#OnThisDay, 23 Apr 1872, Charlotte E Ray was admitted to the bar in the District of Columbia (USA). She is the first Black woman to be certified as a lawyer in the USA.

Read more: https://carvehername.org.uk/charlotte-e-ray-and-143-years-of-progress/

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory #WomensHistory #Histodons

The 1950s promised the perfect American family—suburbs, single income, nuclear home. But beneath the surface, cracks were already forming.
Read here: https://www.djoinerbooks.com/fabulous-fifties-american-family-changed/

#AmericanHistory #1950s #Family #SocialChange #PostwarAmerica #TheTurn

The redistribution of institutional power is frequently a direct consequence of systemic crisis and sociopolitical pressure. 🏛️📜

"Historical Crises in American History That Redefined Power." For those interested in historiography, constitutional development, and the structural history of the United States, this is an excellent resource.

Full article here:
🔗 https://www.djoinerbooks.com/historical-crises-in-american-history/

#Historiography #DennisJoiner #AmericanHistory #PoliticalEvolution #PublicInterest #StructuralHistory #USGov

Thomas Leonard (1752-1832), Son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard: Maryland Beginnings

Or, Subtitled: “Formerly Sergeant in the war of 1753 Genl. Washinton’s first Ridgiment and in the Late American war with Britain in the Maryland Ridgiment as Sergeant till killd. in Genl. Gatises Defiat”

Date of Birth

The dates of birth and death of Thomas Leonard, son of Robert Leonard and Honor Pritchard, are recorded on his tombstone in the Leonard family cemetery north of Petersburg, Marshall County, Tennessee. The cemetery, which I visited in February 2008, is on the land Thomas Leonard bought in then Lincoln, now Marshall County, in September 1809 when he moved his family from Pendleton District, South Carolina, to Tennessee. The family lived on this land about 2½ miles north of Petersburg, the Marshall County seat, at what’s now called Leonard Bluff on Liberty Valley Road. The cemetery is located behind the site of an old family house known as the Leonard homestead that stood up to the middle of the 20th century but was no longer there by the 1990s.[1] I’ll discuss this house in more detail later.

The Leonard family cemetery in which Thomas Leonard and wife Hannah James Leonard are buried is said by family tradition to date to the generation of Thomas’ mother Honor Pritchard Leonard, who accompanied the family from South Carolina to Tennessee and is thought by descendants to have died after 1810. According to researcher Elizabeth Lucie Leonard Baxter, Honor is buried in the cemetery in an unmarked grave.[2] When I visited the cemetery in 2008, I noted a row of headstones too weathered to read, in a shape and style that suggested to me that these stones might date from the early 19th century. By 2008, the tombstones of Thomas and wife Hannah were also impossible for me to read. Thomas’ Find a Grave memorial page includes a photo of his stone that is fairly clear and allows the inscription to be made out.[3] See the top of this posting for a digital image.

It reads:

Thomas Leonard

Born

Oct. 15 1752

Died

April 8 1832

The tombstones of Thomas and wife Hannah are matching stones that appear to date from not long after Hannah’s death on 3 November 1842. I suspect, but do not know for certain, that they were erected by Thomas and Hannah’s son Griffith James Leonard (1787-1864), who inherited the family homeplace in his father’s will, and who lived there up to his death. Griffith and his wife are buried in the family cemetery along with several generations of their descendants and other family members.

As a previous posting notes, in his 1883 manuscript entitled “Biography of the Leonards,” Thomas Leonard’s grandson Thomas Dunlap Leonard (1810-1888), a son of Thomas and Hannah Leonard’s son Robert (1777-1844), states that Thomas Leonard’s father Robert Leonard (bef. 1730-1780) was “a soldier of the English Army” who came to Maryland — as a British soldier — around 1750.[4] As the linked posting also tells you (and see here), Thomas Dunlap Leonard’s manuscript states as well that he knew his grandparents Thomas and Hannah James personally, and that he grew up in Tennessee close to them before his family moved to nearby Madison County, Alabama, about 1818. His information on the early generations of the Leonard family rests on what his grandparents shared with him and other family members.

Place of Birth

Thomas Dunlap Leonard’s manuscript does not state a place of birth for his grandfather Thomas Leonard, but does indicate that Thomas married wife Hannah James “of Maryland” about 1775, and the family then lived in Maryland before moving to South Carolina in 1786. As the previously linked posting also says, a number of records place Thomas Leonard’s father Robert at Fort Frederick some eighteen miles west of Hagerstown in the period leading up to the Revolution. Historian Henry Peden notes that Robert Leonard was stationed at Fort Frederick by August 1757, and that the account book of Colonel John Dagworthy, field commander at Fort Frederick in 1756, shows Robert Leonard paid for service by Dagworthy on 7 March 1763.[5] A document dated 8 February 1755 shows Robert Leonard indenturing his son William on that date to a local farmer and identifying himself as a soldier serving under Captain “Dagurthey.”[6]

These records suggest that when Robert Leonard’s son Thomas was born on 15 October 1752, he was very likely born in the part of Frederick County, Maryland, that would become Washington County in September 1776. Fort Frederick, where we can definitely place Thomas Leonard’s father Robert by 1757, was constructed in 1756 west of Hagerstown, as noted above, in what’s now Washington County.  Its construction was financed by Joseph Chapline of Sharpsburg in Washington County, who had ties to Griffith James, who lived at Sharpsburg and whose daughter Hannah Thomas Leonard married about 1775.[7] The likelihood that Thomas Leonard was born in Hagerstown in Frederick (later Washington) County, Maryland, seems to me very strong.[8]

Revolutionary Service, Hagerstown, Maryland, Militia

Previously, I’ve also noted that Thomas Leonard appears in a list of members of the first military company organized for the Revolutionary war in Hagerstown on 6 January 1776.[9] Thomas J. Scharf, whose History of Western Maryland including Frederick and Washington Counties I’ve just footnoted, transcribes a declaration the militia members signed on this date in January, noting that the company was being formed to serve the Council of Safety of Maryland. As the linked posting notes, in addition to Thomas Leonard, those signing included Richard Moore, whose father Daniel Moore lived in Sharpsburg next to a Dean family intermarried with the family of Griffith James, as well as brothers Samuel and Thomas Dean.[10] Samuel Dean was Thomas Leonard’s brother-in-law. He married Gwendolyn James, sister of Thomas’ wife Hannah James, in 1773. This militia unit was under the command of Joseph Chapline, the founder of Sharpsburg, who was connected to Thomas Leonard’s father-in-law Griffith James from the time Griffith James first appears in Sharpsburg records in September 1763.[11]

Sharpsburg is bit over thirteen miles south of Hagerstown, which was originally known as Elizabethtown. Scharf is citing minutes of the Elizabethtown District Committee of Observation for 5 June 1776, which say that on that date, a list was presented to the committee compiled on 6 January 1776 of a group of men who signed their names to a resolution to form a militia per a resolution of the Provincial Convention held at Annapolis on 26 July 1775.[12] Thomas Leonard’s sister Mary Ann married Colin Campbell at Hagerstown on 27 July 1780, and Hannah James’s sister Mary James married Harmon Cummings on 7 September 1779 at Hagerstown.[13] Both couples were married by Reverend George Mitchell of Hagerstown.[14]

We can, then, confidently place Thomas Leonard in a militia company organized for Hagerstown in Washington County, Maryland, in January 1776, in the year after it’s thought he married Hannah James of nearby Sharpsburg. In the same militia company was Samuel Dean, who married Hannah’s sister Gwendolyn in 1773. Signing next to Thomas Leonard in the declaration establishing this militia was Richard Moore, who had close ties to the family of Griffith James into which Thomas Leonard and Samuel Dean married. And leading the militia unit was Joseph Chapline, the founder of Sharpsburg with ties to Griffith James. In September 1779, another sister of Hannah and Gwendolyn James, their sister Mary, married Harmon Cummings in Hagerstown, and in July 1780, Thomas Leonard’s sister Mary Ann married Colin Campbell in Hagerstown. Both of these couples were married by Rev. George Mitchell, a Hagerstown pastor.

There are multiple pointers to Hagerstown or nearby Sharpsburg as the place in which Thomas Leonard lived from the time he married Hannah James about 1775, Hagerstown also being his probable place of birth…. Then in or just before 1786, as noted above, Thomas Leonard and wife Hannah moved their family to Pendleton District, South Carolina. This is a move that Thomas and Hannah made along with her sister Gwendolyn and husband Samuel Dean and her sister Mary and husband Harmon Cummings. The tradition of these families is that they moved to South Carolina from Washington County, Maryland.[15]

Dean Family’s Connections to Cumberland (and Bedford) County, Pennsylvania

But researcher Beverly Dean Peoples, a descendant of Samuel Dean and Gwenny James, finds a pattern of back-and-forth movement of some of her Dean ancestors from Washington County, Maryland to Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and its daughter counties of Bedford and Huntingdon in the 1770s.[16] Beverly states, “[P]rior to the move to SC with his wife’s family, Samuel [Dean] had tried to establish a home in the now Huntingdon County, PA area with his brothers Thomas, William and John.” Land records place Samuel in Huntingdon’s parent county of Bedford in 1774, and histories of the area state that he began building a house in Bedford County in 1773. Beverly thinks that Samuel’s brother William first claimed land in Cumberland County in 1766 before Beford was split from Cumberland in 1771, with Huntingdon then being formed from Bedford in 1787.

Since Samuel Dean is in the January 1776 Hagerstown militia list with his brother-in-law Thomas Leonard, he evidently had not moved his family permanently from Maryland to Pennsylvania in these years. Beverly notes that the reported birthplaces of the children of Samuel Dean and Gwendolyn James suggest that the family may have been coming and going in the 1770s between Maryland and Pennsylvania, and that as the Dean brothers were considering new locations for their families in Pennsylvania, they may have left their wives in Washington County for much of the time when they were sojourning in Pennsylvania, where skirmishes between native peoples and settlers of European descent were creating dangers for incoming settlers. Beverly Peoples notes that Samuel returned to Washington County from Pennsylvania for good in 1784, selling his land in Pennsylvania, and at this point, he joined with his brothers-in-law in their plan to move to South Carolina.

I mention Beverly’s well-researched findings about the history of the Dean family during this period because if Thomas Leonard’s brother-in-law Samuel Dean was moving with his brothers between Washington County, Maryland, and Cumberland (or Bedford) County, Pennsylvania, in the 1770s and early 1780s, it seems to me worth asking if Thomas Leonard might have been making similar moves. We know that he was definitely in the Hagerstown militia in 1776, and he begins appearing in Pendleton District, South Carolina, records in 1786. So the time frame in which I’m suggesting that Thomas might have spent some time in Cumberland or Bedford Counties, Pennsylvania, would be in that decade, 1776-1786.

In fact, I have not found any clear records showing this Thomas Leonard in Cumberland or Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in that decade. However, I want to point to a record I shared in a previous posting. In the posting I’ve just linked, I shared a digital image of a 12 September 1800 power of attorney given by signed by Thomas, his brother Robert, their mother Honor, and their brother-in-law Colin Campbell to James Irwin of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. I’ve reposted that image here. As the linked posting explains, this document passed down among descendants of Thomas Leonard and Hannah James and in 1972 was in the possession of descendant Leonard Wilson of Petersburg, Tennessee. I have not found this power of attorney recorded in court records of Pendleton District, South Carolina, or Cumberland County, Pennsylvania.

September 1800 Power of Attorney of Leonard Heirs to James Irwin of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania

As you’ll see as you look at the image of this power of attorney, what it says is not easy to make out. Part of the document is torn away, and some words defeat me as I try to read them. The following transcript is my best attempt at reading this document:

The Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, location of James Irwin leaps out at me, of course, as I read this document in conjunction with Beverly People’s research about her Dean family members of Washington County, Maryland, before Samuel Dean and wife Gwendolyn James moved in 1786 with Thomas Leonard and Hannah James to Pendleton District, South Carolina. Who was James Irwin, and how were the Leonard family members giving him this power of attorney in 1800 connected to him?

In particular, why were they asking him to recover pay due to Robert Leonard for Robert’s service in the French and Indian War and then in the Revolution? This document states that Robert served as a sergeant in George Washington’s first regiment in the “war of 1753.” I think that “war of 1753” is a reference to what is now conventionally called the French and Indian War: Robert’s heirs are not stating that he served under Washington in the year 1753 specifically but in the war that began with hostilities building in 1753 and open warfare commencing in 1754.

As noted previously, we have documentary evidence that Robert Leonard was serving as a British soldier under John Dagworthy in western Maryland by February 1755. In 1756, construction began on Fort Frederick near Hagerstown, with construction completed the following year.[17] As stated above, we know from documentary evidence that Robert Leonard was serving under Dagworthy at Fort Frederick in 1757.[18] Dagworthy’s troops were at Fort Cumberland on the Potomac west of Fort Frederick prior to their move to Fort Frederick. Virginia took possession of Fort Cumberland in the fall of 1755 and this placed Dagworthy on what historian Eric Sterner calls a “collision course” with Washington.[19] Washington was considered to be in charge of the fort, but Dagworthy saw him as a young upstart and refused to submit to his command.

As construction began on Fort Frederick in July 1756, Washington visited the fort, and in June 1758, he returned to the fort during his campaign to capture Fort Duquesne. All during these years, with documentary evidence that Dagworthy paid Robert Leonard for service in March 1763,[20] there was interaction, usually hostile on the side of Dagworthy, between Robert Leonard’s commander John Dagworthy and George Washington. And there were questions about who was in command of whom, so that confusion about whether Robert Leonard was serving under Dagworthy or Washington for part of this period of time is understandable.

The 1780 power of attorney goes on to state that Robert Leonard then served during the Revolution as a sergeant and was killed in the defeat of General Gates. Horatio Gates was defeated by the British at the battle of Camden in South Carolina in August 1780.

And to return to the question of who James Irwin was and why the heirs of Robert Leonard gave him power of attorney in 1800 to recover pay due to Robert for his service in these two wars: there were multiple James Irwins living in Cumberland County in the period 1780-1800. I’ve entertained the idea that a man of this name who was a captain in the 5th company of Cumberland County’s 2nd militia battalion in 1780 is the James Irwin to whom the Leonard heirs gave power of attorney in 1800.[21] I suggest this possibility  because I suspect that the James Irwin of the power of attorney had some military background and ties, if the Leonard heirs were asking him to retrieve back pay for Robert Leonard’s military service.

But I honestly don’t know enough about the Irwin families in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, in this period to be certain that this James is the man named in the Leonard power of attorney. I have also entertained the possibility that a Thomas Leonard who was serving as a lieutenant in a Cumberland County militia unit under Captain William Black is Thomas, son of Robert and Honor, but I suspect this was an entirely different Thomas Leonard.[22] A Thomas Leonard born in New Jersey in 1753 married Esther Cookson in Cumberland County in 1781, with his affidavit given as he claimed a Revolutionary pension stating that he moved to Cumberland County in 1780 after having given Revolutionary service in New Jersey.[23] I think it’s highly likely he was the man who was a lieutenant in a Cumberland County militia unit in 1780.

I do, however, think it’s well worth noting that the heirs of Robert Leonard gave power of attorney to a James Irwin of Cumberland County in 1800, asking him to recover pay due to Robert for Revolutionary service. I think this is well worth noting when we know from Beverly Dean’s exhaustive research on the family of Thomas Leonard’s brother-in-law Samuel Dean that Samuel and his brothers were trekking back and forth between Washington County, Maryland, and Cumberland/Bedford Counties, Pennsylvania, in the 1770s and first part of the 1780s.

By 9 February 1786, Thomas Leonard with wife Hannah James had moved, along with Samuel Dean and wife Gwendolyn James, Harmon Cummings and wife Mary James, and Colin Campbell and wife Mary Ann Leonard, from Washington County, Maryland, to Pendleton District, South Carolina. In my next posting, I’ll pick up the story of Thomas Leonard’s life from the start of his years in South Carolina.

[1] In a telephone conversation with me on 16 December 1996, Jackie Leonard of Athens, Alabama, told me that Leonard homestead land was owned in 1996 by Tommy Wilson, owner of a horse farm, Ridge Vale Farms, whose address was Rt. 1, Petersburg, TN 37144.

[2] See Elizabeth Lucie Leonard Baxter, “Leonard Family,” Marshall County, Tennessee, Historical Quarterly 6,2 (summer 1975), and “Thomas Leonard Family Graveyard,” Marshall County, Tennessee, Historical Quarterly 10,1 (spring 1979), both reporting a transcription of the cemetery headstones made by Baxter on 28 January 1968.

[3] See Find a Grave memorial page for Thomas Leonard, Leonard cemetery, Marshall County, Tennessee, created by Donna B., maintained by LookingForFamily, with a tombstone photo by Jimmy Trout.

[4] Thomas Dunlap Leonard, “Biography of the Leonards” (1883 manuscript now circulated as typescript; present whereabouts are not known).

[5] Henry C. Peden Jr., Marylanders and Delawareans in the French and Indian War 1756-1763 (Lewes, Delaware: Colonial Roots, 2004).

[6] Frederick County, Maryland, Land Record Bk. E, pp. 659-660.

[7] See Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, pp. 798-802, stating that Chapline had sold 215 acres to Daniel Moore and Griffith James. On Joseph Chapline and the founding of Sharpsburg, see Edward C. Papenfuse, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Lee and Barbara Barron, The History of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Founded by Joseph Chapline 1763 (1972), pp. 8f; Maria J. Liggett Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia (priv. publ., 1902); and Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc., vol. 1 (Hagerstown, 1906; repr. Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 23-4.

[8] The one child of Thomas Leonard and Hannah James who was still living when the 1880 federal census was taken was their youngest child Hannah (1795-1886), widow of William Depriest Moore. Hannah was living in 1880 in Marshall County, Tennessee, with her daughter Angelina and Angelina’s husband Joseph John Skidmore Gill. On the 1880 census, Hannah reported the birthplace of both of her parents as Maryland: see 1880 federal census, Marshall County, Tennessee, 4th civil district p. 347 C (ED 135, dwelling 88/family 101; 7 June).

[9] See J. Thomas Scharf, History of Western Maryland: Being a History of Frederick, Montgomery, Carroll, Washington, Allegany, and Garrett Counties, etc., vol. 2 (Philadelphia: L.H. Everts, 1882), pp. 1189-1190.

[10] The Dean home tract, Hunting the Hare, and Griffith James’ home tract, Pough, were across from each other on present-day Burnside Bridge Road close to its intersection with present-day Mills Road just outside Sharpsburg to the southeast. I visited this area in August 2007 and took photos of both pieces of land.

[11] See Frederick County, Maryland, Deed Bk. J, pp. 798-802, stating that Chapline had sold 215 acres to Daniel Moore and Griffith James. On Joseph Chapline and the founding of Sharpsburg, see Edward C. Papenfuse, A Biographical Dictionary of the Maryland Legislature, 1635-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Lee and Barbara Barron, The History of Sharpsburg, Maryland, Founded by Joseph Chapline 1763 (1972), pp. 8f; Maria J. Liggett Dare, Chaplines from Maryland and Virginia (priv. publ., 1902); and Thomas J.C. Williams, A History of Washington County, Maryland, etc., vol. 1 (Hagerstown, 1906; repr. Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1968), pp. 23-4.

[12] See Henry C. Peden Jr., Revolutionary Patriots of Washington County, Maryland 1776-1783 (Westminster, Maryland: Family Line, 1998), p. 210, citing “Proceedings of the Committee of Observation for Elizabeth Town District [Washington County],” Maryland Historical Magazine 12 (1917), p. 270; and Williams, A History of Washington County, p. 1189.

[13] See Maryland Historical Society, Maryland Marriages 1777-1804 (1949), p. 226; and Gaius Marcus Brumbaugh, Maryland Records, vol. 2 (Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 1928; repr. Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1967), p. 522.

[14] In a 3 March 2006 email to me, researcher Barbara Horne told me that she lived in Washington County and believed that Mitchell was a Reformed minister.

[15] See Beverly Dean Peoples and Ralph Terry Dean, Country Cousins: Descendants of Samuel Dean (Franklin, North Carolina: Genealogy Publishing Service, 2001).

[16] See “Richard Deane (1701-1788) and His Children” at Rootsweb.

[17] See Debra R. Boender, “Fort Frederick (Maryland,” in Colonial Wars of North America, 1512-1763: An Encyclopedia, ed. Alan Gallay (Oxford: Routledge, 1996), pp. 236-7;“Frederick, Fort,” in Encyclopedia of the French and Indian War in North America, 1754-1763, ed. Donald I. Stoelzel (Westminster, Maryland: Heritage Books, 2008), p. 160; Maryland Park Service, “Fort Frederick State Park History,” at website of  Maryland Department of Natural Resources; and “Fort Frederick,” in Forts of the United States: An  Historical Dictionary, 16th Through 19th Centuries, ed. Bud Hannings (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006), p. 193.

[18] See supra, n. 5.

[19] Eric Sterner, “General John Dagworthy: George Washington’s Forgotten American Rival,” Journal of the American Revolution (online; 11 October 2017). See also George W. Marshall, Memoir of Brigadier-General John Dagworthy of the Revolutionary War (Wilmington: Historical Society of Delaware, 1895), pp. 13-15; “General John Dagworthy,” in Biographical and Genealogical History of the State of Delaware, vol. 1 (Chambersburg, Pennsylvania: J.M. Runk, 1899), pp. 105-6; “Dagworthy Controversy,” at The Ladies of Mount Vernon’s George Washington’s Mount Vernon website; and “John Dagworthy” at Wikipedia.

[20] See supra, n. 5.

[21] Pennsylvania State Archives, “Cumberland County Revolutionary War Militia,” online at the website of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. On 18 October 1835 in Butler County, Ohio, a James Irwin deposed as he applied for a Revolutionary pension, stating that he was born in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on 16 October 1758. This is not the James Irwin who signed the 1800 Leonard power of attorney. The signature of this James Irwin on his pension affidavit does not match the signature of James Irwin of the power of attorney: see NARA, Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 – ca. 1912, documenting the period ca. 1775 – ca. 1900, RG 15, file of James Irwin, Pennsylvania, S9743, available digitally at Fold3. In February 1833, James Irwin deposed in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which was formed from Cumberland County, as he applied for a Revolutionary pension. The signature of this James on his affidavit does not match that of the James of the 1800 power of attorney: see ibid., file of James Irwin, Pennsylvania, W3689, available digitally at Fold3.

[22] Pennsylvania Archives, fifth series, vol. 6, ed. Thomas Lynch Montgomery (Harrisburg: Harrisburg Publishing Company, 1906), p. 340.

[23] NARA, Case Files of Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Applications Based on Revolutionary War Service, compiled ca. 1800 – ca. 1912, documenting the period ca. 1775 – ca. 1900, RG 15, file of Thomas and Esther Leonard, available digitally at Fold3. See also S. Falsey, “Sgt. Thomas Leonard,” at Brad Leonard’s Leonard Genealogy – Solomons Leonard of Duxbury and Bridgewater.

The fault in our system: Why The George Stinney Jr. story is still important

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Fault in the System
  • The Systemic Failure of 1944
• The Architecture of a Loophole
  • The 13th Amendment and the “Except” Clause
• 81 Days: The Velocity of Injustice
  • Isolation, Confession, and the Ten-Minute Verdict
• The Silent Suspect: When Justice is a Shield
  • The Burke Family and the Protected Elite
• The Physical Impossibility
  • Engineering and the Laws of Physics vs. State Narrative
• The Pattern: Beyond Alcolu
  • The Ghosts of Alexander McClay Williams, Joe Persons, and James Arcene
• The Filter of Justice: Calibrating the Outcome
  • Over-Policing, Differential Processing, and the “Crime Rate” Myth
• The Economic Engineering of Poverty: Wealth Theft
  • The Removal of the Breadwinner and Generational Economic Erasure
• The “Why” of the Present
  • Modern Parallels and the Continuity of Disparity
• A Note on “The Green Mile”
  • Magical Realism vs. Historical Reality
• Conclusion: Closing the Loophole

Introduction: The fault in the system

When I first told my wife and my son about the subject of my next article, they cringed. I don’t blame them. As an engineer who spends my days developing solutions that ensure the reliability and integrity of the systems my clients depend on, my life is dedicated to solutions that are sound. But the story of George Stinney Jr. is a systems failure so profound, so gut-wrenching, that the natural human instinct is to look away.

I struggled with the “why” myself. Why revisit a tragedy from 1944? Why drag a 14-year-old boy back into the light only to watch him sit on a Bible to fit into an electric chair? The answer lies in the foundation of our country. If we do not understand the “Stinney Era,” we cannot understand the modern carceral state. We are not just looking at a sad story; we are looking at the blueprint of mass incarceration—the “teeth” that gave the Jim Crow era its bite.

The Architecture of a Loophole

To understand why George Stinney was executed in 81 days, we have to go back further than 1944. We have to look at the 13th Amendment. While we celebrate it for “ending” slavery, it contained a structural flaw that was exploited by design:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States…”

That “except” clause is the most expensive word in American history. It created a legal bypass. If the state could label a Black person a “criminal,” it could legally return them to a state of servitude. Following the Civil War, Southern states engineered “Black Codes”—laws that criminalized everything from “vagrancy” to “loud talking.” This wasn’t about public safety; it was about labor and social control. The convict leasing system that followed was a direct evolution of the plantation, and by the mid-20th century, this system had evolved into the machinery of state-sanctioned terror that caught George Stinney in its gears.

81 Days: The Velocity of Injustice

In March 1944, in the segregated mill town of Alcolu, South Carolina, two young white girls—Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames—were found dead in a ditch. The town wanted blood. George Stinney Jr., a 95-pound Black boy who had been seen near the girls earlier that day, was the easiest target.

The “system” functioned with terrifying efficiency:

• Isolation: George was interrogated alone. His parents were forced to flee town under threat of violence, leaving their child in the hands of a mob-controlled state.
• The “Confession”: The police claimed he confessed. No written record of this confession exists. There were no witnesses to the statement.
• The Trial: The trial lasted barely two hours. George’s court-appointed lawyer, a tax commissioner with no trial experience, called zero witnesses and performed no cross-examination.
• The Jury: An all-white jury took less than ten minutes to find him guilty. They did not recommend mercy.

On June 16, 1944, George Stinney Jr. became the youngest person executed in 20th-century America. He was so small that the adult-sized electrodes wouldn’t fit his head. They used a Bible—the very book used to swear in the “justice” that was killing him—as a booster seat. When the current hit, the oversized mask fell off, exposing his terrified, weeping face to the witnesses.

The Silent Suspect: When Justice is a Shield

If George Stinney Jr. did not kill those two girls, then who did? For seventy years, the state of South Carolina acted as if the question were settled. But in the decades following the execution, a much more sinister reality began to emerge from the shadows of Alcolu.

The leading theory, supported by local testimony and research presented during the 2014 exoneration hearing, points toward George Burke Jr. He was the son of a prominent white businessman who owned the lumber mill where George’s father worked. More chillingly, Burke’s father was the foreman of the jury that sent George Stinney to the electric chair.

The community had whispered for years about a deathbed confession from the Burke family, but in 1944, those whispers were a death sentence. In the social hierarchy of a segregated mill town, a member of the Burke family was untouchable. The “system” didn’t just need a culprit; it needed a diversion. By sacrificing a 14-year-old Black boy, the state provided the white community with “closure” while ensuring the powerful remained protected. This is the ultimate callousness: the law wasn’t used to find the truth; it was used as a shield for the privileged and a shroud for the innocent.

The Physical Impossibility

We must also look at the physics—the cold, hard data that the 1944 court ignored. The girls were killed with a fourteen-inch railroad spike, suffering massive skull fractures. Forensic experts in 2014 testified that it would have been physically impossible for a 95-pound child to wield such a weapon with the force required to kill two people while also managing to overpower them both.

George had an alibi—his sister, Amie, was with him grazing the family cow when the girls passed by—but in a system designed to exploit the “punishment clause” of the 13th Amendment, an alibi is just noise. The “duly convicted” label was the goal, and the state achieved it by ignoring the laws of physics and the screams of a child.

The Pattern: Beyond Alcolu

George was a centerpiece, but he was not an anomaly. As I researched this, I found the ghosts of other children whose names have been scrubbed from the collective memory:

• Alexander McClay Williams (1931): At 16, he was the youngest person executed in Pennsylvania history. His “confession” was coerced, and the state suppressed evidence of a bloody handprint that didn’t match his. It took until 2022 for his conviction to be vacated.
• Joe Persons (1915): A boy in Georgia, estimated to be 12 or 13, who was so small that officials debated adding weights to his feet so the hanging would “work.”
• James Arcene (1885): A Cherokee youth executed for a crime committed when he was just 10 years old.

In each of these cases, the 13th Amendment’s “duly convicted” clause was the shield. By providing the thin veneer of a trial, the state could legally commit what was essentially a lynching.

The Filter of Justice: Calibrating the Outcome

When we discuss mass incarceration, a common counter-argument often arises: “Don’t Black people simply commit more crime?” I know that if you calibrate a sensor to only look for anomalies in one specific area, your data will be skewed. To understand the disparity, we must look past the “output” and analyze the “filter” of the legal machine.

1. The Frequency of Interaction Fallacy

The argument that Black people “commit more crime” often confuses crime rates with arrest rates. A 2023 UCLA study using smartphone data from 10,000 officers across 23 cities found that police spend significantly more time in Black neighborhoods, even when those neighborhoods have the same crime rates and income levels as white neighborhoods.

The result is simple math: if you put 100 police officers in one neighborhood and two in another, you will “discover” more crime in the first one—even if the actual behavior is identical. This creates a “feedback loop” where higher arrest records are used to justify even more policing, artificially inflating the statistical profile of a community.

2. Drug Use vs. Drug Arrests

This is the “smoking gun” of systemic bias. For decades, federal surveys from the CDC and the NAACP have shown that Black and white Americans use and sell drugs at almost identical rates. However, despite similar usage, Black Americans are nearly 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession and 6 times more likely to be incarcerated for drug charges overall. It’s not about who is committing the crime; it’s about who the system is looking for.

3. The “Differential Processing” of Justice

Even when the crime and the criminal history are identical, the system treats the bodies differently:

• Bail: Black defendants are 21% more likely to be denied bail, which forces them to stay in jail while awaiting trial—leading to lost jobs, lost homes, and a higher likelihood of eventually taking a “guilty plea” just to go home.
• Plea Bargaining: Prosecutors are more likely to offer plea deals that include prison time to Black defendants, while white defendants are more likely to be offered “diversion programs” or probation.
• Sentencing Length: According to 2026 data reports, Black men receive sentences that are 19.1% longer than white men for the exact same crimes.

4. Wrongful Convictions: The Margin of Error

If the system were truly objective, the rate of “mistakes” would be equal. It isn’t. Black people make up 13% of the population but over 50% of the exonerated population. Innocent Black people are 7 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder and 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of drug crimes than white people.

George Stinney Jr. is the historical proof of this. The system didn’t care about the truth; it cared about “closure” that fit the racial hierarchy. When someone says, “they commit more crime,” they are looking at the output of a machine and assuming it is a neutral scale. But as an engineer, I see a filter. It filters out white crime through warnings and diversions, and it filters in Black crime through over-policing and structural bias.

The Economic Engineering of Poverty: Wealth Theft

If you want to understand why a large percentage of the Black community remains trapped in poverty today, you need to look no further than the “teeth” of mass incarceration. It was never just about free labor for a season; it was about the permanent maintenance of a lower class.

When the state arrested George Stinney Jr., they didn’t just take a child; they destroyed a household. Within hours of his arrest, his father was fired from the local lumber mill. The family was given mere hours to vacate their company-owned housing and flee the town. They left behind their possessions, their community, and their stability.

Mass incarceration acts as a surgical strike against the Black family unit. By removing men—and in George’s case, the future men of the community—the system achieves several objectives:

• Destruction of the Household Anchor: Historically, when a man was incarcerated or executed, the family lost its primary earner. According to the American Journal of Sociology, paternal incarceration is one of the single greatest predictors of a family falling below the poverty line.
• The “Marriageable Men” Gap: By disproportionately removing Black men from the community, the state created a demographic vacuum. This forced single mothers into a cycle of “survival labor,” where the ability to save, invest, or purchase property became a mathematical impossibility.
• Educational Depletion: A 2014 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that the children of incarcerated parents are significantly less likely to graduate from college, creating a “secondary sentence” that spans generations.

The Numbers Behind the Theft

The statistics are staggering:

• The Wealth Gap: Today, the median white household holds roughly eight times the wealth of the median Black household. This is not a failure of work ethic; it is a result of a century of wealth-stripping policies.
• Lifetime Loss: The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that formerly incarcerated people lose an average of $500,000 in lifetime earnings. When you multiply that by the millions of Black men swept up in the “War on Drugs,” you are looking at trillions of dollars in wealth that never entered the Black community.
• Voter Disenfranchisement: In many states, a felony conviction (the “duly convicted” status of the 13th Amendment) leads to the loss of voting rights. This removes the community’s ability to vote for the very policies—school funding and housing—that build wealth.

Mass incarceration is not a “side effect” of poverty; it is the architect of it. It ensures that the Black community remains in a state of “perpetual catch-up.” Every time a generation begins to build equity, a new wave of “tough on crime” legislation resets the clock.

The “Why” of the Present

People ask me why this matters now. It matters because the “punishment clause” is still in the Constitution. The transition from the Jim Crow executions of the 40s to the mass incarceration boom of the 80s and 90s is a straight line.

I know that systems don’t fix themselves. When we look at the racial disparities in our modern prison system, we are seeing the same logic that executed George Stinney. We are seeing a system that prioritizes “closure” and “control” over “integrity.”

When the Stinney family was run out of town, they lost their property, their stability, and their history. This is how the wealth gap was engineered. Mass incarceration isn’t just about the person in the cell; it is about the “Generational Theft” of Black potential. We care about George Stinney because his execution was a warning shot: The law does not belong to you.

A Note on “The Green Mile”

By the way, as I dug into this, I noticed how many people believe that Stephen King’s The Green Mile is based on George Stinney. While King has never confirmed this, the parallels are undeniable: the two girls, the rural South, the wrongful execution.

But there is a dangerous difference. In the movie, John Coffey is a “Magical Negro”—a gentle giant with supernatural powers. In reality, George Stinney had no magic. He was just a scared 14-year-old child who wanted to go home. By turning these tragedies into “magical fables,” we risk softening the edges of the reality. We don’t need magic to explain George’s innocence; we just need to look at the physics of a 90-pound boy and the corruption of a system that didn’t care to measure the weight of the evidence.

Conclusion: Closing the Loophole

In 2014, seventy years after he was killed, Judge Carmen Mullen vacated George Stinney’s conviction. She cited “fundamental, constitutional violations of due process.” It was a victory, but a hollow one. You cannot return 70 years of life to a boy who was burned to death by his own government.

We revisit this story because the “crack” in the foundation is still there. As long as the 13th Amendment allows for slavery-by-another-name, and as long as our system views Black children as “superpredators” rather than children, George Stinney is not a ghost of the past. He is a mirror of the present.

If a system is designed to protect some by sacrificing others, it has no integrity. It is a bridge waiting to collapse. We owe it to George—and to the children whose names we don’t yet know—to stop patching the cracks and start questioning the blueprint. Until the “except as punishment” loophole is closed and the law is applied without the filter of power and race, we aren’t living in a state of justice. We are just living in a very long, very crowded Green Mile.

Glossary of Terms

• 13th Amendment (Punishment Clause): The section of the US Constitution that abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, creating a legal loophole for involuntary servitude.
• Black Codes: Laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War to restrict the freedom of Black Americans and compel them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt.
• Convict Leasing: A system in which state penitentiaries leased incarcerated people to private companies (e.g., coal mines, railroads) for labor.
• Differential Processing: The phenomenon where individuals of different races are treated differently by the criminal justice system even when the alleged crimes are identical.
• Doli Incapax: A legal doctrine (often ignored in the Jim Crow era) suggesting that children below a certain age are incapable of forming the intent to commit a crime.
• Generational Wealth Theft: The systemic removal of assets, property, and earning potential from a specific community over time, preventing the accumulation of intergenerational wealth.
• Jim Crow Era: The period (late 19th century to mid-20th century) characterized by state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the United States.
• Vacated Conviction: A legal ruling that voids a previous conviction, treating it as if it never happened due to errors or violations of rights (as seen in Stinney’s 2014 case).

Bibliography & References

Legal & Historical Documents

• U.S. Const. amend. XIII. (1865). The 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution.
• State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr. (1944). Trial Transcript and Court Records (Archived).
• Mullen, C. (2014). Order Vacating Judgment in the Case of State v. George Stinney, Jr. Circuit Court of South Carolina.

Academic Research & Books

• Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press.
• Blackmon, D. A. (2008). Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Doubleday.
• National Academy of Sciences. (2014). The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences. National Academies Press.
• The Sentencing Project. (2023). The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons. ### Articles & Data Reports
• Brennan Center for Justice. (2022). Conviction, Imprisonment, and Lost Earnings: How the Criminal Justice System Deepens Inequality.
• UCLA Department of Sociology. (2023). Police Activity Analysis: Surveillance and Deployment in Urban Environments.
• U.S. Sentencing Commission. (2024-2026). Report to the Congress: Federal Sentencing Statistics and Fentanyl Trafficking Trends.
• Urban Institute. (2026). Racial Disparities in Charging and Plea Bargaining: A Longitudinal Study.

🏛️ THE MIDNIGHT RIDE BEGINS

April 18, 1775 — As British redcoats march toward Lexington under cover of darkness, Paul Revere mounts his horse and slips past the HMS Somerset. The lantern in the Old North Church has already signaled 'one if by land, two if by sea.' Now the rider races through colonial Massachusetts, warning minutemen that the shot heard 'round the world is imminent.

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