Borderlands of Slavery. William S. Kiser

authors have increasingly recognized the historical roles of various southwestern tribes and continue to elevate Native Americans—especially Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes—to a higher level of importance as actors in the gradual evolution of regional societies.¹¹ Others have focused on the participation of indigenous peoples, and women especially, in southwestern slave raiding and the resulting contention for social and cultural hegemony in that porous borderlands region, a conflict that often saw Indians emerging as a dominant force during multilateral interactions.¹² The existence of racial castes and social hierarchies meant that most New Mexican communities exhibited some level of segregation, with marginalized Indian captives and indigent peons occupying positions at the periphery of communal interaction.¹³ The work in these fields of study has been remarkable over recent years, but two blind spots in the new historiography have ensured that the history of labor coercion in the Southwest continues to be seen as a regional rather than a national story. First, while these respective works have analyzed Indian slavery in great depth, they largely ignore debt peonage. Second, although some of these writers acknowledge the ways in which the nation impinged on the region, many of them have overlooked the ways in which the region impinged on the nation. Thus, my arguments expand on the existing literature by contextualizing captivity and peonage within the broader themes of antebellum sectionalism, wartime emancipation, and postwar Reconstruction.

      Slaves can be seen in several different ways: as commodities, as workers, or, in some instances, as both. As commodities, slaves are directly convertible to cash, while as workers, they are similarly subjected to servitude and varying levels of dependency but seldom have significant marketplace value. In the Southwest, captives and peons toiled as unfree laborers in fields and households and therefore did have economic value as producers of goods and providers of services. But rarely were they commodifiable to the same degree as Southern slaves, who could be sold at auction for princely cash sums. Herein lies a significant difference between peonage and captivity in the Southwest and chattel slavery in the South. The Southern dilemma—which scarcely existed in New Mexico—was that plantation owners had become reliant on slaves, both as a labor source and as a monetary asset, to such an extent that slaves were crucial to individual affluence as well as sectional economic prosperity.¹⁴ By 1860, for instance, almost half of all Southern assets were tied up in chattel slaves: The states below the Mason-Dixon Line had a collective wealth of $6.33 billion on the eve of the Civil War, of which the cash value of slaves constituted $3.05 billion.¹⁵

      Southerners’ reliance on slaves as chattels and producers became especially acute as the nineteenth century wore on, with emerging capitalist markets prompting commercial expansion and intensification in both the North and the South. The increasing commercialization of slavery after 1800, attendant with the contemporaneous communication and transportation revolutions, made slavery an increasingly imperative institution for Southerners’ economic success, particularly those in the burgeoning Cotton Belt.¹⁶ While Hispanos enjoyed the fruits of their servants’ labor in fields and households, they also relied to a remarkable degree upon peons and captives as a reflection of elevated social status. Like seventeenth-century Virginia plantation owners, New Mexico’s landholders lived in a society where, up until the Civil War era, specie remained scarce and a barter economy prevailed. In each place, the demonstrable socioeconomic status of patriarchs depended primarily on their dependent laborers rather than bank accounts. In nineteenth-century New Mexico, as in early colonial Virginia, proprietors exercised direct control over labor and the means of production within a social system contingent upon patriarchy, enslavement, and the overt disempowerment of entire classes and racial groups.¹⁷

      When New Mexico came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1846, debt peonage and captive slavery were thrust into sectionalist debates in the U.S. Congress. Preexisting Mexican laws regulating human bondage were continuously called into question during discussions over slavery in the newly acquired territories. Legislators temporarily mitigated these incendiary issues with the Compromise of 1850, allowing popular sovereignty for New Mexico and Utah territories and free-soil statehood for California.¹⁸ By that time, however, dependent servility had become a mainstay in southwestern culture and economy, and federal attempts to uproot it met with staunch resistance at the local level. Although on several occasions they did take up the issue of African American rights and chattel slavery, New Mexico’s territorial legislators typically avoided mentioning peonage and captivity during official proceedings. Most Hispanic policymakers belonged to an elite echelon of society that traced its lineages to the earliest Spanish colonists and they themselves often held Indian captives and indigent debtors as servants. For this reason, local lawmakers nonchalantly perpetuated peonage through their silence on the issue, while simultaneously expressing a deep aversion to a chattel slavery in which they held no vested economic or social interests. In the mid-1850s, however, the ascension of proslavery Democrats during the presidential administrations of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, as well as the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, prompted a shift in policy objectives on the part of New Mexicans. The territorial legislature first adopted a measure regulating the mobility of blacks in 1857, then passed an infamous “slave code” in 1859 that mirrored those of many eastern states. In the eyes of most Americans, this placed New Mexico firmly in the camp of proslavery interests.¹⁹

      Events during the Civil War ultimately induced the repeal of New Mexico’s slave code, and not long afterward the federal government, influenced by Radical Republican ideology and Reconstruction policy, ventured a step further and outlawed peonage as well. By 1867, the peculiar institutions of Indian captivity and debt bondage, as they had existed and evolved over three hundred years and three political sovereignties, were finally nearing their demise. The systems remained so entrenched, however, that it would take several more years and numerous judicial proceedings to finally liberate captives and peons. Not until the 1870s did most servants attain freedom—more than three centuries after Spaniards introduced the system, almost three decades after American debates on slavery in the southwestern territories began, and several years after the final shots of the Civil War had been fired.

      Captive slavery had a profound impact on the social, economic, and political development of the Southwest, both prior to and following its geopolitical absorption into the United States. Kinship components of human bondage proliferated to a larger degree in the Southwest—where racial prejudice was less pervasive among indigenous and Hispanic inhabitants—than in the South, where the spread of chattel slavery in place of indentured servitude had propagated increasing racism toward blacks since the early 1700s. This led to many misconceptions among easterners not familiar with the region.²⁰ The multifaceted institution of Indian slavery and the ethnically amalgamated society that resulted from it undermined New Mexico’s political advancement once it became a part of the United States, as evidenced in debates over issues of mixed-blood identity and involuntary servitude in both the territorial legislature and the U.S. Congress during the antebellum years.

      The existence of captives and peons in New Mexico communities following the American conquest also trivialized the territory in the minds of many Protestant white easterners. While anti-Hispanic ethnocentrism and anti-Catholic nativism contributed to New Mexico’s stifled political aspirations during the years following the U.S. conquest, Indian slavery and debtor servitude—within the context of antebellum sectionalism—became another reason for the territory’s struggle to achieve statehood prior to the Civil War. New Mexico languished in territorial status for more than sixty years, in part because the continuing presence of involuntary servitude discouraged favorable action toward statehood on the part of Northern freesoilers and Radical Republicans.²¹ When social change did occur in the Southwest vis-à-vis the eradication of peonage and captive slavery during the Civil War era, it came not as a movement from within, but was instead driven by external political and ideological forces and backed by legislative and judicial doctrine that originated in evolving American ideas of republicanism and democracy.

      The presence of two distinct systems of servitude, coupled with the enactment of discriminatory slave codes in the territorial legislature, sent a confusing message to Southerners and helped to encourage a Confederate invasion of New Mexico at the onset of the Civil War. After that war, with the manumission of African American slaves, Northern politicians expected to see a similar liberation of bound laborers in