The Other Slavery (9 page)

A brief comparison with the legal framework of slavery in the United States will reinforce this point. In the antebellum South, black slaves possessed no legal standing. They were barred from southern courtrooms, which were populated by white judges, lawyers, and witnesses—the majority of whom were slaveholders. Laws specifically prevented persons of color, whether free or slave, to testify, except in the rarest of cases. Ironically, slaves were frequently the objects of litigation—for example, buyers sued sellers over slaves’ physical or moral defects or sought compensation for slaves injured by overseers. Yet the slaves themselves could not act legally. A white master could mistreat or even kill a slave, and as long as there were no white witnesses, he could not be brought to justice. As the former slave Harriet Jacobs famously wrote in her autobiographical account, a slave woman has “no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death.” The notion that a slave could sue his or her master to attain freedom
would have been laughable to most southerners during the first half of the nineteenth century.
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Spain’s slaves lived under an entirely different legal regime. The New Laws not only affirmed that Indians were free vassals but also instructed the
audiencias,
or high courts, of the New World to “put special care in the good treatment and conservation of the Indians,” to remain informed of any abuses committed against Indians, and “to act quickly and without delaying maliciously as has happened in the past.” Because the Spanish legal system was open to Indians, a class of specialized lawyers that became known as
procuradores generales de indios
served to represent them. These procuradores assisted indigenous clients in building their cases and navigating the Spanish bureaucracy. In stark contrast to the black slaves of the antebellum South, Indians could rely on these lawyers for at least some representation in the Spanish legal system.
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To be sure, sedentary Indians living in large cities had a great deal more access to the law than nomadic peoples from peripheral areas. And even those who lived in cities could not always rely on the letter of the law. Daily interactions between slaves, masters, and judges generated legal cultures that could deviate substantially from a strict interpretation of the law. Indians may have been “free vassals” in the eyes of the law, but Spanish masters resorted to slight changes in terminology, gray areas, and subtle reinterpretations to continue to hold Indians in bondage. Still, the larger point remains true: the legal regimes under which African and Indian slaves operated were vastly different. The title of this book,
The Other Slavery,
is meant to draw a contrast between African and Indian slaves that was ultimately rooted in the law.
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The Indians of Spain

To understand how the law shaped the lives of Indian slaves, we need to begin in Spain. During the first half of the sixteenth century, upwards of 2,500 Natives were shipped to the Iberian Peninsula and spent years there toiling in obscurity. Locked up in houses and shops in various towns and cities in southern and western Spain, they would have died
without leaving a trace had it not been for the New Laws of 1542, which specifically required all Spaniards already in possession of Indians to show their legitimate titles of ownership and if they did not have them, to liberate their slaves at once. By all accounts, the Spanish king Charles I was very serious about enforcing this provision. Immediately after the promulgation of the code, he directed royal officials to make inquiries and look for Natives held in bondage improperly.
⁶

The man most directly responsible for carrying out this effort was the licenciado Gregorio López. He had been part of the small cabal that in 1541–1542 had pushed for the pro-Indian legislation and in 1543 was appointed to Spain’s powerful Council of the Indies. His first year as councilor was a veritable baptism of fire. He spent his time compiling a list of owners of Indian slaves in Seville, gathering information about these Natives, and initiating no less than sixteen lawsuits. He had to deal with irate slaveholders and decide the fates not only of Natives who won their cases but also, more dramatically, of those who lost. López could not have been more different from Las Casas in temperament and method. The licenciado had never set foot in the New World. He was married to a cousin of Francisco Pizarro, the conqueror of Peru. He was a legal scholar who felt more comfortable poring over the minutiae of legal cases than making grand pronouncements in public. Yet López, in his own quiet way, became the best hope for the enslaved Indians of Spain.
⁷

The archives in Seville contain more than a hundred cases of Natives who had the courage to partner with Spanish attorneys and officials to sue their masters. These cases were sixteenth-century courtroom dramas featuring not faceless “Indian slaves,” as I have called them thus far, but highly motivated human beings, such as Gaspar, María, and Beatriz (whose stories are presented later in this chapter), pitted against owners who were just as motivated to hold on to what they regarded as their property. No Indian slaves wrote detailed accounts of their lives comparable to the works penned by African or African American slaves, such as Olaudah Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative
(1789), Frederick Douglass’s
Narrative
(1845), and Harriet Jacobs’s
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861). Nonetheless, these court cases are powerful examples of how Natives, even after they had been forcibly moved halfway around the world,
were capable of adapting, making a place for themselves, and fighting to regain their freedom.
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Who were these Indians? They hailed from the areas colonized by Spain, first Española and the other Caribbean islands, then coastal Mexico, Florida, and Venezuela, as well as elsewhere. The most striking observation about them is that a majority were women and children. When we think of the Middle Passage, we immediately imagine adult African males. This image is based on fact. Of all the Africans carried to North America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, males outnumbered females by a ratio approaching two to one, and they were overwhelmingly adults.
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The “reverse Middle Passage,” from America to Spain, was just the opposite: the slave traffic consisted mostly of children, with a good contingent of women and a mere sprinkling of men. The main reason was that Indians going to Europe were intended for work in homes, not on plantations, and European heads of household largely regarded children and women as better suited than men for domestic service. Children were more adaptable than adults, learned new languages quickly, and they could be trained and molded with greater ease. Women were less threatening than men and could be sexually exploited. These preferences had enduring demographic consequences. Most slaves held in Italian and Spanish households in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries—whether Slavs, Tartars, Greeks, Russians, or Africans—were women. Females comprised an astonishing eighty percent or more of the slaves living in Genoa and Venice, the two leading slave-owning cities in Italy. The situation was similar in the Iberian Peninsula. Contrary to what one might expect, women accounted for a majority of the African slaves in cities such as Granada and Lisbon.
¹⁰

Thus it is no wonder that Europeans would also demand women and children from the New World. Slave prices in the Caribbean already implied such preferences. Women were easily the most expensive of all Indian slaves. On average, adult Native women in Santo Domingo or Havana cost sixty percent more than adult males. Girls were next, followed by boys in the middle of the price range, then full-grown men, who were considerably cheaper (see
appendix 3
). It is difficult to know
exactly what determined these prices. One possibility is that the supply of women and minors was less abundant due to restrictions on their capture and enslavement. But the most likely explanation is simply that the demand for women and children was much greater. Indeed, scattered price information indicates that the premium for Indian women and children spanned the entire hemisphere, from southern Chile to northern Mexico, and endured from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century.
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Indian women and children were carried to Europe primarily because customers wanted them. Additionally, the well-intentioned but ultimately deleterious royal policies regarding Indian slavery played a role. As we have seen, the Spanish crown originally prohibited Indian slavery except in a handful of cases (cannibalism, ransomed Indians, and slaves obtained in “just wars”) but closed those loopholes in 1542 with the passage of the New Laws. As a result, Spaniards who wished to transport Indians to Europe had to demonstrate that they were taking legitimate slaves—branded and bearing the appropriate documentation from the time when slavery was legal—or were accompanied by “willing” Native travelers. Faced with these circumstances, traffickers went to great lengths to procure “willing” Indians, particularly children, who were more easily tricked and manipulated than adults. Years later, when these Indians appeared in court and recounted their lives, they often began with how they had been taken to Spain by “deception” and “trickery” when they were twelve or thirteen years old. Some enslaved children may have been even younger. Since Native children did not come with birth certificates, traffickers determined age by height, by the presence of pubic hair, and, undoubtedly, by the need to comply with regulations that prohibited the enslavement of children below age twelve.
¹²

Once these Indians were in Spain, their lives revolved around the master’s house. Occasionally they accompanied their masters on errands or were sent out of the house to fetch water, food, or some other necessity. For the most part, however, they were confined to the home, where their chores were never-ending. They swept floors, prepared food, looked after children, and worked in the master’s trade. On duty at all hours of the day and night, they watched as the days turned into months
and years. The major milestones in their lives occurred when they were transferred from one master to the next. In return for their ceaseless work, they received no compensation except room and board.

The case of a slave named Gaspar illuminates this situation. Gaspar was thirteen when a Spanish merchant found him in Española and “by means of trickery” took him to Seville. For the next twenty-one years, he served in various households around the Spanish port. In 1559, when he was in his early thirties, he finally ran away. He drifted in the city, eking out a living for more than a month, until, quite by chance, his master spotted him in the Plaza de San Francisco. Rather than risk public scandal or a violent altercation, the master prudently called a guard (police officer), who in turn approached Gaspar. Instead of returning the slave to his master, however, the guard took him to the municipal jail, where the local authorities launched an investigation.
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As a child, immediately after disembarking in Seville, Gaspar had been sold for 36 ducats to a family of tailors and weavers. The bill of sale describes him as a thirteen-year-old “obtained in a just war” who was “not a drunkard or a thief or an escapist” and who had “no public or private illnesses,” all stock phrases that appeared in contracts involving slaves of all races and ethnicities. In his new home, he joined two Indian women who were already working there. The three Natives spent their days under the watchful eye of Ana Sánchez, the matriarch of the family. In addition to doing chores around the house, Gaspar was given some weaving to do, which enabled him to become skilled in this trade.

After thirteen years of service, Gaspar was transferred to a new household. The occasion was the marriage of one of Ana Sánchez’s daughters: Gaspar was part of the dowry. Giving slaves as a dowry was a common practice in early modern Spain and a clever way for parents to shield a newlywed daughter from the increased workload of setting up a household, tending to a husband, and starting a family. For Gaspar this move was only the first in a series of transfers over the next few years. Ana Sánchez’s intention was to give each of her children a turn with him. After staying with her daughter for some time, Gaspar was transferred to the household of Luis Álvarez, the matriarch’s son. From the surviving documentation, it is not possible to determine how long Gaspar
remained with the daughter, when he came to Luis Álvarez, or why he also spent time in other households working as a weaver. Years later Gaspar declared in court that all along the person who had remained truly in control of his life was Ana Sánchez.

Complicating all of these moves was Gaspar’s wife. Ana Sánchez had consented to his marriage to Elvira, a free Indian woman working in her household as a weaver. Gaspar and Elvira probably occupied a room in the house and were able to stay together even when Gaspar was temporarily rented out to other weavers. But in 1559 Ana Sánchez sold Gaspar to a sixty-year-old man named Bartolomé Vallejo. The new owner refused to accommodate the Indian couple. He took Gaspar away from Seville and kept him as his personal servant during a lengthy stay in the Spanish court. A few days after Gaspar and his master returned to Seville, the slave fled from the elderly Vallejo.

Gaspar’s story reveals that slaves could improve their condition with the passage of time. He started out as an Indian boy from Española who had been deceived and victimized by a slave trader. Once in Spain, he acquired a trade, became an asset to his masters, got married, and expected to be treated with the considerations due to a loyal and valuable servant. And yet, as Gaspar discovered, slaves could lose this hard-earned social esteem in an instant. After being sold to Bartolomé Vallejo and working for him for some time, Gaspar decided to risk everything by becoming a fugitive of the law.