60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Totalitarianism and Slavery
51
the short term. 14 Lucien Peytraud (1897, 343) is close to the truth when he
asserts that liberty is so natural to the human condition that marronage began
from the time that enslaved persons were introduced into the Americas.
Toussaint Louverture is said to have explained his decision to join the
Haitian revolution on the basis that, though born into slavery, he had
received the soul of a free man (Fouchard 1972, 159–60).
The British anti-slavery lobby in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries insisted that the mere state of freedom uplifted a person regardless
of his material condition (Ragatz 1977, 255). J.P. Gannon gave one of the
clearest expressions of the ideology that informed marronage when he wrote:
[W]hy men, whose ideas of freedom are so very confined and so free from
romance, should prefer an uncertain mode of subsistence to the certainty of
rations in food, clothing, &c. such as they formerly received, I am unable to
account, otherwise than by supposing, that they find their condition on the
whole to be improved by the change. A desire of being free from control, and the
power of disposing of their time and labour in the way that should appear most
agreeable to themselves, would, no doubt, be sufficient to induce men in every
Zone to prefer for a time, a precarious mode of living accompanied by freedom,
to more certain means of subsistence if attended with control. 15
This rationale, however, was lost on most enslavers and some modern
writers. Gilberto Freyre (1963, 132), for instance, implicitly challenged the
anti-slavery view when he asserted that freedom was not sufficient in itself to
make the life of an urban runaway more bearable, at least materially. In his
opinion, the runaway became submerged in the urban proletariat with its
shanty dwellings, and his diet and living conditions worsened; many former
enslaved persons, degraded by such freedom, ended up as street idlers, ruffians,
thieves, prostitutes and murderers.
Some writers, such as Fernando Ortiz, declared that flight, or freedom,
was the ideal of the enslaved person (Deschamps Chapeaux 1983, 11).
However, it is important to understand that deserters did not see freedom as
an end in itself but rather as the precondition for ordering their lives according
to precepts that improved their self-worth as human beings and gave
them an opportunity to live with a certain measure of dignity (García 1996,
63). Among the rights that they sought were freedom from hunger, harassment,
and unjust punishments, and also freedom to associate, to raise a family
and to worship as they saw fit. Arlette Gautier (1985, 227) must have been