Borderlands of Slavery. William S. Kiser

Northern and Southern interests claimed that their perceived constitutional rights—including private property ownership—must be affirmed and protected within the boundaries of any and all new territories. By attempting to prohibit slavery in territorial appendages, Senator Calhoun thundered, the North made “the most strenuous effort to appropriate the whole [Mexican Cession] to herself, by excluding the South from every foot of it.”²³ He pointed out that thousands of men from both sections and from all ideological persuasions fought in the Mexican-American War and shed blood in that struggle for the collective American cause. In a similar vein, other legislators noted that the federal government, representing all of the states, purchased the Mexican Cession using assets from the “common fund” of the U.S. Treasury, which entitled citizens to equal rights within those new territories. “They are as much the territories of one state as another … of the Southern as the Northern States,” Calhoun reasoned. “They are the territories of all, because they are the territories of each.” The South Carolina statesman believed that congressional oversight in territorial governance must not privilege one section’s interests over the other.²⁴

      As the Dred Scott decision later affirmed, constitutional property rights included the ownership of slaves. This notion did not sit well with Northern free-soilers, and even representatives from some border states expressed dissatisfaction with that idea. After his retirement, former Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton explained that Southerners felt aggrieved by their inability to take slave property with them when immigrating to the western territories. “In reality,” an unsympathetic Benton countered, “it was that he was not allowed to carry the State law along with him to protect his slave.”²⁵ Truman Smith of Connecticut concurred when informing fellow senators that slaveholders could move westward into New Mexico or Utah “on an exact footing of equality with the non-slaveholders,” inasmuch as any American citizen, regardless of sectional origin, “can take their families, and, on arrival, can go to work and earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.” Migrating slaveowners could transport all personal property with them should they so choose, “if they will only convert [their slaves] into money” before entering the territories. Any prohibition against the movement of slaves into the new territories, Smith maintained, had nothing to do with constitutional doctrine but could instead be attributed to slave property being “against common right.”²⁶

      Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, similarly maintained that the prohibition of human trafficking had nothing to do with sectionalism or slavery, pointing out that it applied to other articles of trade as well. Alcohol, much like slaves, could not be taken into certain territories because of prohibitory local laws that were “directed against no section, and impair the rights of no State of the Union,” Douglas explained. Such codes pertained to the sale and use of specific types of goods and property, “whether brought from the North or the South,” and therefore had no bearing on sectional or antislavery ideology.²⁷ Although the landmark Supreme Court opinion in the Dred Scott case had yet to be rendered at the time these political deliberations took place between 1848 and 1850, preexisting notions of constitutionality lent credence to a belief among Southerners that they held the rational advantage in congressional debates. The basic republican principle of equal rights for all individuals, established during the revolutionary generation, spawned a variety of arguments over slavery and servitude that, by the antebellum era, had come to be fueled by sectional interests.

      These political viewpoints and the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision invigorated the ongoing debate over slavery that culminated in civil war. Senator Benton believed that the issue of slavery in the territories, as it arose in 1848, and as later manifested in the Dred Scott case, represented one of the instigating factors in the sectional conflict. “And there commenced the great slavery agitation,” he wrote, “founded upon the dogma of ‘no power in Congress to legislate upon slavery in the territories,’ which has led to the abrogation of the Missouri compromise line—which has filled the Union with distraction—and which is threatening to bring all federal legislation, and all federal elections, to a mere sectional struggle, in which one-half of the States is to be arrayed against the other.”²⁸ New Mexico was strewn directly into these political and ideological struggles following the Mexican-American War, largely as a result of slavery, peonage, and captivity.²⁹

      In regard to the southwestern territories, abolitionists and free-soilers immediately invoked the argument that chattel slavery could not exist there with any practicality, owing primarily to the climate and geography of the region. The most well-known proponent of this line of reasoning was the Whig senator Daniel Webster. In 1850, he delivered an impassioned speech based on a notion of providential design, declaring that chattel slavery could never survive as an institution in California or New Mexico for reasons of “physical geography,” and both regions would therefore remain “free by the arrangement of things by the Power above us.”³⁰ His frequent allusions to the will of God and laws of nature as the leading factors precluding slavery from the western territories drew harsh rebukes from less-pious congressmen, particularly Senator Douglas, who understood the importance of ideological underpinnings in the slave debates. With poignant sarcasm, Douglas responded that he was “exceedingly gratified” by Webster’s conclusions about the impossibility of slavery in the West, but pointed out how useless such theological reasoning would be in determining pro-or antislavery sentiment and the ideological nature of political representation in the new territories.³¹

      In a sense, Webster and Douglas were both right. While Douglas asserted that laws of nature and providential design would not direct the flow of ideology, Webster’s observations about western geography being antithetical to profitable plantation-style slavery also had merit. Any person who traveled to the Mexican Cession could attest to the fact that the landscape varied significantly from that of the American South, and the attendant differences in agricultural practices and economic exchange precluded the sensibility of introducing chattel slavery into the region on a mass scale. Known for its basin-and-range topography, the Southwest consists of arid and sparsely inhabited deserts bisected from north to south by lofty, rugged mountain ranges at intervals of fifty to one hundred miles. The vast majority of the region lacks the necessary rainfall and humidity to grow year-round market crops for export, with only the occasional river valley providing the appropriate ecosystem for agricultural production.

      In New Mexico, only three such rivers—the Chama, the Pecos, and the Rio Grande—provided enough water to support farming on any significant scale, and even then irrigation was necessary in most places and for most crops.³² Taken collectively, the farmlands in those three valleys composed an infinitesimal fraction of the total land area, and that tiny percentage was in turn subdivided into hundreds of long-lots of twenty to forty acres each, based on family inheritance of property, a distributive tradition that traced its origins back to colonial land grants. Most of northern New Mexico was therefore relegated to a pastoral economy based largely on sheep-raising and wool harvesting. This combination of pastoralism on the grassy hillsides and at higher elevations, along with agriculture in the more arable valleys and lowlands, necessitated involuntary labor in the form of Indian captives and Hispanic peons. The number of man-hours needed to sustain the Southwest’s seasonal subsistence economy, however, never remotely approached what was required for export-driven cotton and tobacco plantations in the South.

      New Mexico also operated in large part on what historian Dan Usner has called a “frontier exchange economy,” with Hispanos obtaining many of their goods through barter-driven trading networks that involved peripheral Indian tribes.³³ Exemplified by the trade fairs at Pecos and Taos, this component of the southwestern economy involved the exchange of animals, food, and items of Native manufacture for staples of Euro-American origin and captives. In this sense, mid-1800s New Mexico lacked the telltale features of western capitalism—industrialization, the capacity for mass production, and extractive market resources—that many American newcomers hoped to encounter there. What they discovered instead was a variegated economic system that included hunting and gathering, pastoralism, subsistence agriculture, involuntary servitude, and even the extension of credit in the form of merchandise, but rarely the circulation of hard currency or bank notes.³⁴ Despite the advent of the Santa Fe Trade in 1821 and the concomitant commercial network established with Missouri merchants, New