As a popular military man, both Democrats and Republicans sought out Frémont as a candidate in 1856. He turned the Democrats down because he opposed their doctrine of “popular sovereignty” (that would allow the settlers to decide the issue of slavery or not in their territories), and he favored a Free Soil Kansas. He also opposed the Democratic-supported Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. So the Free Soil Democrat became a Republican and accepted their nomination. Their slogan, echoing their Free Soil Party roots, was “Free Soil, Free Men, and Frémont.”47
A new third party joined the fray, the nativist American Party (called the “Know- Nothing Party” by its opponents, since, as a secret party, when asked about its purpose, their members would reply, “I know nothing”), which ran ex-president Millard Fillmore and gathered over 20% of the popular vote. They were basically an America-first group that opposed Catholic immigrants. While the Republicans pushed their Free Soil campaign, the Democrats warned the public that victory for the Republicans would mean civil war for the country. While the Democrats attacked Frémont’s illegitimate birth, the Know-Nothings accused Frémont of being a Catholic, an absurd charge that the Republicans could not counter since they did not want to offend their German Catholic voters. When the votes were counted Frémont received 114 electoral votes while the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan from Pennsylvania, got 174. Surprisingly, Frémont lost his home state of California, with Buchanan receiving over 48% of the vote, while the Know-Nothings got 32%. Poor John could only gather in a little over 18% of the California tally.48 Perhaps this was an omen that the future might not be as bright as the past.
The question first posed in this chapter must now be answered. If Frémont were a free soiler who opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories, and California had been a territory since 1846 and a state since 1850, how could this man, who was a friend to many anti-slavery proponents, own so many de facto Indian slaves and peons on his gold ranch in California?49 What was his actual situation, and did his wealth come from exploiting Indian workers? Did he think Indian peonage and involuntary servitude in California was the norm, while African chattel slavery in the American West was not? And what about his wife Jessie and what was her situation? To answer these questions it is first necessary to look briefly at the traditions and customs of Indian slavery in both Spanish-Mexican California before 1850 and Anglo-American California after 1850.50
The system of law that the Anglo-Americans of California created after 1846 perpetuated the labor exploitation of the Spanish colonial era and the Mexican period. In the first years of military rule in California a series of martial codes restricted the freedom of the Indian, including labor contracts that bound the Indian workers to their employer, limitations on the freedom of movement of all Indians, and the development of an Indian apprenticeship that allowed whites to obtain and control Indian labor. All of these restrictions were very reminiscent of the Spanish system of encomienda and repartimiento of the early period, as well as the hacienda peonage of the later era—Indians were free, but not free to not work.51
By 1849, California had established a constitutional government. As a condition for California’s entry into the Union the delegates agreed that slavery would be prohibited in that state. However, they were speaking of black slavery, not Indian slavery. As for the Indian, they were to remain what they had always been—a subservient class of workers. Accordingly, when dealing with suffrage they voted to limit it along racial and sexual lines and only allowed “white male citizens” to vote. In the final analysis, however, it was the 1850 law entitled “An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians” that defined the status and place of Indians in California society.52
The 1850 law stated that any able-bodied Indian who refused to work would be liable to arrest, and “vagrants” could be hired out for up to four months. Indian convicts could be bailed out by “any white person,” and they would be forced to work for the person doing the bailing. Under the apprenticeship clause of the law, whites could legally obtain the services of Indian males under 18 and females under 15. A revised statute in 1860 allowed third parties to obtain Indian children without parental consent. In effect, the peonage system of the Mexican period was being extended and legalized for the post-1850 Americanized state of California.53
Whatever the intent of these laws, the apprenticeship clauses had the effect of encouraging kidnapping and selling of Indian children. Desperados and reckless criminals plied their trade in the frontier areas of northern counties like Humboldt, selling and ransoming their human prey to eager participants in southern California. Young Indian women and child “apprentices” were forcibly wrested from their families and communities and sold to miners, ranchers, and farmers. While most worked in mining, ranching, and agriculture, many of the female slaves became domestic servants. The state was approving a form of Indian servitude not found in the earlier Spanish and Mexican period, crossing the boundary from peonage to slavery. It has been estimated that over 4,000 children were stolen between 1852 and 1867, with the prices for Indian women and children dependent upon sex, age, physical attributes, and usefulness.54
A typical feature of this trade was that Indian girls as young as eight or nine were sold by their captors to other whites expressly as sexual partners. Sometimes they became concubines. Otherwise they would be used until they became useless. In December 1861, according to historian James Rawls, the Maryland Appeal “commented that, while kidnapped Indian children were seized as servants, the young women were made to serve both the ‘purposes of labor and of lust.’” In 1862 a correspondent to the Sacramento Union wrote about the “baby killers” of Humboldt County who “talk of the operation of cutting to pieces an Indian squaw in their indiscriminate raids for babies as ‘like slicing old cheese.’ …The baby hunters sneak up to a rancheria, kill the bucks, pick out the best looking squaws, ravish them, and make off with their young ones.”55 Boys as young as 12 were also enslaved, and given the disparity in power between master and slave, the conjecture is that pedophilia may have been a likely result.
In spite of the protestations of the Anglo-Americans of California, relations between Indians and whites in the Southwest paralleled those between blacks and whites in the Confederate South. Although California did not create slave codes like those in New Mexico, their laws and rules restricting Indian freedoms were similar to the infamous Black Codes of the South. Indian passes and the practice of limiting Indian mobility were similar to restrictions on blacks in the post-war South. Vagrancy and bail-out provisions were similar, as were instances where Indians and blacks could not testify against their white masters.56 While the Spanish and Mexican heritage of peonage and involuntary servitude was important for slavery in California, the racism, sexism, and violence that accompanied Indian slavery after 1850 became commonplace throughout much of the Indian Southwest.
In the early period prior to 1850, California Indians provided a variety of tasks for their white overlords, from laboring as mechanics and domestics to deckhands and lumbermen. The gold-rush of the late 1840s meant that most laborers were headed for the gold fields, and therefore the scarcity of labor for the remaining jobs required the use of Indian workers. And the Argonauts needed food for them and fodder for their livestock. Beef was in great demand. The California cattle boom extended the Mexican tradition of utilizing Indian labor on the ranchos and haciendas. In the 1850s most of the cattle ranches in Bernardino and Los Angeles counties used Indian laborers who were permanently attached to the soil, who were, as one contemporary observed, “no better than slaves.” Eventually, the “great drought” of 1862–1864 brought an end to the cattle industry, with many “useless” Indians becoming homeless vagabonds.57
Of course, the dominant activity in the early years after the 1848 discovery of gold was not ranching but mining. The Hispanic tradition of the repartimiento or allocation was transferred from the farms to the mines, with the white miner and his Indian worker having a relationship not unlike the traditional ranchero and his Indian peon. One Argonaut estimated that within months after the initial discovery of gold, four thousand Indians worked alongside two thousand whites. Just as the Indians on the ranchos were considered