Slavery is a complex and damaging issue with effects that linger even today.
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Introduction
Slavery is widely known as a complex and damaging issue in and of itself, with its residual effects lingering even today. Yet, slavery did not end when it is widely purported to have done.
The Myth of the Civil War Ending Slavery
The pervasive idea is that the Civil War ended slavery in the United States through the enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation and Thirteenth Amendment. However, large corporations still in need of cheap labor found ways to retain their clutch on the chains of Black people regardless of slavery’s “illegality.”
Debt Peonage
One of the ways corporations could do this was through debt peonage. In this system a person would be first arrested, taken to court, and convicted; then, if the punishment for their crime was limited to a fine, they would be presented with the option of paying off their debt by working for the suing corporation.
This doesn’t sound extremely exploitative, but the system was easily manipulated. This was done through the company’s deploying unfair contracts in an attempt to ensnare the typically Black convicts, many of whom had been charged of committing phony crimes. A common example of such a crime was vagrancy or lack of employment.
Furthermore, during the time that the convict was working for the corporation that got them to sign the contract, all of the food and housing they received from the company was added back to their debt. Due to the exceedingly low wages, a person with a contract such as this would likely spend the rest of their life working, all because of a typically insignificant crime.
Sharecropping
Sharecropping was also used to a similar end. This involved someone working on a farm for a share of the crop being cultivated; but, in most cases, the farmer earned an income insufficient for their needs. Typically the worker – again usually Black – would either fall into debt or be left with extremely minimal amounts of residual income. Sharecropping differed from a contract of debt peonage due to the fact that the worker for the former could leave on their own volition, while the victim of debt peonage was in effect bound to serfdom.
Convict Leasing
In the years following the Civil War, companies that had relied heavily on the use of slavery were having a difficult time surviving, so they worked out agreements with prisons through a system known as convict leasing. This would be where a convict, instead of serving their sentence in prison, would be leased out to work to anyone that wanted to employ them.
If it seems acceptable for a convict to do labor as opposed to using up taxpayer dollars in prison, remember that these convicts were usually charged with the sham crimes mentioned above. The labor they had to do was also very dangerous: in many cases it involved working in a coal mine or on a farm prone to accidents, in addition to being deprived of sufficient food or water. An example of the extent to which victims of these venal tactics were exploited is the story of John Clarke. Convicted of “gaming” – rolling dice on a sidewalk – he was sentenced to prison for 114 days. After being leased to a coal mine, he died after being crushed by a rock after 38 days.
What did the coal mine do after he died? It acquired another convict for cheap. This epitomizes the danger of convict leasing. In some aspects, a victim of convict leasing was valued to an even lesser extent than an enslaved person would have been. This is why the “ending of slavery” only made enslavement worse.
Further Reading:
If you are interested in this topic, and are interested in learning about all the complications and details that were skipped over, I encourage you to read Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon.