The records are difficult to make out at first—blurred rows listing the names of slaveholders, enslaved individuals, and prices under the dim light of the microfilm reader. But once brought into focus, they reveal a harrowing moment: enslaved men and women being appraised for the last time in their lives, a valuation made with abolition in service of direct payments to their former owners. There’s the record listing the enslaved man Santiago Servacio, possessed by the mistress Tereza Castaño, whose value was set at 9,900 pesos. And there are those described as “Many without names” (Varios sin nombre) claimed by Placida Colón for 2,000 pesos—likely elderly given their low assessment. Thousands more like these are stored away, accumulating dust in Colombia’s national archive, in the capital.
We often think of the abolition of slavery as a single, triumphant moment. But in reality, across the Americas, it was a slow process that was rife with concessions for slaveowners. The documents in Bogotá are one example of this. They are what historians call “compensation records,” which guaranteed government payment to former slaveholders to make up for their “lost property” after abolition. According to economic historians Jorge Andrés Tovar Mora and Hermes Tovar Pinzón, the Colombian treasury invested nearly 2.5 million pesos in compensating the former owners of 16,468 enslaved people after the abolition of slavery in 1852. The records are proof of the great lengths that governments went to in order to appease slaveholders.
Compensation to slaveholders after the abolition of slavery was the political consensus among elite powerbrokers across the 19th-century Atlantic World. After 1838, when the British crown abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies, nearly 20 million British pounds were paid out to former masters. In Uruguay, which had a smaller enslaved population, an 1842 abolition law offered indemnification for owners. The French Revolution of 1848 terminated slavery in the country’s Caribbean colonies, again with compensation. Abolition with compensation swept the South American republics—Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Venezuela, and Peru—in the 1850s. The only exceptions to the rule were Brazil and the United States—save for Washington, D.C., which provided slaveholders loyal to the Union $300 for every enslaved person that was emancipated by the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862, as historian Tera W. Hunter has shown.