Most Anglo-Americans residing in New Mexico also acknowledged the irrationality of black slavery in the territory. Joab Houghton, a Santa Fe resident with a background in politics and law, informed Senator John M. Clayton that “any owner of slaves who should bring slaves to New Mexico would be ruined,” because plenty of peons and captives already satisfied the demand for labor there. The introduction of African American slaves into the territory, he believed, would “produce the most deleterious effects upon the morals and the industrial interest of the country.”54 Two politically connected New Mexicans, Henry Connelly and James L. Collins, buttressed Houghton’s argument when writing that most inhabitants, including Hispanos and Pueblo Indians as well as recent Anglo-American arrivals, were unequivocally averse to slavery.55 Even New Mexico’s territorial governor on the eve of the Civil War, Abraham Rencher—a man whose public statements pandered to Northerners but whose personal sympathies espoused Southern interests—admitted that “no efforts on the part of designing men can ever disturb the public peace by agitating the question of slavery.”56
Yet another obstacle to the introduction of chattel slavery in the Mexican Cession lands stemmed from geopolitical concerns. The Southwest shared an extensive international border with Mexico, a nation that abolished slavery years earlier and that therefore became a place where escaped slaves sometimes sought refuge. Many people believed that slaves taken to New Mexico would have ample means of escape and, like runaways from East Texas, would enjoy the protection of Mexican citizens once they crossed either the Rio Grande or the newly drawn east-west boundary from El Paso to the Pacific Coast.57 Because mountain ranges with dense vegetation afforded cover and nearby Mexico already prohibited slavery, opportunities to escape abounded to such a degree as “to render such property valueless,” declared one Connecticut senator, who merely repeated the prior testimonials of many New Mexico residents.58 Several of the territory’s leading citizens explained that, unlike the deep waters and powerful currents of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers, the Rio Grande was nothing more than a shallow stream at most points and would do nothing to inhibit escapees. Once they crossed the river and reached Mexico, such slaves “would be as free as in the land of his forefathers” because Mexican citizens, opposed to slavery and still reeling from the loss of half their national domain in the recent war with the United States, would protect them from recapture and prevent their extradition.59 The continued existence of debtor servitude and Indian captivity throughout the Southwest and in Mexico, however, suggests that Hispanics were not as averse to slavery as some Americans imagined.
To be sure, New Mexico’s original constitution—written in 1850 by a group of delegates in anticipation of statehood—expressed a distaste for slavery, although the document was conceived with the assistance of Anglo-American newcomers who had their own political and sectional agendas and therefore did not necessarily reflect local sentiment. The framers resolved that slavery “is naturally impracticable” and could never tangibly exist in the region, noting that it only affected them with politically “evil tendencies” and must therefore be unambiguously rejected.60 Only a few months later, New Mexico would be admitted into the Union as a territory rather than a state, and the constitution never went into effect. Territorial judge Joab Houghton, a transplant from New York, wrote many of the document’s antislavery provisions, and the free-soil overtones reflected his own views more than those of regional occupants.61 Regardless of what New Mexico’s constitution dictated relative to slavery, its ideological implications were widely ignored in congressional circles.
In May 1850, Collins and Connelly met with Senator Truman Smith to discuss slavery in New Mexico. The Connecticut politician based his subsequent congressional speeches on both that meeting and his prior written correspondence with those two individuals. At that time, Collins and Connelly remained sympathetic to the slavery cause; the former edited a proslavery newspaper, the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, and the latter held dozens of Hispanic peons, although he freed them several years later. At Smith’s insistence, Collins and Connelly produced a detailed description of the slavery issue as it pertained to New Mexico. “Experience has shown,” they wrote, “how infinitely more dangerous—more savage—is an escaped negro, than the worst of an Indian tribe.” The two men called specific attention to the numerous Native groups inhabiting the territory, pointing out that, like Mexican citizens below the border, they too would likely assist and protect fleeing black slaves. “The known sympathy of the Indian for a fugitive slave would secure him every protection at their hands which he could desire,” they predicted.62
In addition to the nomadic tribes inhabiting outlying regions, thousands of Pueblo Indians occupied permanent settlements in the more central portions of New Mexico and they too might protect black slaves. As with the lower and middle classes of the Hispano population, many Pueblos sympathized with the enslaved and entertained “none of the prejudices against the color of the negro,” meaning that they would likely abet their escape whenever possible.63 Any compassionate disposition toward slaves on the part of New Mexico’s people emanated at least in part from the ongoing captive trade. Having been so frequently exposed to the horrors of human bondage, it stood to reason that many Indians and lower-class Hispanics would be sensitive to the plight of escaped black slaves. In their general ambivalence to race, New Mexicans represented the polar opposite of most easterners, whose prejudices drove them to abhor not just African Americans, but also the Indians and mixed-blood mestizos of the Southwest.
Setting aside the geographical and racial arguments against human bondage, Representative Marsh invoked the popular abolitionist claim of morality, positing that only the human conscience could truly check the spread of slavery. “Slavery is everywhere profitable, under the management of a prudent master,” Marsh proclaimed, and mere geographic or climatic concerns could therefore never prevent its spread entirely. Commending the abolition of slavery in some New England states, he delivered a pious diatribe to his Southern opponents, claiming that slavery in the North “was abolished, not because it was contrary to the economical law of profit and loss, but because our fathers held it … to be contrary to the law of conscience and of God.”64 Horace Mann, a Massachusetts representative, shared this theological tenet of abolitionism; insisting that the existence of slavery was strictly a matter of conscience, he provocatively declared that “wherever the wicked passions of the human heart can go, there slavery can go.”65 Building upon this rationale, Senator Smith pronounced that the only real obstacle to chattel slavery in New Mexico “results from principles and jurisprudence acknowledged by the whole civilized world.”66 Thus, from the ideological standpoint of staunch abolitionists, the issue of slavery in newly acquired territories should be viewed as a matter of ethics and humanity rather than economics or legality.
Abolitionists and free-soilers echoed a wide range of Northerners in their general assertion that chattel slavery could not exist in New Mexico or any other southwestern territories. As one army lieutenant noted in 1846, peonage predominated throughout New Mexico, and the negligible profits to be gained from yet another form of involuntary servitude did not justify “the existence of negro slavery.”67 Senator Smith reiterated this supply-anddemand concept when telling his colleagues that slavery could never “be advantageously used in competition with the cheap peon labor of New Mexico,” and any Southerner venturing into New Mexico would therefore find it most economical to simply sell his plantation slaves and “employ the native labor of that country.”68 Thus some easterners—albeit a minority—rightly connected the debate on slavery in the territories to the preexistence of peonage in those regions and the comparatively minimal demand for manual labor in a localized subsistence economy.
Despite their moral aversion to slavery in New Mexico, antebellum abolitionists