The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, by the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865, and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
The Constitution of the Confederate States was the supreme law of the Confederate States of America. It superseded the Provisional Constitution of the Confederate States, the nation's first constitution, in 1862. It remained in effect until the end of the American Civil War in 1865.
Peon usually refers to a person subject to peonage: any form of wage labor, financial exploitation, coercive economic practice, or policy in which the victim or a laborer (peon) has little control over employment or economic conditions. Peon and peonage can refer to both the colonial period and post-colonial period of Latin America, as well as the period after the end of slavery in the United States, when "Black Codes" were passed to retain African-American freedmen as labor through other means.
Involuntary servitude or involuntary slavery is a legal and constitutional term for a person laboring against that person's will to benefit another, under some form of coercion, to which it may constitute slavery. While laboring to benefit another occurs also in the condition of slavery, involuntary servitude does not necessarily connote the complete lack of freedom experienced in chattel slavery; involuntary servitude may also refer to other forms of unfree labor. Involuntary servitude is not dependent upon compensation or its amount. Prison labor is often referred to as involuntary servitude. Prisoners are forced to work for free or for very little money while they carry out their time in the system.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 was an Act of the United States Congress to give effect to the Fugitive Slave Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which was later superseded by the Thirteenth Amendment, and to also give effect to the Extradition Clause. The Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause guaranteed a right for a slaveholder to recover an escaped slave. The subsequent Act, "An Act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters", created the legal mechanism by which that could be accomplished.
Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the court held that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 precluded a Pennsylvania state law that prohibited blacks from being taken out of the free state of Pennsylvania into slavery. The Court overturned the conviction of slavecatcher Edward Prigg as a result.
The fugitive slave laws were laws passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of enslaved people who escaped from one state into another state or territory. The idea of the fugitive slave law was derived from the Fugitive Slave Clause which is in the United States Constitution. It was thought that forcing states to deliver fugitive slaves back to enslavement violated states' rights due to state sovereignty and was believed that seizing state property should not be left up to the states. The Fugitive Slave Clause states that fugitive slaves "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due", which abridged state rights because forcing people back into slavery was a form of retrieving private property. The Compromise of 1850 entailed a series of laws that allowed slavery in the new territories and forced officials in free states to give a hearing to slave-owners without a jury.
Bailey v. Alabama, 219 U.S. 219 (1911), was a United States Supreme Court case that overturned the peonage laws of Alabama.
The Confiscation Act of 1862, or Second Confiscation Act, was a law passed by the United States Congress during the American Civil War. Section 11 of the act formed the legal basis for President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.
The Confiscation Act of 1861 was an act of Congress during the early months of the American Civil War permitting court proceedings for confiscation of any of property being used to support the Confederate independence effort, including slaves.
Slavery among the Indigenous peoples of the Americas refers to slavery of and by the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The history of slavery spans all regions of the world; during the pre-Columbian era, many societies in the Americas enslaved prisoners of war or instituted systems of forced labor. Contact with Europeans transformed these practices, as the Spanish introduced chattel slavery through warfare and the cooption of existing systems. A number of other European powers followed suit, and from the 15th through the 19th centuries, between two and five million Indigenous people were enslaved, which had a devastating impact on many Indigenous societies, contributing to the overwhelming population decline of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
The Indian Slavery Act, 1843, also known as Act V of 1843, was an act passed in British India under East India Company rule, which outlawed many economic transactions associated with slavery.
Slavery in international law is governed by a number of treaties, conventions and declarations. Foremost among these is the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1948) that states in Article 4: “no one should be held in slavery or servitude, slavery in all of its forms should be eliminated.”
Labor trafficking in the United States is a form of human trafficking where victims are made to perform a task through force, fraud or coercion as it occurs in the United States. Labor trafficking is typically distinguished from sex trafficking, where the task is sexual in nature. People may be victims of both labor and sex trafficking.
The history of forced labor in the United States encompasses to all forms of unfree labor which have occurred within the present day borders of the United States through the modern era. "Unfree labor" is a generic or collective term for those work relations, in which people are employed against their will by the threat of destitution, detention, violence, lawful compulsion, or other extreme hardship to themselves or to members of their families.
Slavery in New Mexico existed among the Native American (Indian) tribes prior to the arrival of the first Europeans. In 1542, the Spanish king banned the enslavement of the Indians of the Americas in Spanish colonies, but the ban was mostly ineffective. The enslavement of Indians was common during the Spanish exploration and colonization of New Mexico from 1540 to 1821. Slaves of the Spanish included a few of the Pueblos living in the Spanish colony, but most slaves were captured from other Indian tribes in the region. Women were more valued than men as slaves. Slaves were not only valued for their labour, but were also a prestige item among the more prominent and prosperous of the Spanish colonists. Enslavement of an individual was not always permanent. Slaves, especially women, often gained kinship relationships with their owners. The offspring and descendants of enslaved persons were called genizaros and made up one-third of New Mexico's population in the early 19th centuries. In the Spanish caste system genizaros had low status, but were important for frontier defense and cultural contacts with Indian tribes. Forced labor and debt peonage were also features of slavery in New Mexico. Some Indians captured and enslaved in New Mexico were sent south to work in Mexican mines or even to distant places like Cuba to work on sugar plantations.
An Act to Encourage Immigration was a federal law passed by the 38th United States Congress and signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. It was the first major American law to encourage immigration.
The history of slavery in Colorado began centuries before Colorado achieved statehood when Spanish colonists of Santa Fe de Nuevo México (1598–1848) enslaved Native Americans, called Genízaros. Southern Colorado was part of the Spanish territory until 1848. Comanche and Utes raided villages of other indigenous people and enslaved them.
