History of unfree labor in the United States
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The history of forced labor in the United States encompasses to all forms of
The arrival of the Europeans ushered in the
Labor reforms in the 19th and 20th eventually outlawed many of these forms of labors. However, illegal unfree labor in the form of human trafficking continued to grow, and the economy continued to rely on unfree labor from abroad. Starting at the end of the 20th century, there became an increased public awareness of human trafficking. More anti-human trafficking groups began to form and anti-human trafficking laws began to be passed, though the extent of the laws and the implementation varies widely from state to state. The U.S. Justice Department estimates that 17,500 people are trafficked into the country every year, but the true figure could be higher, because of the large numbers of undocumented immigrants. Those being trafficked include young children, teenagers, men and women and can be domestic citizens or foreign nationals. According to the Department of State's statistics from 2000, there are approximately 244,000 American children and youth that are at risk for sex trafficking each year. Of these children and youth, 38,600 were originally runaways.
Traditions of Native American slavery
Native American groups often enslaved
In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid.
Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment.
When the Europeans made contact with the Native Americans, they began to participate in the slave trade.[5] Native Americans, in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a “method of playing one tribe against another” in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer.[5]
The
Legal chattel slavery
By the time of the
Congress under
As the West was developed for settlement, the Southern states wanted to keep a balance between the number of slave and free states, in order to maintain a political balance of power in Congress. The new territories acquired from Britain, France, and Mexico were the subject of major political compromises. By 1850, the newly rich cotton-growing South was threatening to secede from the Union, and tensions continued to rise. With Southern church ministers having adapted to supporting slavery, as modified by Christian paternalism, the largest denominations, the Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian churches split over the issue into regional organizations of the North and South. When Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election on a platform of no new slave states, the South broke away to form the Confederacy; the first six states to secede held the greatest number of slaves in the South. This marked the start of the Civil War, which caused a huge disruption of the slave economy, with many slaves either escaping or being liberated by the Union armies. Due to Union measures such as the Confiscation Acts and Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the war effectively ended slavery, even before ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865 formally ended the legal institution throughout the United States.
Other forms of unfree labor
Continued forms of involuntary servitude persisted after the
Black Codes
The Black Codes were laws passed by
In the first two years after the Civil War, white dominated southern legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor, as slavery had given way to a free labor system. Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the black codes.
The term "Black Codes" was given by "negro leaders and the Republican organs", according to historian John S. Reynolds.
Convict leasing
With emancipation a legal reality, white Southerners were concerned with both controlling the newly freed slaves and keeping them in the labor force at the lowest level. The system of
It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.[15]
The constitutional basis for convict leasing is that the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude generally, expressly permits it as a punishment for crime.
Peonage
Peonage is a type of involuntary servitude. After the
After the Civil War, the
The following reported court cases involving peonage:
- 1903: South Dakota a 17-year-old girl was reported to have been sold into peonage at the age of two by her own father.[16]
- 1904: Alabama ten persons Indicted for holding black and white persons in peonage.[17]
- 1906: John W. Pace of Alabama-the "father" of Peonage; pardoned by his friend President Theodore Roosevelt.[18]
- 1906: Five officials of Jackson Lumber Company received prison terms for peonage.[19]
- 1916: Edward McCree of Georgia Legislature; owner of 37,000 acres of land; indicted on 13 charges; pleaded guilty to one charge and paid a $1,000 fine.[20]
- 1916: Two men found guilty in Lexington County, South Carolina of trying to force a white man into peonage; each fined $500.00 and sentenced to a year and day in jail.[21]
- 1921: Hawaiian Sugar Plantation owners try to legalize peonage of Chinese workers.[22]
- 1921, Georgia, Williams Plantation Murders: Farmer John S. Williams and his black overseer, Clyde Manning, were convicted in the deaths of 11 blacks working as peons in Williams' farm.[23] Williams was the first white person convicted of murder for killing a black person in Georgia since 1877. Manning died in prison in 1927. Williams was killed in an accident in prison in 1932.[24]
- 1922: Convicted in 1921 for hopping a freight train without a ticket in Florida, Martin Tabert of North Dakota becomes part of State Convict leasing; he died Feb 1, 1922 for being whipped for being unable to work due to illness. Reports of his death lead to outlawing of convict leasing in Florida in 1923.[25]
Because of the Spanish tradition, peonage was still widespread in
With the Peonage Act of 1867, Congress abolished "the holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage",[27] specifically banning "the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise."[28]
In 1939, the Department of Justice created the Civil Rights Section, which focused primarily on First Amendment and labor rights.[29] The increasing scrutiny of totalitarianism in the lead-up to World War II brought increased attention to issues of slavery and involuntary servitude, abroad and at home.[30] The U.S. sought to counter foreign propaganda and increase its credibility on the race issue by combatting the Southern peonage system.[31] Under the leadership of Attorney General Francis Biddle, the Civil Rights Section invoked the constitutional amendments and legislation of the Reconstruction Era as the basis for its actions.[32]
In 1947, the DOJ successfully prosecuted Elizabeth Ingalls for keeping domestic servant Dora L. Jones in conditions of slavery. The court found that Jones "was a person wholly subject to the will of defendant; that she was one who had no freedom of action and whose person and services were wholly under the control of defendant and who was in a state of enforced compulsory service to the defendant."
Truck system
A truck system, in the specific sense in which the term is used by
Under this system, workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with non-transferable credit vouchers which could be exchanged only for goods sold at the company store. This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or houses, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay. In the United States the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly formed
Sexual slavery
Under chattel slavery
From the beginning of African slavery in the North American colonies, slaves were often viewed as property, rather than people. Slave women were often raped by white overseers, planter's younger sons before they married, and other white men associated with the slaveholders. Some were sold into brothels outright. Plaçage, a formalized system of concubinage among slave women or free people of color, developed in Louisiana and particularly New Orleans by the 18th century.
Slave breeding was the attempt by a slave-owner to influence the reproduction of his slaves for profit.[35] It included forced sexual relations between male and female slaves, encouraging slave pregnancies, sexual relations between master and slave to produce slave children and favoring female slaves who had many children.[36] The historian E. Franklin Frazier, in his book The Negro Family, stated that "there were masters who, without any regard for the preferences of their slaves, mated their human chattel as they did their stock". Ex-slave Maggie Stenhouse remarked, "Durin' slavery there were stockmen. They was weighed and tested. A man would rent the stockman and put him in a room with some young women he wanted to raise children from."[37]
Many female slaves (known as "fancy maids") were sold at auction into concubinage or prostitution, which was called the "fancy trade".[38] Concubine slaves were the only female slaves who commanded a higher price than skilled male slaves.[39]
In Louisiana
The plaçage system developed from the predominance of men among early colonial populations, who took women as consorts from Native Americans and enslaved Africans. In this period there was a shortage of European women, as the colonies were dominated in the early day by male explorers and colonists. Given the harsh conditions in Louisiana, persuading women to follow the men was not easy. France sent females convicted along with their debtor husbands, and in 1719, deported 209 women felons "who were of a character to be sent to the French settlement in Louisiana".[40] France also relocated young women orphans known as King's Daughters (French: filles du roi) to their colonies for marriage: to both Canada and Louisiana.
Through warfare and raids, Native American women were often captured to be traded, sold, or taken as wives. At first, the colony generally imported male Africans to use as slave labor because of the heavy work of clearing to develop plantations. Over time, it also imported African female slaves. Marriage between the races was forbidden according to the Code Noir of the eighteenth century, but interracial sex continued. The upper class European men during this period often did not marry until their late twenties or early thirties. Premarital sex with an intended white bride, especially if she was of high rank, was not permitted socially.
White male colonists, often the younger sons of noblemen, military men, and planters, who needed to accumulate some wealth before they could marry, took women of color as consorts before marriage. Merchants and administrators also followed this practice if they were wealthy enough. A white man might rape a slave as young as twelve.
Post-emancipation
After slaves were emancipated, many states passed
During the
A few captives from
White slavery
By the 19th century, most of America's cities had a designated, legally protected area of prostitution. Increased urbanization and young women entering the workforce led to greater flexibility in courtship without supervision. It is in this changing social sphere that the panic over "white slavery" began. This term referred to women being kidnapped for the purposes of prostitution.[citation needed]
Numerous communities appointed
According to historian Mark Thomas Connelly, "a group of books and pamphlets appeared announcing a startling claim: a pervasive and depraved conspiracy was at large in the land, brutally trapping and seducing American girls into lives of enforced prostitution, or 'white slavery'. These white slave narratives, or white-slave tracts, began to circulate around 1909."[45] Such narratives often portrayed innocent girls "victimized by a huge, secret and powerful conspiracy controlled by foreigners", as they were drugged or imprisoned and forced into prostitution.[citation needed][45]
This excerpt from The War on the White Slave Trade was written by the United States District Attorney in Chicago:
One thing should be made very clear to the girl who comes up to the city, and that is that the ordinary ice cream parlor is very likely to be a spider's web for her entanglement. This is perhaps especially true of those ice cream saloons and fruit stores kept by foreigners. Scores of cases are on record where young girls have taken their first step towards "white slavery" in places of this character.[45]
Suffrage activists, especially Harriet Burton Laidlaw[46] and Rose Livingston, worked in New York City's Chinatown and in other cities to rescue young white and Chinese girls from forced prostitution, and helped pass the Mann Act to make interstate sex trafficking a federal crime.[44] Livingston publicly discussed her past as a prostitute and claimed to have been abducted and developed a drug problem as a sex slave in a Chinese man's home, narrowly escaped and experienced a Christian conversion narrative.[47][48] Other groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Hull House focused on children of prostitutes and poverty in community life while trying to pass protective legislation. The American Purity Alliance also supported the Mann Act.[49]
In 1910, the US Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910 (better known as the Mann Act), which made it a felony to transport women across state borders for the purpose of "prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose". Its primary stated intent was to address prostitution, immorality, and human trafficking particularly where it was trafficking for the purposes of prostitution, but the ambiguity of "immoral purpose" effectively criminalized interracial marriage and banned single women from crossing state borders for morally wrong acts. As more women were being trafficked from foreign countries, the US began passing immigration acts to curtail aliens from entering the country. Several acts such as the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924 were passed to prevent emigrants from Europe and Asia from entering the United States. Following the banning of immigrants during the 1920s, human trafficking was not considered a major issue until the 1990s.[50][51]
The 1921 Convention set new goals for international efforts to stem human trafficking, primarily by giving the anti-trafficking movement further official recognition, as well as a bureaucratic apparatus to research and fight the problem. The Advisory Committee on the Traffic of Women and Children was a permanent advisory committee of the League. Its members were nine countries, and several non-governmental organizations. An important development was the implementation of a system of annual reports of member countries. Member countries formed their own centralized offices to track and report on trafficking of women and children.[44] The advisory committee also worked to expand its research and intervention program beyond the United States and Europe. In 1929, a need to expand into the Near East (Asia Minor), the Middle East and Asia was acknowledged. An international conference of central authorities in Asia was planned for 1937, but no further action was taken during the late 1930s.[52]
Labor trafficking
According to the National Human Rights Center in Berkeley, California, there are currently about 10,000 forced laborers in the U.S., around one-third of whom are domestic servants and some portion of whom are children. In reality, this number could be far higher due to the difficulty in getting exact numbers of victims, due to the secretive nature of human trafficking. The U.S. government only keeps a count of survivors, defined as victims of severe instances of human trafficking, who have been assisted by the government in acquiring immigration benefits.[53] Research at San Diego State University estimates that there are 2.4 million victims of human trafficking among illegal Mexican immigrants.[54] On the other hand, it could be far lower—and possibly approach zero[citation needed]—since there are virtually no arrests for this.[citation needed] Research by the Urban Institute says that law enforcement agencies do not prioritize labor trafficking cases, were reluctant to help victims obtain authorization to legally remain in the United States, and felt there was not enough evidence to corroborate victim statements.[55]
In 2014, the
See also
- Sharecropping in the United States
- Convict lease
- Peon
- Labor history of the United States
- History of labor law in the United States
- Human trafficking in the United States
References
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Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
— Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.amendmentxiii.html - ^ "Sacajawea." Shoshone Indians. (retrieved 1 Nov 2011)
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Tony Seybert (4 Aug 2004). "Slavery and Native Americans in British North America and the United States: 1600 to 1865". Slavery in America. Archived from the original on 4 August 2004. Retrieved 14 June 2011.
- ^ "Slavery in America". Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History. Retrieved October 24, 2007.
- ^ a b Bailey, L.R. (1966). "Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest". Los Angeles, CA: Westernlore Press.
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- ^ John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina; Columbia, SC: State Co., 1905; p. 27.
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- ^ Soifer, "Prohibition of Voluntary Peonage" (2012), p. 1617.
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who are disproportionately affected by poverty, the lack of access to education, chronic unemployment, discrimination, and the lack of economic opportunities