Mobility and Accumulation

In order to understand how slaves were able to leave the hacienda and use legal mechanisms to achieve increasing degrees of freedom, it is necessary to begin where the cycle of liberation began—within the world of the hacienda. Because the connections between the countryside and city were relatively fluid, as soon as an urban link was forged, the likelihood of relocation and freedom increased. Relocation did not automatically imply the accession of freedom: reaching the city might simply mean changing ownership and duties. But slaves knew that there were greater prospects for accumulation in the city; thus, a first step to freedom could be relocation to the city.

As if imitating the slaves on the Buena Muerte hacienda who one day marched to Lima, more than a handful of slaves staged similar actions, either on their own or collectively, with or without the permission of the mayordomo or owner. Generally, these slaves, dissatisfied with their situation, left the hacienda in search of a new owner; their owner or mayordomo had abused them or perhaps he or she had not provided the slaves with their accustomed provisions or treatment. In the city slaves would find someone who might take pity on them or see profit in them, and assign them to day labor. Many slaves took this first step from the hacienda to the city; hacendados did not protest, and no one stopped them as possible bandits or runaways. The move was too common to rouse suspicions. All might proceed smoothly if the hacendado was satisfied with the new owner's payment, the new owner was content with his slave, and the slave paid the agreed-upon daily wages. Nonetheless, conflict was almost inevitable. As in many transactions, and even more so when so many conflicting interests existed, some link in the chain of agreements could give way. The courts were full of the complaints of sellers, buyers, and slaves. For some slaves, the daily wage arrangement did not signify profits; the seller rarely received the slave's appraised price or agreed to the appraisal price. Fur-

thermore, buyers would always find defects in the slave. One urban owner, a free moreno , who had acquiesced to the requests of a slave couple originating from a limeño hacienda, described the conflicts that could arise:

I have as my slaves the couple of José and Mariana Saldonado ... the same slaves I purchased for 400 pesos each six or seven years ago from Don Ramón Saldonado to spare them the terrible punishment he was intending to give them. I assigned them to daily wage labor in order to make them more profitable, this assignment by virtue of the tasks for which they have the disposition and for which they have been effectively apprenticed, they certainly have not religiously paid me the moderate sum that I designated because, abusing my goodness and as I was of their same class, they have paid their daily earnings when they have so desired, leaving me to incur the greatest debts while they have profited from their diverse occupations.^[32]

The slave couple had not become a free man and woman, they had simply changed their owner and environment. Once in Lima and under the roof of a new owner, they agreed to the daily wage as a possible arrangement. Not much time passed, however, before the moreno owner claimed that the slaves had not complied with payment of the daily wages.^[33] To settle this complaint the Defensor de Menores (the judge or defender who represented legal minors) intervened in favor of the slaves and began a process of negotiation through rounds in which the slaves increasingly neared freedom. The Defensor alleged that the slaves, had not complied with the payment of daily wages because they had fallen ill and that the owner had not fulfilled his duty of administering them medicine. Moreover, the owner had demanded advance payment of the daily wages in order to acquire more slaves.^[34]

The daily wage was not a novelty in the experience of slaves in nineteenth-century Lima. It existed in slaveholding environments as rigid as those of the southern United States (Hart [1906] 1968, 130 ff.), and in Lima during a much earlier era than the one under analysis (Bowser 1977, 172 ff.). What is distinct in this case was its significance and value for slaves on their path to freedom. The argument of the Defensor de Menores illustrates that a new owner would not necessarily satisfy his proprietary obligations. The owner attempted to pass on to his slaves not only the costs of their maintenance but their medical expenses as well. Slaves could be subjected to demands for money from an owner who might place his or her

slaves in the city and turn them into his or her most important source of capital accumulation, using the daily wage system in order to purchase more slaves. Such were the contentions heard over and over again in the judicial courts, and they elucidate—despite the uncertainty underlying most decisions to abandon the hacienda—the gradual attempts by the slave population to expand mobility and gain ground on the road to freedom.

In spite of owners' exigencies and urban vicissitudes, it was not unusual for a slave to abandon a hacienda on his or her own in order to leave behind rural slavery. The complaints of hacienda owners and Lima's citizens about the looseness and disobedience of slaves outlined in earlier paragraphs shows that this was not an isolated occurrence. As long as these complaints were part of a widespread rhetoric, officials such as the Defensor de Menores (in the case of José and Mariana), became the protectors of slaves and opposed the interests of owners. For some officials the defense of slaves became a lucrative profession, as slaves paid them to assume this task. As we can see, legal arguments were useful not only to masters but also to slaves and eventually to a new kind of professional. In the words of Don Manuel Arsola, the hacendado of the Bocanegra hacienda:

It is correct to say, Your Honor, that the Defensor de Menores is agriculture's greatest enemy and most terrible obstacle. The smallest detail that any slave reports to him is enough to support notoriously unjust judgments against his owner, and enough to spark rural disorder between owners, slaves, libertos —this being so true that there is not one hacendado , who if asked, would not answer affirmatively.

Other slaves did not need or desire the intervention of the Defensor de Menores. Sometimes hacienda slaves did not even try to settle in the city. For these persons, escape from the hacienda and residence in Lima for given periods of time was a routine pattern. Generally, these slaves knew where to go in the city upon arrival. Tiburcio María, a slave on the Palpa hacienda (which in 1802 belonged to Don Vicente Salinas) located in Ica, south of Lima and much more remote than the chacras of Amancaes, provoked the ire of his master more than once. Each time the threat of punishment hung over his head Tiburcio fled and took refuge in Lima. He ran off three times between 1798 and 1802, each time hiding for five or six months in Malambo (San Lázaro), where he maintained relations "in no way

honorable" with "certain half-breeds and mestizas ... sleeping in their houses or lodges where he stored his clothes and saddle."^[35] Tiburcio's owner could not control the slave's behavior; Tiburcio left and entered the hacienda with ease. To avoid a beating he would take himself off and return when a half-breed in San Lázaro began to demand a longer stay or perhaps even a wedding ring. Ownership of a horse and saddle facilitated Tiburcio's movement, and perhaps for him the horse was an intermediate investment option until he gained freedom. His chosen solution was not a permanent escape from the system but rather an eloquent demonstration of how a slave could maneuver on the fringes of a slave system. Nonetheless, the repetition of such acts created the impression that slaves moved everywhere in search of work, day labor, change of ownership, or simply diversion. Some contemporaries interpreted these ventures as typical instances of maroonage, in part because they wished to elicit some response from those officials who were entrusted with the control and maintenance of public order and who—when faced with such slave behavior—exhibited a great deal of inertia and incapacity (or fear). Meanwhile, physical movement and contact with the city allowed the slaves to forge relationships (even matrimonial) and to have a destination. Slaves gradually grew familiar with the urban territory and their unsettled behavior and relative geographic mobility can explain why news traveled so quickly, not only in Lima, but also from one hacienda to another. Even if this freedom of movement did not exist on all haciendas or estates, it had wide recognition and was a key argument owners used to seek state support.

As we have seen, many owners were absentee; they controlled neither production nor the labor force. Nonetheless, they occasionally visited their properties. During arrival and departure they were usually accompanied by one or several slaves, who thus moved with regularity between the rural and urban spheres.^[36] And when hacendados or mayordomos had to leave the hacienda, for example, to buy or sell products, they were accompanied by one or several slaves who had privileged positions within the rural environment. Several episodes of rather peculiar negotiations have been recorded for slaves in this position. Given the frequency of arrivals and departures, slaves often had a relative or friend in the urban realm to ease their relocation from countryside to city. The mobility of owners as well, and conflict within an owner's family, created connections for slaves and perpetuated ex-

isting ones. Comings and goings were opportunities for family reunions—for example, allowing one grandmother to find her granddaughter who was living as a slave on a hacienda. When a slave was unable to negotiate his or her purchase price or simply did not have sufficient capital for manumission, the slave could use such intervals to attempt an escape to Lima, even if the fear of being sent back to a hacienda provoked scenes as dramatic as flight over a fiat roof, fall and injury, and stay in the hospital.^[37]

How disagreements within the families of owners could favor slaves and become part of the field of negotiations for freedom is illustrated by the case of a son who disobeyed the orders of his family, the Ocharán family, which owned a hacienda in Ica.

The destiny of the young slave was the subject of judicial debate from 1811 to 1815. The slave's mother, Tiburcia, lived in Lima. She stated that according to the orders of the owner, Doña Teresa de Arroserena, Doña Teresa's son had put Tiburcia's son up for sale in the city of Lima. Tiburcia had purchased him for 150 pesos because the owner's orders included "the condition that [the slave] could not be sold for a greater amount, nor leave this city, and that when and where he provided the money, to be free or slave, freedom be granted to him." One fine day when Tiburcia was walking with her son through the streets of Lima, a poor Spaniard, an agent of Doña Teresa, intercepted them and alleged that the slave had been sold for a sum below his true value. He seized the young slave and sent him to the Serrano panadería . The agent stated that the slave's stepfather and mother took advantage of the presence of the owner's son in Lima, the son's pressing need for money, and his defiance of his mother, in order to encourage the young Ocharán to sell the slave for the stated price. Furthermore, it appears that there was a romantic liaison between Tiburcia and the owner's son. By 1813 the slave had again changed owners. The owner this year, Doña Juana Lezpus, stated that she had paid 300 pesos for the slave but that the stepfather had appeared and made off with the slave for eight months, until he was captured by the patrol of dragoons. In his declaration the stepfather admitted that he had removed the slave and stated that he was disposed to pay the slave's guarantee of person and daily wages. But, the stepfather contended, the slave was a victim of cruelty: given the inflicted abuse, it would befit the slave's parents at this time to initiate litigation in the court of Ica.^[38]

Thus other members of an owner's family could become mediators of freedom as long as they received the money from the slaves themselves. The combination of Tiburcia's position (mother of the slave and lover of the owner's son), the stepfather's intervention, and the speedy sale in Lima (eased by discord within the owner's family), made it possible for the slave to remain in Lima for an extended time. Furthermore, the confluence of these factors also allowed a devalued price, even if the owner later managed to offset her loss through successive sales. This case exemplifies—in spite of its scant suceess—the existence of well-honed strategies slaves could use to reach the final goal: lower price and manumission.

Undoubtedly, contact with the city was part of davy life and essential to explaining the transfer of slaves from the countryside to the city. But each journey started from the hacienda and within the conditions of a master-slave relationship there. It required a complex range of maneuvers and strategies in discrete and diverse patterns of accumulation.

A slave's first step toward freedom involved the capacity to procure money. One viable tactic on haciendas of all sizes (from Huaito to Guia and Amancaes) was the sale of goods in urban and village markets; this process was especially successful in those cases where owners supplied their slaves land in usufruct and allowed them to sell the crops they raised, keeping their earnings as peasants did (a "peasantization of slaves," observed in Brazil [Cardoso 1979]). The level of control exercised by masters varied, as did the rate at which slaves could amass their purchase price and place it in the hands of their respective owners. We view one side of the process in an image of Lima's marketplaces transmitted by the English traveler Proctor.^[39] According to him, in Lima's two big markets at the beginning of the 1820s in the main squares of San Francisco and San Agustín all the wares were very expensive. In the plazas of the other churches many smaller markets existed, and they were the filthiest part of the city, crowded with people cooking and selling food in the open air.

Those who sell fruit and vegetables spread them on the ground beneath a huge umbrella of canvas: these commodities are conveyed by slaves from the farms and orchards in the vicinity of Lima: they are paid by their masters according to the price they can procure, and in general, everything of the kind is extremely dear.^[40]

Indigenous women from Chorrillos also sold fish in these same vivid marketplaces. Commercial activity offered wide margins for social interaction and also capital accumulation. An owner could not easily sit down beside his or her slave in the marketplace in order to control the slave's profits—from farm or market vegetables if from the outskirts of Lima or from pigs if from Huaito. The slave could also claim that sales had been bad that day; inevitably the difference would go into the slave's pockets. Whatever the level of sales, in contexts such as these owners preferred to ask slaves for a fixed weekly, monthly, or even annual sum. This arrangement transferred the risks of a bad harvest and an unprosperous day of sales to slaves but also gave them more responsibility and independence. Buying and selling directly correlated to slaves' mobility, just as leaving the hacienda of their own volition did. The greater the capacity for movement, the greater the chance to shun the master's control.

It is reasonable to assume that not all slaves had an opportunity to leave the estate or hacienda. Where slaves were more tied to the hacienda, the forms of negotiation became more sophisticated and were less visible at first glance. The small prerogatives granted to slaves for good service or for "abundant childbirths" (for example, for a woman on the Huaito hacienda who had borne six children) generated opportunities for accumulation. These privileges were the consequence of a slave's good service or level of specialization, at times simply of old age, and at others of pity. The slaves utilized all these bargaining tools to redefine their position on the hacienda. Slaves who had obtained perquisites usually remained on the hacienda. However, they generally spent fewer hours on hacienda labor than their slave status implied. As a consequence, these slaves had more time to cultivate their truck gardens and sell their goods in the small markets near the hacienda or eventually in larger city markets.

However, slaves also had at their disposal a reserve of work time that they could sell either on the hacienda where they worked or on other haciendas. In principle, they sold their labor to the highest bidder, and demand depended on the type and level of individual specialization and on the hacienda's requirements and rules. By staying on the hacienda and carrying out the same or different duties, slaves could receive a wage. The existence of this possibility indicates that the organization of the labor force on the haciendas was changing. We have scattered figures for several haciendas in the district of Miraflo-

res (which registered the emergence of salaried blacks) and information systematized through the cartas de libertad in notarial record books. Given the informality of these arrangements, they are difficult to measure. Nevertheless, some cases illustrate the varying ways in which this process of transition to wage labor took place.

In 1807 Francisca Suazo was a free morena day laborer on the Chancay hacienda; her slave daughter lived with her. This same year the hacienda owner passed away, and Jacinta, Francisca's daughter, was included in the appraisal of the hacienda's assets. In opposition to one of the heirs who had requested a new appraisal of the slave girl (valued at 350 pesos), Francisca petitioned to buy her daughter. The heir's request was denied, and Francisca paid her daughter's purchase price.^[41] In order not to abandon her slave daughter (from the sought price we infer that the girl was at least sixteen years old), Francisca probably remained on the hacienda. The price exacted of Francisca was equivalent to the price of her own manumission. The question that arises in this case concerns the source of the money Francisca used to purchase her daughter. We do not know if others contributed, but lacking evidence of assistance we must assume that Francisca, still on the hacienda's borders, was able to amass a sum of money that was quite an expenditure in that era, approximately equal to the annual salary of a state functionary or thirty-five years of an Indian's tribute.

Obviously, the fewer free hours dedicated to the slave's plot on the hacienda, the slower the process of accumulation. After all, an exemption of labor time or, as in Francisca's case, release from all type of obligatory labor, did not mean that the individual could abandon the hacienda. Thus, the potential for accumulation also depended on the regulation of work within the hacienda and hence on the master's control.

However, alongside opportunities to reduce the hours of required work on the hacienda were other levels of negotiation that could approximate the purchase price and the needed amount of remunerated free labor. Slaves used a two-sided strategy; on one hand, their objective was to acquire their own labor time, and on the other, to reduce their price. The closer slaves could come to both goals, the greater the amount of free labor remunerated on the hacienda, and the faster the reduction of their own price, the better the chances for freedom.

Conditional freedom granted in a will can be seen as a form of internal accumulation on the hacienda, to the extent that it represented

a daily wage (i.e., for the number of years of service under the testator) that masters would repay at the end of the contract with the liberation of the slave. Many slaves were aware of this trade-off, and they were not convinced by promises of freedom that an owner would devise and bequeath, an option that masters cherished as warrant for the trumpets of the Last Judgment. For many slave owners such divine redemption meant an expensive trade-off and they preferred to settle their matters in more mundane fashion.

According to the testamentary wishes of Don Dámaso Jáuregui, his mulata slave, Bernardina León, was to be manumitted at the age of twenty-five. Until that time, the will redacted in 1795 placed Bernardina in the service of Doña Nicolasa Lobatón who was entrusted to find a husband for Bernardina before she started on the road toward freedom. When she had barely reached twenty-five years, Bernardina presented herself before the Cabildo and requested that the promise of freedom be expedited immediately:

I will not address the inexplicable desires that I had of this moment's arrival because I have undergone misfortunes that have disturbed me, having been victim of the work and demands that in this period have been exacted of me; without hyperbole I can affirm that I did not receive liberty by the grace of my master, but rather, by justice in force of the work with which I purchased it.^[42]

Bernardina affirmed "without hyperbole" what she knew very well: her labor generously repaid her purchase price. She feared her owner's retaliation because of the legal proceedings Bernardina had initiated. But without incident she was declared free that same year. For Bernardina, having access to Lima's judicial court was critical, and apparently she managed to use the legal system without any problems, even though she had resided in the town of Supe on the northern coast her entire life.

Many years could elapse between the promise of freedom and actual emancipation. While the master was still alive, until the slave reached a certain age, until the details of the testamentary bequests were settled, the slave had to remain under the tutelage, property, or control of the master or those who had taken on the responsibility of executing a testator's wishes. In the end, sometimes the wait revealed that a testator's debts were greater than his legacy.^[43] Furthermore, all slaves knew that what brought them closer to freedom was not their

labor alone; each and every condition imposed on their freedom was vulnerable to legal judgments beyond their control. For this reason, slaves needed to accelerate the promise of freedom, make recourse to legal courts, and seize and make effective any initiative expressed by the masters that indicated their desire to free them. Freedom was the coveted goal at the end of this chain of possible situations of negotiation, perhaps more than simple relocation to Lima.

Testamentary pledges had another side. From the masters' perspective, conditional freedom was a way to assure the submission and permanence of a slave, even if cases existed in which a slave—the promise of freedom or price reduction already existing—wished for the quick death of his or her owner. In May of 1854 the female slave Candelaria Mora, a native of the town of Chineha, who classified herself as a liberta , signed a petition before the judge of Lima's court of appeals. This petition stated that her owner, Doña María del Rosario Velásquez, had requested in her will that Candelaria remain in the service of her daughter and one of the inheritors, Doña Irene Mora, until the latter died. Many years passed, but one fine day Doña Irene's husband decided to sell Candelaria "for the exorbitant amount of 350 pesos," to a señora who lived in Lima and, Candelaria alleged, "no doubt making no mention to the buyer of the testamentary clause that declared me free in an earlier epoch. As a result of that illegal sale, I have been transferred to this capital from Chincha, which is my birthplace." After a few months in Lima, Candelaria had located a relative of the Mora family, a presbyter, in whose house she found shelter while she wrote her petition. Candelaria's new owners would claim that she had been transferred for only four years, and that this did not contradict the testamentary wishes of her first owner. Nonetheless, it was decreed in 1855 (i.e., one year after President Ramón Castilla declared the abolition of slavery) that the money be refunded and the slave returned to the Mora family.^[44]

It is not clear if the slave wished to go to Lima or if, for reasons not mentioned in the document, the presbyter was interested in keeping the slave. Candelaria stressed the fact that Chineha was her birthplace, and given the connection of last names (the female slave, the presbyter in Lima, and the will's beneficiary all have the surname Mora), a common ancestor is possible. At the very least, the slave acquired her surname through birth into her master's control. Even if circumstances suggest that the slave wished to return to the hacienda, what this case

demonstrates is that when a fixed temporal horizon for freedom existed, an interim change of ownership became more difficult. Moreover, this transfer proceeded by the masters' initiative and included a high price for the slave (or perhaps, in Candelaria's case, set the slave's price for the first time in her life). The apparent philanthropy of conditional liberty was but a way to entrap a slave on the road to freedom. When the promise of freedom depended on someone else's death, permanence on the hacienda was almost assured; conditional freedom was a way to perpetuate the slave's loyalty. We should not forget that cases such as Candelaria's took place in an environment in which the slaves were becoming aware of the centrality of their work and claiming monetary compensation.

The manifold strategies of accumulation and of negotiation that slaves gradually secured from wills always revolved around the slave's price. Once the channels of negotiation were open, the purchase price was the bridge between slavery and freedom. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the average price for a male slave was 465 pesos, and 494 for a female slave (Haitin 1983, 166). Because of these elevated prices, it is not surprising that many manumissions and sales were transacted on credit. The ways varied. One form of credit was the successive reduction of a slave's value owing to good service, extraordinary service, or simply to aging; another was the payment of small installments to the master over many years, which a slave usually amassed by appealing to an entire network of family and urban connections. The most complex form of credit involved a third person who lent the money to the slave in exchange for services until the debt was settled (the arrangement between Manuel and Doña Agreda noted in chapter 1). This last way gave the slave freedom but kept him or her subject to slavery. It is possible that these various forms of credit help explain the depreciation of the average price for a slave, for slaves whose value was fixed by the market as well as those whose mean value can be deduced from an analysis of the cartas de libertad . Between 1840 and 1854 the average price of male slaves on the market was 289.4 pesos, of female slaves, 267.3. Of those slaves whose names appeared in the cartas de libertad in these same years, the mean price of men was 229.4 pesos and that of women, 207.3 (Aguirre 1991, 122).^[45] The average for slaves who obtained a carta de libertad was lower: their owners were apparently willing to accept the gradual reduction of their slaves' value and the slaves' emancipation

as well; perhaps the masters had no other alternative. It is also significant, despite the biases of averages, that female slaves at the beginning of the nineteenth century cost more than male slaves. The preference for female slave labor on Lima's big haciendas (such as Villa and San Juan) surely was part of this situation. A greater demand resuited in a higher price.^[46] However, it is also true—as we will see later—that the lower price of female slaves had to do with their particular skills (see chapter 3).

Arrangements even less transparent appeared in the lives of Lima's slaves. These fell somewhere between wage labor arrangements (with varying amounts of free time on or off the hacienda) and price reduction. Often, instead of paying a slave a daily wage in exchange for the market value of additional labor power, an owner calculated the daily wage according to the price stated on the slave's conque —in which case there was no promise of a grant of freedom or a sum of money to go into the hands of slaves; the slaves would make incremental payments that slowly reduced their price. Manumission was a calculable arrangement; masters and slaves carried debit notes. The manner in which this payment and its related negotiations could vary suggests that this arrangement allowed owners to assure the slave labor force's immobility and faithfulness, especially if both sides kept its terms. In a more sophisticated version of this process, the reduction of the slave's purchase price appeared to be a concession by the owner who had sold a slave below his conque value. What seems to be a benefit resulting from the owner's initiative might mask a sum owed to the slave's first owner, which the slave continued to pay after the official sale.^[47] The male or female slave labored for two masters, the work intensified, yet the slave's price decreased.

Among the most common explanations for the depreciation of a slave's price was old age, when the slave became useless for the work on the hacienda. The only way to sell him or her was to reduce the slave's price, adjusting it to the changes in the "quality of merchandise." Price reduction within an urban labor market permitted rural masters to minimize their losses and urban owners to exploit slave wage labor—a way to stretch the profitability of the system to its final limits, although slaves still found and benefited from some opportunities beyond the control of masters.^[48] Sometimes the master's final choice was emancipation of aging slaves, in order to avoid the medical costs and care.

Francisco Calderón and his wife had been slaves on the Monterrico hacienda, owned by the entailed estate of Quintanilla. In 1826 the hacienda was leased to a priest who had been granted the right to buy and sell slaves, provided that he replace them. Appraised, the slave couple received a document stating that they could freely circulate in search of a new owner. (Here the impetus to seek a new owner came from the priest, whereas in other cases slaves fled the hacienda to do the same.) On their journey, Francisco was caught by the police; he was not offered an opportunity to show his document and was deposited in the Tigre panadería . Soon thereafter, the military captors were reprimanded for this blunder, and under the protection of a bondsman Francisco was liberated.^[49] In this case it was the proprietor or the mayordomo who guaranteed the slave's departure and was willing to lower the slave's price and even endorsed the slave couple's quest to find a new owner. From another point of view, sadly, aging was also an aspect of credit that gradually eroded the slave's value but allowed greater and greater spaces of freedom. Freedom became a double-edged sword, especially for slaves with little or no urban experience if kinship and wider social networks could not subsidize their old age.

Time and time again, price is the reason behind negotiations. Price was a crucial issue for owners because business depended on it and for slaves because access to freedom rested on it. Price increases benefited owners who wanted to sell their slaves, and price reductions advanced slaves and those wishing to purchase slaves. Thus, the issue of price split owners into buyers and sellers, and buyers often invented strategies, working in unison with slaves, in order to obtain cheaper slaves. In chapter 5 we will look at this phenomenon as it affects the lives of masters and slaves in the urban context. Contemporaries frowned on the practice of increasing a slave's price. Occasionally, the infringement of a conque' s stipulations would invalidate the new owner's contract of sale. For the slave, this annulment could even mean return to the hacienda or relocation to Lima after several years. In a case in which the price of a female slave had been raised from 100 to 250 pesos, the slave's defender asked:

"What authority did these owners have to alter the price of the original conque ? Never [the Defensor made clear] has it been permitted to increase the value by even one real, and when owners have desired to do so, they have had to turn to the court and file a suit, in

order to prove the fairness of the reasons they have alleged for such pretensions."^[50]

Beyond fluctuations in value and negotiations between countryside and city were small sums of money that many slaves gradually amassed while in the service of their owners. They handed these amounts over to owners as collateral for the freedom they would earn when they had gathered together the entire purchase price or as repayment of sums they borrowed for self-manumission. This type of arrangement was ever-present in the minds of the slaves who put stock in the November 1821 decree on patronage, which stated that work should be remunerated.^[51] But slaves' wages were not the same as those of a free person, and the difference (along with its legal implications) never figured in coherent legislation. What value did the labor of a slave halfway between slavery and freedom have—especially within monetary arrangements so complex that slaves were paid? A rather unusual mulato , Patricio Negrón, related his experiences in 1840:

Being a slave originally from the city of Ica, I was brought up in the manner appropriate to my condition and according to the talents that were discovered in me. Nature more actively inclined me to the work that should occupy women. I washed and took care of the linen with skill, cooked, and ran a house as the best housekeeper might do. Never did any aspect of my integrity, conduct, or social behavior give occasion for remark. However, displeased with my master, I came to this city, and he arrived soon after in search of me—he wished to take me away by force; however Doña Estefa Palacios, who understood well the importance of my services, lent me 200 pesos to free myself, in such a way that I managed to release myself from servitude. The owner received the money for my freedom—returned to his estates, and I remained in Doña Estefa's service.

But from this moment on, Patricio realized, none of his services were going to be effectively remunerated:

My work earns more than 24 pesos monthly, however this señora did not give me anything. She planned a trip to Ica and took me with her. There I served her for the length of the four months that included the arrival, stay and return. There I gave her from the total amount of 200 pesos she lent me, 47 pesos and 7 reales, but she did not give me a penny in those four months. There I gave her 11 pesos on the one hand, and 8, on the other, according to her receipt, making her at the time a debtor of 133 pesos and 1 real; and the said señora owes me for all the time that I have served her without payment. Finally, she tells me that I have to give her the money or a guarantee.

When Patricio had offered to pay a guarantee, he was unexpectedly placed in the Pericotes panadería and cruelly whipped. Bed-ridden, he wrote his accusation against the owner and the panadero who had lashed him. He appealed to article three of the decree issued on 16 October 1821, which stated that owners who whipped their slaves were to be punished. He furthermore argued that even if this article had been later modified by the law of 1827, it still forbade an owner to flog a slave with more than six lashes (in the colonial era the maximum allowed was twelve) and required that the barrio commissary be present during any and all punishment. Owners who violated these laws were to be deprived of their slaves. Patricio managed to prove that this had not been the first time that Doña Estefa had advanced money and later abused the labor of her debtors.^[52] Patricio had not been her first victim.

The slave knew that the value of his labor should have been gradually subtracted from his purchase price. Formally he was free, he possessed a carta de libertad . But since he was a servant of the person who lent him money to manumit himself, his work was considered to be an interest payment, and the money for his purchase price was assumed to come from outside the established relation of servitude. Thus in fact Patricio remained a slave with a limited margin of accumulation.^[53] Persons such as Doña Estefa, who invested money in the manumission of slaves and later used slaves as retainers, were probably the last social agents who took advantage of a system in decline and of slaves' yearnings toward freedom as well. Not only did their actions change the patterns of slave ownership and the composition of slaveholders, they unbalanced the master-slave relationship.

When President Ramón Castilla decreed the abolition of slavery in 1854 many slaves were caught in the middle of paying for their freedom. Some had given money to their owners, were bargaining to lower their prices, or were fighting to obtain salaries their owners had left unpaid. Abolition also created tensions among owners eager to make their slaves pay and determined not to give back any part of the money that formed the slaves' price of freedom. None of the negotiations established clear dividing lines between salary, interest on invested capital, and self-purchase money.

Perhaps the events at the Molina hacienda best synthesize the crux of the issue in 1854. Ownership of the hacienda was contested, which meant that its slave population had no master or mayordomo . Absen-

teeism—as we have seen—was an impetus for slaves to mobilize, and for hacienda slaves to request transfers and price appraisals. But on the Molina hacienda these petitions coalesced into a collective effort toward freedom, whereas in the cases previously examined such negotiations had involved action only by individuals and by several couples. The slaves on the Molina hacienda sought the intervention of the courts. The complaints of the slaves had been building up over the previous years; many of the slaves from the Molina hacienda figured in the registers of the cartas de libertad in the 1850 notarial record books. One of the cartas de libertad referred to the free black Simón García, who in 1854 was pleading for the freedom of his sister, who was over forty years old: "the service rendered, her age, and because the many children she bore and raised have aged her." His sister's price was 400 pesos and Simón asked for a new appraisal, based on the argument of her age, "to try to grant her freedom so that she die free and in old age does not suffer what slaves must suffer." But on 18 August 1856, almost two years after Simón had filed his request, the case was ordered closed, "because the reasons for which this suit arose have disappeared since all slaves have been declared free."^[54]

Thus what started as a personal negotiation grew into a strategy that attracted more and more slaves from the same hacienda. Not only did rumors about the Quebrada slaves who marched to Lima to protest work conditions spread throughout the rural region, but communication among slaves on haciendas—especially the smaller ones—was also quite effective. Slaves were using the arguments of old age, or of numerous children and the exhausting effects of rearing them, to legitimize their requests for freedom. These arguments were no longer the exclusive property of masters. Since more than one slave learned about the abolition decree through the sentences issued in a pending file, and often after some time had elapsed, the delay brought in new claims for retroactive payment of a free laborer's salary. And an owner might argue, as in the case of Simon García's sister, that the slave hardly deserved payment—hadn't her brother stated she was too old and tired to be of any use to the hacienda? In this final expression of resistance to abolition, owners neatly reversed the slaves' arguments and built up a case for compensation payments from the state.

In contrast to a city such as Rio de Janeiro (Karasch 1987, 356 ff.), Lima had no mediating institutions specifically concerned with the negotiation of freedom—lending banks or savings associations. In Lima, negotiations between masters and slaves were much more direct, although they often took place before civil and ecclesiastical tribunals. Perhaps this absence of bureaucratic or state mediation explains the enormous diversity of means slaves devised to survive or leave the haciendas, as well as the intricate patterns of accumulation that existed. And perhaps it links the universe of family and kin that was so important to slaves in Lima. The lack of more organized intervention probably underlies the preeminence of slave family relations and the "moral" arguments asserted by slaves in defense of their right to form families and live a home life.