The REAL end to slavery was… Mexican

The English — who understandably are hard-pressed to find things in their imperialist past to celebrate — are making a big to-do over their 1807 anti-slavery bill.  That bill forbade the TRANSPORTATION of African slaves after 1825.  That’s nice.  They didn’t get around to freeing their own slaves until 1838, and even so, they still kept to their beliefs in racial segregation

The British get better press, and certainly they should celebrate the 1807 Act, but I don’t know why we didn’t throw the party back in 2003.  After all, the first steps towards abolition were in the  Danish West Indies in 1803.  The Brits were a few years late. 

But who first freed the slaves?  Mexico in 1828.  And, even more importantly, what was the first country to recognize all persons as equal, regardless of race?  Mexico… 1814, under the Chilpancingo Constitution. 

Ending slavery in Mexico was relatively painless (outside of Texas, where most slaves were emancipated, but left as peones, or re-enslaved after 1836), in part because there weren’t a lot of slaves, and in part because the ”Rational” Spanish confused the heck out of everyone a few years earlier. 

Scholar Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán claims the 18th century Bourbon rulers of Mexico were philosophical control freaks . The best way to control the world, for the Bourbons, was to make “rational” distinctions.  “Race” being an irrational thing, sort of made them a little nuts, and they did their best to rationalize it — and control the “races”.

Oh, they could figure out Criollo, Indio, Negro easily enough.  But who was Zambo, who Mestizo, who Mulatto, and who something else — or some or all of the above… (assuming anybody cared or knew what their great-granny’s “race” was)? 

It got a little complicated back there in the 1750s.  And in the Spanish and Portugese colonies, where there was never much hangup about “miscegenation” anyway, it got very, very complicated.  Slaves themselves, being in the eyes of the Church human beings with souls and free will, had some basic human rights.  They could marry whomever they wanted and if they married a free person, the children weren’t slaves.  It was, to the 18th centry rationalists, irrational. 

The Mexicans just said the hell with it, and decided back in 1814, when they wrote the Chilpancingo Constitution to do something radical and just say all men are equal with no if’s and or buts… or 2/3rds counts, or “except for Indians”. 

The United States didn’t get around to freeing its slaves until 1865 (and it took a war to do that), and we still hang on to the British concepts of segregation.  The Mexicans are SOOOO over it.  Where we think someone like Barack Obama is a novelty, here are three important Mexican leaders, at least two of whom weren’t afraid to count slaves among their ancestors:   

Cowboy, priest, guerilla-leader and father of the racial equality before the law, José Maria Morelos y Pavon (1765-1815)

“We should do away with the picturesque jargon of black, mulatto, mestizo… and etc., and instead view ourselves geographically, calling ourselves Americans for where we are from, as do the English, and the French and that other European country that is oppressing us, and the Asian in Asia and the African in his part of the world.”

Gunsmith, farmer, soldier (who won 419 straight battles… not even Napoleon could claim that) and president who emancipated the slaves in 1828 (when Abe Lincoln was 9 years old), Vicente Guerrero (1782 - 1831)

The administration is obliged to procure the widest possible benefits and apply them from the palace of the rich to the wooden shack of the humble laborer. If one can succeed in spreading the guarantees of the individual, if the equality before the law destroys the efforts of power and of gold, if the highest title between us is that of citizen, of the rewards we bestow are exclusively for talent and virtue, we have a republic, and she will be conserved by the universal suffrage of a people solid, free and happy. 

Soldier in the War of Independence, in the War of the French Invasion (1838), in the War of the U.S. Invasion (1846), guerilla leader during the Franco-Austrian Invasion of 1862(when he was over 70), farmer, political moderizer, liberal reformer, and President, Juan Alvarez Benítez (1790-1867)

I entered the presidency a poor man, and a poor man I leave it, with the satisfaction that I do not bear the censure of the public because I was dedicated from an early age to personal labor, to work the plow to maintain my family, without the need for public offices where others enrich themselves by outrages to those in misery.