Bravo for bringing up this critical issue. I think about this clause a lot. Imagine a thought experiment where you tell your child: You cannot have not have ice cream at all, except for you clean room on Saturday and then you can some that day. Now on Saturday your child says, “Daddy (or mommy), I’ve cleaned my room.” Do you then give your child ice cream? Of course, because your personal law of the house said “except for Saturday”. In other words you made an allowance for ice cream under certain circumstances on Saturday. “Unless you clean your room you won’t get any ice cream on Saturday.” Get it now?
This experiment to me has meant that, “Slavery does not exist, unless a person is duly convicted of a felony. Or, a duly convicted felon is a slave. (Or indentured servant as in the language of the thirteenth amendment.) This means that from the perspective of the US Constitution, slavery was introduced by the 13th Amendment in 1865. Before that, slavery was constructed by British colonist rules quoted earlier in the article, before democracy was created. That British autocratic colonist slavery, called chattel slavery, was wiped out in 1865. Northern states has already wiped it out one by one, starting with Vermont. But Southern states refused to. They then signed at gunpoint new state constitutions that mimicked almost exactly the US constitution at gunpoint in 1865 as a condition for entering the United States of America (really for the first time since they previously refused). Now though, since American slavery replaced British colonial constructed slavery, they simply had to arrest freed black for vagrancy. Which explains why black Americans in the late 1860s and 1870s were complaining about being arrested by sheriffs and sold to work in chain gangs.
So American slavery still exists today, but it’s been neatly tucked away in prisons where “duly convicted” blacks and browns, who serve longer jail sentences and re-convicted for minor parole violations than white for the same crime at the same sociopath-economic level. They now work making things in prison for a dollar a day or free legally under the 13th. No one wants to believe this slavery exists, despite the proof. See EndtheException dot com I just ran across, as some people at least recognize slavery exists in America.