audiobook Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color; Gender; and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro by Camillia Cowling in History

Description

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 Freedom's 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 California's unfree workers and documents the political and legal struggles over their destiny as the nation moved through the Civil War; emancipation; and Reconstruction. Smith reveals that the state's anti-Chinese movement; forged in its struggle over unfree labor; reached eastward to transform federal Reconstruction policy and national race relations for decades to come. Throughout; she illuminates the startling ways in which the contest over slavery's fate included a western struggle that encompassed diverse labor systems and workers not easily classified as free or slave; black or white.