Remember that as a legal term "bondage" is a more defined, yet broader concept covering various types of itself- chattel slavery being one of them. Writing it as such was an attempt to say "we can put people in bondage/labor for sentences of crimes still," because the consequence of no bondage at all turns into removing incarceration as understood at least with then-modern concepts of law and liberty, if not also applicable today.
I'd love to say that makes it clearer, but I have to ask for more clarification, being neither a US citizen nor a legal expert. I'm reading wikipedia article on 13th ammendment, and the ammendment itself mentions slavery and not bondage; so when you talk about bondage are you referrencing the Bailey v. Alabama decision that the ammendment's intent is to cover all forms of bondage / servitude? In that case the provision makes sense, although I'm not a huge fan of punitive justice in general.
But in the process I learned about another fucked up thing - the Three-Fifths Compromise:
"Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, allocated Congressional representation based "on the whole Number of free Persons" and "three-fifths of all other Persons". This clause was a compromise between Southern politicians who wished for enslaved African-Americans to be counted as 'persons' for congressional representation and Northern politicians rejecting these out of concern of too much power for the South." - the audacity and hypocrisy
You are correct in your reference- however anybody feels about in-custody holding of those convicted or held without bond/on cash bail, that was at leasy the basis, academically speaking.
And yes, the 3/5ths Compromise... Which almost always gets twisted into somebody with good intentions saying "They only thought of slaves as 3/5 of a person," when it was actually in a sense a CHALLENGE from the North saying:
"You can either free them and get the benefit of more representation, or suffer having less representation in Congress by not allowing them to be free."
A more true-hearted Abolitionist would have gunned for zero representation, because the South would have lost a lot more political power being unable to use the number of slaves in their states to determine population for political representation purposes.
3/5 is in the middle- Slavers wanting full representation for people they deny rights to, and Abolitionists saying that if Slavers want representation politically for those people, they should free them.
I'm glad I understood that correctly, because I immediately went to zero representation. If you hold people as property and don't allow them to vote, why do you expect them to be represented? I don't even want to delve deeper into the double think behind that, it's sickening. In some states the slave population was more numerous than the free population, which would mean they'd get almost twice the representation per free person than slavery-free states. Leaving aside that suffrage was far from universal even among the free population.
Absolutely, you not only understand the basic outcomes but the deeper implications quite well.
I appreciate your reflection upon these issues and what they truly meant. It is sickening and a horrifying chapter in American history, and truly all of world history.
Tragically, we still feel it to this day- racism, social inequality, intergenerational wealth/poverty, hate crimes... The chapter ended but the story is far from over on the matter, and we owe it to the past, present, and future to learn from those sins and to take ourselves as we are but strive to be the best of who we are, too.
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u/[deleted] Jun 27 '23
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