Black Political Power and Incarceration: Evidence from the Reconstruction South

• In Event: Southern Reconstruction and Its Aftermath: APD and HPE Perspectives

Abstract

How did black political empowerment during Reconstruction affect incarceration in the American South? The historical narrative has documented that freedpeople suffered enormous discrimination, violence, and abuse in Southern prisons after the Civil War as Southern whites sought to reinstate racial hierarchies throughout the region (e.g., Ayers, 1984; Lichtenstein, 1996; Mancini, 1996). At the same time, Reconstruction invoked hopes for a racially inclusive democracy as un- precedented numbers of freedmen were granted suffrage for the first time. Black Reconstruction politicians in particular worked relentlessly to ameliorate the lives of freedpeople, for example by bringing education and land reform to their constituents (Logan, 2020). Whether these political representatives also provided a bulwark against discrimination in Southern criminal justice systems is an open empirical question I seek to answer in this paper. I collect a novel dataset on Postbellum Incarceration in the American South (PIAS), which details yearly, county-level state prison admissions between 1868-1882, to test whether and how gains in political representation affected incarceration during Congressional Reconstruction. Using an identification strategy that employs the number of antebellum free blacks as an instrument for black Reconstruction politicians, I find that each additional black state house representative elected during the first racially inclusive elections in 1868 decreased yearly county convictions by almost 17 convictions per 100,000 population. However, the representational efficacy of black politicians seemed somewhat mitigated by whether or not military troops were deployed in a given county. This underscores the importance of federal enforcement of minority rights, in particular in post-conflict settings.

Author

• Susanne Schwarz, Swarthmore College