Chain Gangs - And Our Story?

In the recent family reunion it came up that John Gary Maggard "ran a chain gang" and that our grandmother, Jessie Maggard Butler, was very embarrassed over this. I asked my grandmother's niece, Helen Smith, and she doesn't recall him "running a chain gang" but said convict labor may have worked to build roads or on his land as was common place during a certain time period. I found this article online in regards to chain gangs in Georgia and Alabama. The first article states chain gangs met its "zenith" between 1880 and 1910. Jessie Maggard was born 1890 and married in 1909. She and my grandfather left Mississippi for North Texas upon their marriage.

I think things need to be looked at in context and not singled out. I asked the same grandmother if her family had slaves. After I readjusted my head on my neck due to asking such a stupid question as she was born 25 years AFTER the Civil War she told me that her grandparents had former slaves. "They wouldn't leave." They stayed and her grandparents continued to "look after them" while the former slaves did nothing "for their keep" and were squatters where they once lived as slaves.

You can like it or not but even today the black population ends up in jail far more than the white population. I'm sure an out of work demographic group that never supported itself black population found itself at a loss without a structured environment to live in after the Civil War. The white population had lost its way of life, culture, sons, health and its very ground had been scorched. Most no longer had a way to financially support former slaves. The Yankees had come to straighten the white southern out and the animosity there was towards the black population was enhanced. The black animosity was likewise enhanced towards the whites. The Yankees took vile advantage of blacks and whites.

By today's values General Sherman would be tried as war criminal he was for his raping of the South and "the collateral damage" of killing he did to any woman or child that got in the way of of the fires that he set to burn out the South. When he left Meridian, MS...he said..."Meridian is no more."

In the rebuilding of the south chain gangs were "needed" as a way to support themselves while in prison. Today it is called "Department of Corrections Work Release Center" and my former church picks the local branch up every chance it can and feeds them and brings them to church for bible study, worship, recreation and....to pick up a paint brush or a broom. During the week they work on the city streets, sewer system or where they can. They work for little of nothing except their keep and there are those who say a free non-imprisoned person could be doing that work instead of a convict.

I would say John Gary Maggard, known as a trader, did lease out convict labor to reconstruct the south. I'm not apologizing. I now know he was a good man that sent his daughter flowers...and was torn to the core of his very being when his youngest daughter died ten days after giving birth. One way or another the south had to be rebuilt.

Someone had to rebuild Meridian. The federal government wasn't going to do it. The Yankee Carpetbaggers had come down to finish the figurative raping that had not already been done and weren't there to provide infrastructure assistance.

It was up to the local young guns, the sons of the sons of the Confederacy, to rebuild the South.

John Gary Maggard did his part.


http://www.answers.com/topic/chain-gang
Chain Gangs, a type of convict labor that developed in the American South in the post–Civil War period.
Many penitentiaries and jails had been destroyed during the war and money was lacking to repair them or build new ones. The southern prison system lay in ruins and could not accommodate the influx of convicts moving through the court system. Chain gangs offered a solution to the problem since they generated revenue for the state and relieved the government of prison expenditures. They also eased the burden on the taxpayer. Southern states would lease convicts to private corporations or individuals who used the prisoners to build railroads, work plantations, repair levees, mine coal, or labor in sawmills. The lessees promised to guard, feed, clothe, and house the convicts. Convict leasing reached its zenith between 1880 and 1910 and proved to be extremely profitable.
The majority of convicts working on chain gangs were African Americans. Convict leasing was a tool of racial repression in the Jim Crow South as well as a profit-driven system. Some state legislatures passed laws targeting blacks that made vagrancy a crime and increased the penalties for minor offenses such as gambling, drunkenness, and disorderly conduct. As a result, arrests and convictions of African Americans (including children) shot up dramatically.
Life on the chain gang was brutal, and the mortality rate was extremely high. Many prisoners died of exhaustion, sunstroke, frostbite, pneumonia, gunshot wounds, and shackle poisoning caused by the constant rubbing of chains on flesh. Convicts were often transported to work camps in rolling cages where they slept without blankets and sometimes clothes. Sanitary conditions were appalling. Convicts labored from sunup to sundown and slow workers were punished with the whip. Chain gangs allowed white southerners to control black labor following the end of slavery.
County and municipal governments also used penal chain gangs to build roads in the rural South. In response to the "good roads movement" initiated during the Progressive Era, the state used convict labor to create a modern system of public highways. The goal was to modernize the South, and the use of chain gangs to build a transportation infrastructure contributed to commercial expansion in the region. Eventually, Progressive reformers began to focus on the atrocities of convict leasing. As a result, the private lease system was abolished. However, some southern states continued to use chain gangs on county and municipal projects until the early 1960s.

Bibliography

Lichtenstein, Alex. Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. New York: Verso, 1996.
Mancini, Matthew J. One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996.
Oshinsky, David M. Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

—Natalie J. Ring

http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6045/Chain-Gangs.html

Chain Gangs

Nearly half a century after the Civil War, the southern states’ prison systems, with a largely black population, comprised two models of outdoor convict labor: The prison farm and the road chain gang. The chain gang started in Georgia in 1908 and was envisioned as a progressive penal reform movement, the direct consequence of the ending of the convict lease system, as well as public demand for improved transportation. Chain gangs flourished throughout the South and by the 1920s and 1930s chained prisoners, mostly black, became a common sight along southern roadways. Georgia grasped the economic and social benefits of the chain gang, which soon developed into the “good roads movement.” “Bad boys,” a Georgia folk saying went, “make good roads.” Hired labor and even conscription had proved unreliable in the past, as free men were not disposed to work the roads if they could help it. Advocates for the good roads movement considered it advantageous to the state if convicts were made to serve their time building roads without creating unfair competition with labor. On a “humanitarian” level, proponents claimed that it would take the convict out of his cramped cell and provide him with work in the fresh air and sunshine. The federal government under, the auspices of the United States Department of Agriculture’s Office of Public Roads, joined in and spearheaded the movement as a way to modernize the South’s economy.
Magazine editorials applauded Georgia for having abolished the convict lease program, and for building more good roads than any other Southern state, encouraging other states to follow its lead. The race factor, for the most part, enhanced the enthusiasm for the chain gang as there was overwhelming white support for the good roads movement. The tragic plight of the black lawbreaker, however, was not diminished by the shift from the lease system to county chain gangs. To a southern black prisoner there was little difference between his situation as a slave on the plantation, as a leased convict forced to toil in the coal mine, or as a chained prison worker on the roads. The chained southern black man on the southern county road had been transformed from the plantation owner’s chattel into a “slave of the state.”
Georgia’s reform efforts merely shifted the atrocities from the private to the public sector. For southern whites the chain gang had much of the attraction of the legacy of slavery. The state now became the actual master responsible for the welfare of a growing pool of forced black labor. Black prisoners labored and even slept together, with chains fastened through their feet and around their ankles. Their rations were infested with maggots. With an armed white overseer, the black convict slaved from sunup to sundown. Brutalities, corporal punishments (beatings with a leather strap, thumpings with rifle butts and clubs) and outright torture, were commonplace. Major atrocities, such as the staking treatment (chaining an inmate between stakes and pouring molasses over his body while flies, bees and other insects crawled all over him); the sweat box treatment (locking a prisoner for days into a wooden box that was neither high enough to stand nor deep enough to sit, while temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees); and the Georgia rack (stretching the inmate between two hooks with a cable and a turn crank) were all meted out for the most trivial disobedience.
Chain gangs had a brief existence, as economic forces played a central role in their demise. During the Great Depression, as jobs became scarce, criticism was heard that convict chain gangs took work that rightfully belonged to free labor. The government stopped providing federal funds to finance roads built using convict labor. Enthusiasm for chain gangs also decreased as the number of white convicts on the roads increased. By the 1940s, chain gangs had almost vanished. The last few chained prisoners were pulled off the roads when Georgia finally eliminated the practice in the early 1960s.

The media contributed significantly to the practice’s demise. Films ranging from Meryn LeRoy’s graphic expose, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) to Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) showed the atrocities of the system. As shameful as the abuses chronicled in the movies were, they could not capture the raw vivid details of everyday life suffered by black convicts on the chain gang. Prisoners were restrained at all times with heavy chains that were riveted around their ankles and were only removed (by a chisel) when the convict was released. At night another long chain was run between his legs, so that every man was connected to every other man, and no one was able to go to the toilet (a hole in the floor) without waking everybody on the chain gang. In the movies, the protagonists were mostly white, while in reality, the racial composition of the chain gangs were disproportionately African American. It took white actors, however, to generate a national scandal and shame a mostly Caucasian audience.
Half a century after their disappearance, convicts working in shackles once again became a sight on southern roads. The practice was reinitiated in 1995, when four hundred convicts, predominately black, were marshaled into a chain gang, at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Alabama. The reemergence of the chain gang began when Ron Jones, a prison warden, recommended it to gubernatorial candidate Forrest “Fob” James as a “get tough on crime” measure. Once elected, Governor James, with overwhelming white support, established chain gangs, alleging that it was an effective crime deterrent that made Alabama a safer place for the law-abiding citizen. The governor added that he reintroduced chain gangs because some convicts found prison life much too easy, and that they ought to be out working hard rather than cuddled by lifting weights and watching cable TV. Arizona, Florida, Massachusetts, Iowa and Wisconsin shortly joined Alabama. In Arizona, women inmates also began to work on a chain gang, burying dead indigent bodies. Juvenile chain gangs shortly became yet another manifestation of the practice.
Commentators have urged that the chain gang’s historical connection to slavery is indisputable, and that the practice offends human dignity and should be condemned as a form of cruel and unusual punishment under the mandate of the Eighth Amendment. Other critics have pointed to the Thirteenth Amendment, although its constitutional prohibition on involuntary servitude specifically provides an exception for those convicted of crime. Although the Supreme Court has prohibited many forms of prison abuse, it has not specifically addressed the constitutionality of chain gangs. The Court has, however, condemned Alabama’s “hitching post practice” (chaining convicts to a hitching post for over a seven-hour period where they were exposed to the heat of the sun, deprived of bathroom breaks, and subjected to prolonged thirst and taunting) as gratuitous infliction of wanton and unnecessary pain in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Additionally, in response to a civil action by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the state of Alabama reluctantly, without admitting that chain gangs violated the Eighth Amendment’s “cruel and unusual punishment” clause, agreed to end the practice of shackling convict work crews together.
The spectacle of black prisoners in chains is powerfully linked to the images of slavery serving as a forceful reminder of their heritage of racial oppression in America. It brings to mind southern slave auctions where black families, linked by leg irons and iron collars, were sold and transported to the plantations. After the Civil War when slavery was abolished, southern states passed Jim Crow laws to hinder migration and control freed blacks. Blacks found guilty of these laws were forced to work as convict contract workers, and on the prison farms and southern roads in chains. The iron chains were the emblem of degradation and humiliation. The states that have revived and continue to use chain gangs (a practice embedded into the cultural history of oppression of an entire race) undermine the moral legitimacy of their criminal justice system.

Read more: Chain Gangs - Roads, Southern, Black, Convict, Convicts, and Prison http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/articles/pages/6045/Chain-Gangs.html#ixzz0zzqdpGtD