On the night of April 7, 1865, in the company of Colonel Heman H. Perry, assistant adjutant general of Moxley Sorrel's brigade, English received the first written communication from Grant to Lee about a surrender, which happened soon after at Appomattox Court House.

English was one of Atlanta's most prominent citizens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was an ardent promoter of a New South, based on industry rather than on cotton.

While he was not descended from the antebellum era aristocracy and had never owned a slave before emancipation, by 1897 "his enterprises controlled 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in brick making, cutting cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction, and turpentining."

Although its methods were nearly identical to those used centuries before, it achieved high levels of productivity and vast profits by subjecting the convict laborers it leased from the city to brutal discipline and cruel deprivation.

"[6]: 74 Before a legislative commission in 1908, former guards as well as workers reported that at the brickyard prisoners "were forced to work under unbearable circumstances, fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens.

"[6]: 344  Although one former guard estimated that 200 to 300 laborers were flogged each month, English angrily protested, "If a warden in charge of those convicts ever committed an act of cruelty to them…and it had come to my knowledge, I would have had him indicted and prosecuted.

Even when materials were provided, they often neglected to use them since they feared, if they took time to protect themselves, they would not complete their daily task and consequently be whipped by bosses who would sometimes embed their lashes with sand to increase the severity of the punishment.

For example, in 1883 he purchased half of John T. Milner's Coalburg mine company and, "in an overtly illegal aspect of the transaction, a lot of one hundred black convicts."