The Arkansas State Capitol, Built on Convict Labor

The Arkansas State Capitol sits at the west end of Capitol Avenue, a beaux-arts building in white limestone that took two decades and several scandals to complete. Construction began in eighteen ninety-nine. The building was not fully finished until nineteen fifteen.

During those years it became one of the most visible symbols of a practice that shaped the postwar South: the use of convict labor. Arkansas, like most Southern states after the Civil War, operated a convict lease system in which the state rented its prison population to private contractors. The convicts who cut the limestone for the Capitol building were leased by a contractor named Caldwell and Drake, who used them as a cheap labor force.

Many of these men were Black, imprisoned under the vagrancy laws and similar statutes that existed throughout the South specifically to criminalize Black freedom of movement and provide the plantation economy with a replacement for slavery. The conditions under convict leasing were often brutal. Disease and injury rates were high, oversight was minimal, and the financial incentive ran entirely toward extracting maximum work at minimum cost.

Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name documented this system nationally. The Capitol itself is a handsome building, modeled loosely on the United States Capitol in Washington, though at a smaller scale. It houses a functioning legislature and a remarkable collection of stained glass.

Visitors tour it and photograph it. The history of who built it and under what conditions sits beneath the limestone in the public record, available but rarely told on the tour.