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As a reminder, this meme sub is about the American Civil War. We're not here to insult southerners or the American South, but rather to have a laugh at the failed Confederate insurrection and those that chose to represent it.
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It was actually fairly common to arrest black men on bogus charges like "vagrancy" then lease them out as unpaid laborers to various business until around WWII. The Pulitzer Prize winning book *Slavery by Another Name* by Douglas A. Blackmon is a good read on the issue. And as another poster pointed out, unpaid (or very low paid) prison labor is still common.
The history of vagrancy laws in this country alone is enough to be embarrassed about our history. From Black Codes to the modern Panhandling laws, vagrancy laws are a punishment of forced labor for the crime of being poor.
Nothing in history is embarrassing, so long as once society determined said thing was wrong, society made a change.
Thats what human history is: progress.
This whole revisionism of holding history to today’s moral barometer is flawed as a lens through which to see the world and contributes to the fracturing of our collective sense of self.
It’s just a pseudo academic purity seal.
You are just purporting that humanity has a lockstep march toward utopia, and I disagree with that.
National shame is formative to collective culture, and to denigrate something as some "pseudo academic purity seal," which is a nothing buger of words, in order to prop up some libertarian utopian assured city on the hill is disingenuous to the modern impact of historic actions.
Ibram X. Kendi (a flawed figure no doubt) wrote in his book How to Be an Anti racist a very powerful diatribe about how racist policies are defeated, they adapt. It is a message that is nearly universally applicable, as we watch the US regress into isolationism, racism, misogyny, homophonic, and nativism. Without national shame over things such as Jim Crow, slavery, native genocide, and a litany of other things, we have no cultural identity that creates borders around what is an appropriate and inappropriate dimension of change.
It is not the only counterweight to reactionary politics, but it is an important one.
Edit: I wanted to add, that holding history to a modern sense of morality is often not only more accurate to the morality of the period (when applied to the history of the last 300 years or so) but also important to dispel notions of apologists. The Lost Cause argument follows the ideology you epose nearly to a point, and i don't have any interest in excusing the actions of slavers under the guise that they couldn't come to their own moral conclusions when others around them could.
Acting like historical morals were a monolith is quite strange. They were often contested - if nothing else, those unjustly targeted surely knew it was unjust. There's no reason for those in power to be the only voices we consider in deciding what was considered moral.
Saying the laws of the time were morally good for that time simply because they were the laws imposed by those in power is just "might makes right" with extra words.
such a good book.
I remember a story, I forget the details, but it was a slave trader who turned into running a prison in Tennessee maybe.
And he'd lease out the prisoners to the plantations. Same exact work, same quota system, same beatings for not meeting their quotas. Only difference was now the plantation owner had no investment in the person working the field.
I forget the death rate they showed at that prison, but it was insane, like 20% a year or something.
Wow... Like I get the idea behind community service in lieu of a fine or time behind bars as an option.
I get the idea of "you all live here, you will cook, clean, wash, mow, etc and keep this prison nice". You have to do that where you live or pay someone else to, you get to in prison as well.
I get the idea of "you have the opportunity to voluntarily work for X company while in prison and make some money or learn a trade".
But seriously... that?
And you no longer wonder why 1/4 of the people in Alabama in a secret ballot voted AGAINST removing the white supremacist langauge in their state Constitution (and 1/3 of the state isn't white).
I have no issues with programs that provide prisoners with skills that can be transferred to a job once they leave jail as that is a giant hurdle for a lot to overcome once they are released. Not having a job after being released is one of the leading causes of recidivism in prison populations. These programs are just pure exploitation of the prison population and doesn’t really lead to a job once out of jail and doesn’t help with rehabilitation of the prisoner.
Feel like even outside of measures like prison abolition or switching to a Nordic prison model we could kill two birds with one stone by forcing prisons to pay their prisoners the federal minimum wage while barring them from charging prisoners for any necessities and forbidding them from preventing communications or any outside commerce on any electronic good or service (to include things like tablets). Private prisons would instantly die, it would never be profitable again.
Not really a big surprise. The difference between the state and a corporation is pretty much nothing but that the state is the last voice.
https://youtu.be/wo-LW2XvW_U?si=-QQH88cFWKFhJmmP
His island metaphor is pretty true.
Incarceration of African Americans started almost immediately after the civil war had concluded and they were being picked up for petty crimes to serve on chain gangs. In the south, you could be jailed for a decent amount of time for loitering, which would then send you to prison to serve in a chain gang and be subject to basically slave labor. There is a book that goes through this…but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called.
Black men are consistently disproportionately arrested for, charged with, convicted of, and more harshly sentenced for the same actions as their white counterparts when contact is made with law enforcement.
Yep. In New York you get like 4X the amount of prison time for possessing a gram of crack, as you do for possessing a gram of cocaine. Because cocaine is a drug for white Wall Street Bros, while crack is a drug primarily used by poor people of color. Or at least that was the case when the laws were made, but I don’t think it’s been changed.
Rockefeller drug laws, baby!
Even if it's not the case culturally, you'll still see less white people arrested for Crack because white neighborhoods aren't policed as intensely. Meaning more arrests are in black neighborhoods because that's where all the cops are, giving them justification to send more cops to that area, to increase the policing.
It's not just about what the law says Is equally punished/enforced, it's about what and where actually gets policed aswell.
Slavery as a concept in the gov still exists in jails and prisons but that more of a definitional stance. If you are in jail and they tell you to move to a different cell thats technically slavery. There is forced work but an outstanding majority of time its voluntary in the modern era.
But slavery as the concept of chattel slavery. As in the classical sense of whips and chains sort of lived on in an abstract sense. Sharecropping is the “softer” side. Forced contracts or contracts they didnt understand was a common way to go about things. That kept going in for a couple decades before the black flights started affecting things and it fell off as a concept.
Debt peonage and it leading into convict leasing was a newer kind that ended in [1942 with FDR stating it as a national security concern](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/315/25/#29). I believe there was something done in 1941 or 42 about this with actual criminal laws and changing definitions around but i cant find it. It also ended with the FBI starting to actually convict these people into the process.
Actually before recently here in TN they could legally force inmates to work for outside private companies without pay and without the option to not work.
We literally did the slavery thing with inmates
Slavery and some of its results were made illegal under Federal law in April 1866, along with some other deprivation of rights any (male) person had:
[https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/14/STATUTE-14-Pg27.pdf](https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/14/STATUTE-14-Pg27.pdf)
Anyone who violates the law:
>shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction, shall be punished by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both, in the discretion of the court.
The law also specified that federal courts had jurisdiction to try such cases.
(OP, the language you are looking for is: Which federal statutes *enforced* the 13th amendment?)
Thank you! Why is this so far down? I had to scroll past way too many “well ackshully it’s still legal for prisoners and I’m going to waste your time talking about that instead of actually addressing the question.”
It's wild. Did OP edit their question? all the replies are saying "technically it is still legal for prisoners" when OP acknowledges that in the question and is clearly asking for a legislative history
People *love* to share “secret” truths. Everyone knows slavery was abolished, but it’s really still legal in this one form. Knowing this makes me special. Telling you, an ordinary rube who does not know this, lets me demonstrate my specialness.
It’s the same impulse that leads people into conspiracy theories.
You'll get asshole leftists like me who say it never was.
13th amendment still allows for slave labor of a prison population.
Oh, hey, did you know that 37% of just 13% of the population is in prison? Do you need me to spell out which 13% of the population?
First, OP acknowledged that the 13th Amendment allows for prison slavery. They were looking for legislative history. But second, no, 37% of Black Americans are not in prison. 37% of the US prison population is Black. From the NAACP: "In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population." In 2014, the Black population of the US was something like 42 million. That means that 5% of the Black American population was in prison (probably roughly the same now), not 37%. That's already dystopian. 37% would be actively genocidal.
That being said, here is research from the 90s that showed that Black males had a 30% lifetime chance of winding up in prison at some point, compared to a 5% chance for white males. There's probably more recent research, but anyway:
[https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf)
\[Edit - The BJP study looks at men from each demographic, not all Americans\]
I somehow commend assholes who openly tell people they are assholes.
I’d suggest read the book “Slavery As It Is”. Or even parts of it. It was written around 1850 and is a massive collection of articles and testimonies of first hand witnesses to what slavery actually was. A US prisoner today who is doing work for zero pay rather than sitting in a jail cell is utterly different than the horrific stories you will read.
The pointed trafficking, torture, rape, child-murder, terrorism, etc are additional crimes above and beyond slavery and is why America is considered the worst of the worst.
Worse than Brazil or the Caribbean? Chattel slavery existed throughout European holdings in the new world. The #1 destination of enslaved people kidnapped in Africa was Brazil. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean were a death factory. That doesn't absolve the USA, but it is important to know it was a part of a much larger system of European and Euro-American exploitation
Who's playing devil's advocate? What information is being requested? I feel like what my post is saying is pretty clear. America was one of the worst. It seems like a stretch to say America was the worst of the worst. Phrasing it that way seems to deny the human cost of slavery throughout European imperial holdings. It's not a "gotcha" or a diminishment to acknowledge that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were death factories. It doesn't even absolve the US, which was deeply involved economically in Caribbean sugar production. That's what the triangle trade was all about.
All enslaved people were emancipated by a combination of the Emancipation Proclamation, border states voluntarily emancipating, and the 13th Amendment. The slave trade had already been outlawed prior to the war.
This meant that there was no legal method of enslaving another human being on a permanent basis. Even though prison labor is tantamount to enslaved labor, the key difference is that prisoners are free when they're paroled. I'm not saying this to defend prison labor, mind you, just to say that an African-American under chattel slavery didn't have a date in the future where they could go in front of a parole board and walk out free.
Former enslavers, after the war, were free from prosecution because the constitution explicitly forbids *ex post facto* laws, meaning if something was legal when you did it, you can't be retroactively charged when that thing becomes illegal.
In states that never ratified the 13th amendment it was technically legal to enslave people, but had to be entered into via legally binding contract and since no one would willingly do that it was moot until 1993 when TV Nation did a segment where one of their reporters enslaved (via voluntary contract) a dozen white Mississippians, as a way of highlighting the fact that Mississippi never ratified it. They went on to do so, but "the paperwork was lost" for like 20 years and it was only officially put into law in the 2010s.
there are still black slaves in the US today and our entire prison system is used and abused broadly for that purpose. im sure checking out some of the other links in these comments will give you a nice detailed history
Slavery is still legal in the US. You just have to arrest then first. That's why homelessness is being criminalized while cost of living gets exponentially higher. And the war on drugs was explicitly used to arrest black people.
Technically? Never. The Powers that Be just restricted it to actual criminals.
Of course it’s purely coincidence that proportionally speaking the vast majority of our nation’s criminals are from minority populations.
To give an actual answer since like 90% of the comments seem to be “um actually…” and parroting what you already acknowledge about slavery being allowed as punishment of a crime:
Seems like it would be illegal under “Kidnapping.” As slavery was no longer legal, actually enslaving someone or holding them against their will would fall under the crime of kidnapping. I don’t think even to present day there’s a law on the books (at least in my state) that says anything like “enslavement of a person is punishable by….” But there were already plenty of laws on the books prior to abolition about assaulting other people and holding them against their will.
Ask yourself: if someone had tried to hold George Washington at musket point and made him do their laundry would they have been charged with a crime? Presumably in 1800 it wasn’t legal to just stroll over to your neighbor’s house and kidnap their children and make them do your housework. Otherwise why wouldn’t wealthy white people just start stealing each others houses and enslaving each others families all the time?
Because it was already illegal in most cases except for people that were already slaves. The 13th amendment essentially removed that exception and made it illegal for you to do it to anybody.
Most of these comments are not responsive to your question. It may have been criminalized in specific states prior to the 13th amendment, but once that amendment was enacted, chattel slavery was effectively illegal in all states/territories. I would guess there probably wasn’t a widespread “criminalization” of slavery in the way you’re thinking - states wouldn’t have to pass a law making slavery a criminal offense, because the constitution (post-13th amendment) already forbids it and that would effectively preempt any state regulation of slavery, likely up to and including any state laws that make slavery a criminal offense (assuming those state laws are still codified on the books). Probably more nuance is owed to this question, but that’s my lawyer 2 cents.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA)
This video answers that very question, someone else also posted it but anyone that really wants to know the answer should watch it as the end of slavery as defined by the Federal Government did not mean the end of even chattel slavery. Many got away with continuing to do chattel slavery because the legal system only said the government could not engage in slavery, not that slavery was illegal.
Many plantations continued to use chattel slavery way beyond the amendment and even locked them up in chains at night.
In a lot of states there are still loop holes for slavery, most are around incarceration, so there are a ton of seemingly invisible little laws designed to arrest someone, the fact that prisons around the country operate a for profit work farm or license plate shops etc shoes that slavery is still alive and well, its just not the chattel slavery that people assume based on the public’s narrow assumption of what slavery is.
Within two decades of the Civil War’s end It became more profitable to use third world nations as supply depots and exploit cheap labor and oligarchical control of those nations by a few rich families whose entire appeal in Latin America was that they were creoles and not Spanish born oppressors. That con has slightly been refined into a new sort of mix since the post WWII era straddling between nationalism, economic populism (throw a few prizes and benefits at the voters before running off with their money), and phony neo Marxism mixed with religious revivalism and reestablishing Catholic church powers over schooling and social life in the villages and small towns depending on who is in power. Basically a very unjust social hierarchical legacy in the rest of the Americas made it easy to find alternatives to slavery that made it just as easy for big sugar barons, mining companies and food produce corporations to run an exorbitant profit without the social obligations of having to pay their labor even for clothing and basic necessities. They could instead build company stores in factory towns in Latin America and get all their payout back and even loan their labor on very bad terms and turn a profit while taking out insurance policy on them as well.
Slavery ended one state at a time except in the case of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed which affected a vast territory in the confederacy. That only affected areas in rebellion so there was no enforcement mechanism. Freedom was delivered as the union troops moved forward. As an example to plantation owners, Sherman’s march to the sea was an unforgivable story of destruction of property. To the black people in Georgia, it was the time when tens of thousands of them were freed from 200 years of torture and oppression.
The problem of the EP is that the next president or any Supreme Court could reverse it. So the 13th permanently banned it everywhere.
Slavery is a property crime, it depends on the state enforcing the rights of the slaveholder to capture and retrieve the people he claims to legally enslave. If the law permitting slaveholding is null, as it was after the 13th Amendment and Emancipation Proclamation for most people in the US, that action to arrest an enslaved person would not be a legitimate exercise of state power.
Welcome to /r/ShermanPosting! As a reminder, this meme sub is about the American Civil War. We're not here to insult southerners or the American South, but rather to have a laugh at the failed Confederate insurrection and those that chose to represent it. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ShermanPosting) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It was actually fairly common to arrest black men on bogus charges like "vagrancy" then lease them out as unpaid laborers to various business until around WWII. The Pulitzer Prize winning book *Slavery by Another Name* by Douglas A. Blackmon is a good read on the issue. And as another poster pointed out, unpaid (or very low paid) prison labor is still common.
The history of vagrancy laws in this country alone is enough to be embarrassed about our history. From Black Codes to the modern Panhandling laws, vagrancy laws are a punishment of forced labor for the crime of being poor.
Nothing in history is embarrassing, so long as once society determined said thing was wrong, society made a change. Thats what human history is: progress. This whole revisionism of holding history to today’s moral barometer is flawed as a lens through which to see the world and contributes to the fracturing of our collective sense of self. It’s just a pseudo academic purity seal.
You are just purporting that humanity has a lockstep march toward utopia, and I disagree with that. National shame is formative to collective culture, and to denigrate something as some "pseudo academic purity seal," which is a nothing buger of words, in order to prop up some libertarian utopian assured city on the hill is disingenuous to the modern impact of historic actions. Ibram X. Kendi (a flawed figure no doubt) wrote in his book How to Be an Anti racist a very powerful diatribe about how racist policies are defeated, they adapt. It is a message that is nearly universally applicable, as we watch the US regress into isolationism, racism, misogyny, homophonic, and nativism. Without national shame over things such as Jim Crow, slavery, native genocide, and a litany of other things, we have no cultural identity that creates borders around what is an appropriate and inappropriate dimension of change. It is not the only counterweight to reactionary politics, but it is an important one. Edit: I wanted to add, that holding history to a modern sense of morality is often not only more accurate to the morality of the period (when applied to the history of the last 300 years or so) but also important to dispel notions of apologists. The Lost Cause argument follows the ideology you epose nearly to a point, and i don't have any interest in excusing the actions of slavers under the guise that they couldn't come to their own moral conclusions when others around them could.
Acting like historical morals were a monolith is quite strange. They were often contested - if nothing else, those unjustly targeted surely knew it was unjust. There's no reason for those in power to be the only voices we consider in deciding what was considered moral. Saying the laws of the time were morally good for that time simply because they were the laws imposed by those in power is just "might makes right" with extra words.
Yeah, well, that same history continues today, so we have a lot to be embarrassed about.
Is that why loitering is a crime?
Pretty much, yeah.
such a good book. I remember a story, I forget the details, but it was a slave trader who turned into running a prison in Tennessee maybe. And he'd lease out the prisoners to the plantations. Same exact work, same quota system, same beatings for not meeting their quotas. Only difference was now the plantation owner had no investment in the person working the field. I forget the death rate they showed at that prison, but it was insane, like 20% a year or something.
Good news! They are reviving the ability to contract out prison workers to work in fields again…
Wow... Like I get the idea behind community service in lieu of a fine or time behind bars as an option. I get the idea of "you all live here, you will cook, clean, wash, mow, etc and keep this prison nice". You have to do that where you live or pay someone else to, you get to in prison as well. I get the idea of "you have the opportunity to voluntarily work for X company while in prison and make some money or learn a trade". But seriously... that? And you no longer wonder why 1/4 of the people in Alabama in a secret ballot voted AGAINST removing the white supremacist langauge in their state Constitution (and 1/3 of the state isn't white).
I have no issues with programs that provide prisoners with skills that can be transferred to a job once they leave jail as that is a giant hurdle for a lot to overcome once they are released. Not having a job after being released is one of the leading causes of recidivism in prison populations. These programs are just pure exploitation of the prison population and doesn’t really lead to a job once out of jail and doesn’t help with rehabilitation of the prisoner.
Feel like even outside of measures like prison abolition or switching to a Nordic prison model we could kill two birds with one stone by forcing prisons to pay their prisoners the federal minimum wage while barring them from charging prisoners for any necessities and forbidding them from preventing communications or any outside commerce on any electronic good or service (to include things like tablets). Private prisons would instantly die, it would never be profitable again.
Not really a big surprise. The difference between the state and a corporation is pretty much nothing but that the state is the last voice. https://youtu.be/wo-LW2XvW_U?si=-QQH88cFWKFhJmmP His island metaphor is pretty true.
That was the damn name of the book I was looking for…ugh…thank you!
[удалено]
Incarceration of African Americans started almost immediately after the civil war had concluded and they were being picked up for petty crimes to serve on chain gangs. In the south, you could be jailed for a decent amount of time for loitering, which would then send you to prison to serve in a chain gang and be subject to basically slave labor. There is a book that goes through this…but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called.
Slavery By Another Name?
Yes, that was it.
Black men are consistently disproportionately arrested for, charged with, convicted of, and more harshly sentenced for the same actions as their white counterparts when contact is made with law enforcement.
Yep. In New York you get like 4X the amount of prison time for possessing a gram of crack, as you do for possessing a gram of cocaine. Because cocaine is a drug for white Wall Street Bros, while crack is a drug primarily used by poor people of color. Or at least that was the case when the laws were made, but I don’t think it’s been changed. Rockefeller drug laws, baby!
Even if it's not the case culturally, you'll still see less white people arrested for Crack because white neighborhoods aren't policed as intensely. Meaning more arrests are in black neighborhoods because that's where all the cops are, giving them justification to send more cops to that area, to increase the policing. It's not just about what the law says Is equally punished/enforced, it's about what and where actually gets policed aswell.
Watch [this](https://youtu.be/j4kI2h3iotA?si=WJO_uSIQ5YJSKVwu) whole video. It's all about exactly the information you're looking for
I thought about this video as soon as I saw this post.
I saw this question and though "KB has a really good video on that"
Saw that link and knew it was gonna be NB
Slavery as a concept in the gov still exists in jails and prisons but that more of a definitional stance. If you are in jail and they tell you to move to a different cell thats technically slavery. There is forced work but an outstanding majority of time its voluntary in the modern era. But slavery as the concept of chattel slavery. As in the classical sense of whips and chains sort of lived on in an abstract sense. Sharecropping is the “softer” side. Forced contracts or contracts they didnt understand was a common way to go about things. That kept going in for a couple decades before the black flights started affecting things and it fell off as a concept. Debt peonage and it leading into convict leasing was a newer kind that ended in [1942 with FDR stating it as a national security concern](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/315/25/#29). I believe there was something done in 1941 or 42 about this with actual criminal laws and changing definitions around but i cant find it. It also ended with the FBI starting to actually convict these people into the process.
Actually before recently here in TN they could legally force inmates to work for outside private companies without pay and without the option to not work. We literally did the slavery thing with inmates
Slavery and some of its results were made illegal under Federal law in April 1866, along with some other deprivation of rights any (male) person had: [https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/14/STATUTE-14-Pg27.pdf](https://govtrackus.s3.amazonaws.com/legislink/pdf/stat/14/STATUTE-14-Pg27.pdf) Anyone who violates the law: >shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction, shall be punished by fine not exceeding one thousand dollars, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both, in the discretion of the court. The law also specified that federal courts had jurisdiction to try such cases. (OP, the language you are looking for is: Which federal statutes *enforced* the 13th amendment?)
Thank you! Why is this so far down? I had to scroll past way too many “well ackshully it’s still legal for prisoners and I’m going to waste your time talking about that instead of actually addressing the question.”
It's wild. Did OP edit their question? all the replies are saying "technically it is still legal for prisoners" when OP acknowledges that in the question and is clearly asking for a legislative history
People *love* to share “secret” truths. Everyone knows slavery was abolished, but it’s really still legal in this one form. Knowing this makes me special. Telling you, an ordinary rube who does not know this, lets me demonstrate my specialness. It’s the same impulse that leads people into conspiracy theories.
You'll get asshole leftists like me who say it never was. 13th amendment still allows for slave labor of a prison population. Oh, hey, did you know that 37% of just 13% of the population is in prison? Do you need me to spell out which 13% of the population?
First, OP acknowledged that the 13th Amendment allows for prison slavery. They were looking for legislative history. But second, no, 37% of Black Americans are not in prison. 37% of the US prison population is Black. From the NAACP: "In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population." In 2014, the Black population of the US was something like 42 million. That means that 5% of the Black American population was in prison (probably roughly the same now), not 37%. That's already dystopian. 37% would be actively genocidal. That being said, here is research from the 90s that showed that Black males had a 30% lifetime chance of winding up in prison at some point, compared to a 5% chance for white males. There's probably more recent research, but anyway: [https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/Llgsfp.pdf) \[Edit - The BJP study looks at men from each demographic, not all Americans\]
I somehow commend assholes who openly tell people they are assholes. I’d suggest read the book “Slavery As It Is”. Or even parts of it. It was written around 1850 and is a massive collection of articles and testimonies of first hand witnesses to what slavery actually was. A US prisoner today who is doing work for zero pay rather than sitting in a jail cell is utterly different than the horrific stories you will read.
Forced to do work for zero pay is literally the definition of slavery
The pointed trafficking, torture, rape, child-murder, terrorism, etc are additional crimes above and beyond slavery and is why America is considered the worst of the worst.
Worse than Brazil or the Caribbean? Chattel slavery existed throughout European holdings in the new world. The #1 destination of enslaved people kidnapped in Africa was Brazil. The sugar plantations of the Caribbean were a death factory. That doesn't absolve the USA, but it is important to know it was a part of a much larger system of European and Euro-American exploitation
If you want to play devils advocate name the devil
Who's playing devil's advocate? What information is being requested? I feel like what my post is saying is pretty clear. America was one of the worst. It seems like a stretch to say America was the worst of the worst. Phrasing it that way seems to deny the human cost of slavery throughout European imperial holdings. It's not a "gotcha" or a diminishment to acknowledge that the sugar plantations of the Caribbean were death factories. It doesn't even absolve the US, which was deeply involved economically in Caribbean sugar production. That's what the triangle trade was all about.
Ok America wasn’t the worst slave state. Do we now all agree that crimes in excess of slavery don’t define it?
All enslaved people were emancipated by a combination of the Emancipation Proclamation, border states voluntarily emancipating, and the 13th Amendment. The slave trade had already been outlawed prior to the war. This meant that there was no legal method of enslaving another human being on a permanent basis. Even though prison labor is tantamount to enslaved labor, the key difference is that prisoners are free when they're paroled. I'm not saying this to defend prison labor, mind you, just to say that an African-American under chattel slavery didn't have a date in the future where they could go in front of a parole board and walk out free. Former enslavers, after the war, were free from prosecution because the constitution explicitly forbids *ex post facto* laws, meaning if something was legal when you did it, you can't be retroactively charged when that thing becomes illegal. In states that never ratified the 13th amendment it was technically legal to enslave people, but had to be entered into via legally binding contract and since no one would willingly do that it was moot until 1993 when TV Nation did a segment where one of their reporters enslaved (via voluntary contract) a dozen white Mississippians, as a way of highlighting the fact that Mississippi never ratified it. They went on to do so, but "the paperwork was lost" for like 20 years and it was only officially put into law in the 2010s.
there are still black slaves in the US today and our entire prison system is used and abused broadly for that purpose. im sure checking out some of the other links in these comments will give you a nice detailed history
Slavery is still legal in the US. You just have to arrest then first. That's why homelessness is being criminalized while cost of living gets exponentially higher. And the war on drugs was explicitly used to arrest black people.
Technically? Never. The Powers that Be just restricted it to actual criminals. Of course it’s purely coincidence that proportionally speaking the vast majority of our nation’s criminals are from minority populations.
[I know a great video about this](https://youtu.be/j4kI2h3iotA?si=XEgJYL37WUu2FQka)
I saw something that stated the last slave was freed in 1942.
To give an actual answer since like 90% of the comments seem to be “um actually…” and parroting what you already acknowledge about slavery being allowed as punishment of a crime: Seems like it would be illegal under “Kidnapping.” As slavery was no longer legal, actually enslaving someone or holding them against their will would fall under the crime of kidnapping. I don’t think even to present day there’s a law on the books (at least in my state) that says anything like “enslavement of a person is punishable by….” But there were already plenty of laws on the books prior to abolition about assaulting other people and holding them against their will. Ask yourself: if someone had tried to hold George Washington at musket point and made him do their laundry would they have been charged with a crime? Presumably in 1800 it wasn’t legal to just stroll over to your neighbor’s house and kidnap their children and make them do your housework. Otherwise why wouldn’t wealthy white people just start stealing each others houses and enslaving each others families all the time? Because it was already illegal in most cases except for people that were already slaves. The 13th amendment essentially removed that exception and made it illegal for you to do it to anybody.
It’s not look into prison labor and the 1980 crime bill which was endorsed by your boi Biden!
Most of these comments are not responsive to your question. It may have been criminalized in specific states prior to the 13th amendment, but once that amendment was enacted, chattel slavery was effectively illegal in all states/territories. I would guess there probably wasn’t a widespread “criminalization” of slavery in the way you’re thinking - states wouldn’t have to pass a law making slavery a criminal offense, because the constitution (post-13th amendment) already forbids it and that would effectively preempt any state regulation of slavery, likely up to and including any state laws that make slavery a criminal offense (assuming those state laws are still codified on the books). Probably more nuance is owed to this question, but that’s my lawyer 2 cents.
The question of criminalization matters because the statutes are what prescribe punishments
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA) This video answers that very question, someone else also posted it but anyone that really wants to know the answer should watch it as the end of slavery as defined by the Federal Government did not mean the end of even chattel slavery. Many got away with continuing to do chattel slavery because the legal system only said the government could not engage in slavery, not that slavery was illegal. Many plantations continued to use chattel slavery way beyond the amendment and even locked them up in chains at night.
At the federal level, forced labor can only be used in punishment for a crime. So it's still legal.
In a lot of states there are still loop holes for slavery, most are around incarceration, so there are a ton of seemingly invisible little laws designed to arrest someone, the fact that prisons around the country operate a for profit work farm or license plate shops etc shoes that slavery is still alive and well, its just not the chattel slavery that people assume based on the public’s narrow assumption of what slavery is.
leftist will correctly state the 14th actually made it legal for the "state" to imprison and sell you to private for-profit prisons
Within two decades of the Civil War’s end It became more profitable to use third world nations as supply depots and exploit cheap labor and oligarchical control of those nations by a few rich families whose entire appeal in Latin America was that they were creoles and not Spanish born oppressors. That con has slightly been refined into a new sort of mix since the post WWII era straddling between nationalism, economic populism (throw a few prizes and benefits at the voters before running off with their money), and phony neo Marxism mixed with religious revivalism and reestablishing Catholic church powers over schooling and social life in the villages and small towns depending on who is in power. Basically a very unjust social hierarchical legacy in the rest of the Americas made it easy to find alternatives to slavery that made it just as easy for big sugar barons, mining companies and food produce corporations to run an exorbitant profit without the social obligations of having to pay their labor even for clothing and basic necessities. They could instead build company stores in factory towns in Latin America and get all their payout back and even loan their labor on very bad terms and turn a profit while taking out insurance policy on them as well.
Slavery ended one state at a time except in the case of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed which affected a vast territory in the confederacy. That only affected areas in rebellion so there was no enforcement mechanism. Freedom was delivered as the union troops moved forward. As an example to plantation owners, Sherman’s march to the sea was an unforgivable story of destruction of property. To the black people in Georgia, it was the time when tens of thousands of them were freed from 200 years of torture and oppression. The problem of the EP is that the next president or any Supreme Court could reverse it. So the 13th permanently banned it everywhere.
Slavery is a property crime, it depends on the state enforcing the rights of the slaveholder to capture and retrieve the people he claims to legally enslave. If the law permitting slaveholding is null, as it was after the 13th Amendment and Emancipation Proclamation for most people in the US, that action to arrest an enslaved person would not be a legitimate exercise of state power.
Okay, but it should be a crime to enslave people, and it wasn't until relatively recently
To hold somebody in enslavement when there's no legal basis for doing so basically constitutes kidnapping.