Slavery to peonage

With the nation focused on race relations, it’s a good time to be reading a book that outlines the often violent history of Arkansas. Written by Van Hawkins of Jonesboro, the author of eight previous books, it’s titled Moaning Low: From Slavery to Peonage, Involuntary Servitude in the Arkansas Delta. It’s not a feel-good story, but it’s an important one for those who want to understand Arkansas history, warts and all.

Hawkins describes it as “a story about the ruthless suppression of vulnerable people by unscrupulous Delta planters and powerful business interests. It began when the Civil War ended and freedmen became their target. It continued when black farm workers struggled to protect their families. At the start of the Great Depression, planters suppressed white laborers as well, cheating them out of government assistance. The crime of peonage initially covered labor locked in place by debt, but it became involuntary servitude by many means.

“These included debt peonage, a term used advisedly since alleged debt often consisted of fiction written by landlords; contract law disregarding civil rights; criminal surety frequently accomplished through selectively applied vagrancy laws; work under threat of violence; convict leasing; and kidnapping followed by physical enslavement. Victims found themselves caught in a spider’s web, with planters at the center among strands often woven by Jim Crow. Like other American tragedies, this one involved control of land, some of the richest agricultural ground in the United States.”

Most Arkansans don’t realize that the huge fields of row crops that they think of as the Delta once consisted of swamps and dense bottomland forests. The New Madrid Earthquakes of late 1811 and early 1812 made Arkansas an even tougher place to settle. Millions of trees were toppled. The land sunk, forming Delta landmarks such as Big Lake and the St. Francis Sunken Lands. Hawkins describes it as “gloomy swamps with countless interlaced trees and brush and water covered with a coat resembling green

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buff velvet.”

“Valuable soil lay below this inhospitable cover, and a brutal process of recovery at first fell upon the backs of enslaved people,” he writes. “They worked in rancid water amid swarming mosquitoes and endured scalding heat and wilting humidity. Slaves felled trees, cut them into logs and burned underbrush. In the night sky, flames roared upward amid billowing smoke and ashes like a scene described by Dante. Some who faltered endured unmerciful beatings. Despite formidable obstacles, new ground emerged throughout the Delta. Given the rich soil, temperature ranges, average annual rainfall and growing season, cotton proved to be an ideal crop.”

In his 1992 book The Most Southern Place on Earth, which focuses on the Delta, historian James C. Cobb noted that those who questioned whether the region could be cleared and then farmed efficiently “failed to take into account the determination, rapacity and cruelty that humans could exhibit if the proper incentives were in place.”

“Cruelty and rapacity dominated cotton fields throughout the South since production of the fiber required extensive labor,” Hawkins writes. “The crop had to be planted, chopped and picked by hand. Great Britain’s mills preferred long-staple American cotton, so demand expanded rapidly. By 1860, Southern cotton growers supplied most of the cotton manufactured in Great Britain and in New England’s mills. The Union’s Civil War blockade ended the boom, causing many British textile factories to go bust. But demand returned after the war, and buyers began to ship approximately 1 million bales a year through New Orleans.

“Many white Southerners blamed the war’s devastation on enslaved persons, so racial hatred and desperation for laborers combined to force workers into peonage conditions some considered akin to slavery. Harnessing a large, subservient labor force to clear unimproved land for cotton continued for decades in the Delta. It stretched out due to late development of regions that remained largely untamed until early in the 20th century. … Many planters who victimized black workers convinced themselves, or pretended to believe for economic reasons, that they were doing their victims a favor.”

In his 2002 book American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow, Jerrold M. Packard described the attitude of planters this way: “Didn’t both God and reason … declare the Negro inferior to the white Man, and wasn’t the black Man thus fulfilling his proper even though lesser station in life by serving a superior class that was at the same time providentially providing him with work and shelter and protection.”

When blacks left as part of the Great Migration to industrial cities, planters looked elsewhere for labor. Hawkins says they brought in “poor immigrants by using spurious promises of financial opportunities. Italians and other Europeans found themselves victims of peonage upon arrival in the Delta. As the 20th century advanced, so did the arc of abuse. It became a way of life for poor black and white families. During the 1930s and beyond, planters cheated both out of federal assistance provided during the Great Depression. The same forms of peonage existed throughout the South because planters, legal authorities, business allies and Southern politicians blocked efforts to end them. Some Southern dynasties achieved their success this way and refused to admit it. But as Abraham Lincoln made clear in an 1862 message to Congress, we cannot escape history.”