In 1821, as insurgent forces battled Spanish royalists in what would become the last throes of the Wars of Independence in the northern Andes, representatives of the newly constituted republic of Gran Colombia (present-day Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama) passed a gradual emancipation law to address the problem of slavery. At the center of this law was a Free Womb law that declared legally free the children of enslaved women born after the law's promulgation while bonding these children to their mothers' masters until the age of eighteen. This presentation explores the emergence of Colombia's gradual emancipation law, in addition to the violent financial lives of Free Womb children in the autonomous rainforests and gold mines of the Colombian Black Pacific. Although gradual emancipation was ostensibly designed to destroy slavery, Barragan shows how slaveholders in Colombia came to have even greater stake in it.