The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers

by Various

  Briefly summed up, the specific charges preferred by one of the South’s most distinguished sons who had made a most painstaking and exhaustive investigation of the convict lease camps of Georgia are as follow:

  (1) Robbing convicts of their time allowances for good behavior. According to Colonel Byrd, there were not five camps in the State that had complied with the law requiring them to keep a book in which the good or bad conduct of each convict shall be entered daily. In the event of good conduct the law provides that a prisoner’s term of confinement shall be shortened four days during each month of service. In fifteen out of twenty-four private camps the contractors did not give the convicts a single day off for good service, nor did they even make pretense of doing so.

  (2) Forcing convicts to work from fourteen to twenty hours a day.

  (3) Providing them no clothes, no shoes, no beds, no heat in winter, and no ventilation whatever in single rooms in summer in which sixty convicts slept in chains.

  (4) Giving them rotten food.

  (5) Allowing them to die, when sick, for lack of medical attention.

  (6) Outraging the women.

  (7) Beating to death old men too feeble to work.

  (8) Killing young men for the mere sake of killing.

  (9) Suborning jurors and county officers, whose sworn duty it is to avenge the wrongdoing of guards.

  It is when he struck the convicts leased to private individuals that Colonel Byrd took off his gloves, as the Atlanta Constitution well said, and dipped his pen in red ink. In these private camps Colonel Byrd found the convicts, men committed at the most for some trivial offence or perhaps none at all, had no clothes except greasy, grimy garments, which in many cases were worn to threads and were worthless as protection. These men, women, and children, for there were children only eight years old in the camps inspected by Colonel Byrd a few years ago, were badly shod and in the majority of cases went barefoot the year round. In many of the pine belt gangs, where the convicts were buried in the fastness of mighty pine forests, they went from year’s end to year’s end without a taste of vegetables. Usually after the convicts returned from their fourteen hours’ work they were given raw chunks of meat to prepare for their own dinner. In the matter of buildings the report was no less severe. In a camp owned by a well-known Georgian, Colonel Byrd found eleven men sleeping in a room ten feet square and but seven feet from floor to ceiling, with no window at all, but one door which opened into another room. In another camp the convicts slept in tents which had no bunks, no mattresses, and not even a floor. Fully thirteen of the camps out of twenty-four contained neither bunks nor mattresses, and the convicts were compelled to sleep in filthy, vermin-ridden blankets on the ground. And the men were obliged to sleep chained together.

  Many of the camps had no arrangements and scarcely miserable excuses for means of warming the barn-like buildings in which the convicts were confined during stormy days and wintry nights. The suffering the helpless inmates were forced to endure in winter, according to Colonel Byrd’s description, must have been terrible, while in the summer they were locked into the sweat boxes without ventilation, in order that the lessee might save the expense of employing night guards.

  “In two instances,” said Colonel Byrd, “I found by the bedside of sick convicts tubs that had been used for days without having been emptied and in a condition that would kill anything but a misdemeanor convict.” But Colonel Byrd’s description of the insanitary condition of some of the camps and the horrors of convict life are unprintable. He calls attention to the fact that the death rate in the private camps is double that of the county camps. In one of the camps one out of every four convicts died during their incarceration. In another camp one out of every six unfortunates who had committed some slight infraction of the law, if he were guilty at all, was thrust into a camp which he never left alive. In twenty-one out of twenty-four private camps there were neither hospital buildings nor arrangements of any kind for the sick. After describing the lack of bathing facilities, which Colonel Byrd says gave the convicts a mangy appearance, he refers to the inhuman beatings inflicted upon the convicts. A leather strop was the instrument of punishment found by the commissioner in all the camps, “and my observation has been,” said he, “that where the strap has been used the least the best camps exist and the best work is turned out by the convicts.”

  In the camp in which the negroes looked worst the commissioner found very few reported dead. On the very date of inspection, however, there were three men, all new arrivals, locked in the filthy building, sick. They said they had been there a week, and two of them looked as though they could not recover. In another camp there was not even a stove, and the negroes had to cook on skillets over log fires in the open air. There were no beds at all and the few blankets were reeking with filth, as they were scattered about over a dirty floor.

  In his report Colonel Byrd called particular attention to a few of the many cases of brutality, inhumanity, and even murder which came under his own personal observation. In the banner camp for heavy mortality the commissioner found two men with broken legs, so terribly surrounded as practically to make it impossible for them to recover. Both in this camp and in others there were numerous instances of sudden deaths among convicts, which were attributed to brain trouble and other diseases. On reliable authority Colonel Byrd learned that the guards in one of the camps visited had just a short while before his arrival literally beaten one of the convicts to death and then burned his remains in his convict suit with his shackles on. “A reputable citizen,” said Colonel Byrd, “told me that he had seen the guards beating this convict, and that in their anger they had caught him by the shackles and run through the woods, dragging him along feet foremost.” He stated he had gone before the grand jury of Pulaski Co., where the camp was situated, and had sworn to these facts, but that Mr. Allison, who ran this camp, had friends on the jury and that other citizens had thought it would be best to hush the whole deplorable affair up, so as to keep it out of the newspapers and courts. The superintendent of the camp simply claimed that the murdered negro had died of dropsy and was buried in his stripes and shackles to save time.

  The camp of W. H. and J. H. Griffin in Wilkes Co. was described as being “very tough.” It was in that camp that Bob Cannon, a camp guard, beat to death an aged negro named Frank McRay. The condition in this camp was too horrible to describe. The prison was an abandoned kitchen or outhouse in the yard of a large ante bellum residence. Every window in it had been removed and the openings closely boarded up and sealed. It was a small square box with not even an augur hole for air or light.

  “When the door was opened” [said Colonel Byrd], “and I had recovered from the shock caused by the rush of foul air, I noticed a sick negro sitting in the room. How human beings could consign a fellow being to such an existence I cannot understand any more than I can understand how a human being could survive a night of confinement in such a den. There was an open can in the center of the room and it looked as if it had not been emptied in a fortnight. A small bit of cornbread lay on a blanket near the negro, and that poor victim, guilty of a misdemeanor only, while sick, confined in this sweat-box dungeon, humbly asked to be furnished with a drink of water.

  “It was in this gang that I found Lizzie Boatwright, a nineteen-year-old negress sent up from Thomas, Ga., for larceny. She was clad in men’s clothing, was working side by side with male convicts under a guard, cutting a ditch through a meadow. The girl was small of stature and pleasant of address, and her life in this camp must have been one of long drawn out agony, horror, and suffering. She told me she had been whipped twice, each time by the brutal white guard who had beaten McRay to death, and who prostituted his legal right to whip into a most revolting and disgusting outrage. This girl and another woman were stripped and beaten unmercifully in plain view of the men convicts, because they stopped on the side of the road to bind a rag about their sore feet.”


  Be as sanguine as one may, he cannot extract much comfort from the hope that conditions at present are much better, if any, than they were when Col. Byrd made this startling, shocking revelation, as the result of a careful investigation of these camps several years ago, since camps for misdemeanor convicts are being conducted by private individuals to-day just as they were then. The eighth annual report of the Prison Commission, issued May 1905, shows that thirteen of the misdemeanor convict camps in the State of Georgia are worked for and in some cases by private individuals, contrary to law, who hire them directly from the authorities having them in charge after conviction with no legal warrant from the county authorities in those counties where they are worked. These convicts, according to the last year’s report from Georgia, are entirely in the custody and control of private individuals. The officials hire them in remote counties, never seeing them after delivery, and the county authorities where they are worked never exercise supervision over or control of them.

  The law explicitly states that the Prison Commission of Georgia shall have general supervision of the misdemeanor convicts of the State.

  “It shall be the duty of one of the Commissioners, or, in case of emergency, an officer designated by them, to visit from time to time, at least quarterly, the various camps where misdemeanor convicts are at work, and shall advise with the county or municipal authorities working them, in making and altering the rules for the government control and management of said convicts. . . . And if the county or municipal authorities fail to comply with such rules, or the law governing misdemeanor chain gangs [reads the statute], then the Governor with the Commission shall take such convicts from said county or municipal authorities. Or the Governor and Commission in their discretion may impose a fine upon each of the said county or municipal authorities failing to comply with such rules or the law.”

  But this law is easily evaded, because the county authorities where the convict is sentenced have established no chain gang, and the county authorities where the convict is worked none, so that neither can be proceeded against by the Commission. “The Prison Commission of Georgia has repeatedly called the attention of the General Assembly to this condition,” says the report, and cannot refrain from again doing so, hoping that some means may be devised by which this violation of the law may be prevented.

  Again and again efforts put forth by humane people, both in Georgia and in other southern States, to correct abuses in the camps have been frustrated by men high in authority, who belong to the State legislatures and who make large fortunes out of the wretches they abuse. Colonel Byrd called attention to the fact that the whole political machinery of the State and county stood in with the lessees, because the first money earned by the poor victims paid the cost of trial and conviction. Not a dollar of the rental for the convicts reached the county treasury, he declared, till sheriff, deputy sheriff, county solicitor, bailiffs, court clerks, justice of the peace, constables and other officials who aided to put the convict in the chain gang were paid their fees in full. “It is not to be supposed,” said Colonel Byrd, “that these people would be in favor of destroying a system profitable to themselves.” The following incident throws some light on this point. A colored man was convicted of larceny and sentenced to twelve months on the chain gang. The county solicitor personally took charge of him, carried him to a private camp, where the contractor gave him 100 dollars in cash for this prisoner. A few months later it was discovered that the man was innocent of the crime. Both the judge and the jury before whom he was convicted signed a petition to the Governor praying for the prisoner’s release. The county solicitor refused to sign it, however, because he had received his 100 dollars in advance and distributed it among the other court officials and did not want to pay it back.

  There are in Georgia at the present time 1,500 men who were sold to the highest bidder the 1st of April, 1904, for a period of five years. The Durham Coal and Coke Co. leased 150 convicts, paying for them from 228 dollars to 252 dollars apiece per annum. The Flower Brothers Lumber Co. leased one hundred and paid 240 dollars a piece for them for a year. Hamby and Toomer leased five hundred, paying 221 dollars a head. The Lookout Mountain Coal and Coke Co. took 100 at 223.75 dollars a head.

  The Chattahoochee Brick Co. secured 175 men at 223.75 dollars apiece per annum. E. J. McRee took one hundred men and paid 220.75 dollars for each. In its report the Prison Commission points with great pride to the fact that for five years, from the 1st of April, 1904, to the 1st of April, 1909, this batch of prisoners alone will pour annually into the State coffers the gross sum of 340,000 dollars with a net of 225,000 dollars, which will be distributed proportionately among the various counties for school purposes.

  In 1903 a man whose barbarous treatment of convicts leased to him by Tallapoosa and Coosa Counties, Alabama, had been thoroughly exposed, and who had been indicted a number of times in the State courts, succeeded in leasing more convicts for a term of three years without the slightest difficulty, in spite of his record. The grand jury for the May term, 1903, of the District Court of the middle of Alabama returned ninety-nine indictments for peonage and conspiring to hold parties in a condition of peonage. In these ninety-nine true bills only eighteen persons were involved. Under the convict lease system of Alabama the State Board of Convicts then had no control whatever over the County convicts, and if they were leased to an inhuman man there was absolutely nothing to prevent him from doing with them what he wished. During the trial of the cases in Alabama to which reference has been made, a well-known journalist declared over his signature that when the chief of the State Convict Inspecting Bureau, who had been sent to Tallapoosa Co. to investigate conditions obtaining in the penal camps there, reported that some of the largest landowners and planters in the State were engaged in the traffic of selling negroes into involuntary servitude, the Governor took no further steps to bring about the conviction of the guilty parties.

  In Alabama a justice of the peace in criminal cases has power to sentence a convicted prisoner to hard labor for a term not exceeding twelve months. He is required under law to make a report of such cases to the Judge of Probate of his respective county, and to file a mittimus with the jailer of each man who is tried before him who has been convicted and fails to give bond. As soon as a man was convicted in Tallapoosa and Coosa counties by a Justice of the Peace, who was in collusion with the party or parties who had a contract with the county for leasing the county convicts, he would turn each of them over to the lessee without committing them to the county jail, and without filing a certificate of these convictions with the Judge of Probate. Since there was no public examiner to go over the books of the Justice of the Peace, it was easy, when they were examined by order of the grand jury, to explain away as a mistake any discrepancies upon the docket. Since there was nothing on the docket of the Justice of the Peace to show the length of time the man was to serve, he was held by the lessee, until he broke down or managed to escape. Moreover, the prosecution of the cases mentioned showed that trumped-up charges would be frequently made against negroes in the two counties mentioned for the most trivial offences, such as happened in the case of one convict who was arrested for letting one man’s mule bite another man’s corn. It also came out in the trial that when the sentence of two convicts expired at the same time they were often provoked into a difficulty with each other and then each man would be taken down before a Justice of the Peace without the knowledge of the other, and persuaded to make an affidavit against the other man for an affray. Both would then be tried before a Justice, convicted and sentenced to imprisonment at hard labor for six months, and this would go on indefinitely. It was also developed at this Alabama trial that there was often no trial at all. An affidavit would be sworn out, but never entered upon the docket, and after a mock trial the man would be sentenced for three months or six and the judgment never entered up.

  If there was an examination by the grand jury of the county, there would be no way for it t
o secure the facts, and no one in the community seemed to think it was his duty to make any charges. Between A and B, both of whom were convicted of peonage in Alabama in 1903, it is said that there was an understanding that the men arrested in A’s neighborhood were to be tried before C, one of B’s brothers-in-law, while those whom B wanted would be tried before one of the A’s, who was Justice of the Peace. If material ran short, the men held by the A’s were taken down and tried before B’s brother-in-law and turned over to B and vice versa. It can easily be seen that negroes—friendless, illiterate, and penniless—had no salvation at all except when the strong arm of the United States Government took them under its protection. Although the grand jury at the May term in 1903 declared that Tallapoosa and Coosa counties were the only localities in the State where peonage existed, subsequent arrests of persons who were bound over by a United States Commissioner to await the action of the United States grand jury at the December term of 1903 proved conclusively that there were many cases of peonage in Covington, Crenshaw, Pike, Coffee, Houston, and other counties in the State of Alabama.

  Describing the convict lease system, as it is operated in Mississippi, one of the best attorneys in that State said:

  “This institution is operated for no other purpose than to make money, and I can compare it with nothing but Dante’s Inferno. Hades is a paradise compared with the convict camps of Mississippi. If an able-bodied young man sent to one of these camps for sixty or ninety days lives to return home, he is fit for nothing the rest of his natural life, for he is a physical wreck at the expiration of his term.”

  As in other States, the convict camps of Mississippi are operated by planters or others who have secured a contract from the County Board to work all prisoners sent up by the magistrates or other courts. A stipulated sum per capita is paid for the prisoners, who have to work out their fines, costs, and living expenses, receiving practically nothing for their labor. As spring comes on, officers of the law become exceedingly busy looking up cases of vagrancy or misdemeanor, so as to supply their regular patrons.