Slavery After Abolition: How Freedom Seekers from New Mexico to Alaska Invoked the Thirteenth Amendment to End Slavery in the United States, 1862-1877

FAIN: FEL-288461-23

Alice Baumgartner
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA 90089-0012)

Research leading to a book on laborers’ use of the Thirteenth Amendment to seek relief from coercive work conditions in the American West (1862-1877). 

The study of abolition in the United States has focused almost exclusively on the South, even though the West also had a long history of coercive labor practices like Indigenous captivity and debt peonage. How, then, was abolition implemented in the West? In the same way that enslaved people in the South escaped to Union lines to claim their freedom during the Civil War, so too did African Americans, Indigenous peoples, Chinese coolies, and Mexican debt peons in the West flee to the nearest federal official to protest their continued bondage. Drawing on territorial records, military correspondence, and judicial case files, this book will tell the story of freedom seekers in the postbellum West. In the process, it will argue that their claims not only helped to implement the abolition of slavery in the United States, but also contributed to contentious debates about what counted as slavery in a postbellum economic system defined by degrees of coercion.