Distribution of the Slave Population

Lima was and is a city of barrios with easily detectable social and economic characteristics. The barrios, districts, and parishes of wealthy people were easily distinguishable from the less white and less wealthy areas. Slaves moved about in all these areas because many lived outside the owner's household—depending on their trade and the work arrangements between them and their masters. The San Lázaro parish, for example, was considered to be an area of black residence, and we know that the links between slaves on the haciendas of Lima's hinterland and the residents of this parish were crucial elements of the trajectory between countryside and city. This parish appears to have been a place of arrival, residence, and meeting for blacks from all walks of life. Santa Ana, by contrast, located within the walls of the city of Lima, was a parish composed of whites but had a large number of domestic slaves.

A residential census of the Santa Ana parish, dated 1808, indicates that this parish housed 11,432 inhabitants of principally Spanish descent in 1813.^[9] This census includes the number of slaves per household, which permits us to measure the distribution of slaves per residence and per owner in Lima or, in other words, the relative concentration of each group. Unfortunately, the census recorded only 3,460 persons, 30.0 percent of the parish's population, and 6.4 percent of the total urban population. The slave population makes up 22 percent of the total in this sample and might indicate that each fifth resident of Santa Ana owned a slave. The 3,460 inhabitants were grouped into 898 dwellings of which 187 housed 763 slaves (Table 9). Of the various types, houses and cottages (small houses) were large enough to hold domestic slaves (74.8 percent), whereas apartments, interiores (usually smaller rooms within a house, sublet to third parties), and single rooms (11.2 percent) were smaller, crowded residential units where slaves could hardly live with a master. The presence of market shops and stores indicates the existence of some type of mer-

cantile activity involving slaves, (13.3 percent); orchard houses were the parish's more rural element (0.7 percent).

Ascertaining the number of slaves per owner helps us clarify the dispersion and concentration of the black population in Santa Ana. Among the parish's households, 108 (57.8 percent) had one to two slaves, 44 (28.9 percent) three to six slaves, 10 (9.1 percent) had from seven to 12 slaves, 7 (3.7 percent) from 13 to 37, and one, Lima's mint, had 60 slaves (0.5 Percent).^[10] Thus it works out that 57.8 percent of the residential units counted in the 1808 census contained 19 percent of the slaves; 28.7 percent (small to medium units) had 31.3 percent; 9.1 percent (medium to large units) had 20.2 percent; and 3.7 percent (large units) contained 21.6 percent of the slaves (Figure 2). A high percentage of households in Santa Ana reported one or two slaves. This percentage increases if we add the medium-sized ones. Our bet is that the fewer slaves per owner, the greater the tendency to assign slaves to daily-wage labor, and the greater the dependence on slaves' earnings. Lima's nobility could most likely be found in the middle and tipper categories of slave owners; although they too occasionally hired their slaves out in exchange for a daily sum, they usually considered their slaves part of their retinue and social status. Their slaves, therefore, would be placed in domestic service. If we extrapolate on Santa Ana's figures for the city as a whole, we would estimate that 20 Percent of Lima's households had slaves, and that approximately x o percent of Lima's households lived off the income earned by slaves.

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Figure 2.
Distribution of slaves per household in Santa Ana: 1808.

Thus urban society included a high number of individuals who depended on slaves' wages for survival itself—even to the point of selling their only slave to avoid the anticipated disgrace of a pauper's burial.^[11]

From the viewpoint of slaveholders—discreetly poor or prosperous—the hiring-out system was lucrative, though contemporaries condemned its "idleness." An owner's profits depended on the number of slaves, their age and health, the arrangement the owner made with those who were interested in hiring his or her slave, and profits hinged on the slave's "willingness" and aptitude for the given work. Despite the belief that a slave was a good investment (sometimes the only one possible), an owner knew its risks. Calculations for regions other than Lima have shown that the hiring-out system began to be profitable only when an owner possessed at least twenty slaves (da Silva 1988, 109). For Lima, the Defensor de Menores articulated the reasoning as he evaluated a father's hopes to invest money he had received to buy a slave whose daily wages would assure the rearing of the prospective owner's son in the capital. The Defensor de Menores evinced skepticism for several reasons:

The first is that when such daily wages reach no more than four or six pesos a month, it is not possible to meet the costs of food, shoes, clothing, and schooling [for the child]: The second that the daily wages of slaves tend to have the effect of causing debt, and much more so if women are involved. Given the uncertain outcome one cannot even consider that scant income: The third is that if it is necessary to pay for the treatment of the sick slave or if death accrues, everything will go to pot.^[12]

With great assurance, the judge was dismissing the father's proposal. But can we take the judge's evaluations at face value? Mendiburu records a daily-wage arrangement that would yield annual interest—which fluctuated between 5 and 20 percent (1987, 39)—on an owner's investment equal to a slave's purchase price and comparable to earnings from other investments (i.e., in land, mercantile activity, factories). Several documents confirm that at the close of the eighteenth century the minimum daily wages given to owners by apprenticed slaves amounted to three reales. It has also been noted that the slave day laborers tended to work during the day—at jobs assigned by their owners or perhaps searching for employment—and returned at night to the homes of their masters, "to be of service to them in whatever capacity they might offer." The capital slaves acquired during holidays, which exceeded that earned during weekdays, was for the slaves' use and for the purchase of clothing. This pecuniary source allowed slaves some freedom; however, it also represented a way in which owners transferred a portion of their obligations to the slave. During the workday the slave ate in the home of his or her current employer. This meant that, especially when the day-labor contract was temporary, that whoever was exploiting the slave's labor power would have little interest in giving the slave an adequate diet; contracts of the time stated that "all of this is observed as firmly established practice and custom in all these kingdoms."^[13]

In 1828 a daily-wage guarantee recorded before the notary Manuel Suárez noted that "According to established practice slaves are commonly obligated to pay their owners for the right of the daily wage only 1 real for each 100 [of their value]."^[14] Thus, if a slave's conque listed his or her value as 300 pesos, then his or her daily wage would amount to 3 reales (see also Fuentes 1867, 191). And in this case 5 to 20 percent of a slave's annual earnings (as calculated by Mendiburu) represented 30–110 pesos each year—based on a daily wage of 3 reales and annual work of 300 days—which in turn equaled a slave's high aver-

age price of between 550 and 600 pesos; the average price for slaves in Lima was 280 pesos (Aguirre 1993, l02). The calculation suggests that in real terms slaves were paying more than 1 real for each 100 of their value. The earnings noted by María Baraona (from 4 to 6 pesos a month) would yield an annual income between 48 and 72 pesos.^[15] Averaging both, we obtain an annual income of 65 pesos (70 pesos as calculated by Mendiburu and 60 as declared by Baraona). The proximity of the two values indicates their reliability and suggests that an owner could recuperate his or her initial investment—barring disturbances along the way—in seven or eight years. With the passing of the centuries, the recuperation period of this investment seems to have lengthened from the one Bowser (1977, 189) notes for the seventeenth century, when the owner of a specialized slave could—with a little luck—recover the value of his or her slave in two or three years. We might interpret the extension of the slaves' mortgage period as an increase in slaves' potential for accumulation, assuming that slaves kept a greater part of the earnings and the price of slaves had dropped. This outcome might, in turn, result from a real decrease in the profitability of the slave system except that other circumstances, such as the general state of the economy, explain similar outcomes.

We will never know precisely how many slaves earned daily wages for their masters, since we cannot measure the variations in daily wages over the course of the decades under consideration. Wages were determined by the arrangements between owners, or in their absence, between slaves and owners, and also by the slave's qualifications. In addition, slaves were not subject—despite contrary assertions—to regulations, but rather to the practices established in each particular case.

In spite of these limitations, we must hazard an approximation in order to understand the significance of daily wages in the lives of urban slaves and to illustrate—through the preponderance of wage labor—the exhaustion of the slave system. Three additional forms of evidence suggested by our data—of varying validity and weight—further corroborate the importance of daily wages to slaves. The first is the existence of San Lázaro as a parish in which freed and enslaved blacks lived together. They lived there because they had somehow found ways to leave the homes of their masters at night. As we will see, this option depended on the slaves' use of daily wages and of arguments about their rights to matrimonial and family life (such argu-

ments before ecclesiastical courts gave Manolo Lasmanuelos the chance to marry Manola, a free zamba ). The second hypothesis involves an analysis of the mechanisms through which slaves obtained freedom. Daily wages, along with robbery and eventually the lottery, were the only mechanism of accumulation to which slaves had access, especially in cases in which a slave was free of the owner's domestic control and the provided daily wages were both fixed and relatively low. The figures of the notarial record books entitled cartas de libertad (see Tables 1 and 8) help elucidate slaves' ability to accumulate and eventually manumit themselves.

If we base our calculations of the slave population's decrease on the censuses (1820, 1836, 1845, and 1850), we discover that from census to census the slave population fell at a rate that fluctuated between - 2.4 and - 2.8 percent annually (in absolute terms this rate is equal to an annual decrease of 143 slaves between 1836 and 1845, and 175 slaves between 1820 and 1836). If we project our statistical information for 1830 and 1840 onto these figures, we see that the manumissions recorded in the notarial record books represent 97 percent of the total slaves who disappeared from the statistical sampling between the first two censuses (1836–1845), and 74 percent between the second and third (1820–1836). This exercise reveals the reliability of the censuses and of the notarial record books and also demonstrates that slaves increasingly turned to notaries to record their freedom. Throughout all the years examined, the total percentages of manumissions through self-purchase or purchase by a relative (63 percent, 66 percent, and 68 percent respectively) were significantly greater than manumissions through the intervention of a third party or through a master's grant of freedom (37 percent, 45 percent, 41 percent), which—as we have seen—was not always easy to obtain (an assertion documented and valid for both rural and urban areas).

Beyond statistics, an examination of many slaves' daily life yields a third hypothesis about the prevalence and importance of daily wages amid the vicissitudes of urban existence.