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FORUM: COMMENT


Still Continents (and an Island) with Two Histories?

Christopher Schmidt-Nowara


Historians of Latin American slavery will find de la Fuente's article to be a particularly trenchant and learned essay on familiar historiographic controversies.1 The archival research awakens anticipation for the author's in-depth study of the earlier period of Cuban slavery, much neglected in favor of the heyday of the sugar complex of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Concentrating on the law and "slaves' claims-making" (341) allows for an important entry into the subject, complementing recent studies of slavery in Spanish America that have focused on how slaves used the institutions of Spanish colonialism to gain freedom or greater autonomy.2 However, reviving the Tannenbaum thesis, even in the limited form of the law, inspires less enthusiasm. De la Fuente's interpretation of Cu-ban slavery, through his rereading of Tannenbuam, does not produce misrepresentations in his treatment of historiography or sources; rather, I sense in this work the static conception of New World slavery created by Tannenbaum's dichotomous vision, both among and within particular colonial and national slave societies. 1
      To illustrate what I mean, I turn to the efforts of historians to undo the binary oppositions that structure Tannenbaum's work by looking at New World slavery as part of a broader Atlantic world. By widening their focus, historians have called into question the hard and fast divisions that Tannenbaum posited between slavery in the British and Iberian empires; they have also included the colonial regimes that inexplicably found no place in his account of "the Negro in the Americas," most notably the French and the Dutch. Moreover, they have emphasized the historicity of slavery, a protean institution that changed considerably according to time and place. After discussing these Atlantic perspectives, I consider the reproduction of Tannenbaum's antinomies in Alejandro de la Fuente's fine essay and suggest how his rendering of Tannenbaum combines with a major trope of Cuban historical writing to create an unnecessarily rigid account of Cuban and Spanish American slavery. 2
      Ira Berlin's synthesis, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, demonstrates this search for connections and overlapping histories on an Atlantic scale.3 One of the richest concepts in Berlin's work is that of "Atlantic creoles," one that extends far beyond the study of North American/U.S. slavery. What Berlin calls the "charter generations" of slaves in North America often arrived from the Caribbean or points along the African littoral. These Atlantic creoles were people of African and mixed origin who had interacted with Europeans before enslavement in North America, assimilating significant aspects of European ways into their own sense of self and community. Many spoke European languages, especially Portuguese, practiced Christianity, and were familiar with European laws and concepts of property, work, and wealth. Many were of mixed race. Atlantic creoles were thus hybrid and cosmopolitan people, intermediaries between Africa and Europe. 3
      Because of their familiarity with the culture and economy of the enslavers, many were able to attain freedom once enslaved in colonial North America. Their ability to use the law, to engage in various crafts or businesses to earn money to purchase their freedom, and their intimacy with the master class, expressed through shared religion, language, or family, made them more than chattel. Free people of color in the seventeenth-century Chesapeake with names like Domingo Mathews and John Francisco not only illustrate the intermixture of peoples and cultures along the Atlantic littoral but also that "these first arrivals [in North America] were not denigrated by diminutives, labeled with names more appropriate to barnyard animals, or derided with the appellations of ancient notables. Instead, their names provided concrete evidence that they carried their dignity and a good deal more with them to the New World" (39). 4
      However, this world was subject to dramatic change, not unlike Cuba in the late eighteenth century. As plantation production grew in the Chesapeake region and the Carolina low country and these regions engaged with the Atlantic economy in the mid to late seventeenth century, the slave trade brought new kinds of slaves, while colonial planters used their local power to limit the rights and prerogatives of slaves and free people of color alike. Slaves arriving in the New World during the plantation revolution were from the African interior and had no previous exposure to the cosmopolitan world of the Atlantic littoral. The gulf between them and the master class, and between them and African-Americans, was enormous. Differences of language, religion, and culture left the newly enslaved uniquely vulnerable, especially as the intensification of plantation agriculture subjected them to harsh labor discipline. In the Chesapeake, "Africanization ... marked the debasement of black life" (122), by which Berlin means that not only did slaves suffer more but free blacks saw the relative freedom of the early colonies curtailed. Slavery, too, became more identified with blackness as planters turned away from the use of indentured European laborers who were less easily controlled. Africanization led to the development of an ideology of white supremacy and effaced the many bonds between black and white that had existed earlier. Plantation slavery and racism marched hand-in-hand: "The growth of a slave society and the degradation of free people of African descent were part of the same process of making slavery and making race" (126). 5
      The totalizing vision offered up by Tannenbaum silences the variability and contingency of slavery and freedom in North American history, not only by homogenizing the time and space of that history but also by overlooking the movements across the boundaries of supposedly discrete slave societies, a movement of peoples epitomized by the Atlantic creoles of the seventeenth century. Berlin enhances his argument about the temporal and spatial variability of slavery, race, and freedom on the North American continent by looking beyond the British colonies. Quite distinct patterns developed in the French and Spanish North American colonies, in no small part because of different slave laws, in addition to complex economic and political factors.4 These regions disrupt the tidy division between colonial regimes posited by the Tannenbaum thesis. How does one account for these numerous spaces in the Americas where diverse imperial and national states vied for domination over the centuries? Is Louisiana to be counted in the British column, the Spanish, or the French, which does not even exist in Tannenbaum's schema? 6
      Moreover, the interactions among different slave societies, particularly in the circum-Caribbean in the late eighteenth century when Cuba's plantation economy was taking off, threatened the permanence of the plantation revolution in British North America and elsewhere. Berlin shows that, beginning with the American Revolution, slaves throughout the New World found unprecedented opportunities for claiming freedom. In British North America, slaves benefited from military service, both for loyalists and patriots, in exchange for freedom. And flight from enslavement was helped by the weakening of discipline in the context of war. This pattern, with differing outcomes, would recur in the other anti-colonial wars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (not least in Cuba beginning in 1868),5 the pivotal event being the Revolution of St. Domingue (1791–1804). This was the New World's most massive and successful slave rebellion that liberated hundreds of thousands of slaves and destroyed French rule in the Caribbean's richest colony. The revolution was not self-contained. From then on, St. Domingue/Haiti symbolized both the aspirations of free blacks and slaves throughout the Caribbean and the Americas and the nightmare of planters and government officials, perhaps nowhere more so than in Cuba, just across the Windward Passage.6 7
      Tannenbaum's dichotomous vision of American slave societies, whether he discusses the law, race relations, or economic development, effaces any trace of the movements of peoples and knowledge across colonial and national boundaries, which historians have found to be so crucial to the constant restructuring of New World slavery. The layered and uneven nature of economic and social change described by Berlin finds no place in a historical paradigm that posits essentialized cultures, on continental scales, forged in the first moments of conquest and colonization. 8
      Alejandro de la Fuente indicates that he is aware of this latter pitfall. Not unlike Berlin, his emphasis on the continuity of practices through the plantation revolution is an effort to highlight the different economic and temporal layers of Cuban slave society often unintentionally homogenized by historians who have focused on the plantation.7 I fully agree that "it would be erroneous to assume that traditional legal and social customs vanished overnight. It is in this area that additional empirical research is badly needed" (365). Yet I believe that he still falls into this trap (at least in this short essay) by in turn excluding the plantation altogether. The plantations of late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Cuba hover offstage, seemingly unrelated to the slave society "outside sugar's immediate domain"(366). The author's attempt to qualify the limits of his argument nonetheless reproduces this fundamental opposition:
Neither these traditional legal and social customs, nor the presence of a sizeable community of free people of color, could deter the expansion of plantation slavery and its byproducts of social and racial polarization. But they probably served, to a certain extent, to subvert the unobstructed formation of a plantation society like these in other Caribbean territories. (364).
 This qualification implies that slavery in the cities and underdeveloped rural zones was more authentically Cuban and/or Spanish American than the "Caribbean" slavery of the sugar plantation, which was somehow outside Cuban historical development.		 9
      This latter binary opposition derives not only from the use of Tannenbaum but also from a powerful trope in the writing of nineteenth-century Cuban history, one captured by the title of an influential essay by the historian Juan Pérez de la Riva: "Una isla con dos historias" ("An Island with Two Histories"). In his essay, Pérez de la Riva divides Cuba into Cuba A and Cuba B. Cuba A was the plantation zone, the Cuba of sugar and slavery: "A splendid landscape of opulence and misery, of palm trees and smoke stacks, ... Nature transformed, waiting for the fuse of liberation to light itself."8 In contrast, social relations in the less developed areas of Cuba B were "patriarchal" and "the overseer's whip rarely sounded."9 Cuba B was the authentic Cuba. While Cuba A held within itself the seeds of revolution and represented the furthest point of human development in colonial Cuban society, it nonetheless had sold its soul to Spain for sugar and slaves. Cuba B was backwards but uncorrupted. The autonomous people of Cuba B gained nothing from Spanish colonial rule or from slavery so it was they who began the attack on both in 1868. 10
      A familiar trope of Cuban historiography thus shapes de la Fuente's rereading of Tannenbaum, both working to divide Cuban and New World slavery into hermetically sealed times and spaces. I do not mean to question the author's findings about continuities in the midst of the plantation revolution. But I question the rigid division between the plantation and the older forms of slavery and emancipation at work in Cuba, what de la Fuente calls "a dual slave system" (366). There is the impression that authentic Spanish American slavery is where coartación, manumission, and god-parentage persist, while the plantation is a historical anomaly with no organic link to other forms of slavery and freedom in the island or to earlier stages of Cuban and/or Spanish American history. One wonders how the same society, governed by the same laws, could produce by far the largest plantation complex in Spain's colonial empire. In other words, how did the law simultaneously facilitate the continuity of coartación and the construction of a plantation economy of unprecedented scale? I would ask the author to spell out more carefully for the reader the relations between these different layers of colonial slave society. It is important and efficacious to demonstrate that the plantation did not carry all before it; yet the question lingers about connections, not only among slave societies but also within them. 11


Christopher Schmidt-Nowara is an assistant professor in the department of history at Fordham University <schmidtnowar@fordham.edu>. The author thanks Dale Tomich and Laurent Dubois for conversations on related topics in the history of Caribbean slavery, which have been invaluable in writing this comment. He also thanks Christopher Tomlins for inviting him to participate in the Forum.


Notes

1. See Alejandro de la Fuente, "Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited," Law and History Review 22 (2004): 339–69.

2. Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999); María Elena Díaz, The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre; Negotiating Freedom in Colonial Cuba, 1670–1780 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

3. Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Dale Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1815–1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997); and John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1998).

4. On French and Spanish slave laws and their use by the enslaved in colonial New Or-leans, see L. Virginia Gould, "Urban Slavery-Urban Freedom: The Manumission of Jacqueline Lemelle," in More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, ed. David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hines (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 298–314. See also Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida.

5. Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1865–1899, 2nd ed. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

6. Julius S. Scott, "Crisscrossing Empires: Ships, Sailors, and Resistance in the Lesser Antilles in the Eighteenth Century," in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion, ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L. Engerman (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 128–43; and David Geggus and David Barry Gaspar, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

7. See also Díaz's comments on this issue in The Virgin, the King, and the Royal Slaves of El Cobre, 12–13.

8. Juan Pérez de la Riva, "Una isla con dos historias," in El barracón: esclavitud y capitalismo en Cuba (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1978), 175.

9. Pérez de la Riva, "Una isla," 176.

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