People have been repeating this for so long, the repetition has made it true. It is not. The mechanism ending British enslavement constructed by laws written before America was founded as a democracy was the state constitutions. States like South Carolina were constructed under autocracy, not democracy. While Northern states wiped out or abolished slavery under new state constitutions, like Vermont in 1777, and continuing to adopt the principles of democracies, the South Carolina constitution never did, and only set up a system of voting. The United States, after defeating the Confederate States of America, forced principles of democracy incorporated into the US Constitution to be copied into their state constitutions as a condition of re-entry into the USA. South Carolina refused, and their constitution was forced through Congress. Thus the construct of British enslavement ended.
But the American construct of slavery began in 1865. I know this because it says effectively, rewording the exception clause, “You in charge can use humans as slaves if they are convicted felons.” That condition means by law that slavery was re-introduced, nationalized under this conditional phrase. Slavery was interjected slavery into the US Constitution for the first time, which is anathema to democracy. This is the reason for the yearly reporting done mentioned in the article. It was to arrest or rearrest “convicted felons.” The convicted felons became synonymous with black Americas, and they —the slaves—were rent out in “convict leasing” programs by sheriffs to plantation owners. The renting out of these literal slaves accounted for 70 to 80 percent of tax revenue by 1890 to rebuild the white south and their system of repression. Cotton was picked both by internal slaves and by slavecroppers, known as sharecroppers—people (again mostly black Americans) forced to work on the masters land through rental agreements in contracts where cotton was turned over the master and his people to pay back the debt accrued through land leasing, rent, and food sold on advanced pay, all with interest.
Today, right now, an estimated 800,000 prisoners of the 1.2 million work as actual American slaves under the 13th amendment. No one will listen to them tell their stories, because we’ve all been forced to read and repeat one hundred years of the white narrative, “slavery ended with the civil war, slavery ended with the civil war.” Cotton quadruple in production by 1914, all picked by black hands, many actual slaves. See my recent article for links and listen to the American slaves give their testimony.
