Over the past couple years I’ve been a bit obsessed about the history of slavery and one of these days am actually going to have time to get working on the web site I started on the topic.
Anyway, David Bloomberg has written a very good review of Gregory Freeman’s excellent book, Lay This Body Down, which is about the horrific murder of 11 black men in 1921 who were trapped in a slave-like system called peonage –essentially they were forced to work to pay off completely bogus debts.
Even though slavery was technically outlawed within the United States at the conclusion of the Civil War, peonage was not fully outlawed until about 1910, and continued for decades after that in parts of the South.
There have been a number of excellent books about this topic, including Pete Daniel’s The Shadow of Slavery : Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 and the out-of-print, The Peonage files of the U.S. Department of Justice, 1901-1945, which as its title suggests presents documents and information from the FBI’s investigations into peonage (it was just such an investigation that led to the murder of the 11 men in Georgia — the white plantation owner wanted to destroy the evidence, which happened to be the black men he forced to work for him).
People interested in the topic can also find a first hand account of the peonage system on the web —Peonage in the South: The Life Story of a Negro Peon — taken from a 1906 compilation.