The Green Bag
526
them from going to jail, reluctantly
paid over $34 to the officer on the assurance
that Clyde’s
mother
and
Judge Speer's charge to the grand jury was notable as a recital of the history of the federal District Court of
brother would be responsible for the debt. After that there was some conflict in the evidence as to whether Clyde and Maud worked as hard as they should have on their crop. One witness said that Clyde would report his crop "as clean as the big road," and another testified that he was seen asleep in the “jam" of the fence. However, Dupree insisted that his two croppers had not done their work properly and decided
servitude has been for centuries the loftiest task of the enlightened, the hu man and the far-seeing. It existed generally among nations in their primi tive condition. ‘The early law of Rome, while prohibiting contracts of usury, still gave the legal creditors the speedy remedy of dividing the carcass of their
that they should go to jail for what they
debtor and selling him and his family
owed him.
into slavery.' The slavery of white men once existed in England. You will
He swore out a warrant
under the Georgia labor contract law, charging them with cheating and swind
ling and failing to work. Clyde and Maud accordingly went
to jail.
Rodgers, the jailer, loses the
warrants and has no entry of their names on the jail books. He calls on
Dupree and the latter says he is willing for anybody to have the prisoners for $100. At the end of eight days, the negroes get out of jail through the kind
intervention of one Chauncey,
Georgia and as a discussion of the crime of peonage, from which we select the following interesting passage: “To abolish slavery and involuntary
recall in the majestic, historic novel of ‘Ivanhoe’ how Gurth, the swineherd,
is described as wearing the metal collar indicating that he was the thrall, or slave of Cedric, the Saxon. The charac ter, while fictitious, is typical of the conditions of slavery as they existed in
the days of Richard the Lion Heart» and for years afterward in that wonder
ful land whence we draw our own laws,
and where, in the familiar lines of
who advances the necessary money to Dupree and sets them to work to_ satisfy the debt which he has transferred to
Tennyson:—
himself. On these facts Chauncey, Dupree,
“The great men who framed our re public, while the greatest of them were slave-holders, almost to a man were
Rodgers and Home were indicted for conspiring to commit the crime of peonage; Chauncey having warned the negroes that they must stay in his employment to work out an illegal debt to himself, Dupree having deprived them of their personal liberty to collect what he claimed they owed him, Rodgers
having held them in jail without right and released them for a consideration, and Home having served, without
reading it, the warrant through which Dupree placed them in jail.
"Freedom broadened slowly down from pre cedent to precedent.
opposed to the institution of slavery Many of them manumitted their own slaves, and others predicted the calami ties the institution would bring upon our country.
Indeed, the fact that the
British King obliged the Americans to receive shipments of African slaves was incorporated by Mr. Jefferson in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence as one of the reasons why we should sever all connection with Great Britain. Mr. Jefferson, John
