Serfs and Slavery...

5fish

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2019
Messages
10,626
Reaction score
4,544
Here is an article that compares the two...

With the stroke of his pen, the nation’s leader abolished a system of servitude that had lasted generations. Over twenty million people received their liberty in this declaration of emancipation. In 1861, Alexander II of Russia freed the serfs almost two years before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Russians, however, did it without war. The Tsar allegedly said that his top-down decree precluded a bottom-up revolt.

Snip...

Serfdom was a form of agricultural servitude that most of Europe had left behind in the medieval period. Russian serfdom developed, as historian William C. Hine writes, during roughly the same time period as American slavery. The Russian Code of 1649 “firmly embedded serfdom” as a labor system. The Virginia House of Burgesses’s first piece of slave legislation, allowing African slavery for life, passed in 1661. Though both slavery and serfdom mandated total control over the bodies of those in bondage, Hine says the Russian experience was “incredibly more varied and complex than its American counterpart” because of the time-honored relationship between peasants and the land.

Snip...

Nonetheless, as historian Peter Kolchin shows, the defenders of both systems used much the same justification through the eighteenth century.

Defenders of slavery in the United States pointed to an alleged racial difference as the reason Africans and African-Americans needed to be enslaved. In this racist argument, blacks were not fit for freedom

Russian lords believed the same thing about serfs. The class difference was so great, Kolchin says, that “Russian noblemen had come to regard themselves as inherently different from their peasants.”

Kolchin writes that the Russian nobles “invented many of the same kinds of racial arguments to defend serfdom that American slave-owners used to justify” slavery. Some nobles went so far as to say they had white bones, while the serfs had black bones. Kolchin calls this an “essentially racial argument in defense of serfdom, even though no racial distinction divided lord and peasant.”

Both Russians and Americans argued that their systems of bondage resulted in a superior society.

Link to the article:https://daily.jstor.org/how-american-slavery-echoed-russian-serfdom/

There is a book...



Summary:
Two massive systems of unfree labor arose, a world apart from each other, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.

These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free.

Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master–bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage.

This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.




 

5fish

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2019
Messages
10,626
Reaction score
4,544
A video to help us...

 

O' Be Joyful

ohio hillbilly
Joined
May 12, 2019
Messages
3,491
Reaction score
3,136
August 24, 1855: Letter to Joshua F. Speed

The American or "Know Nothing Party" was an anti-immigrant political party of the 1850's.

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.--A. Lincoln

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/knownothingparty.htm
 

O' Be Joyful

ohio hillbilly
Joined
May 12, 2019
Messages
3,491
Reaction score
3,136
" When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.--A. Lincoln

To add: This seems ever MORE true Today.

Beware and be on-guard, despotism may arise in places where you would at one time...least expect it.
 

5fish

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 28, 2019
Messages
10,626
Reaction score
4,544
To add: This seems ever MORE true Today.
I agree....

I found that we did have serfdom in the south after reconstruction and system called "peonage"

https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/peonage/

Slavery v. Peonage

Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.

In some cases, employers advanced workers some pay or initial transportation costs, and workers willingly agreed to work without pay in order to pay it off. Sometimes those debts were quickly paid off, and a fair wage worker/employer relationship established.

In many more cases, however, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping loans), merchants (through credit), or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle.

But the most corrupt and abusive peonage occurred in concert with southern state and county government. In the south, many black men were picked up for minor crimes or on trumped-up charges, and, when faced with staggering fines and court fees, forced to work for a local employer would who pay their fines for them. Southern states also leased their convicts en mass to local industrialists. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and these men found themselves trapped in inescapable situations.


We passed a law ending it but did we...

Peonage Act of 1867 - Wikipedia


The Peonage Abolition Act of 1867 was an Act passed by the U.S. Congress on March 2, 1867, that abolished peonage in the New Mexico Territory and elsewhere in the United States.

Designed to help enforce the Thirteenth Amendment, the Act declares that holding any person to service or labor under the peonage system is unlawful and forever prohibited. It defines peonage as the "voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons . . . in liquidation of any debt or obligation."
Violations of the Act were punishable by fines and imprisonment.
 

O' Be Joyful

ohio hillbilly
Joined
May 12, 2019
Messages
3,491
Reaction score
3,136
I agree....

I found that we did have serfdom in the south after reconstruction and system called "peonage"

https://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/peonage/

Slavery v. Peonage

Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, is a system where an employer compels a worker to pay off a debt with work. Legally, peonage was outlawed by Congress in 1867. However, after Reconstruction, many Southern black men were swept into peonage though different methods, and the system was not completely eradicated until the 1940s.


In many more cases, however, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping loans), merchants (through credit), or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous work-without-pay cycle.
And then, "they" invented" credit cards.
 
Top