Manifest Destinies, Second Edition

by Laura E. Gómez

  Most commonly, Prince made his arguments in popular forums, but when the opportunity presented itself, he also utilized his varied legal roles. Such an opportunity arose in 1881, when a Euro-American convicted of first-degree murder asked the territorial supreme court to rule on whether Mexicans who could not speak English could serve as jurors in the territorial courts. Richard Romine had been convicted of the first-degree murder of fellow Euro-American Patrick Rafferty. According to eyewitness evidence, Romine had killed Rafferty with a hammer in 1877 in a mining camp in Grant County. Created by the territorial legislature in 1868 when silver was discovered there, Grant County was the only of New Mexico’s fourteen counties to have a majority-Euro-American population. Undoubtedly because every potential juror there knew about the murder, Romine received permission to move his trial from Grant County to Doña Ana County. In so doing, he moved the case from a county where Euro-Americans made up 57 percent of the population to one where they composed only 5 percent of the population.101

  Represented by the most powerful lawyer and one of the richest men in the state, Thomas Catron, Romine argued that his conviction must be overturned because “the jurors who sat in the trial of this case were Mexicans, and none of them understood the English language, in which the proceedings at the trial were had.”102 Catron’s brief drew heavily on an 1874 case in which the Texas Supreme Court had reversed a Euro-American defendant’s conviction for murdering a Mexican man because of the presence of jurors who did not speak English.103 The Texas decision was not binding on New Mexico’s territorial supreme court, but Prince still might have chosen to rely on its reasoning to establish legal precedent in New Mexico. Alternatively, assuming Prince wanted to affirm Romine’s conviction, he could have easily disposed of the appeal by telling Romine that he had gotten what he deserved, in that the racial and linguistic composition of his jury was a function of his earlier motion to move the case out of the only majority-Euro-American county in the territory.

  Instead, writing one year before his letter to the editor in the New York Times, Prince used the case to launch the progressive view of race relations. Prince’s opinion in the Romine case offered two rationales for upholding the right of monolingual Spanish-speaking jurors to serve. The first was practical: there simply were not enough potential English-speaking jurors in the territory. If New Mexico was going to have jury trials, it would have to rely on Mexican American jurors, and, hence, it would have to provide simultaneous Spanish-English translation of trial proceedings. Prince wrote:

  We cannot shut our eyes to the peculiar circumstances of this territory, taken from the Republic of Mexico in 1846, and nearly all of whose inhabitants, in the years first succeeding the annexation, understood no English. Even at the present time the preponderance of Spanish speaking citizens is very large; and in certain counties the English speaking citizens possessing the qualification of jurors, can be counted by tens instead of hundreds. In at least three of the courts of the territory at the time of this trial below, it may be said without hesitation, that a sufficient number of English speaking jurors could not have been obtained to try any important case which had attracted public attention.104

  But Prince went further, articulating a second rationale based on justice—a rationale that put him in the position of defending the civil rights of the native Mexican citizens of the region:

  [I]t would have been manifestly unjust to the great majority of the people of the territory, had such a requirement as language been made. Either they would have had to be tried in a language which they did not understand, or else a double system would necessarily have been established, including an English speaking jury for English defendants, and a Spanish speaking jury for Spanish defendants; and if the theory had been carried to its logical conclusion, an English speaking judge to address the English jury, and a Spanish speaking one to instruct the Spanish jury.105

  Such a system was not inherently problematic—it all depended on how one perceived the relationship between New Mexico and the United States at the time of the American conquest and on how one imagined the future of that relationship. If one viewed New Mexico as a colonial possession that would exist in a permanent state of political disadvantage relative to the rest of the nation, then such a dual-language and, effectively, dual-race system was conceivable. If, instead, one viewed New Mexico as an annexed territory that would eventually join the Union as a state, then Prince was correct—a system of separate courts (divided by race and language) was unjust because it signaled a second-class citizenship. Fundamentally, Prince viewed the establishment of a criminal justice system—complete with jurors—as crucial to the statehood agenda: in order for New Mexico to achieve statehood, it had to look as much as possible like its neighbors to the east.106

  More than a decade after he wrote the Romine opinion, Prince would articulate a more comprehensive and subtle vision of civil rights as inextricably linked to statehood. In essence, he argued that territorial citizenship was incompatible with full American citizenship and civil rights. In an essay written for an audience of Euro-American elites on the East Coast and published in the North American Review, Prince wrote: “We insist that self-government is the normal condition and indeed an inherent right of American citizenship; that it is inseparable from any true idea of republican institutions. . . . A territorial condition, therefore, is an unnatural one, which deprives resident citizens of many of their dearest rights.”107 Although Prince spoke in general terms about New Mexico’s “resident citizens,” the Mexican majority was not far from his mind. One need look only to how Prince deployed a reconstructed version of New Mexico history to his rhetorical advantage. Prince saw the representation of history as crucial in the statehood debate, and he sought to control the framing of characters, events, and trajectory. In 1883 he was elected president of the New Mexico Historical Society and served in that position until he died in 1922.108 He founded the Society for the Preservation of Spanish Antiquities.109 He authored at least a half dozen books on New Mexico history, including Historical Sketches of New Mexico, published in 1883, and A Concise History of New Mexico, published in 1912.

  In an 1893 article written when he was governor, Prince argued that Americans should view the U.S.–Mexico War and the annexation of New Mexico as a kind of sacred covenant that required granting statehood to New Mexico. Prince conceived the United States as having “a special obligation . . . to the native people of New Mexico” because of the manner of military conquest in 1846 and the treaty that ended the war in 1848:

  When General Kearney [sic] made his peaceful entry into Santa Fe, he issued a formal proclamation . . . : “It is the wish and intention of the United States to provide for New Mexico a free government, with the least possible delay, similar to those in the United States.” The people were satisfied with the assurances of the American commander, trusted the promises of the proclamation and offered no opposition to the occupation of the whole area of the Territory.110

  Clearly, Prince misrepresented the facts to suit his rhetorical purposes. Following the bloodless conquest narrative, he portrays the military occupation as “peaceful.” He also omits the revolts of 1847 and the American executions at Taos in order to portray the native Mexican and Indian residents of the region as welcoming, rather than resisting, the American occupation. In 1883, when Prince was writing, he found these rhetorical moves necessary in order to portray the native Mexican population as unfairly put upon by the continuing delay of statehood.111

  A second tactic in Prince’s arsenal was to confront directly the transparent racism of the dominant view of New Mexico race relations. Prince concedes that Congress would be well within its legitimate powers to deny statehood to a territory based on the “unsatisfactory character of the population” but suggests that this is connoted by insufficient education, patriotism, or adherence to the law.112 Prince does not state outright but clearly implies that the dominant view’s emphasis on race as a proxy for “unsatisfactory character�
� is illegitimate. Instead, he turns to demography with the assumption that Mexicans should be included as full-fledged citizens. He notes that the 1880 census counted 153,076 New Mexicans, “without counting Indians on the reservations,” and notes that the actual population, including Indians, is at least 180,000, making New Mexico considerably more populous than other recently admitted territories (including Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada).113

  It was not, however, only a matter of numbers. Prince also sought to repackage New Mexico in order to put its Spanish settlers on an equal footing with the Anglo setters of the original thirteen colonies. Rather than duck the question of the racial character of the “native” population, Prince sought to redefine it in mythic terms. He spoke of the mixture of “the solid and conservative native element of Spanish descent” as moderating “the energetic and enterprising, but sometimes over-zealous, Anglo-American[s] from the East.”114 In his telling of the myth, notice that the Pueblo and other indigenous elements drop out of the equation; they were not included in the territorial polity, and so would not be in the polity of the state-to-be. The finishing touch was to suggest that Mexicans and Euro-Americans were, after all, equally great colonial powers: “Our citizens are mainly the descendants of the two great nations which insisted on the rights of people in England under the Magna Carta and drove the Moors out of Spain that self-government should reign there. They are the children of the patriots who fought for the independence of the United States in 1776, and in Mexico from 1810–1821. Surely the sons of such sires must be capable of self-government!”115

  The progressive view was embraced by a cadre of Euro-American elites in New Mexico beginning in the 1880s. Historian Porter Stratton argues that the racial attitudes of the Euro-American editors of New Mexico newspapers changed dramatically at this time in direct response to the rise of the dominant view in Congress and the national press, and that “as a result the entire territorial press sprang to the defense of the Spanish-Americans.”116 This was a considerable overstatement. In fact, Euro-American newspapermen in New Mexico were split between advocating the dominant and progressive views. If Stratton is correct, the majority embraced the progressive view, but a substantial minority, especially those based in the southeastern and southwestern quadrants, subscribed to the dominant view. In 1905, the Euro-American editor of a Santa Fe paper openly declared: “It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the Democrats of southeastern New Mexico, like their brethren in Texas, hate the early white settlers of Spanish descent in New Mexico.”117 The Euro-American leadership of southeastern Eddy County went so far as to institute an all-white primary in 1906, from which Mexican Americans were excluded, generating much criticism from Republican newspaper editors in central and northern New Mexico.118

  Race and the Statehood Debate

  The primary engine driving the cadre of Euro-Americans aligned behind the progressive view of race was gaining statehood for New Mexico.119 Statehood would signal political legitimacy and, most importantly, would carry the promise of financial profit. Thomas Catron, New Mexico’s most prominent lawyer and largest landowner, stated that New Mexico’s land values would triple overnight with the granting of statehood.120 He campaigned for statehood both nationally and within New Mexico and in 1912 became one of the new state’s first two U.S. senators. Likewise, Prince, who after resigning as chief justice of the territorial supreme court had invested heavily in land and mining ventures,121 perceived his financial well-being as dependent on statehood.

  Race was at the crux of the congressional debate over statehood for New Mexico, and so race figured prominently in the strategies of Prince, Catron, and others. Prior to the final push for statehood from 1910 to 1912, there were two major battles on this front that reveal the centrality of race and racism in the debate and illustrate the dominant view of race that Prince and company sought to dislodge.122 The first occurred in 1875, when New Mexico and Colorado were both up for statehood. Advocates for New Mexico statehood argued that it should be treated on at least an equal footing with Colorado, since New Mexico had at least a hundred thousand residents compared to sixty-five thousand in Colorado.123 In both debates, the key questions concerned the interplay of race, nation, and citizenship.

  The national press was generally outspoken in its opposition to statehood for New Mexico.124 Larson describes the press overall (especially the New York Times) as extremely critical of New Mexico’s bid for statehood but relatively more positive toward Colorado.125 The Cincinnati Commercial may have been typical, opining in its editorial pages that New Mexico was composed of at least eighty thousand people of “Mexican descent” who were “almost wholly ignorant” of English and who “are aliens to us in blood and language.”126 The editorial reasoned that statehood was unjustified because New Mexico had a population three-quarters of which was illiterate, a larger proportion than was illiterate in South Carolina and Mississippi, states where “blacks outnumber whites.”127 Similarly, during the House’s consideration of the New Mexico statehood bill, New York Congressman Clarkson Potter argued that statehood should be denied on the grounds that a “very considerable portion of the population of the Territory [of New Mexico] do [sic] not speak the English language.”128

  Despite the racial and linguistic differences, New Mexico’s and Colorado’s electorates were similar in one respect: they were presumed to be majority-Republican. Debate on African American civil rights issues in the last weeks of the forty-third Congress colored the statehood proposals. Radical Republicans managed to push through a Civil Rights Act requiring racial equality in hotels, in theaters, and on transportation (which eventually was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), and they managed to derail a Democratic proposal to allow governors in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to suspend the writ of habeas corpus.129 As Larson has noted, these Republican victories only “increased the antagonism of Southern Democrats toward any Republican effort,” including the admission of new states likely to be Republican.130 In a highly partisan congressional debate that went into the early-morning hours on the last day of the session, Colorado won statehood, while New Mexico lost and would have to wait another thirty-two years for admission.131

  If southern Democrats were able to muster the votes to defeat New Mexico, why did Colorado squeak through? Larson posits that it was due to Colorado’s Democratic nonvoting delegate to Congress (as compared to New Mexico’s Republican Elkins), but the difference is better explained by the racial composition of the two territories in 1875. Colorado had a majority Euro-American electorate and a relatively small Indian population, whereas New Mexico had a majority-Mexican electorate and a large population of Pueblo and other Indians. Commenting on the 1875 vote, the New York Times enumerated “several good reasons why New-Mexico should not be admitted as a State,” most of which dealt with the faults of its native Mexican population: “The average [Mexican] citizen gets on in about the same old way, never richer and never poorer, while the lower element, the men who hire out, are but little better off than slaves, receiving scant wages for hard work.”132 To put it bluntly, and the New York Times did, “its people are not of us . . . the most numerous inhabitants are the joint offspring of [Mexican] Peons and Indians.”133

  In a later anti-statehood diatribe, the New York Times faulted both the Mexican elite (“the aristocrats, more or less descendants of the Spanish”) and the Mexican masses (“the peon or slave”).134 For newspaper editors in New York, the Mexican elite and the Mexican masses were equally problematic. The Mexican masses were weak—and unworthy of state citizenship—because they were not free. At the same time, and perhaps because of their dependence on the peons, the Mexican elite was similarly unworthy of state citizenship because its members did not aspire to hard work and achievement. As it was put in the New York Times, “Indeed, it is an undeniable fact that New-Mexico has steadily gone backward since its annexation to the United States, as well as for hundreds of years before, and upon every hand are the ruins ind
icative of a greatness in population and industry—of which the Pilgrim Fathers were as ignorant as we of the present day.”135 In response to the deluge of criticism after the 1875 vote, Prince’s pragmatic solution was to take on the task of battling this portrayal of New Mexico’s Mexican elite (though not particularly that of the Mexican masses). His goal was to revive the Spanish conquest as a moment of greatness that extended into the present to rehabilitate Mexican elites of the late nineteenth century.

  In 1902, New Mexico again seemed to be on the brink of admission to the Union, and, once again, the racial composition of its population proved the major stumbling block. This time, its fate was paired with that of Arizona and Oklahoma (the newly renamed Indian Territory); the so-called Omnibus Statehood Bill proposed that Congress admit the three territories together. The bill passed the House on May 9, 1902, but was doomed to failure in the Senate, where opposition to the admission of New Mexico and Arizona was orchestrated by Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, who chaired the Senate’s Committee on Territories.136

  Beveridge’s virulent opposition to New Mexico statehood must be understood within the larger context of his outspoken advocacy for the continuation of Manifest Destiny as a national policy at the turn of the century. This time the stage was the American war against Spain in 1898, settled the following year with the Treaty of Paris. Cuba won its independence from Spain, and the United States annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines. In what seemed almost like a throwback to the slogans of fifty years earlier that had fueled the war with Mexico, Beveridge linked American exceptionalism to race and religion: “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth, to lead in the regeneration of the world.”137 The racism that animated Beveridge’s imperialist goals also fueled his opposition to making state citizens of New Mexico’s Mexican majority. For him, the world was divided into those capable of self-government and those who had to be governed by others: “You who say the Declaration [of Independence] applies to all men, . . . how dare you deny its application to the American Indian? And if you deny it to the Indian at home, how dare you grant it to the Malay abroad? . . . [T]here are people in the world who do not understand any form of government . . . [and] must be governed.”138