A New South Rebellion

The Battle against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896

Karin A. Shapiro

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807847336, 9780807824238
• eBook ISBN: 9780807867051
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In 1891, thousands of Tennessee miners rose up against the use of convict labor by the state's coal companies, eventually engulfing five mountain communities in a rebellion against government authority. Propelled by the insurgent sensibilities of Populism and Gilded Age unionism, the miners initially sought to abolish the convict lease system through legal challenges and legislative lobbying. When nonviolent tactics failed to achieve reform, the predominantly white miners repeatedly seized control of the stockades and expelled the mostly black convicts from the mining districts. Insurrection hastened the demise of convict leasing in Tennessee, though at the cost of greatly weakening organized labor in the state's coal regions.
Exhaustively researched and vividly written, A New South Rebellion brings to life the hopes that rural southerners invested in industrialization and the political tensions that could result when their aspirations were not met. Karin Shapiro skillfully analyzes the place of convict labor in southern economic development, the contested meanings of citizenship in late-nineteenth-century America, the weaknesses of Populist-era reform politics, and the fluidity of race relations during the early years of Jim Crow.

CHAPTER 1
The Convict Wars and the New South

In the moonlight of July 14, 1891, several hundred east Tennesseans emerged from homes nestled in the ridges of Anderson County. The men were mostly coal miners who worked in the towns of Briceville and Coal Creek, though they also included a number of shopkeepers, professionals, and farmers. Residents of Coal Creek gathered first. Armed with rifles and shotguns, they assumed something of a military formation and began to make their way along the five-mile railway line that curved between their town and Briceville. As they proceeded, the company swelled with the bodies of men who lived in the vicinity of the neighboring village.

Sometime around midnight—later reports disagreed about whether the action took place on Bastille Day or just after its conclusion—the band of local residents arrived at the Tennessee Coal Mining Company’s jerry-built stockade, just outside Briceville. This prison housed forty convicted criminals, wards of the state who had recently been leased to the company and who toiled six days a week in its mine. After reassembling outside the stockade, the group demanded that the jail’s guards immediately release the convicts. Heavily outnumbered, the watchmen quickly capitulated. With minimal fuss and no bloodshed, the crowd then escorted the inmates back to Coal Creek. There the miners and their allies placed the convict laborers on a train and sent them on a thirty-two-mile ride to Knoxville.¹ So began a rebellion against the use of convict labor in coal mines that would last over a year, involve thousands of Tennesseans and Kentuckians, and engulf five mining communities in east and mid-Tennessee.

These communities did not only resort to arms in their efforts to focus public attention on the state’s well-established penal policy. The miners regularly sought the assistance of sympathetic governmental officials, such as the commissioner of labor and the attorney general. In the early fall of 1891, they forced the governor to call a special session of the legislature, at which they lobbied state legislators to abolish the convict lease and reform the criminal law. Throughout the late 1880s and early 1890s, these workingmen appealed to the courts to clarify penal practices and vindicate their contractual rights. Over the same period, they negotiated vigorously with their employers and struck on numerous occasions. Finally, Tennessee’s coal miners established formal political alliances with organizations that represented urban workers and small farmers. These varied strategies were interspersed with three more attacks on the state’s convict stockades, including the periodic liberation of predominantly black convicts by predominantly white miners.

After July 14, 1891, the convict question remained the state’s most pressing political controversy for years. But the “convict wars,” as many contemporaries called them, did not immediately achieve the miners’ most cherished goal—the abolition of convict labor in coal mines. During the fourth attack, in August 1892, four militiamen were killed in skirmishes. These deaths turned public opinion sharply against the miners. Facing a greatly enlarged militia contingent and confronting a public increasingly critical of their methods, the miners surrendered. As a result, convict mining continued in competition with free labor until the lease contract expired at the end of 1895.

The story of rebellion against convict labor in Tennessee provides a series of vantage points from which one can survey the terrain of aspiration and repression that constituted the postemancipation South. In the social and economic currents that brought coal mining to postbellum Tennessee, one can discern significant evidence about the terms on which upcountry southerners experienced and responded to industrialization. At the intersection of a momentary industrial labor shortage, a paternalistic and racially oppressive approach to criminal justice, and the attempt of southern industrialists to limit the power of unions, one can glimpse the role of convict labor in the New South’s embrace of the industrial world. And through the narrative of the Tennessee coal miners’ economic, legal, and political struggles, one can discover a new angle on the tumultuous transformations of the 1890s—including the character of Populism, the nature and limits of late-nineteenth-century labor militance, and the impact that Jim Crow had on the southern industrial workplace.

This book chronicles Tennessee’s convict wars, pausing throughout to scrutinize the rich analytical vistas that they offer. It has much to say about southern industrialization, the rise of modern southern business, convict labor in the southern economy and southern society, the southern industrial working class, southern Democrats, Republicans, and Populists, and southern race relations. But this is not a comprehensive history of any of these topics. The goal throughout is to show how these processes and protagonists shaped a coal miners’ revolt and what that revolt reveals about the New South.

Most of the people who came to work in Coal Creek and Briceville migrated from surrounding counties. These upcountry Tennesseans moved from farms to outposts of the industrializing world. Like so many other nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans who migrated from rural areas to towns and cities, the newcomers to the coal mines of postbellum Tennessee had to adapt to life as wage laborers in industrial communities.

For well over a decade now, historians of the late-nineteenth-century South have argued about the impulses that led tens of thousands of southerners—both white and black—to leave agricultural work and enter the industrial labor force. Some scholars maintain that the yeomanry of the upcountry South vigorously resisted the growth of a commercial society. Residents of Appalachia, they contend, were squeezed off the land by the combination of a spreading railroad network, a consolidation of land ownership, stock and fence laws that closed the southern range for livestock, and crippling debts associated with sharecropping and crop liens. Together, these developments accelerated commercialization of the southern upcountry and weakened the independence of small-scale farmers, who profoundly resented an ever-encroaching market society. According to this view, upcountry southerners reluctantly left their homesteads to seek work in the New South’s textile mills, coal mines, timber operations, and iron forges. Other historians portray these same people as all too ready to leave the drudgery and isolation of farm life, especially since population pressure on the land made it increasingly difficult for every child in an upcountry family to gain access to an economically viable piece of land. After moving away from the crowded countryside, this alternative interpretation suggests, they embraced meaningful social and economic opportunities in the growing industrial towns.²

The experience of the Tennesseans who came to work in the coal-rich areas of Anderson and Grundy Counties, both of which became consumed by the miners’ rebellion, most closely supports the second of these historiographic accounts. The majority of residents in these two counties’ coal towns did not migrate because of acute economic problems in the countryside; they did not leave crushed or destitute communities. In the twenty years preceding the rebellion, the value of farms and the agricultural goods they produced moved steadily higher in upcountry Tennessee, while almost four in five farms were worked by their owners. But by 1880, the owners of farmsteads encountered increasing difficulty in providing adequate land for all of their children. The sons of many farmers and tenants could no longer find an attractive livelihood in their immediate neighborhood. Scores of these individuals sought work in the area’s coal towns.

These migrants were not alienated people ripped from a previous pastoral way of life. They came to town with substantial hopes, and many sank roots, helping to build the new municipalities, buying houses, founding churches and schools, and creating a vibrant local culture.³ Coal Creek and the other Tennessee mining settlements were not classic “company towns,” where residents owned nothing and found themselves perpetually in debt to their employer through rent obligations and store accounts.

The new communities, of course, were one-industry towns, where the primary employers retained substantial authority. If a coal miner crossed “the boss” and lost his job, he usually had no choice but to seek work somewhere else. A full realization of the aspirations held by the townspeople in Tennessee’s mining settlements also largely depended on strong demand for coal, which only periodically obtained in the postbellum decades. Yet one must not lose sight of the expectations that mineworkers and their families possessed about their communities. A collective sense of possibility and belonging was an indispensable catalyst to the coal mining rebellions.

The migrants to Tennessee’s coal towns experienced industrialization after the core regions of the American North and northern Europe had initiated the factory age. Many of the areas on the periphery of the industrial heartlands were beset by a shortage of skilled labor, a dearth of financial capital, and high transportation costs associated with long distances from markets. Constrained by these shortcomings, the industrial economies of outlying regions were typically founded on the exploitation of natural resources, which were sent to the industrial heartland for processing and manufacture. As scholars have long noted, the relationship between peripheral regions and the most thoroughly industrialized economies were profoundly colonial in character—even when, as in the case of the postbellum South, the colonial region was part of a single national polity.

In attempting to extract raw materials inexpensively, capitalists within colonial economies like that of late-nineteenth-century Tennessee often relied on cheap labor and, not infrequently, on various forms of unfree labor. After the Civil War, every southern state placed at least a portion of its convicted criminals in the hands of private businessmen who put the prisoners to work. One must be careful, though, not to exaggerate the significance of prison labor in Tennessee’s postbellum industrial economy. Throughout the late nineteenth century, coal mining never contributed more than one-tenth of the state’s industrial output or employed more than one percent of its adult male population. In this period, Tennessee’s industrialization rested to a large extent on small-scale manufactories and workshops and on textile, grist, and sawmills that were dependent on water power, not coal-powered steam generators. At the same time, the toil of thousands of prisoners in Tennessee’s mines was by no means marginal to the state’s industrial development. The labor performed by Tennessee’s convicts primed the economic pump of a pivotal extractive industry—coal mining—upon which many other industries depended.

In the aftermath of the Confederacy’s surrender, a number of Tennessee’s leading capitalists turned their attention to the state’s coal seams, hoping to develop a large-scale mining industry. When these would-be industrialists encountered difficulties in recruiting labor for their ventures, they lobbied the state government to make convicts available for use in the mines. During the 1870s—the early years of commercial coal mining in Tennessee—mine managers perceived prison laborers to be cheap and dependable. The exertions of convicts helped to propel the new ventures underground, lowered labor costs, and indirectly assisted railway development in the state, as railroads depended on coal for both fuel and cargo.

Although prison workers may have been vital in the initial period of coal mining in the Volunteer State, within a few decades convict labor no longer fulfilled its earlier function of supplying cheap and dependable labor. By the late 1880s, Tennessee’s coal operators had discovered that reliance on the labor of criminals entailed a host of indirect costs. Convict lessees were responsible for paying prison guards and rewarding those who captured escaped inmates. The coal companies also suffered losses as the result of property destroyed by prisoners. In addition, management could not lay off convicts during hot summer months when demand for coal waned, nor when the market became depressed. The cost of feeding, clothing, housing, and treating ill or injured inmates remained fixed, regardless of the ebb and flow in demand for coal. Those companies that were vertically integrated and that produced for more than one market, such as coal and pig iron, were able to employ convicts most profitably. When one market weakened, larger coal corporations could simply redeploy the prisoners under their control.

Irrespective of the structure of their operations, every coal company employing state inmates found that convict labor diminished productivity at the same time that it brought fixed and often unanticipated expenses. Many customers complained that the coal excavated by prisoners was below par. Because convicts had few incentives to mine with care, their coal was frequently “shot to pieces” or filled with slate. As a result, no Tennessee company relied solely on prisoners to mine its coal. Those mining operations that did employ convicts judiciously balanced their number of free and unfree laborers.

Why then did the Volunteer State’s coal operators persist in relying on the convict lease throughout the 1880s and early 1890s? The answer lies primarily with the impact of the convict lease on labor relations in the coal industry. With convicts at the coal face, corporate managers gained significant leverage over their employees. From the early 1870s until well after the first revolt of 1891, the state’s free miners lived with the understanding that strikes might prompt coal companies to bring in convict laborers as replacements. Both east and mid-Tennessee mine directors were convinced that the ready availability of convict laborers dampened the labor militance of Tennessee’s free miners. Convict labor, these managers found, served both to reduce the wages they paid to free miners and to curb challenges to work rules. Thus in Tennessee the convict lease structured the psychological balance between industrial capital and labor. The institution enhanced the confidence and bargaining position of mining capitalists, while always reminding mineworkers of a threat from the degraded alternative of prison labor. Eventually, however, the rebellions of 1891 and 1892 dramatically increased the costs associated with administering the convict lease, persuading Tennessee’s mining magnates that convicts no longer improved their balance sheets.

As long as convict leasing remained an integral part of Tennessee’s coal industry, the institution held social as well as economic significance. In tandem with the criminal justice system that generated its laborers, the lease helped to forge a new postemancipation structure of racial subordination. Thousands of state inmates—primarily young black men who were convicted of petty theft-found their lives defined by the policy of leasing prisoners to private companies. In Tennessee’s bid to enshrine individual property rights, these young men learned that there were harsh penalties for individuals who took a chicken or items of clothing that did not belong to them, especially in the state’s growing cities, where most postbellum inmates had been convicted of a crime. These lessons did not come cheaply. The costs entailed in the administration of criminal justice—largely the payment of fees to sheriffs, county prosecutors, and other officials—far exceeded the sums generated by the leasing out of convicts. Though the state’s financial managers occasionally noted this anomaly, the legislature repeatedly refused to reform the criminal law so as to reduce its costs, such as by limiting the number of petty crimes that constituted felonies. The people’s representatives believed that the money spent on law enforcement was fully justified.

The criminal justice system and the convict lease did not simply remind Tennessee’s black population that transgressing the law carried stiff penalties; they also greased patronage networks and bolstered the sense among the South’s white elite that it presided over a paternalistic and even benevolent social order. The numerous people who fed, clothed, and guarded the state’s convicts were invariably appointed through political intervention at the state or local level. In most of these appointments, patrons dispensed sinecures to local whites in return for social and political loyalty. Tennessee’s penal system also encouraged the state’s elite to help secure pardons for its inmates. The governor’s correspondence files from the late nineteenth century are filled with petitions for clemency by thousands of prisoners. The vast majority of the petitions—whether filed by a black or white convict—were signed and supported by jurors, justices of the peace, judges, and local notables. Without such endorsements, the chances of a pardon were slim. With them, inmates regularly obtained substantial reductions in their sentences. The culture surrounding pardon-giving in Tennessee reinforced the dependence of black and white prisoners on the patronage of their “betters,” thereby assuring Tennessee’s white elite that it oversaw a paternalistic and honor-bound society.⁴

The highly personalized world of pardons and petitions recalled an antebellum past in which slaves, free blacks, and many poor whites had relied heavily on the goodwill of a white patron. Similarly, the actual practice of the convict lease, which required white prison guards to coerce hard labor from groups of mostly black prisoners, was profoundly reminiscent of slavery. But while the echoes of many older social relationships continued to reverberate in the postbellum South, the region’s political context changed dramatically, especially after the late 1880s. The whirlwind of populism gave tens of thousands of southern farmers reason to believe they could successfully challenge the region’s prevailing structure of political power. In addition to mobilizing farmers, the Populist crusades also proved capable of galvanizing southern workers like Tennessee’s miners.

The waxing of populism in the Volunteer State provided a crucial impetus to the miners’ opposition to convict labor. Members of the Farmers’ Alliance, which gained statewide prominence in the late 1880s and early 1890s, spoke a political language that resonated in the hills of east and mid-Tennessee. They believed that capitalists should not be accorded special privileges; they demonized “monopolists”; they denounced government intervention on behalf of the “aristocrats” of capital; and they considered Andrew Jackson—the defender of the ordinary white man—to be their hero. Alliance leaders and newspapers combined this rhetoric with promises to bring down the “penitentiary ring” by terminating the convict lease. Thus when members of the Tennessee Farmers’ Alliance won the state’s governorship and a plurality of seats in the state legislature in 1890, Tennessee’s coal miners had every reason to believe that the newly elected government would redress their grievances. Together, the electoral successes of Tennessee’s populism, the movement’s political creed, and the adoption of campaign planks friendly to labor all emboldened the state’s free coal miners—even those who hailed from thoroughly Republican east Tennessee.

The Farmers’ Alliance, however, ultimately failed to respond to the miners’ fervent demand for the abolition of convict leasing. Internal weaknesses provide one explanation for the Populists’ inability to fulfill their undertaking to end the use of prison labor in the mines. The Alliance constituted a broad church, embracing political congregants from the cotton farms of west Tennessee, the wheatlands of mid-Tennessee, and upcountry east Tennessee. Broadly pitched rhetoric and carefully created campaign platforms could hold together these very different groups of farmers, who often possessed widely diverging interests. Once in power, though, Alliance leaders experienced great difficulty in adopting and implementing specific proposals. On a host of issues, such as the convict lease, the Populist leadership encountered internal factions opposed to one course of action or another. Large-scale farmers in west and mid-Tennessee came to oppose outright termination of the lease, fearing the resulting loss of revenue to state coffers and the added expense of building and operating state penitentiaries.

Had the Alliancemen possessed more experience in political affairs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Convict Wars and the New South
• 2 Schemes and Dreams in the Coalfields
• 3 Measures of Southern Justice
• 4 Kindling Insurrection
• 5 An Uneasy Armistice
• 6 Dilemmas of Militance
• 7 The Spread of Rebellion
• 8 Aftermath
• 9 The Boundaries of Dissent
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Index