“Of a Stronger Make Than Most Ladies”: Female Slaveholding on the Post-independence Colombian Black Pacific

Although the gold-mining Pacific coastal province of Chocó, with the highest concentration of slaves of any province in New Granada, was often considered to be an absentee, male-dominated, isolated ‘backwater’ of the nation well into the nineteenth century, this paper shows how a sizeable population of white and black female slaveholders integrally shaped the making of the region and the everyday institution of slavery after independence. Whether single mothers, older widows, or prosperously married, these women oversaw the administration of gold mines, bargained with English, French, and local merchants over the sale of slaves in the central marketplace of the capital of Quibdó, and conditionally granted and vehemently contested their slaves’ legal and extralegal quests for freedom. In this paper, I first examine the domestic universes of prominent and less wealthy mistresses through a reconstruction of their households and holdings as documented in their last will and testaments. Next, I present a portrait of the social and economic lives of a diverse range of female slaveholders, connecting the enslaved household to the public marketplace, showing how these women managed freedom and enslavement in their daily lives. As one visitor to New Granada commented in the late 1850s, white slaveholding women were considered to be “of a stronger make than most ladies”; yet, as I demonstrate, this ‘ruggedness’ was at times perceived as a threat after independence, especially in frontier, majority-black regions like Chocó. This is evident in two high-profile criminal cases involving white women in the late 1820s, cases which show how the gendered and sexualized treatment of these “unruly” women were intended to serve as reminders to slaves, free blacks, and indigenous groups of the boundaries of racial rule in the new republic.