I hope you keep bringing it on. The 13th Amendment was crafted and spearheaded by a Senator who was white Harvard lawyer from the pro-slavery state of Missouri in early 1864, a state still in “the Union” or the USA and not on the opposing side, the CSA. This meant he and his backers could push it through Congress, since the 11 states of the CSA were no longer in Congress. Their intent was to keep slavery, making under a palatable condition. The condition, the Exception Clause, gave states the explicit Constitutional permission or allowance to craft new ways of enslaving black Americans, different from the ones previously below the Mason-Dixon Line, which were based on British laws that certain states kept. Mississippi immediately made laws explicitly allowing for the arrest of “negroes” who were not working, loitering, and other petty things.
The law state that the sheriff could sell off the black man if he didn’t pay the fine or bond, and the sheriff could sell him off only to white men at “call out.” That was a literal auction. Since most freed Black Americans didn’t have the $3,000 dollars, white plantation owners or mining operators leased them out by paying the bond, and so these black men and women became bonded, or held under bondage. The practice was widespread, and the sentences were regularized into one, two and five year sentences for “vagrancy” and other petty offenses that weren’t really crimes at all. Im 1897 for example, Alabama made the sentences two years or five, in order match the leasing contracts. These arrested black men working in mines and sugar fields had it worse physically, not better, than before the Civil War. They worked underground in coal mines 12 to 15 hours a day in darkness, many times with only one or two days off a year. Five percent or so died every year, and their bodies were thrown into a shallow ditch or into the blast furnace nearby. “When one dies, get another.” That was the white owner’s philosophy and literally what one said. A book was written on this type of “convict leasing” or constitutional slavery cover the years from 1865 to 1920s, among a couple other. If you believe this was not slavery, then you might change your mind. I know after reading and researching the topic, I have concluded it was slavery or indentured servitude and often much worse. I lived for decades under the school boy notion “slavery ended because of the Civil War.” What nonsense. It is still alive and kicking.

Thank you.