Peonage and the Perpetuation of Slavery After Emancipation

Introduction: Emancipation's Unfinished Promise

The emancipation of slaves did not lead to the dismantling of the underlying structures of slavery. Its most formidable social, economic, and political institutions persisted in spite of federal legislation following the end of the Civil War. Weak federal legislation enabled the racist social and political climate in the American South to fester, depriving all Americans of the opportunity to experience a "more perfect union." The PBS documentary Slavery by Another Name examines the perpetuation of slavery under the guise of the peonage system. The peonage system represents one of the great failures of Reconstruction. PBS based its Slavery by Another Name documentary on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book of the same name by Douglas A. Blackmon. The documentary adds a visual dimension to the harrowing imagery Blackmon writes about in his book. Slavery by Another Name raises difficult, important, and often uncomfortable questions about the failure of the United States to live up to its promise of "liberty and justice for all," even when that promise had been enshrined in constitutional law. Peonage exhibits the role of racism in American society, reveals the systematic ways racism was used to perpetuate white hegemony, and explains the multigenerational impact on African-Americans. An examination of peonage in particular demonstrates the deep racial, cultural, and geographic divide that characterizes the United States of America.

The Mechanics of Peonage and Debt Servitude

What peonage did was to appease the South at its moment of greatest humility. Akin to offering sanctuary to Nazi war criminals after World War Two, the appeasement of Southern lawmakers and landowners may have been good politics for President Johnson in the wake of the Lincoln assassination — after all, Johnson was a Southern Democrat with cultural and political ties to the region. Blackmon refers to the situation as "re-enslavement," and that is precisely what peonage was. Peonage is also referred to as debt slavery or debt servitude.

Under this system, whites would fabricate crimes — or exaggerate actual ones for a white-dominated court system — and accuse newly freed African-Americans. The courts would fine the accused citizens, who, having just been freed from slavery, could not afford to pay. Complicit in the conspiracy were local businessmen who pretended to help by offering to cover the fine through a loan. In order to repay the loan, the person was forced into a contract "to work for him without pay until the debt was paid off" (Wagner, 2012, p. 3). The same dynamic played out in a number of different forms, including sharecropping schemes. These scams seem obvious in retrospect, and it is difficult to comprehend how completely and inextricably racism had become embedded in the American political system. This was not a matter of the South acting in a rogue fashion; it represented the absolute complicity of the federal government in allowing the system of peonage to continue.

Social Awareness and Federal Complicity

At the time peonage and other "slavery by another name" phenomena were occurring, commentators looked on with shock; yet neither the federal government nor local citizens did anything about it. Chesnutt (1904) was already keenly aware that peonage was slavery by another name: "Under the renting system, the crop mortgage laws leave the laborer but little more than a slave to the soil, while at the worst the Southern labor system presents peonage, or the new slavery." The problem was not only apparent in hindsight — it was immediately visible to all who cared to see. This shows that, like German citizens during the Nazi era, many Americans stood by and watched while their neighbors were tortured, beaten, killed, and oppressed.

Writing in 1904, Chesnutt also identified the problem with the slow eradication of slavery: "nothing is slower than social movements. A form of government may be radically changed and laws easily enacted without modifying for a long period thereafter the social customs, the habits of thought, the feelings, in other words the genius, of a people." In other words, emancipating the slaves and passing a few constitutional amendments was not sufficient. Racist Americans clung to the old social order tenaciously.

Lingering Effects on African-American Society

Peonage had a long list of lingering effects, most of which remain evident in the twenty-first century. Effectively, peonage prevented the integration of African-Americans into mainstream society by erecting insurmountable barriers to social, economic, and political progress. Self-empowerment was a long, hard-fought battle achieved by very few — most of whom had left the painful memories of plantation life for a new start in the North. In reality, the majority of African-Americans remained enslaved in order to pay off false debts, and those debts were passed on to their children, perpetuating economic, social, and political oppression across generations. Peonage also shaped the way otherwise well-meaning whites perceived Black Americans: because they had been processed through the criminal justice system, African-Americans were collectively viewed as dangerous criminals.

The sociological component of peonage thus created a vast underclass of people labeled as "criminal." Labeling theory in sociology and criminology holds that individuals or whole groups are "tagged" with a deviant designation and that, once those tags are in place, they are difficult to remove — because "the stigma that accompanies the deviant 'tag' causes a person to fall into deeper nonconformity" (Becker, n.d.). The label creates a personal identity and a sense of belonging to a deviant subculture. When the dominant culture refuses to welcome the outsider, the subculture strengthens and flourishes, and before long the "criminal" label becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Furthermore, the entire structure of a white-dominant hierarchy with a Black "deviant" subordinate culture created long-lasting resentments. African-Americans understandably did not trust whites. Just as Native Americans had been deceived and maneuvered into relocating to Oklahoma, African-Americans were promised liberty and given none. Having endured enough deception, the African-American community evolved into an oppositional culture by nature. America developed deep cultural rifts, and the chasm between the dominant in-group culture and the out-group deviant subculture grew throughout the twentieth century.

One important consequence of peonage was that the system inherently prevented African-Americans from organizing and building a cohesive community. Slavery had already done enormous damage by severing family and community ties — mothers and children were ripped apart, as were husbands and wives. African-Americans had few role models or community leaders to help them organize and overcome their circumstances. W.E.B. Du Bois and other early twentieth-century thinkers helped provide a framework for change, but it would take generations for those changes to manifest. The vestiges of peonage are visible today in the fact that poverty and race remain deeply entwined in nearly every part of the United States, with inner-city poverty reminding us of the legacy of slavery by another name.

One direct vestige of the peonage system was the Black Codes, which restricted the social, economic, and political behaviors of African-Americans. When we speak of institutionalized racism, the Black Codes and the peonage system that preceded them illustrate precisely how racism becomes embedded in a dysfunctional culture. Peonage evolved into a Jim Crow culture in the South, which would be challenged in the mid-twentieth century. The Black Nationalism movement represented a cohesive response to systematic oppression, and the hostile reactions to Black Nationalism and Black Power reveal how little white Americans understood the chasm they had created. Those calls for continued subjugation were met by the sensitive, patient, and spiritually grounded response of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Conclusion: Slavery by Another Name

Slavery by Another Name is a powerful documentary that deepens our understanding of American history. We tend to sweep things like peonage under the historical rug — dark and uncomfortable chapters we prefer to forget. Yet the information is already documented. There are still people alive who endured the tyranny of slavery under a new name, and their stories, combined with rigorous scholarly research, reveal the nefarious nature of racism and how it manifested in American society. Criminologists can point to labeling theory, anomie, and strain theory to explain the correlations between race and incarceration, and most of those theoretical accounts are probably correct in part. The peonage story is only one chapter in the long history of how African-Americans have been systematically oppressed on physical, psychological, cultural, political, and economic levels — a history that continues to shape American life today.

References

Becker. (n.d.). FSU Criminology. Retrieved from

Chesnutt, C.W. (1904). Peonage, or the new slavery. In Voice of the Negro, 1 (Sept. 1904): 394–397.

Cutler, J. (2012). PBS doc shines light on shameful period in American history. Zap2it. Retrieved from http://www.zap2it.com/news/zap-slavery-name-story,0,7916225.story

Slavery by Another Name. [Documentary Film]. PBS. 2012.

Society in Reconstruction. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.shmoop.com/reconstruction/society.html

Wagner, N.O. (2012). Slavery by Another Name history background. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/media/cms_page_media/128/Slavery%20by%20Another%20Name%20History%20Background_Final.pdf