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At the 1897 National Prison Association convention, Thomas J. Goree, superintendent of the Texas penitentiary from 1877 to 1891, regaled the audience with an apocryphal tale about emancipation, blacks, and their propensity for theft. At war’s end, Goree’s mother informed her slaves they were free and that all laws now applied to them. A plantation blacksmith asked Mrs. Goree if this included “stealing.” Yes, she replied, since this violated the criminal code. The former slave artisan claimed he should have been trained as a brick mason instead of as a blacksmith because if blacks were sent to prison for theft, the state would have to build a wall extending five miles out on the prairie to hold all those convicted.1 His statement proved to be prophetic. A study of black prisoners confined in the Texas state penitentiary during the years immediately following the Civil War catalogues the patterns of crime, rates of violence, and reasons for imprisonment for the former slaves. In the early years of Reconstruction, the Lone Star State experienced mayhem of epidemic proportions. Yet blacks, who were most often the victims of violence, rarely responded in a like manner. As compared to whites, black individuals did not commit much violence, nor were black communities plagued by it. Nevertheless, one year after the end of the war, blacks composed almost one-half of the total prison population in the state penitentiary at Huntsville. A watershed in southern prison development, the Civil War “changed the status of half of the population—the slaves—who were most liable to penal action, and it thus created a wholly new situation for the penal system to deal with.” Blacks were “jammed into overcrowded and dilapidated penal facilities constructed in antebellum days primarily ‘for whites only.’” According to C. Vann Woodward in Origins of the New South, “among the institutions of the Old Order that strained to meet the needs of the New, none proved more hopelessly inadequate than the old penitentiaEight THE FETTERS OF JUSTICE Black Texans and the Penitentiary during Reconstruction 160 Reaction ries.” Called upon to assume the “plantation’s penal functions,” prisons had neither the proper facilities nor the personnel to function effectively.2 Works that focus upon the Reconstruction-era Texas penitentiary, like those about other southern prisons, largely ignore or only pay lip service to the dramatic increase in the number of black inmates during the early years of Reconstruction, when the Conservatives were in power. Most of the published and unpublished historical scholarship on the Texas state prison (again, similar to works on other southern prisons) deals with a later period (when convict leasing was the vogue), the administrative history of the prison, or its political relationship with the state government, often giving only a cursory glance at the prisoners. What occurred before the advent of convict leasing is every bit as significant.3 By 1849 the impulse to build penitentiaries had reached its southernand westernmost point. Texas erected a prison at Huntsville, the second largest in the South. Modeled after Mississippi’s penal institution, it resembled a textile factory, which it was, and later returned considerable profits. In its first decade of operation, the Texas penitentiary was comparable to those of other southern states. In 1850, ten inmates resided in the prison, and by 1851 the roll had swelled to thirty-eight. The first woman entered in 1854. Convicted of infanticide, she served a one-year confinement. Although the records are somewhat vague for 1849–1860, five slaves seem to have served time in Huntsville during that period.4 The prison population fluctuated during the war. Texas established military prisons, specifically at Camp Groce, but also used Huntsville to house thirty-three prisoners of war. Moreover, to assist its Union-occupied neighbors—Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri—the Texas government volunteered to incarcerate any person from these three states sentenced to “hard labor.” As the war turned against the South, no institution was safe from plundering—including the prison, which produced wagon sheets, flour sacking, and other cloth products for the Confederate Army. Perhaps looking for clothing or other items, a Confederate colonel and his men robbed the penitentiary. To their surprise, the raiders discovered blacks in the prison.5 Ironically, on January 1, 1863, six black crewmen off the U.S. steamer Harriet Lane were captured in Galveston harbor and transported to the penitentiary , despite their assertions of being free. Three weeks later, twentynine more blacks—twenty...

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