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By Root 1384 0

to white efforts to relegate them into a permanent underclass, in the South or elsewhere. In a culture that viewed blacks and Native Americans as having sprung from an inferior culture, the Chinese quickly recognized that anyone associated with these other two races was likely to be abused. In 1853, when a California judge barred a Chinese man from testifying against whites on the premise that the Chinese should be considered part of the same race as Indians and blacks, the Chinese community took greater offense at the comparison than at the exclusion. In an outraged letter widely circulated throughout the San Francisco business community, one Chinese merchant wrote that his people enjoyed thousands of years of civilization. How dare white Americans “come to the conclusion that we Chinese are the same as Indians and Negroes... these Indians know nothing about the relations of society; they know no mutual respect; they wear neither clothes nor shoes; they live in wild places and in caves.” Not surprisingly, such attitudes aroused bitter resentment from other minority groups, who believed that the Chinese should not be exempted from the unfair treatment they endured from the white population. When the Grass Valley Indians in central California were being shunted onto reservations, King Weimah, their chief, pointedly objected to the Chinese remaining free in the United States while his own people were being rounded up and isolated from American society.

Until the Civil War, racial injustice was legally codified in most states, and only after the war did the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee all citizenship rights, including the right to vote, to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” while the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race, color, or previous servitude. But during the post-Reconstruction era, southern states resorted to a variety of ruthless Jim Crow tactics, ranging from poll taxes to outright violence, to keep blacks away from the ballot box.

While southern racists were widely regarded in the North with righteous scorn, it should be noted that western politicians were equally unwilling to see the Chinese gain the right to vote. They feared, as California Republican senator Cornelius Cole warned, that “If the Chinese were allowed to vote,” it would “kill our party as dead as a stone.” Those who feared that the Chinese immigrants would start applying for naturalization, and once they had citizenship be guaranteed the right to vote, won a victory when in the 1870s Congress and a federal court decision withheld from the Chinese the right of naturalization, declaring them aliens ineligible for citizenship. But the Fourteenth Amendment, written to ensure that African Americans were given the full rights of citizenship, extended the right of birthright citizenship to all those born in the United States, and as a consequence to the American-born Chinese population as well. So while Congress denied Chinese immigrants the right to become naturalized citizens, the Reconstruction amendments precluded both the federal and state governments from denying American-born children their citizenship rights. It would be a distinction the Chinese would not ignore.

Before the 1870s, only a handful of Chinese had lived in the old South, a few working as physicians, and many more as merchants, storekeepers, or cooks. Some had made their homes in southern port cities such as Charleston and New Orleans. But with the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of the black slaves, southern planters, hearing of the exemplary work habits of the Chinese and knowing they had no rights of citizenship, wanted to use them as field hands. Unlike the ruling class in the West, which feared the Chinese as competition, white southerners had no difficulty with the idea of importing hordes of foreigners, in this case to pressure their former black slaves to return to field labor under conditions that had prevailed under slavery. “Emancipation has spoiled the Negro, and carried him away from