PEONAGE

From the earlier chapters on the Negroes and on the Cotton Hands it is plain that the Southern agricultural laborer is unsatisfactory to his employer, and not happy in himself; that the two races, though allied, are yet in disharmony. Of recent years a new or rather a renewed cause of race hostility has been found, because the great demand for labor, chiefly in the cotton fields, gives rise to the startling abuse of a system of forced labor, commonly called peonage, which at the mildest is the practice of thrashing a hand who misbehaves on the plantation, and in its farthest extent is virtually slavery. For this system the white race is solely accountable, inasmuch as it is the work of white men, sometimes under the protection of laws made by white legislatures, and always because of an insufficient public sentiment among white people.

When the slaves were set free, the federal government was careful to protect them against a relapse into bondage. The Thirteenth Amendment, which went into effect in 1865, absolutely prohibited “slavery or involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In addition, in 1867, an act of Congress formally prohibited “the system known as peonage.” A further statue of 1874 declared it a crime “to kidnap or carry away any other person with intent to hold him in involuntary servitude.” The word “peonage” comes from the Mexican system of serfdom, the principle of which is, that if an employee owes his master he must continue to serve him until that debt is paid, the only escape being that if another employer is willing to come forward and assume the debt the employee is allowed to transfer his obligation to the new master. In practice, the system amounts to vassalage, inasmuch as the debt is usually allowed to reach a figure which there is no hope of paying off.

The term “involuntary servitude” is clear enough, and it is a curious fact that when the Philippine Islands were annexed there was a system of slavery in the Sulu Archipelago which was actually recognized by a treaty made by General Bates; but the federal government dropped the treaty, and there is no doubt that the United States courts would uphold any Sulu bondman who sought his liberty under the Thirteenth Amendment.

In 1865 some of the Southern states passed vagrant laws under which Negroes were obliged to make a labor contract for a year, and could be compelled to carry out that contract; and the belief in the North that these statutes were virtually intended to reËnslave the freedmen was one of the mainsprings of the Fourteenth Amendment and the other Reconstruction legislation.

Inasmuch as the raising of cotton requires almost continuous labor, it is customary to make voluntary contracts with both renters and wage hands running for a year, commonly from the first of January; and breach of contract is a special grief and loss to the planter, inasmuch as if a Negro throws up a crop it is often impossible to find anybody else to finish it. Hence has grown up almost unconsciously a practice which closely resembles the Mexican peonage. It is unwritten law among some planters that nobody must give employment for the remainder of the year to a hand who is known to have left his crop on another plantation; and still further, that no contract should be made at the beginning of the year with a family which, after accounting for the previous crop, is still in debt to a neighbor, except that the new employer may pay the old debt and charge it as an advance against the hand. There is nowhere any legal sanction of this widespread practice, but the result is that thousands of Negroes are practically fastened to their plantation because nobody else in the neighborhood will give them employment; and far too many planters therefore make it a point to keep their hands in debt.

This system grew up slowly and attracted little attention till it began to be applied to Whites. During the last ten years the South has been opening up sawmills and lumber camps, often far back in the wilderness. In order to get men either from the South or the North, it was necessary to prepay their fare, which was subsequently taken out of their wages. Hence the proprietors of those camps felt that they had a claim on the men’s service, and in some cases kept them shut up in stockades. For instance, in 1906, a Hungarian named Trudics went down to Lockhart, Texas, receiving $18.00 for railroad fare, on an agreement to work for $1.50 a day. He did not like the work and thought he had been deceived as to the terms; whereupon he used a freedman’s privilege of bolting. He was trailed with bloodhounds by one Gallagher, caught, brutally whipped by the boss, and driven back, as he said, “like a steer at the point of a revolver.”

Similar cases have been reported from various parts of the South, involving both native Americans and foreigners; the latter have sometimes had the special advantage of aid from the diplomatic representatives of their country. Inasmuch as some of the state courts were unwilling to take action, cases were brought before the federal courts under the Peonage Act of 1867. Thus, though the personal abuse of Trudics by Gallagher was a state offense which seems to have escaped punishment, the violent laying of hands on him and restraint of his liberty was made a case before a federal court; and Gallagher was sent to prison for three months. It is plain that if foreigners and white Northerners can be practically enslaved, the same thing may happen to white Southerners; this and other like convictions have had a good effect. Quite beyond the injustice of the practice, it has been a damage to the South because it checks a possible current of immigration.

In 1908 an attempt was made to show a case of peonage of Italians on the Sunny Side plantation, Arkansas. It proved that one of the hands had grown dissatisfied and started to Greenville to take a train for the wide world, leaving unpaid a debt of about a hundred dollars at the commissary. One of his employers followed him to the station and told him that if he attempted to leave he would arrest him for breach of contract; whereupon the man returned to the plantation. This was certainly not peonage, and the grand jury consequently refused to indict; but it was an attempt to enforce specific performance of a labor contract. Peonage of Whites seems to have about come to an end; it was not stopped, however, by public opinion in the South, and it still goes on through the holding in bondage of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Negroes, either in unabashed defiance of law or through the means of cruelly harsh and unjust laws, aided by bad judges.

In the first place, many planters assume that a Negro who is on the debit side on their books has no right to leave the plantation, even for a few days, and as one of them expressed it to me: “If he goes away, I just go and get him.” A case recently occurred in Monroe, La., where some colored men were brought from Texas by one Cole on the assurance that they were to be employed in Arkansas. Instead they were switched off and set to work in Louisiana. One of them departed and made his way to Texas, but his master followed him, seized him, brought him back in defiance of all law, and set him at work again. The master was tried for peonage in Texas, but was not convicted.

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?