A New South Rebellion by Karin A. Shapiro

Author:Karin A. Shapiro [Shapiro, Karin A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807847336
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1998-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

The stockade at Inman (Harper’s Weekly, August 27, 1892, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University)

Whether he based his refusal on his inability to raise a posse, sympathy for the miners, or opposition to the convict lease remains ambiguous.17 On the miners’ arrival in Inman, the thirty guards stationed there capitulated immediately. The visitors, including around thirty blacks from Whitwell and some ex-convicts, called the 290 convicts from the mines, loaded them onto trains, and sent them to Nashville.18

Unlike the Tracy City men, Marion County miners did not cut the telegraph wires, choosing to control rather than stymie news coverage. To this end, the Inman miners posted at nearby Victoria an editor, who “exercised rigid censorship over every dispatch that went out.” The miners additionally chose to refrain from pyrotechnics, acceding to the mine superintendents request that they not burn the stockade for fear of damaging the nearby railroad. Instead of torching the building, the miners emulated prerevolutionary New England mobs, who had a penchant for “pulling down” the houses of lordly colonial officials—they dismantled the structure piece by piece. These events took place without great conflict. Neither miners nor guards fired a single shot during the entire episode.19

By their actions, the workingmen of Grundy and Marion Counties halted all of TCIR’s mid-Tennessee operations, wreaking a “temporary disaster” on “commercial interests.” Within three days of the August 13 release of Tracy City’s convicts, TCIR’s coal mines at Tracy City and Whitwell, its coke ovens at Tracy City, Whitwell, and Victoria, its ore mine at Inman, and its blast furnaces at South Pittsburg (a town located in southern Marion County near the Alabama border) had all ceased to operate.20

If the miners had intended to make the continued use of convict labor increasingly and even prohibitively expensive, they set about their business with dispatch. TCIR officials immediately issued public complaints about the great cost of rebuilding destroyed property. In addition to demolished stockades, the company confronted substantial damage to its Inman ore mine. During the convicts’ absence, a cave-in caused serious obstructions in the mine’s entryway. TCIR also claimed injuries beyond the physical damage to its properties. Officials immediately began grumbling about the “general demoralization and the breaking down of its business.” Five months after the revolt, the assistant general manager noted in his annual report that the company had “not been able to ‘re-establish’ the standard of labor or the quality of coal and coke. Our furnaces,” he continued, “are still suffering from the use of inferior coke, consequent upon this outbreak.”21

Although TCIR may not have anticipated the long-term effects of the revolt in mid-Tennessee, company executives were not completely averse to the demise of the convict lease. Such diverse observers as the governor and a United Mine Workers Journal reporter intimated that TCIR officials colluded with the miners, “secretly rejoic[ing]” at the pretext the miners’ assaults provided to rid the company of the convict lease.22 But before journalists or legislators could even begin to

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