Letter from "Tramp Printer" about the Chinese, 1885

The postbellum Republican rhetorical shift from racial equality to exclusion

A butcher in San Francisco, 1885. Underwood Archives Inc./Alamy.com.

For a while now, I’ve been studying how the United States first went on an immigration restriction diet. Conspicuously, the move to restrict immigration began about ten years after the end of the Civil War, with laws to keep out Chinese immigrants.

Republicans in this era – the party of Lincoln – at first tended to reject race-based restrictions as un-Republican and un-American. But by 1924, they had done an about-face, passing a law that barred all Asians and offered much more generous visa quotas to countries in Western Europe than anywhere else.

How and why did the sacred principle of racial equality disappear in the decades following the Civil War? Specifically, I wonder why this value disappeared not just among the political elite but among the generation of Republicans that fought and saw many of its members die for the Union cause.

Recently, my research has me focused on the 1870s and 1880s. As usual, I’m more interested in story than in theory, and I’ve encountered some striking examples. Here’s one.

The Republicanism of Racial Equality

I’ve been reading an avowedly Republican paper, the Highland Weekly News, because it’s the only paper still widely available from the community I’m interested in, a rural county about 60 miles east of Cincinnati. In 1879, the paper still echoed with the ideology of racial equality. With respect to a bill to restrict Chinese immigration, the paper said,

The Anti-Chinese Immigration bill (prohibiting any vessel from bringing more than 15 Chinese to this country at one time) passed the Senate last week, and now only awaits the President’s signature, which we hope it will not receive. It is a narrow, bigoted, proscriptive, anti-Repubulican measure, of which our great nation should be ashamed, and besides all this, it is in direct violation of treaty stipulations with China, as was clearly shown by Senator Matthews, of our State, in a masterly speech last week against the bill. We hope the President will exercise the veto power, and give the measure its quietus.

Hayes did veto the bill on the grounds that it violated the Burlingame Treaty.

Chinese exclusion didn’t die, but neither did Highland County Republicans’ opposition to it. After President Arthur vetoed the first Chinese exclusion bill in 1882, Congress quickly crafted another one that shortened the exclusion period from twenty years to ten. The editors of Highland Weekly News agreed with the New York Independent in hoping Arthur would veto that one too, because “it is wrong in principle, unworthy of the American people, and a disgrace to the civilization of the age. Moreover it is not a Republican measure, a large majority of the Republicans in both Houses having voted against it, and it should not receive the sanction of a Republican President.”

They were wrong about the vote: A majority of House Republicans did vote for the bill; in the Senate, 15 voted against and 9 in favor, but 14 abstained from voting. But that’s the point: Even while the congressional tide shifted, popular ideology of racial equality persisted.

Othering the Chinese

By September 1885, something important had changed. In “Special Correspondence” to the Highland Weekly News from a writer identified only as “Tramp Printer,” the writer described his travels and shared his conclusions from them.

Tramp Printer had favored unrestricted Chinese immigration just a few years prior, and as a youth in Highland County had eloquently argued the point in school debates. At the time, the only Chinese he knew were the occasional traveling minister, or Sam Kee, who ran the local laundry.

After observing Chinese settlements on a trip from Denver through the Wyoming Territory to Portland, however, Tramp Printer had radically changed his opinion. He returned so disgusted that he had to wait a while to write, until time “might soften any unjust prejudices I may have entertained in regard to the sons of guns.” Describing his visit to a Chinese house of worship (where he appears to have been hosted courteously), he wrote,

The ‘priest’ or whatever his office may have been (a deacon, perhaps) took me behind the cabinet into the sanctum sanctorum, where there was more tea (presumably for the accommodation of thirsty spirits or gods), more burning punk, some little carved wooden images, some tom-toms (improvised from pieces of sheep skin and old kegs), and a collection of other trumpery, which the heathen (in his blindness) clothes with religious sanctity and supernatural powers (at least I guess he does.)

Religious intolerance obviously drives much of the negative opinion, and – not unlike earlier fears of Catholicism as anti-American – the writer generalized his estrangement from these religious practices to economic competition and a more general unfitness for citizenship:

You can’t Christianize one out of a thousand. They will attend mission schools in order to learn English, but when they want to ask a favor they kneel before their own gods, and when they want to exercise evil spirits they burn an image of their own devil. (I do not know whether they recognize the same devil we do or whether they have a devil peculiarly their own.) Neither have they any appreciation of the worth of American citizenship. Among all the Chinese I ever saw I have found but three or four who had the courage to go against Chinese popular superstition far enough to part with their queues.

Tramp Printer felt a deep sense of cultural disorientation walking through Portland’s Chinatown. He wrote:

For six or seven squares you can walk on one street and with the aid of very little imagination be, to all appearances, in the Celestial empire itself. There are Chinese bazaars, meat shops, stores and shops of all kinds, and what money they spend is spent with their countrymen, merchants and tradesmen, and they in turn procure nearly all their goods from China. They buy of the whites only what they can’t get of each other and yet must have.

In 1885, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants were men. First the men had come as laborers, and then the Page Act of 1875 had effectively shut down the immigration of Chinese women on the grounds that most were prostitutes (or unable to prove otherwise to the satisfaction of an American immigration inspector). The Page Act effectively prevented most Chinese men from establishing families here and entrenched the prostitution of many Chinese women. Tramp Printer wrote:

I would I might say something complimentary to the Chinese women, but I can not. Virtue, they have none, and their vices are too numerous to mention. They are bought in China and imported to this country for servants – and worse; and such as are found in the West are not an ornament even to the worst of Chinese society.

Tramp Printer concluded that “[t]here is no use to try to evade the fact that this country has a Chinese problem on its hands.” The immigration laws didn’t prevent smuggling into the country across the land borders, and Tramp Printer felt that the situation could not be tolerated. “No one who will spend a month on the Pacific coast ever comes back with a favorable impression of the Chinese, and if it is not more rigidly watched the whites of the West coast will be compelled to do something terrible.”

But this was a Republican paper, and Tramp Printer had not forgotten the Republican value of equality. Right after this chilling prediction, Tramp Printer hastened to add,

There is no negro problem before this nation. The negro of to-day is as really an American as any one can be. His welfare is our welfare, and his impulses, ideas and religions are ours. He shares our misfortunes without a murmur, and our pride and patriotism as becomes him well. The Indian can also be made a good and useful citizen, as a trip through the eastern portions of the Indian Territory will show anyone. But the Chinaman is a heathen through and through and it will be ages (if ever) before he will become anything else. He starves our American laborers and then takes all his money to China.

The Neighbor and the Other

Tramp Printer – who sent other correspondence from his travels to the Highland Weekly News during this period – ended his letter home with a postscript. “As this might hurt Sam Kee’s feelings,” Tramp Printer wrote, “I will ask as a special favor that you don’t sell him a paper this week. It won’t do to hurt any Hillsboro man’s feelings.”

Well, the letter almost ended with there. Following the P.S., Tramp Printer added an N.B.: “The Chinese must go – or mend their ways.”