Daily Wages: Part of Everyday Life

In 1819 a deceased master's testamentary wishes handed over a slave to his new owner, a priest.^[16] From the convent he wrote to the archbishop, stating that despite the fact of his marriage he was forced to

perform arduous labor and furthermore had been assigned on repeated occasions to work on the Monterrico hacienda close to Lima, and thus to abandon his wife. The response to the slave's first petition was that he should not be separated from his wife and children. The priest's defense revealed the range of negotiations in the case of—we should remember—a married slave: "He was placed in the kitchen to prepare the daily meals, however the difficulties that he caused owing to the vice of drunkenness were so frequent that the situation became intolerable."

It was the slave who immediately proposed to apply himself to "work, and contribute a daily wage so that the convent can replace the post with another hand." And, the priest replied, "I complied in order not to contravene the slave's wishes, and after living with free rein, because this class of people does not respect the sacred duties to which marriage is bound, his wife barely furnished me with a few reales, and he now owes me a considerable sum of money."^[17] To understand how negotiations with masters were carried out, we must consider the implications of this brief dialogue.

What the slave argued was that since he was married, a transfer to another hacienda would interrupt his marital relationship. But the interference of alcohol sabotaged his kitchen labor; the priest's response illustrates that he did not wish to override the slave's wish. In short, a convenient solution for both sides was to use the slave's daily wages to pay for a replacement. In this way, the slave left the convent, sought day labor in the city, and demonstrated by the subterfuge of subverting his kitchen duties and the appeal to the Church's sacrosanct image of marriage that he could transform himself from a domestic into a day-labor slave. However, he did not keep his side of the bargain. As we see, the slave's initial negotiations were embedded in the context of the moral conditions sanctioned by the Church, a strategy that frequently led to success. Later, when a master's control had lessened, little could be done to make a slave comply with his promises. The priest argued that the wife—as he defined marital duties among slaves—was obliged to assume her husband's debts. But she did not: the male slave was deceitful, and the female slave was immoral since she did not understand her sacred duties. Yet both had succeeded on their own terms, something the priest, of course, failed to admit.

Others paid their daily wages and used their compliance to restrict an owner's arbitrary decisions. The court listened to these arguments

and was inclined to favor the slaves. Manuela, a free black, lived with her husband in Bellavista. She claimed that she had punctually complied with the payment of daily wages (ten pesos a month) to her husband's owner, for which the latter allowed the couple to live together outside his household. One fine day, the owner decided to sell the husband in Pisco. Manuela would use the two-sided argument (of marriage and compliance with the payment of daily wages) in order to prevent this occurrence. And Manuela was successful in this endeavor.^[18]

Marriage, family life, and daily wages appear together, whether to arrange a change of ownership, or to maintain a place in the day-labor market. Within the hundreds of records preserved in Lima's Archivo General de la Nación and Archivo Arzobispal are very few that do not explicitly refer to slaves' daily wages and marriage. This fact alone indicates their enormous reach and importance. Many of these cases were filed by owners demanding outstanding daily wages, and the owners' action tacitly gave slaves juridical personality: their response to owners' claims took place in the courtrooms.

Shrugging aside such cases, one owner declared, "It should be stated that there is no law that grants slaves the civil personality to make contracts or gives any consequent value to their contracts."^[19] This statement, made at the beginning of the nineteenth century, underscores the fact that legal authority did not entirely cover the operations of day-to-day life. Both sides defended their interests in the civil and ecclesiastical courts. Slaves coveted their daily wages and sought to enlarge the degrees of relative freedom; owners tried to recover capital that the new arrangement forced them to collect.

Another gauge of the prevalence and significance of day labor were the cases that illustrate the amount of accumulation that daily wages made possible. As slaves became able to generate savings more quickly, a growing number of day-labor slaves were able to pay owners their purchase price. The slaves who encountered the greatest problems in negotiating margins of freedom, and thus in obtaining the sums needed for manumission, were those who we would generally suspect had the worst chances of earning and saving money: the bozales . This group of newcomers lacked the normal contacts and connections within the ranks of the slave and black population and could not make similar appeal to nonblack padrinos . Moreover, women—except wet nurses—also represented weaker links in the new economic and social network because they had only a remote chance of learning a

trade. Although female labor was always needed, even in the midst of economic crises that contracted the male labor market, women's concentration in "female tasks" reduced their market flexibility and options, particularly because more free black women competed for the same tasks. Consequently, over the long run and the closer we come to abolition, slave women's potential for accumulation was reduced. Women and bozales , thus, represented fragile links of the slaveholding structure. And if it is true that both groups were successful at the urban process of accumulation, other groups with more experience and more contacts, and with varied and versatile occupational options, were even more effective in procuring their purchase price.

The tribulations of Luciana, born on the Bocanegra hacienda in 1753, are representative of the experience of slave women and their earning capacity. After five decades of work for two owners, Luciana had ended up in the hands of Doña Paula Almogera. For a long time she had contributed her daily wages to the maintenance of her owner, with whom she shared her small house. In 1810, at the age of fifty-seven, Luciana pleaded before the judicial courts that she be exonerated from the obligation of supplying her daily wages. In her appeal she enumerated her activities and sufferings:

During the years when I was at my owner's side, serving her in her own house, I gave birth to sixteen children of whom four remain, and for three of whom my said owner, Doña Paula, has collected 400 pesos for one, 350 for another and 300 for the third, renting out the fourth, who is a girl, for whom she would no doubt demand 500 pesos if she were to attempt to sell her. In addition to the hardship that the upbringing of my children has naturally caused me, I have had to undertake that of my owner's grandchildren, all of whom were put in my hands, and also the individual care for an orphan whom I nursed with my own milk, and for which my master received six pesos a month; furthermore I sell bread dough in the streets, from which I gain one real and a half per day, and finally I gave her fifty pesos last year toward my own purchase price.^[20]

In the litigation pursued by Luciana, she enumerated the multiple ways in which her presence had been exploited—what we might call an amortization of self. Luciana stated that she had worked for her owner for sixteen years, and that practically each year she had given birth to a child. Of these, four had lived to reach working age and had doubled the owner's collected income. We can break down the slave's annual contribution to the household:

As we see without counting the slave's hours of additional domestic work, each year Luciana brought in a sum that equaled her purchase price. Luciana represents the case of a slave who went out into the neighborhood every day but remained subject to her owner's close control. The breakdown of the income supplied by the slave illustrates a degree of profitability beyond that of daily wages. Luciana worked as a day laborer on two levels: she was a bread-dough vendor and a wet nurse. Both activities amounted to 45.8 percent of the total 299 pesos. Additional sums derived from the children (the daily wages supplied by one daughter and the sale of the other children) represented 33.4 percent of the total. The remaining amount was at least equal to the value of the domestic labor. Even if the daily wage was the most significant percentage of the slave's total payments, it alone cannot account for all the characteristics of the slave system's profitability. Thus, what we have examined raises two fundamental issues: first, the profit possible in an urban hiring-out system beyond strict calculations of daily-wage contributions; and second, a slave's capacity to generate mechanisms of accumulation and surplus in the context of slaveholding. In spite of all the work and the beings—literally—handed over to the owner, in 1809 Luciana could still pay her owner fifty pesos toward her purchase price, which inevitably had to come from one of the listed activities: the sale of bread dough or wet nursing outside the house. Her capacity to accumulate was reduced by her specific circumstances, her status as a slave. In other words, a slave's earning power was quite impressive, although restricted by the master's control. As long as control was effective, it guaranteed the profitability of the hiring-out system, especially linked to other forms of slave exploitation. The lessening of authority, which the slaves fought for in

myriad ways, would make the slave system useless from the viewpoint of slaveholders.

As Luciana's case reveals, slaves recognized that their owners rapidly amortized their initial investment through the great diversity of work slaves performed and through other benefits that accrued. Slave women's reproductive capacity, along with their work inside and outside an owner's household, made slave women more successful at bargaining for freedom. Sometimes, but not always, these arguments supported a ruling in the slave's favor, in the name of ill-defined but incipient notions of social justice within the slave system.

The greater the distance from a master's control, the greater the likelihood of channeling substantial sums of money into a slave's own pocket. A case of marital conflict between two slaves allows us to underscore this assertion and further illustrates the differences between men and women, the dynamics of strife over daily wages, and—as we are examining a bozal couple—the problem of the rate of accumulation even for those recently immersed in the turbulence of urban life.

In a petition dated 1806 Catalina, married to Miguel, related how—thanks to daily wages—she had managed to obtain the freedom of both:

Last year, in 1791, being subject to the slave servitude of Doña Sipriana Palacios, I married Miguel Geronimo de Teruz, a black bozal , born and raised in the Portuguese Indies and then after we married and when he began to work with me, we reaped the fruits of our labor and he was freed first, and afterward we proceeded to liberate me. However, Your Most Honorable Sir should understand the conditions in which I did this: he being a slave and house servant, and I being a day laborer, who would be the one who worked to liberate both?^[21]

Catalina and her contemporaries took for granted that they could purchase freedom with sufficient daily wages but were unlikely to reach their goal as long as they remained in domestic service. With her labor, Catalina managed over the course of approximately five years to free her husband and herself. Along the way, she had to hand over to the owner part of her daily wages; once one spouse was free and resided outside the master's household, the couple would assume maintenance costs for the freed slave, a minimum monthly expenditure of twelve pesos that decreased the couple's real income.^[22] Even so, the total of slaves' daily wages given to the master, the costs of

maintenance, and the additional accumulated amounts were by far more important than what the master contributed to the slaves' upkeep (food, shelter, and clothing). Thus bozales quickly learned to loosen their ties to the master's house and go out into the street to earn wages, and even for them the period of accumulation could be relatively short.

If we compare Luciana's capacity for accumulation with that of Catalina, we see what statistical information on methods of manumussion (Table 1) meant in real life. Luciana was able to save only fifty pesos over the course of thirty-nine years, or one or two pesos per year, whereas Catalina (with her husband's help) managed to save approximately six hundred pesos in fifteen years, or about forty pesos a year.^[23] Catalina's rate of accumulation is very close to the seven or eight years previously recorded as the time in which masters could amortize a slave purchase. Thus in the best of cases, slaves needed twice the time to do what slaveholders did; in the worst of cases they died before they could finish payment of their purchase price.

As a consequence, the scale was tilted in favor of accumulation and freedom through the daily wage; it gave slaves increasing leverage against the slave system. In this sense the Defensor de Menores's skepticism was justified, though perhaps not for the reasons he gave to a father trying to recover the costs of his son's education. The purchase of freedom through a daily-wage arrangement could take an entire lifetime because daily wages came first and savings toward freedom followed. Yet this mechanism alone permitted accumulation, unless slaves could devise other strategies to lower their purchase price or obtain money outside the hiring-out system. The extreme alternative was to hide away and not pay the daily wages. But such an option could carry with it judicial persecution and possibly the enforcement of retroactive payment before delinquent slaves could purchase freedom.

If slaves had any incentive to reproduce, it was the fact that they could use children, as they could use marriage, to lower their own price—as Luciana did—or advance moral claims that would oblige masters to free their illegitimate offspring.