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Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: "The Negro Convict is a Slave" Author(s): Alex Lichtenstein Source: The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1993), pp. 85-110 Published by: Southern Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2210349 Accessed: 21-10-2017 18:37 UTC

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Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South:

"The Negro Convict is a Slave"

By ALEX LICHTENSTEIN

"PLEASE, READER, DO NOT READ THIS CHAPTER UNLESS YOU CAN STEEL YOUR heart against pain," cautioned Frank Tannenbaum in his 1924 expose of conditions in southern prison camps. The catalogue of horrors introduced by these words strongly resembles George Washington Cable's earlier indictment of convict leasing, The Silent South, pub- lished in 1885. And nearly a decade after Tannenbaum's book appeared, the Nation proclaimed that "no [fugitive] ought to be delivered to Georgia as long as it persists in its inhuman and barbarous chain-gang system." Yet the brutal regime endured by African Americans working the southern roads in the 1920s, forcefully described by Tannenbaum as 6ne of the "darker phases" of the South, was conceived as a model of reform and progress, the direct result of the abolition of convict leas- ing. The chain gang consisting primarily of black convicts working the roads of the Deep South embodied the brutality of southern race relations, the repressive aspect of southern labor relations, and the moral and economic backwardness of the region in general. I But when

I Frank Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South (New York and London, 1924), 74-115 (quotation on p. 74); George Washington Cable, The Silent South, Together with the Freedman 's Case inEquityand the Convict Lease System (New York, 1885; rpt. ed., New York, 1907);Nation, CXXXVI (January 4, 1933), 2. For a description of the creation of the image of the "benighted" South, see George B. Tindall, "The Benighted South: Origins of a Modem Image," Virginia Quarterly Review, XL (Spring 1964), 281-94. Tindall locates the origins of the benighted image in the 1920s, during which the road gang became the pre-eminent penal institution of the South. Tannenbaum's book is a classic example of the genre that generated the image. Exposes from the left written in the 1930s include Walter Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States (New York, 1933), and a "fictionalized" account by John L. Spivak, Georgia Nigger (New York, 1932). I would like to thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing me with an Archie K. Davis Fellowship, which helped me carry out the initial research for this article. Thanks are also due to Dan Carter, Pete Daniel, Matt Mancini, and Gerald Shenk, all participants in a panel presented on November 9, 1989, at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in Lexington, Ken- tucky, where I first presented this argument. Thanks also to Dean Hansen for producing the map, and to James Miller for locating a crucial citation. Sybil Lipschultz has been a consistent and enormously helpful reader of and listener to the ideas presented here.

MR. LICHTENSTEIN is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University.

THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Vol. LIX, No. 1, February 1993

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86 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

it originated, the penal road gang was regarded as a quintessential southern Progressive reform and as an example of penal humanitarian- ism, state-sponsored economic modernization and efficiency, and racial moderation.

The Progressive elements of convict road work are clear in their close relationship to the great wave of southern reform known as the "good roads movement," which successfully melded agrarian discon- tent with urban Progressivism. The attempt to improve southern roads initiated "the closer binding of the common interests of the farmer and the merchant," in the words of Joseph M. Brown, the governor of Georgia during the Progressive Era . "The South is today enjoying an era of prosperity and expansion," wrote the director of the U. S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Office of Public Roads (OPR) in 1910. "Its manufacturing industries are being enlarged; its railroads are being extended, and its agriculture is ... opening up to new pos- sibilities .... But in order for this growth to continue," he warned, "it will be necessary that the roads of the South be improved...." In concert with state and local "good roads" associations across the South this federal agency promoted a modern transportation network as the answer to southern social and economic woes.2

2Joseph Brown in Southern Good Roads, I (March 1910), 17; Logan Waller Page [director of OPR], "The Necessity for Road Improvement in the South," South Atlantic Quarterly, IX (April 1910), 156-60 (quotation on p. 157); see also Southern Good Roads, III (January 1911), 26. On the good roads movement see George B. Tindall, The Emergence of the New South, 1913-1945 (Baton Rouge, 1967),254-57; Harry McKown, "Roads and Reform: The Good Roads Movement in North Carolina, 1885-1921" (M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1972); Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), Part I; Howard Lawrence Preston, Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South,

1885-1935 (Knoxville, 1991); Cecil K. Brown, The State Highway System of North Carolina: Its Evolution and Present Status (Chapel Hill, 1931) is an excellent study, done under the auspices of the Institute forResearch in Social Science; Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville, 1983), 134-35, 307- 10. The Good Roads

Circular published by the North Carolina Geological Survey(NCGS), the OPR bulletins and other USDA publications, and Southern Good Roads magazine, among others, provide numerous examples of the goals of the good roads movement and frequently emphasize the importance of convict labor to road improvement. See for examples, J. A. Holmes, "Road Building With Convict

Labor in the Southern States," USDA, Yearbook, 1901, pp. 319-32; J. E. Pennybacker, Jr., H. S. Fairbank, and W. F. Draper, Convict Laborfor Road Work, USDA Bulletin No. 414 (Washington, 1916); Maurice 0. Eldridge, "The Evolution of Convict Labor," Good Roads, n.s., VI (February 1905), 59-64; Joseph Hyde Pratt, "Economics of Convict Labor in Road Construction," NCGS, Good Roads Circular No. 97, (1914); William L. Spoon, "Road Workand the Convict," Southern Good Roads, II (November 1910), 13-15; Joseph Hyde Pratt, "Convict Labor in Good Roads Construction," ibid., 29-32; Editorial, "Convict Labor in Road Building," ibid., (October 1910), 18; J. E. Pennybacker, Jr., "The Road Situation in the South," ibid., I (January 1910), 9-14; and

USDA, Yearbook, 1895, p.491. Hilda Jane Zinmmerman, "Penal Systems and Penal Reform in the South Since the Civil War" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1947), 322-33, is one of the few treatments of the good roads movement that takes into account its close ties to penal reform. For a fine contemporary study of the chain gang in North Carolina in the 1920s see Jesse F. Steiner and Roy M. Brown, The North Carolina Chain Gang: A Study of County Convict Road Work (Chapel Hill, 1927). On the USDA's OPR see Seely, Building the American Highway System, Part I.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 87

The South's archaic statute labor system was a major impediment to good roads. "The antebellum style of 'working' the public highways, which generally prevails, is about as well suited to the purpose as were the old militia musters to the development of actual soldiers," a speaker informed the first North Carolina Good Roads Association (NCGRA) annual convention in 1902. Indeed, by 1904, only 10 of North Carolina's 100 counties had entirely abandoned the feudal system of "warning out" all able-bodied road hands for four or five days of work a year on the local roads. In Georgia, only 8 of 137 counties had done away with this so-called labor tax by 1904, and the value of conscripted labor across the state that year exceeded the cash taxes collected for county road work. The system of statute labor was the first target of the modernizers, for, not surprisingly, the corvee was hopelessly ineffec- tive. "If there is a pernicious law or custom in our state," proclaimed Governor Elias Carr of North Carolina in the 1890s, "I believe it is the old system of working roads. The average road hand goes on the road with the purpose not to work."3

Thus, from its earliest days the good roads movement recognized that an ambitious program of highway expansion required a large and efficient labor force and that the statute labor system was wholly inadequate to the task. Joseph A. Holmes, state geologist in North Carolina and a champion of good roads, insisted that "the abandonment of the old system of compulsory road labor" by free men, and its replacement by "a system of road work by [cash] taxation, and the use of convict labor in road building is [an] essential feature of any system for the improvement of public roads." At its founding convention the NCGRA pursued this course; "we urge a more extended use of convict labor in road building in North Carolina," they resolved. Holmes himself seconded the resolution.4

In North Carolina and elsewhere in the South where enthusiasm for good roads reigned, convict leasing was attacked, and the state was urged to put convicts to work on the roads; the good roads movement

I USDA, OPR, Proceedings of the North Carolina Good Roads Convention, Bulletin No. 24 (Washington, 1902), 36; USDA, OPR, Public Roads of North Carolina: Mileage and Expendi- tures in 1904, Circular No. 45 (Washington, 1907); USDA, OPR, Public Roads of Georgia: Mileage and Expenditures in 1904, CircularNo. 76 (Washington, 1907); Speechby GovernorCarr to the North Carolina Good Roads Convention, circa 1894, Folder 348, Box 31, North Carolina Geological Survey (NCGS) Papers (Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; hereinafter cited as SHC). Critiques of statute labor can also be found in Martin Dodge, "Government Cooperation in Object-Lesson Road Work," in USDA, Yearbook, 1901, pp. 411-12; Editorial, "The Good Roads Revolution," Southern Good Roads, I (February 1910), 15; Joseph Hyde Pratt, "The Construction of Good Roads in the South," South Atlantic Quarterly, IX (January 1910), 57. On Georgia's statute labor and the transition to convict labor, see Peter Wallenstein, From Slave Souuth to New So/uth: Public Policy in Nineteenith/-Centuiry Georgia (Chapel Hill and London, 1987), 196-207.

4 J. A. Holnes to Martin Dodge, August 21, 1901, Folder 8, Box 9, NCGS Papers; Proceedings of the North Carolina Good Roads Convention (1902), 67.

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88 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

became "identified with the movement to take the prisoner out of the cell, the prison factory and the mine to work him in the fresh air and sunshine." An observer in the 1890s noted that "the substance of our work of several of the last Georgia road congresses was to pass resolutions to the effect that the convicts should be worked upon the roads." As improvements were made over the next decade good roads enthusiasts pointed to convict labor as a key component of the change sweeping the southern transportation network. "The old labor system is gradually giving place to the more modern, more enlightened, and more practicable system of improving roads by taxation," reported the secretary of agriculture in 1904. As a result, "the number of convicts employed at road building in the different States has steadily increased ... and this use of the convict force has done much to help along the movement for good roads in all [the South]," the report continued, because "its employment has cheapened the cost of road building... ." In 1902 Joseph Holmes bluntly informed the NCGRA convention, "The use of convict labor has been the beginning and the basis of the modern road building in the southern states."5

While the Tarheel State was in the vanguard of the good roads cause, its neighbor Georgia eventually built and improved an exem- plary network of roads with state-controlled forced labor.6 As early as 1894 0. H. Sheffield, a civil engineer at the University of Georgia, produced a study for the USDA's Office of Road Inquiry on the "improvement of the road system of Georgia." Sheffield emphatically rejected the statute labor system and insisted that "through the employ- ment of the convicts upon the public roads is offered a rational solution of the road question ... ."7 At the time, however, nearly all of Georgia's more than two thousand felony (or state) convicts were leased to operators of coal mines, brickyards, turpentine farms, and sawmills. Only misdemeanor convicts under short sentences were available for public county road work. The state gradually expanded the cast of the legal net that captured prisoners for the use of county chain gangs instead of the private lease camps; in 1903, for example, Georgia's legislature gave counties the option of requisitioning for road work state felony convicts with less than five-year sentences to supplement their misdemeanor county prisoners. But the felony convict labor force

5E. Stagg Whitin, "Convicts and Road Building," Southern Good Roads, V (June 1912), 16

(first quotation); Harlan H. Stone, "Good Roads," Methodist Review (published in Nashville for the MEC,S), LXXVIII (July-August 1896), 421; USDA, Report of the Secretary ofAgriculture,

1904 (Washington, 1904), 421-22; Proceedings of the North Carolina Good Roads Convention (1902), 70. See also W. G. Whidby to J. A. Holmes, September 10, 1894, Box 2, NCGS Papers,

on the discussion of convict labor by the Georgia Road Congress. 6 See, for example, H. B. Varner, "Why Convicts Should be Worked on Public Roads,"

Southern Good Roads, VIII (September 1913), 22-23.

' O. H. Sheffield, Improvement of the Road System in Georgia, USDA, Office of Road Inquiry,

Bulletin No. 3 (Washington, 1894), 26.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 89

was not completely mobilized for road work in Georgia until the state abolished convict leasing in 1908.8

This exemplary Progressive reform has been presented both as a response to humanitarian outrage stirred up by the press and as a corrective to the declining economic rationality of convict leasing.9 But such noble sentiments as "the punishment [of convicts] ought not to be at the hands of a private party who may be tempted by the exigencies of business .. . to make punishment either more or less" were not given political expression until a consensus was reached about an alternative for the convict lease. With the help of Georgia's labor movement, which "believe[d] the best interest of the state and the public at large will best be served if convicts are made to do public duty on the roads," where they could work "without producing unfair competition with anyone," the campaign for good roads provided this alternative. 10

Southern good roads advocates harnessed convict labor to charac- teristic Progressive methods and beliefs. By attacking the statute labor system, they championed efficiency. Moreover, road improvement was financed with modern forms of state-generated revenue, either increased tax assessments or debt in the form of local bond issues. And road building could not go forward without the intervention of experts;

I Georgia, Principal Keeper of the Penitentiary, Report, 1894, (copy in Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta, hereinafter cited as GDAH); for a full history of the convict lease and its demise in Georgia see Alexander C. Lichtenstein, "The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1990); for changes in sentencing law see S. W. McCallie, "Convicts on the Public Roads of Georgia," Southern Good

Roads, II (December 1910), 3; Georgia, Prison Commission, Report, 1907-8, pp. 7-9 (copy in

GDAH); and Georgia General Assembly, Journial of the Senate, 1903, pp. 466-68.

9 The original student of the abolition of leasing in Georgia gives great weight to the storm of protest raised by lurid press accounts of conditions in the convict camps; see A. Elizabeth Taylor, "The Abolition of the Convict Lease System in Georgia," Georgia Historical Quarterly, XXVI (September-December 1942), 273-87; for the economic context and a convincing critique of explanations stressing humanitarian reform, see Matthew J. Mancini, "Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing," Journal of Negro History, LXIII (Fall 1978), 339-52; for the political context of abolition in Georgia see Dewey W. Grantham, Jr., Hoke Smith and the Politics of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1958), 173-75.

'? Eugene C. Branson to Unnamed Correspondent, June 13, 1908, Folder 3, Correspondence, Eugene Cunningham Branson Papers, SHC (first quotation); Journal of Labor, July 17, 1908, p. 4, and July 31, 1908, p. 6; for quotation oil "unfair competition," see the petition of the Georgia Federation of Labor in Georgia General Assembly, Journal of the House of Representatives, Extraordinary Session, 1908 (Atlanta, 1908), 550. Labor's opposition to leasing and support for placing convicts on the roads are also found in Journial of Labor, July 3, 1908, p. 4, August 21, 1908, p. 6, January 15, 1909, p. 2, November 29, 1907, p. 4, which stresses the question of competition with free labor; and the petitions and memorials to the legislative session considering the abolition of the lease, Georgia General Assembly, Journial of the House, Ext. Sess., 1908, pp. 11,277,300-302, 315-16. Earlier studies of the abolition of the convict lease in Georgia largely ignore the contribution of the labor movement; see Taylor, "Abolition of the Convict Lease System in Georgia." The groundbreaking published survey of southern penal reform, Jane Zimmerman's "The Penal Reform Movement in the South during the Progressive Era, 1890- 1917," Journial of Southerni History, XVII (November 1951), 462-92, does not mention the role of organized labor.

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90 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

localities were provided with professional engineering and construc- tion advice, often under the aegis of the federal OPR. I I But as historians of southern Progressivism have noted, many southern reform move- ments of this era were also oriented toward the "rationalization" of race relations. And in the realm of Progressive ideas about race the good roads movement and the champions of penal reform found common cause. 12

Remarking on the extraordinary revelations of the 1908 investiga- tion of the convict lease that preceded its abolition in Georgia, the southern reformer Alexander J. McKelway pointed out that witnesses "would frequently speak of a convict as a 'nigger,' when it was found that he meant a white man." Such confusion was readily understand- able, because nine-tenths of the state's prisoners were black. But it would be a mistake to understand McKelway's support for the elimina- tion of leasing as merely an attempt to rescue a handful of whites from its indiscriminate brutality. Certainly penal reformers hoped that white prisoners would be remanded to a central penitentiary while blacks would work the public roads in chains, since the "moral standard[s]" of blacks are "not lowered by this form- of publicity."'3 But southern Progressives applauded the abolition of the convict lease also because this reform advanced what they believed was their moderate racial agenda for African Americans. The perceived injustices of the convict lease system undermined its legitimacy as a punishment for crime, and thus encouraged "absolute indifference of the negroes to the punish- ment of the criminal." But by removing corruption and brutality from the penal system, men like McKelway hoped to encourage "the negroes ... to aid in the detection of the criminal and his delivery to justice."114 For Progressives, overt racial repression and brutality were counterproductive. Instead, social progress for the South and the nation

"See the good roads propaganda cited in note 2. 12 On the racial ideology of southern Progressivism see John Dittmer, Black Georgia in the

Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1977), 110-15; George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York and other cities, 1971), Chap. 10; Grantham, Southern Progres- sivism, 230-45; Jack Temple Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the

Progressive South (Philadelphia, New York, and Toronto, 1972). 13 Alexander J. McKelway, "The Convict Lease System of Georgia," Outlook, XC (September

12, 1908), 67; Georgia, Prison Commission, Report, 1908-09, pp. 7-8; J. E. Pennybacker to H.

G. Buchanan, January 20, 1912, pp. 2-3, Box 35, File 97- "Convict Labor," General Correspon-

dence, 1893-1912, Records of the Bureau of Public Roads, Record Group 30, (National Archives, Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland; hereinafter cited as RG30) for

quotation on "moral standards. " For evidence of the increasing use of penitentiaries for whites, and chain gangs for blacks, in North Carolina, see North Carolina, Prison Department, Report, 1897, p. 32; 1898, p. 128; 1903-04, p. 106; and 1905-06, p. 22.

14 Alexander J. McKelway, "The Atlanta Riots: A Southern White Point of View," Outlook, LXXXIV (November 3, 1906), 559 (first quotation), 562 (second quotation); McKelway, "Convict Lease System of Georgia"; and McKelway, "Abolition of the Convict Lease System of Georgia," Proceedings of the Americati Prisons Association, 1908 (Indianapolis, 1908), 219-27.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 91

as a whole depended on well-ordered race relations and the firm control-and protection-of what was regarded as a childlike race.'5

Thus disfranchisement, segregation, and prohibition were all pro- moted as reforms to check the chaotic tendencies of southern race relations and to protect against the "moral and physical reversion" of what nearly all whites believed was the inferior race. 16 In Georgia, in the wake of the 1906 Atlanta race riot, these Progressive reforms were accomplished by Governor Hoke Smith's administration, which also oversaw the abolition of convict leasing.17 In the latter instance, the substitution of the public chain gang for the private convict lease mobilized the power of the state to reproduce what Progressives under- stood to be the benign paternalism of antebellum slavery. When it came to the South's "criminal class"-synonymous, in the minds of reformers, with "the negro"-the chain gang thus could operate as a form of state-sponsored noblesse oblige. Just as the vicious and arbi- trary mob would be replaced by the strong but fair arm of the law, the greed of the convict lessees would be supplanted by the reformatory power and interest of the state. As one northern penal reformer noted, "the convict on the road is the slave of the state," and slaves had always labored faithfully for kind masters.'8

In a striking modernization of the proslavery argument presented before the Southern Sociological Congress in 1913, Georgia legislator Hooper Alexander explained how Progressive penology and modern racial paternalism went hand in hand. According to Alexander, slavery had itself been a reform made necessary by the racial burden left to the colonies by the African slave trade. This burden required governmental action, but "domestic slavery was an expedient for discharging that duty by contract." In other words, slavery had been nothing more than the privatization and alienation of the state's function of racial control; and slave labor was the slaveowner's just compensation for carrying out this function at his own expense. So too, in the wake of emancipa- tion, the convict lease was an analogous private means to carry out the public end of coping with the freed slaves' alleged natural criminal tendencies. Alexander admitted, however, that, in contrast to the pecu- liar institution, the convict lease was not beneficial for blacks. Nevertheless, he concluded, "the real evil was worse than the suffer-

'5 Edgar Gardner Murphy, Problems of the Present South: A Discussion of Certain of the Educational, Industrial and Political Issues in the Southern States (New York, 1905), Chap. 6; Dittmer, Black Georgia, 110-15; Fredrickson, Black Image, 286-96; and Kirby, Darkness at the

Dawning, 62-78. 16 Murphy, Problems of the Present South, 165.

" Grantham, Hoke Smnith, 172-75; and J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven and London, 1974), 221-23.

18 E. Stagg Whitin, "The Spirit of Convict Road-Building," Southern Good Roads, VI (December 1912), 12-13 (quotation on p. 13).

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92 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

ings of the convict," as bad as those might have been; for convict leasing competed with free labor and represented "the shirking of its duty by the government."'9

Ultimately, Progressive reformers, using the chain gang, reclaimed for the state the means with which to fulfill its duty to constrain and uplift the black race; unfortunately, in the process the sufferings of the convict were ignored. Opposition to the lease did include a protest from organized labor "against this foul wrong upon the convicts them- selves" and popular outcry at a mass meeting over "punishments, abuses, and suffering ... inflicted upon the convicts which were un- justified, unmerciful, cruel and inhuman."20 But whether the chain gangs that superseded the lease system were in the best interest of the convicts themselves can be doubted. Long after the transition from the lease to the chain gang, in both Georgia and North Carolina, investiga- tors and convicts complained about poor food and sanitation, relentless labor, and brutal punishment in the states' road camps. North Carolina chain-gang convicts complained to the governor in 1920 that "we are beat up like dogs ... they work us hard and half feed us [and] beat us with shovel and stick." They added that "we cannot make it for the food." Another group of black convicts had written earlier that "they are whipping right on. We can't get water but one time a day. We cant live." Reports of mass beatings and shootings on the Wayne County, North Carolina, chain gang also reached the governor, through the importunities of a "respected colored woman" in the community. From Johnston County, Wiley Woodard, a black convict, admitted that he had "made a mistake" but insisted that his crime did "not call for the management of this camp to treat me and my race as dogs because he has been mislead [sic] regarding the law." Woodard pointed out that road work at his camp was "at the point of a gun and threats of [the] lash." An independent observer of North Carolina's chain gang wrote the governor that even though "the State may be getting some good roads out of this system" the chain gang should be terminated, for "it savors too much of slavery times." In Georgia, as in North Carolina, prisoners complained of indiscriminate beatings, being worked in the rain, "rat[i]ons not fit for Dogs," and drunken guards.2"

19 Hooper Alexander, "The Convict Lease and the System of Contract Labor-Their Place in History," in James E. McCulloch, ed., Tie South Mobilizinigfor Social Service (Nashville, 1913), 161-74 (first quotation on p. 165; second on p. 173).

20 Journal of Labor, July 17, 1908, p. 4; and Resolutions of Mass Meeting, Rising Fawn, Georgia, August 2, 1908, "Convicts" Subject File, Box 64, File II (GDAH).

21 Convicts to Governor, March 7, 1920, Convicts to Governor Bickett, March 17, 1919, Joe Bisset to T. T. Thorne, January 22, 1918, Mrs. Dr. D. D. Bennet to Governor Bickett, July 8, 1918, T. T. Thorne to R. F. Beasley, July 16, 1918 (for reference to "respected colored woman"), Box 8-"Prisons 1917-1925, General and Miscellaneous"; Wiley Woodard [a black convict] to Kate Burr Johnson [Commissioner of Public Welfare], August 10, 1925, Box 9-"Prison Complaints, 1915-1929"; Urban A. Woodbury to Governor Bickett, February 8,1920, Box 8-"Prisons 1917-

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 93

Muckraking accounts of the chain gang from the 1920s, 1930s, and even late 1940s reveal that convicts continued to labor, eat, and sleep with chains riveted around their ankles. Work was done under the gun from sunup to sundown, shoveling dirt at fourteen shovelfuls a minute. Food was bug infested, rotten, and unvarying; rest was taken in unwashed bedding, often in wheeled cages nine feet wide by twenty feet long containing eighteen beds. Medical treatment and bathing facilities were unsanitary, if available at all. And above all, corporal punishment and outright torture-casual blows from rifle butts or clubs, whipping with a leather strap, confinement in a sweatbox under the southern sun, and hanging from stocks or bars-was meted out for the most insignificant transgressions, particularly to African Ameri- cans who were the majority of chain-gang prisoners.22

Indeed, as one historian of southern penal reform notes, even though after 1908 Georgia was considered a "banner" state in road building, it remained one of the "most backward in its penological development."23 The good roads movement looked to the state to provide a labor pool; but the chain gang, which the state used to supply the manpower for road improvement, perpetuated rather than eradicated one of the "darker phases of the South." Thus, the most ambitious pre-New Deal effort to nationalize and modernize the isolated rural South depended on one of the region's most viciously racist local institutions. It is striking how closely the post-1908 descriptions of Georgia's chain gang resemble those of the locally administered prison camps that, during the era of leasing, housed petty criminals under some of the worst penal condi- tions in the South.24 Under the lease system, while most of Georgia's convicts worked for the benefit of private industry, there coexisted a parallel, shadowy system of county and municipal road gangs, made up

1925, General and Miscellaneous," all in Subject Files, Department of Social Services Records, State Board of Public Welfare (State Board of Public Charities) Records (North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh). These subject files contain numerous pleas for help addressed to Kate Johnson, most of which emphasize poor food, hard work, and brutal punishment. For Georgia, see Charlie Bailey to Joseph M. Brown, March 7, 1912, Box 182; and D. C. Hamilton to Joseph M. Brown, April 4, 1912, Box 183, Governor's Incoming Correspondence (GDAH).

22 This composite picture is drawn from Tannenbaum, Darker Phases of the South; John L. Spivak, On the Chain Gang, International Pamphlets No. 32 (New York, 1932); Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill, 1936), 294-96; and Bayard Rustin, "Twenty-Two Days on a Chain Gang," in Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin (Chicago, 1971), 26-49, written in 1949 (see original typescript in North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).

23 Zimmerman, "Penal Systems and Penal Reform," 332-33. 24 For criticism of the deplorable conditions in Georgia's misdemeanor camps and the

impossible taskof regulating them, see Selena S. Butler, The Chain-Gang System (Tuskegee, Ala., 1897), which is a speech delivered before the National Association of Colored Women, Nashville, Tennessee, on September 16, 1897 (copy in Georgia Room, University of Georgia Library, Athens; hereinafter cited as UGa); Georgia General Assembly, Journal of the House, 1894, pp. 33-35; 1895, pp. 245-51; Georgia, Prison Commission, Report, 1898-99, pp. 17- 18; 1899-1900, pp. 16-23; 1901-02, p. 14.

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94 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

of misdemeanor prisoners. Chain gangs had their origins in this south- ern archipelago of misdemeanor convict camps.25

Many of the short-term convicts in these camps were sent to the chain gang for between thirty days and one year for petty crimes such as gambling, carrying a concealed weapon, drunkenness, fighting, disorderly conduct, loitering, and vagrancy. The Bibb County, Geor- gia, road camp, for instance, drew its labor force from the summary convictions meted out by the Macon city recorder's court, which in March 1904 alone sent 149 men and women to the county chain gang for a total of 6,751 days of labor. Fifty-six of these convictions were for drunkenness, 40 for disorderly conduct, 18 for fighting, 12 for loitering, another 12 for violating city ordinances, 4 for reckless driv- ing or riding, 2 for throwing rocks, and 1 simply for "suspect." Dan Johnson was given six months on the roads for "suspect loitering." Henry Jamison, an African American whose habeas corpus challenge to the chain gang later reached federal district court, in a few minutes before Macon's recorder was "sentenced to pay a fine of Sixty Dollars, or ... to serve a term of Two Hundred and Ten days in the County Chain Gang" for drunk and disorderly conduct and disorderly conduct "in Barracks" (the police station). The recorder's court heard between 18 and 50 cases like this daily. Although the list of sentences imposed is not broken down by race, the Bibb County sheriff testified in federal court that of 180 state, county, and municipal convicts on the county roads, 10 or 12 were white.26

If not sentenced to road work for the county, misdemeanor convicts, especially in south Georgia, were leased to turpentine camps, saw- mills, and other enterprises with short-term or seasonal labor needs. The Donalson Lumber Company in Decatur County, for example, leased thirty-nine convicts (thirty-seven of them black) for its turpen- tine business in 1899. Twenty-six of these bound laborers had been convicted of larceny, and these convicts were drawn from the courts of

23 For a description of a Georgia county road camp in 1906 that easily could have been written thirty years later, see George Herbert Clarke, "Georgia and the Chain-Gang," Outlook, LXXXII (January 13, 1906), 73-79.

26For the crimes of misdemeanants sent to the roads prior to 1908 see Chain Gang Sentences Imposed by Recorder (Macon, Georgia), March 1904, "Exhibit," Jamison v. E. A. Wimbish, File 53A386, Box 488, Case Files, U. S. District Court, Southern District of Georgia, Western Division (Macon), Record Group 21 (Atlanta Regional Archives, National Archives and Records Service; hereinafter cited as RG2 1, ARA); for the summary procedures of the Macon Recorder's Court see Pearson v. Wimbish, 124 Ga. 701 (1905), and "Criminal Docket," Jamison v. Winibish, pp. 2-3, Case File A-28901, Box 499, Case Files, Records of the Supreme Court of Georgia (GDAH); Petitionforhabeascorpus, June 20,1904, pp. 40-54,61, Petitionforwritof habeascorpus, n.d.(for Jamison's sentence), and habeas corpus proceedings, Savannah, March 23, 1904, p. 3H, all in Jamison v. E. A. Wimbish, File 53A386, Box 488, Case Files, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Georgia, Western Division (Macon), RG21, ARA. The racial breakdown is found in Petition for habeas corpus, June 20, 1904, p. 81. See also Voice of the Negro, I (August 1904),300-301; and Clarke, "Georgia and the Chain-Gang," on the importance of the Jamison case.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 95

six different nearby counties. County court clerks, sheriffs, and judges "farmed out" these convicts, often in an attempt to collect their fees and costs. In Colquitt County, Will Boyd received five months at a lumber camp for stealing an ax; in Wilcox County an unspecified misdemeanor could mean twelve months of hard labor for the Ocmulgee Brick Company.27 Indeed, county commissioners who wanted to im- prove their roads frequently had to compete with local turpentine and brickyard operators for this labor force (see table), especially when wages for free labor rose and "the loafing negro has things going his way and goes from place to place" (in the words of a turpentine operator). When wages were high, a stable, cheap labor force was at a premium, and the demand for leased convicts increased. Unfortu- nately, for entrepreneurs who sought a bound labor force, rising wages often enabled blacks to pay fines for misdemeanors rather than serve their sentence of hard labor, thus decreasing the pool of short-term convicts. The Georgia Prison Commission reported in 1901, for in- stance, that in prosperous times, when the price of cotton was high, black laborers hauled before local courts for misdemeanors-or their white patrons-could come up with the cash for fines. This, the commissioners claimed, restricted the available pool of misdemeanor convicts.28

In Colquitt County, in south Georgia turpentine country, for ex-

27 For the crimes of leased inisdemeanants sent to turpentine and other private camps see Report, Donalson Lumber Company, October 1899; other examples are Report, P. E. Williams

Camp, May 1900; Report, E. J. Smith Camp, May 1900, all in Monthly Reports of Misdemeanor

Chain Gangs, Georgia Prison Commission Records, Records of the Georgia Board of Corrections

(GDAH); Moultrie (Ga.) Weekly Observer, November 13, 1903, p. 3; Wilcox County Superior

Court Minutes, September Term 1893, vols. III-IV, 1892-1902, p. 8 (GDAH microfilm). For the

deals made between lessees and county officials, including judges, to obtain this labor, see for

example Georgia General Assembly, Proceedings of the Joint Committee of the Senate and House to Investigate the Convict Lease System of Georgia, 1908, vol. 2 of 5 ms. vols., pp. 684-89 (GDAH microfilm); Transcript of Record, October 14, 1897, Russell v. Tatum, Case File A-

21517, Box 352, Records of the Supreme Court of Georgia (GDAH); on fees, fines, and costs see,

e.g., Black v. Fite, 88 Ga. 238 (1891); Rountree v. Diirdeti, 95 Ga. 221 (1894); Pulaski Coullty v. DeLacy, 114 Ga. 583 (1901); Barron v. Terrell, 124 Ga. 1077 (1905); and Sapp v. DeLacy, 127 Ga. 659 (1906).

28 On competition between the public and private sectors for misdemeanor convicts see, e.g., Minutes of County Commissioners (MCC), Worth County, Georgia, Vol. A, 1904-1926, pp. 54-

55, 64-67, 168-70, 173, 180; Minutes of Court of Ordinary, Worth County, Vol. C, 1897-1903, pp. 430,451, both in Box 71, Georgia County Records, Works Progress Administration Historical

Records Survey (Special Collections, University of Georgia; hereinafter cited as WPA, UGA); MCC, Colquitt County, Georgia, Minute Book D, 1898-1902, pp. 198,235,240,244; Grand Jury

Presentments (GJP), Minutes of the Superior Court, Colquitt County, Minute Book E, 1902-1907, pp. 140-41, 197, 261-62, 308, 366, both in Box 19, Georgia County Records (WPA, UGA). For

the effects of the free labor market on the supply of and demand for misdemeanor convicts, especially in the turpentine and lumber industries, see Letter to the Editor, Savainiah Naval Stores

Review, XIV (August 6, 1904), 8 ("the loafing negro"); Southerni Liminberiniant, XXXIX (April 1, 1901), 6; ibid., (May 1, 1901), 7; Prison Commuission, Report, 1898-99, pp. 8-9, 1900-01, pp. 7- 10, 1901-02, pp. 19-20, 1903-04, pp. 9-10, 1906-07, p. 6; and Georgia General Assembly, Proceedings of the Joint Conun. to Investigate the Convict Lease System, 1908, vol. III, p. 967.

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96 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

DISTRIBUTION OF GEORGIA MISDEMEANOR CONVICTS BY WORK, 1898- 1908

Forest Farm Roads Otherb Total

1898 305 141 1388 1834 16.6% 7.7% 75.7%

1899 616 273 1495 2384 25.8% 11.5% 62.7%

1900 613 346 1469 23 2451 25.0% 14.1% 59.9% .9%

1901 660 236 1092 43 2031 32.5% 11.6% 53.8% 2.1%

1902 643 175 1256 147 2221 29.0% 7.9% 56.6% 6.6%

1904 502 99 1297 66 1964 25.6% 5.0% 66.0% 3.4%

1905 590 82 1597 67 2336 25.3% 3.5% 68.4% 2.9%

1906 503 51 1410 79C 2043 24.6% 2.5% 69.0% 3.9%

1907 559 75 1650 14 2298 24.3% 3.3% 71.8% .6%

1908 495 54 1871 12 2432 20.4% 2.2% 76.9% .5%

SOURCE: Prison Commission, Report, 1898-1908. The Georgia Prison Commission did not provide data for 1903.

* Includes turpentine, sawmills, cutting wood and crossties. b Mining ore and coal, brickmaking. c Includes 57 on railroad work.

ample, the local grand jury (which convened twice a year) constantly prodded the county commissioners to "make arrangements for working the misdemeanor convicts of the county on the public roads." The commissioners themselves acknowledged that there was "a good deal of complaint ... in regard to the public roads of the county being in bad shape." Yet at the same time the grand jury noted that in September 1903 there were thirty convicts at work at the Allen & Holmes turpen- tine camp; the following year they reported that twenty convicts were found at Mallets and Gray's sawmills. In 1905 the county was able to get nine convicts for its road crew, but by 1907 the grand jury still complained that "we found [only] two convicts and are informed that in about two weeks they both will be released and the chain-gang will

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 97

have no inmates.... We would recommend that some Means be pro- vided to increase the number of convicts," they concluded. Three years after the statewide abolition of leasing, however, the grand jury re- ported that thirty convicts-twenty-nine of them black-worked Colquitt County's roads. "As a whole," the grand jury concluded in 1911, "the Public roads of the County have been greatly improved during the past few years."29 But until 1908 the tension over the distribution of county misdemeanor convicts persisted despite the dubious legality of misdemeanor leases. Misdemeanor convicts on the roads were worked by the county authorities; but others were leased to private interests just as the state felony convicts were. Leasing county convicts, however, was illegal, according to critics of these so-called wildcat camps.30

Roads in counties that established chain gangs on a regular basis improved markedly, and gradually misdemeanor convicts were being put on the chain gangs rather than being leased. By 1908, 77 percent of misdemeanants worked on the roads (see table). Partly because Georgia's criminal justice system was overly concerned with punish- ing the minor social transgressions of blacks and partly because blacks rarely could afford to pay fines, the 95 percent black composition of the misdemeanor chain gangs was even more unbalanced than that of the felony convict camps.3'

Significantly, the first counties in Georgia to draw on this pool of labor for their roads cut a swath through the black belt plantation districts, where the black population was concentrated, racial subordi- nation and control were essential to production, and good roads

29 GJP, Colquitt County, Minute Book E, pp. 197 (first quotation), 308, 366, 500 (second quotation); MCC, Colquitt County, Book #1, 1902-1919, p. 22; GJP, Colquitt County, Minute

Book F, 1907-1912, p. 364 (third quotation), all in Box 20 (WPA, UGA). 30 On wildcat camps and their legal ambiguity see Prison Commission, Report, 1899- 1900, pp.

17-18,1901-02, pp.9,16,1904-05, p.7; Georgia General Assembly,Journal ofthe House, 1894, pp.33-35, 1895, pp. 245-51; Russell v. Tatum, 104 Ga. 332 (1898); Daniel v. State, 114 Ga. 533 (1901); Georgia General Assembly, Proceedings of the Joint Comm. to Investigate the Convict Lease System, 1908, vol. IV, pp. 1266-68; Hearing, Investigation of Connaly & Pinson Camp in Turner County, September 9, 1908, pp. 3-13, Prison Commission 1908 Folder; Joseph Turner to Hoke Smith, September 16, 1908, Prison Commission Correspondence, 1908-1909, both in Box 19 (Pratt-Ransom Box), Hoke Smith Collection (Richard B. Russell Library, UGa). This area of the penal system frequently overlapped-and was confused with-peonage; see Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1972),24- 25; Daniel A. Novak, The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced LaborAfter Slavery (Lexington, Ky., 1978), 24; and Charles W. Russell, Report on Peonage, U.S. Department of Justice (Washington, 1908). Transcript of Record, October 14, 1897, Russell v. Tatum, Box 352, Records of the Supreme Court of Georgia (GDAH); and L. C. Tanner to Department of Justice, May 10, 1909, Folder 7, Box 10799, Correspondence, Series 50- 162, Classified Subject Files, General Records of the U. S. Department of Justice, Record Group 60 (National Archives, Washington) both provide primary evidence of this confusion.

31 On the racial composition of misdemeanants, see for example, Prison Commission, Report, 1901-02, pp. 9, 31, which shows that 2,113 of 2,221 misdemeanor convicts were black; and the Monthly Reports of Misdemeanor Chain Gangs, Georgia Prison Commission Records (GDAH).

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98 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

benefited large landholders (see map). It is also interesting to note that almost all the counties of the Tenth Congressional District, which encompassed the eastern edge of the black belt and was the stronghold of Georgia Populism, had established chain gangs before 1900. The Populists had opposed convict leasing and supported good roads. Counties with growing urban areas, where social control of a black working class cut loose from plantation discipline meshed with com- mercial expansion, were also pioneers of the chain gang. By 1901 only 25 of Georgia's 137 counties worked convicts on the roads, but these counties, which had only 21 percent of all roads in the state, boasted 90 percent of the state's surfaced roads and 75 percent of the graded roads. Indeed, in the 112 counties that relied on statute labor or hired free labor to work the roads only 1.4 percent of the roads were improved; in the counties with chain gangs the figure was 19.7 percent.32

A frustrated county commissioner who did not have access to con- victs for road work complained to the state geologist, "We use only statute labor, and our roads are poorly worked." This Irwin County correspondent concluded, "I am satisfied that we can never have good roads until they are worked by direct taxation, and the use of the Chain gang." In counties with convicts, such as Richmond, it was reported that "we find them the most satisfactory labor for the roads, and the very best disposition to make of the convicts." Generally, those coun- ties that reported a recent adoption of the chain gang noted, as Greene County did, that "the roads during this time [since using convict labor] have been greatly improved." Fulton County-where Atlanta, com- mercial hub of the Progressive South, is located-had the state's most modem road system. Misdemeanor convicts had worked the roads there since 1876, when a local judge noticed that the roads were impassable, and in order "to ameliorate these conditions ... organized the first chain-gang."33

32 On Populism and the convict lease see Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia 's Populist Party (Baton Rouge and London, 1984), 79 and 133; Zimmerman, "Penal Systems and

Penal Reform," 239-44, who notes the anti-lease/pro-road comnection; Alton DuMarr Jones,

"Progressivism in Georgia, 1898- 1918," (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1963), 3; Atlanta

People's Party Paper, November 1, 1895, p. 4. On the chain gang as a form of social control for urban blacks see Joel Williamson, A Ragefor Order: Black/White Relations in the Anerican South Since Emancipation (New York and Oxford, 1986), 146; and Howard N. Rabinowitz, Race

Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Urbana, Chicago, and London, 1980),49-50. Figures on road improvement and use of convicts are from Georgia Geological Survey, A Preliminary

Report of the Roads and Road-Building Materials of Georgia, Bulletin No. 8 (Atlanta, 1901). 33 Georgia Geological Survey, Prelimfinary Report on time Roads and Road-Building Materials

of Georgia (1901), 235 (Irwin County Commuissioner), 207 (Richmond County), 173 (Greene),

191 (Upson), 225 (Stewart), and 150-51 (Fulton). On roads and the growth of Atlanta see Howard L. Preston, Automnobile Age Atlanta: The Making of a Southern Metropolis, 1900-1935 (Athens, Ga., 1979). Automobile License Register, 1904-1910 (3 vols.), Records of the City of Atlanta (Atlanta Historical Society), shows that 86 auto licenses were granted in six months of 1904; by 1908, 738 had been issued; two years later, 2,397.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 99

BLACK POPULATION OF GEORGIA COUNTIES WITH CHAIN GANGS, 1901

MORE THAN 51 % BLACK

41%-50% BLACK / zT1 31%-40% BLAcic Atlanta 3 4 BL.CK BLACK BELT BETWEEN LINES

Augusta

Savannah

SOURCE: Georgia Geological Survey, A Preliminary Report on the Roads and Road-Building Materials of Georgia, Bulletin No. 8 (Atlanta, 1901); Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens, 1983), for black belt counties; U. S. Department of Interior, U. S. Census Office, Twelfth Census of the U. S., Vol. I, Population (Washington, 1901), 533-34.

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100 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Apparently the use of misdemeanor convicts on the roads was popular, as Georgia's law of 1903, which made felony convicts with sentences of less than five years available to the counties, suggests. Any county which "work[ed] their misdemeanor convicts upon the public roads" could petition the Prison Commission for these felons to add to the growing pool of misdemeanor prisoners doing road work. Thus even before the convict lease was abolished in 1908, leasing had been eroded by road work, and nearly 50 percent of the entire forced labor pool worked on the state's roads.34

When leasing was abolished in 1908 nearly five thousand felony and misdemeanor convicts, 91 percent of whom were black, were made available to the state to be worked on the roads. Counties clamored for their portion of the forced labor, and state officials anticipated the beneficial results of the new penal system.35 Ten days after the general assembly passed the legislation ending leasing, Gov- ernor Hoke Smith proudly informed the OPR that "we are about to inaugurate upon a broad scale the improvement of our roads in Geor- gia," a project made possible by the large pool of forced labor suddenly at the state's disposal. And when he boasted of his administration's record in his legislative address the following year, Smith pointed to the end of the convict lease as a prime example of Progressive reform. "[All] the convicts ... are now at work upon the public roads of the State," he told the general assembly. "As a result of placing the convicts upon the public roads an enthusiasm has been aroused through- out the entire state for good roads," he concluded.36

During the subsequent years this reform was touted as a great success, not least by the prophets of southern progress and economic modernization, who crowed that "good roads and prosperity are syn- onymous."37 Legislative committees continued to visit convict camps and remarked approvingly that "the magnitude of the work being done in Georgia by the convicts, and the results being accomplished, are almost beyond conception." In a single year alone, the committee claimed, convicts had "graded and made permanent" six thousand

34 Georgia General Assembly, Acts, 1903, pp. 65-71 (quotation on p. 70); and Prison Commission, Report, 1907-08, pp. 23-24.

35 Prison Commission, Report, 1907-08; 1908-09, table 2; Georgia General Assembly, Acts, Ext. Sess., 1908, pp. 1119-30; S. W. McCallie, "Convicts on the Public Roads of Georgia," Southern Good Roads, II (December 1910), 3-5; Goodloe Yancey to Logan Waller Page, November 25, 1908, Box 35, File 97-"Convict Labor," General Correspondence, 1893-1912, RG30; and Atlanta Journal, August 19, 1908, p. 1.

36 Hoke Smith to Logan Waller Page, September 29, 1908, Box 49, File 135-"Georgia Roads," General Correspondence, 1893-1912, RG30; Georgia General Assembly, Journal ofthe House, 1909, pp. 33-34; see also Prison Commuission, Report, 1908-09, p. 5; Speech by C. B. Goodyear to Good Roads Meeting, Brunswick, Georgia, February 22, 1909, p. 5, Folder 4, Box 2, Joseph Mackey Brown Papers; and Hoke Smith, Inaugural Address, 1911, p. 8, Folder 15, Box 15, E. Merton Coulter Pamphlet Collection, both in Special Collections (UGA).

37 Soutlhernm Good Roads, III (January 1911), 26.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 101

miles of road and "to some extent permanently improved" another fif- teen thousand miles. This was made possible because "with little or no inconvenience [the convict] accomplishes double as much in a day as a free laborer."38 The Georgia Prison Commission, whose members were delegates to the National Good Roads Convention in 1912, was equally enthusiastic. In 1911 the commission reported that convicts worked the roads in 135 of Georgia's 146 counties, which were "getting real benefit out of the convicts on their highways." The state geologist, while noting that the 11 counties without chain gangs-all in the up- country, with negligible black populations-"have no improved roads," claimed that in the rest of the state convicts built twelve miles of good roads each day. In counties with chain gangs, prisoners were "con- structing annually more than twice the number of miles of improved highways than [Georgia] had when our present convict system was put into effect," according to this state official. "It is only a quetion of time when our good old state of Georgia will lead the entire United States in the matter of good roads," boasted the prison commissioners.39

This may have been an idle boast, but other observers confirmed the rapid improvement in Georgia's transportation infrastructure. South- ern Good Roads magazine ran several editorials praising Georgia for "throw[ing] off the shackles [of the lease] and ... building more good roads than any other state in the South" and urging other southern states to follow suit by taking the convicts "in the penitentiaries, on farms, in factories and mines, or ... leased out to contractors" and putting them on the roads. Good roads enthusiasts pointed to the immense increase in the taxable value of property in Georgia wherever new or improved roads penetrated.40

38 Georgia General Assembly, Journal of the Senate, 1912, p. 883. 3 Prison Commission, Report, 1910-11, p. 7; see also Prison Commission, Report, 1909- 10,

p. 11; S. W. McCallie [Georgia State Geologist], "Road Improvement in Georgia," in Southern

Appalachian Good Roads Association, Bulletin No. 3 (Durham, N. C., 1910), 6-7; for delegates to the National Good Roads Convention see List of Delegates to the National Good Roads Convention, April 1912, Box 183, Governor's Incoming Correspondence (GDAH). In 1916 the prison commission was merged into the newly created highway department; Georgia General

Assembly, Acts, 1916, p. 125. For another enthusiastic response to Georgia's road work see G. Grosvenor Dawes, "The Good Roads Movement Throughout the South," in Southern Appala- chian Good Roads Association, Bulletin No. 2 (Durham, N.C., 1909), 19.

40 Southern Good Roads, V (February 1912), 21 and V (May 1912), 18. Georgia served other states as an example of successful convict road work; see Logan W. Page, "Progress and Present Status of the Good Roads Movement in the United States," in USDA, Yearbook, 1910, p. 273, for the federal view;Appalachian Trade Journal,IV (March 1910), 10-12; VI (March 1911), 15-16; VIII (June 1912), 14; and Cyrus Kehr to Director, Office of Public Roads, July 25, 1914, Folder

3, Box 112, File 712-"Convict Labor," General Correspondence, 1893-1916, RG30, on

Tennessee; Varner, "Why Convicts Should be Worked on the Public Roads," 22-23 (speech to the NCGRA, July 31, 1913); Press Release, Asheville Board of Trade, March 27, 1916, and N. Buckner to J. C. Forester, March 27, 1916, Folder 52, Box 2, Branson Papers, for North Carolina.

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102 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Rhetoric and boosterism aside, the number of miles of surfaced road-and the percentage of roads improved-in Georgia increased dramatically once convicts began to work on the highways. In 1904 only 2.85 percent of the state's 57,000 miles of roads was surfaced with gravel, stone, or sand-clay. By 1909, when all the convicts were placed on the roads, the state had 82,000 miles of road, 7.27 percent of which was surfaced, although only five miles were laid in bituminous macadam, the most modem road surface. Five years later, however, the percentage of surfaced roads had at least doubled to 15.5 percent, and was, in one estimate, over 25 percent; by 1914, fourteen Georgia counties had between 200 and 300 miles of surfaced roads. Over 300 miles were surfaced in bituminous macadam, according to one esti- mate, and, by the end of 1915, Georgia had 13,000 miles of surfaced rural roads, more than any other southern state, and the fifth largest number of miles of surfaced rural roads in the United States.41

Generally, after the abolition of convict leasing in Georgia, the counties with the most miles of improved roads were the counties with the largest force of convicts; county chain gangs worked both their own misdemeanants and the felony prisoners, often convicted else- where in the state, they acquired from the state prison commission. For example, the roads of Clarke County, home of the University of Georgia (whose civil engineering department was in the forefront of the state's good roads/convict labor movement) benefited from ten thousand man-days of forced labor between April 1913 and April 1914, provided by sixty-six black and twelve white convicts. In 1909 only 30.6 percent of Clarke's roads were surfaced; by 1914 the figure was 57.2 percent, surpassed by only a handful of counties in the state. "The county is remarkable for its system of public roads, which are among the best in the state," one student of rural life in Clarke County remarked in 1915. Only fifteen years earlier the superintendent of Clarke's public roads had vowed to employ misdemeanor convicts in road work, complaining that "it is well nigh impossible to have [con-

For the economic benefits of road improvement see Southern Good Roads, I (June 1910), 21; II (August 1910), 20-21; and (October 1910), 22.

41 USDA, Office of Public Roads, Mileage and Cost of Public Roads in the United States in 1904, Bulletin No. 32 (Washington, 1907), 8; Georgia Geological Survey,A Second Report on the Public Roads of Georgia, Bulletin No. 24 (Atlanta, 1910), tables; USDA, Office of Public Roads, Mileage and Cost of Public Roads in the United States in 1909, Bulletin No. 41 (Washington, 1912), 16-17, 40; USDA, Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering, Public Road Mileage and Revenues in the Southern States, 1914, Bulletin No. 387 (Washington, 1917), 20; American Highway Association, Good Roads Yearbook for 1917 (Washington, 1917), 473. Discrepancies in mileage counts result from inaccurate or incomplete reports from counties, different measure- ments of total roads, different definitions of surfaced and improved roads, and the decision to omit or include rural and urban roads. The American Highway Association, Good Roads Yearbook for 1913 (Washington, 1913), 390 gives the figure 26.2 percent of Georgia's roads being improved, perhaps because that year they added partially improved roads to the usual figure of surfaced roads. Fifteen percent by 1914 appears to be an accurate minimum figure for surfaced roads.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 103

scripted] farm-hands do good work, because they are untrained and the overseers ... allow them to kill time."42

The improvement of roads in Georgia was in great measure the result of the labor of five thousand convicts, which was considered by its advocates to be superior to free labor. The Georgia Senate estimated that convict labor cost "less than half what free labor would cost." Moreover, convict labor was, according to a report by the OPR, "absolutely dependable so far as numbers are concerned. Plans for work can be made in advance with a sure knowledge that the antici- pated number of laborers will be on hand to execute them," which had been impossible with the inefficient statute labor system. This regular- ity of labor allowed the road overseer to "develop the maximum efficiency of each man to an extent which is not possible with shifting free labor," the OPR concluded. Thus convict labor combined "the great advantages of regularity, of being under perfect control, and of being operated at about 60 per cent of the cost of ordinary labor." In short, promoters of convict road work saw the same economic advan- tages in forced labor that the convict lessees had before them. Moreover, "convict labor is far more easily controlled" than statute or even hired labor. "You take the average built free man and put him on the public roads and work him hard ten hours a day, and he will strike for higher wages," claimed William L. Spoon, a road engineer. "The convict," on the other hand, "is forced to do regular work, and that regular work results in the upbuilding of the convict, the upbuilding of the public roads, and the upbuilding of the state," he proclaimed.43

42 Walter B. Hill, "Rural Survey of Clarke County, Georgia, with Special Reference to the Negroes," Phelps-Stokes Fellowship Study, No. 2, Bulletin of the University of Georgia, XV (March 1915), 24; Georgia Geological Survey, Preliminary Report on the Roads and Road- Building Materials of Georgia (1901), 167. The number of convicts in each county can be

correlated with the miles of paved road in 1914 by matching the Prison Commission, Report, 1914, pp. 15-17 with Table 41 (Georgia) in the appendix of USDA, Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering, Public Road Mileage and Revenues in the Southern States, Bulletin No. 387, pp. li- liii, and, for 1909 and 1911, by matching the Prison Commission Report of those years with the tables in Georgia Geological Survey, Second Report oil the Public Roads of Georgia ( 1910), and A Third Report on the Public Roads of Georgia, Bulletin No. 28 (Atlanta, 1912) respectively. On the University of Georgia and the good roads movement see C. M. Strahan, "Good Roads for Georgia," Journalof Labor, January 15, 1909, p. 2; Southern Good Roads, V (February 1912), 23- 24; Harry Hodson to Governor Joseph M. Brown, undated; Conference Proceedings, January 9-10, 1912; C. M. Strahan to A. H. Ulm, December 2, 1912, December 31, 1912, all in "Roads" File, Box 200, Governor's Incoming Correspondence (GDAH). Strahan was a professor in the civil engineering department, also known as the "good roads department," at the University of Georgia. Indeed, when the state highway commission and the prison commission merged in 1916,

the dean of the College of Civil Engineering and a professor of highway engineering were made members of this new commission to oversee convict road work; Georgia State Highway Department, First Annual Report (Atlanta, 1919), 47.

43 Georgia, Journal of the Senate, 1912, p. 884; Pennybacker, Jr., Fairbank, and Draper, Convict Labor for Road Work, 20-21; P. St. Julien Wilson, "Convict Labor on the Roads of Virginia," Southern Good Roads, II (November 1910), 11; Joseph A. Holmes, "Convicts on the

Public Roads," Manufacturers' Record, XXVI (November 16, 1894), 238; W. L. Spoon, "Road

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104 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

Spoon, at least, reminded the good roads movement that the chain gang was meant to be progressive in the area of penology as well as economic development. "Bad men make good roads" became a folk aphorism in Georgia, but penal reformers believed that ""bad men on bad roads make good roads while [work on] good roads make[s] good men."" After all, as Alexander J. McKelway told the American Prison Association in 1908, with the abolition of leasing in Georgia "the retributive idea of punishment is giving place at last among us to the reformatory idea."'45 The convict's rehabilitation was not merely attrib- uted to state-as opposed to private-control of his labor, but to the very character of labor on the roads. The cult of the "strenuous life," the frequent conflation of the physical and moral spheres in the Pro- gressive Era, was applied to penal labor, especially in the South. "Life in the convict road camp ... is more conducive to maintaining and building up the general health and manhood of the convict than where he is confined behind prison walls," claimed Southern Good Roads magazine. The director of the OPR used a poem, supposedly written by a convict in Virginia, to illustrate the prisoners' own alleged preference for "open air work."

Oh! take me back to the convict camp, Put me to work on the grade;

I like the scent of the canvas tent And the bunk the Sargeant made.

Just take me out of this pesky jail, To the camp, and God's fresh air;

Away from this shack, where the small gray-back, Skiddoos through my uncut hair.

Work and the Convict," 15. See also Joseph Hyde Pratt to Walter R. Markley, January 21, 1911, Folder 170, Box 19, NCGS Papers; and J. E. Pennybacker to H. G. Buchanan, January 20, 1910, Box 35, File 97-"Convict Labor," General Correspondence, 1893-1912, RG30, for further examples of the elimination of labor uncertainty and the labor control afforded by reliance on a convict force; see Joseph Hyde Pratt, "Organization of Road Forces," North Carolina Economic and Geological Survey, Good Roads CircularNo. 98 (1914), 7; C. A. Spratt to Joseph A. Holmes, December22,1902, Folder98, Box 11; State Geologist to John B. Cunningham, February 5,1905, Folder 107, Box 11; and Joseph Hyde Pratt to Fond Du Lac [Wisconsin] Business Men's Association, March 9, 1914, Folder 323, Box 29, all in NCGS Papers, on cost savings. The USDA helped build "object lesson" roads with convict labor in Georgia and studied the cost of these projects. See, for example, USDA, Report of the Secretary ofAgriculture, 1909, p. 724, 1910, p. 775, 1911, pp. 726-28.

44 E. Stagg Whitin, "Convicts and Road Building," 16 (second quotation). According to oral historian Cliff Kuhn, "Bad Men Make Good Roads" was a popular folk saying in early twentieth- century Georgia; personal conversation, July 11, 1988. For the ameliorative aspect of road work see, e.g., Editorial, "Shall Convicts Be Used in the Construction of Public Roads?" Southern Good Roads, II (November 1910), 19.

45 McKelway, "Abolition of the Convict Lease System of Georgia," 226.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 105

Oh! take me back to the village of tents, I am sick of this prison cell;

I'm an old Hobo, but think I know When I strike a good hotel.

Please take me back, today if you can, Just forget about your fee;

I've been there once, and served six months, And the road man's jail suits me.46

On the roads the convict worked at a "healthful occupation," which simultaneously improved his character and paid his debt to society. "Even if against his will [the convict] is taught to know what it means to be healthy, cleanly, industrious and orderly, he will have reached a higher standard of living by reason of his experience on the convict force," suggested one defender of the South's convict camps. The invigorating and rewarding experience of outdoor labor was contrasted to the alienation of penitentiary factory labor; "although the convict's labor [on the roads] may be of very great benefit to the state, it also is of benefit to the convict himself in that it brings to him the realization he cannot grasp in the prison-shop grind, that he may be of real impor- tance in life as a producing agent," insisted the USDA's road experts. Joseph Hyde Pratt, one of the most persistent advocates of the chain gang, admitted that despite the fear of competition with free labor "the state should try to train the prisoner to some useful occupation." On the roads, he claimed, convicts will be "trained as expert day laborers and can give good value for money received."47

The enthusiasm of the good roads movement for the chain gang was not confined to the South, but "it was in the South that convict road labor became so popular that it threatened to displace all other penal systems," according to one historian. During the Progressive Era the southern popularity of the chain gang was attributed in part to cli- mate-outdoor labor was possible year round in the South-but race was far more significant than sunshine. Most of the convicts in the

46 Editorial, "Shall Convicts Be Used in the Construction of Public Roads?" 19; see Logan Waller Page to Judson M. Bemis, September 7, 191 1, Box 35, File 97-"Convict Labor," General

Correspondence, 1893-1912, RG30, for the poem.

47 Joseph Hyde Pratt, "Convict Labor in Good Roads Construction," 30; P. St. Julien Wilson,

"Convict Camps in the South," in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1915 (Chicago, 1915), 382; Peiuiybacker, Jr., Fairbank, and Draper, Convict Labor for Road Work, 13; Joseph Hyde Pratt, "Convict Labor in Highway Construction," Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science, XLVI (March 1913), 86. See also Southern Good Roads, II (August 1910), 14, and (October 1910), 18. The most fully developed view of the

moral and physical benefits of road labor, which manages to make republican manhood compat-

ible with forced labor, is E. Stagg Whitin, "The Spirit of Convict Road Building," and Whitin,

"Convicts and Road Building," both cited above in Southern Good Roads. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Atinuiodernismn and the Transfornmation of Anmerican Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), especially Chap. 3 on the moral and physical elements of the strenuous life.

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106 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

South, of course, were African Americans. Road work was frequently defended as being appropriate to southern conditions because blacks were perceived as suited to the heavy, unskilled labor it required and the discipline of coerced outdoor labor was perceived as beneficial to blacks. Good roads advocates at the national, as well as the regional and local, level advanced racial rationales for the southern chain gang. "Personally, I favor the employment of convicts [only] in the Southern States in the building of public roads," a federal road engineer wrote privately in 1912, "as in this section of the country the convicts are largely made up of negroes, who are benefited by outdoor manual labor" and who are not morally injured by working in chains in public. "The negro is accustomed to outdoor occupations ... [and is] experi- enced in manual labor," claimed the assistant director of the OPR, and "does not possess the same aversion to working in public . .. as is characteristic of the white race." The compatibility of penal labor and road improvement was thus deemed unique to the South, where, in the words of OPR engineers, "the human material dealt with is so radically different from that of the other sections." According to material pub- lished by the OPR fifty years after emancipation, convict road work in the South was racially, penologically, and economically progressive because "the negro of criminal tendency is compelled by the chain- gang to live a regular and healthful life," and "fear of punishment produces a respectful attention to the orders of the overseer, and a willingness to do more work than money would induce him to per- form. "48

Racial ideology, Progressive penology, and the goal of economic modernization were reconciled in the realm of political economy. As the most prominent penal reform in the early twentieth-century South, the convict road gang was touted as a physically healthful alternative to leasing state and county convicts to coal mines, turpentine farms, brickyards, and railroads, where conditions were hazardous and dirty. But by wresting the convicts from the hands of the New South's capitalist entrepreneurs, the state abandoned its role as a recruiter and seller of forced labor used for capital accumulation and the exploitation of the South's resources in extractive industries. Instead, the state became the direct exploiter of that labor in an effort to build and maintain a transportation infrastructure that might contribute to the expansion of the manufacturing and commercial sectors. And just as

48 Zimmerman, "Penal Systems and Penal Reform," 332-33; J. E. Pennybacker to H. G. Buchanan, January 20, 1912, pp. 2-3, Box 35, File 97-"Convict Labor," General Correspon- dence, 1893-1912, RG30; P. St. Julien Wilson [asst. director, OPRI, "Convict Camps in the South," 379; Pennybacker, Jr., Fairbank, and Draper, Convict Laborfor Roads, 18-19,26; see also

Logan Waller Page to William D. Scheir, June 21, 1916, Box 4119, File 712, General Correspon- dence 1912-1950, RG30. On convict road work in other regions see Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XLVI (March 1913), an issue devoted to prison labor.

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 107

that earlier system of forced labor was driven primarily by the dictates of political economy rather than humane penology, so too was the decision to remove the South's forced labor pool from private enter- prise and give it to the "people" in the interest of a more public notion of economic development. "The convict is as much the property of the state as the slave before the war was the property of the slave owner," wrote one reformer. "The state is his real master and as such is not only responsible for his well-being, but for the productivity of his labor to the end that the community at large may be served." Road work in particular was held up as penal labor "for the common welfare." Since the criminal had offended the community, his hard labor "belongs to all the people"; on the South's roads "instead of building to the interests of private parties [the convict] is building to the interests of all the people," declared believers in the chain gang. "The people should demand that their criminals be worked on the roads.... The state should receive the profit of their labor, and not a few individuals," thus became the battle cry against convict leasing.49 Yet the result, in Georgia at least, was that, with the end of leasing, the futile struggle to reconcile labor recruitment, racial control, and infrastructure develop- ment with rational and humane penal policies shifted from the private to the public sector.50

In fact Georgia's impressive road expansion depended on its brutal penal conditions. The official focus on the economic benefits of forced labor resulted in conditions that made the difference between the chain gang and the convict lease negligible. Chain-gang convicts were scat- tered in hundreds of road camps subject to little state oversight. Prison Commission rules on the treatment of prisoners were ignored, claimed D. C. Hamilton, a convict on the Hall County chain gang, and convicts were forced to work under horrendous conditions. The bosses of the gang "have got a whole lots of Rules of they own," he complained to the governor, "so they can get [to] Beat a man half to [death] Every Day." In words reminiscent of desperate pleas to the state executive by leased convicts, Charlie Bailey, another black chain-gang prisoner, wrote "[I] have Been Beat + treated wor[se] than if I was a Dog." Perhaps conditions in such convict camps were more modern because

49E. Stagg Whitin, "Convicts and Road Building," 16; "The Use of Convict Labor on Roads," Southern Good Roads, II (July 1910), 23; Editorial, "What is Coming," ibid., (August 1910), 17. See also NCGS, Good Roads Circular No. 53 (1910), 3; Joseph Hyde Pratt to H. W. Horton, September 4, 1913, Folder 301, Box 28, NCGS Papers, for some specific examples of this line of argument. The issue of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XXV (January 1910) devoted to the New South exemplifies the belief that the South needed to shift from extractive industries to manufacturing and value-added sectors based on its own raw materials.

so On similar trends in states other than Georgia see note 40, above. North Carolina probably offers the best example; see NCGS, Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the North Carolina Good Roads Association, 1913, Economic Paper No. 36 (Raleigh, 1913), 89-94, for a full-blown debate between advocates of convict road work and defenders of leasing convicts to railroads.

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108 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

"a convict overseer ... [now] rides about in an automobile and uses a strap handwide studded with brass nails to flog convicts." Similar expressions of desperation and outrage were prevalent in North Caro- lina, another pioneering state in convict road work.5"

"The Act of 1908 [abolishing the lease] contemplated humanitarian- ism as the basis of the management of the State's convicts in the infliction of punishment," proclaimed the Georgia Senate Penitentiary Committee in 1912, and "convicts are not [sic] longer considered an object of merchandise." Yet the committee also warned that "in some instances the county authorities appeared to exercise a property right over the convicts." Public control and supervision did not alter the basic function of Georgia's penal system: the exploitation of black labor. Indeed, the prison commission reported that "the [county] au- thorities are doing their utmost to properly care for the convicts in their charge and at the same time get the maximum amount of work for their roads." The former goal was predictably subordinated to the latter, and the extraction of labor continued to define the conditions of life for Georgia's convicts, much as it had in both private camps and on public misdemeanor road gangs before the abolition of leasing. It had always been common knowledge in white Georgia that "men sentenced [to the chain gang] for crap shooting, gambling, burglarizing stores . .. ain't used to work.... They will not do a good day's work unless they whip them," claimed attorney Minton Wimberly in his 1904 defense of practices on the Bibb County chain gang. "Without some method of punishment, why, we would not be able to get much work" out of the convicts agreed E. A. Wimbish, boss of the Bibb County chain gang. Henry Jamison and Richard Ruff, black convicts on this chain gang, claimed that "generally they were whipping some one mighty near all the time" and that "if you don't work like fighting fire all the time you are whipped, [by] a man standing over you with a big strap." Such treatment was selective, however. The guards "did not whip the white people at all while I was out there," Ruff testified. "[White convicts] fare very well, but the colored people catch it shore [sic]. "52

51 Zimmerman, "Penal Systems and Penal Reform," 327; D. C. Hamilton to Governor Joseph M. Brown, April 4,1912, Box 183; Charlie Bailey to GovernorJoseph M. Brown, March 7,1912, Box 182, both in Governor's Incoming Correspondence (GDAH); L. R. Livingston to Governor Joseph M. Brown, February 10, 1912, "Pardons" File, Box 201, Governor's Incoming Correspon-

dence (GDAH), for description of the overseer in an automobile, emphasis in original. For other complaints about the brutal conditions on Georgia's chain gangs from convicts and citizens see Monroe Watson to Governor J. M. Slaton, February 28, 1914, Box 210; Jess C. Page to Governor Slaton, March 17,1914, Box 210, both in Governor's Incoming Correspondence (GDAH). Steiner and Brown, North Carolina Chain Gatig, 173-84, claimed that decentralized administration was the crucial defect in the organization of southern chain gangs.

52 Georgia General Assembly, Journial of the Senate, 1912, pp. 880, 882; Prison Commission, Report, 1911-12, p. 8; Cross examination by Minton Wimberly, p. 36; Testimony of E. A. Wimbish, p. 80; Testimony of Henry Jamison, p. 9; Testimony of Richard Ruff, p. 17; all in transcript, petition forhabeas corpus, June 20,1904, Jamiison v. E. A. Wimbish, File 53A386, Box

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GOOD ROADS AND CHAIN GANGS 109

The belief that blacks would work effectively only under the threat of punishment was the ideological basis of penal labor in the South, and the greatest continuity between the convict lease and the chain gang was this racialist view of labor. Moreover, the southern penal system continued to play a dual role, not only enforcing labor disci- pline through direct coercion of its unfortunate recruits but also through imminent threat to its potential victims. The road gang was a highly visible, and economically beneficial, means of controlling rural Afri- can Americans, who were habitually castigated by powerful whites for their alleged reluctance to enter and remain in the agricultural labor market. Commenting on the highly developed chain-gang system that he observed in Georgia, one road engineer remarked that "the most striking effect of the convict camp on the roads ... is its effect on the free labor in producing abundance of labor on the plantations. The prompt arrests for loitering, gambling and other petty offenses with a short sentence on the chain gang has a wholesome effect on a race that are not noted for either industry or thrift."53

Similarly, black convicts were desirable for road work because "you can control the convict and make him work while you have practically no control of the free labor," which did not respond properly to the inducement of wages. Free black labor was deficient because "a nigger is born happy, and he is going to stay that way if possible," wrote an itinerant OPR engineer to his superior in Washington when asked to compare free and convict labor. "So as soon as any money is earned, it is spent in dissipation ... and the next morning [you] find him dis- qualified for work," he complained. "If you hire that kind of a nigger [for road work], he won't do much and you can't make him." He voiced a preference for forced labor, because "the convict is kept in his place, sleeping at night .... Nature has no mortgage on him, the only one is the shackle he wears. And as long as that is on him, he must obey."54

Another OPR agent who traveled across the South, James Abbott, made similar observations, but with a more critical eye. "Wherever they use convict labor on roads in the South it is nearly all colored, and they control them with the lash," he wrote with disgust. Visiting the Mecklenburg County road camp in North Carolina (widely regarded as the model for convict road work), Abbott reported that "the man in

488, Case Files, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Georgia, Western Division (Macon), RG21, ARA.

53 D. H. Winslow, "Defects in Southern Road Laws," Southern Good Roads, VI (July 1912), 11; see Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., "Principle and Prejudice: The Supreme Court and Race in the Progressive Era. Part 2: The Peonage Cases," Columbia Law Review, LXXXII (May 1982), 649, 653, on the functions of legal terror in the South.

54 J. H. Dodge to A. N. Johnson, June 18, 1905, Box 35, File 97-"Convict Labor," General Correspondence, 1893- 1912, RG30.

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110 THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY

charge told me that it would be impossible to work colored convicts successfully without plenty of corporal punishment." "This would never do with white men," he observed, for "public sentiment would not tolerate it, and it would bring odium to the good roads cause." Recounting with horror his recent investigations of southern road gangs, Abbott suggested that in county convict camps "[the negro's] condition is more deplorable than it ever was in antebellum days. They beat him and torture him and do all manner of evil things to him. It often happens there that a negro convict working on the road invites the bullet of a guard as a desirable alternative and desperate relief from a condition to which death is preferred." Abbott, unlike most advocates of good roads, recognized that this form of progress in the South was based on a single terrible tradition: on the roads, as in the railroad camps, coal mines, turpentine forests, and brickyards before, "the negro convict is a slave."55

Penal refonn-the abolition of convict leasing-and the good roads movement were inseparable components of one particular attempt to bring the South into the twentieth century. Because effective road construction, improvement, and maintenance in the South was almost always associated with the use of convicts, modernization remained dependent on one of the South's apparently ineradicable claims to distinctiveness: forced black labor. In this instance progress and tradi- tion were neatly reconciled, often with the help and encouragement of federal intervention: progress, in this case the creation of a modern transportation network, and tradition, unfree black labor, were symbi- otic. This lends credence to the picture of southern Progressivism as antidemocratic, racially intolerant, and labor-repressive. The substitu- tion of the public chain gang for the private convict lease did not bring about the demise of these antimodern tendencies in the region but rather reconciled them with the advent of modernity.56

55 James W. Abbott to "My dear Senator," June 24, 1904, and June 27, 1904, ibid. In North

Carolina the original legislation placing convicts on the roads was referred to as the "Mecklenburg Road Law"; Joseph A. Holmes, "Some Recent Road Legislation in North Carolina," NCGS, Economic Paper No. 2 (Raleigh, 1899); Steiner and Brown, North Carolina Chain Gang, 29,34. See State Geologist to John B. Cunningham, February 5, 1905, Folder 107, Box 11, NCGS Papers, for Mecklenburg County as the "best illustration" of what could be done with convict labor on the roads.

56 The phrase "reconciliation of progress and tradition" to describe southern Progressivism is Dewey Grantham's, which he uses without irony in Southern Progressivism; see p. 419 for an example of this argument. For more critical assessments of southern Progressivism, particularly with reference to Georgia, see Numan V. Bartley, The Creation of Modern Georgia (Athens, 1983), Chap. 7; Dittmer, Black Georgia; and Kirby, Darkness at the Dawning. Interesting critiques of southern modernization are found in Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transfor- mation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana and Chicago, 1985); Ronald D Eller, Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization ofthe Appalachian South, 1880- 1930 (Knoxville, 1982); and Jack Temple Kirby, Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (Baton Rouge and London, 1987).

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  • Contents
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  • Issue Table of Contents
    • The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Feb., 1993) pp. 1-198
      • Front Matter [pp. 1-185]
      • The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 1909-1965: "To Reach the Conscience of America" [pp. 3-30]
      • Industrial Slavery at the Margin: The Maryland Chemical Works [pp. 31-62]
      • Freedmen and the Soil in the Upper South: The Reorganization of Tennessee Agriculture, 1865-1880 [pp. 63-84]
      • Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: "The Negro Convict is a Slave" [pp. 85-110]
      • Book Reviews
        • Review: untitled [pp. 111-112]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 112-113]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 113-114]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 114-115]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 115-117]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 117-118]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 118-119]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 119-120]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 120-121]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 121-122]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 122-123]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 124]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 125-126]
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        • Review: untitled [pp. 128-129]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 129-130]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 130-131]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 132-133]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 133-134]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 134-135]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 136-137]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 137-138]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 138-139]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 139-140]
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        • Review: untitled [pp. 141-142]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 142-143]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 143-145]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 145-146]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 146-147]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 147-148]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 148-149]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 149-150]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 150-152]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 152-153]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 153-154]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 154-155]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 156-157]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 157-158]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 158-159]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 159-160]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 160-161]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 161-162]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 162-163]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 163-164]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 164-165]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 165-166]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 166-167]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 167-171]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 171-172]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 172-173]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 173-175]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 175-176]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 176-177]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 177-178]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 178-179]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 179-180]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 180-182]
        • Review: untitled [pp. 182-184]
      • Historical News and Notices [pp. 186-198]
      • Back Matter