States imposed marriage on freed slaves under threat of forced labor until the 1900s

Evidence

If the poor were unwilling to enter into binding agreements of marriage and kinship by consent, then the state was quite happy to conjure up these unions out of thin air and impose them as a legal obligation of mutual support. If a male servant refused to pay for the support of his presumptive bastard child, then he would be called upon to perform unpaid labor to pay off his debts to the parish. If recently freed slaves continued to live together outside of wedlock, the state would compel them to marry and threaten them with forced labor if they refused to comply. These laws remained very much in vigor right up until the mid-twentieth century, when they came into conflict with the principles of state-managed social insurance championed by New Deal reformers. In many instances, they were never completely overridden. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 218

Categorization

• QUESTION: Would be worth chasing: which rules survived past the New Deal, and how they map onto later workfare/family-cap policy.
• XREF: Connects to scholarship on how post-emancipation law forced Black marriage/nuclear family forms (e.g., Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom). — connects to: The state imposed forced marriage on freed slaves as welfare cost control; Post-emancipation states suppressed slavery only to enforce other forms of compulsory labor — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 749

Broader Connections

• The state imposed forced marriage on freed slaves as welfare cost control #corroborates (0.95)
• Post-emancipation states suppressed slavery only to enforce other forms of compulsory labor #expands (0.80) — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 749