This drives home the point that things like universal education and laws controlling terms of credit (e.g. allowing bankruptcy) are essential to not just economic freedom but actual freedom.

My understanding is that sharecropping as effective slavery was pretty widespread until the 40s.

Yes. I hadn't heard of it being run so explicitly as debt peonage but I guess that's pretty standard for sharecropping, just a matter of degree.

What was striking about this was that the plantation owners would punish the family because of the "debt" if somebody else in the family left. Sharecropping was obviously horrible, but huge numbers of people fled north without anybody chasing them for money owed.

Were sharecroppers allowed to leave the property? It turns out I'm very ignorant.

Yes, generally -- the linked story is a freak thing where the landowners were getting away with terrorizing their tenants because law-enforcement wasn't stopping them. But keeping sharecroppers confined to the property wasn't formally on the law-books anywhere I'm aware of.

I remember some of this from a documentary - that at some point during Jim Crow the federal government started intervening on grounds of "peonage" being illegal (a law that had originally targeted old arrangements in the territory taken from Mexico). But I assume that was only in the most egregious cases (maybe in particular for debt

I think sharecroppers could legally leave but not socially - viz. stories in Warmth of Other Suns of people packing small bags so it looked plausible they were coming back, or leaving at the dead of night. And I'm sure many were convinced they couldn't legally leave.

s/b (maybe in particular for debt imposed through the judicial system, which would have been more public).

Sharecropping is an effective way to keeping somebody tied to the land until harvest and often too poor to travel.

In the course of a long-lasting lawsuit involving the Pribilofs, I met a number of people who'd lived under conditions easily comparable to slavery. Into the 1960s.

This topic is reminding me of Holmes's view of the countryside.

I got to work on that case, and much else of value in my career, through my relationship with a couple of guys who'd represented the Pribilof Aleuts in a case that went to trial in the 60s. (For those we didn't click through, the Pribilof slavery was a US government operation.) Among other things, they'd proved that the government was rationing Aleuts working in the seal plants (that's hard physical labor, by the way) 1700 calories per day. In contrast, German POWs were given 1900 calories per day.

I've heard that one of the government's witnesses testified, concerning the high Aleut death rate, that they just don't value life as much as we white people do.

That was trial testimony in the late 1960s, elicited on cross-examination by an attorney I'll be talking to on the phone today.

As with my comment the other day about Philadelphia, Mississippi, I don't mean to imply that there's never been progress, or that our current situation isn't a substantial deviation from the norms that prevailed for most of y'all's lives. The veneer is pretty thin, though, and any let up in the march towards justice lets the countervailing tendency, which is always there, push back into view.

10 link looks fascinating, thanks.

I haven't read Warmth of Other Suns yet, but IIRC Grossman, Land of Hope, about the Great Migration with a focus on Chicago, writes about southern white landowners trying to block sharecropper tenants from leaving, sometimes with violence. It's only because I was shocked to learn this and other things about sharecropping while reading that book that I'm not as shocked by the story linked here.

Also, I recommend Grossman if you're at all interested in the topic. One of the books I read for my exams that really stood out.

In the tragedy/farce department, the first thing the Russians did to abuse the Aleuts was to take away their slaves:

Russian fur hunters brutally mistreated the Aleuts and at the same time commanded their labor. The Russians stole the Aleuts' wives, slaves, and possessions, and slaughtered any who resisted their domination.
[...]
The Aleuts' slaves were prisoners of war, taken in raids on other villages (Aleut and Eskimo). Slaves were accorded diverse treatment. Some became wives or adopted children and were integrated into the community. Others remained in slave status and were used or abused according to the inclination of the owner. He mig'nt liberate them, add them to a dowry, torture them, or burn them alive. An entire family of slaves might be murdered at funerals or during mourning rites.

I cannot refuse a dire share of praise to the natural gifts of the Aleutian race, and I beg leave to express here my earnest belief that the Aleutes might become as good American citizens as any admitted under the fifteenth amendment to the constitution.

Time for an all-Aleut version of "Gone with the Wind".

I will for real read that book.

The judicial version: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/icc/v42/iccv42p042.pdf

I don't know how similar the Chukchi are to the Aleuts, but the novel "A Dream In Polar Fog" was very interesting about Chukchi interactions with Westerners a hundred years ago. Kind of idealized and sentimental, but it might be the only Chukchi novel. It doesn't mention slavery by name, but the injured Canadian guy does become a sort of household servant. Written by Chukchi novelist Yuri Ryktheu in Russian in 1970, and translated recently.

(In 17 years litigating my Pribilof case, I'd never read the decision linked in 20, going from general understanding instead -- including regarding the timing, about which I was wrong. Trial was in the 70s. It's a harrowing read. My impression that the royalty payments from the Pribilof seal operation had paid for the purchase of Alaska even before gold was discovered was only slightly off.

My case didn't require this kind of detailed knowledge, because it was about the post-1983 distribution of government lands among various stakeholders.)

One last comment from me on the Aleuts: that 70s case was basically a calculation and award of reparations. This was legally viable because to the special relationship between the federal government and Native populations, based on a couple of specific statutes. (That issue was litigated earlier in the case, along with the Aleuts aboriginal title.) The difficult of making the calculation is certainly evident, but so is the fact that it's not impossible.

One wonders if the slaves in the OP can make a legal claim.

By 1873 agents began to complain about increasing Aleut resistance to the American schools, stemming from parents' fear that "in learning English their children will forget their Russian and weaken their attachment to the church."