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 The Green Bag

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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