One of the worst criminal cases of this kind is that of John W. Pace, of Dade City, Ala., who not only shut in his own people, but would seize any black that chanced along that way and compel him to work for him a few days. Judge Thomas G. Jones, who in 1901 was put on the federal bench in that state, made it his business to follow up Pace; when a jury declined to convict him, the judge rated them soundly; another case was made out and Pace thought it prudent to plead guilty, and was sentenced to fifty-five years in the penitentiary. The Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the constitutionality of the peonage law and Pace threw up his hands; then, on the request of the judge, the President pardoned him. These and some like convictions have shaken the system of confining men because the employer thinks that otherwise they will go away.
Nevertheless, under cover of iniquitous state laws, peonage of Negroes goes on steadily, first by a most unjust enforcement of various special state statutes which require agricultural labor contracts to be made in writing, and to run for a year. The illiterate Negro often does not know what he is signing, and if he did know might see no means of helping himself. It is difficult to contrive a legal penalty for a Negro who simply leaves his contract and goes off; he might be arrested and held for debt, since almost all such hands owe their employer for supplies or money; but all the Southern states have constitutional provisions against imprisonment for debt. The difficulty is ingeniously avoided by most of the states in the Lower South, which make it a punishable offense to draw advances on “false pretenses”; thereby a hand who attempts to leave while in debt to his master can be arrested as a petty criminal. But how is it provable that the Negro might not intend to return and carry out his contract? In Alabama the legislature, with intent to avoid the federal peonage law, has provided that the acceptance of an advance and the subsequent nonperformance of the contract shall be proof presumptive of fraudulent intent at the time of making the contract. Now the employer can follow his absconding hand by a process thus described by a planter. You arrest him on the criminal charge of false pretenses, which is equivalent to a charge of stealing the money; you get him convicted; he is fined, and in lieu of money to pay the fine he goes to jail; then you pay the fine and costs and the judge assigns him to you to work out the fine, and you have him back on your plantation, backed up by the authority of the state.
Let a few actual illustrations, all based on Southern testimony, show what is done under such a system. A woman borrows six dollars of a neighboring planter, who afterwards makes a demand for the money. As it is not paid, he sets up without further ceremony the pretense that she is obliged to work for him, refuses to receive back the money which her present employer furnishes her, and attempts to compel her to labor. In South Carolina a man starts to leave his employer, asserting that he has paid up his debt; the employer denies it; the man is brought into court and fined thirty dollars, and in lieu of the money goes back to the same servitude, this time hopeless. A Negro in Alabama makes a contract January 1st and takes $5.00 earnest money, and works until May; the master refuses to give him a house. He works two months more, and then leaves, is arrested for breach of contract, and the courts hold that the acceptance of that five dollars proves that he did not mean to carry out his contract, although he has worked seven months. A woman makes a labor contract; and before it expires marries a man whom she had never met at the time of making her contract; held, that her marriage proves that she did not mean to carry out the contract when she made it, and she is therefore guilty of false pretenses.
Even without a contract a Negro may be legally obliged to labor for a white man under vagrancy laws, by which Negroes who are not visibly supporting themselves may be convicted for that crime, and then sent to the County Farm, or hired out to somebody who will pay their fine. Once in the hands of a master, they are helpless. For instance, one Glenny Helms, who was apparently guilty of no offense, was in 1907 arrested, fined and sold to one Turner, who in this case thought it prudent to plead guilty of peonage. The son of this Turner was the agent in the most frightful case of peonage as yet recorded. A woman was accused of a misdemeanor; it is doubtful whether she had committed any; but at any rate she was fined fifteen dollars; Turner paid the fine; she was assigned to him and he set her to the severe labor of clearing land. And then what happened? What was a hustling master to do with a woman who would not pile brush as fast as the men brought it, but to whip her, and if she still did not reform, to whip her again, and when she still would not do the work, to string her up by the wrists for two hours, and when she still “shirked,” God Almighty at last came to the rescue; she was dead! When they tried to prosecute the man for murder in the state courts, the sheriff of the county (who was in the gang) came to the other slaves who had seen this, as they were summoned to the grand jury, and told them that if they gave any damaging testimony “we will put you in the river.” Such things happen occasionally in all civilized lands. As dreadful a crime was committed in Paterson, New Jersey, not many years ago; but there are two differences between the Bosschieter and the Turner cases. Those Jersey murderers were all convicted; that man Turner walks the earth, unmolested, not even lynched. The public sentiment of New Jersey was clear that an offense against the humblest foreigner was an offense against the Commonwealth; but the blood of that poor black woman cries in vain to the courts of Alabama; and the thousands of people down there who feel furious about such matters are so far helpless.
The states by their statutes of false pretenses are partners in those iniquities, but the federal government has done its best in prosecutions. Between fifty and a hundred indictments have been brought. Federal Judge Boyd, of North Carolina, said of his district: “There has been evidence here of cruelty so excessive as to put to shame the veriest barbarian that ever lived.” Federal Judge Brawley, of South Carolina, has held void an act of that State making breach of labor contract a misdemeanor. Convictions have been obtained in half a dozen states, and it is altogether likely that the Supreme Court of the United States will confirm this good work by holding invalid all state statutes which attempt to enforce a debt by sending a man to prison, or still more by selling his services to a master.
Here, as in so many other phases of this question, the troublous thing is not that there should be cruelty and oppression or servitude. Gangs of Italians under a padrone in the North are sometimes little better than bondmen. Masters of almshouses and reform schools will sometimes be brutal unless their institutions are frequently and carefully inspected. The real difficulty is that the superior race permits its laws and courts to be used for the benefit of cruel and oppressive men; that public sentiment did not prevent the peonage trials by making the cases impossible; that a federal judge in Alabama should be assailed by members of the bar and members of Congress because he stopped these practices. Peonage is an offense which cannot be committed by Negroes; it requires the capital, the prestige, and the commercial influence of white men.
The federal government has instituted investigations of these practices, and Assistant Attorney General Russell has urged the passing of such federal statutes as shall distinctly reach these cases of detention; and also the amendment of the state laws so as to take away the authority to transfer the services of anyone from the state to an individual. This last is a reform of which there is especial need. Most of the cases of peonage arise out of the practice of selling the specific services of a convict to an individual; and it carries with it practically the right to compel such a person to work by physical force. What is to be done with a bondman who refuses to touch a hoe, except to whip him, and to keep on whipping him till he yields? The guards and wardens of prisons in the South use the lash freely, but they are subject at least to nominal inspection and control. To transfer the distasteful privilege to a contractor or farmer is to restore the worst incidents of slavery.
Sympathy must be felt for the planters and employers who make their plans, offer good wages, give regular employment, and see their profits reduced or eliminated because they cannot get steady labor. Much of the peonage is simply a desperate attempt to make men earn their living. The trouble is that nobody is wise enough to invent a method of compelling specific performance of a labor contract which shall not carry with it the principle of bondage. Men enlisted in the army and navy may be tracked, arrested, and punished if they break their contracts—but they cannot be lashed into shouldering a gun or cooking a meal. Sailors are, by the peculiar conditions of isolation at sea, subject to being put in irons for refusing to obey an order—but the cat has disappeared from the legal arguments to do their duty. It is the concomitant of freedom that the private laborer shall not be compelled to work by force; there is no way by which the South can cancel that triumph of civilization, the exercise of free will. When will people learn the good old Puritan lesson that the power to do well involves the power to refuse well doing? That you cannot offer the incitement of free labor without including the possibility of the laborer preferring to be idle?