California bound: Unfree labor, race, and the Reconstruction of the Far West, 1848--1870

This dissertation seeks to recast and retell the story of the sectional crisis, emancipation, and Reconstruction in United States by geographically recentering that story in the North American West. In 1850, California entered the Union as a free state with a constitution that prohibited both slavery and involuntary servitude. During and after the gold rush, however, Californians witnessed the development of multiple forms of bound labor---including slavery, apprenticeship, contract labor, indenture, debt peonage, and sexual servitude---many of which defied easy categorization as free or unfree. Moreover, the distinctly multiracial character of California society broke out of the black-white racial binary that prevailed in the eastern United States and disrupted predictable ways of marking freedom and slavery onto black and white bodies. The complexity of labor and race relations in California engendered a profound struggle over the meaning of human freedom and human difference in a state nominally dedicated to free labor. Californians argued over the status of fugitive African American slaves in the state; they debated whether to exclude Chinese contract laborers; they wrangled over the moral legitimacy of the state's system of forced Native American apprenticeship; and they struggled over how best to eradicate sexual trafficking in bound Chinese and American Indian women. By Reconstruction, these local conflicts merged with national debates over emancipation and the fate of the freedpeople in the U.S. South. The antislavery rhetoric that infused national politics in the 1860s led to the abolition of some of California's racialized bound labor systems, but it also gave rise to a distinctive anti-Chinese discourse that portrayed Chinese men and women as degraded slaves whose presence threatened to overturn the accomplishments of emancipation. This antislavery critique of Chinese immigration, first developed in California, reshaped national racial policy during Reconstruction and culminated in the draconian federal Chinese exclusion acts of the 1870s and 80s. Ultimately, California's distinctive contests over unfreedom remade the face of national Reconstruction itself. To understand the national story of the transition from bondage to freedom in all of its complexity, then, historians must look not only north and south, but also west.