Concepts of Slavery in the United States 1865–1914

Abstract

The post-emancipation era was defined by the United States’ attempts to come to terms with the loss of slavery and to renegotiate its economic and political position in a global context. By moving slavery into the historic past, politicians remodeled the United States as part of the antislavery alliance with Britain and other European nations, for whom slavery and its eradication was approached with a missionary zeal, representing a key pillar in their imperialist foreign policy. However, many in the United States were unable to consign slavery as quickly to the history books, and slavery and its legacy was a hugely significant issue as the United States grappled with its own identity on the world stage, with the practicalities of coercive labor practices within its own borders and externally, and with the hardening racial doctrines enabled by theories of social Darwinism that seems to militate against the healing of the wounds caused by almost three hundred years of forced labor practices. Domestically, systems of convict labor and debt bondage kept African Americans and some new immigrants trapped in labor systems akin to slavery, while overseas, as the United States became an imperial power, slavery was used as a justification for intervention, for rejection of imperialism, and as a means to deploy inferior races in civilizing employment, who otherwise would not work. Defining a group of workers as slaves was a rhetorically powerful act during this period, as it became a means for conservatives to control and exclude Chinese laborers from the American body politic, as well as a means to control and limit women’s sexual work by labeling even voluntary prostitution as white slavery. Pointedly observing the inherent racial traits that allowed the continued existence of slavery overseas, for example, in Africa and the Middle East, was a way for the United States to define itself as an antislave power alongside its European competitors. In fact, the rhetoric of this period was defined by the racial othering of both slave and slave owner as the United States used slavery and its legacy to construct a new role on the world stage.