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.
Why this wins its question: Coartación is usually summarised in one sentence — "in Spanish America slaves could buy their freedom" — with nothing under it. This object gives the machinery and the limits together and from documents of the period: the three valuers and which of them spoke for the slave, the fifty-peso threshold that opened the right, the price ceiling that passed from buyer to buyer, the alcabala the owner could add if the slave asked to be sold, the article that made the benefit strictly personal so that no child inherited it, the papel para buscar amo and the twelve centavos per hundred pesos of the jornal — and then the question the Spanish government itself put about it in 1866 and the answer that proposed to count freedom in fifths.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The base right was not coartación but forced sale at a judicially controlled price: owners were obliged to free their slaves the moment the price of estimation, legitimately acquired, was tendered to them, that price being set by agreement between the parties or, failing agreement, by three valuers — one named by the owner or by the justicia in his default, one named by the síndico procurador general in representation of the slave, and a third named by the justicia in case of discord. Coartación sat on top of this: the right to hand the owner a sum on account of that price.
Once part-paid, the price became a ceiling that travelled with the person. Article 35 of the Cuban Reglamento de esclavos provided that coartados could not be sold for more than the sum fixed at their last coartación, the condition passing from buyer to buyer; article 34 provided that no owner could refuse to coartar his slaves whenever at least fifty pesos were exhibited on account of the price. The effect is a ratchet: each payment lowered the price at which the person could ever again be sold, until the last payment bought the whole.
The same article carried a penalty clause that ran the other way. If the slave sought to be sold without just cause, or gave occasion for the sale by his own bad conduct, the owner was permitted to add to the coartación price the amount of the alcabala and the duties of the sale — so the instrument that protected the price could be used to raise it against a person who had asked to change owner.
Article 36 declared the benefit of coartación personalísimo, and that the children of coartada mothers should not enjoy it. The consequence is the exact point at which the institution stops being a road out of slavery for a family: a woman could buy four fifths of herself and her children would be born whole slaves.
Two further rights of the coartado rested on custom rather than on the code. The first was to compel the owner to give him papel para buscar amo — written authorisation to look for a purchaser of his own choosing, usually with a term of three days — a right alluded to in article 35 of the Reglamento, in the words of the source, "con la recelosa cautela que presidió á la redacción de ese conjunto de disposiciones". The second was to ganar jornal: to work outside the owner's house, paying him a fixed quota equivalent to twelve centavos of a peso for each hundred pesos of the price at which the slave was contracted, and keeping everything else the work produced. The second was recognised and sanctioned expressly by a special decree of the island's superior civil government.
The right was old and its origin was already uncertain to a lawyer writing in 1866. The source records that it was recognised in cédulas of 21 June 1708 and 8 April 1788, and speculates that in its origin it may only have existed where a quarter — the cuarta parte — of the price was handed over, which would explain why the common people said "cuartado" where the official documents said "coartar". He offers this as a guess and this object carries it as one.
The Spanish government put coartación to its colonial commissioners as an open question. Question 10 of the interrogatorio in the section headed NEGROS ESCLAVOS asks what rules it will be advisable to establish for the use the slaves make of the benefit of coartación, whether it should continue to be personalísimo, and in what form it might be used within a family by the children of a coartado.
The commissioners' agreed answer, after what the record calls a long and animated debate, proposed to stop counting coartación in money and start counting it in fractions of a person: a slave who hands over a hundred pesos and is valued at five hundred is not coartado at four hundred but at four fifths, having redeemed the fifth part of his liberty, so that he can never afterwards be valued higher than at his first coartación. They further proposed that coartación pay neither alcabala nor notarial duties, as complete manumission did not, and that the benefit — "hasta ahora personalísimo" — be transmitted to children born after the law, following the condition of the womb, with legitimate children inheriting the father's coartación as well as the mother's.
A second signed answer in the same volume attacks the rule directly: by making the benefit personalísimo the Reglamento in force in Cuba consecrated an exception contrary to equity and to the laws of nature, since the states of complete liberty and complete slavery are transmitted to children and the middle state of coartación is not. The reform, in other words, was argued inside the Spanish consultation as a matter of consistency in the existing law, not as an abolitionist demand.
What the 1866-67 record shows is a proposal, not an enactment. The volume prints the questions and the answers of a consultative body; it does not print a law, and one commissioner's individual answers in the same section are already arguing for the free womb — "si no se declara desde ahora el vientre libre" — which tells you that neither the fractional coartación nor its inheritance was law when the volume was printed in 1867.
Both witnesses here stand inside the order they describe. The 1866 treatise is by a Cuban writer who calls the resulting arrangement "a kind of condominium" over the person of the slave, one that modifies the relations of the two "aunque no gravemente"; the 1867 volume is the record of a Spanish government consultation whose commissioners were, in the main, the colonial propertied class. No account by a coartado of his own coartación was reachable from this container, and the reader should assume the mechanism worked worse in practice than either source implies.