Coal Creek War Begins: Miners Free Convict Laborers, Attack Lease System

Three hundred Tennessee coal miners successfully besiege the Briceville stockade after midnight on July 15, 1891, the anniversary of Bastille Day, freeing forty convict laborers and their guards and putting them on a train to Knoxville. Later that day, miners march on the Knoxville Iron Company mine near Coal Creek, force guards at its stockade to surrender, and likewise send its convicts to Knoxville. The uprising launches the Coal Creek War, one of the largest insurrections in American labor history, as miners face off against the convict lease system—a private-public partnership where prisoners are leased to private companies for labor that undermines union organizing and perpetuates slavery by imprisoning African Americans on false charges. By 1891, six corporations use 746 convict miners, nearly 75 percent of whom are Black Tennesseans serving terms for petty offenses under Jim Crow laws.

The conflict begins on April 1, 1891, when the Tennessee Coal Mining Company (TCMC) rejects miners’ demands for payment in cash rather than company scrip and the right to use their own checkweighmen—both already required by state law. TCMC shuts down operations, then mockingly reopens on July 4—Independence Day—with convict-lease labor. Forty convicts are brought to Coal Creek and ordered to demolish the evicted miners’ homes and build a stockade for more prisoners. The deliberate timing and humiliating symbolism—replacing American workers with enslaved labor on Independence Day—triggers the armed response. The miners’ grievances extend beyond immediate workplace conditions to the fundamental injustice of competing against forced labor: convict miners receive no wages, can be worked without limit, and serve as a permanent scab workforce to break strikes and drive down wages.

When the Tennessee General Assembly meets in August 1891, legislators not only fail to end the convict lease system but vote more money for the state militia to control the miners, demonstrating that Tennessee’s government serves corporate interests over both workers and the rule of law (since the companies are violating existing statutes). In September 1891, a justice of the peace is smuggled into one of the mines to secure a habeas corpus application for a convict on grounds of being held in an illegal prison not controlled by the state. The case reaches the Tennessee Supreme Court in October 1891, where Chief Justice Peter Turney rules against the miners, citing the sanctity of contracts—elevating corporate agreements over basic legal requirements and human rights.

On the night of October 31, 1891, hundreds of masked men burn down the stockades of the Tennessee Coal Mining Company and the Knoxville Iron Company, setting three hundred convicts free, dressing them in civilian clothing, and telling them to “go and sin no more.” Over the course of the convict wars, striking miners free hundreds of convicts, in some cases providing them with fresh food and civilian clothes, demonstrating solidarity across racial lines against the corporate use of incarceration as a labor control mechanism. What begins as a small protest in a company town grows into a massive insurrection involving thousands of miners from eastern Tennessee and Kentucky facing armed state guardsmen and militias in the Cumberland Mountains foothills.

The conflict forces the Tennessee General Assembly to rethink its convict-leasing system. When contracts with private businesses end in 1896, the Tennessee state government decides not to renew them, making Tennessee one of the first southern states to stop this practice. The Coal Creek War demonstrates that direct action and armed resistance can achieve reforms that legislative processes controlled by corporate interests will not deliver. However, the victory proves limited: while Tennessee ends convict leasing in mines, the broader system of using incarceration to supply cheap labor and break unions persists, evolving into chain gangs, prison farms, and eventually the modern prison-industrial complex. The miners’ rebellion shows both the possibility of interracial working-class solidarity against corporate exploitation and the willingness of state governments to deploy military force to protect corporate profits over workers’ rights and racial justice.