Dissertation Information for Donald Michael Bottom JrNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Fully Complete Title: "An aristocracy of color": Race and reconstruction in post-Gold Rush California Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century, California was the most racially diverse region of the United States. Home to Asians, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and European Americans, California was the first place Americans struggled with the task of constructing a multi-racial society of free people. Initially, Californians dealt with that diversity by ignoring it. Before the Civil War, California law recognized only a simple division between white and non-white, effectively treating all non-whites the same. Historians of California's racial past have generally tread a similar path, writing histories of racial experience in which each non-white racial group was similarly oppressed by white racism. Yet by the end of the Reconstruction era, California law not only recognized differences between non-white racial groups, it treated each racial group differently. Amidst the turmoil of Civil War and Reconstruction, Californians developed a complicated racial hierarchy that drew distinctions between non-white racial groups even as it set whites apart from, and above, other races. This dissertation traces the process by which Californians, white and non-white, organized their society around racial difference, and examines the ideas and practices which justified their new racial scheme. The new racial hierarchy encouraged competition between non-whites for position within the scale, effectively legitimizing that scale and enlisting non-whites in support of white supremacy. By emphasizing the ways in which California's non-white minorities cooperated with and competed against each other in their battles with white oppression, this new interpretation reveals a more muscular racial dynamic at work in the maintenance of white supremacy during the nineteenth century than previously acknowledged. This dissertation's multi-racial, western perspective challenges traditional arguments concerning the development of white racial identity in nineteenth-century America which focus exclusively on binary relationships between black and white, free labor and slave. Finally, through its focus on law and Reconstruction, this thesis connects the histories of the South and West, and renders both regional histories central to national history. |
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