In fact, they go back to being slaves because then they don’t have to worry anymore.
This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.
Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.
The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.
Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.
The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.
But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.
That’s all well and good, but Asterix is a satirical comic book making a point about wage slavery, not happy slaves. The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.
And I might have imagined the re-enslaving, too. I can’t find it in plot summaries. Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.
The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.
No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.
Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.
Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.
But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.
This last bit is Neo-Confederate propaganda. The “slaves were happy to be slaves” myth is wildly apocryphal.
Far more often, the freedmen leave their plantation economies in pursuit of more lucrative work in more industrial and urban regions. Harlem, New York and Detroit, Michigan are testament to the exodus of American colored people northward following the war. Or they strike out to undeveloped territories and form their own municipalities. Large black communities popped up across the Southwest and West coast, as the post-Civil War frontier was subjected to industrial scale genocide of native peoples.
The consequence of this mass migration is a labor shortage at home. One which can only be resolved by (a) raising wages / living standards until people want to stay or (b) re-enslaving the population through other means. In the case of the US South, these “other means” were the Jim Crow laws, which transformed the private plantation economy into a publicly managed (and privately profitable) state prison economy.
Following the end of Reconstruction under Rutherford B. Hayes, southern state governments imposed a suite of laws forbidding “vagrancy” and constricting the right of colored people to travel unattended. Independent communities of black citizens were raided and demolished (The Wilmington Massacre of 1898, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 being two notable examples - really all of Red Summer being a major historical turning point for American race relations). Enormous prison compounds were constructed. And the incarceration rate among people of color skyrocketed.
The campaign to re-enslave the colored population was a central position of the “Dixiecrats” straight into the LBJ administration. And capturing these revanchists was pivotal to the Nixon and Reagan campaigns, even as the taste for segregation soured nationally on the American tongue. All of this was covered up and expunged from US History, following the 1980s Reagan Revolution and the reactionary efforts to undo the Civil Rights Movement. So it’s very easy to never know the long dark winter of civil rights in post-Civil War American history.
But “slaves were actually happier to be on the plantation” is textbook Coolidge Era white nationalist revisionism.
That’s all well and good, but Asterix is a satirical comic book making a point about wage slavery, not happy slaves. The author is French, the story in France, and the slaves are Roman.
And I might have imagined the re-enslaving, too. I can’t find it in plot summaries. Maybe it’s in the movie adaptation, but the scene of their “freeing” is pretty clear about its point.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hLmniv6RNPs
No shortage of French slavery in the New World. Just ask anyone from Louisiana or Haiti.
Oh sure. You can find all sorts of period critiques of industrial capitalism as slavery with extra steps.
But the notion that people would volunteer to return to bondage really undersells how hard plantation overseers and state police in slave states had to work to keep them there.