Jonathan Curry-Machado - How Cuba burned with the ghosts of British slavery race abolition and the escalera

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Slavery & Abolition: A Journal
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How Cuba burned with the
ghosts of British slavery:
race, abolition and the
Escalera
Jonathan Curry-Machado research officer,
assistant editor and associate fellow
a b
a
Crisis States Development Research Centre ,
London School of Economics and Political Science
b
Caribbean Studies Centre , London Metropolitan
University
Published online: 25 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: Jonathan Curry-Machado research officer, assistant editor and
associate fellow (2004) How Cuba burned with the ghosts of British slavery: race,
abolition and the Escalera , Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave
Studies, 25:1, 71-93, DOI: 10.1080/0144039042000220937
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039042000220937
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How Cuba Burned with the Ghosts of British
Slavery: Race, Abolition and the Escalera
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JONATHAN CURRY-MACHADO
In March 1844, one James Thompson made a statement to the Baron von
Ketelhodt, a leading abolitionist resident in the Parish of St Andrews,
Jamaica. The Baron, and other representatives of the Householders of St
Andrews, sent a memorial to Queen Victoria, pleading:
That the cause of humanity generally, and the interests of those unfortunate persons, equally demand their immediate restoration to the blessings of freedom, with the option of their coming to this Island or of
proceeding to any other of your Majesty’s possessions.1
The cause that they were referring to was that of ‘a great number of persons,
born in the Bahamas, and elsewhere in your Majesty’s dominions’, who,
despite being British subjects, were being ‘held in slavery, in the
neighbouring Island of Cuba’.2 James Thompson was one of these unfortunates. Illegitimate son of a planter from Nassau, he was taken into slavery
in Cuba by his father’s family when he was still little more than a boy.
Finally, some 30 years later, he managed to escape and eventually make his
way to Jamaica, with the assistance of the British Consul in Havana, David
Turnbull.3
That same month saw the beginning of one of the most brutal periods of
repression ever to be inflicted upon the island of Cuba. Throughout the previous year, there had been increasing instances of slave rebellion, and
growing rumours of a widespread conspiracy for a general uprising. The
Governor of the island, Captain General Leopoldo O’Donnell, responded with
rapid severity. From March 1844, investigations began in the province of
Matanzas, carried out by a special Military Commission. The result was the
arrest and punishment of a large proportion of the free coloured population,
along with a number of foreign workers implicated in the affair. It also saw
the mass torture of many slaves, from whom confessions and accusations
Jonathan Curry-Machado is a research officer and assistant editor at the Crisis States Development
Research Centre, London School of Economics and Political Science; and associate fellow at the
Caribbean Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University.
Slavery and Abolition, Vol.25, No.1, April 2004, pp.71–93
ISSN 0144-039X print / 1743-9523 online
DOI: 10.1080/0144039042000220937 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
72
SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
were extorted using, amongst other methods, that which gave the ephemeral
uprising its name – the Escalera. The accused were:
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taken to a room which had been white-washed, and whose sides were
besmeared with blood and small pieces of flesh, from the wretches
who had preceded them . . . There stood a bloody ladder [escalera],
where the accused were tied, with their heads downward, and whether
free or slave, if they would not avow what the fiscal officer insinuated,
were whipped to death . . . They were scourged with leather straps,
having at the end a small destructive button, made of fine wire.4
It is the purpose of this paper to show how these two circumstances – the
taking of British West Indians into slavery in Cuba and the repression of a supposed uprising – were in fact closely connected. The Escalera, while not
directly caused by the presence of these black British subjects, was nevertheless partly the result of interrelated events that began with the importation of
the latter into Cuba by white British planters escaping the abolition of slavery
and the slave-trade in the British colonies. With Cuba still firmly a slave
society, they were maintained in bondage, along with other black British
West Indians who were kidnapped from their home islands by unscrupulous
traders, and sold to Cuban planters hungry for labourers. Despite the presence
in Havana of a Mixed Commission for the Suppression of the Slave Trade,
charged with ensuring that such breaches of the anti-slave-trade treaties did
not go unchallenged, many British representatives in Cuba were themselves
implicated in the continuance of slavery, until the appointment in 1840 of
the militant abolitionist David Turnbull as British Consul and Superintendent
of Liberated Africans. Turnbull forcefully investigated and sought freedom for
all those black British subjects who were being held in slavery in the island.
While the Spanish accusations made against him of conspiring for revolution
were probably false, his actions (combined with the presence in the island of
other abolition-minded British migrants, as well as that of the enslaved black
British subjects themselves) had a destabilizing effect upon the Cuban slave
system, acting as a catalyst for the unsuccessful uprising of 1843/44, and
the subsequent brutal repression.
British Abolition and Cuban Slavery
As the British anti-slavery campaign gathered pace in the 1820s, opposition
and forebodings for the future grew in the West Indies. Planters became
very concerned about losing their vested interests when emancipation
occurred, and were unhappy about the reforms that were being introduced
to ameliorate the condition of the slaves.5 Just as had occurred following
the Haitian Revolution, with the large scale relocation of slaveholders and
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
73
their slaves from Hispaniola to other parts of the Greater Caribbean, many
British West Indian slave owners removed themselves and their workers to
the Spanish Antillean colonies, where it seemed their interests would be
secure.6 From around 1821, at least 2,300 slaves (about 20 per cent of the
total) were removed from the Bahamas alone, with many of these ending up
in Cuba; and a similar movement occurred from Jamaica.7 David Turnbull
later identified four routes by which this migration was effected. While
many were forcibly removed, ‘sometimes by violence, but more frequently
by fraud’, others were persuaded to sign up, upon their manumission, as indentured labourers ‘with their previous owners, by which they bound themselves
to serve, without wages’. Still others were removed as servants, taking advantage of the loophole in the law that permitted a master to travel to a foreign
colony with two domestic slaves. Some were even ‘sold to Spanish dealers
out of the public prison’, having been condemned to ‘banishment from the
colony’.8 As a result of such a range of illicit methods, the number actually
taken was almost certainly much higher than the estimates would suggest.
For British West Indian planters, unhappy with the prospect of losing their
captive workforce, unwilling to attempt to make the necessary adjustment to
free labour, or even to simply improve the conditions of the slaves they had,
Cuba offered the perfect escape. Here they were able to continue pretty much
as they had done before the tide turned against the slave system on their home
islands, out of sight, or so they thought and hoped, of British abolitionism. The
arm of British power might be long, but if there was anywhere that they could
hide from it, then the Cuban countryside, under Spanish rule, appeared to be
the place. Not only was such regional slave movement largely ignored by the
British anti-slave cruisers, which preferred to concentrate on the trans-Atlantic
trade;9 but with most usable land already under cultivation in the smaller
British West Indian islands, Cuba was also attractive for those who might
want either to obtain land, or to extend their ownership. Here there were
huge tracts of largely unused and highly fertile land, in particular in the
central and eastern parts of the island, offering a great prospect for whomever
had the means to tame them.
Cuba also had the advantage of proximity, along with an extensive coastline, surrounded by small islets, or keys, that made it quite easy for people in
the neighbouring islands to find their way in, without necessarily having to go
through the principal ports, or coming under the open gaze of the authorities.
There had been a long history of this, with much of the island’s economy
dependent on contraband. Since the sixteenth century, bays and towns
around the East of Cuba had provided havens for a nationally mixed array
of smugglers and pirates, upon which the local population depended for
survival, largely forgotten about by the Spanish government.10 Just as was
occurring throughout the region, small trading and fishing boats would regularly
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
ply their way across the narrow stretches of water that separated Cuba from
other islands in the Caribbean, between which there were long-standing ties
of familiarity that undermined the official protectionist policies imperfectly
enforced by the colonial powers.11
However, the most attractive reason to draw British West Indian planters
to Cuba was that here the slave system was not merely firmly entrenched, but
flourishing. As the British West Indian colonies began to move towards emancipation, in Cuba the growing sugar industry was generating a massive
increase in the demand for labour, of which there was a chronic shortage in
the island.12 As a result of this, far from seeing a reduction in the slavetrade following the signing of the Treaty for the Suppression of the
Slave Trade by Spain and Britain in 1817, the period saw an extension of
slave-trading practices. The number of slaves in Cuba swelled from 38,879
in 1774, to 286,942 in 1827, and 436,495 in 1841, by which time they represented 43.3 per cent of the total population.13 While there was an initial
reduction in the number of slaves imported in the years immediately following
implementation of the Treaty, with an accompanying increase in prices in the
Cuban slave market,14 the British naval cruisers attempting to prevent the
transportation of slaves from Africa to Cuba seem to have been largely unsuccessful. Between 1835 and 1865, a mere 20,000 of the almost 400,000 slaves
imported into Cuba were captured in this way.15 Even though the cruisers were
a perennial inconvenience for the slave-traders, so ineffectual was their
presence that far from continuing to force up the value of slaves in Cuba,
their price was actually reduced during the 1830s and 1840s.16
Slavery was a far from illicit practice in Cuba. Contemporary commentators noted how it seemed that everyone was implicated in some way. In
1843, the British abolitionist Francis Ross Cocking, who had been resident
for some time in Havana and was a close associate of David Turnbull, told
the London Anti-Slavery Convention that:
in a country such as Cuba, where the whole white population, foreigners
as well as natives, are all either slave-holders in deed, or slave-holders in
principle, no law or laws, whether for the suppression of the slave-trade,
or for the partial amelioration of the condition of the slaves, can have
any executive principle, inasmuch as those whose duty it is to give
effect to such laws are interested in defeating them.17
It was a long held complaint of British representatives in Cuba that
the very local authorities charged with overseeing and enforcing the antislave-trade laws were themselves benefiting from that trade. Such corruption
was seen to begin with the Captain General (or Governor) himself, who could
expect to receive from half to one ounce of gold for every slave imported,
and worked its way down to local officials, who would be expected to turn
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
75
a blind eye to what was going on.18 Even many of the very British officials
charged with combating the slave-trade in the island, but who earned their
keep through commerce (in some cases amassing quite sizeable fortunes),
were themselves implicated. Charles Tolmé was relieved of his duties as
Consul partly as a result of the accusations of slave-trading made against
him;19 and Tolmé’s replacement as Consul, David Turnbull, entered into a
feud with James Kennedy, the British Commissary Judge on the Havana
Mixed Court for the Suppression of the Slave Trade who had provided
evidence against Tolmé, as a result of Kennedy’s personal employment of
slaves.20 All this, of course, helped the British West Indian planters bringing
slaves into Cuba to cover their tracks.
The attempt to suppress the slave-trade had another effect that was contrary to the spirit of the law. Many of the captured slave-traders were escorted
into Cuban ports by the naval vessels (generally British) that had detained
them. Here the slaves on board came under the jurisdiction of the local authorities, while the local Mixed Commission (on which both Britons and
Spaniards sat) deliberated as to whether the human cargo was in breach of
the Anti-Slave-Trade treaties or not. This could take a long time, and generally
resulted in a deadlock that left the nominally liberated slaves, known as
emancipados, in an often indefinitely extended limbo. Although no longer
anybody’s property, having been confiscated from the slave-traders, they
effectively became the property of the state, which would hire them out to
local employers under nominal terms of apprenticeship, or use them themselves for public works.21 They thus became a source both of revenue for
the local authorities, and cheap labour. One of the emancipados, Gabino,
who came to the attention of the British, had been pronounced free in 1824,
yet spent the following 16 years being transferred by the government from
one patron to another, generating a total of 36 ounces of gold for the local
authorities. Working as a water carrier, he was forced to hand over his earnings ‘to the persons to whom he has been transferred, exactly as a numerous
class of slaves in this country are compelled to do to their owners’.22 As a
result, such ‘freed’ slaves found themselves in a situation that was, if anything,
worse than slavery: ‘Nominally of free condition these unfortunate persons are
even deprived of that imperfect protection which the laws of the Spanish
monarchy extend to the slave’.23
While the suppression of the African slave-trade by Britain appeared to do
little to limit the importation of slaves into Cuba, it did force Cuban planters to
begin to look towards alternative sources of labour. Despite the large numbers
of slaves still entering the island, there were nevertheless fewer than were
required by the rapid growth of the Cuban sugar industry.24 Some amongst
the white creole elite promoted the immigration of white labourers as an
alternative to slavery – not for especially humanitarian reasons, but rather
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
out of fear of the growing black population of the island.25 Others began to
look towards the neighbouring islands of the Caribbean as a source of
slaves. Acquisition of slaves through kidnapping, and other illicit means,
was long-established in the Caribbean in response to labour shortages, and
there had always been a certain amount of movement of slaves around the
region.26 This became accentuated in the first half of the nineteenth century
in response to the gradual ending of slavery,27 but attention only began to
become drawn to it once the British had turned their back on slavery, and
were keen to force the other colonies in the region to do likewise. The same
conditions that made it relatively easy for British West Indian planters to
carry their slaves into Cuba, and maintain their anonymity, also made it a
simple task for unscrupulous ship captains to pick up slaves and, after 1834,
ex-slaves in Jamaica and elsewhere, and carry them to deserted parts of the
Cuban coast, where they would be offloaded, taken to a local plantation,
and from there enter into the Cuban slave market.
In the late 1830s and 1840s, a number of prominent cases brought these
kidnappings to light. In 1835, Francis James kidnapped a number of young
Jamaican men and boys and carried them on his ship to a remote point in
Eastern Cuba, near Manzanillo, where he sold them to the Guamá plantation.
Over the coming years, a number of them were discovered and eventually
released. One of them, referred to by the British Consul David Turnbull as
‘the unfortunate Wellington’, became the subject of much argument
between the British and Spanish authorities, as the former attempted to
locate his whereabouts, and eventually his release. This was seven years
after his original capture, and by this time he had passed through several
different owners, making it very difficult not just to trace him, but to also
establish his identity. In the end, two of the other Jamaicans who had been
captured with him, and later released, were brought back to Cuba to help in
this investigation.28
It was very easy to hide such kidnapped slaves in Cuba at this time. Many
of those discovered had been given Hispanic slave names, to prevent their
identification as British subjects. One such was William Jones, also kidnapped
from Jamaica in the 1830s, who was renamed by his Cuban owners as ‘Julián
Carabalı́ No.42’.29 Even when identity was definitely proved, obstacles would
still be placed in the way of achieving their release. When the British Consul
attempted to secure the release of the kidnapped Caribbean, Henry Shirley, it
was the Lieutenant Governor of the province where he was discovered who
asserted that he would be delighted to release Shirley, if it was not for the
fact that he was dead.30 Subsequent enquiries revealed that this was a
complete lie. Not only was Shirley alive, but he also had a wife and daughter
likewise held in slavery, for whom, upon his release, he attempted to secure
freedom.31
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
77
It was partly thanks to the investigations being pursued by such British
officials as David Turnbull into the presence of kidnapped British subjects
in slavery in Cuba, that the presence of so many black British subjects
brought into the island by British West Indian planters from, in particular,
the Bahamas was discovered. Although elsewhere it has been suggested that
there were as few as 200 such people in Cuba,32 the investigation carried
out by David Turnbull suggests that there were in fact far more. By the
time his enquiries were cut short in 1842, he had already reached a tally of
431 slaves, held by 28 different British subjects from the Bahamas, who
had been ‘fraudulently exported from the Bahamas in contemplation of a
general measure of emancipation, and are now, or their descendants, deprived
of their freedom’.33 Although there were cases uncovered in other districts (in
particular around Cárdenas), many of these were concentrated in the district of
Candelaria, near Holguin, in the East of the island. Such was the extent of their
presence here that contemporaries commented on how the only language that
could be heard in that district was English.
However, the total was almost certainly higher than that reported by
Turnbull, given the ease with which such black British subjects could be
made to disappear into the general Cuban slave milieu. The story of James
Thompson, with whom we began, is particularly illustrative – in part, because
he was one of the very few victims of this traffic who subsequently left detailed
testimony of their experience. Thompson was the son of a black slave, and an
Irishman engaged in salt works on Ragged Island. Prior to his death, the latter
manumitted both Thompson and his mother, giving them at the same time a
plot of land for their support. In 1820, while still a child, the husband of his
half-sister, an American called John Norris, kidnapped Thompson. He
‘enticed me away, giving me some cake, and asking me if I would go on a
frolic with him’. This ‘frolic’ involved taking him on a boat to Gibara in
Cuba, where the family had already decamped with many of their slaves.
When Thompson’s sister discovered what her husband had done, she insisted
that he return him to his mother. This occasioned a violent argument, prompting
the sister to leave her husband, but at the same time leaving Thompson in
Norris’s clutches. To avoid his discovery, Norris sold Thompson to another
planter in Holguin. Although an investigation carried out by the Governor of
Holguin revealed the guilt of Norris, and resulted in the confiscation of his property in Cuba, Thompson was not released, and was sold on first to a French baker
in Puerto Prı́ncipe, and finally to a Cuban coffee planter near Havana. Here he
remained in slavery for many years, with his name changed to Santiago
Ignacio Vilá, suffering greatly under the tyranny of his master’s wife – who,
herself mulatta, appears to have felt particularly threatened by the mulatto
Thompson, whose presence no doubt provided her with an unwelcome reminder
of her own slave roots.34
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
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Although Thompson was a house slave, working as cook and coachman,
his experience reveals how even such a privileged slave would be subject
to the arbitrary whims and cruelty of their masters. When Thompson
and another slave expressed their wish to get married, they were cruelly
punished:
we were both seized . . . and held by four men, we received 250 lashes
each . . . Our little stock of goods was burnt before our eyes, and our
poultry and stock taken from us. After the flogging, a mixture of rum
and cayenne pepper was poured upon the wounds, and we were then
sent to the hospital, where we were confined three months. After this,
we had irons placed on our feet, with a chain connecting them suspended
from the waist. A collar with three hooks was placed round our necks
and a coupling chain secured to each collar. Thus linked together, we
worked in the field for two years and a half, being every night and
during the hours of rest on the Sundays and festivals, confined in the
stocks. Throughout the whole of this period, the collars and irons
were never once removed.
Eventually Thompson managed to escape. After a dramatic journey, in
which he narrowly avoided capture on a number of occasions, he finally
reached Havana, and the protection of the British Consul, David Turnbull.
Thanks to the latter’s intervention Thompson was eventually enabled to
return first to Nassau, then to England and finally Jamaica to testify as
to his experiences as a free British subject who spent 21 years in slavery
in Cuba.35
Turnbull and the Escalera
Three years later, when the Military Commission of Matanzas made its final
report on their investigations into the alleged conspiracy for an uprising,
now known as the Escalera, a serious diplomatic situation was provoked by
the explicit naming of this same, now ex-British Consul, David Turnbull, as
having been ‘the prime mover and focus from which emanated’ the plot,
and others like it to bring about the ‘dislocation’ of Cuba from Spain.36
Throughout the investigation, his name had continually cropped up in the
interrogations of those who were arrested. The accusations made against
him had ranged from the simple promotion of slave emancipation, through
the promising of weapons for an armed uprising,37 to bizarre suggestions,
such as that he intended to intervene militarily in such an uprising, so as to
crown himself King of Cuba.38
It has been much questioned whether there ever was any plot
for which Turnbull could be made responsible. Just ten years after the
CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
79
event, a subsequent Governor of the Island, José Gutiérrez de la Concha,
commented that:
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The findings of the military commission produced the execution, confiscation of property, and expulsion from the island of a great many
persons of colour, but it did not find arms, munitions, documents, or
any other incriminating object which proved that there was such a
conspiracy, much less on such a vast scale.39
At the time of the 1844 trials, one of the British representatives in the island,
James Kennedy, was just as certain ‘that no such conspiracy ever existed’,
suggesting that the authorities had exaggerated the threat in their own interests.40 While some historians have picked up on such doubts, questioning
whether the conspiracy ever really existed or at least downplaying it in
favour of stressing the Spanish exaggeration of the threat,41 others have
defended the idea that there was indeed an attempted revolution of slaves
and free men at that time.42 However, although research suggests that the
British, headed by Turnbull and his associates, were heavily involved in the
events of 1843 and 1844,43 the most compelling interpretation has
come from Robert Paquette, who identifies a number of overlapping, racially
defined conspiracies, partly inspired (whether directly or indirectly) by British
abolitionism. The Spanish authorities, and Cuban white elite, perceived ‘the
resultant unrest as a single conspiracy and as a real threat to the existing
social and imperial arrangements’.44
Although the full and true extent of Turnbull’s involvement, and that of
other agents of British abolition, continues to be debated, there is no
doubt about Turnbull’s sincere commitment to the cause of abolition of the
slave-trade, and slave emancipation – and it is his militant activity in promoting these, and in particular that of the kidnapped black British subjects, that
led the finger of suspicion to be pointed in his direction. During 1838 and
1839, Turnbull made an extensive voyage around the Caribbean, including
visits to the Spanish colonies, and in particular Cuba, where, as a guest of
the then British Superintendent of Liberated Africans, Dr Richard Robert
Madden, he made a detailed study of the operation of the slave system in
the island.45 Turnbull published the results of this investigation and journey
the following year, and this brought him to the immediate notice of the
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London, which, exploiting their
close ties to Marlborough’s Whig government, pushed both the Colonial
Secretary (Lord John Russell) and the Foreign Secretary (Viscount Palmerston)
to appoint him, respectively, as Superintendent of Liberated Africans and British
Consul at Havana.46 Turnbull enthusiastically accepted both positions, and
arrived once again in Cuba in November 1840.47
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He began to write almost daily letters of complaint to the Captain General
of Cuba about the treatment of British subjects. Not a professional diplomat, in
these letters he made little attempt to hide his contempt for all those in any way
implicated in slavery. As a result, despite having initially been greeted amicably by the Spanish authorities, Turnbull rapidly managed to annoy them
to such an extent that high-level calls began to be sent to London to have
him removed.48 Although the British Government continued to protect him
for a while, reprimands were sent to him complaining that:
You write with so much bitterness of feeling; with so much of sneer and
irony, that you excite a suspicion that you are actuated by some personal
or vindictive motives as much as by a sense of duty . . . Moreover, you
constantly exaggerate things, which require no exaggeration, and thus
you defeat your own purpose.49
But while his manner of pursuing his goals was objected to, it was the
goals themselves that were most onerous to the Spanish authorities in Cuba.
Turnbull had been instructed by the Foreign Office to ‘take all steps which
may be necessary for finding out all British subjects in Cuba who are illegally
detained in Bondage’.50 On his arrival in Havana, he inherited a number of
such cases from the previous Consul, Charles Tolmé, including the previously
mentioned cases of Wellington and Henry Shirley.51 Unlike either Tolmé or
the British Commissary Judge of the Mixed Court for the Suppression of
the Slave Trade in Havana, James Kennedy, Turnbull set out vigorously to
pursue not just these, but all cases that came to his attention relating to the
plight of any British subject in the island, but above all of those who had
been kidnapped or otherwise brought into slavery in Cuba. Such concern on
his part also led him into confrontations with other resident British representatives, who felt that he was overstepping his authority. Not only did Turnbull
attack James Kennedy, the Judge on the Mixed Court, for being implicated in
the slave system he was supposed to combat, but Kennedy in turn objected
bitterly to Turnbull meddling in what was rightfully his jurisdiction.52
The Spanish authorities became especially displeased when Turnbull, not
content to remain in Havana waiting for cases to be brought to him, set out in
search of evidence. One of the first instances to be brought to his attention of
British West Indian planters from the Bahamas continuing their slave practices in Cuba, was that of William Henry Forbes, who had established a
coffee plantation near Cárdenas.53 In November 1841, Turnbull travelled to
Matanzas with the intention of investigating the claims that rightfully free
black British subjects had been kept in slavery by Forbes. From his room in
the Hotel de Comercio, he summoned into his presence a number of such
people, so as to provide him with statements as to their condition and
history.54 This immediately came to the attention of the local authorities
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81
who, suspecting him to be engaged in more nefarious anti-slavery agitations,
refused him permission to continue to Cárdenas, and he was instructed to
return at once to his post in Havana.55
The campaign against Turnbull was eventually successful in securing his
removal from the office of British Consul.56 With the arrival of his replacement, Joseph Crawford, in June 1842,57 Turnbull (still nominally holding
the office of Superintendent of Liberated Africans, a position to which there
was much moral, but very little real power attached) felt it to be too dangerous
for him to continue on shore, due to the mounting threats against his life by
pro-slavery elements, and he sought refuge on board the British hulk, HMS
Romney, that was stationed in Havana harbour to house freed slaves prior to
their removal from the island.58 He did not pass his confinement on board
the Romney in idleness, and continued to send long missives back to the
British government not just concerning the plight of the emancipados and kidnapped British West Indians, but on all manner of pet projects, from details of
the developing conspiracy on the island, to the education and habits of the
black soldiers stationed on the ship and proposals for the establishment of a
colony of freed slaves in Africa.59 However, frustrated at his inability to effectively pursue his objectives, and pleading the ill health of his wife Eleanor, he
set off for England in August 1842, by way of Nassau.
Finding himself in the Bahamas, Turnbull began to make enquiries into the
full extent of this illicit trade, with the full cooperation of the local functionaries and community.60 In Cuba he had succeeded in ascertaining the presence
of ‘several hundreds of . . . British born subjects illegally removed from this
Colony’, and in Nassau ‘not a single day has elapsed . . . without bringing
me fresh accessions to my List of Candidates for Freedom’. His presence
seems to have caused something of a stir, prompting many people to come
forward with news of relatives who had been taken into slavery in Cuba.
After travelling to the Out Islands, ‘from which it is known that abductions
have taken place’, he chartered a boat, and returned to Cuba.61 Although he
was arrested upon his arrival, he managed to trick the Spanish officer accompanying him into allowing him to visit one of the plantations containing a
number of the Bahamian slaves. Before his captor realized what was taking
place, he was able to tell them that they were entitled to their freedom,
before being finally taken, under much closer custody, to Havana. After a
trial from which he was lucky to escape with his life, he was expelled from
the island, with the warning that if he ever dared to return, not just to Cuba
but to any Spanish colony, he would be summarily dealt with.62
The months that followed saw an increase in slave rebellion in Cuba.
Already slave resistance of both an active and passive kind had weakened
the control of the Creole elite and the Spanish authorities in the countryside;
and the white population was becoming increasingly hysterical about the
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
blacks, the British, and the possibility of an uprising.63 Just such an uprising
broke out on 26 March 1843, on the Alcancı́a plantation, near Bemba (now
Jovellanos): one of the largest sugar estates in one of the principal sugar
producing districts. The revolt began with the killing of the mill engineer
and two other white employees, and much destruction of property. They
then progressed to a neighbouring estate, and ‘destroyed the place leaving
only untouched the sugar house’, before moving on to the Luisa plantation,
which suffered the same fate. In all, insurrection occurred that night on five
of the estates in the district, three of which were set on fire.64
Fearing that the slaves working on the railways would join the revolt, the
owners of the Cárdenas –Júcaro line took two hundred of their slaves to
Cárdenas, where they ‘were shut up in a wooden building and on the night
they managed to scape [sic] & went to join the Mutineers’. By the time
they had covered the distance of about 20 kilometres that separated Bemba
from Cárdenas, the number of insurgents had reached almost one thousand.
Since damage was also caused to the railway that night, there was some
suspicion that they received assistance from some of the white carters and
muleteers, whose business was threatened by the new trains. Troops were
quickly mobilized from Matanzas, and, combined with the efforts of the
local white population, the rebellious slaves were driven into the hills. It
was later reported that while only five whites were killed that night, ‘more
than half the 950 engaged in the outbreak have perished, chiefly by their
own hands, the woods being filled with hanging victims’.65
Throughout 1843, even where open rebellion did not take place, generally
higher levels of slave insubordination were reported, even amongst the normally trustworthy house slaves. The maroon leader, José Dolores, became
something of a legend amongst plantation slaves throughout Western Cuba,
leading guerrilla-style raids on plantations, and seeking to free the slaves
imprisoned following the Alcancı́a uprising. In April, rumours abounded in
Havana of other insurrectionary attempts, both near Güines and Cárdenas,
although ‘it is said they did not get to be of very serious moment’. In May,
the slaves rebelled on the Santa Rosa and Majagua plantations near Sabanilla,
both owned by Domingo Aldama, one of the wealthiest and most influential of
the Creole landowners. In July, another such uprising occurred on the Arratı́a
estate, near Corral Falso.66
On 5 November there occurred what has been described as ‘the biggest
rebellion ever seen in the island’.67 Slaves on the Triumvirato sugar estate
rose up and went to the neighbouring Acana plantation, where there were
still slaves being kept in shackles following an earlier rebellion. Here
they killed six whites, and wounded several others, before the troops from
Matanzas could arrive to drive them off. Far from being put down, the rebellion continued to spread to other plantations in the vicinity. A small slave army
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
83
of some three hundred was ambushed by the troops on the San Rafael estate,
and the rebels fled after a battle that lasted several hours.68
What might have been dismissed as a spontaneous uprising took on a more
sinister meaning when one of the slave women of the Santı́sima Trinidad
estate, not far from the Triumvirato and Acana, denounced the existence of
a conspiracy amongst the slaves to bring about a general uprising. Her evidence, with which she obtained her own freedom, led to the immediate
arrest of hundreds of slaves from the plantations in the area, sixteen of
whom were executed.69 In January 1844, a conspiracy was allegedly discovered on the Andrea estate, near Macurijes – very close to where the March
1843 uprising had broken out. It now seemed that the plot, which was becoming increasingly generalized and exaggerated in the popular mind, had
involved not just slaves, but also free people of colour. The following
month, rumours were circulating that a deposit of arms and munitions had
been discovered near Güines, and a visiting North American commented
that the slaves had become very restive, and that conditions were ‘not very
pleasant’. White racial paranoia now began to run out of control, with
rumours of attempts to poison them spreading panic.70 Over the coming
months, the Military Commission in Matanzas uncovered what they
claimed to have been a highly organized conspiracy of free blacks and
slaves, instigated by British abolitionists. It was said that a government in
waiting had even been established, with agents spread throughout the island.71
From the start Turnbull was considered to be profoundly implicated in
these occurrences, and a sentence was passed against him en absentia by
the Military Commission, claiming that he was the ‘author and prime mover
of the conspiracy’.72 Although Turnbull strenuously denied not just any
knowledge of the plot, but of having even the slightest contact with inhabitants
of the island since his expulsion almost two years previously,73 there is some
evidence that his activities had gone beyond just representing the interests of
British subjects. In March or April 1843, his replacement as Consul, Joseph
Crawford, was called upon by Juan Rodrı́guez, a leading member of the committee of free blacks that had been established to coordinate the planned uprising. He told Crawford that they now required the arms and munitions that
Turnbull had promised them the year before.74 A few years later such
active involvement in conspiracy was confirmed by evidence given by
Francis Ross Cocking, who had served as Turnbull’s aide while the latter
was in Cuba. Cocking gave a detailed account of how, partly at the behest
of Turnbull, he had acted as something of an intermediary between the two
racially divided committees that were organizing the uprising; and had also
travelled to Jamaica with the express purpose of building support there for
the rebellion.75 Turnbull himself boasted of his intimate relationship with
Cuban supporters of independence and abolition, claiming that ‘no other
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
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Englishman in the Island enjoys equal opportunities with myself of arriving at
correct information, as to the wishes, intentions, and movements of the creole
party’.76 The case against him appeared to become all the more compelling
with the discovery that one of Cuba’s leading opponents of the slave-trade,
and an influential member of the growing Cuban nationalist movement,
Domingo del Monte, had maintained an extensive correspondence with the
North American diplomat, Alexander Everett. In his letters, Del Monte
denounced the existence of a conspiracy, and the prominent role played by
Turnbull, and through him the British.77
Catalysts
Nevertheless, it is unlikely that Turnbull was guilty of being the chief instigator of the planned uprising. Although there is no doubt that he was in close
contact with many of those allegedly involved, it is hard to sustain the suggestion that the conspiracy was the direct result of his efforts, at the behest of the
British government and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.78 Not
only is it questionable that there ever was a concerted attempt to organize a
rebellion, beyond the optimistic projections of a few and the paranoid fantasies of the Spanish authorities and Cuban planters; but also nothing has
been found in the correspondence between Turnbull and the British government and Anti-Slavery Society that provides proof that he was acting under
orders from either. In fact, quite the contrary, since he always went to great
pains to reassure the government that such charges made against him were
quite groundless;79 and the minutes of the Anti-Slavery Society, despite
being kept informed of events in Cuba by both Turnbull and Cocking, show
a total absence of awareness, let alone involvement, in any conspiracy.80 Of
course, he may have been acting on his own initiative, as Cocking’s ‘confession’ would appear to suggest.81 However, in his letters from the Romney,
while he revealed the extent to which he was personally familiar with, and
sympathetic to, the discontented elements on the island and urged the
British government to declare its support for any separatist attempt, his
principal concern continued to be full realization of the suppression of the
slave-trade.82 In fact, if it was not for the subsequent uprisings and conspiracy
trials, all Turnbull’s concrete movements and actions in Cuba can readily be
accounted for purely in terms of his pursuit of freedom for black British
subjects in slavery. The belief by some conspirators that he had promised a
supply of weapons can also be seen in such a light, and may easily have
stemmed from Turnbull too readily reassuring them that, in the event of a
rebellion, the British state was sure to come to their assistance. Thus resulted
the misunderstanding that Turnbull spoke in all matters with the full authority
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
85
of the British state, rather than his own personal opinion as to what that British
state should do.
The Spanish charges against Turnbull were clearly exaggerated, and
simply an example of their scapegoating of external agents rather than
facing up to the very real internal forces that were pushing towards an
explosion over emancipation and independence. To suggest that he might
have been the principal organizer and promoter of rebellion is to denigrate
the capabilities of the Cubans themselves to formulate and seek to put into
practice their own struggles. Turnbull himself had no illusions in this
respect, stating that ‘those who would be free themselves must strike the
blow’.83 However, he may well have remained informed of developments
in the island, despite his protestations to the contrary. He was based in
Jamaica from 1843, and throughout that year there were widespread
rumours in Cuba that an expedition was planned against Cuba from
Jamaica, in support of both the slaves and independence forces.84 There had
been a long-held fear in Cuba of the influence of abolitionists in the island,
and of the abolition campaign coming out of Jamaica.85 Evidence was
given in the course of the investigation into the Escalera that journeys had
been made by conspirators to Jamaica to receive training, make contact
with co-conspirators, and to bring back arms for their struggle.86 Given his
previous tenacity, it seems unlikely that Turnbull would have just given up
all interest when the situation in Cuba was coming to such a head.
But it is questionable that there ever really was such a direct threat from
Jamaica. In 1843, in response to the rumours, the Captain General of Cuba,
Gerónimo Valdés, sent agents to the neighbouring island to investigate the
claims. Their report unequivocally stated that ‘there is not the least indication
that here they are conspiring, or have recently conspired, against the tranquillity’ of Cuba.87 Valdés reported to the Spanish government that such evidence:
makes me suspect that the suggested revolution is no more than the
efforts of the slave traders poorly reconciled to the dispositions of the
Superior Government and to my decision to comply with these and
with the applicable treaties.88
The failure of Valdés to accept at face value the rumours of a conspiracy and
impending rebellion, which were being spread by those implicated in the
slave-trade, and his insistence in trying to put into full effect the Anti-Slave
Trade treaties, led to pressure being placed on the Spanish government to
replace him. Thus in October 1843, he lost his job as Governor to Leopoldo
O’Donnell, who arrived predisposed to take seriously the conspiratorial
stories, and who put into effect the extreme repression of the following
year.89 This puts the otherwise condemning disclosures of Del Monte in an
entirely different light. It would seem that he, and other abolitionist-minded
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86
SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
members of the white Creole elite, were themselves terrified by the rumours of
impending social upheaval. Del Monte was a member of one of the wealthiest,
and most powerful, Cuban planter families: the Aldamas, who owned plantations directly affected by the slave uprisings of 1843. For all that he was
opposed to the slave-trade, this was for largely economic reasons; and
neither he nor other liberally minded whites were prepared to continue to
support a bid for independence if this would entail Cuba becoming another
Haiti.90 Del Monte’s communications with Everett formed an important part
of the renewed negotiations between the Cuban elite and the United States
for possible annexation of the island.91 However, by tarring Turnbull and
the British with the brush of black rebellion, they simply succeeded in providing Spain with an excuse for the reassertion of their dominion over Cuba.
Instead of seeking to prove or disprove Turnbull’s guilt, it would be more
appropriate to take a rather more subtle approach to the question of his
involvement in the events of the Escalera. Opposition in Cuba to the slavetrade, slavery and Spanish dominion predated, and was in no way reliant
upon his presence in the island. However, the ardently abolitionist activities
of Turnbull can be seen to have acted as a catalyst in the development of
not just Cuban abolitionism, but also of slave uprisings. By daring to speak
the unspeakable, he not only gave courage to opponents of slavery, but also
planted the idea in the heads of slaves, and not just those with some claim
to British subject-hood, that they were entitled to freedom, and that the
British would come to their defence. Turnbull and his associate, Cocking,
may also have played an important part not so much in the instigation of a conspiracy, either amongst white Creoles or their black counterparts, but in the
recognition that if the conspirators were to be at all successful then they
would need to overcome their racial differences. Since they had the ear of
both sides, they were able to form a communication bridge between the
two, racially defined insurrectionary committees. However, as Del Monte’s
correspondence with Everett reveals, Cuba was still not ready for such a
cross-racial harmony of interests, and such a project was doomed to
failure.92 Turnbull may have helped plant the seed of such unity, but it was
entirely beyond his power to bring about its growth. Ironically, the very
words and actions that helped stimulate slave uprisings, also led to exposure
of the ‘conspiracy’, and the repression that followed.
Although there is no evidence that kidnapped Caribbeans played an active
part in the slave uprisings, or in the conspiracy,93 and they were relatively few
in number, their mere presence on the island would have been provocative,
and might have likewise had a catalytic effect. They contributed to an increasingly generalized atmosphere of subversion of the slave system, ranging from
everyday acts of resistance and assertions of freedom, to open rebellion.94
Having come from recently emancipated islands, they made liberty a reality
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CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
87
for the Cuban slaves. Ephemeral as freedom had proved to be for them as
individuals, their experience may have galvanized the latter in their own
struggle, revealing by example just how precarious the boundary between
slavery and freedom was.95 Certainly the kidnapped Caribbeans did not
create the conditions that led to an open challenge being made by slaves to
the system that had enslaved them. Those conditions were already present
in abundance; and their numbers were probably not sufficient in themselves
to cause an uprising. Nevertheless, they can be seen to have played an important part in the igniting of the Cuban slaves in the events of 1843. The
Spanish authorities were clearly aware of this. Despite their annoyance at
the investigations of Turnbull, once it was definitively proved that a slave
was in fact a British subject, they generally acted quite quickly to not just
free the individual, but to make sure they were promptly removed from the
island. This unwillingness to have in their midst free black British subjects
was illustrated in the months following the uncovering of the Escalera conspiracy, when all such were summarily deported.96
Conclusion
In 1812, events occurred that were remarkably similar to those of the
Escalera, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. Then too, a series of slave uprisings culminated in the uncovering of a conspiracy to bring about a general
rebellion. As in the Escalera, it was alleged that the leader of the plot – the
free, black carpenter, José Antonio Aponte – had promised his followers external military assistance: not from Britain, in this case, but from the newly
independent black republic of Haiti.97 Poorly guarded words and rumour of
impending emancipation played a crucial part in fuelling unrest, and Aponte
and his co-conspirators were arrested and executed to set a brutal example.98
The Haitian Revolution had long-lasting effects upon the entire Caribbean
region.99 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass
recognized that despite the positive role played by the North American and
British abolitionists, ‘we owe incomparably more to Haiti than to them all’.
Haiti was ‘the original pioneer emancipator of the nineteenth century’;100
and along with the Aponte conspiracy it continued to provide an inspiration,
both positive and negative, in the period of the Escalera. While free blacks
and slaves could take heart from the example of the neighbouring island, as
they could from that of the recent emancipation in the British West Indies,
the white Cuban elite was able to use the same example to warn the
Spanish of the effects of any concession on either slavery or the slavetrade.101 In a striking parallel with the Aponte conspiracy, in 1844 the Military
Commission investigating the Escalera conspiracy took very seriously the
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
rumours that Haitian agents were operating in Cuba alongside the British, and
were preparing an armed intervention.102
Such a suspicion was almost certainly as spurious as that which painted
Turnbull as the chief instigator of the planned rebellion; yet it is every bit
as illustrative both of the catalytic effect that such events and individuals
can have, and of the importance played in the history of Cuba by the informal
networks of communication that underlay the official politics of the
island. News of the Haitian Revolution had been rapidly spread about the
Caribbean, without respect for geographical, national, linguistic or ethnic
boundaries, disseminated along unofficial trade routes by a motley crew of
sailors, privateers, refugees, migrant labour and slaves.103 Likewise, Cuban
slaves could not be kept ignorant of the progress of emancipation in the
region, and would have been fully apprised of the emancipation of British
slaves in the 1830s.
For all that the Spanish sought to assert the isolation of their prized sugar
colony, and the Cubans gradually developed a sense of distinct nationhood,
Cuban society and politics existed and developed in the interstices of such
trans-national networks.104 That Turnbull, as British Consul, was suspected
of spreading dissent was not far-fetched at a time when most European and
North American Consuls acted as agents for the penetration of their countries’
imperial interests.105 This was compounded by the knowledge that Turnbull
was not just an active abolitionist, but also had close links with the Baptist,
and other Protestant missionary networks that were not simply seeking to
extend their religious influence in the region, but had played a significant
part in the abolition and emancipation campaigns (including uprisings) in
the British West Indies.106 All this occurred alongside the ongoing migration
around the Caribbean of individuals, both free and enslaved, whose example
ensured that the ending of slavery in one location would have repercussions
throughout the region.
Thus the process by which slavery came to an end in the British colonies,
while it continued in Cuba, led to the surreptitious importation of black British
Caribbeans, both brought by their white British Caribbean owners and
kidnapped by slave-traders to feed the hungry Cuban labour market. In
many cases they remained hidden in Cuba for many years, phantasmagoric
reminders of British slavery and catalysts in the growing discontent in Cuba.
Their presence stimulated British abolitionist agitation, which in turn helped
provoke the uprisings and conspiracy, while at the same time helping to
weaken the revolutionary attempt by permitting the Spanish authorities to
label it as the result of foreign intervention, so leading to the repression that
followed being all the more fierce.
Hence it was not really such a coincidence that James Thompson made his
declarations about his kidnapping into slavery in Cuba at the same time that
CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
89
Cuba was burning under the extremities of the repression provoked by the
reality of a year of slave uprisings, and the rumour of a far reaching conspiracy
to end slavery and Spanish dominion in the island. The two events were
closely linked. The very presence in Cuba of such ghosts of British slavery,
their discovery and the campaigns to secure their release, contributed to the
conditions that ignited the powder keg that Cuba had become.
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NOTES
1. Letter from Joseph Gordon, Baron von Ketelhodt, and William Wemyss Anderson to Lord
Elgin & Kincardine, 18 April 1844 (Public Record Office (PRO), CO 137/279).
2. Memorial to Queen Victoria from the Householders of the Parish of Saint Andrew, County
of Surrey, Jamaica (PRO, CO 137/279).
3. Statement of James Thomson, made before Max. Aug. Baron v. Ketelhodt, 22 March 1844
(PRO, CO 137/279).
4. Letter from Richard Burleigh Kimball, Knickerbocker, July 1845, cited in Robert
L. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood: The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict
between Empires over Slavery in Cuba (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University
Press, 1988).
5. The British Parliament passed the Consolidated Slave Act in 1824, which included amongst
its measures protection against excessive punishment and the right for slaves to secure their
freedom and to own property. However, it took two years and much arm-twisting to force
the measure through the Bahamas Assembly, and even then in a somewhat weakened form.
G. Saunders, Slavery in the Bahamas, 1648–1838 (Nassau: Nassau Guardian, 1985),
pp.172, 175. A similar story of opposition from leading members of colonial society
could be seen throughout the West Indies.
6. J.C. Dorsey, ‘Seamy Side of Abolition: Puerto Rico and the Cabotage Slave Trade to Cuba,
1848–73’, Slavery and Abolition, 19, 1 (April 1998), pp.106–28. Dorsey identifies 5 illicit
movements of slaves around the Caribbean in the first half of the nineteenth century: from
Hispaniola following the Haitian Revolution; from Jamaica and the Bahamas to Cuba, in
response to abolitionism and eventually emancipation; from the Eastern Caribbean
islands to Puerto Rico at the time of British emancipation; Spanish-sponsored movement
from the French Antilles to Puerto Rico; and the sale of slaves from the French and
Dutch Antilles to Puerto Rico at the time of emancipation there. Many of the slaves who
entered Puerto Rico were subsequently transferred to Cuba.
7. M. Craton and G. Saunders, Islands in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People, Vol.1
(Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 1985), p.224.
8. Letter from David Turnbull to Lord Stanley, Nassau, 3 Sept. 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
9. H. Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (London:
Picador, 1997); José Luciano Franco, Comercio clandestine de esclavos (Havana: Editorial
de Ciencias Sociales, 1996).
10. José Luciano Franco, ‘Piratas, corsarios, filibusteros y contrabandistas’, in José Luciano
Franco, Ensayos Históricos (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1974), pp.47–92.
11. L. Derby, ‘National Identity and the Idea of Value in the Dominican Republic’, in
N. Priscilla Naro (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century
Latin America (London: ILAS, 2003), p.17. Roland Ely describes how it was this contraband trade between the British and Spanish colonies that provided the important stimulus
to Cuba’s economy, forcing the Spanish to liberalize its trade policies (R.T. Ely, Cuando
reinaba su majestad el azúcar: Estudio histórico-sociológico de una tragedia latinoamericana: el monocultivo en Cuba. Origen y evolución del proceso (Havana: Imagen
Contemporánea, 2001), pp.47–54).
12. See, M. Moreno Fraginals, El Ingenio, 3 Vols. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
1978); F. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the 19th Century (Madison: University of
90
13.
14.
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
Wisconsin Press, 1970); Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Azúcar y población en las Antillas
(Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1970).
Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez et al. (eds.), Historia de la nación cubana, Vol.2 (Havana,
1952), p.78; and Resumen del censo de la población de la isla de Cuba (Havana, 1842),
p.19 – cited by Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, p.24.
L.W. Bergad, Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic
History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990),
pp.69–76; L.W. Bergad, Fé Iglesias and Marı́a del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave
Market (1790–1880) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, p.53; Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, pp.275–6;
Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (AHN), Ultramar, Esclavitud, Legs.3547, 3552,
3553. Slave trade reports sent by British representatives in Cuba to the British government
throughout the period are a litany of complaints of the blatant breaches of the Treaty, and
show that there was a constant stream of illicit slave landings which they were all but powerless to prevent (PRO, FO 84).
A number of factors saw prices increasing greatly once again from the late 1840s: repeal of
British sugar duties; uncertainty about the future of the slave trade; an increase in international sugar prices leading to increased production; inequality in mechanization
between agricultural and industrial phases of sugar production. L.W. Bergad, ‘Slave
Prices in Cuba, 1840–1875’, Hispano American Historical Review, 67, 4 (Nov. 1987),
pp.631–55; Bergad, Cuban Rural Society; Bergad et al., Cuban Slave Market.
British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter (BFASR), 4, 13 (21 June 1843), p.107.
BFASR, 2, 3 (10 Feb. 1841), pp.34–5.
Letter from Foreign Office to Charles Tolmé, London, 31 Aug. 1838 and letter from Tolmé
to Viscount Palmerston, Havana, 14 July 1838 (PRO, FO 72/513).
Rhodes House Library (Oxford) (RH), British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society papers
(BFASS), MSS Brit Emp s.18, G77; PRO, FO 84/357 and FO 84/358.
D.R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave Trade
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp.271–97.
Letter from David Turnbull to HM Commissioners for the Suppression of the Slave Trade,
Havana, 4 Jan. 1841 (PRO, CO 318/153).
Letter from David Turnbull to Gerónimo Valdés, Havana, 8 March 1841 (PRO, FO 72/584).
See M. Fraginals, El Ingenio; Ely, Cuando reinaba su majestad el azúcar. By 1867, more
than 40 per cent of the world’s cane sugar came from Cuba (A. Dye, Cuban Sugar in the Age
of Mass Production: Technology and the Economics of the Sugar Central, 1899– 1929
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.27). The expansion was not just in
terms of the number of plantations cultivating sugar, but also resulted from the many technological improvements that speeded up the grinding and refining processes. Since the
labour-intensive field work remained largely unmechanized, this accentuated the need for
more labourers. See, for example, M. Moreno Fraginals, ‘Plantations in the Caribbean:
Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in
M. Moreno Fraginals, F. Moya Pons and S.L. Engerman (eds.), Between Slavery and
Free Labor: The Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore &
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), pp.3–21.
José Antonio Saco was particularly prominent in the promotion of white immigration as
both economically and racially necessary (amongst many such writings, see José Antonio
Saco, ‘Análisis de una obra sobre el Brasil’, Papeles sobre Cuba, Vol.2 (Havana: Ministerio
de Educación, 1960), pp.30–90).
Derby, ‘National Identity and the Idea of Value’, p.20.
Dorsey, ‘Seamy Sides of Abolition’.
Archivo Nacional de Cuba (ANC), Fondo Gobierno Superior Civil (FGSC), 844/28360.
ANC, FGSC, 843/28293.
ANC, FGSC, 844/28360.
ANC, FGSC, 844/28351.
Craton and Saunders, Islands in the Stream, p.225.
PRO, CO 318/157.
CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
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42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
91
ANC, FGSC, 845/28390.
BFASR, 4, 9 (3 May 1843); ANC, FGSC, 845/28390; PRO, CO 137/279.
AHN, Estado, Legajo 8057/1, No.1.
AHN, Estado, 8057/1 No.2.
AHN, Estado, 8057/1 No.5.
José Gutiérrez de la Concha y de Irigoyen, Marqués de la Habana, Memorias sobre el estado
polı́tico, gobierno y administración de la isla de Cuba (Madrid, 1853), p.15.
Letter from Kennedy to Earl of Aberdeen, Havana, 8 July 1844 (PRO, FO 84/509).
Vidal Morales y Morales, Inicadores y primeros mártires de la revolución cubana (Havana,
1901), pp.129–77; F. González del Valle, La Conspiración de la Escalera. I. José de la Luz
y Caballero (Havana, 1925); P. Deschamps Chapeaux, El negro en la economı́a habanera
del siglo XIX (Havana, 1971); Knight, Slave Society in Cuba.
José de J. Márquez, ‘Plácido y los conspiradores de 1844’, Revista Cubana, 20 (1894);
Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana; los negros esclavos; estudio sociológico y de
derecho público (Havana, 1916); José Manuel de Ximeno, ‘Un pobre histrión (Plácido)’,
in Primer Congreso Nacional de Historia, Vol.2 (Havana, 1943), pp.371–7; also idem,
‘Apuntes para la historia constitucional de Cuba. Los complicados con Plácido’, Libertad
nacional, 4 May 1944; G. Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies: A Comparison of St Domingue and Cuba (Baltimore, 1971); Jonathan Curry-Machado, ‘Catalysts
in the Crucible: Kidnapped Caribbeans, Free Black British Subjects and Migrant British
Machinists in the Failed Cuban Revolution of 1843’, in Naro (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds
and National Identity, pp.123–42.
M. Hernández y Sánchez-Barba, ‘David Turnbull y el problema de la esclavitud en Cuba’,
Anuario de estudios americanos, 14 (1957); Daisy Cué Fernández, ‘Plácido y la conspiración de la Escalera’, Santiago, 42 (June 1981), pp.145–206; R. Sarracino, Inglaterra: sus
dos caras en la lucha cubana por la abolición (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1989).
Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp.263– 4.
PRO, FO 72/584.
David Turnbull, Travels in the West: Cuba; with notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade
(London, 1840).
PRO, FO 72/559.
Letter from Luis de Florez (Encargado de Negocios en Londres) to Earl of Aberdeen,
London 22 Sept. 1841 (AHN, Estado 8054/1).
Letter from Palmerston to Turnbull, 2 Aug. 1841 (PRO, FO 84/358).
Letter from Palmerston to Turnbull, 26 Aug. 1841 (PRO, FO 84/358).
Letter from Tolmé to Turnbull, 9 Nov. 1840 (PRO, FO 72/559).
The result was a vitriolic exchange of letters between both men and the British government.
The latter eventually had to verbally knock their heads together, since the conflict was in
danger of becoming a serious embarrassment to the British state (PRO, FO 84/357, 358).
Letter from Turnbull to Lord Stanley, 22 Dec. 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
ANC, Comisión Militar (CM), 51/1, pp.566–7.
ANC, FGSC, 843/28310, 844/28329 and AHN, Estado, 8054/1.
Aberdeen to Turnbull, 10 Feb. 1842 (PRO, FO 72/608).
Crawford to Aberdeen, 24 June 1842 (PRO, FO 72/609).
Turnbull to Aberdeen, 14 June 1842 (PRO, FO 72/608); Turnbull to Lord Stanley, 14 June
1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
PRO, CO 318/157.
Various letters from Turnbull to Lord Stanley from Nassau, Sept. and Oct. 1842 (PRO, CO
318/157).
Letter from Turnbull to Lord Stanley, Nassau, 3 Sept. 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
Extracts of statements sent by Captain General Valdés to First Secretary of State in
Madrid, 5 Nov. 1842 (AHN, Estado, 8054/2); Crawford to John Bidwell, 6 Nov. 1842
(PRO, FO 72/609); Turnbull to the Lieutenant Governor of the Bahamas, 22 Oct. 1842
(PRO, CO 23/113); H. Leapern to Secretary of the British & Foreign Anti-Slavery
Society, Nassau, 5 Nov. 1842 (RH, BFASS, MSS Brit Emp s.18, C14/141).
Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp.78, 180.
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SLAVERY AND A BOLITION
64. Letter from J.M. Morales to Henry A. Coit, Havana, 1 April 1843 (Biblioteca Nacional ‘José
Martı́’, Havana (BNJM), C.M. Lobo 113, No.1, File 2; Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood,
p.177; Letter from Crawford to Aberdeen, 18 April 1843 (PRO, FO 72/634).
65. Morales to Coit, 1 April 1843 (BNJM, Lobo 113/1/2); Crawford to Aberdeen, 18 April 1843
(PRO, FO 72/634); Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, p.210.
66. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp.178, 210; Crawford to Aberdeen, 18 April 1843
(PRO, FO 72/634).
67. Manuel Barcia Paz, ‘Entre amenazas y quejas: un acercamiento al papel jugado por los
diplomáticos ingleses en Cuba durante la conspiración de la Escalera, 1844’, Colonial
Latin America Historical Review, 10, 1 (Winter 2001), pp.1–25 – my translation.
68. Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp.209–10.
69. M. del Carmen Barcia and M. Barcia Paz, ‘La Conspiración de la Escalera: el precio de una
traición’, Catauro: revista cubana de antropologı́a, 3 (2001), pp.199–204; Paquette, Sugar
is Made with Blood, p.215.
70. Letter from José del Castillo to John Scoble, Havana, 14 Feb. 1844 (RH, BFASS, MSS Brit
Emp s.18, C 15/10); William Norwood Diary, 18 Feb. 1844 (Virginia Historical Society);
Paquette, Sugar is Made with Blood, pp.217, 222–3.
71. Sentence (12a) pronounced by Military Commission, Matanzas (AHN, Estado, 8057/1, No.1).
72. ANC, CM, 51/1, pp.591–2.
73. Turnbull to Aberdeen, 21 Aug. 1844 (PRO, FO 84/516); and Turnbull to Earl of Elgin, 21
Aug. 1844 (PRO, CO 137/280).
74. Crawford to Aberdeen, 18 April 1843 (PRO, FO 72/634).
75. PRO, FO 72/709.
76. Turnbull to Lord Stanley, 31 July 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
77. Sarracino, Inglaterra.
78. Sarracino, Inglaterra, pp.132–5.
79. See, for example, Turnbull to Aberdeen, Havana, 30 Oct. 1841 (PRO, FO 84/358).
80. BFASS Minute Book No.2 (RH, MSS Brit Emp s.20, E 2/7).
81. PRO, FO 72/709. Although Cocking goes into great detail as to the workings of the committees organizing the uprising, and the plans they had, it is highly probable that he exaggerated the significance both of these, and of his own and Turnbull’s involvement. At the
time of writing his confessional letters, he was almost destitute in Caracas, and was desperately seeking through his letters to curry favour with the British government. They were
none too impressed with his heroic claims, however, and clearly felt that there were no
grounds on which to reward him.
82. Turnbull to Lord Stanley, HMS Romney, 31 July 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
83. Turnbull to Lord Stanley, HMS Romney, 31 July 1842 (PRO, CO 318/157).
84. Charles Clarke to Aberdeen, 2 June 1843 (PRO, FO 72/634); also PRO, CO 137/275.
85. AHN, Estado, 8038/3.
86. AHN, Estado, 8057/1.
87. ANC, Asuntos Polı́ticos (AP), 41/52 – my translation.
88. ANC, AP, 41/51 – my translation.
89. J. Luciano Franco, ‘La conjura de los negreros’, in Franco, Ensayos Históricos, pp.193–200.
90. See Sarracino, Inglaterra, pp.135–6.
91. Clarke to Russell, 20 Nov. 1840 (PRO, CO 318/149); Turnbull to Stanley, 31 July 1842
(PRO, CO 318/157); Turnbull to Palmerston, 15 Dec. 1840 (PRO, FO 72/559); Turnbull
to Palmerston, 27 Jan. 1841 (PRO, FO 72/584); Crawford to Aberdeen, 12 Aug. 1842
(PRO, FO 72/609). For a full history of the imperial machinations of the United States in
Cuba, and the rivalry with Britain, see Luis Martı́nez-Fernández, Torn between Empires:
economy, society and patterns of political thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–
1878 (Athens & London: University of Georgia Press, 1994).
92. Race continued to be the principal stumbling block for a successful Cuban national project
throughout the nineteenth century. Racial differences played a large part in the failure of the
first war of independence (the Ten Years War, 1868–78); and largely defined the limits of
support for Maceo’s continued rebellion (1878–79). It was not until José Martı́ succeeded in
building a cross-race, cross-class national coalition of forces in the 1890s that Cuba finally
CUBA: RACE, ABOLITION AND THE ESCALERA
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93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
93
succeeded in ridding itself of Spanish control. However, racial differences continued to be at
the heart of contested visions of what the Cuban nation should be well into the twentieth
century. See A. Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–
1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Alejandro de la Fuente,
Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2001); P. Pérez Sarduy and J. Stubbs (eds.), AfroCuba: An Anthology
of Writing on Race, Politics and Culture (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1993).
While no kidnapped Caribbeans were directly accused of complicity in the plot, some black
British subjects were arrested. Amongst them was Joseph Kelly, a freeborn native of the
Bahamas. He arrived in Cuba in 1823, working as a carpenter in the vicinity of Matanzas.
Although he was not the only British worker to be caught up in the trials, unlike the
white workers who were all eventually released, he was found guilty and sentenced to
ten years of hard labour in the Ceuta penal colony (PRO, FO 72/664; PRO, CO 23/118;
PRO, FO 84/520). Six years later diplomatic pressures were continuing in an attempt to
secure his release (PRO, FO 72/771).
See R.J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: the Transition to Free Labour, 1860–1895
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
Curry-Machado, ‘Catalysts in the Crucible’.
PRO, FO 72/664. Free blacks in general were seen as a threat to the established white order
in Cuba throughout the nineteenth century (see J. Stubbs, ‘Race, Gender and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Cuba: Mariana Grajales and the Revolutionary Free Browns of
Cuba’, in Naro (ed.), Blacks, Coloureds and National Identity, pp.95– 122). It was they who
bore the brunt of the repression that followed the Escalera.
M.D. Childs, ‘The Aponte Rebellion of 1812 and the Transformation of Cuban Society:
race, slavery and freedom in the Atlantic World’ (PhD thesis, University of Texas at
Austin, 2001); M.D. Childs, ‘“A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island”:
Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s 1812 Aponte Rebellion’, in D. Geggus (ed.),
The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 2001), pp.135– 56; José Luciano Franco, ‘La Conspiración de
Aponte, 1812’, in Franco, Ensayos Históricos, pp.127–90.
Rumours that emancipation had been decreed in Spain, but denied by local authorities in
Cuba, fuelled slave uprisings at the time both of the Aponte and Escalera conspiracies.
See D. Murray, ‘The Slave Trade, Slavery and Cuban Independence’, Slavery & Abolition,
20, 3 (Dec. 1999), pp.112–13. Similar events occurred in Jamaica in 1831, sparking unrest
there (see M. Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp.291–321).
D.B. Gaspar and D.P. Geggus (eds.), A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the
Greater Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Geggus, Impact of
the Haitian Revolution.
F. Douglass, ‘Lecture on Haiti’, in P.S. Foner (ed.), The Life and Writings of Frederick
Douglass (New York: International Publishers, 1950–75), Vol.4, pp.484–6.
Murray, ‘Slave Trade, Slavery and Cuban Independence’, p.113.
ANC, CM, 51/1.
J.S. Scott III, ‘The Common Wind: Currents of Afro-American Communication in the Era
of the Haitian Revolution’ (PhD thesis, Duke University, 1986).
J. Curry-Machado, ‘Beneath and Beyond the Nation: Cuba at the Interstices of Nineteenth
Century Trans-national Networks’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, forthcoming.
P.D. Curtin, Cross Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1984), p.246.
M. Turner, Slaves and Missionaries: The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–
1834 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); C. Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole
and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).