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

Conclusion

Conclusion The Hottentots stand heat better than Coolies. —H A R P E R ’S W E E K L Y (1862) If the Philippines are annexed, what is to prevent the Chinese, the Negritos and the Malays [from] coming to our country? How can we prevent the Chinese coolies from going to the Philippines and from there swarming into the United States engulfing our people and our civilization? —S A M U E L G O M P E R S (1898) The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black. —W . E . B . D U B O I S (1935) Seventy years ago, historian W. E. B. Du Bois characterized Reconstruction as a “splendid failure” because “it did not fail where it was expected to fail.” To him, the age of emancipation was defined by a violent confrontation between capital and labor, always in articulation with the ideology of white supremacy. Reconstruction’s demise in the United States, he argued, was due to an “understanding between the Southern exploiter of labor and the Northern exploiter” and the fatal decision by “poor whites” to seek “redress by demanding unity of white against black, and not unity of poor against rich, or of worker against exploiter.” The millions of black workers who essentially effected their own emancipation, however, did not fail and in their “hands and heart[s]” rested “the consciousness of a great and just cause; fighting the battle of all the oppressed and despised humanity of every race and color, against the massed hirelings of Religion, Science, Education, Law, and brute force.” Writing in an era defined by racist denunciations of multiracial democracy, Du Bois’s bold claim that black workers’ struggles for democracy and justice had shaped the course of U.S. history was beyond prescient. It was revolutionary. But his analysis suggested even more. He insisted that U.S. Reconstruction be situated within a global framework and its collapse in relation to the superexploitation of “the dark proletariat” all over the world, what he termed “the real modern labor problem.”1 More than any other work, Du Bois’s landmark study has guided my interpretation of the age of emancipation. Throughout this book, I have tried to show how racial imaginings of coolies disrupted and reestablished a series of overlapping social and cultural dualisms at the heart of American culture—slavery and freedom, black and white, domestic and foreign, alien and citizen, modern and premodern. In the decades before the Civil War, chiefly through reports from the Caribbean and Asia, coolies came to epitomize enslaved labor, a foreign scourge that threatened to undermine both American freedom and American slavery. The close association between slavery and coolieism, in turn, incorporated coolies in the domestic struggle over slavery, with Republicans taking charge of the crusade against the coolie trade during the Civil War. In their desire to protect an “inferior race” of coolies, Republican officials expressed the popular antebellum notion that the transport of Asian laborers marked a reversion to slavery rather than a progression toward freedom. Even as the antislavery rhetoric and logic would lead to the exclusion of Asian workers from the United States beginning with Chinese laborers in 1882, coolies defied singular categorization. In the wake of emancipation, Louisiana planters and merchants—culturally and socially tied to the orbits of sugar, empires, and revolutions of the Greater Caribbean— launched a campaign to import coolies and, in the face of federal intervention, to recast them as voluntary immigrants. Though reluctantly accorded the legal status of immigrants by federal officials , Asian migrants could never overcome their racialization as coolies to become immigrants in nineteenth-century American culture. The impulse to import and to exclude coolies served to make immigrants European and white during Reconstruction, an era defined by the first concrete steps toward removing racial barriers to citizenship rights. But race remained central in the project of U.S. nationalism after slavery, with the contested status of coolies perhaps posing the greatest challenge to the Radical Republican goal of universalizing free labor and republican citizenship. Were coolies, in fact, slaves or immigrants ? Social critics, government officials, plantation owners, and many others grappled for decades with this seemingly simple question that could produce 222 Coolies and Cane only contradictory and ambiguous answers. In the end, coolies...