Chain Gangs and the Good Roads Movement Primary Title Grant Holt Kenyon College - Class of 2022
In June 1912, penal reformer E. Stagg Whitin published “Convicts and Road Building” in an issue of the periodical Southern Good Roads. In this article, Whitin wrote of the “good roads movement,” and how it had become identified as “the movement to take the prisoner out of the cell, the prison factory and the mine to work him in the fresh air and sunshine.” This so-called good roads movement advocated “that bad men on bad roads make good roads,” and consequently that “good roads make good men.”1 Within a few sentences, Whitin captured the fundamental idea that drove much of the South to use convict labor on public roads. Around the turn of the twentieth century, this use of convict labor produced sprawling state highways. The driving force behind this application of convict labor was the Good Roads Movement, which marketed convict roadwork not only as an efficient means of public development, but also as a humanitarian penal reform. The impact of the Good Roads Movement, however, was not penal rehabilitation, but rather the successful rallying of enough social and political capital to stimulate public development. As a so-called progressive movement, it did not overcome the cruelty and abuse of the southern penal system, focusing more on development rather than reform. The movement’s penal reforms perpetuated a state of subservience among African Americans in a post-bellum nation, becoming a functional replacement for slavery in the modern age. Before the Good Roads Movement, however, prisoners worked under the convict leasing system. Under this system, state governments leased out prisoners to private employers as workers, who labored under the supervision of armed prison guards. In exchange, state governments received hundreds of thousands of dollars from private contractors leasing convicts. Convict leasing appealed to southern states 1 E. Stagg Whitin, “Convicts and Road Building,” Southern Good Roads, June 1912, 16, https://digital.ncdcr.gov/digital/collection/p249901coll37/ id/13775.
most impacted by the Civil War. The war decimated many southern prisons, and with no money to erect new penitentiaries, leasing was an attractive option.2 Furthermore, to the state and society, convict leasing was convenient. It transferred responsibility for thousands of prisoners from the state to private entities. Leasing generated millions in revenue for state and local coffers, funded public infrastructure like roads and bridges, and lowered taxes for the average citizen.3 Leasing also worked as a system of racial domination and control in a post-slavery society. A number of trends developed during the age of convict leasing: longer sentences translated into a larger convict population, the number of people sentenced rose drastically, and prisoners became almost entirely black. Convict leasing even incorporated elements of slavery. Convicts leased in Alabama and Texas, for example, were classified by their level of labor, such as “full,” medium,” and “dead” laborers. Slaves were classified under a similar system. However, unlike slavery, convict leasing offered no proprietary protection.4 Reports of poor food, abysmal sanitation, brutal labor, and inhumane punishment defined life on the chain gang. In 1920, black convicts working on a North Carolina chain gang wrote to the governor that they were “beat up like dogs” and that their overseers “work us hard and half feed us [and] beat us with shovel and stick.” In North Carolina’s Johnston County, Wiley Woodard, a black convict, wrote to the state’s commissioner of public welfare. Woodward said that although he had “made a mistake” on the job, it did “not call for the management of this camp to treat me and my race as dogs,” and that his camp kept convicts “at the point of a gun and threats of [the] lash.” A critic of North Carolina’s chain gangs wrote to the governor stating that although 2 Christopher Adamson, “Punishment after Slavery: Southern State Penal Systems, 1865-1890,” in Social Systems 30, no. 5 (June 1983): 556.
3 David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 57. 4 Matthew J. Mancini, “Race, Economics, and the Abandonment of Convict Leasing,” The Journal of Negro History 63, no. 4 (October 1978): 343-345.
