In the American popular understanding, the Spanish colony of Cuba did not play a significant role in the nation's politics or culture until the outbreak in 1898 of the Spanish-American War, the outcome of which saw this island being drawn ever more closely into the political and economic orbit of the United States. But, as these two new studies make clear, the story of Cuban-American relations began significantly earlier, as practices of enslavement and liberation and the struggle between the North and the South over these and related questions resonated within both polities.

In their coauthored monograph, Becoming Free, Becoming Black, legal historians Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross examine the ways in which the laws of various colonies and states facilitated or militated against the possibility that enslaved people might legally gain their freedom, whether by allowing them to argue that, as Nanny Pegee did in early nineteenth-century Virginia, they had been inaccurately classed as “black,” rather than Native American, and thus were not subject to enslavement; or by providing Juana, a resident of Havana at the end of the seventeenth century, the opportunity to receive her freedom papers from her owner as soon as she finished paying him the sum of 300 pesos. Nanny Pegee was successful in her appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia, and was not only liberated from her servitude but was given the sum of 200 pounds in recompense, whereas the records of colonial Cuba do not allow us to know if Juana was able to raise the funds needed to complete her self-purchase. But the authors are interested not only in the processes by which enslaved individuals were able to avail themselves of legal schemas by which to liberate themselves, but in the racial regimes under which they lived once they had emerged from bondage, and specifically how the options open, or barred, to freed slaves both reflected and influenced a given society's understanding of the relationship between race and unfree servitude.

In response to the influential view of the sociologist Frank Tannenbaum, most widely known through his mid-century study Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas, that Catholic colonies recognized the enslaved as human beings while those founded by Protestants classed them as chattel, de la Fuente and Gross center their analysis on three slave societies: those of Anglo-American Virginia, French Louisiana, and Spanish Cuba, from their founding through the outbreak of the Civil War.Footnote ¹ As they point out, enslaved people inherently “breached the racial order” (41) of the communities in which they lived by transforming themselves into free men and women, even if they did so with the sanction of their owners and of the law. It was for this reason that the relatively fluid racial classifications of the early period of European settlement became much more rigid in Virginia and Louisiana by the middle of the eighteenth century, and opportunities for manumission were curtailed, though not completely erased, by the courts and the governing bodies of these colonies. By contrast, in Cuba, the manumission of slaves, and the opportunity for them to gradually purchase their freedom from those who owned them (a practice known as coartacion) was considered to be the personal decision of an individual slaveholder, and the metamorphosis of a slave into a free person of color was not a source of considerable public anxiety.

This distinction was crucial not only for individual enslaved people, but for these colonial societies. At the outset of the Civil War, “being black was nearly synonymous with being enslaved in most areas of Louisiana and Virginia” (177). Not only were opportunities for legal freedom scant, but even those who were able to take advantage of them were placed under legal and social pressures to relocate, either by moving to the North or by participating in white-directed colonizing ventures in Liberia. In either context, they would be barred from contact with those among their kin and friends who remained in bondage, and also prevented from challenging the political and social authority of their former owners. Yet Havana boasted a free black community, which was not only large—four times the size of that of contemporary New Orleans—but which was home to many community groups such as cofradias and cabildos, mutual-aid organizations based on religion or locality that offered their members economic and practical support as well as festivity and sociability. The majority of free men and women of color in nineteenth-century Havana had to cope throughout their lives with poverty and racial discrimination, including educational segregation, but they possessed a degree of personal and communal self-determination that would have been unimaginable to American ex-slaves of the era, even to those who joined the free black communities of such northern cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. But while white habaneros appear to have mostly been unconcerned about sharing their city with a large number of former slaves, white Southerners repeatedly overhauled their legal codes in order to prevent ex-bondspeople from gaining comparable opportunities; to them, Cuba was an object lesson of the need to restrict the possibility of manumission and to rid their localities of those few women and men who nonetheless gained their liberation through the courts.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of slavery and racial formation in the Atlantic world, replete as it is with micro-narratives, recovered from often obscure archival documents, regarding the efforts of formerly unknown men and women to deploy legal methods in order to gain their liberty. Concluding as it does with the American Civil War, the book may appear to be of limited interest to readers of this journal. But reading it in tandem with Gregory P. Downs's The Second American Revolution illuminates those developments of the later decades of the nineteenth century that call into question the alleged marginality of Cuba to pre-1898 United States history. In Downs's formulation, the conflict widely known as the “Civil War” could be more accurately described, as the New York Herald did on the morning of Ulysses Grant's first inauguration, as the “second American Revolution,” after which the Constitution of the Founders would be replaced by one which re-created the nation as a polity no longer destabilized by the divergent interests of the supporters and opponents of slavery. But to fulfill this dream, it would be necessary for the United States, now led by the architect of Union victory, to “revolutionize the world” (2), and the ideal starting point for such an exportation of the revolution would be Cuba, which was at that time convulsed by a conflict in which the insurgents fought to free the island of both imperial control and slavery.

Beginning in the 1840s, Spanish imperial authorities had forced hundreds of anti-colonial and antislavery Cuban radicals into exile in the United States, and these individuals influenced the formation among Northern politicians of “an antislavery expansionism, even antislavery imperialism, that made the conflict with the South a struggle over competing versions of the world” (3). This ideology emerged in the face of the proslavery expansionism that was embodied in 1854's Ostend Manifesto, coauthored by the future President James Buchanan, which called for the United States’ acquisition of Cuba, by force if needed, as a slave state. By 1868, antislavery Cubans were depicting their struggle against Spain as the logical culmination of the Civil War, and they hoped that the Republican Party, which Downs claims had with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment become a “revolutionary party” (31) would lend them its powerful support.

Much of Downs's study focuses on the contrast between “the Civil War the world made” (55) and “the world the Civil War might have made” (95), with particular reference to Cuba and Spain. Of course, we know that in the end President Grant and his fellow Republicans did not assist the Cuban revolutionaries, and a generation later, when the end of the Spanish-American War brought about the conclusion of both slavery and Spanish rule in Cuba, its inhabitants were all too aware that by this time the United States had become “an imperial power of its own” (140), rather than a republican force of liberation. But what Downs makes clear in this densely but lucidly written monograph is that this turn of events was not predestined, any more than the Radical Republicans’ dreams of Reconstruction were fated to remain unfulfilled. The Second American Revolution opens with a lengthy, highly detailed, and somewhat dry recounting of the legal and political changes that the nation experienced during and immediately after the Civil War; readers familiar with these events may be tempted to put the book on the shelf, but they are advised to stay with Downs as he moves beyond the U.S.’ borders to recast this conflict as one which both influenced and was influenced by other polities’ struggles over questions of freedom, whether of a colony from a metropole or of human beings from enslavement.

Similarly, although Becoming Free, Becoming Black is written in a livelier prose style than Downs's book, and unlike his it presents enslaved people as agents rather than as objects of liberation, aspects of its argument, particularly those related to the diminishing possibilities for manumission in antebellum Virginia, may initially seem familiar to scholars of slavery. Again, however, readers would do well to stay the course and allow de la Fuente's and Gross's argument to unfold, emphasizing as it does that, as much as the enslaved yearned for freedom, the context in which they emerged from bondage and began their lives as free men and women was crucial in determining both their life chances and the possibility that free people of color might be considered “rights-bearing subjects” (224) of their respective nations. Frederick Douglass, newly escaped from enslavement in Maryland, wrote that, after he arrived in Manhattan, he “lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life,” but the opportunities that he found there were paltry in comparison with those he might have experienced in contemporary Havana.Footnote ²

It may be that few readers, other than those who have a particular interest in nineteenth-century Cuba, are motivated to take up both Becoming Free, Becoming Black and The Second American Revolution; the former is a legal history of slavery in the Atlantic world that concludes with the outbreak of the Civil War, while the latter centers on political actors in the years following that war's end. This possibility is reflected in the blurbs on the two monographs’ dust jackets: the former is praised by African American scholars such as Annette Gordon-Reed and Henry Louis Gates Jr.; and the latter by historians of the Civil War, including Aaron Sheehan-Dean and Michael Vorenberg. Such an outcome would be less than ideal, though, as, taken in tandem, these studies encourage those whose primary field of study is the United States to see Cuba as an important reference point in pre– and post–Civil War ideas and realities with reference to questions of slavery, race, and empire. As the practice of U.S. history becomes ever more transnational in its approaches, this is a salutary lesson to learn.