Convict Leasing
Florida’s Governor George Franklin Drew codified the convict leasing system In 1877, legalizing the ability for plantation owners and private companies to lease black prisoners as unpaid labor (Alexander 2010: 28). The practice initially began as a stopgap measure to deal with prisons overflowing with formerly enslaved people and a growing fear of black crime among whites.
Most convicts were black. They were forced into high-risk forms of labor, but since they were not “owned” property they were easily replaceable and often suffered in inhumane conditions that some described as worse than slavery (Oshinksy 2010: 104, 109).
As David Oshinsky explains:
Thousands of former slaves were now being arrested, tried, and convicted for
acts that had once been dealt with by the master alone. Black crime was no
longer a private matter but rather an offense against the state. Law enforcement
meant keeping the Negro in line. (101)
In Jacksonville, Florida, the frequent “recruitment process” for convict labor included the sheriff and major employers comprising a list of prospective black men, known as good workers, and then arresting the “recruits” for petty charges such as gambling, assault, and disorderly conduct. Most arrests were made at “Saturday-night shindies” (105). One black man was hired out for forty days because he was convicted for selling a log he had found drifting in a river (Richardson 1969: 376).
If blacks sought to bring a case to court, justices of the peace and civil officers usually required advanced payment, and thus blacks had few if any opportunities for redress. Whites who committed crimes, on the other hand, received much lesser penalties. For example, a white man who murdered a black man was sentenced to one minute of imprisonment (376). Blacks who killed other blacks were frequently pardoned for their offense.
Convict leasing was not a coherent regional system; practices varied based on the needs of dominant industries in each state (Oshinksy 103). Despite attempts by the Freedman’s Bureau to interfere with the legislation, Florida’s court made numerous attempts to enforce convict laws. As noted by Douglas Blackmon in Slavery by Another Name, Florida had a particularly brutal convict leasing system. Convicts had short lifespans due to long days mining phosphate and turpentine, clearing brush and laying roads in the hot sun. They received limited food, water and shelter. They were punished as slaves had been punished: whipped, tortured, and subjected to solitary confinement.
Suffrage threatened the profits of Florida’s agricultural and industrial interests. Business interests sought to limit blacks’ access to power and their ability to receive fair wages. Sheriffs, prison wardens, and state officials traded in contracts for prison labor. According to Blackmon, “By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites.”
In guidebooks, travel narratives and corporate prospectuses, both northern and southern whites contributed to a Florida booster ideology that portrayed the subjugation of black labor as necessary to Florida’s economic expansion. Defenders of this ideology thought black landownership would scare away wealthy growers seeking to move into Florida (Ortiz 2005).
References
Alexander, Michelle. 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Ortiz, Paul. 2005. Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Oshinsky, David M. 2010. “Convict Labor in the Post–Civil War South: Involuntary Servitude After the Thirteenth Amendment.” In The Promises of Liberty, edited by Alexander Tsesis, 100-118. New York: Columbia University Press.
Richardson, Joe M. 1969. “Florida Black Codes.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 47, No. 4: 365-379.