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Updated: May 4, 2025
Legislation concerning labor, the industrial condition, and contract rights of the negro, such as the peonage laws, we have considered in an earlier chapter; both State and national laws exist, and the Thirteenth Amendment, being self-executing, has proved effective.
And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake somewhere.
That this was by no means the case was shown by the astonishing revelations from Jasper County, Georgia, early in 1921, it being demonstrated in court that a white farmer, John S. Williams, who had "bought out" Negroes from the prisons of Atlanta and Macon, had not only held these people in peonage, but had been directly responsible for the killing of not less than eleven of them.
No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring.
Then a return of cheerful tolerance, a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.
The Bailey case is one of importance by reason of the fact that the decision handed down by the Supreme Court was an effective blow against the "peonage system," which is an evasion of the constitutional prohibition of slavery.
Debt peonage could be fastened on part of the rural South and was; but even here the new Negro landholder appeared. Thus despite everything the Fifteenth Amendment, and that alone, struck the death knell of slavery. The steps toward the Fifteenth Amendment were taken slowly. First Negroes were allowed to take part in reconstructing the state governments.
And this, we are told by the President and his supporters, is not imperialism, but a process of extending the blessings of liberty and civilization to the inferior races of the earth. The claim of the President is the assertion of a right in Congress to establish a system of peonage or even of slavery in Alaska, Hawaii, and the rest.
Several men went to Congress and popular education began to be emphasized; but the difficulties of Reconstruction and the outrages of the KuKlux Klan were succeeded by an enveloping system of peonage, and by 1890-1895 the pendulum had swung fully backward and in the South disfranchisement had been arrived at as the concrete solution of the political phase of the problem.
Then a return of cheerful tolerance, a feeling, that, if the Deity could bear with rats and sharpers, he could; with a confident trust, that, in the long run, terriers and honest men would have the upperhand, and a grateful consciousness that he had been sent just at the right time to come between a patient victim and the master who held her in peonage.
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