Mexico City, 1849. Near fine.. 35pp. Original brown printed wrappers. Very minor wear, slight discoloration along fore-edge of rear wrapper. The slightest faint dampstain along the extreme outer margin of first two leaves, else internally clean. Untrimmed. One of the most influential works on civil rights in Mexico, setting the basis of the Constitution of 1857, and a milestone in the history of slavery in North America for offering freedom to any slaves who stepped both feet into Mexico. This small booklet resulted from a commission led by Mariano Otero, in an attempt to codify some of the liberal aspirations of the "Acta Constitutiva y de Reformas de 1847." Among them was Article 5, roughly translated as "To ensure the rights of man that the Constitution recognizes, a law will establish the guarantees of freedom, security, property and equality enjoyed by all the inhabitants of the Republic, and will establish the means to make them effective." The Dictamen included those individual guarantees and rights. The new law also had a huge impact in the United States concerning the issue of slavery. In 1821 slavery was banned in Mexico, with the exception of Texas, and in 1837 the ban was extended to the whole Mexican territory. However, slaves that entered Mexico from the United States were still legally property of their owners. With the constitutional reforms issued in 1849, all foreign slaves would become free by the sole act of stepping on Mexican territory. This law effectively created what some historians have designated as the southbound Underground Railroad.
As Richard Grant writes in Smithsonian Magazine: "This soon became common knowledge among enslaved people in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, and what would later become Oklahoma. They envisioned what historian Mekala Audain calls a 'Mexican Canaan' across the Rio Grande -- a promised land where they could be free. They made the arduous journey through Texas. They stowed away on boats leaving from Galveston and New Orleans for Tampico and Veracruz. In the 1850s a dozen slaves were reaching Matamoros, Mexico, every month. Two-hundred-seventy arrived in Laredo, in Tamaulipas (now called Nuevo Laredo, just across the border from Laredo, Texas) in a single year. American diplomats kept pressuring their Mexican counterparts to sign extradition treaties, which would return runaway slaves to their owners, but Mexico flatly refused -- in 1850, 1851, 1853 and 1857."
A wonderful copy of an important Mexican work, with just seven copies in OCLC, at the Bancroft, Yale, Boston Athenaeum, Harvard, UT-Austin, the Library of Congress, and the Biblioteca Nacional de Mexico.
