peonage

peonage , system of involuntary servitude based on the indebtedness of the laborer (the peon) to his creditor. It was prevalent in Spanish America, especially in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, and Peru. The system arose because labor was needed to support the agricultural, industrial, mining, and public-works activities of the conquerors and settlers in the Americas. With the Spanish conquest of the West Indies, the encomienda , establishing proprietary rights over the natives, was instituted. In 1542 the New Laws of Bartolemé de Las Casas were promulgated, defining natives as free subjects of the king and prohibiting forced labor. Black slave labor and wage labor were substituted. Since the natives had no wage tradition and the amount paid was very small, the New Laws were largely ignored. To force natives to work, a system of the repartimiento [assessment] and the mita was adopted; it gave the state the right to force its citizens, upon payment of a wage, to perform work necessary for the state. In practice, this meant that the native spent about one fourth of a year in public employment, but the remaining three fourths he was free to cultivate his own fields and provide for his own needs. Abuses under the system were frequent and severe, but the repartimiento was far less harsh and coercive than the slavery of debt peonage that followed independence from Spain in 1821. Forced labor had not yet included the working of plantation crops—sugar, cacao, cochineal, and indigo; their increasing value brought greater demand for labor control, and in the 19th cent. the cultivation of other crops on a large scale required a continuous and cheap labor supply. To force natives to work, the plantations got them into debt by giving advances on wages and by requiring the purchase of necessities from company-owned stores. As the natives fell into debt and lost their own land, they were reduced to peonage and forced to work for the same employer until his debts and the debts of his ancestors were paid, a virtual impossibility. He became virtually a serf, but without the serf's customary rights. In Mexico a decree against peonage was issued in 1915, but the practice persisted. Partly to alleviate it, Lázaro Cárdenas instituted the ejido in 1936. In that year, too, debt peonage was abolished in Guatemala. In the United States after the Civil War, peonage existed in most Southern states as it had in the Southwest after its acquisition from Mexico. Not only blacks and Mexicans but whites as well found themselves enmeshed. By 1910 court decisions had outlawed peonage, but as late as 1960 some sharecroppers in Southern states were pressured to continue working for the same master to pay off old debts or to pay taxes, which some states had levied to preserve the sharecropping system.

Bibliography: See L. B. Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain (1950); J. F. Bannon, Indian Labor in the Spanish Indies (1966).

Peonage lay at the juncture of race and economic arrangements that fixed the distinctive character of the South during the Progressive Era. The Peonage Cases—Bailey v. Alabama (1911) and United States v. Reynolds (1914)—were the most lasting of the Supreme Court's contributions to justice for African‐Americans during the tenure of Chief Justice Edward Douglass White. The decisions gave realistic scope to the Thirteenth Amendment's protection against involuntary servitude as they peeled back a corner of the system of forced labor that continued in the South into the twentieth century.

Peonage existed in many Southern states and was a component of a system of state laws and customs, including statutes dealing with contract fraud, criminal surety, vagrancy, and other open‐ended laws that permitted prosecution of laborers who sought to abandon their jobs. The laws and their enforcement contributed to what the Supreme Court called “a wheel of servitude” (Reynolds, pp. 146–147).

Peonage first became a serious concern to the Justice Department and in the federal and state courts after 1900. The first major peonage prosecution began in 1901 in Florida, with the prosecution of Samuel Clyatt of Georgia. Clyatt v. United States (1905) tested the legality of forced labor by persons under contract and in debt. On appeal, the Supreme Court affirmed the validity of the Peonage Abolition Act of 1867, which declared unlawful “the holding of any person to service or labor under the system known as peonage” and which nullified “all acts, laws, resolutions, or usages” by which peonage was maintained (p. 546). However, the Court defined peonage rather narrowly, restricting the federal statute's coverage to forced servitude for debt.

More than a hundred other peonage cases were prosecuted by the federal government between Clyatt's conviction in 1901 and the Supreme Court's 1905 decision in the Clyatt case. These other cases arose from the multiple prosecutions known as the Alabama Peonage Cases, conducted by U.S. District Judge Thomas Goode Jones in 1903. During the course of those prosecutions, Jones struck down several coercive Alabama statutes and affirmed the rights of individuals to work where they pleased subject only to civil liability for breach of contractual obligations. By his efforts, Jones created a momentum against peonage that reached into the White House, stirred the Justice Department, galvanized public interest, and led directly to the great peonage decisions of the Supreme Court.

The first of these, Bailey v. Alabama, altered the legal relations of African‐American and immigrant laborers to their employers in the South. Avoiding both sectional recrimination and the quagmire of race relations, the opinion of the Court extended federal protection to America's most wretched workers under the general rubric of freedom to labor, a progressive variation on the central laissez‐faire abstraction of freedom of contract. Bailey struck down criminal penalties for the breach of labor contracts. The second great decision, United States v. Reynolds, struck down criminal‐surety laws under which indigent convicts avoided the chain gang by contracting themselves into servitude for employers who would pay their fines. The Court observed that the criminal‐surety system stood as a major support of involuntary servitude. The Bailey and Reynolds decisions were reassuring symbols of the progressive tendencies of constitutional law in the Progressive Era. They demonstrated the Court's willingness to apply general principles of liberty to achieve justice for African‐Americans.

Bailey and Reynolds knocked out the main props from the peculiar system of laws prevailing in the South that were intended to compel labor from African‐Americans, but the Court left vagrancy and other laws that permitted prosecution of discretion largely untouched. Entirely beyond the Court's reach were the lawless supports for peonage: the violence and intimidation that infected race relations; the cycle of poverty and debt that bound tenants, sharecroppers, and field hands to the land and the landlords; and the apathy of powerless, exhausted people. In the end, it was the wave of African‐American migration northward and to the cities, more than judicial decisions or law enforcement efforts, that broke the wheel of black servitude in the South, but the Peonage Cases remain landmarks in the slow process of exorcising the vestiges of slavery from American law.

See also Labor; Race and Racism.

Bibliography

Alexander M. Bickel and and Benno C. Schmidt, Jr. , The Judiciary and Responsible Government, 1910–21 (1984).

Benno C. Schmidt, Jr.