A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

The persistence of racialized labor systems—peonage among Hispanics in the Southwest, long-term indentures of Chinese immigrants on the West Coast—as well as the dispossession of the lands of Native Americans raise important questions about the limits to the triumph of free labor during the Civil War.

In the absence of slavery, other means of peonage were devised to continue a similar labor system as slavery, but lacking the name.