I heard a law professor remark in passing that the 13th amendment to the US Constitution outlawed slavery. Nonsense, of course. Anyone who takes an oath to protect, defend and uphold the US Constitution supports slavery. Read the entire 13th Amendment for yourself, and decide if I am right:
AMENDMENT XIII
Passed by Congress January 31, 1865. Ratified December 6, 1865.
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2.
Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Now, the word "except" is no error, the plain english meaning today is the same as 1865, and that is, slavery is allowed, as long as it is state-run, that is state-owned slaves. Now today people will say, "O that is just to stop people from calling a jail term 'slavery...'" That is anachronistic, in 1865 everyone knew exactly what slavery was, so they knew what they were doing passing this law. The law was intended to permit slavery, if it was not private ownership. The civil war did not end slavery, it made it constitutional.
So if it was constitutional, why didn't slave states convict people, make them state slaves, and continue slavery? Well, the states did. And governors and other privileged people got fantastically wealthy working state-owned slaves, in the South. From the Turpentine swamps of Florida to the Parchman Farm, a little known part of US history is slavery was alive and well after the civil war in the South.
I descend from a family of slave-owners myself, and my father had an ex-slave for a servant as a child. When I take Rev. Ralph Abernathy's witness of slavery, along with stories from my family, I understand that slavery is undeniably evil, and I ponder what horrors I accept today senselessly as my ancestors once accepted in their time. But private slavery, by all accounts was a economic system, with checks and balances, if only grounded in raw economics. Slaves cost about $700 when that was a lot of money. People were generally careful with their slaves, if for no reason other than to avoid financial loss.
Rutgers History Professor David M. Oshinsky, details this time and place you never heard of, even though it lasted into the 1970's (along with the Tuskegee experiments In Alabama, where the forerunner of the Center for Disease Control let blacks go untreated for syphilis to see what would happen. They learned that blacks suffered just like whites if untreated.)
His book focusses on the Parchman Farm in Mississippi, where we see that again we cannot have government involved in anything. When slavery is legal as punishment, after due process, the results is "worse than slavery," the title of Oshinsky's book, and a quote from ex-slaves who got caught up in the Parchman Farm system. The simple fact is when the government runs slavery, you can work slaves to death, because they cost you nothing. There are always more people for the state to go out, charge, try, convict, and bring into the death camps.
The complexities of this system, and the human reactions to it all are the most fascinating aspects of the story. I put Oshinsky up there with Jonathan Spence and Simon Schama as a first rate historian (if not as prolific).
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