From slavery to ICE: How money shapes Minnesota’s moral battles

In 1860, Eliza Winston was freed from Mississippi slave owner Richard Christmas in a Minneapolis courtroom after the Christmas family brought Winston with them on vacation to Minnesota. According to the Library of Economics and Liberty, many white residents in the state were pro-slavery because of the economic benefits it brought, even though slavery was illegal. Winston’s case offers one historical example of how economic arguments have long shaped decisions about who is deemed worthy of rights, from slavery in Minnesota to contemporary deportation enforcement.

“Minnesotans were conditioned to accept the presence of enslavers and enslaved people since the construction of Fort Snelling in the 1820s,” said Dr. Christopher Lehman, a professor of social sciences at St. Cloud State University. “At this time, the U.S. Army allowed officers from Missouri to bring one or two enslaved people with them to the military installation.”

“At the same time, residents were conditioned to accept money from slaveholders,” Lehman added.

Fur trading posts owned by enslavers in St. Louis, Missouri, were economically linked to Minnesota. The people who operated these posts, including Henry Sibley, Minnesota’s first governor, and Henry Mower Rice, one of the state’s first U.S. senators, were paid by slaveholders for their work. In essence, the region’s early economy was intertwined with slavery, even as Minnesota itself was considered free territory.

Tourism and Tolerance

In the 1850s, steamboat travel along the Mississippi River became increasingly popular, and riverside towns in Minnesota began profiting from southern tourism.

“In order to make southerners feel welcome, they have this unspoken arrangement at first, which is that whatever enslaved people the tourists bring with them, Minnesotans won’t pressure them to set them free,” Lehman said. “Even though Minnesota’s a free territory at first.”

The 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship and legal protections to Black people, effectively made slavery legal in Minnesota while it was still a territory. In the months between that ruling and Minnesota’s admission as a free state in 1858, Lehman said there was an uptick in southern tourists.

Even after statehood, anti-slavery laws were often ignored to preserve tourism revenue. According to the Ramsey County Historical Society, congressman William MacKubin attempted to introduce legislation that would have allowed Minnesota to function as a slave state during certain months to accommodate southern visitors.

“There were plenty of Minnesotans who, even if they didn’t want to own people, were perfectly happy with taking money from people who did,” Lehman said.

Echoes in Modern Immigration Policy

Economic rationales once used to justify slavery, some argue, mirror contemporary justifications for mass deportation.

Julia Decker, policy director with the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said a common argument from deportation supporters is that immigrants, documented and undocumented, are taking jobs. Housing shortages are also sometimes blamed on immigrant populations.

“So many of those arguments, they’re not logical, and they’re very visceral,” Decker said. “They resonate very strongly with people who are having trouble for many, many other reasons affording daily necessities and struggling to put food on the table. It is very easy to scapegoat a vulnerable group of people.”

“Economics is a powerful thing,” she added. “That’s why economic arguments are so powerful.”

Immigrant residents in Minnesota have spending power exceeding $12.4 billion annually, and immigrant households paid $4.5 billion in taxes in 2019, according to a 2021 Minnesota Chamber of Commerce report. The report also highlighted immigrant contributions to population growth, agriculture, health care and food manufacturing, along with improvements in poverty, unemployment and homeownership rates.

“The success of Minnesota’s economy, both now and in the future, is intrinsically linked to Minnesota’s immigrant communities,” the Minnesota Chamber Foundation wrote.

Still, Decker pointed to what she described as a similar pattern in both eras: exploitation of vulnerable populations for economic benefit.

She noted that the immigrant enforcement system also generates revenue. Federal funds are allocated for deportation campaigns, private detention centers earn money based on occupancy, and companies contracted to maintain facilities receive payment.

“There’s a whole industrial complex that many of us are lightly contributing to and/or benefiting from,” Decker said. “Some of us maybe don’t even know it.”

“Anytime a new detention center is built, there’s always the jobs argument, like, ‘We want to revitalize a small town; let’s build a jail,’” she added. “Incarcerating people for economic benefit seems like a pretty poor business model.”

Resistance Then and Now

Lehman, author of Slavery’s Reach: Southern Slaveholders in the North Star State and It Took Courage: Eliza Winston’s Quest for Freedom, found a telling quote during his research: “We in Minnesota are not beating people or whipping people, we’re not the ones buying and selling people, we’re just taking money from the people who do that.”

The physical and emotional distance from slavery’s violence influenced some Minnesotans’ willingness to tolerate it. Decker said support for mass deportation has also shifted as more residents witness its direct impact, particularly during Operation Metro Surge.

“Metro Surge has, I think, brought out a much clearer sentiment of supporting your neighbors and community defense and standing up for immigrant and refugee communities in the face of what I think is broadly seen as the federal government violently and vastly overstepping its bounds,” she said.

For immigration attorneys, she added, these types of incidents have been occurring within the system for years, even if they have not always been visible to the broader public.

Lehman sees parallels in the activism of both eras.

Winston encountered Emily Goodridge Grey, a free African American woman and abolitionist, who helped organize legal support for Winston’s freedom, according to MNopedia.

“All of the people who have helped targets of ICE in the state are standing on the shoulders of the people who were involved with helping Eliza realize her freedom,” Lehman said.

But resistance was not universal then, and it is not universal now.

“Just like there were Minnesotans willing to help Eliza, there were Minnesotans invested in making sure she stayed enslaved,” Lehman said. “[Some] feel there’s just a no-holds-barred approach to treating anybody suspected with as much force as necessary.”

Opponents of Winston’s freedom feared it would deter southern tourists.

“It wasn’t necessarily that Minnesotans liked slaveholders,” Lehman said. “They just appreciated that slaveholders were willing to come in as many numbers as they did, with as much money as they did.”

He noted there was no clear majority in either era.

“The majority of people who lived in the area where Eliza was being enslaved were not invested in helping her become free; there were just a select few,” he said. “Similarly, the people advocating for the undocumented right now are not part of the majority, but neither are the people who support ICE actions.”

For a report conducted by Dr. Christopher Lehman on Eliza Winston, visit repository.stcloudstate.edu/ews_facpubs/6/.

Damenica Ellis welcomes reader responses at dellis@spokesman-recorder.com