Customer Reviews

New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coalfields, 1871-1896 (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

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In *Origins of the New South*, his famous history of the transformation of the American South after reconstruction, C. Vann Woodward briefly mentions the rebellion of Tennessee coal miners against the use of convict labor, largely African-Americans, by mine owners. These miners, many of them recently arrived from tiny rural farms elsewhere in Tennessee and Kentucky, were an unsung constituency of the populist movement that roiled tensions between capital and labor during the Gilded Age.

In her fascinating new book, Karin Shapiro has answered Woodward's call and written a comprehensive study of this nineteenth-century miner's revolt. It is a story--this in itself is one of the book's most appealing features--of how the miners of Coal Creek, in Anderson County, Tennessee, fashioned a revolt based on ideals of rights and solidarity.

The book's themes are unusually rich. The relations some white miners were able to establish with black convict laborers are explored. The Tennessee strikers were committed to obtaining justice through non-violent, political means. Most important, the coal miners were able to win many immediate battles but not achieve their ultimate goal. They wanted to participate in a new industrial order without abandoning their Jacksonian ambition of becoming independent property owners and therefore truly "free" men. Like populists elsewhere, their seemingly radical demands were rooted in conservative beliefs. Their ideas were enormously powerful for sustaining a local uprising but less successful in holding back the emerging corporate organization of capital.

Thanks to its clear prose, moving narrative, and glimpses of the human cost of these strikes, Shapiro's book will engage the general reader as well as the serious historian. Southern, labor, economic, and African-American historians will want to add the book to their collections. Both experts and lay readers with a deep interest in the South are greatly in Shapiro's debt.