Abolition, Chinese Indentured Labor, and the State: Cuba, Peru, and the United States during the Mid Nineteenth Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin N. Narváez

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.

2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caitlin A. Fitz

A new order for the New World was unfolding in the early nineteenth century, or so many in the United States believed. Between 1808 and 1825, all of Portuguese America and nearly all of Spanish America broke away from Europe, casting off Old World monarchs and inaugurating home-grown governments instead. People throughout the United States looked on with excitement, as the new order seemed at once to vindicate their own revolution as well as offer new possibilities for future progress. Free from obsolete European alliances, they hoped, the entire hemisphere could now rally together around republican government and commercial reciprocity. Statesmen and politicians were no exception, as men from Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay tried to exclude European influence from the hemisphere while securing new markets for American manufactures and agricultural surplus.


Perceptions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Julius Nathan Fortaleza Klinger

The purpose of this paper is to explore the question of whether or not early nineteenth-century lawmakers saw the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a true solution to the question of slavery in the United States, or if it was simply a stopgap solution. The information used to conduct this research paper comes in the form of a collation of primary and secondary sources. My findings indicate that the debate over Missouri's statehood was in fact about slavery in the US, and that the underlying causes of the Civil War were already quite prevalent four whole decades before the conflict broke out.


Author(s):  
William H. McNeill

IN THE LATTER part of the nineteenth century, east coast city dwellers in the United States had difficulty repressing a sense of their own persistent cultural inferiority vis-à-vis London and Paris. At the same time a great many old-stock Americans were dismayed by the stream of immigrants coming to these shores whose diversity called the future cohesion of the Republic into question almost as seriously as the issue of slavery had done in the decades before the Civil War. In such a climate of opinion, the unabashed provinciality of Frederick Jackson Turner's (1861-1932) paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," delivered at a meeting of the newly founded American Historical Association in connection with the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), began within less than a decade to resound like a trumpet call, though whether it signalled advance or retreat remained profoundly ambiguous....


Author(s):  
Thomas J. Brown

This introduction traces antebellum American skepticism about public monuments to the distrust of standing armies that was central to the ideology of the American Revolution. The popularity of Independence Day illustrates the iconoclasm of the early republic, which paralleled a widespread resistance to compulsory military service. Remembrance of the Civil War vastly increased the number of public monuments in the United States. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, these memorials became a vehicle for the militarization of American culture.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-381
Author(s):  
E. Mark Moreno

Between 1844 and 1896, two archetypal figures on horseback known as rancheros and chinacos were disseminated through print publications. As war with the United States loomed in 1844, a relatively obscure Mexican writer depicted the ranchero as a “true national type” in a popular magazine. Eighteen years later another archetype on horseback, the chinaco, appeared in newspaper propaganda designed to provoke resistance against an imminent French advance into the Mexican interior. Later writers, such as Justo Sierra and Antonio García Cubas, imbued such figures with racialized mestizo qualities and heroic martial traits, equating mestizo blood with strength and martial capabilities that could build a more advanced Mexican state. The depiction of both figures as of mixed-race origins was a popular perception that carried over into the Porfirian years. This article traces the origins of these figures in popular reading during the years in which Mexico dealt with war with the United States, a civil war, and finally the French Intervention. Through an analysis of popular reading and intellectual commentaries, supplemented by archival research, mestizaje as a foundational concept of Mexican nationhood is traced to these early depictions. Entre 1844 y 1896, las publicaciones impresas de México difundieron dos figuras arquetípicas a caballo, conocidas como rancheros y chinacos. Cuando se avecinaba la guerra con Estados Unidos, un oscuro escritor mexicano describió al ranchero como un “verdadero tipo nacional” en una revista popular. Dieciocho años más tarde, otro arquetipo a caballo, el chinaco, apareció en la propaganda periodística diseñada para incitar a la resistencia contra un inminente avance francés hacia el interior de México. Más adelante, escritores como Justo Sierra y Antonio García Cubas infundieron tales figuras con las cualidades racializadas del mestizo y los rasgos marciales heroicos, equiparando la sangre mestiza con la fuerza y las capacidades marciales necesarias para construir un Estado mexicano más avanzado. La representación de ambas figuras como mezcla de razas constituyó una percepción popular que se mantuvo durante los años del Porfiriato. El presente artículo rastrea los orígenes de estos dos arquetipos en las lecturas populares durante los años en que México libró una guerra contra Estados Unidos, una guerra civil y, finalmente, lidió con la intervención francesa. A través de un análisis de las lecturas populares y los comentarios intelectuales, complementado con una investigación de archivo, se rastrea el origen del mestizaje en cuanto concepto fundacional de la idea de nación mexicana hasta estas representaciones.


Author(s):  
Erik Mathisen

Though the fusion of loyalty and citizenship in Civil War America proved short lived, the mark that it left on the republic would endure. While former Confederates would benefit from the uncoupling of loyalty from citizenship by the later decades of the nineteenth century, the treason at the heart of the Civil War and the collective memory of that conflict would live on every time a politician waved the memory of the war before the electorate in a bid for votes. The national state would experience a hollowing out of its wartime powers in the decades that followed the Civil War, but the experience of Reconstruction would set the nation against individual states. And for more than a century after the war, former slaves and their descendants bore the hardship and galling discrimination in the nation’s military, to prove and prove again their allegiance to the United States through their service as soldiers in war.


Author(s):  
Jay Sexton

Jay Sexton’s opening essay focuses on the role of the Civil War in the realization of U.S. national and global power in the nineteenth century. Though the Civil War gave evidence of the immense military and economic power of the United States, he shows, the projection of that power on the world stage also required foreign collaboration.


1971 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold C. Livesay

Professor Livesay describes the prevailing marketing patterns in the various branches of the iron manufacturing industry in the United States before the Civil War. Iron products, like most antebellum manufactured goods, were distributed by independent merchants who played a dominant role in many aspects of economic life. The coming of integrated rail mills, however, foreshadowed the merchants' eventual decline later in the nineteenth century.


2012 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-113
Author(s):  
Romain Huret

In Ohio, during the Civil War, one Thomas H. Hanner imposed himself upon a Revenue Officer of the 19th district as a special agent of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and made “decisions as to the effect of the law, giving directions as to the management of cases involving large amounts and borrowing money upon the strength of his alleged position.”1 Another usurpation of identity occurred in Philadelphia where a person named Gillepsie collected taxes in the city. In many States, an impostor under the name of Thomas Glanner also sought to collect federal taxes.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document