In the days when slavery was legal in the US (or in parts of the US), was it possible for a free person to sell themselves into slavery? For example, if an ex-slave was granted their freedom and then decided that their life was better as a slave (with free housing, clothing, and food) than a free laborer scrounging to make this month’s rent, could they legally become a slave again, say, in exchange for a cash payment? Was it theoretically possible for a white person to do this, or could white people not be enslaved under any terms?
Indentured servitude. Sometimes better than slavery, sometimes not.
It’s called ‘working for a corporation during a recession’.
No state ever made provision for people to sell themselves into slavery. However if you were black, and were determined to be enslaved (
), it was easy enough to arrange. Every slave state had restrictions on free black people–they had to register periodically, they couldn’t immigrate to the state, the had to do this, they couldn’t do that–for which one possible penalty for failure to comply was reenslavement. All you had to do was violate one of those rules, and make sure the authorities found out about it.
By analogy, you can’t ask to be put in jail, but if you want the jail experience, just commit a crime and get caught.
If you were white, well, it would be a little tougher. You’d have to convince the authorities you were really black. Maybe register one year, saying you had been passing and wanted to stop, and then fail to register the next year. And be really obnoxious about it. I don’t know, as you might expect, there aren’t a lot of cases where people tried this.
There is a very apocryphal (and thus almost certainly false) about an interracial couple who wanted to marry. They were of course forbidden, but then one of them (white male the way I heard it) pricks his wife-to-be’s finger, drinks a drop of her blood. The judge therefore has no choice but to allow the marriage according to the one drop rule. This assumes they didn’t know back then that it would just pass through your digestive tract.
It probably came from Show Boat, where it was a major plot point.
Yes, but in Showboat it’s simply a dodge to allow the couple and the rest of the troupe who were present to tell the sheriff that they would all swear in a court of law that the husband had negro blood in him. He’d cut his wife’s finger and swallowed a drop of blood in front of the others before the sheriff arrived. The sheriff backed down, unaware of the trick that had been played.
+1