An African American and Latinx History of the United States

by Paul Ortiz

  Frederick Douglass’ Paper reprinted a petition that the American Anti-Slavery Society had submitted to Congress demanding that the United States compensate Mexico for what was essentially an illegal war:

  Believing that the existing war between this country and Mexico originated in a desire to extend the area of Slavery, and that it is still prosecuted with the same object: We, the undersigned, inhabitants of —— county and State of ——, respectfully request your honorable body to take immediate Measures to recall our armies from Mexican Territory, and to make full Reparations to Mexico for the wrongs we have done her. 65

  The triumph of US arms did not break the antislavery spirit of the majority of the Mexican people. The American diplomat Nicholas Trist discovered that “the Mexicans not only understood the project of forcing slavery into the territory sought to be acquired from them, but viewed it with an abhorrence which strangely contrasts with the pro-slavery proclivity of [the United States].”66 Later, during the American Civil War, a reporter for Californio, Ramón Hill, affirmed that a Southern victory would mean the reestablishment of slavery in Mexico: “If a monarchy is established in the United States, Mexico will be contaminated with the cursed plague of slavery; and this would be the ultimate misfortune that the nation could suffer, for death is a thousand times preferable to regressing to the point of tolerating slavery.”67

  Resistance fighters continued battling slavery in every corner of the empire. Enslaved African Americans escaped into Mexico individually as well as in groups: “The People of Texas bordering on the Mexican provinces have also been bitterly complaining of the escape of their slaves across the Rio Grande, and the impossibility of recapturing them, threatening to redress themselves by force.”68 A correspondent from Mexico reported to the National Anti-Slavery Standard, in a story headlined “A New Plot of the Slave-Drivers,” that slave drivers were “trying to acquire Mexican territory, to own slaves there, but to also keep those regions from being available to fugitive slaves to hide.”69 Harold Preece wrote, “In 1856—almost on the eve of the Civil War—a Mexican farmhand, remembered only as Frank, was flogged and burned with rebellious Negroes at Columbus, Texas, for organizing the slave in a movement aimed at overthrowing the white planters and confiscation of the estates originally stolen from Mexicans. After the lynchings, the planters held a meeting and ordered the Sheriff to run all Mexicans out of the county lest they continue to stir up the Negroes.”70

  In 1852, B. F. Remington, a Black abolitionist, wrote that the United States aimed to shut down the Underground Railroad and bring an end to antislavery sanctuaries in Canada and Mexico.71 At the same time, groups of American citizens known as “filibusters”—irregular military adventurers—began launching invasions of countries throughout Latin America, seeking to reimpose slavery or take over existing plantation societies such as that in Cuba. “General” William Walker, a US filibuster who briefly seized control of Nicaragua, wrote: “The introduction of negro-slavery into Nicaragua would furnish a supply of constant and reliable labor requisite for the cultivation of tropical products.”72 The proslavery Richmond Enquirer urged that the federal government annex Cuba to stave off the possibility of the British intervening militarily to end slavery in Cuba:

  Our views of the policy of this measure as, of every other, is determined by the paramount and controlling consideration of Southern interests. It is because we regard the acquisition of Cuba as essential to the stability of the system of slavery, and to the just ascendency of the South. . . . We must re-enforce the powers of slavery as an element of political control, and this can only be done by the annexation of Cuba. In no other direction is there a chance for the aggrandizement of slavery.73

  African Americans and abolitionist newspapers believed that the filibusters received unofficial backing from the highest circles of government in Washington, DC.74 Regarding the Cuban filibuster movement, Frederick Douglass’ Paper commented, “Our voracious eagle is whetting his talons for the capture of Cuba. This beautiful Island has long been a coveted treasure, and, at last, has so excited our national cupidity that we are no longer able to restrain it. The value of the prize, and the probability of success in securing it, alike conspire to sharpen our over keen and almost insatiable appetite for that which can only be attained by plunder.” Basing its analysis on the outcome of the US invasion of Mexico, Frederick Douglass’ Paper believed that “all difficulties will be encountered, all dangers braved, and though it may cost millions of treasure and rivers of blood, Cuba will be conquered and severed from the Spanish crown, and sooner or later annexed to the United States.”75

  Mexican writers in newly conquered California shared this contempt for imperial slavery as well as for the US filibusters. Antonio Mancillas, writing in La Voz de Méjico, wrote, “Each acre of territory that the South gained, made the price of slaves rise in the market; and consequently this [phenomenon] was duplicated with the acquisition of Texas. From this arose that insatiable desire of the Southern filibusters to take over Cuba and Nicaragua.”76 Francisco P. Ramírez’s El Clamor Público fiercely criticized the US filibusters and their quest to reestablish slavery in Latin America.

  Abolitionists kept close tabs on US misadventures in the United States’ backyard and elsewhere. Martin Delany, a Black abolitionist, prepared a special international report for a meeting of antislavery activists in Pittsburgh in 1855. Delany rejoiced in the failure of US forces to annex either the Sandwich Islands or Haiti, citing as the reason that “the Haytien people are too intelligent and too conversant with the outlandish prejudices of the Americans, for a moment to entertain any such proposition.” Delany likewise detailed the failure of US efforts to seize Cuba, and predicted that the Nicaraguan people were now on their guard against further US incursions on their soil, stating, “We trust this may be so, since the sole object of the Americans in desiring a foot hold in foreign territories, is the servitude and enslavement of the African and colored races.”77

  African Americans engaged in the resistance to empire understood that their uncompensated labor power was the fundamental force building the nation. “We were stolen from our mother country, and brought here,” Bishop Richard Allen cried out. “We have tilled the ground and made fortunes for thousands, and still they are not weary of our services.”78 Slave testimonies reveal that Black workers carefully gauged their market value. In 1855, N. A. Matheas, a fugitive slave, was interviewed shortly before he fled America to find freedom in Canada. Matheas “estimated his value in Virginia at $900.”79 Frederick Douglass introduced himself as a “thief and a robber” for “stealing” his own body to freedom and away from his erstwhile owner. The ex-slave Richard Moran spoke for many when he recounted the ways that slave labor had enriched the United States:

  We have felled almost all the forest that is felled in the south, and a deal elsewhere. We have cultivated, and do cultivate the fields of the south, and much elsewhere. The annual millions of exports from the south, and part of the west, in cotton, rice, hemp and tobacco, are, I might say, exclusively the labor of our hands. Is it unreasonable, after all this accumulation of wealth in the hands of the whites, that here we should be men—be respected? My heart sickens when I reflect, that thousands of men calling themselves philanthropists, republicans, nay more, Christians, can entertain the feelings and views they do towards the colored man.80

  “It is idle to talk of preventing the extension or circumscribing the limits of slavery,” Dr. J. McCune Smith told his Philadelphia audience at the Colored National Convention in 1856. “There is no foot of American Territory over which slavery is not already triumphant, and will continue triumphant, so long as there remains any foot of American Territory on which it is admitted that man can hold property in man.”81 This was a clear rejection of the idea that the United States was uniquely democratic and served as an exemplar to other nations. Smith asserted that it would take external pressure to stop the United States:

  In spite of the resistance of public sen
timent, from the Seminole robbery and massacre, the conquest and purchase of Texas, the Mexican robbery, to the Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Law, those parties have dragged the country down, until the opposing force in the parties is all spent, and nothing but an external resistance can now prevent them from descending still to the lowest depths of dishonor, injustice and oppression.82

  REENVISIONING AMERICAN HISTORY

  Black thinkers attempted to link the Mexican War of Independence, the antislavery movement in the United States, and the ongoing efforts to end racial and caste oppression in the Americas. José María Morelos and Frederick Douglass were born in two very different times and places, but their separate struggles were truly united in purpose. The efforts of Black communities to pay homage to Morelos, Guerrero, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and other freedom fighters suggests a political culture where the pursuit of liberty outranks nationalism or commercial imperialism. Emancipatory internationalism weathered the onslaught of American nativism and the anti-immigrant “Know-Nothing Party” in the 1850s; it reemerged in the midst of the Civil War, when African Americans continued to think expansively about the relationship between citizenship and liberation.83

  African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, and other groups waged intense battles against slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century. The determination to fight the slave republic and create a culture of anti-imperialism is a singular achievement and requires a reenvisioning of US history. African Americans repeatedly pointed out that slavery and imperialism were fatally intertwined and encoded in the nation’s institutions from the very beginning, with grave consequences for all of the citizens of the Americas. Inundated with propaganda about the superiority of Anglo-Saxon institutions, freedom fighters against slavery looked to Haiti, Mexico, and other nations in the Global South for political wisdom on how to grapple with racial capitalism.84

  Unfortunately, too many Americans have forgotten Mexico’s rich history of social democracy, and how African Americans, Latinx people, Native Americans, and citizens of the Americas have made the practice of anti-imperialism central to their way of life. Mexican immigrants brought traditions of mutual aid, solidarity, and democracy with them to the United States. These values have too often been squandered by their adoptive country. Instead, these immigrants have been asked to assimilate to a nation that was ignorant of the role they had played in eradicating slavery and in waging a heroic war of independence against the Spanish Empire.

  Of course, not all Americans were ignorant of this history. Speaking with gratitude toward a nation where former slaves were welcomed, the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet, one of the foremost abolitionists in American history, described Mexicans as “liberty-loving brethren” and “ultra-abolitionists.”85 Garnet’s understanding of the role that Mexican and Latin American abolitionists played in the struggle against slavery fired his own international solidarity work, which lasted for the rest of his life.

  Manifest destiny was, among other things, a preemptive strike to ensure that the freedom movements rising in Mexico, Florida, the Caribbean, and elsewhere did not spread to the United States. The Cuban revolutionary José Martí noted that US imperialism was rooted in the nation’s “tradition of continental dominion perpetuated in the Republic.”86 Generations later, Jack O’Dell, a radical scholar, connected the histories of slavery, the US war on Native Americans, and its invasion of Mexico: “This was the main path by which the American power structure ascended to the position of a world power, by the turn of the 20th century.”87 More recently, William Appleman Williams reaffirmed that “Empire as a way of life,” has been a central theme of US history.88 It is equally true, however, that African Americans, Latinx people, Native Americans, and people of the Global South practiced anti-imperialism as their way of life.

  CHAPTER 3

  “TO BREAK THE FETTERS OF SLAVES ALL OVER THE WORLD”

  THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CIVIL WAR, 1850s TO 1865

  Every major political gain that African Americans and Latinx people have made has been countered by waves of violence and statutory countermeasures designed to abrogate their human rights and claims to citizenship.1 To officially end the Mexican War, on February 2, 1848, the United States and Mexico negotiated the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This accord was designed to confer citizenship rights on Mexicanos in the territories that the United States had seized from Mexico in the wake of the war.2 In response to the possibility of Latinx people becoming citizens, however, states passed measures to ensure that most Mexican Americans and their descendants remained permanent outsiders. White vigilantes engaged in armed assaults on Mexican American communities, lynched Mexican Americans, and stole land from rightful owners. While Mexicans were driven off of farms and gold mining claims, African Americans were banned from entire regions.3 The territorial governor of New Mexico advocated the proscription of African Americans, claiming, “Free negroes are regarded as nuisances in every State and Territory in the Union; and where they are tolerated, society is most degraded. . . . The disgusting degradation to which society is subjected by their presence, is obvious to all, and demands a prohibitory act of the severest character.”4

  The West was now, in Alexander Saxton’s terminology, a white republic whose fields were patrolled by settler colonialists, as John Steinbeck illustrated in Grapes of Wrath:

  Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land—stole Sutter’s land, Guerrero’s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.5

  African Americans in the North were besieged by segregation laws, re-enslavers, and anti-Black race riots.6 Dr. John S. Rock, a Black abolitionist, elicited bitter laughter from his audience when, in 1862, he reminded them,

  In Philadelphia, where there is a larger free colored population than is to be found in any other city in the free States, and where we are denied every social privilege, and are not even permitted to send our children to the schools that we are taxed to support, or to ride in the city horse cars, yet even there we pay taxes enough to support our own poor, and have a balance of a few thousand in our own favor, which goes to support those “poor whites” who “can’t take care of themselves.”7

  Dr. Rock described slavery as a business that enforced a false unity between whites of different classes:

  The educated and wealthy class despise the negro, because they have robbed him of his hard earnings, or, at least, have got rich off the fruits of his labor; and they believe if he gets his freedom, their fountain will be dried up, and they will be obliged to seek business in a new channel. Their “occupation will be gone.” The lowest class hates him because he is poor, as they are, and is a competitor with them for the same labor. The poor ignorant white man, who does not understand that the interest of the laboring masses is mutual, argues in this wise: “Here is so much labor to be performed,—that darkey does it. If he was gone, I should have his place.”

  During the antebellum period, Francisco P. Ramírez mobilized his Los Angeles–based Spanish-language newspaper, El Clamor Público, to challenge the march of slavery and white supremacy across the continent. “But here in this fabulous country,” Ramírez argued in 1855, “he who robs and assassinates the most is he who enjoys freedom. Certain people have no kind of freedom—this freedom, we say, is that which the courts deny to all individuals of color.”8 The young editor wielded El Clamor as an educational tool to counter the views of the majority of white Angelenos who were ardently proslavery. Ramírez attacked the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857, in which it was ruled that African Americans had no rights that white people were bound to respect; echoing abolitionist movement warnings, Ramírez predicted that slave
ry would tear the United States apart.9 He “angered whites, many of whom were Southern sympathizers, with his attacks on slavery and calls for racial equality for Mexicans, blacks, Chinese and Indians.”10 El Clamor Público posited that slavery was the linchpin of the apocalyptic violence sweeping the continent. As a result of El Clamor Público’s agitating, the San Francisco Herald labeled El Clamor Público as one of the state’s “Free Nigger organs,” one that endangered white rule.11

  Anglo theft of Mexican and Indian lands was the order of the day. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was supposed to protect the status of the approximately 115,000 former Mexicans who lived within the newly conquered territories of the West.12 Instead, existing anti-Indian and anti-Black laws were amplified to undermine the human rights of Mexicans who could not prove that they were definitively white. The California Gold Rush and Anglo hunger for land combined to create what the anthropologist Martha Menchaca calls “the racialization of the Mexican population,” as state authorities created laws that defined Mexicans overall as an inferior people with minimal claims on citizenship and land tenure.13 There were certainly exceptions to this rule. Some wealthy Mexicanos and Tejanos, Mexicans who lived in newly conquered Texas, managed to hold on to Spanish and Mexican land grants through the late nineteenth century.14 However, the overall trend of land loss in the West was so devastating that the popular image of the typical Mexican American in mid-twentieth-century America was that of a landless laborer.15 Anglo racism against Mexicans, Chinese, Indians, and free Blacks was interconnected, and numerous state laws were passed to deny each group basic rights such as due process, public assembly, and voting rights as well as equal access to property ownership and employment.16