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Introduction

Two months after the Civil War ended, President Andrew Johnson issued an executive order that some Americans might have found strange and unimportant, considering the monumental and urgent task of reunifying a deeply divided nation. Johnson’s mandate required that government officials take concrete action to end the practice of Indian enslavement in New Mexico.¹ A year and a half later, on March 2, 1867, the president affixed his signature to another seemingly obscure piece of legislation, entitled “An Act to abolish and forever prohibit the System of Peonage in the Territory of New Mexico and other Parts of the United States.”² In the Southwest, however, few if any inhabitants would have deemed either of these actions peculiar. By the Reconstruction era, Hispanic peons and Indian captives throughout territorial New Mexico had long hoped that American democracy might free them from bondage. Their anxious masters feared they could be right and fought shrewdly to fend off systemic change.

It is today taken as a simple fact that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. This book argues otherwise. Debt peonage and even captive slavery outlived the Civil War, often to the shock and consternation of the nation’s champions of freedom. More than that, the fight over peonage and captivity in New Mexico demonstrated the importance of those systems in America’s nineteenth-century transition to free labor and the concomitant evolution of United States jurisprudence in the post–Civil War era. The constitutional amendment banning slavery in 1865 failed to encompass all forms of coercive labor in the United States and its territorial appendages. The presence of peonage and captivity in the Southwest caused many Americans to realize that slavery and involuntary servitude were not limited to blacks in the South, but also subsumed many Hispanics and Indians in New Mexico who suffered the similarly stigmatizing effects of human bondage, or “the other slavery,” as historian Andrés Reséndez has called it.³ After coming to this understanding in the immediate post–Civil War years, American reformers embarked upon a renewed quest to eliminate compulsory labor in the United States. In so doing, they effectively expanded the scope of the Thirteenth Amendment and, in the parlance of the times, set out to make “freedom national” in the reunified republic.⁴

In the Southwest, as in the South, slavery was both a labor regime and a social system, and the number of enslaved people in late eighteenth-century New Mexico roughly mirrored that in the United States. An estimated 12 percent of New Mexico’s population in 1790 lived in a servile status, a statistic that closely coincided with the early American republic, where 15 percent of the national population in 1780 was enslaved.⁵ Until recently, however, scholars have tended to overlook the Southwest’s multiethnic institutions of human bondage, especially during the period following the 1846 American conquest. This owes in large part to the longstanding propensity of U.S. historians to focus on racialized chattel slavery in the antebellum South, casting alternative forms of involuntary labor into the shadows of academic and public awareness. As historian Joseph C. Miller points out, however, the institutionalization of slavery in the early American republic “was the least representative instance of the processes of slaving in the global perspective” and has therefore become a “politicized paradigm of slavery” in the modern imagination.⁶ Perhaps nowhere on the nineteenth-century North American continent did this hold truer than in the West, where alternative forms of coerced labor and dependency in the Mexican Cession lands stripped thousands of people of their freedom and mobility.⁷

Academic debates continue as to whether or not debt bondage should be classified as a form of outright slavery.⁸ Although peonage and captivity differed in certain particulars, both relied on coercion and subjected weaker groups to involuntary, wageless servitude for extended periods of time. But contrary to hereditary chattel slavery, peonage involved a contractual verbal agreement between creditor and debtor, making it a negotiated relationship of servility and dependency at the outset. Yet this shared power dynamic immediately and permanently shifted in favor of the master once a labor deal was finalized. While it might be true that nobody held a gun to a person’s head and forced them to become indebted to a landlord (patrón), and indeed prospective peons understood the consequences of their failure to repay a creditor, the system nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage. Both parties knew that the ultimate outcome would likely be a lifetime of servitude, and unfortunate peons necessarily subjected themselves to that condition anyway because no plausible alternative existed. As contemporary observers described it, debt peonage constituted a hybridized form of slavery, servitude, and serfdom, drawing characteristics from each while bearing certain traits inimitable unto itself.⁹

The most straightforward description of peonage in New Mexico comes from a descendant of a Spanish colonial family that was part of the landholding element of society. “In feudal times,” according to Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, “there were many poor people who became indebted to the ricos, and the rich were never at a loss to find men to be sent with flocks of sheep.” In colonial and territorial New Mexico, she explained, herding was among the few methods of employment outside the household. As a consequence, “if a man became indebted to a rico, he was in bond slavery to repay,” and few peons ever questioned the legitimacy of the system that perpetuated their servitude. Because of such machinations, “entire families often served a patrón for generations to meet their obligations.” Cabeza de Baca described several crucial elements of peonage, including its comparability to slavery, types of work performed, the sense of dependency that developed between master and servant, and the hereditary nature of the institution. She implicitly revealed one reason why large outbreaks of violent resistance never occurred—because of family obligation and a sense of honor—and her use of the terms “ricos” and “poor people” acknowledged the socioeconomic hierarchy that undergirded the entire system.¹⁰

While debt peonage remains comparatively obscure in the historiographies of American labor, slavery, and the western frontier in general, the subject of indigenous captivity has received considerable attention and scholars generally agree that it was a form of slavery. Building on the path-breaking work of James Brooks, recent authors have increasingly recognized the historical roles of various southwestern tribes and continue to elevate Native Americans—especially Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes—to a higher level of importance as actors in the gradual evolution of regional societies.¹¹ Others have focused on the participation of indigenous peoples, and women especially, in southwestern slave raiding and the resulting contention for social and cultural hegemony in that porous borderlands region, a conflict that often saw Indians emerging as a dominant force during multilateral interactions.¹² The existence of racial castes and social hierarchies meant that most New Mexican communities exhibited some level of segregation, with marginalized Indian captives and indigent peons occupying positions at the periphery of communal interaction.¹³ The work in these fields of study has been remarkable over recent years, but two blind spots in the new historiography have ensured that the history of labor coercion in the Southwest continues to be seen as a regional rather than a national story. First, while these respective works have analyzed Indian slavery in great depth, they largely ignore debt peonage. Second, although some of these writers acknowledge the ways in which the nation impinged on the region, many of them have overlooked the ways in which the region impinged on the nation. Thus, my arguments expand on the existing literature by contextualizing captivity and peonage within the broader themes of antebellum sectionalism, wartime emancipation, and postwar Reconstruction.

Slaves can be seen in several different ways: as commodities, as workers, or, in some instances, as both. As commodities, slaves are directly convertible to cash, while as workers, they are similarly subjected to servitude and varying levels of dependency but seldom have significant marketplace value. In the Southwest, captives and peons toiled as unfree laborers in fields and households and therefore did have economic value as producers of goods and providers of services. But rarely were they commodifiable to the same degree as Southern slaves, who could be sold at auction for princely cash sums. Herein lies a significant difference between peonage and captivity in the Southwest and chattel slavery in the South. The Southern dilemma—which scarcely existed in New Mexico—was that plantation owners had become reliant on slaves, both as a labor source and as a monetary asset, to such an extent that slaves were crucial to individual affluence as well as sectional economic prosperity.¹⁴ By 1860, for instance, almost half of all Southern assets were tied up in chattel slaves: The states below the Mason-Dixon Line had a collective wealth of $6.33 billion on the eve of the Civil War, of which the cash value of slaves constituted $3.05 billion.¹⁵

Southerners’ reliance on slaves as chattels and producers became especially acute as the nineteenth century wore on, with emerging capitalist markets prompting commercial expansion and intensification in both the North and the South. The increasing commercialization of slavery after 1800, attendant with the contemporaneous communication and transportation revolutions, made slavery an increasingly imperative institution for Southerners’ economic success, particularly those in the burgeoning Cotton Belt.¹⁶ While Hispanos enjoyed the fruits of their servants’ labor in fields and households, they also relied to a remarkable degree upon peons and captives as a reflection of elevated social status. Like seventeenth-century Virginia plantation owners, New Mexico’s landholders lived in a society where, up until the Civil War era, specie remained scarce and a barter economy prevailed. In each place, the demonstrable socioeconomic status of patriarchs depended primarily on their dependent laborers rather than bank accounts. In nineteenth-century New Mexico, as in early colonial Virginia, proprietors exercised direct control over labor and the means of production within a social system contingent upon patriarchy, enslavement, and the overt disempowerment of entire classes and racial groups.¹⁷

When New Mexico came under the jurisdiction of the United States in 1846, debt peonage and captive slavery were thrust into sectionalist debates in the U.S. Congress. Preexisting Mexican laws regulating human bondage were continuously called into question during discussions over slavery in the newly acquired territories. Legislators temporarily mitigated these incendiary issues with the Compromise of 1850, allowing popular sovereignty for New Mexico and Utah territories and free-soil statehood for California.¹⁸ By that time, however, dependent servility had become a mainstay in southwestern culture and economy, and federal attempts to uproot it met with staunch resistance at the local level. Although on several occasions they did take up the issue of African American rights and chattel slavery, New Mexico’s territorial legislators typically avoided mentioning peonage and captivity during official proceedings. Most Hispanic policymakers belonged to an elite echelon of society that traced its lineages to the earliest Spanish colonists and they themselves often held Indian captives and indigent debtors as servants. For this reason, local lawmakers nonchalantly perpetuated peonage through their silence on the issue, while simultaneously expressing a deep aversion to a chattel slavery in which they held no vested economic or social interests. In the mid-1850s, however, the ascension of proslavery Democrats during the presidential administrations of Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, as well as the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, prompted a shift in policy objectives on the part of New Mexicans. The territorial legislature first adopted a measure regulating the mobility of blacks in 1857, then passed an infamous “slave code” in 1859 that mirrored those of many eastern states. In the eyes of most Americans, this placed New Mexico firmly in the camp of proslavery interests.¹⁹

Events during the Civil War ultimately induced the repeal of New Mexico’s slave code, and not long afterward the federal government, influenced by Radical Republican ideology and Reconstruction policy, ventured a step further and outlawed peonage as well. By 1867, the peculiar institutions of Indian captivity and debt bondage, as they had existed and evolved over three hundred years and three political sovereignties, were finally nearing their demise. The systems remained so entrenched, however, that it would take several more years and numerous judicial proceedings to finally liberate captives and peons. Not until the 1870s did most servants attain freedom—more than three centuries after Spaniards introduced the system, almost three decades after American debates on slavery in the southwestern territories began, and several years after the final shots of the Civil War had been fired.

Captive slavery had a profound impact on the social, economic, and political development of the Southwest, both prior to and following its geopolitical absorption into the United States. Kinship components of human bondage proliferated to a larger degree in the Southwest—where racial prejudice was less pervasive among indigenous and Hispanic inhabitants—than in the South, where the spread of chattel slavery in place of indentured servitude had propagated increasing racism toward blacks since the early 1700s. This led to many misconceptions among easterners not familiar with the region.²⁰ The multifaceted institution of Indian slavery and the ethnically amalgamated society that resulted from it undermined New Mexico’s political advancement once it became a part of the United States, as evidenced in debates over issues of mixed-blood identity and involuntary servitude in both the territorial legislature and the U.S. Congress during the antebellum years.

The existence of captives and peons in New Mexico communities following the American conquest also trivialized the territory in the minds of many Protestant white easterners. While anti-Hispanic ethnocentrism and anti-Catholic nativism contributed to New Mexico’s stifled political aspirations during the years following the U.S. conquest, Indian slavery and debtor servitude—within the context of antebellum sectionalism—became another reason for the territory’s struggle to achieve statehood prior to the Civil War. New Mexico languished in territorial status for more than sixty years, in part because the continuing presence of involuntary servitude discouraged favorable action toward statehood on the part of Northern freesoilers and Radical Republicans.²¹ When social change did occur in the Southwest vis-à-vis the eradication of peonage and captive slavery during the Civil War era, it came not as a movement from within, but was instead driven by external political and ideological forces and backed by legislative and judicial doctrine that originated in evolving American ideas of republicanism and democracy.

The presence of two distinct systems of servitude, coupled with the enactment of discriminatory slave codes in the territorial legislature, sent a confusing message to Southerners and helped to encourage a Confederate invasion of New Mexico at the onset of the Civil War. After that war, with the manumission of African American slaves, Northern politicians expected to see a similar liberation of bound laborers in all parts of the country. In the remote Southwest, citizens ignored emancipation laws and retained many of their servants, contending that captives had nowhere to go if freed and that peons, who went into debt voluntarily, did not fall into the category of slaves. In so doing, Hispanos further exacerbated Anglo-Americans’ pessimistic opinions of the culturally and socially “backward” territory.

Most important, the existence of debt peonage and Indian captivity in New Mexico culture and society played a prominent role in the political debates that brought about America’s midcentury transition from slavery to free labor. With the implementation of popular sovereignty, peonage and captivity became critical factors in congressional deliberations over the future of slavery because of their entrenchment in the newly acquired Mexican Cession lands. Although most federal leaders soon realized that these institutions existed in the Southwest, Northerners and Southerners disagreed over whether or not debt peons and Indian captives were slaves.

Antebellum political discourse surrounding these unfamiliar systems of bondage ultimately informed federal policy during the Reconstruction era, helping to expand abolitionist legal doctrine to include peonage in addition to the “involuntary servitude” mentioned in the Thirteenth Amendment. During the fifteen years preceding the Civil War, the existence of debt bondage and captive servitude in New Mexico forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South. This recognition informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country. In the immediate postwar years, federal leaders realized that the constitutional ban on slavery failed to encompass all systems of servitude, due to varying definitions of voluntary and involuntary labor. Postwar investigations, along with President Johnson’s 1865 executive order banning Indian captivity and the 1867 congressional moratorium on peonage, broadened federal policy on coercive dependent labor. The subsequent implementation of debtor servitude and sharecropping in the rural South indicates that those efforts, while eventually effective in New Mexico, lacked nationwide resonance. Despite this shortcoming, federal deliberations over peonage and captive slavery prior to and during the Civil War had a significant impact on the future legal perception of compulsory labor in the United States. Indeed, early twentieth-century court proceedings in the Deep South cited New Mexico peonage cases as guiding precedent when formulating legal decisions about the status of African Americans bound to similar forms of unfree labor.²² The legal and political implications of debt peonage and Indian captivity in territorial New Mexico thus resonated for decades after the Thirteenth Amendment purportedly ended the practice of enslavement in the United States of America.