America the Home of the Free

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 9, 26 August 1908, Page 46

America the Home of the Free

EXCEPT FOR SLAVES

By

RICKARD BARRY

Slavery to day! Yes. Not the wagcelavcry that grinds the human undergrowth of these United States, not the other slavery of a hundred forms that holds even you and me chafing to the task, but the ancient slavery, the actual, ■physical slavery that keeps men worse than animals. On December 5, 1900. in Pensacola, a United States judge, sentenced live officers of the Jackson Dumber Company, one of the largest concerns of its kind in this country, to seven years in the penitentiary. At the same time there were in other courts in Florida requests for seventeen indictments against equally prominent citizens. The charges were all the same —slavery! The lawcalls it “peonage,” which means the holding of a man to unwilling labour to work out a debt. But on this peonage these crafty and cruel employers had ingrafted the antebellum implements of bondage the lash and the bloodhound. It was all proved incontestably in the courts —that the men were enticed to their work by glowing and fraudulent representations, that once on the job they were held to it with threats, that when a few of spirit rebelled and tried io run away they were intimidated with firearms, that when some did finally get away they were tracked with hounds and brought back at the point of the pistol, that when the law intervened in the person of the local justice and tried to set them free they were shown to be in debt to their employers and the strenuous incident of ’their keep justified on the score of an ancient statute which gave a debtor's body to the creditor until the debt was satisfied. And all this m the face of a public Sentiment that justified the bondage as «n essential evil of the land, in the face of a judiciary intimidated by this public sentiment. and a political machinery as much its slave as the poor black bodies which invoked the protection of Unc.e Sam It is difficult to find a man of prominence i nFlorida who docs not condone the svstem. “Trent a mgger white they sav, -and he'll treat you black. The cases were flagrant, though but a bubble rising from the elemental daikncss of the slavery throughout the State, or they never would have forced a trial, much less conviction. The monumental error made by the einplovers of Florida was in going bevond the black man with their slavery, dfad they stuck to the racial division they might have escaped castigation, as they have for a decade. But, insatiate, and not finding enough blacks to satisfy iheir ambitious wants, they reached out end took in white men. From employment agencies in New York the operators in turpentine and lumber got men fresh from Europe, and some stale from the slums of the great citv. Those fresh from Europe were not of the best, and those stale from New York's East Side were of the worst. These job lots of humanity arriving in Florida met no welcome. The employers would have been glad to do well by good workmen, but the good workmen arc drafted to more congenial climes and more attractive labour. In some instances where the men were of the best labouring type, they were well treated; but when, as was more often the case, they were starving Jews, decrepit Poles, and mangy Scandinavians, they were railroaded directly into the peonage camps. In debt when they arrived, they were held in debt; feeble in the beginning, they were more enfeebled by the climate anil doubly incapacitated by unendurable labour. Instead of foremen they found overseers; instead of employers, masters; instead of employment, slavery. If they escaped into the swamps they caught malaria; if they eeeaped death the bloodhounds found them; if they eluded the hounds the nearest constable took them in and turned them over to another Waster. And yet, here and there, a few escaped. A relative of a schoolboy friend of Curtis

Guild, governor of Massachusetts, drifted into Boston one day last year and told his story. Three poor, health-broken Jews came to the officials of the Jewish Protection Society in Jacksonville and showed the livid scars where they had been whipped. Some miserable blacks crawled into the prosperous town of Orlando and pitifully begged from door to door, their legs a mass of sores. A dozen tramp immigrants ran away from the O’Hara camp at Buffalo Bluff and startled the inhabitants of Palatka with their story of frightful wrongs. Then the United States district attorney- took notice. Asi enterprising lawyer from New York put sleuths on some of the cases. President Roosevelt and the Commissioner of Labour were appealed to. Investigations were begun. The whitewashing process was developed. The Florida East Coast Railway-—Flagler-Standard-Oil route—produced affidavits to disprove every statement of the friend of Curtis Guild. The blacks were discredited as natural liars, the Jews as welchers, the “poor white trash” as incompetent. All prominent citizens, the machinery of journalism and politics, combined to spread the whitewash. And so the slavery lives. There it is to-day. Five convictions prove it; seventeen indictments smell of it; hundreds of newspaper stories floating about the states smoke out the iniquity. To understand it well, let us look a little into history. Florida, the State, has about the population of Boston, the city. But it has room and natural wealth for millions more. So have been drawn to it in the past 20 years many adventurers. Crackers —poor whites—have come from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Alabama. These crackers have been in the majority, but the North has sent its quota— New York Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch, especially. Sweeping into the state from above, this ambitious nevi- blood has ousted the ancient aristocracy that once gave Florida the distinction of age and chivalry. Ready to the hand were great forests in which slept turpentine and lumber, and deep mines from which could be disgorged great wealth in phosphate. Yet there was no money-, quick or otherwise, without labour.’ The blacks already there were both too few and too lazy. The white man could not endure the climate, the immigrant could not be enticed. What was there to do? Confronted on the one hand with opportunities as unbounded as those found in the Michigan forests or among the wheatfields of Dakota, and, on the other hand, with a population of ignorant, lazy blacks, they did not hesitate to pay- the price demanded by fortune. This price was peonage—and more, for peonage means, as the statutes read, “the securing, holding, or retaking of people for debt.” But the men who secured, held, and retook those whom they wanted for their work used legal officers to get them, firearms to hold them, and bloodhounds to retake them. This had gone along all right, without much complaint, for a period of ten or twelve years. So long as only the blacks were concerned they took the slavery as symbolic of the universal bondage condoned by their ministers. But in the last 18 months it has reached out and embraced immigrants from the North; heaice the United States Courts. A vast system of corruption radiates behind. This corruption concerns every element in the .State. It corrodes polities; it blackens industry; it retards immigration; and it clogs the wheels of justice. The corruption begins in the convict system. Florida has no State prison. She has 1200 convicts and no place to put them. The State, therefore, is compelled to speculate in her criminals. She leases them out to individuals who pay for the privilege. Instead of an expense, her convicts are thus a source of income. And what is the effect on the convict? He becomes a mere chattel from whom the final lessee, who operates him, must

drive an exorbitant amount of work to make him pay. The convict is a very desirable workman, lie can be counted on for six days a week from dawn till dark, and that is more than can be said of any but a very few negroes, most of whom obey their own sweet, wayward, indifferent will. There has been a semblance of effort by the state to regulate abuses, but, to complicate the system, each county also has its convicts, and these are leased by the same villainous patronage, but with the added disadvantage that they have no supervision. The state inspects its camps; the counties do not have even that formality. The horrors of this convict system have become so heartrending in Florida during the past few years that the respectable people, of whom there are a goodly number, have at last risen in revolt. Orange, one of the most prosperous counties in the central district, the home at once of the fruit it is named for and of turpentine, first flew the white flag. The citizens of Orlando, the county seat, month after month were outraged by tales of cruelty from a turpentine camp near Gabriella, twelve miles away in a lonely forest. .Sixty convicts from Duval and Osceola Counties were there under half a dozen guards and a convict captain named 11-J*. Douglas. Twice there appeared on the streets of Orlando (as pretty-, prosperous, and law-abiding town as could be found in New England) wrecks of what once were men —decrepit, with their backs scarred, their clothes in rags, shoeless, their feet splintered and swollen with the ugly wounds of the saw-palmetto. They told tales that would have brought tears from Judge Jeffreys. They were convicts, of course; still, they were human beings. Strapped across a barrel, these men had repeatedly submitted to the lash, their heads covered by a revolver in the hands of one guard, while another wielded the whip. Their shoes had given out. They had asked for new ones. These refused, they did their work barefoot. This work was often on saw-palmetto, where the sharp teeth worked into the flesh and produced incurable festers. Often mere caprice brought a whipping. Some of the guards wore boys of nineteen. The captain, twice every day, made a tour of his gang, asking the individual guards which men were to be whipped. No overt offence was necessary. The youngsters, ennuied with tho monotony of the lonely forest, required the diversion of a whipping nearly every day—j us t for the fun of the thing! This sounds incredible for 1906 in the United States of America, but only a few months later the writer visited a number of those same camps, and in ono of them, expressing doubt that such a condition could exist, was told that he could “have one now” if he wished. But such a state of things was not to continue. Complaint got to the governor, and he made an investigation. J. A. Kirkwood, a deputy sheriff, and J. H. Jones, a prominent lawyer, went clandestinely to the camp. They caught Captain Douglas red-handed. They failed to find a single convict wearing a whole pair of shoes. The feet of many were painfully lacerated. Laceration from the saw-palmetto when exposed to the dews of the forest produces intense inflammation, sometimes blood-poisoning—even death. There is always intense pain. One of the guards told Kirkwood that “a stick of palmetto in ’em helps the niggers to work to forget it.” The details of Kirkwood’s and Jones’s private report to the Governor are too revolting for exact excerpt. They found a man in an outhouse dying from the poison of the palmetto—dying unattended, with no effort being made even for his comfort. On the backs of eight prisoners were huge sears, fresh and livid. The men were driven to and from work on the run, the pace set by a mounted man. They limped and scrambled along pitifully, three guards with drawn guns bringing up the rear. Asked why he brought them in on the run, Douglas said that he must save time, that they -worked eight miles out, and needed all of daylight on the job. Later it developed that most of the gang were 30-day men, serving time for petty offences, and, though soft to the work, were -being driven harder than old hands.

A convict serving a sentence of several years would be well taken care of, his body being as valuable a chattel as that of a horse, but a 30-day man was of little consequence at the time, and of

none after the month waa out; hence he must be worked to a finish in 30 days. All of this and much more was developed under oath at the trial of Douglas, for he waa soon indieted on 17 counts, which included everything from assault to murder in the first degree. The information gotten by Kirkwood and Jones, though taken privately for the governor, was of too sensational a nature to remain long a secret, and once loose among the leading citizens of Orange (County, brought an imperative demand for justice. At the trial one witness told of a day when a convict had fallen from exhaustion. how Douglas had ordered two of his fellows to help the man along, how the exhausted convict proved too big a burden for the swift pace of the gang, how Douglas had then ordered them all on to the camp, leaving him alone with the disabled convict. An hour later, the witness said, he and another man had been ordered to the front yard to bring in the fallen labourer, who died the next morning. When the gang returned to work the next day, on the dusty highway could be plainly seen a broad streak,* as of a sack of meal dragged along. The story, then, seems all too plain—Douglas had tied the convict to his saddle-bow, and had dragged him three miles along the road. Yet Douglas escaped on 16 of the 17 counts. A jury of his cracker peers let ■him off, because no cracker will believe the testimony of a coloured man. They convicted him on only one count—manslaughter. It is popularly believed in Orlando that Douglas would have escaped On the final charge, also, had he not put up too good a story in defence. He swore that he had made it a practice personally to bathe the feet of a certain convict. That was too much for the cracker jury. They knew he must be lying, and returned a verdict of “guilt?.” That more than three thousand white labourers have been slaving, under the brutal and heartless peonage system, on railroad constructicn in North Carolina ■and Tennessee was shown recently by the testimony of a number of fugitive victims before the United States grand jury at Charlotte, North Carolina. The facts brought out were so harrowing and conclusive that the grand jury indicted the Carolina Construction Company, Mayor Radcliffe of Marion, North Caro-

linn, T. C. Baker, a deputy sheriff, J. C. Porter, a superintendent, and Charles Crawford and a man named Drinkard, two foremen of the company. The charge was conspiracy to commit peonage. The company was fined twelve hundred dollars, which it paid with the understanding that the charges against Radcliffe and Baker be quashed. The testimony of these fugitives adds another chapter or horrors to the almost unbelievable peonage tyranny which exists in many states. The men were honest, hard-working labourers, seeking a livelihood. Like so many thousands of other workers they fell into the snares of one of the “shark” employment agencies in New York. Enticed to North Carolina on the promise of good treatment and good wages, they speedily faced the realities of slavery. The South and Western Railroad, a branch of Thomas F. Ryan’s .Seaboard Air Line, is being built from Marion, North Carolina, to Johnson City, Tennessee, by slavery methods. The tnen were shipped in a batch from New York and taken to Altapas, North Carolina, on October 18, 1906, and then marched the next day six miles through the mountains to Spruce Tine, North Carolina. Here they were quartered with negroes in miserable shacks. Bare pine boards were their beds. When they protested Crawford shouted, “Oct down and dig in that tunnel or I’ll send for the (logger!” The. men kept protesting against working under revolting conditions and being forced to do work for which they had not contracted. Crawford’s only reply was to point his gun at them and exclaim, “You just march ahead of my mule into that tunnel and no more monkey business.” Headed by William Burke, of Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, a party of the victims escaped the next day. They had not gone a mile before an armed sentinel, in the person of Baker, abruptly halted their Hight. Although he had no warrant, Baker arrested them and drove them back to camp. Here was a fine spectacle—American citizens being arrested without warrant, simply because they chose to flee from unendurable conditions! At the camp more indignities were heaped upon them. Thrown into a hut, they were kept imprisoned for twenty-four hours, with two armed guards stationed at the door. A young

labourer, James Pappello, of No. 03 Oli-ver-street, New York city, was thrown into the shack with them. Pappello had been flogged by a foreman until his body was covered with cuts and bruises. What waa his crime? Like the others he had sought to throw off the shackles of peonage slavery. The next day the prisoners were marched twenty-two miles through deep mud to Marion. As if they were criminals and not free workmen in a free country, they were held in the country jail for seventy-seven hours without a trial. Upon being taken before Mayor Radcliffe they were sentenced to twenty days in the chain-gang. Ball-and-chain attachements were riveted on their ankles to prevent their escape, and they were put to work hammering rocks. Through Burke’s ingenuity' the victims brought the outrage to judicial attention. Fugitives are constantly escaping from the slavery eamps of the South, and the peonage employment agencies of the North are as busy as ever recruiting victims to replace those who contrive to escape.