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 Chinese Question 