Justice in the By-Ways, a Tale of Life

This historical fiction focuses on the life of Tom Swiggs, who in the beginning of the work gets dragged to the Charleston jail. Justice in the By-Ways, a Tale of Life is written by Francis Colburn Adams, an American miscellaneous writer, formerly living in Charleston, South Carolina, who wrote under various pseudonyms. Adams, in the preface, states that a profound interest in the welfare of South Carolina and the high regard in which he held the better, and a more reasonable class of the state's citizens, encouraged him to sit down in Charleston and write this history some four years ago.

Excerpt from Justice in the By-Ways, a Tale of Life

"His mother, otherwise a kind sort of woman, sends him here. She believes it will work his reform. I pity her error-for it is an error to believe reform can come of punishment, or that virtue may be nurtured among vice." Thus responds the brusque but kind-hearted old jailer, who view swith an air of compassion his new comer, as he lays, a forlorn mass, exposed to the gaze of the prisoners gathering eagerly about him.