Slavery

María Antonia was a slave owner and feared the loss of her labor force with the war's end. Slaves entered Venezuela from the Caribbean Islands during the colonial period where their labor supported the plantation economy and urban households. Located mainly in the coastal regions, they made up sixty per cent of the population.32 The republicans needed their support to win the war for independence and along with the llaneros they ensured victory for the patriot side. As a member of the social elite and a former slave owner, Bolívar proposed emancipation of slaves at the Congress of Angostura in 1819 in an effort to recruit them for his army and to keep his promise to President Alexandre Pétion of Haiti. At the Congress of Cúcuta in 1821, in an attempt to mollify property owners, he modified his stance on full emancipation by proposing that the sons of slaves be freed.33 María Antonia feared the results of this limited emancipation as it would lead to the ruin of the country and benefit neither race. She attributed the troubles in Caracas, in part, to the presence of former slaves.34 As a member of the white property owning elite, she felt threatened by the liberty and social mobility of emancipated slaves. Once freed, slaves abandoned the haciendas, leaving owners without an adequate labor force to harvest crops and turn a profit, as was the case at Bolívar's estate at Tuy. Over and over again in her letters to her brother, María Antonia referred to the collapse of the plantation economy and the scarcity of labor.35 She also feared slave insurrections, like those that occurred in Venezuela in the eighteenth century and later in Haiti. While she praised the Bolivian Constitution of 1826, she urged Bolívar to reconsider the provision for the emancipation of slaves (Boletín de la academia de historia 1933).