USS ALASKA
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Visiting Our Past: Convict labor built the railroads here
Rob Neufeld, Visiting Our Past
Published 9:00 a.m. ET March 3, 2019
"Too many convicts," thought Jacob Allen, president of the North Carolina State Penitentiary board in 1874, as he reviewed the prisons. There was an "urgent necessity to find employment for this surplus."
Incarceration and rehabilitation had replaced corporal punishment as ways to address crime, so there was a need to do something with the manpower under the guise of rehabilitation, and that was hard labor. Seven-eighths of the convicts were African-American.
The convict labor system was "Slavery by Another Name," as Nancy O'Brien Wagner calls it on her PBS webpage with that name. New laws made it easy to pick up any black youth along the road and put him in prison.
"Pig laws," Wagner notes, "made the theft of a farm animal worth a dollar punishable by as much as five years in jail. Vagrancy statutes made it a crime not to have a job or be able to show proof of employment."
In 1875, the state purchased the Western North Carolina Railroad and on Feb. 19, 1877, the legislature authorized the enlistment of "not less than five hundred convicts," none of whom had been convicted of violent crimes. "The costs of keeping these creatures (the convicts) is greater (in the Raleigh penitentiary) than in the mountains," the railroad commissioners reported.
North Carolina put its prisoners on chain gangs under heavy guard to avoid the expense of arduous state projects, such as the building of railroads and blasting of paths. After being fed supper, journalist Rebecca Harding Davis reported, the convicts, "were driven into a row of prison cars, where they were tightly boxed in for the night, with no possible chance to obtain either light or air."
James W. Wilson, contractor for the excavation of the Swannanoa Tunnel, told the General Assembly that the actual cost of the work (not counting the value of labor) was thirty cents a day — seven cents for the feeding of the prisoners, ten cents for the guarding, and the rest for miscellaneous care.
Wilson was an old hand at the business. He had been the railroad company engineer and superintendent during the Civil War. At the time of his winning the contract for the Swannanoa Tunnel, he was also the state's chief engineer, the president of the railroad, and a major stockholder.
The Swannanoa Tunnel — the system's longest at 1,822 feet — has become the stuff of legend. Mountain society had been forever altered by the arrival of the inaugural train in 1879 as "convicts pulled the seventeen ton 'Salisbury' … to tracks on the western side by dragging three ropes, laying track in front and removing track from behind as they traveled along the stagecoach road."
Rob Neufeld writes the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, "The Read on WNC." Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at [email protected]; call 828-505-1973.
Full article can be found here - https://www.citizen-times.com/story...onvict-labor-built-railroads-here/2992778002/
Cheers,
USS ALASKA
Rob Neufeld, Visiting Our Past
Published 9:00 a.m. ET March 3, 2019
"Too many convicts," thought Jacob Allen, president of the North Carolina State Penitentiary board in 1874, as he reviewed the prisons. There was an "urgent necessity to find employment for this surplus."
Incarceration and rehabilitation had replaced corporal punishment as ways to address crime, so there was a need to do something with the manpower under the guise of rehabilitation, and that was hard labor. Seven-eighths of the convicts were African-American.
The convict labor system was "Slavery by Another Name," as Nancy O'Brien Wagner calls it on her PBS webpage with that name. New laws made it easy to pick up any black youth along the road and put him in prison.
"Pig laws," Wagner notes, "made the theft of a farm animal worth a dollar punishable by as much as five years in jail. Vagrancy statutes made it a crime not to have a job or be able to show proof of employment."
In 1875, the state purchased the Western North Carolina Railroad and on Feb. 19, 1877, the legislature authorized the enlistment of "not less than five hundred convicts," none of whom had been convicted of violent crimes. "The costs of keeping these creatures (the convicts) is greater (in the Raleigh penitentiary) than in the mountains," the railroad commissioners reported.
North Carolina put its prisoners on chain gangs under heavy guard to avoid the expense of arduous state projects, such as the building of railroads and blasting of paths. After being fed supper, journalist Rebecca Harding Davis reported, the convicts, "were driven into a row of prison cars, where they were tightly boxed in for the night, with no possible chance to obtain either light or air."
James W. Wilson, contractor for the excavation of the Swannanoa Tunnel, told the General Assembly that the actual cost of the work (not counting the value of labor) was thirty cents a day — seven cents for the feeding of the prisoners, ten cents for the guarding, and the rest for miscellaneous care.
Wilson was an old hand at the business. He had been the railroad company engineer and superintendent during the Civil War. At the time of his winning the contract for the Swannanoa Tunnel, he was also the state's chief engineer, the president of the railroad, and a major stockholder.
The Swannanoa Tunnel — the system's longest at 1,822 feet — has become the stuff of legend. Mountain society had been forever altered by the arrival of the inaugural train in 1879 as "convicts pulled the seventeen ton 'Salisbury' … to tracks on the western side by dragging three ropes, laying track in front and removing track from behind as they traveled along the stagecoach road."
Rob Neufeld writes the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen-Times. He is the author of books on history and literature, and manages the WNC book and heritage website, "The Read on WNC." Follow him on Twitter @WNC_chronicler; email him at [email protected]; call 828-505-1973.
Full article can be found here - https://www.citizen-times.com/story...onvict-labor-built-railroads-here/2992778002/
Cheers,
USS ALASKA
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