Slave Exports and the Politics of Slave Punishment during Colombia’s Abolition Process (1820s–1840s)

Abstract

This article focuses on the contentious process that characterized the slow, gradual abolition of slavery in Colombia and New Granada between 1821 and 1852. I investigate how in this period slaveowners in the southwest advocated for their right to export their slaves as a form of punishment. In the foundation of the antislavery Colombian Republic, the 1821 manumission law had prohibited Colombians from participating in slave trading. Yet the slave-owning elite justified their appeal for exporting their enslaved property by claiming that selling the slaves outside of Colombian territory (New Granadan after Colombia was dissolved in 1830) was a strategy to get rid of the Afro-descendant populations, whom they considered to be dangerous to the social order. I also study how the position of the enslaved in the southwestern region was politicized both by the military dynamics and legal changes underway after independence. Justifying slave exports as a punishment of the “unruly slaves” was not only a strategy of the slaveowners to regain their capital. It was, mainly, a form of empowerment in response to the challenges they faced as a class in the context of gradual abolition, including the state’s courting of slaves through antislavery legislation.