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Chapter 2

Indian Slavery Meets American Sovereignty

In 1867, under the direction of Republican James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, a Senate special committee released a voluminous 532-page report outlining the “condition of the Indian tribes” occupying America’s western domain.¹ Impelled by widespread accusations alleging mistreatment of indigenous peoples all across the continent, the published testimonial initiated a period of restructuring in approaches to Indian affairs. With moral reformers demanding modified federal Indian policies and the “Doolittle report” (as it has come to be known) substantiating previous allegations of abusive conduct, officials felt pressured to pursue corrective action. Under the political leadership of Republicans and the moral guidance of religious activists, this far-reaching movement promulgated the liberation of many debt peons and Indian captives in the Southwest Borderlands, a vast area that included New Mexico, Arizona, southern Utah and Colorado, and the trans-Pecos part of Texas. It also prompted federal investigations to ensure compliance on the part of regional servantholders.²

The 1867 report, which included the sworn testimony of several prominent New Mexico citizens and bureaucrats, revealed a grim portrait of circumstances in that region, one where systems of human bondage persevered and prospered even after the Civil War’s culmination brought about the manumission of African American slaves. The informants—including Brigadier General James H. Carleton, Judge Kirby Benedict, ex-governor Henry Connelly, former Superintendent of Indian Affairs James L. Collins, and famed frontiersman Kit Carson—concurred in one thing if nothing else: Forms of coercive labor remained firmly implanted in the Southwest at that time.

Carleton’s testimony set the tone for what lay ahead. “The number of Indians, men, women, and children, who have been captured or bought from the Utes, and who live in the families in the Territory,” he told investigators, “may be safely set down as at least three thousand.” Implicitly describing the cultural and filial dependency that this fostered, he noted that many of these captives learned to speak Spanish and “become attached to the families they live in.” Carleton also acknowledged that New Mexicans frequently rode into Navajo country, where they “capture some of the women and children and make slaves of them.” He spoke of only two tribes—the Utes and Navajos—while neglecting to mention the roles of Apaches, Comanches, or other groups who acted with similar complicity in the captive slave network.³

Judge Benedict took the stand next. Nearly a decade earlier, in a case that had legal implications into the early twentieth century, this official from Illinois had established himself as the face of antislavery judicial activism in New Mexico by ruling in favor of a peon in an 1857 lawsuit. “There are in the Territory a large number of Indians, principally females (women and children), who have been taken by force, or stealth, or purchased,” Benedict explained. “It is notorious that natives [Hispanos] of this country have sometimes made captives of Navajo women and children when opportunities presented themselves; the custom has long existed here of buying Indian persons, especially women and children; the tribes themselves have carried on this kind of traffic.” Lest his intended audience misunderstand any of his testimony, he concluded by bluntly telling them that “the Indian persons obtained in any one of the modes mentioned are treated by those who claim to own them as their servants and slaves.” Once again, however, the informant alluded only to a solitary tribe—this time the Navajos.⁴

Connelly, following the lead of Carleton and Benedict, seemed merely to reiterate what his colleagues had already made quite clear. Describing relations between Navajos and New Mexicans, he noted that “they mutually also captured and held as slaves the women and children of each other,” explaining that reciprocal slave raiding “had existed since time immemorial.”⁵ James L. Collins, who developed a deep knowledge of slaving practices during his tenure as an Indian agent, similarly testified that at least two thousand Indians “are held and treated as slaves, but become amalgamated with the Mexicans and lose their identity.”⁶ A fifth informant, Kit Carson, revealed that “even before the acquisition of New Mexico there had always existed a hereditary warfare between the Navajoes and Mexicans; forays were made into each other’s country, and stock, women, and children stolen.”⁷

When these five men testified in the summer of 1865—with the nation still reeling from the deadliest conflict it has ever experienced—they doubtless realized the political, legislative, and juridical implications of the coercive labor systems that they described. Even so, all of them understated the extent of captivity in New Mexico. The decades following Mexican independence saw a noticeable increase in captive slaving throughout upper Rio Grande villages, as New Mexico’s absorption into capitalist commercial networks via the Santa Fe Trail increased the demand for uncompensated labor and contributed to the proliferation of slave trafficking.⁸ Triumphant military campaigns during the Mexican national period enabled soldiers and civilian auxiliaries to capture large numbers of women and children servants.⁹ In 1825, Juan de Abrego returned from a Navajo campaign in which his men took twenty-two “slaves of both sexes.”¹⁰ In a particularly destructive expedition during 1838, New Mexicans killed seventy-eight Navajo warriors near their Canyon de Chelly homelands and took another fifty-six captives back to the Rio Grande settlements, a devastating tragedy for the tribe.¹¹

While New Mexicans continued to carry Indians into captivity throughout the 1820s and 1830s, peripheral tribes reciprocated and exacted a similarly heavy toll on Hispanic villages. When a civic leader, Donaciano Vigil, addressed the New Mexico Assembly in June 1846—just two months prior to the American invasion—he lamented the large number of captives living within Indian camps. Expressing particular concern about “young Mexican women who serve the bestial pleasures of the barbaric Indians,” he insisted that the national government provide a liberal supply of arms and ammunition so that Nuevomexicanos could protect themselves from Indian attacks.¹² On some occasions, abductees managed to flee from their captors and found refuge at agencies or military posts. In 1855, New Mexico Indian agent Michael Steck received no less than six liberated captives at his Fort Thorn agency, including two boys aged fourteen and sixteen who arrived “nearly naked” after escaping from the Mescalero Apaches.¹³ That same year, James H. Carleton of the First Dragoons received four captive Mexican boys who absconded from the Comanches and sought refuge in his camp at Hatch’s Ranch near the Pecos River. Carleton sent the escapees—named Louis Martinez, Felix Bonciargo, Theodoro Garcia, and Ivan Salgado—to headquarters in Santa Fe, where the department commander arranged to have them reunited with family members.¹⁴ Like the thousands of so-called contraband slaves during the Civil War, who ran to Union troops for protection from recapture, these captives sought out the military in hopes that soldiers might assist them in their plight for freedom.

By the 1850s, sanctioned trade fairs rarely, if ever, occurred and captive exchanges took place predominantly through individual transactions. Hispanos made annual voyages to trade with Navajos and Utes and, during the course of those commercial expeditions, traders frequently bartered for Indian slaves among the tribes they encountered. “All children bought on the return trip would be taken back to New Mexico and then sold, boys fetching on an average $100, girls $150 to $200,” the western explorer Daniel Jones explained. Private James Bennett of the First Dragoons was surprised to learn that Indian captives brought to Santa Fe were “sold as slaves,” with prices ranging from $100 to $400 worth of trade goods each. According to Jones, exploitative Mexican slave traders “were fully established and systematic in this trade as ever were the slavers on the seas.” They especially targeted southern Utah’s starving Paiutes, who sometimes swapped a child for a horse and then killed the animal for food.¹⁵

Many masters placed a monetary value on their Indian servants, whom they sold and traded with greater frequency than the indebted peons being similarly held in bondage. The “domestication” of indigenous captives increased their market value, providing an incentive for assimilation through baptism and further exacerbating the frequency with which masters initiated intimate interethnic relationships and fostered filial connections. Writing about Paiute slaves in 1852, one Indian agent explained that their adoption into New Mexican families effectively bound them to that society and precluded most attempts at running away.¹⁶ The practice of selling and trading assimilated captives continued well beyond the initial American occupation of New Mexico in 1846. “There is no law of the Territory,” Steck confessed in 1864, “that legalizes the sale of Indians, yet it is done almost daily, without an effort to stop it.”¹⁷

New Mexico’s captive exchange favored females as the more valued commodity, owing not only to their usefulness as domestic servants, but also because of their appeal as potential wives and childbearers. Governor Calhoun attested to the value of women as both servants and concubines, noting that men purchased them based on their physical appearance. “The value of captives depends upon age, sex, beauty, and usefulness,” he explained. “Good looking females, not having passed the ‘sear and yellow leaf,’ are valued from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars each,” while boys typically brought only half that amount, a testament to the value that masters placed on a servant’s sex appeal.¹⁸ Thomas Farnham, a traveler during that time, reiterated that “the price of these slaves in the markets of New Mexico varies with the age and other qualities of the person,” alluding to sexual availability when noting that younger captives fetched higher prices. Once abducted, the Englishman wrote, captives “are fattened, taken to Santa Fe and sold as slaves … a ‘likely girl’ in her teens brings often £ sixty or £ eighty.”¹⁹ As Judge Benedict noted in 1865 when asked to testify about the nature of slavery in New Mexico, “a likely girl of not more than eight years old, healthy and intelligent,” would be valued around $400, because “when they grow to womanhood” they could be forced to serve in sexual capacities.²⁰

The phrase “likely girl” implied a direct correlation between Indian slavery in the West and chattel slavery in the Southern states. In nineteenth-century parlance, professional slave traders and auctioneers used terms like “fancy girl” and “likely girl” to indicate sexual availability when advertising upcoming slave auctions in local newspapers. Whenever a potential buyer read an advertisement describing a slave woman as “likely” or “fancy,” he could be fairly certain that she was young, physically attractive, and vulnerable to being raped. Once purchased, such women took on a twofold purpose in that they not only labored as slaves, but also provided sexual services and, in many cases, bore children and future servants for their master.²¹ By using this terminology in reference to New Mexico’s Indian captives, Farnham and Benedict implicitly acknowledged two critical similarities between nineteenth-century America’s regional systems of slavery. First, that indigenous captives could be bought and sold like chattel slaves in the South, and second, that Hispano masters had sexual exploitation in mind when purchasing Indian girls.

Years of slave trafficking and ransoming had a noticeable cultural and demographic impact on the Southwest. Like many enslaved families in the antebellum Upper South, where a mass redistribution of chattels to the more southerly Cotton Belt propagated forced migrations that broke filial bonds through spatial disassociation, countless Indian families, whose kinfolk were forcibly redistributed among households across a large geographic area, underwent an indelible psychological imprint from this form of captivity.²² One U.S. special agent, writing to the commissioner of Indian affairs in 1867, lamented that he would not be able to locate and redeem many of the captives recently taken from the Navajo tribe. The abductees, he explained, were scattered throughout the northern New Mexico settlements of Tierra Amarilla, Ojo Caliente, El Rito, Arroyo Seco, and Taos, as well as Los Conejos in the Colorado Territory.²³

As New Mexicans variously hoped and feared, the system of captive slavery that developed over the course of three centuries began to wane following the arrival of American troops in 1846. After New Mexico’s conquest in August of that year and the subsequent implementation of the Kearny Code (a set of civil regulations that his officers devised), the territory became subject to the laws of the United States.²⁴ At that time, national slavery debates proliferated and required the undivided attention of federal officials. Ultimately, the appointment of Anglo-Americans to fill many of New Mexico’s political offices would have a pronounced impact on indigenous slavery and the regional societies of dependency that it propagated. As territorial governor David Meriwether stated in his 1853 inaugural address, “The elevated and the lowly, the rich and the poor, the native-born and the immigrant, are all alike entitled to the protection of the laws.”²⁵ Sectional developments, coupled with the increasing vigor with which the United States military implemented and enforced Indian policy in the West, altered the fundamental characteristics and severity of local slaving practices.

Whereas civilian militias typically avenged—or at least tried to avenge—Indians’ captive raids during the period of Mexican sovereignty, the task of punishment fell to federal troops after the midcentury American conquest. In 1853, territorial governor William Carr Lane revealed the lofty goals of civil and military officials when informing Steck that the southwestern tribes “shall eschew violence and bloodshed, and the law of retaliation shall be forever annulled.”²⁶ With permanent army outposts at Abiquiú, Albuquerque, Cebolleta, Doña Ana, Las Vegas, Los Lunas, Rayado, Santa Fe, Socorro, and Taos, the Indians’ propensity to take captives decreased during the 1850s as the Apaches and Navajos concentrated instead on stealing livestock for subsistence purposes. In 1851, when Colonel Edwin V. Sumner oversaw a complete reorganization of the military department, troops were redistributed to newly established forts constructed in the heart of Indian homelands. Fort Defiance monitored the Navajos, Fort Union watched over the Southern Plains tribes, Fort Massachusetts policed Ute country, and Forts Fillmore and Webster supervised southern New Mexico’s Apachería.²⁷ As the commanding officer at Fort Defiance pointed out in 1853, the placement of troops closer to Indian villages and encampments had a “controlling influence” and discouraged captive taking during depredations.²⁸

Figure 6. New Mexico military posts and towns, c. 1850.

Contrarily, captive raiding did not immediately begin to wane among New Mexicans, as civilians continued to exact a heavy toll on Native groups and in so doing perpetuated the tradition of enslavement and blood feuding. In 1861, Miguel A. Otero, a New Mexico congressional representative, referred to Indians as nothing more than “sullen and reluctant” slaves, and the territorial secretary noted that “the people obtain possession of their children by purchase or otherwise, whom they rear in their families as servants, and who perform a lifetime servitude to hard task masters and mistresses.”²⁹ The 1850s and 1860s would be a tumultuous time for relations between New Mexicans and Indians, with increasing violence and frequent military campaigns inflicting tremendous demographic hardships on both sides.

Because multilateral warfare carried on even after the American occupation, southwesterners continually memorialized Congress on the subject, claiming that “hostile Indians penetrate the country in every direction and rob, and kill, and carry into captivity” New Mexico’s women and children.³⁰ Civilians’ independent pleas to federal politicians echoed the many resolutions that local legislators approved relative to the issue. During the 1849 constitutional convention at Santa Fe, representatives adopted numerous instructions for New Mexico’s delegate to present in Congress, one of which bewailed that “many of our citizens of all ages and sexes are at this moment suffering all the horrors of barbarian bondage, and it is utterly out of our power to obtain their release from a condition to which death would be preferable.”³¹ Another declaration in 1852 said, “This territory has been a continual scene of outrage, robbery, and violence carried on by the savage nations by which it is surrounded … our citizens … are daily massacred before our eyes … our wives and daughters violated, and our children carried into captivity.”³² Similar petitions would arrive in Washington, D.C. almost annually for the next fifteen years. Although Indian depredations happened less regularly than the exaggerated petitions indicated, raids nonetheless occurred with enough prevalence to substantiate the alacrity with which Nuevomexicanos approached the issue. Between 1846 and 1860, Navajos alone attacked territorial settlements no less than fifty-eight times, killing and capturing hundreds of people. New Mexican militias took the field on twenty-six different occasions during that same time period, killing ninety-eight Navajos and capturing 283 more.³³

In response to civilian entreaties, Texas senator Thomas Rusk implored his fellow lawmakers to take immediate action to thwart raiding and captive taking. The statesman’s concern owed in part to the fact that his constituents had long suffered similar hardships at the hands of some of the same tribes. Speaking before Congress in June 1850—just three months before New Mexico and Utah officially became U.S. territories—he described the hazardous circumstances under which residents of that region lived. Captive raiding, he noted, “is not only continued from day to day, but is increasing from day to day, by the culpable neglect of this Government to protect its citizens there.” Rusk asked his colleagues to take whatever action necessary in order to protect women and children “from being carried off and made slaves to savage Indians.”³⁴ The senator, however, overlooked the reality that New Mexicans, as newly christened American citizens, were equally guilty of his allegations and had abducted many Indian captives themselves. The federal government ultimately did take action to counteract the slaving practices that plagued the region, sending large numbers of troops to garrison several of the larger villages and implement new Indian policies. But these initiatives, while partially effective, proved insufficient in preventing slave raids altogether.

Whereas previous Spanish and Mexican governments maintained only a nominal military force in New Mexico (the presidial garrison at Santa Fe rarely had more than one hundred troops), the U.S. military dispatched thousands of soldiers to the West, hindering Indians’ ability to raid settlements for plunder and captives.³⁵ A combination of political policy and military force acted to limit—and eventually eliminate—slave raiding in the Southwest, albeit very gradually, as attested to by the fact that New Mexicans continued to memorialize Congress well into the 1860s in hopes of securing additional military protection.

During the earliest years of American occupation, the predatory warfare between Hispano civilians and independent tribes hamstrung the U.S. Army’s ability to enforce Indian policy. After 1846, American troops permanently occupied New Mexico in order to guard the civilian inhabitants from Indian raiding and depredations, protection from which General Kearny had promised to them during his conquest. “From the Mexican government, you have never received protection,” he had declared from atop a roof in the village of Las Vegas. “The Apaches and Navajos come down from the mountains and carry off your sheep, and even your women, whenever they please. My government will correct all this.”³⁶ Kearny’s specific mention of women being carried away as captives during the course of raids acknowledged the commonality of the practice. His pledge to counteract such behavior, however, indicated that he underestimated the severity of raiding at the midpoint of the nineteenth century. His colleagues, in fact, employed Indians for their own use while at Santa Fe, with one officer admitting that a Ute slave made his bed each night, while another lieutenant enjoyed the service of “a few female serfs” when dining.³⁷ Even the man Kearny appointed to serve as New Mexico’s first civil governor, Charles Bent, had an Indian servant named María Guadalupe in his household, and he also owned a black slave known as Dick, who was severely wounded on January 29, 1847, at the Battle of Embudo, south of Taos.³⁸ So common were Indian slaves in New Mexico in the mid-1800s that even the army officers charged with suppressing captive raiding benefited from the services of such abductees while at their posts.