Borderlands of Slavery. William S. Kiser

of chattel slavery into New Mexico. The debates did lay the rhetorical groundwork for future Reconstruction policymakers seeking to expand the Thirteenth Amendment to encompass peonage and captivity, because antebellum political arguments developed precedents that helped to define and even expand the free labor ideology of postwar legislators and reformers. Within the context of prewar sectionalism, however, more than two years of deliberation on slavery within the Mexican Cession lands revealed the indecisiveness of federal lawmakers on such issues, and their indeterminacy culminated in the Civil War a decade later. The debate carried on and, ultimately, the territorial legislature passed laws throughout the 1850s that would have more immediate consequences for the nature of debt peonage and Indian slavery, while simultaneously placing New Mexico firmly within the camp of the Southern cause. In the meantime, as more and more Americans traveled to and settled in New Mexico after 1850, the nation would gradually become more familiar with the nature of debt peonage and Indian captivity.

      Chapter 2

      Indian Slavery Meets American Sovereignty

      In 1867, under the direction of Republican James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, a Senate special committee released a voluminous 532-page report outlining the “condition of the Indian tribes” occupying America’s western domain.¹ Impelled by widespread accusations alleging mistreatment of indigenous peoples all across the continent, the published testimonial initiated a period of restructuring in approaches to Indian affairs. With moral reformers demanding modified federal Indian policies and the “Doolittle report” (as it has come to be known) substantiating previous allegations of abusive conduct, officials felt pressured to pursue corrective action. Under the political leadership of Republicans and the moral guidance of religious activists, this far-reaching movement promulgated the liberation of many debt peons and Indian captives in the Southwest Borderlands, a vast area that included New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah and Colorado, and the trans-Pecos part of Texas. It also prompted federal investigations to ensure compliance on the part of regional servantholders.²

      The 1867 report, which included the sworn testimony of several prominent New Mexico citizens and bureaucrats, revealed a grim portrait of circumstances in that region, one where systems of human bondage persevered and prospered even after the Civil War’s culmination brought about the manumission of African American slaves. The informants—including Brigadier General James H. Carleton, Judge Kirby Benedict, ex-governor Henry Connelly, former Superintendent of Indian Affairs James L. Collins, and famed frontiersman Kit Carson—concurred in one thing if nothing else: Forms of coercive labor remained firmly implanted in the Southwest at that time.

      Carleton’s testimony set the tone for what lay ahead. “The number of Indians, men, women, and children, who have been captured or bought from the Utes, and who live in the families in the Territory,” he told investigators, “may be safely set down as at least three thousand.” Implicitly describing the cultural and filial dependency that this fostered, he noted that many of these captives learned to speak Spanish and “become attached to the families they live in.” Carleton also acknowledged that New Mexicans frequently rode into Navajo country, where they “capture some of the women and children and make slaves of them.” He spoke of only two tribes—the Utes and Navajos—while neglecting to mention the roles of Apaches, Comanches, or other groups who acted with similar complicity in the captive slave network.³

      Judge Benedict took the stand next. Nearly a decade earlier, in a case that had legal implications into the early twentieth century, this official from Illinois had established himself as the face of antislavery judicial activism in New Mexico by ruling in favor of a peon in an 1857 lawsuit. “There are in the Territory a large number of Indians, principally females (women and children), who have been taken by force, or stealth, or purchased,” Benedict explained. “It is notorious that natives [Hispanos] of this country have sometimes made captives of Navajo women and children when opportunities presented themselves; the custom has long existed here of buying Indian persons, especially women and children; the tribes themselves have carried on this kind of traffic.” Lest his intended audience misunderstand any of his testimony, he concluded by bluntly telling them that “the Indian persons obtained in any one of the modes mentioned are treated by those who claim to own them as their servants and slaves.” Once again, however, the informant alluded only to a solitary tribe—this time the Navajos.⁴

      Connelly, following the lead of Carleton and Benedict, seemed merely to reiterate what his colleagues had already made quite clear. Describing relations between Navajos and New Mexicans, he noted that “they mutually also captured and held as slaves the women and children of each other,” explaining that reciprocal slave raiding “had existed since time immemorial.”⁵ James L. Collins, who developed a deep knowledge of slaving practices during his tenure as an Indian agent, similarly testified that at least two thousand Indians “are held and treated as slaves, but become amalgamated with the Mexicans and lose their identity.”⁶ A fifth informant, Kit Carson, revealed that “even before the acquisition of New Mexico there had always existed a hereditary warfare between the Navajoes and Mexicans; forays were made into each other’s country, and stock, women, and children stolen.”⁷

      When these five men testified in the summer of 1865—with the nation still reeling from the deadliest conflict it has ever experienced—they doubtless realized the political, legislative, and juridical implications of the coercive labor systems that they described. Even so, all of them understated the extent of captivity in New Mexico. The decades following Mexican independence saw a noticeable increase in captive slaving throughout upper Rio Grande villages, as New Mexico’s absorption into capitalist commercial networks via the Santa Fe Trail increased the demand for uncompensated labor and contributed to the proliferation of slave trafficking.⁸ Triumphant military campaigns during the Mexican national period enabled soldiers and civilian auxiliaries to capture large numbers of women and children servants.⁹ In 1825, Juan de Abrego returned from a Navajo campaign in which his men took twenty-two “slaves of both sexes.”¹⁰ In a particularly destructive expedition during 1838, New Mexicans killed seventy-eight Navajo warriors near their Canyon de Chelly homelands and took another fifty-six captives back to the Rio Grande settlements, a devastating tragedy for the tribe.¹¹

      While New Mexicans continued to carry Indians into captivity throughout the 1820s and 1830s, peripheral tribes reciprocated and exacted a similarly heavy toll on Hispanic villages. When a civic leader, Donaciano Vigil, addressed the New Mexico Assembly in June 1846—just two months prior to the American invasion—he lamented the large number of captives living within Indian camps. Expressing particular concern about “young Mexican women who serve the bestial pleasures of the barbaric Indians,” he insisted that the national government provide a liberal supply of arms and ammunition so that Nuevomexicanos could protect themselves from Indian attacks.¹² On some occasions, abductees managed to flee from their captors and found refuge at agencies or military posts. In 1855, New Mexico Indian agent Michael Steck received no less than six liberated captives at his Fort Thorn agency, including two boys aged fourteen and sixteen who arrived “nearly naked” after escaping from the Mescalero Apaches.¹³ That same year, James H. Carleton of the First Dragoons received four captive Mexican boys who absconded from the Comanches and sought refuge in his camp at Hatch’s Ranch near the Pecos River. Carleton sent the escapees—named Louis Martinez, Felix Bonciargo, Theodoro Garcia, and Ivan Salgado—to headquarters in Santa Fe, where the department commander arranged to have them reunited with family members.¹⁴ Like the thousands of so-called contraband slaves during the Civil War, who ran to Union troops for protection from recapture, these captives sought out the military in hopes that soldiers might assist them in their plight for freedom.

      By the 1850s, sanctioned trade fairs rarely, if ever, occurred and captive exchanges took place predominantly through individual transactions. Hispanos made annual voyages to trade with Navajos and Utes and, during the course of those commercial expeditions, traders frequently bartered for Indian slaves among the tribes they encountered. “All children bought on the return trip would be taken back to New Mexico and then sold, boys fetching on an