prison being against the prison would neces certainly seem to be high on their list because they were actually trying to think about the opportunity to actually be like be able to defend oneself, which would be the next step in accruing rights. and so these are complicated, complicated landscapes. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. and i'm glad that you brought up of the question of what was important to black communities when they if they were not rallying against this this nascent convict labor. what was important to them and it's exactly what you just said. they were they were rallying around voting. they were rallying around the rights of citizenship, including the right to a fair trial. they were rallying around their own economic development. they were rallying against southern slavery because of course, this was all in the wake of northern slavery. this was after the end of northern slavery very recently, after the end of northern slavery.

they were organizing against southern slavery. so and they were they were organizing their communities. they were building churches. they were creating social constructs. they were doing all these really important things. and when you when you think about the urgency in the moment of all of these political projects, we can understand better why, why, why convict leasing seemed not as important at the time, except it was really important to william freeman and he was raising this this challenge. and we should understand him in that way as as somewhat prescient. you know, he he he was not imagining the future. he was making this very simple claim. and i think it's power or it was actually in its simplicity. he kept saying that he wanted wages for his work. he never even said, i want the prison to close. he never said the prison.

this prison system is inherently wrong and it should be abolished. he never said that. he never even said, i want other people to be paid. he just wanted his pay that he deserved for his work and that is a very narrow claim. and i think a lot of its force actually derived from the fact that it was so narrow and so undeniable. how can you look somebody in the eye and say, no, you don't deserve wages for your five years of labor? so the force was actually in this the narrowness of the claim, beautifully said. let's we have a couple of minutes. let's see if there are questions in the audience. people want to ask questions? i could talk all night with you, but. and thank you for waiting until the microphones make their way around. should i stand? you know.

oh, that's okay. i want them to thank you so much for that talk. i the book sounds awesome and i think it's really important that you're not only bringing the story of convict leasing it to the north and before the civil war, but also really the way that black pathologizing or the pathologizing of black criminality was a story of that predate it that's not just the 20th century but also the civil war. i think it's really important work. i did have a question, a more context driven question. you kind of alluded to this in your in your talk. and i'm sure in the book it gets deeper treatment. but, you know, auburn, the penitentiary, was at the center of this kind of national and transatlantic conversation about prison reform. and you kind of were highlighting, i don't know if it

was tension with the profit driven component of the of the prison, but one of the one of the things that i was curious about while you were talking about the fact that auburn was essentially a factory or at least a series of factories, was its relationship to other penitentiaries in in the north as well as the south. regard guarding the economic functions of it. because other, you know, was this system i mean, beyond the disciplinary component, was this economic system also being exported to other places? i know that like i've done work on maryland, i know that they also had profit driven so was the would you describe those other prison systems as that as being convict leasing, as well? or like how does it work? yeah, absolutely. i'm so glad you asked that. thank you so much for that. yes. so the auburn system was very exported and imitated and

duplicated. so it was duplicated almost instantly. and exported across the north, across the united states, across the ocean, to europe. so these other prisons that had similar similar goals, similar economic goals, similar structures, they were all imitating auburn. so i'll give you just a simple a single example. san quentin was duke was built on the auburn model and this was completely explicit, absolutely deliberate. one of the reasons they were tourists at the auburn state prison was people were so interested in this system and interested in replicating it. so there were there were private tourists who just came to gawk, but there were also many, many official envoys. so to tocqueville came to auburn and harriet martineau came to auburn. so there were many people who were coming in order to assess

the system and make on whether it should be replicated. so it was so auburn was, you know, ground zero, but it very quickly spread. and so all the other systems that we know about that have similar models, they are all in direct relationship, in direct of auburn. and we're pushing back here in newton. okay. i manisha asks robyn, thanks for the great talk. i was wondering if you could compare this for profit convict labor, auburn prison with the later development of the convict lease system in the postwar south? sure, sure. so heather anne thompson has done really important work on this on this on exactly this comparison. so what thomson is that we should understand southern convict leasing practices post-civil war as as as as an

adjustment on the pre-civil war practices that originated at auburn. so you could you could she was for her for four for thomson the similarities are much more significant than the differences and there are important differences. southern post-civil war convict leasing is not primary early in factory based manufacturing, for example. so there are really important differences. but thomson's argument is that the similarities in the continuities are more important than the similar than the differences. and i agree with that and what i would also add is that the lines of influence are explicit and direct the post-civil war south was adapting process is that were innovated in the north and i'll go backwards just a moment to say there are these really wonderful books about convict leasing in the post-civil war south and they have produced so

much knowledge that is so important and they have told the story of post-civil war convict leasing so vividly that it has had these excellent books, have had the inadvertent effect of suggesting that that's the whole story. in fact, these wonderful books are starting the story in the middle. and by start and the story they tell is important and correct and true. but it's starting the story in the middle. and by starting the story with the civil war and the end of the civil war, what has happened inadvertently is that these excellent books have let the north off the hook. so one of the things that i want to accomplish with freeman's challenge is to put the north back on the hook. i saw a question over here, is it help? one second for the microphone. and i just i just wanted to ask

or say, aren't there for profit prisons now? oh, yes, absolutely. there are. there are so i'm sorry, do i say more? but do they are they run the same way as they had been before? and yes and no. so different states have different laws. so in new york state there is still in prison, forced manufacturing. and one thing that i want to state really clearly is that auburn was never a private prison. nowadays, when we say prison profit, often we assume it's a private prison. and so this is one of the the arguments that i really want to make is that when we're talking about a prison for profit, meaning a prison that was built for the purpose of generating profits, that's not necessarily a private prison. so absolutely, there are profits of in prisons today. it varies state to state. how that manifests in new york state, there are no longer there

is no longer a partnership with private companies. so in new york state, you do not have the same convict leasing that william freeman experienced where he was. his work was being leased by private companies that no longer exists in new york state. now, today in new york state, there is massive manufacturing. but what incarcerated people build in new york state is materials that are then sold only to the state itself. so things like license plates, for example. so that is a difference, you know, in some ways. but it's still forced labor and that's why the work of 13th forward is so important. 13th forward is working to end forced labor in prisons in new york state. they get. oh, yes, they do get paid, but they get paid in new york state by the way, there are plenty of incarcerated people in the united states who get paid nothing, who are forced to labor and get paid nothing. and that is true in many, many

states in new york state, people in prisons are paid for their work, but they are vastly underpaid. so they get paid, for example, the men who make license in the in auburn today, they get paid $0.65 an hour. so this not a living wage. and we need to remember that william freeman wanted wages, but he also wanted fair wages and that is not what we have in new york state today. and again, this is what the bill about fairness and opportunity. this is exactly what that bill is all about. so 13 forward, please and convict labor in new york state. we have to stop soon. but you make a point in the book of about that even the 1840s there were states that paid prisoners and new york was not one of them. and indeed when when he left after five years, they gave.

to $2. this was part and you talk about the kind of social pressure that produced that kind of modest compensation to, prisoners who were relieving. i wish we should stop soon because we're out of we're at about an hour. but we can take we can take two more questions. yeah. and then we have one up front. okay. in your talk, you mentioned william freeman using humor to assert his humanity and resist the state while in prison. can you offer any particular examples of how he used humor in these ways? yeah. yeah. what he did was while was in one of these. in one of these factories, what he would do is he would make silly faces and cause other prisoners to laugh because they did look in each other's faces. they were not permitted to, but of course they did do it. and he and this was this was not just him. this was a game that a lot of

prisoners played where they would try to make each other laugh and and it was it was it was a very humanizing game, but it was also a really dangerous game. he was he was caught and he was whipped for it. and he also he was he was whipped multiple times. one time he danced. dancing was also forbidden. he was dancing and he was he was whipped for that. i mean, that's not humorous, but these are exam plays of ways that he claimed his humanity and resisted the dehumanization of the prison. and these are these were dangerous and courageous acts and it reminds us that he again he was this by everyone's description, playful and vibrant 15 year old got in trouble in ways that that young people do went into prison. and i know you've done a lot of work of cautioning us against the idea of innocence and except

that in the case of, of course, black people, black boys and girls, young black people, that they don't get the same kind of innocence. and so when he came out and he was 21, 22, changed and making this case about payment, about recompense, he was a young person. yeah, he was a young person making this kind of a student, as you say, clearly forced argument that i think also adds to to the to the clarity of your insight about how important his claim was. yeah. yeah. he was really young. he was a teenager while he was in prison. and and he in a lot of ways, he acted like a teenager, including some of his bravery and some of his bravado is i associate with with teenager ness. yeah. yeah. i'll take one more question. oh, i was just very curious. what, what women and horace

greeley to say and also, was there anybody in the press who grasped the importance of freemen saying this was the state? yeah. yeah. so walt whitman and horace greeley were basically interested in it from the perspective of the capital punishment. so walt whitman commented on it somewhat extensively in multiple, multiple columns. he spoke about it as part of his camp. he was against capital punishment, and he was arguing against that in in many cases including freedman's case. and he whitman is really interesting. he and whitman is really interesting. he wrote one column in which he really recognized the challenge and he really backed it up in a lot of ways. and then all of his other columns on william friedman, he didn't do that at all. he reversed himself.

whitman is a little painful because he heard it and then he didn't. and why did he hear in one moment and then slipped into not hearing it in another moment? i couldn't say. you didn't ask about james this bottle answer him. he common on case because he was furious at william henry seward. james mccune smith very clearly recognized the racism in william henry stewart defense of freeman and he was absolutely furious at him for that. >> part of the excellence of this book, i'll say again, is a way in which you navigate the complicated entanglements of what it is to think about race and racial legacy and american culture. i said this to you, if one is building a classic trying to study that complexity, and if morrison's beloved is in there,

baldwins fire, next time, all these books that ask any reader to figure out how do you witness and participate and find your place in the story, i think we could say that your book would be there. so i just want to congratulate you and thank you. thank you for sharing it with us. us. what a phenomenal work. >> thank you so much. that means the world to me. i am very touched that you would say that.ll thank you so much. and thank you all for being a part of this conversation. [applause] >> thank you, robin bernstein, kevin quashie. what he conversation. this is what we hope to do with the american antiquarian society, to think about the past in all its complexity and its resonance for our own day. you've done that marvelously. thank you.

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