There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
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Hellraisers Journal, Monday January 31, 1898
Albion, Florida – “Great Annual Sale of Convict Labor”
From The San Francisco Call of January 30, 1898:
After a fashion slavery still exists In the United States! Only the other day at Albion, Fla., 430 men, women and children were sold into a bondage worse than death, and the State of Florida to-day is richer by $21,000.
To be sure, these poor wretches were convicts, and had broken the laws. But they were none the less human beings. You might have had some difficulty in realizing this could you have seen them as I saw them in all the misery of their hopeless, squalid dejection. And they were bought, body and soul, for the period of one year. The State sold them to four contractors, who had made the highest bids. Next year they will hare other masters.
They have no penitentiary in Florida, and so the convicts are sold into slavery. To build penitentiaries means the expenditure of money, and this the legislators are not willing to vote for, even were the property owners willing to be thus taxed. So the State of Florida, instead of providing accommodations for its criminals, derives a pecuniary benefit from a form of traffic which is appalling in this age of civilization and in this land of the free.
It isn’t called slavery in Florida. There is no auctioneer to cry: “How much am I offered for this man?” There is no bidding and raising of bids. The bidding has already been done to the State officials, and the entire lot has been knocked down to the highest bidders. Oh, no, it is not the selling of slaves, they will tell you. The scene I witnessed was merely the “annual division.”
