20140421 - Brown Bag Presentation

Notes for my “brown bag” presentation in the history department today.

Introduction

Begin with image of the Huntsville prison yard, circa 1873/1875.

Taken at a moment of transition in the penitentiary’s history:

Huge postwar growth in prison population

• in the antebellum period and during the Civil War, the population of the Huntsville State Penitentiary had remained relatively low
• at the end of the war, it was the only Confederate state prison still left standing, and it experienced a huge growth in its population
• quote from the penitentiary agent report for 1866 shows that “we are having almost daily acquisitions, most all of whom are negroes”
• another source, crow1961, says that while only 209 new convicts entered the prison from 1861 to 1865, suddenly 263 new persons entered in one year—1866—and black prisoners, who had never been sent to the penitentiary before, made up 40% of the total population
• a Marshall newspaper noted that the “penitentiary is already full to overflowing and in less than two years all of the idle, vicious Negroes in the State will find their way there.”¹

Embattled federal agents from the Freedmen’s Bureau looked with great concern on this influx, identifying it for what it was: an attempt to control freedpeople through “Black Codes.” One noted shortly before his death of yellow fever in May 1867 that most black convicts were sent for petty offenses that should have confined them to the county jails.⁷ Another visited Huntsville and spoke directly with around 220 new black inmates, concluding that they were “the innocent and unfortunate victims of their [former owners’] wrath and disappointment.”⁸

Beginnings of the convict lease system

• to deal with overcrowding, the state passed a law in 1866 allowing the use of convicts for labor on works of “public utility” and began leasing about 250 convicts to railroad companies in 1867, though these leases did not last because of failure to pay and also because of political upheaval
• in 1871, Governor Edmund Davis’s administration leased the entire penitentiary to a Galveston mercantile company—Ward, Dewey, and Company—who agreed to pay the state a total of $325,000 spread out over the fiteen years of the lease, in exchange for use of the convicts as laborers
• Ward, Dewey and Company made renovations to “the walls” unit, but began aggressively subleasing convicts to private companies outside of the prison in Huntsville, including the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, which absorbed the Airline railroad that had earlier received convicts, and also to area plantations
• Ward and Dewey also got into the business of employing convicts at the same time, purchasing a Lake Jackson plantation in 1873 that used convicts to grow sugar

Exposure of abuse

• spring of 1872: letter to governor reporting that prisoners in a railroad camp near Bremond were being brutally beaten by guards
• but mostly ignored until late 1874—a governor’s committee sent in January declined to investigate work in labor camps because they saw no reasons at the prison itself to mistrust the lessees
• expose occurs in December 1874 when some army prisoners transferred to Kansas report severe abuse, focusing especially on Ward, who allegedly ordered a hospital attendant not to feed a sick prisoner, and instructed another prison guard to kill an inmate who had tried to escape
• worst punishments at labor camps were said to require gags to stifle screams, and were conducted under cover of night—when people living near the prison work camps heard “groans and entreaties … so absolutely heart rending as to prevent … sleeping.”⁹
• this sparked another investigative committee that confirmed many of the allegations; one negro convict on the Patton plantation in Brazoria County had received 604 lashes shortly before investigators arrived.¹⁰ Similar abuses found at the Lake Jackson plantation that Ward and Dewey had purchased.

Confederate refugees in Texas

In many ways this story sounds like a typical “Reconstruction” story—evidence of how postwar Black Codes were used to reconstruct a system much like the institution of slavery that had been destroyed. But there is a danger in seeing the story solely as a postwar story.

A. J. Ward shows that the story I’ve told so far had some interesting roots:

• Ward first enters the historical record as leader of a group of white workingmen protesting use of convict labor in 1858 …
• and then as the first lessee of the Arkansas State Penitentiary in 1859
• during the war, Ward won several contracts from the Confederate military, including permission to sell cotton across the border in Mexico to acquire machinery from the penitentiary workshops, and then became the state’s “most important producer of war material.”¹¹
• forced to flee when Union trips occupy and destroy the Little Rock penitentiary

I’ve found evidence suggesting that this is the same Ward who later leased the Huntsville penitentiary, including two runaway slave advertisements. After Ward fled from Arkansas in mid-1863, he appears to have gone first to Lamar County, and a captured “runaway slave” ad from Texas in 1864 indicates that Ward had brought slaves with them. One captured runaway named John “represents that he belongs to the State of Arkansas.” Another runaway ad suggests that Ward had started with a cotton train to Mexico around November (perhaps as part of an attempt to secure machinery for his contract work?) when at least one several slave who had been in the penitentiary ran away from him.¹²

This evidence connects, in at least this one man, the story of convict leasing after the war with the story of Confederate mobilization and refugeeing before the war.

Ward one of numerous refugees to the state:

• discuss figures, ranging from 50,000 to 150,000
• show map where they settled, discuss methods of tracking them
• many of them benefitted (like Ward) from state contracts, including to supply raw cotton to the Huntsville State Penitentiary and to work on local railroads
• William F. Weeks, for example, “obtained a contract to furnish X ties to the Rail road at 65 each cutting them along side of the track lining not more than 100 yards to haul and deliver,” and at favorable rates of $40 a month for the hire of the men.^[John Moore to J. A. Johnson, July 7, 1863, Records of Ante-Bellum Southern Plantations, Series I, Part 6, Reel 18, Frame 116f.

Wartime Origins of Unfree Labor

My study of refugeed slaves so far suggests that we can see in Texas many of the origins of the kinds of unfree labor that emerged after the destruction of slavery

• shift from “hiring out” as a way of generating revenue from surplus labor to a way of dealing with financial desperation
• recognition that a large new population of slave laborers might benefit the state if applied to “works of public utility”
• legislation passed sentencing black prisoners to hard labor
• interpersonal networks and ties that often provide the basis for contracting after the war

Challenge both to historiography and memory of Texas as a state relatively unaffected by the Civil War.

• if Civil War seen as an engine of emancipation, difficult to fit Texas in that picture, and it’s usually been seen as an exception that proved the rule
• problem with that is that it reinforces collective memory of Civil War Texas as a state untouched by war or change—static view of Confederate Texas evident, ironically, both in neo-Confederate memory and in the “Juneteenth” story

Conclusions/Questions

Questions guiding the research at this stage:

• What did “refugeed slaves” and refugee slaveholders do while they were in Texas?
• What did Confederate states like Texas “learn” from the Civil War?
• How does our image of wartime emancipation if we take more seriously the western Trans-Mississippi experience?