Racial Reconstruction

Black Inclusion, Chinese Exclusion, and the Fictions of Citizenship

Edlie L. Wong

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479856572
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Discriminazione e rapporti razziali

The end of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade triggered wide-scale labor shortages across the U.S. and Caribbean. Planters looked to China as a source for labor replenishment, importing indentured laborers in what became known as “coolieism.” From heated Senate floor debates to Supreme Court test cases brought by Chinese activists, public anxieties over major shifts in the U.S. industrial landscape and class relations became displaced onto the figure of the Chinese labor immigrant who struggled for inclusion at a time when black freedmen were fighting to redefine citizenship. Racial Reconstruction demonstrates that U.S. racial formations should be studied in different registers and through comparative and transpacific approaches. It draws on political cartoons, immigration case files, plantation diaries, and sensationalized invasion fiction to explore the radical reconstruction of U.S. citizenship, race and labor relations, and imperial geopolitics that led to the Chinese Exclusion Act, America’s first racialized immigration ban. By charting the complex circulation of people, property, and print from the Pacific Rim to the Black Atlantic, Racial Reconstruction sheds new light on comparative racialization in America, and illuminates how slavery and Reconstruction influenced the histories of Chinese immigration to the West.

1

“Cosa de Cuba!”

American Literary Travels, Empire, and the Contract Coolie

In 1871, the Charleston banker George W. Williams authored Sketches of Travel in the Old and New World (1871) after a lavish two-month tour of Cuba, the “Queen of the Antilles.” His narrative typified the countless American travelogues of Cuba that found their way into print over the course of the nineteenth century. Beginning in 1847, Cuba’s experiment with Chinese contract labor—popularly referred to as coolieism—became a particular fascination for these American travelers. Their narratives sought to answer the question—most concisely formulated by Evelyn Hu-DeHart—of whether Chinese contract labor constituted a form of slavery or a transition to free labor. “I am surprised to see so many Chinamen scattered throughout the Island,” writes Williams. “They are brought here by the cargo, in English and Yankee ships, and sold into ten or more years of slavery!” He continues, “You see them loaded with the cruel Spanish chain, for rebelling, when they ascertain how shamefully they have been imposed upon. Oh, for a Harriet Beecher Stowe, to write a Chee-Chow-Wang romance upon the cruelty to this deluded people! It is a horrid thing, according to modern philanthropy, to steal wild Africans, but a blessing to kidnap the educated Chinaman, and sell him into slavery.”1 Merging Orientalism with New World discourse, Williams’s droll, sentimentalized appeal sought to educate Americans about the true nature of so-called free Chinese contract labor, as the U.S. began to define the meaning of postemancipation freedoms, often in relation to colonial Cuba, where experiments with Chinese labor appeared closely connected with—and possibly coconstitutive of—black chattel slavery.2

This chapter mines an archive of American travelogues to explore the literary and cultural construction of the Chinese “coolie-slave” as a circum-Atlantic racial formation. The analogy embedded in this term influenced the course of U.S. empire in the Caribbean as well as national debates over the “Labor Question” and Chinese immigration. In the nineteenth century, a steady stream of personal narratives recounting travels to Cuba made their way into U.S. print, including Richard Henry Dana’s well-received To Cuba and Back (1859), Maturin Murray Ballou’s History of Cuba; or, Notes of a Traveller in the Tropics (1854) and Due South; or, Cuba Past and Present (1885), John Abbott’s South and North; or, Impression Received during a Trip to Cuba and the South (1860), Julia Ward Howe’s A Trip to Cuba (1860), R. W. Gibbs’s Cuba for Invalids (1860), Cornelia H. Jenks’s The Land of the Sun; or, What Kate and Willie Saw There (1861), J. Milton Mackie’s From Cape Cod to Dixie and the Tropics (1864), Samuel Hazard’s Cuba with Pen and Pencil (1871), Julia Louisa Matilda Woodruff’s My Winter in Cuba (1871), James O’Kelly’s The Mambi-Land; or, Adventures of a Herald Correspondent in Cuba (1874), J. W. Steele’s Cuban Sketches (1881), and Eliza McHatton Ripley’s From Flag to Flag (1889), culminating in the 1890s with a flood of books by those who went to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War (1898).3

As a genre, travel literature performed powerful acts of national symbolization as it staged the consolidation of national culture through the representative figure of a traveler in foreign lands. The literary theme of travel not only gave expression to American territorial ambitions in Cuba. It also became a “discursive means for managing a national culture’s concern with internal social differences and change,” as the U.S. grappled with slavery and abolition.4 Moreover, feminist scholars have long noted that women travelers occupying tenuous relations to authority—narrative and otherwise—staged difference and sameness in ways that both challenged and diverged from male-authored travelogues.5 This was especially true in the case of Ripley, a Confederate slaveholder who fled to Cuba after the Civil War. This diverse corpus of Cuban travelogues, ranging from humorous sketches to political journalism and ethnography, helped shore up American attitudes and ideas about the changing relations of race, gender, and labor, while their sustained popularity throughout the century attested to long-standing U.S. expansionist interests in the Caribbean.

This chapter focuses on two narratives, Dana’s To Cuba and Back and Ripley’s From Flag to Flag, which represent the antinomies of American political and aesthetic responses to Cuba’s Chinese experiment. It pays particular attention to Ripley’s management of sexuality, marriage, and Cuban plantation home life, both in practice and in narrative, as key elements of postemancipation discussions of personal freedom. Reformers initially welcome indentured Chinese as a transitional labor force, facilitating the passage from slavery into a wage-labor economy. However, American travelers’ eyewitness accounts of wide-scale abuse and contract violations began turning international public opinion against the use of Chinese labor in Cuba. In response, the Chinese government sent a mixed commission of British, French, and Chinese officials to Cuba to investigate the conditions of contract labor. Published in English translation, the resultant 1876 Cuba Commission Report furthered the indelible association between black chattel slavery and Chinese labor that later influenced U.S. immigration legislation and public debates over Chinese exclusion.6 The blending of enslaved black with indentured Chinese labor was, in the oft-repeated refrain of the humorist travel writer and Civil War veteran Samuel Hazard, “Cosa de Cuba!” (Thing of Cuba).7 By reading these travel accounts with and against the Chinese testimonies recorded in the Cuba Commission Report and by the Chinese American newspaperman Wong Chin Foo, this chapter investigates how the “coolie” shaped American ideas about slavery, racial citizenship, and free labor, specifically as they took shape in postemancipation liberal philosophies of contract freedom.

Controversies over American participation in the lucrative “coolie trade,” involving the transport of thousands of Chinese contract laborers to Cuba and Peru intensified in the U.S. as sectional tensions over the future of slavery threatened to erupt into Civil War. The specter of a new slave trade in Asiatic coolies helped shape antebellum American debates over domestic slavery in largely understudied ways.8 It raised the problem of racial definition in U.S. federal policies against the contraband foreign slave trade, and it later became a potent symbol of the enduring afterlife of slavery in Reconstruction-era debates over immigration restriction and control. Analogies between enslaved blacks and Chinese laborers structured U.S. critiques of Cuban coolieism before the Civil War, and their significance intensified after the abolition of slavery, as labor demands grew more acute in the agricultural, postbellum South. This chapter excavates the circum-Atlantic contours of the “Afro-Asian analogy,” as the “contract coolie” gave way to the specter of the “coolie-slave.” These relations of influence between the U.S. and Cuba reveal underexamined hemispheric circuits of comparative knowledge production about race and racial formations. For Dana, the “Coolie problem” emerged as an unexpected permutation of the “strange system” of unfree labor “by which one man is enthroned in the labor of another race, brought from across the sea,” whereas Ripley, fleeing the fall of the Confederacy, turned to Cuba to shore up shifting ideologies of race and slavery.9 In these long-standing debates over the form and significance of Chinese labor in Cuba, competing proslavery and abolitionist discourses, racial imaginaries, colonial epistemologies, and laws collectively constructed the figure of the Chinese “coolie.” The coolie came to represent an alternate racialized labor form that embodied the contradictions and disjunctive temporalities of U.S. emancipation. Was the coolie a throwback to slavery’s past or a harbinger of freedom’s future?

The Chinese Experiment

Cuba suffered periodic labor shortages after a series of bilateral Anglo-Spanish treaties led to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the Spanish Caribbean. In Cuba, a robust contraband slave trade emerged that continued as late as 1867.10 The U.S. Civil War helped hasten the end of this contraband trade, as the withdrawal of U.S. ships and capital combined with a British blockade of West African ports stemmed the supply of new slaves to Cuba’s expanding sugar industry.11 According to Sidney Mintz, modern sugar plantations became an “industrial enterprise” combining labor-intensive agricultural work with factory work in the sugar mills, and continuous capital accumulation demanded a steady supply of cheap and plentiful labor.12 In the face of a growing labor crisis, commentators such as John Thrasher, the U.S.-born filibusterer and editor of the short-lived government-suppressed Cuban newspaper El Faro, noted that the “Spanish Government in Cuba has declared that its duty is to increase the supply of labor in that island at all hazards. . . . Great exertions are being made . . . to bring in European, Indian, and Asiatic laborers. . . . Its declared policy is to reduce the price of labor.”13 Cuban planters began looking toward China’s teeming population as a viable source of labor replenishment, “delaying the inevitable crisis that would have set in with the end of the slave trade and making it possible for the plantation economy to continue to prosper,” according to Hu-DeHart.14 At midcentury, one self-described “Yankee” traveler to Cuba speculated that “it would not be strange to see them [Chinese], at some future time, occupying the place of the negroes in all agricultural districts.”15

The coolie trade emerged in an Atlantic world that had yet to see the end of black chattel slavery or the political structures that seemed to ensure its indefinite continuation. In 1806, as Britain debated the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, Chinese contract labor was first introduced into the West Indies in the short-lived “Trinidad experiment,” which imagined Chinese labor as a buffer against black slave rebellion and a means to expand West Indian sugar production.16 By 1838, Britain had turned to India, importing a million South Asians to Mauritius in British East Africa and the plantation economies of British Guiana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Suriname, and Fiji just as Chinese laborers first began arriving to Cuba.17 Moreover, British colonial incursions into the long-fabled China market, culminating in the Anglo-Chinese Wars or the Opium Wars (1839–1842, 1856–1860), further catalyzed this Chinese outward migration.18 In Cuba, Chinese labor served as both substitute for and supplement to black chattel slavery. It facilitated the restructuring of long-standing colonial labor systems, helping to stabilize and undermine existing colonial orders.19 In Lowe’s insightful formulation, the Chinese appeared as a “collective figure, a fantasy of ‘free’ yet racialized and indentured labor” central to the development, following Michel Foucault, of “a modern racial governmentality.”20 Thus, the “coolie” helped sustain a narrative of historical transition from slavery to free labor in Cuba even as it troubled the “social and cultural dualisms” at the heart of a long-standing colonial slave society, which tethered legal status and identity to a racial hierarchy that parsed legal and social rights according to whether the individual was considered “de color.”21

American ships helped transport up to 225,000 Chinese laborers to Cuba and Peru between 1847 and 1874.22 Largely originating in the infamous Portuguese transit port of Macao, Chinese coolies awaited shipment in guarded barracoons, and their transport vessels followed a lengthy six-month route crossing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans to Cuba in what was known as la trata amarilla (the yellow trade) in Spanish.23 American vessels quickly surpassed the British, Spanish, French, and Portuguese in the transport of primarily male Chinese laborers. British vessels dominated the shipping of South Asian labor, which involved the transport of men along with widows, married couples, and families, unlike its Chinese counterpart.24 Joseph Conrad’s novella Typhoon (1900–1901) fictionalized this nefarious commerce as it imagined the calamitous journey of the steamship Nan-Shan transporting two hundred Chinese “coolies,” “all seven-years’-men.”25 As a furious hurricane engulfs the Nan-Shan, British Captain MacWhirr’s incredulous reply to his first mate’s growing concern over the safety of the Chinese locked in the darkness of the damaged and flooded “ ’tween deck” reveals the logic of commodification that underwrote the global commerce in coolies. “Never heard of a lot of coolies spoken of as passengers before,” exclaims MacWhirr. “Passengers, indeed! What’s come to you?”26 By century’s end, coolieism had come to name a racialized servile labor regime akin to the African slavery that it was imagined to supplant.

In the 1850s, U.S. newspapers had begun to remark with increasing distress on the prevalence of “Northern freighting ships” “from the ports of New York and Boston” engaged in the transport of “Chinamen Coolies” to Cuba.27 For these outraged commentators, the transport of Chinese by American vessels constituted a circumvention of the 1808 Slave Trade Act, which prohibited the “transport from any of the coasts or kingdoms of Africa, or from any other foreign kingdom, place or country, or from any sea, any negro or mulatto or person of color . . . in any ship, vessel, boat, or other water-craft, for the purposes of holding, selling, or otherwise disposing of such person as a slave, or to be held to service or labor.”28 Additional legislation in 1820 enforced this ban, declaring participation in the foreign slave trade to be an act of piracy punishable by death. As the slavery controversy spilled into sectional violence, the Chinese coolie raised the problem of racial definition in U.S. federal policies against the contraband foreign slave trade.29 “We do an immense business in Coolie transportation,” observed William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, “and sometimes do it horribly.”30 Ballou’s Boston-based story paper Flag of Our Union took an even stronger stance as it portrayed Chinese indentured or contract lab...