Convict Wars, Tennessee

In the fall of 1891, miners from Briceville, a small Appalachian settlement in East Tennessee, smuggled a justice of the peace into a coal pit where the company had replaced free labor with convicts leased from the state. The magistrate interviewed a convict and convinced him to sign an application for habeas corpus proceedings, which the free miners’ lawyers subsequently introduced in the Criminal Court of Knox County. The case, known as State ex rel. Warren v. Jack, hinged on the legality of subleasing convicts, a state-sanctioned system that passed the control of convicts from the state to a lessee