James M. Smith held hundreds of debt slaves on a farm that stretched thirty miles from the town he named after himself.

He became a major buyer of convicts soon after Georgia's Reconstruction government was toppled by a campaign of voter fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence.

For workers he relied on an army of convict slaves, including many African Americans he had owned before the war or their descendants.

In the post-Civil War economy, Smith used the labor of the debt and convict slaves to grow a small farm into the state's largest plantation.

If workers tried to flee, Smith relied on deputy sheriffs to recapture them and his own overseers to inflict brutal punishments.