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There should be a word for slaves who agreed to be salves, w/o extortion or other illegitimate pressures. E.g. Sally Hemings & brother made deals w/ Jefferson. Different word could highlight its lower moral culpability.
"James & Sally did threaten to stay in Paris [as free people]. Madison believed that Thomas Jefferson … made a deal: Sally’s children would be free & James would be free when he had trained a chef for Monticello." uramericansinparis.wordpress.com/2010/10/01/sal…
Note: I'm not claiming that it is OBVIOUS that these two people were not subject to illegitimate pressures, only that it seems PLAUSIBLE that they were not. Allowing them to serve as an example of the concept I ask about.
Some say voluntary slaver almost never happened & so isn't an interesting category. But debt bondage was extremely common in ancient societies, and is arguably a subcategory of voluntary slavery.
FYI, I'm aware that "voluntary slave" is the most common term used today to describe the category I refer to. But I'm still unhappy with that term, as it doesn't parse for many people, seeming to them to be self-contradictory.
Many want to argue about the exact degree to which these kids made a "voluntary" deal, given their specific options, history, & preferences. But once we accept that differing degrees are possible, we can agree that many of them can be less morally culpable than simple slavery.
A surprising number of commenters claim that these kids should have presumed that Thomas Jefferson was threatening to kill their family in US & also hunt them down and kill them, if they did not agree to the deal. These seem crazy extreme assumptions to me.
