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3 results

  • 6 - The Legion of the Damned

  • Edited by Jan C. Jansen, The University of Tübingen, Kirsten McKenzie, University of Sydney
  • Book:
    Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions
    Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    16 May 2024, pp 128-152
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  • Summary

    From the fifteenth to the twentieth century, the use of convicted labor to supplement overseas garrisons was commonplace across colonial frontiers. While this practice has been the subject of recent study in the French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish Empires, the British military deployment of convicts has been comparatively neglected. This matters for two reasons. A focus on civil transportation systems appears to have led to a considerable underestimation of overall transportation numbers. Second, while much has been written about the manner in which Britain redirected transportation from the Atlantic to its new Australian colonial possessions in the late eighteenth century, the military deployment of convict labor remained centered on the Atlantic. In fact, during the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, many more convicts served in the African and Caribbean colonial garrisons than were ever shipped to the Antipodes. In this chapter, we use a range of different sources to piece together the military deployment of convicted labor in the British Atlantic World in the period 1780–1820, and to explore its complex relationships with the transatlantic slave trade.

  • Colorado Honor Convicts: Roads, Reform, and Region in the Progressive Era

  • Alexander Finkelstein
  • Journal:
    The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era / Volume 20 / Issue 1 / January 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    20 August 2020, pp. 24-43
    Print publication:
    January 2021

  • In the early twentieth century, many states turned to convict road labor in response to the clamor for good roads and the contemporaneous crisis of imprisonment. States, guided by the federal government that served as an information broker, developed two main types of convict labor program—the honor and guard systems. These systems differed by regional and local context. Colorado developed the honor form of convict labor based in Progressive principles. The Colorado system offers a case study in local conditions that took on national importance as Warden Thomas Tynan became enmeshed in a national network of Progressive penal reformers helping define state-run convict labor systems. This essay follows the reform ideology and financial incentives that drove Colorado's honor program, showing how capitalist labor motivations were balanced with ideals of reform. The honor system spread across the United States, and the story of this system complicates regional paradigms while highlighting national patterns. The story of honor guard convict labor and infrastructure development connects Progressive Era reform, penal reform, labor history, and regional and demographic patterns.

Williams' Gang
  • A Notorious Slave Trader and his Cargo of Black Convicts
  • Jeff Forret
  • Published online:
    16 January 2020
    Print publication:
    16 January 2020
  • William H. Williams operated a slave pen in Washington, DC, known as the Yellow House, and actively trafficked in enslaved men, women, and children for more than twenty years. His slave trading activities took an extraordinary turn in 1840 when he purchased twenty-seven enslaved convicts from the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond with the understanding that he could carry them outside of the United States for sale. When Williams conveyed his captives illegally into New Orleans, allegedly while en route to the foreign country of Texas, he prompted a series of courtroom dramas that would last for almost three decades. Based on court records, newspapers, governors' files, slave manifests, slave narratives, travelers' accounts, and penitentiary data, Williams' Gang examines slave criminality, the coastwise domestic slave trade, and southern jurisprudence as it supplies a compelling portrait of the economy, society, and politics of the Old South.