Convict leasing and indentured servitude replicated antebellum racial subordination after the Civil War

Evidence

In the aftermath of the Civil War, America established twinned economic and political systems that pushed capitalists and workers further apart, creating winners and losers, the rich and the rest. Many formerly enslaved Black workers were pushed into indentured servitude or imprisoned and leased out to companies as convict laborers, dual systems that “replicated the antebellum cycles of racial subordination and exploitation,” writes the historian Talitha LeFlouria. Meanwhile, Northern white elites became the most powerful in the world, shrugging off the Puritan frugality and modesty of their forbears, who had been rich but not spectacularly so and had maintained an egalitarian affect. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 593

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bears on the Wilentz dispute: the claim that postbellum labor systems replicated slavery’s racial cycles is exactly the kind of contested causal claim the reader is tracking.