After the fracture of the Republic of Colombia in 1831, a first civil war that took place in the Republic of New Granada—known as the War of the Supremes (1839-1842)—pitted slaveholding elites in New Granada’s Cauca region against the central government in Bogotá, whose republican platform centered egalitarian and inclusive antislavery goals. As a means of mobilization, Julio Arboleda, a powerful slaveowner in Cauca, founded the newspaper El Payanés. From the outset of the war, then, an influential proslavery voice was articulated publicly, and with the intent of fostering favorable opinion. The paper denounced what it called ‘violent acts’ by Afro-descendants across the country, and was expressly concerned with the supposed ‘sedition’ of Afro-New Granadans in and around the cities of Cali and Popayán. It produced a solid image of the dangers that the slaves, as a population, represented and argued in favor of their exclusion from the republic; literally their exportation outside of the territory.

This presentation contextualizes the rise of this proslavery publication in the broader process of republican formation in South America, analyzing the links of Arboleda’s proslavery activism to the emergence of a Pacific transnational class in defense of slavery. Putting El Payanés and its racist discourse about slaves’ incompatibility with the republican project at the center of the study, the presentation also reads Arboleda’s denunciatory accounts in El Payanés against the grain to trace slaves’ politics in Cauca as a crucial factor in the War of the Supremes and in close connection with the New Granadan antislavery republic’s foundations and goals.

Marcela Echeverri is the author of Indian and Slave Royalists in the Age of Revolution: Reform, Revolution, and Royalism in the Northern Andes, 1780–1825. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016

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