o prison. Slaves who commit grave
crimes are hung; those who commit heinous crimes not punishable with
death are sold out of the State. In selling him care is taken that his
character and former life are not known, _because it would lessen his
price_." Thus wrote De Beaumont and De Tocqueville; and in so writing
they handed down a fine insight into the methods of that Southern
propertied class which assumed so exalted an opinion of its honor and
chivalry.

But the sentencing of the criminal was merely the beginning of a weird
life of horror. It was customary at that period to immure prisoners in
solitary confinement. There, in their small and reeking cells, filled
with damps and pestilential odors, they were confined day after day,
year after year, condemned to perpetual inactivity and silence. If they
presumed to speak, they were brutally lashed with the whip. They were
not allowed to write letters, nor to communicate with any member of
their family. But the law condescended to allow a minister to visit them
periodically in order to awaken their religious thoughts and preach to
them how bad a thing it was to steal! Many were driven stark mad or died
of disease; others dashed their brains out; while others, when finally
released, went out into the world filled with an overpowering hatred of
Society, and all its institutions, and a long-cherished thirst for
vengeance against it for having thus so cruelly misused them.

Such were the laws made by the propertied classes. But they were not
all. When a convict was released, the law allowed only three dollars to
be given him to start anew with. "To starve or to steal is too often the
only alternative," wrote John W. Edmonds, president of the New York
board of prison inspectors in 1844.[132] If the released convict did
steal he was nearly always sent back to prison for life.

Equally severe in their way were the laws applying to mendicants and
vagrants. Six months or a year in the penitentiary or workhouse was the
usual sentence. After the panic of 1837, crime, mendicancy, vagrancy and
prostitution tremendously increased, as they always do increase after
two events: war, which, when over, turns into civil life a large number
of men who cannot get work; and panics which chaotically uproot
industrial conditions and bring about widespread destitution. Although
undeniably great frauds had been committed by the banking class, not a
single one of that class went to jail. But large