When the Enslaved Went South
Interesting article on Slaves heading south not north in the mid 1800's. Definitely some items I didn't know.
Long Article,
Interesting article on Slaves heading south not north in the mid 1800's. Definitely some items I didn't know.
When the Enslaved Went South
How Mexico—and the fugitives who went there—helped make freedom possible in America.
By Alice Baumgartner
November 19, 2020
In the four decades before the Civil War, an estimated several thousand enslaved people escaped from the south-central United States to Mexico. Some received help—from free Black people, ship captains, Mexicans, Germans, preachers, mail riders, and, according to one Texan paper, other “lurking scoundrels.” Most, though, escaped to Mexico by their own ingenuity. They acquired forged travel passes. They disguised themselves as white men, fashioning wigs from horsehair and pitch. They stole horses, firearms, skiffs, dirk knives, fur hats, and, in one instance, twelve gold watches and a diamond breast pin. And then they disappeared.
Why did runaways head toward Mexico? For enslaved people in Texas or Louisiana, the northern states were hundreds of miles away. Even if they did manage to cross the Mason-Dixon line, they were not legally free. In fact, the fugitive-slave clause of the U.S. Constitution and the laws meant to enforce it sought to return runaways to their owners. Mexico, by contrast, granted enslaved people legal protections that they did not enjoy in the northern United States. Mexico’s Congress abolished slavery in 1837. Twenty years later, the country adopted a constitution that granted freedom to all enslaved people who set foot on Mexican soil, signalling that freedom was not some abstract ideal but a general and inviolable principle, the law of the land.
Two options awaited most runaways in Mexico. The first was to join Mexico’s military colonies, a series of outposts along the northern frontier, which defended against Native peoples and foreign invaders. The second was to seek employment as servants, tailors, cooks, carpenters, bricklayers, or day laborers, among other occupations. Their lives were by no means easy, and slaveholders pointed to these difficulties to suggest that bondage in the United States was preferable to “freedom” in Mexico. Noah Smithwick, a gunsmith in Texas, recalled that a slave named Moses had grown tired of living off “husks” in Mexico and returned to his owner’s “lenient rule” near Houston. Another came back from his “Mexican tour” in 1852, according to the Clarksville, Texas, Northern Standard, with a “supreme disgust” for Mexicans. The conditions in Mexico were so bad, according to newspapers in the United States, that runaways returned to their homes of their own accord.
Some enslaved people did return to the United States, but typically not for the reasons that slaveholders claimed. In 1858, a slave named Albert, who had escaped to Mexico nearly two years earlier, returned to the cotton plantation of his owner, “a Mr. Gordon of Texas.” The Independent Press in Abbeville, South Carolina, reported that, “like all others” who escaped to Mexico, “he has a poor opinion of the country and laws.” Albert did not give Mr. Gordon any reason to doubt this conclusion. He remained at his owner’s plantation, near Matagorda, Texas, where the Brazos River emptied into the Gulf. But Albert did not come back to stay. Five or six months after his return, he was gone—this time with his brothers, Henry and Isaac. What drew them across the Rio Grande gives us a crucial view of how Mexico, a country suffering from poverty, corruption, and political upheaval, deepened the debate about slavery in the decades before the Civil War.
Northern Mexico was poor and sparsely populated in the nineteenth century. During the winter months, Comanches and Lipan Apaches crossed the Rio Grande to rustle livestock, and the Mexican military lacked even the most basic supplies to stop them. Local militiamen did not have enough saddles. Military commanders asked “the coöperation of the female population” to provide their men with uniforms. Town councils pleaded for more gunpowder. Desperate to restore order, Mexico’s government issued a decree on July 19, 1848, which established and set out rules for a line of forts on the southern bank of the Rio Grande. A previous decree provided that foreigners who joined these colonies would receive land and become “citizens of the Republic upon their arrival.”
In 1850, several hundred Seminoles moved from the United States to a military colony in the northeastern Mexican state of Coahuila. Eighty-four of the three hundred and fifty-one immigrants were Black—formerly enslaved people, known as the Mascogos or Black Seminoles, who had escaped to join the Seminole Indians, first in the tribe’s Florida homelands, and later in Indian Territory. Fugitive slaves were already escaping to Mexico by the time the Seminoles arrived. In 1849, a judge in Guerrero, Coahuila, reported that David Thomas “save[d] his family from slavery” by escaping with his daughter and three grandchildren to Mexico. A year later, seventeen people of color appeared in Monclova, Coahuila, asking to join the Seminoles and their Black allies. Another two men, José and Sambo, claimed to be “straight from Africa,” according to one account. By 1851, three hundred and fifty-six Black people lived at this military colony—more than four times the number who had arrived with the Seminoles the previous year.
Life in Mexico was not easy. Few fugitive slaves spoke Spanish. (“Couldn’t even ask for a chaw of terbacker!” a son of a Black Seminole remembered in an interview with the historian Kenneth Wiggins Porter, in 1942.) Most had so little taste for Mexican food that they scraped the red beans from the tortillas their neighbors handed them. But the Mexican government did what it could to help them settle at the military colony, thirty miles from the U.S. border. A priest arrived from nearby Santa Rosa to baptize them. A schoolteacher followed, along with crates of tools. With the help of the three hundred and seventy pesos a month that the government funnelled to the colony, the new inhabitants set to work growing corn, raising stock, and building wood-frame houses around a square where they kept their animals at night.
In this small, concentrated community, Black Seminoles and fugitive slaves managed to maintain and develop their own traditions. At the urging of the priest in Santa Rosa, they fasted every Friday and baptized the faithful in the Sabinas River. But when they kept vigil over the dead there was traditional stamping and singing around the bier, and when they took sick they ministered to one another using old folk methods. The demands of military service constrained their autonomy—fathers, husbands, and sons had to take up arms at a moment’s notice—but this also earned them the respect of the Mexican authorities. In 1851, a high-ranking official of Mexico’s military colonies reported that the “faithful” Black Seminoles never abandoned the “desire to succeed in punishing the enemy.” Another official expected that their service would be of “great benefit” to the country. The victories that they helped score against the Comanches and Lipan Apaches proved to Mexican military commanders that the Seminoles and their Black allies were “worthy of every confidence.”
For all of its restrictions, military service also helped fugitive slaves defend themselves from those who wished to return them to slavery. On September 20, 1851, Sheriff John Crawford, of Bexar County, Texas, rode two hundred miles from San Antonio to the Mexican military colony. There, he arrested two men he suspected of being runaways and carried them across the Rio Grande. José Antonio de Arredondo, a justice of the peace in Guerrero, Coahuila, insisted that the two men were both “under the protection of our laws & government and considered as Mexican citizens.” When U.S. officials explained that a court in San Antonio had ordered their arrest, the sub-inspector of Mexico’s Eastern Military Colonies demanded that they be released. Meanwhile, a force of Black and Seminole people attempted to cross the Rio Grande and free the prisoners by force.
Though military service helped insure the freedom of former slaves, that freedom came at a cost: risk to one’s life, in the heat of battle, and participation in Mexico’s brutal campaign against Native peoples. Not every runaway joined the colonies. Some settled in cities like Matamoros, which had a growing Black population of merchants and carpenters, bricklayers and manual laborers, hailing from Haiti, the British Caribbean, and the United States. Others hired themselves out to local landowners, who were in constant need of extra hands. Evaristo Madero, a businessman who carted goods from Saltillo, Mexico, to San Antonio, Texas, hired two Black domestic servants. Espiridion Gomez employed several others on his ranch near San Fernando.
These runaways encountered a different set of challenges. Those who worked on haciendas and in households were often the only people of African descent on the payroll, leaving them no choice but to assimilate into their new communities. Most learned Spanish, and many changed their names. (A former slave named Dan called himself “Dionisio de Echavaria.”) Fugitive slaves also encountered labor practices that bore some of the hallmarks of chattel slavery. In northern Mexico, hacienda owners enjoyed the right to physically punish their employees, meting out corporal discipline as harsh as any on plantations in the United States. In parts of southern Mexico, such as Yucatán and Chiapas, debt peonage tied laborers to plantations as effectively as violence. In 1849, a Veracruz newspaper reported that indentured servants suffered a state of dependence worse than slavery. In 1857, El Monitor Republicano, in Mexico City, complained that laborers had earned their “liberty in name only.”
But, in contrast to the southern United States, where enslaved people knew no other law besides the whim of their owners, laborers in Mexico enjoyed a number of legal protections. These workers could file suit when their employers lowered their wages or added unreasonable charges to their accounts. They could also sue in cases of mistreatment, as Juan Castillo of Galeana, Nuevo León, did, in 1860, after his employer hit him, whipped him, and ran him over with his horse. (His employer admitted to an “excess of anger.”) In general, laborers had the right to seek new employment for any reason—a right denied to enslaved people in the United States. And, more often than not, the greatest concern of former slaves who joined Mexico’s labor force was not their new employers so much as their former masters.
Long Article,