Conquest, Captivity, and Emancipation in Civil War California

In 1862, authorities in Mendocino County, California, arrested George Woodman after he kidnapped sixteen Indian children and attempted to sell them as slaves to white settlers. Woodman’s arrest came at the order of Indian Superintendent George Hanson, a Republican and a Lincoln appointee, who was determined to break up the state’s Indian slave trade.

This paper uses the Woodman case to explore the rise and fall of Indian slavery in Civil War California. Just as a war over slave emancipation raged in the eastern United States, northwestern California witnessed its own struggle over race, slavery, and freedom. The U.S. conquest of the region in the 1850s and 60s not only subjected Indian populations to campaigns of state-sponsored violence and dispossession; it also made them vulnerable to coercive labor. California’s Act for the Government and Protection of Indians permitted the forced apprenticeship of Indians and encouraged illegal kidnapping and enslavement. Bound Indian labor transformed the Northwest into a battleground over the U.S.’s wartime emancipation policy. Newly-ascendant California Republicans like George Hanson hoped to dismantle Indian servitude just as national Republican legislators abolished slavery in the U.S. South. Meanwhile, northwestern whites—including many southern-born Confederate-sympathizing Democrats—condemned Republican interference. They insisted that forced integration into the labor market was more humane than allowing Indians to degenerate in the “uncivilized” freedom of their native communities.

California Republicans overcame these protests and repealed Indian apprenticeship laws just months after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. Nevertheless, most Republicans believed that Indians, like southern freedpeople, needed strict labor discipline before they could assimilate into the nation as workers and citizens. They endorsed forced labor for Indian “vagrants” and a coercive labor regime on California’s Indian reservations. California thus presents an alternative regional story of emancipation that highlights the uneven, ambiguous transition from bondage to freedom in the U.S.