Peonage The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 15

Excerpt

The Negro was kidnapped from the shores of Africa and brought into the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of the sixteenth century in order to meet the conditions growing out of an acute labor problem. The greedy and adventurous Spaniard had come to these shores in quest of gold, and after years of experiment he discovered that the Indian who lived in the islands and on the coast of the New World, either would not or was not physically able to perform the heavy labor of extracting gold from the mines. To meet his greedy quest, it was then necessary to look elsewhere to find the man who was feeble enough in will and strong enough in body to meet the conditions which then presented themselves. The African was that man. It is not the purpose of these reflections to deal with the institution of slavery other than to point out that what slavery is appears altogether from the point of view of the one who discusses it. It is common nowadays to refer to it as a practical institution by means of which the savage African was brought under the beneficent influences of Christianity, taught the English language, and the joy of intelligently directed labor. But before the beginning of the institution as a means of meeting the needs of work, the moralist considered it as the sum of all villanies, the reformer termed it the negation of all right. But the economist looks at it as a system of labor, and the historian and philosopher, as a step in the progress of the human race from the time when savages were put to death when taken in battle to the time when men realized that they could eat bread by the sweat of other men’s faces.

It is a remarkable concurrence of historical facts that the opening of the Panama Canal will be precisely the four hundredth anniversary of the introduction of Negro slavery into the Western Hemisphere. Most of those centuries were passed without any alleviation of the condition of the chattel slave. The Liberal and Revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought about the downfall of chattel slavery as a system of labor in the civilized world. Immediately succeeding the emancipation of the slave from chattelism, slavery reappeared in a new form. The former slave-holding states enacted a series of so-called “Labor Laws” intended to apply exclusively to the recently emancipated slaves, which at that time so outraged public sentiment that the American nation just emerged from the great war, intending to destroy every vestige of slavery and its incidents, conferred upon the Negro the common and universal legal rights which pertained to white men throughout the English speaking world. It was evidently the thought and purpose of the men of that day to cure in the light of the formulas and promises of their fundamental charters the curse that had been a sore to civilization for years. And for a time it looked as though they had done so, but of late years there has grown up a series of laws and court decisions giving distinct recognition to the fact of Race, and in spite of the constitutional guaranties, differentiating at least in the matter of the enjoyment of rights as between white men and black men. This paper is concerned merely with those distinctive laws which relate to labor.

In all English speaking countries the freedom of labor has been a fundamental principle of the law, and the freedom of contract has been absolutely unlimited and unhampered, as was also the right to abrogate or to disregard the contract of labor on the part of the laborer, there being no remedy of specific performance against him. The failure to observe the contract of employment was never, until recently, regarded as a criminal offense, and the only remedy that the employer had against the employee who willfully or who for good reason or for no reason refused to live up to his contract was an action for damages sustained. Of late years there has grown up in the former slave-holding states of the South a series of laws which abrogate all this well-known and time-honored common law principle.

Does peonage exist in any part of the United States to-day? The question is answered both in the affirmative and in the negative. Those who deny the existence of peonage assert that merely the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of a person in payment of a debt or obligation is not peonage; that it is not the system of peonage as practiced in Spanish-American countries and in Mexico; that there is in this country nothing resembling the Spanish or Mexican peonage system. It is probably true that there are no laws on statute books which resemble the laws under which peonage is practiced in Mexico, and under which it was practiced in New Mexico and Arizona before they became parts of the United States....