Convict Lease, Free Black Labor, and Political Participation in Two Texas Counties, 1870–1900

In Texas, as in other Southern states, during the decades after the Civil War, the practice of leasing out penitentiary convicts to private parties became established, while the ability of black citizens to cast ballots and exercise political power was drastically narrowed.  These coinciding developments have long been recognized as related parts of the political agenda of white Democratic “Redeemer” governments which catered to established economic interests while affirming white supremacy and reconstructing racial hierarchy.  Yet as recent scholarship on Redemption-era Texas has noted, widespread insistence on local autonomy by grass-roots white Democrats allowed some black-majority counties to continue electing Republican officials into the 1890s without being constrained by state constitutional provisions.  Fort Bend County in the Texas coastal region, on the lower Brazos River, and inland, upriver Robertson County, were two such jurisdictions, with landholdings largely concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy white owners, but with black residents maintaining voting majorities for roughly two decades after the collapse of Republican-led state government.  Also, during this same period, Fort Bend and Robertson were the two counties to which state penitentiary convicts leased by plantation owners were mostly sent.  Sugar planters in Fort Bend and cotton plantation owners in Robertson County together hired the vast majority of convicts made available by state officials for labor on private farms.

Both of these two counties, I argue, demonstrate a relationship between the political orientation of county leaderships and hiring-out decisions by state penitentiary board members.  Moreover, a comparison of political activity in the two counties reveals the political importance of plantation staple crops, and the labor requirements and social patterns distinct to each.  During the 1880s, as the use of convict labor by elite planters became an object of heated political controversy, many black Republicans petitioned and voted in opposition to the policy.  But while black petitioners and voters in Robertson County joined with white laborers, town business owners, and other residents seeking an end to convict labor on local plantations, Fort Bend County officials and voters opposed the transfer of convict workers from private to state-owned farms.  My poster maps out both counties by voting precinct and demonstrates the impact on election returns of proximity to plantation lands where convicts were worked.  Using petitions to the Texas Legislature, U.S. population and agricultural census, and county tax rolls, I demonstrate that the response of neighboring black residents to the use of convict labor was significant in both counties, yet totally different in its orientation.  Where convicts worked on cotton plantations, neighboring black tenant farmers opposed a policy which allowed their labor to be displaced.  But in the region once known as the “Texas sugar bowl,” seasonal hiring of local workers by sugar producers gave black residents a stake in the prevailing policy.  Sugar production, I argue, allowed spaces for black wage labor and political expression which white Democrats could not contain through typical political methods.