East African Doctors A History of the Modern Profession Book

A slim book but packed with solid analysis, reference, and great anecdotes outlining the fundamental inhumanity, cupidity, and official savagery of the period, domestic as well as imperial. The roots of the convict lease and chain gang systems as practiced in the postbellum South are found here, their goals being identical: to reduce nominal freemen to a state of grateful submission through legal terror. This terrorizing of the "lower orders" through "the rigorous interpretation and application of law" was freely admitted by its proponents, as quoted by Mr. Coldham on p. 11: "Hopeless slavery was the proper condition for labourers," according to Andrew Fletcher, MP Saltoun; "such people existed only to work and that politicians should be able to limit their existence by work." Thus "the freedom of the few was bought by the servitude of the many," a state of affairs openly advocated by many so-called libertarians today.

The law was specifically framed to snare the poor offender against property, raising the list of capital crimes to ridiculous lengths: a cottager who cut down trees in an orchard deserved the death penalty; a slumlord committing arson to collect insurance money, endangering the lives of dozens of tenants, committed a misdemeanor. So unconscionable were the contradictory lengths of such class-biased law that more "humane" justices would offer plea bargains of transportation for "reduced offenses" like stealing a handkerchief. Thus the "justice" as well as "the majesty" of the law was upheld, contracting ship captains ensured plentiful marketable cargo, and colonial American planters assured ready labor for expanding fields of "endeavour."

But, while many of the transported may have been "rough and ready rogues" who would have seen the law's hard end under any system, Coldham stresses (p. 14) that "the majority of those transported to the colonies may, however, be justly regarded as having fallen victim to oppressive circumstances and harsh environment rather than as professional villains." This is exactly parallel to the postbellum freedman bound by vagrancy and debt laws into servitude in coal mines and turpentine camps. The law was designed to subvert "the rights of Englishmen" as much as possible for the poor, for in this age a white skin counted for naught.

The British penal system missed not a beat, however, when the practice was forcefully stopped by the US Congress in the 1780s, flowing directly into the Australian transport system. Whenever we hear clucking noises coming from the usual suspects over Russian gulags and Siberian exiles, one must recall why so many white, colonial British-Americans cannot properly trace their forbears any more than the chained Africans who followed them.

(Worth a look also is Ben Franklin's appended 1751 satire, "On the Subject of Transportation," where he advocates deporting rattlesnakes back to England as an equal opportunity of social reform and usefulness as provided by transportation.)