Abolition of slavery, March 22, 1873

The road to abolition ran through several distinct stages, not a clean cut in a single year. Queen María Cristina of Spain abolished the slave trade, the transport of newly enslaved people, to the Spanish colonies on June 25, 1835, but that step did not end existing slavery within Puerto Rico itself, only the arrival of newly enslaved people.

A more direct step came on June 4, 1870, when the efforts of Román Baldorioty de Castro, Luis Padial, and Julio Vizcarrondo produced the Moret Law, covered further in the lesson that follows. It freed only enslaved people born after September 17, 1868, or those over 60: a partial measure, not full abolition, but a real crack in the system nonetheless.

Full abolition finally came on March 22, 1873, when the Spanish National Assembly officially abolished slavery in Puerto Rico, at the very start of Spain's brief First Republic, a political turn that finally made full abolition possible.

Even that moment came with conditions. The freed people were not immediately free in full practice: former slaves had to enter a mandatory three-year labor contract with their former masters, who were compensated for the loss, and the freed only gained full possession of their rights after five years had passed.

Put on a timeline, the 1873 abolition arrived 38 years after the 1835 trade ban and some 360 years after the first documented enslaved Africans reached the island in 1513, and it landed two years after a comparable milestone in the post-Civil War amendments of the United States, placing Puerto Rico within a far broader nineteenth-century hemispheric wave of emancipation.

Sources: Historia de Puerto Rico; Román Baldorioty de Castro. Freeze 2026-08-22.