It is safe to say that freedom
doesn’t always mean free; nothing is free in this mad world. In reality, freed
slaves were essentially displaced. After years and years of being enslaved,
aside from the horrid treatment, the necessities of life were provided
(somewhat). There was food and shelter,
along with other slaves to interact with. When abolition finally came, most
slaves were left with nowhere to go, and quite a few ended up going to work for
their former masters. Freedom sometimes meant deprivation, but in a new way.
Deprivation of opportunity; instead of being shackled physically, their minds
were still enslaved. Which goes back to my comment about slaves returning to
their masters, they had been brainwashed for so long that they felt as if they
really needed their masters.
This is understandable, one would
become dependent on whoever was over them because there was nowhere else to go
nor did they have a say in the situation.
Whites in this era systematically de-humanized African slaves and broke
them down to the most basic level of laborers. Even with abolition, there was
still a need for labor, and there were hundreds of thousands of people that
needed a place to go.
After the Spanish reoccupied the
Dominican Republic, there was a wave of indentured servitude. Workers would be
contracted to work for a certain amount of years. They were paid for their
work, given adequate food rations, and even had the opportunity to own land.
Women didn’t have the same opportunities as they were still taken advantage of
and considered to be lower on the totem pole than their male counterparts. This
doesn’t come as a big surprise due to the treatment of women historically.
Having a system of indentured
servitude with the opportunity to become self-sufficient did bring a somewhat
positive light to the island. We can assume that things looked better on paper
but just the fact that a structured system was put in place that was
drastically different from slavery let people know that it was going in the
right direction. This led to institutions and progress mainly because they
weren’t laboring for masters, they finally had the opportunity to work for
themselves and better their own lives. In my previous post, I credited the
Haitians for Dominican freedom and success. In my opinion this post confirmed
that notion because without the revolt, who knows what would’ve happened.
As a result, a new system was put
into place and the journey to reconstruction and independence was able to
commence.
Charles C. Hauch
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2508418
Julie Franks
Latin
American Perspectives
Vol. 26, No. 1, Creating Markets in Latin America, 1750-1998 (Jan., 1999), pp. 106-128
Vol. 26, No. 1, Creating Markets in Latin America, 1750-1998 (Jan., 1999), pp. 106-128
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2634040
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