Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery and liberate slaves around the world.
The history of the Caribbean reveals the significant role the region played in the colonial struggles of the European powers since the 15th century. In the modern era, it remains strategically and economically important. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean and claimed the region for Spain. The following year, the first Spanish settlements were established in the Caribbean. Although the Spanish conquests of the Aztec empire and the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century made Mexico and Peru more desirable places for Spanish exploration and settlement, the Caribbean remained strategically important.
Slavery in the colonial history of the United States refers to the institution of slavery as it existed in the European colonies which eventually became part of the United States. Slavery developed due to a combination of factors, primarily the labour demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies, which had resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were victims of enslavement by European colonizers during the era.
In the United States before 1865, a slave state was a state in which slavery and the internal or domestic slave trade were legal, while a free state was one in which they were prohibited. Between 1812 and 1850, it was considered by the slave states to be politically imperative that the number of free states not exceed the number of slave states, so new states were admitted in slave–free pairs. There were, nonetheless, some slaves in most free states up to the 1840 census, and the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, as implemented by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, provided that a slave did not become free by entering a free state and must be returned to his or her owner.
Segundo Ruiz Belvis was a Puerto Rican abolitionist who also fought for Puerto Rico's right to independence.
Grito de Lares, also referred to as the Lares revolt, the Lares rebellion, the Lares uprising, or the Lares revolution, was the first of two short-lived revolts against Spanish rule in Puerto Rico, staged by the Revolutionary Committee of Puerto Rico on September 23, 1868. Having been planned, organized, and launched in the mountainous western municipality of Lares, the revolt is known as the Grito de Lares . Three decades after rebelling in Lares, the revolutionary committee carried out a second unsuccessful revolt in the neighboring southwestern municipality of Yauco, known as the Intentona de Yauco(The Attempted Coup of Yauco). The Grito de Lares flag is recognized as the first flag of Puerto Rico.
The Ten Years' War, also known as the Great War and the War of '68, was part of Cuba's fight for independence from Spain. The uprising was led by Cuban-born planters and other wealthy natives. On 10 October 1868, sugar mill owner Carlos Manuel de Céspedes and his followers proclaimed independence, beginning the conflict. This was the first of three liberation wars that Cuba fought against Spain, the other two being the Little War (1879–1880) and the Cuban War of Independence (1895–1898). The final three months of the last conflict escalated with United States involvement, leading to the Spanish–American War.
Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties was an economic and social institution which existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
The Pact of Zanjón ended the armed struggle of Cubans for independence from the Spanish Empire that lasted from 1868 to 1878, the Ten Years' War. On February 10, 1878, a group of negotiators representing the rebels gathered in Zanjón, a village in Camagüey Province, and signed the document offered them by the Spanish commander in Cuba, General Arsenio Martínez Campos, who had arrived in the Spanish colony two years earlier and immediately sought to come to terms with the rebels. The end of hostilities did not represent a military victory for either side, but a recognition by both sides of their "mutual exhaustion".
Compensated emancipation was a method of ending slavery, under which the enslaved person's owner received compensation from the government in exchange for manumitting the slave. This could be monetary, and it could allow the owner to retain the slave for a period of labor as an indentured servant. Cash compensation rarely was equal to the slave's market value.
The decolonization of the Americas occurred over several centuries as most of the countries in the Americas gained their independence from European rule. The American Revolution was the first in the Americas, and the British defeat in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) was a victory against a great power, aided by France and Spain, Britain's enemies. The French Revolution in Europe followed, and collectively these events had profound effects on the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies in the Americas. A revolutionary wave followed, resulting in the creation of several independent countries in Latin America. The Haitian Revolution lasted from 1791 to 1804 and resulted in the independence of the French slave colony. The Peninsular War with France, which resulted from the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, caused Spanish Creoles in Spanish America to question their allegiance to Spain, stoking independence movements that culminated in various Spanish American wars of independence (1808–33), which were primarily fought between opposing groups of colonists and only secondarily against Spanish forces. At the same time, the Portuguese monarchy fled to Brazil during the French invasion of Portugal. After the royal court returned to Lisbon, the prince regent, Pedro, remained in Brazil and in 1822 successfully declared himself emperor of a newly independent Brazilian Empire.
Afro–Puerto Ricans are Puerto Ricans who are of African descent. The history of Puerto Ricans of African descent begins with free African men, known as libertos, who accompanied the Spanish Conquistadors in the invasion of the island. The Spaniards enslaved the Taínos, many of whom died as a result of new infectious diseases and the Spaniards' oppressive colonization efforts. Spain's royal government needed laborers and began to rely on African slavery to staff their mining and fort-building operations. The Crown authorized importing enslaved West Africans. As a result, the majority of the African peoples who entered Puerto Rico were the result of the Atlantic slave trade, and came from many different cultures and peoples of the African continent.
La Amistad was a 19th-century two-masted schooner owned by a Spaniard living in Cuba. It became renowned in July 1839 for a slave revolt by Mende captives who had been captured and sold to European slave traders and illegally transported by a Portuguese ship from West Africa to Cuba, in violation of European treaties against the Atlantic slave trade. Spanish plantation owners Don José Ruiz and Don Pedro Montes bought 53 captives in Havana, Cuba, including four children, and were transporting them on the ship to their plantations near Puerto Príncipe. The revolt began after the schooner's cook jokingly told the slaves that they were to be "killed, salted, and cooked." Sengbe Pieh unshackled himself and the others on the third day and started the revolt. They took control of the ship, killing the captain and the cook. Three Africans were also killed in the melee.
Free womb laws, also referred to as free birth or the law of wombs, was a 19th century judicial concept in several Latin American countries, that declared that all wombs bore free children. All children are born free, even if the mother is enslaved. This principle did not go into effect unless a country adopted it and included it in its constitution or other legislation. It overturned a tradition, under which babies born to enslaved women became the property of the women's owners. Intended as a step towards ending slavery, it was unevenly adopted.
For most of its history, Cuba was controlled by foreign powers. The country was a Spanish colony from approximately 1511 until 1898. The United States governed the nation from 1898 to 1902, and would intervene in national affairs until the abolishment of the Platt Amendment in 1935. The struggle for independence and a national identity was a complex and prolonged affair that began in earnest during the late 18th century and lasted well into the 20th century.
Julio Vizcarrondo Coronado was a Puerto Rican abolitionist, journalist, politician and religious leader. He played an instrumental role in the development and passage of the Moret Law which in 1873 abolished slavery in Puerto Rico. Vizcarrondo was also the founder of the Protestant movement in the Iberian Peninsula in the 19th century.
The Captaincy General of Cuba was an administrative district of the Spanish Empire created in 1607 as part of Habsburg Spain attempt to better defend and administer its Caribbean possessions. The reform also established captaincies general in Puerto Rico, Guatemala and Yucatán.
The history of Puerto Rico began with the settlement of the Ortoiroid people before 430 BC. At the time of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World in 1493, the dominant indigenous culture was that of the Taínos. The Taíno people's numbers went dangerously low during the later half of the 16th century because of new infectious diseases carried by Europeans, exploitation by Spanish settlers, and warfare.
Marcos Xiorro was the slave name of an enslaved African in Spanish Puerto Rico who, in 1821, planned and conspired to lead a slave revolt against the sugarcane plantation owners and the Spanish Colonial government. Although his rebellion was unsuccessful, he achieved legendary status among the island's slave population and has become part of Puerto Rican folklore.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic Slave Trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practised on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
