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  • Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith
  • Michael F. Magliari
Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. By Stacey L. Smith (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2013) 324 pp. $34.95

Standard narratives of the American Civil War, slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction typically are structured around three basic polarities—North vs. South, white vs. black, and free labor vs. slavery. For the past three decades, however, scholars focusing on early California’s complex labor and racial histories have steadily exposed the inadequacy of this venerable triad. Taken together, their work makes it clear [End Page 94] that the epic struggles waged by Americans between 1846 and 1877 about such vital matters as freedom, equality, race, and citizenship cannot fully be understood without reference to events in California. There, on “Freedom’s Frontier,” advancing whites confronted a diverse array of non-white peoples that included not only African Americans but also Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians.

Although admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, gold-rush California quickly became home to a wide range of racially based unfree labor systems that matched its ethnic diversity. Toiling alongside of free laborers in California’s mines, farms, cities, and households were Mexican and Chilean peons; Hawaiian contract laborers; African-American slaves retained by indenture and held in place by the state’s fugitive slave law; Chinese “coolies” and “credit-ticket” workers; and, under the notorious Indian Act of 1850, Native Americans bound variously as apprentices, minor custodial wards, indentured servants, debt peons, and leased convicts.

Though extensive, the historical literature devoted to these enthralled workers has remained deeply segmented along racial lines. Now, at last, Smith has produced a long overdue and urgently needed synthesis that weaves their separate stories together and offers important intergroup comparisons. Along the way, she highlights the poignant plights of bound Indian and Chinese women trafficked throughout frontier California as prostitutes and concubines.

Methodologically, Smith’s work represents a splendid example of traditional archival-based historical research in primary-source documents. Smith draws heavily from a plethora of state and federal government records along with twenty-four California newspapers. Particularly impressive is her work in local and county-court case files that provide detailed and intimate glimpses into the lives of bound workers and their white employers.

Smith’s prodigious research enables her carefully to trace the rise of California’s unfree labor regimes during the 1850s and their subsequent decline during the 1860s when antislavery Republicans came to power in Sacramento. Always the subject of intense partisan conflict, unfree labor sparked contentious debates that mirrored the acrimonious confrontations waged between North and South about slavery. Similarly, the demise of bound labor led to bitter battles regarding the proper place of minority peoples within free society, again reflecting the national problem of how to deal with emancipated African Americans in the South.

Regrettably, these debates led to California’s ironic contribution to Reconstructionera racial policy—discriminatory anti-Chinese immigration laws couched as antislavery legislation aimed at ending the scourge of “Asiatic coolieism.” As Smith rightly claims, California was “critical in the making of the postemancipation racial order of the United States” (234).

With her uniquely comprehensive treatment of race and unfree labor in California, Smith succeeds in her quest “to recast the narrative of [End Page 95] the sectional crisis, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the United States by geographically recentering it in the Far West” (2).

Michael F. Magliari
California State University, Chico
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