By Bill Littlefield

The prison was the first in the nation specifically designed to generate a profit for everybody but the laborers.

Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit by Robin Bernstein. University of Chicago Press, 293 pages including Notes and Index.

In 1840, William Freeman, a young black man, was convicted in Auburn, New York, of stealing a horse. He protested his innocence at trial, but to no avail. He was sent to the institution known — at least to some — as “Sweet Auburn, Loveliest Prison.” That institution would become a model adopted by states throughout the young nation.

Freeman, like the rest of the men incarcerated at the prison, was forced to work. He was not paid. The goods produced by the labor of the prisoners were sold to benefit various businessmen and industries in Auburn. The prison was the first in the nation specifically designed to generate a profit for everybody but the laborers.

When he was released in 1845, Freeman was given four half-dollars, perhaps so that he wouldn’t be arrested immediately for vagrancy. He complained. “I have been in Prison five years unjustly, and ain’t going to settle so.”

From the day he was released from prison until the day he died, two years later, Freeman never deviated from that position. He’d protested his innocence when he was arrested. He protested that his work while he was incarcerated was treated as slave labor. As Professor Bernstein notes, many incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women and their allies have protested that this is still the case, at least in part because of the 13th Amendment, which prohibits slavery, EXCEPT with regard to incarcerated citizens. Harvard University professor Robin Bernstein points out that the amendment merely codified a circumstance that was already common. Today, most incarcerated men and women are paid between 10 cents and 65 cents an hour.

William Freeman was not the perfect champion for the rights of the incarcerated. A guard at Auburn, where physical abuse was common, had whacked Freeman in the head with a length of lumber. The blow severely damaged his hearing, and witnesses who’d known Freeman before he went to prison thought that the blow had damaged his mind as well. Still, after he was released, Freeman was sufficiently self-organized to seek redress for his mistreatment. He talked to lawyers and various influential people in Auburn, many of whom, as Bernstein points out, were profiting from their association with the prison.

Rendering of William Freeman, Daily Cayuga Tocsin — Extra, March 19, 1846. Photo: William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

After Freeman got no satisfaction from his appeals to the authorities, he armed himself with a couple of knives and murdered four members of the Van Nest family. As far as anyone could determine, none of the victims had anything to do with Freeman’s incarceration or the beatings he’d suffered. Freeman was arrested and, though a mob shouting “Hang the Negro!” had assembled, he was conveyed to jail. When he was interrogated there, Freeman’s responses were difficult for the authorities to comprehend. He was asked, “Why the Van Nests?” He said, “Because I must go.” Some speculated that he could not hear the question. He was asked, “Who brought you up to kill?” He said, “The State.”

William Freeman was eventually sentenced to be hanged, a fate he avoided by dying of tuberculosis. But Bernstein posits that the greater significance of Freeman’s story arose from the way it was interpreted by white citizens in Auburn and beyond. As she writes of the verdict, “It distracted from Freeman’s challenge to the Auburn System by unfurling two stories of Blackness: one of social deprivation, the other of inherent menace. One of a pathetic, damaged victim who deserved pity, the other of a vicious, dangerous villain who warranted contempt and punishment…. both asserted an inherent Black inferiority and therefore the need for white control in the postslavery North.” In part, perhaps because William Freeman’s “challenge” to the treatment of incarcerated men and women as slaves has been so thoroughly ignored, what Bernstein calls “a new form of unfreedom” developed without much public opposition, and “the slavery-based economy transformed into state-funded, carceral capitalism.”

Freeman’s Challenge engages the reader on various levels. The story of Freeman’s oppression, abuse, desperation, determination, and murderous acts is compellingly told. The author is a careful, thorough historian who supports her contentions about the development in the early 1800s of some of the most poisonous and debilitating theories, beliefs, and prejudices that continue to clog, debase, and pervert the justice system and the culture at large. As Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has written, the book “deftly reveals the deep connections between imprisonment, racism, and the development of the capitalist economy.” Freeman’s Challenge is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the development in this country of the system that currently imprisons almost two million people.

Bill Littlefield volunteers for the Emerson Prison Initiative. His most recent novel is Mercy (Black Rose Writing).