Dred Scott Redux?

UB's crack Wichita bureau spotlights a fascinating dustup between the Sheriff and San Francisco and Federal immigration authorities:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF/AP) — If the San Francisco sheriff’s plan becomes reality, illegal immigrants arrested for petty crimes won’t be held in jail longer than necessary, even if federal immigration agents may want them detained for possible deportation.


Instead, starting Wednesday, deputies will treat those eligible for release just like U.S. citizens: They will be cited to appear in court.


City officials, however, aren’t so sure about Sheriff Mike Hennessey’s plan.

The new policy is his attempt to comply with a city law that prevents police from aiding federal authorities in non-felony crimes and a U.S. law that requires authorities to share fingerprints with immigration agents.


ICE Spokeswoman Virginia Kice said Hennessey’s decision is “unfortunate.”

Wichita asks: Fugitive slave law? But I would go a half step further: rerun of Dred Scott. You remember Dred Scott: slave carried to free territory, claims his freedom, Supreme Court rips his case to shreds. And we all know how that ended.  

Afterthought: I did my best to keep from calling this "The ICEman cometh." But I suppose somebody else has used this line already.

Slavery v. Serfdom

I've long been curious about identifying the differences between (American) slavery and (Russian) serfdom.  Peter J. Parish, channeling Peter Kolchin, provides an economical summary:

In round figures, there were two whites to every black in the antebellum South; in Russia in 1858, there was one male nobleman to every fifty-two male peasants.  In the South, there were just over two slaves for every member of a slaveholding family; in Russia, there were more thn twenty-four male serfs for every male nobleman.  Russian serfs were generally held in very much larger units than Southern slaves.   To take the extreme case, the U.S. census of 1860 listed only one owner of more than one thousand slaves; the 1858 census in Russia listed 3,858 owners of over one thousand serfs.  One Russian family owned more than 37,000 serfs, scattered over numerous estates.

The consequences of the enormous differences were profound.  Because many Russian owners were absentees, the relationship between owner and owned was inevitably more distant, geographically as well as personally.  Serfs were probably punished less often, but more brutally, than slaves.  Many of them rarely saw their owners, and dealt mainly with minor officials and bureaucrats. ... They grew their own food, had a voice in local government, and were able to engage in organized rather than individual resistance.  Moreover, unlike slaves, they were required to devote only a part of their labor to the service of their owners.

That's from Peter J. Parish, Slavery (1990). Note to self, find a copy of Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor (1990).

Hitchens on Central Africa

If you want a little perspective after you've reviewed your 401k statement, take a look this stuff from Peter Hitchens, reporting from Zambia (link):

These poor, hopeless, angry people exist by grubbing for scraps of cobalt and copper ore in the filth and dust of abandoned copper mines in Congo, sinking perilous 80ft shafts by hand, washing their finds in cholera-infected streams full of human filth, then pushing enormous two-hundredweight loads uphill on ancient bicycles to the nearby town of Likasi where middlemen buy them to sell on, mainly to Chinese businessmen hungry for these vital metals.

To see them, as they plod miserably past, is to be reminded of pictures of unemployed miners in Thirties Britain, stumbling home in the drizzle with sacks of coal scraps gleaned from spoil heaps.

Except that here the unsparing heat makes the labour five times as hard, and the conditions of work and life are worse by far than any known in England since the 18th Century.

Many perish as their primitive mines collapse on them, or are horribly injured without hope of medical treatment. Many are little more than children. On a good day they may earn $3, which just supports a meagre existence in diseased, malarial slums.

We had been earlier to this awful pit, which looked like a penal colony in an ancient slave empire.

Defeated, bowed figures toiled endlessly in dozens of hand-dug pits. Their faces, when visible, were blank and without hope.

We had been turned away by a fat, corrupt policeman who pretended our papers weren't in order, but who was really taking instructions from a dead-eyed, one-eared gangmaster who sat next to him.

By the time we returned with more official permits, the gangmasters had readied the ambush.

The diggers feared - and their evil, sinister bosses had worked hard on that fear - that if people like me publicised their filthy way of life, then the mine might be closed and the $3 a day might be taken away.

Hitchens calls this a new "slave empire" and he blames it on "the Chinese,"but I'm not sure this hits the point. On his own account, it appears that these miserable people are doing the best they can with the resources available to them.