Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

4 Domesticating Labor

c h a p t e r f o u r Domesticating Labor Southern planters’ swaggering pronouncements on race and labor captured the nation’s attention in the summer of 1869, a moment when the nation itself was being redefined. In a speech delivered in Boston, Frederick Douglass, the former slave and eminent abolitionist, disparaged the “Southern gentlemen who led in the late rebellion” for “they believed in slavery and they believe in it still . . . They would rather have laborers who will work for nothing; but as they cannot get the negroes on these terms, they want Chinamen who, they hope, will work for next to nothing.” In the end, he warned, they would regret their foolish notions. “But alas, for all the selfish inventions and dreams of men!” Douglass exclaimed. “The Chinaman will not long be willing to wear the cast off shoes of the negro, and if he refuses, there will be trouble again.” He challenged his compatriots to reconstruct the United States truly as a “composite nation” with “human rights” for all. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” he concluded. “Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions.”1 Douglass’s eloquence stood out, but his views did not stand alone. Indeed, the surging demand for coolies confronted a widening movement for multiracial democracy and class struggle. Within days of the Memphis gathering of southern employers, the State Labor Convention of the Colored Men of Maryland resolved to organize a national conference, in part to consider the “Contract Coolie Labor” question. Black workers and leaders across the nation responded enthusiastically to the call, selecting and sending 214 delegates to Washington, D.C., for the Colored National Labor Union’s founding convention in December 1869. The meeting denounced the classification and exclusion of laborers based on “a geographical division of the globe in which they or their forefathers were born, or on account of statutes [sic] or color,” as “a disgrace to humanity.” “While we extend a free and welcome hand to the free immigration of labor of all nationalities,” a resolution read, “we emphatically deem imported contract Coolie labor to be a positive injury to the working people of the United States . . . the system of slavery in a new form, and we appeal to the Congress . . . to rigidly enforce the act of 1862, prohibiting Coolie importation , and to enact such other laws as will best protect, and free, American labor against this or any similar form of slavery.” In rejecting slavery and racism of any kind, the delegates hoped to build a labor movement without regard to “nationality, sex, or color,” “a superstructure” to unite workers of all backgrounds —Irish, German, “poor white” southerners, northern whites, blacks, and Chinese.2 The nation was at a crossroads in 1869. African Americans and Radical Republicans forged ahead to recast the United States into a multiracial democracy, making the first significant strides toward disaggregating race and American citizenship . Southern planters, on the other hand, plunged into the global competition for plantation labor, fueled by revamped dreams of white supremacy and enslaved labor. Asian coolies figured prominently yet tenuously within and between these competing visions, as impassioned reactions to the Memphis convention would reveal. After a two-year hiatus, political battles between federal officials and Louisiana planters and merchants over the status of coolies erupted again. Champions of coolie labor, moreover, encountered an obstacle 108 Coolies and Cane far greater than Republican politicians. In contrast to their imperial ambitions, they turned out to be decidedly minor players on the world stage and, after a series of frustrating attempts abroad, would concentrate increasingly on domestic sources of migrant labor, eastward and westward, to check the effects of black enfranchisement and labor struggles. The contradictions of emancipation and imperialism thus generated new opportunities and migrations that brought Asian and black bodies next to one another, first in Louisiana planters’ minds and then on their plantations. The contested status of coolies, at the same time, proved critical in the regeneration...