San Lorenzo de los Negros — the town the viceroy of New Spain conceded to Yanga's maroons (1609)
After a viceregal expedition failed to break them, the maroons of the mountains above Córdoba wrote to Luis de Velasco proposing terms, and the viceroy granted them a town of their own with a priest and a magistrate. The same terms bound them to hunt down future runaways and hand them back for a small payment. Read from the Jesuit chaplain's relación as Alegre printed it and from Orozco y Berra's article of 1856.
Why this wins its question: This episode is normally met in one of two shapes: a line about the first free black town in the Americas, or nothing at all. Neither shape carries the documents. This object puts the terms of the settlement on the page in the order the sources give them — the maroons' letter refusing that anyone could own their liberty, the town of eighty huts with a church and a lookout tree nine months after it was built, the clause that bound a free community to return other people's runaways for a small payment, the viceroy's stated motive of cost, the war the new town then waged on its Indian neighbours, and the thirty-six people hanged in Mexico City three years later during a panic — and then says in a claim of its own that its two sources are not independent, that neither prints the grant, and which facts rest on which.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
At the end of 1609 the viceroy Luis de Velasco commissioned D. Pedro González de Herrera, a vecino of Puebla, to subdue by arms the bands of escaped slaves whose attacks had made the roads and settlements between Veracruz and Mexico City unsafe. He asked the Jesuit vice-provincial Martín Peláez for chaplains who might also attempt the peaceful reduction of the fugitives, and the fathers Juan Laurencio and Juan Pérez were sent. Laurencio's own account, printed by Alegre, opens: "Salimos á nuestra empresa á 26 de enero de 1609", a proclamation having first forbidden any black person to leave the city who might carry word of the march.
The force was mixed and largely irregular. Orozco y Berra gives it as one hundred soldiers, an equal number of adventurers and one hundred and fifty Indians armed with bows under Herrera's command, joined on the march by some two hundred more Spaniards and gentes de las castas from the estancias and haciendas of the district; it left on 26 January and reached the foot of the mountains on 20 February. The date of departure is the one Laurencio gives; the numbers are Orozco y Berra's alone.
Before any battle the maroons sent Herrera a letter, carried by a Spanish prisoner they had spared and fed, and Orozco y Berra prints its substance in direct speech: that they had withdrawn to that place "por libertarse de la crueldad y de la perfidia de los españoles, que sin algun derecho pretendian ser dueños de su libertad"; that God favouring so just a cause they had until then beaten every Spanish party sent to take them; and that in raiding Spanish farms they did nothing but recover by force of arms what was unjustly denied them. The words reach this corpus through a compilation of 1856 and are reported as what that source prints, not as a transcript.
Yanga, whom the source describes as "bran de nacion" and of whom it was said that had he not been taken he would have been a king in his own country, had escaped from servitude thirty years earlier. By 1609 he was old, and had kept the civil government of the settlement to himself while giving command of the arms to Francisco de la Matosa, a black man of Angola who bore the name of the Castilian who had owned him.
The settlement the Spaniards found was a working town nine months old: seventy or eighty huts around a church, a great tree in the middle serving as a lookout, and fields of plantains, fruit trees, maize, frijol, potatoes, cotton, tobacco and some vegetables. Laurencio's relación adds the division of labour — the women worked, and of the men half were employed in the fields and half kept under arms.
The assault carried the palisades and the town, which was sacked and burned; the Spaniards kept the site as their camp and made a hospital there for their many wounded. The maroons withdrew into the forest. Herrera twice raised a white flag on high ground and left behind a signed cédula granting a general pardon, and they did not come in; the Spaniards then set about felling their fields and wearing them down with continual raids.
The settlement was reached by treaty, not by surrender. Yanga wrote to the viceroy proposing capitulaciones: that he and his principal companions would hand over at once every fugitive slave then in their camp; that, so the sierra should not go on serving as a refuge for runaways, all those who were free be granted another suitable site, not far from the ground the Spaniards had won, where they might live with their wives and children; that they bound themselves to allow no enslaved black person among them and to seek out and collect such people in those hills and return them to their owners for a small payment; and that, protesting they had never meant to fail God or the king, whose faithful vassals they were and would remain, His Excellency assign them a priest to be recognised in spiritual matters and someone to do the office of justice for the political government of the town.
The viceroy granted the whole of it. Orozco y Berra adds the motive in the same sentence as the grant — Velasco conceded it "en obvio de mayores males y de los muchos gastos que se erogaban", to avoid greater evils and the expense the campaign was costing. The site lay near where the villa of Córdoba would later stand, and the town formed there was known in the nineteenth century as San Lorenzo de los Negros; the cimarrones settled it with their families. In spiritual matters it was attached to the nearest beneficed priest, of the parish called de la Punta.
Neither source dates the grant or the founding. Alegre fixes the relative order instead: the viceroy conceded "el sitio en que está hoy el pueblo de S. Lorenzo, á pocas leguas de la villa de Córdova, que se fundó despues por los años de 1618" — the maroon town came first and the Spanish villa afterwards, about 1618. Any single date for the charter given elsewhere does not come from these documents.
The price of the charter is written into the charter. The clause that made the town possible is the clause by which its inhabitants undertook to admit no enslaved person, to hunt runaways through the hills and to deliver them to their owners "por una corta paga". One community's freedom was granted on the condition that it police the slavery of others, and both sources state the term without embarrassment because neither thought it needed defending.
Both sources also record that the new town made war on its Indian neighbours. Orozco y Berra writes that "por odio ó por la causa que se quiera" its people were in continual and silent war against the Indians, whom they declared their enemies and pursued so fiercely that they left not one in the neighbourhood; the 1842 editor of Alegre says the same in a footnote of his own, adding that the two are "enemigos naturales". The statements are recorded here; the explanation offered with them is a nineteenth-century editor's and is not adopted, and no source from the Indian side of it was reachable.
The treaty did not change what happened when the colonial capital took fright. In 1612 a rumour that the blacks of Mexico City meant to rise brought armed patrols into the streets and guards into the churches; on the night the panic broke a herd of pigs entering the city was taken for the shouting of the rebels. At Easter, before an immense crowd, twenty-nine men and seven women were hanged on one gallows, their bodies quartered and nailed on spikes along the roads, the heads left at the place of execution until the smell obliged their removal. Orozco y Berra's own comment is that the undiscreet fear of the populace was calmed with blood.
The same source states plainly what the maroons had fled. Slaves were brought into the colony to serve in place of the Indians in the heavy labour of the fields and the mines; they were treated "dura y cruelmente, segun lo exigian las creencias y las costumbres de la época"; and flight into the inaccessible mountains running from the Cofre de Perote to the Pico de Orizaba, in search of shelter and liberty in the thickness of the woods, is given as the direct consequence. An earlier conspiracy of 1546 had ended with its authors hanged in the public square.
The two sources used here are not independent witnesses. Alegre, writing in the eighteenth century and printed in 1842, quotes Fr. Juan Laurencio's first-person relación at length and closes it "Hasta aquí la relacion del padre Juan Laurencio"; Orozco y Berra's article of 1856 follows Alegre closely and in the capitulaciones almost word for word, and names no archive of its own. Where the two agree, the agreement is not corroboration. Orozco y Berra is used here for what Alegre does not carry — the composition of the force, the maroons' letter, the description of Yanga, 1546 and 1612 — and the claims say which source each rests on.
Neither source prints the viceregal act. What is read here is a chaplain's narrative of the campaign set by a Jesuit historian a century and a half later, and a Mexican compilation two centuries later still. The cédula or provisión by which Luis de Velasco made the grant, and the town's own later records, were not reachable from this container, and the object is tiered secondary for that reason.