About This Book
The essay traces the continuity from transatlantic enslavement to post-emancipation systems that reimpose coerced labor under legal pretenses, arguing that formal abolition was followed by statutes and court practices that differentiated rights by race. It outlines constitutional and statutory tensions, invokes the Supreme Court’s definition tying compulsory service to indebtedness, and groups contemporary mechanisms of coercion into five categories: criminalized employment contracts, restrictions on recruiting laborers, penalties tied to surety breaches, vagrancy laws, and immigrant-agent regulations. Using Southern statutes as examples, it shows how such laws penalize leaving work and thereby function to compel labor despite formal guarantees of freedom.
About the Author
You May Also Like
"'Tis Sixty Years Since" / Address of Charles Francis Adams; Founders' Day, January 16, 1913
by Charles Francis Adams
"1683-1920" / The Fourteen Points and What Became of Them—Foreign Propaganda in the Public Schools—Rewriting the History of the United States—The Espionage Act and How It Worked—"Illegal and Indefensible Blockade" of the Central Powers—1,000,000 Victims of Starvation—Our Debt to France and to Germany—The War Vote in Congress—Truth About the Belgian Atrocities—Our Treaty with Germany and How Observed—The Alien Property Custodianship—Secret Will of Cecil Rhodes—Racial Strains in American Life—Germantown Settlement of 1683 and a Thousand Other Topics
by Frederick Franklin Schrader
"America for Americans!" / The Typical American, Thanksgiving Sermon
by John Philip Newman
"Billy" Sunday, the Man and His Message / With his own words which have won thousands for Christ
by William T. Ellis
"Boots and Saddles"; Or, Life in Dakota with General Custer
by Elizabeth Bacon Custer
"Broke," The Man Without the Dime
by Edwin A. Brown