these captives, and restore them to their families and friends.”5 The president recognized that the borderlands region hosted a large population of enslaved captives and debt peons and pledged that the federal government would work to liberate them, in effect making an antislavery pronouncement that went unnoticed because it involved Indians and Mexicans rather than African Americans.
Figure 2. New Mexico and Utah territories, c. 1850s. Courtesy David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
Once the Southwest became a U.S. possession, regional forms of coerced servitude underwent a rapid politicization at the federal level. The issue of slavery in western territories had already plagued Congress for decades and would have a profound influence on sectional debates in the years leading up to the Civil War.6 The precedent for congressional regulation of slavery in newly acquired lands stemmed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which specifically prohibited “slavery and involuntary servitude” in any new territories north and west of the Ohio River.7 Questions regarding the geographic extension of slavery arose repeatedly as America continued to expand westward. The idea of territorial self-government, or “popular sovereignty”—which effectively sectionalized the slavery issue—arose with the creation of the Southwest Territory in 1790 and was tested multiple times over the ensuing decades, first with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; again with the 1820 Missouri Compromise; and finally with the vast domain that Mexico relinquished to the United States in 1848.8
The path to territorial status for New Mexico, which took almost three years, proved to be an object of great controversy and placed it at the forefront of a heated national discourse on slavery. The admission of New Mexico and Utah into the Union as either free or slave territories prompted numerous debates in Congress and exacerbated sectional turmoil between Northern and Southern lawmakers.9 Political leaders in both houses argued over whether or not slavery should be sanctioned in the Southwest, discussing the aptitude of the arid climate and mountainous topography for supporting involuntary servitude, the sentiments of the civilian inhabitants toward such an institution, and the validity of preexisting Mexican laws banning human bondage. In most of these exchanges, legislators failed to distinguish between slavery in the South, and captivity and peonage in the Southwest. One of the great peculiarities about debates on slavery in the Mexican Cession lands was that the topic of discussion—plantation-style chattel slavery—mattered very little to most of the recently naturalized Mexican Americans living there. Only a handful of U.S. politicians ever recognized this discrepancy and, when attempting to explain the true nature of regional systems of servitude to their peers, they often received laughter and jeers in response.10
Congressional debates on the regulation of slavery in New Mexico began even before the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.11 But when Mexico ceded California and New Mexico to the United States in 1848, the question of admitting those two provinces into the Union took on increased urgency. A year later it became evident that California would seek entry as a free-soil state, meaning that New Mexico must be admitted as either a slave state or territory in order to maintain sectional balance, a stipulation that traced its precedent to the Missouri Compromise.12 In a speech delivered on June 27, 1848, South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun outlined one critical consideration involving whether or not the Northern states, through their congressional representatives, should have the power to block Southern migrants from relocating to the new territories with their slave property.13 While the Compromise of 1850 offered a temporary solution to the problem, the 1857 Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford provided a more conclusive (and controversial) verdict on the future of slavery in the territories.14 The arguments undergirding the 1857 decision help to explain the eccentricities of the political debates over slavery in New Mexico that occurred between 1848 and 1850, and they provide a broader contextual framework in which to view and interpret southwestern slave systems.
One of the primary dilemmas addressed in the Dred Scott case involved the transport of slaves into U.S. territories. Senator John M. Berrien of Georgia, a former attorney general in Andrew Jackson’s administration, posed that question to Congress as early as 1850. “If the Constitution of the country recognizes my title to the slave within my State, beyond my State, and within a sovereign State that inhibits slavery, does it forbid, does it deny that title within a territory that is the common property of the United States?” he asked rhetorically.15 The senator was referring to an American legal principle known as the “right of transit,” wherein the constitutionally protected property rights of slaveholders enabled them to bring bondsmen into states that had abolished slavery, although by the 1850s most Northern states had stopped recognizing this purported right.16 Berrien’s inquiry and others regarding slavery in the territories would be answered in the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling.
Some scholars have criticized the Dred Scott case—a landmark victory for proslavery ideologues and a stunning defeat for the free-soil movement—as a failure of American jurisprudence and one of the earliest examples of overt judicial activism on the part of the U.S. Supreme Court.17 In a vote that transcended sectional lines, six of nine Supreme Court judges sided with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney in the opinion that Congress had no power to regulate slavery in the territories, nor did it have the ability to prohibit citizens from transporting their slave property into such regions.18 The constitutional interpretations and legal theories sustaining the Supreme Court decision could be traced back to the Northwest Ordinance.19 The Dred Scott case cemented lingering ambiguities on territorial jurisdiction to the benefit of proslavery interests, although its failure to address involuntary servitude more broadly left plenty of latitude for New Mexicans to interpret the ruling loosely in regards to captivity and peonage.
Through Dred Scott, the Supreme Court answered many of the questions that had arisen in Congress surrounding the admission of new states and territories in the Mexican Cession lands. Following the Mexican-American War, political leaders spent more than two years sparring over the regulation of slavery in the Southwest and debating whether or not territorial legislatures could legally sanction systems of involuntary servitude. If Congress admitted New Mexico and Utah without a clause protecting the peculiar institution, Southerners feared that, however economically and agriculturally impractical the implementation of plantation slavery in those regions might be, slaveholders who relocated there might be forced to surrender their human property upon arrival.
Most congressmen acknowledged the vast differences between state and territorial governments and, by extension, their capacity as federal lawmakers to legislate over them. Long before the Dred Scott case, Representative David Wilmot described states as independent and highly organized political entities while explaining that territories, on the other hand, “are unorganized, dependent communities, destitute of sovereignty, looking to us for political existence.”20 As quasi-colonial bodies, territories existed at the behest of the federal government; most high-ranking officials received their appointments from Washington bureaucrats, including governors, whom the president appointed directly. This placed territories in a subordinate political position, denigrating their inhabitants as veritable wards of the government and allowing for a higher degree of federal oversight.
Because each territory had only a single congressional representative who could do little more than give speeches when allowed the opportunity, the addition of a new territory did not disrupt sectional political balance to the same degree as did the admission of new states with multiple congressmen and full voting powers. With California receiving free-soil statehood status in 1850, Southerners were perturbed that two popular sovereignty territories (New Mexico and Utah) did not adequately compensate for the disruption of political representation in Congress. Senator Calhoun despaired the outcome of debates on California’s admission as a free-soil state and spoke vehemently against it, recognizing that no solution was likely to preserve national unity forever. From the moment the Northwest Ordinance became law in 1787, he lamented, the
