Many will recall the popular and successful film Cool Hand Luke. It starred Paul Newman alongside a cast of future all-stars — George Kennedy, Wayne Rogers, and Strother Martin. On its surface, the plot centers on a Southern prison camp. In truth, its author, Donn Pearce, built the story out of his own years on a Florida chain gang. This article is about that side of our beloved state: the convict-lease system — slavery preserved under a new name — stood up almost the moment the Civil War ended.
Contrary to the tidy lesson taught in most schools, slavery did not end with the Civil War. It was renamed. What the war never touched was the appetite of a certain kind of predator — those high-functioning, morally vacant men who have always considered it their god-given right to use up anyone they deem beneath them.
Let's clear up a common misconception about that harsh word, convict. The label implies someone who imposed his — and sometimes her — will on the weaker and less fortunate. Yet, as the story has it, Luke was arrested after a drunken night spent lopping the heads off parking meters. He never pocketed a cent of what was inside; those coins were the property of the people who ran the town. He was found passed out in the lot. No innocent soul was harmed. Luke had merely lashed out at society's inequity.
As we careen deeper into the twenty-first century, we've come to see that even the Constitution of the United States can be bent to a cruel purpose. The proof sits inside the Thirteenth Amendment, the very article that made slavery illegal — except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. How convenient.
Seize control of the justice system, and those two words — duly convicted — become a fog: cover for arbitrary punishment, kept profitable by complicit law enforcement and by corporations forever tending their bottom line.
I'm old enough to have been threatened, as a boy, with a one-way trip to the Division of Youth Services school in Marianna, Florida. It was the seventies, and the place was finally losing its grip — rightfully so. We now know that institution, the Dozier School, as the ground where many young men lost their lives at the hands of the very "officials" sworn to correct them. I put that word in quotes deliberately. I am, one hundred percent, for society's laws and for their enforcement — but not when the men enforcing them answer to something rotten.
Florida became notorious for running an unusually large convict-lease operation. Before the war, the state's enslaved population was smaller in raw numbers than that of older slave states like Virginia. Afterward, Florida's officials more than made up the difference, leaning into the "legal" convict-lease system with a vengeance.
One of the largest industries to draw on that labor was turpentine — the so-called "Naval Stores" trade. Turpentine and pitch waterproofed the world's wooden ships, enriching, once again, the men who profited from global commerce and from war.
By now we all understand that the men who traffic in human misery do their best work in the dark. Light has a way of disinfecting the stench of cruelty.
The case that finally broke the system belonged to Martin Tabert. A young man from North Dakota, the great crime of this twenty-two-year-old drifter was riding a train without paying his fare. For that, he was flogged to death in a Florida swamp. It made no difference to the men who ran and profited from the machine; their creed was simple — "one dies, get another." It was a behemoth, and it demanded a steady feeding of fresh bodies, now that the slave markets were gone.
Sheriffs collected a cash fee for every convict they leased — twenty dollars in some cases, real money in the early twentieth century.
Had it not been for Gudmundur Grimson — the North Dakota prosecutor who pressed an investigation into Tabert's death on behalf of the grieving family — the system might have ground on for decades more.
The "Florida Man" punchline has become a national joke. But understand the harsh, coercive world this state was built upon, and you begin to see why Floridians whose families have lived here for generations defend their independence so fiercely. It is one of the few ways left to push back against a global appetite that still feeds on human misery.