The First Hundred Years of the Tennessee State Prison System, 1830-1930

Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1992 The Keepers and the Kept: The irsF t Hundred Years of the Tennessee State Prison System, 1830-1930. (Volumes I and II). Larry D. Gossett Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Gossett, Larry D., "The Keepers and the Kept: The irF st Hundred Years of the Tennessee State Prison System, 1830-1930. (Volumes I and II)." (1992). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5307. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5307 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 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ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE KEEPERS AND THE KEPT: THE FIRST HUNDRED YEARS OF THE TENNESSEE STATE PRISON SYSTEM 1830-1930 VOLUME I A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of History by Larry D. Gossett B.A., B.S., The University of Tennessee, 1987 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1988 May, 1992 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Dedication This work is dedicated to the more than two hundred thousand convicts, inmates, and residents who have passed through the gates into the Tennessee State Prison System since its inauguration on January 1, 1831. It is also dedicated to the many thousands of employees of those institutions: commissioners, wardens, officers, nurses, and staff personnel. It is especially dedicated to those guards who view the convict not as a reject but as a human being who happened to go wrong and who then treat him as he would any other person down on his luck. A special note of dedication goes to Billy Mayo McWherter of Tiptonville, Tennessee, who started me on this long journey with a simple statement in 1983. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. For Allison/ Ryan, and Emily — with love, as always. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledqements Any project of this magnitude requires the coopera tion and support of many individuals to accomplish. The efforts of my dissertation director, Professor Hark T. (Tom) Carleton, in this regard have been exemplary, and all candidates should receive the same amount of attention from their professors. Professors Burl Noggle, Robert Becker, Benjamin F. Martin, James Bolner, Sr., and Marshall De Rosa have also been supportive, yet critical and demanding of the work. Professor Susan Haynie also read and commented on the work. The staff of the Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee, and especially Robert O. DePriest, Archivist II and Manuscript Librarian (now retired), went far beyond the bounds of duty in helping me locate many sometimes obscure materials on the prison system. Greg Maynard, former director of Planning and Research for the Tennessee Department of Correction and now an official of the state juvenile corrections department, was a model for cooperative state employees. The staff of the Louisiana State University Troy Middleton Library Interlibrary Loan Department was also extremely helpful in the acquisition of hard-to-find materials. The wardens and staff members of the Tennessee prisons were generous with their time and iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. limited resources in response to my requests for records and information. A graduate fellowship from the Louisiana State University Alumni Federation and a national graduate fellowship from Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society made the achievement of both the graduate degree and the writing of this work much easier. Appreciation is very gratefully extended to both organizations for their generous financial assistance. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Preface In the author's course of questioning the "whys" of modern prison management during the mid-1980s, Billy Mayo McWherter, warden of Tennessee's Lake County Regional Correctional Facility, said in response to a question about his own innovative management approach, "How can anyone fault anything that I do? We haven't done anything right in Tennessee prisons in 150 years." It was that statement from one of Tennessee's most respected prison officials, a former Deputy Commissioner of Correction and now Administrator of all West Tennessee prisons, along with a somewhat morbid personal sense of curiosity about modern prisons, crime, and convicts that led me to this study of Tennessee prisons. The earliest Tennessee prisons resembled large jails more than modern prison facilities, and there was no attempt at segregation by age or seriousness of offenses. Blacks and women, however, were segregated from white males, and blacks would remain segregated until the early 1980s. These "hell holes"1 did more than their share to increase contempt for society among the early convicts, many of whom would return to prison National Banner and Nashville Whig. September 12, 1835. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. again and again during their lifetimes.2 Punishment in the harshest sense of the word was the only reason for state prisons to exist in nineteenth century America; reform and rehabilitation are concepts that had very little actual application or success during the first one hundred years of Tennessee prisons. What caused early Tennesseans to push for a central penitentiary system? What were the problems of those earliest prisons? Was the penitentiary philosophy that developed unique to Tennessee or was it more regional in scope? What was the condition of Tennessee prisons at the end of the Civil War, and how did that war affect prisons in the South and in Tennessee in particular? What were the particular problems faced by Tennessee prisons during these first 100 years? Were those problems unique to Tennessee and, if so, why? Why was there a need for reform, where did the ideas for reform originate, and how were they implemented? These are the basic questions along with others that developed as the research progressed and that are answered by this study of the first one hundred years of history of the Tennessee state prison system. Preliminary planning for this work envisioned covering the entire 160 year of Tennessee's prisons but, as the work advanced, it became more logical to break 2See Convict Grade Books Numbers 1 through 15, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Manuscript Division, Nashville, Tennessee. vii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. the study at approximately the end of the first century. The changes in penal philosophy, criminal justice management, and political systems after

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