The Other Slavery (46 page)

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The Other Slavery and the Other Emancipation

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MERICANS TODAY ARE
well aware of some of the milestones in the antislavery movement, such as the Underground Railroad, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in 1852, and the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery throughout the United States in 1865. Very few, however, would be able to say specifically when or how the enslavement of Indians ended. This blind spot harks back to the Civil War era. American leaders of the 1850s and 1860s became aware of the phenomenon of Indian slavery only slowly, and Washington’s crackdown on the other slavery occurred by fits and starts.

To be sure, federal agents in the West kept sending reports to Washington about Indians held in bondage. But the West was still a world away prior to the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869: months of travel by wagon across the plains or by ship around South America. Easterners readily identified the South’s system of chattel slavery as a major national problem, but they had tremendous difficulty rallying against the West’s kaleidoscopic, shadowy, and ever-changing labor practices concerning Chinese coolies, Mexican peons, and American Indian slaves. And yet the solution had to come from the East, as local, territorial, and state authorities in the West were either implicated in the traffic and exploitation of Indians or unable to act
against local and regional elites that were too entrenched and dependent on coerced Native labor.

Abolitionist societies in the East did concern themselves with the plight of Native Americans from time to time. Events such as the Seminole Wars in Florida during the 1810s and 1830s, the Cherokee removal in the 1830s, and the Indian wars of the 1860s sparked discussions and calls for action. Abolitionists’ awareness of the condition of the original inhabitants of North America is at times remarkable. In 1838 the editor of the
Pennsylvania Freeman,
John Greenleaf Whittier, understood that “the same despotic, cruel, and diabolical spirit that oppresses the African race acts in all its unearthly force and virulence against the poor Indians.” One year later, the man who served as lawyer for the Cherokee nation, James G. Birney, spelled out in an open letter how white settlers had “traversed the seas, invaded another continent, set on fire the humble dwellings of the unoffending heathen and enslaved their young men and maidens.” Yet these early insights did not translate into concrete action. The main problem was conceptual. Abolitionists (and nineteenth-century Americans more broadly) believed that the nation consisted of a collection of races afflicted by different problems. Blacks were thus defined by the American system of chattel slavery. This gave abolitionists a clear target. In contrast, the condition of Indians arose from multiple factors, including land dispossession, removal to reservations, wanton murder at the hands of white colonists, disappearance due to illnesses to which they had no immunity, and, only in passing, enslavement. This layering of different forms of abuse prevented abolitionists from seeing the common threads of labor oppression that affected Africans and Native Americans alike.
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The impetus to eradicate Indian slavery did not originate in abolitionist groups. Instead, it came from that much-maligned institution, the United States Congress. Congressmen were called on to review legislation emanating from the western territories, and sometimes they did not approve what they received.
In 1851 New Mexico’s territorial assembly passed the Law Regulating Contracts Between Masters and Servants, which contained the usual provisions about debt obligations that had to be repaid through labor. Congress went along with that legislation. But in 1859 New Mexico’s legislature made the servitude code more draconian by allowing masters to “correct their servants” without the intervention of any court. Adding insult to injury, that same year the legislature reissued an act declaring all black slaves the legal property of their masters. These two territorial laws proved much too controversial in Washington. Some legislators began referring to them as the “white slave code,” which allowed “all white laboring men and women to be whipped by their employers,” and the “black slave code,” which allowed “any person to arrest anyone whom he calls an absconding slave by force and without any legal process from any court or magistrate.” The ensuing sectional spat prompted Ohio representative John A. Bingham to introduce a bill “to disapprove and declare null and void all Territorial acts and parts of acts heretofore passed by the Legislative Assembly of New Mexico which establish, protect, or legalize involuntary servitude or slavery within said Territory, except as punishment for crime, upon due conviction.” The bill narrowly passed in 1860.
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Congress thus intervened to nullify New Mexico’s servitude laws. Yet as the nation plunged into war, the matter of Indian servitude took a backseat to the burning question of black slavery. In 1862 the U.S. House of Representatives enacted a broader law prohibiting “slavery and involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States.” In theory Congress had proscribed all forms of bondage in the territories, but in practice the overriding concern was to prevent the spread of black slavery into the West. Even within New Mexico, Congress’s nullification of the indenture laws in 1860 and the prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude in 1862 made little difference in the ongoing traffic of Indians. As we have seen, Indians held in bondage reached record numbers in New Mexico during the Navajo campaign of 1863–1864.
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Indian slaves had to wait until the end of the Civil War to get additional attention from the federal government. As the North gained the upper hand in the war, a group of congressmen began to think about the nation that would emerge after the conflict. One of the most ebullient was Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin. In a Senate speech in January 1864, he asserted that “we shall come out of this struggle with slavery utterly done away with; that we shall be redeemed and regenerated as a
people; that we shall stand hereafter, as we have stood heretofore, in the vanguard of the civilized nations.” Senator Doolittle was a deeply religious man who believed that the Declaration of Independence was “the new gospel of man’s redemption” and the Fourth of July “the Birthday of God’s Republic, second only in history to the birth of Christ.” Doolittle’s opportunity to play a part in perfecting the Union after the Civil War was not long in coming. On March 3, 1865, Congress passed a resolution creating the Joint Special Committee on the Condition of the Indian Tribes, a bicameral committee charged with investigating their treatment by the civil and military authorities of the United States. Doolittle had been serving as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs in the Senate, so it was only natural that he would also chair this joint committee, which received considerable backing from Congress.
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The task before the Doolittle Committee was gargantuan. Three senators and four representatives could not possibly collect all the necessary information about a continent-size nation, let alone process it and craft a report based on a comprehensive examination of the evidence. Nonetheless, the committee used the powers vested in it to call witnesses and request reports from military officers, Indian agents, superintendents, and “other persons of great knowledge in Indian affairs.” Through circular letters and questionnaires, the committee soon amassed hundreds of pages of information. During the summer recess of 1865, the committee members also toured the West. Two of them journeyed to California, Oregon, Nevada, and the territories of Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Another two were assigned to Minnesota, Nebraska, Dakota, and upper Montana. Senator Doolittle and the last two members went to Kansas, Indian Territory, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. After these travels, the committee faced the daunting task of making sense of it all and writing a report. Remarkably, the final draft consisted of only ten pages—followed by testimonies and documentation running for more than five hundred pages. The short expository portion of the report lacked any concrete proposals. It merely rehashed familiar tropes about the disappearance of the Indians as a result of wars with whites, disease, and Indian intemperance—and even as a Darwinian outcome of an inferior race coming into contact with a superior one. Still, the Doolittle
Report accomplished much. Among other things, the report substantiated the traffic of Indian slaves and the prevalence of peonage. It was the first time many easterners and Washington politicians had heard about these other forms of bondage.
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One of the high-ranking officials who kept abreast of the findings of the Doolittle Committee was Secretary of the Interior James Harlan. He was an ardent opponent of slavery with boundless energy who had just assumed his duties as secretary in the cabinet reshuffle following President Lincoln’s assassination. Harlan found the information about the slaving practices in New Mexico troubling and decided to take up the matter with President Andrew Johnson. After a few preliminary meetings, the president must have come around to Harlan’s point of view. On June 9, 1865, President Johnson issued a statement from the executive mansion affirming that the Indians of New Mexico had been “seized and reduced to slavery.” It is significant that he used the “s” word—with its great emotional charge in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War—to describe the condition of the Natives of New Mexico. Johnson also ordered “that the authority of the Executive branch of the Government should be exercised for the effectual suppression of a practice which is alike in violation of the rights of the Indians and the provisions of the organic law of said Territory.”
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The president’s directive was all Secretary Harlan needed to take additional action. He ordered the commissioner of Indian affairs to launch a parallel investigation into the condition of the Indians of New Mexico. And thus the wheels of government began turning. The commissioner appointed a bank clerk from Dubuque, Iowa, named Julius K. Graves as “special agent” in charge of this second investigation. Graves was a methodical and persistent man who did much to explain the depth of the Indian slavery problem to the eastern establishment. In September Graves received his final instructions and, after a harrowing trip that left some of his limbs frozen, reached Santa Fe on December 30, 1865. On New Year’s Day, Special Agent Graves began his investigation by attending the opening session of the territorial legislature. “The Indian question was the all absorbing topic of conversation among the entire community,” Graves reported to his superiors in Washington. “Each
individual seemed to have peculiar ideas upon the subject, and freely announced and advocated them.” He correctly surmised that New Mexico’s peonage system had been in existence for more than a century. In Graves’s words, it remained “the universally recognized mode of securing labor and assistance; and the results of that system were identical to that of Negro slavery as formerly practiced in the southern states.” Graves distinguished between the ordinary Mexican form of peonage, which he described as “a state of continual imprisonment or service for debt,” and a second system derived from the practical enslavement of captive Indians taken in raids. About the first system, Graves merely reported that the New Mexican peons received salaries of between $2 and $15 per month. After deducting food, clothing, and other expenses, they were left with little to pay down their debt. The result in most cases was compulsory service for life.
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Graves was more interested in documenting the second system. The special agent pointed out that New Mexicans continued to send expeditions that all too often were nothing but slave raids. He believed that these actions were “calculated to keep alive the Indian troubles, and indeed, provoke the savage beings to continued acts of vengeance.” Although in theory expedition leaders were supposed to turn over all their Indian captives to the territorial authorities, “in most cases the captives are either sold, at an average of $75 to $400, or held in possession in practical slavery.” According to Graves, this system persisted all over New Mexico, “to an alarming extent” and in spite of the various acts of Congress and President Johnson’s more recent executive order. From what the special agent had been able to observe, Santa Fe alone may have had four hundred Indian slaves. He also mentioned that “nearly every federal officer holds peons in service,” including New Mexico’s superintendent of Indian affairs, who had half a dozen. No wonder the orders from Washington had gained little traction in New Mexico. Graves concluded with an impassioned plea, urging the federal government to take vigorous action in New Mexico, because failing that, the enslavement of Indians would continue for years. His assessment would prove entirely correct.
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While Doolittle and Graves conducted their inquiries, congressmen in Washington struggled to ratify and implement the Thirteenth Amendment—the first constitutional amendment in sixty years. Its wording was succinct and full of possibilities:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

American leaders had proposed the Thirteenth Amendment as a way to guarantee the Union’s victory over the Confederacy and ensure the abolition of African slavery. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had been a necessary first step, but an executive order could always be ruled unconstitutional by the courts or reversed by Congress or future presidents. The idea of a constitutional amendment thus emerged as an expedient and almost accidental solution to the impermanence of Lincoln’s proclamation. Rather than leaving this great act of emancipation to the executive branch alone, Supreme Court justice Samuel Miller would later explain, Congress “determined this [amendment] to place this main and most valuable result in the Constitution of the restored Union as one of its fundamental articles.” The intended beneficiaries of the Thirteenth Amendment were unquestionably African slaves. But the adoption of the term “involuntary servitude,” a formulation borrowed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, opened the possibility of applying it to Indian captives, Mexican peons, Chinese coolies, or even whites caught in coercive labor arrangements. During Reconstruction, legislators and justices were thus forced to come to grips with the precise meaning and extent of the Thirteenth Amendment and its related legislation.
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