Peonage

• Author: William M. Wiecek
• Pages: 1896-1897

Page 1896

Peonage is a system of debt bondage, in which a laborer is bound to personal service in order to work off an obligation to pay money. The system originated in the newly independent countries of Spanish America early in the nineteenth century, and in Hawaii and the Philippines later, as a substitute for various institutions used in the colonial era to marshal a labor force. In some of these countries the system continues to exist. In its classic form, peonage involves a trivial advance of money to a worker, in exchange for a contractual obligation to work for a term, or until the debt is repaid. From then on, the laborer is bound by law to serve the employer, and efforts to quit are met with the force of the state: arrest, imprisonment, return to the employer's service.

Peonage was also part of a larger system of involuntary servitude that emerged in the American South after the CIVIL WAR. As such, though whites have sometimes been its victims, peonage has served as a substitute for black SLAVERY. After the slave states were forced by emancipation to shift from a labor regime based on status and force to one of free labor based on contract and choice, peonage emerged as a system that hid the wolf of involuntary servitude in the sheep's clothing of contract.

Page 1897

Peonage as a customary system for coerced black labor had its origin in the contract-enforcement sections of the BLACK CODES (1865?1875) and other labor-related statutes of the era. These provided both civil and criminal penalties for breach of labor contracts, punished VAGRANCY, prohibited enticement of laborers from their jobs, and hampered or penalized agents inducing the emigration of laborers. Southern states also permitted the leasing of convict labor and adopted a criminal-surety system, whereby a person convicted of a MISDEMEANOR would have his fine and costs paid by a prospective employer and then be obliged to work for the surety. Though the Black Codes were soon repealed, the FREEDMEN ' SBUREAU at the same time emphasized labor contracts as the nexus of the employer-employee relationship for former slaves, and this later encouraged the use of contracts as a device for forcing black labor.

In 1867, when Congress enacted the Peonage Act to abolish peonage in New Mexico Territory, it also made it applicable to "any other Territory or State of the United States." The act made it a FELONY to hold a person in a condition of peonage, or to...