As the South rose out of the ashes of the Civil War, leaders began to contemplate which direction the region should take in restoring its economic fortunes. New South advocates encouraged white southern capitalists to invent a newly diversified economy, and to engage in the second industrial revolution by redirecting their energies toward developing a new system of factories, businesses, and railroads. Even in its broken-down state, the New South held promise for its most influential citizenry. For ex-slaves, however, the “prophecy” of the New South presented an ominous revelation—southern industry and commerce would develop at the expense of forced labor.

The convict lease system was adopted in the southern states soon after the close of the Civil War and became as much a product of entrepreneurial ingenuity as it was a practical solution to the region’s postwar fiscal crisis. By 1876, all southern states had adopted laws authorizing the lease of convicts to private industries for an annual fee. By the late 1870s, the convict lease system had evolved from a temporary resolution to provide states with economic relief to a sustained source of income.

Thousands of felony inmates — the majority of whom were African American men, women, and youth — were forcibly contracted by each respective leasing state to work for private industrialists, who established the terms of their labor, living conditions, diet, medical care, and assumed total control over their bodies. Imprisoned workers labored from sunup to sundown and were confined to stockades that were barely fit for human habitation. Many died from fatal diseases like tuberculosis and yellow fever, or succumbed to injuries resulting from ill-fated encounters with “whipping bosses” and guards. Others died as a result of overwork and malnutrition, which exacerbated existing illnesses.

Facing a groundswell of black arrests and convictions—a calculated consequence of emancipation—state officials took swift measures to siphon off excess inmate populations to private contractors. The fragile postwar southern economies could not sustain the financial burden of building and maintaining central prison facilities to warehouse its deeply engorged prison population. Leasing convicts, then, allowed state governments to reduce prison costs while increasing its treasuries. Labor shortages also contributed to the rise of the southern convict lease system.

Convict laborers were a preferred source of labor in the post-emancipation South because they could be hired at a fraction of the cost of a free worker and could be forced to work in the region’s more dangerous, yet lucrative, businesses like mining and turpentining. Prisoners also worked in industries that placed them in direct competition with free labor, such as railroad construction, brick making, sawmilling, and farming.

By using a system of convict labor, southern businessmen increased their personal fortunes and expanded state treasuries while placing strict limitations on black freedom. The penal system became a driver of white supremacy throughout the southern states. The suppression of black freedom was first codified in state-sponsored Black Codes and vagrancy laws that strategically undermined freedpeople’s social, economic, and political (in the case of black men) mobility, and regulated black life. Even after 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified and the Black Codes repealed, vagrancy statutes were still customarily upheld in all of the southern states well into the twentieth century. In the case of felony offenders, the Thirteenth Amendment — which legally abolished slavery — also encouraged the disproportionate arrest and incarceration of African American men, women, and youth, whose labor helped build the New South during the Gilded Age.