Competing Freedoms: Property Rights versus Personal Freedom in Master-Slave Ligation in Colonial Lima, Peru

The argument that a defining characteristic of Spanish American slavery was that slaves there were entitled to manumission by law or custom continues shape recent scholarship.  Slaves’ ability to initiate lawsuits against masters in pursuit of personal liberation guaranteed in a 1540 Royal Order, the argument goes, underscores the recognition of slaves’ humanity in Spanish America, and provided a powerful avenue of slave agency in pursuit of liberty and dignity.

However, for much of the colonial period these lawsuits turned on much narrower criteria – whether or not an offer of manumission, or in some case a completed manumission (thought to be sacrosanct), proved prejudicial to the manumitting master’s debtors and heirs.  For example, in 1682 Micaela de la Torre freed her slaves Margarita (for free) and Margarita’s two sons (for 300 pesos).  Upon Micaela’s death, her heirs initiated a lawsuit to return Margarita and her sons to slavery because their manumissions undermined the heirs’ rights to their full inheritance.  The Audiencia partially granted this petition in 1685 revoking Margarita’s manumission, returning her to slavery, but upholding that of Margarita’s sons (because their freedom was paid for).  The Audiencia concluded that Margarita could only be free once she paid 500 pesos to Micaela’s heirs.

As Margarita’s case suggests, these lawsuits are best understood in terms of competing types of freedom: the civic freedom of slave owners related to the sanctity of property and inheritance, and the access to personal freedom for slaves.  This paper explores such lawsuits from Lima prior to 1780 (when the number of such cases exploded) in order to elucidate the social value placed on access to manumission for slaves and to speculate how colonial court’s predisposition to esteem property rights over access to personal freedom for slaves changed, if at all, across the colonial period.