A Parody on the Law: Organized Labor, the Convict Lease, and Immigration in the Making of the Texas State Capitol

In 1884, the Texas Capitol’s builders brought prisoners from the state’s convict lease to cut costs and maximize profits. Members of the National Granite Cutters Union were outraged, and refused to train the prisoners to work on such a symbolically important project. In response, the builders sent to Aberdeen, Scotland, and, in direct violation of the Foran Act, contracted Scots workers to break the Union's boycott. Prisoners resisted exploitation in numerous ways, but the granite cutters, white men with citizenship status, brought legal suit against the builders. The subjects of this literal story of state-formation—black, white, and Mexican convicts, skilled Scottish immigrants, organized white male workers and their enemies — confronted each other’s visions of American citizenship. Moreover, the case revealed how the Foran Act’s meaning was transformed from its original intent—skilled workers trying to exclude skilled strikebreakers—to the nativist prohibition of pauper labor. It also revealed the how the convict lease system was refined to support an emergent segregated system. In each stage of building the capitol, the large lessons were clear. Elites who broke the law would be hardly penalized, while a poor man who stole a cow could be worked to death.