[Peace-discuss] 5 Myths re Why the South Seceded (James Loewen) wall

Tue Apr 19 22:54:32 CDT 2011

    April 10, 2008
    Books of The Times
    What Emancipation Didn't Stop After All
    By JANET MASLIN

    SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
    The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II
    By Douglas A. Blackmon
    Illustrated. 468 pages. Doubleday. $29.95.

In "Slavery by Another Name" Douglas A. Blackmon eviscerates one of our 
schoolchildren's most basic assumptions: that slavery in America ended with the 
Civil War. Mr. Blackmon unearths shocking evidence that the practice persisted 
well into the 20th century. And he is not simply referring to the virtual 
bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from 
farming.

He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by 
chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. 
That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.

All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy, gambling, 
changing employers without permission, false pretense, "selling cotton after 
sunset": these were all grounds for arrest in rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. 
Blackmon explains in describing incident after incident, an arrest could mean a 
steep fine. If the accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.

Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased convicts to private 
businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest rates and the labor needs of local 
businesses could conveniently be made to dovetail.

For the coal, lumber, turpentine, brick, steel and other interests described 
here, a steady stream of workers amounted to a cheap source of fuel. And the 
welfare of such workers was not the companies' concern. So in the case of John 
Clarke, convicted of "gaming" on April 11, 1903, a 10-day stint in the 
Sloss-Sheffield mine in Coalburg, Ala., could erase his fine. But it would take 
an additional 104 days for him to pay fees to the sheriff, county clerk and 
witnesses who appeared at his trial.

In any case, Mr. Clarke survived for only one month and three days in this 
captivity. The cause of his death was said to be falling rock. At least another 
2,500 men were incarcerated in Alabama labor camps at that time.

This is a very tough story to tell, and not just because of its extremely 
graphic details. Mr. Blackmon, who was reared in the Mississippi Delta and is 
now the Atlanta bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal, must set forth a huge 
chunk of history. He writes of how the emancipation of slaves left Southern 
plantations "not just financially but intellectually bereft" because the slaves' 
knowledge and experience could be indispensable; how the rise of industry 
reshaped the South; how a new generation of African-Americans who had not known 
slavery found themselves threatened by it; how slavery intersected with efforts 
to unionize labor; and even how, once blacks lost their voting rights but still 
had clout at the Republican convention, they were strategically important to 
President Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 election campaign.

The roles of elected officials in acknowledging and stopping this new slavery 
are a crucial part of Mr. Blackmon's story. Needless to say, it is complicated. 
The book describes the 1903 investigation authorized by the Justice Department, 
the trial of accused slave traders and the aggressive stance taken by Warren S. 
Reese Jr., the United States attorney in Alabama, in prosecuting his case.

"As allegations of slavery in his jurisdiction multiplied, Reese demonstrated a 
prehensile comprehension of the murky legal framework governing black labor," 
Mr. Blackmon writes, "and a hard-nosed unwillingness to ignore the implications 
of the extraordinary evidence that soon poured into his office."

The resulting trial is among this book's many zealously researched episodes. 
(Mr. Blackmon's sources range from corporate records to one "Sheriff's Feeding 
Account, 1899-1907.") Its outcome was promising, but there were loopholes. As 
one sign of this story's complexity, consider that the traders were tried on 
charges of peonage.

Those charges turned out not to be applicable in Alabama. And in another such 
case, lawyers would argue that the charge should instead be involuntary 
servitude. Reformers were dealing with "a constitutional limbo in which slavery 
as a legal concept was prohibited by the Constitution, but no statute made an 
act of enslavement explicitly illegal."

Mr. Blackmon's way of organizing this material is to bookend his legal and 
historical chronicle with the personal story of Green Cottenham, a black man 
born free in the mid-1880s. This gets "Slavery by Another Name" off to a shaky 
start, if only because many of Mr. Blackmon's wordings are speculative. The book 
underscores that if black Americans' enslavement to U.S. Steel (which, when it 
acquired the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, became a prime offender) 
is analogous to the slavery that occurred in Nazi Germany, it also emphasizes 
that the American slaves' illiteracy meant there would be no written records of 
their experience. So imagining Mr. Green's experience becomes something of a 
stretch.

But as soon as it gets to more verifiable material, "Slavery by Another Name" 
becomes relentless and fascinating. It exposes what has been a mostly unexplored 
aspect of American history (though there have been dissertations and a few books 
from academic presses). It creates a broad racial, economic, cultural and 
political backdrop for events that have haunted Mr. Blackmon and will now haunt 
us all. And it need not exaggerate the hellish details of intense racial strife.

The torment that Mr. Blackmon catalogs is, if anything, understated here. But it 
loudly and stunningly speaks for itself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/10/books/10masl.html?ref=douglasablackmon

On 4/19/11 10:41 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> "[Much of the post-Civil War history of African-Americans] remains generally 
> unknown. It is, of course, known that slaves were formally freed during the 
> American Civil War, and that after ten years of relative freedom, the gains 
> were mostly obliterated by 1877 as Reconstruction was brought to an end.
>
> "But the horrifying story is only now being researched seriously, most 
> recently in a study called 'Slavery by another name' by Wall Street Journal 
> editor Douglas Blackmon. His work fills out the bare bones with shocking 
> detail, showing how after Reconstruction African-American life was effectively 
> criminalized, so that black males virtually became a permanent slave labor 
> force. Conditions, however, were far worse than under slavery, for good 
> capitalist reasons. Slaves were property, a capital investment, and were 
> therefore cared for by their masters. Those criminalized for merely existing 
> are similar to wage laborers, in that the masters have no responsibility for 
> them, except to make sure that enough are available. That was, in fact, one of 
> the arguments used by slave owners to claim that they were more moral than 
> those who hired labor. The argument was understood well enough by northern 
> workers, who regarded wage labor as preferable to literal slavery only in that 
> it was temporary, a position shared by Abraham Lincoln among others.
>
> "Criminalized black slavery provided much of the basis for the American 
> industrial revolution of the late 19th and early 20th century. It continued 
> until World War II, when free labor was needed for war industry. During the 
> postwar boom, which relied substantially on the dynamic state sector that had 
> been established under the highly successful semi-command economy of World War 
> II, African-American workers gained a certain degree of freedom for the first 
> time since post-Civil War Reconstruction. But since the 1970s that process is 
> being reversed, thanks in no small measure to the 'war on drugs,' which in 
> some respects is a contemporary analogue to the criminalization of black life 
> after the Civil War -- and also provides a fine disciplined labor force, often 
> in private prisons, in gross violation of international labor regulations..."
>
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