There are no limits to which
powers of privilege will not go
to keep the workers in slavery.
-Mother Jones
Hellraisers Journal, Sunday January 23, 1898
West Palm Beach, Florida – On Sale: Men, Women, and Children
From The San Francisco Call of January 7, 1898:
From the New York World of January 7, 1898:
FLORIDA’S TRAFFIC IN SLAVES.
—–
Four Hundred Convicts Sold Into a
Life More Cruel Than that of
Negroes Before the War.(Special to the World.)
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla., Jan. 6.-The last Legislature appointed a committee to visit the various convict lessees and report the condition of the convicts, their treatment and whether properly fed and clothed. The report showed great cruelty, and that just food enough to keep them from starving and scarcely any clothing were given by the lessees. The result was a bill making a change in lesses Jan. 1.
The old lessees at once set out to make all out of the convicts possible, and the prisoners were worse treated, foodless and compelled to work harder, and if they failed to perform tasks set they were punished for laziness.
A central stockade was located at Albion and 450 convicts were returned there by Jan. 3. Then they were sold for four years to five men. The State receives an annual revenue of $1,000 from this slave traffic.
The convicts were ranged in a long line. The lessees tossed up for first choice, then each selected a man in turn, until the entire lot was gone through, examining each one for durability, strength, &c. In fact, it was a repetition of the sale of slaves before the war in the South, only worse, for the owner of slaves would take proper care of them [*].
No white men are able to survive four years in a convict camp in the phosphate mines and the majority of negroes succumb.
The number of convicts in all the camps is 687, an increase during the year of 37. There are 91 white men, 1 white woman, 21 colored women and 33 boys between twelve and sixteen years old, two of which are white. There is one colored girl fifteen years old.
———-
*The idea of “proper care” care of slaves before the Civil War is, of course, ridiculous, unless chains, whips, family separation and violently enforced human bondage can be considered “proper care,” not to mention that the enslavement of human beings is, in and of itself, barbaric and certainly not proper.
SOURCES & IMAGE
The San Francisco Call
(San Francisco, California)
-Jan 7, 1898
https://www.newspapers.com/image/80995889/
The World
(New York, New York)
-Jan 7, 1898
https://www.newspapers.com/image/3141657/
See also:
Appeal to Reason
(Girard, Kansas)
-Jan 22, 1898
https://www.newspapers.com/image/66970133/
Note: the story as carried by the Appeal of Jan 22nd, mistakenly placed West Palm Beach in Georgia:
Note: editions of the New York Evening World for 1898 are missing but do exist for the New York World.
NY Evening World
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030193/
NY World
https://www.newspapers.com/title_162/the_world/
One Dies, Get Another:
Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928
-by Matthew J. Mancini
U of South Carolina Press, 1996
(search: florida)
https://books.google.com/books?id=im68YsXbvZ0C
We Are Soldiers in the Army – Freedom Singers