Hispanic American Historical Review 87:4
doi XXXXXXXXXX/ XXXXXXXXXX
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
“A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and
Respect”: Slaves and Their Masters in the
Courts of Late Colonial Buenos Aires
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
eplied in writing to the charge that he held the parda Francisca Marigorta in
illegal bondage. After fleeing from his household, Francisca had found tempo-
ary refuge with a sympathetic neighbor, Don Bernardo Quiroga. The neighbor
had then written to the defensor general de po
es, 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, Je
y 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.
HAHR874_02_Johnson.indd XXXXXXXXXX/1/07 2:58:27 PM
632 HAHR / November / Johnson
esponse, 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 po
es, 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 a
ange for a transfer to a new master. These 133 cases were distributed
y decade in the following manner: 1761 – XXXXXXXXXX%), 1771 – XXXXXXXXXX%), 1781 – 90 (25%),
1791 – XXXXXXXXXX%), 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 po
es,” Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español XXXXXXXXXX):
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.
HAHR874_02_Johnson.indd XXXXXXXXXX/1/07 2:58:27 PM
‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect’ 633
small number of cases were
ought directly to higher authorities: the audien-
cia, the captain general, or the viceroy (after XXXXXXXXXXAll 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
ought 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.
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634 HAHR / November / Johnson
esisted 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
fa
ic 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
etween 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 na
owly 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.
HAHR874_02_Johnson.indd XXXXXXXXXX/1/07 2:58:28 PM
‘A Lack of Legitimate Obedience and Respect’ 635
the slave.7 Free blacks attempting to gain the manumission of a relative were
even less constrained, although they wo
ied 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
utally 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