Articles

Mentha Morrison's Anti-Slavery Petition to President Roosevelt: Resisting Peonage in a Southern Jim Crow Company Town

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Abstract

In 1903, Mentha Morrison, a Black woman in Smithonia, Georgia, wrote a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt and requested that he save her husband from "slavery." Her description of his plight implicated Colonel James “Jim” Monroe Smith, the eponymous plantation owner of Smithonia. While Smith was widely known for convict leasing and debt slavery, it is the sheer scale of his landholdings that presents a unique circumstance wherein Smith maintained extraordinary sociopolitical cachet due to his wealth, which enabled him to escape punishment for the abuses he inflicted upon workers, such as Mrs. Morrison’s husband. This cachet was borne from the fact that, as this article argues, Smithonia was not merely a plantation, but a prototypical company town - one that provided a complete civic infrastructure that permitted the plantation to operate on a scale beyond those of other contemporaneous operations. Though Mentha Morrison and her husband eventually escaped Smithonia, the town still stands, built upon the land once owned entirely by Colonel Jim Smith. 

Keywords: peonage, Georgia, Jim Crow, Mentha Morrison, Colonel James Monroe Smith, Smithonia, company town, convict leasing, debt slavery, plantation, Colonel Jim Smith, Peonage Files

How to Cite:

Lewis, S., (2026) “Mentha Morrison's Anti-Slavery Petition to President Roosevelt: Resisting Peonage in a Southern Jim Crow Company Town”, Footnotes: A Journal of History 8, 38-60.