The Cuban Reglamento de esclavos of 1842
The slave regulation drawn up in Havana under governor Jerónimo Valdés by a fiscal, a government assessor and a war auditor: it fixed fifty pesos as the sum an owner could not refuse for coartación, capped the resale price of a part-paid person, then made the benefit strictly personal so no child inherited it. A Cuban lawyer in 1866 ranked its authors below the royal code of 1789, and said why — the slave trade was booming.
Why this wins its question: The 1842 Reglamento is usually mentioned as the harsh Cuban slave code and left at that. This object names the three lawyers who wrote it and the governor they wrote it for, gives the three articles that governed self-purchase by number and content, shows the one right the drafters would only allude to, and then sets against it the two judgements its own century passed: a Cuban lawyer in 1866 ranking it below the royal code of 1789 and explaining why — the slave trade was booming — and the Spanish government's commissioners in 1867 arguing that its rule on inheriting coartación was contrary to equity and pointing at Puerto Rico's regulation as the better one.
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 Reglamento de esclavos was drawn up in the time of Jerónimo Valdés, governor and captain general of Cuba, by a commission composed of José Antonio de Olañeta, fiscal of the audiencia, José María Pinazo, assessor of government, and José María Franco, auditor of war — three crown lawyers, not a legislature and not the planters.
Its coartación articles are the ones that mattered in daily life. Article 34 provided that no owner could refuse to coartar his slaves whenever at least fifty pesos were exhibited on account of the price. Article 35 provided that coartados could not be sold above the sum fixed at their last coartación, the condition passing from buyer to buyer, but allowed the owner to add the alcabala and the duties of the sale where the slave sought to be sold without just cause or gave occasion for it by his own bad conduct. Article 36 declared the benefit personalísimo and the children of coartada mothers excluded from it.
The right that let a coartado escape a bad owner was in the text only by allusion. The custom by which the slave could compel his owner to give him papel para buscar amo — written leave to find a buyer of his own choosing, usually within three days — is referred to in article 35, in the source's phrase, "con la recelosa cautela que presidió á la redacción de ese conjunto de disposiciones": with the suspicious caution that presided over the drafting of the whole set of provisions.
Its own contemporaries measured it against the royal code of half a century earlier and found it wanting. Comparing his extract of the Instrucción contained in the cédula of 1789 with the provisions of the Reglamento, the source concludes that the authors of the Reglamento of 1842, notwithstanding how far the age had advanced, were not on the level of the author of the Instrucción of 1789 in humanitarian and philosophical ideas — and attributes this, probably, to the fact that in 1842, despite what he calls the never denied purity and honesty of general Valdés, the slave trade was in one of its most brilliant and flourishing periods, because the good policy of the government and the need to promote the agriculture of Cuba were believed to require an extraordinary increase of the slave population.
The same passage records the moral climate in which it was written without being asked to: slaves were then so abundant that they were sold cheaply and handed over to the buyer on credit, without guarantee and on nothing but renewable promissory notes; and the moral sentiment of some inhabitants of Cuba was so debased or benumbed, the source writes, that they used to celebrate with great praise the exploits of one or two slaving captains who had brought in a large number safely. This is a witness inside the slaveholding order describing his own society, which is what makes the passage evidence.
By 1866 the Spanish government's own colonial commissioners were attacking its central rule. A signed answer holds that by making the benefit of coartación personalísimo the Reglamento in force in Cuba consecrated an exception contrary to equity and to the laws of nature, and proposes that coartación be transmitted to children in the same order as the states of liberty and slavery, following the condition of the womb.
Where the Cuban regulation was measured against Puerto Rico's, it was Puerto Rico's that was proposed as the model. On working hours the signatories propose, on reasons corroborated by what experience had already shown in Puerto Rico, that the precept of that island's Reglamento be applied in Cuba, which sets nine hours for ordinary times and thirteen as the maximum in the sugar harvest; the agreed answer of the commissioners adopts the same nine and thirteen, with any hours worked beyond them to be paid to the slave at the going rate for day labour, the payment increasing his peculio.
The text of the Reglamento was not reachable from this container. Every article reported here — 34, 35 and 36 — is quoted or paraphrased by a Cuban lawyer in 1866 or argued over by commissioners in 1867, and the numbering, the fifty pesos and the personalísimo rule are consistent across the two sources; but no clause is reproduced from the regulation itself, which is why this object is tiered secondary.