-Part 3-

Leasing Considered Slavery?

          The motions recorded in the Clemson Trustees Minutes and the Presidential Reports to the Board of Trustees, along with subjective language used when discussing black convicts in correspondence between penitentiary officials, Clemson Board members, and College Faculty, all supply ample evidence in the realization that Clemson College demanded much from the convicts in their employ. The question could be asked, was the convict system effectively slavery?

As stated before, southern states essentially used the vague structuring of the thirteenth constitutional amendment to recreate a system similar to the one used before the Civil War, in which reliance on slave labor was the foundation of the southern economy, in order to achieve economic stabilization. Utilizing convicts for labor, or ‘Convict Labor,’ was the solution southern states utilized to work towards a financially sound economy. With this scheme in operation, South Carolina leased convicts to institutions in need of cheap access to manual labor. The partnership between the South Carolina State Penitentiary and large corporations, like Clemson College, provided each operating party with revenue, and a way to regenerate the sorely depleted economic structure of the state. Therefore, like slavery, convict labor was used as a regulator for southern economies.

Thus, the compliance of Clemson college to engage in the formulated process of convict labor, which effectively grew a successful white corporation from the ground up, based off of the strenuous labor performed by blacks, only strengthens the claim made popular by a southern delegate, “Before the war, we owned the negroes…but these convicts, we don’t own ‘em. One dies, get another.” Convicts, like slaves, were worked to death with no consequences on the part of their white superior counterparts. But, here is where differences between the systems form:

“Of all the factors that distinguish convict leasing from slavery, however, none was more economically important than the fact that the lessee had only a minimal capital investment in any individual convict. This reality combined with a relative – to be sure, also variable – abundance of supply to produce a level of oppression that, taking convict leasing as a whole, can be said to have been “worse” than slavery during the period of the convict’s sentence. The phrase worse than slavery may seem surprising, even shocking. But the word slavery itself is, as many scholars have argued, often used imprecisely to refer to a kind of absolute oppression.”[1] 

Readers, see that Convict Leasing and Slavery are majorly different, primarily in the treatment of the laborers, and additionally through the economic value of the laborers.