The Making of the Free Womb Trade at the Congress of Cúcuta, 1821

Over the course of three weeks in June and July of 1821, more than 45 delegates from Colombia's and Venezuela's prosperous late-colonial elite, including small- and medium-sized slaveholders, debated slavery's future at the Congress of Cúcuta.Footnote ¹⁸ José Félix de Restrepo, a revolutionary republican lawyer, educator, and slaveholder from the western Colombian province of Antioquia, initiated the debate by proposing a gradual emancipation law. Restrepo's proposed law at the Congress of Cúcuta was largely modeled on an earlier law that he crafted and helped pass in revolutionary Antioquia, then under the leadership of President-Dictator Juan del Corral, in 1814. At the center of the Antioquia law of 1814 was a “Free Womb” law that “freed” all children born from enslaved women but bonded them to their mothers’ masters until the age of 16 as compensation for their rearing.Footnote ¹⁹

Seven years later, in 1821, Restrepo proposed a similar but now national project of gradual emancipation at the Congress of Cúcuta. Like the Antioquia law of 1814, Restrepo's proposed law centrally featured a Free Womb clause whose parameters were fiercely contested by delegates.Footnote ²⁰ Two key issues regarding the Free Womb law emerged at Cúcuta: the age of emancipation for Free Womb children and the conditions of their salability. After weeks of tense deliberation, the former issue was settled when delegates finally voted 28-17 to fix the age of emancipation for Free Womb children at 18; the final vote's margin reflects the law's controversial nature.Footnote ²¹ The resolution of the second of the two issues, as we shall soon see, would materialize into what would become the Free Womb trade.

With the Free Womb children's age of emancipation established, Cúcuta delegates grappled with the conditions of these children's salability. In the course of this debate, two interconnected issues arose: the terms under which a Free Womb child could be removed from a master's dominion, and whether a mother and child could be separated for sale. José Félix de Restrepo proposed that designated individuals could “withdraw” the child prior to the age of 18 by providing their master with a “just compensation for the alimentos” that had been provided for the child while under the master's dominion. Crucial to Restrepo's proposal, however, was which designated individuals were authorized to “withdraw” the child from the master's dominion. As per Restrepo's original proposal, only “the parents or relatives of the [Free Womb child] or persons not of kin” could claim the child from their master.Footnote ²² Regarding the first two group of people (“parents or relatives”), Restrepo proposed something analogous to a Free Womb self-purchase mechanism, insofar as relatives would be able to buy the “withdrawal” of their Free Womb kin from their master. However, in the case of an enslaved person's self-purchase, the slave repaid the master's investment for her very being. For the Free Womb child, by contrast, “alimentos” were theoretically the only object of repayment.

Yet, in addition to parents and relatives, Restrepo proposed granting the right of removal to “persons not of kin” (extraños), which meant that slaveholders unrelated to the Free Womb child were legally empowered to acquire the child from another master. This clause thus laid the legal groundwork for a Free Womb trade and created another category of salable human beings. The Free Womb child was not explicitly considered a slave, but like a slave could be bought and sold on the marketplace. Fellow Cúcuta delegate and Venezuelan priest Antonio María Briceño argued that it was essential to firmly stress the rights of non-kin. To this end he proposed slightly modifying the language of Restrepo's article on this point from “los padres o parientes del esclavo o extraños” (the parents or relatives of the slave or persons not of kin) to “los padres, los parientes u otros extraños” (the parents, relatives or other persons not of kin). This seemingly minor modification emphasized that “other persons not of kin,” as opposed to simply “persons not of kin,” could acquire the children, by which Briceño forcefully underscored the purchasing powers of non-kin slaveholders. The congress adopted Briceño's proposal for the final version of the law, codified in Article 3 of the 1821 law, which reveals that a majority of delegates sought to clarify the Free Womb child's salability. There were some vocal opponents to this emphasis on salability. While the Bogotano delegate Miguel Tobar was in favor of extending the Free Womb child's age of bondage during earlier debates, he protested Briceño's amendment, because it meant that “any stranger would be authorized to take advantage of the labor of the youth.”Footnote ²³

Yet, while the final law secured the Free Womb trade, it also set specific conditions for its operation. José Félix de Restrepo originally proposed a clause that prohibited separating through sale enslaved mothers from their Free Womb children who had not yet reached the age of pubertad (puberty), left unspecified by Restrepo.Footnote ²⁴ Fellow delegate and Antioqueño lawyer José Manuel Restrepo was seemingly perturbed by this proposition. In response, he suggested amending the clause to only ban the sale of slaves apart from their prepubescent Free Womb children “outside their province,” thereby expanding Félix de Restrepo's proposal to allow for trade in individual prepubescent Free Womb children at the provincial level.Footnote ²⁵ In both Restrepos’ proposals, there would be no restrictions on family separation once the child reached the age of puberty. José Manuel Restrepo's proposed changes were included in the final version of the law. Article 5 of the 1821 law specified that it would “not be lawful to sell any slaves outside the province in which they reside, separating the children from their parents; this prohibition however shall only be in force until the children have attained the age of puberty.”Footnote ²⁶

The decision to legalize the prepubescent Free Womb trade at the provincial level reflected the profound importance of the province as a distinct political unit during and after the Wars of Independence in the northern Andes. The number of provincial juntas exploded after 1810 as news of the Napoleonic invasion in Spain and King Ferdinand VII's abdication in 1808 made its way across the Atlantic. Reflecting the deeply regional politics of the time, several provinces formed a federalist government called the United Provinces of New Granada, in November 1811. By the early-to-mid 1820s, this local, provincially based politics evolved into a politics of federalism that championed regional autonomy and decision-making, against that of centralism.Footnote ²⁷ In turn, a provincially based, prepubescent Free Womb trade secured the operations and mechanics of the trade at the regional level, which would undoubtedly be favorable to slaveholders who may have feared the repercussions of a blanket prohibition of family separation at the local level.

The exact “age of puberty” was not explicitly designated in the final law. Cúcuta deputies might have left the “age of puberty” vague to place more control over the law's application at the local level, leaving the question a matter of controversial interpretation between individual masters and parents of Free Womb children. Informally, there was general consensus among Colombian slaveholders that slaves reached puberty somewhere between 12 and 14 years of age. For example, the prominent Popayán slaveholder Gerónimo Francisco de Torres remarked as an aside in his pamphlet against the 1821 gradual emancipation law that an enslaved woman reached puberty at 12 years of age, while one slaveholder from the Pacific lowlands, owner of the Raspadura mine, cited the age at 14 during a discussion of the mine's inventory in 1834.Footnote ²⁸ Torres's specific reference to a female suggests that the delegates might have failed to designate a particular age of puberty in recognition of the gendered nature of puberty, attained at different ages by different sexes.

The law's reference to “puberty” further reflected the Enlightenment-era intellectual spirit of the Cúcuta delegates. While the term puberty dates back to the Roman period (deriving from the Latin puberatum or pubertas, meaning “age of maturity”) and can be found in the medieval Castilian code Siete Partidas, puberty as a classificatory problem of scientific inquiry developed only in the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ One of the best-known Enlightenment proponents of the scientific idea of puberty was the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose famous educational treatise Émile ou De l’éducation (1762) was grounded in a “physiology of puberty.”Footnote ³⁰ Moreover, the category of puberty—a not uncommon category of import in legal medicine throughout the Spanish empire—may have reflected the medical jurisprudential backgrounds of some of the Cúcuta delegates as well.Footnote ³¹

Unlike the Colombian law, other gradual emancipation laws across the nineteenth-century Atlantic World authorized the separate sale of the children at a designated age (in fact, Colombia had the only such law featuring a “puberty” clause).Footnote ³² For example, the Argentine law of 1813 stipulated that a child could be sold without their mother after age 2, while the 1856 law in the Portuguese West African territories specified that such children could be sold after age 7.Footnote ³³ One legislative project debated in the House of Representatives in Uruguay in 1838 even proposed regulating sale prices for individual “Free Womb” children, with one-year-olds sold for 30 pesos and 12-to-16-year-olds for 100 pesos—in some ways constituting a kind of Free Womb market regulation.Footnote ³⁴ Gradual emancipation laws in late nineteenth-century Brazil and Cuba specified that Free Womb children could not be sold apart from their enslaved parents before the ages of 12 and 14, respectively.Footnote ³⁵ Nevertheless, turning to the practice and implementation of the Free Womb trade in Colombia at the provincial level, the following section explores the commerce in and circulation of Free Womb children within the geographical confines of the northern Pacific lowland province of Chocó.

Legalized Captivity: The Commerce in Free Womb Children in Chocó

The Free Womb market operated in intimate connection with the slave trade in Chocó, a riverine province known for its vast rain forest, hundreds of rivers and tributaries, endless downpours, and rich gold mines. It could take several days to travel from the gold-mining camps along the province's winding rivers to arrive at Quibdó, the region's small capital and center of the local trade in human flesh, a journey that enslaved people and Free Womb children knew well. While occupying a legal category distinct from that of their enslaved kin, Free Womb children were typically sold alongside their enslaved mothers throughout key sites of Quibdó. Free Womb children could be sold in the town's rugged plaza, where the pregonero público (town crier) auctioned off deceased locals’ properties, including enslaved people and their Free Womb kin.Footnote ³⁶ The city notary's office was the central commercial clearinghouse for the regional slave and Free Womb trade. Masters and mistresses, or their legal representatives, were required to report to this office to record their transactions, which protected the parties from any potential legal complications. Notaries also regularly executed notes of sale in the lowland masters’ homes in case of their illness or other extenuating circumstances. The Free Womb trade thus cannot be physically extricated from the slave trade.

Although it experienced ebbs and flows, the slave trade continued to thrive in Chocó during the era of gradual emancipation. From 1828, the year in which the first notarial records are available for the republican period, to 1851, 510 enslaved people were bought and sold before the city notary.Footnote ³⁷ As a point of comparison, 573 enslaved people were purchased in the Caribbean port city of Santa Marta from 1821 to 1851, while 825 were sold in Cartagena from 1814 to 1852, and 1,596 in the Andean capital of Bogotá from 1819 to 1851; these statistics represent longer periods of time in larger, more centrally located Colombian cities than Quibdó.Footnote ³⁸ Scattered notarial records reveal that 191 enslaved people were purchased in Quibdó between 1810 and 1819. Thus, from 1810 to 1851, at least 700 enslaved people were sold in Quibdó.Footnote ³⁹ Given the incompleteness of these records, which are missing crucial years in the local slave trade, it is even possible that Quibdó saw the sale of as many enslaved people as did Cartagena, if not more. The similar rates of sale for Quibdó and larger Caribbean slave ports like Santa Marta and Cartagena reveal chattel slavery's overall strength in Chocó's economy under the period of gradual emancipation.

While not legally considered slaves, Free Womb children were still fungible commodities that required pricing. The national gradual emancipation law had a mechanism for this, as the previous section explored. Article 3 stipulated that “persons not of kin,” including other masters, could “withdraw” a Free Womb child from their master by offering a “just compensation for the alimentos”—in the form of education, clothing, and food—that had been provided by the master. As to assigning a monetary value to the alimentos, the law specified that this would be determined either by a “private agreement” between master and buyer or by the “prudent decision of a judge.” Strictly speaking, buyers on the Free Womb market were not purchasing the very person of the enslaved human—they were buying the debt incurred by the master for the Free Womb child's alimentos. Strictly speaking, this meant that all purchases made on the Free Womb market established relations of debt bondage. That the Free Womb child had to compensate in turn, with their “labor and service,” the person who had paid the cost of their previous master's alimentos meant that this system in practice amounted to slave labor. As the slaveholder Gabriel Andrade emphasized to the buyer of the enslaved mother María Rosa and her two Free Womb children in 1831, the children were “under the concessions of the Law of Manumission, which is to say, that they are obliged to serve [the buyer] until the age determined by the law.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Although the children's procurement was almost always discussed in terms of debt accrued for alimentos, masters sometimes explicitly deployed the language of property. This happened only twice in more than 20 years of records of sale maintained by the notary of Quibdó.Footnote ⁴¹ In one such instance recorded in 1835, under the title “Property of a black girl free by the law,” doña Rosa del Pino declared that she would “desist, renounce, and transfer the property rights of la negrita Petrona that through alimentos has been granted to [Pino] by the Law of Manumission.”Footnote ⁴² Similarly, after receiving more than 100 pesos, another lowland slaveholder transferred the “property rights granted to him over Candido according to Article 2 of the Law of Manumission of slaves declared on July 21, 1821,” which stipulated that Free Womb children would “compensate their mother's masters” by being bound to them until the age of 18.Footnote ⁴³ Neither Article 2 nor any other of the law's articles officially endowed “property rights” to the master; both these slaveholders were merely making explicit what was fundamentally implicit.Footnote ⁴⁴ As George Reid Andrews argues in the case of “Free Womb” children in revolutionary Buenos Aires, “In theory it was the right of patronage and the right to the liberto's services that changed hands, but in practice it was a human being who was being sold, despite the fact that he might be theoretically free.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The slippage in language reveals that lowland slaveholders ultimately believed Free Womb children to be chattel property.

The Free Womb law left implicit the children's status as property, and it sometimes left ambiguous the price to be paid on the market. This ambiguity resulted when slaveholders had different assessments as to the actual economic value of the alimentos to be compensated on the Free Womb market. This can be seen especially in inventories from throughout Chocó containing Free Womb children. In some of these, masters and mistresses did not assign prices to the Free Womb children. In one 1828 inventory, the value of a young Free Womb child could not be assessed “because he was born under the law.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Likewise, an 1831 inventory of a gold mine owned by the deceased slaveholder Antonio García y Falcón listed prices for enslaved miners but appraised the value of their Free Womb children at “0000.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The same was true for an 1832 inventory from the Raspadura gold mine.Footnote ⁴⁸ A later record from this mine, from 1834, clarifies the reason for this practice: the owners claimed to be unable to appraise the 113 Free Womb children because their alimentos could not be determined until the moment the children left their master's dominion.Footnote ⁴⁹

In other words, while the enslaved person had a more or less fixed price—a price, nevertheless, that would be affected by factors such as age and health—the value of the Free Womb child was constantly shifting.Footnote ⁵⁰ Some slaveholders did appraise the children, as did the executors of the Tutunendo mine, on Quibdó's outskirts.Footnote ⁵¹ Still, the practice of not assessing Free Womb captives continued into the 1840s; in one 1846 inventory, a slaveholder noted that the Free Womb child he owned was “without appraisal for being a manumitida,” a term that slaveholders in Chocó increasingly used to refer to Free Womb children.Footnote ⁵² Only when the child reached the age of 18 would their value fall back to zero, a phenomenon evident in the inventories of the deceased slaveholder Santiago Chaverra. Appraising his properties in 1843, Chaverra's executors stated that they should terminate “the value of 226 pesos for the manumitido Saturnino, who has reached the appropriate age and is removed from servitude; [in addition to] Eulogia and Juana, who have about two months left before they leave.”Footnote ⁵³ As the older children reached the age of majority, they would age out of this particular form of unfreedom, while the younger children were increasingly treated as financial assets whose value and alimentos increased over time. In some ways, the Free Womb child's financial cycle was an even more compressed version of the slave's cycle, whereby their value would appreciate and ultimately decline over time.Footnote ⁵⁴

Although slaveholders occasionally purchased Free Womb children by themselves, most of the time they purchased mother and child together, transforming them into a single productive unit. In the available notarial records of Quibdó from 1828 to 1851, there were eight sales of Free Womb children sold on their own and 78 involving Free Womb children alongside their mothers. On the other hand, it was understood that the offspring of Free Womb children were not assets and thus did not circulate in the Free Womb market. This appears to have been an informal understanding, given that the 1821 law and subsequent national legislation did not formally address the matter.

In fact, there is only one instance in the Pacific lowlands in which the offspring of Free Womb children was discussed. In an 1844 inventory of the Tutunendo mine, the assessor noted the need to “exclude from the inventory and assessment [of the mine] José Romelio, eight months old, for being informed that he is a child of a [Free Womb woman], and thus not subject to appraisal or belonging to the mine.”Footnote ⁵⁵ This implicitly suggests that Romelio belonged to someone else, namely, his Free Womb mother.

This absence of uproar over the status of Free Womb captives’ children stood in sharp contrast to the reactions in other parts of the Atlantic World under Free Womb legislation. In New Jersey, for example, slaveholders in several counties vehemently complained that the state's Abolition Act of 1804 infringed on their right to the services of their Free Womb captives’ offspring.Footnote ⁵⁶ Likewise, there are documented cases of masters successfully imposing Free Womb status on Free Womb captives’ children in Buenos Aires during the age of gradual abolition. Paulina L. Alberto has referred to these affected children as “second-generation [liberto/as].”Footnote ⁵⁷

Over time, Free Womb captives were incorporated into the everyday business practices of Chocó, whether in wills, gifts, dowries, inventories, mortgages, or notes of sale—the definitive manifestation of their proprietary nature. By the 1830s, they began to appear regularly in slaveholders’ last wills and testaments throughout the province, included among a diverse set of properties. At times, they were identified alongside their mothers and siblings, as in the will of Leonarda Palacios, a single mother of four and a small landholder from Quibdó in 1833. After declaring the locations of her various tracts of land, she claimed to own four slaves named Josefa, Manuel José, Feliciana, and Ramona, adding that Ramona had “un hijo libre por la Ley” (a child free under the Law) named Juan José, and a daughter “mucho también libre por la Ley” (also very much free under the Law) named Florencia.Footnote ⁵⁸ The seemingly casual reference to “also very much free,” as opposed to simply “free,” may have signaled an attempt by someone (perhaps the mother, Ramona) to emphasize Florencia's special Free Womb status. Fourteen years later, in 1847, doña Palacios's revised will made no mention of the children, who might have purchased their full freedom in the meanwhile or been sold to a new patron. The revised will still included their mother, “a slave named Ramona, who cannot be sold or freed for more than 100 patacones.”Footnote ⁵⁹

However, Free Womb youth were not always listed in wills alongside their enslaved mothers and kin, given that they could be legally tradable separately within the province regardless of pubescence. In his 1839 last will and testament, Estevan Palacios declared that he had acquired several properties during his second marriage, to a local woman. These properties included a straw house with a plot of land extending nearly 12 yards near the center of Quibdó, gold jewelry worth 60 pesos, seven large pigs, and a Free Womb girl named María Rosa, in addition to other implements such as a large iron pot and mining tools.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1844, the small shop owner Rufino Villanueva listed among his properties a slave named Matias, “who ran away fifteen months ago”; another slave named Ubalda; and the Free Womb child Casimiro.Footnote ⁶¹ The will of Carlos Salazar, from 1848, is perhaps one of the bolder examples demarcating the natal estrangement of the children. Immediately after announcing his desire to be buried in the mining town of Lloró's cemetery, Salazar requested that his two “negritos manumitidos,” Miguel and Juan José, be sold as his property and that the money be used toward masses for the rest of his soul.Footnote ⁶²

Much as they did with slaves, masters also bequeathed the Free Womb children to their own children, siblings, and other kin, in last wills and testaments. Doña Barbara Polo left her daughter Margarita several hundred pesos and, along with the enslaved couple Felix and Juana, their children Pascacio and Petrona who “are free by the law.”Footnote ⁶³ Likewise, the slaveholder Mariana Trejo declared in her will that she owned two enslaved families with Free Womb children, one of which was comprised of the enslaved couple Juan and Gregoria and their “hijos manumitidos” Miguel and Elena. Trejo requested that her daughter be given the slave Juan; Juan's wife Gregoria, along with her children, would be given to serve under doña Trejo's son, Carlos Salazar.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was the same Salazar who, as we have just seen, sold two “negritos manumitidos” to fund masses for the repose of his soul; one of those sold was Gregoria's son Miguel. The story of Miguel, separated first from his enslaved father and later from his enslaved mother when sold to unburden his master's sins, captures the legal and emotional labyrinths navigated by Colombia's generation of Free Womb children technically born free.

These children were actively traded as part of the emotional economy of lowland slaveholders, who gave away the youths as gifts throughout the province. For “all the love and affection he professes to have for his daughter Silvia,” the vecino Juan Bautista Siguesa in 1841 gave his daughter the slave Micaela and her two children “free by the law,” José Eugenio and Doroteo.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a similar expression of “love,” the elderly Leonor Machado presented her grandson Eliseo López, “for the respect and good services that he provides for her,” with a Free Womb child named Ysidro, along with a total of nine cows and half a pound of gold jewelry, among other possessions.Footnote ⁶⁶ The priest Manuel María Ochoa rewarded the “good services” of his loyal parishioner Manuela Valencia and her children by granting them the slave Vicitación and her “manumitido” son Domingo, whose combined value was 350 pesos, in addition to two other Free Womb children, Natividad and Lorenza (assessed at 80 and 30 pesos, respectively).Footnote ⁶⁷

The Free Womb children included in dowries played an important role in differentiating between two classes of Chocó's elite. Of the nine complete dowries available today in the notarial archive in Quibdó, six consisted of more than 1,000 pesos, reflecting the elite nature of this practice. The highest dowry consisted of 10,000 pesos, granted to Natividad Vidal, the hija natural (daughter born out of wedlock) of the prominent mistress and slave trader María Cruz de Vidal. But the young Josefa Álfaro's dowry was more indicative of the typical well-to-do family in Chocó. In 1829, Álfaro and her partner received not only a house valued at 2,000 pesos in the center of Quibdó but also five slaves.Footnote ⁶⁸ Interestingly, none of the dowries worth more than 1,000 pesos included Free Womb children (or at least children explicitly identified as such). In contrast, all three dowries valued at 1,000 or below featured Free Womb children. Thus María Ambrocio Ospina's far more modest 240-patacones dowry included a tract of land on the Sanmurindó River, half of a house in the village of Lloró, and two young Free Womb children, assessed at 30 and 20 patacones respectively.Footnote ⁶⁹ Cheaper to acquire than chattel slaves, Free Womb children facilitated a second-tier class of mistresses within the province. This reflected more general trends within the transatlantic slave trade, where children were at times the “chattel of choice” for less wealthy buyers unable to afford the price of enslaved adults.Footnote ⁷⁰

As capital, the youth, in conjunction with their mothers or other slaves, were also used as collateral in mortgages between affluent merchants in Quibdó. In 1839, the wealthy miner Francisco F. Vetancur, son of a famous Spanish royalist official in Chocó named don Melchor de Varona i Vetancur, owed 1,600 pesos to Nicolas Bonolí, an Italian slave trader and merchant living in Quibdó whose small slaving empire extended from the Pacific coastal jungles of Chocó to Cartagena and Jamaica. As part of his pledge of repayment, Vetancur mortgaged the enslaved couple Marcos and María Antonia and their daughter Mercedes, “free by the law,” in addition to a woman named Ysabel and her daughter Benancia, also “free by the law.”Footnote ⁷¹ In the notarial records, the Free Womb children never appear as collateral separate from their enslaved mothers, which suggests that the children served as a commercial appendage increasing the total value of the mother.

Yet, the parameters of the Free Womb children's commercialization would expand throughout the nation in the wake of Colombia's first civil war in 1839, popularly known as the War of the Supremes. Beginning in late June 1839, this wave of federal rebellions and insurrections was sparked by the closure in early May of several monasteries in Pasto, a town in the southwestern province of Popayán, which was a royalist stronghold during the Wars of Independence. Led by the parish priest, locals revolted in response to the decision but were quickly defeated. Their cause was soon resurrected by the popular liberal caudillo and political rival of the central administration, José María Obando, who mobilized support from southwestern Colombia to counter Bogotá's centralizing policies. Obando and other high-ranking liberal officers (known as jefes supremos, the source of the war's popular name) bolstered their troop numbers by successfully recruiting free blacks and slaves in the region, offering the latter freedom if they enlisted.

Over time, the national state racialized the insurgent army by accusing them, as historian Francisco Zuluaga noted, of fomenting “caste war” with “aspects of an anti-slavery movement.”Footnote ⁷² Meanwhile, centers of slavery like Popayán in the southwest reeled in the civil war's aftermath. At the epicenter of the rebellion, the province saw its slaveholders allegedly lose 600,000 pesos in livestock, tools, money, expropriated provisions, and fugitive captives who joined Obando's rebel forces.Footnote ⁷³ The financial damages and racial fears resurrected southwestern slaveholders’ calls to reform the 1821 law. The result of all these efforts was a law passed on May 29, 1842, that established for Free Womb children a system of concertaje, a mandatory apprenticeship program that would compel the generation of Free Womb children to work under a master until the age of 25. This meant seven more years of forced labor than proposed in the original Free Womb law.Footnote ⁷⁴

Under these expanded parameters, Free Womb youth continued to be bought and sold after the 1842 law. In early 1846, for example, a wealthy lowland master sold to a local slaveholder several elderly and ill enslaved people alongside a group of Free Womb captives, which included:

This particular note of sale reflects the shifting state of Chocó's economy of flesh in the late 1840s. Burdened by “disposable people,” the master was selling elderly and ailing slaves who now were an encumbrance.Footnote ⁷⁶ The group of Free Womb captives included in the sale may have been part of a compromise with the buyer, who would also be receiving the dynamic, healthy labor of Free Womb children and adults in exchange for taking on the sickly and aged slaves. “While the sale of slaves in family groups kept slaves with their loved ones,” Caitlin Rosenthal importantly reminds us that “it also had a pecuniary upside because it bundled the elderly and infirm with their more valuable kin.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The lowland mistress María Cruz de Vidal may have had this “upside” in mind when she purchased several elderly slaves and younger “Free Womb” captives in 1846 for the sizeable sum of 2,875 pesos. Vidal acquired the group of 16 lowland captives from José Gregorio Fernández, who appeared to be liquidating his human and gold-mining estates in Chocó throughout the mid-to-late 1840s.Footnote ⁷⁸

As this section reveals, a dynamic Free Womb trade and economy was powerfully forged at the provincial level. Yet, as the final section illustrates, despite the strength of the local Free Womb trade in Chocó, the full extent of its legal power was not entirely secure. The terms of the Free Womb trade could be successfully challenged in court, as evident in the final section, which focuses on the lawsuit lodged by an enslaved mother named Juana del Concilio and a sympathetic municipal judge.

“[I]n no way can she be separated from her daughter”: The Free Womb Trade Challenged

Soon after arriving in the world around 1830, the young child María Brigida became one of hundreds of Free Womb children sought after and trafficked in Chocó. For the first year or years of her life (the documentation is unclear), María Brigida and her enslaved mother, Juana del Concilio, were claimed by a prominent slaveholder and local official named Jacinto Alvares del Pino, who likely employed them in his gold mines. One of the more than 2,600 enslaved women who lived and labored in Chocó by 1835, María Brigida's mother might have helped her daughter take her first steps or say her first words as she laboriously sifted through the sandy rocks of del Pino's gold mines on the banks of the Negua River, just north of Quibdó.Footnote ⁷⁹ Like many enslaved and captive families across the African diaspora, their fragile security as a family unit crumbled even further after their master passed away, most likely in 1835. Soon after his passing, the late master's daughter, Maria Rosa Alvares del Pino, inherited the captive family and eventually made the decision to sell her father's holdings. She hired the well-known slaveholding official and future governor of Chocó José Nicolás Castro as her apoderado (legal representative) to oversee the liquidation.Footnote ⁸⁰

On December 3, Castro appeared before the Quibdó notary to finalize the sale of del Pino's inherited pigs, a small table, six enslaved people, including Juana del Concilio, and three Free Womb children—not including the Free Womb girl María Brigida—to a slaveholder in the mining village of Nemotá in the province of Chocó.Footnote ⁸¹ Instead of remaining with her mother, the young María Brigida was sold off to a different master, a local mistress in the same village of Nemotá, who claimed several enslaved and Free Womb lowlanders with her husband.Footnote ⁸² Although she had few resources and little power, Juana del Concilio swiftly turned to the court to wage a battle to retrieve her daughter.Footnote ⁸³ On the day following the sale, and with the permission of her new owner, del Concilio protested the transfer of her Free Womb daughter to another master. In her verbal petition before the municipal judge of Quibdó, Mauricio Díaz, del Concilio argued that there was “no obstacle” that barred her new master from purchasing her daughter's alimentos, an action that would allow her daughter to be sold to her mother's new master and remain by her mother's side. “[I]n no way can she be separated from her daughter,” del Concilio is said to have stated to the municipal judge.Footnote ⁸⁴

After hearing Castro's plea, the judge (whose response was not recorded) was apparently persuaded by the enslaved mother's arguments and referred to parts of the 1821 gradual emancipation law to explain his decision. He specifically referenced part of Article 5, which prohibited the sale of prepubescent Free Womb children anywhere outside the province. The judge agreed that Juana del Concilio's new master should purchase her daughter, “considering that the muchacha is only about four to five years old” and “that the mother needs to take care of her daughter who is young until she reaches the age of puberty in conformity with Article 5 of the Law of July 21, 1821.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Technically speaking, the prepubescent María Brigida was not sold outside Chocó and thus her sale did not violate the 1821 law. While the judge likely knew the particulars of Article 5, he appears to have rejected the full conditions of the law and instead sided with the evocative matter of puberty. By claiming that she could in “no way . . . be separated from her daughter,” del Concilio powerfully claimed that she was exercising her right as a mother in her plea against their family separation. By agreeing with her demand, the municipal judge was likewise eschewing the full letter of the Free Womb trade's stipulations. He eventually ordered del Concilio's new master to pay Castro 50 patacones for the young girl's alimentos and Castro to bring María Brigida to her mother's new master, thereby reuniting the family.Footnote ⁸⁶

It is not entirely clear why the municipal judge, Mauricio Díaz, decided to ignore the geographical stipulations of the Free Womb trade and selectively side with the puberty clause. Certainly, the judge's decision to reject the letter of the law followed a Hispanic juridical culture lasting into the early republican period that favored interpretations and adaptations of the law, best exemplified by the early modern legal formula “se obedece pero no se cumple” (“obey but do not comply”) applied across New Granadian and other Spanish American courts.Footnote ⁸⁷ Moreover, Juana del Concilio's case was the only lawsuit of its kind—that is, one protesting the separation of mother and Free Womb child—that appears to have been brought before the municipal court during the nearly 30 years of gradual emancipation, signaling the unusual nature of the case. The extraordinary nature of the suit, at least within the province, may have played a role in the judge's decision to side with the enslaved mother.

The judge may have also been influenced by the general practice of selling enslaved mothers and Free Womb children together that was the cultural norm in the Free Womb trade in Chocó. As discussed earlier, there were 78 sales of Free Womb children sold alongside their mothers, as opposed to eight sales of Free Womb children sold on their own from 1828 to 1851 in the available notarial records of Quibdó. Thus, this prevailing practice in the province may have influenced the judge's decision. The judge also had firsthand experience with the operations of the slave market and, most importantly, the Free Womb trade. In 1835, he had purchased an enslaved man named Nicolás who had run away from his master, and in 1837 he sold an enslaved woman named Dionicia.Footnote ⁸⁸ In 1828, several years prior to hearing del Concilio's case, the judge purchased an enslaved woman named Josefa, in addition to her Free Womb daughter Rosana Navida, on behalf of a local priest.Footnote ⁸⁹ This direct and potentially intimate experience with the slave and Free Womb trade may have played a role in affirming the judge's stance against local family separation, giving him firsthand familiarity with how the Free Womb trade functioned in practice.

It is also important to note that although administratively controlled by slaveholders, politically the capital of Quibdó was known as a relatively liberal center during the first half of the nineteenth century, especially in comparison to the conservative stronghold of Nóvita, Chocó's second most important town, just south of Quibdó.Footnote ⁹⁰ Nineteenth- century liberals often embraced or at least expressed sympathy for abolitionist measures and causes across Colombia. Indeed, in the early-to-mid 1820s, Bogotá, the capital and seat of the new republic of Gran Colombia, became the de facto pro-abolitionist headquarters of Colombia. José Félix de Restrepo's speech in support of the 1821 law at the Congress of Cúcuta was published in Bogotá in 1822, and the government-sponsored La Gaceta de Colombia, along with other Bogotano newspapers, printed constant praises for the law throughout the 1820s.Footnote ⁹¹ Enslaved people were emancipated by Bogotá's manumission juntas in theatrical public ceremonies featuring powerful republican leaders. For example, before an audience that included Vice President Francisco de Paula de Santander, Bogotá manumission junta officials in 1822 “placed on the head of each one of the manumitidos the cap of liberty in order to show that they were now truly free.”Footnote ⁹² Similar spectacular manumission ceremonies took place across the Antioqueño highlands and Colombian and Venezuelan Caribbean, where pro-abolitionist newspapers also circulated.Footnote ⁹³ In contrast, no such comparable scenes could be found in Chocó, a province long associated with gold-mining slavery, during the 1820s and 1830s; the province did not boast its own newspaper until the mid 1830s.Footnote ⁹⁴

Yet, although the municipal judge certainly did not reside within a bulwark of liberal or abolitionist politics, he may have been one of many Quibdoseño liberal authorities who supported or at least sympathized with the abolitionist sentiment of the 1821 gradual emancipation law. As evident in the short-lived Quibdó newspaper, El Constitucional del Chocó, there appears to have been support for parts of the 1821 law in the province, particularly the manumission juntas. For instance, in October 1835 an anonymous republican writer chastised Chocó's juntas for the lack of public manumissions, decrying: “Why is it that even though the [1821] law has existed for fourteen years, not more than one slave has been manumitted in the province of Chocó?”Footnote ⁹⁵ Indeed, an article published in the national newspaper Gaceta Oficial in the early 1850s, after the Liberal Party took power and a final abolitionist movement began to sweep the nation, confirms Díaz's abolitionist sympathies. In April 1851, Díaz offered an enslaved man he possessed named Nicolás Cuesta to the manumission junta in Nóvita. Moved by the “spirit of the philanthropy of the century and the humanitarian ideas professed and practiced by the Government of the Republic,” Díaz sought no compensation for Cuesta's freedom from the manumission junta.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nevertheless, amid this regional political context of frustration over failure to implement the 1821 law in the 1830s, the municipal judge refused to execute the full terms of the Free Womb trade.

Unsurprisingly, an enraged José Nicolás Castro rejected the court's orders and appeared before the municipal judge the following day to protest the judge's decision. Whereas the judge failed to cite the law's geographical stipulations, Castro unsurprisingly fixated his claim on the legal geographies codified by Article 5 of the 1821 law. He focused on the law's legalization of the intraprovincial Free Womb trade, which he noted “only prohibits, explicitly and clearly, removing [Free Womb children] outside of the Province in which they are located.” Because María Brigida was sold to a master in the same province, Castro argued, he was perfectly within his legal rights, “the natural meaning of this Article being entirely clear that these [Free Womb children] can be sold, even separated from their parents as has been seen, as long as one complies with the requirement of not removing them from the province.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Castro's casual reference to other cases of family separation—reflected in his words “as has been seen”—was an attempt to bolster his claim to the full letter of Article 5.

As stated earlier, while not the norm, the sale of Free Womb children without their mothers did occur in Chocó. In fact, notarial records reveal that on the same day Castro sold Juana del Concilio to her new owner, he also oversaw the individual sale of a different Free Womb child named Petrona, also possessed by the del Pino estate.Footnote ⁹⁸ In other words, according to Castro, family separation was normal, legal, and uncontroversial within the geographical bounds of the province. Castro even requested the notary certify the home, residence, and neighborhood of Juana del Concilio and María Brigida's new owners in order to prove that both mother and child were residing in the town of Nemotá, that is, within the boundaries of the province of Chocó.Footnote ⁹⁹ Yet, the municipal court did not budge on its ruling.

Dissatisfied with the sentence, Castro appealed the municipal court's decision to the Higher Court of Justice of Cauca in the southwestern capital of Popayán, which reviewed the case in late January 1836. Castro's legal representative in Popayán followed the same line of argumentation by emphasizing the geographical conditions set forth in Article 5, which “favor the free will of property owners to transfer their things” within the bounds of the law.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Yet, much to Castro's disappointment, Popayán officials were more focused on the legal technicalities of the suit rather than the apoderado's argumentation. Technically, according to Popayán officials, the object of appeal was not explicitly Article 5 of the 1821 law, but the 50 patacones that the municipal judge ordered Castro to pay for María Brigida's alimentos. As per Colombia's law on civil proceedings, the higher court in Popayán could not rule on cases concerning small claims like that of Castro's sentence. In fact, Popayán officials invited Castro to submit a new suit based on the potential violations of Article 5.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Finally, in March 1836, the Higher Court of Popayán officially dismissed Castro's appeal, on the grounds of failing to meet Colombia's law on civil proceedings. Moreover, in spite of the municipal court of Quibdó's breach of the 1821 law, Popayán officials argued that the original sentence was “in conformity with the principles of justice and equity and in the spirit of the law of manumission,” echoing a similar language of legal interpretation legislated by the Quibdó ruling.Footnote ¹⁰² Moreover, while the slaveholding center of Popayán was home to powerful pro-slavery interests, anti-abolitionist opinions circulated in Popayán-based newspapers like El Fósforo and the pro-gradual emancipation law El Republicano as early as the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁰³ It is quite possible that court officials in Popayán agreed or sympathized with these sentiments and actively supported the law's implementation.

What then became of Juana del Concilio and her young daughter? Presumably, mother and child were reunited, given that no new lawsuits were initiated. Perhaps after conversation with his client (and possibly community pressure), Castro decided to drop the case and unite María Brigida with her mother.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The case and final rulings demonstrate the limited power of the 1821 law and, consequently, the limits of its Free Womb trade. Although the intraprovincial Free Womb trade was technically legal, other factors and forces—such as an emotional appeal to motherhood, economic cultural norms, or interpretational respect for “the spirit of the law”—could trump the letter of the law.

Making and Unmaking the Free Womb Trade

In establishing the Free Womb trade, Articles 3 and 5 of the 1821 national gradual emancipation law introduced a new dimension into the republic's economy of slavery. The Free Womb captives were readily exchangeable market commodities that occupied an ambiguous space between chattel slavery and debt bondage. Yet, borrowing from Caitlin Rosenthal, a “form of market regulation” was built into the law, insofar as geographical and (relatively vague) age restrictions were imposed, leading to the legalization of an intraprovincial Free Womb trade and interprovincial, postpubescent Free Womb trade within Colombia.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Focusing on the former, this article explored the dynamic local trade in Free Womb children within the geographical confines of the province of Chocó, revealing the powerful local markets their circulation engendered. Typically trafficked with their enslaved mothers (and occasionally on their own) in Chocó, Free Womb children served as valued commercial appendages with the economic potential of appreciation. Yet, as the final section of this article revealed, the cultural practice against family separation in Chocó may have played a crucial role in influencing one municipal judge's decision to return the Free Womb child María Brigida to her enslaved mother Juana del Concilio, thereby rejecting the full legal terms of the Free Womb trade.

Arguably, the Free Womb trade revitalized the new republic's devastated economic terrain in the years after the Wars of Independence by offering—as the Free Womb generation aged—especially cheap pools of unfree and exploitable labor, especially at the local, provincial level. As one slaveholder in Chocó in the 1840s recounted, “A seven-year-old slave would cost 150-200 pesos. . . . Who doesn't know that a manumitido of such an age could only be sold for 60 pesos?”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Slaveholders’ opportunities for acquisition of Free Womb captives expanded throughout the country after the extension of Free Womb bondage from 18 to 25 years of age in 1842, in the wake of Colombia's first civil war.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

A product of Colombia's slave system, one would expect that the Free Womb law would have been abolished along with the final abolition of slavery in January 1852. Some Free Womb children, however, continued under the tutelage of their mothers’ former masters after final abolition, with various officials arguing that the final abolition law did not affect Free Womb children. Declaring that there was “no particular order in the law of May 21 of last year” concerning Free Womb children, the governor of Popayán instructed that several children be returned to their mothers’ masters.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The Free Womb children thus remained in a juridical limbo that lasted until April 1852, when Congress approved the “Additional Law of Manumission and Freedom of Slaves” after receiving complaints. This new law's first article stated unequivocally that the “children of slaves born free . . . have been exonerated from January 1 to the present year of all obligations of service or special concierto that previous laws of the Republic imposed on them.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Only then, in April 1852, was the Free Womb generation legally emancipated and, consequently, the Free Womb trade abolished. After 1852, former slaveholders and anxious authorities in Chocó were forced to confront a new terrain of free black market geographies. Supported by a strong historic tradition of independent gold prospecting and subsistence production, black inhabitants of Chocó and the greater Pacific lowlands expanded their moral economies of rubber collection and forest products, an expansion that would profoundly trouble the local ruling classes well into the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁰ No doubt, the market geographies of the past—of slavery and the Free Womb trade—would continue to haunt former masters and captives alike, albeit in radically different ways.