The Eighteen Eighty-Six Expulsion: Seattle's Chinese Community Marched to the Waterfront

The morning of February seventh, eighteen eighty-six was organized. That is the first thing to understand about what happened in Seattle that day: it was not a riot in the sense of spontaneous mob behavior. It was a plan, months in the making, carried out by men who called themselves the Home Guard.

Seattle's Chinese community numbered roughly three hundred fifty to four hundred people. They had built the city's laundries, its restaurants, its domestic-labor economy. They had been in Seattle since the early eighteen seventies, and by the eighteen eighties they were under sustained pressure: the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty-two had made new Chinese immigration illegal, and across the Pacific Northwest, an organized movement was demanding that Chinese workers already in the country be removed. Tacoma had acted in November of eighteen eighty-five. Seattle's Home Guard had been watching.

On the morning of February seventh, the Home Guard and allied groups went house to house through Seattle's Chinese neighborhood. They told residents to pack their belongings. They formed the residents into a column and marched them to the waterfront, where a steamship, the Queen of the Pacific, was docked. They loaded the Chinese residents onto the ship. Territorial Governor Watson Squire declared martial law and called for federal troops. Some residents were returned to shore under military escort. Most were not. Most never came back.

The Chinese community that eventually rebuilt in the same neighborhood was smaller, more cautious, and organized differently. Over the following decades, Japanese Americans and Filipino Americans settled in the same blocks, layering their own histories over the ground that the Home Guard had cleared. The neighborhood they built together became what is now the Chinatown-International District.

The men who organized and carried out the February expulsion were not prosecuted. The economic logic that drove them, the desire to eliminate Chinese workers from the labor market, was the same logic that had produced the federal Exclusion Act four years earlier. Seattle did not invent this impulse. It executed it with particular efficiency on a February morning when the plan was finally ready.