The Transition to Free Labour in Puerto Rico: Class, Race and Politics in a Nineteenth-Century Colony

Abstract

This article analyses the abolition of slavery and the transition to free labour in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, seeking to understand the terms and timing of Puerto Rican abolition and the nature of society in its wake. Especially important in Puerto Rico, it argues, was the intertwined nature of slavery and other forms of forced labour as well as the predominance of foreign merchants and planters in the island's economy, which created multi-class alliances between working-class Puerto Ricans and creole elites. These class dynamics interacted with events in the metropole to influence the terms of labour on the island.

La transición hacia el trabajo libre en puerto rico: clase, raza y política en una colonia del siglo xix

Este artículo analiza la abolición de la esclavitud y la transición al trabajo libre a fines del siglo XIX en Puerto Rico, con el propósito de entender los términos y la temporalidad de la abolición puertorriqueña y las características de la sociedad tras la abolición. Especialmente importante en Puerto Rico, se argumenta, fue la naturaleza interrelacionada de la esclavitud y otras formas de trabajo forzado así como la predominancia de comerciantes y hacendados extranjeros en la economía de la isla, lo cual creó alianzas multiclase entre la clase obrera puertorriqueña y las élites criollas. Estas dinámicas de clase interactuaron con eventos en la metrópoli para influir sobre las condiciones de trabajo en la isla.

A transição para o trabalho livre em porto rico: classe, raça e política em uma colônia do século xix

Este artigo analisa a abolição da escravatura e a transição para o trabalho livre em Porto Rico no final do século 19, buscando entender os termos e o momento da abolição porto-riquenha e a natureza da sociedade que a seguiu. Especialmente importante em Porto Rico foi a natureza entrelaçada da escravidão e outras formas de trabalho forçado, bem como a predominância de mercadores e plantadores estrangeiros na economia da ilha, que criou alianças multi-classe entre a classe trabalhadora porto-riquenha e as elites crioulas. Essas dinâmicas de classe interagiram com os acontecimentos da metrópole para influenciar os termos de trabalho na ilha.

Upon visiting Puerto Rico in 1834, George Dawson Flinter, a liberal Irish-born officer in the Spanish army, expressed optimism about the prospects of the abolition of slavery on the island. ‘Three-fourths of the produce consumed in and exported from the island’, Flinter claimed, ‘is cultivated by free labour … The friends of human nature, the friends of rational liberty, the advocates for the prudent emancipation of the West India slaves, must rejoice in the triumph of this practical experiment of free labour.’¹ Thirty-three years later, in 1867, Ernest l’Épine, a liberal civil servant at the French Cour des Comptes, wrote a similarly enthusiastic account of the systems of labour on the island. After visiting Puerto Rico as part of a trip to the Caribbean in the capacity of ‘delegate to the island of Cuba’, l’Épine wrote that Puerto Rico's free people of colour were ‘hardworking’, and that the island had more or less ‘resolved the problem of slavery in substituting forced labour with free labour little by little, without shocks, without disorder’.²

Flinter and l’Épine's arguments, though written three decades apart, expressed a common enthusiasm for Puerto Rico as a showcase of ‘free labour’ in a post-emancipation world. Both authors suggested that slavery was likely to die a natural death sooner there than in other bastions of the institution (the West Indies for Flinter, Brazil and Cuba for l’Épine). The inevitability of a more gradual abolition process in Puerto Rico was a concept that carried into academic studies well into the twentieth century, including in the works of data-driven economic and social history that characterised the field in both Puerto Rico and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Among the arguments that were marshalled were that the expansion of European beet production in the 1850s put productivity pressures on Puerto Rican sugar production that made slavery on the island unprofitable; that abolition was the result of a low-tech plantation sector reaching inherent contradictions as its territorial expansion exhausted itself; and that rapid population growth on the island during the nineteenth century provided an abundant supply of cheap labour that made slavery unnecessary for plantation profitability.³

These works of social history on abolition in Puerto Rico, both in the mainland United States and in the ‘Nueva Historia’ movement on the island,⁴ provided refreshing perspectives on everyday life and social structures. However, scholars came to challenge two key aspects of these studies’ assumptions. The first was the notion that slavery in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, at least in its sugar industry, was unprofitable. In his seminal work on the plantation economy of the southern municipality of Ponce, for example, Francisco Scarano demonstrated not only that Puerto Rican sugar plantations were profitable well into mid-century, but also that profits were based on a particularly intensive exploitation of enslaved labour.⁵ In fact, although Puerto Rican sugar production did eventually begin to stagnate in the 1880s and 1890s in the face of tough international competition and lower prices, sugar exports actually peaked in value in 1878/9 – five years after abolition.⁶ The second major flaw of the early social history was its implication that it was mainly economic and demographic factors, rather than political struggles, that led to abolition. Quite to the contrary, historians like Laird Bergad and Christopher Schmidt-Nowara have demonstrated that on the eve of abolition Puerto Rico was the site both of complex class conflicts and of a strong transatlantic abolitionist current.⁷

Despite several decades of advances in the historiography, the endeavour of explaining the social forces behind Puerto Rican abolition and the subsequent transition to free labour is still incomplete. In part, this is due to a tendency for studies to divide regionally along the coast–interior lines of the two agricultural export economies prominent on the island in the mid and late nineteenth century, sugar and coffee. Corresponding to this agroecological divide was a social one: Puerto Rico was unique in the Caribbean in the success of the colonial government in systematically coercing free peasants, including those categorised as ‘white’, into plantation labour through a passbook system, the libreta, which was implemented in 1849 and abolished along with slavery in 1873. Relatively few studies focus specifically on this passbook system itself,⁸ and since slavery was more predominant in coastal sugar areas while libreta labour was more dominant in the coffee areas of the interior, there has been a tendency for studies of the abolition of slavery to focus solely on sugar areas, while studies of the coffee sector focus on the libreta.⁹

There is a need, then, for an analysis of abolition in Puerto Rico which examines both the intersection of internal and transatlantic struggles, and the intersection of slavery and the libreta. How did those subjected to enslavement and the libreta interact to influence the timing and outcome of abolition? How did their struggles intersect with those of elite creole abolitionists described by scholars like Schmidt-Nowara? And finally, how did social struggles around abolition carry into the post-abolition world, where former libreta and enslaved workers had to negotiate the terms of labour in a now ‘free’ market?

This study follows in the footsteps of others that have taken similar perspectives on abolition struggles in different parts of Afro-Latin America. Scholars like Anne Eller and Andrew Walker have examined the complex long-term social and political reverberations of the Haitian Revolution,¹⁰ and Sidney Chalhoub's work on the ‘precarity’ and ‘ambiguity’ of freedom in Brazil echoes the emphasis taken here on moving the study of (un)free labour beyond just the abolition of slavery itself.¹¹ Closer to the time and place studied here, Rebecca Scott has analysed the effects of complex class struggles involving the enslaved and formerly enslaved, as well as small farmers and peasants squeezed by sugar capitalism, on the movement against Spanish colonialism in late nineteenth-century Cuba.¹²

This article argues that, in order to understand the terms and timing of Puerto Rican abolition and the nature of society in its wake, we must examine the complex class dynamics of the island and the ways these intersected with social struggles and political shifts in the metropole. The argument proceeds as follows. The first section outlines the development of a plantation system on the island in the first half of the nineteenth century. The second section uses documents of Puerto Rico's rural police and published communications of the colonial government and the press to paint a picture of political struggles surrounding the abolition of forced labour in 1873. The final section fast-forwards to the US occupation in 1898, examining working conditions and labour resistance as documented in hearings and testimony compiled by the new colonial authorities. All of these sections suggest that abolition and post-abolition society in Puerto Rico were fundamentally shaped by the struggles of an emerging multiracial working class, often in alliance with the creole petty bourgeoisie. These two emerging class forces took advantage of shifts in the colonial metropole to advance a general agenda of free labour, greater political freedom, higher wages and better working conditions.

Puerto Rican Plantation Society: Slavery, Libreta and the Foreign Plantation Elite

In the eighteenth century, Puerto Rico was on the periphery of the Spanish empire. Rural production focused mainly on the rearing of livestock and food crops. Direct trade with Spain and other Spanish American colonies was legally prohibited, but a flourishing contraband trade existed through which Puerto Rico supplied draught animals, meat, hides and food crops to the slave-based sugar economies of the non-Hispanic Caribbean.¹³

Agricultural production on the island was organised mainly on large cattle ranches, or hatos, as well as smaller productive units, or estancias. The hatos were collectively owned, often by several family groups, and were not subdivided through inheritance.¹⁴ In this context, there were relatively ample opportunities for the island's multiracial and mostly free population to survive as independent peasants. Often, they settled on abundant Crown lands without property titles, or lived as dependants (agregados) on the lands of other settlers, tending their cattle in profit-sharing arrangements and planting subsistence crops.¹⁵

Slavery in Puerto Rico during this period did not resemble the institution in the sugar plantation economies of the non-Hispanic Caribbean. First of all, the enslaved rarely worked in large concentrations.¹⁶ In the northern agricultural community of Arecibo between 1708 and 1764, for example, 70 per cent of the enslaved lived in households where there were three or fewer enslaved people. Unlike in other parts of the Caribbean, where the extreme conditions of sugar slavery resulted in high mortality rates that exceeded birth rates among the enslaved, in the eighteenth century there was natural growth among the enslaved population in Puerto Rico. Analysing parish birth and death records, David Stark finds that in 1790 the birth rate among the enslaved was 4.1/100, while the death rate was 1.8/100.¹⁷ In contrast, evidence from Jamaica suggests birth rates of around 2.3/100 and death rates of 2.6/100 among the enslaved population – that is, natural decrease – even in the nineteenth century, after the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire.¹⁸

Starting in the late eighteenth century, however, Puerto Rico experienced rapid agricultural commercialisation and immigration, both encouraged by the colonial authorities. In 1765, the Spanish authorities instituted a policy of ‘free commerce’, which expanded the prospects for direct trade with peninsular Spain.¹⁹ Between that year and 1800, the population of the island exploded, from 45,000 to 155,000.²⁰ In the early nineteenth century, the Haitian Revolution and the Spanish American wars of independence, which drastically interrupted the flow of commodity exports to Europe, redirected the impetus of commercial agriculture toward Puerto Rico. From about 5,000 acres in 1814, the amount of land planted in sugar cane on the island doubled to 11,000 acres in 1830 before skyrocketing to 55,000 in 1862.²¹

What were the impacts of this economic transformation on the class structure of the island? Three major effects are of note. First of all, there was a rapid expansion in the number of enslaved people on the island, which increased from 13,000 in 1802 to a peak of 51,000 in 1846.²² Importantly, the percentage of enslaved people within Puerto Rico's total population did not increase during this period; in fact, during the century between 1776 and the abolition of slavery on the island in 1873, the percentage of enslaved people in the total population of Puerto Rico actually fluctuated relatively little, reaching a high of about 12 per cent in 1834 and a low of 6 per cent on the eve of abolition.²³ This proportion was small when compared to the other quintessential cases of nineteenth-century Latin American plantation slavery, Cuba and Brazil; around 1820, enslaved people constituted 40 per cent of Cuba's population and a third of Brazil's.²⁴

However, the nature of slavery in Puerto Rico did change. Whereas in the eighteenth century enslaved people usually lived in small groups – often in households with only one enslaved person – and were inserted into the livestock ranching economy of the time, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a true plantation complex developed that employed the labour of large groups of enslaved people. Slave labour on Puerto Rico's nineteenth-century sugar plantations was particularly intensive; Scarano estimates that productivity per worker in Ponce's large sugar plantations might have been three times as high as on French and British plantations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.²⁵ Moreover, whereas in the eighteenth century Puerto Rico's enslaved population had been overwhelmingly made up of creoles,²⁶ in the nineteenth century the percentage of African-born people in the total enslaved population increased significantly. Scarano estimates that, by 1838, more than half of Ponce's 3,341 enslaved people were African-born.²⁷ Similarly, Pedro San Miguel finds that in 1841 there were 342 African-born enslaved people working on the sugar haciendas of the northern community of Vega Baja versus only 58 creoles.²⁸ Particularly in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, a burgeoning contraband trade supplied plantations with enslaved workers from Africa.²⁹

A second salient feature that emerged from the economic transformation of Puerto Rico in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the composition of the planter class. The island's nineteenth-century plantation boom never produced a creole elite that even remotely rivalled those of Cuba, Brazil or eighteenth-century Saint Domingue. In 1845, of 86 sugar hacendados (plantation owners) in the prosperous southern port of Ponce, only 22 were Puerto Rican-born. In contrast, 18 were peninsular Spaniards, 15 were French (including those from the former Saint Domingue and the French West Indies), eight were Dutch, German or British and nine were from the former colonies of Spanish South America. (The remainder were of US or unknown origin). Peninsular Spaniards, and particularly Catalans, were especially dominant in the merchant circles surrounding the plantation economy, were relatively endogamous, and often had connections to government officials.³⁰ The situation in highland coffee production was essentially similar. Here, although hacendados were more likely to be creoles, capital was also controlled by foreign merchants. In 1848, 75 per cent of the merchant capital in the highland coffee municipality of Lares was controlled by non-creoles.³¹ Non-creole dominance of the plantation economy distinguished Puerto Rico from the two bastions of nineteenth-century plantation slavery in Latin America, Brazil and Cuba, in which there were more powerful domestic planter classes controlling the commanding heights of production.³²

The third major result of the plantation boom in Puerto Rico was that the peasant subsistence economy that existed relatively unperturbed in the eighteenth century began to be encroached upon. In 1819, the colonial authorities created the Junta Superior de Terrenos Baldíos (Supervisory Board on Vacant Lands) to distribute land titles and encourage agricultural production. For landless peasants, this made the process for obtaining land titles more onerous; it now required travelling to the capital, San Juan, to obtain the title, and could involve years of delays.³³

The colonial authorities also began to use various measures to coerce peasants into market dependency, either as direct producers for the market or as wage labourers. Foremost of these were anti-vagrancy laws. Evidently, such laws had already begun to take effect in the 1820s. For example, between 1824 and 1827, the number of agregados almost tripled, from about 14,000 to 39,000³⁴ – these agregados, now forced into dependent relationships with titled landowners, likely had formerly been peasant squatters. Throughout the nineteenth century, the colonial government issued ‘Bandos de Buen Gobierno’, or public ordinances, that placed increasingly strict requirements on ‘free’ people to enter wage-labour or dependent farming arrangements if not entitled to land. The Bando of 1824 contained one of the first such ordinances, in which the governor called ‘particularly on the town councils [ayuntamientos] and other judges [to] prosecute idleness, seeking that all should live from their labour, and rounding up all loafers and beggars’.³⁵ More explicit vagrancy laws were passed in 1832, 1833 and 1834, while the first effort to regulate the work of jornaleros, or wage labourers, as a particular category came in the Bando of 1838.³⁶

However, large landowners continued to complain of labour shortages in Puerto Rico in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly given the success of British efforts to curtail the Atlantic slave trade. The main complaint was one of ‘mucha población, pocos trabajadores’ – many people, but few workers.³⁷ The result was the promulgation, in 1849, of the infamous ‘Reglamento de Jornaleros’. The Reglamento required any free man over the age of 16 who, ‘for lack of capital or industry, needs to employ himself in the service of another', including any who owned land but not enough to ‘cover his necessities', to work for a wage, either for a private employer or, if one was not forthcoming, on public works. Municipalities were required to keep registers of jornaleros in their area, updated yearly, and to issue jornaleros a libreta, or passbook, in which employers would record their work and behaviour. A poor reputation as a labourer (‘malos antecedentes') would be punished by six months’ work at half pay. Failure to have the libreta accessible for inspection could be punished by labour on public works at half pay for eight days. Neighbourhood commissioners (comisarios de barrio) were to report monthly to the local judicial authorities (the Justicia local) on the number of unemployed jornaleros.³⁸

The Reglamento had a rapid effect on Puerto Rican society. While the coffee-producing highlands came to rely the most on jornalero labour in the decades following the promulgation of the law, there was also a rapid shift to the employment of jornaleros on sugar plantations. By 1864, there were more than four times as many jornaleros as enslaved persons in the coffee town of Utuado and ten times as many in the town of Lares.³⁹ Meanwhile, whereas in 1845 80 per cent of the labour force on Ponce's sugar haciendas was enslaved, by 1869 this had decreased to 50 per cent.⁴⁰

The importance of the libreta regime – a form of class struggle from above – cannot be overemphasised, particularly when taken in comparative context. Forms of coerced labour other than slavery certainly existed in other parts of the plantation world in the nineteenth century. Both Brazil and Cuba imported significant numbers of immigrant labourers, often indentured, in response to the rapidly declining availability of enslaved Africans in the mid to late nineteenth century.⁴¹ What set the libreta apart as a system of coerced labour, as Sidney Mintz argues, is that ‘unlike the other cases [of plantation slavery], it involved the deliberate and systematic disenfranchisement of free white citizens, in the nineteenth century and before emancipation, who then joined enslaved Africans in doing the most onerous and debased labor’.⁴² Here the ‘objective’ factor of geography was probably important. Puerto Rico was large enough, and land plentiful enough, that an ample supply of cheap wage labour for planters was not forthcoming. But it was also small enough that – unlike in Cuba or Brazil – peasants, if coerced into wage labour, could not easily resist pressures by fleeing to a frontier.⁴³

Not all peasants impacted by the jornalero law became jornaleros, at least initially. Many were able to become direct producers, either as arrendatarios or as proprietors. Whereas in Utuado there were 840 jornaleros registered in 1849–50, immediately following the promulgation of the Reglamento, by 1853 this had decreased to 131 jornaleros, 108 mozos de labor (resident employees of an hacienda) and 146 arrendatarios, while the number of proprietors increased from 479 in 1848 to 922 in 1855. There also seems to have been a trend toward the fragmentation of property. The percentage of land in farms of less than 100 acres increased significantly from 15 per cent in 1833, before the jornalero law, to 26 per cent in 1866.⁴⁴ A similar trend was evident in Lares, where the percentage of land held in farms of less than 20 acres increased gradually from just 1.7 per cent in 1836 to 10.4 per cent in 1885.⁴⁵

Nevertheless, over the decades following the Reglamento, the number of jornaleros multiplied. As Fernando Picó explains, the main reason was that peasants lost title to their lands through bankruptcy. In coffee regions, the economy was highly commercialised and the market moved quickly, so producers often took on credit that they were unable to repay. Moreover, land taxes had to be paid in cash, which forced peasants to enter market relations. This was also a source of bankruptcy, especially when the authorities began to crack down on tax collection around 1868, resulting in a spike in bankruptcies.⁴⁶

The statistics given so far paint a rather fragmented picture of class structure on the island in the wake of the economic boom. The Spanish Census of 1860, which was also taken in Puerto Rico, provides a useful overall picture of class categories on the island roughly a decade after the implementation of the libreta system and 13 years before abolition. The total population was found to be just short of 600,000, of whom 41,738 were enslaved, 241,037 were categorised as free people of colour, and 300,406 as ‘white’.⁴⁷ The Census provides data on professional categories among free people on the island by race, categorising the employed as either ‘blancos’ or ‘de color’ (see Table 1). The total number of people for whom a profession was recorded – 80,680 blancos and 54,845 de color – was considerably lower than the total population recorded in each racial category. However, the resulting ratio of ‘employed’ to total population (22 per cent) was not far outside the range in Spain's peninsular provinces, in which the figure varied widely from less than 30 per cent to more than 60 per cent.⁴⁸

Table 1. Professions, Puerto Rico, 1860

Source: ‘Profesiones, artes y oficios (Puerto Rico y Cuba)’, in Junta General de Estadística, Censo de la población de España: https://www.ine.es/inebaseweb/pdfDispacher.do?td=192527&ext=.pdf

Several trends are of note from the 1860 data in Table 1. The inequality between whites and free people of colour seems to have been concentrated in two areas. Whites essentially monopolised government positions and liberal professions: virtually all of the clergy, public employees, military personnel and teachers were white. At the other end of the class hierarchy, people of colour were significantly more likely to be jornaleros (39.7 per cent) than were whites (23.3 per cent). To put it another way, people of colour constituted just over half (54 per cent) of all jornaleros, despite making up less than half of the total free population. However, there seems to have been more equality in what we might call the ‘middle’ sections of free society: in the percentage of propietarios (11 per cent of whites vs. 8.3 per cent of people of colour), labradores (21.6 per cent vs. 17.6 per cent), and industriales (1.08 per cent vs. 0.93 per cent).

Puerto Rico thus developed a distinct class structure between the Reglamento of 1849 and abolition in 1873. A sizeable enslaved population continued to work on the island's plantations, and people of colour were more likely to be jornaleros than were whites. However, Puerto Rican class structure was also defined by both a multiracial mass of dispossessed and coerced labourers and a multiracial middle class of small farmers, proprietors, small-scale manufacturers and merchants. These latter aspects of Puerto Rican society were to play a key role in the struggles surrounding abolition and the transition to ‘free’ labour.

Abolition: Struggles Align in the Colony and the Metropole, 1868–73

The importance of two aspects of Puerto Rican plantation society – a non-creole plantation and merchant elite and a coerced labour force not entirely composed of enslaved persons – became clear between 1868 and 1873, a period marked by social turbulence on the island. These two factors produced a multi-class alliance – between a marginalised creole petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and enslaved and libreta workers on the other – against the intertwined forces of peninsular political oppression and foreign economic dominance, both of which were seen by the enslaved and jornaleros as the source of labour coercion. The political programme of this alliance, expressed as either independentism or liberal reformism, held a common set of ‘reforms’ in mind: more political power, an expansion of suffrage, greater civil liberties and the abolition of forced labour.

It is important to note that, although conservative Spanish officials – who provide the main sources available – portrayed all working people and people of colour (regardless of class) as a monolithic mass to be swayed by liberal or independentist radicals, the former acted with clear agency during the turbulence of the 1860s and 1870s. Already in 1866 British consular officials on the island were noting that the abolition of slavery in the United States had created a ‘general feeling’ that abolition was on the horizon. This ‘feeling’ was not lost on the enslaved. ‘Between the slaves themselves’, the British vice-consul in Mayagüez noted in February of that year, ‘there is a common belief that they are already liberated by the government in Spain, but that the Authorities here keep the corresponding Royal Decree’.⁴⁹ This was more than a simple ‘belief’, however. Six months later in that same year, police in Mayagüez reported an insurrection on hacienda Restauración, where the enslaved had risen against overseers and beaten them.⁵⁰ Given that scholars have noted the relative rarity of such open insurrection under slavery, particularly when compared with the post-abolition period,⁵¹ the timing of this event suggests that the enslaved were well aware of political tension in the atmosphere and that many were not willing to wait passively for freedom.

This tension reached breaking point in 1868, a pivotal year for both Puerto Rico and the Spanish empire as a whole. On 23 September, somewhere between 600 and 1,000 men, including jornaleros and enslaved workers, led by creole coffee hacendados, overran the town of Lares. They took peninsular merchants as prisoners, confiscated their property and declared Puerto Rico an independent republic. In addition to burning libretas, the rebels declared free any enslaved person who joined the cause, but – notably – did not actually proclaim the abolition of slavery during the course of the (relatively brief) revolt. We may wonder why: were they intending to do so upon victory (and so were simply concerned at that moment with adding soldiers to their cause)? Or was there was a deeper suspicion among the landowners who led the revolt as to the implications of abolition? Either way, a certain contradiction was evident in the revolt itself. The uprising was clearly under the control of landed elites, some of whom were enslavers. Yet even if it was led by creole landowners, the revolt still inverted social hierarchies; one disgruntled merchant, for example, would later take care to note that hundreds of the rebels confiscating peninsular goods during the revolt were ‘colored’.⁵²

The Lares revolt for independence was a product of the unique nature of Puerto Rican plantation society. On the one hand, the resentment of creole elites toward merchant capital, to which they were heavily indebted, helped fuel the revolt. On the other, a perception of the Reglamento as a peninsular invention, as well as the traditional patron–client relations that resident creole landowners maintained with their peones (wage labourers resident on agricultural estates) – in contrast to foreign merchants, who were urban, socially endogamous and maintained links with Europe – helped garner the creole landowners’ support among the working classes in the revolt.⁵³

The so-called ‘Grito de Lares’ (‘Cry of Lares’) was followed by state repression, which placed liberals and independentists alike under suspicion. The conservative governor of the island, José Laureano Sanz, installed two new repressive apparatuses: a rural police force, the Guardia Civil, and a military corps of volunteers, the Voluntarios.⁵⁴ Yet conservative peninsular repression could only go so far: the year 1868 saw not only the Grito de Lares, but also the Glorious Revolution in Spain, where liberals toppled Queen Isabel II and replaced her with the Italian prince Amadeo of Savoy.⁵⁵ The Revolution had important ramifications for Puerto Rico. In 1870, the Spanish Cortes passed the Moret Law, which declared all children born to enslaved mothers in Cuba and Puerto Rico after 1868 to be free once they reached adulthood.⁵⁶ In 1869, Puerto Rico held its first elections since 1836 and was allowed to send deputies to the Spanish Cortes. The elections were followed by the enactment of a new constitution and electoral law for Spain in 1869, which expanded the franchise. As a result, whereas only 3,718 people were eligible to vote in the Puerto Rican elections of 1869, which handed the Conservatives an easy victory, in June 1871 this increased to 19,789, out of a total population of 650,000, of whom 15,940 actually voted – still a small number, but a significant change. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the expansion of suffrage, the Liberals swept the elections.⁵⁷

Peninsular colonial officials were alarmed. In July 1871, the Regente of Puerto Rico's colonial Audiencia wrote an indignant letter to the Spanish minister in charge of the affairs of the overseas provinces, the Ministro de Ultramar. He claimed that since the provincial and Cortes elections the previous month, ‘conducted for the most part by blacks and mulattoes, many of whom were taught to write for the event, the Island began to feel an effervescence that gave a sense of the proximity of some conflict’. Several days prior, the popular classes of San Juan had gathered in a ‘comparsa de máscaras’ – a traditional masked ball – and the energies of the crowd had turned violent, with people throwing rocks at the military marching band and at the windows of peninsular-owned businesses. The government had declared a lockdown and the unrest had taken two hours to quell. The Regente was adamant – no doubt with a considerable dose of exaggeration aimed at the metropolitan authorities – that these events continued the work of the Lares revolutionaries. He insisted that anti-Spanish propaganda in Puerto Rico was worse than in Cuba, where he had lived for 15 years – with the only difference that Puerto Rico lacked ‘the high, impenetrable mountains’ in which the Cuban revolutionaries could hide. If full political freedoms were granted to the island, he warned, ‘Independence will be gained on its own, surely, and will be followed by the immolation of the Spaniards by that semi-savage phalanx of blacks and mulattoes’, the ‘docile instruments of the so-called liberals’.⁵⁸

The unrest in San Juan described by the Regente would come to be called the ‘Motín de las Pedradas’ – literally, ‘the stone-throwing riot’.⁵⁹ It is important to note the Regente's connection of the events to the elections of the previous months. Given that free people of colour and the enslaved combined made up just over half of Puerto Rico's population at the time, it is unlikely that ‘blacks and mulattoes’, as defined by patterns of racialisation on the island, made up the majority of the electorate in the elections of 1871 as the Regente claimed. What is likely, however, is that the expansion of suffrage that followed the events of 1868 brought free men of colour to the polls – perhaps the more modest proprietors, merchants and artisans who qualified under the still-restricted franchise – who had hitherto been excluded from political participation, and who helped sweep the Partido Liberal Reformista (Liberal Reformist Party) to victory.⁶⁰ Free people of colour – at least those who were members of the creole petty bourgeoisie – were participating in politics in a way never seen before, and they were evidently throwing their support behind the Liberals.

This tense atmosphere continued in the years leading up to abolition. A few months later, in September 1871, rural police in the town of Ciales, in a report to their superiors regarding a dance attended by ‘those of the so-called second class’ where the crowd had turned violent and beaten several policemen, repeatedly emphasised the mayor's ‘complete indifference’ toward their efforts to find the guilty parties.⁶¹ Evidently, the Guardia Civil fretted over a perceived friendliness toward popular revolt among creole elites. One final major recorded outbreak in the run-up to abolition was particularly revealing of the complex social cleavages running through the island at the time. In early February 1873, members of the Guardia Civil repressed what they claimed was a planned insurrection in the northwestern town of Camuy, based at the home of local landowner Cayetano Estrella. The commander on watch in the town on the night of the 14th claimed that there were some 150 to 200 insurgents at Estrella's house that night – armed with machetes and shouting ‘Viva Puerto Rico libre’ (‘Long live free Puerto Rico’) and ‘Muera España’ (‘Death to Spain’) – and that he had been able to repress them only with reinforcements totalling 22 men, leaving three insurgents dead and one Guardia wounded.⁶²

The conservative press was quick to sensationalise the event, thereafter referred to as the ‘Estrellada’. The Boletín Mercantil called it a repeat of Lares. Liberal newspapers – including El Progreso, La España Radical, La Razón and Don Simplicio – quickly cried foul. Cayetano Estrella and his family had been framed, having received an anonymous threat several days before. Preparing for attack, Estrella had gathered family, friends and ‘various of his peones’ to defend the house on the night of the 14th. ‘The greatest fatality for our Party’, the Liberals complained, ‘is the mantle covering the events of Lares and the heavy load [excessive importance] that has been attributed to the … Pedradas of July’.⁶³ Twentieth-century historical interpretations of the event argue – although most rely on press accounts and few, if any, on police documents – that the Estrellada was at least clear evidence of the tense atmosphere between ‘Liberals’ and ‘Conservatives’ in the run-up to abolition, and probably an event orchestrated by the Guardia Civil and their reactionary planter allies in Arecibo to give metropolitan officials the illusion of disorder and stall a perceptibly imminent abolition process.⁶⁴

Understanding the events of the Estrellada requires context about the town of Camuy and Cayetano Estrella himself. Camuy was a marginal municipality dominated by subsistence agriculture rather than plantations, and it provided cattle and food products to the neighbouring plantation city of Arecibo. It was also the Puerto Rican municipality with the most dispersed distribution of land and where the highest percentage of the population owned some land – most often small plots of 5 to 20 acres. If it is true that Arecibo reactionaries plotted the Estrellada, Camuy would make sense as a locale. It was where the Grito de Lares had initially been planned to take place. Liberals were the dominant force in local politics, and, as in Lares, indebtedness, in this case particularly to merchants in Arecibo, was common.⁶⁵ In fact, as historian Astrid Cubano Iguina has noted, peninsular immigrant merchants – Basques, Catalans and others – were particularly prominent in Arecibo's nineteenth-century plantation economy, including at the time of the Estrellada.⁶⁶

In this milieu Estrella was something of an exception. He was actually from neighbouring Santo Domingo, emigrating in the wake of the unification of Hispaniola under Haitian forces in 1822. Estrella was a large landowner by the neighbourhood's standards: by 1860, he already owned over 150 acres in Camuy, mostly in pasture, and 11 enslaved people (six of whom were small children); by 1867, he claimed 240 acres. On the other hand, Estrella had been involved in local politics as a liberal; his status as a rancher, not a planter, more closely resembled the stereotypical profile of the eighteenth-century creole elite, and it seems he had got into legal trouble with peninsular officials before.⁶⁷

This was the man who in 1873 – at 80 years old, no less – would be a radical independentist according to reactionaries and, in the eyes of ‘Liberals’, a victim of a plot to stall the abolition of slavery. Regardless of which account is empirically correct, Estrella's place in the story seems contradictory. Yet it makes sense if we see Puerto Rico in the late 1860s and early 1870s as the site of a complex set of class conflicts – between creole debtors and foreign creditors, between workers and planters, between creole landowners and peninsular officials – as well as of multi-class alliances. As a small-scale slaveholder, it is not difficult to believe that Estrella might have been more resentful of creditors in Arecibo than he was intent on perpetuating the institution of slavery. On the other hand, regardless of whether Estrella was a fully-fledged abolitionist or not, enslaved workers and peones might have holed up in his house not simply out of a sense of patrimonial deference, but also out of a clear interest in promised ‘reforms’, especially the abolition of slavery and, perhaps, of the libreta.

The balance in the tensions of 1868–73 would be shaken precisely during the week of the Estrellada. On 17 February, the governor of the island made a proclamation regarding the restoration of order after the confusing events of the previous days, signing off with ‘¡Viva España! ¡Viva el Rey!’ (‘Long live Spain! Long live the King!’)⁶⁸ Evidently, he had not yet received the news that, six days previously, King Amadeo had abdicated and radical liberals had declared the First Spanish Republic.⁶⁹ Social struggles finally aligned on the island and the peninsula. In March and April, Puerto Rico saw the extension of numerous reforms, including the legal protection of freedom of the press and association, an expansion of suffrage and, most importantly, the abolition of slavery.⁷⁰

After Abolition: Class Struggle and Alliances at US Occupation

The abolition process in Puerto Rico, as outlined in the law of March 1873, was supposed to be gradual and indemnified. The law required the formerly enslaved, or libertos, to find employment until 1876 and allowed them to change their contract only with the permission of their employer during that period; it also offered to compensate enslavers for the freedom of the formerly enslaved.⁷¹ However, both indemnification and the practice of forcing libertos to contract for three years met limited success. In April 1873, the Republic installed Rafael Primo de Rivera as governor of the island.⁷² Primo de Rivera was a radical liberal; while not friendly to collective bargaining, he took seriously the concept of freedom of contract. In a letter to the Marquis of Salisbury, British Consul Charles Bidwell would note retrospectively in 1879 that Primo de Rivera did not enforce the policy of forced contracting for libertos.⁷³ In July of 1873, Primo de Rivera went further, abolishing the libreta.⁷⁴

How did libertos and former libreta workers negotiate the terms of ‘free labour’ in the wake of abolition? Libertos seem in many cases to have been particularly well placed to exert their power in the labour market. Many had acquired skills in sugar milling under slavery that libreta labourers had not because the latter ‘refused’ to work in the mills. Libertos were also disproportionally represented among paleros – technicians who surveyed the slopes of sugar-growing terrains and maintained irrigation systems – as well among other artisan professions linked to the sugar industry, such as carpenters and masons.⁷⁵

Existing evidence suggests that prevailing daily wages in the immediate post-abolition period – the mid-1870s – ranged from about 50 to 65 cents,⁷⁶ depending on the area and on workers’ age, gender and skills.⁷⁷ Bergad finds that in 1873 libertos in the coffee plantations of Lares were paid 5–7 pesos a month – less than libertos in sugar regions, but likely compensated by non-cash pay such as land usufruct rights.⁷⁸ British Consul William Berjew Pauli claimed that ‘to retain their [the libertos’] skilled labour after the expiration of the term of the contract, some owners of estates give them small plots of land, which they gradually bring under cultivation, and on which they feed a horse, cow, pigs, poultry &c, bought by their savings’.⁷⁹ That planters were taking such measures to attract libertos into labour on their plantations suggests that the latter were reasonably successful in leveraging their labour power, and undermines the notion of an automatic labour surplus after abolition.

Information on labour conditions in the late 1870s and 1880s suggests a mixed labour system: widespread wage labour coexisted with continued access to land. On the one hand, the coffee economy of the highlands saw increased wages, increased coffee prices, and a pattern of inland migration from the coast. Here the jornalero population grew relative to the population of resident peones with land usufruct rights, such that the latter became a sort of privileged group among plantation workers because of their access to land. By 1879, jornaleros constituted 60 per cent of the landless population in the coffee-producing municipality of Yauco, while arrendatarios and resident peones constituted the other 40 per cent.⁸⁰

On the other hand, access to land among the working classes had by no means disappeared. That same year, 1879, Consul Bidwell would write regarding the ‘Gibaros’ of the central highlands that ‘these people live in a manner as primitive as did the aborigines. They cultivate a few yards of ground near their hut, and with its produce and perhaps one or two days’ work in a week, a whole family is supported.’⁸¹ Similarly, Mintz claims in a study of a large hacienda in the sugar town of Santa Isabel that in the 1880s the hacienda was home to over 100 agregados, of all races, who had rights to land plots of up to 5 acres, woodlands for timber, common plots planted in plantains and malanga (an edible root similar to yam), and pasture on which to graze their animals.⁸² Evidently many Puerto Rican workers were able to maintain a set of customary rights to land.

Few studies exist projecting the conditions of libertos in the immediate post-abolition years forward into the 1880s and 1890s, for the simple fact that, once libertos were released from forced contracting in 1876, they ceased to appear in records specifically as such.⁸³ Yet given the intertwined natures of slavery and libreta labour before abolition, information on labour conditions during this period still provides valuable knowledge. The best such information clusters around 1898, the year of the US occupation. By this time, Puerto Rico had undergone two decades’ worth of major economic transformations. While the sugar industry had stagnated in the face of falling prices and increased international competition, coffee had surpassed sugar as the island's main export, as the 1890s in particular saw a significant increase in prices.⁸⁴

Almost immediately after taking the island, the US government commissioned both a census and a series of qualitative reports, based on hearings and interviews, directed by Henry Carroll, President McKinley's ‘Special Commissioner for the United States to Porto Rico [sic]’. These reports, which contain testimony from planters, government officials, teachers and even some agricultural workers, paint a fascinating picture of labour conditions at the time of US occupation. Diverse evidence from testimony contained in the reports suggests that wages in 1898/9 were more or less what they had been in the 1870s. Joaquín Cervera, a sugar planter in San Germán, claimed he paid wages of 50 cents, ‘provincial money’ (i.e. not in foreign silver currency or American gold dollars – see note 93), with skilled labourers obtaining ‘higher wages’.⁸⁵ Benigno López Castro, a ‘professor of elementary instruction’ who claimed to be ‘representing small planters and day laborers’ – note the inclusion of the two in the same category – thought wages on the island were about 38 to 50 cents a day for ‘the field laborer’.⁸⁶

However, two factors undermined the value of workers’ wages. The first was the practice of paying workers partly or wholly in vales, tickets redeemable at plantation stores, rather than in cash.⁸⁷ The Carroll report mentioned numerous complaints from workers about the (technically illegal) practice, and several workers even presented their vales to the commission along with demands that the practice be abolished for good.⁸⁸ Two unnamed labourers on a coffee plantation in Coamo reported wages of 25 to 37.5 cents, paid in ‘orders which any store will take’, and said they also received a house and one meal a day, but no plot of land. One of the labourers remarked that payment in orders ‘is worth half to me’.⁸⁹ During hearings in the eastern town of Yabucoa, the commissioner interviewed ‘two colored laborers, Justo Lindo and Hermann Oquendo’, employed on the Sucesores de Ballecillo plantation. When asked his reason for coming to the hearings, Lindo replied: ‘they pay us in vales here, and we want to see if we can not obtain money instead of vales’. Lindo reported that he got about 60 to 65 cents a day, half in vales and half in cash – all planters in the area except one Don José Vicente Cintrón paid at least partly in vales. Lindo also qualified: ‘I am paid according to the work I do, but laborers generally receive about 50 centavos [cents] a day’⁹⁰ – perhaps Lindo was an example of the predominance of skilled labour among libertos and their descendants noted by Andrés Ramos Mattei and Mintz.

In the same hearing, one Galvino Velázquez, a self-identified ‘agriculturist on a small scale’ and ‘owner of a piece of property’, said he came ‘to protest, in the name of all the laborers’, against the practice of paying wages in vales. The labourer, Velázquez protested, ‘had to accept them [vales], no matter what the law ordered, because he had against him the civil guard, the magistrate, the judge, and the owner of the estate’. What led Velázquez to take the side of labourers, as an ‘owner of a piece of property’? We can only guess, but it seems reasonable to suppose that he was a member of a class of creole proprietors who were marginal in Puerto Rico's late nineteenth-century agrarian export economy. Indeed, Velázquez invoked the hated troika of Spanish colonialism – the Guardia Civil, colonial officials and (peninsular) planters.⁹¹ Perhaps Velázquez employed very little wage labour, perhaps none at all, or perhaps he hired himself out for wages to supplement his farm income; perhaps he was indebted to foreign merchants or large hacendados.

Severo Tulier of Vega Baja, who came ‘in behalf of the peons of Porto Rico’, presented a similar case. Tulier claimed his family had a coffee estate in the northern town of Vega Baja but that it had abandoned cultivation. He explained that he had come to San Juan to learn a trade; the report noted that he ‘had the appearance of a poor country laborer’. Tulier described low wages and poor working conditions among the plantation labourers of Vega Baja: usually ‘25 centavos [cents] and breakfast’ and 37.5 to the ‘better class of workmen’; some skilled labourers got 50 cents, but in vales.⁹²

In addition to that of vales, another contested issue in the commission hearings was the devaluation of the currency itself, which also undermined workers’ wages. Beginning in 1876, the authorities allowed the circulation of Mexican pesos, which were not on the gold standard. Hacendados thus were able to sell on the international market in (higher-valued) gold-anchored currencies and pay wages in (lower-valued) Mexican pesos.⁹³ In 1895, the Spanish authorities ordered the replacement of the Mexican silver pesos with Spanish silver pesos, which did not fix the problem of devaluation of the island's circulating currency and may have even worsened it.⁹⁴

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the possibility of an impending conversion from silver pesos to US gold-anchored dollars hung over the hearings, and planters seemed to know that the terms of conversion would profoundly affect their labour costs. Carroll noted in a report to the Secretary of the Treasury that ‘the continuation of the native money pleases the planters’. He also remarked that ‘the peon has heard of the “strike”’, and wondered whether, ‘under the freer conditions prevailing since American occupation’, he would ‘decide to see whether he can not use it [the strike] to obtain higher wages’.⁹⁵

Planter and merchant elites seemed quite convinced that this was already the case. Antonio Figaros of Arecibo, from Rosas & Co., ‘one of the largest mercantile houses’ of Puerto Rico, remarked that ‘another difficulty here now is the tendency of the peons to demand better wages. I think it would be a sufficient concession to them if they were paid in gold what they are now paid in silver.’ An unnamed planter in Arecibo affirmed that ‘whatever we pay in silver we would have to pay in gold after the exchange of the currency’.⁹⁶ When Carroll asked Adolf Bahr and Bernardo Huicy, from the Arecibo municipal council and presumably sugar planters, a seemingly logical question – why could they not explain to workers that a numerically lower wage in gold would be worth as much as a larger wage in silver – Huicy responded: ‘we will have to try it, but the chances are that it will not succeed and they will strike, and strikes mean fires. There have been two instances here of that. On two estates they cut down wages 10 cents, and that same day the two estates were burned.’⁹⁷

Although conversions were already being made at rates of up to 1.9 pesos per dollar, starting in 1899 the US authorities set a formal process for the withdrawal of silver pesos from circulation and their conversion to dollars at a rate of 1.66 pesos per dollar.⁹⁸ And it seems that the monetary conversion ultimately forced planters to pay in gold dollars the same numerical wages that they had paid before in silver pesos. A 1902 study by planter José Ferreras Pagán, which surveyed sugar plantations across the island, recorded wages – depending, again, on region and the age, gender and skills of the workers – of as low as 25 cents and as high as 75 cents, with the major difference that these wages were now in gold dollars. Indeed, Ferreras Pagán noted this change as one of the problems facing sugar planters.⁹⁹ It should be noted that a wage of 50 cents in 1902, with the conversion, would have a value equivalent to 83 cents in silver pesos in 1898. Even considering the practice of paying partially in vales, this was a significant wage increase for workers.

Clearly, just as they had in response to political changes in Spain in the late 1860s and early 1870s, Puerto Ricans were acting in tandem with events in the metropole and exploiting the contradictions of colonialism to their advantage. But we should be cautious of concluding that this kind of working-class struggle was simply a product of the US occupation. Already in mid-April of 1898, for example, three months before the occupation in July, officials in San Juan, Carolina and Río Piedras variously described a strike by 230 workers – referred to as ‘peones’ – for higher wages at hacienda Buena Vista and the factoría (factory) Canóvanas in the northern town of Loíza.¹⁰⁰

Another important trend to note is one Ramos Mattei claims was already evident in the 1870s: the organisation of Puerto Rico's artisans. In Carroll's introduction to the commission report, he noted that he had received eleven leaders of the island's ‘gremios or unions’. ‘Nine of the eleven’, Carroll noted, ‘were colored men’, and they represented ‘painters, tinsmiths, silversmiths, bookbinders, cigar makers, printers, masons, carpenters, bakers, shoemakers, and boatmen’.¹⁰¹ Carroll noted here another trend argued by Ramos Mattei: that people of colour, and particularly the formerly enslaved and their descendants, were well represented among artisans, and that many of them seem to have transitioned to urban labour in wake of abolition. Indeed, in the census undertaken on the island by the US authorities in 1899, 64 per cent of blacksmiths, 52 per cent of carpenters, 77 per cent of masons, 44 per cent of ‘gold and silver workers’, 37 per cent of printers and lithographers, 36 per cent of ‘cigar factory operatives’, 62 per cent of tailors and 42 per cent of tinsmiths were recorded as ‘colored’ – as compared to 38 per cent of the general population.¹⁰²

Carroll described the artisan guild leaders as ‘neatly dressed, well-appearing, intelligent men’, and noted that ‘all except one wrote his name and occupation in the stenographer's notebook’ – a signal of literacy in a society in which only 143,472 out of a population of about 658,691 aged ten and over, or about 22 per cent, were recorded as able to read and write.¹⁰³ Santiago Iglesias, of the carpenters’ guild, reported prevailing wages to be $1 to $1.50 among workers in the guild. Since the American occupation, they had been paid in gold, a ‘60 per cent premium’ in value over their previous wages in pesos.¹⁰⁴

Conclusion

The transition from coerced to free labour in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico was shaped by a complex set of social struggles and alliances. Coerced and later free agricultural labourers, marginalised creole proprietors, colonial officials and foreign planters and merchants engaged in a struggle that was heavily influenced by events elsewhere, and particularly by struggles against the monarchy in Spain in 1868–73 and the change of colonial powers in 1898. Only by examining the intersections of these struggles on and off the island can we understand the timing of abolition and the evolution of agrarian society in its wake.

One broader implication of the Puerto Rican abolition process as a case study concerns the nature of colonialism, as Puerto Rico was the penultimate case of colonial abolition in the Americas (Cuba was the last). The process described above should dispel any understanding of colonialism as a simple dynamic between ‘colonisers’ and ‘colonised’. Instead, colonialism in Puerto Rico involved a complex class dynamic which dictated the way struggles before and after abolition were carried out. This dynamic explains why creole workers and marginalised proprietors struck an alliance that characterised the whole period under study, an alliance which effected major social changes when met with sympathetic interventions by either Spanish republicans hostile to planter elites or US colonial officials indifferent to them.

A second implication of the Puerto Rican case concerns the salience – or lack thereof – of race as a cleavage of social mobilisation. In 1902, General George Davis, after serving as Military Governor of Puerto Rico from 1899 to 1900, reported to his superiors in the federal government: ‘If the disenfranchisement of the negro illiterates of the Union can be justified, the same in Porto Rico can be defended on equally good grounds, for the educational, social, and industrial status of a large portion of the native inhabitants of Porto Rico is no higher than that of the colored people.’ He also took care to note, however, that disenfranchisement should not stop at illiterate people of colour: ‘If the latter are disfranchised, as is being done at home, the electoral franchise should be withheld from the poor and ignorant peones, who are classed as whites, but who differ from the negroes in no material or moral respect.’¹⁰⁵ Evidently, the multiracial nature of class oppression and coercion in Puerto Rican history was deeply rooted enough not to be lost on US colonial officials. For Davis, illiterate workers of colour should be politically disenfranchised as in the US South, but so should the ‘poor and ignorant’ – and ‘white’ – peones.¹⁰⁶

Just as revealing as Davis's words themselves is the fact that they never even came close to becoming a reality. After decades of struggles, unqualified universal male suffrage had been attained months before the US invasion of 1898,¹⁰⁷ a situation which would never be overturned. Exactly why is a question somewhat outside of the chronological scope of this article. However, the analysis provided here should give some clues. For decades, a multiracial coalition of creole workers and petty bourgeois had fought against forced labour, the privileges of peninsular colonial officials and the dominance of immigrant agrarian elites, and in favour of expanded political rights. The fact that forced labour in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico cast a net that transcended racial boundaries, as well as the salience of a divide between foreign landed and merchant elites and marginal creole landowners, regardless of race, are important factors to consider in analysing the role of race in Puerto Rican society over the longue durée. In short, for those interested in studying abolition, race and colonialism in comparative perspective, the Puerto Rican case suggests the importance and complexity of class relations in defining these social processes.