Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Stacey L. Smith (review)

When considering slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction historians have long ignored the role of California and the American West. In those rare cases when they are mentioned it is with an antiquarian fascination with battles on the periphery of the war or with a Frederick Jackson Turner-like fixation on rugged individualism and freedom. However, these misperceptions are changing. For the past several years, historians of western borderlands have recognized the importance of the West in the history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. These historians assert that despite its distance from the fighting, the West and California played a crucial role in the Civil War, and that the integration of this once-ignored region brings new depth and meaning to our understanding of the conflict and the policies of Reconstruction that followed.

Throwing her hat into this ring, Stacey Smith in Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation and Reconstruction deftly proves that California’s experience with slavery and its transnational and multifaceted Gold Rush population in the years leading up to the war set the stage for the nation’s understanding of race and informed the construction of and debate over national policies on race, slavery, and civil rights in the late nineteenth century.

Smith begins her narrative with a fascinating exploration of the massive trans-national migration to California during the Gold Rush. In the first few chapters she reveals how African Americans, Chileans, Pacific Islanders, Mexicans, and the Chinese negotiated this new and unfamiliar environment and the way that California’s legislative body and burgeoning political parties tried to control and make sense of this troubling diversity. Using an interesting mix of legislative and court records, Smith reveals how the legislature dealt with this complicated mix of minority groups and the complicated labor systems they devised to maintain the “free soil” mythology of California and at the same time maintain Anglo hegemony over the state.

For those who traveled to, or in the case of many African Americans and Chinese women, were forcibly brought to California, the early period of the Gold Rush promised a freedom that at least in terms of labor, slavery, and access to the gold fields seemed to transcend the racism and gendered attitudes that prevailed in the rest of mid-nineteenth century America. These promises of freedom were quickly dashed. When minorities made headway, the legislature rearranged laws that governed labor contracts, changed the definitions of free or unfree labor, and made certain that those who had always been defined as unfree remained so. These adjustments to the law and popular attitudes about race reasserted Anglo power over the state and reassured those who felt threatened by the ascendancy of minorities that California and its politicians, despite their claims to support a free state, would maintain the racialized status quo.

In her concluding chapters Smith reveals how these early laws and the policies and attitudes that the California legislature adopted became the genesis for a virulent and ultimately national anti-Chinese campaign. California’s Republicans and Free Soil Democrats banded together to redefine coolie labor as slave labor. Thus defining Chinese as slaves, Republicans at the national level could wave the banner of anti-slavery, claim that their goals were not racially motivated, and force a conversation about the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act. In this way, California’s Gold Rush struggle over unfree labor informed national Reconstruction-era conversations about race and exclusion and set the stage for the passage of one of America’s most discriminatory immigration laws.

Ultimately, Smith’s analysis is cogent and detailed, and her arguments are solid. The book is a welcome addition to both the history of California and the West and to the history of the Civil War and Reconstruction.