Most important, the existence of debt peonage and Indian captivity in New Mexico culture and society played a prominent role in the political debates that brought about America’s midcentury transition from slavery to free labor. With the implementation of popular sovereignty, peonage and captivity became critical factors in congressional deliberations over the future of slavery because of their entrenchment in the newly acquired Mexican Cession lands. Although most federal leaders soon realized that these institutions existed in the Southwest, Northerners and Southerners disagreed over whether or not debt peons and Indian captives were slaves.
Antebellum political discourse surrounding these unfamiliar systems of bondage ultimately informed federal policy during the Reconstruction era, helping to expand abolitionist legal doctrine to include peonage in addition to the “involuntary servitude” mentioned in the Thirteenth Amendment. During the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, the existence of debt bondage and captive servitude in New Mexico forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South. This recognition informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country. In the immediate postwar years, federal leaders realized that the constitutional ban on slavery failed to encompass all systems of servitude, due to varying definitions of voluntary and involuntary labor. Postwar investigations, along with President Johnson’s 1865 executive order banning Indian captivity and the 1867 congressional moratorium on peonage, broadened federal policy on coercive dependent labor. The subsequent implementation of debtor servitude and sharecropping in the rural South indicates that those efforts, while eventually effective in New Mexico, lacked nationwide resonance. Despite this shortcoming, federal deliberations over peonage and captive slavery prior to and during the Civil War had a significant impact on the future legal perception of compulsory labor in the United States. Indeed, early twentieth-century court proceedings in the Deep South cited New Mexico peonage cases as guiding precedent when formulating legal decisions about the status of African Americans bound to similar forms of unfree labor.22 The legal and political implications of debt peonage and Indian captivity in territorial New Mexico thus resonated for decades after the Thirteenth Amendment purportedly ended the practice of enslavement in the United States of America.
Chapter 1
Debating Southwestern Slavery in the Halls of Congress
An embattled James K. Polk stood in front of a vehemently divided Congress on December 5, 1848, poised to deliver his first State of the Union address since the culmination of the Mexican-American War earlier that year. The United States had just absorbed a tremendous amount of land through the Mexican Cession, and the president understood that the ensuing admittance of that region as either free or slave territory would be extremely contentious and might ultimately drive the nation to internal conflict. Realizing the high stakes, he implored his colleagues to enter the process of political incorporation with open minds and conciliatory hearts. Polk declared that Congress ought to establish “regularly organized territorial governments” for California and New Mexico, stressing that legislators would do well to set aside “the agitation of a domestic question which is coeval with the existence of our government itself.” Allowing the slavery issue to disrupt the admittance of these newly acquired regions would, in Polk’s estimation, undermine national prosperity, embarrass the country internationally, and jeopardize the federal Union itself. The president’s well-founded exhortations, as it turned out, would be in vain. The congressional leaders sitting in the audience that day had no intention of incorporating the Southwest into the Union without unprecedented levels of sectional fanfare and debate over slavery.1
Debt peonage and Indian captivity first ascended to the forefront of national discourse following the culmination of the Mexican-American War in 1848. By the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States came into possession of almost half of Mexico’s previously claimed territory. Conspiracy theorists believed that Southerners participated in and promoted the war in an attempt to gain land for the expansion of their peculiar institution. Horace Mann, a staunch Massachusetts abolitionist, wrote an accusatory letter in 1850 declaring that “the south waged war with Mexico from one, and only one, motive; for one, and only one, object,—the extension of slavery.” Mann supposed that slavery in the western territories would doom the United States to an “unobstructed career of conquest, of despotism, and of infamy,” postulating that the introduction of chattel bondage into either California or New Mexico would be “a vastly greater crime than was the African slave trade itself.”2
Mann was clearly referring to President Polk, a Southern slaveholder from Tennessee, who helped to incite the war and had insisted on Mexico’s cession of territory as a prerequisite to peace. Polk vehemently denied allegations that his administration waged the war in view of advancing slavery westward. “I did not desire to extend slavery,” he confided to his diary, noting that neither California nor New Mexico would have been likely to support slavery anyway and that the mere acquisition of those provinces for future American settlement satisfied him.3 Even in his inaugural address, in which he stressed the importance of American imperialism, Polk insisted that “the bonds of our Union, so far from being weakened, will become stronger” with westward expansion, insinuating that he fought the war with no fractious intentions in mind.4
Polk could not have been more mistaken in his assumption that acquiring the Mexican Cession lands would foster national unity. Contrarily, this newly seized domain, comprising what would eventually become the State of California and the territories of New Mexico and Utah, sparked intense sectional debates in Congress that lasted for more than two years. Politicians argued incessantly over the existence of slavery in the West, exemplifying the overall ignorance of many Americans regarding peonage and Indian captivity. Polk himself unwittingly acknowledged the widespread presence of captive slaves in the Southwest when his administration assured Mexican dignitaries that the U.S. government would quell Indian raiding around the new international border “and compel them to release these captives, and restore them to their families and friends.”5 The president recognized that the borderlands region hosted a large population of enslaved captives and debt peons and pledged that the federal government would work to liberate them, in effect making an antislavery pronouncement that went unnoticed because it involved Indians and Mexicans rather than African Americans.
Figure 2. New Mexico and Utah territories, c. 1850s. Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
Once the Southwest became a U.S. possession, regional forms of coerced servitude underwent a rapid politicization at the federal level. The issue of slavery in western territories had already plagued Congress for decades and would have a profound influence on sectional debates in the years leading up to the Civil War.6 The precedent for congressional regulation of slavery in newly acquired lands stemmed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which specifically prohibited “slavery and involuntary servitude” in any new territories north and west of the Ohio River.7 Questions regarding the geographic extension of slavery arose repeatedly as America continued to expand westward. The idea of territorial self-government, or “popular sovereignty”—which effectively sectionalized the slavery issue—arose with the creation of the Southwest Territory in 1790 and was tested multiple times over the ensuing decades, first with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; again with the 1820 Missouri Compromise; and finally with the vast domain that Mexico relinquished to the United States in 1848.8
The path to territorial status for New Mexico, which took almost three years, proved to be an object of great controversy and placed it at the forefront of a