“The New Slavery in the South: An Autobiography by a Georgia Negro Peon,” Independent, February 25, 1904

After the Civil War, sharecropping became a convenient labor option for landless, unskilled, and unemployed freedmen and women. It was a system whereby a white landowner allowed a sharecropper to use his land in return for a share of the crop produced on the land. The land holder provided seeds, tools, shelter, and other supplies that aided in labor production. Sharecroppers were seldom paid wages and were often cheated out of their share of the crop, and the system left many farmers in debt because if the crop failed, the cropper would owe double the following year. Sharecroppers were not allowed to leave the land until their debts were settled. If they dared leave, they could be arrested and fined, and technically sold back to their supervisors until they worked off their fine. This was made possible through a system known as the debt peonage system.

The excerpt that follows depicts one man’s account of his experiences in the southern peonage system. After the Civil War, he became a freeman, however, left in the care of his uncle, he was “sold” into servitude to a white southern land owner referred to as Captain. His story reveals how the debt peonage system was used and abused to keep black freemen in chains.

When I reached twenty-one the Captain told me I was a free man, but he urged me to stay with him. He said he would treat me right, and pay me as much as anybody else would…. And I stayed. I signed a contract — that is, I made my mark — for one year. The Captain was to give me $3.50 a week, and furnish me a little house on the plantation — a one-room log cabin similar to those used by his other laborers.

During that year I married Mandy. For several years Mandy had been the house-servant for the Captain, his wife, his son and his three daughters, and they all seemed to think a good deal of her. As an evidence of their regard they gave us a suit of furniture, which cost about $25, and we set up housekeeping in one of the Captain’s two-room shanties. I thought I was the biggest man in Georgia…. We did so well for the first year that I renewed my contract for the second year, and for the third, fourth and fifth year I did the same thing. Before the end of the fifth year the Captain had died, and his son … took charge of the plantation. Also, for two or three years, this son had been serving in Atlanta in some big office to which he had been elected. I think it was in the Legislature or something of that sort — anyhow, the people called him Senator. At the end of the fifth year the Senator suggested that I sign up a contract for ten years; then, he said, we wouldn’t have to fix up papers every year. I asked my wife about it; she consented; and so I made a ten-year contract.

Not long afterward the Senator had a long, low shanty built on his place. A great big chimney, with a wide, open fireplace, was built at one end of it, and on each side of the house, running lengthwise, there was a row of frames or stalls just large enough to hold a single mattress…. They looked for all the world like stalls for horses…. Nobody seemed to know what the Senator was fixing for. All doubts were put aside one bright day when about forty able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them handcuffed, were brought out to the Senator’s farm in three big wagons. They were quartered in the long, low shanty, and it was afterward called to stockade. This was the beginning of the Senator’s convict camp. These men were prisoners who had been leased by the Senator from the State of Georgia at about $200 each per year, the State agreeing to pay for guards and physicians, for necessary inspection, for inquests, all rewards for escaped convicts, the costs of litigation and all other incidental camp expenses. When I saw these men in shackled, and the guards with their guns, I was scared nearly to death….

But this first batch of convicts was only the beginning. Within six months another stockade was built, and twenty or thirty other convicts were brought to the plantation, among them six or eight women! The Senator had bought an additional thousand acres of land, and to his already large cotton plantation he added two great big saw-mills and went into the lumber business. Within two years the Senator had in all nearly 200 negroes working on his plantation — about half of them free laborers, so-called, and about half of them convicts. The only difference between the free laborers and the others was that the free laborers could come and go as they pleased, at night — that is, they were not locked up at night, and were not, as a general thing, whipped for slight offenses. The troubles of the free laborers began at the close of the ten-year period…. To a man, they all refused to sign new contracts — even for one year, not to say anything of ten years. And just when we thought that our bondage was at an end we found that it had really just begun. Two or three years before, or about a year and a half after the Senator had started his camp, he had established a large store, which was called the commissary. All of us free laborers were compelled to buy our supplies … from that store. We never used any money in our dealings with the commissary, only tickets or orders, and we had a general settlement once each year…. In this store we were charged all sorts of high prices for goods, because every year we would come out in debt to our employer. If not that, we seldom had more than $5 or $10 coming to us — and that for a whole year’s work. Well, at the close of the tenth year, when we kicked and meant to leave the Senator, he said to some of us with a smile (and I never will forget that smile — I can see it now):

“Boys, I’m sorry you’re going to leave me. I hope you will do well in your new places — so well that you will be able to pay me the little balances which most of you owe me.”

Word was sent out for all of us to meet him at the commissary at 2 o’clock. There he told us that, after we had signed what he called a written acknowledgment of our debts, we might go and look for new places. The storekeeper took us one by one and read to us statements of our accounts. According to the books there was no man of us who owed the Senator less than $100…. These debts were not accumulated during one year, but ran back for three and four years, so we were told — in spite of the fact that we understood that we had had a full settlement at the end of each year. But no one of us would have dared to dispute a white man’s word — oh, no; not in those days. Besides, we fellows didn’t care anything about the amounts — we were after getting away; and we had been told that we might go, if we signed the acknowledgments. We would have signed anything, just to get away. So we stepped up, we did, and made our marks. That same night we were rounded up by a constable and ten or twelve white men, who aided him, and we were locked up, every one of us, in one of the Senator’s stockades. The next morning it was explained to us by the two guards appointed to watch us that, in the papers we had signed the day before, we had not only made acknowledgment of our indebtedness, but that we had also agreed to work for the Senator until the debts were paid off by hard labor. And from that day forward we were treated just like convicts. Really we had made ourselves lifetime slaves, or peons, as the law called us. But, call it slavery, peonage, or what not, the truth is we lived in a hell on earth what time we spent in the Senator’s peon camp.

The stockades in which we slept were, I believe, the filthiest places in the world. They were cesspools of nastiness. During the thirteen years that I was there I am willing to swear that a mattress was never moved after it had been brought there, except to turn it over once or twice a month. No sheets were used, only dark-colored blankets. Most of the men slept every night in the clothing that they had worked in all day. Some of the worst characters were made to sleep in chains. The doors were locked and barred each night, and tallow candles were the only lights allowed. Really the stockades were but little more than cow lots, horse stables or hog pens. Strange to say, not a great number of these people died while I was there, tho a great many came away maimed and bruised and, in some cases, disabled for life. As far as I remember only about ten died during the last ten years that I was there, two of these being killed outright by the guards for trivial offenses….

Barring two or three severe and brutal whippings which I received, I got along very well, all things considered; but the system is damnable. A favorite way of whipping a man was to strap him down to a log, flat on his back, and spank him fifty or sixty times on his bare feet with a shingle or a huge piece of plank. When the man would get up with sore and blistered feet and an aching body, if he could not then keep up with the other men at work he would be strapped to the log again, this time face downward, and would be lashed with a buggy trace on his bare back. When a woman had to be whipped it was usually done in private, tho they would be compelled to fall down across a barrel or something of the kind and receive the licks on their backsides.

The working day on a peon farm begins with sunrise and ends when the sun goes down; or, in other words, the average peon works from ten to twelve hours each day, with one hour (from 12 o’clock to 1 o’clock) for dinner. Hot or cold, sun or rain, this is the rule. As to their meals, the laborers are divided up into squads or companies, just the same as soldiers in a great military camp would be. Two or three men in each stockade are appointed as cooks. From thirty to forty men report to each cook…. Each peon is provided with a great big tin cup, a flat tin pan and two big tin spoons. No knives or forks are ever seen, except those used by the cooks. At meal time the peons pass in single file before the cooks, and hold out their pans and cups to receive their allowances. Cow peas (red or white, which when boiled turned black), fat bacon and old-fashioned Georgia corn bread, baked in pones from one to two and three inches thick, make up the chief articles of food. Black coffee, black molasses and brown sugar are also used abundantly…. As coarse as these things were, we [were] kept, as a rule, fat and sleek and as strong as mules….

But I didn’t tell you how I got out. I didn’t get out — they put me out. When I had served as a peon for nearly three years — and you remember that they claimed that I owed them only $165 — when I had served for nearly three years, one of the bosses came to me and said that my time was up. He happened to be the one who was said to be living with my wife. He gave me a new suit of overalls, which cost about seventy-five cents, took me in a buggy and carried me across the Broad River into South Carolina, set me down and told me to “git.” I didn’t have a cent of money, and I wasn’t feeling well, but somehow I managed to get a move on me…. I have been here in the Birmingham district since they released me, and I reckon I’ll die either in a coal mine or an iron furnace. It don’t make much difference which. Either is better than a Georgia peon camp. And a Georgia peon camp is hell itself!

Source: “The New Slavery in the South: An Autobiography by a Georgia Negro Peon,” Independent, February 25, 1904, 409–14.

Evaluating the Evidence

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