This article examines how the cultural concept of the American home shaped Reconstruction politics in the American West. In a post-Civil War era in which Republicans sought a national culture and homogenous citizenry, ideas about what made a proper home became a powerful way to measure the potential inclusion of western minority groups. Three “questions”—the Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions—became some of the most pressing and passionately debated political controversies of the period. Historians have tended to treat these questions separately, but American congressmen, policy makers, and reformers discussed the three groups in remarkably similar ways. Ultimately, these Americans asked a single question—who had the right to possess homes and, by extension, American citizenship. These commentators, the article argues, saw Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons as unfit for U.S. citizenship for three main reasons: their failure to create proper homes, their threat to white homes, and their occupation of land that could otherwise be settled with white homes and families. When examined together, the western questions reveal how the American home, born in an emancipatory moment, became a blunt and violent tool of Reconstruction in the West.
In 1881, the satirical magazine The Wasp included a political cartoon seeking to illustrate the nation’s ongoing problems in the post–Civil War West. The cartoon, titled “The Three Troublesome Children,” portrays a maternal Columbia sitting in a parlor with her misbehaving children, whom the artist has labeled as the “Indian Question,” the “China Question,” and the “Mormon Question” (fig. 1). Each “child” is caricatured as a diminutive version of an adult male persona that embodied the stereotypes that mainstream American society feared most about each group: uncivilized warrior, unassimilable immigrant, and polygamist patriarch. The Chinese and Mormon children sit on Columbia’s lap, the former painfully tugs on her hair while the latter defiantly spits in her face. The Native American child plays at Columbia’s feet, aggressively chopping up toy U.S. soldiers with an axe. Uncle Sam sits reading in the background, immersed in the world of politics, ignoring the domestic troubles assaulting Columbia. By refusing to use the law to make his unruly children respect the proper order of an American home, he allows the nation’s western progeny to wreak havoc.
The three western questions illustrated as children assaulting a maternal Columbia. Source: “The Three Troublesome Children, The Wasp, December 16, 1881. Courtesy of the Bancroft. Library.
The three western questions illustrated as children assaulting a maternal Columbia. Source: “The Three Troublesome Children, The Wasp, December 16, 1881. Courtesy of the Bancroft. Library.
Based in San Francisco, The Wasp focused on concerns particular to the West, with Sinophobia its trademark. But cartoons like “The Three Troublesome Children” also tapped into national concerns. When Reconstruction in the South formally ended in 1877, it did not mean the federal government had abandoned its project of shaping the racial contours of the nation through a homogenous vision of liberal citizenship that rejected pluralism and cultural diversity. Instead, the government shifted the project to the West, seeking to address the country’s remaining racial and moral “problem” groups in what one scholar has called “a second reconstruction in the West” and another “Greater Reconstruction.”1 Over the next decade, the Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions became some of the most pressing and passionately debated political controversies of the post–Civil War era.
Historians have usually treated these questions separately, but as the “The Three Troublesome Children” illustrates, they were commonly linked in the minds of nineteenth-century commentators. While each question possessed its own history, they were all invoked within the context of integrating the West into the union. They were, in other words, questions of an expanding and diversifying nation asking, at heart, who belonged in the nation. To answer this question, Americans turned to the cultural measure that had increasingly come to define what it meant to be an American: the home. Specifically, Americans looked to the single-family, free labor home supported by a male breadwinner and presided over by a wife dedicated to raising the next generation of American citizens—a concept this article variously and imperfectly refers to as the “American home,” “white home,” “Christian home,” or even the “proper home.”2 The commentators, I argue, saw Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons as unfit for U.S. citizenship for three main reasons: their failure to create proper homes, their threat to American homes, and their occupation of land that could otherwise be settled with American homes and families.
White homes had been a symbol of America well before the Civil War era. Catherine Beecher, one of the major architects of domesticity in the antebellum period, first made the home central to early American nationalism in An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (1835). Believing unrestrained liberty to be a curse rather than a blessing, she dedicated a large portion of her life to her perceived solution: American society needed the check of the home. Beecher’s obsession with home was far from unique, but she was one of the first to imagine the home as a solution to a national problem. Her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, followed in her footsteps. She expertly employed the emotive power of the monogamous, Christian home in her best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to illustrate how slavery both ruined white homes and denied homes to the enslaved. In the midst of the Civil War, she explained to her editor that the public mind was “unsettled, burdened” and instead suggested, “Home is the thing we must strike for now.” Home, in other words, was both the justification for fighting and the solution a war-torn nation needed. 3
Stowe’s words proved prophetic, as the Civil War and Reconstruction played a monumental role in the creation of a uniform American home, most notably through the Republican passage of the Homestead Act (1862) and through Reconstruction efforts to create Black homes. Republicans demanded that freedmen should be given the same citizenship as white men. While the Reconstruction Amendments were the legal mechanism designed to secure this citizenship, ideas about what made a proper American home played a crucial role in defining citizenship. Key to the single standard of citizenship was the right to enter the marriage contract, for Black men to earn enough with their free labor to maintain a single-family home that supported a wife and children.4
Thomas Nast’s illustration “Emancipation” captured the home’s importance to the Radical Republican vision of a multiracial democracy (fig. 2). At the center of the illustration, Nast drew a happy Black family in the parlor of a home, complete with a “Union” stove. Vignettes to the left revealed slavery’s destruction of the Black family while the right highlighted the possibility of thriving Black homes and families under free labor. This promise of the Black home also pervaded actions on the ground: from the freedmen of Edisto Island’s eloquent plea for homesteads to farm their own land to the Freedmen’s Bureau efforts to make the home the reward of wage labor. While formerly enslaved people and Bureau officials may have disagreed on the details of the economic system underpinning the home, they agreed on the end goal: the creation of the Black home. The new American home ideally embraced both white and Black families.5
Artist Thomas Nast placed the home at the center of his depiction of a successful Reconstruction. Source: “Emancipation/Th. Nast; King & Baird, printers, 607 Sansom Street, Philadelphia,” 1845. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Artist Thomas Nast placed the home at the center of his depiction of a successful Reconstruction. Source: “Emancipation/Th. Nast; King & Baird, printers, 607 Sansom Street, Philadelphia,” 1845. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
While historians have long recognized the overwhelming cultural presence of the home in nineteenth-century America, they have underemphasized the political dimensions of the American home as a tool of Reconstruction in the West. Historian Stephen Kantrowitz has shown that in the post–Civil War era, citizenship was something that had to be earned through the embodiment of “civilization.” However, Republican ideology poorly defined the relationship between citizenship and civilization, with citizenship seemingly equaling a whole host of economic and cultural prerequisites associated with a “civilized” life—including private property, fixed habits of settlement, monogamy, and Christianity. If we look to the West, however, we can see how firmly ideas about what defined civilization, and thus what served as a prerequisite for citizenship, coalesced around the powerful core concept of home.6
When put side by side, “Emancipation” and “The Three Troublesome Children” show the complicated and evolving relationship of the American home to citizenship. Around the time of the Civil War, citizenship was supposed to guarantee you a home. However, the messy process of Reconstruction, especially its implementation in the West, provoked a new series of questions about whether the American home had room for Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons. Were these western groups capable of making proper homes and conforming to the dominant national culture?, asked legislators, government officials, and reformers. Or were they putting in danger the existence of American homes and thus the bedrock of the new American order? Depending on the answer, how should the nation proceed with these groups?
Historian Holly Case has identified the long nineteenth century as an “age of questions” that spanned the Atlantic World. Case traces the origin of the formulation of “the x question” to American sovereignty under British rule when an expanding British colonial hegemony created a new set of moral-political challenges. By aggregating the flood of questions that followed, Case argues that while questions seekers, or what she calls “querists,” may have believed in a real essence to individual questions, the definitions were always strategic and never clearly defined or fixed. Focusing largely on Europe, Case outlines a set of common criteria for questions: they extended beyond the purview of the state to the larger public sphere, became instruments of thought that structured ideas about society and the range of political possibilities, were framed as problems to be solved, were often bundled together, contained both progressive and force-based arguments, and were self-consciously of their time while desiring to be timeless.7
Case’s criteria can be found in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War over competing sovereignties in both the South and West and can help us better understand how the western questions shaped Reconstruction politics. Americans frequently referred to the three western questions as “problems” that needed to be solved. If, according to Case’s formulation, commentators mentally bundled the three western questions together, then they were likely to favor a one-size-fits-all solution that more easily ignored specific contexts in favor of grand, structural, and territorial overhauls. And all three questions wrestled with the word that, according to Case, ruled the age of questions: emancipation. All three questions probed the boundaries of freedom and belonging as they considered whether each group should be included or excluded from the expanding American polity. While the solution in each case differed, they all resulted in force to one degree or another, stripping emancipation of its progressive veneer.8
In the decades after the Civil War, the three western questions, I argue, were actually a single question: who had the right to possess homes, and by extension, American citizenship. The commentators or “querists” referred to in this article were a diverse group—politicians, intellectuals, social reformers, and newspaper editors, among others—and they came from all regions of the United States and held a variety of political affiliations. My point here is not to gloss over their differences, which were numerous, but to emphasize how they increasingly found common ground around the concept of the home in the 1870s and 1880s. Indeed, the very differences during Reconstruction around issues of federal authority, race, gender, and citizenship are what raised the stakes for the creation of a national culture centered on the American home that would hold the country together.9
This article first discusses important differences between how each western “problem” group has been historically conceptualized as a question. It then explores how the western questions overlapped in the words of commentators in the decades after the Civil War through three main arguments containing startling similarities. It shows how querists accused each problem group of failing to make proper homes and endangering American homes. Finally, I look at how querists believed the three groups occupied valuable space that would be better served with American homes—and the varying success each group had in using the rhetoric of the home as a pathway to full citizenship. The similarities, I argue, were a product of the fact that the home had become the measure for inclusion into a standard national culture. Put differently, the free labor home became a moral blueprint guiding the question of each group’s potential to be assimilated into the national fold.
The Three Western Questions
In the years leading up to the Civil War, each question had its own distinct history and essence that changed depending on the querist, time, or place. The Indian Question was the oldest; it had existed in one form or another since European colonists desired Native lands. However, it assumed greater urgency with the western territorial acquisitions of the late 1840s and the checkered federal policy that embraced, sometimes at the same time, removal, Indian Territory, reservations, military conquest, genocide, and assimilation. In the post–Civil War era, the Indian Question grabbed the public spotlight as recurring wars and atrocities followed in the wake of the federal government’s advancement westward.10
After defeating the Confederacy, the U.S. Army turned its resources to defeating various Native claims of sovereignty in the West. At the same time, Civil Rights legislation designed to incorporate freedpeople raised basic questions about the status of Native peoples. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared that all persons born in the United States except “Indians not taxed” were citizens. The Senate interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment in the same vein when it clarified that “the 14th amendment to the Constitution has no effect whatever upon the status of the Indian tribes within the limits of the United States.” Then, in 1871, Congress ended the treaty-making system, replacing it with a policy of wardship that imbued Congressional law with the power to decide where and how Native Americans lived. President Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy” consolidated postwar Republicans around a policy of forcing Indigenous Americans onto protected reservations to learn “civilized” habits of fixed settlement and household order in the hopes of detribalization and eventual political incorporation. However, this doctrine of wardship left the question of Native peoples’ status within the nation as unclear and contradictory as ever. If they were not citizens but wards, should they be made citizens? If “civilization” was a prerequisite to citizenship, how did one go about measuring whether that requirement had been met?11
In contrast to the Indian Question’s long presence, the Chinese Question sprung suddenly into being with the advent of the California Gold Rush in 1848 and the mass of Chinese immigration that came in its wake. Despite the initial democratic promise of California, it was only a short time before white miners subjected Chinese miners to brutal acts of violence and the discriminatory Foreign Miners’ Tax of 1852, which kept Chinese and other non-whites from the mines. Additional anti-Chinese legislation quickly followed, designed to tax incoming Chinese immigrants, prohibit Chinese immigration, and deny civil rights such as testifying in court against whites and access to public education.12
While the West remained the epicenter of anti-Chinese sentiment throughout the rest of the nineteenth century, the Chinese Question became one of the most fiercely argued national controversies of the 1870s and 1880s. In addition to discussing the Indian Question, Congress debated whether the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should extend the rights of citizenship to immigrants excluded from naturalizing under the “free white person” provision of the 1790 Naturalization Act. Democrats and many Republicans made sure the language of the Fourteenth Amendment clearly stated citizens to be “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States.”13 Congressman William Higby, a Republican from California, summarized the prevailing logic of the constitutional debates when he argued that “the negro is a native” and thus deserving of naturalization whereas the Chinese “are foreigners” and “nothing but a pagan race” that could not be made into “good citizens.” If unable to naturalize, should the Chinese immigrant be extended the rights and protections of citizenship? Or, if unassimilable, should they be barred from even immigrating in the first place?14
Like the Chinese Question, the Mormon Question was a child of the nineteenth century. Almost from its founding in rural New York during the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints faced opposition. Angry white mobs drove Mormons from their homes, killing their founder and leader Joseph Smith in 1844. The Mormon belief that God spoke directly to church leaders incited charges of blasphemy, violation of the separation of church and state, and political oligarchy. In Utah, the Mormons’ new leader, Brigham Young, exacerbated these fears when he made church leadership and territorial government one and the same. The church’s public announcement endorsing polygamy in 1852 only worsened public opinion. Before long, Republicans began referring to polygamy as the “twin relic of barbarism” to slavery.15
After the public revelation of polygamy, Mormons increasingly became seen as a federal problem. While far from the only religious dissenters to challenge traditional structures, they had political control of Utah and seemed to be in open defiance of federal authority with their embrace of self-governance, leading to the “Mormon War” of 1857–58. While the rebellion resulted in Young’s removal as governor, Mormons largely kept control of the territorial government. In response, through a series of federal indictments and court rulings, spurred on by a massive national anti-polygamy campaign, the federal government sought to expand its reach into Utah with the object of forcing conformity to monogamous marriage. However, the ambiguous status of territorial sovereignty as well as the protection of religious freedom in the First Amendment made Mormons’ place within the nation far from clear. Yes, they were legal citizens, American insiders even, and largely white, but what about their peculiar alternative domestic practices that appeared to share similarities with Native peoples and Chinese immigrants, thus threatening emerging notions of American citizenship? Should they be protected by religious freedom or made to conform?16
The specific history of each group reveals unique, complex relationships to the American nation. For Native Americans, it was a question that put wardship in relation to citizenship; for Chinese immigrants, naturalization with citizenship; and for Mormons, religious freedom with conformity. All the questions grappled with national belonging and suggested the need for cultural metrics to arrive at an answer. As commentators debated the questions within the context of Reconstruction, the three western questions essentially became a single question that used the home as the measure for inclusion, revealing just how much political and cultural ground the American home had gained. When the questions are analyzed together, the conversation about the nation’s “troublesome children” coalesces into a series of strikingly similar arguments about inferior culture, the endangerment of white homes, challenges to the American spatial order, and fitness for citizenship.
The Cultural Argument: Failure to Create Proper American Homes
The first charge leveled at the three groups was that they failed to create true American homes. Although querists identified specific ways in which each group failed, they all converged into the same accusation about having an inferior culture that was incompatible with American homemaking. While querists commonly relied on political and economic arguments, these were always embedded in arguments about culture. Making the South and West conform to the image of the North required creating not only a national free labor economy but also a national culture. The American home straddled these two spheres. It was both the rationale for the economy—to create single-family homes across the continent—and a powerful cultural aspiration that shaped everyday actions and bestowed meaning on American lives.17
The Civil War and its aftermath had no shortage of paeans intimately linking nation to home and family. The Reverend Edward Hopper, a New York–based Presbyterian minister, passionately explained early in the war that home and country were “clamped together by the strongest affections of which the human heart is capable,” in which women were the key players. “The Republic will be what our homes make it, and our homes will be what woman makes them.”18 Almost two decades later, the same logic held when debating the place of Chinese immigrants when a San Francisco lawyer explained that all of society was organized around the principle “that every man among us is to have a family and a home.” In a free labor economy, men would make sufficient wages to support a wife and children in homes made homelike by the women who presided over them. Over four decades after she published An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers, Catherine Beecher’s vision of the American home was alive and thriving.19
The fact many white Americans failed to live in single-family homes and reproduce the ideal family receded in the face of the overwhelming assumption that the home was fundamental to white, and now Black, American identity. The same assumption did not apply to the three western problem groups. When applied to these groups, the home as the answer to a reconstructing nation became a question of its own. Could these groups make proper homes? While the arguments offered for each group varied in their specifics, they all reduced to a base argument about failing to make proper homes. Querists claimed each group fell far below the standards of civilization, measured against the American home ideal. They linked arguments about gender perversion and racial outsider status to those about alternative house structures and family arrangements that failed to embody the model single-family home ideal.
The association of civilization with Anglo-American ideas about home and family formed in relation to assumptions about the inferiority of Native ways of life. Nineteenth-century scientists on both sides of the Atlantic constructed a theoretical continuum of human progress from savagery to civilization. The pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan embedded his civilization theory with domestic values. He argued that over time the family developed from a “communism in living” marked by large, matriarchal families seen in American Indian societies to “a political society” based on property and small, patriarchal families that defined European societies. Morgan found the power of “house architecture” to be especially revealing. In Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (1881), he argued that the growth of civilization could “be traced from the hut of the savage, through the communal houses of the barbarians, to the house of the single family of civilized nations.” Showcasing numerous house plans of different Native peoples across North America, he claimed that most lived in large houses that accommodated several families, demonstrating “the wide difference…between the Indian family, without individuality, and the highly individualized family of civilization.”20
Like other social evolutionists of his time, Morgan contended that a particular set of gender roles were inherent to civilization and progress. These gender roles depended on a separation of tasks that assigned men physical labor or work outside of the home and women dependence and confinement within the home. Querists helped define proper manhood and womanhood by obsessing about how each problem group deviated from these gender expectations. For the men of each group, querists focused on traits they claimed the men held in excess: savagery, docility, and patriarchy.
The trope of Indian savagery contained two seemingly opposing images of Native men: hostility and laziness. Abigail Scott Duniway, remembered most as a leading woman suffragist in the West, published sensational news of Native groups that often combined these two sentiments in her Portland-based newspaper, the New Northwest. She frequently reported on “hostile Indians” brutally murdering and scalping settlers. Native men, she claimed, were “wild animals” unable to be “tamed,” by which she meant unable to accept the civilizational influence of women in the home. Duniway also employed frequent language accusing Native men of laziness, a stereotype dating to the colonial era. She alleged, “the Indian [will] avoid all physical drudgery, except that which he can compel the women to perform for him.”21 Colonists labeled the Native men they encountered as lazy since they did not engage in farmwork—labor that they saw as male and crucial to maintaining a homestead. Instead, Native women tended the crops while men left to hunt, leading colonists to dismiss Native men as indolent exploiters who kept their women in drudgery. What brought hostility and laziness together as dual conditions of savagery was a failure of Native men to be properly domesticated according to the American concept of home.22
Rather than the trope of the “savage” who could not be domesticated, querists subjected Chinese immigrant men to the opposite stereotype: they were all too easily domesticated, in a way that upset the gender balance of the proper American home. Commentators accused Chinese immigrant men of lacking the requisite masculinity on which heterosexual marriage and homes were to be built. These accusations of effeminacy and docility first proliferated during the Gold Rush. When violence and unfair labor practices pushed Chinese immigrants from the mines, many took up labor generally marked female in Anglo American society, particularly laundry and cooking. As historian Susan Lee Johnson has argued, this mapping of racial constructions onto gender constructions in the diggings helped to assimilate “Chinese men to dominant notions of female gender.” At the same time, the new sciences of polygenism and physical anthropology demarcated distinct and separate races through physical difference. These scientists claimed the Chinese had smaller cranial and stature measurements, features that to them suggested an “enervated race” and innate effeminacy.23
Mormon men did not face the same overt racism—but were still accused of not creating proper American homes. As querists saw it, their crime was an overextension of patriarchy. In place of Morgan’s positive image of European patriarchal families, the U.S. Supreme Court accused Mormon men of a “patriarchal principle,” insinuating a tie to despotism in relation to both the Mormon church and the practice of polygamy. The nationwide anti-polygamy campaign commonly linked Mormon polygamy to images of plantation slavery. The 1887 Puck cartoon, “An Interrupted Idyll,” equated polygamy with slavery by including a patriarch reminiscent of a plantation owner or overseer lounging against a tree while his wives worked in the field as part of “the system of Woman-Slavery in Utah” (fig. 3). To further illustrate how far Mormon’s men’s patriarchy wandered from acceptable gender norms, anti-polygamists commonly associated Mormons with both the “savagery” of Indians and “Asiatic effeminacy,” coding Mormons as non-white while also linking all three problem groups together.24
An example of American popular culture equating polygamy with slavery. Source: “An Interrupted Idyll,” Puck, 30 March 1887. Courtesy of Hathitrust.
An example of American popular culture equating polygamy with slavery. Source: “An Interrupted Idyll,” Puck, 30 March 1887. Courtesy of Hathitrust.
When it came to discussing the women in each group, distinctions among gender violations blurred together more than they did for the men. Querists tended to see the women as victims of a manhood gone awry. Sometimes this took the form of overworked slaves, as illustrated in “An Interrupted Idyll” or in the belief that Native women were the “squaw drudges” of lazy Native men.25 Sometimes, compulsory prostitution was added to accusations of slavery. While some Chinese immigrant women did enter the United States contracted as prostitutes, Sinophobes commonly argued that “they are all slaves, all prostitutes.”26 Anti-polygamists saw polygamy and prostitution as one and the same. In the cornerstone anti-polygamy text, Female Life among the Mormons (1855), Maria Ward claimed polygamy made “the domestic altar a shrine of legal prostitution, sanctioned by the authority of a pretended revelation.” If nothing more than men’s property, unwilling “concubines,” women’s sacred role as the chief regulator of morality became tainted beyond recognition, opening the home to all kinds of vices and corruptions.27 Whether depicting the women of each group as slaves, prostitutes, or both, querists cited them as violations of the American home and woman’s sacred place within it.
According to querists, the problem groups failed to create homes in two ways: their vices and corruptions, querists claimed, found expression in their homes’ physical structure and in the family relations within. For the Indian Question, the argument that Native Americans lacked homes began with the belief that they did not exploit land to its fullest potential, a convenient and powerful argument used to justify American conquest. According to this logic, Native communal ownership and subsistence practices failed to improve the land, which in the post–Civil War era was tied explicitly to building a single-family homestead as much as it was to farming. Both the 1862 Homestead Act and Indian Allotment put home building at the center of their policies. The architect of the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887, Senator Henry Dawes explained, “The home is the central force of civilization,” and “this home is what the Severalty Act attempts to supply.”28 Despite a rich diversity in Native homemaking, the American press often focused on “the habit of wigwam life” to highlight the difference between Native homes and American homes.29 More dangerous than the physical structure, however, was what querists believed happened within the wigwam. Associating Native peoples with immoral sexual practices such as polygyny, homosexuality, gender fluidity, premarital sex, and divorce had existed since Spanish missionaries began their colonizing project in the sixteenth century and continued to be a subject of endless fascination for Americans.30
Many querists accepted Lewis Henry Morgan’s assertion that house structure and the family within reinforced each other. When visiting California for the first time after the Civil War, social reformer Charles Loring Brace noted polygamy among the so-called “Digger Indians,” alongside poor, dirty living conditions, claiming, “I have never seen anything which can be called a cabin for them.” “Digger,” a derogatory term most often applied to Great Basin Indians, was frequently applied to other problem groups to express the extent of their degradation.31 An 1876 issue of the illustrated magazine Scribner’s Monthly warned that if you followed an anonymous “John Chinaman” home you would find “a herd of animals living in a state of squalor and filth at which even a Digger Indian would shudder.” An 1878 special committee report on Chinese immigration to California State Senate filled its pages with similar descriptions. Chinese immigrant domiciles were “filthy in the extreme, and to a degree that cleansing is impossible except by the absolute destruction of the dwellings they occupy.” The filth was depicted as an offshoot of overcrowded conditions, often illustrated through animal metaphors like “herd” and “a perfect hive” to demonstrate the horrific outcome of “a hundred living in a space that would be insufficient for an average American family.”32
Comparisons to the “average American family” served to highlight how Chinese immigrants seemingly lacked proper homes. Querists obsessed about how, instead of recreating respectable domesticity, Chinese immigrants appeared to live in what historian Nayan Shah characterized as “a plurality of queer domestic arrangements, from female headed household networks to [male] workers’ bunkhouses and opium dens.” The imagery mixed dirt and disease with an implicit queerness signaling “perverse spaces, anomalous gender roles, and deviant sexualities.” The single-sex living arrangements of Chinese immigrants presented an alternative domesticity frightening for its potential subversiveness. The California State Senate investigation linked a lack of homes with queer family arrangements when it warned: “The workmen live in sheds or in straw stacks, do their own cooking, have no homes, and are without interest in their work or the country.”33
Querists made many of the same arguments about Mormons, even though most Mormons’ homes were physically similar to those of other white, middle-class Americans.34 Anti-polygamists had to work hard to demonstrate how Mormons’ physical homes differed, often looking inside the home to do so. Sometimes this meant depicting the homes as overcrowded “harems,” complete with a “family bedstead” for multiple wives or envisioning several families squeezing into a single structure. One visiting woman recorded her shock when she entered a Mormon dwelling with its “smoky, filthy room serving as a living room and sleeping apartment for three women and their offspring,” declaring that she never could have “dreamed of such dirt, rags, and squalor.” This description mirrored closely those applied to Chinese immigrant living conditions, with the emphasis on a single sex packed into small, dirty spaces. However, the writer instead made the connection to the other western problem group when she declared the situation was worse than what one would find among the “Digger Indians.”35
As with the other two groups, the greater sin for anti-polygamists was how Mormonism destroyed the family found within the home. A typical anti-polygamy novel painted a sensational picture, telling of rampant divorce, women being forcibly passed among licentiousness men, jealous wives, and a series of broken families. As one tract succinctly stated the omnipresent message, “the Mormon polygamist has NO HOME.”36 They had no homes, according to the logic of anti-polygamists, because they destroyed the conditions associated with the home: not only domestic affection, privacy, and order, but also the relations that defined monogamous marriage in the wake of the Civil War. This latter standard built on a gendered understanding of contract and consent, whereupon a man had the right to enter into labor contracts while a woman had the right to enter into the marriage contract that subsumed her political and economic identity under that of her husband. Anti-polygamists argued that the conditions of Mormon theocracy and plural marriage deprived both genders from these respective contracts, making a viable home impossible.37
When put side by side, the arguments about the Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions become predictable, as if simply following a script. Without civilized gender roles, and the loving companionate monogamous marriages that supposedly came along with them, the groups each failed to enact proper domesticity, to have families and maintain beautiful single-family homes. Instead, they tarnished the home ideal by living in huts, boardinghouses, or communal configurations that denied privacy. Their domestic spaces were dirty, overcrowded, and without love. Their families were too large or non-existent, single-sexed or polygamous. When measured against the idealized American home, they were found wanting.
The Material Argument: Endangering the White Home
Cultural arguments about each group failing to make proper homes usually mixed with another set of arguments. The western problem groups did not just passively lack homes, they also actively threatened white homes. These arguments all had to do with material or physical harm directed at white Americans and their homes. For the Indian Question, it was a direct physical threat to white homes, as embodied in the narrative of the white settler cabin under attack by “hostile” Indians. For the Chinese Question, the threat came through a two-pronged indirect attack. First, by driving down wages below what a white male breadwinner could make to support his family, and second, through the contagion of disease supposedly spread to white homes through Chinese men’s domestic work and Chinese women’s prostitution. The Mormon Question also pointed to contagion but theirs was a moral contamination from within the home that indicated the possibility of white degeneration. By spreading the moral sin of polygamy to other white men and women, they destroyed the very foundations of what made a white home a home.
Since its conception, the Indian Question centered on one of the most powerful stories Americans told about themselves. It was a story of the white home in the wilderness, “an ark of civilization” standing alone against the forces of savagery. Catherine Beecher invoked this home to highlight women’s self-sacrificing labor in bringing civilization to the “primeval” corners of the world.38 As historian Louis Warren has shown, Buffalo Bill Cody helped whittle this story down to a central, marketable core in his highly popular Wild West Show: the Indian attack on domestic order (fig. 4). “The Indians creep up on the settler’s cabin. They climb up on the roof. They capture the women, who are engaged in domestic duties. They flee with their captives,” narrated a newspaper account of the extravagant finale of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Just in the nick of time, “the brave cowboys appear on the scene. They follow up the Indians, lasso them, shoot them, recover the captives and so on.” While minor variations of the act existed, the basics remained the same. A white family was forced to take refuge inside their rural settler home from mounted Indians violently descending upon it until Buffalo Bill and his cowboys appeared, defeating the Indians with their superior guns and riding prowess. According to this mythos, only true white manhood could save the white home.39
Buffalo Bill Cody “saving” the white home from attack by Indians in the final act of his popular show. Source: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Program, 1887. Courtesy of the William F. Cody Archive.
Buffalo Bill Cody “saving” the white home from attack by Indians in the final act of his popular show. Source: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Program, 1887. Courtesy of the William F. Cody Archive.
While Buffalo Bill popularized the white-settler-home-under-attack story for audiences across the United States and Europe, Indian War veteran groups made the story essential to their identity. Inspired by the success of Civil War Union veterans, who had come together in 1866 to form the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternal lobby organization devoted to comradery and veteran benefits, Indian War veterans banned together in the late nineteenth century for their services conquering the American West. They wanted pension benefits to improve the living conditions of their families, and to legitimate their claims, they argued that they had protected white homes from “savage” Indians. As “Winners of the West,” vanguards of civilization in the wilderness, they desired to be respected as much as those who fought in the Civil War. The 1890 constitution of the North Pacific Coast branch underscored veterans’ special contribution to the pioneer process by voluntarily placing “their lives behind their rifles to preserve the lives, safety, happiness, homes and property of friends and loved ones at home against murdering, burning and plundering savages.” From mass spectacle to personal identity, the story of Indians endangering white homes became an “emotional truth” that western novels and eventually films would exploit for decades to come.40
In comparison to a direct Indian attack on the white settler home, querists imagined Chinese immigrants waging an indirect and convoluted attack. Sinophobes extended the arguments about a lack of homes and families to claim that Chinese immigrant workers could live on wages far too low for a white male worker to maintain a home and family. Puck’s late 1870s anti-Chinese cartoon, “A Picture for Employers,” illustrated this fear perfectly (fig. 5). One side of the cartoon depicts a dozen underfed Chinese male workers crowded into a small room, sleeping heaped together and crouching as they dine on rats with their bare hands. The other side shows a large white man coming home to a tranquil domestic scene: two children play in a spacious room marked with the refinements of domesticity while a smiling wife lifts a baby up to greet her husband as he enters under the sign, “God bless Our Home.” To make the message even clearer, the caption under the Chinese immigrants reads, “Why They can live on forty cents a day” while the other side reads, “and They can’t.” The different perceptions in how Chinese and American workers lived, and the meaning imbued in those differences was exactly what one California Senate testifier meant when he declared, “It is not a mere question of comparative wages, but of civilization and progress.” Lower wages were only a problem when they denied a man the ability to maintain the very elements that made civilization and progress possible: families and homes.
Cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted Chinese as threatening the white home by lacking their own homes and families. Source: “A Picture for Employers,” Puck, August 21, 1878. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Cartoonist Joseph Keppler depicted Chinese as threatening the white home by lacking their own homes and families. Source: “A Picture for Employers,” Puck, August 21, 1878. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
The Workingmen’s Party in California led the attack on Chinese male workers for undermining white wages, and they bolstered this claim by pointing to another: the Chinese immigrant as a vector of infectious disease. The Chinese immigrant men who performed laundry and domestic services, they argued, had created “a perfect network of contagion and infection…a veritable octopus of disease, having its seat in Chinatown, and its infectious arms thrust into every house of the city.” Chinese immigrant women faced similar arguments. Assuming that all these women were prostitutes, querists claimed they infected “thousands” of young white men and boys with dangerous venereal diseases. Removing any agency from the young men, critics placed the full blame on Chinese women for degrading “Christian civilization” by luring the men into their “dens of iniquity” with cheap prices. While not as direct as the Indian attack, querists imagined the Chinese immigrant threat as no less lethal, a multidirectional attack that undermined the American home’s financial and moral foundations.41
Taking cues from the Chinese immigrant attack, querists also framed the Mormon threat to the white home as an attack of contagion but as one that originated from within the very walls of the white home. Unlike Native Americans and Chinese immigrants, who mostly lacked legal citizenship in the nineteenth century, Mormons had always been citizens. Their open defiance of the American home threatened the homogenous vision of citizenship Reconstruction policy hoped to make uniform throughout the nation. The idea that polygamy could spread from Mormons to other whites, a “slow march of disease” threatening “to desolate all households,” underlay the urgent call to defeat plural marriage. In anti-polygamy fiction, the lack of strong federal regulation around polygamy meant otherwise good men were lured away from the sanctity of the home by the temptations of sexual license. Frances Willard, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, called for “a deeper, more combined, and far-reaching movement” against polygamy because “each woman degraded means the potential degradation of all women.” Willard, like Catherine Beecher before her, looked to the home to put a check on a nation with few formal restraints. The purity of monogamous marriage kept the “selfishness of man” in check through “one abiding love, one hearth, one home.”42
Sentimental writers expressed what most Americans considered fact. Monogamous marriage and the home were not just “a matter strictly between individuals” but a public benefit responsible for “the founding of families and establishment of communities.” The Christian home, with a monogamous marriage at its center, was the defining line between civilization and savagery. According to the influential nineteenth-century political ethicist Francis Lieber, it was “one of the pre-existing conditions of our existence as civilized white men.”43 The heathens of the world lacked homes, as another anti-polygamist put it, but Americans had homes, and “[s]uch homes make a law-abiding people; they create a public sentiment which produces good government.” Mormon polygamy, as Congressman Thomas Bayard reminded Congress, was a “horror” they could all agree upon, “a social and political evil, and an evil fatal to the existence of a republican state.” Like the other western problem groups, Mormons put the white home in peril. The solution, according to one anti-polygamist, was straightforward: “The Home must conquer the Harem.” It was a battle cry that could have just as easily been applied to any of Columbia’s “troublesome children.”44
The Spatial Argument: The Misuse of Western Lands
Querists made one last set of arguments about each problem group failing to live up to the standards of the American home—this third set of arguments focused on space and on political power within that space. Specifically, querists argued that the problem groups occupied land that would be better populated with white homes. This belief played a crucial role when politicians, social reformers, and cultural commentators evaluated each group’s potential for citizenship.
All three groups were situated in the West, a region of particular significance for its land and resources. Greater Reconstruction imagined a West of independent homesteads that would eventually be grouped together into small towns and thriving regional economies in the image of the North. Already, the 1862 Homestead Act had represented the first step in making the American home the cultural centerpiece of a national project that would, in the words of Republican Congressman Stephen Foster, “people the wilderness, and convert it into smiling fields and peaceful homes for millions of Christian families.” Querists saw Native peoples, Chinese immigrants, and Mormons as all obstructing this vision by the very space they occupied. They believed that this situation, if unaddressed, would lead to the failure of the American home and the newly unified nation it represented.45
In the late nineteenth century, white Americans deeply felt the presence of Native peoples in the West—despite the widely held assumption that Native Americans were a vanishing race—and they longed for the land Native Americans legally occupied. Congressman Foster had supported the Homestead Act by arguing that Indigenous Americans stood in the way of white homes, proclaiming, “I deny the right of a handful of savages to monopolize a continent, when millions of men, more intelligent and better every way, need homes.” Many other westerners agreed. For example, Duniway, the newspaper editor and suffragist, believed that Native peoples on reservations occupied all the good land “while industrious white men, and thrifty, thorough-going white women, are driven to the most undesirable tracts of government land to get themselves a foot-hold.” For Duniway, the creation of pioneer homes helmed by white women asserting “a higher civilization” was a prime reason to break up Indian lands.46
Ostensibly, federal Indian policy would nurture Native homes as well, leading to Native citizenship. In the decades after the Civil War, Indian reformers made federal Indian policy all about dissolving tribal lands—culminating in the Dawes Act of 1887, which broke reservations into plots allotted to the heads of individual Native families. Dawes eagerly supported the home as the end goal of allotment, looking forward to a time that: “in every Indian home…the wife shall sit by her hearthstone clothed in the habiliments of true womanhood, and the husband shall stand sentinel at the threshold panoplied in the armor of a self-supporting citizen of the United States.”47 This same sentiment served as the foundation for the brutal system of Indian boarding schools, which separated children from parents in the name of training children in citizenship and “proper” gender roles in the Christian home.48
As many scholars have demonstrated, the Dawes Act and the Indian boarding school system resulted in only a small number of Native peoples gaining citizenship. Furthermore, the policies conveniently ignored those Native peoples who already possessed homes and farms within their own nations, laying bare the government’s fundamental goal of converting Native land for white settlement and homes. By the 1930s, Native peoples had lost 60 percent of their remaining lands and 66 percent of their allotted lands. For most Indigenous Americans, the home as a pathway to citizenship meant violence, displacement, and cultural harm through forced assimilation.49
If the contradiction at the heart of the Indian Question was that Native Americans were vanishing but also held valuable land white settlers wanted, something of the opposite applied to Chinese immigrants. Put simply, Americans feared that the Chinese immigrant population was growing and spreading across the country at an alarming rate. Pierton Dooner’s Last Days of the Republic (1880), a popular anti-Chinese novel, took these fears to the extreme, arguing that unrestricted Chinese immigration would topple the American republic. To sketch this harrowing future, Dooner recycled the arguments about Chinese immigrant men failing to make homes of their own and endangering white homes by undercutting the so-called family wage. It was only a matter of time, Dooner argued, until these immigrants spread across the continent, destroying white homes as they went, and ultimately enabling a successful military coup of the nation’s capital.50
This fear about Chinese immigrants taking space from white homes had significant political purchase. Querists passionately argued, to great effect, that the two cultures, “one founded upon the basis of the family relation, the other upon a regulated system of prostitution, cannot exist side by side,” without endangering “the very existence of our republic.”51 Furthermore, some querists, like Senator La Fayette Grover (D-Or.), used the historic treatment of Indians as “aliens and outcasts” as a precedent for limiting “the rights of man” to just “the oppressed of all European nations” and not “colored foreign peoples.” The passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the most powerful outcome to derive from these arguments.52
The legal restrictions that followed the Chinese Exclusion Act, from the Foran Act (1885) that banned alien contract workers, to the Geary Act (1892) that extended exclusion with harsher requirements, all attempted to minimize the Chinese presence on American soil. While they failed to prevent all Chinese immigrants from entering the country, these laws did send the powerful message that those of Chinese descent were not wanted as American citizens, helping to incite a flood of violence against those of Chinese descent in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Because Chinese immigrants were declared unable to ever make homes, the home as a pathway to citizenship became a complete dead end for them.53
Mormons, like Indians, also held control of valuable land. They were permanent settlers—colonizers even—but according to anti-polygamists they were not “good” colonizers. Their land would be better served, querists claimed, by proper American homes. Querists believed that Mormon communities were growing uncontrollably, spreading beyond the West just like the “Chinese invasion,” a belief that led to deep-seated fears about the destruction of republican institutions through Mormon absorption. Some homestead boosters, like Foster, believed the Homestead Act would solve the Mormon Question by overwhelming “the polygamists of Utah beneath the advancing tread of Christian civilization.”54
While the Homestead Act did not temper Mormon population growth, querists continued to believe that it might do so. In 1885, New England reformers Eli Thayer and Amos A. Lawrence formed the Utah Emigrant Aid and Improvement Company to remove the political power of polygamists through the organized emigration of northern Protestants. (Notably, Thayer and Lawrence had developed these tactics in the “Bleeding Kansas” movement of the 1850s, recruiting anti-slavery “Free-Staters” to move to Kansas and vote for an anti-slavery constitution.) Like others of their time, Thayer and Lawrence did not think of the Mormon Problem in isolation from the other major western problem groups. To provide land for their venture, they looked to reservation lands, believing that Native Americans were using the land incorrectly and needed to be removed through the implantation of northern homes. Thayer described the 12-million-acre Ute reservation as nothing more than “a handful of Utes who must go.”55
While Thayer and Lawrence’s scheme never came to fruition, federal pressure to overpower polygamy did increase through legislation and a series of Supreme Court decisions.56 In 1890, the Mormon church finally capitulated when it released a manifesto officially ending polygamy. As with Native peoples, the federal government forced Mormons to assimilate to Protestant Christian conceptions of the home. However, unlike the two other western problem groups, Mormons could use their whiteness to claim full inclusion as Americans. In fact, Mormons used early twentieth-century fears of race suicide to reclaim whiteness and help smooth their integration into the national fold. Overall, the home as a pathway to citizenship proved to be a smoother journey for Mormons than either Native Americans or Chinese immigrants.57
* * *
Querists discussed all three questions in the same way because they imagined all three groups as enemies of the reconstructing nation. They claimed these groups interfered with the national project because they failed to live up to the common ground upon which the nation was consolidating: the free labor home. While commentators imagined the home as the solution to the problem of the formerly enslaved, treating it as a pathway to citizenship after the war, in the West it became a question—the measure used to assess whether each “problem” group was worthy of inclusion into the new national cultural order. As I have argued, American authorities accused each group of practicing alternative domesticities that threatened the values of the ideal American home. Even worse, they claimed this domestic diversity threatened white homes and defied the order and uniformity of the reconsolidating nation.
While the querists subjected all three groups to the same question and came to the same answer, differences in degree led to varied outcomes for each group’s citizenship status. Chinese immigrants, deemed the most foreign and un-homelike of all, were rejected from the polity outright through the Chinese Exclusion Act; Native peoples were given a dishonest invitation through the forced assimilation of the Dawes Act; and Mormons accepted their invitation on the condition that the church renounce polygamy. By 1890, the federal government had successfully wielded the home in the name of national consolidation.
The home that once helped defeat slavery had become a blunt and violent tool of empire, its emancipatory potential disappearing almost as quickly as it had appeared. By interrogating the major questions that dominated the post–Civil War public sphere, we can see in greater detail the power of the federal government and various cultural authorities as they treated the western groups the same—as “problems” to be solved—in order to make the vision of a Greater Reconstruction possible. This history of three western questions in the post–Civil War era sheds new light on the political power of the home as the cultural ground of Reconstruction and an important measure of citizenship well beyond the moment of emancipation.
As much as this history reveals, it also has its limits. By following those with the power to question and solve on a grand scale, we lose the voices, wants, and desires of those being questioned and the messy and varied realities on the ground. Sarah Winnemucca, a member of the Paiute tribe and a skilled negotiator and activist, was one such voice. She pointed out the hypocrisy of the policies implemented in the name of building American homes. In the first book written by a Native American woman, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), she reversed the typical narrative that depicted Native peoples as “savages” threatening white settler homes and instead portrayed these same settlers as violent threats to Indigenous homes, including the perpetuation of sexual violence against Native women. “Oh, for shame!,” she wrote, “your so called civilization sweeps in…marked by crimson lines of blood.” Flipping the rhetoric of home making, she called for “justice to these my suffering people, who had been snatched from their homes against their wills.”58
Not surprisingly, the public and Indian reformers roundly attacked Winnemucca for exposing this darker side of American home expansion. Even when she asked for a solution that would seemingly make sense to nineteenth-century Americans—“give us homes to live in for God’s sake and for humanity’s sake”—her pleas went unheard because the home she asked for, led by Native women and Native traditions, did not fit neatly into a uniform American home.59 Winnemucca intimately understood something that few others were willing to admit. As the proposed solution of the age of emancipation, the home had become a question that, when answered, created illiberal solutions in the name of freedom.
Notes
I would like to extend my heartfelt thanks to Estelle Freedman for providing many years of wise counsel, including invaluable feedback on this article.
Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Press, 2002). On Greater Reconstruction, see Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 6–26; Stacey L. Smith, “Beyond North and South: Putting the West in the Civil War and Reconstruction,” Journal of the Civil War Era 6, no. 4 (December 2016): 566–91.
For recent works placing at least two of the groups in conversation during Reconstruction, see Joshua Paddison, American Heathens: Religion, Race, and Reconstruction in California (Oakland: University of California Press, 2012); D. Michael Bottoms, An Aristocracy of Color: Race and Reconstruction in California and the West, 1850–1890 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013); Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Brett D. Dowdle, “‘To Merge Them into More Wholesome Social Elements’: The Greater Reconstruction and Its Place in Utah,” in Reconstruction and Mormon America, ed. Clyde A. Milner II and Brian O. Cannon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), 150–80.
Catharine Beecher, An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (New York: Van Nostrand & Dwight, 1835), 9–10, 14; Ibid, A Treatise on Domestic Economy: For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School, rev. ed. (Boston: Thomas H. Webb, 1843), esp. 38, 40–41, 46–47; Harriet Beecher Stowe to James Fields, n.d. (before November 9, 1864), Fields Papers, Huntington Library, quoted in Joan. D. Hendrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 317.
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, updated ed. (1988; reprint, New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014); Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
For Committee of Freedmen letter, see Steven Hahn et al., Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 3, vol. 1, Land and Labor, 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 440–42; Foner, Reconstruction, 82–88.
Stephen Kantrowitz, “‘Not Quite Constitutionalized’: The Meanings of ‘Civilization’ and the Limits of Native American Citizenship,” in The World the Civil War Made, ed. Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2015), 75–105, esp. 83–84. For gender, civilization, and Native American citizenship in the post–Civil War era, see Jane Simonsen, Making Home Work: Domesticity and Native American Assimilation in the American West, 1860–1919 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2006).
Holly Case, The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), xiii–xvi, 1–7.
Ibid, 72, 93, 101–4.
For the home’s central place in the post–Civil War era, see Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University, 2017), 5, 136–71.
Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman: Oklahoma University Press, 1991), 85–117.
Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Report no. 268, 41st Cong., 3rd Sess., December 14, 1870; White, “It’s Your Misfortune,” 109; Kantrowitz, “Not Quite Constitutionalized,” 75–76, 81, 84.
Stuart Creighton Miller argues that Americans held negative views about the Chinese since the country’s founding but that Chinese immigrants were not labeled a “problem” until the late antebellum period. Stuart Creighton Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant: The American Image of the Chinese, 1785–1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). For legislation directed at Chinese immigrants, see Charles J. McClain, In Search of Equality: The Chinese Struggle against Discrimination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), 9–42.
“An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization,” First Congress, Sess. 2, 1790, in U.S. Congress, The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, ed. Richard Peters, vol. 1 (Boston: Charles C. Little & James Brown, 1845), 103; “Article XIV,” 39th Congress, Sess. 1, 1866, in U.S. Congress, The Statutes at Large, Treaties, and Proclamations, of the United States of America from December 1865, to March, 1867, ed. George P. Sanger, vol. 14 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1868), 358–59.
Congressional Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., February 7, 1867, 1056.
For early Mormon history, see White, It’s Your Misfortune, 163–69; Gordon, The Mormon Question, 19–29.
Gordon, The Mormon Question, 28, 60–62, 147–81.
West, “Reconstructing Race,” 21–22; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 137.
Edward Hopper, Republican Homes: An Address Delivered (New York: University Press, 1861), 6, 17.
Special Committee on Chinese Immigration, Report to the California State Senate on Chinese Immigration: Its Social, Moral, and Political Effect (Sacramento: Fr. P. Thompson, 1878), 267.
Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society; Or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), vi, 6, 70; Morgan, Houses and House-Life, xxiv, 78; Simonsen, Making Home Work, 76–77.
For the popular phrasing of “hostile Indians,” see Buffalo Bill Cody’s use of the term in Louis S. Warren, “Cody’s Last Stand: Masculine Anxiety, the Custer Myth, and the Frontier of Domesticity in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” Western Historical Quarterly 34, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 56–60; Abigail Scott Duniway, “Pendleton Swarms with Indians,” November 26, 1875, New Northwest; Ibid, “Indians: The Doomed Race,” December 26, 1878, New Northwest; Ibid, “Reflections on the Indian Question,” June 9, 1881, New Northwest; Ibid, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (Portland: James, Kerns & Abbott, 1914), 145, 148–50.
Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 190–91.
Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: Norton, 2001), 35, 121, 125–27, 245–46. For “enervated race,” see Arthur B. Stout, Chinese Immigration and the Physiological Causes of the Decay of a Nation (San Francisco: Agnew & Deffebach, 1862), reprinted in California State Board of Health, Biennial Report of the State Board of Health of California, for the Years 1870 and 1871 (Sacramento: D.W. Gelwicks, 1871), 60, 74.
Reynolds v. U.S., 98 U.S. 145 (1879), 164, 166. In this unanimous opinion, Chief Justice Morrison Waite cited Francis Lieber’s work claiming that monogamy was a pre-existing condition of civilization. For examples comparing Mormons to racial others, see “Mormons and Indians,” Harper’s Weekly, February 18, 1882, 109; George H. Nayes, The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother (1869; reprint, Philadelphia: David McKay Publisher, 1890), 80.
Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 113.
“John Chinaman in San Francisco,” 870. Emphasis in the original. See also Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 80–81.
Maria Ward, Female Life among the Mormons: A Narrative of Many Years’ Personal Experience (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857), 314.
Henry L. Dawes, “The New Indian Law: Letter from Senator Dawes of Massachusetts,” Friends’ Intelligencer and Journal (Philadelphia: July 23, 1887), 475.
Robert G. Hays, A Race at Bay: New York Times Editorials on “the Indian Problem,” 1860–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997), 172.
Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 1–19.
Charles Loring Brace, The New West; Or, California in 1867–1868 (New York: G.P. Putnam & Son, 1869), 145. Ned Blackhawk points out that the term “digger” was a “debasement of Shoshone gathering practices with strong homophonic resonance with America’s most powerful racial epithet.” Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 275.
“John Chinaman in San Francisco,” Scribner’s Monthly XII, no. 6 (October 1876): 866; Special Committee, Chinese Immigration, 35, 235, 243.
Shah, Contagious Divides, 78, 14; Special Committee, Chinese Immigration, 53.
Dell Upton, “What the Mormon Cultural Landscape Can Teach Us,” in From the Outside Looking In: Essays on Mormon History, Theology, and Culture, ed. Matthew J. Grow and Reid L. Neilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 219, 226–27.
For large beds and family bedsteads, see “The Elders’ Happy Home,” Chic, April 19, 1881, 8–9; “In Memoriam Brigham Young,” Puck, September 5, 1877; Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford: American, 1873), 125–26; Jennie Anderson Froiseth, ed., The Women of Mormonism: or, The Story of Polygamy as Told by the Victims Themselves (Detroit: C.G.G. Paine, 1882), 137.
Quoted in Christine Talbot, A Foreign Kingdom: Mormons and Polygamy in American Political Culture, 1852–1890 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 104. From “The Mormons at Home,” Frank Leslie’s New Family Magazine, 1871, 280. Emphasis in the original.
Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 23, 77–104; Stanley, From Bondage to Contract, 35–59.
Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 40, 46–47.
“The American Abroad,” San Francisco Bulletin, May 16, 1887, William F. Cody Archive, http://codyarchive.org/texts/wfc.nsp00774.html#bottomBibl; Warren, “Cody’s Last Stand,” 54.
Jerome A. Greene, ed., Indian War Veterans: Memories of Army Life and Campaigns in the West, 1864–1898 (New York: Savas Beatie, 2007), xv–xvii; “Records of the Grand Encampment, 1890,” 45, Folder 3, Box 1, Indian War Veterans of the North Pacific Coast Records, 1883–1974, Oregon Historical Society Research Library, Portland. By emotional truth, I mean beliefs that had little grounding in “fact” but fit with larger political and moral values of the era.
Workingmen’s Party of California, Chinatown Declared a Nuisance! (San Francisco: Workingmen’s Party of California, 1880), 13; Special Committee, Chinese Immigration, 25–28.
Metta Victoria Fuller, Mormon Wives: A Narrative of Facts Stranger than Fiction (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856), iii, 199; Gordon, “Our National Hearthstone,” 315; Frances Willard, “Introduction by Ms. Willard,” in Anderson, ed., The Women of Mormonism, xviii.
Beadle, Life in Utah, 356; Francis Lieber, “The Mormons: Shall Utah be Admitted into the Union?,” Putnam’s Monthly 5, no. 27 (March 1855): 234.
W.S. Hawkes, “The Christian Home: Its Perils and Opportunities in Utah,” in The Situation in Utah: The Discussions of the Christian Convention Held in Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Parsons, Kendall, 1888), 63; Chinese Immigration: Extracts from the Speeches (Senate of the United States, March and April 1882), 5, in Mss 831, John H. Mitchell Correspondence and Speeches, Oregon Historical Society Research Library. J. Brainerd, “Encouragements for the Future,” in The Situation in Utah, 127.
Stephen Foster, “Republican Land Policy: Homes for the Million” (Washington, D.C., 1860), 5.
Foster, “Republican Land Policy,” 4; Duniway, “Pendleton Swarms with Indians”; Duniway, Path Breaking, 145.
Twenty-Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners, 1897 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1898), 30.
For the cruelty of the Indian boarding school system, see Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race; Annual Report of the Women’s National Indian Association (Philadelphia: Women’s National Indian Association, 1885), 13.
Alexandra Stern, Reconstructing Indian Territory: Federal vs. Native power and the Expansion of American Sovereignty, 1861–1907 (doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 2018), 155; White, It’s Your Misfortune, 115. Katherine Ellinghaus has shown that for some Indigenous women, the policy of competency did improve their economic destinies. See Katherine Ellinghaus, “‘A Little Home for Myself and Child’: The Women of the Quapaw Agency and the Policy of Competency,” Pacific Historical Review 84 (2015): 307–32.
Pierton W. Dooner, Last Days of the Republic (San Francisco: Alta California, 1880), 29–30, 111, 134.
Special Committee, Chinese Immigration, 267, 277.
Chinese Immigration: Extracts from the Speeches, 8.
Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), especially 114–16, 227–29.
Gordon, The Mormon Question, 192. For “Chinese invasion,” see Dooner, Last Days, 189; Foster, “Republican Land Policy,” 5.
Letters from Thayer to Lawrence, February 15, 18, 21, 27, 1885, Box 32, Amos Adams Lawrence Papers, 1817–1886, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.
The most important federal legislation and Supreme Court decisions upholding said legislation were the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (1862), Poland Act (1874), Reynolds v. United States (1879), Edmunds Act (1882), Murphy v. Ramsey (1885), Edmunds Tucker-Act (1887), Late Corporation v. United States (1890), and Davis v. Beason (1890).
W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 247–50.
Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs & Claims (Boston: G. P. Putnam’s Sons and by the author, 1883), 207.
For Sarah Winnemucca’s reception, see Frederick Hoxie, This Indian Country: American Indian Activists and the Place They Made (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 164–65; Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes, 243.
University of California Press