On September 15, 1846. John Montgomery, the commandant of the the U.S. Army Northern Department of California issued his first proclamation concerning Indian labor in California. He acknowledged that there were Native Americans laboring on ranches held by those of European descent in conditions of slavery. He sort of freed them–but then required them to labor for European employers without the right to quit. This is just a moment that allows us to get into a poorly understood issue in American history–the widespread use of Native American slaves in 19th century California and how it was part and parcel of the genocidal project of whites in this place and time.

California was the ur-state of American white supremacy in the mid 19th century. You are saying, what, a Union state? Yes. See, whites moved to California beginning in the California Gold Rush in 1848 and they were not happy with the diversity they found there. Not only were there Native Americans, but Mexicans, Chinese, Hawaiians. People from the around the world came to make their money in gold, including from places such as Chile and France. While a few groups were OK (Germans, Australians) with these native-born American whites, most were not, including the French, who could be evicted from their diggings on the basis of religion that made then not quite white.

Whites saw California as a white space that needed to remain that way except for forced or semi-forced labor. The issue of Chinese labor remained contentious for decades, as the Chinese were evicted from the diggings but found a niche in the economy providing the reproductive labor that white men didn’t want to do in a world where most of the women were sex workers and the overall migration was something like 90:10 male. So you see the Chinese-American restaurant and the Chinese-owned laundry to develop, not to mention Chinese sex workers (see also here). But the Chinese could also be a cheap labor force for new industrial enterprises such as the railroads, which led to white violence and eventually the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first major national law that came out of the labor movement. Fun fact there! There was also plenty of support for chattel slavery in California, especially southern California. Los Angeles was a particular center of southern sympathy. California politics in the 1850s were dominated by pro-slavery politicians. While the state never seriously threatened secession to go with the South in the Civil War, there were plenty of people who wanted a subservient labor force.

But those who wanted that subservient labor force? They weren’t just southern sympathizers. In fact, it was in northern California where slave raids dominated in the landscapes. These were slave raids against Native Americans. California had perhaps 150,000 Native Americans when the United States stole it from Mexico in 1846. By 1870, that dropped to 30,000 and to 16,000 in the 1880 U.S. Census. It was an outright genocide and forced labor was central to it. That this is genocide is pretty universally agreed to–leading scholars of genocide see it as clearly over a line that too often is defended to exclude anything that wasn’t done by the Nazis.

Indian labor laws based on Montgomery’s edict were created throughout California, with much drawn from southern slavery, such as passes for travel. While there wasn’t a lot of slave sales like in the South, Native peoples were rounded up, forced to work for a white, and kept there for decades or their whole lives, totally cut off from their peoples and culture. What kind of labor was this? Some of it was farm labor, some of it was domestic labor, much like in the South. There was a huge market for Native women, especially young women. This had to do, like with the Chinese, with the lack of white women in the gold camps and growing cities. They were often stolen from their home tribes, sold or kept by those who got them, and used as domestic labor, not to mention as sex slaves. That got so bad that California newspapers–Democratic newspapers for that matter, so generally pro-slavery, started to criticize the widespread use of slave labor in the state by 1860.

The Spanish and then Mexicans had started quite a bit of this. Of course they were colonists too. American whites intensified it. There were Orwellian titled laws behind it all too. In 1850, California passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. It basically “protected” Indians by allowing whites to apply to the state to move any Native person off land that had been sold to a white. It allowed for whites to go to the state and request particularly humans for indenture. That was particularly used for children, who the white would have complete control over until they reached the age of majority (18 for boys, 15 for girls).

There were also huge slave raiding parties that extended past the end of the Civil War. Those slave raids were particularly targeted at children because of the additional control whites would have over them. Do not downplay this–these slave raids were as horrible and brutal as anything you can imagine in your historical nightmares of slavery coming out of Africa.

This all only ended when everyone reminded California that the 13th Amendment had been ratified. California did officially end its Native slavery after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863. But there were slave raids well into the early 1870s, into the small tribes in northern California. Who was going to do anything about it? The Army itself spent 1861 engaging in massive raids that even papers in San Francisco called a “slaughtering” of Indians. That led to a huge boom of slave raids later that year, which peaked with even larger slave raiding parties in 1862.

Congress had to pass additional laws during Reconstruction that specifically targeted the California slave labor system, such as a bill in 1867 banning “peonage.” It was not until 1873 reforms that California allowed Native people to testify in court. It was after that when slavery really declined, because now Native people could legally say what happened to them and the slave raiders and traders–people as awful as the worst the South ever produced–could no longer operate with impunity. That didn’t end the genocide against the tribes, but it did end the aggressive direct slavery and murder phase.

In short, we have many histories of slavery in this nation and what happened in California is every bit as horrible as what happened in the South and in some ways worse since genocide was the stated goal.

I borrowed from Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 to write this post. For as horrible as all this history sounds in my post, it’s so much more horrifying in Madley’s book.

This is the 612th post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.

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