The term “Coolie” was used to describe unskilled, low-wage laborers from Asia. Coolies lived like slaves, having insufficient food and medical care, and suffering long hours of physical labor. The Anti-Coolie Trade Act was passed in 1862 attempting to appease rising anger of white laborers competing for jobs against increased numbers of Chinese immigrating to the United States. The Act sought to protect white laborers by imposing a tax on Chinese immigrants seeking to work in the state of California.
In 1875, The Page/Immigration Act, otherwise known as The Asian Act, was passed “prohibiting the entrance of women from China, Japan or any other Oriental Country" suspected of prostitution that was not "free or voluntary". Since many Chinese women at the time were forced to immigrate to the United States to participate in the prostitution industry, The Page law effectively halted the immigration of Chinese women into the United States.
Some official "Correspondence respecting Emigration from Canton" has been laid before Parliament, which shows the abominable character of the coolie-trade, carried on at Canton and Whampoa. Foreign vessels arriving there to engage and embark emigrant laborers, have sought the assistance of native brokers, who, in their turn, have employed crimps (also Chinese) to collect coolies for them. Thirty dollars a-head or more were being paid last year for coolies delivered on board; arrived at Havana, the "contracts" could be sold at $400 a-head. An iniquitous system was thus created, which grew until not only men were inveigled on board receiving ships on false pretexts, such as promises of work, but force also was used, and no man could leave his house in open day without danger of of being hustled, under false pretences of debt or delinquency, and carried off by the crimps to be put on board ship and taken to sea, never again to be heard of."
-The New York Times, August 16, 1860
The Coolie trade, it will be seen is speculation in human labor. In other words, it is reducing human labor to the list of marketable commodities making it an object of purchase and sale, and holding it, subject to the various vicissitudes which attend stocks, provisions, dry goods and other articles of commerce. The year 1870 marked the moment at which struggles between capital and labor interpenetrated the commercial culture, producing a common visual and written language in which Chinese labor would be represented in national political debate"
-Chinese protestant missionary quoted by John Kuo Wei Tchen, an authority on Chinese-American History
SEC. 5. That it shall be unlawful for aliens of the following classes to immigrate into the United States, namely, persons who are undergoing a sentence for conviction in their own country of felonious crimes other than political or growing out of or the result of such political offenses, or whose sentence has been remitted on condition of their emigration, and women "imported for the purposes of prostitution." |
Angry and desperate coolies butchered crew and officers, and often set fires aboard their ships in mid-passage. One case of mutiny that attracted the attention of the United States government occurred aboard the American ship “Robert Brown,” sailing from Amoy in 1852. “Four hundred Chinese emigrants had been enticed aboard the vessel normally bound for San Francisco. When they discovered that they had been deceived and were being carried into contract service in another country, they mutinied and killed the officers.”: Afterwards, they testified in court that they had been promised four dollars a month as hired laborers and not as contract laborers.
-American Involvement in the Coolie Trade, Shih-shan H. Tsai
“Mr. D’Arcy threw a damper on the meeting by stating that this was no anti-Coolie meeting, and that they were not there for the purpose of discussing the Chinese question, he put on another blanket by saying that they had met, not for the purpose of encouraging riot and incendiarism, but to give their brother workmen in the [East Coast] their moral support.”
-The Daily Alta, 1877
Some official correspondence has recently been laid before the British Parliament, in relation to the traffic in coolies, which confirms all that has ever been said in relation to the abominable character of that trade, as carried out in the ports of China. It shows the system to have been one of kidnapping, either by force or fraud, for the purpose of selling the poor wretches who were inveigled or forced on board the receiving-ships, into slavery in Cuba. And so exasperated had the Chinese at length become by the barbarities which were practiced upon the unsuspecting and the ignorant of their people, that there was some fear, a year ago, that their indignation would find vent in a popular rising. The exigency of the case was met by Laou, the acting Governor General of the Two Kwang, by substituting a system of free emigration."
-The New York Tribune, August 17, 1860