One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 (review)

270CIVIL WAR HISTORY responded with the EnforcementActs; empowered by the third act, President U. S. Grant suspended the writ of habeas corpus in the region and sent in troops. Mass arrests followed. Although most Klan leaders had fled, Attorney General Amos T. Akerman was determined to prosecute the rest. Between November 1 87 1 andApril 1872, several Klansmen were convicted ofcrimes and dozens of others pleaded guilty. The Klan was broken in South Carolina. Lou Falkner Williams, in this first monograph on the trials, views those federal convictions as hollow victories in a lost war. At the beginning, she maintains , the Justice Department was determined not only to root out the Klan, but also "to establish a broad nationalization ofblack civil and political rights" (60) by establishing the principle that the Fourteenth Amendment had nationalized the Bill of Rights, especially the Second and Fourth Amendments. So empowered , the federal government could actively protect the civil rights offreedpeople. Akerman and prosecutor David T. Corbin, however, were thwarted at every turn. Conservative and crippling rulings were handed down by the Fourth Federal Circuit Court. Attempts to obtain favorable Supreme Court decisions were frustrated by Akerman's replacement, Grant crony George H. Williams, who also halted prosecutions in 1873. Despite dozens of convictions, "the federal government's most sustained effort to provide positive civil and political rights for black citizens ended with no substantial constitutional gains" (1 1 1). Indeed, Grant soon ordered the release of most of those awaiting trial and pardoned the convicted. Before the end of the decade, dual federalism had triumphed and South Carolina whites were firmly back in control. Although a slim volume, Williams's postrevisionist monograph has much of importance to say about Reconstruction, especially the period's violence, graphically depicted in trial testimony. The author maintains that Klan brutality was more than political oppression. It also was a function of traditional concepts of honor, a determination to maintain community mores. Moreover, a dustjacket at last is correct: Williams does break new ground in her textured analysis of women as Klan targets. The trial-by-trial format becomes both tedious and repetitive at times, and some phrases are overworked; the book clearly is a revised dissertation. Nonetheless, this is a solid addition to Reconstruction scholarship. Kenneth W Noe State University of West Georgia One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-IÇ28. By Matthew J. Mancini. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1 996. Pp. xi, 283. $34-95) Convict leasing was a system whereby penitentiary prisoners were leased (rented) out to lessees who could use them in any endeavor, no matter how dangerous, and treat the felons any way they desired. The evils were myriad, and by the BOOK REVIEWS27I time one completes Matthew J. Mancini's book the reader understands how incredibly despicable the system was and became even worse over time. Economically profitable for a number of years in a number of states, leasing had no redeeming value in any shape, form, or manner. The only difference between the leasing camps and the Nazi gas chambers was the fact that in the South they did not often immediately murder those who would labor for them. Under leasing , it was a slower and agonizing death. Since 1994 three studies have appeared about Southern convict leasing. Its Southern predominance in the six decades following the Civil War (it now seems to be coming back) was one of the truly disgusting aspects ofAmerican history. Two of the trilogy approach leasing in a general and interpretative way (only one is worth consulting); the third focuses upon the inhumanity that prevailed on the Mississippi Parchman enclave (David M. Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery ": Parchman Farm and the Ordeal ofJim Crow Justice [New York, 1 996]). All three monographs have analytical approaches, but Mancini's exposition is pathbreaking. In One Dies, Get Another, he has given the profession a superb investigation of a truly evil phenomena. In whatever Southern state convict leasing was practiced, the system had three ineluctable trends: "soaring death and escape rates, degenerating physical conditions, and fraudulent actions by unscrupulous contractors" (7). It was, Mancini contends, the "prebourgeois form ofcoerced labor par excellence" (36...