By the early nineteenth century, the Southwest’s involuntary labor regimes had expanded in two separate yet not dissimilar directions in order to subject a greater number of persons to a lifetime of dependent bondage. Debt peonage and Indian slavery were firmly entrenched in local society and culture, becoming nearly as common in some New Mexico communities as chattel slavery in the South’s Cotton Kingdom. The arrival of Americans in New Mexico, however, would forever alter these preexisting regional systems of coerced labor, with sectional struggles catapulting the issue of slavery in the West to the forefront of public and political discourse. Ensuing congressional discussions about New Mexico’s two forms of involuntary servitude would not only impact the nature of those systems as practiced locally, but also begin to modify American understanding of slavery and free labor during the age of emancipation.
Introduction
Two months after the Civil War ended, President Andrew Johnson issued an executive order that some Americans might have found strange and unimportant, considering the monumental and urgent task of reunifying a deeply divided nation. Johnson’s mandate required that government officials take concrete action to end the practice of Indian enslavement in New Mexico.1 A year and a half later, on March 2, 1867, the president affixed his signature to another seemingly obscure piece of legislation, entitled “An Act to abolish and forever prohibit the System of Peonage in the Territory of New Mexico and other Parts of the United States.”2 In the Southwest, however, few if any inhabitants would have deemed either of these actions peculiar. By the Reconstruction era, Hispanic peons and Indian captives throughout territorial New Mexico had long hoped that American democracy might free them from bondage. Their anxious masters feared they could be right and fought shrewdly to fend off systemic change.
It is today taken as a simple fact that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. This book argues otherwise. Debt peonage and even captive slavery outlived the Civil War, often to the shock and consternation of the nation’s champions of freedom. More than that, the fight over peonage and captivity in New Mexico demonstrated the importance of those systems in America’s nineteenth-century transition to free labor and the concomitant evolution of United States jurisprudence in the post–Civil War era. The constitutional amendment banning slavery in 1865 failed to encompass all forms of coercive labor in the United States and its territorial appendages. The presence of peonage and captivity in the Southwest caused many Americans to realize that slavery and involuntary servitude were not limited to blacks in the South, but also subsumed many Hispanics and Indians in New Mexico who suffered the similarly stigmatizing effects of human bondage, or “the other slavery,” as historian Andrés Reséndez has called it.3 After coming to this understanding in the immediate post–Civil War years, American reformers embarked upon a renewed quest to eliminate compulsory labor in the United States. In so doing, they effectively expanded the scope of the Thirteenth Amendment and, in the parlance of the times, set out to make “freedom national” in the reunified republic.4
In the Southwest, as in the South, slavery was both a labor regime and a social system, and the number of enslaved people in late eighteenth-century New Mexico roughly mirrored that in the United States. An estimated 12 percent of New Mexico’s population in 1790 lived in a servile status, a statistic that closely coincided with the early American republic, where 15 percent of the national population in 1780 was enslaved.5 Until recently, however, scholars have tended to overlook the Southwest’s multiethnic institutions of human bondage, especially during the period following the 1846 American conquest. This owes in large part to the longstanding propensity of U.S. historians to focus on racialized chattel slavery in the antebellum South, casting alternative forms of involuntary labor into the shadows of academic and public awareness. As historian Joseph C. Miller points out, however, the institutionalization of slavery in the early American republic “was the least representative instance of the processes of slaving in the global perspective” and has therefore become a “politicized paradigm of slavery” in the modern imagination.6 Perhaps nowhere on the nineteenth-century North American continent did this hold truer than in the West, where alternative forms of coerced labor and dependency in the Mexican Cession lands stripped thousands of people of their freedom and mobility.7
Academic debates continue as to whether or not debt bondage should be classified as a form of outright slavery.8 Although peonage and captivity differed in certain particulars, both relied on coercion and subjected weaker groups to involuntary, wageless servitude for extended periods of time. But contrary to hereditary chattel slavery, peonage involved a contractual verbal agreement between creditor and debtor, making it a negotiated relationship of servility and dependency at the outset. Yet this shared power dynamic immediately and permanently shifted in favor of the master once a labor deal was finalized. While it might be true that nobody held a gun to a person’s head and forced them to become indebted to a landlord (patrón), and indeed prospective peons understood the consequences of their failure to repay a creditor, the system nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage. Both parties knew that the ultimate outcome would likely be a lifetime of servitude, and unfortunate peons necessarily subjected themselves to that condition anyway because no plausible alternative existed. As contemporary observers described it, debt peonage constituted a hybridized form of slavery, servitude, and serfdom, drawing characteristics from each while bearing certain traits inimitable unto itself.9
The most straightforward description of peonage in New Mexico comes from a descendant of a Spanish colonial family that was part of the landholding element of society. “In feudal times,” according to Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, “there were many poor people who became indebted to the ricos, and the rich were never at a loss to find men to be sent with flocks of sheep.” In colonial and territorial New Mexico, she explained, herding was among the few methods of employment outside the household. As a consequence, “if a man became indebted to a rico, he was in bond slavery to repay,” and few peons ever questioned the legitimacy of the system that perpetuated their servitude. Because of such machinations, “entire families often served a patrón for generations to meet their obligations.” Cabeza de Baca described several crucial elements of peonage, including its comparability to slavery, types of work performed, the sense of dependency that developed between master and servant, and the hereditary nature of the institution. She implicitly revealed one reason why large outbreaks of violent resistance never occurred—because of family obligation and a sense of honor—and her use of the terms “ricos” and “poor people” acknowledged the socioeconomic hierarchy that undergirded the entire system.10
While debt peonage remains comparatively obscure in the historiographies of American labor, slavery, and the western frontier in general, the subject of indigenous captivity has received considerable attention and scholars generally agree that it was a form of slavery. Building on