How the South Reinstated Slavery After the Civil War
Slavery didn't end when the Union won the Civil War. It ended when federal law was clarified and enforced in the early to mid-1900s.
The traditional story Americans tell themselves is that slavery ended after the Civil War, following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment. However, the South didn’t just want to bring back discriminatory policies. Southerners wanted a returnto slavery and found creative and cruel ways to do so.
As the South industrialized, factories and mines required laborers who could work for low wages and, in some cases, undermine union workers demanding reasonable compensation. The new system of laws targeting newly freed African Americans sent many of them to southern Alabama and Mississippi to become slaves in emerging industries.
Douglas Blackmon’s book Slavery by Another Name is a haunting look at the history of the second enslavement of African Americans that was supported by Jim Crowe laws and segregationist policies that followed Reconstruction’s end.
The Freedom to Enslave
In the 1650s, as southern colonies began to “define residents by color and lineage,” Southerners were enshrining a right to deprive others of their own into state law. Blackmon notes:
“The intents were twofold: to create the legal structure necessary for building an economy with cheap slave labor as its foundation, and secondly, to reconcile bondage with America’s revolutionary ideals of intrinsic human rights.”
The laws allowing slavery not only had horrific consequences for generations of Black Americans. These legal structures also influenced how the South viewed the loss of its right to enslave other people.
“…this was the paradox of the post-Civil War South — recognition of freed slaves as full humans appeared to most white southerners to as an extension of liberty but as a violation of it, and as a challenge to the legitimacy of their definition of what it was to be white.”
The laws may have changed, but southern attitudes about race had remained calcified from the 1600s. To revive slavery in the South, southerners would lean on the one exception to slavery the 13th Amendment left available.
Slavery as a Prison Sentence
The 13th Amendment prohibits slavery “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” So, new laws finding petty reasons to arrest recently freed Black Americans became the favored tool of re-enslavement.
County sheriffs enforced vagrancy laws that were defined “so vaguely…that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime.” One Mississippi law required Black workers to “enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest.” Prisoner leases provided farms, mines, and other industrial businesses with slave labor. Blackmon elaborates:
“They [forced laborers] were routinely starved and brutalized by corporations, farmers, government officials, and small=-town businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed.”
Federal Government’s Role in Ending Slavery — Again
During the early 1900s, industrial titans like U.S. Steel were using forced labor from in the South. Southern states like Alabama were thriving on the next wave of slave labor. It took until the end of World War II for the tide to begin turning.
Fighting against the Nazis revealed the horrific endpoint of a violent ideology that divided people between pure and impure races. African American soldiers also returned from countries that treated them like human beings, creating a surge of new members of the civil rights movement. Enemy propaganda even implored Black soldiers to turn against the United States due to their treatment at home.
The federal government reversed decades of deference to local and state authorities to enforce civil rights law. Blackmon writes:
“…President Harry Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights recommended bolstering the anti-slavery statute to plainly criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal criminal code was dramatically rewritten, further clarifying the laws against involuntary servitude. Finally, in 1951, Congress passed even more explicit statutes, making any form of slavery in the United States indisputably a crime.”
Today, celebrating smaller government for the sake of a smaller government is popular, but the federal government plays a crucial role in curbing the most abusive state and local practices. We don’t face the same moral emergency as slavery today. However, we should ask ourselves what we want our government to accomplish so we can right-size it instead of cripple it.