Quote:
Originally Posted by SECdomination
The second article was interesting. It had many more useful facts than the first. But I don't understand how you could hold servants against their will. Did officials look the other way because this was taking place in the south?
|
For an interesting discussion of holding servants against their will, you could check out James Brooks's
Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. He's mainly looking at a form of non-chattel slavery that existed in the American SW (mainly New Mexico) throughout the 19th century. The enslaved people or "servants" or "captives" were American Indians. He argues that the master/slave relationship was justified as a kinship or familial relationship, although masters also held the power of violence over their slaves and that slave raids among Native American communities were ongoing. He has a lot of concrete evidence to support his argument.