Chuck

Incarceration stepped up, but prison labor also did it as well.

And it was nothing compared to what you would, the work you would be put to in the North.

It was essentially nothing

slavery all over again.

But again, this time, the feds, the feds, the union wasn't going to come down and push anybody around at the end of a bayonet because this was all agreed upon in the 13th Amendment.

Right.

So that was like plantation owners, local plantation owners.

Like you said, you could have been a former slave who was arrested for something as stupid as mischief.

and put back to work on that same plantation, essentially as a slave, they would also, like corporations got in on this as well.

Like you said, the railroad.

There was a company in Alabama called the Schloss Sheffield Steel and Iron Company in Jefferson County, Alabama.

That's where their mines were.

They had a 10% death rate from the least convict labor that they got from the state.

And there was a sugar company, the Imperial Sugar Company in Sugar Land, Tennessee, which I guess is an appropriate place for it to be.

A lot of people died when Texas leased them every single state prisoner it had in 1878 to help in the sugar fields.

People were dying of things like malaria.

Like you said, they weren't given any kind of medical care at all.

They were fed just the minimum amount to keep them alive and have energy enough to work.

And this was just par for the course in the South.

That's another thing too that you mentioned, like they built the railroad or say they mined something that was turned into a product that people use.