"Take Refuge under the Laws of [Colombia]": Slavery, African American Migrations, and Political Abolitionism in the Hemispheric 1850s

In the early-to-mid nineteenth century, an unknown number of free and fugitive African Americans fled south to Latin America in search of freedom. From border towns in northern Mexico to the coastal Caribbean port of Veracruz, African Americans escaped enslavement and racism as Mexico passed abolitionist legislation and Free Soil policies in the 1820s and 1830s. By the 1840s and 1850s, Central America and northern South America emerged as attractive sites for informal asylum and settlement, particularly after the 1848 California Gold Rush. The isthmus of Panama was the gateway for this migration, as it functioned as the most popular and fastest overland route for aspiring gold miners. In its wake, African American restauranteurs and fugitive-turned-hoteliers emerged in places like Greytown, Nicaragua and Chagres, Panama.

Meanwhile, amid the relentless profits of cotton slavery, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, and the 1857 Dred Scott decision up north, final abolition laws were being passed across South America—including Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru. “Take refuge under the laws of New Grenada [Colombia],” advised one New York-based anti-slavery periodical to potential captives in transit on the Panamanian isthmus. Newspapers publicized Colombian emancipation, while the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society championed Venezuelan abolition in their report, noting that this “triumph of liberty, though in a distant land, quickens our pulses, and brightens our hopes of the coming of our own nation’s day of jubilee.” This paper explores how the adoption of final abolitionist legislation in South America, coupled with Black American emigrationism to Latin America, helped bolster the cause of political abolitionism—that is, the notion that the abolitionist struggle must be forged in the arena of formal, electoral politics—in the United States in the 1850s.