Persons or Property? Subjects or Slaves? Runaway Curaçaoan Slaves in the Spanish Colonial Legal System

Throughout the first two decades of the eighteenth century an intriguing case unfolded at the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, concerning the fate of thirty-one runaway slaves from the Dutch island of Curaçao who had been captured on the nearby coast of Venezuela. On the one hand Spanish colonial authorities, Venezuelan slave owners, and the representative of the French Guinea Company (which then held the asiento de negros) fought over ownership rights to the chattel. One the other hand, successive captains of the free black militia of Caracas advocated for the foreign fugitives’ freedom, successfully arguing that they should be allowed to live in liberty as subjects of the Spanish Crown. Hundreds of pages of testimony reveal both a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the Spanish colonial legal system on the part of the African-Dutch migrants and their allies, and colonial authorities’ repeated and blatant disregard for the Audiencia’s rulings. As the case dragged on the fugitives were caught in legal limbo, suspended between multiple layers of the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, and the conflicting interests of different colonial power groups.