Liberty like thunder: Law, history, and the emancipatory politics of Reconstruction America.

Abstract

My dissertation analyzes federal efforts to liberate Indian-Mestizo captives in New Mexico during the Reconstruction Era. Recent work on Indian-Mestizo servitude has begun to explore interesting new aspects about the trade, but a full comparative analysis of federal manumission efforts in the South and New Mexico has yet to be undertaken. Key questions to be addressed include: What was Indian-Mestizo servitude and was it the same kind of institution as Black slavery? If Indian-Mestizo servitude was similar to Black slavery did the government create a parallel enforcement program to abolish it during Reconstruction? If not, why not? What factors influenced the creation and implementation of civil rights law during this period? Did Indian-Mestizo servitude create specialized challenges to government liberation that differed from Black slavery? If so, what were these challenges? In my work, I demonstrate that federal emancipation in New Mexico lagged far behind that in the American South. I attribute much of this lag to the pernicious affects of a Black/White racial paradigm that bound congressional debate over civil rights legislation and created a set of enforcement tools that emphasized the liberation of Black slaves in the South. Convergently, the civil rights law that emerged out of this paradigm aimed to secure basic economic and political liberties for new Black citizens in the South. But because congress did not believe that Indians, and by implication Mestizos, were prepared for American citizenship, they did not take aggressive steps to protect the rights of Indian-Mestizo captives in New Mexico. In 1868, determined American officials tried to abolish the Indian-Mestizo slave trade by utilizing civilian interdiction teams. But New Mexicans resisted these activities because they interpreted such interdictions as yet another attempt by Americans to supplant their natal customs. In the end, these interdiction teams were much too modest in size and strength to abolish pernicious customs like Indian-Mestizo servitude. Federal attempts to prosecute New Mexican slave owners also faltered and servants continued to remain in captivity within the New Mexico territory well after the official end of Reconstruction in 1877.