The “Chinese Question” – A Call for a New Direction

 

Construction of a Chinese camp on the Canadian Pacific Railway, Kamloops, British Columbia, circa 1885

http://www.bcarchives.gov.bc.ca/sn-283FF15/cgi-bin/text2html/.visual/img_txt/dir_121/d_04712.txt

 OAH 2012 

In late April, the historian Mae M. Ngai delivered a paper at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) 2012 conference entitled “Chinese gold miners, the coolie question, and the propaganda of history.” The paper can be found here:

http://annualmeeting.oah.org/pdf/ngai.pdf

I want to highlight this paper because I think it provides not only an excellent overview of the historiographical issues, but persuasively argues for a new direction in our understanding of the “Chinese Question.”

In this blog post, I want to explore some of the key points that Mae M. Ngai makes about the historiography as well as examine her argument further in regards to my own research on Chinese railway labourers.

Historiography

First the historiography. Mae M. Ngai makes a salient point about the disjuncture between Chinese American social history and American labour history. She notes that there is little contact between the two fields because they have focused on different questions. According to Ngai, Chinese American social historians have mostly been concerned with “community formation, transnational social and cultural practices, and politics; and less so with labor, especially in the nineteenth century.” Labour historians on the other hand, Ngai notes, “do not understand the social organization of Chinese American communities and have done neither primary research nor read the secondary literature to learn more about it.” The exception to the rule is Moon-Ho Jung, whose work on Chinese labourers in the South after the civil War, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation, is arguably an essential study in both fields.

Argument

Reviewing the historiography, Ngai argues that our understanding of Chinese labour “must be tackled empirically as well as discursively.” She does so in her paper by studying Chinese gold miners. While Ngai agrees that the introduction of Chinese gang labour in the 1860s “reinforced the view that Chinese labor was unfree,” her research on Chinese gold miners reveals that were neither “unfree or coerced.”

My own studies on Chinese labour support Ngai’s argument. A particular incident involving Chinese railway labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), I believe demonstrates that Chinese labour was neither “unfree or coerced.”

Yale, BC – May 14, 1881

On May 14, 1881, around one o’clock about two hundred Chinese labourers working on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) entered the town of Yale, British Columbia.  They headed toward the “China Department in the Warehouse,” a store for goods that were supplied to the railway labourers.  Approximately a dozen of the men tried to enter the warehouse and confront G.P. White, an overseer stationed at the warehouse. Flanked by two assistants, White resisted attempts by one “riotious character” to “force an entrance.”  In the ensuing tumult the Chinese labourers began “breaking the windows” and “chopping down the doors” to the warehouse.  White responded to the threat, firing two or three shots from his pistol into the crowd.  Soon the police “interferred and quieted them [the Chinese] down, marching several of the ringleaders to gaol.”*

* Daily Colonist, May 17, 1881.

On May 16, 1881, two defendants were brought to trial at the Yale court of assizes.  Ah Loom “the ringleader of the mob of the attack” and Ah King who assaulted a police officer when trying to rescue Ah Loom confronted the prosecution.  Faced with a barrage of evidence against them, both men were held for further trial at a higher court.  On May 17, 1881, G.P. White, the overseer at the warehouse who fired into the crowd of Chinese labourers, faced prosecution.  During the trial several Chinese labourers who were at the warehouse on the day of the violence were called to testify.  Their testimony, translated into English for the court, was reproduced in the Inland Sentinel on May 19, 1881.

The following passages have been extracted from the testimony.  Ah See was the first sworn in.  He testified:

I was there in the afternoon, there were lots of Chinamen there; I saw several Chinamen go in the store; I did not go in; I saw Mr. White shove one Chinaman out of the door, down the steps; I saw White shut the door; I saw one or two Chinamen pushing the door; there were lots of other Chinaman there, who, did nothing. I saw White at the window, a few Chinamen were then standing beside me-15 or 16-I was then on the opposite side of the road, about 17 or 18 yds; I heard three shots fired, it was the first shot that passed my head; there were about two minutes time between each shot; the shots all came from the same window.

Implying that G.P. White as the person who shot into the crowd, Ah See was cross-examined by the defense on the time of the incident and why he was at the warehouse in the first place. Ah See replied:

This happened about 1 p.m.; I came down to see about the two per cent commission, I saw some parties pushing at the door with their hands; I saw no stones thrown at the door or building; did not see anyone attempting to break the door with an axe or crowbar; I stood directly in front of the window, about 18 yds. off; I saw White shut the door before I heard the shooting; I saw three other persons at that time in the store with White; I saw stones thrown at the window; I did not know the names of any of the men I saw about me; I did not know if White intended to shoot me or some one else; I did not see anyone throwing stones at the window, until White fired the shot; the window was closed. I saw the window raised, a shot fired, and then shut down again.

Ah See lay the blame for the violence on the actions of G.P. White (White fired the first shot and incited the crowd to throw stones at the warehouse).

The next Chinese labourer to testify was Ping Sing.  Answering the question why he was at the warehouse, Sing stated:

I came here last Saturday. I came down to the China store to collect some money. I on first going in saw White. I saw the contractor, Lee Lum, and Ah Soon. I was one of the first who entered the store followed by several others, I saw White pushing some of them out; the door was then shut and some Chinamen outside were pushing against it. I was then inside; there were 5 whitemen and 5 Chinamen in the store; White was one of the whitemen. I saw White raise up the window and shoot off a pistol; he fired 3 shots; could not say in what direction he fired. I know there were lots of Chinamen outside; as soon as the first shot was fired, lots of rocks came in; I distinctly swear that the shot was fired before the rocks were thrown into the building, and that there were 3 shots fired. I saw a pistol in White’s hand, an ordinary one.

Sing’s closeness to the action meant he could identify White as the shooter. The defense cross-examined further, trying to pick holes in Sing’s original testimony.  Sing replied:

I went in the store for my 2 per cent. I cannot tell how long I remained in the store; I was there during the whole of the disturbance; cannot tell how long it was from the time the stones were thrown until the crowd left; there were some goods in the room; I stood in the room on the left hand side; White was walking around the room; when White shut the door I was standing at the side of it. I did not arrange to give any evidence at this court to-day. White told me to go out of the store into the next room, but not till after the shooting and rocks had been thrown.

Clearly frustrated by the questioning, Sing stated that he did not “arrange to give any evidence.“  The final Chinese labourer to testify was Ah Lin.  Like Ping Sing, Ah Lin identified G.P. White as the shooter of the pistol.  Ah Lin testified:

I was at the Chinese store on Saturday; I came down to see about my wages. I came to see Ah Soon, the agent; White asked us to go in; lots of Chinamen followed; someone stopped them from coming in; I saw the door shut; someone outside tried to push open the door; I saw White raise the window, and look out; then raise the pistol and fire, I am positive that White did not order us out until all the trouble was over.

After further cross-examination, Ah Lin stated:

I was in the front part of the room when the shooting was going on. I was about 6 feet from White when he fired; cannot say what kind of a pistol he used; heard 3 shots, could not see into the street. I saw nothing but White shooting, and then I left that part of the building. There were 5 whitemen and 8 Chinese in the room at the time. I knew 2 of the Chinamen within the store. I can see 2 whitemen in the court room whom I recognize as 2 I saw in the store. White ordered 3 of us out after the trouble was over, the axe I had in my hand on Saturday at the store I left there, inside the store.

Conclusion

The testimony from these Chinese labourers clearly demonstrates that they were not held in servitude, that they acted in self-interest (e.g. they were by definition “free labor”). Yet, as Ngai concludes in her paper, “our analysis remains limited if our aim is to establish simply that Chinese had ‘agency’.” Something else is going on in regards to Chinese labour. As Ngai notes, Chinese miners “need to be understood in their specificity and on their own terms, and not forced into the Orientalist binary of free and unfree labor; for they are not comprehensible as either.”

This is a useful starting point from which to explore the meaning of the “Chinese Question.”

Historians and the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882

The majority of studies on Chinese labour in the United States have been occupied with answering a somewhat narrow question, why was the Chinese Exclusion Act 1882 passed (the Act excluded Chinese labourers from entering the United States).^⁠1  The first to address the Chinese Exclusion Act was not a historian but a sociologist, Mary Roberts Coolidge in 1909. Coolidge argued that California and its working people were the key agents in instigating the Act. Workers, and in particular Irish immigrants, led by Denis Kearney, the president of the Workingmen’s Party of California, and his call of “The Chinese Must Go!” created an atmosphere of racial hatred and discrimination. This, Coolidge concluded, “was sufficient to change the policy of a nation and to commit the United States to a race discrimination at variance with our professe[d] theories of government.”^⁠2  Thirty years later in 1939, Elmer Clarence Sandmeyer’s Anti-Chinese Movement in California reaffirmed Coolidge’s thesis on Sinophobia but argued that the anti-Chinese sentiment crossed all classes in California. Investigating the cause of the racism, Sandmeyer argued that Chinese customs were incompatible with American norms, consequently laying the cultural grounds for racial hostility and ultimately the Exclusion Act of 1882.

The core arguments of these publications, all written at a time when the Exclusion Act was still enforced (it was not repealed until 1943), prevailed until the late 1960s and early 1970s.  New broader approaches, chronologically and geographically, were taken by Alexander Saxton with The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California and Stuart Creighton Miller’s The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785-1882.^⁠3  Alexander Saxton traced the roots of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the working class ideology of the Jacksonian era.  This ideology was steeped in racism, for when the white working class of California encountered not blacks but Chinese they transferred racial hostility towards the perceived economic threat of the newly arrived immigrants.  For the white working class of California, the Chinese represented the “indispensable enemy” of American labour, a common foe that people could unite against.  Stuart Creighton Miller took an approach from an intellectual history perspective, examining thousands of books, magazines, and newspapers from the nineteenth century.  Miller found numerous negative stereotypes of the Chinese, images that long preceded their arrival in North America.  From this catalogue of primary sources, Miller concluded that anti-Chinese prejudice was well established and nationwide. It was this prevalence of anti-Chinese imagery that ultimately led to the Exclusion Act in 1882.

Many of the methods and approaches deployed by Alexander Saxton and Stuart Creighton Miller have been utilised by historians such as David Roediger.  Roediger openly acknowledges the influence of Saxton’s “new social and cultural history of race and labor,” while at the same time tackles sources in the manner of Creighton Miller.  Roediger notes, “the use of racial language and racist precedents … ran through the postbellum labor movement.”  So much so that, “the labor and anti-Chinese movements overlapped so thoroughly as to be scarcely indistinguishable in California, where the exclusion issue provided the basis for labor unity at key points.”^⁠4

The focus on Sinophobia and the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act has created a historiography that mirrors the debate over white working class racism.  While historians such as Gwendolyn Mink have forcefully made the connection between national organized labour and the passing of the Exclusion Act, others such as Andrew Gyory have dismissed the connection.^⁠5  Gyory instead argues that politicians used Chinese immigration as a smoke screen.  In a period of rising class conflict, Gyory contents that politicians aimed both to propitiate working-class voters and to deflect attention from genuine national problems-economic depression, mass poverty, and growing unemployment.  This culminated in the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.^⁠6

Two articles published in the journal New Politics typify the historiographical debate; the first, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” an attack on Andrew Gyory’s Closing of the Gate by Stanford Lyman; and the second, Andrew Gyory’s response to Lyman’s accusations.^⁠7  Lyman sets forth his argument, pointing the finger at white working class racism for the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act.  For Lyman, Gyory’s thesis, effectively laying the blame on politicians for the Exclusion Act, amounts to the denying of the racist tradition in the white working class.  Gyory’s reply charges Lyman with a lack of evidence.  The debate, fierce and often personal, is regarded by Gyory as an “ideological Cold War.”  For Lyman it is a battle over whether organized labour’s history was from “left multiracial” roots or from “right-racist vices.”

References

¹ See Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 1.

² Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: 1909), 182.

³ David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 10-11; Matthew Frye Jacobson’s analysis although focusing on European immigrants mirrors that of Stuart Creighton Miller.

⁴ David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1992), 179.

⁵ See Joanne Pope Melish, “Workers and Whiteness Revisited,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 5:4 (2008), 65-68.

⁶ Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina, 1998), 15.

⁷ Stanford Lyman, “The Chinese Question and American Labor Historians,” New Politics 4:28 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue28/lyman28.htm>; Andrew Gyory, “A Reply to Stanford Lyman,” New Politics 1:29 (2000) <http://nova.wpunj.edu/newpolitics/issue29/gyory29.htm>.

Henry George, John Stuart Mill, and solving the “knotty labor question”

In May 1869, the New York Tribune published an article by Henry George detailing his views on the “Chinese Question.”  Arguing that the introduction of Chinese immigrants into the labour market “[was] to the interest of capital and opposed to the interests of labor,” George initially detailed his objections to Chinese immigrants on economic grounds.  While others argued that the employment of Chinese immigrants would not harm the existing labour force, George suggested; “If this position is correct, then the knotty labor question is indeed solved; the interests of labor and capital are indeed identical.”  However, for the George the position did not seem correct.  Rather for George, the “Labor Question” remained unsolved.  The low wages that Chinese immigrants received and the assumption that all profits, rents, and alike would be reduced by the same proportion as the reduction in wages, was to George a manifestly absurd fallacy.  Instead, he argued that “when we speak of a reduction of wages in any general and permanent sense, we mean this, if we mean anything – that in the division of the joint production of labor and capital, the share of labor is to be smaller, that of capital larger.” Adding, “this is precisely what the reduction of wages consequent upon the introduction of Chinese labor means.”  From this juncture in the article, the meaning of Chinese labour took a racial turn. “The population of our country [is] welded into a homogeneous people,” George declared, preceding to note that, “to a certain extent the Chinese become quickly Americanized; but this Americanization is only superficial.”  The superficiality of Chinese Americanization implied a lack of willingness to become citizens and in general a transient and temporary nature of being.  This condition, in George’s eyes, was unwelcome in a nation being reconstructed.  “A population born in China, expecting to return to China, living here in a little China of its own, and without the slightest attachment to the country” declared George, were “utter heathens, treacherous, sensual, cowardly and cruel.”  For George the future of the United States looked bleak because of the Chinese.  He argued that, “they will bring no women with them (and probably will not for a little while yet) except those for the purposes of prostitution; and the children of these, of whom there are some hundreds in California, will exercise upon the whole mass but little perceptible influence, while they will be in all respects as essentially Chinese as though born and reared in China.”^⁠1  The solution to the “knotty labor question” was apparent to George; the Chinese must be excluded from the United States.

Henry George, who had been inspired by the work of British philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, decided to sent a copy of his article to Mill.^⁠2  Mill responded to George in a letter published in the National Standard during July 1870.  The reply agreed in principle with the economic side of George’s polemic, but also laid out a plea to regard Chinese immigrants as citizens.  If an “overwhelming” influx of Chinese immigrants occurred, Mill believed that it would be “economically injurious to the mass population; that it must diminish their wages, and reduce them to a lower stage of physical comfort and well-being.”  In Mill’s mind, the severity of an influx was such that workers should rally against immigration, stating that, “if the working-men have not combined to prevent this, it is time they should.”  However, Mill also believed that granting immigrants citizenship was a principle that should be upheld, declaring that “every immigrant of every race must be admitted citizenship.”  In an appeal to George, Mill argued that admitted citizenship would strengthen the labour movement.  Mill insisted that, “all men equal, equally free to carve each his own career, and entitled to all the aid his fellows can give.”^⁠3

References

¹ New York Tribune, May 1, 1869.

² Alexander Saxton, The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 100-103.

³ National Standard, July 30, 1870.

Was the credit-ticket scheme a form of slavery or even indentured servitude?

During the mid-late nineteenth century, the majority of Chinese immigrant workers in the United States were under the supervision of a labour agent.  According to Leland Stanford, the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, labour agents were “shrewd, business men” who essentially advised “their subordinates where employment can be found on the most favorable terms.”^⁠1 The labour agents themselves operated collectively under an organization known as the Chinese Six Companies.  Based in San Francisco, the Six Companies commanded a vast network of intermediaries in both China and California, possessing a virtual monopoly on the migrations of nearly all U.S. bound Chinese immigrants.^⁠2

Credit ticket scheme

The power of the Chinese Six Companies stemmed from the scheme that financed the immigration process. The majority of Chinese immigrants financed their voyage across the Pacific using the debt inducing credit-ticket scheme.  The cost of the voyage was approximately $40, a sum of money out of the reach of the average Chinese migrant.  The credit-ticket scheme effectively became the only way migrants could cross the Pacific. Notably, labour agents cut deals with the steamship companies making sure that no Chinese immigrant could return without the debt being repaid.  This meant that immigrants became financially tied to labour agents, empowering labour agents to redirect immigrants into unskilled labour, such as railroad construction.

Similarities to Indentured Servitude

To many contemporaries, the credit-ticket scheme reduced Chinese immigrants to the status of slaves or a derivative of slaves, “coolies.”^⁠3  However, I would argue that the credit-ticket scheme was essentially a reinvention of indentured servitude.^⁠4

Indentured servitude had been the dominant form of European migration to North America during the eighteenth century.  European migrants who could not pay the cost of the voyage to North America with their own money or were unable to borrow funds from other individuals or financial institutions, turned to indentured servitude to facilitate their migration to the New World.  Through merchants, migrants could borrow the cost of their passage as an advance against their future labour.^⁠5

The credit-ticket scheme followed a similar strategy in regards to repayment of the cost of passage. However, there are some noticeable differences between the two systems.

Differences to Indentured Servitude

The key difference between indentured servitude and the credit-ticket system was the method in repaying the cost of passage.  While indenture servitude rested on migrants being bound to an employer for a length of time in order to pay off the debt, the credit ticket system simply obligated Chinese immigrants to repay the debt rather than to serve a term of years.  As the U.S. Senate reported, “They [Chinese immigrants] often borrow money to get here, and agree to pay high premiums or interest, but the agreement is in the amount of money rather than in the number of years of service.”^⁠6  Frederick Low added, “If I am correct in my supposition, these contracts do not bind them to work for any specific length of time; they only bind them to refund a certain sum of money, and when that money is paid they are as free as you and I.”^⁠7

This still leaves the question, why was indentured servitude reinvented in the mid-late nineteenth century?

Debt and the creation of a new American workforce

The answer perhaps can be found with debt and the creation of a new American workforce. As Sven Beckert has shown in his recent study of cotton production after the Civil War, debt was a powerful tool in re-energising the labour force of the South and developing a new system of labour.  Through schemes such as sharecropping Beckert notes, “[cotton] cultivators were now nominally free,” but, “networks of credit … captured them in an ongoing cycle of indebtedness that required them to grow cash crops.”^⁠8

I believe a similar analogy can be used for understanding the role of the credit-ticket scheme and Chinese immigrants. For Chinese immigrants to escape the cyclical debt of the credit-ticket scheme, meant not only finding work but also sustaining employment. Interestingly, expectations regarding employment were low.  As one contemporary noted, the immigrants hoped “for the present at least, to perform the most common and unskilled labor.”^⁠9

References

¹ Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. Statement made to the President of the United States, and Secretary of the Interior of the Progress of the Work (Sacramento: H.S. Crocker & Co., Printers, 92 J Street, 1865).

² Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 51.

³ See David Gouter, “Drawing Different Lines of Color: The Mainstream English Canadian Labour Movement’s Approach to Blacks and Chinese, 1880-1914,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 2:1 (2005), 55-76.

⁴ Lydia Potts, The World Labour Market: A History of Migration (London: Zed Books, 1940); Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Kay Saunders, ed., Indentured Labor in the British Empire, 1834-1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Jan Lucassen, “Free and Unfree Labour Before the Twentieth Century: A Brief Overview,” in Free and Unfree Labor, ed., Tom Brass, Marcel van der Linder, and Jan Lucassen (Amsterdam: International Institute for Social History, 1993), 7-18.

⁵ D.W. Galenson, “The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis,” Journal of Economic History XLIV (1984), 16-17.

⁶ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 405.

⁷ “Report of the Joint Special Committee Investigate Chinese Immigration.” U.S. Senate, (1877), 83.

⁸ Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review (December 2004), 1428.

⁹ Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 55.

Gambling, opium, and life as a Chinese railroad hand

The hard labour of clearing the right of way, grading, laying track or tunneling through granite demanded a release.  Many Chinese hands found that release through gambling.  A variety of games were played like battling bulls, with each man rolling the dice to determine who should throw the dominoes first.  But mostly fan-tan was played.  The dealer placed a small handful of buttons from a pan on the ground under a cup.  After bets were laid down, the cup was lifted and the buttons counted out four at a time.  The men who guessed how many buttons would be left; one, two, three, or none would be the winners.^⁠ Gambling drew the ire of local authorities.  In Washington territory, gambling was outlawed, but “Chinamen continued to take the chances.”  As the Seattle Post-Intelligencer  noted the consequences were that, “Chief Woolery and officer Thompson lit down on two of them and arrested the dealers and captured considerable money.”^⁠1  The two arrested were fined $10 each.

The smoking of opium was another way to take away the painful drudgery of everyday life on the railroad.  Although, according to a Chinese merchant called to testify at the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration, opium smoking was “not as injurious as drunkenness,” the drug did have addictive qualities that had negative consequences for its users.^⁠2  One railway contractor stated that he had seen labourers “under the influence of opium,” as such they risked impaired judgment at often dangerous work-sites.  Another problem was over use.  One contractor commenting on the advantages of the contract system touched upon opium abuse, noting, “if the boss had to have a certain number of men at the railway the fact that ten of his men might be sleeping off an opium debauch would not prevent ten others being in their places.”^⁠3   After waking the reality for the ten sleeping off the “opium debauch” would have hit, no wages for that day and competition to regain employment on the line.

 

References

¹ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 31, 1883.

² Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), 172.

³ Report of the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration (Ottawa, 1885), xxvii.

Debating the “Chinese Question” in the South

The completion of the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) in 1869 was a significant event for the South and its relationship with Chinese labour. The success of the CPRR brought an air of confidence and belief in Chinese labour that had previously been tentative and unsure. The planters already sensitive to the labour market, required a stable labour force that they could trust and and rely upon.[1] The momentous achievement of completing the transcontinental railroad and the role that Chinese labourers played in such an event made them standout in an increasingly diverse and influx labour market. As the New York Times declared in a further article:

Take the work of the Chinese laborers performed on the Central Pacific Railroad-it was good work, well done, entirely satisfactory, and the wages were $30 a month or less. Now, what can a Southern planter conclude from observing and examining this? He finds a large class of hands ready for rough labor.[2]

Despite a “large class of hands ready for rough labor,” not everyone in the South thought that the Chinese were the answer to the “Labor Question.” Colonel Giers, a veteran of the Civil War, spoke out against “coolie” labour on the grounds of race. As the Daily Picayune reported from the Alabama Immigration Convention held in June 1869, Giers, “opposed the introduction of coolies, as it would not be advisable to have any further combination of races … there will be plenty of black labor in the prairies and cane brake lands of the South, where the colored labor is more profitable and suitable.[3] Giers’ comments reflected two concerns. First, the cost and duration to import Chinese labourers. On balance, Giers believed the availability of the black labour would make the exercise of importing in Chinese labour fruitless. Second, the move to import Chinese labour would antagonize those workers (white and black) already in the labour market. The “combination of races,” instead of easing the worries of the South’s elite, Giers concluded would cause greater social upheaval at a time when the world had been turned upside down.

A month after Giers’ rebuttal, the editor of the Daily Picayune summarized the argument against importing Chinese labour. Rather than focusing on just the South, the editor framed the discussion nationwide. Arguments ranged from the Chinese degrading “American” labour, to being deliberately employed to rile freed slaves. Yet, for the editor of the Daily Picayune, the option of employing Chinese hands was not out of choice but driven by necessity. The editor wrote:

The labor question in the South, has been made to bear a political aspect, which cannot be put out of view, for there is something in it which is the creation of a necessity it is impossible now to rename or avoid. The introduction of Chinese labor to do the agricultural work in the South is opposed in one place as a further national degradation of the laboring classes by an admixture with immense numbers of heathen Asiatics to whom the institutions of republicanism are wholly unknown. In another place the importation is charged as being gotten up in special animosity towards the liberated blacks of the South – a measure taken by their late masters to deprive them of support by bringing in a cheap class of workers in revenge for the depreciation of property by the freeing of slaves.[4]

For the Daily Picayune, the introduction of Chinese labour would have a powerful impact both within the labour market and within the political realm of the South. The ethos of the free market that underpinned the “bringing in” of “a cheap class of workers,” the newspaper grandly remarked was “a fixed fact, upon which all our industrial relations are to be based, as well as all our political institutions are be modeled and controlled.”[5]

After years of slavery was the Daily Picayune embracing the “Free Labor” ideology of the North? Not entirely, rather the “New South” was awakening to the idea that free labour could be used to re-assert the authority of the old master-slave relationship. The introduction of Chinese hands would create not only a competitive labour market but a racially divided workforce. This model would become the basis to control the workforce of the South. Pulling the strings were the Southern elite, deliberately manufacturing a coercive socio-economic framework that had a distinct parallel with the “peculiar institution” of slavery. 

References

[1] See Richard Follett and Rick Halpern, “From Slavery to Freedom in Louisana’s Sugar Country: Changing Labor Systems and Workers’ Power, 1861-1913,” in Sugar, Slavery, and Society, ed. Bernard Moitt, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 135-156.

[2] New York Times, July 14, 1869, 4.

[3] Daily Picayune, June 9, 1869.

[4] “The Chinamen and the Negroes” Daily Picayune, July 13, 1869.

[5] Daily Picayune, July 13, 1869.

The National Labor Union, Colored National Labor Union and Chinese labour

In 1869, although both the National Labor Union (NLU) and Colored National Labor Union (CNLU) held separate conventions, both organizations voiced resolutions against the importation of Chinese “coolie” labourers.  The CNLU sought to petition Congress to prevent the “importation of contract coolie labor” becoming a “system of slavery.”^⁠  While the NLU also pressured Congress to honour the Anti-Coolie Act 1862, passing a resolution opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”^⁠

However, John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and president of the National Equal Right League, believed, rather than division, American workers (including Chinese labourers) could be unified.^⁠  In a speech delivered at the Colored National Labor convention, Langston drew a picture of the diverse American workforce within a frame of unionism, politics, and common interests.  Langston declared:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the alter of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.^⁠

References

New York Times, September 12, 1869.

New York Times, August 21, 1869.

John Mercer Langston cited in Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, eds., The Black Worker: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present, Volume II: The Black Worker during the Era of the National Labor Union, 54.

Reconstruction and the debate over the “Chinese Question”

During the mid-1870s, as shoe factory owner, Calvin Sampson, began an “experiment” with hiring Chinese labour, the New York Tribune praised the North’s approach to the employment of Chinese labourers arguing that, “Massachusetts grapples the Coolie problem in another spirit than that of California or the South.”  “The South,” the Tribune insisted, “in … stranger wood” and “more glaring folly, rejects the labor herself established … and seeks, in her spiteful temper, to introduce unskilled creatures in whom she has no-confidence.”  For the Chinese, there is “taxation in the West; contempt in the South;” but according to the Tribune, “fair play in the East.”  “Tested thus differently,” the Tribune continued, “the problem, of course results differently.”  Comparing the South to the North, the Tribune proclaimed, “southern planters, having hardly begun the experiment already think John a poor substitute for Sambo; a Mass. manufacturer finds him industrious, intelligent, clean, and economical, and all the other manufacturers cry for him to come.”^⁠

Yet, as Calvin Sampson’s “experiment” began to unravel during the summer of 1870, newspapers in the South mocked the North’s growing unease with questions over the hiring of Chinese labour and Reconstruction.  Noting how, “the recent importation of a few Chinese into Massachusetts has created much discussion in the Northern papers,” the editor of the New Orleans based Daily Picayune commented, “we have taken no stand favoring Chinese immigration, but we ask the sober second thought of the North if the Chinese are a more ignorant, debased and degraded race than the African?”  The editorial comment concluded on a political note, attacking Radical Republicans and their principle of racial equality, the Daily Picayune stated that the potential influx of Chinese labourers “may yet do some good, and may cause the Radical to pause and reflect upon the principle announced that all races and all colors are equal.”^⁠

But why was the “Chinese Question” such a topic of North/South rivalry and sectionalism?  The answer I believe can be found in analyzing the motivation behind hiring Chinese labour. In the South, Chinese labour became central in the strategy to re-energise and coerce the labour market through racial division.  Under the headline, “The Labor Question – Africa vs Asia,” the Daily Picayune eagerly remarked, “before long the blacks of the South will be arrayed against the Celestials, the same as the white laborers of the Pacific coast.”^⁠  The desire to compare and contrast races continued with another report on labour in Louisiana. The report findings noted that Swedish workers were “the best hands,” out of work and “glad to accept the same terms that we made with the negroes.”  The report added, “last year … Negroes had a monopoly of the work” they were “idle and shiftless,” but now the “stimulat of competition” was “proof that the importation of Chinese to the South will have a good effect in bringing out the industrial resources of the freedmen.”^⁠ In the North, the hiring of Chinese labourers spoke to resolving labour conflict between employers and employees. For example, in July 1870 Collis Huntington, former Associate of the Central Pacific Railroad, as the director of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad explored the idea of hiring Chinese labourers to break a strike by Irish hands.  As Huntington noted the intention would be “in consideration of the good effect it would have upon other labor.”^⁠

Thus, by 1870 the “Chinese Question” had become the new battleground over how the ideology of “Free Labor” would be re-invented in a post-Civil War United States.

References

New York Tribune, June 18, 1870.

“The Almond-Eyed Race,” Daily Picayune, July 7, 1870.

Daily Picayune, July 16, 1869.

Daily Picayune, August 7, 1870.

Scott Nelson, “Who Was John Henry? Railroad Construction, Southern Folklore, and the Birth of Rock and Roll,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas2:2 (2005), 74.

“The new comet – a phenomenon now visible in all parts of the United States”

In 1870, responding to the hiring of several hundred Chinese labourers in the South, North, and the West of the nation, Harper’s Weekly published a cartoon metaphorically depicting the appearance of a comet in the night sky as “a phenomenon now visible in all parts of the United States.” The cartoonist’s clever use of a comet deliberately spoke to the significance of the moment for Americans, demonstrating how the hiring of Chinese labour intrigued and beguiled a wide spectrum of society. As illustrated by the cartoonist, the telescopic gaze of employers, labour unions, and the press, all focused on this comet. These concerned parties all sought to understand the meaning of Chinese “cheap labor.”

Yet, beyond this list of concerned parties, an analysis of the cartoonist’s crowd also reveals how the appearance of the comet cut across wider society, both in regards to gender and generational boundaries. Along with men, women gathered in the street to discuss and observe the phenomenon. Children mingled in the crowd, the cartoonist purposely pointing to future generations who would be affected by the comet in the night sky.

The acute observations of the cartoonist aside, the cartoon itself asks important historical questions. Why did this metaphorical comet appear in 1870? And what did it mean to those so beguiled by the comet?

References
Harper’s Weekly, (August 6, 1870), 505.

http://immigrants.harpweek.com/ChineseAmericans/Illustrations/028TheNewCometMainBI.htm

My One Minute Argument

The success of Chinese railroad hands during the 1860s became the catalyst for the employment of thousands of Chinese labourers across multiple industries across the United States during the 1870s and 1880s. However, the history of Chinese labour during the mid-late nineteenth century is more than their immense contribution to the building railroads, mining, or agriculture. As the initial experiment with Chinese labour became a national phenomenon, the debate over why and how Chinese labourers were employed, what contemporaries called the “Chinese Question,” began to transform the debate over who would do what and for how much in the emerging industrial economy. By the end of the nineteenth century, the “Chinese Question” had transformed the “Labor Question.”