The state of Connecticut officially abolished slavery in 1784 but there were laws enacted that gave the former owner of the family the right to keep certain slaves beyond the formal abolition of slavery.  We tend to think of the issue of slavery as being solved in the northern states through legislative action and in the south by the 13th Amendment but the reality is much more vague.  The process of emancipation around the world was not a series of sudden events but a long and drawn-out battle. Millions of enslaved people were kept in what was effectively a continuing bondage, certainly not accorded their rights as full members of society well into the 20th Century.

The economies of Europe and subsequently the United States had been fundamentally altered by the exploitation of African and Indian peoples. descent. The national wealth of these countries was built on slavery’s plunder. The money flowing from lucrative European sugar plantations and later American cotton plantations literally funded the Industrial Revolution.  Having grown to depend on these sources of free labor for centuries, slave holders were reluctant to end slavery quickly.

Many US States took the pathway of gradual emancipation. These laws promised to free all slaves born but still protect the slave holders’ businesses and lifestyles.  In most cases the slaveholders’ interests were placed above those of the enslaved.  Even in the defeated Confederate States, emancipation marked by a sudden end slavery.  Post-slavery laws and policies excluded black communities from full participation in society, he says, while Jim Crow laws, ensured that former slaves (for generations after the 13th Amendment was ratified) were keep in a status of servitude.

In 1876, Rutherford B Hayes, a Republican, lost the popular vote in 1876 but assumed the presidency after considerable controversy and negotiation. The Electoral College gave him a one-vote edge over his Democratic opponent, but Democrats challenged the decision on grounds that some states submitted two sets of returns. Facing the possibility, the country would be left without a president, both parties considered taking the office by force. Eventually, the Republicans struck a secret deal with Southern Democrats in Congress, who agreed not to dispute the Hayes victory in exchange for a promise to end Reconstruction and withdraw federal troops from the South.  With this withdrawal of troops from the South, the states were now free to selectively interpret the 14th Amendment and many did so in a manner that was prejudicial toward former slaves.

Southern states began to pass a series of discriminatory state laws collectively known as black codes. These laws were explicitly designed to maintain the social and economic structure of racial slavery in the absence of the “peculiar institution.” The laws codified white supremacy by restricting the civic participation of freed people; the black codes deprived them of the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to own or carry weapons, and, in some cases, even the right to rent or lease land. 

Black codes sought to recreate the antebellum economic structure under the façade of a free-labor system. New “apprenticeship” laws allowed judges to sentence African American orphans to white plantation owners who would then force them to work. Adult freedmen were forced to sign contracts with their employers that prevented them from working for more than one employer, or complaining about low wages or poor working. Men who attempted to violate or evade these contracts were fined, beaten, or arrested for vagrancy.

Upon arrest, many “free” African Americans were now subject to a loophole in the 13th Amendment that allowed for people to be enslaved “as a punishment for crime.”  All policemen in southern states had to do was find a reason to arrest a former slave, and they could legally throw them right back on the plantation and make them work for free. In many cases, a black person could be arrested for anything from using obscene language to selling cotton after sunset. This system was so pervasive that by 1898, 73 percent of Alabama’s revenue came from leasing out convicts as slaves and a late as 1995, Texas had “chain gangs” working cotton fields for wealth politicians.

Those blacks that could not be enslaved through crime and punishment were enslaved through debt.  Emancipated slaves had been promised 40 acres of land and a mule, but the government quickly backed out of the deal. Men who had only known farming were left destitute and plantation owners were left without a workforce which led to sharecropping.  Like medieval barons, white landlords would offer to give black families about 20 acres of land on which to grow cotton. In exchange, the tenant farmers were expected to turn over half of their crops. Since the landlords could dictate how the land was used, most of these sharecroppers had to use all their land to grow cash crops like tobacco or cotton. With fields full of cotton, they could not grow their own food. So, they had to buy it. They would borrow money for food, tools, seed, and other necessities from their landlords, but never make enough income to pay off the dept keeping them in a perpetual cycle of debt and servitude.

In the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson included a passage attacking slavery in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence.  This was struck down by Congress and replaced with a more ambiguous passage about King George’s incitement of “domestic insurrections among us.”  This singular act by a nascent United States, sealed the fate of millions.  Had Congress taken up the cause that “all men are created equal,” centuries of brutal slave trading and chattel slavery could have been avoided.  Jefferson blamed the removal of the passage on delegates from South Carolina and Georgia and Northern delegates who represented merchants who were at the time actively involved in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade but in his original draft, he had a clearer understanding.  Slavery was a “cruel war against humanity itself” and while it didn’t start with King George, powerful people, including Jefferson, both profited by it and were trapped in an economic quagmire that demanded free labor to fuel the empire’s economy.  This quagmire didn’t go away when the British outlawed the slave trade in 1807.  It didn’t go away when the Haitians revolted against France in 1791.  It didn’t even end when the US ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.  It took generations to unravel the intricate cancer of slavery from the world and in some cases, echoes of that cancer live on even today.

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.  This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.  Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.  And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus, paying off former crimes committed again the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another. 

– Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, June 1776

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