by Various
The plan of hiring out short term convicts to an individual or a company of individuals who needed laborers was adopted by the southern States shortly after the war, not from choice, it is claimed, but because there was neither a sufficient number of jails nor money enough to build them. Those who need laborers for their farms, saw mills, brick yards, turpentine distilleries, coal or phosphate mines, or who have large contracts of various kinds, lease the misdemeanants from the county or State, which sells them to the highest bidder with merciless disregard of the fact that they are human beings, and practically gives the lessee the power of life and death over the unfortunate man or woman thus raffled off. The more work the lessee gets out of the convict, the more money goes into his gaping purse. Doctors cannot be employed without the expenditure of money, while fresh victims may be secured by the outlay of little cash when convicts succumb to disease and neglect. From a purely business standpoint, therefore, it is much more profitable to get as much work out of a convict as can be wrung from him at the smallest possible expense, and then lay in a fresh supply, when necessary, than it is to clothe, and shelter, and feed him properly, and spend money trying to preserve his health. It is perfectly clear, therefore, that it is no exaggeration to say that in some respects the convict lease system, as it is operated in certain southern States, is less humane than was the bondage endured by slaves fifty years ago. For, under the old régime, it was to the master’s interest to clothe and shelter and feed his slaves properly, even if he were not moved to do so by considerations of mercy and humanity, because the death of a slave meant an actual loss in dollars and cents, whereas the death of a convict to-day involves no loss whatsoever either to the lessee or to the State.
Speaking of this system a few years ago, a governor of Kentucky said:
“I cannot but regard the present system under which the State penitentiary is leased and managed as a reproach to the commonwealth. It is the system itself and not the officer acting under it with which I find fault. Possession of the convict’s person is an opportunity for the State to make money—the amount to be made is whatever can be wrung from him without regard to moral or mortal consequences. The penitentiary which shows the largest cash balance paid into the State treasury is the best penitentiary. In the main the notion is clearly set forth and followed that a convict, whether pilferer or murderer, man, woman, or child, has almost no human right that the State is bound to be at any expense to protect.”
Again, at a meeting of the National Prison Association which was held in New Orleans a few years ago, a speaker who had carefully studied the convict lease system declared that the convicts in the South, most of whom are negroes, are in many cases worse off than they were in the days of slavery. “They are bought as truly,” said he, “are more completely separated from their families, are irretrievably demoralized by constant evil association and are invariably worse off when they leave the camps than when they entered.” “Over certain places where the convicts of Alabama are employed,” said an authority on penology, “should be written the words ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here,’ so utterly demoralizing is the entire management.” And so it would be possible to quote indefinitely from men all over the country in every station of life, from judges, governors of States, prison experts, and private citizens, whose testimony without a single exception proves conclusively that the convict lease system in particular, and the chain gang on general principles, are an insult to the intelligence and humanity of an enlightened community.
It is frequently asserted that the convict lease camps and other forms of peonage are dying out in the south. First one State and then another passes laws against leasing convicts to private individuals or attempts to pass such a law, or, if it still adheres to the convict lease system, it tries to provide for the inspection of the camps by men appointed to do this work by the State. But facts which have been brought to light during the last year or two show that those who extract comfort from the reports which announce the disappearance of the convict camps and the chain gangs build their hope upon a foundation of sand. During the year 1906 allegations of the existence of slavery in Florida were made to the department of justice, and evidence was produced to show that hundreds of men, the majority of whom were colored, but a few among the number white, were virtually reduced to the condition of slaves.
Facts were produced which showed that the officers of the law, the sheriffs themselves, were parties to reducing to a condition of slavery the colored people who work in the phosphate and coal mines, in the lumber mills or on the turpentine farms of Florida, for instance. These camps were inspected by a woman who was commissioned, it is said, by those high in authority to secure the facts. Only last September a government detective disguised as a man anxious to purchase timber lands, visited the railroad camps of Blount Co., Tenn., and secured evidence against some of the most prominent contractors in that section, which showed that hundreds of colored men have systematically been deprived of their liberty, while it is impossible to state how many of them lost their lives.
Before the grand jury the victims of this barbarous system of peonage, many of whom had been brought to Tennessee from North and South Carolina, told pitiable tales of their suffering and maltreatment and related stories of seeing men killed, dragged to the river in blankets, weighted, and then sunk into the water, which are too horrible to believe. As a result of this trial one of the largest railroad contractors of Knoxville, Tenn., was indicted by the grand jury on the charge of peonage, the indictment containing twenty-five counts.
Upon the evidence of a colored soldier who was with President Roosevelt in Cuba, and who sawed his way to freedom through the floor of the shack in which he was confined at night, together with a large number of peons, the man who thus held him in bondage in Missouri was sentenced to three and a half years in the penitentiary of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in addition to paying a fine of five thousand dollars and costs. Several others who were engaged in conducting this particular camp, among them the son of the chief offender, were also sentenced to the penitentiary, fined, and obliged to pay the costs. Last spring six colored people filed suits against a family by whom they had been held in a state of peonage in Ashley Co., Ark. Their complaint set forth inhuman treatment, imprisonment in jails in various places, that they were bound like beasts, paraded through public streets, and then imprisoned on plantations, where they were compelled to do the hardest kind of labor without receiving a single cent.
While colored people were originally the only ones affected to any great extent by the practice of peonage in the southern States, in recent years white people in increasingly large numbers have been doomed to the same fate. For instance, only last July the chairman of the Board of Commissioners of Bradford Co., Florida, was arrested for holding in a state of peonage an orphan white girl sixteen years old. The girl declares that she was so brutally treated, she started to walk to Jacksonville, Fla. When she had gone six miles, she was overtaken, she says, by her hard task-master and forced to walk back by a road covered with water in places, so that she was obliged to wade knee deep. When she returned, she declared her master beat her with a hickory stick and showed bruises to substantiate the charge. Last October a wealthy family, living in Arkansaw, was convicted of holding two white girls from St. Louis, Mo., in peonage, and was forced to pay one of the white slaves one thousand dollars damages, and the other 625 dollars. The farmer had induced the girls to come from Missouri to Arkansaw, and then promptly reduced them to the condition of slaves. In the same month of October came the startling announcement that one thousand white girls, who are rightful heiresses to valuable timber lands in the wilds of the Florida pine woods, wear men’s clothing and work side by side with colored men who are held in slavery as well as the girls. Stories of the treatment accorded these white slave girls of Florida, which reached the ears of the Washington officials, equal in cruelty some of the tales related in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In
the black depths of pine woods, living in huts never seen by civilized white men other than the bosses of the turpentine camps, girls are said to have grown old in servitude. These girls are said to be the daughters of crackers who, like fathers in pre-historic times, little value the birth of a girl, and sell the best years of their daughters’ lives to the turpentine or sulfur miners and to the lumber men for a mere song. To be discharged from one of these camps means death to an employé. Since they receive nothing for their services, their dismissal is no revenge for an angered foreman or boss. The slaves are too numerous to be beaten, and it is said to be a part of the system never to whip an employé, but invariably to shoot the doomed man or woman upon the slightest provocation, so that the others might be kept in constant subjection.
Two white men of Seymour, Indiana, went to Vance, Mississippi, not very long ago, to work for a large stave company, as they supposed; but when they reached Vance, they were told they must go to the swamp and cut timber. When they demurred, the foreman had them arrested for securing their transportation money “on false pretenses.” The squire before whom they were taken fined each of them 45 dollars and costs. They were then obliged to ride twenty-three miles on horseback to Belen, the county seat, where they were kept three days and given one meal. Then they were taken to Essex, Mississippi, turned over to the owner of a plantation, placed in a stockade at night and forced to work under an armed guard. They were ordered to work out their fine at fifteen cents a day, such a contract being made by the court officers themselves. These Indiana men learned during the nine days they were in this Mississippi stockade that there were men on the plantation who had been there for ten years trying to work out their fines. Before one fine could be worked out a new charge would be trumped up to hold them. Only last August a young white man who had lived in New York returned to his home, half starved, his body covered with bruises, resulting from unmerciful beatings he had received in a State camp in North Carolina, and related a story which was horrifying in its revelations of the atrocities perpetrated upon the men confined in it. This young white man claimed that at the time he escaped there were no less than twenty other youths from New York unable to return to their homes, and enduring the torture to which he was subjected by inhuman bosses every day. According to this young New Yorker’s story, there were about one thousand men at work in this camp, each of whom was obliged to contribute 50 cents a week toward the support of a physician.
“On one occasion” [said he] “the foreman threw heavy stones at me, one of which struck me on the head, knocking me senseless, because I sat down to rest. For hours I lay on the cot in my shack without medical aid, and I bear the mark of that stone to-day. For refusing to work because of lack of nourishment, for our meals consisted only of a slice of bread and a glass of water, I saw the foreman take a revolver, shoot a young negro through the leg and walk away, leaving him for dead. This fellow lay for days without medical aid and was finally taken away, nobody knows where. Three Italians were killed and two others were severely injured in a fight between the foreman and laborers, and yet not one of these men was arrested. Since the post office was under the control of the men running the camp, the letters written by the New York boys to their friends and relatives never reached their destination.”
The cases just cited prove conclusively that not only does peonage still rage violently in the southern States and in a variety of forms, but that while it formerly affected only colored people, it now attacks white men and women as well.
From renting or buying colored men, women, and children, who had really fallen under the ban of the law, to actually trapping and stealing them was a very short step indeed, when labor was scarce and the need of additional hands pressed sore. Very recently, incredible as it may appear to many, colored men have been captured by white men, torn from their homes and forced to work on plantations or in camps of various kinds, just as truly as their fathers before them were snatched violently by slave catchers from their native African shores. Only last February (1906) two cotton planters of Houston Co., Texas, were arrested for a kind of peonage which is by no means uncommon in the South to-day. The planters needed extra help, so they captured two strong, able-bodied negroes, whom they charged with being indebted to them, and with having violated their contracts. Without resort to law they manacled the negroes and removed them to their plantations, where they forced them to work from twelve to sixteen hours a day without paying them a cent. The sheriff who arrested the planters admitted that this practice of capturing negroes when labor is needed on the plantations has prevailed for a long time in Madison Co., Texas, where the population is mainly negro. The captured men are worked during the cotton-planting season, are then released with empty pockets and allowed to return to their homes as best they can, where they remain until they are needed again, when they are recaptured.
But the methods generally used by the men who run the convict camps of the South or who own large plantations, when they need colored laborers, are much more skillful and less likely to involve them in trouble than those which the Texans just mentioned employ. Colored men are convicted in magistrates’ courts of trivial offences, such as alleged violation of contract or something of the kind, and are given purposely heavy sentences with alternate fines. Plantation owners and others in search of labor, who have already given their orders to the officers of the law, are promptly notified that some available laborers are theirs to command and immediately appear to pay the fine and release the convict from jail only to make him a slave. If the negro dares to leave the premises of his employer, the same magistrate who convicted him originally is ready to pounce down upon him and send him back to gaol. Invariably poor and ignorant, he is unable to employ counsel or to assert his rights (it is treason to presume he has any) and he finds all the machinery of the law, so far as he can understand, against him. There is no doubt whatever that there are scores, hundreds perhaps, of colored men in the South to-day who are vainly trying to repay fines and sentences imposed upon them five, six, or even ten years ago. The horror of ball and chain is ever before them, and their future is bright with no hope.
In the annual report of the “Georgia State Prison Commission,” which appeared only last June, the secretary shows that during the year 1905–06, there was a decrease of fully 10 percent in the number of misdemeanor convicts on the county chain gangs in Georgia, notwithstanding the fact that there has been an increase among the felony convicts. This decrease in the number of misdemeanants is explained as follows: “Owing to the scarcity of labor, farmers who are able to do so pay the fines of able-bodied prisoners and put them on their plantations to work them out.” “Had it not been for the fact that many farmers have paid the fines of the men convicted,” explains the prison commission, “in order to get their labor, there is no doubt that there would be an increase instead of a decrease in the number on the misdemeanor gangs.” This very frank admission of the open manner in which the law against peonage is deliberately broken by the farmers of Georgia is refreshing, to say the least. Surely they cannot be accused by prudish and unreasonable persons of violating the thirteenth amendment by mysterious methods hard to detect and transgressing the peonage law in secret, when the decrease in the number of misdemeanants of a sovereign State is attributed in a printed report to the fact that the farmers are buying up able-bodied negroes a bit more briskly than usual.
While the convict lease camps of no State in the South have presented conditions more shocking and cruel than have those in Georgia, it is also true that in no State have more determined and conscientious efforts to improve conditions been put forth by a portion of its citizens than in that State. In spite of this fact it is well known that some of the wealthiest men in the State have accumulated their fortunes by literally buying colored men, women, and children, and working them nearly, if not quite, to death. Reference has already been made to the report submitted to the Georgia legislature a few years ago by Colonel Byrd, who was appointed
special commissioner to investigate the convict lease camps of his State. In reviewing this report the Atlanta Constitution summed up the charges against the convict lease system as follows: “Colonel Byrd’s report was not written by a Northerner, who does not understand conditions in the South, or the people living in that section” (as is so frequently asserted, when one who does not live in the sunny south dares to comment on anything which takes place below Mason’s and Dixon’s line); “but it is written by one of the South’s most distinguished citizens who did not deal in glittering generalities, but in facts.” Colonel Byrd gave a truthful account of his trips to the camps, of his visits in the day time and at night, when none knew of his coming. He made it a rule, he said, to arrive at each camp unannounced, and he has told us exactly what he saw with his eyes and heard with his ears. Of the fifty-one chain gangs visited, Colonel Byrd discovered that at least half were operated exclusively by private individuals who had practically the power of life and death over the convicts. Seldom was provision made for the separation of the sexes, either during work by day or sleep by night. Little or no attention was given to the comfort or sanitary condition of the sleeping quarters, and women were forced to do men’s work in men’s attire. The murder of the men and the outrage of the women in these camps, the political pulls by which men occupying lofty positions in the State were shielded and saved from indictment by grand juries, formed the subjects of many indignant editorials in the Atlanta Constitution.