Decades of Darkness #100: Born In The USA
Decades of Darkness #100: Born In The USA
“The essence of all slavery lies in taking the product of another’s labour by force. It is immaterial whether this force be founded on ownership of the slave or ownership of the money that he must get to live.”
-- Sergey Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian author, philanthropist, and philosopher)
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Taken from: “Without Conscience Or Colour: The Rise and Rise of American Slavery”
(c) 1952 by Prof. Clarence Clemens
Prifysgol Caerdydd [Cardiff University]
Cardiff, Republic of Cymru
F.W. Norton & Co: Cardiff Edinburgh Dublin Truro
Foreword: Discussions and Dilemmas
The controversies of historians of slavery have been so intense and protracted during the past two decades that they have caught the attention of the entire history profession and regularly featured on mainstream news media. This is inevitable given the obvious implications of an institution which continues to the present day, albeit in modified form. Debates over the origin, conditions, economics and social history of slavery carry an unavoidable nationalistic bias. In the majority of the world, slavery is viewed as a morally abhorrent institution, or at best as an outmoded relic of a feudal past. In a small minority of countries, principally the United States, slavery and related institutions persist to the present day.
Throughout this volume I have attempted to approach the topic of slavery objectively. However, given the applicability of any commentary on historical slavery to the present day, it is appropriate that any potential sources of bias for authors on the subject be disclosed, so that readers can form their own judgement about the validity of the opinions expressed. I was born in 1901 in the American state of Veracruz, to an American father and a Welsh mother. My parents left America in 1903, along with my paternal grandfather, whose vigorously expressed opinions on American slavery and racial attitudes had aroused enough ire that he found it prudent to move to another country. My parents migrated to Cardiff, and I completed my schooling here, receiving both a B.A. and Ph. D. in History (on the development and decline of the Atlantic slave trade) from Prifysgol Caerdydd, completing the latter in 1927. My postdoctoral studies were interrupted by the outbreak of war in Europe, and I relocated to Australia after the war, lecturing and researching at the University of Sydney (later New Cambridge University) until 1945, when I returned to Cymru. My research interests have been about the many forms of indenture which have existed throughout history, from those under the Pharaohs to those under the Presidents. And while I have not attempted to make any value judgements in my analysis of the causes and features of slavery, I do not attempt to disguise the fact that I personally believe it to be a great moral injustice.
This volume has been divided into four parts. Part One, “Sugar and Slavery”, describes the historical origins of New World slavery, from the pre-Columbus Portuguese slave ships, to the initial enslavement of the native American inhabitants, to the Atlantic slave trade and the development of Caribbean sugar plantations. Part Two, “From Jamestown to Jefferson”, describes the development of slavery in North America from early colonial days until the War of 1811. Part Three, “Abolition and Advancement”, describes the contrary trends of abolitionism in all of the Americas except for the United States and Brazil, and the corresponding advancement of the institution of chattel slavery within those nations until the 1880s, a decade which includes the final end of the Atlantic slave trade and the Third Mexican War, and which brought considerable changes to the institution. Part Four, “Peons and Persistence”, describes the modern forms of American slavery as a social and economic system...
Chapter 12: The Changing Face of American Slavery: 1850-1890
In 1850, only one significant form of slavery existed in the United States: race-based chattel slavery of Negroes. This was part of a system which had been developing in the New World for 350 years, and continued in the USA despite being increasingly anachronistic in most of the New World. The United States had the implicit and sometimes explicit aim of forming a strictly organised racial hierarchy, with whites on top and only enslaved Negroes beneath, no intermediate grades, and all other races excluded.
Indeed, in that year it was conceivable that this would be the eventual historical result. The United States had only a few of what most considered minor exceptions to this racial classification. There were still some free Negroes who had long been encouraged to migrate back to Liberia, but who were already being considered for expulsion or re-enslavement, an outcome which would follow in only a handful of years. Closer examination of historical records found that the expulsion was for many years less than complete, with many de facto free Negroes remaining in Maryland and Delaware, in particular, but it remained the American ideal. Aside from the free Negroes, there were only a handful of marginalised Spanish-speakers in the former Texas, and the surviving Amerindians who were being pushed back with the ever-moving frontier of white settlement. At this stage, no Amerindians had been enslaved for centuries, and while they had been killed, dispossessed and driven out, those in the further reaches still retained some independence. Some of the tribes with longer contact with whites had become considered honorary whites, particularly the protected tribes in the Indian Territory, some of whom had even become slaveholders.
Yet this developing pattern of stability would soon be fragmented. The immense territorial gains of the First Mexican War brought into the United States a substantial population of Spanish-speaking Catholics, too numerous to be readily assimilated but for whom the existing racial theories did not permit enslavement, and in some cases required acceptance as white citizens. The American involvement in the Yucatan peninsula brought them into contact with another form of servitude, with a kind of serfdom reimposed on the Maya, although with strict legal protections for the enserfed inhabitants. The further acquisition of territory in Nicaragua and Cuba soon meant that the United States would develop further forms of servitude, as the nature of American slavery was broadened and redefined. This would have considerable consequences not only for the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of Central America and the Caribbean, but also the remaining Amerindian tribes, and even some white inhabitants who were classed as convicts...
Recent scholarship, in accounting for the changing face of American slavery, has done much to revise and re-examine the old view that the establishment of new forms of indenture were a continuation and extension of existing social systems in pre-annexation Central America. This view was championed by the majority of historians in the early twentieth century, drawing on mostly American sources that described nineteenth-century Mexico as still involving considerable indentured labour in the form of debt-peonage and sometimes de facto slavery. Given the difficulty of accessing pre-annexation hacienda records, this view was long defensible (see e.g. Brown, 1912, American Property Rights). However, once more detailed hacienda records became available, it became clear that nineteenth-century Mexican debt-peonage had simply involved a system of advance payment, and that any restrictions on free workers were relatively minor. There were occasional exceptions to this rule, particularly in Chiapas and the Yucatan, but the large bulk of the population were free in fact and in law during the Mexican era.
A revised view of the origins of American indentured labour has been developed in considerable detail by Michelle Davies in Slaves, Serfs and Peons (1947). Davies’ thesis is that the American system of indenture is indeed linked to pre-annexation institutions, but only in a specific area, that of the Yucatan. Davies advances the view that the Yucatan served as a microcosm as the United States acquired new inhabitants who did not fit into their old neat biracial view of the world, and that in the struggle to assimilate these inhabitants, a new social system developed which would be the exemplar that Americans elsewhere sought to follow. According to this view, the old Yucatan institution of serfdom was adopted and remoulded by the United States into the first instance of a new social system [1]. This Yucatan thesis includes two critical assumptions, firstly that there was considerable social continuity in the Yucatan or indeed anywhere within old Mexico after annexation, and secondly that events within the Yucatan had much impact beyond the borders of that peninsula. Both of these assumptions are flawed.
The first assumption, that of social continuity, is contradicted by a closer examination of the social history of Mexico. The American conquest shattered the entire social system of Mexico, both in the Yucatan and elsewhere. A portion of the wealthier pre-annexation population of Mexico survived as free and even influential citizens, but they had to adapt to a new racial, legal and social system imposed from outside. This social transformation altered their society from a free populace to one where large portions of the population were either indentured or otherwise disenfranchised and marginalised. While the annexation allowed an uninterrupted tradition of property ownership, the legal and economic system of old Mexico was overthrown as it was integrated into the United States. The continuation of the label ‘peon’ and the continuous land ownership of many of the richer haciendados should not obscure the fundamental social revolution which took place in the country.
Even within the Yucatan, it is difficult to build a case for social continuity. While the label serf was re-imposed on the Mayan population of the Yucatan, the new institution had very little in common with the former serfdom. The American conquerors, while allowing the ladino inhabitants considerable latitude, took care to create a new regulated system of indenture with more rights for the serfs, especially in the right to marry and limitations on hours of work, which addressed the most serious of their grievances. More importantly, the institution of serfdom is itself something of a special case within American indentured labour, one created for the Yucatan and which was only rarely imposed in that state. It is therefore difficult to see the Yucatan as the basis for the development of the new American indentured system. It may be responsible for the reinstitution of serfdom, but not the broader system of debt-peonage which became the hallmark of the United States’ expansion into Central America.
If there was a single microcosm for American indenture, it was Nicaragua, not the Yucatan or elsewhere in Mexico. Here, in a place where not even the fiction of continuity with the old institution of peon could be claimed, the new system of indentured labour was shaped. By the time the USA annexed Nicaragua, the prerequisites for the system had been created elsewhere, particularly with the Citizenship Act of 1859. This was the American response to their self-perceived racial crisis after acquiring so many inhabitants in northern Mexico and Cuba who did not fit into their old biracial view of the world. With Nicaragua being the first Central American territory acquired after the passage of this Act, it became the testing-ground for the successful implementation of the new system. In some respects the Americans claimed they were resurrecting an old social system, but that of indentured labour as used in colonial North America, not the peonage of Central America. However, it soon became clear that where the old colonial indenture had been for a fixed number of years, the new debt-peonage system would be for life...
Chapter 13: The Nicaraguan Experiment
The United States had originally acquired Nicaragua through the actions of filibusters, who had entered to support the conservative faction within that country. From the very beginning they were trying to support the wealthy landowners against liberal forces (and also create their own powerbase), and this pattern was to be repeated in later U.S. acquisitions. Many of these freebooters had seen service in the Yucatan or in the First Mexican War. While they did not try to create the system of serfdom which was being bloodily reinstituted in the Yucatan, they did seek to create effective second-class citizenship for the poorer inhabitants of Nicaragua.
The filibuster period in Nicaraguan history saw first the military defeat of the liberal forces, then an attempt to create a rigid political hierarchy. This would divide ‘citizens’, which included the wealthy landowners and some acquiescent factions within the local Catholic clergy, and the more militant supporters of the landowners, and ‘non-citizens’, which largely included the rest of the population. The filibusters’ intention, as expressed in the private declaration of President Lansdowne, was to exclude the non-citizens from the mainstream political and civil life, gradually eroding their civil rights until they were in a state of de facto serfdom. This model did not appear to include any legal forms of serfdom, and it is suggestive that the development of the American indentured system would have been considerably different if the filibusters had remained in control of Nicaragua.
Yet this cannot be tested, for the social models of the filibuster era were never fully implemented. They had successfully marginalised the lower classes of Nicaraguan society from political power, at least in the short term, but any further erosion of civil rights was cut short with a Honduran invasion of Nicaragua and the reluctance of many of the regime’s Nicaraguan supporters to go as far in disenfranchising their own countrymen as the filibusters intended. Despite defeating this invasion, the shock and potential for further war saw President Lansdowne seek American annexation, which followed shortly thereafter.
With the annexation of Nicaragua, the United States now had a new territory in which to apply the vague provisions of the Citizenship Act. This Act variously classes peons and serfs as racially-based distinct forms of bound labour (to a particular location, in such cases), debt-slaves as a non-raced based category of those owing labour in payment of a debt, convicts as those who had been stripped of citizenship as punishment for crimes or for armed resistance to American forces, and the catch-all class of non-citizens for those inhabitants who were to be excluded from political power but who could not be classed in any other category.
These new categories of indenture (not slavery, but not true political freedom either) could now be applied to anyone in Nicaragua who didn't fit the category of citizen. How vigorously they were applied varied enormously, however. Essentially there were rich local Nicaraguans classed as citizens, American immigrants, a few slaves being brought in by optimistic landowners, and a large mass of 'non-citizens' who were being marginalised but as yet only rarely enslaved. A very few Nicaraguans were willing to accept a form of indenture, under the category of peon, in exchange for protection and food.
The far more common reaction was resistance to the loss of freedom. Some of this involved passive resistance, sometimes military resistance, and sometimes fleeing the country. The American reaction to the military resistance involved a combination of direct action and improvements to infrastructure and communications in the key populated areas. To fund this campaign and improvement, the United States levelled an occupation tax on the population of Nicaragua (although this required a constitutional amendment before it could be imposed). The application of the tax, however, was imposed according to chosen needs. Taxes were not imposed on the wealthy landowners unless they were active opponents of the American occupation, and their militia supporters were similarly exempted. The occupation tax was imposed on the rest of the population, who then had fight, try to pay the tax (which they could not afford), accept some form of indenture either to a private citizen (and thus be exempted), accept indenture to the U.S. government to pay the tax, or flee to an outlying part of Nicaragua where the American writ did not run, or otherwise out of the country.
The effect of this tax was to produce a large class of indentured Nicaraguans, a few peons who had accepted bound service to one landowner or another, and a much larger class of debt-slaves who theoretically owed service to the federal government in payment of their debt. In practice, the local landowners were permitted to buy out the debt of these debt-slaves and then use their labour, initially with the agreement of the debt-slaves, albeit with strict limits on how readily a debt-slave could withhold agreement. The debt-slaves had assumed that their debts could indeed be worked off, and a fraction of them did earn freedom, but the large majority did not. This was partly due to further taxes being imposed in the early years until the last military resistance was broken [2], and partly due to the inherent injustices of the system. Landowners kept account of how debt-slaves’ labour could be recorded against their debts, but were free to imposed assorted charges and exorbitant interest rates.
Nonetheless, there were restrictions on the treatment of debt-slaves that were more lenient than those imposed on chattel slaves. There were limitations on hours of work, and physical punishment required a court order from a magistrate, rather than being an unrestricted right as with slaveholders [3]. This was in large part because debt-slaves were legally considered people, unlike slaves, and also to limit the dangers of future rebellion.
The system of debt-slavery and peonage was converted into a generational indenture system by the provision that the debts could be inherited, and which further classed the family unit rather than an individual as the legal entity responsible for the debt. The purpose for the family classification was twofold: partly to minimise discontent amongst debt-slaves who would otherwise have their families ripped apart, but also for legal and administrative convenience. Since the debts were hereditary, legally registered marriage and descendants were necessary to complete the process. The hereditary nature of the debt also made working it off much more difficult. Dependent children all had to be fed, boarded, schooled and clothed, all of which became a debt which acquired interest, and thus each person began their life born into bondage.
The Nicaraguan social system soon produced other requirements to make it a fully-fledged indenture system, including compulsory identification papers and the first suggestions that tattoos should be required as identification. It also produced some unexpected events, such as the reluctance of the Nicaraguan inhabitants to be called debt-slaves or in any way associated with slaves. This led to the convention of referring to debt-slaves as peons, and later the legally mandated term of peon being applied to all forms of indentured labour within Nicaragua, except for chattel slaves. The same indentured system adapted to an urban setting relatively quickly, with most of the poorer city dwellers owing labour to either a resident citizen or rural landowner. The most common practice was for urban artisans and merchants to continue their own labour or commerce in exchange for payment of a weekly fee to their master, in lieu of labour to work off the debt-payment. The more successful debt-slaves earned freedom, which was more readily obtained in an urban setting, while the others were gradually integrated into a system of urban citizens or owing labour to corporations. It was this system which would be applied, with local modifications, as the United States acquired other territory in Central America and the Caribbean...
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The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified by the North California Legislature on 12 December 1860, the 20th state to do so, and went into force on 1 January 1861.
The Congress of the United States shall have power, in Territories in rebellion or threatened with rebellion, to lay and collect capitations to support the operations of armed forces in such Territories, and to support the construction of such internal improvements as may be necessary to prevent or suppress such rebellion, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
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Taken from: “Without Conscience Or Colour: The Rise and Rise of American Slavery”
(c) 1952 by Prof. Clarence Clemens
Prifysgol Caerdydd [Cardiff University]
Cardiff, Republic of Cymru
F.W. Norton & Co: Cardiff Edinburgh Dublin Truro
Chapter 14: Peonage In Expansion
The implementation of peonage in Mexico depended on the time of conquest. With the exception of the special case of the Yucatan, where serfdom rather than peonage became the dominant form of indenture, former Mexico can be divided into four tiers of states according to the time of annexation and the initial numbers of Spanish-speakers. The first two tiers were those acquired in the First Mexican War: one tier including the territory which had few Spanish-speakers or where those Spanish-speakers would quickly be outnumbered by anglo immigrants, and which would become the states of New Mexico, Deseret, Nevada, and the Californias; and the other tier consisting of the eventual states of Sonora, Chihuahua, North Durango, New Leon and Tamaulipas. The other tiers were the territory acquired in the Second and Third Mexican Wars, respectively.
Within these tiers, the first-tier states would have virtually no native peons, with their local inhabitants being assimilated relatively early. The second-tier states had far more free inhabitants, as many of the locals were granted freedom once the Citizenship Act went through, particularly in Sonora and Chihuahua [4]. With the third and fourth tiers, however, far more of the inhabitants became classed as peons. The acquisition of the fourth-tier of Mexican states would have the most long-term impact on the indentured system within the United States. Since the 1860s, there had been a migration of peons to the older American states, which increased with each decade, but which in the 1890s became a much greater flood of immigrants as much of the population of former Mexico began to migrate within the United States. The incorporation of these labourers brought about the formalisation of two prices for peons, with both a legal ‘debt-price’ and a ‘market value’, with the price of the latter moving according to market signals and being the price where peons would be traded within the United States. This market value was often quite high. Indeed, the booming industrial economy of the USA in the 1890s meant that some Americans began to call for further labour to be brought in from even further afield, despite the resistance of some planters who found that while slave prices were relatively stable, they were not increasing substantially as they had during the first six decades of the nineteenth century [5]...
Chapter 15: The Struggles of the Amerindians
The fate of the Amerindian peoples in the New World appeared ominous long before the United States appeared as a nation; European diseases had decimated their populations, and even in colonial North America attempts were made to enslave them. When the Amerindians obtained some measure of support from whites, it was usually an alliance of convenience against a common foe, such as the Indian Confederation supported by the English against the United States.
As the United States expanded, the prospects for the Amerindians continued to be poor. None of the tribes succeeded in holding on to most of their ancestral lands; those who were not killed were dispossessed. A fortunate few Amerindian peoples became the “Five Civilized Tribes” who were protected in the Indian Territory, but otherwise none of the Amerindian peoples north of the Rio Grande survived as cultural entities within U.S. territory. Some of those further south had already been largely conquered by the Spanish, and thus shared the same fate as other Mexicans, although some of the more independent tribes who had held out against Mexican rule now found that a worse fate awaited them.
During the expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the Amerindians were simply driven out of territory that American settlers wanted. This began to change in the second half of the century, after the provisions of the Citizenship Act. The far northern United States saw wars of extermination with the survivors being driven over the border into Canada. In the rest of the United States, the still independent Amerindian tribes were treated instead as rebels against American authority, and they were thus ‘convicted’ and sentenced to what was in practice slave labour in distant parts of the United States, in what became the first instances of labour camps within the United States. Thus many of the Amerindians ended up in the Yucatan or New Leon, working cotton and sisal plantations. This fate awaited the Comanches, the Kiowas, the Cheyenne, the Yaquis, the Tarahumara, and the Kumeyaay. A few peoples, most notably the Apaches, were never enslaved; their military resistance was fierce enough that the Americans eventually needed to resort to using some Apaches as allies against their still-independent compatriots, and while the latter were exterminated the former were granted citizenship. But the general trend throughout most of the USA in the second half of the nineteenth century was to effectively enslave most of the Amerindians...
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[1] See DoD #56 for a fuller description of the Yucatan system and the writings of Michelle Davies, which Clemens disputes.
[2] Most Nicaraguan resistance was broken by 1864, except for the intermittently enforced U.S. writ on the Mosquito Coast.
[3] Usually, the threat of visiting a magistrate was enough to bring reluctant debt-slaves into line, and the landowners figured out very quickly that positive incentives or the threat of removal of privileges was a more effective motivator than punishment in any case.
[4] Many of the Sonoran ranchers, in particular, were favoured for their support against the Apaches.
[5] Slave prices are not actually declining, because slaves still have some advantages over peons. They can be made to work for longer hours, do not have even limited options as to where they can be bought and sold, and most significantly because peons almost always refuse to work in gang labour conditions.
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Thoughts?
Kaiser Wilhelm III
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