“The lessees at various camps have been from time to time charged with cruelty to their prisoners. A common charge has been working them on Sunday; so it is common to hear of whipping them to death for refusing to work on Sunday, or when they have been worn out with fatigue. The charge of favoritism is so well established and so generally admitted that it has ceased to be urged.
“The ‘Old Town Camp’ has a very bad reputation. Here most of the serious charges have been laid, and here it was proved that whipping-bosses positively whipped men to death.
“Another camp prolific of charges is that of State Senator Smith in Oglethorpe County. He has been accused of working convicts on Sunday, of shooting them down in cold blood, and an affair of honor is now pending between Smith and Principal Physician Westmoreland, of the penitentiary. Westmoreland accuses Smith of gross inhumanity to the poor creatures under his charge, and dares him, or rather invites him, to meet him on the field of honor for the various false accusations and scandal that Smith has made against him.”
Another Account.
Here is a part of the account which a reporter of the Augusta Chronicle gives of a convict camp, in Richmond County, which he has recently visited on a tour of investigation for his paper.
“Leaving the hospital the reporter went into a barn 80 by 20, divided into two compartments, and they divided by a 10 foot alley. The barn would not be given as a resting-place to a beast that is prized by its owner, as the rain or sun could easily gain admission through the top, and the openings in the sides so affected the house that it gave no protection from the weather. On looking into this place it was horrible to realize that a commonwealth like the State of Georgia would allow the offenders against her laws to be kept in so dirty and filthy a place as that in which the eighty convicts at the camp of the A. and K. Railroad are placed. Along the narrow aisles in the barn smouldering fires were burning, and on the beds sat the prisoners. All of the convicts were seen. They begged that their names would not be used, for they would be lashed if it were known that they told of the treatment. They state that Captain Starns uses the lash freely. Several testify that, overcome with the heat, they stopped to rest and were taken out and whipped. Attention was called to the cruel whipping of Chuck Cooper, a mulatto about twenty-five years old, who was quartered in the hospital. The reporter, without being noticed, repaired to the hospital, and, being assured that the guards were not near at hand, Chuck Cooper disrobed himself and showed huge scars left from the lash, the skin being badly lacerated. Returning to the barn the reporter inquired of Mr. Smith the cause of the filthy beds on which the convicts slept. They were caked in dirt and as black and as filthy as could be imagined. Mr. Smith, the guard, admitted that the blankets and bedding had not been washed for several months, although Mr. Shubrick had notified Captain Starns, and he had promised two months ago to have new straw put in the beds and have them washed. ‘It is seven months,’ Smith said, ‘since we left the brick-yard, and the bedding has not been touched since.’”
And this is the kind of place to which the Georgia Legislature is ready to send the trustees and teachers of Atlanta University!
WHAT THE PRESS HAS TO SAY.
The press North and South has been roused by the introduction of this bill as we have never known it to be before by the action of any State Legislature. In the North it is practically unanimous in condemnation, and for the most part in denunciation. Republican, Democratic and Independent papers are, in this instance, found united. They differ somewhat about the constitutional right of a State to pass such a bill, but they all unite in pronouncing the punishment attached to the Glenn Bill as “disgraceful,” “outrageous,” “infamous,” “wicked.” In the South the colored papers are all against the bill; the white papers, outside of Georgia, somewhat divided, but in the main, so far as we can learn, for the bill. In Georgia the white papers are for it. Were the editorials on this subject by the press of the United States compiled and published they would fill several large volumes. We quote from as many as our space allows: