Slavery's Borderland Research Articles

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Reviewed by: Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser Lauren Brand (bio) Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. By William S. Kiser. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 280. Cloth, $47.50; paper, $24.95.) Could slavery in any form expand into the American West? Was it realistically possible? Did the U.S. government have the right to regulate the expansion of slavery? These are some of the massive questions that dominated the political discourse of the antebellum United States. William S. Kiser’s Borderlands of Slavery explores how the reality of Native captivity and debt peonage in New Mexico played a crucial role in the answers that both northern and southern politicians offered to these questions. New Mexico not only shaped national conversations about slavery’s expansion in the antebellum era, but also influenced national policy makers’ decisions regarding the definition of unfree labor during the Reconstruction era. Kiser argues that the existence of a different form of slavery in New [End Page 248] Mexico “forced Americans to think more broadly about slavery and brought awareness to the fact that involuntary labor was not limited to the chattel system in the South” and that this realization “informed profound political debates during the 1850s regarding the future role of unfree labor in the country” (21). The prologue provides a concise overview of the history of New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the territory’s integration into the United States in the mid-nineteenth century in order to quickly familiarize readers with this complex period. Indeed, scholars from many subfields of nineteenth-century United States history will find much of interest in this short book. For example, historians studying the various forms of enslavement endured or practiced by the Indigenous peoples of North America (or “the other slavery,” as Andrés Reséndez describes it)1 will appreciate Kiser’s description of the widespread prevalence of Native captivity in New Mexico from the Spanish colonial era through the Civil War. Additionally, historians of the antebellum U.S. South will be interested in Kiser’s dissection of how southern politicians used New Mexico and the various forms of captivity there as a foil to compare to the southern system of enslavement. Although debt peonage was not a racially based system of enslavement, it was a structure that “nonetheless operated upon manipulated conditions of dependency that typically ensured perpetual bondage” (16), leading many southern congressmen to view New Mexico as a valid point of comparison to demonstrate the compatibility of slavery with peonage in the American West. Kiser shows throughout that such comparisons were not unwarranted. For example, he explores comparisons between the ways captive women in the Southwest were described as “likely girl[s]” and valued for their attractiveness and sexual availability in the same way that African American women were in the South (61). However, despite some similarities that prompted these comparisons, Kiser notes that, in the end, there remained “widespread confusion about the differences between Southern slavery and New Mexico’s traditional forms of bondage . . . among federal lawmakers” (52). State and local historians will also appreciate Kiser’s attention to the perspectives of people actually living in New Mexico during this period. Kiser explains how residents of New Mexico themselves thought about these issues. For example, he notes that local people were somewhat ambivalent about chattel slavery and the comparison to the U.S. South but remained just as concerned about retaining their rights to captives and peons as they always had. Kiser also explores how, after 1846, local New Mexico law-makers purposely kept quiet about the issue of debt peonage, because they often personally benefited from it. Thus Kiser notes how challenging it can [End Page 249] be for historians to study the ways captivity and debt peonage impacted the lives of people in New Mexico. The sources have to be carefully mined to reveal what was really going on behind the surface. Kiser is very open about these challenges and how he reads the available sources. As time passed and sectionalist sentiment increased in both the United...

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

What's in a Name?

What's in a Name? Margaret Ellen Newell (bio) William S. Kiser. Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 266 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00. Andrés Reséndez. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. 448 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, index. $30.00. At a recent roundtable on Indian slavery at the Myaamia Center at Miami University, borderlands historian Andrew Offenburger posed two great questions: Is slavery the appropriate "container" for the variety of labor arrangements and captivities that indigenous people experienced? And why are scholars of Native American history suddenly using the term? Certainly, Indian slavery is having a moment. A slew of award-winning works have discussed Indian slavery's scale and effects across the western hemisphere. But is slavery too blunt an instrument for analyzing the Native American experience? An institution that has existed in many eras and places, slavery would seem a capacious container. Still, in the Americas slavery remains closely associated with European colonization, with victims of African descent, with plantations, and with the racialized, heritable, chattel form that emerged between 1650 and 1750. This definition would appear to leave little room for pre- and post-contact indigenous practices, the non-economic aspects of captivity, and the nuances of peonage. Another nomenclature controversy involves the use of terms like "human trafficking" in talking about the past. This issue has popped up at panels on slavery and has invited passionate "yeas" as well as naysayers who fear teleology. In Brazil, Sudan, Thailand, Syria, and the United States, to name a few, women and children are trafficked for sex, unpaid workers are held against their will, and regimes justify the enslavement of ethnic and religious minorities. Does establishing a link with the present help or hinder our understanding of the unique historical circumstances that produced eighteenth-and nineteenth-century slavery? Should our stories of slavery end with the Thirteenth Amendment? [End Page 24] These two books speak to the question of what to call unfree Indians and why names matter. In The Other Slavery, Andrés Reséndez offers an emphatic "yes" to the question of whether slavery is the appropriate analytical tool for understanding colonization and the indigenous experience in Latin America and the U.S. borderlands. William S. Kiser offers a more ambiguous answer in Borderlands of Slavery, in which he explores efforts to end Indian bondage in New Mexico in the Civil War era, a fight that turned on whether captivity and peonage really constituted slavery. A finalist for the National Book Award and a Bancroft Prize-winner, The Other Slavery is a tour de force. Reséndez combines synthesis and original research seamlessly, and since he draws material from Latin American and borderlands histories unfamiliar to many U.S. historians, it feels fresh. The scope is breathtaking, ranging over four centuries and covering the Spanish empire (including the Philippines and the Caribbean), independent Mexico, and the southwestern United States. At the same time, individual stories and often searing first-hand testimony give emotional heft to this persuasive account. Not afraid to name names when it comes to slavery, Reséndez surveys an array of coerced labor regimes: the Mit'a, encomienda, repartimiento, and similar forced labor requirements; debt peonage; ransomed captives forced to labor to repay their benefactors; convicts and rebels sentenced to servitude; indentured servants; orphans and paupers bound to service; and ostensibly free wage laborers whose employers never paid them are all gathered under the same umbrella. The Other Slavery puts Indian slavery into dialogue with Atlantic African slavery, not to argue that they were the same but rather to convey significance and horror. Upping numbers first proposed by Brett Rush-forth, Reséndez estimates that between 2.5 and 5 million Indians experienced enslavement. The numbers suggest that a higher proportion of Indians faced enslavement than did Africans, and The Other Slavery challenges common understandings of the Americas' demographic catastrophe. Slavery and slaving, not merely epidemic disease, bore significant blame. Traders kidnapped entire populations of some Caribbean Islands and stole able-bodied adults, especially women...

William S. Kiser. Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest.

William S. Kiser. Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest.

Borderlands Narratives: Contours of Life in the Southwest Borderlands

Book Review Essay – Arredondo: Last Spanish Ruler of Texas and Northeastern New Spain, by Bradley Folsom. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. – Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest, by William S. Kiser. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. – Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands, by Janne Lahti. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. – Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands, 1848-1886, edited by Janne Lahti. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. – The Other California: Land, Identity, and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands, by Veronica Castillo-Munoz. Oakland: University of California Press, 2017.

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest by William S. Kiser

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. America in the Nineteenth Century Series. By William S. Kiser

Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. America in the Nineteenth Century Series. By William S. Kiser

Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865

Book Review| September 01 2015 Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865 Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River. Salafia, Matthew. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013 328 pp., $55.00 (cloth)On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865. Burke, Diane Mutti. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010 413 pp., $69.96 (cloth); $24.95 (paper) Calvin Schermerhorn Calvin Schermerhorn Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Labor (2015) 12 (3): 132–136. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2920603 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Calvin Schermerhorn; Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River Missouri's Small-Slaveholding Households, 1815–1865. Labor 1 September 2015; 12 (3): 132–136. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-2920603 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsLabor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Labor and Working-Class History Association2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Matthew Salafia. Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River.

Matthew Salafia. Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River.

Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River

Slavery's Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River

"The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan": A Review of Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland

"The Ohio River Was Not the River Jordan": A Review of Matthew Salafia's Slavery's Borderland

Slavery's borderland: freedom and bondage along the Ohio River

Introduction: Listening to the River Chapter 1. Origins of the Border between Slavery and Freedom Chapter 2. Crossing the Line Chapter 3. Slaveholding Liberators Chapter 4. Steamboats and the Transformation of the Borderland Chapter 5. Politics of Unity and Difference Chapter 6. Fugitive Slaves and the Borderland Chapter 7. The Nature of Antislavery in the Borderland Chapter 8. The Borderland and the Civil War Notes Index Acknowledgments