July 4

 Happy Independence Day--might as well celebrate as long as we have any shred of independence. For many of us that independence seems to be disappearing at a rapid pace.

I have spent most of my day reading but not yet on my e-mail. But I am starting reading that now.

First up is this piece by Timothy Snyder. It reflects some thoughts I had (particularly nasty thoughts at that) as I watched Trumps victory parade through his "Alligator Alcatraz." I wondered how soon they would be converted to labor concentration camps. People don't have a long memory and they generally don't read much history. The U.S. has had a long and varied history of "unfree" labor and not just the 2+centuries of African slave labor. 

Much of the work force in the Colonies were bound to masters in various ways. Indentures were contracts between migrants and people who paid their passage. When they arrived those contracts were sold to farmers and others who needed labor. The term of the contract was generally seven years during which the workers were not free to move or seek other employment. And women who became pregnant (whether by their masters, someone else in the household, or any other man) had about two years added to their term because their masters couldn't get the full value of their labor during pregnancy and lactation. 

Parents often made contracts of apprenticeship which bound their children (mostly boys) to a particular master for seven to ten years during which those apprentices would be trained in a craft they would pursue as adults. 

Theoretically, indentured servants and apprentices couldn't leave their masters but the newspapers and broadside sheets carried numerous entries describing the runaway apprentices and servants. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's vice president, was an apprentice tailor who ran away to the frontier of Kentucky. He managed to become literate, married a wealthy woman and prospered. Benjamin Franklin had been apprenticed to his elder brother, a chandler, but ran away to Philadelphia and established himself as a printer before embarking on a retirement that included scientific observations, politics, and diplomacy.

There are three differences between those unfree laborers and Africa slaves. First, either the worker themselves or parents of minor children gave consent. Second, the conditions of work were covered by the contract and by custom. Third, the length of the term was fixed. None of that covered slaves.

Indentured servitude ended because people in England, the major source of servants, became outraged by stories of the conditions under which the workers lived. Economic changes and massive immigration from Europe reduced the need for apprenticeships. Slavery was, theoretically, abolished in 1865 though the southern prison system provided low cost laborers who could be rented from the states (not many today remember chain gangs) and the sharecropping system kept many farmers in a condition of debt slavery.

It doesn't take much imagination to see the "concentration camps" of Trumps Gulag becoming an economic resource from which companies prosper at the expense of the inmates.