According to a New York editorialist, New Mexico’s Hispanic population deserved little if any blame for either pro-or antislavery movements in the territory, and regional agitation over the issue could be attributed to the implanted federal officials who propagated such political maneuverings.118 In an attempt to counter local proclamations in favor of slavery and to encourage citizens to oppose human bondage, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society published a lengthy statement and distributed it among territorial residents. Provocatively entitled Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California … on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery, the pamphlet implored Hispanos to reject the introduction of a “detestable institution” into their territory. Heedless of the fact that their audience had just recently been naturalized as American citizens and that many of them continued to identify with their former nation, the abolitionist authors declared that “Patriotism and Christian benevolence” must be the guiding lights for them in their resistance to slavery. The booklet urged that they “tolerate no servile caste kept in ignorance and degradation” and claimed that the society’s members would rather see New Mexico and California “forever lost” to another country than allow them to “be converted by the American people into a region of ignorance, vice, misery, and degradation by the establishment of human bondage.”119 Ironically, involuntary servitude had existed for generations in the area and had indeed propagated a discernible “servile caste” but, due to the swarthy efforts of New Mexicans, those institutions remained mysterious to many Americans. The failure of the proclamation to condemn peonage and captivity suggests that the organization was halfhearted in its pursuit of abolition and indicates that a political and sectional intent may have superseded any pietistic one. Had the society’s members sought unequivocal universal emancipation on moral pretenses, they might have included peons and captives in their crusade for slave liberation.
United States military authorities in Santa Fe attempted to suppress the Anti-Slavery Society’s potentially incendiary edict by preventing dissemination of the organization’s propaganda. Such maneuvering, however, failed in its intended effect because the editor of Santa Fe’s newspaper, William G. Kephart, served as an agent for the organization and had been dispatched to New Mexico with orders to “show the inhabitants the advantages of free over slave labor.”120 He used the newspaper as a platform to broadcast an abolitionist agenda and conspired to enlist Catholic priests to his cause, noting that with ecclesiastical aide “and God’s approbation of the work,” his success would be ensured.121 The Protestant missionary lodged malicious verbal assaults “of the rankest character” against any Anglo-American who brought slaves into the territory. Judge Spruce M. Baird, a native Texan, avowed Southerner, and victim of Kephart’s antislavery rhetoric, complained that his adversary repeatedly used the newspaper as an outlet for “his abolition doctrines.”122
Kephart’s abolitionism in New Mexico caught the attention of many congressional lawmakers, some of whom feared that he might provoke violence in the same manner that agitation over slavery brought turmoil to Kansas in 1854. Richard H. Weightman, the territory’s delegate to Congress and a personal rival of Kephart, publicly attacked his foe and accused him of using the “garb of a missionary” to conceal his machinations under a disingenuous veil of morality.123 Deeply concerned about the situation, Weightman belittled antislavery activists as conspirators who hoped to incite “treason and rebellion” against the federal government and assured Congress that Kephart’s efforts to bring New Mexico’s people to their knees over slavery had been in vain. The society’s pamphlet was circulated throughout New Mexico, with copies printed in both English and Spanish, in order to urge the people “to set up an independent government unless exempted from the curse of slavery.” Ultimately, the abolitionist undertaking failed to sway public sentiment, in part because Kephart did not speak Spanish himself and showed disdain toward the Hispanic culture. Despite the society’s control of the only territorial newspaper and its distribution of abolitionist ideas, “no excitement took place in New Mexico,” Weightman wrote with undisguised relief.124
Kephart’s stay in Santa Fe lasted less than three years; with his newspaper nearing bankruptcy and personal expenditures mounting, he had little choice but to abandon the antislavery mission and return to the Eastern states in January 1853.125 “The controlling influences here are pro-slavery,” he griped, “and almost the whole of the American population is from the slave states.”126 Kephart’s experience epitomized the ongoing confusion among American outsiders relative to New Mexicans’ perspectives on the slavery issue. Whereas Hugh Smith and Richard Weightman—both of whom represented the territory in Congress—swore that Hispanos disavowed the peculiar institution in both practice and principle, Kephart believed the entire population to be wedded to the Southern proslavery cause.
Congressional deliberations over slavery in the territories lasted for the better part of two years, commencing with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 and culminating on September 9, 1850, with the passage of the congressional compromise accord. The brainchild of an aging but determined Henry Clay, the conciliatory legislation temporarily assuaged both pro-and antislavery factions but also laid the groundwork for the impending political conflagration of the 1850s.127 It allowed for the admittance of California as a free-soil state and for Utah and New Mexico to be appended as territories under the premise of popular sovereignty, granting residents the ability to decide for themselves on the slavery issue. Clay’s efforts brought temporary closure to some of the most heated sectional debates the nation had yet seen, averting Southern secession for another decade.
These discussions at the national level almost exclusively addressed chattel slavery, which scarcely existed in New Mexico and, many argued, could never be profitably implemented there. Debt peonage and Indian slavery, long entrenched in southwestern culture, had become a mainstay of everyday life just as black slavery was an omnipresent characteristic of the South. Congressional leaders neglected to account for the disparities in these systems of servitude when formulating policy objectives. On one telling occasion, during a Senate debate over the 1850 compromise measure, an amendment sought to include a provision “that peon slavery [be] forever abolished and prohibited” in the territories. Many legislators scoffed at the proposal, with one senator standing and proclaiming sarcastically, “I move to amend that amendment by striking out the word ‘peon,’” a quip that instigated laughter throughout the chamber. Senator Benton retorted by pronouncing the amendment to be worthy of consideration. In place of the word “slavery,” he suggested that the more all-encompassing term “servitude” be substituted.128 Another senator thought that “this peonage … was servitude existing by virtue of the contract of the individuals … [and] by the recognized law of that country,” meaning that Congress had no right to interfere.129 The entire debate on peonage versus slavery ultimately failed to provide any meaningful solutions, with many senators believing that Congress lacked the power to legislate on slavery in the territories. In this, one gets a sense of the general ambivalence toward Hispanic peons and Indian captives. Many officials either neglected or refused to recognize such persons as involuntary servants and thus avoided legislating on what they perceived to be a nonissue.
In the years immediately following the Mexican-American War, congressional discourse on slavery in the Southwest had little direct impact on preexisting systems of bondage. Nor, for that matter,