“Citizens of a Free People”: Popular Liberalism and Race in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia

Abstract

“All that belong to the Liberal Party in the Cauca are people of the pueblo bajo (as they are generally called) and blacks,” observes an 1859 letter written by Juan Aparicio, a local political operative who had undertaken the unenviable task of recruiting these same “lower classes” to support the powerful caudillo Tomás Mosquera’s new National Party. Aparicio tried to explain his failure in this assignment, arguing that “this class of people will not listen to anyone that is not of their party.”1 How had the local Liberal Party—controlled at the national level by wealthy white men—become associated with blacks and the poor in the Cauca region of southwestern Colombia? Or, more to the point, how did Afro-Colombians and other lower-class people transform elite political organizations into “their party”?In the Cauca, Afro-Colombians actively negotiated, bargained, and came to identify with the Liberal Party, seeing it as a means to enter the nation’s public, political life and improve their social and material condition. This alliance would last for roughly three decades, from the late 1840s until the late 1870s. During this time, both popular liberals and party leaders continually negotiated the meanings and terms of this association. This political bargaining arose most powerfully and memorably over the institution of slavery but soon included questions of land, rights, and citizenship. Many of the political transformations and civil wars of this period hinged on the social dynamics engendered by Afro-Colombians’ embrace of popular liberalism, a phenomenon that would significantly democratize Colombian republicanism. Eventually, the fates of Afro-Colombians and the Liberal Party became so closely intertwined that, especially for Conservatives, liberalism and blackness became synonymous.The Afro-Caucanos’ story occurred in both a postcolonial and—as their efforts bore fruit—a postemancipation environment. Perhaps even more directly than Rebecca Scott’s pioneering work revealed for Cuba, in Colombia slaves and freed communities played an important role in abolition.2 This grand effort was intricately linked with Afro-Colombians’ pursuit of full membership in the nation via the medium of popular liberalism.3 People of African descent succeeded in making liberalism their own very early in the century and, for a time, remarkably thoroughly. Ada Ferrer notes the uniqueness of the multiracial armies in Cuba’s wars for independence. Similar armies emerged in Colombia almost half a century earlier, and, although they were not as fully integrated as Cuba’s, they played an equally profound role in Colombia’s national development.4 Along with their compatriots engaged in similar struggles across Latin America, Afro-Colombians were part of a pan-Atlantic movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to contest the meanings of liberalism and republicanism.5 Liberalism, republicanism, and democracy were not only created in the salons and statehouses of London, Paris, and Philadelphia; they were also given life in the streets and surrounding countrysides of Cap François, Havana, and Cali.The alliance that developed between the Cauca’s elite and subaltern liberals involved three dimensions: first, bargaining over the social, economic, and political structures of the region; second, the weight of Afro-Caucanos’ military and political support in the region’s elections and civil wars (which made the Liberal Party unbeatable when it was not internally divided); and third, the confluence of Liberals’ conception of citizenship with Afro-Colombians’ appropriation of that identity. While a full accounting of this story would begin with the wars of independence, the association of the Cauca’s Afro-Colombians and liberalism crystallized in the early 1850s with the emergence of the Liberal Party and the final struggle to abolish the lingering stain of slavery.During the turbulent years of 1850 and 1851, the Afro-Colombians of Cartago (a city in the northern Cauca) gathered at the local Democratic Society— a new, liberal political club—to await the arrival of mail from the capital, anticipating the news that Congress had finally abolished slavery.6 By the summer of 1851, two years after the installation of Liberal president José Hilario López, the Liberal Party seemed ready to fulfill their promises and end the ownership of human bodies in Colombia. The Cartaganos, a mixture of slaves and free, waited to see if the words that continually circulated since the Liberals’ victory— liberty, equality, republic, democracy—would mean anything for them.The Cauca had long been under conservative control, and large haciendas dominated the landscape of the river valley and southern highlands, broken only by Indian resguardos (protected communal landholdings) in the south and the unsettled Quindío hills to the north.7 Afro-Colombians lived along the coast, where gold mining continued to be of import, and in the central valley, working on haciendas and in mines. In the early 1850s, one local geographer estimated that blacks and mulattos constituted 60.4 percent of the region’s population, while the 1851 census reported 34.8 percent.8 A foreign observer thought the Cauca was five-sixths black or mulatto.9 While today people of African descent are often thought of as concentrated in the coastal region, the Cauca Valley was also a center of slaveholding and hosted a large free black and mulatto population.10 By 1850–51 there were 10,621 slaves and over 7,614 children of slaves (who, while nominally free, had to live and serve their parents’ masters until the age of 18 and then had to work for low pay until age 25).11 Indeed, the Cauca, where a majority of the nation’s enslaved toiled, remained the center of slavery in Colombia.12 Conservative hacendados not only owned most of the region’s slaves but also controlled much of the land and commerce as well. Almost all arable land was held in large haciendas, and the remainder was cultivated by mestizo smallholders. Slaves and freedmen thus had little access to land, with the exception of the common lands (ejidos) around some cities such as Cali.13 The hacendado class sought to complete its economic dominance by securing aguardiente (cane liquor) and tobacco monopolies, thus eliminating outside income sources for tenants and sharecroppers.While Afro-Colombians faced many problems, and even if most people of African descent were not slaves, the destruction of the slave system nevertheless defined popular liberals’ goals, actions, and discourse. Although slavery was in decline following independence due to the manumission of many slaves who had fought in the wars, the prohibition of the slave trade by the new national state, and the 1821 law of free birth, the institution was still important, both socially and economically. Afro-Colombians, slave and free, had been struggling since the colonial era to destroy slavery and to secure some economic and political independence, but with limited success.14 During the War of the Supremes (1839– 42), José María Obando (who had been a royalist for much of the wars of independence but would later become a Liberal leader) offered slaves their freedom if they joined his forces.15 Obando was defeated, and conservatives regained control of the Cauca; yet the eagerness of some blacks and mulattos to challenge traditional power relations would not be forgotten.By the late 1840s, middle-class and elite Liberals took renewed notice of their Afro-Colombian neighbors’ anxieties and desires. Elite Liberals in the Cauca were desperate for allies in their struggle against the Conservatives who had traditionally dominated the region’s economy and politics (and were most of the largest slaveholders). Although the Liberals did count on the support of some powerful families, most of their ranks were made up of a few priests, shop-keepers, bureaucrats, lawyers, intellectuals, and smaller landowners.16 While Liberals and Conservatives shared a similar economic agenda (except concerning slavery and monopolies), they differed sharply on the role of the church and conceptions of citizenship.17 In the face of Conservative power, Liberals began to recruit subaltern allies to shore up their precarious situation in the Cauca, with an eye to both the ballot box and the battlefield. Thus, when Manuel María Alaix, a priest affiliated with the Liberal Party, urged President López to abolish slavery, he did not stress humanitarian or economic concerns but rather a political motivation: “The slaves that lose their chains bring to society gratitude for the government that has lifted the yoke off them. . . . The complete extinction of slavery is the magnum opus to which we must consecrate all of our efforts: 27,000 men that become citizens weigh something in the electoral balance.”18Liberals sought to mobilize the region’s plebeians through three broad initiatives: public ceremonies (especially ceremonies of manumission), the national guard, and Democratic Societies. In the colonial period, the church, now allied with Conservatives, had organized most important public events; Liberals sought to open up public space and turn the traditional power of public ceremonies to their advantage. On the one-year anniversary of López’s presidential victory, Cauca’s elite Liberals organized grand festivities that included artillery salutes, music, parades, religious ceremonies, and speeches. Plebeians also participated, especially if they were members of the national guard. The Liberal celebrations thus afforded subalterns a very public role in the social life of the city. Liberals took advantage of their audience, and the centerpiece of these ceremonies left no doubt about the Liberal program concerning the pueblo. In Cali and Buga, the festivals concluded with ceremonies of manumission, during which presumably Liberal masters freed their slaves.19Although undoubtedly Afro-Colombians were not particularly impressed by the freeing of one or two slaves while the majority remained in bondage, the ceremonies did begin to reinforce the association between emancipation and the Liberal Party. As the Juntas de Manumisión (the institutions that oversaw slavery) gained more funds, they freed more slaves, often in a grand ceremony to ensure that Afro-Colombians knew who was responsible for their emancipation. One such spectacle in Cali began with speeches in the Democratic Society and culminated in the central plaza with an emancipation ceremony for 46 slaves. After music and cannon fire, three chosen slaves, each bearing a standard with “liberty,” “equality,” and “fraternity” emblazoned upon it, came forward to a table where the Junta de Manumisión presented them with certificates of freedom. As each new freedman left the table, Liberal women placed a garland of flowers on his or her head.20 A similar public ceremony marked the manumission of 32 slaves in Popayán in October 1850. Afterwards, the libertos marched arm in arm with Liberal officials, shouting “vivas” to the government, while Conservatives looked on with disdain.21 Popayán, the center of the old colonial mining aristocracy and a stronghold of Conservatives and the church, was considered one of the most traditional cities in Colombia. Yet in this bastion of power, built with lucre from mines worked by slaves, whites marched alongside blacks through the town.Liberals also utilized the national guard to disseminate their program. The trainees did not simply learn military lessons but also received, in the words of Liberal governor Ramón Mercado, “doctrinal exercises.”22 Many Afro-Colombians took advantage of this opportunity to gain some small amount of power (trainees often kept their weapons). After emancipation, Conservatives accused Liberals of “indiscriminately” signing up all freedmen into the militia.23 The national guard was doubly important to Liberals as a means of political mobilization: first, it served as a conduit of political education, but more important, it acted as a way of organizing their supporters in the eventuality that politics extended to the battlefield. The national guard was also linked to the most important of Liberal initiatives, the Democratic Societies. Indeed, in order to join Cali’s Democratic Society, one also had to be a member of the guard.These Democratic Societies provided the social space where elite and popular liberals began to form an alliance and share a common, public discourse. The clubs emerged from the 1848 elections, as Liberals adopted a more aggressive campaign style. Adherents of Liberal candidate José Hilario López spoke out about what he would do while in office: both generalities, such as progress and equality, and specifics, such as protecting access to the ejidos. An observer noted that López’s adherents claimed their candidate would “break the chains with which the oligarchy has oppressed the pueblo.”24 This rhetoric could be interpreted in many ways by many people, but such language would have been of particular interest to slaves.During the 1848 elections, Cali’s Liberals founded a society to work for López’s victory. Afterward, the young Liberals expanded the club’s purpose, with an eye to creating a new society out of the colonial past that independence had not fully vanquished. To build this new Colombia they would first need to build new citizens, in order to break the powerful hold centuries of colonial repression had on the minds of the lower classes. They would teach Cali’s poor about their program: about liberalism, republicanism, and democracy. They would make citizens of the masses.25They christened their club the Democratic Society of Cali (after a similar political club founded by artisans in Bogotá) and opened wide its doors, inviting one and all—by which, of course, they meant men. Perhaps to their surprise, and certainly to the surprise of outside observers, plebeians decided to attend. However, unlike in Bogotá, it was not just Cali’s artisans but also the lower classes in general and workers from nearby haciendas who responded.26 Ramón Mercado (a fiery orator and Cali’s appointed governor) noted that the Liberal Party was “composed almost exclusively of the scorned masses.”27 Conservatives delighted in noting that the club and the party, if not a majority Afro-Colombian, certainly counted many blacks and mulattos as members.28 Years later, another Conservative asserted that “blacks . . . are those that make up the democráticas [Democratic Societies] of Buga, Palmira, and Cali.”29The Liberals began a program of political education for the club’s members. Orators expounded on the problems of the day, and the literate read newspapers aloud.30 Every week, middle-class and elite Liberals held courses on the meaning of the constitution, the nature of democracy, the laws concerning elections, and the rights and duties of citizens.31 Soon, lower- and middle-class members also rose to speak, exposing elite Liberals to popular concerns.32While Cali’s Democratic Society was the most active and powerful of the political clubs, Liberals began to found new associations throughout the Cauca, but especially in the valley. By 1851, Liberals had founded clubs in the valley towns of Buga, Candelaria, Cartago (with over 350 members), Cerrito, Florida, Guacarí, Palmira, Roldanillo, San Pedro (with over 160 members), and Toro.33 Florida, Guacarí, and San Pedro were mere hamlets of fewer than three thousand people, demonstrating that Liberals did not only seek alliance with the urban poor.34 In the southern highlands, clubs held meetings in Popayán, Puracé, and Pasto.35The Democratic Societies also provided elites and plebeians with a public space in which to build a shared discourse out of popular and elite ideas concerning republicanism, democracy, and rights. Afro-Colombians had made important gains in the independence wars and subsequent civil conflicts, but Conservative intransigence had prevented them from claiming a place in the Cauca’s political and public life. The Democratic Societies united, under a shared language of republicanism, Afro-Colombians desperate for change with Liberals searching for allies. However, these discursive and imaginative developments only provided the basic terrain upon which elite and popular Liberals negotiated their alliance. The main reason for the Liberals’ success was their willingness to negotiate with their popular allies. Many of the concerns of elite Liberals—abolishing slavery, freeing industry from monopolies, and ending old forms of deference—coincided with those of the valley’s poor.In club meetings, Liberals made promises of what their administration would do and listened to members’ concerns. Governor Mercado wrote to the president to report on the progress he had made in strengthening the Liberal Party and to assure him that the masses were still under control. He urged López to push Congress to pass several key reforms, stressing the need to abolish slavery, increase the importance of the national guard, end monopolies (especially over aguardiente), make the judiciary more fair, “strengthen the principle of equality,” and “procure land and industry for the poor classes.”36 Mercado summed up the Liberal program to win over the popular liberal masses of the central valley, especially Afro-Colombians: aguardiente, land, emancipation, and social equality. Subsequently, national and provincial governments began to pass legislation concerning slavery, monopolies, taxes, and the role of the poor in society and politics in general.The Democratic Societies did not just discuss these problems but also acted to secure political change. From the time of its founding, members of Cali’s Democratic Society heatedly debated the aguardiente monopoly, which either forbade the poor from producing liquor or taxed them for that privilege.37 Many of the valley’s residents, especially poor women, engaged in small-scale aguardiente production and sale; liquor production was of great economic import to landless Afro-Colombians.38 Five hundred of the club’s members signed a petition demanding an end to the monopoly system. They complained not only that the tax hurt “the poor part of the nation” most but also that the violent methods used to enforce it—hired goons who burst into poor women’s homes looking for clandestine stills—violated their “most sacred rights.” The signatories suggested that new taxes should apply to “citizens in proportion to their fortune.”39 The club also called for full citizenship for its members (most of whom, landless or illiterate, were not legal citizens under the 1843 constitution) and pushed for progressive taxation. If petitions failed, plebeians violently resisted the monopolists by sacking warehouses or boycotting licensed stores.40 Urged on by popular agitation, many of the coastal and valley provinces began to eliminate the tax, and the national government followed by terminating the hated tobacco monopoly.41 Along similar lines, Liberals ended many of the harshest statutes concerning vagrancy, which had forced freedmen to work for their old masters.42 The pueblo’s desire to control their own production and livelihoods coincided with the Liberals’ goal of “freedom of industry.”43Although these actions were important, the land question was even more significant to Cauca’s poor subalterns. Their concerns centered on the common lands of Cali, which hacendados had begun to fence in and claim as their own private property. Although Cali’s Democratic Society was generally supportive, progress on the question of these ejidos was slow.44 By 1852, in spite of an agreement to resolve the problem, the measurement of Cali’s ejidos had still not been completed, due to problems with the surveying.45 An official warned that the city should do whatever necessary to resolve “such a hazardous question and thus avoid its becoming the apple of discord that will produce immense problems in the future and engender eternal hatreds.”46 Liberals knew that the ejidos were a problem, yet their ideological program of individual economic liberty had little to say about such an issue. Indeed, Liberals (especially at the national level) generally viewed ejidos as premodern communal landholdings, like Indians’ resguardos, and sought to eliminate them.47 Yet the topic obsessed popular liberals and was apparently under much discussion in the clubs. A Conservative noted that there was much talk among the “plebes” of “the possibility of taking over lands from the current property holders.”48 The liberal newspaper El Pensamiento Popular suggested that any practice that increased inequality was unjust, but anything that aspired “to divide between all men with more equality the common inheritance is divine.”49 Such language raised the hopes of popular liberals, but Liberal leaders had little chance of satisfying subaltern desires, even if that had been their goal. Land would always be the most contentious issue between elite and popular liberals, eventually rupturing the alliance between them. Yet in the early 1850s, in spite of this policy’s complete variance with the Liberal philosophy of individual landholding, many of the valley’s Liberals supported the continued existence of the commons. Popular concerns had forced them to adapt their philosophy in order to satisfy their lower-class allies.Of course, before 1852, the most pressing concern of Afro-Colombians was not land but slavery. As final emancipation stalled in Congress during 1850 and early 1851, it was also the issue which gave elite Liberals the most concern, since it was the centerpiece of their program, both ideologically and as a means of securing alliances with the Afro-Colombians. Congress’s failure to abolish human bondage and the increasing militancy of the valley’s masses worried Liberals with ties to subaltern allies and those sympathetic to the slaves’ plight. These men, such as Governor Mercado, fretted over their position as interlocutors with the pueblo. They had made certain promises, and the people seemed inclined to hold them to their word. Perhaps more importantly, many of the valley’s subalterns were taking the matter into their own hands, violently attacking Conservatives and their property. Mercado and his friends needed something to reassure the masses that progress was being made and that the leaders had not betrayed their followers.Mercado knew that the valley’s residents were particularly anxious about abolition, as they had now been waiting three long years for the Liberal government to act.50 Officials did their best to reassure Afro-Colombians. The popular José María Obando, the rebel leader in the earlier War of the Supremes that had developed some antislavery aspects, spoke in Buga during that town’s anniversary celebration of the Liberals’ ascent to power. A Conservative news-paper mocked the plebeian welcome, noting that “at the entrance to the city a great number of blacks and vagrants” awaited him. The paper sneered that “a loathsome and despicable black woman named la Maravilla” hugged him upon his arrival and further insinuated that la Maravilla entered Obando’s lodging that night. Obando promised the assembly that he was working so that the current Congress would finally abolish slavery.51 President López himself urged Congress to act in March 1851, noting that slaves “craved the liberty so many times sensed in the republican atmosphere.”52The Liberal program was conscious and premeditated, and the party’s plan to ally with the lower classes was not simply the whim of a few middle-class radicals. Although Liberals hoped to unite a substantial section of the poor behind them, they arrogantly viewed Indians as too barbarous and religious for an alliance, and many poor mestizos had close clientalist ties to Conservatives.53 Afro-Colombians, however, already disdained Conservatives, as most (but certainly not all) of the great slaveowners were affiliated with that party. Thus, while Liberals attracted many poor white and mestizo adherents, Afro-Colombians especially embraced and championed popular liberalism. As Alaix’s desire to secure 27,000 loyal voters revealed, Liberals thought if they could take credit for ending slavery, they could secure a large number of allies for future electoral or military struggles.Afro-Colombians did not just passively respond to such entreaties but rather made the Democratic Societies their own and pressured Liberals to act. Elite Liberals could not fully control the political space they had opened. Their popular allies were not content to wait for legislative changes but, rather, seized the initiative to act on their own. They not only encouraged Liberal leaders to enact legal abolition but also challenged social and political subordination to the old master class and pushed for land redistribution and citizenship rights. Conservatives bitterly commented on the decline of respect showed to them by their social inferiors, complaining that plebeians openly insulted them in Cali’s streets.54 Crowds regularly marched through Cali and other towns at night, shouting “vivas” to Liberals and insulting Conservatives.55Popular liberals’ bold aims soon grew beyond insults and shouts. With Liberals now in control of much of the state, popular supporters struck back against the Conservative land- and slaveholding class in an eruption of popular violence known as the zurriago or perrero. The zurriago began with the destruction of fences on Cali’s ejidos, in which as many as one thousand men and women may have participated.56 Soon the movement spread to include attacks on Conservatives and their property throughout the valley. Bands of men, often assumed to be slaves or exslaves, burned haciendas, tore down fences, and assaulted prominent Conservatives and their families, turning upon their former masters the hated symbol of slavery: the whip.57 The hacendado Ramón Orejuela bitterly cried, “We are in the epoch of terror, and our throats are threatened with our slaves’ knives.”58What is surprising about the zurriago is not Conservatives’ horror or their pronouncements that a race war was nigh, but rather the Liberal response. Of course, many Liberals denied having any link with the perreristas, referring to their actions as simply a problem of crime that had no connection with liberalism.59 Others, however, defended the perreristas, framing their attacks as just retribution for centuries of Conservatives’ abuses under slavery.60 Of course, Liberals did seek to rein in the excesses of the zurriago, but they generally did this not by cracking down on the instigators but rather by seeking to redress many of their concerns. Bargaining did not just involve laws or policy but also accepting extralegal actions of allies who could not be completely controlled.Conservatives feared not just the zurriago but also the Liberals’ unseemly politicking with the lower classes.61 In Popayán, Conservatives bemoaned how Liberals worked “to pervert the people of the pueblo” by showing concern and attempting to mollify the masses.62 Referring to the Democratic Societies, Julio Arboleda wrote to his relative, expresident Tomás Mosquera, expressing his bitterness about the new situation—“the spirit of the mob”—in which, in his mind, the two of them would never participate.63 He acknowledged Liberal success but ridiculed popular liberals as “barbarians,” “criminals,” and “blacks that run around armed through the streets of Cali.”64 The cleric Alaix defended the Liberals’ plebeian allies, while issuing a prescient warning to Conservatives about their increasingly open plans to test Liberals in armed struggle. Responding to Arboleda’s slurs, Alaix wrote, “Those manumitted blacks, those ignorant men, are the best national guards that the Republic counts as members, because they will not flee on the day of danger.”65 The following year would prove Alaix correct.With abolition apparently nigh and popular liberals’ insolence and attacks intolerable, Conservatives revolted. They had high hopes, given the elite support they enjoyed throughout the region and their dominance of Caucano politics and society since independence. However, they were sorely disappointed. The reaction of the valley’s plebeians was amazing, even to the most dedicated Liberals.66 Popular liberals rallied to their party’s standard with a zeal that shocked most observers in the valley.Liberals made sure that their popular allies knew the Conservative rebels’ designs: namely, to roll back all the gains of the past few years. The newspaper of Cali’s Democratic Society claimed that Conservative rebels wanted to eliminate plebeians from politics and ensure that tobacco and aguardiente remained monopolies. They added that all the rebels were slaveholders.67 Provincial governor J. N. Montero noted that “the blacks knew that the revolution had, in part, the object of impeding their liberty, and they let it be known that they were ready at any moment to go and fight for their freedom and that of their children.”68 He added that blacks along the coast offered money and supplies to support the troops fighting the Conservatives in Pasto and Obando Provinces.69Liberal volunteers quickly assembled as rumors of the revolt spread. When the call went out to defend the government, the response was quick: two thousand men assembled in Cali, six hundred in Palmira, five hundred in Santander, and two hundred in Celandia.70 The areas where Afro-Colombians lived—areas where the zurriago had raged and where Liberals’ promises regarding the ending of slavery, monopolies, and traditional power relations held the most appeal—provided the most volunteers. Mercado noted that the “Democratic Societies serve as the base for the organization of the national guards.”71 Liberal armies easily defeated the rebels and then sent soldiers north to put down the revolt in the neighbor