The history of enslaved firefighters offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of relying on involuntary labor to fight blazes.
…for heroically saving people and buildings from fires. Even so, it took 18 years after Hunt first received plaudits until he could use his wages to purchase his freedom. Further, his firefighting wages were so paltry that he had to pool wages from other odd jobs together to afford his freedom.
…for heroically saving people and buildings from fires. Even so, it took 18 years after Hunt first received plaudits until he could use his wages to purchase his freedom. Further, his firefighting wages were so paltry that he had to pool wages from other odd jobs together to afford his freedom.
Because of their supply of unfree labor to fight fires, Southern leaders felt little need to fireproof their cities, or adopt the innovations in firefighting made possible by new technologies. While cities like Augusta, Ga., did ban wooden structures, officials in Charleston defeated a proposed 1838 ban — even after fire destroyed the city that year. As late as 1861, the city’s fire chief advocated against adoption of a steam pump because it was cheaper to continue using enslaved firefighters to pump the water.
Rejecting such cutting-edge technology, however, meant that Northern insurance companies wouldn’t write policies in the South. This refusal forced Southern newspapers to advertise charity drives for fire victims and Southerners to attempt to found their own fire insurance companies. Southerners took Northern refusal to extend them insurance as proof of anti-Southern discrimination, helping to bolster a sectional identity.
The Civil War and the end of slavery brought about the end to this Southern approach to fighting fires. Yet, crucially, the years of using enslaved men to fight fires had set the precedent for putting those thought to be inferior on the front lines in this fight. It cemented an association between Black and other non-white male bodies and forced firefighting that would later inform decisions to use inmates for this task.
This was legal because the 13th Amendment, which banned slavery, continued to allow involuntary servitude when it was “punishment for a crime…” Southerners quickly adopted the practice of forced prisoner labor as a way of restoring coerced labor in a supposedly free labor market. Southern whites imprisoned a disproportionately Black convict population, often for minor and outright fictional crimes, and put them to work, especially in building the highways that brought the South into the modern age.
But prison labor wasn’t exclusive to the South: California had used it since 1850, and in 1915, the state began using inmates to fight fires. The program greatly expanded after World War II. Advocates championed the rehabilitative potential for inmates exposed to the outdoors. Inmates have remained a staple of California firefighting ever since.
These roots help connect inmate firefighting in 2025 with enslaved firefighting in the antebellum South. Enslaved fire crews did some of the most grueling work like hand-pumping water, while today inmate crews likewise dig fire breaks by hand. Today, inmate fire crews are likewise four times as…
Source: https://www.bunkhistory.org/resources/the-troubling-slavery-era-origins-of-inmate-firefighting
