Johnson, L. (Ed.), "A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect Slaves and Their Masters in The Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires"

“A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and
Respect”: Slaves and Their Masters in the

Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/hahr/article-pdf/87/4/631/705257/hahr874_02_johnson.pdf by UNIV TORCUATO DI TELLA user on 02 November 2023

Lyman L. Johnson
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s

original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made,
through disobedience and through rebellion.
— Oscar Wilde
In Buenos Aires, on October 26, 1759, Don Alonso Isidro Rodriguez de la Peña
replied in writing to the charge that he held the parda Francisca Marigorta in
illegal bondage. After fleeing from his household, Francisca had found tempo-
rary refuge with a sympathetic neighbor, Don Bernardo Quiroga. The neighbor
had then written to the defensor general de pobres, indios y esclavos (the defender of
the poor, Indians, and slaves), Don Pedro Gonzalez Cortina, to lay out Fran-
cisca’s claim that she was a free woman held illegally as a slave. According to this
unofficial advocate, Francisca had been born to a free mother in the interior city
of San Juan and was therefore free from birth.
Francisca claimed that she had come to Buenos Aires from her native San
Juan as a free servant in Rodriguez de la Peña’s household. Once relocated in
Buenos Aires, however, her employer began to “treat [her] as a slave, subjecting
[her] to harsh punishments and confining [her] to the house.” When she pro-
tested, Rodriguez de la Peña had put her in chains. Because Francisca was “poor
and miserable,” the defensor took up her case. He immediately requested that
Rodriguez de la Peña produce proof of her condition or stop harassing her. In
I wish to thank Charles Cutter, Jerry Dávila, Zephyr Frank, Jane Landers, Bianca Premo, Matt
Restall, Susan Socolow, and Ben Vinson, as well as the anonymous readers for the Hispanic
American Historical Review, for their helpful comments. This work was supported, in part, by a
Senior Faculty Research Grant from The University of North Carolina Charlotte.
Hispanic American Historical Review 87:4

doi 10.1215/00182168-2007-038
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
HAHR874_02_Johnson.indd 631 10/1/07 2:58:27 PM

632 HAHR / November / Johnson
response, Rodriguez de la Peña admitted that he could not provide a bill of sale
for Francisca because, he claimed, she had been part of a contested inheritance
still unresolved by the courts. His claims therefore rested on his self-interested
assertion that “Francisca has been in my power for years” and “has served me

and my family as a slave” without protest. That is, she was a slave because she
had acted like one. Almost one year to the day after her initial appeal to colonial
authorities, the court recognized Francisca’s freedom and ordered Rodriguez de
la Peña to leave her in peace.1
This article analyzes three types of late colonial court cases found in the
Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina: individuals held as
slaves who disputed their legal status, slaves who demanded the right to purchase
their freedom or the freedom of family members, and slaves who demanded
the right to seek new masters because of abuses suffered at the hands of their
present owners.2 This last process, papel de venta, gave a slave a set term, usu-
ally a month, to find a more congenial owner willing to pay the assessed price.
Most commonly the defensor — an advocacy position usually filled by one of
the cabildo’s regidores, or occasionally an alcalde — represented the plaintiff.3 A
1. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, DC-SG, Tribunales (hereafter, AGN-

DC-SG, Tribunales), leg. M8, exp. 21.
2. I found 78 cases where individuals held as slaves complained to judicial authorities
that they were held illegally. Typically they initiated this process by contacting the defensor
general de pobres, indios y esclavos. The defensor was a regidor (member of the town
council) selected by his peers to serve as advocate for a one-year term. In an additional 36
cases, slaves demanded the right to purchase their own freedom or that of a family member.
Another 19 cases involved slaves who asked the defensor to facilitate relocation to a new
master via a papel de venta. This process established the slave’s market price and permitted
the slave to arrange for a transfer to a new master. These 133 cases were distributed
by decade in the following manner: 1761 – 70 (7.5%), 1771 – 80 (13.5%), 1781 – 90 (25%),
1791 – 1800 (38%), 1801 – 10 (16%).
3. Historians of colonial Spanish America have moved away from studies of
administrative and judicial institutions to engage a range of social, cultural, and economic
topics. Most of the work on these institutions is vintage in character. See John Preston
Moore, The Cabildo in Peru under the Hapsburgs (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1954);
Constantino Bayle, S.J., Los cabildos secularles en la América española (Madrid: Sapientia, 1952);
and W. W. Pierson, “Some Reflections on the Cabildo as an Institution,” HAHR 4, no. 3
(1922): 573 – 96. For an economic treatment, see Clarence Haring, The Spanish Empire in
America (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1953), 158 – 78. A useful recent discussion
of the Iberian antecedents and early institutionalization in New Spain is found in Agustín
Bermudez, “La abogacia de los pobres,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español 50 (1980):
1039 – 54. Charles R. Cutter discusses the role of the defensor in the indigenous regions of
northern New Spain in The Legal Culture of Northern New Spain, 1700 – 1810 (Albuquerque:
Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995), see 126 – 27 and 136.

‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect’ 633
small number of cases were brought directly to higher authorities: the audien-
cia, the captain general, or the viceroy (after 1776). All these files contain a full
statement of the complaint, often amplified in response to the counterclaims of
masters or others, as well as the record of all actions initiated by the defensor.

Most cases also note the court’s final resolution.4
Cases such as Francisca’s reveal three central characteristics of slavery in
late colonial Buenos Aires. First, even though a majority of slave plaintiffs failed
to win their cases, the courts did provide slaves with significant leverage in dis-
putes with owners. The legal process could drag on for years, during which time
the courts often permitted slaves to live and work away from an owner’s direct
supervision and control. Therefore, even when an owner prevailed in court, the
victor had often been deprived of all or a part of a slave’s labor or income while
simultaneously being forced to bear significant court costs (often exceeding 25
percent of a bozal’s market value or 40 percent of the annual income earned by
a slave journeyman).5 In some cases owners or purported owners simply gave
up the legal battle rather than accept these costs. Slave plaintiffs, on the other
hand, generally did not incur legal costs, since their costs were routinely subsi-
dized or paid in full by the defensor. Even when slaves were forced to remain in
the hands of an oppressive master, the experience of close supervision by court
officers and related court costs could force an owner to improve conditions. For
many slaves, compelling even a small adjustment in the behavior of an abusive
owner must have been viewed as a victory.
Second, slaves often found allies outside the slave community in their con-
tests with masters, as Francisca’s case demonstrates. These allies might include
local officials and other members of propertied and influential groups. In nearly
every case examined here, slaves’ claims were supported by the testimony of
propertied Spaniards and creoles, many of whom condemned the behavior
of particularly cruel masters like Rodriguez de la Peña. Francisca’s case was
brought to the attention of the defensor by a sympathetic neighbor who also
4. Within the limited research on the use of courts by slaves, most discussion to
this point has not relied on actual court cases. Nevertheless, the topic continues to attract
attention. See Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The
Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004):
339 – 68. An older but still-useful examination is Norman A. Meiklejohn, “The
Implementation of Slave Legislation in Eighteenth-Century New Granada,” in Slavery and
Race Relations in Latin America, ed. Robert Brent Toplin (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974),
176 – 203.
5. See my “Salarios, precios y costo de vida en el Buenos Aires colonial tardío,” Boletín
del Instituto de Historia Argentina y América 2, 3rd series (first half of 1990), esp. 137 – 46, for
discussion of wages at this time.

resisted Rodriguez de la Peña’s efforts to seize her. Moreover, the ultimate suc-
cess of Francisca’s case depended on the testimony of two Spanish witnesses in
her native San Juan, who rejected the claims of Rodriguez de la Peña as cruel
and untrue, specifically excoriating him for his misrepresentations. Finally,

Pedro Gonzalez Cortina, the Buenos Aires defensor, demonstrated again and
again a healthy skepticism about the self-serving testimony of Francisca’s self-
professed master, emphasizing in his statements to the court the grave injustice
of imposing slavery on a free person.
Third, the documents make clear the deeply personal nature of these con-
flicts over legal status and treatment. The testimonies illuminate the complex
fabric of deference, dependence, affection, loyalty, guilt, animus, and disgust
that held masters and slaves together or propelled them apart, sometimes vio-
lently. When pursued systematically, the language of the claims and counter-
claims reveals the emotional, as well as legal, landscape within which masters
and slaves sought to impose their wills.6 The slave plaintiffs generally knew
their masters well. In some instances they had dressed them, bathed them, and
prepared their meals. Some had had sex with their masters. Many worked with
them shoulder to shoulder every day. When these slaves came to see their bond-
age as an intolerable injustice, they knew exactly who was at fault. They did not
view injustice as the abstracted characteristics of a cruel institution; they instead
viewed it as the result of specific actions by the masters with whom they lived
in close proximity. As a result, these documents are filled with the white heat
of emotion — allegations of betrayal, lies, and physical abuse march across our
line of sight. Although slaves often received harsh punishments, many remained
unbowed in the face of abuse. A minority found, in the frustration and bitter-
ness generated by a master’s violence and lies, the strength to pursue redress in
court. The testimony offered to the court in these cases suggests that relations
between slaves and masters in late colonial Buenos Aires had a sharp edge.
The slaves’ testimonies present few expressions of deference, and even
those few were constrained, limited in reach, and formulaic in nature, suggest-
ing they were offered narrowly to satisfy the expectations of lawyers and judges.
It was more common for slaves, once under the thin protections of the courts,
to express contempt, not deference, toward their masters, describing them, for
example, as “belligerent,” “cruel,” “filled with pride,” or “filled with hate” for
6. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. S5, exp. 10, for a good example of the heated
emotional context within which these contests developed. In this case from the 1770s, a
slave was forced to continue working in bondage, “with near fatal consequences and risks,”
even though his mother had paid 150 pesos toward his freedom 16 years later.

the slave.7 Free blacks attempting to gain the manumission of a relative were
even less constrained, although they worried that their actions or words might
provoke an assault on a loved one. One aunt, frustrated by a master’s effort to
extract the maximum economic benefit from her niece’s manumission, reported

to the defensor that the child was “mistreated brutally because of the hatred
this man has for me.”8 Francisca, our initial case, demonstrated little fear of
the man who claimed to be her master, despite his use of corporal punishment
and chains to control her. She fled from his authority, found a safe refuge, and
then filled her letters to authorities with angry denunciations of Rodriguez de
la Peña’s character and behavior. After reminding the court of the “many cruel-
ties” she had suffered, she demanded that “perpetual silence” be imposed on
“this Peña.”
Francisca’s words, and the heat with which they were expressed, suggest that
historians need to pay more attention to the emotional, and not just evidentiary,
content of these cases. I am not suggesting that our ongoing effort to illuminate
the nature and functioning of the institution of slavery be replaced by a serial
examination of individual disputes between masters and slaves; I am suggesting,
however, that we might better grasp the lived reality of this condition, at least in
urban settings, if we recognize the personal and sometimes intimate nature of
these conflicts. The evidence demonstrates that these were not abstracted argu-
ments about the place of slavery in society; they were, instead, conflicts between
and among human actors disputing claims of authority, power, obligation, duty,
honor, and affection.9
Slaves saw the courts as a venue in which to seek redress for the violence
and mistreatment they had suffered. Many used their sworn testimonies to place
an owner’s most embarrassing behaviors and shameful actions before the public.
Although testimonies were taken privately outside the court, slaves knew that
these stories often circulated in the wider society. Slaves embittered by their
7. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. B8, exp. 13 for a case brought by three male
slaves against their owner, Don Faustino de la Barcena. The slaves asked the defensor to
force a sale to a new master to protect them from cruel treatment. The quotations are from
José’s complaint.
8. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. V3, exp. 13.
9. At times the asserted impunity of slave owners was breathtaking. In a 1777 case,
Viceroy Pedro Cevallos was addressed by Antonio Galain, “moreno libre.” Antonio asserted
that he had won the right to purchase his freedom with monthly payments in an earlier
court case. Yet, with only a single payment outstanding, he had been transported to the
Banda Oriental (Uruguay) and forcibly enlisted in a segregated militia unit by his owner,
Doña Francisca de Sorarte. AGN-DC-SG, Solicitudes Civiles, book 3, F – G.

bondage seldom focused their testimonies narrowly on the legal issue brought
to court. Instead they freely discussed the sexual misconduct, debts, physical
disabilities, and even incontinence of masters, pushing these embarrassing
revelations into the public realm. The satisfaction that slaves could take from

performing their anger and frustration to this broader public helps us better
understand why slaves pursued these unequal legal contests.10
This also helps explain why masters responded with such anger to what
they took to be the aggressive language and rebelliousness of their servants.
The words and tone of slave testimonies led both masters and judges to com-
plain of “a lack of legitimate obedience and respect due a master.” Many masters
seemed genuinely shocked to find themselves in court defending actions they
assumed were essential to maintaining discipline and order in their households.
Faced with her slave’s demand for a papel de venta, Doña Feliciana Duarte
complained that Juana had left her house without permission to file the com-
plaint and that the slave’s testimony “defamed my reputation and honor.”11 Yet,
despite the fact that many of these cases were widely discussed, owners often
appeared unprepared for the formal complaint and resulting legal process that
enveloped them. Rodriguez de la Peña, for example, expressed his frustration
that his “scrupulous and decent treatment” of Francisca had been rewarded by
allegations that challenged his “honor” and damaged his reputation. He was
not alone. Masters nearly always condemned the testimony of their servants as
scurrilous and defamatory, but these complaints seldom gained traction with
judicial officers.12
Typically, disputes over legal status entered the judicial process through
the intervention of defensores. The incumbents were usually laymen serving
as regidores of the cabildo, selected to serve an annual term. They were almost
never lawyers.13 Not only were defensores uncompensated; they were also
10. Daniel Lord Smail thoughtfully explores the use of courts to seek revenge in The
Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marsailles, 1264 – 1423 (Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press, 2003), chap. 2.
11. The defensor, Don Bernardo Pereda Saravia, sought a papel de venta for Juana
because she had been mistreated by Doña Feliciana Duarte, who had demanded 650 pesos
when Juana sought to purchase her freedom. The defensor pointed out that Doña Feliciana
had only paid 400 pesos for Juana two years earlier. See AGN-DC-SG, Administrativos,
leg. 30, exp. 1030.
12. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. 31, exp. 21, for an example of this reaction.
13. It was not uncommon, however, for the defensor to seek, and even pay for, a
lawyer’s assistance. For a case where a local lawyer volunteered to represent poor prisoners,
including slaves, see Acuerdos del Extinguido Cabildo de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Archivo

required to bear most of the costs associated with these cases. To limit these
expenses, in 1786 defensores were relieved of the burden of advocating for slaves
in civil cases.14 Surviving cabildo records do not suggest that defensores were
selected because of some demonstrated interest in or commitment to the plight

of slaves, Indians, or the poor in general. The widespread assumption within the
culture seems to have been that these were the predictable concerns of Catholic
Christians. In practice, incumbents varied significantly in their willingness to
pursue the complaints of slaves.15 Some expressed a strong belief that both God
and Natural Law were inclined on the side of freedom and that slavery could
be imposed only within strict limits.16 One defensor expressed this sentiment
expansively when arguing for the right of a freeman to purchase his son’s free-
dom, beginning his appeal with “Oh! Sweet liberty!”17 On occasion, a defensor
even found the resources to gain a slave’s freedom outside the judicial process.18
On the other hand, some defensores never took up a single case on behalf of a
slave during their terms.19
While only a small percentage of those held in bondage in late colonial
Buenos Aires were involved in such cases, it is clear that both slaves and slave
owners discussed and remembered the courts’ decisions, the relative efficacy
of slaves’ strategies, and the authorities’ responsiveness to specific complaints
General de la Nación, 1929), series 3, vol. 6, bk. 41, 115 – 16. Agustín Bermúdez, in his
“La abogacia de pobres,” esp. 1047 – 52, shows that in New Spain, Peru, and Nueva
Granada defensores were commonly lawyers paid from audiencia funds.
14. After 1786, the defensor de pobres was relieved of the burden of advocacy in civil
suits brought by the poor. Instead, an annual fund of three hundred pesos was put aside to
hire lawyers to take these cases. See Acuerdos del Extinguido Cabildo de Buenos Aires, series 3,
vol. 8, bk. 48, 203.
15. There were some exceptions to the general pattern, however. See AGN-DC-SG,
Tribunales, leg. 31, exp. 47, for a case where the free morena María Antonia complained that
the defensor was the brother-in-law of her daughter’s master and had not actively pursued
her request to force a manumission for a fair price.
16. References to natural law were more common in the last decade of the eighteenth
century than earlier, suggesting that the Enlightenment had begun to reframe legal
discussions in Buenos Aires.
17. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. 56, exp. 12. This case was appealed by the defensor,
Don Manuel Rodriguez de la Vega, all the way to the viceroy in 1779.
18. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. S5, exp. 10, for a case where the defensor found
the funds to purchase a slave’s freedom.
19. Among those who served as defensor was Tomás Antonio Romero — without a
doubt the city’s most successful participant in the African slave trade. During his year of
service he did not file a single complaint on behalf of a slave. See Acuerdos del Extinguido
Cabildo de Buenos Aires, series 3, vol. 9, bk. 56, 385.

(or lack thereof). As in the case of Francisca, slaves often made their case for
freedom or protested abusive treatment in very public ways. From the moment
that Francisca was protected behind the door of a neighbor’s home, her dispute
with Rodriguez de la Peña was performed directly for various audiences: for

her protector’s household, which included three slaves; for the defensor; and for
neighbors and even for strangers passing in the street. We must also suspect that
her grievances were then circulated through the conversations of witnesses with
their friends and acquaintances. The accumulated effect of these cases and the
protests and complaints that surrounded them, therefore, broadly influenced
the experience of slaves in Buenos Aires, far beyond the record of episodic and
sometimes unreliable advocacy by defensores.20
In late colonial Buenos Aires, disputes over legal condition almost always
occurred in one of two circumstances. In the first (as in the case of Francisca),
relocations broke patterns of established routine, separating slaves and free
blacks from family, friends, and neighbors who “knew” where they fit in the
social order. Once removed from well-established patterns of command and
subordination or, alternatively, patterns of independence and autonomy, some
slaves chose to challenge the authority of masters. Conversely, some free blacks
found their freedom threatened when separated from those who could vouch for
their legal status. In the second set of circumstances, the death of a slave owner
often led to conflict when the dying owner’s promise of freedom was contested
by heirs or a disputed inheritance forced the transfer of a slave to a new master.
These two contexts were pregnant with the potential for conflict and ambiva-
lence, suggesting that the effective boundaries of slavery were maintained not
only by laws and institutions but also by a dense web of human attachments and
habitual experiences. In cases where established relations of obedience and sub-
ordination were loosened, even temporarily, legal status could be challenged.
Here at the margins of slavery we can see revealed the institution’s essential
character, a character roiled continuously by the refusal of those held in bond-
age to consent to their condition.
As slavery expanded rapidly in the Río de la Plata after 1780, large num-
bers of slaves were on the move. Thousands of Africans carried to Montevideo
and Buenos Aires by the slave trade were sent to the interior, even to distant
Alto Perú and Chile. Although thousands more remained in Buenos Aires as
laborers, artisans, and servants, even among this more settled population many
20. For examples of slaves displaying knowledge of recent cases brought by defensores,
see AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. 129, exp. 3; Administrativos, leg. 32, exp. 1097;
Tribunales, leg. 81, exp. 45; and Administrativos, leg. 19, exp. 627.

were moved back and forth from Buenos Aires to the countryside by seasonal
labor demands. We also know that many free blacks moved from place to place
seeking better prospects, leaving Montevideo for Buenos Aires or Buenos Aires
for Córdoba, for example.21 The fact that former slaves often experienced their

freedom most fully through physical mobility helped to promote these pat-
terns of relocation. Putting distance between themselves and former masters
helped create new beginnings, away from the experience of close control and
supervision.
Nevertheless, while the forced movement of slaves facilitated escape for
some, the physical mobility of freed blacks entailed real dangers, as well as
the promise of new opportunities. If their legal status was challenged in a new
location, as was the case with Francisca, distance made it difficult to produce
documents and witnesses to substantiate claims to free status. Maritime routes
that crossed colonial boundaries could be particularly treacherous. In the com-
plex geopolitical environment of the late eighteenth century, when Spain was
engaged in a series of wars with European rivals, the capture of vessels by pri-
vateers and warships nearly always put in question the legal status of free black
passengers and crew.22 Two cases involving privateers illustrate the risks.
In 1799 a French privateer put into Montevideo with a Portuguese prize
captured along the coast of Brazil. The captain sought to sell the ship and its
cargo, including an African-born woman, Rosa María, who claimed to be free.
When local officials sought to determine the legitimacy of her claims, the cap-
tain quickly sold the captured ship and its cargo, then put to sea with Rosa
María on board. Spanish naval authorities intercepted the French ship in inter-
national waters and liberated the woman.23 In a 1802 case, the defensor in Bue-
21. For an interesting introduction to the situation in Montevideo, see Carlos Demasi,
“Familia y esclavitud en el Montevideo colonial,” in Sociedad y cultura en el Montevideo
colonial, ed. Luis Ernesto Behares and Oribe Cures (Montevideo: Centro de Estudios
Interdisciplinarios Uruguayos, 1997).
22. Since the crews of both privateers and naval vessels benefited financially from the
cargo seized from prizes, self-interest inclined them to claim all blacks on board as slaves,
barring conclusive evidence to the contrary. See Brian Vale, A War Betwixt Englishmen:
Brazil against Argentina on the River Plate, 1825 – 1830 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000); Horacio
Rodríguez, El corso rioplatense (Buenos Aires: Instituto Browniano, 1996); Miguel Ángel
de Marco, Corsarios argentinos (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 2002); and Cnel. (R) Dr. Carlos A.
Maynard, “La utilización del instituto del armamento en corso por parte de Artigas a la luz
del derecho internacional,” Revista del Instituto Histórico y Geográfico del Uruguay 28 (2002):
343 – 66.
23. This is the case of the French privateer Republicana. Rosa María Banguela, who was
seized onboard, managed to contact authorities to claim she was free. She had had

nos Aires intervened in a similar case. When the locally owned privateer Pilar
anchored off Buenos Aires with a Portuguese prize vessel, the Pilar’s owner,
Don Gerónimo Merino, announced the sale of the captured cargo, including
nine black men purported to be slaves. Before the sale could be arranged, the

nine Portuguese-speaking blacks aboard found a way to contact the defensor.
Three asserted that they were free passengers, while the other six claimed to
be crew members, “all manumitted or born free” — a claim the owner of the
privateer denied24 While he investigated these claims and counterclaims, the
defensor removed all nine from Merino’s control. The three passengers were
freed almost immediately when the captain of the captured Portuguese ship and
another passenger testified that the manumission papers of these individuals
had been thrown overboard by Merino following the capture of the ship. The
other six were forced to work in a local panadería while the case proceeded.25 In
the end, they were also freed when the pay records of the Portuguese vessel con-
firmed that they had all served as wage-earning crewmen during the voyage.26
Two things are clear from these cases. First, the legal status of free blacks,
whether born free or manumitted, was conditional and vulnerable in ways that
separated Africans and their American-born descendents from other plebeians.
In a world where the future labor value of slaves could be quickly converted to
cash through sale, the most unscrupulous, greedy, and ruthless members of soci-
ety could capitalize on any ambiguity in the legal status of a free black to impose
slave status.27 And second, free blacks resisted attempts at such subterfuge, with
the help of their families, the defensores, and other colonial judicial authorities
who sought to defend the legal boundary between slavery and freedom.28
the presence of mind to give her carta de libertad to a free black sailor as the ship had
surrendered. Rosa María then provided the document to authorities. While the defensor
gathered documents, the French ship sailed with Rosa María on board. See AGN-DC-
SG, Tribunales, leg. 21, exp. 12.
24. AGN-DC-SG, Interior, leg. 51, exp. 14.
25. For the use of slaves in panaderías, see my “The Entrepreneurial Reorganization of
an Artisan Trade: The Bakers of Buenos Aires,” The Americas 37, no. 2 (Oct. 1980): 139 – 60.
26. AGN, Interior, leg. 51, exp. 14.
27. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. B5, exp. 21. María Petrona, “de color parda,” of
Asunción, Paraguay, had been granted her freedom in a will but was sold three different
times and moved from place to place. She finally forced the recognition of her status by
contacting the defensor in 1777, after being relocated to Buenos Aires.
28. This boundary was often poorly marked. In 1712, Juan Terese approached the
defensor to claim he was an African who had been born free and transported to Buenos
Aires as a translator for the French slave asiento. He was, he asserted, being held illegally as
a slave. As the case proceeded, it was determined that he had served as a translator but was,

Since nearly every defensor in Buenos Aires during the late colonial period
owned slaves and benefited from a social hierarchy that privileged European
culture and light skin color, their willingness to confront members of their own
class must have been rooted in a broadly established belief that imposing slavery

on a free person was a grave injustice. The nine free Brazilians of color captured
by the Pilar certainly found in the defensor a reliable ally willing to frustrate the
privateer’s attempt to extract maximum financial benefit from his prize.29 More
significant still was the fact that nine Portuguese-speaking foreigners were so
quickly appraised of local law and put in contact with the defensor, a process
that indicated that the slave community of Buenos Aires had not only harvested
experiences and lore from the courts but also stood ready to disseminate this
information to captive strangers in ways that could prove determinative in the
local courts.
These records also demonstrate that even without the special circum-
stances that resulted from war and privateering, free blacks separated from their
homes and families could find their freedom threatened. The pardo Manuel
Francisco Arias traveled from his native Rio de Janiero to Buenos Aires in April
1778 to look for work. After disembarking, he agreed to carry to shore the bags
and equipment of a Spanish artillery officer, Captain Vicente de Reyna Vásquez,
who had arrived on the same ship. Arias had further agreed, for a small fee,
to carry the captain’s baggage to a residence some seven blocks from the river
front. After being paid, the captain extended an apparently generous offer of a
place to sleep for the night. The next morning, Reyna Vásquez informed Man-
uel that he was now his slave and threatened violence if he attempted to leave.
Although now held captive in a strange city with no friends or relatives to aid
him, Manuel managed to contact the city’s defensor, Don Cecilio Sánchez de
Velasco, and ask his intervention.30 We can only speculate on the process that
brought notice of Manuel Francisco’s plight to the defensor, but certain assump-
tions seem justified. First, the Buenos Aires slave community shared a practi-
in fact, a slave. The defensor continued his case anyway, claiming that under French law
any slave resident in France for a year was free. Since Juan had lived in France for more
than year in the service of the asiento, he should be free. This defense failed. AGN-DC-
SG, Tribunales, leg. M2, exp. 3.
29. See a similar case from 1802, where six blacks from Brazil were seized with a prize
taken by the privateer San Juan Bautista. Here again the captain tried to sell them as slaves.
The defensor proved one was free, and others were placed in the jail to await clarification of
their status. AGN-DC-SG, Administrativo, leg. 8, exp. 232.
30. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. A13, exp. 16.

cal knowledge of colonial institutions and legal practices.31 And second, as was
true in the case of the Pilar captives and other similar cases, a recently arrived,
foreign-born, Portuguese-speaking black laborer like Manuel Francisco could
access this knowledge and find allies to carry his case to authorities in a matter

of weeks.32
As in the case of Francisca’s purported master, Captain Reyna Vásquez
was unable to produce evidence of ownership when challenged by the defensor,
asserting instead that Manuel had “served him like a slave” while onboard. As
was also true in Francisca’s case, the self-serving cant of a well-placed Spaniard —
in this case a military officer — was demolished by a defensor who relentlessly
collected the evidence that established Manuel Francisco’s freedom. The artil-
lery captain’s pretensions were undermined initially by the testimony of a pair
of Spaniards who had traveled from Rio on the same ship with Manuel Fran-
cisco. Final vindication, however, awaited copies of documents sent from Rio
de Janeiro, which showed that that Manuel Francisco’s parents were free at the
time of his birth. While the potential of defensores to protect the fragile free-
dom of men and women like Francisca and Manuel Francisco is demonstrated,
the eight-month ordeal in which a free man was forced to live under the control
of this false master also forces us to recognize that the courts were not only
interested in protecting the boundary between slavery and freedom but were
also zealous guardians of property rights.33
The death of a master could also raise questions about legal status. It was
not uncommon for slave owners in Buenos Aires and other Spanish colonies
to free slaves in their wills. We should assume that it was even more common
for slave owners to promise freedom as a device for controlling or manipulat-
31. Walter Johnson makes this point convincingly in his edited book The Chattel
Principle (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 22 – 23. Another author in this same
collection emphasizes the same point; see Phillip Troutman, “Grapevine in the Slave
Market: African-American Geopolitical Literacy,” 218 – 19. See also Julius Sherrard Scott’s
excellent dissertation “The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in
the Era of the Haitian Revolution” (Duke Univ., 1986), esp. 174 – 233.
32. In a 1777 case begun with a letter to Viceroy Pedro de Cevallos, Joaquin de
Acosta established his freedom despite the relentless opposition of the administrator of
Temporalidades who managed an ex-Jesuit estate. The evidence indicates that Acosta and
two compatriots had fled from Brazil to the Río de la Plata because they had heard that
they would be freed once across the border. After finding work on this former Jesuit estate,
Acosta was “treated as a slave” and forced to endure long working hours, poor food, and
inadequate clothing. He asked for the opportunity to “seek a life that suits me without
additional interference.” His case was decided favorably by the audiencia in 1778.
33. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. A13, exp. 16.

ing their servants, as the following case suggests.34 Doña Bernardina Lemus
had been pressed repeatedly for manumission by her slave Gregoria. In the end
Doña Bernardina told Gregoria that as a reward for her loyalty she was “now
half slave and half free.” When Gregoria went to court to clarify the status of

her two sons born soon after this pledge, she asked the judge, “How can my
sons be absolutely slaves when I am half free and half slave?”35 While only a
very small percentage of slaves were manumitted through wills, the practice was
sufficiently common and well known by slaves that they often pressured their
masters to promise manumission.36 Evidence suggests that these negotiations
were initiated most predictably and pursued most intensely when the balance
of power between master and slave was altered by changes in an owner’s health,
financial resources, or family circumstances.37 Desperately ill masters, depen-
dent on the care given by their servants, often found the promise of manumis-
sion a useful tool.
After a long and painful illness, Don Manuel Basavilbaso, a powerful colo-
nial official, died in 1799. His slave Félix soon complained in a letter to the
recently arrived Viceroy Gabriel de Avilés y del Fierro, marqués de Avilés, that
although he had been freed during his master’s long illness, he was still being
forced to endure slavery by the heirs.38 According to Félix, “I have sacrificed
my own health to care for Don Manuel Basavilbaso.” Once the matter had been
34. See my “Manumission in Colonial Buenos Aires, 1776 – 1810,” HAHR 59, no. 2
(May 1979): 258 – 79.
35. After three years of appeals pursued with great energy by the sons of Gregoria, the
audiencia determined they were in fact the property of the estate of their mother’s mistress.
The sons had proved as determined as their mother. Not only had they pursued every
available legal recourse; they had also fled their master’s home and resisted efforts to bring
them home. Angered by the brothers’ relentless pursuit of freedom, the audiencia decided
against them and denied them further appeals, condemning them to “perpetual silence.”
See AGN-DC-SG, Administrativos, leg. 22, exp. 702.
36. Silvia C. Mallo discusses this point in “La libertad en el discurso del estado, de
amos y esclavos, 1780 – 1830,” Revista de Historia de América 112 (July – Dec. 1991): 121 – 46.
37. When Don Antonio Rigolo needed cash to cover his numerous debts, he tried to
sell his three male slaves to a buyer in Potosí. The slaves went to the defensor in Córdoba
to demand that he order a papel de venta so that they could remain with their families.
Although they lost the initial case, they prevailed on appeal to the audiencia in Buenos
Aires. See AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. R17, exp. 1.
38. Manuel Basavilbaso served as director of mails for the Viceroyalty of Río de la
Plata. It may be that Félix approached Viceroy Avilés directly with this first letter because
he had seen the viceroy in Basavilbaso’s home or heard the viceroy discussed by the family.
See the still very useful John Lynch, Spanish Colonial Administration: The Intendant System in
the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata (New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), esp. 137.

passed on to the defensor, Don Miguel Azcuénaga — a politically connected and

wealthy merchant married to Basavilbaso’s daughter and chief heir, Justa — he
immediately rejected Félix’s claim. Azcuénaga acknowledged that Basavilbaso
had promised manumission on numerous occasions in front of witnesses, includ-

ing family members and his confessor. However, Félix’s desperately ill master
had signed no papers, and therefore, Azcuénaga asserted, Félix was not free.39
As the case proceeded, relations between Félix and Azcuénaga became
deeply embittered and then violent. It is clear in the documents that Félix
expressed his contempt for Azcuénaga in various settings, including during the
reading of Basavilbaso’s will. Living in Azcuénaga’s household, subordinated to
his will, and forced to demonstrate deference was more than Félix could bear.
His situation was complicated by the fact that his wife and daughter had been
inherited by Azcuénaga’s wife.40 After months without legal resolution, Félix
heatedly asked the defensor to provide his “carta de libertad” or place him “in
deposit” in another household immediately “to prevent violence and extortion”
by Azcuénaga.
The local alcalde serving as judge of first instance attempted to find a mid-
dle ground. He found that Basavilbaso had clearly and unambiguously promised
Félix his freedom but acknowledged that this intention had not been formalized
legally. Félix, he stated, was undeniably the slave of Doña Justa Basavilbaso.
But because the decedent’s repeated promises had created the expectation of
freedom, the alcalde ordered that Félix be permitted to purchase his freedom
and that of his wife and daughter at an assessed fair-market price. Azcuénaga
rejected this compromise, forcing the judge to agree that his order had not fol-
lowed required procedures. In his successful effort to force the alcalde to back
down, Azcuénaga explained that he refused to compromise because “Félix lacked
the legitimate obedience and respect due a master.” Pushed beyond endurance,
Félix fled to a neighbor’s house.
Félix’s flight, his persistence with authorities, and his use of confrontational
language were provocations that Azcuénaga, a prickly, self-important man,
could not accept without being shamed. As a result, Azcuénaga recruited a cli-
39. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. 129, exp. 3.

40. Ibid. As events would demonstrate, Azcuénaga was more than willing to use the
wife and daughter for leverage, threatening them with whippings and locking the wife up
to prevent “her running away.” See also AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. Q2, exp. 11, for
a similar case where a morena, Ana María, was threatened that she would be forced into
a second, bigamous, marriage because her current husband was slow to deliver promised
payments for her manumission.

ent, the militia captain Melchor López, who owed him money, along with an
enlisted man from the same regiment, to drag Félix home from his temporary
refuge. The two soldiers severely beat Félix with a wooden chair and left him
chained to a post in the patio of Azcuénaga’s house. Despite this terrible beat-

ing, Félix refused to end the litigation. Once the case reached the audiencia on
appeal, Azcuénaga’s wealth and political connections controlled the outcome.
The audiencia judges, including two of Azcuénaga’s close friends, dismissed the
case and, after condemning what it saw as the intemperate language of Félix’s
testimony, repeated almost verbatim Azcuénaga’s demand that “the slave Félix
begin to give the obedience and respect due the authority and dominion of his
owner.”41
It seems unlikely that Félix followed this trajectory of escalating confronta-
tion in a coldly calculated effort to gain freedom. There is little likelihood that
the defensor or other court officials signaled approval of his heated words or
confrontational manner. Instead, it appears that Félix conducted his dispute in
public places or in front of court authorities to satisfy his need for revenge. By
forcing Azcuénaga’s friends, clients, and family members to testify to the nar-
row greed and selfishness that had thwarted his deceased master’s desires, Félix
gave voice to his anger in ways that challenged the public character and asserted
virtue of his powerful master. Given the beating administered earlier, we must
presume that similar cruelties awaited Félix at the end of his legal appeals. Nev-
ertheless, we must suspect that forcing Azcuénaga into this extended contest,
with all of its attendant embarrassments, would have provided significant com-
pensation for Félix. The fact that so many of his confrontations with Azcuénaga
occurred in front of witnesses from outside the household or in public places
seems to clearly indicate that one of Félix’s primary objectives was to injure the
reputation of this proud and cruel man.
Don Antonio José de Escalada, defensor in 1780, was among the handful
of incumbents who combatively sought justice for the enslaved. Illegitimate son
of a wealthy merchant, Escalada eventually became one of the city’s most suc-
cessful merchants in his own right, holding various positions in both the cabildo
and consulado.42 In April 1780, Escalada filed a brief on behalf of María Josefa,
41. The case began in August 1799 and ended with the audiencia’s final decision in
February 1800. AGN, Tribunales, leg. 129, exp. 3.
42. Susan Migden Socolow discusses Antonio José de Escalada in detail in The
Merchants of Buenos Aires (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), 20, 23, and 97 – 98. She
provides the family tree on 181.

the 22-year-old slave of the recently deceased Doña Juana Estela. As was clear
in the will of Doña Juana, María Josefa had been granted the right to purchase
her own freedom and that of her infant son for the generously low sum of two
hundred pesos. As explanation, Doña Juana Estela’s will spoke of María Josefa’s

“loyalty and love” during her long final illness.
Following Doña Juana Estela’s death, Don José Atanacio Albeniz de
Toro — husband of the decedent’s only daughter and primary heir — disputed
this provision. Once it became clear to Albeniz de Toro that the defensor was
unsympathetic to his claims, he sought to drag out the case past the end of Esca-
lada’s term. Escalada quickly recognized this stratagem and responded with out-
rage. From this moment on, the defensor dismissed letters from the son-in-law
as “having no substance” or as expressing “mere invective.” As his exasperation
mounted, the defensor noted to the court the “absence of Christian charity”
and “impiety” explicit in the executor’s effort to deny the wishes of his generous
mother-in-law. In the end, however, the selfish son-in-law outlasted Escalada.
María Josefa was then forced by the new defensor to pay 70 pesos more for her
freedom and that of her son than had been stipulated in her deceased mistress’s
will.43 Although Escalada proved a relentless advocate for the two slaves, María
Josefa’s experience demonstrates that the property rights of heirs could frustrate
both the intentions of a generous slave owner and the desires of a powerful and
well-connected defensor.
Escalada’s energy on behalf of María Josefa suggests that well-placed mem-
bers of the colonial propertied classes could prove useful and dependable allies
for slaves in their disputes with masters. Escalada was unusual in his relentless
pursuit of justice and his impatience with the manipulations of Juana Estela’s
heirs, but other defensores proved useful advocates as well. Once confronted in
the courts by their slaves, masters or their heirs used every available legal device
to put off an unfavorable decision. They obscured or hid evidence and delayed
responding to defensors’ questions and requests for documents. They also mis-
represented oral agreements, and, when pressed, they lied. Once engaged in
the courts, owners hoped to wear out the resources of their slaves and sap the
energy of the defensores. Nevertheless, it is important for us to recognize that
the masters’ victories were seldom won cheaply.
Slave families and individual slaves bore considerable emotional costs
in their pursuit of justice. Given the steep impediments slaves faced in these
unequal contests, their endurance, patience, and skillfulness in the pursuit of
freedom reveal the deep repugnance they felt toward the institution that held
43. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. D5, exp. 1.

them in its grasp. In February 1772, Gregorio Ignacio de Echeverría appealed

to the alcalde de segundo voto acting as defensor to intervene in what had become,
for him, an impossible situation. Twenty years earlier, Gregorio’s mother, a
free morena, had given his original master a 150-peso down payment toward

his freedom. The remaining 190 pesos were to be paid from Gregorio’s future
labor in the building trades. Three years later, before the full payment had been
made, the son was sold to brickyard owner Don Nicolás Zarco. With the pas-
sage of time, mother and son began to push for resolution, but Zarco refused to
tell them how much they stilled owed. Even though Gregorio served as the fore-
man of the brickyard, Zarco had begun to mistreat him, berating him in front of
other slaves and free employees and even striking him with a whip.
Gregorio protested that he had served for 20 years in the “most subor-
dinated servitude” but was compensated with “ever harsher punishments and
harder labors.”44 In his testimony to the defensor, Gregorio calculated that as a
free master brickmaker he would have earned more than two thousand pesos in
the time since his mother made the first payment to his original owner. Now,
he complained, his status was even more precarious, because his master had
managed to talk his mother, “born in Africa and with very little Spanish,” into
relinquishing the receipt for the original payment, leaving Gregorio with no
proof of the original agreement. After a heated exchange that led to another
beating, Gregorio fled Zarco’s household to pursue his case from the sanctuary
of a neighbor’s home. He begged the defensor “to avoid the fatal consequences
of sending me back into the hands of my enemy.” Although Gregorio was not
returned to Zarco and his freedom was ultimately granted, he was forced, in the
end, to pay the full 190 pesos without any recognition of the terms of the origi-
nal agreement and his long years of labor since his mother initiated the manu-
mission process. Certainly, the cruelty and cynical manipulations of his master,
Nicolás Zarco, are shocking, revealing the institution of slavery stripped of any
pretence of paternalism or reciprocity. But our attention is perhaps more profit-
ably directed to the stubborn pursuit of freedom by an African-born mother
and her American-born son who remained undefeated after a 20-year struggle,
successfully accessing the colonial judicial system, courageously assuming the
risks of flight, and mustering the last, large, cash payment to ultimately gain
freedom. All this was accomplished without bending their knees, as they put it,
“to the tyranny of our enemy.”
Defensors were more likely to succeed in cases where slave status was ille-
44. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. S5, exp. 10.

gally imposed on the weakest and most vulnerable members of society by cyni-
cal and greedy free persons than they were in contests where the legal claims of
slaves challenged the property rights of heirs. Thirteen years after the widow
Doña María Catalina Lucero had freed her slave Monica Josefa de la Cruz as

a reward for her loyalty and affection, the executor of her estate, Don Antonio
López, claimed Monica’s three young children had been born prior to formal
manumission and therefore belonged as slaves to Doña María Catalina’s heirs.
He then seized the children, denying the distraught mother access until he had
sold them and distributed the proceeds to the heirs. Once Monica Josefa con-
tacted the defensor in March 1791, López raised a smokescreen of hearsay and
manufactured evidence to cover the absence of documents to substantiate his
claims. This heartless scheme was quickly overturned by the thoroughness with
which the defensor established the actual legal status of the children, using a
copy of the original will and the children’s baptismal records.45 Here, as in other
cases where legal documents sustained the claims of those held in bondage, the
defensor was able to enforce the statutory definition of slavery, effectively resist-
ing this effort to steal the liberty of freedmen.46
Once in a while, the use of delaying tactics to thwart the actions of the
defensor produced unforeseen and costly consequences for masters. In 1778,
the slaves Joaquin and Cristóbal appealed to the defensor Don Cecilio Sánchez
de Velasco. They claimed that while residing in Colonia, in the Banda Oriental,
their mistress had freed them in her will. After she died, they returned to Bue-
nos Aires to enjoy their freedom, but her husband, Juan de Victoria, a moreno
libre, forced them back into service. When questioned by the defensor, Victo-
ria claimed the slaves had always been his property, rather than matrimonial
property; his wife therefore did not have the right to manumit them, regardless
of their loyalty and service. The case dragged on for months as the widower
appealed the case to the viceroy. In the end Victoria won, but the defensor obli-
gated him to pay full court costs after the slaves were returned to him. Unable
to pay, Victoria was forced to permit Joaquin and Cristóbal to purchase their
freedom so he could use their installment payments to satisfy court costs.47
Joaquin and Cristóbal’s success, tempered by the need to pay for their free-
45. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. C15, exp. 10.

46. In a similar case, two young children of the recently manumitted Catalina were
seized by the attorney of her owner’s heirs and sold. In this example, however, despite the
intervention of the defensor, the courts upheld the heirs, and the children were sold. AGN-
DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. P9, exp. 14.
47. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. V5, exp. 15.

dom in installments, reminds us that in late colonial Buenos Aires a surprising

number of masters and slaves shared lives of poverty. In these circumstances,
conventions of deference and subordination were undermined daily by the
struggle for food and shelter. In 1798 the slave Francisco Muñoz complained

to the defensor that his master refused him medical care and adequate food,
despite his life-threatening illness. Francisco demanded the right to seek a new
master willing to buy him from his current owner, paying the price set by a
court-appointed appraiser. The master resisted this request for a papel de venta
by claiming that he himself was a “habitual invalid” who depended on Francis-
co’s wages. As a result, he stated, he would be destitute if forced to sell his slave
at the price set by the defensor’s appraiser.48 In circumstances like these, master
and slave stood eye to eye; there could have been little expectation that bullying
or violence would break a slave or that a defensor’s actions would be constrained
by the desire to defend racial hierarchy.
What is apparent across these cases is that the selfishness and arrogance
of owners was often anticipated and then effectively resisted by defensores and
other officers of the colonial judiciary. Defensores did not routinely accept that
slave owners told the truth or that slaves lied. They saw over and over again the
ways in which self-interest and greed could brush aside a concern for justice
or equity. Even where a slave had cared for a desperately ill master or where a
slave’s wages propped up a poor family’s slim pretense of respectability, the slave
was a negotiable and transferable form of wealth that few owners would surren-
der to the impulse of generosity. On occasion, however, we can see a defensor
begin to make the connection between the greed and cruelty of a specific owner
and the inherent injustice of the slave system itself.
In April 1796, defensor Don Anselmo Saenz Valiente took on a case begun
three years earlier on behalf of the slaves Petrona Patrón and her daughter Ber-
narda. Both had been freed by their mistress, Doña Magdalena Pimienta, in
her will, a document that noted (as with many other such cases) the loyalty,
affection, and generosity of the two slaves. The executor of the estate, however,
disputed this provision of the will on behalf of two impoverished minor heirs.
Despite an earlier effort by the city’s alcalde de primer voto to enforce the will,
both slaves remained in the household of the heirs, their future unclear, while
the defensor appealed to the audiencia.
In the end, the estate’s executor blocked Saenz Valiente’s desire to free the
two slaves by complicating the legitimacy of the will with legal concerns for the
48. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. M19, exp. 13. In the end, this case went to the
audiencia on appeal; the resolution is unknown.

financial claims of the minor heirs. Probate law afforded only limited discretion
in the distribution of an estate, and grants of manumission were not permitted
to adversely affect the claims of heirs.49 When Saenz Valiente’s term ended, the
two slaves remained in the power of the executor. The new defensor, Don Jaime

Alzina, proved a worthy successor to Saenz Valiente. He entered the case by
summarizing the executor’s “malicious falsehoods” and the “grave injustices”
experienced by the two slaves. In 1798 the energetic advocacy of four differ-
ent defensores, pursued over more than four years of litigation, finally gained
Petrona and Bernarda their freedom. Despite this happy outcome, the case
serves as a useful corrective to any desire we might have to see this process as a
completely reliable protection of slave rights. Having gained their freedom, the
audiencia obligated the two women to pay court costs that mounted to nearly
one hundred pesos, effectively leaving them destitute.50
This case also reveals the complicated place of slavery in late colonial Bue-
nos Aires. Slaves were everywhere. Slaves were found in nearly every artisan
shop, ranch, and farm. They unloaded the ships that plied the river and Atlantic
trades, they paved the streets, and they carried the goods that floated the city’s
growing commerce. Yet slavery was increasingly troublesome to the elite who
were its primary beneficiaries. On the one hand, the growing slave population
was seen as a potential threat, as demonstrated by a rising tide of local laws that
circumscribed the lives of slaves, banning them from organizing social activi-
ties like dances and barring them from carrying weapons, even small knives.51
On the other hand, a growing number of elite residents saw the institution of
slavery as unjust and as an offence to religion.
49. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. D6, exp. 12. The Spanish judiciary’s concern to
protect the property rights of heirs, especially minor heirs, complicated and sometimes
impeded masters’ desires to manumit their slaves. This case provides excellent access to
both the legal requirements and local custom.
50. In this case the executor cited the Ley del Toro, claiming that “no one in life or
death could cause heirs to lose more than one-fifth of their inheritance.” Nearly all other
assets had been sold to cover unpaid debts, leaving the slaves as the only remaining assets of
substance.
51. A series of arrests in 1795 provides the best single example of this growing fear.
Colonial authorities concluded that French residents of the city were conspiring to raise a
slave rebellion. There are older studies of enduring value; see, e.g., Ricardo Caillet-Bois,
Ensayo sobre el Río de la Plata y la revolución francesa (Buenos Aires: Imprenta la Universidad,
1929); and Ezequiel César Ortega, El complot colonial (Buenos Aires: Editorial Ayacucho,
1947). See also my “The Subversive Nature of Private Acts: Juan Barbarín: The 1795
French Conspiracy in Buenos Aires,” in The Human Condition in Colonial Latin America, ed.
Kenneth Andrien (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 259 – 77.

Before the end of his term as defensor, Saenz Valiente expressed his frus-
tration with the executor’s effective resistance to his efforts to free Petrona and
Bernarda. Looking beyond the narrow boundaries of this case, he launched a
broad assault on the institution of slavery. His angry denunciation provides a

useful example of the gradual weakening of support for slavery among the elite,
a process that would lead, early in the independence era, to the abolition of the
slave trade to Buenos Aires.52 After ordering the executor to stop “bothering”
the two slaves, the defensor addressed the court, characterizing slavery as “a
horrible and deceitful metamorphosis” of humanity that “cruelly subjected indi-
viduals to the ownership and trade of others.” While earlier defensores had been
equally resolute in defense of those held illegally as slaves, they had depend-
ably defended property rights over human beings. Saenz Valiente’s defense of
Petrona and Bernarda raised the foundational question that would eventually
undermine the institution in Spanish America: could slavery that “cruelly sub-
jected individuals to the ownership and trade of others” ever be made compat-
ible with justice?
As these cases suggest, although some owners were hurt by court costs,
it was certainly common for masters, given their greater resources, to gain
their ends by drawing out and slowing down the resolution of cases brought
by slaves. But the records reveal that in some cases a slave (or someone claimed
as a slave) could use delaying tactics to their own advantage. We see, then, that
conflicts between slaves and masters often took on the character of trench war-
fare, where small advantages were gained at enormous cost. In September 1797,
police authorities in the Banda Oriental seized the pardo Yldefonso Peralta as a
runaway slave. Peralta was working on a farm when a jailor transporting prison-
ers from Córdoba to Montevideo passed by and thought he recognized Peralta
as someone who had fled his master in Córdoba 22 years earlier. Taken prisoner
and transferred to jail in Buenos Aires, Yldefonso contacted the defensor Don
Joaquin de Arana, claiming to be the victim of mistaken identity.
The defensor soon determined that the purported owner was long dead
and that there was no one from Córdoba in Buenos Aires who could provide a
convincing identification of Yldefonso as the escaped slave. The case dragged
52. For a discussion of the end of slave trade in Buenos Aires, see Alberto González
Arzac, Abolición de la esclavitud en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Editorial Polémica, 1974);
and Hebe Clementi, La abolición de la esclavitud en América Latina (Buenos Aires: Editorial
La Pleyade, 1974), esp. 53 – 76. For slave culture, see Oscar Chamosa, “To Honor the Ashes
of Their Forebears: The Rise and Crisis of the African Nations in the Post-Independence
State of Buenos Aires, 1820 – 1860,” The Americas 59, no. 3 (2003): 347 – 78.

on for years as piles of contradictory claims mounted. Yldefonso remained in

jail this whole time, in circumstances that the defensor claimed were “a grave
threat to his health and well-being.” Yldefonso was not released until July 1800,
when it became clear that the heirs of his purported master in Córdoba had

given up their claims to escape mounting court costs.53 In this case, a succes-
sion of defensores successfully defended Yldefonso from being sent to Córdoba,
where his prospects were much worse. In effect, they won for him the status of
freeman, regardless of whatever truth might have been buried in the competing
claims about his identity.
The pardo Alexandro faced a similar threat in 1792 when he was identified
as a runaway who had fled from his master in a rural partido of the province of
Buenos Aires 16 years earlier. Placed in jail, Alexandro contacted the defensor,
Don Antonio Gardia, identifying himself as “free” and “of Spanish calidad.” The
defensor gathered testimony and sought a clear identification but failed to gain
Alexandro’s immediate release from jail. At the end of a month, mounting court
costs had sapped the willingness of Alexandro’s purported owners to continue
the struggle, as in the prior case. In the end, the litigants who had forced Alex-
andro’s incarceration failed to cut their losses, however, because the defensor
successfully forced them to pay Alexandro six pesos, the estimated value of the
wages he had lost during his imprisonment.54
Slaves knew that defensores and other colonial judicial officers could prove
useful allies in cases of abuse, cruelty, or the violation of legal rights. The case
of José, “pardo slave of Don Juan García,” provides a good example. In May
1788 José approached an audiencia judge in the street, claiming that his master
had refused him the right to marry Josefa, “parda slave of Doña Josefa Puche.”
When questioned, José’s owner initially claimed he would not permit the match
because of prior conflicts with Josefa’s mistress. Because of this bad blood, he
claimed that cooperation between them to facilitate the slaves’ marriage would
be impossible. Josefa’s mistress then acted generously to remove this objection
and facilitate the marriage by selling her slave to Don Manuel Lecica. But José’s
owner continued to resist the marriage, now claiming that José had stolen some
cash years before and would have to repay it before gaining his permission to
marry.
With the owner’s resistance to any compromise now clear, the case was
sent to the defensor. He reviewed the testimony and found the character of
José’s owner to be the central obstacle to what both “law and church teachings”
53. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. M4, exp. 5.

54. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. C14, exp. 27.

required. Dismissing the ever-shifting litany of objections raised by, as he put

it, “the selfish and dishonest” owner, the defensor demanded that the marriage
be permitted. In response, Juan García now claimed that he was not motivated
by “capriciousness or a lack of pity” but was trying instead to “discipline a rebel-

lious and insulting slave.” Worse, from the master’s perspective, was the fact
that José’s beloved, Josefa, was “the cause of his disorderliness,” having insti-
gated José’s repeated flights from the master’s household, as well as José’s refusal
to turn over the required portion of his wages as a journeyman shoemaker.
He should not be required, the master wrote, to reward “insubordination and
conspiracy.”55 This, then, was a retreat to the essential default position of the
institution’s defenders. Since public order rested upon the discipline and defer-
ence of slaves, failure to enforce an owner’s authority was an invitation to chaos.
This defense seldom found purchase in the courts.
The defensor’s reply was merciless, sweeping aside the owner’s claims as a
“story invented by his imagination.” He noted that Josefa’s owner had painted
a very different picture of the two slaves, noting their “mutual professions of
love.” According to the defensor, all the allegations of José’s master, Don Juan
García, were unsubstantiated. Even more damning, he stated, was the fact
that the master held in contempt the “universal right” of “all human beings”
to marry. This right, the defensor asserted, was upheld by “canon lawyers and
theologians.” Despite Don Juan García’s angry effort to have the defensor con-
demned to “perpetual silence” for what he saw as defamation and complicity
in the insubordination of a slave, the marriage was finally permitted. Perhaps
convinced by the defensor’s characterization of García as “vindictive and cruel,”
the court also permitted the slave José to live outside his master’s household,
imposing only the obligation that he turn over a portion of his wages to his
master every week.
As in the case of Francisca that begins this article, we see here again that
slaves were sometimes able to resist their masters by finding allies among influ-
ential, propertied Spaniards and creoles. Josefa’s two masters serially supported
55. It was not uncommon for a free black or even a slave to confront the master
of a spouse in cases of abuse or unfair treatment. In 1795, for example, Don Domingo
Azcuénaga, a powerful member of a merchant family, went to court to have Escolástica, wife
of his slave Manuel, placed in a casa de recogimiento because of “her scandalous actions” that
included “constant interference” and “angry words shouted in the street.” Three months
after her confinement, Escolástica gained her freedom by “imploring Don Domingo’s
pardon.” See AGN-DC-SG, Cabildo de Buenos Aires, Correspondencia con el virrey,
1795 – 96.

the couple’s efforts to overcome Don Juan García’s objections. Her first owner
arranged a convenient sale to a sympathetic neighbor to negate the first objec-
tion, and the subsequent master provided useful testimony corroborating the
love of the two slaves and raising doubts about José’s supposed insubordina-

tion and ill discipline. The eventual success of the marriage was also furthered
by José’s effective escape from the household of his furious owner, an escape
facilitated by a Spanish master shoemaker who offered to employ him.56 Clearly,
members of the colonial propertied class — even those who owned slaves them-
selves — did not feel obligated to support the claims of abusive masters or believe
the testimony of defendants who invented tales or forged documents in order to
circumvent justice. Once slaves successfully engaged the legal system, masters
were essentially on their own, their claims closely scrutinized by often skeptical
defensores and judges. Shared race and class interest did not always result in a
predictable collusion on behalf of those who asserted property rights.
However, as this case shows, a defensor’s legal intervention in a dispute
could sometimes gain the removal of a slave from a master’s household, if only
temporarily. No longer under their masters’ direct control and no longer obli-
gated to render the fruits of their labor and wages, slaves gained substantial
leverage that many of them wielded with great skill. In 1763, for example, Fran-
cisca de Soria complained to the defensor Don Ignacio de Irigoyen that “the
exhorbitant price” her mistress demanded effectively obstructed the efforts of
her husband, a moreno libre, to purchase her freedom. Francisca argued that she
had “provided long years of service” to Doña Serafina Soria, and now “as an old
woman” she wanted to end her life as a free person. When the defensor ques-
tioned her, Doña Serafina Soria initially acknowledged the slave’s good qualities
and loyal service. She cited these qualities, however, to justify the high price
demanded for her manumission. As the case developed, the defensor appointed
a series of appraisers, who each offered lower estimates of the slave’s market
value. The owner rejected each appraisal in turn. Although the defensor argued
that a slave’s good qualities should not be penalized by a manumission price that
effectively denied freedom, the case dragged on.57
56. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. P11, exp. 10. A similar case is found in Tribunales,
leg. Q2, exp. 11; here the defensor intervened to prevent a master from breaking up a
marriage by selling his slave, Ana María Quinton, to someone in Paraguay. In this case, the
defensor forced the owner, Doña Damacia María de San Juan, to allow Ana María’s husband
to purchase her manumission.
57. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. S4, exp. 14. A similar case occurred in 1789,
involving two slaves being sent to Potosí. Hoping to avoid labor in the mines, they went to
the defensor in Córdoba and asked that their value be established so that they could seek a

Frustrated by this process, Francisca fled her mistress’s house and found
refuge with a free black friend in Luján. When Francisca changed the game by
running away, the character of Doña Serafina Soria’s correspondence with the
defensor changed as well. She now complained bitterly about Francisca’s flight,

which left “her and her aged and blind mother alone and helpless.” Francisca
replied with her own inventory of ailments from her sanctuary in Luján, noting
her own “chest pains, sore back, and infertility.” In the end, Francisca was forced
to pay 287 pesos for her freedom, only 13 pesos less than her owner’s original
demand. Yet her strategy of confrontation and flight had gained her two small
premiums: living outside her mistress’s house, effectively free, for nearly three
months, and dragging her mistress into a public forum where she was forced to
acknowledge her humiliating poverty and dependence on Francisca.
Let me end with a case that will refocus us again on the cruel core of the
slave experience in late colonial Buenos Aires. In 1752, 24 years before the cre-
ation of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata, Agustina Peñalosa, parda slave of
Don Josef Cortín, addressed the lieutenant general asking for relief. She had
fled her master’s home because of the “intolerable services” she was forced to
render. Agustina justified her flight as her only recourse in “clarifying [her] lib-
erty.” Once the case was sent to the defensor, a brief investigation produced the
complicating information that Agustina had physically threatened her owner
and his wife before she fled. Despite the desperate nature of Agustina’s flight
and her acknowledged threats, the defensor, Don Juan Benito González, took
her case. While the defensor gathered testimony, Agustina’s owner located her
refuge, dragged her home by the hair, beat her, and placed her in chains. The
defensor, learning of these events, intervened to move Agustina to a new refuge
and threatened her master with a stiff fine if he struck her again.
Despite the owner’s obvious cruelty, the defensor soon dropped the case,
noting that he could not condone Agustina’s threats and prior acts of violence
toward her master. This decision only emboldened the owner; he located Agus-
tina in a nearby plaza, beat her terribly in front of numerous witnesses, and
then had her incarcerated in the municipal jail. Even with the severely beaten
Augustina confined in jail, Cortín continued his cruel revenge, demanding that
the jailors strip Agustina of her clothing, since her pathetic rags were his “prop-
erty.” He also refused to send her food while in jail, leaving her to rely on the
thin charity of stale bread and cold soup provided by the city’s bakeries and
new owner in that jurisdiction. The defensor complied, and they avoided the mines.
AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. R17, exp. 1.

convents. While the defensor’s decision to drop the case left Agustina without
legal recourse, she found a new ally, Don Lorenzo Josef Cessar, a lawyer who
agreed to take her case to the captain general, motivated, in his own words, “by
Christian charity.”

According to this new advocate, the facts of the case were that Cortín had
bought Agustina as a young girl, sending her into the street to earn a wage
in whatever way she could. She was soon assaulted and raped. Her master had
located the rapist and forced a cash settlement of three hundred pesos. Agustina,
now an adult and filled with bitterness for mistreatment over the years, asserted
that the cash indemnification rightfully belonged to her and was, in effect, a
de facto purchase of manumission. Her lawyer cleverly argued that since the
owner was not the injured party, the payment should have gone to Agustina
as a “dowry.” The master — in a statement that revealed both his character and
the character of the institution — replied that his slave had “no need for honor,
unlike a free woman.”58
Once again we find evidence that a slave could gain the attention of the
defensor and the courts. And once again a slave found other useful allies: wit-
nesses to the beatings, a lawyer to present her case once the defensor had bowed
out, and neighbors to provide a temporary refuge from the beatings. In the end,
however, Agustina gained only a brief respite from the terrors of her captivity,
rather than manumission or forced sale to another household. She lost the case
and was left in the household of Cortín. Along the way Agustina had demon-
strated remarkable strength, striking out in self-defense, threatening revenge
when brutalized, and then running away. Repeated beatings did not defeat her
efforts to prevail. Her prolonged resistance and her courage in the face of many
cruelties and disappointments suggest that slaves did not necessarily surrender
to the tyrannies of even the worst masters.
These documents do not reveal any organized and sustained opposition to
slavery in late colonial Buenos Aires. The city’s defensores and judges were not
precursors of the later abolitionists. The documents do illuminate, however, the
ways in which slaves — as individuals and as members of families — learned the
workings of the colonial judicial system, assimilated the values and prejudices of
those who controlled this system, and found allies among the free population in
their quest to escape intolerable living conditions or win freedom for themselves
and their children.59 The resulting record of success and failure, when examined
58. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. P6, exp. 12.

59. The case of Fermín Gayoso provides an example of such sophistication in dealing
with courts and colonial administration. In 1808, he sought permission to purchase

closely, forces us to appreciate the complexity of this late-colonial slave soci-

ety. Among these complexities is the fact that some of the powerful Spaniards
and creoles who served as defensores — men who owned slaves and benefited
from their labor — recognized that the institution permitted widespread abuse,

understood that the power of masters served as an invitation to cruelty, and then
acted to mitigate these injustices.
More important still, perhaps, these cases illuminate the ongoing pattern
of slave resistance that informed relations between masters and their servants.
Within the experience of the institution, slaves forged a well-developed sense of
justice and equity. They had also accumulated broad understandings of the legal
system. They followed closely legal cases that pitted slaves against their masters
and harvested information that then framed the vocabulary of future protest
and litigation against owners. When promises were not kept, when cruelties
were imposed, and when the law failed them, they confronted masters, they
fled, they sought the aid of family, neighbors, or the courts, and they sometimes
sought revenge. One seldom-recognized form of revenge was the decision of
slaves to take their masters to court, a public venue where their grievances could
be performed and the most embarrassing elements of the master’s life could
be made public. Each of these responses provides opportunities to assess the
emotional content of these legal conflicts between slaves and their masters and
appreciate the individual and personal way in which they experienced injustice
and cruelty.
his freedom in order to “perfect [his] training as an artist.” In support of this appeal he
provided testimony that he had fought with bravery against the British invasion force
in 1807 and — perhaps consciously manipulating the racial feeling that supported the
slave regime — that he was “not a black but a son of a Spaniard married to a free mulata.”
Although the final resolution is unclear, he appealed his case all the way to Spain.
Archivo General de las Indias, Seville, sección quinta, gobierno, Audiencia de Buenos
Aires, correspondencia, Mar. 30, 1808.

Johnson, L. (Ed.), "A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect Slaves and Their Masters in The Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires"

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“A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and

Respect”: Slaves and Their Masters in the

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Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s

Hispanic American Historical Review 87:4

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1. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, DC-SG, Tribunales (hereafter, AGN-

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passed on to the defensor, Don Miguel Azcuénaga — a politically connected and

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39. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. 129, exp. 3.

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43. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. D5, exp. 1.

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them in its grasp. In February 1772, Gregorio Ignacio de Echeverría appealed

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44. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. S5, exp. 10.

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45. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. C15, exp. 10.

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dom in installments, reminds us that in late colonial Buenos Aires a surprising

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on for years as piles of contradictory claims mounted. Yldefonso remained in

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53. AGN-DC-SG, Tribunales, leg. M4, exp. 5.

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required. Dismissing the ever-shifting litany of objections raised by, as he put

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