Slavery in the Spanish World

This is a post by guest author Dr. Dan Crews, Professor in the Department of History and Anthropology at UCM. 



          The discussion following the film and panel on “The Abolitionists” brought out connections of slavery in the US to the “Atlantic World,” or “Atlantic Worlds.” As a Professor of Spanish and Latin American History, I will comment briefly on the significance of what is usually referred to as the “Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis,” or the “Tannenbaum-Elkins Thesis.” Obviously Tannenbaum’s 1948 classic, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas is the crucial work.

          In 1922 Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian graduate student at Columbia, published an article in the Hispanic American Historical Review that drew contrasts between the culture of slavery in Brazil and the U.S. To my knowledge, this is the origin of modern studies of comparative slavery, i.e. that Black slavery is not the same everywhere. In 1946 Freyre fleshed his argument out in his masterpiece The Masters and the Slave. The next year Tannenbaum published his classic focusing more narrowly on legal and religious institutions. Spanish laws on slavery derived from Roman law, the Justinian Code, adopted into Spanish law in 1215. In Roman law slaves, who could be from any race, had the right to earn property and purchase their freedom. Indeed, grandchildren of slaves could hold any public office in the Empire. The second-century emperor Pertinax was in fact the grandson of a slave. The Catholic Church forbade requiring work on feast days, prohibited the break up of families and encouraged church attendance meaning limited access to education. Since North American slave laws derived from British Common Law, they assumed, according to Tannenbaum, that being a slave meant being Black, the legal precedents were established in this context. Put simply, the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” holds that the humanity of Black slaves was not ignored in Latin America to the degree that it was in North America. The strongest support for the thesis has and continues to be the degree of inter-racial marriage, and the general lack of racial conflict between Blacks and Whites in post-emancipation Latin America. There were no Jim Crow segregation laws in Latin America.

          Stanley Elkins adopted Tannenbaum’s thesis, but also went into the psychology of slavery in North and South America. According to Elkins the Manichean division of Black and White led to the creation of a “Sambo psychology” in North America. The first edition of Elkins’ Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life appeared in 1959, and the third addition in 1976. Several scholars have taken issue with some of Elkins’ psychological arguments, especially Eugene Genovese, but the “Elkins-Tannenbaum Thesis” continued to find supporters as in Nell Irvin Painter’s Southern History Across the Color Line, 2002. Meanwhile the core of the “Freyre-Tannenbaum Thesis” continues to be very strong in Colonial Spanish and Latin American studies as demonstrated in Jane Landers’ Black Society in Florida, 1999, and Herbert Klein and Ben Vinson, African Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean, 2007.

          While Latin America definitely has its problems, racial tensions between White and Black have not been much of a cause for social unrest. Indeed, the idea of a Latin American “cosmic race” has been the root of much of twentieth-century Latin American nationalism, from José Marti in the 1890s to the “Bolivarian Revolution” of Hugo Chavez.

          For a good introduction to the scholarly debates surrounding the Tannenbaum thesis, see Laura Foner and Eugene Genovese, eds., Slavery in the New World, 1970.


 Editor's Note:
While slave violence in the Spanish colonies of the southern U.S., Central, and South America centered primarily around the Indian-Spaniard-Creole ethnic dynamic, blacks enslaved by the Spanish did, on occasion, revolt--for example, see Sir Walter Raleigh's alliance with the Cimarrons (black escaped slaves) in Panama against the Spanish in the 1570s.  Stanley Elkin's conclusions about the differences between Brazilian and American slavery may still apply in Latin American studies, but his conclusions about the passivity of American slaves have been subsequently overturned by numerous studies over the last forty years.  Slaves in America resisted their masters in many ways, from milder examples of destroying property and theft of foodstuffs to full rebellion in the case of Nat Turner's Revolt.  Moreover, as slaves were taught trades or sent to cities to work, they further undermined the institution of slavery by creating space for lives outside the control of whites.  In some cases, they even earned enough to purchase their freedom.  As Eugene Genovese wrote in From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (1979):

"Accordingly, the legend of black docility in slavery appears the more ironic

as well as the more ludicrous, for, so far as the evidence allows generalization,

no enslaved people in world history rose in revolt so often or in such numbers 

or with so large a measure of success [as in the Americas].  The slaves of the Old South
rose much less frequently, in fewer numbers, and less successfully than those of
the Caribbean region and South America, but they too made vital contributions
to the history of revolt." (xxii)

Two books that provide an excellent overview of the scholarship on slavery in the last three decades of the twentieth century are: John B. Boles, Black Southerners 1619-1869 (1984) and Peter Kolchin American Slavery 1619-1877 (2003).  For additional readings on this topic, see:

John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972).
John Hope Franklin and Lauren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (2000).
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (1992).
Eugene Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll (1974).
Patrick Manning, The African Diaspora: A History through Culture (2010).
David Northrup, Crosscurrents in the Black Atlantic 1770-1965 (2007).
Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Slavery, Freedom and the Law in the Atlantic World (2007).
Robert Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (1971).
Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities (1967).

Food for Thought

We were glad to see almost 100 people come out for the event, and we hope you took away from the film and the panel discussion some new insights into the abolition movement in the United States as well as the larger international reform movements of the era.  Thank you for attending, and for stopping by our blog.


Some interesting questions that were raised during the event are worth noting here for further reflection:

-We talked about differences in slavery in Africa, the Spanish colonies, and the English colonies, and how legal and social proscriptions for the institution of slavery varied between the European empires of the colonial era.  How did those variations develop into chattel slavery, or a racial and inherited status of slavery, in the American South?  Do you think there were differences in areas of the United States that had a stronger Spanish or French influence for longer periods of time?

-Another topic that came up in the question and answer session was the prevalence of racism in the United States, even today.  In the video, do you remember how crowds responded to the abolitionists' message in Philadelphia and in Boston?  Was the backlash isolated to the South, or was racism prevalent throughout the antebellum United States?  (Remember the mob violence threatened against Garrison in Boston, and Elijah Lovejoy who was attacked and murdered in Illinois?)

-The film briefly mentioned two historical figures who play a significant role in the abolitionist movement in the 1850s, which we were not able to discuss in the time we had.  Harriet Beecher's experience (better known as Harriet Beecher Stowe) of a slave sale in Kentucky influenced her writing of a book that became a national and international bestseller after 1852: Uncle Tom's Cabin.  The book's vivid depiction of slave life drew many to the abolition cause.  The second figure mentioned was John Brown, who later was involved with the violence over slavery along the Kansas-Missouri border and in Virginia.

In the coming weeks we will be posting short follow-up essays on these individuals, as well as other related topics to this event, by the panelists and other guest bloggers.  Please check back regularly to learn more!