Coal Creek War
| Coal Creek War | |||||
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| Part of the Coal Wars | |||||
 Key locations during the Coal Creek War |
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| Belligerents | |||||
 United States
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Tennessee Coal miners | ||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||
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John P. Buchanan Samuel T. Carnes Granville Sevier |
Eugene Merrell George Irish Marcena Ingraham Keller Anderson |
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The Coal Creek War was an armed labor uprising that took place primarily in Anderson County, in the American state of Tennessee, in the early 1890s. The struggle began in 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed attempted to replace free coal miners with convicts leased out by the state government. Over a period of just over a year, the free miners continuously attacked and burned prison stockades and company buildings, hundreds of convicts were freed, and dozens of miners and militiamen were killed or wounded in small-arms skirmishes. One historian describes the conflict as "one of the most dramatic and significant episodes in all American labor history."
The Coal Creek War was part of a greater struggle across Tennessee against the state's controversial convict-leasing system, which allowed the state to lease its convicts to mining companies to compete with free labor. The outbreak of the conflict touched off a partisan media firestorm between the miners' supporters and detractors, and brought the issue of convict leasing to the public eye. Although the uprising essentially ended with the arrests of hundreds of miners in 1892, the publicity it generated led to the downfall of Governor John P. Buchanan, and forced the state to reconsider the convict-leasing system. In 1896, when its convict-lease contracts expired, Tennessee's state government refused to renew them, making it one of the first Southern states to end the controversial practice.
The Coal Creek War took place on the eastern fringe of the Cumberland Mountains, where the range gives way to the Tennessee Valley. Coal Creek, a tributary of the Clinch River, flows north for several miles from its source in the mountains, slicing a narrow valley between the backbone-like Walden Ridge on the east and Vowell Mountain to the west before exiting the mountains eastward through a water gap in Walden Ridge. A flank of Vowell Mountain known as "Militia Hill" overlooks this water gap.
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