The 13th Amendment to the Constitution linked Black slavery with White indentured servitude. It prohibited both in the same sentence.
It is well that we remember the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery as a good fruit of the Civil War.
But most people forget that vast numbers of poor Whites were also freed from a semi-slavery called indentured servitude, Most modern anti-slavery organizations count “indentured servitude” as a form of slavery.
In order to recruit labor for the colonies in America, poor people were offered the opportunity of free transit to the colonies, room, and board in exchange for becoming indentured servants. They worked for a master under tight control and were promised freedom after a number of years of forced labor.
However, unscrupulous landowners often ignored aspects of the contract like a limitation on the duration of the contract (usually five to seven years). The owners of the contracts of the indentured servant would add all sorts of charges to the debt that had to be repaid before one was free. A common refrain of the indentured servants was, “What about that lie you told us about when we would be free?”
Also, although indentured servants were not “property,” their contracts were. Consequently, indentured servants also could be sold, loaned, or inherited like slaves, at least during the duration of their contract terms. The potential for abuse of indentured servants was so high that the 13th Amendment legally did away with the practice along with slavery.
Indentured servitude was a step up from serfdom, which many European countries defined as a lifetime status of forced labor, sometimes with relatively little autonomy. In Prussia, the lords even had the right to “try out” the fiancees of the peasants before marriage. However, serfdom was a step up from slavery. Serfs had certain traditional rights including a share in the fruits of their labors, while slaves did not.
After the Civil War, many Whites and African Americans fell into sharecropping, which was working someone else’s land and sharing the revenue between the owner and the sharecropper. Technically, it was a step up from indentured servitude: a sharecropper had more personal autonomy; controlled resources outside of the sharecropping arrangement; and could leave after fulfilling a sharecropping contract. In practice, landlords unscrupulously used sharecropping to create two classes of almost-slaves: White and Black sharecroppers.
Typically, the sharecropper was in permanent debt-bondage to the landlord, and education for other trades was scarce. Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book called sharecropping “slavery by a different name.” In the South, the material circumstances of poor Blacks and Whites were often not too different. However, the landowners used the competition of slight differences between the White and Black poor to create racial division and to push the Blacks furthest down into a high degree of unfreedom and suffering.
Today, many hyper-educated elites want to keep control of power by pitting the poor Whites, Blacks, and other ethno-racial groups against each other– again– by dismissing poor White, Asian, and Hispanic suffering and prioritizing concern with Black suffering. They forget the wisdom of the 13th Amendment: no one is free of mistreatment if some are not free from mistreatment.
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