Between Slavery and Freedom Read Online Free

some instances, they freed their concubines and their children and provided for them financially. Other slaves got their liberty because of their skills as craftsmen. Slave artisans were much more likely than field hands to be able to earn enough money to start the process of coartación. They might in time be able to buy not only themselves but their wives and children.
    Other black men in Spanish territory fought their way to freedom. In 1565, Spain established the settlement of St. Augustine in Florida. The authorities quickly realized that to protect their beleaguered outpost from Native attacks, they had to call upon every able-bodied man, regardless of race. Thus they turned to their slaves, promising them freedom in returnfor military service. What began as a short-term survival tactic resulted in the creation of a sizable free black and pardo (mixed-race) fighting force. Wherever the Spanish founded settlements, sooner or later they recruited their slaves to help defend those settlements, and they accepted the reality that no man would risk his life if he knew he had to remain a slave. Military service led to freedom. Eventually the authorities in Florida organized their free black and pardo soldiers into formal military companies. Although the Spanish tried to keep these forces under white control, they could not do so. Black and mixed-racemen rose through the ranks to become officers, and they led the men under their command into battle with the enemies of Spain. In the process, they claimed many of the same rights that other Spanish subjects enjoyed, insisting that their courage and loyalty entitled them to nothing less.
    By the middle of the eighteenth century the black and pardo population of Spanish North America was a complex one. While Spain’s slave system was undeniably brutal, it was loose enough to allow some people to gain their freedom. Throughout Spanish territory African and African-American men and women maneuvered, negotiated, and fought their way out of slavery. Those who became free began seeking ways to prosper as landowners, as business owners, and in some instances as slave owners.
    While the Spanish were asserting their rights to all of North America, other Europeans were making their presence felt on the continent. Their settlements also relied, to varying degree, on the labor of enslaved black people. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the French spread steadily north from the Gulf of Mexico and south from Canada down the Mississippi. In the vast Louisiana Territory, French colonists engaged in raising sugar cane in the swampy, humid lands around the Mississippi Delta, cultivating grain in the Midwest (the so-called “Illinois Country”), and trading furs for European manufactured goods with Native peoples. With a constant need for workers, settlers enslaved Indians. They also brought in black slaves from Africa and the West Indies. Regardless of the race of their slaves, French settlers treated them with appalling cruelty. They met every act of rebellion or defiance, real or imagined, with savage reprisals.
    Securing one’s freedom in French territories proved more difficult than in Spanish territories, in part because there was no French equivalent of co artació n. A slave could attempt to bargain for his or her freedom, but a master or mistress had no obligation to agree to any kind of arrangement. Theoretically, the French slave system did not allow slaves to own property or earn money, hence depriving them of the means to purchase their liberty. In practice, though, some slaves were able to buy themselves. The port ofNew Orleans, for instance, could never attract enough skilled white artisans. That spelled opportunity for slaves whose masters arranged for them to be trained in a specific trade and then permitted them to hire their time. Cohabitation was also as common in French settlements as it was in Spanish ones. Some Frenchmen took Native