{ "id": "instruccion-sobre-el-trato-de-esclavos-1789", "type": "entity", "name": "The Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves (1789)", "summary": "A royal code for the Spanish Indies that fined owners for underfeeding or abandoning the people they held, ordered every death or absence reported to a judge within three days, prosecuted anyone but the owner who wounded a slave under the penalties for wounding a free person — and in the same document authorised the stocks, the chain and twenty-five lashes. The planters of Havana petitioned against it in 1790; twenty years later the Cuban authorities could not say when it had ever been in force.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "cuba", "colonial-law", "slavery", "colonial-institutions", "legal-history", "eighteenth-century", "spanish-empire" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "coartacion" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "reglamento-de-esclavos-de-cuba-1842" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "empires-slavery-and-coercion-compared" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "sandoval-naturaleza-policia-1627" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "freedom-of-marriage-in-the-laws-of-the-indies" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "pesquerias-de-perlas-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "milicias-de-pardos-y-morenos" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "albornoz-arte-de-los-contractos-1573" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "san-lorenzo-de-los-negros" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "libertad-de-los-indios-de-chile" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "negros-fugitivos-de-colonias-estrangeras" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "jornal-de-los-indios" } ], "questions": [ "What was the Spanish royal slave code of 1789?", "What protections did the Instrucción of 1789 give enslaved people?", "Why was the Spanish slave code of 1789 never enforced in Cuba?", "Did Spanish law punish the killing of an enslaved person?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "A Real cédula of 1789 carried an Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves, whose preamble alluded to the abuses committed in matters of slavery against the principles and rules of religion, humanity and the good of the State, and ordered the Instrucción observed. The source dates the cédula to 30 May 1789 in its chapter heading and opening sentence and to 31 May 1789 twice later in the same chapter; the discrepancy is left standing here rather than resolved, since the cédula itself was not reachable.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.7 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The obligations it placed on owners were material and priced. Chapter I required the Christian doctrine to be explained on days of precept, on which slaves were neither to be obliged nor permitted to work for themselves or for their owners except at harvest, the owners paying the priest who said mass and taught. Chapter II recognised the obligation to feed and clothe the slaves and even their free children. Chapter X fined the owner 50, 100 and 200 pesos — even where the fault was the overseer's — for infringing what was laid down on education, food, clothing, moderation of work or tasks, attendance at honest amusements, the assignment of quarters and an infirmary, or the abandonment of minors, the old and the disabled, with heavier penalties on relapse and a report to the King.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Marriage was protected against the property line that ran through it. Chapter VII prohibited illicit dealings between the sexes, ordered marriages to be encouraged, and required that the owner of the husband buy the wife, or the reverse, at a just appraisal by valuers. Where liberty was granted to the old or to children, chapter VI required that it not be granted without providing the peculium sufficient to keep them without other help — freeing a person too old to work was not to be a way of discharging the duty to feed them.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The same code authorised the violence it regulated. Chapter VIII set out the obligations of slaves — to obey and respect owners and overseers and to perform the tasks assigned them according to their strength — and permitted them to be punished correctionally with prison, shackle, chain, maza or stocks, or with lashes not exceeding twenty-five, and with a soft instrument. Any account of this code that omits chapter VIII is not describing it.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "Above that threshold the code moved the case out of the owner's hands. Chapter IX required that where the quality of the excess demanded greater penalties, the justicias be informed so as to proceed according to law, with a hearing of the owner and of the procurador síndico. Chapter X provided that where correctional punishment caused grave contusion, effusion of blood or the disabling of a limb, the case be prosecuted according to law \"como si fuere libre el injuriado\" — as if the injured party were free — the slave being confiscated if still fit to work, with the proceeds to the fines chest, and the owner compelled to maintain him by thirds paid in advance if he was not.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "Chapter XI reserved correctional punishment to owners and overseers alone and provided that any other person who injured, punished, wounded or killed a slave should incur the penalties established by the laws for such excesses or crimes committed \"contra las personas de estado libre\".", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "Enforcement was designed as an audit, and its central device was a death register. Chapter XII obliged owners to present to the justicia a signed and sworn list of the slaves on their estates by sex and age, to be entered in a particular book, and to report to the justicia within three days of any slave dying or going missing, failing which the owner had to justify the absence or the natural death or have proceedings opened against him. Chapter XIII ordered the clergy who came to the estates to inform themselves of how the Instrucción was being kept and to give secret notice to the procurador síndico, provided for persons of character to visit and inspect the estates three times a year, and declared the denouncing of breaches a popular action. Chapter XIV set up a chest of fines, one third to the informer, one third to the judge and one third to the chest, whose product was to be spent precisely on the means needed to make the Instrucción observed.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "It was not obeyed, and the record of why is administrative rather than inferred. Of this Instrucción, the source writes, we know only that it has not been in observance in the island of Cuba. The governor-president, in the cabildo of 15 September 1809, had to inquire into the cause; the commissioners of the ayuntamiento reported that grave inconveniences had been noticed in complying with its letter; that the planters of Havana, in a memorial of 19 October 1790, and those of Caracas and Santo Domingo, had made humble representations against it; that the King referred these to Francisco Saavedra and Juan Ignacio de Uriza, whose opinion was that its execution to the letter should not be insisted upon; and that the later Real cédula of 22 April 1804 did not require the punctual and exact observance of the letter of the 1789 code but only humanity in general in the treatment of slaves.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "Three quarters of a century later the code was still being invoked as a standard the colony had refused. A signed answer to the government's 1866 inquiry recommends to the government's consideration the two indicated chapters of the Real Cédula of 1789, whose humanitarian and charitable spirit the signatories are pleased to commend — not only to honour the memory of the monarch who dictated it but, in their own words, to protest in some measure against the alarm it produced in Havana and against the petition then raised to the King that it be left without effect.", "sources": [ "informacion-reformas-cuba-puerto-rico-1867" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "This object stands on an extract, not on the cédula. Every chapter reported here is summarised by a Cuban lawyer writing in 1866, who says himself that he is briefly extracting; the text of the Instrucción was not reachable from this container, the tier is secondary for that reason, and a printing of the cédula would be the right anchor for this subject.", "sources": [ "armas-y-cespedes-esclavitud-en-cuba-1866" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of the 1789 code either praise it as the humane Spanish slave law or dismiss it as a dead letter, and almost none quote a chapter. This object prints the chapters in both directions from a single contemporary extract — the fines of 50, 100 and 200 pesos on the owner, the wounding prosecuted as if the injured man were free, the three-day report of every death, the fines chest paying its own informers, and beside them the stocks, the chain and the twenty-five lashes the same code allowed — and then gives the paper trail of its defeat: a planters' memorial of 19 October 1790, two named ministers advising the King not to insist, a 1804 cédula asking for humanity in general instead, and a governor in 1809 still asking why the law had never been kept.", "confidence": 0.8, "last_verified": "2026-08-12", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/instruccion-sobre-el-trato-de-esclavos-1789", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/instruccion-sobre-el-trato-de-esclavos-1789.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "The Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves (1789)", "description": "A royal code for the Spanish Indies that fined owners for underfeeding or abandoning the people they held, ordered every death or absence reported to a judge within three days, prosecuted anyone but the owner who wounded a slave under the penalties for wounding a free person — and in the same document authorised the stocks, the chain and twenty-five lashes. The planters of Havana petitioned against it in 1790; twenty years later the Cuban authorities could not say when it had ever been in force.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/instruccion-sobre-el-trato-de-esclavos-1789", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-12", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "De la esclavitud en Cuba", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=kalg4gAsC1YC&pg=PA156" }, { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Informacion sobre reformas en Cuba y Puerto Rico: Introduccion. 1.a pte. Preliminares. 2.a pte. Cuestion social. 3.a pte. Cuestion economica", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=L1BKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA70" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "The Instrucción on the education, treatment and occupations of slaves (1789)" } }