CITIZENSHIP EXCLUSIONS AND AMERICAN DISUNION
In order to understand more clearly what was behind the blatant ambiguity displayed by Spanish liberals in the 1812 constitution, it is necessary to read the exhausting and heated debates that led to the exclusion of the castas pardas from citizenship very carefully.
Agustin de Arguelles, the most outstanding peninsular orator, loudly insisted that far from any bad faith regarding pardos - a social group cherished by the Spanish bureaucracy since the time of so-called Bourbon reforms - the measure arose from reasons that could not be made explicit. Going further, he did not hesitate to bring up some biographical information regarding his own approach to the subject, reminding his fellow diputados of his genuine interest in the abolitionist debates about the slave trade when a Spanish diplomat in the British Parliament. Over and over again, Arguelles emphasized his personal goodwill toward free people of mixed blood (“pardos y morenos libres" in the Spanish imperial terminology), and although it is useless to ruminate on the sincerity of Arguelles of that of his fellow peninsular liberals, it is worth mentioning that rulings enforcing equality in colonial societies were passed in parallel to those agonizing debates on the issue of limiting citizenship. It was then that the doors were opened to castas pardas in guilds and professional careers in colonial America, corporate bodies that had been previously closed to people with African forebears. Those measures should hardly surprise us. In the first place, free blacks and mulattos could not in any way be depicted as a homogeneous social group. On the contrary, in societies where the level and significance of slavery varied greatly, manumission, religious conversion, miscegenation and constant legal claims resulted in a variety of local and regional differences of status and social mobility, as well as socially significant phenotypical variation. Dispositions were taken in the last decades of eighteenth century to make social mobility and political equality more fluid in city councils, courts and guilds. As colonial Spanish America specialists well know, royal pardons (“ gracias al sacar,,} that “washed” away the stain of African slavery (as well other marks of inferiority, such as illegitimate origin) were granted to those who could afford to purchase them. In some places, like Caracas for instance, white creoles were scandalized by the permission granted by royal officers to free blacks and mulattos to participate in local elections.[656]In the dramatic circumstances of war in the Peninsula and the diverse uprisings all across the empire, there were sound reasons to keep the doors open to free colored people. Given the massive Indian uprisings in New Spain at the time, it would be an unwise strategic measure to exclude free people of color from citizenship, for this could alienate them from the Spanish, or worse, encourage them to support the Indians. After all, both the first insurgent proclamation of Chilpancingo by father Morelos, in September of 1813, and the Apatzingan Constitution of October 1814 included the abolition of the slavery among its dispositions.[657] Moreover, as the diputados from New Spain stressed in the Cortes’ debates in order to reject the exclusion of castas pardas from citizenship, a significant number of high ranking Army officers (including generals) and Church dignitaries (including bishops), not to mention many others in positions below them, had African ancestors.
Furthermore, claims by Spanish officials or by selected members of the Cortes that urged avoiding any legal push in the direction of the exclusion of the castas pardas should prevent us from reading this period merely in terms of racial distinctions. The matter of delimiting citizenship did not divide the Cortes clearly into a Peninsular “anti-pardo” vs. an American “pro-pardo” side.
Cuban representatives supported the exclusion of pardos, although their reasons understandably differed from those of peninsular liberals. Cuba was a site of unique ferment in social transformation in the late eighteenth-century Spanish empire, and imperial reforms were not, of course, inimical to that change, especially in the face of the Saint Domingue or Haitian Revolution. First, by 1789 the slave trade had been deregulated in the whole empire, and second, less restrictive international trade was tolerated in times of war, including imports of wheat, flour and salted fish from the United States. Thanks to the increased prosperity that these two measures - among other things - brought them, Cuban representatives and agents played a significant role in Cadiz, both as political brokers and moneylenders of the Spanish Regency. Their fear of more open and unqualified political participation by free blacks and mulattos was key, especially since the French sugar colonies had been shaken by slaves’ and former slaves’ revolts, and “their own” blacks seemed to be affected. While the Cortes discussed the scope of citizenship, both the authorities and the white plantation owners in Cuba were appalled by the number of blacks and mulattos that joined the secessionist Bassave conspiracy of 1810. A year and a half later, Cuban authorities put down a second large movement of free blacks and mulattos led by Jose Antonio Aponte after six months of violence and protest in the plantations surrounding Havana.[658] Thirty-two of the people arrested were put to death and many more sent to jail. What really alarmed the Spanish authorities were the social networks underlying Aponte’s conspiracy: many of the free colored people who participated in Aponte’s movement had been members of the recently disbanded mulatto militias, and the officers in particular had important followings and contacts.What made blackness or African ancestry so crucial in Cuba, compared with New Spain or Peru, was the underlying transformation taking place on the island.
In less than three decades, Cuban society shifted from one where slavery was not a major social institution to one where it became a major organizing and demographic force.[659] Therefore, the upsurge of racial and ethnic violence in those years in Havana can only be understood with the transformation of the social landscape in mind. Moreover, Cuba’s new economy and society should be placed within a wider Caribbean framework, one which was undergoing dramatic events. Distances between the islands and the coastal Greater Caribbean are short, so migration and political exile as well as the spread of information were intensified during this period of upheaval. French planters and the slaves that they could carry with them - as well as runaway slaves from almost everywhere - spread in disparate directions looking for more secure shelters. David Geggus, Rebecca J. Scott, Ada Ferrer and Frank Moya Pons have reminded us of the intensity of the political transformation across the Revolutionary Caribbean. In the years between the Saint-Domingue crisis of the summer of 1791 and the proclamation of the Republic of Haiti, contacts and emigration between islands and coastal Caribbean were constant and intense, and were particularly fluid between the French Saint-Domingue and the Spanish part of the island as well as the eastern part of Cuba. Aponte’s plan to rebel reflected the intense cross-currents of information and political experience all over the Caribbean islands.[660]In the decade that preceded Aponte’s plot against the Spaniards and their Creole allies, information about what was happening in France and Southern Europe was also available almost everywhere. Events like the assault on the Bastille by the Parisian population, the meeting of the National Assembly in Paris, the capture of the royal family and its subsequent execution, Robespierre’s Terror, and Napoleon’s glories were not only the hallmarks of contemporary politics in Europe.
So were, for obvious reasons, the discussions of colonial slavery and emancipation in Saint- Domingue and, as a result, at the Revolutionary Convention in February of 1794. Exiles from a wide political spectrum both right and left spread out all over European metropoles and their overseas possessions. Political exchanges and alliances grew in tune with personal contacts and the making of political networks. As a result, when Napoleonic armies crossed the boundaries of the Low Countries, Italy and, finally, the Iberian Peninsula, the motivation to replicate the common language of revolution and counterrevolution was ripe.In the Spanish Caribbean, the influence of European revolutions had been strongly reinforced by the events of Saint-Domingue. The decade between the ceremony at Bois Caiman in August of 1791 that ignited the revolution and the proclamation of the Republic of Haiti in 1802 - the first and only independent state established by former slaves - placed the notion and power of citizenship at the very center of the political debate. Haiti was not only the epicenter of the bonfire that spread out later in the rest of the Caribbean islands, but the terrible destiny to be avoided that slave-holders used to sway the freeborn population in societies where slaves and former slaves were demographically significant.[661] When the political implications of citizenship were discussed in the Spanish Cortes, the strength of the notion and its implications as an irreducible and powerful political identity had already spread throughout the Spanish Caribbean. But despite this, the meaning of such political innovation and its limits were far from clear for the generation involved in the concept, with its powerful connotations and ideological appeal.
For Aponte and his followers, the meaning of citizenship was closely related to the very specific circumstances of its particular milieu. What was at stake in Cuba (and other societies with slaves) was the arguable continuity of a former pattern of political progress and upward mobility for freemen of color through military honor and judicial protection.
Those military units, the very core of the Bourbon military reforms, had been a crucial component of the empire’s defense in the Caribbean and Louisiana (a Spanish possession for almost half a century, from the Treaty of Paris at the of the Seven Years’ War in 1763 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802), as well as in some continental possessions, such the Captaincy of Venezuela and the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, where Caracas, Coro, Maracaibo, Santa Marta or Cartagena de Indias reproduced in a similar scale the social microcosm of Havana. However, the racial and social pattern in the rest of the continent followed very different lines. Excluding Indians and their mixed offspring from universal citizenship was never seriously contemplated by Spanish liberals, despite the cascade of derogatory expressions that many of them so often indulged in during the debates.[662] Indian citizenship was emphasized as necessary in order to reinforce imperial sovereignty upon lands and peoples. Peninsular Spaniards and creoles were not reluctant to acknowledge Indian citizenship because centuries of domination made both groups take it for granted that they would be able to administer and control the Indian vote.[663] But for many petty dignitaries in Indian towns, both Indians and mixed- blood or mestizos, by granting them citizenship the Cortes sanctioned local power and demonstrated that they relied on Indian leaders’ capacity to compete in elections.[664] The social coalitions of mutual interests and compromises that emerged in this period specifically around the elections that were to take place lasted for a long time: up to the mid-nineteenth century in Mexico, when Juarez’s liberal reforms reformulated the political and social landscape; and up to the decline of Peru’s “military Republic” (as it has been called by Paul Gootenberg) in the 1860s.[665]5.