most easterners, whose prejudices drove them to abhor not just African Americans, but also the Indians and mixed-blood mestizos of the Southwest.
Setting aside the geographical and racial arguments against human bondage, Representative Marsh invoked the popular abolitionist claim of morality, positing that only the human conscience could truly check the spread of slavery. “Slavery is everywhere profitable, under the management of a prudent master,” Marsh proclaimed, and mere geographic or climatic concerns could therefore never prevent its spread entirely. Commending the abolition of slavery in some New England states, he delivered a pious diatribe to his Southern opponents, claiming that slavery in the North “was abolished, not because it was contrary to the economical law of profit and loss, but because our fathers held it … to be contrary to the law of conscience and of God.”64 Horace Mann, a Massachusetts representative, shared this theological tenet of abolitionism; insisting that the existence of slavery was strictly a matter of conscience, he provocatively declared that “wherever the wicked passions of the human heart can go, there slavery can go.”65 Building upon this rationale, Senator Smith pronounced that the only real obstacle to chattel slavery in New Mexico “results from principles and jurisprudence acknowledged by the whole civilized world.”66 Thus, from the ideological standpoint of staunch abolitionists, the issue of slavery in newly acquired territories should be viewed as a matter of ethics and humanity rather than economics or legality.
Abolitionists and free-soilers echoed a wide range of Northerners in their general assertion that chattel slavery could not exist in New Mexico or any other southwestern territories. As one army lieutenant noted in 1846, peonage predominated throughout New Mexico, and the negligible profits to be gained from yet another form of involuntary servitude did not justify “the existence of negro slavery.”67 Senator Smith reiterated this supply-anddemand concept when telling his colleagues that slavery could never “be advantageously used in competition with the cheap peon labor of New Mexico,” and any Southerner venturing into New Mexico would therefore find it most economical to simply sell his plantation slaves and “employ the native labor of that country.”68 Thus some easterners—albeit a minority—rightly connected the debate on slavery in the territories to the preexistence of peonage in those regions and the comparatively minimal demand for manual labor in a localized subsistence economy.
Despite their moral aversion to slavery in New Mexico, antebellum abolitionists rarely demanded that peonage or Indian captivity be banned there. This anomalous oversight suggests that, while some Americans recognized these two systems at face value as forms of human bondage, most did not view them with the same abhorrence as they did black slavery. Many easterners had personally witnessed Southern slavery, been exposed to both pro-and antislavery rhetoric and propaganda, and had read the heartrending slave narratives that began to appear in the 1830s, but they had never been offered a firsthand glimpse of peonage and captivity in the western territories, nor did any published accounts from Indian slaves or Hispanic peons exist.69 Observers reported what they saw for publication in newspapers, pamphlets, and books, although in so doing they merely condemned without acting. That is, most travelers were passive witnesses who criticized the evils of slavery not so much to elicit direct action against the system, but rather to assert their own morality in appeasement of conscience.70 This was precisely the disingenuous position that Horace Greeley accused Daniel Webster of taking during the debates over slavery in the territories.
The prevailing ignorance of southwestern slave systems among easterners also emanated from strong Anglo-American prejudices against Hispanics and Indians, whose racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds made them seem different and strange to newcomers. A piece appearing in the Santa Fe Weekly Gazette took a sardonic tone intended to capture the attention of seemingly oblivious Northern free-soilers and antislavery Whigs. “There is in this country a state of things existing which is much more worthy of the efforts of your philanthropists, your Abolitionists, and your nigger-loving whites, than the question of slavery,” the article read, “and that is the fact that there are thousands … of Indian women and children who have been stolen from their families and sold into slavery, worse than Southern Slavery.”71 The author of the letter clearly intended to ruffle some feathers by pointing out the hypocrisy of certain antislavery groups.
Further evidence of such prejudices surfaced in military reports as well. A medical officer named J. F. Hammond believed that New Mexico’s servile population lacked any “spark of culture,” evincing instead a “painful combination of astuteness with impotency.”72 His observations reflected a common idealistic mentality during an era when many Americans perceived Indians and Hispanos on the western frontier as socially and culturally flawed, essentially nothing more than an impediment to the nation’s providential imperialistic expansion and a scourge upon more pure Euro-American bloodlines. Even Northern abolitionists who abhorred chattel slavery and disseminated a rhetoric of morality retained strong racial prejudices toward the very same peoples whose plight for freedom they espoused, as evidenced by the fact that many antislavery activists supported the African colonization movement. Hammond’s viewpoint coincided with that of many others—Northern and Southern alike—who believed Hispanics and Indians to be intellectually inferior and culturally incompatible with the divine scheme of Manifest Destiny.73 For these reasons, some easterners completely overlooked the existence of peonage and Indian slavery in New Mexico and often failed to even view them as forms of coercive labor.
The widely acknowledged impracticality of chattel slavery in the western territories did little to deter Southerners in their insistence that the institution be extended there in ideology if not in practice. Plantation-style agriculture never gained a foothold in the Southwest, but the practice of holding humans in servile bondage continued to enjoy the wholehearted ideological support of Southerners from the moment the territory fell under the dominion of the United States. More than anything else, black slavery was a nonstarter in New Mexico because hacendados and political elites already possessed sufficient means for oppressing indigent citizens and captive Indians into a condition of permanent servitude and simply did not need an additional labor force.74 Seemingly undeterred by Northern onslaughts, proslavery interests fought to preserve New Mexico’s peculiar institution in any form possible, endeavoring to make it a slave territory under the guises of peonage and captivity if nothing else.
Systems of involuntary servitude existed in the Southwest long before the installation of western capitalism and constitutional principles. Throughout the colonial period, New Mexico’s social structure resembled that of the American South in that a small, land-rich contingent of the inhabitants were a veritable provincial aristocracy. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, a Union soldier noticed that only a few hundred “rich Mexicans” lived in the territory.75 Although they represented a small percentage of the total population, these ricos reigned supreme over territorial affairs and controlled vast tracts of land, oftentimes traceable to Spanish and Mexican land grants. To develop and maintain the arable portions of these lands and to raise livestock on the grassy hillsides, patrones employed the traditional methods of debt peonage and Indian slavery.76 Small villages frequently appeared within the boundaries of these large landholdings, with laboring peons as the principal occupants. On vast pastoral ranges, lower-class peon laborers “made little villages around the ground of the lord of these estates,” a practice that often segregated the lower classes of peons from the families of the landed gentry.77
James Josiah Webb, a merchant and trader on the Santa Fe Trail, noted in his memoirs that by the time he arrived in the province in the early 1840s peonage “was a fixed institution.”78 When General Kearny occupied New Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the temporary legal code that he implemented implicitly acknowledged the existence of slavery by mandating that only “free male citizens” would be able to vote in the new territory.79 Touring New Mexico a decade later, United States Attorney William Davis observed that debtor servitude remained the predominant form of labor, having originated during the Spanish colonial era and being recently codified in a territorial statute.80 When debating the slavery
