Good Morning POU.
Down South if you do anything that’s wrong, They’ll sure put you down on Parchman Farm.
They’ll put you under a man named Captain Jack; He’ll write his name all up and down your back.
–Son House “Parchman Farm Blues”
I think God intended the niggers to be slaves. Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is keep ’em as near to a state of bondage as possible. . . . My theory is, feed ’em well, clothe ’em well, and then, if they don’t work . . . whip ’em well. — A Yazoo Delta planter, 1866
Jim Crow Justice
Parchman, Angola – the names are of the country’s most notorius prisons for thousands of young black men and boys who were thrown into the penal system for such charges as “loitering” or “failing to step aside” if a white person approached – or more accurately, for the charge of being born a Negro in America. After the Civil War and throughout Jim Crow, black men were routinely thrown into southern prisons to provide the free labor that businesses and plantation owners had become accustomed to before the war. The results would tear apart families and destroy communities forever.
Convict Leasing
Initially, to save money on prison construction and later to actually generate revenue, Southern states and counties began leasing “convicts” to commercial enterprises. Within a few years states realized they could lease out their convicts to local planters or industrialists who would pay minimal rates for the workers and be responsible for their housing and feeding, thereby eliminating costs and increasing revenue. Soon, markets for convict laborers developed, with entrepreneurs buying and selling convict labor leases. From county courthouses and jails, men were leased to local plantations, lumber camps, factories and railroads. The convict lease system became highly profitable for the states.
To employers and industrialists, these men represented cheap, disposable labor. The costs to lease a laborer were minimal, and the cost of providing housing, food, clothing and medical treatment could be kept low. Replacement costs were cheap. Unlike in slavery, there was no incentive to treat a laborer well. (Slaves were expensive to purchase, but might create new profit by having children who became more slaves, and could live with a family for generations.)
But for victims and all Southern blacks, convict leasing was a horror. Prisoners were often transferred far from their homes and families. The paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and the men were unable to prove they had paid their debts — and were otherwise assumed they hadn’t. Working conditions at the convict leasing sites were often terrible: illness, lack of proper food, clothing, or shelter as well as cruel punishments, torture and even death.
Despised, powerless, and expendable, a prisoner could be made to do any job, at any pace, in any location. Why? “Because he is a convict,” a Southern railroad official explained, “and if he dies it is a small loss, and we can make him work there, while we cannot get free men to do the same kind of labor for, say, six times as much as the convict costs.”
Their lives were always in peril. A year or two on the Western North Carolina Railroad was akin to a death sentence: convicts were regularly blown to bits in tunnel explosions, buried in mountain landslides, and swept away in springtime floods. At a prison camp of the Greenwood and August Railroad, convicts were used up faster than South Carolina authorities could supply them. Between 1877 and 1879, the G&A “lost” 128 of their 285 prisoners to gunshots, accidents, and disease (a death rate of 45 percent) and another thirty-nine to escapes. Indeed, one has only to look as far as the quote in Mancini’s book title, which comes from a Southern employer explaining the benefits of convict leasing to George Washington Cable in 1883.
“Before the war we owned the Negroes,” he said. “If a man had a good nigger, he could afford to take care of him; if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don’t own `em. One dies, get another.”
Peonage
Another way that blacks were forced into labor was through a system known as “peonage.” Peonage, also called debt slavery or debt servitude, was a system where an employer compelled a worker to pay off a debt with work. Peonage had been in use in New Mexico Territory before the Civil War. Although Congress deemed that peonage was illegal in the Anti-Peonage Law of 1867, the practice began to flourish in the South after Reconstruction.
A loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment that declared involuntary servitude illegal “except as a punishment for crime” was used to ensnare blacks into peonage. In many cases, defendants were found guilty of real or fabricated crimes and were fined for both the crime and additional court fees. When the men were unable to pay, a local businessman would step forward to pay the fines. The convict would then sign a contract agreeing to work for him without pay until the debt was paid off.
A second method involved a defendant who, when faced with the likelihood of a conviction and the threat of being sent to a far-off work camp, would “confess judgment,” essentially claiming responsibility before any trial occurred. A local businessman would step forward to act as “surety,” vouching for the future good behavior of the defendant, and forfeiting a bond that would pay for the crime. The judge would accept the bond, without ever rendering a verdict on the crime. The defendant would then sign a contract agreeing to work without pay until the surety bond was paid off.
In other cases, workers became indebted to planters (through sharecropping), merchants (through credit) or company stores (through living expenses). Workers were often unable to re-pay the debt, and found themselves in a continuous workwithout-pay cycle. Often struck in remote company towns or isolated plantations, workers were prevented from attempting escape by chains, cells, guards, dogs and violence. If they did attempt to flee their workplace or the spurious debt, they risked a very high chance of being picked up, found guilty of abandoning their debts, fined for court fees, and eventually returned to the same employer — or worse, “leased” to a convict mine.
There was little interest in prosecuting the employers who abused their forced laborers: the employers were rich, white, and often politically connected. Worse, many of the laborers had “agreed” to their unfair treatment when they had signed the contracts agreeing to work off their debt. Most were unable to read. Sometimes, the contracts stated that the men agreed to be locked up, to be physically punished, and that any expenses due to health care, new clothing, or re-capturing due to an escape attempt could be added to the total.