Involuntary Servitude Research Articles

Constitutionalizing Employees’ Rights: Lessons from the History of the Thirteenth Amendment

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the Thirteenth Amendment as a source of constitutional rights. Arguments based on the amendment have taken various forms to support different rights, ranging from protection of children, to safeguarding abortion rights, to prohibiting discrimination, and to the topic of this conference — protecting employees, both in their individual rights and in their right to organize unions, to engage in collective bargaining, and to strike. These positions have been asserted in the service of a progressive and liberal agenda for social change, in a tradition that goes back to the radical and abolitionist roots of the amendment. Yet the self-enforcing provisions in Section 1 of the amendment have never expanded far beyond abolition. As the Supreme Court observed in United States v. Kozminski, decisions enforcing these provisions have never gone beyond identifying conditions of involuntary servitude that “involved compulsion of services through the use or threatened use of physical or legal coercion.” Meanwhile, the decisions on enforcement legislation, enacted under Section 2 of the amendment, have gone considerably further, mainly to support civil rights legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866 in so far it prohibits private discrimination. Current attempts to revive the influence of the amendment must take this history into account. It offers three salutary lessons for efforts to protect employees’ rights by this means. First, it is not likely to be accomplished by judicial interpretation of the amendment alone. Second, decisions interpreting the amendment, to the extent they depart from enforcement legislation, have historically served conservative purposes as frequently as they have served progressive purposes. And third, the current Supreme Court has shown little sympathy for the progressive uses of constitutional law, especially to protect employees, and if anything has shown the reverse. It follows that constitutional arguments under the Thirteenth Amendment must be deployed as part of a larger strategy to obtain legislative endorsement of labor’s goals. Only in that way will current efforts to revive the amendment learn from its history, rather than repeating it.

“New People in a New World”?: Defoe's Ambivalent Narratives of Emigration

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack, both published in 1722, have often been read as propaganda for emigration, transportation of criminals, and involuntary servitude. Both title characters find financial security and social status after being transported as indentured servants, and they eventually return to England. Each protagonist, however, makes an additional transatlantic journey out of choice rather than necessity, which paradoxically leads to greater risk and a more coercive atmosphere. Defoe complicates matters further by reversing the order of these journeys in the two novels, thus qualifying and in some respects subverting a purely optimistic view of colonial prospects. And while both Moll and Jack clearly distinguish themselves from African slaves, each is subject to more subtle forms of subjugation because of the connectedness of a transatlantic world that proves surprisingly small.

"New People in a New World"?: Defoe's Ambivalent Narratives of Emigration

Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack , both published in 1722, have often been read as propaganda for emigration, transportation of criminals, and involuntary servitude. Both title characters find financial security and social status after being transported as indentured servants, and they eventually return to England. Each protagonist, however, makes an additional transatlantic journey out of choice rather than necessity, which paradoxically leads to greater risk and a more coercive atmosphere. Defoe complicates matters further by reversing the order of these journeys in the two novels, thus qualifying and in some respects subverting a purely optimistic view of colonial prospects. And while both Moll and Jack clearly distinguish themselves from African slaves, each is subject to more subtle forms of subjugation because of the connectedness of a transatlantic world that proves surprisingly small.

Cross-Border Trafficking in Nepal and India—Violating Women’s Rights

Human trafficking is both a human rights violation and the fastest growing criminal industry in the world. This article examines cross-border trafficking of girls and women in Nepal to India. It gives a brief explanation of what is meant by trafficking and then looks at the reasons behind trafficking. In Nepal, women and children are trafficked internally and to India and the Middle East for commercial sexual exploitation or forced marriage, as well as to India and within the country for involuntary servitude as child soldiers, domestic servants, circus entertainment, and factory workers. Nepal and India are both signatories to international conventions and bound by domestic law to combat trafficking, and yet, this scourge continues. There are many laws in place, both in Nepal and India, which regulate the trafficking and prostituting of girls and women. This article looks at how effective these laws and regulations actually are and will look at the reasons for the continuation of trafficking. Despite the formal recognition of girl trafficking as a major problem and the existence of laws to curtail it, trafficking continues. The major problem with Nepal’s and India’s domestic laws is in the lack of enforcement. Finally, this article will look at ways to fight trafficking and make the governments of India and Nepal more effective in their fight against trafficking.

The Demise Of Slavery In The District Of Columbia, April 16, 1862

On Thursday, May 22, 1862, Margaret C. Barber of Washington, D.C. stood before the Board of Commissioners for the Emancipation of Slaves in the District of Columbia. She presented a claim to the Commission to be compensated by the Federal Government, which had freed her 34 slaves. She was not alone in making such a request, as more than 1,000 District residents filed similar documents, but hers was the second largest. Documents from her claim provide a vantage point onto both the institution of slavery and the beginning of its demise during the Civil War. As of April 16, 1862, all slaves within the District of Columbia were freed by the "Act for the Release of Certain Persons Held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia," passed by the U.S. Congress. According to this Act, All persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are hereby discharged and freed of and from al I claim to such service or labor; and from and after the passage of this act neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for crime, whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall hereafter exist in said District. The Act passed after considerable congressional and Presidential debate and compromise. Some urged a cautious approach for fear of alienating slaveholding border states such as Kentucky. Abolitionists wanted immediate emancipation without compensation to slave owners, with some suggesting compensation be given to slaves instead. Non-abolitionists tended to favor compensation to former owners.

A Promise the Nation Cannot Keep: What Prevents the Application of the Thirteenth Amendment in Prison?

The walls of the prison are not solely physical. The doctrine of judicial deference to prison officials, which compels courts to defer to the discretion of those officials in almost all instances, obstructs the effective scrutiny of modern practices of punishment. Since its ratification, the Thirteenth Amendment - which prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude anywhere within the United States or its jurisdiction, except where imposed 'as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted' - has been seen by courts as one brick in this wall. This article makes the novel argument that, properly read, the amendment should instead function as a breach in this wall - one of sufficient size to allow some needed light to shine within.Although in some states inmates may still be sentenced to hard labor, in most systems today they labor under a more general requirement that, if they are able-bodied, they must work. Reading the word 'punishment' in the Thirteenth Amendment in a manner consistent with the way that same word is used in the Eighth Amendment, and is understood in the rest of the Constitution, reveals that only those inmates who are forced to work because they have been so sentenced - which is not the vast majority of inmates compelled to work in the present day - should be exempted from the general ban on involuntary servitude. In addition to examining the jurisprudence of the Eighth and Fifth Amendments as it relates to this question, this article also details the history of forced labor programs as punishment, and how courts’ reading of the punishment exception is not supported by either the circumstances surrounding ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, or the ways that courts have construed it as a whole since that time. This article argues that the reason courts have broadened of the meaning of 'punishment' in the Thirteenth Amendment, while simultaneously narrowing it in the Eighth Amendment, is because these directly contradictory acts of constitutional interpretation both serve the same end of judicial deference to the actions of prison officials, which has resulted in the general abdication by courts of their constitutional obligations to oversee those officials’ actions. This article also theorizes about the potential outcomes of interpreting the Thirteenth Amendment properly with respect to prison labor, and suggests that the resulting recognition of the punitive purposes that have always driven our prison labor programs may actually lead to an improvement in the overall well-being of prisoners, and perhaps of society as a whole.

Self-Ownership and the Lockean Proviso

Locke's defense of private property rights includes what is called a proviso— “the Lockean proviso”—and some have argued that in terms of it the right to private property can have various exceptions and it may not even be unjust to redistribute wealth that is privately owned. I argue that this cannot be right because it would imply that one's right to life could also have various exceptions, so anyone's life (and labor) could be subject to conscription if some would need it badly enough. Since this could amount to enslavement and involuntary servitude, it would be morally and legally unacceptable.

THE EMPLOYEE FREE CHOICE ACT AND A LONG‐TERM STRATEGY FOR WINNING WORKERS' RIGHTS

Despite its positive features, the Employee Free Choice Act has no place in a long‐term strategy for workers' rights. If enacted, it will dissipate the energy for labor law reform without producing any results other than a marginal improvement in the prospects for staff‐driven organizing campaigns. More likely, however, it will fail of passage. History teaches that the enormous advantages enjoyed by employers in ordinary politics (for example, the grossly disproportionate influence exerted by wealthy interests and rural states in our political system) can be offset only by a long‐term and uncompromising movement for workers' rights. In the first half of the twentieth century—the period when all of our major workers' rights statutes were won—the movement approached the issue as one of long‐term struggle over fundamental principles, and not as a matter of wheeling and dealing for whatever gain could be obtained at the moment. For half a century, workers and unions insisted that without the full freedom to associate in unions and engage in concerted activities like strikes, workers would be reduced to an unconstitutional condition of involuntary servitude. By adopting a similarly principled approach, adapted to fit the emerging industrial regime of flexible production, we can reclaim the rights to organize and strike.

Compulsory Labor in a National Emergency: Public Service or Involuntary Servitude - The Case of Crippled Ports

The 13th Amendment ban on involuntary servitude has new relevance as the U.S. grapples with national emergencies such as catastrophic hurricanes, flu pandemics, and terrorism. This Article considers work refusal and coerced work performance in life-threatening employment contexts. Overwhelmed by fear, hundreds of police officers and health care workers abandoned their jobs during Hurricane Katrina. Postal clerks worked against their will without masks in facilities with anthrax. A report by Congress worries that avian flu will cause sick and frightened medical personnel to stay away from work, thus jeopardizing a coherent response to a crisis. How far can the U.S. go in forcing reluctant civilians to perform essential jobs during a national emergency? I explore solutions to this question by hypothesizing a large release of radiation - whether by terror attack, or catastrophic accident, or major earthquake - in a vital Pacific port. These ports have a history of work stoppages that disrupt the nation's economy. I examine federal government responses if dock workers refused assignments until conditions were safe: (1) The President could declare a national emergency labor dispute under the Taft-Hartley Act, and seek an 80-day back-to-work injunction. (2) Congress could re-enact Section 8 of the War Labor Disputes Act, making it unlawful for dock workers to discontinue production for 30 days and subjecting violators to coercive damages. (3) The president could issue strong executive orders, backed by imprisonment, that regulate employment in ports. At the heart of my analysis, I ask: Would any of these responses violate the Thirteenth Amendment ban on involuntary servitude? Congress and the judiciary have broadened this law, and its enforcement counterpart in 18 U.S.C. § 1584, beyond the abolition of African slave-holding. The Supreme Court in Kozminski defined involuntary servitude as forcing a person to work by physical or legal coercion. But the Supreme Court created 13th Amendment exceptions for transportation work. Robertson upholds a law that bars merchant seamen from quitting work, and imprisons deserters. Butler permits states to conscript citizens to work on highways, on pain of imprisonment. Dock work is similar because ports integrate ships and trucks in a transportation hub. Courts now apply these precedents to new compulsory activities, such as mandatory public service for graduation. Moreover, Kozminski reaffirmed Robertson and Butler as precedents. Thus, the Constitution would be unlikely to shield dock workers from involuntary labor. This has troubling implications for employees who have recently worked in national emergencies, and may do so again. Employees who work to alleviate avian flu or other catastrophic health threats are also at risk for compulsory labor that exposes them to extraordinary hazards. I conclude with a legislative proposal to strengthen individual rights. As my research shows, courts that are presented with national emergency disputes rarely side with the individual who stands in the way of the public's welfare. Without a more balanced labor policy to address emerging crises, the nation may realize belatedly that when we allow fundamental freedoms to be sacrificed in the name of real or perceived emergency, we invariably come to regret it.

The Mass Incarceration of African-American Males: A Return to Institutionalized Slavery, Oppression, and Disenfranchisement of Constitutional Rights

This Article expands on the plight of James Somerset by exploring how the American justice system disenfranchises African-American males of their constitutional rights of liberty and equal justice, thus placing them in a system of de facto slavery. This Article will also reveal how the American justice system has not only had a devastating impact on the social and economic status of African-American males, but also on their constitutional rights of freedom and justice. Specifically, this Article explores how the mass incarceration of African- American males is a system of involuntary servitude for life, similar to the institution of slavery. This Article documents the mass incarceration of African-American males in federal, state, and local prisons and jails throughout the United States. Evidence is presented that illustrates a direct correlation between the incarceration of African-American males and the loss of their rights to vote in state elections throughout this country.

Human Trafficking: Breaking the Military Link

Keith J. Allred ∗ Over 140 years after slavery was outlawed in the United States, and nearly eighty years after world leaders signed the Slavery Convention, human slavery and enforced servitude continue to doom millions to lives of involuntary servitude in our day. The U.S. State Department’s 2005 Report on Human Trafficking estimates that 600,000–800,000 persons are trafficked across international borders every year. Many more, perhaps millions, are trafficked within the borders of their own nations. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are about 12.3 million people enslaved in various kinds of forced or bonded labor, sexual or involuntary servitude at any given time. Some are kidnapped, while others are enticed by promises of good jobs abroad. Some are sold to traffickers by their parents or husbands; many simply migrate of their own accord in search of work, and find themselves in the hands of traffickers. Like the slaves of times past, many labor in fields and factories, yet a more pernicious form of human bondage has become the most common form of servitude: sexual slavery. Like slave owners of old, modern traffickers use violence, threats, intimidation, the confiscation of travel documents, and physical restraint to keep slaves at their tasks. Yet modern human trafficking seems more pernicious than the chattel slavery of the past, in part because it is so thoroughly the province of transnational organized crime. Human trafficking is considered to be the third-largest source of criminal income worldwide, generating an estimated $9.5 billion per year. It is also closely linked with money laundering, document forgery, drug trafficking and human smuggling, and international ter-

Women in Prison and Work

WHEN A WOMAN GOES to jail, she is confronted with time-mostly idle time. In many county jails, there is little to do: a few orderly or trustee jobs perhaps, and daily-demanded tasks such as making a meagerly furnished bed. The real work is to learn to maintain one's equanimity and sanity in an insane situation. Insane because the institution, although it exists ostensibly to deprive one of her liberty or to detain her in the belly of the society for the protection of others, does much more. It redefines work, life, and culture. Labor is a central component in the business of prisons. It has been regarded as a means of punishment as well as of correction; it is seen as both a moralistic coercion and a form of rehabilitation. According to Michel Foucault, the purpose of penal labor is . . the constitution of a power relation... a schema of individual submission and of adjustment to a productive apparatus.' Foucault discounts profit as a motivating factor; however, in the era of the burgeoning prison-industrial complex, profits are enormous. Because prison labor is firmly established in a power-submission dynam ic, it engenders an attitude of rebellion: a moral and ethical response to an immoral situation of coercion and degradation. Involuntary servitude is immoral even though it has been justified by the Catholic and Protestant Reformation churches for centuries.

The Thirteenth Amendment and Slavery in the Global Economy

The globalization of industry has been accompanied by a globalization of labor exploitation. With increasing frequency, U.S.-based multinational corporations are carrying on their foreign operations through the deliberate exploitation of involuntary or slave labor. This development in the foreign labor practices of U.S. entities heralds a new era of challenge and transformation for the Thirteenth Amendment and its prohibition on the existence of slavery or involuntary servitude. It has become necessary to reexamine the range of activities in American industry - and American participation in global industry - that the amendment reaches.I begin that reexamination here. In this article, I analyze the history of slavery and the slave trade in America in order to identify the principles that lie at the core of the Thirteenth Amendment's eradication of those practices. I describe how the Court has translated these core principles into a new industrial context once before, in response to the rise of domestic peonage arrangements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I then offer a model for translating these same core principles into the emerging context of the global economy and, in the process, lay the foundation for a more modern and salient Thirteenth Amendment jurisprudence.

The Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights

For the fifteen years prior to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, did not refer to a unified, coherent category. Rather, the content of the term was open, changing, and contradictory. The lawyers of the Civil Rights Section of the Department of Justice, which was created in 1939, were among those thinking about, and experimenting with, different ways of practicing and framing civil rights in the 1940s. Their practice shows how, as the Great Depression faded and World War II loomed, the most prominent civil rights issues shifted from the labor arena to the rights of minorities, especially African Americans. Because of the doctrinal uncertainties that accompanied the demise of the Lochner era, the lawyers of the Civil Rights Section looked to Reconstruction for inspiration, constitutional authority, and federal power. As the Section's lawyers explored the boundaries of their new authority, they emphasized enforcement of the Thirteenth Amendment and involuntary servitude statutes. They came to use the Thirteenth Amendment as a vehicle for attacking legal and economic coercion broadly defined. This Article narrates the history of the Civil Rights Section and analyzes its practice as a moment in the creation of modern civil rights law. Emphasizing that the wartime turn to racial issues did not eliminate labor from the Section's civil rights practice, it describes the resonances between the Section's civil rights framework - and its uses of the Thirteenth Amendment in particular - and both Reconstruction era and New Deal notions of free labor. Viewed against the backdrop of a historical concern with labor and the mid-century realities of involuntary servitude, we can see in the Section's practice a framework for a labor-infused civil rights that has, for the most part, since been lost.

Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction: free wage labor in the history of the West Part I. American Contract Labor and English Wage Labor: The Use of Pecuniary and Nonpecuniary Pressure: 1. 'Free' contract labor in the United States: an anti-essentialist view of labor types I 2. 'Unfree' wage labor in nineteenth-century England: an anti-essentialist view of labor types II 3. Explaining the legal content of English wage labor 4. Struggles over the rules: the Common Law Courts, parliament, the people, and the master and servant acts 5. Struggles under the rules: strategic behavior and historical change in legal context 6. Struggles to change the rules 7. Freedom of contract and freedom of person Part II. 'Free' and 'Unfree' Labor in the United States: 8. 'Involuntary servitude' in American fundamental law 9. Labor contract enforcement in the American north Conclusion.

How I became pro‐life: remarks on abortion, parental obligations and the draft

Outlines the authors’ influences whilst forming a pro‐life view. States that the parent’s duty to care for their child begins at conception and is a form of involuntary servitude. Compares this with the military draft and argues that more emphasis should be placed on parental obligations.

The Constitutionality of Mandatory Public School Community Service Programs

RODNEY A. SMOLLA [*] I INTRODUCTION Proposals for public service programs have long had currency in America, and may be gaining a certain millennium momentum in current public debate. While proposals for national public service programs of varying ambition and scope continue to be debated, [1] at the local level a growing number of U.S. public school districts are implementing community service programs for high school students. [2] Community service programs generally require students to complete a specified number of hours of service as a condition for graduation. [3] In a typical program, a student may be required to complete forty to sixty hours of community service with organizations or agencies on an community service during their high school years. There are often modest academic or introspective components to a community service program, such as a requirement that a student compose a paper reporting or reflecting upon his or her community service. [4] As with all innovations in U.S. public life, such programs are inevitably challenged in the courts. At first blush, the challenges appear plausible: These programs are forced labor of sorts, an oxymoronic coerced volunteerism, the imposition of a particular philosophic vision of civic duty and community life on the whole student populace, and the cry that this just can't be constitutional is at least colorably serious. Constitutional challenges to community service programs may be divided into two generic types--those raised by students or parents who object to the requirement of community service, and those raised by students, parents, organizations, or agencies who object to the selection criteria used to include or exclude organizations or agencies eligible to participate in community service programs. The first form of challenge will involve someone who claims to be a conscientious objector to compelled community service. The objection may be broadly articulated, contesting the entire idea of coerced community service, or it may be more narrowly conceived, claiming that for reasons unique to a certain student, participation in a community service program of a particular design violates the student's constitutional rights. Broad objections are likely to be grounded in the claim that community service is a form of involuntary servitude prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, or a deprivation of the students' or parents ' liberty protected under the substantive due process principles that have evolved from the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. More targeted challenges are likely to be grounded in First Amendment arguments, such as claims that for a particular student, participation in a community service program violates the student's rights of freedom of association, freedom against forced speech, or the free exercise of religion. Challenges to the selection criteria used to determine which groups are eligible for participation in community service programs may attack either a decision to keep a particular organization on or off of the approved list of participants, or a decision to include an organization or agency on the list. Thus, a service program operated by a local church might be excluded by a school board from participation on the ground that inclusion would violate principles of separation of church and state. The church might sue the school board, claiming that the exclusion of the church service program, when other similar programs run by secular organizations are not excluded, violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Or, imagine that a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan creates what purports to be a community service program, and a school board refuses to include the program, on the ground that the Klan's racist agenda renders it inappropriate for participation in any joint venture with public schools. T he Klan might sue to challenge its exclusion, arguing that such ideology-based decisionmaking by the school board amounts to viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. …

The Reconstruction Justice of Salmon P. Chase: In re Turner and Texas v. White.

The demise of the Confederacy left a legacy of legal arrangements that raised fundamental and vexing questions regarding the legal rights and status of former slaves and the status of former Confederate states. As Harold Hyman shows, few individuals had greater impact on resolving these difficult questions than Salmon P. Chase, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1865 to 1873. Hyman argues that in two cases Re Turner (1867) and v. White (1869) Chase combined his abolitionist philosophy with an activist jurisprudence to help dismantle once and for all the deposed machineries of slavery and the Confederacy. In these cases, Chase sought to consolidate the gains of the Civil War era, while demonstrating that the war had both preserved the precious core characteristics of the federal union of states and fundamentally improved the nature of both private and public law. Re Turner was a private law case decided at the federal circuit level. It involved a black woman's claim that she, a recent slave, was being held in involuntary servitude. Elizabeth Turner's mother had apprenticed Elizabeth to their former master, who had not abided by his contractual obligations to provide Elizabeth with training and compensation, substantively keeping her in slavery. Chase's decision, which relied upon due process and equal protection implications in the thirteenth amendment and 1866 Civil Rights Act, confirmed the rights of emancipated slaves to bargain and contract with employers on a parity with white workers. v. White was a public law case decided in the Supreme Court. It revolved around the issue of whether the holders of U.S. bonds seized and sold by the Confederate state of Texas could demand payment after the war from that state's newly reconstructed government. In effect, Chase and his associate justices were asked to determine the legality of actions committed by all former Confederate states and, thus, to define what constituted a state. Chase's opinion reaffirmed the Union's permanence, and that of the constituent states in the federal union, and the states' duty to respect the legal rights and obligations of all citizens because states were people as well as acreages and institutions. Hyman's exemplary analysis of these cases reveals how their political, legal, and constitutional aspects were so inextricably interwoven. They secured for Chase a rostrum for both moral and legal reform from which he asserted his strong views on the fundamental rights of individuals and states in an era of sporadically increasing federal power. Hyman's study provides a much-needed reevaluation of those cases both in the context of Chase's life and in terms of their mark on history.

The Fonds Schoelcher: History and Contents

The French writer and politician Victor Schoelcher is well known to scholars of George Frideric Handel's life and works as author of an important biography of the composer, The Life of Handel (London, 1857). Schoelcher was also a cataloguer and avid collector of Handel's music. His catalogues, though never published, have served as a basis for subsequent efforts, and his collection of manuscripts, printed editions, and librettos must be counted as one of the major Handel collections. Schoelcher's Handel library, now at the Bibliotheque nationale, Paris, has lain in relative obscurity: there is only one scholarly study of it in the literature (1) and there is no published catalogue. The collection, however, merits much greater attention. A summary, manuscript listing of part of its contents can be found at the Bibliotheque nationale, and that list, combined with Schoelcher's own catalogue of his library and with a rough estimate of as yet uninventoried portions of the collection, shows that the Fonds Schoelcher numbers more than three thousand items, including eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts, first and early editions, arrangements, opera and oratorio librettos, newspaper clippings, programs, tickets, and even posters. I am presently cataloguing the collection and offer here a preliminary report on its history and contents. I emphasize the fact that this report is preliminary: so far, I have catalogued about 1,300 items. Nonetheless, it is already clear that this is an important collection that deserves to be better known. VICTOR SCHOELCHER (1804-1893) The son of a porcelain manufacturer, Schoelcher first made his mark as an art critic, but it was during a voyage to the Caribbean and the southern United States in 1829-30 that he found his true calling, when he encountered slavery for the first time. From that date on, Schoelcher was a tireless champion for the slaves of the French territories, publishing numerous pamphlets and books based on research conducted in many of the countries where involuntary servitude was practiced. When he was appointed Under-Secretary of State for the colonies in 1848, he wrote, and succeeded in passing, the law abolishing slavery in the French colonies. For that, Schoelcher is still revered in the Caribbean today: in Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana monuments evoke his memory, his portrait graces the majority of town halls, and the esprit schoelcherien is referred to almost daily in the press. (2) Schoelcher opposed the coup d'etat of December 1851 and, like his friend Victor Hugo and many others, was exiled. Schoelcher spent the next eighteen and one-half years in England. In August 1870 he returned to France and directed a legion of artillery during the siege of Paris. In 1871 he was elected to the National Assembly, where he served until being voted a senator for life in December 1875. Schoelcher was a prolific author; many, but by no means all, of his writings concern the abolition of slavery. (3) He also campaigned for prison reform and revocation of the death penalty, fought for the rights of women and children, chronicled various historical events of his time, and wrote essays and two books on music, the Life of Handel and La Modernite de la musique (Paris, 1881). Finally, he was a distinguished collector. His library, a point of pride, was noted by more than one contemporary. Over the course of his long life, Schoelcher amassed a remarkable collection that was generously given before his death to a variety of libraries and museums. (4) To the Bibliotheque nationale he gave several thousand books in 1884 and, according to one author, a further 18,000 volumes after his death in 1893. (5) Between 1879 and 1885 he donated to the Ecole des Beaux Arts a collection of more than 9,000 engravings along with 500 reference works and a detailed, six-volume manuscript catalogue he co-authored with his colleague Wundt. …

A Pastoral Response to Society's Polarization

Expresses a personal sadness over America society's current tendencies to polarize moral positions along extreme lines. Offers a pastoral response to such polarization tendencies by drawing upon prophetic traditions of both Judaism and Christianity. Offers some practical guidelines for pastoral caregivers, recognizing the inevitable ambiguities that accompany the search for God and for personal meaning within the complex realities and dynamics of a rapidly changing world. Randall Terry [spokesman for the pro-life organization Operation Rescue]: “The bottom line is that killing children is not what America is all about. We are not here to destroy our offspring.” Fay Wattleton [president of Planned Parenthood]: “Well, we are also not here to have the government use women's bodies as the instrument of the state, to force women into involuntary servitude—” Randall Terry (laughing): “Oh come on Faye.” Faye Wattleton: “I think that as Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, our independence, and when we reflect on our personal liberties, this is a very, very somber time, in which the courts have said that the most private aspects of our lives are now … not protected by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. And I believe that that is a time for Americans to reflect on the need to return to the fundamentals, and the fundamentals of personal privacy are really the cornerstones upon which our democracy is built.” Randall Terry: “I think that to assume or even suggest that the founding fathers of this country risked their lives and many of them died so that we can kill our offspring is pathetic.”