(narrator) What had begun as a principal investigation that was probably going to go nowhere, was turning into a potential political catastrophe for the Roosevelt Administration. (woman) "Mr. President, I have a brother about 14 years old. A man hired him from me and I heard of him no more." Among black Southerners, reports that peonage was being prosecuted sparked a very different outcry: a flood of letters, many of them addressed to the president. (Douglas A. Blackmon) At the National Archives today, there's more than 30,000 pages of this kind of material that document the arrest, the subjugation, the punishment, the mistreatment, the profit that was made off of the forced labor of armies and armies of people. (woman) He has done nothing wrong for them to keep him in chains. So I write to you to help me get my poor brother. Please let me hear from you at once, Carrie Kinsey.