Crossword-Solution: PEONAGE 7 letters, 17 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 10

Plain, simple instructions went out from Washington,--the freedom of laborers to choose employers, no fixed rates of wages, no peonage or forced labor.

Plain instructions went out from Washington: the laborers must be free to choose their employers, no fixed rate of wages was prescribed, and there was to be no peonage or forced labor.

And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake—somewhere.

Thus it is that in the country districts of the South, by written or unwritten law, peonage, hindrances to the migration of labor, and a system of white patronage exists over large areas.

After describing in detail the system of semi-peonage created by the merciless exactions of lawyers and petty court officials, and the insatiable greed of "these cursed hungry caterpillars," Sims with rude eloquence calls upon the people to pull them down from their nests for the salvation of the Commonwealth.