Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: Free Soil, Unfree Labor [Cave Johnson Couts] Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 20 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 22:09:00 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:17:31 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:17:31

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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350 Pacific Historical Review demand for domestic servants and agricultural laborers, these forms included minor custodial wardship, indentured servitude or “apprenticeship,” convict leasing, and debt peonage. Although widely discussed by scholars specializing in California Native American history, the 1850 Indian Act remains only partially understood. Even the most accurate and detailed accounts tend to be incomplete, and most focus almost exclusively on the law’s indenture and convict lease provisions, along with the illegal slave trade that emerged to supply the Indian labor market.' There was, however, much more to the law, including the two features that were arguably its most important by far: the effective legalization of debt peonage, and the vesting of excessive power over Indians with local justices of the peace. This article seeks a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the Indian Act by providing 1) a careful and complete analysis of the key provisions that directly or indirectly governed Indian labor, and 2) the first detailed case study of the law as actually applied by an employer. By carefully scrutinizing the private correspondence and business papers of Cave Johnson Couts, the full range and scope of the law become apparent. As the owner of Rancho Guajome near San Diego, Cave Couts was among the chief beneficiaries of California’s unfree labor system. Through the artful manipulation of nearly every advantage conferred upon employers by the Indian Act, Couts, a transplanted slaveholder from Tennessee, successfully built Rancho Guajome 1. The most complete accounts are Robert F. Heizer and Alan J. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination Under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley, 1971), 39-58, 212-217; James J. Rawls, Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman, Okla., 1984), 85-105; Albert L. Hurtado, /ndian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven, Conn., 1988), 127-131, 145-147, 176-182; and Richard S. Street, “We Are Not Slaves.’ A History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1869: The Formative Years” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1995), 334-337, 359-371, 383, 442-448, 493-495, 498-504. See also Sherburne F. Cook, The Conflict Between the California Indian and White Civilization (Berkeley, 1976), 308-315; Robert F. Heizer, ed., The Destruction of California Indians (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1974), 219-241; Richard Carrico, Strangers in a Stolen Land: American Indians in San Diego, 1850-1880 (Sacramento, Calif., 1987), 39-44; Douglas Monroy, Thrown Among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley, 1990), 185-186, 192-193; Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, 1994), 133-141; and Joel R. Hyer, “We Are Not Savages”: Native Americans in Southern California and the Pala Reservation, 1840-1920 (East Lansing, Mich., 2001), 58-60. Cave Couts and Indian Labor into a working model for antebellum California’s own “peculiar institution.” Given his background, few of Couts’s guests could resist making comparisons between his estate and the plantations of the American South. Indeed, in the words of one overnight visitor, the California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, “everything about Guajome had the air of the home of a wealthy southern planter.” Quite fittingly, Rancho Guajome would later provide another prominent guest, Helen Hunt Jackson, with the setting for her novel Ramona, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the late nineteenth-century Indian reform movement.? The labor law upon which Rancho Guajome rested was, to a large degree, a response to the Gold Rush. Thanks to the discovery of gold in January 1848, California qualified for statehood within two years of its conquest by the United States in the war with Mexico. In the fall of 1849 delegates to the state constitutional convention in Monterey drafted an organic law that prohibited chattel slavery with the following words, adopted bya unanimous vote: “Neither slavery, nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in this state.” Despite its straightforward tone, however, this seemingly unambiguous clause contained two significant loopholes created by the explicit exception made for convict labor and the implied exception for “voluntary” systems of servitude.® Commercial agriculturists, led by the Anglo and Hispanic owners of California’s famous Spanish and Mexican rancho grants, wasted little time before exploiting these loopholes. Indeed, for the 2. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Personal Observations During a Tour Through the Line of Missions of Upper California, 1874,” unpublished manuscript, p. 46, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; Antoinette May, Helen Hunt Jackson: A Lonely Voice of Conscience (San Francisco, 1987), 97-109. For a dissenting view supporting Ventura County's Rancho Camulos as the “true home of Ramona,” see James A. Sandos, “Historic Preservation and Historical Facts: Helen Hunt Jackson, Rancho Camulos, and Ramonana,” California History, 77 (1998), 168-185, 197-199. 3. Constitution of the State of California, 1849, Article 1, Section 18. The same two loopholes existed in the nearly identical anti-slavery clauses of the Northwest Ordinance and the Illinois constitution of 1818. In those cases, the porous provisions led to the subsequent binding of African Americans as indentured servants in both Indiana and Illinois. Whether California lawmakers consciously followed these earlier precedents in shaping Indian labor policies remains an unexplored but intriguing question. See Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic, 9 (1989), 21-51. 351