Enslaved Litigants, Emotions, and a Shifting Legal Landscape in Cauca, Colombia (1825–1831)

Abstract

This article reconstructs judicial practice in Cauca, Republic of Colombia, through the close reading of two criminal court cases involving enslaved litigants during the early transition from colony to independent state. In 1825, the enactment of laws that created new courts, judgeships, and procedures aimed to restructure and strengthen judicial practice in a nascent republic convulsed by internal division, which would disintegrate politically in 1831. Enslaved people—who had a long engagement with the law since colonial times—litigated in this context of political and judicial transformation in cases about adultery, theft, murder, vagrancy, cruelty, and freedom. This article sheds light on how these litigants were caught in the tensions that emerged between low- and high-ranking legal authorities over conflicting understandings of the role of religious thinking and the use of emotions in the adjudication of criminal cases and their appeals. In addition to drawing from the rich scholarship on slavery and the law in Latin America, this article broadly addresses recent calls from Latin America-based scholars to nourish national historiographies by inserting “the emotional” into the analytical framework. Through this approach, enslaved litigants appear moving through an uneven judicial apparatus in which authorities tried balancing their desire to uphold new procedural rules to create a secular legal sphere on the one hand and their personal religious convictions and status as enslavers on the other.

In 1827, Simón Bolívar, the president of the Republic of Colombia (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador), publicly lamented how people across the territory “abhorred” the administration of justice, did not trust the new laws, and showed no respect for appellate judges.¹ As high-ranking officials, these judges were spearheading a transformation of the judicial system by teaching their subordinates, through newly created appeals courts, how to abide by new constitutional mandates, guaranteeing what we now call due process.² They expected justice officials at first-instance levels to follow procedural conventions in accordance with the 1821 constitution and to produce credible and objective evidence for trials. Appellate judges understood the failure to adhere to new procedures as “legal arbitrariness,” a negative inheritance from the time of the Inquisition and a supposed trademark of the Spanish colonial past. Justice officials thus faced increased scrutiny from their superiors after independence from Spain.³ Between 1825 and 1831, the year the republic disintegrated following the secession of Venezuela and Ecuador, appellate judges at the Superior Court of Justice of Cauca in the city of Popayán reviewed around 200 criminal judicial cases that were dispatched by local magistrates from across the northern Andes for the court’s approval or modification of first-instance sentences. Of these, roughly fifty cases specifically involved enslaved people as defendants and accusers in crimes such as adultery, theft, murder, vagrancy, and cruelty. In almost all of these cases, the appellate judges highlighted procedural violations at the first-instance level that reflected shifting legal realities.

In 1826, a criminal case against Manuel Agustín Moreno reached the appellate court in Popayán from the northern mining district of Supía.⁴ He was an enslaved man facing a death sentence for murder and adulterous concubinage.⁵ The appellate judges approved the death sentence but ordered the local magistrate to obtain Manuel’s confession before his execution. Two months later, the court fined the local magistrate in Supía for failure to follow due process; they learned that Manuel had been executed without leaving a record of his confession in the case files. The local magistrate explained that he had followed court orders and had made Manuel confess, but privately and to a Catholic priest. In other words, the local magistrate had understood the appellate judges’ legal order strictly in spiritual terms. His confusion reflected the tortuous path toward secularizing legal practice and the administration of justice after independence; he had to pay a fine for his mistake.

One year later, the same court revoked the first-instance sentence in a case filed by María Lucas Domínguez in the southern mining district of Barbacoas.⁶ She was an enslaved woman who accused her owner of cruelty and rape (sevicia y estupro).⁷ Based on the testimonies of María Lucas and three witnesses, the local magistrate had ordered the enslaver to grant María Lucas permission to seek a new owner while demanding that he compensate her with a dowry that would restore, in the words of the enslaver’s lawyer, her honor. The appellate judges fined the local magistrate on the grounds that he had failed to take the enslaver’s deposition. Furthermore, they argued, the local magistrate had also refused to hear complaints about the enslaved woman’s adulterous concubinage, which would have questioned the existence of any honor to be restored with a dowry in the first place.⁸

These two cases offer an entry point into the conflicts and ambiguities that emerged among enslaved litigants, local authorities, and appellate judges working amid Colombia’s shifting legal landscape during the late 1820s. The appellate judges not only agreed that someone had been deprived of due process in each of these cases, but there also seemed to be some confusion among them about the lines separating religion-based values and secular notions of justice. In other words, they reprimanded and fined low-ranking authorities for procedural infractions influenced by religious thinking. At the same time, they also gave weight to the litigants’ alleged immoral and sinful behavior to decide whether to grant an appeal. In this way, both cases underscore a paradox in the administration of justice in the early post-independence period in Cauca: high-ranking legal authorities demanded that subordinates avoid what they called legal arbitrariness by leaving religious thinking out of judicial proceedings but continued to privilege religion-based morality as a legal paradigm to evaluate first-instance sentences and prepare their rulings.

Individuals’ moral behavior dictated how they were perceived and treated by members of society. As in other parts of Spanish America, morality was intimately linked to honor in post-independence Colombia.⁹ Honor was not reserved for elite men and women only. The enslaved, too, viewed themselves as possessing honor and they used the courts, when possible, to defend it.¹⁰ Scholars working on the northern Andes have traced enslaved people’s engagement with the law since well before independence in cases where excessive cruelty at the hands of an owner injured their honor.¹¹ By law, cruelty complaints could lead to a change of owner and provide the aggrieved enslaved person a chance, however miniscule, to improve life conditions for themselves or someone they cared about through litigation. The study of this legal strategy has led historians like Carolina González Undurraga to argue that “the honor of slaves was in constant articulation with the honor or dishonor of their masters.”¹² This articulation shines through in court records and can be analytically expanded if, as Margarita Garrido has recently suggested, we approach the concept of honor as a sentiment that intertwines with other emotions to shape civil, political, and military decisions.¹³ Garrido’s intellectual invitation opens up a space not only to reconsider concepts and questions that may seem outdated or already settled in North American scholarship, but also to revisit moments of political upheaval through a lens that establishes fruitful dialogues with scholars working desde Latin America.¹⁴

Drawing from the scholarship of slavery and the law, I reconstruct judicial practice in the second half of the 1820s in Cauca and broadly explore the deployment of emotions in two cases involving enslaved litigants. I do not offer a comprehensive study of emotions, but specifically analyze how appellate judges’ efforts to secularize the judicial system became entangled with Catholic values and emotions that pervaded legal practice in contradicting ways. Judges, who were commonly enslavers themselves, were eager to participate in building a new republic by revamping the judicial system, but they were simultaneously fearful and anxious about the socioeconomic consequences that new laws like the 1821 national gradual emancipation laws would have on their patrimonies and their community’s social order.¹⁵ Judges’ work in court required, thus, a delicate balance between enforcing new legal paradigms to assert a novel form of state power while maintaining intact a hierarchical social order defined by colonialism and slavery. In this context, emotions like fear and pain also influenced high-ranking authorities’ review and deliberations of first-instance sentences in court, leading them to endorse rigid or selective interpretations of the law. Furthermore, litigants’ experiences were shaped by procedural misunderstandings and ideological tensions between low- and high-ranking legal authorities vying for legitimacy. Capturing these tensions reveals that the judicial system was a site of contestation not only for litigants, but also for judges struggling to counteract legal arbitrariness at lower courts after independence.

This article begins by reconstructing how the judicial system functioned before and shortly after independence. Next, it examines the cases concerning Manuel Agustín and María Lucas—a defendant and an accuser—which took place as legal authorities set out to reform the judicial system. This close examination of their cases sheds light on the ambiguous legal tactics and appeals to emotions that high-ranking authorities used to discredit or deny the legal standing of enslaved litigants.

Popayán and the Changes to the Judicial System after Independence

Known as the Governorate of Popayán during the colonial period, the Department of Cauca, in the Colombian southwest, encompassed vast swaths of the Pacific lowlands, the Andean highlands, and part of the Amazon plains and jungles.¹⁶ The Andean city of Popayán was the region’s administrative capital as well as the second major slave-trading center in colonial Colombia after the northern port city of Cartagena. Beginning in the sixteenth century, slavery along with grants of indigenous labor (encomienda) consolidated as interdependent systems of labor exploitation, defining the political and social characteristics of daily life both in the region and in the city of Popayán.¹⁷ The city, in particular, became a critical meeting point for local elite miners, merchants, and colonial officials who conducted business, engaged in political matters, and purchased enslaved people to work their gold mines in the Pacific lowlands. As absentee mine owners, local elites lived comfortably in the provincial capital; they hired poor Spanish immigrants to oversee their mines in the Pacific, relied on enslaved domestic work, and demanded food as tribute from Indians.¹⁸

Strategic marriage alliances between well-off Spaniards and Creoles in the city of Popayán formed the basis of a vibrant elite that was educated, Catholic, and deeply committed to the preservation of the institution of slavery across the region.¹⁹ Among the members of that slaveholding elite in the early nineteenth century were men trained as lawyers who served in the judicial apparatus including Dr. Don Santiago Pérez de Valencia y Arroyo. A renowned lawyer and public official, Arroyo played key roles in Popayán’s political and judicial life during and after the wars of independence. A long supporter of the patriot cause, Arroyo was named representative of Popayán to the General Congress, the constituent assembly in 1821 where delegates formalized the union of their provinces and drafted the first national constitution.²⁰

The constitution’s preamble recognized Catholicism as the state religion, but the document omitted any references to religion in its mandates to distribute power or in the layout of the new political order.²¹ These important changes reflected a move towards the gradual construction of a secular state in which the executive, legislative, and judicial branches would administer and balance out supreme power.²² Initially, however, these changes coexisted with vestiges of the colonial legal past. Proposals that Congress write a criminal code to replace all other laws went unanswered at first; a penal code would not appear until 1837. Until then, authorities working on judicial cases were expected to draw on medieval laws like Las Siete Partidas.²³ Authorities also used Spanish colonial law (Recopilación Castellana and Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias) and legal reports and manuals to frame their arguments.²⁴ Additionally, they were required to keep abreast of the scattered laws and decrees passed by Congress and President Bolívar during this period. Most laws that governed daily life thus remained unchanged from the colonial era. What changed, however, were the set of rights guaranteed by the new constitution. In other words, the constitution provided a framework to redefine the legal proceedings through which authorities were to adjudicate criminal and civil cases. This change was meant to consolidate and protect new rights and duties in judicial matters while cementing the legal basis that would guarantee state legitimacy.

Although separation of powers was at the heart of the 1821 constitution, the executive and judicial branches remained inextricably connected, at least during the first half of the 1820s. The constitution continued to allow provincial governors to perform their roles as the highest authorities in judicial cases, as ordered by Bolívar since 1817.²⁵ Governors reviewed matters that took place within their jurisdictions, delegated legal tasks to their subordinates, and later approved and confirmed sentences. However, this changed in 1825 when Congress enacted a set of laws (Ley Orgánica del Poder Judicial and Ley Orgánica de Tribunales) that restructured the judicial apparatus. Low- and high-ranking justice officials, not the governors, were now in charge of the judiciary in every province. Provincial governors could no longer interfere in any judicial matters and local officials’ duties followed specific parameters.²⁶ This was a clear attempt at drawing a sharper division between the executive and judicial branches of government.

The 1825 laws also formalized the creation of the High Court of Justice (Alta Corte de Justicia) in Bogotá and Superior Courts of Justice (Cortes Superiores de Justicia) in provincial capitals across the territory including the city of Popayán. The High Court would mainly focus on civil and criminal complaints involving members of the executive branch while Superior courts would hear appeals from the lower courts in their provinces and monitor the performance of local justice officials. For Congress, the creation of more courts and judicial districts would result in a more efficient administration of justice. That, in turn, promised “to guarantee that the constitutional rights of every Colombian citizen would not remain mere elusive ideas.”²⁷ In Popayán, Arroyo seemed firmly committed to improve judicial performance across Cauca. He remained an active member of the legal profession through the post-independence years, serving in various capacities as legal advisor, prosecuting attorney, minister of justice, and eventually president of the Superior Court of Cauca.²⁸ Arroyo faithfully executed the duties expected from a man in his role as president of the court: “to supervise the court's subordinates carefully so that they carry out their duties accurately and do not delay [legal] proceedings.”²⁹ Who were these subordinates in courts of first instance and what was the legal process that had been standard procedure through colonial times?

Administering Justice: Between a Colonial Past and an Incipient Liberal Present

During the colonial period, local officers (alcaldes pedáneos) were distinguished members of their communities who were at the bottom of the judicial hierarchy and served as local administrators of the law in their assigned districts, which were typically rural and somewhat remote. Those districts were still under the ultimate jurisdiction of the capital city of their provinces. Because they represented the authority in their communities, these local officers were allowed to detain a person suspected of a crime. They could place the suspect in jail and confiscate their belongings as a preventive measure. They would then open a formal criminal investigation that consisted in collecting witness testimonies, the defendant’s confession, and arguments for and against a defendant. These local officers could also name patrol officers (comisarios de barrio) to help them supervise people’s public behavior or even “catch” (echar mano) unmarried couples engaging, for example, in illicit sexual behavior. In many instances, local officers exercised the duties of patrol officers themselves by patrolling the streets and inspecting houses with suspicious activity late at night.³⁰ The responsibilities of both local officers and patrol officers were thus not just an extension of the Church’s watchful eye, which penetrated the privacy of ordinary people; they were also an integral part of the legal system as their work contributed to the criminalization of those whose behavior threatened colonial ideas of morality and public order.

Local officers delivered all collected information, evidence, and the defendant, if arrested, to local magistrates just one rank above (alcalde ordinario o municipal) who would officially compile a summary report (sumaria) and move to the next step in the legal process. After examining all collected evidence, local magistrates would determine the type of punishment based on the seriousness of the crime as well as on the lineage and gender of the accused. But because most local magistrates had no formal legal training, they were expected to request advice from trained lawyers or legal advisors (asesores letrados) to dictate a sentence.³¹ Legal advisors evaluated all the evidence collected and provided an informed opinion to the local magistrates about the most appropriate sentence in a given case. They also used their legal knowledge to help categorize the severity of any crime and its corresponding punishment.³² As was true before and during the wars of independence, the work of these local justice officials in towns and villages continued to be at the base of any judicial matter in post-independence Cauca. Appellate judges, however, now expected them to follow constitutional mandates as they exercised their duties in their districts.

A major task for Arroyo, three other judges, and two prosecuting attorneys at the appeals court was, thus, to counteract actions perceived to be legally arbitrary at the first-instance level. For example, actions that reflected arbitrariness included arresting people or searching homes without a warrant and failing to take depositions or confessions from defendants. For appellate judges, justice officials who engaged in these actions were plainly disregarding constitutional mandates and due process. This behavior could resemble elements of colonial rule that high-ranking officials were attempting to dismantle at every level. Arroyo opposed arbitrary rule in the adjudication of criminal court cases because, in his view, inconsistent adherence to the rule of law signaled a continuation of the despotism that had characterized Spanish rule, particularly during the Bourbon Reforms.³³

These concerns also worried others outside of the legal sphere. Through its publication of letters, speeches, summaries, and information of general interest, newspapers like Gaceta de Colombia became crucial platforms to highlight dangerous cultural remnants that threatened to erase or prevent any efforts to disassociate legally and politically from the Spanish colonial past.³⁴ For instance, judicial performance was heavily monitored and criticized through the Gaceta’s coverage of high-profile judicial cases. Editors also wrote long articles denouncing delays in the adjudication of appeals and dwelled on the ineffectiveness of the courts as a way to shape public opinion and hold authorities accountable.³⁵ In addition to keeping tabs on the administration of justice, the editors of the Gaceta also reported, in accordance with the 1821 national gradual emancipation laws, updates on the progress of the manumission of enslaved people across the territory. In 1827, for example, the Gaceta published a committee report on the state of manumission in which its members expressed dismay at the level of disorder, lack of commitment, and “lethargy” with which manumission juntas—entrusted with collecting funds to help pay for emancipation—had been performing their duties in Venezuela and the rest of the territory.³⁶ The committee pledged to do all in its power to make effective “the most salutary of measures” of the Colombian legislature even if it meant publishing a list of uncooperative slaveholding families in the Sunday newspaper to publicly humiliate them.³⁷

“Uncooperative” families typically presented themselves as advocates to end Spain’s “enslavement” of Colombia and fierce opponents of the gradual emancipation of enslaved people who constituted their family’s wealth. For example, speeches and letters published through the 1820s in the Gaceta register show how President Bolívar was celebrated, often with Catholic fervor, for “having lavished his blood to redeem his beloved compatriots from slavery [of Spain].”³⁸ The same slaveholding elite who engaged in that rhetoric, however, opposed the Free Womb law and expressed concern about their investments in human property coming to an end. Among those men was the governor of Cauca who praised President Bolívar for bringing the Republic “out of the slavery of a tyrannical government,” but was a staunch opponent of liberating the enslaved.³⁹ Historian Yesenia Barragan further complicates this dynamic by arguing that while these enslavers “derided the law as theft, some of them nevertheless saw the Free Womb law as a real economic opportunity to cash in on especially cheap pools of unfree labor” creating a trafficking system of children who were free by law.⁴⁰ Enslavers’ political and economic stances reflect the complex logics that defined public life, financial investment in humans as property, and judicial practice in the early post-independence years.

Judges’ roles administering justice were critical to reassure the slaveholding elite that Spain’s colonial subjugation had ended and that they would keep enslaved litigants in check by overseeing their judicial activity. Outside of the judicial terrain, however, enslaved people navigated the socioeconomic landscape in strategic ways. Enslaved parents were on the ground creatively mobilizing their networks and resources to prepare freedom suits on behalf of children born after 1821.⁴¹ Enslaved fugitives and deserters, on their part, were living “as-if-free” on the land, wandering around mines and haciendas where they could rely on kinship ties to survive.⁴² Some fugitives joined well-established palenques or fugitive communities in the Patía Valley. These communities remained strong through the post-independence period, providing recruits for Bolívar’s enemies to mount attacks over the city of Popayán.⁴³ These actions made enslavers fearful. Their emotions come across palpably in their personal correspondence with friends and family where they devised plans to sale, gift, or exchange enslaved people perceived as troublemakers. Arroyo, in particular, discussed decisions to hire reliable captains to increase control and oversight of his family’s gold mines in the letters he exchanged with close relatives and people he trusted.⁴⁴ Regardless of what measures were taken, slave insurrections in mines or fugitives’ support of political enemies figured prominently in the minds of enslavers in Cauca. And they turned to the judicial system to punish enslaved people whose defying actions threatened social stability.

Manuel Agustín Moreno: An Infectious Threat for the Enslaved

A criminal case from 1826 that illustrates fears among slaveholding families and legal authorities is that of Manuel. In 1818, eight years before the appeals court confirmed his death sentence, a mob of men armed with sticks had followed Manuel into the house of his owner Don Joaquín Velarde—a well-known priest in Supía who in the early years of the war was among the local elites to declare independence from Spain.⁴⁵ The confrontation that ensued inside the priest’s house ended with Manuel killing one man with a machete and wounding five others. Although the records do not specify the reasons for the mob attack or provide any references about the men’s racialized identities, they highlight multiple times that Manuel had confessed to an illicit friendship with a married enslaved woman.

The enslaved woman and her husband were owned by María Josefa Moreno de la Cruz, member of a once powerful slaveholding family in Supía.⁴⁶ According to historian Álvaro Gärtner, María Josefa and one of her nephews were the last living members of the Moreno clan in Supía in the 1820s. Most members of the “dominant caste,” as Gärtner calls the creole families who owned enslaved people through the colonial period, were either dead or ruined as a result of the wars of independence.⁴⁷ In this context of ruin and precariousness, the new republican government had been leasing or selling abandoned mines in Supía and other neighboring towns to English investors. Through these transactions, the government aimed to pay war debts and revive the mining economy. The success of this new enterprise still depended, in large part, on the availability and control of an enslaved labor force. In other words, as a mining district in flux, Supía presented an opportunity for economic renovation that required, at the very least, that colonial practices and ideologies about slavery remain in place. It made sense, then, for enslavers in Supía “to lease their slaves to the English-owned mining companies and collect wages for their work.”⁴⁸

Because enslaved people were so central to the success of the postcolonial project unfolding in 1820s Supía, legal authorities in Manuel’s case all agreed that a murderous enslaved man should die or else he would continue to behave criminally fearing no consequences. For them, Manuel had unquestionably killed traitorously and with premeditation, and the law stipulated those individuals who killed intentionally and treacherously deserved to be hanged.⁴⁹ In their eyes, a death sentence seemed urgently necessary to communicate to the enslaved community that criminal behavior would be severely punished. At the same time, it aimed to calm elite miners’ anxieties around the moral and physical threats, real or imagined, that enslaved people could pose to slaveholding families and their own livelihoods. The legal interventions of both the prosecuting attorney and the advocate in this case reveal those fears in detail.

When Manuel’s case file arrived in the appeals court, the judges had one task: to decide whether Manuel had killed intentionally or not. They asked prosecuting attorney Dr. Fortunato Manuel de Gamba to review the case. His evaluation of the case files concluded that Manuel had acted with malice and that his crimes together with his “haughty, wayward, and daring attitude make him a dangerous man in society. Justice, safety, and the well-being of citizens urgently demand that as a corrupted member he be separated from the body politic so that he does not infect it.”⁵⁰ Gamba’s words expressed concern about the repercussions that the slaveholding community could potentially face if the appeals court did not confirm the death sentence. He insinuated that failing to punish Manuel for his criminal actions could lead him to “infect” others with his unruliness, immoral, and fearless behavior. Infecting others likely meant spreading ill ideas within enslaved communities in what was a resurrecting mining district. Under this logic, the “infected” or “corrupted” enslaved person posed a dangerous threat to miners and enslavers’ authority. They could potentially face labor disruptions and immoral rampage while also finding their own safety jeopardized.⁵¹

Isolating Manuel, in Gamba’s view, seemed like the right choice to maintain the socioeconomic order in Supía while preserving the citizens’ well-being. Gamba advised to confirm the death sentence and the judges, given the seriousness of the matter, followed legal procedure by assigning Manuel a procurator (procurador) who could represent him as the court deliberated. That procurator was Ramón Estrella. Estrella was born in Quito, the capital city of present-day Ecuador, but in the early nineteenth century he was a prominent local resident (vecino) of Popayán. Records indicate that he supported the royalist cause during the wars of independence, but like Dr. Fortunato Manuel de Gamba and many other royalists during this time, he found himself pledging allegiance to the new independent republic in 1821.⁵² After working as a scribe (oficial de pluma) for a governmental commission in 1822, Estrella actively served as a procurator in Cauca’s judicial sphere during the second half of the 1820s.⁵³ Procurators were “legal experts without formal legal training but knowledgeable of the practice of the law” and as such were allowed to advocate on behalf of litigants.⁵⁴ Estrella served in this capacity both for low- and high-status litigants, but his advocacy skills would prove unsuccessful in this particular criminal case.

Estrella argued that on the day of the mob attack, his client Manuel had been scared and had acted solely in defense of his own life. In response to the criminal murder charge, Estrella pointed out that nothing in the case file proved that Manuel had any feelings of “hatred or resentment” against the dead man to want to kill him.⁵⁵ The absence of evidence that rested on emotional disposition, argued Estrella, weakened the criminal murder charge since no “voluntary intention” on the part of Manuel or enmity between the two men could be proven. Estrella further argued that the Recopilación Castellana was on the enslaved man’s side since two of its statutes stated that the lives of those who kill without intention or malice could be forgiven.⁵⁶ In addition to citing laws from the Recopilación, Estrella cited the Siete Partidas to further argue that the law protected people who kill in the event of being persecuted or threatened by an individual armed with a “knife in hand, a sword, a stone, a stick or any other arm that could potentially kill.”⁵⁷ Estrella asked the court to revoke the death sentence and consider the “tyrannical prison of handcuffs, chains, and shackles” that Manuel had suffered while the case remained unresolved as enough punishment for his crimes.⁵⁸

But Gamba successfully convinced the appellate judges that the death sentence against Manuel was fully justified. The court agreed that Manuel had no other reason than his “depraved malice and ill-inclined will” to perpetrate his crimes. The law still offered Manuel an opportunity to say his piece. Doing so would only mean that by leaving a record of his confession, legal authorities could demonstrate they had applied the law properly and that local justice officials had followed due process. In other words, appellate judges would not change their confirmation of the death sentence even if emotions of remorse emerged in Manuel’s act of confessing.⁵⁹ No regrets could diminish judges’ expressed concerns over Manuel’s inclination to defy authority. He had escaped from jail after he was first charged in 1818 and lived as a fugitive until he was re-apprehended under unknown circumstances shortly before his case reached the appeals court. For authorities, Manuel’s experience living as a fugitive could have emboldened him to behave criminally again, and this worked against him too. In the judges’ eyes, he seemed unafraid of the law. The judges’ fear of Manuel’s fearlessness would have to be appeased both at court and in the town’s main plaza.

Running away had allowed Manuel to put on hold a death sentence for several years, but his recapture after independence meant local justice officials would make an example of him in a public spectacle.⁶⁰ On the day of the execution, the local magistrate took Manuel to church and asked priest José Antonio Bonafort to administer Manuel’s last rites and to hear his confession, though this was not the confession that the magistrate’s superiors had envisioned. After that, Manuel walked the streets to the town’s central square accompanied by the local magistrate, the scribe, a group of priests and soldiers, and a town crier who chanted the long-known Spanish formula “let he who acts thus, pay thus” (quien tal hace, que tal pague).⁶¹ The group was followed by residents of the town and surrounding villages who had been summoned to witness “justice in practice” and see what could happen to enslaved people who behaved like Manuel.⁶² Manuel was not hanged but executed by a firing squad. His body was later claimed by the local priest who gave it a Christian burial. In an execution turned a public, semi-religious spectacle with confessions, rites, and familiar words of admonition—much like during Inquisition times—the town crier’s message was blunt: any slave who committed a serious crime deserved an equally serious punishment.⁶³

Manuel’s case encompasses all that seemed to generate fear among legal authorities at every level. Fear influenced their discussions and judicial decisions. The fear of losing enslaved people’s respect threatened elites’ legitimacy as socially entitled figures who defined power relations. The potential collapse of those relations motivated elites to use their entitlement to demand judicial action while skillfully diverting their emotions into court deliberations that resulted in sentences with serious physical punishments. Historian Erin Dwyer found that in the U.S. antebellum south, “the physical punishment of an individual enslaved person could have a communal impact by invoking fear in the enslaved populace in general.”⁶⁴ This also happened in the Colombian southwest where authorities in Manuel’s case aimed to resignify their fears of insurrection by instilling them back in the enslaved population through public punishment tactics. In this way, fear was both a real and performative emotion that fueled elites’ anxieties, framed judicial practice, and impacted enslaved people individually and collectively.

Beyond this, other aspects about the administration of justice raised concerns for authorities: the violations of legal conventions and the persistent role of religious thinking in legal culture shortly after independence. High-ranking authorities trying to institutionalize liberal political thought and an efficient judicial system kept bumping up against religious-based arbitrariness and custom or plain ignorance on the part of local justice officials. Appellate judges found it hard to enforce their agenda for a new legal landscape when local justice officials seemed to display a colonial attitude of adhering to norm rather than principle. Local justice officials obeyed by forwarding first-instance sentences to appeals courts for review as mandated by new laws, but plainly dismissed or misunderstood orders from the Superior Court. This attitude became a source of anxiety for high-ranking authorities like José Manuel Restrepo, minister of the interior in Bogotá, who insisted that if appeals courts “rigorously demand[ed] responsibility from subordinates who [were] negligent, there would be prompt and very important improvements in the administration of justice.”⁶⁵

The appellate judges, advised by Gamba, sought to improve the administration of justice at the first-instance level in Supía by issuing a fine to the local magistrate in Manuel’s case. Gamba referred to the magistrate as “a tyrant” for conducting an execution “in violation of the will of the sovereign people” expressed in the appellate judges’ order to hear and record his confession.⁶⁶ The judges agreed with Gamba. The local magistrate’s actions had undermined the legitimacy of the new republic, which depended on the observance of its sovereign principles. Still, the judges determined that the magistrate’s decision to take Manuel to confess at the church revealed “no malicious intent” on his part. They lowered the fine from fifty to twenty-five pesos.

Despite the tensions generated by legal confusion or local presumption, all authorities involved in the case coincided on one important idea: enslaved men like Manuel deserved severe punishment. Manuel’s behavior had the potential to be “infectious,” which was extremely undesirable in a mining district reinventing itself with the arrival of new English and German investors. Outside of Supía, this behavior also threatened elite visions to rebuild the Colombian southwest after the war. Holding men, even those considered socially and racially inferior, to the highest standards of conduct was crucial for authorities envisioning an ideal male citizen who would contribute positively to that rebuilding effort in and outside the public eye. Despite their status, enslaved men were expected to behave morally based on those standards.

Five months after Manuel’s execution in Supía, President Bolívar announced several actions to tackle delays and “arbitrariness” in the administration of justice across the territory. He ordered appellate judges to keep “a journal of their work” that provided details about civil and criminal cases reviewed on a weekly basis.⁶⁷ A copy of this journal was to be shared every Saturday with provincial governors who, despite their inability to rule in such cases, could demand officials to speed up their judicial decisions. Additionally, the journal would be published monthly in a newspaper for further public accountability.⁶⁸

María Lucas Domínguez: Raped or Morally Corrupted?

Soon after President Bolívar’s decree, Gaceta de Colombia published the journal submitted by the Superior Court of Cauca for the month of October 1827, which detailed how on “Day 20” the appeals court “declared null the criminal proceedings against slave master José Castillo y Erazo for having raped and mistreated an enslaved woman.”⁶⁹ That woman was María Lucas Domínguez. Her owner had won his appeal of the first-instance sentence that, among other things, had ordered him to restore her honor with a dowry and give up ownership over her. Castillo y Erazo’s legal advocate at the appeals stage was none other than Ramón Estrella, who represented the enslaved man in the previous case.

In this opportunity, Estrella displayed the wealth of his accumulated legal knowledge by requesting that the appellate judges condemn the legal actions taken against his client as “abusive, injurious, unjust, and unlawful.”⁷⁰ In contrast to the previous case, this time Estrella was successful. This victory came with a fifty-pesos legal fee paid to Estrella by the local justice officials in Barbacoas, whom the appellate judges also penalized for having conducted a criminal investigation without merit against the enslaver.⁷¹ How was Estrella able to convincingly demonstrate that the criminal case against the enslaver for cruelty and the rape of María Lucas was, as he noted, “swarming with [legal] excesses”?⁷²

Estrella did not produce new evidence for his client’s defense at the appeals court. He focused exclusively on refuting the enslaved woman’s allegations and the local magistrate’s judicial actions through a careful and strategic reading of the Recopilación Castellana and the Siete Partidas. For instance, he cited the Partidas on the invalidity of witness statements in criminal trials and pointed to two laws that specifically described enslaved people’s ineligibility to testify against their owners, unless the owner had engaged in treason.⁷³ Estrella argued that in light of these laws, María Lucas, as well as all the other enslaved women who testified in support of her complaints, had no legal standing and should have been dismissed by the Barbacoas authorities at the first-instance level. The sole recognition of these legal stipulations, explained Estrella, should have stopped the local magistrate from initiating judicial proceedings against his client. It would have avoided, too, the “legal outrage” (indignación legal) that he and his client said they felt as a result of the magistrate’s legal abuses.⁷⁴ These men’s outrage was an emotional response to what they perceived was a poor administration of justice in the lower courts that had placed the enslaver in a tremendously disadvantaged position.

Dr. Rufino Cuervo, the prosecuting attorney assigned to this case by the appeals court, agreed with Estrella and further emphasized that all witnesses in the case “son de oídas,” meaning that witness testimonies were based on statements overheard from others and this was legally unacceptable.⁷⁵ Furthermore, the prosecuting attorney also determined that María Lucas had made baseless estupro allegations against her owner. He argued that her status as a slave made her unworthy of credit and that a careful reading of her testimony revealed that she had contradicted her statement, making it inconsistent and thus unreliable. This referred to a point raised by Estrella in his legal brief that outlined how María Lucas had supposedly and disconcertingly gone from accusing her owner of estupro to explaining in her official deposition that her owner had punished her for being intimate with another man. This apparent contradiction, which cannot be verified since no original copies from the first-instance proceedings were kept in the appeals court’s records, raised serious doubts about María Lucas’s morality, credibility, and emotional state that helped the appellate judges reach a verdict in favor of the enslaver.

Estrella skillfully used the best-known scholarly authors of legal and medical manuals from late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain to argue that estupro had not been proven. He cited the work of jurists Lorenzo Matheu y Sanz and Francisco Elizondo to raise questions about the procedures followed in Barbacoas to examine María Lucas’s genitals after the alleged estupro. He specifically referred to Elizondo’s well-known book Práctica universal forense de los tribunales de España, y de las Indias, which was broadly read in Europe and Spanish America at the time. Specifically on the question of estupro, Elizondo writes that “two honest, judicious, and honorable midwives, if there were any,” could carry out a physical inspection of an assaulted woman.⁷⁶ Those midwives would then declare under oath any observations about the woman’s genital area to determine whether or not an estupro had taken place. Estrella reproduced Elizondo’s description of the ideal midwife word for word in the legal brief that he filed with the appeals court, brief that the prosecuting attorney found convincingly crafted.⁷⁷ However, he left out a central part of Elizondo’s instructions: “if there were any” (si las hubiere). This is especially significant when considering that the only women available to assist María Lucas after the estupro had been her enslaved mother and godmother.

In this criminal case, Estrella and Cuervo not only legally discounted enslaved women as witnesses, but they also suggested that these women lacked the intellectual and moral qualities necessary to be credible and reliable midwives. Cuervo specifically wrote in his statement to the appellate judges that “the signs of the alleged estupro were not recognized by two honest and intelligent women,” which to him further demonstrated that the crime had not been proven.⁷⁸ In this way, both men selectively cited Elizondo on the question of estupro because his legal scholarship explicitly addressed who was expected to perform physical examinations on a woman and be credible. They strategically used this legal scholar’s words to cast doubt upon and ultimately reject the testimonies of the women who assisted María Lucas, declaring their statements legally useless. One would think that Elizondo’s addition of “si las hubiere” was meant to leave enough room for interpretation and flexibility depending on the particularity of any given situation or context, but clearly that was ignored by Estrella and Cuervo in this case.

In the early post-independence years, these men’s interpretations of laws and manuals from the Spanish regime considered illegitimate the actions taken by enslaved women like María Lucas and her female relatives in Barbacoas. Although enslaved women did not enjoy full legitimacy under Spanish rule either, in the late colonial period their legal claims had often been acknowledged by crown authorities who were increasingly concerned over enslavers’ cruel treatment of enslaved people. Carlos IV’s Instruction on the Education, Treatment and Occupation of Slaves, for instance, was a piece of Bourbon legislation that in 1789 aimed to regulate enslavers’ physical and psychological actions against the enslaved across Spanish America.⁷⁹ The legislation was highly controversial (and often ignored) because, as historian Bianca Premo explains, it “placed far more emphasis on the responsibilities of masters than on the obligations of slaves.”⁸⁰

In the Governorate of Popayán, as in other Spanish colonies, enslavers furiously opposed the Instruction arguing that it interfered with their authority while promoting rebellious behavior among enslaved people, many of whom had already initiated legal actions against them based on allegations of abuse.⁸¹ The crown ultimately repealed the Instruction six years after its promulgation to appease disgruntled enslavers across the colonies. This measure, however, did not put an end to the late colonial judicial activity among enslaved people across Popayán, who continued to find ways to advocate for themselves through civil or criminal litigation.⁸² For example, enslaved women and men appear in late colonial sources demanding that Popayán’s governor consider the arrangements they had made with their masters, which involved performing personal work or achieving specific savings goals, to grant them freedom. Others alluded to masters’ promises of testamentary manumission.⁸³ The governor, as highest judge at the time, ruled in favor of several of these enslaved litigants. However, when the governor ruled against the “unfounded” complaints of an enslaved woman seeking a new owner after allegedly experiencing excessive cruelty, he still advised the accused owner to grant the woman an opportunity to find a new owner (papel de venta) out of his own free will.⁸⁴ Thirty years later and under an emerging post-independence regime, appellate judges reviewed María Lucas’s case and determined it was also based on “unfounded” complaints. This time, however, the judges effectively denied María Lucas from seeking a new owner by declaring the first-instance sentence null and acquitting the enslaver.

The persistence of formal and informal cruelty complaints in the 1820s led vice-president Francisco de Paula Santander, head of the executive branch in the absence of President Bolívar, to dust off the 1789 royal decree. Santander, deeply concerned that enslaved people continued to be “treated very harshly by their masters,” proclaimed in 1822 that all jurisdictions across the territory would have to “publish, comply, and enforce” the resurrected decree since it had not been repealed by the Colombian congress.⁸⁵ Historian María Eugenia Chaves has argued that the decree played, in fact, a marginal role since the legislative focus in this period was on the gradual emancipation laws.⁸⁶ In Popayán, an original copy of Santander’s proclamation and the decree can be found in the city’s judicial archive. It stands as a testament that it was published, as mandated by Santander, but was it strictly enforced by judges in their rulings concerning enslaved people?

In Cauca’s judicial sphere, the decree was referenced by authorities both explicitly and implicitly in some of the judicial records involving enslaved litigants examined for the period. In María Lucas’s case, for instance, the court’s prosecuting attorney cited the decree to explain to the appellate judges how the local magistrate in Barbacoas had violated its mandates by assigning the roles of prosecutor and defender of slaves to the same person. At the appeals court, deliberations on María Lucas’s case centered, then, not on her right to be treated well by her owner but on procedural infractions that, in the eyes of high-ranking authorities, revealed incompetence and an emotional disposition to conspire against the enslaver. To Estrella, these dynamics exacerbated two profound fears: the weakening power of enslavers to punish enslaved people as they pleased and, as Dwyer puts it, to be “publicly perceived as an inept slaveowner.”⁸⁷ Fueled by these fears and their aforementioned legal outrage, the procurator focused his defense on the oversight of legal technicalities in the case to demonstrate that his client endured an unfair trial and thus restore his honor, which had been tainted by the shame of being dragged into a lawsuit initiated by an enslaved woman.⁸⁸

For example, Estrella insisted that his client’s charge on cruelty could not be proven given that no medical doctor or surgeon had examined María Lucas’s body in search of signs of physical punishment. This specifically referred to the lashes the enslaved woman said she received at the hands of her owner and that caused her pain.⁸⁹ Estrella argued that the lack of an expert medical report on her wounds undermined the legitimacy of the charges against Castillo y Erazo. Estrella was convinced that the availability of a medical report was critical and necessary to determine the truth in the case against his client and in any judicial matter. Estrella’s close reading of Domingo Vidal’s Cirugia forense, ó, Arte de hacer los informes y declaraciones chirurgico-legal informed his position on this issue and his defense of the enslaver.⁹⁰ In his book, Vidal clearly delineates what a surgeon should do if asked by authorities to examine a wounded person. If the person was found alive, the surgeon was required to inspect the body and explain the “nature and character of the wounds,” which involved determining the level of severity of each wound and any potential health complications that could put the person’s life at risk.⁹¹

Vidal provided a detailed classification of wounds in his book to guide practicing and future surgeons who were called to the task. This classification was organized by levels of severity, including minor, incurable, and mortal injuries.⁹² Surgeons were expected to make close observations of the wounds in their reports given that in most instances such reports would become of important relevance in ongoing criminal cases, especially if the wounds were fatal. For Estrella, all these details were crucial in determining the level of cruelty allegedly experienced by María Lucas. The absence of a medical report by a surgeon was proof, he said, that the charges against his client were not solidly justified. In other words, the physical and emotional pain experienced by María Lucas as a result of her wounds were irrelevant without a certified report. Through the “disavowal of captive’s pain,” as put by Saidiya Hartman, Estrella invalidated María Lucas’s suffering while privileging scientific truth.⁹³ As procurator, Estrella tactically invoked or refuted emotions in his representation of clients. Estrella’s defense of Manuel in the previous case and arguments against María Lucas both drew on the absence of acceptable proof that could demonstrate emotional disposition or experience.

Estrella’s denial of María Lucas’s pain worked, in turn, to validate and push for the medical evaluation of injuries on the bodies of aggrieved litigants. In this case, that litigant was María Lucas, an enslaved woman he already perceived as unworthy and corrupted. This strategy shaped the legal discourse through which Estrella won the appeal, enabling him to restore the enslaver’s honor. In this way, the study of late eighteenth-century legal and medical manuals among high-ranking authorities was increasingly leading them to transform legal practice. Estrella’s arguments in this case firmly rested on the idea that to be objective, as they called it, evidence in criminal cases could only be collected and examined either by medical experts or by people who enjoyed a favorable public reputation. This clearly elevated the importance of honor after independence since it could dictate someone’s trustworthiness in a judicial matter. This may also explain, to some extent, Estrella’s work to clear his client’s name so he could remain amongst the people who enjoyed that important recognition. Estrella was not alone in thinking this way.

For the judges, modernizing the judicial system entailed finding the truth in the scientific expertise of professionals and abandoning colonial legacies that defaulted exclusively to moral or spiritual failings.⁹⁴ The unevenness of this legal landscape is reflected, however, in the fact that the same judges reached a verdict in this case mostly based on their characterization of María Lucas as a morally corrupted slave because of her alleged involvement in an illicit friendship. Even though there was no “objective” evidence to prove the allegations against María Lucas, the narratives about her lack of honor or low moral standing prevailed among the judges who ruled against her. Thus, the coexistence of old and new legal frameworks made this transitional period complex, especially for local justice officials in remote towns who, aside from lacking education and formal legal training, continued to rely on religious perceptions of the world to sort out matters of honor, authority, and justice. They were often reprimanded for doing so in a legal terrain where high-ranking authorities often contradicted themselves. That coexistence also impacted women like María Lucas, whose pursuit of justice and reparations was halted by accusations of sexual immorality and, simultaneously, by an increased focus on objective truth as dictated by medical and legal experts that invalidated her expressed suffering.

This focus on objective truth was, however, not always transparent. Estrella cited Vidal’s work to discuss the importance of expert medical reports in criminal cases about cruelty, but he completely ignored Vidal’s comments on estupro. Vidal’s book has a chapter titled “Deflowering” (Defloramiento), which discusses the difficulty that a surgeon faces when asked by authorities to determine whether a woman had lost her virginity or not. He says that in such cases, a surgeon would have to make “conjectures and assumptions” (conjeturas y presunciones) to arrive at a decision given that a physical examination of a woman’s genital area a few days after an estupro would reveal, in his view, little to no signs of abuse. If a surgeon indeed located signs of estupro during an examination but determined them to be too minor to be considered acceptable proof, any conjectures and assumptions made at that point would intrinsically be of moral character.⁹⁵ For Vidal, medical inspections to prove the loss of virginity in a woman could hardly ever be physically accurate or morally reliable. Estrella conveniently ignored this part of Vidal’s work because it did not align with his legal strategy of undermining testimony by an enslaved woman.

Estrella’s actions exposed the contradictions that could emerge from using several bodies of laws and different sources of jurisprudence and technical practice. But they also revealed the arbitrary nature of ongoing efforts at judicial reform: local justice officials at the first-instance level were accused of engaging in exactly the same type of legal cherry picking that Estrella adeptly practiced at the appeals court. But this was not worrisome for high-ranking legal authorities with the power to steer moral, legal, and scientific assessments of the truth in this criminal case. According to their logic, María Lucas gave inconsistent verbal testimony twice, raising enough suspicion among authorities about her emotional state and credibility. This led them to believe that the charges against the enslaver were unjust and unfounded. The court’s final decision was meant to send a strong warning: enslaved women, too, were expected to behave morally and display sexual restraint while nonconforming local magistrates had to adapt to the liberal judicial system, follow constitutional mandates, and respect social hierarchies.

***

In his defense of María Lucas’s owner, Ramón Estrella pointed out that the local magistrate’s way of proceeding in Barbacoas was comparable to the “horrendous Tribunal of the Holy Office” of the Inquisition, which had been formally abolished in the republic in 1821.⁹⁶ Estrella’s observation implied that the magistrate had acted like an Inquisition officer against his client, carrying out the judicial process with outdated practices and seeking to punish the enslaver unfairly. By drawing parallels between post-independence judicial trials and the trials of the Inquisition, Estrella suggested that an “evil” colonial past continued to infiltrate a forward-looking judicial sphere.

High-ranking legal authorities like Estrella thus understood and portrayed justice tribunals as extensions of the wars of independence battlefields, platforms for the epochal fight against Spain and its allegedly atavistic and tyrannical ways. The concern that local justice officials were carrying out their duties based on an antiquated framework of sin and punishment was not irrelevant for the politics of the early republic. Visual allusions to the Spanish Inquisition were much too apparent in the Supía local magistrate’s detailed description of the day he carried out Manuel’s death sentence. His plan to show enslaved people in Supía what “justice in practice” looked like and instill terror in them recalled a seventeenth-century procession of penitents on their way to be publicly punished by Inquisition officials.

The symbolic violence and terror contained in these implicit and explicit references to the Inquisition in particular, and to a religious cultural framework in general, frustrated the appellate judges who, as we saw, penalized the local magistrates in each of these cases for legal arbitrariness. The local magistrates had displayed no respect for due process when each of them either produced or executed first-instance sentences without taking depositions from the defendants. While this might suggest that appellate judges applied the rule of law equally, the deliberations and outcomes in these cases reflect the persistent class hierarchies that divided this society and the emotions that influenced judicial practice and decisions. High-ranking authorities recognized the centrality of piety in the exercise of judicial duties at the local levels. However, through fines, citations, and other disciplinary actions, judges attempted to teach subordinates that while religious sentiments were important, they had no place, at least in the most technical sense, in the administration of justice. In this way, appellate judges seemed committed to transform the judicial system by implementing procedural change.

In this shifting judicial landscape, new constitutional mandates changed legal procedure but not necessarily the personal, emotional, and religious attitudes of legal authorities at large. Persistent references to the alleged immoral behavior of enslaved litigants to discredit them in trial or at the appeals stage not only muddied the litigants’ reputations but tainted the secular parameters that defined what could constitute evidence in a criminal trial after independence. In these cases, the appellate judges willingly accepted “moral corruption” as irrefutable evidence against the enslaved litigants that did not need legal or scientific verification. To them, enslaved people’s moral corruption involved lack of honor, killing fearlessly, sex before marriage, concubinage or the violation of the family unit as a sacred Catholic institution. Enslaved people accused of any of these actions had a hard time clearing their names since authorities simply understood such accusations as absolute and unquestionable truths partly because of their own fears and prejudices. High-ranking authorities’ interest in the “objective” interpretation of the law and collection of evidence to support cases was, then, inconsistent at best shortly after independence. Judges selectively continued to privilege information against a litigant’s character that suggested deviation from the standards of high moral behavior established by the Catholic Church, effectively policing public morality. Notions of honor based on morality and public reputation remained influential in the early postcolonial legal world, framing arguments and outcomes.

Appellate judges portrayed enslaved litigants in these two cases as morally corrupted, confirming the first-instance sentence in which Manuel was the defendant and revoking the other case where María Lucas was the accuser. Yet it can be said that their appearance as enslaved litigants complicated the work of legal authorities. These authorities’ real or imagined fears of enslaved people led them to deliberate on the serious ambivalences raised by these litigants’ cases. The contradictions between Christian imperatives and the enslavement of humans had been noted for generation, but a look at the case load from this period suggests those contradictions heightened unevenly. Change did not occur uniformly in this agitated post-independence context, but enslaved people’s complaints and emotional experiences in captivity remained constant. For example, two years after María Lucas lost her case, Arroyo ruled in favor of acquitting a different owner accused of beating an older enslaved woman. This time, however, he also granted the woman permission to seek a new owner. Arroyo ordered the local magistrate in that case to exercise “prudence” when communicating this decision to a group of enslaved people who belonged to the same owner and had informally raised similar complaints of cruelty against him as the court deliberated on the ruling. In this scenario, exercising prudence meant delivering the verdict cautiously to avoid conflict or insurrection.

To Arroyo, it was important for the enslaved to understand that the court’s final decision was meant “to reconcile the principles of religion, humanity, and the state with those of slavery and public order.”⁹⁷ These words reveal the judges’ maneuvers to attend to several conflicting sociopolitical issues all at once at a time when so much seemed at stake in Cauca and, more broadly, across the republic. Judicial practice unfolded, then, in a changing and uncertain landscape in which a fundamental ambivalence of the Republic of Colombia was articulated and debated: a new republic philosophically committed to ending slavery—along with all other Spanish institutions—but in practice still ensuring its daily continuity through many of its appeals court rulings. The enslaved challenged that continuity both through formal litigation and informal complaints that pushed legal authorities to face the contradictions in their actions, emotions, and aspirations. Answering to slave demands in this context would gradually reveal that the brutality of enslavement was increasingly untenable and could not be simply justified by fears of contagion or moral corruption.

My sincere gratitude to Sueann Caulfield, Rebecca Scott, Edgardo Pérez Morales, Ana María Silva, Yesenia Barragan, Bethan Fisk, Luis Ervin Prado, Anna Mester, and Ray McDaniel for the valuable feedback they offered at different stages of this article. I am equally grateful to the organizers and participants of the Andean Cultures and Histories Working Group at Northwestern University and the Hurst Institute for Legal History for their encouraging comments on earlier drafts. I also thank the archivists and assistants in Popayán, particularly Natalia Cruz, for their help finding sources. Special thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Social History and its editor, Matthew Karush, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions. Research for this article was supported by fellowships from the SSRC-Mellon Mays Program and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Finally, the PPP&E Program and Linda Borish, Chair of the Department of History at Western Michigan University, kindly offered assistance to make this an open access publication.

Footnotes

1

“Documentos importantes relativos a la responsabilidad del poder ejecutivo,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 290 (May 6, 1827).

2

Recent works that explore the meaning of due process in the transition to independence include Reuben Zahler, Ambitious Rebels: Making Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780-1850 (Tucson, 2013), 110-114 and Victor Uribe-Urán, Fatal Love: Spousal Killers, Law, and Punishment in the late Colonial Spanish Atlantic (Palo Alto, 2015), chap. 8.

3

These were not completely new tensions, but they intensified and took on different meanings after independence. Scholars who have studied legal practice and legal authority in late colonial Colombia such as Beatriz Patiño Millán and Victor Uribe-Urán have pointed to the absence or poor interpretation of laws and regulations in the prosecution of alleged criminals at the local levels. This was usually the result of plain ignorance or, at times, arbitrariness on the part of local authorities working under Crown supervision. Beatriz Patiño Millán, Criminalidad, ley penal y estructura social en la Provincia de Antioquia, 1750-1820, 2nd ed. (Bogotá, Colombia, 2013); Victor Uribe-Urán, “Colonial Lawyers, Republican Lawyers and the Administration of Justice in Spanish America,” in Judicial Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Eduardo Zimmerman (London, 1999), 25–48; and Fernando Mayorga, “Codificación de la legislación en Colombia,” Revista Credencial Historia 148 (2002).

4

Vega de Supía was a mining town in southwestern Colombia. Scholars have referred to it as a “hybrid town” because of the multiethnic character it had in the nineteenth century. See Luis Fernando González Escobar, Ocupación, poblamiento y territorialidades en la Vega de Supia, 1810-1950 (Bogotá, 2002) and Alvaro Gärtner, Guerras civiles en el antiguo Cantón de Supía. Relatos de episodios armados acaecidos entre el siglo XVI y el XIX: luchas por las tierras del oro (Manizales, Colombia, 2006). For an English-language study about race and region in mid nineteenth-century Supía and its surrounding areas, see Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters: Race, Region, and Local History in Colombia, 1846–1948 (Durham, NC, 2003).

5

“Criminal contra Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827 (hereafter Manuel Agustín Moreno),” Archivo Central del Cauca (hereafter ACC), Independencia, Sala Judicial (J) 1, Anaquel Criminal (Cr) 6, Signatura (Sig.) 5739, Folio (fol.) 1v.

6

Barbacoas became an important mining district in the early seventeenth century when Spanish colonists and their families conquered the area and established control, amid fierce resistance, over indigenous labor. Gradually, the arrival of enslaved Africans to the region’s gold mines changed the social landscape both by replacing a decimated indigenous population and transforming labor practices and expectations. Despite its wealth, Barbacoas was often referred to by visitors as a town lost in the hot and unhealthy Pacific lowlands. See Bernard Lavallé, “Aquella ignominiosa herida que se hizo a la humanidad: El cuestionamiento de la esclavitud en Quito a finales de la época colonial,” Procesos: Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia 1, no. 6 (1994), 23-48; Mario Diego Romero, Poblamiento y sociedad en el Pacífico colombiano (Cali, Colombia, 1995), 103; Kris Lane, “The Transition from Encomienda to Slavery in Seventeenth‐century Barbacoas (Colombia),” Slavery & Abolition 21, no. 1 (2000): 73–95; Marta Herrera Ángel, “En un rincón de ese imperio en que no se ocultaba el sol: Colonialismo, oro y terror en Barbacoas. Siglo XVIII,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, no. 32 (2005): 31–49; Manuel Lucena Salmoral, Leyes para esclavos: El ordenamiento jurídico sobre la condición, tratamiento, defensa y represión de los esclavos en las colonias de la América española (Madrid, 2005), 370-372; María Cristina Navarrete, Génesis y desarrollo de la esclavitud en Colombia siglos XVI y XVII (Cali, Colombia, 2005), 158-159; Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito (Chapel Hill, NC, 2014) and Marcela Echeverri, “‘Enraged to the Limit of Despair’: Infanticide and Slave Judicial Strategies in Barbacoas, 1788–98,” Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 3 (2009): 403–26.

7

“Causa criminal contra José Castillo por sevicia y amancebamiento con su esclava María Lucas, 1827 (hereafter María Lucas,)” ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 1r. Estupro from the Latin “Stuprum.” This was an ambiguous term that in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Spanish America generally meant to sin with a virgin (doncella virgen). Authorities in judicial records from the period use the term to refer to abduction, rape or sex extracted under false pretenses such as the promise of marriage. In the particular judicial case examined in this article, authorities use the words estupro, doncella, deflower, and violated (violada) interchangeably. For works that discuss estupro, see Uribe-Urán, Fatal Love, 14, 28; Victoria Rodríguez Ortiz, Mujeres Forzadas: El Delito de la Violación en el Derecho Castellano (Siglos XVI-XVII), (Almeria, Spain, 2003), 43-62; Carmen Castañeda García, Violación, estupro y sexualidad: Nueva Galicia, 1790-1821, (Guadalajara, Mexico, 1989), 53-57; Sarah C. Chambers, “‘To the Company of a Man like My Husband, No Law Can Compel Me’: The Limits of Sanctions against Wife Beating in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1850,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 1 (1999): 41; and Sarah C. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780-1854 (University Park, PA, 2011), 211-212.

8

During this time, men found guilty of estupro normally faced punishments that involved banishment and paying compensation to the alleged victim in the form of a dowry to avoid marriage. The local magistrate’s legal decision in María Lucas’s case made sense in this context except María Lucas was an enslaved woman and the accused was her owner. While it is true that across Spanish America some enslaved women received modest dowries from religious organizations, more often than not enslaved women were rather included as property that added value to an elite woman’s dowry. Evidence suggests, however, that freed African-descended women who accumulated wealth over time in areas like New Spain could afford dowries for their daughters. Extraordinary or not, this case reveals expectations at play in the way justice was generally administered for enslaved litigants, including the expectation of moral behavior. For scholarship on dowries and African-descended women, see Christine Hunefeldt, “Las dotes en manos limeñas,” in Familia y vida privada en la historia de Iberoamérica. Seminario de historia de la familia,” eds. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia Rabell Romero (Mexico City, 1996), 267-268; Sandra Lauderdale Graham, “Honor Among Slaves,” in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, eds. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque, 1998), 201-228; and Danielle Terrazas Williams, “‘My Conscience Is Free and Clear’: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico,” The Americas 75, no. 3 (2018): 525–54. For work on dowries in Colombian history, see Pablo Rodriguez, “La dote en Medellín, 1675-1780,” Revista Sociología, no. 10 (1987): 53–60; Jorge Augusto Gamboa, “La dote matrimonial a finales del siglo XVI: El caso de la provincia de Pamplona en el Nuevo Reino de Granada (1574-1630),” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, no. 24 (1997): 47–77; and Jacqueline Blanco and Margarita Cárdenas, “Las mujeres en la historia de Colombia, sus derechos, sus deberes,” Prolegómenos 12, no. 23 (2009): 143–58.

9

North America-based scholars have shown how honor was deeply rooted in Catholic conceptions of the world in which an individual’s moral and sexual virtue was of public concern. The works concerning the Andes that stand out in this robust body of scholarship are Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, 1999); Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, 172, 180 and 213–214; Reuben Zahler, Ambitious Rebels, chap. 4 and Uribe-Urán, Fatal Love, chap. 6. For a close examination of honor-based disputes and illicit friendships during Colombia’s wars of independence, see Ángela Pérez-Villa, “Disorderly Love: Illicit Friendships, Violence, and Law in a Slave Society at War, Popayán-Colombia, 1809-1830” (PhD diss.: University of Michigan, 2017), chap. 3. In Colombia, honor has been studied through the history of daily life issues such as marital and family relations. See Patiño Millán, Criminalidad; Guiomar Dueñas, Los hijos del pecado (Bogotá, 1997); Pablo Rodríguez, Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglo XVIII (Bogotá, 1997); Hermes Tovar Pinzón, La batalla de los sentidos. Infidelidad, adulterio y concubinato a fines de la colonia (Bogotá, 2012); Mabel Paola López Jérez, Las conyugicidas de la Nueva Granada. Transgresión de un viejo ideal de mujer, 1780-1830 (Bogotá, 2012); Mabel Paola López Jérez, Morir de amor. Violencia conyugal en la Nueva Granada. Siglos XVI al XIX (Bogotá, 2020); and Lida Tascón, “Vida familiar en la población esclavizada y liberta de la provincia de Popayán, Colombia (1780-1852)” (PhD diss.: Universidade de São Paulo/Universidad de Sevilla, 2022).

10

See Lauderdale Graham, “Honor Among Slaves;” Carolina González Undurraga, “Los usos del honor por esclavos y esclavas: del cuerpo injuriado al cuerpo liberado (Chile, 1750-1823),” Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos (2012): [Online]; and Tamara J. Walker, Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima (New York, 2017).

11

On the northern Andes, Sherwin Bryant’s work has demonstrated that slave litigation based on discourses of honor and freedom was at the core of juridical life there since the early colonial years. His discussion of seventeenth-century cases established a significant “continuum” between them and similar late colonial sources examined by scholars in the context of the Age of Revolutions. See Sherwin K. Bryant, Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage, 119; Camilla Townsend, “‘Half My Body Free, the Other Half Enslaved’: The Politics of the Slaves of Guayaquil at the End of the Colonial Era,” Colonial Latin American Review 7, no. 1 (1998): 105–28; María Eugenia Chaves, “Slave Women’s Strategies for Freedom and the Late Spanish Colonial State,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, eds. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, NC, 2000), 108–26; Eduardo Restrepo, “Medidas abolicionistas en la Nueva Granada, 1814–1851,” Revista CS, no. 9 (2012): 235–72; Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780-1825 (New York, 2016); and Edgardo Pérez Morales, Unraveling Abolition: Legal Culture and Slave Emancipation in Colombia, (New York, 2022). Bethan Fisk uses judicial records to delve on enslaved people’s ritual practices in “Black Knowledge on the Move: African Diasporic Healing in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada,” Atlantic Studies 18, no. 2 (2021): 244–70. Outside of Colombia, critical work on these issues includes Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800-1854 (Berkeley, 1995); Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854 (Lima, 1993); Rachel Sarah O’Toole, Bound Lives. Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh, 2012); Sherwin K. Bryant, Rachel Sarah O’Toole, and Ben Vinson III, eds., Africans to Spanish America: Expanding the Diaspora (Chicago, 2014); and Michelle McKinley, Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700 (New York, 2016). Bianca Premo has extensively shown how enslaved people actively contributed to and shaped eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourses through their engagement in civil litigation to achieve freedom in Lima, Trujillo, and Mexico City in The Enlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire (New York, 2017), chap. 6.

12

González Undurraga, “Los usos del honor,” [online]

13

Margarita Garrido, “Historia de las emociones y los sentimientos: Aprendizajes y preguntas desde América Latina,” Historia Crítica, 78 (2020): 16. Margarita Garrido, “Do Recognition and Moral Sentiments Have a Place in the Analysis of Political Culture? Honor, Contempt, Resentment and Indignation in the Late Colonial Andean America,” Storia della Storiografia 67, no. 1 (2015): 67–85. American historian Peter N. Stearns has welcomed the interest in expanding the study of emotions in Latin American history in “Choices in the History of Emotions,” Historia Crítica, no. 78 (2020): 3–7.

14

In Latin America, María Eugenia Albornoz has led this area of historical inquiry through her work on the uses of sentiments like shame in judicial disputes over insults in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Chile. See, for example, María Eugenia Albornoz, “Umbrales sensibles de la modernidad temprana: los usos de la vergüenza en Chile, siglos XVIII y XIX,” Caravelle. Cahiers du monde hispanique et luso-brésilien 86, no. 1 (2006): 43–69. Her most recent edited volume brings together the work of several historians who study emotions in the judicial experiences of litigants in Chile from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. See María Eugenia Albornoz, ed., Sentimientos y justicia. Coordenadas emotivas en factura de experiencias judiciales. Chile 1650-1990 (Santiago de Chile, 2016). Other studies that have examined emotions in Latin American history from different angles and time periods include Claudia Rosas Lauro, ed., El miedo en el Perú, siglos XVI al XX (Lima, 2005); Sandra Beatriz Sánchez López, “Miedo, rumor y rebelión: La conspiración esclava de 1693 en Cartagena de Indias,” Historia Crítica, no. 31 (2006): 77–99; Pablo Rodríguez, “1812: El terremoto que interrumpió una revolución” in Una historia de los usos del miedo, eds., Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Anne Staples, and Valentina Torres Septién (Mexico City, 2009), 247–71; and Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque, 2014). Recent studies focusing on slavery and emotions include, Bianca Premo, “As If She Were My Own. Love and Law in the Slave Society of Eighteenth-Century Peru” in Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, eds. Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (Athens, GA, 2018), 71–87; Carolina González Undurraga, “‘Me es intolerable su sevicia’: Dolor por crueldad y demandas por papel de venta de esclavos negros y mulatos, Santiago, 1770-1800,” in Sentimientos y justicia, 126–53; Roger Pita Pico, “La ‘esclavitud’ de los sentimientos: vida familiar y afectiva de la población esclava en el nororiente del Nuevo Reino de Granada, 1720-1819,” Revista de Indias LXXII, no. 256 (2012): 651–86; and Christine Hunefeldt, “Mujeres: Esclavitud, emociones y libertad. Lima, 1800-1854,” Documento de trabajo No. 24 (Lima, 1988).

15

Early works that discuss the challenges posed by emancipation laws in Colombia include Jaime Jaramillo Uribe, “La controversia jurídica y filosófica librada en la Nueva Granada en torno a la liberación de los esclavos y la importancia económica-social de la esclavitud en el Siglo XIX,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, no. 4 (1969): 63–86 and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, De una chispa se forma una hoguera. Esclavitud, insubordinación y liberación (Tunja, Colombia, 1992): 63-81. For political and legal approaches to the topic, see Edwin Cruz Rodríguez, “La abolición de la esclavitud y la formación de lo público-político en Colombia 1821-1851,” Memoria y Sociedad 12, no. 25 (2008): 57–75; Jorge Andrés Tovar and Hermes Tovar, El oscuro camino de la libertad: Los esclavos en Colombia, 1821-1851 (Bogotá, 2009); María Eugenia Chaves, “El oxímoron de la libertad. La esclavitud de los vientres libres y la crítica a la esclavización africana en tres discursos revolucionarios,” Fronteras de la historia 19, no. 1 (2014): 174–200; Ana Pérez, “Apropiación de herramientas jurídicas de los esclavizados en la provincia de Antioquia (Colombia), 1789-1821,” Memorias: Revista Digital de Historia y Arqueología desde el Caribe, no. 37 (2019): 12–39; Edgardo Pérez Morales, “Félix José de Restrepo, las ambigüedades de la esclavitud y la sensibilidad antiesclavista. Popayán, 1783-1808,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 48, no. 1 (2021): 45–67; and Yesenia Barragan, Freedom’s Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (New York, 2021).

16

For a study of the complex geography and natural landscape in colonial Colombia, see Edgardo Pérez Morales, La obra de Dios y el trabajo del hombre. Percepción y transformación de la naturaleza en el virreinato del Nuevo Reino de Granada (Medellín, Colombia, 2011).

17

See Germán Colmenares, Historia económica y social de Colombia II—Popayán: una sociedad esclavista, 1680-1800 (Bogotá, 1997); Zamira Díaz López, La ciudad colonial. Popayán: política y vida cotidiana (siglo XVI), (Cali, Colombia, 1996); Sherwin Bryant, “Finding Gold, Forming Slavery: The Creation of a Classic Slave Society, Popayán, 1600-1700,” The Americas 63, no. 1 (2006): 81-112; Robert C. West, Colonial Placer Mining in Colombia (Baton Rouge, LA, 1952); and Ann Twinam, Miners, Merchants, and Farmers in Colonial Colombia (Austin, TX, 1982).

18

See Germán Colmenares. La Independencia. Ensayos de historia social (Bogotá, 1986).

19

See Colmenares, Historia económica y social, chaps. 10 and 14.

20

“Instrucción de los miembros de la Asamblea Electoral de la Provincia del Cauca, 1820” Archivo Histórico Cipriano Rodríguez Santa María, Fondo David Mejia Velilla, caja 11, carpeta 3, f. 1–22.

21

Gilberto Loaiza Cano, “Las primeras constituciones de Colombia,” Revista Historia y Espacio 39 (2012), 146.

22

See Isidro Vanegas, El Constitucionalismo Fundacional (Bogotá, 2012); Loaiza Cano, “Las primeras constituciones de Colombia;” Andrés Botero, “Constitucionalismo Gatidino y de la Nueva Granada,” Revista Historia Constitucional 15 (2014): 311–89.

23

Alfonso X of Castile and his advisors compiled Las Siete Partidas or the Seven-Part Code between 1256 and 1265. The Partidas presented a new juridical system based on Roman law and the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The merger of those two entities resulted in a powerful legal code that beyond creating new laws, provided an important portrayal of social and economic life in thirteenth-century Spain. Las siete partidas del Rey Don Alfonso el Sabio: cotejadas con varios códices antiguos por la Real Academia de la Historia. Tomo 2: Partida Segunda y Tercera (Madrid, 1807).

24

On the use of these laws in Colombia, see María Virginia Gaviria, “Aproximaciones a la historia del derecho en Colombia,” Historia y Sociedad 22 (2012): 131–56; Andrés de Zubiría Samper, “La historia de la rama judicial en Colombia,” Criterio Jurídico Garantista 6 (2012): 153–87; Francisco Barbosa Delgado, Justicia, rupturas y continuidades: El aparato judicial en el proceso de configuración del estado-nación en Colombia 1821-1853 (Bogotá, 2007); Mauricio García Villegas, “Apuntes sobre codificación y costumbre en la historia del derecho colombiano,” Precedente. Revista Jurídica (2003): 97–124.

25

Juan Carlos Vélez Rendón, “El establecimiento local de la administración de justicia en Antioquia, 1821-1853. El difícil cumplimiento de una promesa republicana,” Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 40, no. 1 (2013): 120.

26

“Ley de 11 de marzo de 1825,” Codificación nacional de todas las leyes de Colombia desde el año de 1821, Vol. II (Bogotá, 1924), 22.

27

“Que sin una recta y pronta administración de justicia siempre serán ilusorios los derechos que garantiza la constitución a cada uno de los colombianos […],” “Ley de 11 de mayo de 1825,” Codificación nacional, 121.

28

“Alta Corte de Justicia,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 231 (March 19, 1826); “Nombramientos del ejecutivo” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 277 (February 4, 1827).

29

“Administración de justicia,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 311 (September 30, 1827).

30

Patrol officers in late colonial and revolutionary Popayán punished moral and sexual offenses among people from different racial backgrounds and legal statuses, see Pérez-Villa, “Disorderly Love,” chap. 2. Sally Hadden has argued that in the U.S. south, slave patrols disciplined and regulated the movement and daily life practices of enslaved people. Her comprehensive study of slave patrols in Virginia and the Carolinas from the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth century demonstrates how the state, together with slaveowners, institutionalized the functions of the patrols and perpetrated violence. See Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA, 2001).

31

See Victor Uribe-Urán, “The Lawyers and New Granada’s Late Colonial State,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27, no. 3 (1995): 517–49 and Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780–1850 (Pittsburgh, 2000).

32

Uribe-Urán, Fatal Love; chap. 1; Armando Suescún, Derecho y sociedad en la historia de Colombia, Tomo II (Tunja, Colombia, 2001).

33

See Ann Twinam, “Repensando las reformas sociales de los borbones en las colonias, siglo XVIII,” El Taller de la Historia 5, no. 5 (2013): 5–32 and George Reid Andrews, “Spanish American Independence,” 121.

34

On the importance of the printed press in late colonial and revolutionary Colombia, see David Bushnell, “The Development of the Press in Great Colombia,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 30, no. 4 (1950): 432–52; Rebecca Earle, “Information and Disinformation in Late Colonial New Granada,” The Americas 54, no. 2 (1997): 167–84; and Renán Silva, Prensa y revolución a finales del siglo XVIII: Contribución a un análisis de la formación de la ideología de Independencia Nacional (Medellín, Colombia, 2010).

35

See, for example, Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 217, (December 11, 1825) and Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 219, (December 25, 1825).

36

“Manumision en Venezuela,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 318, (November 18, 1827). For more details on manumission juntas, see Tovar and Tovar, El oscuro camino de la libertad, 60-68 and Roger Pita Pico, “Fisuras y escollos en la institucionalización de la libertad de los esclavos: Las juntas de manumisión en la provincia del Cauca, 1821-1825,” Historia y Espacio 11, no. 44 (2015): 1–27.

37

“Manumision en Venezuela,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 318, (November 18, 1827).

38

“Por la patria i por Bolivar. Franca i respetuosa manifestacion que hace de sus votos el bravo ejercito del Sur a la gran convencion de Colombia [sic],” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 345, (May 11, 1828)

39

“Comunicacion del intendente del Cauca al secretario jeneral de S. E. el Libertador [sic],” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 349, (June 1, 1828). For an examination of newspapers’ discussion of manumission in the 1820s, see Barragan, Freedom’s Captives, Chap. 3. For a discussion about Cauca’s important family clans and their relationship with Bolívar, see Luis Ervin Prado-Arellano and David Fernando Prado-Valencia, “La familia Mosquera y Arboleda y el proyecto Bolivariano (1821-1830),” Memoria y Sociedad 14, no. 29 (2010): 55–69.

40

Barragan, Freedom’s Captives, 160. Also, Tovar and Tovar, El oscuro camino de la libertad, 33. On the intricate power relations that continued to link these families through the decade and after 1830, see Marcela Echeverri “Esclavitud y tráfico de esclavos en el Pacífico suramericano durante la era de la abolición,” Historia Mexicana 69, no. 2 (2019): 627–92 and Willian Alfredo Chapman-Quevedo, “La red sociofamiliar Mosquera y sus relaciones de poder en Popayán, 1832-1836,” Memoria y Sociedad 14 (2010): 37–54.

41

See Barragan, Freedom’s Captives, 163-167. Outside of Colombia, recent works on mothers’ litigation of free womb children include Magdalena Candioti, “Free Womb Law, Legal Asynchronies, and Migrations: Suing for an Enslaved Woman’s Child in Nineteenth-Century Río de La Plata,” The Americas 77, no. 1 (2020): 73–99 and Paulina L. Alberto, “Liberta by Trade: Negotiating the Terms of Unfree Labor in Gradual Abolition Buenos Aires (1820s–30s),” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019): 619–51. Carolina González Undurraga also explores the role of the womb in two cases where enslaved women in Chile claim different maternal ancestry to demand freedom in “Mujeres esclavizadas y el uso del partus sequitur ventrem ante la justicia: inscribir la ascendencia materna e intervenir el archivo género-racializado en Chile colonial,” Estudios del ISHIR 11, no. 30 (2021): [online].

42

On enslaved soldiers and desertion, see Roger Pita Pico, El reclutamiento de negros esclavos durante las guerras de Independencia de Colombia 1810-1825. 2^nd ed. (Bogotá, 2021), 321–39 and Daniel Gutiérrez Ardila, “El coronel Concha en el Cauca o la gestación de un vórtice político, 1821-1824,” Historia Crítica, no. 78 (2020): 71–75. For a microhistorical approach to desertion before the 1820s, see Ángela Pérez-Villa, “Cena, baile y muerte: cotidianidad y administración de justicia en Popayán durante la restauración monárquica, 1815-1819,” Historia y Justicia, no. 15 (2020): 1–26. For works on war, soldiers, and desertion outside of Colombia, see Peter Blanchard, “The Slave Soldiers of Spanish South America: From Independence to Abolition,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, ed. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven, CT, 2006), 255-273 and Alejandro Rabinovich, Ser soldado en las guerras de independencia: La experiencia cotidiana de la tropa en el Río de la Plata, 1810-1824 (Buenos Aires, 2013).

43

On the Patía Valley in southwestern Colombia, see Francisco Zuluaga, Guerrilla y sociedad en el Patía. Una relación entre clientelismo político y la insurgencia social (Cali, Colombia, 1993); Rocío Rueda Novoa, “Esclavitud, resistencia y participación de los afrodescendientes durante la independencia,” Revista Afese, no. 51 (2009): 306; Jairo Gutiérrez Ramos, Los indios de Pasto contra la república (1809-1824) (Bogotá, 2012), chap. 6; Luis Ervin Prado Arellano, “Redes, movilización y bases de autoridad en el valle del Patía, 1820-1851,” Historia Caribe 8, no. 22 (2013): 75–103; and Marcela Echeverri, Indian and Slave Royalists, 104-106. María Camila Díaz Casas discusses “collective action” among members of fugitive communities in Patía later in the 1840s in Salteadores y cuadrillas de malhechores. Una aproximación a la acción colectiva de la “población negra” en el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada, 1840-1851 (Popayán, Colombia, 2015) while James Sanders examines the alliances that Afro-Colombians and Indians in Cauca forged with emerging political parties in Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Durham, NC, 2004). For a discussion on loyalism across the Andes, see Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Independence and Nation-Building in Latin America: Race and Identity in the Crucible of War (Milton, UK, 2022), 49–51.

44

Louis R. Wilson Special Collections Library, Popayán Papers Collection 11500, box 15, folder 161, 1828.

45

Alvaro Gärtner, Los místeres de las minas: Crónica de la colonia europea más grande de Colombia en el siglo XIX, surgida alrededor de las minas de Marmato, Supía y Riosucio (Manizales, Colombia, 2005).

46

On female slaveholders in Colombia, see Gärtner, Los místeres de las minas, 75 and Yesenia Barragan, “Gendering Mastery: Female Slaveholders in the Colombian Pacific Lowlands,” Slavery & Abolition 39, no. 1 (2017): 1–26. Sergio Mosquera offers transcriptions of female slaveholders’ wills in Memorias de los últimos esclavizadores en Citará: História documental (Chocó, Colombia, 1996).

47

Gärtner, Los místeres de las minas, 139-140; Nancy Appelbaum, Muddied Waters, 57.

48

Gärtner, Los místeres de las minas, 185.

49

The judges wrote cited Libro VIII, Título XXIII, Ley X of the Recopilación Castellana.

50

“Esta multitud de delitos, su genio altanero, díscolo y audaz le constituyen un hombre peligroso en medio de la sociedad. La justicia, la seguridad y conservación de los demás ciudadanos exigen imperiosamente que como miembro corrompido se le separe del cuerpo político para que no lo infecte [sic].” Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 2r.

51

The idea of slaves “contaminating” or “infecting” others with revolutionary thoughts and actions has appeared in scholarship about Latin America and the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions. See Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in The Age of Revolution (New York, 2014), 80; David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus, A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, IN, 1997), xi; Edgardo Pérez Morales, No Limits to Their Sway: Cartagena’s Privateers and the Masterless Caribbean in the Age of Revolutions (Nashville, 2018), 35; and Cristina Soriano, Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela (Albuquerque, 2019), 101.

52

Colombian historian and colleague Luis Ervin Prado Arellano kindly shared with me parts of his unpublished biographical and genealogical database on important figures in the history of Popayán. Some of these details come from Prado’s database as well as from documentation from ACC, Archivo Muerto, 1823, No index.

53

“Carta a los Ministros de la Tesorería Departamental, 1822,” ACC, Independencia, Civil I, Contaduría General 13, Sig. 7249.

54

Uribe-Uran, Fatal Love, 373. For a discussion on the roles of procurators, attorneys, and other legal agents in Chile and the Spanish empire, see Carolina González Undurraga, “El abogado y el procurador de pobres: la representación de esclavos y esclavas a fines de la Colonia y principios de la República,” SudHistoria (2012): 81–98 and Premo, The Enlightenment on Trial, chap. 1.

55

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 3v.

56

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 4r. Estrella specifically cited Libro VIII, Título XXIII, Ley IV and Libro VIII, Título XXIII, Ley XIII, which can be found in España, Segunda parte de las leyes del Reyno: Libro sexto (Alcala de Henares, 1567), fol. 196v, 197r.

57

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 4r. Estrella cited Partida VII, Título VIII, Ley IV as well as Partida VII, Título VIII, Ley II to back up his argument in defense of Manuel Moreno. In Siete Partidas, 566–68.

58

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 4v.

59

Monique Scheer argues that individuals can mobilize emotional practices to invoke feelings that were not originally present in a particular scenario. See Monique Scheer, “Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 209-212. Jan Plamper discusses the act of confession in Catholic cultures as an example of Scheer’s “mobilizing emotional practices” idea. See Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford, 2015), 266–67.

60

More research is needed on punishment and slavery in Colombia. Scholars who have addressed this issue in the U.S. and the Caribbean include Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery, (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 129–37; Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 171–73; and Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives. Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016), 124–43. Saidiya V. Hartman focuses on quotidian practices of violence and terror against the enslaved in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1997).

61

I thank Rebecca Scott for highlighting that this is a line used by seventeenth-century baroque dramatist Tirso de Molina, in El burlador de Sevilla, in reference to God’s justice.

62

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 21v.

63

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 23r. A search for a story about Manuel Moreno’s crime in two different newspapers from the period yielded no results. This case is briefly mentioned in Gärtner, Los místeres de las minas, 224.

64

Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (Philadelphia, 2021), 149. Daniel Walker also discusses fears of slave rebellion and punishment among Cuban slaveholders in No More, No More Slavery and Cultural Resistance in Havana and New Orleans (Minneapolis, 2004), 37–38 and 28.

65

“Administración de justicia,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 311 (September 30, 1827).

66

Manuel Agustín Moreno, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 6, Sig. 5739, fol. 9v.

67

A month after Bolívar’s decree, Gaceta de Colombia published a story about two men sentenced to death for stealing jewelry from a church who had invoked article 127 of the constitution, which allowed them to petition the president to review and commute their sentence. Bolívar denied their request and sided with the appellate judges arguing that there were serious reasons to “irrevocably execute” sentences against the growing number of thieves. Publishing these stories was meant to make public the ins and outs of administering justice effectively under constitutional principles. “Administración de Justicia,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 312 (October 7, 1827).

68

“Decretos del poder ejecutivo, Simón Bolívar, Libertador, Presidente, 26 Septiembre, 1827” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 312 (October 7, 1827).

69

“Diario de la Corte Superior de Justicia del Cauca,” Gaceta de Colombia (Bogotá), No. 321 (December 9, 1827).

70

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol.7v.

71

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol.11r.

72

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 6v.

73

Estrella specifically cited Partida III, Título XVI, Ley XIII and Ley XXII. Las siete partidas, 522, 525. Scholars of slavery in Latin America have written extensively about the use of custom and written law in litigation involving the enslaved. Adriana Chira carefully examines this vast body of scholarship and draws on the entanglements between custom and positive law in “Manumission, Custom, and the Laws of Slavery and Freedom in Latin America,” History Compass 19, no. 2 (2021), 1-11. See also, Manuel Lucena Salmoral, “La esclavitud americana y las Partidas de Alfonso X,” Indagación: Revista de Historia y Arte, no. 1 (1995): 33–44 and Bianca Premo, “An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 4 (2011): 495–517.

74

In addition to the law cited by Estrella, Partida IV, Título XXII, Ley III stipulated that a slave who reported to crown authorities the abduction or rape of a virgin by another man could be granted freedom. This could explain why both Estrella and Cuervo emphasized that María Lucas’s modified statements raised suspicions. They doubted about María Lucas’s true intentions. Similarly, Partida VII, Título I, Ley II stated that slaves were not allowed to accuse their masters to the authorities, Las siete partidas, 123, 521. María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 5v, 6r.

75

Cuervo cited Partida III, Título XVI, Ley XXVI. Las siete partidas, 527.

76

Francisco Elizondo y Alvarez, Práctica universal forense de los tribunales de España y de las Indias, vol. 4 (Madrid , 1784), 342.

77

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 4v.

78

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 8v.

79

The Instruction is reprinted in Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493-1810, vol. 3 (Madrid, 1953), 643–52.

80

Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005), 216.

81

See Marcela Echeverri, “Conflicto y hegemonía en el suroccidente de la Nueva Granada, 1780-1800,” Fronteras de la Historia 11 (2006): 355–87 and Edgardo Pérez Morales, “Manumission on the Land: Slaves, Masters, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century Mompox (Colombia),” Law and History Review 35 (2017): 511–44. For other works on slave rights and paths to freedom in Spanish America, see Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel,” Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2007): 659–92; Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Adriana Chira, “Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual Emancipation Laws in Cuba, 1817–68,” Law and History Review 36, no. 1 (2018): 1–33; and Magdalena Candioti, Una historia de la emancipación negra. Esclavitud y abolición en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2021).

82

See Colmenares, Historia económica y social, 73–76; Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez, “La manumisión en Popayán, 1800-1851,” Revista de Extensión Cultural, No. 9–10 (1980): 77–85; Sergio Mosquera, “Los procesos de manumission en las provincias del Chocó,” in Afrodescendientes en las Américas. Trayectorias sociales e identitarias, eds. Claudia Mosquera, Mauricio Pardo, and Odile Hoffmann (Bogotá, 2002): 99–119; and Karent Portilla Herrera, “La coartación y el peculio, dos elementos claves en la manumisión de esclavos. Santiago de Cali (1750-1810),” Fronteras de la Historia 20, no. 1 (2015): 96–123.

83

Several primary sources in Popayán’s judicial archive offer glimpses into the strategies employed by enslaved men and women to obtain their freedom during the late colonial period, including 1798, ACC, Colonia, J II, Cv 14, Sig. 10254; 1801, ACC, Colonia, J II, Cv 14, Sig. 10255; 1804, and ACC, Colonia, J II, Cv 14, Sig. 10256.

84

1794, ACC, Colonia, J II, Cv 14, Sig. 10253, fol. 25r.

85

1822, ACC, Independencia, Civil 3, Gobierno 2, Sig. 6902, fol. 9v.

86

María Eugenia Chaves Maldonado, “La ley para el gobierno de los esclavos en el régimen de Santander,” Procesos. Revista Ecuatoriana de Historia, no. 54 (2021): 174.

87

Dwyer, Mastering Emotions, 30.

88

Even though María Eugenia Albornoz moves beyond the relationship between shame and honor in her work, she states that the ownership and uses of a discourse of shame in judicial disputes is a privilege of people with higher social standing or calidad superior. Albornoz, “Umbrales sensibles,” 63.

89

Estrella refuted María Lucas’s expressed pain by citing a medical manual that focused on the existence of legitimate proof. He did not bring up the laws in the siete partidas or the Instruction that outlined the fair treatment that the enslaved deserved. Carolina González Undurraga discusses these laws and the references to them in the cruelty cases she analyzed for colonial Santiago de Chile. González Undurraga, “Me es intolerable su sevicia,” 134–38.

90

Domingo Vidal, Cirugia forense, ó, arte de hacer los informes y declaraciones chirurgico-legal (Madrid, 1791). Don Domingo Vidal was a professor and librarian at Real Colegio de Cirugia de Barcelona. In May 1791, he published Cirugia forense based on his reading and interpretation of Jean Devaux’s L’art de faire les rapports en chirurgie. Devaux was a French surgeon and scholar.

91

Vidal, Cirugia forense, 28.

92

Vidal, Cirugia forense, 28–29.

93

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 36.

94

Lina del Castillo argues that colonial legacies were invented in the nineteenth century as part of republican-liberal projects of state formation. See Lina del Castillo, Crafting a Republic for the World: Scientific, Geographic, and Historiographic Inventions of Colombia (Lincoln, NE, 2018).

95

Vidal, Cirugia forense, 81–82.

96

María Lucas, 1827, ACC, Independencia, J 1, Cr 3, Sig. 2494, fol. 6r. For discussions on the abolition of the Inquisition, see Natalia Sobrevilla, “Loyalism and Liberalism in Peru, 1810-1824,” in The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World: The Impact of the Cádiz Constitution of 1812, eds. Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2015), 116-17 and Daniel Muñoz, “The Abolition of the Inquisition and the Creation of a Historical Myth,” Hispanic Research Journal 11, no. 1 (2010): 71–81.

97

Contra Antonio Reina, 1829, ACC, Independencia, J I, Cr 5, Sig. 4307, fol. 5r.