The Trouble They Saw: Approaches to the History of the Convict Lease System

Mary Ellen Curtin. Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865-1900. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. xi + 261 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $19.50.

In 1890 Julia S. Tutwiler gave a paper, "Our Brother in Stripes, in the School-Room," before the National Educational Association. Though her purpose was to describe the schools she had recently established at Alabama's convict camps, she began with a discussion of the convict lease system itself. Tutwiler (1841-1916) was a child of the slaveholding regime and its racial thought. She readily accepted the notion that large numbers of newly enfranchised blacks, "suddenly freed from all restraints," had fallen into crime following the Civil War. The bankrupt southern states, she argued, had been forced to lease out their convicts, but in so doing had made a terrible mistake, that of "not protecting them from the avarice and cruelty of their hirers." The result was a system that had "all the evils of slavery without one of its ameliorating features-the pride of ownership, self-interest, and inherited affection." ¹

A whole generation of white reformers shared significant elements of Tutwiler's paternalist vision. Even George W. Cable, a scathing critic of racial repression, conceded that the master-slave relationship had often been marked by a "really tender and benevolent sentiment of dependency and protection." Though skeptical of the justice afforded freedmen in southern courts, he was "far from overlooking 'the depravity of the negro'" as a factor contributing to the arrest and conviction rates of black people. Rebecca Felton, Tutwiler's counterpart in Georgia, was an eloquent advocate for the women and children, mostly African Americans, punished out of all proportion to their trifling (or nonexistent) offenses. Yet Felton viewed black men as naturally dangerous-"ravenous beasts at heart," according to her biographer. ²

These commentators were more than upper-class southerners dabbling in good works. Several were students of penology, affiliated with such organizations as the National Prison Association (NPA). Founded in 1870, this group was dedicated to the premise that penitentiaries should seek to reform prisoners and return them to society with useful skills. The NPA was northern-dominated, and in theory should have been utterly opposed to the lease system. Yet it was a sign of the late nineteenth century's hardening attitudes toward race that southerners were able to secure a type of privileged status within the organization. In her groundbreaking Black Prisoners and Their World: Alabama, 1865-1900, Mary Ellen Curtin shows that by the mid-1880's, delegates to NPA meetings had embraced stereotypes of black criminality--and had accepted leasing as the only system bankrupt states could afford (pp. 169-173). At the 1888 convention, Alabama's R.H. Dawson found nothing but sympathy when he discussed the high death rate of black convict miners under his supervision. In the ensuing exchanges, comparative biology played a much larger part than outraged morality or critiques of practice.

Native whites interested in the convict lease tended to assume that they "understood" the convicts. As social scientists they were more likely to concentrate on legal and structural details, and to compare methods used in southern prisons with those employed in more enlightened institutions. Earnest in tone and statistically accurate, the writings of Cable and his contemporaries acquired the stature of primary sources and deeply influenced subsequent historians of criminal justice. Such works as Hilda Jane Zimmerman's 1947 dissertation "Penal Systems and Penal Reforms in the South Since the Civil War," Blake McKelvey's American Prisons: A History of Good Intentions (1977), and Donald R. Walker's Penology for Profit: A History of the Texas Prison System, 1867-1912 (1988) are packed with factual information and analysis of laws, lease arrangements, punishments, medical care, living arrangements, and death-rates.

In addition, Zimmerman and other "revisionist" southern historians began to place...