Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction

Freedom's Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction by Smith, Stacey L.. Paperback edition. ISBN: 9781469626536.

Most histories of the Civil War era portray the struggle over slavery as a conflict that exclusively pitted North against South, free labor against slave labor, and black against white. In ###Freedoms Frontier#, Stacey L. Smith examines the battle over slavery as it unfolded on the multiracial Pacific Coast. Despite its antislavery constitution, California was home to a dizzying array of bound and semibound labor systems: African American slavery, American Indian indenture, Latino and Chinese contract labor, and a brutal sex traffic in bound Indian and Chinese women. Using untapped legislative and court records, Smith reconstructs the lives of Californias unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War, emancipation, and Reconstruction.