I can’t remember where I heard it, but I’ve heard that there were some cases of slavery continuing. Not in the form of share croppers or Jim Crow. But slave owners continuing to enslave people in the south. Keeping the news of the wars end from them or hiding their operation from the government. Or just strong arming these people into continued servitude. If so, did this manage to continue into the 20th century?
Although I am not aware of any masters trying to hold on to their slaves by keeping news of the 13th amendment from them, there are numerous cases of slavery, in the sense of forced labor. Southern States passed discriminatory laws called Black Codes, part of which was criminalising things such as vagrancy or being unemployed. Now, if a black person was accused of vagrancy, this was before Gideon v Wainwright established the right to a free defence attorney, so what could they do? Being accused by a white man, in front of a white sheriff or judge, all conspiring to press them into unfree labor, a black person could indeed do very little.
Generally, someone charged and convicted of one of these charges would be fined an amount, such as $25, which they were unlikely to have on their person. We didn't have the modern system of prisons, either. So, a local who wanted convict labor would pay the fine, and in return the person would have to work for them. This system was called convict leasing.
To keep their labourers, the master would do things such as let them borrow money, to keep them further in debt, or simply making up debts—practices still used in debt slavery today. If the laborer tried to simply run away, they could be chased down with horses and dogs.
There are also cases of people, both black and white, being promised good paying jobs, for example in a mine or lumber camp far from town, and arriving to find that although the work was there, the pay was not, and being kept there by one way of coercion or another.
In 1921, there was the case of Martin Talbert, a young white man from a middle class family in North Dakota, who was hopped on a freight train and was caught by a sheriff and charged with vagrancy. Unlike most, his family actually had money to pay the $25 fine, which they duly wired over, but Martin had already been sent to a turpentine camp to work for three months, and was not released after the $25 for the fine was wired over by his family. Unused to hard labor, he was whipped to death by the whipping boss, Walter Higginbotham, whose conviction of second degree murder was later overturned.
After the attacks on Pearl Harbor, FDR realised that forced labor in America would be ruthlessly exploited in enemy propaganda, and had Francis Biddle set out federal enforcement for slavery, the prosecution for which had before been left to local jurisdictions.
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