Coolieism and Slavery

In 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant during his State of the Union address turned to the issue of Chinese immigration.  Alluding to the system of slavery, Grant proclaimed that, “the great proportion of the Chinese immigrants who come to our shores do not come voluntarily, to make their homes with us and their labor productive of general prosperity, but come under contracts with headmen, who own them almost absolutely.”^⁠1  In an open letter to President Ulysses S. Grant, representatives of the Chinese Six Companies, the headmen who Grant referred to, countered the allegation of slavery, declaring that:

It is charged that all Chinese laboring men are slaves. This is not true in a single instance. Chinamen labor for bread. They pursue all kinds of industries for a livelihood. Is it so then that every man laboring for his livelihood is a slave? If these men are slaves, then all men laboring for wages are slaves.^⁠2

The words of President Ulysses S. Grant and the response of the Chinese Six Companies offers an insight into the broader debate over the hiring of Chinese labourers and the crisis “Free Labor” ideology post-Civil War.

Grant’s allusion to slavery clearly reflected concerns about how Chinese labourers were hired, and how that hiring process undermined the ideals of “Free Labor.” However, the statement by the Chinese Six Companies suggests a different understanding of  “Free Labor” post-Civil War.  Defining Chinese immigrants as wage-labourers and not slaves, the Six Companies offered a critique of industrial capitalism by implying that all workers were being transformed into “wage slaves.”^⁠3

References

¹ Ulysses S. Grant quoted in Patrica Cloud and David W. Galenson, “Chinese Immigration and Contract Labor in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Explorations in Economic History, 21 (1987), 34.

² Memorial from Representative Chinamen in America to U.S. Grant President of the United States, reprinted in Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walden, 1877), 322.

³ A number of studies have compared wage work and chattel slavery. See David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999), 65-94; Eric Foner, “Workers and Slavery,” in Working for Democracy: American Workers from the Revolution to the Present, ed., Paul Buhle and Alan Dawley (Urbana: University of Illnois Press, 1985), 21-30.