Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

By Stacey L. Smith

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In Freedom's Frontier, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.
Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement, forged in its struggle over unfree labor, reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout, she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave, black or white.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Aug 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469607696

Stacey L. Smith

Stacey L. Smith is associate professor of history at Oregon State University.

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freedom’s frontier

freedom’s frontier

California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Stacey L. Smith

THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

Chapel Hill

© 2013 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved

Designed by Sally Scruggs

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Stacey L. Freedom’s frontier : California and the struggle over unfree labor, emancipation, and reconstruction / Stacey L. Smith.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-0768-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2653-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Forced labor—California—History—19th century. 2. Slave labor— California—History—19th century. 3. California—Social conditions— 19th century. 4. California—Economic conditions—19th century. 5. Slavery—California—History—19th century. 6. Labor—California—History— 19th century. 7. California—Gold discoveries—Social aspects. I. Title.

HD4875.U5S525 2013

331.11’730979409034—dc23

2013001365

Portions of this work appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as Remaking Slavery in a Free State: Masters and Slaves in Gold Rush California, Pacific Historical Review 80, no. 1 (February 2011): 28–63. © 2011 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, and the Regents of the University of California.

for David

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION California, Free and Unfree

CHAPTER 1 California Bound

CHAPTER 2 Planting Slavery on Free Soil

CHAPTER 3 Hired Serfs and Contract Slaves

Peonage, Coolieism, and the Struggle over Foreign Miners

CHAPTER 4 Enslaved Wards and Captive Apprentices

Controlling and Contesting Children’s Labor in 1850s California

CHAPTER 5 For Purposes of Labor and of Lust

California’s Traffics in Women

CHAPTER 6 Emancipating California

California’s Unfree Labor Systems in the Crucible of the Civil War

CHAPTER 7 Reconstructing California, Reconstructing the Nation

CONCLUSION Beyond North and South

APPENDIX Masters and Slaves in 1850s California

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Tables

Illustrations

Oliver Wozencraft and Maidu headmen

Contract between Jacob Leese and 'Ai

Party of white miners and black miners working on Spanish Flat, El Dorado County

African American miner working in Auburn Ravine, Placer County

Advertisement for an indentured slave

Maidu boy

Lucy Young

Mug shot of Ah Jim, kidnapper

The Reconstruction Policy of Congress, as Illustrated in California

Where Both Platforms Agree

Residence and ranch of Basil Campbell

Negro Slavery Divides Court

Tables

1. Origins of Probable California Masters and Slaves, 1850

2. Probable California Masters and Slaves, by Age and Sex, 1850

3. Birthplace/Last Residence of Probable California Masters and Slaves, 1852

4. Probable California Masters and Slaves, by Age and Sex, 1852

Acknowledgments

Writing a book can often be a solitary venture. I am fortunate, however, to have had the support and encouragement of many people, who have made the research and writing process far less lonely and far more rewarding than I would have ever imagined.

My greatest debts, intellectual and personal, are to Susan Lee Johnson. I first met Susan when I was an undergraduate at the University of Colorado–Boulder. In a serendipitous turn of events, she ended up taking a job at the University of Wisconsin–Madison shortly after I began my graduate career there. I am thankful every day for the twist of fate that caused our paths to cross again. Susan read earlier versions of this work over and over again, always with an eye for detail and story, and always with excellent advice, encouragement, and praise. Susan is a dogged researcher, a fantastic writer, a generous scholar, an amazing editor, and a dedicated teacher. Her guidance over the past decade has made me a better writer and a better historian. I could not have asked for a more engaged and helpful mentor.

I owe a great deal to several other Wisconsin faculty who have shaped this project along the way. My earliest graduate adviser, Stephen Kantrowitz, guided me through my first years of the program. His unfailing faith in my abilities, his spirit and smarts, and his boundless enthusiasm for history helped me make it through those first angst-filled years of graduate school. Whenever my confidence faltered, Steve was always there to remind me of the significance of this project and the important work yet to be done. Bill Cronon, Arthur McEvoy, and Ned Blackhawk also played critical roles in shaping this text. Bill is a model of how to be a generous and engaged scholar and teacher, and I am indebted to him for all the time he has invested in my career. Art has been of invaluable help in teaching me to navigate the treacherous waters of U.S. legal history. Ned’s teaching and scholarship have greatly enhanced my understanding of the history of North American indigenous peoples, and he has been a great influence on this work.

As an undergraduate and later as a graduate student, I have been fortunate to work with many other wonderful scholars, teachers, and fellow students. I am grateful to Fred Anderson, Virginia Anderson, Julie Greene, and Martha Hanna at the University of Colorado–Boulder for encouraging me to go on to graduate school and for keeping in touch with me long after. At Wisconsin, I had the good fortune to work with the late Jeanne Boydston, as well as with Cindy I-Fen Cheng, Colleen Dunlavy, Florencia Mallon, Tony Michels, Francisco Scarano, and Steve Stern. A number of gifted fellow graduate students also helped my career, and this book, come to fruition. Many thanks to Catherine Burns, Sarah Costello, Suzanne Danks, Jerome Dotson, Jim Feldman, Mark Goldberg, Kori Graves, Rob Harper, Michel Hogue, Jennifer Holland, Sarah King, Abigail Markwyn, Gladys McCormick, Michelle Morgan, Haley Pollack, Gil Ribak, Kelly Roark, Kendra Smith-Howard, and Tyina Steptoe for support, friendship, food, and fun over these many years.

My colleagues at Oregon State University, where I arrived in 2008, have aided immensely in the production of this book. As chairs of the History Department, Paul Farber, Jonathan Katz, David Luft, and Ben Mutschler guided me through the hiring and tenure process and made sure I had time and resources to complete the book manuscript. Very special thanks go to Jeffrey Sklansky for his enthusiastic support of my research and the many hours he spent helping to get me settled in at Oregon State. Fellow Americanists Mina Carson, Marisa Chappell, and Christopher Nichols and fellow western historian Bill Robbins have been generous with their time and help. I have also benefited from many conversations with colleagues in other fields, including Gary Ferngren, Anita Guerrini, Jake Hamblin, Bill Husband, Hung-Yok Ip, Paul Kopperman, Bob Nye, Mary Jo Nye, Mike Osborne, Stephen Rubert, Lisa Sarasohn, and Nicole von Germeten.

Beyond my own institution, I have been fortunate to receive help from many generous and talented scholars. Michael Magliari has shared his scholarship on Indian slavery with me, commented on the entire book manuscript, and helped me to tackle the vast California manuscript collections at the Huntington Library. He has my eternal thanks for his generous spirit and for his help correcting many mistakes. Thanks, too, to the editors of the Pacific Historical Review, Carl Abott, David Johnson, and Susan Wladaver-Morgan, as well as to Amy S. Greenberg and several anonymous readers who helped me develop an earlier article related to this book. Thanks also to Stephen Aron, Alicia Chávez, Lauren Cole, William Deverell, Robert Dykstra, Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Deena González, Kelly Sisson Lessens, Joshua Paddison, Heather Cox Richardson, Steven Rosales, Allison Tirres, and Richard White for reading and commenting on portions of this work at various conferences and workshops over the years.

A number of institutions also made my writing and research possible. Funding from the Horning Endowment and the Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University provided me with much-needed leave time to finish the book revisions. As a graduate student, I also benefited from funding by the Doris G. Quinn Dissertation Fellowship, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of History and the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, as well as the Dana-Allen Dissertator Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Institute for Research in the Humanities and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Grant. The Western History Association–Huntington Library Martin Ridge Fellowship and the Annaley Naegle Redd Award in Western Women’s History from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University allowed me to travel to crucial archives.

This project would not have been possible without the expertise and untiring help of the dozens of librarians and archivists whom I have met during my research travels. Peter Blodgett, curator of western history collections at the Huntington Library, has spent many hours talking with me about my project, helping me to make my way through the Huntington Library collections, and recommending secondary literature. He is also a great friend and has always made the Huntington feel like home. I also appreciate the help of Chris Adde, Jill Cogen, Bill Frank, and Kate Henningsen of the Huntington Library; Walter Brem, Iris Donovan, David Kessler, and Theresa Salazar of the Bancroft Library; Pat Johnson of the Center for Sacramento History; and Linda Johnson of the California State Archives. All of them patiently answered my numerous questions and tolerated my unending manuscript retrieval requests.

This book would not have come together (literally) without the unflagging efforts of the editorial team at the University of North Carolina Press. Mark Simpson-Vos, my acquiring editor, took an interest in the project very early on and has encouraged me every step of the way. He has answered endless first-time author questions, helped me manage the review and editorial process, and made many helpful suggestions that focused and tightened my arguments. Ron Maner, Zachary Read, Jay Mazzocchi, and Dorothea Anderson have provided much-needed assistance with matters of presentation, style, and organization. They have helped me create a much more polished final product.

My parents, George and Cindy Smith, and my in-laws, David and Eve Bishop, have long supported my pursuit of higher education and eagerly read my work. Many thanks to all of them for standing by my history dreams these many years. My grandmother, Edna Mae Bly Clark, never had the chance to earn a high school education. She was, nonetheless, an avid reader and a great lover of history. I likely owe my lifelong engagement with the past to her. This project would almost certainly never have come to fruition without the love and encouragement of my husband, David Bishop. David, a historian-turned-academic administrator, has read and commented on many of these pages. More important, his unfaltering faith in me as a teacher, as a scholar, as a historian, and as a person has kept me going with the project during my greatest moments of uncertainty and frustration. I am forever grateful to him.

freedom’s frontier

Introduction

California, Free and Unfree

In December 1856, more than six years after California entered the Union as a free state, an African American woman named Charlotte Sophie Gomez appeared before San Francisco’s Fourth District Court on charges of kidnapping. Gomez’s accuser, a prominent white physician named Oliver Wozencraft, testified that she had taken a nine-year-old girl named Shasta from his home and concealed her for nearly three years. Gomez belonged to a small network of African American abolitionists who aided enslaved people brought to California in violation of the state’s antislavery constitution. Shasta’s abduction had all the trappings of a fugitive slave case. After Gomez took Shasta from Wozencraft’s home, she changed the girl’s name and eventually cut her hair so that she could pass as a boy. When Wozencraft caught wind of Shasta’s whereabouts, Gomez spirited her out of the city to live with a free black family in the countryside. To all appearances, Shasta was a fugitive slave on free soil.¹

But Shasta differed from other California runaways in a critical regard: she was a Yuki Indian child. Wozencraft, a former federal Indian commissioner, had captured her during a punitive campaign against her people in northwestern California in 1851.² He then bound her as his ward under the provisions of California’s 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. This law allowed whites to keep Indian children and profit from their labor until they reached adulthood. Gomez had, in effect, used the same underground networks developed to smuggle African American slaves out of bondage to liberate an Indian child from long-term servitude in a white household. Gomez appeared before the court and, supported by a large delegation of the colored population, both male and female, refused to disclose the child’s whereabouts. These efforts to conceal the young girl failed. A private detective finally tracked Shasta to her hiding place. Wozencraft reclaimed the child, and she remained with his family as a domestic servant until at least the 1880s.³

Shasta’s master, Oliver Wozencraft (seated center), served as a special Indian commissioner and negotiated several treaties with northern California bands. Wozencraft met with these Maidu headmen in July 1851, three months before he and his entourage clashed with Yuki Indians and took the infant, Shasta, prisoner. Unknown photographer, Maidu Indians and Treaty Commissioners, 1851. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, N.Y.

In unearthing stories of people like Shasta and Charlotte Sophie Gomez, this book seeks to recast the narrative of the sectional crisis, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the United States by geographically recentering it in the Far West. It contends that California’s struggle over slavery did not end with its entrance into the Union as a free state as part of the Compromise of 1850. Instead, as Shasta’s case shows, California’s free soil was far less solid, its contests over human bondage far more complicated, contentious, and protracted, than historians have usually imagined. Across the antebellum and Civil War decades, Californians saw the rise of a dense tangle of unfree labor systems—most real, some imagined—that undermined and unsettled free-state status. The development of African American slavery, diverse forms of American Indian servitude, sexual trafficking in bound women, and contract labor arrangements involving Latin Americans, Asians, and Pacific Islanders all kept the slavery question alive in California during the 1850s. The rise of the Republican Party and national slave liberation in the 1860s eroded the state’s coercive labor systems, emancipating California alongside the rest of the nation. By Reconstruction, California’s struggles over slavery became narrowly focused on the growing perils that allegedly unfree Chinese, coolie contract laborers and bound prostitutes, posed to the accomplishments of emancipation. Deftly fusing the anti-Chinese cause with the antislavery cause, California’s legislators formulated immigration restriction laws that excluded Chinese slaves without explicitly violating new Reconstruction prohibitions on race-based civil and legal discrimination. California politicians eventually carried these anti-Chinese antislavery laws beyond California’s borders to Congress, where, despite recent efforts to liberate and enfranchise African Americans, they became the blueprints for the nation’s most racially exclusive immigration statutes to that date. Once we set our sights on the Pacific Coast, it becomes clear not only that the struggle over slavery was a truly national story, encompassing North, South, and West, but that the Far West played a critical role in remaking the post–Civil War nation.

Moving the crisis over slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction to California upends familiar narratives of regional and national history. First, the presence and persistence of unfree labor in California seems at odds with much of western history. In popular mythology, the American West stands as a kind of ultimate free-labor landscape, a place where autonomous, mobile individuals were at perfect liberty to pursue their economic interests and raise their social status. Historical scholarship, too, has often linked the West’s destiny with that of free labor. Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis depicted the West as a space of freedom characterized by individual autonomy, geographic mobility, and social and economic fluidity. Starting in the 1920s, historians of the American South also naturalized free labor in the West by arguing that western geography and climate were incompatible with plantation agriculture, thus placing natural limits on slavery’s expansion. Social and political historians working in the latter half of the twentieth century took a different approach, documenting how the militantly free-labor, antiblack, and antimonopoly politics of many western whites, rather than geography alone, precluded slavery. Taken together, these works present the region’s history as incompatible with—even antithetical to—slavery. The triumph of free labor in the West appears, if not predetermined, then at least overdetermined.⁴

The persistence of the slavery question in California also challenges us to rethink the broader narrative of nineteenth-century U.S. history. Histories of the sectional crisis invariably focus on politics east of the Mississippi River and treat the Far West as an imagined space, a place onto which northerners and southerners projected their hopes and fears about slavery’s future. Pro- and antislavery advocates, North and South, argued over whether the region would be opened to slaves and slaveholders, or whether it would be preserved for prospective free white laborers. Once California adopted an antislavery constitution and gained admission as a free state under the Compromise of 1850, it promptly disappears from most discussions of the sectional crisis and the Civil War.⁵ As a result, we lose sight of how slavery became an issue of long-term social and economic importance within western communities. California, and, by extension, the rest of the Far West, seems an isolated, peripheral region, disconnected from the monumental conflict over slavery and freedom that rocked the nation after 1850.

Freedom’s Frontier addresses the absence of slavery in western regional history and the absence of the Far West in the broader history of American slavery and emancipation by bringing the two fields into dialogue with each other. It both integrates California into the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras and suggests that California’s story can enhance our understanding of U.S. national history in fundamental ways. A multiracial society with multiple systems of bound and semibound labor, California complicates familiar black-white, slave-free binaries at the heart of most histories of the era. There, categories like free and slave often adhered to racially marked bodies in unfamiliar or unpredictable ways. In the legal and political struggles over the state’s multitude of labor systems, white Californians were just as likely to express concern about American Indian, Mexican, Chilean, and Chinese slaves as they were to discuss the fate of African American bondpeople. Politicians, reformers, and lawyers refashioned the language of antislavery in new and surprising ways to contest labor systems ranging from peonage to contract labor to prostitution. California, then, opens new insights into the instability and fluidity of racial categories, particularly the ideological linkages between slavery and race. It also shows that slavery and free labor were not rigid oppositional categories but fluid concepts that could each be reimagined to encompass a wide range of waged, unwaged, voluntary, and involuntary work.⁶

California’s freedom struggles not only give scholars a more complete, complex understanding of this transformative period in American politics, law, and race relations. They also help to explain a critical paradox of the postwar era: how Reconstruction, a period focused on the breakdown of race-based civil and legal inequalities, also witnessed the nation’s most virulent anti-Chinese immigration laws. This book suggests that the re-racialization of slavery in California—the association of Chinese with forms of degraded servitude that threatened the United States’ new birth of freedom—helped shape national debates over race and liberty in the wake of emancipation. California politicians, both Democrats and Republicans, framed Chinese immigration restriction as an antislavery measure that advanced the emancipatory principles of the Thirteenth Amendment rather than as a racially exclusive policy. In doing so, they evaded the guarantees of due process and equal protection, regardless of race, embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Ku Klux Klan Acts and made anti-Chinese laws appear wholly consistent with the national Republican Party’s emerging Reconstruction policy on race, slavery, and civil rights.⁷ This strategy hastened the federal march toward Chinese immigration restriction, inspiring both the Page Law of 1875 and the general exclusion of most Chinese in 1882. California’s internal slavery debate reached eastward to shape national Reconstruction policy in crucial, but overlooked, ways.⁸

This story of California’s contest over unfree labor builds on the work of other historians who have begun to narrow the chasm between the history of the American West and the history of American slavery. In the past three decades, scholars of western North America have problematized free labor in the region. In a pathbreaking 1985 essay, From Bondage to Contract, Howard Lamar challenged Frederick Jackson Turner’s assertion that in the West free land meant free people and a democratic society. Instead, slavery, debt bondage, contract labor, and indentured servitude were critical to the development of western colonial economies. The American West was, in fact, more properly a symbol of bondage than freedom when it comes to labor systems, and scholars would do well to explore the connections between western labor history and the broader national history of slavery.⁹

Many western historians have heeded the call. The burgeoning field of western borderlands history has done much to dispel the myth that the West was a landscape of liberty. Borderlands scholars have documented the importance of captive raiding and slavery to the social, cultural, economic, and biological reproduction of both Native and European borderlands communities. Scholars of transnational labor migrations across the West have also demonstrated how the region’s vast geography and seemingly limitless opportunities restricted rather than enhanced workers’ freedom. Reliant on employers and labor contractors to move them to and across the West’s wide-open spaces, immigrant workers often became enmeshed in debt peonage and contract labor.¹⁰ Historians of California have contributed a great deal to this growing literature. They have documented the journeys of slaves to the goldfields, California’s systems of forced Indian labor, the lives of Chinese women bound in the sex trade, and the debates over imagined Chinese coolie slavery on the Pacific Coast.¹¹ In light of this research, the idea that western environments, economies, or social structures were somehow incompatible with bound labor is gradually losing its force.

This book weaves together these histories of California’s bound workers into a common narrative about western unfreedom. It takes stories that have often been told separately and along racially segmented lines—of westward-bound African American slaves, of northward-bound Mexican and Chilean contract workers, of eastward-bound Chinese credit-ticket laborers and prostitutes, of Native American apprentices—and puts them next to and up against each other. Once integrated into the same story, it becomes clear that California’s diverse labor systems and the debates over them did not stand in isolation from each other. Instead, they were each different facets of a common struggle over the meaning of freedom in California, and their simultaneous rise and fall collectively illustrate the West’s tortuous, and torturous, transition through the era of emancipation.

In addition to helping lay the groundwork for a history of the unfree West, this study also builds on the findings of scholars who have worked to construct a truly national narrative of the sectional crisis, the Civil War, and Reconstruction that encompasses North, South, and West. Western scholars such as Eugene Berwanger, Elliott West, Alvin M. Josephy Jr., and Joshua Paddison have proposed West-centered histories of the Civil War and Reconstruction eras, while scholars of western Native America have analyzed the complex transition from slavery to freedom in the Indian Territory. Together, these works not only demonstrate that federal policies regarding slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction extended westward to shape the region’s law and politics. They also illuminate how the West’s multiracial populations, together with its position at the leading edge of U.S. empire, gave the region a prominent role in national discussions about race, freedom, religion, and the republic’s future.¹² Historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction have also begun to reframe the contest over slavery and freedom as a three-sided struggle fought on northern, southern, and western fronts. This project initially focused on integrating the North more fully into the story of emancipation and Reconstruction. Eric Foner, Amy Dru Stanley, and Heather Cox Richardson made compelling arguments that the end of slavery transformed the industrializing North along with the South, embroiling northerners in conflicts over the unfreedoms of wage labor and marriage.¹³ Recent works bring this analytical frame westward. Leonard L. Richards, Heather Cox Richardson, and Adam Arenson show that the national politics of the Civil War and Reconstruction were intimately bound up with the politics of westward imperial expansion, western economic development, and the complexity of western race relations. Nation transformed region, and region, in turn, transformed nation.¹⁴ Following the lead of works that break the North-South binary, this book contributes to the construction of a new national history that treats the Far West as an equal participant in the crisis over slavery and emancipation rather than as an isolated outpost of frontier freedom.

IN 1850, FEW CALIFORNIANS anticipated that their state would become the stage for a long-term struggle over slavery. For most of the nineteenth century, California was (at least nominally) free soil. Mexico outlawed slavery in its territorial possessions in 1829. Twenty years later, the U.S. conquest of California and the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills created a national crisis over slavery’s status in the West. The free-soil movement emerged in the Northeast and the Midwest, dedicated to keeping slavery out of California and other former Mexican territories. Free-soilers argued that the West should be preserved as a haven for white workers, free from competition with slaveholders and slaves. Between 1846 and 1850, they pressed for federal legislation, including the unsuccessful Wilmot Proviso (1846), to ban slavery from the entire Mexican cession. Their efforts soon locked Congress into a stalemate over slavery’s westward expansion that stalled California’s bid for territorial organization.¹⁵

In the meantime, thousands of goldseekers crushed into the diggings. Californians, desperate for government, called their own constitutional convention in 1849 and made plans to apply for immediate statehood. California’s free-soilers took advantage of this lawmaking opportunity, as well as the absence of formal party organization in the region, to secure free-state status. They quickly proposed an antislavery provision for the new state constitution. Proslavery, southern-born California politicians, wary of losing support among their miner constituents or delaying statehood, chose not to press the question. In the fall of 1849, delegates to the constitutional convention voted, unanimously and without discussion, that neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this State. After a long struggle, Congress finally granted California statehood and approved its antislavery constitution as part of the Compromise of 1850. Foes of slavery rejoiced that the Golden State would remain forever a wonderland open to free labor.¹⁶

Even as free-soilers congratulated themselves on rescuing California from the Slave Power, they confronted a rapidly changing political scene and a confusing array of labor relations, which shook their confidence in free-state status. The most obvious challenge to free soil came from the thousands of white southerners who migrated to California. In 1850, roughly 36 percent of California’s U.S.-born residents hailed from the slave South. Many of these migrants had owned slaves in their home states; several hundred brought their bondpeople with them to work in the mines.¹⁷ White southerners may have been a minority and California masters may have been a minuscule group, but they had clout. Southern whites avidly sought political and legal office in the early 1850s and were vastly overrepresented in the state legislature and judiciary. As one California abolitionist remembered, The southern element was exceedingly strong, and especially at [the state capital of] Sacramento, and anybody who had any tincture of abolitionism or sympathy with antislavery, was practically an outcast.¹⁸ When Californians organized formal political parties in 1850–51, these southerners flocked to the Democratic Party. They created a well-oiled political machine under the leadership of Mississippi slaveholder-turned-U.S. senator William M. Gwin. Nicknamed the Chivalry (or Chivs) for their aristocratic pretensions and the elite backgrounds of their planter leaders, California’s southern-born Democrats emerged as strident voices for slaveholding rights in the Far West.¹⁹

Meanwhile, northerners who had been Democrats back east also gravitated to the Democratic Party of California. They constructed their own powerful political machine under New Yorker David C. Broderick. Broderick’s branch of the Democratic Party appealed to urban working-class whites and became popularly known as the Shovelry, in opposition to the southern Chivalry. Many Broderick Democrats, including Broderick himself, embraced free soil and chafed at the power of the southern slaveocracy at home and in national politics. Hoping to maintain the West as a refuge for humble white workers, free from slaveholder land monopolies, the Shovelry supported free homesteads on public lands and strongly opposed the federal Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which threatened to open up new western territories to slavery. They also posed the primary antislavery challenge to California’s proslavery Chivs.²⁰ This was because the Whig Party, the main rival to the Democrats at the national level, was weak in California and its members were lukewarm (or outright hostile) to free soil. The state’s Whigs ranged from middle-class, commercially oriented urbanites to adamant proslavery southerners. Few were outspoken opponents of slavery, and a great many even sided with the Chivalry Democrats on the issues of fugitive slaves and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Only when a state branch of the Republican Party gathered force in the late 1850s would the Chivs face a major external antislavery threat to their power.²¹ Before then, California’s struggle over slavery happened mainly within political parties rather than between them.

The contest between California’s free-soilers and proslavery Chivs went far beyond the abstract question of whether slavery should expand westward. The presence of several hundred enslaved African Americans in the state forced California politicians to confront the question of slaves’ and slaveholders’ rights on free soil. Slaves played a central role in bringing the issue to the forefront of political debate. Once in California, they ran away, used the threat of escape to extract concessions from their masters, and petitioned the courts for their freedom. Their actions compelled anxious slaveholders to seek new legal strategies to enforce their mastery and protect their rights to slave property. Masters found sympathetic advocates among southern politicians and judges who, though they had no slaves in California themselves, were eager to press the issue of slaveholding rights in the West. Echoing a central proslavery legal argument of the sectional crisis, Chivs insisted that the U.S. Constitution gave southerners equal rights with northerners to carry their property into the federal territories.²² California’s antislavery constitution thus could not suddenly deprive masters of slave property that they had legally transported into the region during the pre-statehood era. Proslavery forces proposed a state fugitive slave law that allowed masters to claim any slaves that they had brought before California’s official statehood in September 1850. The new law also committed the state government to capturing and returning resistant slaves to the South. Free-soilers fought the bill by contending that the antislavery constitution immediately liberated every slave who set foot in California. The proslavery faction had the votes, and in 1852 the fugitive slave bill became law. Renewed twice by the state legislature and upheld by a proslavery state supreme court, the California fugitive slave law vitiated the antislavery constitution and carved out a foothold for slavery on free soil.²³

At the same moment that enslaved African Americans occupied the attention of the legislature, other, ambiguously free laborers generated a new set of social and political conflicts. Gold rush California lay at a global labor crossroads. The expansion of capitalism into northern Mexico, Chile, the Pacific Islands, and East Asia created new disruptions and new opportunities that impelled many people to seek their fortunes in California’s goldfields. A number of these new arrivals financed their goldseeking journeys through intricate relations of debt and credit by which they pledged to pay off their passage money by working in the California diggings. Poorer Sonorans and Chilean contract workers, sometimes known as peones, bound themselves to work for wealthy patrones in exchange for transportation to the mines. Native Hawaiian workers left their island homeland for California under long-term contracts with British and American employers. Hopeful goldseekers from southern China made similar arrangements with American and British entrepreneurs or borrowed their passage money from Chinese merchants and committed to pay back the loans, with heavy interest, by working in California.²⁴

The labor arrangements that brought many Sonorans, Chileans, Hawaiians, and Chinese to California bore key hallmarks of free labor: workers voluntarily entered into contracts, and they frequently received wages. And yet free-soilers railed that these foreign miners were not free laborers at all but peons and coolies, little different than slaves. Among foreign miners, contracts were not symbols of freedom but markers of bondage. Foreign employers used these legal instruments to bind otherwise free workers to toil for years on end and to accept nonmonetary compensation—passage, food, clothing, and goods—in lieu of meaningful cash wages. Workers’ debts to employers made them powerless to resist abuse and severely limited their autonomy and mobility. On one level, peons and coolies threatened to destroy the free-labor refuge that free-soilers hoped to create with the antislavery constitution. Allegedly trapped in semislavery, they would be a cheap, tractable workforce that would reduce wages, compete with independent white miners, and eventually drive whites out of the mines. On another level, peons and coolies highlighted and magnified free-soilers’ own anxieties about the emerging capitalist economy and American imperial dominance on the Pacific Coast. In their utter servility and dependence on their employers, both groups portended the fate that might await free white men if they became trapped in permanent wage labor. The pawns of wealthy employers who carried off California’s wealth to distant lands, they also challenged white supremacy and U.S. imperial control over the West and its resources. Prohibiting the immigration of alleged peons and coolies and expelling both groups from the state remained leading free-soil preoccupations long into the Reconstruction era.²⁵

The debate over slaves, coolies, and peons centered on mining, work that white Americans invariably constructed as a male sphere of labor. Free-soilers emphasized that mining needed to be preserved for free, white, U.S.-born men and protected against men who were unfree, nonwhite, foreign-born, and degraded. This incessant focus on male gold diggers often obscured crucial ties between bound labor and domestic work in California. Amid the overwhelmingly male population of goldseekers, domestic work that whites customarily associated with women—cleaning, cooking, child care, laundering, and nursing—commanded a high price. Sometimes white, American Indian, African American, and Chinese men made lucrative careers providing these services to fellow goldseekers. But demand for domestic labor also fueled a market in bound women and children who worked in private households as wards, apprentices, debt-bound servants, and slaves. For women and girls, labor exploitation and sexual exploitation frequently went hand in hand. Diverse Californians bought and sold women as domestic servants and as forced sexual partners, prostitutes, concubines, and wives. The struggle over free-state status, then, often moved out of the mines and into the intimate labor and sexual relations of California households.²⁶

One front of this battle focused on children who, like the Yuki girl Shasta, spent their youths as bound domestic servants. White Californians and elite Mexican Californians (Californios) were often desperate for household help, and they turned to the state’s guardianship laws to procure youthful domestic servants. The most important of these laws was the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, section three of which allowed non-Indian families to claim Native American children as wards. The children’s new guardians enjoyed their labor and their earnings until they reached adulthood. The law ultimately fueled a statewide traffic in kidnapped or captive Native children, bought and sold as domestic servants. African American children of enslaved parents suffered similar fates, although on a much smaller scale. Southern slaveholders eager to hold onto the children of slaves that they had brought to California used the state’s general guardianship laws. These statutes authorized state probate courts to assign new guardians for orphans and children of impoverished or unsuitable parents. Slaveholders often succeeded in obtaining guardianship by arguing that enslaved children were parentless or that slave mothers were too poor or immoral to care for them.²⁷

Once the courts transformed children into wards and masters into guardians, the compulsive nature of children’s household labor—and the labor itself—became culturally invisible. Male heads of household simply commanded the labor of bound children just as they did that of their other domestic dependents, their wives and children. For this reason, legal and political officials generally failed to see bound children’s labor or hesitated to intervene lest they disrupt white men’s mastery over their household dependents. The status of unfree child laborers thus remained relatively uncontroversial until the late 1850s, when a small cadre of politicians from southern California proposed a formal program of forced apprenticeship for both Indian and black children. Free-soilers defeated these efforts but failed to block a later, larger campaign to add an expansive apprenticeship provision to the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. Passed in 1860, the new amendment allowed the binding out of Indian children and Indian adults convicted of vagrancy or captured in war. The apprenticeship provision expanded the Indian slave trade in northern California and kept the question of compulsive Indian labor alive into the Civil War era.²⁸

Like children, bound women also played crucial roles as domestic laborers in California households. But there, as in the rest of the nation, control over women’s labor could seldom be separated from mastery over women’s bodies, sexuality, and reproduction. Just as cultural understandings of domestic labor as a female endeavor generated demand for bound women as household laborers, social constructions of male desire also generated sexual commerce in captive and enslaved women. During the 1850s and 1860s, California became the site of two such enduring trades. One involved captive American Indian women and girls whom rural whites bought and sold as domestic servants, concubines, and wives. The other centered on bound and indentured Chinese women who arrived in California to work in the urban sex trade or to be sold as wives, secondary wives, concubines, and domestic servants to Chinese men. Both traffics raised profound moral and political dilemmas for free-soilers, who perceived them as dangerous intrusions of the market into the home. The sale of women’s bodies—both sexual commerce and the literal sale of female persons—rendered intimate family and household relations such as domestic labor, sex, marriage, and childbearing mere matters of bargain and sale. These transactions turned women into slaves and upended the normative gender and sexual relations of free society. Whether the victims of unscrupulous white squaw men on the northwestern California frontier or of tyrannical Chinese husbands and brothel keepers, bound women (according to free-soilers) fell prey to defective gender and sexual relations born of inferior class and ethnic cultures. Free-soilers strove to eliminate both forms of woman slavery by suppressing interracial sex between whites and Indians and by excluding both Chinese men and Chinese women from the state.²⁹

The 1860s brought the struggle over unfree labor in California to a head. National slave emancipation, heralded by the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), inspired Californians to assail a variety of local compulsive labor systems. Republicans took the lead in these efforts. First organized by free-soilers in 1856, the Republican Party of California rose to power when the state Democratic Party, like its national counterpart, fractured completely along sectional lines during the election of 1860. Republicans took the governorship in 1861 and swept state legislative elections in 1862 by merging with former free-soil Democrats to form a new Union Party.³⁰ The short-lived Union coalition ousted the Chivs and dismantled much of the proslavery, antiblack legislation that had long made the state’s African Americans vulnerable to exploitation and reenslavement. It repealed the apprenticeship provisions of the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians that had once fueled the state’s Indian slave trade. Finally, it moved to suppress woman trafficking in rural northwestern California and in urban brothels. But the Union Party was a diverse and fractured coalition of true Republicans and former