Fagan 1

Benton D. Fagan
Mr. Beasley
ENGL 1010-09E
26 February 2016
The Color of Slavery is Orange

The Thirteenth Amendment to Constitution of the United States of America reads,

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[4]. This amendment was
meant to provide freedom for the previously enslaved African-American population. In response
to it, the predominately white governments of the Southern states created laws, using the
punishment clause of the amendment, to reintroduce slavery to the south. Through the use of feebased law enforcement, a lack of education for the poor, and the implementation of draconic
laws, the Reconstruction South used the Thirteenth Amendment to continue the institution of
slavery.
The poor population of the South, especially the African Americans, were the targets of
many laws, aimed at their state of poverty. The Mississippi Vagrancy Act states all free negroes
and mulattoes over the age of eighteen as criminals unless they could furnish written proof of a
job at the beginning of every year.[4]. This was just one of several laws passed in
reconstruction Mississippi. These laws were known the Black Codes[4] and they were used to
define virtually every former slave as a criminal[4]. Another example was Alabamas Burglary
Law. This law led toJames Thomasguilty of burglary in which $1.50 was the loothis

Fagan 2
punishment.life imprisonment.[7]. This led to the former slaves states having new means to
control the black population. Former slaves, after their arrest, inevitable conviction, and
imprisonment, were then leased or effectively sold to the former slave owner or businesses that
needed a supply of cheap labor.[5].
The former slaves were used as a cheap supply of workers. This was exacerbated by a
prolific fee-based system of law enforcement. Fee-based law enforcement simply is where the
sheriffs office or police department and local judiciary derive the majority of their income from
fees levied upon individuals at their conviction such as, Milly Lee was a Negro woman
convicted of using abusive language and fined one dollar and costthe costs(emphasis
added) consisting of fees to judge, sheriff, clerks, and witnesses, totaling $132[7]. These fees
were levied upon a population that, when they were not paid, allowed them to be legally
enslaved. The fines were usually paid by previous slave owners or businessmen needing labor.
This made the criminal indebted to the person who paid their fines. The convicts whose fines
were not paid were imprisoned and then leased out by the state where they were imprisoned.
These prisoners were effectively slaves of the state. This system benefitted the lessee the most,
The private lessee guarded, disciplined, fed, housed, and worked the convicts as he saw fit[5].
In Georgia, the system was quite different, prisoners who had been leasedat about $200 each
per year, with the State agreeing to pay for all guardsall rewards for escaped convictsand all
other incidental camp expenses.[24]. This made being leased out by the state an effective death
sentence given that working and living in such hellish conditions that their life expectancy
rarely exceeded two years.[5]. Even in death, the convict still provided a means of income for
the state in some cases the bodies of convictswere sold to the Medical School in
Nashville[5].

Fagan 3
Many of the former slaves, to avoid imprisonment, signed contracts to work for their
previous owners for a set period of time. These former slaves were most often illiterate, as the
Georgia peon states I never went to school a day in my life. To-day I cant write my own name,
tho I can read a little.[23], and had no idea what they were agreeing to by signing a contract for
labor. This is indicative of most African-Americans in the south. By keeping the black population
illiterate, the former slave-owners could deceive blacks into signing contracts of binding
servitude. Not know what they were signing, at the end of the contract, the employee would find
himself indebted to his employer. This debt was created by overcharging the laborers, for the
necessities of life and work. To be released from the debt, the contracted worker was usually
asked to sign something, not knowing what they had signed was an acknowledgment of their
debt. Using tactics like this, former slave-owners increased their labor pool. The worker now had
to work to pay off his debt, all the while accruing more debt from their previous employers. This
vicious cycle is best surmised, Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves[26]
The Thirteenth Amendment created for a noble purpose has an insidious legacy. The
amendment actually wrote slavery into the Constitutionbut only for those people legally
defined as criminals[4] continued to allow other forms enslavement. The creation of laws that
targeted a particular segment of society allowed the state to duly convict people of poorly
defined crimes. Keeping the former slaves uneducated meant they did not what they were
signing when they contracted as workers. Creating sheriffs departments and criminal courts
which acquired a significant portion of their income off of a fee-based system, condemned
criminals to be used as a commodity by the state for its profit. Slavery though outlawed by the
Constitution exists today and is usually clothed in orange.