Doyle, when there were company towns, and company stores, and company script instead of money, and wages never were enough to cover debt, as in coal mines and mill towns, there was economic slavery. It served the owners better than debtors' prison, because the system kept workers on the job, making profits for the owners, instead of in prison, where they would have at least have had to be fed.

My wife's grandfather was a Kentucky coal miner who died of black lung, caused from breathing coal dust. I don't know who wrote it, but the song, "Sixteen Tons", recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford, laid out the miners' troubles very well.

In the South after the war, prisoners were rented out to farmers and contractors as labor. The state and county got the money, and the convicts did the time. It got so bad they would break a leg with the sledge they used to break rocks. I made a movie in Lynchburg, Virginia, back in the early 70s, about a man named, of all things, Jim Martin, who had escaped from a chain gang in Georgia and wrote a book about it, called "Thirty Nine Stripes". Mr Martin was associated with Jerry Falwell's church. Stan