" What was developing in the South was a coercive labor system, which although not slavery, was not free labor either. It depended on extralegal violence, coercive laws, burdensome debt relations, and the use of convict labor to limit alternatives. The South was demonstrating that there were routes to capitalist development—both agricultural and industrial—that did not rely on free labor. "

― Richard White , The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896