Borderlands of Slavery
AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Series editors Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley
America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.
BORDERLANDS
THE STRUGGLE OVER
CAPTIVITY AND PEONAGE
IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST
WILLIAM S. KISER
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press
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University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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ISBN 978-0-8122-4903-3
For Nicole, the love of my life
Contents
Chapter 1. Debating Southwestern Slavery in the Halls of Congress
Chapter 2. Indian Slavery Meets American Sovereignty
Chapter 3. The Peculiar Institution of Debt Peonage
Chapter 4. Slave Codes and Sectional Favor
Chapter 5. Reconstruction and the Unraveling of Alternative Slaveries
Prologue
In a January 1864 communication with Indian Commissioner William P. Dole, New Mexico Superintendent of Indian Affairs Michael Steck provided a concise description of Indian slavery that alluded to every fundamental aspect of the practice as it existed in the Southwest. Upon being taken into captivity, he explained, indigenous slaves “are usually adopted into the family, baptized, and brought up in the Catholic faith, and given the name of the owner’s family, generally become faithful and trustworthy servants, and sometimes are married to the native New Mexicans.”1 In a single breath the superintendent summarized—albeit somewhat superficially—Indian slavery as it existed not only in American times but in earlier Spanish and Mexican periods as well. Steck’s previous decade of experience with New Mexico Indian affairs rendered him eminently qualified to comment upon the nature of captivity. His letter to Dole asserted the widespread cultural hybridity and concomitant transformation of human identity that emanated from captivity and dependency, practices that predated Steck’s arrival in New Mexico by three centuries.
Human captivity was a critical component of indigenous warfare, labor, and social interaction in the Southwest long before the influx of European explorers and colonists that began in the sixteenth century. Complex trade networks linked nomadic peoples of the Plains with sedentary Puebloan inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande region through intricate commercial mechanisms, primarily involving commodities obtained through hunting, gathering, and cultivation. The exchange of human subjects, however, also formed an element of this culturally entrenched kin-based system, with adoption, dependency, and assimilation being important components. Intertribal warfare in the Southwest perpetuated a continuing captive trade, one based more on honor, community, gender roles, and kinship demands rather than on economic necessity.2 When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado reached northern New Mexico in 1540–41, he found a thoroughly enmeshed system of slavery emanating from warfare and raiding between sedentary Puebloan peoples and nomadic tribes occupying neighboring regions. Coronado himself enlisted a former Indian slave—a Pawnee held in servitude at the Tiguex Pueblo—as a guide for his expedition from the upper Rio Grande Valley to the South Plains.3
With the arrival of the first Spanish imperialists—many of whom subverted Native inhabitants to servitude using the encomienda and repartimiento systems—multiethnic slavery institutions took on new importance in the Southwest and quickly burgeoned into a permanent fixture of community interaction. Political, military, and ecclesiastical support buttressed Euro-American influence over Indians in the Rio Grande Valley of north-central New Mexico during the early decades of colonization. Although European systems of coerced labor proliferated to a larger degree in Spain’s South American and Central American outposts, where labor-intensive sugar plantations and silver mines required large numbers of workers, colonists representing the cross and crown carried the impetus for involuntary servitude into the more northerly provinces as well.4 When Spaniards colonized New Mexico, they established a predominantly agricultural and pastoral economy, one that required a liberal supply of manual labor to ensure optimum production.5 With demand for labor exceeding the number of available working-age men and women, colonists began forcing Indians into servitude, a phenomenon first manifested in the encomienda and later in captive enslavement. Whatever their sobriquets, such systems introduced a more profit-centered form of slavery into the Southwest.6
The practice of forcibly removing indigenous women and children (who collectively were some two-thirds of all captives) from their tribes and subverting them to servitude entailed a widespread assimilation of Indians into Spanish culture—and vice versa—and often resulted in a transformation of identity on the part of the victim.7 In New Mexico, the encomienda system, which the Spanish crown formally inaugurated in 1503, legitimized the subjugation of Pueblo Indians. Through this legal apparatus, Spaniards manipulated power