Texas could lay claim to another dubious “first.” In 1849, Dr. Gideon Lincecum introduced a memorial before the Texas legislature hoping to ensure “good breeders.” His solution was to castrate criminals in the manner of gelding bulls, thus literally cutting off the bloodline in order to prevent inferior people from reproducing. “Like breeds like” was the basic rule of animal breeding, and degraded stocks of animals were no different than humans. Lincecum offered a folksy analogy to make his case: “When the horse and the mare both trot, the colt seldom paces.” His plan was rejected, but he was merely ahead of his time. Future eugenic policies built upon his blueprint for filtering out bad seeds from America’s human breeding stock.15
But as Jefferson and Adams had concluded decades earlier, humans were never very careful in choosing mates. Racial mixing was consequently quite common in Texas. The American settlers who had arrived before independence were encouraged by the Mexican government to marry local Tejano women; men were granted an extra land bonus if they did. White male settlers routinely took Indian and Tejano women as concubines, and mixed-race children populated the nation and later the state. The Mexicans subscribed to a racial class and caste system, but were accustomed to racial mixing. At the top were the descendants of the old Spanish families, those claiming to have pure Castilian blood in their veins; next came the criollos (creoles), the locally born colonists of Spanish heritage, who could possess up to one-eighth Indian blood; the lower castes were composed of mestizos (of mixed Spanish and Indian background), Indians, and Africans. American men who married wellborn women were warmly embraced by Mexican society. As a consequence, after 1836, Texans retained the Mexican distinction between noble Castilians and inferior racially mixed classes.16
By the time of annexation, Anglo-Texans routinely ridiculed the dark-skinned, lower-class Tejanos as a sign of degradation among the native population. Here again, common language underscored the degradation of bloodlines. Increasingly, Mexicans were thrown together with blacks and Indians and contemptuously dismissed by Americans in general as a “mongrel race.” “Mongrel” was just another word for “half-breeds” or “mulattoes,” those of a “polluted” lineage. In 1844, Pennsylvania senator and future president James Buchanan crudely described an “imbecile and indolent Mexican race,” insistent that no Anglo-Saxon should ever be under the political thumb of his inferior. His colleague from New Hampshire, former treasury secretary Levi Woodbury, elevated the Texas Revolution into a racial war of liberation: “Saxon blood had been humiliated, and enslaved to Moors, Indians, and mongrels.” Such rhetoric had appeal far beyond the bloviated oratory of politicians. One Texas woman confidently wrote to her mother, “You feel the irresistible necessity that one race must subdue the other,” and “they, of the superior race, can easily learn to look upon themselves as men of Destiny.”17
Supporters of Texas annexation dramatized the urgent need to preserve a safely Anglo-Saxon society—continent-wide. Anglo-Texas would protect all Americans from the “semi-barbarous hordes,” whose “poisonous compound of blood and color” flowed through the arteries of the mixed races in Mexico. That is what Senator Robert Walker of Mississippi argued in Congress, and reinforced with his widely influential 1844 Letter on the Annexation of Texas. Though a withered shell of a man, barely five feet tall and only a hundred pounds, Walker had become the most powerful Democrat in Washington. As ludicrous as it now sounds, he proclaimed that Texas would magically drain free blacks, mulattoes, and other African “mongrels” from the United States, siphoning off the dangerous dregs of slavery’s past into South America. It was a racist theory with a familiar ring to it: Benjamin Rush’s migratory model of 1798, in which Pennsylvania would filter out the weaker squatters by dispatching them to the lazy, cracker-filled South. Walker simply added another piece of pseudoscientific evidence to make his case: a high number of free blacks in the northern states suffered from insanity. Here was another example of political arithmetic gone awry, since the southern senator intentionally misused the U.S. census data (as Alabama’s Josiah Nott had done) on black inmates in northern asylums. His main point was that free blacks were congenitally weaker in mind and body, and ill-suited for freedom, in contrast to the supposedly healthy and contented slaves in the South who did not have to aspire to liberty.18
The heavy-handed rhetoric cut both ways. Texas was to be rescued to strengthen America’s pedigree, but the admission of too many Mexicans into an expanded Union could undermine America’s racial stock. Georgia representative Alexander Hamilton Stephens, future vice president of the Confederacy, asserted that the great majority of Texans were from good stock—the right kind of people, worthy of breeding and mixing with other Americans. He employed a familiar marital metaphor from the book of Genesis to make his point: as heirs of the “Americo-Anglo-Saxon race,” Texans were “from us and of us; bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh.” Opponents of the Mexican–American War used the same race-specific language in an effort to limit the amount of territory to be taken into the United States.19
Breeding was expected to be an increasingly important weapon in America’s imperial arsenal during the one-sided war. Yankee soldiers were expected to settle in occupied territory, marry “beautiful se?oritas,” and achieve a new kind of “annexation.” This was what had happened in California, as illustrated by the remarkable career of a young Tennessee officer, Cave Johnson Couts, a close friend of President Polk. He married a daughter of a wealthy Mexican rancher, received a large tract of land from his brother-in-law, and built a grandiose home, which he filled with his ten children. By the 1860s he owned over twenty-three thousand acres and had established himself as one of the ruling patriarchs of the new state.20
Yet California’s early history had been as grim as that of Texas. Both of these extensive territories were overrun with runaway debtors, criminal outcasts, rogue gamblers, and ruthless adventurers who thrived in the chaotic atmosphere of western sprawl. The California gold rush attracted not only grizzled gold diggers but also prostitutes, fortune hunters, and con men selling fraudulent land titles. Among the Texas and California cutthroats who captured the American imagination was the “half-breed Mexican and white.” He was known for his “mongrel dandyism,” loud jewelry, and flamboyant clothing.21
In a certain sense, California reverted to older British colonial patterns. Though it entered the Union as a free state, prohibiting slavery, the legislature soon passed a series of byzantine laws permitting the indentured servitude of Native Americans. Between 1850 and 1854, nearly twenty thousand Indian men, women, and children were exploited as bound servants. It was John Smith’s Jamestown all over again, even to its out-of-balance male-to-female ratio. The popular presses back east appealed for white women to move out west. Some of these were earnest requests, while others satirized Californians’ desperate pleas for good breeders. A popular 1850 French caricature featured women packed in crates like everyday commodities, ready for export to female-starved “Californie.” The United States Magazine and Democratic Review prophesied that if prospective wives were shipped off to California at the rate they were needed, the institution of spinsterhood would become extinct in America.22
The gold rush attracted more than restless white Americans looking for easy riches. Adventurers came from as far away as Australia, Chile, Hawaii, and France. Large numbers of Chinese began arriving in 1852. San Francisco quickly became the most cosmopolitan hub in all of North America. North Carolinian Hinton Rowan Helper was one of the many educated travelers to write on the racial “menagerie”—and utter degeneration of whites—that he discovered in California. His book Land of Gold (1855) laid the groundwork for his far more controversial polemic on poor whites, The Impending Crisis of the South (1857).23