Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith

Abstract

 Reviews reviews Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 344 pages. $39.95 cloth. This book centers California, and more broadly the American West, in a story historians used to tell as the southern history of African American slavery, freedom, national reconstruction, and racial segregation. Stacey L. Smith joins a throng of recent historians pulling apart the exceptionalist story of the West as a region removed from, antithetical to, and an antidote for the racial struggle that led to the American Civil War. She relocates the West in the middle of antebellum race relations and in the failed promise of racial equality and civil rights that followed. Smith focuses on California because of its history as a free state with a complicated history of human bondage, both before and after the Civil War. And while the story she tells could be (and probably should be) explored in every western territory and state, California’s large and multiracial society — the product of generations of exchange and the tsunami of gold rush immigration — makes this a particularly satisfying analysis of the multiple forms of bound labor that existed in the West and the fluidity of racial categories across time. Smith argues that California — a transnational crossroads of imported social and economic systems — exploded the dichotomous concepts of race (black and white) and labor (free and slave) in the United States. Across seven chapters, Smith explores the different kinds of imported bound-labor practices that coexisted in California with the arrival of peoples from Chile, Mexico, Hawaii and the South Pacific, China, Japan, Europe, and the United States — white, black, and Native. As those peoples converged in the mines, their methods of “managing, binding, and disciplining labor” converged as well (p. 17). When Californians organized themselves as a free state in 1850,they had to navigate (socially as well as legally) those distinctive versions of wage and contract labor, debt bondage, peonage, indentured servitude, wardship, prostitution, and slavery. Californians did so through a shifting lens of racial classifications and valuations. Smith documents the ways slave-owning Southerners bound blacks under contracts different from hereditary slavery as a means of perpetuating state-sanctioned bondage on free soil.Asian“coolie”and Latino “peon” labor, defined as threats to free white labor, elicited legal expulsion or exclusion, yet the use of Indian or black children — bound through legal guardianship as domestic servants — gained protection. Smith also evaluates the ways in which sexual commerce and the labor of prostitutes was both normalized and criminalized, depending on race. With the onset of the Civil War, California’s Union Party embraced political emancipation,freeing African Americans while ignoring the virtual slavery of unfree Indians and Asians. In her most significant interpretive argument,Smith then connects the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to California’s experiments with racially discriminatory immigration laws in the 1870s that evaded the “equal protection” intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and other civil rights laws by masquerading as antislavery measures. Those laws emerged as a means to prevent Asian immigration by defining their bound labor as imported slavery, a threat to free white labor, and therefore excludible. In this way, Smith traces how an era of emanci-  OHQ vol. 115, no. 2 pation in the West morphed along racial lines into a national era of exclusion. Smith excels at illustrating her arguments with the stories of real people struggling to make a living and find their place in California ’s society and polity. Rather than abstract nameless victims of bound labor and a legal system dominated by faceless white men of power and greed, she reconstructs individuals with agency, motive, and history. Smith mines information from newspapers, memoirs, letters , and legal cases, introducing readers to a parade of characters who illustrate the ambiguity and historical contingency of unfree labor.Readers meet indentured Indian servant Augustín, a New Mexican genízaro, who along with Mexican debt peons Benito Pérez and his wife, travelled from Sonora to California to dig gold and wash laundry for their patrone Antonio Francisco Coronel. There is James...