

24

The Cuban slave market ijgo—i880

maica in the mid-seventeenth century for the same purposes, the establishment of French Saint Domingue so close, and the onset of commercial contacts with British North America had a profound impact on both the attitudes and activities of Cuba's colonial elite. The growth of Caribbean commerce and the specter of so much agriculturally derived wealth flowing to elites elsewhere provoked the Cuban nobility to the aspiration of developing its agrarian economy in a more intensive way. The process of agricultural growth and the development of African slavery in Cuba's rural zones were not linear or accomplished with ease during the eighteenth century, despite intentions on the part of powerful Havana families to emulate the British and French colonial experiences. Indeed, the sugar industry was in disarray in the early 1700s and the agricultural sector was dominated by small-scale tobacco production. Sugar developed sporadically, each effort at fomenting production on a significant scale thwarted by one set of problems or another. In 1717 the powerful regidor, or leading official, of the Havana Cabildo, Sebastian Calvo de la Puerta, reported that nearly 100 ingenios, or sugar mills, had been founded near the capital over the previous ten years but that only 28 remained.4 The 1740s, however, heralded changes. Conditions gradually emerged favoring a transfer of resources toward sugar cane cultivation, and this implied a shift in the nature of slavery on the island as well. Under pressures from the island's colonial elite, the Crown removed all taxes on Cuban sugar entering Spain and this coincided with a rise in world market prices for sugar. In 1750 there were 62 ingenios grinding cane in the Havana region, and this increased to 88 in 1759 and 96 ingenios in 1761 on the eve of the English occupation of Havana.5 Cuba, unknowingly, was poised at the brink of its destiny, for the gradual development and then triumph of 4. Levi Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1983), vol. 7, pp. 1—10, cites various reports on the island's agriculture which were gleaned from the Actas del Cabildo and the "Informe del Gobernador y los oficiales reales al Consejo de las Indias" of August 25, 1728. These have been noted in Reynaldo Funes Monzote, "Del trapiche al ingenio," Trabajo de Diploma, Facultad de Filosofia e Historia, Universidad de la Habana (1990). The poverty of the island's sugar industry was noted in the Royal Cedula, which authorized the establishment of the Real Compania in the following way: "a causa de haber abandonado sus vecinos casi enteramente la fabricacion de los azucares, por no alcanzar su valor a cubrir los gastos de su cultivo . . ." (since residents have nearly abandoned entirely the manufacture of sugar because its value does not reach the costs of cultivation). On Cuba's tobacco economy see Jose Rivero Muniz, Tabaco. Su historia en Cuba, 2 vols. (Havana: Instituto de Historia, 1964-5). Also see John Robert McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain: Louisbourg and Havana, 1700—1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 154-62. 5. ANC, Miscelanea de Libros, no. 2646, "Libro de carga y data de los propietarios azucareros que contribuyen con el 5% al Rey." Ortiz, in Los negros esclavos, p. 89, noted that 4,986 slaves were imported by the Real Compania between 1740 and 1760.

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history

25

sugar monoculture would define the island's economy and society from that point on. The English invasion and successful occupation of Havana during the summer of 1762 is a historical landmark discussed in every treatment of eighteenth-century Cuban history.6 Although free trade in slaves would not be legalized until 1789, the British occupation virtually shattered the asiento system and opened the island to unrestricted access to African slave labor even though there were attempts to revive monopolies after the English withdrew in 1763. The economic significance of the English seizure of Havana has been succinctly pointed out by Moreno Fraginals.7 The labor of at least 4,000 slaves introduced in eleven months permitted the Cuban sugar economy to finally realize its installed productive capacity and set the stage for a new phase of ingenio development.8 It also established strong economic linkages to British North America, a market that was stable and ultimately more lucrative than European markets. In the wake of the British withdrawal the slave trade and sugar output escalated: Between 1763 and 1792 nearly 70,000 slaves were imported to Cuba, and sugar expanded its domain from approximately 320 caballerias planted in 1762 to more than 5,000 caballerias in 1792.9 The slave population of the island had grown to 84,456 by 1792 and the number of ingenios and trapiches, or animal-powered small sugar mills, in the Havana region increased from 88 to 225 between 1759 and 1792. Their average productive capacity rose by 25 percent from 48 tons to 60 tons per ingenio.10 Thus, at the onset of our quantitative study of the Cuban slave market, 6. The best summary is contained in Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), pp. 1—11. It should be emphasized that the English invasion was not the cause of sugar's meteoric expansion. The sugar economy had been developing in earnest from the 1740s, but was greatly stimulated by the English invasion and subsequent unrestricted introduction of slaves. 7. Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. 1, pp. 34—6. 8. John Robert McNeill believes these data on slave imports during the British occupation, so often cited, may be erroneous. He has examined documentation in the Archivo General de Indias which indicate that nine weeks prior to the English withdrawal only 1,700 slaves had been imported. See McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, p. 167. 9. Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. 1, pp. 36, 53. For data on the slave trade see Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad, vol. 9, p. 18. Marrero lists all of the various companies granted asientos and the number of slaves they imported between 1764 and 1789. He cites a total of 58,734 slaves. It should be noted that Moreno estimates 2,000 slaves imported annually after the English occupation, which would be slightly higher than Humboldt's or Marrero s figures. 10. These are the figures cited by Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, p. 63. Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad, vol. 9, p. 151, indicates that there were 245 sugar ingenios in the Havana region according to the 1792 census compared with 166 ingenios in 1778. He also indicates the existence of 529 ingenios in 1792 throughout the island, although those in the east were less productive trapiches. The 1792

26

The Cuban slave market

I~J^o—i880

the island was fully integrated into the international economy as an exporter of primary agricultural products and an importer of slaves, who provided the labor to sustain export agriculture. Sugar was to overwhelm the Cuban countryside during the nineteenth century, but not before a prolonged struggle with tobacco planters, and for a time coexisting with a coffee economy which also prospered on the basis of slave labor until the 1840s. As Cuban exports grew in the last third of the eighteenth century and increased steadily during the nineteenth century, while Cuba replaced Jamaica and French Saint Domingue as the leading exporter of sugar to the world market, the island's cities expanded as well. The demand for urban slave labor did not wane, even during the heyday of slave-based sugar production. Thus, the island's slave market, at least until the 1840s, was conditioned by the strong demand for slaves in three sectors: sugar, coffee, and urban services. It can be argued, nevertheless, that it was sugar production which determined both the overall direction of the Cuban economy after 1790 and the price structure of the island's slave market. Estimates on the number of slaves arriving in Cuba between 1790 and 1820, when trading was legal and open, vary considerably. In the most recent work based on British documentary sources, David Eltis has revised existing figures upward and estimates that approximately 325,000 slaves entered Cuba in this period, which is over 18 percent higher than the officially recorded entries of 274,000 slaves arriving on the island noted in documentation found in the Archivo Nacional de Cuba. (See Figure 3.1 for slave trade trends according to Eltis.) Herbert S. Klein, using data from the Archivo General de Indias, indicates 183,338 slaves imported, clearly well below the actual totals.11 Eltis's estimates seem to coincide with other official data. The Cuban census of 1817 listed over 199,000 slaves on the island, but this was before the massive imports of 1817 through 1820 when over 100,000 more slaves were imported due to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, regularization of international trade, and the reaction to the first Anglo-Spanish treaty (1817) abolishing the slave trade.12 census was published by Ramon de la Sagra, Historia economica, politica, y estadistica de la Is/a de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta de la viuda de Arazoza y Soler, 1831). 11. See David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 245; ANC, Intendencia General de Hacienda, 1052/23; and Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 215. Marerro, Cuba: economia y sociedad vol. 9, pp. 37—9 cites Humboldt's figure of 225,574 slaves but estimates that this must be increased by 25 percent to 281,967 slaves to account for legal entries in Santiago and Trinidad not included in Humboldt's figures plus illegal entries. Marrero also lists the data found in the Archivo General de Indias used by Klein. 12. If we assume that there were some 300,000 slaves in Cuba in 1820, a figure not confirmed by any official census reports, it is likely that Eltis's figure of 325,000 imports between 1790 and 1820 may be accurate. The critical variables that are unknown are mortality, emancipation, and birth rates, thus making slave population growth rates impossible to calculate.

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history

27

Slave imports 40

Year

Figure 3.1 Slave imports to Cuba, 1790-1866 (in thousands)

The sex imbalance of the Cuban slave trade in this period was striking and partially explains the inability of the island's slave population to reproduce naturally. Over 70 percent of all slaves imported between 1790 and 1820 were males, and it is likely that a large percentage of these were destined for labor in the growing sugar and coffee sectors which were expanding away from Havana toward Batabano, the Giiines valley, and Matanzas. This was reflected in the 1827 population census of the island, which enumerated a slave population of 286,942 of whom 64 percent were males.13 The 1827 census did not list the number of slaves employed in each of the island's industries but it is likely that approximately one-fourth of the slave population lived on sugar ingenios, with perhaps another onefourth on the island's coffee farms. It is also probable that another 25 percent of the total slave population labored in cities with the remaining onequarter working in various other agricultural endeavors —on food crop farms, cattle ranches, and tobacco vegas.14 13. Francisco Dionisio Vives, Cuadro estadistico de la siemprefiel isla de Cuba correspondiente al ano de 182-/ (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitanfa General, 1829). 14. Thomas, Cuba, p. 169, indicates 70,000 slaves on sugar ingenios in 1827. The other estimates are the authors' and must be viewed as approximations in the absence of hard data. Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad, vol. 9, p. 114, estimates that there were 50,000 slaves employed on ingenios in 1827 and an equal number on coffee estates, figures which seem low in our estimation.

28

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

The well-known impact of the Haitian slave revolt of the 1790s on Cuba's sugar and coffee economies and the ensuing nineteenth-century technological transformations of the Cuban sugar industry have been discussed extensively in a number of scholarly studies.15 The progressive utilization of steam engines, Jamaican trains, vacuum evaporators, centrifuges after midcentury, and the onset of railroad construction in 1837 revolutionized the sugar economy. Not only did the number of mills increase— 529 in 1792; 1,000 in 1827; 1,439 m 1846; and 1,531 in 1 8 6 2 - b u t their individual productive capacities soared as well. Yet, while the technical innovations in sugar processing transformed the manufacture of sugar, the production of sugar cane remained nearly timeless. Cane yields per land area may have been increased because of the application of fertilizers, but the railroad revolutionized the transportation of cane to mills, and industrial productivity soared. But the harvesting of sugar cane was a laborintensive task that was never transformed in any fundamental way during the nineteenth century. The ratio of laborers per caballeria of planted cane was not altered regardless of other transformations in the industry as a whole.16 The constant construction of new mills with increasing productive capacities and the spatial expansion of sugar cane cultivation toward eastern frontier regions because of the railroad meant that there was an insatiable demand for unskilled labor. This fueled the slave trade to Cuba, regardless of legal dispositions outlawing the trata, or trans-Atlantic slave trade, threats to the slave system heralded by the slave rebellions of the 1840s, or intentions of European powers or colonial governors to curb slaving. That sugar's labor needs determined the patterns of slaving to the island is clear. By the second decade of the nineteenth century the slave trade was largely in the hands of Cuban and Spanish entrepreneurs, many sugar planters themselves or closely tied to the sugar export economy.17 Yet the linkage of coffee production and slavery should not be overlooked. Before the exodus of French refugees from revolutionary Haiti during the 1790s coffee cultivation was largely unknown in Cuba. But from the waning years of the eighteenth century and through the early 1840s coffee became a crop 15. See Moreno Fraginals, ElIngenio, for the most complete analysis to i860. Fe Iglesias Garcia, "The Development of Capitalism in Cuban Sugar Production, i860—1900," pp. 54—76, in Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Frank Moya Pons, and Stanley L. Engerman, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), and in "Azucar, esclavitud y tecnologfa (Segunda mitad del siglo XIX)," Santiago, no. 61 (1986): 113—32, discusses transformations after i860. 16. Bergad has estimated a figure of seven slaves per caballeria of planted cane as fairly constant through the nineteenth century with some geographical variations. See Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, p. 221. 17. See Eltis, Economic Growth, chapter 4, "The Restructuring of the Slave Trade, 1780s to 1820s," pp. 4 7 - 6 1 ; Franco, Comercio clandestino de esclavos, chapter 6, "La oligarquia negrera" pp. 203-56; and Thomas, Cuba, chapter 13, "The Slave Merchants," pp. 158—67. The names of the island's principal slave traders are synonymous with Cuba's great mill owners.

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history of considerable importance, and its cultivation was based on slave labor.18 Although profit margins on capital invested in coffee were not as great as those derived from successful sugar ingenios, it is estimated that by 1830 investments in coffee production were equal to those in sugar. Thereafter, this was not the case as sugar overwhelmed the Cuban export economy. It is also conspicuous that coffee cultivation marched forward together with sugar planting in the same geographical zones in the early nineteenth century. Although after 1850 eastern Cuba would be associated with coffee farming, during the period of coffee prosperity prior to the 1840s, production was concentrated in the Havana and Matanzas regions of western Cuba. Over 70 percent of coffee exports were shipped from Havana in 1827. It is apparent that as many slaves were employed on coffee farms as were in sugar and that coffee cultivation was as dependent upon slave labor as the sugar sector. The number of slaves utilized on each coffee farm could be as great as on sugar plantations.19 The slave trade may have been driven by sugar interests in the early nineteenth century, but the role of slavery in the coffee economy must be emphasized as well. If the British and North American ban on slaving, which became effective in 1808, scarcely affected the volume of the Cuban slave trade, the first Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 to end slaving to Cuba and the second treaty of 1835 remained dead letters.20 Slave imports waned in the 1820s to an average of slightly over 8,000 slaves yearly according to Eltis, but this was due to labor market saturation rather than the theoretical curb on slaving. The expanding coffee and sugar sectors enjoyed an overabundance of labor due to the huge imports of the previous decade, and this was reflected by a sharp decline in slave prices in the 1820s (see Chapter 4). But as installed productive capacity was fulfilled by the late 1820s and sugar's eastern frontier pushed to the Colon region of southeastern Matanzas during the 1830s, slave imports escalated once again. Between 1831 and 1840 over 180,000 Africans were imported to the island to satisfy the labor needs of a relentlessly expanding sugar economy. It should be noted that British abolition 18. The classic study of the Cuban coffee economy is Francisco Perez de la Riva, El cafe. Historia de su cultivoy explotacion en Cuba (Havana: Jesus Montero, 1944). Also see Doria Gonzalez, "Acerca del mercado cafetalero cubano durante la primera mitad del siglo XIX," in Revista de la Biblioteca NacionalJose Marti, no. 2 (1989): 151-76. 19. See the comparative data presented on the sugar and coffee economy of Matanzas in Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, pp. 33—45. In the Matanzas partido of Ceiba Mocha there were 12 ingenios and 15 cafetales in 1817, an excellent example of a mixed economy where both activities existed side by side. The ingenios employed an average of 63 slaves per farm while the cafetales utilized an average of 72 slaves per farm. 20. For a discussion of the impact of the 1817 treaty see David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Arthur F. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition ofSlavery inCuba, 181J-1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); and Franco, Comercio clandestino de esclavos.

29

3o

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

of slavery in its Caribbean colonies in 1833 did not affect slave arrivals in Cuba. By 1846 Cuba's population included over 320,000 slaves with a continued high ratio of males (62 percent of all slaves) to females. It is difficult to determine the occupational structure of Cuba's slaves because of insufficient information, but there are suggestive data. In 1846 over 40,000 slaves were enumerated between the ages of sixteen and sixty working in domestic services. This represented some 17 percent of all slaves in this age category, illustrating the continuing importance of urban occupations for the history of Cuban slavery. Among female slaves, 35 percent of all adults worked as domestics. Although the number of slaves laboring in other urban trades is unknown, the demand for slaves in the island's cities, especially Havana, was significant in nearly all occupational categories. Because 17 percent of all adult slaves worked as domestics, and an undetermined, but substantial, number of slaves worked in other urban occupations, it is likely that an estimate of one-quarter of Cuba's slaves laboring in cities in 1846 would be conservative.21 Another document from the epoch estimates that approximately 75,000 slaves worked in the coffee sector, a figure which is logical since the coffee economy had contracted from the early 1840s but was still near its peak in 1846.22 It is difficult to estimate the number of slaves working on sugar ingenios during the 1840s. Although we know how many ingenios existed on the island, we can not calculate any given average number of slaves per ingenio to estimate the total number of slaves employed by the sugar economy. Processing technology varied by region as did the number of slaves per sugar plantation. It is likely, however, that the percentage of the total slave population on ingenios increased from 1827 21. Data on domestic slaves are contradictory. An 1849 document notes 18,057 slaves working in domestic services and another 36,639 slaves in nonagricultural industries, but this figure is undoubtedly erroneous since in the 1862 Cuban census over 75,000 slaves were counted in Cuba's cities. See Comision de Estadfstica de la Isla de Cuba. Estado que manifiesta el total de esclavos existente en toda la Isla, cited in Marrero, Cuba: economiay sociedad, vol. 9, p. 186. This validity of this 1849 document is also called into question by examining the slave census of 1857 which designated over 65,000 slaves as urban. See Archivo Historico Nacional (hereafter AHN) (Madrid), Ultramar, Esclavitud, leg. 3,553. An 1855 document cited by Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad, vol. 9, p. 208, indicates over 67,000 urban slaves in that year. For an informative discussion on urban slavery see Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, El negro en la economia habanera del siglo XIX (Havana: Union de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1971). 22. Jose Garcia de Arboleya, Manual de la Isla de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitania General, 1852), pp. 133-4. The 1841 census of Cuba was considered to be unreliable because of suspected overcounting. However, the data on the number of slaves working in the sugar and coffee sectors are worth noting for comparative purposes. That census enumerated 138,701 slaves working on ingenios (32 percent of the total listed slave population); and 114,760 slaves working on cafetales (26 percent of all slaves). See Resumen del censo de poblacion de la Isla de Cuba a fin del ano 1841 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitanfa General, 1842).

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history

31

when we estimate that they accounted for 25 percent of all slaves. In all probability approximately one-third of the total slave population of Cuba (over 100,000 slaves) was employed in the sugar economy in 1846.23 The slave trade to Cuba in the 1840s and 1850s repeated prior cycles in an important way. Periods of intense slaving, such as during the 1815 through 1820 period and again from 1828 through 1840, were followed by decreases in the volume of the trata. These tendencies were less related to institutional factors, such as the treaties to ban slaving or British efforts at enforcing them, than to the demand for slaves in the island's various economic sectors. Average yearly imports of 17,000 slaves during the 1830s permitted a sufficient flow of labor to the island's sugar economy so that installed capacity could be fully realized. When that occurred, and expansion toward virgin eastern frontier areas paused or was consummated by new ingenios beginning their cycles of production, slave imports declined. Such was the case during the 1840s when they averaged 5,000 slaves yearly. But when mill construction and new planting picked up again, and this characterized the 1850s, slave imports once again increased. Between 1851 and i860 the island imported an average of 12,000 slaves yearly. Labor supplies were also supplemented by the beginning of the Chinese contract labor trade. Between 1853 and i860 over 6,000 Chinese workers annually were brought to Cuba.24 It should also be noted that the 1845 penal law imposed by Spain had little impact on the slave trade to the island despite stipulating severe penalties for slaving and the fact that it was the first strictly Spanish law attempting to control the trata.25 For 1862 precise data on the occupational structure of slavery is available, which reflect the well-known economic supremacy of sugar, the decline of coffee, the continued importance of urban slavery, and the perva23. This estimate is comparable with the proportional data appearing in the suspect 1841 census when 32 percent of all slaves worked on ingenios. 24. For data on Chinese imported to Cuba see Public Records Office (London), ZHCI/3831, p. 6. For the Chinese in Cuba see Duvon C. Corbitt, A Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847—194-7 (Wilmore, KY: Asbury College, 1971); and Denise Helly, Ideologie et ethnicite: Les Chinois Macao a Cuba: 1847— 1886 (Montreal: Les Presses de l'Universite de Montreal, 1979). Juan Perez de la Riva, "Aspectos economicos del franco de culfes chinos a Cuba," and "Demograffa de los culies chinos en Cuba (1853—1874)," in Juan Perez de la Riva, El barracon y otros ensayos (Havana: Ed. de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), pp. 255-82, 469-508. 25. The details of this law reflected the power of Cuba's sugar planters. Captured slave traders would be imprisoned and their ships destroyed, theoretically. But once slaves were on sugar estates, authorities were forbidden from pursuing or seizing them. This stimulated and reinforced slave smuggling rather than effectively curbing the trade directing newly arrived Africans straight to sugar ingenios. See Eltis, Economic Growth, p. 201; Maria del Carmen Barcia, "La Ley de Represion del Trafico Negrero, los intereses de la burguesfa esclavista de Cuba y la polftica del gobierno espanol," Alcance a la Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional Jose Marti, no. 2 (1988): 38; and Maria del Carmen Barcia, Burguesta esclavista y abolicion (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987), pp. 55-60.

32

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

siveness of slave labor in all rural productive endeavors. Because of the substantial imports of the 1850s the island's slave population had increased to 368,550 by 1862, 60 percent of whom were males. Nearly 47 percent of these slaves (172,671) resided on ingenios, with a heavy concentration of males (64 percent of all slaves on sugar estates). This reflected a major redistribution of the slave population from 1846 when approximately 33 percent of all slaves worked on sugar estates. Almost 21 percent (75,977) of the Cuban slave population lived in cities in 1862. However, the number of slaves employed by the island's cafetales, or coffee plantations, was reduced to 25,942 (7 percent of all slaves) because of the decline in coffee production in western Cuba.26 It is probable that, with the high slave prices of the late 1850s (see Chapter 4), slaves were transferred from coffee farms to sugar estates, and there may have been some transfer of urban slaves to the sugar sector as well. Slave labor was also employed in other rural agricultural enterprises most notably onpotreros, or cattle ranches (31,514 slaves or 9 percent of the total), and on sitios, or small-scale food crop farms (24,850 slaves, or 7 percent of the total). These were activities which supported the sugar sector and were economically aligned with the ingenios supplying them with cattle and its by-products as well as food. Tobacco vegas utilized 17,675 slaves in 1862 (5 percent of all slaves); and other nonspecific agricultural activities employed 19,737 slaves, or 5 percent of Cuba's total slave population.27 Slavery was a pervasive institution in Cuba with slaves present in all occupations, even after sugar monoculture dominated the island's economic history during the nineteenth-century. Yet, nearly half of all slaves lived on sugar plantations in 1862, with another 15 percent working on 26. Cuban coffee production fell by more than half between 1846 and 1862 from 1.5 to 0.7 million arrobas. In 1846 western Cuba produced nearly 70 percent of all Cuban coffee, while in 1862 this had declined to 40 percent. Cuba, Gobernador y Capitan General, Cuadro estadistico de . . . 1846; and Cuba, Centro de Estadfstica, Noticias estadisticas . . . de 1862. Annual average yearly coffee exports by 5 year periods between 1804 and 1859 are indicated below:

Period 1804-1805 1806-1810 1811-1815 1816-1820 1821-1825 1826-1830

Annual yearly exports In millions of pounds

Period

Annual yearly exports In millions of pounds

1.5 4.8 11.5 16.0 21.7 40.0

1831-1835 1836-1840 1841-1845 1846-1850 1851-1855 1856-1859

50.1 47.0 42.2 19.2 13.7 5.1

Source: Marrero, Cuba, vol. 12, p. 136. 27. Cuba, Centro de Estadfstica, Noticias estadisticas . . . de 1862.

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history food- and cattle-producing farms which supported sugar; and slaves were heavily concentrated geographically in the regions of sugar production. In 1862 70 percent of all slaves in Cuba lived in Havana, Matanzas, and Santa Clara, the principal zones of the sugar economy, and this proportion increased as slavery declined in the 1870s. In 1867 the percentage of slaves in these three provinces remained at 70 percent but increased to 77 percent in 1877 as final abolition approached.28 The end of the Cuban slave trade was heralded by a Spanish royal decree of September 1866 which revised the 1845 penal law by abolishing the exemption on seizures of slaves residing on plantations if suspected of being illegally brought to the island.29 Spain, under abolitionist pressures from all quarters, was now committed to ending the slave trade to Cuba. Not only did the 1866 decree make Africans on sugar plantations vulnerable to seizure and their owners to arrest, but the law stipulated that a slave census would be conducted in 1867 and that any slave not registered, and discovered after 1867, would be set free. The resolve of Spain to finally end slaving was echoed in Cuba by a sector of the planter class which recognized that international pressures to end the Cuban trade could not be avoided much longer.30 The Anglo-American treaty of 1862, which gave English naval patrols the right to board ships flying the U.S. flag, was a serious blow to Cuban slave traders who had previously found ways to register their ships in the United States as a means of circumventing the ever-present British naval squadrons in the Caribbean and off the African coast. Additionally, the end of the Civil War and abolition in the United States were an ominous warning to those who continued defending Cuban slavery. The Cuban slave trade came to an abrupt end in the late 1860s, but a more serious and ultimately fatal threat to slavery itself resulted from the revolutionary war for Cuban independence which exploded in October 1868. The process of Cuban slavery's disintegration during the Ten Years' War (1868—1878) is fairly well known.31 After debating the slave question, the rebellion became definitively abolitionist after 1869 and offered free28. For 1867 data see A H N (Madrid), Ultramar, leg. 4,884, exp. 4,884, "Resumen general de los esclavos . . . de 1867 . . . "; for 1877 data see Fe Iglesias Garcia, "El censo cubano de 1877 y sus diferentes versiones," Santiago, no. 34 (1979): 167—211. 29. A H N (Madrid), Estado, Esclavitud, leg. 8,049, "Disposiciones sobre la Represion y Castigo del Trafico Negrero, mandadas observar por Real decreto de 24 Septiembre de 1866." 30. For the positions of planters on slavery and the slave trade during the 1860s see Barcia, Burguesia esclavista, pp. 134-8. 31. For the most complete study see Rebecca Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, i860—1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). Also see Raul Cepero Bonilla, Azucary abolicion (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1971); Barcia, Burguesia esclavista; and Fe Iglesias Garcia, "Algunas consideraciones en torno a la abolicion de la esclavitud," in Academia de Ciencias de Cuba, ha esclavitud en Cuba, pp. 59—85.

33

34

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

dom to any slaves serving the revolutionary cause. This forced Spain to move further than anticipated on the issue of slavery and to begin the dismantling of the system as a partial response to the rebellion. The Moret Law of 1870 began the institutional dismemberment of slavery by granting freedom to all children born of slave mothers after 1868 and to all slaves reaching sixty years of age. The role of slaves themselves in promoting their own freedom is a theme that has only been recently explored.32 It is clear that the Cuban slave population was aware of, and followed, all developments of both the war and the legal dispositions about their lives which were promulgated so far away. Their yearning for freedom translated into active efforts to sabotage the slave system which bound them and to establish new prerogatives for themselves in a rapidly changing world. Plantation discipline slowly eroded. Slaves deserted estates in many cases, would not work without some kind of monetary incentives, and in other ways resisted continued absolute domination by slaveholders. Although the Moret Law sought the preservation of core plantation labor forces by freeing only young and old slaves, the transformation of labor relations was underway through the activities of slaves themselves. The system stubbornly lasted through the war, and by 1877 the slave population had declined to 199,000.33 The emancipation law of 1880 followed the end of hostilities, establishing the patronato, a final attempt at preserving forced labor through the guise of gradual abolition and the facade that slaves would now be classified as patrocinados whose labor, however, was still obligated to former masters. This system could not function, largely due to resistance by freedom-yearning slaves, who refused to cooperate. In 1886 slavery was definitively abolished. Slave living conditions have been described by Ortiz in his pioneering study, Los negros esclavos, and were commented on by the many travelers who journeyed to Cuba during the nineteenth century and wrote memoirs or journals.34 The general image has often been described. Urban slaves lived in material situations which were superior to those laboring in rural areas and had greater prerogatives and more flexibility. Especially notable was access to small quantities of cash which could lead to self-purchase, or coar32. See Scott, Slave Emancipation. 33. See Iglesias Garcia, "El censo cubano de 1877 . . . " 34. Louis A. Perez has recently published excerpts of the most widely known travel literature in Louis A. Perez, ed., Slaves, Sugar, & Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801—1899 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1992). Especially see chapter 3, "Slaves and Slavery," pp. 97-132. Some of these have been published in Juan Perez de la Riva, La isla de Cuba en el stglo XIX vista por los extranjeros (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1981). For a mid eighteenth-century account see Nicolas Joseph de Ribera, Descripcion de la isla de Cuba (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1973)-

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history

35

tacion.^ Additionally, there was a hierarchy of living conditions for slaves bound to farms and this depended upon what crop or product was being produced. The nineteenth-century sugar plantation was the worst possible fate, especially as productive units became larger and discipline became a priority of owners and overseers. Coffee farms were supposedly places where better treatment toward slaves prevailed, and to work on small-scale crop farms and cattle ranches was to live within material parameters which were far superior, relatively at least, to the great sugar ingenios. None of these generalizations have been adequately explored, nor sufficient empirical evidence introduced to back up these assertions. The social history of slavery remains an area of future research.36 The demography of the Cuban slave population remains largely unknown despite contemporary testimonies in various epochs and several scholarly studies.37 The ravaging impact of disease, such as periodic cholera epidemics, the worst occurring in 1833 and 1853, *s w e ^ known. It is estimated that as many as 30,000 people died in 1833, perhaps two-thirds of them slaves, and that 20,000 slaves died in the epidemic of 1853. 38 Humboldt wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century that between 10 percent and 12 percent of the slave population died each year, but this seems exaggerated. Juan Poey, a nineteenth-century slave trader, sugar planter, and merchant; and Joseph Crawford, the British consul in Cuba, estimated a 2.5 percent yearly decline among the island's slaves during the 1840s.39 It is unknown whether this was because death rates were greater 35. Coartacion will be discussed in Chapter 6. 36. Juan Perez de la Riva, "El barracon de ingenio en la epoca esclavista," pp. 15—124, in Juan Perez de la Riva, El barracon y otros ensayos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1975), provides an excellent account of deteriorating living conditions as sugar production advanced. Pedro Deschamps Chapeaux, El negro en la economia habanera, offers insights on urban living conditions. Also see Rafael Duharte Jimenez, El negro en la soriedad colonial (Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 1988). 37. See Jack Ericson Eblen, "On the Natural Increase of Slave Populations: The Example of the Cuban Black Population, 1775-1900," in Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 211-48; and Kenneth F. Kiple, Blacks in Colonial Cuba, 1774-1889 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1976). 38. See Jose Antonio Saco, Coleccidn de papeles cientificos, historicos, politicos y de otros ramos sobre la is la de Cuba, 2 vols. (Havana: Direccion General de Cultura, i960). For an excellent discussion of the various diseases afflicting Caribbean slaves see Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 39. Juan Poey, Informespresentados al excm. capitdn general gob. superior civil de la isla de Cuba sobre elproyecto de colonizacion africana y al llmo. Sr. intendente de Hacienda de la propia isla sobre derecho de los azucares (Madrid: Imprenta D. A. Aurial, 1862), p. 144; and letter of Jan. 28, 1848, Jos. T. Crawford to Viscount Palmerston, Public Records Office (London), FO 72/748. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, estimates a 1.8 percent yearly decline among Matanzas slaves between 1846 and 1862. See p. 100.

36

The Cuban slave market 1-790—1880

than birth rates or was the result of a combination of manumissions, selfpurchase, and death rates exceeding birth rates. It is absolutely certain, however, that overall slave population growth through natural reproduction did not occur. Recently imported slaves were designated by their national origins within Africa. The most numerous were denominated as Lucumis, Carabalis, Gangas, and Congos, although there were a multitude of African nations from which Cuban slaves hailed. Ortiz, in Los negros esclavos, notes all the African nationalities present in Cuba and describes their geographical origins within Africa. The principal source used by Ortiz is a map of Africa composed by the nineteenth-century Cuban geographer Esteban Pichardo, which indicates the locations of the different nationalities of Cuban slaves along with an annotated discussion of each.40 What is apparent from these sources are the overlapping designations Cuban slave traders and owners bestowed upon Africans. For example, the term Carabali was applied to slaves from a broad region in Africa which composed the kingdom of Calabar. However, the designation Carabali could mean someone who was a Btbt, Briche, or Bricamo, although these nationalities also appear in slave censuses and in sales. The same kind of general categories were used for the other major slave nationalities assigned to Africans by Cuban slaveholders. Although the general characteristics of slavery's history in Cuba are fairly well known, it is striking that so much about the demographic and economic history of Cuban slavery remains enigmatic. Until parish records and local-level archival materials are studied to ascertain slave birth and death rates, it is likely that reproductive rates will remain speculative at best. The economic dynamics of slave labor in the various periods of Cuban colonial history have also been the subject of conjecture and generalization rather than empirical study. The economics of urban slavery, for the most part concentrated in the service sector of the Cuban economy, are virtually unknown and have never been the subject of any serious scholarly studies. Surprisingly, the same holds true for rural slavery, including the economic characteristics of the great nineteenth-century sugar estates, which remain mysterious despite the many studies on different aspects of the sugar economy. These lacunae in Cuban economic history are closely connected to the 40. This map was produced in 1866 and never published. It was seen by Fernando Ortiz and very possibly is contained in his private papers. For the other principal sources on African nationalities in Cuba see Esteban T. Pichardo Tapia, Diccionario provincial cast razonado de voces cubanas (Havana:

Impr. La Antillana, 1862); Henri Dumont "Antropologfa y patologia comparada de los negros esclavos," Revista Bimestre Cubana 10, no. 3; 11, no. 2 (1915-16); and Jose Maria de la Torre y de la Torre, Compendio de geografia, fisica, politica, estadistica y comparada de la isla de Cuba (Havana:

Imprenta de M. Soler, 1854).

The development of African slavery and Cuban economic history availability, or in this case nonavailability, of documentary source materials. To date there have been few account books located which detail the economic aspects of any urban or rural agricultural enterprises. In the absence of systematic data on slave-based economic activities in any period, it has been virtually impossible to understand how slavery functioned from a detailed economic point of view. Impressions, speculation, and theoretically motivated arguments have been used in lieu of empirical data which could reveal the economic characteristics of slave labor. The quantitative analysis of the Cuban slave market which follows provides indisputable data on the cost of slave labor over a ninety-one-year period which was the most important in Cuban slave history. The archival sources from which these data were derived have long been available to historians, but because of their enormous volume and the absence of a workable methodology to plumb their resources, they have remained unutilized until now. The slave price series presented and analyzed in Chapters 4 and 5 is the first effort at providing a scientifically derived data base over an extended time frame on one of the most important economic characteristics of slavery in Cuba — the cost of slave labor. It is also the first time that slavery in eastern Cuba has been subjected to any kind of empirical examination. Because of its marginal importance to the dominant sugar economy during the nineteenth century, eastern Cuban slavery has been virtually ignored until now.

37

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790-1880

Between 1790 and 1867 o v e r 780,000 African slaves were imported to Cuba making the island the greatest slave-importing colony in the history of the Spanish empire and the center of the nineteenth-century slave trade to the Caribbean.1 The African trade did not exclusively determine the demographic and economic characteristics of the Cuban slave market because it was supplemented by reproduction, although birth and death rates and overall rates of increase or decrease among Cuban slaves are largely unknown.2 Published colonial census reports and slave trade data indicate quite clearly that the Cuban slave population did not experience natural demographic expansion.3 Nevertheless, the sale of Cuban-born slaves had a significant impact on the slave market especially after 1845 when the majority of slaves sold in our sample were born in Cuba. This chapter's analysis of the Cuban slave market is based on 23,022 total sales {ventas reales) recorded between 1790 and 1880: 9,401 were from 1. See David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1987), p. 245; and Eltis, "The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade: An Annual Time Series of Imports into the Americas Broken Down by Region," Hispanic American Historical Review 67, no. 1 (1987): 122-3. For the period between 1790 and 1811 according to official colonial documentation see "Entrada de esclavos por diferente puertos," ANC, Intendencia General de Hacienda, 1,052/23. 2. The term "reproduction" does not imply that the slave population increased by natural demographic growth. It refers to the fact that births to slave mothers and the growth of a Cuban-born, or Creole, slave population had a significant impact on Cuban slavery. Slave demography has been discussed by Jack Ericson Eblen, "On the Natural Increase of Slave Populations: The Example of the Cuban Black Population, 1775—1900," in Engerman and Genovese, eds., Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere, pp. 211-47. 3. The following table illustrates the overall inability of the Cuban slave population to reproduce naturally since between each census year the net increase of the slave population was less than the number of imports. There was also an estimated annual rate of slave population loss between each census. This decline suggests that death rates among slaves exceeded birth rates. Manumissions could have played an important role in slave population decline, although annual rates remain unknown.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

39

Havana; 10,069 were from Santiago; and 3,552 were from Cienfuegos.4 Although we have a complete time-series record from Havana, data are not available for Santiago until 1816, and it is only beginning in 1830 that slave sales were recorded in Cienfuegos. Thus, the conditions of the islandwide Cuban slave market between 1790 and 1816 described below were exclusively determined by information from Havana. These data can be used as reliable indicators of conditions on the overall market for slaves in this period because 90 percent of all slaves officially imported entered through the colonial capital.5 Slave population, imports, net population increase, and estimated annual rate of population decline among Cuban slaves, 1792—1862 (in thousands)

Year

Slave population

Slave imports from previous census year

1792 1817 1827 1846 1862

86.6 199.1 286.9 323.8 368.6

219.8 110.5 260.2 159.3

Slave population increase from previous census

Est. annual rate of slave population decline

112.5 87.8 36.9 44.8

3.0% 0.9% 3.8% 2.1%

Sources: For data on the slave population see Cuba, Gobernador y Capitan General, Cuadro estadistico de la siemprefiel isla de Cuba correspondiente alano de 1827 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitania General, 1829); Cuadro estadistico de la siemprefielisla de Cuba correspondiente al ano de 1846 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitania General, 1847); Cuba, Centro de Estadfstica, Noticias estadisticas de la isla de Cuba en 1862 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, Capitania General y Real Hacienda, 1864). For slave imports see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 245. Slave imports have been derived according to the Eltis data by adding the yearly import totals from the year after the first census through the next census year. The estimated annual rate of slave population decline was calculated following the methods of Richard B. Sheridan, "Mortality and the Medical Treatment of Slaves in the British West Indies," in Engerman and Genovese, eds. Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere, pp. 309—10. The following formula was used: [((a+b)—c) •+• d] •+• e; where a = the population at the start of the period; b = total slave imports between census years; c = the population at the end of the period; d = the number of years between censuses; and e = the slave population in the middle year between the two census years. E was calculated as the arithmetic mean of the total slave populations at the beginning and end of the period under consideration. 4. We want to stress that the number of transactions recorded is not reflective of any geographical distribution of Cuba's slave population. It should also be noted that these were ventas reales whether recorded in the tax records for Santiago and Cienfuegos or the protocol records of Havana. 5. Between 1790 and 1816 colonial authorities reported that 175,896 slaves entered Cuba. Of these, 158,395 (90.1 percent) entered through Havana; 16,911 (9.6 percent), through Santiago; and 590 (0.3 percent) through Matanzas, ANC, Intendencia General de Hacienda, 1,052/23. Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 245, estimates imports to be 18 percent higher for the same period at 208,000 slaves.

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Table 4.1 Slave sales by sex, origin, age and place, 1790-1880

Category

No. of sales

Males Females Totals

11,445 11,552 22,997

50 50 100

Creoles Africans Totals

8,666 7,935 16,601

52 48 100

Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 + Totals

3,140 10,301 855 14,296

22 72 6 100

Havana Santiago Cienfiiegos Totals

9,401 10,069 3,552 23,022

41 44 15 100

Demographic characteristics of the Cuban slave market The changing demographic profile of slaves bought and sold between 1790 and 1880 is useful for the insights it provides into various aspects of the history of Cuban slavery. The expectations and projections of slave owners toward such vital issues as the future of the slave trade, the reproductive potential of their slave dotaciones, prospects for economic growth, and their reactions to a constantly changing colonial and international political environment determined whether they purchased prime-age or younger slaves, Africans or Creoles, males or females. Tables 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4 provide various profiles of the slave sales we analyzed by sex, origin, age group, place, and time period, and these are indicated graphically in Figures 4.1, 4.2, and 4-3-6 6. Nearly all transactions contained data on the sex of the slave sold, but many did not have either age or origin information. This is why the totals do not correspond in Tables 4.1 through 4.4. For each category we only listed data available for that specific category.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790—1880

Table 4.2 Slave sales by origin, sex, and age, 1790—1880

African males Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+ Totals

196 2,499 324 3,019

African females

% 6 83 11 100

174 2,033 185 2,392

% 7 85 8 100

Creole females 1,106 1,830 79 3,015

%

Creole females

%

37 61 3 100

1,236 2,525 119 3,880

32 65 3 100

Table 4.3 Slave sales by origin, age, and time period 1790-1800 No. %

1801-1820 No. %

1821-1835 No. %

Creoles 1-14 Creoles 15-40 Creoles 41 + Totals

79 185 11 275

29 67 4 100

170 305 10 495

35 63 2 100

171 232 3 406

42 57 1 100

1,094 2,029 77 3,200

34 63 2 100

747 1,487 89 2,323

32 64 4 100

36 142 9 187

19 76 5 100

Africans 1-14 Africans 15-40 Africans 41 + Totals

38 428 15 481

8 89 3 100

52 654 21 727

7 90 3 100

73 310 15 398

18 78 4 100

175 2,642 247 3,064

6 86 8 100

31 487 217 735

4 66 30 100

1 17 7 25

4 7 28 100

1836-1850 No. %

1851-1868 No. %

1869-1880 No. %

Table 4.4 Slave sales by sex, age, and time period 1790-1800 No. %

1801- 1820 No. %

1821-1835 % No.

1836-1850 0/ No.

1851-1868 No. %

1869-1880 % No.

Males 1-14 Males 15-40 Males 41 + Totals

73 349 21 443

17 79 5 100

125 524 19 668

19 78 3 100

158 334 14 506

31 66 3 100

17 655 2,922 77 217 6 3,794 100

405 958 208 1,571

26 61 13 100

11 85 6 102

11 83 6 100

Females 1-14 Females 15-40 Females 41 + Totals

61 314 17 392

16 80 4 100

124 505 20 649

19 78 3 100

145 340 10 495

29 69 2 100

749 21 2,633 74 162 5 3,544 100

487 1,292 157 1,936

25 67 8 100

22 101 11 134

16 75 8 100

The sale of working-age slaves (indicated in Figure 4.1) largely determined the demographic and economic characteristics of the Cuban slave market between 1790 and 1880. Nevertheless, there were variations in the age structure of slaves sold in the time periods chosen for analysis and also important differences in the age profiles of slaves sold by origin. The slave trade to Cuba was heavily dominated by prime-age slaves and among our African-born slave sample it is hardly surprising that over 80 percent were between fifteen and forty years old. A more balanced age structure logically existed among Cuban-born slaves because this was a population resulting from reproduction rather than selection.

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Year Figure 4.1 Slave sales by age group and time period, 1790-1880 (in percentages)

Percentages 100

I Africans

90 80 -

•1 B Ji •1

70 60

-H

H

•

50 40 30 20 10

1

3 Creoles

1 Year

Figure 4.2 Slave sales by origin and time period, 1790-1880 (in percentages)

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790—1880

43

Percentages 100

^

Males

90

111 Females 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

H

1 m

J

1111 •Hi

Year

Figure 4.3 Slave sales by sex and time period, 1790—1880 (in percentages)

Among Creoles sold between 1790 and 1835 there was a clear trend toward an increasing share of the market occupied by younger slaves. Twenty-nine percent of Cuban-born slaves were under fifteen years of age from 1790 to 1800; 35 percent between 1801 and 1820; and 42 percent from 1821 through 1835. This last period was characterized by the most intense marketing of Creole youth from 1790 to abolition. The shift in the 1820s and early 1830s toward the sale of younger slaves was manifest among Africans as well. Eight percent of all Africans sold from 1790 to 1820 were under fifteen years of age. But between 1821 and 1835 younger Africans were sold in 18 percent of all sales, paralleling the relative increase among Creoles. This transformation in age structure toward the sale of younger slaves, especially after 1820, suggests shifting attitudes toward the future of slaving. It is evident that Cuban slave buyers perceived the 1817 AngloSpanish treaty banning the slave trade to be a genuine threat despite its subsequent failure to halt African imports during the 1820s and 1830s7. From the perspective of purchasers, the more frequent buying of younger slaves presented an opportunity to guarantee future labor supplies if these slaves survived and reproduced. This implies two changes within Cuban slave society. First is the likelihood that mortality rates among 7. The impact of the 1817 treaty on the slave market will be considered in more detail in the section on price trends later in this chapter.

44

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

younger slaves declined resulting in the expectation that the slave population had the potential to effect higher rates of natural reproduction. Second was the short-lived adoption of a longer-term perspective, at least from the vantage point of the 1820s, on the part of Cuban slaveholders concerning the use of labor. All demographic evidence on the slave market prior to 1820 suggests that Cuban slave buyers focused their attention on purchasing and exploiting the labor of prime-age slaves in the short term and assumed that the slave trade would supply a steady stream of working-age Africans. However, with the 1817 treaty, expectations temporarily waned among slaveholders that future labor supplies could be guaranteed by continuing imports.8 This was an ephemeral situation. The 1817 treaty never effectively limited imports and after 1836, despite the second Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1835, Cuban slave owners reverted to early nineteenth-century patterns of purchase and once again consistently bought higher ratios of prime-age slaves. The failure of the antislaving measures of 1817 and 1835 presumably reinstilled confidence among slave owners that the slave trade would guarantee a reliable supply of working-age Africans. Nevertheless, any perceived threat to slaving invariably provoked short-term responses, most notably rapidly shifting differentials in prices by sex toward higher female slave valuations.9 Prior to 1835 t n e sa ^ e of African slaves dominated the Cuban slave market, although this changed significantly thereafter in favor of increasing numbers of Creoles. (See Figure 4.2.) Creoles were sold in 33 percent of all transactions between 1790 and 1800; 38 percent between 1801 and 1820; and 36 percent between 1821 and 1835. They accounted for nearly half of all sales (49 percent) between 1836 and 1850 and 74 percent from 1851 through 1868 despite the surge in the slave trade of the 1850s.10 Yet, the increasing importance of Creole sales did not affect their age structure. Between 1836 and 1850, 63 percent of all Creoles were prime-age slaves; 64 percent from 1851 to 1868. The relative percentages of Africans and Creoles, males and females, or prime-age slaves and other age groups found in our sample after midcentury did not reflect any known changes in the demographic characteristics 8. It is also conspicuous that the lowest estimated intercensal annual rate of slave population decline from 1792 to 1862 occurred between 1817 and 1827 at 0.9 percent. See footnote 3 in this chapter for these data. This confirms the impression that mortality rates among the Cuban slave population may have dropped significantly, thus opening real possibilities of increasing slave populations through natural reproduction, and encouraging the purchase of younger slaves. 9. This will be discussed in detail later in this chapter. 10. These data are suggestive since they indicate the significance of reproduction for the Cuban slave market. This study, however, has not examined source material which could reveal rates of slave population increase or decrease.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

45

of the slave trade to Cuba after 1850. It is conspicuous that, despite the increasing volume of African imports during the 1850s, our sample revealed continually rising numbers of Creoles sold relative to Africans in all three local slave markets surveyed. If we are to fully appreciate the changed ratio of Creole to African sales, the terms of the antislaving 1845 penal law should be understood with clarity. The law was literally quite severe, if sporadically enforced. One of its key provisions stated that once African slaves were on estates they could not be seized by authorities.11 This stipulation was obviously designed to protect the most powerful sectors of Cuban colonial society — plantation owners with recently imported Africans. Because of this caveat in the law it is very likely that a large percentage of African slaves imported to Cuba after 1850 did not find their way to the island's urban slave markets, but were destined directly for plantations. This, in part, accounts for the significant rise in Creoles relative to Africans found in our sample between 1851 and 1868. Africans could not be marketed as freely as before because of the 1845 law and various attempts to actually enforce it, and also because of increased marketing expenses in the form of bribes to authorities who were well aware of the volume of the illegal slave trade. Slave owners could sell Creoles legally because there were no prohibitions on the free and open marketing of Cuban-born slaves, whereas the sale of recently imported Africans could result in prosecution or demands for certain gratuities on the part of colonial bureaucrats. The increasing number of Creoles found on the Cuban slave market after 1850 should not be misinterpreted as evidence that the slave population was experiencing net population increases or even that the importance of African imports diminished. Prior to 1850, when the public sale of Africans was so frequent, the demographic structure of Africans sold reveals much about the slave trade to Cuba. We previously indicated that there was a significant change in the age structure of Africans marketed between 1821 and 1835 and that this complemented the trend toward the sale of younger Creole slaves. Primeage slaves comprised 89 percent of all African sales between 1790 and 1800, and 90 percent from 1801 through 1820. However, among Africans sold between 1821 and 1835, 78 percent were between fifteen and forty years of age, a significant relative decrease of 12 percentage points from the previous period. The increased number we encountered of Africans under fifteen years old during the 1820s and 1830s was probably the result of changes taking place in the age structure of African slaves imported to the island. Although there are no extant data on the demographic profile of slaves arriving in Cuba after 1820, Herbert S. Klein found that the percentage of 11. See Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 201.

46

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

slaves under the age of eighteen relative to total imports continually rose from 1790 to 1820. Between 1790 and 1804 approximately 31 percent of slaves arriving in Havana were seventeen years old or younger. But between 1815 and 1819 they accounted for 59 percent of all imports.12 Klein speculated that this dramatic relative increase indicated fundamental changes in the nature of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This was reflected on the Cuban slave market by the increased sale of younger Africans, even after 1820 when documentation on the age structure of imports is not available. Yet, the demographic characteristics of the slave market were always in flux, and early nineteenth-century patterns of age distribution among Africans sold in Cuba were reestablished after 1835. Among Africans purchased between 1836 and 1850, only 6 percent were fourteen years old or younger, and this percentage declined to 4 percent in the period between 1851 and 1868, compared with 18 percent from 1821 to 1835. These data suggest yet another change in the age structure of the Cuban slave trade after 1835, back toward a predominantly working-age population. This came during one of the most intense epochs of new ingenio construction and sugar expansion in Cuba's nineteenth-century economic history. The years between 1851 and 1868 were the first in which females accounted for a majority of sales (54 percent). It is probable that this was the result of the usual strong urban demand for female slaves and also due to heightened concerns that slaving would be curtailed because of the demise of the Brazilian slave trade in 1851 and 1852. The potential to increase slave dotaciones through natural reproduction probably led to greater demands for females of child-bearing ages, a conclusion sustained by changes in the price structure for prime-age female slaves to be considered below.13 This greater relative frequency of female slave sales continued after the closing of the slave trade in 1867 and may have also signaled the reluctance of slaveholders to part with male slaves who were so critical to the sugar industry. 12. Herbert S. Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 223. The following table, derived from Klein's data, illustrates this trend: Africans under 18 years of age entering Havana Period 1790-94 1795-99 1800-04

Period 32 30 31

1805-09 1810-14 1815-19

37 44 59

13. When the relative trends in male and female slave prices are considered later in this chapter, this theme will be further elaborated.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

47

A hesitance to sell working-age male slaves can be noted after 1850 and is confirmed by examining the age structure of slaves sold by sex. Among male slaves 61 percent were between fifteen and forty years old between 1851 and 1868 compared with 67 percent of females. These percentages were significantly lower than the 77 percent male and 74 percent female prime-age slaves sold between 1836 and 1850. General price trends and statistical correlations14 The price pattern for all working age slaves found in our sample between 1790 and 1880 is indicated in Figure 4.4. (See Table B.i for the data.) The most significant observation to be stressed was the secular stability in slave prices from the early nineteenth century to 1850. For a half century, despite radical fluctuations in the slave trade, constantly shifting colonial and international political conditions, and an economy which experienced qualitative transformation and quantitative expansion, the cost of slave labor remained strikingly stable, short-term fluctuations notwithstanding. In 1850 prime-age slaves sold for average prices (393 pesos) which were lower than in 1800 (428 pesos), suggesting that slave labor supplies kept pace with demands over the long term, belying the never-ending complaints by planters about labor shortages and supposed spiraling labor costs. This stability was preceded by the slave price increases of the 1790s and followed by the rise in slave prices of the 1850s, both periods to be analyzed in more detail later in this chapter. During the history of the Cuban slave market after 1790 it is not surprising to find that the movement of prices for prime-age slaves was closely associated with Cuban sugar exports. When sugar exports by weight were 14. The average prices cited and analyzed in this and subsequent chapters are based upon nominal prices listed in the Cuban documentary sources we have utilized. In the transcription of data from archival sources, care was taken to assure that the peso value in all transactions was equivalent to gold, not paper currency as noted at the end of Chapter 2. During the nineteenth century the Spanish peso was generally on par with the U.S. dollar, which was on the gold standard until i860. Nevertheless, in the absence of a Cuban price index which could be used to adjust nominal prices to "real" prices, some question may arise as to the validity of using nominal prices to measure long-term trends. Appendix A addresses this issue by calculating "real" price movements for prime age slaves using published U.S., British, and Spanish price indexes to convert the nominal Cuban slave price list into a "real" price index. The drawback here is that the Cuban economy may not have followed precise year-by-year movements in the international economy. This implies that when scholars produce a nineteenth-century Cuban price index it may differ somewhat from available international measurements. The slave price conversions noted in Appendix A confirm the general movements indicated by Cuban nominal prices. Although there are discrepancies for several years in each index, the long-term trends in the "real" price indexes we have constructed provide reliable evidence that the nominal prices presented here reflected real, not inflated, values on the Cuban slave market. For these reasons we have chosen to use nominal Cuban prices in our analysis with the understanding that there may be an undetermined margin of error in some years.

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Year Figure 4.4 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40, 1790—1875

correlated on slave prices from 1790 through 1875, a correlation coefficient of .82 resulted.15 (See Figure 4.5.) No other variables produced such statistically significant results of association, although a separate analysis of each period yielded varied statistical correlations. (See Table 4.5 and Figures 4.6 and 4.7.) From 1790 to 1800 the same strong relation between slave prices and sugar exports prevailed and a coefficient of .86 was produced when comparing the two. However, there was also a statistical association between the volume of the Cuban slave trade and slave prices. Although slave imports surged in 1791 and 1792 because of the short-term reaction to international market conditions created by the economic impact of the Haitian slave revolt, yearly imports declined significantly by the end of the decade.16 The negative correlation coefficients indicated for the 1790—1800 period in Table 4.5 reveal that, as imports declined, prices increased. The most significant reaction to fluctuations in slave arrivals came after two 15. The statistical procedure which produced this and all subsequent coefficients was the CORRELATION procedure of SPSS, which measures linear association by producing the Pearson correlation coefficient. See SPSS/PC + V2.0 Base Manual (SPCC, Inc.: Chicago, 1988), chapter 13, pp. B143-B-151. 16. Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 245. Imports were 11,300 in 1791; 11,400 in 1792; and 2,700 in 1798.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790—1880

49

Sugar exports 1,000 slave prices 900 Sugar exports in thousandsIs ton tons

O N O N O O ^ - 1 ' | ( N f N m m ^ T t i n u ) s O v o r r r ^ r ^ O O O O C X J O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

Year Note: Correlation coefficient for 1790-1875 was .82.

Figure 4.5 Average prices for all slaves ages 15-40 compared with sugar exports, 1790-1875

Table 4.5 Correlation coefficients between average prices for prime-age slaves and selected variables 17901800

18011820

18211835

18361850

18511868

18691875

17901875

Sugar Exports

.86

.34

-.72

.76

.43

.50

.82

Slave Imports Current Year

-.23

.51

-.50

-.55

.37

__

.08

Slave Imports Previous Year

-.31

.50

-.76

-.51

.29

__

.06

Slave Imports Two Years Prior

-.55

.47

-.67

-.52

.13

__

.01

Slave Imports Three Years Prior

-.19

.45

-.25

-.54

.12

—

-.05

--

-.09

.75

.25

.41

Sugar Prices a

For period between 1800 and 1875

-.88

.24"

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Slave imports Slave prices Slave impon 40 in thousand*

o m

oo

oo

«o en oo

O rf oo

»/-> TJoo

O u-> oo

«/"> «o oo

Year : Correlation coefficients for 1790-1866 were as follows: Year by year, .08; previous year, .06; minus 2 years, .01; minus 3 years, .05.

Figure 4.6 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40 compared with slave imports, 1790—1866

Sugar prices 25 Slave prices 20

Sugar prices in cents/pound

Year Note: Correlation coeffecient for 1800-1875 was .24.

Figure 4.7 Average prices for all slaves ages 15—40 compared with sugar prices, 1800-1875

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

51

years. A coefficient of —.55 resulted when prime-age slave prices were correlated with slave import levels two years earlier. Yet, between 1801 and 1820 none of these associations were valid. Although there was a positive correlation between sugar exports and slave prices (.34), import levels seem to have had little effect on the slave market. It is probable that this was caused by the distorting impact on slave prices of the 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty which banned the slave trade. If we examine the years between 1815 and 1820 nearly 140,000 slaves arrived in Cuba compared with approximately 38,000 between 1810 and 1814. Despite this surge in slaving, average prices for prime-age slaves rose by 38 percent between 1814 (341 pesos) and 1819 (470 pesos). The response of prices to fluctuations in the slave trade seems to have been reestablished between 1821 and 1835. A correlation coefficient of — .76 resulted when slave prices were compared with slave import levels for the previous year indicating that, as imports declined, prices for slaves increased after one year. Between 1821 and 1835 there was a positive correlation (.75) between the movement of wholesale sugar prices in the United States and prices for prime-age slaves in Cuba. The price for sugar declined from 11.4 cents per pound in 1821 to 7.8 cents per pound in 1835, a decrease of over 31 percent.17 Slave prices fell from a peak of 516 pesos for prime-age slaves in 1821 to 365 pesos in 1835, a drop of 29 percent. The strong relationship between sugar exports and slave prices resumed from 1836 through 1850, yielding a correlation coefficient of .76. Additionally, there seems to have been a statistical connection between the level of the Cuban slave trade and the prices for prime-age slaves. Correlation coefficients of over —.50 were produced when comparing slave import levels from three years, two years, and one year earlier to the actual year of slave prices. This indicates an inverse relationship between the two: As slave imports fell, slave prices rose. During the 1850s measures of statistical association were conditioned by soaring slave values during an epoch of increasing sugar prices and considerable labor demand. Prime-age slave prices nearly doubled between 1851 and 1858. The waning of the slave trade in the mid-i86os and its final end in 1867 were paradoxically accompanied by falling slave prices, at least until 1868, when the independence insurrection began in eastern Cuba. No negative correlation coefficients resulted when comparing slave import levels with prices. Thus, the volume of the slave trade did not have a direct impact on slave prices. 17. These are wholesale prices noted in United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States. Colonial Times to 1970, Part 1, (Washington, DC: Government

Printing Office, 1975), pp. 208-9.

52

The Cuban slave market

1790—1880

There remained, however, an association between sugar exports and slave price levels. A positive correlation coefficient of .43 resulted when comparing the two between 1851 and 1868. A similar positive association was evident when examining the relation between sugar and slave prices, which yielded a correlation coefficient of .41. After 1869, with the end of the slave trade and the beginning of the abolition process, a positive correlation (.50) between sugar exports and slave prices remained. Short-term fluctuations in slave prices Despite its long-term stability during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Cuban slave market exhibited extreme sensitivity to changing colonial and international economic and political variables. Slave owners and dealers keenly followed a wide range of factors affecting their economic projections for the future, and they were remarkably quick to react in the short term by raising or lowering prices for slaves. The single most important cause of significant short-term slave price increases was any perceived threat to the future of the slave trade, real or speculative. The period surrounding the 1817 Anglo-Spanish treaty, which theoretically was to ban the trata in 1820, best exemplifies this. In 1816, the year prior to the treaty, prime-age slaves were sold for an average of 405 pesos. By 1821, the year following the treaty's supposed implementation, prices for slaves ages fifteen through forty reached 516 pesos, an increase of over 27 percent from 1816 and the highest level for prime-age slaves from 1790 through the sharp price increases of the 1850s. It should be stressed that this rise in prices for working-age slaves was accompanied by the most intense period of African imports in Cuba's slave trade history.18 Yet, despite soaring supplies of Africans, slave prices moved impressively upward, underlining the fears among Cuban slave buyers and sellers that the future of the slave trade was in doubt. After 1821, as it became evident that the 1817 treaty was a dead letter, prices for working-age slaves declined almost continuously for two decades. In 1845 average prices were 346 pesos, nearly one-third lower than the 1821 peak of 516 pesos. Despite its sensitivity to threats posed to slaving, the Cuban slave market ignored two other possible signals that the slave trade could be in jeopardy. The first was the British abolition of slavery in their colonial possessions in 1833, which was written off as meaningless to the future of slavery or the slave trade to Cuba since there was no price reaction by the slave 18. According to Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 245, between

1815 and 1820 over 140,000 slaves landed in Cuba compared with nearly 38,000 between 1810 and 1814.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880 market. The second, the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1835 once again "banning" the slave trade, was a more direct threat. But Cuban slave buyers and sellers paid no attention to the 1835 law and prices remained absolutely stable. This unwillingness of the Cuban slave market to react to the 1835 treaty is indicative of the poise, power, and confidence of Cuba's merchant, planter, and bureaucratic elite. In the midst of an impressive new era in sugar planting, exports having doubled between 1821 and 1835, Cuba's colonial elite did not feel threatened by political machinations in distant Europe and evidently remained confident of its power to control Cuba's immediate future. One of the most important components of that future was the continuation of the African slave trade. Several themes dominated the social and economic history of Cuba from the 1835 treaty to midcentury. The dynamic expansion of sugar production continued unabated, as the fertile plains of the province of Matanzas to the east of Havana were colonized by the noble families who had made Cuba the leading exporter of sugar in the world during the early nineteenth century. Recently arrived entrepreneurial immigrants from Spain contributed to this process.19 Sugar's rapid penetration of frontier zones south and east of the colonial capital was made possible by the development of a sophisticated railroad network. Construction began in 1837 and by the middle of the nineteenth century Cuba's most important interior sugar producing zones in Havana, Matanzas, and Las Villas were connected by rail with the ports of Havana, Matanzas, Cardenas, and Cienfuegos.20 The march of sugar toward eastern frontier zones was not simply an exercise in spatial expansion or mere quantitative increase. There was a qualitative transformation of the industry wrought by the application of new technological forms. The revolution in transportation was perhaps the most significant. But of near equal importance was the utilization of new sugarprocessing techniques made possible by the mechanization of sugar mills through application of the steam engine, Derosne trains for evaporation, and later vacuum evaporators. Yet, in this epoch of change, African slavery and the slave trade continued to provide the labor foundation upon which Cuba's sugar economy rested, although slave resistance increasingly became an important factor to all sectors of colonial society. During the early 1840s a series of slave rebellions exploded, and conspiracies, real or imagined, were rumored 19. In 1836, according to Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Cuba produced 112,948 metric tons of sugar. By 1850, production had increased 2.6 times to 294,952 metric tons. Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. 3, pp. 4 4 - 5 . For an account of sugar's march into Matanzas province see Bergad, Cuban Rural Society. 20. For the development of the Cuban railroad system see the excellent study by Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garcia, Caminos para el azucar (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1987).

53

54

The Cuban slave market 1790-1880

everywhere. In 1844, in a preemptive strike, the colonial state unleashed its armed forces upon both the slave and free black and mulatto communities of Cuba in the most brutal wave of repression ever experienced in the history of Cuban slavery. "La Escalera," as this episode is known, was centered in the principal slave-holding and sugar-producing regions of the province of Matanzas.21 Through 1841 the slave trade, although legally banned, continued the high levels prevalent in 1834 and 1835. However, from 1842 through 1852 Cuban slave imports fell to their lowest (to date) annual levels of the nineteenth century. Average yearly imports between 1834 and 1841 were 18,713 slaves. Between 1842 and 1852 average annual imports plummeted to 4,655 slaves.22 Perhaps in response to the dangers of slave rebellion emphatically underlined by "La Escalera" and to the general uncertainty on the future of slaving posed by continued British efforts to curb the slave trade, Cuban planters began importing Chinese contract laborers in 1847 for work in the sugar economy.23 Although the social and economic environment of colonial Cuba was experiencing a series of transformations indicated previously in this chapter, the slave market was absolutely impervious to these changes. Rapid sugar expansion, railroad building, technological innovation, slave rebellion and repression, and the beginnings of Chinese labor importation had almost no impact on the Cuban slave market. To 1850 prices for slaves in Cuba were strikingly stable over the long term. Although Cuba was being transformed in so many ways, the Cuban slave market hardly took notice. There were the usual short-term fluctuations as always, and a slight rise in average prices in 1848 and 1850, but the average price for working-age 21. For a well-written account of "La Escalera" see Robert L. Paquette, Sugar Is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict Between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988). 22. These are the estimates of Eltis, "The Nineteenth Century Transatlantic Slave Trade," pp. 122—3.

Yearly slave imports to Cuba, according to Eltis, 1836—1850 Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

1836 1837 1838 1839

20,200 20,900 21,000 19,900

1840 1841 1842 1843

13,700 11,600 4,100 7,100

1844 1845 1846 1847

10,000 2,600 1,000 1,700

1848 1849 1850

2,000 7,400 3,300

23. For the most complete study of the Chinese in Cuba see Denise Helly, Ideologie et ethnicite; Les Chinois Macao a Cuba: 1847-1886 (Montreal: Les Presses de 1'Universite de Montreal, 1979). Also see Duvon C. Corbitt, A Study of the Chinese in Cuba, 1847—1947 (Wilmore, KY: Asbury College,

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

55

slaves between 1835 and 1850 did not surpass 400 pesos. In 1850 slaves between fifteen and forty years of age sold at average prices (393 pesos) below levels prevailing a half century earlier. The stability in prices exhibited in the slave market for working-age slaves indicates a balance between labor supply and demand and confidence that the trata, combined with the sale of Creoles, would maintain a steady supply of prime-age slaves into the future. The price stability characterizing the Cuban slave market during the first half of the nineteenth century was shattered after 1850. Price rises for sugar on world markets and ensuing increases in the profitability of sugar production during the mid-1850s drove slave prices to their nineteenthcentury peaks before the decade was out. Havana white sugars, which sold at 4 cents per pound in New York in January 1850, soared to a record high of 14 cents per pound by June 1857.24 This increase in sugar prices sparked an unprecedented wave of financial speculation highlighted by the acquisition of land and sugar mills at very high prices by newly established jointstock companies {sociedades anonimas), most failing by the mid-1860s. 23 The slave market's trajectory paralleled price movements in the sugar sector. By 1859 the average price of prime-age slaves peaked at 806 pesos, more than double the 393 pesos average of 1850. It must be stressed that the slave price rises of the 1850s were in real terms and not the result of any generalized inflation within Cuba or on international markets. Prices for all commodities in the principal consuming markets for Cuban sugar rose at rates which were considerably slower than the price increases in the Cuban slave market. Between 1850 and the peak in Cuban slave prices of 1859, overall, real wholesale prices increased by 13 percent in the United States; 21 percent in Great Britain; and 28 percent in Spain. Slave prices in Cuba rose by 103 percent in the same period.26 This suggests that slave owners and sugar producers enjoyed real comparative economic advantages during the decade. 24. "The Range of Prices at New York for Thirty Nine Years," Executive Documents Printed by Order of the House of Representatives During the First Session of the Thirty Eighth Congress, 1863—1864, vol. 6, nos. 2 and 3 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), pp. 387, 397. 25. For a discussion of the 1857 crisis and its aftermath see Marrero, Cuba, vol. 12, pp. 285—303; and LeRiverend, Historia economica, pp. 420-30. 26. See Appendix A for graphic evidence of this. U.S. wholesale price indexes are listed in United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 201. British price indexes can be found in B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 722—3. Spanish price indexes are found in B. R. Mitchell, European Historical Statistics, 1750-1970 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 736-7. For the purposes of these calculations all indexes have been converted to 1850 = 100 by dividing all years by the 1850 index number in each series. The following indexes were produced for the 1850s:

56

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Although sugar price increases and the ensuing speculative fever gripping Cuba's sugar-producing elite during the late 1850s were important short-term factors pushing slave prices to the unparalleled levels of 1859, other variables linked to long-term structural aspects of Cuba's colonial economy were of equal significance. The most central were sugar monoculture's relentless growth and its continuing demand for, and dependence upon, slave labor.27 Until the Ten Years' War ended in 1878, the sugar economy reproduced itself according to the formulae of the past. The technological parameters changed to be sure, but so much was a familiar replay of themes which characterized the previous century of development. The gravitational pull of fallow forested frontier regions to the east; the building of infrastructural linkages to those areas, after 1837 centering on the railroad; the founding of new mills with greater processing capacity by a Havana-based entrepreneurial elite; and above all the continuing dependence on slave labor and the slave trade remained as the central characteristics of a colonial sugar

Year

Cuban slave price index

U.S. price index

British price index

Spanish price index

100

100

100

93

99

122 112 125 120 134

105 115 129 131 125 132 111 113 111

96 99

100 105 103

1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

179 205 203 178

96

118 132 132 131 134 117 121 126

104 113 126 129 109 128 125

27. Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. 3, pp. 43—44 notes the following data on sugar exports in metric tons. Year

Exports

Year

Exports

Year

Exports

Year

Exports

1851 1852 1853 1854 1855

365,843 329,905 391,247 397,713 462,968

1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

416,141 436,030 426,277 469,263 428,769

1861 1862 1863 1864 1865

533,800 454,758 445,693 525,372 547,364

1866 1867 1868

535,641 585,814 720,250

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

57

economy which had reduced every other economic sector to insignificance by midcentury. Despite English pressures to end slaving and slavery, irrespective of rumblings among the Cuban planter class concerning the desirability of free labor, and notwithstanding the fear among whites induced by the slave conspiracies and rebellions of the 1830s and early 1840s, slavery and the slave trade remained the bedrock upon which sugar monoculture rested. There was no mitigation to the continuing dependence of plantation owners on slave labor, even as the abolition process began and deepened and the insurrection of 1868 became a protracted struggle which was to last for ten years.28 The increase in revenues resulting from high sugar prices on world markets during the mid-1850s permitted Cuban planters to purchase slaves at higher prices and to infuse the trans-Atlantic slave trade to Cuba with renewed vigor. Between 1851 and i860 over 120,000 Africans landed on the island, no doubt because of the impetus provided by higher sugar and slave prices, increased sugar output, and the continued strong demand for slave labor. In the history of the Cuban slave trade this decade was only surpassed by the period between 1811 and 1820 when over 167,000 slaves were imported and the 1830s when over 170,000 slaves were forced from Africa to colonial Cuba.29 The enforcement of the ban on slaving and subsequent end of the Cuban slave trade in 1867 marked the onset of the final phase in slavery's tragic history in Cuba, despite the continuing economic resiliency of slavery as a system of labor exploitation. However, the end of the trata was not the determining factor heralding the demise of slavery, for the two were not necessarily linked, as the history of slavery in the United States demonstrated so graphically. The revolutionary war and its consequences, which began in October 1868, would be the decisive catalyst forcing Spain to begin dismantling the system which supported the colonial economy. 28. This continuing dependence upon slave labor, even after abolition began, is discussed in Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba; and in Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century. 29. Yearly slave imports to Cuba between 1851 and 1868, according to Eltis, "The NineteenthCentury Transatlantic Slave Trade," pp. 122—3, i n these two decades were as follows: Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

Year

Slaves

1851 1852 1853 1854 1855

5,000 7,000 12,500 11,400 6,400

1856 1857 1858 1859 1860

7,300 10,400 15,000 25,000 21,000

1861 1862 1863 1864 1865

13,800 10,100 3,800 2,400

1866 1867 1868

1,000

800

700 0

58

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

The Cuban labor market was also affected after 1850 by the importation of over 120,000 Chinese contract laborers between 1847 and 1873, most destined to work in the sugar sector. However, the expansion of sugar into new frontier zones of eastern Matanzas and Las Villas provinces between 1850 and the end of the Ten Years' War produced unprecedented labor demands. Even the vigorous revival of the slave trade during the 1850s and early 1860s and the importation of so many Chinese workers did not dampen demand for labor.30 In response to short-term shifts in labor demands the Cuban slave market's price structure fluctuated to be sure. But a return to the price levels prevailing prior to 1850, or to the relative secular stability of the first half of the nineteenth century, was impossible during the last three decades of slavery's history in colonial Cuba. Although economic factors were paramount in determining the price structure of the Cuban slave market through most of the 1850s, the unprecedented increase in slave prices between 1851 and 1852 must be explained by examining both internal economic variables and changes in international political factors affecting Cuban slavery. The founding of new sugar estates in the 1840s, almost all with highly mechanized milling equipment, resulted in a substantial surge in Cuban sugar production capacity. This in turn meant an increased demand for agricultural labor, because more cane was required for grinding in the newer mills. Cuban sugar exports surged by 78 percent between 1846 and 1851, from 205,608 to 365,843 metric tons.31 The increased labor demands of sugar's agricultural sector undoubtedly led to upward pressures on slave prices. Paralleling these internal factors were significant changes in the structure of the African slave trade which had serious repercussions in Cuba. The long British effort to close the Brazilian trade, the most voluminous of all the trans-Atlantic routes, culminated in 1850 and 1851 in a largescale military campaign which included the threat of a complete naval blockade and the seizing of slave ships in Brazilian ports.32 The Brazilian trade was effectively closed thereafter. There is no doubt that British success in ending the slave trade to Brazil produced heightened concerns in 30. Although the processing phase of sugar production was continually modernized with the application of capital-intensive technology which reduced labor demands and increased sugar to cane yields, it must be emphasized that the agricultural side of the productive process remained labor intensive. Methods of planting, maintaining, and harvesting cane fields were almost timeless in an era of technological innovation in other sectors of the sugar economy. Cane continued to be cut by gangs of workers, mostly slave or Chinese, by hand. The number of laborers needed to harvest a caballeria of land did not change until well after slavery was abolished. 31. Moreno Fraginals, Ellngenio, vol. 3, pp. 44—5. 32. See Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade: Britain, Brazil, and the Slave Trade Question, 1807-1869 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Robert Edgar Conrad, World of Sorrow: The African Slave Trade to Brazil (New Orleans: Louisiana State University Press, 1986); and Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

59

Havana that the official ban on slaving to Cuba would be enforced. The only prior threat to end the trata resulting in short-term increases in slave prices was the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 discussed above. However, the reaction to the closing of the Brazilian slave trade was more abrupt. From 1851 to 1852 the average price of prime-age slaves in Cuba increased by 31 percent from 364 to 468 pesos. By 1852 prices on the Cuban slave market had reached levels that had not been experienced in three decades.33 The increase in prices for prime-age slaves occurring between 1851 and 1852 was also connected to the Cuban colonial government's quick opportunistic reaction to the closing of the Brazilian trade. This took the form of raising the level of bribes which colonial officials extracted for slaves introduced to Cuba. It is well known that every legal provision to end the slave trade, whether in the form of international treaty or imperial law, was blatantly ignored in Cuba. The 1845 law banning the Cuban slave trade, passed by the Spanish Cortes and signed by the Queen, can be added to the Anglo-Spanish treaties of 1817 and 1835 as another dead letter. The appointment in 1852 of Valentin Canedo as the new Cuban CaptainGeneral was trumpeted as an effort to enforce the legal ban on slave trading, and indeed he made some well-publicized seizures of slave cargoes. However, the significance of Canedo's efforts and those of the next CaptainGeneral, Juan de la Pezuela (1852—1853), to the Cuban slave market was to raise the cost of bribing local level officials to turn their backs on slaving. Even the Queen Mother, Maria Cristina, whose Havana agent Antonio Parejo was closely involved in slave trading, benefited substantially from the increased level of bribes. 34 Thus, the closing of the Brazilian slave trade and the increase in "distribution costs" in Cuba were in part responsible for the short-term rise in slave prices between 1851 and 1852. The end of Brazilian slaving and the strong demand for agricultural labor in Cuba because of mill mechanization and rising production capacity 33. This rise in slave prices was paralleled in the other principal American slave markets, Brazil and the United States. These will be considered in Chapter 7. The conversion of nominal Cuban slave prices to "real" prices, using U.S., British, and Spanish general price indexes in Appendix A, verifies this sharp upward trend in real prices between 1851 and 1852. 34. More reference to Canedo's efforts will be made in the section on comparative prices by sex in this chapter. For a discussion of Canedo and how the Queen Mother benefited from the favorable conditions for increased bribes of the early 1850s see Jose Luciano Franco, Comercio clandestino de esclavos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), pp. 379—80. David Eltis, in Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, also underlines the fact that increased slave prices in the early 1850s were connected to the closing of the Brazilian trade and the rise in the cost of bribing Cuban colonial officials. While bribes were estimated to be $25.00 per slave between 1826 and 1845, between 1856 and 1865 Eltis estimated bribes to be at $136.00 per slave. See pp. 202—3 and pp. 273-4. These increased bribes were obviously related to the political factors alluded to previously in this chapter. There was no subsequent decrease in the level of slave imports because of increased distribution costs.

60

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

also led to an upsurge in the Cuban slave trade as cargoes bound for Brazil were diverted to Cuba, the last great destination of the trans-Atlantic trata. Between 1846 and 1850, 15,400 slaves disembarked in Cuba. This was the lowest volume for a five-year period during the entire history of the nineteenth-century slave trade to the island. Over the next five years, however, the Cuban trade increased to 42,300; and between 1856 and i860, 78,700 slaves were brought to the island.35 The Chinese contract labor trade, which became quite voluminous in the late 1850s, also shaped the Cuban labor market. While approximately 78,700 Africans were imported between 1856 and i860, during the same period 40,300 Chinese laborers landed in Cuba. Only 9,600 Chinese had arrived between 1847 and 1855. Thus, the rise in slave prices noted above during the early 1850s coincided with fairly large-scale labor imports, suggesting that demand for workers in the late 1850s significantly exceeded available supplies. The abolition of slavery in the United States and the end of the Confederacy (1865) produced no short-term ramifications in Cuba, such as feared British intervention, and slave prices once again decreased for working-age slaves. This fall in slave prices was also a reflection of softening sugar prices on world markets and probable labor market saturation because of the increased slave and Chinese imports of the late 1850s. The various short- and long-term factors which determined the price structure of the Cuban slave market prior to 1869 were rendered meaningless with the actual end of the slave trade and the onset of the independence insurrection which began in October 1868 in eastern Cuba. Although the leadership of the rebellion initially accepted the legitimacy of slavery, abolitionist pressures and the desire to incorporate slaves as revolutionary fighters led to the acceptance of complete abolition by late 1870. The appeal of the insurrection's abolitionism to the island's people of color, slave and free, made it untenable for Spain to continue slavery. The official abolition process began in 1870 with the Moret Law, which freed children born to slave women after 1868 and those reaching sixty years of age. As the Ten Years' War drew to a close the transition to new labor forms became a fundamental priority of the colonial regime, and in 1880 final abolition was proclaimed, although the patronato was established, which theoretically gave former slaveholders a wide range of authority to control the labor of freed men and women.36 35. See Eltis, "The Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Slave Trade," pp. 122—3. Also see Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. 1, pp. 278—9 fora brief discussion of the impact of the closing of the Brazilian slave trade on Cuba. 36. For the most complete consideration of these themes see Scott, Slave Emancipation. The forerunner to the official abolition laws of the 1870s and 1880s was the 1866 Spanish Royal Decree of September 29, 1866. This law, which was not the result of an agreement with England, abolished the

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

61

The Cuban slave market reacted quickly. Prices for prime-age slaves plummeted over 30 percent from 1868 (715 pesos) to 1869 (492 pesos). Although final approval of the Moret Law was one year away, it was anticipated by purchasers of slaves in Cuba who were also reacting to fears spawned by the rebellion. With the radical decline in the number of slave sales occurring throughout Cuba after 1868, our data base diminished considerably in quantity as well as quality. Yet, the information gleaned from the protocol records is suggestive. Although slave prices collapsed between 1868 and 1869 and remained depressed at 480 pesos for prime-age slaves in 1870, prime-age slave prices recovered after 1871 and rose to, and even surpassed, the peaks achieved in the late 1850s. Although we recorded only nine transactions involving prime-age slaves in 1873, their average price was 919 pesos, the highest average level achieved during the history of Cuban slavery. (See Table B. 1.) In 1874 f ° u r working-age slaves were sold for an average of 854 pesos; and in 1875 fifteen prime-age slaves were marketed for an average of 831 pesos. After 1875 prices once again fell sharply, and this continued to 1880 when working-age slaves were sold for 150 pesos, a price which in all likelihood reflected the yearly hire rate for labor. The increase in prices for working-age slaves with final abolition so chronologically near and during the period of war and revolution in the east indicates two things. First was the continued strong demand for slave labor despite slavery's approaching end, a fact that was not at all obscure to Cuban slaveholders in the aftermath of the Moret Law. Second was the apparent economic vitality of slave labor, even at the higher prices of the mid-1870s. Slave purchasers were willing to buy slaves at the high prices of 1873, J 874, a n d 1875 o n ly because they felt that their labor could yield profits in the short term.37

Price differentials by sex Until 1819, a year before the first Anglo-Spanish treaty abolishing the legal slave trade was to be implemented, prime-age male slaves were consisCuban slave trade and indicates Spain's commitment to end slaving before the outbreak of the Ten Years' War. Not only did the law end slaving but it also abolished article 9 of the penal law of 1845. This article was designed to protect sugar planters by exempting slaves living inside plantations from confiscation, even if they had entered the island illegally. That meant that sugar planters could continue slaving as long as their imported slaves were destined for plantations. The 1866 law also declared that a slave census would be held in 1867 and that all slaves not registered would be freed after that date. This meant that any slaves imported after 1867, and discovered on plantations, would be set free. This was a powerful inducement to end slaving. 37. This is discussed in Bergad, Cuban Rural Society, pp. 217—28. The relation of slave prices to hire rates is generally unknown due to the absence of systematic empirical data on wages.

The Cuban slave market 1790-1880

Price ratio 200

100

Year 1. First Anglo-Spanish Treaty abolishing slave trade to take effect. Female prime-age slaves sold at 130% value of prime-age males. 2. British abolition of slavery in Caribbean colonies and cholera epidemic. Female prime-age slaves sold at 115% value of prime-age males. 3. Efforts by Captain-General Geronimo Valdds to surpress slave trade. Female prime-age slaves sold at 114% value of prime-age males. 4. The end of the Brazilian slave trade and efforts by Captain-General Valentin Cafiedo to close the Cuban slave trade. Female prime-age slaves sold at 121% value of prime-age males. 5. General rises in overall slave prices, census of 1857, and renewed efforts to suppress slaving. Female prime-age slaves sold at 122% value of prime-age males. 6. End of the slave trade and beginning of the Ten Years War. Female prime-age slaves sold at 131 % value of prime-age males.

Figure 4.8 Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages, 1790-1871

tently priced higher than females. Over the thirty years between 1790 and 1819 working-age males sold for prices which averaged n o percent the cost of prime-age females. However, from 1820 to the abolition law of 1880, there was a striking equality in slave prices by sex: Prime-age males sold for a sixty-year average of 99 percent the value of females. This was one aspect of a radical departure from pre-1820 comparative price patterns by sex. The other was sharp periodic fluctuations in relative prices between prime-age males and females encountered in the post-1820 price history of Cuban slavery. These are indicated graphically in Figures 4.8 and 4.9. Factors responsible for the abrupt short-term shifts in comparative slave sex values after 1820 varied to be sure. It is certain that differences in occupational categories were influential because our meager evidence on occupations (to be discussed later in this chapter) indicates that male field hands sold for average prices which were always lower than slaves working in urban areas where females predominated. It is unfortunate, however, that

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790-1880

Males

oo

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Year Figure 4.9 Average prices for slaves ages 15-40 by sex, 1790-1880

our data are not systematic enough to measure occupational and sex price differentials through time in any statistically reliable way. The one single variable that stands out as an explanation for the sharp short-term rises in female prime-age slave prices relative to males indicated in Figure 4.8 was the premium the slave market placed upon reproductive potential in specific years. This almost always occurred when any threat was posed to the future of the slave trade. The statistical record on prices strongly suggests that when slaving was jeopardized in some way, real or merely possible, enhanced premiums were placed upon female slaves of child-bearing ages. It was obvious to the Cuban slave market that, if the African trade ended, the only way to maintain or increase the slave labor force would have been through reproduction. It is likely that Cuban slave owners were well aware of the dynamics of the slave system in the United States, where natural reproduction was so prodigious and resulted in consistent slave population growth.38 The possibility of emulating the North American model became appealing at times when the future of the slave trade was in doubt. Yet, when threats to slaving subsided, the price of 38. For the most exhaustive and controversial study on the quantitative dimensions of slavery in the United States, see Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: the Economics of American Negro Slavery, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974).

64

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

prime-age females inevitably declined relative to males, underlining the short-term volatility of comparative slave prices by sex, as well as the ephemeral character of concerns with reproductive potential. The first dramatic and obvious manifestation of this occurred between the 1817 antislave trade treaty and 1821, one year after it was to have been enforced. Prime-age female prices sold for an average of 393 pesos in 1817, and their prices soared by 44 percent to 564 pesos by 1821, surpassing the average price for males in 1819. Females between fifteen and forty years of age were valued at 130 percent of prime-age males in 1820, and 117 percent in 1821. Through most of the 1820s working-age female slaves sold for higher average prices than their male counterparts. This was the first period in Cuban slave market history during which prime-age female slaves consistently sold for greater values than males. Our conclusion that rising prices for prime-age females indicated a short-term preoccupation with reproductive possibilities is supported by the demographic profile of slaves sold discussed earlier in this chapter. It should be recalled that the 1820s and early 1830s were characterized by the most intense purchase of younger slaves (under fifteen years of age) in the history of the Cuban slave market. Buyers of slaves prepared for any possible future contraction in slaving by purchasing younger slaves with greater future reproductive and work potential, while demanding more slave women in their prime reproductive years. The slave trade continued, however, and in the 1830s prime-age males once again consistently sold for higher prices than females, although there were some short-term exceptions. The pattern of sharp price increases for female slaves relative to males in the prime reproductive and working-age group was repeated over and over again at chronological points when some real or perceived political threat to the slave trade took place. The year the British abolished slavery in their Caribbean colonies, 1833, was not marked by any major shift in the general price structure of the Cuban slave market. Yet, there was another significant increase in the price ratio (to 115 percent) of prime-age females relative to males. This was related to the short-lived scare that the British, as part of their ongoing attack on Caribbean slavery, would directly intervene in Cuba to end slaving. Additionally, during early 1833 a severe cholera epidemic struck the Cuban slave population, and the resulting high mortality rates could have provoked concerns with slave reproductive potential as a strategy to increase individual holdings. However, once the cholera epidemic waned toward the end of the year and feared British intervention did not take place, there was a recovery of working-age male prices relative to females. (See Figure 4.8.) If the slave market reacted so quickly to potential threats to the trata by raising the price of reproductive-age females, the failure to respond to the

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

65

1835 Anglo-Spanish antislave trade treaty was a major exception. The treaty was preceded by an intense period of slaving and a continued gradual decline in slave prices. (See Figure 4.6.) It is evident from slave price trends that the high volume of the African trade in the 1820s and 1830s resulted in labor market saturation, despite rising labor demands because of increasing sugar production and regardless of the ephemeral reaction to abolition in the British colonies. Even the sharp downturn in slaving occurring after 1839 produced no rise in general slave price levels. These slave price trends suggest that the Cuban labor market was reassuringly stable by the late 1830s, making it difficult for Cuban slave buyers and sellers to take British and Spanish machinations seriously, at least in the immediate aftermath of the 1835 law. The effect of the 1817 treaty was surely recalled as ludicrous at best, and this must have reinforced the perceptions among Cuba's slave trading, sugar producing, and soon-to-be railroad-building elite, that it was firmly in control of Cuban economic affairs. Spain and Britain could sign treaties, but the Cuban coast could not be effectively patrolled by either country's naval forces, and Spanish colonial officials were almost always willing to turn their backs on slaving for the right price. However, during the early 1840s colonial politics were altered with the appointment of Geronimo Valdes as Captain-General of the island in 1841. In a move that was a surprise to the island's elite, Cuban and Spanish alike, Valdes struck vigorously against the slave trade by ordering the enforcement of antislaving laws; closing well-known Havana markets for newly arrived Africans; and even forbidding the registration of foreign manufactured ships, often used as slavers, under the Spanish flag.39 It is conspicuous that these antislaving efforts were paralleled by a sudden increase in the comparative prices of female prime-age slaves who were valued at 114 percent the price of males in 1842. With the departure of Valdes in 1843, comparative price ratios by sex for prime-age slaves returned to a more balanced equality. As in 1821 and 1833, the threat to slaving posed by Valdes s policies quickly produced changed ratios in prices by sex for prime-age slaves. The Cuban slave market would react by increasing prices for prime-age female slaves relative to males on three other occasions when the slave trade was endangered. The first was in 1851 and 1852 in response to the successful closing of the Brazilian slave trade by the British. For Cuban slave traders, ever sensitive to changes in international economic and political conditions, this was not merely a distant attack on a faraway nation. It was a 39. See Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 200. Jose Luciano Franco, in Comercio clandestino, pp. 369-76, discusses the attacks on the slave trade by Valdes, and the pressures in Spain by Cuban slave trade interests to have him removed. These were successful in 1843.

66

The Cuban slave market iygo—i880

clear signal of British resolve and perhaps foreshadowed a direct assault on Cuba, the last major destination of the African slave trade. The British naval intervention in Brazilian ports could not be merely shrugged off because such actions were rumored to be in store for Cuba time and again. It is not coincidental that in 1851 the Cuban slave market began its first significant price increase since the 1817 to 1821 period. This was underscored by sharply higher prime-age female-to-male price ratios. The end of the Brazilian trade was accompanied by the appointment of another antislaving crusader as Captain-General of Cuba in 1852, Valentin Canedo. Canedo was determined to end the independent and arbitrary power of Cuban slave traders and attacked them continuously during his short tenure which ended in 1853. In violation of the 1845 penal law which prohibited entry into sugar estates, Canedo invaded ingenios to seize newly arrived Africans and even arrested Cuba's wealthiest sugar planter and slave trader, Julian Zulueta.40 This direct assault on Cuban slaving complemented both the end of the Brazilian trade as a determining factor in causing prime-age females to be valued at 114 percent the value of males in 1851 and 121 percent in 1852 and the concomitant reconsideration of reproduction as a possible way to guarantee the future of Cuban slavery. After a five-year hiatus between 1853 through 1857, during which prime-age males sold at greater prices than females, in 1858 females of reproductive age sold for the highest average price level ever attained during the history of Cuban slavery, 849 pesos. This was more than double the price levels of 1850 (377 pesos) and 122 percent the value of prime-age males in 1858. Higher prime-age female prices relative to males prevailed from 1858 through 1861. Once again the premium placed upon female reproductive potential was the certain cause of these price differentials. However, this time around the price increases for all slaves was a strong contributing factor, in addition to the cyclical fears concerning the future of the slave trade. With general slave prices skyrocketing between 1855 and 1858 to unforeseen levels, reproduction became an obvious alternative as a mechanism to drastically cut future labor costs, while building equity in the form of higher-valued slave holdings. Additionally, it is certain that some slave purchasers recognized the business opportunities of potential reproduction. It is likely that the extraordinary retail price of slaves far outstripped the costs of maintaining and raising Cuban-born slaves to adolescence when they could be marketed for substantial profits if prices remained so high. However, threats to the slave trade should not be discounted as an important factor contributing to the higher valuation of prime-age female slaves. In 1855 the first generalized registry of Cuban slaves was initiated 40. See Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 202.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

67

with the stipulation that all enumerated slaves be issued cedulas, or registration papers, containing complete descriptive information.41 This was followed by the slave census of 1857. The beginning of government registries for slaves was an explicit antislave trade measure designed to placate the crusading British, and it also reflected a growing sentiment among sectors of the Spanish political elite that the African trade had to be ended. After 1855, if slaves did not have cedulas they could be considered recent imports and subject to seizure, something that was only hypothetical because this was never effected on any significant scale until after the 1866 Spanish decree which permitted authorities to seize Africans on sugar estates. All of this was taking place in the late 1850s against a resurgence in the slave trade to levels which had not been seen since the 1830s. Despite the renewed increase of slaving, which would abruptly end after the onset of the U.S. Civil War in 1861, reproductive considerations exerted upward pressures on female prime-age slave prices relative to males. The final episode in the cyclical short-term reactionary pattern of relative sex prices to threats to slaving, was in response to the actual ending of slave traffic in 1867. The great mainstay of the Cuban labor force, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, was successfully shut down by Spanish resolve to rigorously enforce all antislaving measures. The slave market responded in 1868 by valuing reproductive age females at 131 percent the value of males, the highest relative level achieved during the history of Cuban slavery. This was comparable to the response to the first Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 when females were sold for 130 percent the value of prime-age males in 1820. The premium placed on reproduction is the sole explanation which accounts for this comparative price differential by sex in 1868. Price differentials by origin Throughout the history of the Cuban slave market prime-age, Cuban-born slaves of either sex consistently sold for greater average prices than Africans. There were several periods when short-term relative increases in African slave prices occurred, such as in the 1790s and during the early 1830s. But these were not part of any general pattern which can be methodically analyzed and were probably the result of idiosyncratic factors having to do with the random nature of our sample.42 The greater value of Creoles 41. See Knight, Slave Society, p. 144, for a brief description of this. 42. Klein indicates that there was a temporary decline in the African slave trade after 1792 because of disruptions in international commerce caused by the Napoleonic Wars. The short-term drop in slave imports, combined with strong labor demands because of the sugar and coffee price rises in the aftermath of the Haitian slave revolt, may have been responsible for greater demands for Africans and upward pressures on African prices in the 1790s. See Klein, The Middle Passage, pp. 212—13.

68

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

underscores the premium placed upon acculturation by the slave market. Creoles could speak Spanish, had usually assimilated the rudimentary rituals of Catholicism, had never experienced freedom, had become (through coercion) accustomed to labor routines, and were generally considered to be less potentially rebellious than Africans.43 Between 1836 and 1868 our sample was sufficiently large enough to permit a comparison of average prices for prime-age slaves by origin and sex. These are summarized in Table 4.6 and Figures 4.10 and 4.11. These data indicate the greater demand for prime-age Creole slaves and once again they reinforce our conclusion that fundamental changes occurred on the Cuban slave market with the secular price increases beginning in 1850. From 1836 to 1850 prime-age Creole males sold for 105 percent the value of African males and Creole females for 108 percent the average prices of African females. However after 1850, relative prices of Creoles of either sex increased markedly relative to Africans. Working-age Creole males averaged 118 percent the price of African males between 1851 and 1865, while Creole females were sold for 122 percent the average value of African females between 1851 and 1862.44 This increase in price differentials by origins and sex after midcentury was related to a number of factors. With respect to female slaves, it is likely that the episodic emphasis on reproductive potential discussed above was critical. Although no firm reproductive data have been generated by extant studies on Cuban slavery, it is probable that birth rates among Creole slave women were significantly higher than among Africans, making them comparatively more valued.45 Differential occupational categories between Creole and African women may also have been a factor accounting for higher Creole prices, because there was a well-known preference for Creole females in the domestic occupations of Cuban urban centers. If a greater comparative percentage of African women were destined for nondomestic labor, this could have resulted in higher relative prices for Creole females, although it is unfortunate that data on occupations are not extensive enough to permit a reliable analysis. 43. The primary source documentation used in this study gave no indication as to the length of time each marketed African slave resided in Cuba. There was no way to determine whether a slave was recently imported or had been on the island for a considerable period of time. This is unfortunate since there was surely a premium placed on Africans who had been in Cuba for some time compared with recent African imports. This could not be calculated. 44. The years for comparing males and females differ because we only calculated average prices when ten or more transactions were available in each category. 45. In his study on the British Caribbean Barry Higman found indisputable evidence that Creole women had significantly higher fertility rates than African-born female slaves. It is probable that this same pattern was found in Cuba. See the discussion on fertility differentials in Barry Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 355-62.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790—1880

Table 4.6 Average prices of slaves ages 15-40 by sex and origin, 1836-1868

Year 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868

Creole males

No. of sales

Creole females

No. of sales

African males

No. of sales

African females

365 345 372 326 371 367 315 364 343 348 369 378 412 390 410 447 463 467 509 488 594 735

(22) (48) (35) (42) (91) (64) (42) (58) (124) (30) (88) (113) (68) (47) (33) (13) (32) (52) (58) (23) (64) (28) (7) (43) (37) (39) (67) (27) (12) (23) (19) (14) (11)

319 352 330 367 377 369 378 355 355 361 375 391 406 370 385 493 558 437 488 482 512 717 807 821 741 771 632 692 727 631 621 571 804

(18) (72) (40) (47) (107) (93) (65) (61) (119) (30) (136) (160) (84) (52) (39) (17) (60) (84) (76) (37) (123) (43) (26) (60) (48) (46) (96) (72) (29) (39) (22) (16) (24)

342 324 326 344 352 365 326 352 332 338 347 353 399 315 408 414 391 419 466 460 509 664 545 627 499 588 556 767 831 651 371 540

(37) (102) (60) (114) (217) (127) (87) (95) (199) (33) (147) (127) (88) (43) (26) (7) (28) (40) (24) (10) (52) (13) (4) (11) (11) (19) (24) (3) (8) (10) (7) (3) --

311 321 343 306 343 347 363 305 335 326 353 351 367 338 364 492 427 411 496 415 489 605 913 594 708 468 561 482 463 783 700 500 400

721 850 749 627 651 741 746 717 645 541 587

No. of sales (18) (91) (28) (93) (166) (102) (91) (69) (139) (16) (114) (101) (64) (31) (15) (3) (23) (36) (26) (13) (27) (10) (8) (12) (12) (11) (11) (10) (4) (3) (1) (2) (1)

Reproductive possibilities were not the sole determining factor causing Creole slave prices to rise relative to Africans after 1850, because the same phenomenon was evident among males. The fact that Creole slaves of either sex could be freely marketed and registered after the proclamation of the 1845 penal law may have influenced comparative prices by origin. We indicated above that Africans imported after 1845 were increasingly destined directly for estates because this made them exempt from possible seizure by zealous officials. It should not be inferred that Africans were not marketable. However, the ability to openly sell Creole slaves without concern for

The Cuban slave market 1J90—1880

Price ratio 200

100

I

1

l

,

1

, I

1836 1838 1840 1842 1844 1846 1848 1850 1852 1854 1856 1858 1860 1862 1864 Year

Figure 4.10 Price ratios of Creole males to African males ages 15—40 in percentages, 1836—1865

Price ratio 200

100

1836

1838

1840 1842 1844 1846

1848 1850 1852 1854 1856 Year

1858

1860 1862

Figure 4.11 Price ratios of Creole females to African females ages 15-40 in percentages, 1836-1862

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

71

subterfuge and bribes probably contributed to higher Creole prices relative to Africans of either sex. Average prices for prime-age Creole males (850 pesos) and females (821 pesos) reached their apex in 1859. For African males (664 pesos) this occurred in 1857 and for African females (708 pesos) in i860. 46 These peaks coincided with the period of price rises for sugar on world markets, increased labor demands because of rising sugar production, and intense plantation development. Yet, the average price of prime-age Creole males fell by 26 percent from the peak in 1859 to 1861, only to increase once again as the U.S. Civil War deepened thereafter. Trends in prices for prime-age Creole women were slightly different and notable. The steep decline in average prices for prime-age Creole males between 1859 and 1861 was not paralleled in Creole females whose prices declined only 6 percent in these two years. In 1861 prime-age Creole females sold for prices (771 pesos) which were 123 percent higher than for Creole males (627 pesos). Why was there this one-year lag in price movements for prime-age Creole men and women and how do we account for the significant price differentials of Creoles by sex of 1861? The answer most likely revolves, once again, around the Cuban slave market's quick reaction to perceptions of any threat to the slave trade. In the past this invariably led to a rise in prices for females in the prime reproductive years, which occurred in the early 1820s and 1850s. In the case of the 1861 sex price differential it is likely that the critical factor was the outbreak of the U.S. Civil War and perhaps anticipation of the 1862 AngloAmerican treaty which permitted British ships to board U.S. vessels suspected of slaving. Prior to 1862 ships flying U.S. colors could not be inspected by English squadrons in the Caribbean or off the African coast, and these became major carriers of slaves to Cuba. This tendency to emphasize reproductive possibilities by raising the demand, and thus the price, for prime-age Creole female slaves was repeated in 1868. In 1867 average prices for Creole females between fifteen and forty years old stood at 571 pesos. As the slave trade was closed, prices soared to 804 pesos in 1868, an increase of nearly 41 percent from 1867, the largest single one-year increase in slave prices recorded during the history of the Cuban slave market. After 1868, of course, with the outbreak of war and revolution in eastern Cuba, it became pointless to plan for reproduction as the abolitionist character of the rebellion became manifest and Spain responded with the Moret Law of 1870 which freed all children born to slave women. 46. Although Table 4.4 indicates that there were higher prices for African males in 1863 and 1864, and for African females in 1865, these data were not considered for analysis because they were based on less than ten transactions.

72

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Table 4.7 National origins of African slaves sold, 1790—1880

Nationality

No. of sales

%

Carabalis Congos Gangas Lucumis Mandingas Others Totals

1,873 1,901 1,118 640 663 712 6,917

27 28 16 9 9 10 100

Data on the origins of slaves sold in Cuba reveal that 90 percent of Africans whose origins were known between 1790 and 1880 were Carabalis, Congos, Gangas, Lucumis, or Mandingas. (See Table 4.7.) There seems to have been no preference for any particular African nationality, and it is likely that conditions on African slave markets determined which slaves were available for purchase and shipment to Cuba. Demand from the island does not seem to have been a factor in deciding the African national characteristics of the slave trade. This is revealed by the erratic comparative price structure of slaves when their African origins are examined. (See Table 4.8 and Figure 4.12.) There was no consistently more expensive African national group nor any discernable relationship between the prices of the five principal African nationalities.

Occupations Data on occupational categories between 1790 and 1820 were fragmentary, yet suggestive. The one clear apparent pattern was the consistently lower price structure of rural field hands when compared with urban skilled slaves or domestics. Scattered examples illustrate this. For example, in 1799 two field slaves were sold for an average of 312 pesos; two domestics brought 450 pesos; and a driver and a mason were sold for 500 pesos each. Twenty years later, in 1819, three rural field hands sold for an average of 467 pesos each; three domestics were purchased for 533 pesos; two carpenters brought 525 pesos; and a tailor was bought for 550 pesos. After 1820 our sample of occupational categories increased somewhat and confirm the higher price structure of urban slaves relative to their rural

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

IJgo—1880

73

Table 4.8 Average prices of slaves by nationality, 1790—1868 Year 1790 1791 1792 1793 1794 1795 1796 1797 1798 1799 1800 1801 1802 1803 1804 1805 1806 1807 1808 1809 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835

Czirabalis Price No. 268 (22) 313 (4) 270 (5) 241 (22) 260 (16) (23) 270 (16) 272 324 (16) 324 (14) 410 (21) (20) 424 433 (15) 381 (8) 354 00 332 (4) 333 (6) -319 (4) 330 (8) 320 (23) 380 (8) 394 (8) 359 (16) 300 (8) 339 (3) 352 (7) 418 (6) 353 (12) 383 (16) 459 (8) 424 (20) 465 (12) 428 (15) 393 (33) 376 (23) 480 (10) 367 (6) 330 (14) 413 (8) 395 (14) 357 (17) 342 (19) 263 (12) 264 (16) 361 (17) 302 (24)

Congos No. Price 275 238 267 268 235 267 277 290 335 369 434 411 409 328 300 351 340 300 375 339 403 381 385 388 353 432 403 332 383 454 404 437 418 395 374 306 386 393 404 -366 315 271 276 338 272

(13) (2) (3) (14) (14) (19) (15) (13) (26) (11) (18) (19) (14) (16) (1) (7) (10) (5) (15) (17) (9) (8) (19) (12) (12) (9) (10) (17) (29) (14) (20) (27) (29) (41) (23) (9) (7) (15) (8) (24) (14) (7) (11) (14) (25)

Gangas No. Price 300 215 293 270 283 353 250 315 390 500 525 400 270

(4) (3) (3) (5) (2) (8) (5) (1) (1) (2) (2)

350 350 433 425 400 400 370 353 401

(1) (4) (3) (2) (2) (1) (3) (6) (7)

411 414 505 461 429 438 364 454 417 386 486 388 283 390 366 297 318 297 331

(8) (15) (10) (9) (13) (25) (13) (13) (6) (7) (11) (9) (12) (12) (20) (15) (35) (16) (21)

(1) (4)

Lucumis Price No. .. ._ 220 (2) 225 (4) 231 (7) 300 (1) 250 (3) 265 (6) 339 (10) 325 (2) 330 250 275 300 425 400 450 300 211 350 334 514 338 300 523 522 494 436 374 433 357 383 300 383 323 200 300 287 313

(5) (2) (2) (1) (2) (1) (2) (2) (1) (2) (5) (5) (3) (1) (3) (8) (8) (3) (8) (3) (3) (3) (2) (12) (13) (4) (9) (14) (18)

Mandingas Price No. 332 400 233 234 190 294 380 328 403 353 351 325 409 333 366 250 288 414 344 415 410 444 380 302 398 384 405 418 514 402 475 435 444 404 450 379 284 369 333 373 404 175 289 375 273

(6) (1) (6) (9) (5) (8) (5) (9) (7) (6) (5) (6) (6) (3) (5) (2) (4) (11) (18) (5) (9) (8) (10) (5) (15) (7) (13) (17) (7) (14) (11) (16) (18) (14) (4) (7) (7) (7) (3) (5) (8) (2) (9) (2) (11)

{continued)

counterparts. Domestics between 1821 and 1835, all females, sold for the prices shown in Table 4.9. Several characteristics of the market for domestic slaves can be noted from these data. The peak in the average prices paid for domestic slaves in 1821 of 570 pesos would not be surpassed until 1856. There was an overall 31 percent decline in their average values between 1821 and 1835, and this paralleled the general 21 percent price decrease for prime-age slaves

74

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Table 4.8 Year 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868

Canibalis Price No. 348 323 335 318 343 328 328 332 333 325 317 351 367 312 314 325 371 399 420 418 440 675 700 782 681 543 333 508 650 500 250

(38) (116) (35) (112) (172) (113) (50) (81) (115) (24) (102) (91) (38) (34) (17) (4) (17) (21) (15) (7) (10) (4) (3) (11) (9) (8) (3) (6) (1) (1) (1)

599

(3)

Conj30s Price No. 307 311 304 305 328 327 327 322 319 338 334 361 307 330 322 383 383 369 426 400 473 623 677 475 568 509 600 491 727 678 342 550 379

(50) (80) (32) (55) (103) (79) (46) (48) (109) (29) (70) (85) (42) (45) (31) (12) (19) (33) (20) (17) (33) (15) (11) (8) (20) (11) (10) (10) (7) (4) (6) (2) (7)

continued

Gangas Price No. 359 403 329 325 358 363 349 324 328 331 357 348 380 365 380 469 380 412 480 493 542 576 942 590 732 682 411 476 650 500 500 418 516

(37) (15) (19) (53) (69) (64) (58) (29) (54) (21) (62) (37) (27) (14) (24) (13) (21) (30) (13) (3) (26) (13) (10) (15) (8) (4) (10) (4) (5) (2) (1) (4) (9)

Lucumis Price No. 357 339 340 363 347 398 362 310 343 394 365 382 406 369 375 513 432 455 541 408 508 628 691 280 691 620 550 650 531 600 600 650

(25) (28) (4) (11) (17) (33) (25) (29) (15) (14) (35) (18) (35) (13) (21) (4) (15) (31) (4) (6) (13) (8) (2) (5) (8) (5) (8) (1) (17) (1) (2) (5)

Mandingias Price No. 410 348 328 350 342 306 332 306 300 370 354 289 358 344 310 50 300 340 450 350 340 462 483 400 800 600 525 ~

(10) (20) (9) (13) (42) (16) (15) (25) (34) (1) (29) (25) (13) (15) (2) (1) (5) (11) (3) (3) (1) (3) (3) (2) (2) (1) (2) --

(from 516 to 365 pesos) during the same period. Although the sample size for other occupational categories was limited, domestic slaves were consistently sold for higher prices than field slaves. However, other urban skilled occupational categories were usually valued higher than domestic workers, although statistical information was again derived from comparatively small sample sizes in each year. The data are suggestive, however. For example, in 1821 drivers in five transactions were sold at an average price of 601 pesos compared to 570 pesos for domestics. In 1833, in a sample of nine transactions for each category, drivers averaged 446 pesos to 376 pesos for domestics. Skilled slaves could command extremely high prices. A male worker in a brick-works (tejero) was sold for 750 pesos in 1830 when the average price for prime-age male slaves was 406 pesos. A mule train driver (arriero) was sold for 600 pesos in 1825 when domestics averaged 439 pesos, drivers 550 pesos, and a midwife (partera) sold for 550 pesos. Two shoemakers were sold for an average of 550 pesos, and two masons for 475 pesos in 1828 when domestics averaged 425 pesos.

The price structure of the Cuban slave market,

1790—1880

Price 700

75

Carabalis Congos

600

Gangas Lucumfs

500

Mandingas 400

300

-

200

-

100 -

1790-99 1800-09 1810-19 1820-29 1830-39 1840-49 1850-59 1860-68 Years Figure 4.12 Average slave prices by African nationalities, 1790-1868

After 1835 our sample of sales with occupational data was large enough to compare prices of domestics, drivers, and field slaves. (See Tables 4.10 and 4.11.) There were significant discrepancies in the movement of prices among domestics and drivers, the two urban occupational categories with the largest sample sizes. The market for domestics reflected general conditions on the overall Cuban slave market. Prices were stable or exhibited downward tendencies prior to the general price increases occurring after 1850. Average prices for domestics were in fact higher in 1836 than in any year thereafter through midcentury. This was in sharp contrast with the movement of average prices for drivers, who not only were consistently valued higher than domestics, but whose average prices increased significantly between 1836 and 1850. Whereas domestics were sold in 1850 for prices that were 8 percent lower than those prevailing in 1836, drivers were valued 9 percent higher in 1850 than in 1836. Although the sample size for field hands was limited in some years, there were sufficient transactions recorded to indicate the lower relative average prices prevailing for slaves in rural Cuba compared with the market for slaves in the island's cities. There were year-to-year fluctuations in average prices for field hands, but no long-term upward trend, as was the case with drivers. Data on other occupational categories were limited. However, beginning in 1840 there was an increased number of transactions involving cigar roll-

76

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Table 4.9 Average prices of domestics, 1821—1835

Year 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835

Average price 570 430 408 383 439 458 400 425 406 486 383 420 376 372 396

No. of sales 10 8 6 61 14 9 10 13 17 13 12 2 9 19 19

ers {tabaqueros) who were consistently valued higher than field hands and domestics, but usually lower than drivers. The most expensive slaves sold prior to 1850 were two masons marketed for 750 pesos in 1836, which was 79 percent higher than the average price for field hands (420 pesos). Ten shoemakers were valued at an average of 385 pesos in 1842, when cigar rollers sold for 372 pesos, and domestics for 362 pesos. In 1847, nine seamstresses were marketed for an average of 447 pesos each when cigar rollers brought 415 pesos; shoemakers, 436 pesos; drivers, 430 pesos; domestics, 404 pesos; and field hands, 326 pesos. The extreme sensitivity of the Cuban slave market to changes in the international economic and political environment was one of the principal characteristics of the slave system in Cuba between 1790 and 1880. This is most clearly indicated by the sudden short-term price rises of reproductive-age females relative to males when slaving was threatened in any real or perceived way. When the slave market did not feel menaced by potential disruptions in slaving, price fluctuations followed patterns responding to the supply and demand for labor, as well as other economic variables. The long-term sta-

The price structure of the Cuban slave market, 1790—1880

77

Table 4.10 Average prices of domestics, drivers, and field hands of both sexes, 1836-1868

Domestics #

Year

Price

1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868

445 415 395 419 393 384 362 372 364 350 399 404 419 373 411 469 457 511 542 505 620 938 1070 975 925 683 617 712 813 734 608 590 621

(13) (28) (15) (27) (56) (76) (30) (37) (83) (20) (93) (70) (57) (63) (20) (29) (57) (52) (35) (29) (26) (8) (5) (4) (6) (6) (63) (37) (6) (10) (14) (5) (8)

Drivers

Price

#

391 402 440 450 457 454 467 434 393 413 417 430 576 432 474 492 436 593 525 801 800 1200 850 ~ 1725 1150 950 875 750 -750 --

(16) (7) (5) (4) (11) (8) (3) (12) (18) (6) (12) (13) (11) (18) (11) (6) (6) (18) (2) (4) (1) (1) (2) « (2) (2) (2) (2) (2) -(2) —

Field hands Price # 420 325 350 363 319 370 383 360 304 322 380 326 412 297 150 428 440 361 510 550 505 500 400 700 825 501 633 « 350 650 675 252

(5) (9) (1) (3) (19) (21) (3) (13) (64) (6) (31) (21) (9) (13) (2) (5) (5) (9) (5)

0) (5) (1) (3) (1) (2) (30) (16) (2) (2) (2) (5)

bility in slave prices until 1850 indicates that labor was abundantly available and affordable in Cuba, and this is confirmed by the constantly rising volume of sugar exports. The slave price rises of the 1850s were a response to the increased revenues flowing to the sugar sector because of rising sugar prices on world markets. These price increases, for both sugar and slaves, were not the re-

78

The Cuban slave market IJC^O—I 880

Table 4 . 1 1 Price ratios of domestics/field hands; drivers/field hands; and drivers/domestics of both sexes for selected years, 1840—1863

(in percentages)

Year

Domestics/ field hands

Drivers/ field hands

Drivers/ domestics

1840 1843 1844 1846 1847 1849 1853 1862 1863

123 103 120 105 124 126 142 123 113

143 121 129 110 132 146 164 190 138

116 117 108 104 106 116 116 154 123

Note: The years selected were those with the most number of sales recorded in these categories.

suit of generalized inflation in Cuba or internationally. They were price rises in real terms because prices for all commodities in the principal consuming markets of the North Atlantic world rose at much lower rates. Although slave prices in the various regions of Cuba generally moved in the same direction, it is important to note that there were variations in economic structures at the local level which resulted in some interesting comparative price differentials in the three slave markets we examined. These are considered in the following chapter.

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos

The general characteristics of the Cuban slave market were summarized in the previous chapter by analyzing aggregated data on slave sales from Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos. This chapter will consider each area separately and offer comparative observations. Because the regional history of Cuban slavery was closely related to distinct patterns of socioeconomic development, brief local histories will provide frameworks for understanding the factors affecting the slave markets of each region.1 Slavery and the socioeconomic development of the Havana region2 Before the advent of large-scale plantation agriculture in the middle of the eighteenth century Havana and its environs experienced various economic 1. This chapter will present only general price trends. The discussion will not be as detailed as found in Chapter 4 nor will the chronological periods delineated in the previous chapter be considered. The authors feel that to engage in lengthy analytical observations for each region would be repetitive. Yearly systematic data on occupations and African nationalities at the regional level are limited and will not be discussed here. 2. For the purposes of this study the Havana region is considered to be the port city and its environs as delineated in the Cuban census of 1846 — Cuba, Comision de Estadfstica. Cuadro estadistico de la siemprefiel Is/a de Cuba, correspondiente al ano de 1846. (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capi-

tanfa General, 1847). To arrive at demographic data for Havana from this census, information from Matanzas and Filipinas were subtracted from the grand totals listed for Havana, since later these became separate jurisdictions. For data derived from the census of 1862 - Cuba, Centro de Estadfstica, Noticias estadisticas de la lsla de Cuba, en 1862 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, 1864) — demographic information from the jurisdictions of Bahfa Honda and Guanajay have been added to data for Havana. These were included in the 1846 data. For data derived from the census of 1877 Spain, Instituto Geografico y Estadistico. Censo de la poblacion de Espana, segun el empadronamiento hecho

en 31 de diciembre de I8JJ, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Direccion General del Instituto Geografico y Estadistico, 1883, 1884 —data from the municipalities of Bahfa Honda, Guanajay, and Mariel have been added to the Havana data. For data derived from the census of 1887 — Spain, Instituto Geografico y Estadfstico, Censo de la poblacion de Espana, segun el empadronamiento hecho en 31 de diciembre

de I88J, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Direccion General del Instituto Geografico y Estadfstico, 1891, 1892) - data from Guanajay was added to the Havana data. These adjustments were made so

79

80

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

transformations.3 The critical factor in the socioeconomic development of the colonial capital was its designation by the Crown in 1562 as the rendezvous point for the fleets from Vera Cruz and Panama before they returned to Spain laden with American treasure. The city's population was subsequently nurtured by colonial bureaucrats, officially sponsored colonists, and slaves imported to serve them. Its economy was strengthened by capital invested from Spain to fortify and protect the bay, as well as by the consumption demands of the fleet. Shipyards were built to service the fleet; docks and warehouses were constructed to facilitate commerce and storage; and truck farming and cattle ranches developed in rural areas close to the port to provision the city and its swollen population when the fleet arrived. These activities contributed to an impressive process of capital accumulation which would provide the foundation for the development of export agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Slaves were employed in nearly every urban and rural occupation from the earliest phases of colonization. Havana's slave population numbered approximately 5,000 in 1609, and most were involved in the city's economic life.4 Primitive trapiches produced sugar near the port, but it was not until the eighteenth century that cane cultivation became significant. The sugar sector was dwarfed by the urban economy and tobacco farming was the principal export agricultural activity. Small-scale tobacco cultivation flourished along rivers running from the south of the colonial capital, stimulated by an active contraband trade which official Havana could not adequately control.5 Sugar, however, would become the Havana hinterland's destiny, spurred by expanding European markets and the dramatic increase in per capita sugar consumption accompanying the industrial revolution.6 Its rapid development during the second half of the eighteenth century was closely

3.

4. 5.

6.

that there could be geographical consistency to the Havana region through time and changing administrative boundaries. For the early history of the Cuban capital see Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, Historia de la Habana desde susprimeros dias hasta 1565 (Havana: Municipio de Havana, 1938). Also see Julio LeRiverend, La Habana (biografia de unaprovincia) (Havana: Editorial Siglo XX, i960). For these data see Archivo General de Indias, Santo Domingo, no. 116. In 1757 the bishop Pedro Agustin Morell de Santa Cruz conducted a census of Havana and found a population of 73,605 of whom approximately 50,000 lived within the city's walls. There were also 66 sugar ingenios, most in the Guanabacoa region, and 1,941 small farms (estancias) and tobacco farms (vegas). See Archivo General de Indias, Santo Domingo, no. 534, "Visita pastoral del Obispo Pedro A. Morell de Santa Cruz"; and Fe Iglesias Garcia, "La tierra en el pafs de la Habana durante la primera mitad del siglo XVIII" (unpublished manuscript located in the library of the Cuban Institute of History). On the Havana tobacco economy see McNeMl, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, pp. 154-62. For the growth of sugar consumption in Europe see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking-Penguin, 1985).

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market

81

connected to the capital accumulated by a powerful Havana-based nobility with strong ties to the peninsular economy. Cuban-born families with noble titles bestowed from Spain had been granted huge tracts of land in usufruct early in the colonial period and their names were synonymous with economic and political power in the Cuban capital-the Penalvers, O'Farrils, Calvos, Montalvos, Herreras, Recios, and many others. Most were members of the Havana cabildo and had varied economic interests which included diversified investments in urban and rural endeavors. When conditions on international markets became favorable in the eighteenth century, this nucleus of families increasingly turned to sugar production.7 Accumulated capital and external market conditions favored sugar's growth, but the problem of labor posed a more difficult obstacle because of the absence of an internal labor market. The urban economy occupied a significant portion of Havana's slave population and, to provision emerging sugar estates with labor, the slave trade had to increase significantly. This was one of the principal objectives of the Real Compania de Comercio de la Habana which was established in 1739 by the very families referred to above. Its original mission was to monopolize the tobacco trade, as well as to export other Cuban products such as sugar and hides. Yet, it increasingly turned to slaving as the eighteenth century progressed, especially in the aftermath of the English seizure of Havana in 1762.8 Prior to 1762 sugar was established in areas close to the colonial capital. Sugar ingenios had been constructed along the Chorrera, Jaimanitas, and Guanabacoa rivers.9 Some 96 trapiches and ingenios with approximately 3,000 slaves were producing sugar in these regions by 1762.10 The English occupation and its accompanying unrestricted introduction of slaves helped accelerate the process of sugar expansion already manifest in the 7. The favorable economic and ecological conditions leading to sugar's expansion are explored in Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, vol. i, pp. 15—16. 8. Prior to the establishment of the Real Compania, the English South Seas Company had been granted an asiento, or trade monopoly, on the slave trade to Cuba. It is known that between 1715 and 1747 over 9,000 slaves were legally imported through Havana. See Allan J. Kuethe, "Havana in the Eighteenth Century," in Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, eds., Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650—1850 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), pp. 15—16. This is also discussed by Mercedes Garcia in "El asiento ingles de negros y la compania de los mares del sur" (unpublished manuscript available in the library of the Cuban Institute of History). Also see Pablo Tornero, "Emigracion, poblacion y esclavitud en Cuba," in Anuario de estudios americanos (Seville), vol. 44 (1985). 9. For an excellent study of this development of ingenios in the Havana region in the early eighteenth century see Reinaldo Funes Monzote, "La evolucion del trapiche al ingenio en la region de la Habana" (unpublished dissertation for Diploma, available for consultation at the library of the Facultad de Filosoffa e Historia of the University of Havana). 10. See ANC, Miscelanea de libros, 2,646, for these data.

82

The Cuban slave market 1-790—1880

Havana region.11 By the late eighteenth century sugar had marched away from the immediate outskirts of the city toward the Giiines valley, and the slave trade had become a sustaining factor in this process. It is estimated that between 1763 and 1792 nearly 70,000 slaves were imported to Cuba, and that the slave population of the city of Havana doubled in this period from 25,739 to 49,775 slaves. In 1792 there were 237 sugar ingenios compared with the 96 trapiches of 1763. 12 By 1790 the Havana slave market was conditioned by the two primary factors alluded to above —the port city and its vibrant economy, and the development of a sugar export industry. To these, small-scale tobacco cultivation can be added, as well as a fourth factor — the growth of coffee cultivation and its parallel demand for slave labor.13 Coffee had been grown in very small quantities in Cuba from the mid-eighteenth century, although even as late as 1790 there were no farms in the Havana region designated as cafetales. The Haitian revolution and the arrival of French political refugees through the 1790s and early years of the nineteenth century changed this situation. Settling in eastern Cuba and in areas close to Havana, coffee farms were established by these French immigrants, as well as by Cubanborn entrepreneurs seeking the advantage of a new export product. By 1800 there were 80 cafetales in Havana and neighboring Santiago de las Vegas. In 1804 over 50,000 arrobas (1 arroba — 25 pounds) were exported from Havana; 320,000 arrobas in 1809; and by 1827 there were 902 cafetales in Havana and Santiago de las Vegas producing 1,687,631 arrobas of coffee, over 58 percent of total Cuban output. 14 These farms depended upon slave labor, often utilizing more slaves per plantation than sugar estates.15 11. As indicated in Chapter 3, footnote 8, John Robert McNeill discounts the importance of slave imports during the English occupation and points out that actual imports were considerably lower than have traditionally been cited. See the discussion in McNeill, Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, pp. 167-70. 12. For data on the slave trade in this period see ANC, Miscelanea de Expedientes, 3,772. Levi Marrero, Cuba: economiay sociedad, vol. 9, p. 18, indicates from documentary sources that 58,734 slaves were imported between 1764 and 1789. Moreno Fraginals, Ellngenio, vol. 1, p. 50, indicates an average of 2,000 slaves yearly between 1765 and 1790. David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, p. 245 estimates that 41,100 slaves were imported between 1791 and 1795. In Atlantic Empires of France and Spain, p. 169, McNeill estimates 75,000 slaves imported between 1700 and 1760. 13. On the development of Cuban coffee production see the classic study by Francisco Perez de la Riva, El cafe: historia de su cultivoy explotacion en Cuba (Havana: Jesus Montero, 1944). Also see Levi Marrero, Cuba: economia y sociedad, vol. 11 (Madrid: Editorial Playor, 1984), chapter 6, "El cafe: auge y caida," pp. 97-139. 14. Francisco Dionisio Vives, Cuadro estadistico de la siemprefiel is la de Cuba correspondiente al ano de 1827 (Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno y de la Capitanfa General, 1829. 15. Although there have been no monographic studies of coffee and slave labor in Cuba, data from the Matanzas partido of Ceiba Mocha in 1817 are suggestive. In that year 15 coffee plantations utilized more slaves per farm (72) than the 12 sugar ingenios in the region (63 slaves per farm). Archivo

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market

83

By the turn of the nineteenth century the internal factors determining the dynamics of the Havana slave market were all in place. The city, now the third largest in the Americas behind Mexico and Lima, required large numbers of slaves in a variety of occupations. The sugar revolution was well under way and, although cane cultivation would march decisively away from Havana to the south and east, Cuba was poised to become the leading exporter of sugar to the world market and the principal Caribbean destination of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Small-scale tobacco planting continued. Finally, coffee cultivation expanded, although in the early 1840s coffee production in western Cuba collapsed and ceased to be a factor for the regional slave market. Havana's slave population increased significantly with the economic expansion indicated above. By 1817 the region possessed 88,045 slaves and this climbed to Havana's nineteenth-century apex of 165,789 slaves in 1827, of whom 23,840 lived and worked within the city itself. By 1846, however, there was a decline to 142,198 slaves in the region, including 21,988 slaves in the city. This trend continued through 1862 when 118,354 slaves were enumerated in the Havana area. Although the number of total slaves had declined, it should be noted that the city's slave population reversed the past intercensal trend and increased by nearly one-fourth from 1846 to 27,296 slaves in 1862.16 By 1877, as the Ten Years' War was drawing to a close and well after the legal abolition process began in 1870 with the passage of the Moret Law, the Havana region's slave population had declined to 55,349 a figure which includes coartados, slaves who had begun the process of self-purchase. Official Cuban census reports do not provide systematic data on slave occupations, and as indicated in Chapter 4 our record of sales is also lacking in occupational information. However, scattered documentary evidence is suggestive. For 1836 occupational data are available for 1,702 slaves working in artisan workshops within and outside the city's walls. Because the slave population of the city in 1827 was 23,840 with only a slight decline to 21,988 slaves in 1846, these skilled slaves probably represented close to 14 percent of the city's slaves in 1836. The most numerous category, 612 slaves equal to 36 percent of all artisans, worked in cigar factories which included cigar rollers, and tobacco sorters and stemmers. Slaves made up 28 percent of the total work force in Havana's tabaquerias. The second most important occupation for skilled slaves was that of baker. Not only did 389 slaves work in Havana bakeries, Historico Provincial de Matanzas, Miscelanea de Expedientes, Estadfstica, leg. 8, no. 137, fols. 17-64. 16. Vives, Cuadro estadhtico de. . . 1827; Cuba, Gobernador y Capitan General, Cuadro estadistico de. . . 1846; and Cuba, Centro de Estadfstica. Noticias estadhticas de . . . 1862.

84

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

23 percent of all skilled slaves in the city, but slaves accounted for over 76 percent of all people employed as bakers in the colonial capital. Slaves also labored as shoemakers: 185 slaves were found in this occupation, 11 percent of all skilled slaves and they accounted for approximately one-quarter of all employees in the city's shoe-making shops. Thus, the professions of cigar worker, baker, and shoemaker accounted for nearly 70 percent of all skilled slaves in Havana.17 Data found in the 1846 Cuban population census reveal that a significant portion of Havana's slave population worked as domestics. Because of a tax levied on domestic slaves, all female domestics between the ages of fourteen and sixty were enumerated while males were counted if they fell between the ages of sixteen and sixty. The census reveals that there were 18,973 domestic slaves in Havana and its surrounding rural jurisdictions. This represented 39 percent of the 48,834 total slaves between the ages of sixteen and sixty counted in these administrative districts. Although not specified, in all likelihood the proportion of domestics found in the city itself was even greater than this total. Of these domestic slaves 12,375 o r 65 percent were females. What is even more striking about the sex distribution of domestic slaves is that 66 percent of all female slaves between the ages of sixteen and sixty found in Havana and its surrounding jurisdictions labored as domestic workers. It is also notable that 22 percent (6,598 slaves) of all male slaves (29,995 slaves) between the ages of sixteen and sixty worked as domestics in 1846. Thus, the market for slaves in the Cuban capital in the mid-nineteenth century was heavily influenced by the demand for domestic slaves.18 The Cuban census of 1862 indicates the place of residence for the slave population, but there are no data on occupations. In the Havana region approximately two-thirds of the slave population either worked on sugar estates or lived in the city — 35 percent of all slaves resided on ingenios and 32 percent in the urban districts of the capital. Coffee plantations, in a state of decline from the 1840s, employed only 7 percent of the region's slaves; food-crop farms (sitios) accounted for 11 percent; and 10 percent of all slaves labored on stock-raising farms (potreros). A fractional number of slaves (0.1 percent) lived on tobacco vegas and the remainder worked on other rural properties.19 Thus, it is evident that the demands of the sugar and service sectors of the capital continued shaping the Havana slave market in the early 1860s. 17. "Memorias de la Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pafs" (La Habana, 1836), vol. 13, p. 136. 18. Cuba, Gobernador y Capitan General, Cuadro estadistico . . . de 1846, p. 28. There are no data on other occupational categories, nor are there data on the types of farms on which slaves lived, as was the case with the 1862 census report to be discussed later in this chapter. 19. Cuba, Centro de Estadistica, Notirias estadisticas . . . en 1862.

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market

85

Although the revolutionary violence of Ten Years' War (1868—78) was largely confined to eastern Cuba, and thus did not directly affect the slave population of Havana, the beginning of the legal abolition process in 1870 undermined slavery in the region. Between the census reports of 1862 and 1877 the Havana slave population fell by more than one-half. There are no precise data on the urban/rural dimensions of this decline, but in all likelihood the city's slave population fell more dramatically than in rural areas.20 It is probable that there was a transfer of slaves from urban areas to plantation zones. The Havana slave market During the legal phase of the Cuban slave trade between 1790 and 1820, Havana was the principal disembarkation point for African slaves arriving in Cuba and the island's most important slave market.21 Accordingly, the sale of Africans determined the general level of slave prices. Between 1790 and 1820, 65 percent of all sales for which nationality was known in our Havana sample were Africans.22 The predominance of African slave sales continued until 1845, after which the sale of Creoles became more frequent. Indeed, of the three local slave markets, Havana was the only one for which the sale of Africans was more frequent than Creoles between 1790 and 1880 (53 percent of all transactions) and this reflects the high proportions of Africans sold during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. (See Table 5.1.) Until the mid-nineteenth century male slaves were sold more often than females in Havana because of the male majorities found among imported Africans. However, the shift in the slave market toward an increasing percentage of Creole sales from the 1840s on, and the strong demand for female slaves in the urban labor market of the Cuban capital, gradually led to more balanced sales by sex over the long term. Between 1790 and 1880, 51 percent of all sales were of slave women. Among both sexes over 70 percent of all slaves sold were between fifteen and forty years of age. (See Figures 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3) Trends in Havana slave prices are indicated in Figures 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, and 5.8. These follow the slave price movements analyzed in Chapter 4 with some variation reflecting patterns of local economic development. The 20. This is the conclusion of Scott, Slave Emancipation, pp. 86—87, who observes that while slavery declined, it remained comparatively resilient in plantation zones. 21. The empirical data and analytical conclusions presented in Chapter 4 for these years were almost entirely reflections of conditions on the Havana slave market. There were no data on slave sales from Cienfuegos between 1790 and 1820, and data only became available from Santiago in 1816. 22. There were 1,575 Africans and 863 Creoles sold between these years.

86

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Table 5.1 Slaves sold in Havana by sex, nationality, and age, 1-790—1880

Category

No. of sales

Males Females Total

4,568 4,818 9,386

49 51 100

Africans Creoles Total

3,987 3,501 7,488

53 47 100

Ages 1-14 Ages 14-40 Ages 41+ Total

1,241 3,733 269 5,243

24 71 5

Category

Males

100

Total

Females

Creoles

Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+ Total

425 656 32 1,113

38 59 3 100

438 925 40 1,403

31 66 3 100

863 1,581 72 2,516

34 63 3 100

Africans

Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+ Total

100 870 59 1,029

10 85 6 100

88 786 88 962

9 82 9 100

188 1,656 147 1,991

10 84 8 100

Note. Discrepancies in the totals result from the fact that not all variables, such as sex, nationality, or age were known for every transaction. Included above are only totals for data which were known.

price rises of the 1790s were followed by normal fluctuations, but with a clear downward trend in prices to 1814. The period surrounding the establishment of European peace following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 abolishing the slave trade was accompanied by sharp slave price increases in Havana and these peaked in 1821. These were years of intense ingento development and the growth of coffee production in the Havana region. Upward pressures on slave prices resulted from fears that slaving would be curtailed due to the 1817 treaty, the increased labor demands of the export agricultural sector, and the strong demand for urban labor in the Cuban capital. Prime-age Creole slaves consistently sold for higher prices than Africans, averaging 109 percent the value of African slaves between 1790 and 1865. Male slaves were generally sold in Havana for higher prices than females (106 percent their average values between 1790 and 1871) although, in

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market

Percentage 100 ^

Ages 1-14

90 80

I I Ages 15-40

70

Pp] Ages 41 +

60 50 40 30 20 10

I

li «n O TJ- in 00 00

Q i n O * n o i n o » n o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

00

00 00

Year Figure 5.1 Havana, percentage of slave sales by age, 1790-1880

Percentage 100

I Creoles

90 Africans

80 70 60 50 40 30 20

OO

00

00

oo

oo

oo

ON

T

in

c

oo

OO

Oi0

ON

I ? OO

oo

oo

s s

8 oo 18

oo

o

oo

70

r

in

55

$

r- r~»

ON

m

20-

5! 3 9 U

10-

0

30-

10

fC!

oo

oo

Year Figure 5.2 Havana, percentage of slave sales by origin, 1790-1880

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

88

Percentage 100

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

00

00

00

00

00

Year Figure 5.3 Havana, percentage of slave sales by sex, 1790—1880

Price ratio 200

1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835 1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 Year Figure 5.4 Price ratios of Creole to African slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Havana, 1790-1865

Regional variations in the Cuban slave market

Price ratio 200

100

,,, 1,,,, 1,,, , 1,

1790 1795 1800 1805 1810 1815 1820 1825 1830 1835 1840 1845 1850 1855 1860 1865 1870 Year

Figure 5.5 Price ratios of male to female slaves ages 15—40 in percentages for Havana, 1790-1871

88

87

865

87

860

855

850

845

840

Males

Year Figure 5.6 Havana, average price by sex, ages 15—40, 1790—1880

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Creoles

00

00

cs

n o > n 2 2 o o o o t x i o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Year Figure 6.2 Percentage of coartado sales by origin, 1791-1880

Percentage 100

[Ages 1-14

90

n

80

JAges 15-40

n I Ages 41 +

70 60 50 40 30 20

y

10

0 ON

ON

CN

(N

m

O r ( f N c N m m ^ O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

«n

»n

^o

^o

r

OO

OO

CX3

CX5

OO

r OO

Year Figure 6.3 Percentage oi coartado sales by age, 1791-1880

Coartacion and letters of freedom

Price 1000

127

Coartados

900

Slaves

800 700 600 500 400 300 200 100 IIIMIMMIIIIIIMIIIMMIM

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Year Figure 6.4 Average price for slaves and coartados ages 15-40, 1790-1872

paralleled the trajectory of the slave market. (See Figures 6.4 and 6.5.) There are no data in the protocol records on coartado sales indicating the agreed market price for freedom established when the coartacion contract was initiated. Nor is there any information citing the date of the original contract. Thus, we have no indication of the lag time between the initiation of the coartacion contract and the sale of the coartado recorded in the notarial protocols. But the fact that the price curve of prime-age coartados moved nearly in lockstep with the price curve of prime-age slaves over the long term, suggests that the selling price of a coartado was determined by the market for slaves, albeit at a lower level, and not by the price of freedom established at the initiation of the contract as stipulated by law. This does not mean that the price of freedom of the original coartacion contract was altered. It does suggest that the demand for labor, especially female labor in urban centers, was so great that purchasers were willing to pay prices for coartados which were higher than the ultimate price of freedom. This reveals that coartados were bought in the belief that they would remain enslaved long enough to generate enough capital to justify paying prices which were higher than the stipulated price of freedom, but lower than the average price of prime-age slaves in any given year.6 6. We suggest that the selling price of the coartado was determined by the price structure of the overall slave market, not the initial price of freedom established at the inception of the coartacion contract.

128

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

Price ratio 200

Year Figure 6.5 Price ratios of coartados to slaves ages 15-40 in percentages, 1790-1872

Letters of freedom The documentary sources we examined revealed that slaves in Cuba were constantly issued letters of freedom (cartas de libertad), and that this was almost always the result of purchase rather than having been bestowed freely by slave owners. We found 6,027 letters of freedom issued in our sample compared with 23,178 slaves who were sold, or one slave freed for every four slaves marketed. There were two kinds of letters of freedom. The more numerous (5,477 transactions) was the carta de libertad venta or the sale of a letter of freedom, in which an amount of money was paid to the slave owner in exchange for freedom. The documentation does not stipulate whether this money came from the slave, but this was undoubtedly the case. The other type was the carta de libertad coartado or a letter of freedom issued to a coartado, and this transaction was also accompanied by payment to the slave owner of a sum which was presumably the balance owed That coartado sale prices averaged approximately 20 percent below slave prices could have been the result of two different, but related factors. The first, suggested here, is that coartados had been able to pay 20 percent of their ultimate purchase price. The second is that coartado purchasers were buying 20 percent less expected labor time over the productive life of the coartado, thus making their values 20 percent less than slaves. This implies the expectation of ultimate freedom for coartados at some point. We want to thank Stanley Engerman for pointing out this second possible conclusion.

Coartacion and letters of freedom

129

Slaves

Letters of freedom

Year

Figure 6.6 Average prices of slaves and letters of freedom for ages 15-40 for selected years, 1796—1871

after other payments had been made. None of this information was stipulated in the documentation. We found only 550 transactions labeled as cart a de libertad coartado.

It is our impression, however, that even the transactions labeled carta de libertad venta more than likely involved coartados who had made some prior payment on freedom. We arrived at this conclusion after analyzing price data for these letters of freedom. The average price of freedom found for each year when sufficient data was available was substantially below the actual market price for slaves in almost all years. Letters of freedom for prime-age slaves (excluding the cartas de libertad coartado) were issued for an average of 73 percent the value of prime-age slaves who were sold between 1790 and 1871. Because there was no reason for masters to "sell" freedom for any sum below actual market prices, we concluded that prior payments were probably made by slaves issued the carta de libertad venta and that they were really coartados, even if the particular transaction did not designate them as such. The data on comparative prices between slaves and the sale of letters of freedom are indicated graphically in Figures 6.6 and 6.7. This conclusion is supported by limited data on actual coartacion contracts. In the notarial protocols and tax records examined, only 145 coartacion contracts were found. This suggests, surprisingly, that slaves became coartados in individual transactions with masters that may not have been recorded by colonial officials. However, despite the apparent absence of no-

The Cuban slave market 1790—1880

130

Price ratio 200

VO

t-~

Year Figure 6.7 Price ratios of letters of freedom to slave prices for slaves ages 15-40, 1796-1871

tation in public documents, these coartacion arrangements were evidently acknowledged and honored by slave owners and guarded by slaves, a conclusion suggested by the large number of cartas de libertad venta issued for prices well below actual market values. It is also quite clear from the discussion on coartados above that, when a coartado was sold, this was judiciously recorded by island notaries. Of the letters of freedom analyzed here, 2,991 were from Havana; 1,964 were from Santiago; and 522 were issued in Cienfuegos. The profile of slaves able to acquire liberty implies a great deal about the urban slave experience. Although the place of residence was not specified in the documentation, it is likely that most of the slaves found in our sample who were able to purchase freedom were from the cities in the regions examined. The majority of slaves able to acquire their liberty were women (58 percent of the total), and this implies access to cash on a scale which was significantly greater than was afforded to urban male slaves.7 And although slaves born in Africa accounted for a substantial portion of those able to purchase their freedom (44 percent), Cuban-born slaves (56 percent of the total) had 7. This was conspicuously the exact same percentage of women gaining freedom between 1858 and 1862 noted in the 1862 Cuban census.

Coartacion and letters of freedom

Table 6.2 Letters of freedom issued in Havana, Santiago, andCienfuegos

131

by category, 1 7 9 0 - 1 8 8 0

Category

No. of letters of freedom

%

Males Females Totals

2,510 3,509 6,019

42 58 100

Creoles Africans Totals

2,380 1,849 4,229

56 44 100

Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+ Totals

612 2,003 735 3,350

18 60 22 100

Note: The totals for each category do not match because data were not available for all variables in each sale. This table includes cartas de libertad coartados. greater possibilities of acquiring the funds needed to secure liberty. Nearly 60 percent of the total letters of freedom were issued to prime-age slaves and another 22 percent to those over forty years of age. This is not surprising since younger slaves had limited access to cash. However, the fact that 18 percent of our sample were slave children suggests that adult slaves actively purchased the freedom of their children with accumulated capital. These data are summarized in Table 6.2 and in Figures 6.8, 6.9, and 6.10. Coartacion and manumission in comparative perspective The rights of slaves to accumulate property and capital was recognized by medieval law and codified in Spain in the mid-thirteenth century through the compilation of an extensive legal code called the Siete Partidas.8 These 8. See Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967) p. 116; and Klein, Slavery in the Americas, pp. 5 7 - 8 5 , for a discussion of slave legal prerogatives. For the extensive texts of the laws see Las siete partidas del rey Alfonso el sabio, cotejadas con varios codi ices antiguos, por la Real Academia de la Historia, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1807).

132

The Cuban slave market 1790-1880

Percentage 100 I Males 90 Females

80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

O

-—'

n

325 277

(18) (13) (5) (2) (14)

328 328 328 325 334 369 374 350 342

(405) (216) (189) (167) (178) (53) (57) (85) (63) (55)

(3D (24) (42) (7)

1844 Price 319 317 322 313 323 343 357 330 338

N (708) (384) (323) (314) (336) (107) (99) (168) (121)

1845 Price

N

315 (484) 318 (282) 311 (202) 305 (79) 317 (54) 329 (16) 376 (21) 336 (30) 274 (11)

227 (102) 224 (50) 210 (52) 213 (81) 235 (14)

229 261 190 196 367

(22) (12) (10) (15) (3)

340 335 347 350 333 343 357 330 338

(535) (296) (238) (207) (289) (107) (99) (168) (121)

335 333 338 356 319 329 376 336 274

(87) (53) (34) (37) (41) (16) (21) (30) (11)

246 219 274 286 228

(30) (15) (15) (7) (21)

265 263 267

(5) (2) (3) (1)

425

(continued)

Table B.3 Continued 1847 Price

1846 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

331 328 333 329 333 364 385 347 343

(792) (402) (389) (304) (282) (82) (119) (133) (103)

338 329 346 339 338 366 398 346 354

(725) (343) (382) (307) (193) (83) (126) (85) (77)

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

229 225 232 218 284

(98) (43) (54) (81) (9)

214 211 216 214 250

(75) (36) (39) (70) (2)

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

359 354 364 376 346 364 385 347 343

(489) (246) (243) (201) (236) (82) (119) (133) (103)

368 353 381 385 350 366 398 346 354

(422) (201) (221) (209) (162) (83) (126) (85) (77)

Ages 41+ Males Females Creoles Africans

220 232 193 219 205

(32) (22) (10) (6) (21)

276 278 275 295 272

(30) (17) (13) (8) (17)

N

N

1849 Price

N

1850 Price

341 337 345 330 351 368 391 380 363

(404) (191) (213) (141) (97) (35) (53) (46) (34)

301 296 305 303 305 362 361 313 338

(543) (250) (293) (128) (90) (29) (46) (42) (31)

309 382 244 300 350 500 400 425 --

233 227 239 239 193

(54) (28) (26) (45) (4)

206 193 216 203 180

(60) (26) (34) (47) (1)

377 (211) 375 (99) 379 (112) 382 (88) 373 (80) 368 (35) 391 (53) 380 (46) 363 (34) 254 237 254 309 224

1848 Price

(18) (11) (18) (4) (10)

1851 Price

N

(15) (7) (8) (4) (3) (1) (1) (2)

293 313 269 289 413 370 367 300 --

(35) (19) (16) (13) (4) (5) (3) (1) --

150 150 150 150 --

(2) (1) (1) (2) --

160 183 125 160 --

342 (164) 333 (81) 351 (83) 362 (75) 324 (73) 362 (29) 361 (46) 313 (42) 338 (31)

438 450 400 450 425 500 400 425 --

(4) (3) (1) (2) (2) (1) (1) (2) -

244 227 255 400 228

200 200 200

(1) — (1) — (1)

(17) (7) (10) (1) (12)

N

1852 Price

1853 Price

N

375 (131) 372 (60) 377 (71) 387 (54) 355 (27) 421 (7) 420 (12) 338 (4) 364 (5)

376 367 384 336 368 421 423 414 447

(289) (133) (156) (105) (48) (21) (33) (16) (13)

(5) (3) (2) (5) --

299 250 321 303 --

(13) (4) (9) (12) --

226 245 208 233 200

(46) (22) (24) (40) (1)

361 358 367 369 300 370 367 300 --

(9) (6) (3) (8) (1) (5) (3) (1) --

409 408 409 420 352 421 420 338 364

(33) (13) (20) (19) (9) (7) (12) (4) (5)

426 420 431 422 429 421 423 414 447

(87) (38) (49) (54) (29) (21) (33) (16) (13)

350 350

(1) (1) (1)

295 295 — 295

286 264 331 325 279

(21) (14) (7) (2) (17)

350

N

(2) (2) — (2)

(continued)

Table B.3 Conh 1854 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

400 399 401 413 435 521 466 468 496

(737) (372) (365) (181) (67) (53) (66) (23) (26)

414 415 412 429 395 484 435 429 450

(92) (36) (56) (55) (25) (17) (24) (7) (8)

663 700 650 663

(4) (1) (3) (4)

---

-

--

--

-650 -

(3)

--

--

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

278 268 292 282 150

(59) (35) (24) (56) (2)

279 294 250 275 --

(6) (4) (2) (5) --

---

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

484 (181) 505 (79) 468 (102) 490 (119) 483 (49) 521 (53) 466 (66) 468 (23) 496 (26)

449 463 439 455 440 484 435 429 450

(60) (25) (35) (41) (15) (17) (24) (7) (8)

650 -650 650

650 -

(3) --

Ages 41+ Males Females Creoles Africans

313 315 310 300 312

350 333 357 367 325

(19) (6) (13) (6) (9)

700 700

(1) (1)

700

(1)

(17) (11) (6) (1) (14)

1*55 Price

N

1856 Price

1857 Price

N

-

--

1858 Price

N

--

N

(69) (42) (27) (32) -(10) (2)

773 793 738 842 450 1200 --

(11) (7) (4) (6) (3) (2) --

660 755 618 730 750 809 833

(29) (9) (20) (15) (4) (5) (6)

N

--

--

--

100

(1)

667

(3)

-

---

300 250 350 350 --

(2) (1) (1) (1) --

725 700 750 725

(2) (1) (1) (2)

400 400 400 475 -

(5) (1) (4) (4)

916 889 1050 916 889 1050 -

(12) (10) (2) (12) -(10) (2)

875 1133 100 1200 100 1200 -

(4) (3) (1) (2) (1) (2) --

750 841 711 822 667 809 833

(20) (6) (14) (11) (3) (5) (6)

-

100

(1)

667

(3)

(3) (1) (2) (2)

650 650

(1) (1)

675 675

(2) (2)

650

(1)

1000

(1)

-

--

--

--

1861 Price

--

----

--

N

------

----

-

1860 Price

-----

----

-

N

522 584 425 643 -889 1050

--(3) -(3) (3)

1859 Price

--

------

---

583 600 575 625

(continued)

Table B.3 Continued 1862 Price

N

1863 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

491 (186) 529 (88) 456 (98) 505 (91) 434 (17) 659 (29) 522 (34) 780 (5) 359 (3)

496 556 441 446 367 463 538

(78) (37) (41) (11) (9) (4) (4)

375

(4)

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

369 291 406 368 175

(22) (7) (15) (17) (1)

100

(1)

100 100

(1) (1)

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

579 642 513 585 622 659 522 780 359

(80) 472 (41) 531 (39) 439 (63) 500 (8) 375 (29) 463 (34) 538 (5) (3) 375

Ages 41 + Males Females Creoles Africans

316 (16) 312 (11) 325 (5) 305 (5) 278 (8)

1864 Price

(14) (5) (9) (8) (4) (4) (4)

1865 Price

1866 Price

N

1867 Price

1868 Price

1869 Price

516 (55) 531 (27) 502 (28) 361 (8) 200 (1) 425 (4) 300 (1) 200 (1) 150 150

(1) (1)

150

(1)

335 380 260 400 200 425 300 200

(8) (5) (3) (5) (1) (4) (1) (1)

650 650

(2) (2)

(4)

250 (4) 200 (1) 267 (3) 250 (4)

(continued)

Table B.3 Continued 1870 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females Ages 41+ Males Females Creoles Africans

1871 Price

N

1872 Price

N

1873 Price

N

1874 Price

N

--

-

--

-

-

--

-

. ~

--

.

-

_ --

_

. ~

.

-

--

(1)

450 450

(1) (1)

450

(1)

~

~

--

-

~

-

-

--

--

450

(1)

-

~ -

~ ~

---

450 450

(1) (1)

--

-

-

--

450

(1)

-

--

-

N

450

-

-

(39) (18) (21) (2)

-

-

--

321 309 331 350

1875 Price

N

-

~

-

-

Table B.4 Average slave prices by sex, age, and nationality, Cienfuegos, 1830 Price

1831 Price

N

1832 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

314 333 290 253 398 293 213 395 400

(22) (12) (10) (8) (8) (4) (4) (4) (4)

336 353 313 280 373 336 225 362 391

(35) (20) (15) (14) (21) (7) (7) (13) (8)

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

150 -150 150

(1) -(1) (1)

217 217 -217

(3) (3)

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females Ages 41+ Males Females Creoles Africans

(3)

1833 Price

N

350 350

(1) (1)

350

(1)

---

1834 Price

N ---

1830—1863

1835 Price

N

1836 Price

N

--

350 --

(1) -

-

--

--

--

-

~

~

~

--

-

---

300 300

(1) (1)

--

-

--

300

(1)

N

289 (176) 307 (85) 273 (91) 261 (82) 311 (82) 295 (33) 238 (49) 316 (48) 305 (34)

302 346 236 244 428 273 212 418 428

(33) (20) (13) (19) (12) (10) (9) (10) (12)

(19) (9) (10) (16) (2)

130 100 142 142

(7) (2) (5) (5)

-

--

--

--

--

--

--

---

-

--

96 86 104 90 100

-

208 208

(2) (2)

--

208

(2)

-

--

-

1837 Price

N

-

--

--

-

--

--

(continued)

Table B.4 Continued 1838 Price

1839 Price

N

N

522 500 540

(53) (24) (29)

333 275 450

(6) (4) (2)

275 — 275 __ -_ --

(4) 299 329 (4) 231 367 — 340 -- 300

(6) (7) (3) (3) (5) (2)

519 450 468 565 463 425

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

250 250 — 250 __

(2) 200 (2) — 200 — (2) 200

(1) -(1) — (1)

__ -— —

----

Ages 41+ Males Females Creoles Africans

--

----

--

(18) (12) (6)

1840 Price

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

322 325 317

N

-

---

N (28) (17) (11)

1844 Price

N

(19) (6) 360 — (9) — (10) (4) 360 -(2)

— (2) — — (2) --

333 200 400 200 100 300

(3) (2) (2) (1) (1) (1)

347 (9) 328 (18) 344 (4) 350 (5) 327 (13) 330 (5)

300 300 — — 300

(1) (1) — (1)

250 -250 200 300

(2) -(2) (1) (1)

221 208 233 258 225

-

100 --

(1) --

--

100 --

(1) --

--

100 --

(1) --

344 345 343 388 331 400 383 339 313

(17) (10) (7) (4) (13) (1) (3) (9) (4)

340 346 331 350 328 355 344 334 316

(70) (41) (29) (18) (44) (10) (8) (28) (16)

344 329 352 301 442 300 302 300 463

(42) (15) (27) (16) (6) (9) (7) (9) (4)

450 450

(1) (1)

450

(1)

313 330 296 316 300

(6) (3) (3) (5) (1)

296 300 295 358 300

(6) (1) (5) (3) (1)

--

--

--

-

-

--

--

--

--

293 285 299

N

326 331 318

--

312 (130) 333 (70) 286 (60)

1845 Price

(7) (5) (2)

-

-

1843 Price

286 300 250

-

N

(2) (2) --

—

360 360 --

1842 Price

N

--

----

1841 Price

(88) (39) (49)

(49) (64) (21) (28) (40) (24)

270 (50) 419 (8) 267 (29) 273 (21) 367 (3) 450 (5)

(6) 191 (23) (3) 185 (8) (3) 194 (15) (3) 213 (17) (2) 200 (2)

152 (20) 164 (12) 134 (8) 165 (17) —

272 338 289 260 344 327

(continued)

Table B.4 Continued 1846 Price

N

1847 Price

N

1848 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

314 339 289 247 377 306 218 358 415

(58) (30) (28) (27) (30) (9) (18) (20) (10)

314 (211) 335 (116) 290 (95) 297 (84) 330 (110) 330 (41) 265 (43) 338 (69) 317 (41)

331 (178) 348 (98) 321 (80) 291 (81) 366 (94) 306 (43) 275 (38) 381 (55) 345 (39)

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

141 192 104 123 250

(14) (6) (8) (12) (1)

174 212 141 179 300

175 157 189 169 210

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

356 356 355 331 370 400 310 347 406

(36) (17) (19) (13) (23) (3) (10) (14) (9)

Ages 41 + Males Females Creoles Africans

450 450 — — 450

(1) (1) — — (1)

1849 Price

1850 Price

N

N

1851 Price

N

1852 Price

N

1853 Price

N

-— -— -— --

338 (177) 339 (84) 338 (93) 339 (101) 341 (64) 353 (47) 325 (54) 321 (37) 369 (27)

569 390 638 584 513 150 663 525 500

(18) (5) (13) (13) (4) (2) (11) (2) (2)

358 358 359 341 393 329 351 395 388

(245) (126) (119) (143) (75) (63) (80) (50) (25)

370 376 365 362 372 351 371 386 343

(207) (106) (101) (118) (65) (51) (67) (43) (22)

(34) (15) (19) (29) (5)

_. — — ---

188 178 193 190 200

(25) (9) (16) (20) (2)

225 150 300 225 --

(4) (2) (2) (4) --

214 207 220 210 283

(61) (30) (31) (57) (3)

207 206 209 206 153

(38) (22) (16) (34) (1)

361 (109) 374 (62) 344 (47) 372 (40) 355 (63) 415 (20) 329 (20) 359 (40) 347 (23)

398 (116) 415 (66) 376 (50) 396 (42) 400 (72) 404 (24) 386 (18) 421 (42) 370 (30)

__ — — — — — --

383 390 377 392 366 405 382 366 365

(83) (37) (46) (54) (27) (23) (31) (14) (13)

683 — 683 700 600 — 700 600

(6) — (6) (5) (1) — (5) (1)

444 429 459 471 417 467 474 404 437

(95) (48) (47) (52) (37) (22) (30) (22) (15)

427 437 416 433 406 437 431 424 368

(95) (46) (49) (57) (33) (21) (36) (22) (11)

254 277 219 238 259

250 255 240 288 240

(15) (10) (5) (4) (10)

__ -—

281 277 300

(6) (5) (1)

300 300 —

(1) (1) —

--

281

(6)

300

(1)

237 248 100 400 269

(14) (13) (1) (1) (9)

267 277 250 322 258

(22) (14) (8) (5) (13)

(26) (12) (14) (23) (1)

(18) (11) (7) (4) (14)

{continued)

Table B.4 Continued 1854 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

__ _. —

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

.. _. _.

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females Ages 41 + Males Females Creoles Africans

_. — _. __ --

1855 Price

N _. — — __ — ._ __ --

__ — — — — —

„

„

__

--

--

— — — --

„

„

__

__

__

—

—

— __

_. _.

__

„

__

__

. .

_,

__

- -

__

— — _. __ — _. --

1856 Price

N — — — — — — --

457 487 433 453 481 463 445 501 439

__ — — -— — — — — -__

__

..

„ „ „

--

—

.. --

— --

N (541) (242) (299) (315) (102) (130) (185) (69) (33)

1857 Price

N

1858 Price

N

1859 Price

N

1860 Price

N

1861 Price

N

546 (194) 562 (86) 534 (108) 564 (92) 530 (36) 588 (38) 547 (54) 555 (22) 492 (14)

660 (158) 690 (72) 634 (86) 641 (54) 728 (26) 605 (19) 660 (35) 704 (19) 793 (7)

665 721 625 674 604 741 638 609 599

(341) (142) (199) (193) (54) (68) (125) (27) (27)

284 (112) 301 (44) 273 (68) 290 (90) 300 (1)

336 338 334 337 400

(28) (16) (12) (22) (1)

397 396 400 306 500

(14) (11) (3) (8) (2)

573 572 573 536 600

(57) (26) (31) (43) (2)

501 531 485 504 500

(26) (9) (17) (19) (1)

450 567 404 386 700

(21) (6) (15) (18) (1)

522 570 484 531 512 592 497 528 472

(289) (127) (162) (171) (65) (61) (110) (47) (18)

617 648 600 642 532 700 612 558 506

(61) (22) (39) (41) (12) (14) (27) (6) (6)

702 692 706 683 780 688 682 641 850

(31) (8) (23) (21) (6) (4) (17) (2) (4)

775 (115) 770 (53) 779 (62) 788 (75) 657 (20) 831 (29) 761 (46) 640 (10) 673 (10)

732 736 730 814 768 895 780 925 733

(76) (25) (51) (41) (11) (12) (29) (2) (9)

669 614 708 681 558 600 715 627 420

(62) (26) (36) (37) (15) (11) (26) (10) (5)

410 424 390 450 371

(24) (14) (10) (8) (14)

450 471 424 500 422

(13) (7) (6) (1) (9)

528 569 200 — 500

(22) (10) (12) (1) (17)

587 663 436 500 643

(18) (12) (6) (3) (11)

568 636 487 347 729

(13) (7) (6) (5) (5)

(9) (8) (1) — (6)

530 551 512 400 530

713 (197) 735 (78) 702 (118) 755 (101) 744 (40) 814 (37) 722 (64) 738 (17) 749 (23)

635 (122) 633 (48) 636 (74) 584 (72) 623 (25) 548 (24) 602 (48) 709 (15) 495 (10)

(continued)

Table B.4 Continued 1862 Price

N

1863 Price

N

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

521 (187) 497 (87) 543 (100) 523 (136) 522 (24) 510 (57) 533 (79) 455 (17) 684 (7)

650 (104) 683 (32) 636 (72) 641 (78) 538 (8) 735 (26) 594 (52) 400 (4) 675 (4)

Ages 1-14 Males Females Creoles Africans

368 306 405 378 --

(43) (16) (27) (41) --

496 541 458 496 --

(22) (10) (12) (22) --

Ages 15-40 Males Females Creoles Africans Creole males Creole females African males African females

629 594 664 647 578 619 674 532 700

(90) (45) (45) (66) (18) (32) (34) (13) (5)

747 800 732 729 650 808 701 700 633

(60) (13) (47) (45) (4) (12) (33) (1) (3)

Ages 41 + Males Females Creoles Africans

341 320 367 420 233

(9) (5) (4) (5) (3)

411 300 467 400 425

(9) (3) (6) (5) (4)

198

Table B.5 Average slave prices by African nationality, Havana, Santiago, Cienfuegos, 1790 Price African Arara Carabali Congo Ganga Guinea Iolofe Lucumi Macua

242 -268 275 300 ----

Mandinga Mina

332 300 1798 Price

African Arara Carabali Congo Ganga Guinea Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mina Mondongo

1791 Price

N (4) -(22) (13) (1) ---

-230 313 238 215 -220

(6) 400 (1) --

N --

324 (14) 335 (26) 315 (8) _. 339 (10) 400 (1) 328 (9) 425 (4) 250 (1)

N

1792 Price

1793 Price

N

-(1) (4) (2) (4)

219 -270 267 --

(11) -(5) (3) --

281 350 241 268 293

(2) --

---

---

350 225 --

(1) --

---

---

233 --

1800 Price

N

1801 Price

(10)

231

N (10) (1) (22) (14) (4) -(2) (4) --

1-790-1880

1794 Price

N

1795 Price

N

1796 Price

N

1797 Price

N

232 -260 235 270 190

(81) -(16) (14) (3) (2)

242 265 270 267 283 350

(10) (2) (23) (19) (3) (1)

221 350 272 277 353 200

(6) (2) (16) (15) (5) (2)

266 400 324 290 250 350

(13) (1) (16) (13) (2) (3)

231 --

(7) --

300 --

(1) --

250 --

(3) --

265 300

(6) (20)

(6) 234 --1802 Price

(9) 190 -- 100 1803 Price

(5) 294 (8) 380 (5) (1) 300 (2) 1804 Price

1799 Price

N

413

(13)

386

410 369 390 383 325 400 403 301

(21) (11) (5) (3) (2) (1) (7) (6)

424 (20) 433 (15) 381 (8) 354 (11) 332 434 (18) 411 (19) 409 (14) 328 (16) 300 500 (1) 525 (1) 400 (2) 270 (2) 290 (3) 300 (2) 292 (3) ----- 330 (5) 250 (2) -513 (4) 450 (2) 353 (6) 351 (5) 325 (6) 409 (6) 333 450 (3) 550 (1) 400 (3) 250 (1) ---

N (7)

300

N (2) -

292 700

N (5) (1)

260

1805 Price

N (1)

270

N (2)

(4) 333 (6) (1) 351 (7) --

275 (2)

(3) 366 (5) -- 400 (1) -- 450 (1) (continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1806 Price African Arara Bricamo Carabali Congo Ganga Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mina Mondongo

400

340 350 300 250 400

1814 Price African Arara Bibi Bricamo Brichi Carabali Congo Dahome Ganga Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mayombe Mina Mozambique

340

1807 Price

N (1)

(10) (1) (1) (2) (1)

-319 300 350 425 375 288 338

1815 Price

N

1808 Price

N -

(4) (5) (4) (2) (2) (4) (4)

N

N

1809 Price

N

1812 Price

1813 Price

N

N

(6)

374

(4)

--

--

333

(3)

328 339 433

(23) (17) (3)

380 403 425

(8) (9) (2)

394 381 400 450

(8) (8) (2) (2)

359 385 400

(16) (19) (1)

300 388 370 300

(8) (12) (3) (2)

(11) (2)

375 344 380

(2) (18) (3)

400 415 305

(1) (5) (4)

410 450

(9) (3)

444 500 200

(8) (1) (2)

380 300

(10) (3)

N

1817 Price

N

1818 Price

N

(18)

333

(10)

470 330 375

(1) (8) (15)

400

(1)

414 250

1816 Price

(3)

(2) (1)

300

(1)

450

(1)

(1) (1) (12) (17)

-

N

455

339 353

(3) (12)

352 432

(V) (9)

418 403

(6) (10)

400 250 353 332

353 211

(6) (1)

401 350

(7) (2)

334

(5)

411 514

(8) (5)

302

(5)

398

(15)

384

(7)

326 350

(7) (1)

405 450 367

(13) (1) (3)

--

1811 Price

(7) (1)

(2)

305

(1)

N

244 300

400

340 800

377

1810 Price

1819 Price

N

306 350

(21) (1)

1820 Price

N

1821 Price

N

317 500

(30) (1)

384

(9)

100

(1) (20) (20) (1) (9) (3) (2) (14)

465 437

(12) (27)

429 522 429 475

(13) (8) (4) (11)

(4)

450

(2)

383 383

(16) (29)

459 454

(8) (14)

414 338 350 418

(15) (3) (1) (17)

505 300

(10) (1)

514

(7)

424 404 500 461 523 375 402

493

(8)

475

(2)

500

(continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1822 Price

N

1823 Price

N

1824 Price

African Angola Arara Bricamo

430 399 600 250

(19) (1) (1) (1)

336

(13)

600 --

(1) --

Carabali Congo Dahome Fula Ganga Iolofe Lucumi Mandinga Macua Marabi

428 418 --438 -494 435 ---

(15) (29) (25) -(8) (16) --

393 (33) 376 395 (41) 374 200 300 (1) 364 (13) 454 436 (3) 374 444 (18) 404 392 (3) 500

Mina Mondongo Mozambique

-— --

-~ --

432 ~ --

(5) — --

349 400 -

444 425 400

N

1825 Price

N

(7)

400

(1)

(1)

300

(1)

1826 Price

N

348 500 450 --

(11) (1) (1) --

(23) 480 (10) 367 (23) 306 (9) 386 (1) (13) 417 (6) 386 -(8) 433 (3) 357 (14) 450 (4) 379 300 (1) (5) (2) (2)

300

(1)

1827 Price

N

1828 Price

321

(15)

--

400 --

(1) --

439

N -(2)

1829 Price

N

363

(13)

336

(9)

(6) 330 (14) 413 (8) 395 (14) (7) 393 (15) 404 (8) (7) -(3) (7) (1)

486 (11) 388 (9) ----383 (3) 300 (2) 284 (7) 369 (7) 438 (4) 200 (1)

283 (12) 500 (3) 383 (12) 333 (3)

200

(2)

450

450

-

--

--

(1)

310

(4)

(2)

(continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1830 Price

o

N

1831 Price

1832 Price

N

1833 Price

N

-470 -250

N -(1)

1834 Price

African Arara Bibi Bricamo Brichi

100 350

(1) (2)

351 333

(7) (3)

-235

-(3)

275

400 --

(1) -

--

--

---

---

Carabali Congo Ganga Guinea Ibo Lucumi Mandinga Macua Mina Mozambique

357 (17) 342 (19) 263 (12) 264 (16) 361 366 (24) 315 (14) 271 (7) 276 (11) 338 390 (12) 366 (20) 297 (15) 318 (35) 297 -- 275 (2) --400 (1) ---- 323 (13) 200 (4) 300 (9) 287 373 (5) 404 (8) 175 (2) 289 (9) 375 --- 450 (1) --- 400 (1) -400 (3) 314 (5) 368 (5) 338 (4) 425 500 (1) -

1835 Price

N (7)

(1) -

-

275

N -(4)

1836 Price 327 279 375 --

N (19) (8) (2) --

(17) 302 (24) 348 (38) (14) 272 (25) 307 (50) (16) 331 (21) 359 (37) -- 321 (28) -- 400 (2) (14) 313 (18) 357 (25) (2) 273 (11) 410 (10) 400 (2) (2) 365 (8) 100 (1)

1837 Price 192 350 297 369 325

N (6) (3) (15) (4) (4)

323 (116) 311 (80) 403 (15) 447 (6) 225 (2) 339 (28) 348 (20) 263 (4) 408 (9) (continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1838 Price

O 00

N (8) -(1) (8) (1)

1839 Price 329 -414 319 333

N

1840 Price

N

(18) -(3) (13) (3)

335 350 430 333 335

(16) (1) (3) (21) (18)

1841 Price

N

1842 Price

African Angola Arara Bibi Bricamo Brichi

356 250 314 300

Carabali Congo Dahome Ganga Ibo Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mina Mozambique Zape

335 (35) 318 (112) 343 (172) 328 (113) 328 304 (32) 305 (55) 328 (103) 327 (79) 327 — -— — 300 (1) 329 (19) 325 (53) 358 (69) 363 (64) 349 --- 350 (1) 288 (2) 400 (1) 500 340 (4) 363 (11) 347 (17) 398 (33) 362 --- 306 (4) 355 (10) 285 (5) 200 328 (9) 350 (13) 342 (42) 306 (16) 332 300 (1) 363 (4) 275 (8) 350 (2) 325 ----- 400 (1) ---

N

340

(8)

375

(6)

508 347 329

(5) (13) (12) -

295 296 315 --

(11) (7) (6)

1843 Price 336 300 360 200 347

N

1844 Price

N

(15) (2) (4) (1) (3) -

329 400 437 297 315 260

(53) (1) (4) (23) (8) (5)

(50) 332 (81) 333 (115) (46) 322 (48) 319 (109) (58) (1) (25) (2) (15) (2)

1845 Price

N

400

(2)

253 325 273

(4) (2) (3)

325 (24) 338 (29)

324 (29) 328 (54) 331 (21) --- 400 (2) 310 (29) 343 (15) 394 (14) 313 (3) 325 (5) 200 (2) 306 (25) 300 (34) 370 (1) 289 (3) 363 (4) 400 (1) 350

(1) (continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1846 Price African Angola Arara Bibi Bricamo Brichi Carabali Congo Ganga lOlOIC

Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mina Mondongo

N

391 (30) 242 (6) 259 (18) — — — 317 (102) 334 (70) 357 (62) 400 (1) 365 (35) 533 (3) 354 (29) 510 (5) 300 (2)

1848 Price

1850 Price

N

1851 Price

(4) (1) (2) (3)

334

(27)

575

— 312 330 365

(34) (45) (14)

325 314 322 380

369 368 344 300

(13) (2) (15) (2)

375 563 310 217

1849 Price

1847 Price

N

315 -460 330 294 343 351 361 348

(96) (5) (5) (3) (3) (91) (85) (37)

375 338 290 200 — 367 307 380

(84) -(4) (5) (1) — (38) (42) (27)

300 180 450 200

382 301 289 371

(18) (9) (25) (2)

406 420 358 —

(35) (8) (13)

N

N

383 —

1852 Price

N

1853 Price

N

(2)

378

(58)

396

(43)

600 —

(1) —

600 —

(1)

(2) (3) (2)

(2) (17) (31) (24)

— 325 383 469

— (4) (12) (13)

— 371 383 380

— (17) (19) (21)

325 317 383 — 399 369 412

(21) (33) (30)

(21) (3) (2) (3)

513 350 50 —

(4) (1) (1) —

432 150 300 159

(15) (2) (5) (1)

455 300 340 474

(31) (5) (11) (4)

(6) —

N

(continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1854 Price

N

1855 Price

N

1856 Price

N

1857 Price

N

1858 Price

1859 Price

N

N

1860 Price

N

1861 Price

N

African Arara Bibi Bricamo Carabali Congo

418 540 333 400 420 426

(23) (1) (3) (2) (15) (20)

400 578 -

(5) (1)

459

(28)

441

(11)

663

(8)

720 450

(14) (2)

745 580

(10) (6)

623 1000

(11) (2)

418 400

(7) (17)

(4) (15)

700 677

(3) (11)

782 475

(11) (8)

681 568

(9) (20)

543 509

(8) (11)

480 — 541

(13) — (4) _. (3) — (1)

493 600 408 400 350 —

(10) (33) (1) (26) --

675 623

Ganga Guinea Ibo Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mina Mozambique

440 473 300 542 -

576 350

(13) (1)

942 -

(10) -

590 -

(15) --

(13) (3) (1) (4)

628 500 —

691 __ — —

(2)

280 — 462 433

(8) (1) (8) .. (3) (3) ~

682 — 620 433 400 — —

(4) -

508 433 340 588

732 500 691 — 483 413

1864 Price

N

450 — 400 1862 Price

Angola Arara Carabali Congo Ganga Lucumi Macua Mandinga Mihi Mina

300 333 600 411 550 — o i l

(3) — (1) (6) (1) (3) „

N

1863 Price

(23)

407

(7)

(1) (3) (10) (10) (8) — — (3)

— 508 491 476 — — 800

— (6) (10) (4)

N

— (2)

450 700 650 727 650 650 300 600

(2) (1) (1) (7) (5) (1) (1) (1)

1865 Price

(8) (1) —

N

1866 Price

— —

N

1867 Price

(5) — (3) (3)

N

1868 Price

N

1869 Price

(5) (3) (2) —

N

__ 600 500 678 500 531 — -

(4) (1) (4) (2) (17) -

400 250 342 500 600 — 525

(1) (1) (6) (1) (1) — (2)

— 550 418 600 800 -

— (2) (4) (2) (1) -

700 599 379 516 650 — -

(1) (3) (7) (9) (5) — -

733

(3)

— 500 100 -

— (2) (1) — —

-{continued)

Table B.5 Continued 1870 Price African Angola Arara Carabali Congo Ganga Lucumi

--483 --1878 Price

Congo Ganga

-800

1871 Price

N --(3) ---

N -(1)

--638 450 -1879 Price --

1872 Price

N --

150

(4) (2) --

1000 --

N

1880 Price --

150

N

1873 Price

N

900

(3)

800 700 1000 --

(1) (2) (1) --

(1)

(1) ---

N (10)

1874 Price --

1875 Price

N --

1150

1876 Price

N (2) -

--500

-(1)

920 -

1500

N

1877 Price

N •

(1)

(5) -

Table B.6 Average slave prices by occupation, Havana, Santiago, Cienfuegos, 1790 Price Carretero boyero Carpintero Decampo Domestico Hornero

500 300 400

1798 Price Albanil Calesero Carpintero Decampo Domestico Salinas Zapatero

1806 Price

Calesero Decampo Domestico Zapatero

--

1791 Price

N (1) (1) (1)

--

1799 Price

N -

-

--

N

500 500

(1) (1)

312 450

(2) (2)

1807 Price

N

1792 Price

N

300 50 300 500

N (1) (1) (4) (1)

1793 Price

N

--

--

350

(1) -

1800 Price -450 --450

-(1) --(2)

--

--

1808 Price ---

-

--

--

-

-

229

(7)

1802 Price

N

--

--

--300 600 --

-(1) (1) -

1809 Price

N

--

500

N

300

1803 Price

---

(1) -

-400 1804 Price

N

N

1797 Price

N

1805 Price

N

(1)

N

(1) -

500

1810 Price

N

1796 Price

N

(1) 800

--

1795 Price

N

--

1801 Price

N

1794 Price

N

1790—1875

300 517 -

(1)

N (1) (3)

--

1811 Price -500 350

-

-

-

500

N -(1) (3)

1812 Price ----

1813 Price

N ---

400 200

(2)

N (1) (1) -

(continued)

Table B.6 Continued 1814 Price Calesero Carpintero Carretillero Costurera Decampo Domestico Sastre Tabaquero Zapatero

1815 Price

N

1816 Price 544

318

500

1822 Price Albanil Arriero Calesero Carpintero Carretero boyero Con tramayoral Costurera Decampo Domestico Partera Tachero Zapatero

N

650

500

(1)

441 500

(5) (2)

N (1)

1817 Price

1818 Price

N

--

--

534

N (1)

1819 Price

1820 Price

N

--

N

500

(1)

500 556

(2) (8)

1821 Price

N

601

(5)

550 570

(1) (10)

1829 Price

N

(1)

(1)

N

(1)

500

(1)

430

(8)

1823 Price

583

N

(3)

366

1824 Price

540

(2)

N

(5)

475

(2)

450

(1)

1825 Price

N

305 305

(6) (3)

467 533 550

(3) (3) (1)

500 500

(1) (1)

525

(2)

1826 Price

N

600 550

(1) (4)

(1) (1) (2) (14) (1)

300 458

(1) (9)

(1)

350

(2)

500 525 408

(1) (2) (6)

385 443 383

(2) (6) (61)

500 450 500 439 550

400

(2)

500 510

(1) (1)

400

430

(5)

1827 Price

N

1828 Price

N

600

(1)

475

(2)

417 480

(3) (1)

480

(1)

500

(2)

409

(2)

388

(4)

480 425

(1) (13)

250 406

(1) (17)

550

(2)

336 400

(4) (10)

345

(1)

--{continued)

Table B.6 Continued 1830 Price Albanil Calesero Carretero boyero Costurera Decampo Domestico Jornalero Maquinista Minero Panadero Tabaquero Talabartero Tejero Zapatero

— 484 450 — 175 486 .. -— __ 480 750 514

1831 Price

N ~ (4) (1) — (3) (13) -— (1) (1) (1)

N

1832 Price N

373 550

(3) 300 (2) 484

300 300 383 475

(1) -(1) -(12) 420 (2) -

306 500 350

(1) -(1) (2) 200

528

(2)

--

1833 Price N

(1) 510 (5) 446 --

400

(2) 376

-(1)

-

400 350 --

350

1834 Price N

1835 Price N

(1) 383 (3) (9) 600 (1) 600 (1) (1) --- 300 (1) 176 (4) (9) 372 (19) 396 (19) (1) (1) 360 (1) -- 350 (3) 467 (3) -- 600 (2) 338

(1) -(4) 353

1836 Price N

1837 Price

N

750 (2) 425 (2) 391 (16) 402 (7) 500 (1) 400 (1) 411 (6) 420 (5) 325 (9) 445 (13) 415 (28) -

-

300 (1)

488

(4) 442 (3)

(3) 500

300 (1) (1) 467 (7) {continued)

Table B.6 Continued 1838 Price

M °

Albanil Arriero Calesew Carpintero Carretero boyero Costurera Decampo Domestico Enfermero Herrero Jornalero Maestro azucar Minero Panadero Partera Sastre Tabaquero Talabartero Tejero Tonelero Zapatero

N

1839 Price

N

1840 Price

N

440 350 395

-

350

(2)

400

(1)

(5) -(1) (15)

450 -363 419 -

(4) (3) (27) --

300

(1)

457 200 100 461 319 393 300 -

(11) (1) (1) (3) (19) (56) (1) --

350

(2) 400 -

(1) ---

439 -

300

(1)

410

(5)

425

(2)

450

452

(3) --

(5)

506

1841 Price

1842 Price

N

N

1843 Price

1844 Price

N

1845 Price

N

N

500 350 454

(1) (1) (8)

-425 467

-(1) (3)

400

(1)

--

--

434

(12)

393

(18)

300 300 413

450 370 384 -450

(1) (21) (76) -(1)

377 383 362 450

(2) (3) (30) (1)

500 360 372 --

(1) (13) (37)

350 340 304 364

(1) (5) (64) (83)

350 (5) 322 (6) 350 (20)

250

(1) ---

(14)

--396

-400 100

(1) (1) (1) (2) (4)

(12)

372

500 500

(9) (2)

-(5)

400

(2) (11) (1)

400 449

(1) (8)

439

(7)

300

(1)

585 ---

(1) ---

400 350 400 235 431

-450

-(2)

350 364

--

385

(2) (1) -(13) (10)

400

(3)

(2) (1) (6)

{continued)

Table B.6 Continued 1846 Price Albanil Alfarero Calesero Carpintero Carretero boyero Carretillero Costurera Decampo Domestico Maquinista Moledor Panadero Salinas Sastre Tabaquero Tachero Talabartero Veguero Zapatero

N

400 417 350 300

(2) (12) (2) (1)

250 380 399

(1) (31) (93)

500 300

(1) (1)

452

(12)

400 358

(1) (6)

1847 Price

N

1848 Price

1849 Price

N

N

360

(2)

1850 Price

1851 Price

N

1852 Price

N

1853 Price

N

N

200

(1)

430 600

(13) (1)

576

(11)

432

(18)

474

(11)

492

(6)

436

(6)

593 500 500

(18) (1) (1)

447 326 404 525

(9) (21) (70) (2)

533 412 419

(3) (9) (57)

350 476 297 373

(1) (7) (13) (63)

618 150 411

(2) (2) (20)

475 428 469

(6) (5) (29)

500 440 457

(3) (5) (57)

606 361 511

(8) (9) (52)

302 300

(4) (1)

400

(2)

--

--

--

300

(2)

--

--

(14) (1) (2)

400 483

(2) (6)

(1) (1) (4) (4)

--

415 350 455

300 500 438 338

--

--

500

(1)

--

--

550 495

(1) (5)

--

--

300

(2)

436

(9)

517

(6)

450

(5)

500

(1)

454

(5)

--

--

500 632

(1) (5)

(continued)

Table B.6 Continued 1854 Price Albanil Alfarero Ayudante maquinista Calesero Carretero boyero Costurera Decampo Domestico Hornero Jomalem Panadero Sastre Tabaquero Tejero Zapatero

Arriero Calesero Carpintero Carretillero Costurera DeCampo Domestico Herrero Panadero Peon de Almacen Tabaquero Tonelero Zapatero

Decampo Domestico

750 — 525 — 650 510 542 550 600 500 508

1855 Price

N

1856 Price

N

1857 Price

N

1858 Price

N

(2) -(2) -(2) (5) (35)

-801 500 575 550 505

(4) (1) (2) (1) (29)

(1) (2) (1) (6)

-350 331

--

1862 Price

N

437 950 500 -1022 501 617 800 538 825 500 850 783

(2) (2) (1) -(3) (30) (63) (1) (4) (2) (4) (1) (3)

1870 Price

N

-1863 Price 875 -650 633 712

--

--

492 483

300

500 500 1864 Price

N (2) -(2) (16) (37)

---1871 Price

--

(1) (4)

-800 — 750 505 620

-N (3) (3)

750 800

813

900

-— -(1) 1200 -— (2) 850 (5) 500 (26) 938 --(1) -

(3) (3)

1212 600 1865 Price

N (2) -(1)

--(1) (6) (1) (8) --

(1)

450 300 850 . ~ 1282

1859 Price

N (1) (1) (2) (2)

1860 Price

N --

1200

(1)

--

--

1725

(2)

1150

(2)

-(3) (4)

700 925

(1) (6)

825 683 800

(2) (6) (1)

700

(1)

1000

(1)

1000

(1)

1070 --

(5) --

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

--

800

(1)

(2) 1866 Price

N

1867 Price

N

--

---

750 --

(2) -

-

(6)

800 350 734

(1) (2) (10)

650 650 608

(1) (2) (14)

~ 675 590

--

--

--

800

(2)

1868 Price

N -

(2) (5)

-

1873 Price

---

906 550

N (4) (1)

1874 Price 400

N

-

1869 Price

N -

900 -

(1)

N

N

--

-400 975 -

-1872 Price

1861 Price

N

1875 Price

N

(1) 550

(2)

— 252 621

— (5) (8)

N (1)

Table B.7 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos

1791-1880 1791 Price

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

222 150 230 350 167 250 243 ~

N (19) (2) (17) (5) (12) (1) (15)

1792 Price

N

1793 Price

N

1794 Price

(14) (3) (11) (6) (8)

250 250 250 250

(2)

(2)

N

200 — 200 — 200

(1) (1) — (1)

225 257 216 208 238

200

(1)

227

(11)

250

1800 Price

N

1801 Price

N

328 335 327 346 319 275 326 266

(59) (13) (46) (22) (35) (2) (49) (5)

277 224 301 314 260 250 293 275

(26) (8) (18) (8) (13) (3) (18) (2)

1798 Price

N

1799 Price

279 308 266 271 283 225 283 250

(43) (13) (30) (16) (21) (2) (37) (1)

295 302 292 294 301 350 298 225

N

(50 (21) (29) (30) (20) (4) (38) (6)

(2) (1) (1)

1795 Price

N

246 256 242 246 249

(24) (6) (18) (9) (12)

249 250

1797 Price

N

(19) (1)

235 278 218 227 230 177 241 200

(47) (13) (34) (22) (19) (3) (38) (2)

251 270 245 246 259 251 250

(19) (5) (14) (7) (11) -(17) (2)

1802 Price

N

1803 Price

N

1804 Price

N

331 332 331 293 344

(50) (15) (35) (17) (30)

313 200 325 318 305

(32) (3) (29) (14) (15)

200 200 200 —

333 300

(43) (4)

320 200

(27) (3)

— 200

1796 Price

N

1805 Price

N

(1) — (1) (1) —

304 317 300 325 294

(13) (3) (10) (4) (8)

— (1)

304 --

(13)

(continued)

Table B.7 Continued 1806 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

296 267 301 250 288 400 290 — 1814 Price

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

271 248 278 257 313 350 244 ~

N (20) (3) (17) (3) (9) (1) (19) —

N (8) (2) (6) (6) (2) (1) (6) --

1807 Price

N

1808 Price

290 270 298 273 303 250 283 275

(34) (10) (24) (15) (17) (1) (29) (2)

306 311 300 277 323 314 250

1815 Price

N

1816 Price

N

328 360 311 357 305 260 336 326

(85) (30) (55) (34) (38) (6) (72) (1)

343 427 328 342 333 350 330 350

(20) (3) (17) (10) (9) (1) (17) (1)

N (8) (4) (4) (3) (5) (7) (1)

1809 Price

N

1810 Price

323 307 329 325 323 332 248

(57) (14) (43) (26) (27) (51) (4)

1817 Price

N

1818 Price

(73) (28) (45) (24) (37) (69) (3)

345 325 353 410 314 -358 226

324 316 328 298 307 -324 367

315 289 326 331 272 100 319

N (30) (9) (21) (16) (9) (1) (28) —

N (79) (23) (56) (22) (50) (66) (5)

1811 Price

N

1812 Price

N

306 308 304 333 311 230 326 250

(40) (17) (23) (9) (21) (1) (30) (2)

311 327 304 282 323 300 308 288

(32) (10) (22) (12) (18) (1) (24) (4)

1819 Price

N

1820 Price

N

1821 Price

N

356 297 380 390 349 300 350 --

(59) (17) (42) (10) (20) (1) (18) --

336 377 306 313 357 283 367 290

(47) (20) (27) (8) (31) (3) (6) (2)

376 440 355 375 373 440 353 275

(74) (18) (56) (19) (30) (2) (28) (2)

1813 Price 290 277 307 344 268 293 200

N (23) (13) (10) (6) (14) — (19) (1)

(continued)

Table B.7 Continued 1822 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

N

327 200 344 415 298 368 100

(41) (5) (36) (10) (21) -(15) (1)

1830 Price

N

351 330 365 294 364 150 357 400

(47) (19) (28) (16) (23) (1) (23) (2)

1823 Price 386 465 359 400 386 374 — 1831 Price 284 308 255 291 279 153 217 --

N (47) (12) (35) (16) (23) (18) —

N (11) (6) (5) (5) (6) (1) (3) --

1824 Price

N

363 365 360 365 373 250 378 325

(87) (38) (49) (27) (31) (1) (6) (2)

1832 Price

N

295 306 291 259 343 — 256 263

(16) (4) (12) (7) (7) — (6) (2)

1825 Price 336 364 318 400 313 700 373 —

N (45) (18) (27) (4) (16) (1) (13) —

1826 Price

N

334 345 329 350 336 200 400

(43) (12) (31) (7) (13) (1) (3)

N

1833 Price

N

1834 Price

302 392 279 317 285 375 367 --

(30) (6) (24) (6) (13) (2) (9) --

301 319 293 321 292 217 292 --

(50) (16) (34) (21) (26) (3) (15)

1827 Price

N

348 348 348 285 374 294 500

(30) (17) (13) (10) (5) (9) (1)

1835 Price

N

285 308 276 268 292 153 292 313

(32) (9) (23) (11) (13) (1) (9) (2)

N

1829 Price

(39) (27) (12) (5) (14) (1) (7) ~

341 312 363 305 353 327 ~

1836 Price

N

1837 Price

N

268 288 255 225 267 350 240 177

(85) (35) (50) (19) (50) (2) (19) (3)

279 273 294 249 286 186 269 225

(65) (46) (19) (22) (31) (5) (29) (2)

1828 Price 325 339 293 350 310 200 271 —

N (23) (10) (13) (9) (10) (9) —

{continued)

Table B.7 Continued 1838 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

292 300 288 276 353 — 299 138

N (39) (14) (25) (17) (9) — (23) (4)

1839 Price

N

1840 Price

N

1841 Price

N

291 338 254 275 311 209 278 284

(71) (31) (40) (17) (35) (3) (36) (6)

305 328 294 287 346 100 298 256

(71) (24) (47) (21) (21) (1) (34) (3)

303 264 325 288 310 235 315 240

(81) (29) (52) (34) (37) (5) (48) (11)

N

1849 Price

N

1850 Price

(73) (26) (47) (15) (23) (21) (5)

292 334 277 267 303 250 311 ~

1846 Price

N

1847 Price

N

1848 Price

297 321 285 313 269 200 315 312

(48) (15) (33) (17) (18) (1) (20) (4)

308 325 296 333 305 500 308 243

(89) (37) (52) (29) (43) (1) (32) (3)

291 314 276 268 313 100 289 280

(53) (20) (33) (21) (19) (2) (21) (1)

284 284 284 313 230 316 181

1842 Price 293 292 293 282 273 — 279 200

N (35) (9) (26) (14) (13) — (18) (2)

N (59) (16) (43) (17) (31) (2) (13) —

1843 Price 275 349 230 297 285 — 331 203

N (35) (13) (22) (12) (17) __ (17) (6)

1844 Price

N

305 309 304 285 309 200 301

(39) (15) (24) (12) (16) (1) (21)

1851 Price

N

1852 Price

N

370 396 336 440 230 300 454 240

(16) (9) (7) (9) (5) (1) (4) (1)

319 284 382 318 316 217 352 250

(61) (39) (22) (24) (27) (3) (22) (1)

1845 Price

N

266 252 301 229 219 100 239 350

(36) (26) (10) (9) (6) (1) (8) (1)

1853 Price

N

351 (171) 385 (59) 334 (112) 354 (65) 361 (51) 267 (3) 351 (54) 256 (5) (continued)

Table B.7 Continued

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+

1855 Price

N

1857 Price

N

1858 Price

N

1859 Price

N

1860 Price

N

1861 Price

N

346 322 360 395 280 325 358 299

(68) (24) (44) (31) (14) (4) (29) (18)

409 448 379 415 402 428 246

(35) (15) (20) (12) (12) (18) (5)

566 481 589 673 448 700 670 335

(24) (5) (19) (11) (7) (1) (10) (4)

516 716 446 535 532 500 636 366

(46) (12) (34) (21) (6) (3) (15) (5)

468 470 468 538 374 533 478 229

(53) (17) (36) (29) (17) (3) (21) (4)

448 460 443 428 407 350 491 342

(71) (21) (50) (29) (21) (4) (42) (10)

N

1864 Price

N

1865 Price

N

1866 Price

N

1867 Price

N

1868 Price

N

1869 Price

N

(42) (9) (33) (26) (10) (24) (11)

527 450 561 520 435 200 570 382

513 450 548 598 422 700 511 442

(25) (9) (16) (14) (5) (1) (16) (5)

501 600 489 476 599 510 500

(18) (2) (16) (15) (1) (14) (1)

491 218 554 559 417 605 289

1854 Price

N

376 461 349 367 433 50 414 195

(55) (13) (42) (21) (10) (1) (21) (1)

339 418 301 358 334 171 437 280

(37) (12) (25) (18) (12) (4) (12) (2)

1862 Price

N

1863 Price

440 446 438 489 381 247 535 302

(67) (22) (45) (45) (5) (6) (32) (10)

504 972 376 392 805 574 308

N

1856 Price

(26) (8) (18) (19) (6) (1) (19) (5)

494 483 500 520 450 300 420 800

(8) (3) (5) (5) (3) (1) (5) (1)

(16) (3) (13) (11) (3) (10) (4)

486 — 486 510 426 525 252

(7) (7) (6) (2) — (6) (1)

{continued)

Table B.7 Continued 1870 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41+

423

(6)

423 467 — — 459 200

(6) (5)

1878 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

1871 Price

N

__ _. — — -—

— (4) (1)

462 533 400 471 350 — 462 1879 Price

N

N (13) (6) (7) (12) (1) — (13) -N

1872 Price 444 560 380 485 346 — 453 -1880 Price

N (14) (5) (9) (11) (1) — (11)

N

—

521

(4)

275

(2)

— — — —

521 512 550 235 650 550

(4) (3) (1) (1) (2) (1)

275 200 — 275

(2) (1) — „

(2) • "

1873 Price

N

1669 1595 1680 1876 1325 2575 1893 936

(14) (2) (12) (11) (2) (1) (9) (4)

1874 Price

N

1875 Price

N

1876 Price

N

496 675 258 546 200

(7) (4) (3) (6) (1)

483 650 388 508 -

(11) (4) (7) (8)

368 450 204 368 —

(3) (2) (1) (3)

619 333

(4) (3)

491 400

(9) (1)

368 --

(3) -

1877 Price 412 575 357 360 400 466 249 --

N (8) (2) (6) (6) (1) (6) (2)

Table B.8 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, 1791 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

N

1792 Price

N

1793 Price

N

1794 Price

N

1795 Price

N

1791—1880

1796 Price

N

1797 Price

N

235 278 218 227 230 177 241 200

(47) (13) (34) (22) (19) (3) (38) (2)

251 270 245 246 259 251 250

(19) (5) (14) (7) (11) (17) (2)

1804 Price

N

200 _. 200 __ 200

(1) — (1) ._ (1)

225 257 216 208 238

(14) (3) (11) (6) (8)

250 — 250 250 250

(2) — (2) (1) (1)

242 242 242 219 268

(15) (4) (11) (6) (6)

200

(1)

227

(11)

250

(2)

256

(13)

N

1800 Price

N

1801 Price

N

1802 Price

N

1803 Price

N

(51) (21) (29) (30) (20) (4) (38) (6)

328 335 327 346 319 275 326 266

(59) (13) (46) (22) (35) (2) (49) (5)

277 224 301 314 260 250 293 275

(26) (8) (18) (8) (13) (3) (18) (2)

331 332 331 293 344

(50) (15) (35) (17) (30)

313 200 325 318 305

(32) (3) (29) (14) (15)

200

333 300

(43) (4)

320 200

(27) (3)

— 200

222 150 230 350 167 250 243

(19) (2) (17) (5) (12) (1) (15)

1798 Price

N

1799 Price

279 308 266 271 283 225 283 250

(43) (13) (30) (16) (21) (2) (37) (1)

295 302 292 294 301 350 298 255

200 200 —

1805 (1) — (1) (1)

304 317 300 325 294

(13) (3) (10) (4) (8)

— (1)

304

(13) --

{continued)

Table B.8 Continued 1806 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

296 267 301 250 288 400 290

1814 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

271 248 278 257 313 350 244 -

N

1807 Price

N

1808 Price

(20) (3) (17) (3) (9) (1) (19) ~

290 270 298 273 303 250 283 275

(34) (10) (24) (15) (17) (1) (29) (2)

306 311 300 277 323 314 250

1815 Price

N

1816 Price 343 427 328 342 338 350 330 350

N (8) (2) (6) (6) (2) (1) (6) -

328 360 311 357 305 260 336 326

(85) (30) (55) (34) (38) (6) (72) (1)

1809 Price

N

326 307 332 325 328 336 248

(55) (14) (41) (26) (26) (49) (4)

N

1817 Price

N

1818 Price

N

(20) (3) (17) (10) (9) (1) (17) (1)

325 316 331 298 307 ~ 324 367

(72) (28) (44) (24) (37) (69) (3)

345 325 353 410 314 358 226

(79) (23) (56) (22) (50) (66) (5)

N (8) (4) (4) (3) (5) (7) (1)

1810 Price 315 289 326 331 272 100 319

N (30) (9) (21) (16) (9) (1) (28) —

1811 Price

N

1812 Price

N

306 308 304 333 311 230 326 250

(40) (17) (23) (9) (21) (1) (30) (2)

311 327 304 282 323 300 308 288

(32) (10) (22) (12) (18) (1) (24) (4)

1819 Price

N

1820 Price

N

1821 Price

N

(58) (17) (41) (10) (20) (1) (18) -

336 377 306 313 357 283 367 290

(47) (20) (27) (8) (31) (3) (6) (2)

376 440 355 375 373 440 353 275

(74) (18) (56) (19) (30) (2) (28) (2)

357 297 382 390 349 300 350

1813 Price 290 277 307 344 268 — 293 200

N (23) (13) (10) (6) (14) — (19) (1)

(continued)

Table B.8 Continued 1822 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

327 200 344 415 298 — 368 100 1830 Price

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

350 330 364 294 364 150 357 400

N (41) (5) (36) (10) (21) — (15) (1)

N (46) (19) (27) (16) (23) (1) (23) (2)

1823 Price 386 465 359 400 286 — 374

N (47) (12) (35) (16) (23) (18) •

1831 Price 284 308 255 291 279 153 217 --

•

N (11) (6) (5) (5) (6) (1) (3) ~

1824 Price

N

363 365 360 365 373 250 379 325

(87) (38) (49) (27) (31) (1) (36) (2)

1832 Price

N

295 306 291 259 343 -256 263

(16) (4) (12) (7) (7) — (6) (2)

1825 Price

N

1826 Price

N

336 364 318 400 313 700 373

(45) (18) (27) (4) (16) (1) (13)

346 358 342 375 336 200 400

(40) (11) (29) (6) (13) (1) (3)

1833 Price

N

1834 Price

N

1835 Price

307 392 285 317 385 375 394 --

(29) (6) (23) (6) (13) (2) (8) --

301 319 293 321 292 217 292 --

(50) (16) (34) (21) (26) (3) (15) --

276 295 271 264 261 153 304 313

"

•

1827 Price 352 354 348 289 374 294 500

1828 Price

N

325 293 339 350 310 200 271

(39) (12) (27) (5) (14) (1) (7)

N

1836 Price

N

(22) (5) (17) (7) (9) (1) (8) (2)

296 335 268 262 290 350 257 225

(53) (22) (31) (9) (28) (2) (11) (2)

N (29) (16) (13) (9) (5) — (9) (1)

1829 Price 349 312 379 305 353 327

1837 Price 308 350 303 288 295 — 284 300

N (22) (10) (12) (9) (10) — (9) —

N (28) (3) (25) (8) (14) — (8) (1)

(continued)

Table B.8 Continued

N

1839 Price

N

1840 Price

N

1841 Price

367 370 365 300 450

(10) (5) (5) (2) (5)

311 350 278 304 327

(35) (16) (19) (5) (22)

360 364 359 383 358

(25) (7) (18) (6) (14)

324 240 366 287 314

300 —

(3)

303 260

(9) (2)

392 300

(6) (2)

300

1838 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

1846 Price

N

302 359 260 328 250 350 300

(26) (11) (15) (7) (10) (6) (2)

1847 Price 312 326 302 318 320 500 318 175

N (53) (22) (31) (13) (28) (1) (6) (2)

1848 Price 320 333 308 271 350 100 450 --

N (25) (12) (13) (7) (12) (2) (2) --

1842 Price

N

1843 Price

N

1844 Price

(15) (5) (10) (3) (7)

344 350 341 367 317

(13) (4) (9) (3) (6)

262 273 200 325 288

(14) (5) (9) (2) (8)

311 317 308 250 326

(2)

400 —

(2)

352 200

(4) (1)

267 —

N

• "

1849 Price 278 297 268 349 223 334 164

N (45) (16) (29) (8) (21) (7) (4)

N (19) (6) (13) (2) (8) (3) —

1850 Price

N

1851 Price

N

1852 Price

N

287 358 267 275 286 -300

(42) (9) (33) (11) (21) (4)

369 385 352 414 237 300 388

(12) (6) (6) (8) (3) (1) (3)

304 340 297 341 282 250 350

(18) (3) (15) (8) (9) (1) (4)

1845 Price

N

247 (10) 273 (3) 236 (7) 213 (4) 275 (2) 100 (1) 300 (1) — ~ 1853 Price

N

359 400 338 390 357 267 393 200

(98) (34) (64) (33) (35) (3) (16) (2)

(continued)

Table B.8 Continued 1854 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

412 529 386 380 482 — 443

1862 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

427 313 465 445 300 — 448 418

N (27) (5) (22) (12) (8) — (12)

N (16) (4) (12) (14) (1) (10) (3)

1855 Price

N

1856 Price

N

372 441 321 411 361 201 612 400

(26) (11) (15) (12) (8) (2) (5) (1)

377 363 384 All 261 349 425 233

(24) (8) (16) (9) (5) (2) (10) (3)

1863 Price

N

1864 Price

N

610 1250 408 445 881 670 342

(25) (6) (19) (13) (8) (15) (5)

527 450 561 520 435 200 570 382

(26) (8) (18) (19) (6) (1) (19) (5)

1857 Price

N

1858 Price

N

1859 Price

395 396 393 405 420 455 220

(19) (8) (11) (6) (11) (14) (4)

633 400 679 859 450 700 724 367

(12) (2) (10) (5) (4) (1) (8) (3)

483 483 575 300 750 300 400

1865 Price

N

1866 Price

N

1867 Price

511 425 560 594 422 700 502 442

(22) (8) (14) (13) (5) (1) (15) (5)

494 483 500 520 450 300 420 800

(8) (3) (5) (5) (3) (1) (5) (1)

501 600 489 476 599 — 510 500

N (3) (3) (2) (1) (1) (1) (1)

N (18) (2) (16) (15) (1) (14) (1)

1860 Price

N

1861 Price

N

384 420 366 423 360 533 391 350

(29) (10) (19) (15) (10) (3) (11) (1)

404 470 371 371 357 350 434 243

(48) (16) (32) (20) (15) (2) (30) (6)

1868 Price

N

1869 Price

N

491 218 554 559 417 — 605 289

(16) (3) (13) (11) (3) (10) (4)

486 — 486 510 426 525 252

(7) (7) (5) (2) (6) (1)

{continued)

Table B.8 Continued 1870 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

423 __ 423 467 — 459 200 1878 Price

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

1871 Price

N (6) (6) (5)

(4) (1)

„

„

__

__

__

__

„

_.

__

_.

—

— —

--

--

1872 Price

N

462 533 400 471 350

(13) (6) (7) (12) (1)

444 560 380 485 346

(14) (5) (9) (11) (1)

462 —

(13) —

453

(11)

1880 Price

N

1879 Price

N

N

521 __ 521 512 550 235 650 550

N (4) (4) (3) (1) (1) (2) (1)

275 __ 275 200 — 275 --

(2) (2) (1) (2) -

1873 Price

N

1874 Price

1669 1595 1681 1827 1325 2575 1893 936

(14) (2) (12) (11) (2) (1) (9) (4)

496 675 258 546 200 619 333

N (7) (4) (3) (6) (1) (4) (3)

1875 Price 483 650 388 508 — 491 400

N (11) (4) (7) (8) (9) (1)

1876 Price 368 450 204 368 — 368 —

N (3) (2) (1) (3) (3)

1877 Price 412 575 357 360 400 466 249

N (8) (2) (6) (6) (1) — (6) (2)

Table B.9 Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Santiago, 1817 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles

200 __ 200 __

N (1) .. (1) __

1819 Price 300 __ 300 ._

N (1) __ (1) _.

1826 Price 167 200 150 200

N (3) (1) (2) (1)

1827 Price 250 250 — 250

N (1) (1) (1)

1829 Price 175 _. 175 ..

N (1) — (1) —

Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 + 1837 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

249 269 240 229 254 186 263 150

N

1838 Price

(29) (9) (20) (13) (12) (5) (21) (1)

271 279 269 285 231 299 138

N (27) (7) (20) (13) (4) (20) (4)

1839 Price 269 323 233 254 284 209 269 294

N (35) (14) (21) (11) (13) (3) (27) (4)

1840 Price 267 293 253 248 322 100 277 167

1833 Price

181J-1866

N

1835 Price

N

1836 Price

(10) (4) (6) (4) (4)

189 200 187 183 195

(8) (1) (7) (4) (4)

0)

205 80

(7) (1)

150 — 150 —

(1) — (1) —

305 325 292 275 363

150

(1)

200

N

1841 Price

N

1842 Price

N

1843 Price

N

(45) (16) (29) (15) (7) (1) (28) (1)

299 269 315 288 310 235 316 240

(66) (24) (42) (31) (30) (5) (46) (11)

263 245 268 259 236 264 200

(22) (5) (17) (11) (7) (16) (2)

281 325 259 290 279 318 215

(18) (6) (12) (9) (7) (11) (4)

1844 Price 300 304 297 303 290 301

N

N (16) (7) (9) (8) (7) — (15) --

(continued)

Table B.9 Continued 1845 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

277 313 257 243 200 233 —

N (20) (7) (13) (5) (1) (3) —

1846 Price

N

291 218 307 302 292 200 300 325

(22) (4) (18) (10) (8) (1) (14) (2)

1859 Price

N

1848 Price

1847 Price

N

281 232 296 346 251

(17) (4) (13) (5) (9)

238 — 238 212 211

278 380

(13) (1)

233 —

1860 Price

N

1849 Price

N

1852 Price

N

1853 Price

N

(17) — (17) (6) (4)

293 263 310 272 309

(28) (10) (18) (7) (2)

299 400 273 233 311

(10) (2) (8) (5) (2)

332 395 310 311 344

(46) (12) (34) (14) (8)

(10)

308 250

(14) (1)

361 250

(2) (1)

320 300

(20) (2)

1862 Price

N

1863 Price

1866 Price

N

N

ON

1855 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

261 160 271 251 280 142 312 160

N

(10 (1) (10) (6) (4) (2) (7) (1)

466 381 500 440 — 667 --

(7) (2) (5) (4) — (3) -

428 387 508 439 416 300 216

(6) (4) (2) (3) (3) (1) (1)

1861 Price 646 347 684 710 556 750 284

N (9) (1) (8) (5) (3) (7) (2)

486 500 483 588 — 134 631 350

(16) (3) (13) (10) — (1) (9) (2)

395 500 342 380 500 460 329

N (6) (2) (4) (3) (2) — (3) (3)

527 650 466 650 650 --

(3) (1) (2)

(0 (1) -

1854 Price 341 419 310 350 237 50 376 195

N (28) (8) (20) (9) (2) (1) (9) (1)

Table B . i o Average coartado prices by sex, age, and nationality, Cienfuegos, 1830 Price All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

373 — 373 196 247

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

260 __ 260 — 187 228 350 1857 Price

All coartados Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

(1) (1) (6) (18) —

—

1845 Price

426 507 362 425 200 338 350

1836 Price

N

N (6) — (6) — (3) (4) (1) N (16) (7) (9) (6) (1) (4) (1)

234 209 260 200 340 300

1847 Price

N (24) (12) (12) (1) (5)

1837 Price 288 300 200 200

N (8) (7) (1) (2)

1838 Price

N

1839 Price

N

1840 Price

1830—1863

N

200 200

(2) (2)

350 350

(1) (1)

639 639

(1) (1)

350

(1)

300

(1)

250

(2)

(1)

N

1848 Price

N

1850 Price

N

1851 Price

N

1843 Price 296 364 160

(3) (2) (1)

294

(2)

364 160

(2) (1)

1852 Price

N

334 388 277 339 336 200 351 --

(33) (17) (16) (11) (16) (2) (16) --

354 336 371 322 395 — 348 280

1853 Price

323 357 276 344 316 335 --

(19) (11) (8) (11) (6) -(13) -

305 285 360 306 303 314 280

(11) (8) (3) (8) (3) (9) (1)

306 303 308 254 340 250 316 --

(17) (7) (10) (6) (10) (2) (9) --

373 417 240 650 220 650 240

1858 Price

N

1859 Price

N

1860 Price

N

1861 Price

N

1862 Price

N

1863 Price

500 534 488 518 447 -455 240

(12) (3) (9) (6) (3) (2) (1)

529 784 431 555 578 375 658 358

(36) (10) (26) (15) (5) (2) (11) (4)

(18) (3) (15) (11) (4) (9) (2)

473 452 482 362 509 350 475 699

(14) (4) (10) (4) (3) (2) (5) (2)

426 471 392 472 401 270 537 213

(35) (15) (20) (21) (4) (5) (13) (5)

322 247 330 325 _. 394 230

617 747 591 720 379 ~ 605 175

(4) (3) (1) (1) (2) (1) (1)

N

N (27) (13) (14) (18) (8) (18) (1) N (11) (1) (10) (10) (6) (3)

1844 Price 300 300 300 __ 300 200 333

1856 Price 330 301 346 362 291 300 323 312

N (4) (2) (2) (1) (1) (3)

N (44) (16) (28) (22) (9) (2) (19) (15)

Table B.i i Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Havana and Santiago, 1802-1877

1802 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

356 385 317 275 388 200 465 245 1827 Price

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

364 342 401 75 393 127 424 350

N (7) (4) (3) (2) (5) (1) (4) (2)

N (56) (45) (21) (6) (48) (7) (36) (3)

1807 Price 450 450 450 — 450 400 456

1812 Price

N (9) (4) (5) (8) (1) (8) " •

1834 Price 347 350 342 335 350 350 350 350

N (44) (25) (19) (10) (34) (10) (26) (3)

300 — 300 — 300 — —

N (1) — (1) (1) —

• •

1835 Price

N

241 (24) 223 (125) 272 (9) 272 (7) 354 (5) 87 (3) 353 (8) 241 (5)

1815 Price

N

382 391 333 300 404 300 404 200

(19) (16) (3) (4) (15) (2) (16) (1)

1836 Price

N

170 170 170 — 170 --

(1) (1) (1) — (1) --

1822 Price 300 300 — 300 —

N (1) (1) — (1) —

1824 Price 238 200 250 250 200 -

1839 Price

N

1840 Price

349 350 347 347 350 350 348 350

(36) (17) (19) (17) (19) (10) (23) (3)

348 333 377 347 350 400 372 --

N (4) (1) (3) (3) (1) —

N (9) (6) (3) (6) (3) (1) (6) --

1825 Price 350 — 350 — 350 — 350

N (1) — (1) — (1) — (1)

1841 Price

N

357 376 327 327 374 203 453 354

(275) (164) (111) (61) (192) (45) (94) (130)

1826 Price

N

414 (167) 441 (89) 383 (78) 433 (6) 400 (5) 425 (2) 450 (9) 175 (2) 1848 Price 410 410 — 410 410 --

N (2) (2) (2) (2) --

{continued)

Table B. 11 Continued 1849 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

300 — 300 300 — — 300

1863 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

1001 1001 __ __ — --

1852 Price

N (1) — (1) (1) — (1) —

N (1) (1) _. __ — -

560 600 500 650 538 — —

N (5) (3) (2) (1) (4) — —

1853 Price

N

332 (113) 352 (64) 307 (49) 425 (29) 290 (27) 247 (35) 465 (43) 254 (29)

1864 Price

N

1870 Price

N

607 637 519 539 630 458 818 342

(87) (65) (22) (33) (48) (18) (45) (22)

311 353 257 342 268 250 450 216

(291) (165) (126) (169) (120) (41) (113) (136)

1856 Price

N

681 (146) 669 (69) 692 (77) 681 (146) — 473 (26) 836 (73) 554 (47) 1872 Price

N

656 (111) 641 (64) 677 (47) 72 (51) 567 (51) 415 (13) 871 (55) 474 (41)

1858 Price 450 450 — — — — 1874 Price 722 814 597 328 790 233 899 458

N (2) (2) — — —

1859 Price 643 445 722 651 — 507 863 650

N

1860 Price

1861 Price

N

(42) 947 (315) (11) 1024 (181) 843 (134) (30) (39) 896 (125) — 981 (189) 630 (45) (20) (12) 1086 (198) 778 (66) (10)

N

1875 Price

N

(400) (231) (169) (58) (340) (63) (272) (65)

505 525 492 506 500 267 625 500

(10) (4) (6) (8) (2) (3) (6) (1)

1877 Price 556 800 486 — __ — —

N (9) (2) (7) __ —

332 356 294 400 —

N (21) (13) (8) (1) — —

Table B.12 Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Havana, 1802-1877 1802 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

356 385 317 275 388 200 465 245 1827 Price

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

1807 Price

N (7) (4) (3) (2) (5) (1) (4) (2)

450 450 450 — 450 400 456

(9) (4) (5) (8) (1) (8) •

1834 Price

N

1812 Price

N

(35) (17) (18) (5) (28) (3) (20) (3)

1861 Price

N

1863 Price

(21) (13) (8) (1)

1001 1001 — -

(1) (1) — --

— -

— --

— — --

— — --

•

(1) (1) (1) —

N

(1) (1) (1) -

"

1836 Price

N

396 385 406 70 445 87 473 350

332 356 294 400

200 — 200 200 __ — —

"

300 300 300 — —

N

170 170 170 170 —

N (1) (1) (1) — (1) —

1815 Price

N

382 391 333 300 404 300 404 200

(19) (16) (3) (4) (15) (2) (16) (1)

1841 Price

N

357 376 327 327 374 203 453 354

(275) (164) (111) (61) (192) (45) (94) (130)

1864 Price

N

1870 Price

N

607 637 519 539 630 458 818 342

(87) (65) (22) (33) (48) (18) (45) (22)

311 353 257 342 268 250 450 216

(291) (165) (126) (169) (120) (41) (113) (136)

1822 Price

1824 Price

N

300 300 — — 300

(1) (1) — (1)

—

— —

1848 Price

N

410 410 — 410

(2) (2) — — (2)

410

(2)

1872 Price

N

656 (111) 641 (64) 677 (47) 722 (51) 567 (51) 415 (13) 871 (55) 474 (41)

238 200 250 250 200

(4) (1) (3) (3) (1) — --

—

1852 Price 560 600 500 650 538

1825 Price

N

(5) (3) (2) (1) (4) —

—

350 350 350

(1) (1) (1)

350

(1) —

1858 Price

N

1874 Price

N

722 814 597 328 790 233 899 458

(400) (231) (169) (58) (340) (63) (272) (65)

N

450 450 — — — —

1877 Price 556 800 486 — __ __ — --

N

1826 Price

N

400 411 367 433 400 400 450 175

(12) (9) (3) (6) (5) (1) (9) (2)

1860 Price

N

947 (315) (2) (2) 1024 (181) — 843 (134) 896 (125) — 981 (189) 630 (45) - 1088 (199) 778 (66)

N (9) (2) (7) ._ __ — --

Table B.13 Assessment values by sex, age, and nationality, Santiago, 1826—1875 1826 Price All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

415 (155) 445 (80) 384 (75) — — 450 (1) — — 1856 Price

All slaves Males Females Creoles Africans Ages 1-14 Ages 15-40 Ages 41 +

N

N

681 (146) 669 (69) 692 (77) 681 (146) — _. 473 (26) 836 (73) 554 (47)

1827 Price 311 301 372 100 322 158 363

1834 Price

N (21) (18) (3) (1) (20) (4) (16) •

1859 Price 643 445 722 651 — 508 863 650

•

N (42) (11) (30) (39) — (20) (12) (10)

350 350 350 350 350 350 350 350

N (43) (25) (18) (9) (34) (10) (26) (3)

1875 Price

N

505 525 492 506 500 267 625 500

(10) (4) (6) (8) (2) (3) (6) (1)

1835 Price 241 223 272 272 354 87 353 241

N

1839 Price

N

(24) (15) (9) (7) (5) (3) (8) (5)

349 350 347 347 350 350 348 350

(36) (17) (19) (17) (19) (10) (23) (3)

1840 Price 348 333 377 347 350 400 372 —

N (9) (6) (3) (6) (3) (1) (6) —

1849 Price 300 — 300 300 — 300

N (1) — (1) (1) — (1) —

1853 Price

N

335 (112) 357 (63) 307 (49) 425 (29) 290 (27) 254 (34) 465 (43) 254 (29)

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Index

abolition of slavery, xiv, 10, 10033, 12, 13, 15, 21, 29-30, 31, 311125, 33-4, 43, 57, 571128, 60, 60036, 61, 66, 83, 85, 93-4, n o , 151, 153; in Brazil, 46, 58-9, 65-6, 91-2, 151; by British in colonies, 29-30, 52—3, 64; see also Anglo-Spanish antislave trade treaty ofi8i7,ofi835; Moret Law of 1870; U.S. South, abolition of slavery in Academia de Ciencias de Cuba. See Cuban Academy of Sciences African slave nationalities, 72—5, 144; see also un-

147, 149—154; slave self-purchase compared with coartacion in, 133-7, I 4° bribing, of local officials, 59, 59n34, 71 British South Sea Company, 94-5, 95n2 8 British West Indies, historiography of slavery in, 6ni7,7,8 caballeria. See agrarian land units cafetales. See coffee cultivation Calvo de la Puerta, Sebastian, 24 Canedo, Valentin, 59, 59n34, 66 Carabalfs, 36, 72—5

der individual African nations

African slaves compared with Creoles: ages of, 41-7; coartado sales of, 145; fertility rates of, 68, 68n45; population of, 99, 111, 11 m64; prices of, 67-72, 85, 86, 99, 114-5, 144; sales of, 38, 43-6, 85 agrarian land units: planted in sugar, 25; price of, 107, iO7n5o; for settlement of Cienfuegos, 106, io6n44, io6n45 alcabala. See sales tax

Anglo-American treaty of 1862, 71 Anglo-Spanish antislave trade treaty of 1817, 21, 25, 26, 29, 29n2O, 43-4, 51-2, 86, 91, 93-4,!43, 146 Anglo-Spanish antislave trade treaty of 1835, 2 9> 43-4, 65,91, 144 asientos. See monopolies, trade Bahia Honda, 79 Barbados: historiography of slavery in, 8, 23; slave self-purchase in, 138m 8 Batabano, expansion of sugar and coffee sectors into, 27 billetes. See currency, paper Brazil: abolition of slavery in, 52—3, 65—6, 91— 2, 151; coffee production in, 5ni6, 27, 150; end of slave trade in, 46, 58—60, 65—6, 92, 119, 144, 150; historiography of slavery in, 5, 6, 6ni7; price trends in, 2, 3n6, 146,

cartas de libertad. See letters of freedom

cattle ranching, 27, 32—3, 35, 84, 107; in Cienfuegos, 107, 109; in Havana, 80; in Puerto Principe, 109; in Santiago, 94, 941126 Cedula de Gracias of 1815, 106 cedulas. See registration, slave Chinese contract labor, 31, 54, 54n2 3, 58, 58n3o, 60, 143 Cienfuegos, 13, 103-21; cattle sector in, 107; domestic slaves in, 108; expansion of sugar economy in, 99, 106-11; formerly colonia Fernandina de Jagua, 106-7; l an d prices in, 107; slave market of, 13, 111—21, 144—5 Civil War, United States, 33, 67, 71, 119, 143, 144; see also South, United States cliometrics. See econometric history, use of coartacion, 18, 34—5, 122—42, 143; by national origin, I 3 4 n i o ; see also coartados; coartado

prices; letters of freedom; manumission; slave self-purchase coartado prices: compared with contracted prices, 18, I27n6, 130, 133; compared with slave prices, 18, i23n4, 124-5, I27> 128-9; by sex, 137 coartado sales, 18, 121, 145; of Africans compared with Creoles, 145, 145m; by age, 123, 124; by origin, 124, I24n5; by sex, 12 3-4

243

244

Index

coartados: down payments by, 18, 122, 123, 133; legal status of, 18, 122; rights of, 122, 131— 2, 133 coffee cultivation, 25, 26, 2~jni^, 28—9, 29m8, 2c>ni9, 30, 3on22, 31-2, 3in26, 35, 6yn42, 82ni3, 82ni5, 83, 84, 107; in Brazil, 6, 27, 150, 151, 153; and French immigrants, 82, 95; in Havana, 29, 82, 83, 86, 96; in Matanzas, 29m9; in Santiago, 96—8 Colombia, slave self-purchase in, 138 Colon, 29, 108, 109 Congos, 36, 72—5 corn production, in Cienfuegos, 109-10 Creole slaves compared with Africans: ages of, 41—7; coartado sales of, 145; fertility rates of, 68, 68n45; population of, 99-100, i n , 11 in64; prices of, 67—72, 85, 86, 99, 114— 15, 144; sales of, 38, 43-6, 85 Cuban Academy of Sciences, xivni Cuban census: of 1817, 25, 26; of 1827, 107; of 1841,3on22;of 1846, 79n2; of 1852, 3on22;of 1862, 79n2, 83, 85, 98, 100, 108; of 1877,79n2, 85 Cuban Institute of History, xv, xvi currency: gold, 19, 22, 47ni4; paper, I2n37, 19,I9ni4, 22, 47ni4 demographics of slave market. See slave population disease, impact on slave population of, 35, 35n38,64 domestic workers, 30, 3on2i, 72, 73, 83; in Cienfuegos, 108; in Havana, 30, 84; in Santiago, 96-7; see also slave occupations econometric history, use of, 2-8, 13 elite, Cuban, 24, 53, 65, 81, 95-6, 106, 121 emancipation, 26, 34; see also coartacion; coartados

exslaves, and forced labor contracts, 34, 60

Havana: British occupation of, 24—6, 2 5n6, 81; coffee cultivation in, 27, 29, 82, 83; demographics of slave market in, 38—47; land prices in, 107; slave price trends by origin in, 144; slave price trends by sex in, 145; slavery in, 13, 79—85, 85—94; socioeconomic development of, 79-85; sugar expansion in, 27, 79-82; tobacco economy in, 80; historiography of slavery in, 1—14 Jamaica: slavery in, 7, 23—4; slave self-purchase in,138,I38ni8 Kindelan, Sebastian, 96 Las Villas: railroad building in, 53; sugar expansion into, 99, 57 letters of freedom, 18,12 8-31; see also coartacion Lucumis, 36, 72-5 Mandingas, 72-5 manumission, 38n3, 122—42; unpaid, 134, I 3 4 n i o ; see also coartacion; coartados; letters of

freedom; slave self-purchase Martinique, 8 Matanzas: coffee cultivation in, 27, 29m9, 82m5; railroad building in, 53; slave prices in, 13; slave repression in, 54; slavery in, 13, 27, 33, 35n39; sugar economy in, I3n4i, 29ni9, 53, 57, 58, 99, 108, 109 monopolies, trade, 23, 25, 2 5n9, 81, 8in8, 945, 95n28; see also British South Sea Company; Real Compania Moret Law of 1870, 34, 50, 60-1, 71, 83, non63, 151 mulattoes, 23 Napoleonic Wars, 25, 26, 67n42, 86, 96

French presence: expulsion from Cuba, 95-6; im- papeletas para el cobro de la alcabala. See sales tax patronato. See exslaves migration from French Saint Domingue, 95; Peru: commodity prices in, 1; slave self-purchase refugees from Haiti, 82 in,137,I37ni4 French Saint Domingue, 24 Pezuela, Juan de la, 59 frontier regions, expansion of sugar into, 27, 28, 2 9> 37> 53' 56, 57> 58, 99, 108, 109; see also potrero. See cattle ranching prices, real versus nominal prices, 22, 47ni4, under individual regions 155-6 prostitution, slave, 139, I39ni9, 145 Gangas, 36, 72-5 governors, Cuban, 66, 28, 59, 65, 66, 67, 143; railroad building, 28, 53, 56, 99 see also under individual names Ramirez, Alejandro, 106 Guana jay, 79 Real Compania, 241^4, 2 4 ^ , 2"ync^, 8in8 Giiines valley, expansion of sugar and coffee secregistration, slave, 66—7, 93 tors into, 27 reproduction, slave, 26, 35—6, 38, 38n2, 38n3, 68, 68n45, 98n4o; premium placed on poHaiti: exodus of French refugees from, 28; slave tential for, 43—4, 63—4, 63^38, 66, 67, 68, revolt in, 67n42, 82, 106, 28, 8

Index 76, 90, 92, 119, 154; in Santiago, 98; in U.S. South, 63, 63038 rice production, in Cienfuegos, 109 rural workers, 72—8; living conditions of, 34—5; in Santiago, 97 sales tax, 13, 16-7, I7n6 Santiago: African slaves compared to Creoles in, 99; coffee cultivation in, 96—8; slave market of, 13, 99-103; slave prices in, 38-47; slave price trends by sex, 99, 145; socioeconomic development of, 94—9; tobacco economy in, 94 Siete Partidas, 131 slave living conditions, 34—5, 35, 35n36 slave occupations, 17, 20, 62-3, 72-8, 83-5, 84ni8, 96-8, 139, 140, 144-5 slave population: by age, 17, 20, 40—2, 46, 96— 7, 98; of Cienfuegos, 98; of Havana, 98; by origin, 36, 40—2, 67—72, 85, 114—16; of Santiago, 38-47, 96-9; by sex, 27, 30, 40-2, 86, 90-2, 9on24; 92n25, 97, 108,114, 119-20

slave prices: by age, 13, 90-2, 115; compared with Brazilian prices, 147—54; compared with coartado prices, 124-5, I27> 128-9; compared with U.S. prices, 146-50, 153-4, 155-6; general, 21, 38-47, 49-52, 55, 6 5 6, 77-8, 8 5 - 6 , 9 1 - 4 , 1 1 9 , 143, 150, 155—6; impact of bribes on, 59, 59n34; influenced by personal defects, 17, 19; by occupation, 72—78, see also slave occupations; by origin, 13, 67—72, 144; by sex, 13, 61-7, 145; short-term fluctuations in, 52-61 slave rebellions of 1830s—1840s, 28, 53—4, 57 slave sales, by age, 13, 17, 41—6; by age (in Cienfuegos) 112,114; linked to sugar prices, 93; by origin, 13, 17, 41-5, 85; by sex, 13, 17,

245

44> 46—7, 85, 86—92; by sex (in Cienfuegos), 111—12, 145; by sex (in Santiago), 13, 99; by time period, 38-47 slave self-purchase, 18, 34—5; compared with Cub a n coartacion, 131—42; see also coartados

slave transactions: analysis of total sales, 38—78; types of, 17, I7n9; see also coartacion South, United States: abolition of slavery in, 29, 33, 60, 93; impact on Cuban slavery, 33; impact on slave trade volumes, 67; manumission of female slaves in, 138-9; slave prices in, 59, 146—50, 153—4, I55~~6; slavery in, in 1, 3, 3n8, 3n9, 4nio, 41112, 7, 10-11, 63, 63n38, 67; slave self-purchase in, 138, 138m 8; see also Civil War, United States Spanish antislaving penal code of 1845, 31, 3in25, 45, 59,69,93, 100 Spanish antislaving royal decree of 1866, 33, 6on36, 93 tachas. See slave prices, influenced by personal defects taxes: on domestic slaves, 84; on exports, 24, 95 technical innovation, in sugar-processing, 10, n , 12, 53, 57, 58n30, 109 Ten Years' War (1868-78), 12, 19, 20, 33-4, 56, 57, 60, 83, 85, 99, n o , 143, 151 tobacco economy, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32, 81, 82; in Havana, 80, 8on5, 81, 83, 84; in Santiago, 94 Trinidad, slavery in, 7 U.S. Civil War. See Civil War, United States U.S. South. See South, United States Valdes, Geronimo, 65 vegas. See tobacco economy Zulueta, Julian, 66

CAMBRIDGE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

3 8 10 15 22 24 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Peter Calvert. The Mexican Revolution 1910—1914: The Diplomacy of Anglo-American Conflict Celso Furtado. Economic Development of Latin America: Historical Background and Contemporary Problems D. A. Brading. Mines and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico. 1763—1810 P. J. Bakewell. Silver Mining and Society in Colonial Mexico. Zacatecas. 1564—1700 James Lockhart and Enrique Otte. Letters and People of the Spanish Indies: The Sixteenth Century Jean A. Meyer. The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State. 1926—1929 Charles F. Nunn. Foreign Immigrants in Early Bourbon Mexico. 1700—1760 D. A. Brading. Haciendas andRanchos in the Mexican Bajio David Nicholls. From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Color, and National Independence in Haiti Jonathan C. Brown. A Socioeconomic History of Argentina. 1776—i860 Marco Palacios. Coffee in Colombia. 1850—1970: An Economic, Social, and Political History David Murray. Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain, and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade D. A. Brading. Caudillo and Peasant in the Mexican Revolution Joe Foweraker. The Struggle for Land: A Political Economy of the Pioneer Frontier in Brazil from 1930 to the Present Day George Philip. Oil and Politics in Latin America: Nationalist Movements and State Companies Noble David Cook. Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru. 1520-1620 Gilbert M.Joseph. Revolution from Without: Yucatan, Mexico, and the United States. 1880—1924 B. S. M.cBeth. Juan Vicente Gomez and the Oil Companes in Venezuela. 1908—1935 J. A. Offner. Law and Politics in Aztec Texcoco Thomas J. Trebat. Brazils State-Owned Enterprises: A Case Study of the State as Entrepreneur James Lockhart and Stuart B. Schwartz. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil Adolfo Figueroa. Capitalist Development and the Peasant Economy in Peru Norman Long and Bryan Roberts. Mines, Peasants, and Entrepreneurs: Regional Development in the Central Highlands of Peru Ian Roxborough. Unions and Politics in Mexico: The Case of the Automobile Industry Alan Gilbert and Peter Ward. Housing, the State, and the Poor: Policy and Practice in Three Latin American Cities Jean Stubbs. Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labor History. 1860-1958 Stuart B. Schwartz. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia. 1550—1835 Richard J. Walter. The Province of Buenos Aires and Argentine Politics. 1912—1945 Alan Knight. The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1: Porfirians, Liberals, and Peasants Alan Knight. The Mexican Revolution, vol. 2: Counter-Revolution and Reconstruction P. Michael McKinley. Pre-Revolutionary Caracas: Politics, Economy, and Society. 1777—1811 Adriaan C. van Oss. Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala. 1524—1821 Leon Zamosc. The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia: Struggles of the National Peasant Association. 1967-1981 Brian R. Hamnett. Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions. 1750—1824 Manuel Caballero. Latin America and the Comintern. 1919—1943 Inga Clendinnen. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan. 1517—1570 Jeffrey D. Needell. Tropical Belle Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio deJaneiro Victor Bulmer-Thomas. The Political Economy of Central America since 1920 Daniel James. Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class. 1946-1976 Bill Albert. South America and the First World War: The Impact of the War on Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Chile Jonathan Hartlyn. The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia Charles H. Wood and Jose Alberto Magno de Carvalho. The Demography of Inequality in Brazil

CAMBRIDGE LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

68

Sandra Lauderdale Graham. House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in NineteenthCentury Rio deJaneiro 69 Ronald H. Chilcote. Power and the Ruling Classes in Northeast Brazil: Juazeiro and Petrolina in Transition 70 Joanne Rappaport. The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes 71 Suzanne Austin Alchon. Native Society and Disease in Colonial Ecuador 72 Charles Guy Gillespie. Negotiating Democracy. Politicians and Generals in Uruguay 73 Michael P. Costeloe. The Central Republic in Mexico, 1835-1846: Hombres de Bien in the Age of Santa Anna 74 Richard J. Walter. Politics and Urban Growth in Buenos Aires, 1^10—1^42 75 Anthony McFarlane. Colombia Before Independence: Economy, Society, and Politics under Bourbon Rule 7 6 Oscar Cornblit. Power and Violence in a Colonial City: Orurofrom the Mining Renaissance to the Rebellion of Tupac Amaru (1740—1782) ~~l~l Victor Bulmer-Thomas. The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence 78 Eugene Ridings. Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth Century Brazil 79 Laird W. Bergad, Fe Iglesias Garcia, Maria del Carmen Barcia. The Cuban Slave Market, 1790—1880