"Most of the jurisprudence surrounding the thirteenth amendment concerns Congress’ power under the second section, but this essay will focus on the first, which is self-executing. Although primarily directed against the slavery of the antebellum South, the amendment is broader in scope, as the Court held when it first considered the amendment in the Slaughter House Cases: Undoubtedly while negro slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which proposed the thirteenth article, it any other kind of slavery, now or hereafter If Mexican peonage or the Chinese coolie labor system shall develop slavery of the Mexican or Chinese race within our territory, this amendment may safely be trusted to make it void. The Court also said that “the word servitude is or larger meaning than slavery, as the latter is popularly understood in this country . . . . It was very well understood that . . . the purpose of the article might have been evaded, if only the word slavery had been used.” Later cases explain more specifically what “involuntary servitude” encompassed: “the control of the labor and services of one man for the benefit of another, and the absence of a legal right to the disposal of his own person, property and “services”; “a condition of enforced compulsory service of one to another,” ”that control by which the personal service of one man is disposed of or coerced for another’s benefit which is the essence of involuntary servitude.”"