Famous Bastards of Florida, Pt. Deux
The Turpentine Industry and Constitutional Enslaved Labor
We’re jumping ahead in Florida history a bit. Like most of its history, this is an ugly story. Also, like most of what I write about, I went down this rabbit hole when researching Florida foodways. In this case, I was studying something called Rosin Potatoes, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like, potatoes boiled in pine rosin. How the dish came to be is a trip into how horrible humans can be.
Florida has always had an “open for business” stance, especially if the business is generous with campaign donations. One of the best ways that Florida was open for business was by exploiting the asterisk in the 13th Amendment. Most people know that the 13th ended slavery. But many are unaware that the authors left a gaping hole still allowing enslavement for people convicted of a crime. Convict leasing became a highly lucrative industry, benefiting governments and private businesses, but never the prisoner. Major corporations like McDonald’s and Wendy’s have used convict labor to process beef patties, Victoria’s Secret has used the same to sew lingerie, Starbucks used prison labor to package coffee. Convictive labor has also staffed car rental, banking, and airline call centers. So nothing that I’m talking about here is really in the past; you’re never far from goods or services essentially provided by legalized enslavement.
But Florida had turpentine camps. Anyone who’s ever driven through the Florida woods has encountered the symmetry of our pine forests. The majority of our old-growth is long gone, replaced with easily planted and harvested, perfectly straight rows of Longleaf Pines. Lumber was valuable in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but turpentine harvested from the pines was even more valuable. Because of its ubiquity in products of the time, turpentine became Florida’s second-largest industry, demurring only to citrus. Turpentine was found in ink, paint, lamp oil, soaps, and medicines and was also heavily used in the marine industry.
At its basics, processing turpentine isn’t all different from making maple syrup. Workers collect pine sap from 1000s of trees running into small pots. Those pots would be dumped into large barrels and taken to a centrally located still in the woods. The crude “gum” would undergo a distillation process and come out the other end as turpentine. Yes, it is a much more detailed process than that, but that’s the gist of it. Harvesting and processing required an extensive workforce in a hostile environment. The woods were full of mosquitos, biting flies, and other bugs. Swamps, bogs, and creeks dot the land, and with those came gators, snakes, and more bugs. All of this is before we factor in the heat, humidity, and generally dangerous and horrific working conditions of the Gilded Age and the decades following, both environmental and human. People weren’t exactly lining up for the work with all of this taken into account. Those who were desperate enough to do so wanted to be paid for their work, a fact that was problematic to unchecked capitalism.
Like most states in the Jim Crow South, Florida created two sets of crimes; those that carried jail time and those that carried fines. The latter benefitted a small, privileged minority of wealthy citizens, who could merely reach in their pocket and be on their merry way. The majority of the citizenry would be unable to do the same, and the courts converted their fines to jail time. While these sentences applied to poor people of all colors, they disproportionately affected Black citizens and still do. Add to the mix that peonage - forced labor as repayment of debts - was the law of the land during this time. Poor people who could not buy their way out of their offenses or obligations filled many jails.
Running jails is expensive. Anyone running for public office, from dog catcher to president, will tell you so even if it has no bearing on their job. To defray the expenses, Florida and many other states used the 13th to their advantage. Convict leasing became the norm. Florida state prisons would lease convicts to “employers” with the highest bid on two-year contracts. A bid-winner could put prisoners to work in their industry, such as turpentine or phosphate, or use them to make money by subletting them to other companies. Less publicly, county jails would lease short-term prisoners to local interests, which led to nefarious old boy deals and widespread exploitation. Minor offenses frequently became death sentences for the imprisoned workers due to the very nature of the work and conditions in which their employers held them.
Even with this system in place, there was still a shortage of cheap labor. Since the powers that be in the early Jim Crow era were the same powers of the Antebellum period, the view of Blacks as nothing but a labor source remained unchanged. But how to get more Black bodies to feed the system was the question. Outside of the convict leasing system, the Company Store model was in full effect. Employers paid less than they charged for food and housing. An employee who left a job owing the employer for back rent, food, or tools could expect to be tracked down and returned to work without the involvement or oversight of the local constabulary. To lend legitimacy to this practice, a law created in 1891 stated that anyone who accepted “money or any other thing of value” in exchange for labor and did not deliver a complete return would be guilty of fraud. That fraud would then require working off the debt as the cycle perpetuated.
In the early 1900s, the Florida-Georgia Sawmill Association sought to "make the vagrancy laws of Georgia and Florida more effective" to feed the machine further. In addition to an already lengthy list of possible vagrancy offenses, the association spread money around to curry favor and change current statutes. “Persons who neglected their calling or employment and all able-bodied males over the age of 18 without means of support and who remain in idleness” now fit the bill for vagrancy. In short, arrests occurred simply because someone -usually the arrester - said that the person was a vagrant—anything to feed to the work camp machine. These were the gulags of the USA.
Once there, in addition to the work conditions already described, workers faced living conditions and crew bosses no different than Antebellum times. Scant food, often rotten, was provided and billed to the worker, as were the tools necessary to do the job. Beatings and whippings for non-compliance or insubordination were the norms. Discussion of punishment was justification for a further beating. The wooden sweatbox portrayed in “Cool Hand Luke” was frequently deployed as punishment for both minor and major offenses. Escapees would be tracked and hunted by camp guards with limited hope of survival, should they be caught. No visitors were allowed at the camps.
Some prisoners went as long as fifteen years without seeing anyone not associated with the company due to their peonage going unpaid. Chattel enslavement, as codified in the US Constitution, lived on.
Even though this treatment was not exclusive to Blacks, poor white people were also subject to it; an out-of-sight-out-of-mind mentality permeated an apathetic public. It wasn’t their outrage or work to change the system, even in the early Civil Rights movements of the 1950s, that put an end to these camps. In the end, it was technology and a shift towards other products that made them economically inefficient. Humans couldn’t be arsed to lift a finger to change any of it. It’s also a glaring example of our history of governance by industry. They have the capital to shape legislation to their benefit, even if the benefit is in human lives.
As described above, the abuses continue in the prison-for-profit model, still disproportionately affecting people of color. It's important to note also that enslavement continues in modern times in our communities in areas such as sex work or agriculture. We wrap it in a prettier bow with terms like Human Trafficking, which minimizes the reality of people actually being enslaved. The last known case of modern-day slavery prosecuted in Florida was only 15 years ago. The truck that the workers were held captive in is now a traveling museum one can visit should they find themselves in Immokalee.
By the way, I’ve never brought myself to make rosin potatoes because I feel that the legacy responsible for their creation is too horrific and that it would be an approving nod to those mechanisms.
Thanks for sharing. Robert and I recently went down the early history of sugar production in Florida rabbit hole. Lots of parallels. The sunshine state definitely has a dark history. 😥