and servants, Benedict reasoned that a patrón could only “recover his debt from his servant or peon, as in the ordinary way from another debtor.”110 Although this opinion highlighted the system of peonage more so than that of chattel slavery, it nonetheless defined both institutions as involuntary servitude. Benedict’s comments relative to Mexico’s peon regulations applied to all forms of coerced labor, and he reaffirmed that slavery had been outlawed multiple times through the mandates of both Spain and Mexico. Of all the commentary on Mexico’s slavery laws, however, a German-born doctor, Adolph Wislizenus, provided the most concise explanation. Describing the system of debt peonage that he encountered almost everywhere he went, Wislizenus wrote that “this actual slavery exists throughout Mexico, in spite of its liberal constitution; and, as long as this contradiction is not abolished, the declarations of the Mexican press against slavery in the United States must appear as hypocritical cant.”111
While remaining mostly ambivalent toward chattel slavery—viewing it through the tunnel vision of political expediency rather than economic practicality or moral standing—many inhabitants of New Mexico vehemently defended their right to retain captives and peons. Superintendent of Indian Affairs James S. Calhoun noticed in 1850 that the recent transformation in political sovereignty and nationality had little effect on New Mexicans when it came to their outlook on Indian slavery and debt bondage. “They yet think that the right to buy and sell captives is perfect, and that no human power can disturb that right,” he wrote, explaining that “trading in captives has been so long tolerated in this territory, that it has ceased to be regarded as wrong.”112 Although Calhoun referred to Indian servants, his allusion to exchanging human property extended to peons as well. Widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage continued among federal lawmakers. As late as January 1861, with the first shots of the Civil War just weeks away, those in the East remained perplexed as to New Mexico’s stance on slavery. Congressional leaders could not discern the true sentiments of the people, having been bombarded with innumerable “contradictory and self-stultifying reports” from territorial residents.113
Even leading territorial officials did not quite understand the actual prevailing sentiment on slavery in the Southwest. Daniel Webster asked Hugh Smith to explain “what the fact is, at the present time, respecting the existence of slavery in New Mexico.”114 The response contradicted Governor Calhoun’s earlier claim that local residents retained slave labor. Smith assured Webster that New Mexico “is a free territory” and that he knew of no persons there “who are treated as slaves,” with the exception of a few black men accompanying military officers and other temporary residents. “The strongest feeling against slavery universally prevails throughout the whole territory,” he concluded in a rather simplistic analysis, carefully avoiding any mention of the peons and captives that his Hispano constituents held and, with political acumen, deflecting attention toward chattel slavery.115
Still others believed that Hispanics would reject the implementation of chattel slavery on racial pretenses. While serving as Polk’s secretary of state during the Mexican-American War, James Buchanan—who proclaimed in 1826 that slavery constituted “a great political and a great moral evil” from which the nation might never recover—foresaw the impending crisis that would follow annexation of Mexican territory. In 1847, he stated that it would be unlikely for Hispanos to “reestablish slavery” after banning the institution years earlier vis-à-vis the three Mexican statutes. Buchanan’s reasoning, however, revolved around a personal prejudicial belief that Nuevomexicanos were themselves “a colored population,” and he betrayed his own ethnocentrism when writing that “among them the negro does not socially belong to a degraded race.”116 In other words, Buchanan saw both Hispanics and African Americans as racially and socially inferior and did not believe that two such groups could interact on a civilized level without the paternalistic oversight of white men.117
According to a New York editorialist, New Mexico’s Hispanic population deserved little if any blame for either pro-or antislavery movements in the territory, and regional agitation over the issue could be attributed to the implanted federal officials who propagated such political maneuverings.118 In an attempt to counter local proclamations in favor of slavery and to encourage citizens to oppose human bondage, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society published a lengthy statement and distributed it among territorial residents. Provocatively entitled Address to the Inhabitants of New Mexico and California … on the Social and Political Evils of Slavery, the pamphlet implored Hispanos to reject the introduction of a “detestable institution” into their territory. Heedless of the fact that their audience had just recently been naturalized as American citizens and that many of them continued to identify with their former nation, the abolitionist authors declared that “Patriotism and Christian benevolence” must be the guiding lights for them in their resistance to slavery. The booklet urged that they “tolerate no servile caste kept in ignorance and degradation” and claimed that the society’s members would rather see New Mexico and California “forever lost” to another country than allow them to “be converted by the American people into a region of ignorance, vice, misery, and degradation by the establishment of human bondage.”119 Ironically, involuntary servitude had existed for generations in the area and had indeed propagated a discernible “servile caste” but, due to the swarthy efforts of New Mexicans, those institutions remained mysterious to many Americans. The failure of the proclamation to condemn peonage and captivity suggests that the organization was halfhearted in its pursuit of abolition and indicates that a political and sectional intent may have superseded any pietistic one. Had the society’s members sought unequivocal universal emancipation on moral pretenses, they might have included peons and captives in their crusade for slave liberation.
United States military authorities in Santa Fe attempted to suppress the Anti-Slavery Society’s potentially incendiary edict by preventing dissemination of the organization’s propaganda. Such maneuvering, however, failed in its intended effect because the editor of Santa Fe’s newspaper, William G. Kephart, served as an agent for the organization and had been dispatched to New Mexico with orders to “show the inhabitants the advantages of free over slave labor.”120 He used the newspaper as a platform to broadcast an abolitionist agenda and conspired to enlist Catholic priests to his cause, noting that with ecclesiastical aide “and God’s approbation of the work,” his success would be ensured.121 The Protestant missionary lodged malicious verbal assaults “of the rankest character” against any Anglo-American who brought slaves into the territory. Judge Spruce M. Baird, a native Texan, avowed Southerner, and victim of Kephart’s antislavery rhetoric, complained that his adversary repeatedly used the newspaper as an outlet for “his abolition doctrines.”122
Kephart’s abolitionism in New Mexico caught the attention of many congressional lawmakers, some of whom feared that he might provoke violence in the same manner that agitation over slavery brought turmoil to Kansas in 1854. Richard H. Weightman, the territory’s delegate to Congress and a personal rival of Kephart, publicly attacked his foe and accused him of using the “garb of a missionary” to conceal his machinations under a disingenuous veil of morality.123 Deeply concerned about the situation, Weightman belittled antislavery activists as conspirators who hoped to incite “treason and rebellion” against the federal government and assured Congress that Kephart’s efforts to bring New Mexico’s people to their knees over slavery had been in vain. The society’s pamphlet was circulated throughout New Mexico, with copies printed in both English and Spanish, in order to urge the people “to set up an independent government unless exempted from the curse of slavery.” Ultimately, the abolitionist undertaking failed to sway public sentiment, in part because Kephart did not speak Spanish himself and showed disdain toward the Hispanic culture. Despite the society’s control of the only territorial newspaper and its distribution of abolitionist ideas, “no excitement took place in New Mexico,” Weightman wrote with undisguised relief.124
Kephart’s stay in Santa Fe lasted less than three years; with his newspaper nearing bankruptcy and personal expenditures mounting, he had
