At the dawn of the twentieth century, Ida B. Wells helped galvanize a militant movement against lynching in the United States. In newspaper articles, speeches, and pamphlets, she exposed racist violence, examined its roots, and highlighted the liberation struggles of Black people. In her life and practice, she fiercely bore witness to the racist barbarism of America and urged others to join in combat against it.
Wells also blasted the system of convict-lease labor, then ubiquitous throughout the American South. From Chicago, she wrote, “The Convict Lease System and Lynch Law are twin infamies which flourish hand in hand in many of the United States.”1From the pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Colombian Exposition. https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/idabwellsconlea.html But while lynchings continued to flare at near-regular intervals, the convict-lease system was eventually snuffed out by a series of fiery insurrections in Tennessee and elsewhere.
Black Labor and the Industrializing South
In the waning years of Reconstruction, capitalist development in the South continued to rely on the forced labor of Black workers. While plantation agriculture continued to dominate, industrial capitalism mushroomed in ways unimaginable before the Civil War. As the white supremacist newspaper the San Francisco Examiner gloated in 1883,
The fact is undeniable that the South, at this moment, is richer, more productive, more orderly and more prosperous than at any previous time within its history. . . . While the iron furnaces in Ohio and Pennsylvania are shutting down work and turning their men out of employment, those in Alabama and Tennessee are increasing their capacity and doubling their capital. And, what is more startling still, the Birmingham furnaces are shipping their products into Cleveland and Pittsburgh, and underselling the native products in their native market.2The San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, California) 22 Dec. 1883, Saturday, p. 2.
In the North as well as the South, industrial capitalism’s hunger for Appalachian coal was insatiable. Between 1870 and 1920, hordes of railroad barons invaded the mountains to conspire with the coal industrialists. Four major railroad systems were constructed across the serpentine landscape, the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O), the Norfolk & Western (N&W), the Louisville & Nashville (L&N), and the Southern Railroad, in addition to countless branches and local rail lines. Boom towns and mining camps followed, as the barons of capital smuggled incredible amounts of fossil fuels out of the mountains.
The frenzy and conflict produced working-class legends like the Black railworker John Henry; cities like Birmingham, Alabama; and capitalist behemoths like the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI). Miners and railroad workers staged heroic rebellions against the march of capitalist plunder. And, southern Democrats, antsy to retain their grip on wealth and power, campaigned vigorously for protectionist measures to boost southern industrialism in their “New South.”
Although enslaved labor was no longer legal, the coercion and exploitation of Black labor remained vital to the capitalist project. Without the old system of chattel slavery, however, plantation owners needed new laws to guarantee their domination of the argricultural labor force. Eventually the ruling class settled on a strategy of criminalization: those who refused to submit to exploitation would be thrown in jail, chained, and forced once again to produce wealth for the planters. In this context, legislatures passed reams of laws to criminalize Black workers as well as poor whites, the better to secure control of the labor force as a whole.
State governments and prison wardens contracted with industrial giants like US Steel and TCI, granting them access to incarcerated workers in mining, railroad construction, and other deadly jobs. As C. Van Woodward described it, The South’s “penitentiaries” were great rolling cages that followed construction camps and railroad building, hastily built stockades deep in forest or swamp or mining fields, or windowless log forts in turpentine flats.”3Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 213.
The Convict Leasing System
Ida B. Wells was all too familiar with the brutal racism and forced labor that facilitated capitalist development in the New South. Before landing in Chicago, Wells lived in Memphis where she was an editor and co-owner of the city’s Black newspaper Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. As editor, she documented the plight of Black Tennesseeans and was active in early civil rights organizing. She even launched a campaign against lynching in Memphis, for which she became the target of a violent racist mob. She narrowly escaped with her life and headed first to New York City and then to Chicago.
Once in Chicago, Wells continued writing and organizing about what she had seen in Tennessee. In one early piece written shortly after she arrived, Wells underscored capitalist profit as the driving force behind the convict-lease system in her old home state:
The defense of this prison is based wholly upon its economy to the state. It is argued that it would cost large sums of money to build penitentiaries in which to confine and work the prisoners as is done in the Northern States, while the lease system brings the state a revenue and relieves it of the cost of building and maintaining prisons. The fact that the convicts labor is in this way brought into direct competition with free labor does not seem to be taken into account. The contractors, who get these laborers for 30 or 40 cents per day, can drive out of the market the man who employs free labor at $1 a day.4From the pamphlet, The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World’s Colombian Exposition. https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/idabwellsconlea.html Published in Chicago, 1893.
The convict-lease system was a win-win for the racist southern Redemptioners and their capitalist partners who sought to build a “New South” while retaining all the trappings of racism and cheap labor. Rather than rely on unpopular taxes to operate the ever-expanding penitentiary systems, prison convictions produced massive revenues for state governments. In Mississippi, the number of convicts increased 25% in just three years. In Georgia, it increased nearly 30%. By 1898, nearly three-quarters of Alabama’s state revenue was stolen from the forced labor of incarcerated workers.
Of course, Wells also exposed the essentially racist character of the convictions. She pointed to a report in the People’s Advocate, a Black journal in Atlanta, which observed in 1892: “It is an astounding fact that 90 percent of the state’s convicts are colored; 194 white males and 2 white females; 1,710 colored males and 44 colored females.”
The convict-lease system was a bloody binge of brutality and inhumanity, a damning indictment of unbridled capitalist development. As Eugene Debs excoriated the system in South Carolina in 1899, “Out of 258 prisoners employed by one company, 128, or more than 40 per cent, died as the result, largely, of brutal treatment.”5Eugene V. Debs, speech on “Prison Labor,” before the Nineteenth Century Club at Delmonico’s in New York City, March 21, 1899, printed in Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), April 29, 1899, p 1-2.
Corruption and profiteering were hallmarks of the lease system. Convicts were often “subleased” to other planters, industrialists, and mining corporations. Thus, humans were traded back and forth, like money, all in the interest of rolling capitalist development in the New South. It was not uncommon for well-connected industrialists to obtain convict lease grants of twenty to thirty years. Penitentiary wardens grew magnificently wealthy in the process. But, it was the southern industrialists who most vociferously defended, and profited from the convict-leasing.
For the industrialists, convicts were a source of very cheap labor, which drove down the price for labor throughout the region. As one Alabama newspaper pointed out, “Employers of convicts pay so little for their labor that it makes it next to impossible for those who give work to free labor to compete with them in any line of business. As a result, the price paid for labor is based upon the price paid convicts.”6Quoted in, Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 232.
Moreover, convict labor represented a reserve army for strike-breaking. Colonel Colyer, a former Confederate Congressman, head of Tennessee Coal and Iron, and controller of the influential Nashville American was heavily invested in the system of convict leasing. As leader of the “Whig-industrialist wing of Tennessee Democrats,”7Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 3. he vigorously defended the actions of TCI in his newspaper, writing, “One of the chief reasons which first induced the company to take up the system was the great chance which it seemed to present for overcoming strikes.”8Quoted in Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 4. Colyer and TCI leased Tennessee prisoners for $101,000 a year in efforts to construct his industrial “New South.”
But, convict leasing didn’t result in the smooth, conflict-free system of labor exploitation Colyer hoped for. Rather than strikes, TCI faced armed insurrections of miners and their supporters.
Labor, Insurrection, and Abolition
The U.S. ruling class has always sought to divide black and white workers in order to more effectively control and exploit both. They continued this time-honored racist tradition in the way that they operated the convict-lease system.
As early as 1877, east Tennessee miners protested the use of convict labor, especially as strike-breakers. Because of the racialized nature of the convict-lease system, opposition often accepted racist tropes and viewed the convicts as enemies, rather than the state-sponsored labor program. By 1891, six companies relied on nearly 800 convict miners, overwhelmingly Black Tennesseeans.9Daniel, Pete. “The Tennessee Convict War.” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 34, no. 3 (1975): 273-92. Accessed May 15, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42623533. 274. But, the twin terrains of labor and race quickly merged into one battlefield.
The miners’ organizations balanced delicately between the decline of the Knights of Labor and the rise of the United Mineworkers of America, both organizations that embraced interracial organization. Eugene Merrell, a former Knights of Labor organizer blacklisted from the mines, emerged as one of the most effective organizers against the convict-lease system.
This all came to a head in 1891, when Tennessee miners in Coal Creek refused a contract with TCI’s Tennessee Coal Mine Company. In retaliation, TCI ordered convict laborers to destroy the miners’ homes and re-use the materials in the construction of a new stockade—to house convict labor. The displaced miners responded with a hastily organized march to the stockades where they forced guards, officers, and convicts to board a train to Knoxville.
The Democratic Governor John P. Buchanan sent three militia companies to suppress the rebellion and return convict laborers to the stockade. Within days, more than a thousand armed miners once again forced the guards and convicts onto another train to Knoxville.
Under pressure from labor activists, the Governor promised to hold a special session of the Tennessee legislature in order to placate the miners. Demonstrations throughout the region organized solidarity and fundraisers to help the miners rebellion while the Farmers’ Alliance demanded the repeal of the convict-lease law. Still, Buchanan and the state’s halls of power refused to make any meaningful change.
On Halloween night, 1891, miners once again marched to the stockades, freed all of the convicts, and burned the stockade to the ground. Similar tactics were organized at several other mining companies. No convict laborers were abused in the actions. Instead, they were often sent away with food and clothing.
The following year, similar insurrections broke out in middle Tennessee at TCI mines. In Tracy City, miners overpowered the guards, freed the convicts, and burned the stockade to the ground. In Anderson County, TN, miners laid siege to Fort Anderson.
The insurrections spelled the end for the convict-lease system. Indeed, the actions of rank and file miners had simply made the project too expensive and unpopular. And, like the interracial general strike of New Orleans, “gave notice that Southern labor was not going to accept the Old South labor philosophy of the New South leaders—not without a fight, anyway.”10Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971. 234.
Between 1900 and 1913, activists “overthrew the convict lease system in six states and weakened it in others.”11Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971.424. By 1919, the state of Alabama was the final holdout to retain the convict-lease system.12Woodward, C Vann. Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Baton Rouge] Louisiana State University Press, 1971.425.
The racialized system of convict-lease in the industrializing New South was an extension of the Old South’s system of enslaved labor. It forced free labor (mainly, but not exclusively, white) to compete against unfree labor (mainly, but not exclusively, Black) for the profit of coal barons.
Ida B. Wells’ writings projected the campaign for abolition of the convict-lease system nationally. She provided a rich voice to the practical actions of miners in Tennessee and elsewhere in Appalachia. The Coal Creek insurrections were an all too rare moment when the actions of Black and white workers obliterated systems that divided them and oppressed them both in discrete ways.
Although the convict-lease system was abolished, capitalist development continued. The militant traditions of Coal Creek also provided the foundation for more radical miners’ actions in Appalachia decades later. And, unsurprisingly, TCI’s operations in Birmingham, AL became a hotbed for Black communists like Angelo Herndon in the 1930s.