University of North Carolina Press
Chapter Title: Convict Lease System and Peonage
Chapter Author(s): PAUL M. PRUITT <suffix>JR.</suffix>
Book Title: The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
Book Subtitle: Volume 10: Law and Politics
Book Editor(s): JAMES W. ELY <suffix>JR.</suffix>, BRADLEY G. BOND
Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2008)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469616742_ely.8
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The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture
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William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765); Melvin E. Bradford, A Better Guide than Reason: Studies in the American Revolution (1979); Ernest S.
Easterly III, Geojurisprudence: Studies in Law, Liberty, and Landscapes (1980); W. B.
Hamilton, South Atlantic Quarterly (Spring 1968); Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974); A. Kocourek, American Bar Association Journal (October 1932);
Roscoe Pound, The Spirit of Common Law (1921); David Ren and J. E. C. Brierley,
Major Legal Systems of the World Today: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of
Law (1978); A. G. Roeber, Faithful Magistrates and Republican Lawyers: Creators of
Virginia Legal Culture, 1680–1810 (1981); Louis E. Wolcher, American Journal of Legal
History (July 1992).
Convict Lease System and Peonage
The convict lease system was the means by which southern states dealt with
their post–Civil War prisoners. Under this regimen, convicts were leased to
individuals or corporations, who thus acquired a captive labor force and at the
same time agreed to supervise it. As a result, the industrial landscape of the
New South was dotted with prison work camps and stockades, home to inmates who were overwhelmingly (roughly 90 percent) African American. At
their worst, these facilities afforded examples of human misery that shocked
contemporaries and gave southern corrections a bad reputation.
Apologists pointed out that the state governments were impoverished, that
penitentiaries erected before the war were destroyed, and that state and local
officials had no reliable mechanism of control over recently freed black populations. In fact, models for privately run prisons were already in place. As early
as 1825, Kentucky had leased its inmates to a businessman who sought to turn
the penitentiary at Frankfort into a factory. In 1846 Alabama legislators leased
the “Walls” at Wetumpka to the first of a series of entrepreneurs. The lure of
turning a debit into a credit through off-site labor appealed to postwar officials,
Republicans, and former Confederates alike.
The convict lease system should be understood as a child of slavery. White
southerners (and many northerners) believed that African Americans needed
the tutelage of their former masters—that left to their own devices, freedmen
would fall into idleness and crime. Judges imbued with these beliefs found
themselves dealing with a range of behaviors (ranging from genuinely criminal
acts to mere rudeness) that once would have been handled extralegally by plantation discipline. In the post-Reconstruction world such offenses were punished
by hard labor for the state or county. Judges of the period exercised considerable discretion in sentencing, taking into account the labor needs of sheriffs
or lessees. Sentences tended to be long. Of 1,200 convicts leased by Georgia
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in 1880, more than 500 were serving terms of 10 years or more. In Texas, with
more than 2,300 incarcerated in 1882, only two men were sentenced for less
than 10 years.
By the 1880s several states had given their convicts over to large corporations. This had the merit of administrative simplicity and was also financially
attractive. Georgia in 1876 divided 1,100 prisoners among three companies,
each of which agreed to pay the state $25,000 per year. Tennessee and Alabama
made their arrangements with the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (tci). In
1890 more than 800 Alabama convicts worked in tci mines, for which the state
was paid more than $180,000—6 percent of its yearly income. It would be an
oversimplification to argue that the South was following the “Prussian Road” of
authoritarian development. On the other hand—in light of many alliances between entrepreneurs and ultraconservative Bourbon politicians—it is true that
racial ideology and law converged for the benefit of New South industrialists.
The latter gained both cheap labor and a ready-made strikebreaking force.
Yet the concentration of convicts made them more visible to journalists, reformers, and other critics of the system. An assertion made during the period
was that convict leasing was worse than slavery—that, as Woman’s Christian
Temperance Union leader Julia Tutwiler said in 1890, it had all of slavery’s evils
without the personal contact and paternalism that she viewed as “ameliorating
features.” She was right to think that most lessees had few occasions to look
upon their laborers as individuals and only the slightest economic motives to
promote their welfare. The frequency of escapes was such that camp managers
tended to fire lenient guards and to employ shackles and close confinement
whenever possible. The results were poor sanitation and scandalously high
mortality from disease and accidents. While 1 to 2 percent of northern prisoners died each year, death rates of 15 percent were not unknown in the South.
Critics of the system were a diverse group, including the African American
leaders Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Mary Church Terrell, white
women activists like Tutwiler and Georgia’s Rebecca Felton, agrarian politicians
and labor activists who opposed corporate power, and an intriguing number of
well-placed, otherwise conventional whites who can be called “Bourbon reformers.” The most celebrated of the latter was the Louisiana writer George
Washington Cable, whose nonfiction work eloquently denounced racial discrimination and southern penal practices. These disparate elements did accomplish certain reforms in the 1880s and 1890s.
Administratively, these years saw the creation of stronger state regulatory
boards, staffed by men who were acquainted with professional organizations
such as the National Prison Association. Through these boards (and with perCONVICT LEASE SYSTEM AND PEONAGE
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27
sistent lobbying by women’s organizations) the states mandated improved standards of housing, diet, and health care and began to provide educational facilities for inmates. During the same period, the states began to exclude female
prisoners and minors from the camps, placing them in separate facilities. By
the turn of the century, reformist and anticorporate influences were strong
enough to put some states on the road to ending the lease system, initially by
working convicts on state-owned farms. A leader in this development was Mississippi, which took steps to abolish the lease system in its 1890 constitution
(interestingly, the same constitution that effectively disfranchised black voters)
and had opened Parchman Farm by 1901.
For all these improvements the convict lease system was irretrievably flawed.
This is evident in the career of R. H. Dawson, chief inspector of the Alabama
Department of Corrections (1883–96). A true Bourbon reformer, Dawson saw
himself as a mediator between the convicts and tci, the state’s chief lessee.
Each prisoner was expected to produce 4,000 pounds of usable coal per day;
Dawson worked to insure honest timekeeping and decent living conditions.
To improve morale and fend off vice, he distributed writing materials and encouraged letter writing. Thus miners could stay in touch with their families and
more easily report corporate rule-breaking. He gave each convict a card with
two dates written on it: the date of the man’s full-sentence release and the date
of his “short-time” release for good behavior. For several years Dawson’s methods seemed to work, and convicts had a fighting chance to survive prison—and
to leave it with coal-mining skills, which many proceeded to put to use.
Yet in the 1890s tci officials steadily undermined Dawson’s achievements.
Guards goaded prisoners into riots that wrecked their “short-time” status.
Company bosses bribed or pressured inmates into overtime work in exchange
for company scrip that fueled gambling and black market activities. Clearly,
the lessees preferred to handle overburdened, dissolute men, and Dawson
concluded that the kind of order he was promoting—prison run as a school
of discipline—could not take hold within the convict lease system. Governor
Thomas Goode Jones (1890–94) agreed, and under his administration the state
prepared to shift its corrections to Mississippi-style prison farming. However,
the Panic of 1893 touched off a crisis of state finance, and Jones’s successors
preserved the always-profitable mining lease.
The eventual decline of convict leasing came about as a result of several factors: middle-class concerns over child labor, illiteracy, and public health; election of progressive Democrats such as Georgia’s governor Hoke Smith (a major
actor in that state’s 1908 abolition of the lease); and the “good roads” movement
in Georgia, North Carolina, and other states, which shifted convict labor to
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the highways under state control. State sponsorship of private indentured labor
ended with Alabama’s 1928 laws terminating the convict lease. But public laws
had little to do with the survival of a parallel regime—peonage—still very much
alive in the 1930s.
Large numbers of African American farmers were sharecroppers who paid
the landowner half their crops in addition to the value of supplies received. Declining prices of staple crops almost insured that they (and their white counterparts) fell deeper in debt each year, thus creating a class of hopeless debtors.
When plantation owners compelled tenants to work out their debts, the result was peonage. Across the region, contract labor laws criminalized breach
of contract, opening the way for shadowy collaborations between planters and
local law enforcement. Under this system a justice of the peace would arrange
for a defaulting debtor to be arrested and fined on charges that might or might
not be entered on his books. The landowner would appear, pay the fine, and be
granted custody. Now the peon had to work out the fine (and the rest of his indebtedness) or risk another arrest. Though such practices appear (correctly) to
modern eyes as a crude restoration of master-slave relations, they also meshed
perfectly with a long-lived stereotype of black folk and poor whites alike—that
the working classes must be forced to work.
Peonage was widespread in the “cotton belt,” in Florida’s turpentine camps,
and other settings of isolation and poverty. Nonetheless, in the early 1900s a
number of federal officials, most of whom were Republicans, joined forces with
black spokesmen and a sprinkling of Bourbon reformers to challenge these
practices. Acting under an 1867 statute U.S. attorneys brought cases before District Judges Charles Swayne (Fla.), Thomas Goode Jones (Ala.), Emory Speer
(Ga.), and Jacob Trieber (Ark.). Their greatest success came in Alabama, where
Judge Jones and Booker T. Washington quietly supported a state case, Alonzo
Bailey v. Alabama (1911), in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Alabama’s contract labor law. Subsequently (U.S. v. Reynolds, 1914) the high court
also struck down Alabama’s practice of assigning prisoners to private citizens.
Still, these victories did not end peonage. So long as debt reigned supreme, so
long as planters and industrialists were patrons of local lawmen, the corrupt
regime would flourish.
paul m. pruitt jr.
Bounds Law Library
University of Alabama
Brent Jude Aucoin, “‘A Rift in the Clouds’: Southern Federal Judges and AfricanAmerican Civil Rights, 1885–1915” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arkansas, 1999);
CONVICT LEASE SYSTEM AND PEONAGE
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29
Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865–1900 (2000); Pete
Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (1990); Matthew J.
Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866–1928
(1996); Blake McKelvey, American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (1977);
David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow
Justice (1996); Paul M. Pruitt Jr., Reviews in American History (September 2001);
Hilda Jane Zimmerman, “Penal Systems and Penal Reforms in the South since the
Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1947).
Criminal Justice
The South has a long-standing reputation for violence and criminal disorder.
It also has an image as a region where violent white men went unpunished
and where, until recently, citizens frequently resorted to vigilantism to maintain order. Scholars have blamed the region’s poverty, its racism, its pessimistic
view of human nature, and even its debatable Celtic heritage for this crime and
violence. Historians have suggested that an ineffective legal system intensified
the combativeness of southern society.
Two themes from the Old South—frontier individualism and the plantation
system—have served most frequently to explain the legal system’s inability to
deal with crime. No one has advanced these ideas with more assurance than
W. J. Cash in his book The Mind of the South (1941). To Cash, an intense individualism, buttressed by a belief in white supremacy, blunted the development
of law and government, while the growth of the plantation system kept the
police power decentralized. An effective legal system was neither expected nor
desired.
Historians have done little to rebut Cash’s interpretation. Charles Sydnor,
for example, declared that just as geographical distance isolated the westerner
from legal restraints, so “the social order diminished the force of law in the
South.” For other scholars, the private discipline enforced by masters over their
slaves found its counterpart in extralegal or illegal means of resolving disputes
between whites.
Although an ineffective legal response to crime may be yet another burden
of southern history, there are reasons to doubt traditional interpretations of its
causes. Students of the westward movement are no longer so certain that the
frontier experience was abnormally violent or excessively individualistic. Much
of the frontier, including the South, was a peaceful place where settlers tried to
maintain order and re-create community. The urban disorder of the 19th and
20th centuries, especially in the North, also makes it difficult to conclude that
lawlessness was uniquely western or southern. Moreover, the idea that informal
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CRIMINAL JUSTICE
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