I wanted to create this post because I have read on different websites that Arubans are mostly descendants of the indigenous people of Aruba and Europeans with no African ancestry whatsoever. As if the black population in Aruba are only the descendants of immigrants from mainly the Anglophone Caribbean and other islands, as if slavery never existed in Aruba at all, in Curacao? Of course! Bonaire? Sure! Sint Maarten? Totally! Sint Eustatius? Yup! Saba? Duh!, but in Aruba? Nope.
I even found a old blog about the 'real' history of Aruba, which was pretty interesting but the author only told about the Amerindians and Europeans, and I grew tired of it.
In Aruba there is not that much mention regarding slavery in Aruba, they only know about slavery in Curacao and take much pride in their indigenous ancestry which Aruba teaches, in contrast to Curacao in which the opposite happens, indigenous roots are pretty much ignored and they only tell you that Arubans and Bonairians have indigenous roots and that Curacaons lack any indigenous roots whatsoever, which is not true and I have proven this in my post regarding the Indians in Curacao, Bonaire, and Aruba.
My father is from Aruba and my mother is from Curacao, both of them are black although my dad's side is more mixed with more lighter-skinned people. In our extended family everybody knows that they are descendants of Africans regardless about how they look, and they are not ashamed of it. Since I was a little boy, I already knew that I was a descendant of Africans slaves even though of course, I did not had that much knowledge about slavery at all at that time.
Aruba has a rich history and present, and a wonderful culture and its such a shame that this part of history is not being taught. But today I will change that and share a different, new light towards the history of Aruba.
The only victim of the situation.
On April 3, 1848, 1848, 18-year-old Constantinus, commonly referred to as Constantine or Constantien, was given a new owner. Widow Van Dragt forced him out due to circumstances. Constantijn lived in Aruba for eight years at the time, as a slave to the childless couple Abraham van Dragt and Reinira Dettinger. In addition to Constantine, there was the twelve-year-old slave Merselina.
In 1840, separated from their mothers, they had come to Aruba from Curacao after Van Dragt had been appointed teacher at the (public) national school and as a religious teacher for the Protestant community in Oranjestad. Van Dragt belonged to both the shopkeeper class and the clergy. For his appointment as a school and religious teacher, he received an annual salary of nine hundred guilders. For additional income, he relied on paying apprentices and the proceeds from his land and herd. No wealth to make the possession of a large number of slaves meaningful or possible.
Constantijn and Merselina lived in the village of Oranjestad on the Paardenbaai. In 1845, 1,154 people lived there; 315 of them, or more than a quarter of the population, were slaves. Elsewhere on the island, another 215 slaves lived, mostly within a five-mile radius of the village. The houses on the bay were crisscrossed, without a clear street plan, on a rocky bottom without much vegetation. On the east side, the village was bordered by a shallow lagoon and on the west side by a horn-shaped salt pan. Some heirs had small corals, often poorly sealed, so to the annoyance of everyone sheep and goats, but also stray dogs roamed freely through the village. Most houses had a straw roof, the best houses a tiled roof that in one case had a dormer window. On a number of heirs were small outbuildings, such as sheds and slave houses
The house where Constantijn and Merselina lived was located in the eastern half of the village. They may each have had a room in the main house (with straw roof) or lived in a small building in the yard around the main house. During their childhood, until about the age of fourteen, both Constantijn and Merselina carried out jobs in and around the house, such as keeping the mahogany and spruce furniture clean and the eight paintings that Van Dragt owned. They polished the silver crockery, helped in the kitchen, fed the two mares and ran errands on foot in the village. As their age progressed, both young slaves each were given specific tasks.
Merselina's life lock was increasingly linked to that of her owner. While she became The Dragt-Dettinger Reinira's domestic servant, Contantijn's life increasingly played out outside the home. He was given tasks in the processing of the farmland and herding of Van Dragt's cattle.
On Van Dragt's site Mijn Vermaak, just outside the village, there was a country house where Constantijn helped with agriculture. On the Lot Ruimzicht in the eastern district of the village, Van Dragt possibly kept some cattle. Together with Joseph Schwengle and Richard Raven Muskus, he had also acquired the small plantation Trio at the still uninhabited Commandeurs bay.
Perhaps that's where Constantijn van Dragt's herd was: eight donkeys, 32 sheep and 128 goats. Constantine was also a handyman. In 1846 he was hired as a carpenter in the construction of the Protestant church that was founded under the leadership of Van Dragt. He made 75 cents a day. Finally, Constantijn helped maintain the house and in the school he repaired school benches and school desks. Of the 240 books available to the national teacher, he probably could not read one, because there was no education for slave children yet.
The sudden death of Van Dragt on 14 February 1848 further separated the lives of Constantine and Merselina. The teacher left behind a widow who did not have income. She was left with a sum of 164 guilders and an outstanding mortgage of 175 guilders. Constantine became redundant and he was soon sold to Jean Oduber on 3 April. The child of the bill raised 350 guilders, a customary price for a slave of that age.
Slavery is a black and long-hidden page in Aruban history. Aruba's reputation is that of the neglected island where commanders and settlers who mingled with Indians settled in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet in 1849 21 percent of the population was slaves and on July 1, 1863, 480 slaves were given freedom there. 219 of them were under the age of 15. The nature and extent of child slavery in Aruba is the central question of this article.
Although in Aruba children were supposed to perform slave labour from the age of fourteen and did not go through life as children after that age, I will also discuss young adult slaves and slaves between fourteen and twenty years old in this contribution. This group was in the no man's land between childhood and adulthood: at this stage of life, the unfree and oppressive situation of slavery will have played a strong role in their changed daily lives and in their growing consciousness. Young adults therefore play their own role in slavery history.
Slaves without plantantion.
Aruba occupies a separate place in the history of the Caribbean area. The island was greatly neglected by Spaniards (circa 1500-1636) and by the West Indian Company (1636-1792). The West Indian Company used Aruba for animal husbandry and felling firewood for Curacao. In order to preserve the grazing grounds for the company's animal husbandry, the settlement of settlers was prohibited. Indians from the mainland were allowed on the island to assist with logging and animal husbandry. In exchange for these so-called gentlemen's services, they were allowed to work a modest living ground and keep a limited amount of sheep and/or goats. Experiments to start food plantations failed.
First in 1717 with a land plantation, then in 1754 when some settlers on the
island were allowed to start private corn plantations. Cause: the
drought. All in all, only a handful of company employees and a larger
group of Indians lived in Aruba. In 1767, 120 households were counted,
eight of whom worked for the company and twelve otherwise stayed on the
island with the company's permission. The hundred remaining households were Amerindian.
Under the West Indian Company, slavery was not very extensive. Only the commanders and after 1754 the handful of settlers held some slaves. In the plantation experiment of 1717 twenty slaves from Curacao were deployed, who returned after three years.
In 1774, the company expropriated six hundred sheep from the Amerindian Maria Tromp. To supervise the confiscated herd, the company brought two elderly company slaves and for the first time two child slaves from Bonaire. The slave remained an unremarkable figure in Aruba for a long time and when he or she came into the picture it was because of escape or resistance.
In 1750 slaves murdered commander Nieuwkerk's sister, her child and two slaves. In 1795, the year of the slave revolts in Saint-Domingue, France, on the landing in the hilly area around Coro, Venezuela and on Curacao, there were around thirty black slaves living in Aruba and they too rebelled. In June, the Amerindian population of the village of Noord first rebelled against the abuse of labour obligations and in the aftermath Aruba's black slaves also protested against the continuation of slavery in September. Entirely in the style of the Curacaon slave leader Tula, the land slave Thico acted as spokesman:
'hebbende eene Neeger Thico aan den Staat behorende en aldaar ten dienste van den Commandeur sig seer stoutmoedig en brutaal uytgelaaten, seggende niet meerder te willen dienen, maar vrij te sijn'
Thico was transferred to Curacao, where after a few months incarceration he proved unsaleable and was therefore employed as a sjouwer slave in Fort Amsterdam. The Aruban slavery had four generations to go. Colonization and slavery increased in size after the restoration of the Dutch colonial regime in 1813-1816. The landsvee cultivation and logging had been neglected during the English intermediate administration (1801-1803, 1806-1816) and this fact paved the way for colonization of the island. During a resurgence of trade between Curacao and Venezuela between 1795 and 1823, Aruba's Paardenbaai functioned as an intermediate port and the village of Oranjestad was created. Gold finds in 1824 raised hopes that the island would develop some prosperity.
The introduction of a liberal establishment policy, also in 1824, made the development of a modest colonial society possible. However, the trade revival proved short-lived and came to an end in 1822 after Simon Bolivar had defeated the Spanish troops on the Mainland. The high expectations of gold mining had to be adjusted as early as 1829. Nevertheless, the isolation of the island came to an end.
It was mainly newcomers, mainly traders and ship owners from Curacao, who owned slaves and brought them to Aruba from there. In 1795, around thirty slaves lived in Aruba. More reliable data dates from 1806 and 1816 when there were 194 and 336 black and colored slaves living in Aruba, respectively.
The population increased from 1,546 in 1806 up to 2,420 persons in 1830 due to migration of white settlers and their black slaves and natural growth among the existing population. By 1840, the number of slaves had risen to 497. But the number of owners also increased between 1816 and 1836, from thirty to no less than 101.
Due to the loss of gold mining and trade and because of the enormous drought, small-scale self-sufficient agriculture dominated in which there was no place for large-scale slavery. Attempts to establish agricultural plantations also failed in the nineteenth century.
Plantation experiments focused on finding commercial crops, in which finding export products for Curacaon trade and creating employment for the impoverished free population went hand in hand. In the years 1836-1845, director (read: governor) Van Raders in Curacao and Aruba built model plantations for the cultivation of aloë and cochineal.
The company proved unprofitable and was put on the back burner after Van Raders was promoted to governor-general of Suriname in 1845. In Aruba, nine land slaves were employed in 1854, mostly in the alo' and cochineal fields. Despite the small success of the land plantations, a number of landowners took over this cultivation. Even less than the governorate, they use slave labour on a large scale. The cultivation proved to be no success for them either and fell silent around 1865. Plantation farming came to an end. The island sank back into poverty and oblivion until the rise of phosphate extraction in the 1980s and the oil industry in 1924.
Slavery was abolished on July 1, 1863. 486 slaves were freed. Six of them were country or governorates. We have the most complete picture of Aruba's slave population from just before that, the years 1862-1863, when the abolition of slavery was announced. In 1862, 75 owners came forward who wanted to be eligible for the Emancipation Allowance. A total of 493 slaves were registered: 266 women and 227 men. The possession of a small number of slaves prevailed. Forty-one households had fewer than five slaves. Only 14 owners had ten or more slaves.
One consequence of the lack of a plantation economy was that fieldwork was equivalent to domestic service. Women usually worked in the house as a servant, cook, kitchen maid, seamstress or laundry lady. Thirteen often older women were shop assistants or hat braiders. Most men worked in agriculture as field workers, gardeners or herdsmen. Sixteen modest plantations were abandoned, but only one of them knew the bomba system.
There saw two bomba's (slave keepers) to no more than four field slaves and some livestock farmers. Most of the agricultural slaves worked on the boarding grounds of their owners. The eighteen craft slaves were blacksmith, cooper, carpenter, bricklayer or sailor. They lived and worked mostly in the city. In most cases, no appeal was given up on persons over 60 and under 14 years of age. Children usually did household chores. Two thirteen-year-old slaves of widow Scholten, for example, were declared servants. The slave group was a young population. The 219 slaves up to the age of 15 made up 45 percent of the total.
Demographic profile: causes of growth and decrease
The small-scale nature of Aruban slavery was the result of the lack of a plantation economy. After the economic recession continued around 1840, immigration fell and the number of slaves increased purely thanks to birth surpluses. Impoverished owners regularly left the island, leaving slaves to their fate or taking them to Curacao. Other owners were forced to sell their slaves. The increasing poverty among the owners resulted in high infant mortality among the slave population. Nevertheless, the total number of slaves increased. Even in times of economic stagnation, such as in the 1840s, the birth surplus was 11 to 25 people annually. Occasionally, as in 1841 and 1842, the birth surplus was nullified by manumission or the sale of slaves. Unfortunately, reliable sales and manumission figures for this period are missing.
The decline in the number of slaves in the 1850s is notable because the birth surplus was persistently higher than the number of manumissions. Between 1848 and 1863, 102 deaths and a whopping 291 births were reported: a birth surplus (189) which far exceeded the number of manumissions (54). The decrease must have been due to sales, departure or escape and manumission of slaves. Sales outside the island were rare and escapes to the mainland were rarely successful. Ten slaves escaped in 1856 and five in 1861. They were arrested without exception and extradited to their owners in Aruba. As recently as 1862, two escapes took place
All in all, an explanation for the decrease in the number of slaves declared must be sought in the flawed island administration. Nevertheless, we can conclude that the persistent birth surplus was the cause of the youthful composition of the Aruban slave population.
The slave household: mortality, sales and manumission among children
In 1854, Commander Jarman wrote that, in the absence of plantations, slaves often lived in their own small houses under the consent [permission]of their masters.
Marriage to or between slaves was prohibited by law. Pastors did, however, bless marriages. According to Jarman, this happened very little on Aruba in contrast to Bonaire and the ecclesiastical marriages (in his eyes) were often dissolved without much fuss. The Protestant church also recognized the slave child. Between 1830 and 1865, at least sixteen slave children were baptized Protestant. Most slave children became catholic.
Slavery had a small-scale character. 41 owners owned fewer than five slaves; Twenty other owners had five to 10 slaves. In the slave registers and the Emancipation Archive we see that children were often registered with their mother and lived with them. Most of the time, one owner had one slave family: a man who worked the land, a wife in the household and some children. Also among slave owners who owned more than ten slaves in 1862, we see that mothers and children lived together, often in the presence of an adult male and not infrequently with several generations together.
However, slaves did not maintain only relationships with male slaves. Shortly after the abolition of
slavery, marriages between former slaves and already free Arubans were
frequently arranged, with the children being passed on by the man. We can assume that the nuclear family and the multigenerational family were the main household units among the Aruban slave population, of course with the mother-child relationship as the foundation. The Aruban slave register shows that most slaves had between two and seven living children. Despite the high birth rate and the birth surplus, Aruba had a shockingly high infant mortality rate.
Between 1841 and 1850, of the 56 deaths among slaves, 23 were children up to three years (41.1%). Children under the age of 10 were also vulnerable, with one in eight deaths involving children aged three to nine. That the infant mortality on Aruba surpassed that on Curacao and Bonaire will have had to do with the general impoverishment among the slave owners and the drought that also hit the poor free population with great regularity. Moreover, the slaves had hardly any access to medical care.
There were only a few unqualified medical practitioners working on the island. Their treatment had to be paid for and only the most prominent free Arubans could afford the trip to see a doctor on Curacao.
A major threat to the unfree Arubans was the possibility of sale. Since the return of the colony of Curacao in Dutch hands (1816), the sale of slaves has been highly regulated. The transatlantic slave trade was forbidden and in fact slaves could only change hands within the colony. Most of the slaves were born and raised in Aruba in 1862. The State Commission that prepared the abolition of slavery describes how the sale of slaves took place on the Leeward Islands. A slave could be notified of the sales plans by his or her master and sent out to find a buyer himself. There was also the possibility of public sale. Slaves were placed next to a table and sold by auction.
The collective sale of slaves as the estate of the plantation, as occurred in Suriname, was not known on Curacao, let alone Aruba. In Aruba, the small scale will have ensured that sales plans quickly became known in the village and beyond. It wasn't just sales that allowed slaves to be monetized. One could also take out a mortgage on slave ownership. On 29 November 1859 Maria Elisabeth Croes, wife of Jean Oduber, for Commander Jarman, in charge of notarial matters, for a mortgage issue in order to ''een en twintig koppen slaven haar in wettige eigendom aankoomende, voor eene som van Een duizend een honderd en tachtig gulden en, veertig centen(f. 1180,40) mortgage to dissolve, at the interest of six to one hundred. No doubt there were also children under the mortgaged property
Constantine and Merselina were not the only minors living without their mothers. In 1824 the individual sale of child slaves was prohibited, but the practice turned out to be different. In April 1839, L. Oduber was caught trying to sell a slave separated from her four young children in Curacao. The sale of children up to the age of 12 separated from their mother was again prohibited, unless by granting of the mother, consent authority and in the best interests of the children.
Sales of child slaves up to the age of 10 were less common than sales of teenagers and the elderly, but were not exceptional. It occurred in four out of ten years between 1843 and 1852. The slave regulations of 1857 repeated this prohibition, but the practice turned out to be another.
Relative groups often fell further apart when their owner died. An example is the slave ownership of the prominent citizen J.H.G. Eman, progenitor of the well-known political family in Aruba. When he died in 1849, he left fifteen slaves who were sold by the heirs. Although this was forbidden, several children were separated from their mothers. Juana Barbara (six years old) and her brother Minguel de los Santos, also known as José (seven years), had been purchased from José Anthony Yarzagaray shortly before Eman's death without their mother Cristina.
Mother Cristina and her infant had been sold by Yarzagaray to Lodewijk Scholten. After Eman's death, the roads of brother Minguel de los Santos (José) and sister Juana Barbara also separated. José went to Jan Werleman; Juana Barbara to Michael Solagnier. She was sold again in September and reunited with her mother Cristina and the baby with Lodewijk Scholten. This was not exceptional.
Children were allowed to be sold to their mothers. Sometimes that happened in larger groups. Emanuel, seven, and Vincent, five, stayed with their mother Carolina, 22, when the heirs Eman sold them to Jan Daniël Oduber. In 1843, the sale of a group of two men, six boys, four women and a girl brought in a sum of two thousand guilders. In the same period, two more groups of slaves were sold. For a mother with a boy and three girls, 490 guilders was paid. A year later, a woman with three boys and a girl raised 650 guilders.
Juana, 35, and her children Pedro Secundino, nine, and Andrea, four, were jointly offered for sale at a public auction. However, the heirs of Willem Kelly sold the children Francisca (twelve years) and Anna Stacia (nine years) separately from each other and from their mother Maria Felipa to Lodewijk F. Scholten and Jacobus de Lange. The price paid for Constantinus did not deviate from the usual amounts for which slaves changed hands.
Slave prices did fluctuate, though. The authority attributed this to the varying prosperity and the prevention of forced sales as a result of the impoverishment that started after 1830. The fact that children spent less was obvious: they needed costly care and yielded little. The State Commission found that - as elsewhere in the region - men and boys typically made more money than women and girls.
In Aruba, this was not quite the case in 1853. Women between the 20s and 30s were more precious than men. In the other age groups, men and boys did make more. Manumission was a limited phenomenon in the Aruban slave world. No individual adult, male or female, gained freedom between 1848 and 1851 years through manumission. Indications that slaves were able to save for their own liberation are missing. Nevertheless, manumission played an important role for mothers and children. Children who are fathers were conceived by slaves, because they could not be conceived unless they were first manumitted.
This form of manumission prevails in the notarial deeds drawn up from it. In 1848, 1849 and 1850, five, zero and eleven slaves were successively rehabilitated: among them thirteen children under the age of eleven. Among the sixteen manumitted were two mothers with their (together five) children. On April 17, 1848, Jacobus Croes applied for manumission letters for his slave Anna Cristina (22 years) and her children François (three years), Jeantil (two years) and Jan Pieter (three months).
Croes obtained it after payment of the legally required deposit of eleven hundred guilders. In 1850 Johan Henriquez paid four hundred guilders for the bail of Rosina Ursula (41 years) and her children Minguellina (six years) and Francisco (three years). Children without mothers were also bailed out. Louis Bazin paid three hundred guilders for the manumission of eight-year-old Evarista Virginia.
Maria Elisabeth Croes released five children in 1850, the eldest of whom, Corina, was ten years old and twins Josephina and Celina, just four. Pieter Ridderstap paid four hundred guilders for the manumission of fifteen-year-old Joseph Leon, who was thus the only individual slave to be redeemed.
Between 1851 and 1862 a total of 54 slaves were manumitted. The number of manumissions per year ranged from zero to five, with outliers in 1850 (fifteen) and 1861 (thirty). Twenty-four of these last 30, including four children under the age of 14 and three teenagers, gained freedom after the death of their owner, cochineal grower Marten Evertsz.
Whether or not manumissions preceded recognized relationships between owners or other free Arubans and slaves is of course not mentioned in the archives. Manumission, however, was able to pave the way for the formal marital union of a biological family across the borders of freedom.
Rights for the child.
In order to determine the nature of child slavery, it makes sense to look at the legal protection of slaves and to examine how it was applied. Aruban slavery only developed when the regulations on the treatment of slaves in the Caribbean region were tightened.
Also in the colony Curacao. In a publication of 20/24 November 1795, a large part of the slaves who had participated in the Tula rebellion - the leaders had already been exceuted- were pardoned. They were spared further prosecution and had to return to their state of slavery.
The colonial government wanted to prevent a repetition of rebellion by improving the living conditions of the slaves, and therefore new regulations for the treatment, nutrition and clothing of slaves were also announced in the same publication. Little attention was paid to children in this publication and in its adaptation of 1804. It was only in the regulations of 1812 (during the second English intermediate administration) that some change came. Article 3 provided that children shall be issued as many corns as they have been for years to come.
In 1824 a new slave regulations came into force that proved inapplicable on Aruba. In 1841, an indignant commander Jacobus Jarman wrote to the board in Curacao that the slave legislation in Aruba was poorly complied with.
The desperation of the commander was prompted by a painful incident that had also caused public anger. A still young and pregnant slave had been severely abused by her owner and her two daughters. She was locked in the house and shaved, then stripped naked and flogged completely naked for more than an hour by the owner and her daughters.
Afterwards, another slave was forced to continue the flogging at gunpoint if he refused to be abused himself. The owners were already known for the cruel treatment of their slaves. A furious crowd gathered in front of the locked house and bombarded it with stones. Jarman decided to relieve and protect the slave by taking her in Fort Zoutman, at the expense of the owner. After two weeks of insistence, the owner finally showed herself willing to sell the battered slave.
As a result of this abuse, Commander Jarman complained that 90% of the owners did not comply with the slave regulations and that he was powerless in enforcing compliance. Reminders had no effect; imposing fines did not help because the partially impoverished slave owners were often not even able to pay the tax on their slave property. Incentives to sell - especially if there were abuses - did little. At Jarman's request, an amended slave regulation for Aruba was introduced in 1841, which also came into force on Bonaire.
The absence of the child slave in the arrangements of 1824 and 1841 is striking. Child labour was not regulated, working hours for young and old were. Farmworkers and craft slaves were free on Sundays and public holidays. During the day they were entitled to rest between 12:00 and 2:00. Domestic slaves, herdsmen and gardeners had to continue working if their owner felt it was necessary. There was no working time scheme for domestic slaves. In the case of night work, compensation times had to be observed.
The food rations were dependent on gender and age and also on the season. Adult males were given six (litre) jugs of corn per week in and after harvest; women five, children received a quantity proportional thereof. In the dry season one got one can less. The owner was obliged to hand out the food regularly to prevent slaves from becoming dependent on their possible boarding grounds or on labour for third parties. According to the dress code, the owner had a duty to ensure their nudity.
The regulation of corporal punishment did not pay particular attention to underage slaves. In 1841, as in 1824, it was stipulated that offences that gave rise to penalties heavier than household chastening had to be reported to the government in order to be assessed and possibly punished. Collective punishments were prohibited on Curacao, for Bonaire and Aruba they were not mentioned in 1841; they may have been less or even less so due to the lack of large private plantations. If owners failed to comply with the slave regulations, they could be fined or taken to the local court, the Peace Court.
Slave affairs were also regularly found in the Peace Court after 1841 and both owners and slaves were on trial. Most of the complaints concerned non-compliance with the clothing and
feeding rules by the owners. Slaves walked in rags and sometimes completely naked or received too little food.
Slaves also had to appear in court. In 1848, a slave was convicted of beating her owner. Although there was no witness, because this was not required in cases against slaves, she was sentenced to two months in prison on the basis of her owner's statement. A government slave was sentenced to three weeks in prison in handcuffs for stealing a silver spoon
It is striking that in these years few cases involving child slaves occurred. Perhaps that was due to the inadequate elaboration of the rights of the slave child, perhaps also of the fact that the regulations of 1841 were as difficult to enforce as the regulations of 1824. On December 10, 1850, the same Jacobus Jarman wrote - his title had changed from commander to commander - for two years with the same aversion and despair at the lack of application of the slave regulations and his inability to force compliance.
Once again, a wry incident involving a mother and child prompted Jarman's lament. He had been approached by 'eene negerin met eene kind op den arm, weenende en kermende, en zich beklagende over de handeling door haar meester en diens gezin en verzocht te mogen worden verkocht, de vleesch wonde aantoonende dien zij op de rug had bekomen, ook haar kind zag er uitgeteerd uit'.
It was the third time that she had turned to the authority with such a complaint. Jarman pointed out to the owner that it was a hefty fine hanging over his head and, as in the abuse case of 1841, he directed the sale of the slave and her children. Although the owner agreed, the sale did not take place. In addition, the owner did not stop openly threatening the slave with new abuses. Jarman realized that any fine imposed by the Peace Court would not be enforceable.
The authority faced the same implementation problems around the slave regulations as nine years earlier. And that didn't change. Article 59 of the government regulations of 1848 again established that the physical and spiritual condition of the slaves was a matter of government. Because this care was strictly observed by the owners - especially on Curacao -, circulars were repeatedly issued to encourage this.
The last slave regulations of 1857 were not only in a better way to protect the slaves, but also to prepare them for Emancipation. More detailed than the previous regulations, the publication containing provisions concerning the feeding, dressing, nursing, housing and punishment of slaves established the rights of the slave child and also pregnant and lactating women. New rules were laid down with regard to the nutrition of the children. On slaves from 10 to 14 years, two thirds, half to those from 7 to 10 years, and to younger ones a third of the aforementioned ration are given (i.e. six jugs).
For their clothes, children under the age of five had to wear a length of textiles of three tbsp every six months collete (coarse linen), an amount that rose to six tbsp for boys aged 11 to 15 and girls aged 10 to 14. From the age of ten, children were entitled to fifty cents twice a year to buy themselves a hat, cloth or sandals.
Child labour was not prohibited, but restricted: children under the age of 10 are only subject to such work as is calculated for their powers. For the elderly and the same limitation applied. Possibly spurred on by the high infant mortality rate in the 1840s, pregnant women were only allowed to do light work from the fifth month of their pregnancy, something that persisted unduly the suckling time.
The colonial administration also encouraged religious education among the slave population: On children under 14 years of age must be granted permission, to receive education for at least two hours a day, when the opportunity exists. That was already the case in Aruba. The Colonial Report of 1855 mentioned that at the Catholic school of Oranjestad education was given to both free and slave children. The Colonial Report added: Besides there were no other schools in the colony in the year 1855, as far as I know, where slave children are admitted. It also observed: For more advanced slaves of age, there is no other opportunity to provide education than the [...] Sunday schools.
The punishment regime for the children was more regulated than before. As a domestic chastening, boys aged between 14 and 16 could get up to eight rope strokes and women and girls aged 16 and over could have six. Slaves could be punished with imprisonment of up to eight days and nights. Rope strokes were banned for boys under the age of 14 and girls under the age of 16, as well as for pregnant and lactating women. They were also exempt from penalties with the chain buoy (The owner was allowed to impose penalties in the event of refusal to work, petty thefts, if slave parents did not send their children to school or religious education or if they neglected their children or barbaric chastice.
If owners treated their slaves - badly regardless of age -, the court could impose a fine and possibly order the sale of the slave. It was also prohibited by law to sell mothers and children up to the age of 12 separately, unless they obtained the freedom to do so.
The regulations restricted the owners' control over their slaves by prohibiting the administration of corporal punishment and henceforth the head of the police (the authority) imposed punishments that were heavier than domestic discipline. The new regulations led to strange situations in Suriname, but also in Curacao and Aruba. Owners felt curtailed in their property rights and had to treat their slaves more cautiously than their own children.
Still in his annual report on 1861, commander Michael de Veer wrote about the impending abolition of slavery: Generally, the owners long for emancipation, especially on the grounds that the Regulations of 1857 give them little or no authority over their slave. Still, a lot of things came before the Peace Court.
The Peace Court.
Virginia was Aruba's most unruly slave. In March 1859, as a seventeen-year-old field worker, she stole some garments from her master J.H. van der Biest. The authority punished her with a fortnight of hard labor on public roads. Four months later she committed the same offence and this time she had to do two months of forced labour on the grounds of her master.
In November, an attempt to run away failed and again she had to work on her master's grounds for a month. In July 1860, she was convicted of runaway and false accusations, accompanied by irreverence. She was locked up for eight days. Barely out of prison, she was recaptured for causing street noise and resisting police. For this she received her first and last official corporal punishment: fourteen rope strokes. This made Virginia Aruba's most frequently punished slave.
Between 1859 and 1863, 28 violations of the slave regulations were dealt with, with 15 slaves under the age of twenty found guilty in fifteen cases. The number of cases where no conviction took place was not mentioned. The offences ranged from runaways and irreverence to theft and street noise. Punishments handed out for this purpose were forced labour, imprisonment and rope strikes. We mention some.
On August 13, 1860, 10-year-old Jonathan, slave to Jean Oduber, received twelve rope strokes for running away multiple times. For the same offence, 14-year-old garden slave Juan (also Christoba Juan) was jailed for eight days in 1862 by owner Gabriel Ruiz. In 1859, the two field slaves Jacobus (eighteen years) and Isaac (nineteen years) of owner P. Quant were sentenced to 25 rope battles each for theft with fallow. Eloise, the widow Quant's home slave, was no older than 15 when she was jailed for eight days in 1861 for theft.
Field slave David (eighteen years old), who belonged to A.E. Oduber, was imprisoned for two days in 1861 for rioting on the street. Guilliermo was a 19-year-old land slave who in 1860 was punished for actual violence with incarceration at night for 3 days.
It wasn't just slave violations that the governorate oversaw. Owners who violated the rules were led before the Peace Court. From the cases found, it becomes clear that owners in violation were judged rather leniently. Juan, slave to Gabriel Ruiz (we already came across him as an accused), sued his owner's son in 1860 for giving him a corporal punishment of about ten blows with a double-beaten pickaxe after he had stayed away too long when making purchases.
The injuries were so severe that it would take at least a week for them to heal. The accused defended himself by stating that the boy Christoba Juan is very naughty and he, the defendant, considered himself entitled, in order to improve his orientation, to chastise him with rope blows.
Juan himself was absent from the case because he had run away. Only after two days could the trial be resumed. Ruiz was found guilty of violating the provision that children should not undergo corporal correction or physical punishment and he was sentenced to a fine of no less than one hundred guilders. Ruiz appealed, but the Peace Court rejected his request for clemency, which he sought. The governor did not rescind the guilty plea, but did reduce the fine from 100 to 15 guilders.
On July 3, 1861, a case was brought against Alexander Kelly, who killed his 12-year-old slave Eduardo Rei, after he had punished him with beating. Eduardo was sent to the market in Oranjestad to sell milk. On the way back he had lost the yield of 12.5 cents and for fear of his master he was afraid to return home for two days. Under the ban on corporal punishment. For children under 14, Kelly was sentenced to a fine of fifty guilders. Kelly also appealed and his sentence was reduced because he was known to be someone who treated his slaves well.
The Petitioner would undoubtedly not have been mindful of that provision of the law in question, simply treating the slave boy as his own child.
Because poverty and lack of money were also trumped by many slave owners, no large fines could be imposed. Here, the objective of the regulations, which was to protect slaves from inhumane treatment, clashed with the practice of the often familial intercourse between slaves and sex. Like free children, slave children were also succeeded. On appeal, this contradiction was resolved or settled
In conclusion.
Aruban slavery developed in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, while Caribbean slavery was already on its way back. Slaves frequently rebelled or fled the plantations. On Haïti the slaves had overthrown this institution; in the French Caribbean slavery had already been abolished and reintroduced by Napoleon. England forbade the transatlantic slave trade and committed itself to the abolition of slavery, with or without a transitional period.
A plantation economy was unachievable on the driest island of the Caribbean area and slavery remained small-scale in nature and size here. Yet in 1849, 21 percent of Aruba's population lived in freedom. Women worked in the household or in shops; men worked as lamb's slaves on their owner's boarding grounds or as craftsmen in the village. Children did housework. 480 Aruban slaves, including 219 children under the age of fifteen, obtained freedom in 1863.
Unlike, for example, the Surinamese slave population, Aruba had persistent birth surpluses during the nineteenth century. Slaves usually had two to seven living children. Despite this, infant mortality was alarming, probably due to the widespread poverty and lack of medical care. Slaves lived with a certain degree of independence under the consent in their own households or lived with their owner.
The bond between mother and child was the foundation of domestic unity and upbringing. The role and position of the fathers, free or slave, in the education of slave children is as yet unclear. Single children lived with their owners as domestic workers. The stability of the slave family was constantly threatened by the likelihood of sale due to impoverishment, departure or death of the owner.
Although that was forbidden, it did happen that children were separated from mothers by sale. Manumission also occurred and even especially among mothers with their children. Slave laws were tightened throughout the Caribbean region after the turn of the century, initially for fear of the uprisings that had taken place throughout the region around 1795. Laws and regulations were in place to protect slaves from exploitation or neglect by their owners and to prevent slaves from rebelling. As the abolition of slavery approached, stricter regulations also had to prepare slaves for freedom. Children, but also pregnant and lactating women, have been given increasing attention.
The measures concerned labour, food and clothing and the penal regime. Compliance with regulations proved problematic throughout the nineteenth century due to the impoverishment and perhaps unwillingness of slave owners on the impoverished island. Nevertheless, the regulations gave the slaves a possibility of defense if their owners fell short. Violations of slave owners were dealt with by the courts where possible. Slaves were also punished and the number of older children aged 14 to 20 was striking among the condemned slaves. They were punished for theft, runaway and disobedience, among other things. Apparently, freedom knelt most during the transition years from childhood to adulthood.
Back to the child from the bill. The majority of Aruban child slaves lived in great poverty and enormous simplicity in a small-scale colonial society that took a marginal position in the colony of Curacao. Poverty hit the island in the mid-19th century due to recurring droughts, the largely loss of trade and gold mining. Poverty, famine and infant mortality were also common among the free population.
Child slaves were entirely at the mercy of the well-being and the indulgebility of their owners. Child slaves usually lived with their mother and possibly more relatives in the village of Oranjestad on the Paardenbaai or not far away. Constantijn and Merselina, on the other hand, lived from a young time without their mothers in the household of country teacher Van Dragt. They were servants and domestic servants, ran errands and did jobs in and around the village.
They probably participated in the ecclesiastical life of the Protestant community. Slave children had access to Catholic poor education after 1857, but whether Constantine and Merselina used it may be questioned. Nor have they been found in the pupil lists of their owner's national school.
Although nineteenth-century Aruban child slavery is mild in the horrors of freedom elsewhere in the region, slavery ultimately had no pardon. Once superfluous, Constantijn was monetized for 350 guilders. There was no grey middle ground between the blackness of slavery and the white freedom of colonial Aruba.
Source: https://www.academia.edu/39198255/Kind_van_de_rekening_Kinderen_in_slavernij_op_Aruba
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