Slavery by Another Name

---

Slaveholders Had Previously Been Accepted

Slavery by Another Name: The Forced Labor System That Survived Emancipation

Most Americans are taught that slavery ended with the Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Douglas A. Blackmon’s Slavery by Another Name challenges that familiar timeline. His book documents how, after legal slavery was abolished, new systems of forced labor developed across the South and trapped thousands of Black Americans in conditions that closely resembled slavery.

Through discriminatory laws, arrests, fines, debt, convict leasing, and forced labor contracts, Black men in particular could be seized by local authorities and compelled to work for private businesses, farms, mines, and industrial operations. In many cases, the legal system became the mechanism that supplied labor. Blackmon’s central argument is uncomfortable but important: slavery did not simply disappear in 1865—it was reorganized under new names and legal structures.

From Chattel Slavery to Forced Labor

After emancipation, Southern states and local governments enacted laws that severely restricted the freedom of newly emancipated African Americans. Black citizens could be arrested for offenses such as vagrancy, accused of owing debts, or fined amounts they had little chance of paying.

Those unable to pay could be placed into labor arrangements where employers or contractors paid their fines in exchange for control over their labor.

The result was a system in which African Americans could once again be forced to work under threat of violence, imprisonment, or death.

Slavery by Another Name shows that this was not simply a collection of isolated abuses. The system involved local governments, courts, sheriffs, businesses, landowners, and industrial interests. Forced Black labor became economically valuable, and the institutions responsible for enforcing the law often benefited from keeping the system alive.

The Thirteenth Amendment and a Dangerous Exception

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, but it contained an important exception for punishment following a criminal conviction.

That exception created an opportunity for Southern governments to criminalize ordinary behavior and then use prisoners as a labor force.

In practice, a Black man could be arrested, convicted through a deeply discriminatory legal system, and then leased to a private company where he could be forced to work under brutal conditions.

The legal terminology had changed.

The underlying reality often had not.

The Southern Baptist Convention and the Defense of Slaveholding

The story told in Slavery by Another Name begins after the Civil War, but understanding what came afterward requires looking at the religious and cultural system that had defended slavery before emancipation.

The Southern Baptist Convention was organized in Augusta, Georgia, in 1845, two decades before the abolition of slavery.

Its formal constitution emphasized missions and cooperation among churches, but the accompanying proceedings—especially the convention’s public Address of the Convention—make clear that the treatment of slaveholders was central to the separation between Northern and Southern Baptists.

The immediate controversy concerned whether a slaveholder could be appointed as a Baptist missionary while continuing to own enslaved people.

A Boston-based Baptist mission board had determined that if a missionary candidate was “having slaves” and intended to retain them “as his property,” the board would not appoint him.

Southern Baptist leaders objected.

They argued that Baptists had previously made “no difference between slaveholders and non-slaveholders.” Slaveholders had contributed financially, served in denominational leadership, and participated in missionary efforts.

The dispute therefore went beyond missionary administration. At its heart was the question of whether the ownership of another human being should disqualify someone from Christian missionary service.

Was Slavery Sinful?

The Southern delegates objected to the growing Northern Baptist conviction that slavery was morally incompatible with Christian missionary work.

Their own address complained that the Northern board appeared to regard slavery as “in all circumstances, sinful.”

Southern leaders rejected that proposition.

They defended the earlier denominational arrangement that allowed individuals to advocate their own positions on slavery and objected when slaveholding became grounds for refusing missionary appointment.

This historical background matters because institutions do not immediately lose their cultural assumptions when laws change.

When slavery was abolished after the Civil War, the religious, political, economic, and racial ideologies that had justified slavery did not disappear overnight.

The legal institution changed.

Much of the culture that sustained it remained.

Slavery After Slavery

That is where Blackmon’s work becomes especially important.

Slavery by Another Name demonstrates how a society that had depended on enslaved Black labor developed new methods for controlling that labor after emancipation.

The old system had treated Black Americans as property.

The new system often treated them as criminals, debtors, prisoners, or contracted laborers.

The terminology changed, but the result could still involve forced labor, violence, confinement, family separation, and the denial of basic human freedom.

This is one reason the history of slavery cannot be understood simply by drawing a line at 1865.

The end of legal slavery was a monumental change, but it did not erase the institutions, economic incentives, racial ideology, or religious justifications that had supported generations of human bondage.

Why Slavery by Another Name Matters

Blackmon’s book forces readers to reconsider one of the simplest narratives in American history: slavery existed, the Civil War happened, emancipation followed, and slavery ended.

The historical record is far more complicated.

For many African Americans, emancipation was followed by decades in which freedom remained dangerously fragile. Law enforcement, courts, businesses, and governments sometimes worked together to create systems that effectively returned Black citizens to involuntary servitude.

Understanding this history also helps explain why examining institutions such as the Southern Baptist Convention matters.

The SBC’s 1845 proceedings show religious leaders defending the right of slaveholders to remain fully accepted within Baptist missionary life. Slavery by Another Name then documents a later America in which the formal institution of slavery had disappeared but powerful systems of racial exploitation continued.

These histories are connected.

One shows how slavery was defended.

The other shows how elements of the system survived.

Watch: Slavery by Another Name

The documentary below examines the forced-labor systems that emerged after emancipation and the institutions that allowed those systems to survive well into the twentieth century.

It provides important historical context for understanding what happened after the period in which the Southern Baptist Convention was founded—and why the legacy of slavery cannot be understood simply by ending the story in 1865.

Conclusion

The history of the Southern Baptist Convention cannot be separated from the slavery controversy that surrounded its creation.

The convention’s own 1845 proceedings show Southern Baptist leaders objecting to restrictions placed upon slaveholding missionaries and rejecting the proposition that slavery was necessarily sinful.

The history that followed also demonstrates that emancipation did not immediately eliminate systems of forced labor and racial domination.

Understanding this history requires more than remembering dates such as 1845 or 1865. It requires examining the institutions, religious arguments, laws, economic systems, and cultural beliefs that allowed human exploitation to survive even after slavery had supposedly ended.

Primary documents and historical investigations such as Slavery by Another Name give readers an opportunity to examine that history directly.

References and Further Reading

Southern Baptist Convention, Proceedings and Address of the Convention, Augusta, Georgia, 1845.
Primary historical source concerning the organization of the Southern Baptist Convention and the missionary controversy involving slaveholders.

Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name.

---