Oshinsky, "Worse Than Slavery"
David Oshinsky's history of "convict labor" in the Reconstruction-era American South bears the title Worse Than Slavery. The title itself raises questions about the role played by moralistic discourse in historiography, and what purpose it serves. Oshinsky certainly paints a grim picture of the systematic use of African-American prisoners at Parchman Farm -- the focus of his study -- and throughout the South after the Civil War. I would like to examine the system that Oshinsky describes, while incidentally paying attention to the rhetoric he employs in doing so. But ultimately I wish to call attention to, and question, the validity of Oshinsky's title. The title is provocative, and therefore can only be termed responsible historiography if indeed his purpose is to provoke further questions. Chief among these must be the question of what it actually means to declare that what he describes in the book is, indeed, worse than slavery.
Oshinsky begins his account by describing the condition of the South in the period immediately following the Civil War. His preliminary account of the state of Mississippi is particularly grim, and describes a situation of tremendous calamity, seemingly verging upon anarchy:
More than a third of Mississippi's 78,000 soldiers were killed in battle or died from disease. And more than half of the survivors brought home a lasting disability of war. Visitors to the state were astonished by the broken bodies they saw at every gathering, in every town square. Mississippi resembled a giant hospital ward, a land of missing arms and legs. In 1866, one-fifth of the state budget went for the purchase of artificial limbs. Few could escape the consequences of this war. Mississippi was bankrupt. Its commerce and transportation had collapsed. The railroads and levees lay in ruins. Local governments barely functioned. (12)
In some sense, Oshinsky clearly wishes to paint an accurate picture of the sort of society in which the system of convict labor which he outlines could even arise. But that situation is one in which the term "society" hardly seems accurate or appropriate. Yet Oshinsky's argument is one in which a tremendously unjust and inhumane system of labor would be established in the wake of a near-total societal devastation -- replacing a system of labor which was in itself tremendously unjust and inhumane. It might perhaps be more shocking to consider that any sort of system of labor might emerge from a society in this state of post-war devastation, but to a certain extent Oshinsky's argument is intended to show that, in some crucial way, the system of convict labor that would emerge at places like Parchman Farm represents a form of continuity with the chattel slavery of the old South. He makes this aspect of the argument explicit:
Convict leasing would also serve a cultural need by strengthening the walls of white supremacy as the South moved from an era of racial bondage to one of racial caste. In a region where dark skin and forced labor went hand in hand, leasing would become a functional replacement for slavery, a human bridge between the Old South and the New. (57)
The perceived continuity here is, in Oshinsky's argument, the continuity of racism. "Racial bondage" will be replaced by "racial caste," and the system of convict leasing (declared in the title to be worse than slavery) emerges as a "functional replacement for slavery." But the difficulty here is separating out the fact of racism, which Oshinsky posits as the central fact of the convict leasing system, from the larger set of facts of a society in upheaval. The fact of emancipation had suddenly created a new population of free individuals, but it is worth reminding ourselves that (in Isaiah Berlin's famous phrase) "liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or
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