soon learned to regard
as morally wrong when a freeman.

But the most effective agency in filling Southern prisons with Negroes
has been, and is, the chain-gang system--the farming out of convict
labor. Just as great railway, oil, and telegraph companies in the
North have been capable of controlling legislation, so the
corporations at the South which take the prisoners of the State off of
the hands of the Government, and then speculate upon the labor of the
prisoners, are able to control both court and jury. It has been the
practice, and is now, in some of the Southern States, to pronounce
long sentences upon able-bodied young Colored men, whose offences, in
a Northern court, could not be visited with more than a few months'
confinement and a trifling fine. The object in giving Negro men a long
term of years, is to make sure the tenure of the soulless
corporations upon the convicts whose unhappy lot it is to fall into
their iron grasp. In some of the Southern States a strong and healthy
Negro convict brings thirty-seven cents a day to the State, while he
earns a dollar for the corporations above his expenses. The convicts
are cruelly treated--especially in Georgia and Kentucky;--their food
is poor, their quarters miserable, and their morals next to the brute
creation. In many of these camps men and women are compelled to sleep
in the same bunks together, with chains upon their limbs, in a
promiscuous manner too sickening and disgusting to mention. When a
prisoner escapes he is hunted down by fiery dogs and cruel guards; and
often the poor prisoner is torn to pieces by the dogs or beaten to
death by the guards. No system of slavery was ever equal in its cruel
and dehumanizing details to this convict system, which, taking
advantage of race prejudice on the one hand and race ignorance on the
other, with cupidity and avarice as its chief characteristics, has
done more to curse the South than all things else since the war.

It was predicted by persons hostile to the rights and citizenship of
the Negro, that a condition of freedom would not be in harmony with
his character; that it would destroy him, and that he would destroy
the country and party which tried to make him agree to a state of
independent life; that having been used to the "kind treatment"(?) of
his master he would find himself unequal to the responsibilities of
freedom; and that his migratory disposition would lead him into a
climate too cold for him, where h