Alejandro de la Fuente, Ariela Julie Gross.  Becoming Free, Becoming
Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana. 
Cambridge  Cambridge University Press, 2020.  294 pp.  $24.95
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-48064-2.

Reviewed by Patrick Barker (Yale University)
Published on H-Slavery (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler

Collaboratively researched and written, this is a richly detailed and
carefully argued book that traces the evolution of distinct racial
regimes in three Atlantic slave societies, namely Cuba, Louisiana,
and Virginia, over the _longue durée_. From their foundation as
colonies of the Spanish, French, and English empires, respectively,
through to the late 1850s, de la Fuente and Gross demonstrate how
laws of race and freedom came to shape the emergence of different
racial regimes in what became the United States and what remained
Spanish Cuba. In each of these jurisdictions, slaveholding elites
racially ordered their localized legal regimes in ways that heavily
discriminated against Afro-descended peoples. However, by the 1850s,
the legal link between "whiteness and citizenship"--and by extension,
Blackness and slavery--was most clearly expressed in anti-Black laws
of freedom and race in Louisiana and Virginia. While anti-Blackness
had found legal expression in the earliest laws governing slave
society in Spanish Cuba, by the 1850s, the colony's law still
permitted free communities of color to participate meaningfully as
rights-bearing subjects in ways that were roundly suppressed by
lawmakers in Louisiana and Virginia. Resultantly, for free
communities of color, the racial barriers to belonging were "much
farther advanced" in Louisiana and Virginia than in Cuba on the eve
of the US Civil War (p. 222).

De la Fuente and Gross provide a compelling and original argument as
to how and why these distinct racial regimes came into being by the
late 1850s. Harnessing comprehensive insights from an extensive range
of legal documentation housed in Cuban, Spanish, and US archives, the
authors argue it was the "law of freedom" and "not the law of
slavery" that proved "most crucial" in creating racial regimes in
each of these societies (p. 4). In particular, it was the degrees of
racialized severity with which slaveholding elites could--or could
not--regulate manumission, interracial unions, and the rights of free
communities of color over the _longue durée_, which effectively
shaped the contours of these distinct legal regimes of anti-Blackness
in the US south and Cuba by 1860.

As the others make clear, however, even in Louisiana and Virginia,
slaveholding elites were never fully able to enact what de la Fuente
and Gross call the "dichotomous world that they envisioned"--namely a
world in which African ancestry was made entirely synonymous with
degradation and slavery (p. 220). De la Fuente and Gross explain that
white slaveholding elites could never fully exact this racial
ordering project because across every era and with varying degrees of
success, people of African descent always found ways to pursue and
secure legal freedom in each jurisdiction. Once free, communities of
color struggled to make their freedoms meaningful despite the racist
laws that so often restricted their public lives and haunted their
private relationships. In doing so, free people of African descent,
particularly in Cuba and in specific eras in Louisiana and Virginia,
were able to form numerically significant and lasting free
communities of color that stood in defiance of slaveholders'
long-standing efforts to equate Blackness with slave status.
_Becoming Free, Becoming Black _is thus not merely a study of how
elite slaveholders crafted anti-Black laws to suit their own
political and economic goals. Through a multigenerational analysis of
enslaved peoples' manumission and litigation strategies, the authors
illustrate how people of African ancestry negotiated and gave shape
to the laws of freedom and race and did so in often remarkable and
creative ways. This theme of study has of course animated much of the
most recent and exciting historical scholarship on race and the law
in Americas, but _Becoming Free, Becoming Black _adds to that body of
work by excavating a deep history of Black manumission and litigation
strategies in legal systems informed by different legal precedents
and imperial legacies.[1]


De la Fuente and Gross draw their many insights from an extensive
multilingual study of legal documentation produced over more than
three centuries and housed in Cuban, Spanish, and US archives. To
understand how, when, and why slaveholding elites imposed racialized
regulations on people of African descent and the laws of freedom, de
la Fuente and Gross analyze sources produced at a range of
administrative levels of power. Such sources include municipal and
policing ordinances, assembly records, state laws, imperial codes,
and royal edicts. The authors' assessment of enslaved claims-making
and litigation strategies is made possible by close readings of
individual claims and court cases, along with aggregate analyses of
the strategies pursued by the enslaved over time, where the available
data permits. For this element of the project, the authors collected
and analyzed a remarkable range of legal documents, including
legislative minutes, court records, trial records, notarial deeds,
and wills, among other types of sources. Complementing their analyses
of these archival sources, the book's clarity of argument and its
endnotes demonstrate a deep engagement with a large body of
comparative historical literature on race and slavery in the
Americas, charting back to sociologist Frank Tannenbaum's _Slave
& Citizen_, first published in 1946.

The book consists of five chapters, each comparative in form. The
first chapter explores to what degree legal and social precedents
informed the laws of race during the earliest stages of colonial
settlement in each society. De la Fuente and Gross show how early
settlers in Cuba and Louisiana inscribed African ancestry as a
distinct marker of social degradation. Several ordinances between the
1550s and early seventeenth century demonstrate that anti-Black
ideology was a fixture in early Spanish Cuba's law. Local ordinances
governing crime, commercial life, political participation, and
so-called vagrants contained racially discriminatory provisions that
prescribed disproportionate policing and punishment for people of
African descent. In developing Cuba's early racial regime, the
authors explain that Iberian settlers were drawing on racialized
ideas about blood purity (_limpieza de sangre_) and racial codes
already enacted in the Iberian Peninsula. Some of Cuba's earliest
municipal ordinances bore a remarkable similarity to the legal codes
policing racial order in slaveholding Iberian cities like Lisbon,
Seville, and Valencia, where African slavery and free communities of
color were already visible elements of urban life. While Cuba's
authorities created localized racial ordinances that embodied Iberian
legal precedent, French Louisiana's slaveholding elites borrowed from
and then expanded the racialized regulations contained within the
French empire's Code Noir_ _of 1685 when making Louisiana's first
anti-Black civil code, the Code Noir_ _of 1724. The Louisiana code
contained numerous provisions not listed in the French Antillean code
of 1685 and prescribed discriminatory punishments for freed Black
transgressors of the law, racial restrictions on interracial marriage
and sex, and even attempted to constrain Black social mobility by
banning donations and legacies from white settlers.

The early colonial process of race-making, as de la Fuente and Gross
show, was more gradual in English Virginia than in French Louisiana
and Spanish Cuba. When English settlers disembarked in what became
Virginia in 1607, they "lacked clear precedents" for the legal
enslavement of people of African descent and therefore did not have a
clear legal distinction of race from which they could draw. According
to the authors, the laws governing racial status in English Virginia
"remained unsettled and open to interpretation" in the colony during
the earliest decades of settlement (p. 16). Before the late 1650s,
some Black subjects were able to win their freedoms and enjoyed
rights later available to only white English settlers. Virginia's
legal system would begin to change in 1659, as a statute that reduced
import duties for slave traders simultaneously discussed the
importation of "negroes" rather than slaves, suggesting lawmakers had
already begun conflating African ancestry with slave status. However,
the lack of clear legal and social precedent in Virginia did not
prevent slaveholding elites from borrowing legal principles from
other legal regimes. Just three years after the 1659 law, Virginia's
legislators adopted the _partus sequitur ventrem_ (offspring follows
belly) principle, which instituted that slave status was inheritable
via the maternal line.[2] By introducing this principle, Virginian
lawmakers had subverted English legal doctrine and replaced it with a
Roman principle already practiced in Iberian and French colonies.
Virginia slaveholding elites began to develop more explicitly
anti-Black laws, the authors argue, not because of a particular event
such as Bacon's Rebellion. Instead, slaveholders began to restrict
laws of freedom and racialize existing legal codes in ways that
discriminated against people of African descent because of longer-run
structural changes in Virginia's demography and economy.[3] As the
migration of English servants slowed down and the plantation economy
expanded in the latter half of the seventeenth century, Virginia's
lawmakers--in effect--sought to maintain and more tightly control
their captive African labor force. To support those aims, lawmakers
began to more deliberately use "race as a marker of degradation" (p.
58).

Chapter 2 shifts to consider the legal contours of manumission and
interracial marriage in each society before the 1770s. By seeking
freedom through any legal means available, de la Fuente and Gross
argue in this chapter, "slaves breached the racial order" and were
not passive recipients of freedoms granted by white slaveholders (p.
41). However, the possibilities available to the enslaved for
pursuing legal freedom differed considerably across these societies.
Manumission was part "of the traditional architecture of slavery" in
Iberian society (p. 43). Additionally, interracial marriage and sex
were legally unregulated in Cuba until 1778. Unlike early Spanish
Cuba's racialized municipal ordinances, which explicitly
discriminated against Cubans of African descent, lawmakers never
restricted the colony's manumission laws, nor did they tie those laws
to race. Instead, Spanish officials and slaveholders viewed
manumission as an "ordinary practice" safeguarded by long-standing
Roman principles in the law of Iberian slavery (p. 45). Enslaved
people in Cuba could make use of manumission by will, faithful
service, and self-purchase practices, including that of
_coartación_, a commonly deployed form of incremental self-purchase,
across the entire period of study. Women in Cuba were also
consistently the most likely to obtain their legal freedoms through
manumission, as they were in Louisiana and Virginia. At the turn of
the seventeenth century, women constituted as many as 65 percent of
people manumitted in Havana, a trend that only continued into the
eighteenth century. Most freed peoples in Cuba won their freedom
through self-purchase. Because Cuba's race laws--like French
Louisiana and after 1662, Virginia--adhered to the principle of
_partus sequitur ventrem_, children also inherited freedom through
the maternal line. Longer-term, manumission unrestricted by race and
the prevalence of women claimants meant Cuba's free communities of
color grew to a far higher proportional rate than in French Louisiana
and what became British Virginia before 1770.

In French Louisiana and what became British Virginia, on the other
hand, lawmakers succeeded in racializing and tightly restricting
manumission practices in ways that discriminated against people of
African descent. As plantation slavery expanded in English Virginia
during the latter half of the seventeenth century, the colony's
legislators increasingly restricted manumission and marriage
practices based on race. The colony's first comprehensive slave code
in 1691 described freed peoples as an "inconvenience" and imposed
mandatory fines on slaveholders who manumitted enslaved people of
African ancestry (p. 60). By the early eighteenth century,
slaveholders tightened the laws even further. In 1723, Virginia's
legislature banned manumission in all cases except for "meritorious
service" and mandated that the colony's governor and council mediate
all manumissions. As in the well-known case of James Papaw, some
enslaved people still managed to obtain their freedom despite such
deliberately onerous stipulations. However, in practice, most
manumissions were few and far between, and mostly enacted through
wills for what slaveholders called "faithful service" (pp. 60-61). As
in Virginia, French Louisiana's lawmakers restricted manumission in
deliberately onerous and racially discriminatory ways. Slaveholding
elites' efforts to suppress manumission and interracial union in both
societies were not always successful. Nevertheless, by 1770
slaveholding elites in French Louisiana and British Virginia had
developed legal systems of race and freedom that aimed to suppress
the formation of free communities of color using techniques not
implemented in Cuba.

The book's third chapter explores how enslaved people negotiated
manumission and the courts during the Age of Revolution, an era of
great paradox. As the pressures to end or reform slavery grew in each
society from within and without, slaveholding elites sought ways to
protect the institution's future. Slaveholders succeeded in expanding
racial slavery in each society. At the same time, reformers and
revolutionaries installed new legal apparatuses through which
enslaved claimants could seek their freedom, often opening up
opportunities unavailable to claimants in the prerevolutionary era.
Throughout the era, free communities of color grew in size as
enslaved people took advantage of the still limited but significant
opportunities the laws of freedom afforded them in each society.
During this period, manumissions increased in Virginia, and so too
did the size of the state's free communities of color. National
legislation expanded the laws of freedom, while Virginia's court
system grew considerably in the last decades of the eighteenth
century. These changes to the state's legal system were exploited by
enslaved claimants who sought their freedom through manumission and
the courts. The Manumission Act of 1782, despised by many Virginia
slaveholders, permitted freed peoples to remain in Virginia after
claiming their freedom and mandated that manumissions no longer
required legislative approval. The Freedom Suit Act of 1795 enabled
enslaved people to sue for freedom themselves, without a legal
guardian required in the court. Other laws, not originally designed
to encourage freedom suits among the enslaved, nonetheless prompted
enslaved claimants to litigate for their freedom. For instance, the
Importation Act of 1778 banned imported captives from Africa or other
states. After learning that slaveholders' penalties for illegal
importation included the emancipation of trafficked captives,
enslaved litigants sued for their freedom, especially in Virginia's
border counties. Enslaved people also made use of a growing county
court system to sue for their freedom. After learning of a series of
cases in the 1770s that "affirmed that Indians could only have
legally been held as slaves between 1682 and 1705," numerous
claimants began to invoke their indigenous ancestry and press for
freedom in Virginia's expanded court system.[4] In Accomack County,
de la Fuente and Gross argue, this legal argument formed the "most
common basis for freedom suits" (p. 95).

During the Age of Revolution, free communities of color also grew
numerically in Louisiana and Cuba. As the authors argue, unlike in
Virginia, this process was "not the product of revolution," but
rather a result of the Spanish crown's more gradual efforts to expand
its colonial legal apparatus and raise imperial revenues under
Bourbon rule (p. 11). Following the Seven Years' War, the Spanish
empire governed Louisiana between the 1760s and early nineteenth
century. The transfer of governance from the French to the Spanish
empire brought with it an expanded legal apparatus for Black
claims-making, as the colony's laws of race and freedom came to
mirror those long in force in Spanish Cuba. Enslaved people soon
learned how to negotiate the Spanish legal system in the colony. By
the end of the century, manumissions increased, especially those
involving _gracioso_ (self-purchase), and enslaved people also made
use of _coartación_. In Cuba, enslaved people exploited new
institutions such as the _síndico procurador, _or slaves' protector,
while also utilizing older customary practices like self-purchase. 

However, the growing presence of free Black communities in all of
these societies during the Age of Revolution prompted a fierce
backlash from slaveholding elites in each society. As chapters 4 and
5 show, slaveholding elites between the 1830s and 1850s viewed free
communities as hotbeds of abolitionist radicalism and potential
rebellion. The very presence of sizeable numbers of freed peoples
worked to subvert the binary racial orders imagined by slaveholders
as necessary to defend slavery's future. In the United States,
slaveholding elites were more able to realize their visions of firmly
equating Blackness with slavery in the late antebellum era. In
contrast, Iberian legal precedent and the comparatively large size of
Cuba's freed communities of color prohibited Cuban officials from
attempting to reform the colony's law of freedom. Set against rising
antislavery pressures in the North and the threat of Black
insurrection in their midst, chapter 4 shows how slaveholding elites
in Louisiana and Virginia sought to protect US slavery's future by
suppressing manumission and promoting campaigns to expel free people
of color. Lawmakers in both jurisdictions also restricted the
manumission practices introduced during the Age of Revolution. In
Virginia, the state legislature overturned revolutionary-era reforms
that allowed freed people to remain in the state after earning their
freedom from slavery. In 1851, the Virginia state constitution
"reiterated that slaves emancipated after that date" would "forfeit
their freedom" if they remained in the state for more than a year (p.
162). In 1857, lawmakers in Louisiana banned manumissions altogether.
While Cuban slaveholding elites admired these US legislators' efforts
and complained about enslaved peoples' use of the colony's court and
manumission systems, they "stopped short of insinuating that
manumission policies should change" (p. 171). Cuba's authorities
discussed the expulsion of Black Cubans in the 1830s, but never
publicly promoted campaigns like those of their North American
counterparts. Cuban lawmakers did not avoid supporting such campaigns
due to their affinity for free communities of color. Instead,
officials were afraid that support for such campaigns would provoke
resistance from a numerically preponderant class of free Black people
in a colony already threatened by slave rebellion.

The fifth and final chapter primarily concentrates on the laws
regulating the civic and social lives of free people of color in the
decades preceding the US Civil War. By the late 1850s, lawmakers had
introduced numerous regulations in Louisiana and Virginia that
racially restricted the freedom to educate, freedom to marry and
inherit property, freedom to worship, and freedom to participate in
civic life. In these US states, Black freedom's meaning and its
already precarious future were under full and frontal assault by the
eve of the Civil War. Black educational and religious institutions,
in particular, were favored targets of slaveholding lawmakers in the
United States. Conversely, in Cuba by the 1850s, it was still
possible for free people of color to participate publicly in public
religious and social life and to possess honor and civic virtue in
the eyes of white governing officials. Cuban officials and
slaveholding elites still tried to regulate Black social mobility
during this period. During the 1830s, for example, slaveholding
elites in Havana segregated Havana's schools and eliminated Black
teachers from the education system. However, Cuban officials were
never able to restrict long-standing institutions of free Black
religious and social life to the degrees enacted in Louisiana and
Virginia.

_Becoming Free, Becoming Black_ is a formidable accomplishment. While
the book primarily speaks to historians of comparative race and the
law, its arguments will also interest social and cultural historians
of race and slavery in colonial Latin America, colonial North
America, and the US South. Scholars of gender, sexuality, and women's
history will find the text's emphasis on the critical importance of
Black motherhood and women's litigation strategies of interest.
Historians of post-emancipation race and Black belonging in the
Americas will also find the book of interest. 

The comparative study of race and the law has long lived in the
shadow of Tannenbaum's much-criticized _Slave & Citizen_, a point
made by de la Fuente and Gross in a co-authored literature review
published a decade ago, but a claim that nonetheless remains true
today.[5] Like Tannenbaum, de la Fuente and Gross_ _ask fundamental
questions about how and why distinct racial regimes emerged in the
Americas. Unlike Tannenbaum, de la Fuente and Gross never allow legal
precedent or binary concepts of culture to stand in as explanations
for the messy, nonlinear, and contested processes of race-making on
the ground. Instead, legal and cultural precedents were two of
several important variables informing the legal practices governing
race, freedom, and the laws regulating free people of colors' lives.
The authors also pay special attention to how broader metapolitical
and economic transformations in the Atlantic world shape the laws of
race and freedom in Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia to varying degrees
over time. This integrative approach allows the authors to_
_respectfully negotiate decades of debate concerning the origins of
distinct racial regimes in the Americas while offering a novel
assessment of which variables mattered most in this story.

Notes

[1]. Some examples of this tradition include Adriana Chira,
"Affective Debts: Manumission by Grace and the Making of Gradual
Emancipation laws in Cuba, 1817-68," _Law and History Review_ 36, no.
1 (2017): 1-33; Martha S. Jones, _Birthright Citizens: A History of
Race and Rights in Antebellum _America (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2018); Bianca Premo, _Enlightenment on Trial:
Ordinary Litigants and Colonialism in the Spanish Empire_ (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2017); Michelle A. McKinley, _Fractional
Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima,
1600-_1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Rebecca
J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, _Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey
in the Age of Emancipation_ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2014).

[2]. For more on this principle in Virginia, see also Jennifer L.
Morgan, _"_Partus Sequitur Ventrum: Law, Race, and Reproduction in
Colonial Slavery," _Small Axe _22, no. 1 (March 2018): 1-17.

[3]. This argument is made by de la Fuente and Gross in distinction
to Edmund S. Morgan, who famously viewed Bacon's Rebellion as a
turning point in the history of race in colonial North America. See
_American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia_
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1975), esp. 250-70.

[4]. A subsequent law in 1807 "narrowed this window to 1682-1691," as
the authors show (95). 

[5]. Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross, "Comparative Studies
of Law, Slavery, and Race in the Americas," _Annual Review of Law and
Social Science _6 (2010): 469-85; helpful introductory essays on the
historiographical debates surrounding Tannenbaum's text include
George Reid Andrews, "Brazilian Racial Democracy, 1900-1990: An
American Counterpoint," _Journal of Contemporary History_ 31, no. 3
(1996): 483-507; and Alejandro de La Fuente, "From Slaves to
Citizens? Tannenbaum and the Debates on Slavery, Emancipation, and
Race Relations in Latin America," _International Labor and
Working-Class History_, no. 77 (2010): 154-73.

Citation: Patrick Barker. Review of Fuente, Alejandro de la; Gross,
Ariela Julie, _Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law
in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana_. H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55043

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