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[Trojita]

I was reading up on some stuff around the Civil War to shore up some missing information. One entry led to the next and I was introduced to the governor of Georgia during the confederacy, Joseph E. Brown, who sounded like a modern day conspiracy nut. He was the first governor to deny the Confederacy soldiers under draft, not for moral reasons, but because he thought confederate president Jefferson Davis was secretly working to eradicate state's rights and "individual liberty".

So let's get into the nitty gritty about him.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Brown

Joseph Emerson Brown (April 15, 1821 – November 30, 1894), often referred to as Joe Brown, was an attorney and politician, serving as the 42nd Governor of Georgia from 1857 to 1865, the only governor to serve four terms. After the American Civil War, he was elected by the state legislature as a two-term U.S. Senator, serving from 1880 to 1891. Brown was a leading secessionist in 1861, and led his state into the Confederacy.

A former Whig, and a firm believer in slavery and southern states' rights, he defied the Confederate government's wartime policies. He resisted the military draft, believing that local troops should be used only for the defense of Georgia. He denounced Confederate President Jefferson Davis as an incipient tyrant, and challenged Confederate impressment of animals and goods to supply the troops, and slaves to work in military encampments and on the lines. Several other governors followed his lead.

So he's a gigantic piece of shit.

After the war, Brown joined the Republican Party for a time, and was appointed as chief justice of the Supreme Court of Georgia from 1865 to 1870. Later he rejoined the Democrats, became president of the Western and Atlantic Railroad and began to amass great wealth; he was estimated to be a millionaire by 1880. He earned high profits from two decades of using mostly black convicts leased from state, county and local governments in his coal mining operations in Dade County. His Dade Coal Company bought other coal and iron companies, all based on the use of convict labor. By 1889 it was known as the Georgia Mining, Manufacturing and Investment Company.

So after the Civil War, he used connections to institute a system where he could get free labor from a system that now encouraged law enforcement and the court system to arrest and sentence as many black men as they could. The term for this is called convict leasing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convict_lease

Convict leasing was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations such as the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. The lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners.

The state of Louisiana leased out convicts as early as 1844,[1] but the system expanded all through the South with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865. It could be lucrative for the states: in 1898 some 73% of Alabama's entire annual state revenue came from convict leasing.

While northern states sometimes contracted for prison labor, the historian Alex Lichtenstein notes that,

only in the South did the state entirely give up its control to the contractor; and only in the South did the physical "penitentiary" become virtually synonymous with the various private enterprises in which convicts labored

That doesn't just sound like slavery. That is slavery.

Brown and his wife were honored in 1928 by a statue installed on the state capitol grounds.

 

[Shy Fingers]

..and rewarded with a statue no less. "History" my ass.

 

[Heroman]

This is where blackness became a crime all aross the south, they created bougs laws in oder to lock up black people

 

[Faddy]

And private prisons companies continue to make millions on the oppression of black men to this day.

 

[Slayven]

That is why i will never a pass to "Some confederate guys were good". Cause they went right back home and put a boot to black folk's neck

This is where blackness became a crime all aross the south, they created bougs laws in oder to lock up black people

Blackness and the myth black people were lazy.

 

[Llyranor]

So that's where the longstanding tradition of profiteering from the prison industry comes from.

 

[Nafai1123]

The slave trade is still alive and well throughout our criminal justice system.

 

[Heroman]

Pbs did a documentary on this a few years back
https://youtu.be/UcCxsLDma2o

 

[Harrison Bergeron]

The North was complicit in what went on in the South with vagrancy laws, and sharecropping to essentially maintain slave labor.

Economically, the northern fledgeling industrial economies needed those non-existant labor costs maintained in order to keep a steady supply of cheap inputs and food.

Where was the Federal intervention?

Really greasy shit post Emancipation.

 

[LucidMomentum]

I mean it still happens, prison labor gets used for pennies on the dollar.

 

[Heroman]

The North was complicit in what went on in the South with vagrancy laws, and sharecropping to essentially maintain slave labor.

Economically, the northern fledgeling industrial economies needed those non-existant labor costs maintained in order to keep a steady supply of cheap inputs and food.

Where was the Federal intervention?

Really greasy shit post Emancipation.

The feds didn't really want to help black people.

 

[jtb]

The North was complicit in what went on in the South with vagrancy laws, and sharecropping to essentially maintain slave labor.

Economically, the northern fledgeling industrial economies needed those non-existant labor costs maintained in order to keep a steady supply of cheap inputs and food.

Where was the Federal intervention?

Really greasy shit post Emancipation.

Once federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 (in one of the most corrupt elections in American history - would make 2016 blush), the federal government lacked the enforcement mechanism to adequately combat white supremacist violence and intimidation. The effects and legacy of Reconstruction's failure are unfortunately still being felt today.

 

[Heroman]

Here are some of the laws to used to law black people up
Common ones
Race was defined by blood; the presence of any amount of black blood made one black.
Employment was required of all freedmen; violators faced vagrancy charges.
Freedmen could not assemble without the presence of a white person.
Freedmen were assumed to be agricultural workers and their duties and hours were tightly regulated.
Freedmen were not to be taught to read or write.
Public facilities were segregated.
Violators of these laws were subject to being whipped or branded

From Mississippi

That all freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, without lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling themselves with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freed woman, free negro or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in a sum not exceeding, in the case of a freedman, free negro, or mulatto, fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars, and imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, the free negro not exceeding ten days, and the white man not exceeding six months

 

[DarthWoo]

With the vagrancy laws, it was all one big and intentional cycle. We don't want to hire no freedmen. Oh, you're outside without a job? You're a vagrant and must be incarcerated! Oh, now that you're a prisoner, we'll be happy to use your free and non-consensual labor.

 

[Llyranor]

I did not know about the vagrancy laws. That is messed up.