184 PART TWO
covering up every crime and outrage with the word civilization” and pointedly
referred to Sarmiento’s war against native peoples and gauchos. Another was the
Cuban José Martí, who denounced “the pretext that ‘civilization,’ the name com-
monly given to the present state of Europe, has the natural right to seize the land
of ‘barbarians,’ the name that those who hunger for other people’s land give to
everyone who is not European or of European descent.”
Even before the wars of independence, black slavery had declined in vari-
ous parts of Latin America. This occurred in part because of economic develop-
ments that made slavery unprofi table and favored manumission or commutation
of slavery to tenantry. An even more signifi cant reason, perhaps, was the fre-
quent fl ight of slaves to remote jungles and mountains, where they formed self-
governing communities. In Venezuela, in about 1800, it was estimated that
alongside some eighty-seven thousand slaves were twenty-four thousand fugi-
tive slaves. Of course, arguably the most powerful force shaping the movement to
abolish slavery was enslaved Africans and their descendants who, following the
lead of Toussaint L’Ouverture and his comrades in Haiti, took up arms to secure
their collective freedom from Latin American slavery.
The wars of independence gave a major stimulus to emancipation. Patriot
commanders like Bolívar and San Martín and royalist offi cers frequently offered
slaves freedom in return for military service, and black slaves sometimes formed
a majority of the fi ghting forces on both sides. About a third of San Martín’s army
in the campaign of the Andes was black. Moreover, the confusion and disorder
produced by the fi ghting often led to a collapse of plantation discipline, easing the
fl ight of slaves and making their recovery diffi cult if not impossible.
After independence, slavery further declined, partly because of its patent in-
compatibility with the libertarian ideals proclaimed by the new states, but even
more as a result of the hostile attitude of Great Britain, which had abolished the
slave trade in all its possessions in 1807 and henceforth brought pressure for simi-
lar action by all countries still trading in slaves; British pressure on Brazil contrib-
uted to the crisis of Brazilian slavery and its ultimate demise.
Emancipation came most easily and quickly in countries where slaves were
a negligible element in the labor force; thus, Chile, Mexico, and the Federation
of Central America (1823–1839) abolished slavery between 1823 and 1829. In
other countries, the slave owners fought a tenacious rear-guard action. In Ven-
ezuela a very gradual manumission law was adopted in 1821, but not until 1854
was slavery fi nally abolished. Ramón Castilla abolished slavery in Peru in 1855.
After a long and violent struggle to subdue rebellious slaves, the Spanish Cortes
fi nally decreed the end of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873 and in Cuba in 1880, but
in Cuba the institution continued in a disguised form (the patronato) until 1886,
when it was fi nally abolished.