Oshinsky's "Worse Than Slavery": A Critical Historiographic Review

Introduction: The Title as Argument

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. This review examines the system that Oshinsky describes while paying attention to the rhetoric he employs in doing so. Ultimately, however, the central concern is with the validity of Oshinsky's title. The title is provocative, and can therefore only be termed responsible historiography if his purpose is genuinely 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, describing a situation of tremendous calamity that seemed to verge 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)

Post-Civil War Mississippi and the Rise of Convict Labor

In some sense, Oshinsky clearly wishes to paint an accurate picture of the kind of society in which a system of convict labor could even arise. But that situation is one in which the term "society" hardly seems accurate or appropriate. Yet Oshinsky's argument is that a tremendously unjust and inhumane labor system would be established in the wake of near-total societal devastation — replacing a system of labor which was itself tremendously unjust and inhumane. It might be more shocking to consider that any labor system could emerge from a society in this state of post-war ruin, but Oshinsky's argument is intended to show that, in some crucial way, the convict labor system that emerged 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 in Oshinsky's argument is 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." The difficulty, however, lies in separating out the fact of racism, which Oshinsky posits as the central fact of the convict leasing system, from the larger constellation of facts characterizing a society in upheaval.

The fact of emancipation had suddenly created a new population of free individuals, but it is worth recalling that, in Isaiah Berlin's famous phrase, "liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture or human happiness or a quiet conscience." The last of these might indeed be crucial to understanding the dynamic at work here, although Oshinsky is not particularly interested in psychological history. Yet psychological history seems necessary in explaining why a particular social system would emerge: one aspect of the unquiet conscience of a former slaveholding society in transition to one in which slavery is abolished must, necessarily, include the fear of potential retribution.

Racism, Social Psychology, and the Limits of Oshinsky's Framework

Oshinsky seems to rely on racism as a primary motivating factor without necessarily indicating where he thinks racism comes from. In Worse Than Slavery, racism appears to be constructed as a kind of instinctive behavior. Yet it is worth inquiring whether the conditions from which the convict labor system emerged would be regarded differently if there were no question of racial difference. On the issue of the mobility of emancipated slaves, for example, Oshinsky reads white reaction in terms of basic racism essentially unaltered from the era of slavery:

"The extent of this mobility is difficult to gauge. Among the hundreds of ex-slaves interviewed in the 1930s, about 40% claimed to have moved during the war itself or in the months immediately following emancipation. But most remained where they were, living as tenants or field hands on the same land they had worked all along. And those who did leave often went a very short distance — to a neighboring plantation, perhaps, or the nearest crossroads town. The exhilaration of moving was tempered by feelings of insecurity and fear… Southern whites took a different point of view. Emancipation had ended slavery but had not destroyed the assumptions upon which slavery was based. The fact that many blacks abandoned their plantations in 1865 simply reinforced the image of the lazy, indolent field hand, shuffling aimlessly through life. In white eyes, the Negro viewed his freedom in typically primitive terms — as a license to roam the countryside in search of pleasure and trouble." (17–18)

Oshinsky suggests here that the mobility of newly emancipated people — who had no established role in any surviving social structure — was greatly exaggerated by the racist imaginations of white Southerners. Yet the Civil War itself was a distinct demonstration of the possibility of mass population movement: it had uprooted vast numbers of whites (and blacks) across the region. Mass mobility and widespread destruction had already gone hand in hand within white observation of white behavior during the war. Certainly racism played a massive role in the horrifying overreaction of the Klan to the potential for Black insurrectionary violence, but to call it the only factor seems like a simplification.

To some extent, the unquiet conscience of a former slaveholding society can be understood through Oshinsky's account of the Meridian riot of 1871, the site of the worst violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan:

"As Meridian's black population expanded in the late 1860s, tensions increased between local Republicans, who ran the town government, and local vigilantes, who vowed to bring it down. Both groups formed their own militias; both held emotional rallies and parades. In 1870, two black county supervisors were assassinated. An explosion seemed inevitable. It came in the spring of 1871, at the trial of three blacks charged with inciting arson in the town. Almost everyone came to the courtroom well armed, as Mississippians had been doing for years. This time shots rang out, killing the white Republican judge and several black spectators. The crowd surged forward, chasing down one defendant, whose body they riddled with bullets, and hurling another from the roof. ('When this failed to kill him,' a witness reported, 'his throat was cut.') For the next three days, local Klansmen rampaged through Meridian, murdering 'all the leading colored men of the town with one or two exceptions.' Despite frantic pleas for help, federal troops in Mississippi did not arrive in time. When the slaughter finally ended, more than twenty-five blacks were dead. So, too, was Republican rule in this hill country town. The Meridian riot demonstrated that the black community — poorly armed, economically dependent, and new to freedom — could not effectively resist white violence without federal help. And it showed that such help might be lacking at the very moment it was needed most. By 1871, Northern sympathy for the freedman's troubles had begun to wane. Military occupation was simply not working in the South; even General Sherman, the U.S. Army commander, despaired of propping up weak and provocative state governments with more federal troops. As black Meridian buried its dead that spring, the failure of Reconstruction was clear. The freedman stood dangerously alone." (27–28)

Conclusion: Provocative Historiography and Its Responsibilities

It is difficult to argue with Oshinsky without feeling like one is, in some way, unintentionally taking the side of the Klan, or the Southerners who created the utterly inhumane and deplorable institution of convict leasing in the post-war South. But at the same time, there is a tendentiousness to Oshinsky's reliance on racism as the primary motivating factor that deserves scrutiny. The book's title signals that Oshinsky's way of framing a shocking and little-known episode in American history is itself a distinct form of argument. To some degree, this polemical approach may be guilty of a form of condescension toward the past — an oversimplification of human psychology and of historical processes overall. A provocative title is only responsible historiography if it genuinely opens up further questions rather than foreclosing them.