Non-racialized slavery in the US

Vivisfugue

Banned
There is a great saying about black America, power and the moral high ground--black folks only problem with slavery is that they were the slaves.
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- Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic

The above quote crystallized a thought I'd been having after watching the series Rome: what if the indentured servitude system in colonial America (where white convicts or debtors worked without pay for white masters, although their status wasn't heritable) hadn't been replaced by race-based slavery, or had continued alongside it? That is, both whites and blacks, and any other ethnic group that pops up in America, would be equally liable to forced servitude.

Would slavery have ended sooner, later, or not at all? What might modern America look like? The question, I think, turns on how/why the race system overtook the class/criminal system in the first place, so any light that anyone might add on that score is welcome.
 

Kidblast

I think it would have been much harder for people from Europe to agree to move to the United States. Why move to somewhere where you could be kidnapped into slavery?
 

proximefactum

Rome is a great example of different types of slavery co-existing within one political system. So I'd say it's a good place to start in your research.

There were many different shades of Roman servitude, and some slaves could hold possessions, money etc. Some slaves were actually powerful to the point where they were better off materially than many freed people. An example of this would be a farm overseer that managed the property in an owner's absence. Often a landowner would give high ranking slaves a salary, a place to live, marital rights, and other advantages in return for being a middleman with other owners and/or the de facto head of a farm. As you can guess this often fell into abuse.

The Bible has a good example of a powerful slave overseer -- see Luke 16:1-8. That farm overseer stole from the owner, and had to make up the loss or be thrown in prison or worse. So he in turn intimidates his slave subordinates into making up his loss. Because he could cover his losses in the end the slave overseer remained on good terms with the landowner. It's clear from other contemporary Roman writers etc. that overseers often had more power than the owners over slaves. I don't think the Gospel writer(s) wouldn't have included this in a parable if this situation wasn't well known to listeners.

Also many slaves were freed and achieved quite high places in government and commerce, for example ... a very popular theme in Roman literature. Nevertheless slaves weren't "indentured" -- a person was enslaved and was manumitted for a great number of reasons, but unilaterally on the owner's initiative.

I think an important question about your WI is this: would your WI allow slaves/indentured people quite a wide degree of achievement and economic/social power, and many opportunities for manumission? Or would your system reflect racial/class prejudices to the extent that certain groups would be denied significant powers purely because of racism/prejudice, and few options for manumission/achievement based on their ethnicity? The history of American/European enslavement of other peoples suggests that the Roman model would not easily happen if the American/European OTL model dominates in your WI.
 
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HUCK

The Bible also says if you piss yourself that you can't touch anything holy for 30 days.:)
 

ninebucks

Banned
HUCK said:
I know. What I'm saying is historical. If an Israelite pissed himself he couldn't touch anything sacred.
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You say that as if it isn't a completely reasonable rule.

Anyway, this is a thread about alt-slavery, not silly things the bible may or may not say.
 

Broz

in fact european imigrants, indigenous population, and hispanics, were often used as slaves in both americas
there are numorous acounts of people being forced to work and then recived no wages, wich is unpayed labour, wich is basically slavery
also in manny parts of USA thousands of people without regard to race or sex were sold and traded with and forced to heawy manual labour or exploited as sex-slaves or in any number of other ways
theres an acount of up to 300 or more sex-slaves being found in one whore house during a police raid in the 1890is most of wich were european and underage, you can bet before that things were no better

id say youd need a POD before or during early colonisation, or during the revolution, that sets a presedan for white christians being used as slaves or at least a form of serfdom, maybe on religious or political bases (or if some setlers repeat the european feudal model)
lets say people acused of blasfemy, heresy or similar sin get to work it out to take some load of the soul, then it slowly becomes legalised, or captured loyalists are put into some kind of rent-a-labourer camps
then when capitalism hits the fan thats all you need

no realy white slavery was as normal in America as it was in England or France or Hungary, forced labour of ewery kind was as normal as sifilis
 
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Vivisfugue

Banned
Broz said:
id say youd need a POD before or during early colonisation, or during the revolution, that sets a presedan for white christians being used as slaves or at least a form of serfdom, maybe on religious or political bases (or if some setlers repeat the european feudal model)
lets say people acused of blasfemy, heresy or similar sin get to work it out to take some load of the soul, then it slowly becomes legalised, or captured loyalists are put into some kind of rent-a-labourer camps
then when capitalism hits the fan thats all you need

no realy white slavery was as normal in America as it was in England or France or Hungary, forced labour of ewery kind was as normal as sifilis
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But Broz, the indentured servitude system was replaced by the racial system.

Perhaps Protestant-Catholic tensions could be exported to the New World (say as a result of the English Civil War and Cromwell's invasion of Ireland). As I recall the first African slave in the future US was sold by the Dutch at Jamestown in 1620. Say you have thirty years of that, and then Cromwell decides to depopulate Ireland for whatever reason and replace the Catholic population with Anglo-Protestants, sending the Irish to America as slaves.

While I've done no more research today (I had some heavy unpaid labor of my own to do ;)), I have an intuition that the racial system got started because it allowed heritability-you'd never have any trouble figuring out who had been born into bondage, and "passing" socially would be near-impossible. However, if there was a strong political push towards multiracial servitude, and you have an early enough POD, then the American social system would form around it. Laws and property rights would coalesce, and I have real doubts the system would be confined to the South (the northern states only ended black slavery in the late 18th/early 19th century). Thus, the only reason slavery might ever end is that it becomes unprofitable as steam and gas power comes on line, and the moral argument against slavery might never occur to anyone (in an America where the economies of both the north and the south are based on bondage) at all.
 

ShadowCommunist2009

Bacon's Rebellion also played a large role in the racialization of slavery in the Americas. It was a multi-racial rebellion involving white landowners, white indentured servants, black indentured servants, black slaves, and sympathetic native americans. It's failure resulted in the Virginia colonial government facing the possibility of the entire mass of lower economic and social classes rising up again, so they began to move in directions to prevent such an uprising.

What happened was that white indentured servitude began to be replaced by the international slave trade. The native americans were dealt with easily enough (the British practiced exclusion concerning indigenous peoples, despite the success of neighboring Spanish and French policies of inclusion), and white immigrants were granted less freedom in labor contracts, thereby requiring that most immigrants had to pay for their passage before coming. The natural result was that the menial labor was done by the other social group of Bacon's Rebellion: the black servants and slaves.

By the time of the Revolution, white indentured servitude was still going on, but the racialisation of slavery had already been finalized. Any POD has to be before Bacon's Rebellion due to the Rebellion's fundamental role in the process itself. All laws that made slavery a strictly African state were made after Virginia began passing its own laws, which didn't start until after Bacon's Rebellion.

Additionally, had the British practiced a policy of inclusion from the start, whereby all resident indigenous people were considered potential or real citizens of the colonies, there would be less socially and politically to do with race, which would have offset the response to Bacon's Rebellion if the rebellion would have still happened. We would probably have seen the economicalisation of slavery versus the racialisation of slavery, where anyone who was not a landowner would be a serf, and we would have developed a feudal economy in the colonies rather than an industrial one.
 

Fiver

Vivisfugue said:
But Broz, the indentured servitude system was replaced by the racial system.
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When a indentured white person ran away, there were plenty of white people who would hide them. When an enslaved Native American ran away, his people would hide them. When a black slave ran away, well, it was a rather long swim across the ocean.
 

TheBarricuda

Follow the Money.

Indentured servants eventually got their freedom and received land on the frontier. All of these former servants were getting politically unruly (see Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia).

Big plantation owners in Virginia found black slaves cheaper (never had to be freed) and easier to manage...didn't have the same rights as Englishmen.

As Virginia went in colonial times...so went the rest of the South.

And then the plantation owners created a racial mythology, enlisting poor whites to keep the black slaves down (the unintended consequence of the cheap labor idea was that there were soon millions of slaves who had to be kept down permanently).

It ain't pretty.
 

Thermopylae

Indentured servitude has, in some ways, distinct advantages over slavery.

Slaves, while not paid wages, are large capital investments, very expensive to buy initially. Indentured servants don't require any large up-front capital investment, and payment is deferred until the end of their contract (in the English colonies I believe this was about 7 years, generally-speaking)

However, it is the end payment which was causing problems for the system of indentured servitude. The contract stipulated that the master, upon the fulfillment of the contract, give a certain amount of his land to the servant. However, the contracts generally said nothing about the quality of said land.

This, after 69 years, created a problem in the colony of Virginia, whereby you have a burgeoning class of hard-scrabble, poor farmers occupying land which was either exhausted of its nutrients (a product of the ever-popular Virginia pastime, tobacco cultivation) or was never particularly fertile in the first place. These lands were of course far from the relatively wealthy coast and thus on the oft-harried western frontier, creating near-constant clashing with the interior tribes.

Now, according to Wikipedia (take that source as you see fit) there are other factors playing into Bacon's Rebellion (the aforementioned problem for the colony of Virginia). Overproduction of tobacco drove the price of tobacco down, which meant that these poor farmers who themselves got into the tobacco racket after their indentured servitude had expired, could no longer turn a profit once in competition with the "Tidewater gentry." This combined with the Navigation Acts, the attempt by the Virginia Colony to diversify its heretofore tobacco-based economy and a need to defend the frontier against Indians and the odd Dutchman resulted in rather high taxes.

So Bacon's Rebellion, the last nail in the coffin for indentured servitude in North America, was the result of high taxes on a class of once-indentured farmers already pushed to the brink by Indian attacks and poor land.

So, given this, one has a few things one could do to created a sustainable system of indentured servitude.

1) Diverse economy early on. I'm not entirely sure how this is possible, unless somebody wants to ISOT a mother-lode of gold into the Tidewater area.

2) More responsible indentured servitude contracts, which would ensure medium- to good-quality land upon the release of an indentured servant. Not sure what PoD would be required for this, this delves into legal history.

3) Ameliorate the pressure applied by the frontier Indians. You have any number of ways of doing this.

4) Somehow avoid the Navigation Acts. This put a lot of strain on farmers of all classes in the colonies.

Just my $0.02. :)
 

strangeland

several ways we could get this to come about:

1. Indentured servitude never dies out, but becomes longer and harsher, appealing to poorer, more destitute European immigrants

2. some evil European ruler decides to get rid of a disliked minority, likely the Jews or Gypsies, by selling them to the American South as slaves.

3. some mechanism is created by which economically desperate poor whites can sell themselves or their excess children into slavery
 
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