Isaac Franklin made his money first. From 1828 to 1841 his firm, Franklin and Armfield, bought enslaved people in Virginia and Maryland, held them at a depot in Alexandria and sent them south to be sold at Natchez and New Orleans. Franklin then turned planter. In May 1835 he bought a half-share in a 7,767-acre property in West Feliciana Parish with 205 enslaved people on it, and the land he assembled around it included plantations he called Panola, Killarney, Loango and Angola. Historian Joshua Rothman counts 636 enslaved people in his hands when he died in 1846 at Bellevue, one of his Louisiana plantations.
The lease
Franklin's widow held the land until 1880, when Samuel Lawrence James, a former Confederate major, bought it. James already controlled the state's convicts. In 1870 the legislature gave him and two partners the lease of the penitentiary and everyone in it for 21 years, at a price that was meant to rise from $5,000 in the first year to $25,000 in the twentieth. James paid only a fraction. Most Black prisoners were hired out to landowners who needed hands now that slavery was gone. Even in 1867, before James, 214 of the 222 people in the Baton Rouge penitentiary were Black, and 16 died that year. Convicts built levees and railroads, and James moved some to Angola, where they were housed in the old slave quarters.
The count
Nobody knows how many died. The state published no reports on its convicts from 1873 to 1889, and in 1887 Governor Francis Nicholls admitted that what reports existed were "vague, conflicting, or nonexistent." Deaths rose in the 1880s as James pushed men harder, enough to bring about the Prison Reform Association in New Orleans in 1886. One study of the old penitentiary estimates that as many as 3,000 prisoners died under James and his estate between 1870 and 1901. It is an estimate because the counting was never done at the time.
The 1898 constitution banned leasing once the last contract ran out. In 1900 the state paid James's heirs $200,000 for about 8,000 acres, and in 1901 it took charge of 1,142 prisoners, most at Angola. The vast majority were Black, and 240 were serving life. The plantation manager was James's son, and the chairman of the new penitentiary board was the executor of James's estate. After floods the state bought neighboring plantations in 1922, bringing the farm to about 18,000 acres.
The fields now
State figures for 2010 put the prison population at 76 percent Black, with 71 percent serving life sentences. Men arriving at Angola work in the fields for at least 90 days, and reporters have found pay starting at two cents an hour. In May 2018 prisoners refused field work. The corrections department said 27 joined the first man to refuse, and one participant estimated about 50; they called for an end to what they described as modern-day slavery.
The Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum stands outside the front gates, at the end of Tunica Trace. It keeps the prison's history and is open on weekdays.