The prevailing ignorance of southwestern slave systems among easterners also emanated from strong Anglo-American prejudices against Hispanics and Indians, whose racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds made them seem different and strange to newcomers. A piece appearing in the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette took a sardonic tone intended to capture the attention of seemingly oblivious Northern free-soilers and antislavery Whigs. “There is in this country a state of things existing which is much more worthy of the efforts of your philanthropists, your Abolitionists, and your nigger-loving whites, than the question of slavery,” the article read, “and that is the fact that there are thousands … of Indian women and children who have been stolen from their families and sold into slavery, worse than Southern Slavery.”71 The author of the letter clearly intended to ruffle some feathers by pointing out the hypocrisy of certain antislavery groups.
Further evidence of such prejudices surfaced in military reports as well. A medical officer named J. F. Hammond believed that New Mexico’s servile population lacked any “spark of culture,” evincing instead a “painful combination of astuteness with impotency.”72 His observations reflected a common idealistic mentality during an era when many Americans perceived Indians and Hispanos on the western frontier as socially and culturally flawed, essentially nothing more than an impediment to the nation’s providential imperialistic expansion and a scourge upon more pure Euro-American bloodlines. Even Northern abolitionists who abhorred chattel slavery and disseminated a rhetoric of morality retained strong racial prejudices toward the very same peoples whose plight for freedom they espoused, as evidenced by the fact that many antislavery activists supported the African colonization movement. Hammond’s viewpoint coincided with that of many others—Northern and Southern alike—who believed Hispanics and Indians to be intellectually inferior and culturally incompatible with the divine scheme of Manifest Destiny.73 For these reasons, some easterners completely overlooked the existence of peonage and Indian slavery in New Mexico and often failed to even view them as forms of coercive labor.
The widely acknowledged impracticality of chattel slavery in the western territories did little to deter Southerners in their insistence that the institution be extended there in ideology if not in practice. Plantation-style agriculture never gained a foothold in the Southwest, but the practice of holding humans in servile bondage continued to enjoy the wholehearted ideological support of Southerners from the moment the territory fell under the dominion of the United States. More than anything else, black slavery was a nonstarter in New Mexico because hacendados and political elites already possessed sufficient means for oppressing indigent citizens and captive Indians into a condition of permanent servitude and simply did not need an additional labor force.74 Seemingly undeterred by Northern onslaughts, proslavery interests fought to preserve New Mexico’s peculiar institution in any form possible, endeavoring to make it a slave territory under the guises of peonage and captivity if nothing else.
Systems of involuntary servitude existed in the Southwest long before the installation of western capitalism and constitutional principles. Throughout the colonial period, New Mexico’s social structure resembled that of the American South in that a small, land-rich contingent of the inhabitants were a veritable provincial aristocracy. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a Union soldier noticed that only a few hundred “rich Mexicans” lived in the territory.75 Although they represented a small percentage of the total population, these ricos reigned supreme over territorial affairs and controlled vast tracts of land, oftentimes traceable to Spanish and Mexican land grants. To develop and maintain the arable portions of these lands and to raise livestock on the grassy hillsides, patrones employed the traditional methods of debt peonage and Indian slavery.76 Small villages frequently appeared within the boundaries of these large landholdings, with laboring peons as the principal occupants. On vast pastoral ranges, lower-class peon laborers “made little villages around the ground of the lord of these estates,” a practice that often segregated the lower classes of peons from the families of the landed gentry.77
James Josiah Webb, a merchant and trader on the Santa Fe Trail, noted in his memoirs that by the time he arrived in the province in the early 1840s peonage “was a fixed institution.”78 When General Kearny occupied New Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the temporary legal code that he implemented implicitly acknowledged the existence of slavery by mandating that only “free male citizens” would be able to vote in the new territory.79 Touring New Mexico a decade later, United States Attorney William Davis observed that debtor servitude remained the predominant form of labor, having originated during the Spanish colonial era and being recently codified in a territorial statute.80 When debating the slavery issue as it pertained to the land acquired from Mexico, many congressional leaders cited this preexistence of involuntary servitude as ample precedent for its retention and legal sanction. One politician explicitly understood peonage as a form of slavery when outlining its legal history in the Southwest, noting that it existed under former Mexican statutes and was merely perpetuated in recent master-servant codes.81 These legal precedents became a focal point for congressional deliberations prior to New Mexico’s admission into the Union as a territory on September 9, 1850. Another senator sardonically summarized the crux of the entire debate when he insisted that any assertion of previous Mexican laws remaining valid “is to say, in other terms, that we are subject ourselves to the laws of a foreign nation.”82
Hugh N. Smith corroborated the shaky ground upon which this viewpoint rested. Regarding the statutory preexistence of slavery in New Mexico, he informed Daniel Webster that it “had been altogether abolished by the laws of Mexico,” although such abolitionist doctrine effected only racial slavery and did nothing to suppress or limit peonage and captivity.83 Mexico did indeed approve several measures outlawing slavery and regulating relationships between masters and servants between the years 1821, when it gained its independence from Spain, and 1846, when the Mexican-American War commenced. Southerners contended that preexisting antislavery laws became extraneous the moment Mexico ceded the territory to the United States, at which time the mandates of the U.S. Constitution immediately applied to those lands. Contrarily, Northerners insisted that Mexican slavery statutes continued in full force until territorial officials abrogated them, an understanding with roots in the American conquest of New Mexico. When the Army of the West took possession of Santa Fe in August 1846, Kearny immediately issued a proclamation declaring that “the laws hitherto in existence will be continued until changed or modified by competent authority,” thereby acknowledging congressional authority to legislate more definitively on the issue at some future date.84
The first such controversial decree appeared in Mexico’s 1824 constitution and primarily involved the transatlantic slave trade. The law forbade trafficking or commerce in slaves and granted instantaneous freedom to any bondsmen brought into the country. It required the immediate seizure of sea-bound slave-trading vessels and called for the imprisonment—for a period of up to ten years—of any persons found to be complicit in such activities. The edict reinforced earlier Spanish regulations banning the slave trade and prohibited any person from taking slaves into Mexico, whether for the purpose of selling them or for retaining them as personal servants.85
Another regulatory measure of April 15, 1829, marked the second time that Mexico abolished slavery and reiterated