The Story of Parchman Farm
"Parchman, I believe, is the closest thing to slavery to survive the Civil War. Its story covers the bleak panorama of race and punishment, brutality and paternalism, in the darkest corner of the American South.
... my main body of research came from the Penitentiary Books that described the prisoners as they arrived to be processed, the plantation ledgers of the men who leased them, the reports of the state inspectors and doctors who occasionally visited their quarters and, above all, the pardon files of every convict who applied for early release from state custody for a period of almost a hundred years.
The pardon files were the mother lode. In Mississippi, a convict wanting early release had to put a petition in his local newspaper, alerting the community of his intentions. Since most convicts were illiterate, their families would hire a white attorney to compose the petition and get it published. Thus alerted, the community would respond by writing letters of support or opposition to the governor, who would make the final decision. The letters poured in from plantation owners, merchants, ministers, police chiefs, district attorneys, friends, family members, and, of course, the victim (or victims) of the crime. Each pardon file amounted to a social history of the convict, telling of his background, his work habits, his ties to the locality, his standing among the whites in town with influence and the blacks who knew him best.
The Mississippi plantation leasing records from this era tell a story of relentless brutality and neglect. The convicts ate and slept on bare ground. They were punished for “slow hoeing” (ten lashes), “sorry planting” (five lashes), and “being light with cotton (five lashes). Many dropped from exhaustion, malaria, pneumonia, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and “shackle poisoning” (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh). A doctor sent by the state on a rare visit to a Delta plantation wrote that the word “unsanitary” did not begin “to express the filthy conditions of the convict cage”: bloodstained dirt floors, overflowing waste buckets, and vermin-covered walls. In the 1880s, the annual mortality rate for Mississippi’s leased convicts ranged from 9 to 16 percent. Not a single one lived long enough to serve out a sentence of ten or more years."
by David M. Oshinsky
http://www.yale.edu/glc/events/cbss/Oshinsky.pdf
~I haven't written a letter in years. Perhaps emails will be a primary source future historians rely on?
Is it disingenuous to believe that in these days of instant world-wide communications human bodies are free from this sort of systematic abuse?
The problems of our bodies. (The problem is their bodies./The solution is their bodies.)
Posted by Stubbornson at May 20, 2007 09:54 AM