Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest

It is often taken as a simple truth that the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution ended slavery in the United States. In the Southwest, however, two coercive labor systems, debt peonage—in which a debtor negotiated a relationship of servitude, often lifelong, to a creditor—and Indian captivity, not only outlived the Civil War but prompted a new struggle to define freedom and bondage in the United States.

In Borderlands of Slavery, William S. Kiser presents a comprehensi...