were to be freed upon the death of their masters, and babies of slaves were to be free at birth. That next year Spanish St. Louis, according to census data, reported that 66 Indian slaves were being held in that city, mostly women and children. Obviously, the King’s law stopped at the gates of the city, with all the area claimed by Spain from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains being untouched by the Spanish edict.18
On September 15, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero emancipated all slaves in Mexico. A law in April 1830, prohibited the introduction of slaves into Spanish Texas. Needless to say, Mexican frontiersmen in Coahuila, and Tejanos (Mexicans in Texas) and Anglo-Americans in Texas protested these laws and did their best to evade the law’s intentions.19 The law was not enforced in Texas. As mentioned before (see endnote 9), 25% of the population of Texas prior to 1836 consisted of African slaves.
Although slavery had been legally abolished in New Mexico while a province of Mexico, in actuality, slavery still persisted after 1850 when New Mexico acquired US territorial status. In 1858, a proslavery faction of the territory passed a slave code known as the Otero Slave Code (named for Miguel Antonio Otero, a delegate in Congress from New Mexico), and approved by Governor Abraham Rencher on February 3, 1859. This slave code was similar to those of the southern confederate states, including provisions requiring runaway servants to be arrested, fines and punishments for slaves violating curfews, and imprisonment for any person found guilty of giving a slave a sword or any firearm. This slave code specifically affirmed “that it in no way applied to peonage and that the word ‘slave’ designated only a member of the African race.”20
When, in 1860, the New Mexico legislature attempted to extend the Otero Code to male and female Indians, the governor vetoed the bill. The governor explained his action by saying: “The act apparently is founded on the supposition that the Indians acquired from the savage tribes were slaves; which is not the case; neither is it in the power of the legislature to make them such … . The normal or native condition of our Indian tribes is that of freedom and by our laws they cannot be made slaves either by conquest or purchase. We may hold them as captives or peons but not as slaves.”21 The governor, like most New Mexican citizens who held peons and captives, was in denial that their form of peonage or “enforced servitude of savages” was not a form of slavery. Only African slavery deserved that epitaph.
Indian slavery in New Mexico, intertwined as it was with peonage and kinship, took several decades to die. One example of this would be the ineffectiveness of President Andrew Johnson’s directive of June 1865 declaring that slavery in the territory of New Mexico was in violation of “the rights of Indians” and instructing his subordinates to participate in “an effective suppression of the practice.”22 The president’s letter elicited a response from Felipe Delgado, New Mexico’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To Commissioner of Indian Affairs, William Dole, he argued that:
It is true that there are among the citizens of this country a large number of Indian captives … but the object in purchasing them has not been to reduce them to slavery, but rather from a Christian piety on the part of the whites to obtain them in order to instruct and educate them in Civilization. … This has been the practice in this country for the last century and a half and the result arising from it has been to the captives, favorable, humane, and satisfactory.23
Like an earlier generation of New Mexicans, the post-Civil War cohort denied that their form of servitude was slavery. It was simply a historical and customary way of extending Spain’s original civilizing mission. This was the dominant “local” view until the early 1880s, and Indian slavery lasted in New Mexico well into the twentieth century.24
About two months after Johnson’s declaration a Hopi woman staggered into Fort Wingate. She said that she and her daughter had been attacked on the road from Cubero to Fort Wingate, and that she had been beaten and battered and her daughter kidnapped. She knew that some men in Cubero held her daughter, and she requested aid from the US military in retrieving her child. The military caught up with the man who had taken her daughter, but he protested that “he had assumed a debt which the woman contracted” and had initially taken both the woman and child as security or collateral against the debt. The matter was dropped. The merger of peonage and slavery was the way the Hopi woman and child had become servile workers in the home of the man from Cubero. Involuntary servitude was the norm and American reformers could not eliminate debt bondage, let alone slavery.25
In the first half of the nineteenth century, from California, through New Mexico, to Texas, gente de razón (literally “people of reason”), that is, people of any race whose way of life was Hispanic and not Indian, maintained the Spanish practice of taking, purchasing, and ransoming Indian captives. These captives, so-called gente sin razón (“people without reason”), became involuntary members of Mexican households. Rarely called esclavos or slaves because they were legally and theoretically free, the bondage was always justified on the grounds that these pagans were baptized and received the blessings of Christianity.26
In 1927, Amado Chaves recalled the traditions of his family of frontiersmen by saying that:
To get Indian girls to work for you all you had to do was organize a campaign against the Navajoes or Utes or Apaches and kill all the men you could and bring captive the children. They were yours … . Many of the rich people who did not have the nerve to go into campaigns would buy Indian girls.27
If the Indian servants were fortunate enough to work off their ransom or become acculturated adults, they might be released from their masters and mistresses. But as “detribalized” peoples they found themselves in between Indian and non-Indian societies, and on the bottom perch.
Obviously, many of the gente sin razón did not view peonage and the kidnapping of their children as a blessing of civilization. In 1852, Armijo, a Navajo headman from Chuska, voiced to the regional Indian agent the feelings of the Diné: “My people are all crying in the same way. Three of our chiefs now sitting before you mourn for their children, who have been taken from their homes by the Mexicans. More than 200 of our children have been carried off; and we know not where they are … . My people are yet crying for the children they have lost. Is it American justice that we must give up everything and receive nothing?”28
Historian L. R. Bailey has coined a term for this process of assimilating alien individuals. He uses the rather formidable word transculturalization to describe “the process whereby individuals under a variety of circumstances are temporarily or permanently detached from one group, enter the web of social relations that constitute another society, and come under the influence of its customs, ideas, and values to a greater or lesser degree.”29 This process is a universal one, and applies equally to the white captives that become “Indianized,” such as the Oatman sisters under the Mojave (see Chapter 6), non-Athapascans (white or Indian) who became members of Navajo or Apache “alien clans,” or Native Americans who became acculturated peons of their Spanish and Mexican masters. It is in this context that Indian slavery, involuntary servitude, and the slave trade in the American Southwest must be understood.
The foundation for Indian slavery in the borderlands was obviously a rigorous slave trade that continued throughout the Spanish colonial era and into the nineteenth century. In the 1620s and 1630s New Mexicans looked eastward and traded iron knives, cattle, and sheep for plains products, including bison hides, robes, and Apache slaves. Backed up by a provincial government that claimed the Apaches were a menace, by the 1640s most Spanish households in New Mexico possessed Quiviran, Ute, or Apache slaves. In the early 1660s 40 colonists and 800 Pueblo Indians under the direction of the Governor of New Mexico brought over 70 captives to Santa Fé. Those who were not sold locally were sent to work the silver mines of Nueva Vizcaya (today’s Chihuahua and Durango in northern Mexico).30
When the Plains
