Book Review

Karin Shapiro's study of the Tennessee convict wars is a local story, but it resonates with southern business history, legal history, politics, republicanism, and Jim Crow. As she carefully points out, the East Tennessee coal towns involved in the crisis were hardly backcountry mining camps but were rather communities of mildly ambitious working people. Residents saw themselves as upstanding, church-going, and hard-working folk. Competing with convicts undermined their self-esteem as well as their livelihood. East Tennessee miners did the unthinkable: they burned the stockades and sent the mostly African American convicts away. They then confronted mine owners and the governor, and, as has so often been the case, they paid a price.	1
Shapiro places the crisis in the context of the Populist movement, Jim Crow, parsimonious Tennessee state government, business history, prisons, and economic cycles. She describes with equal thoroughness the capitalists who presided over the state's mines and railroads, and the workforce. In towns near Knoxville in Anderson County, mine owners were less paternalistic than in those in Grundy and Marion counties near Chattanooga. Anderson County towns offered opportunities for small businesses, home ownership, and freedom from company oversight. As Shapiro puts it, "their families were not especially beholden to their employers when they bought homes, went to church, or sent their children to school" (40). Although race relations were sometimes strained, Anderson County blacks lived among the white population and held important union positions. Grundy County had only a small black population, which lived in a separate section.	2
Convicts began mining coal in 1871 as coal companies attempted not only to cut costs but also to use convicts as a lever to control free workers. Due to draconian penalties for petty crimes, there was a substantial black convict population that would not fit into the state's prison. As with most convict laborers in the South, Tennessee's convict miners lived and worked in primitive conditions and were beaten. Prisoners learned how to mine efficiently, and they learned how to disrupt. One in ten died each year, and one in twelve escaped.	3
The series of outbreaks both in Anderson and Grundy counties raised questions that Shapiro treats with objectivity and clarity. She analyzes the miners' leaders, their rhetoric, and their actions and balances this against the reaction of the governor, businessmen, and legislators. The result is a complex layering of politics, commerce, and resistance. All interests attempted to influence legislators, state agencies, and the governor. Shapiro includes one startling example of the failure of railroad regulation, when in 1896 the reform legislature introduced forty-two bills to curb corporations and to regulate railroads. The only bill that passed regulated African Americans to Jim Crow cars.	4
Ultimately, the burnt stockades, the freed prisoners, and skirmishes turned public opinion away from the miners. The state militia arrested hundreds of miners, targeting especially union men, ransacked their homes, and portrayed them as shiftless and violent. Yet few miners served time. Some melted away, others waited till charges evaporated, and a few stood trial. Although the convicts returned to the mines, the convict lease system in Tennessee ended in 1895. The crisis had profound effects on the miners. The revolt ruptured unions, depleted union funds, and increased racial tensions. Republican virtue that provoked the attacks warped into a view of class conflict, Shapiro concludes. The conflicts of 1891 and 1892 were driven not by miners' hopes to overthrow economic power and institutions but rather to vindicate their rights as free laborers. "Indeed," Shapiro concludes, "their ability to challenge the state so directly and for such an extended period depended precisely on the degree to which they were prototypical citizens of the New South" (247). Shapiro's careful analyses, clear argument, and excellent writing elevate the convict wars to one of the South's major struggles between capital and labor.	5
Pete Daniel National Museum of American History

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