Topic for discussion - manumission

[epeeblade]

(I haven't done one of these in a while, so here goes...)

I was reading the latest bit of A Kept Boy last night when something occurred to me.

In it Jensen vehemently denies being part of any family, and denies any identity other than that of slave. He's not the only one raised from childhood to be the perfect slave.

So what would happen then if the abolitionist movement does pass a manumission clause? Now granted, it's probably not going to cause hundreds of people freeing their slaves en masse, but I can imagine wealthy owners "freeing their slaves" in their will after they pass. What happens to the slaves who can't imagine a life outside of slavery?

(And yes this would probably be AU like whoah, but it's something I'm interested in seeing explored in fic...)

Comments

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

Coming in late as usual, but anyway.... [duck]

One possible first step would be to change the law so that children born to slaves were free instead of slave. Right now the slave population is growing two ways -- both people who go bankrupt, or families who nearly go bankrupt and sacrifice a child, and also the slave population reproducing. Cutting off that second point of growth would let the reformers concentrate on the economic problem slavery was designed to cope with. Even without manumission, if you can solve the economic problem -- not assuming that no one will ever be poor or bankrupt again, but coming up with different ways of dealing with that than enslavement -- eventually slavery would dwindle.

Of course, there's the question of whether the slaves and reformers would be willing to wait that long. But the more time they could buy with mitigating legislation, the less of a problem there'd be when the crisis point came.

Assuming some point of mass manumission, I'd assume it'd work out much like it did the last time, with newly freed slaves going into debt so they can afford to live right then and there, and falling into a cycle of constantly paying off last year's debt with this year's work. Sharecropping wasn't all that much different from slavery when you get right down to it. If anything, it was more of a benefit to the landowners; if one of the tenants died or was disabled, the owner could just find someone else to work the land, rather than having to invest the money to buy someone else to do the work, as they would've if they depended on slaves.

I can see the biggest slave owners/contractors -- the factories, that sort of mass employer -- ending up with most of the same workers, or drawing from the same pool of workers, and the whole thing ending up as a massive debt-indenture system similar to sharecropping, just because if all the slaves were suddenly freed, the vast majority of them wouldn't have owners like Dylan who were able and willing to set them up. :/

Angie

[isaacsapphire.livejournal.com]

I think that besides Commerce themselves (of new Commerce slaves, not for general sale), nobody's doing very much breeding of slaves; it's supposed to be very illegal to do it in quantity.

Yeah, slavery means that owners/employers have some sort of financial motivation to institute baseline safety standards and make sure their slaves/employees aren't injured or killed too often.

In the US during the Industrial Revolution, in the North women and children (because men cost more) were paid extremely small wages to work in very dangerous conditions. If someone got their arm ripped off in a loom, oh well, go hire a new girl from outside the gates. Whereas at the same time down South they couldn't afford to be quite so careless.

[angiepen.livejournal.com]

It's illegal to breed slaves in quantity, yes, but without some sort of systematic sterilization, a heck of a lot of breeding is going to be happening anyway. When you're talking about millions of people (tens of millions? maybe) there's going to be a lot of breeding going on, even without owners trying to dodge the system and run their own little breeding farms for profit. :/

However much breeding is going on, though, there's definitely some. Cutting off that supply of new slaves, whether you go all Draconian on the breeding itself or whether you declare all those children free, that'd still solve a chunk of the problem, however large or small a chunk we want to argue it might be. At that point, tackling the economic problems which cause free people to become slaves would have some real impact in the longer term -- say, a generation or two.

If someone got their arm ripped off in a loom, oh well, go hire a new girl from outside the gates. Whereas at the same time down South they couldn't afford to be quite so careless.

And yeah, ironic how slavery benefits the slaves in that one matter. Greed and financial self-interest would maintain some minimal standards, at least. :P

Angie