by Paul Ortiz
The Anglo-Saxon “march of civilization” in the West was accomplished through a mix of legal and extralegal measures. In 1850, the State of California used a “foreign miner’s tax” to drive Chinese and Mexican miners out of precious-metals mining. A few years later, Francisco P. Ramírez connected the California legislature’s anti-Mexican Vagrancy Law, widely known as the “Greaser Act,” with anti-Black racism and manifest destiny.17 One historian has written, “The antivagrancy law provided one more justification for expropriating lands belonging to Mexicans in northern California.”18 Though California was admitted to the United States as a “free state” in 1850, slavery was tacitly tolerated throughout the state, and California passed a fugitive slave law in 1852.19 Whites impatient with the pace of legal disenfranchisement launched assaults against Mexicans and Indians. In California, hundreds were lynched in the decades after California statehood, while in Texas, Afro-Mestizo landowners were driven off of their lands by white usurpers.20 In the late nineteenth century, from Southern California to Seattle, Washington, vigilantes and law enforcement launched nearly three hundred pogroms, or organized massacres, against Chinese workers.21 California state policy toward Native Americans was indentured servitude, slave labor, and extermination.22
The rise of agriculture in the West was premised on the creation of an impoverished working class unable to defend itself in the courts, in politics, or in the fields.23 In an overview of two centuries of agricultural history, Ernesto Galarza argued that twentieth-century farmworkers were disenfranchised politically and economically because their ancestors did not own land. Galarza argued, “The black slave, the sharecropper, the hired hand, the migratory harvester, the wetback, the bracero, and all the intermediate types of land workers in America never had any institutional connections with the government because they had never possessed land.”24 In his study of Chicanos in Santa Barbara, California, the historian Albert Camarillo writes, “The incorporation of Mexican workers into the capitalist labor market locked them into the status of a predominantly unskilled/semiskilled working class at the bottom of the occupational structure.”25 Oliver Cromwell Cox, a Trinidadian American sociologist, posited that the dynamics of racial inequality were to be found in capitalism’s “need for slaves, or peons, or unorganized common laborers—a need for ‘cheap, docile labor.’” Furthermore, “The fact of crucial significance is that the racial exploitation is merely one aspect of the problem of the proletarianization of labor, regardless of the color of the laborers. Hence, racial antagonism is essentially a political-class conflict. The capitalist exploiter, being opportunistic and practical, will utilize any convenience to keep his labor and other resources freely exploitable. He will devise and employ race prejudice when that becomes convenient.”26 Not hatred but racial capitalism drove this system of exploitation. Indeed, employers not infrequently waxed elegiac about how much they loved “their workers”—so long as they did not complain or go out on strike.
States mercilessly attacked the rights and economic well-being of free Blacks in the North and in the South. Several states and territories, including Illinois, Indiana, and Oregon, passed “exclusion laws” and other anti-immigrant measures prohibiting Black settlement in their jurisdictions.27 Rooted in the racial logic of the 1791 Naturalization Act, such laws made whiteness a valuable birth-right.28 Oregon was organized as a white homeland. In 1844, the Provisional Government of Oregon banned slavery and ordered all free blacks age eighteen or older to leave the territory. To enforce Black expulsion, provisional authorities established the “Lash Law,” whereby recalcitrant Black Oregonians received twenty to thirty-nine lashings every six months “until he or she shall quit the territory.” This punishment was soon replaced by a more profitable penalty: forced labor.29
When Oregon gained statehood, in 1859, its bill of rights contained a Negro Exclusion Law, which remained on the state’s law books until 1926. During the Oregon Constitutional Convention that preceded statehood, the number of votes against admitting African Americans to the state exceeded even the number of votes against slavery.30 Three years after statehood, Oregon passed a “race tax” that required African Americans, Hawaiians, Chinese, and “Mulattos” (individuals of mixed race) to pay an annual five-dollar penalty for residing in the state.31 In 1868, the state legislature abrogated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution just in case African Americans had not received the message that they were persona non grata in the Pacific Northwest.32
Learned Americans crafted theories of racial hierarchy that were used to promote white supremacy. Dr. Samuel George Morton, known by the New York Tribune as the most noted “scientific man in America,” published his popular book, Crania Americana, in 1839. Ranking human groups by their skull size, Morton argued that Native Americans were inferior because “they are crafty, sensual, ungrateful, obstinate and unfeeling, and much of their affection for their children may be traced to purely selfish motives.”33 Morton collected hundreds of human skulls and measured them for the stated purpose of judging the intelligence of each racial group he named. Remarkably, the skulls perfectly affirmed America’s racial order: the white “Teutonic Family” skulls enjoyed the largest cranial capacity, while African Americans and what Morton called the “Toltecan Family” (including Mexicans) ranked near the very bottom. Scientific racism became a well-funded tendency in educated circles, one that endures to this day.34
The duel between enslaved workers and their masters for control of workers’ labor was the most important political issue of the antebellum period. This battle for Black labor power determined land values in vast areas of the republic, set profit margins for entire industries, generated new political parties, and drove constitutional debates in the Congress. Slavery exhausted land and bodies at a frightening rate; hence, for survival, it depended on policies of territorial expansion that were justified in terms of imperial manifest destiny. The slave republic mobilized the resources of the nation to maintain chattel bondage by offensive wars, the numerous fugitive slave acts (both state and federal), the suppression of slave revolts, and other expenditures of money and blood.
The investments that were required to sustain and to expand slavery defy imagination. In 1848, the North Star, which became Frederick Douglass’ Paper a few years later, set the amount from the nation’s coffers used to expand slavery at approximately $227.25 million.35 The Sacramento Daily Union contended that the figure was no less than $100 million by the eve of the Civil War. This included the costs of annexing Texas, invading Mexico, waging war on Indian nations, purchasing millions of acres from Spain and France, and securing slavery’s borders. In addition, “from the date of the Constitution until the treaty with Mexico was signed, every foot of territory acquired by purchase and negotiation was, when so acquired, occupied by slaveholders.”36
The Daily Union described the foundation of the nation’s economy in one concise sentence: “In political economy a negro is considered as property—capital invested. He is as much a machine as the spinning jenny, and the profits of his labor are considered as the interest paid to the owner upon the money invested.”37 The weaponized labor relations that underwrote this system would color race and class relations in the United States for centuries to come.38
Antislavery’s partisans rejected the inhuman calculus of racial capitalism, and they tirelessly built new way stations of the Underground Railroad, eventually connecting Montreal, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Tampa, Mexico City, Haiti, and the Bahamas in a grand trunk line of liberation. In the early 1850s, the Mexican government welcomed Black Seminoles, veterans of the Seminole Wars, as border guards to defend Mexico from Texas Rangers, slave catchers, and outlaws.39 In turn, these veterans began helping scores of slaves find freedom in Mexico in what whites, infuriated by these actions, called “The Mexican Border Troubles.”40
Genevieve Payne Benson, a descendent of Black Seminoles who evacuated from Florida at the end of the Second Seminole War, recounted how generations of her family fou
nd freedom in Mexico. In the 1850s, Benson’s grandfather, Isaac Garden, dug his way out of a Texas prison along with two of his brothers and received sanctuary in Mexico with the help of sympathetic Tejanos.41 Zaragosa Vargas notes that Tejanos “rescued runaway slaves, hid them, fed them, and at great risk guided them to safe passage across the Rio Grande at Laredo and Eagle Pass. When the Texas Rangers captured Tejano abolitionists, they immediately executed them.”42
Slave catchers and law enforcement officials faced increasingly determined slaves, free Black communities, and vigilance committees determined to resist recapture—by force of arms if necessary. On November 5, 1850, near Quincy, Illinois, “about fifty negroes, of all ages and sexes, with teams, stampeded from the Missouri side of the river. . . . The slaves were overhauled on Saturday morning, and after a desperate resistance and the loss of their leader, they were captured.” The following year, a fugitive slave was apprehended in Syracuse, New York, “but he was rescued by a mob from the officers who had charge of him, and the result was that he escaped to parts unknown.”43 In 1857, the efforts of United States marshals to recapture a single fugitive slave from Kentucky led to a series of shootouts and an incident called “the Civil War in Ohio.”44 Anthony Burns, a man owned by Charles F. Suttle of Alexandria, Virginia, was seized by US marshals in Boston. While Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and other abolitionists were making indignant speeches about the incident at Faneuil Hall, it was suddenly “announced that there was a mob of negroes in Court Square, attacking the Court House where the prisoner was confined.” US troops were called out to disperse a reported gathering of over 1,000 people who attempted to free Burns. Church bells in Manchester “and many of the interior towns” tolled in mourning after a final rescue effort failed. Shortly afterward, images of the officials responsible for re-enslaving Burns were wrapped on the flagstaff in Boston Common with the following messages: “I: Marshal FREEMAN. Chief of the Boston Ruffians, Slaveholders and Bloodhounds. II. BENJAMIN F. HALLETT. U.S. District Attorney and Attorney General to the Prince of Darkness. Commissioner LORING, The Ten Dollars Jeffries of 1854.”45
The resistance of African Americans, Tejanos, and white abolitionists was decisive in the advent of the Civil War. C. L. R. James wrote, “The agitation of the abolitionists, the sensational escapes by the Underground Railway, the ferment among the Negroes, all helped to focus public attention on slavery. But long before the Civil War the great issues were becoming clear.”46 Antislavery insurgencies gravely threatened racial capitalism and forced the hand of Southern politicians. Southern elites viewed the preservation of slavery and the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act to be nonnegotiable. The leading white women of Broward’s Neck, Florida, informed the Jacksonville Standard shortly after the election of 1858, “In our humble opinion the single issue is now presented to the Southern people, will they submit to all the degradation threatened by the North toward our slave property and be made to what England has made white people experience in the West India Islands—the negroes afforded a place on the same footing with their former owners, to be made legislators, to sit as Judges.” In the spring of 1860, Democrats in Jacksonville stated that regardless of who was nominated to run for president, “The amplest protection and security to slave property in the territories owned by the General Government” and “the surrender [of] fugitive slaves when legally demanded” were vital to Florida’s interests. If these terms were not met, they asserted, “then we are of the opinion that the rights of the citizens of Florida are no longer safe in the Union, and we think that she should raise the banner of secession and invite her Southern sisters to join her.”47 The following year, John C. McGehee, the president of the Florida Secession Convention, gave the most concise reason why the majority of his colleagues supported secession: “At the South, and with our People of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property.”48
The United States drove itself to civil war because the society valued profits over Black humanity, as the following story illustrates. When plantation owners vacationed in the North, they often brought their slave servants with them, and many Northern communities became dependent on Southern tourist dollars. The town of Manchester, New York, near Niagara Falls, was a popular destination. Allegedly, local African Americans approached one Southern tourist’s female servant in the first week of July 1847 to help her escape. Local whites mobilized in opposition. They beat the African Americans who were involved in the rescue effort, and it was reported that members of law enforcement led the attack. One correspondent noted, “The mobocrats however were not satisfied with beating the men, who for the sake of the liberty of a woman would run the risk of injuring the business of the village. They gathered together again in the evening, and tore down the grocery shop of J. M. Anderson, destroyed his goods, and broke up his furniture.”49 The correspondent who wrote about the riot emphasized the pecuniary impetus behind the mob’s actions: “The people of that neighborhood, it seems, take a peculiar interest in the support of the system of Slavery, flattering themselves, of course, that it is a patriotic love of the Union, and of justice, but like all the patriotism that goes by the name now-a-days, it is easily resolved into a base love of dollars and cents.”
The Christian Recorder explained the coming of the Civil War as a culmination of decisions made by the nation’s leaders at the founding of the nation:
The slave power has always ruled the continent. It ruled the colonies, it ruled the British cabinets as long as we were colonies; it was no small element in causing the revolution, as Jefferson said in his declaration. . . . The Constitution recognized it. Washington signed a fugitive slave bill, and Jefferson annexed Louisiana in its interest. It caused the war of 1812, the war with Mexico, and the present war. It is met to-day on its own merits. Our statesmen do not yet avow it, but they feel it. We may have to fight for political existence, for personal liberty even.50
“UNTIL FREEDOM IS PROCLAIMED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD”
Because their resistance to slavery had occurred on an international stage, many African Americans viewed the Civil War through a global lens. Black Southerners’ and Northerners’ “self-activity”—self-determined activism in their own behalf—in waging a war for liberty radically enlarged the meaning of the war. Ideas of emancipation without borders were grounded in everyday flesh-and-blood struggles. The truth of this was personified in the Civil War odyssey of Garland H. White. White was a slave of Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia. In explaining the reason for his state’s secession from the Union, Toombs, a future Confederate general, vowed: “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no negro race to degrade our own; and as one man [we] would meet you upon the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other.”51
White escaped from Toombs in 1860 and reached Canada. A few years later the former slave returned to the United States and recruited African Americans to the Union Army.52 “It is no longer a question of doubt as to what the American people think of us,” White, now chaplain of his regiment, wrote from Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1864. “From Fortress Monroe to the Rio Grande, colored pickets can be seen watching the approach of every ship, and the nation intends to use us in restoring peace, order and national tranquility. The very position we occupy to-day in the army of our country has a voice much louder than the organs of a thousand demoralized cities.”53 This man, a slave only five years earlier, now dreamed of an international liberation struggle. Reflecting on his regiment’s triumphant march into Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, in the spring of 1865, Chaplain White stated, “I was with them, and am still with them, and am willing to stay with them until freedom is proclaimed throughout the world. Yes, we will follow this race of men in search of Liberty through the whole Island of Cuba.”54
The French invasion of Mexico in 1861 raised alarm bells in African American and Mexican American communities across the continent. An emperor, Maximilian I of Mexico, had been imp
osed on Mexico by France. The popular assumption in the abolitionist press was that Maximilian’s ultimate goal was to reestablish slavery in Mexico, as well as to negotiate an alliance with the Confederate States of America.55 The Black press echoed the tenor of the Hartford Daily Courant’s headline “Brilliant Achievements of the Mexicans” in resisting the French invasion.56 At times, coverage of the French invasion preempted reporting on American Civil War battles. The Christian Recorder published “A letter from Vera Cruz,” which reported “that the Mexicans, after holding out so long, and fighting with desperate bravery, are now taking the offensive. . . . Twice the French were driven from the city. The Mexicans have fought admirably, and the French are depressed by their defeat.”57
The Christian Recorder exulted in the gallant Mexican defense at Puebla between 1862 and 1863 and marveled at the besieged garrison’s ability to hold out against French artillery. “It is reported that the French army has been again repulsed and driven back from before Puebla with great loss,” the Recorder reported on January 31, 1863. “General Berthier’s van-guard, 4000 strong, was completely surprised by 800 Mexican cavalry, and about 2000 of the French were killed and wounded. Several French officers were taken by the lasso and dragged off. The prospects of the French look exceedingly bad.”58 Even after Puebla—after most of the country had fallen to the French onslaught—the Christian Recorder quoted sources that claimed, “Over seventy guerilla bands, of about two hundred men each, harass the roads leading to [Mexico City]. The renegade Mexicans are rapidly deserting the French.”59 The popular holiday Cinco de Mayo, initiated by Mexican American Union Army veterans in the Southwest to commemorate the Mexican victory over the European invaders, joined together themes of Mexican independence, resistance to imperialism, and slavery abolition. It would become a major commemoration in American culture more than a century later.