St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1884-03-16
TIMELY TOPICS.


fed to british beasts, for men more brutal
than savage beasts, lord it over helpless con-
victs. fortunes are inflicted upon the in
mates of southern prisons that make one
blush for our common humanity. The leg
islature Of the state of Mississippi appointed
q committee on the penitentiary, and the re-
port of that committee unfolds most horri-
BILE state of affairs. It declares that under
the system of leasing and sub-leasing prison
ers, crimes have been committed more cruel
and offensive than in Fleet and Marshalsea,
by Higgins, Cambridge, Corbit and Acton :,
under the English system. The lesses sub
let the prisoners, in gangs, to merciless con-
tractors. The committee says that ''the most
inhuman and uncommon modes of punish
ment'' were employed, ''totally without au-
thority of law, often pulling the prisone r
till he would faint;'' that prisoners were shot
dead and then reported as having escaped !;
that, in no case of sudden death, has coro-
ner or jury of inquest been called in, that
prisoners were punished SHY the lash 4,
used on the naked back while the sufferer
was stretched out by four strong men, each
holding band or foot, over the frozen
ground, or over stumps and logs, and beaten,
often with three hundred stripes at time,
which more than once, it is thought, resulted
in the death of convct;' that men unable
to work have been driven to death, and have
even died when fettered in the chain-gang;n
that they were generally so poorly fed that
they would eat the ears of corn dropped in
fia11 hot cd for
even when near at hand, and compelled to
drink, under the pressure of thirst, the water
from the pillow burrows or from the swamp
trenches in which they were working in
chain-gangs and which they were compelled
to foul, while spading in their bare feet in
cany and rooty ground up to their knees in
water, while their chains Greeted into their
flesh" The number of deaths reported is
217 out of a total of 1853 convicts during
the year, or, 1879 per cent, not to mention
1877 Escaped" which, we were told, includes
a number who were killed. The story is
simply horrible, and it is to the credit of the
legislative committee that they have not
shrunk from the exposure. We wait to learn
what the state will do about it.
AN article in the N. Y. Independent of Feb.
| Z, described the morals of the negroes in
certain parts of the South as horribly deplor-
able. Miss Annie Porter who resides near
the region described, writes to the hadspen-
dent claiming that the accuser greatly exag-
gerated the moral delinquency of the negroes
but she admits that their morals are at a
| low h ~ fha haef Go Two.
dictory statements are made of the Southern
| negro, information from reliable source is
| valuable and of much interest. The follow
| ing statement of Miss Porter in reference tc
exaggerated accounts is therefore given as
follows: TOO much of that article is true OF
the colored people of this section-the heart
of the cotton-growing belt-but that it is
much exaggerated for even the locality OF
which the writer speaks, cannot but feel
In this county there are five colored persons
to one white one. / have lived here fourteen
| years as teacher, merchant and planter,
have met them in all relations, and I must
positively assert that the colored people arr
progressing, and, taking all things into con-
| cideration, their progress has been surpris-
| ingly rapid. Some one, in the american Is
raelite, said of them: They are the most re-
igious people in the world, and the most i'm
| moral;' and certainly there seems to be nc
morality in their religion. Fit were not SO
if, when they get religion as they term it,
| they made an attempt to become morally
better, their advancement would be more
rapid; but that they are becoming more and
more savage and brutalized in Arkansas,
Mississippi and Louisiana-the states with
which I am best acquainted, with the pos
sible exception of the quiet country neigh
borhood' of which your correspondent writes
4 must positively deny, and quite as posi-
| lively assert the reverse to be the fact. With
in my observation, the percentage of white
men killed by white men is greater than
that of colored men killed by colored men.
In concluding an editorial on The Future
of the ,Colored Race The Weekly Times-Dm-
oorat, of New Orleans, Feb. 18th, says;
''Lastly, there can be no doubt that the
colored people of the South are progressing
Intellectually, and that their habits and
modes Of life will be changed for the better
within another generation"
AN interesting question recently came be-
fore the Court of Common Pleas, of Toledo,
in Ohio. A coiored man, by the name of
Anderson, was married in that city in 1888,
and soon after the marriage was criminally
prosecuted on the charge of bigamy. The
ground of the charge was the fact that, being
a slave in Bedford Country in Virginia, in
1861, he was in that year married to a slave
woman in that country, who was still living.
The legal question that arose was whether
this first marriage, being contracted while
Anderson was slave, had any validity in
law, so as to sustain the prosecution for biga-
my against him on the ground of the second
marriage. The court instructed the jury
that, under the system of slavery as it form
erly existed in this country, slaves, being
deemed to be the property of their masters,
could not make legal contracts of any kind,
and also that the courts had decided that a
slave marriage became legally valid by the
parties living together as husband and wife
after the Emancipation Proclamation of Pre-
sident Lincoln went into effect. The ques-
ton whether Anderson was guilty of bigamy
or not thus turned ON the question whether,
after the Presidents proclamation, he had
lived with the woman as husband whom he
married when both we're slaves; and, in res
pect to this question, the jury returned YER
dict of not guilty. This case revives the
memory of those dark and horrid days iu the
history of this country when the marriage
contract between slayes had no legal recogn-
ition or legal protection, and when the slave
family was in the same predicament. The
relation of master and slave absorbed and
destroyed all other relations. Happily, those
| days are gone, never to return.