This dissertation provides a new interpretive framework for understanding the historical origins of the American reaction to Chinese immigration from 1848 to the passage of the first Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Though building on earlier explanations of the Chinese exclusion movement, this dissertation takes a different perspective, by placing the Chinese interaction with Americans within a context of acute consciousness of race. The nineteenth-century history of Chinese immigration unfolded during a period of intensifying sectionalism, which culminated in major changes in race relations, especially between African Americans and white Americans. It is the thesis of this dissertation that the best way to reconstruct the dynamics of the Chinese exclusion movement, at both the regional and national levels, is to relate it to the dynamics of black-white relations. This dissertation thus eschews the thoroughly explored theme of the relation between the anti-Chinese movement and labor organizations. It instead examines the successive manifestations of anti-Chinese sentiment and behavior in connection with the evolving status of African Americans, from slavery to emancipation and from Reconstruction to post-Reconstruction.;To achieve a thorough account of the historical origins of the Chinese Exclusion Movement, it was necessary to move back and forth between a western and national focus. From that perspective, the Chinese Exclusion Act was the culmination of thirty-four years of unequal treatment of the Chinese in the Western region, and sixteen years of hesitant progress on the part of the Republican majority towards the civil rights of the Chinese and resistance to granting them citizenship rights. The anti-Chinese movement was a coherent and continuous movement involving not only California, her working class, labor organizers and political demagogues, but also eastern workingmen and labor reformers, California and United States justices, northern and southern congressmen and presidents of the United States. It was also necessary to move back and forth between the black and Chinese experiences in order to trace the complex pattern of the "racialization" of the Chinese Question in California and in the nation at large and the essential role of black-white relations in the shaping of Chinese-American relations.
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