Deciphering and Decolonizing the Spanish Transpacific

Freeing the Black Runaways in the Philippines

Francisca Bridget Bico and Caio Mathias Vaz Pereira

Introduction

The documents transcribed and translated here about “Freeing the Black Runaways in the Philippines” deals with the 24 September 1750 Royal Decree and its reception in the Philippines. ¹ The Royal Decree begins by recounting the case of three enslaved Africans who fled Jamaica for Santiago de Cuba in order to embrace the Catholic faith. The legal impasse is sent to the Council of the Indies, which decided that from then on black slaves who fled from English and Dutch colonies to Spanish possessions with the aim of adopting Catholicism would henceforth be considered free and could no longer be mistreated or subjected to bondage. This decision was then sent to New Spain to be applied throughout the Viceroyalty. In the Philippines, the Royal Decree was received by the Governor and the Marquis of Ovando, in 1752. The chain of command in the region to receive and implement the regulations involved the Prosecutor, the Fiscal, the Real Audiencia and, then, the Juzgado de Esclavitud, which was the responsible institution for handling such cases. The documents also include the account of its public proclamation through the streets of Manila, the fixing of copies of the document in public places and, finally, a copy of the report that was sent back to the Council of the Indies throughout the Manila Galleon in July 1753.

As the royal decree itself acknowledges, this was not the first time a similar decision had been made in the Spanish Empire. There are two precedents in 1680 and 1693 in Florida, then a Spanish colony, where the same measure was adopted to deal with the flight of enslaved people from the British Mainland North America. ² But it was from the 1740s until the end of the century that we can see a real “asylum policy”. ³ Similar decrees were issued in 1733, 1740, 1750, 1764, 1769, 1773, and 1789, signed by three different monarchs (Ferdinand VI, Charles III, and Charles IV), extending the instructions to the rest of the empire. It is within this continuum that the document presented here should be understood.

The so-called asylum policy is the result of the meeting of two legal traditions, the people’s rights (derecho de las gentes) and the legal notions of asylum inherited in the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the Reconquista. ⁴ The first, with roots in the laws of the Siete Partidas and the municipal foros, sanctioned and recognized the treatment of enslaved people within the Hispanic legal tradition. ⁵ The concept of asylum, which had previously been linked to asylum granted by the Churches or by various political jurisdictions, underwent a process of secularization and became the domain of the monarch through decrees such as these. A particular conception of state reason, which can be understood as racial pragmatism, provides the justification for these guidelines. ⁶ That is, without denying the weight of racial ideologies, the Spanish Empire adopted a flexibility to use asylum as a strategy to both weaken its enemies and increase its own number of subjects. This was part of a new conception of colonial enterprise that resulted from the Bourbon reforms, in which occupation and territorial defense were combined with the development of agricultural production. ⁷ We can also add the impact of the Stono Rebellion (1739), when enslaved people from South Carolina, many from the Congo, where they had converted to Catholicism and learned Portuguese, rose up and headed for Florida. ⁸ Although unsuccessful, this event highlighted the geopolitical dimension of slavery and brought to light the disputes over asylum.

As this document was circulated throughout the Spanish Indies, Manila had become an integral port in the trading network of foreign slaves, including African slaves. ⁹ Prior to the “Hispanization” of the Philippines, there was already an existing debt-servitude relationship among the indigenous elites. Native chiefs would acquire slaves and captives seized during raiding, increase labor, uplift their status quo, and, for some slaves in this system, repay their debt. Thus, the social structure of pre-Hispanic Philippines was then characterized as a complex hierarchical society that relied on debt bondage and mutual obligation. ¹⁰ Under Spanish rule in the Philippines, this indigenous system of slavery was exploited by Spanish authorities to gain stronger control over the islands and the natives by co-opting with the local elites and utilizing the existing slave systems. Furthermore, there was an increase in the demand for foreign slaves when contestations on this system pushed for the Spanish monarchy to proclaim all indios to be free and the transpacific trade allowed for further diversification of slavery in the Philippines. ¹¹ Hence, these contextualize how heavily dependent Spanish authorities are on the slave system in maintaining their colonization project.

As mentioned above, there were previous documents that proclaimed the freedom of black slaves and extended to the Spanish Indies. Manila, being an important port in the transpacific trade, positioned itself on the global network and centralization of the Spanish administration. The documents at hand acknowledge the presence of black slaves across Spanish territories in Southeast Asia, linking Spanish America and the Philippines through trading routes. The Portuguese slave trade brought in an increase of foreign slaves upon the demands of Manila, including African slaves, which in turn, made Spanish administrations weary of this increasing number. In 1605, it was noted that “many black slaves brought by the Portuguese ran away and became drunkards and robbers.” ¹² The lack of accurate statistics on black slaves in Manila opens potential discussions on how likely these black slaves were received among the indigenous populations upon manumission and how likely was the royal decree of manumitting followed through among the natives and Spanish authorities alike. If we juxtapose the previous decrees in abolishing the slave system in the Philippines, many authorities voiced out their contestations to them and wrote to the Crown that the Philippines, being unique to the Spanish empire, “should not be considered the same as the rest of the kingdoms and provinces of the Americas, where the slaves are negros and mulattos or pure indios: because in these islands there is such a diversity of nations that it is not easy to comprehend all of them and impossible to record them”. ¹³