Freedom's Frontier

California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Stacey L. Smith

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781469607696
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.
Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

CHAPTER ONE

California Bound

Robert Baylor Semple made an odd spokesman for free labor. A tall and lanky frontiersman who frequently donned a backward coonskin cap, “Long Bob” was famous for his leading role in the 1846 Bear Flag Revolt, which helped topple California’s Mexican government. He also came from an old and distinguished family of Kentucky slaveholders. In the fall of 1849, the residents of Sonoma, California, sent Semple as their delegate to the state constitutional convention in Monterey. His admiring American colleagues quickly elected him as the convention president.¹ Only nine days after the convention voted unanimously to prohibit slavery in the state, Semple proclaimed that California’s free white men still faced a threat from slave labor. He warned that enterprising southern slaveholders, lured by the same promises of fast fortune that drew other Americans to the goldfields, plotted to circumvent California’s ban on slavery. They would bring their slaves west under contracts and indentures, hold them in the state and profit from their labor, and then set them free. The presence of these degraded slave-hirelings threatened to drive down wages, promote land monopolies, and deprive the free white man “of all that encourages him to industry and makes labor profitable.” Semple insisted that the only way to protect free white labor would be to prohibit all black Americans, free or slave, from migrating into the state. “In God’s name, I say, let us make California a place where free white men can live,” he implored.²

Semple’s condemnation of slavery and his plea to preserve California as a haven for free white men rested on a series of assumptions: that white men were free, that most blacks were slaves, and that a ban on all African Americans provided the most effective prohibition against slavery. Others shared his logic. A majority of the convention delegates initially voted for a constitutional provision barring all future black migration; they reasoned that it would keep slavery from gaining a foothold in the new state. The debates over the measure revealed, however, that Semple’s division of the world into black and white, slave and free, inadequately described California’s emerging labor landscape. One delegate who supported banning black migration argued that this exclusion did not go far enough. Protecting free white labor from the degrading effects of slavery also required outlawing “the peons of Mexico, or any class of that kind; I care not whether they be free or bond.” Alternately, opponents of antiblack legislation contended that “foreigners” were primarily responsible for bringing slavish and degraded labor into the state. The proposed constitution did nothing to restrict the migration of “the miserable natives that come from the Sandwich Islands and other Islands of the Pacific” or “the refuse of population from Chili, Peru, Mexico, and other parts of the world.” These people were “as bad as any of the free negroes of the North, or the worst slaves of the South.” Prohibiting black laborers made little sense if these foreign slaves were allowed to migrate freely into California.³

The convention delegates eventually reconsidered and voted down the black exclusion law, amid growing fears that it would provoke controversy in Congress and hold up California’s bid for statehood.⁴ The discursive wrangling over black exclusion was, nevertheless, instructive about the instability of racial and labor categories on the eve of statehood. When delegates condemned Mexican peons who were neither clearly “free or bond” and Pacific Islanders who were worse than black slaves, they tried to make sense of a complex gold rush environment in which familiar racial and labor designations—black and white, free and slave—no longer adhered to bodies or labor systems in predictable ways. It was a world where there were not just slaves and free people but also “peons.” It was also a world where there were not just whites and “negroes” but also Pacific Islanders, Mexicans, and Chileans. Most important, it was a world in which people perceived to be “slaves” were not exclusively black and where antislavery measures would not necessarily preserve the state for labor that was “free” and “white.” California, in short, exploded dichotomous, binary conceptions of both race and labor and forced delegates to embrace new categories—like “peon”—and attach new meanings to old categories—like “slave.” Political and legal struggles over the content of these categories fueled a decade-long debate about how to defend California’s free-state status from the incursions of bound, semibound, and quasibound labor.⁵

The complexity of California’s gold rush labor relations drove this debate. A conquered land only recently carved out of the national territory of the Republic of Mexico and a region poised on the leading edge of global capitalism, California was an international labor borderlands in the 1840s and 1850s. As diverse peoples congregated in the mines, divergent ways of organizing, managing, binding, and disciplining labor converged there as well. The qualities that made California a desirable place for “free white men to live”—the low capital investment required for placer mining, the scarcity of workers, and the relatively high monetary rewards for work—also made it an attractive sphere for different forms of bound and semibound labor. Speculators, including merchants, landowners, and slaveholders, recognized that they could profit from the rush by transporting people to the gold country to labor for them. And yet California held out so many opportunities for lucrative employment and presented so many temptations for desertion that these speculators had to devise elaborate methods of binding and holding labor. As a result, California witnessed the emergence of multiple labor systems that relied on physical coercion, long-term contracts, debt servitude, or ties of personal obligation to enforce labor discipline and limit worker mobility. The gold rush California that Semple envisioned as the last best hope for free white labor became, at the same time, a profitable area for the expansion of competing labor systems that neither he nor his colleagues would have recognized as free.

What follows is an effort to trace the routes of people and capital across and between nations in order to reconstruct the social and economic contours of bound labor in gold rush California. On the eve of the gold discoveries, California was a transnational space where work relations that originated in Mexico and the United States overlapped each other. With the conquest of California, free-state northerners and slaveholding southerners replicated familiar systems of waged labor and slavery in the region. These labor systems existed alongside Spanish-Mexican labor traditions that bound Indian workers to large ranchos through a mixture of wage labor, captivity, and debt peonage. As the local gold rush of 1848 expanded into a global rush in 1849, this borderland became far more complicated. California was the locus of migrations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Peoples from the United States, Mexico, Chile, Peru, China, and Hawai‘i brought regionally and temporally distinctive renditions of wage labor, slavery, contract labor, debt bondage, peonage, and indentured servitude to the gold country. As these people crowded into the mines, labor systems ran up against and intersected with each other. They also changed dramatically as employers and employees, patrones and peones, masters and slaves, creditors and debtors, abandoned, renegotiated, or reinvented their relationships. Making sense of California’s crisis over the boundaries of free and unfree labor during the antebellum era requires us first to follow people, money, and work relations over deserts, across seas, and into the Sierra Nevada foothills.

California’s Indigenous Labor Systems and the Gold Rush

Eight months after the first discovery of gold on the American River, a party of thirty goldseekers set out from the village of Los Angeles for the diggings in the north. Six prominent Californios, including a young ranchero named Antonio Francisco Coronel, headed up the expedition. The Californios’ success rested on the backs of dozens of Indian men whom they transported north to work in the mines. Coronel’s personal retinue included two men whom he described as mute Indians (indios mudos). One of them, seventeen-year-old Augustín, was a genízaro, a detribalized Indian captive from New Mexico. Coronel had obtained Augustín as a child several years earlier when New Mexican traders agreed to part with the boy in exchange for a set of fine California horses. The young man became a valuable worker on Coronel’s rancho, and now the Californio sought to make use of his labor in the goldfields.⁶ Coronel was not alone. His traveling companion Ramón Carillo had “at his disposal twenty or more Indians,” whom he put to work in the mines. After traveling several hundred miles to the north, the party settled in the Southern Mines, the southernmost region of the gold country drained by the San Joaquin River. The fall of 1848 proved profitable, and after a brief winter hiatus, Coronel and his party headed out to the dry diggings along Weber’s Creek. There they fell in with a heterogeneous “population of Chileans, Peruvians, Californians [Californios], Mexicans, and many Americans, Germans, etc.” All of the miners worked peacefully until the Americans, determined that no “foreigners” should benefit from the gold rush, threatened to expel all but U.S. citizens. The party left for new diggings in the Northern Mines, the northern end of the gold country adjacent to the Sacramento River, only to be run off of a second claim. A dismayed Coronel took his Indian servants back to Los Angeles, never to return to the mines.⁷

The journey of Augustín and the other Native workers who traveled north with their Californio masters helps to illuminate the complexity of labor relations that existed in California long before the gold rush. With the conquest of the Mexican North in the 1840s, the United States absorbed a distinctive set of Spanish-Mexican labor practices that had no direct American analogues. The rancho system under which Augustín and other Native people labored rested on paternalistic ties of mutual obligation and involved elements of captivity, slavery, debt peonage, and wage labor. Born of secularization in the 1830s, it provided the rising Californio ranchero class with a semipermanent Indian workforce. Once this Mexican territory became American, U.S. officials were quick to label the rancho system a backward and undesirable form of slavery. U.S. authorities’ desire to maintain a stable Indian workforce finally prevailed over these concerns, and much of the old rancho system survived into the American era and traveled into the mining country, intact. Indian workers continued to enrich rancheros in the goldfields until new American emigrants, insistent that both groups threatened the economic interests of white U.S. citizens, expelled them from the mines. The persecution of Indian miners presaged a broader assault on Native peoples and cultures, which came to fruition in California’s 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians.⁸

The rancho system that the United States inherited in 1848 grew out of the Mexican government’s secularization of California’s Catholic missions during the 1830s. Prior to secularization, many Indians who lived in Spanish-speaking communities were neophytes who labored under the supervision of Franciscan missionaries. They worked and lived on lands that adjoined mission churches—partly from necessity, partly from physical compulsion—and they received religious instruction. Following independence in 1821 and the adoption of a liberal constitution in 1824, Mexican authorities eventually secularized the missions by breaking up their large landholdings and liberating neophytes from Franciscan control. Emancipated neophytes became eligible for Mexican citizenship and grants of former mission land. In actuality, mission Indians benefited little from secularization. Eager to develop and fortify the far northern frontier, the Mexican government granted enormous parcels of former mission lands—lands on which Indian people had lived and labored for generations—to its own citizens who promised to settle, improve, and defend them. This new landed class consisted of both Mexican-born Californios and American and European immigrants who adopted Mexican citizenship. They converted their land grants into massive ranchos where they raised thousands of cattle to supply a burgeoning demand for beef tallow and cowhides in New England tanneries. Dispossessed and landless, former neophytes became a “windfall of cheap Indian labor” essential to rancheros’ participation in this global trade.⁹

Rancheros gradually tied Indian workers to the ranchos through an intricate labor system that historians have variously described as slavery, peonage, feudalism, seigneurialism, or paternalism. Rancheros themselves insisted that only familial ties of mutual affection and obligation bound Indians to their employ. Salvador Vallejo, brother of the famous Sonoma ranchero General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo, remembered fondly that “many of the rich men of the country had from twenty to sixty Indian servants whom they dressed and fed.” The Californios considered Indians “as members of our families[,] we loved them and they loved us.” Francisca Benicia Carrillo de Vallejo, Salvador’s sister-in-law, affirmed that Indian servants “do not ask for money, nor do they have a fixed wage; we give them all they need and if they are ill we care for them like members of the family.”¹⁰

Rancheros’ claims of benevolent paternalism and their depictions of Indians as dependent children obscured a much more complex and coercive set of labor exchanges. Most rancho Indians labored for little more than weekly rations, two sets of clothing per year, and the right to establish villages on rancho land. The most skilled Indian vaqueros might also earn monthly wages or cash payments for each cow they killed and skinned.¹¹ Rancheros used both of these waged and nonwaged exchanges to lock Indians into debt servitude. They advanced food, goods, or cash to their workers and demanded repayment in future labor. Local laws upheld these claims by prohibiting Indian debtors from leaving the ranchos, requiring all Indians to obtain the approval of their ranchero before securing employment elsewhere, and punishing those who “enticed” away Indian workers. Rancheros relied on local alcaldes to enforce these measures. American John Bidwell, the magistrate for San Luis Rey during the U.S.-Mexico War, remembered that “owners of ranches came to reclaim Indians, asking me to command them to return to their service, generally on the ground of indebtedness.” Mexican law and custom, they alleged, gave them the “right to make the demand.” Bidwell refused to return the workers, but at least some American alcaldes honored these requests.¹²

Californios also bound Indians into the rancho system through captivity and slavery. In southern California, Californios purchased captive Indian children from the Great Basin. Like Antonio Coronel’s servant Augustín, these captives arrived with New Mexican and Ute traders, who exchanged them for California horses. Californios justified these transactions by claiming that they had adopted the poor waifs into their families and educated them in the Catholic faith. These relationships were usually embedded in Catholic traditions of compadrazgo (godparenthood). Rancheros stood as padrinos (godfathers) and madrinas (godmothers) to young Indian captives or orphans or the children of their rancho laborers at their baptisms. Then they took charge of the children until adulthood. Coronel raised Augustín in just such a manner, and he averred that purchasing captives had “great benefits to the Indians,” who were “educated and treated as members of the family.”¹³

Other methods of obtaining captives involved more overt violence. Parties of Mexicans and their Indian allies raided villages in the California interior and took captives whom they held as long- and short-term laborers. This slave raiding often went hand in hand with punitive expeditions against so-called horse thief Indians accused of stealing livestock from Mexican coastal settlements. U.S. naval officer Joseph Warren Revere reported, for instance, that an 1840s campaign against Coast Miwok horse raiders near present-day Marin County netted dozens of captives. “The prisoners thus pressed into our service were divided equally among our party,” he noted. Rancheros compelled the captives to make adobe bricks before finally releasing them. Sometimes retribution played no part in the raiding; obtaining lifelong captives was the goal. Well-armed rancheros in need of servants would “club together,” attack an unsuspecting village, kill any resistant Indians, and carry off “to the settlements such as they thought best suited for servants.”¹⁴ Kidnapping became so prevalent by the 1840s that, according to one historian’s estimate, nearly one-fifth of California’s Indian population suffered captivity and enslavement.¹⁵

Californios seized Native people of all descriptions, but wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Freedom’s frontier
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE: California Bound
• CHAPTER TWO: Planting Slavery on Free Soil
• CHAPTER THREE: Hired Serfs and Contract Slaves
• CHAPTER FOUR: Enslaved Wards and Captive Apprentices
• CHAPTER FIVE: For Purposes of Labor and of Lust
• CHAPTER SIX: Emancipating California
• CHAPTER SEVEN: Reconstructing California, Reconstructing the Nation
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index