Slavery and incarceration in the frontier: the origin of convict leasing

ABSTRACT This article uses original archival research to revise the scholarly consensus on convict leasing to demonstrate that it first emerges on US soil in Kentucky’s eighteenth century frontier society (rather than in the Deep South in the wake of the 13th amendment) and that it began in a prison filled with incarcerated white people (rather than as a way to keep African Americans trapped in a condition analogous to slavery). Convict leasing was born on the frontier – in the hazy netherworld between slavery and freedom, between British colonial geographies and the territories settlers seized from indigenous peoples to establish a sovereign republic. I argue that convict leasing constituted a novel financial frontier that tethered slaveholding to new strategies for adjudicating debt to new lease arrangements for private firms. More specifically, I argue that convict leasing was inaugurated in the US in Kentucky because of its unique relationship to three related developments: the birth of the domestic slave trade, the debut of incarceration as a pervasive mode of punishment, and the plight of debtors in the aftermath of the American Revolution. This article demonstrates how Kentucky moved from being foremost understood as a geographic frontier – the expanding boundary of a new republic – to a financial frontier as the westward march of slave coffles prepared Kentucky to launch a hemp industry that was uniquely profitable. The desperate plight of debtors in the context of booming hemp profits made them especially vulnerable to Joel Scott’s innovative model for extracting profit from prison labor based on techniques African workers had developed for transforming a recalcitrant plant into an economic marvel. In this context, incarcerated white people were subjected to a labor regimen that had heretofore largely been restricted to enslaved black workers. This geographic frontier and financial frontier ushered in new legal frontiers, including the threshold marking a shift from colonial subjects to incarcerated citizens.