"Freedom" on a Smaller Scale: Convicts, Ordinary Citizens, and the Georgia Convict Lease System, 1868-1908

This research explores the ways in which convicts and civilians resisted and reformed the convict leasing system in Georgia. Scholarship on Progressive-era Southern reformers focuses exclusively on “reform intellectuals,”... [ view full abstract ]

This research explores the ways in which convicts and civilians resisted and reformed the convict leasing system in Georgia. Scholarship on Progressive-era Southern reformers focuses exclusively on “reform intellectuals,” loosely affiliated academics and religious leaders who spoke out against convict leasing. While acknowledging the discursive significance of these thinkers, I challenge this narrow definition of “reform,” instead exploring the ground-level actions of “ordinary citizens” in Georgia. Convicts organized strikes and mutinies to attain better in-camp conditions. Their civilian allies, invoking shared moral principles, advocated to state officials on behalf of individual prisoners to ensure that the “ends of justice” were met. While not critiquing the system in its totality, the local mutinies, clemency applications, and strikes collectively reveal a patchwork of resistance far more indicative of public dissent than the writings of elite intellectuals. Prisoners and ordinary citizens did not have to self-identify as “reformers” to voice their own expressions of reformist sentiments. At the same time, their actions reveal that Progressive “reform” rarely challenged the racialized character of forced labor. If nothing else, this research offers a glimpse into past mobilizations against the developing carceral state, and in doing so, perhaps offers cogent lessons for our own time.