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Updated: June 9, 2025
I have forgotten my history, if that be not true history." The Administration had not yet abandoned hope of removing the pickets. They persisted in their policy of arrests and longer imprisonments. Prison Episodes During all this time the suffrage prisoners were enduring the miserable and petty tyranny of the government workhouse at Occoquan. They were kept absolutely incommunicado.
Armed with 18 affidavits and a score of witnesses as to the actual conditions at Occoquan, Attorney Samuel C. Brent and Judge J. K. N. Norton, both of Alexandria, Virginia, acting as counsel with Mr. Malone, appeared before the Board on the opening day and asked to be allowed to present their evidence.
At length Pope's forces were being massed along the line of the Rappahannock, below the Occoquan river, and upon the "Piedmont" highlands. "Piedmont" is the name applied to the fine table-lands of Northern Virginia, and the ensuing campaign has received the designation of the "Piedmont Campaign."
Sir William Berkeley in order to help the frontiersmen, unwisely, and at great expense to the people, commanded a fort to be built at the mouth of each head river; e.g., one was built at Colchester on the Occoquan. These forts proved of no value, being made of mud and dirt. Other precarious forts were built in place of the mud ones.
Virginia Bovee, an ex-officer of the workhouse . . . . The prisoners for whom I am counsel are aware that cruel practices go on at Occoquan. On one occasion they heard Superintendent Whittaker kicking a woman in the next room. They heard Whittaker's voice, the sound of blows, and the womans cries.
"These are not state prisoners; they are prisoners of the District of Columbia. They are held by an order of the court claiming to have jurisdiction in the District of Columbia. But they are imprisoned in the Eastern District of Virginia, in Occoquan workhouse which, very much to our regret, is down here, and is an institution that we alone have jurisdiction over.
We are glad you are to conduct this long-needed inquiry and shall cooperate in every way to get at the truth of conditions in Occoquan through your investigation, provided you make the hearings public, subpoena all available witnesses, including men and women now prisoners at Occoquan, first granting them immunity, and provided you give counsel an opportunity to examine and cross examine all witnesses so called.
John Joy Edson, President Board of Charities, Washington, D. C. Dear Sir:-We are counsel for a large group of citizens, men and women, who have in the past been associated with Occoquan work house as officials or inmates and who are ready to testify to unspeakable conditions of mismanagement, graft, sanitary depravity, indignity and brutality at the institution.
Under this published interpretation of his pardon the women at Occoquan accepted the pardon and returned to Washington. The incident was closed. I returned to New York. During the next two months I carefully watched the situation. Six or eight more groups of women in that time were arrested on the same false charges, tried and imprisoned in the same illegal way.
The suffragists as well as the public at large are thankful that the police department has finally determined to arrest the pickets, instead of allowing them to be mobbed by hoodlums . . . . The public eye will be on Occoquan for the next few weeks, to find out how these women bear up under the Spartan treatment that is in store for them.
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