Abolition forced planters in the post-Civil War US South to consider new sources and forms of labor. Some looked to Spanish America for answers. Cuba had long played a prominent role in the American imagination because of its proximity, geostrategic location, and potential as a slave state prior to the Civil War. Even as the United States embraced abolition and Cuba maintained slavery, the island presented Southern planters with potential labor solutions. Cuban elites had been using male Chinese indentured workers (“coolies” or colonos asiáticos) to supplement slave labor and delay the rise of free labor since 1847. Planters in coastal Peru similarly embraced Chinese indentured labor in 1849 as abolition neared. Before the Civil War, Southerners generally had noted these developments with anxiety, fearing that coolies were morally corrupt and detrimental to slavery. However, for many, these concerns receded once legal slavery ended. Planters wanted cheap exploitable labor, which coolies appeared to offer. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern elites, especially in Louisiana, attempted to use Chinese indentured workers to minimize changes in labor relations.
Yet, these efforts did not go well. Southerners had a harder time recruiting, exploiting, controlling, and retaining coolies. This is not to say that Chinese indentured labor was an unquestioned “success” in Cuba and Peru. Compared to several centuries of African slavery, the period of coolie labor was short (roughly three decades). Moreover, the search for inexpensive labor continued well after the coolie era. Nevertheless, between 1847 and 1874, about a quarter-million Chinese left for Cuba and Peru, which enabled a period of economic prosperity. Chinese indentured labor in the US South, in contrast, lasted only a few years and provided virtually no labor shortage reprieve. Why did these outcomes differ so much?
Race, abolition, Chinese resistance, and international relations all interacted to shape and undermine the use of Chinese indentured labor in Cuba, Peru, and the US South. Nevertheless, the state was central to making or breaking the coolie labor system. In particular, the strength (even if temporary), goals, and actions of states in transition helped determine coolie labor's viability. During the mid nineteenth century, Cuba had a relatively strong colonial government due to centuries of colonialism; its support for slavery and coolie labor maintained Cuban elite loyalty during the age of Atlantic revolutions and emancipation. Cuban planters generally ceded power to the state in order to protect their privilege and access to cheap, exploitable labor. The power of Cuba's late-colonial government was real, but contingent.Footnote 1 Peru, in contrast, was an incipient nation-state. Although the national government abolished slavery in 1854, it was weak and virtually absent in the countryside. Therefore, it was incapable of protecting the Chinese, even if it so desired. The state was not as young in the United States, but it too was learning to assert itself during a period of major change. Southern planters turned to Chinese indentured labor following a massive civil war in which the federal government had triumphed, became more powerful than before, and was more confident in asserting its power, particularly against slavery and its legacy. This power would not last beyond Reconstruction, but when the South flirted with coolie labor, planters confronted a relatively strong US federal government and its Republican allies in state government who were generally anti-planter, increasingly feared the Chinese as a racial group, and believed coolie labor was akin to slavery. These factors together led them to oppose coolie labor and refuse to enforce labor contracts and hunt down and return coolies to plantations.
In examining the state's relationship to coolie labor, this essay sheds light on the transnational and country-specific nature of Chinese migration. Studies of Chinese indentured labor, including comparative ones, traditionally have focused on the nation-state.Footnote 2 However, historians have begun embracing transnational frameworks when studying Chinese migration to the Americas.Footnote 3 In fact, Elliott Young's recent work largely moves beyond the nation-state as a unit of analysis when examining Chinese migration to the Americas, hemispheric efforts to control this movement, Chinese responses to exploitation and exclusion, and the connections and similarities between indentured and non-indentured Chinese.Footnote 4 This study, like Young's, considers how debates and actions concerning race and labor crossed borders, as well as how Chinese workers themselves could cross these borders. Nevertheless, by carefully comparing state policies and the ability to carry them out, this article reveals important points of divergence, as well as reasons for points of convergence, that a strict transnational approach might miss. Thus, it balances national, comparative, and transnational history.
Young's broad approach versus this article's narrower, yet comparative and transnational, scope raises another issue: defining the term “coolie.” Although it can be used pejoratively in the present day, the word was used commonly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe Asian migrant laborers (especially Chinese, but also Indians and others). Historians, however, disagree on who constituted a coolie. As Walton Look Lai notes, some scholars use it for Chinese indentured laborers, while “others apply the term coolie migration to the entire global movement of Chinese unskilled manual labor (huagong) in this period, to distinguish it from the centuries-old movement of traders (huashang), artisans, and skilled workers who migrated mainly to Southeast Asia.” Suggesting that the “latter usage is historically more accurate” because the same basic push-pull factors shaped Chinese migration in general, Lai proposes a distinction between “more general coolie migration” and the “coolie trade,” represented by “the Latin American indentured migrations (Cuba and Peru),” which were “the most calamitous of these migrations.”Footnote 5 Moon-Ho Jung and Elliott Young similarly question the coolie-immigrant binary due to the term's widespread use and historical ambiguity and the fact that both indentured and non-indentured Chinese experienced coercion, exploitation, and marginalization.Footnote 6
While acknowledging the merits of using “coolie” broadly (or not at all), I reserve it for indentured laborers. Despite similarities between indentured and non-indentured Chinese, using “coolie” for all workers papers over important differences. All experienced exploitation and discrimination, but the situation of the indentured approximated that of slaves, most directly in terms of physical abuse and lack of freedom. Although labor recruiters similarly encouraged and deceived Chinese to go to the American West, these migrants did not arrive under contract. Instead they went under the credit-ticket system, which entailed borrowing money to pay for the passage. These debts, plus interest, served as mechanisms of control and led to exploitation.
Nevertheless, Chinese in California emigrated more willingly and had greater mobility than the indentured elsewhere. Like Erika Lee, I believe that these differences are still worth recognizing.Footnote 7 The narrower use of the term is also warranted because its application to non-indentured Asian workers was often intended to link them to indentured ones so as to denigrate and exclude them. Calling people coolies meant that they were unwanted except as cheap, exploitable, virtual slaves, a claim that was rooted in the indenture experience. Thus, despite its ambiguous nature, the term was intrinsically linked to a historical period in Cuba, Peru, the British Empire, and briefly the US South.
Finally, this article addresses debates over the strength of the state in the United States and Reconstruction's nature and outcome. William Novak and Gary Gerstle emphasize the limitations of centralized power during the nineteenth century, while acknowledging the Civil War and Reconstruction as exceptions to this rule.Footnote 8 Examining Chinese indentured labor within a comparative framework sheds additional light on how the state asserted itself, even if fleetingly, as never before. As Eric Foner, Rebecca Scott, and others have shown, the federal government, working in tandem with previously disenfranchised African Americans and state and local Republican allies, aggressively sought to dismantle the legacy of slavery and racial inequality. This effort largely succeeded until 1877 when Northerners lost their appetite for remaking the South and the federal government retreated. Power returned to the states, allowing white supremacists to roll back these gains.Footnote 9
Coolie labor further highlights Reconstruction's success and failure. A newly assertive federal government and its allies blocked Chinese indentured labor from taking root in the South. But, as Jung argues, this campaign helped solidify anti-Chinese sentiment in the American imagination, thereby contributing to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.Footnote 10 Moreover, preventing Chinese bondage did not ensure free labor. Exploitative sharecropping, wage labor, and convict labor dominated the South after Reconstruction, while the padrone system flourished in the US West.Footnote 11 Still, tens of thousands of Chinese never labored as virtual slaves in the US South, in large part because of a temporarily assertive state opposed to slavery, in contrast to events in Cuba with its strong pro-slave-owner colonial government and Peru with its fledgling liberal state.
Coolie Labor in Cuba, Peru, and the US South
Cuba turned to Chinese indentured workers in 1847 due to concerns over race and labor. Sugar relied on slavery, but growing international and domestic pressure against this institution led some Cubans to contemplate alternative labor supplies. Treaties with Great Britain in 1817 and 1835 made the Atlantic slave trade illegal and more costly. Spain did not enforce the ban until the mid 1860s, but many Cubans recognized the need to find new sources of labor well before that. Moreover, fear of becoming another “Haiti” (specifically, fear of a slave rebellion) led some to call for whitening the island and adopting a free labor system. During this same period, the British had opened up China to the West following the Opium Wars, and many Chinese, particularly in the southern part of the country, began emigrating to escape hardship caused by overpopulation, government corruption, famine, and civil unrest. Early experiments with Asian indentured labor in the British Caribbean also inspired Cuban planters worried about maintaining a cheap, immobile labor force. Ultimately, Chinese workers were attractive because they were neither European, which made exploitation easier, nor black, which assuaged racial anxieties. Coolies provided much needed labor that could help divide plantation workforces and prevent Haitian-style rebellion.Footnote 12
Unlike Cuba, Peru was a young independent liberal republic without slavery during most of the coolie era. During the first 30 years of independence, slavery was gradually undermined by the independence war, political instability, economic difficulties, and the growth of liberalism and abolitionism. However, just as legal slavery was ending, the guano industry boomed, allowing coastal elites to invest in sugar and cotton plantations. Thus, while demand for exploitable labor re-emerged, African slavery was disappearing as an option. Moreover, coastal elites believed that recruiting workers from the highlands was too difficult and costly due to a history of Indian communal autonomy. Dreams of European immigration also failed to materialize. Consequently, Peruvian planters looked across the Pacific. Coolies first arrived in 1849, five years before abolition, but the trade boomed after the end of legal slavery.Footnote 13
From these beginnings to 1874, roughly 125,000 indentured Chinese men arrived in Cuba, and some 92,000 came to Peru. They labored on sugar and cotton plantations, on railroads, in mines and guano pits, and as urban and domestic workers. There they experienced a middle ground between free labor and slavery. Colonos asiáticos were legally free individuals who signed eight-year labor contracts that required patronos (employers) to pay four-peso monthly wages, provide adequate food and healthcare, and allow rest on Sundays and holidays. After completing their contracts coolies were theoretically free.
Nevertheless, their experience resembled slavery. Recruiters used deception and force to get signatures on contracts. The voyage echoed the African Middle Passage, with thousands dying from imprisonment, beatings, malnourishment, and unhygienic conditions. Once in Spanish America, coolies seldom received their pay and adequate care. Instead, they faced long work hours and harsh treatment, including whippings, imprisonment, shackles, and death. Patronos often forced coolies to work beyond the original contract as well.Footnote 14 Many coolies in Cuba worked alongside slaves in a slave society, which encouraged exploitation. But, as Peru shows, abolition did not preclude abuse. Regardless of legal abolition, both societies experienced tension between preserving the traditional social order—including slavery and forced labor— and embracing liberal “progress.”
This tension led to the ambivalent racialization of the Chinese. On the one hand, coolies were free men and a positive social element. Unlike slaves, they signed contracts and had the right to a wage. In Cuba, the Junta de Fomento's sponsorship of Asian immigration as part of its white colonization project, the 1854 Royal Order on colonos, the census, some baptismal and government records, and the Consejo de Administración's 1864 ruling all indicated Chinese legal whiteness, meaning they could not be enslaved on the island.Footnote 15 In Peru, coolie trade legislation from 1856 and 1861, along with abolition in 1854 and its enshrinement in the 1860 constitution, similarly assured their free status.Footnote 16 Labeling coolies as colonos (colonists), contratados (contracted) or free laborers further distinguished them from slaves.Footnote 17 Many also praised the Chinese as a positive social element in contrast to Africans, pointing them out as hard workers, skilled, respectful, intelligent, cultured, moral, and capable of assimilating and becoming Christians.Footnote 18
On the other hand, coolies were slaves, racially inferior, and social menaces. As discussed below, coolie law in both places largely reflected slave codes, favored patronos, and denied or undermined coolies' rights as free individuals. Likewise, Cubans and Peruvians often used the language of slavery to discuss these workers. Coolies were “slaves” and “property,” employers were “owners,” ex-coolies were “free,” runaways were “cimarrones,” and new arrivals were even “bozales.” Individuals also “bought,” “sold,” “rented,” and “stole” colonos asiáticos.Footnote 19 Finally, many denigrated the Chinese, branding them as lazy, weak, dishonest, rebellious, savage, and morally corrupt, citing gambling, opium use, suicide, and homosexuality.Footnote 20
In spite of these clashing views, opinion initially facilitated coolie labor. Racializing coolies as free laborers and worthy immigrants justified letting them in. Moreover, as Lisa Yun argues for Cuba, many in both places minimized or explained away abuse by turning to the law and the contract, insisting that the Chinese were protected and that they had willingly accepted their obligations.Footnote 21 On the other hand, racializing them as subhuman slaves and a social cancer also legitimized exploitation.Footnote 22 Supporters of forced re-contracting and those accused of withholding wages, forcing coolies to work beyond their contract, and chaining, imprisoning, and beating them, regularly asserted that the supposed character flaws of the Chinese justified these actions.Footnote 23 For a quarter-century, this ambiguity enabled a coolie labor system. But the contradictions eventually helped undercut the coolie trade because domestic and international critics could condemn the slave-like treatment of supposedly free, cultured men or embrace Sinophobic views advocating Chinese exclusion, or both.Footnote 24
Chinese resistance in its everyday and radical forms also challenged this labor system. Coolies slowed their work, struck, practiced sabotage, stole, petitioned officials, saved money to buy out contracts and purchase certificates of freedom, forged documents, ran away, committed suicide, and individually or collectively attacked and murdered their superiors.Footnote 25 These actions did not always succeed in an immediate sense, but they cumulatively weakened this labor system by making Chinese suffering visible to domestic and international eyes. Combined with the ambiguities concerning who a coolie was, Chinese actions and domestic and international criticism of coolie labor made it difficult to completely deny the Chinese a place in free society and maintain coolie labor indefinitely. By 1874, international pressure, especially from the Chinese, British, and US governments, led Portugal to close Macao to the coolie trade, thereby dooming coolie labor in Spanish America, since most of these workers embarked from this port.Footnote 26
During the 1850s, a minority of Americans looked to Cuba and Peru and advocated Chinese indentured labor for the South. Some Northerners promoted these workers as a step toward free labor, while a handful of Southerners believed coolies could delay the rise of free labor. Southern voices also insisted that the Chinese suffered greatly in their homeland and would benefit from laboring for “benevolent” planters. Both Northern and Southern advocates agreed, however, that Asian laborers were inexpensive, hardworking, intelligent, and skilled.Footnote 27
Nevertheless, free labor ideology, the linking of coolies to slavery, and racial anxiety increasingly led Northerners and Westerners to condemn coolie labor during the decade before the Civil War. Free labor ideology insisted on a society of equal rights and opportunities that would allow anyone to advance from wage laborer to independent producer. Slavery, free labor advocates argued, precluded this ideal in the South, and its westward expansion threatened social mobility by eliminating this region as a land of individual opportunity. With this context in mind, and with eyes on Cuba, Peru, and the British West Indies, interest in Asian indentured labor quickly faded as many Northerners and Westerners came to see it as mocking free labor. Racial thinking also influenced free labor ideology and, by extension, opposition to coolie labor. As much as this ideology condemned slavery, white proponents of free labor increasingly disparaged slaves and free blacks as they developed a stronger sense of working-class racial consciousness. This intensified othering of US blacks and adherence to whiteness reflected white laborers' socioeconomic and political anxieties over their own economic dependence as wage earners. Attempting to validate their sense of self and claim a firmer place in American society and politics, white free labor advocates rarely viewed blacks as equals. Instead, they questioned whether blacks as an “inferior race” could handle the responsibilities of freedom, with many arguing for colonizing American blacks in the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa. Finding a parallel, opponents of Chinese labor began depicting this group also as racially inferior, willing to work for inhuman wages, unable to assimilate, and a threat to free society. Racial arguments against the Chinese were not as common before the Civil War, but they were gaining credence, especially in California where thousands of non-indentured Chinese worked.Footnote 28
Most Southern planters temporarily joined the chorus against Chinese immigration and coolie labor. Many believed Southern slavery remained strong, precluding any need for coolies.Footnote 29 Southern condemnations of coolie labor also frequently mirrored Northern and Western ones, though the goal of this opposition clearly differed. Southern opponents insisted that the coolie trade and treatment of Chinese in the Caribbean and Peru was more cruel than Southern slavery. Many also echoed the complaint that Asians represented an uncivilized race that would morally corrupt slaves. Others maintained that the Chinese did not integrate and endangered the racial balance in the South. Ultimately, the goal was to preserve slavery. Thus, Southerners upheld their treatment of slaves and criticized Chinese labor.Footnote 30
The Civil War had a mixed effect on the coolie question. Responding to mounting criticism of coolie labor, the federal government banned American participation in the coolie trade in 1862, linking it to the illegal Atlantic slave trade.Footnote 31 Three years later, slavery itself ended. But was coolie labor illegal in the United States, and what exactly was a coolie? The answers were obvious to some, less so to others. The status of “coolies” remained somewhat ambiguous, giving them another chance in the South as the labor situation changed following the Civil War.Footnote 32 Free blacks refused to work for low wages and planters hesitated to embrace sharecropping because they feared losing authority and giving “lazy” freedmen too much autonomy. Indentured Asians suddenly seemed more attractive. The rhetoric switched from coolies undermining slavery to coolies saving the social and economic order. Many Southerners now claimed coolies were affordable, skilled, intelligent, hardworking, and physically and morally fit. They also insisted that the Chinese would create labor competition and force freedmen to accept lower wages. Privately, some suggested that indentured Asians offered the option closest to slavery. Many planters had flipped in their opinions as they began looking to Cuba, China, and California for Chinese workers.Footnote 33
These efforts bore little fruit. Only several thousand coolies from China, the Caribbean, and California arrived during Reconstruction.Footnote 34 Spanish American planters had more time to obtain coolies, but even during overlapping periods, this migration heavily outpaced the South.Footnote 35 If these numbers differed, so did the Southern experience more generally. Coolies were never docile, but Southern planters found it harder to retain them, neutralize resistance, and profit from them at the same time. In the end, few Chinese arrived, and those who did stayed too short a time to produce the desired results. Unlike their impact in Cuba and Peru, Chinese indentured labor did little to help delay the shift to free labor in the South. As Moon-Ho Jung contends, the idea of Chinese coolies, rather than their actual presence, had a large impact on race and labor relations in the United States.Footnote 36
Coolie Labor and the State
What accounts for coolie labor's failure in the South as compared to its roles in Cuba and Peru? As already mentioned, slavery, abolition, contradictory racial tropes, Chinese resistance, and international politics all shaped coolie labor's trajectory in the Americas. But, as the following pages argue, the relative strength and goals of the state were central to these different outcomes.
Cuba
Cuba had a strong colonial government that upheld slavery to maintain planter-class loyalty. Officials allowed the clandestine slave trade into the 1860s, and they rarely punished masters for violating slaves' rights. The colonial government also tracked down, detained, and returned runaway slaves and used military force to prevent and respond to slave rebellion. Heightened fears of slave rebellion in the 1840s also led colonial authorities to restrict the freedom and mobility of free people of color. The Ten Years War (1868–1878) pressured Spain into gradual abolition, but slavery lasted until 1886.Footnote 37 The colonial government's response to the coolie trade and coolie labor largely mirrored its defense of slavery. Colonial officials did debate coolie labor, as well as slavery, but overall, they sided with patronos and masters. At times, they upheld the free status of the Chinese and defended them from abuse. More frequently, the ambiguous standing of colonos asiáticos and the desire to please the elite limited efforts to curb abuse.
Thus, despite international outcry, Spain and the colonial Cuban government did more to sustain coolie labor than undermine it. Many coolie traders had direct connections to the Atlantic slave trade.Footnote 38 However, this fact raised few concerns, even when reports suggested that coolie traders acted no differently from slave traders. Spanish agents in Macao were required to ensure that all coolies had signed their contracts willingly and that ships were not overcrowded and had proper ventilation and sufficient food, water, and medical supplies (including a doctor).Footnote 39 They typically ignored abuses when certifying that all was in order.Footnote 40 Despite criticism and evidence to the contrary, Spanish officials in Macao repeatedly insisted that they had fulfilled their duties and that “all the coolies come here [to the labor recruiting houses in Macao] with absolute liberty.”Footnote 41 Clearly, Spain's representatives in Macao did not impede this traffic.
Nor did Cuba's colonial government do much to prevent abuse in the coolie trade. An 1860 royal decree obligated colonial officials to conduct investigations and fine ships that broke the law, but only when passenger mortality rates surpassed six percent.Footnote 42 Cuban officials inspected ships but rarely criticized or punished coolie traders for high fatality rates at sea. They instead blamed opium for Chinese uprisings and deaths during the voyage. In 1869, 273 of 444 Chinese aboard the French ship Nelly died. Investigators claimed the crew had treated the coolies well, insisting so many had died from their inability to physically and mentally handle the crossing without opium. The deaths, the report explained, were “certainly lamentable, but almost inevitable in such long voyages with the crowding of men of their weakness and dissoluteness. … It is supposed that the cause was the lack of opium to which they are habituated, and in others that same opium is considered harmful and poisonous.”Footnote 43 Blaming the victim was the norm.
Occasionally, officials complained about abuses at sea, but complaints rarely led to action. Officials in Havana criticized the company La Alianza for repeatedly overcrowding and abusing Chinese passengers on board its ships; yet they barely punished the company.Footnote 44 Some coolie traders, assuming they would be heard by sympathetic ears, even complained to the authorities about ships that did follow the law. In 1857, the company La Colonizadora wanted compensation from an American ship captain for failing to board 400 coolies as it had requested, even though the captain insisted he could legally transport only 230.Footnote 45 Sometimes officials warned against future infractions.Footnote 46 In other instances they issued fines.Footnote 47 Yet, warnings meant little and fines could be revoked.Footnote 48 With little to fear, coolie importers continued to overcrowd ships, ignore regulations, and abuse passengers.Footnote 49
Just as the colonial government facilitated, or did not hinder, the coolie trade, it also enabled exploitation. In particular, the law allowed patronos to treat coolies like virtual slaves. When Chinese signed contracts, they temporarily gave up civil rights that conflicted with their labor obligations. These civil rights were poorly defined, which opened the door to abuse. The punishments patronos could legally mete out were much harsher than the ones they might receive for violating the contract or coolie regulations. Spain initially sanctioned corporal punishment. Even after regulations in 1854 banned whippings, employers still could withhold wages and use stocks and chains on deserters and those who “refused” to work. Employers did not have to worry about imprisonment or corporal punishment; they faced only economic sanctions (fines and the potential loss of a laborer) if they violated the contract or coolie regulations.
New regulations in 1860 essentially reiterated earlier rules favoring patronos over coolies.Footnote 50 By helping to create the infrastructure for putting down slave and coolie rebellion, the colonial government also provided planters and others with physical and psychological support that made them feel secure in exploiting slaves and coolies. Cuban planters permitted a relatively strong government presence in the countryside if it meant protection from rebellion.Footnote 51 Cuba's guardia civil was prepared to restore order on plantations in case of an uprising.Footnote 52 Potential Chinese mass rebellions did occur, but colonos asiáticos never succeeded in taking over a plantation—largely due to the vigilance of the guardia civil.Footnote 53 Well aware of the dangers inherent in the labor system, Cuban elites were prepared to survive the worst through their alliance with colonial authorities.
The colonial government went beyond sanctioning abuse and physically protecting patronos: it strove to keep Chinese laboring while under contract. Various laws required employers to register indentured laborers with the government. Theoretically, this prevented employers from forcing coolies to work beyond the contract, but a registry also made it easier to track down runaways. Free Chinese had to register with the government as well—another safeguard against runaways. Other laws required colonos asiáticos to carry identification papers, including their place of work, at all times. They needed written permission from their employer to leave a work site; otherwise the authorities could arrest them.Footnote 54 Looking for runaways, the guardia civil often checked the papers of Asians and Afro-Cubans who traveled alone.Footnote 55 When local authorities believed Chinese were deserters, they placed them in a depósito de cimarrones (jail for runaway slaves) until employers retrieved them. Officials also helped patronos by publishing notices of captured runaways.Footnote 56 Additionally, police periodically raided the island's free Chinese community, hoping to find runaways or Chinese residing illegally in the colony.Footnote 57
The colonial government also limited coolie mobility and protected patronos' rights by trying to prevent third parties from harboring or contracting runaways. As early as 1849, fines existed for sheltering missing colonos asiáticos. Guilty parties had to pay the cost of returning a runaway and four pesos for every day they hid the worker.Footnote 58 By 1868, the fine for sheltering or hiring someone else's Asian worker had reached 500 pesos. A royal decree five years later reaffirmed this punishment.Footnote 59 An investigation into the trafficking of other people's colonos asiáticos in Havana in 1859 reveals the government's concern for this issue. That July, Felipe Arango informed local officials that one of his coolies, a 14-year-old domestic named Joaquín, had disappeared. Arango believed Joaquín was staying with some white men who regularly “seduced” other people's coolies with the help of a free Chinese man and then “[sold] them to the countryside.” Arango accused these “agents of seduction” of running a racket worse than “highway robbery.” Officials discovered that the house contained a handful of Chinese and that the white individuals in the house had forged documents for some of them and had no documents for the others. As the investigation and trial proceeded, it became clear that a group of relatives and friends back in Galicia, Spain, had migrated to Cuba and at some point established an elaborate illegal business of “stealing” coolies and then “selling” them to others. The judge ultimately punished the ringleaders with two to four years of hard labor.Footnote 60
The colonial government also made it difficult for coolies to attain freedom after they finished their contracts. An 1860 royal decree gave them two months to re-contract, leave the island, or do forced public labor. Ex-coolies had virtually no money for passage home, so this law essentially sentenced them to perpetual servitude. Some evaded this law and joined free society, but it was not easy. Gaining legally free status involved procuring a number of documents (proof of having finished a contract, a baptismal certificate, a letter of domicile, and similar proofs), many of which needed yearly renewal. Of course, these papers cost money, which few Chinese had, and the authorities did not refrain from charging exorbitant prices for them or stealing them and making ex-coolies buy new ones. Lisa Yun has aptly dubbed this constant struggle the “paper chase.” All of these steps made escaping bondage difficult.Footnote 61 The 1860 law and the paper chase evince the strong support employers received from the colonial state.
Government support for the coolie labor system existed in a proactive sense, in the form of laws and enforcement favoring patronos, but it also consisted of non-action. Regulations may have suggested official concern for coolies, but enforcement was minimal. Abuse, including corporal punishment, rarely resulted in punishment for overseers or patronos. Local officials could legally visit and monitor treatment on plantations, but they almost never did, unless colonos asiáticos directly complained to them. Even when investigations occurred, patronos and overseers rarely were found guilty. If a case of abuse or failure to fulfill the contract actually led to a conviction in court, the penalty was usually rather minor, such as a modest fine. Too many officials sympathized with employers due to the respect and power that planters and other elites commanded, or because of their own racial biases. Some took bribes from the accused as well. Cuban criminal records involving Chinese reveal the light or non-existent punishments patronos and overseers frequently received when failing to fulfill contractual obligations and physically abusing workers.Footnote 62 Likewise, coolies who testified to a Chinese government-led commission in 1874 decried the lack of concern and corruption of Cuban authorities.Footnote 63 Unfortunately for the Chinese, most officials sympathized with patronos or were in their pockets.
Peru
Peru's coolie experience resembled Cuba's in many ways. Although all men were legally free and equal in Peru, the postcolonial state failed to make equality a reality. Peruvian officials on both sides of the Pacific did little to curb abuses in the coolie trade, despite laws that required they do so.Footnote 64 The Peruvian government issued fewer and less detailed regulations for the proper treatment of Asians laboring in the country than did its Cuban counterpart, which left the door open to abuse. In addition, local officials often failed to enforce laws that would protect the Chinese. When they did punish employers, punishments tended to be insignificant.Footnote 65 Local officials refused to give the proper papers to free Chinese or confiscated these papers, making these immigrants vulnerable to being sent back to the plantation.Footnote 66
Peruvian officials also tried to prevent runaways and capture runaway coolies. Police often harassed and arrested Chinese they saw on the street, including free ones, for being “suspicious.”Footnote 67 They also raided the homes and businesses of free Chinese, claiming they ran clandestine opium and gambling dens and sheltered runaways.Footnote 68 Officials placed captured runaways in a depósito until they could reunite coolie and employer. They further aided patronos by publishing notices of captured runaways.Footnote 69 As early as the 1850s, the department of Lima fined individuals for harboring missing coolies. Patronos regularly published notices of disappeared Asian workers in Lima's newspapers, often with reminders of the penalty for sheltering these laborers.Footnote 70 At times, as in Cuba, officials prosecuted individuals for “stealing” and “selling” other people's Chinese.Footnote 71
In 1867, the department of Lima enacted a coolie contract registration system that favored patronos and helped locate runaways. Chinese without the proper papers could be arrested and returned to an employer. In contrast, patronos caught making a coolie work beyond the original contract faced only a “fine” of paying regular wages for the extra work. These rules also forced free Chinese to register with the departmental government and prove their freedom, or face arrest, fines, and forced labor.Footnote 72 In 1869, Peruvian president José Balta ordered all free Chinese to register with the government and prove that they had finished their contracts and were not vagrants.Footnote 73 Measures taken against free Chinese further signaled government sympathy for patronos. Acquiring a “legitimate” job, proof of a finished contract, and money to pay for proper documents were challenges for most Chinese.
However, as a “liberal” state and not a colonial slave regime, the Peruvian national government was troubled by abuse, leading it at times to take a more pronounced stance on behalf of colonos asiáticos than did the government in Cuba. Abolition in 1854, and the elimination of the Indian head tax, meant equality before the law. Coolies could not be slaves or “second class citizens.” In fact, President Ramón Castilla, worried that the coolie trade mocked abolition, essentially banned it in 1856 by not permitting labor contracts to be signed abroad. He believed that the coolie trade was “degenerating into a species of the trade in blacks” and that it could not continue “without the outrage of humanity, nor the violation of the principles of liberty and equality proclaimed by the Government.” The decree specified that future contracts had to be entered into willingly on both sides and respect Peruvian law.Footnote 74 The 1860 constitution Castilla oversaw confirmed abolition and legal equality in Peru. Against his wishes, the Congress reauthorized the coolie trade in 1861, but all contracts still had to follow Peruvian law.Footnote 75
Fewer protective regulations in Peru did not mean the national government sided more with patronos than Cuba's colonial government did. So few regulations existed in part because less confusion over a coolie's status existed, due to abolition and the 1860 constitution. Abusing indentured Asians and violating their rights obviously conflicted with Peruvian law. However, a history of mistreatment slowly generated more governmental action in the late 1860s and early 1870s. An 1867 law for the department of Lima required officials to visit plantations every three months and check on the situation of Chinese workers. Planters who tried to prevent such visits faced a 50-peso fine.Footnote 76 New rules in 1873 more carefully regulated the workday and pay and established better measures for preventing abuse, including visits to plantations by officials in the prefecture of Callao.Footnote 77 In 1870, the national government ordered departmental commissions to investigate the condition of Chinese. It is not clear how many of these commissions existed, but a commission visited plantations and cities in the province of Santa and concluded that coolies generally received proper treatment. In a few instances, the commission was critical and enforced the law (at least temporarily), including freeing some Chinese.Footnote 78
The action of the Congress in voting down a forced re-contracting law in 1870 provides further evidence of a government unwilling to support planters to the same degree as occurred in Cuba.Footnote 79 Moreover, unlike Cuba, Peruvian officials showed a willingness to go beyond fining abusive patronos and actually free Chinese whose contracts and rights had been violated. The Santa commission illustrates this point, but such things happened in other instances as well. An 1861 trial concerning physical abuse on the Monterrico plantation led to the freeing of seven coolies who had been whipped.Footnote 80 By 1873 a national law granted Asian workers their freedom if patronos violated contracts, but not simply because they administered whippings.Footnote 81
Nevertheless, despite some good intentions, the national government was too weak to protect Chinese in the countryside. Abolition meant Asians could not be legal slaves and limited the perceived need for coolie legislation, but the relative lack of legislation also resulted from an impotent central government. Between independence and the War of the Pacific (1879-83), the Peruvian state struggled to consolidate itself. True, guano profits, General Castilla's rule (1845-51 and 1854-62), and the rise of civilian leadership under Manuel Pardo in 1872 helped create a more stable order by establishing Lima's hegemony over the rest of the country. But the capital's power still depended on the guano plutocracy and the coastal elite.Footnote 82 Thus, limited resources went to protecting the government in power, and defending the rights of Chinese, even if desired, was not a priority. Castilla had alienated coastal elites to a degree with his assault on slavery, which explains why he compensated slaveholders so they could invest in Asian labor. The need for support from this powerful sector of society limited the efforts of Castilla's successors to change patrono behavior. Even Castilla lacked political capital to truly defend coolies. He fully opposed reopening the trade in 1861 and vetoed legislation reauthorizing it, but the Congress, with pressure from the planter class, overrode his veto.Footnote 83
If enacting regulations to protect coolies was difficult, enforcing them was even harder due to the state's weakness. On paper, power was highly centralized in the hands of the president. However, the actual implementation of the chief executive's will depended on the cooperation of regional and local powerbrokers.Footnote 84 Holding local officials accountable for not protecting Chinese risked alienating crucial allies. In his detailed 1872 study of the legal situation of foreigners in Peru, Félix Cipriano C. Zegarra noted how planters often held greater sway over local officials than the central government in Lima did. As Zegarra explained, the national government may have wished to enforce the law and protect colonos asiáticos, but the “influence of the hacendado over the local authorities is generally too strong for the latter to be anything other than an instrument of the former's design.”Footnote 85 Moreover, government officials were virtually absent in some rural areas.Footnote 86 Zegarra understood the implications of this situation. “The great distance of the authorities from the rural estates,” he wrote, “serves as a security for the patrón that the abuses perpetrated by him will not be corrected or punished.”Footnote 87 Christopher Robinson, US minister to Peru from 1861 to 1866, made similar observations about the abuse of Spanish contract workers on the cotton hacienda Talambo in the department of La Libertad. He noted that local authorities, allied to the estate owner, failed to properly investigate the situation “and in this most flagrant manner attempted to pervert the course of justice to screen the perpetrators of these outrages from the punishment which the laws of Peru award to such crimes.” Robinson was surely referring to Chinese coolies when he further explained that “this case is one of many of a similar kind which have occurred in the interior provinces of this country, and where the political influence of the aggressor is often relied on by him as a shield from the punishment he deserves, while the distance from the Capital and the inconvenient modes of communication prevent summoning of the proper means to prevent aggression.”Footnote 88 Planters were isolated or had local officials in their pockets. They could rule their properties as miniature kingdoms and the national government could do little about it.
An impotent state proved a mixed blessing for Peru's plantation owners. Although the thin government presence in the countryside gave planters freedom to exploit Chinese, it also made capturing runaways harder and rendered planters more vulnerable to Chinese mass rebellion, compared to Cuba under its colonial regime. At least seven major Chinese rebellions involving temporary takeovers of plantations occurred in Peru, whereas records do not reveal any such cases in Cuba with its strong guardia civil.Footnote 89 The virtual absence of a strong rural police force in Peru allowed these events to escalate to such dangerous levels. Maintaining order in the countryside required meaningful support from the government. This was not fully the reality in Peru, but it was in Cuba.
The US South
Coolie labor's success in Cuba and Peru depended, respectively, on a strong supportive state or a weak one incapable of challenging planter interests. Neither was the case for the US South. During Reconstruction, the South experienced an assertive federal government and a Republican Party committed to eliminating slavery and at least temporarily promoting racial equality. This is not to claim evidence of long-term centralized power nor full Republican support for racial equality. However, constitutional amendments banning slavery and guaranteeing equality regardless of race, the commitment to abolition and the defeat of the Confederacy, the military occupation of the South, the banning of Confederates from office, the lack of federal/Republican desire to aid treasonous planters, and the 1866 Civil Rights Act seriously weakened traditional Southern elites and for a time helped African Americans advance. Many of the Northern occupiers and their Southern allies wanted ex-slaves to continue to work on plantations, but as Reconstruction proceeded they scoffed at planters who wanted to make freedmen virtual slaves. Republicans took over Southern state governments and wrote new state constitutions fully enfranchising African Americans. For the first time, blacks played prominent roles at all levels of government. A dominant Republican party and a more forceful federal government during the late 1860s and early 1870s meant a decisive move away from slavery and racial inequality during Reconstruction.Footnote 90
This was not a setting conducive to coolie labor, especially when so many associated coolies with slavery. Southerners also had to contend with a growing anti-Chinese movement, some of which arose from within their own ranks.Footnote 91 The New Orleans Times during the summer of 1865, for example, asserted slavery's death and warned that “the ‘coolie’ plan is not to be thought of” since “we have had trouble enough from the importation of inferior races to become the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, to introduce a new class of servile workers with yellow instead of black skins.”Footnote 92 That same summer the Augusta Chronicle in Georgia called the desire for coolies “madness.” The paper declared coolie labor “the most barbarous ever in existence. It is no use for anyone to think that such a thing will be permitted. It has been decreed that henceforth that nothing but free labor shall exist in the United States, and it is sheer madness for any man or clique of men to flatter themselves into the belief that they can set aside or evade the decree.” Readers were encouraged to “accept the true status of affairs” and pursue realistic paths toward prosperity, “instead of wasting our energies in concocting utopian schemes antagonistic to the avowed policy of the Government, and which will result in nothing but injury to ourselves and our country.”Footnote 93 This warning about government opposition proved prophetic.
The US government offered little support for Chinese indentured labor compared to their Cuban (and, to a degree, Peruvian) counterparts. Federal officials immediately opposed post-Civil War efforts to import coolies to the South. In 1865 Southern labor speculators sought federal permission to import Chinese workers, but the Bureau of Immigration denied these requests, believing it would violate the 1862 Anti-Coolie Act.Footnote 94 Horace N. Congar, a radical Republican and commissioner of the Bureau of Immigration, informed Congress the following year that he had rejected “numerous” requests to import coolies, and told petitioners “that the whole policy of the government is opposed to such propositions, and that the introduction of new races bound to service and labor, under contracts similar to those of the West Indies, is contrary to the true interests, as it is to the laws, of the United States.”Footnote 95 Later that year, the new commissioner, Republican E. Peshine Smith, responded similarly to additional queries.Footnote 96
Nevertheless, Southerners kept trying. Planters and their supporters insisted that the 1862 anti-coolie law did not apply to them. The law, they asserted, applied to the movement of unfree laborers from China to other foreign ports; it did not prevent American ships from carrying Chinese, nor American agents from contracting Chinese workers outside of the United States when both sides freely entered the agreement.Footnote 97 Coolie dreams continued throughout 1866, but none arrived that year.Footnote 98 By the next year, labor recruiters in Louisiana succeeded in introducing a few hundred Chinese workers from Cuba where they had just completed their contracts.Footnote 99 However, the Cuban door for Chinese labor quickly swung shut when Cuba's Ten Years' War began in 1868 and the Spanish colonial government made efforts to stop Chinese from leaving the island for fear that they might be runaways with contracts to fulfill.Footnote 100
The push for coolies gained new impetus in 1869. Various Southern labor conventions that year promoted coolie labor, and planters and other business interests formed joint-stock companies dedicated to recruiting these workers. With Cuba off the table, recruitment shifted to China and the Chinese in the western United States.Footnote 101 By the second half of 1869, labor agents had left for both places. Efforts in China bore little fruit. Chinese hesitated to sign contracts, and the British in Hong Kong had blocked recruitment by 1870, fearing exploitation. In the end, only two ships, the Ville de St. Lo and the Charles Albert, left China, landing in New Orleans in 1870 with 169 and 220 laborers, respectively.Footnote 102 Recruiting in California also stumbled, because many labor recruiters did not take their job seriously and because the Chinese had greater economic opportunities in the West and associated the South with slavery. Still, Southern railroad companies and planters, aided by mounting Sinophobia in the Western states, recruited some California Chinese. The Houston and Central Texas Railroad in Calvert, Texas, received 250 in 1869. The next year, the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad recruited 963, while a handful headed to Selma, Alabama, to work on the Selma and Gulf Railroad. Hundreds also went to work on Louisiana's plantations.Footnote 103
Federal officials and others vigorously opposed these developments. As the public learned about efforts to import Chinese from Cuba, strong statements of disapproval appeared in Congress and the press. In January 1867, Republicans passed resolutions in both houses of Congress condemning coolie labor in the United States and the rest of the Americas.Footnote 104 Later that year, the Daily Phoenix in Columbia, South Carolina, reprinted a New York Tribune article decrying Louisiana planters' attempts to import “chattel” from Cuba and violate the 1862 Coolie Act.Footnote 105 Based on Congress's resolutions, Secretary of State William Seward issued a Circular Relative to the Coolie Trade in early 1867, calling on US consuls to use “all the authority, power, and influence, at your command, towards preventing and discouraging” the coolie trade. Seward sanctioned voluntary migration, but consuls had to verify and endorse voluntary status for any Chinese headed to the United States.Footnote 106 Officials were tasked with preventing coolies from entering the United States, but determining who was and was not a coolie remained open to interpretation, as future conflicts between coolie importers and US officials would demonstrate. Still, Southern newspapers noted that the “Radicals” in government, as well as federal policy more generally, were major obstacles to the Southern coolie trade.Footnote 107
The federal government may have missed the arrival of the first Chinese from Cuba, but overall it made importing Chinese indentured laborers from Cuba and China rather difficult. The US consuls in both places became more vigilant following Seward's circular. The consul's office in Havana informed Seward in July 1867 that Louisiana planters had begun importing coolies from Cuba. In particular, J. J. Wyckes had sent 25 coolies to New Orleans on the American ship William Robertson on behalf of others. The consul claimed that Wyckes had “purchased” some of the Chinese and was defying US law by importing individuals bound to contracts that created “the relation of slavery or servitude.” He hoped US officials would inspect the ship upon its arrival. The letter also noted that some Southerners wanted to obtain coolies directly from China. The next month, the consul again warned of Southern attempts to procure Chinese laborers in Cuba, admitting that these endeavors had begun earlier than he had originally believed.Footnote 108
Federal officials in Washington did not turn a blind eye. Seward requested more information from the consul and relayed the original message to the attorney general and the secretaries of war and the treasury. The attorney general instructed the US district attorney in New Orleans, Samuel H. Torrey, to investigate, while the secretary of the treasury ordered New Orleans' collector of customs to assist Torrey. Upon discovering 23 coolies on board the William Robertson without US consular documents certifying voluntary emigration, Torrey directed customs to seize the ship. He also had the ship captain and Edward Wykces, the son of J.J. Wyckes, arrested for violating the 1862 Coolie Act; it was Edward who had gone to Cuba and held the labor contracts. The two men and the ship soon were released on bond.
As the case proceeded, Torrey learned that vice consul Thomas Savage in Havana blamed Wyckes and his associates, not the ship captain. Savage had told the captain to allow the Chinese to go wherever they wanted upon landing in New Orleans, and he believed the ship captain had “acted in good faith, and under the impression that the chinese [sic] were passengers going to New Orleans as free agents.” Wyckes insisted he had followed the law and that the Chinese wanted to go to Louisiana and had voluntarily signed contracts. Bradish Johnson, a wealthy planter already employing Chinese contract laborers, wrote to the secretary of the treasury, Hugh McCulloch, defending Wyckes along similar lines. Secretary McCulloch was unmoved. Nevertheless, by late September, Torrey dropped the case for fear of not having enough evidence to get a conviction. Edward Wyckes then attempted to sue Torrey and other federal officials, but failed as well. The attorney general's office ultimately reprimanded Torrey for dropping the case.Footnote 109
Although federal officials may not have handled the William Robertson affair well, they had signaled a willingness to harass Southern coolie importers. For the next three years, Southerners still sought coolies from Cuba, but they received resistance from US officials. True, when J. J. Wyckes revisited Cuba in late 1867, vice consul Savage permitted him to return with 12 coolies, certifying that they had signed one-year contracts voluntarily.Footnote 110 However, Wyckes still had to allow Savage to question the Chinese, which if the task were taken seriously, would be an obstacle to a Cuban or Peruvian-style coolie labor system. It is unlikely that Savage would have certified eight-year contracts like those found in Spanish America. In May 1870, the US consul in Havana reported frequent inquiries about the legality of sponsoring ex-coolie migration from Cuba to the United States. He believed it would be legal if Spanish laws were respected and Chinese willingly agreed to it. His superiors in Washington disagreed, explaining that US courts would be unlikely to enforce contracts signed in Cuba, and that the 1862 Anti-Coolie Act likely “embrace[d] not only the case of coolies transported directly to the United States, and in vessels of the United States, but also those who having been originally carried to Cuba in violation of the policy of that law, may afterwards be shipped to the United States from Cuba in either American or foreign vessel.”Footnote 111 Along with conditions on the island, negative responses from US officials helped end recruitment in Cuba.
Confusion concerning who a coolie was and harassment from US officials also impeded recruitment in China. In 1869, the New Orleans shipping merchant William Creevy sought confirmation that the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China had abrogated the 1862 Anti-Coolie Act. Reacting to the intense interest in Chinese contract workers at a major labor convention in Memphis that July, Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell wrote to the collector of customs in New Orleans refuting Creevy's position. Boutwell insisted that the 1862 law remained in force and that the Burlingame Treaty actually strengthened it by making “it a penal offence to take Chinese subjects from China without their free and voluntary consent.” Boutwell concluded, “Such being the facts in the case, you are hereby authorized and directed to use all vigilance in the suppression of this new modification of the Slave trade.” The letter and summary of the exchange were published widely and helped cool some of the efforts to import coolies.Footnote 112
But the demand for labor remained high, and many Southerners still believed in importing Chinese workers, if they could get consular certification that these workers had signed contracts voluntarily. In the end, however, only two coolie ships left China for Louisiana. In both cases, the US consul in Hong Kong delayed their departure to ensure there were no violations of the Coolie Act. After carefully examining the ships, interviewing the Chinese, and insisting that contracts not be signed before departure, the consul allowed the ships to leave. Despite the consul's stance against contracts signed in China, the labor agents still viewed the Chinese as under contract.Footnote 113 Nonetheless, this type of governmental action added to the difficulty of recruiting in China.
Moreover, news of the two ships from China led the US Senate to renew its scrutiny of the coolie trade. A Senate resolution in 1870, passed unanimously, demanded a presidential report on the status of the coolie trade in the country. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish reported no violations of the 1862 Coolie Act, but declared his office would continue to monitor the situation.Footnote 114 As the US Senate worried about coolies, British officials closed Hong Kong to Southern labor recruiters, effectively killing efforts in China (recruitment in Macao was associated with “Chinese slavery”). By mid 1870, California remained a possibility, but few Chinese wished to go to the South. Federal hostility had clearly hindered the Southern coolie trade. Foreign governments and Chinese disinterest in the South only compounded these difficulties.
State and local governments also impeded the movement of Chinese indentured labor to the South. New Southern state constitutions banned slavery and involuntary servitude. Texas's 1869 constitution explicitly banned “the importations of persons under the name of ‘coolies,’ or any other name or designation, or the adoption of any system of peonage, whereby the helpless and unfortunate may be reduced to practical bondage.”Footnote 115 Nonetheless, the 1869 constitution did not stop some Texas railroad entrepreneurs and cotton planters from hiring Chinese workers, but it did hinder importing truly indentured ones. The desire to prevent a new form of bondage, along with racial anxiety, led Tennessee's legislature and Alabama's governor and commissioner of industrial resources to oppose Chinese labor in 1869.Footnote 116 Indentured Chinese did go to the South during Reconstruction despite government opposition, but far fewer went than planters had envisioned. Various factors made populating the South with coolies difficult, but opposition from federal and state officials clearly played a leading role in shaping this outcome.
A lack of government support in other ways doomed coolie labor in the South. No guardia civil existed to control slaves and coolies, a reality the New Orleans Times seemed to understand.Footnote 117 Additionally, the government never created coolie codes sanctioning the exploitation of Chinese. Nor did it contemplate laws supporting perpetual servitude. Similarly, state and federal officials never established government registries of coolie contracts that could be used to find runaways. No laws explicitly penalized hiring other people's coolies. Instead, during Radical Reconstruction the federal government and state allies attempted to ensure equality in the United States. The fourteenth and fifteenth amendments and the 1870 Enforcement Act made it difficult for states to create a secondary class of individuals. Some Radical Republicans, such as Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, advocated for protecting the Chinese in the country.Footnote 118 Of course, the push for equality ultimately failed. In 1870 Congress voted to prevent Chinese naturalization.Footnote 119 Moreover, in the long run Jim Crow created second-class citizens in the South and federal officials completely forsook Chinese with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Also, the padrone system took hold in the West. In any case, at the time that Southerners turned to coolie labor, Radical Reconstruction and mounting anti-Chinese sentiment posed major obstacles.
Coolie contracts and their enforcement in the South show how Reconstruction created an environment that was not conducive to this labor system. Chinese in Cuba and Peru signed eight-year, transferable contracts that paid four dollars a month and restricted civil rights. Contracts in the South were non-transferable, shorter (one to three years), for higher pay ($10 to $16 a month), and did not limit civil rights.Footnote 120 These differences occurred because state and federal officials refused to sanction exploitative relationships that turned individuals into temporary property; instead, they largely let employers and employees work out labor relations on their own, within the confines of the law. Thus, during Reconstruction, Southern planters operated in a freer labor market than their Cuban and Peruvian counterparts. White Southerners suddenly had to negotiate with and control non-white workers without strong government backing. This new environment did not preclude exploitative labor relations, but it clearly softened them. Planters repeatedly complained about officials weakening vagrancy laws and failing to enforce them or labor contracts on their behalf. For the first time, the law and the courts seemed to place a higher premium on protecting workers' wages and rights than on the interests of an employer.Footnote 121
Although these complaints often focused on African American workers, they also included Chinese workers. Local and state authorities rarely stopped Chinese from leaving work sites and finding new employment. Examples abound. Chinese railroad workers in Calvert, Texas, sued and abandoned their employer over a pay dispute in 1870. The lawsuit's outcome is unknown, but many hired themselves out to Texas cotton farmers or migrated to Louisiana without any legal repercussions.Footnote 122 In 1871, roughly 500 Chinese in Alabama deserted the Alabama & Chattanooga Railroad for Mobile, Tuscaloosa, and some parts of Mississippi and Louisiana in search of better opportunities. The Louisiana labor agent W. A. Kissam had lured them away with promises of better pay. John C. Stanton, co-owner of the railroad, sued Kissam over his workers, but lost. Later that year, Stanton failed to pay the remaining Chinese, causing most of them to leave as well.Footnote 123
Stanton's experience contrasted sharply with those of patronos in Cuba and Peru who did not let coolies leave and “break” contracts, even when they did not pay them. The owners of the Live Oaks and St. Louis plantations in Iberville Parish, Louisiana, watched in dismay in 1871 as most of their coolies left to work in the S. L. James factory in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Baton Rouge, for better wages or headed to New Orleans. A parish judge ordered some of the workers to return to the St. Louis plantation or pay for breach of contract, but officials never enforced the order. Instead, the investment in Asian workers turned into a major loss.Footnote 124 By late 1871, most Chinese on the Millaudon plantation in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana had left for other plantations, the cotton mills in Baton Rouge's state penitentiary, or simply disappeared. Nearly all of the original Chinese on the Leighton plantation near Thibodaux “abandoned” their employer within a year, despite having signed three-year contracts.Footnote 125 Other Louisiana planters reported Chinese flight as well.Footnote 126 Many Chinese moved from plantation to plantation, but they also went to cities to find work, open shops, restaurants, and laundries, or wait for higher wages back in the countryside.Footnote 127
Based on Chinese moving from plantation to city and back again, the Donaldsonville Chief in Louisiana concluded that “the pig-tailed celestials seem to be of a wandering disposition and unable to stay for any length of time in the same place.”Footnote 128 More than a “wandering disposition,” the Chinese demonstrated a refusal to work under harsh labor conditions and resentment of violations of their contracts. In the end, they could leave and find better employment because officials did not stop them, and because the demand for labor remained too high to prevent employers from colluding with each other.
When Chinese refused to work, employers in the South could not count on government support. In 1871, coolies on the Poydras plantation in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, complained about contract violations to the head of the metropolitan police. Although he disregarded their grievances and insisted they would be arrested for vagrancy if they remained idle, he did not send them back to Poydras.Footnote 129 Similarly, the owner of the Millaudon plantation repeatedly had to renegotiate the terms of service in favor of his Asian workers because local authorities lent him little support. Moreover, violent confrontations on Millaudon led to minimal legal punishment for coolies, thereby doing little to stem Chinese pressure for better labor relations.Footnote 130 In 1871, a violent confrontation between management and coolies on the Cedar Grove plantation in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, led parish judge Paul Guidry to jail the plantation owner and two of his associates and have them stand trial. Another judge released the defendants, but the Chinese refused to work and Judge Guidry allowed them to leave the plantation. Cedar Grove's owner was left with a failed investment.Footnote 131 Although government officials in the South often did not support coolies strongly, they did not enforce contracts on behalf of planters the way they did in Cuba and often in Peru. When employers were abusive, the authorities sometimes punished them and did not force Chinese to stay on the plantation. Government officials left employers and employees to figure out labor relations on their own for the most part, which was a losing scenario for planters under the larger conditions of Reconstruction.
When Reconstruction ended, Southern whites had a chance to recreate coolie labor. However, they now had the political power to more closely control and exploit the black population. Also, by that time planters had largely given up on Chinese indentured labor due to earlier obstacles to acquiring and controlling them. Sinophobia also had grown to a fevered pitch in the United States, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. As coolie labor and Chinese immigration became illegal, Southern coolie labor dreams definitively died.
Conclusion
Coolie labor in the Americas offers an excellent opportunity to do national, international, comparative, and transnational history, and to consider the balance between the transnational and the national. The trajectory of coolie labor in Cuba, Peru, and the US South reveals substantial transnational links. Slavery, abolition, and coolies were hotly debated and contested issues in all three societies. Moreover, they all looked to each other, to the British Caribbean, and to China for inspiration and solutions to their race and labor problems. Each one dealt with international conditions that threatened the institution of slavery, and they all took advantage of international developments that made China a possible source of labor. Representatives from these societies made their way to China to recruit workers. Chinese laborers sailed across the ocean to work in the Americas, and some even went from one country in the region to another. Planters in all three societies confronted Chinese who resisted virtual enslavement through everyday and radical means. Many Spaniards, Cubans, and Peruvians insisted that they did not exploit the Chinese, hoping to blunt international criticism. Americans before and after the Civil War monitored and participated in these developments.
Members of these societies spoke to each other and together they developed a contradictory discourse concerning the Chinese and coolie labor. The coolie as either free or slave, as hard-working and skilled or lazy, rebellious, and weak, and as civilized or morally corrupt was a co-creation. Finally, transnational realities played a role in coolie labor's demise as well: high levels of abuse led British and Portuguese officials to close China as a source of labor for Peru, Cuba, and the United States, and Spain also closed Cuba to the United States because it wanted to keep Chinese laboring on the island.
If these places were intimately linked, they also differed. Despite similar labor needs and similar ideas about the Chinese, coolie labor was more successful in Cuba and Peru than in the US South. This is where national contexts enter the story. Differences in the agenda and strength of the state played key roles in these developments. In Cuba, the strong colonial government was aligned with planters and supported slavery and coolie labor. Peru abolished slavery, but it was an unstable young liberal republic. The national government was in no position to challenge planters. Thus, the weakness of the state in Peru helped coolie labor flourish there, whereas the strength of the colonial state in Cuba facilitated a similar outcome.
Planters in the US South lacked the proper variables to adopt Chinese indentured labor. Following the Civil War, the United States had a more assertive federal government that was anti-planter and committed to ending slavery and promoting racial equality. By the time of Reconstruction, the long debate about coolies in the United States had convinced government officials for the most part that coolie labor was slave labor and that the Chinese were undesirable immigrants. Consequently, the government did not support the coolie trade and did not favor planters over Chinese laborers. Although Reconstruction prevented coolie labor from flourishing, the linking of coolie labor to slavery helped lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Thus, Reconstruction largely prevented the exploitation of Chinese labor in the South, but it also contributed to the marginalization in general of the Chinese in the United States.
Southern planters failed spectacularly compared to planters in Cuba and Peru, but even in those two Spanish American societies coolie labor lasted only three decades. The explanation for this long-term failure in Cuba and Peru shares some similarity with its failure in the South. All three developed an ambiguous discourse on coolies. In Cuba and Peru, these inconsistencies helped justify both Chinese immigration and exploitation. However, the same contradictions also made coolie labor vulnerable. As Chinese resisted more and more and their actions increasingly highlighted Cuban and Peruvian hypocrisy, domestic and international pressure against coolie labor increased. By the mid 1870s, both societies had to abandon this labor system. The ambiguous discourse on coolies existed in the United States as well, but because of the timing of the efforts there to establish the coolie labor system in relation to larger domestic and international conditions, it actually stifled this project. Americans were convinced at that point that Chinese coolies were slaves and undesirable immigrants. Thus, in all three places, the notion of the coolie, however ill-defined, played a role in enabling, inhibiting, and undermining Chinese indentured labor.
