Convict Lease System Research Articles

“The Spawn of Slavery”? Race, State Capacity, and the Development of Carceral Institutions in the Postbellum South

AbstractThe end of the Civil War brought freedom to 3.9 million formerly enslaved people. Yet, almost immediately following the war, Southern states started to incarcerate freedpeople at unprecedented rates in an effort to reinstate racial hierarchies in the post-Emancipation era. Not before long, Southern states introduced new carceral institutions, most notably the convict-lease system, under which prisoners were leased out as laborers to private contractors for the duration of their sentence. The emergence of convict leasing has often been portrayed as a programmatic attempt by the Southern whites to find an alternative to antebellum chattel slavery.1 Paying special attention to the sequencing of political events during Reconstruction, I revisit this story by highlighting the role that state capacity and public finance played in the introduction of the policy. As conviction numbers swelled after Emancipation, the carceral capacity of Southern penitentiaries was quickly overwhelmed, prompting Reconstruction legislatures and governors to search for alternatives to conventional imprisonment. I argue that convict leasing emerged from these capacity challenges as a cost-effective solution that initially enjoyed broad bipartisan support. Over time, leasing grew more profitable, both for the state governments and the lessees, and abolition efforts were stalled for decades, even when the system became increasingly abusive. Using a range of archival materials, I illustrate these carceral developments in an in-depth case study of the origins of convict leasing in Georgia.

An Archaeology of Convict Leasing in the American South

ABSTRACT Between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, thousands of men, women, and children in the American South were forced to labor for private businesses and individuals under the convict lease system. This system disproportionately impacted Black men and boys, although it also ensnared Black women and girls as well as poor white men, women, and children. Motivated by the financial gains achieved through leasing prisoners, states ensured that the system continued despite numerous highly-publicized human rights violations. Although numerous scholars and grassroots activists have brought attention to the history of convict leasing, historical archaeology has only engaged with the phenomenon in a limited capacity. In this article, we call for archaeologists, and archaeologists of the African Diaspora in particular, to engage with sites and materialities of convict leasing more directly. Our article outlines a potential path forward for such a research program.

Colonial Britain's Convict Labour Policies and the Cape Colony, 1806-1899

This article evaluates how convict labour alleviated labour shortages experienced in the Cape Colony from 1806 to 1899. It explores and evaluates Britain's significant impact on labour policies followed in the Cape Colony and focuses on the imperial government's role in developing legislation and procedures regarding management and transportation of convicts. It also considers the influence of nineteenth century policies of convict control in Britain, and the application of these policies and labour regimes in the Cape Colony. The article describes convict transportation, anti-convict agitation by Cape colonists and the economic significance of convict labour and public works projects. Finally, the convict lease system - the practice of hiring convicts to mines and to farmers - and Cape labour legislation's role in increasing the convict labour force through criminal sanctions will be examined.

Filosofie zločinu a trestu – vybrané aspekty amerického trestního práva v 19. století se zvláštním zřetelem k problematice vězeňství

In his article, the author discusses the development of American criminal law in the 19th century, with the focus on prison issues. In this context, he also recalls the views of the French thinker Michel Foucault on this topic expressed in his now classic work “Discipline and Punish”. In order to provide the necessary context, this section is preceded by a brief outline of the development of American criminal law since its colonial beginnings. Then, as far as the prison system itself in the newly founded United States of America is concerned, the author highlights two different approaches to prisoners that were applied in the jail houses Eastern Penitentiary in Pennsylvania and Auburn Prison in New York. He also focuses on the economic side of the issue, whereas part of the text aims to analyse the phenomenon of the “convict lease system” as practised particularly in the American South. Finally, he concludes his article by mentioning other attempts to reform the prison system in the second half of the 19th century.

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest

Reviewed by: Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum by Mab Segrest Dennis Doyle Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum. By Mab Segrest. (New York and London: The New Press, 2020. Pp. xvii, 396. $28.99, ISBN 978-1-62097-297-7.) Scholar-activist Mab Segrest's latest book is not simply another entry in the growing list of publications arguing for the centrality of the South, race, and African Americans to the history of U.S. asylums and psychiatry. Segrest's ultimate aim is different. Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting [End Page 554] of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum is an ambitious retelling of the history of long-nineteenth-century Georgia that presents the now-defunct Milledgeville Asylum as a touchstone whose microhistory mirrors larger shifts in both the state and the South. Segrest conceives of antebellum Georgia as, first and foremost, a white settler society erected on land forcibly wrested from Indigenous peoples and transformed into a cotton kingdom through racial slavery. All of that was accomplished through violence and exploitation of the vulnerable, aided and abetted by a cheerleading state insensate to the pain it inflicted. That is when the Milledgeville Asylum entered the story in 1842. As the largest institution in Georgia's public sector, it served the state's interest. And this frontier state had a vested interest in both growing its plantation-based extractive economy and ignoring the suffering that racial slavery inflicted on the people it exploited. According to Segrest, archival records reveal that doctors served that interest by taking in the white victims of such a violent settler society while conveniently eliding the possibility that racial slavery could inflict pain and suffering on Black people. Georgia's leading alienists theorized that people of African descent were somehow racially immune to stress, helping justify the exclusion of Black people from the asylum and render invisible the plantation system's cruelty. The key to Segrest's thesis is that the asylum doctors' obliviousness to the violence and racism endemic to Georgia endured well after slavery's end. It lasted through the Civil War, with psychiatrists hesitating to attribute the cause of the soldiers' and refugees' ills to the horrors of war. Segrest then argues that in 1867, as the asylum became racially segregated, it joined the Black Codes, the Milledgeville penitentiary, a convict-lease system, and chain gangs in providing postbellum Georgian elites with a carceral state that could compel Black labor. As African Americans suffered terrorism, lynching, debt peonage, and the indignities of Jim Crow, the asylum's clinicians helped the state overlook that violence by blaming Black asylum commitments on the Black race's alleged lack of emotional fitness for emancipation. As the asylum entered the twentieth century, the superintendents' tendency to blame Black illness on racial heredity led them to ignore how the asylum's overcrowding and inadequate menus produced disease. Segrest rounds out her narrative by contending that by eventually embracing eugenics and therapeutic nihilism, the asylum superintendents located the blame for the failings of racial capitalism squarely within the biology of Georgia's citizens. Segrest ultimately argues that Georgia and the South's current reliance on mass prison incarceration to care for mentally ill African Americans is a legacy of a society that habitually confined suffering African Americans rather than reckon with how it caused that suffering in the first place. Administrations of Lunacy is engaging, but advanced graduate students might find its epistemology, methods, and style problematic. Almost every chapter makes use of an individual patient's record to create illustrative vignettes, but it is unclear how representative these cases are. More troubling, Segrest takes liberties in second-guessing the clinicians, imposing contemporary diagnoses, and speculating on disease causation. She also falls back on techniques of narrative fiction to imagine a historical actor's perspective or life [End Page 555] details when the historical record is silent. Undergraduates will be more likely to overlook these flaws, as Segrest's style is irreverent and conversational, makes no apologies for her support of prison abolitionism, and enlivens the page with gripping and...

“This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois

Incarceration served as a primary apparatus by which abolition democracy was defeated after Reconstruction. Carceral institutions—such as the penitentiary, the convict-lease system, and the chain gang—functioned to demarcate the racial limits of citizenship and to impede equal political power. This article turns to W. E. B. Du Bois to argue that incarceration constrains democratic political equality. Turning to Du Bois’s treatment of crime and imprisonment in works including The Philadelphia Negro (1899), “The Spawn of Slavery” (1901), and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), alongside archival material, I situate incarceration in Du Bois’s democratic thought. According to Du Bois, carceral institutions bounded ideas of full citizenship, fueled panic over Black “criminality,” fomented feelings of inferiority, and hampered the possibility for abolition democracy, a multiracial, multiclass movement committed to worker democracy and a future rid of slavery and subjugation. Du Bois shows us how carceral institutions run into tension with democratic ideals.

Genres of Enslavement

In July 2018, the New York Times reported on the remains of some ninety-five people discovered at a construction site in the Houston, Texas, suburb of Sugar Land. The archaeologists called in to identify the remains determined that they likely belonged to African American laborers who worked between 1878 and 1911 on the Imperial Sugar Company’s plantation as part of Texas’s convict-lease system. The remains unearthed in Sugar Land compel consideration of the tenuousness and illusory nature of freedom in the United States. Focusing on James Hannaham’s Delicious Foods (2015) and Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), this essay considers how the neo–slave narrative might allow access to enslavement and the plantation not as a retrospective event or site but as coterminous and ongoing iterations of US anti-Black violence. Thinking of the plantation not as a site but as a logic, this essay also proposes the concept of “plantation future blues,” expressed in forms of sociality meant to unthink Black unfreedom. Ultimately, the piece considers how contemporary novels might point toward both anti-Black violence and elaborate on the hope of Black futurity by engaging the genres of enslavement.

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture Erica Richardson (bio) Carefully and conscientiously we shall study the questions, which affect the race most deeply and directly. Against the convict lease system, the Jim Crow car laws, lynchings and all other barbarities which degrade us, we shall protest with such force of logic and intensity of the soul that those who oppress us will either cease to disavow the inalienability and equality of human rights, or be ashamed to openly violate the very principles upon which this government was founded. —Mary Church Terrell, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play” (1902)1 The immorality of colored women is a theme upon which those who know little about them or those who maliciously misrepresent them love to descant. Foul aspersions upon the character of colored women are assiduously circulated by the press of certain sections and especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves […] Dotted all over the country are charitable institutions for the aged, orphaned, and poor which have been established by colored women, just how many it is [End Page 33] difficult to state, owing to the lack of statistics bearing on the progress, possessions, and prowess of colored women. —Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1904)2 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black middle-class women around the United States formed a series of clubs to mobilize a racial uplift reform movement. They created kindergartens and reading groups.3 They encouraged and guided the cultivation of black homes. And above all else, black clubwomen, as they came to be known, worked tirelessly to address the myriad challenges the black race faced with the rollback of civil rights following the end of Reconstruction and the steady rise of racial prejudice and antiblack violence.4 By way of introduction into this essay’s focus on the archive of black clubwomen’s public writing and print culture, I offer a reading of the two passages above by Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was one of the most influential and powerful black women’s club leaders and the first president of the national network of black clubwomen, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In the first selection above, taken from a speech delivered to a meeting of black clubwomen, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play,” Terrell draws on a series of issues related to the social realities for black Americans. The convict lease system practically undermined the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Jim Crow train cars vacated the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring equal rights to blacks as citizens, and lynchings negated perhaps all of the Reconstruction amendments, threatening black death in response to any semblance of black life and equality, from voting rights to the sheer attempt at black dignity. Terrell illustrates the social and political awareness of black clubwomen, but it is her carefully crafted sentimental tone that captures my attention for it indicates an ability to refashion epistemological tools to assert black women’s authority and agency. For example, when Terrell proclaims black clubwomen’s potential to intervene “with such force of logic and intensity of the soul,” she aligns reason with spirituality, effectively combining two categories of thought and knowledge production typically regarded as mutually exclusive during the period.5 Victorian middle-class women were given province over the home, emotions, and care of the family, but rarely were they perceived as mobilizing a set of politics based on their intellectual abilities. Black women were often excluded from this cultural standard due to race. Terrell combines logic and the soul to assert black women’s ability to meet a middle-class standard and to give them greater authority to perceive, think, and reimagine black social and political life not only for the benefit of blacks but also for the substantiation of “the inalienability and equality of human rights.” And yet, as the second selection suggests, that was not enough to persuade American society to recognize what black clubwomen knew of their...

Freedom and Convict Leasing in the Postbellum South

In 1868, the state of Georgia began punishing convicts by leasing them to private companies. Georgia’s transition from penitentiary confinement to convict leasing coincided with a shift in the composition of its inmates. Fifteen years after the Civil War, African-Americans in Georgia were imprisoned at a rate more than 12 times that of whites. This article finds that black men were most likely to be imprisoned in the convict lease system where they overcame whites’ efforts to preserve their position as dependent agricultural laborers. Where elite white landowners were able to reconstitute a dependent agricultural labor force, they had little reason to use the convict lease system to punish their workers. But in urban counties and in counties where African-Americans had acquired considerable landholdings, black men faced comparatively high rates of imprisonment for property crimes.

Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin

Reviewed by: Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South by Brent J. Aucoin David E. Alsobrook Thomas Goode Jones: Race, Politics, and Justice in the New South. By Brent J. Aucoin. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2016. 248 pp. $54.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1913-7. Thomas Goode Jones (1844-1914) was one of Alabama's most influential, enigmatic public figures of the New South Era. Utilizing a rich array of primary and secondary sources in this ambitious, incisive biography, Brent J. Aucoin vividly reveals the panoramic arc of Jones's life and times and his distinguished service as a soldier, lawyer, politician, and jurist. As a biography and historical monograph, Aucoin's much-anticipated work will be of keen interest to a wide audience of readers. Historians, attorneys, and casual aficionados of the Alabama saga will discover some familiar topics in this book—the postbellum Bourbon Democratic political agenda, the rise of populism in the 1880s and 1890s, the bitterly contested gubernatorial elections of 1890-92, the tumultuous constitutional ratification campaign of 1901, and the protracted struggle over the regulation of railroads in [End Page 72] the early 1900s. But Aucoin also includes a wealth of fresh insights into Jones's personal life, his phenomenal relationship with Booker T. Washington, and his philosophical evolution as a public official and jurist. Like so many other young men of his generation, Jones's courage was forged in the horrific crucible of Civil War combat—as a lieutenant commanding Company K of the 53rd Alabama Infantry Regiment and as an aide-de-camp to General John B. Gordon in the Army of Northern Virginia. Wounded in his baptism under fire at Thompson's Station, Tennessee, in March 1863, Jones later saw extensive action in some of the war's bloodiest engagements, including Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. In April 1865, General Robert E. Lee ordered Jones and a small cadre of staff officers under a flag of truce to Appomattox Courthouse, where they personally witnessed the Confederate surrender. Jones's memories of battlefield carnage and its indiscriminate toll on comrades and foes alike haunted him until he died a half-century later. He emerged from the war with deep respect and admiration for his former enemies and became a vocal champion of reconciliation between the North and South two years before the end of Reconstruction and a decade prior to Henry W. Grady unveiling his famous New South Creed. In his meteoric postwar public career, Jones served as a Montgomery alderman, chief counsel of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, and governor (1890-94). During the twenty-five years after the war, he became entrenched in the state's Bourbon Democratic leadership hierarchy that espoused fiscal austerity, generous subsidies and minimal taxation for industries and railroads, and white supremacy. Yet, as Aucoin meticulously documents, Jones frequently drifted away from the Bourbon Democrats' doctrines and dogma. As a legislator, for example, he vociferously opposed the state's lucrative convict leasing system and, openly breaking ranks with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, he supported a bill that obligated railroads to pay injured workers' medical expenses. He cast the deciding vote [End Page 73] in 1886 against the Wiley Contract Bill, a cleverly drafted initiative to provide white planters with unfettered control over African American laborers. Early in his first gubernatorial term, Jones cited the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause in haranguing legislators on the legal pitfalls of withholding state appropriations for black public schools. Almost twenty years later, Jones vehemently exclaimed that the legislature's recalcitrance on this issue "was not only unconstitutional, but … wrong in principle, morals, and policy" (31). Despite Jones's seemingly enlightened positions on black educational funding and labor contracts, the author argues that "he was not a racial egalitarian or immune to the racist ideas of his day" (32). Jones, as a product of his ancestry and environment, was a racial paternalist who fervently believed that African Americans' salvation lay in segregation, industrial education, and gradual economic advancement—all under the vigilant guidance of their white superiors. Thus, both Jones and Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute's principal...

Convict Leasing: Justifications, Critiques, and the Case for Reparations

The first prisoner received by State of Florida into convict leasing system was an African-American man named Cy Williams. He was officially entered into prison records as No. 1. rather than by his name. Williams did not know his own age upon arrival, but one prison official's memoir states that boy had been convicted when he was a mere pickaninny. Though not large enough to mount a horse, Williams nevertheless attempted to steal one and authorities caught him while he was trying to lead it off by halter. For his crime, a judge duly sentenced Williams to twenty years imprisonment. Malachi Martin, warden of work camp at time, unsure at first how to put such a small prisoner to work, eventually came up with an idea. He placed a pile of two bricks at each of end of prison yard while giving the black baby two more. The warden then ordered Williams to carry his two bricks to one of piles at either end of yard, place them on ground, pick up other two bricks, and carry them to pile at opposite end. He continued this process for entire day, always carrying two bricks at a time. Martin instructed Williams to keep piles of bricks neat and warned him not to break any of them. If he failed to keep his stack orderly, or if he damaged bricks, he would be whipped. He continued this activity throughout his sentence and grew up at task until given other labor assignments years later. Through abrasion from simply picking bricks up and setting them down, Williams managed to wear out four sets of bricks while carrying out his sentence. The state never considered commuting Williams' sentence, even after ten years of service as protocol dictated; proper avenues for commutation were not in place at camp because of inefficient leadership and poor organizational structures within prison system. Eventually, however, Williams received gain time and only served seventeen years out of his twenty-year sentence.

No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley

Reviewed by: No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity by Sarah Haley Elaine Frantz Parsons (bio) No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. By Sarah Haley. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 360. Cloth, $34.95.) Sarah Haley's No Mercy Here reveals the routine exploitation of black women's bodies and labor by the carceral state in Georgia in the late nineteenth through early twentieth century. Haley powerfully uses the story of black female incarceration to show "that gender is constructed by and through race, and that the production of woman and other stable gender categories required violence" (8). From the Reconstruction era through 1908, most incarcerated black women were sent to work camps under the convict leasing program. When convict leasing was abolished that year, they worked on the (state-run) chain gang and were often ordered to spend a probationary period as domestic servants. Haley traces the "queering" of incarcerated black women. The Progressive Era was the moment of the production of normative heterosexuality: marking incarcerated black women as queer was part of this project. Agents of the state labeled them as hypersexualized, mannish, and insufficiently domestic. In the convict leasing system, and then the chain gang, the women were forced to take on male work, sometimes even to wear men's clothing. State agents also displayed the women as hypersexual, punishing them by forcing them to appear partially naked in front of male guards and convicts, and subjecting them to sexual assault so regularly that when they became pregnant while incarcerated, the state treated their pregnancy as a natural event, asking no questions. Because the state imagined black women as outside of womanhood, forcing them to labor as men was natural, and their right to reject sex was unthinkable. Haley suggests that anxiety about white womanhood motivated this queering of black women prisoners. At a time when all women were claiming economic and political rights and sexual self-ownership, queer black [End Page 501] female prisoners became caricatures; by contrast, white women were rendered as domestic, modest, and compliant. White women who were arrested or incarcerated found both the public and agents of the state sympathetic to their claims that it was intolerable for them to be incarcerated alongside, or treated as though they were, black women. Black women through these years were approximately six times as likely to be arrested as were white women. Atlanta police arrested girls as young as twelve and women as old as sixty. Half were arrested for violent crimes (including infanticide, often on thin evidence), but some were arrested for even petty theft or vandalism. Arson convictions were also common. Standards of evidence to convict black women were demonstrably lower than those applied to white women. For instance, a white man accused a black woman of pickpocketing him on a city street in the dark. He was able to identify her as the culprit later, he claimed, because of the large size of her breasts. Haley catalogues the many physical abuses and deprivations that the white men who ran institutions like Milledgeville State Prison Farm regularly inflicted. In addition to being constantly subjected to sexual violence, incarcerated black women suffered physical injury from the grueling labor they were required to perform. They suffered sickness and early death from unhygienic conditions at the camps, exposure, lack of adequate medical care, and malnutrition. They were subjected to whippings that combined physical pain with a deliberately perverse display of gender role violation meant to underline their status as nonwomen. Even as it disciplined their bodies, the state constantly observed and labeled incarcerated black women: white people who worked in the prison system held themselves forth as experts who could explain black women's true natures and character. Incarcerated black women learned to explain themselves in terms that whites would find compelling. Unlike incarcerated white women, incarcerated black women had little success in asking for leniency on the grounds of their womanliness; courts and parole boards looked skeptically at black women's claims that they had committed crimes under duress, that they were too frail to do physical labor, or that...

The Medicinal Rod: Slave Health and Redhibition Law in George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes.

The economic transactions and litigation necessary for slavery to function, coupled with the South's honor culture, meant skepticism and posturing frequently attended the buying and selling of enslaved people. This atmosphere provided opportunities for enslaved individuals familiar with the symbiotic ways their health and value intertwined to manipulate owners by feigning illness or adopting behaviors contrary to those of a "sound and sane" captive under Louisiana's redhibitory (slave warranty) law. Such actions offered a chance at preserving that which slavery denied its victims: proximity to family, a reduced chance of being sold, and an opportunity to exert agency within a strictly oppressive system. In dramatizing these paradoxes, George Washington Cable's The Grandissimes illustrates the vile hollowness of owners' paternalistic attitudes towards the enslaved, acknowledges the subjectivity and will of enslaved individuals, and castigates the return of slavery-like conditions in the form of the convict lease system.

Chained in silence: black women and convict labor in the New South

The video is part of the recording of a live event, a symposium on capitalism and the convict leasing system in the American South, hosted by Rice University and organized by Dr. Caleb McDaniel. The lectures and panel discussion were given by activists and scholars who document and write on the continuing history and political and economic effects of the convict leasing system in America.

Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois by Darrel Dexter (review)

Reviewed by: Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois by Darrel Dexter Matthew E. Stanley Bondage in Egypt: Slavery in Southern Illinois. Darrel Dexter. Cape Girardeau, MO: Center for Regional History, 2011. ISBN 978-1-890551-00-1, 747 pp., paper, $17.00. Recent studies of slavery in Kentucky and Missouri have enhanced our understanding of slavery’s variability and underscored the importance of the institution’s geography and borders. Yet slavery was not relegated to the south bank of the Ohio River. Indeed, slavery was still practiced in Illinois when Abraham Lincoln moved to the “free state” in 1830. Lincoln’s antebellum Illinois was a “quasi slave state,” according to Darrel Dexter, whose new book asserts that both de facto and de jure forms of chattel slavery existed in the impending “Land of Lincoln” between 1720 and 1865 (15). Dexter, a high school history teacher in Cairo, Illinois, [End Page 462] utilizes voluminous research to provide a thorough account of slavery in southern Illinois during the periods of French, English, and American rule. In doing so, and in challenging popular conceptions of North and South, he adds dimension to the story of race and slavery, regionalism, and the coming of the Civil War. Slavery existed in Illinois for well over a century, dating back to at least 1720 (and legally recognized under the French Code Noir of 1724). Although both the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the state’s 1818 constitution outlawed slavery in Illinois, the law was not binding to French inhabitants and other whites who moved there before that date. Whites in Little Egypt—the state’s southern region, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—practiced bondage intermittently, as county and state officials ignored or made exceptions to state law. As time passed, however, and politics and demography changed, Illinoisans became more concerned with how best to keep blacks out of Illinois than with retaining the semblances of slavery, culminating with the state’s infamous exclusion law of 1853. By the Civil War, Illinois was mostly antislavery and vehemently anti-black, as Leon Litwack and Eugene Berwanger have argued. Dexter claims that Illinoisans practiced five types of term bondage. Indentured servitude, a form of “voluntary” servitude, was legal until 1848. Registered servants, typically those under the age of eighteen who worked in “apprenticeships,” existed in Illinois until 1836. The leasing of slaves was yet another form of antebellum slavery. So many Kentucky slaves were “hired out” to salt mines in Gallatin County, in the south-eastern part of the state, that it often had a greater slave population than some counties in formal slave states. The imprisonment and enslavement of runaway slaves and free blacks was also common in the “free” states along slavery’s border (so common that every county in southern Illinois had slave auctions on the courthouse steps until the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850). The final form of slavery, practiced until 1865, was a locally tailored convict lease system that involved the arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and “auctioning off” of free blacks who could not pay their fines or court costs. Dexter argues that these five forms of slavery made Illinois a “quasi slave state” before the Civil War. To use Ira Berlin’s paradigm, early Illinois was a society with slaves, not a slave society—Dexter does not overplay his hand. Indeed, the state’s commitment to slavery never approached that of even Delaware, and Illinois’s Union loyalty during and after the Civil War reflected the extent of its commitment to slavery. Yet, as Dexter admits, southern Illinois was not “the North” as it is traditionally understood. Unlike Joanne Pope Melish does in her examination of slavery in the Northeast, however, Dexter hardly broaches whether or not Illinoisans intentionally deleted their slaveholding past. One wishes he (or some other scholar) had pursued more fully such fascinating memory questions and cultural omissions. [End Page 463] Yet Dexter draws from an impressive array of sources, notably county records and census data, to support the important claims he does make. Bondage in Egypt also includes several helpful maps and appendixes featuring an absolute wealth of slave and census data and election returns. As such, Dexter...

More expendable than slaves? Racial justice and the after-life of slavery

The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by the detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, the demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who kill, humiliate, and threaten immigrants with impunity. The public discourse on immigration is defined by racist anti-immigrant editorials, ballot measures, Congressional speeches, and public affairs “debates”, that are often more adequately described as hate speech. All these things contribute to an environment that definitely undercuts Latino voters and perhaps more importantly Latino non-voters including children, undocumented people, and people residing in detention. This stage of the struggle for immigrant rights reminds people of slavery, bondage, the convict lease system, and resistance to them as well as the direct action taken to mobilize after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and to press for Anti-Lynching legislation. It is not accidental that this toxic atmosphere reminds us of enslavement – because slavery has an afterlife of enduring gratuitous violence at its heart. Using Saidiyah Hartman's concept of the “after-life of slavery” and Dale Tomich's work on the “second slavery” this paper more fully articulates the relationship between slavery and myths about emancipation, on the one hand, and immigration from colonized places, on the other. Robust pan-ethnic coalitions must support immigration rights that are more keenly aware of their relationship to contemporary black survival, struggles for racial justice, and the role that race plays in US empire. The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by the detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, the demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who kill, humiliate, and threaten immigrants with impunity. The public discourse on immigration is defined by racist anti-immigrant editorials, ballot measures, Congressional speeches, and public affairs “debates”, that are often more adequately described as hate speech. All these things contribute to an environment that definitely undercuts Latino voters and perhaps more importantly Latino non-voters including children, undocumented people, and people residing in detention. This stage of the struggle for immigrant rights reminds people of slavery, bondage, the convict lease system, and resistance to them as well as the direct action taken to mobilize after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and to press for Anti-Lynching legislation. It is not accidental that this toxic atmosphere reminds us of enslavement – because slavery has an afterlife of enduring gratuitous violence at its heart. Using Saidiyah Hartman's concept of the “after-life of slavery” and Dale Tomich's work on the “second slavery” this paper more fully articulates the relationship between slavery and myths about emancipation, on the one hand, and immigration from colonized places, on the other. Robust pan-ethnic coalitions must support immigration rights that are more keenly aware of their relationship to contemporary black survival, struggles for racial justice, and the role that race plays in US empire. The contemporary context of the struggle for immigrant rights is characterized by detention and deportation of children, ongoing militarization of the border, demonization and criminalization of migrants, heavily armed vigilantes who humiliate, kill, and threaten immigrants with impunity, a racist public discourse that discourages electoral participation in the present and the future.

The Modern Chain Gang: How Convict Leasing Can Help Repair the California Prison System

Inmates who work while incarcerated are less likely to succumb to the common negative effects of prison life both during their incarceration and after their release. Both the federal government and California, which have inmate labor programs already in place, realize the benefits and importance of inmate labor to the government, the individual inmate, prisons systems, and society. Labor as a means to reform served as the backbone of early private prison labor programs. These programs were vastly successful until opposition from organized labor caused their dissolution. This article proposes a regulated and humane return to the convict leasing system. Because the private sector cannot currently utilize the benefits of inmate labor, using laws, regulations, and doctrine from both private prisons and labor, I propose a cooperation program between private industry and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). This program will see private companies permanently house, secure, and care for inmates who produce goods or services for the companies on-site, or transport inmates between the prisons and the production facilities and secure and care for inmates who are in their custody while paying the state a fee for each inmate assigned a position with the company. This system will help defray the per inmate cost to the California prison system by requiring private industry to internalize inmate expenses while in their care and will also secure a recurring revenue stream for the CDCR while adhering to current political, cultural, societal, and legal standards that will insulate inmates from the problems of early convict leasing systems and current private prisons.

“Like I Was a Man”: Chain Gangs, Gender, and the Domestic Carceral Sphere in Jim Crow Georgia

In 1908, Georgia legislators passed a historic prison reform act that eliminated the convict lease system, replacing it with chain gangs. This article examines black women’s exclusion from the category “female” and white women’s protection from Georgia’s prison regime as a condition of possibility for the passage of this law. Criminalized black women were forced to endure torturous conditions on chain gangs, while white women were protected from violent conditions. In 1908 Georgia also implemented a domestic carceral sphere, forcing black women to work as domestic servants while serving the final portions of their sentences on parole. Georgia’s prison regime operated to reinforce the capitalist logic of Jim Crow, as well as to forestall challenges to racial and gender hierarchy from black women and men and from white women. The exclusion of black female subjects from the categories “female” and “woman” during the consolidation of Jim Crow was central to the process of reinforcing white supremacist patriarchal authority. This unexplored history of Southern punishment as a gendered carceral regime reflects both the violence of imprisonment and the violence of gender categorization.

Race as Region, Region as Race: How Black and White Southerners Understand Their Regional Identities

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The is virtually inconceivable without sustained attention to race, yet most scholarly examinations of southern identity have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of white southerners, ignoring the experiences of other racial groups in the region, most particularly black southerners. A similar phenomenon occurs in everyday conversations about the evidenced by the well-worn habit of talking about when actually referring to white southerners. For example, most of us, at one time or another, have heard, or perhaps even said, that are racist or owned slaves. Such statements implicitly connect being southern with being white. (1) The lay and academic tendency to equate southernness and whiteness is troubling when one considers that, in today's black southerners living in the region are slightly more likely to claim a southern identity than whites are. According to polls conducted throughout the 1990s, about 78 percent of African Americans living in the region claimed to be southern, compared to 75 percent of whites. Many scholars of the South have asserted that African Americans are now starting to reclaim their southern identity after the demise of Jim Crow. Noting that African Americans are returning to the South in large numbers, historian Edward Ayers argues that for some black Americans the South may be seen as a homeland. Even so, Ayers argues that there is a different moral geography for blacks and whites in the South. Writing in 1996, he noted that black southerners did not have flags or monuments to connect them with the official South, but they were connected to the region by their own sweat and sacrifice and by places of personal meaning--certain farms, houses, and streets. (2) Today, the region's African Americans still have few monuments dedicated to the memory of their cultural contributions and sacrifices, yet black southerners' labor, and often their blood, played an important and essential role in the development of the region. In an environment characterized by brutal racial oppression, white supremacy, slavery, segregation, and violence, black southerners raised crops, built roads, labored in coal mines, raised white children, and were vital in creating an infrastructure and a way of life that supported and enabled the prosperity of many whites. The recent work by journalist Douglas A. Blackmon on the convict leasing system reminds us that the forced and exploited labor of black southerners allowed for the growth of many corporations that still enjoy great prosperity today. (3) Looking at the recent history of the it appears that the demise of Jim Crow has created both the opportunity and the increasing desire of black southerners to assert their own identity as southerners. We began to see a contested view of southern identity in the 1990s, as black southerners sought to remove Confederate flags from state capitals, to change state flags that incorporated the Confederate battle flag into their designs, to stop the playing of Dixie at college football and basketball games, and to challenge the use of public money for the upkeep of Confederate memorials. At the same time, cultural conflicts over the meaning of southern identity between blacks and whites have led to increasing efforts by white southerners to hold onto symbols of the Confederate past. James C. Cobb argues that identity-challenged white southerners--middle and upper-class southern whites who have become increasingly assimilated into mainstream America, but still long for and wish to hold onto their southern identity--now feel that their heritage is under siege. (4) This activism suggests that at least some black southerners are reclaiming their identity as southerners, but what do we really know about how black southerners perceive their regional identity? Do these discussions concerning black southern identity, which often take place within the realm of academia, really reflect the experiences and concerns of black southerners, or is this a case where academic analysis does not really connect with the lives and concerns of everyday folks? …