Peonage
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Peonage. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
the holding of a person in forced labor until his debts are paid. It is a disguised form of slavery. In a strict sense, giving a penniless outcast a choice between paying a fine and serving a workhouse sentence is condemning him to peonage. The term is applied ordinarily to service from which the master intends the person shall not escape. To confine the discussion to recent times and to this side of the Atlantic, it may be said that peonage has existed in the former slave states, and that it exists still in Mexico and in the Central American and South American states. Parts of the cotton states after the Civil War were overrun with negro vagrants who did not know what liberty meant if it did not mean to carouse in idleness. Plantations and public works were at a stands-still for want of laborers. A mixture of native zeal for the public good and gratification of slaveholding instincts led to the arrest of negro vagrants for misdemeanors and selling them to contractors to work out their fines. These ignorant "convicts" signed contracts to avoid lying in prison. They were kept in gangs and were herded with shot guns to prevent escape. They were kept to their work and in subjugation with stripes. They were allowed to buy freely at the contractor's store. When the time of their contract was up they were in debt and had a choice only between the prison and a new contract. In this way the old slavedriving, not the former slaveholding, element held negroes in the gang indefinitely. Outrageous instances and descriptions of revolting camps got into the public press. As late as 1903 the courts found ninety-nine indictments against persons in Alabama and Georgia for holding negroes in peonage. Cases are not unknown of poor whites rented, practically sold, to work out fines. As a matter of fact it is difficult to draw the line between peonage and leased convict labor. For this reason a state should employ convicts on its own premises under state guards and no other. The term peon is a Spanish word for foot-soldier. Peonage is more or less prevalent in the Latin states of both Americas. Logging, mining, railroad building, the construction of roads, and the work on coffee plantations is done in part by gangs of Indian peons, who do not know enough to escape from peonage or to stay out when they get out. Mr. John V. Noel, chief of the Latin-American press section at the Pan-American Exposition, writing in 1905, said: Generally speaking, there are in the Latin-American countries two classes: the governing and the governed. The former are not inclined to grant reforms unless compelled to. The latter have not reached, as a rule, that condition of intelligence or freedom to demand or force legislation for their betterment and protection. The lower classes, especially the majority of those millions of Indians who constitute the numerical force in Mexico, Central, and South America , are victims of the peon system and slaves to all intent and purposes, according to our standards. Oppressed from the days of Spanish conquerors, they have been stoical and happy in their fashion, careless of the morrow. Climatic conditions have thereon a direct bearing. The stern realities of life do not influence them in lands where starvation is impossible and where a few palm-leaves furnish shelter. Occasional outbreaks from this passive and contented attitude take place, such as the dock strikes at Valparaiso, Chile, or the cigarmakers at Havana. It may be stated in a general way that the people, meaning the masses, have not come to realize the necessity for improvement in their methods of living, sanitation, customs, and general surroundings, or have never broached the question as to whether they are receiving a fair share of the general purse in return for their contribution of labor. There is a constantly growing tendency, however, among those whom the accident of birth and blood or of political fortune has placed in a commanding position to adopt modern ideas and champion measures which experience in older countries has suggested--a tedious and thankless task, which the apathy of the people in general and Spanish-inherited procrastinating tendency emphasizes. In the matter of sanitation, great improvements, however, have been made. The invade one of his own kind. . . . To affright Argentine and other Latin-American countries may well serve as an example to other nations. In Chile the standard of education is very high, and an educational congress and school exhibit, held in the early part of the year, reflected great credit upon that progressive nation. In all countries there are, however, earnest men and women working courageously and trying to give light and educate their people in many reformatory efforts, such as sanitation, prevention of cruelty to children and animals, moral customs, and in general for a higher standard of living and thinking.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a system of agricultural servitude common in Mexico, and some other parts of Spanish America. The peon in debt to his employer was by the Spanish colonial system bound to labor for his employer till the debt was paid. Peonage in New Mexico was abolished by Act of Congress in 1867; it was also abolished in the Argentine Republic.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 account treated peonage as a scandal at the edges of the law, and blamed the freedmen themselves as "negro vagrants who did not know what liberty meant"; modern historians read the same facts as a deliberate system of re-enslavement, the argument made at length in Douglas Blackmon's Pulitzer-winning "Slavery by Another Name" (2008). The legal props were knocked out one by one after these entries were written: the Supreme Court struck down Alabama's debt-contract law in Bailey v. Alabama (1911) and the criminal-surety system in United States v. Reynolds (1914), Alabama became the last state to end convict leasing in 1928, and Florida's contract-labor statute fell in Pollock v. Williams (1944). Mexico, which Collier's in 1921 still described as the home of the system, had formally abolished debt servitude in its 1917 Constitution, though enforcement lagged for decades. Federal peonage prosecutions ran on into the 1940s and beyond, and the modern successor framework is the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000, which covers debt bondage under the heading of human trafficking.
Written for this edition, 2026.