At the end of the Civil War, Georgia like the rest of the American South struggled to piece itself back together. The state, however, would never be able to replicate fully the social order that existed prior to the war. Not only was the state ravaged by poverty and debt, it also suffered from the loss of slavery, which before the war had been the South’s chief economic and social, institution. In 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ordered the Emancipation of millions of African Americans held in bondage. In Georgia, the half million freed people immediately began their struggle for citizenship and equal rights. After the Civil War, the black population of Greene County Georgia began their struggle for independence in the wake of Georgia’s development of several institutions, including the notorious convict lease system, designed to undermine and limit their autonomy.1
All over the state, in regions both urban and rural, emancipation meant the reorganization of social systems in order to adapt to the changes brought by the loss of slave labor, and the new freedom of the black population. No other region experienced the change from slave to free society as deeply as did the counties of the plantation belt, an area that spanned central Georgia from Liberty County in the northeast to southwestern Early County. The transformation from the old social order was so formidable in the plantation belt, also known as the “black” belt, because African Americans made up greater that fifty percent of each of the region’s respective counties. Greene County lay in the heart of the plantation belt and, in 1865, had one of the largest black populations in the state.2
In 1786, the Georgia legislature carved Greene County out the western half of existing Washington County. Following the invention of the Cotton Gin in 1789, cotton became a staple of the counties economy. Greene County’s cotton production thrived on the rich soil of the Georgia piedmont. Some of Georgia’s earliest cotton fortunes were built on the backs of Greene County slaves. Cotton production is especially labor intensive. Proceeds from cotton sales went towards the purchase of more slaves, to increase the bounty of each harvest. The slave holdings increased concurrently with cotton production so that by emancipation Greene was among the list of counties with a majority black population.3
With emancipation, both white and black Greene County citizens experienced vast social change. The planters lost slavery, their chief source of economic gain and the base of Georgia’s economy. At the same time, the freedman lost a measure of protection that had been provided by planter paternalism. When one Greene County farm, slave owner Hardy Peek, informed his slaves of emancipation the people rejoiced all day. By morning, the troughs used to feed the slave children in the quarters were gone. Peek was no longer obligated to, nor financially able to provide food for his former slaves. From then on, the freedmen would have to fend for their keep by themselves. The new social structure in Georgia was no longer defined by the “non-commercial paternalistic relationship” that had existed between master and slave. Greene County blacks began to work in the new free labor system.4
During military Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau existed to both protect the rights of the freedman and enforce the transition from slave to free labor in the state. Georgia planters probably would have resisted the transition with out military coercion. Freedmen, however, were no longer subject to the violent coercion of slavery. Blacks now had the choice of where, when, and whether the worked. In their efforts to stabilize the debt ridden Georgia economy, the Augusta regional Freedman’s Bureau office urged Greene County planters and freedmen to negotiate labor contracts. The contracts would allow the freedmen some control over their labor, while guaranteeing the planter a legally secured labor force. The transition however would not come so easily.5
Although the blacks in Greene County suffered considerable hardship with the termination of paternalism, most were hesitant to make amends with the planters. For many, returning to agricultural labor for their former masters, under contract or not, was not an option. In the months following emancipation many Greene County blacks took to the roads to seek their fortune. Others reunited with family members, legitimized their marriages and began to establish communities and churches throughout the county. Poverty was rampant in Greene’s communities both black and white. The planters were debt ridden, needing to resume production on their farms and raise money. Few freedmen had any money or property at all. Yet most blacks still resisted contracted labor. The freedmen’s initial reluctance to return to labor did not reflect laziness or obstinacy. Rather the former slaves questioned the legitimacy of a freedom in which they would be contractually bound to the same men that had abused them and exploited their labor just months before. How real was freedom if they had to return to the same houses, to eat the same food, or answer the same bell every morning? Likewise some questioned the reality of freedom in which they lived without the fulfillment of basic needs. Although Georgia blacks received seventy-five percent of 800,000 federal government food rations in 1865 and 1866, dispersal of the relief came with a catch. Any freedman not actively seeking work, either independently or under guidance of the Freedmen’s Bureau, would be denied aid. In the end, the desire to provide for themselves and their families compelled the freedman to engage free labor under the contract system.6
At the outset the contract labor system, local planters rejected the plan as a “northern humbug” created to plague southern society. Planter Joseph Turner initially snubbed the system, arguing, “Negroes will not work unless …forced to do so, and they can not be forced to do so unless they are slaves.” Turner and other planters urged the reinstitution of slavery as the only viable answer the labor problem. Though planters were initially reacted negatively to the prospect of contract labor, they quickly found ways to manipulate the system in their favor.7
By fall of 1865, Greene County’s agricultural industry was just starting to climb out of the stagnancy of the war-time economy. Officers from the Freedman’s Bureau mediated many of the labor contracts and supervised their inceptions. Three kinds of contracts existed. Under share-cropping and share wage contracts, blacks would work on the planters’ land and receive parts of the crops or wages at harvest and sale. Under tenancy, blacks worked and lived on the planters’ land. At year end the tenants would pay rent with the greater portion of the harvest they brought in. However, it was not long before the planter class began to systematically abuse their laborers. At their discretion, planters who paid their laborers in wages and crops would make deductions for misbehavior or “idleness.” At pay time many laborers were indebted to planters and forced to work off the debt. Other planters refused to pay or forced their tenants off the land after the harvest was reaped. Prior to emancipation, blacks had not been subject to formal justice. They lacked the legal knowledge necessary to negotiate unbiased contract. Black plaintiffs who attempted to sue the planters in court were ruled against and often made to pay high damages to the defendants. Whites, however, had the law fully at their disposal and wielded it to bind blacks in “contractual slavery.” Blacks who broke their contracts were subject to both civil suits and legal prosecution. The contract system in its inception was meant to provide labor solutions to both those seeking work, and those seeking workers. In the end it developed in to one of many institutions aimed a subordinating blacks and exploiting their labor.8
Slavery had been an institution that provided “social controls” necessary to subjugate a people and abuse their labor. Under the free labor system, blacks were less subject to the violent coercion that had defined slavery, so white legislators began to manipulate and redefine laws to accommodate the need for a bound labor force. In 1866, the legislature amended the apprentice act, which previously was designed to insure the protection of orphans. The law stated that anyone under twenty one without a parent or parents residing in the same county would become wards of the state and be “apprenticed” to a person in good standing. There were many of these “orphans” in Greene County. They were usually young black males, whose parents had been sold away during slavery. This law allowed planters to bind young blacks to them in force labor. Vagrancy laws attacked blacks who were unemployed. They could be sentenced to steep fines or time on the county chain gang. Blacks who broke unfair labor contracts could be charged with vagrancy. Planters often purchased the forced labor of their tenants by paying court fines.9
In 1866, the Green County court had a Confederate veteran for judge and a Klan leader as solicitor. Of twenty one vagrancy cases heard that year, all had black defendants, and seventeen ended in convictions. The Greene County chain gang used its convicts in agricultural labor. Black belt counties were among the first to use the convicts to build roads, and was rumored to that Greene County was the very first to use the system. One way or another, blacks in Greene County would be bound to the land. They could either submit to contractual slavery, or rebel and be forced into labor as remuneration for some contrived offense.10
Either way most blacks would be subject to some reenactment of the slave system. The chain gang was a county based vehicle of black subordination, and though its history is marked by violence towards and exploitation of its prisoners, it pales in comparison to the statewide initiative to control black labor. During Reconstruction Georgia would create the convict lease system as an instrument as a “social control” that during its career forced thousands of blacks into a hybrid form of slavery.11
Georgia enacted the convict lease system during the economic turmoil of Reconstruction as a way of alleviating the state of the expense of providing for prisoners. Though the lease laws were created in 1866, the first lease was granted two years later by provisional military governor, General Thomas Ruger. During the first year of the lease the state, though relieved of prison upkeep, did not make a profit from the endeavor. In subsequent years, however, the lease system began to bring in considerable revenue for the state. What began as an “experiment” quickly evolved into a state institution.12
The convict lease system provided Georgia with both a legal way to control and manipulate black labor, and a means of raising revenue. Vagrancy, contract violation, larceny, and burglaries, all property crimes, accounted for more than half the convictions used to put black Georgians in the penitentiary and thus the lease system. Vagrancy and contract violations were related to contract labor. Larceny and burglary resulted from the rampant poverty in black communities. Throughout the history of the lease system, at least ninety percent of the prison population was made up of black males; most of them came from black belt counties. The majority of convicts in the penitentiary system fit a similar profile; they were black, lived in black belt counties, were convicted of property crimes, and were between the ages of nineteen and thirty-five. Landon Broomfield for instance, a black man from Greene County was convicted of burglary in 1870. He was twenty six years old when he was sent to the penitentiary, where he served five years in the lease system before being released in 1875 for good behavior.13
The convict lease system so closely resemble the slave system that it was often referred to as penal slavery. Including the racial dynamics of the prison population, the system contained various other replications of slavery. Some prisoners were organized into gangs for completing certain projects. Others worked on the task system, having to meet production quotas every day. Prisoners were separated and given jobs based on the same classifications used by slave masters to denote ability. As in slavery, violent coercion and cruel physical punishment were used to extract labor from black convicts. Convicts were flogged and whipped, often to death, for minor transgressions. Unlike slave owners, the lessees did not have large amounts of money invested in their labor force. Convicts were much cheaper than slaves and court systems of the black belt offered a limitless supply of offerings to the lease system. So the inadequate housing and food, excruciating physical punishment, and long work hours were of no consequence to the proprietors of prison camps. The prison population multiplied tenfold from the birth of the convict lease system in 1868 to its demise in 1908. The system represented the great lengths taken by the state to “perpetuate [the] racial subordination” previously guaranteed by slavery.14
In 1876 the state negotiated a twenty year lease of the entire penitentiary with three private companies. Each of the companies had held convicts in alternating, overlapping periods in the past eight years. The twenty year lease divided the penitentiary into three units. Known as Georgia Penitentiary Companies Numbers One, Two and Three, the proprietors were granted permission in 1879 to locate. Company Number Three chose Greene County as its base of operations.15
In 1879, in last attempt to save the Fontenoy Cotton Mill at Scull Shoals, Thomas Poullain of Greene County sold 3,200 acres of the adjacent farm to William D. Grant and the other owners of Georgia Penitentiary Company Number Three. Though Poullain made $26,000 from the sale, the money was not enough to revive the ailing mill. While one Greene County institution was dying, another was just taking root.16
Unlike their counterparts in Companies One and Two, the inmates of Company Number Three labored in agriculture. In fact in most previous leases, convicts had been used in industrial capacities. Prisoners had been used to mine coal, work in factories, make bricks, and build public works and railroads. Landon Broomfield of Greene County had been put work building a railroad in 1870 under one of William Grant’s previous leases. The prisoners of Company Number Three, however, worked on cotton farms all over the plantation belt, from Greene and adjacent Oglethorpe County, to Dougherty County in Georgia’s southwest corner. In 1881, there were 110 convicts at the Scull Shoals farm. Despite the lease systems notorious history of convict abuse, Greene County grand jury, in reports from 1880 and 1881, agreed that the convicts at Scull Shoals were well taken care of and supported the continuation of the lease. Other grand juries from other counties concluded similarly and blamed any discrepancies in convict testimonies on the questionable moral character of the men. Company Number Three was able to keep its lease and the black population of Greene County lived and labored in the shadow of the Scull Shoals camp for twenty years. Blacks in the plantation belt, like their brothers and sisters all over the state, struggled against the bonds of contractual and penal slavery. Yet despite being subjected to so much widespread and institutional exploitation, the freedmen of Greene County were able to maintain and wield considerable amounts of political and social autonomy.17
With emancipation, blacks in Greene County obtained the right to leave the plantations and lands of their former masters. The freedman sought to establish their own communities. In the county seat of Greensboro, spelled Greenesboro prior to 1900, the freedmen established a community that the whites “derisively” called Canaan. While the naming of the neighborhood was joke to Greenesboro whites, the former slaves accepted the name, viewing their community as the embodiment of the Promised Land. In Canaan, blacks could exercise and enjoy their new freedom. They started their own churches, practiced religion on their own terms. The community organized its own militia, and offered shelter and protection to its inhabitants. Blacks still living isolated on plantations were more vulnerable to white aggression. Poverty and overcrowding were omnipresent in the community. However, the inhabitants still preferred to struggle amongst their own people. Canaan became a symbol of freedom in the black community and would be the base from which the Greene County’s freedman organized and directed their new political power.18
Under the leadership of Abram Colby, Greene County blacks established a local chapter of the Equal Rights Association, an organization formed at the 1865 Freeman’s convention. Colby, the black son of a white planter, had been free and working as barber for fifteen years when emancipation came. Colby was widely known for his oratorical skills and was chosen by the black community to represent them at the convention. Led by notable freedmen like Colby, and Macon minister Henry McNeal Turner, the Equal Rights Association battled to secure education, legal protection, and government representation for black citizens across the state. The only way for the freedman to insure these rights was by exercising their most important right: their right to vote.19
Greene County’s population, like the rest of the plantation belt, had a black majority. All over the plantation belt black citizens actualized their right of suffrage. By contrast, many white citizens abstained from voting in protest of federal control of Georgia’s Government. In 1867 while only 1,002 of Greene County white citizens registered to vote, 1,528 blacks signed up. With greater than fifty percent more voters than in the white registry, Greene County blacks would dominate up coming elections. Black citizens of Georgia were overwhelmingly Republican – it was the party of Lincoln, and represented divine deliverance from slavery – and voted for its candidates both black and white. The black citizenry, of Greene and other plantation belt counties, was instrumental in electing thirty-two freedmen, among them Abram Colby and Henry M. Turner, to the Georgia legislature in 1868. Later that year, white legislators, Democrats and Republicans, would vote to remove the black representatives from their posts. Georgia laws of 1866 had defined state citizens of being white; people with “one eighth or more Negro blood” could not be citizens. The black politicians were voted out based on the premise that their lack of citizenship, made them ineligible to participate in government. In their short careers, the black legislators, addressed and instituted change in issues of education, poverty and labor for the black community. When Abram Colby was nominated again, the Klan attempted to bribe him not to run. When Colby refused, Klan members took him from his home, beat him, and left him for dead. Colby recovered but never returned to the legislature. In following years, black leaders in the county were terrified into inaction by the Klan. White officials manipulated the polls in order keep the black registry from voting. Though their political power was eventually usurped, initially, black voters in Greene County demonstrated their voting power with full force. Black citizens nevertheless would find other ways to use the size of their population to retain independence.20
Under the contract labor system, blacks in Greene County were subject to myriad forms of exploitation. With vagrancy laws and fraudulent contracts black workers were under constant legal coercion to confirm to white ideals of black subservience. However, the black laborers of Greene County would use the labor in Georgia as leverage to negotiate better contracts in the free labor system.21
In Georgia, black agricultural laborers preferred to work as tenants rather than in wage labor. Tenancy allowed some control over crop production, but more importantly put land at the tenants’ disposal. In some cases, tenants were eventually able to purchase the land on which they labored. Few blacks owned land during Reconstruction, yet they all understood the power and autonomy that accompanied land ownership. Land represented wealth and allowed owners to practice subsistence farming. Planters on the other hand favored wage and share contracts that allowed them to pay blacks little for their labor or cheat them with deductions. In 1866, and again in 1870 and 1871, Greene County blacks walked out on and refused to negotiate wage or share contracts. The 1866 strike lasted from February to April of that year. Workers walked away from inequitable contracts and refused to return until conditions improved. In January of both 1870 and 1871, workers refused to enter into wage and share agreements when contracts were to be reinstated. Though put under the pressure of vagrancy laws, and threatened with legal recourse, the freedmen abstained from work, sometimes leaving entire plantations without a single hand. In the 1870-1871 strikes, planters threatened to replace blacks with Chinese laborers. But, the freedman understood the power of their labor. Crops could not be sown or harvested without them. The strikes occurred during a time of economic turmoil, in which the planters were dependent upon black agricultural labor to insure production. The loss of black workers caused a labor crisis in Greene, and the size and unity of the population prevented whites from forcing the freedmen back into labor. When the strikes ended, many blacks went back to work either as tenants, or under more favorable wage or share contracts.22
As the state of Georgia made the transition from slave to free labor, state and local officials sought to replicate the social controls used to exploit black labor during slavery. Through the modification and creation of laws, the manipulation of the judicial system, and the establishment of a penal labor system, the state used the law to usurp black autonomy. The institutions created by the state for exploitative purposes signified the states insistence on maintaining control over the free black labor force. Though the state realized its goals to create hybrid forms of slavery to some extent, the scope of these institutions was limited by black autonomy. While white legislators tried to recreate total black subservience, the freed people were exercising their rights to self determination and confronting the established social order. The freedmen of Greene County understood the strength of their numbers and value of their labor, and used these tools to retain autonomy within a social order designed to destroy it. Greene County’s African American community provides an example of how unity can be employed by the modern black community to achieve and maintain social equality.
1. Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth Century Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 126-128; 140-141.
2. Wallenstein, From Slave South, 141; Arthur F. Raper, Preface to Peasantry: A Tale of Two Black Belt Counties (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936), 11; Ibid., 10.
3. Arthur F. Raper, Tenants of the Almighty (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), 12; Ibid., 92-93; idem, Preface, 10; Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land: Change and Conflict in Greene County Georgia, 1850-1885,16-17; Charles Flynne Jr., White Land, Black Labor: Caste and Class in Nineteenth-Century Georgia (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 8.
4. Bryant, How curious, 91-93; Ibid., 157-158; Raper, Tenants, 31; Ibid., 72-73.
5. Wallenstein, From Slave South, 131-139; Bryant, How Curious, 97-99.
6. Raper, Tenants, 72; Ibid, 77; Bryant, How Curious, 97-99; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 141-142.
7. Raper, Tenants, 72; Bryant, How Curious, 99; Flynne, White Land, 9-10.
8. Bryant, How Curious, 99; Ibid., 101-103; Ibid., 105; Ibid.,109; Raper, Tenants, 78; Ibid., 107-108; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 141; Flynne, White Land, 65-68; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 144.
9. Wallenstein, From Slave South, 141-144; Bryant, How Curious, 106-109; Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso, 1996), 71-73.
10. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, 71-73; Bryant, How Curious, 108-109; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 201-202; Raper, Tenants, 108.
11. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, 17-18; Ibid., 71-73; Milfred C. Fierce, Slavery Revisited: Blacks and the Southern Convict Lease System (New York: Brooklyn College, City University of New York for Africana Studies Research Center, 1994), 146-147; Matthew J. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” The Journal of Negro History vol. 63, no. 4 (October 1978): 341-343.
12. Mancini, “Race Economics”, 340-341; A. Elizabeth Taylor, “The Origin and Development of the Convict Lease System in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly vol. 26, no.2 (June 1942; reprint, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1942):1-4 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
13. Martha A. Myers, Race, Labor and Punishment in the New South (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 1-5; Mancini, “Race Economics”, 339; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 198; Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, 72-73.
14. Mancini, “Race Economics”, 345-349. Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, 131-142; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 201-206; A. Elizabeth Taylor, “The Abolition of the Convict Lease System in Georgia,” Georgia Historical Quarterly vol. 26, no.3-4 (September-December 1942; reprint, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1942):1-8 (page citations are to the reprint edition).
15. Taylor, “Origin Development”, 7-8.
16. Bryant, How Curious, 171-172; Taylor, “Origin Development”, 8; [William D. Grant], “Georgia Penitentiary Company No. 3 and the Convicts” (report submitted to the Georgia Prison Commission, [1881]) Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Georgia Room), University of Georgia, Athens.
17. Bryant, How Curious, 171-172; [Grant], “Company No. 3”; Raper, Preface, 11; Taylor, “Abolition Convict”, 1-8; idem, “Origin Development”, 7-13; Myers, Race, Labor, 1-2; Lichtenstein, Twice the Work, 18-20; Ibid., 72-73.
18. Bryant, How Curious, 100; Ibid., 118; Ibid, 153; Raper, Tenants, 108-110.
19. Bryant, How Curious, 26-27; Ibid., 104-106; Ibid., 108-113.
20. Bryant, How Curious, 117-124; Ibid., 131-132; Ibid., 138-139; Edmund Drago, Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982; reprint, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1992), 22-23 (page citations are to the reprint edition); Ibid., 105-106; Ibid., 120-126, Ibid., 146; Wallenstein, From Slave South, 144.
21. Bryant, How Curious,106-107; Ibid., 149-150.
22. Bryant, How Curious, 106-107; Ibid., 149-150; Ibid., 180; Flynne, White Land, 60; Ibid., 64-67; Ibid., 74.