crouch2007a

@InCollection{ crouch2007a,
	author = {Barry A. Crouch},
	title = {The Fetters of Justice: Black Texans and the Penitentiary during Reconstruction},
	pages = {159-180},
	editor = {Larry Madaras},
	booktitle = {Dance of Freedom: Texas African Americans during Reconstruction},
	address = {Austin},
	publisher = {University of Texas Press},
	year = 2007,
}

According to Crouch, “works that focus upon the Reconstruction-era Texas penitentiary, like those about other southern prisons, largely ignore or only pay lip service to the dramatic increase in the number of black inmates during the early years of Reconstruction, when the Conservatives were in power. Most of the published and unpublished historical scholarship on the Texas state prison … deals with a later period. … What occurred before the advent of convict leasing is every bit as significant” (160).

During the war, says Crouch, the Huntsville State Penitentiary housed 33 POWs, and also “volunteered to incarcerate any person from these three states [Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri] sentenced to ‘hard labor’” (160). Crouch also mentions the crewmen of the Harriet Lane and the Morning Light who were put in the penitentiary during the war.

On p. 162, Crouch provides some fairly damning figures to show the increase in black prisoners at the penitentiary, as well as a telling quote from the prison superintendent, James Gillespie, who stated that “we are having almost daily acquisitions, most of all of whom are negroes” (162). The Marshall Texas Republican also declared 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” (162). In the aftermath of the emancipation, “black criminality moved from the private to the public sector. The state legislature responded with laws that courts readily used to entrap blacks” (162).¹

The local Freedmen’s Bureau Agent, James C. Devine, also noted the increasing imprisonment of blacks in Huntsville after May 1867, shortly before his death of yellow fever. Often, he noted to his superiors, freedpeople were imprisoned for terms of many years for petty offenses that should have confined them only to the county jails (163-164).

p. 173: “In effect, penal slavery became one method by which the disgruntled losers in the war punished their former chattels. Huntsville became its embodiment.”