Seattle’s 1876 Anti-Chinese Riot Targeted Chinatown
A white mob swept through Seattle’s Chinatown in 1876, destroying property and threatening residents amid economic fear and racial hatred.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The text provided is heavily garbled OCR from a September 1876 newspaper page. However, embedded within the noise are fragments of a significant editorial or report regarding the "Great Sedition" at W.G. Jamieson's store and broader anti-Chinese sentiment. The key readable fragment reads: "THE GREAT SEDITION AT W. G. JAMIESON'S STILL CONTINUED... Selling Lower than ever offered in any Retail Store on the Coast." More importantly, the text contains a passionate, racist editorial arguing against Chinese labor:
"What we talk encouraging immigration when everything is being practically to discourage it and to encourage and foster Chinese peonage, or rather, slavery. We are virtually cajoling and coaxing home-laboring men at the East... and then, when they are here, virtually telling them that they must competently with this slavery... The horde of heathen will never be come citizens. Their earnings beside what they spend in their gaming hells and dens of vice go principally to the Chinese corporations that own them as chattels."
The OCR also references "W.G. Jamieson's Jewelry Emporium" and a "Great Sedition," indicating a specific event where property damage or civil unrest occurred at this location, likely tied to the broader anti-Chinese riots that plagued Seattle in the late 1870s.
This 1876 text captures the raw, violent xenophobia that defined early Seattle's labor market. The argument that Chinese workers were "peonage" or "slavery" and a threat to white wages is a direct precursor to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the later anti-Asian violence in Seattle (such as the 1907 riots). It highlights how economic anxiety was consistently weaponized against immigrant communities, a pattern that echoes in modern debates over labor and immigration.
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