Carceral State: Baton Rouge and its Plantation Environs Across Emancipation by William Iverson Horne M.A. in History, August 2013, The George Washington University A Dissertation submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 19, 2019 Dissertation directed by Tyler Anbinder and Andrew Zimmerman Professors of History The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that William Iverson Horne has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy as of March 6, 2019. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation. Carceral State: Baton Rouge and its Plantation Environs Across Emancipation William Iverson Horne Dissertation Research Committee: Tyler Anbinder, Professor of History, Dissertation Co-Director Andrew Zimmerman, Professor of History and International Affairs, Dissertation Co-Director Erin Chapman, Associate Professor of History, Committee Member Adam Rothman, Professor of History, Committee Member ii © Copyright 2019 by William Iverson Horne All rights reserved iii Dedication I dedicate this work to my family, who supported me from the beginning of this project to its completion. I simply could not have done any of this work without their love and encouragement. My wife Laura has, at every turn, been the best partner one could hope for while our two children, Abigail and Eliza, grounded me in reality and sustained me with their unconditional affection. They reminded me that smiling, laughing, and even crying are absolute treasures. I have learned so much from each of them and remain, above all else, grateful to be “Dad.” iv Acknowledgments Two groups of people made this work possible: the scholars who gave me advice at various stages of the project and my coworkers, neighbors, and friends who shared their stories of struggle and triumph. Each of these thinkers, academics and non-scholars alike, substantially shaped my thinking on race, work and the state. I owe much to their collective insight. Special thanks are due to my advisors, Tyler Anbinder and Andrew Zimmerman, who provided crucial support, helping me work through countless issues while pushing me to think more critically about my work and its relationship to the field. Since my first semester at GW, Andrew has encouraged me to ask big, bold questions of the historical record while Tyler has shown me time and again that the devil really is in the details. Both have taught me much about what good scholarship looks like and pushed me to pursue it. Many thanks are also due to my other committee members, Erin Chapman and Adam Rothman, both of whom substantially influenced my work through their careful criticism during seminars and the early stages of this project. Though there are too many to name, I must also thank the countless scholars who made generous suggestions during conferences and seminars, especially Eric Arnesen, Brian Kelly, Keri Leigh Merritt, Chandra Manning, Terry Murphy, Elaine Parsons, John Rodrigue, Richard Stott, and Karin Zipf. I owe a significant debt to my peers in the graduate program who offered feedback and support along the way. Foremost among them is Lauren Angel, who generously read every word of this dissertation. Lauren convinced me to take more risks in my scholarship and, perhaps more than any other person, helped me to work though ideas in ways I could never hope to fully repay. Many thanks are also due to Ashley Brown, Tom Foley, Lucien v Holness, Bob Isaacson, Ruby Johnson, Andreas Meyris, Rahima Schwenkbeck, Kyla Sommers, Kamilah Stinnett, Cory James Young, Katy White, and Nathan Wuertenberg. I must also thank my colleagues and comrades at The Activist History Review for reminding me to embrace the implications of my work. Their commitment to Marx’s famous “ruthless criticism” through their scholarship has been a constant source of inspiration and encouragement. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank my coworkers, neighbors, and friends. Because of when, where, and how I grew up, I spent a great deal of time moving between blue-collar and white-collar worlds. Through this experience, I learned the differing ways of thinking and being that characterized these spaces. I’m grateful for the friends who helped me navigate these transitions and for the lessons they shared with me along the way. They showed me new ways of thinking about work, the boss, and race that challenged my upbringing and forced me to think more deeply about the ideological systems that govern our world. My interest in labor history was born in conversations with these thinkers on the job and on the block. The insight shared by Cheryl, Darlene, Darrell, Jake, John, Josh, Lauqan, Lana, Leslie, Matthew, and Shantrelle, though outside the footnotes, formed the crucial intellectual foundation of this work. I am in their debt, not only for their generosity, but also for their intellectual labor. vi Abstract of Dissertation Carceral State: Baton Rouge and its Plantation Environs Across Emancipation This work examines systems of incarceration across emancipation, beginning in slavery and ending with the unravelling of Reconstruction in late 1868 and early 1869 in the Baton Rouge area. The enslavers in the region built a system of carceral consumption in the 1850s, basing their wealth and power on their control of the state to police the property of others in an attempt to retain the benefits of ownership for themselves. They outlawed forms of commerce and interaction from which they did not benefit and maintained the boundaries of their propertied power through vigilantism. When their consumption of black bodies as an elite prerogative seemed in danger, they supported secession in the hopes that founding a nation on the bedrock of unfree labor would guarantee their wealth. Instead, enslaved men and women rejected slavery in droves when the Union liberation of south Louisiana afforded the opportunity. The white Northerners who facilitated self-emancipation, however, had their own notions of racial hierarchy and treated black Louisianans in ways reminiscent of slavery. Together with former enslavers, they defined postemancipation wage labor as an exclusively white benefit. Postwar planters found reliable allies among the rank and file of the Union Army and used these alliances to leverage unpaid work from African Americans through mechanisms like the “boisterous clause.” They forged a common cause with poor and working-class whites who they once exploited, relying on a more vigorously policed racial divide to grasp power. The result was a state premised upon binding and controlling African American workers through theft, extortion, vigilantism, and the control of the legal process. vii This work reveals how rapidly former enslavers refurbished the carceral capitalism of the antebellum regime. It defines incarceration broadly, focusing on the ways that planters and employers used the spectacle of violence to control their workers before emancipation and in its wake. It also demonstrates the extent of black radicalism across emancipation. African American workers took enormous risks to thwart white claims to the fruits of their labor. They vigorously pursued an alternative vision of work that was undermined only because of the accumulated white power produced by slavery and reinforced by the state. This power imbalance rested on a state that substantially shifted its approach to poor and working-class whites, which became one of the most consequential aspects of Reconstruction. The result was an early reconciliation that aligned white supremacist Northerners and Southerners after emancipation. Finally, the work points to the impact of ecology on wage labor as a series of floods and crop failures drained the capital from the region at the apex of postemancipation black power. This convergence of African American power with regional poverty exacerbated the rapid escalation of white vigilantism and entrenched the carceral state. viii Table of Contents Dedication …...…………………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgments…..……………………………………………………………………v Abstract of Dissertation ………………………………………………………………vii List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………….x Chapter 1: Introduction …………………….……………………………………………. 1 Chapter 2: “Carceral Consumption, 1850-1861” ……………………………………….23 Chapter 3: “State of War, 1861-1867” ………………………………………………….64 Chapter 4: “The Carceral Contract, 1865-1867”……………………………………….105 Chapter 5: “Policing Property, 1865-1867” ……………………………………………138 Chapter 6: “From Resistance to Reconciliation, 1867-1869” ………………………….178 Chapter 7: Conclusion: “The Death of a Politician” ...………………………………... 223 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………231 ix List of Figures Figure 1: Marie Adrien Persac’s 1858 chart of the Lower Mississippi ……….……….. 24 Figure 2: Taylor, drummer for the 78th USCT ……………………………..………….. 85 Figure 3: Antislavery envelope …………………………………..…………………….. 91 Figure 4: Wilcox & Wible receipt ...………………..………………………………….126 Figure 5: Isom McDowell penitentiary slip ……………...…………………………… 149 Figure 6 : Browder acquittal ……......………………………………………………….164 Figure 7 : “Black Against White” ..………………………………………………….. 180 Figure 8 : “Assassination of a Colored Man” ...………………………………………. 189 Figure 9: DeGrey complaint book ……………………………………………………. 213 Figure 10: Nero Mack conviction …………………………………………………….. 226 x Chapter 1: Introduction Sometime in early 1865, Andrew and Caroline Hickley