Track 3 CONTRACTS + LABOR / Presentation 1
‘The Movers of the Work’: The Army and Black Workers in Reconstruction Alabama
John Dean Davis, PhD
Assistant Professor
Knowlton School of Architecture / College of Engineering The Ohio State University
Federal military engineers oversaw construction of infrastructure projects as part of their duties during Reconstruction. Large-scale building projects were sites where the struggle to forge new political and social orders became visible. Chronic labor shortages and the tenuous logistics of heavy construction in a hostile, occupied territory made the army’s use of free African American labor a political decision with ramifications that affected federal policy for decades.
At Muscle Shoals, Alabama, the U.S. Army directly intervened in labor relations when building a canal and navigation dams on the Tennessee River in the 1870s. Military engineers assigned to this fifty-mile-long project confronted a rapidly changing industrial environment. Southern contractors, notorious exploiters of freedpeople and who maintained shadowy relationships with networks of prison labor dealers, caused the federal military engineers to weigh moral considerations in addition to their engineering decisions. The engineers found that convict labor system -- virtually indistinguishable from slavery -- threatened to engulf the entire heavy construction industry in the U.S. South. Ultimately, the social landscape along this stretch of the Tennessee River contributed to the military engineers’ abandoning of the contract and bidding system in favor of hiring Black laborers directly into the employ of the War Department.
Black workers’ emerging sense of their own political power based on acquired skills proved a crucial turning point in the army’s realignment of contracting practices. Though individual army engineers abhorred the practice, military bureaucracy required more than moral impulse to reject cheap convict labor. I use the military’s engineering records – both design documents and payroll data – to make the case that white engineers and Black laborers made a series of tacit agreements, adjusting the engineers’ measures of work and ways of gauging efficiency that emphasized skill as an essential facet of free labor, concretizing free labor practices in the federal contracting system.
John Dean Davis, PhD, is an environmental and architectural historian and assistant professor at the Knowlton School at Ohio State University. He is currently writing a book on engineering, construction, and environment in the US South during Reconstruction.
