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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 heated national discourse on slavery. The admission of New Mexico and Utah into the Union as either free or slave territories prompted numerous debates in Congress and exacerbated sectional turmoil between Northern and Southern lawmakers.⁹ Political leaders in both houses argued over whether or not slavery should be sanctioned in the Southwest, discussing the aptitude of the arid climate and mountainous topography for supporting involuntary servitude, the sentiments of the civilian inhabitants toward such an institution, and the validity of preexisting Mexican laws banning human bondage. In most of these exchanges, legislators failed to distinguish between slavery in the South, and captivity and peonage in the Southwest. One of the great peculiarities about debates on slavery in the Mexican Cession lands was that the topic of discussion—plantation-style chattel slavery—mattered very little to most of the recently naturalized Mexican Americans living there. Only a handful of U.S. politicians ever recognized this discrepancy and, when attempting to explain the true nature of regional systems of servitude to their peers, they often received laughter and jeers in response.¹⁰

Congressional debates on the regulation of slavery in New Mexico began even before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.¹¹ But when Mexico ceded California and New Mexico to the United States in 1848, the question of admitting those two provinces into the Union took on increased urgency. A year later it became evident that California would seek entry as a free-soil state, meaning that New Mexico must be admitted as either a slave state or territory in order to maintain sectional balance, a stipulation that traced its precedent to the Missouri Compromise.¹² In a speech delivered on June 27, 1848, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun outlined one critical consideration involving whether or not the Northern states, through their congressional representatives, should have the power to block Southern migrants from relocating to the new territories with their slave property.¹³ While the Compromise of 1850 offered a temporary solution to the problem, the 1857 Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford provided a more conclusive (and controversial) verdict on the future of slavery in the territories.¹⁴ The arguments undergirding the 1857 decision help to explain the eccentricities of the political debates over slavery in New Mexico that occurred between 1848 and 1850, and they provide a broader contextual framework in which to view and interpret southwestern slave systems.

One of the primary dilemmas addressed in the Dred Scott case involved the transport of slaves into U.S. territories. Senator John M. Berrien of Georgia, a former attorney general in Andrew Jackson’s administration, posed that question to Congress as early as 1850. “If the Constitution of the country recognizes my title to the slave within my State, beyond my State, and within a sovereign State that inhibits slavery, does it forbid, does it deny that title within a territory that is the common property of the United States?” he asked rhetorically.¹⁵ The senator was referring to an American legal principle known as the “right of transit,” wherein the constitutionally protected property rights of slaveholders enabled them to bring bondsmen into states that had abolished slavery, although by the 1850s most Northern states had stopped recognizing this purported right.¹⁶ Berrien’s inquiry and others regarding slavery in the territories would be answered in the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling.

Some scholars have criticized the Dred Scott case—a landmark victory for proslavery ideologues and a stunning defeat for the free-soil movement—as a failure of American jurisprudence and one of the earliest examples of overt judicial activism on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court.¹⁷ In a vote that transcended sectional lines, six of nine Supreme Court judges sided with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the opinion that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories, nor did it have the ability to prohibit citizens from transporting their slave property into such regions.¹⁸ The constitutional interpretations and legal theories sustaining the Supreme Court decision could be traced back to the Northwest Ordinance.¹⁹ The Dred Scott case cemented lingering ambiguities on territorial jurisdiction to the benefit of proslavery interests, although its failure to address involuntary servitude more broadly left plenty of latitude for New Mexicans to interpret the ruling loosely in regards to captivity and peonage.

Through Dred Scott, the Supreme Court answered many of the questions that had arisen in Congress surrounding the admission of new states and territories in the Mexican Cession lands. Following the Mexican-American War, political leaders spent more than two years sparring over the regulation of slavery in the Southwest and debating whether or not territorial legislatures could legally sanction systems of involuntary servitude. If Congress admitted New Mexico and Utah without a clause protecting the peculiar institution, Southerners feared that, however economically and agriculturally impractical the implementation of plantation slavery in those regions might be, slaveholders who relocated there might be forced to surrender their human property upon arrival.

Most congressmen acknowledged the vast differences between state and territorial governments and, by extension, their capacity as federal lawmakers to legislate over them. Long before the Dred Scott case, Representative David Wilmot described states as independent and highly organized political entities while explaining that territories, on the other hand, “are unorganized, dependent communities, destitute of sovereignty, looking to us for political existence.”²⁰ As quasi-colonial bodies, territories existed at the behest of the federal government; most high-ranking officials received their appointments from Washington bureaucrats, including governors, whom the president appointed directly. This placed territories in a subordinate political position, denigrating their inhabitants as veritable wards of the government and allowing for a higher degree of federal oversight.

Because each territory had only a single congressional representative who could do little more than give speeches when allowed the opportunity, the addition of a new territory did not disrupt sectional political balance to the same degree as did the admission of new states with multiple congressmen and full voting powers. With California receiving free-soil statehood status in 1850, Southerners were perturbed that two popular sovereignty territories (New Mexico and Utah) did not adequately compensate for the disruption of political representation in Congress. Senator Calhoun despaired the outcome of debates on California’s admission as a free-soil state and spoke vehemently against it, recognizing that no solution was likely to preserve national unity forever. From the moment the Northwest Ordinance became law in 1787, he lamented, the South had been “deprived of its due share of the territories,” the result being the destruction of “the equilibrium which existed when the government commenced.” Calhoun interpreted sectional inequity in terms of political power and population—both of which influenced the allotment of congressional seats and had been the basis of earlier compromises—to assert the importance of balanced representation between the North and South. The growing population imbalance between the two sections, which the 1840 census placed at a difference of 2.4 million people, meant that power in the House had shifted significantly in favor of the North. Calhoun pointed out that Northern states had forty-eight more seats in the House than did Southern states, a gap that would only widen with time. The admission of new slave territories would do nothing to mitigate this discrepancy because their representatives did not have voting powers and, even if they did, the population of western territories remained negligible compared to that of states in the East.²¹

Calhoun’s points about political representation in Congress and the limited power of territorial governments precipitated widespread anxiety over new territories. Those tensions arose in part from the unforeseen ramifications that sometimes attended the admission of these geographically immense regions, where populations often became divided over the slavery issue. When the Northwest Territory was broken up into multiple smaller states, for example, the settlers in southern Illinois and Indiana related more to neighboring slave regions like Kentucky and Missouri, than they did with northerly Wisconsin and Michigan residents. This meant that territories might become internally divided and seek admission as multiple states with either pro-or antislavery constitutions. The same held true for New Mexico, a vast region that, prior to the creation of Arizona Territory in 1863, stretched from Texas to California and covered some 250,000 square miles. Because it encompassed such a large area and included diverse groups of people, New Mexico was susceptible to ideological divergences on the slavery issue among its widely dispersed and ethnically diverse population. This prevailing uncertainty frightened political leaders in the North and South alike and militated against the admission of new territories without extensive debate and compromise.²²

Both 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 Mexico remained a quasi-feudalist society with a hierarchical social order—a primitive civilization, in the eyes of most American newcomers—that hardly beckoned for the implementation of chattel slavery and market agriculture on a grand scale. Southern efforts to extend slavery westward were in large part a political ploy to secure additional proslavery representation in Congress and to prevent any significant dissolution of the peculiar institution in places where it already existed.

Southerners valued the Southwest primarily for its geographic and political importance, not because they hoped to establish profitable plantations and transport large numbers of black slaves there, although this was the very ideological objective to which they turned during debates on the topic. Since New Mexico linked slaveholding Texas with Southern California, the region would complete an uninterrupted coast-to-coast empire should the South succeed in conquering New Mexico and California at the onset of a civil war. During his tenure as secretary of war in the 1850s, the future Confederate president Jefferson Davis commissioned the Pacific Railway Surveys and endorsed the Gadsden Purchase in advancement of a futuristic Southern strategy that saw New Mexico as the location of a transcontinental railroad linking the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Coast.³⁵ Thus, Southern attempts to establish and uphold the right of slaveownership in New Mexico were predominantly ideological, a strategic machination seeking sectional geographic expansion not for the purpose of implanting chattel slavery and plantation agriculture, but rather for establishing a continental empire that would enable Southern cotton to be more easily exported worldwide.

Some politicians readily acceded to the fact that the southwestern environment did not appear conducive to chattel slavery or plantation agriculture. Speaking to Congress in 1848, George P. Marsh, a Vermont representative, stated that the Mexican Cession lands “lie without the natural limits of slavery, and the institution cannot exist in those provinces, because it is excluded by physical conditions, and the economical law of profit and loss which they dictate.” In their arguments against slavery, some abolitionists and free-soilers contended that the Southwest, with its subsistence agriculture and pastoral economy, must “be inhabited and tilled only by freemen” because the absence of labor-intensive export crops like rice, cotton, sugar, and tobacco precluded any extensive demand for manual slave labor.³⁶ That observation, while partially true, also assumed that slavery existed in only certain environments where particular crops grew, a fallacious notion that neglected to account for the thousands of unfree peons and captives toiling in southwestern fields, pastures, and households. Expounding upon Marsh’s claims, Senator Truman Smith pledged that New Mexico “will and must be [a] free state, proviso or no proviso,” referencing the provocative but moribund proposal of Representative David Wilmot in 1846.³⁷ As supporting evidence, Smith introduced published travelogues and reports from the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers to describe the southwestern climate. All of these firsthand accounts sustained the contention that chattel slavery could not profitably exist in the arid deserts and high altitudes of New Mexico and Utah.³⁸ Describing the Santa Fe region, Lieutenant William H. Emory reported quite bluntly that it “presents nothing but barren hills, utterly incapable, both from soil and climate, of producing anything useful.”³⁹ Even Southerner Henry Clay, in attempting to lead a highly factionalized Congress to a compromise measure in 1850, pointed out that New Mexico, with its dry climate, had nature itself on her side, which he equated to “a thousand Wilmot Provisos.”⁴⁰

Senator John Bell from Tennessee joined antislavery congressmen in alluding to the dryness of the Southwest, proclaiming that “African slavery can never find a foothold in New Mexico.”⁴¹ Even if territorial residents favored slavery in practice, in principle, or both, Southerners would be unlikely to transport chattels there because, according to one Pennsylvania senator, “Masters will hardly carry their slaves into a territory in which they will be likely to be free as soon as their feet touch its soil.”⁴² In making such claims these politicians reasserted the statements of a New Mexico congressional delegate, Hugh N. Smith, who in April 1850 acknowledged the region to be “entirely unsuited for slave labor.” Smith then paradoxically admitted that debt peonage, existing “in a quantity quite sufficient for carrying on all the agriculture of the territory,” effectively fulfilled regional demand for labor.⁴³

During discussions over a proposed compromise measure, Bell’s antislavery colleague, Senator Daniel Webster, remarked that “no man would venture a farthing today for a great inheritance to be bestowed on him when slavery should be established in New Mexico.”⁴⁴ Longtime New York politician Washington Hunt sarcastically offered a reward of $1,000 “for the discovery of a slaveholder who even wished to take his slaves thither.”⁴⁵ Others refused even to lend credence to the issue, believing the impracticality of slavery in the Southwest to be so obvious that it scarcely warranted their time and attention. By invoking the climate as an argumentative point, such claims reverberated around the more familiar plantation slavery and maintained that, so long as irrigation was needed to grow crops, slavery could not logically or profitably exist. This Northern Whig stance offered a practical nature-based alternative to the ideological abolition movement, which many saw as overly incendiary and antithetical to preserving the Union.⁴⁶

Webster commended fellow Northerner Truman Smith for having adequately proven, “beyond the power of any conscientious man’s denial,” that slavery could never exist in New Mexico and for demonstrating to Northerners “that that which they desire to prohibit will never need any prohibition there.”⁴⁷ He then insisted that the debate should proceed no further because “there is not, & there cannot be slavery” in California, New Mexico, or Utah.⁴⁸ Webster remained convinced that New Mexicans, “to a man, are opposed to slavery” and believed all territorial inhabitants to be “as warmly and decidedly” averse to it as the people of Maine were. The statesman assured his listeners that “slavery of the African race does not exist in New Mexico” and explained that the social and economic atmosphere of the region had no need for such a system because “the use of cheaper labor [peonage] rejects it.” Invoking a final hyperbolic analogy, Webster swore that chattel slavery was about as likely to gain a foothold in New Mexico as it was to “be established on Mars’ Hill.”⁴⁹

The forceful congressional interchange over compromise proposals resulted in a number of Northern newspaper editorials that specifically cited New Mexico’s statutory retention of peonage, drawing comparisons between debt bondage and chattel slavery and attracting publicity to an already politically charged issue.⁵⁰ Despite Webster’s impassioned speeches in the halls of Congress, Horace Greeley, a New York newspaperman and renowned abolitionist, lambasted the senator for not taking more forceful action to prevent slavery from being established in the western territories. Greeley criticized the congressman for what he perceived to be a lukewarm resistance to slavery. According to Greeley, Webster’s opposition to the peculiar institution in New Mexico stemmed from slavery’s moral reprehensibility, but he had done little to effect the passage of laws to definitively prevent it in practice. “Ten years have since passed,” he wrote, “and Slavery is already there—there both in the abstract and the concrete—in the form of a slave law and in that of slaves.” Greeley grasped the realities of southwestern slavery with much greater acuity than most Americans, recognizing peonage as an “abstract” form of slavery. His perceptive allusion to the “concrete” referenced New Mexico’s Slave Code and the fact that the territorial legislature continued to sanction involuntary labor in the form of “master-servant relationships.”⁵¹

Figure 3. Daniel Webster, antislavery Massachusetts senator. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Figure 4. Truman Smith, antislavery Connecticut senator. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

While Webster’s belief that all New Mexicans, “to a man,” opposed slavery was an obvious fallacy for its universal inclusivity, the majority of the territory’s native Hispano inhabitants did seem either opposed to or ambivalent toward the institution, in part owing to Mexico’s earlier prohibition of slavery. Richard Weightman, a New Mexico congressional delegate, wrote that his constituents mostly opposed the introduction of chattel slavery and, he believed, would one day seek statehood on a platform of free labor. Having already suffered undue hardship in recent years “as a political battlefield over which to settle the slavery question,” most Nuevomexicanos had no desire to choose sides on an issue “which in no way practically concerns them.”⁵² Responding to Weightman’s claims, the antislavery National Era newspaper accused him of “bending his knee to the ruling power” in order to retain his position as a congressional delegate. “What can be expected of a Territory,” an editorialist quipped, “the first act of whose first Delegate is one of abject submission to the slave power?”⁵³

Most Anglo-Americans residing in New Mexico also acknowledged the irrationality of black slavery in the territory. Joab Houghton, a Santa Fe resident with a background in politics and law, informed Senator John M. Clayton that “any owner of slaves who should bring slaves to New Mexico would be ruined,” because plenty of peons and captives already satisfied the demand for labor there. The introduction of African American slaves into the territory, he believed, would “produce the most deleterious effects upon the morals and the industrial interest of the country.”⁵⁴ Two politically connected New Mexicans, Henry Connelly and James L. Collins, buttressed Houghton’s argument when writing that most inhabitants, including Hispanos and Pueblo Indians as well as recent Anglo-American arrivals, were unequivocally averse to slavery.⁵⁵ Even New Mexico’s territorial governor on the eve of the Civil War, Abraham Rencher—a man whose public statements pandered to Northerners but whose personal sympathies espoused Southern interests—admitted that “no efforts on the part of designing men can ever disturb the public peace by agitating the question of slavery.”⁵⁶

Yet another obstacle to the introduction of chattel slavery in the Mexican Cession lands stemmed from geopolitical concerns. The Southwest shared an extensive international border with Mexico, a nation that abolished slavery years earlier and that therefore became a place where escaped slaves sometimes sought refuge. Many people believed that slaves taken to New Mexico would have ample means of escape and, like runaways from East Texas, would enjoy the protection of Mexican citizens once they crossed either the Rio Grande or the newly drawn east-west boundary from El Paso to the Pacific Coast.⁵⁷ Because mountain ranges with dense vegetation afforded cover and nearby Mexico already prohibited slavery, opportunities to escape abounded to such a degree as “to render such property valueless,” declared one Connecticut senator, who merely repeated the prior testimonials of many New Mexico residents.⁵⁸ Several of the territory’s leading citizens explained that, unlike the deep waters and powerful currents of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers, the Rio Grande was nothing more than a shallow stream at most points and would do nothing to inhibit escapees. Once they crossed the river and reached Mexico, such slaves “would be as free as in the land of his forefathers” because Mexican citizens, opposed to slavery and still reeling from the loss of half their national domain in the recent war with the United States, would protect them from recapture and prevent their extradition.⁵⁹ The continued existence of debtor servitude and Indian captivity throughout the Southwest and in Mexico, however, suggests that Hispanics were not as averse to slavery as some Americans imagined.

To be sure, New Mexico’s original constitution—written in 1850 by a group of delegates in anticipation of statehood—expressed a distaste for slavery, although the document was conceived with the assistance of Anglo-American newcomers who had their own political and sectional agendas and therefore did not necessarily reflect local sentiment. The framers resolved that slavery “is naturally impracticable” and could never tangibly exist in the region, noting that it only affected them with politically “evil tendencies” and must therefore be unambiguously rejected.⁶⁰ Only a few months later, New Mexico would be admitted into the Union as a territory rather than a state, and the constitution never went into effect. Territorial judge Joab Houghton, a transplant from New York, wrote many of the document’s antislavery provisions, and the free-soil overtones reflected his own views more than those of regional occupants.⁶¹ Regardless of what New Mexico’s constitution dictated relative to slavery, its ideological implications were widely ignored in congressional circles.

In May 1850, Collins and Connelly met with Senator Truman Smith to discuss slavery in New Mexico. The Connecticut politician based his subsequent congressional speeches on both that meeting and his prior written correspondence with those two individuals. At that time, Collins and Connelly remained sympathetic to the slavery cause; the former edited a proslavery newspaper, the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette, and the latter held dozens of Hispanic peons, although he freed them several years later. At Smith’s insistence, Collins and Connelly produced a detailed description of the slavery issue as it pertained to New Mexico. “Experience has shown,” they wrote, “how infinitely more dangerous—more savage—is an escaped negro, than the worst of an Indian tribe.” The two men called specific attention to the numerous Native groups inhabiting the territory, pointing out that, like Mexican citizens below the border, they too would likely assist and protect fleeing black slaves. “The known sympathy of the Indian for a fugitive slave would secure him every protection at their hands which he could desire,” they predicted.⁶²

In addition to the nomadic tribes inhabiting outlying regions, thousands of Pueblo Indians occupied permanent settlements in the more central portions of New Mexico and they too might protect black slaves. As with the lower and middle classes of the Hispano population, many Pueblos sympathized with the enslaved and entertained “none of the prejudices against the color of the negro,” meaning that they would likely abet their escape whenever possible.⁶³ Any compassionate disposition toward slaves on the part of New Mexico’s people emanated at least in part from the ongoing captive trade. Having been so frequently exposed to the horrors of human bondage, it stood to reason that many Indians and lower-class Hispanics would be sensitive to the plight of escaped black slaves. In their general ambivalence to race, New Mexicans represented the polar opposite of most easterners, whose prejudices drove them to abhor not just African Americans, but also the Indians and mixed-blood mestizos of the Southwest.

Setting aside the geographical and racial arguments against human bondage, Representative Marsh invoked the popular abolitionist claim of morality, positing that only the human conscience could truly check the spread of slavery. “Slavery is everywhere profitable, under the management of a prudent master,” Marsh proclaimed, and mere geographic or climatic concerns could therefore never prevent its spread entirely. Commending the abolition of slavery in some New England states, he delivered a pious diatribe to his Southern opponents, claiming that slavery in the North “was abolished, not because it was contrary to the economical law of profit and loss, but because our fathers held it … to be contrary to the law of conscience and of God.”⁶⁴ Horace Mann, a Massachusetts representative, shared this theological tenet of abolitionism; insisting that the existence of slavery was strictly a matter of conscience, he provocatively declared that “wherever the wicked passions of the human heart can go, there slavery can go.”⁶⁵ Building upon this rationale, Senator Smith pronounced that the only real obstacle to chattel slavery in New Mexico “results from principles and jurisprudence acknowledged by the whole civilized world.”⁶⁶ Thus, from the ideological standpoint of staunch abolitionists, the issue of slavery in newly acquired territories should be viewed as a matter of ethics and humanity rather than economics or legality.

Abolitionists and free-soilers echoed a wide range of Northerners in their general assertion that chattel slavery could not exist in New Mexico or any other southwestern territories. As one army lieutenant noted in 1846, peonage predominated throughout New Mexico, and the negligible profits to be gained from yet another form of involuntary servitude did not justify “the existence of negro slavery.”⁶⁷ Senator Smith reiterated this supply-anddemand concept when telling his colleagues that slavery could never “be advantageously used in competition with the cheap peon labor of New Mexico,” and any Southerner venturing into New Mexico would therefore find it most economical to simply sell his plantation slaves and “employ the native labor of that country.”⁶⁸ Thus some easterners—albeit a minority—rightly connected the debate on slavery in the territories to the preexistence of peonage in those regions and the comparatively minimal demand for manual labor in a localized subsistence economy.

Despite their moral aversion to slavery in New Mexico, antebellum abolitionists rarely demanded that peonage or Indian captivity be banned there. This anomalous oversight suggests that, while some Americans recognized these two systems at face value as forms of human bondage, most did not view them with the same abhorrence as they did black slavery. Many easterners had personally witnessed Southern slavery, been exposed to both pro-and antislavery rhetoric and propaganda, and had read the heartrending slave narratives that began to appear in the 1830s, but they had never been offered a firsthand glimpse of peonage and captivity in the western territories, nor did any published accounts from Indian slaves or Hispanic peons exist.⁶⁹ Observers reported what they saw for publication in newspapers, pamphlets, and books, although in so doing they merely condemned without acting. That is, most travelers were passive witnesses who criticized the evils of slavery not so much to elicit direct action against the system, but rather to assert their own morality in appeasement of conscience.⁷⁰ This was precisely the disingenuous position that Horace Greeley accused Daniel Webster of taking during the debates over slavery in the territories.

The prevailing ignorance of southwestern slave systems among easterners also emanated from strong Anglo-American prejudices against Hispanics and Indians, whose racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds made them seem different and strange to newcomers. A piece appearing in the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette took a sardonic tone intended to capture the attention of seemingly oblivious Northern free-soilers and antislavery Whigs. “There is in this country a state of things existing which is much more worthy of the efforts of your philanthropists, your Abolitionists, and your nigger-loving whites, than the question of slavery,” the article read, “and that is the fact that there are thousands … of Indian women and children who have been stolen from their families and sold into slavery, worse than Southern Slavery.”⁷¹ The author of the letter clearly intended to ruffle some feathers by pointing out the hypocrisy of certain antislavery groups.

Further evidence of such prejudices surfaced in military reports as well. A medical officer named J. F. Hammond believed that New Mexico’s servile population lacked any “spark of culture,” evincing instead a “painful combination of astuteness with impotency.”⁷² His observations reflected a common idealistic mentality during an era when many Americans perceived Indians and Hispanos on the western frontier as socially and culturally flawed, essentially nothing more than an impediment to the nation’s providential imperialistic expansion and a scourge upon more pure Euro-American bloodlines. Even Northern abolitionists who abhorred chattel slavery and disseminated a rhetoric of morality retained strong racial prejudices toward the very same peoples whose plight for freedom they espoused, as evidenced by the fact that many antislavery activists supported the African colonization movement. Hammond’s viewpoint coincided with that of many others—Northern and Southern alike—who believed Hispanics and Indians to be intellectually inferior and culturally incompatible with the divine scheme of Manifest Destiny.⁷³ For these reasons, some easterners completely overlooked the existence of peonage and Indian slavery in New Mexico and often failed to even view them as forms of coercive labor.

The widely acknowledged impracticality of chattel slavery in the western territories did little to deter Southerners in their insistence that the institution be extended there in ideology if not in practice. Plantation-style agriculture never gained a foothold in the Southwest, but the practice of holding humans in servile bondage continued to enjoy the wholehearted ideological support of Southerners from the moment the territory fell under the dominion of the United States. More than anything else, black slavery was a nonstarter in New Mexico because hacendados and political elites already possessed sufficient means for oppressing indigent citizens and captive Indians into a condition of permanent servitude and simply did not need an additional labor force.⁷⁴ Seemingly undeterred by Northern onslaughts, proslavery interests fought to preserve New Mexico’s peculiar institution in any form possible, endeavoring to make it a slave territory under the guises of peonage and captivity if nothing else.

Systems of involuntary servitude existed in the Southwest long before the installation of western capitalism and constitutional principles. Throughout the colonial period, New Mexico’s social structure resembled that of the American South in that a small, land-rich contingent of the inhabitants were a veritable provincial aristocracy. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a Union soldier noticed that only a few hundred “rich Mexicans” lived in the territory.⁷⁵ Although they represented a small percentage of the total population, these ricos reigned supreme over territorial affairs and controlled vast tracts of land, oftentimes traceable to Spanish and Mexican land grants. To develop and maintain the arable portions of these lands and to raise livestock on the grassy hillsides, patrones employed the traditional methods of debt peonage and Indian slavery.⁷⁶ Small villages frequently appeared within the boundaries of these large landholdings, with laboring peons as the principal occupants. On vast pastoral ranges, lower-class peon laborers “made little villages around the ground of the lord of these estates,” a practice that often segregated the lower classes of peons from the families of the landed gentry.⁷⁷

James Josiah Webb, a merchant and trader on the Santa Fe Trail, noted in his memoirs that by the time he arrived in the province in the early 1840s peonage “was a fixed institution.”⁷⁸ When General Kearny occupied New Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the temporary legal code that he implemented implicitly acknowledged the existence of slavery by mandating that only “free male citizens” would be able to vote in the new territory.⁷⁹ Touring New Mexico a decade later, United States Attorney William Davis observed that debtor servitude remained the predominant form of labor, having originated during the Spanish colonial era and being recently codified in a territorial statute.⁸⁰ When debating the slavery issue as it pertained to the land acquired from Mexico, many congressional leaders cited this preexistence of involuntary servitude as ample precedent for its retention and legal sanction. One politician explicitly understood peonage as a form of slavery when outlining its legal history in the Southwest, noting that it existed under former Mexican statutes and was merely perpetuated in recent master-servant codes.⁸¹ These legal precedents became a focal point for congressional deliberations prior to New Mexico’s admission into the Union as a territory on September 9, 1850. Another senator sardonically summarized the crux of the entire debate when he insisted that any assertion of previous Mexican laws remaining valid “is to say, in other terms, that we are subject ourselves to the laws of a foreign nation.”⁸²

Hugh N. Smith corroborated the shaky ground upon which this viewpoint rested. Regarding the statutory preexistence of slavery in New Mexico, he informed Daniel Webster that it “had been altogether abolished by the laws of Mexico,” although such abolitionist doctrine effected only racial slavery and did nothing to suppress or limit peonage and captivity.⁸³ Mexico did indeed approve several measures outlawing slavery and regulating relationships between masters and servants between the years 1821, when it gained its independence from Spain, and 1846, when the Mexican-American War commenced. Southerners contended that preexisting antislavery laws became extraneous the moment Mexico ceded the territory to the United States, at which time the mandates of the U.S. Constitution immediately applied to those lands. Contrarily, Northerners insisted that Mexican slavery statutes continued in full force until territorial officials abrogated them, an understanding with roots in the American conquest of New Mexico. When the Army of the West took possession of Santa Fe in August 1846, Kearny immediately issued a proclamation declaring that “the laws hitherto in existence will be continued until changed or modified by competent authority,” thereby acknowledging congressional authority to legislate more definitively on the issue at some future date.⁸⁴

The first such controversial decree appeared in Mexico’s 1824 constitution and primarily involved the transatlantic slave trade. The law forbade trafficking or commerce in slaves and granted instantaneous freedom to any bondsmen brought into the country. It required the immediate seizure of sea-bound slave-trading vessels and called for the imprisonment—for a period of up to ten years—of any persons found to be complicit in such activities. The edict reinforced earlier Spanish regulations banning the slave trade and prohibited any person from taking slaves into Mexico, whether for the purpose of selling them or for retaining them as personal servants.⁸⁵

Another regulatory measure of April 15, 1829, marked the second time that Mexico abolished slavery and reiterated that all persons formerly held in a condition of servitude were henceforth free. The primary difference between this law and Mexico’s 1824 constitutional provision arose from the fact that it allowed slaveowners to be compensated for their freed slaves “when the condition of the Treasury admits it.”⁸⁶ The stipulation that masters be remunerated for their liberated slaves sought to ease the transition to a nonslaveholding society and stifle any public outcry that might emanate from such a decree. Unfortunately for Mexican slaveholders, a chronically overspent national treasury never facilitated the issuance of such reimbursements. The Mexican president at that time, Vicente Guerrero, could scarcely have imagined that his government’s slave code would become an object of debate in the United States Congress twenty years later. One U.S. senator, while denying the validity of the law as it pertained to New Mexico after the 1846 conquest, referred to Guerrero’s decree as “waste paper,” an assertion to which Northern abolitionists vehemently objected.⁸⁷ Senator James Cooper of Pennsylvania, for one, not only believed these Mexican antislavery laws to be commendable but also insisted that they remained valid and effective in the southwestern territories, a suggestion that many in the room found audacious and even laughable.⁸⁸

A third and final Mexican statute of April 4, 1837, repeated the stipulations of the preceding two laws, once again banning slavery and reaffirming the right to compensation for any master despoiled of his human property upon entering Mexico.⁸⁹ The passage of three nearly identical mandates betrayed the Mexican government’s failure to effectively enforce the first two. The country’s vast territorial domain made it hard for the government to uphold such regulations in its sparsely populated frontier provinces, especially New Mexico, a difficulty that American lawmakers came to appreciate in later years. Continuous reverberations in governmental leadership, an omnipresent threat of political coups, and financial insolvency made it tough for the Mexican national government to exert any meaningful effort toward the enforcement of antislavery provisions.

Congressional dialogue on the validity of Mexican laws during the 1848–1850 sessions reflected the rampant sectionalism that fueled such debates, with all rationality sometimes being thrown to the wind during the course of rhetorical exchanges. Because Mexico’s statutes prohibited slavery, Northerners voiced strong support for their continuance and sought to incorporate them into a new set of regulations for New Mexico. Conversely, Southerners denied that the laws remained applicable. John Berrien summarized his section’s position when stating that earlier laws, “with whatever authority they may have been enacted while California and New Mexico were a part of the Mexican republic, ceased instantly upon their transfer to the United States.”⁹⁰ Had Mexico’s laws upheld the institution of slavery, Northern and Southern positions on the matter would no doubt have been reversed.

Northerners cited legal precedent in support of retaining the preexisting laws of conquered territories, alluding to instances in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that civil and municipal codes relating to property ownership in ceded foreign land remained in force until government officials annulled or replaced them. Senator Cooper mentioned seven different court cases that established this legal standard.⁹¹ The primary basis for his argument emanated from an 1828 Supreme Court case in which Chief Justice John Marshall addressed the issue as it pertained specifically to territorial acquisitions. Upon reverting to American sovereignty, a ceded territory dissolved all formal relations with its former country and came under the jurisdiction of the United States. Marshall explained that the transfer of land from one nation to another involved a complementary and obligatory shift in allegiance on the part of those residing there but acknowledged that any law regulating “the intercourse and general conduct of individuals,” including property rights and, by extension, slavery, would remain in effect until modified “by the newly created power of the state.”⁹²

In other words, upon the acquisition of foreign territory, the existing law of the land continued in full effect until the conquering nation abrogated or amended it. Northern abolitionists used this ruling to argue for the continuation of Mexican antislavery laws, pointing out that no new edicts had yet been enacted to replace the old ones. According to Southern logic, however, this argument did not apply to the present situation because the Supreme Court ruling pertained to civil laws involving “the intercourse between citizen and citizen” and therefore had no impact on political mandates involving slavery.⁹³ Senator Calhoun conceded that foreign municipal laws proven to be consistent with the American political system might remain unchanged, but he insisted that this should have no impact on slavery in New Mexico. Based on his interpretation of preexisting Mexican municipal law, Calhoun concluded that “the peonage system would continue, but not to the exclusion of such of our citizens as may choose to emigrate with their slaves or other property.”⁹⁴ In Calhoun’s eyes, the Northern argument contradicted itself inasmuch as Mexican statutes prohibited chattel slavery but upheld peonage, which in principle and practice was merely a modified form of involuntary servitude. Because slaves were not considered citizens, Northerners countered that Mexico’s civil and municipal laws could not, under the U.S. Constitution, continue to regulate slavery in New Mexico. The entire debate hinged upon one question: Did a law regulating slavery constitute a “civil or municipal law” or a “public or political law”? If the former, then Mexican legislation could not remain in effect beyond the moment of American conquest.

Speaking to the House of Representatives on July 29, 1848, Richard Donnell of North Carolina announced once again that Mexican law abolished enslavement and proclaimed in no uncertain terms that “African slavery, as it exists in the Southern States, was forbidden in that territory at the time it became, by cession, a part of our country.”⁹⁵ Senator Benton, who claimed to have been averse to slavery in principle since early adulthood, concurred in the view that Mexico’s antislavery provisions had not been automatically repealed when the southwestern domain shifted to American jurisdiction. In New Mexico and California, he pointed out, slavery had already been abolished at the time of the American conquest and could be reintroduced there only if Congress passed a new law to that effect.⁹⁶

Addressing political colleagues on July 8, 1850, Senator Truman Smith offered a detailed description of slavery laws in New Mexico, beginning his diatribe with the straightforward comment that slavery had been prohibited there prior to the region being ceded to the United States. “If the ordinances and laws of Mexico abrogating slavery do not continue, yet it may be assumed that there is no law authorizing it,” he reasoned, “and this is just as serious an obstacle to the introduction [of slavery] as a positive law forbidding it.”⁹⁷ Because Mexican statute applied to the region at the time of the American conquest, Smith contended that those laws remained valid and enforceable, and by simply recanting such edicts Congress could not “reintroduce slavery” without passing an entirely new law to that effect.⁹⁸

Still other Northerners feared that previous Spanish and Mexican mandates outlawing slavery would prove insufficient in preventing its eventual extension into the Southwest, demanding that Congress enact additional measures to ensure that black men and women could never be taken to those territories as slaves. Representative Marsh again questioned the validity of Mexico’s laws, warning fellow Northerners about the veracity of such abolitionist doctrine and suggesting that U.S. courts would be unlikely to recognize another nation’s legal codes. Skeptical of what judges might rule in the event of litigation, he cited this ambiguity as sufficient justification for the enactment of additional measures outlawing slavery in the Southwest.⁹⁹

Marsh focused on Mexico’s 1824 federal constitution, which he claimed had regulated slavery but not abolished it entirely, because the document banned involuntary servitude only in that republic’s states. New Mexico and Alta California had been provinces—similar to territories in the U.S. body politic—and it remained a matter of interpretation as to whether the Mexican constitution had indeed outlawed slavery there along the same lines as the more southerly states. Subsequent laws passed in 1829 and 1837 were also questionable in their ultimate effect, in part due to civil and social unrest in that country. The general instability of Mexico’s government made it difficult for American lawmakers to determine whether or not that country’s congressional bodies even had the power to pass acts that superseded the 1824 constitution.¹⁰⁰

These legal loopholes jeopardized the Northern movement to ban slavery in the Southwest. “Though slavery may have been abolished by Mexico,” Marsh concluded, “yet American slaveholders may now revive it, by removing to the Territories and carrying their slaves with them,” a possibility that, however unlikely, nonetheless necessitated congressional action.¹⁰¹ Broadcasting the Southern viewpoint, Senator Calhoun sprang to his feet and condemned all antislavery interpretations of New Mexico’s legal situation. At the moment Congress ratified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, he insisted, Mexican sovereignty “became extinct” in the ceded territory and the U.S. Constitution took effect.¹⁰² As one of the most vocal and preeminent proslavery representatives of his time, Calhoun voiced the sentiments of many Southerners when he asserted the irrelevance of all Mexican laws. Their Northern counterparts had, they believed, strayed woefully awry in embracing the notion that another country’s statutes prohibited the extension or regulation of slavery within the American national domain.

Jefferson Davis, at the time a U.S. senator from Mississippi, likewise deflected the Northern argument with his own forceful invective. “Did we admit territory from Mexico subject to the constitution and laws of Mexico? Did we pay fifteen millions of dollars for jurisdiction over California and New Mexico, that it might be held subordinate to the law of Mexico?” the senator asked rhetorically during a February 1850 speech.¹⁰³ Davis recalled the negotiation process antecedent to the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, during which time a United States minister plenipotentiary, Nicholas Trist, discussed the slavery issue with Mexican commissioners. Trist purposely sidestepped the topic of slavery in the actual treaty to avoid setting a controversial precedent, informing his ambassadorial counterparts that “the bare mention of [slavery] in any treaty … was an absolute impossibility.” He understood that any provision either including or excluding slavery in the ceded territory could not be considered without inciting political turmoil in the halls of Congress. Trist only slightly exaggerated the gravity of the situation when he told Mexican diplomats that “if it were in their power to offer me the whole territory described in our project, increased tenfold in value [and] covered a foot thick over with pure gold, upon the single condition that slavery be excluded therefrom, I could not entertain the offer for a moment, nor think even of communicating it to Washington.”¹⁰⁴

Figure 5. John C. Calhoun, proslavery South Carolina senator. Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Davis alluded to this intentional omission of Mexico’s slave laws as evidence that such mandates could not remain in effect after the treaty had been signed. He quoted the constitutional recognition of slave property as validation for the Southern cause, noting that the founding document ensured all American citizens the same legal protections regardless of sectional affiliation. Mexico’s abolition of slavery during the 1820s, he insisted, became irrelevant the moment that it ceded New Mexico and California to the United States, whereupon that entire region came under “a sovereignty to be measured by our Constitution, not by the policy of Mexico.”¹⁰⁵

The most comprehensive analysis of preexisting Mexican laws and their impact on the extension of slavery into New Mexico came from Judge Kirby Benedict. Explaining his ruling in an 1857 peonage case, Benedict expounded upon previous Spanish and Mexican slavery statutes, analyzing the intended effects of those laws and addressing many of the same unresolved issues that congressmen had raised several years earlier. Benedict began by acknowledging the longtime existence of debt peonage in New Mexico. Comparisons first had to be drawn between the common perceptions (and misperceptions) of peonage versus slavery as institutions of involuntary servitude. Identifying them as essentially one and the same system in principle, Benedict opined that slavery “ceased to exist” during the Spanish colonial era, citing an act of Spain on August 6, 1811, as the official moratorium. Spanish law thereafter prohibited any person from selling another’s liberty or engaging in any other act that might be perceived as human trafficking. In Benedict’s estimation, all forms of involuntary servitude had been banned in New Mexico by decree of its mother country in 1811.¹⁰⁶

After gaining independence in 1821, Mexico’s lawmakers passed their own edicts defining and regulating slavery, all of which reinforced previous Spanish law and included additional sanctions for violations. According to Benedict, such legislation demonstrated “the Mexican spirit” on the topic of slavery and would be the guiding principle for his pending legal interpretation.¹⁰⁷ Mexico’s 1829 decree defined master-servant relationships, acknowledged the existence of servitude, and placed numerous restrictions upon masters. Nobody in Mexico would ever again be born into slavery, and six months after the law’s inception “the introduction of slaves” would be forever prohibited.¹⁰⁸ The law also forbade whipping and other forms of corporal punishment, with a provision allowing servants and slaves to sue an abusive master for “excessive chastisement.”¹⁰⁹ This and other Mexican statutes applied equally to New Mexico and had effectively banned racial slavery—while specifically allowing peonage—many years prior to the 1846 U.S. conquest.

Having thus established the parameters of preexisting Spanish and Mexican laws relative to slavery in New Mexico, Benedict examined the territory’s midcentury transition in sovereignty. He cited the inception of the Kearny Code in September 1846 as the first instance of American law being implemented, noting that the document failed to address servitude and therefore left the institution intact by virtue of salutary neglect. Because the code lacked specific wording relative to masters and servants, Benedict reasoned that a patrón could only “recover his debt from his servant or peon, as in the ordinary way from another debtor.”¹¹⁰ Although this opinion highlighted the system of peonage more so than that of chattel slavery, it nonetheless defined both institutions as involuntary servitude. Benedict’s comments relative to Mexico’s peon regulations applied to all forms of coerced labor, and he reaffirmed that slavery had been outlawed multiple times through the mandates of both Spain and Mexico. Of all the commentary on Mexico’s slavery laws, however, a German-born doctor, Adolph Wislizenus, provided the most concise explanation. Describing the system of debt peonage that he encountered almost everywhere he went, Wislizenus wrote that “this actual slavery exists throughout Mexico, in spite of its liberal constitution; and, as long as this contradiction is not abolished, the declarations of the Mexican press against slavery in the United States must appear as hypocritical cant.”¹¹¹

While remaining mostly ambivalent toward chattel slavery—viewing it through the tunnel vision of political expediency rather than economic practicality or moral standing—many inhabitants of New Mexico vehemently defended their right to retain captives and peons. Superintendent of Indian Affairs James S. Calhoun noticed in 1850 that the recent transformation in political sovereignty and nationality had little effect on New Mexicans when it came to their outlook on Indian slavery and debt bondage. “They yet think that the right to buy and sell captives is perfect, and that no human power can disturb that right,” he wrote, explaining that “trading in captives has been so long tolerated in this territory, that it has ceased to be regarded as wrong.”¹¹² Although Calhoun referred to Indian servants, his allusion to exchanging human property extended to peons as well. Widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage continued among federal lawmakers. As late as January 1861, with the first shots of the Civil War just weeks away, those in the East remained perplexed as to New Mexico’s stance on slavery. Congressional leaders could not discern the true sentiments of the people, having been bombarded with innumerable “contradictory and self-stultifying reports” from territorial residents.¹¹³

Even leading territorial officials did not quite understand the actual prevailing sentiment on slavery in the Southwest. Daniel Webster asked Hugh Smith to explain “what the fact is, at the present time, respecting the existence of slavery in New Mexico.”¹¹⁴ The response contradicted Governor Calhoun’s earlier claim that local residents retained slave labor. Smith assured Webster that New Mexico “is a free territory” and that he knew of no persons there “who are treated as slaves,” with the exception of a few black men accompanying military officers and other temporary residents. “The strongest feeling against slavery universally prevails throughout the whole territory,” he concluded in a rather simplistic analysis, carefully avoiding any mention of the peons and captives that his Hispano constituents held and, with political acumen, deflecting attention toward chattel slavery.¹¹⁵

Still others believed that Hispanics would reject the implementation of chattel slavery on racial pretenses. While serving as Polk’s secretary of state during the Mexican-American War, James Buchanan—who proclaimed in 1826 that slavery constituted “a great political and a great moral evil” from which the nation might never recover—foresaw the impending crisis that would follow annexation of Mexican territory. In 1847, he stated that it would be unlikely for Hispanos to “reestablish slavery” after banning the institution years earlier vis-à-vis the three Mexican statutes. Buchanan’s reasoning, however, revolved around a personal prejudicial belief that Nuevomexicanos were themselves “a colored population,” and he betrayed his own ethnocentrism when writing that “among them the negro does not socially belong to a degraded race.”¹¹⁶ In other words, Buchanan saw both Hispanics and African Americans as racially and socially inferior and did not believe that two such groups could interact on a civilized level without the paternalistic oversight of white men.¹¹⁷

According to a New York editorialist, New Mexico’s Hispanic population deserved little if any blame for either pro-or antislavery movements in the territory, and regional agitation over the issue could be attributed to the implanted federal officials who propagated such political maneuverings.¹¹⁸ In an attempt to counter local proclamations in favor of slavery and to encourage citizens to oppose human bondage, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society published a lengthy statement and distributed it among territorial residents. Provocatively entitled Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California … on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery, the pamphlet implored Hispanos to reject the introduction of a “detestable institution” into their territory. Heedless of the fact that their audience had just recently been naturalized as American citizens and that many of them continued to identify with their former nation, the abolitionist authors declared that “Patriotism and Christian benevolence” must be the guiding lights for them in their resistance to slavery. The booklet urged that they “tolerate no servile caste kept in ignorance and degradation” and claimed that the society’s members would rather see New Mexico and California “forever lost” to another country than allow them to “be converted by the American people into a region of ignorance, vice, misery, and degradation by the establishment of human bondage.”¹¹⁹ Ironically, involuntary servitude had existed for generations in the area and had indeed propagated a discernible “servile caste” but, due to the swarthy efforts of New Mexicans, those institutions remained mysterious to many Americans. The failure of the proclamation to condemn peonage and captivity suggests that the organization was halfhearted in its pursuit of abolition and indicates that a political and sectional intent may have superseded any pietistic one. Had the society’s members sought unequivocal universal emancipation on moral pretenses, they might have included peons and captives in their crusade for slave liberation.

United States military authorities in Santa Fe attempted to suppress the Anti-Slavery Society’s potentially incendiary edict by preventing dissemination of the organization’s propaganda. Such maneuvering, however, failed in its intended effect because the editor of Santa Fe’s newspaper, William G. Kephart, served as an agent for the organization and had been dispatched to New Mexico with orders to “show the inhabitants the advantages of free over slave labor.”¹²⁰ He used the newspaper as a platform to broadcast an abolitionist agenda and conspired to enlist Catholic priests to his cause, noting that with ecclesiastical aide “and God’s approbation of the work,” his success would be ensured.¹²¹ The Protestant missionary lodged malicious verbal assaults “of the rankest character” against any Anglo-American who brought slaves into the territory. Judge Spruce M. Baird, a native Texan, avowed Southerner, and victim of Kephart’s antislavery rhetoric, complained that his adversary repeatedly used the newspaper as an outlet for “his abolition doctrines.”¹²²

Kephart’s abolitionism in New Mexico caught the attention of many congressional lawmakers, some of whom feared that he might provoke violence in the same manner that agitation over slavery brought turmoil to Kansas in 1854. Richard H. Weightman, the territory’s delegate to Congress and a personal rival of Kephart, publicly attacked his foe and accused him of using the “garb of a missionary” to conceal his machinations under a disingenuous veil of morality.¹²³ Deeply concerned about the situation, Weightman belittled antislavery activists as conspirators who hoped to incite “treason and rebellion” against the federal government and assured Congress that Kephart’s efforts to bring New Mexico’s people to their knees over slavery had been in vain. The society’s pamphlet was circulated throughout New Mexico, with copies printed in both English and Spanish, in order to urge the people “to set up an independent government unless exempted from the curse of slavery.” Ultimately, the abolitionist undertaking failed to sway public sentiment, in part because Kephart did not speak Spanish himself and showed disdain toward the Hispanic culture. Despite the society’s control of the only territorial newspaper and its distribution of abolitionist ideas, “no excitement took place in New Mexico,” Weightman wrote with undisguised relief.¹²⁴

Kephart’s stay in Santa Fe lasted less than three years; with his newspaper nearing bankruptcy and personal expenditures mounting, he had little choice but to abandon the antislavery mission and return to the Eastern states in January 1853.¹²⁵ “The controlling influences here are pro-slavery,” he griped, “and almost the whole of the American population is from the slave states.”¹²⁶ Kephart’s experience epitomized the ongoing confusion among American outsiders relative to New Mexicans’ perspectives on the slavery issue. Whereas Hugh Smith and Richard Weightman—both of whom represented the territory in Congress—swore that Hispanos disavowed the peculiar institution in both practice and principle, Kephart believed the entire population to be wedded to the Southern proslavery cause.

Congressional deliberations over slavery in the territories lasted for the better part of two years, commencing with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in February 1848 and culminating on September 9, 1850, with the passage of the congressional compromise accord. The brainchild of an aging but determined Henry Clay, the conciliatory legislation temporarily assuaged both pro-and antislavery factions but also laid the groundwork for the impending political conflagration of the 1850s.¹²⁷ It allowed for the admittance of California as a free-soil state and for Utah and New Mexico to be appended as territories under the premise of popular sovereignty, granting residents the ability to decide for themselves on the slavery issue. Clay’s efforts brought temporary closure to some of the most heated sectional debates the nation had yet seen, averting Southern secession for another decade.

These discussions at the national level almost exclusively addressed chattel slavery, which scarcely existed in New Mexico and, many argued, could never be profitably implemented there. Debt peonage and Indian slavery, long entrenched in southwestern culture, had become a mainstay of everyday life just as black slavery was an omnipresent characteristic of the South. Congressional leaders neglected to account for the disparities in these systems of servitude when formulating policy objectives. On one telling occasion, during a Senate debate over the 1850 compromise measure, an amendment sought to include a provision “that peon slavery [be] forever abolished and prohibited” in the territories. Many legislators scoffed at the proposal, with one senator standing and proclaiming sarcastically, “I move to amend that amendment by striking out the word ‘peon,’” a quip that instigated laughter throughout the chamber. Senator Benton retorted by pronouncing the amendment to be worthy of consideration. In place of the word “slavery,” he suggested that the more all-encompassing term “servitude” be substituted.¹²⁸ Another senator thought that “this peonage … was servitude existing by virtue of the contract of the individuals … [and] by the recognized law of that country,” meaning that Congress had no right to interfere.¹²⁹ The entire debate on peonage versus slavery ultimately failed to provide any meaningful solutions, with many senators believing that Congress lacked the power to legislate on slavery in the territories. In this, one gets a sense of the general ambivalence toward Hispanic peons and Indian captives. Many officials either neglected or refused to recognize such persons as involuntary servants and thus avoided legislating on what they perceived to be a nonissue.

In the years immediately following the Mexican-American War, congressional discourse on slavery in the Southwest had little direct impact on preexisting systems of bondage. Nor, for that matter, did the Compromise of 1850 satisfactorily resolve the issues that arose concerning the extension of chattel slavery into New Mexico. The debates did lay the rhetorical groundwork for future Reconstruction policymakers seeking to expand the Thirteenth Amendment to encompass peonage and captivity, because antebellum political arguments developed precedents that helped to define and even expand the free labor ideology of postwar legislators and reformers. Within the context of prewar sectionalism, however, more than two years of deliberation on slavery within the Mexican Cession lands revealed the indecisiveness of federal lawmakers on such issues, and their indeterminacy culminated in the Civil War a decade later. The debate carried on and, ultimately, the territorial legislature passed laws throughout the 1850s that would have more immediate consequences for the nature of debt peonage and Indian slavery, while simultaneously placing New Mexico firmly within the camp of the Southern cause. In the meantime, as more and more Americans traveled to and settled in New Mexico after 1850, the nation would gradually become more familiar with the nature of debt peonage and Indian captivity.