Together with the railroad industry, coal mining became one of the most predominant industries in the New South and one of the primary employers of convict labor. According to New South booster Henry Grady, coal and iron manufacturing was “the base of all industrial progress” in the post-emancipation South. Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama were the South’s greatest producers of coal and iron. Yet the development of these industries was largely based on the use of convict workers, who could be forced to produce “twice the work of free labor” and could be impressed to conduct labor tasks that were either too dangerous or undesirable for free laborers to perform. Dozens of coal miners were severely injured or killed from falling rocks or explosions, or from injuries resulting from severe punishment and violence.
Alabama was particularly successful in instituting a financially prosperous convict lease system, which was almost exclusively based on iron and coal production. The coal mining industry in Alabama was dominated by several companies: Pratt Coal and Coke; Sloss Furnace Company; and the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company (which purchased the Pratt Coal and Iron Company in 1886). With this appropriation, TCI acquired the Pratt mines, several furnaces, more than 1,000 coke ovens, and roughly 76,000 acres of coal lands. In 1888, the entire prison population of Alabama was leased to TCI for a period of ten years, allowing the company to become the largest producer of coal and iron in the South. This following letter from the Alabama Department of Archives and History was written by two of those prisoners.
Pratt Mines, May 26, 1884
Dear Sir:
We write you hoping to get your kind attention in this case. We have bin treated very cruel lately by the Board and we wish to find out what we have done to cause such treatments…. We all know that we being colored men have not the chances of the white men, and we at the same time know that we are the greatest in nomber. We are the men who do the work. We pays for kind treatments and fails to get it. Please look at the white men more and see how many are cutting 5 or 8 ton coal per day. They are few. They are the men that causes the presant truble and evry state officer tries to hold us accounterble for there actions by deniing us the privlidges of alowing our familys to come to see us if our families come. More or less they are doged away by saying too many visitors…. And if we mistake not the rules reads the conversation of visitors shall be in presant of gard. This we accept on the grounds we have no secrets and our family coming is the next favor to liberty and they are the only comfort we have left. This fact we made known to Mr. Lee and the reply was the white mens conduct. He speaks as thou we are not got sence eknuff to know that we should not be held for what they have done or will do…. We appreciate good treatment and our actions stands good to show the same. And will we be made to suffur for anothers crime. If so we rather wish to know the grounds on whitch you intend us to act. We appreciate good treatments and we know where we get such…. Consiter for instance if you were by law or violence be taken from your family and see them come and go with out speaking one word to them. Sir it is heart-breaking to our familys and to us. Such treatments makes any man look a many diffrent way. We all wanted to serve our time but the times is geting very hard dayly with out seasing…. We are whiped if we fail to get our task…. We are longing to see the day when time shall cause evry man to reap what he have sowed, let it be good or bad…. We only call your attention to this fact — where there is a hard bed a man will try to get a softer one.
Truly the humble servants of the state
Signed
Ezekiel Archey
Ambrose Haskins
Source: Letter from Ezekiel Archey and Ambrose Haskins, convict laborers at Pratt Mines in Jefferson County, Alabama, to Reginald Dawson, president of the Alabama Board of Inspectors of Convicts, January 26, 1884. Alabama Department of Archives and History.
Evaluating the Evidence