The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [27]
The foreign miner’s tax stipulated that no Chinese could work his mining claim unless he paid a monthly license fee in gold dust, a fee arbitrarily increased by the state of California over the next few years. Designed ostensibly for the “protection of foreigners,” the loose way the law was written, and the way it was administered and enforced, effected the opposite. Some collectors backdated the effective date of a miner’s license, obligating the miner to pay money he didn’t even owe. Others pocketed money from miners and gave them bogus receipts, leaving the miners vulnerable to legitimate collection efforts later on. One tax collector wrote in his diary, “I had no money to keep Christmas with, so sold the chinks nine dollars worth of bogus receipts.” The worst of the collectors used physical coercion to compel Chinese miners to pay the tax more than once a month: they tied the Chinese to trees and whipped them; pursued them on horseback, lashing at them with rawhide as they fled. Corruption aside, no law restrained the methods collectors could employ. “I was sorry to have to stab the poor fellow,” one collector wrote, “but the law makes it necessary to collect tax, and that’s where I get my profit.”
The Chinese, however, had come to America with some experience in thwarting corrupt agents of an indifferent government. To evade the tax collector, they devised various warning systems, such as arranging for runners to sprint from one village to the next, alerting the inhabitants to the collector’s approach. These stratagems were so effective that the government found it necessary to employ the services of Maidu Indians to track down Chinese miners who had fled without paying their taxes.
While these first two tax laws unfairly burdened the Chinese miners, the most damaging government action was a legal decision barring them from testifying against whites in court. In 1853, a grand jury in Nevada County indicted George W. Hall and two others for the murder of a Chinese man called Ling Sing. After three Chinese and one Caucasian testified on behalf of the prosecution, Hall was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Hall’s lawyer appealed the verdict on the ground that Chinese testimony was prohibited under the state’s Criminal Proceeding Act, which stated that “no black or mulatto person, or Indian, shall be permitted to give evidence in favor of, or against, any white person.” In People v. Hall, the state supreme court reversed Hall’s conviction on the grounds that “the evident intention of the act was to throw around the citizen a protection for life and property, which could only be secured by raising him above the corrupting influences of degraded castes.” Further, in a bizarre decision illustrative of the absurd workings of the California jurisprudential mind of the time, Chief Justice Hugh Murray asserted that the Chinese were, in reality, Indians, because Christopher Columbus had mistaken San Salvador as an island in the China Sea. “From that time,” he wrote, “down to a very recent period, the American Indians and the Mongolian, or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type of the human species.”
Then, to shore up what he must have expected would be read as weak legal reasoning, Murray declared that even if Asians were not the same as American Indians, the word “black” should be understood to include all nonwhite races. Noting that the Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibited the Chinese and other nonwhites from becoming U.S. citizens, Murray further justified his decision as necessary for social stability: if the Chinese were admitted as witnesses in court, he said, the state would “soon see them at the polls, in the jury box, upon the bench, and in our legislative halls.” Where would it all end?
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