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4: A Law That Would Make Caligula Blush?: New Mexico Territory’s Unique Slave Code, 1859–1861
- University of New Mexico Press
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56 4 A Law That Would Make Caligula Blush? New Mexico Territory’s Unique Slave Code, 1859–1861 mark j. stegmaier • • • In 1861 Congressman John A. Bingham of Ohio, a leading Republican, who would later draft the most significant parts of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866, denounced the New Mexico slave code as a law that would have brought “blushes to the cheek[s] of Caligula .”1 But why would the legislature of the territory of New Mexico— a generally arid and barren region encompassing the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona, and a territory hardly associated with the plantation slavery of the antebellum South—have enacted such a law in the first place? Was there an actual or even a potential slave population involved? How did this slave code compare and contrast with other slave codes in the country? Did New Mexico’s slavery law affect national politics and congressional action? And finally, what led New Mexico’s legislature to repeal this law? These are some of the questions that the following article attempts to answer. The territorial legislature certainly did not enact its slave code of 1859 to legitimize an already thriving economic institution. Since the establishment of New Mexico’s territorial government in 1850, very few black slaves had been brought to the territory. The slave population remained small despite the fact that no official obstacles existed to block an influx of slaves, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857. New Mexico’s barren landscape and arid climate were better suited for livestock grazing than A Law That Would Make Caligula Blush? 57 slave labor for plantation agriculture. The mining industry could have utilized slaves as a labor force, but mining of any substantial nature also required abundant water resources unavailable in most of the territory. As a result of New Mexico’s Spanish and Mexican cultural foundations , peonage (bondage for debt) diminished the population’s desire for a slave-labor system since the population of peons supplied a sufficient workforce for the territory.2 Unofficially, several hundred Indian slaves, either purchased or captured from various tribes, toiled for their owners. In New Mexico, when U.S. government officials and army officers from the South were appointed to office or ordered to posts, they brought black slaves with them to serve as house servants.3 Theoretically, nothing prevented black slaves from replacing peons and Indian slaves in herding, mining, or any other occupation, but peons were plentiful and cheaper. Thus, there appeared to be no local demand in New Mexico Territory for large-scale black slave labor. It is impossible to calculate exactly how many black slaves lived in the territory in 1860. Unlike the Southern states, which listed slaves in a schedule separate from free blacks in the census of 1860, New Mexico had so few slaves that the territory’s census did not differentiate between its enslaved and free black populations. Further complicating the subject of New Mexico Territory’s enslaved black population is the question of whom to count as black. The Hispanic and Indian population had shown no particular aversion to sexual relations, marital or extramarital, with blacks; mixed-race offspring were common in New Mexico.4 An analysis of the federal census of 1860 for New Mexico Territory shows fifty-three black inhabitants and eighty-two mulattoes. A contemporary extract from that census numbered ninety persons as “negros,” and the latest edition of Historical Statistics of the United States gives a figure of eighty-five blacks in New Mexico Territory in 1860.5 Contemporary estimates on the number of black or mulatto slaves in the territory ranged from less than ten to a high of fifty, with most members of Congress in their speeches estimating the number of slaves in the territory from ten to twenty-five.6 These figures indicate that most blacks and mulattoes in New Mexico were not slaves but free people of color, even if most of them were probably bound in some form of peonage. The territorial legislature in early 1857 had enacted legislation to severely restrict the residency of free blacks and [3.238.62.119] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:36 GMT) 58 mark j. stegmaier mulattoes in New Mexico, but population statistics for 1860 suggest that local authorities were very lax in enforcing this law.7 With only a handful of blacks and mulattoes, free or slave, out of a total population...