“Claiming Protection of Her Majesty”: Kidnapping and Freedom Suits in Santiago de Cuba, 1845–60

Once the British moved to police and end the African slave trade on humanitarian grounds, enslaved Africans and African Americans around the Atlantic World sometimes claimed to be British subjects in an effort to gain their freedom. For these men and women, popular royalism was not an abstract ideology, but rather a concrete set of expectations and obligations with real meaning and value in their lives. Their cases –tried in the courts, negotiated through diplomatic channels, and sometimes fought militarily– were often successful. These “micro-diplomatic” cases turned on questions of citizenship and subjecthood, on whether or not these individuals belonged to a particular state. Once the person was kidnapped, the new purported owner had to somehow transform that free person into property through a process that historian Rebecca Scott has referred to as “legal alchemy.” Those newly enslaved persons did not simply accept this legal sleight of hand, and they searched for ways to undo their enslavement, sometimes through the efforts of the British consuls. Enslaved Africans and African Americans around the Atlantic World understood the potential value of British citizenship and the role British consuls could play in their freedom suits.

This paper will focus on representative cases brought by women and men in Santiago de Cuba where many enslaved people appeared before the British consuls there claiming to have been kidnapped and illegally enslaved. Their cases are reminders, if any is needed, that Africans and enslaved African Americans understood local, national and even international legalities that could break the shackles of slavery, and they knew how to negotiate them. These cases raised important issues of citizenship and sovereignty, of international human rights, and the relationship between the citizen and the state, issues that continue to resonate today.