Coartación — buying freedom in instalments under Spanish law

The Spanish-American right by which an enslaved person could pay part of their own price, have the rest fixed by valuers one of whom spoke for them, and never again be sold above that ceiling — opened in Cuba by fifty pesos, and declared strictly personal so that no child inherited it. Read from a Cuban treatise of 1866 and from the Spanish government inquiry of 1867 that proposed counting freedom in fifths.