Conditional Freedom

Front matter

STUDIES IN GLOBAL SLAVERY 14

Conditional Freedom

Free Soil and Fugitive Slaves from the U.S. South to Mexico’s Northeast, 1803-1861

Contents

Acknowledgments 1x List of Maps, Figures, and Tables xi Abbreviations XII

1 Free Soil and Spaces of Freedom in the Age of the Second Slavery 2 Historiographies and Insights 11

3 Sources and Outline 19

PART 2 Crafting Freedom

3 Self-Liberated Slaves and Asylum in Northeastern Mexico, 1803-1836 129 1 Introduction 129 2 Slave Refugees in Late Colonial New Spain (1803-1821) 130 21 Imperial Contests and Borderland Interactions 130 2.2 Settlement and (Re)-Settlement 135 2.3 Challenging or Asserting Asylum Policy: The Salcedo-Ugarte Controversy 139 2.4 Local Pressures, National Concerns 141 2.5 Self-Emancipated Slaves during the Mexican War for Independence 147 38 Self-Liberated Slaves in Early Independent Mexico (1821-1836) 154 31 Slavery and Euro-American Colonization after the Plan de Iguala 154 3.2 Extradition or Free-Soil Policy? 160 3.3 Formaland Informal Settlement(s) 166 3.4 The Ambiguities of Refuge in Mexican Texas 170 4 Conclusion 180

4 “Mexico Was Free! No Slave Clanked His Chains under Its Government”: Contests over Mexico's Free Soil, 1836-1861 181 1 Introduction: The Texas Revolution and the Political Landscape of Slavery and Freedom 181

CONTENTS VII

2 The Disputed Making of Mexico's Free Soil after1836 185 21 Antislavery and Asylum Policy in Mexico 186 2.2 Debating Free Soil’s Limits in Mexico and the US 191 3 US Refugees from Slavery and Their Contested Settlement in Mexico 196 31 Reaching Black Communities (Gulf of Mexico and Coahuila) | 197 3.2. Forming New Beacons of Freedom 205 3.3 Defending US Refugees from Slavery in Mexico's Northeast 21 4 Free Soil and Escaped Slaves in-between Conflicting States and Allegiances 218 41 ‘A Second Canada Only a River’s Width Away?”: Runaways and the Divisive Future of the Republic of Texas (1836-1848) 218 4.2 Separatism(s), Manifest Destiny and the Fugitive Slave Issue (1848-1861) 223 5 Conclusion 235

Conclusion: "Mexico Will Assuredly Be Overrun by the Slaves from the Southern States": The Making of Free Soil, The Unmaking of the Second Slavery 237

1 The Making of Free Soil 237

2 The Unmaking of the Second Slavery 243

Appendix 1: The Process of Abolition of Slavery in Early Independent Mexico following the Federalist Constitution of 1824 251

Appendix 2: José Joaquin Ugarte to Sefior Brigadier Marqués

de Casa Calvo [Sebastián Calvo de la Puerta y O'Farrill], Nacogdoches, u September1804 252

Glossary of Spanish Terms 253

Index 294

Acknowledgments

More often than not, books are born out of a sense of community and intellectual generosity. This work is not an exception to this rule, and a brief word of appreciation to the people who supported me during its conception is more than warranted. First of all, I would like to thank Damian Pargas. As a mentor, Damian has always been very generous with advice, and extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable in his backing. Marlou Schrover kindly read the entire draft manuscript with care and has steadily supported this project; I warmly thank her for that. I was also fortunate to benefit from the unwavering energy and expertise of Catia Antunes.

The intellectual debt I owe to James D. Nichols, Sean M. Kelley, and Alice L. Baumgartner will be evident to specialists in the field. They have my gratitude for their guidance at different stages of this endeavor. I am also thankful to Bertrand van Ruymbeke, Jared Hardesty, David Doddington, Pepijn Brandon, Karwan Fatah-Black, Matthias von Rossum, Deborah Toner, Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Bradley Folsom, Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber, Lawrence Aje, Claudine Raynaud, Anne-Claire Faucquez, and Adam Fairclough for their constructive criticism on different parts of this project. Ronald A. Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have been very pleasant colleagues to work with. I would like to thank the editors and anonymous peer reviewers who commented on early drafts for their valuable feedback. The participants of the N.W. Posthumus training conferences helped me a lot during the take-off stage of this book. My gratitude likewise goes to colleagues I met at the different conferences in which I presented my research over the last seven years. This book would not be the same without the guidance of Debbie de Wit and Jennifer Obdam from Brill, Alex Jordan’s excellent proofreading work, as well as Gaélle Sutton’s cartographic skills. The kind support of my new colleagues in Essen since 2021, Jan C. Jansen, Megan Maruschke, Jannik Keindorf, Sabine Hanke, Anja Neuhaus, Lena Filzen, Yves Schmitz and Sophie Rose has helped me cross the finish line.

I would like to express my most sincere appreciation to the staff of all the archives and libraries which I visited since 2015. Special thanks must go to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, the Benson Library at Austin, Texas as well as the staff of the Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila. I am thankful for the very responsive personnel of the Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and for the friendly staff of the Archivo General de la Nación. My gratitude to Dean Smith, from the Bancroft Library at Berkeley, and Arnoldo Bermea, from the Archivo Municipal de Monclova for

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS their consideration. Lastly, I was delighted to be able to spend the fall of 2019 atthe Roosevelt Institute for American Studies, a place full of warmth and conviviality in the middle of Zeeland.

I have been fortunate enough to count on the support of wonderful people in The Netherlands and elsewhere, who made the road to completing this book far more enjoyable than if they had not stood by my side. In Leiden, thank you to Oran, Viola, Chris, Edgar, Henri, Thom, Paul, Anne, Teuntje, Larissa, Bram, Elizabeth, Sander, Marion, and Albertine. To Alix, Susannah, Jacob and Carien as well, many thanks for all the precious moments spent together chatting, bouldering and travelling. Rebecca and Álvaro made me feel very welcome in Mexico City. During a brief non-academic parenthesis in Brussels, I was lucky to meet Elisa, David, Raquel and Jorge, and spend quality time with Marjolein and Wessel. In France, Adrien, Lucille, Thalie, Stefania, Ahmad, Elias, Mira, Francois and Paul have always made me feel like I had never actually left home. The unfailing support of my family, from a distance, has meant a lot to me, more than they can imagine. My final words are for Girija: I will never thank you enough for your care and companionship, and for supporting me in moments of doubt.

Essen, September 2022

Parts of this book were previously published in adapted form in: “Looking for Freedom in the Borderlands: U.S. Black Refugees from Slavery in Early Independent Mexico”, in Ronald A. Johnson and Ousmane Power-Greene (eds.), In Search of Liberty: African-American Internationalism in the Nineteenth- Century Atlantic World (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2021), 57-86. "Freedom at the fringes? Slave Flight and Empire-Building in the Early Modern Spanish Borderlands of Essequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana-Texas" (with Bram Hoonhout), Slavery & Abolition 40:1 (2019), 61-86. "Abolitionists, Smugglers and Scapegoats: Assistance Networks for Fugitive Slaves in the Texas-Mexico Borderlands (1836-1861), Mémoire(s), Identité(s), Marginalité(s) dans le Monde Occidental Contemporain 19 (2018). URL: https://journals.openedition .org/mimmoc/2731.

Maps, Figures, and Tables

Maps

1 Approximate routes of escape for slave refugees in the Louisiana-Texas borderlands and through the Gulf of Mexico, c.1803-1836 85

2 Approximate routes of escape for slave refugees in the Texas-Mexico borderlands and through the Gulf of Mexico, c.1836-1861 87

Figures

1 The Louisiana-Texas borderlands after 1803. Courtesy of Rice University. Sketch of a part of the Boundary between Mexico & the United States as far as the Red River. 1838. https://hdl.handle.net/191/35335 31

2 El Paso. Courtesy of Rice University. The Plaza and Church of El Paso, 1857. https: //hdl.handle.net/1911/35793 99

3 San Antonio. Courtesy of Rice University. Military Plaza — San Antonio, Texas, 1857. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/35622 120

4 Matamoros during the US Civil War and the French Intervention. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Source: Bonwill, C.E.H., Artist, Loading Wagons on the Calle de Cesar, Matamoras, for Piedras Negras, from sketch by our special artist, C.E.H. Bonwill, Matamoras, Mexico, 1864. https://www.loc.gov/ item/97518764/ 248

Tables

1 High and low extrapolations of yearly numbers of self-emancipated slaves absconding to Mexico (1840-1859) 42

2 Periodicity of escape attempts to Mexico (1840-1859) 57

3 Gender imbalance in escape attempts to Mexico (1840-1859) 66 Generational under- and over-representation in escape attempts to Mexico (1840-1859) 67

5 Individual and collective escape attempts to Mexico (1840-1859) 79

6 Main royal decrees and provisions for the Spanish free-soil policy in the early modern Americas (1680-1789) 131

Abbreviations

AEMEUA AGEC AGI

AGN AHDF AHM AMC AMG AMMVA BA Beinecke Benson Bolton Briscoe CDS

CP

CPN Cuba FO FCMO FJPB FSXIX FWP Guadalajara LA

LAGP

RBBC

Archivo de la Embajada Mexicana en los Estados Unidos de América Archivo General del Estado de Coahuila

Archivo General de Indias

Archivo General de la Nación

Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal "Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora" Archivo Histórico de Monterrey

Archivo Municipal de Cadereyta

Archivo Municipal de Guerrero

Archivo Municipal de Monclova

Bexar Archives

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection

Herbert E. Bolton Papers

The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Cartas de Seguridad

Correspondance Politique

Comisión Pesquisidora del Norte

Papeles de Cuba

Foreign Office

Fondo Colonias Militares de Oriente

Fondo Jefatura Política de Béjar

Fondo Siglo x1x

Federal Writers' Project

Audiencia de Guadalajara

Laredo Archives

Luis Alberto Guajardo Papers on the History of Coahuila Legajo Encuadernado

Matamoros Archives

Muzquiz Records

Nacogdoches Archives

National Archives and Records Administration Provincias Internas Robert Bruce Blake Collection

ABBREVIATIONS XIII

RSPP Race and Slavery Petitions Project

SA Saltillo Archives

SAMA San Antonio Municipal Archives

SEDNA Archivo Histórico Militar de la Secretaria de Defensa Nacional SJMASC Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection

SML Sterling Memorial Library

SRE Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores TBL The Bancroft Library

TCA Travis County Archives

TSLAC Texas State Library and Archives Commission

UT(A) University of Texas (Austin)

UT(SA) University of Texas (San Antonio)

YU Yale University

Introduction

As he was travelling through the Texas-Mexico borderlands during the mid- 1850s, Frederick Law Olmsted, an antislavery journalist commissioned by the New York Daily Times to report on the southern slaveholding states, reflected upon the condition of enslaved African Americans who absconded to the Mexican border in the hope of finding freedom across the Rio Grande. The chronicler wondered: “the impulse must be a strong one, the tyranny extremely cruel, the irksomeness of slavery keenly irritating, or the longing for liberty much greater than is usually attributed to the African race, which induces a slave to attempt to escape to Mexico”! The reputation of Mexico as a site of asylum for fugitive slaves was by then already decades in the making, not just among enslaved people living in Texas, but also among those who lived further afield. Solomon Northup, a free black from the northern states who was abducted in Washington DC in 1841 and sold into slavery in the Deep South, described in his iconic narrative how a year before his own arrival, some enslaved African Americans on a plantation near Bayou Boeuf in Louisiana had “conceived the project of organizing a company sufficiently strong to fight their way against all opposition, to the neighboring territory of Mexico”.?

Set during the last two decades of US slavery, both testimonies underscore how during the course of the nineteenth century, Mexico’s northeastern borderlands came to be understood as gateways to freedom by enslaved African Americans living in the US Southwest. Bondspeople in the southwestern slaveholding states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and even the Indian Territory often sought to achieve freedom by absconding to Mexico, following routes that ran in the opposite direction to the Underground Railroad that led other freedom seekers to the North. Although their numbers paled in comparison to their northern counterparts (who numbered upwards of 1.000 per year, according to some estimates), they were far from insignificant. Precise estimates of how many fugitive slaves crossed the Mexican border remain elusive. In aletter to Olmsted, Adolf Douai, a German-born free-soiler and editor of the San Antonio Zeitung in Western Texas, asserted that the number of enslaved people who had absconded to Mexico in 1854 “scarcely can be short of a

1 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas: or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Edwards & Co., 1857), 328-329.

2 Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1997), 247.

© THOMAS MAREITE, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004523289_002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Cc BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

hundred" a figure that lawyer, writer and Douai's fellow countryman Friedrich Kapp rounded up to 150.3 Estimates by pro-slavery apologists yielded similar results. The Telegraph and Texas Register contended in July 1851 that “about two hundred fugitives from Texas crossed at one of the principal ferries on the Rio Grande, during the last two years”. By the mid-1850s, the Texan journalist and legislator John Salmon Ford (who had a vested interest in making an exaggerated claim) argued that about 4.000 enslaved African Americans had already escaped across the river.*

Even if Mexico never developed into the major beacon of freedom that the northern US or Canada would become, the fact that enslaved people attempted to seek freedom there at all speaks volumes as to how African Americans viewed the landscape of slavery and freedom in North America during the first half of the nineteenth century. During this period, two conflicting developments — the simultaneous retreat and expansion of slavery — found themselves on a collision course. While in certain parts of the continent free-soil territories emerged, slavery massively expanded in others, trapping millions into a life of exploitation with little hope of emancipation. These two developments gave rise to new waves of slave flight from the latter regions to the former, as runaway slaves increasingly sought out new spaces of freedom. This book examines how these developments played out in the Mexican borderlands, focusing on two main themes. First, it provides a social history of enslaved freedom-seekers. Second, it also provides a political history of the contest between Mexican free soil and the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi river valley between 1803 and 1861. Its main question is: what was the nature of slave flight in the Mexican borderlands, and how and why did Mexico develop into a site of “conditional freedom" for slave refugees from the American South?5

3 LOC, Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, General Correspondence, 1838-1928; "Douai to F.L. Olmsted, 16 Dec. 1854”; New York Daily Tribune, 20 Jan. 1855. On the Olmsted-Douai connection: Mischa Honeck, We are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 38-70.

4 Telegraph and Texas Register, 18 July 1851; Texas State Times, 2 June 1855.

5 The expressions “slave refugees” and “refugees from slavery” used in this study (alongside “self-liberated slaves” or “self-emancipated slaves’, among others) refer to people more commonly designated by the existing literature as “runaway” or “fugitive” slaves. While the latter will sometimes be used for the sake of convenience, the use of a more diverse lexicon represents a first step in ridding ourselves of the legalist connotations carried by the vocabulary of “runaway” and “fugitive”, as both of these terms tend to reproduce the enslaver's perspective and its underlying stigmas, prejudices and racial ideology. It does justice to enslaved people’s own perspectives and motives regarding their own flight, and thus reflects their own identities as refugees from slavery, instead of portraying them as truants or criminals. Historians have emphasized the historicity of refugees long before the modern invention of

INTRODUCTION 3 1 Free Soil and Spaces of Freedom in the Age of the Second Slavery

In order to understand why enslaved people absconded to Mexico, it is important to first understand the changing legal and political landscape of freedom and slavery in North America during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Age of Revolutions, rooted in enlightened ideals of equality, liberty and natural rights, profoundly reshaped the Atlantic world. Importantly, the period witnessed the first serious blows against slavery in the western hemisphere and the emergence of spaces of formal and informal freedom for fugitive slaves. In parts of the Americas, there arose formal variants that legally abolished slavery according to free-soil principles (beginning with the northern US and Haiti), thus providing fugitive slaves with new refuges. At the same time, a spike in individual manumission and self-purchase arrangements in the wake of the American Revolution (1776) led to a significant growth of urban free black populations within the slaveholding US South. Cities increasingly became spaces of informal freedom for thousands of runaway slaves, who attempted to get lost in the crowd and clandestinely pass for free.9

Even as such spaces of formal and informal freedom emerged throughout the hemisphere, however, other parts of the Americas strengthened their commitment to slavery, a development Dale Tomich has dubbed the “Second Slavery" — a process of revival, intensification and territorial expansion of the production of slave-grown commodities, especially in Cuba, Brazil and the US South.” Indeed, with the cotton boom of the early nineteenth century (augmented by renewed sugar and tobacco production), the US South was transformed into one of the last bastions of the so-called “peculiar institution”. Following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the southwestern borderlands were transformed into a thriving and rapidly expanding frontier of slavery, stretching from riverine areas to their upcountry hinterlands. An unprecedently dynamic the legal category of refugee in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the emergence of the refugee regime over the twentieth century: Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1-13, esp. 2; Philip Marfleet, “Refugees and history: why we must address the past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly 26:3 (2007), 136-148; J. Olaf Kleist, “The History of Refugee Protection: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges”, Journal of Refugee Studies 30:2 (2017), 161-169.

6 Damian A. Pargas, “Urban Refugees: Fugitive Slaves and Spaces of Informal Freedom in the American South”, Journal of Early American History 7 (2017), 262-284.

7 On the Second Slavery: Dale W. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery: Labor, Capital and World Economy (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Javier Lavifia and Michael Zeuske (ed.), The Second Slavery: Mass Slaveries and Modernity in the Americas and in the Atlantic Basin (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2014); Dale W. Tomich (ed.), Slavery and Historical Capitalism during the Nineteenth Century (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017).

plantation economy - connected to capitalist Atlantic markets for cotton, sugar and tobacco — fueled an insatiable demand for slave labor and gave rise to a massive domestic slave trade that drew a million slaves from the Upper South to the lower Mississippi Valley and its western frontier - augmented by illegal smuggling from the “Hidden Atlantic,” especially the Caribbean, but also Africa. With slave-based agriculture booming and the domestic slave trade thriving, Southerners began to double down on their ideological commitment to the institution, even as support for slavery faded in the northern states following the American Revolution.? As Anthony E. Kaye has emphasized, understanding the relationship between the cotton and sugar frontier in the southwestern borderlands and the advent of the Second Slavery enables us to connect slavery in the antebellum South to larger developments at play in the Atlantic world, thus challenging notions of Southern exceptionalism. This resilient Second Slavery, contrasting in scale and nature with colonial slavery, significantly contributed to the US frontier’s expansion to the west, with a coercive empire of cotton clashing with Jeffersonian ideals of an “empire for liberty”. Through the formation of new slaveholding territories, slavery's entrenchment and frenetic progress in the southwestern corner of the Union spectacularly contradicted those republican discourses of liberty and democracy that had gained momentum through the American Revolution.?

In the ever-shifting US-Mexico borderlands, the expansion of slavery on the US side violently clashed with the simultaneous rise of free soil on the Mexican side — in other words, the Second Slavery collided with the emergence of sites of formal freedom. As Mexico's commitment to the abolition of slavery gained traction in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the incompatibility

8 Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the origins of the Deep South (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005); Richard J. Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael Zeuske, "Out of the Americas: Slave Traders and the Hidden Atlantic in the Nineteenth Century", Atlantic Studies 153 (2018), 103-135.

9 Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World" in Tomich (ed.), Slavery and Historical Capitalism, 190. Kaye's observation forms an antithesis to: Frederick J. Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Holt and Company, 1921), 1-38. On Jefferson’s “empire for liberty": Peter S. Onuf, "Jefferson, Louisiana, and American Nationhood”, in Peter J. Kastor and Francois Weil (ed.), Empires of the Imagination: Transatlantic Histories of the Louisiana Purchase (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 23-33; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).

of these two developments became visible in conflicts involving refugees from slavery — “runaway negroes’, according to their enslavers — who sought refuge from the Second Slavery by attempting to reach Mexican free soil.!° The emergence of free-soil principles during the first half of the nineteenth century along the lines set by the Somerset case (1772) offers the most tangible expression of the Age of Revolutions as an Age of Emancipation for many African Americans, especially from the mid-1830s onwards." Mexico's own free-soil policy developed haphazardly in a nonlinear fashion throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, a development that was ultimately enshrined in the liberal constitution of 1857, following a series of piecemeal policies dating back to the colonial period. The practice and legal principle of free soil had roots in Spain's colonial policy of granting protection (also referred to as "refuge", "asylum", “sanctuary” or “amparo”) to foreign self-emancipated slaves from the late seventeenth century onwards, despite still legally sanctioning slavery within its own imperial limits. Legitimated on religious grounds, this policy originally applied to enslaved people fleeing from Protestant colonies — mostly British, Dutch and Danish territories — who sought refuge in the Spanish possessions in the Americas, being consecrated by a Real Cédula issued in 1750. During the eighteenth century, the northeastern fringes of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (colonial Mexico until 1821) constituted a very occasional site of refuge for enslaved African Americans running away from their masters in French Louisiana. Because France was not a Protestant power, however, Spain's agents in the province of Texas never actively welcomed these fugitives to settle, as was for instance the case in Florida — which attracted bondspeople from the British colonies of the Carolinas and Georgia — and Venezuela. Between 1763 and 1800, Louisiana became part of the Spanish Empire, and administrators in

10 On free soil in the Age of Revolutions: Keila Grinberg, Sue Peabody, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle’, Slavery & Abolition 32:3 (Sep. 2011), 331-339; Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free Soil and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic", American Historical Review 7:1 (Feb. 2012) 40-66; Jean M. Hébrard, Rebecca J. Scott, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Johnhenry González, “Defiant Haiti: Free-Soil Runaways, Ship Seizures and the Politics of Diplomatic Non-Recognition in the Early Nineteenth Century”, Slavery & Abolition 36:1 (2015), 124-135.

11 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1975]); Ira Berlin, The Long Emancipation: the Demise of Slavery in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015); Manisha Sinha, The Slave's Cause: a History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). By the mid-1830s, British Canada, the US North and Mexico, among others, had completely banned slavery.

the latter and Texas systematically collaborated for the rendition of runaways from one province to the other.

The combination of a new, although initially poorly defined, border between Spain and the US through the Louisiana Purchase and the spectacular emergence of a plantation economy in the lower Mississippi region accounts for the increase in escape attempts from Louisiana to New Spain's borderlands after 1803. By contrast with other possessions of the Spanish Empire, in which specific legal provisions had explicitly enshrined the policy of sanctuary, no locally specific orders as to whether or not to welcome refugees from slavery had previously been issued for Spanish Texas, except for generic and sometimes conflicting Real Cédulas. As a result, Spanish officials often resorted to ad hoc policies of protection or restitution according to political circumstances and the willingness of refugees’ to embrace Roman Catholicism. The independence of Mexico from Spain (1821) brought about new changes in the political geography of slavery and freedom in North America, further deepening the divide between the Second Slavery and the cause of abolition and free soil that many of the Mexican revolutionaries — from military leaders to self-emancipated slaves themselves — had supported. During the 1820s, the new republic gradually eradicated slavery (culminating in president Vicente Guerrero’s national abolition on 15 September 1829), strengthened its commitment to free soil and emerged as an ostensible beacon of liberty for foreign enslaved African Americans. Just four days before Guerrero’s decree of emancipation, a correspondent for the St. Louis Beacon argued that escape to Mexican Texas now represented an “easy and certain” way out of slavery for an

12 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: the Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 148; Gilbert C. Din, Spaniards, Planters and Slaves: the Spanish regulation of slavery in Louisiana (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 18-34; Douglas Richmond, “Africa's Initial Encounter with Texas: the Significance of Afro-Tejanos in Colonial Texas, 1528-1821’, Bulletin of Latin American Research 26:2 (2007), 200-221. On Spain’s sanctuary policy, see in particular: José Luis Belmonte Postigo, “No siendo el mismo echarse al mar, que es lugar de libertad plena”: Cimarronaje Marítimo y Política Trans-Imperial en el Caribe Español, 1687-1804”, in Consuelo Naranjo (ed.), Esclavitud y Diferencia Racial en el Caribe Hispano (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2017), 43-70; Jane Landers, “Giving Liberty to All: Spanish Florida as a Black Sanctuary, 1673-1790” in Viviana Díaz Balsera, Rachel A. May (ed.), La Florida: Five Hundred Years of Hispanic Presence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014), 117-140; Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled History, Entangled Worlds: the English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery”, American Historical Review 112:3 (June 2007), 764-786.

13 Bram Hoonhout, Thomas Mareite, “Freedom at the Fringes? Slave Flight and Empire- Building in the Early Modern Spanish Borderlands of Essequibo-Venezuela and Louisiana- Texas”, Slavery & Abolition 40:1 (2019), 61-86.

increasing number of bondspeople from the US South.!^ However, Mexico's first offers of freedom to runaway slaves from adjacent countries remained timid, being constrained by the new republic's lingering inconsistencies over slavery. Indeed, after 1821, Mexico opened Texas up to settlement by foreign settlers (mostly from the US) and their enslaved workforce, being anxious to develop a province that had historically stagnated both in demographic and economic terms, and that had been further devastated by the wars of independence. Attempts by the Mexican federation to end slavery in Texas (which by the 1830s had been transformed into a thriving slaveholding territory) failed. Nevertheless, they infuriated the new colonists, thus contributing to the outbreak of the Texas Revolution (1835-1836), which pushed the border between slavery and freedom further west, from the Sabine River to the Rio Grande.!5 Mexico's loss of Texas further encouraged its officials to take the side of enslaved people absconding from north of the Rio Grande. As such, it was increasingly viewed by African Americans in the US Southwest as an enticing place of refuge. The southern federation now began opposing slavery in a more straightforward way, both domestically and internationally. The steady arrival of self-emancipated slaves in independent Mexico contradicted the republican paradigm of a nation composed by racially indistinguishable citizens and challenged the new federation's abstract discourses of racial liberalism and equality, forcing the republic's authorities to convert such rhetoric into practice.!® Mexico gradually embraced a full and unequivocal free-soil policy for foreign runaways, granting them formal freedom on paper. Yet the transition from an early modern conception of free soil as conditional to its modern interpretation as unconditional was not as linear as has often been assumed. In Mexico's northeastern borderlands, this promise of formal freedom often failed to materialize (even after the Texas Revolution), considering that free soil — the legal principle and practical precept from which it derived — remained highly contested, both in legal discussions and informal debates. While Mexican officials themselves occasionally disagreed on the extent to which to apply free soil, US diplomats and ministers strove for the conclusion of agreements providing for

14 Richmond Enquirer, 11 Sep. 1829; Elena Abbott, “Beacons of Liberty: Free-Soil Havens and the American Anti-Slavery Movement, 1813-1863” (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 2017), 102.

15 On this process: Sean M. Kelley, Los Brazos de Dios: a Plantation Society in the Texas- Mexico Borderlands, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010); Andrew J. Torget, Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

16 Marisela Ramos, “Black Mexico: Nineteenth-Century Discourses of Race and Nation” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 2009), 113-157.

the restitution of fugitive slaves from the US South. In addition, by violating Mexican sovereignty, armed incursions launched by slaveholders and mercenaries threatened self-liberated bondspeople in Mexico with re-enslavement. Finally, frequent discrepancies between federal laws and their local enforcement, state policies and borderlands practices — in the midst of fierce contests for political hegemony in independent Mexico — often jeopardized the status of runaways who had settled across the border.