"Que gocen de libertad": the Spanish rule that slaves fleeing foreign colonies became free (1773-1789)
A circular royal cédula of 14 April 1789 ordered that enslaved people who escaped from foreign colonies into Spanish territory were not to be given back and kept the liberty they acquired by taking refuge. It was decided on the case of a free mulata of Trinidad who offered to buy her mother and six siblings out of English Grenada, and it reversed an instruction of 1783 ordering such fugitives returned. Weeks earlier the same crown had opened the slave trade to its subjects.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Spanish sanctuary for fugitive slaves begin and end with Fort Mose in Florida, and cite modern scholarship for a policy whose own texts are rarely quoted. This entry gives the general rule as it was printed for the whole of the Indies, with the words that carry it - liberty acquired "conforme á derecho de gentes" by taking refuge, and the general declaration that such fugitives "no se restituyan" - together with the three things that make the rule intelligible and that a triumphal account omits: the reserved instruction of 1783 that had ordered exactly the opposite, the petition of a free mulata offering to pay for her own family which the crown refused to accept, and the royal cédula of six weeks earlier opening the slave trade in the expectation that the enslaved population of the Americas would grow considerably.
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 rule is printed under its own heading in the article ESCLAVOS of the Spanish compilation of overseas law: "Real cédula circular á Indias de 14 de abril de 1789, para que no se restituyan los negros fugitivos de colonias estrangeras, y que gocen de libertad." The operative words of the resolution, quoted there from the text, order the governor to maintain the liberty "que conforme á derecho de gentes, y á lo dispuesto en la preinserta, adquirieron, acogiéndose á mis dominios" and declare "como declaro por punto general, no se restituyan los negros fugitivos, que por estos legítimos medios adquiriesen su libertad." Liberty is grounded on the law of nations and on the act of taking refuge, not on baptism or on any service owed in return.
The rule of 1789 was not new law so much as the settling of a contradiction. The same entry records that the cédula inserted an earlier one communicated on 20 February 1773 to the governor of Trinidad, and that article 13 of the reserved instruction given to that governor on 8 December 1783 had prescribed the opposite - that slaves fleeing from Grenada "y otros estrangeros, que se refugiasen en aquella, los devolviese á sus dueños, ó magistrados, siempre que los reclamasen con justificacion." For six years the crown's own papers told the same official to shelter fugitives and to return them.
The case that forced the decision is named in the text and is not the crown's own initiative. A "morena inglesa" had crossed from Grenada to Trinidad with six enslaved children to claim the benefit; a daughter of hers, "Margarita Marizo, mulata libre, y nueva colona de aquella isla", petitioned on 18 November 1784. Her petition set out "los inhumanos, y duros castigos con que en estos casos trataban los ingleses á sus esclavos", stated that her mother and siblings had fled "con el único objeto de conseguir su natural libertad", asked that the delivery be suspended, and offered to pay within three years whatever price all seven were assessed at, giving security for it. The governor's advised order of 19 November 1784 conceded the valuation and referred the matter to the king as one of the greatest gravity.
The crown's answer refused the transaction as well as the restitution. It ordered that the liberty of the seven be maintained, that neither their persons nor "el precio de su rescate" be surrendered to the former owner, that Margarita Marizo's "generoso ofrecimiento" not be accepted, that she be released from the obligation she had entered into and that the sums already deposited in the royal treasury on that account be returned to her. A right that had to be bought would have been a price; the resolution as printed makes it a status.
The same crown, in the same season, was enlarging the traffic. The cédula and instruction of 31 May 1789 on the treatment of slaves, printed two pages further on in the same article, opens by explaining that "con la libertad, que para el comercio de negros he concedido á mis vasallos por el artículo 1.º de la real cédula de 28 de febrero próximo pasado, se aumentará considerablemente el número de esclavos en ambas Américas." Seven weeks separate the liberalisation of the slave trade from the cédula that freed fugitives from foreign colonies, and the second is written in the knowledge of the first.
Where the crown legislated against slaveholders' interest, the slaveholders answered and the law gave way. The compiler's footnote to the 1789 instruction records that its literal observance "hubo de suspenderse ... en la isla de Cuba", on the evidence of the report the commissioners of the Havana town council gave their governor in cabildo of 15 September 1809: the planters of Havana petitioned against it in a memorial of 19 January 1790 and "lo hicieron tambien las provincias de Caracas y de Santo Domingo"; the representations went to consultation with two ministers who had served in America; and the only later cédula on the matter, of 22 April 1804, required not the letter of 1789 but "la humanidad en general con que deben ser tratados los esclavos". The footnote's own gloss on why is worth quoting because it is the planters' argument in the compiler's mouth - some chapter, it says in a marginal note, "comprometia demasiado á los amos."
An older layer in the same article shows the crown preferring private pressure to public rule. The "antigua real cédula de 14 de noviembre de 1693" to the captain general of Havana, on the daily wage enslaved men and women were made to hand their owners, orders him to call the owners "reservadamente" and to tell them in the king's name not to press them with rigour for that payment, "pues es bastante dolor el de su cautividad, sin que tambien esperimenten el destemplado rigor de sus amos." The instruction is confidential, addressed to owners rather than to courts, and changes nothing in the wage itself: it is a measure of how far the crown thought it could go in Cuba in 1693, and of how much further the declaration of 1789 went.
What this evidence will not carry should be said plainly. It is a nineteenth-century compilation of the law, printed in Madrid in 1845 by an official of the colonial treasury, and it establishes the wording, the dates and the sequence of the orders. It does not show a single fugitive actually kept free after 1789, does not report how many people crossed, and says nothing about the earlier and better known application of the same principle in Spanish Florida, where fugitives from the English colonies had been received since the sixteen-nineties; no source opened for this entry mentions Florida at all, so no claim is made about it here. Whether the rule survived is also left open on purpose. The chronological index of the same compilation carries an entry "R. C. Octubre 27 [1790], libertad de esclavos. I, 164" - a royal cédula issued eighteen months after the one printed above, in the volume of the first letters, which was not reachable and was not opened for this entry. Until that page is read, nothing here should be taken to mean that the declaration of April 1789 remained in force.