The convict lease system is starkly emblematic of the terror that filled the void left by the retreat of federal authority. After the collapse of Reconstruction in 1874, convict leasing took off rapidly to become a system of labor, a mode of social control, a shortcut to industrialization, and a stream of private and political revenue—a panacea, really, for all that ailed white Alabama in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
The African American prisoners hailed mostly from the Black Belt, convicted of a variety of crimes—some small, a few real, most trumped up. Labor contractors bought up their sentences and fines from county jails and the state prison and then leased them to the mine operators at a tidy profit. The prisoners had no choice but to sign the contract placed in front of them by the labor contractors.
Although the prison miners, unlike chattel slaves, had hopes of regaining their freedom one day, unlike with slavery their overseers had no investment in keeping them healthy or even alive. Convicts were disposable, cheap, and in near infinite supply. The convict labor system reestablished the terms of the old regime but looked to the future, balancing the slavery past and the industrial future.
The prisoners resurfaced after dark and dragged themselves back to the stockade in their leg irons. For months they did not shower and changed clothes only rarely. The convicts ate their meager grub and lay their bodies down on vermin-infested bedding packed into windowless rooms and surrounded by overflowing buckets of human waste filled by men not infrequently dying of dysentery. The only fresh air available filtered through the slim cracks in the walls.
One state official described the “damp sleeping clothes, damp bedding, deficient cubic space and ventilation, want of sunlight in the cells, and, for the men, cold water for bathing purposes, and general overcrowding.” It was “unfit in every particular for the habitation of animal beings.” The threat of the lash, a heinous symbol of the slave system, returned. According to one report, every single miner had either been whipped or witnessed a whipping. Even the most basic health care was lacking, and many were maimed in the various tortures designed to enforce discipline.
Convict leasing, as well as other horrors such as lynching and constitutional disenfranchisement, flourished in the void left by the retreat of federal power after the 1870s. Whereas the Black vote and the Republican Party—and the federal authorities that assisted them—all lost political legitimacy, the locking up of prisoners to use as convict miners had the full sanction of the county, the state, and much of the region.