After the Slavers: Law, Liberation and Captive-taking in the New Mexican Borderlands

Abstract

This article explores how Congress decided that captive-taking customs, such as Indian-Mestizo servitude were on balance, more like Black slavery than not and should be abolished as a result. I contrast the scholarly literature against first-hand accounts of the slave trade as it appeared to several witnesses at the time. I argue that captive-taking customs were complicated and unstable institutions. If kinship practices did resonate expansively within the trade, they did not necessarily transcend custodial relationships that were ultimately based on dominance and subordination. In this sense, captive-taking customs paralleled black servitude institutions. Congress, too, reached these same conclusions after reviewing the evidence. Collectively, legislators decided that Indian-Mestizo servitude was inconsistent with newly passed anti-slavery legislation and should be abrogated permanently.