no matter how hard he may work or how saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the year, and once in debt, he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the law

WHEN FREDICK DOUGLASS was very old and had more or less retired from public life, in 1894, the great journalist Ida B. Wells convinced him to come out of retirement to write and present his last great address,  The Lessons of the Hour against the crisis of terror by lynching and the neo-slavery system that Southern lawyers, legislators, governors, judges and "justices" erected to not only reinstitute actual slavery in addition to the methods using trumped up crimes to abduct and enslave Black People and, I would bet, a few poor whites, but also through the civil laws, no doubt explained by the "freedom of contract" or some such other legal fiction.  He was explicit in calling it that and pointed out that unlike de jure slavery which had been abolished by the Emancipation Proclamation and, supposedly, the Thirteenth Amendment, it was actually MORE FINANCIALLY BENEFICIAL for the enslavers because they had no obligation to care for the elderly who couldn't work, those too young to work or too disabled to work, and so was even worse for many of the enslaved.  

All of this was certainly, beyond any doubt, known for what it was to state and federal judges and "justices" including members of the Supreme Court because some of them were beneficiaries of it directly and some were certainly complicit in it in other ways.   It was certainly known to their colleagues from other parts of the country, especially on the Supreme Court. 

Another mode of impeaching the wisdom of emancipation, and one that seems to give pleasure to our enemies, is, as they say, that the condition of the colored people of the South has been made worse; that freedom has made their condition worse.

The champions of this idea are the men who glory in the good old times when the slaves were under the lash and were bought and sold in the market with horses, sheep and swine. It is another way of saying that slavery is better than freedom; that darkness is better than light and that wrong is better than right. It is the American method of reasoning in all matters concerning the negro. It inverts everything; turns truth upside down and puts the case of the unfortunate negro wrong end foremost every time. There is, however, always some truth on their side.

When these false reasoners assert that the condition of the emancipated is wretched and deplorable, they tell in part the truth, and I agree with them. I even concur with them that the negro is in some respects, and in some localities, in a worse condition today than in the time of slavery, but I part with these gentlemen when they ascribe this condition to emancipation.

To my mind, the blame for this condition does not rest upon emancipation, but upon slavery. It is not the result of emancipation, but the defeat of emancipation. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty, but the work of the spirit of bondage, and of the determination of slavery to perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another. It is due to the folly of endeavoring to retain the new wine of liberty in the old bottles of slavery. I concede the evil but deny the alleged cause.

The land owners of the South want the labor of the negro on the hardest possible terms. They once had it for nothing. They now want it for next to nothing and they have contrived three ways of thus obtaining it. The first is to rent their land to the negro at an exorbitant price per annum, and compel him to mortgage his crop in advance. The laws under which this is done are entirely in the interest of the landlord. He has a first claim upon everything produced on the land. The negro can have nothing, can keep nothing, can sell nothing, without the consent of the landlord. As the negro is at the start poor and empty handed, he has to draw on the landlord for meat and bread to feed himself and family while his crop is growing. The landlord keeps books; the negro does not; hence, no matter how hard he may work or how saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end of the year, and once in debt, he is fastened to the land as by hooks of steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the law.
 
Another way, which is still more effective, is the payment of the labor with orders on stores instead of in lawful money. By this means money is kept entirely out of the hands of the negro. He cannot save money because he has no money to save. He cannot seek a better market for his labor because he has no money with which to pay his fare and because he is, by that vicious order system, already in debt, and therefore already in bondage. Thus he is riveted to one place and is, in some sense, a slave; for a man to whom it can be said, “You shall work for me for what I shall choose to pay you and how I shallchoose to pay you,” is in fact a slave though he may be called free man.

We denounce the landlord and tenant system of England, but it can be said of England as cannot besaid of our free country, that by law no laborer can be paid for labor in any other than lawful money.England holds any other payment to be a penal offense and punishment by fine and imprisonments.The same should be the case in every State in the Union.

Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical the negro  may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again and again, seldom with any better result.

With this power over the negro, this possession of his labor, you may easily see why the South sometimes brags that it does not want slavery back. It had the negro’s labor heretofore for nothing, and now it has it for next to nothing, and at the same time is freed from the obligation to take care of the young and the aged, the sick and the decrepit.

Anyone who tells you that slavery in the United States ended with the 13th Amendment is lying while telling the truth, after a fashion.  

Generally, it is claimed that the kind of American serfdom described ended with the depression, the mechanization of farming and the Second World War, making it profitable for the land owners to do what the Brits did when they stole the commons from the commoners and set them free to starve to death.  I would like to know more about that because there's one thing I'm sure of, it was not something that rich people absorbed any cost of.   That puts us within the realm of lived experience and families who many alive today were born into as they were suffering the aftermath of it. 

Anyone who tells you that no one alive today has not benefited from slavery and no one alive today was not harmed by it is lying, too, though that might be out of ignorance of real history instead of falsified hagiographic bull shit, the kind of history that Republican-fascists want told and the kind that Hollywood and show biz and "historical novels" traffic in, expanded into the internet now.   

And the newspapers, Fredrick Douglass had no illusions about the great "free press" being the tireless defenders of truth, justice and the alleged American way, which I plan on posting tomorrow.  Ida B. Wells certainly knew the uses to which "freedom of the press" was put by the enemies of equality, democracy and justice. 

This is one in a two part answer to some hate mail, by the way.