American Slavery Never Ended
A Black ‘chain gang’ in the South in 1898. Photograph by Carl Weis.
This July 4th, it’s important to remember that American slavery didn’t just disappear overnight: it’s still happening.
As the sun set on the final days of the Trump administration, the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission was hard at work. Established in September 2020, the commission published its final thesis, “The 1776 Report,” just two days before Trump left office, designed as part of Trump’s “patriotic education” initiative. Clocking in at a paltry 41 pages, “The 1776 Report” masqueraded as an authoritative narrative of American history, when in fact it was no work of serious historical scholarship: the commission that wrote it featured zero historians, actual historians widely condemned and criticized the inaccuracies and over-simplistic glorifications of America’s past littered throughout the report, and the Biden White House brought the commission to a swift and merciful end.
“The 1776 Report” was an attempt to rewrite history. It was a clear rebuke of The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” an initiative by largely Black journalists to reframe American history with African slavery at its corewhich drew significant criticism from conservatives. But while it lacked academic merit, “The 1776 Report’s” dangerous attempt to whitewash American history may bear fruit in censoring the teaching of America’s original sin: slavery, and how it never ended.
The conventional narrative around American slavery is that it ended in 1865 with the Civil War. This is untrue. A war fought over slavery didn’t end in the end of slavery at all; on the contrary, of the 4 million enslaved Africans on the eve of the Civil War, an estimated 800,000 would end up reenslaved. This remained true in spite of—or actually, because of—the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in December 1865:
"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 1, 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution
In other words, slavery was abolished for all, unless they were convicted of a crime. With this legal loophole established, Southern states exploited the 13th Amendment to continue practicing slavery. The South’s transition from an agrarian, plantation-based economy to a more modern economy based on factory labor, commerce, and industrial cities like those in the North (though still reliant on agriculture) cannot be explained without discussing the immense role that unfree labor played from its inception.
To reenslave hundreds of thousands of new freedmen as chattel slaves—personal property—Southern politicians passed what are popularly known as the Black Codes. The laws were an explicit attempt to criminalize Black behavior and provide a constant labor supply of convict laborers for the nascent Southern industrial base. Among the dozens of new crimes established were vagrancy or unemployment, walking along railroad tracks at night (trespassing), and gambling. One such laborer was Green Cottenham, a 22-year-old Black man arrested in 1908 for vagrancy in Shelby County, Alabama. Cottenham, unable to pay his court fees for a trial that resulted in him receiving a 30-day sentence of hard labor, found his sentence extended to one year. Leased by the state to Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company (a subsidiary of Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel), Cottenham was tasked with mining eight tons of coal every single day, chained every night and whipped for failing to meet his daily quota. Cottenham never completed his sentence, as did thousands of Black convict laborers in the coal and iron mines that dotted the industrial South.
The rebuilding city of Atlanta was no different: the Chattahoochee Brick Factory, dubbed the “Black Auschwitz of Georgia,” housed thousands of Black men, women, and children who shoveled clay and blasted bricks in dangerous, sweltering kilns for 15 hours a day (it has been speculated that dead convicts were buried on site). Unlike under antebellum slavery, the white bosses who owned convict laborers had no incentive to keep their workers healthy: if one died, another could always be arrested and put in their place.
Black convict laborers in Thomasville, Georgia in the late 1880s. Photograph by Joseph John Kirkbride.
But perhaps an even more insidious system of convict labor was debt peonage. When Black convicts were unable to pay their court fees, white plantation owners could offer to pay their fines for them in exchange for signing a labor contract. However, these labor contracts were frequently exploitative (which went unnoticed because the vast majority of African-Americans in the South were illiterate), and Black workers would be caught in an immense, cyclical debt to their white masters for which they would be forced to work for nothing for years. 25-year-old sharecropper John Davis found himself in this predicament. When boarding a Nixburg, Alabama-bound train to come home to his ill wife, Davis was arrested on fraudulent pretenses of vagrancy, charged with an unpayable $75 fine, and was then coerced into signing an exploitative labor contract with wealthy landowner John W. Pace. Davis had surrendered his own freedom, agreeing to “be locked up in the cell at night” and to be “[hired] out to any person, firm or corporation in the state of Alabama”; he was, for all intents and purposes, a slave. Pace, for his part, was no stranger to this arrangement: Pace’s slave ring numbered up to 100 Black men and women. When Pace was finally brought to court for peonage by the Department of Justice in 1903, he and other white landowners who had participated in peonage ultimately went free, as slavery was still not a crime: no federal statute existed to criminalize owning another person as property, and slavery was still protected by the 13th Amendment. After being set free, Pace then continued to operate his convict leasing system.
Black convicts working in a work quarry, probably in the early 1940s. Photographer unknown.
Legalized chattel slavery in America only ended in the 1940s, as a direct result of American entry in World War II against Japan. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened his cabinet to discuss retaliation and potential sources of Japanese wartime propaganda. One topic that arose was the treatment of African-Americans in the South, including the ongoing practices of debt peonage and convict leasing. Hoping to prevent these from being exploited as Axis propaganda, Attorney General Francis Biddle directed federal prosecutors to aggressively prosecute instances of involuntary servitude and peonage they encountered, essentially bringing legalized chattel slavery to an end:
“In the United States one cannot sell himself as a peon or slave -- the law is fixed and
established to protect the weak-minded, the poor, the miserable. Men will sometimes sell themselves for a meal of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his [sic] bond to work out the amount of the bond upon his [sic] release from jail. Any such contract is positively null and void and the procuring and causing of such contract to be made violates these statutes.”
Attorney General Francis Biddle, Circular No. 3591, p. 3, Dec. 12th, 1941
Although federal intervention played a key role in ending chattel slavery, slavery by other names has persisted in the United States to this day, predominantly through prison labor: the lone exception to slavery explicitly permitted by the 13th Amendment. This is where slavery graduated from history to a present reality for countless Black Americans. The American prison population doubled to 627,000 during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as a result of the infamous War on Drugs, a campaign initiated by Richard Nixon to target Black communities and the antiwar movement. It remains no surprise that mass incarceration affected, and continues to affect, Black Americans the most: from the 1980s to the 2000s, the number of incarcerated Black men grew by five times to almost 800,000, about as many Black people who were reenslaved by peonage after the Civil War. Republicans like Nixon and Reagan weren’t alone, however: mass incarceration and the virtual re-enslavement of Black Americans was a bipartisan effort. From the 1980s and 1990s onwards, to allay criticisms that they were soft on crime, Democrats like Bill Clinton and Joe Biden passed laws that put more police officers on the streets, funded the prison construction boom of the late 20th century, created sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine that disproportionately targeted Black drug users, and overall contributed to the continued escalation of the prison population in the United States.
Via The Sentencing Project.
Mass incarceration and slavery are overlapping sins, but ones that have both embedded themselves into the American criminal justice system. In her memoir It Takes a Village, Hillary Clinton recounted how, during her and her husband’s time in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, they relied on “African-American [male prisoners] in their thirties” as unpaid servants, part of a “longstanding tradition” designed to keep costs down. The wildfires that have raged in Northern California were fought by incarcerated firefighters paid under minimum wage even while risking their own lives. The office furniture damaged in the Jan. 6th storming of the Capitol was rebuilt by inmates paid between 23¢ and $1.15 an hour by Federal Prison Industries, or UNICOR, which the federal government is contractually obligated to buy from. Prisoners often lack a choice in working: either they toil for pennies, or they face punishment like solitary confinement. UNICOR, for its part, forces prisoners into producing combat helmets and body armor, the same equipment used by militarized police forces to brutalize Black communities and ship off hundreds of thousands of African-Americans to prison. Call it what it is: slavery. America’s original sin is alive and well in a population of 2 million incarcerated Americans.
American slavery is both a cruel history and an oppressive present for millions of Black Americans, among longstanding traditions of militarized policing, economic inequity, and segregation. Naturally, it has always been an inconvenient truth for conservatives, from Southerners burning copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to modern right-wingers promoting “patriotic education” like Trump and the 1776 Commission. It’s also no surprise that conservatives like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin have made hay over fears about “critical race theory,” going so far as to ban it from being taught in schools in certain states. Unfortunately for conservatives, critical race theory (an academic discipline that examines the intersections of race and law and how they disadvantage people of color) isn’t nearly as exciting as they imagine: a Marxist propaganda campaign to turn children into far-left, anti-American, white person-hating woke ideologues. It’s telling that the right immediately assumes that any discussion of systemic inequalities is inconvenient to them, because any accurate history of American racism requires an understanding of slavery and conservatives’ role in preserving it, from Reconstruction to Reagan.
If you learn anything this July 4th, it’s that we need more than awareness of modern American slavery: we need accurate history, police demilitarization, and reparations. Slavery won’t end until the foundational systems of white supremacy are completely dismantled. It’s up to all of us to do it.
"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour."
Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"