The Crisis Over Slavery, 1848–1860 5
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ch13 2/15/02 4:00 PM Page 2 CHAPTER The Crisis over Slavery, 13 1848–1860 CHAPTER OUTLINE Regional Economies and Conflicts Shifting Collective Identities The Paradox of Southern Political Power The Deepening Conflict over Slavery Conclusion Sites to Visit For Further Reading I T.W. Wood, Market Woman, 1858. Wood’s portrait depicts an African American woman going about one of her daily chores—going to market. ch13 2/15/02 4:00 PM Page 3 N JANUARY 24, 1848, HENRY WILLIAM BIGLER TOOK A BREAK FROM BUILDING A sawmill for John Sutter in California’s Sacramento Valley and penned in his Opocket diary, “This day some kind of mettle was found … that looks like goald.” GOLD! News of the discovery at Sutter’s mill spread like wildfire. By 1849, immigrants from all over the world and migrants from all over the United States had begun to pour into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. They had journeyed west across the mountains, from the tenements of New York City and the great plantations of Mississippi; north from Mexico; and over the oceans, from western Europe, China, and South America. Equipping themselves with the simple tools of placer (surface) mining, the Forty-Niners began to dig for buried treasure, determined to stake a claim and make a for- tune. And so they sang, I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys, I’ll drain the rivers dry, A pocket full of rocks bring home, So brothers, don’t you cry! Placer mining could be done cheaply by individuals or by small groups of people rotating tasks, implying a rough equality among those who ventured so hopefully to what the Chinese called Gold Mountain. Yet in an effort to advance their own interests, European American settlers quickly set about preserving old social hierarchies and creating new ones. According to the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War, the United States Chinese and European American miners pan for acquired by conquest a vast expanse of land stretching from the gold in the Auburn Ravine in California in 1852. plains of Texas to the deserts of the Southwest and the fertile val- leys of California, 529,189 square miles called the Mexican Cession. In addition to the land, the nation added to its population thousands of Mexicans and Indians (in California alone, 13,000 of the former and 100,000 of the latter). Although the treaty guaranteed American citizenship rights to Mexicans, they found themselves vulnerable to violence and land dispossession perpetrated by the growing Euro- pean American majority (90,000 in-migrants resided in the state in 1850). Delegates to Cali- fornia’s constitutional convention in 1849 stipulated that only white Californios (descendants of the original Spanish colonists) were entitled to vote, over the objection of the 8 Cali- fornios among the 48 delegates in attendance. The majority of delegates also approved a measure prohibiting Indians and blacks from testifying against white people in court. California was located a continent away from the plantation South, and few settlers contemplated growing cotton in the region. Nevertheless, the Compromise of 1850, which brought California into the Union as a free (that is, nonslave) state, inflamed tensions between the North and South. Southern planters deeply resented the fact that the land they 3 ch13 2/15/02 4:00 PM Page 4 4 PART 5 • DISUNION AND REUNION had fought to conquer in the Mexican War would be off-limits to the slave system. For their part, northern abolitionists expressed outrage over the Fugitive Slave Law, a provision of the compromise mandating that runaway slaves who found their way north to freedom be arrested and returned to their southern masters. Moreover, despite California’s status as a free state, the principle of free labor seemed far from secure in that area of the country. To mine and cultivate the land, California’s European Americans experimented with a variety of labor systems. In 1850 the state enacted a law with the misleading title “An Act for the Government and Protection of the Indians,” which provided for the indenture or apprenticeship of Indian children to white men for indeterminate periods of time. The law also allowed for the hiring out, to the highest bidder, of adult Indians deemed guilty of vagrancy. Indians in the region belonged to the Uto- Aztecan, Hokan, Penutian, Yukian, and Athabascan language families. Nevertheless, European Americans ignored these dis- tinctions and called all Indians by the contemptuous term Diggers, denouncing them as lazy and uncivilized, and denied them the rights accorded American citizens. The California black population more than doubled between 1850 and 1852 (from 692 to 2206) and included free people of color, slave runaways, and people held against their will by men such as Thomas Shearon, a quartz-mining entrepreneur from Nashville, Tennessee. Shearon defied the state Constitution by deploying a slave labor force in the vicinity of San Francisco. Cali- fornia’s own Fugitive Slave Law of 1852 decreed that regardless of his or her current status, a black person who had entered the state as a slave and thereafter attempted to remain on free soil “shall be held and deemed a fugitive from labor.” That year, three African American gold miners, Robert Perkins, Carter Perkins, and Sandy Perkins, all former slaves who had been freed by their owner, were arrested and ordered reenslaved in their native Mississippi. I This pair of cartoons, titled “What We Want in California,” Chinese immigrants to California entered the country suggests that migrants from the East hoped to reestablish a organized in companies, or district associations, indebted to middle-class ideal in their new home. Above, an Indian family merchants for their transportation and bound to work for an watches the arrival of a train from New York. Below, a European American family relaxes in their well-appointed parlor. employer until the debt was repaid. Fearing competition from cheap labor, alarmed European Americans labeled these Asian workers “coolies” (i.e., enslaved laborers). By 1852, the nearly 20,000 Chinese in California (almost all of them men) had been pushed out of mining as a result of the discriminatory Foreign Miners Tax, a measure leveled with special force against both Mexicans and Chinese. During the Gold Rush years of 1848 to 1859, various cultural groups were thrown into close proximity to each other. Men from Belgium, France, Germany, Scotland, Chile, and Long Island learned to appreciate flour and corn tortillas (tortillas de harina and tortillas de maiz) and beef cooked in chili, staples of the Mexican diet. The disproportionate num- ber of men permitted small numbers of women to challenge European American gen- der conventions. A gold miner might take a break from washing his clothes, straighten his aching back, and watch a Mexican woman and her daughter, well mounted on their horses, rounding up a herd of near-wild cattle. Ah-Choi, a Chi- nese immigrant woman, earned a tidy sum running a brothel that catered to gold ch13 2/15/02 4:00 PM Page 5 CHAPTER 13 • THE CRISIS OVER SLAVERY, 1848–1860 5 miners. Biddy Mason, an enslaved woman, successfully sued for her freedom and became the first African American homesteader in Los Angeles. In the decade before the Civil War, increasing numbers of Americans entered into a heated national debate over the relationship between citizenship and economic development. To extract the riches from the land—whether bolls of cotton or fistfuls of gold dust, barrels of wheat or buckets of rice—workers needed to be organized and their legal rights (and liabili- ties) defined. Economic transformation and territorial conquest aggravated this debate, which was not always a civil one. While some Americans wrote and agitated on the subject of slavery, others took up arms in the name of either liberty or bondage. All over the nation, in the pages of the popular press, on the streets of Boston, in the cotton fields of Alabama, and in the courts of California, Americans gradually united around a radical proposition: that the ques- tion of whether human beings could be held as private property would brook no compromise. Regional Economies and Conflicts t is tempting to view the 1850s with an eye toward the impending conflagration of 1861. However, in the early 1850s, few Americans could have anticipated the Civil War. At mid- Icentury the United States amounted to a collection of regional economies, each one a prod- uct of a distinctive physical landscape and a distinctive mix of peoples, characterized by a variety of labor systems. New forms of transportation (such as railroads), manufacturing (the fac- tory system), and machines (farm implements) gave shape to an emerging national economy and sharpened patterns of regional economic specialization. In the 1850s, the development of these regional economies pointed in two directions: one toward national growth and economic integration, as different sections of the country became more interdependent; and the other toward social and political conflict, as Ameri- cans wrestled with the meaning of slavery in a rapidly changing society. Native American Economies Transformed On the Plains, Indians confronted wrenching transformations in their way of life. Forced to relocate from the Southeast to present-day Oklahoma, the Five Southern (“Civilized”) Tribes, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole, grappled with the task of rebuild- ing their political institutions. By the 1850s the Cherokees had established a new capital at Tale- quah, along with public schools. They published a Cherokee newspaper (the Advocate) and created a flourishing print culture in their own language. To the north and west of Indian Territory, nomadic tribes such as the Sioux, Kiowahs, and Arapahos exploited the horse, which had been introduced by Europeans in the South- west in the seventeenth century.