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In the 1850s, Los Angeles was a dusty outpost in the sparsely settled southern half of the young state of California. Amidst all of the typical trappings of the old West \u2014 a familiar litany thanks to the motion picture industry that would emerge there more than half a century later \u2014 something peculiar was going on, something few contemporary Californians know about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLos Angeles had its slave mart,\u201d the lawyer Horace Bellwrote in his memoirs. \u201cOnly the slave at Los Angeles was sold fifty two times a year as long as he lived, which did not generally exceed one, two, or three years.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bell is describing California\u2019s system of Indian \u201capprenticeship,\u201d which legalized the de-facto enslavement of Indigenous children and adults convicted of a crime from 1850 to 1863. As Bell\u2019s account suggests, it was a huge factor in the genocide of California\u2019s Indigenous people, whose population declined from about 150,000 in 1845 to 30,000 in 1870. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The apprenticeship system is just one form of unfree labor, either involuntary or without pay, thathelped build California in the early days of its statehood. Despite being admitted to the Union as a free state, in the 1850s California was home to enslaved Black people toiling in bondage. Chinese, Sonoran, Chilean, and Hawaiian laborers were brought over under the auspices of debt peonage; and a significant number of Chinese women were enslaved in the sex trade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This history does not easily fit with California\u2019s self conception as one of \u201cthe freest places in America,\u201d says Stacey Smith, a professor of history at Oregon State University and author of Freedom\u2019s Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. <\/em>Not only does an honest reckoning with this history begin to honor and speak truth about the people who were brutally victimized as part of California\u2019s development, it also provides a more accurate understanding of the forces that shaped the state and the nation during one of its most challenging moments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The unfree labor landscape of early American California helps illustrate California\u2019s complex role in the lead-up to the Civil War, blurring overly-simplistic North\/South, free\/slave binaries. It\u2019s key to understanding how and why California lawmakers spearheaded the Chinese Exclusion Act, America\u2019s first immigration restriction targeting a specific nationality, and its most baldly racist. Starting from these historical episodes, it becomes easier to make sense of explicitly racist state-level policies on housing<\/a>, immigration<\/a>, and other issues from the more recent past.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere is a tendency to really underplay and ignore that broader history of labor exploitation, racism and exclusion,\u201d Smith says. \u201cIt\u2019s important to think of California as less exceptional and more like the rest of the nation than we have heretofore understood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n California\u2019s status as a free state was by no means a foregone conclusion. During the Gold Rush, white Southerners made up 36 percent of California\u2019s American-born population. This group was a formidable voting bloc at the state\u2019s 1849 Constitutional Convention and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Delegates at the Constitutional Convention \u201cwanted California to receive statehood by any means,\u201d says Taylor Bythewood-Porter, a curator at the California African American Museum who worked on the 2018 exhibition, \u201cCalifornia Bound: Slavery on the New Frontier, 1848-1865.\u201d Delegates were thinking, \u201cWe need everything that comes with being a state. We need military help. We need money. If we say that we want to be a slave state, that would provoke controversy, and it would delay statehood.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the convention, after a contentious debate, delegates also decided not to give Indigenous people the right to vote, a move that would pave the way for their enslavement. A proposal to ban Black people from the state, inspired by the one Oregon Country adopted<\/a> in 1844, was also considered but did not pass. In fact, the mastermind behind that law, Peter Burnett, was California\u2019s first civilian American governor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Once statehood was granted in September 1850, California lawmakers had a problem. While only a small group of Southerners had brought their slaves with them to the gold fields (approximately 500 enslaved Black people were brought here, Smith estimates), they were supported by a larger community of pro-slavery voters, legislators, and jurists who were willing to fight for their fellows\u2019 \u201cproperty rights.\u201d Some judges and elected officials argued that the state constitution was a \u201cdeclaration of principle,\u201d and did not actually free enslaved people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was in this climate that California enacted a fugitive slave law in 1852, which was continuously extended until 1855. It stated that enslaved Black people who were brought to California before it was a state remained the rightful property of their slaver, and could be returned if they escaped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This meant that through the first half of the 1850s, enslaved Black people from the South continued to labor in bondage on California\u2019s free soil. Some of these enslaved people lived and worked in small, isolated, self-policed enclaves of Southerners. In other cases, slavers would lease enslaved people to work in mines or hotels, collecting the profits back home in Dixie. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The fiercest opposition to these arrangements often came not from committed abolitionists, but from white miners who resented the unfair competition. \u201cSome of the biggest challenges to the slaveholding enclaves come from these white miners who say, \u2018We\u2019re not here to free the slaves, we just don\u2019t want them competing with us,\u2019\u201d Smith says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Gradually, communities of free Black people began forming, which would pool resources to buy the freedom of enslaved people, or fight legal battles on their behalf. Free Black people in San Francisco helped support<\/a> Archy Lee, whose enslaver Charles Stovall argued that federal fugitive slave laws supported his right to claim his \u201cproperty\u201d in California in 1858. The California Supreme Court, which included Peter Burnett, concurred with Stovall, and ordered Lee returned to him, in a decision historians would call<\/a> \u201cCalifornia\u2019s Dred Scott case.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, Lee won his freedom on an appeal and moved to Canada with a community of free Black people in the wake of an unsuccessful law that once again proposed<\/a> banning Black people from moving to the state. Still, the public outrage generated by Lee\u2019s case helped turn state politics in an affirmatively abolitionist direction \u2014 nearly a decade after California was admitted to the Union as a free state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, a different form of slavery was being practiced with the full legal backing of California\u2019s government. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the state legislature\u2019s first orders of business upon formation was the passage of the 1850 Act for the Government Protection of Indians. This little-known \u201capprenticeship\u201d law is one of California\u2019s most shameful. It allowed white people to take custody of Indigenous minors as well as adults convicted of a crime, and put them to work without pay. For many whites, it was an attractive business proposition in a state where farm labor was four times more expensive than in Pennsylvania or New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The law institutionalized more efficient forms of existing labor relations from pre-American California. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Spanish missions were sustained by the forced labor of California\u2019s Indigenous people. During Mexican rule, Mission Indians, whose communities and food sources were no longer intact, were swept into a quasi-feudal labor system in the state\u2019s vast land-grant ranchos. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While mission and rancho labor systems dominated the central and southern coastal parts of the state, in the foothills and far north, some communities of Indigenous people remained relatively undisturbed by colonists. That all changed during the Gold Rush, as prospectors and settlers fanned out across the remotest parts of the new state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thanks to other laws passed in the early 1850s, which barred Indigenous people not only from voting but from serving as jurors, judges, or witnesses in criminal cases, white people were free to push the boundaries of the state\u2019s apprenticeship laws to the cruelest possible outcomes. These anti-Indian laws \u201camounted to a virtual grant of impunity to those who would attack them or commit crimes against them or grossly exploit them,\u201d says Benjamin Madley, a professor of history at UCLA and the author of An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Groups of slave raiders<\/a> marauded through Indian villages, taking children from the arms of their parents and killing adults who resisted, according to Smith. These children would then be sold off to white households for \u201cadoption,\u201d in other words, to become domestic slaves. The second mayor of Los Angeles, Benjamin Davis Wilson, took advantage of this system to \u201cadopt\u201d two enslaved Black girls, Emily and Maria, from his wife\u2019s family in St. Louis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The criminal justice system forced adults into cycles of criminalization that kept them available as slave labor. In Los Angeles, eye-witness observer Horace Bell described how Indigenous men would be leased to farmers by the week. Their pay came in the form aguardiente, a kind of unrefined rum, which often provided a pretext to arrest them once again for public drunkenness or vagrancy, starting the process anew. \u201cThousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed this way,\u201d Bell wrote. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Madley doesn\u2019t think Bell was exaggerating. Census records show that the Indian population of Los Angeles declined from 3,693 in 1850 to just 219 in 1870. Slave drivers and baby snatchers played a very direct role in genocide. In addition to the murder that accompanied countless raids of Indian villages, Madley documents instances of Indians being worked or beaten to death. In other cases, enslaved people were abandoned in the wilderness after their labor was complete. Eighteen men starved to death this way after the 1852 harvest at Rancho San Pablo, in present day Richmond. Many Indigenous women, known by the derogatory term, \u201csquaws,\u201d (as in the soon to be re-named<\/a> Squaw Valley ski resort) were captive in sexual slavery or forced marriages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Madley estimates that between 9,000 and 16,000 California Indians were killed by non-Native whites between 1845 and 1873, not including the many who were worked to death or who died while incarcerated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was in the newspapers, people knew what was going on,\u201d Madley says. \u201cAnd it seems that a lot of people had California Indian slaves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Multiple agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs described what was taking place in Calfiornia as \u201cslavery,\u201d with the most brazen instances showing up in the rugged and pro-Confederate North Coast counties. In 1860, as California expanded the scope of its apprenticeship laws, making it easier for slave raiders to kidnap children and adults, reports<\/a> of Indian slavery in California were made on the floor of the U.S. Senate, but no action was taken as the nation descended into Civil War. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1863, five months after the emancipation proclamation, California, now firmly under the control of pro-Union Republicans, like Gov. Leland Stanford, repealed its Indian apprenticeship laws. These prohibitions were strengthened by the 13th Amendment, which California immediately ratified in 1865 \u2014 unlike subsequent Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, there is evidence that slave labor persisted. In 1867, the Indian Affairs Commissioner reported that Indian slavery was \u201cnot uncommon\u201d in California. As late as 1869, farmers lined up outside the Los Angeles mayor\u2019s office on Monday mornings to obtain Indian convict labor. It wasn\u2019t until 1873 that Indians could testify in court, a civil right that significantly curtailed forced labor, although convict leasing remained legal until 1937. <\/p>\n\n\n\n California was among numerous Western States that turned a blind eye to Indian slavery after the emancipation proclamation; the territories of New Mexico and Utah, which encompassed present day Arizona and Nevada were also guilty of the practice. In response, Congress in 1867 passed the Peonage Abolition Act, which technically ended all forms of debt peonage, but specifically targeted forced Indian labor in the West. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The law was one of the few in American history that targeted Indigenousslavery, a poorly studied historical institution that has seen renewed interest in recent years. Historian Andr\u00e9s Res\u00e9ndez of UC Davis, the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America<\/em>, estimates that between the time of Columbus and the end of the 19th Century, between 2.5 million 5 million Indigenous people across the Americas were enslaved. In the United States, Indigenous slavery has been documented<\/a> in a diverse variety of locations, from the colonial Northeast to the Antebellum South, Alaska to California. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The slave labor of Black and Indigenous people were far from the only forms of unfree labor that built early American California.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the gold rush, a dizzying array of people from around the world came to California under a huge variety of circumstances. \u201cThe gold fields are one of the most ethnically and racially diverse places on the globe,\u201d says Smith. \u201cThe expectations that people from the Eastern United States have, that there are two kinds of labor, slave and free, collide with all of these regionally distinctive labor systems from other parts of the world.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Chilean and Sonoran (people from northern Mexico) peones were brought by patrones, essentially feudal lords, to work in the gold fields. While these laborers came under less than free conditions, it was difficult for patrones <\/em>to control their subordinates once they arrived in California. There are reports of ships from Latin America sailing through the Golden Gate and passengers jumping ship and swimming ashore to go seek their own fortune. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Hawaiian laborers were leased to American companies to work in California for three-year periods by their aristocratic ruling class, the Ali\u2019i, who would then get a cut of the workers\u2019 earnings. While their contracts stipulated that the workers must be brought home after their work period, many ended up staying on in California, working in the maritime trades or inter-marrying with California Indians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the early part of the Gold Rush, Chinese \u201ccoolies,\u201d an anachronistic British term describing indentured laborers from Asia, were brought under similar arrangements, with American or Western companies paying for their travel and then forcing them to work off the debt. But after 1851, most Chinese men came by way of their own countrymen, through the credit-ticket system, facilitated by the Chinese Six Companies in San Francisco. These men were in a form of debt bondage, but it was not as vicious or strict as other forms, particularly the coolie<\/a> labor taking place in Cuba, where conditions in some cases resembled those faced by enslaved Black people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Chinese men came to California, which they called Jinshan, Gold Mountain, of their own volition, similar to migrants from across the United States and elsewhere in the world. Guangdong (Canton), where most of the early Chinese migrants to California originated from, was in a turbulent moment, suffering from natural disasters, colonialism, and the Opium Wars, leading many able-bodied men to leave the homeland. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, labor conditions for Chinese workers in America were often extremely exploitative and unjust, especially during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s. Chinese laborers were paid 30 percent less than their white counterparts, and unlike them, had to purchase their own food, according to Stanford\u2019s Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project<\/a>. While railroad company records didn\u2019t include the names of individual Chinese laborers \u2014 a sign of the way they were treated \u2014 historians believe anywhere from 150 to 1,000 Chinese men died during construction of the railroad. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Many Chinese women, on the other hand, did not come to California of their own free will, and were not paid at all for their labor once they got here. The majority of Chinese women in California in the first two decades of California\u2019s statehood were listed on census records as prostitutes. The late historian Lucie Cheng Hirata documented<\/a> their experience, from the early 1850s, when Chinese sex workers were more likely to be highly successful \u201cfree agents,\u201d taking advantage of the extreme gender imbalance of the Gold Rush, to the more organized and exploitative forms of sex work that emerged later. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Starting in the mid-1850s, tong secret societies began to control of the sex trade in San Francisco\u2019s Chinatown and beyond, transforming it into a coercive and violent form of labor. In China, brothel agents would dupe women into believing that they were coming to California to join a pre-arranged marriage or another opportunity. Sometimes, families sold their daughters willingly based on false promises of their circumstances in California, according to Hirata. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Invariably, upon arriving, these women faced incredibly difficult and dangerous lives. Some did not receive wages; many who did were extorted by the tongs<\/em> at pain of whipping or torture. Brothel owners would go to extraordinary lengths to prevent escape, using their own \u201cpolice forces\u201d or going through the American legal system and claiming the escaped woman had stolen property. White San Francisco leaders abetted these systems through the 1850s and \u201960s. Prominent members of society owned the brothels and collected rents as high as double the going rate; police officers and politicians received bribes and patronized the brothels. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like many Indigenous slave laborers, Chinese sex workers were often treated as disposable, and had little agency over their own circumstances. Hirata documents instances of women being beaten to death by brothel owners. Suicide and opium addiction were rampant. Even the highest-status prostitutes could be bought and sold to other brothels, or to a wealthy man looking for a wife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The conditions under which Chinese women and men labored were widely cited by anti-Chinese racists looking to stem the tide of Chinese immigration. Despite their different circumstances, Chinese sex workers and coolie laborers were both characterized as slaves so California politicians could enact discriminatory immigration policies while technically sidestepping questions of race. \u201cAfter slavery is abolished in the United States, people who are opposed to Chinese immigration can grab on to anti-slavery as a way of justifying exclusion,\u201d Smith says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Anti-Chinese arguments, masquerading as anti-slavery arguments, were one of the reasons that California was the only former free state to not immediately ratify the 14th and 15th amendments, which enshrined a much more inclusive definition of citizenship. (California symbolically ratified those amendments in 1959 and 1962, respectively.) The Page Law of 1875, a prelude to the broader Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, explicitly banned Chinese sex workers and forced laborers from the U.S. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Chinese exclusion was architected by abolitionist California Republicans. In his inaugural address as governor in 1862, Leland Stanford became the first politician<\/a> to publicly endorse the policy. \u201cIt will afford me great pleasure to concur with the Legislature in any constitutional action having for its object the repression of the immigration of the Asiatic races,\u201d he said. Eventually, Stanford would acknowledge<\/a> that he owed his great wealth as a railroad tycoon to Chinese laborers. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act was framed by its author, California Senator John F. Miller, as the only way to prevent \u201call the speculators in human labor, all the importers of human muscle, all the traffickers in human flesh, to ply their infamous trade without impediment under the protection of the American flag, and empty the seething, teeming slave pens of China upon the soil of California.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The law passed, and was continually extended in subsequent decades, significantly curtailing immigration from China for 60 years. It was America\u2019s first broad immigration ban, and the first moment in American politics in which the rhetoric of immigration as invasion<\/a> was invoked. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, labor was not the only reason behind these policies and beliefs, it was merely a pretext. California\u2019s politics and newspapers were full of white supremacist views that painted Chinese people as subhuman. Just as with California\u2019s Indigenous people, this rhetoric was translated into policy with deadly consequence. An 1863 state law that barred Chinese people from testifying in court meant that police didn\u2019t think it was worthwhile to intervene in the 1871 massacre<\/a> and lynching of at least 17 Chinese people in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe decisions and actions made by people in the past actively affect our future,\u201d says Bythewood-Porter of the California African American Museum. \u201cI think it\u2019s really important to stay focused on these things, because they repeat themselves.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Former President Donald Trump\u2019s draconian rhetoric on \u201crapist\u201d immigrants and the \u201cChinese virus\u201d follow in the footsteps of Miller and other supporters of the Chinese Exclusion Act. As recently as 1994, similar views were affirmed by Governor Pete Wilson and a majority of California voters, when they passed Proposition 187<\/a>, which prevented undocumented immigrants from accessing healthcare, education, and other government services. Most of the law was quickly struck down by a federal judge for being unconstitutional. <\/p>\n\n\n\n California\u2019s legacy of unfree labor continues to be felt in the state in many other ways; from the inter-generational consequences<\/a> of the Native American genocide, to the shockingly high<\/a> number of confederate memorials and honorific names that still exist here, the most outside of the South. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In California\u2019s self image \u201cof surfers<\/a> and Disneyland,\u201d Madley says, \u201cthere\u2019s still not a lot of room in public consciousness today for this very dark history upon which all of that is actually built. Fortunately, I think that is changing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are efforts underway to add ethnic studies to school curricula, seeking to paint a more accurate picture of California history, and race relations, in the collective memory. In 2019, 156 years after California\u2019s system of Indigenous slavery was abolished, Gov. Gavin Newsom became the first<\/a> leader in state history to apologize to California\u2019s Indigenous people, and refer to their mistreatment as \u201cgenocide.\u201d Newsom also created a Truth and Healing<\/a> commission, composed of Indigenous leaders to \u201cclarify the record \u2014 and provide their historical perspective \u2014 on the troubled relationship between tribes and the state.\u201d The commission will produce annual updates on their findings until releasing a final report in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a member of the state assembly, Shirley Weber, who last week was sworn in as California\u2019s Secretary of State, spearheaded a bill to study reparations for African Americans. Weber sees California\u2019s effort as a way to jumpstart the goal of reparations at the federal government. \u201cIf anybody could really, honestly have a conversation and wrestle with the issue of reparations, it will probably be California,\u201d she says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The commission created by the bill will begin to report back its findings and recommendations approximately a year from now. Weber says she expects the commission to focus on correcting systemic issues, rather than simply providing cash payments to Black people. \u201cWe have to look at the education system, we have to look at the banking system, home ownership, wealth in California,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019ve got all these systems that have been working against this population and very little response to it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n California\u2019s early statehood era marks a dark origin point for many of these injustices \u2014 when \u201ceverything in the [state] government basically supported slavery,\u201d Weber says \u2014 that is all too often forgotten. Acknowledging that history, and moving forward in a more just way, will not be simple or easy. But at least those difficult conversations are beginning, Weber says. \u201cIt is a massive task to ask ourselves the question of, how do we try to begin the process of repairing this?\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the early statehood era, the “free state” of California allowed multiple forms of slavery, posing difficult questions for how to honor that history. by Benjamin Schneider \u2022 02\/04\/2021 (SFWeekly.com) In the 1850s, Los Angeles was a dusty outpost in the sparsely settled southern half of the young state of California. Amidst all… Continue reading Enslaved 49ers <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\u2018Apprenticeship\u2019 & Genocide <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Peonage & Indentured Servitude <\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sex Slavery in San Francisco<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Justifying Chinese Exclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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