Prisoners At War

ED: We’re going to move now to one final story about a struggle over wages, this one in the years after the Civil War. It takes place in the 1890s on my home turf of East Tennessee. Now wages for coal miners there had been declining for two decades. And when miners in the town of Briceville pushed for better working conditions and higher wages, they didn’t get very far. The local money company said, hey we’re feeling an economic crunch, too.

KARIN SHAPIRO: The coal company then actually just simply locked out the miners.

ED: This is Karen Shapiro, a historian at Duke.

KARIN SHAPIRO: And decided to bring in convict laborers to replace them as strike breakers.

PETER: Convict laborers were just what they sounded like, convicts from the Tennessee prison brought in to work the mines. The companies didn’t have to pay these workers so they were perfect strike breakers, which was why the miners in Briceville wanted them gone.

ED: So on the night of July 14, 1891, a group of armed miners and townspeople gathered in the nearby town of Coal Creek. Around midnight they marched to Briceville where 40 convicts were being held in the stockade. The miners asked the stockade guards to hand over the convicts. And they quickly did so.

KARIN SHAPIRO: They then took the convicts, took them back to Coal Creek, and put them on a train to Knoxville.

PETER: Before long, the governor had gotten involved. And the convicts were shipped back to Briceville. A few months later it happened again. The miners marched on the stockade and freed the convicts. These struggles became to be known as The Convict Wars.

ED: Historian Karen Shapiro has written about this rebellion. She says that to understand exactly why the miners were so upset you have to know a little bit more about the practice of convict leasing. In the decades after the Civil War, Tennessee’s prison population skyrocketed thanks to a justice system that harshly punished petty crimes by African Americans. The state would not build a prison space to confine all this new convicts, so it came up with an innovative solution. It would rent them out to private companies.

KARIN SHAPIRO: The coal companies leased all of these convicts. And they would pay the state in Tennessee, it so happened to be $100,000 per annum. But the coal companies themselves would become responsible for feeding, housing, and guarding the convicts and transporting them. And this saved the state an enormous amount of money. But it also dampened the ability of working men to negotiate with companies in a reasonable way. Because the convicts, the threat of convict labor, always hung over them, much like a sword of Damocles.

ED: So people imagine this era as being laissez faire, but what you really finding is that the state is intruding by supplying a labor force that undercuts the whole idea of people getting the fruits of their labor.

KARIN SHAPIRO: That’s correct.

ED: So Karen, as you know, the struggle continues for more than a year with a lot of the local people supporting the miners including the local militias. But that changes in August when violent conflict breaks out between the miners and the militia members. Can you take us through how that turns out?

KARIN SHAPIRO: Well a couple of militia men are killed, actually, probably four. At which point, public opinion turns competing against the miners from being conservative and reasonable men, they now become anarchists. They are called anarchists, a society anarchists. And this totally changes the whole framework in which the community, the broader Tennessee community, would view this rebellion. It would later be shown that, probably, some of the militia had killed their own men, and that the other two that had died was killed by their own arms. But nonetheless, the governor calls up the militia and imposes military order on east Tennessee. He can’t quite do that legally, but the man who comes in, he essentially does that. And he runs up hundreds of miners.

ED: So after the public and the governor turned against them, it would seem that the miners have lost. But the state doesn’t want all these headlines all the time about the despicable conditions. So what is the consequence of The Convict Wars?

KARIN SHAPIRO: The convict lease system comes to an end at the end of 1895. You are correct, the governor, the coal corporations, are all fed up with convict lease system. But they don’t want to just end it. And there would be endless bickering in the courts about who was responsible for what between the coal corporations and the governor, and the legislature. But when this contract ends in 1895. The governor and the state does not renew it. And instead they build– it’s on of the ironies of the rebellion, the state builds its own coal mine in Marion County in East Tennessee. It would become known as Brushy Mountain where they would put the convicts to work. They would mine coal, they would produced coke, and they would grow vegetables. And this Brushing Mountain would in fact operate until 1938.

ED: Karen, it really strikes me that, the theme of our show today is fairness, and everybody is claiming the issue of fairness as their own. It’s not so much that this is pure self interest, they’re saying this is a violation of the way that contract is supposed to work. This is a violation of the way that industry is supposed to work. This is a violation of the way that the state’s ownership of its own prisoners is supposed to work. And how do we explain that combination of the constant threat of violence? But they work through the courts and it seems quite decorous on one hand and quite threatening on the other? How do we put those pieces together?

KARIN SHAPIRO: Well I think there are two points to be made here, Ed. The first is that the miners and all of their associates were not looking to destroy the mining industry. They would not pining for a pre-industrial America. They embraced industrialization. And they thought that corporations had a legitimate role to play. But they also believed that the government should not grant any special privileges to monopolous. Because if they did, once convict labor entered into the equation, then the honest relationship between capital and labor would be destroyed.

And so, they root their demands in a conception of themselves as responsible citizens, as man of integrity, and his homeowners.

ED: So Karen, as a native of East Tennessee, I happen to notice that your accent is not exactly that of my native region. How did you happen to become interested in this conflict in the mountains of East Tennessee?

KARIN SHAPIRO: I’m from South Africa, was born and raised in South Africa. And I came to study American labor and the history of race relations in America because of what was happening in South Africa in the 1980s. I turn to history as a way of understanding contemporary South Africa. That was the big reason. I came across this story and I was immediately interested in the questions of industrialization. South Africa, like the American South, industrialized on underpaid, unskilled, labor that was very badly treated. South African in the gold mines, and American South in the coal mines.

I was interested in the questions of decent. In South Africa in the 1980s, many South Africans were trying to overturn the state. Where as here, there were group of men who were saying, we are part of the government, we are part of the state. We are not against the stars and stripes. And so I was trying to understand the limits of political decent in America.

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ED: Karin Shapiro a historian at Duke University. You can read more about The Convict Wars in her book, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields.