J. K. P. Campbell

Campbell was the government-appointed inspector of the Huntsville State Penitentiary who uncovered some of the worst abuses by A. J. Ward and his partner Dewey during their term as lessees of the prison.

Campbell was especially critical of the inhuman beatings of convicts on the Lake Jackson plantation run by Ward and Dewey, and in early 1875 campaigned hard to have a guard named A. J. Smith, whom he considered a “brute–he is not a man,” discharged from his duty, especially after he learned that Smith had only been transferred from Lake Jackson to an Overtorn railroad camp.¹ Shortly after an exchange with Dewey about Smith, Campbell noted in a separate, confidential letter to attorney James Q. Chenoweth that “both Ward & Dewey would give an eye tooth a piece to have me removed by Gov. Coke, and would give a good deal to be able to name my successor. They had every thing their own way under the Davis administration and the [restraints] which I have put upon them causes them to dislike me very much.”²

That summer, Campbell also clashed with Ward over a night seargent in the prison walls named Veitch, whose discharge Campbell had demanded, and over the a gang of men just returned to the prison from work on the Overton and Henderson Rail Road, whose condition was “deplorable in the extreme.”³