" Alabama legislature swiftly passed a measure under which the orphans of freed slaves, or the children of blacks deemed inadequate parents, were to be "apprenticed" to their former masters. The South Carolina planter Henry William Ravenel wrote in September 1865: "There must… be stringent laws to control the negroes, & require them to fulfill their contracts of labour on the farms."44 "

― Douglas A. Blackmon , Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II