I’m personally all for restorative justice and reparations. But it should be extended as the answer to the question of Whose Slavery is important. Slavery was not some randomly constructed thing that happened. A moral basis had to be established to form the laws that constructed the institution, just like any other institution operating under government control. The narratives around slavery never discuss this fundamental fact of the foundation it is built on. The first wave of New World slavery started under the moral permission of the Pope in the 1452 in the papal bull he to the Portuguese King. The King interpreted heathens to mean “West Africans” and made laws or codes around that permission. Thus the laws of slavery were the Portuguese laws under the Pope’s moral permission. It was a type of joint legal control that structured the institution, rules, laws, conditions and organized most importantly the monetary investment and profits. Corporate profits took off with the invention of the sugar mill in Brazil in 1519, transforming Papal-Portuguese Slavery into a the world’s first commodity empire. By the 1600s, Portuguese empire built the most successfully profitable business on earth, selling sugar across Europe and incentivizing 288 more years of Portuguese enslavement until abolition in Brazil around 1888.
But massive wealth building inspires competition, or neighboring countries. Hence, the second wave started under the British King, who had no need of the Pope, and had the moral authority enact British slavery and construct laws and corporations around it this accepted and controlled government institution. The King gave out certificates of incorporation with aristocratic investors in joint stocks and later shareholders. That structured capital investment paid for all the ships built in Britain and the British colonial ports like Boston. British slavery created tobacco and sugar, solidify the legal institution but also give strong motive to protect it when “rebels” attacked in Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676. The laws began to change radically to structure better protections of the shareholders, resulting in the Virginia Book of Laws of 1705 that evolved, circulated through the governor and power structure before final approval of the King in his colony, the ultimate authority. We deceptively call this period either “slavery” or “chattel slavery”, but those are misnomers that act like red herrings meant to throw you off the track of the ownership and origin of this type of slavery, which is called British slavery. It did last from 1619 to 1865, but the laws and regulations around the structure of it that entire time were British.
The great deception of whose slavery masks two critical factors of the responsibility and ownership of that British legal construction of that institution. The first obvious masking is that that Britain constructed it, set it up through the principle of commodity production for monetary enrichment, and then made laws to protect the investment into slavery. The Papal Bull in contrast was made to collect “heathens” not as a capital making institution for wealth generation but given as permission to counteract the Ottomans attacking the Christian countries from the East. The Pope want soldiers and military assistance slaves provide, or “heathens.” The Ottomans were doing exactly that, gathering “heathens”, non-believes, from North Africa in their religious war and invasion of Europe. The Pope was “just” copying that strategy. It may have generated wealth through empire building of course, but the immediate need for those two fighting religions were to get slaves to carry supplies to the front lines in the war. The Pope had been calling on British and French, but they were tuckered out from three hundred years of fighting each other and didn’t offer up any soldiers, hence he turned to the Portuguese to “bring me some “heathens.”” The primary reason slaves are black is not because of their skin color but because the Portuguese had been exploring the coast of west Africa from Senegal downward, as the Ottomans were getting slaves from North Africa.
People ask what is the difference, slavery is slavery. But this vital break in tradition removed the surface and immediate impetus of slavery, to gather enslaved workers in a time of war to do the heavy lifting. There was no war for the first time. They needed free labor to generate wealth but clearing land in the New World, which they discovered in 1492 of course, which shifted the focus of slave usage and of demand. The British then set out to copy the Portuguese’s success, and dispelled for the first time in history of using enslaved humans as for anything else BUT wealth generation. That was primary purpose of the legal institutions of incorporation that set up the joint stock companies for slave trading, the tobacco trading, sugar milling, etc.
The Northerners has erased the British legal structure of slavery by abolishing slavery state by state through new state constitutions that eradicated the legal basis of law, changing that basis from British established “common law” to American law based on the principles in the Declaration of Independence, namely natural inalienable rights. Vermont was the first country to make a constitution in 1777 based on those principles (and yes it was a country not a state when established though was later incorporated into the US). By 1804 all the northern states made constitutions based on those sacred principles. States had to independently enact those principles by decision as the federal government had NO authority to force states to write their own constitutions. But the Southern states had not made such state constitutions so they could maintain British laws that allowed to maintain slavery, in principle and in law. In fact, in South Carolina, they rewrote their 1776 constitution in 1778 to make it even stricter in limiting participation in government and in assigning governor to only aristocrats.
This extreme misnomer shifts the ownership of the laws away from whose slavery and the responsibility. This narrative cannot be told as it clearly involves first the British and creating the legal structure that created the institution of British slavery, disguises the motives for the laws, and it also shifts responsibility away from the Southern States who did not comply with making new state constitutions based on inalienable rights and thus abolishing slavery by establishing laws based on not British ideals of alienating rights to a benevolent monarch as per Hobbes’ philosophy, but in shift the social contract to be based on the newly established political contract for government on not alienating an individuals rights to a benevolent monarch, and thus eliminating the need for a monarch or autocrat entirely. The Southerns kept the motivations for slavery and the legal structure by NOT adopting the principles of America as Northern states had done in order to maintain slavery. Lincoln knew that, and he called those pro-slavery states as having “slave constitutions” in his 1854 speech. He was a lawyer who clearly saw their constitutions and the US constitutions through “the lens of the Declaration”. He did not accept any form of compromise with those principles, though many were offered, four amendments by Senator Crittenden alone.
The tragic part of it all came during the Civil War of course. Senator Henderson, a Harvard trained laws from the Union pro-slave state of Missouri sat on a committee to create the amendment, after many failed attempts for years, and shoved in the famous “exception clause” into the 13th amendment over the strong objections of Senator Sumner from Massachusetts. Sumner was a staunch abolitionist, labelling a “radical republican,” but in fact he was simply an American adhering to the correct principles of democracy the founders like Adams started. The other 3 members on the committee just wanted the whole thing over with and didn’t understand the compromise they were making by buckling into Henderson. When the 13th Amendment passed and then was ratified, a new era of slavery began, American Slavery.
This third phase of corporatized slavery is even more sinister and diabolical than the previous two, as it allows slavery to be hidden behind the mask of a “duly convicted” person. From 1865 to 1941, convict leasing was a from of permission given by this constitutional exception clause to have states interpret it into their own laws, which were mainly Southern ex-confederate states needing the free labor, where sheriffs executed the laws of those states interpreting “crime” at will and “duly” convicted to mean black Americans, of course. These state governments through the laws and sheriffs swept up poor black Americans, duly convicted them, then rent them out to corporations (cotton pickers, railroad builders, coal miners), and in return the state collected mass revenues to rebuild after the war and the just fund their state budgets through. In 1941 though that system was nationalized by the federal government that created “Unicor”, as it is known today and convicts were moved inside. The states outside the Southeast eventually took notices and copied this form of “convict leasing,” which is actually American Slavery under the Exception clause, which I’ve renamed the Permission Clause because it is overtly stated, not a loophole that isn’t there. It clearly is there.
Today some states from the 49 that have it (Rhode Island I called banned it in 1848), have banned it, but state law is based on this Constitutional provision, which can’t be overturned. That means a state like Tennessee and reacted this law under a new name anytime it wants to, and it does want to since that is the history of those supermajority whites. Underneath the surface, the system is the same: over 4,100 corporations listed in the database rent out American Slaves, mostly all black but latinos as well, who hide under the mask of a “criminal” or “convict” and are leased out by the state to these companies in a variety of industries. You can see the database on the WorthRises website. The federal government has Unicor and has a giant warehouse factory, or plantation, a big house, where it trains black convicts (as seen on their website the majority of pictures are black men) in “skills” that benefit them, or slaves with benefits. The reason you and everyone else doesn’t believe this true narrative is that the white victors have always written the narrative and use phrases that throw you off the path, repeated again and again. For example, codes implies some secret handshake thing, where was Laws are central and made by lawmakers in control.
Black codes and Jim Crow are nonsense white words that mask the source and principles behind Portuguese-Papal slavery, British Slavery, and American Slavery. When you can’t see the source, the origin of these three systems of slavery, then can’t find the path to a solution to end it. At the heart of these systems lies a money hungry beast with its hands wrapped tightly around the law and principles. No one wants to End the Exception because their beliefs have been shaped by this white beast, who is angry, and always forces compromises at the top levels of power to construct these systems of weaponized slavery, of white racism. Not just racism but white racism, not just slavery, but white slavery, not black codes but white laws. The white has been taken out all the phrases to erase the color of the men who created the system, responsible for these slavery constructions, destroying your believes, and forcing you to self-gaslight through well worn phrases repeated by white historians sitting on college boards and state education boards. How will we rise up against it when we can’t even speak the language that puts responsibility of the aggressors through out this long history?