American Imperialism in the Age of Contract: Herbert Spencer and the Defeat of Contractual Capitalism in Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don

After the Civil War, Americans generally regarded the abolition of slavery as the disappearance of the last vestige of feudalism and the beginning of a truly contractual society. According to Amy Dru Stanley, "Emancipation apocalyptically achieved the transition from status to contract . . . by affording freed slaves the right to own themselves and enter into voluntary relations of exchange."¹ Contract for many Americans in the late nineteenth century became synonymous with freedom and progress, in keeping with Henry Sumner Maine's famous proclamation that "the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract."² In this "Age of Contract," to be modern meant abandoning a status-based feudal society, where people's roles were defined by pre-existing, rather than chosen, obligations.³ A contractual society promised to be more dynamic and egalitarian because it allowed people the freedom to fashion new commitments and relationships through an exchange of promises. One was not confined to a closed circle of family and immediate relations. By sanctioning the exchange of promises with strangers, society became more open, and one's circle could expand or contract depending on how one chose to pursue one's own interests.

However, after Southerners were reincorporated into the Union without their consent, postbellum America struggled to reconcile the use of coercion in its military victories and its vision of itself as a progressive contractual society. How could a society that claimed to value contractual relationships justify

María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, date unknown.

the abridgement of consent entailed in reunifying the nation?⁴ Although her husband was an officer in the Union army, nineteenth-century Mexican American writer María Amparo Ruiz de Burton sympathized with the Southerners. Her letters and novels make clear that she believed Southerners and Mexicans shared a similar plight. Both The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872), her satire of the Civil War, often use the situation of Southerners to elucidate the suffering of the conquered Mexicans. As Suzanne Bost astutely notes, Ruiz de Burton borrows "the model of the vanquished South to situate Mexican/American national division, as well as her characters' national marginalization, within a framework that is more culturally intelligible to her readers from the East."⁵

The aftermath of the Civil War gave Ruiz de Burton a fresh impetus to re-examine the effects of the Mexican-American War on another group that had been incorporated into the Union without their consent: the Californios (Mexican Californians). Ruiz de Burton considered both national expansion (the acquisition of former Mexican territories) and national reunification (the forced re-incorporation of the South into the Union) acts of conquest that resulted in an untenable union between an American republic and an American empire. Her works clearly connect the extension of democracy with the extension of a contractual capitalist system. In The Squatter and the Don, Ruiz de Burton presents the elite Californio landowners as ready to make the leap from a hacienda economy to capitalism. The novel begins with Californios and Anglos of good character exchanging promises with each other, creating the beginnings of a contractual capitalist society, which is violently supplanted by an imperialist order. The Squatter and the Don clearly laments the defeat of contractual capitalism in California at the hands of the new imperialists: squatters and monopolists. This imperialist state has created a warped and immoral capitalist system that allows the strong and wealthy to pursue their self-interests while preventing others from doing the same. Without the establishment of a moral contractual society, the extension of democracy will never match national expansion.⁶

Ruiz de Burton applies British Liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer's theories of competition and social evolution in order to engage the language of contract and the emerging discourse of injury to critique U.S. imperialism. The text refers to two works in particular: Spencer's essay "Representative...