The Other Slavery (70 page)

10. The quotes are from Foner,
Free Soil,
chap. 1. See also Vorenberg,
Final Freedom,
especially chaps. 2 and 3; and Alexander Tsesis, “The Thirteenth Amendment’s Revolutionary Aims,” in Alexander Tsesis, ed.,
The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1–23.

11. Journal of George W. Julian, quoted in James M. McPherson,
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 839–840.

12. The quotes are from David M. Oshinsky, “Convict Labor in the Post–Civil War South: Involuntary Servitude After the Thirteenth Amendment,” in Alexander Tsesis, ed.,
The Promises of Liberty: The History and Contemporary Relevance of the Thirteenth Amendment
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 100–118. See also Daniel A. Novak,
The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor After Slavery
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), passim.

13. The quote is from “The 1866 Civil Rights Act,”
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War,
PBS, December 19, 2003,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reconstruction/activism /ps_1866.html
. For Justice Miller’s opinion, see Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873). As examples of such usage, he mentioned long-term apprenticeships and former slaves reduced “to the condition of serfs attached to the plantation.” Although the Thirteenth Amendment prohibited these practices, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 offered a practical remedy by extending the rights and protections of whites to all former slaves. See the analysis in Jacobus tenBroek, “Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States: Consummation to Abolition and Key to the Fourteenth Amendment,”
California Law Review
39 (1951), 199–200.

14. The quotes are from Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873). Dissenting justice Stephen Field preferred a more expansive understanding of the term “involuntary servitude.” It is worth quoting him at length: “The words ‘involuntary servitude’ . . . include something more than slavery in the strict sense of the term; they include also serfage, vassalage, villenage, peonage, and all other forms of compulsory service for the mere benefit or pleasure of others. Nor is this the full import of the terms. The abolition of slavery and involuntary servitude was intended to make everyone born in this country a freeman, and, as such, to give to him the right to pursue the ordinary avocations of life without other restraint than such as affects all others, and to enjoy equally with them the fruits of his labor . . . A person allowed to pursue only one trade or calling, and only in one locality of the country, would not be, in the strict sense of the term, in a condition of slavery, but probably none would deny that he would be in a condition of servitude. He certainly would not possess the liberties nor enjoy the privileges of a freeman. The compulsion which
would force him to labor even for his own benefit only in one direction, or in one place, would be almost as oppressive and nearly as great an invasion of his liberty as the compulsion which would force him to labor for the benefit or pleasure of another, and would equally constitute an element of servitude.”

15. For an excellent introduction to the legal debates surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment, see tenBroek, “Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” 171, 199–200; Risa L. Goluboff, “The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights,”
Duke Law Journal
50 (2001), 1609–1685; and Azmy, “Modern Slavery and a Reconstructed Civil Rights Agenda,” 981–1061.

16. Both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment contained the clause quoted and excluded Indians. For a brief but sound discussion of the legislation surrounding Indian citizenship, see Bryan H. Wildenthal,
Native American Sovereignty on Trial: A Handbook with Cases, Laws, and Documents
(Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), 27–29. For census information, see James P. Collins, “Native Americans in the Census, 1860–1890,”
Prologue
38:2 (Summer 2006); available online at
http://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2006/summer/indian-census.html
.

17. The quote is from Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884). For a broader analysis, see Stephen D. Bodayla, “‘Can an Indian Vote?’:
Elk v Wilkins,
a Setback for Indian Citizenship,”
Nebraska History
67 (1986), 372–380. On the interesting connections between community freedom and citizenship among African Americans, see Steven Hahn,
A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Stephen Kantrowitz,
More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889
(New York: Penguin, 2012).

18. The quotes are from Smith,
Freedom’s Frontier,
185–186.

19. Woodman’s letter and Hanson’s reply appeared in the
Marysville (CA) Daily Appeal,
June 18, 1862. For additional context, see Smith,
Freedom’s Frontier,
186–187.

20. Smith,
Freedom’s Frontier,
188–190; Brendan C. Lindsay,
Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), chap. 6.

21. Charles Sumner, resolution and remarks in the Senate, January 3, 1867; and Peonage Act of 1867, March 2, 1867, both cited in Aviam Soifer, “Federal Protection, Paternalism, and the Virtually Forgotten Prohibition of Voluntary Peonage,”
Columbia Law Review
112 (2012), 1607–1640. Senator Sumner’s correspondence with New Mexicans included a very revealing letter from the acting governor, W.F.M. Arny, which reads as follows: “The House of Representatives has first passed a law entirely repealing all Peon and involuntary servitude laws of this Territory and it has also been read twice in the Council and as soon as it passes I will sign and approve it. But my dear sir: it appears to me that the repeal of laws and the declaration of Congress will not be sufficient to correct the evil so long as we have military officers who will deliberately encourage the enslavement of Indians and Mexicans, and will give away Indians to be held in servitude.” W.F.M. Arny to Sumner, Santa Fe, January 21, 1867, MS AmW 13, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Governor Robert B. Mitchell’s proclamation is quoted in Keleher,
Turmoil in New Mexico,
471. See also Rael-Gálvez, “Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity,” chap. 6; and Kiser, “A ‘Charming Name for a Species of Slavery,’” 169–189.

22. William T. Sherman to Ulysses Grant, June 7, 1868, quoted in Thompson,
The Army and the Navajo,
151–152. For a relevant biography of Sherman, see Robert G. Athearn,
William Tecumseh Sherman and the Settlement of the West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1956), 15–16. See also Keleher,
Turmoil in New Mexico,
472–474; and Bailey,
Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest,
177–178.

23. Council Proceedings, Fort Sumner, May 29, 1868, in Brugge,
Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico,
100–105.

24. “Joint Resolution No. 65, U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C., July 27, 1868,” and William T. Sherman to George W. Getty, St. Louis, September 8, 1868, both in Keleher,
Turmoil in New Mexico,
470–471 and 471–472, respectively. See also Bailey,
Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest,
176–178.

25. Both quotes are from Commissioner William W. Griffin to S. B. Elkins, September 28, 1868, cited in Rael-Gálvez, “Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity,” 292.

26. Descriptions of these proceedings and the newspaper editorial appear in Keleher,
Turmoil in New Mexico,
471–472. Additional details can be found in Rael-Gálvez, “Identifying Captivity and Capturing Identity,” 295–296; and Brooks,
Captives and Cousins,
351–353 and app. C.

27. The numbers of Navajos appearing in baptismal records are from Brugge,
Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico,
102–103.

28. tenBroek, “Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,” 171–172. Present-day legal scholars continue to highlight the inadequacy of the Thirteenth Amendment to counter the rise of modern forms of human trafficking, servitude, and enslavement. As Baher Azmy observed in 2002, modern victims of slavery generally have no recognized Thirteenth Amendment remedy for what are quite obviously Thirteenth Amendment violations. More recently, Americans and people around the world are paying more attention to this problem. In 2000 the United Nations adopted the Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, which included protocols on human trafficking and smuggling. That same year, the U.S. Congress promulgated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Although it is still too soon to tell whether these initiatives will make a difference, at least they address some of the deficiencies of the previous legal framework. On the continuing relevance and potential of the Thirteenth Amendment, see Azmy, “Modern Slavery and a Reconstructed Civil Rights Agenda,” 981–1061; Tobias Barrington Wolff, “The Thirteenth Amendment and Slavery in the Global Economy,”
Columbia Law Review
973 (2002); and Neal Kumar Katyal, “Men Who Own Women: A Thirteenth Amendment Critique of Forced Prostitution,”
Yale Law Journal
103:3 (1993), 817–820.

29. The quotes are from
Albuquerque Journal,
April 26, 1967, and
Albuquerque Tribune,
March 29, 1967.

EPILOGUE

1. Gunther Peck,
Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially
chaps. 2 and 3. Peck repeatedly locates this relationship as somewhere in a continuum between free and unfree labor.

2. See Kevin Bales,
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Kevin Bales,
The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The Global Slavery Index for 2014 can be found at
http://www.globalslavery index.org/findings/#rankings
.

3. Shelley,
Human Trafficking,
passim.

APPENDIXES

1. All of these figures are quite speculative, but I offer them in the hope that they will generate competing estimates and significant adjustments. To paraphrase one prominent economic historian, all of these numbers are, without exception, inaccurate. However, this is not a valid argument against their use. One needs to begin somewhere.

2. This region includes the plains of Colombia and Venezuela.

3. Indians from Florida were traded all across the Caribbean and some as far as Spain. Swagerty, “Beyond Bimini,” 38–74; Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano;
and Hoffman,
A New Andalucia,
41–47. I propose a range of 2,000 to 10,000 subject to revision. I do not include Indian captives held by other Indians in any of these estimates not only because of lack of sources but also to be consistent with the methodology used for counting African slaves that considers only those who crossed the Atlantic but not the ones held by other Africans.

4. I discard Las Casas’s estimate of “more than three million slaves” in Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela. Instead, I use Motolonía’s numbers, which added all the slaves taken in the various provinces of Mexico up to 1555 and arrived at a range between 100,000 and 200,000. See Berthe, “Aspectos de la esclavitud de los indios,” 66–67. I then added the number of Indian slaves taken in Central America as discussed in William L. Sherman,
Forced Native Labor,
chap. 6; David R. Radell, “The Indian Slave Trade and Population of Nicaragua during the Sixteenth Century,” in William M. Denevan ed.,
The Native Population of the Americas in 1492
(Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 67–76; Linda A. Newson,
The Cost of Conquest: Indian Decline in Honduras Under Spanish Rule
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1986), 110–111 and 127; and Linda A. Newson, “The Depopulation of Nicaragua in the Sixteenth Century,”
Journal of Latin American Studies
14:2 (November 1982), 271–275. Their estimates range between 150,000 and 500,000.

5. The total population of the Caribbean at the time of contact is hotly debated. I discard the “‘High Counters’” figures of 8 or 10 million (see discussion in
chapter 1
) and instead assume a total initial population of around half a million. Considering that early Caribbean labor institutions like naborías, repartimientos, and encomiendas were quite coercive (see discussion in chapters
1
and
2
), I further assume that all of these Indians were enslaved broadly speaking. This would yield an estimate of
between 100,000 and 150,000. See Livi Bacci,
Conquest,
67–88; Livi Bacci, “Return to Hispaniola,” 3–51; and Mira Caballos,
El indio antillano
, passim. To this figure we must add the slaves of the plains of Venezuela and Colombia. Slave-takers were very active in this large region, so an estimate of 30,000 to 50,000, while speculative, is reasonable. See Jiménez G.,
La esclavitud indígena en Venezuela
, chap. 6; and Mena García,
El oro del Darién.
Nancy E. van Deusen estimates the total number of enslaved Indians in the sixteenth century at 650,000 or more in van Deusen,
Global Indios
, 2.

6. The late conquest of places like Peru, Chile, Río de la Plata, and Ecuador left little time for the acquisition of slaves during this period. Some Indians sold others into slavery and Spaniards acquired them readily. See “Real Provisión de D. Carlos por la que manda que ni los caciques, ni los indios principales puedan hacer esclavos, ni venderlos, ni rescatarlos, entre los indios de la provincia del Perú,” Toledo, January 31, 1539, AGI, Lima, 565, L. 3, F. 71. A related category of coerced Indians known as
yananconas
may have also been significant. The first encomiendas are awarded. Many more Indians were pressed into military service by Spanish conquistadors. See Karen Spalding, “The Crises and Transformations of Invaded Societies: Andean Area (1500–1580),” in Frank Salomon and Stuart B. Schwartz eds.,
The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas
, vol. 3, part 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 904–972. A range of 40,000 to 80,000 is speculative.