From the Epstein Files to Tariff Act enforcement, trafficking/slavery is front-page news and a growing practice area. We will examine anti-trafficking law’s doctrinal progression from the Antebellum period through the modern era, concentrating on the 13th Amendment and its operationalizing legislation. We will interrogate changes and commonalities in activism and enforcement: 1800s sugar boycotts echoed in today’s solutions of supply chain transparency, end-user liability, and Worker-led Social Responsibility; modern practices in prisons and detention centers traceable to convict leasing schemes of the Jim Crow era; and how the Progressive Era bifurcation of statutory and enforcement regimes around labor and sex trafficking (and the attitudes it reveals about immigration, morality, femininity, and whiteness) plays out in current debates over the sex industry and technology policy. We will center our inquiry through the voices of the enslaved, from Antebellum “slave narratives” to modern survivor accounts and leadership, as well as assessing governmental responses through primary historical research.