Introduction

This chapter challenges the notion that, in the United States, slavery ended with the ratification of the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution in 1865, which declared slavery illegal. Despite its changing legal status, I argue that slavery-like labor forms continued to be part of the story of the United States and of many other places in the world in which the United States had an imperial interest, such as the Hawaiian Islands. While these forms of labor may not have been called “slavery” and, indeed, managers of these laborers often went to great lengths to deny enslavement, in several ways, the lived experiences of those working within these contexts were similar to those of enslaved people. Another way in which slavery had a long and enduring legacy was in the impact that the chattel slavery practiced in the United States prior to the Civil War had on formerly enslaved and their descendants. After the war, the memorialization and remembrance of slavery were politicized and used to prevent African Americans from claiming their civil rights. In effect, after the nation’s traumatic and fratricidal civil war, this was a ritualized forgetting of slavery’s pain and horror, in favor of a reframing of a nostalgic storytelling of a golden age, with the aim of uniting the white population. This re-invention of what American slavery was like then fed into the structural inequalities of the Jim Crow era, which allowed such labor forms as sharecropping and convict labor to perpetuate. Politically, the aftermath of the Civil War, then, far from providing a lasting moment of jubilee, failed the African American population, offering them, and other abused racial groups such as the Chinese, no true and full exit from slavery at that time.

Simultaneously, while the continental United States failed to rid itself of slavery-like labor forms, such forms were adopted and adapted in places such as Hawaii. The newly bonded workers there were not of African descent, but, nonetheless, their experiences of disenfranchisement, coercion, and abusive labor shared similarities with chattel slavery and its aftermath. Their working lives revolved around the cultivation, harvesting, and processing of staple crops such as sugar, and their recruitment into the workforce sometimes involved long transoceanic journeys, including an element of deception on the part of those who convinced them to board the ship. In both contexts, antebellum chattel slavery and the bonded labor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, industrial relations of the period were defined by resistance by workers and the fear of such resistance among the planter class. In the early twentieth century, the fight for an end to coercive practices such as convict labor, and for the rights of workers to be recognized, was gradual and ongoing, led by the workers themselves and achieved with the support of allies such as Mary Grace Quackenbos, whose pioneering work helped to bring to an end the abusive southern system of agricultural peonage, which trapped many freedmen and women into working for their former slave master or mistress.

The Afterlife of Chattel Slavery

We begin by examining how “legal” chattel slavery made way for slavery-like labor practices, and how people (including the formerly enslaved) entered into such practices. The American Civil War damaged the psyche of the people of the United States to such an extent that, without first unpicking the distorting impacts of the war, it is very difficult to understand the transition from chattel slavery to labor systems involving a mixture of bonded, coerced labor and wage labor. Slavery was a tragedy enacted upon the minds and bodies of the African American population of the United States, but white Americans had no time to understand and acknowledge this because they were consumed with the process of trying to rebuild after the war and mitigate its devastating impact on individuals and communities across the country. In the end, much of the effort of Reconstruction, partly designed to give freedmen and women a secure footing within the nation, came to naught because unifying the disparate sections of white America took political priority. This erroneous prioritization, underpinned by increasingly entrenched pseudo-scientific racist and eugenicist theories, had the effect of allowing free rein to those who, for reasons of economic gain or for racial control, had an interest in seeing bonded labor continue. Abolitionists, exhausted after the struggle to end slavery and disappointed by the entrenchment of the former slaveholding power in the South, were unable to prevent these slavery-like labor forms from flourishing.

At the same time, a reframing of the story of chattel slavery that denied its abusive nature, which emphasized its reliance on a consensus between benevolent, paternalistic white planters and contented enslaved people, essentially robbed the horrific system of antebellum slavery of its power to shock and bring about change. It prevented the emergence of a civil rights discourse that treated black Americans with justice and aimed at reparation and, instead, metaphorically trapped them in subordinate positions from which there was no escape, in the words of Steven Dubin, a “symbolic slavery.”1 The failure to provide safe and financially secure future for freedmen and women also literally trapped them in their former places of work so that, as nominally free individuals, they continued to work for former masters under much the same labor conditions as before the war. Sharecropping was a labor relationship in which no wages were paid but, instead, part of the profit from the year’s crop would go to the laborer. In the meantime, before the harvest was sold, in order to buy tools and to subsist, the laborer became indebted to their master. Debt bondage of this kind rendered it illegal for laborers to leave their employer and seek work elsewhere while still owing money, which their illiteracy and lack of experience with contracts ensured was almost always the case. For many freedmen and women, leaving their plantation to search for work was part of their new-found freedom, and moving elsewhere did come to represent a symbolic freedom for the African American community, if not an actual one, facing pernicious racism in all parts of the country. But their freedom of movement was curtailed by local laws designed explicitly to keep the African American population working on their old plantations. Vagrancy laws and curfews were deployed successfully to achieve that end during this period, showing the systemic rather than ad hoc nature of the entrapment of African Americans.

Another example of systemic “slavery by another name,” in Douglas Blackmon’s famous phrase, is convict labor.2 The entrapment into convict labor of many hundreds of African American men and women (as well as a few of other ethnicities) was a collaborative effort by legislators, law enforcement, the justice system, and industrialists. These groups shared two interests, the need for cheap and disposable labor, and the desire to control the movement of the black population and maintain the supremacy of the whites. Black men and women were wrongly accused of minor offenses such as curfew violations, and in sham trials without legal representation were told that a local plantation owner or industrialist who paid their fine required them to work off their debt. Prisoners, who were usually illiterate, were coerced into signing contracts which essentially bound them almost continually to these employers. The working conditions endured by the prisoners were often unspeakable, with no protection against injury, heat or cold, and no healthcare should they fall sick. The accommodation provided was inadequate and exemplary punishments amounting to torture were administered for the most minor refractions. Convict laborers were variously used for private contracts such as in mines, factories, or agriculture, to the benefit of the state who leased them to the contractors. Given the considerable labor unrest in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an important attraction of convict laborers was that they were much cheaper than wage laborers and that they might be used to strike break. Convict laborers might also work for the state directly undertaking public works such as forest clearance, or road or railway building. In other cases, as now, prisoners worked inside state penitentiaries undertaking work akin to slave labor. Classic examples are Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and its equivalent, Parchman, in Mississippi. Angola was situated on an operational plantation, which during the antebellum period had been staffed by enslaved people, and in the post-emancipation era was then simply adapted to use convict laborers. Parchman was built later, but nonetheless was modeled on a slave plantation, down to the neo-classical architecture of the superintendent’s residents. I argue that this labor form should be considered to be the moral and experiential equivalent of slavery. This is because of the way that the laborers were treated, but also because of the structural continuities of economic purposes and of its foundation upon notions of white supremacy, all of which intimately connect convict labor to the world of chattel slavery that had gone before.

The cultural continuities with the slavery of the antebellum period are also marked. In the post-civil war era, the United States was keen to define itself as an antislavery world power, rivaling the British and the French on the world stage, espousing their view that slavery was a marker of incivility and of backward societies. However, this rhetorical maneuver which was taking place at the elite political level masked the equally powerful tendency in American cultural life to romanticize “old slavery days” and to render the slave system as benign and harmless, causing to this day lasting pain to African Americans. To understand the reason why this happened, we must acknowledge the significant psychological trauma that the American Civil War caused some sections of white American society. The fratricidal violence caused white Americans to reconsider the entire foundation of their national, regional, and racial identities. Over the course of the Reconstruction era, the priority for white Northerners became reunifying the nation, welcoming white Southerners back into the fold as Americans and, in doing so, the priorities and needs for citizenship and equality of black Americans from all parts of the country were first neglected and then abandoned. White unity took precedence over black equality, as has arguably been the case ever since. One way in which white unity was achieved was through the assertion of a pseudo-scientific white supremacy, justified with ideas of Social Darwinism about the hierarchies of races and about racial purity.3 Another way in which white unity was achieved, and this is most relevant here, is through the assertion that the Civil War was not fundamentally caused by differences over slavery, that the Southern way of life was an honorable and chivalrous one, that Southerners had acted properly in respect to their slaves and treated them with care and duty, and that, white Southerners were experts in regard to race relations in the country and should be respected as such.

Such assertions about the validity of the values of the southern plantocracy were immortalized in the culture of the United States. Veterans’ organizations representing both Union and Confederate armies became less partisan in their memorialization of fallen comrades and spoke less frequently about the cause for which they had fought. Instead, the speeches delivered at Memorial Day parades to remember the Civil War fallen emphasized shared masculine and nationalist values of the soldiers from both sides, with them even, at times, having unified commemorations. Women often led the way in fundraising and in the memorialization of the Civil War dead and, especially in the South, were fundamental to the valorization of not only the individual soldier but the values of the entire section of the nation. As is finally being acknowledged in the twenty-first century, the erection of Civil War statuary was not merely a mark of respect for the veterans and their deceased comrades but, rather, a claiming of territory in southern cities by those who lauded and shared the attitude of their antebellum predecessors towards slavery. Statues became yet another indication that the heritage of chattel slavery, when raised in public discourse, must be disarmed by the reification of the plantocracy. While statues carried this message into the towns and cities of the United States, the agricultural landscape of slavery reflected similar denials. Some plantations continued to function exactly as under chattel slavery, with freedmen and women undertaking the same work tasks under the oversight of the same white family, but now legally having the status of sharecroppers. Other plantations were abandoned and left to decay after the Civil War and, over a few generations, became part of the romanticization of slavery as poignant gothic ruins speaking about the golden age enjoyed by their ancestors to descendants of white slave owners. By the early twentieth century, some intact plantations were already being converted into heritage sites, with the stories of the enslaved people who had lived and worked there diminished or silenced altogether, in favor of a narrative about the aristocratic white families and the beauty of their luxurious possessions and manicured homes and gardens.

The denigration of the horrors of slavery into a marginal cultural concern, and the accompanying emphasis on the paternalistic, benign nature of the plantation system, and the happiness of enslaved people within it, not only served to skew and misrepresent the history of chattel slavery, although this was destructive enough. It also had two other even more painful legacies. First it denied the nation, and African Americans in particular, the opportunity to face, grieve, and express the truth about the pain and trauma that they suffered under slavery. This legacy of the denial of painful pasts continues to be felt to this day and has resulted in the cultural norm derived from the stereotype that any black person who speaks out and complains about their situation is seen as troublesome or, in the language of the Jim Crow era, “uppity.” In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the horrific impact of this was racist violence such as targeted lynching and so-called race riots, properly massacres, designed to intimidate and silence black people who had spoken out or had been overtly financially or politically successful. It has also contributed to the normalization of the histories of white Americans and the denial of the role of African Americans in the nation’s past. Second, the notion that black men and women had been happy and content under slavery, and that enslavement or servitude was their proper state, was soon deployed as part of the white supremacist doctrine which claimed the inability of African Americans to fully achieve intellectual or political parity. Thus, there existed a continuity of representation of African Americans as servile, from happy plantation enslavement to honorable servitude in the Jim Crow era, with stereotypical depictions in advertising such as Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, still deployed into the twenty-first century, reflecting the cultural continuity of the “happy slave.” This depiction is one which white Americans, whether descended from slave owners or not, still find comforting. Psychologically, assimilating the happy slave is far easier and safer for white Americans than acknowledging the true systemic horrors of plantation slavery.

Although this model of memories of a happy, passive enslaved population was ubiquitous, there were a few exceptions that did not display such willful ignorance of slave discontent and resistance. During the late nineteenth century, stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antebellum novel about runaway slaves, were incredibly popular.4 Every small-town theater company put on a version of the show, and there were many imitators who produced similar novels and plays. In many of these plays, the use of sensationalism and melodrama served to distract and distance the audience from the shocking reality of the human drama as it played out. For example, the occasional use of live bloodhounds on stage in scenes in which the hunted runaways were dramatically pursued created a vivid excitement in the audience but gave no space to the audience to reflect on both the treatment of enslaved people before the Civil War or the similar treatment of freedmen and women who dared to speak out afterward.

This cultural milieu worked in sync with economic inequalities, violence perpetrated by the criminal justice system, and indifference at best from the federal government to render the years following emancipation as a period of missed opportunity to provide justice to the African American community. Although many older narrators telling their stories during the Depression era proudly and vividly remembered the moment of jubilee, when the enslaved were told for the first time that they were to be free, their stories of resistance and rebellion which had contributed to the eventual downfall of the system of slavery had to be suppressed. The need to conform to the white narrative of the happy slave, in order to ensure their safety, denied the formerly enslaved opportunity to tell the stories with their agency centered, and instead it was safer for them and their descendants to assimilate and repeat stories of benevolent masters and compliant slaves. In the years after the Civil War, while initially grassroots activists, as well as some politicians, hoped to drive forward a radical agenda that did acknowledge a new role for the freedmen and women, activists and politicians soon became focused on new issues as, in the South, old hegemonic power brokers regained control. In doing so, they did not perpetuate chattel slavery, but the systems of debt bondage, convict labor, and “symbolic slavery” that followed it were built firmly on its foundations, mirrored its intentions, and dismissed any consideration of the trauma that it had caused.

After the war, for many in the political hierarchy, slavery became a toxic subject. The United States, when looking outwards, wished to ally itself with, and define itself in competition with, the antislavery powers of Europe, who, by the late nineteenth century, were talking about slavery in very particular ways.5 Often hypocritically, for European powers slavery became a labor form deployed by the ethnic other as, on a global scale, slave owners were no longer “us, but “them,” whether Muslim, or African, or other indigenous group’. This had an impact on the way that coercive labor such as debt bondage and convict labor was described in the United States. In this period to name something as slavery was a rhetorically powerful thing to do. Those wishing to challenge the deployment of abusive or coercive labor compared it unfavorably to chattel slavery. In the late nineteenth century, there was also an important strand of African American thought which attempted to address the traumatic aftermath of enslavement and began considering race and racism in a global context, but much of this debate did not receive mainstream attention, and it was a discourse of men such as Booker T. Washington, emphasizing racial harmony, that reached white ears and found favor. Both Washington and W.E.B. DuBois were interested in the variety of labor forms used across the world, and their discussions of them contributed to the growing understanding of slaveries since emancipation.6

What Were Postbellum American Slaveries Like?

Now, we move on to examine the experiences of enslaved people and their attempts to resist their enslavement. In this period, the study of slavery is complex because the word “slavery” becomes an umbrella term, used for many labor forms with diverse ways of coercively recruiting laborers, a wide range of methods for the extraction of labor, and many different forms of resistance resulting from that. I will focus on two types of slavery-like labor practices that existed in the United States and its territory of Hawaii at the turn of the twentieth century and beyond: convict labor in the southern United States and indentured labor in the sugar plantations of Hawaii. Both types of slavery-like practices shared important continuities with the antebellum period, but also important differences when compared to chattel slavery.

Convict labor and sugar industry indenture are similar in that they provided economic solutions to a labor shortage. Convict labor filled some of the gaps left by the ending of chattel slavery in the South and also, in the New South and especially in Florida, responded to increasing industrialization and need for labor for public works. Similarly, the potentially lucrative sugar industry of the Hawaiian Islands would not be viable without a large labor force to undertake the growing and milling. In the racist ideology of the time, indigenous Hawaiians were dismissed as a potential labor force because of their perceived innate characteristic of laziness, and their low birth rate and susceptibility to disease. In both regions, rejecting free wage labor also allowed the power of population control to reside in the hands of the white political elite because of a fear of unrest and flight from work where freer forms of labor permitted. In other ways, the two were significantly different. As shown above, convict labor was built on the foundations of chattel slavery and it treated prejudicially an already persecuted group of people. However, to stay on the right side of the law and to distance themselves from a discredited system, it was in the interests of perpetrators to deny its similarity to chattel slavery. In the Hawaiian Islands, sugar planters also denied that they treated their workers as though they were slaves but, nonetheless, racist discourse of the time connoted the workers as slaves or slave-like. Many of the sugar plantation laborers were, in fact, voluntary migrants, willingly signing contracts for a number of years. But they were often depicted as slaves in an attempt to remove their agency, to stereotype them as passive and “other” and to link them racially in the minds of a white audience with African Americans. The term often used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean migrants to Hawaii, and to other parts of the Pacific World, was “coolie,” a derogatory term that had the equivalence of “slave” because it referred not only to a person’s work or migration status but also negatively to their class, education status, character, and morality. Racial theory underpinned this othering, arguing among other things, that coolies were predisposed to working for lower wages because their inferiority required them to need fewer provisions and poorer accommodation. Attitudes like this also allowed plantation owners to segregate workers by race and to treat Asian American workers less well.

The recruitment of workers into these slavery-like systems was by very different routes, although both might involve an element of coercion and abuse. Convict laborers had sometimes committed minor criminal offences but, in most cases, had been accused of trumped-up charges and were innocent. They were entrapped into this form of slavery through their illiteracy and ill-preparedness to counter the racist criminal justice system. They were often led to believe that a period of work as a convict was their only option. Indentured migrants to Hawaii sometimes traveled entirely voluntarily but sometimes were tricked by labor agents who promised them lucrative, safe, and secure work in the United States. Once onboard ship, they were unable to change their minds and, certainly on arrival in America, had few options other than to work to pay off the cost of their passage. Changing employer was very difficult, if not impossible; wages were incredibly low or non-existent and so, for all intents and purposes, this was unfree labor. Indentured labor was not solely used in the sugar plantations of Hawaii. Since the early nineteenth century, in response to the end of the slave trade and chattel slavery in their colonies, this labor form had become popular in British and other European empires. In the eyes of imperialists, it filled a labor need and represented a pragmatic redistribution of manpower. They saw in India, for example, famine and under-production as a problem that might be solved by the emigration of a considerable number of workers. The movement of these workers was perceived by white hegemons in a racialized way, very different to the campaigns aiming to encourage white settler movement. Similarly, convict labor was also a response to acute labor demands, and the need to control a supposedly errant population of the racial “other.”

The lived experiences of these two groups illustrate how like chattel slavery these emergent systems really were. In both cases, white power brokers gave detailed consideration to how to structure living and working arrangements in order to extract from those ensnared within the systems the most productive labor. In both cases, a veneer of respectability was given to the labor forms by those who claimed how benign they were and, indeed, how beneficial to the laborers. Exactly as chattel slavery had been depicted as a form of education for the ignorant African, in order to justify its violent and coercive aspects, the same rhetorical maneuvers were deployed in depictions of convict labor and indenture within the sugar industry. Contemporary descriptions of these forms of slavery-like labor were expressed simultaneously with the rise of a new history of slavery in the United States, with scholars such as Ulrich B. Phillips, descended from slave owners, crafting a powerful narrative about the benefit of slavery to the enslaved that, for half a century and more, infected the historiography of the subject.7

The working conditions in Hawaii’s sugar industry were challenging in their long hours, the hard physical labor, and the dangerous working conditions. Outside of work, leisure time was often controlled by the plantation’s owners, with the movement of workers restricted. In many cases, outside of work time, laborers were confined to segregated barracks, segregated so that the workers of one nationality might not stir up others in solidarity and industrial unrest. As with chattel slavery, plantation owners in Hawaii feared such worker uprisings more than anything, ranging from a loss of revenue, caused by workers systematically downing tools, to a violent response from aggrieved laborers. Workers’ behavior was controlled in both Hawaii’s sugar industry and in convict labor in the Southern United States by the provision of minimal food rations and poor housing. Convict laborers were frequently treated little better than animals, confined for many days in trucks in which it was barely possible to move. Lack of energy and ill health among the convict labor population, as well as the fear of exemplary punishment often rendered attempts to resist this horrific treatment less frequent than they may otherwise have been.

In both contexts, overseers working on behalf of the white owners were instrumental in instilling control and fear in the workers. As under chattel slavery, rather than those in power themselves, it was these representatives of white power who inspired the most hatred in workers. Overseers nominally had supervisory responsibility during the working day but, in reality, they usually lived alongside the workers and could also impose restrictions on their personal and leisure time. On Hawaiian sugar plantations, work was monotonous, physically challenging, and, at times, dangerous. In the heyday of chattel slavery, sugar milling processes had been among the most dangerous in the Atlantic world, with thousands of enslaved people working on sugar plantations seriously burned, maimed by machinery, or killed. Outdoor work in the tropical Hawaiian heat proved difficult for many in the Pacific as it continued to do in the Atlantic context. Convict labor in the Southern states was often deployed for work in the harshest conditions. In agriculture, sugar and cotton cultivation was common, as was turpentine harvesting from pine forests to make naval products. Convict laborers also often found themselves doing the challenging work of clearing overgrown land ready for cultivation and, in an era before power tools, this work was arduous. Climatic conditions again exacerbated these pressures, with laborers put to work in Florida regularly facing temperatures exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Industrial laboring was also common, with convict laborers required to construct roads, lay railway tracks, and work in factories. Among the more notorious uses of convict labor was in the coal fields of Tennessee and Alabama to replace regular wage laborers who, during the 1890s and 1900s, were frequently striking over pay and conditions. In 1891, in Coal Creek, Anderson County, Tennessee, the mine owners replaced striking miners with laborers leased from the local prison, leading to violent conflict between miners and mine owners. The miners themselves were fighting for the right to be paid in cash, rather than “scrip,” which could only be spent at company stores.

The prejudicial situation in which indentured sugar workers and convict laborers found themselves was exacerbated by the racial ideology. Sugar industry workers in Hawaii who migrated from Japan, China, and Korea were marked out as inferior and “slavish” by this ideology, which was used by those in power to prevent cross-ethnicity solidarity and support for these workers by poor whites and Hawaiians. Similarly, the appalling treatment of convict laborers in the Jim Crow south was possible because almost all these laborers were African American. Allies did try to prevent labor abuses by publicizing and challenging them but seeking change both in law and in practice was an extremely slow process. This was partly because non-white laborers were depicted as inherently suitable for mindless and difficult work, and therefore these were individuals on whom a higher education to better themselves would be wasted. But ironically, highly controlled coercive labor forms were thought appropriate for these groups because of the educationally and morally beneficial properties of hard work, although these benefits might not be immediately apparent to the workers themselves, and so therefore coercion was required. Thus, arguments over racial predisposition served both to explain and justify these labor conditions which were deployed to fulfill a need for laborers, from they would leave if free to do so. We should not be shocked at how similar to slavery these succeeding forms of labor were but, rather, recognize that, from the point of view of the white hegemony, slavery had worked economically and for population control, and therefore similar systems evolved allowing power brokers to remain within the law, but to build on these positive aspects of chattel slavery. Such a move, therefore, was deliberate and not accidental.

Finally, we will now explore the limited possibilities of exit from these types of enslavement. Scholars of comparative slavery studies have identified common features experienced by enslaved people across time and place. One of these is the difficulty with which enslaved laborers can extricate themselves from their bondage. For many in the antebellum United States who were living in chattel slavery, opportunities for beginning a new life as a free laborer were severely limited. Yes, some enslaved people were manumitted by their master, although this was rarer in the United States than in systems of slavery found elsewhere. Other enslaved people freed themselves by undertaking a variety of types of resistance, such as running away and living in maroon communities, or fleeing across borders and seeking refuge with allies, for example, in Canada, or with Native Americans in the far south. But for many who were able to escape their immediate place of enslavement, the life they found afterward was one of curtailed freedom, in which they lived in constant fear of persecution or of re-enslavement. To differing extents, the challenges of extricating oneself from enslavement, and the limited opportunities for true freedom afterward, were elements of both the indentured sugar industry in Hawaii and convict labor in the Deep South.

The nature of the convict labor and indentured labor systems meant that once bonded within them, the financial opportunities for “freedom” were limited. For convicts, those in positions of authority within the criminal justice and the agricultural or industrial sectors conspired to extend their contracts and terms of work, and the illiterate convicts did not understand the contracts they signed and had no legal representation, so were trapped into promising to serve ever longer terms as punishment for the slightest infraction while a convict, or in exchange for goods that they received during that time. For indentured laborers, in theory, their term of work was limited to a handful of years but, for many, being able to establish oneself after the term of indenture was complete, as either a self-sufficient entrepreneur or a wage laborer, was out of reach, and often at the end of their term indentured laborers signed new contracts with the same or rival employers.

However, those indentured laborers who managed to escape the perpetual indenture contracts did have an opportunity to establish themselves through the support and sense of community provided by free migrants of the same ethnicity. Small and tightly-knit groups of recent immigrants provided loans and other forms of support to subsequent arrivals, even providing them with places to stay. Many Chinese, Japanese, and Korean migrant families who arrived in Hawaii as indentured sugar workers had, within a few generations, moved away from the cane fields and established themselves as business owners and workers, often in urban areas of the islands such as Honolulu.8 As a substantial community became established growing in wealth and resources all the time, those who had found financial success were able to help more of their fellow countrymen and women. This is not to suggest that these workers did not suffer racism and violence, and this challenging situation continued throughout the twentieth century to the World War Two era when global politics affected the ways that Asian Americans were perceived. But, nonetheless, for migrants working in the sugar industry, indentured labor was often only a temporary trap. Conditions were very different for convict laborers. Those who did complete their sentences and were freed experienced severe racism, including violence. Many workers in this position returned to work as sharecroppers, another form of bonded labor in which the white man or woman was the master. There was always the risk that once known to their local law enforcement officials, a former convict would be trapped again on trumped-up charges under the black codes of the Jim Crow era and taken back into custody and forced labor.

As in the case of antebellum slavery, there was a considerable amount of resistance to the injustices found within both of these labor systems. Resistance came from those trapped in unfree labor in the form of internal struggle against the system itself, and also from allies outside, attempting to dismantle the abusive structures with awareness raising and other forms of activism. The internal struggle of convict laborers was rarely successful because of the restrictive nature of the regime in which they lived, controlled by harsh punishments and poor provisions, borrowed from the system of slavery which preceded it. For convicts, physically surviving the demanding work, while malnourished and experiencing physical and mental ill health and traumatic and demeaning racism meant that, while they were trapped within it, the opportunities to challenge the system were limited. However, as under slavery, written accounts of those who were enslaved but then became free were fundamental to force a reconsideration. Robert Burns, a white man tricked into robbing a store in Chicago, and sentenced to hard labor in 1920s Georgia, wrote one of the most famous of these accounts. There were few prisons in Georgia at this period, and so, instead, prisoners were leased out to local businesses. His book, I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, widely credited with mobilizing activism around the abolition of the chain gang system, was turned into a Hollywood film.9 There were some limited acts of resistance by workers within the convict leasing system that mirror those by chattel slaves in the earlier system, including attempts to run away, breaking tools, working slowly, and other forms of sabotage. If caught, prisoners faced harsh exemplary corporal punishments, such as the notorious torture of being hog-tied and bound to a stake in the full sun, unable to move for many hours.

Conditions in the sugar fields of Hawaii were marginally less brutal, and the workers were less frequently brutalized. They often worked and lived in family groups and therefore had some sense of support and community, as enslaved people had, which was not immediately shared by convict laborers. However, in Hawaii in the early twentieth century, considerable resistance to poor conditions led to Asian workers in the sugar industry becoming notorious as labor troublemakers. Striking was the weapon of choice for the indentured laborer, and Japanese workers soon developed a reputation for resorting to striking to get their own way. Racist commentators in Hawaii suggested that this was an inherent trait and that this “blood unionism” as they called it, was not a rational decision but an emotive one. But, rather, the industrial action of indentured laborers was targeted and deliberate, designed to highlight injustices and improve conditions around a specific set of issues. Japanese workers were routinely treated worse and paid lower wages, than workers of other nationalities. Many strikes were peaceful although there was also some use of violence when overseers known as “lunas” were attacked. In 1909 more than 1500 workers from the Aiea plantation near Pearl Harbor, Honolulu went on strike for more pay and many were imprisoned and tortured by guards. But the strike spread throughout Oahu’s sugar industry until 7000 workers had downed tools and, within a year, Hawaii’s planters had paid Japanese workers the wages they had demanded.

In these situations where slavery-like conditions endured, discontented workers were not the only source of resistance, and others challenged employers and their persistent use of unfair labor forms. In the twenty-first-century terminology, “activists” and “allies” also highlighted frequent abuses and developed their use of newspapers and other forms of cheap print and, later, radio, to spread the word, as well as using other tactics such as challenging poor treatment of workers in the courts. Two vocal opponents of convict labor who did a great deal to change the perceptions of those in power and bring an end to this pernicious system were Frederick Douglass and John Spivak, using very different approaches but, nonetheless, sharing empowered visions of what a post-slavery world might look like.10 In 1893 Douglass, the famous abolitionist campaigner, delivered a speech about the convict lease system, from typed notes with handwritten amendments, the manuscript copy of which is now archived in his family papers in the Library of Congress. The extensive speech documents state by state the criminal justice system and its racist abuses perpetrated through the use of convict labor. Although by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, many states had abolished convict leasing, the process of leasing workers to private companies, it had been replaced by a coercive system of prison labor built around the labor camp chain gang. In 1932, based on his experiences traveling round the South in the early years of the decade, photographing labor camps, left-leaning writer and investigative journalist, John L. Spivak, wrote a novel that highlighted these abuses. It was these photographs as much as the prose which rallied opponents against the violent treatment of the prisoners depicted therein. Spivak’s approach to the cause received support from artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, such as Countee Cullen, despite Spivak’s notorious use of the n-word in the title of his novel.

In the sugar industry of Hawaii, the majority of the resistance to the indentured labor system came from within because workers were able to organize and then, by the early twentieth century, fully unionized. Sometimes they received active support from politicians and commentators in their countries of origin in order to further their own political agendas. For example, around the turn of the twentieth century, Puerto Rican workers sent reports home of the abusive working conditions on Hawaii’s sugar plantations and these were reported frequently in the print media of Puerto Rico with a view to stemming the tide of outward migration and exposing the negative treatment of their countrymen overseas in Hawaii. In the United States, those who were opposed to the migration of “Asiatics” to Hawaii for reasons of racial purity also made rhetorical use of accounts of bad treatment and unrest on the sugar plantations. The blame was not solely laid at the door of the plantation owners and their “luna” but also, in language motivated by racial ideology, described the workers’ slavish personalities and their tendency to tolerate poorer working conditions and their ability to subsist on the food of lesser quality and quantity. Since the 1870s, this anti-Chinese and Japanese rhetoric had become common in the West Coast newspapers, as native-born American workers organized against the influx of immigrants from China into ports such as San Francisco. In these cases, highlighting the poor treatment of workers and labeling them as akin to slaves, did not aim at humanitarian relief or at social justice but, rather, at the exclusion of these workers, marking them out as different from the white American. These more reactionary responses to abusive labor conditions show that, even where laborers struggled to claim the rights afforded to free wage earners, the rhetoric of slavery was used to subjugate and alienate.

Conclusion

This examination of American slaveries since emancipation has revealed that after the Civil War, those in the United States had a complex relationship with the notion of slavery itself. Many struggled to come to terms with the aftermath of the destructive war and to acknowledge the place of the abolition of slavery in that war. Throughout the country, but especially in the South, formerly enslaved people found it almost impossible to assert their rights in the light of racism and exertions of white supremacy, leading to the perpetuation of abusive and coercive labor forms for decades to come. In many laboring contexts, the abolition of slavery did not remove the need for cheap labor, with the development of the New South and the sugar plantations of Hawaii being just two examples among many seen around the world. Workers themselves resisted injustice and claimed legal rights, and they were often supported in this by allies, neo-abolitionists who wished to bring industrial harmony to their country or, more ambitiously, aimed at equality and social justice. However, highlighting labor abuses was not always a progressive act, and for some reactionary commentators, the purpose was to discourage the immigration of workers from certain racial or ethnic groups. There is clear evidence of the use of persistent slavery-like labor systems following slavery’s abolition in the United States but, during this period, there is also clear evidence of the continued and controversial rhetorical power of naming a labor form as slavery.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Steven C. Dubin, “Symbolic Slavery: Black Representations in Popular Culture,” Social Problems 34, no. 2 (1987): 122–40.

  2. 2.

    Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War Two (New York: Anchor Books), 2008.

  3. 3.

    For more on this see Thomas C. Leonard, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 2016.

  4. 4.

    Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: J.Cassell, 1852).

  5. 5.

    Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) further explores the ways the United States refashioned itself on the world stage during this period.

  6. 6.

    The bibliographies of works by both men are extensive, but these items address questions of black labor most fully: Booker T. Washington, Working with the Hands (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1904); W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935).

  7. 7.

    Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1918).

  8. 8.

    For more on the Asian American immigrant experience, see Yukiko Kimura, Issei: Japanese Immigrants in Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988); Wayne Patterson, The Korean Frontier in America: Immigration to Hawaii, 1896–1910 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1988).

  9. 9.

    Robert Burns, I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932).

  10. 10.

    Frederick Douglass, “Speech on Convict Leasing System (1893),” in Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress. http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mfd.01008. Accessed 11 February 2022; John Spivak, Georgia Nigger (New York: Brewer, Warner & Putnam, 1932).