SERMON: "Slavery Today"
Rev. Paul Beedle
April 13, 2008
A press release early this month announced the following:
Rozina Mohd Ali pleaded guilty and was sentenced today in federal court in Houston, Texas, for holding a woman in forced labor as her domestic servant, ... Under the terms of the plea agreement, Ali, 43, of Sugarland, Texas, will spend one year and one day in prison and provide $72,676 in restitution to the victim. ... Although the victim wanted to return to Indonesia, Ali did not allow it. Instead, Ali engaged in a plan to compel the victim to continue working for her, which included intimidation, suggestions of adverse consequences, withholding the victim's passport and placing the victim in fear of serious harm if she did not remain with Ali. Nonetheless, on Aug. 19, 2007, the victim left Ali's residence and was subsequently taken to the Indonesian Consulate for assistance by strangers who found her the following day. ...
“Holding a woman in forced labor as her domestic servant.” Why do we believe that slavery is a thing of the past?
As schoolchildren we were taught that our Civil War ended slavery in the United States. The truth is only that after the Civil War, slavery was not legal in our country. But as this press release shows, slavery still exists here. I remember learning in school that Congress made importing slaves illegal starting in 1808. I don't remember if it was pointed out that the United States Constitution forbade Congress from doing that sooner. But I know that the effect of this was not made clear. It might sound like a good thing: slavery itself was legal, but at least we were out of the slave trade. In fact, we were not out of the slave trade. It was not illegal for Americans to participate in the international slave trade, as long as they didn't import them into the United States. And the effect of the Congressional ban on importing slaves was to create a self-sufficient domestic slave trade.
Settlement in the Old Southwest – Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana – expanded that trade. Slaves bred in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia were sold and driven west. Groups of “`half naked women, and men loaded with chains' ... anywhere from a dozen to over a hundred ... were expected to walk up to twenty-five miles a day and sleep on the ground. The long trek overland from Virginia to Mississippi or Louisiana would [take] six to eight weeks and was usually undertaken in winter, when agricultural labor could best be spared. ... The interstate slave trade was big business; the Chesapeake Bay region alone exported 124,000” between 1810 and 1820. [1] That's what the slave trade looked like when it was legal.
A year before Congress acted to ban the importing of slaves, the British Parliament acted to ban the slave trade in the British Empire. The movie Amazing Grace tells the story of William Wilberforce's campaign of many years to acheive that. His followers stopped taking sugar with their tea so as not to participate in the slave labor system, especially the Caribbean sugar plantations with their notoriously brutal conditions. Near the end of the film, Parliament votes to ban the slave trade, and the actor Michael Gambon – who played Albus Dumbledore in the later Harry Potter movies; this time he is playing Lord Charles Fox – rises to say (in a much-quoted line): “William Wilberforce will return to his family, lay his head on his pillow, and remember the slave trade is no more.” But of course, that's not correct. The slave trade was thriving; all Parliament had done was made it illegal. A quarter century would pass before slavery itself was made illegal in the British Empire, and Wilberforce led that effort as well; he died just a year after slavery was banned, in 1834. One result of his life's work was that the British Navy, the most powerful in the world, became a force to fight slavery around the globe.
Among the themes in the movie Amistad is the Royal Navy's good fight against slavery. Near the end of the film is a scene depicting a British brig firing broadsides at the just-liberated and evacuated Lomboko Slave Fortress in Sierra Leone. At some point in the story, the United States Secretary of State had informed the British government that Americans were not involved in the slave trade in that area, and claimed that the rumors of this slave fortress – a place where seized Africans were held before they were transferred to slave ships – were false, that the fortress did not exist. As the cannons roar, the captain says: “Ensign, take a letter. To his honor the United States Secretary of State Mr. John Forsythe. My Dear Mr. Forsythe: It is my great pleasure to inform you that you are in fact correct. The slave fortress in Sierra Leone does not exist.” Bracing stuff!
That the Royal Navy should have become a force to fight slavery is ironic. Britain's Navy was as much sustained by slavery as British planters. That's why the United States went to war with Britain in 1812 – at least, that's what our government claimed that war was about. But it was true that the Royal Navy felt entitled to seize American as well as British citizens off ships on the high seas and force them to join its crews to keep its ships sailing. “Impressment” it was called. The peace settlement in 1815 did not even mention this practice. Both sides were just glad to stop fighting. Impressment stopped because it wasn't needed any more: Napoleon was defeated and the war with France ended. It was never repudiated in law. [2]
Funny thing about the war with Napoleon: it drove cotton prices up. The first economic boom experienced throughout the United States economy came when the war with Napoleon was over and European demand for cotton and other goods stimulated American exports. Even the inferior short-staple cotton became marketable. These economic conditions accelerated settlement in the Old Southwest, where an acre of land could produce three times the cotton that an acre could in the older Southern states. Already-wealthy planters bought up large areas of prime land, brought plenty of slaves there, and established new plantations, [3] much as modern multinational corporations might build a factory in southeast Asia, or Walmart might open a new store in a small town, using its greater resources to crowd out the competition and grab a big share of the market. You see, globalization had already happened back then. That's why there were American colonies to rebel and create this country in the first place.
Two hundred years before the cotton boom, as the first Europeans settled in Massachusetts and Virginia, India was “the world's greatest center of textile production, exporting cotton cloth to the Middle East and West Africa as well as to Europe. The range and quality of Indian cottons and their relative cheapness ... [gave] an enormous advantage in European markets.” [4] The British East India Company noticed this, and began to concentrate on the import and resale of Indian textiles; Calcutta became the main center of its operations – a company town, in fact. By the eighteenth century, as much as “60 per cent of global manufactured exports ... were produced in India, the textile workshop of the world. India's muslins and calicoes were in huge demand as luxury items in ... Europe, while its cheaper cottons were re-exported [from Europe] to West Africa to be exchanged for” – guess what? – “slaves.” [5] In the 1750s the ruler of Bengal seized Calcutta and jailed the officials of the East India Company who he thought were harboring his enemies. The Company hired troops to liberate Calcutta; their commander, Robert Clive, wrote in his report: “So large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too extensive for a mercantile company ... without the nation's assistance.” [6] That's how the British began to colonize India. Gradually they took over the trading system India had built, and with industrialization England would displace India as the world's major textile producer. With the cotton boom, America surpassed India as the world's leading producer of cotton. [7] That's globalization.
Of course, after a boom comes a bust. It came in 1819. English textile mills were temporarily unable to absorb American cotton production; the price of cotton fell; London banks stopped extending credit; American banks started calling their loans; investors panicked; consumers stopped buying so much in order to pay off their loans; businesses went bankrupt; people were out of jobs. Hard times would last about four years. [8] And just as this was happening came a political surprise.
James Tallmadge, congressman from Poughkeepsie, New York, proposed that a gradual emancipation program like the one he had helped enact in his state [9] should be imposed on Missouri as a condition of granting statehood. Conventional political wisdom at the time was that eventually all states would make slavery illegal. Why not get Missouri started on it? It was a shock to many people to discover that in places where the domestic slave trade was big business – particularly in Virginia and Georgia – people were violently opposed to limiting the market for slaves. But of course they were. It hadn't just been cotton's price that rose during the boom; the value of slaves went up, too, “bringing substantial capital gains to the owners of slaves and demonstrating broad confidence in the security of that form of investment. Slavery became so profitable, in fact, that it crowded out other forms of investment in the South.” [10] So with the bust – and lower prices for both cotton and slaves – came a capital loss for slaveholders and hard times for slave traders. They had invested heavily in the means of cotton production and now depended upon it. Their resistance to limiting slavery was rooted in economic motivations similar to those of energy companies today that are resisting limits to further oil exploration. They may believe in their hearts that they need to shift their business away from oil, but it doesn't make sense to them to do that in any great hurry. Slaveholders and slave traders felt the same way. Thomas Jefferson, no less, argued that “diffusion [of slaves] over a greater surface [would] facilitate the accomplishment of their emancipation.” [11]
And there was something else. Jefferson's argument was that if slavery was legal in more places, it would end sooner. It doesn't make sense, does it? What Jefferson had in mind was that, if there weren't so many slaves concentrated in any one place, whites would be less afraid to free them. That fear is the surest measure of how far off a moral course the economic winds had driven them, how far they had strayed from protecting what they knew to be sacred: the worth and dignity of every person.
So that's what slavery looked like when it was legal. Human beings bred like animals, used as farm machinery, sold and shipped in volume. Other human beings owning them, sometimes forming human relationships with them that they had somehow to reconcile in their hearts with their roles in the economic system. “Counteracting whatever tendencies existed toward human relationships between slaves and masters ... was a substantial body of advice on plantation management discouraging intimacy and fraternization as inimical to discipline and efficiency.” [12] Economic links and dependencies that stretched around the world affected households, businesses, investment decisions, politics, security and peace.
So how does slavery look today? Here's some more from that press release:
During the plea hearing, Ali admitted she withheld travel documents of an Indonesian domestic servant for the purpose of forcing the victim to work for Ali and Ali's relatives. The victim was forced to work long hours over a period of approximately four years ... with almost no compensation. In August 2002, Ali employed the victim to work as a domestic servant for her in Malaysia for approximately $112 per month. An employment contract was signed and executed, and one month later, Ali brought the victim to the United States on a temporary visitor's visa to work as a domestic servant. From that date until August 2007, the victim ... was only paid on two occasions, totaling approximately $320. ...
Several aspects of modern slavery are illustrated in this story. One is that the term “slavery” is not used – they say “domestic servant” instead. It's the same with the term “slave trade” – today it's called “human trafficking.” Why not call it slavery? Because slavery is illegal, and part of the process of making something illegal is that you have to define it. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons defines “trafficking in persons” as “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation [is defined], at a minimum, [as] the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.” In other words, “slavery” is now thought by lawyers and diplomats to be too narrow a term. In practice, and in our federal law, the operational definition is the use of force, fraud or coercion to exploit someone. Exploitation is proven by appeal to labor law, such as the minimum wage – hence all the attention to how much the victim was paid.
Another feature of modern slavery is that there are parts of the world where the idea of having domestic servants is still a cultural norm. General Electric and Westinghouse have not yet revolutionized homemaking everywhere. Apparently in Malaysia there is an expectation that a domestic worker would be paid. Perhaps an employment contract is also expected; or perhaps that was a gesture to gain the victim's confidence. In any case, there are folks willing to take such work. But once employed, this victim was transported thousands of miles away – I understand this victim didn't even know she was in the United States – and manipulated with threats of various kinds – the press release lists: intimidation, suggestions of adverse consequences, withholding the victim's passport and placing the victim in fear of serious harm if she did not remain.
But this case is small-time. As you can see on the map inside your order of service, people are being trafficked in volume. What accounts for that? In some parts of the world, as investigative reporters have told us from time to time, there are factories where the workers are locked in and forced to sleep beside the machines they run. Some or all of those workers may have been trafficked. In many places, agricultural workers are sold by traffickers in a way that makes them look like immigrant workers, but they are not sending their wages home to their families – they might not ever see their wages. Service workers doing things like lawn work or gardening, cutting hair or doing ladies' nails, or giving massages may have been trafficked and not actually being paid for their work. And then, of course, illegal industries, like the sex trade, have nothing to lose employing trafficked persons since they're already doing something illegal. In all these different industries, trafficked persons are sold over and over again just as planters would sell surplus or bred slaves to liquidate capital. But now that slavery and the slave trade are illegal in much of the world, trafficked persons can't be capital to invest in, only commodities to be used up.
How does this touch our lives? In two ways. First, as a practical matter, if you think you are seeing a possible case of human trafficking, how can you reach the right person to tell?
Memorize two numbers: triple-8 and 37. Memorize them twice. It'll help you remember the number to call to reach the National Rescue Hotline for human trafficking: it's 1-888-3737-888. Two triple-8's like bookends around two 37s. If you can remember that number, you can speak directly to folks who are paying attention to human trafficking all the time. The number is in the lower right-hand corner of the map of human trafficking routes in your order of service.
Second, as a matter for spiritual growth and reflection, the existence of slavery and the slave trade in our world dramatizes the way economic winds can blow us off our moral course in life. It is hard not to participate indirectly in the exploitation of others. The English used to take sugar in their tea. Kathie Lee Gifford got a lot of negative publicity for a line of clothing sold at Walmart with her name on it, because the clothes were made in sweatshops. If you're in business, you want to use the best trading network, whether it's the East India Company or Walmart. A consumer's desire for pleasant taste of sugar, or a producer's desire for profits – our interests and ambitions – can send us in directions we don't want to go – and like sailing ships at sea, we don't always know until it's too late that we're off course.
If we want not to be blown off our moral course by economic winds, it's important to proceed from understanding rather than interest. Everybody looks after their own interests, but when that's all any of us do, the market does not produce the best moral results – everything from exploitation in boom times to panic in bust times is the result. So the issue of human trafficking calls us to examine our personal conduct in daily life, to see how often we act from compassion and how often we act from a hope for some kind of personal gain. If we err on the side of compassion, we are far less likely to be tempted into exploiting our neighbors.
Slavery is not gone. It must be fought. You can help. You can know what it looks like and help authorities to fight it. And you can make your life a prayer to end exploitation by examining your own balance of ambition and compassion, and by practicing a discipline in your life that helps you to err on the side of compassion. Most of us have no trouble remembering to look after our own interests. May we all be mindful of the world's need for us to practice compassion. So may it be. Amen.
[1] Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, pp. 129-130.
[2] The story of the War of 1812 and British impressment practices is told in: Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates; and Walter R. Borneman, 1812: The War that Forged A Nation.
[3] Howe, p. 128.
[4] John Darwin, After Tamerlane, p. 144.
[5] ibid, p. 193.
[6] ibid, p. 177.
[7] Howe, p. 128.
[8] ibid, pp. 142-147.
[9] Slavery in some forms was permitted by law in New York as late as the 1840s.
[10] Howe, p. 56.
[11] ibid, p. 149.
[12] ibid, p. 58.