Together toward the Island of Santo Domingo: Hopes and Fears in Puerto Rican Slave Society in the Early 19th Century

In mid-July 1826, an enslaved person named Juan Bautista was having dinner in his bohío on a plantation in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Juan proposed to a traveling enslaved man, African-born José Joaquin, to flee to Santo Domingo, “where he knew that black people wore epaulettes and that he himself had had that distinction.” José Joaquín, who stated that he had gone to that plantation to play music for money, left Juan’s bohío with a detailed plan to escape to Santo Domingo, then part of the Republic of Haiti. The escape plan was exposed to the authorities and the plantation owners of the town and both Juan Bautista and José Joaquín accused each other of being the principal conspirator. This episode was part of a recurring pattern of resistance as Spanish authorities and sugar plantation owners tried to insert Puerto Rico into what we now understand as the “second slavery.” In their effort to shift into the sugar economy, land and slave-owning elites destroyed livestock ranching hatos and replaced them with plantations, which displaced both enslaved and freed Black people within the hato regions and severely impacted kinship relationships developed during the 18th century. Meanwhile, the parallel Haitian revolution provided a tangible aspiration for Black people on the island. The article demonstrates how these changes propelled both enslaved and free Black people’s resistance and simultaneously triggered increased surveillance by authorities and enslavers. An analysis of the records from the criminal investigation of the plot provides a detailed picture of the networks, knowledge, and equipment needed to complete a maritime escape. Bringing forth a different portrait of early nineteenth-century Puerto Rico allows this article to present the unification of Haiti in 1822 as a tipping point that brought enslaved people and enslavers the hopes and fears of freedom much closer.