Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest (America in the Nineteenth Century) - Hardcover

Kiser, William S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812249038 ISBN 13: 9780812249033

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017

Synopsis

Winner of the 2018 Historical Society of New Mexico Gaspar Pérezde Villagrá Award

It is often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two coercive labor systems, debt peonage—in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor—and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondáge in the United States.

In Borderlands of Slavery, William S. Kiser presents a comprehensive history of debt peonage and Indian captivity in the territory of New Mexico after the Civil War. It begins in the early 1700s with the development of Indian slavery through slave raiding and fictive kinship. By the early 1800s, debt peonage had emerged as a secondary form of coerced servitude in the Southwest, augmenting Indian slavery to meet increasing demand for labor. While indigenous captivity has received considerable scholarly attention, the widespread practice of debt peonage has been largely ignored. Kiser makes the case that these two intertwined systems were of not just regional but also national importance and must be understood within the context of antebellum slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.

Kiser argues that the struggle over Indian captivity and debt peonage in the Southwest helped both to broaden the public understanding of forced servitude in post-Civil War America and to expand political and judicial philosophy regarding free labor in the reunified republic. Borderlands of Slavery emphasizes the lasting legacies of captivity and peonage in Southwestern culture and society as well as in the coercive African American labor regimes in the Jim Crow South that persevered into the early twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

William S. Kiser teaches history at Texas AandM University-San Antonio. He is author of Turmoil on the Rio Grande: The Territorial History of the Mesilla Valley, 1846-1865 and Dragoons in Apacheland: Conquest and Resistance in Southern New Mexico, 1846-1861.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue

In a January 1864 communication with Indian Commissioner William P. Dole, New Mexico Superintendent of Indian Affairs Michael Steck provided a concise description of Indian slavery that alluded to every fundamental aspect of the practice as it existed in the Southwest. Upon being taken into captivity, he explained, indigenous slaves "are usually adopted into the family, baptized, and brought up in the Catholic faith, and given the name of the owner's family, generally become faithful and trustworthy servants, and sometimes are married to the native New Mexicans." In a single breath the superintendent summarized—albeit somewhat superficially—Indian slavery as it existed not only in American times but in earlier Spanish and Mexican periods as well. Steck's previous decade of experience with New Mexico Indian affairs rendered him eminently qualified to comment upon the nature of captivity. His letter to Dole asserted the widespread cultural hybridity and concomitant transformation of human identity that emanated from captivity and dependency, practices that predated Steck's arrival in New Mexico by three centuries.

Human captivity was a critical component of indigenous warfare, labor, and social interaction in the Southwest long before the influx of European explorers and colonists that began in the sixteenth century. Complex trade networks linked nomadic people of the Plains with sedentary Puebloan inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande region through intricate commercial mechanisms, primarily involving commodities obtained through hunting, gathering, and cultivation. The exchange of human subjects, however, also formed an element of this culturally entrenched kin-based system, with adoption, dependency, and assimilation being important components. Intertribal warfare in the Southwest perpetuated a continuing captive trade, one based more on honor, community, gender roles, and kinship demands rather than on economic necessity. When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado reached northern New Mexico in 1540-41, he found a thoroughly enmeshed system of slavery emanating from warfare and raiding between sedentary Puebloan peoples and nomadic tribes occupying neighboring regions. Coronado himself enlisted a former Indian slave—a Pawnee held in servitude at the Tiguex Pueblo—as a guide for his expedition from the upper Rio Grande Valley to the South Plains.

With the arrival of the first Spanish imperialists—many of whom subverted Native inhabitants to servitude using the encomienda and repartimiento systems—multiethnic slavery institutions took on new importance in the Southwest and quickly burgeoned into a permanent fixture of community interaction. Political, military, and ecclesiastical support buttressed Euro-American influence over Indians in the Rio Grande Valley of north-central New Mexico during the early decades of colonization. Although European systems of coerced labor proliferated to a larger degree in Spain's South American and Central American outposts, where labor-intensive sugar plantations and silver mines required large numbers of workers, colonists representing the cross and crown carried the impetus for involuntary servitude into the more northerly provinces as well. When Spaniards colonized New Mexico, they established a predominantly agricultural and pastoral economy, one that required a liberal supply of manual labor to ensure optimum production. With demand for labor exceeding the number of available working-age men and women, colonists began forcing Indians into servitude, a phenomenon first manifested in the encomienda and later in captive enslavement. Whatever their sobriquets, such systems introduced a more profit-centered form of slavery into the Southwest.

The practice of forcibly removing indigenous women and children (who collectively were some two-thirds of all captives) from their tribes and subverting them to servitude entailed a widespread assimilation of Indians into Spanish culture—and vice versa—and often resulted in a transformation of identity on the part of the victim. In New Mexico, the encomienda system, which the Spanish crown formally inaugurated in 1503, legitimized the subjugation of Pueblo Indians. Through this legal apparatus, Spaniards manipulated power relations and allowed for Indians to be claimed by settlers and soldiers who, as masters, exposed them to Christianity and protected them from enemies. In return, indigenous subjects performed menial chores and acted as either domestic servants or shepherds in the field, depending on age and gender; they also paid tributary taxes in the form of corn and other foodstuffs that they cultivated throughout the year. Perceiving this to be a noble undertaking, colonists taught Puebloan subjects to speak the Castilian language while ecclesiastics forcefully instructed them in the tenets of Catholicism, believing that this so-called salvation warranted servitude as a means of remuneration.

Spanish officials not only condoned but even encouraged miscegenation between Indians and New World colonists, recognizing the social and religious benefits entailed in demographic incorporation and believing that the absorption of Native blood into Catholic lineages through the ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) would more readily foment spiritual conversion and civility. Although it continued to sanction the encomienda and remained supportive of settlers who held others in bondage, the crown insisted that such a system not be identified as "slavery" and banned settlers from holding Indians in that capacity. In 1542, the Spanish monarchy outlawed Indian slavery in the so-called New Laws, and leaders reiterated that decree in the 1681 Recopilación de Leyes (a nine-volume set of laws governing all aspects of colonial affairs), which prohibited the ransoming of captives but simultaneously and incongruously encouraged that noncompliant Indians be attacked and subverted. Even so, the redemption and exchange of captives occurred frequently throughout Spain's colonies and effectively counteracted any prohibitory edicts issued from across the Atlantic. Like English colonists in seventeenth-century Virginia, whose statutes-at-large mandated that "all Indians taken in warr [sic] be held and accounted slaves," New Mexicans easily circumvented antislavery royal cedulas by invoking the "just-war doctrine," enabling them to take captives during hostile encounters without fear of being reprimanded.

In 1638, Fray Juan de Prada criticized the encomienda as a system of persecution and ominously predicted that Indians, "oppressed with new impositions and annoyances," would lash back at the ecclesiastics who collected their tribute. Time would ultimately prove him correct. At the onset of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, an estimated one-half of the approximately two hundred Spanish households in New Mexico held Indians in varying forms of servility. The rebellion occurred because of not only cultural tensions between Natives and newcomers, but also the widespread use of Puebloan peoples as unwilling and uncompensated laborers. The successful Native insurgence ousted colonists from New Mexico for more than a decade and invoked a profound sense of fear among Euro-Americans, with the ripple effect being felt as far away as Seville.

Following Don Diego de Vargas's 1692 reconquista and subsequent reestablishment of Spanish rule in New Mexico, settlers came to better appreciate the limits to which the Pueblos could be subverted. Like the 1676 Bacon's Rebellion in colonial Virginia—which prompted a tactical shift in coerced labor from the predominantly white method of indentured servitude to a race-based chattel system of African slavery—the Pueblo Revolt altered slaving practices in the Southwest. By the early 1700s, enslavement of indigenous peoples began to shift toward nomadic and seminomadic Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes. Catholic missionaries actively contested the enslavement of Pueblo Indians, hoping instead to convert them to Christianity through conciliatory strategies. Long-standing rivalries between secular and clerical elements stemming from the Inquisition fanned the flames on these already firmly established hegemonic quarrels. Ecclesiastics emerged largely successful in their protestations, although Spanish captive raiding and violence toward slaves perpetuated a process of hostile reciprocation that did not dissipate until the mid-nineteenth century.

Predicated upon imperial interlopers exerting symbolic psychological power and physical control over Native peoples and the spaces they inhabited, the proliferation of Indian slavery in the Southwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the development of similar slave systems in the eastern part of the continent. On North America's Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and throughout its hinterlands, English and French settlers also subjected Indians to comparable forms of denigrating and exploitative bondage. Spaniards acted unintentionally in concert with rival European imperialists in promulgating new systems of involuntary servitude across much of the continent, and in so doing all three of those foreign nations influenced the indigenous forms of labor and exchange that Indian tribes practiced.

Indigenous captivity continued unhindered in part because of the material and symbolic wealth that slaves represented within frontier societies. Ideally, colonies existed for the benefit of the mother country, with settlers expected to produce tangible goods to augment the monarchy's riches. Whereas silver and gold could be shipped back to Spain, slaves represented a wholly different type of commodity. New Mexico's landholders found captives to be a convenient means of retaining a publicly visible form of wealth, a type of symbolic capital. Indian slaves served a purpose even greater than precious metals or specie to many New Mexicans in that they not only provided labor, but also could be exchanged as a sort of organic currency in a region where, until the late 1700s, hard coinage remained scarce. Spain attempted to impose strictures on colonial slave markets despite its ongoing inability to regulate commerce in human captives, enabling the colonies to retain capital and resources that the crown believed should belong solely to the mother country.

By the late 1700s, lower-class New Mexicans utilized the captive trade to repay their own debts and avoid falling into servitude themselves as peons. Slaves became a medium of exchange, with some people using Indian captives to purchase and barter for merchandise or other inanimate items, creating an economic dynamic that swapped living for nonliving commodities and that dehumanized those held in bondage. Oftentimes, individuals participated in raids on Indian camps and villages for the sole purpose of taking captives and selling them after returning to the Rio Grande settlements. With indigenous women and children in high demand, marauders could accrue handsome profits by providing captives to landowners, some of whom owned dozens of servants.

Catholic Church records indicate the extent to which Indian slavery flourished in the Southwest during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spanish priests frequently baptized Indian children, at which point they became accepted members of the adoptive families who initially served as their captors. New Mexico's clergymen were only too happy to oblige any such request, recognizing anointment in the holy faith as a symbolic means of achieving religious conversion and thereby stripping Indians of their spirituality, tribal identity, and previous kinship associations while simultaneously instilling and broadcasting the mystic power of the Church. Theological conversion served as a secondary form of enslavement, one that priests hoped would bind a person spiritually in addition to their preconceived physical bondage and geographic isolation from their tribe of origin, thus augmenting a psychological state of subjectivity.

Catholic priests recorded 3,237 Indian baptisms in New Mexico between 1700 and 1849, a calculation that doubtless fell short of the actual figure. Navajos had the most baptisms after Mexican independence, representing 37.5 percent of the total. Apaches comprised 24 percent, Utes represented 16 percent, and Comanches just 5 percent. In a brief five-year period from 1750 to 1754, the Church anointed more than three hundred abductees, indicating a drastic increase in captive taking during that period. A considerable percentage of all baptisms (1,171 of them, or roughly one-third) occurred in the Spanish settlements north of Santa Fe, with a relatively even distribution across other provincial regions as far south as Paso del Norte (modern Ciudad Juárez) on the Rio Grande.

Church registries from the Spanish colonial era are replete with individual examples of indigenous baptism, each entry giving voice to a human subject that would otherwise remain invisible in the historical record. Priests noted an approximate age—almost invariably under ten years—and assigned a new name to each Indian child, a common practice in slave cultures worldwide that served as a symbolic ascription of hybridized identity. Six Comanche children baptized at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1743 became, by virtue of receiving the sacrament, María la Luz, Polonia, Antonia, Josepha, Lorenza, and Cristobal. Through the simple and superficial act of Catholic conversion, these Indian youth immediately became less of an "other" within the adoptive society, as baptism and renaming marked the beginning of the cultural assimilation process. Typically, several captives would be baptized in one day, an indication that they had been taken from their tribe during a single slave raid. Although most ceremonies involved only a small number of children, mass baptisms did occasionally occur. Fray Manuel Sopeña baptized twenty-two Apache children at Santa Clara in 1743; Fray Otero did the same with nineteen Apaches at Laguna Pueblo that year; and Fray Manuel Zambrano anointed an additional eleven Indian children in one ceremony on August 27, 1759, at Santa Fe.

More than three thousand Indian baptisms in New Mexico resulted in a corresponding 3,302 mixed-ethnicity childbirths. The number of slave baptisms and illicit conceptions through unsanctified exogamous unions remained relatively constant over a period of 150 years and had not begun to wane even after the 1846 American conquest. The frequency of childbearing among captive Indian women, not only in New Mexico but throughout the colonial New World, indicated the extent to which the Spanish—and later the Mexicans—practiced miscegenation as a method for assimilating indigenous peoples. Such intimate relations directly contradicted the teachings of Catholicism regarding sexuality but nonetheless occurred with noticeable regularity. The progeny that resulted from such unions bound women to their captors through their shared offspring and, in some instances, also raised the societal status of the mother. Most mixed-blood children spent their entire lives in the Spanish settlements, giving rise to the racial and ethnic castes that emanated from interethnic relationships between European masters and Indian slaves.

Very few baptized...

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0812249038
• ISBN 13: 9780812249033
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 280