Siervos libres: Una propuesta antiesclavista a finales del siglo XVII

Abstract

In 1681, civil authorities deported two Capuchin missionaries from Cartagena and Cumaná to Cuba for causing trouble. In Havana, Francisco José de Jaca and Epifanio de Moirans met and together undertook a campaign against slavery. They preached against it, denied sacramental absolution to slave owners and their wives, and produced two major abolitionist manuscripts. Relegated for three centuries to Seville’s Archivo General de Indias and short footnotes in books on colonial slavery, these works are finally receiving the attention they deserve. In 1982, José Tomás López García published Jaca’s Spanish text and translated Moirans’s Latin manuscript in Dos defensores de los esclavos negros en el siglo XVII (Caracas: Universidad Cátolica Andrés Bello). Two decades later, Miguel Anxo Pena González edited Jaca’s Spanish text in Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros, en estado de paganos y despues ya cristianos: la primera condena de la esclavitud en el pensamiento hispano (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas); and two years ago, he edited Moirans’s Latin text with a Spanish translation in the book under review. In 2007, I published a critical edition of Moirans’s Latin text with an English translation in A Just Defense of the Natural Freedom of Slaves: All Slaves Should Be Free (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press).Why so much activity concerning these documents in the past 25 years after centuries of neglect? The answer is twofold: an increasing recognition of their significance in the documentary history of colonial slavery, and their relevance to our situation today with the resurgence of slavery in human trafficking. They are the only examples of extended theological arguments against slavery in the Spanish colonies between the 1570s and the 1790s. They exemplify important intellectual trends in the Roman Catholic Church of the seventeenth century: moral argument from scripture, neoscholastic thinking, probabilism’s method of development, and casuistry’s emphasis on the practical and the use of analogy. Finally, they tell us of churchmen who used contemporary resources for a good cause in a nonviolent way, fought for human rights against empire and church, sacrificed their ministries to do what was right, and bore the contempt of authorities for their efforts. We would do well to imitate them.But do we need more books, editions, and translations to do this? Yes, because it is important to get the history and the texts right. Each book adds to our knowledge of the events and contributes to our understanding and interpretation of the texts. López García gave a general overview of Moirans’s work but did not provide the original Latin text. Pena González recounts in much more detail the events that led to Moirans’s arrest; his subsequent trial, deportation to Spain, and house arrest there; his trip to Rome to press the case against slavery; and the positive reaction of the Vatican bureaucracy to his and Jaca’s efforts. He places the Latin text side by side with a Spanish translation for those who want to check its accuracy. He makes it possible to take the document seriously.My overall evaluation of the book is positive: it is competent and well done. The transcription from the original is generally good, though I would differ on certain readings. The Spanish translation’s stated goal is readability, and in this it succeeds, at least in my judgment as a nonnative student of the language. The more than three hundred footnotes give bibliographic references, cite similarities with Jaca’s work, reproduce the marginal notes, and offer short biographies of major authors discussed in the text. The book ends with a “Document Appendix,” a “Source Index,” and a “Subject Index.”My criticisms of the book are minimal. I prefer a critical edition that presents the original in as exact a manner as possible; this book corrects and interprets Moirans’s Latin somewhat freely. The translators don’t distinguish between two concepts, ius naturae and lex natural, the “order of nature” and “natural law”; this distinction isn’t used consistently, but it is important for understanding natural law and what Moirans is trying to do. Some typographical errors mar the Spanish text, and five lines of the Latin text are missing at the end of chapter 2. Some marginal notes are not reproduced, and sections crossed out in the original text are included without notation or explanation. But these matters don’t affect the substance of the book.This work is a major contribution to the understanding of an important period in the history of Spanish colonial slavery and the church’s relation to it. As such, it is worthy of consideration by any serious scholar or student of the period.