Borderlands of Slavery. William S. Kiser
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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