Southerners valued the Southwest primarily for its geographic and political importance, not because they hoped to establish profitable plantations and transport large numbers of black slaves there, although this was the very ideological objective to which they turned during debates on the topic. Since New Mexico linked slaveholding Texas with Southern California, the region would complete an uninterrupted coast-to-coast empire should the South succeed in conquering New Mexico and California at the onset of a civil war. During his tenure as secretary of war in the 1850s, the future Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned the Pacific Railway Surveys and endorsed the Gadsden Purchase in advancement of a futuristic Southern strategy that saw New Mexico as the location of a transcontinental railroad linking the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast.35 Thus, Southern attempts to establish and uphold the right of slaveownership in New Mexico were predominantly ideological, a strategic machination seeking sectional geographic expansion not for the purpose of implanting chattel slavery and plantation agriculture, but rather for establishing a continental empire that would enable Southern cotton to be more easily exported worldwide.
Some politicians readily acceded to the fact that the southwestern environment did not appear conducive to chattel slavery or plantation agriculture. Speaking to Congress in 1848, George P. Marsh, a Vermont representative, stated that the Mexican Cession lands “lie without the natural limits of slavery, and the institution cannot exist in those provinces, because it is excluded by physical conditions, and the economical law of profit and loss which they dictate.” In their arguments against slavery, some abolitionists and free-soilers contended that the Southwest, with its subsistence agriculture and pastoral economy, must “be inhabited and tilled only by freemen” because the absence of labor-intensive export crops like rice, cotton, sugar, and tobacco precluded any extensive demand for manual slave labor.36 That observation, while partially true, also assumed that slavery existed in only certain environments where particular crops grew, a fallacious notion that neglected to account for the thousands of unfree peons and captives toiling in southwestern fields, pastures, and households. Expounding upon Marsh’s claims, Senator Truman Smith pledged that New Mexico “will and must be [a] free state, proviso or no proviso,” referencing the provocative but moribund proposal of Representative David Wilmot in 1846.37 As supporting evidence, Smith introduced published travelogues and reports from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers to describe the southwestern climate. All of these firsthand accounts sustained the contention that chattel slavery could not profitably exist in the arid deserts and high altitudes of New Mexico and Utah.38 Describing the Santa Fe region, Lieutenant William H. Emory reported quite bluntly that it “presents nothing but barren hills, utterly incapable, both from soil and climate, of producing anything useful.”39 Even Southerner Henry Clay, in attempting to lead a highly factionalized Congress to a compromise measure in 1850, pointed out that New Mexico, with its dry climate, had nature itself on her side, which he equated to “a thousand Wilmot Provisos.”40
Senator John Bell from Tennessee joined antislavery congressmen in alluding to the dryness of the Southwest, proclaiming that “African slavery can never find a foothold in New Mexico.”41 Even if territorial residents favored slavery in practice, in principle, or both, Southerners would be unlikely to transport chattels there because, according to one Pennsylvania senator, “Masters will hardly carry their slaves into a territory in which they will be likely to be free as soon as their feet touch its soil.”42 In making such claims these politicians reasserted the statements of a New Mexico congressional delegate, Hugh N. Smith, who in April 1850 acknowledged the region to be “entirely unsuited for slave labor.” Smith then paradoxically admitted that debt peonage, existing “in a quantity quite sufficient for carrying on all the agriculture of the territory,” effectively fulfilled regional demand for labor.43
During discussions over a proposed compromise measure, Bell’s antislavery colleague, Senator Daniel Webster, remarked that “no man would venture a farthing today for a great inheritance to be bestowed on him when slavery should be established in New Mexico.”44 Longtime New York politician Washington Hunt sarcastically offered a reward of $1,000 “for the discovery of a slaveholder who even wished to take his slaves thither.”45 Others refused even to lend credence to the issue, believing the impracticality of slavery in the Southwest to be so obvious that it scarcely warranted their time and attention. By invoking the climate as an argumentative point, such claims reverberated around the more familiar plantation slavery and maintained that, so long as irrigation was needed to grow crops, slavery could not logically or profitably exist. This Northern Whig stance offered a practical nature-based alternative to the ideological abolition movement, which many saw as overly incendiary and antithetical to preserving the Union.46
Webster commended fellow Northerner Truman Smith for having adequately proven, “beyond the power of any conscientious man’s denial,” that slavery could never exist in New Mexico and for demonstrating to Northerners “that that which they desire to prohibit will never need any prohibition there.”47 He then insisted that the debate should proceed no further because “there is not, & there cannot be slavery” in California, New Mexico, or Utah.48 Webster remained convinced that New Mexicans, “to a man, are opposed to slavery” and believed all territorial inhabitants to be “as warmly and decidedly” averse to it as the people of Maine were. The statesman assured his listeners that “slavery of the African race does not exist in New Mexico” and explained that the social and economic atmosphere of the region had no need for such a system because “the use of cheaper labor [peonage] rejects it.” Invoking a final hyperbolic analogy, Webster swore that chattel slavery was about as likely to gain a foothold in New Mexico as it was to “be established on Mars’ Hill.”49
The forceful congressional interchange over compromise proposals resulted in a number of Northern newspaper editorials that specifically cited New Mexico’s statutory retention of peonage, drawing comparisons between debt bondage and chattel slavery and attracting publicity to an already politically charged issue.50 Despite Webster’s impassioned speeches in the halls of Congress, Horace Greeley, a New York newspaperman and renowned abolitionist, lambasted the senator for not taking more forceful action to prevent slavery from being established in the western territories. Greeley criticized the congressman for what he perceived to be a lukewarm resistance to slavery. According to Greeley, Webster’s opposition to the peculiar institution in New Mexico stemmed from slavery’s moral reprehensibility, but he had done little to effect the passage of laws to definitively prevent it in practice. “Ten years have since passed,” he wrote, “and Slavery is already there—there both in the abstract and the concrete—in the form of a slave law and in that of slaves.” Greeley grasped the realities of southwestern slavery with much greater acuity than most Americans, recognizing peonage as an “abstract” form of slavery. His perceptive allusion to the “concrete” referenced New Mexico’s Slave Code and the fact that the territorial legislature continued to sanction involuntary labor in the form of “master-servant relationships.”51
Figure 3. Daniel Webster, antislavery Massachusetts senator. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Figure 4. Truman Smith, antislavery Connecticut senator. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
While Webster’s belief that all New Mexicans, “to a man,” opposed slavery was an obvious fallacy for its universal inclusivity, the majority of the territory’s native Hispano inhabitants did seem either opposed to or ambivalent toward the institution, in part owing to Mexico’s earlier prohibition of slavery. Richard Weightman, a New Mexico congressional delegate, wrote that his constituents mostly