Final Episodes

Slavery did not end in 1854. It ended both before and much later. Before, because it was a system undermined from within. Later, because the slaveholding system created racial prejudices whose wounds remain open, and more directly because the formal dismantling of slavery in limeño society after official abolition lasted at least two more decades. Cluttering the years after 1854 were suits by owners who sought to recover slaves mortgaged to other persons and to collect sums set by the official manumission council.^[41] Civil suits dragged on for many years to limit the mobility of ex-slaves. Other owners, having sold their slaves or holding partial payment of their purchase prices, now pretended to be proprietors in order to collect the 300 pesos offered as compensation by the state.^[42] Contemporaries decried the slow pace of this process of change or clung to their cherished ideas that correlated slave with black and black with manual labor and robbery.

Perhaps a final story will help us clarify the long transition from slavery to freedom. According to his baptismal certificate, Manuel del Espíritu Santo Real, a moreno of sixteen years of age in 1855, had been born free. He was raised in the house of Don Eusebio Carrillo. Through a public deed, Manuel was placed with a shoemaker to learn the trade. Soon after, several pairs of shoes vanished from the shoe shop. The owner of the shop immediately accused Manuel and two

underlings of having stolen the shoes. Claiming that it was of no concern to him whether Manuel was a slave or not, he deposited Manuel in the Pescadería panadería , ordering that he be whipped and shackled. This not sufficing, Manuel remained in the panadería for a few months and the daily wages he earned (six reales a day) were contributed to the shoe shop owner in payment for the supposed theft. In this situation the shoemaker offered to sell the slave to the panadero . The latter requested the conque and the only record that the shoemaker could show him was the deed that placed him as an apprentice. The panadero knew that this document did not furnish proof of slave status and withdrew from the proposed sale. The shoemaker told to the panadero that it did not matter if he did not wish to purchase the slave, since he already had another buyer, a hacendado from outside. While the shoemaker insisted on Manuel's sale, the latter's defender alleged that the shoemaker should indemnify Manuel 100 pesos for each lashing inflicted and that for shackling him for the period of three months, he should pay a fine of 500 pesos. He added that even if the robbery had taken place the police intendant had no jurisdiction, and the real crime was treating him as a slave instead of sending him to prison and filing a civil suit.^[43]

Thirty years after the republic was founded the combined tensions and confusions of slavery and bureaucracy generated an atmosphere that included such possibilities as using an apprentice contract to sell a slave or a convenient panadería to punish an artisan and demanding indemnification for whippings and accusations of participation in robbery. Contemporaries generally regarded blacks as more delinquent, even as others sifted through criminal statistics in order to dismantle common prejudices. In 1855 Santiago Távara took the daily criminal column published by the police in the newspaper El Comercio as a point of reference; he compared crime rates for the first six months of 1854, when slavery existed, with those for the first six months of 1855, after its abolition. The crime rate had decreased (from 36 prisoners in 1854 to 30 in 1855), although murder had risen among the reasons for imprisonment. This increase of homicide in 1855, explained Távara (1855, 35–36), came from the increase of military troops: many of the murders were committed by soldiers who were not black. "It should be warned that in both columns the blacks receive very little space: because when a member of this class com-

mits an offense, the police usually uses the words, 'the so-and-so moreno ,' a phrase used only once in the column of 1854." However, the majority of Távara's contemporaries did not know how to read and the minority continued to cling to the construction (and necessity) of hierarchies that allowed for the essentially primitive construction and reproduction of interests.

This social image of the black had its economic counterpart. The guilds that had weathered political separation from Spain were gradually dying out as new urban jobs opened up for castas and slaves (Haitin 1986, 108, 118 if.). Later on, with greater sophistication in consumption and higher revenues from guano exports, the unskilled black population found fewer places within the traditional artisanal trades.

The guilds, which survived a few years of republican life, did not last long.... Their rules were seen as strangling, based on exigencies too impossible to fulfill such as the obligation that their members know how to read and write, even though national illiteracy reached 90 percent. Apprentices disappeared. The new small industries were in the hands of foreigners. Articles as easy to make within the nation such as doors and windows came from abroad. There was no place for the artisan and manual laborer in the workshops. (Romero 1980, 41)

This loss of jobs resulted from slavery, not only in the racial perceptions it included but also in the ways slaves emerged from it. To pay for manumission, they spent savings that otherwise might help them perfect an apprenticed trade or procure work tools to compete with imports. In the struggle to survive many ended up without savings or skills. And they and their more fortunate contemporaries existed in the economic context of a state that did not, could not, and would not see the disastrous consequences of its policies. After abolition became official in 1854, those who protested the state's blindness were not members of the black population but artisans, castas .

The guild of cart makers, comprised wholly of people of color, tries to sabotage the construction of the railway between Lima and Callao, which deprives them of their occupation. Shortly after, the carpenters (people of all ethnic combinations) burn the doors and windows that this train transports and for forty-eight hours they fight against the troops sent to subdue them, producing casualties and fatalities in the struggle. (Romero 1980, 41)^[44]

Artisans' protests, as well as banditry and rural laborers' uproars, continued in a fragmented struggle for power and self-assertion. How-

ever, British pressures, racism, and inefficiency were more powerful than the protests of artisans. We recognize here the long-term effects of the reality and experiences of the slave system that we have explored—and within it the hiring-out system, the ethnic occupational structure, and the dissension among social groups—as a continuing inheritance and, most important, a pattern very particular to the form in which slave life developed in Lima.