Wheel of Servitude, The: Black Forced Labor After Slavery

Emancipation brought an end to many of the evils of slavery, but it did not do away with involuntary servitude in the South. The institution of peonage has aroused surprisingly little interest in the past; this compelling account does much to show that it was and is one of the most serious violations of civil rights in the nation.
Even during Reconstruction, state legislatures passed laws that bound the agricultural laborer to the landowner with a nearly unbreakable tie.
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Daniel Novak shows how federal, state, and local regulations combined in an undisguised effort to keep Southern agriculture supplied with black labor.

-(Summary excerpted from the front-cover flap of the text)-