The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery

Matt D. Childs

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807877418
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

In 1812 a series of revolts known collectively as the Aponte Rebellion erupted across the island of Cuba, comprising one of the largest and most important slave insurrections in Caribbean history. Matt Childs provides the first in-depth analysis of the rebellion, situating it in local, colonial, imperial, and Atlantic World contexts. Childs explains how slaves and free people of color responded to the nineteenth-century "sugar boom" in the Spanish colony by planning a rebellion against racial slavery and plantation agriculture. Striking alliances among free people of color and slaves, blacks and mulattoes, Africans and Creoles, and rural and urban populations, rebels were prompted to act by a widespread belief in rumors promising that emancipation was near. Taking further inspiration from the 1791 Haitian Revolution, rebels sought to destroy slavery in Cuba and perhaps even end Spanish rule. By comparing his findings to studies of slave insurrections in Brazil, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States, Childs places the rebellion within the wider story of Atlantic World revolution and political change. The book also features a biographical table, constructed by Childs, of the more than 350 people investigated for their involvement in the rebellion, 34 of whom were executed.

Chapter 1: The Present Time Period Is Very Delicate

Cuban Slavery and the Changing Atlantic World, 1750–1850

On the morning of 9 April 1812, a crowd of spectators gathered next to the military fort of La Punta, which to this day guards the western entrance to the Bay of Havana. Men, women, and children waited for the public execution of the conspirators who had attempted to overthrow Spanish colonialism and destroy Cuban slavery. According to the island’s captain general, the crowd responded to the execution of the leaders “with applause from the public who desired the quick satisfaction of repressing the [movement], and [it] provided an example to others of the horror of their excess.”¹ Among those on the execution scaffold with José Antonio Aponte, the leader of the rebellion, stood a free black named Juan Barbier. After inflicting a painful death by hanging, the executioner severed Barbier’s head from his body. Colonial authorities then placed Barbier’s head in a steel cage, secured it to the top of a pole, and placed it at the entrance to the Peñas-Altas plantation outside of Havana where the revolt had erupted on 16 March 1812.²

While judicial figures quickly, confidently, and authoritatively executed Barbier, privately they revealed their anxiety in attempting to identify Barbier and his specific role in the rebellion. Like the millions who shared the same tragic distinction of being part of the largest forced migration in human history, Juan Barbier crossed the Atlantic Ocean as a slave, undoubtedly with a different name. After his arrival in the Americas, unlike the vast majority who would die laboring on plantations, he managed to gain his freedom. Judicial officials could not determine how and when Barbier earned his freedom. They did suggest, however, that he had lived in Charleston, South Carolina, and concluded that he had spent considerable time in the former French colony of Saint Domingue where he learned how to read, write, and speak French before settling in Cuba.³ His identification with the former French colony only recently transformed into the independent republic of Haiti by slave revolution terrified authorities and caused them to investigate further.

Several slaves and free people of color questioned for their involvement in the rebellion had singled out Barbier as one of the leaders. Clemente Chacón, a free black from Havana, identified Barbier as “an admiral who has served in Haiti and demonstrated papers written in French.”⁴ Tiburcio Peñalver, a slave from a plantation outside of Havana, reported a similar story that Barbier “said he was a general and read some papers declaring [that] by order of his King, he had come to give the blacks their freedom.”⁵ Another slave from the same plantation told judicial authorities that, during a meeting where they discussed the rebellion, “Barbier took out some French papers and read them in his language saying he would explain them later.”⁶ José Joaquín Machado, a slave of Maca ethnicity from the Lower Guinea region, encountered Barbier on the road leading from Havana to the plantations outside the city. Barbier told José to prepare for the rebellion because “two generals from Haiti had come to Cuba to aid the rebellion.”⁷ Several of the arrested recalled seeing Barbier dressed in a “blue military jacket,” mounted on a horse, and greeting slaves with “camarada, como va? [comrade, how is it going?].”⁸ Barbier’s image of a military figure speaking and reading in French resonated with slaves and free people of color in Cuba as a crucial event in the preparation for the rebellion. As authorities continued their investigation they discovered that many slaves identified Juan Barbier and several others of the arrested rebels as “French,” such as the free black Juan Tamayo from Bayamo, known as “el Francés.”⁹

Juan Barbier symbolized the radical changes circulating in the Atlantic world during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The attention Juan Barbier attracted from slaves and free people of color, as well as the officials who suppressed the movement, illustrates how Haiti provided contrasting images of fascination and fear for different sectors of Cuban society.¹⁰ Slaves and free people of color connected to maritime commerce had routinely traveled throughout the Caribbean and crisscrossed the Atlantic since the sixteenth century.¹¹ By the late 1700s and early 1800s, however, the same currents that had carried ships for centuries now transported a revolutionary cargo of ideas, literature, and people that Cuban officials feared would infect a society based on slave labor.¹² The American, French, and Spanish American Revolutions directly and indirectly confronted the legitimacy of slavery by questioning the rights of monarchical authority and colonialism. No single political event in modern history, however, revealed so dramatically the contradiction between slavery and the political right of individual liberty as the Haitian Revolution. This chapter analyzes what ideas and influences emanating from the Age of Revolution had on the Aponte Rebellion of 1812.¹³ The contradictions generated by the dramatic increase in Cuban slave labor at the exact time period the institution of slavery came under question as an organizing principle for New World colonies fueled the aspirations for liberation by free people of color and slaves.

CUBAN SLAVERY DURING THE ATLANTIC AGE OF REVOLUTION

From roughly 1750 to 1850, the continents bordering the Atlantic Ocean witnessed a series of civil wars, bloody revolutions, independence struggles, and battles for political dominance that forced cartographers to work at a feverish pace for decades. Just as modern nation-states signed constitutions that chipped away at monarchical authority and colonial rule in favor of expanding individual autonomy and sovereignty, the people living in the increasingly interconnected Atlantic world found themselves more vulnerable to dramatic changes in their daily lives caused by events thousands of miles away. For some, these changes marked the birth of a new era; for others, they signaled the passing of an old one. Benigno López, a Spanish colonial official who advised the crown on foreign affairs, feared the changes circulating in the Atlantic world would disrupt three centuries of Spanish supremacy in the Americas. In 1796, he argued for the need to fortify the Spanish islands of the Caribbean against the contagion of slave insurrections from Hispaniola and Coro, Venezuela, as well as from an uprising of Native Americans on the Darien peninsula of Panama. López blamed the rebellions on the political ferment created by the English and the “new republic of the United States” with their “dominant and conquistador spirit” found in the “hearts of Englishmen and Anglo-Americans as they are the children of the same mother.”¹⁴ While Spanish officials feared these political changes, slaves and free people of color in Cuba embraced the time period as a revolutionary era.

The French, British, American, and Spanish political and economic elites of the era recognized the radical changing times. Bryan Edwards, an astute English planter from Jamaica, in a speech to the British Parliament in 1798, warned that “a spirit of subversion has gone forth that set at naught the wisdom of our ancestors and the lessons of experience.”¹⁵ The American revolutionary John Adams revealed more than he could have imagined with his response mocking his wife Abigail’s plea to “remember the ladies” when drafting the Declaration of Independence: “As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters.”¹⁶ As independence struggles called into question the relationship between crown and colony, individuals also began to rethink their relations with their superiors and the hierarchical divisions that ordered societies. The Age of Revolution that swept the Atlantic world would involve, to different degrees, numerous nations, various social classes, and diverse races and ethnicities in the fight to end colonization, servile labor, and monarchical authority in order to expand political rights, citizenship, and individual liberty.

The Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), the first global war that marked the rise of Britain as the undisputed leader in overseas colonization, accelerated interactions among different people in the Atlantic world. The battlefields of the Seven Years’ War blanketed Europe and extended around the globe to the Caribbean, North America, South America, the Philippines, and the Indian Subcontinent. After Spain and France signed the third Bourbon Family Compact on 15 August 1761, the British navy targeted Havana, the largest port city of the Spanish Caribbean and the gateway to the Spanish mainland.¹⁷ During the summer of 1762, an invasion force of over 12,000 soldiers supported by 200 warships commanded by the Earl of Albermarle, laid siege to Havana and after two months of bombardment, conquered the city.¹⁸ The British only occupied Cuba for a year until the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, returning the island to Spain in exchange for Florida.

Although brief, the British occupation initiated a series of changes that would fundamentally alter Cuban society. The British maritime supremacy that helped ensure victory in the Seven Years’ War also strengthened the British as the leading force in the Atlantic slave trade. Although British control of Cuba lasted less than a year, perhaps as many as 4,000 African slaves arrived on the island in that period, comprising an amazing 8 to 10 percent of all slaves imported over the previous 250 years.¹⁹ The British occupation further expanded Cuba’s plantation system and strengthened the chains of human bondage and racial slavery. At the same time, the political rivalries of the Seven Years’ War also provided the opportunity for some slaves to obtain their freedom. English officials reported that during their attack on Havana “five mulattoes, eighty-four negroes, and one Indian” sided with the invaders in exchange for their freedom.²⁰ Slaves could navigate the political openings caused by international warfare to inject their own strategies for liberation into the battles.

Once Spain regained control of the island in 1763, colonial official Julian de Arriaga realized the danger “of the increasing number of slaves that could become partisans of enemies if they are offered freedom.” In order to diminish the anticipation of such a future “promise,” the Spanish Crown decided to grant freedom to slaves who could demonstrate they had participated in the defense of Havana.²¹ During the siege, the British had encountered a committed defense at Morro Castle by the Cuban standing army and the numerous volunteers who took up arms. The captain general of Cuba, the Conde de Ricla, granted twelve slaves their cartas de libertad (letters of liberty) upon issue of the decree in 1763. Over the next year, fourteen additional slaves successfully documented their participation in the defense of Havana and earned their freedom. The slave José Aponte (perhaps a relative of José Antonio Aponte, the leader of the 1812 Aponte Rebellion) participated in the defense of Havana. During the battle, José Aponte “captured seven prisoners and killed two white English soldiers.”²² Despite four witnesses testifying to José Aponte’s participation in the defense of Havana, the judge ruled that because “he had waited fifteen years to apply for his freedom, his request could not be granted,” and he remain enslaved.²³

While it is unclear if José Aponte of the Seven Years’ War and José Antonio Aponte of the slave rebellion of 1812 shared a common ancestry, the latter included several sketches of family members who participated in the defense of Havana in his book of drawings. Judicial official Juan Ignacio Rendón grilled Aponte on the meaning of the book for three days, attempting to understand the images of blacks soldiers defeating whites. Aponte explained that one of the drawings portrayed his grandfather, “Captain Joaquín Aponte[,] in battle” against “six hundred men and an English Battalion that landed” in Havana.²⁴ José Antonio Aponte also elaborated on a drawing of the free black militia led by his father, “Nicolás Aponte, … demonstrating the carrying away of white male prisoners that were the English who entered the city at six in the morning.”²⁵ In another drawing, Aponte depicted his grandfather wearing the medal “of the royal effigy of Carlos III,” king of Spain (1759–88), for his service in battle.²⁶ While the English occupation of Havana represented a decisive blow to the Spanish imperial system in the Americas, the images of black soldiers heroically defending the city and the capture of white prisoners represented a source of pride for Aponte and probably numerous other free blacks and slaves.

Military records from Spanish archives confirm some aspects of Aponte’s drawings of his grandfather Joaquín and father Nicolás. Joaquín Aponte served in the free black militia for most of his life. In 1775, at the age of s...