Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Mexican American Elites and Indian Slavery

  In 1868, nearly three hundred New Mexicans were served with arrest warrants charging them with the crime of holding Indian slaves or peons. Six years earlier, Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all black slaves. In 1865, President Johnson issued the Special Proclamation seeking the same result with respect to Indian slaves in New Mexico.113 That presidential act and subsequent federal legislation in 1867 that made it illegal to own Indian slaves brought the nation’s battle over slavery to New Mexico in far more than mere symbolic terms.

  It was the 1867 law that led to the subpoena of three hundred persons to testify before a federal grand jury that would decide whether or not to issue indictments against them.114 Among those charged were many prominent citizens, both Mexican American and Euro-American, including elected and appointed officials, priests, and merchants. Those testifying included Juan José Santistevan, who at the time was between stints as the elected probate judge of Taos County; later, he would preside over the Taos County Commission and serve in the territorial legislature.115 Santistevan testified without shame and, apparently, without fear of indictment or conviction—since he implicated his mother as a fellow slaveholder (though she was not one of those initially charged). About the Indians in his own and his mother’s households, he said:

  They are there of their own free will. I don’t know that they are paid especially. . . . I know as long as I can remember that the Indians have been as servants, that campaigns have been made against Indian tribes [Navajos] and the captives brought back and sold into slavery by parties making a campaign. In this way most of the Indians held and now living in the territory were obtained. In years past the Pah Utahs [Southern Paiute Tribe] before the American conquest used to sell and trade their children to the citizens of New Mexico as slaves. The descendants of these slaves or servants now live in the families of the people.116

  In relatively few words, Santistevan succinctly catalogued the various justifications for Indian slavery. He presents the “custom” of holding Indian slaves as a product of military conflict and as historically rooted. And, like southern slaveholders, his justification of the practice (“they are here of their own free will”) is belied by his own description (they were not paid, they were captured or sold into slavery). He speaks about the history and mechanics of slavery in a detached way (for example, Indian slaves “were obtained” rather than purchased by himself or his ancestors), as if he is not personally implicated. Moreover, Santistevan’s description presents a system of slavery that includes intergenerational transmission of slave status—the children and grandchildren of the slaves originally purchased or traded remain as “slaves or servants” within the households of the original owners and their descendants.117

  In the end, the grand jury refused to return an indictment against Santistevan or any others charged with Indian slavery. This is not surprising, given that the grand jury likely was composed mostly of Mexican American men who knew or knew of Santistevan.118 If Santistevan’s experience is any guide, there was no lasting stigma in being charged with this crime, either in the community of Mexican American elites to which he belonged or among Euro-American elites. In the decade following his indictment as a slaveholder, Santistevan played an active role as a layperson in the American court in Taos County. On four occasions, three different chief justices of the territorial supreme court (all Euro-American) appointed Santistevan as one of three lay jury commissioners, whose task was to select panelists of grand and petit jurors for the following court session. Chief justices, who also served as presiding judges riding circuit in the first judicial district that included Taos County, named Santistevan the interpreter to the grand jury seven times during the 1870s, a position for which he was paid three dollars per day. During the September 1875 term of court, Chief Justice Joseph G. Palen selected Santistevan foreman of the grand jury.119 In short, Santistevan was a model citizen—and an elite Mexican American who owned Indian slaves.

  Consider the multiple, crosscutting ways in which the efforts by American officials to contain Indian slavery in New Mexico shaped relations among the various racial groups in the region. Begin with the parameters of Indian slavery.120 Despite the formal prohibition of Indian slavery under Spanish law, enslavement of Indians by Spanish and mestizo settlers in New Mexico occurred throughout the Spanish colonial and Mexican periods, as well as the American period.121 Gutiérrez describes slaves captured by Mexicans directly from nomadic tribes and those purchased from middleman captors (usually other nomadic tribes) as crucial to the frontier economy: “Slaves were a medium of exchange and were pieces of movable wealth.”122 Using a quantitative analysis of baptisms in New Mexico of nomadic Indians between 1700 and 1849, Gutiérrez shows that the number of Navajo, Apache, Ute, and Comanche Indians baptized correlated strongly with the number of deaths of Spanish/Mexican settlers, thereby revealing the links between Indian slavery and cyclical armed conflict between settlers and nomadic tribes.123

  In a comprehensive study covering several centuries, historian James Brooks describes the complex political economy of exchange in people that included both captivity of Mexican settlers by nomadic and seminomadic tribes and captivity and enslavement of Indians by Mexicans.124 This political economy was gradually transformed and eventually destroyed with the American conquest of the region.125 The American campaign to subjugate nomadic Indians and the fight against Indian slavery intertwined to eventually cripple the latter, though not in ways that necessarily worked to Indians’ advantage.126 In the short term, the effect of the transition from Mexican to American sovereignty was to greatly increase hostilities between the non-Pueblo Indian tribes and both Americans and Mexicans. The pattern that Gutiérrez had identified in the Spanish colonial period continued with a vengeance: increased hostilities—now with the Americans, Mexicans, and Pueblos allied together against the nomadic tribes—meant more Indian captives. Using a slave census taken in 1865 by a U.S. Indian agent in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, Rael-Gálvez concludes that the vast majority of Indian slaves were Navajo and that almost three-fifths had been sold to Mexican households by Mexican middlemen, while two-fifths were sold to Mexican households by members of other nomadic tribes.127 Perhaps the most striking fact is that conflict with nomadic Indians increased dramatically in the first two decades of the American occupation, likely leading to a correspondingly dramatic increase in the number of Indian slaves held in mestizo households.

  Even after the Civil War, when American military and civil officials were charged with eliminating Indian slavery and peonage from New Mexico, the evidence suggests that antislavery efforts sometimes resulted in the capture of more Indian prisoners who were then sold into slavery. For example, Kit Carson’s First New Mexico Volunteers conducted campaigns against the Navajos ostensibly to curtail their raids and captive-taking, but Carson then rewarded his Mexican and Pueblo militiamen and Ute scouts with Navajo captives.128 After emancipation and the Civil War, the U.S. government participated in the transfer of Indian captives into slavery in New Mexico. While anti-peonage initiatives were under way in Washington, the army was engaged in a war against the same peoples who were the objects of the peonage legislation (the nomadic tribes). At the federal level, a number of Reconstruction-era initiatives were directed at ending the so-called “custom” of Indian slavery in New Mexico. President Johnson’s Special Proclamation of 1865 extended the Emancipation Proclamation to Indian slaves in the federal territories.129 In 1867, multiple congressional bills were introduced on the subject, culminating in the passage of the so-called Peon Law, whose purpose was “to abolish and forever prohibit the system of peonage in the Territory of New Mexico.”130 There is little evidence to suggest, however, that change resulted from either of these federal initiatives, as neither contained enforcement provisions.131

  Indian slavery emerges, then, as a fertile site for examining the conflicts among and within racial groups—betwee
n Indian slaves and their Mexican American masters, between Mexican American and Euro-American elites, among Euro-American elites who differed sharply, and even as a dramatic status difference between Pueblos and other Indians in New Mexico.132 Euro-Americans’ efforts to dislodge Indian slavery in New Mexico can be read in multiple ways. Certainly, they are consistent with the principles of equality and liberty and also with the abolition of slavery and eventual emancipation of enslaved blacks after the Civil War. But Euro-Americans’ advocacy of Indian slaves can also be read as an effort to further entrench American hegemony against the interests of Mexican American elites. Whether consciously or not, the war against Indian slavery also became a political war against Mexican American elites who held Indian slaves.

  The fact that Euro-Americans charged with combating Indian slavery themselves owned Indian slaves is telling. Returning to the 1868 prosecutions, most charged with holding Indian slaves were Mexican, but significant numbers of Euro-American men and Mexican women married to Euro-American men also were among those charged.133 Writing almost contemporaneously and speaking of Euro-American elites in New Mexico, Hubert Howe Bancroft noted that “there were few military or civil officials who did not own captive slaves, and they were found even in the service of the Indian agents.”134 Lafayette Head, the former New Mexico territorial legislator and Indian agent charged specifically with identifying and liberating Indian slaves, held multiple Indian slaves in his southern Colorado household in the mid-1860s.135 Indeed, Head justified his slaveholding in a manner that resonated with Santistevan’s grand jury testimony: they “enjoy the full privilege of returning to their people whenever they have the inclination or disposition to do so.”136 Yet he ignored the fact that most of his slaves were acquired as children and, thus, would not have known where or how to find their families or tribes.

  For Mexican American elites, possession of Indian slaves marked them as both economically and racially privileged. While it is difficult to determine with accuracy, it appears that slaveholding occurred primarily in elite families. Brooks reports that American authorities identified 288 households in Taos County in 1868 as having Indian slaves or peons out of a total of 2,820 households in the county.137 Extrapolating from these numbers, this would mean that about 10 percent of Taos County households included Indian slaves or peons—although Euro-Americans, due to their class status, may have been proportionally more likely than Mexicans to have Indian slaves.138 Brooks also shows that, typically, households with Indian slaves included only one or two such persons: 87 percent of households with Indian slaves had only one slave and 85 percent of households with Indian peons held only one or two peons.139 This provides another contrast with the South: in New Mexico, Indian slaves provided mostly household labor (perhaps because they were predominantly captive women and children), rather than labor designed to further large-scale capitalist enterprises in farming or mining, for example. Indian slaves were not limited to the very richest native New Mexican households, but their presence was an indication of wealth and, perhaps more so, past status under the Spanish and Mexican governments.

  Within the context of American colonialism and the intensifying debates over black slavery, the ownership of Indian slaves may have become a different kind of status marker, one that together with wealth marked white racial privilege. From this perspective, Mexican elites’ defense of the system of Indian slavery constituted resistance to American hegemony, but also capitulation to American white supremacy. One sees this in the strained dance between three sets of actors in the legal system: Mexican justices of the peace, Mexican legislators, and Euro-American judges. Over the course of the first two full decades of the American occupation of New Mexico, these three sets of actors engaged each other in a series of legal skirmishes that reveal the contestation and ultimate negotiation of a new racial order.

  Often, these disputes entered the legal system at the level of justice of the peace courts, where Indian slaves complained of mistreatment by their Mexican masters or where Mexican slaveholders sought to regain control of an Indian slave who had been stolen or had run away. Because these forums were not courts of record, we have relatively little data about how these disputes typically proceeded. In what we can assume is a small number of cases (in no sense representative), however, the losing party in the justice of the peace court appealed to the district court, presided over by one of the territorial supreme court justices (appointed, you will recall, by the U.S. president); and, in an even smaller number of cases, the loser in this second litigation forum pursued an additional appeal to the territorial supreme court. The pattern in these appealed cases was for justices of the peace—who were overwhelmingly Mexican Americans during the 1850s and 1860s—to rule in favor of the Mexican slaveholders and for Euro-American judges to rule against them.140

  Two additional patterns emerge in the Indian slavery context. First, majority-Mexican legislatures continually sought legislative solutions to what they perceived as an activist judiciary composed exclusively of Euro-Americans. They formalized the ownership of Indian slaves by other names—under the rubric of an expanding master-servant law, drawing heavily on Anglo-American common law traditions.141 As Brooks notes, this meant that “after 1851, peonage and slavery became densely interwoven” and, he concludes, “virtually merged.”142 Even as this route was increasingly stymied by Euro-American judges, Rael-Gálvez has concluded that Mexican slaveholders turned to county probate courts to use the guardianship system essentially to disguise the master-slave relationship in the euphemistic language of family relationships.143 By taking the guardianship route, Mexican slaveholders satisfied two goals: first, they established their forum as probate court (a forum controlled by elected Mexican American judges);144 and second, they cloaked the practice of slavery in familial terms (saying, for example, that they were rescuing “orphaned” Indian children).145

  Second, Euro-American judges responded in ways that substantially curtailed the power of Mexican American elites. They overturned or narrowly construed master-servant legislation in favor litigants who were Indian slaves.146 More globally, they sought over a period of decades to curtail the power of justice of the peace courts. This had the effect of gradually yet systematically weakening these largely Mexican controlled courts of first impression.147 Eventually, Euro-American elites appealed to higher authority—not the U.S. Supreme Court, but the Congress, which, as the reader will recall, had the authority to nullify any act of the territorial legislature. Frustrated by unsuccessful attempts to use general slavery and peonage prohibitions to address Indian slavery in New Mexico, Congress in 1867 directly prohibited Indian slavery and the practice of Indian peonage.148

  Although one may see these Euro-American judges and federal legislators as champions of civil rights—and, in particular, as advocates of the extension to Indians of recently won black civil rights—in order to fully understand the dynamics at work we must consider the constellation of racial groups, racial ideologies, and the emergent racial order. From the actions of Mexican elites in the first twenty-five years of American colonization, it is impossible to deny that they perceived it in their interest to defend the practice of Indian slavery. It also appears that Euro-Americans, especially judges, were increasingly critical of the practice euphemistically labeled “peonage.” What do the debates between Mexican elites and Euro-Americans over Indian slavery reveal about the deeper, highly racialized conflict in this colonial moment?

  The broader context is extremely important because, at this same point in time, the American military was engaged in its most intense “Indian wars” against the nomadic tribes in New Mexico.149 The culmination of the assault on nomadic Indians was Kit Carson’s forced march of eight thousand Navajo men, women, and children for more than three hundred miles, from their homeland to the Bosque Redondo Reservation, where they were held as captives from 1864 to 1868. Historian Richard White provides this description: “The ‘Long Walk’ became an event seared into the Navajo memory
, a lasting reminder of the power and ruthlessness of the federal government. It would be four years before the Diné, as the Navajos call themselves, returned to their own country. . . . These were four years of humiliation, suffering, death, and near starvation.”150

  Consider, then, the situation of a hypothetical Navajo woman enslaved in a Mexican or Euro-American household in 1868, the year of the indictment against Santistevan and the other slaveholders. Indian agent Head, who filed the indictments, “liberated” Indian slaves as he found them, with the following speech: “they were strictly and absolutely free to live where and work for whom they desired, and were at perfect liberty to go where and when they pleased”151 As Rael-Gálvez has insightfully observed, that Navajo slave would have been unable to return to her homeland, had she sought to do so in 1868, but, rather, would have been forced to join the Navajo people at the Bosque Redondo prison camp.152 This is not to justify Mexicans’ enslavement of Indians, but, rather, to highlight the outright hypocrisy of the federal government’s Indian policy.

  Americans’ actions regarding Indian slavery are better understood as part of a larger project of institution building for the purpose of extending and preserving American material and ideological interests in this newest colony. From this perspective, the conflict between Mexican Americans and Euro-Americans over Indian slavery represented both a power struggle between colonizer and native and between dominant (Euro-American) and subordinate (Mexican) racial groups. Mexican American elites attempted to resist American hegemony by holding onto one of their most valuable assets (even as their land holdings plummeted during the nineteenth century). At another level, Mexican American elites sought to maintain their honor and status, which under the Spanish and Mexican periods stemmed partly from making raids, taking captives, and holding Indian slaves. This tradition surely resonated with the transfer of power to the Americans, who, after all, understood both the traffic in human beings and its justification on the basis of racial inferiority. In the context of American racial hierarchy, then, we must also read Mexican American elites’ fierce battle to maintain Indian slavery as an effort to legitimize (and, thus, fortify) their ever-tenuous claim to whiteness.