Praise for Douglas A. Blackmon's

S L A V E R Y

BY ANOTHER NAME

"Vividly and engagingly recalls the horror and sheer magnitude

of…neo- slavery and reminds us how long after emancipation

such practices per sisted…. Provides insights on how we might

regard the legacy of slavery, reparations, and perhaps even our

justice and correctional system, with echoes for our own time."

—The Boston Globe

"A terri c journalist and gifted writer, Blackmon is fearless in

going wher ever the research leads him."

—Atlanta Magazine

"Personalizing the larger story through individual experiences,

Blackmon's book opens the eyes and wrenches the gut."

—Rocky Mountain News

"For those who think the conversation about race or exploitation

in Amer ica is over, they should read Douglas Blackmon's

cautionary tale, Slavery by Another Name. It is at once

provocative and thought-provoking, sobering and heartrending."

—-Jay Winik, author of The Great Upheaval:

America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

"A powerful and eye-opening account of a crucial but

unremembered chapter of American history. Blackmon's

magni cent research paints a devastating picture of the ugly and

outrageous practices that kept tens of thousands of Black

Americans enslaved until the onset of World War II. Slavery by

Another Name is a passionate, highly impressive and hugely

important book."

—David J. Garrow, author of

Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr.

and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference

"Wall Street Journal Bureau Chief Blackmon gives a

groundbreaking and dis turbing account of a sordid chapter in

American history—the lease (essen tially the sale) of convicts to

‘commercial interests’ between the end of the nineteenth century

and well into the twentieth."

—Publishers Weekly

DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON

S L A V E R Y

BY ANOTHER NAME

Douglas A. Blackmon is the Atlanta Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal. He

has written extensively on race, the economy, and American society. Reared in

the Mississippi Delta, he lives in downtown Atlanta with his wife and children.

www.slaverybyanothername.com

To Michelle, Michael,

and Colette

Slavery:…that slow Poison, which is daily contaminating the

Minds & Morals of our People. Every Gentlemen here is born a petty

Tyrant. Practiced in Acts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to

the Dictates of Humanity, & all the finer feelings of the Soul. Taught

to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject & contemptible

Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the

Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great & useful purposes.

GEORGE MASON, JULY 1773

VIRGINIA CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

CONTENTS

A Note on Language

Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On

PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON

I. THE WEDDING

Fruits of Freedom

I . AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

"Niggers is cheap."

I I. SLAVERY’S INCREASE

"Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."

IV. GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD

"The negro dies faster."

PART TWO: HARVEST OF AN UNFINISHED WAR

V. THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

"I don't owe you anything."

VI. SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

"We shal have to kil a thousand…

to get them back to their places."

VI . THE INDICTMENTS

"I was whipped nearly every day."

VI I. A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

"The master treated the slave unmerciful y."

IX. A RIVER OF ANGER

The South Is "an armed camp."

X. THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."

XI. SLAVERY AFFIRMED

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

XI . NEW SOUTH RISING

"This great corporation."

PART THREE: THE FINAL CHAPTER OF AMERICAN SLAVERY

XI I. THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM

A War of Atrocities

XIV. ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."

XV. EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

"Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet."

XVI. ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

"I wil murder you if you don't do that work."

XVI . FREEDOM

"In the United States one cannot sel himself."

EPILOGUE

The Ephemera of Catastrophe

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

A NOTE ON

LANGUAGE

Periodically throughout this book, there are quotations from individuals who

used o ensive racial labels. I chose not to sanitize these historical statements

but to present the authentic language of the period, whenever documented

direct statements are available. I regret any o ense or hurt caused by these

crude idioms.

INTRODUCTION

The Bricks We Stand On

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheri of Shelby

County, Alabama, and charged with "vagrancy"1

Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy the o ense of a

person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed,

was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of

the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern

states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheri s and constables,

adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all

in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among

all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's

offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found

guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately

sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees

assessed on every prisoner—fees to the sheri , the deputy, the court clerk, the

witnesses—Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former

slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between

the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North—U.S. Steel

Corporation—the sheri turned the young man over to the company for the

duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay o Cottenham's ne

and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of

other black men they purchased from sheri s across Alabama, was entirely up

to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a

mine called Slope No. 12—one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the

edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a

long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour

digging and loading coal. His required daily "task" was to remove eight tons of

coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the

requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable

to the sexual predations of other miners— many of whom already had passed

years or decades in their own chthonian con nement. The lightless catacombs

of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and

coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in

the countryside of Alabama—even a child of slaves—could have ever imagined.

Waves of disease ripped through the population. In the month before

Cottenham arrived at the prison mine, pneumonia and tuberculosis sickened

dozens. Within his rst four weeks, six died. Before the year was over, almost

sixty men forced into Slope 12 were dead of disease, accidents, or homicide.

Most of the broken bodies, along with hundreds of others before and after,

were dumped into shallow graves scattered among the refuse of the mine.

Others were incinerated in nearby ovens used to blast millions of tons of coal

brought to the surface into coke—the carbon-rich fuel essential to U.S. Steel's

production of iron. Forty- ve years after President Abraham Lincoln's

Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and

more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by

whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern

corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name.

Almost a century later, on an overgrown hillside ve miles from the bustling

downtown of contemporary Birmingham, I found my way to one of the only

tangible relics of what Green Cottenham endured. The ground was all but

completely obscured by the dense thicket. But beneath the undergrowth of

privet, the faint outlines of hundreds upon hundreds of oval depressions still

marked the land. Spread in haphazard rows across the forest oor, these were

sunken graves of the dead from nearby prison mines once operated by U.S.

Steel.2 Here and there, antediluvian headstones jutted from the foliage. No

signs marked the place. No paths led to it.

I was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, exploring the possibility of a

story asking a provocative question: What would be revealed if American

corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical

confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that

relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that

robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

My guide that day in the summer of 2000 was an industrial archaeologist

named Jack Bergstresser. Years earlier, he had stumbled across a simple iron

fence surrounding a single collapsed grave during a survey of the area.

Bergstresser was mysti ed by its presence at the center of what at the

beginning of the twentieth century was one of the busiest con uences of

industrial activity in the United States. The grave and the twisted wrought iron

around it sat near what had been the intersection of two rail lines and a

complex of mines, coal processing facilities, and furnaces in which thousands

of men operated around the clock to generate millions of tons of coal and iron

—all owned and operated by U.S. Steel at the height of its supremacy in

American commerce. Bergstresser, who is white, told me he wondered if the

dead here were forced laborers. He knew that African Americans had been

compelled to work in Alabama mines prior to the Great Depression. His

grandfather, once a coal miner himself, had told him stories of a similar burial

field near the family home place south of Birmingham.

A year later, the Journal published my long article chronicling the saga of

that burial ground. No speci c record of the internments survived, but

mountains of archival evidence and the oral histories of old and dying African

Americans nearby con rmed that most of the cemetery's inhabitants had been

inmates of the labor camp that operated for three decades on the hilltop above

the graveyard. Later I would discover atop a nearby rise another burial eld,

where Green Cottenham almost certainly was buried. The camp had supplied

tens of thousands of men over ve decades to a succession of prison mines

ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not

survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then "leased" by state and

county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3

Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the nal chapter of

American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly

di erent from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the

relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not

automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless

slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled

by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were

repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white

masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion.

The article generated a response unlike anything I had experienced as a

journalist. A deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls arrived. White readers

on the whole reacted with somber praise for a sober documentation of a

forgotten crime against African Americans. Some said it heightened their

understanding of demands for reparations to the descendants of antebellum

slaves. Only a few expressed shock. For most, it seemed to be an account of

one more important but sadly predictable bullet point in the standard

indictment of historic white racism. During an appearance on National Public

Radio on the day of publication, Bob Edwards, the interviewer, at one point

said to me: "I guess it's really no surprise."

The reactions of African Americans were altogether di erent. Repeatedly,

they described how the article lifted a terrible burden, that the story had in

some way—partly because of its sobriety and presence on the front page of the

nation's most conservative daily newspaper—supplied an answer or part of one

to a question so unnerving few dared ask it aloud: If not racial inferiority,

what explained the inexplicably labored advance of African Americans in U.S.

society in the century between the Civil War and the civil rights movement of

the 1960s? The amorphous rhetoric of the struggle against segregation, the

thin cinematic imagery of Ku Klux Klan bogeymen, even the horrifying still

visuals of lynching, had never been a su cient answer to these African

Americans for one hundred years of seemingly docile submission by four

million slaves freed in 1863 and their tens of millions of descendants. How

had so large a population of Americans disappeared into a largely unrecorded

oblivion of poverty and obscurity? They longed for a convincing explanation. I

began to realize that beneath that query lay a haunting worry within those

readers that there might be no answer, that African Americans perhaps were

simply damned by fate or doomed by unworthiness. For many black readers,

the account of how a form of American slavery persisted into the twentieth

century, embraced by the U.S. economic system and abided at all levels of

government, offered a concrete answer to that fear for the first time.

As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians

concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse

of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger

sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the

punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in

light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and

their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were

unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been

conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held

that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks

in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally

they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals.

Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened

couldn't be determined. O cial accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged,

because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which

black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia,

and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally awed.

That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of o cial summaries

and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources

—southern whites who engineered and most directly pro ted from the system.

It overlooked many of the most signi cant dimensions of the new forced labor,

including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to

suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and

the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of

African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and

tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from

political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or

forced labor camps. The judges and sheri s who sold convicts to giant

corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans

to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to

acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because

most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to

each southern state, they minimized the collective e ect of the decisions by

hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this

period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

I was also troubled by a sensibility in much of the conventional history of

the era that these events were somehow inevitable. White animosity toward

blacks was accepted as a wrong but logical extension of antebellum racial

views. Events were presented as having transpired as a result of large—

seemingly unavoidable—social and anthropological shifts, rather than the

speci c decisions and choices of individuals. What's more, African Americans

were portrayed by most historians as an almost static component of U.S.

society. Their leaders changed with each generation, but the mass of black

Americans were depicted as if the freed slaves of 1863 were the same people

still not free fty years later. There was no acknowledgment of the e ects of

cycle upon cycle of malevolent defeat, of the injury of seeing one generation

rise above the cusp of poverty only to be indignantly crushed, of the impact of

repeating tsunamis of violence and obliterated opportunities on each new

generation of an ever-changing population outnumbered in persons and

resources.

Yet in the attics and basements of courthouses, old county jails, storage

sheds, and local historical societies, I found a vast record of original

documents and personal narratives revealing a very di erent version of events.

In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest

to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans

into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty

thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the les of the Department

of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure

entries in the public record o er details of a forced labor system of

monotonous enormity.

Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over

decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands

of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of

probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this

net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than

twice that gure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original

records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential

charges or for violations of laws speci cally written to intimidate blacks—

changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a

ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women.

Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to

rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of

crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the

South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-

time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers

became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations. Where mob

violence or the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black citizens periodically, the return

of forced labor as a xture in black life ground pervasively into the daily lives

of far more African Americans. And the record is replete with episodes in

which public leaders faced a true choice between a path toward complete

racial repression or some degree of modest civil equality, and emphatically

chose the former. These were not unavoidable events, driven by invisible

forces of tradition and history.

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly recon gured to make

one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with

the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that

1901 also marked the nal full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks

throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local

mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white

business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments.

Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were

rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured

the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama,

Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South

Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United

States then lived.

It also became apparent how inextricably this quasi-slavery of the twentieth

century was rooted in the nascent industrial slavery that had begun to ourish

in the last years before the Civil War. The same men who built railroads with

thousands of slaves and proselytized for the use of slaves in southern factories

and mines in the 1850s were also the rst to employ forced African American

labor in the 1870s. The South's highly evolved system and customs of leasing

slaves from one farm or factory to the next, bartering for the cost of slaves,

and wholesaling and retailing of slaves regenerated itself around convict

leasing in the 1870s and 1880s. The brutal forms of physical punishment

employed against "prisoners" in 1910 were the same as those used against

"slaves" in 1840. The anger and desperation of southern whites that allowed

such outrages in 1920 were rooted in the chaos and bitterness of 1866. These

were the tendrils of the unilateral new racial compact that su ocated the

aspirations for freedom among millions of American blacks as they approached

the beginning of the twentieth century. I began to understand that an

explicable account of the neo-slavery endured by Green Cottenham must begin

much earlier than even the Civil War, and would extend far beyond the end of

his life.

Most ominous was how plainly the record showed that in the face of the

rising southern white assault on black independence—even as black leaders

increasingly expressed profound despair and hundreds of aching requests for

help poured into federal agencies in Washington, D.C.—the vast majority of

white Americans, exhausted from the long debates over the role of blacks in

U.S. society, conceded that the descendants of slaves in the South would have

to accept the end of freedom.

On July 31, 1903, a letter to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the

White House from Carrie Kinsey a barely literate African American woman in

Bainbridge, Georgia. Her fourteen-year-old brother, James Robinson, had been

abducted a year earlier and sold to a plantation. Local police would take no

interest. "Mr. Prassident," wrote Mrs. Kinsey, struggling to overcome the

illiteracy of her world. "They wont let me have him…. He hase not don nothing

for them to have him in chanes so I rite to you for your help." Like the vast

majority of such pleas, her letter was slipped into a small rectangular folder at

the Department of Justice and tagged with a reference number, in this case

12007.4 No further action was ever recorded. Her letter lies today in the

National Archives.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a black man—even a black child—

was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of

blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers or their family members, or

African Americans in terror of the system's caprice. The practice would not

fully recede from their lives until the dawn of World War II, when profound

global forces began to touch the lives of black Americans for the rst time

since the era of the international abolition movement a century earlier, prior

to the Civil War.

That the arc of Green Cottenham's life led from a birth in the heady afterglow

of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to

the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of

millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era.

Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate,

comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that

enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve

their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the

United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast

majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive.

There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a

Pratt Mines burial eld. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their

existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

That silence was an agonizing frustration in the writing of this book—

especially in light of how richly documented were the lives of the whites most

interconnected to those events. But as I sifted more deeply into the fragmented

details of an almost randomly chosen man named Green Cottenham and the

place and people of his upbringing, the contours of an archetypal story

gradually appeared. I found the facts of a narrative of a group of common

slave owners named Cottingham and common slaves who called themselves

versions of the same name; of the industrial slavery that presaged the forced

labor of a quarter century later; of an African ancestor named Scipio who had

been thrust into the frontier of the antebellum South; of the family he

produced during slavery and beyond; of the roots of the white animosities that

steeped the place and era of Green Cot-tenham's birth; of the obliterating

forces that levered upon him and generations of his family. Still, how could

the account of this vast social wound be woven around the account of a single,

anonymous man who by every modern measure was inconsequential and

unvoiced? Eventually I recognized that this imposed anonymity was Green's

most authentic and compelling dimension.

Retracing the steps from the location of the prison at Slope No. 12 to the

boundaries of the burial eld, considering even without bene t of his words

the sti ed horror he and thousands of others must have felt as they descended

through the now-lost passageway to the mine, I came to understand that

Cottenham belonged as the central gure of this narrative. The slavery that

survived long past emancipation was an o ense permitted by the nation,

perpetrated across an enormous region over many years and involving

thousands of extraordinary characters. Some of that story is in fact lost, but

every incident in this book is true. Each character was a real person. Every

direct quotation comes from a sworn statement or a record documented at the

time. I try to tell the story of many places and states and the realities of what

happened to millions of people. But as much as practicable, I have chosen to

orient this narrative toward one family and its descendants, to one section of

the state most illustrative of its breadth and injury, and to one forgotten black

man, Green Cottenham. The absence of his voice rests at the center of this

book.

I

THE WEDDING

Fruits of Freedom

Freedom wasn't yet three years old when the wedding day came.

Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop had been chat el slaves until

the momentous nal days of the Civil War, as nameless in the

eyes of the law as cows in the eld. Al their lives, they could no

more have obtained a marriage license than purchased a horse, a

wagon, or a train ticket to freedom in the North. Then a nal

furious sweep of Union soldiers—in a bewildering blur of

liberation and terror unleashed from a distant war—ravaged the

Cahaba River val ey.

Henry was suddenly a man. Mary was a woman, a slave girl no

more. Here they stood, bride and groom, before John Wesley Starr,

the coarse old preacher who a blink of an eye before had spent his

Sundays teaching white people that slavery was the manifestation

of a human order ordained by God, and preaching to black people

that theirs was a glorified place among the chickens and the pigs.

To most people along the Cahaba River, January 1868 hardly

seemed an auspicious time to marry. It was raw, cold, and hungry.

In every direction from the Cot ingham Loop, the simple dirt road

alongside which lived three generations of former slaves and their

former owners, the land and its horizons were muted and bit er.

The val ey, the undulating hil s of Bibb County, even the bridges

and fords across the hundred-yard-wide Cahaba sweeping down

from the last foothil s of the Appalachians and into the at fertile

plains to the south, were stil wrecked from the savage cavalry raids

of Union Gen. James H. Wilson. Just two springs earlier, in April

1865, his horsemen had descended on Alabama in bil owing

swarms. The enfeebled southern army defending the state scat ered

before his advance. Even the great Confederate cavalry genius

Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

Nathan Bedford Forrest, his regiments eviscerated by four years of

war, was swept aside with impunity. Wilson crushed the last

functioning industrial complex of the Confederacy and left Alabama

in a state of complete chaos. Not three years later, the val ey

remained a twisted ruin. Fal ow elds. Burned barns. Machinery

rusting at the bot oms of wel s. Horses and mules dead or lost. The

people, black and white, braced for a hard, anxious winter.

From the front porch of Elisha Cot ingham's house, two stories

stacked of hand-hewn logs and chinked with red clay dug at the

river's edge, the old man looked out on his portion of that barren

vista. The land had long ago lost nearly al resemblance to the

massive exuberance of the frontier forest he stumbled upon fty

years earlier. Now, only the boundaries and contours remained of

its careful y tended bounty of the last years before the war.

He had picked this place for the angle of the land. It unfolded

from the house in one long sheet of soil, fal ing gradual y away

from his rough-planked front steps. For nearly ve hundred yards,

the slope descended smoothly toward the deep river, layered when

Elisha rst arrived with a foot of fertile humus. On the east and

south, the great eld was hemmed in by a gushing creek, boiling up

over turtle-shel shapes of limestone protruding from the banks,

growing deeper and wider, fal ing faster and more furiously—strong

enough to spin a smal grist mil —before it turned to the west and

suddenly plunged into the Cahaba. He named the stream Cot ing-

ham Creek. An abounding sense of possibility exuded from the

place Elisha had chosen, land on which he intuitively knew a

resourceful man could make his own indelible mark.

Yet in the aftermath of the war Elisha Cot ingham, like countless

other southern whites in 1868, must have felt some dread sense of

an atomized future. They knew that the perils of coming times

constituted a far greater jeopardy than the war just lost. A society

they had engineered from wilderness had been defeated and

humiliated; the human livestock on which they had relied for

generations now threatened to rule in their place. In the logical

spectrum of possibilities for what might yet fol ow, Elisha had to

consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

consider the terrifying—and ultimately realized—possibility that al

human e ort invested at the con uence of Cot ingham Creek and

the Cahaba River would be erased. The alacrity that infused their

achievement was lost. More than a century later, the last

Cot ingham would be gone. No trace of the big house, the slave

cabins, or a waterwheel would survive. None of the elds hacked

from the forest remained at plow. Only the creek and sun-bleached

gravestones clustered atop the hil stil bore the Cot ingham name.

Elisha had arrived at the banks of the Cahaba, barely a man himself,

in an Alabama territory that was stil untamed. It was 1817, and

Elisha and his three brothers faced a dense wilderness governed by

the uncertainties of Indian territory and the vagaries of an American

nation debating the precepts of eminent domain that would

ultimately expand its borders from the Atlantic to the Paci c

Ocean.1 Alabama would not be a state for two more years.

Elisha's brother Charles soon decamped to the newly founded

county seat of Centrevil e, where in short order shal ow-draft

riverboats would land and a trading center would be established.2

Another brother, Wil iam, moved farther south. But Elisha and his

younger sibling, John, stayed in the wilderness on the Cahaba. In

the four decades before the Civil War, they staked out land, brought

in wives, cleared the lush woodlands, sired bountiful families, and

planted season upon season of cot on. The engines of their

enterprises were black slaves. In the early years, they imported

them to Alabama and later bred more themselves—including Henry

—from the African stock they bought at auction or from peripatetic

slave peddlers who arrived unbidden in springtime with traces of

ragged, shackled black men and women, carrying signs advertising

"Negroes for Sale." Manning farms strung along a looping wagon

road, the brothers and their slaves cleared the land, raised cabins,

and built the church where they would pray. Harnessing their black

labor to the rich black land, the Cot ingham brothers became

prosperous and comfortable.

Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

Some neighbors cal ed the Cot ingham section of the county

Prat 's Ferry, for the man who lived on the other side of the Cahaba

and poled a raft across the water for a few pennies a ride. But the

Cot inghams, Godfearing people who gathered a congregation of

Methodists in the wilderness almost as soon as they had fel ed the

rst timber, adopted for their homestead a name marking the work

not of man but of the Almighty. Where the clear cold creek gurgled

into the Cahaba, a massive bulge of limestone rose from the water,

imposing itself over a wide, sweeping curve in the river. To the

Cot inghams, this place was Riverbend.

The Cot inghams demanded a harsh life of labor from their

bondsmen. Otherwise, what point was there to the tremendous

investment required of owning slaves. Yet, especial y in contrast to

the industrial slavery that would eventual y bud nearby, life on the

Cot ingham plantation re ected the biblical understanding that

cruelty to any creature was a sin—that black slaves, even if not

quite men, were at least thinly made in the image of God.

Set among more than twenty barns and other farm buildings,

Henry and the rest of the slaves lived in crude but warm cabins

built of rough-hewn logs chinked with mud. Heat came from rock

replaces with chimneys made of sticks and mud. Elisha recorded

the ownership of thirteen slaves in 1860, including four men in

their twenties and thirties and six other male teenagers. A single

twenty-year-old female lived among the slaves, along with two

young boys and a seven-year-old girl.3

Given the traditions of isolated rural farms, Elisha's grandson

Oliver, raised there on the Cot ingham farm, would have been a

lifelong playmate of the slave boy nearly his same age, named

Henry4 When Elisha Cot ing-ham's daughter Rebecca married a

neighbor, Benjamin Bat le, in 1852, Elisha presented to her as a

wedding gift the slave girl who likely had been her companion and

servant. "In consideration of the natural love and a ection which I

bear to my daughter," Elisha wrote, I give her "a certain negro girl

named Frances, about 14 years old."5

Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

Those slaves who died on the Cot ingham place were buried with

neat ceremony in plots marked by rough unlabeled stones just a

few feet from where Elisha himself would be laid to rest in 1870—

clearly acknowledged as members in some manner of a larger

human family recognized by the master. Indeed, Elisha buried his

slaves nearer to him by far than he did Rev. Starr, the man who

ministered to al of the souls on the Cot ingham place. The Starr

family plot, with its evangelical inscriptions and sad roster of infant

dead, was set down the hil and toward the road, even more

vulnerable to the creeping oblivion of time.

Long generations hence, descendants of slaves from the plantation

still recounted a vague legend of the generosity of a Cot ingham

master— giving permission to marry to a favored mulat o named

Green. That slave, who would remain at Elisha's side past

emancipation and until the old master's death, would become the

namesake of Henry and Mary's youngest son.

But even as Elisha had al owed a strain of tenderness to co-reside

with the brutal y circumscribed lives of his slaves, he never lost

sight of their fundamental de nition—as cat le. They were creatures

bought or bred for the production of wealth. Even as he deeded to

daughter Rebecca the slave Frances, Elisha was careful to enumerate

in the document the recognition that he was giving up not just one

slave girl, but a whole line of future stock who might have brought

him cash or labor. Along with Frances, Elisha was careful to specify,

his newlywed daughter received al "future increase of the girl."6

The marriage of Henry, now twenty years old, and Mary, one

year his junior, in 1868 was the rst among Cot ingham people,

black or white, in two seasons. Another slave, Albert, had wed, and

left for good in the middle of the rst picking time after the

destruction of the war—amid the chaos and uncertainty when no

one could be sure slavery had truly ended.7 Albert didn't wait to

find out.

Now, two years later, the coming marriage surely warmed Elisha

at some level. But as Henry prepared to take a wife and become a

man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

man of this peculiar new era, everything the old white man had

forged—everything on which that gift to his daughter twenty years

before had been predicated— hung in the fragile limbo of a

transformed social order. Whatever satisfaction the lial ties gave

the white master at the wedding of his former bondsman would

have been tempered by the poverty and grief that had

overwhelmed him.

Most of Elisha's slaves remained nearby. Some stil worked his

property, for wages or a share of the cot on crop. But the end of the

war had left the white Cot inghams at a point of near desolation.

The hard winter threatened to bring them to their knees.

As Henry and Mary's wedding approached in 1868, whites across

the South strained to accept the apparently inevitable ignominies

descending from the war. The loss of fortunes, the war's blood and

sorrow, the humiliation of Union soldiers encamped in their towns,

al these things whites had come to bear. They would bear them a

lit le longer, at least until the instant threats of hunger and military

force receded.

But these abominations paled against the specter that former

slaves, with their huge mathematical majorities in Louisiana,

Mississippi, southern Alabama, south Georgia, and South Carolina,

would soon vote and rule governments and perhaps take their

masters’ lands. This vision was a horror almost beyond

contemplation. It poisoned the air for Elisha and other white

landowners with prospects for even greater disaster.

In the last days of ghting, the U.S. Congress had created the

Freed-men's Bureau to aid the South's emancipated slaves.8 New

laws gave the agency the power to divide land con scated by the

federal government and to have "not more than forty acres of such

land …assigned" to freedmen and black war refugees for a period of

three years. Afterward, the law said former slaves would be al owed

to purchase the property to hold forever. President Andrew

Johnson rescinded the provision a few months later, but

emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

emancipated slaves across the South remained convinced that

northern soldiers stil garrisoned across the region would eventual y

parcel out to them al or part of the land on which they had long

toiled.

The threat that Elisha's former slaves would come to own his

plantation—that he and his family would be landless, stripped of

possessions and outnumbered by the very creatures he had bred and

raised—was palpable.

The last desperate ral ying cal s of the Confederacy had been

exhortations that a Union victory meant the political and economic

subjugation of whites to their black slaves. In one of the final acts of

the Confederate Congress, rebel legislators asserted that defeat

would result in "the con scation of the estates, which would be

given to their former bondsmen."9

Already, forty thousand former slaves had been given title by

Gen. Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman to 400,000 acres of rich

plantation land in South Carolina early in 1865. It was unclear

whether blacks would be able to retain any of the property, but

rumor ared anew among blacks across the South the next year at

Christmastime—the end of the annual crop season—that plantation

land everywhere would soon be distributed among them. The U.S.

Congress debated such a plan openly in 1867, as it drew up the

statutes to govern Reconstruction in the southern states. And again

as harvest time ended that year, word whipped through the

countryside that blacks would soon have land. At one point the

fol owing year, in 1868, during a period of intense speculation

among freed slaves that land was soon to be provided to them,

many blacks purchased boundary markers to be prepared for the

marking of of their forty-acre tracts.10

Forty miles to the west of the Cot ingham farm, in Greene

County, hundreds of former slaves led suit against white

landowners in 1868 demanding that the former slave masters be

compel ed to pay wages earned during the prior season's work.

Whites responded by burning down the courthouse, and with it al

1,800 lawsuits filed by the freedmen.11

Despite Bibb County's remote location, far from any of the most

famous military campaigns, the Civil War had not been a distant

event. In the early months of ghting, Alabama industrialists

realized that the market for iron su cient for armaments would

become lucrative in the South. In 1860 only Tredegar Iron Works, a

vast industrial enterprise in Richmond, Virginia, driven by more

than 450 slaves and nearly as many free laborers, could produce

bat le-ready cannon for the South. The Confederate government,

almost from the moment of its creation, set out to spur additional

capacity to make arms, particularly in Alabama, where a nascent

iron and coal industry was already emerging and lit le ghting was

likely to occur. During the war, a dozen or more new iron furnaces

were put into blast in Alabama;12 by 1864, the state was pumping

out four times more iron than any other southern state.

Across Alabama, individual property holders—slaveholders

speci cal y— were aggressively encouraged to at empt primitive

industrial e orts to support the Confederate war e ort. The rebel

government o ered generous inducements to entrepreneurs and

large slave owners to devote their resources to the South's industrial

needs. With much of the major plantation areas of Mississippi

under constant federal harassment, thousands of slaves there were

without work. Slave owners wil ing to transport their black workers

to the new mining regions of Alabama and dig coal could avoid

conscription into the southern armies.

After seeing their homes and stockpiles of cot on burned, W H.

and Lewis Thompson, brothers from Hinds County, Mississippi, and

the owners of large numbers of slaves, moved to Bibb County

midway through the war to mine the Cahaba coal elds for the

Confederacy. They opened the Lower Thompson mine, and later

another relative and his slaves arrived to dig another mine. The coal

was hauled eleven miles to Ashby and then shipped to Selma. The

mining was crude, using picks and hand-pul ed carts. The slaves

drained water from the shafts by carrying buckets up to the

surface.13

surface.

A neighbor of the Cot inghams, local farmer Oliver Frost,

regularly took his slaves to a cave on Six Mile Creek to mine

saltpeter—a critical ingredient for gunpowder—for the Confederate

army, often remaining there for weeks at a time. The Fancher

family, on a farm three miles north of the crossroads community

cal ed Six Mile, regularly hauled limestone from a quarry on their

property to a Bibb County furnace during the war.14

The centerpiece of the Alabama military enterprises was a

massive and heavily forti ed arsenal, naval foundry, ironworks, and

gunpowder mil located in the city of Selma. To produce its

weapons and metal plating for use on ironclad ships critical to the

Confederacy's limited naval operations, the Selma works relied on

enormous amounts of coal and iron ore mined and forged in nearby

Shelby and Bibb counties.15 Alabama iron was particularly wel

suited to use in the revolutionary new development of fortifying

bat le ships with steel plates. Iron forged at Alabama's Cane Creek

Furnace, in Calhoun County, had been utilized for a portion of the

armor used to convert the hul of the captured USS Merrimac into

the CSS Virginia, the southern entrant in the famous March 8, 1862,

bat le of ironclads.16 The Confederacy was hungry for as much of

the material as it could get.

Of particular strategic value were ironworks established by local

investors in 1862 in the vil age of Brier eld. Nine miles from the

Cot ing-ham place, the Brier eld Iron Works produced the plates

that adorned the Confederate vessel CSS Tennessee, which during

the bat le of Mobile Bay on August 5, 1864, withstood the barrage

of seventeen Union vessels without a single shot penetrating her

hul .17 Bibb County iron quickly became a coveted material.

As the war escalated, maintaining production required an ever

increasing number of slaves. Agents from major factories, Brier eld

Iron, and the Shelby Iron Works, scoured the countryside to buy or

lease African Americans. Foundries routinely commissioned labor

agents to prowl across the southern states in search of available

slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

slaves. In 1863, the Confederate government purchased the

Brier eld operation for $600,000, so that it could directly control

its output. The purchase encompassed "its property of al kinds

whatsoever," including thousands of acres of land and a catalogue of

dozens of wagons, wheelbarrows, coal sleds, axes, and blacksmith

tools. On the list of livestock were seventy mules, forty-one oxen,

and nine black men: "John Anderson, aged about 35, Dennis, about

38, George, about 30, Charles, about 47, Perry, about 40, Curry

about 17, Mat hew, about 35, Mose, about 18, and Esquire, about

30 years."18

The Confederate government began construction of a second

furnace at the site shortly after acquiring the property. Al of its

output went to the Selma Arsenal, fty miles by railroad to the

south, where the iron was used for armor and for naval guns,

including the state-of-the-art eleven-inch Brooke ri ed cannon, with

a capacity of ring a 230-pound shel more than two thousand

yards.19

By the standards of the antebel um South, the Brier eld Iron

Works was a spectacle of industrial wonder. The adjacent vil age

held church in a schoolhouse surrounded by the tenements and

smal housing for three hundred workers. Two massive brick blast

furnaces, each forty feet high, belched a thick brew of smoke and

gases at the top and a torrent of lique ed iron at the base. Nearby

was a rol ing mil where the molten iron was formed into crude

one-hundred-pound "pigs" for shipment to Selma, and loaded onto

a railroad line extended into the factory yard. One hundred yards

away sat a kiln for ring limestone, ten tons of which was fed each

day into the furnaces. Beyond the kiln was a quarry for the endless

task of repairing the stone furnaces, a sawmil , and then seven

thousand acres of forest from which fuel for the constantly burning

fires was cut.20

The nine slaves owned by the ironworks were an anomaly. Few

industrial enterprises wanted to actual y purchase slaves. They were

too expensive at acquisition, and too costly and di cult to

maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become

maintain. Too unpredictable as to when they might become

uncooperative, or die. Far preferable to the slave-era industrialist

was to lease the slave chat el owned by other men.

In 1864, however, few such workers could be found anymore.

Instead, the Confederate o cer commanding the Brier eld iron

production operation, Maj. Wil iam Richardson Hunt, rented two

hundred slaves to perform the grueling tasks necessary to continue

equipping the rebel army.21 Late in the war, as the need for the

area's coal and iron capacity grew dire, the Confederate government

began to forcibly impress the slaves held by whites in the county. A

son of Rev. Starr's—a doctor and also a resident of the Cot ingham

Loop—became the government's agent for seizing slaves.22 There is

no surviving record of which black men were pressed into service.

But by war's end, Scipio Cot ingham, the sixty-three-year-old slave

who had shared the farm longest with master Elisha, had come to

identify himself as a foundry man. Almost certainly, he had been

among those rented to the Brier eld furnace and compel ed to help

arm the troops fighting to preserve his enslavement.

As the war years progressed, ever larger numbers of local men from

near the Cot ingham farm left for bat le duty. Two of Elisha's sons

fought for the Confederacy. Moses and James, both husbands and

fathers, each saw gruesome action, personal injury, and capture by

the Union. Elisha's grandson Oliver, too young to ght with the

troops, joined the Home Guard, the ragtag platoons of old men and

teenagers whose job was to patrol the roads for deserters, eeing

slaves, and Union scouts.

In the beginning, large crowds gathered at the stores in the

crossroads set lement of Six Mile to send them o , and groups of

women worked together to sew the uniforms they wore. Soldiers on

the move through the area were a regular sight, crossing the Cahaba

on the ferry near the mouth of Cot ingham Creek, and traversing the

main road from there toward the rail towns to the east.23

Confederate soldiers camped often on the Cot ingham farm,

stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the

stretching out in the big eld near the river, foraging from the

plantation's supplies and food, exchanging spent horses for fresh

ones. At one point late in the war, an entire regiment set camp in

the field, erecting tents and lighting cooking fires.24

The appearance of Confederate soldiers must have been an

extraordinary event in the lives of the black members of the

Cot ingham clan. The war years were a con icted period of

confused roles for slaves. They were the subjects of the Union

army's war of liberation, and the victims of the South's economic

system. Yet at the same time, slaves were also servants and

protectors of their white masters. In the woods near the Cot ingham

home, slaves guarded the horses and possessions of their white

owners, hidden there to avoid raids of northern soldiers. Some

slaves took the opportunity to ee, but most stayed at their posts

until true liberation came in the spring of 1865.

The foundry and arsenal at Selma and the simple mines and

furnaces around the Cot ingham farm that supplied it with raw

materials had taken on outsized importance as the war dragged on.

The Alabama manufacturing network became the backbone of the

Confederacy's ability to make arms,25 as the Tredegar factories were

depleted of raw materials and skil ed workers and menaced by the

advancing armies of Ulysses S. Grant. Preservation of the Alabama

enterprises was a key element of a last-ditch plan by Je erson

Davis, the southern president, to retreat with whatever was left of

the Confederate military into the Deep South and continue the

war.26

For more than a year, Union forces in southern Tennessee and

northern Alabama massed for an anticipated order to obliterate any

continued capacity of a rump Confederate government to make

arms. Smal groups of horse soldiers made regular probing raids,

against minimal southern resistance. In April of 1864, Alabama's

governor wired Confederate Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk, commander of

rebel forces in Alabama and Mississippi, imploring him to send

additional troops. "The enemy's forces …are fortifying their position

with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the

with their cavalry raiding over the country…. It is certain that the

forces wil work way South and destroy the valuable works in

Central Alabama…. Can nothing be done?"27

Final y in March 1865, a mass of 13,500 Union cavalrymen

swept down from the Tennessee border, in one of the North's

penultimate death blows to the rebel ion. Commanded by Gen.

James H. Wilson, the Union army, wel dril ed and amply armed,

split into three huge raiding parties, each assigned to destroy key

elements of Alabama's industrial infrastructure. Moving

unchal enged for days, the federal troops burned or wrecked iron

forges, mil s, and massive stockpiles of cot on and coal at Red

Mountain, Irondale, and Helena, north of Bibb County. On the

morning of March 30, Union soldiers slogged down the rain-

drenched roads into Columbiana, destroying the machinery of the

Shelby Iron Works, shoving its equipment into local wel s and

streams, and freeing the slaves critical to its operations.

Against nearly hopeless odds, Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former

slave dealer who had become the South's most storied horseman,

met the blue advance at a point south of the town of Monteval o.

Skirmishing along Mahan Creek, just miles from the Cot ingham

farm, Forrest's disorganized command could only harass Wilson's

advance. Northern troops took the Brier eld furnace on March 31,

and left it a ruin.

Outmanned and outfought, with ooding creeks blocking his

maneuvers, Forrest, himself slashed by a saber in savage ghting on

April 1, retreated for a nal stand at Selma. The next day, Wilson's

troops charged the fortified industrial complex in Selma, and routed

Forrest's remaining four thousand men. The Confederate general

slipped away with an escort of one hundred soldiers, massacring as

he made his escape most of a contingent of twenty- ve sleeping

Union scouts he stumbled upon in a field.

Federal forces captured nearly three thousand of Forrest's men,

along with more than sixty pieces of eld cannon, scores of heavy

artil ery guns, nine factories, ve major iron forges, three foundries,

twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and

twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and

35,000 bales of cot on. The arsenal, factory shops, and foundries at

Selma were systematical y destroyed. Perhaps most shocking to

local whites, before moving on to at ack Georgia, Wilson's o cers

quickly raised a one-thousand-man regiment of black troops, placed

under the command of the Third Ohio Cavalry28

With the remaining Confederate armies commanded by Gen.

Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unable to unite,

Je erson Davis's hope to continue the rebel ion as a guerril a

struggle col apsed. Cut o from his remaining troops, his Alabama

munitions system destroyed, deprived of the last regions of relative

security in the South, he at empted to ee to Texas or Mexico.

Under hot pursuit by detachments of General Wilson's troops, he

was captured by Union forces in Georgia weeks later. The war

came final y to its end.

Alabama had su ered losses totaling $500 mil ion—a sum

beyond comprehension in 1865. The total value of farm property

was reduced during the war from $250 mil ion to less than $98

mil ion, including the loss of slaves. Al banks in the state had

col apsed. Agricultural production levels would not match that of

1860 for another forty years.29

But the nal days of the war proved to be only the beginning of a

more inexorable and anarchic struggle. A vicious white insurgency

against the Union occupation and the specter of black citizenship

began to take shape, presaged by the conduct of Home Guard

patrols like the one Oliver Cot ingham had joined. The patrols,

uncoordinated and increasingly contemptuous of any authority

during the war, had come to be known more as bandits and thugs

than defenders of the Confederacy. After four years of conscriptions

verging on kidnappings, violence perpetrated against critics of

rebel ion, and ruthless seizures of supplies and property, the Home

Guard was in many places as despised as the Yankee troops. But in

the aftermath of a sudden—and in much of the South, unanticipated

—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic

—surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic

a airs of places too smal or remote to warrant a detachment of

northern troops. In the Deep South, that meant nearly everyplace

outside state capitals and economic centers.

The result, in the two years preceding Henry and Mary's wedding,

was a spreading wave of internecine violence and thievery by

returning Confederate soldiers, particularly against those

southerners who had doubted the war. Deserters, who had been far

more numerous than southern mythology acknowledged, began

set ling old scores. The increasing lawlessness of the postwar years

was, rather than a wave of crime by freed slaves as so often

claimed, largely perpetrated against whites by other whites.

The Cot ingham farm sat in the middle of this unrest. One gang of

deserters in Bibb County, made up of men believed to have

abandoned the armies of both the North and the South, cal ed

themselves the Uglies, and marauded through the countryside

during the war, robbing farms and threatening Confederate

supporters. Another gang inhabited the Yel ow Leaf swamp on the

border with adjoining Chilton County. A paramilitary band of men

near the town of Monteval o, cal ing itself Blackwel 's Cavalrymen,

hunted the countryside for Confederate deserters before the

southern surrender and continued as an outlaw gang after the war.

The group eventual y murdered a total of seventeen local men.

White lawlessness was so rampant in Shelby County that less than a

year before Henry and Mary's wedding, Union military o cials in

the Alabama capital threatened to send troops into the area to

restore peace.30

Chilton County had been a hotbed of such guerril a activity

throughout the war and emerged as a refuge for Confederate

deserters and southerners who remained loyal to the Union. A local

plantation owner, Capt. James Cobb, who had been sent home

from duty with the southern army due to poor health, was assigned

the task of breaking up the gangs of deserters. The e ort spawned

vendet as that would outlast the war. On June 3, 1865, nearly two

months after the surrender, Cobb was seized by a group of thirty

whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they

whites and hanged from a tree on his property. Afterward, they

ransacked his home, kil ing or stealing his livestock. The former

Confederate o cer was accused of having named seven of the

mob's members as deserters. The Blackwel group subsequently

captured the seven and summarily executed them.31

Of the handful of Union soldiers sent to Bibb County to oversee a

nominal local court system during the rst two years after the war,

one was kil ed on a Centrevil e street corner by a Confederate

veteran wielding an axe handle.32 Two agents of the Freedmen's

Bureau were assigned to the area in January and February of 1866.

The men, named Beard and Higgen-botham, were promptly

whipped by local whites and driven from the county. Not long

after, rumor spread that two former slaves named Tom Johnson

and Rube Russel had been seen around the county sporting ne

clothes paid for by Freedmen's Bureau agents. The emancipated

slaves planned to "live like white folks and marry white wives,"

according to a newspaper account. Johnson was promptly hanged

from a tree on Market Street. A few mornings later, passersby found

Russel dangling dead, in a tree not far from the scene of the earlier

lynching.33

Yet even as southern whites like those in Bibb County made their

rejection of the new order so apparent, no alternative was clear

either. The loss of slaves left white farm families such as the

Cot inghams, and even more so those on expansive plantations with

scores or hundreds of slaves, not just nancial y but intel ectual y

bereft. The slaves were the true experts in the tasks of cot on

production on most farms; in many cases it was slaves who directed

the gangs of other slaves in their daily work. Slavery had been

introduced into the southern colonies in the 1600s with the

argument that whites, operating alone, were incapable of large-

scale cot on production. The concepts of sharecropping and farm

tenancy hadn't yet evolved. The notion that their farms could be

operated in some manner other than with groups of black laborers

compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as

compel ed by a landowner or his overseer to work as many as

twenty hours a day was antithetical to most whites.

Moreover, the sudden wil ingness of mil ions of black laborers to

insolently demand cash wages and other requirements to secure

their labor was an almost otherworldly experience for whites such

as Elisha Cot ingham. Former slaves were suddenly mobile too,

seeking new lodging away from the farms of their slave lives and

at empting to put white farmers into competition with one another

for their work.

In the absence of any means to supply freed slaves with land, the

Freed-men's Bureau and northern military commanders stationed in

the South encouraged blacks to enter into labor contracts with

whites. The results were writ en agreements between whites and

black farmhands l ed with provisions aimed at restoring the

subjugated state of African Americans. One agent of the Freedmen's

Bureau wrote that whites were unable to fathom that work "could

be accomplished without some prodigious binding and obligating

of the hireling to the employer."34

Some white plantation owners at empted to coerce their former

slaves into signing "lifetime contracts" to work on the farms. In one

South Carolina case in 1865, when four freedmen refused such

agreements, two were kil ed and a third, a woman, was tortured.35

More common were year-to-year contracts that obligated black

workers to remain throughout a planting and harvest season to

receive their ful pay, and under which they agreed to

extraordinarily onerous limitations on personal freedom that

echoed slave laws in e ect before emancipation. They agreed not to

leave the landowner's property without a writ en pass, not to own

rearms, to obey al commands of the farmer or his overseer, to

speak in a servile manner, and in the event of a violation of the

rules to accept whatever punishment the farmer deemed

appropriate—often the lash.36 Most of the early contracts adopted

in the South in 1865 and 1866 were dissolved by commanders of

the occupying Union troops. But they framed a strategy that

southern whites would return to again and again.

southern whites would return to again and again.

When Elisha's sons arrived home from the war, they found only

the barest gleanings of the earlier time with which to restart their

lives. The thriving farmland world of their boyhoods no longer

existed. After four years of steadily in ated Confederate scrip, now

entirely worthless, the value of a man's land and tools, even of a

bale of cot on, was nearly unknowable. Elisha's property was worth

the substantial sum of nearly $20,000 before the war. The great

bulk of that was invested in his slaves, and now they were his no

more. The Cot inghams had not even the cash to buy cot on seed

and corn, much less the labor of the former slaves they had so

recently owned.

In February 1868, Elisha, perhaps sensing his own mortality more

acutely in the postwar chaos, began dividing much of the plantation

among his four sons, John, James, Moses, and Harry37 At the same

time, his daughter, Rebecca Bat le, bought two hundred acres of the

property for $600.38

Later that month, Moses Cot ingham borrowed $120 from a

cot on buyer in the town of Randolph, an outpost in the other end

of the county on the edge of the wide-open cot on lands of southern

Alabama. For col ateral, Moses promised two ve-hundred-pound

bales of cot on at the end of the season.39 From another man, he

borrowed $120, securing that note with one six-year-old mule and a

ten-year-old horse.40 The fol owing January, 1869, Moses borrowed

again, mortgaging for $150 his ever older horse and three other

mules. The crop that fal wouldn't be enough to pay o the loan,

and Moses couldn't clear his debt until 1871.41

A sense of paralysis was pervasive among whites. Elias Bishop, a

prosperous farmer with a spread of several hundred acres under

plow in another rich bend of the Cahaba downstream from the

Cot inghams, was in similar straits. In the fal of 1869, Bishop,

South Carolina-born and another of the county's earliest set lers,

borrowed a lit le more than $50 against one hundred bushels of

corn and mortgaged a portion of his land for $37.60. He never paid

it back.42 The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

it back. The next summer, wife Sarah Bishop borrowed $150

against two bales of cot on from John C. Henry, the cot on buyer at

Randolph who had become the county's de facto banker and

nancier. She set led the debt after the harvest of 1870, but

immediately had to assume another loan.43

The Bishops, like Elisha and his family, were devout Wesleyan

Methodists.44 Along with their slaves, the Bishops had at ended the

Mount Zion church near their farm in the south end of the county,

where the family lived in a house over owing with daughters.45

The Bishops and Cot inghams, white and black, would have known

each other wel through the close-knit circles of the Methodist

circuit. John Wesley Starr, as a circuit-riding clergyman, was a

regular feature before both congregations. Elias Bishop had

accumulated an even more impressive col ection of slaves than

Elisha, with ten black men and three black females old enough to

work in the elds at the beginning of the war. A half dozen young

children rounded out the slave quarters. On the day of

emancipation in 1863, the Bishop slave girl named Mary, who ve

years later would become Henry Cot inham's wife, was fourteen.46

In the wake of the war, one episode in the lives of white

Cot inghams became the de ning anecdote of the family's su ering

and resurrection. Elisha's son Moses, who had migrated to Bienvil e

Parish, Louisiana, a few years before secession, lost his land and the

life of his wife, and had been forced to send his children on a

harrowing journey through the bat le zones of Mississippi with only

a slave and a geriatric preacher to protect them. The saga resonated

through generations of white Cot inghams and blacks descended

from their slaves.

After Moses enlisted in January 1862, his pregnant wife, Nancy

Katherine, grew il and then died during childbirth. Moses returned

home from the front to bury Nancy and make arrangements for

their six surviving children. Elisha Cot ingham sent a Baptist

minister to Louisiana to bring his grandchildren back to Alabama

for the duration of the war. With the southern railroad system

already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

already in shambles and most trains impressed into military service,

the preacher and one of Moses’ two slaves, Joe, set out in an ox-

drawn wagon. "That was the hardest trial I had ever had to go

through, to leave my lit le children to be carried o to Alabama,"

Moses recounted to descendants years later.47

For three weeks, the odd expedition inched across the war-

disrupted South. The preacher and the old African American, a

scramble of children foraging for turnips and cornmeal, the oldest

daughter, Cirrenia, stil a child herself, feeding two-month-old

Johnny, the infant whose birth had kil ed their mother, with a gruel

of baked sweet potatoes. In November 1862, the ragged band

arrived at Elisha Cot ingham's farm on the Cahaba River. The fate of

Moses, stil at war, was unknown. "We never knew whether he was

dead or alive til one day, after the war was over, we saw him

coming," Cirrenia later wrote. Moses started over, reset ling on

nearby land along Copperas Creek, marrying the daughter of

another former slaveholding family and beget ing another seven

children.

The losses su ered by Moses and the slow rescue of his family in

the heat of war could have been a parable for how white

southerners perceived the destruction of the South they had known.

Physical and nancial devastation, death and grief, fol owed by a

transforming struggle to survive and rebuild. But the story also

underscored the terrifying vulnerability whites like the Cot inghams

discovered in being forced to place the fate and future of Moses’

family in the hands of a descendant of Africa. After the war, as the

Cot ingham slaves brazenly asserted their independence, the

journey of Joe and the children across the South came to symbolize

a reliance on blacks that southern whites could never again al ow.

Regardless of their intertwined pasts, the rehabilitation of the South

by whites would not just purposeful y exclude blacks. As time

passed and opportunity permit ed, former slaves would be

compel ed to perform the rebuilding of the South as wel — in a

system of labor hardly distinguishable in its brutality and coercion

from the old slavery that preceded it.

If one looked out from Elisha's porch in December 1868, across the

crop rows and down past the creek, the only green in a nearly

colorless winter landscape was in the short scru y needles of

twisted cedars he had planted long ago, along the wagon drive from

the road to the house. The slave cabins, nearly two dozen of them,

were mostly empty now. Even Scipio, the old man slave who had

worked Elisha's farm nearly as long as the white master himself,

was gone down the road. Already, weather and uselessness were

doing the shacks in.

Crisp brown leaves heaped at the feet of a line of high pines and

bare hickories that framed the boundaries of the main eld

between the river and the house. The wal s of yel ow limestone

rising up abruptly from the eastern bank of the Cahaba looked pale

and gray.

The big eld, long devoid of its hardwood forest, was striped

with lifeless rows of cot on stalks and corn husks standing against

the low, sharp-angled rays of winter sun. In every direction,

thousands of bedraggled slips of lint stil clung to broken cot on

bol s—wisps of that portion of the harvest that time and weather

and, in Elisha's mind, the obstinancy of "his Negroes" had conspired

to leave behind. Al winter long they would hang there, limp and

wet, layering the dead elds with a hazy whisper of white and

goading Elisha Cot ingham in their waste.

How di erently lay the land for Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop.

They had been reared on farms within a night's walk of the plain

country church where now they would marry, and the hil s and

elds and forests fanning out from the Cahaba eastward along Six

Mile Road had been the width and range of life to these two slaves.

Contrasted against that circumscribed existence, the extraordinary

events in the aftermath of emancipation—no mat er the deprivation

or arduousness—must have been bathed in a glow of wonder and

astonishment.

It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

It was slaves who had created the Cot ingham plantation and

civilized the Cahaba val ey and al of rugged central Alabama. Bibb

County was a place where there were no at places. A freshly

cleared tract of forest ground displayed a roiling surface of earth, a

scene more like swel s pitching in a rol ing sea than elds

beckoning the plow. It was the rst generation of slaves, like

Scipio, who hacked and burned the woods, sawing down the great

virgin forests, digging out and dragging away the stumps and stones

left behind, breaking by plow for the rst time the rich, root-

infested soil, smoothing and shaping the land for seed. For the

generations of slaves that fol owed, it was the traces of a mule-

drawn plow that de-marked the boundaries of hour upon hour

spent restraining the iron blade from plunging down hil sides or

struggling to drive it up the impossible inclines that fol owed.

As wel as Scipio and the black families that surrounded him had

come to know the shape and contours of the Cot ingham farm,

never, until wel into the years of war, had they even imagined the

possibility that they could someday own the land, grow their own

harvests, perhaps even control the government. Now, al those

things, or some luminous variant of them, seemed not just possible

but perhaps inevitable.

Whatever bit erness Elisha Cot ingham carried on the day of

Henry and Mary's wedding must have been more than surpassed by

the joy of the plantation's oldest former slave, Scipio, the

grandfather of Henry. Almost seventy years old yet as robust as a

man a third his age, Scip, as he was cal ed, had witnessed near

unearthly transformations of the world as he knew it. He had been

born in Africa, then wrenched as a child into the frontier of an

America only faintly removed from its eighteenth-century colonial

origins. Through decades spent clearing forest and planting virgin

elds, he watched as the unclaimed Indian land on which he found

himself evolved into a yet even more foreign place. In the early

years of the Cot ingham farm, Cherokee and Creek Indians stil

control ed the western bank of the Cahaba's sister stream, the Coosa

River. Choctaw territory extended to within fty miles of the

plantation.48 Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

plantation. Steadily as the years passed, the natives of Alabama

receded, and the frontier outposts swel ed into set lements and then

lit le, aspiration- l ed towns. As the Civil War years approached,

the Cot ingham plantation fel nal y into a steady rhythm of

stability and cot on-driven prosperity.

Whether the child who came to be a Cot ingham slave cal ed

Scipio knew the speci c place of his origins, who his parents were,

what African people they were a part of, how they came to be

compel ed across the Atlantic and into slavery—what his native

name had been—al was lost.

The erasure of his history was completed by the moniker placed

on him by white captors. Scipio was a classic slave name, one of a

catalogue of cynical, almost sneering, designations rooted in the

white South's popular fetish for the mythology of the classic

cultures. It came from the name of a second-century general who

governed Rome as Scipio Africanus. For the Roman Scipio, this was

a tribute to his victory over Hannibal in the year 201, extending

Roman control over Carthage and al of northern Africa. His reign

had also seen the brutal suppression of the rst great Roman slave

revolt, in which on one occasion more than twenty thousand

rebel ing slaves were cruci ed. The context of such a name might

have been lost on an African slave barred from learning Western

history, but to educated whites the mocking irony would have been

obvious.49

Scipio at least knew that he had been born in Africa, unlike

nearly every other slave that entered the Cot ingham farm, and that

he believed the year of his birth was 1802. Perhaps he came

directly to Cot ingham from an Atlantic slave ship. Possibly he was

rst enslaved in Virginia or North Carolina, and then resold to the

Deep South in the great domestic slave trading boom of the early

nineteenth century. Shipping manifests at the port of New Orleans

contain an entry for a teenage slave boy named Scipio arriving from

a plantation in Virginia in 1821. Whatever his origins, Scip would

hold de antly until the end of his life to his identity as an Africa-

born black man.50

born black man.

Even bound into the agony of a quotidian life of forced labor,

Scip must have conversely thril ed to the rise of the bountiful tribe

of men and women who sprang from his Atlantic passage. The

white people who brought him here had purchased other slaves,

particularly in his boyhood, and housed them in the quarter of log-

and-mud cabins down the hil from Elisha's house. But since Scip

had grown to manhood, it was he who had sired slave after slave.

First came George in 1825 (who would become the father of

Henry) and Jef in 1828. Then, in 1830, arrived Green, whose likely

namesake, born more than fty years later, would be delivered to

Slope No. 12 mine in 1908.

They were al sturdy boys, and as much as any man might expect

in a hard life. But in the nal years before the Civil War, Scip

surprised any of the other freed slaves who might have thought old

age was set ing upon him. He took up with Charity, a teenage girl

almost forty years his junior. Whether the union was coerced or by

choice, it was consummated in slavery and continued in a sweet

freedom. Charity would stay with Scip until the end of his long life,

deep into the years of emancipation, and for nearly twenty years

bear to him sons and daughters with the regularity of cot on bol s

and swol en spring streams.

Years before emancipation, Scip had seen the rst signs of the

epochal transformation about to infuse his world. Exotic new

enterprises began to appear in the former frontier of Bibb County.

On creeks surrounding the Cot ingham farm, smal forges were built

in the 1830s, early precursors to the massive steel and iron industry

that would come to dominate Alabama by the end of the century. In

1850, at a location a few miles from the Cot-tinghams’, a massive

boiler-driven sawmil began operation, pumping from the stil

virgin forests a fantastic stream of sawn planks and timbers. More

ominously, Bibb Steam Mil Company also introduced to the county

the ruthless form of industrial slavery that would become so

important as the Civil War loomed.

The mil acquired twenty-seven male African Americans, nearly

al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

al strapping young men, and kept them packed into just six smal

barracks on its property. The Cot ingham slave cabins would have

seemed luxurious in contrast.51

The founders of Bibb Steam, entrepreneurs named Wil iam S.

Philips, John W. Lopsky Archibald P. McCurdy and Virgil H.

Gardner, invested a total of $24,000 to purchase 1,160 acres of

timbered land and erect a steam-powered sawmil to cut lumber

and grind corn and our. 52 In addition to the two dozen slaves,

Bibb Steam most likely leased a larger number of slaves from

nearby farms during its busiest periods of work.

The signi cance of those evolutions wouldn't have been lost on a

slave such as Scipio. By the end of the 1850s, a vigorous practice of

slave leasing was already a xture of southern life. Farm production

was by its nature an ine cient cycle of labor, with intense periods

of work in the early spring planting season and then idleness during

the months of "laid-by" time in the summer, and then another great

burst of harvest activity in the fal and early winter, fol owed nal y

by more months of frigid inactivity. Slave owners were keen to

maximize the return on their most valuable assets, and as new

opportunities for renting out the labor of their slaves arose, the

most clever of slave masters quickly responded.

Given al that had changed in Bibb County in the years leading

up to the southern rebel ion, it would have been no surprise to the

old slave that he found himself during the war in the service of the

Confederacy, making iron for cannons and rebel ships in the

ironworks at Brierfield.

Perhaps it was a comfort to Scip that joining him at Brier eld

was the pastor who had been for so long a part of life at the

Cot ingham plantation. After thirty years of itinerancy among

scat ered churches, Rev. Starr was posted in 1864 to the Bibb Iron

Works, a gesture on the part of the Methodist circuit to al ow the

old preacher to nish out his days at a congregation close to the

home he cherished on Cot ingham Loop.

Starr was the archetypal backwoods Methodist. He had

completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so

completed hardly any formal schooling. Indeed, Starr was so

profoundly uneducated that when as a man barely twenty years old

he rst began to preach at lit le churches not far from his south

Georgia birthplace, even his friends doubted privately that he could

ever carry o a career as a professional minister. But Methodism

was a young and evangelical sect in the 1830s. The rough Alabama

countryside, and especial y the masses of stil heretical slaves who

made up much of its population, was a major target for missionary

work.

The life of a Methodist circuit rider, traveling in a grinding,

repetitive loop from one set lement chapel to another, was an

entrepreneurial task of establishing churches and converting the

unwashed. A vigorous iconoclast such as Starr could overcome

academic ignorance with a fundamentalist fervor for the Bible and a

resounding voice from the pulpit. Starr had done that, winning

postings at a string of smal Methodist congregations across Georgia

and then Alabama. 53

Through the years, he had been formal y assigned to nearly

twenty di erent congregations in the circuits orbiting the Bibb

County seat of Cen-trevil e. Along with each of those churches had

come responsibility for stil more gatherings of the faithful who

worshipped in the homes of scat ered landowners or in remote

rustic set lement chapels. That duty had delivered Starr to the home

of Elisha Cot ingham, and eventual y the preacher bought a smal

piece of Cot ingham land to which he hoped someday to retire.

The people of Riverbend, free whites and black slaves, had met

for services on Elisha's plantation for so long that in minutes of the

meetings of the Methodist circuit, the congregation was known

simply as "Cot ingham's." After nearly twenty years, its members

raised a spare one-room church in the 1840s on the adjacent land

of Elisha's brother, John Cot ingham. Built on immense timber

joists, resting on pil ars of limestone rock, it would stand against

the wind and shifting times for nearly a century and a half. The

builders dubbed it Wesley Chapel.54

Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed

Starr preached there many times, and as age and dropsy slowed

his step, it was to this corner of Bibb County that he was drawn to

rest. One of the preacher's sons, Lucius E. Starr, grown and ready to

raise a family of his own, became a physician and made a name for

himself in the county seat. The Cot inghams were good to Rev. Starr

and his wife, Hannah, and after a lifetime of near constant motion it

must have been a relief to him in 1860 to buy land right beside the

family that had treated them so wel .55 The Starr home was within

walking distance of the spare country chapel and the Cot ingham

family cemetery, where Starr already hoped to be buried. They

cal ed the farmhouse the "preacher's sanctum."

By the nal months of the war, the old rebrand knew wel life's

most bit er stings. His namesake son, also a Methodist minister, died

in an epidemic of yel ow fever a few years before secession. One of

his youngest, Wilbur Fisk, another likely playmate of the slave

Henry and Elisha's grandson Oliver, became a sergeant in the

Alabama 29th Infantry before seeing his unit decimated in savage

ghting across north Georgia. He died soon after during the long

defense of Atlanta in 1864.

As an unschooled man, Starr, in his day, had a particular appeal

for the raw country folk that predominated the rut ed back roads of

the South. That translated as wel into an a nity for slaves. As a

young pastor on the circuits of Georgia, Starr was praised for his

ministrations to the souls of black folks as he gal oped among the

plantations and camp meetings of south Alabama.56 So it was

t ing that the nal church appointment of his long career, where

he would wait out the end of the war, was to the ironworks at

Brier eld where slavery was being practiced in its most raw and

brutalizing form. There, Scip and the preacher Starr toiled at their

respective tasks, until General Wilson's army descended.

A few months after the surrender of the Confederacy, the U.S.

government sold the wrecked ironworks at Brier eld to the man

who during the war had been responsible for arming the entire

southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven

southern military, Josiah Gorgas, the architect of the slave-driven

Alabama wartime industrial complex. Gorgas, a Pennsylvania native

who married the daughter of a former Alabama governor, had

become a commit ed Confederate, rising to the rank of general by

war's end. After the surrender, he worked tirelessly to return the

furnaces to ful use and profitability.

But the ravaged state of Alabama that surrounded him made that

plan nearly impossible. The cost of paying market rate wages to

black men such as Scip who had worked as slaves during the war

totaled a bankrupting $200 per day. Those black laborers Gorgas

could pay and keep on hand were repeatedly harassed by

marauding bands of Ku Klux Klan members. Gorgas, like Elisha

Cot ingham and so many other whites bewildered by both the

rami cations of black emancipation and the continuing venality of

renegade whites, was disconsolate. The South they rst dreamed of

making an independent republic grounded in slavery—and then

dreamed of rebuilding as a rival to the North—appeared

irretrievably broken. "What an end to our great hopes!" he wrote in

his diary. "Is it possible that we were wrong?"57

Scip Cot inham, having learned the skil s of a foundry worker

during the war, must in his own way also have been ba ed by the

extraordinary turn of events that left him a free man in the twilight

of his life.

Neither he nor Henry would likely have known what to say to so

strange and moot a white man's question as the one posed by

Gorgas to his diary. But they would have had no doubt as to

whether Gorgas and the Cot ingham brothers, and the hundreds of

thousands of other southern men who had taken up arms during the

war, had been wrong.

Before Union troops arrived in Bibb County, the night hours had

permit ed Henry his one limited taste of freedom within the

con nes of chat el life. It was after sundown that the slaves of

Riverbend and other farms could slip quietly through the forests to

see and court one another.

Now freedom had turned darkness into light. Henry young and

Now freedom had turned darkness into light. Henry young and

strong at the very moment of the rebirth of his people, no longer

had to wait for the passage of the sun into the horizon. His feet

could carry him ying down the dusty track to the Bishop place, in

plain daylight for al to see, past old Elisha's cabins, past the store

at Six Mile, past the broken iron furnace at Brierfield, to Mary.

For Henry and Mary, freedom was a tangible thing, and January

was a ne time for a wedding. Both raised on the banks of the

Cahaba, they were as at uned to the seasonal swel s of the river and

the deep soil on its edges as the great stretches of spidery white

lilies that crowded its shoals each spring and retreated into its

depths every winter.

Picking last fal 's crop of cot on in the val ey had gone on until

nearly Christmas. In another two months, it would be time to begin

knocking down the brit le cot on stalks left from last year,

harnessing the mules and plows, and breaking the crusted soil for a

new crop. Planting season came hard on the heels of that, and

before long it would be summer, when mule hooves and plow

blades and bare black feet, slavery or no slavery, would march

between the furrows, without rest, for nearly every hour of every

day. So that January, bit er as was its wind, arrived for them sweet

and restful.

Like Henry and Mary al of Alabama, and the South—indeed at

one level al of the United States—was set ing up housekeeping in

the winter of 1868. Rede ned by war, grief, deprivation, death, and

emancipation, America was faced with the chal enge of repairing

and reordering a col ective household.

Some of the old slaves said they too weren't sure what "freedom"

real y was. Henry likely couldn't explain it either, but he had to

know. This wedding day was emancipation. It was the license from

the courthouse and big leather-bound book that listed his marriage

right beside those of the children of the old master. It was his name

on the piece of paper, "Henry Cot-tinham." No more was he one of

the "Cot ingham niggers."

To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er

To Henry Cot inham and Mary Bishop there could be no bet er

time to marry They marched the few steps to the house of Rev.

Starr, down to the Cot ingham chapel around the curve, and took

their vows as free citizens.58 Henry Cot inham was a man, with a

name, spel ed just the way he had always said it. Freedom was an

open eld, a strong wife, and time to make his mark. Mary's

"increase," like the product of al their labor, would be theirs—not

Elisha Cot ingham's. Henry would plant his seed, in soil he knew

and in Mary his wife. In a few years, they would have a son named

Green. Henry would raise up the o spring of the land and of his

blood.

Surely, that was freedom.

I

AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

"Niggers is cheap."

Across the South, white southerners were ba ed. What to do with

.freed slaves like Henry Cot inham and his grandfather Scip?

They could not be driven away. Without former slaves—and

their steady expertise and cooperation in the elds—the white

South was crippled. But this new manifestation of dark-skinned

men expected to choose when, where, and how long they would

work. Those who could not nd employ wandered town to town,

presumptuously asking for food, favors, and jobs.

To get from place to place, or to reach locations where work had

been advertised, they piled onto the empty freight cars of what few

trains stil ran. They formed up at night around camp res in the

shadows of train depots and cot on warehouses on the fringes of

towns. In the face of hostile whites—the Ku Klux Klan and members

of other suddenly ourishing secret white societies—they

brandished guns and were wil ing to use them. Beyond gal to their

former masters, these meandering swarms of il iterate men also

expected to be al owed to vote.

The breadth of white venom toward freed slaves—and the

decades of venality that fol owed it—belied the wide spectrum of

perspectives on slavery shared by white southerners before the war.

From the earliest years of the North American colonies, whites

struggled to resolve vastly di ering views even among slaveholders

of the place and position of blacks in the new society.

Colonial America began as a place uncertain of the abject

subjugation of native Indian populations and thousands of African

slaves pouring into the Western Hemisphere. Many were perplexed

by the concept of categorizing humans by race and skin color,

versus the long-standing European tradition of identi cation rooted

in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of

in nationality and place of origin. In the rst decades of

colonization in the 1600s, "slave" and "Negro" were not synonymous

in the American colonies. Slaves were as likely to be Indians as

Africans. Some early owners of black slaves were themselves black.

Free Africans in Virginia were permit ed to vote wel into the

1700s. Many indentured white servants were coerced into extending

their labor contracts until death—e ectively making them light-

skinned slaves.

Dispel ing that confusion and ensuring the dominant position of

whites in general—and Englishmen in particular—colonial

legislatures, especial y in Virginia, South Carolina, and, later,

Georgia, began in the 1650s to systematical y de ne residents by

color and lineage. The intentions were twofold: to create the legal

structure necessary for building an economy with cheap slave labor

as its foundation, and secondly, to reconcile bondage with America's

revolutionary ideals of intrinsic human rights. Blacks could be

excluded from the Enlightenment concepts that every man was

granted by God individual freedom and a right to the pursuit of

happiness because colonial laws codi ed a less-than-ful y-human

status of any person carrying even a trace of black or Indian blood.

Instead of embracing the concept that regardless of color "Al men

are created equal," with no king or prince born to higher status than

any other, colonial leaders extended a version of "royal" status to al

whites.

Stil , vast swaths of the region, including the rock-strewn

Appalachians stretching from northern Alabama, across Georgia,

and up through the Carolinas and Virginia, contained virtual y no

slaves at al . Indeed, in some of those places, companies of men had

gathered after secession, armed themselves, and marched north to

join with the Union armies moving upon the South.

In other places, men who owned hundreds or thousands of slaves

nonetheless wrestled without resolution with the subtle moralities

of human bondage and the tra cking of men. Robert Wickli e,

owner of more slaves than any other person in Kentucky and likely

anyone in the United States, argued passionately against the

exportation of slaves from the coastal regions of the United States

exportation of slaves from the coastal regions of the United States

to the comparative horrors of Deep South plantations in Georgia

and Mississippi. The 1860 census counted among four mil ion

blacks in the South more than 250,000 free African Americans in

the slave states, more than fty thousand of them in Virginia. In

Louisiana, a handful of black freedmen owned dozens of slaves. In

the intricately hued tapestry of New Orleans, more than three

thousand free blacks owned slaves themselves.1

But in what came to be known as the Black Belt—a long curve of

mostly al uvial cot on farmland stretching across the fertile atlands

ranging from South Carolina through the lower reaches of Georgia

and Alabama, and then extending across Mississippi and Louisiana

—antebel um society had been built whol y on true chat el slavery.

Mil ions of slaves came to live there under the ruthless control of a

minority of whites. Here, the moral rationalization of slavery—and

the view of slaves as the essential proof of white men's royal status

—became as fundamental to whites’ perception of America as the

concept of liberty itself. A century later, this was the paradox of the

post-Civil War South—recognition of freed slaves as ful humans

appeared to most white southerners not as an extension of liberty

but as a violation of it, and as a chal enge to the legitimacy of their

definition of what it was to be white.

The destruction of slavery in the Civil War didn't set le this

contradiction. Instead, it made more transparent the fundamental

question of whether blacks and whites could ever cohabit

peaceful y—of whether American whites in any region could

recognize African Americans as humans. Faced with the mandated

equality of whites and blacks, the range of southern perspectives on

race distil ed to narrow potency. Even among those who had been

troubled by—or apathetic toward—slavery before the war, there

was scant sympathy for the concept of ful equality. By

overwhelming majorities, whites adopted an assessment of the

black man paral el to that in the great crescent of cot on country.

The Civil War set led de nitively the question of the South's

continued existence as a part of the United States, but in 1865 there

was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and

was no strategy for cleansing the South of the economic and

intel ectual addiction to slavery. The resistance to what should have

been the obvious consequences of losing the Civil War—ful

emancipation of the slaves and shared political control between

blacks and whites—was so virulent and e ective that the tangible

outcome of the military struggle between the North and the South

remained uncertain even twenty- ve years after the issuance of

President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. The role

of the African American in American society would not be clear for

another one hundred years.

In the rst decades of that span, the intensity of southern whites’

need to reestablish hegemony over blacks rivaled the most visceral

patriotism of the wartime Confederacy. White southerners initiated

an extraordinary campaign of de ance and subversion against the

new biracial social order imposed on the South and mandated by

the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which

abolished slavery. They organized themselves into vigilante gangs

and militias, undermined free elections across the region,

intimidated Union agents, terrorized black leaders, and waged an

extremely e ective propaganda campaign to place blame for the

anarchic behavior of whites upon freed slaves. As the United States

would learn many times in the ensuing 150 years, a military victor's

intention to impose a new moral and political code on a conquered

society was much easier to wish for than to at ain.

Bibb County, home of the Cot inghams, was edged on the south by

that great fertile prairie of plantation country where by the 1850s

slaves accounted for the majority of most local populations. Bibb

whites harbored no equivocation about the proper status of African

Americans in their midst. There had been no agonized sentiment of

doubt in this section of Alabama regarding the morality of

slaveholding. No abolitionist voices arose here. In the 1840s, when

the northern and southern branches of the Methodist Church

divided over the issue of slavery, its Bibb County congregations—

certainly including Cot ingham Chapel—emphatical y went the way

certainly including Cot ingham Chapel—emphatical y went the way

of the southern church.2

There were no free blacks there before the war. The explosion in

slave numbers in the adjoining counties—where tens of thousands

of black men and women populated plantations strung along the

Tennessee, Alabama, and Tombigbee rivers—o ered a huge

inventory of readily available African Americans and sustained a

thriving local traf ic in slaves.3

In Montgomery, the state capital seventy miles from the Bibb

County seat, a huge wholesale market in slaves preoccupied the

commercial life of the bustling city. Richard Habersham, a Georgian

traveling through the town in 1836, described a sprawling slave

market with scores of black men and women and crowds of white

men closely inspecting them. "I came suddenly upon ranges of wel

dressed Negro men and women seated upon benches. There may

have been 80 or 100 al in di erent parcels…. With each group

were seated two or three sharp, hard featured white men. This was

the slave market and the Negroes were dressed out for show. There

they sit al day and every day until they are sold, each parcel rising

and standing in rank as a purchaser approaches. Although born in a

slave country and a slave holder myself and an advocate of slavery,

yet this sight was entirely novel and shocked my feelings."4 Twenty-

ve years later, three months after the opening of the Civil War, a

correspondent for the Times of London watched a twenty- ve-year-

old black man sold for less than $1,000 during a day of slow

bidding at the same market. "I tried in vain to make myself familiar

with the fact that I could for the sum of $975 become as absolutely

the owner of that mass of blood, bones, sinew, esh, and brains as

of the horse which stood by my side," wrote W H. Russel . "It was

painful to see decent-looking men in European garb engaged in the

work before me…. The negro was sold to one of the bystanders and

walked o with his bundle God knows where. ‘Niggers is cheap,’

was the only remark."5

Elisha Cot ingham might have acquired Scipio at the Montgomery

market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between

market, or from one of the speculative traders who moved between

the big urban slave markets at Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama.

They traveled the crude roads of the backcountry acquiring lots of

slaves and then pushing "droves" of them shackled together from

town to town. They pitched their tents in crossroads set lements to

showcase their wares, and paraded slaves before landowners in

need of labor.

During the 1850s, a man named J. M. Brown styled himself as

"not a planter but a Negro raiser," growing no cot on on his Bibb

County plantation but breeding slaves on his farm speci cal y for

sale on the open market.6 On the courthouse steps, Bibb County

sheri s routinely held slave auctions to pay o the unpaid taxes of

local landowners. County o cials authorized holding the sales on

either side of the Cahaba River for the convenience of potential

buyers in each section of the county.

The South's highly evolved system of seizing, breeding,

wholesaling, and retailing slaves was invaluable in the nal years

before the Civil War, as slavery proved in industrial set ings to be

more exible and dynamic than even most slave owners could have

otherwise believed.

Skil ed slaves such as Scipio, churning out iron, cannons, gun

metal, ri ed artil ery, bat le ships, and munitions at Selma, Shelby

Iron Works, and the Brier eld foundry, were only a sample of how

thousands of slaves had migrated into industrial set ings just before

and during the war. The extraordinary value of organizing a gang of

slave men to quickly accomplish an arduous manual task—such as

enlarging a mine and extracting its contents, or constructing

railroads through the most inhospitable frontier regions—became

obvious during the manpower shortages of wartime.

Critical to the success of this form of slavery was dispensing with

any pretense of the mythology of the paternalistic agrarian slave

owner. Labor here was more akin to a source of fuel than an

extension of a slave owner's familial circle. Even on the harshest of

family-operated antebel um farms, slave masters could not help but

be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human

be at least marginal y moved by the births, loves, and human

a ections that close contact with slave families inevitably

manifested.

But in the set ing of industrial slavery—where only strong young

males and a tiny number of female "washerwomen" and cooks were

acquired, and no semblance of family interaction was possible—

slaves were assets to be expended like mules and equipment. By

the early 1860s, such slavery was commonplace in the areas of the

most intensive commercial farming in Mississippi and parts of

Alabama.

It was a model particularly wel suited to mining and rst

aggressively exploited in high-intensity cot on production, in which

individual skil was not necessarily more important than brute

strength. In those set ings, black labor was something to be

consumed, with a clear comprehension of return on investment.

Food, housing, and physical care were bot om-line accounting

considerations in a formula of pro t and loss, weighed primarily in

terms of their e ect on chat el slave productivity rather than

plantation harmony.

On the enormous cot on plantations unfolding in the antebel um

years across the malarial wasteland of the Mississippi Delta,

absentee owners routinely left overseers in charge of smal armies

of slaves. In an economic formula in which there was no pretense

of paternalistic protection for slaves, the overseers drove them

mercilessly.

Frederick Law Olmsted, traveling through the South prior to the

Civil War, wrote of the massive plantations of Alabama and

Mississippi as places where black men and women "work harder

and more unremit ingly" than the rest of slave country. "As

property, Negro life and Negro vigor were general y much less

encouraged than I had always before imagined them to be."7

Another observer of Mississippi farms said that on the new

plantations "everything has to bend, give way to large crops of

cot on, land has to be cultivated wet or dry, Negroes to work hot or

cold."8 Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that

cold." Under these circumstances, slave owners came to accept that

black laborers would also die quickly9 "The Negroes die o every

few years, though it is said that in time each hand also makes

enough to buy two more in his place," wrote planter James H.

Ruf in in 1833.10

An English traveler visiting the great plantations in the nal years

of slavery described African Americans who "from the moment they

are able to go a eld in the picking season til they drop worn out

in the grave in incessant labor, in al sorts of weather, at al seasons

of the year without any change or relaxation than is furnished by

sickness, without the smal est hope of any improvement either in

their condition, in their food, or in their clothing indebted solely to

the forbearance and good temper of the overseer for exemption

from terrible physical suf ering."11

Even large-scale slave owners who directed their business

managers to provide reasonable care for slaves nonetheless

advocated harsh measures to maintain the highest level of

production. "They must be ogged as seldom as possible yet always

when necessary," wrote one.12

An overseer's goal, a Delta planter said, was "to get as much work

out of them as they can possibly perform. His skil consists in

knowing exactly how hard they may be driven without

incapacitating them for future exertion. The larger the plantation,

the less chance there is, of course, of the owner's softening the rigor

of the overseer, or the sternness of discipline by personal

interference."13

Scip saw those changes coming. In the 1830s, a water-driven

cot on mil was constructed on a creek seven miles north of the

county seat, not far from the Cot ingham plantation.14 Employing

several dozen white laborers , the mil ginned cot on and spun it

into thread and rope. Of far more portent for Scip's future, and that

of his descendants, had been a chance discovery in the 1820s by a

white set ler named Jonathan Newton Smith. On a hunting trip

near the Cahaba, Smith was surprised when large stones pul ed

from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped

from a creek to encircle a camp re ignited. Smith had tripped

across the massive deposits of coal abounding in Alabama, and over

the next fty years would be a pioneering exploiter of the

serendipitous proximity of immense brown iron ore deposits

scat ered across the ridges and, beneath the surface, the perfect fuel

for blasting the ore into iron and steel.15 It was a combination that

would transform life in Alabama, reshaping Scip's last years of

slavery and radical y altering the lives of mil ions of individuals

over the next century.

Smith ambitiously assembled thousands of acres of land

containing mineral deposits, and by 1840, he and others had

opened smal iron forges on al sides of the Cot ingham farm. One

was built on Six Mile Creek, a few miles down the mail road

toward the nearest set lement. Another was across the Cahaba River.

A third was constructed on a tributary of the big river just north of

the plantation.16 These were crude mechanical enterprises, belching

great columns of foul smoke and rivers of e uent. But they were

marvels of the frontier in which they suddenly appeared. A giant

water-powered wheel rst crushed the iron ore, which was fed into

a stone furnace and heated into a huge red molten mass. The

"hammer man," working in nearly unbearable heat and using a red-

hot bar of metal as his tool, then maneuvered the molten iron onto

an anvil where a ve-hundred-pound hammer, also powered by the

waterwheel, pounded it into bars. Primitive as was the mechanism,

the rough-edged masses of iron were the vital raw material for

blacksmiths in every town and on every large farm to craft into the

plows, horseshoes, and implements that were the civilizing tools of

the Alabama frontier.17

In addition to Smith, two other white men living near the

Cot ingham farm, Jonathan Ware and his son Horace, were

aggressively expanding the infant industry18 To Smith's geological

observations, Horace Ware, a native of Lynn, Massachuset s, brought

a keen instinct for the market among southern cot on planters for

local y forged iron. He had learned the iron trade from his father,

and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of

and bought land near the Cahaba coal elds and on a rich vein of

iron ore in 1841. He put his first furnace into blast in 1846.19

Slaves were the primary workers at the earliest recorded coal

mines in Alabama in the 1830s. Moses Stroup, the "father" of the

iron and steel industry in Alabama, arrived in the state in 1848,

acquired land on Red Mountain just south of present-day

Birmingham, and erected his rst furnaces. By the early 1850s, he

was constructing a much larger group of furnaces in Tuscaloosa

County, entirely with slave labor.20

Indeed, nearly al of the early industrial locations of the South

were constructed by such slaves, thousands of whom became skil ed

masons, miners, blacksmiths, pat ern makers, and furnace workers.

Slaves performed the overwhelming majority of the raw labor of

such operations, working as l ers, who shoveled iron ore,

limestone, and coal into the furnaces in careful y monitored

sequence; gut ermen, who drew o the molten iron as it gathered;

tree cut ers, who fel ed mil ions of trees, and teamsters to drive

wagons of ore and coal from the mines and nished iron to railroad

heads.21Alabama's rst recorded industrial fatality was a slave

named Vann, kil ed in the early 1840s by fal ing rock in an iron ore

pit near Alabama's earliest known forge.22

Southern railroads also became voracious acquirers of slaves,

purchasing them by the hundreds and leasing them from others for

as much as $20 per month in the 1850s.23 By the beginning of the

Civil War, railroads owned an estimated twenty thousand slaves.24

Al of the early iron masters of the region relied on slaves for the

grueling menial work of clearing their property, constructing hand-

hewn stone and brick furnaces and forges, and gathering the ore

and coal exposed on outcrops or near the surface.25 As the forges

went into production, slaves were trained to perform the arduous

tasks of the blast furnace. Quickly, the Wares and other budding

industrialists began a tra c in the specialized category of slaves

trained in the skil s of making iron.

During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a

During the late 1830s, the Wares took on as an apprentice from a

businessman in Georgia a slave named Joe. Five years later,

Jonathan Smith purchased the slave at auction for $3,000, and set

him to work as the hammer man in one of his Bibb County

forges.26 By the late 1850s, the Wares, having shifted their iron-

making operations to adjoining Shelby County, operated the largest

metal works in the Deep South, largely with skil ed slaves. Horace

Ware's son, John E. Ware, would later reminisce about the most

valued slaves at the forge. He recal ed that "Berry, Charles,

Anderson, Clark and Obediah" held key positions.27

The Hale & Murdock Furnace near Vernon, Alabama, was built in

1859 and then dramatical y expanded to meet war needs in 1862

by a force of 150 men, most of whom were slaves.28 In December

1862, a Montgomery businessman began work on an iron ore mine

and furnace north of the Cane Creek forge using a force of two

hundred slaves moved from Tennessee as federal forces advanced

from the North.29 Shortly after the operation was ful y under way,

Union general Wilson's raiders wrecked it.

In 1860, a year before the Civil War erupted, Jonathan Smith

launched his most ambitious e ort ever, the enormous ironworks at

Brier eld, less than nine miles from the Cot ingham farm. A partner

of Smith's, Col. C. C. Huckabee, was a planter and longtime major

slaveholder. His forced workers were a key element of his

investment in the enterprise, and in its expansion during the war.

Enormous numbers of men were needed to provide the quantities

of wood, ore, and limestone required by a nineteenth-century

furnace. "I set al my niggers to work in the woods," Huckabee later

recal ed, "and for many a day after that, the axes sounded like

thunder in the pines."30

At the Wares’ Shelby Iron Works, slaves were the salvation of the

operation's ability to continue supplying thousands of tons of iron

to the Confederacy. Perhaps owing to his New England origins,

Ware had never seriously considered extensive use of black labor in

the rst fteen years of business. In 1859, however, he inquired

about the industrial use of slaves in a let er to Joseph R. Anderson,

about the industrial use of slaves in a let er to Joseph R. Anderson,

manager of the Tredegar Works and perhaps the most famous

southern industrialist of the era. Anderson responded

enthusiastical y and o ered to sel Ware some of Tredegar's wel -

trained factory slaves.31

Ware didn't buy any of the African Americans available from

Virginia, but he did bring in as partners several of Alabama's most

prominent proponents of industrialism.32 They in turn began to

acquire black laborers aggressively Soon, Shelby Works, with

dozens of African American forced laborers on its balance sheet,

was the largest owner of slaves in the county. Nearby, the Alabama

Coal Mining Co. owned another dozen slaves, al men aged twenty-

six to sixty.33

In 1862, the Shelby Works contracted with the Confederate

government to produce the vast quantity of twelve thousand tons of

iron a year for the war e ort, e ectively placing the operation

under the control of the Confederate chief of ordnance in

Richmond, Col. Josiah Gorgas, and his iron agent at the rebel

arsenal and munitions factory in Selma, Col. Colin J. McRae. For

the course of the war, the Shelby Works at empted to keep its

furnaces in near constant blast—producing huge quantities of iron

to be shipped to gun barrel makers in Mississippi and Georgia,34

and to the cannon and plate armor manufacturers at Selma. A

second furnace was added in 1863 to boost the war ef ort.35

With most of the white male population already mustered or

conscripted into ghting units, the company's only option for

ful l ing its obligations was to rely almost entirely on slaves.

Borrowing from the practices of railroads and the few other

industrial systems already familiar to businessmen of the South, the

Shelby Works quickly came to rely on "leased" slave labor that

would prove both extraordinarily ef ective and resilient.

To procure the slaves, the Shelby Works hired a labor agent

named John M. Til man to lease African Americans from plantation

owners in central Alabama, northeastern Mississippi, and eastern

Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as

Georgia. Til man's duties also included acquiring as many mules as

possible, and the feed corn to feed both the four-legged and two-

legged creatures he col ected.36

Leased slave laborers typical y cost $120 a year near the

beginning of the war, but their cost more than doubled by the crisis

years of 1864 and 1865. Slaves with a particularly useful skil , such

as carpentry or prior iron-making experience, fetched $500 or more

per year. The great majority were men aged twenty to forty- ve,

engaged in the back-breaking work of cut ing timber in nearby

forests and digging iron ore and limestone. They were

supplemented by a much smal er number of women and their

children who performed menial tasks such as cooking and cleaning.

Soon, Ware was the master of between 350 and 400 slaves. His

company remained hungry for more.37

Ware's slaves worked under the control of a white overseer,

mostly in gangs of men assigned to speci c tasks. Under terms of

the contracts, owners received quarterly payments, and their slaves

were provided with basic food, clothing, and shelter. If a slave

escaped, it was the responsibility of the company to pay a fee for

the slave's arrest and return to the ironworks. As an incentive to

work hard and fol ow rules, slaves were permit ed to earn smal

amounts of cash for themselves—typical y less than $5 a month—by

agreeing to perform extra tasks such as tending the furnace at night,

cut ing extra wood, or digging additional ore.38

The company overseer, cal ed "boss" or "captain" by the slaves,

was not empowered to severely discipline the leased slaves in his

charge. Punishment remained the province of the owner. When

slaves at empted to ee, stole, or refused the orders of the overseer,

Shelby Works wrote the owner for instructions on how to handle

his property. The punishments meted out by plantation masters to

the slaves who worked under their direct employ were often harsh

in the extreme, even torturous by modern sensibilities. But few

slave masters encouraged the forge operators to treat their valued

stock with brutality, particularly when the e ciency of the slave

had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at

had no bearing on his nancial return to the owner. Slaves who at

Christmas reported to their owners that the managers of the

ironworks had abused them often were not made available to the

company again. Moreover, slaves with wives stil living back at the

plantations from which they had come were al owed to return

home periodical y, sometimes several times a year.

Industrialists were embracing the same practices across the South.

An advertisement placed by the Empire State Iron and Coal Mining

Company of Trenton, Georgia, in the Huntsvil e, Alabama,

Confederate in 1863 sought to "hire or buy, 100 able-bodied hands,

to be employed at their works … 20 miles southwest of

Chat anooga."39

In 1862, an Alabama engineer named John T Milner and his

business partner, Frank Gilmer, convinced the Confederate

government to nance the construction of a blast furnace on Red

Mountain in Je erson County to produce iron for the war e ort.

The plant, constructed and operated primarily by slaves, marked

the birth of the vast industrial complex that would surround the

new city of Birmingham by the end of the century. By the time the

Red Mountain furnace was in operation in 1863, Milner and Gilmer

had also opened a complex of mines operated with slave labor near

the town of Helena, Alabama.40 Within a decade after the war, the

Helena mines would be manned entirely by convict forced laborers

and set an early standard for the depredations against ostensibly

emancipated African Americans.

Everywhere in the South that could produce coal or iron during

the war, southern industrialists were being pressured to increase

production at existing mines and furnaces, or to seize and reopen

idled business. In a move that would hang ominously over the

descendants of the Cot ingham slaves, southern industrialists in

1861 took over a mining company near Tracy City, Tennessee,

previously control ed by a syndicate of northern investors.

With the outbreak of war, the formerly New York-control ed

mines of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. were placed in the

hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,

hands of Confederate-sympathizing businessmen. Arthur S. Colyar,

the southerner who took over management of the company in

1861, immediately placed forty slaves in the concern's Sewanee

Mines. He was quickly pleased with their performance, tel ing a

newspaper reporter: "In a few months they were doing good service

and not one of the party failed in the ef ort to learn to dig coal."41

The business would become the largest commercial enterprise in

the South, and a half century later the largest subsidiary of U.S.

Steel, and the company that would acquire Scip's grandson Green

Cot enham four decades later.

To the enterprising industrialists who would reshape the southern

economy in the half century after the Civil War, the new concepts

of industrialized black labor had taken rm hold. Long before the

end of chat el slavery, Milner was in the vanguard of that new

theory of industrial forced labor. In 1859, he wrote that black labor

marshaled into the regimented productivity of factory set ings

would be the key to the economic development of Alabama and

the South. Milner believed that white people "would always look

upon and treat the negro as an inferior being." Nonetheless—indeed

for that very reason—blacks would serve a highly useful purpose as

the clever mules of an industrial age, "provided he has an overseer

—a Southern man, who knows how to manage negroes."42 Milner's

intuition that the future of blacks in America rested on how whites

chose to manage them, whether in slavery or out of it, would

resonate through the next half century of national discourse about

the proper role of the descendants of Africa in American life.

Milner was no mere theorist. He was a dogged executor of his

vision. It was men like Milner who would seize the opportunity

presented by convict leasing to reclaim slavery from the destruction

of the Civil War. As Alabama began sel ing its black prisoners in

large numbers in the 1870s, he scrambled to acquire al that were

available—plunging them by the hundreds into a hel ish coal

operation cal ed the Eureka mines, and later il egal y sel ing

hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal

hundreds of these new slaves in the 1880s, along with another coal

mine, to the Georgia Pacific Railroad Co.

In every set ing that Milner employed convict slaves in the late

nineteenth century, he and his business associates subjected the

workers to almost animalistic mistreatment—a revivi cation of the

most atrocious aspects of antebel um bondage. Records of Milner's

various mines and slave farms in southern Alabama owned by one

of his business partners—a cousin to an investor in the Bibb Steam

Mil —tel the stories of black women stripped naked and whipped,

of hundreds of men starved, chained, and beaten, of workers

perpetual y lice-ridden and barely clothed.

Milner took center stage in Alabama's new industrialization,

urging southerners to "go to work…eradicating the diseases that are

destroying us." Part of that eradication would be to successful y re-

regiment freed slaves. "I am clearly of the opinion, from my own

observation, that negro labor can be made exceedingly pro table in

rol ing mil s," Milner had writ en of steel production in 1859. "I

have long since learned that negro slave labor is more reliable and

cheaper for any business connected with the construction of a

railroad than white."43

Milner and others had seen his theory of the black slave as an

e ective industrial forced worker vividly ful l ed during the war.

The system emerging with the end of Reconstruction would mimic

it repeatedly. African Americans driven by the right men, in the

correct ways, could be the engines of far more complex enterprises

than the old bourbon-soaked planters would ever have believed

possible. Black laborers might not quite be men, the industrialists

reasoned, but they recognized that African Americans were far more

than apes. The renting of slaves, as much as anything, had taught

them that masses of black laborers brought under temporary control

of a commercial enterprise could be powerful y leveraged in

commerce.

The at itudes among southern whites that a resubjugation of

African Americans was an acceptable—even essential—element of

solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The

solving the "Negro question" couldn't have been more explicit. The

desire of white farmers to recapture their former slaves through

new civil laws was transparent. In the immediate wake of

emancipation, the Alabama legislature swiftly passed a measure

under which the orphans of freed slaves, or the children of blacks

deemed inadequate parents, were to be "apprenticed" to their

former masters. The South Carolina planter Henry Wil iam Ravenel

wrote in September 1865: "There must… be stringent laws to

control the negroes, & require them to ful l their contracts of

labour on the farms."44

With the southern economy in ruins, state o cials limited to the

barest resources, and county governments with even fewer, the

concept of reintro-ducing the forced labor of blacks as a means of

funding government services was viewed by whites as an inherently

practical method of eliminating the cost of building prisons and

returning blacks to their appropriate position in society. Forcing

convicts to work as part of punishment for an ostensible crime was

clearly legal too; the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution,

adopted in 1865 to formal y abolish slavery, speci cal y permit ed

involuntary servitude as a punishment for "duly convicted"

criminals.

Beginning in the late 1860s, and accelerating after the return of

white political control in 1877, every southern state enacted an

array of interlocking laws essential y intended to criminalize black

life. Many such laws were struck down in court appeals or through

federal interventions, but new statutes embracing the same strictures

on black life quickly appeared to replace them. Few laws

speci cal y enunciated their applicability only to blacks, but it was

widely understood that these provisions would rarely if ever be

enforced on whites. Every southern state except Arkansas and

Tennessee had passed laws by the end of 1865 outlawing vagrancy

and so vaguely de ning it that virtual y any freed slave not under

the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime. An

1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to

1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to

enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every

year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African

Americans could not legal y be hired for work without a discharge

paper from their previous employer—e ectively preventing them

from leaving the plantation of the white man they worked for. In

the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida enacted laws

making it a criminal act for a black man to change employers

without permission.

In nearly al cases, the potential penalty awaiting black men, and

a smal number of women, snared by those laws was the prospect

of being sold into forced labor. Many states in the South and the

North at empted to place their prisoners in private hands during

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The state of Alabama

was long predisposed to the idea, rather than taking on the cost of

housing and feeding prisoners itself. It experimented with turning

over convicts to private "wardens" during the 1840s and 1850s but

was ultimately unsatis ed with the results. The state saved some

expense but gathered no revenue. Moreover, the physical abuse that

came to be almost synonymous with privatized incarceration always

was eventual y unacceptable in an era when virtual y every convict

was white. The punishment of slaves for misdeeds rested with their

owners.

Hardly a year after the end of the war, in 1866, Alabama

governor Robert M. Pat on, in return for the total sum of $5, leased

for six years his state's 374 state prisoners to a company cal ing

itself "Smith and McMil en." The transaction was in fact a sham, as

the partnership was actual y control ed by the Alabama and

Chat anooga Railroad. Governor Pat-ton became president of the

railroad three years later.45 Such duplicity would be endemic to

convict leasing. For the next eighty years, in every southern state,

the questions of who control ed the fates of black prisoners, which

few black men and women among armies of defendants had

commit ed true crimes, and who was receiving the financial benefits

of their re-enslavement would almost always never be answered.

Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the

Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the

rate of $12.50 a month.46 In May 1868, four months after Henry

and Mary's wedding, the state of Georgia signed a lease under

which the Georgia and Alabama Railroad acquired one hundred

convicts, al of them black, for $2,500. Later that year, the state sold

134 prisoners to the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad and sent 109

others to the line being constructed between the towns of Macon

and Brunswick, Georgia.

Arkansas began contracting out its state convicts in 1867, sel ing

the rights to prisoners convicted of both state crimes and federal

of enses.47Mississippi turned over its 241 prisoners to the state's

largest cot on planter, Edmund Richardson, in 1868. Three years

later, the convicts were transferred to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the

former Confederate general, who in civilian life already was a

major planter and railroad developer. In 1866, he and ve other

former rebel o cers had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Florida leased

out half of the one hundred prisoners in its Chat a-hoochee

penitentiary in 1869.

North Carolina began "farming out" its convicts in 1872. After

white South Carolinians led by Democrat Wade Hampton violently

ousted the last black government of the state in 1877, the

legislature promptly passed a law al owing for the sale of the state's

four hundred black and thirty white prisoners.

Six years earlier, in 1871, Tennessee leased its nearly eight

hundred prisoners, nearly al of them black, to Thomas O’Conner, a

founding partner along with Arthur Colyar of Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad Co.48 In the four decades after the war, as Colyar built

his company into an industrial behemoth, its center of operations

gradual y shifted to Alabama, where it was increasingly apparent

that truly vast reserves of coal and iron ore lay beneath the surface.

Colyar, like Milner, was one of those prominent southern

businessmen who bridged the era of slavery and the distinct new

economic opportunities of the region at the end of the nineteenth

century. They were true slavers, raised in the old traditions of

bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

the lash were the key to building an industrial sector in the South to

fend of the growing influence of northern capitalists.

Already, whites realized that the combination of trumped-up

legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a

desirable business proposition and an incredibly e ective tool for

intimidating rank-and- le emancipated African Americans and

doing away with their most ef ective leaders.

The newly instal ed white government of Hale County—deep in

the majority-black cot on growing sections of Alabama—began

leasing prisoners to private parties in August 1875. A local grand

jury said the new practice was "contributing much to the revenues

of the county, instead of being an expense." The money derived

from sel ing convicts was placed in the Fine and Forfeiture Fund,

which was used to pay fees to judges, sheri s, other low o cials,

and witnesses who helped convict defendants.

The prior year, during a violent campaign by Ku Klux Klansmen

and other white reactionaries to break up black Republican

political meetings across Alabama, a white raiding party confronted

a meeting of African Americans in Hale County. Shots were red in

the dark and two men died—one white and one black. No charges

were brought in the kil ing of the African American, but despite any

evidence they caused the shooting, leading black Republicans R. H.

Skinner and Woodvil e Hardy were charged and convicted of

murder. They were sent to the Eureka mines south of Birmingham

in the spring of 1876.49

By the end of 1877, fty convict laborers were at work in

Milner's Newcastle Coal Company mine outside Birmingham. An

additional fty-eight men had been forced into the Eureka mines he

founded near Helena. A total of 557 prisoners had been turned over

that year to private corporations by the state of Alabama. 50

By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every formerly Confederate

state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black

prisoners into commercial hands. There were variations among the

states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

functions of government were turned over to the companies

purchasing convicts. In return for what they paid each state, the

companies received absolute control of the prisoners. They were

ostensibly required to provide their own prisons, clothing, and

food, and bore responsibility for keeping the convicts incarcerated.

Company guards were empowered to chain prisoners, shoot those

at empting to ee, torture any who wouldn't submit, and whip the

disobedient—naked or clothed—almost without limit. Over eight

decades, almost never were there penalties to any acquirer of these

slaves for their mistreatment or deaths.

On paper, the regulations governing convict conditions required

that prisoners receive adequate food, be provided with clean living

quarters, and be protected from "cruel" or "excessive punishment."

Al oggings were to be recorded in logbooks, and indeed hundreds

were. But the only regularly enforced laws on the new slave

enterprises were those designed primarily to ensure that no black

worker received freedom or experienced anything other than

racial y segregated conditions. In Alabama, companies were fined

$150 a head if they al owed a prisoner to escape. For a time, state

law mandated that if a convict got free while being transported to

the mines, the sheri or deputy responsible had to serve out the

prisoner's sentence. Companies often faced their strongest criticism

for al owing black and white prisoners to share the same cel s.

"White convicts and colored convicts shal not be chained together,"

read Alabama law.51

In almost every respect—the acquisition of workers, the lease

arrangements, the responsibilities of the leaseholder to detain and

care for them, the incentives for good behavior—convict leasing

adopted practices almost identical to those emerging in slavery in

the 1850s.

By the late 1870s, the de ning characteristics of the new

involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed

with ensuring disparate treatment of blacks, who at al times in the

ensuing fty years would constitute the vast majority of those sold

into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

corporations, farmers, government o cials, and smal -town

businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance

between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining

them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the

rst two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent

of them died.52 In the fol owing year, mortality rose to 35 percent.

In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were kil ed.53

I I

SLAVERY’S INCREASE

"Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."

Henry and Mary did not wait long to begin their increase.

Cooney, a lit le girl, came to them before the end of another

harvest season had passed.1 The arrival of an infant, even more

so a rst child, to a pair of former slaves in the rst years after

emancipation must have been an event of sublime joy. A young

black family of the early 1870s already knew that the presumptions

of ful freedom that had accompanied the end of slavery were being

gravely chal enged in the South. But surrounding and overwhelming

the anxieties triggered by those obstructions—violence by the Ku

Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups and the machinations of

white political leaders—was the astonishing range of possibilities

now at least theoretical y available to a newly born child.

While Cooney was stil a babe, the northern states by

overwhelming majorities rati ed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

amendments to the Constitution, abolishing with absolute clarity

the institution of slavery as it had existed for the previous 250 years

and granting ful citizenship and voting rights to al black

Americans. A black toddler in central Alabama would learn his rst

words at a time when black men were gathering regularly with

others to elect those who would govern their counties and states.

Cooney was seven years old when the U.S. Congress passed its

rst Civil Rights Act, further guaranteeing the right of African

Americans to vote on the same terms as whites and to live as ful

citizens in the eyes of the law. The new state legislatures of the

South, now including substantial numbers of black Republicans,

passed laws mandating for the rst time in the southern states that

children, whether black or white, be a orded some semblance of

basic education. By 1871, more than 55,000 black children were

at ending public school in Alabama.

at ending public school in Alabama.

Henry and Mary knew there would be trouble, yes, plenty of it.

But the young man and woman, il iterate, provincial, and unskil ed,

had every reason to expect nonetheless that in the expiring of ten or

twenty years, their daughter and the boisterous brood of boys and

girls who would fol ow her would live lives in a world so

transformed from their own as to be ut erly unrecognizable.

By the time Cooney turned two, as Thanksgiving approached in

1870, the most de ning feature of the old Cot ingham world,

Elisha, the white man who had sculpted the landscape onto which

Cooney was born and then seen it disintegrate, was dead.

Elisha was laid to rest at the top of the red-clay hil , surrounded

by what was left of the stand of beech and oak that had greeted his

arrival in the wilderness. As his life had been on the landscape

stretched out around him, Elisha's plot was squarely in the center of

the graveyard, with his wife, siblings, and kin fanning out to each

side. One body length away, just within arm's reach, lay in death a

long row of the slaves he had governed for most of a century in

life.2

Old Scip, once Elisha's most reliable slave, was not easing gently

toward his natural end. Freedom had taken tangible form for the

former slaves of the Cot ingham farm. Old Elisha's former slaves

separated into three groups. The rst, beginning with young Albert

Cot ingham, abandoned Bibb County and the place of their

enslavement as quickly as it had become clearly established that

they were in fact free to go wherever they wished.

Three other black families—each of them led by one from the

generation of middle-aged slaves who had spent the longest spans

of their lives as Cot ingham slaves—chose to remain close by the

old master, likely stil residing in the slave quarters a short distance

from Elisha's big house and later in simple tenant cabins erected to

replace them. The elder Green Cot inham , a partly white slave

now forty years old, along with his wife, Eme-line, and their baby

boy, Caesar, remained on the farm. Likely Green's mulat o line

boy, Caesar, remained on the farm. Likely Green's mulat o line

connected him directly to the white Cot inghams, but no record

survives to indicate whether that was so. Another slave father to

remain on the place was Je Cot ingham, forty-eight, who

continued to spel his name as his former master did, and who was

raising in his home an eight-year-old boy named Jonathon, who

was also partly white.3 Also staying behind was Milt, another of the

older crew of slaves.

On the other side of the big house, away from the slave cabins,

lived the youngest of Elisha's sons to reach adulthood, Harvey, also

forty years old, with his wife, Zelphia, and seven children. Slightly

farther down the wagon road, J. W. Starr's widow, Hannah,

remained in the preacher's house, though her son Lucius had

become the master of the household. Next door to them, a Starr

daughter and her family farmed on another portion of the dead

reverend's land.

A few miles away, beyond Cot ingham Loop, at the edge of the

Six Mile set lement around which the lives of al the Cot inghams

had come to orbit, Scip and the third group of former slaves set led

themselves in a life overshadowed by their former enslavement but

clearly distinct from the control ed lives they had formerly led.

At the center of those former slaves remained Scipio, stil

defiantly insistent that his birth as an African and the African origins

of his mother and father be ful y recorded whenever the census

taker or another government o cial inquired as to his provenance.

He took the name Cot inham.

Six Mile had the vague makings of a real town, with a smal

school and a weekly newspaper that boasted of a cluster of homes,

two stores, and a sawmil . On one boundary of the set lement lived

George Cot inham, now forty- ve, and next door lived Henry,

twenty-two years old, and Mary, with the lit le girl Cooney George

and Henry, as father and son, farmed rented property, probably

owned by the white Fancher family nearby.

Two houses away, Scip was ensconced with Charity, his junior by

thirty-eight years, and the ve children they had under the age of

thirty-eight years, and the ve children they had under the age of

fourteen. The e ort by General Gorgas to rebuild the Brier eld

furnaces had col apsed, and the weary Confederate industrialist

turned over the operation to another ex-rebel o cer turned

entrepreneur.

Scipio worked under his supervision at the Bibb furnace where

he had spent so much of the wartime years, stil laboring at the task

Elisha had sent him to learn in the e ort to save the Confederacy.

He traveled daily to the furnaces, several miles away, usual y in the

company of four much younger black men who boarded in a smal

house near the dry goods store in Six Mile. Sometimes, Scip would

spend the night near the furnace in rented lodgings with two of the

men, Toney Bates, twenty-two, and Alex Smith, nineteen.4

The free lives of Scip, George, and Henry were hardly easy. But

for the rst time they were truly autonomous of Elisha Cot ingham

and his kin. How long such black men in the post-emancipation

South could remain so would become the de ning characteristic of

their lives.

As slaves, men such as Scipio and Henry were taught that their

master was a palpable extension of the power of God—their

designated lord in a supremely ordained hierarchy. In the era of

emancipation, that role—now stripped of its religiosity and pared

to its most elemental dimensions of power and force—was handed

to the sherif .

This was a new capacity for local law enforcement o cers, and

the smal circles of elected o cials who also played a part in the

South's criminal and civil justice systems. Prior to the Civil War, al

of government in the region, at every level, was unimaginably

sparse by modern standards. In Alabama, an elected board of

county commissioners oversaw local tax col ections and

disbursements, primarily for repairs to bridges, maintenance of the

courthouse, and operation of a simple jail. The sheri , also chosen

by the people, usual y spent far more time serving civil warrants

and foreclosing property for unpaid debts than in the enforcement

and foreclosing property for unpaid debts than in the enforcement

of criminal statutes. The arbiter of most minor legal disputes and

al eged crimes would be a justice of the peace, normal y a local

man appointed by the governor to represent law and government

in each "beat" in the state. In an era of exceedingly di cult

transportation, beats were tiny areas of jurisdiction, often limited to

one smal quadrant of a county. One rural Alabama county elected

thirty justices of the peace in 1877.5 But within those boundaries,

the justice of the peace—more often than not the proprietor of a

country store or a large farm—held tremendous authority, including

the power to convict defendants of crimes that carried potential

sentences of years of confinement.

In most southern states, county sheri s and their deputies

received no regular salaries. Instead, the law enforcement o cers,

justices of the peace, certain court o cials, and any witnesses who

testi ed against a defendant were compensated primarily from

speci c fees charged to those who voluntarily or involuntarily came

into the court system. A long schedule of approved fees designated

the cost of each o cial act those o cials might undertake: 50 cents

for serving a warrant in a lawsuit over a bad debt; $1 for making an

arrest on an indictment; 35 cents for a clerk who certi ed a court

document. Payment was enforced at the resolution of every court

proceeding, with the accumulated fees lumped into whatever other

penalty was ordered by a judge. After the advent of widespread

convict leasing, the fees—which usual y amounted to far more than

the actual nes imposed on defendants—were paid o from the

payments made by the company that acquired the prisoner.

Before the war and immediately afterward, the cases brought

before the county judge and his fel ow commissioners in most rural

southern counties were drearily routine, and rare. In the great

majority of cases in Bibb County and similar places, the penalty for

guilt was a ne of $1, regardless of the o ense. The point of the

prosecution and conviction was not so much to mete out justice

from the government but to establish de nitively that an o ense

had been commit ed and compel the guilty party and the victim to

resolve their di erences. If a drunken man injured a neighboring

resolve their di erences. If a drunken man injured a neighboring

farmer's cow, then the court's role was to ensure that the drunk paid

for the loss. Incarceration was an expensive and impractical

outcome in a society where cash rarely changed hands.

Already, the practice had become established of one man acting

as "surety" for the ne imposed on another. Traditional y, this

meant the father, brothers, or neighbors of a man convicted of a

crime coming into court to pay his nes and assure the court of his

future good conduct. In many cases, the surety would actual y be

the victim of the crime, agreeing to resolve a dispute in return for a

contract with the accused to work as payment for the damages he

had done.

The county was interested in neither rehabilitation nor long-term

punishment , particularly in an era when every man was needed to

sta the farms and enterprises of the county. With the exception of

those men who clearly merited the noose, most miscreants could be

rendered harmless if they simply stayed at whatever lonely place on

a muddy road they had appeared from. Those guilty of serious

felony crimes were the business of the state, anyway—tried and

sentenced by state circuit court judges and incarcerated however

and wherever the state saw t. The local sheri was a referee in the

world of misdemeanors, cal ing fouls and separating fighters.

Where sheri s exercised their greatest power was in the

enforcement of debts. In Shelby County, where Green Cot enham

would ultimately be arrested three decades later, Amos M. El iot

owned a store on a backcoun-try road, and by the 1870s had

become a stalwart citizen of his corner of the county. Merchants

such as he were as much bankers as retailers. Nearly every purchase

was made on credit to be repaid when a farmer's crop was sold at

the end of a season. More often than not, the store owner would be

the buyer of the crop as wel , meaning that the man who had

plowed the elds and picked the cot on or corn might never

actual y see hard currency. His debts, payments, and pro t or loss

were recorded only in the ledgers of the store. This was even more

were recorded only in the ledgers of the store. This was even more

so the case for a black man.

El iot was also justice of the peace—the most visible presence of

government authority in the crude world of country life,

empowered to perform marriages, formalize contracts between

parties, and otherwise represent law and order. In the late 1870s,

El iot 's docket was l ed with cases involving disputes over

amounts ranging from $5.85 to $7.45. A judgment— ordering

payment to a particular party or a term of forced labor in lieu of

one—often triggered a busy trade in bet ing on the future of the

convicted man. Judgments were treated like securities, and were

resold at discounts based on the likelihood, or not, of the losing

party being able to pay them.

In every case, the sheri and El iot , as the presiding justice of the

peace in his beat of the county, received a portion of the set lement

as a fee. Many times, El iot himself agreed to pay a defendant's

judgment and then take a mortgage in the same amount on the

man's property. In nearly every one of the 225 cases he heard

between 1878 and 1880, El iot ordered that "al of the defendants

[sic] personal property is therefore liable to the satisfaction of this

judgment."6

In July 1882, El iot ordered Harman Davis to pay a $30.88

judgment on a three-year-old debt. El iot paid the amount himself,

and Davis signed a mortgage to repay the money to him with

interest. The consequences of losing a case over a $5 debt could be

catastrophic. Alf Barret was sued for $5 on September 6, 1879, and

then failed to appear at the trial El iot convened. El iot declared

the man to be in default and ordered that he pay the plainti

$5.07, 60 cents each to the sheri and himself, and 50 cents each to

three witnesses. Two months later, to clear the obligations, the

sheri seized every article of property to which Barret could lay

claim, "one lounge, 1 Round Table, 1 Lamp, 1 looking Glass, 4

Picture frames & Pictures, 3 chairs, 2 Wash Tubs, Wash Stand, Bowl

& Pitcher, 1 Lantern, & 3 Sad Irons."

The jeopardy at ached to minor violations of the law would soon

The jeopardy at ached to minor violations of the law would soon

become much more serious than to be stripped of every possession.

The South's judicial tradition of using the criminal courts to set le

civil debts, and of treating a man's labor as a currency with which

to pay nes and mortgages, was being recognized, ominously, by

the new commercial engines of the era. In Alabama, the nexus of

new economic mechanisms, old legal pat erns, and antebel um

traditions of industrial slavery occurred more natural y than in any

other place.

The system of leasing convicts soon radical y altered the

implications of the debt enforcement process and the signi cance of

each o cial involved in it. County sheri s and judges had dabbled

with leasing black convicts out to local farmers, or to contractors

under hire to repair roads and bridges, beginning almost

immediately after the Civil War. But as the state turned ever larger

blocs of African Americans over to private companies, an organized

market for prisoners began to evolve. Soon, labor agents for the

mining and timber companies were scouring the countryside to

make arrangements for acquiring able-bodied black laborers—just

as John Til man had done to locate slaves for the Shelby Iron

Works during the war, just as Rev. Starr's son was doing when Scip

Cot inham was leased to the Brierfield furnaces in the 1860s.

Instead of slave owners, the men who now control ed squads of

black laborers available to the highest bidder were sheri s. The key

distinction, however, between the sheri and the old slave masters

was that since these African Americans were not his or anyone else's

permanent property, he had no reason for concern about how they

were treated by their new keepers or whether they survived at al .

By the early 1880s, twenty-nine of Alabama's sixty-seven counties

were leasing their prisoners.7 The trade in black workers continued

to swel . Because of the nancial bene ts of leasing convicts rather

than sending them to state o cials, some counties opted to

prosecute men accused of felonies on misdemeanor charges— solely

so the sheri and other locals could receive the proceeds of the

prisoner's lease. County prisoners eventual y far surpassed the

number of men pressed into forced labor by the state.

number of men pressed into forced labor by the state.

Control of those county convicts was lucrative, for both the

companies who acquired them and the sheri s who supplied them.

In addition to the fees they received from defendants, sheri s also

kept any amount left over from daily feeding fees paid for each

prisoner by the state. As a result, Alabama's sheri s were nancial y

motivated to arrest and convict as many people as possible, and

simultaneously to feed them as lit le as they could get away with.

In counties where large numbers of convicts were sold to the

mining companies, such as Je erson County, where Birmingham

was located, a speculative trade in convict contracts developed. The

witnesses and public o cials who were owed portions of the lease

payments earned by the convicts received paper receipts—usual y

cal ed scrips—from the county that could be redeemed only after a

convict had generated enough money to pay them o . Rather than

wait for the ful amount, holders of the scrips would sel their notes

for cash to speculators at a lower than face amount. In return, the

buyers were to receive the ful lease payments—pro ting

handsomely on those convicts who survived, losing money on the

short-lived. In Je erson County, the nancial arrangements on each

convict were recorded in ledger books showing earnings due to

each o cial and then a subsequent calculation of the nal rate of

return on each prisoner after his release, escape, or death.8

The job of a county sheri became a heady enterprise, often

more akin to the business of trading in mules than law

enforcement. Sheri s and their local judges developed special

relationships with local companies and preferred acquirers of their

prisoners. Arrests surged and fel , not as acts of crime increased or

receded, but in tandem to the varying needs of the buyers of labor.

Companies, commissioners, justices of the peace, probate judges,

and sheri s issued o ers of rewards for escapees. Constables

arrested men on speculation that they might be wanted elsewhere,

seizing them on the basis of rumors, and then inquiring whether

there might be reward money available in the county from which

they hailed. Town bul ies and rural store owners such as El iot

became bounty hunters verging on extortionists.

became bounty hunters verging on extortionists.

Swift, uncomplicated adjudication was the key to the system.

Trials were discouraged; lawyers for black misdemeanor defendants

were scant. Indeed, the fee system—with its additional charge for

each act in the judicial process or appearance of another witness or

o cial—was a built-in disincentive to prisoners who knew that

each added dol ar of their nal ne and costs would ultimately

equate to additional days held in forced labor. The span of time

from arrest to conviction and judgment to delivery at a slave mine

or mil was often no more than seventy-two hours. The most

common penalty was nine months to a year in a slave mine or

lumber camp.

Al of this was predicated on the absolute defenselessness of

black men to the legal system, and the near certainty that most

would be unable to bond themselves out of jail or pay nes

imposed upon them. Across Alabama, northern Florida, and

Georgia, a bewildering world of casual judicial process emerged in

which a davits were scribbled on scraps of notebook paper, half-

o cial judges and strongmen assuming the authority to arrest

resided every few miles, men were identi ed and arrested on the

basis of meaningless physical descriptions, and hardly anyone could

sign their own name. Increasingly, it was a system driven not by any

goal of enforcement or public protection against serious o enses,

but purely to generate fees and claim bounties.

The county convict leasing system, with its e cient mechanisms

for forcing black men to do the bidding of white business operators,

soon leached into the process of col ecting debts of any kind. White

farmers who advanced money to black tenants at the beginning of a

crop season began to enforce their debts not by evicting those black

men who fel behind, but by swearing out criminal warrants

accusing them of fraud. Facing certain conviction by a local white

judge, most laborers wil ingly agreed to accept their white

landlords—who had brought them to court in the rst place— as

their "sureties." The defendants typical y would "confess judgment,"

an archaic legal concept under which the accused confesses his

responsibility before being tried. The local judge then accepted

responsibility before being tried. The local judge then accepted

payment and forfeiture of a bond from the white surety, rather than

render a verdict on the al eged "crime." In return, the African

American farmer would sign a contract to work without

compensation for the white landlord for however long it took to

pay back the amount of the bond.

The instances of confessing judgment spread rapidly through the

farming regions of the South, according to local court dockets of the

1880s and 1890s. This was especial y true as southern states

adopted more statutes intended to criminalize routine black

behaviors—such as carrying a weapon, riding on empty freight train

cars—or violations of racial etiquet e such as speaking loudly in the

presence of white women. On its face, the arrangement appeared

similar to other practices that would remain common in the courts

for the next century and beyond—granting mercy to a criminal

partly in exchange for a commitment to repair the damage of their

crimes, and place themselves under the close supervision of a

trusted party.

Occasional y, confessing judgment in the 1880s was precisely just

such a legitimate, humane resolution of a legal mat er. But only

rarely. The records of thousands of prosecutions show it was vastly

more likely that an arrested black man—knowing he had no

possibility of true due process, or acquit al—agreed to confess

judgment speci cal y to avoid the far more dire alternatives that he

knew lay in wait. It was the nineteenth-century equivalent of

modern plea bargains, in which a defendant agrees to a lesser

sentence ahead of trial in order to be spared any possibility of the

most severe punishment. The exception being that in the variation

of this practice in the 1880s, it was a nearly foregone conclusion

that the man under arrest would be found guilty of something.

Often, his only hope for moderating the blow was to negotiate the

most bearable form of forced labor.

The black men who confessed judgment avoided being sold into

the slave mines, but traded that fate for onerous labor contracts

closer to home or working under men they had at least elementary

knowledge of—their present landlord, or often with the same farm

knowledge of—their present landlord, or often with the same farm

families under whom they or their slave forebears had worked in

antebel um times. The result was that black tenant farmers and

sharecroppers often returned as uncompensated convict laborers,

subject to imprisonment, shackles, and the lash, to the same elds

where a few days earlier they had worked as independent, free

men. White farmers often continued to claim that the convict

laborer was incurring additional debts for necessities such as visits

by a doctor, medical care, clothing, damaged implements, or

housing. Once captured by a contract under which the black man

was not free until al his debts were paid, the "convict"—who in fact

might never have been found guilty of a crime— could be held

almost inde nitely. Moreover, almost any white person who

became involved in the resolution of a black man's legal situation

could casual y add his own "costs" to the balance of a prisoner's

debt and compel him to labor for an even longer period.

When a black man named Sevi Pearson was accused in

Tal apoosa County of bat ery against a woman named Cora Iverson

in April 1885, he confessed judgment to an elderly notary public

named Luke Davenport as part of an arrangement with John W

Pace, an active acquirer of black men through the courts.

Davenport, whose legal credentials were limited to a stint as an

acting justice of the peace three decades earlier, had the legal

power to order Pearson to pay a total of $70.50. Pace paid the

penalty for him instead, and Pearson signed a contract under which

he agreed to work for Pace for nine months. Ominously, the

contract included a provision that the black laborer "further agrees

that he wil take such treatment as other convicts."9

In November 1887, the county clerk of Wilcox County wrote the

state o cial in charge of the system for leasing prisoners into mines

and lumber camps, to outline arrangements related to the

anticipated gubernatorial pardon for two black convicts named Cats

Sel ers and Lewis Walker. "My fees for this and forms [and]

applications are contingent on the negroes working with John

Pritchit after their liberation. He having paid for their at orneys

fees, notices," wrote the clerk, Thomas L. Cochran.10 Only the

fees, notices," wrote the clerk, Thomas L. Cochran. Only the

slimmest fraction of men forced into Alabama's slave mines ever

gained a governor's pardon. Even for many of them, freedom did

not mean being free.

In its ful bloom, the misdemeanor convict leasing system solved

two critical problems for southern whites. It terrorized the larger

black population into compliance with a social order in which they

wil ingly submit ed to complete domination by whites, and it

signi cantly funded the operations of government by converting

black forced labor into funds for the counties and states.

Most scholars of American history have accepted that the repressive

legal measures and violence of the post-Civil War era were the

result, at least in part, of the lawless behavior of freed slaves.

Charitable, if patronizing, iterations of this picture at ributed the

supposed criminal inclinations of freed-men to the psychic injuries

of their generations of bondage, or simply to the di culty of any

emancipated people in adjusting to the dynamics of a life in

freedom.

The reality of crime in the era, based on the actual arrest records

of many counties in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, is that true

crime was almost trivial in most places. In the Bibb County of

January 1878, where African Americans stil had the legal right to

vote, the biggest criminal threat to the peace of the county was a

band of Gypsies plying their wares from an encampment near

Columbiana and wandering the muddy wagon rut roads in the

country. To move them along, the sheri brought charges of

vagrancy and of trading goods between the hours of sunrise and

sunset— an "o ense" that would increasingly be used to prevent

freed slaves from buying goods from anyone other than their white

landlords. Before the case could be heard, the idle Gypsies moved

on. Peace was maintained.

Later that year, during the summer, James Cot ingham, one of

Elisha's many white grandsons and a regular troublemaker in the

postwar years, was convicted of assault and bat ery with a weapon.

postwar years, was convicted of assault and bat ery with a weapon.

His fine was $1 plus court costs. He paid it and was free.

In neighboring Shelby County, the arrest log of 1878 shows only

twenty-one prisoners brought to jail for the year. There were three

homicides in that time, and a woman named Lucy Cohil was

arrested for adultery—a charge that in almost al instances stemmed

from sexual relations between a black and a white. But few other

cases even registered in the public eye. The total fees charged to al

those arrested amounted to $80.80.11 Lit le changed over the next

two years, with the number of inmates in the county jail never

exceeding twenty.

Al of that transformed as the value of leasing black convicts

became more apparent. County after county was adopting the

practice. The at raction was not just that local o cials could fob o

most of the cost and trouble of housing and guarding prisoners. By

the end of the 1870s, the opportunity represented by forcing black

laborers into the mines was being richly ful l ed at Milner's

Newcastle Coal Co., operating just north of where the Prat Mines

were then being developed, and Shelby County's Eureka mines.

The Eureka mine complex consisted of two operations, one

manned by free miners and the other by convicts. Managing the

forced labor was J. W. Comer, a descendant of one of Alabama's

great prewar slave-owning families and a brother to Braxton Bragg

Comer, who would become Alabama's governor in 1907. Under

Comer, the Eureka Iron Works thrived on a cruel mix of primitive

excavation techniques and relentless, atavistic physical force.

State inspectors sent to the convict work camps wrote repeatedly

during the 1870s that the "convicts everywhere were being properly

cared for and guarded …humanely treated."12 Similarly facile

characterizations would be issued repeatedly by other examiners

over the decades of convict leasing, often the result of payo s

between the acquirers of forced laborers and their supposed

supervisors.

The reality of conditions inside the Eureka mines was

documented with rare clarity as a result of a brief state inquiry in

documented with rare clarity as a result of a brief state inquiry in

1881 into Comer's operations and Milner's Newcastle mines. More

signi cantly, vignet es of Comer's conduct were also recorded as a

result of the presence of a prisoner able and wil ing to complain of

conditions named Ezekiel Archey and the tenure of a nominal y

sympathetic Alabama o cial in charge of guarding the welfare of

leased prisoners, Reginald H. Dawson.13

Archey, a prisoner leased into Comer's Eureka mines, wrote that

the convicts lived in a windowless log stockade, their quarters

" l ed with lth and vermin." Gunpowder cans were used to hold

human waste that periodical y "would l up and runover on bed"

where some prisoners were shackled in place at night. Prisoners left

for the mine at 3 A.M. in chains, forced to march at a quick trot.

The grueling task of boring rock for dynamite, exploding sections of

a seam of coal, and shoveling tons of the remains into cars lasted

until 8 P.M.14

"Every Day some one of us were carried to our last resting, the

grave. Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to

speak," Archey wrote. "We can go back to ‘79 and ‘77 al these years

of how we sufered. No humane being can tel …yet we hear. Go

ahead. Fate seems to curse a convict. Death seems to summon us

hence." Indeed, between 1878 and 1880, twenty- ve prisoners died

at the Eureka mines, most dumped unceremoniously into shal ow

earthen pits on the edge of the mine site.15

During hearings held by the special legislative commission in

1881 to inquire into the conditions and operations of the convict

leasing system, a witness named Jonathon D. Goode testi ed that

Comer ordered a recaptured black escapee to lie "on the ground

and the dogs were biting him. He begged piteously to have the dogs

taken of of him, but Comer refused to al ow it."

Then, Comer "took a stirrup strap, doubled it and wet it, stripped

him naked, bucked him, and whipped him—unmerciful y whipped

him, over half an hour. The Negro begged them to take a gun and

kil him," Goode continued. "They left him in a Negro cabin where

… he died within a few hours."16

… he died within a few hours."

An assistant superintendent at the mine, James O’Rourke,

testi ed that guards whipped prisoners with "a leather strap or stick

about an inch broad and two foot long." For o enses as generic as

"disobeying rules," state law al owed up to thirty-nine lashes.

Punishment was far more severe for infractions as minor as ghting,

tearing bedding, or insolence toward guards. One witness told of

the use of water torture at Eureka, on convicts for whom whipping

was deemed insu cient. Such prisoners were physical y restrained.

Then, "water [was] poured in his face on the upper lip, and

e ectual y stops his breathing as long as there is a constant

stream."17 Over the next thirty years, variations of this medieval

water torture technique were repeatedly employed in southern

slave labor camps, in some cases supplanting whipping as a

preferred method of punishment. Many convict managers chose this

terrifying method because the convict was able to more quickly

recover and return to work than after a severe flogging.

The commission also investigated Milner's Newcastle mines, where

both state and county convicts were at work. Milner was already

one of the key industrial pioneers of Alabama, having mapped and

directed the e ort to build one of the state's most important

railroad routes prior to the Civil War. Milner had grown up in a

slave-owning family, and in early adulthood owned "a lit le negro

of his own named Steve, who fol owed him about like a shadow,"

according to one contemporary. Milner put his Steve and several

other slaves to work prospecting for gold in the 1840s to earn his

tuition for col ege.18 Elected to the state Senate in 1866, Milner,

short of height but a deliberate speaker, was a key gure in the

later ouster of African Americans from al political participation

and authored a widely distributed statement titled, "White Men of

Alabama Stand Together." He was one of the founders of the city of

Birmingham in the 1870s.

By 1881, Milner was already one of the state's most substantial

industrialists. His primary company, Milner Coal and Railway

industrialists. His primary company, Milner Coal and Railway

Company, developed extensive mines at Coalburg and Newcastle,

north of Birmingham. At Newcastle, Milner played the part of a

self-aggrandizing antebel um slave master. The complex featured its

own private railroad, more than 150 forced laborers acquired from

the state and various counties, and an elaborate system of high-

temperature beehive ovens used to make coke—a derivative of

regular bituminous coal from which impurities had been baked out.

A quarter mile from the mine, Milner presided over his family and

received political and business visitors in a spacious house featuring

a detached kitchen, smokehouse, and barns. Orchards and rose

gardens crowded the home.19

It was a di erent scene in the prison mine not far away. A

description of Milner's mine by The New York Times in December

1882 told of black prisoners packed into a single cramped cabin

like slaves on the Atlantic passage. The building had no windows.

Vermin-ridden bunks stacked three high were covered with straw

and "ravaged blankets." "Revoltingly lthy" food was served cold

from unwashed coal buckets, and al 150 black convicts shared

three half-barrel tubs for washing. Al convicts were forced to wear

shackles consisting of an "iron hoop fastened around the ankle to

which is at ached a chain two feet long and terminating in a ring."20

The powerful utility of slave labor as a weapon against the

unionization of free laborers began to become most apparent in

1882, when hundreds of skil ed and unskil ed workers refused to

continue work at the Prat Mines, the steadily enlarging labyrinth of

shafts on the edge of Birmingham. The miners objected to a sharp

wage reduction and the company's growing reliance on convict

laborers. Rather than relent to the strikers’ demands, the company

leased the mines to Comer, who l ed them with legions of convicts

at his disposal. The strike was crushed.21 The same year, Alabama

col ected $50,000 in revenue from the sale of convict leases.22

The impact of that relatively brief labor event and its

correspondence with payments equal to approximately $860,000 in

correspondence with payments equal to approximately $860,000 in

modern currency, when adjusted for in ation, would be felt for

decades. It forged in dramatic fashion the consensus that the coal

and steel industry of Birmingham would thrive only with a central

reliance on forced labor. That would not change for a half century.

Later in 1882, state inspectors, writing the rst candid o cial

assessment of convict camps, said the private prisons were "total y

un t for use, without ventilation, without adequate water supplies,

crowded to excess, lthy beyond description." Prisoners were

"poorly clothed and fed …excessively and sometimes cruel y

punished; there were no hospitals; the sick were neglected; and

they were so much intimidated that it was next to impossible to get

from them anything touching on their treatment."23

Milner also operated a slave mine at the aptly named Coalburg.

The place was no town, but a ramshackle mining camp adjacent to

a shaft into a seam of coal that would be exhaustively mined for

more than eighty years. The prison at Coalburg, and its nearby

successor, Flat Top, were synonymous with the most wretched

conditions that could develop in the forced labor mines. The

Coalburg prison had no oor or toilets; prisoners were fed only

meat and bread. Many men were being held long past the

expiration of their ostensible sentences. In the late spring of 1883,

eight out of one hundred prisoners died—a rate that the state prison

inspector extrapolated to be 30 percent a year.24

Milner had no compunction about his view that black prisoners

purchased from the state and from county sheri s were his to do

with as he saw t. True, they were no longer mortgaged slaves, as

were Steve and the blacks he had owned in the 1850s. But he was

as much their lord and master as he had been over the African

families. Shortly after the war, he warned fel ow southerners of the

importance of combating the "unthrift, idleness, and weeds" that

were certain to fol ow the emancipation of the slaves.25

Milner became the central gure in an orbit of shrewd but brutal

southern industrialists who shared his views on the best means of

managing black laborers. Beginning before the Civil War, Milner

managing black laborers. Beginning before the Civil War, Milner

teamed up with Wil iam Hampton Flowers to operate slave-driven

timbering operations near Bol ing, Alabama. Using mostly hand

tools and enormous exertion, the slaves fashioned thousands of

crossties for the railroads then under construction across southern

Alabama.

After the war, Flowers purchased a half interest in Milner's

timber operation. The partnership, Milner, Caldwel & Flowers

Lumber Co., built a state-of-the-art sawmil and came to control

tens of thousands of acres of prime forestland. From the 1880s

through the turn of the century, the company relied on thousands of

convict laborers leased from counties and the state of Alabama to

produce vast quantities of turpentine and mil ions of linear feet of

cut lumber and crossties.

In the spring of 1883, Milner was made an o er by the

entrepreneur behind an ambitious railroad under construction from

Atlanta. Milner quickly sold to the Georgia Paci c Railroad part of

his Coalburg mine operation and, in an overtly il egal aspect of the

transaction, a lot of one hundred black convicts. The buyer of both

the mine and the forced laborers was Capt. James W. English, a

powerful Atlanta politician who also headed Chat ahoochee Brick

Company in Atlanta, the biggest and arguably most abusive buyer

of forced laborers in Georgia.

In 1883, Alabama's prison inspector, Reginald Dawson, began to

visit prisons populated with men convicted of state crimes, and a

commission of the state legislature undertook an investigation to

ensure that the prisoners were being humanely treated. The moves

were made not out of humanitarian concerns but as acts of

preservation for the system. In some other states, notably Tennessee,

public criticism of barbaric conditions among prison laborers had

threatened the entire practice of convict leasing. In Alabama, the

system was already proving uniquely wel suited to the needs of

mine owners, coke oven operators, foundries, and lumber and

turpentine camps. The men in charge were commit ed to preserving

the system against any criticism.

Shortly before Milner's transaction outing the laws that

Shortly before Milner's transaction outing the laws that

super cial y governed Alabama's prison mines, Dawson became

"chief inspector" of the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts. He was

a South Carolina native, born in 1838 to an il ustrious lawyer and

planter father. The family moved to Dal as County, Alabama, in

1842, and Dawson studied to become an at orney. A lieutenant in

an Alabama infantry regiment during the war, he was wounded and

came home in 1864.26

Dawson distinguished himself as one among a smal number of

southerners who were troubled by the obvious contradictions

between the convict leasing laws and the realities of the forced

labor system that it spawned. He repeatedly gave o cials an

unvarnished assessment of the situation, apparently in the sincere

belief that with ful exposure, the apparatus of Alabama's tra c in

African Americans could be reformed.

After becoming chief convict inspector, Dawson visited prison

encampments scat ered across the state. In addition to examining

the destinations of state convicts, a law passed the previous year

also al owed state o cials to inspect the larger, but even less

regulated, county convict system. An early stop was at J. W. Comer's

plantation in Barbour County. Dawson described the men held

there on misdemeanor charges in a desperate condition, poorly

clothed and fed, and "unnecessarily chained and shackled."27

At the Prat Mines, then also under the management of Comer

and his business partner, Wil iam McCurdy Dawson observed

extremely high death rates. He termed conditions at two drift mines

as having "miserable accommodations, un t for men to be kept

in."28 Like Comer, McCurdy was a south Alabama man with a long

track record, rst in slaves, then in convicts, on his Lowndes County

farm. On McCurdy's plantation in Lowndes County, seventy black

convicts leased from the state and an unknown number of county

prisoners were held in two pens cal ed the upper and lower cel s.29

The farm would operate with forced laborers for at least fty

years.30

Despite the conditions and the appal ing number of maimed and

Despite the conditions and the appal ing number of maimed and

"disabled men" that Dawson found at the mines operated by Comer,

Milner, and the other forced labor entrepreneurs in 1883, there was

lit le he could do. Comer and McCurdy, as wel as the Prat Mines,

held binding contracts under which the corporations had e ective

ownership of two hundred prisoners each.

Dawson wrote repeatedly in his diary during the hot summer of

that year that he was "stronger than ever in the conviction that the

convicts should not be worked in the mines."31 The inspector also

began to write country judges across Alabama urging them to cease

the transfer of local prisoners to the desperate mines near

Birmingham. Dozens received such let ers, including one on

September 10, 1883, to Simon O’Neal reporting that prisoners at

the Prat Mines "are not wel clothed." He added: "I think the work

required of some of the convicts is excessive." Two weeks later,

Daw-son wrote R. A. J. Cumlie: "The appal ing amt of deaths that

have occurred at the mines, both from disease and accidents, the

great number of cripples, the men broken down by disease to be

found there should convince the public that they should not be

forced to incur the augers incident to this sort of work."32

After Dawson inquired into the circumstances of a convict from

Lee County being held by Comer and McCurdy at one camp, the

inspector realized that although the man had been in custody since

1875—eight years— he wasn't listed in o cial records as a

prisoner. Comer "never reported him," Dawson wrote to the Lee

County judge. "Comer and McCurdy have had him near two years….

You have no idea how many such cases I have worked up."

Dawson appealed to Governor Edward A. O’Neal for help.

"Convicts have been hired out and lost sight of, others are in

possession of contractors and no bond or contract on le. Others

have been found in possession of parties di erent from those to

whom hired."33

Dawson's pleas had lit le e ect. By March 1883, twenty-nine

counties were leasing their prisoners to mines. Altogether, in excess

counties were leasing their prisoners to mines. Altogether, in excess

of four hundred such men were being forced into labor, the vast

majority of them because of their inability to pay nes imposed for

minor or spurious of enses.34

Similarly, Dawson discovered multiple county prisoners at the

Newcastle and Coalburg prison mines owned by Milner who had

never been paid for by the company and were never listed on the

rol s of prisoners that Milner was required by law to maintain. The

bene t of never showing a prisoner on the o cial registers of

convicts was tremendous. The company holding him could ignore

its obligation to make monthly payments to the county of the

prisoner's arrest. Far more ominously, the prisoner could be held

inde nitely. The end e ect, by almost any de nition, was to reduce

the convict to a slave. After a visit to Coalburg in July 1885,

Dawson wrote in his diary: "Stil a great deal of sickness. There is

much dissatisfaction and complaints here. The convicts are

demoralized and the management is bad."35

Dawson could never determine how many such cases occurred.

He wrote that his investigation never truly "probed to the bot om."

Even inspectors such as Dawson rarely considered an even more

troubling dimension of the system: that much larger numbers of the

prisoners—whether listed on the o cial registers or not—had

commit ed no real crime.36

A woman named Annie Tucker was convicted of a misdemeanor

and sold into the Prat Mines in 1883. She later testi ed during a

legislative inquiry that she "cooked, washed and ironed at mines."37

At some point that year, P. J. Rogers, an o cial at the prison who

later became sheri of Je erson County, so severely whipped

Tucker that the Board of Inspectors censured him. Dawson wrote in

his diary that Tucker "ran away from Mr. McCurdy's house—was

caught and carried to the prison. Col. Bank-head whipped her

himself—not severely—After he left, by order of Mr. McCurdy, P. J.

Rogers stripped her, had her held down, and in icted 56 lashes

upon her with a heavy strap."38

After a meeting on November 14, 1883, with two white men

After a meeting on November 14, 1883, with two white men

who had recently visited Comer's Prat Mines, Dawson wrote in his

personal diary: "Disgusted with what they found at shaft—men

eating out of coal shovels. Noti ed Col. Ensley to furnish men

things to eat out of—and other necessaries—Reported to Governor

the neglect of sick men …and also cruelty."

A week later Dawson visited the Shaft mine himself. "Found

things not at al improved—men lousy, lthy and dirty Had no

change for near two months—beds scarce and dirty. One very sick

man in a cel in a miserable condition."39

The plantation operations of J. W. Comer were no bet er. After a

visit to the Comer farm in Barbour County, Dawson wrote: "Things

in bad order. No replace in cel . No arrangements for washing …

no hospital. Everything lthy—privy terrible—convicts ragged—

many barefooted— very heavily ironed."40

Elected o cials responded by adopting new rules governing the

leasing of convicts. Companies that acquired forced laborers were

mandated to provide "clean quarters" and adequate food. Guards

were prohibited from using "cruel" or "excessive punishment." The

new rules also dictated that if the body of a dead prisoner was not

taken by a family member, the company was responsible for an

orderly internment.41

Except for the requirements of racial separation, operators of the

slave labor camps roundly ignored the rules. Between 1882 and the

end of 1883, the number of convicts in the Prat Mines increased

from ninety-two state prisoners and an unknown number of county

convicts to more than ve hundred slave laborers in its Slope and

Shaft mines, about half its total workforce.42 One of Dawson's

deputies wrote him in December 1883 that conditions at the Prat

Mines were severely deteriorating. "Most of the Negroes have not

had a change of clothing in from three to nine weeks and are as

lousy as they can be," wrote Albert T. Henley, citing "the lthy

condition of things."43

In 1884, Archey stil imprisoned at the Eureka mine, wrote to

In 1884, Archey stil imprisoned at the Eureka mine, wrote to

Dawson decrying the treatment he and other black men continued

to receive. "Comer is a hard man. I have seen men come to him

with their shirts a solid scab on their back and beg him to help

them and he would say let the hide grow back and take if o again.

I have seen him hit men 100 and 160 [times] with a ten prong

strop, then say they was not whiped. He would go o after an

escape man come one day with him and dig his grave the same day.

"We go to cel wet, go to bed wet and arise wet the fol owing

morning and evry guard knocking beating yel ing Keep in line

Jumping Ditches," Archey wrote.44

In 1885, when Dawson personal y appealed to Milner to unchain

his permanently shackled laborers at the Newcastle mines for some

portion of each day or night, Milner reacted contemptuously. "My

best and longest mine men," Milner wrote back, "wil get away &

then ruin my business here."45

For its part, Shelby County, though home to some of Alabama's

most glaringly abusive slave mines, moved cautiously, reconsidering

each year whether to partake in the profits of ered by the new trade

in laborers or to stick with working prisoners on the muddy country

roads and col apsing bridges across the county. On December 13,

1880, the county commission split the di erence, ordering that

prisoners convicted of crimes in the fol owing year be hired to an

outside labor agent, but that the men be "employed on public

works." The labor agent was the firm of Comer & McCurdy

The requirement for prisoners to be used on the public roads was

only temporary, however. Late in 1881, the commissioners

authorized the probate judge to hire local convicts to "a farm, coal

mine or Iron works," with the nearby Shelby Iron Works production

facility or Comer's Eureka mines obviously in mind. Immediately

the character of law enforcement in the county changed

profoundly46

In November of that year, the jail suddenly l ed with forty- ve

In November of that year, the jail suddenly l ed with forty- ve

prisoners, six charged with burglary, ten accused of carrying a

concealed weapon, six for petit larceny, and, notably, a woman

named Mol ie Stubbs was accused of vagrancy. It was the rst use of

the old-fashioned "idleness" charge in many years, almost certainly

the rst since the end of the Civil War. Stubbs was ordered to work

forty days at hard labor to pay of a $12 fine.47

Now engaged in the business of black labor, the Shelby County

jail stayed a busy place from then on. A month rarely passed in

which there were fewer than twenty prisoners. Charges such as

vagrancy, adultery, using obscene or abusive language, and

obtaining goods under false pretenses suddenly became common,

and were almost always filed against African Americans.

In July 1883, Shelby County recognized that the initial

restrictions placed by local o cials on prisoner leasing were

limiting the revenue that could be generated. The commission

named Amos El iot , the county's best-known and longest-standing

storekeeper and justice of the peace, to act as its agent in the

management of prisoners. El iot was given virtual carte blanche as

to the fate of men arrested in Shelby County, receiving

authorization to hire out prisoners to "persons or corporations" in

accordance with state laws revised earlier that year. The one caveat

was that El iot was also to "make the necessary arrangements for

the safe keeping and proper care of Convicts," and, in accordance

with the rules of treatment the state had adopted along with its

newest statute on prisoner labor, El iot was bound to "scrutinize

and enquire into the management and treatment of said Convicts."48

El iot , already wel acquainted from his many years as a justice

of the peace with the pecuniary bene ts of the Alabama fee

system,49 energetical y took up the rst order of the commission.

There was no indication that he did on the second.

Despite the Shelby commissioners’ initial reluctance to see their

prisoners dispatched to commercial enterprises, the lure of private

sector payments was simply more than any paternalistic good

intentions could resist. In February of 1884, the commission

intentions could resist. In February of 1884, the commission

approved payments to El iot of $273.93 for his work in hiring out

prisoners and judging cases. Approval was also granted for $94

paid to James T. Leeper for his help in placing convicts, and F. A.

Nelson, the county sheri , was authorized to receive $173 for

having arrested them.50 Like El iot , the men engaged in the

county's trade of forced labor weren't marginal or disreputable

gures. The sheri was a popular elected o cial. J. T Leeper was

the county solicitor, and worked as a lawyer in partnership with W.

B. Browne, president of the Columbiana Savings Bank and on

several occasions mayor of the town. 51

The number of men arrested, and the fees paid to such prominent

local white men, escalated swiftly, even as the particularities of the

ostensible judicial process deteriorated. Between late summer of

1884 and the spring of 1886, more than two hundred prisoners

passed through the jail and then into private hands. In county

ledgers, the nature of the charges against most of them, or the

amounts of the fines they were ordered to pay, weren't recorded. 52

Five years earlier, with the passing of New Year's Day 1881, the

people of adjoining Bibb County found themselves under the

extraordinary power of a new county judge. Jonathon S. Gardner,

veteran county commissioner, had been elevated to the nearly

omnipotent position. From a shiny straight-back chair in the

courthouse, Judge Gardner control ed both the judicial and

administrative functions of local government, with the power to tax

citizens, build roads and bridges to their farms, convict them of

crimes, decide their punishments, and incarcerate them as he saw

fit.Gardner succeeded atorney Thomas J. Smitherman, descendant

of one of the county's most prominent families, a major holder of

property, and a neighbor and longtime acquaintance of the

Cot inghams. In August 1865, Smitherman, also a Confederate

veteran, had been authorized by the provisional governor of

Alabama to give oaths of al egiance to residents of the county

Alabama to give oaths of al egiance to residents of the county

wishing to restore their citizenship rights.

While the power of the county judge's position whenever it

intersected with the life of a speci c individual was almost

boundless, there was in fact lit le in the way of meaningful

philosophical policy shifts that the new county judge could e ect.

Which roads and bridges to rebuild after each year's spring

downpours, in what order, and by whom among the smal coterie

of local men who lived primarily o the odd jobs of the county,

were the judge's most consistent questions and demonstrable

executive power.

They were mundane decisions, but often were the determining

factor between which farmers would thrive and which would

wither in isolation. A passable road was critical to the primitive

task of moving to market a ve-hundred-pound load of cot on—the

sole goal of most smal -acreage farmers. A washed-out bridge,

unrepaired, might be insurmountable.

Crime and punishment was the judge's other realm of discretion.

While the number of men brought up on even the smal est of

criminal charges in the nineteenth century was inconsequential—no

more than a dozen a year—the county judge's method of response

was virtual y unlimited. It was here that the new judge Gardner

would make his mark.

Six months after Gardner took o ce, Bibb County joined the

rising tide. Two days after the county's Independence Day

celebrations that July, Dave Wilson was charged with assault and

bat ery and the equal y serious crime of using "abusive and insulting

language in the presence of females." Found guilty, Wilson, a

twenty-one-year-old black farmhand, was sentenced to ten days of

hard labor, under the supervision of the sheri , plus the cost of the

court proceeding.53

A few months later Abram Gri n, an itinerant black farmhand

from Montgomery, 54 faced charges of carrying a concealed weapon

and assault and bat ery. Guns carried by black men were becoming

an increasingly potent issue among white southerners. Across the

an increasingly potent issue among white southerners. Across the

South, but nowhere more intensely than in Alabama, public

campaigns were under way to ban the possession of firearms by any

African American. In an era when great numbers of southern men

carried sidearms, the crime of carrying a concealed weapon—

enforced almost solely against black men—would by the turn of the

century become one of the most consistent instruments of black

incarceration. The larger implications of disarming black men, at a

time when they were simultaneously being stripped of political and

legal protections, were transparent.

Gri n's assault, whatever it was, lit le interested the Bibb County

judge in 1881. He was convicted but ned only $1. On the charge

of carrying a weapon, however, the man faced a serious penalty.

Unable to pay the court a $50 ne and costs, Gri n instead was

forced by Judge Gardner to work at hard labor 188 and one half

days.55

Later that year, Judge Gardner presided over the case of Milton

Cot-tingham, one of the former slaves Elisha had watched come of

age on the banks of the Cahaba and likely another son of Scipio.

Milton was stil working a portion of the land he had farmed as a

slave for Elisha, though by 1880 he was a sharecropper on a plot

next to Rev. Starr's old home on the Cot-tingham Loop. Like Scip,

he had married after slavery to a woman half his age, and lived

with Julie and their two-year-old son, Gabe, just steps from the

slave cabins Milt had known as a boy.

On Hal oween day of 1881, Milton came before Judge Gardner,

charged with malicious mischief. The prosecutor was Thomas

Smither-man, the former judge. At issue was an al eged injury to

some cows owned by A. B. McIntosh.

Only the barest details of the accusation survive in court records,

but it was not uncommon in the South at the time for a white

landowner to accuse a tenant farmer of overworking or otherwise

harming a mule or cow furnished along with the land. Ostensible

injuries to the livestock could be another basis for landowners to

withhold additional amounts from their sharecroppers when it

withhold additional amounts from their sharecroppers when it

came time to set le accounts at the end of the year. Whatever the

specifics in Milt Cot ingham's case, he pleaded not guilty.

Judge Gardner heard testimony on the al eged incident and ruled

the former slave before him guilty. He levied a ne of $24. The vast

majority of African Americans in the county—or the entire South

for that mat er— in 1881, given the same outcome, would have

faced a Faustian bargain. Twenty-four dol ars was a huge sum, the

equivalent for most laborers of three months or more of wages.

Without cash, the typical freedman would have had to choose

between spending a year or more held by the county in a primitive

jail, and working a chain gang on the roads each day. Or he could

agree to work for an even longer period as the near-property of a

white man wil ing to pay the fine on his behalf.

Milt Cot ingham enjoyed a rare advantage. The community of

former Cot ingham slaves remained su ciently intact—and had

prospered enough during Reconstruction—that Milt's brothers,

James and George, appeared on his behalf, with $24 in hand. The

black Cot inghams had not yet been crushed. Milt was set free.56

On February 13, 1893, the Bibb County Commission voted to

"hire out convicts of the County that have heretofore and may

hereafter be convicted." The probate judge, M. Y. Hayes, was made

the labor agent for the county and ordered to enter into a two-year

contract under which convicts would be leased out for $4 per

month "per head," and $2.50 to cover the county court costs of each

prisoner.

Two years later, in 1895, the commission authorized Hayes to

continue leasing "as in his discretion he deems best." At the same

meeting, the commission approved a proposal for upgrading and

repairing a local road— perhaps the modest government's single

most important function in encouraging the prosperity of its rural

residents. The road to be improved that winter was the one leading

to the farm of Elisha's son whose children had been forced to trek

across the war-riven South in 1862, Moses L. Cot ingham.57 When

the cot on came in later that year, the white Cot ingham would

the cot on came in later that year, the white Cot ingham would

have no trouble get ing to market.

IV

GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD

"The negro dies faster. "

In the two decades after Henry and Mary Cotinham exchanged

vows at Wesley Chapel, the pair had successful y established their

own self-sustained lives apart from the old Cot ingham plantation.

They and many of the other former slaves who had banded together

with Scipio and lived in proximity at the crossroads of Six Mile

eventual y moved into the set lement at Brier eld, the remnants of

the town surrounding the old furnaces where Scipio had worked as

a slave and a freedman and the location of a basic school for black

children.

The Cot ingham slaves scratched out a tenuous self-reliant life.

But the years did not pass easily. Mary's increase, as Elisha

Cot ingham had cal ed the future o spring of the slave girl Francis

when he gave her away in 1852, had been great, but leavened with

pain and sorrow. She carried nine children to birth. Only six

survived early childhood. Cooney the lit le freedom baby who had

arrived with such expectation, was not among them.

The last of Henry and Mary's children, a fourth boy, came in May

of 1886. Henry cal ed him Green, the same name as Henry's

mulat o uncle born on Elisha Cot ingham's plantation more than

fifty years earlier.

Beyond the confines of the family's strained domesticity, lit le else

was evolving in the way that Henry and Mary and mil ions of other

black southerners, had imagined at the dawn of freedom.

As Green grew into school age and then adolescence, the family

increasingly felt the repercussions of two convulsive crescendos

building toward a climax early in the next century. First was the

progressively more overt e ort to obliterate al manner of black

independence and civic participation in the South—the e ective

reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and

reversal of the guarantees of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and

Fifteenth amendments. Then came a fevered movement to fol ow

the great American territorial expansions of the nineteenth century

with an era of unprecedented government-engineered social and

economic uplift almost whol y reserved for whites. The two

campaigns arrived like successive storms on a shore—the rst

violent wave smashing any creation of man, the second scouring

what had been, scat ering the remains, and saturating the soil with

salt.

The totality of the destruction to be wrought on American blacks

was underscored by a remarkable and lit le acknowledged facet of

southern life in the nal two decades of the 1800s. African

Americans, by the most critical economic measures, were not

signi cantly disadvantaged in comparison to the great mass of poor

whites that surrounded them in the South. Of 4.4 mil ion black

southerners, poverty was abject and daunting. But mil ions of white

southerners shared the same plight. And while more than half of

southern blacks—about 2.5 mil ion—could not read, there were 1.3

mil ion whites among their neighbors who also were il iterate.

The prolonged economic inferiority and social subjugation of

African Americans that was to be ubiquitous in much of the next

century was not a conclusion preordained by the traditions of

antebel um slavery.

Indeed, optimism and an expansive sense of opportunity

pervaded black life in the years surrounding Green Cot enham's

birth in 1886. African Americans stil felt strongly that they were on

the cusp of authentic integration into mainstream American life.

Inspired by the moral force of the Civil War victory and the

pronouncements of evangelical uplift, self-reliance, and personal

improvement o ered by an army of black pastors and statesmen of

abolition such as Frederick Douglass, and soon Booker T

Washington, black Americans were poised to assimilate ful y into

American society. Already, African Americans were seeing concrete

dividends from the black public schools established during

dividends from the black public schools established during

Reconstruction.

The chal enges of freedom's aftermath remained surmountable,

and the United States, just beginning to emerge as a truly modern

nation, was embarking upon an unparal eled period of strategic

social uplift. Blacks and poor whites alike were ready to exploit the

opportunities of what would become a fty-year campaign by

federal and state governments to dramatical y elevate the horizons

of tens of mil ions of Americans living in crude frontier towns,

urban tenements, and the isolation of remote rural farms.

By World War I , mil ions of white southerners had been raised

from profound poverty, il iteracy, and ignorance to at least modest

middle-class status. Free public schools, consistent medical care,

passable roads, clean tap water, electricity, even the concept of

regular hourly wage work—al stil rarities across the South and

much of the rest of the nation at the dusk of the nineteenth century

—were promulgated upon mil ions of the most dispossessed of

Americans with a speed and e cacy that in hindsight made the

Great Society initiatives of the 1960s appear timid and indolent.

Even as southern whites rampaged violently and blacks su ered a

grinding series of legal and political reverses, African American

men continued to save meager funds to buy farms, mules, and

plows. Black land ownership surged. New communities were

established. Additional schools were opened against extraordinary

odds. Most African Americans were resigned to the reality that

whites would hold a dominant position in southern society, but

found it incomprehensible that they and their descendants might be

relegated again to a permanent, inferior social and legal position.

Many, probably a majority, were reconciled to the likelihood of

second-class citizenship. But, as argued by Booker T. Washington,

they saw this status as a way station to ful participation in society

—a time to build economical y and overcome the most obvious

vestiges of slavery. Tens of thousands of blacks continued to

exercise their vote, and a not insigni cant number of white leaders

stil accepted, even if reluctantly, that the equal citizenship of

former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal

former slaves could not be constitutional y revoked. The legal

construct of separate-but-equal segregated government services—

which would de ne the long era of Jim Crow in the twentieth

century—had not yet been clearly established. Even the practice of

identifying in government records every citizen as either "Negro" or

"White"—a nearly obsessive American compulsion by early in the

next century—in many areas had not yet become routine.

But the succeeding years would come as if the masses of

povertystricken whites and blacks were twin siblings of a parent

indulgent to one and venomous to the other. A new national white

consensus began to coalesce against African Americans with

shocking force and speed. The general white public, the national

leadership of the Republican Party, and the federal government on

every level were arriving at the conclusion that African Americans

did not merit citizenship and that their freedom was not valuable

enough to justify the con icts they engendered among whites. A

growing body of whites across the nation concluded that blacks

were not worth the cost of imposing a racial morality that few in

any region genuinely shared. As early as 1876, President Ulysses S.

Grant, commander of the Union army of liberation, conceded to

members of his cabinet that the Fifteenth Amendment, giving freed

slaves the right to vote, had been a mistake: "It had done the Negro

no good, and had been a hindrance to the South, and by no means a

political advantage to the North."1 "The long controversy over the

black man seems to have reached a nality," wrote the Chicago

Tribune, approvingly. Added The Nation: "The Negro wil

disappear from the eld of national politics. Henceforth, the nation,

as a nation, wil have nothing more to do with him."2 That the

parent had once sacri ced enormously to rescue the less favored

child only made its abandonment deeply more bit er.

By the end of the 1940s, when Green Cot enham might have been

easing toward a workman's retirement, it was only his white peers

who approached old age as the rst American generation with

social y guaranteed security. Emerging among the children and

grandchildren of those whites was a level of modest wealth,

educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to

educational at ainment, and personal achievement unimaginable to

anyone in the South of 1886. For the rst time in U.S. history, a

geographical y broad and stable national middle class had evolved

—an anchor of sustained wealth and shared values that would

sculpt American life through the end of the twentieth century. But it

would be defined in white-only terms.

The South was in the midst of an economic and cultural convulsion,

one that should have o ered an opening for a radical rede nition

of the roles of blacks and whites in American life. A terrible

depression in the 1870s had nal y eased as the South began to

emerge from economic ruin. In the disputed presidential election of

1876, white southern political leaders leveraged the electoral

col ege system to rob the winner of a huge majority of the popular

vote, Samuel J. Tilden, of the White House. In return, the Congress

and the administration of the fraudulent new Republican president,

Rutherford B. Hayes, final y removed the last Union troops from the

South and ended a decade of federal occupation of the region.3 An

era of southern economic revitalization appeared to be at hand. In

1886, Henry Grady the dynamic young editor of the Atlanta

Constitution, famously declared the creation of a "New South"—one

in which industrialism would replace agriculture and in which the

con icts of region and race that had paralyzed the nation for more

than twenty-five years were at an end.

In some places, the economic evolution was truly

phantasmagoric. In 1880, large portions of Alabama remained as

sparsely populated as the newest western territories of the United

States. Most of the state averaged fewer than twenty residents per

square mile. A decade later, nearly al of Alabama was as thickly

populated as most states to the east.

Birmingham il ustrated the tectonic forces at work in U.S. society

more than any other place. The booming city erupted out of

abandoned forest in the 1870s and suddenly became a national

center for the making of iron and steel. As coal production in

Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000

Alabama surged from 10,000 tons in the early 1870s to 400,000

tons in 1881, the city built thousands of new homes, laid streets,

instal ed the infrastructure of a major capital, and opened schools,

churches, and col eges. Je erson County, center of the boom, nearly

quadrupled from fewer than 25,000 residents in 1880 to nearly

90,000 ten years later. By 1900, the number approached 150,000.4

The entire U.S. economy was surging with industrial fervor,

generating a ravenous appetite for Alabama's coal and iron ore.

Wal Street nanciers joined with the South's new generation of

industrialists, men such as Col. James W Sloss, James

DeBardeleben, and Truman Aldrich, to aggressively exploit the

deposits of iron ore and apparently limitless seams of coal that

riddled the Appalachian foothil s of northern Alabama. In 1878,

Sloss— one of the original lessors of Alabama prisoners sixteen

years earlier— DeBardeleben, and Aldrich formed the Prat Coal

and Coke Co., and took over what would become the underground

behemoth known as Prat Mines.

Recognizing the vast potential of the mineral deposits, the

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. soon moved its center of

operations from Nashvil e to the coal elds of Alabama. The coming

economic boom, unprecedented in the South, would require

thousands of men, working deep in the earth, in a never-stopping

excavation.

In 1886, Sloss sold his massive Birmingham furnace complex to a

group of New York-backed investors. A year later, with additional

nancial backing from the North, the new owners formed a

corporation that would come to be known as Sloss-She eld Iron

and Steel Company. The corporation quickly purchased the

territory and mining operation at Coalburg owned by John Milner.

Production boomed. The crude mines and simple furnaces of Bibb

County now paled in the glow of this industrial revolution. The old

shafts and digs were being abandoned. The work they represented

to families such as the black Cot inghams melted away. Word

spread that soon there would be no work except in the new city

spread that soon there would be no work except in the new city

exploding less than fty miles away— Birmingham. The family's

center was slipping too. Sometime in the 1880s the old slave

Scipio, the man who had carved a world from the wilderness, had

fathered and grandfathered so many in slavery but de antly never

forgot en his African roots, died at Brierfield.

The furnaces near Six Mile, where Scipio, Henry, and their clan

had sustained a measure of economic independence, ceased

operations. Only the families of grandson Henry and his much

younger half-brother Elbert remained in the community. Most of the

former Cot ingham slaves and their descendants, many now using

the more phonetical y correct names Cot inham or Cot enham, had

already been pul ed toward the lure of activity and wealth of

Birmingham. Huge numbers of other poor blacks and whites from

across the South were pouring into the city. Henry and Mary could

not resist the inexorable current of the new era, tugging them

toward the bulging, smoky new metropolis.

Yet already, the opportunity for the rise of new industries to open

substantial new doors for black citizenship and economic

advancement was being ignored. Even black leaders such as Booker

T. Washington were urging blacks to accept a deferential, second-

class position in American society, in return for less racial violence

by whites. African Americans increasingly found themselves trapped

between the accommodationist retreat of Washington and the

hol ow claims of harmony and goodwil by white men such as

Henry Grady

Few companies riding the southern boom saw any value in

integrating black workers into their expanding enterprises. African

Americans’ value in the new order was greatest as a defense against

unions at empting to organize free workers—especial y in

Alabama's coal elds. The utility of forced labor as a bulwark

against disruptions of the South's biggest enterprises was obvious.

Coal mines, timber camps, and farms worked by imprisoned men

couldn't be shut down by strikers, or have wages driven up by the

couldn't be shut down by strikers, or have wages driven up by the

demands of free men. The new slave labor provided an ideal

captive workforce: cheap, usual y docile, unable to organize, and

always available when free laborers refused to work.

By the end of the 1880s, at least ten thousand black men were

slaving in forced labor mines, elds, and work camps in the

formerly Confederate states.5 The resubjugation of black labor was

a lucrative enterprise, and critical to the industrialists and

entrepreneurial farmers amassing capital and land.

In Georgia, near the town of Athens, former state senator James

M. Smith held hundreds of debt slaves on a farm that stretched

thirty miles from the town he named after himself: Smithonia. In

the post-Civil War economy, Smith nurtured a smal farm into the

state's largest plantation. He became a major buyer of convicts soon

after Georgia's Reconstruction government was toppled by a

campaign of voter fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence.

On thousands of acres, he raised cot on, corn, sorghum, and

timber, and operated smal factories.6 For workers he relied on an

army of terri ed convict slaves, including many African Americans

he had owned before the war or their descendants. John Hil , a

former slave who said his relatives had been held at Smithonia for

decades after the end of slavery, described the farm in an interview

given in the 1930s: "He had what they cal ed chain-gang slaves. He

paid them out of jail for them to work for him," Hil recounted. "He

let them have money al the time so they didn't never get out of

debt with him. They had to stay there and work al the time, and if

they didn't work, he had them beat."

If workers tried to ee, Smith relied on deputy sheri s to

recapture them and his own overseers to in ict brutal punishments.

"They had dogs to trail them with so they always got caught, and

then the whipping boss beat them almost to death," Hil said. "It

was awful to hear them hol ering and begging for mercy. If they

hol ered ‘Lord have mercy!’ Marse Jim didn't hear them, but if they

cried, ‘Marse Jim have mercy!’ then he made them stop the beating.

He say, ‘The Lord rule Heaven, but Jim Smith ruled the earth.’ "7

He say, ‘The Lord rule Heaven, but Jim Smith ruled the earth.’ "

Another former governor and U.S. senator of Georgia, Joseph E.

Brown, worked hundreds of black forced laborers in his coal mines

in the northern mountains of his state. Other slave laborers helped

rebuild Brown's iron furnaces that had been destroyed by Union

troops in the Civil War. In North Carolina, the tracks of the critical,

state-owned Western & Atlantic Railroad were being laid by huge

gangs of black men compel ed by sheri s to work for the company.

In Louisiana and Mississippi, thousands of impoverished African

Americans were building levees and working massive cot on

plantations under the lash.

In Atlanta, an expert in the prewar use of slaves to build

railroads, John T Grant, and his son Wil iam Grant leased nearly

four hundred of Georgia's state and county convicts to perform the

extraordinarily harsh work of building a seventy-one-mile railway

line between the towns of Macon and Augusta. Despite reports of

terrible abuse and high mortality among the forced laborers, the

business—Grant, Alexander & Company—soon control ed nearly al

of Georgia's prisoners. Though the Civil War was nearly a decade

past, Grant, Alexander was soon laying track on projects across the

state—al of it performed with slave labor.8

Meanwhile, John Grant's railroad building partner from before

the war, Col. Lemuel P. Grant, was developing his extensive

landholdings into the city's rst major suburb, cal ed Grant Park.

The colonel, an engineer and railroad builder unrelated to John

Grant, had directed construction of the extensive forti cations

surrounding Atlanta during the Civil War using slave labor. The

neighborhood surrounded the growing city's rst substantial green

space, a Frederick Law Olmsted rm-designed park that would

permanently bear the colonel's name. Nearby, Joel Hurt—one of

the state's wealthiest men and a major leaseholder of convicts for

his Georgia Iron and Coal Company—was building another of the

city's finest residential enclaves.

The bricks used to pave the streets and line the sidewalks of these

ourishing new Victorian areas were sold in lots of a mil ion to the

Atlanta City Council by former mayor James W. English. His brick-

Atlanta City Council by former mayor James W. English. His brick-

making concern, Chat ahoochee Brick Co., would by the end of the

century churn out 300,000 hot red rectangles of hardened clay every

day—al made by forced laborers. On Sunday afternoons, white

men frequently met in the yard of the English brick factory to swap

or buy black men, lit le changed from the slave markets of a half

century earlier.9

As leases for forced laborers proliferated across the South, whites

re-adopted a sense of ownership reminiscent of antebel um days.

After the death of a partner in Stevens Bros. & Co., a pot ery factory

in Georgia's Baldwin County, in 1890, an auction was held to sel

o al the assets. The newspaper advertisement for the sale could

just as wel have been from the world of Elisha Cot ingham in the

1850s. "Wil be sold … to the highest bidder …Eleven mules, 1

horse, 1 bul , 800 bushels of corn …lease of 30 convicts with

various terms to serve, 1 grist mil ."10

Thousands more forced laborers slaved on extraordinarily

pro table farms stretching across the old slavery belt of Texas,

where prisoners were chained at the neck and held in boxcars at

night. Working from sunup to sundown, they survived on "food

buzzards would not eat" and su ered sadistic punishments.

Hundreds of men charged with pet y crimes were simply worked to

death and then buried unceremoniously wherever they fel . To

escape that fate, Texas convicts mimicked the desperate tactics of

slaves before them—slicing their heel strings, hacking o their

hands, or gouging out their eyes. A few chronicled their nightmares

in the writ en word. I spent "the prime of my life …as a slave,"

exclaimed one prisoner, while another lamented that he was

"buried alive …dead to the world."11

Speaking to a gathering of prominent black writers and thinkers

on the twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in

1883, Frederick Douglass, the aging black leader of pre-Civil War

years, lamented that despite the bloody sacri ce of black soldiers in

the ght for liberation, "in al relations of life and death, we are

met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us

met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us

accommodation …excludes our children from schools …compels us

to pursue only such labor as wil bring us the least reward."12

A few months later in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that

the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the one federal law forcing whites to

comply with the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

amendments—awarding voting and legal rights to blacks—could be

enforced only under the most rare circumstances. Civil rights was a

local, not federal issue, the court found.

The e ect was to open the oodgates for laws throughout the

South speci cal y aimed at eliminating those new rights for former

slaves and their descendants. Justice John Marshal Harlan, the only

member of the court to oppose the opinion, publicly worried that

the amendments representing the ideals of equality and freedom

articulated by Lincoln in the Get ysburg Address, as wel as the

arching moral justi cation for the carnage of the Civil War, had

been renounced.

Douglass, despondent, wrote to an acquaintance: "We have been

…gruesomely wounded …in the house of our friends."13 In the

wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government adopted

as policy that al egations of continuing slavery were mat ers whose

prosecution should be left to local authorities only—a de facto

acceptance that white southerners could do as they wished with the

black people in their midst.

The signi cance of those legal and political developments can

hardly be overstated. The era of Reconstruction and black political

control on any statewide level in the South had ended fteen years

earlier, but in the early 1880s, large numbers of African Americans

continued to vote, particularly in majority-black cot on-growing

counties. As a result, even deeply racist white politicians were

compel ed to temper—or at least consider—their rhetoric and

positions with racial implications. Funding for public schools

remained equal y apportioned to black and white children, and

African Americans in many places maintained at least some level of

access to local courts and other government services. But a

access to local courts and other government services. But a

declaration by the country's highest courts that the federal

government could not force states to comply with the constitutional

requirement of the equal treatment of citizens, regardless of race,

opened a torrent of repression.

• •

In 1888, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad entered into its rst

contract with the state of Alabama to lease convicts into the Prat

Mines. The big company took over operations from J. W. Comer,

who had long held thousands of forced laborers in his farm elds

and mines. After acquiring Prat Mines, the Tennessee company

competed for the lease on al state prisoners in an auction against

companies representing nearly every major economic gure in

Alabama or the South. Other bidders included Sloss-She eld,

several companies control ed by Milner, and a partnership between

DeBardeleben and Comer's sometime associate, Lowndes County

planter Wil iam D. McCurdy Within ve years, more than one

thousand men, nearly al of them black, were working under the

whip at the Prat Mines, and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in

ef ect owned al state convicts for the next quarter century.

Fueled by access to this large pool of forced laborers and fresh

investment from New York, the company began a dramatic

expansion. By the end of 1889, there were eight major mine

openings in the Prat complex, producing 1.1 mil ion tons of coal in

that year alone—a nearly 25 percent increase over the prior year.

Each shaft descended several hundred feet, and then branched into

passageways fol owing a seam of coal. O the passageways, miners

excavated "rooms," leaving columns of coal at speci c intervals to

hold up the roof of the mine. A few men returned to the same

room each day, removing more coal using varying combinations of

picks, levers, dynamite, and hydraulic jackhammers. The coal was

loaded into smal cars running on narrow gauge rails through the

passageways back to the bot om of the main shaft, where the cars

were consolidated into larger wagons. There, a mechanized hoist,

powered by a steam engine on the surface, hauled the wagons out

powered by a steam engine on the surface, hauled the wagons out

into daylight.

The coal was pul ed to the "tipple," a huge wooden structure atop

a railroad trestle, and tipped. The coal was dumped into much

larger railroad cars waiting below. A steam locomotive hauled the

trainload from there to one of several nearby sites where the

company operated more than eight hundred ovens to produce the

dense-carbon coke used as fuel by the growing number of steel and

iron furnaces in and around Birmingham. In addition to nearly one

thousand forced prison laborers regularly on hand, the company

soon employed another two thousand free miners, the majority of

whom were also black, many of them former convicts.14

Forced laborers were priced depending on their health and their

ability to dig coal. Under state rules, a " rst-class" prisoner had to

cut and load into mine cars four tons of coal a day to avoid being

whipped. The weakest inmates, labeled "fourth-class" or "dead

hands," were required to produce at least one ton a day. A rst-class

state convict cost a company $18.50 a month, according to a convict

board nancial report. A dead hand cost $9. The leasing of convicts

soon was generating in excess of $120,000 a year for the state of

Alabama, an extraordinary sum for a state whose total general tax

revenue—and budget—at the time barely exceeded $1 mil ion.

To boosters of southern industry, the rapidly expanding

operations at Prat Mines were the ful l ment of a once impossible

fantasy. The success not only de ed caricatures of the slumbering

rural South, but actively chal enged a citadel of northern capitalism.

"Nothing has ever been done in the South that looks so much like

being a real competitor of Pennsylvania in the iron business,"

boasted the Nashvil e Union.15

In 1889, the Prat Mines moved their prisoners into new barracks

in the company's wooden stockade at the Shaft No. 1 mine. In a

report to the governor, mine inspectors said the prison, designed to

hold 480 men, was "as neat and clean as …the best regulated

hotels" and that "the drinking water is ltered and in warm weather

is cooled with ice."16 A second prison was opened at Slope No. 2

is cooled with ice." A second prison was opened at Slope No. 2

later in 1889, nearly doubling the number of convicts the company

could house. The company claimed to have spent $60,000 building

the structures and surrounding compound.

For the men beneath the surface, the view was very di erent. Prat

Mines was a scene of nightmarish human su ering and brutal

retaliation. Subjected to squalid living conditions, poor medical

treatment, scant food, and frequent oggings, hundreds died—the

victims of mine explosions, rock fal s, res, neglect, and, most

commonly, recurring outbreaks of disease. Many more left the

mines and work camps alive but physical y shat ered. If unclaimed

by relatives, those who died were quickly interred in crude burial

places adjacent to the prison camps or incinerated in one of the

company's coke ovens.

In hushed tones, survivors recounted to friends and relatives how

slave miners labored under ghastly conditions, working in pools of

putrid water that seeped out of the rock or leaked from equipment

used to soften the coal. The seepage was contaminated by mineral

residues and the prisoners’ own body waste, but was often the only

water available to drink. The contaminated seepage frequently

triggered waves of dysentery, a painful malady caused by drinking

water contaminated with human waste. Dysentery causes

in ammation of the large intestines, terrible stomach pains, and

uncontrol able diarrhea that leads to severe dehydration and,

ultimately for many, death. Dozens died each year during epidemics

of diarrhea and intestinal sickness that swept through the mines

with grim regularity, according to death registries maintained at

some mines. Gas from the miners’ headlamps and smoke from

blasts of dynamite and gunpowder choked the air. Deadly methane,

which occurs natural y in seams of coal, accumulated in poorly

ventilated sections of mines. An 1890 convict inspector described

"more sickness" at the Prat Mines "than any other place."17

An unintended distinction between antebel um slavery and the

new forced labor system became increasingly clear—and disastrous

new forced labor system became increasingly clear—and disastrous

for the men captured into it. Slaves of the earlier era were at least

minimal y insulated from physical harm by their intrinsic nancial

value. Their owners could borrow money with slaves as col ateral,

pay debts with them, sel them at a pro t, or extend the investment

through production of more slave children. But the convicts of the

new system were of value only as long as their sentences or

physical strength lasted. If they died while in custody, there was no

nancial penalty to the company leasing them. Another black

laborer would always be available from the state or a sheri . There

was no compel ing reason not to tax these convicts to their absolute

physiological limits.

The private guards who sta ed the slave labor mines and camps

were vulgar, untrained, and often inebriated. Placed under the

complete control of the companies and businessmen who acquired

them, the laborers su ered intense physical abuse and the

deprivation of food, clothing, medical care, and other basic human

needs. Guards, rarely supervised, hung men by their thumbs or

ankles as punishment. Convict slaves were whipped for failure to

work at the rate demanded by their overseers, commonly receiving

as many as sixty or seventy lashes at a time. Accounts of men or

women lashed until skin literal y fel from their backs were not

uncommon. Convicts who at empted repeated escapes were subject

to many of the same torturous restraints as their slave forebears—

shackles, bal s and chains, or objects riveted to iron cu s or col ars

to limit their mobility. A convict recaptured after escaping a labor

camp in Muscogee County, Georgia, had a steel ring placed around

his neck to which "was xed a spike, curling inward, so that rapid

running was impossible."18

Underfed and overworked convicts traveled from the Prat Mines

stockade to the mine through an underground manway before dawn

each day, and back through the same tunnel after dark. Only on

Sundays, when mining ceased for a day, would the prisoners see

sunlight. An 1889 report by Alabama legislators reported an

"immense amount of whipping" of inmates at Prat and other prison

mines.

mines.

During 1888 and 1889, seven of the black laborers forced into the

Slope No. 2 mine were children under the age of ten. Prison

inspection reports indicated that among nearly 1,100 men brought

there, only one third could read. Fewer than forty had prior

criminal records. Of the 116 prisoners who died, a large number

were teenagers.

The o cial registry of casualties listed the death of twelve-year-

old Arthur Easter in March 1888 for unknown reasons. Fifteen-year-

old George Wolfork, a waiter before being seized into the prison,

died in May 1888 of typhoid after rst being stabbed in the arm.

Malachi Coleman, a sixteen-year-old trained as a bricklayer, serving

a four-month term, died in May after having his "leg mashed."

Luther Metcalf, sixteen years old, died of unknown causes in

October. John Cot on expired in November, six weeks after arrival.

The cause of death was listed as "arm o below shoulder." Other

common causes of death from just one page of the registry

included: "yel ow fever; abscess lower jaw; shot in neck; shot in

shoulder and finger; right eye out; skul fractured."19

Volatile mixtures of fumes or combinations of "afterdamp"—air

with dangerously elevated levels of carbon monoxide and other

gases—and coal dust col ected in the poorly ventilated shafts,

sometimes igniting to cause huge explosions. Gas ignited in Shaft

No. 1, kil ing eleven men in one 1891 incident, al but one of

whom were forced workers. At other times, gas did not explode but

began burning as it passed out of the coal—igniting the seam itself

and turning the mine passage into a tunnel of literal y aming

rock.20 Some res could only be extinguished by ooding the mine

shafts entirely.

Under such execrable conditions, prisoners at empted

increasingly brazen escapes, with almost monthly frequency. More

than once, convicts themselves at empted to set re to the mine in

hopes of breaking free during the ensuing melee. Invariably,

escapees or others died in the plots. The company reported one

such breakout in May of 1890, claiming that three white prisoners

such breakout in May of 1890, claiming that three white prisoners

and one black convict staged a re alarm in the middle of the night.

"In the terror and confusion, while the of icers were trying to restore

quiet," the four broke free of the stockade, guards said. One

prisoner remained free for some time; a second was mortal y shot.

Two others— Bob Crawford and Noah Marks—were immediately

recaptured, most likely by the prison's bloodhounds.21

In the meantime, the pent-up hostilities of the stockade erupted

into riot. "It became necessary for us to adopt some prompt and

severe measures to reduce the insubordinates to subjection. But

everything was set led in a short time," read the company report. It

is not di cult to imagine what those measures were. Mine o cials

said Crawford, a white man from outside the South, "commit ed

suicide on the day afterwards."22

Conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg slave camp were even

worse than at the Prat Mines. Several hundred prisoners purchased

from judges and sheri s in twenty-three Alabama counties—

including the Cot ingham homeplace of Bibb—had been acquired

along with the purchase of the mines. In 1889, an epidemic of

measles and dysentery swept through the men.

"The sickness hung on as if loathe to give up its hold upon this

unfortunate place," wrote one state inspector. He cal ed the place

"disastrous." Of 648 forced laborers at the mine in 1888 and 1889,

34 percent did not survive. At the Prat Mines, 18 percent died. Al

but a handful were black.23 Another visitor in the same period

wrote the Alabama governor that every slave worker who had been

in the mine for at least six months had contracted dysentery. He

cal ed the death rate "enormous, frightful, astonishing."24

Convicts in Sloss-She eld's prison compound reached the mine

b y shu ing through a long, low-ceilinged shaft extending from

inside the wal s of their prison compound.25 A special commit ee

of the Alabama legislature studying the convict system in 1889

reported that "many convicts in the coal mines …have not seen the

sun shine for months." In the rst two weeks of June of that year,

sun shine for months." In the rst two weeks of June of that year,

137 floggings were given to the 165 forced laborers at the mine.26

Conditions were so demoralizing at the Coalburg mine, the

convicts so beaten and bedraggled, that laborers did not even

choose to at end church services on Sundays—the one regular

diversion permit ed forced workers. "There are but few of the

convicts that manifest any interest in any kind of religious services,"

wrote Evan Nicholson, a chaplain at the camp in 1890.27

The horror of the mortality rates and living conditions was

underscored by the triviality of the al eged o enses for which

hundreds of men were being held. At the end of the 1880s,

thousands of black men across the South were imprisoned in work

camps only for violations of the new racial codes, completely

subjective crimes, or no demonstrable crime at al . Among the

"felons" sold to the Prat Mines in 1890, seven men were working

for the crime of bigamy, four for homosexuality, and six for

miscegenation—an o ense almost solely prosecuted against black

men who engaged in sex with white women. Many others had been

arrested and sold for ostensible crimes that explicitly targeted

blacks’ assertions of their new civil rights: two for "il egal voting"

and eleven on a conviction for "false pretense," the euphemism for

new laws aimed at preventing black men from leaving the employ

of a white farmer before the end of a crop season.28

The application of laws writ en to criminalize black life was even

more transparent in the prisoners convicted of misdemeanors in the

county courts. Among county convicts in the mines, the crimes of

eight were listed as "not given." There were twenty-four black men

digging coal for using "obscene language," ninety-four for the

al eged theft of items valued at just a few dol ars, thirteen for

sel ing whiskey, ve for "violating contract" with a white employer,

seven for vagrancy two for "sel ing cot on after sun set"—a statute

passed to prevent black farmers from sel ing their crops to anyone

other than the white property owner with whom they share-

cropped—forty-six for carrying a concealed weapon, three for

bastardy, nineteen for gambling, twenty-four for false pretense.

bastardy, nineteen for gambling, twenty-four for false pretense.

Through the enforcement of these openly hostile statutes, thousands

of other free blacks realized that they could be secure only if they

agreed to come under the control of a white landowner or

employer. By the end of 1890, the new slavery had generated

nearly $4 mil ion, in current terms, for the state of Alabama over

the previous two years.29

By then, local sheri s, deputies, and some court o cials also

derived most of their compensation from fees charged to convicts

for each step in their own arrest, conviction, and shipment to a

private company. The mechanisms of the new slavery reached

another level of re nement, as trading networks for the sale and

distribution of blacks emerged over wide areas. Sheri s were now

incentivized to arrest and obtain convictions of as many people as

possible—regardless of their true guilt or whether a crime had been

commit ed at al . Ever larger numbers of other whites also began to

seek their own slice of the growing pro ts generated by the trade in

compulsory black labor.

"It is plain that [prisoners] are fed as cheaply as possible in order

that the sheri s may have wide margin of pro t," wrote one jail

inspector, Dr. C. F. Bush. "I have had several sheri s to admit to me

that, without pro t from the feed bil , they would not have the

of ice, as it was one of their greatest sources of revenue."

Another o cial said the system "legalized graft" and "resulted in

starvation." A third prison doctor wrote that men held in the county

jails routinely "made their appearance pale, weak and anemic, and

the bodies covered with ulcers due to have been con ned in vermin

ridden, insanitary and poorly ventilated jails and the lack of a

suf icient amount of…food."30

In J. W. Comer's remote home territory, Barbour County, in the

cot on country of southern Alabama, nearly seven hundred men

were leased between June 1891 and November 1903, most for $6 a

month, each logged elegantly into a leather-bound Convict Record.

Most were sent to mines operated by Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad or Sloss-Shef ield.31

Railroad or Sloss-Shef ield.

Steady streams of telegrams and let ers radiated from sheri s,

labor agents, and company executives in a furious search for

additional laborers or to induce men in positions of pet y power to

arrest ever more men under any circumstances. O ers to bring in a

particular black man for sale or pleading that certain African

Americans be seized for sale poured into the o ce of Shelby

County sheri Lewis T Grant in 1891. G. Bridges, an agent of the

Louisvil e & Nashvil e Railroad, wrote Grant on February 24,

complaining about the number of itinerant men near the station in

the town of Calera, one stop away from Columbiana. "We are

su ering from a surplus of loa ng negroes and white tramps, and

car breaking and pilfering is frequently indulged in…. Perhaps you

might have a lot of them arrested for trespassing on the property of

the Railroad Co."32

Bridges was less than thril ed when Sheri Grant suggested that

the railroad pay him for the arrest of the unwanted men. "Thank

you for the o er of services you so kindly make," the railroad man

responded a day later. He suggested that instead the sheri 's deputy

be sent out. "Would it not be more convenient and expeditious, to

cal on him to arrest trespassers?" These were business transactions,

not law enforcement.33

Escambia County sheri James McMil an wrote on March 13

asking Grant to watch out for a seventeen-year-old "yel ow" boy and

an accompanying woman with a lit le girl. "Please get them up for

me and if they fail to make bond which I expect they wil I wil

come or send after them."

Je erson County sheri P. J. Rogers telegrammed on April 9 to

"look out for Andrew Cubes a yel ow negro about 22 years old who

escaped from guards at Calera last night while in transit to our

place from Selma, $50 reward."34

Sloss-She eld sent preprinted l -in-the-blank postcards to

sheri s in every county, announcing the escape of convicts and the

reward placed on their head. "$25 REWARD!" read the card mailed

on April 21, 1891, seeking 175-pound Dan Homer, a twenty-two-

on April 21, 1891, seeking 175-pound Dan Homer, a twenty-two-

year-old county convict with dark black skin, black whiskers, and

scars on his left thumb and left hand.35

Often the sheri s’ correspondence re ected a simple gamble by

some treacherous white man that if he pointed out a promising

black laborer, a sheri or deputy would nd a reason to arrest him

and share the nancial bene ts. "There is a negro up there at the

Public Works by the name of Peter McFarland …he is a ginger cake

color Black hair Black eyes hair cut close …he is wanted for

Burglary if you wil arrest him and put him in jail. I wil give you

$10 …wire me at once if you get him," wrote F. E. Bur t , from

Selma, on May 26.

The next day, Calhoun County deputy sheri John Rowland

wrote Grant: "Is there a reward for one Wil Riddle wanted in your

county for disturbing public worship?"

W. B. Fulton of Pensacola, Florida, wrote the Shelby County

sheri on November 23, 1891, asking if a black man with the last

name of El iot had perhaps stabbed a man at the Shelby Iron

Works some years earlier. "Look into the mat er and see if there is

any Reward for him, and if so I wil bring him to you and divide

the Reward. I know where he is and can get him anytime. Hoping

to hear from you at your earliest convenience."36

A week later, a telegraph to Grant on November 29, 1891, from

the constable in Waverly Alabama, warned that he had arrested an

African American named Frank Hubbard but "wil not hold unless

there is an ample reward." Scores upon scores of such let ers—some

penned in re ned script of educated men, more often in the scrawl

of county brutes, sometimes crisp and terse telegrams—piled in

heaps in a drawer of the sheri 's wooden desk.37 Scat ered among

them were reminders from Je erson County's Sheri Rogers, who

later became general manager of convicts for the Tennessee Coal,

Iron & Railroad Co., to send along bil s and receipts related to the

transportation of prisoners from Columbiana to the Prat Mines—by

then the ultimate destination of nearly every one of the hundreds of

black men unfortunate enough to encounter Sherif Grant.38

black men unfortunate enough to encounter Sherif Grant.

The opportunities for abuse in these dealings were immense and

obvious. Blacks who fel into the disfavor of white o cials

anywhere in the South could be swept into the penal system on the

most super cial pretense. The ability of blacks to resist these

developments became more and more circumscribed.

The sudden rise of this new threat was shocking to blacks at a time

when thousands stil actively participated in southern political life.

But that too was soon under a new and corrosive at ack. In the

Alabama election of 1892, the political dynamics of the state were

cloaked in what appeared to be a clash of ideals between a new

populist rhetoric aimed at uniting agrarians and laborers against the

"Bourbon" al iance of plantation owners and industrialists who

control ed the Democratic Party—a theme echoing across the South.

The Alabama populists were led by gubernatorial candidate

Reuben Kolb. It was widely believed that his victory in the previous

election had been stolen in 1890, when Democrats stuf ed the bal ot

boxes with thousands of ostensible African American votes in

overwhelmingly black counties. The result had been the fraudulent

but irreversible coronation of Governor Thomas Goode Jones, a

former Confederate who a decade later would play a pivotal role

on the issue of continuing the South's new slavery.

In 1892, both Kolb and Jones ran for the governor's o ce again.

Kolb promised to support crop prices and regulate the abusive

railroad cartels that imposed high freight fees on farm goods being

shipped to market. Philosophical y, he had the support of new

activist black farmer's groups who shared the populist concerns

over laws and practices that abused poor people, sharecroppers,

and tenant farmers. In a nod to black voters, Kolb, the former state

agriculture secretary and a Confederate veteran as wel , also said he

opposed the practice of leasing convicts.

Governor Jones vowed to revive the state by encouraging the

explosive growth of Birmingham and continuing to help wealthy

cot on plantation owners in the state's predominantly black,

cot on plantation owners in the state's predominantly black,

southern counties. Whites were in turmoil over the choice, with

poorer hil country counties breaking for Kolb and whites in the

rich atlands once again supporting Jones. To win reelection, Jones

knew he had to once more pack the voting pol s with thousands of

black Republicans on his side. Despite their shared economic

interests with black sharecroppers and tenants, Kolb's poor-farmer

white fol owers responded to Jones's currying of African American

voters with the most shril white supremacist rhetoric.

Jones's conservative Democrat backers, including the state's major

newspapers, shamelessly turned the tables—accusing Kolb populists

of supporting black political rights and dubbing him the candidate

of the "nigger party." Kolb's supporters reacted with even more

odious anti-black invective. The South was tracing out the lines of

the violent racial ideology and vernacular that would consume it for

the next seventy-five years.

John Milner, the Alabama industrialist who had so aggressively

pushed for the state to adopt laws helping him l his mines with

forced black labor, published a pamphlet denouncing even the

vaguest suggestion of al owing black political rights.

Titled "WHITE MEN OF ALABAMA, STAND TOGETHER!," the

pamphlet blared: "It would be bet er … if left in the control of their

negroes, that Alabama …sink beneath the waves and be forever

lost."39

That was the real substance of the campaign. Most of the

philosophical clash between the two sides was a sham, as the South

was swept by the latest wave of white animosity toward African

Americans. Whites realized that the al ies of blacks in the North

appeared to be abandoning the former slaves. A time had come to

set le scores and relay the foundations for a society based on the

harshest racial divisions. Further inflaming the passions of 1892 was

the Federal Election Bil sponsored by Massachuset s representative

Henry Cabot Lodge. The act, known to opponents as the "Force

Bil ," mandated that black voting rights be protected in the South

through federal supervision of elections. Two years earlier, the

through federal supervision of elections. Two years earlier, the

measure was approved by the House of Representatives but failed

in the Senate. The new version raised the sensational specter of

reintroducing federal troops in the southern states to force

compliance.

In reality, the Force Bil was the last gasp of the dwindling

numbers of Civil War-era Republican idealists in Washington to

compel adherence to the mandates of the constitutional

amendments granting citizenship to African Americans. The

measure was doomed from introduction. But its consideration left

southern whites seething at the vision of another Union invasion

and a return of power to blacks. It spurred the push to eliminate

African American political activity once and for al . On election day

in Alabama, there was virtual y no doubt that Kolb outpol ed

Governor Jones. But once again, thousands upon thousands of

bal ots purportedly cast by blacks who clearly were no longer being

al owed to vote turned the balance for Jones. He was declared the

winner, after o cial returns showed 127,000 votes for Jones to the

chal enger's 116,000.

The reelection was fol owed by an astonishing surge of activity

against African Americans. The opening of the next session of the

state legislature marked the beginning of the nal push to end al

black political involvement, to consolidate the segregation codes

that would de ne the Jim Crow era, and to begin cut ing African

Americans out of the most important e orts of government to

improve public life. Legislators voted to join seven other southern

states that already mandated segregated seating for blacks and

whites on trains. Public education, a new but increasingly popular

government function, was the most critical target of the racial

at ack.

Whites had chafed at the notion of black education as long as

Africans had been imported to the United States. Instruction of

slaves was il egal in the antebel um South. After emancipation,

government-col ected property taxes were used to open new

schools for al children. Whites gawked at the schools opened for

blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations

blacks during Reconstruction—even the crude one-teacher variations

that predominated in the region. Per pupil spending on education

for black children and white children was essential y identical,

leading to wide resentment among whites—especial y in the cot on

plantation regions where whites owned the vast majority of land

and paid nearly al the taxes, but were enormously outnumbered by

African Americans in population. That "white taxes" were spent for

the education of black children, rather than solely their own, was

infuriating.

White leaders began to openly espouse that schools for blacks

were bad for the emerging new economic order. "Education would

spoil a good plow hand," opined a state legislator, J. L. M. Curry, in

a speech to the Alabama General Assembly.40 Most worrisome to

leading whites was that schooling il iterate blacks would encourage

"the upper branches of Negro society, the educated, the man who

after ascertaining his political rights, forced the way to assert

them."41

In the 1880s, the Alabama legislature at empted to enact laws

specifying that school funds would be apportioned on the basis of

which taxpayers contributed them: whites would fund white

schools, blacks would fund black schools. Federal courts quickly

declared that openly discriminatory scheme in violation of the

Fourteenth Amendment.

As the popularity of state-funded free public schools surged, the

friction caused by black education grew. The number of white

children at ending public schools in Alabama raced from 91,202 to

159,671 between the 1870s and late 1880s. At the same time, the

number of black pupils increased from 54,595 to 98,919. But the

amount of funding spent for every student was declining, and

at empts to raise taxes were doomed. Whites saw the money spent

in black schools as the only viable source of additional funds for

their own children.

In the legislative session of 1892, white leaders simply changed

the law so that school taxes were no longer distributed among al

schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of

schools in equal per pupil al otments. Instead, the total number of

students, white and black, would determine how much funding a

county or town received from the state. But it would be up to local

o cials to divide the money among schools "as they may deem just

and equitable." The author of the bil was hailed by another elected

o cial who said he "deserved a vote of thanks from the white

people of the state."42 The e ect on blacks was catastrophic.

Overnight, white schools came to receive the vast majority of al

funds for education. In one predominantly African American

county, the total budget for black teachers’ salaries in 1891 was

$6,545—in approximate parity with what was being spent per

student at white schools in the county. After turning over control of

funding to local o cials, black teacher salaries were slashed. Later

the length of the black school year was cut to just six months—

reducing costs and eliminating school as an excuse for African

American children not to work in the elds during planting and

harvest. Forty years later, the total salaries for teachers instructing

8,483 black children in the county had risen negligibly to just over

$8,000. The budget for white teachers, with fewer than two

thousand pupils, had climbed by a factor of almost 30, to nearly

$60,000.43

If any doubt remained about the intentions of southern whites in

1892, vigilante and mob violence soon dissolved it. More lynchings

of blacks occurred in the United States in 1892 than in any other

year—in excess of 250. Executions peaked in Alabama the

fol owing year, with the deaths of twenty-seven blacks.

At the same time, the region's biggest industrial concerns

continued to expand explosively. In December 1892, Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad bought outright the Cahaba Coal Mining

Company and its 44,000 acres of coal-rich property—some of it

extending to within a few miles of the old Cot ingham plantation in

Bibb County. In addition to the coal elds, the company acquired a

fteen-mile railroad, nearly ve hundred coke ovens, much of the

town of Blocton, and seven mines producing up to three thousand

tons of coal a day44 The number of men forced into Alabama slave

tons of coal a day The number of men forced into Alabama slave

mines surged with the growth, swel ing by half to 1,200 in 1892

from 845 just three years earlier.

As labor strife surged in the early 1890s, company o cials

privately worked on plans to shift even more of the company's

operations to captive forced laborers. One Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad o cial visiting Montgomery wrote to the superintendent

of the Prat Mines: "[T]he probability is we wil have to arrange to

take care of a great many more convicts."45

On the fourteenth day of February 1893, a new era opened for

the black men of Shelby County—where Green Cot enham would

be arrested fteen years later. Four men were loaded onto the

Birmingham train, headed to the new buyer of Shelby's prisoners.

Ben Alston, Charles Garnes, and Issac Mosely had each been

convicted of assault six weeks earlier. Henry Nelson was arrested

the previous day for using "abusive language in the presence of a

female"—a phony charge available for arresting "impudent" black

men. Scratched into the record of prisoners was the same entry for

al four men, a destination so new that the jailer hadn't yet learned

to spel it: "sent to prats mines."46

Voices of opposition to what was happening in the South were

dying. Some reform-minded activists protested the physical abuses

of prison labor, but the explicitly racial aspect of the new forced

labor system was often largely unacknowledged. White southerners

responded with gal ing mendacity to the occasional criticism

expressed by northern newspapers. Many whites were thril ed by

the patina of legitimacy presented by Charles Darwin's new

concepts of human evolution, which were being twisted to o er a

genetic, seemingly objective rationale for black inferiority. The

dark-skinned race was capable of learning less, so blacks needed

fewer and smal er schools, according to this logic. Blacks could

work ef ectively only under threat of a whip.

In a speech to the National Prison Congress in Cincinnati, Ohio,

in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,

in October 1890, Alabama's new inspector of convicts, W. D. Lee,

cool y defended the appal ing conditions at the mines in Coalburg

and Prat City. Virtual y al criticism of Alabama's and the South's

forced labor system were "exaggerations" and "falsehoods," he said.

The prisons were clean, the prisoners wel fed and humanely

treated. The hounds used to track escapees were "nothing more than

the fox or deer hounds that have been used in the South for the

chase from time immemorial, trained to run the human track."

Never once had a dog injured a convict, Lee maintained.

Prisoners in Alabama received generous amounts of corn bread,

bacon, fresh meat, bread, co ee, and tobacco. "Hundreds of convicts

have been sent to the penitentiary with diseases of which they

would have died at home for want of medical at ention, who have

been cured and sent home, at the end of their terms, sound men,"

Lee continued.

He said he was morti ed by al egations that the prisoners were

underfed and overworked. "In some form or other I have had the

management and control of negroes ever since I came to the years

of discretion," Lee said. "In the days of slavery, I fed, clothed and

worked them, and since they became free, I have employed and

managed them on the plantation. I see what, as free men, they have

to eat and wear, and the houses they live in. And I assert here,

without fear of successful contradiction, that the negro convicts …

are bet er housed, bet er fed, bet er clothed, and receive bet er

medical care and treatment in sickness than do the majority of the

same class, as free men, in their homes."47

The truth was that African Americans were trapped in a catch-22

between the laws criminalizing the mores of black life and other

laws that e ectively barred them from assimilating into mainstream

white American society or improving their economic position.

Even ostensible friends of African Americans succumbed to the

increasingly mandatory dismissal of black intel ectual faculties. "The

population of our prisons is mostly a population of negroes. These

people are proverbial y weak, improvident, credulous—the victims

of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

of impulse and circumstances. Many of those in the prisons have

been guilty of only trivial o ense; and many of these o enses are

not in themselves criminal, or even immoral, but which have been

made penal simply by statutory enactment," wrote Jerome Cochran,

state health of icer, in 1892.

"It is the peculiar misfortune of the negro," Cochran continued,

"that his investment with the privileges of citizenship, and of the

elective franchise has also subjected him to the operation of laws

made by men for the government of white men—law which he

does not understand, and the moral obligations of which he is not

able to appreciate."48

In 1895, Thomas Parke, the health o cer for Je erson County,

investigated conditions at Sloss-She eld's Coalburg prison mine. He

found 1,926 prisoners at toil. Hundreds had been charged with

vagrancy gambling, carrying a concealed weapon, or other minor

o enses, he reported. In many cases, no speci c charges were

recorded at al . Dr. Parke observed that many were held for minor

infractions, ned $5 or $10, and, unable to pay, leased for twenty

days to Sloss-She eld to cover the ne. Most then had another year

or more tacked onto their sentences to cover fees owed to the

sherif , the clerk, and the witnesses involved in prosecuting them.

"The largest portion of the prisoners are sentenced for slight

o enses and sent to prison for want of money to pay the nes and

costs…. They are not criminals," Dr. Parke wrote in his formal

report.

Male prisoners were barracked in a primitive wood-plank prison

beside the putrid Five Mile Creek, near a row of coke ovens. The

miners spent nearly half of each twenty-four hours in the mine, six

days a week. The shaft was minimal y ventilated; coal cars were

pushed out of the earth by the miners themselves, rather than with

mechanized equipment. Medical care was dispensed occasional y

from a primitive shack; scores of miners worked with serious

il nesses, including untreated and open wounds in amed with

infected boils and pus. Parke's tal y of prisoners held at Coal-burg

in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

in 1895 included at least ve hundred workers not accounted for in

the state's o cial records at the time—indicating that hundreds of

laborers had been sold into the mine through extralegal systems.

More than a hundred forced laborers died at the mine during the

two years prior to Parke's visit.

The physician, even one burdened with intensely racist

perspectives, was shocked by the inhumanity. He asked whether "a

sovereign state can a ord to send her citizens, for slight o enses, to

a prison where, in the nature of things, a large number are

condemned to die."

Embarrassed by the publication of Parke's report, Sloss-She eld

commissioned the physician it paid to care for the forced laborers,

Dr. Judson Davie, to write a response. He claimed the extraordinary

rate of mortality among blacks was their own fault. But even his

apologia for health conditions at Coalburg was tel ing. He said

many convicts, once injured, tried not to become wel to avoid a

return to the mine. "Some eat soap; some rub poisonous things into

their sores or cuts; but by far the greater obstacle to their making

quick and good recoveries is the mental depression of the new

men," he wrote. He added that many miners chose to drink the

pol uted "seep water" in which they worked "of their own accord in

preference to going to springs or other usual places of get ing

drinking water." He also contended that nearly every black man

contracts syphilis by adulthood. No blame for that could be ascribed

to the mine, he contended.

The larger issue, Davie wrote, was genetic: "It is a fact that the

negro race is inferior to the white race physical y as wel as

mental y and moral y— their powers of resistance, so far as a great

many diseases are concerned, notably tuberculosis, does not

compare at al favorably with the white race."

Stil , Dr. Parke's criticism of the lethal conditions in Sloss-

She eld's slave mine embarrassed the company enough that a

month later its president, Thomas Seddon, sent a let er to local

o cials defending his treatment of black workers. He summed up

the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."49

the explanation neatly: "The negro dies faster."

Sentiments like that were hardly rare in the three decades after

the Civil War. Yet throughout that di cult time, African Americans

stil clung at some level to the idea that whatever white men such

as Parke said or did, the United States as a whole stil stood

squarely to the contrary. This, the Civil War proved, was

immutable.

Then, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court denied a thirty-year-old

white shoemaker with a trace of African blood, named Homer

Plessy the right to ride in the white compartment of an East

Louisiana Railroad train. On its face, the ruling sanctioned only the

newly conceived concept of "separate but equal" public facilities for

blacks and whites. But its actual import was vastly greater. Plessy v.

Ferguson legitimized the contemptuous at itudes of whites like the

top executives of Sloss-She eld. Moreover, it certi ed that any

charade of equal treatment for African Americans was not just

acceptable and practical at the dawn of the twentieth century, but

moral y and legal y legitimate in the highest venue of white society.

It was a signal moment in America's national discourse. From the

lowliest frontier outposts to the busiest commercial centers,

Americans had shared a consensus that the highest de nition of a

citizen was his veracity, that truth tel ing and ful l ment of a man's

commitments were the highest measures of virtue. The near cult of

honesty that pervaded public discussions was quaint by the

sensibilities of more than a century later. But in a stil new nation

born of the eighteenth-century Age of Reason, it was an ut erly

sincere expression of a fundamental national creed.

That al egiance to logical purity, combined with the basic tenets

of equality embodied in the philosophies of the Revolution, had

impel ed the nation toward civil war during the antebel um

decades, as the inherent contradiction between the new republic's

noblest ideals and slavery grew more apparent. In spite of the

prevailing view among al white Americans that blacks were in

some manner lesser to them, the nation nonetheless made war

upon itself at devastating cost, in a con ict ultimately justi ed as a

struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

struggle to end the bondage of slaves. Northern soldiers who had

doubted whether emancipation was worth the blood it required

were transformed by scenes of new freedom they encountered in

the South. The moral y bewildering sacri ce of the war became a

concrete demonstration that a nation could steadily mold itself

toward the "more perfect union" of the Founding Fathers. The

surrender of the South, the emancipation of the slaves, and passage

of the civil rights amendments of the 1870s were the zenith of that

vision.

The Supreme Court's endorsement in 1896 of the agrantly

duplici-tous doublespeak of Jim Crow segregation represented a

resignation of America's white institutions to the conclusion that the

emancipation of black slaves had been fol y. Most agreed that the

elimination of slavery per se was an adequate remedy to the past

abuses of blacks. In the eyes of the vast majority of white

Americans, the refusal of the southern states to ful y free or

enfranchise former slaves and their descendants was not an issue

worthy of any further disruption to the civil stability of the United

States. Black Americans were exchanged for a sense of white

security.

There had always been lies and misrepresentations in U.S.

politics, but the new consensus represented by Plessy v. Ferguson

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of

the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of

their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the

principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with the

American compulsion for honesty demanded it. The abandonment

of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of

citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that

abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be

reconciled to reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern

cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a

pat ern over the ensuing twenty years in which almost any

rationalization was su cient to excuse the most severe abuses of

African Americans.

Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

Emboldened by the betrayal from the nation's most eminent legal

minds, the men control ing the mines and labor camps of the South

adopted even more imsy ruses of justi cation for black men's

imprisonment. The level of physical coercion increased terrifyingly

At the Prat Mines, an observer for a special Alabama legislative

commit ee in 1897 wrote a report describing 1,117 convicts, many

"whol y un t for the work," at labor in the shaft.50 In an 1898

convict board report, the largest category in a table listing charges

on which county convicts were imprisoned was "Not given." 51 No

one even bothered to invent a legal basis for their enslavement.

In a 1902 report, one man was in the mines for "disturbing

females on railroad car." More than a dozen were incarcerated for

"abusive and obscene language." Twenty convicts were digging coal

for adultery, twenty-nine for gambling. Dozens of prisoners were at

labor for riding a freight train without paying for a ticket. 52 In

1902 and 1903, local o cials in Je erson County prosecuted more

than three thousand misdemeanor cases, most of them yielding a

convict to work in a Sloss-She eld mine—the vast majority of

whom were black.53

One of those convicts was John Clarke, a miner convicted of

"gaming" on April 11, 1903. Unable to pay, he ended up at Sloss-

She eld. Working o the ne would take ten days. Fees for the

sheri , the county clerk, and the witnesses who testi ed against him

required that Clarke spend an additional 104 days in the mines.

Sloss-She eld acquired him from Je erson County for $9 a month.

One month and three days later, he was dead, crushed by "fal ing

rock."54

At least 2,500 men were being held against their wil at more

than two dozen labor camps across Alabama at the time Clarke

died. More than nine hundred were in the Prat Mines. Sloss-

She eld held nearly three hundred. The McCurdys stil control ed

nearly one hundred in Lowndes County. Scores more were

imprisoned in the turpentine and lumber camps of the Henderson-

Boyd and Horseshoe Bend lumber companies and other remote

prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

prison compounds scat ered deep in the forests of southern

Alabama. Payments to the state that year exceeded a half mil ion

dol ars, the equivalent of $12.1 mil ion a century later and a gure

nearly equal to 25 percent of al taxes col ected in Alabama.55

As the dark cloud of the new slavery was descending on those

men and the hundreds of thousands of friends, acquaintances, and

family members across the South, the descendants of the old slave

Scipio struggled to maintain emancipated lives. Abraham

Cot ingham and his sons Jimmy and Frank, descendants of Mit ,

another son of Scipio, were among nearly four hundred black voters

who stil participated in Shelby County elections in 1892. De ant,

even as the vast majority of other black men in the county were

intimidated or obstructed from the pol s, Abraham paid an

increasingly onerous pol tax and complied year after year with

burgeoning requirements established by the state of Alabama for

blacks to qualify for a bal ot. Each election year, under hostile eyes,

he signed his name boldly in the register of voters maintained in

the worn-brick county courthouse across the street from the jail.56

But even Abraham could not resist the new state constitution

adopted in 1901, under which virtual y no black person could

again vote in Alabama. No black Cot ingham would cast a bal ot for

at least six decades.57

Sometime in the 1890s, Henry Cot inham died. The circumstances

of his death weren't recorded. In June of 1900, Mary Cot inham

abandoned Brier eld, where so many black descendants of the

Cot ingham farm had once congregated, leaving behind only

Henry's younger brother Elbert, with his own wife and ten children.

Struggling to survive, Mary, the former slave girl from the Bishop

farm, moved the remaining family to Monteval o, a town just inside

Shelby County, where a new mining company was expanding

quickly. She found work as a washerwoman. Her two daughters,

Ada and Mariet a, sixteen and twenty, were anxiously hoping for

marriage. Soon, the girls would leave home, and Mary was alone

with her youngest. Her baby boy, Green, was fourteen and had

learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

learned to read and write. Surrounded by the terrible tempest of

hostility engul ng black America, he was rising into the muscle,

hair, and boisterous curiosity of a teenage man.

V

THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

"I don't owe you anything."

The last thing John Davis should have been doing in the second

week of September 1901 was a long hike across the parched

elds of cot on stretching endlessly along the Central of Georgia

Railway line running from the Georgia state line to the notorious

town of Goodwater. Mil ions of crisp brown cot on bol s, fat and

cracking at the seams with bulging white ber, waited in the elds

and river atlands of central Alabama cal ing out to be picked. The

task would take weeks and demand the labor of virtual y every

available man, woman, and child for hundreds of miles.1

Davis needed to be in his own patch of cot on—the lifeline of his

tiny farm near Nixburg, a wisp of a town twenty miles south of

Goodwater. For him to maintain any glimmer of independence in

the South's terrifying racial regime, Davis had to produce his single

bale of cot on—the limit of the physical capacities of one farmer

and a mule and just enough to pay a share to the owner of the land

he farmed and supply his family with enough food and warmth to

pass the cold months soon to set in.

But as he struggled to reach the tight bend in the rails more than

ten miles from his farm, where freight trains were forced to slow

and itinerant travelers knew there was a chance to leap aboard

empty freight cars, John knew he needed just as badly to see his

wife, Nora. She was il —so sick it had become impossible for him

to care for her and the young couple's two children—especial y at

the very time of the season when he, like hundreds of thousands of

men working smal farms across the South, had no choice but to

remain in his fields from dawn to dusk.

John and Nora had been married for only three years. At twenty-

ve, she was two years older. She came to the marriage with two

children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

children born when Nora was lit le more than a child herself. John

treated the youngsters as his own. The husband and wife had come

of age just miles apart on the outskirts of the rough-edged railroad

town of Goodwater and married there in 1898. Eleven-year-old

Albert certainly was already John's most important helpmate in the

elds. At harvest time, he would have also needed ten-year-old

Alice and Nora picking the rows.2 Sending them al to Nora's

parents’ house meant John would have to pul every bol himself.

But it must have seemed the only way.

John stayed behind working furiously to bring in the crop. But

Nora remained desperately il . Her husband had to see her now. So

Davis made his way on September 10, 1901, to the big railroad

curve outside Alexander City and waited with the other men

wandering the rails for the No. 1 train. The fal sun was just

beginning to falter as the train eased out of the lit le mil town at

5:31 P.M. each day. Half an hour later, he would be on the outskirts

of Goodwater.

As the train ambled forward, Davis must have felt a contradictory

set of worry and relief as panoramas of cot on elds ashed by in a

gentle blur on each side of the tracks, bobbing across the low

foothil s at the southernmost base of the Appalachian range. He

would have to hurry to see Nora and the children, and stil return to

Nixburg in time to save his cot on. He prayed he was not going to

Goodwater to bury his wife. He had to know he might not make it

home before his fields were ruined.

Stil , the dust-choked freight car rat ling across the landscape was

in its own way a respite from the torturous tasks of the harvest.

Gathering a season's cot on was excruciating work. Davis, like

nearly every black man and woman in Alabama, had spent most of

his waking life pawing through such elds. The passing crop rows

soon would be choked with laborers: strapping young men coursing

through the rows with swift, nimble expertise; young mothers with

babies towed atop long sacks of cot on dragging behind them;

nearly feeble old men and women—African Americans whose lives

were grounded immutably in the seasonal rhythm of growing,

tending, and picking cot on for other men.

tending, and picking cot on for other men.

The eldest in the elds were slavery's children—the toddlers and

adolescents and near adults of the emancipation time—who had

experienced the ful exuberance of freedom and citizenship and

then the terror of its savage and violent withdrawal. Now they

moved slowly behind their young people, picking with thin

leathery ngers whatever ber had been missed by the others,

while the toddling children of this sour new era of oppression

scrambled alongside, heaving their own sacks. Albert and Alice

would absorb for themselves the same unchanging equinoxal cycle

of cot on growing and cot on picking, but in their lives—at least

until old age—it would never be sweetened or leavened by even

the ash of freedom that the children of slavery days had brie y

known three decades earlier.

On the plants, blanketing the elds and rising in the most fertile

places as much as six feet high, supple green buds that had swol en

beneath smal graceful owers were by now turning hard and

brit le. Split open and dried dark brown, the outer skin of each pod

was sharp to the touch. As the strongest eld hands moved down

the furrows, pul ing the cot on and passing it into their sacks,

ngers and palms began to crack and bleed from the pricks and

slices of thousands of bol s. Depending on the weather and

condition of the cot on, harvest season might wel begin in

September and drag past Christmas, long after the cot on stalks had

frozen and died.

With every passing week in that span and each downpour of rain,

the crop grew less saleable and more vulnerable to swings in the

prices o ered by the ginners who consolidated the local harvests for

sale to cot on brokers in Montgomery or Columbus, Georgia. At

critical junctures in the picking season, poor weather or lack of

su cient laborers could destroy an entire year's crop. For the white

men who owned cot on land in 1901, mobilizing every available

black worker—man, woman, and child—into the elds at picking

time was the single most crucial chal enge of the entire season.

Even the most progressive and generous white men in America,

whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

whether in the South or the North, almost universal y agreed that

blacks were preter-natural y skil ed at this particular task, and

natural y and spiritual y ordained to perform it. That it might be

wrong to coerce or compel African Americans to work the elds

when the crop was in danger rarely occurred to any white man.

White farmers needed similar numbers of black workers in the

early weeks of the fol owing spring, when seed was being planted

and bright new shoots of cot on had to be careful y tended, each

furrow regularly hoed to keep weeds from smothering the fragile

seedlings. Once the cot on was up, and stretching toward the sky,

and al through the hot months of summer, there could be fewer

hands. Nearly al the women and children were idled during the

humid months. So long as rain and sun came in the correct

proportions, the cot on would stretch higher and ful er. In some

years, it grew as tal as a man's shoulders, thick and impenetrable,

straining with the weight of blossoms. After the cot on was picked

in the fal , there was once again lit le work to be done. African

Americans faced the long, hungry "lay by" of winter.

This conundrum of farm labor management—the need to satisfy

radical y spiking demands for labor and the absolute peril of failing

to do so—had been the most compel ing impetus for slavery in the

nineteenth century. There were many other reasons that slavery

survived in the Deep South too, some economic and some cultural.

But in the end, it was the particular nature of cot on production,

requiring absolute access to armies of laborers for brief periods at

crucial points in the calendar, which made slavery a superbly

successful economic mechanism. By holding laborers captive,

plantation men could dragoon every worker, regardless of age or

strength, at those urgent junctures and marshal them into highly

e cient gangs of eld workers—al without worry that they might

ever drift away in search of bet er circumstances during the lean

months in between.

In the nearly four decades since emancipation of the slaves, white

farmers in the South had evolved only negligibly in their abilities to

manage enterprises with free labor. Concepts of industrial labor

practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

practices—such as set working weeks and xed hourly wages—

remained foreign to most late-nineteenth-century southerners. They

were mysti ed and o ended by the demands of former slaves—

encouraged by agents from the federal government in the

immediate wake of emancipation—that they be paid regular, set

amounts and receive guarantees of certain working conditions

through a writ en contract with white farmers. Even sharecropping

—in which black farmers lived on and worked smal parcels of land

in return for keeping a portion of their harvest—and

straightforward renting of farm land to African Americans required

a form of business acumen and honest dealings that few southern

whites were capable of ful l ing in their relations with blacks.

White landowners in the South almost universal y believed that

management of their farms could be successful only if, in one way

or another, "their Negroes" could be tied to the land. Coercion and

restraint remained the bedrock of success in the cot on economy—

and the cornerstone of al wealth generated from it.

To establish a ser ike status for blacks, whites relied on a bit erly

repressive new social code. Few would hire a black worker who

did not have the express approval of his or her former white

employer to change jobs. O the farms, only the most menial work

could be awarded to African Americans—a convention that both

blacks and whites violated only at risk of their own physical harm.

Black public behavior beyond the "bumbling Negro" caricature

acceptable to whites—whether in at itude, dress, or visible

aspirations—also invited economic ostracism by whites, at best, and

physical injury at worst. The possibility of mob violence against any

African American who blatantly rejected the unwrit en code

lingered in the background of black life, a relatively infrequent but

omnipresent threat.

Just as ubiquitously undergirding the new conventions of black

and white relations—and overshadowing every aspect of the lives of

young black men—was "the Lease," as most southerners generical y

cal ed the new system for seizing and sel ing African Americans. In

addition to the black men compel ed into slave mines and lumber

camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

camps, thousands of white landowners and local businesses in the

countryside and in provincial towns like Goodwater, Nixburg, and

nearby Columbiana regularly purchased black men from local

sheri s and judges who participated in or turned a blind eye to the

process.

There was also no longer any possibility that blacks might

obstruct the new trade in forced labor through political

participation. As of 1901, nearly every African American had been

e ectively stripped of al elective rights in Alabama and virtual y

every southern state. After passage of a new state constitution in

1901, Alabama al owed the registration only of voters who could

read or write and were regularly employed, or who owned

property valued at $300 or more—a measure clearly aimed at

complete elimination of blacks from voting. In Mississippi, only

those who were able to pay a pol tax of up to $3 and who could,

according to the voting registrar's personal assessment, read or

understand any clause in the U.S. Constitution could register.

Louisiana permit ed only those who could read and write or owned

at least $300 worth of property. (However, any person who could

vote on January 1, 1867, or his descendants, was al owed to

continue voting regardless of reading skil s. This literal "grandfather

clause" guaranteed continued voting rights for il iterate and

impoverished whites.)

South Carolina required literacy or property ownership. North

Carolina charged a $2 pol tax and required the ability to read.

Virginia, after 1904, al owed to vote only those who had paid their

annual $1 pol tax in each of the three years prior to an election

and who could l out a registration form without assistance.

Veterans from either the armies of the Union or the Confederacy

were exempted of the requirements—though few of the thousands

of African Americans who fought in the Union army were

acknowledged as veterans.

During the same legislative gathering at which the new Alabama

constitution was drafted, a delegate from Chambers County named

James Thomas He in came to prominence. Over the next thirty

years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

years, he would be the state's most in uential gure, serving as a

U.S. senator and an early master of the rhetoric of white supremacy

that would be emulated across the South by men such as Theodore

Bilbo in Mississippi, Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, and Bul

Connor and George Wal ace in Alabama. During debate over how

completely blacks should be blocked from the vote, He in argued

that there should be no possibility of African Americans casting

bal ots, regardless of their individual intel igence or wealth.

Standing in the elegant legislative chambers of the state capitol in

Montgomery—a building that forty years earlier had served as the

rst seat of government of the Confederacy—he boomed: "I believe

as truly as I believe that I am standing here that God Almighty

intended the negro to be the servant of the white man." Anticipating

eventual war between the races, He in continued: "I do not believe

it is incumbent upon us to lift him up and educate him on an equal

footing that he may be armed and equipped when the combat

comes."3

When debate turned brie y to whether the whipping of prisoners

leased to coal mines and lumber camps should be prohibited, a

representative from Sumter County summed up the position of the

constitutional convention:

"Everybody knows that the great bulk of convicts in the state are

Negroes," he said. "Everybody knows the character of a Negro and

knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the

place of the lash with him. He must be control ed that way"4 The

laws remained unchanged.

• •

As Central of Georgia No. 1, carrying John Davis on a car close to

the rear, approached the nal wide curve of the tracks on the

outskirts of Goodwater on that Tuesday in September 1901, the

conductor blew his whistle and slowed dramatical y as the engine

eased past Sterling Lumber Company. For almost thirty years, this

had been the point of disembarkation for the scores of

impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

impoverished men—mostly black and a few white—who used the

freight trains of the South routinely to move from town to town and

job to job. The railroad bed was itself the handwork of forced

laborers, as was the case for nearly al southern rails built before

the Civil War or in the rst decades after. Goodwater was a place of

rich opportunity for men seeking menial work. It had grown into a

ourishing commercial center as the hub of the cot on economy in

the verdant plain of farmland that rippled between the Coosa and

the Tal apoosa rivers—which plunged on paral el currents, eighty

miles apart, out of the Appalachians and into the Black Belt of

south Alabama. As the picking season progressed each fal , farmers

pul ed their cot on in long trains of mule-powered wagons from

outlying set lements to the gin and rail station at Goodwater. From

there, the compressed bales of lint were shipped by train southeast

through a succession of other Alabama towns to Columbus, Georgia,

sixty miles away. River barges took them down the Chat ahoochee

River to ports on the Gulf of Mexico at Pensacola and Apalachicola,

Florida.

For the paying passengers on the line, Goodwater was a welcome

respite from the dusty rails. The town had been the nal stop on

the line in the railroad's rst years of operation, feeding a

ourishing local economy of hotels, restaurants, and carriage rentals

to continue the journey to the new city of Birmingham. Goodwater's

Pope House hotel was a nineteenth-century culinary landmark. The

nearby Palace Hotel and Argo Saloon were famous as outposts of

comfort and vice. After the rails were extended the remaining

distance to Birmingham in the 1880s, nearly every train on the line

continued to stop at Goodwater to rest passengers and load cot on,

coal, and water for the steam engine.

After the nal whistle before the train neared Sterling Lumber,

John Davis and the other informal travelers deftly hopped o . It

would soon be dusk, and Davis began making his way by foot

toward the home of Nora's parents. As he arrived at the rst cluster

of houses near the Goodwater train station, within earshot of the

Pope House and its dinnertime banter drifting in the late-day quiet,

a white man suddenly appeared in the road ahead.

"Nigger, have you got any money?" he shouted.5

The man was Robert N. Franklin, one of the town's appointed

constables and keeper of a dry goods store perched at the top of the

muddy dirt street that led through Goodwater's commercial district.

Davis certainly would have known who Franklin was. Short-necked

and rotund, Franklin and the store he ran had been xtures in

Goodwater for at least a decade. There were no black-owned

enterprises in Goodwater, and Davis's parents would have traded

regularly at the store owned by Franklin. The very overal s that

Davis wore that day almost certainly came from Franklin's store or

one of the other white-owned mercantile shops facing Main Street.

That mat ered lit le at the moment Franklin appeared from the

shadows. The question he bel igerently posed was a simple but

perilous provocation. However Davis answered was fraught with

jeopardy. Under the new racial statutes and conventions of the

South, demanding whether an itinerant black man had money was

tantamount to asking him to prove his right to freedom, or his right

even to live. A black man traveling alone in Alabama could be

arrested and charged with vagrancy on almost any pretense. To

have no money in hand demonstrated his guilt without question

and, worse, was seen as absolute proof of his worthlessness. Almost

every possible consequence of admit ing indigence or joblessness—

much less of having ridden for free on a freight train—was terrible.

Yet given the vulnerability of every black man among whites—

even more so a white with some measure of o cial authority and

community respect—to reveal that he possessed cash exposed him

to more grave risk. Vulgar whites like Franklin could rob or harm a

black man with impunity, against which he had no recourse.

Contrarily to accept the risk of a vagrancy charge and lie to a local

o cial might be the beginnings of even more serious trouble. Davis

had only to glance around as the light faded that evening to be

reminded of his vulnerability. The road ahead ran from the edge of

town, alongside the tracks, rising slowly up a long hil . It passed the

open gal ery of the Pope House and its two stories of painted

wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad

wooden clapboards—al o limits to African Americans. Railroad

Street continued rst past the crude one-room brick lockhouse that

passed for the town jail, and then the enormous Goodwater train

depot, and nal y to a crest where Franklin's store looked over the

set lement. At the train station, as a score or more of white

passengers disembarked, local black men hustled to unload baggage

and l the freight cars with freshly ginned bales of cot on. Al but a

few came from farms owned by white men but worked by black

men.

A partly blind African American man clad in threadbare overal s,

cal ed "Bad Eye" Bradley, furiously re l ed the steam engine's

boilers with water and its fuel car with coal. He was one of the few

black men in the town with a job paying regular wages. Across the

street from Franklin's store, Davis could have seen the plate glass

windows on the front of the saloon and the balustrade of the

second- oor balcony of the Palace Hotel—both destinations of

relative luxury that no black man would ever dare enter as a

customer. Tethered out front were the one-horse carriages and

open-bed wagons that only the rarest African American owned.

Out of sight from Davis, except for their clut ered rear entrances,

stood a succession of new brick buildings extending south from

Franklin's store for several hundred yards. Among them were

businesses operated by the mayor, Dave M. White, and his close

friend, justice of the peace Jesse L. London, as wel as the vacant lot

where construction of the new town hal was to begin in a few

months. Only to the north, across the railroad tracks, among a

ramshackle col ection of shotgun houses and unpainted bungalows

where most of the town's black population lived, was there a place

of refuge for an African American man. Davis had prayed to reach it

before Franklin appeared in the street. Now it was too late.

With his single hostile query—"Nigger, have you got any

money?"— Franklin distil ed the smothering layers of legal and

economic jeopardy that de ned black life in the twentieth-century

South. Davis was pinned.

"No, I have not got any money," the black man stammered. Then,

gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have

gambling on what Franklin was up to, he corrected himself. "I have

some, but not for you."

"When are you going to pay me the money you owe me?"

Franklin pressed.

"I don't owe you anything," Davis said.

The two men stood facing each other in silence for a moment.

Then Franklin went on his way, but Davis knew the incident wasn't

over. He crossed the iron rails and made his way to the home of

Nora's parents as quickly as he could. For a few hours, there was a

quiet reunion of the farmer, his children, and the stricken wife and

mother.

But later that evening, the constable showed up again. He cal ed

for Davis to come outside.

"I want that money, or I wil arrest you," Franklin shouted.

"You wil have to arrest me. I do not owe you anything," Davis

said, clinging to the hope that a higher authority would see through

Franklin's ruse.

Gal ed by the black man's resistance, Franklin left again. But soon

another local constable arrived, Francis M. Pruit , a burly mass of

man who sported a bushy western mustache and a wide-brimmed

black hat. He said he held a warrant for Davis's arrest.

"Let me see it," the black man said.

"Come up town and I wil let you see it," Pruit rejoined.

There was lit le else Davis could do. Earlier in the day, he might

have escaped by catching another railroad car and eeing the

county as quickly as possible. But the chance for that was passed

now. Docile cooperation was Davis's only reasonable recourse, his

only chance of seeing Nora again, of ever returning to his elds. It

was stil conceivable that he could weather this scrape with no

harm, that a reasonable voice would come to his aid. If necessary,

he would simply submit to whatever the white men demanded. It

was a dance every black man in the South was being forced to

learn. To resist only invited far worse.

Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him

Davis trudged to the center of town with Pruit , who locked him

in the calaboose near the train station, not far from where his

encounter with Franklin had begun. Four other African Americans

seized by Franklin and Pruit in the previous forty-eight hours were

already there. Davis never saw the ostensible warrant for his arrest,

and would have been unable to read it if he had. Later Jesse

London, the justice of the peace, would testify that Pruit himself

had sworn out a warrant claiming Davis "obtained goods under false

pretenses" from him—rather than Franklin—and that Davis

wil ingly pleaded guilty to the charge.6 London claimed he ordered

Davis to pay a ne and the costs of his arrest and trial, though no

one involved could later recal what the amount of the sentence had

been.

The next morning, Pruit retrieved Davis and the others from the

calaboose and hustled them onto the train platform to board the

No. 3 train from Birmingham at 9:55 A.M.—one of two daily runs

rat ling from Alabama's booming new industrial center, down

through the prosperous provincial towns of Sylacauga, Goodwater,

Dadevil e, and beyond to either Montgomery, the state capital, or

the river port at Columbus.

"We are going to carry you over to Mr. Pace's," Pruit informed

Davis.

"I don't know Pace's," Davis replied.

"We know," the white man answered.7

John Davis had been snared in the web. In the section of Alabama

where Davis traveled that fal , at least two dozen local white men

were actively involved in a circuit of tra c in human labor orbiting

a seventy- ve-mile stretch of the Central of Georgia rail line, with

the town of Goodwater as its epicenter.

Pruit and Franklin were the most regular procurers of stout-

backed black workers for men of means in the surrounding towns

and counties who needed a steady stream of compliant hands.

Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made

Nearly every sheri and town marshal in southern Alabama made

his primary living in some variation of this trade in human labor—

some through formal contracts between the counties or towns and

the big mining companies and timber and turpentine operations.

Others limited themselves to the less organized, clandestine capture

and sale of black men along the railroads or back roads—such as

John Davis. Pruit and Franklin and many others operated with a

measure of o cial police power given by local governments. Even

more men—typical y brutish plantation guards or the young adult

sons of large landowners—acted as "special constables" or

temporary deputies appointed to serve arrest warrants concocted to

justify the capture of a particular black man.

To give the arrests an imprimatur of judicial propriety, Franklin,

Pruit , and others relied on the judges of what were cal ed

Alabama's "inferior" courts. In these lower courts, town mayors,

justices of the peace, notaries public, and county magistrates had

authority to convene trials and convict defendants of misdemeanor

o enses. A relic from the frontier era, every Alabama town or rural

community had such local judges appointed by the governor or

local y elected. Most were store owners or large landowners— men

of limited substance but in the context of their world the most

substantial men of the community. In the town of Goodwater, the

amateur judiciary consisted of Mayor White and Jesse London.

Once appointed justice of the peace by one governor, such men

retained their powers almost in perpetuity either by routine

reappointment from successive governors or so long as local citizens

accepted their continuation in uno cial "ex o cio" capacities. By

the turn of the century Alabama had thousands of such judges

scat ered through every community and at almost every major

crossing of roads, so many that no one in the state capital even

maintained a comprehensive list of who they were.

Mayor White's dry goods store was a few doors down Main Street

from Robert Franklin's. London, whose mercantile business was

nearly adjacent to the mayor's, was almost as young as White's

oldest children, and he was married to a cousin of White's wife. The

two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed

two wives, both reputed to be marvelous cooks, at times managed

the Pope House hotel near the train station.8

Mayor White, the son of a blind farmer, had grown up without

education under di cult circumstances in the countryside of

another rural Alabama county. To his death in 1935, his tastes

never deviated from the poor people's fare of squirrel, opossum,

and chit erlings. Yet in spite of those origins, White moved to

Goodwater intent on lifting himself from the coarse life of frontier

Alabama through sheer labor and wil power. He had no patience

for games or those he considered loafers. "By the eternal, if you

need exercise, get a hoe and do something constructive with it,"

White liked to tel children. Over time, he acquired farms and a

livery stable in addition to the store. With success, he took on the

air of a benevolent businessman, donning a daily uniform of a

pinstripe shirt, gray suit, black bow tie, and a black hat. At

Christmastime, he secretly passed out food and paid for medical

care for poor whites in the town. He was active during the turmoil

of Alabama's late-nineteenth-century political bat les, eventual y

winning election to the Alabama Senate and the Executive

Commit ee of the state Democratic Party9

But the emergence of a place like Goodwater, or a man such as

White, into the rst degrees of twentieth-century sophistication was

not entirely what it seemed. Long into middle age, White would

ght any man he believed insulted him. He impressed his children

with his gal on-by-gal on consumption of moonshine whiskey, and

ability to chain-smoke cigars. On one occasion, he survived a

gunshot wound received during a political argument at a ral y in

Dadevil e. He was an early proponent of the de ant "states’ rights"

agenda that would consume southern Democrats, and in the next

generation fuel segregationists like Strom Thurmond and in the

fol owing generation George Wal ace. He made bit er enemies in

politics and business, and believed there were "parasites"

threatening the society that whites like him had wrested from the

tailings of the previous century. He was contemptuous of the notion

that African Americans deserved the ful citizenship of the Fifteenth

Amendment.

Amendment.

Yet it was this man—uneducated and crude—who held power in

Good-water, conducting rudimentary trials on the boardwalk in

front of his store, maintaining a clumsy "city court" docket of

warrants and verdicts behind his counter, and extending his legal

authority in support of the county's busy slaving network. Under

White's acquiescence, his friend Jesse London summarily found

John Davis guilty of a misdemeanor—despite the fact that Franklin

and Pruit couldn't agree on what charge they were claiming to

bring against him.

In adjoining Tal apoosa County, the man most relied on to

sentence free men to hard labor was a justice of the peace named

James M. Kennedy, a civic jack-of-al -trades who extracted a steady

income from a col ection of overlapping, periodic public

appointments. He had been an election inspector for the area in

1892, and not infrequently was made a special temporary deputy

sheri to serve warrants in civil and criminal cases. Most important,

Kennedy was named by Governor Wil iam Oates in 1894 a justice

of the peace and notary public for the remote section of Tal apoosa

County where he lived—though a decade later he was no longer

certain by which governor or in which year his tenure as a judge

had begun.

Few of the part-time judges such as White and London had any

legal or academic quali cations beyond bet er than average

handwriting. Even that skil was not often apparent. There were no

clear guidelines for the proper operation of the inferior courts or

clear case law de ning their parameters and jurisdiction. Like so

much of the legal and administrative systems of regions only

decades removed from wilderness status, the lower courts of

Alabama were policed mainly by citizens’ innate sense of justice.

The power of these il -de ned casual judges, particularly over

il iterate and impoverished citizens, was immense.

Above men like Kennedy, White, and Franklin, at the top of the

pyramid of players in the rural forced labor networks, were large

landowners, entrepreneurs, and minor industrialists—just as they

had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa

had been in the years before the Civil War. In Coosa and Tal apoosa

counties, the trade in African Americans relied on three powerful

families, al of whom in turn at least periodical y employed or

conducted business with most of the other men involved in the

buying and sel ing of black men.

The two most prominent buyers, John W Pace and James

Fletcher Turner, together held a contract to "lease" every prisoner

sentenced to hard labor by the two counties. Turner and sometimes

Pace also leased from the city of Dadevil e al prisoners who had

been convicted under the town ordinances.10 Sometimes in

conjunction with each other, sometimes operating independently,

Pace and Turner actively purchased African Americans through

every o cial and uno cial means available. Both operated farms

with hundreds of acres under til , large sawmil s, and mining or

quarrying. In 1900, Pace paid $2,600 to expand his holdings to

include a ve-hundred-acre plantation near his main farm.11 He ran

the farm from a large and comfortable country home—where he

had become wel known in the county for his lavish hospitality—

and maintained a second residence in town, less than a block from

the Dadevil e square.

Turner, known to acquaintances as Fletch, owned a large farm

four miles outside the town limits, in a place cal ed Eagle Creek, a

booming sawmil at a set lement cal ed Camp Creek, and a major

stake in a limestone quarry at Calcis opened by his father and

managed by his younger brother Eliza. Even measured against the

wide scope of human horror being perpetrated in the slavery

operations of Pace and Turner at their farms and sawmil s, the

quarry near the newly founded town of Calcis stood alone as a

place of notably perverse abuse.

Situated thirty- ve miles northeast of Goodwater, the quarry was

halfway up the rail line to Birmingham. Inside its compound,

workers heaped huge quantities of shat ered limestone into two

thirty-foot-high cylindrical kilns, which superheated the rock with

blasts of burning coal piled into a lower chamber. Under intense

heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder

heat, the limestone turned to quicklime, a highly caustic powder

that when moist turned instantly into a burning, potential y

explosive acid.

Eliza Turner was a man of questionable mental stability—

claiming later in life that he had invented the radio, the X-ray, and

the Teletype, only to have been robbed in each case by Guglielmo

Marconi and others.12Laborers who survived the Calcis quarry told

frightening stories of tubercular men and sexual y abused women

quarantined to a sick house hidden deep in the adjoining woods.

Equal y horrifying were the fates of workers who accidental y came

into contact with quicklime unintentional y mixed with water. The

few who lived left the quarry with terrible, disfiguring acid scars.

Despite the dangers in making quicklime, the substance was a

critical component in the blasting of iron ore into steel and fetched

lucrative prices from the iron companies expanding at breakneck

speed in Birmingham. By the time the Turners’ ve-year-old quarry

and kiln was operating at ful capacity in 1903, its sole customer

was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—the company fast

becoming the most powerful commercial interest in the state and

the keeper of more than a thousand forced laborers at its Prat

Mines.

The Turner quarry hired skil ed free laborers to run the

locomotive that dragged tons of limestone up from the quarry pit

and coopers who made barrels to ship the powder. But for the

back-jarring task of wielding picks and sledgehammers in the

bot om of the pit, and the unremit ing task of piling thousands of

tons of stone into the stone kilns, the Turners relied on Franklin,

Pruit , and the others to supply dozens of slave laborers crowded

into a crude log and stone "pen" at the edge of the quarry.

Turner himself lived in a spacious farmhouse at the Eagle Creek

farm with his extended family, including a volatile eighteen-year-

old son, Al en, who took charge whenever his father was away.

Not far from Pace's farm were George D. and Wil iam D. Cosby,

two middle-aged brothers with large landholdings who frequently

repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,

repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,

along with W.D.'s twenty-seven-year-old son, Burancas, worked the

black men and women they acquired on their own farms and also

engaged in a sideline of resel ing workers to smal er-scale farmers

nearby.

Between the fal of 1901, when John Davis was arrested in

Goodwater, and the spring of 1903, the three families—Pace,

Turner, and Cosby— bought at least eighty African American men

and women. Like the hundreds of undocumented forced workers

tal ied in the Sloss-She eld mine in 1895, none of those captured

near Goodwater ever appeared among the thousands of "o cial"

convict laborers sold by the state of Alabama and its counties. The

true total seized by the three families was almost certainly far

higher.13

A day after his arrest, John Davis stil didn't know what charge he

had been convicted of, or how much money Robert Franklin falsely

claimed he owed. After a one-hour rail ride to Dadevil e and then a

ten-mile trip by horse and wagon to a ve-hundred-acre farm at the

meeting of the Tal apoosa River and Big Sandy Creek, Davis faced

the hoary form of John W. Pace.

Pace was a towering gure. He loomed over most men, more

than six feet tal and weighing at least 275 pounds. Despite his

fortune, he stil routinely appeared in town in a col arless,

homespun shirt, homemade shoes, and a broad-brimmed black hat

—his face was ush from a life of work outdoors. By 1900, he

showed signs of gout and walked awkwardly—which he explained

as the result of severe frostbite to his feet in the past.14

Davis was pul ed from the wagon and forced to stand before the

old farmer. Pace, further confusing the contradictory bogus charges,

proclaimed that the black man owed Pruit $40 for goods

purchased at a store in Goodwater. Now he claimed Davis also

owed Franklin $35 for nes and costs from his conviction.15 Davis

had two choices, Pace said: to pay $75 immediately or agree to be

taken under his control.

taken under his control.

Davis had no choice. He had no money at al . Pace promptly

produced a two-page handwrit en contract on which Davis, who

could not read or write his name, scrawled an "X." The contract

signed, Pace paid Pruit and Franklin $75. The coerced contract was

a sham, and il egal on its face. Court decisions already in force

made it clear that even if Davis had been legitimately convicted of a

crime, he could not legal y be held on the conviction once his ne

had been paid—as Franklin and Pruit claimed they had done.

Regardless, Davis knew only that he had marked a document that

he was told obligated him to work at any task Pace demanded for

ten months, to repay the $75 Pace had "advanced" him to pay the

nes. Most signi cantly, Davis had unwit ingly agreed to language

that appeared in dozens of such contracts that Pace and others

intimidated black laborers to sign.

Under the documents, the blacks Pace acquired "agree[d] to be

locked up in the cel at night" and submit to "such treatment as

other convicts."16The contracts further authorized "that should the

said Pace advance me anything over and above what he had already

furnished me, I agree to work for him under this contract until I

have paid for same in ful ." The additional charges explicitly

included any costs resulting from a laborer at empting to escape the

farm. Most ominously, the documents al owed Pace to "hire me out

to any person, rm or corporation in the state of Alabama—at such

sum as he may be able to hire me at for a term su cient to pay

him al that I may owe him."17

For al practical purposes, Pace owned John Davis.

John Pace arrived in Tal apoosa County at the age of twenty- ve in

1879, a time when set lement towns and farms were stil being

carved from unmarked forests. Most land was dense red clay,

ecked with shards of igneous rock, layered upon the anks of

infertile ridgelines cut ing asymmetrical y to the north and east.

Gold was mined there in the 1830s and the 1840s, and the urry of

early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.

early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.

Almost ten miles from the deep Tal apoosa River, Dadevil e had a

railroad station, a few stores, and a livery stable. Set ing it apart

from other hard-edged outposts was a smal medical institute—a

source of southern physicians since before the Civil War.

By the 1880s, the rich mineral veins were tapped out. The al ure

of cot on had replaced the magnetic at raction of gold. Farmers and

tradesmen like Pace were slipping in from Georgia and other parts

of Alabama to begin a new, more orderly domestication of the land.

Growing numbers of them worked in exasperation to clear the trees

and scratch crops out of rocky elds on the low ridges. But along

the Tal apoosa River lay a wide spine of rich al uvial soil running

through the center of the county. On that bot omland plain, where a

creek cal ed Big Sandy emptied into the Tal apoosa, spread one

great tableau of at, fertile land. Pace set out to obtain al of it he

could, and make his fortune there.

Pace had never been troubled by slavery, or any other manner of

the white man's control of blacks in the odd postwar world. For

that mat er, hardly any man Pace had ever met objected. He had

been only nine years old when his family's slaves were emancipated

from their Georgia farm during the Civil War. One of them, a girl

named Catherine, only a few years younger than he, never

departed. She took the Pace family name and, despite freedom,

grew to middle age as a servant in his Tal apoosa County home.

There were no il usions in this section of Alabama about the

nature of relations between black men and white. No one laid

claim to the stylized hoop-skirt vision of antebel um life embraced

in the Old South fantasies that were becoming the vogue in the rest

of the United States. Eastern Alabama had never been suited to vast

plantations where paternalistic slave masters and contented black

servants supposedly lived before the war. Black men and women in

Tal apoosa County were there to be worked, worked hard like

mules. Notwithstanding whatever the Thirteenth Amendment said

about slavery, if white people wanted to buy "Negroes" like mules,

sel them, trade them, or whip them, there was nothing wrong

about that to Pace either.

about that to Pace either.

Before the war, a slave owner named Gum Threat owned another

Tal apoosa river plantation not far from where Pace established his

rst farm. He handled his slaves in the nal years before

emancipation with indi erent brutality. "I en they ever was a devil

on this earth it was Gum Threat," recal ed one of his former slaves a

half century later. "He jest didn't have any regard for his slaves. He

made ‘em work from daylight to dark and didn't give them any

more food and clothes than they could possibly git along with. He

beat them for everything they done and a lot they didn't."

After an escaped slave named Charles Posey was dragged back to

Threat's plantation, the master stood above him on the edge of his

front porch and kicked the man under the chin. "You could hear his

neck pop. He fel to the ground and kicked around like he was

dying," recal ed the former slave who witnessed the punishment.

"They brought him to and then Gum Threat stripped him to the

waist and took him into an old building, stretched him out and

fastened his feet and hands wide apart. Then he took a live coal of

re as big as your hand and laid it in the middle of his bare back. I

remember seeing the scar there and it was about one-eighth of an

inch deep."18

John Pace recognized the value of restoring forced black labor as

soon as he arrived in Tal apoosa. Soon after the Civil War's end, the

probate judge in Dadevil e, who ran the county government,

adopted the practice of parceling out arrested blacks to farmers

who were wil ing to pay for them. Pace successful y ran for county

sheri and quickly absorbed how pro tably black men could be

rounded up and put to work in his own commercial interest, and

what lit le glimmer of judicial process was necessary to hide slavery

behind a guise of prisoners working o legal penalties for actual

crimes.

By 1885, just six years after buying his rst two hundred acres of

Tal-lapoosa river bot om, Pace reached an agreement with the

county judge to lease every prisoner sentenced to hard labor, as

wel as any unable to pay nes and court costs. As in almost every

Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.

Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.

Fifty years after Gum Threat's assaults on his slaves, life was lit le

changed for the new slaves of Tal apoosa County. Not far from

Pace's spread, a man named B. S. Smith operated a large farm and

timber operation on the banks of the Tal apoosa. He contracted

directly with the state of Alabama to acquire several hundred men

found guilty in state courts of felony o enses. In addition, Smith

and his wife, Elizabeth, aggressively sought scores of other forced

laborers from counties across Alabama. After the couple wrested the

contract for Autauga County prisoners away from W. D. McCurdy in

1883, Mrs. Smith complained to the county sheri that one worker

had disappeared during the transfer from McCurdy's notoriously

brutal Lowndes County farm to hers.19 By the mid-1880s, the Smith

plantation degenerated into a miserable compound of rampant

disease and death.

In 1886, a black prisoner named Alex Crews died at the Smith

convict farm from complications of severe frostbite to his feet. A

state physician visited on January 30, 1886, and reported back to

the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts. "I found the clothing of the

convicts very defective, being thin and worthless, insu cient for

protection during the cold weather. Many of them had no shoes

beyond a sole tied to their feet, there being no uppers and some

with no protection for the feet except rags tied around them. I told

Mr. Smith that the clothing and sanitary condition of the men were

miserable and outrageous."20

A reporter for the Montgomery Daily Dispatch, a black

newspaper in the state capital, wrote that one of its reporters had

asked Crews on his deathbed whether there were other men on the

Smith farm as il as he. "Oh, yes, boss," Crews replied. "Some of

them are a heap worse." The fol owing month, the president of the

Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Col. Reginald H. Daw-son, visited

the farm and reported back to Governor Edward O’Neal that he

found "seven convicts more or less frostbit en, and that one of them

…wil probably die."21 The state took no action.

Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his

Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his

landholdings and his purchases of black men in tandem

proportions. As his operations grew, he employed a growing

number of white men to manage various enterprises and portions

of the farm. In the spring of 1892, he hired the justice of the peace,

James Kennedy, who had just married the younger sister of Pace's

wife, Mol ie. Pace had raised Mol ie almost as a daughter, and

Kennedy became in e ect his rst son-in-law. After a few months

spent running a limestone quarry in the adjacent county, Kennedy

set led into a house 150 yards from that of Pace and took over the

older man's sawmil and its squads of black hands.

Six years later, Pace added Anderson Hardy to the payrol , a man

just a few years his junior but the new husband of Pace's nineteen-

year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He lived in a house adjacent to Pace's

and acted as a foreman of the farm, guard, and, frequently, the

designated whipping boss to lash noncompliant workers.

Pace had become a great landowner by the standards of the

province and his era, with nearly a thousand acres of property

under til at the Big Sandy Creek farm and ownership of several

blocks, including a second home, in downtown Dadevil e.22 Like

many in Tal apoosa County, he also harbored visions that gold

might once again be found in the area, and purchased a half interest

in May 1894 in a labor-intensive mining venture at his end of the

county23

Powered by the ow of the Big Sandy Creek, the Pace sawmil

teemed with the black laborers he acquired from throughout

Alabama, working under conditions and with technology lit le

changed from the Bibb Steam Mil a half century earlier. Kennedy

oversaw the operation with cold indi erence, and soon began to

branch into other duties desired by Pace.

Thin, ever clad in an inexpensive rumpled jacket, balding

severely except for a few twisted locks at the crown of his forehead,

his voice high-pitched and nasal, Kennedy struck an unat ractive

pro le, a southern Icha-bod Crane, unaccustomed to and il -

equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the

equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the

place, and most likely al of the women, could have knocked him

to the ground. But armed with a buggy whip and his obscure

appointment as a justice of the peace, and backed by the wealthy

white men who paid him, Kennedy was transformed into a

terrifying figure.

Using his status as justice of the peace to convict and sentence

men for misdemeanor o enses, Kennedy became the on-site judge

for Pace's forced labor business. When the Cosby family wanted to

take control of a particular black man, one of the Cosbys would

order an employee to swear out an a davit accusing the African

American of a crime—usual y failure to pay for goods, breaking a

contract to work for the entire planting season, or a charge as

generic as " ghting." Often, the bogus warrants were signed by Jack

Patil o, the young son of a related white family; J. Wilburn

Haralson, another white employee of the farm; or one of several

black workers who lived permanently under the control of the

Cosbys.

Whatever the charge, the Cosbys seized the black man and took

him and their a davit to Pace's farm, where Kennedy would hold

the semblance of a trial. These proceedings never lasted more than

a few minutes, and rarely was any record of the charge or outcome

preserved. There was never an acquit al, according to later

statements by Kennedy. The defendant was always found guilty and

ordered to pay a ne he could not produce, usual y $5 plus the

costs of the arrest and trial—a total of about $20. For a black

laborer at the turn of the century in Alabama, $20 was a sum equal

to at least three months’ work. The Cosbys, who had seized the

black man to begin with, would claim to pay Kennedy the

ostensible ne and fees, and force the prisoner to sign a labor

contract agreeing to work a year or more under guard to pay them

back.

The system worked almost awlessly. Soon the Cosbys were

acquiring so many black men and women that, within a few years,

Kennedy said he could no longer recal most of their names and

faces.24

faces.

The e ciency of having Kennedy convict any black man or

woman desired by a white buyer was also obvious to Pace. There

was no need to remit any portion of the nes to the county courts

or to submit to even the super cial supervision that was sometimes

demanded for the prisoners he purchased directly from the county

jail. Most useful was that when a black man's term of labor neared

an end, Pace, Turner, or the Cosbys could swear out a new warrant

for another supposed crime. Kennedy would obligingly convict

again, and sentence the worker to another six months or year of

hard labor. Soon, the Cosbys arranged for Wil iam D. Cosby to be

named a notary public as wel . After that, in order to further the

ruse of court oversight, the trials were divided between the two

slave farms in a careful y structured theater.

"W. D. Cosby would try Pace's negroes. I would try Cosby's

negroes," Kennedy later explained. "Whenever the time of a man

working for J. W Pace or W. D. Cosby or G. D. Cosby was about out,

they would send somebody before me, if one of Cosby's negroes, to

have an a davit against him on some trumped up charge; and, if

working for Pace, somebody would go before W. D. Cosby and

make an af idavit against him."25

Except for Pace, Turner, and the eldest Cosbys, nearly al of the men

engaged in this labor-sel ing network were in their twenties or

thirties. Most had recently begun their own families. Many were

born during or just after the Civil War and had grown up steeped in

the stories of the roles their fathers or grandfathers played during

the con ict and the chaotic years that fol owed. They were not

descendants of the white ruling class, but hard-scrabble country

whites whose previous generation had fought to defend slavery but

whose members had rarely owned slaves themselves. Al came of

age during the years when African Americans exercised their

greatest level of freedom and political participation in the South. As

children or teenagers they witnessed or heard the stories of the

violent campaigns carried out by their fathers to reestablish white

violent campaigns carried out by their fathers to reestablish white

hegemony in the 1870s and 1880s.

These men emerged into adulthood just as the political parties of

the South were nal y articulating, without reservation, and with

only scant criticism from elsewhere in the country, a rhetoric of

complete white supremacy and total black political exclusion. They

explicitly embraced as personal responsibility a duty to preserve

the new racial regime. The rising young men of Goodwater and

Dadevil e also were motivated by their understanding that unlike

the long-ago era of ful -scale slavery—in which their fathers gained

almost nothing from richer white men's ownership of slaves—the

economic bene ts of the new system of black forced labor were

available to nearly every white man.

The buyers in the new system grasped that lesson bet er than any.

It was they who had forged the new racial order of the South,

through two decades of strife between whites and blacks and

among whites who could not agree on how best to reassert their

control over the region. Pace and Turner had been in the thick of

that fight.

A decade before John Davis was delivered to Pace's farm, as the

April primary election in the pivotal year of 1892 approached,

Pace and Turner led opposing factions amid the tensions aring in

Tal apoosa and every county seat across the state. Borrowing from

the leading newspaper in Birmingham, the local Tal apoosa Voice

bel owed against the continued participation in elections by black

voters in counties where African Americans made up a majority or

large minority of the population. "The one issue before the white

people of Alabama is to maintain the integrity of the white man's

democratic party. This is the one thing to which the party

organization should look. That is the one thing the voter should

address himself to," said one editorial.26

Pace declared himself a backer of Reuben Kolb, along with the

rest of the local Democratic leadership. The ral ying cal of the Kolb

populists became the denunciation of any black participation in the

primary election. Another newspaper al ied with Pace's group, the

primary election. Another newspaper al ied with Pace's group, the

Al iance Herald, mocked the reliance on black votes by the

Bourbon coalition led by Governor Jones. "Oh yes; you are terribly

concerned about white supremacy! While you are …pretending to

be so much exorcised [sic] on the subject, your friends and al ies in

Sumter county are preparing to have negro votes carry that county

for Jones. Negro votes in Marengo and negro votes in Sumter! No

negro has voted for Kolb in this contest."27

Kolb carried the party primary in Tal apoosa County, but lost the

statewide election. Infuriated by the wave of black voting—some of

it fraudulent—that sealed Jones's nomination, the populists

abandoned any pretense of sympathy to African American farmers.

Kolb continued his bid for governor under the ag of a new third-

party "Agrarian" al iance. To ral y voters, his supporters adopted the

most virulent white supremacist invective.

Quoting from a Republican newspaper in Washington, D.C., the

Voice warned local whites of the "feast" that awaited them if ful

citizenship was al owed for blacks:

More than twenty negro Representatives from the South will render the

Republican control of the future Congresses absolutely safe and sure.

Heavy taxes should be laid upon the property of the whites to develop and

extend the public school system of these States. Separate schools of the

two races would be abolished, and the plan of bringing the youth of both

colors into close and equal relation in school and churches given a fair

trial…. The State laws against the intermarriage of the races should be

repealed, and any discrimination against the blacks in the matter of

learning trades or obtaining employment should be a criminal o ence—

while the colored man's rights to hold o ce should be sacredly protected

and recognized.28

The irony that this description was exactly the vision of American

life promised by the U.S. Constitution escaped nearly al southern

whites. Against that backdrop of fury Tal apoosa County Democrats

met in July 1892 to make o cial the county's support for Kolb, the

populist candidate who had won the earlier primary. As the

formalities were concluded, the county's most prominent

formalities were concluded, the county's most prominent

Confederate veteran, Brig. Gen. Michael J. Bulger, a southern hero

of Get ysburg, the war's most decisive bat le, was asked to regale

the crowd at the mass meeting in Dadevil e. But ten minutes into

Bulger's stemwinder on the heroism of the county's storied Civil

War units, Fletch Turner and a rump commit ee of supporters for

incumbent governor Jones barged in and seized the podium.

Through a series of parliamentary maneuvers, Turner's group took

charge of the county party organization and endorsed a new slate of

party nominees—including the local superintendent of education

substituted for Pace in the race for county sherif .29

Jones carried the statewide election by a vote of 127,000 to

116,000, winning twenty-nine counties versus thirty-seven for Kolb.

Despite Fletch Turner's party coup, Tal apoosa stayed in the Kolb

camp. Jones retained the governorship.

Pace and Turner would not argue politics again. A century of

complete white domination of the South was under way. The two

men forged a commercial partnership grounded on the same white

supremacist principles. On the issue of black men, they agreed

completely. Pace and Turner became partners in the business of

buying and sel ing African Americans. Together they signed a new

contract with Tal apoosa County and with the probate judge of

adjoining Coosa County to acquire al the prisoners of both

jurisdictions. Their forced labor network began to thrive.

As the long spare frame of James Kennedy ambled from house to

house down Red Ridge Road in the dusty southern end of

Tal apoosa County in April 1900, the elds were teeming with

black farmhands planting the cot on that would be harvested the

fol owing fal . In another of his remunerative government sidelines,

Kennedy was the appointed federal census taker for the Red Ridge

beat—the section of the county control ed by his employer and

brother-in-law, John Pace. He spent his days that spring busily

listing the 1,250 residents of every household in the district.30

On the approach to the Pace family compound, Kennedy's task

On the approach to the Pace family compound, Kennedy's task

became both more familiar and unset lingly grim. After listing the

members of his own family and the white farmers who adjoined

the sawmil he managed, Kennedy arrived at the crude farm of

Jessie Lisle, a forty-eight-year-old father who worked mostly as a

guard over the blacks held at Pace's farm. Lisle rented a patch of

property from Pace too and with an overgrown family scratched out

a coarse life from a garden and a few pigs and chickens.

Next came the household of Anderson Hardy, the new son-in-law

of Pace. The marriage was only two years past, but Elizabeth Hardy

had already given birth to a child and seen it die. Sharing the house

with the Hardys was Joseph G. Smith, another guard, renting a bed,

and Mary Smith, a thirty-seven-year-old black women listed as a

servant. Hardy kept four black men aged twenty-eight to thirty-two

years locked in a cel nearby. Final y, there was the prisoner

Maurice Cunningham, an il iterate ten-year-old black "water

carrier," who spent his days sprinting from man to man on the farm

with a simple wooden bucket of water and dipper made from a

dried gourd.31

The last residence before reaching the big house where John Pace

lived was the home of James H. Todd, a guard on the plantation

who rented a room to Arther Berry, a forty-year-old overseer who

acted as Pace's whipping boss.

When Kennedy arrived at the main house on the plantation, he

listed the members of Pace's family in the same straightforward

fashion as he had at almost every other home on Red Ridge Road.

There was John, forty-six years old, his wife of twenty years, Mol ie,

and a sixteen-year-old son, Fulton—a studious boy who was already

working as a teacher in the nearby school for white children. Also

living in the home was Catherine, the black cook who had grown

up from slavery times with John Pace.

Beyond the inner circle of the blood-related family members,

converting the sordid particulars of the farm and its other

inhabitants onto the clinical grids of a census bureau enumeration

form wasn't simple. How, for instance, to categorize the rest of the

form wasn't simple. How, for instance, to categorize the rest of the

Pace farm population's relationship to John Pace, the head of

household? Or of the ve African Americans held in the crude cel

at Hardy's place? Kennedy could not cal them slaves—slavery was

abolished. The census bureau's old "Slave Schedules," listing

unnamed human chat el by sex and age, hadn't been used since

1860. Yet for al practical purposes that was what these black

workers were. Kennedy could not cal them "boarders," as paid

farmworkers living on a worksite were commonly cal ed on

government forms. That was the term used for Pace's various guards

rooming with nearby white families. In his rst pass through the

paperwork, Kennedy simply skipped the column altogether.

Beneath the names of the Pace family members, Kennedy rst

listed the eleven men then on the property who had been delivered

by the sheri s or other authentic police o cials of Tal apoosa or

Coosa county, ostensibly for commit ing misdemeanors. Most were

young, single, strong adults. Al of them were black. Most could

read and write at least a lit le. Henry McClain, twenty-two years

old, Mil edge Hunter, eighteen, Erwise Sherman, thirty, Harry

Montgomery, twenty-one, Jim Miles, thirty-two, Eman-ual Tripp, a

twenty-six-year-old Arkansas boy now very far from home.

Familiarity exempted no black man from the fates of the Pace farm:

Green Lockhart, aged twenty-four, was almost certainly a

descendant of slaves formerly owned by a white family of the same

name at the other end of Red Ridge.

Mixed in with the young men were other African Americans with

larger lives and responsibilities waiting for them elsewhere. Isom

Mosely and Alwest Hutchinson were both thirty-one years old and

married. Mosely had three children somewhere. Wil ie Ferrel ,

twenty-nine, had ten youngsters at home. Henry Wilson, at fty

years old the dean of these men and the father of nine children, had

owned a farm of his own at the time of his capture.

Each of them came under the labor and control of Pace through

at least a semblance of a formal judicial process, though the

legitimacy of al the misdemeanor arrests and convictions was

doubtful. Kennedy listed those men as "convicts." But in addition,

doubtful. Kennedy listed those men as "convicts." But in addition,

Pace was also holding seven other blacks. Augusta Wright, thirteen

years old, was listed as a housemaid. Two sets of brothers were

being worked in the elds: Archer Lewis, aged twelve, and Q. F.

Lewis, just ten. Luke Tinsley was thirteen, and Henry Tinsley was

ten. None had learned to read or write.

Pace had seized the Tinsley brothers as soon as they grew big

enough to pick cot on—to begin paying o a debt he claimed was

owed by their mother for a ne he paid on her behalf three years

earlier, in 1897.32 Luke, already bulking into the young frame of a

man, could swing a hoe as wel as almost any other laborer. Henry,

a smal boy with smooth dark black skin and chocolate hair,

skit ered across the eld to keep up with his brother and avoid the

gru shouts of the two adult African Americans overseeing the

children in the elds. Both adults were former slaves, now almost

certainly being held by force: P. Johnson, a forty- ve-year-old man

born in Virginia, and Josephine Dawson, a thirty- ve-year-old wife

and mother. On his second pass, Kennedy described the group being

held against their wil as "servants."

The largest elds of the Pace farm had long been cleared of forest

and tamed into productive cot on. But on the boundaries, and in

adjacent property he acquired in the 1890s, Pace's enterprises were

a crude blade cut ing into the raw of the land. His holdings

included huge swaths of vestigial forest, stil choked with the same

massive timber that greeted the rst frontier set lers. Removing the

towering stands of oak, hickory, and pine, excavating and burning

the tremendous root systems they left behind in the river's ancient

al uvial deposits, releveling the ground, ditching to drain the new

elds: these were the monumental tasks required to continue

expanding Pace's smal empire. The means and methods of turning

the land to production were hardly changed from the times of

Elisha Cot ingham nearly a century earlier—axes and cross-saws,

mules and slaves.

The economic incentives for Pace were twofold. Clearing the land

The economic incentives for Pace were twofold. Clearing the land

expanded the range of his cot on production. But more

immediately, there was a buzzing market for the lumber he could

produce in clearing the giant trees of the property. Sawmil s were

busy in every section of Tal apoosa County, and Pace needed a

constant ow of new laborers to perform the backbreaking tasks of

clearing the "new ground" and keeping the sawmil in near-

continuous operation.

When John Davis arrived at the Pace farm a year after the census

enumeration, few of the African Americans recorded by James

Kennedy had escaped. Some, like Davis, had been fraudulently

snared as they traveled country roads and sold to Pace by ad hoc

constables, for amounts ranging from $40 and $75. Others were

arrested in towns and formal y convicted in the county seat for

al egedly violating some pet y o ense, most often vagrancy. For

most, there was lit le or no record made of their al eged crimes,

when their "sentences" would expire, or in some cases, even who

they were. Davis was held with men cal ed "Tal asee" and "Gypsy,"

whose identities and origins were never clear to him. No o cial

records of their "arrests" were ever created.

Each was coerced into signing a contract like the one entered into

by John Davis—agreeing to be held essential y as a slave for

approximately a year, locked as "a convict" at night, chained during

the day if Pace desired it, and obligated to continue working past

the expiration of the contract for as long as Pace claimed was

necessary to pay for medical or any other extra expenses over the

term of the agreement—including the cost of recapture if the

prisoner tried to escape. Occasional y, a friend or relative of a Pace

prisoner would appear and purchase their freedom. In the case of

highly productive laborers, Pace nearly always asserted a basis for

keeping them far longer than the original term—often extending

from two years up to ten.

The simplest method of adding additional time to a man's

contract was to accuse him of another made-up charge. A typical

ploy was to claim that a black worker had violated his or her

contract by eating food they weren't entitled to, or rearresting them

contract by eating food they weren't entitled to, or rearresting them

as they departed at the end of the contract on a claim that they

were leaving with clothes that actual y belonged to Pace. Another

theatrical "trial" would be held before one of the various justices of

the peace. If one of the other white men was interested in obtaining

a particular African American, Pace routinely sold them for a

premium over what he had original y paid. In those cases, Pace

made a pro t in addition to the value of the year or more labor

received. The black worker was then compel ed to sign a new

contract with his buyer—usual y agreeing to work another year or

more to pay of his new "debt" to the white man.

To resist the system was more than foolhardy. Arther Berry, the

man Pace most often relied on to discipline his laborers, was like

most southern white men in his belief that black workers could

only be ful y productive if frequently subjected to physical

punishment. Berry's tool of choice was a three-inch-wide leather

strap. The whipping end was eighteen inches long, at ached to a

wooden handle. Berry or one of the other guards, ordered laborers

to lower their pants and lie on the ground while being whipped

with the strap on the but ocks, back, and legs. Those who resisted

were held down at the hands and feet by other laborers, often

stretched across a barrel or the stump of a tree. In the crude

environment of the farm's timber-cut ing operations, Berry would

whip with any available object if his strap was not handy, cut ing a

switch from a tree or using a sapling the size of a broom handle.33

Other whipping bosses on the farm were his brother, Jesse Berry,

and the thuggish guard James Todd.

One prisoner described in an a davit how the obedience of

laborers was enforced: "I was mistreated bad sometimes," said Joe

Pat erson, who became an object of particular cruelty. "Mr. Todd

whips the hardest. Sometimes Mr. Todd would tie [a convict's]

hands together and put them over the knee and put a stick in

between the legs and whip him with a big buggy trace, pul ed the

clothes down so he would be naked. Sometimes he would hit over

one hundred licks, sometimes fty, or seventy- ve times, sometimes

thirty—never less than thirty…. The whipping would take place in

thirty—never less than thirty…. The whipping would take place in

the eld or stockade, no doctor present and nobody to count the

licks, or time it."34

In another bit er echo of antebel um years, any e ort to escape

the slave farm risked not just the laborer who at empted to ee but

any black person he or she encountered. After a black man named

Dave Scot ran away, Pace tracked him down with dogs and then

arrested everyone on the property where he was taking refuge. Pace

ordered that Scot 's wife, four other family members, and two more

blacks found nearby be brought back for "harboring" the runaway

slave.

After being found guilty by James Kennedy, the half dozen

workers were sold to George Cosby, who held them in a stockade

surrounded by guard dogs and beat them regularly. When the

sentence of one of the workers , Lum Johnson, was about to expire,

he was rearrested and charged with stealing potatoes from another

nearby white farmer, Bob Patil o. Cosby took him back to his farm,

claiming he'd paid an $18 ne on his behalf. Johnson was forced to

sign another labor contract and returned to the stockade.

Nearly al the black residents of Tal apoosa and the surrounding

counties had heard stories about atrocities on the farms of Pace and

other forced labor enterprises in the area. Everyone knew black

men faced medieval-era punishments for any failure to work; black

women faced the double jeopardy of being required to submit both

to the cot on elds and kitchens, as wel as the beds of the white

men obtaining them.

A black neighbor near the farms named M. J. Scroggins said the

Cos-bys starved their forced laborers and were violent. "They would

feed the negroes on nothing but a lit le corn bread and syrup. Go

barefooted in cold weather, women and men," Scroggins said. "The

white people would be afraid to go by the Cosbys. Some people

had got en kil ed out there, and never could prove who did it. The

Cosbys are pret y bad folks. If a strange negro walked along the

road they would catch him up and put him on the chain gang." The

Turner farm was particularly notorious for sadistic in ictions upon

Turner farm was particularly notorious for sadistic in ictions upon

sexual y de ant black women. At one point, an African American

woman named Hazel Slaughter suddenly reappeared in Dadevil e

after a months-long disappearance. She showed other women in the

community how her stomach was scarred and raw from an at ack

by dogs used to track her down after an at empted escape from the

farm of Fletch Turner. In whispered tones, Slaughter said she had

run away after watching Turner's teenage son, Al en, use a spade to

beat to death another black prisoner, named Wil ie Ferral .

Bloodhounds were set on her track. They tore through the woods

behind her as she ed, nal y running her down miles from the

farm. Before guards caught up on horseback and began dragging

Slaughter back to service on the Turner farm, the dogs had torn the

clothes from her body and ripped open her stomach.

The account was more than plausible. Stories circulated in the

county months earlier that Al en Turner had kil ed a young black

woman on the farm named Sarah Oliver. Another black woman,

Cornelia Hammock, was arrested in Dadevil e and charged with

larceny on May 20, 1902, according to the rudimentary trial docket

erratical y maintained by the town's mayor. She pleaded innocent,

but was immediately declared guilty by the mayor and ned a total

of $16.40. Unable to pay the ne, Hammock was ordered to the

farm of Fletch Turner to work until November 1903—a total of

eighteen months. She survived only two days. No cause of death

was recorded. Her death was never investigated.35

"It is the general talk of the colored people in and about

Dadevil e," swore a local black leader a year after the kil ing. The

stories were "reported to colored people by other colored people

who have been there that these practices are carried on there al the

time…. Colored people believe it."36

Tal apoosa County had become the embodiment of the casual new

slavery ourishing across the South. White southerners had clearly

won the national debate over who would decide the future of the

country's black population. As southerners had insisted for more

country's black population. As southerners had insisted for more

than a decade, the nation's "Negro problem" would be dealt with

using the southern, white man's solution. None of the ostensible

al ies of black citizenship would act meaningful y to stop it.

From the perspective of most white Americans, the new racial

order had been a rmed formal y and informal y at the highest

levels of society. The U.S. Supreme Court ruling four years earlier

i n Plessy v. Ferguson, sanctioning "separate but equal" public

facilities for blacks and whites, sancti ed the wave of new

legislation and business practices requiring disparate treatment of

blacks and whites. The ruling's e ects went far beyond the courts

and legislative chambers. The open wil ingness of the highest court

to base its seminal ruling on claims that were so clearly false—that

train cars designated for blacks were no di erent from those of

whites—sent a profound message to al Americans. So long as

whites performed at least the bare rituals of due process and

cloaked their actions behind claims of equality, the crudest abuses

of blacks and violations of their protections under law would rarely

ever be chal enged.

The neo-slavery of the new century relied on a simple but

extraordinary ruse that the Supreme Court's ruling implicitly

endorsed. Men such as Franklin, Pruit , Kennedy, Berry, and Todd,

in places like Goodwater and Tal apoosa County, could safely force

a black man into servitude for months or years as long as they

pretended that the legal rights of those black men had not been

violated. The implications were as deeply absorbed by black

people as were the rhythms of farming in the era of old slavery.

This long era of false trials and arrests would taint the African

American view of legal processes and guarantees for generations to

come.

In the larger scheme of what was happening across the South, the

capture of John Davis was a routine, inconsequential event. John

Pace acquired a steady stream of mostly anonymous black men

throughout the year leading to the seizure of Davis. Pace and his

son-in-law Anderson Hardy bought Jack Melton in February 1901,

using the pretext of a fake warrant signed by James Kennedy

using the pretext of a fake warrant signed by James Kennedy

accusing Melton of the ubiquitous al egation of "violating a writ en

contract." In April of that year, Elbert Carmichael was seized. Then

came Ed Burroughs, on an al egation no one could later recol ect.

He was fol owed by Joe Hart and Otis Meyers. Just before

Hal oween—a month after Davis was kidnapped and sold—Pace

bought Lewis Asberry for $48.

Through the winter and approaching spring planting of 1901, the

seizures of black men continued steadily37 After the turn of the year

came Joe Pat erson, the de ant black man sold for $9.50 to

Anderson Hardy, who in turn resold him to Pace. Pat erson had

been arrested in Goodwater and convicted by "Judge" Jesse London,

the same storekeeper who "convicted" John Davis the previous fal .

On January 17, 1902, Franklin and Pruit were back at the Pace

farm o ering a young boy named W. S. Thompson, convicted at

Goodwater of carrying a concealed pistol. Pace paid $50 for him.

The so-cal ed witness to Thompson's signature on a contract

agreeing to work for Pace for one year to pay o his nes was

Lewis Asberry—the black man seized three months earlier. Ten

months later, Pace sold Thompson back to his mother.38

Near the end of February, Turner wrote a check to John G.

Dunbar, the Goodwater town marshal, against his account at

Tal apoosa County Bank in the amount of $40. On the memo line,

Turner scratched: "Cost of nes for 3 Negroes." In March, Robert

Franklin delivered to Pace a black man named Hil ery Brooks and

traded him for $35.

The seizure of black men on the back roads of the South was no

longer even a brazen act. Note Turke, a young black man from the

Tal apoosa County hamlet of Notasulga, held a job as a free worker

with Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in Birmingham. After a visit

home, he was walking down a dirt road outside Dadevil e on the

way to catch a train back to Birmingham on a harshly cold day in

the middle of November 1902. Suddenly Burancas Cosby, the son of

W. D. Cosby, appeared on the road and tackled Turke without

W. D. Cosby, appeared on the road and tackled Turke without

provocation.39

"Where are you going?" Cosby shouted.

"To the depot," Turke replied.

"Do you want a job?"

"I already have one. I'm on my way to it."

"Where are you from?" Cosby asked.

Turke explained where he lived, who his family was, and even

rat led o the names of white people he knew, al in a vain e ort

to demonstrate that he was a black man who deserved not to be

molested or harmed. The result was only to convince Cosby that

Turke was a worker worth having.

"You are a very good nigger. You bet er stop over with me,"

Cosby proclaimed, pointing to his house up the road. Cosby

mounted his horse and continued on his way.

Turke knew bet er than to go to the white man's house. He

hurried toward the train station, stil miles away. Cosby, no doubt

uncertain of whether he could manhandle Turke in a one-on-one

struggle, stayed behind. But soon Cosby caught back up, this time

accompanied by a boisterous crowd of other white men.

"Turn around and go back with me," Cosby shouted.

Turke could do lit le else.

Cosby took him to the farm of his uncle, George Cosby, and

locked him inside a corncrib. The next morning, a black farmhand

named Luke unlocked the door and took Turke before George

Cosby.

"Hel o, young man, what are you doing here?" the elder Cosby

asked through the slats holding Turke and the bulging harvest of the

farm's corn crop.

"I don't know. They have got me here. I don't know what for."

"What are you going to do about it?" Cosby said.

"I don't know. I am a stranger here. They stopped me and got me

here. I cannot help myself," Turke said.

here. I cannot help myself," Turke said.

"Young man, didn't you know they would do things like that?

There are grand rascals about here. Do you want me to go your

bond?"

Turke was abbergasted. "I have not done anything for you to go

my bond."

Cosby, playing out the thin charade of a kind and reasonable

white man, told Turke that he should plead guilty to whatever

charge the white men claimed against him. "If they cal on you, you

plead guilty," Cosby said. "If you say you want me to go, I wil get

you out of this thing and work you."

"Plead guilty of what?" Turke asked. "I am guilty of one thing,

that is going on the public road, and I thought that was free for

everybody."

"You plead guilty and you wil get of light," Cosby reassured him.

"I am in a strange county," Turke replied. "But if you wil al ow

me a chance to write or telegraph home …"

"No, we don't want that at al , you go ahead and plead guilty—

whenever they get their hands on you they are going to do what

they like with you. You just plead guilty."

Turke nal y told the older white man that he and his son would

have to do whatever they chose—kil him or imprison him—but

that he would not plead guilty to a crime dreamt up by others. "Kil

me or do what you please," Turke said. "I propose to do what is

right."

As dark fel , Burancas Cosby and the gang of white men returned

and took Turke into the night. They dragged him outside a window

at the home of another white man who was a justice of the peace.

Turke never heard his name. Talking beneath the raised sash of the

window, the justice astonishingly said he wouldn't play along with

the ruse that night. "Men, I can't have anything to do with this

thing," the justice said. "I have had a lot of those things before me,

and I told you not to come before me any more with such things as

that."

The mob took Turke back to the log crib. The next day, they

The mob took Turke back to the log crib. The next day, they

returned, on horseback, buggies, and wagons, and took Turke to a

smal warehouse where another ostensible justice of the peace

waited. He dutiful y pronounced Turke guilty, though it wasn't clear

of what crime, and fined him $15 plus unspecified costs.

Turke had already been robbed by one of the white men of the

$5.41 and a pocketwatch he carried on the rst day of his

kidnapping. He had nothing with which to pay. George Cosby

appeared and proclaimed he had paid the ne. He took the silent

black man back to his farm and the corn-crib and its iron lock.

The system by which John Pace and Fletch Turner obtained black

men for their farms, sawmil s, and limestone quarry was more

re ned than the Cos-bys’ brutish tactics. The two men often spent

their days on the square in downtown Dadevil e, awaiting word via

telegraph of their various enterprises and the frequent arrival of

regular procurers of black labor, who arrived daily on the two train

runs stopping at the town depot.

Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit , the two men who seized John

Davis, were the county's most important traders in black men. At

forty-six years old, Franklin was the most atavistic of the half dozen

constables and deputies who were routinely on the prowl for black

men on behalf of Pace and Turner. In addition to his store, Franklin

was commissioned as a night watchman, paid $30 a month by the

town of Goodwater. He made easily as much again in the traf icking

of black laborers.40

Pruit , thirty-six years old, also worked as a night watchman in

Good-water and operated a livery stable as a sideline. He received

$42 a month to police the town and col ected a $2-per-family

annual tax for upkeep of the unpaved streets. Altogether, he eked

out enough to maintain his widowed mother and wife, adult sister

and brothers, and two toddling sons, in a compact wood frame

house near the center of town.

The two men's ostensible police supervisor, Goodwater marshal

John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

the town's other constable, Laray A. Grogan, who busily transported

black forced laborers from Goodwater to the Turner lime quarry

and kiln in the town of Calcis. Grogan, thirty years old, lived with

his young wife and three children under age six next door to Mayor

White.41

Early in April of 1902, Franklin and Pruit got word that runaways

had ed the Samples Lumber Company sawmil outside the nearby

town of Hol ands. Samples, like virtual y al lumber cut ing

operations in southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida at the time,

was a spectacle of horrifying abuse. Young black men—and

occasional y whites—were routinely lured to remote timber camps

deep in the forests with promises of solid wages and good working

conditions. As often as not, the camps became prisons, where men

and boys were held against their wil for months or years, fed and

housed miserably, worked under brutal circumstances, and paid

lit le or nothing. Hundreds of other black men were purchased from

jails across the state. Since black men knew they enjoyed no

protection from these abuses from local sheri s or judges, they

relied on word of mouth in African American neighborhoods or

among other itinerant workers to identify which camps ful l ed

their advertisements and white men who could "be trusted."

On April 2, Dock Crenshaw, a twenty-one-year-old black laborer

from Roanoke, Alabama, agreed to take work at Samples. After one

day, Crenshaw and several other young black men realized they had

been grossly misled. Instead of $1 a day in wages, plus food and a

place to stay, the men were being stockaded and fed prisoner's

rations. Other workers told them they would never receive pay.

Instead, they were being charged $2 a week for their food and

shelter—a third of their supposed total wages.

Five young men, Crenshaw, Charles Wil iams, Pat Hil , Jim

Coleman, and Ed Moody, decided to leave at the end of the

workday and return home. This was a particularly gal ing act to the

white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

local white authorities. The sight of ve black men, most of them

teenagers, strol ing up a public road, having de ed their white

employer, justi ed a harsh response in the minds of almost every

white in the region.

As Crenshaw and two others ambled under a bridge at the edge

of the town of Goodwater that night, Franklin and a second white

man from the town stepped out of the darkness and said the men

were under arrest for "jumping" a board bil —or not paying for

food provided to them at Samples.

The ve workers were marched back to a general store in tiny

Hol ands where the town mayor convened what went for a

misdemeanor trial. Crenshaw refused to plead guilty, but the others,

pressured by the armed whites, agreed to confess. The men had

eaten only once at the mil , but the mayor found that each had

walked out on a $5 tab. Al were given nes of about $6, plus

unspeci ed "costs." Franklin told the justice of the peace not to tel

the men the ful amount they owed and that he would take care of

it.Franklin loaded the ve into a wagon and carried them back to

Good-water. After several hours locked in the same smal jail near

the railroad tracks where John Davis and so many others had been

held, Franklin, now joined by Pruit , ordered the black men onto

the next train stopping in the town. When they rol ed into the

Dadevil e station, a wagon was waiting to transport the men to

Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. Pace gave $25 cash to Franklin

and Pruit , $12.50 for transporting the gang, and a check on the

Tal apoosa County Bank for $100.

After several days detained by Pace, the farmer's resident

magistrate, James Kennedy, read a contract out loud to the men. Al

Charley Wil iams could fol ow was that they would have to work

there for at least seven months. They resigned themselves to their

fate and began working under armed guard every day, plowing,

hoeing, and ditching. At night, the men were locked in a crude

cel .42

cel .

Wil iams knew he was in for a hard time, but he could hardly

have imagined its details. A strapping, barrel-chested farmhand, he

wasn't accustomed to the servile status Pace's farm demanded. He

de ed directions and chal enged guards, and for that he was

whipped nearly every day, usual y with his pants pul ed to his

ankles and his back bared. The instruments of punishment used to

beat him were leather plow lines, trouser belts, or saplings.

"Anything happened to be in the boss man's hands," Wil iams

testified later.43

The younger men in the group were terri ed especial y by what

was happening. Within a month of arriving at Pace's farm, Pat Hil

and Ed Moody, both seventeen years old, tried to run away. After

traveling just four miles, they were captured by Pace's son-in-law,

Anderson Hardy. Kennedy, the justice of the peace employed by

Pace, staged another fake trial and convicted the pair of "breaking

the contract" with Pace and sentenced them to six months of hard

labor for the county. Conveniently, Pace was under contract with

the Tal apoosa County judge to hold al local hard-labor convicts.

So Hil and Moody returned immediately to the same chain gang,

now with an additional term of six months to work and explicitly

classified as criminal convicts.

There was another lesson to be learned, however, and one that

Pace believed the other blacks being held on the farm needed to

share in as wel . The risks and futility of at empting to escape

would be demonstrated for al of Pace's laborers. Hil was led

nearly naked in front of a gang of black laborers working in a eld,

forced to bend at the waist and squat, his hands tied together

behind his knees. The point of these beatings was manyfold: the

most obvious was to create a speci c disincentive to escape. Just as

important was to show the power of whites not just to cause pain

but to force a black man to bear profound humiliation, to be

reduced to a state of pathetic powerlessness, to visibly see how

quickly and e ortlessly even the most simpleton whites could force

a de ant black man to reveal emotional vulnerability and physical

weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

over and whipped on the naked back," Hil testi ed stoical y. "He

told me to count, and I counted up to 15, and could not count any

further. He whipped me about 25 licks."44

VI

SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

"We shal have to kil a thousand …to get them back to their

places."

The spring of 1903 arrived in Alabama with a surreal, portentous

fury. Farmers pushed hard to put a new cot on crop in the

ground, only to see nearly every seedling kil ed by an

inexplicable late freeze. Rain and fungus plagued the corn stands

rising in countless thousands of new rows.

In the black of night on April 8, a funnel cloud descended

without warning from a vertiginous sky, zigzagging north of

Birmingham, shearing one-hundred-yard-wide swaths of trees,

homes, and elds as it bounded madly into the earth and back to

the sky across a path of eighteen miles. The horizon coruscated with

astonishing arcs of lightning. By the time the wind and rain

stopped, a dozen people were dead. Five days later, another storm

lashed Bibb County, scraping past the old Cot ingham farm,

obliterating smal buildings and stripping the buds beginning to

swel on fruit trees. On the same day, another tornado—

mysteriously pouring hail but no rain—ripped through south

Alabama, kil ing three more.

Final y, as evening fel on April 19, an unnatural cold swept

across the state as the sky opened above Goodwater and Tal apoosa

County, pouring a deluge of hail and rain. Trees were stripped bare

of leaves and fruit blossoms. What was left of the cot on, corn,

purple-hul eld peas, and early sprouts of squash and okra was

beaten at into the soil. Farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers—

free and enslaved—rushed into the fields to replant.

But by the end of April, another kind of zephyr, something just as

twisted and contradictory to the new order of the white South, was

lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

black laborers on Sunday mornings was a story so unbelievable

most people said it must be fable. A man who claimed to be a

federal Secret Service detective was visiting black residents in

Goodwater. Some had been sent by train to testify before a federal

grand jury col ecting evidence that white people in Tal-lapoosa

County were stil holding slaves.

By the middle of May the rumors were rampant—and seemingly

con rmed by the nearly continual presence of a burly federal agent

named E. P. McAdams. Then on May 27, newspapers across the

state carried an astounding press release issued from the

Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.:

Washington, May 26—At the request of the Department of Justice, the

United States Secret Service has undertaken the work of investigating the

charge of peonage, or holding another in servitude to work out a debt,

which has been made against persons living in the vicinity of Montgomery,

Ala. The punishment provided by the statute for this crime is a ne of not

less than $1,000 nor more than $5,000 or imprisonment of not less than

one year nor more than five.

One man, named Robert N. Franklin, has already been indicted for

keeping a negro in servitude for at least a year. Information in the hands

of [Secret Service] chief Wilkie tends to show that a regular system has

been practiced for a long time between certain magistrates and persons

who want negro laborers.

It is said the plan is to bring a poor negro before a magistrate on a

imsy charge. He is convicted and, having no money to pay a ne, the

white man o ers to advance him the money, provided the negro will make

a labor contract with him for a length of time su cient to reimburse him

for the money and trouble he has taken to keep the negro out of jail. He is

thereupon taken away and begins what is frequently a long term of cruel

servitude, being frequently whipped for failure to perform work to the

satisfaction of his employer.

An agent of the secret service who is now on the ground will make a

thorough investigation of the whole alleged system and turn over to the

United States Attorney of that district all information he may secure with a

view to the prosecution of said offenders. 1

Unexpectedly and without explanation, a ash of hope bolted

across the dark curtain fal ing on black life. Most amazing was that

it commenced in Montgomery, the city that had served brie y

during the early months of the Civil War as the national capital of

the Confederacy2 It remained the seat of a government that since

the war had eviscerated black citizenship more completely and

enthusiastical y than any other.

That the federal government would initiate such an inquiry was

mind-boggling to white southerners. Investigations of any kind by

federal agencies were extraordinarily unusual in an era that

predated the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Moreover, the South's long asserted right to manage the a airs of

black residents without northern interference had nal y been

achieved. Nearly every southern state, including Alabama, had

completed the total disenfranchisement of African Americans by

1901. Virtual y no blacks served on state juries. No blacks in the

South were permit ed to hold meaningful state or local political

o ces. There were virtual y no black sheri s, constables, or police

o cers. Blacks had been whol y shunted into their own inferior

railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, neighborhoods, and schools.

Al of this had been accomplished in a sudden, unfet ered grab by

white supremacists that was met outside the South with lit le more

than quiet assent. During the thirty years since Reconstruction—

despite its being a period of nearly continuous Republican control

of the White House—federal o cials raised only the faintest

concerns about white abuse of black laborers. Southern leaders

were astonished that such a protest had inexplicably arisen now.

For blacks it seemed that a true friend had miraculously come to

occupy the White House, that somehow the assurances of American

democracy might actual y ful l themselves. "The South … is in the

hands of unfriendly white men…It has been left to the Federal

Government, under that administration of President Roosevelt, to

expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

punish and prevent it," wrote the black commentator Charles W

Chesnut . "The President has endeavored to stem the tide of

prejudice, which, sweeping up from the South, has sought to

overwhelm the Negro everywhere; and he has made it clear that he

regards himself as the representative of the people."3

This dramatic turn of events—so revolting to southern whites, so

euphoric to blacks—began with the assassination of President

Wil iam McKinley two years earlier in September 1901.

McKinley had represented more than any other American leader

at the turn of the twentieth century the experiences of those who

directly participated in the war between the North and the South

and came to see that struggle as a moral crusade against slavery and

for the preservation of the union. A young private when he

volunteered, McKinley rose steadily to the rank of major by the end

of the war on the basis of modest acts of heroism. He was the last

president who had served as an o cer in Abraham Lincoln's Grand

Army, and mil ions of aging Union veterans continued to greet him

af ectionately as Major McKinley.

But by the fal of 1901, the veterans he marched with through the

great bat les of the con ict had become a geriatric generation, their

luster increasingly pale against the new economic dramas playing

out between fabulously rich titans of manufacturing and production

such as John D. Rockefel er, Andrew Carnegie, and banker John

Pierpont Morgan and the masses of laborers and immigrants

streaming into the bulging metropolises of the North and Midwest.

Theodore Roosevelt came to serve as McKinley's vice president in

1900 almost accidental y. His place on McKinley's presidential

ticket was engineered by old-guard Republican leaders in New York

primarily to get Roosevelt, the state's unexpectedly popular new

governor, out of their way. Roosevelt was barely set led into

Washington when McKinley was shot by an anarchist while standing

on a receiving line for public visitors at an international exhibition

in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

in Bu alo, New York. McKinley died eight days later, and Roosevelt

was sworn in as president on September 14, 1901.

Roosevelt, who had been a child when the Civil War was fought,

saw himself not as heir to McKinley's archaic nineteenth-century

political regimes and the contradictory outcomes of Reconstruction

and industrialization. Instead, he imagined his rise to the White

House as a catalyst for reconciling Americans to what Roosevelt

perceived as the great missed opportunities of the nation's political

and economic freedoms.

Roosevelt was also at least nominal y concerned about the chasm

between blacks and whites, and the gap between the conditions of

African Americans and the promises made to them at the end of

slavery. But none of this was to Roosevelt an intractable dilemma.

Just forty-two years old upon becoming president, the youngest yet

in U.S. history, he believed that Americans were a people of

seminal y good character, reasonable thinking, and, as a body, of

singular wisdom. Reminded of their fundamental principles, al

white Americans would see the necessity of fairness to freed slaves

and their descendants, Roosevelt thought—just as he was con dent

that the leaders of the new steel, coal, railroad, and banking trusts

ultimately could be relied on to balance pro ts against the needs of

al the nation's workers.

The United States was emerging as an authentic global power for

the rst time in its history. The country's economic and military

prowess outside the national borders was greater than at any time

since the declaration of the republic. The nation was in the midst of

an explosion of new economic production and wealth. In the South,

centers of industry were rising in Birmingham and Atlanta.

Industrial combinations such as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.

were moving to chal enge northern rivals like U.S. Steel and

Carnegie Steel. The landscape of the South remained de ned by the

abject poverty of mil ions of plebeian black and white farmers, but

there was a sense of psychic resurgence in the region. The actual

horrors and injuries of the Civil War were receding from col ective

memory. Nostalgia for the antebel um South and cal s for reunion

and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

and reconciliation among veterans of the armies for both sides were

becoming national obsessions. The literature of Joel Chandler

Harris and scores of imitators—chock-ablock with white writers’

stylized depictions of "Negro" dialect and the most benevolent

images of slave masters and slaves imaginable—had supplanted the

canon of abolitionist novels and rsthand accounts of slaves that

dominated American book sales and lecture tours in the previous

generation.

The long-standing excuse for southern malevolence toward blacks

— that the region left prostrate by war, the ending of slavery, and

the ostensible agonies of Reconstruction couldn't help but abuse its

former slaves—struck Roosevelt and his breed of proactive

Americans as tired, dul , and simply wrong. The assertion by white

southerners of a de facto right to reverse the guarantees of voting

rights and citizenship to blacks seemed to Roosevelt so absurd that

it could only be truly supported by extremists. He reckoned— using

the same logic that compel ed him to chal enge the abuse of

immigrant and impoverished laborers in the factories and coal elds

closer to his home at Oyster Bay, New York—that a reasonable and

progressive northern man such as himself could surely safeguard the

fundamental needs of southern blacks while stil reassuring

southern whites that they had nothing to fear from al owing

authentic citizenship for al .

Roosevelt could hardly have been more wrong in his judgment of

the political and racial realities of the South. But in addition to his

instinctive, if ultimately naive, sympathy for African Americans,

Roosevelt had explicitly political motivations for befriending blacks

as wel . The new president was anything but a celebrated gure

within his own Republican Party. Viewed suspiciously by

Republican leaders in New York, he was despised by leaders of the

national party's archconservative big business faction, who in the

previous three decades had engineered the steady drift of

Republicans from radical abolitionist roots toward a new position

as the party of unrestrained commerce. Roosevelt needed a novel

strategy if he hoped to secure the nomination for the presidential

election in 1904.

election in 1904.

A key element of the strategy was to forge a political base among

southern Republicans, almost al of whom were black. Roosevelt

believed he could cement those loyalties without stirring white

hostilities by appointing "reasonable" white Democrats to many key

federal positions—such as judgeships. The plan relied on one of the

oddest curiosities of the American electoral circumstances at the

beginning of the twentieth century. While African Americans were

almost whol y barred from voting in general elections—having been

disenfranchised in every state in which black voters constituted

statistical y signi cant numbers—black delegations continued to be

accorded ful rights at the national conventions of the Republican

Party. The result was that while African American voters had lit le

practical impact upon national elections, given that they were

whol y unable to deliver any electoral votes from the southern

states where nearly al blacks resided, black Republicans

nonetheless remained an essential swing factor in selecting

presidential nominees for their party.

Theodore Roosevelt made this calculation long before gaining the

presidency, and intentional y cultivated cordial relations with

African American leaders he considered moderate. Chief among

them was Booker T. Washington, the erudite former slave who had

risen to become the nation's most prominent black leader and the

founder of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The two men grew

progressively more friendly during Roosevelt's months of service as

vice president. In early 1901, Roosevelt accepted an invitation to

speak at Tuskegee later that year, as part of a short tour of the

South that was to include a brief homage to the Georgia plantation

home in which his mother had been reared.

With the death of Frederick Douglass in 1895, Washington was by

far the best known and most in uential of black leaders in the

United States— emphasizing black self-improvement, industrial

education, and acquiescence to white political power. Washington's

gradualist message to African Americans was epitomized in a

speech on September 18, 1895, at the Cot on States and

International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

International Exhibition in Atlanta, urging that blacks accommodate

white demands for subservience while building up their own

industrial skil s, farms, and basic education.

To thunderous applause from southern whites, Washington said

of the two races: "In al things purely social we can be as separate

as the ngers, yet one as the hand in al things essential to mutual

progress." The black educator, named a "commissioner" of the event,

urged African Americans across Alabama to use the exposition's

"Negro Building" as a showcase for black skil s in mining,

lumbering and farming, the very industries in which they remained

most oppressed across the South.45

This ideal of a class of political y and legal y passive but

industrious African Americans deeply appealed to white economic

leaders. Near the closing day of the fair in late December 1895,

when Washington returned to speak on "Colored Teachers Day," the

exposition program featured on its last page a drawing of the Negro

Building and a caption praising its black at endants for "at ractive

neatness." The exhibits were "evidence of the growing skil ,

advancing intel igence and promotive industry of the race."

Washington's Tuskegee Institute, located less than fty miles from

the farm of John Pace, in the town of Tuskegee, became celebrated

among white northern philanthropists. Washington spent much of

his time touring the country to raise funds for the school and

at empting to quietly manipulate government o cials and the

political process on racial issues.

Younger black intel ectuals such as Professor W E. B. DuBois in

Atlanta came to bit erly criticize Washington as too wil ing to

accept a secondary position for African Americans. But Roosevelt

perceived Washington's views as sensible, pragmatic, and clearly in

keeping with his own progressive, but eminently paternalistic,

beliefs. Washington's emphasis on personal self-reliance and moral

and religious rectitude as the keys to individual progress

corresponded to Roosevelt's vision for uplifting yeoman farmers,

immigrant laborers, ranch hands, and factory workers of whatever

race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

race or region. Roosevelt was convinced that if the "common man,"

whether black or white, fol owed these principles and that

government ensured that no unjust legal obstacles impeded him,

then the United States could achieve immeasurable progress. Al of

this could happen, Roosevelt insisted, without disrupting the

exponential y expanding business, industrial, and banking sectors

whose fortunes had made families such as Roosevelt's richer than

most Americans could begin to imagine.

Washington's approach appealed to Roosevelt, though, only

because the new president was unwil ing to confront the realities of

southern whites’ venom toward any African American seeking

social or political equality. Roosevelt's father was an ardent Lincoln

Republican, but his mother was born to a slaveholding family in

Roswel , Georgia, not far from Atlanta. President Roosevelt was

drawn to a view of the Civil War that emphasized the valor of both

sides, rather than the evils of whites such as his mother's family in

perpetuating slavery. Gradual change, during which no one was

forced to ful y acknowledge past cruelties to blacks, made sense to

Roosevelt. "I am con dent the South is changing," Roosevelt wrote

in a postscript to a let er to Washington in 1901.6 Roosevelt's

approach to the status of African Americans, fundamental y

acceding to the inferiority of African Americans and anticipating no

signi cant ful integration into U.S. society, would be the

conventional wisdom shared for the next six decades by the vast

majority of white Americans who considered themselves

"progressive" on race.

"I so cordial y sympathize," Roosevelt wrote, with Washington's

"purpose of t ing the Colored man to shift for himself and

establishing a healthy relation between the colored man and the

White man who lives in the same states."7 Roosevelt was thril ed

with Washington's best-sel ing autobiography, Up from Slavery,

when it appeared in 1901, with the message that quiet

perseverance and humility—rather than anger against his slave birth

—had been the keys to the author's success. Roosevelt wrote

Washington: "I do not want to at er you too much …[but] … I do

Washington: "I do not want to at er you too much …[but] … I do

not know who could take your place in the work you are doing."8

Washington's theories also corresponded to Roosevelt's benign but

seminal racism. Principles of fair play told Roosevelt that nothing

should inhibit the individuals in any group who have the ability to

achieve great success. The extraordinary achievements of black men

such as Washington were dramatic proof of this to Roosevelt. But at

the same time, Roosevelt believed that, col ectively, no one should

or reasonably could deny the obvious racial superiority of whites

over al others. Indeed, Roosevelt ultimately took the view that

even when whites most gravely abused the world's darker-skinned

races—as in the African slaving trade, the removal of native

populations in the Americas, and his own brutal suppression while

in the White House of the Philippine Islands—that the outcome was

overwhelmingly good. "The expansion of the peoples of white, or

European, blood during the past four centuries …has been fraught

with lasting bene t to most of the peoples already dwel ing in the

lands over which the expansion took place," Roosevelt said in

remarks to a group of white missionaries during his second term as

president.9

But even as the southern states used similar logic to justify the

elimination of black participation in general elections, the

Republican Party—the party of emancipation—was not yet able to

do the same. Delegations of African Americans from the southern

states—even though they could cast no more than the most scant

votes in the general elections—remained ful - edged and

prominent players in the national conventions of the Republican

Party. (Not until after 1912 would Republicans succumb and al ow

African Americans to be tossed from the party organizations of the

South.) Roosevelt turned to Booker T Washington to build his base

among black southern Republicans.

Before the day of his inauguration was over, Roosevelt had

writ en Washington to cancel his visit to Tuskegee and implore the

black leader to visit him quickly in Washington. "I must see you as

black leader to visit him quickly in Washington. "I must see you as

soon as possible. I want to talk over the question of possible future

appointments in the south exactly on the lines of our last

conversation," Roosevelt wrote.10 Washington made immediate

arrangements to see the new president.

Less than three weeks later, U.S. District Court Judge John Bruce,

the longtime federal jurist who presided over much of central

Alabama, died. Roosevelt and Washington were presented with a

serendipitous opportunity. The judgeship in Alabama could be an

early demonstration of Roosevelt's wil ingness to reward a

progressive southern white leader with an important position—

regardless of his party a liation. The policy left the smal number

of white Republicans who had hung on in the South—many of

whom continued to be viewed by other southerners as radical

carpetbagger al ies left over from the Reconstruction era—in the

cold. However, Roosevelt insisted that his cross-party appointments

go to Democrats who expressed opposition to lynching and support

for at least minimal citizenship rights for African Americans—and

most important that they had not actively supported Wil iam

Jennings Bryan, the Democratic nominee for president in the 1900

election.

Washington immediately recommended to Roosevelt that he

appoint as successor the state's former governor, Thomas Goode

Jones,11 the political gure about whom John W. Pace and Fletch

Turner had so vigorously faced o during Alabama's political

warfare a decade earlier.

On the surface, it was paradoxical that Washington became the

champion of former governor Jones, a Confederate veteran who

served under Thomas J. "Stonewal " Jackson and Brig. Gen. John B.

Gordon, and who was present at Lee's surrender to Grant at

Appomat ox. He was reputed to have carried the white ag of

southern surrender. Jones's successful gubernatorial bids in 1890

and 1892 were based primarily on the interests of wealthy white

plantation owners—men who abused African American laborers on

a greater scale than any other whites. During those campaigns he

a greater scale than any other whites. During those campaigns he

was a vocal critic of black political power. Nonetheless, Jones was

also the cynical y wil ing bene ciary of his faction's reliance on

coerced or falsified votes cast in those years by thousands of blacks.

Yet Washington and Jones had been secret al ies for years—even

as Jones was manipulating black votes in the 1890s.12 It is also

possible that as a result of Washington's secret in uence, some of

the thousands of Jones votes cast by blacks and long assumed by

historians to be fraudulent, were in fact legitimate.

But Washington knew that as an o cer in the state militia in

1883, Jones also had cal ed out troops to prevent a lynching. He

had spoken publicly on many occasions of the importance of

respecting other new rights granted to freed slaves by the

amendments to the U.S. Constitution passed in the 1870s. As

governor, he blocked e orts to divert funds for black schools to

white ones. At the same time, Jones maintained his base of support

with the state's business elite by cal ing out troops to suppress a

major strike by newly unionized miners in the 1890s.

Over the years, Jones appeared to have moderated even further

on race. More recently, he had been a delegate to the just

completed 1901 Alabama constitutional convention. The document

agreed to at the meeting and later rati ed, which would govern

Alabama for the duration of the twentieth century and into the

twenty- rst, nal y eliminated virtual y al vestiges of the electoral

and civil rights given to blacks after emancipation. But Jones de ed

the political winds of the day, vigorously pushing for one of the few

measures approved that bene ted blacks, a law al owing for

impeachment of any sheri who al owed a prisoner to be seized by

a lynch mob. Jones also opposed e orts to eliminate al black

voting and to require that public schools for African American

children be funded only with those taxes col ected from blacks.

Jones quietly strategized with Washington throughout the

convention, consistently engaged in a tone of equals, addressing the

black leader with the honorific "Dear Sir."13

On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after

On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after

Roosevelt had been sworn in as president, Washington sent a let er

through an aide imploring the new chief executive to name Jones

as the new federal judge in Alabama. "He stood up in the

constitutional convention and elsewhere for a fair election law,

opposed lynching, and has been outspoken for the education of

both races," Washington wrote. "He is head and shoulders above any

of the other persons who I think wil apply to you," Washington

wrote to Roosevelt on October 2, 1901.14

Roosevelt took the advice and appointed Judge Jones less than a

week later. The decision elicited the e ect Roosevelt hoped for.

Many southern whites were impressed by the president's

wil ingness to turn to one of their "best men" for a critical federal

position, despite Jones being a prominent Democrat. Newspapers

in the region hailed the move.

Ten days after the appointment, the president was informed that

Washington was in the capital city. He insisted that the black

educator come to a private dinner at the White House with the

Roosevelt family. It was a dizzying sequence of events for

Washington and other African Americans who shared his belief that

accommodating discrimination while incremental y working to

reverse it was the best route to black freedom. Here was proof, it

seemed. Regardless of the struggles stil faced by the majority of

slave descendants, black men of accomplishment could rise to

unprecedented levels of influence.

Blacks had visited the White House before, and prior presidents

had sought the advice of black men. But never had a black man

appeared to be among the very most in uential gures in a

president's execution of so critical a task as selecting federal of icials

in an entire region. Yet more astonishing was that the white

president who had taken his advice won accolades for the resulting

decision. Black men could not be the leaders of whites in this

regime, but they could quietly wield great in uence as to who the

rulers would be. Now, the president wished his African American

counselor to openly sup with himself, his wife, and his children—

making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.

making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.

Roosevelt had no hint of the reaction that would ensue.

Notwithstanding Washington's national fame and his widely known

view that blacks should in most regards accept their legal y inferior

position in the South, word that "a Negro" had dined at the same

table as the president, his wife, and his children—violating one of

the most sacrosanct protocols of southern racial custom—provoked

a sensational backlash.

U.S. senator Ben "Pitchfork" Til man of South Carolina sput ered:

"Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we

shal have to kil a thousand niggers to get them back to their

places." The Memphis Press Scimitar cal ed the evening meal "the

most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any

citizen of the United States." The Rich-mond News declared that

Roosevelt "at one stroke and by one act has destroyed regard for

him. He has put himself further from us than any man who has ever

been in the White House." The governor of Georgia, Al en Candler,

said, "No southerner can respect any white man who would eat

with a negro."15

Laced throughout the vili cations was the implicit or explicit

message that Roosevelt's decision to al ow Washington to share his

personal dining room amounted to an endorsement of sexual

relations—and predations— between black men and white women.

"It is simply a question of whether those who are invited to dine are

t to marry the sisters and daughters of their hosts," said Governor

Miles Benjamin McSweeney of South Carolina.16

The opprobrium continued for months, growing more virulent

with each announcement of another in the slow trickle of black

appointees made by the White House. After several black

o ceholders and their wives at ended a White House reception in

early 1903, the race-baiting Mississippi politician James K.

Vardaman cal ed Roosevelt a "lit le, mean, coon- avored

miscegenationist." The White House, Vardaman said, was "so

saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge

in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the

fol owing year.17

A century later it is di cult to comprehend the degree to which

most southern whites had so thoroughly adopted the rationale

embodied by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling less than ten years earlier

—which e ectively held that African Americans had no basis of

legitimate complaint regarding the racial climate at the turn of the

century, regardless of how overtly apparent was the disparate

treatment of and opportunities for whites and blacks.

Roosevelt's overtures to blacks were not just violations of an

accepted social custom, but gal ing because they suggested that in

fact African Americans did have reason to object to their current

status in the United States. White southerners by and large shared a

consensus that this view was simply nonsensical. They were certain

that the vast majority of blacks were entirely content and that their

contentment would only increase as freed-men were pushed nearer

to a legal status barely distinguishable from those of their parents in

antebel um society.

The Birmingham Ledger newspaper—describing a state in which

African Americans could no longer vote, could not hold o ce,

could not serve on local juries, were proscribed from most higher-

wage work, could arrange only the slimmest legal representation in

the courts, and were subject to ut erly arbitrary enforcement of the

law—summed up the fantasy shared by mil ions of southerners:

"The court of Alabama and schools of Alabama are open to negroes

and every door of opportunity can be entered and above al it is

easier for a negro to get rich here than anywhere else in the

world."18That delusion would not waver in the South for at least

another fty years, until the very climax of the civil rights

movement.

The Dadevil e Spot Cash, the voice of John Pace's Tal apoosa

County, enunciated this white delusion—and its o ense at the

inherent impudence of Roosevelt's at itudes—in a detailed

fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and

many kinds of negroes, as lit le boys have many kinds of marbles.

We have good negroes and bad negroes, industrious negroes and

idle negroes, negroes determined to bet er their own condition and

negroes who care no more about the future than the birds care.

Alabama has negroes who have earned the respect and regard of

the people who know them, and Alabama has negroes who wear

the stripes of the convict."19

The Dadevil e editor also re ected the broadly shared paranoia

that any e ort to change or improve the conditions of blacks

amounted to an e ort to seize control of society: "Alabama has

negroes who own land and cat le and who are rearing their families

respectably and who can go to the bank and borrow money without

security. There are negroes who are teaching and many who are

fol owing honorable lines of work, and it has some who think with

the president that the door of hope for them means governing

white people as of icials. Al these we have and others."20

The message was clear, and shared almost universal y among

whites: whatever happens to black men is strictly the result of their

own choices. Those choices ultimately were to submit quietly to the

emerging new order or be crushed by it.

The reaction of southern leaders to Roosevelt's gesture to

Washington further underscored how far southern whites could

extend their ability to reconcile the obvious and extraordinary

abuses of blacks occurring around them with their rhetorical

insistence that African Americans were entirely free, content, and

unmolested. Never before in American history had so large a

portion of the populace adopted such explicitly false and calculated

propaganda. Many southern whites actual y came to believe claims

that black schools were equal y funded, black train cars were

equal y appointed, and that black citizens were equal y defended

by the courts—as preposterous as those claims obviously were.

Those who truly knew bet er nonetheless relished the clever

fabrication of this mythology, and how it so e ectively stymied the

busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most

cynical thread in the mosaic of racial myth was the outrage of

southern white men at Roosevelt's supposed encouragement of

sexual interrelations between blacks and whites. White men openly

forced black slaves into their beds for two centuries before the Civil

War, and sexual access to local black women remained a running

point of confrontation between white landowners and their black

laborers deep into the twentieth century—a phenomenon that

continued to demonstrate itself a century later with the public

revelation that South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond fathered a

black child with an African American family servant in 1925.

"The whole country wel knows that white men of the South have

come into closer relations with negroes and commit ed far grosser

sins than that of sit ing down to meat with a reputable and

representative colored person," wrote Wil iam A. Sinclair, a black

physician, in 1905. "And in the eyes of their fel ows they su ered

no disgrace."21

President Roosevelt was shocked by the calumnies and vitriol

spewing from the South regarding his friendliness toward blacks.

He moderated slightly— never inviting another black man to his

dinner table again—but continued to insist that good Americans

could not legitimately object to the view that law-abiding and

industrious blacks should be treated with equity and ful protection

of the law.

Roosevelt concluded a long circuit of speeches across much of the

country in the spring of 1903 with an address in Spring eld,

Il inois, on June 4, at the monument there to Abraham Lincoln.

Arriving on a 10:15 A.M. train, Roosevelt was greeted euphorical y

rst by aging Union soldiers in the Lincoln-McKinley Veteran

Voters’ Association, then by more than ve thousand schoolchildren

massed along the street leading past the state capitol and furiously

waving American ags. Businesses and homes were decorated in

elaborate patriotic bunting and ags. A gathering of ten thousand

impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he

would dedicate later in the day. Also in the crowd at the Lincoln

memorial were several detachments of the Il inois National Guard,

including the al -black Company H of the Eighth Regiment. "It

seems to me eminently t ing that the guard around the tomb of

Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers," Roosevelt said,

citing his own service in Cuba beside black soldiers. "A man who is

good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be

given a square deal afterward."22

The words were a modest anodyne for black Americans, given

the scale of the campaign over the previous two decades to

circumscribe their constitutional protections and limit their free

participation in American society. Yet the sentence—condensed by

newspaper reporters and repeated ubiquitously as a promise by

Roosevelt of "a square deal for the negro"—in amed white

southerners yet again. What most gal ed whites was the implication

by Roosevelt that African Americans were not already receiving as

square and fair a deal as they could possibly deserve.

In Alabama, as Secret Service agents scoured the countryside for

slavery, whites recognized that Roosevelt's remarks might be more

than the pitiable window dressing of equal civil rights they had

heard from McKinley and the other Republican leaders of the

previous decade.

By early June 1903, Alabama was a ame. Judge Jones—only

nineteen months into his service as the new member of the federal

bench—had proven to be precisely the gure Roosevelt hoped. The

slavery investigation announced in late May was spreading across

the state. Prominent white landowners in a half dozen counties had

learned they were under examination or at least al egation. Black

laborers—while stil acutely aware that the investigation subjected

them to a new degree of jeopardy with angry whites—quietly

expressed a level of anticipation unlike anything since rst word of

the coming emancipation had arrived forty years earlier.

The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons

was hired to represent a black prisoner being held in Shelby

County. Local authorities obstructed Parsons's e orts to nd the

prisoner and refused to say why he was being held. Parsons

contacted the U.S. at orney in Montgomery, who in turn told Judge

Jones. The rst handful of frightened witnesses were brought before

a grand jury sit ing in Birmingham and presided over by Jones.

They told the first shocking account of Pace's slaving network.23

In March, Judge Jones red o a bewildered let er to At orney

General Philander C. Knox in Washington, D.C. "Some witnesses

before the Grand Jury here developed the fact that in Shelby

County in this District, and in Coosa County in the Middle district, a

systematic scheme of depriving Negroes of their liberty, and hiring

them out, has been practiced for some time," Jones wrote. "The

plan is to accuse the negro of some pet y o ense, and then require

him, in order to escape conviction, to enter into an agreement to

pay his accuser so much money, and sign a contract, under the

terms of which his bondsmen can hire him out until he pays a

certain sum. The negro is made to believe he is a convict, and

treated as such. It is said that thirty negroes were in the stockade at

one time." Already, at least one witness had been seized from a

train after testifying. Judge Jones ordered a deputy U.S. marshal to

protect the man. He urged the at orney general to send a special

investigator into the area quickly24

At orney General Knox, a shrewd lawyer from Pennsylvania who

before entering government service had amassed a fortune as

counsel to some of the largest U.S. corporations, was hardly an

obvious al y of southern blacks. A dapper man who contravened

current fashion with a clean-shaven face and sported high col ars

and broad French cu s, he had no natural a nity for the South or

its black inhabitants. His greatest claim to fame was as legal counsel

to Andrew Carnegie's vast steelmaking enterprises. In 1901, he

played a key role in the merger of Carnegie Steel with J. P.

Morgan's Federal Steel Company and virtual y every other major

steel and iron concern in the nation. The new organization was U.S.

Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity

Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity

created up to that point. It immediately control ed 7 percent of the

nation's gross domestic product. Four days after the merger was

o cial y consummated, President McKinley, a close friend since his

col ege years, named Knox at orney general. Less than six months

later, McKinley was dead, and Knox was part of Theodore

Roosevelt's cabinet.

In light of Roosevelt's pledge of a renewed commitment to black

civil rights, At orney General Knox could hardly ignore Judge

Jones's report of slavery stil being practiced forty years after

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Moreover, the al egations

reanimated a running legal dilemma for the Justice Department. At

least some federal o cials, especial y native southern Republicans

serving as prosecutors, judges, or in government posts in the South,

were acutely aware that slavery had never truly disappeared.

The Justice Department was already on notice. Four years earlier,

in 1899, the colorful federal prosecutor in Atlanta, Edward A.

Angier, went so far as to mount a lone prosecution against one of

Georgia's most prominent planters, Wil iam Eberhart, in Oglethorpe

County, for conspiracy to hold blacks in a state of peonage—a

crime de ned by an obscure and never before used 1867 federal

law passed to prohibit the long-standing Mexican practice of debt

slavery in the new territory of New Mexico.

Relying on his brother-in-law, a justice of the peace, to convict

black laborers on any charge the planter wished to use, Eberhart

enslaved men and women and forced them to bind their children to

him as apprentices. He routinely claimed to have loaned money to

black workers and then held them on his plantation near the town

of Wintervil e to work o the debt— often for years at a time.

Before a grand jury, witnesses described Eberhart as a sadistic brute

who routinely beat adults and children to the edge of death. When

laborers ed to Atlanta, Eberhart sent deputy sheri s into the city to

hunt them down, beat them into submission, and drive them back

to the plantation in chains.

In one count of the indictment, Eberhart was charged with

enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by

enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by

falsely claiming he owed the planter money. When Cal oway

resisted, Eberhart assaulted and degraded the laborer at every

imaginable physical and emotional level: witnesses said that

Eberhart brutal y beat Cal oway's wife, Mary, and then at gunpoint

forced the woman to "yield her body to the lustful embraces" of the

plantation owner.

When Charley Cal oway at empted to escape the farm, Eberhart

had him hauled back and placed in handcu s. Eberhart then beat

him "upon the back, head, face and body" and, in an overt act of

sexual humiliation, had Cal oway stripped naked and chained into

a bed with a sick laborer named Orange Neeley

Later, Eberhart brandished his pistol and forced Cal oway "to

pinion his own beloved son, Robert Cal oway, outstretched to the

ground, and did make the said Charley Cal oway hold his said son

while the said Wil iam Eberhart did violently and unmerciful y beat

the said Robert Cal oway with heavy sticks and other weapons"

until the boy was crippled. As a nal indignity, Eberhart—like the

Alabama slavemasters who at empted to seize the children of

freedmen in the 1860s—forced Cal oway to sign contracts

apprenticing his remaining children, two of whom were stil

nursing babies, into Eberhart's control until they turned twenty-one

years old.25

Despite wide knowledge of Eberhart's sadism, scores of local

white citizens ral ied to Eberhart's defense, signing a petition that

labeled the evidence against him as "the testimony of irresponsible

negroes." Angier, the prosecutor, pressed on with the case, but

acknowledged to his superiors in Washington that "we are the

pioneers in this movement, and as this is the rst time this

‘peonage’ section has ever been invoked." Angier saw clearly that he

was at acking more than debt slavery perpetrated by a single man.

He sought permission from the Department of Justice to widen his

investigation into adjoining counties and warned: "In this

proceeding we have at acked the most powerful combination and

formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.

formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.

"Every resource known and unknown to the law wil be resorted

to by these potent and opulent in uences to break down this Bil

[of indictment], as we have selected the ring-leader for the rst

case," Angier wrote.26

In the end, it took no more than another audacious argument and

a compliant federal judge to col apse the case. Before a trial could

be convened, Eberhart's at orneys chal enged the most fundamental

premise of the case—arguing that no federal statute speci cal y

made it a crime to hold a person in slavery. The presiding judge

agreed: "The indictment did not state an o ense within the

jurisdiction of the federal courts."27 The case was never tried. "The

judge …indicated that the State Court alone had jurisdiction of the

mat ers and things embraced in these indictments," Angier wrote to

Washington.28

Despite the horror of the al egations, no local courts took up the

case. The fate of the Cal oway family was never known.

Two years later, unaware of the failed peonage prosecution in

Georgia, a U.S. commissioner named Fred Cubberly, living in the

Florida Panhandle town of Bronson, witnessed turpentine farmer J.

O. Elvington seize a black man and his wife at gunpoint, claiming

they could not leave his camp deep in the malarial swamps until a

$40 debt had been paid. The incident con rmed to Cubberly

rumors he had heard that forced labor was rampant among the

crude forest labor camps across northern Florida and adjoining

areas.29 Nearly thirty thousand men toiled in the turpentine farms

under excruciating conditions to supply a booming market for pine

tar, pitch, and turpentine used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing

ships and waterproof their ropes and riggings.

Workers carved deep V-shaped notches into the trunks of

mil ions of massive slash and longleaf pines towering in the stil

virgin forests. Smal galvanized iron boxes or gut ers were at ached

to the trees to col ect the thick, milky pine gum that oozed from the

wounds in winter. During spring and summer, as sap began to run,

mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working

mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working

feverishly from before dawn to the end of light, turpentine workers

cut fresh notches into every tree once a week, gathered the gum and

resin by hand, boiled it into vast quantities of distil ed turpentine,

and hauled it in hundreds of thousands of barrels out of the deep

woods. When trees stopped producing gum and resin, the camp

owners harvested them for lumber. As the demand for turpentine

products soared, the timber companies relentlessly acquired fresh

tracts of forest to drain and armies of men to perform the grueling

work.

Imprisoned in stockades or cel s, chained together at night or

held under armed guards on horseback, the turpentine farms were

bleak outposts miles from any chance of comfort or contact with

the outside world. Workers were forced to buy their own food and

clothes from a camp commissary and charged usurious interest rates

on the salary advances used to pay for the goods—typical y at least

100 percent.

A week after witnessing Elvington's seizure of two black workers,

Cubberly encountered three "man hunters" at the local train station,

led by Samuel M. Clyat , a turpentine farmer from Georgia

searching for several men who had run away from his camp. Clyat

and the others, including a deputy sheri from his home county,

forced two workers, Wil Gordon and Mose Ridley, back to Georgia

at gunpoint.

Cubberly began investigating similar complaints and making

reports to the U.S. at orney in Pensacola, Florida. In the summer of

1901, the federal prosecutor there, John Eagan, passed on to the

newly appointed At orney General Knox let ers from Cubberly and

a local at orney in the area al eging that "it is common practice

among parties engaged in Turpentine business in the Northern

District of Florida, to hold laborers … in a state of Involuntary

Servitude."

Eagan added that he personal y confirmed some of the al egations

and ordered that an indictment be sought. The system of coercion

he had discovered in Florida, authorized under an 1891 state law

making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages

making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages

had been advanced, was virtual y identical to that of Eberhart in

Georgia and what Alabama investigators were soon to discover.

"The laborers in this line of business are as a general rule colored

men and are imposed on and treated outrageously by their

employers," Eagan wrote. "A warrant is issued by a Justice of the

Peace and placed in the hands of a constable or sheri who

proceeds to forcibly deliver laborer to the possession of the

employers who made the complaint, and the employer holds him

in service until his claim, including al costs and charges of the

proceedings, are worked out."30

In November 1901, a Tal ahassee federal grand jury indicted

Clyat for peonage. He stood trial ve months later—despite the

unexplained disappearance of Gordon and Ridley, who were never

again seen after their seizure and return to Georgia. Clyat was

found guilty and sentenced to four years in the federal penitentiary.

Recognizing that the conviction could destroy the underpinning of

their industry—and a critical element of the southern economy—an

association of turpentine and timber companies ral ied to Clyat 's

defense. They hired as at orneys U.S. senator Augustus Octavius

Bacon and U.S. congressman Wil iam G Brantley both of Georgia. In

the lawyers’ appeal of the conviction, they observed to the higher

courts that the holding of slaves in the United States was not

technical y a crime. "Congress has never passed a law providing

punishment for slavery or for involuntary servitude," Brantley

reminded the gal ery during a speech before the U.S. House of

Representatives.31

The peonage statute, they claimed, amounted to unconstitutional

federal interference into mat ers of state jurisdiction. It was

improper to apply it to Clyat because no formal "system of

peonage" existed in the South.

As Clyat 's case languished in the Circuit Court of Appeals

throughout 1902, new al egations of slavery in the turpentine

camps continued to surface . Then came the let er to At orney

General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new

General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new

manifestation of the involuntary servitude system in Alabama,

potential y extending across an even larger area of the South.

Knox responded by directing the federal prosecutor in

Montgomery, Warren S. Reese Jr., to investigate the al egations. "I

have this day addressed a communication to each deputy marshal in

this district …requesting them to make a special investigation of the

peonage question," Reese responded enthusiastical y. "If from these

reports I am satis ed that at empts are being made or have been

made to deprive citizens of African descent of their liberty, I wil

report the same in ful to you and request the detail of a Secret

Service Operative if I deem the same necessary"32

It took less than two weeks for federal marshals to report the

discovery of scores of black slaves in Shelby, Coosa, and Tal apoosa

counties. The grand jury in Birmingham issued indictments against

nine Shelby County men near the end of April.33

But the original al egations made before the Birmingham grand

jury were tepid compared to what other agents in the field began to

learn. It was clear that not just one slavery ring existed in Alabama,

but layers upon layers of them, blanketing the state. The men

forced into labor in Shelby and Coosa counties were victims of only

the outermost edge of a network emanating from the farms and

other business interests of John Pace and his partners in Tal apoosa

County. A separate operation run by the sheri of Lowndes County

in the southern section of the state—where more than 25,000 black

farm laborers and sharecroppers lived—appeared to involve

hundreds or thousands of slaves and dozens of local landowners.

More rings operated in at least a half dozen other locations.

In some areas, local whites who were appal ed by the conduct of

their neighbors, or at orneys who had at empted in the past to free

forced black laborers in the southern courts, volunteered tales of

excruciating abuse to federal investigators. But in most locales, few

whites expressed any misgivings about the forced labor going on in

plain sight.

plain sight.

A lawyer named L. E. White, from Columbus, Georgia, a bustling

town on the main train line running through Tal apoosa County,

told Reese how he had traveled to Dadevil e the previous summer

looking for a missing young black man named Esau Wil iams. He

tracked him down at a farm owned by Fletch Turner, where

Wil iams and several other black men were being forced to cut

wood. White bought his freedom for $25 and returned the boy to

his mother.

A few weeks later, the family of Glennie "Speedy" Helms, another

young black man who had been traveling with Wil iams, sent the

lawyer back looking for their son. White found him and more than

a half dozen others working at a sawmil owned by Turner near the

set lement cal ed Jackson's Gap. He had to pay $48 for Helms. But

most striking to White were the execrable working conditions he

found—a scene that must have been strikingly similar to the

operations of the slavery-driven sawmil near the Cot ingham

plantation half a century earlier. "When I found this boy he was at

the sawmil at work completely naked, no clothes on at al ,

absolutely naked," White said. "And there were some six or eight

other negroes there working in the same naked condition."34

Reese was astonished by the evidence piling up in his o ce, and

quickly asked for the assignment of two Secret Service agents to

assist. "I never comprehended until now the extent of the present

method of slavery," he wrote to At orney General Knox,35 asking for

a meeting in Washington to plan a dramatic legal at ack.

The investigation could only have occurred with a man such as

Warren Reese in the role of U.S. at orney. Reese and two part-time

assistants constituted the sum total of the U.S. government's

regulatory and judicial reach into the portion of Alabama he served.

It would be another ve years before the agency that became the

Federal Bureau of Investigation was created in Washington. Until

then, the handful of investigators employed by the U.S. Justice

Department were nearly al accountants temporarily retained from

the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of

the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of

federal power in a place as remote as Alabama was only as strong

as the capabilities and political wil s of the local U.S. at orney and

federal judge.

The thirty-seven-year-old Reese exempli ed the new phenotype

of political and racial moderate that Roosevelt believed could

emerge as a new leadership class in the South—a counterpoint of

reason and modernism to noxious characters like John Pace and

other men who perverted judicial and political systems against

blacks and the constitutional amendments that were supposed to

have freed them.

Born just after the Civil War, Reese was a new husband and fast-

rising at orney in the state's capital city in 1903. Handsome, with an

academic air, Reese's piercing gaze at juries was softened by a long,

narrow face. An eloquent speaker and a orid writer, the at orney

was just mature enough to win credibility in the courtroom, just

youthful enough to ignore the obvious jeopardy that would mount

as he pressed an at ack on slavery and some of his state's most

powerful men. As al egations of slavery in his jurisdiction

multiplied, Reese demonstrated a prehensile comprehension of the

murky legal framework governing black labor, and a hard-nosed

unwil ingness to ignore the implications of the extraordinary

evidence that soon poured into his of ice.

Despite Reese's Republican a liation in rabidly Democratic and

white supremacist Alabama, he carried the social credentials of a

true son of the South. His father, W. S. Reese Sr., was a war hero

who at the age of nineteen earned a commission as a Confederate

colonel for gal antry during the ghting at Chickamauga Creek in

Georgia. After the war, the elder Reese became an activist in

Republican politics, successful y serving as mayor of Montgomery in

the 1880s and running unsuccessful y for the U.S. Senate in 1896 as

a Republican "fusion" candidate—at empting to at ract both black

and white voters. Reese's maternal grandfather, John A. Elmore,

was among Alabama's most famous at orneys—an architect of the

national government of the Confederacy and a key player in

secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.

secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.

Even Alabama's leading Democrats could muster no authentic

opposition to Reese's appointment to the federal post. Dozens of

endorsements poured into the White House and headquarters of the

Department of Justice in 1897, including each state Supreme Court

justice, local judges across Alabama, bankers, railroad executives,

the president of the state senate, the speaker of the Alabama house,

Governor Joseph F. Johnston, the secretary of state, U.S. senators,

and every Republican member of the Alabama legislature. White

Republicans in Alabama saw in Reese the pro le of a potential y

dynamic new base of support—a fresh antidote to the planter class

that dominated Democratic politics, but one who could avoid the

carpetbagger taint of the Reconstruction-era Grand Old Party. "He is

a young man of promise, belongs to an old and in uential family of

this state—the source from which we must have recruits if we

expect permanent and lasting growth for republicanism in the

South," wrote one Alabama GOP leader, in a let er endorsing

Reese's candidacy. He was sworn in as U.S. at orney by President

McKinley in April 1897.36

Four years later, Roosevelt's optimism that men such as the

Reeses and Judge Thomas Jones could change the course of

southern thinking failed to account for the most powerful social

currents surging through the region. Not incidental y, Colonel Reese

and Judge Jones knew each other at least partly through their

prominent roles in the years-long drive in the 1880s to erect a

massive monument to Confederate war dead and veterans in

Montgomery. Their participation underscored the treacherous

political and social straits through which white southern moderates

were forced to navigate at the turn of the century. In the rst four

decades after the war, southern nativity and service in the war, as

Reese and Jones each claimed, were enough to meet the

prerequisites for elected o ce and leadership—and enough to at

least partly inoculate them against the charge that any white man

who supported legal rights for freed slaves was a traitor to his

region.

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of

southern patriotism was mutating virulently. It was no longer

enough to have served honorably. The South now demanded in

public forums an increasingly rabid level of absolute adherence to a

baroque new mythology of the honorable southerner, the contented

slave, and the tragical y defeated secession. The new monument in

Montgomery, one of the largest such memorials anywhere in the

South, was that mythology incarnate. The aging former rebel

president, Je erson Davis, personal y laid its cornerstone on the

grounds of the state capitol, just a short distance from the spot

where he had taken the oath of o ce as president of the

Confederacy. The completed edi ce consisted of four statues

representing the four branches of military service spaced around the

base of an enormous column rising seventy feet above a bronze bas-

relief of a bat le scene.

Atop the shaft of Alabama limestone stood a ten-foot bronze

statue of a soldier titled Patriotism. After two decades of planning

and fund-raising, the monument was nal y unveiled before tens of

thousands of spectators in 1898. Undoubtedly, young Warren Reese

Jr. was among them.

A series of orators extol ed the virtuousness of the southern

rebel ion and the bravery and tenacity of its soldiers. Flanking the

scene was a contingent of young maidens, dressed in pure white,

gray caps, and crimson sashes, each representing one of the

Confederate states. Below the sculpture entitled Cavalry, an

inscription honored the horsemen of the rebel ion as "the

knightliest of the knightly race."37 As special agents scoured the

backcountry of Alabama ve years later, and brought tales of horror

to Montgomery in the spring of 1903, the cynicism of the South's

claim to hold a special position among the most noble civilizations

could not have escaped Reese's acute powers of observation.

An unnamed prisoner tied around a pickax for punishment in a

Georgia labor camp. Photograph by John L. Spivak, during research

for his 1932 book, Georgia Nigger.

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad coke ovens at the Prat Mines near

Birmingham, Alabama.

A southern chain gang in 1898. Photograph by Carl Weis.

"Warden and his pack after capture," at Sprague Junction labor

camp in Alabama. Photograph taken sometime in the 1890s.

A prisoner receiving punishment in a Georgia labor camp.

Photograph by John L. Spivak.

A 1905 scene from Thomas W. Dixon Jr.'s white supremacist

stageplay The Clansman. From a postcard distributed by opponents

of the drama's racist message.

Black convicts forced to work in Thomasvil e, Georgia, in the late

1880s. Photograph by Joseph John Kirkbride.

James Fletcher Turner.

W. D. McCurdy, baron of Lowndes County, Alabama.

U.S. At orney Warren S. Reese Jr.

John T. Milner.

John W. Pace.

U.S. District Court Judge Thomas G. Jones.

An 1880s political pamphlet distributed in Georgia by opponents

of the convict labor system.

Federal courthouse and post of ice in Montgomery Alabama. Scene

of the slavery and peonage trials of 1903. H. P. Tresslar Publisher,

Montgomery Alabama.

Abandoned convict "keep" at a lime quarry in Lee County Alabama.

Photography by E. W. Russel , 1937.

Barracks at Slope No. 12 mine for forced laborers acquired by

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company.

African Americans forced to help build river levees, probably in

Mississippi in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.

Convict wagons like these in Pit County, North Carolina, 1910,

were used across the South to transport and house African

Americans compel ed to work in road gangs, lumber camps, and

farms.

Black prisoners at work in a rock quarry, most likely in the early

1940s. Photographer unknown.

VI

THE INDICTMENTS

"I was whipped nearly every day."

In early May, a federal grand jury, the only province of the legal

system in which African Americans could stil participate in the

South, was impaneled in Montgomery to take up the mounting

evidence of slavery in Alabama. The jury of twenty-three, composed

of twenty whites and three blacks, filed into the elegant federal post

o ce and courthouse—with arched brick doorways and an

imposing square tower at the corner of Dexter Avenue and

Lawrence Street in downtown Montgomery. The foreman was

Judah T. Moses, one of Montgomery's leading Jewish businessmen.1

Soon a steady stream of witnesses—mostly black men and

women elated, bewildered, and a lit le shaken by the sudden

interest by powerful whites in their welfare—made its way to the

grand jury's chambers to tel of their entrapment back into slavery.

The scene's most extraordinary paradox was that the U.S.

commissioner—a federal magistrate with judicial powers one rank

below Judge Jones—presiding over the testimony was a young

John A. Elmore, son of one of the Confederacy's great legal

architects and absolute defenders of antebel um slavery. Yet now,

forty years after emancipation, he supervised an inquiry aimed at

nal y bringing an end to slavery in Alabama. Soon, the black

members of the jury were guiding portions of the investigation with

their own accounts of ongoing slavery2

The rst witness to make a formal statement was a white man

named Jim Ho man—without whose corroboration much of the

testimony from blacks might have been dismissed. A farmer from

the set lement of Camp Hil , Ho man testi ed on May 8 that he

had spent weeks during the previous year at empting to determine

why Jim Caldwel , the son of one of his black farmhands, had been

arrested. But everywhere Ho man or a local lawyer he hired

arrested. But everywhere Ho man or a local lawyer he hired

turned, they discovered that Caldwel and another young black man

seized at the same time had just been resold to a di erent farmer or

had been accused of new or dif erent crimes.

The mayor of Goodwater, Dave White, who had ned the two

African Americans, claimed to Ho man that he couldn't recal

details of the case or what had happened to Caldwel . He told

Ho man it would be a mistake for his lawyer to stir up trouble.

White said to give the lawyer a message: "You had bet er keep out

of this town. If you do not we wil get after you."3 The one

practicing at orney in Goodwater told Ho man that the town

watchman, John Dunbar, had found a pistol on one of the men and

a razor on the other. But Dunbar couldn't be found.

The next day, John Davis came before the jury and told of his

harrowing capture by Robert Franklin. When word of the federal

investigation spread across Alabama, the farmer who had purchased

Davis from John Pace suddenly released him, along with other

slaves. The white men hoped set ing the workers free would prove

they had never been held against their wil s. Under questioning by

Reese, Davis testi ed that afterward he was approached again by

Franklin.

"He said, John?’ I said, ‘Sir?’ He says, ‘We want you for a witness

…want you to sign a paper which won't be nothing, won't hurt

you,’ " Davis testi ed. " ‘If you want to we wil let you sign a lit le

paper, do like we tel you and I wil give you a pret y good suit of

clothes.’ I told him I did not know anything about any court."

Davis said Mayor White then intervened: "Go ahead and sign it,"

White said. "It is nothing to hurt you."

Davis refused. But after several days of harassment, clearly aware

of the risks he faced if he refused to sign the document—apparently

an a davit in which he said his arrest was proper—Davis put his

"X" on the paper. The document was never produced at court. "To

keep from being bothered with them, I just went on and signed the

paper, " Davis said. "I did not know what the paper was for. I never

read the paper. I cannot read nor write, and he did not even read it

read the paper. I cannot read nor write, and he did not even read it

to me."4

• •

Over the next week, federal agents presented a rush of testimony

from others who had witnessed or participated in the seizure of Jim

Caldwel and Herman "Joe" Pat erson. It was transparent that, like

John Davis and so many others, they had commit ed no crime.

There was no gun. And carrying a razor—even if Pat erson had

done so—wasn't even a violation of Alabama law. The facts were

that the pair passed innocently on foot through Goodwater just after

dark on April 23, 1902, headed toward Birmingham to look for

work. As the two approached a cot on gin on the edge of town,

near the Pope House restaurant, they were confronted by the night

watchman, Dunbar, and the bank clerk, J. L. Purifoy.

Dunbar told the grand jury he stopped the two because there had

been burglaries in the area recently. "I discovered two slouchy

negroes slipping towards town, and I suppose they were up to

some devilment," he testi ed.5The watchmen approached the two

young men and asked where they were going.

"To Birmingham," Caldwel said. "To work."

"You boys come on with me," Dunbar replied.6

The two white men shackled Caldwel 's wrists and grabbed

Pat erson by the arms. They marched the two laborers to the lockup

in Goodwater— the same place John Davis had been imprisoned.

Purifoy claimed later that he had searched the two and found a

razor on Pat erson and a pistol in the clothing of Caldwel . The next

morning, when the two men were brought before Mayor White,

both were charged with carrying concealed weapons. The mayor's

court docket showed that both men pleaded guilty to the charge,

though Caldwel testi ed later he believed he had been accused of

vagrancy and that neither entered a plea at al . Regardless, Mayor

White declared the men guilty and ned each $10 plus court costs

of $1.60.7

of $1.60.

After the summary trial, Robert Franklin approached Dunbar and

told him John Pace would be pleased to buy the men. The

fol owing day Dunbar asked Purifoy to accompany him to Dadevil e

with the two captured African Americans. Virgil Smith, a black

laborer working for Purifoy at the time, warned his boss that

Dunbar was in the business of sel ing African Americans. Purifoy

was new to Goodwater, and uncertain of what his employee real y

meant. He had di culty imagining that blacks were truly being

bought and sold. "If they are sel ing Negroes," he told the black

laborer, "I wil go down there and see about it."

Dunbar, Purifoy, and the two black men rode to Dadevil e in a

horse-drawn hack. After arriving on Main Street in the town, John

Pace and Fletcher Turner approached the wagon and told Caldwel

and Pat erson to get out. Purifoy stayed with the wagon, while

Dunbar and Pace took the two black men to a nearby stable. A

short while later, Turner drove away with the prisoners, stil bound.

Franklin had arrived in town separately to negotiate a price for the

men. Pace handed over $24 in cash and scratched out a note to the

president of Tal apoosa County Bank to give Franklin another $46

from his account.8

A lit le while later, Dunbar and Purifoy, back in the now empty

wagon, rat led down a pit ed dirt road toward Goodwater.

"What have you done with the negroes," Purifoy asked.

"Turner has got them," Dunbar replied.

Had Turner paid for the men? Purifoy questioned.

"No, nothing more than the fine and costs," Dunbar replied.

The next day, the two white men saw each other again, on the

road in front of a wealthy local farmer's residence. Standing beneath

the canopy of a landmark oak tree, Purifoy directly asked his friend,

"John, what did you get for those negroes?"

"Nineteen dol ars," Dunbar grudgingly replied.

Purifoy was alarmed that his friend had been party to the sel ing

of men. The two continued talking for an hour. It was apparent to

of men. The two continued talking for an hour. It was apparent to

Purifoy that Dunbar was involved in an active tra c of African

Americans.

"Do you think it's right?" Purifoy final y asked.

"Wel , everybody else was doing it," Dunbar replied.9

The evidence of Pat erson and Caldwel 's capture quickly led

investigators to the fate of three other black men rounded up in

Goodwater a day later. This time, the night marshal rounded up

Dave Johnson, Esau Wil iams, and Glennie Helms. Al were charged

with vagrancy. After a night locked in the town calaboose, they

were brought before Mayor White, who refused to al ow the black

men to cal any witnesses. White declared them guilty and ned

each $6.60.10

None had the money to pay their nes, and the three were tied

up and held until a train arrived, bound for Dadevil e. After the

short ride over, the young men were presented at the station to

Fletch Turner, who said they could choose whether to work on his

farm or Pace's. One of the most bit er incongruities of the slaving

system as it persisted into the twentieth century was the

participation of blacks in the holding of other African Americans—

another debasement shared with antebel um slavery. Black gang

leaders passed on the orders of white overseers; some blacks

assisted in restraining and stripping men to be whipped by the

bosses; and, as in the case of the young men seized in Goodwater

that night, local black workers under the control of Pace and Turner

played out a ruse to convince Johnson, Wil iams, and Helms to

quietly go along with Turner, a man whose cruelty to blacks was

widely known. "There was some colored people there told us we

had bet er go with Mr. Turner, that we would be treated a heap

bet er with Mr. Turner," Wil iams testified to the grand jurors.11

So the deal was completed, with just enough of a chimera that

the transaction had been part of a legitimate legal process and that

the black men in question had voluntarily submit ed to their fates.

the black men in question had voluntarily submit ed to their fates.

"Mr. Turner said he bought us al three for $50 …and we were to

work for four months and a half a piece," testi ed Dave Johnson.

"Mr. Dunbar sold us to him. I don't know for how much," Helms

later told the grand jury. None signed contracts agreeing to the

arrangement, though later such documents mysteriously appeared

with "X" ‘s purporting to be those of the three black men. The

gossamer facade of judicial process took only three days to weave.

The trio had been arrested on a Thursday, tried, sentenced, and

delivered to a new owner on Friday, and were at their forced labor

by dawn's break on Saturday.12

At Turner's farm, the black laborers were put to work digging

drainage, cut ing wood, and cleaning up recently cleared new

pasture—the most grueling sunrise-to-sunset tasks of a farm stil

being carved from forest. Dave Johnson was beaten on the rst

Saturday by Al en Turner, son of the man who had purchased the

three. "I was whipped," Johnson said, "because I did not know how

to ditch—laid me down at on my stomach, one man on my head

and another man to hold my legs, and whipped me across my back,

my clothes were on. I was whipped with a piece of stick about as

big as a broom handle. I got about 25 licks. I was whipped about

every day."13

Helms received his rst beating a day after Johnson's: "I was

whipped about two days after I got there," Helms testi ed later.

"Whipped me a long time, I could not tel how many licks.

Sometimes I was whipped two or three times a day, sometimes

took my clothes down and whipped me with a stick on the bare

back."14Esau Wil iams said his rst corporal punishment came a

week after arriving at Turner's farm. Over the fol owing four weeks,

"I was whipped nearly every day…. Would drop our clothes and

whip us with hickory sticks," Wil iams recounted.15 When guards

were particularly sadistic, they at ached an empty metal bul et

cartridge to the end of the stick to gouge the skin with each swing

of the branch.

After days of testimony by victims of the forced labor ring, the jury

was greeted on May 11, 1903, by the hulking gure of John Pace.

The strange weather of early spring had nal y entered a long calm.

Replanting was in ful swing. Weeks of rain had abated, and the

drying elds were teeming with workers put ing in seed. Just a few

weeks earlier, Pace and his son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, had been

aggressively gathering more laborers, some hired as free men but

most captured through the courts or their procurers scat ered in the

countryside.

Suddenly ordered to appear before the grand jury, Pace turned

the operations over to Hardy and boarded a Central of Georgia

morning train at the Dadevil e depot where he had purchased

hundreds of black men over the prior twenty years. The ride from

Dadevil e's simple train platform to the immense new red-brick

Union Station in Montgomery took not much more than an hour.

Completed just ve years earlier, Union Station, receiving trains

from six competing railroad lines, was the bustling hub of

Alabama's economy—a veritable temple to the cot on-driven

prosperity that the South was reestablishing for itself and that this

federal investigation seemed intent on disrupting.

Wel before noon, Pace was in the capital city. He walked two

short blocks down Commerce Street to Dexter Street, almost

certainly unaware of the irony of his passing the fountain in Court

Square, where Montgomery's antebel um slave market had thrived

for almost fty years with the daily auctions of African Americans

like Scip, the Cot ingham slave, and the forebears of the men and

women Pace held on his farm. Across the street was the federal

court building. Almost exactly forty years after Lincoln's order

freeing the slaves, Pace entered the grand doorway of the

courthouse, the rst man in Alabama to face the threat of criminal

sanction for holding black slaves. Forty-two years later, the modern

U.S. civil rights movement began at the same intersection when

Rosa Parks boarded a bus at the Court Square stop and refused to

give up her seat to a white man.16

In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,

In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,

Pace o ered the grand jury a sanitized, yet nonetheless damning,

version of his dealings with black laborers. It must have been

unnerving for him to face a panel of "peers" that included black

men, holding authority over his freedom and fate. Whatever his

reaction to the African American faces gazing at him from the jury

box, Pace described a plantation melodrama in which he acted not

as oppressor but the rescuer of penniless blacks who preferred life

on his farm to jail or a forced journey into the coal mines of

Birmingham. Ignoring the rst twenty years of his active trading in

black laborers, Pace dated the beginnings of his dealings to April

1901, just two years earlier.

"The first man I got was Elbert Carmichael," Pace said, naming the

victim in what he knew was the earliest case federal investigators

had unearthed so far. Pace insisted that he asked for the proper

paperwork proving that every black man sold to him was a

legitimate convict serving a judge's sentence, but that he took the

word of constables such as Robert Franklin and John Dunbar who

sometimes said the documents had been lost. "They claimed they

did not have time to make the papers out before they caught the

train," Pace said of his arrangement in 1902 to acquire a young

African American boy named W. S. Thompson.17

In the cases of Joe Pat erson and Jim Caldwel , Pace testi ed that

he "noti ed the white people that these boys" were under his

control and that their freedom could be purchased by reimbursing

the $70 he paid for them. A few days later, G. B. Walker, the

at orney, arrived to obtain their release. Pace told the jury he was

outraged to learn that the supposed court fees on the men had

totaled only $22.50 and that they had been improperly placed on

his farm. "I did not want to hold the negroes under those terms, and

I demanded my money back," Pace testified.

As for John Davis, Pace said the black man freely admit ed

shirking a $40 bil at Robert Franklin's dry goods store. He said

Davis volunteered to work o the debt and a $35 ne under guard

at the convict farm. Pace claimed to have sent $4 to Davis's wife at

one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he

one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he

recouped nearly al of his expenditures at the end of the twelve-

month contract by sel ing Davis to another white farmer for $50. He

o ered no explanation for how he had the power to sel Davis,

even after al his al eged debts were paid.

Pace explained that Joe Pat erson was kept under guard an extra

half year to pay a $25 doctor's bil for treatment after Pat erson's

ngers were cut while working on the farm. Yet more time was

added, Pace explained, as penalty after Pat erson at empted to

escape and used another white landowner's boat to cross the Coosa

River during his ight. The owner of the boat and Pace's foreman,

Todd Berry, recaptured Pat erson two days later, after trailing him

with bloodhounds. Dragged back to the Pace farm, the justice of the

peace, James Kennedy, held another sham trial and sentenced

Pat erson to an additional six months of labor. Pace said other

charges could have been brought as wel , but he chose not to. "I felt

kindly towards the boy and I wanted the mat er dropped," Pace

said.18

The next day, Fletcher Turner arrived in Montgomery and made

the same walk to the courthouse to appear before the panel of

jurors. His account was even more blatantly self-serving. Turner

agreed to take on Esau Wil iams, Dave Johnson, and Glennie Helms

only as a favor to another black laborer who asked him to help the

imprisoned three youngsters, he testi ed. There had never been any

violence against anyone on his farm.

"They have three negroes down yonder," Turner quoted the other

black laborer as saying. "And I know a brother of one of the boys,

and the boy knows me, and wants me to come around and see if

you want to make a trade with him."

When Turner arrived at the train station, he said he found the

three black workers "tied in the buggy with a rope." Other white

men, including John Pace, had gathered to inspect them, a common

occurrence when word went out of black men for hire or purchase.

Turner said the three blacks looked worthless: "I wanted negroes

but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a

but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a

common epithet for independent black men. "I asked what is the

cost of them negroes anyhow ? Where were they tried, and what

did they try them for?" Deputy Dunbar answered that they could be

had for $17.50 each.

Turner repeated to the jury his dialogue with the young black

men in the buggy:

" ‘Hel o nigger, how much is your cost?’ One of them commenced

crying and said, ‘Boss, if you wil take me I wil work for you two

years,’ " Turner claimed. "I said, ‘You are nothing but cigaret e

dudes and I would not have you.’ "

Turner described how he nonetheless began bargaining with

Grogan, the marshal from Goodwater who had arrested the three.

Grogan insisted that Turner would have to pay $53 and take al

three men.

"I won't pay any such amount," Turner said he replied.

"What wil you give?" Grogan said.

"Forty dol ars," Turner answered.

"Make it forty-five," Grogan shot back.

"No," said Turner.

Final y, Grogan relented. "Give me the money."

Turner walked into a nearby business, asked for a blank check,

and wrote it out to Dunbar for $40, against an account at the

Tal apoosa County Bank.

Turner told the jury he was incensed when he later learned that

each of the three blacks had only been ned $5 or $6 when

arrested. Turner claimed he told the young men they could leave

after four months of work instead of a year. He said the workers

were "perfectly satis ed," though he admit ed that Speedy Helms—

the "best negro of the bunch"—tried to run away. He was recaptured

and returned to the farm for a reward by a policeman in Opelika.19

Three days later, George Cosby took the stand. Like Pace and

Turner, he told the grand jury he was abbergasted by the

al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said

al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said

he'd had nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or peonage. He

said he'd been a consistent friend to blacks, paying their debts and

providing work out of kindness and good intentions. His version of

events was that he paid a $10 debt to Pace on behalf of "a darkey"

named Elbert Carmichael in January or February 1901. Afterward,

he "al owed" Carmichael to live on his farm.

Carmichael was "a mighty good negro, a might good hand … a

preacher," Cosby said. He freely left the farm to return to his home

in another county. Cosby couldn't remember helping arrest and

hold on a bond a man named Jasper Kennedy. A black woman

named Mat Smith "never worked a day for me in her life," Cosby

said, reporting that after he paid a $3.45 ne for Smith, she

disappeared to her father's. As for Lum Johnson, a black worker

Cosby paid nes for on two occasions, "that negro is working for

me now. He is free. I never whipped him." The same went for Wil

Get ings, "a free hand …working for $7 month." John Bentley,

another black man on the farm, "came along the road the other day

and I hired him," Cosby said. Bentley feared he was about to be

accused of stealing some fence wire in another town, and wanted

Cosby to shelter him. Cosby said he agreed to do so for $9 a month,

but insisted that Bentley remained free at al times.

"Those three negroes are al that I have. I don't lock them up at

night. I have no hounds, I keep a rabbit dog. I don't go armed about

my place," Cosby said. "Those negroes are absolutely free."20

On the same day that Cosby testi ed, a federal marshal escorted

into the courthouse James M. Kennedy, the jack-of-al -trades justice

of the peace and sawmil manager who worked for John Pace. He

told the jury that in the previous eight years he had tried some

workers who ended up working for Pace, but Kennedy was evasive

about exactly how many. The handwrit en docket book, in which

the records of the arrests and trials would have been maintained,

had been lost a lit le more than a year earlier, Kennedy testi ed.

His new docket book contained entries relating only to a dozen

His new docket book contained entries relating only to a dozen

black workers—the exact same workers, remarkably, whom federal

agents had interviewed in the previous few weeks.

Kennedy con dently worked through the cases of each African

American, crisply pointing out how the proper procedures had

been fol owed, appropriate charges al eged, and necessary a davits

signed in every instance. He was con dent even about his handling

of the case of Joe Pat erson, who one week earlier told jurors the

harrowing story of his at empted escape from Pace's farm after

being repeatedly beaten. Pat erson was tracked by dogs for miles,

deep into the woods. Trapped on the bank of the Tal apoosa River,

he jumped in a smal boat tied nearby and paddled across the

water. But Pat erson was soon captured by a posse of "man-hunters"

on horseback, yelping dogs, and guards from Pace's farm. Wet and

exhausted, Pat erson was beaten with sts, boots, and sticks. Then

the white men dragged him before Kennedy for a new trial.

Those events were barely two months old when Kennedy

testi ed. He told the jury in dispassionate detail that the

proceedings against Pat erson were handled entirely within the

technicalities of Alabama law. Pat erson was ordered to work out

his original contract with Pace and an additional six months for

at empting to break the rst contract he was coerced into. When

that year of labor was nished Pat erson would be held for a third

six-month period, Kennedy ruled, for "removing a boat from its

moorings."

"Note," Kennedy reminded jurors, lifting an index nger into the

air. "In none of these cases that I have spoken about did I ever

receive one cent of costs, nor was I paid in any other way by Mr.

Pace or anybody else for trying these cases."21

The testimony of the white men in the slavery ring was crisply

consistent: al of the black men and women held to forced labor

were properly convicted of crimes; they freely agreed to be leased

as laborers; and they were never physical y abused. But outside the

courtroom, the men at the center of the investigation hardly

courtroom, the men at the center of the investigation hardly

behaved as if they were innocent. They began a campaign of

witness tampering and intimidation.

Worried that he would be charged, Mayor White in Goodwater

boarded a train in early May to Columbus, Georgia, to warn John

G. Dun-bar, the marshal who had assisted in seizing so many black

men, about the investigation. "White did not want to be indicted,"

Dunbar later testified.22

G. B. Walker, the lawyer who had helped bring at ention to the

slaving operations and set free Caldwel and Pat erson, got an

ominous let er from his cousin in Tal apoosa County. "Those people

there were his fel ow townsmen and his friends, and asked me not

to stir up anything," Walker recal ed the let er saying. "He said …for

his sake not to do anything against these parties."23

Mat Davis—the brother of John Davis—was seized from a train,

locked in the Goodwater jail, and threatened by the brother of

Robert Franklin. The white man warned Davis's father that he

would "shoot you as sure as hel " if the older man interfered.

Released several days later, Mat began hiding in the woods at

night.24

Despite the e orts to frighten the growing number of accusers,

the accounts of kidnappings and violence were making an

impression on the jury in Montgomery. Even Alabama newspaper

editors, embarrassed by national reports about the investigation,

excoriated the accused slave dealers. The ringleaders were growing

nervous. Kennedy began to wonder if he should tel the truth.

After giving testimony on May 15, Kennedy, George Cosby, and

one of the other guards from Pace's farm shared a wagon for a wet

ride back to Tal-lapoosa County. A steady drizzle pelted the men as

the mule strained to drag the hack down a pit ed, red-mud road.

Deep in the bush, the wagon broke down. The men were forced to

walk through the cold springtime muck. Cosby was frantic at the

delay. He said he needed "to be at home and get niggers out of the

way so that no papers could be served on them from the United

States court," Kennedy later testi ed. Cosby hired a horse at the rst

States court," Kennedy later testi ed. Cosby hired a horse at the rst

set lement the men reached and raced ahead. Kennedy and the

guard trudged on in the rain, certain Cosby intended to murder

witnesses.

A week later, the three men nervously sat down to a meal

together. Cosby had lost his nerve and kil ed no one. But suddenly

he reached into his shirt pocket and pul ed out a package of

morphine. Kennedy tried to wrestle it away from him. "It wil come

to this," Cosby shouted. "I am going to be convicted, and before I

wil be convicted I wil destroy myself. It is a heap bet er than to go

to the penitentiary and disgrace my family"25

At the same time, Pace and Turner hastily began freeing forced

laborers on their farms and at the quarry. Some disappeared

entirely, their fates unknown. Other blacks were warned by the

white men—or through other black employees—not to cooperate

with the federal investigation. Indeed, of the dozens of black

workers being held against their wil when Kennedy conducted the

1900 census, almost none could be located by federal agents three

years later.

On May 23, a few days after Kennedy wrestled the morphine

away from Cosby, Secret Service Agent McAdams stepped o the

rst morning train to arrive in Goodwater. McAdams walked in the

bright sunlight to Robert Franklin's mercantile store, pushed open

the glass-plated door, and informed the constable that the grand

jury had handed up an indictment for holding black workers in

peonage. Franklin, and ve others whom McAdams wouldn't

identify, were named in the indictment. By nightfal , Franklin sat in

a cel at the Montgomery County jail.

Kennedy's anxiety was growing. He had participated in dozens of

bogus trials, though he had never reaped the nancial rewards of

Pace, Turner, and the Cosbys. He was certain the government—and

perhaps his employers— would eventual y try to pin the slave trade

on him. Kennedy told one of the Secret Service agents in Tal apoosa

County he was wil ing to testify again— this time tel ing the truth.

County he was wil ing to testify again— this time tel ing the truth.

A week after Franklin's arrest, Kennedy went back to

Montgomery and stunned the grand jury. He admit ed trying scores

of black laborers to force them to work for Pace, Turner, and Cosby.

He could recal at least thirty cases in which he didn't make any

record of the proceedings or report a verdict to the county judge, as

he was required to do by law. It was clear from Kennedy's

testimony that the tra c in African Americans hadn't been limited

to men. The white landowners sought out nearly half a dozen black

women as wel , Kennedy said, with the clear implication that they

were seized for sexual services. "There were many others, but I can't

remember their names now," Kennedy said.

He claimed to have initial y used his authority as a justice of the

peace properly, but that eventual y the white landowners he

worked for demanded that he convict any black laborer they

desired. "They would send one there and have an a davit made,"

Kennedy said. The black man would be arrested, ned, and sent to

whichever farmer had arranged the arrest.

"The agreement was there was no record to be kept," Kennedy

testified. Nearly every case, he said, "was a trumped up af air."26

Other white men, fearful of the mounting evidence, began

breaking their silence about the truth of the slave farms. Wilburn

Haralson, a young farmer living near the Pace plantation, testi ed

that the Cosbys compel ed him to swear out false charges against

several black men whose sentences to work for them were about to

expire. "I was afraid not to do it, I was afraid of those folks,"

Haralson testi ed. "I was afraid they would get me in some scrape,

swear some lie on me, and get me into it, and I had a wife and

children."

A black woman named Mat ie Turner was held on the farm

inde nitely, falsely accused of prostitution, Haralson swore. The

implication was clear that Turner was held for the sexual

exploitation of the farm. He knew of at least one slave worker who

had been murdered by a relative of the Cosbys. Haralson said few

African Americans ever escaped. George and Burancas Cosby

African Americans ever escaped. George and Burancas Cosby

patrol ed their farms with guns and used special y trained

bloodhounds to track any who tried to take ight. "They had nigger

dogs," he said. "There were two dogs at George Cosby's and two

dogs at Burancas Cosby's house."27

On May 28, U.S. Deputy Marshal A. B. Colquit hauled Francis M.

Pruit , the constable and livery stable keeper in Goodwater, to

Montgomery to hear his indictment read aloud. A total of six

indictments were handed up against Pruit and two justices of the

peace, outlining for the rst time publicly how Pace's slaving

network operated.28

The indictment charged Pruit with "forcibly seizing the body of

Ed Moody, a negro," in Coosa County and sel ing him on April 3,

1903, to Pace, who had held him against his wil since then. At the

courthouse on the day of his indictment, Pruit claimed he had

never seen Moody and didn't know Pace. Appointed to his position

as a constable by former Alabama governor Wil iam Jelks, Pruit

stoutly defended his county, claiming that Coosa citizens are "as

good as any in the State." The town of Goodwater was an

"especial y law-abiding community," he added. Without qualms,

Pruit told a newspaper reporter that as a constable he had

"frequently" arrested African Americans who then were ned by a

local magistrate and "paid out" by local white farmers. But he

insisted this was entirely within the law. The Montgomery

Advertiser reported that his claim had "an honest ring."

The fol owing day, Pace returned to Montgomery. This time, he

was accompanied from Dadevil e by U.S. marshal A. B. Colquit .

The men arrived at Union Station at dusk and headed directly to

the courtroom of Judge Jones. Pace was informed he had been

named in eight indictments as the buyer of black men seized by

local constables. Reese recounted key evidence gathered against

Pace—maintaining that one Negro woman had been kil ed on his

farm, that men and women had been forced to work nude for lack

of clothing, and that the laborers were mercilessly beaten.

of clothing, and that the laborers were mercilessly beaten.

Pace brought with him to the courtroom a bond posted by

Wil iam Gray, the Dadevil e banker who at Pace's direction had

paid out the cash used to purchase most of the enslaved black

workers.29 When the bond turned out to be insu cient, Jones

al owed Pace to travel back home with the marshal in tow to make

new arrangements to avoid jail. Pace expressed his appreciation

and retired to a Montgomery hotel to await the next morning's train

to Tal apoosa County.

Outside the courthouse that night, Pace insisted to a newspaper

reporter that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, even as he

conceded without hesitation that he had purchased men from Coosa

County o cials and worked them on his farm. He said the African

Americans were put into the prison maintained on his property,

where they and the convicts were watched over by hired guards and

hound dogs trained to track men.

He described buying John Davis from Robert Franklin for $70,

but said Davis begged to be left at the farm. Pace said he explained

to Davis that he would be held with the county convicts and treated

the same. Davis readily agreed, and Pace drew up a contract under

which he agreed to work sixteen months to pay of his fine.

Pace was unapologetic, but denied that he had acquired or held a

large number of black laborers. He had purchased no more than

ve in the previous year, he said, al of them as favors to the black

workers themselves. They were never treated brutal y, and it was

"always understood," he said, that the men would be freed if

relatives or friends reimbursed him for the costs of bailing out and

holding the laborers.30

Next to make the trip to Montgomery were George Cosby, his

nephew Burancas, and James H. Todd, one of the strongmen used

as an enforcer on the Pace farm. The men arrived in the state

capital near daylight on June 10, having spent the night on a

Western Railroad train stranded between Ope-lika and

Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram

Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram

Gibson and A. B. Colquit , who had arrested them on Tuesday.

The defendants wouldn't talk to reporters on the day of their

court appearance. Todd had been an overseer for Pace for more

than fteen years. Burancas Cosby, a twenty-three-year-old "wide in

stock, build and ruddy face," worked for his uncle George. The

younger Cosby claimed that at least two of the blacks named in the

indictment were "unknown to him." By nightfal , al had returned to

Dadevil e by train.

As word of the arrests raced across Alabama and the rest of the

country, an epic legal and political confrontation began to take

shape. J. Thomas He in—the stirring white supremacist orator who

proclaimed to the constitutional convention two years earlier that

God put "negroes" on the earth to serve white men—was the

Alabama secretary of state by 1903. Almost immediately, He in

began circulating word that he would aid the indicted white men,

perhaps even representing them in the courtroom. He would have

none of the spineless apologia for new slavery that southern

journalists and some politicians rst o ered. He embraced it as a

return to the natural order of man.

A few southerners stepped forward to genuinely condemn the

new slavery system—but very few. One was Joseph C. Manning, the

postmaster of Alexander City in Tal apoosa County. A ery

populist, he had fought in the 1890s to hold on to a coalition of

black and white voters in Alabama, and after the turn of the century

railed against the growing national consensus that blacks should be

excluded from al political activity—even within the Republican

Party. "What has become of the ringing declaration of Abraham

Lincoln that ‘The nation cannot endure half slave and half free,’ " he

wrote to an Ohio newspaper.31 He denounced the de facto

annulment of the Fifteenth Amendment and condemned Republican

leaders for their crass wil ingness "to acquiesce in slavery for the

south and stand for human liberty in the north."

Later, Manning wrote to the New York Evening Post, lashing out

at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county

at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county

al eged to have held slaves. "It is today under the law in Alabama, a

crime for a farm laborer (black) to quit his employer. He may be

denied his pay, he may be half fed, he may be beaten with a buggy

trace but if he ‘fails to keep his contract’ then he is a criminal,"

Manning insisted. "There are black belt planters who do starve,

mistreat, abuse and beat men, and force them to break their

contract in order to get them arraigned before some demon in

white skin, but with a heart as black as hel itself; and another year

of servitude is at ached by a chain more gal ing than that of chat el

slavery to the ankle of the black man. The case of Pat erson is only

one in thousands, yes, in ten thousand….

"The Mayor of this town of Goodwater …would be

complimented in his own estimation no higher than to have it

writ en that any negro is no more worthy of human sympathy or

political consideration than is any mule, and of less kind treatment

than a good dog," Manning continued. "Here is the truth about the

South that some men of the North would ‘let alone.’ Here is the

South that should be permit ed to adopt its own course in set ling

the race problem!"32

Goodwater Mayor Dave White red back in defense of his town,

claiming that no black man or woman had ever been abused in his

court. "Unjust punishment of negroes is absolutely repulsive to me

and that no negro is imposed on when it is in my power to prevent

it," he wrote.

I defy any person to prove that any negro or white man has ever been

convicted in my court that was not guilty or that didn't have a fair trial, or

that received illegal or cruel punishment after they had been convicted.

And I am certain that I can truthfully state no negro has ever been worked

in slavery in the town of Goodwater since the day when slavery was

abolished in the sixties. It is a fact that numerous negroes have been tried

and convicted in Goodwater for stealing and have received a small ne

and a light punishment, when a white man under the same circumstances

would have been much more severely dealt with as a great allowance is

always made for the negro owing to his standing in life.33

Editors of the state's most prominent daily, the Montgomery

Advertiser, were apoplectic that Manning, an Alabama native, had

ut ered such heresy in the northern press. It cal ed Manning "rat le-

brained" and, reaching back to an archaic term for any creature that

turned against family doctrine and patriarchy, a "nest fouler."

The newspaper labeled his description of widespread slavery an

"outrageous exaggeration." The Advertiser also railed at Roosevelt's

promise at Lincoln's tomb of a "square deal" for African Americans,

and any assertion that the peonage cases were part of a larger

movement in the South to disenfranchise black men and reassert

white dominance.

Peonage was no worse than the treatment of workers in the

factories, mines, and sweatshops of the North, the newspaper

maintained.34 "These cases of ‘new slavery’ have nothing to do with

the adoption of the new Constitution in Alabama. If there is any

di erence, the mass of white people are more kindly disposed

toward the negro now than before their disfranchise-ment. These

peonage cases are simply a few here and there. There have not

been tens of thousands of such cases. We doubt extremely whether

there have been even hundreds of them in al the State in the past

twenty years."35

Nearly every Alabama leader contended the events in Tal apoosa

County constituted a smal anomaly, easily stamped out by making

examples of a few o enders. "Deputy U.S. Marshal Colquit seems

to have taken up with this county," wrote the Dadevil e Spot Cash.

"In fact three or four men of this community have been escorting

him to Montgomery where he placed them under bond, charged

with Peonage—that new word lately sprung on us which means the

enslaving of a freeman against his wil , as we understand it. This is

a pret y bad state of a airs in Alabama, but not so bad as the

northern papers would make it. These conditions wil be

thoroughly investigated and we hope every guilty party wil be

punished so that the evil wil be stopped and the blot on our state

and county removed."36

Underscoring southerners’ sense that it was hypocritical for their

region to be targeted for its racial misdeeds, residents in Bel evil e,

Il inois, went on a rampage a day after the Dadevil e editorial

appeared. A black schoolteacher named David Wyat and the town's

white school superintendent had argued over the renewal of Wyat 's

teaching certi cate. An altercation ensued. The superintendent was

shot, but not seriously harmed. Wyat was arrested and taken to jail.

By nightfal , at least two thousand whites were gathered in the

town—including many women and children encouraged to at end

the spectacle. A phalanx of two hundred men at acked the steel

doors at the rear of the jail with sledgehammers, pounding it with

thousands of hammer blows. The city's police did not voluntarily

hand the prisoner over to the crowd, but also gave no meaningful

resistance. Wyat , an educated and imposing man—standing six feet

three inches tal —waited in his cel on the second oor of the jail,

enveloped in the cacophony of the hammers pounding out his

death beat. After half an hour, the doors splintered open. Wyat was

seized from his cel and his head immediately smashed.

Dragged into the street, the mob surged around him, kicking and

stomping his body until it was mat ed in blood and dirt. A rope

was secured to his neck and tossed to two men who had climbed a

telegraph pole. Hoisted just a few feet o the ground, Wyat 's body

whipped back and forth as members of the crowd gouged, stabbed,

and sliced his torso, legs, and arms with knives. Others in the mob

gathered pickets from nearby fences and roadside signs to build a

crude pyre beneath his dangling corpse. Stil more went for

gasoline and benzene. Soon Wyat 's body was engulfed in ame. By

the time the earliest churchgoers left their homes on Sunday, June

7, the grotesque form of Wyat 's carbonized remains lay amid a

heap of ashes and smoldering wood on the street.

"The mob knew that the negro's victim was alive and had a fair

chance to recover," a correspondent for the New York Herald

dutiful y noted. "The excuse given is that the lawless element

among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it

among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it

was determined to teach the negroes a wholesome lesson."37

Wyat 's lynching was unremarkable in many regards. His was the

thirtieth African American lynched in 1903. There would be at least

fty- ve more before the year ended. Yet few developments caused

as much delight to leading southern whites than a gruesome racial

atrocity commit ed in the North. Such incidents proved, in their

reckoning, that northerners were just as inclined to crimes against

African Americans as their southern cousins, and that the end result

of greater racial equality like that in the North was simply more

brazen criminality and chaos caused by blacks. Many white

southerners were further grati ed when less than two weeks later a

mob in Wilmington, Delaware, seized a black man named George

White from his jail cel . White, accused of rape and murder, was

tied to a stake, forced to confess the crimes, then shot repeatedly

and final y burned.

The Advertiser could hardly restrain its glee.

In the North the negro is an alien, an exostosis on the body politic, as it

were. They do not understand him and cannot do so. They talk

sympathetically and humidly of his wrongs and his rights, shed some tears

over his alleged cruel fate in the South, and then, if he aspires to be a

laborer in the hive of industry, they turn on him and drive him out with

curses and revilings. If he resists or falls back on the sacred laws of self-

deference and self-preservation, he is either shot down or lynched. They

love him— at a safe distance.

With us here in the South it is di erent. We received the negro by

inheritance. He came to us through the generations of slavery.

Emancipation left him stranded on the shores of a new world, for which

he had no preparation and no tness. The Southern people, remembering

the negro of the olden time, when he was the faithful servant, the willing

worker and the protector of the family of his master—with all this in their

minds our people have borne with him, have helped him and have tried to

fit him for some of the duties of citizenship. We recognize in him a part of

our population a necessary worker on the farm, in the shop and in the

home, but not in any way an equal.

And for all this because the negroes have come down to us from the

good days of old; because they are at home with us, and must perhaps

forever be in some degree our wards, we owe them justice, fair treatment,

and protection in all their civil rights. Now that they have practically lost

the right of su rage, we more than ever owe them our watch care and

should throw over and around them the shield of law and justice. The fact

that they are lynched in the North, or driven out like dangerous wild

beasts is no reason that our people should do the same. Let us not follow

the evil example set by those Pharisees who preach what they do not

practice and who condemn in others the deeds which they practice among

themselves. In short, let us steadfastly refuse to follow the evil examples

set by our brethren of the North and the West.38

South Carolina senator Ben Til man summed up the sentiment

more succinctly to a northern audience: "I see you are learning how

to kil and burn ‘niggers.’ That's right. Let the good work go on.

Keep it up. You are get ing some sense."39

Roosevelt had to be astonished. Only a day before Wyat 's murder

in Bel evil e, he had been in the same state, visiting Spring eld,

barely a hundred miles away, praising black soldiers and promising

his "square deal" for African Americans. At the same time, the

Justice Department was tel ing him that slaves were stil being held

down south. There was nothing the president could do about

Wyat 's death; murder was clearly outside the jurisdiction of federal

o cials. But surely slavery, of al things, was di erent. He told

At orney General Knox he was personal y concerned about the

Alabama al egations and asked for a ful report. Roosevelt was

assured that "vigorous and uncompromising prosecutions" were

under way40

In Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese was growing more troubled

by the scale of the crimes coming to light in the grand jury room.

On June 10, he sent an alarmed report to At orney General Knox.

"The conditions of the ‘black belt’ in this district are more

deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now

deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now

being revealed that hundreds of negroes are held in peonage and

involuntary servitude of the most vicious character," Reese wrote.

"Men and women are arrested on the imsiest charges …they are

brutal y whipped, worked and locked up without let or hindrance.

The tortures in icted are severe and sometimes result in total

disability or death. Some counties in this district are honey combed

with these slave trade practices."41 Worried that his report might

sound like hyperbole—and recognizing the potential y explosive

reaction to the case that was bound to soon develop local y—Reese

asked for an urgent meeting with of icials in Washington.

The stoutly bourgeois Knox, hardly two months removed from his

lavish Pit sburgh law o ces and now ensconced in the presidential

cabinet, was perplexed by Reese's let er. He had to take it seriously.

President Roosevelt had expressed concern, and the inquiry grew

from charges rst lodged by a federal judge—one of Roosevelt's

earliest appointees. Reverberations were stil rippling across the

country from the president's "square deal" speech less than a week

earlier.

But Knox couldn't avoid a measure of incredulity. How could so

dramatic a state of a airs come to pass, without chal enge, in

twentieth-century America, even in uncivilized reaches so far from

his rare ed world? Moreover, the prosecutor in Montgomery was

entirely unknown to Knox, who knew that among the scores of U.S.

at orneys named in provincial centers around the nation, many

were less-than-extraordinary political operators— holding their

positions purely as patronage to local presidential al ies or financial

backers. Two days later, on the last workday of the week, Knox told

an aide to telegraph Reese for a more complete report on the

details of the investigation. For the moment, he ignored Reese's

request for a personal audience.

The telegraph from Washington arrived at the drafty o ces of the

U.S. at orney above the Montgomery post o ce as Friday's work

hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other

hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other

lawyers who assisted him in government cases, Julius Sternfeld and

James K. Judkins, and the o ce secretary—his cousin Mildred

Elmore. Sit ing near the transomed door to the hal way, she

managed his correspondence and appointments and at ended to the

two modern luxuries of the o ce—a single Remington typewriter

and one telephone.42

Reese knew he faced the most consequential mat er of the ve

years since his rst appointment to o ce. In the balance of the

report requested by the at orney general hung al of the family

prestige and political support—perhaps even al of the aspirations

of eventual Republican power in his state—that had been so

dramatical y re ected in the ood of supportive let ers that paved

the way for his selection by President McKinley.

The heavy humid heat of early summer in Alabama was already

seeping into the hal ways of the post o ce building. Fixed at his

desk that afternoon, he perspired as the temperature approached

90 degrees, sunlight shafting through the wide sash of rippled glass

in his window. Past the arched doorways opening from the dark

interior of the federal building onto crowded Dexter Street, Reese

could have seen and heard the noisy throngs of pedestrians

crowding the cobblestone street on either side of the clanging

electric trol ey line running through the heart of Montgomery. Lines

of carriages and horsemen pushed slowly through the crowd. Open

wagons pul ed by mules driven by muddy black teamsters waited to

cross from side streets lit ered with manure and the debris of

commerce.

Four blocks to the east, just beyond the eld of view from Reese's

window perch, the domed Alabama state capitol peered regal y

across a city that had become, more than any other, a royal capital

of the New South— col ecting the tribute of both the region's

reengineered cot on empire and its smoke-belching new industrial

expansion.

The trol ey line ran in an asymmetric loop the length of Dexter

Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain

Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain

in Court Square across from the Exchange Hotel. Here, buyers from

textile makers and cot on exporters encamped from hundreds and

thousands of miles away to bid and contract for delivery six months

later of mil ions of dol ars’ worth of cot on from plants only just

beginning to peek from the deep black soil of the South's richest

cot on region.

If Reese climbed into the ve-story-high tower rising atop the

post o ce, he could have fol owed the line as it threaded through

the crowds, drays, buckboards, and early automobiles chugging

down Commerce Street toward Union Station. The streetcars

crossed Bibb, Coosa, and Tal-lapoosa streets, as they rol ed past the

long row of cot on warehouses that, by early fal , would be packed

with the bulk of southern Alabama's economic output. The cot on

compress on the same street packed bil ions of pounds of lint into

ve-hundred-pound bales ready to be loaded on railcars or the

perpetual line of steamboats waiting a few hundred yards beyond,

at the edge of the Alabama River. On the docks there, scores of

black men stacked cot on bales atop loads of pig iron taken in

Birmingham the day before from the furnaces of Sloss-She eld and

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Montgomery luxuriated in the wealth of this surge of cot on—stil

unmolested by the scourge of the bol weevil and other new insects

and diseases that would ravage the crop beginning in a lit le more

than a decade— and the rich new windfal pouring into the state

capital from the sale of convicts into the coal and ore mines in

Birmingham.

Cot on, steel, and timber were by far the state's largest sources of

wealth and livelihood. Alabama produced more than 1.1 mil ion

bales of the white lint in 1900—surpassing the pre-Civil War output

for the rst time and almost tripling the state's production during

the rst years fol owing the war.43 Vast tracts of forest were under

the saw. Yet mineral production and the iron and steel industry

surpassed al other economic activity. In 1905, the state's mines,

anchored by the slave camps near Birmingham, generated nearly

twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore

twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore

— making Alabama one of the foremost producers of iron, steel,

and coal in the world.

Early in the testimony before the grand jury in May of 1903,

Warren Reese shared the conventional assumption that the stories of

John Pace's abuses in Tal apoosa County were anachronistic relics—

isolated redneck antics, certain to be the subject of scorn once

exposed. But by the beginning of June, Reese realized how

signi cantly the new slavery underpinned Alabama's cot on, timber,

and steel paradise. He knew he was on the verge of an at ack on its

heart. He could not know how the ght would end, or whether he

would survive it.

At noon on June 10, the grand jury led into the courtroom to

report seventeen additional indictments. Then, foreman Judah T.

Moses, a wealthy sel er of real estate and insurance, gave Judge

Jones a writ en request for advice on the constitutionality of the

Alabama statute making it a crime for a worker to break a farm

labor contract—which was punishable by a ne of up to $50 or six

months of hard labor.

In the note, the jury asked whether the act violated the Thirteenth

and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution. Judge Jones

replied that he had devoted "much thought" to this question and

would give them an answer later. One juror also inquired whether

a justice of the peace who gave a sentence in excess of his authority

was guilty of peonage. The judge said that the justice of the peace

would not be guilty if the sentence had simply been an honest

mistake, but that if the o cial "acted in bad faith or corruptly" he

would be guilty of causing the person to be held in peonage. No

judicial proceedings, regardless of how lawful they appear on their

face, would be a defense, the judge noted, if they were "a cloak or a

fraud to cover up the il egal design to cause persons to be held in

peonage."44

Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to

the grand jury, answering their inquiries and directing how they

should interpret the federal peonage statute as their deliberations

continued. Jones began with a long discourse on the origins of the

peonage statute after the acquisition of New Mexico by the United

States, and then laid out how the new labor system of Alabama

appeared to violate that law.

Jones explained that any man who induces a laborer to sign a

contract agreeing to be held under guard and unable to leave until a

debt is paid was guilty of peonage. A citizen or law enforcement

o cer who tricked a laborer into believing he could avoid criminal

prosecution or a sentence to hard labor only by signing such a

contract was guilty of peonage, the judge explained. Anyone who

falsely accused a person of a crime in order to compel him or her

to sign such a contract or conspired to obtain the labor of a worker

through such false charges, Jones wrote, was guilty of violating the

pre-emancipation slave kidnapping act, which forbade "carrying

away any other person, with the intent that such other person be

sold into involuntary servitude."

Jones also declared Alabama's labor contract law—which bound

hundreds of thousands of black workers to white landowners—

unconstitutional. Any person held against his wil under this statute,

Jones ruled, should be released on habeas corpus—the ancient legal

principle used to win the release of the falsely imprisoned.45

Southern whites immediately recognized the implications of the

ruling, and the reaction was furious. "Judge Jones’ …opinion, if

sustained by the highest court, is far reaching and with disastrous

consequences to the labor system of the South," wrote the Prat vil e

Progress, a newspaper in the heart of a slave-riddled county. "There

must be a revolution in the labor system."46

The residents of counties across eastern Alabama were ba ed by

Judge Jones's interpretation of the law. Tens of thousands of black

workers were at labor in Alabama under contracts signed when a

white man "confessed judgment" for an arrested black man—paying

his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in

return a signed contract for labor.

These arrangements sounded precisely like the ones described by

Judge Jones as il egal. Hundreds of farmers were at risk of arrest.

Thousands more African American laborers were being forced to

work in mines and timber camps under similar contracts signed

between county governments and the state of Alabama itself. Some

local at orneys asked if farmers who worked convicts for debts were

guilty of peonage, wasn't the state of Alabama equal y guilty in its

handling of convict leases?47 It occurred to virtual y no one in

Alabama that this was precisely the point. The vast majority of

black laborers leased from the law enforcement system were being

held il egal y.

Even Judge Jones failed to comprehend the ful rami cations of

his opinion. Like many wel -intentioned but stil fundamental y

racist whites, he naively believed that the system engineered by

Pace in Tal apoosa County was an isolated instance of abuse. He

accepted the common convention of the time that African

Americans were less intel igent and more inclined to criminal

behavior than whites. He presumed that the vast majority of blacks

arrested in the South were in fact guilty of their crimes, and merited

severe punishment. What made him more "progressive" than other

whites, and where he di ered from most white southerners, was

that he believed blacks could not be brutalized in their punishment,

and that the concept of impartial treatment of al citizens by the

courts had to be upheld.

Rank-and- le southerners, especial y in rural sections with large

black populations, had no such il usions. They knew Judge Jones

had set a standard by which thousands of white men were guilty of

slave dealing, that hundreds of state and county o cials were in

jeopardy, and that the whole nancial structure of governments and

local economies was at risk. A correspondent to the Birmingham

Age-Herald reported that "more than 100 men" in the area of Coosa

and Tal apoosa counties—just two of Alabama's nearly seventy

counties—were at risk of arrest in the federal investigation. "The

people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have

been working criminals for twenty years, and the majority of such

men do not know they are violating the law," the writer said.

Inundated with bewildered queries, Judge Jones began to realize

the breadth of coerced labor in his state. He hadn't intended to set

o panic. To quel anxieties, Jones quietly summoned a reporter

for the Associated Press and explained that white men could avoid

breaking the law if their contracts with blacks were approved by a

local judge and signed in court.48 Surely local judges could never

condone slavery, Jones reasoned.

While Judge Jones tried to soothe Alabama's worries, Warren

Reese asked Sternfeld, the assistant who had listened to much of the

testimony brought to the grand jury, to col ect for the at orney

general the most egregious al egations that had surfaced so far in

witness statements and reports from U.S. marshals in the

countryside. As Mildred Elmore rat led the Remington's keys, they

dictated what became an eight-page report to Washington.

"There have been agrant abuses and violations … on the part of

wealthy and in uential men," Reese began. "These violations have

not been con ned to one or two periodical and independent

instances, but it has developed into a miserable business and

custom to catch up ignorant and helpless negro men and women

upon the imsiest and the most baseless charges and carry them

before a justice of the peace who is usual y a paid hireling of these

wealthy dealers….

The victim is found guilty and a ne is assessed which, in the beginning

cannot be paid by the victim, and then it is that one of these slave dealers

steps up, pretends to be the friend of the negro …telling him he will pay

him out if he will sign a contract to work for him on his farm…

…the negro readily agrees rather than go to the mines, as he is informed

he will have to do, his ne is paid, the contract is signed, and the negro is

taken to the farm or mine or mill or quarry of the employer….

Placed into a condition of involuntary servitude, he is locked up at

nights in a cell, worked under guards during the day from 3 o'clock in the

morning until 7 or 8 o'clock at night, whipped in a most cruel manner, is

insu ciently fed or poorly clad—in fact the evidence in nearly all of the

cases investigated reveals that the negro men are worked nearly naked,

while the women are worked in an equally disgraceful manner.

Brutal things have transpired and sometimes death has resulted from the

infliction of corporal punishment….

When the time of a good working negro is nearing an end, he is re-

arrested upon some trumped up charge and again carried before some

bribed justice and resentenced to an additional time. In this way negroes

have been known to have worked on these places in this situation for

years and years. They can get no word to friends nor is word allowed to

reach them from the outside world…. They are held in abject slavery

without any knowledge of what goes on in the outside world.

If they run away the dogs are placed upon their track, and they are

invariably retaken and subjected to more cruel treatment….

The indictments so far found are based upon some twenty- ve negro

men and women who have been the subjects of these violations. These are

some of the most severe instances, but it has been discovered there are

hundreds of other cases.49

Reese and Sternfeld detailed the physical abuses they had

discovered and the extraordinary obstacles to their investigation. In

Tal apoosa County, the grand jury had already issued indictments

against Pace, Fletch Turner, and the Cosbys. Also charged were the

enforcers and procurers of the system, including Robert Franklin,

Grogan, Pruit , and Dunbar, al constables. The jury had indicted the

three justices of the peace most agrantly involved—-James M.

Kennedy, Jesse L. London, and W. D. Cosby. Another eight men

who had worked as whipping guards for Pace and the other buyers

were also under charge, including Turner's son, Al en, and Pace's

son-in-law, Anderson Hardy.

Beyond Tal apoosa County, Reese reported, the grand jury was

also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles

away and deep in the plantation country of the Black Belt, with

more than 35,000 black farmhands and sharecroppers working

cot on on the land of white men. "This county is real y the center

where it is charged these practices are more freely indulged than

anywhere else. This county, it is claimed, is honeycombed with

slavery."50

The slaving practiced in Lowndes County was orchestrated by the

sheri himself, J. W. Dixon. In one case described by Reese, Dixon

chased down a black worker named Dil ard Freeman, who had left

his plantation without permission to visit a sick brother a few miles

away. Tracked to his mother's home, Freeman was beaten by Dixon

with a pistol, tied with a rope around the neck, and forced to run

behind a mule for more than ve miles, while the sheri fol owed

on horseback, "whipping him whenever he would lag behind."

Once back at the plantation, Reese wrote, Dixon began whipping

Freeman with a wide piece of rubber belt at ached to a wooden

handle. "Four men were required to hold him o the ground while

Mr. Dixon himself administered the punishment. When Mr. Dixon

became tired, another man was made to do the whipping. In this

way, the boy was whipped nigh until death. He cannot tel how

many licks he was hit, nor can he tel how long this happened."

After the whipping, Freeman was chained to the oor near the beds

of Dixon and his overseer.

In the grand jury room, Freeman revealed his back, Reese said,

showing "one mass of scars from his thighs to his neck."

Yet already the prospects of pursuing a conviction against the

slavers of Lowndes County and the other plantation regions where

hundreds of thousands more black farmworkers lived were being

chal enged, Reese advised the at orney general. Dil ard Freeman

was threatened with death if he testi ed to the grand jury. A

member of the Dixon family had fol owed him to the courthouse in

Montgomery on the day of his rst appearance. "It was impossible

to get anything out of him because of his fear of death."

When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went

home after a week of hearing witnesses, Sheri Dixon and his four

brothers rode up to his house at midnight on horseback and

demanded to know what was being said to the grand jury—

testimony that is dictated to be secret under the U.S. Constitution.

They told the juror to remember that "he had to live in Lowndes

county, and if he did not stand up for his own people he knew

what to expect," Reese wrote.

The Dixons are "dangerous men," Reese continued. "They are said

to have kil ed several men. It is believed that witnesses who come

here and who expect to return to Lowndes county are practical y

compel ed to perjure their souls because they fear their lives."51

As the let er to Knox continued, Reese outlined how the new

slavery was far larger than one or two places, and involved far

more than scat ered pockets of involuntary servitude, confusion

about the law, or unintended violations. His timbre rising as the

report continued, Reese said that he was receiving daily let ers from

other Black Belt locations—Wilcox, Sumter, Chambers, and Co ee

counties. "Unquestionably, there are hundreds of these people in

this district who are held in abject slavery," Reese related.

The prosecutor continued that Judge Jones had just ruled that

Alabama's contract labor law—a statute shared in some form by

every southern state and e ectively criminalizing any black worker

who left the employment of a white farmer without permission—

was unconstitutional. The implications of the ruling were just

dawning on Reese. He realized the black men and women of the

South had never been truly set free.

Judge Jones's ruling, Reese wrote, "in e ect, amounts to an actual

and not a theoretical emancipation of the negro, and it is now

necessary that this o ce make an e ort to rescue these people from

their condition by and through habeas corpus proceedings."

Reese recognized that his investigation could eventual y require

thousands of court lings. He asked the at orney general to assign a

Secret Service agent to assist with the investigations and to create a

new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county

in Alabama instituting legal chal enges to free enslaved blacks.

"Unless the government wil take steps to bring these habeas corpus

proceedings …they wil not be much bene ted by these

investigations." 52

As Mildred typed out the last lines of the report, the telephone

rang. Western Union told the secretary a bicycle delivery boy was

pedaling toward them with an urgent message. When the telegram

arrived, Reese read that the at orney general wished him to

personal y deliver his report to Washington. President Roosevelt

had been briefed on the investigations and directed that a legal

at ack be ful y pressed.53 Reese cal ed Western Union and dictated

a reply. Mildred hastily retyped the last page of Reese's report: "I

have just received your wire … I wil report to you at ten o'clock

morning of seventeenth."54

Reese rushed to Washington, where he outlined for the at orney

general the details of the investigation and his belief that much

more than scat ered peonage was at stake. Knox was cautious, but

given the president's speci c interest in the cases, the expectations

raised by his speech at Lincoln's tomb, and a chorus of cries from

northern publications, he could not move slowly. "The new slave-

driving in Alabama has pricked the conscience of the nation,"

proclaimed The Nation on June 11.55

After the meeting, the at orney general authorized what

amounted to the most sweeping federal investigation into the

working conditions of southern blacks since the Civil War. He

directed U.S. at orneys in Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, and in

the southern sections of Georgia to begin inquiries in their districts,

including the densely populated Black Belt, and other areas where

more than a mil ion impoverished African Americans lived. Across

Alabama and Georgia, the prosecutors sent deputy federal marshals

into the countryside with orders to bring back any evidence of

ongoing slavery.

Not since the rst years of Reconstruction had law enforcement

o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of

blacks. Suddenly a squad of Secret Service agents led by an

indefatigable detective named Henry C. Dickey, as wel as every

federal marshal across a three-hundred-mile-wide swath of the

South, was quietly, if often reluctantly, quizzing African American

pastors, sharecroppers, and farmhands about the treatment of black

laborers by many of the most prominent white landowners in the

South.

By late June, sixty-three indictments had been returned by the

Montgomery grand jury, and locals expected as many as twenty

more white men to be arrested. The government was holding nearly

thirty black witnesses in a closely guarded boardinghouse in a black

neighborhood of Montgomery. Not al came from Tal apoosa or

Coosa counties. And many witnesses were reported to have

appeared at the federal courthouse from counties other than those

original y targeted in the investigation.

The ten white men from Coosa and Tal apoosa counties who had

been indicted up to that point were summoned to appear in court

on June 22. Pace, Fletcher, and many of the others arrived by an

evening train the previous day. Monday morning they led into

Judge Jones's courtroom for a grueling, hours-long hearing. Soon,

the corridors of the federal building were clogged with lawyers in

dark, vested suits and the curious wandering in from the streets and

the stone steps of the courthouse. Throughout the morning, U.S.

At orney Reese came in and out of the courtroom, consulting

repeatedly with the bat ery of prominent lawyers representing John

Pace.

Montgomery buzzed with speculation. Word rippled through the

onlookers that al charges against Kennedy would be dropped once

he testi ed in open court. By now Kennedy was a pariah among his

longtime friends. His confessions to the grand jury, implicating at

least a dozen other white men, had been widely reported.

Meanwhile, word was spreading of let ers sent the previous day to

every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

accusations against him were false—most especial y testimony that

women had been murdered at the Turner farm. He speci cal y

denied the claim that Sarah Oliver had been brutal y beaten to

death at his place during the previous winter. Then came the day's

most sensational story: Pace planned to plead guilty to the charges

—and then chal enge the validity of the anti-peonage statute to a

higher court.56

The court formal y convened at noon, with U.S. Marshal L. J.

Bryan cal ing the names of men to form petit juries to hear the

evidence in the cases. A large crowd of spectators jammed the

courtroom, craning their necks to catch a glimpse across the gal ery

of the Tal apoosa farmers. Pace, Fletcher Turner and his son, the

three Cosbys, and other defendants sat together on a bench near the

front of the room. At the bar were the half dozen members of their

defense team. The old guard of Alabama was ral ying to the men.

Among the lawyers was Thomas L. Bulger—son of the Tal apoosa

County Confederate war hero, and D. H. Riddle, the Goodwater

at orney who had actual y participated in some of the fake trials

held by his mayor.

Later, the lawyers announced the defense of the Turners had been

joined by Gen. George P. Harrison, a int-eyed lawyer with a jet

black beard in the imperial style of the day. He too was a widely

remembered former Confederate commander, best known for his

central role as a newly appointed colonel in the bloody repulse of

the Union army's most famous black regiment, the 54th

Massachuset s Infantry, during the gruesome bat le for Fort Wagner

in July 1863.

Judge Jones ordered that the trial of Pace, the Cosbys, and John

Kennedy—the newly cooperating witness—begin one week later on

charges of peonage and related crimes. Fletcher Turner and his son,

Al en, would stand trial beginning July 6. A few days later, the trial

of Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit would begin, fol owed within

a week by Jesse Berry and James Todd, two of the enforcers who

helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

After forming two juries and giving them instructions from the

bench, Judge Jones turned to the crowd, warning that any person

who entered the court with a weapon would be "sent to the

penitentiary" for contempt of court.

Before the day ended, Reese announced that additional

indictments had been issued against J. Wilburn Haralson, of

Dadevil e, and John G. Dunbar, the former city marshal of

Goodwater then serving as marshal in Columbus, Georgia. New

charges were also announced against the Turners, for holding a

black woman named Camil a Hammond. In total, the grand jury

had issued ninety-nine indictments against a total of fteen

defendants. Pace alone faced twenty-two counts.

Lawyers for the defendants urged Judge Jones to delay the trial

to give the farmers time to harvest their elds and to study the

"peculiar" and unfamiliar charges they faced. Reese said the farmers

had created the situation for themselves and that black witnesses

were being held in Montgomery to protect them from intimidation

before trial. "The government is not at liberty to give in detail the

instances of this kind," Reese said. "But it can be said that

intimidation both of witnesses and grand jurors have been going on

in connection with these peonage cases."

Judge Jones concluded that a speedy trial would not burden the

defendants unfairly, and made clear that he feared ef orts to frighten

the witnesses. "The court has nothing to conceal, gentlemen," Judge

Jones said. "In a great many of these cases intimidation has been

practiced. A witness has been taken from a train. I need not say

more. These cases must be tried as early as possible consistent with

proper opportunity to make defense."

It was clear that black witnesses were in danger. For days, Reese

had been gathering African Americans critical to the trial in

Montgomery, housing thirty of them under federal guard in "negro

boardinghouses." At one point in the proceedings, Secret Service

agent Capt. Henry C. Dickey arrested two black schoolteachers who

went to the boardinghouse posing as detectives sent by Judge

Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

government agents, apparently to report back to Pace and the other

whites.

Before any of the trials began, federal o cials learned that

Tal apoosa County had appointed a deputy marshal speci cal y "to

keep an espionage on the negro witnesses of the government,"

reported Montgomery newspapers.57

Until the day of the arraignments, most of Alabama's political elite

and the white general public had imagined that the slavery

investigation was entirely the handiwork of the White House and its

representative in Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese. Judge Jones's

directions to the grand jury a week earlier were startling, but his

confusing equivocation after denouncing involuntary servitude left

open the question of where Jones's true al egiances rested. Across

the South, newspapers and politicians stil banked on the fact that

he would uphold a wel -honed ritual of southern posturing in high-

pro le court cases involving blacks: factitiously expressing the

importance of legal rights for African Americans while

simultaneously ensuring no harm to a white defendant and

aggressively curtailing redress to the black victim.

"It turns out that the main mover in Alabama to break up what is

cal ed the peonage system, whereby convicts are held to labor

inde nitely by white men, who pay their penal nes and contract

their labor in return, is Judge Thomas G. Jones, ex-governor of the

state," wrote the Atlanta Constitution. "If there is anything criminal

in the system, that criminality should be exposed and punished

properly, and whatever of false hue and cry there is on the a air

should be exposed." 58

The Montgomery Advertiser continued to proclaim mock surprise

at the discovery of forced labor in Alabama: "The character of

o ense was peculiar and unknown in this country since the

emancipation of the negroes. It was practical y and to al intents the

enslavement of men for a period of time in violation of State and

Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

deal of testimony given …few of …the people of Alabama …ever

dreamed of such things as seem to have existed."59

As the rst trial neared, however, it was clear that Judge Jones

was deviating from the script. He appeared to be serious. The

Advertiser, alarmed that a southern leader would join with a

Republican president from New York to at ack southern whites

who resubjugated blacks, poured forth with what had become the

ascendant view of turn-of-the-century white southerners. "A

sentiment that is now practical y unanimous throughout the

Southern States … is that we, the white men of the South, propose

to set le racial questions in our own way and in our own time. And

we wil do it in the way best for both races," the newspaper

editorialized.

Several millions of ex-slaves, suddenly exalted to citizenship, was the

heritage we received from the Federal government. As if the mere fact of

their presence in changed conditions was not serious enough, they were

endowed with all the political rights that any citizen of the Union

possessed, and for which they were neither prepared nor tted. And then,

to add to the bitterness of our degradation, and the hopelessness of the

problem, our country was overrun with adventurers from the North, some

of them good and well meaning men, but others as unprincipled

scoundrels as ever scuttled a ship or robbed a safe. It was these and their

kind who made the condition of the Southern people unbearable and

revolt inevitable.

Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but

some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses

that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies,

many of whom were federal o cials, against whose acts our people were

practically powerless. And one of the worst features of this saturnalia was

that the ballot in the hands of ex-slaves was in almost every instance, both

from their own ignorance and at the instigation of their carpet-bag allies,

used to despoil, degrade and humiliate the real citizens of the almost

helpless South.

The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

which they should be applauded—declining to resume armed

rebel ion against the federal government and instead only stripping

African Americans of the right to vote and most other legal rights.

That northerners would complain about this—and that some

southerners agreed—was infuriating.

What do we see? All over the North we nd public speakers and

newspapers assailing our methods and our people and in every way, as

words can do, inciting the colored people to resist, fomenting discord

between the races and in many cases maligning and vilifying the Southern

people for their course.

Our people do resent the interference of Northern people in a matter

with which they have no real concern, and we intend to continue

resenting it. What is more, we intend to settle this race question in our

own way and if the result is to have the country "rent again into factions

hating each other" …we shall not feel that we of the South are the

o ending party. We do not hate the North, but we will settle the race

question.60

Even in the North, there was consternation about the trials

beginning in Alabama, and stirring up issues that northern whites

increasingly agreed should be left to southern whites to handle. The

Chicago Tribune opined that relations between the South and North

had deteriorated to their worst state in more than a decade and

pointed to the current message of former President Grover

Cleveland and other leading northerners: "The South— the white

and the black South—should be let alone to set le their problems in

their own way," Cleveland said.

Edgar Gardner Murphy, a moderate white Montgomery resident,

insisted in let ers to northern newspapers that the Tal apoosa

peonage cases did not indicate a massive level of continued black

enslavement. In a let er to the New York Evening Post, Murphy

wrote:

The sentiment of the whole state has been unanimously insistent upon a

thorough investigation of the charges and upon the rigorous punishment

of the guilty…. An ignorant and lowly people settled in isolated regions

where local courts and local constabularies are often ine cient and

sometimes corrupt are always in danger of becoming the prey of brutality

and greed. If it is hard for the best sentiment of New York to protect

e ectively the poor immigrants of her great port from the avarice of

thieves and "loan sharks," and it is di cult for your city to protect some

of its young girls from the degrading barter of the "cadet."

He argued that the peonage cases weren't the result of leaving the

South alone to deal with race issues. Instead, the new rise of slavery

was caused by "a persistent policy of intrusive censure and of

political threatenings." He said the North placed undue "pressure

upon Southern life, put ing the South ever on the defensive and

partly neutralizing the forces of self-criticism and of local

responsibility. Whatever evils may now exist at the South have not

resulted from the policy of let ing the South alone."61

But as each defendant stood perspiring before Judge Jones in the

increasingly crowded courtroom, wearing his best black church suit,

bolo tie, and clutching his hat, it became clear that whatever the

judge's southern pedigree nothing would be sacrosanct in this

proceeding.

VI I

A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

"The master treated the slave unmerciful y."

Negotiations over Pace's plea to the charges against him continued

for days. His at orneys initial y believed that Judge Jones—like

any other white southern judge—would feel compel ed by

tradition and public pressure to acknowledge the untested status of

the peonage statute and o er a symbolic punishment to Pace in

exchange for a guilty plea. But Judge Jones showed no sign of

doing so. Reese, the prosecutor, was insistent that Pace be

meaningful y punished. Pace's lawyers were certain, regardless of

the public brouhaha in the preceding weeks, that no Alabama jury

would actual y convict a white man on such charges. They urged

him to wait for trial.

Meanwhile, the city was ablaze with anxiety. In the early evening

of the day fol owing Pace's arraignment, a former U.S. marshal

named Charles E. Taylor confronted Deputy U.S. Marshal Byron

Trammel on the sidewalk beneath the white-columned portico of

the elegant Exchange Hotel, where many of the at orneys and others

involved with the peonage cases were staying. Trammel was

assisting Reese in the investigation.

The two men had long disliked each other, according to mutual

acquaintances, and there was no record of the words exchanged

when they faced o outside the front doors of the hotel. But within

minutes, Taylor drew a pistol. Trammel responded in kind. Shots

were fired. Taylor was soon dead.

Stanley W. Finch, another Department of Justice investigator in

Montgomery , was certain the shoot-out was brought on by the

peonage cases. He wrote to his Washington bosses that federal

agents in Alabama—feeling increasingly more like the interloping

Freedmen's Bureau agents who scat ered across the South thirty

years earlier—were encountering unprecedented hostility wherever

years earlier—were encountering unprecedented hostility wherever

they went.

"The country throughout this district wherever [peonage] exists is

pret y thoroughly aroused," Finch wrote. "The fact that a Secret

Service agent is engaged on these cases is wel known and many

have the impression that a number of secret service agents are

scouring the country…. Any one traveling through the country

engaged in an investigation on behalf of the government is liable to

be mistaken for one of these detectives. In some localities the

sentiment has reached such a pitch that it is considered unsafe for

anyone known as or suspected as being a government detective to

travel."

Nonetheless, Finch reported that involuntary servitude was

indeed widespread across the state. He succinctly summed up the

economics of the new slavery. "It is by no means con ned to a few

isolated communities. I have also been again and again informed by

these persons that this peonage system is more cruel and inhuman

than the slavery of antebel um days, since then the master

conserved the life and health of the slave for business reasons just as

he did that of his horse or mule, but now the master treated the

slave unmerciful y and with the sole object of get ing the greatest

possible amount of labor out of him. Moreover a peon costs but a

few dol ars while a slave used to cost several hundred."1

Pace, agitated at the at ention his case drew, appeared alone early

in the morning two days later at the o ces of U.S. At orney Reese.

He said he wished to plead guilty to al eleven counts of peonage

and obviate the need for trial. Pace's supporters spread word that

he had approached Reese against the advice of his own lawyers. In

reality, the gesture was a calculated gambit to shift the focus of the

prosecution to other defendants—while preserving Pace's chal enges

to the constitutionality of the indictment.

Reese refused to accept the plea unless Pace was represented by

his at orney. At noon, after rounding up one of Pace's lawyers—the

others had already departed for Dadevil e—court was cal ed into

others had already departed for Dadevil e—court was cal ed into

session, and the peonage counts read aloud. Pace pleaded guilty to

each one, though only after his at orney led "demurrers" to the

indictments—objections in modern legal parlance—arguing that the

federal peonage statute didn't apply to the acts al eged in the

indictments.

The federal government had no jurisdiction over the use of forced

labor in Tal apoosa County, the lawyers argued, regardless of

whether individuals had been held in slavery. Judge Jones,

acknowledging Pace's right to chal enge the applicability of the

peonage law to a higher federal court, overruled the objections and

ordered Pace to stand for sentencing.

Asked if he had anything to say, Pace—in stark contradiction to

his initial claims to the press—said he was guilty of the seizure of

eleven African Americans, including John Davis, Rita Scot , Jim

Caldwel , and another laborer named Owen Green. Yet Pace denied

that his capture and enslavement of workers violated any United

States laws.

Green had also raised his shirt to show the grand jury his injuries

during earlier testimony. "They whipped scars on me," Green said as

he revealed the marks on his skin. "They laid me up for a week and

a half one time. One of the scars on me is where Mr. Tom

Blassingale struck me on the head. He struck me with a stick …and

knocked me senseless…. Mr. Jim Kennedy choked me and jumped

on my head. After I was stamped, the blood came up from my

lungs…. I bled a good deal from my lungs."2

In the case of Green, Pace lured the farmhand by approaching

him in a saloon in Dadevil e, o ering to hire him for $4 per month,

help his father pay o the mortgage on a $16 horse, and al ow him

to come and go freely from the farm. But once a contract had been

signed, Green was placed in the lockup on Pace's farm for nearly

two years. "I was made to do farming, locked up at nights and

whipped," Green testi ed. "Mr. Jim Kennedy whipped me ve

times in one day. Mr. Bob Smith also whipped me. He whipped me

four times. Mr. Bil Brown whipped me." Later, Pace sold Green to

four times. Mr. Bil Brown whipped me." Later, Pace sold Green to

George Cosby.

In the courtroom, Reese stood and, playing out a careful y

choreographed arrangement with Judge Jones and Pace's lawyer,

made one act of deference to the defendant—who appeared in

court looking far older than his forty-nine years.3 Reese pointed out

Pace's "diseased" condition and asked that the defendant be al owed

to sit for the rest of the proceeding.

Judge Jones agreed and then sentenced Pace to ve years in the

federal penitentiary in Atlanta on each charge. Taking into account

Pace's in rmity, the judge ruled that the sentences would be served

concurrently The charges that Pace had conspired with others in the

seizure and enslavement of blacks were postponed until after the

court of appeals ruled on Pace's chal enge. Accepting assertions that

Pace was in dire health, Jones also al owed him to post a $5,000

bond and remain free pending the outcome of those legal

machinations. Wil iam Gray, the Dadevil e banker, reappeared at

the bar, along with co-defendant Fletch Turner, to sign the bond for

Pace. He was released from custody.

Pace appeared visibly relieved, though the sti sentence sent a

wave of anxiety through the other defendants—who realized Pace

was now likely to be cal ed to testify against them and that Judge

Jones would hand down similar penalties to others convicted.

The Advertiser, like most local whites, remained certain that Pace

would never actual y be imprisoned, regardless of whether the

guilty pleas were a rmed by the court of appeals. "He is in an

almost helpless physical condition. He su ers from a bone disease

which has a ected his feet, and he walks with great e ort. It is said

that he wil be able to produce a surgeon's certi cate showing he is

in a terrible physical condition."

Reese was elated with the guilty plea. But a growing chorus of

politicians, journalists, and southern commentators—the same

voices that original y applauded the investigation as proof that

southerners could be relied on to clean up slavery—hailed Pace's

southerners could be relied on to clean up slavery—hailed Pace's

admission that the continuing slavery was limited to a pocket of

miscreants in one county. They loudly proclaimed there was no

need to pursue any further charges or al egations.

Reese knew bet er. The publicity around Pace's arraignment and

plea triggered a wave of new al egations, some even more grim

than any yet heard by the grand jury. Moreover, At orney General

Knox's earlier order of investigations into peonage and involuntary

servitude across Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida was

detecting dozens of other cases. U.S. District Court judge Emory

Speer in Macon, Georgia, was presiding over his own proceedings

stemming from a multilayered slave trading conspiracy in the

southern half of that state.

Three white men—Wil iam Shy, Arthur Clawson, and Robert

Turner— pleaded guilty there to capturing a black man they

claimed owed them money whipping him, and forcing him into

labor. Judge Speer—behaving more like Alabama had initial y

expected of Judge Jones— ned the men $1,000 each but then

immediately suspended the punishments.

Apparently unaware of the earlier peonage al egations in his

state, Speer made the extraordinary assumption that the three men

before him were the only whites to reenslave a black man since the

Civil War. "In view of the fact that this is the rst crime of the kind

which ever has occurred in Georgia," Speer told the defendants,

"and because of the frank confession of the young men, sentence is

imposed, in order to convince the public that the purpose of the

court is to warn and deter others from like crime. During good

behavior, ne is suspended upon payment of $100 each." Given the

"problems of the times," Speer maintained harsh measures would be

counterproductive. "I deemed it for every reason best to deal very

leniently with the prisoners," Speer wrote to the at orney general.4

Reese was concerned that too many in the South viewed the new

slavery cases just as Judge Speer appeared to, as an anomaly. To

prove the broad scope of involuntary servitude in his jurisdiction,

Reese planned to aggressively broaden his investigation. Just two

Reese planned to aggressively broaden his investigation. Just two

days after Pace's guilty plea, the prosecutor sent federal marshals

back to Coosa County to arrest Laray Grogan, one of the Goodwater

watchguards who had been so busy in the town's trade in black

labor.

Grogan was accused of arresting an African American woman

named Emma Pearson on a bogus charge of vagrancy and then

sel ing her to Eliza Turner, the brother of Fletch Turner, who

managed the family's limestone quarry in Calcis. After arriving in

Montgomery, Grogan told a local reporter that he had done nothing

wrong and further that the peonage cases had made the blacks of

Coosa and Tal apoosa counties "unbearably impertinent." His bond

was immediately posted by two wealthy Goodwater businessmen,

and Grogan was released.

The same day, J. Wilburn Haralson was arrested in Columbus,

Georgia, where he worked in a cot on mil , and brought by a

Saturday morning train to Montgomery. Known as the Cosby

family's "a davit man," Haralson routinely wrote out and swore to

any ctitious charge George Cosby told him to lodge as a ruse for

seizing blacks. He was placed in the county jail to await trial on

five counts of peonage.5

Despite the continuing stream of new charges and the opening of

the Cosby trial a few days away, Reese worried that public support

for his campaign was wavering. Newspapers across the South were

growing more bel igerent in tone as Reese and a few other

prosecutors continued investigations. Alabama's most popular

political gure, Secretary of State J. Thomas He in, was also

growing louder in his denunciations of the cases.

Three days before the Cosby trial was set to begin, Reese

conducted a formal interview with the Montgomery Advertiser. He

said that while the charges against the Cosby men were technical y

termed peonage, the case was in fact about slavery—the overt

buying and sel ing of humans, and holding them in a condition of

coerced forced labor. "These indictments are for …kidnapping and

taking and carrying away any person with intent to place him in a

taking and carrying away any person with intent to place him in a

condition of slavery, and holding and returning him to a condition

of peonage," Reese said.

He also made it clear that the cases were aimed not just at

cleaning up an isolated nest of slavery hanging on in one area of

Alabama. The prosecution was an at ack on widespread practices of

involuntary servitude across the state. The Tal apoosa cases were

the high-pro le criminal thrust of the e ort, but just as important

was Judge Jones ruling that the Alabama contract labor law was

invalid. "The contract labor law which has just been declared

unconstitutional …was passed for the protection of landlords in the

cot on growing belt.

"It is a mat er of common knowledge that under this statute, the

laborer or renter has not been guilty of any criminal act in thus

leaving or abandoning the premises," Reese said. "He has simply

breached a contract which creates the relation of debtor and

creditor. Under this statute the creditor commands the debtor on

peril of hard labor not to work at his accustomed vocation for any

one else during the term of that contract." Reese blamed the nearly

unchecked and unaccountable power wielded by justices of the

peace in rural areas.6

The fol owing morning, the Cosbys appeared on the second oor of

the federal building accompanied by Dadevil e lawyer Thomas L.

Bulger, son of the Confederate hero at Get ysburg. But the rst train

from Tal apoosa County, packed with spectators and key witnesses,

had been delayed. Final y, at 1 P.M., the court convened with a

crowded gal ery of white spectators. White witnesses mil ed in the

corridor. For their safety, the African Americans who would testify,

explained Reese, would be produced only as they were cal ed to

the stand.

Reese announced to the gal ery that the government would rst

prosecute case No. 4218, in which the Cosbys, Pace, J. W. Haralson,

and James Kennedy were charged with conspiring to sel Pike

Swanson into labor on the Cosby farm. Swanson had testi ed

Swanson into labor on the Cosby farm. Swanson had testi ed

previously to the grand jury that he was held on the Cosby

plantation until just before the peonage investigation began. A

farmhand from Macon County, he said he went to the Cosby farm

the previous July and freely signed a contract to work for $2 a

month. But once Swanson began work, the Cosbys refused to pay

him. Instead, he was arrested, then arrested a second time, on bogus

a davits by Haralson accusing him of disorderly conduct and

ghting. Swanson was put through a sham trial by Kennedy, the

justice of the peace. Then Cosby pretended to pay Swanson's nes

in return for holding the worker at least fourteen more months.

Swanson testi ed he was never paid for any work on the Cosby

plantation and was held under guard seven days a week, and

locked in at night. Two weeks before the Cosbys were indicted, the

white men freed Swanson, who then ed to his home county. A

week before the trial, Burancas Cosby claimed never to have seen

Pike Swanson.

After Reese announced that Swanson's capture would be the rst

case, Judge Jones granted a one-day delay to give the defense

lawyers time to prepare. But early that afternoon, George Cosby

sent word that he and the other members of his family wished to

avoid the trial, as Pace had done. G. R. Sha er, of Dadevil e, one of

the men who made bond for the Cosbys, urged them to plead guilty

and had gathered scores of signatures in Tal-lapoosa County on a

petition asking for clemency.

At 5 P.M., Sha er cal ed the judge from his Adams Street home

back to court chambers, where they met with Cosby's lawyers.

Judge Jones refused to promise clemency. But in return for guilty

pleas from two of the men, Jones and Reese agreed to accept the

at orneys’ arguments that the statute of limitations had passed on

the crimes al eged against W. D. Cosby—the man who had been

ready to take morphine a few weeks earlier. His case was

dismissed.

With shafts of summer sun cut ing sharp diagonals through the

courtroom windows, George Cosby and his nephew Burancas stood

before the bench, heads bowed, eyes downcast. They quietly

before the bench, heads bowed, eyes downcast. They quietly

pleaded guilty to forty- ve counts of peonage and conspiracy to

hold blacks in slavery.

The two insisted they had no idea that their actions were against

the law. They vigorously protested al egations by the U.S. at orney

that they treated the forced laborers cruel y. They implored the

court to recognize the hardship on their families that would come

from imprisonment.

"The excuse that you did not know that you were violating the

laws of the United States can have no legal weight, since every man

is conclusively presumed to know the law," Judge Jones responded.

"It is not entitled to a particle of moral weight in these cases,

because you are bound to know that what you did was a violation

of the laws of God and of the State regardless of any law of the

United States. Helpless and defenseless people who are guilty of no

crime have been brought into court and by col usion with justices of

the peace, who prostituted the authority of God and of this State in

the administration of justice have been deprived of their liberty,

fined and forced to work and in some instances cruel y beaten.

"You have violated not only the laws of your country but that

great law of honor and justice, which bids the powerful and strong

not to oppress the down-trodden."7

Judge Jones sentenced each of the men to one year and a day in

the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.

Reese was jubilant. The swift guilty pleas seemed to prove both

the extent of involuntary servitude and the power of the federal

sword to stop it. The clear implication was that he was at the

beginning of a massive campaign to root out slavery once and for

al . The trial of Fletch Turner was next on the docket, and would be

fol owed by many more. Agents continued to probe Lowndes

County and other areas where evidence of even more widespread

slavery was rampant. Reese began advocating to the Department of

Justice that his assistant, Julius Sternfeld, be named a special

prosecutor solely to oversee the expanding investigation. "These

cases justify the contention of the government that peonage and

cases justify the contention of the government that peonage and

involuntary servitude has been practiced in Alabama in no smal

degree," he quickly wrote the at orney general. "These practices are

indulged in many other counties in the district and our e ort shal

be made in the direction of put ing an end to them."8

But more practical men than Reese could bet er see what the

future held. White leaders were ral ying across the South,

emboldened by men such as Secretary of State He in, who was

crisscrossing Alabama denouncing Reese's investigation and

castigating any white man who did not agree. At the same time,

black preachers and African Americans who had established some

sliver of nancial security grew fearful of the rising temperature

around them. They had learned through bloody experience the

dangers of chal enging the status quo of white domination, and also

that in the in exible rituals of southern racial interaction men such

as themselves were expected to prostrate themselves before whites

as proof that they too gave no credence to the inquiries demanded

by President Roosevelt and Judge Jones.

Shortly after the Cosby sentencing, Edward M. Adams, a Secret

Service agent stationed in Montgomery, wrote to Washington

headquarters in hopes of softening any disappointment that might

come if no jury convictions were won in any of the slavery cases.

He was particularly concerned that another agent assigned to the

cases not be tainted by any such failure. "He has secured evidence in

a number of cases that ought to bring convictions, yet, knowing

public sentiment as I do, I fear, unless compromise verdicts can be

secured, that no convictions wil result," Adams wrote. "The iniquity

of peonage wil always remain in this country in practice, to

eradicate it is an interminable work. The sentiment against the

in iction of punishment to o enders nds its strongest exponent in

Secretary of State He in, an orator of no mean ability, and he is

going about the state like a roaring lion. I merely write this, to say,

that whatever the result in the trial of the cases in this court, the

failure to convict and punish o enders, cannot be charged to our

service."

Adams included with his let er a newspaper clipping reporting

Adams included with his let er a newspaper clipping reporting

that petitions signed by hundreds of blacks in Tal apoosa and Coosa

counties had been presented to Judge Jones asking for clemency for

the Cosbys. "These cases have caused a bit er feeling between the

two races," the article said with profound understatement, "and that

the petitioners believe that the peonage system is broken up, and

further says that the Cosbys are good citizens of the community."9

• •

Indeed, whatever initial contrition white southerners expressed at

the rst revelations of slavery was evaporating as it became clear

that Judge Jones and Reese had no plans to stop after a few

symbolic guilty pleas. Facing the dock of the courtroom, Fletch

Turner and his son, Al en, were ready to embrace the most brazen

defense of the new slavery yet of ered.

On July 4, at orneys for the father and son led demurrers,

chal enging the peonage charges against them. Their fundamental

objection was constructed upon a startling argument. The Turners’

lawyers conceded that their clients indeed had engaged in a form of

slavery, but that involuntary servitude wasn't peonage and therefore

wasn't il egal.

"Unlawful y and knowingly holding a person forcibly and against

his wil and requiring such person to labor for the holder to work

out a debt claimed by the holder to be due him …does not

constitute holding such person to a condition of peonage under the

laws of the United States," they wrote.10

Moreover, the Turners’ lawyers argued that no system of peonage

existed in Alabama at al , making the statute forbidding it

irrelevant, and charges based on the law impossible. They added

that since peonage was de ned as forced labor in repayment of a

debt, the Turners couldn't be convicted of peonage if, as the

government contended, the debts owed to them by black workers

were bogus.

Ignoring the claims of extreme abuse and homicide commit ed on

the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might

the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might

constitute a form of slavery but that no federal statute made slavery

a crime. Cases of slavery would have to be brought in a state court

by local o cials under Alabama's law against false imprisonment,

the lawyers argued. No acknowledgment was made that in a local

court, the prosecutor would be a white man elected in al -white

elections, the jury guaranteed to be al -white, the judges likely

involved in the slaving conspiracy, the buyers of men almost

certainly prominent local gures, black at orneys barred from

appearing, and black witnesses treated as unreliable by nature. In

the four decades since emancipation, no one could recal any such

criminal charges ever being brought in a southern court. No one

imagined that ever changing.

Astonishingly, the lawyers were on some level correct. The Civil

Rights Act of 1866, passed in the wake of the war to formalize the

ending of slavery, simply declared al persons born in the United

States to be ful - edged citizens with the right to vote regardless of

race or previous "condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." But

it did not clearly state that the holding of slaves was a crime, and

the disparate treatment of former slaves was made only a

misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail.

Later statutes in the 1870s made segregated accommodations,

schools, and anti-black-voting measures il egal, but actual y

weakened the minimum penalty for violations. In 1883, the U.S.

Supreme Court declared even those laws unconstitutional, ruling

that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments—approved in 1868

to abolish slavery and establish black citizenship—didn't authorize

Congress to pass such enforcement laws. Fol owing the growing

national sentiment that race mat ers be left alone, Congress did

nothing to l the vacuum—leaving a constitutional limbo in which

slavery as a legal concept was prohibited by the Constitution, but

no statute made an act of enslavement explicitly il egal.

It didn't mat er to the Turners’ lawyers that lit le of their defense

claims matched their earlier sworn statements when rst questioned

by a federal agent and a special U.S. commissioner two months

earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling

earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling

of black laborers was legal y or moral y suspect. He o ered

elaborate explanations for why he imprisoned a series of blacks the

federal o cer identi ed. In the case of Joe Strickland, the white

farmer conceded that the laborer didn't appear anywhere in the

records of the local courts but was nonetheless a criminal prisoner.

He claimed Strickland's records were in a di erent jurisdiction, and

that the Goodwater deputy sheri , Grogan, brought two black men

to the Tal apoosa County jail in July 1901 and asked Turner if he

wished to "buy" one of them out of jail. Turner claimed he entered

into a formal labor contract with the worker, who had been tried

for "riding a train," and that the local probate judge said it was

unnecessary for the court to authorize the arrangement.11

"If you behave yourself," Turner claimed to have told Strickland,

"I wil let you o in ve months." Turner demurred that he "had just

commenced in the convict business" and didn't understand the ins

and outs of the rules. In kindness, he had paid a doctor, Turner

claimed, to treat Strickland's syphilis—and then kept him at work

an extra six months simply to cover the costs. By the time of the

trial, Strickland was working in the coal mines near Birmingham,

he added.

On July 7, Glennie Helms became the rst victim of the

Tal apoosa cases to testify publicly. Moving to the witness chair just

after 5 P.M., Helms sat calmly and con dently before the courtroom

l ed with white spectators. Neatly dressed and his head cleanly

shaven, Helms said he was eighteen at the time of his capture and

was at empting to travel from Calcis—where he had worked for a

week in the lime quarry owned by Turner's family— back to his

home in Columbus, Georgia. As Helms and two companions passed

on foot through Goodwater on April 15, 1902, they were seized by

the town marshal, charged with vagrancy, immediately convicted by

the mayor, and then sold at the Dadevil e depot to Fletcher

Turner.12 Turner was apparently unaware that the three had been

working for his family's quarry and put them to work digging

ditches on his farm.

ditches on his farm.

Under questioning from Reese, Helms told the twelve white

jurors how he was brutal y beaten on his arrival at Turner's farm.

Reese, regal in a high, sti ened col ar and checkered cravat, asked

whether either of the Turners or their employees whipped him

again during the four months he was held on the farm. Helms

testi ed he was beaten nearly every day by Turner's son, Al en, or

another armed guard. After about a month of work, he escaped—

only to be captured by the sheri of another county and returned to

the farm. As punishment for eeing, he said Al en Turner whipped

him severely with a thick stick.

The cross-examination that fol owed must have been one of the

most extraordinary encounters ever in a southern courtroom. In the

witness chair sat an eighteen-year-old black boy in the simple at ire

of an indigent farmhand, largely il iterate and almost certainly the

child of parents born in antebel um slavery. Standing before him—

chal enging his account of re-enslavement—was the aristocratic

form of U.S. representative Ariosto Appling Wiley, prominent

congressman and one of the city's most notable at orneys.

Unfazed by the disjuncture of the scene, Helms hewed to his story

—as unswervingly as a skil ed plow hand cut ing neat furrows

across a eld. Unable to budge the verisimilitude of the young

man's descriptions of his capture and beatings, Representative Wiley

obsessed on what he cal ed contradictory details in the testimony.

Was the buggy in which Helms and the others were transported to

the farm owned by a livery stable or someone else? he hammered.

Final y, the lawyer portrayed Helms as a "shiftless negro" enjoying

his moment in the spotlight at the expense of the federal

government.

"Who's been taking care of you since you came here?" Wiley

asked sharply.

"Captain Dickey," replied Helms, referring to the Secret Service

agent who had guarded the black witnesses housed in a

boardinghouse since May.

Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside

Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside

the federal building, Fletcher Turner, soaked from the heat of the

courtroom, fumed to local reporters about published al egations

that his son had brutal y kil ed a black woman named Cornelia

Hammock.13 He insisted that the woman died of disease and

of ered to have her body exhumed to prove it.

The next day, a series of witnesses cal ed by the government

corroborated Helms's account. Dave Johnson, one of the other

blacks captured with him in Goodwater, the night watchman John

G. Dunbar, town mayor Dave White, and others con rmed how the

three African Americans were seized and sold.

The Turner defense aggressively at acked each witness. After the

testimony of the white at orney who bought Helms's freedom after

nding him being worked naked at the Turner sawmil , Colonel

Wiley launched a withering cross-examination—insinuating that the

lawyer, L. E. White, was so friendly to Helms's family and other

black workers that he couldn't be trusted. Wiley didn't use the

speci c words, but his message to the jury was that White was a

"nigger lover"—a man operating outside the racial rituals of the

South. The questions became so sharp that Judge Jones recessed the

proceedings and reprimanded Wiley for the calumnies against

White. "The witness must not be sneered at or insulted," Jones said.

The strategy was designed not to prove that Helms hadn't been

captured and sold—since the Turners admit ed those facts—but to

mock the black witnesses and discredit any white men who

corroborated them. It was a time-proven and honored southern

lawyerly ruse. In the rare instance that a black man or woman

received a day in court, at orneys simply ridiculed the very idea of a

black man being treated respectful y and anyone who appeared

wil ing to do so. Triggering an almost tribal form of group

solidarity, the tactic usual y triggered juries of white men to gu aw

at the comedy of a black man under oath. If the jury concluded that

the government's case was built on the testimony of worthless

African Americans and unreliable whites, Colonel Wiley was

con dent of an acquit al. He knew Alabama was tired of the

peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do

peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do

otherwise would subject them to their own ridicule as "lovers" of

blacks.

On the trial's third day, the defense presented a stream of

witnesses testifying to the Turners’ excel ent character and care of

black convicts they leased from local governments. For weeks

leading up to the trial, court observers and journalists speculated

that Secretary of State J. Thomas Hef-lin, Alabama's most

amboyant white supremacist, might represent the Turners in court

in a show of support for the men.

Just before noon, as the defense prepared to close its case, He in

was cal ed as a witness. In previous weeks, there had been no

indication that the men knew each other. But taking the stand,

He in swore that he had known Fletcher Turner for "several years"

and that Turner had always been a man of good character. The

message to the jury—that the white orthodoxy of the South was

behind the defendants, not the opponents of slavery—was clear.

The next morning, the gal ery was jammed with observers,

including a large crowd of African Americans. As eight hours of

closing arguments by four separate at orneys ground through the

day, the sti ing courtroom became a throng of perspiring men,

aflut er with dozens of handheld fans.

The nal defense argument was explicit—whatever the facts of

the case, every white man must acquit Fletcher Turner as a message

to the rest of the United States. "Forever put at rest the agitated

minds of our Northern friends, and brand the newspaper criticisms

and caricatures which have appeared in the northern journals as a

falsi cation and a slander upon the fair name of Alabama," fumed

at orney Bulger. "I have great faith in the sons and grandsons of the

heroes of forty years ago, who fol owed Lee and Jackson for four

long years through blood and re, even from Sumter's bat ered

wal s to the famous apple tree, who went to the bat le elds of

Virginia and poured out their blood like water in defense of our

Southern homes."14

Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while

Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while

"good negroes" deserved the care of the courts and the a ection of

white southerners, other blacks did not. "Shiftless vagabonds" take

the money of farms and violate contracts, just as Glennie Helms had

done, Wiley said. "If they were to be protected in this sort of thing

the farmers of this country would be ruined," he concluded.

After a two-hour break to cool the courtroom, Reese returned

with the government's nal argument. Lacing his closing with

references to the Bible and a passage in Exodus denouncing those

who tra c in slaves, he scored members of the gal ery who sneered

when blacks were referred to in court as "American citizens." Reese

argued that Turner deserved no mercy. "He bought the negroes just

like one of you would buy a horse or a cow," Reese told the jury.

"Can this man come here and ask you for mercy after that?"

After 5 P.M., Judge Jones began an emotional two-hour charge to

the jury. O ering a detailed history of the peonage statute and the

laws of labor in the United States, he reviewed the evidence

presented and then explicitly urged the jurors to put aside the

appeals to Civil War loyalties and white racial al egiance o ered by

Turner's lawyers. Jones, visibly aroused, left lit le doubt as to the

verdict the jury should reach. "If you believe from al the evidence

that Turner bought this darky, took him to his place, forced him to

stay there, when he wanted to go away, and worked him as a

convict under guard to liquidate the debt paid for him, then he is

guilty," Jones said.15

Representative Wiley and Colonel Bulger shifted nervously as the

judge al but instructed the jury to convict their clients. In truth

there was also lit le doubt what would happen. Within hours of

beginning deliberations that night, word spread through the

courthouse that the jury was deadlocked—with eight men voting for

acquit al and four to convict.

Noti ed of the split the fol owing morning, an exasperated Judge

Jones cal ed the jury back into the courtroom. His con dence that

southern white men could be counted on to police themselves was

badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil

badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil

perjure yourselves in the sight of God and dishonor yourselves in

the eyes of men," Jones told the jurors. Representative Wiley rose to

object, but the judge ordered him silent and told the jurors they

would not be excused until a verdict was reached. "The court does

feel impel ed under an earnest and solemn sense of duty as to the

verdict you ought to render in this case, to appeal to your

manhood, your sense of justice, and your oaths, not to declare that a

jury in the Capital of Alabama would not enforce the law of the

United States because it happened that a negro is the victim of the

violated law and the defendant is a white man."16

When the jury resumed deliberations, the vote shifted to seven

men for conviction and ve for acquit al. But among those ve,

there was no possibility of change. On July 13, the jury reported

that they were impossibly deadlocked. Judge Jones, barely

concealing his scorn, declared a mistrial and set the Turners free.

"God forbid that the time wil ever come in this country when

you are helpless and distressed and have been the victim of

oppression when you wil be denied that protection of the law to

which you appeal and to which every law-abiding human being is

entitled among al civilized people," Jones told the jury. Reese

vowed to bring the Turners back to trial before another jury17

That would not be needed. On the fol owing Monday, Fletcher

Turner surprised Montgomery when he returned to the federal

building and took a seat with his at orney at the front of the gal ery.

When Judge Jones convened court to begin selection of jurors for

the peonage trial of Robert Franklin, one of Turner's lawyers, N. M.

Lackey, rose to speak. Turner was ready to plead guilty to a charge

of peonage in order to avoid further prosecution on any other

charges and in return for the dismissal of the counts against his son.

"My client did not realize that he was violating the law. He did not

know that he was doing anything that was not justi ed by law,"

Lackey explained. "If any cruelty was practiced it was done without

the consent of my client. In this af air my client was mistaken."18

Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true

Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true

slavery. "He purchased their liberty and services," the judge

remonstrated, as Turner stood emotionless before the bench. But

Judge Jones was no naive young Republican prosecutor. Even as he

lectured the unrepentant farmer stil driving slaves forty years after

emancipation, Jones knew hardly any jury in America, most

certainly not one in Alabama, could be relied on in 1903 to convict

the man before him. A new trial would accomplish nothing. He

accepted the plea of guilty, levied a ne of $1,000, and the case

was closed.

IX

A RIVER OF ANGER

The South Is "an armed camp."

In the three months since Reese began his slavery investigation, the

guilt of every defendant cal ed to court had in one manner or

another been established. He'd won the personal at ention and

support of the U.S. at orney general and of President Roosevelt

himself. Indeed, a new position had just been created in his o ce

to oversee an even more expansive at ack on slavery. Reese

believed history, and the power of the nation, were with him. Even

rabidly anti-black, white supremacist politicians and newspapers

such as the Montgomery Advertiser initial y reacted with

embarrassment to the peonage charges that so suddenly burst into

the public eye.

In truth, the mistrial in the case of Fletcher Turner marked an

ominous reversal. Resentment to the exposure of the new slavery

was growing. Other voices, defiant and rancorous, began to rise.

On the Saturday before Turner's surprise guilty plea, Alabama

secretary of state He in spoke to an annual reunion of Confederate

veterans in the town of Luverne, issuing a ringing endorsement of

how men such as Pace and Turner had nobly returned black

workers to their proper position as slaves and at acking Reese and

Judge Jones as wil ing to sacri ce the honor of southern whites in

return for advancement under President Roosevelt. They were nest

foulers and "nigger lovers," cried supporters of the accused. He in

and his al ies said any man who did not defy them deserved al the

contempt of the white South.

Reese and He in traded charges through the newspapers—the

U.S. at orney asserting that He in deceitful y mischaracterized the

facts of the case; He in, annealing his coarse racism in the language

of the U.S. Constitution, retorted that Judge Jones was usurping the

American ideals of trials by jury. 1

American ideals of trials by jury.

While the Turner trial was under way, a frenzied mob in

Scot sboro, Alabama, gunned down the town sheri in front of his

family as he refused to turn over a black teenager who had

al egedly "at empted criminal assault" on a nineteen-year-old white

girl. Once the sheri was dead, the black man was seized from his

cel and hanged from a telegraph pole that night.

Midway through the trial, a lawyer in Dothan, Alabama,

telegraphed Reese to report that a client, Enoch Pat erson, was

being held in peonage by the town's chief of police. Obviously, no

local system of justice was available to defend Pat erson. "I have no

redress here for his wrongs," the lawyer wrote. "I know of no way to

get justice for him but to submit the mat er to you."2 Similar

charges owed into his o ce, so numerous and substantial that

Reese—already frenzied with the duties of the trial and other

indictments—could barely manage to send acknowledgments of the

information, much less open investigations.

In Georgia, al egations surfaced in the court of Judge Emory

Speer, in the cot on-dense version of that state's Black Belt, that the

family of state representative Edward McRee, one of the most

prominent in the state, was operating a slave plantation even more

expansive and brutal than anything al eged in Tal apoosa County.

Across the nation, the spring and summer of 1903 marked a

venomous turn in relations between blacks and whites. A pal was

descending on black America, like nothing experienced since the

darkest hours of antebel um slavery. If anything, the poisoned

atmosphere and accelerating disintegration of the structure of civil

society more resembled to blacks a time two centuries earlier, when

white slave traders and their corrupted indigenous al ies descended

without explanation upon the vil ages of West Africa to plunder the

native population. For at least the next four decades, especial y on

the backcountry roads and rural rail lines of Louisiana, Mississippi,

Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, no black person

living outside the explicit protection of whites could again feel ful y

secure.

secure.

The plummeting position of black Americans was driven by the

convergence of transforming currents in American life. In the years

of abolitionist fervor before and after the Civil War, northern whites

who pushed for ful citizenship for black freedmen operated under

naive assumptions. Many believed that once schools and wages

were extended to liberated slaves, they could be quickly and ful y

assimilated into U.S. society. In the span of half a generation, they

imagined the nation's eleven mil ion African Americans learning to

read and write and becoming dark-skinned versions of the yeoman

white farmers fanning across the western prairies.

Human slaves had been freed many times before—from the

Israelites, to the Romans, to Africans in the vast British Empire as

recently as 1834. But no society in human history had at empted to

instantly transform a vast and entrenched slave class into immediate

ful and equal citizenship. The cost of educating freed slaves and

their children came to seem unbearably enormous, even to their

purported friends. Their expectations of compensation radical y

altered the economics of southern agriculture. And even among the

most ardent abolitionists, few white Americans in any region were

truly prepared to accept black men and women, with their

seemingly inexplicable dialects, mannerisms, and supposedly

narrow skil s, as true social equals.

Moreover, Charles Darwin's stil new theory of evolution was

threading through American culture with unintended sinister

repercussions. Before the publication of Darwin's landmark On the

Origin of Species in 1859, virtual y al Americans viewed the

presumed higher and lower racial order of whites, blacks, and

native Indian tribes as mandated by God. But the nearly ubiquitous

acceptance of Christianity by American blacks—at the active

encouragement of whites—also clearly established the essential

humanity of slaves. Christianity said slaves—despite their legal

categorization as chat el—and their owners were indisputably

members of the same race. Regardless of the violence used by

whites against slaves, there was a loose consensus, even in the

South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and

South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and

that God demanded some measure of moral consideration and

compassion for al . Northern opposition to slavery before the Civil

War was deeply rooted in this religious precept.

But swirling concepts of evolution upended those traditions.

Dehumanizing interpretations of the racial order were unleashed—

driven and de ned not just by skin color but by ever more re ned

concepts of blood. A new conceit of multiple, distinct human

species emerged. The Indian wars of the 1870s solidi ed a growing

sense of genetical y propel ed white superiority and of raw violence

as an appropriate method of protecting white political supremacy

and racial purity. Thousands of Civil War soldiers who had been

introduced to bat le in a moral y complex war of racial liberation

were later immersed on the Great Plains in the simple absolutism

of the pure, racial y motivated violence that would haunt the

twentieth century.

Popular American culture embraced the western con icts as

proof of white superiority—spawning hundreds of novels and short

stories that extol ed the extermination of Indian populations as the

inexorable march of white progress and eminent domain. Wil iam

"Bu alo Bil " Cody's Wild West Show became a pageant of white

supremacist rhetoric, drawing tens of mil ions of American and

European spectators in the 1880s and 1890s.

A whole new genre of ction extol ing the antebel um South and

an idealized view of slavery became immensely popular. Joel

Chandler Harris's books l ed with stories of contented slaves and

kindly masters— rst serialized in the Atlanta Constitution—sold in

enormous volumes in the North. The most sensational book in al

regions of the country remained The Leopard's Spots, a southern

romance by a former preacher named Thomas Dixon Jr.

Published in New York by Doubleday Page & Co. the previous

year, the novel was built around the quest of Confederate colonel

Charles Gas-ton to at ain love and glory as he swept away black

political participation in Reconstruction-era North Carolina.

Underscoring his repudiation of past depictions of cruel antebel um

slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the

slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the

infamous Simon Legree and other key gures in Harriet Beecher

Stowe's prewar abolitionist bible, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet in Dixon's

rendering, the brutal southern slave masters were kindly; former

slaves risen to power in Reconstruction were a gruesome plague

upon whites and themselves. Late in the novel, Gaston gives his

own blood for a transfusion to a girl raped by a black man. After

her death, a relief from a life marked as despoiled, the father

refuses to have his daughter placed in a grave dug by a black man.

Confederate veterans at the funeral ral y to dig a new one.

In the novel, a black man accused of the crime is tied to a pine

tree, doused with oil, and burned to death. Dixon writes of Gaston

pondering how "the insolence of a class of young negro men was

becoming more and more intolerable."3 Gaston "was fast being

overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must

squarely face the fact that two such races, counting mil ions in

numbers, can not live together under a democracy…. Amalgamation

simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, at nose, massive

jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair wil register their animal marks

over the proudest intel ect and the rarest beauty of any other race.

The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood

makes a negro." The book's initial printing of fteen thousand was

immediately consumed. Soon more than a mil ion copies had been

purchased. Dixon instantly became one of the most widely read

writers of the first decades of the century.

Another best-sel ing novelist of the romanticized South, Thomas

Nelson Page, became one of the country's most in uential voices on

race relations. Asserting that blacks constituted the vast majority of

rapists and criminals in the United States, and that the

overwhelming preponderance of blacks remained "ignorant" and

"immoral," Page warned that the continued coexistence of the races

was likely impossible. "After 40 years in which money and care

have been given unstintedly to uplift them …the Negro race has not

advanced at al ," Page declared. Blacks are "a vast sluggish mass of

uncooled lava over a section of the country, burying some sections

and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its

and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its

surface smolder res which may at any time burst forth

unexpectedly and spread desolation."4

Few white Americans expressed disagreement. Southern whites

cheered news in April 1903 that the New York public school

system ordered the removal from its reading lists of Uncle Tom's

Cabin. Echoing Dixon, New York public school libraries

superintendent Cland G. Leland said Stowe's depiction of

antebel um slavery "does not belong to today but to an unhappy

period of our country's history, the memory of which it is not wel

to revive in our children."5

White Americans across the country were adopting a dramatical y

revised version of the racial strife of the nineteenth century—a

mythology in which the Civil War had su ciently ameliorated the

injuries of slavery to blacks and that during the ensuing decades

southern whites heaped assistance and opportunity upon former

slaves to no avail. The new version of events declared that African

Americans—being fundamental y inferior and incorrigible—were in

the new century a burden on the nation rather than victims of its

past.6

A widely disseminated treatise on blacks published in 1901

concluded that cohabitation in the same society by whites and free

blacks would forever be cursed by the immutably brutish aspects of

African character. "The chief and overpowering element in his

makeup is an imperious sexual impulse which, aroused at the

slightest incentive, sweeps aside al restraints in the pursuit of

physical gratification."7

The Montgomery Advertiser reported with obvious satisfaction on

a declaration of thanks issued by the "colored people of Richmond"

to a white education conference for al that it had done for African

Americans. While inviting at endees of the meeting to at end First

African Baptist Church while in the city, the declaration assured

whites, "The negroes of Richmond have always been able to live in

peace and harmony with the white race. The same kindly feeling

which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of

which coursed in the veins of the ‘mammy’ and body servant of

bygone days exists today"8 White southerners clung to any fragment

of such obeisance as demonstration that their racial conduct was a

corrective measure aimed at bringing African Americans back to

their natural posture toward whites—not an eruption of

supremacist venality.

A young white chambermaid at the English Hotel in Indianapolis,

Indiana, named Louise Hadley became a brief cause célèbre in May

1903, hailed in the North and the South, after she refused to make

up a bed that had been occupied by Booker T Washington. After

being red from her job, Hadley issued a public statement: "For a

white girl to clean up the rooms occupied by a negro … is a

disgrace," she wrote. "I have always felt that the negro was not far

above the brute." Commit ees formed in Georgia, Alabama, and

Texas raised several thousand dol ars in contributions to Hadley.

"We admire this young woman's discrimination and think she took

exactly the right action," beamed the Dadevil e Spot Cash.9

When Boston leaders publicly discussed a proposal to transport

large numbers of southern blacks to New England's declining farm

regions, southerners sput ered with skepticism. "We could wel

spare a few thousand ‘crap shooters’ and banjo pickers from the

South," one Alabama let er writer responded on the pages of the

Advertiser. "The only negroes who wil probably agree to go wil be

those with whom it would be a mercy not only for the whites, but

the negro of the South, to part," said the Chat anooga Times. "Since

the mulat o Crispus At ucks led the phlegmatic Bostonians in their

revolt against the British troops, dark skins have been popular up

there," sneered the Montgomery Advertiser. "Such a movement

might be good for the South. It would probably rid our section of a

good many negroes who are worse than useless here…It would give

those far-sighted philanthropists a chance to learn by actual contact

and experience something of the race problem about which they

prate so much." The Advertiser editorialized on the need for African

Americans to be "fixed" through hard labor.10

In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus

In the barely veiled racist invective of the day, the Columbus

(Georgia) Enquirer-Sun said it doubted the movement would

amount to anything until watermelon season was over.11

The popular sentiments used to justify the violence appeared to

correspond with the work of a generation of American physicians

and scientists—in the North and the South—who busily translated

or mistranslated the elementary evolutionary principles outlined by

Darwin into crude explanations for why blacks should be returned

to a "mild form of slavery," as one delegate to a Virginia

constitutional convention phrased it. At a meeting of the state

medical association in Georgia, one physician presented a paper

that purported to document the close similarities between a long

list of black features—skin, mouth, lips, chin, hair, nose, nostrils,

ears, and navel—and those of the horse, cow, dog, and other

barnyard animals. From that claimed evidence, Dr. E. C. Ferguson

extrapolated that the "negro is monkey-like; has no sympathy for

his fel ow-man; has no regard for the truth, and when the truth

would answer his purpose the best, he wil lie. He is without

gratitude or appreciation of anything done for him; is a natural

born thief,—wil steal anything, no mat er how worthless. He has

no morals. Turpitude is his ideal of al that pertains to life. His

progeny are not provided for at home and are al owed to roam at

large without restraint, and seek subsistence as best they can,

growing up like any animal."12

The new science of anthropology embraced the notion that

quanti able characteristics of whites, blacks, and Indians—such as

brain size— demonstrated the clear physical and intel ectual

superiority of whites. In May 1903, as Warren Reese's Alabama

investigation got under way, the Atlantic Monthly magazine

published a long tract titled "The Mulat o Factor ," writ en by an

erudite planter in Greenvil e, Mississippi, Alfred H. Stone, arguing

that the presence of mixed-race blacks—with superior intel igence

and leadership skil s derived from traces of white blood—was the

cause of current race turmoil.

New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum

New exhibits on primitive peoples made the American Museum

of Natural History in New York City a scienti c temple to the

inevitability of white dominion over nonwhite races. The institution

was emerging as a hotbed of the embryonic concepts of eugenics

and "racial hygiene" that would eventual y lead to unimaginable

violence later in the twentieth century.

The St. Louis World's Fair in 1904 featured an exhibit of live

pygmies, transported from the Belgian Congo—then reaching a

gruesome apogee of colonial slavery under King Leopold strikingly

similar to that emerging in the U.S. South. After the fair, one of the

pygmies, Ota Benga, appeared brie y as an exhibit at the Museum

of Natural History, before transferring to the monkey house at the

Bronx Zoological Park—initial y sharing a cage with an orangutan

named Bohong. After several years as a freak curiosity in the United

States, Benga kil ed himself in 1916.13

The same year that Benga appeared at Central Park West, the

Carnegie Institution funded the establishment of the Station for

Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The

center eventual y became the Eugenics Records O ce and the

leading scienti c advocate of notions of racial superiority and

inferiority. With broad support from the federal government,

prominent jurists, and scientists at major universities, researchers

there pursued a decades-long, but scienti cal y awed, project to

col ect data on the inherited characteristics of Americans. (For the

next four decades, the work of the Eugenics Records O ce and its

leaders was the backbone of a highly successful campaign to

promote sterilization for "feebleminded" and other ostensibly

inferior genetic stock, strict laws against racial intermarriage, and

stringent limits on the immigration of Jews and southern Europeans

to the United States.)

Amid that swel ing wave of public sentiment, shared by the

simplest and most advanced white Americans, the moral

implications of the Civil War faltered. More than thirty- ve years

had passed since the end of the con ict, long enough that the grief

and anger associated with individual deaths and disasters had

muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a

muted. Aging Union veterans of the Civil War were declining as a

national voting bloc. In place of the war's fading emotional

resonance, a cult of reunion and reconciliation among whites in al

regions arose, embraced by leaders of al national parties who had

grown weary of the "bloody shirt"—a euphemism for demagogic

political tactics designed to stir regional emotions.

There was a palpable sense that northerners were no longer

wil ing to risk renewed violence to enforce a thinly supported

victor's justice on the South. Al demands for southern acquiescence

to guilt for the war were dissolving. A generation of post-Civil War

southerners—like Pace, McRee, and their contemporaries—were

approaching middle age. They were anxious to redeem their fathers

who fought and died in southern regiments and the skil of the

o cers who led them from the tarnish of defeat, the scandal of

treason, and the perceived amorality of slavery. Southerners—and

growing numbers of northern whites—gravitated to a new

interpretation of the rebel ion, one that abandoned any depiction of

the war as a defeated insurrection and instead permit ed open

reverence for southern "qualities" of bat le eld ferocity and social

chivalry, and for speci c acts of Confederate heroism to be

incorporated into col ective American history.

Georgia's federal judge Emory Speer, overseeing the new slavery

cases emerging in southern Georgia, summed up the new

conventional history in his 1903 commencement speech to

graduates of Atlanta's Emory University. Taking the life of Robert E.

Lee as his topic, Judge Speer cal ed for an explicit rehabilitation of

the once disgraced Confederate military commander. America, he

said, "can no longer a ord to question the military and personal

honor of Lee and his noble compatriots. America, with al her

acknowledged power, cannot fail to appropriate that warlike

renown, which gleamed on the bayonets and blazed in the serried

vol eys of the soldiers of the South."14

The South had nothing to be ashamed of anymore. The myth that

the war had been fought over regional patriotism rather than

slavery became rooted in American identity. Even slavery itself

came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American

came to be remembered not as one of the basal crimes of American

society, but as a nearly benign anachronism. White Americans

arrived at a contradictory but rm view that slavery was a relic of

the past that had rightful y expired, but that coerced servitude and

behavior was nonetheless the appropriate role in national life for

blacks. Whites in the North and the South could be on the same

side in this perverse recasting of the war's narrative. That new

consensus unleashed typhonic waves across black life.

The blithe testimony of an elderly black man to a Georgia

legislative commission inquiring into nancial improprieties in that

state's convict leasing system il ustrated the gratuitous cynicism that

steeped the lives of African Americans. In June 1901, the man,

named Ephraim Gaither, was being held in a work camp for men

arrested and convicted of minor o enses at an isolated location

about fty miles north of Atlanta. Gaither had been arrested on a

dubious charge of carrying a concealed weapon. After conviction,

he was sold along with 105 other men to a timber-cut ing operation

control ed by one of Atlanta's most prominent businessmen, Joel

Hurt. That month, a sixteen-year-old boy arrived in the camp to

serve three months of hard labor for an unspeci ed misdemeanor

he had al egedly commit ed.

"He was around the yard sorter playing and he started walking of

and got to trot ing a lit le bit, playing around there and got behind

a pine tree," Gaither recounted calmly, in testimony to the

commit ee of Georgia elected o cials. "There was a young fel ow,

one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at

the lit le negro and shot this side of his face o ," Gaither said as he

pointed to the left side of his face.

The fellow runs o to the woods about thirty or forty yards and the

guards follow him. Then Charley Goodson, he goes and gets the dog and

puts on the trail of him and they start off, the dogs are barking the way the

negro went o . Directly they came back and I heard one of the guards say

that negro he done and goes across the mountain and we can't get him.

That is when they come back with the dogs and everything was quiet. That

was on Thursday, Thursday evening. They let that negro stay there lying in

the woods from Thursday to Thursday and it gets to stinking so bad we

couldn't stand it hardly; and we complained about the smell. That day we

noticed a bitch, a hound bitch it was going across by the edge of the

woods with something in its mouth and we looked and seed that it was the

arm of that poor negro that they had killed down there in the woods. The

dog had torn the arm o of him and was dragging it down through the

edge of the woods with the ngers dragging on the ground. The Bosses

took John Williams and two or three others, I don't remember the names

now and made him a pine box and went down there and buried him.

Members of the commit ee responded by gril ing Gaither about

why he came to the state capitol that day to testify and whether a

black man's word could be trusted. "Did any white men see that?"

asked one state representative, about the events described by

Gaither. Another quizzed Gaither as to whether any white man in

Atlanta could vouch for him. Final y he was asked: "You were a bad

negro?"

Gaither responded: "No boss, I was no bad negro. They thought I

was." No queries were made as to the identities of the boy kil ed,

the camp boss who shot him, or why myriad state regulations

governing the treatment of prisoners at the time or the handling of

a convict's death were never ful l ed.15 The homicide Gaither

described was never investigated.

The harvest of that river of animosity was palpable for thousands of

African Americans. A venomous contempt for black life was not just

tolerated but increasingly celebrated. On Tybee Island o the coast

of Georgia, guards drove a squad of black men arrested by the local

sheri into the surf to bathe. Few could swim. Weighed down by

bal s and chains, four were swept into the sea. The body of

misdemeanant Charles Walker surfaced a day later on the edge of

nearby Screven Island.16

When a black man in Henderson, North Carolina, refused to give

up his reserved seat in a local theater to a white patron in April

1903, he was forcibly ejected. When he resisted being removed, the

1903, he was forcibly ejected. When he resisted being removed, the

black man was shot dead by a policeman.17 White southerners

applauded broadly.

A white mob seized an African Methodist Episcopal minister in

Lees-burg, Georgia, named Rev. W W Wil iams that spring after he

began to emerge among local blacks in the farm community as an

in uential leader. White men owned nearly al the area's land and

were accustomed to the same conjugal rights with black women on

their farms as had existed during antebel um slavery. Rev. Wil iams

began preaching that black women should resist the sexual

advances of the dominant white men of the community, wrote Rev.

J. E. Sistrunk, in an account of the at ack sent to the Department of

Justice. "The mob …went upon him without warning and taken

him out of the parson aide [parsonage] …and strip[p]ed him

naked and one sat upon his h[e]ad and each by turns with a buggy

whip, whipped him until his back was raw from head to foot and

after whipping him they told him that they whipped him because

he was control ing colored women."18

Southerners particularly reveled at gruesome scenes of racial

violence that occurred outside their region, a rming the hypocrisy

of those Yankee critics who stil criticized racial conditions in the

former Confederacy. For weeks, carnage continued between blacks

and whites in Joplin, Missouri, and Wilmington, Delaware. In April,

a thirty-year-old black man named Thomas Gilyard was lynched in

Joplin, fol owed by the reported expulsion of every black in the

city19 In May, newspapers closely fol owed a "race war" in

Louisvil e, Kentucky20

Accounts of mortal clashes between whites and blacks, and the

raging mobs that often fol owed such incidents, lit ered the pages of

newspapers in the rst years of the century. "Race War in

Mississippi," the Advertiser screamed in May 1903, after blacks and

whites near the town of Laurel bat led over several days, leaving at

least one white farmer and "several negroes" dead. "The enraged

white men of the community are stil in the saddle searching for the

negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic

negro who instigated the trouble," the paper reported with dramatic

thril .21

The same month, whites in Indianapolis, Indiana, began meeting

to formulate a plan for removing African Americans from the city.

Independence Day 1903 stirred extraordinary black and white

hostility. In the tiny South Carolina town of Norway, a white

farmer's son severely beat four black workers. In retaliation, the

father, a one-armed Confederate veteran, was gunned down at his

dinner table with a shotgun blast through a window. Local whites

seized a black man in retaliation and lynched him. In response,

more than two hundred armed blacks surrounded the town on July

4, threatening to burn it to the ground. The state's governor

dispatched the South Carolina militia to counterat ack.22

In Evansvil e, Indiana, crowds of blacks and whites bat led on

July 5 over the fate of a black man accused of kil ing a white police

o cer. Whites successful y broke into the city jail, but were driven

back by armed blacks. Police charged in to disperse the crowds and

spirit away the accused man.

On the same day, a mob of six hundred whites went in search of

a black woman in Peoria, Il inois, who was accused of having

beaten a white boy. After discovering that the woman already was

in jail, the crowd at acked her home, dismantling it to the

foundation and throwing al her furniture and belongings into the

Il inois River. In Thomasvil e, Georgia, a street argument between a

black man and his wife accelerated into a running gun ght between

a white posse and crowds of African Americans.23

The New York Times opined in mid-July 1903 that "respectable

negroes" should ban the city's bad ones. "There are in New York

thousands of ut erly worthless negro desperadoes," the Times wrote,

"gamblers when they have money and thieves when they have none,

moral lepers and more dangerous than wild animals." The

newspaper fol owed up later in the month with hysterical coverage

of racial disturbances in the city. "Negroes At ack Police" blared a

headline over an account of a ght that broke out on West 62nd

Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

on a sidewalk.24

Infuriated by the setbacks su ered by blacks in al regions of the

country, W. E. B. DuBois, the rising young sociologist—the rst

African American Ph.D. graduated by Harvard—wrote that the

South "is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk." The

emancipation act that had ended the Civil War had transmogri ed

into "a race feud," he said. "Not a single Southern legislature stood

ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the pol s; not a

single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible

without a system of restrictions that took al its freedoms away;

there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly

regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nul i cation as a

duty"25

X

THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."

Warren Reese refused to believe the white South was

irredeemably lost. He insisted, despite the mushrooming

resistance to his work, that justice stil could be served in

Alabama.

Judge Jones remained embarrassed and distressed at the mistrial

in the case of Fletcher Turner. He had been convinced that twelve

white men in Montgomery could put aside racial animosity long

enough to see the obvious guilt of a man such as Turner—even if

the jurors did so only to preserve the honor of their home state. At

the conclusion of the brief trial of Robert Franklin during the week

after Turner's guilty plea, Jones once again signaled to the jury the

defendant's guilt as he assailed Alabama's system of lower courts.

"The counsel of defendant spoke of the negro as a ‘so-cal ed citizen,’

" Jones told the court incredulously. "A man is a citizen whether he

can vote or not, and nobody loves a Government that would not

protect him." He decried Alabama's provincial sheri s and judges

who "have reestablished slavery for debt in this state."1

Much to the relief of Jones and Reese, the jury agreed. Franklin

was convicted of a single count of peonage. Final y, a southern jury

had been wil ing to honestly adjudge the actions of a white man,

nding obvious involuntary servitude to be what it truly was:

slavery.

Reese was privately adamant that his o ce would soon bring

another vol ey of slavery charges from elsewhere in the state. But

Jones was ready to declare victory. The enormous public pressure

in Montgomery to end the probe was wearing on him. Jones

declared publicly that the "peonage ring was nearly al broken up."

Alabama had been taught its lesson, Judge Jones hoped, and further

consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

brazenly seized John Davis, was ordered to pay $1,000. Word

spread quickly among the at orneys representing other defendants

that the court would deal just as leniently with those awaiting trial.

Within a few days, John Pace's son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, and

guard James H. Todd pleaded guilty to ve counts of peonage.

Judge Jones ned each man $1,000. They were taken back to the

Dadevil e city jail, to remain there until the penalty was paid.2 But

both men ignored the nes and were soon set free. Before the

summer term of court was over, another half dozen men pleaded

guilty and received from Jones symbolic nes. When court

reconvened in the fal of 1903, the rest of the defendants did the

same. Every major gure admit ed guilt. That was enough for

Jones.

Anxious to show that Tal apoosa County was no longer a center

of antebel um criminality and repair its reputation, a local grand

jury was impaneled in Dadevil e to examine questions of slavery

and peonage in early August. Two weeks later, in a nal report, the

panel of local men concluded that John Pace had been responsible

for virtual y al of the peonage in the area. It remonstrated Pace for

having "kept East Wilson, a negro woman who is serving a twelve

months sentence for larceny at his farm, out of the way, so that the

Sheri could not serve on her a subpoena to appear before this

Grand Jury….

"We suspect that he has kept other witnesses out of the way so

that they could not be served," the report continued. "It is our

opinion, that John W Pace and his convict farm are more

responsible, by far, than al others in our county for the abuse of

ignorant and helpless people, which is the crime known as peonage

in the Federal Court. This evil is practiced by very few in our

County, to the detriment of al , should be discontinued in our

County forever."3

Meanwhile, local residents were ral ying around the Cosby

family. George and Burancas had begun their sentences in the

Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

that it was unfair for the two men to be imprisoned when every

other participant in the slaving scheme received symbolic

punishment. More than three thousand names were a xed to a

petition seeking a pardon from President Roosevelt. Soon, even

Judge Jones supported the Cosby plea for clemency,4 5 directly

urging the president to free the two men. On September 16, 1903,

he did so. Almost as if the testimony of kidnappings, murders,

whippings, and enslavement had never been heard, the Cosbys

returned to their Red Ridge Road farm.

John Pace, the leader of the slavery ring, quietly restarted his

trade in black labor. As 1903 closed, the Alabama Board of

Inspectors of Convicts— the state entity charged with overseeing the

state's penal systems—was chagrined to discover that the county

commissioners of Tal apoosa County had renewed Pace's contract to

lease al county convicts.

As much as Judge Jones—and the more brazen apologists for

slavery across the South—had hoped the Alabama cases represented

the end of the a air, di cult realities continued to intrude. The fal

of 1903 brought new indictments in Louisiana for holding slaves,

but residents were so outraged that the marshal investigating the

cases had to ee the state for his safety. Newspapers across the

North published accounts of additional involuntary servitude in

Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.6

The U.S. at orney in Mobile, Alabama, who had initiated his own

inquiries into slavery in the southern part of the state, reported

"credible reports" of peonage across his territory and in multiple

counties. But investigating the al egations and questioning terri ed

witnesses was proving di cult. "Many of them are unwil ing to

communicate anything …unless assured that it would be

con dential," wrote M. D. Wickersham to his superiors at the

Department of Justice. "Persons manifested such terror when

requested to disclose what they knew that it is doubtful if they can

be persuaded to give any valuable testimony either in the grand

jury room or before the court."7

jury room or before the court."

As in so many other places, the federal marshals in the eld

discovered that the o cial systems of leasing black convicts to

private companies and individuals had become indistinguishable

from the casual slavery ourishing on private farms. If the former

was legal, few southerners—white or black—understood why the

lat er would not be. "So many il iterate persons have confounded

the harsh, and at many times cruel, execution of the convict laws of

the state with the practice of peonage that it has been very di cult

to make them understand the line that distinguishes the one from

the other, " Wickersham wrote.

In late November, a grand jury in Macon began hearing testimony

that Georgia state representative Edward McRee, his brothers Frank

and Wil iam, two former sheri s, and other members of some of

the most powerful families in south Georgia were operating a vast

slave-driven enterprise at their 22,000-acre Kinderlou plantation

near the Florida state line.

The McRee brothers’ farm was a plantation and industrial center

that dwarfed that of John Pace—operating on a scale no antebel um

slave owner could have comprehended. Edward McRee became a

powerful elected o cial serving in the state legislature. By 1900,

the four siblings who inherited the enterprise from their empire-

building father, a noted Confederate o cer named George McRee,

each lived in a lavish mansion within a square mile of the center of

the plantation. Between them a bustling vil age— cal ed Kinderlou

in honor of the Aunt Lou who raised the four brothers from

childhood after the death of their mother—thrived with farm

laborers, tradesmen, and several smal stores. Consuming the bulk

of an entire county, the farm—basking in the subtropical warmth of

the Gulf Coast— included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy

loam under til at any given time. On a private spur of the Atlantic

Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens

of boxcars waited at al times for the hundreds of thousands of

bushels of tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and

cot on. The McRees owned their own cot on gins, compresses to

make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

ve-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation's sugarcane to

make syrup. Five eighty-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco.

Cuban workers were imported to work the plantation's cigar

factory.

Thousands more acres of dense pine and hardwood fed a

ceaselessly turning sawmil , planing mil , and dry kiln. A factory on

the plantation produced thousands of pal ets, wooden crates, and

baskets for shipping agricultural produce. Deep in the forests,

McRee turpentine camps col ected rosin for their naval stores

distil ery. Three to four trains stopped daily, beginning with one at

3:30 A.M. to pick up dozens of three-foot-high barrels of milk

produced in the Kinderlou dairy8

The backbone of the plantation was smal armies of farmhands

and hundreds of mules, who were awakened by the rst bel at 4

A.M. each day and remained in the elds or factories until dark.

From "can't see to can't see," as the laborers cal ed it.

Initial y, the McRees hired only free black labor, but beginning in

the 1890s, they routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from

the state of Georgia to perform the grueling work of clearing lands,

removing stumps, ditching elds, and constructing roads. Other

prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over fteen years,

thousands of men and women were forced to the plantation and

held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. After the turn

of the century, the brothers began to arrange for more forced

laborers through the sheri s of nearby counties—fueling what

eventual y grew into a sprawling tra c in humans across the

southwestern section of Georgia.

"So I was carried back to the Captain's," said a black laborer in

1904, tel ing of his imprisonment on what was almost certainly the

McRee plantation. "That night he made me strip o my clothing

down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered

his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my

bare back, and stood by until it was done."

bare back, and stood by until it was done."

The worker vividly described to a passing journalist how the

farm descended from a place of free employment in the late

nineteenth century to one of abject slavery by the rst years of the

twentieth century. The unidenti ed man was born in the last years

before the Civil War, and then hired out at age ten to the father of

the McRee brothers, a man he knew simply as "Captain." While a

teenager, the black man at empted to leave Kinderlou and work at

another plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure,

one of the McRees and "some kind of law o cer" tracked him

down. The new employer apologized to McRee for hiring the young

worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known "this

nigger was bound out to you."

Soon afterward, one of the Captain's sons, likely Edward McRee,

took over the farm and convinced the free laborers to put their

mark on what was ostensibly a contract to work on the plantation

for up to ten years, in exchange for pay, a cabin, and some supplies.

Then McRee began building a stockade, with a long hal way down

the center and rows of crude stal s— each with two bunk beds and

mat resses—on each side. "One bright day in April …about forty

able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them

handcu ed were brought," the laborer recounted. Word came that

any African American, whether free or convict, who at empted to

leave the farm would be tracked down with hounds and forced

back. The contracts they had signed contained the same language

that John Pace forced men to accept, al owing the McRees to hold

the workers against their wil and beat them if they were

disobedient. "We had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could

we do about it?" the black man asked. "The white folks had al the

courts, al the guns, al the hounds, al the railroads, al the

telegraph wires, al the newspapers, al the money, and nearly al

the land."

When his labor contract final y expired after a decade, the laborer

was told he was free to leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his

accumulated debt at the plantation commissary of $165. Unable to

do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

work on the farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict. He

and several others were moved from their crude cabin into the

lthy stockades. The men slept each night in the same clothes they

wore in the elds, on rot ing mat resses infested with pests. Many

were chained to their beds. Food was crude and minimal.

Punishment for the disobedient was to be strapped onto a log lying

on their backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank

of wood. When the slave was freed, if he could not return to work

on his blistered feet, he was strapped to the log again, this time

facedown, and lashed with a leather whip. Women prisoners were

held across a barrel and whipped on their bare bot oms.9

As the Alabama peonage prosecutions were get ing under way in

Montgomery, newspapers in Georgia published accusations of

extreme cruelty at Kinderlou. Embarrassed by the publicity, state

prison o cials withdrew their convicts stil held on the McRee

farm. The assistant U.S. at orney in Macon asked the Department of

Justice to send him the detective who had cracked the case against

John Pace. Agent Henry Dickey arrived by train and began

inquiring how Kinderlou plantation came to hold dozens of African

Americans against their wil . He soon discovered that the McRees

had arrangements with sheri s and other o cers in at least six

Georgia counties to seize blacks and sel them into labor—al

outside the regular processes of the criminal courts. When the

McRees learned a federal investigation was under way, they hastily

freed al of the remaining workers being held involuntarily on

Kinderlou. At least forty fled immediately10

James Robinson, the fourteen-year-old boy whose sister, Carrie

Kinsey had writ en President Roosevelt begging for his intercession

after James was captured and sold, was likely one of those al owed

to ee in the summer of 1903. Kinderlou was the farm where

Robinson was being held "in chanes" when Kinsey wrote the White

House, though o cials at the Department of Justice never

connected that her plea related to a farm then under investigation

by their agents.11

by their agents.

In November 1903, a grand jury handed up a sweeping

indictment against Edward McRee and his two brothers. The men

were charged with thirteen speci c counts of holding African

American men and women. Several of those enslaved had never

been charged or tried in any fashion. Several public o cials were

indicted for conspiring to buy and sel blacks arrested on trivial or

fabricated charges in nearby Ware County and then turning them

over to the McRees.

A day later, Edward McRee and his brothers appeared in a

Savannah courtroom. McRee assured Judge Speer that while his

family had held many African Americans in the four decades since

slavery's abolition, they never intended to enslave anyone or break

the law. "Though we are probably technical y guilty we did not

know it," McRee told the court. "This custom has been [in] existence

ever since the war…. We never knew that we were doing anything

wrong."

He insisted that no black workers were ever beaten or brutalized

—in part because no worker had ever refused to perform their

assigned duties. Hounds were never used to track runaways because

no one had ever wished to leave, he claimed.12

Whatever had happened at Kinderlou, Judge Speer was of like

mind with his counterpart in Montgomery. He was certain that

symbolic punishments like the ones he handed down to smal er-

scale farmers earlier that summer—designed to demonstrate the

il egality of slavery but not in ame the anger of local whites—were

the best remedy. The McRees were al owed to plead guilty and

accept a token fine of $1,000.

Sheri Thomas J. McClel an and another man who helped in the

capture and sale of African Americans to Kinderlou fought the

charges against them, arguing as the Turners had in Alabama that

no law speci cal y made slavery a federal crime. A member of the

U.S. Congress submit ed a legal brief in support of their arguments.

Prominent state o cials sat at the defendants’ table during a

hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators

hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators

of lumber camps—where thousands of other men were being held

under similarly dubious circumstances—watched the proceedings

closely. After reviewing the arguments, Judge Speer cited the words

of U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Mil er in the Slaughter-House

Cases, a landmark decision in 1873 establishing the distinction

between federal and state civil rights. "Undoubtedly, while negro

slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which passed the

13th Article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or

hereafter."13

Speer overruled the defendants’ chal enges to the case. But once

again, in return for a guilty plea, the judge agreed to impose a

symbolic ne of $500. In the end, the only person jailed in

connection with nearly a half century of post-Civil War slavery on

the McRee plantation was a black man named George P. Hart. For

his role in sel ing a teenage girl to Frank McRee for $25, Hart spent

thirty days in jail.14

Back in Alabama, Warren Reese urged the Roosevelt administration

to mount an even more vigorous at ack on slaveholders. His o ce

reported to At orney General Knox in November that Julius

Sternfeld, the special assistant U.S. at orney assigned to the slavery

investigations, was pursuing more than forty cases in Co ee,

Geneva, Covington, Barbour, Dale, Pike, Houston, and Crenshaw

counties—al in the heavily black plantation areas of southern

Alabama. "The conditions in some of these counties are deplorable,

negroes are taken out at night time, stripped and whipped in a

most endish manner until the blood comes from them," Sternfeld

wrote to Washington. "Negro farm hands and mil workers have

been unmerciful y whipped, two negro churches destroyed by re,

the house of one negro being shot into and a negro woman's house

was riddled with shot, and while eeing with her baby in her arms

she and the baby were shot."

He vowed to ful l "the desire of President Roosevelt and the

Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary

Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary

servitude …and the real emancipation of hundreds of poor, helpless

creatures."15

Complaints of slavery streamed continual y into the Department

of Justice o ces in Washington, into the White House, and into

federal law enforcement o ces across Alabama and the South. Most

were al egations made by the rare quietly outraged at orney or local

Republican-appointed postmaster who, as representatives of the

party of Lincoln, stil felt some lingering political obligation to

African Americans or stil harbored hopes that blacks could again

become critical voters for the GOP. The rare rsthand accounts of

blacks held in slavery, many of them plaintive pleas furtively

scratched out in nearly indecipherable hands, were themselves

testaments to the ut er isolation and economic desperation of

mil ions of rural blacks.

In November 1903, Rev. L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist

church in Morganton, North Carolina, a verdant smal town in the

rol ing foothil s of the Appalachian Mountains, was on the verge of

despair. Farmer sent a dolorous let er to the Department of Justice.

His daughter had been stolen by white men and was being held in

slavery on a farm in Georgia.

"i have a lit le girl that has been kidnapped from me …and i cant

get her out," Farmer wrote. "i want ask you is it law for people to

whip (col) people and keep them and not al ow them to leave

without a pass."16

Farmer had exhausted every remedy available to a black man

trapped in the isolation of the turn-of-the-century American South.

He had contacted local authorities about his daughter's abduction,

even going so far as to at empt to serve on her captors a writ of

habeas corpus. Al his ef orts were ignored.

"The people in Ga wont do any thing with him and if the negroes

tel any thing they wil beat them to death and they are afraid to

testi e against" the man holding his daughter and many others,

Farmer wrote. If any African Americans did talk of what was

happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to

happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to

death," he wrote. "some of them has beened kil ed trying to get

away from their and i got a lit le girl there," Farmer implored. A

postscript on the back of his let er was a tel ing indication of the

desperation and shat ered con dence he shared with mil ions of

blacks. Farmer pleaded for a swift answer from the government. He

enclosed a stamp for the return answer.

On November 20, after the let er's arrival at the new headquarters

of the Department of Justice, an aide to the at orney general

assigned a le number to Farmer's let er, 3098-1902. The fol owing

day, a terse, typewrit en response was mailed on behalf of the

at orney general. It concisely acknowledged receipt of the let er and

then issued a directive to Rev. Farmer:

If you wish this Department to take any action to have your daughter

released, and the guilty parties prosecuted, you should furnish me with the

names of the parties holding your daughter in bondage, the particular

place, and the names of witnesses by whom the facts can be proved.

Respectfully,

Attorney General

No reply from Farmer to the at orney general was led. No

further action was recorded by the Department of Justice.17

The tone of communications between o cials in Washington and

federal prosecutors around the South was beginning to drift.

Investigators and U.S. at orneys such as Reese believed that as they

uncovered more and more instances of ongoing slavery and

reported these horrors back to Washington, top federal o cials

would grow proportional y more alarmed— al ocating more

urgency and resources to defeat them. In fact, President Roosevelt

and his administration were growing weary of what increasingly

appeared to be a moral crusade without a clearly at ainable

resolution—a quagmire of unintended consequences. At rst

imperceptibly, then more clearly, as the al egations of slavery grew

more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in

more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in

equal proportions.

The violence of the white South grew yet more indignant. In

December 1903, as federal agents prowled adjoining areas of the

Alabama countryside, a backwater town in Wilcox County, cal ed

Pine Apple, was the scene of a singularly remarkable episode of

racial carnage.

Deep in Alabama's Black Belt region, Pine Apple embodied the

new paradigm of the rural, post-Reconstruction cot on economy.

Situated on a critical railroad connecting to Selma and the key

Gulf Coast port of Pensacola, Florida, Pine Apple boasted a

handsome col ection of genteel homes and an impressive array of

enterprises centered on the train station and its wide-planked

loading docks. An imposing bank building was the center of

commerce for the area's landed white gentry, whose children

at ended a distinguished private school cal ed Moore Academy. Its

founder and rst principal in the 1880s, John Trotwood Moore,

went on to modest literary renown in the South. Scat ered around

the bank stood a red livery stable, a few dry goods stores with wide

windows facing the muddy streets, hitching rails tied with mules,

and a water trough served by a pump. Outside the stores, an

assortment of horse- and mule-drawn gigs, wagons, and canvas-

topped buggies stood at the wait. Near the station, warehouses, a

cot on gin, and a compress were surrounded by bales upon bales of

the just completed harvest. Smoke belched from the gin as the teeth

of its machinery threshed through the last cot on of the season,

separating ber and seed. In the compress, thousands of wagons of

white lint were pressed into bales for shipment. Between the big

houses and the town's center, wood-frame cot ages were wedged

onto newly delineated lots. Along the pit ed roads fanning out into

the denuded countryside, smal clusters of log cabins, rough hewn

from nearby forest and chinked with sticky red clay, housed black

families bound to the land owned by whites.

Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the

Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the

Louisvil e & Nashvil e Railway line cut ing due south on a

perpendicular through Pine Apple and across the Black Belt. More

than 35,000 people— the great majority of them black farm

laborers at work on land owned by whites—lived here.

Unprecedented numbers of white families made wealthy by the

turn-of-the-century cot on boom had emerged as a new class of

manor-born aristocrats—consolidating land, intermarrying, and

vying for prestige in the resurgent southern planter elite. Their

towns were strung along the railroad lines through plantation

country like antique pearls of white-columned antebel um

nostalgia. The harvest season had been a euphoric one, the most

bountiful in ve years, exceeding 11 mil ion bales of cot on in the

South.18 Across Pine Apple wisps of white ber—the detritus of the

massive harvest—clung to tree branches, windowsil s, and clumps

of grass.

No family in Pine Apple was more prominent among the

nouveaux riches than the Meltons. As the end of 1903 approached,

the family anxiously prepared for a crowning wedding—the union

of the most glamorous young couple in the adjoining counties and

of two great new families. Lovely Leila Melton, the twenty-two-

year-old daughter of Wil iam and Clara Melton, was set to marry

Claud Swink, a year her senior and a promising young planter in

Dal as County. The Melton clan had long been governed by three

brothers—Wil iam, Evander, and John—whose expansive families

control ed thousands of acres of property near Pine Apple. Swink

was the only child of a similarly successful cot on barony, large and

prosperous enough that the set lement at the crossroads nearest the

family plantation had come to be known as Swinkvil e.

The union of the two young people was momentous as wel as a

distraction for family members stil grieving the death of the family

patriarch, Leila's father, Wil iam Melton. More than four years after

he succumbed on July 4, 1900, the legacy of the fty-four-year-old

plantation master stil loomed over Pine Apple, his brothers, Clara,

and his eleven grown children. Even in death, he would be present

for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a

for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a

pedestal above his grave on the hil top across the road from the

church.

Melton intended to be remembered in precise detail. His statuary

captured in crisp relief the distinct planter's regalia: a neat fedora

on his brow and a long overcoat reaching past his knees, a trim

bow tie above the vest, a heavy watch chain across a protruding

midri , an intricately decorated walking stick in his right hand, a

bulging Masonic ring on his left—totemic emblems of the wealth

and power he had extended over the family's cot on empire.

Leila's wedding also was similarly designed as an expression of

the family's extraordinary position in southern life. The ceremony

could not have been more removed from the spare a air in which

the ex-slaves of the Cot-tingham plantation set Henry and Mary on

their way a generation earlier. As the December 29 date

approached, the sanctuary of Pine Apple's Friendship Baptist

Church was decorated in an opulent display of wealth. Arches of

smilax and pink and white chrysanthemums were erected before

the altar. Above the center arch, a stu ed dove held loops of white

tul e. Along the aisle, pil ars held a candle for each year of the

bride's age.

Leila's mother busily completed the stitching and embroidery on

a stunning gown of white peau de cygne silk and duchess lace

ordered from France. The bride's second-eldest brother, Henry, was

to give her away in an elaborate ceremony of eighteen at endants,

including male and female cousins, two nieces as ower girls,

nephews as ring bearers, and Leila's brother nearest in age, Tom, as

the best man. Unbeknownst to her daughter —or the groom-to-be—

Clara Melton planned to give the couple an extraordinary gift:

$1,250 in gold with which to begin their life together.19

The lavish plans belied the cold brutality on which the wealth of

the Melton clan rested. However burnished was the Meltons’ new

patina of sophistication, the family was infamous in the area for

brutal subjection of black workers and intimidation of neighbors,

whether white or black. The three Melton brothers for years had

whether white or black. The three Melton brothers for years had

relied on the local constable to help violently coerce blacks to work

on their farms. Another white farmer, J. R. Adams, incensed at the

Meltons’ contumacious terrorization of local African Americans,

including his own workers, wrote the at orney general to urge that

the family be investigated for involuntary servitude.20

"In al probability there is no other section of state in which the

crime of peonage is so common as here," Adams wrote. "The

Meltons and their connections are the worst o enders. They have

held negroes in peonage for years. It is a very rare thing that a

negro escapes from there…It is next to impossible for a negro who

has ‘contracted’ with one of this gang to ever get away."

Adams said two years earlier one of Melton's men kil ed a black

worker who at empted to escape from the farm. "A poor lit le

negro girl who is kept at [the constable's] house occasional y runs

away and begs other negroes to let her stay with them to keep

[him] from beating her," Adams continued. "The negroes are so

intimidated that they refuse to shelter her…. It is very hard to get

evidence out of the negroes, for this gang keeps it impressed upon

them that they wil be kil ed if they give evidence."21 The local U.S.

magistrate near Pine Apple agreed, writing the U.S. at orney that

among the fearful black population near the town, there was

virtual y no possibility of convincing witnesses to testify22

Late in the afternoon on Christmas Eve, just four days before the

wedding ceremony, Evander Melton, the bride's seventeen-year-old

cousin and a likely groomsman in the wedding, appeared in an

al eyway near the Pine Apple train station. Evander, the second son

of John and namesake of his imposing uncle, was a fat and

pugnacious boy known in town simply as "Pig." The group of young

black men throwing craps in the al eyway must have known

nothing good could come when Pig Melton, drunk and bel igerent,

pushed his way into the game.

They had few options. Meltons did as they wished among black

people. Besides, the young blacks were caught up in the jovial

ebul ience of the Christmas season—which for southern African

ebul ience of the Christmas season—which for southern African

Americans represented far more than a religious holiday. Christmas

marked the end of the long and di cult cot on harvest—a straining

process that in some years extended from September al the way to

yuletide—and the only payday of the year for most southern blacks.

After the nal cot on was in, tenants and sharecroppers—al those

blacks who had some il usion of independence—came to the white

planter on whose land they lived and asked for "set lement."

Apparently, landowners tal ied the cost of seed, supplies, rent, and

every other purchase taken on interest from their plantation stores

since the previous Christmas, subtracted the total from the value of

each family's share of the cot on they grew, and then paid out the

dif erence in cash.

The reality was endemic fraud. Landowners, acutely aware that

any worker ful y clear of his debts might then at empt to relocate to

a friendlier or more generous white property holder, routinely

exaggerated costs and interest so that virtual y no sharecroppers

could ever ful y extinguish their obligations. Instead, African

Americans typical y left the transaction with a smal cash "bonus" or

loan to use for a few weeks of merriment before work for the new

cot on season would begin again.

The young black men in Pine Apple were quickly burning

through their Christmas windfal —consuming liquor and trading

what lit le cash they retained with the dice bouncing across the

chil y soil.

Soon, the dice turned against the Melton teenager. He grew angry

and loud. His losses mounting, a quarrel ensued. Unexpectedly, a

pistol shot crackled in the crowd, from an unknown gun. More

shots may have been red in response. Whatever the case, Melton

fel to the ground, bleeding profusely. In the pandemonium that

fol owed, the black gamblers ed the scene—rushing to reach the

sanctuary of cabins deep in the forests or scrambling madly to

escape the county before nightfal . Arthur Stuart—a thirty-one-year-

old black farmworker whose wife, two-year-old son, and infant

daughter waited for him on rented land at the edge of town—wasn't

fast enough.

fast enough.

No one knew who fired the shot that hit young Melton—who was

taken to his family's house for a doctor to at end the wound. But

Stuart was black and nearby. He was instantly identi ed as an

accomplice. That he was stil in the town at al when the sheri

came was the strongest evidence of his innocence. Any black man

aware that he was within miles of a shooting of a Melton would

have fled for his life.

There was lit le doubt what would happen next. Word spread on

Christmas Eve that Pig Melton was recuperating at home and would

survive his injury. Yet the Meltons vowed a lesson was stil to be

taught. Late on Christmas night, after the day's church services in

praise of the birth of Jesus, family dinners, and singing of carols

had been nished, a smal group of white men led by fty-one-

year-old Evander M. Melton assembled at the center of Pine Apple.

At 4 A.M., the mob easily broke into the jail—the constable was

assisting them—and beat Stuart senseless in his cel . In short order,

the men doused his body with kerosene and set it afire.

Hoots and cheers arose from the unpaved street outside as the

lynchers rushed out the doors of the jail. But soon more than Stuart

was burning. Flames quickly l ed the rst oor of the building.

Orange and red swel s pushed through the windows and ashed up

the sides of the jail. Then brie y the scene was silent except for the

loud roar of re and the groans of the building as its skeleton

col apsed into an embering heap.

The murder of Arthur Stuart and even the destruction of the jail

would have been an almost routine a air except for what fol owed.

A sudden gust of wind whipped through the town. A shower of

burning embers—thousands of missiles of re—poured into the sky

and then scat ered across Pine Apple. The wispy blanket of cot on

dusting the town ignited unpredictably. A burst of ames appeared

on the porch roof of the farm feed store adjacent to the jail. The

roof of cedar shake shingles was a mass of re within minutes.

Whipped by the gusting winds, the ames leapt next to a wagon

Whipped by the gusting winds, the ames leapt next to a wagon

repair shop, the inferno now rippling across the sky like a zephyr

turned red and gold. It blew onto the town bank, the post o ce,

and then beyond to houses and eight stores clustered at the center

of town. Most devastating, the ames reached the great mounds of

cot on bales stored in and around the warehouses of the gin and

compress—turning the cubes of burlap-wrapped white cot on into

roaring blocks of fire. Within minutes of Stuart's last cries in his cel ,

the entire commercial district of Pine Apple was a mass of raging

heat and blaze.23 Where just hours before the sounds of "Joy to the

World" sung from the square-note hymnals of the Baptist church

had wafted down the muddy streets, now only the crackling of coals

and flames and the glow of an ashen town penetrated the night.

Blacks in Pine Apple—and across the country—couldn't help but

savor the apocalyptic consequences of the white mob's rampage.

After three hundred years of Christian teaching that it was some

curse or providential intent that placed Africans in slavery and the

purgatory that fol owed it, the re could only be seen as the

Almighty's sign that it was the white man earning his vengeance

now. The ames were "reinforced by God's disapprobation," one

black preacher said. Booker T. Washington wrote to a northern al y:

"The white people are now in quite a state of indignation…. One

wonders if the same indignation would have been shown if the

property of the white people had not been burned."24

Whatever anger surged from other whites whose homes and

businesses had been destroyed, the Meltons stil had a wedding to

complete. Four days after the con agration, the Baptist church, far

enough from town to be spared from the re, was l ed for Leila's

nuptials.

The Meltons were never prosecuted, either for the murder of

Arthur Stuart or for the enslavement of so many black workers who

created their wealth. No peonage cases were ever brought in the

area. Adams, the white informant, was so fearful for his life that he

burned al let ers from the U.S. at orney investigating the incident.

burned al let ers from the U.S. at orney investigating the incident.

The perpetrators of the lynching escaped punishment. Local African

Americans did take bit er solace in a nal turn that seemed to

a rm God's contempt for what the white family had done: three

weeks after the wedding, on January 26, young Pig Melton, fevered

from an infection of his wound, died. He was interred a few steps

from his Uncle Wil iam's precipice—near, but just outside, his

imposing elder's stony line of sight.

Every day that passed after the immolation of Arthur Stuart

without response by the federal government was further rati cation

that the African Americans of the South had been returned to the

white men who sought to control them. Almost exactly a year later,

as if a demonstration that no one should interpret the catastrophe

as evidence of any change in the state of black-white relations in

the town, two more black men from Pine Apple, brothers Edward

and Wil iam Plowly, were accused of murdering a white man and

then hanged by a mob.

Indeed, where federal investigators initial y stirred near panic

among slaveholding farmers when they rst arrived in Alabama,

Georgia, and Florida, the impotence of the investigations was

becoming richly obvious. Even when men were brought to trial for

the most egregious o enses, they hardly risked conviction. Even if

found guilty, they were in no real jeopardy of meaningful penalties.

Just as the federal Freedmen's Bureau agents sent into remote

southern towns had learned immediately after the Civil War, the

new representatives of northern justice brought more risk upon

themselves than to any person stil holding slaves.

Indeed it was open season on Secret Service investigators. A

government auditor sent to check the books of Reese's o ce in

February 1904 found that two deputy marshals employed in the

investigation had been hiding out at their homes in rural Alabama

when they were supposed to have been pursuing slavery cases in

the most hostile areas of the state, Lowndes and Dal as counties—

the Swink family home territory. "The reason for this was that the

persons living in said counties had sent word to the District

At orney and his assistants to the e ect that, if they had regard for

At orney and his assistants to the e ect that, if they had regard for

their personal safety, they would not at empt to prosecute the

peonage people in said counties," wrote the examiner.25

Reese insisted the inquiries must proceed. He wrote to

Washington a month later urgently asking for additional help from

Secret Service agents to protect witnesses who testi ed against ve

whites in Pike County. The holders of slaves fought back violently,

he said, burning the sawmil of one white landowner wil ing to

speak against the defendants, set ing black churches a re, and

intimidating large numbers of African American workers who were

eeing the area. "The lumber mil s were shut down and the farming

interests paralyzed," Reese wrote.26 Department of Justice o cials

waited nearly two weeks to reply, and then indicated that no agents

were available at the time.

Reese continued to draw indictments from grand juries in the

Black Belt, but often with lit le result. Charges against one Alex D.

Stephens in early 1904 al eged that Stephens sold a black worker

named Wil iam Brown to a white man in Co ee County named

Samuel W Tyson in July 1902.27At orneys in the state by now knew

the dril for responding to such actions. Tyson pleaded guilty and

was then pardoned. Charges against Stephens and two others

involved in related seizures and sales of black slaves were

dismissed.

Even as the federal investigations seemed to weaken from the

interior, external opposition to the campaign against slavery

mounted. A mass meeting of sawmil and turpentine camp owners

in Tifton, Georgia, convened in April 1904 to plot strategy and

col ect funds for a legal defense of the involuntary servitude used by

virtual y every member of the group. "Every turpentine operator

and saw mil man, as wel as every one employing labor in this

section, feels that they are a ected," wrote a newspaperman who

at ended the meeting.28

Nearly a year had passed since John Pace—the primary target of

Reese's initial investigation—pleaded guilty to holding debt slaves.

His sentence of fty- ve years—with ve to serve—remained

His sentence of fty- ve years—with ve to serve—remained

suspended. There had been no activity in his appeal of the

constitutionality of the statute under which he pleaded guilty, and

Pace had made no e ort to obtain a presidential pardon for his

crimes like the one the Cosbys had obtained. He remained free on a

$5,000 bond signed by his partner in the slaving enterprise,

Fletcher Turner, and his banker, Wil iam Gray29

By now, even Reese had begun to doubt whether the laws on the

U.S. books were actual y su cient to prohibit the holding of slaves.

In legal lings, Pace's lawyers freely conceded that the farmer

admit ed "unlawful y and knowingly holding a person forcibly and

against his wil and requiring such person to labor." But this did not

technical y t the de nition of peonage, they argued, saying the

arcane statute could only be prosecuted in locations where a formal

system of peonage had once existed—as in New Mexico.

Reese believed they might be legal y correct. "I very much fear,"

he wrote to Washington, that Pace's conviction would be overturned

on that argument.30 Since there was no other U.S. law making it a

crime to hold slaves, Pace would forever go free.

At orney General Knox resigned in June 1904 to accept an

appointment to the U.S. Senate. His successor, Wil iam Moody, a

former congressman from Massachuset s and then secretary of the

navy, pressed for the existing cases of involuntary servitude

violations to be ful y pursued. But it was obvious that Reese's

enthusiasm for a sweeping assault on new slavery did not arouse

him.

In December of 1904, At orney General Moody made one last

major federal gesture in the campaign against peonage, personal y

arguing to the U.S. Supreme Court that the conviction of Samuel M.

Clyat for having two black men seized and enslaved more than

three years earlier should be upheld. Clyat 's slow-moving appeal—

using the same argument as Pace and his fel ow defendants that the

anti-peonage statute couldn't be applied, had nal y reached the

highest court in the land. Three months later, the court surprised

Reese and other government lawyers across the country. Clyat won

Reese and other government lawyers across the country. Clyat won

a new trial on minute technical grounds. But the court upheld the

validity of the anti-peonage statute.31

The practical import of the ruling was to sustain the fundamental

il egality of involuntary servitude and of the federal judicial

system's one limited weapon for at acking it. But at the same time,

the opinion by Justice David Brewer also a rmed that the South's

growing practice of using hyper-technical interpretations of U.S.

law to thwart the rights of black men on a wide range of issues—

from segregated schools and housing to voter registration and

government aid for the poor—would be abided by the federal

courts.

Days later, in Savannah, Georgia, Judge Speer, emboldened by the

section of the Supreme Court ruling declaring peonage abhorrent,

ordered from his bench that Georgia's vast system of charging

African Americans in the lower courts of towns and sentencing

them to hard-labor chain gangs was il egal. Speer ordered the

freedom of Henry Jamison, a black man arrested on a charge of

drunk and disorderly conduct and then sentenced to spend 210 days

chained into a work crew repairing roads in Macon. The judge

found that local courts had no power to order such penalties for

pet y and largely unde ned crimes such as vagrancy, drunkenness,

or throwing trash in the street. "Enforced labor on a local chain-

gang, imposed for an o ense not amounting to crime, is involuntary

servitude and peonage, in the light of the decision of the United

States Supreme Court, no mat er what the state law or the

municipal ordinances on the subject may be," Speer wrote. "Let but

this crime continue, we wil al be slaves. We wil be slaves to our

prejudices, slaves in that like slaves we tolerate the violation of the

constitution and the law which we are sworn to support; slaves

because we slavishly fail or refuse to perform a lofty civic duty"32

Speer's ruling rippled across the southern landscape. Here was a

legal rationale far more sweeping than anything previously

articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.

articulated by any jurist involved in the involuntary servitude cases.

Under the logic of Judge Speer, thousands—perhaps tens of

thousands—of African Americans being held against their wil to

work o nes levied for trivial, al eged misdemeanors should be

freed.

Back in Montgomery, Reese recognized the import of the decision

instantly. Just a few weeks earlier, he had convinced another grand

jury to hand up sixteen additional indictments on peonage charges

against men in another section of Alabama. But Reese could see the

inef ectual nature of the scat ershot prosecutions. There were clearly

thousands of African Americans being coerced into labor, and

contrary to Judge Jones's original hopes, convictions in a few high-

pro le cases weren't causing other whites to abandon the practice.

Reese knew a broader and more sustained at ack was the only

hope. In Speer's ruling, Reese saw a basis for chal enging the root of

the South's forced labor blight—the system of sel ing convicts

fol owed by the state of Alabama, nearly al of its counties, and at

least a half dozen other southern states.

Then came an astounding revelation, a discovery that must have

been the most dispiriting setback yet in the two years since Reese

made his vow to root out slavery for President Roosevelt. The U.S.

at orney learned that John Pace, his original nemesis in Tal apoosa

County, continued to hold African Americans in involuntary

servitude. "There are two boys ages fteen and sixteen respectively

who are now il egal y restrained of their liberty on the farm," Reese

wrote to his superiors. The teenagers were almost certainly Luke

and Henry Tinsley one of the pairs of brothers James M. Kennedy

had enumerated on the Pace farm during the census ve years

earlier.

Like many other blacks overlooked by investigators and grand

jurors during the probe of Pace's operation, the Tinsleys were never

discovered during the federal inquiry. Now Reese learned the

children had been il egal y held by Pace since 1897—eight years

earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of

earlier—and were stil working o a court bond paid on behalf of

their mother. Reese doubted whether he could bring a peonage

charge based on the sketchy facts surrounding the pair. He knew

without doubt it would be useless to seek charges against Pace in a

local court. Based on Judge Speer's ruling, the vehicle for freeing

the boys would be to seek a writ of habeas corpus—forcing Pace to

demonstrate his authority to hold the two boys against their wil .

The maneuver wouldn't stop with Pace, Reese believed. "There are,

in my judgment, hundreds of negroes that can be freed this way, if I

be given this authority," he wrote to his superiors.

At orney General Moody was unmoved. Undoubtedly, the

administration was not going to authorize Reese to begin

chal enging hundreds or thousands of whites about the status of

their black workers. "If you have good reason to believe that Pace is

holding minors to involuntary servitude, without the consent of the

parents …you should have warrant issued," came the reply. "The

habeas corpus proceedings should not be instituted."33A few days

later, Pace, having heard that Reese was preparing another

prosecution, released the two boys to their mother.34

But Tal apoosa County was quickly reverting to its former ways.

A woman who signed her name only as Susanna wrote Judge Jones

in mid-1905, describing another slaving operation already under

way a few miles from Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. "I whish

to enform you that theare is one J. D. Hugens and son holden

Negroes here in peonage at thear terpen tine Stil 10 miles South of

Dadevil e…. Please send your detective heare at once."35 No one

was sent.

Reese was convinced that his prosecutions had proved the

perverse nexus of debt slavery and the organized convict leasing

system that ourished around him. He made one last thrust to

destroy it. Writing to At orney General Moody in March 1905, Reese

pleaded again for permission to le habeas corpus petitions on

behalf of thousands of Alabama convicts then forced to work in

mines owned by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., other

companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.

companies, and on private farms like John Pace's.

"I am perfectly wil ing for one to shoulder this responsibility and

commence these proceedings …though in doing this I appreciate

ful y what this means," Reese wrote. "I am wil ing to jeopardize …

my relationship with al the nine congressmen and the two Senators

from this District, the local Bar, the Bench and the people of the

city of Montgomery, where I was born and raised," the at orney

continued.

"I desire to know … in case I commence this crusade, so to speak,

that I wil have not only your support, but in time to come if these

very men who have always supported me political y should turn

upon me, because I have instituted these prosecutions and done my

duty, that you wil protect me from such at acks."36

Reese knew that white leaders across Alabama were conspiring to

have him replaced when his term as U.S. at orney expired at the

end of 1905. He wrote Booker T. Washington a few weeks earlier

asking the black leader to send a discreet let er to President

Roosevelt endorsing Reese's work.37

At orney General Moody would have none of it. He ordered that

the young district at orney take no action until the Supreme Court

ruled on an appeal of Judge Speer's decision striking down

Georgia's misdemeanor convict system.38

As Reese was pressing to use the federal courts to free the

thousands of slaves held in Alabama mines—and set a precedent

that might have freed ten thousand or more in other states—the

writer Thomas Dixon released in 1905 the fol ow-up to his

spectacular novel The Leopard's Spots. The new book, an even

more overt paean to the Ku Klux Klan violence that swept away

black political participation in the 1860s and 1870s, was titled The

Clansman. It sold in vast quantities in 1905 at the price of $1.50

and became perhaps the rst true blockbuster in modern U.S.

publishing. Its success— commercial y and as revisionist history—

was so complete that, in an irony of immeasurable proportion,

newspaper announcements for the volume featured a let er from

Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be

Abraham Lincoln's son Robert praising it as "a work that cannot be

laid down."39

The author quickly fashioned the storylines of his two racist

novels into a stage play to tour the United States. The production

featured a cast of exquisitely at ractive young white actresses, white

actors in blackface playing lecherous emancipated slaves hungry to

assault white women and cowering and bu oonish black elected

o cials, gal ant former Confederate o cers, and a ful y out t ed

contingent of white-robed Klansmen who rode across the stage

mounted on horseback. The show opened in Norfolk, Virginia, in

August 1905 at the Academy of Music, and an epic, record-breaking

run of performances fol owed in theater hal s across the South,

Midwest, and Northeast.

It played to packed crowds everywhere, drawing in a period of

ten months "more people …than any other at raction … in the

theatrical history of United States theater," wrote one newspaper

critic.40 Not surprisingly, a new generation of southern white

leaders absorbed its account of Reconstruction and the fury of its

white actors as absolute fact. Audiences roared approval almost

everywhere else too—including standing-room-only audiences in

New York City. In Atlanta, the city's most prominent debutantes

held "box" parties for their friends in the expensive reserved seats of

the Grand Opera House when the play arrived in the city. Mrs.

Dixon, the author's wife, was feted by the finest ladies of Atlanta.41

After the rst performance on a chil y late October night, Dixon

addressed an adoring crowd—revealing from the stage that his

father had been a Ku Klux Klan member when the night riders

waged a campaign of violence on black political leaders during

Reconstruction. Georgia governor Joseph M. Terrel watched

approvingly from a special box. Later that night, Dixon was

honored at a lush private dinner at the Aragon Hotel hosted by the

Kappa Alpha Order, a fraternal order founded at the University of

Virginia in tribute to the life of Robert E. Lee. Raising their glasses

in a series of toasts to the guest of honor and his long membership

in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of

in the fraternity were many of the most prestigious white men of

the city—the leadership elite who would govern and sculpt the

South's leading city for the next fty years—including Hugh Dorsey

a young at orney who a decade later in ated evidence to prosecute

Jewish businessman Leo Frank for the rape and kil ing of a young

woman that he did not commit.42 After his conviction, Frank was

murdered in an infamous lynching by an anti-Semitic mob, led by

the city's leading political and business leaders. Elevated by his role

in the Frank case, Dorsey went on to become governor of Georgia.

Scat ered voices of concern were raised against the brazenly

in ammatory racial rhetoric of the production, and in some cities

gangs of white men—adrenaline raised by the play's stirring cal to

defend their delicate women from the lusts of black brutes—

subsequently at acked random African Americans in their cities. A

commit ee of northern activists at empted to encourage protests

when the production arrived in new cities with special y printed

postcards showing a scene from the play and urging a boycot .43

Most notably, Dixon's own brother, the Reverend A. C. Dixon, cal ed

the stage play "rot en and slimy"44 Here and there moderate leaders

complained that the production painted an exaggerated portrait of

black and white antagonisms. The pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle

in Atlanta decried the performance as a "disgrace to southern

manhood and womanhood" and the heroic portrayal of the Ku Klux

Klan as fraudulent.45

In an interview before one performance in the South, Dixon said

that "the North" was beginning to see the urgency in repressing

African Americans. "It is only within the past 12 months that I have

seen big buck negroes parading up and down Broadway with white

girls hanging on their arms." When some members of an audience

hissed the show in Columbia, South Carolina, Dixon mounted the

stage to defend himself against critics. Stirring the crowd to his side,

he declared: "God ordained the southern white man to teach the

lessons of Aryan supremacy"46

XI

SLAVERY AFFIRMED

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers."

Some African American leaders stil held out hope that at least

northern whites could be turned back from the rising venality of

white Americans. Instead of embracing the accommodationist

philosophy of Booker T. Washington, a generation of younger black

intel ectuals led by W. E. B. DuBois insisted that it was whites who

needed to adapt to ful black citizenship. Born in Massachuset s and

schooled rst in Germany, then in Harvard, DuBois had been since

1897 a groundbreaking professor of sociology at Atlanta University,

one of the most prestigious majority-black institutions in the

country. A stream of his articles, novels, and non ction assessments

of the progress of African Americans, including The Souls of Black

Folk, published in 1903, were scathing incisions into the state of

race relations in the United States. Later, after the formation of the

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in

1909, DuBois would emerge as its most central early figure.

The arrival of DuBois in Atlanta had put him deep in the heart of

the new system of southern slavery. As part of his university duties,

DuBois directed a series of extraordinary statistical and sociological

surveys of the rural South, and black people within it, between

1898 and 1904. The last of them, "Negro Farmer," became a

bedrock demonstration of the new science of sociology and a rigidly

empiricist approach toward quantitative analysis in the study of

social forces. Two years later, the U.S. commissioner of labor,

whose o ce had funded the previous studies, agreed to back a new

DuBois project, this time focused speci cal y on the state of black

sharecroppers in the South.1

Choosing as his venue Lowndes County, Alabama, DuBois's

project injected one of the most extraordinary American intel ects

of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the

of the era into a place as backward and forbidding as any on the

continent. Named after a nineteenth-century U.S. congressman from

South Carolina, Wil iam Lowndes, who prior to the Civil War

strenuously advocated the extension of slavery into new U.S.

territories, the county sat at the center of the Black Belt.

At the beginning of the Civil War, more than nineteen thousand

enslaved blacks—the twelfth-largest population of slaves in one

place in the country—lived on 1,100 farms in Lowndes County,

nearly ve hundred of which exceeded one thousand acres in size.

The war obliterated the hope of Congressman Lowndes and others

to expand slavery. But despite Lowndes having the largest

proportion of blacks to whites of any Alabama county, the war

seemed to have had lit le e ect on the question of whether slavery

would continue there. By 1900, even as the white population

dwindled further, the landholders who remained reforged an almost

impenetrable jurisdiction into which no outside authority could

extend its reach. By then, more than thirty thousand blacks worked

the rich flat cot on fields, no longer cal ed slaves but living under an

absolute power of whites nearly indistinguishable from the forced

labor of a half century earlier. Black land ownership in the county

was inconsequential. Where it existed on paper, the appearance of

independence was a chimera behind which local whites continued

to violently control when and where blacks lived and worked, and

how their harvests were sold. Most o ensive to blacks, white men

in Lowndes County continued to exercise their slavery-era

presumption that they were entitled to the sexual companionship

of virtual y any African American woman residing on their

property.

During the grand jury investigation of peonage that led to the

trials of 1903, Warren Reese concluded that Lowndes County was

the fountain-head of Alabama's new slave labor. W. D. McCurdy one

of the original operators of the most notorious convict slave mines

near Birmingham, also kept dozens of black workers imprisoned on

his home plantation in Lowndes County. It was here that federal

investigators working for Reese had reported—until being run out

of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an

of the county at gunpoint—that the sheri , J. W. Dixon, was an

active participant in a violently enforced convict slave system that

held hundreds or thousands of black laborers. The Smith family—

whose deadly convict farm had become the symbol of convict

leasing's most lethal manifestations in the nineteenth century—was

one of the county's most prominent landholders. But Reese could

bring no charges in Lowndes County because no blacks forced into

slavery were wil ing to risk the lives of family members or their

own by testifying to the grand jury in Montgomery. Even a black

grand juror from Lowndes County participated in the inquiry only

under protest—for fear he would be kil ed upon his return home.

But the failure of the federal investigation to reach Lowndes

County didn't indicate there had been less slavery than federal

agents initial y claimed. Indeed, there was vastly more. In the

summer of 1906, W. E. B. DuBois and a team of more than a dozen

researchers, including sociologists Monroe Work, Richard R. Wright,

and others of the most extraordinary young black minds of the new

century, arrived at the Calhoun School. Founded in 1892 by a

wealthy white northern socialite, the institution operated largely on

the industrial education principles of Booker T. Washington. But

the Calhoun School was distinct in one regard among the many

institutions for blacks established near the end of the nineteenth

century— often naively and il -fated—by wealthy benefactors.

Going beyond training black children in basic academics and

advanced vocational skil s such as bricklaying and carpentry, the

school's founder, a wel -bred Connecticut spinster named Charlot e

Thorn, actual y moved to Lowndes County and eventual y

promoted a land ownership experiment for blacks in the heart of

what was likely the single most repressive white-power regime in

the South. Over time, land companies established by the school

purchased a total of more than four thousand acres of cot on land,

encouraged local blacks to operate the farms on a quasi-communal

basis, and ultimately resold smal er tracts of land to African

Americans.2

DuBois, whose di erences with Booker T Washington had not

advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men

advanced to the complete rupture that eventual y pit ed the men

against each other as commit ed enemies, was at racted to the

Calhoun School as a preserve in which idealistic and educated

whites and blacks could interact freely. He also delighted in the

e rontery the school presented to the white dominance that

surrounded it.

DuBois went to Lowndes County in hopes of capturing an

unassailable, empirical y proven portrait of the penury and

exploitation that African Americans there—and by extension most

of the South—were forced to endure. With funding from the federal

Bureau of Labor, the DuBois team fanned across the countryside

carrying ten thousand copies of questionnaires containing a bat ery

of piercing questions regarding land ownership, labor control,

family life, education, sexual mores, morality, political activity, and

other aspects of black life. By late fal in 1906, more than 21,000 of

the county's black farmers had been interviewed through a cabin-to-

cabin canvass, with researchers scrupulously recording the answers

and compiling tables of the responses back at the school.

Separately, two white investigators provided by the federal

government conducted an even more discreet inquiry into the

political operations and sexual morality of Lowndes County whites.

To cross-reference the individual interviews, white researchers

examined and analyzed prodigious volumes of Lowndes County

mortgages, liens, arrests, incarcerations, and proceedings of local

justices of the peace—al of the key instruments of government used

by whites to contain and control blacks throughout the South.

DuBois used the legal record and personal accounts to create

detailed maps and tables of the county, showing between 1850 and

1906 the evolution of economic, social, and political power and a

chronological movement of land ownership among blacks and

whites.3

No social study on such a scale of research and ambition had ever

been undertaken in the United States, certainly not one focused on

black life and even more so never one at empted in the

environment of overt physical danger that existed in Lowndes

County.

County.

Local whites were already openly hostile toward the existence of

the Calhoun School and its implicit chal enge to the neo-slavery

that surrounded it. DuBois wrote later that researchers met "with the

greeting of …shotguns in certain parts of the county"4 5 He told U.S.

commissioner of labor Charles P. Neil that two investigators "were

shot at and run out of one corner of the county. "

Yet DuBois and others believed the enormity of the data and the

impregnability of a federal y authorized analysis conducted under

the most rigorous scienti c methodology presented an opportunity

to smash the racial myopia and growing indi erence to conditions

in the South of the majority of American whites. DuBois later cal ed

the project his "best sociological work."6 7 By the end of 1906, the

report had been completed, writ en by hand, and delivered to the

Bureau of Labor for publication.

The growing ubiquity for al African Americans of the dangers

DuBois and his col eagues encountered in Lowndes County was

underscored on September 22, 1906, when the team learned that a

mob of as many as ten thousand whites was on the rampage in

Atlanta. DuBois rushed aboard a train to return to his wife, Nina,

and daughter, Yolande, who had remained in their quarters at South

Hal on the campus of Atlanta University, where DuBois was a

professor. He sat in vigil on the steps of the building with a

shotgun. But white at ackers never arrived.

By the time the riot ended, hundreds of African Americans, by

virtual y al accounts, had been at acked on the streets of the city.

Atlanta had never completely cooled since the performances of The

Clansman ten months earlier. Tensions—driven by rumors of black

ambitions for political power and open race baiting by candidates

running for governor—had mounted over the months.

In the weeks just before the riot, the fal of 1906, Atlanta was

whipped into a fury by weeks of exaggerated and fabricated

accounts published in the Atlanta Constitution and other local

newspapers of blacks al egedly raping and insulting white women.

A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was

A second visit to Atlanta by the touring Clansman production was

being arranged—this time featuring in the cast two cousins of

Je erson Davis, the late president of the Confederacy. Two days

after the production began its new tour on September 20, with

packed performances in Charleston, South Carolina, a crowd of

whites—delirious with racial animosity—gathered in downtown

Atlanta.

Heeding an anonymous public cal to revive a new Ku Klux Klan,

a group of men gathered to discuss how to respond to the al eged

series of sexual assaults against white women. Almost none of the

al eged at acks were ever proven. But by late afternoon, the city's

competitive newspapers were rol ing o extra editions to report

even newer dubious claims of black men at acking young women.

Just before midnight, the crowd began marauding indiscriminately

through the city. For ve days, vigilantes, police o cers, and

soldiers grabbed and beat African Americans, seizing them o

sidewalks and streetcars. They broke into businesses where blacks

were employed and crashed into homes in African American

neighborhoods, spil ing blood everywhere they went. In some areas,

blacks stood their ground, ghting back with guns and sts—

spurring even more anger and a rationale for police and militia to

join on the side of white rioters. In the end, the mobs were believed

to have kil ed at least two dozen African Americans. Fewer than a

half dozen whites died.8

Three weeks after the riot in September 1906, a former U.S.

congressman from Georgia, Wil iam H. Fleming, raised a rare voice

against rising racial animosity. "How many causes have recently

been cooperating in that line from the theater, the press and the

stump to familiarize us with the disrespect for law and to arouse

hate and contempt by the whites against the blacks?" Representative

Fleming asked. "Chief among o enders stands a former preacher,

Rev. Thomas Dixon, with his Clansman."9

In Washington, federal o cials who previously had shown such

assiduous interest in the research by DuBois—and the possibility it

would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly

would document the widespread slavery of the South—suddenly

faltered. Tabulations that had appeared acceptable months earlier

now looked questionable to Commissioner Neil . He signaled that

publication of the report would no longer be immediate. Nearly a

year after completion, it remained under review, when a new

commissioner replaced Neil . After reading the report, W W.

Hangar, the new head of the agency, wrote taciturnly to DuBois: "It

would be extremely unwise to make any use whatsoever of the

material which was gathered."10 A year later, after months of

pushing for publication of his research, or at the very least that the

document be returned, DuBois was informed that the study's

conclusions "touched on political mat ers." It could not be sent to

him because "it had been destroyed."11

Nothing of what might have been a seminal study of black life

survived—with one exception. Three years later, DuBois penned his

rst novel—The Quest for the Silver Fleece—a richly descriptive

portrayal of African Americans struggling against the strictures

tightening against them in the North and South. The heart of the

novel was a narrative drawn from what DuBois and his researchers

had witnessed during their dangerous summer in Lowndes County.

Substituting new names for the Calhoun School, the McCurdys, and

other great white landholding families, DuBois rendered the social

order of what he cal ed Tooms County in sharp, but unexaggerated,

relief. The baronic family whose patriarch, Colonel Cress-wel , had

been the county's largest slaveholder before emancipation stil

control ed in the twentieth century fty thousand acres of prime

cot on land and uncounted black families who lived upon it in the

novel's account.

In the portrait etched by DuBois, Colonel Cresswel lived in a

sprawling mansion far from town, surrounded by endless numbers

of broken cabins inhabited by terri ed and uneducated "tenants."

Cresswel was intent on crushing any semblance of movement

toward economic or political independence among those blacks.

"Cheap cot on depends on cheap niggers," he exclaimed. No manner

of shared interests between blacks and whites could ever be

contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need

contemplated. "We've got whips, chain-gangs, and—mobs if need

be…. It's the Negro …we've got to beat to his knees."

In the county described by DuBois, black sharecroppers lived or

died on the whim of the white men stil cal ed "master" by most.

They begged the white men for their broken-down log cabins, for

food and cloth to make clothes. Maturing black girls complied with

their initiation into sexual activity when Colonel Cresswel 's son

demanded it, because "he was our master."

The Cresswel s and other whites "bought" and sold sharecroppers

at wil —substituting the sale of their al eged debts for rent and

supplies as a proxy for the sale of humans themselves. Able black

men and their families routinely "sold" for $250 in this Lowndes

County. Black families who resisted their sale to other whites were

subject to brutal violence and the con scation or burning of their

homes and possessions. Once under a labor contract to any white

man, blacks knew they would almost certainly never be free of it.

Disputes over the value of the cot on they raised were set led by

local o cials control ed by the white farmers. Any man who fought

back against overseers beating workers in the eld risked gruesome

punishments and sale into the convict leasing system.

Robbed of her crop, DuBois's central character, Zora, knows she

has no recourse: "What should she do? She never thought of appeal

to courts, for Colonel Cresswel was Justice of the Peace and his son

was baili . Why had they stolen from her? She knew. She was now

penniless, and in a sense helpless. She was now a peon bound to a

master's bidding." She knew that signing a contract to work for the

Cresswel s "would mean slavery, jail, or hounded running away."

While hunger and the physical abuse of overseers haunted every

day, it was jail, the chain gang, or any other contact with the

judicial system that loomed as the greatest constant jeopardies to

blacks. Starved and manacled squads of black men prowled the

town square and the roads between plantations, hustled along by

gun- and whip-toting guards—a scene hardly changed from the

traveling slave salesmen of a half century earlier. At the slightest

provocation, Cresswel threatened this ignominious horror to any

uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a

uncooperative or insolent blacks. The result of any accusation by a

white man would, almost without exception, be court-sanctioned

ownership. Once hauled before a judge, any African American

could be purchased by Colonel Cresswel or another white. One

passage of DuBois's novel described the routine courthouse scene:

"What's this nigger charged with?" demanded the Judge when the rst

black boy was brought up before him.

"Breaking his labor contract."

"Any witnesses?"

"I have the contract here," announced the sheriff. "He refuses to work."

"A year, or one hundred dollars."

Colonel Cresswell paid his fine, and took him in charge.12

In October 1905, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Judge

Speer's order against Georgia's county convict leasing system,13

nding that the federal courts had no jurisdiction to dismantle the

system of obtaining and sel ing prisoners so vividly described by

DuBois. In January 1906, Warren Reese gave up the modest o ce

in the Montgomery federal building from which he had waged his

quixotic war on slavery. The White House named a new district

at orney for central Alabama.

Three months later, in April 1906, John W. Pace was pardoned

for his crimes by President Roosevelt.14 The fol owing year, Fletcher

Turner was elected to represent Tal apoosa County in the Alabama

House of Representatives.

XI

NEW SOUTH RISING

"This great corporation."

For three years, Americans had received periodic reports on the

slavery of Tal apoosa County. The county, with its exotic

Choctaw Indian name meaning "pulverized rock," and the image

of John Pace, a brutish farmer from the backcountry became the

only enduring symbol of the peonage cases—even as hundreds and

then thousands of other incidents emerged in parts of Alabama,

Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Darkness was crowding

black life in America in an ever more sinister way.

Lost in the Alabama peonage inquiry was how the case began—

with the report to Judge Jones of a miscarriage of justice in the

adjacent Shelby County. Whatever misdeeds had occurred there—

especial y the fact that Fletcher Turner's family operated a slave-

driven quarry within the county— had been almost entirely

forgot en. The town of Columbiana—a provincial county seat

urgently hoping to embody the incipient gleam of the new century

—escaped excoriation. One town nearer to Birmingham than

Dadevil e, bustling with prosperity, new residents, and a vague

sense of Rooseveltian modernity, Columbiana was swel ing with

new wealth. Old one-man, one-mule mines of the nineteenth

century—lit le more than crude horizontal pits dug into hil sides

outside the town—were fast disappearing, replaced by giant brick

edi ces of factories like the Siluria Cot on Mil , where white men

and women could earn wages in regular hourly increments. They

worked de ned shifts, rather than the meteorological clock of

sunup to sundown that had governed farm life since the days of the

rst set lers. Keystone Lime Co. supplied trainloads of the caustic

essential ingredient for iron to the county's biggest employer, the

antebel um Shelby Iron Works, and to the ravenous new furnaces

coming into blast on the fringes of Birmingham.

The bounding economic progress promised far more for whites

than blacks, but African Americans could not resist the entrancing

al ure of new prosperity. Shelby County was now home to growing

numbers of the black members of the Cot ingham clan. Brier eld,

the old Confederate munitions foundry where Green Cot enham and

his family had sheltered during the 1890s, couldn't survive against

the new mil ennium's technology of coal, iron, and steel

production. The foundry town had been a refuge for the family in

the storm of the late nineteenth century. Sheltered by the foundry's

need for a steady supply of black workers, some of the Cot en-hams

avoided for a time the resubjugation of African Americans occurring

on mil ions of southern farms. A succession of black men linked

back to the Cot ingham farm—Scip, the patriarchal slave who now

spel ed his name Cot inham, his sons, Elbert and Henry, his

grandsons, and others—worked in the wilting orbits of re

surrounding the furnaces. Mary and the other wives and older

daughters kept house and washed or cooked for laborers. The

foundry work was grueling, but for a lit le longer Brier eld

a orded these African Americans a way station of modest freedom

and a residue of authentic independence that was fast disappearing

for most rural blacks. Relatively remote from any large population

of whites, the six hundred African Americans there could avoid the

implicit risk of mingling with whites on the roadways into the

county seat or accidental con icts on the back roads of the

countryside. The whites of the furnace town needed them. Rev.

Starr's old Methodist church stil stood—giving Brier eld's black

families their own forum for leadership and worship. In a crude,

overcrowded school for black children, Green and his two older

sisters learned to read and write.

What irony that the maker of cannons for Lee's armies and armor

for the Confederacy's warships became a place of refuge for freed

slaves. But Brier eld, with its redolent sense of post-emancipation

freedom, was vanishing. By 1910 only twenty-nine people

remained. Mary Green, and the girls, Ada and Mariet a, fol owed

the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

the path of the South's evolving economics, moving to Monteval o,

a lit le town perched on a new coal mine in Shelby County just

south of Birmingham. Soon, Mary was working— washing and

cleaning for a white man. Columbiana was a short freight car ride

away. Whatever remained to harbor Green and his siblings would

quickly dissolve before the torrent of trouble pouring across their

world.

Late in the summer of the great 1903 peonage trials in

Montgomery, Green turned eighteen years old.1 Ada was twenty-

one and Mariet a nineteen. Green and his sisters and cousins had

experienced none of the emancipation exhilaration that their

parents and grandparents remembered from the end of the war.

Theirs had been a life of perplexing contradiction, of an ostensible

but most often unrealized freedom, of supposed political and

economic independence from whites but in truth, even in Brierfield,

ultimately a complete dependence on the authority and protection

of whites—or simply the security of isolation. The sisters would stay

with their mother at least until marriage. But Green was nearly a

man now, tal , lean, and muscular like his father, sharpened by the

paucity of food, hardened by the incessant labor demanded of his

life. The freedom of approaching male adulthood—even in the

circumscribed South—was an inescapable al ure.

Green soon ventured deep into the sphere of white men, though

they must have remained a mystery to him. He had to know al the

stories of his father and aunts and uncles who had lived with the

white Cot inghams on the farm by the river. But those were ancient

tales from before his birth. In his iron-town childhood and young

adult years, there had never been familial bonds with any white

people, especial y not the old Cot ingham master and his

acknowledged of spring.

Green's uncle, Abraham Cot ingham, the once spirited

Republican, having journeyed farther from the country crossroads

where the freed slaves congregated after emancipation from old

man Cot ingham's farm than any others, made his home in Shelby

County. Abraham's sons, Jimmy—known as "Cap"—and Frank, were

nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

nearly two decades older than Green, and had already tasted the

bit ersweet paradox of black life at the dawn of the twentieth

century. They had never been slaves. They had voted in elections.

Now they had seen al vestiges of legal citizenship stripped away.

Cap, Frank, and Abraham cast bal ots for the last time in 1901, the

nal election in which blacks were permit ed meaningful

participation in Alabama. Green would never experience that act.

Cap Cot ingham's ouster from the voting rol s was punctuated a

few months later by his arrest, during a visit back in Bibb County,

on a misdemeanor charge. He was quickly sold into the bondage of

a white farmer named O. T. Grimes. On February 18, 1902, Cap

and another prisoner named Henry Johnson successful y ed the

farm and escaped.2

In the fal of 1903, as Warren Reese prepared for the last

peonage trial in Montgomery, Cap was arrested again, this time by

a Shelby County deputy. The charge was for violating the Alabama

statute forbidding any person from carrying a concealed weapon.

The records of Cap's arrest signal that he was picked up as part of a

general roundup in Columbiana to l an order for black labor

from Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. Cap, a muscular six-foot-

tal thirty- ve-year-old with skin as deeply black as his great-

grandfather Scipio's, was arrested along with another African

American named Monroe Wal ace. Both were charged with carrying

concealed weapons on October 2, 1903, and sentenced to four

months and twenty days of hard labor to pay their nes and fees to

the sheri and court. By the end of the month, the two were joined

in the jail by seven other blacks arrested for climbing aboard an

empty freight car, another for gambling, and one more for an

al eged pet y theft.

Six weeks later, on November 21, the county's convict labor

agent, W J. Farley, emptied the jail and delivered its contents to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Cap Cot ingham was turned over

for $9 a month.3 He survived his winter in the Prat Mines and

returned to Columbiana the fol owing year. The creep of darkness

paused, but it would not last.

As the new century bloomed, the civic con dence of the editor of

the gray-typed Shelby County Sentinel was so great that he ordered

a photographer to document the landmarks of the burgeoning town

and penned a twenty-page paean to its economic prospects and fine

citizenry. It was natural, and more than a lit le self-interested, for

editor J. A. MacKnight to do so, given that on the side he was also

the town's leading real estate man.

"The town is beautiful y situated, on a plateau which is

splendidly drained," MacKnight gushed. "There is so lit le sickness

that the doctors are nearly al poor men and their number is few."4

Hyperbole yes, but there was good reason to be enthused. The

county was in the sweetest bend of a rising economic curve. More

land was under farm production than at any point since the arrival

of white squat ers a century before. In each harvest since the turn of

the century, Shelby's cot on gins and compresses pumped out more

than ten thousand bales—totaling in excess of ve mil ion pounds

of handpicked ber. The only hint of the coming bol weevil

debacle that a decade hence would sweep in to ravage the elds

were fearful exclamations from farmers in far-away Texas. The

town population, more than two thousand already, was growing at

a heady rate. Two railroads, the Southern Rail Line and the

Louisvil e & Nashvil e, converged at the freight terminal at the end

of Depot Street. A cot on gin, grist mil , and warehouses crowded

the edge of the commercial district, and plans were being nalized

for that most tantalizing of new luxuries, an electric light plant.

Columbiana was brimming with n-de-siècle optimism. Working

furiously to bring a measure of re nement and civic improvement,

stil coarse towns across the South were laying the building blocks

on which twentieth-century American prosperity would rise. The

community's most respected leaders championed e ulgent

campaigns to bring the rst paved streets, public schools, and

shared utility systems—al social advancements careful y engineered

to transform their town but that would also exclude from its

benefits nearly al African Americans.5

benefits nearly al African Americans.

(There was proof to Columbiana of the town's rising

sophistication in Henry Walthal , the son of the sheri and himself

chief deputy at the Shelby County jail a few years earlier. In the

1890s, he helped his father capture and sel black prisoners ful -

time and taught theater on the side. In the summers, he produced

Shakespeare with a local cast until final y joining a traveling theater

company. Removed to the nascent Hol ywood, Walthal starred a

decade later as the Colonel in The Birth of a Nation, D. W Gri th's

1915 blockbuster lm based on the Dixon blockbuster, white

supremacist stage show, The Clansman. The lm was the rst

moving picture ever shown at the White House. President Woodrow

Wilson, a southerner and an open racist, was said to have praised

the film.)

At the monumental cost of $250,000, Shelby County erected a

new courthouse that without exaggeration could be described only

as extraordinary. Replacing an unadorned brick edi ce scu ed and

scarred with more than a half century of unceremonious use, the

new building was a temple to citizen governance and, even more

so, to the county's rising expectations for itself.

At the grand entrance on Main Street, four columns soared fty

feet to an ornate Greek Revival portico. Encircling the roo ine on

every side, a carved parapet railing framed cupolas of hammered

brass leaf on each wing of the building. At the center of the roof

rose an immense octagonal clock tower, looming magni cently

above the town. In the low sun of early evening, the building's

chiseled west facade, constructed of thousands of tons of yel ow

limestone quarried from the ridges above the nearby Coosa River,

glowed luminescently The shadow fal ing to east and south was

nearly large enough to blot out the rest of the town's jumble of

humble red-brick stores and whitewashed houses. The building was

the community's ag plunged into the earth of the new century, a

clear portent of the ambitions of those who led it. A new future was

coming, to be built and shaped in the manner of its new makers.

The architect of this bold new vision, if not of the courthouse

itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

itself, was Judge A. P. Longshore. A lawyer, a devout Baptist, and a

fervent populist, he commanded a nearly mesmerized local

fol owing. How else that a county stil licking its wounds from the

Civil War would agree to borrow a fortune to build the grandest

courthouse in the South? To Longshore, a rate of 6 percent per

annum on county bonds was simply the wage to be paid for a

di erent future. Already, he dressed and looked in the manner of

the new century rather than the last. Above a mustache twisted at

each end and a tiny tufted goatee on the point of his chin, Judge

Longshore looked ahead, only ahead.

From atop the courthouse, Columbiana's other highest spire was

clearly visible at the opposite diagonal of town. With angular

Victorian sternness, it descended sharply into a square tower of

stacked bricks and then three stories down to the iron-barred door

of the Shelby County jail. A dozen dank cel s on the other side of

the building were heated by coal grates and il uminated by shafts of

sunlight coming between the bars on every window. As new

prisoners passed Sheri J. H. Fulton's house next door and

approached the front entrance on West Sterret Street, one odd

window at the top of the jail's tower could not escape their notice.

Almost as tal as a man, circular at the top and rectangular at the

bot om, the opening in the shape of a giant keyhole gave view into

the county's hanging chamber. There, men condemned to die would

arrive on steps from the second- oor cel block and then twist at the

end of a rope, safe from any last e orts to escape their fate, but

with justice stil plainly on view.6

In the newspaper editor's assessment of Columbiana in 1907,

Mac-Knight included just one photograph containing a black face.

Standing, expressionless, with each arm draped on the shoulders of

a young white child in her care, the woman was identi ed only as

"Black Mammy on Duty." On the whole, MacKnight reported that

"the negro population is not excessive, and is orderly and law-

abiding. They have their own churches and schools, and many of

them own their homes. The ease with which a livelihood is made

here renders them independent, and it is not easy to secure either

male or female help from among them."7

male or female help from among them."

Indeed, obtaining African Americans was crucial and sometimes

di cult, as any traveler arriving in Shelby County during the rst

decade of the century would have seen long before the train pul ed

up to the weathered wooden platform in Columbiana. The rails

into and out of town were surrounded by endless vistas of cot on

and its production.

While the twentieth century brought wonders of technological

advancement in the realm of early automobiles, faster trains, and

electric il umination, every square foot of cot on eld was being

tended in a way lit le di erent from how Scipio had done it on the

Cot ingham place in 1840. It took hands. Mil ions of them had to

be available to plow and seed, and mil ions more to hoe and pick.

That meant African Americans. Strong, dependent, docile black

men. The leaders of Shelby County and thousands of other southern

towns and counties were intent on assuring that they could be

found.

The great crusade against involuntary servitude—and especial y

Judge Jones's famous charge to the grand jury and the Supreme

Court's ruling against Georgia's Judge Speer—achieved an

unexpected result for those in the South most reliant on black

backs. Instead of ending the new regimes of forced labor, Judge

Jones's denunciations and the subsequent legal rulings became

guideposts for a reorganization of the contemporary tra c in black

men. Indeed, the further the court opinions decrying peonage

echoed across the southern landscape, the more hol ow they

became.

The Supreme Court's renunciation of Speer's at empt to outlaw

the misdemeanor convict leasing system was so complete that the

opinion was not even writ en, but issued summarily and oral y.

Among the thousands of words of Judge Jones's famous direction to

the federal jury on the de nitions of legal and il egal labor

practices, a single sentence ultimately rose to greatest prominence.

Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

Jones advised that persons convicted of misdemeanors whose

sureties "confessed judgment" for them and worked them against

their wil could avoid violating the peonage statue by fol owing a

simple procedure. The laborers must be convicted in an authentic

court— not by any bumpkin justice of the peace. The judgment and

penalty had to be writ en down and recorded with the local courts.

And the contract between the defendant and the person paying the

ne—in which the defendant agreed to work for a certain amount

of time to pay o the penalty— had to be signed "in open court

with writ en approval of the judge."

The implication was clear. There would be no risk of another

energetic U.S. at orney arresting white farmers for peonage so long

as they, and local judges, were su ciently hygienic in the records

they maintained.

The old southern window dressing of legal rights for African

Americans won the day again. There was no evidence of the decline

anticipated by Reese and Jones in the number of African Americans

being held by private individuals as a result of ostensible court

nes. If anything, the number of black men "confessing judgment"

swel ed, now plainly and unabashedly acknowledged in open court.

Moreover, undaunted by Judge Jones's ruling against the state's

laws forbidding black men from leaving the employment of one

white man without permission to work for another, the Alabama

legislature passed a new but essential y identical "false pretenses"

statute. Once held under a labor contract, black men who at empted

to leave their employers faced criminal prosecution for doing so. If

they had entered into the contract to avoid an earlier prosecution,

the departure would exponential y increase the time they could be

held as slaves.

In Shelby County, the number of African Americans "confessing

judgment" in open court bal ooned.8 Between November 1890 and

August 1906, the dank county jail admit ed 1,327 prisoners, facing

a total of more than 1,500 charges. Physical descriptions were

recorded only intermit ently, but during the periods when notations

of race were made, more than 90 percent of those arrested were

black. A few were women.

black. A few were women.

A fortunate group of 326 prisoners—general y whites and black

men with some modicum of means—were able to scrape together

enough cash to post a bond and obtain freedom until a later trial

date. Most then simply forfeited their bonds and remained free.

Among the 1,001 prisoners left behind, acquit als were

infrequent. Fewer than 250 defendants won their freedom, by virtue

of a not guilty verdict or some other discharge during the sixteen

years. Al but a handful of the other 750 were ordered to pay

nominal nes coupled with huge fees. A total of 124 of those new

convicts, fewer than 17 percent, were able to pay their judgments.

Ben Holt, convicted of vagrancy on August 29, 1906, was ordered

to pay the county a ne of $1. The costs of his arrest and

prosecution, however, totaled $76.28. Instead of paying, he

confessed judgment with a white farmer named James Wharton,

who paid the ne and fees and in return owned Holt for a

minimum of two hundred days.9

Of the remaining six hundred men, convicted of pet y crimes and

unable to pay what the courts demanded of them, almost ve

hundred were bartered into forced labor. More than two dozen

convicts were leased to other industrial concerns, eight each to the

Sloss mines and Alabama Manufacturing Co. Eight more were

acquired by two sawmil companies, Walter Brothers, in Sprague,

Alabama, and Henderson-Boyd Lumber Co., in Richburg,

Alabama.10

Among the leadership circles of a place such as Shelby County,

the casual acquisition of blacks through the now careful y

choreographed ritual at the courthouse became a routine perk of

modest influence.

Arrested for petit larceny in May of 1905, Jim Goodson was ned

$25. To avoid being sent to the mines with other county convicts,

he agreed to sign a contract for labor with Robert E. Bowden to

work 236 days "in his rock quarry" Bowden bridged two groups

common in southern towns—as both an important local

entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful

entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful

town leaders. His thriving quarry, Keystone Lime Co., was a busy

competitor to the Turner lime quarry not far away in Calcis. Bow-

den's much larger enterprise produced 1,500 barrels of quicklime a

day, in fteen kilns. Deriving lime from the massive formations of

limestone undergirding al of Shelby County before the advent of

the steam shovel required armies of men engaged in the crudest

form of manual labor. Hardly any person would choose such work

freely. Convicts were ideal.

For a quarter of a century, Bowden bene ted handsomely from

the availability of strong black men at the Shelby County jail.

Between 1905 and 1913, he took possession of at least eighteen

people arrested in the county, after each confessed judgment in

open court—just as required by Judge Jones's order.

Nearly al of the essential local enterprises in Shelby County

enjoyed at least periodic use of entrapped African Americans.

Shelby Iron Works, the area's largest employer and biggest

commercial taxpayer, continued to acquire black men by confessing

judgment for their sentences before Judge Longshore—continuing a

nearly uninterrupted use of slaves and other forced black labor

from the early 1860s to the end of the rst decade of the twentieth

century.

Even Sherif Fulton periodical y acquired blacks through the court

for his personal use. Fulton paid nes and costs totaling $58 on a

man named John Mack in October 1907, and in return took control

of him for six months. One of his favored deputies, W. J. Finney

arrested—and then purchased—four di erent black men between

1905 and 1913.11

Later that year, Peter Minor, faced with a $126 ne for carrying a

concealed weapon, agreed to become a sharecropper for W. W.

Wal ace, the popular mayor of Columbiana and secretary of the

Democratic County Commit ee. Minor agreed to give up half of

anything he produced on land provided by the mayor.12

But the largest portion of the men arrested in Shelby County,

nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. About one hundred others

were sentenced to "hard labor for the county" and then almost

certainly transferred to the same place.

Alabama's slave system had evolved into a forced labor agricultural

and industrial enterprise unparal eled in the long history of slaves

in the United States. During 1906, the state sold nearly two

thousand black men to twenty di erent buyers. Nearly half were

bought by the two biggest mining companies, Tennessee Coal &

Iron and Sloss-She eld. The McCurdy brothers of Lowndes County

bought dozens. Hundreds more went to timber camps and sawmil

companies.

In addition to the prisoners auctioned o by the state, nearly

seventy individual local governments, like Shelby County, parceled

thousands more laborers to a hundred or more other buyers.13

These prisoners lived in such misery that even some political

gures in Alabama acknowledged the shamefulness of the system.

In a 1904 report to acting governor Russel Cunningham, the state's

top prison o cial, J. M. Carmichael, reported that Sloss-She eld

had been "required to move its prison" at the Flat Top mine to a

new location "because of the death rate at the prison formerly

occupied by them." Carmichael added that he found: "Hundreds and

hundreds of persons are taken before the inferior courts of the

country, tried and sentenced to hard labor for the county, who

would never be arrested except for the mat er of fees involved. This

is a condition inexcusable, not to say shameful."14

"The County Convict System is worse than ever," wrote Shirley

Bragg, president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, in 1906.

"The demand for labor and fees has become so great that most of

them now go to the mines where many of them are un t for such

labor, consequently it is not long before they pass from this earth…

If the state wishes to kil its convicts it should do it directly and not

indirectly"15

Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a

son of a great and once slaveholding Lowndes County plantation

family—one whose property had been destroyed, according to

family lore, because of their connection to a famous Confederate

general during the same raid by Union general Wilson that also

freed the Cot ingham slaves in 1865.

Yet Bragg, a child during the Civil War, was nauseated by the

degradation he witnessed in oversight of the state penal system. "I

am more convinced that the ideas of humanity and civilization

would be bet er carried out if the torch were applied to every jail

in Alabama. It would be more humane and far bet er to stake the

prisoner out with a ring around his neck like a wild animal than to

con ne him in places that we cal jails, that are reeking with lth

and disease and alive with vermin of al kinds," Bragg continued.

He cal ed the prison mines, where at last sixty-four miners had died

of disease, accidents, or unrecorded causes in the previous two

years, "nurseries of death."16

Sloss-She eld, the successor to John Milner's horrifying Coalburg

and Newcastle mines of the 1880s, had long excel ed at the

exploitation of this county convict system. The old Coalburg mine—

scene of more than twenty years of continuous slave labor—was

nearly exhausted. To exploit the remaining coal in the area, new

managers at Sloss-She eld were building a new two-thousand-foot-

deep mine nearby, named for Flat Top Mountain, and an adjoining

complex of two hundred coke ovens. Work was hastened after a

new round of criticism when thirty-two prisoners died at Coalburg

of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other sickness in just the rst three

months of the year.17 In September 1902, the company relocated its

nearly two hundred state prisoners and nearly a thousand more

men purchased from county governments to the vast new Flat Top

mine.

But the Prat Mines complex, so long in production and now so

large and intricate that not even the owners could keep up with the

locations of al its shafts and underground tangents, outrivaled al

other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. nal y conquered inherent

chemical aws that limited the use of iron ore from its mines and

mastered production of steel at a commercial y viable cost—the first

success at rol ing steel in the South. "This great corporation has

probably done more toward the industrial development of the

South than any other agency," enthused the Birmingham Age-

Herald.18

By the mid-1890s, more than six thousand men toiled in the Prat

Mines, performing dozens of tasks—digging coal, engineering trains,

building ovens, loading and unloading cars, washing coal, charging

ovens, operating furnaces—the free workers each earning from $1

to $3 per day19About a quarter of the workers were seized through

the judicial system, including 504 at Prison No. 2 in June 1900 and

another 400 at Prison No. 1.

The number of free laborers surged past ten thousand, as the

company's thirty coal mines—including the fourteen on the

outskirts of Birmingham—generated nineteen thousand tons a day

in 1900. To provide the most critical raw materials in iron and steel

production, TCI—as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was

commonly known—operated 3,722 coke ovens and four quarries

producing one hundred railroad cars of limestone and dolomite

every day. Twenty blast furnaces smelted 3,550 tons of pig iron

each day. More than two dozen furnaces generated 830,000 tons of

iron and steel, shipped to thirty- ve states and eight foreign

countries. TCI owned in excess of 400,000 acres of mineral lands.20

W. F. Tyler, purchasing agent for TCI's prison mines and fourteen

company stores, stocked food, clothing, furniture, and tools to

supply ten thousand miners and their families—including

provisions for more than one thousand prisoners. "Quote us your

lowest price on say 3,000 yards 10 oz wool convict stripes," he

wrote to a fabric maker in Columbus, Georgia, in 1899.21 The

company issued pay in its own coinage and paper scrip,

emblazoned with the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. name

and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By

1900, the enterprises col ected $2 mil ion a year in revenue.

Responding to booming demand, TCI invested heavily in its Prat

Mines complex and dozens of other sites across the seemingly

boundless coal elds surrounding Birmingham. It spent $7.4 mil ion

to open new shafts, re t old mines, and streamline equipment to

extract coal from ever deeper in the earth and speed the tasks of

sorting, cleaning, and shipping coal to market. The company's

operations teemed with more than twelve thousand miners, guards,

construction, and the endless clang, steam, and whistles of

locomotives and coal cars.

A thriving, permanent town cal ed Prat City sprang up nearby,

with a bustling commercial district, bars, brothels, streetcars,

churches, and an overwhelmingly black population. Six miles to the

west, another town, Ensley grew around the company's

mushrooming pig iron plant and six open-hearth blast furnaces,

each topped with a looming red smokestack perpetual y bil owing

with cinders and toxins. The plants created thousands of the types

of skil ed jobs that only whites could seek to obtain, and soon more

than ten thousand residents crowded into Ensley's houses and

hastily erected tenements. TCI's production of train rails and other

steel surged to more than four hundred thousand tons annual y in

the first years of the century.

Scat ered everywhere were bulging stacks of rough-cut timber and

posts used to shore up the wal s and ceilings of mine shafts. Smoke,

belching from coke ovens, train engines, and houses, never cleared.

The skies were cast with a constant gray haze. In dry weather, a

thick black residue of coal coated every at surface, windowpane,

branch, and leaf—insinuating itself under doors and into cupboards

of TCI mining camps, inescapable for an army of men and their

families. More than a dozen separate major mines near Prat City

soon produced nearly three mil ion tons of coal a year.

Where each shaft disappeared underground, enormous hoist

houses contained the elaborate mechanisms—as big as train engines

—used to lower coal cars containing miners into the shaft at the

beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen

hours later l ed with coal. Past the hoist house sat the coal washer

—where each day's bituminous produce was washed and any slate

or stone accidental y added to the mix removed. Then rose the

tipples—massive timbered structures in the design of the huge

railroad bridges spanning the great gorges in the West. Trams

loaded with cleaned coal were pul ed to the end of the tipple and

the contents dumped into much larger railroad cars waiting on a

track below. From there the coal was rol ed to Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad's thousands of stone ovens— to be baked into coke.

Dozens of the beehive-shaped coke ovens sat a few hundred feet

east of the prison built at the mine cal ed Slope No. 12. Further on,

fanning out from the base of the hil was a rowdy community

surrounding Slope No. 12 and nine other coal shafts operated by

free men. Thousands of miners and their family members were

packed into shacks, tenements, and company houses nearby. A

private rail line passed through the nearly denuded landscape,

connecting the mines, tipples, and furnaces owned by the company.

One spur of track reached a mile-long row of another two hundred

ovens, visibly pulsating the darkness with their heat. Beyond them,

stretched along a fouled stream cal ed Black Creek, was "Smokey

Row," an encampment of rough-sawn company houses occupied by

free African American miners, many of whom had survived their

time in the prison shaft and then stayed on in the town to dig coal

for pay.

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. had always been reluctant

for politicians, the public, or the region's embryonic unions to

realize how lucrative its army of forced laborers had proven to be.

Company o cials publicly complained about the shiftless and

uninspired work of prison laborers and black workers in general.

They accused sheri s of palming o sick and dying men to the

mines.

But in fact, the economic value of the slaves scooped up by labor

agents across Alabama was enormous. In August 1903, just as Judge

Jones was issuing his peonage ruling that, counter to its intention,

rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,

rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,

Erskine Ramsey, the longtime chief of the Tennessee's company

operations, was privately gloating at the pro tability of relying on

slaves. "The operation of the convict mines has been very

remunerative," Ramsey wrote in a let er to Henry Clay Frick, the

notorious Pit sburgh industrialist.22 After building his own coke and

coal company in the 1880s and 1890s, with forty thousand acres of

coal elds and twelve thousand coke ovens, Frick became partners

with Andrew Carnegie, eventual y taking over management of

Carnegie Steel Company.

Frick was most wel known as the man who during the 1892

Homestead incident ordered a smal army of company detectives to

make war on workers striking at a Carnegie plant on the

Monongahela River in Pennsylvania. A dozen people died.

Eventual y, the state governor sent in eight thousand militiamen to

end the ghting. The strike—and organizing union—were crushed.

In 1901, Frick guided Carnegie Steel into the merger that created

U.S. Steel. Two years later, Frick was one of the wealthiest

individuals in the United States, if not the world, and continued to

invest periodical y in other industrial enterprises.

Ramsey had known Frick his entire adult life—literal y growing

up as a mechanic in a Frick coal mine supervised by his father.

Later, Ramsey was a prodigy executive in the Frick company,

becoming its youngest-ever mine manager. An uncanny engineer

and inventor, he moved to Alabama in 1887 to become chief mine

engineer for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. In 1903, Ramsey,

who recently had been pushed out of his role as the top o cial at

TCI, was quietly scheming to create a new coal conglomerate in

Birmingham. Eventual y he would establish Prat Consolidated Coal

Company, which grew to rival the Prat Mines in size and scope.

(The two operations shared the name of Alabama's rst frontier

industrialist, Daniel Prat , after whom Alabama's biggest coal eld

was named. But the two enterprises were completely independent

of each other.)

Ramsey wrote Frick to test his interest in investing in the new

projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor

projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor

systems in the mines, but in his let er to Frick the engineer

combined a recitation of his last successes at Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad, unveiled at acks on the new management, and provided a

report on how ef ectively forced laborers could be managed.

Ramsey wrote that just before leaving the company, he opened a

new mine, Slope No. 10, at the Prat Mines complex. Transferring

convicts taken from the company's rst slave mine, No. 1, the new

prison was successful y obtaining the "cheapest coal ever produced

by the Company"—at a cost of 50 cents a ton. Powered by access to

an extraordinarily inexpensive and indefensible source of labor, the

company reached a record output of 3.4 mil ion tons of coal in

1900 and continued averaging three mil ion or more tons a year

into the next decade. The racial nature of the system was obvious.

Of the nearly one thousand convicts in the two mines, no more than

seventy were white.23 Without forced laborers, Ramsey's startling

successes would have been impossible.

A year after Ramsey's let er to Frick, white miners launched their

most ambitious strike ever against Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,

seeking acknowledgment of their new union as a col ective

bargaining entity. Readying for bat le, the company shut down their

least e cient furnaces, and most signi cantly, converted two more

mines from free workers to forced laborers.24

The strike col apsed within twelve months. Explaining the

company's rationale for crushing the union, Don Bacon, the

president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad told The Wal Street

Journal: "Conditions forced upon the management …had become

intolerable. The authority over your property …had to be restored

and maintained, or al hope of permanent, successful competition

…would have to be abandoned."25

Slavery, and the ability to obliterate free labor a orded by

coerced workers, was seminal to the company's success. It continued

to aggressively seek more and more compulsory workers—from the

state of Alabama, from any city or county, from any source that

would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired

would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired

from the family of Fletcher Turner—partner in John Pace's brutal

forced labor operation—the limestone quarry at Calcis, where so

many men seized o the back roads had been forced into

slavery26The Turner family, quietly back in the trade of black men

after Fletcher Turner's pardon, continued to operate the quarry for

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

• •

Nearly a thousand miles—and seemingly a half century in time—

removed from the frightening Turner quarry, a historic series of

capital events was unfolding in the fal of 1907. A syndicate of Wal

Street investors, backed by brokerage rm Moore & Schley, bought

a majority stake in the shares of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Armed with new nancing from the syndicate, the company

launched a major expansion of steelmaking capacity. Its output of

iron ingots increased to 400,000 tons in 1906. The fol owing year,

it won an order for 157,000 tons of steel rails for the Union Paci c

and Southern Paci c railroads—a direct chal enge to the hegemony

of U.S. Steel Corporation, the great conglomerate of the North.27

But economic turmoil around the world was rat ling the network

of trusts that had come to dominate Wal Street. These highly

speculative banks and nanciers paid exorbitant interest rates,

maintained lower cash reserves, invested heavily in risky schemes,

and backed investors seeking to monopolize key commodities. The

future of the great trusts was also in growing doubt due to a push

by President Roosevelt to punish John Rockefel er's Standard Oil. A

wide-ranging criminal indictment of Standard Oil, al eging il egal

pricing practices, rat led the market. In late October, the failure of

two prominent stock speculators in a bid to take over United

Copper Company led to the bankruptcy of two Wal Street

brokerages, a bank, and another mining company. As word spread

of the failed scheme and its e ect on other prominent bankers,

panic set into the markets. Suddenly, multiple trust banks were

under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to

under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to

disintegrate.

To stave o a complete col apse of the New York Stock Exchange

and the national depression that might fol ow, J. P. Morgan,

patriarch of the gilded Morgan Bank and architect of the 1901

merger that had created U.S. Steel, began propping up ailing trust

banks and investment houses with infusions of his own cash and

from other bankers working with him. On October 28, Morgan and

two other bankers agreed to loan $30 mil ion to the city of New

York, to prevent a failure of the local government.

Five days later, stil bat ling to hold Wal Street together, Morgan

concluded that he needed to simultaneously rescue three

desperately threatened investment houses, Trust Company of

America, Lincoln Trust, and Moore & Schley, the brokerage that had

backed the takeover the previous year of Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Co. The rm's shares of TCI had been placed as col ateral

for $25 mil ion in loans that Moore & Schley could not pay o . It

would soon be forced to liquidate the stake—the beginnings of a

sel -of that Morgan believed might wreck Wal Street.

Morgan proposed that U.S. Steel prevent the dumping of Moore

& Schley's stock by buying the stake for a fraction of its value. In

return, the presidents of the great Wal Street trusts had to agree to

provide $25 mil ion to help bail out the other banks. Henry Clay

Frick, stil a major owner of U.S. Steel, recognized the potential y

vast value of obtaining Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's mineral

holdings and of eliminating it as a competitor. The chief executive

of U.S. Steel, a former Il inois judge named Elbert H. Gary closely

al ied with Morgan, agreed to the purchase only on the condition

that the White House rst give a promise not to at ack the deal as a

violation of new anti-monopoly laws.

After an al -night negotiation in Morgan's o ces beginning

Saturday, November 2, the terms of the deal were hammered out.

Judge Gary and Frick sped for Washington at midnight in a special

single Pul man car. Interrupting the president's breakfast, they laid

out the details of the transaction to Roosevelt and Secretary of State

Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic

Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic

disaster if the stock markets weren't reassured.

Within twenty minutes, the president, freshly returned from a

Louisiana bear-hunting trip, agreed to support the buyout—one of

the biggest nancial transactions in the history of American

capitalism to that date. Roosevelt wired At orney General Charles J.

Bonaparte that the federal government would not oppose the

merger. Judge Gary cal ed Morgan at his o ces. Word of the deal

spread through Wal Street as the stock exchange opened on

Monday morning. The panic subsided. U.S. Steel took control of

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad for $45 mil ion—a minuscule

fraction of the estimated $1 bil ion value of its Prat Mines and

other assets in Alabama.28

That TCI was the largest customer of the Alabama slavery system

Roosevelt had once championed the destruction of was not

discussed at the White House breakfast. Three weeks later, U.S.

Steel's newly instal ed president of its Alabama property, thirty-

eight-year-old George G. Crawford , signed a new lease to acquire

four hundred prisoners from the state of Alabama for use in the

company's No. 10 and No. 3 mines.

Crawford agreed to pay $42 per month for the strongest laborers

and agreed to pay $10 for the weakest. The contract made clear

that as soon as the company's newest prison mine, a deep shaft

cal ed Slope No. 12, was ready, as many prisoners as possible

would be shifted there.29

XI I

THE ARREST OF

GREEN COTTENHAM

A War of Atrocities

Green Cotenham huddled behind the worn, whitewashed wal s

of the train depot in Columbiana. It was a clear, brisk Thursday

—sunny and crisp before noon, the temperature easing toward

the 70s by early afternoon. Green walked to the train station to play

dice, or to nd a day's labor, or for some other claimed reason that

in truth was no di erent from any other. The train station was

simply where he went almost every day, where nearly al young

black men found themselves.

The freight docks of the station in Columbiana, and in every

other county seat on the Southern Railway line between

Birmingham and Eufaula, a lush cot on center deep in southern

Alabama, were the hub of life for African American men in the

South in 1908. Open freight cars, easily boarded as trains eased out

of towns like Columbiana or when they slowed to cross rickety

bridges and tight curves, were the only mechanized means of

movement for the armies of destitute blacks searching or waiting

for work in the rst years of the century—especial y those like

Green who had uncoupled themselves from the traditional black

life of serfdom in a cot on patch. The tracks themselves, removed

from the view of most whites, were the safest paths for walking

from town to town as wel . Either way, a man on the rails or the

trains was violating Alabama law by entering the property of a

railroad company. But the appeal of motion and movement, of

opportunity, that the tracks and trains represented was too much

for a young man like Green to resist.

That spring, there were hardly any jobs for cash to be had for a

black man, unless he was wil ing to take up a cot on hoe or venture

into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the

into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the

swampy jungle forests below the Florida state line, or across the

Georgia border. Railroad companies claimed to pay $2 a day for a

strong hand who could handle an axe, cut ing trees or shaping rail

ties. But the railroad camps sat at the ends of long spurs cut into

near-virgin forests, with no roads or other means of exit except via

the trains that brought more fresh backs every day. Once a man

arrived, there was no departing unless the camp boss al owed it.

And there was no knowing whether the Southern Railway or any

other company would keep its word to pay the amount it

promised, or even to feed men or keep them out of the rain and

swamps. Guards with shotguns and dogs patrol ed the perimeters of

the worksites. The captains of the camps kept long leather straps,

a xed to thick wooden handles, to beat men who tried to ee.

County sheri s developed an uncanny eye for spot ing any eeing

African Americans who made it through the woods to a farm or

town, and received rewards for hauling them back in chains.

That was the work available to an independent black man like

Green: free labor camps that functioned like prisons, cot on tenancy

that equated to serfdom, or prison mines l ed with slaves. The

alternatives, reserved for African Americans who crossed a white

man or the law, were even more grim. Stil , the freight depots were

a magnet of excitement. There was always in some corner a simple

game of dice being played for pennies or tobacco. Now and again,

the freight agent or some farmer in town with a wagon would pay

a man a nickel or a quarter to help move a trol ey of crates from an

open freight car. In picking season, white men would come to the

station every day looking for extra hands in the cot on elds,

apprising on sight—by the look of their hands or the smel of liquor

on their breath— whether an African American boy or man was

worth paying for a week's work in his elds, or whether they

belonged to the new class of independent blacks that whites saw as

the scourge of their lives and towns.

Regardless of their conclusions, every African American was a

nigger in a white man's eyes. So the term for those African

American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant

American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant

at itudes was "cigaret e dudes." These were men cocky by

comparison to their peers; they had learned some reading and

writing, and sometimes worked and sometimes slouched on street

corners. Sometimes cigaret es sat akilter on their lips. There was

likely a bot le of moonshine or a pistol in a pocket somewhere

among each throng of young men gawking from their poses against

the board and bat en wal s of the freight station. Instead of

threadbare overal s, the uniform of al blacks and poor country

whites for as long as anyone could remember, these men might

wear trousers and jackets, even neckties. They stood by the dozens

in the studio of a black photographer in Columbiana, cigaret e

dudes lounging with their arms draped around black girls in their

best Sunday dresses, glaring at the lens. On their faces an air of

de ant con dence, visages of the men they knew they should have

been al owed to be. Among a population of 8.5 mil ion blacks in

the southern states, crushed into subservience in the forty years

since the Civil War, these men were the last refuges of resistance as

the twentieth century dawned.

According to almost every white, these cigaret e dudes were the

source of every trouble in the South. These were the blacks never to

be hired, never to be befriended—to be denied embrocation of any

kind. To be rid of them forever, by whatever means could

accomplish that goal, was something nearly every white man in the

South, most certainly in Columbiana, had openly cal ed for and

worked toward for at least three decades.

This was the snare waiting for Green Cot enham at the Columbiana

railroad station on March 30, 1908. On the prior day, a Wednesday,

the sheri 's chief deputy, a scrawny white man named Newton

Eddings, grabbed Monroe Dolphus, a black man about Green's age,

as he stood in the train yard of the depot. The deputy seized

Cot enham the fol owing day and tossed him into the same fetid

cel where Dolphus had spent the night. There was uncertainty

about what charges against the men should be entered into the

prison registry at the jail.

prison registry at the jail.

Initial y, Eddings claimed that the crime commit ed by Dolphus

was taking a 25 cent tin of sh from the lunch pail of a Southern

Railway worker. Cot enham was charged with riding a freight train

without a ticket. There was no tangible evidence that either man

had commit ed any infraction at al .

Taken before Judge Longshore the fol owing day, Cot enham and

Dol-phus each denied the charges. Eddings was unable to produce

any evidence or witnesses to convict them. But sticking to the

cynical script fol owed thousands of times in the South, Judge

Longshore chose not the release the men anyway. Instead, he

declared them guilty of "vagrancy" that catchal of ense to which any

black man was vulnerable at almost any time. 1

Longshore sentenced both Dolphus and Cot enham to three

months of hard labor for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. Under its

standing contract with Shelby County, the company would pay the

county $12 per month for each man as long as he worked in their

mines.2 The two prisoners were also ordered to pay fees to the

sheri , judge, and other local o cials totaling $31.85 for Dolphus,

$38.40 for Cot enham—extraordinary sums for an unemployed

black man. Unable to pay those costs, Dolphus was ordered to

work an extra two months and twenty days at the mines to cover

the fees. Cot enham would have to spend an additional three

months and six days.3

A day later, Eddings arrived at the county jail with his shiny, six-

inch-barreled Colt .38 pistol in a holster dangling against his thigh.

A simple metal badge pinned to his coat read "Deputy Sheri ." He

carried thick round manacles connected with three tight steel links.

A trace of chains was draped over his shoulder. Eddings barked for

Cot enham and the nine other men in the Shelby County cel s to get

up. It was time to go to "Prat s."

The jail sat at the corner of South Main and Mildred streets,

almost directly across from the spare old county courthouse that the

town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure

town fathers had just abandoned for their ostentatious new structure

three blocks to the north.

Green had never felt irons before that day.4 5 As Deputy Eddings

clapped a shackle on his left ankle, Green must have been surprised

how quickly his skin began to bruise, how heavily the rings of iron

clung to the ground between himself and Monroe Dolphus. Then

there was the startling sharp cold of the steel when Eddings slipped

a metal col ar around his neck.

Eddings locked the clasp on Green and did the same to "Mun," as

the men cal ed Dolphus, and then to each of the other eight

prisoners in the lockup that morning. Earley Bol ing, House

Pearson, and four others had been arrested at the train station too

and convicted for hopping a ride on an empty freight car without

permission. Henry Witherspoon was found guilty of petit larceny—

a crime applied to the theft of any object worth more than $10.

John Jones, arrested as he played dice inside a circle of other black

men squat ed in the dirt on the edges of the railroad yard, was

convicted of gambling. Once al ten were chained together, Eddings

told them to start walking back to the railway station. They trudged

out the scu ed rear door of the jailhouse and around the corner,

passing by the back porch of Sheri Fulton's wood-frame house

next door and on toward Main Street.

Al in the ragged group were stil in the street clothes they had

worn at the time of their arrest. But now the men were smeared

with the lth of the jail's grimy, wet interior. Most had been there

for several weeks, waiting for the monthly delivery to Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad. Several walked shakily, taken aback by the

bright sunlight and unbalanced by subsistence on the sheri 's

meager rations and the partial sleep of nights on remnants of putrid

bedding. As they passed the sheri 's home, the men crossed the

shadow of the jail, looming above them, higher than al the

surrounding structures, the face of the massive tower interrupted

only by the keyhole window in the hanging chamber.6 On a

Saturday morning three months later, the sheri would release the

trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-

trapdoor of the sca old there, and Tom Pat erson, a thirty-eight-

year-old black man convicted of murder, would twist to his death at

the end of the rope.

At the station, Eddings took Green and the other prisoners to the

far end of the platform to wait for the early morning train. They

rode the one-hour journey in the baggage car. Outside the

Birmingham depot, Eddings piled the shackled men into an open,

horse-drawn wagon he had telegraphed ahead to hire. Two mules

slowly pul ed Green and the others away from the city's bustling

center, then through the tempestuous streets of Prat City, past a

haphazard cemetery bulging with dead prisoners’ remains near

Smokey Row, and nal y up the long hil rising from the saloons

and whorehouses past the Catholic church to Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad's newly completed wooden stockade at Slope No. 12.

It was a familiar journey for Eddings, and one he didn't mind. He

had delivered more than sixty men to the Prat Mines in the

previous twelve months, nearly al of them black men he had

himself rounded up and testi ed against to obtain conviction. As

chief deputy, Eddings made considerably less than the high sheri ,

but the business of arresting blacks and get ing them to the Prat

Mines was a good one for a scantly educated man from deep in the

countryside. He'd come to Columbiana to get away from the

drudgery of the isolated farm road where his father and older

brother lorded over his childhood, while the mother who gave birth

to him midway through the Civil War grew progressively demented.

By the time Eddings reached manhood, she was ful y insane.7

Sometimes it seemed the whole South was insane in 1908. Vast

numbers of freed slaves and their o spring like Green had

abandoned their former owners’ lands and scat ered across the rural

landscape, demanding wages and, almost as ridiculously to whites

such as Eddings's father, insisting on writ en contracts to be paid for

their labor—despite that only the rarest among blacks could write

their own names, much less read the words on the page. Stil ,

blacks insisted upon it, and whites initial y acquiesced, knowing

that cot on could not be grown and picked without black labor.

Stranger stil , until just barely a decade earlier, in the counties to

Stranger stil , until just barely a decade earlier, in the counties to

the south of Eddings's boyhood home, where slaves had

outnumbered whites before the war, tens of thousands of African

Americans continued to cast bal ots in every election. Only the

sustained war of atrocities against African Americans in every

section had nal y forced them to ful y submit to Alabama's new

constitution and its provisions banning them from the vote and any

aspects of legal equality. Stil , a perverse cloud hung over the state

of white and black coexistence.

The New South, with its rising great cities of Birmingham and

Atlanta, railroads and factories, was by contrast a utopia compared

to the civil bat le elds of the countryside. Like thousands of other

young southern whites and crowds of young blacks, Deputy Eddings

ed the scarred rural landscape for a semblance of civilization and

opportunity. Now, at the age of forty-two, he was ful y a town man,

moving on the edge of the circle of leaders who were shaping

Columbiana into a model of what prosperous Alabama wished to

be in the young twentieth century. He enjoyed the monthly trips, or

sometimes more often if the mines needed more men, to deliver

African Americans to Prat City. He ignored the prisoners’ pleas to

let them escape and their promises to bring him cash from a father

or uncle if he would set them free.

When girlfriends or mothers of young black men came begging at

the jailhouse, he couldn't help but be tempted. The carnal pleasures

of taking a black girl when you pleased had been a privilege of rich

white men for so long in the South. Now simple men like Eddings

could do the same—tel ing girls to come around to the jailer's room

for an hour of compulsory sexual performance in exchange for a

favor to their man inside. It was hardly even furtive. Guards did the

same at hundreds of jails. At the lumber camps in southern

Alabama, women seeking the freedom of their men were simply

arrested when they arrived, chained into their cel s, and kept to

serve the physical desires of the men running the camps. The slave

camps and mines produced scores of babies—nearly al of them

with white fathers.8

There was no risk of penalty to any white law enforcement

There was no risk of penalty to any white law enforcement

o cer who chose to force himself on a black woman who

presented herself in the vulnerable circumstances of a jail. To al

whites, these were by de nition worthless women—even more

worthless than other black females. Even many African Americans,

terri ed of losing further respect or security among whites, looked

askance at any black who became associated with prisoners and

debt slavery. These women were friendless and abandoned even

among their own. And the laws of the South were interpreted

explicitly to ensure that the rape or coercion of a black woman by a

white man would almost never be prosecuted as a crime.

Indeed, South Carolina governor Cole Blease, citing his belief in

the animalistic inability of blacks to control themselves, routinely

pardoned the kil ers of black men, especial y in the case of African

Americans commit ing violence against African Americans. "This is

the case of one negro kil ing another—the old familiar song—‘Hot

supper; liquor; dead negro,’ " the governor wrote in one

explanation of a pardon. As for sexual assaults of black women,

Governor Blease asserted it was the nature of every African

American woman to want sex at any opportunity. "Adultery seems

to be their most favorite pastime," he said. "I have …very serious

doubt as to whether the crime of rape can be commit ed upon a

negro."9

On each trip to Prat , Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. paid

Eddings a fee for every African American, in addition to his

expenses for train fares, meals, wagon rental from the livery, and,

occasional y, lodging in the city when Eddings couldn't make the

last train back to Columbiana.

Arresting, convicting, and transporting these prisoners was

Eddings's primary livelihood. His and Sheri Fulton's entire

compensation came from an assortment of fees charged for every

action taken by the o ce and paid into the Shelby County Fine and

Forfeiture Fund. The courts col ected fees for serving subpoenas,

foreclosing on delinquent loans, arresting and testifying against

foreclosing on delinquent loans, arresting and testifying against

criminal defendants—tacking the charges onto the nes levied

against nearly every person brought before the county or circuit

judge. Eddings and the sheri —along with the court clerk, the town

solicitor, jury members, witnesses, and nearly any other white

person who played a part in the seizure and conviction of each

prisoner—were awarded fees by the judge and received warrants to

exchange for the money as the prisoner's labor paid down his nes.

Since that typical y took months, or years, the sheri and others

accumulated court-issued scrip for the money—IOUs of a sort. Over

time, they cashed the redeemable warrants as money accumulated

in the county cof ers.

The remuneration was often lucrative. Sheri Fulton, a smooth-

shaven man partial to bow ties, was already balding when he was

rst elected at age thirty-one in 1906. He defeated the former chief

deputy by just seven votes—and even then only by packing the

bal ot box with votes cast by dead men. (Fulton was thrown out of

o ce by a judge two years later for the fraud, but never pursued

criminal y.) During the November before Green Cot enham was

arrested, Fulton cashed out a stack of scrip stemming from sixty- ve

di erent cases in the prior year, and col ected a total of $373.50—

equivalent to about $7,000 a century later.

More lucrative stil , Sheri Fulton, like al his counterparts in

Alabama, also was al owed to keep whatever excess remained from

the state's monthly "feeding" payments received for food provided

to prisoners in the jail. Since nearly al the arrests in the county

were of black men who were soon shipped to Prat Mines, they

required lit le more than cornmeal mush and pork fat, which

Sheri Fulton's wife could prepare. Unlike the occasional white

man thrown into the jail, the black prisoners, nearly al of them

itinerants with no local families or white landowners to speak for

them, could neither say nor do anything about the scant provisions.

Deputy Eddings arrived at the Prat Mines complex and continued

up the hil , past the coke ovens, to the new Slope No. 12 mine at

Booker City, a black neighborhood bought up by Tennessee Coal,

Iron & Railroad when a thick mineral vein was identi ed there a

Iron & Railroad when a thick mineral vein was identi ed there a

year earlier. He delivered Cot-tenham, Dolphus, and the others to

the prison captain. What the company's mine boss and guards did

with Cot enham, or any of the hundreds of other black men they

purchased, was entirely up to them.

Even as a child of two former slaves, versed in the old people's

stories of whips and dogs and weeks spent with feet blistered and

ngers bleeding from picking cot on, Green had never conjured

anything so foreign as what he witnessed on the surface and in the

catacombs beneath Prat City.

For ve days after arriving at Slope No. 12, Green Cot enham had

not seen the rising dawn or the set ing sun. It was not as if he were

a "farm Negro," panging to be on the land and in the sun like so

many of the others around him. It was not as if he had never before

been in the company of brutish or crude men. And it was not as if

he had never before been compel ed to spend his days in grueling

labor. But however contemptuous he might have been of the

whining country boys shivering and sniveling at the shouts of the

crew boss, and however boldly he may have chal enged any man to

touch him, Green could not have been prepared for his fate befal en

here.

Green spent every day but one in a vast labyrinth of black rock

tunnels, shared only by dozens of dirty mules and squadrons of

desperate men, al slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal.

The absence of sunlight, vegetation, or any prospect for the touch of

a not venal human hand had to tear at his soul.

Long before sunrise each morning, two white men swung open

the doors from the entryway at the center of the wooden prison

barrack and pushed into the rancid wooden cavern where Green

and two hundred other black men, chained to one another, lay

wrapped in coarse blankets. Running the fty-foot length of the

room, a continual series of bunk beds dangling on pipes at ached to

the ceiling were piled with bodies. Where there was no space on a

surface, men draped themselves in suspended contortions across

canvas hammocks stretched between the bunks on either side of a

narrow aisle down the center. A single potbel ied stove, long gone

narrow aisle down the center. A single potbel ied stove, long gone

cold, stood at the center of the room.

On Saturday, April 11, 1908, the sudden opening of the doorway

ushered in a blast of crisp spring air, cut ing with swift relief

through the musty wet stink of the men, stil sheathed in the black

detritus of the mine waiting for them outside. As the guards moved

toward the opposite end of the room, releasing the men's irons

from chains looped through their beds and barking for reluctant

prisoners to wake, the men responded in an awkward, col ective

undulation. As each awakened and moved, a succession of pairs of

legs and irons slid wearily toward the keys held in the hands of the

guard, each time pul ing the legs of the next man toward the guard

as wel , and then the next, and the next, al of them spil ing

gradual y of the bunks in a long, groggy metal ic jangle.

Once on their feet and refastened to their chains, Green and the

column of prisoners led out through a front stoop, down the

wooden steps, and into a plain kitchen. Each man stu ed a biscuit

and a cut of cold bacon into his mouth and shuf led out the door. At

the point of shotguns, they tramped into the deep darkness, across

the bare yard, past the pen of bloodhounds trained to track "Negro

scent," past the barrel across which men were stretched naked

almost nightly to be whipped with a leather strap, out the

mammoth gate of the stockade, and up to the ori ce where they

would enter the earth.

There, high on the ridge above Prat City, Green for a moment

would have glimpsed the luminescence of the industrial spectacle

throbbing atop the geological wonder of the coal and iron ore

discovered beneath the hil s of northern Alabama. There had been

nothing more than one prosperous farm in this val ey forty years

earlier, but now in 1908 a city of nearly 150,000 people was

consuming the land. The acrid smel of coal smoke never

dissipated. On the farthest horizon glowed the Sloss Furnaces,

where Col. James W. Sloss, the man more responsible than any

other for the sensational economic boom of what was cal ed "the

Magic City," had presided over a con agration of re, machines,

and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In

and molten iron unlike anything ever before seen in the South. In

the val ey between the high smokestacks of the furnaces and the

hil top perch of Slope No. 12, the lights of new o ce buildings and

churches glimmered at the commercial center of Birmingham.

One can only imagine what l ed Green's mind as he walked

toward the manway to Slope No. 12 in the darkness that Saturday

morning. Farther than he had ever been in his twenty-two years

from the two counties—Bibb and Shelby—where his family, rst as

slaves, then as freedmen, lived for four generations, blinking

through the darkness and the grit in his eyes, he must have studied

the molded let ers in the concrete archway above the portal

spel ing the name of the company that for al intents and purposes

owned him then as much as old Elisha Cot ingham had owned his

father and grandfather. Perhaps he mouthed the words—Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—and then craned his neck to glimpse

behind him the clinking column of slaves, the glow of the city, and,

beyond, a last flash of stars and predawn sky.

XIV

ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

"Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes."

By al accounts, Slope No. 12 was the nest prison ever built in

Alabama. The two-story wood-frame dormitory, constructed in

the shape of a giant T, stood at the center of the fenced

compound where Green Cot en-ham was deposited by Deputy

Eddings. From the front door, atop ten steps beneath a smal

portico, the prison extended outward in three wings. The six

"sleeping rooms" were each large enough to accommodate up to

sixty men sleeping in close quarters on the odd swinging bunk beds.

One room was reserved for whites only. A contained walkway

connected the building to a kitchen immediately to the rear.

Inside, prisoners young and old, hardened and innocent, mingled

whenever they were not chained apart. On Sundays, the one day of

rest, card and dice games continued unceasingly. "They wil gamble

the but ons o their clothes," an inmate told one visitor. Sexual

abuse was rampant, in the darkness of the prison and the isolation

of the mine shaft. "Sodomy is prevalent among these massed men,"

wrote journalist Shelby Harrison in 1912, after a visit to Prat No.

12. "The older men pick out the young ones to make advances to. It

is commonly said in some of the camps that every prisoner has his

‘gal-boy’ "1

Across a eld of grass cropped close by goats wandering inside

the compound stood the o cers’ quarters, a simple but spacious

two-level house with a veranda and rocking chairs anking three

sides. Nearby was a mess hal for the guards. A pressurized water

spigot—a luxury—stood beside the front porch. A tin cup and towel

hung permanently on a nail, where o cers stopped for a drink or

to wash on the way inside at mealtimes.

At the opposite corner of the enclosure stood a storehouse, where

prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their

prisoners fortunate enough to have any money could buy from their

keepers tobacco or extra rations on Sundays. Nearby was a smal

hospital building where the sick could be segregated. When the

mine opened in early 1908, with a workforce made up total y of

forced laborers, state o cials declared the prison the "best in the

state."

For more than a decade, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad—

irritated by criticism that its mines and furnaces were inferior to

those of competitors in the North and that its miners, free and

forced, worked at perpetual risk to their lives—had invested heavily

in dramatic technological improvements and fresh underground

exploration. The new prison cost $54,570— a substantial sum.

The company instal ed thousands of additional coke ovens, added

miles of new railroad track, and developed a breakthrough

technique for forging steel train rails—a rst for any company in

the South. On the outskirts of Birmingham, at the edge of Red

Mountain, the company built a new complex of deep-shaft iron ore

mines. Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad also was abandoning its old

system of dragging coal to the surface in carts pul ed by mules and

instal ing steam-powered systems using cables to pul enormously

greater tonnage of coal from the shafts.2

With U.S. Steel's acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in

November 1907, the pace of new construction and advancements in

the mines accelerated rapidly. But with the company's progress also

came destruction. On the surface, the toxic e uent of the digging

was pumped into wooden ues that poured into vast, fouled

moonscapes of dead forest. Nearby, steam shovels clawed scars fty

feet deep and hundreds of feet wide into the landscape to lay bare

ore, limestone, and other minerals. Near every mine—especial y

those in long operation—gargantuan mounds of slag, the worthless

rock drawn out with the coal, loomed ever larger on the horizon.3

The shafts closest to the center of Prat City—some of them in

production for more than two decades—were depleting. Most had

already been repeatedly extended, rst hundreds of feet below the

surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the

surface and then for thousands of feet horizontal y, fol owing the

thick deposits of coal threading from the Prat seam. The longer the

mine shaft grew, the slower and more expensive it became to

remove coal from the mine—prompting the company to instal new

shafts to the surface closer to the most active areas of mining.

Even the construction of the model new prison carried an ironic

human cost. In 1902, leaders of the Colored Methodist Episcopal

Church bought ten acres in a new residential development designed

by a white investor as a refuge for prosperous African Americans on

the outskirts of Birmingham. The place was cal ed Booker City—

after Booker T Washington. The African American church opened a

smal and struggling high school for black children, similar to the

Calhoun School in Lowndes County, on an elevated point three

miles from the center of the Prat Mines complex.

Five years later, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad recognized that

the acreage owned by the black school would be an ideal location

for a new mine. In return for thirty acres of property in another

location and $30,000, the church sold the property on which the

Slope No. 12 prison would soon be built. A year later, the

Methodists opened a new four-year institution for African

Americans, named Miles Memorial Col ege, in honor of a former

slave who became a famous church bishop after the Civil War.4

At the same time, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad built Slope

No. 12 and its prison compound. Connecting the mine and prison

to the company's coke ovens and industrial infrastructure was a new

railroad spur snaking along a ridge rising from Prat City's old

convict cemetery to the site of the then empty Booker City High

School.

The black Methodists there had struggled to keep their school

operating and its desks and teaching positions l ed. There was no

such di culty with the prison that succeeded it. Under the lease

U.S. Steel quickly signed with the state of Alabama, the company

could shift four hundred convicts from two other Prat Mines to No.

12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county

12. U.S. Steel also obtained leases on hundreds more county

prisoners. Under a contract with Je erson County, the company

paid the local government nearly $60,000—equal to about $1.1

mil ion a century later—to acquire every prisoner arrested during

1908.5

Similar standing agreements were in place with twenty other

Alabama counties, set ing the prices for each laborer between $9

per month for Choctaw County and $28.50 for prisoners captured

in the state capital of Montgomery.6 New leases entered into by

U.S. Steel after it bought TCI were supposed to guarantee a steady

stream of convicts until at least the end of 1912.7

The supply of forced labor became even more critical as tensions

mounted between the coal-mining companies of Birmingham and

the local United Mine Workers organization—which had

aggressively organized more than ten thousand free miners in

Alabama. Convicts—who had no choice but to continue digging

coal under whatever circumstances the company demanded—were

crucial to maintaining operations during a strike or other labor

interruption.

Through the spring and summer of 1908, the number of men

purchased for use in Slope No. 12 steadily climbed—by August

reaching nearly six hundred prisoners taken from county sheri s

and just under four hundred from the state.8 Of the sixty men

delivered by Deputy Eddings in the twelve months before

Cot enham's arrest, nearly half were charged with "jumping"—or

riding a freight train without a ticket. Eddings's jail registry said

George Roberson was sent on a conviction for "assault with a stick."

Another black man, Lou Wil iam, was sold to Slope No. 12 for

adultery. John Jones had been sold for gambling.9

Al his life, Green had heard of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.

Every African American in Alabama had been told stories about the

vast prison mines at Prat City. For a generation it loomed over the

lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried

lives of black people, a mysterious hel in living earth buried

beneath a licentious mining boomtown. Men sent there for three

months or six months instead disappeared for a year, or forever.

The few men who straggled back to their homeplaces told of a

whole city of mines, where shafts crisscrossed the subterranean

world like a crazy quilt of streets with hundreds of underground

"rooms," sometimes nearly intersecting with the shafts of other

mines. Other mines named Flat Top, Coalburg, and Banner, owned

by di erent companies, cut from nearby camps into the fabulous

seam of bituminous coal coursing, four feet thick in some places,

through the low ridges of northern Alabama.

Like Prat City, the mines at Flat Top and Coalburg were packed

with black men forced underground at gunpoint. The others l ed

each day with white men paid by the hour who despised the black

convicts, partly out of the habit of despising African Americans but

more now for the crippling damage their presence did to the free

miners’ pleas for bet er wages and working conditions.

Sometimes the convicts laughed at how the free miners so hated

them, as if black laborers chained to their beds had chosen to be

there. It was another sign that most white people seemed to be

simply crazy when it came to the lives of black people. No sane

man who had ever visited Flat Top, with its two thousand

desperate black prisoners, or the slopes at Prat City, l ed with

1,500 emaciated African American laborers, black whipping guards,

and the white captains who wielded the lash as mercilessly as any

of the old slave masters, could believe such a thing.

Shortly after Slope No. 12 opened in 1907, arrangements were

made for a series of celebratory photographs for the company. At

the storehouse, convicts stand in bright white uniforms. The grassy

yard is pristine and dot ed with newly planted banana trees ready

to unfurl their long, wide leaves. The fence around the compound is

hidden in trees. But behind the barred windows, Slope No. 12 and

the other prison shafts at Prat were beginning a hel ish headlong

descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.

descent in the chaotic aftermath of U.S. Steel's abrupt takeover.

In February, three months after the merger, a wave of pneumonia

and tuberculosis swept through the prison miners, kil ing nine. In

March, six more convicts died of tuberculosis, including Roberson,

the Shelby County man convicted of "assault with a stick."

Nearly al the men thrown into Slope No. 12 shared the same

di cult background of deep poverty and the circumscribed

opportunities of their Black Belt origins. They came in hues every

man of the Black Belt could describe—deep dark like country night,

gingercake, the high yel ow of mulat oes, the sharp features of red

bone. They were farmhands mostly. Baptists and African

Methodists. Nearly al were the children or grandchildren of slaves.

Most knew the families who had once owned their kin. They al

knew no black man would ever see justice in the prisons of white

men.

Yet in the bowels of Slope No. 12, there was lit le more kinship

of skin than that. When Green arrived, nearly a thousand laborers

toiled in the same grueling rhythm. Transported deep into the shaft

on the same narrow gauge trams that would be used to carry out

the coal they mined from the soft bituminous seam, each man

carried a pick, a shovel with a short handle, a sledgehammer, and

two iron or wooden wedges.

Once deep in the mine, the convicts were parceled in pairs into

narrow "rooms" carved at right angles from the sides of the main

shaft under the seam of coal. Many of the rooms were more like

long tunnels—some as tal as four feet but many barely two feet

high and two feet wide. The circumscribed chambers extended

more than twenty- ve feet from the main shaft, forcing Green and

other miners to slide on their stomachs a distance ve or more

times the length of their bodies. The cavities were il uminated by

ickering lanterns hooked on leather straps around their heads.

Shaped like a smal teapot, a lantern held a reservoir of oil, with a

wick running through the snout to the flame.

Crouched or lying in the claustrophobic space, with no light other

than the feeble ame of his oil or carbide headlamp, Green slung

his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless

his steel pick in constricted sidelong arcs, shat ering the worthless

stone and rock below the coal. He drove wedges into the coal to

separate sections weighing a half ton or more. After enough slams

of the sledge, the huge slabs of coal cracked free, sometimes

unexpectedly for inexperienced convicts, landing in thunderous

crashes inches from the prostrate miners. When men worked

entirely beneath the coal seam, they instal ed wooden supports

cal ed sprags to prevent an unexpected col apse. Sometimes only

blasting powder—wrapped in newspaper to make simple

cartridges and placed in holes dril ed at the edge of the seam—

could separate the coal from surrounding rock. Lighting a cartridge

with a crude fuse, the miners hurried out of the room and back into

the shaft seconds before the ceiling of coal col apsed with the

explosion. Many men were caught by the fal ing coal and kil ed or

maimed.

Once broken free, the coal was hammered into fty- and

hundred-pound pieces and loaded into the train cars. Once a day,

another prisoner came by with a bucket containing portions of

crude food.

Here there was lit le of the eld hand or rail bed singing that

Green had heard among country blacks back in Bibb County, no

community of shared perseverance. There was only the furious

scramble to crack and pry and stack and sort the rock and coal, and

watch other stone-faced men moving in the shadowy dark.

Each day, Green spent nearly every waking hour stretched in a

room o the main shaft. Once the coal was freed and broken up, he

loaded coal furiously as a boss, another black convict, snarled that

he would feel the whip if Green mixed rock with the coal in the

wagons to be pul ed from the mine sixteen hours later. After six

days in Slope No. 12, Green had only to return to the mine once

more before Sunday, the one day of rest and of daylight. After that,

there would be twenty-four more Sundays before his time in the

mine was scheduled to end.

If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y

If the worst of a day in Slope No. 12 had been only the physical y

wracking intensity of the labor, then this sentence, even if meted

out by a crude sheri for the imsiest al eged infraction against the

law, might have been bearable. But there was far worse. Green and

Mun were fortunate that they were strapping, grown men, at the

peak of their physical strengths. They were fortunate too that their

stay with the sheri had lasted only three days, not long enough for

the starvation rations to weaken them material y.

The prison mine in some respects was an improvement over the

Shelby County jail. The men were fed semiregularly A doctor lived

in the simple "hospital" across the yard—a big advance over earlier

medical care at Prat Mines, which consisted of a crude one-room

shed, with barn doors, a dirt floor, and one window for light.10

Conditions at the Prat Mines had improved since the deadly

epidemics of disease that regularly occurred in the 1880s and 1890s

—but only marginal y. Inside the shafts, deadly gases accumulated

in unventilated sections, work continued even as water, seeping

from the wal s and fouled with the miners’ waste and excrement,

accumulated in the shafts. Intestinal disorders, malaria, pneumonia,

and respiratory problems dogged the men. Endless contact with

coal dust led to black lung disease, a miserable and certain slow

death.

Hardly a week passed that accidents didn't take men's ngers,

hands, toes, or worse. Often the cause was a careless swing of a

pick. But almost as frequently men were crushed by coal fal ing

before they expected, or pinned by railroad cars that derailed. After

electric trol eys and lights were instal ed in some areas, many a

miner died from "touching a live wire," according to state

inspectors.

Younger and smal er men—and the dozens of pubescent boys

forced into the shafts—on their rst days in the mines faced a

terrible initiation. Argued over—often violently—by the convicts

with bit er months and years of time in the mine behind them, the

boys were pushed into corners of the pitch black mine rooms,

beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough

beaten into submission with the handles of the pickaxes or rough

leather belts worn by the men, and raped daily and nightly.

Disagreements over ownership of the sodomized "gal-boys" or other

infractions of the prisoners’ code erupted into bizarre violence. Men

made huge by their years of labor and hardened by their fates

at acked each other in the constricted spaces with axes, knives,

rocks, and bare hands. Homicides were a constant occurrence.

The ranks of those condemned to the mines were so broadly

uneducated and il iterate—even by the elementary standards of

1908—that hardly any eyewitness accounts were recorded of the

nightmarish episodes beneath the surface. The shame of witnessing

—or being a participant in—such acts further sti ed

acknowledgment of the rapes and violence that accompanied them.

But virtual y every surviving account of life in the slave mines

referred in at least muted tones to these spectacles of sexual abuse.

One white man wrote after his release how "men, degraded to a

plane lower than the brutes, are guilty of the unmentionable crimes

referred to by the Apostle Paul in his let er to the Romans." He cited

the verse: "The men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned

in their lusts one toward another, men with men, working that

which is unseemly"11

As shocking as the sodomy were the o cial punishments of the

mines and convict labor camps administered under the sanction of

government authority. At the end of the day, whatever had

happened deep in the earth, each man was held to account for the

coal he col ected while in the shaft. Healthy prisoners such as Green

and Mun were required to produce eight tons each day. Any man

who came up short of his assigned "task" was subject to the whip—

held over a barrel by two other black men with his shirt removed

and his pants pushed to his knees as the white mine superintendent

or the designated whipping boss lashed him with a thick, four-inch-

wide strap of leather. On some days, as many as two or three dozen

men felt the bite of forty or fty strokes. Those who chronical y

failed to meet task were beaten every day, often in the morning as

wel to remind them of the fate that awaited failure that night.

A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple

A convict named Alvaran Snow Al en published a simple

religious lea et near the turn of the century titled "The Story of a

Lie," recounting the misdeeds of his life and how they led him to

become "Convict No. 2939" in an unspeci ed labor prison. In

excruciating detail, he recounted the methods, lexicons, and

apparatuses of prisoner punishment used throughout the southern

prison labor system. "Come-a-longs" were steel bracelets snapped

onto the wrists and fastened by a chain to a smal metal crossbar.

Turning the crossbar instantly twisted a man's arms into a knot,

forcing him to his knees. In a punishment known simply as "the

chains," a prisoner was placed in handcu s at ached to the ends of a

thirty-inch-long steel bar, which was then hoisted with a pul ey

until the man hung clear of the oor, to be left suspended "from 50

minutes to two hours."12 A variation on this torment was known in

some camps as the "alakazan degree," in which the victim's ankles

were cu ed behind his back and then his feet "drawn upward and

backward until his whole body is stretched taut in the shape of a

bow" and then tied to his wrists. Once pinioned, the most

unfortunate prisoners were then placed in a closed and darkened

box cal ed a "crib" and left there in su ering. "The intense agony

in icted by this method of torture is indescribable; every muscle

throbs with pain," wrote one prisoner after his release.13

"Lit le shackles" were egg-shaped pieces of iron riveted onto

ankle rings on prisoners in rural work camps to make their feet too

heavy to run. "Whipping straps" weighed two to seven pounds for

routine beatings. "Shackles and chains" was a three-foot section of

chain with an ankle cu at one end and a two-inch ring at the other

end. Once the cu was riveted to a prisoner's leg, the chain was

wrapped around the leg during working hours, and then unspooled

at day's end to be at ached to the one long chain holding al

convicts in a particular sleeping area.

Famous to prison mines and camps in Alabama, Georgia, and

Florida was the "pick shackle," which Al en described as a

sharpened pick head riveted upside down to a prisoner's ankle—

making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and

making it ut erly impossible to run or even walk normal y—and

typical y left there for the duration of a convict's sentence.14 Worn

for months or years at a time, the twenty- to thirtypound picks

rubbing against bare skin caused abrasions that led to pus- l ed

lesions and infections prisoners cal ed "shackle poison." Lit ered

through the records of convict camps are amputations of feet and

lower legs as a result of blood poisoning from the injuries.

By far the most torturous and widely used punishment was the

"water cure," a medieval cruciation whose many variations rendered

the strongest and most de ant of men ut erly compliant. In its most

moderate form, the water cure was simply forcing a man to stand

naked under a shower of cold water until he convulsed with cold.

More often, prisoners described being stripped of their clothing and

tied to a post or chair. A water line—often a high-pressure re hose

—was turned on the naked prisoner, pounding his skin with intense

pressure and l ing his mouth and nose with torrents of water until

he became convinced he was about to drown.

In the Alabama prison mines where Green Cot enham was now

an inmate, the preferred form of the water cure was simply to lift a

man o his feet and plunge him head rst into a barrel, with his

arms tied or held useless to his sides. Guards or prisoners working

under the supervision of one held the man's furiously kicking feet

to keep the barrel upright until his thrashing subsided—usual y two

to three minutes after being plunged into the liquid. Then the

prisoner was hauled, gasping, out of the bucket, given a few

seconds of air, then plunged down again. Repeated again and again,

virtual y no prisoner could avoid being turned into a shivering,

begging wretch.15

For the hundreds of men who could not endure the physical abuse

or the grinding labor, or who were kil ed by guards and other

prisoners, death brought a final brief journey into the earth. At dead

center of the sprawling Prat Mines complex, facing Smokey Row,

sat an unkempt 1,300-acre triangle of land, hemmed on two sides

by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal

by tracks to the three nearest shafts. Here and there, heaps of coal

slag and rocky debris jut ed from the ground, amid a helter-skelter

pat ern of shrubby trees. Lit ered randomly among the debris and a

web of muddy footpaths were hundreds of graves—many already

slumping slightly into the earth and overgrown with weeds, many

others stil mounded high from recent burials.

Just outside the fence at Slope No. 12, another burial eld held

the men who died in the newest shaft. In the big cemetery at the

bot om of the hil , a few graves bore simple stones with the names

of free blacks permit ed by TCI to be buried on company land. The

rest—and al the burials outside the new prison at the top of the

slope—were the hastily l ed graves of mine prisoners from

families too poor or forgot en to retrieve the bodies of their dead.16

A few days after Cot enham arrived at Slope No. 12 in April 1908,

the president of U.S. Steel, W. E. Corey, and a contingent of other

top executives from the Pit sburgh headquarters made their rst

visit to inspect the new Alabama properties. There was great

applause in Birmingham for the men whose purchase had saved

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. from nancial ruin. But the

enthusiasm of the city's leaders was tempered by the quiet

recognition that the South's greatest industrial concern had come

under the control of men in Pennsylvania. Whatever ambition there

had been for Alabama's iron and steel industry to eclipse its rivals

in the North was lost. Already, there were rumors that the new

owners were uneasy about the conditions of the prison mine and

the brutality in icted on African Americans there. For the time

being though, lit le would change. Four more convicts died before

the end of the month. Five more in May. Another four in June and

four more in July17 The burial eld at Slope No. 12 quickly began

to fil .

By midsummer, U.S. Steel and other mine owners in Birmingham

were moving toward a bit er climax in their struggle with the

United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—

United Mine Workers. Seven thousand free miners were on strike—

this time joined by ve hundred free black miners, many of whom

had been brought in as strikebreakers during earlier labor unrest

and had never been welcomed by a union run by white men. Now

hundreds of miners swarmed the entry-ways of the mines, harassing

any workers who entered and threatening to break free convicts as

they moved from the mines to their prison. The homes in Prat City

of some leading company of icials, as wel as miners who continued

to work, were dynamited in the night.

Coal company o cials petitioned the state to break up the strike

with militiamen and hired armed deputies, importing sixty "Texas

sharpshooters" to help defend the mines. To keep operating,

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad and Sloss-She eld pushed

Cot enham and other convict laborers—who had no choice but to

continue working—to excruciating limits. They soon resurrected the

long-abandoned and notorious practice of hiring black work gangs

through white foremen—often farm owners with large groups of

African American tenants under their control. In a practice

reminiscent of the Confederate government's inducements to slave

owners to work mines during the Civil War, white foremen brought

in workers from the countryside and directly supervised them in the

mines. The white "owner" col ected al their wages and paid his

black subjects a fraction of the pay of real miners.18 Trains loaded

with black farmworkers from the Black Belt pul ed into

Birmingham each day—to the hoots and threats of strikers. Al the

while, company labor agents prowled the countryside for more

convicts, encouraging local sheri s to arrest and sel as many more

men as possible.

The specter of black and white miners uni ed against the coal

companies was terrifying to the elite of Birmingham—and across

the South. Mine owners responded with an aggressive campaign to

divide the union along racial lines. A prominent African American

union leader, Wil iam Mil in, was taken from jail and lynched with

the aid of two white deputy sheri s. A week later, another union

miner was hanged from a tree—again by a deputy sheri —after

being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor

being accused of dynamiting a company miner's house. Governor

Braxton Comer issued orders preparing the state militia to mobilize

and banning strikers from congregating outside mine entrances.19

In the midst of the crisis, on August 2, Cot enham could not

return to his place in the mine. Green had survived ve months at

Slope No. 12. But he had become a shadow of the man arrested

behind the train station in Columbiana. A doctor diagnosed

Cot enham as having syphilis. If the doctor's assessment was correct,

Cot enham almost certainly was already infected at the time of his

arrest in Shelby County. Even in the bacterium's most aggressive

form in a nineteenth-century medical regime without knowledge of

penicil in, syphilis took at least two years to reach Green's mortal y

il condition. In the unsanitary circumstances of the prison mine, the

symptoms of syphilis were exacerbated and sometimes confused

with other maladies. Already, the organism that causes syphilis—a

bacterium called Treponema pal idum—had infected his central

nervous system. The dorsal columns of Cot enham's spinal cord

already were hardening or developing lesions—triggering

excruciating stabbing pains in his legs, rectum, and upper

extremities.

Even for the most fortunate patients, there was no cure for

syphilis in 1908. Doctors gave those who could a ord it doses of

mercury in the belief it fought the progress of the bacteria.

Otherwise, good food and clean surroundings were the only

prescription for extending the vigor of the patient. Cot enham had

neither. His symptoms progressed rapidly. Temporary blindness. A

lack of sensation in his feet. Searing pains. Soon, his doctor

diagnosed asitia—a loathing of al food—and locomotor ataxia, the

archaic term for syphilis of the spinal cord.20

Green began to lose his ability to maintain balance, and then to

control the movement of his legs. First, he would have walked only

with a stick to stand on, then only with a cane in each hand—

struggling to keep his feet from ying uncontrol ably to his sides,

front, or rear—slapping his feet back to the oor as he struggled to

contain the movement of each step. His stomach convulsed

contain the movement of each step. His stomach convulsed

agonizingly at the sight or swal owing of food, vomiting almost

anything he at empted to ingest.

Cot enham might have lived for weeks or months in such a state

— declining steadily toward a state of complete paralysis. But in his

gravely weakened condition, Green was even more vulnerable to

tuberculosis—the endemic respiratory disease cycling through the

prisoners of Slope No. 12. Transmit ed through impure water

supplies, infected food, close contact with other victims, unsanitary

surroundings, and a host of other means common to a prison mine,

tuberculosis was the world's leading kil er. Triggering vomiting,

night sweats, and chil s, it at acked the outer lining of victims’

lungs, so sapping them of strength and color that the

"consumption"—its common name at the time—was sometimes

mistaken for vampirism.

However or whenever Green became infected, he was spiraling

toward death by the time he entered the prison hospital on the rst

Saturday of August. Wracked with convulsive pains, starved by his

own disgust for food, fevered and unable to control the movement

of his limbs, friendless and lost to the other descendants of old

Scipio, Green Cot enham died thirteen days later.

On August, 15, 1908, his body was placed in a crude pine box

and carried by other convicts out the gate of Slope No. 12. A lit le

more than a hundred yards down the hil , alongside the track

fol owing a long creek bed, past the last pockmarks of shal ow

sinking graves dug earlier that year, the men rested the simple

casket on the ground and began digging among the trash and debris

of the burial eld. In the distance, the belching chimneys of the

Ensley furnaces blackened the western horizon. No record was

made of precisely where Cot enham's twisted remains, riddled with

tubercular infection, were buried. The company couldn't even

clearly remember his name. The doctor for Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Co. logged the event only as the death of "Green

Cunningham."

XV

EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

"Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet."

On the night before Green Cotenham's death at Slope No. 12, a

mob of twelve thousand white people rampaged in Spring eld,

Il inois, the longtime homeplace of Abraham Lincoln and site of

Theodore Roosevelt's "square deal for the Negro" promise ve years

earlier.

A month earlier, on July 4, Spring eld police thwarted the

kil ing of a black man accused of murdering a local white

businessman. On July 12, passengers on a Central of Georgia train

passing Round Oak, Georgia, watched out their windows as a crowd

seized and hanged a black man for pul ing a knife during a brawl

with a local white. Two days later, in Middle-ton, Tennessee, a mob

of one hundred hanged Hugh Jones for al egedly making an

advance on a seventeen-year-old white girl.1 Less than twenty-four

hours after that, an elderly black man was shot to death in

Beaumont, Texas, after a gang of marauding whites mistook him for

a younger African American accused of hit ing a thirteen-year-old

white girl. The mob was set ing two black-owned businesses a re

when the victim passed, but paused long enough to kil the man.2

The next week, news of a notably sordid lynching in Dal as,

Texas, ashed across national newswires: after an eighteen-year-old

African American named Tad Smith was accused of raping a white

woman, a crowd of one thousand whites tied him to a stake in the

ground, surrounded him with kerosene-soaked wood, and cheered

as they watched him burn to death.3

A week later, only a detachment of Georgia state militia in the

town of Ocil a was able to prevent the lynching of four randomly

seized African Americans taken by a mob after a white woman

claimed an unidenti ed black man entered her hotel room. The

next day, a mob in Pensacola, Florida, at acked the jail where

next day, a mob in Pensacola, Florida, at acked the jail where

Leander Shaw was being held for an al eged sexual assault and

kni ng of a white woman. The sheri and two deputies resisted a

crowd that grew to one thousand, shooting and kil ing at least two

of the white men at acking the jail. Sometime after midnight, the

crowd overwhelmed police, took Shaw from his cel , dragged him

two blocks with a noose on his neck, hanged him from a light pole

in the center of the city's park, and then began ring on his corpse.

"2,000 bul ets completely riddled his body," wrote a correspondent

for the Atlanta Constitution. On the same night, in Lyons, Georgia, a

white crowd tore through a brick jail wal to reach and kil a black

man accused of assault on a local white girl.4

Two days later, about one hundred white men broke into the

Russel -vil e, Kentucky, jail and seized a black farmer accused of

kil ing his white landlord; they took three other African Americans

from the jail as wel , and hanged al four from a tree on a country

road. A note at ached to one body read: "Let this be a warning to

you niggers to let white people alone."5

Back in Spring eld, a white woman falsely claimed rape on

August 14, after her secret sexual a air with a local black man was

discovered. The mob that raged that Friday night kil ed at least

seven black people, destroyed much of the African American

section of the town, and issued proclamations that no blacks should

return to the city. Calm was restored only after the arrival of four

thousand soldiers.6

Two weeks later, a delegation of prominent Birmingham citizens

visited leaders of the striking miners stil encamped in tents outside

the Alabama mines and issued an explicit threat. The owners of

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, Sloss-She eld, and Prat

Consolidated Coal—the three biggest companies and each a major

buyer of forced black laborers—made clear they would do anything

necessary to crush the strike. Unless the strike ended, Birmingham

would "make Spring eld, Il inois look like six cents," according to a

newspaper reporter who shadowed the visit.7

newspaper reporter who shadowed the visit.

Alabama governor Braxton Comer issued a statement insisting no

such madness would be necessary to destroy the biracial labor

activists of Birmingham. Tel ing union leaders that he and other

white o cials were "outraged at the at empts to establish social

equality between black and white miners," he demanded that the

strike end. He added that he would not tolerate "eight or nine

thousand idle niggars in the State of Alabama."8 When the walkout

continued, Governor Comer cal ed the unrest a threat to white

supremacy and dispatched the militia on August 26 to cut down the

tents of strikers and break up their camps.

Facing armed military units and out of money, the strike

col apsed on September 1. Free miners returned to their company

housing and reen-tered the forbidding shafts. Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad redistributed its prisoners back into multiple shafts at the

Prat Mines.

Tensions hardly eased. Death in U.S. Steel's slave mines continued

its march—two men in September; six more in October. Early in

November, Birmingham buzzed with word of the latest southern

lynching. A black man named Henry Leidy was accused by a fifteen-

year-old girl in Biloxi, Mississippi, of sexual assault. Quickly taken

from the town jail, he was hanged from a tree overlooking

picturesque Back Bay on the Gulf of Mexico. "Negro Quietly Swung

Up by an Armed Mob …Al is quiet here tonight," wrote the

Birmingham Age-Herald on its front page.9

Less than a week later, black convicts working alongside free

miners in the Prat No. 3 mine grew desperate enough to at empt

an impossibly irrational escape plan. As the day shift of workers

was leaving on November 16 to return to the prison stockade,

about fty African American prisoners couldn't be accounted for.

Extra guards were cal ed, but the missing miners didn't reappear. A

new crew of sixty men descended into the shaft to keep operations

under way.

Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of

Long past nightfal , a guard spot ed smoke and then a burst of

ames coming from timbers supporting the manway the tunnel

used by miners to enter and leave the shaft. Within minutes, the

passageway was l ed with ames. Guards quickly discovered forty

of the missing miners waiting near another mine entrance with

dynamite—planning to blow open an iron gate during the chaos

and make their escape.

Eight other conspirators, who had set the diversionary re,

became trapped in the burning manway when one section of the

tunnel's roof col apsed as the con agration incinerated support

timbers. Engulfed in the ames, the miners were "roasted and

su ocated," according to a newspaperman on the scene.10 The

Board of Inspectors of Convicts recorded the deaths due to

"asphyxiation." The re burned for days. But within a week,

convicts were back in the tunnels of No. 3, digging coal again. By

the end of 1908, the rst ful year of U.S. Steel's ownership of the

Prat Mines, nearly sixty of the company's forced laborers had

died.11

Everywhere in the slave mines of Birmingham was death. Hardly

any week passed when one or more dead black corpses weren't

dragged up from inside the earth, heaped atop the mounds of coal

in the railcars, or found dead in the simple in rmaries of a prison.

Often no one knew or would say how a man died. The coroner of

Je erson County—a dour man named B. L. Brasher—made almost

continual visits to examine the dead or investigate the causes of

their demise.12

On July 20, 1909, Brasher went to examine the body of Joe

Hinson, sentenced to a life term for murder and sold into Prat 's No.

11 mine. Hinson had encouraged the story that his sentence was for

chopping o the head of a man in the town in East Lake after an

argument over Hinson's dog. A brutish record like that—whether

true or not—could save a convict from other prisoners, but not from

the mine itself. Charles Jones, another "prisner at Prat mines #11,"

as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal

as Brasher scrawled the notation, watched as Hinson loaded his coal

car deep in the shaft and then slipped in the con ned quarters. As

he fel , his hand touched a live electric line. He died instantly from

electrocution.

On March 12, 1910, Harrison Grant, a slight eighteen-year-old

boy from Lowndes County with dark brown skin and a smal scar

atop his head, was digging alone in a room o the main shaft of

Prat No. 12—seven months into a term of one year and one day for

burglary. Grant had no formal education. His parents, three

brothers, and a sister lived in Montgomery.

As he hammered a wedge into shale beneath the coal seam, the

entire wal of rock suddenly col apsed, crushing him. There was

lit le in the obliterated mass of his body with which to identify him.

The coroner noted that he "wore shoe and hat #8."

Mat Dunn, an il iterate twenty-six-year-old black farmer from

Pickens County with missing teeth and only ve feet three inches

tal , was crushed on April 22, 1910, in the No. 12 mine, trapped

between a mining car and a "rib" of the mine—slang for the

columns of rock and coal left as supports for the roof of

underground chambers and shafts.13

The next day, inmates Wil Burck and Wil Wil iams began

ghting in the same shaft. Burck, a common laborer arrested in

Russel County for burglary, was gored rst in one side and then

through the head with a mining pick. Archey Hargrove, a black

man from Hale County, was found dead in No. 2 mine on July 3,

1910.

Sometimes death came in plainly obvious ways. Eugene Phil ips,

a twenty- ve-year-old black prisoner with a "ginger-cake

complexion," being held at the No. 12 prison for two years on a

charge of forgery, died July 16, 1910. "I found deceased came to his

death from a lick in the left side with a mining pick, at the hands of

Cli ord Reese," wrote Brasher. The two men had fought for reasons

no witness could recal . It ended with the shaft of pick imbedded in

Phil ips, a farm boy from Chilton County. W M. Hicks died at the

same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was

same mine on July 28 for reasons unknown. Frank Alexander was

stabbed to death on August 25, by a convict defending himself from

Alexander. Gus Miles was crushed by fal ing rock in another Prat

mine on September 24.

On the rst day of October, miners at the No. 3 prison in Ensley

entered a dormant section of the mine and found submerged in the

rancid backwater the rot ing body of Wil Lindsay. A forty-one-year-

old black man, he had been sold by Shelby County sheri Fulton to

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in November 1908. Lindsay was

reported escaped the fol owing July. Guards assumed he slipped

out of the prison. His remains proved he'd disappeared into the

black labyrinth of the forgot en section of the dig. "This negro has

never been heard of since his escape and is quite possible that in

trying to make his escape he got lost in abandoned part of mines

and died from starvation and bad air," the coroner wrote.

Just before Thanksgiving, a sixteen-year-old black farmhand from

Bar-bour County, serving 729 days leased to the mines for an

unrecorded theft, was kil ed by an accidental explosion of dynamite

in the Banner Mine. Also dead was twenty-seven-year-old John Tate

and a free white worker named Fred Woodman.

Four days later, on December 5, the desiccated remains of Joe L.

Thomas, another black man who had at empted to escape the Prat

No. 2 prison, was found lost in the fearsome place miners gave an

almost ethereal name: the "gob." Inside the great maze of tunnels

and rooms abandoned beneath the earth, often l ed with escaping

methane gas and the toxic runo of active shafts, the gob was an

ut erly lightless, nearly impenetrable maze of tunnels and

unventilated gas. "Deceased came to his death from exposure, as he

had been in ‘gob’ of mine for two or three weeks, trying to escape,"

the coroner wrote.

On January 21, 1911, Walter Cratick's skul was split with a

mining pick by another convict at the Banner Mine. A county

convict arrested in Je erson County for petit larceny barely a

month before his death, Cratick was a twenty-seven-year-old

farmhand from Barbour County, with a limp from a broken hip,

one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar

one tooth missing from his upper and lower jaws, and a long scar

on his left side. Just 145 pounds and a lit le over ve feet, his term

was six months. The coroner ruled his death a justifiable homicide.

On January 31, 1911, Dink Tucker was found dead "for unknown

reasons" at Prat Slope No. 12. Nearing the end of his one-year

sentence to the mine, Tucker left behind a wife and two young boys

in Chambers County.

Cassie McNal y died from fal ing rock at the Prat No. 2 mine on

February 28, 1911. Essex Knox was found dead at the same shaft on

April 6. "I found deceased came to his death by being mashed to

death in the #2 prison by fal ing rock," wrote the company

physician.

By the spring of 1911, the coroner was making more and more

trips to the rising new competitor to U.S. Steel's Prat Mines. One of

Birmingham's most admired coal mining engineers and executives,

Erskine Ramsey, organized the Prat Consolidated Coal Company in

1904—quietly merging several smal companies and acquiring

98,000 acres of coalfields in Alabama.

A lifetime bachelor more comfortable with machines and metal

than men and women, Ramsey was intent on eclipsing his former

employer by building the most aggressive and pro table industrial

concern of the South. Prat Consolidated had by 1911 opened nine

new drift mines on previously undeveloped coal elds twenty miles

north of the Prat Mines. The company's showcase was the Banner

Mine, a deep shaft featuring the rst instal ation of electric lights,

cut ing tools, and hauling equipment—some of it invented by

Ramsey himself—and the largest prison compound in the state,

surrounded by a fteen-foot-high wooden stockade.14 Ramsey

sought to obtain as many convict workers as the sheri s of Alabama

would sel .

On April 8, 1911, two black convicts at the Banner Mine died

from inhaling afterdamp—the noxious combination of carbon

monoxide, nitrogen, and other gases left behind when methane

vapor ignites in a mine. One week later, near dawn on a rainy

Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

Saturday morning, just after the day shift of convicts reached their

positions inside Banner, an ignition of blasting powder triggered a

massive detonation. A handful of men nearest the initial blast died

instantly; the ventilation fan that pushed fresh air deep into the

shaft was blown out of position by the force of the explosion. The

sudden ash of re consumed much of the oxygen in the tunnels.

Into the chemical vacuum created by the absence of oxygen poured

what miners cal ed, with terror, "black damp"—a su ocating

mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide. About a dozen men stil

near the 1,700-foot chute leading into the shaft escaped to safety.

The rest—113 black prisoners, the vast majority of them being held

for trivial misdemeanors, ten white prisoners, and ve free miners

—were kil ed by the gases.

A quickly impaneled coroner's jury certi ed that the company

was "using al reasonable means for the prevention of accidents"

and was not culpable in the deaths. Most of the bodies of the dead

were quickly dumped in a long trench dug by other prisoners in the

mine's convict cemetery just outside the stockade.15 Within two

weeks, the Banner Mine was in operation again, with a fresh

contingent of black prisoners.

Alabama's other slave mines never slowed production in the

aftermath of the disaster. Cleve Wat s died at Prison No. 12 on May

22, 1911, "struck in the head with a mining pick." Less than a

month later, June 20, 1911, Lee Lawson was kil ed in the same

mine in a rock fal . On July 29, Frank Mil er was shot to death by

two guards as he tried to escape No. 12.

A week later, Jim Minor died in a pickaxe ght at Sloss-

Shef ield's Flat Top mine. Ed Jerring was crushed by "being jammed

between two cars" in TCI's No. 12 mine on September 29, 1911.

Jackson Wheeler died from "an electric shock" at the company's No.

2 prison on October 3, 1911. Henry Carter was kil ed at Slope No.

12 prison the same day, "from fal ing rock."16

The gruesome fates of al those men ricocheted across the landscape

of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

of black life, depositing as they spread new layers of tragedy atop

the deep residue of trauma left by thousands of prior horrors from

inside and outside the South's forced labor camps. Together, these

events formed the foundation of a col ective recognition among

African Americans of their precarious vulnerability in American

society. In the early years after Reconstruction, such news traveled

like a telegraph, ashing from one outraged bearer of the word to

another. Preachers decried the crimes against innocent men from

their pulpits. Before the nal ouster of blacks from virtual y al

southern elections, African American voters cast bal ots against

those who abided the system, in rare cases forcing a local o cial

out of o ce—as blacks once did to a sheri in Chat anooga,

Tennessee, after he permit ed the lynching of a man from his jail.17

There were isolated cases when black prisoners col ectively refused

to work in protest of brutal punishments meted out—and of

convicts physical y at acking their overseers.

But such resistance was almost invariably crushed with the sheer

force of guns, mob violence, and economic isolation. By the end of

the rst decade of the twentieth century, word of each new outrage

moved osmotical y absorbed often without explicit note into the

shared experience of a black society in which nearly al realistic

hope of authentic independence had been shat ered. The new

slavery of Alabama achieved its zenith. Three massive industrial

concerns—U.S. Steel's Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad unit, Sloss-

She eld, and now Prat Consolidated—competed mercilessly for

forced laborers. Other industrial concerns stood ready to step in if

any major player receded. The system arrived at a cynical optimum

of economic harmony, knit ing together the interests of capitalists,

white farmers, local sheri s and judges, and advocates of the most

cruel white supremacy—al joined and served by an unrelenting

pyramid of intimidation.

The companies, producing nearly fteen mil ion tons of coal

annual y by 1910, held more than three thousand black men against

their wil in Alabama's mines at al times—creating a bulwark

against labor unrest and an enormous economic subsidization to

their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

their most critical cost of production. Hundreds more African

Americans worked in southern Alabama timber and turpentine

camps operated by Henderson Lumber Company, Horse Shoe

Lumber Company, McPhaul Turpentine Company, a textile factory

in Prat vil e, and other businesses. Hundreds more—no one kept

count—were parceled out by local sheri s to farmers and

businessmen scat ered around the state.

The reality of incarceration in the slave mines became so

ubiquitously understood for African American men that landlords

and local sheri s— equipped with almost unchecked powers of

arrest and conviction and enormous personal nancial interest in

providing labor to the mines and other enterprises—could make

almost any demand upon any black man. More often than any

other, that demand was that they remain on the land of speci c

white farmers, living lives of supposedly voluntary serfdom or as

prisoners sentenced to that fate under the system of "confessions"

rati ed by Judge Jones in 1903. Across the Black Belt of Alabama,

more than ninety thousand African American families lived in the

darkness of that oppression with only rare protest.

In Barbour County, 170 miles from Birmingham, deep in the

cot on country of southern Alabama, the shadow was cast in the

shape of two brothers, Wil iam M. and Robert B. Teal. In 1911,

when a term-limit law forced Wil iam to give up his job as sheri ,

Robert was elected to the job instead. Wil iam became his chief

deputy. "The brothers just swapped places," according to the local

newspaper, the Clayton Record.18

Because it control ed the county's convict leasing franchise, the

sheri 's o ce was a plum asset. Over one ten-year period, Barbour

County sent 691 men to the coal mines, primarily those operated

by Sloss-Shef ield and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.19

The Record took lit le note, among its weekly coverage of cot on

prices, buggy accidents, and lost mules, of the disappearance of so

many local black men. It enthusiastical y covered the lynchings of

African Americans, occurring with regularity in nearby towns and

across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

across the South. It labeled as "niggers" those African Americans

who gathered in Georgia for a celebration on the anniversary of the

Emancipation Proclamation. Northern whites who lent support to

wel -known African Americans such as Booker T. Washington were

"negrophilists."

On Confederate Memorial Day that April, the keynote speaker,

standing atop a platform festooned with the bat le colors of the

Confederacy, received "deafening" applause, according to a reporter,

as he told the crowd nearly ve decades after the legal end of

slavery that the forced labor of blacks had been completely

constitutional and never violated "divine or moral law." A local

white girl gave a reading of Uncle Remus stories. Organizers plied

the crowd for donations to help erect a memorial on the town

square to southern veterans of the Civil War.20

Prospects for any black man who crossed Sheri Teal and his

brother were grim. The jail itself was cramped and unsanitary, and

had been formal y condemned by state inspectors.21 What went for

justice for African American defendants was swift. After one trial of

"a negro charged with violating prohibition" in 1911, a local judge

in Eufaula, the more prosperous cot on trading town twenty miles

to the east, explicitly instructed the jurors to convict the man. When

the jury unexpectedly acquit ed instead, Judge M. Sol-lie threatened

to have the jurors arrested for contempt of court.22

Once convicted, African Americans were routinely sent to the coal

mines near Birmingham for o enses as slight as sel ing a bot le of

moonshine. Most months, the Teals arrested fewer than twenty

men. Then suddenly dozens of minor o enders were rounded up

over a few days’ time and charged with vagrancy, alcohol

violations, and other minor o enses. Nearly al were quickly

sentenced to hard labor and shipped out within ten days to l a

gap in men at the coal mines.23

On any given day in the summer of 1912, the county jail near the

town square in Clayton held from ten to two dozen men, awaiting

the arrival of circuit judges who rotated through the area's towns. A

man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

man named Edwin Col ins was charged with eavesdropping.

Another black man, Josia Marcia, was being held for al egedly

having had sexual relations with a white woman. Louis Denham

had been arrested for vagrancy. Housed with them were Ad Rumph,

Henry Demas, Jackson Daniels, and Peter Ford, four African

American men accused in the murder of a sharecropper named

George Blue. Demas, seventeen years old, and his wife were

boarders in the house of Rumph, another young black farmer, on

property near the remote farming community of Mt. Andrew.

Demas could read and write, but had no formal schooling. Rumph,

nineteen years old and il iterate, was married to a woman named

Fredie.24

Blue had been kil ed the prior spring by "a party of negroes,"

according to the Record. As often happened after black homicides

of that era, a large number of African Americans were charged in

the case. Indeed, on the same weekend that Blue was kil ed, seven

African Americans—including thirty-two-year-old farmhand Wil

Mil er—were charged in the death of another black man in Eufaula.

Mil er spent the summer in the Barbour County jail as wel .25

Whatever evidence was presented against the various defendants

was later lost, along with any record of their trials or whether the

men had access to at orneys. By fal , though, al had been convicted

and sentenced to varying terms of hard labor. Each of the accused

murderers received between twenty years and life. Col ins received

six months’ hard labor; Denham got ve months. No sentence was

recorded for Marcia.

Emaciated and marked, the men's bodies told their own story.

Mil er was logged into state records as having "one good tooth on

top," "shot through top of right shoulder," "badly burnt on back left

leg." Demas stood ve feet nine inches tal but weighed just 150

pounds. Scars were scat ered across his frame—the biggest a six-inch

gash stretching from above his left eye down the side of his face.26

In Henry County, the adjoining county to Barbour, Martin Danzy

was a thirty-three-year-old sharecropper and a husband of nine

years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

years. He was arrested with another local black man in connection

with a third man's death, though no records of the precise charge

survived. On October 21, 1915, Danzy was sentenced to a term of

twenty- ve years at hard labor. The man arrested with him, Bud L.

Clark, was sentenced to twenty years.27

Danzy was promptly sold to Henderson Land & Lumber Co.,

which put him to work in a turpentine harvesting camp near

Tuscaloosa. Clark lasted just over two months at labor before

pneumonia kil ed him. Danzy contracted pneumonia as wel . Five

months after his conviction, he too was dead.

Among the prisoners from Barbour County, Col ins and Denham

survived their terms of labor. Mil er lived only a few months, until

he died the fol owing April in a Prat Consolidated mine, at the

hands of another convict. In November 1916, Rumph died of

tuberculosis in a state prison hospital. Demas died the fol owing

month of pneumonia, at the Banner Mine. Daniels was kil ed July

27, 1917, while at empting to escape the Sloss mine at Flat Top.28

Years later, the authorized biography of Elbert H. Gary, the

founding chairman of U.S. Steel, who ran the corporation from

1901 to 1927, quoted Gary as saying he was outraged when he

learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using

slave labor. He said he ordered the executive just instal ed as

president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, George G. Crawford,

to halt the practice immediately. Gary, namesake of the U.S. Steel-

designed city of Gary, Indiana, was widely regarded among U.S.

executives at the time as the national leader on progressive labor

practices and business ethics. "Think of that!" Gary was quoted as

saying. "I, an Abolitionist from childhood, at the head of a concern

working negroes in a chain gang, with a state representative

punishing them at the whipping post! Tear up that contract…I

won't stand for it."29

Perhaps Gary believed he had in fact ended U.S. Steel's slaving

practices. Alabama was far from Pit sburgh. But deep in the bowels

of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

of U.S. Steel's newly acquired mines, slaves remained at work. This

new southern unit of the company held contracts guaranteeing

thousands of forced workers from the state of Alabama for at least

four more years. The reality of the southern economic situation was

that even under the mandate of the most prominent and modern

new corporate executive of the era, U.S. Steel was unwil ing to

simply cease the practice of slavery at its new subsidiary.

Shortly after U.S. Steel acquired Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,

rumors circulated in Alabama that the northern owners were

unenthusias-tic about the convict system. In later testimony during

an investigation into corruption in the state's convict leasing

department, U.S. Steel executives said Judge Gary had indeed

directed them to abandon convict leasing "as soon as possible" after

the merger.

"Judge Gary said whether the hire of convicts was a good thing or

a bad thing that he didn't care to be connected with the penal

system of the State of Alabama," testi ed Walker Percy, a lawyer for

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.30

But in correspondence between company executives and state

o cials, U.S. Steel made clear that despite the chairman's

discomfort with the system, it realized the bene ts of a captive

workforce, particularly in thwarting e orts to unionize local labor.

It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control.

In a let er to the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts in 1911, the

president of TCI was unequivocal: "The chief inducement for the

hiring of convicts was the certainty of a supply of coal for our

manufacturing operations in the contingency of labor troubles."31

Instead of quickly ending its reliance on forced labor, as Judge

Gary later claimed, U.S. Steel made modest improvements,

primarily by raising health standards at the No. 12 mine. At the

same time, it publicly praised Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's

past record of "humane and considerate treatment" of prisoners,32

and entered into new agreements to acquire more convicts from

county sheri s. In 1911, the number of deaths at U.S. Steel prison

mines fel to eighteen.

mines fel to eighteen.

But when Alabama o cials began cut ing the number of men

supplied to U.S. Steel in the middle of that year—four years after

Gary claimed he had ordered an end to slaving in his mines—the

company protested forceful y. The company's general

superintendent, Edward H. Coxe, wrote convict bureau president

James Oakley to complain, "asking him for 30 or 40 more men."

When the number of prisoners dwindled below three hundred later

that summer, Coxe paid a personal visit to Oakley to demand more

forced laborers.33

As the end of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's agreement with

the state was approaching, the company told Alabama o cials it

wanted to begin negotiations to extend the contract for at least one

more year. The state responded that it intended to lease al the

convicts to the Banner Mine—ostensibly because Erskine Ramsey's

company would pay more for them.

"I wish to enter a very vigorous protest against this action, as it is

manifestly unfair to us to take the men from us," responded Coxe in

a September 25, 1911, let er to the o cial in charge of convicts.

"We are paying the State a great big price for these convicts, and it

is certainly a hardship on us to deplete our organization."34

State o cials, some of whom were receiving secret payments to

help Ramsey's company, were unswayed. On January 1, 1912, the

last remaining two hundred state convicts held at the Prat Mines

were marched out under guard and turned over to their new

overseers to help replenish the ranks of forced laborers at the

Banner Mine, decimated by the disaster less than a year earlier.

On December 13, 1912, a roaming labor agent for U.S. Steel sent

out to hustle up as many workers as possible made a last stop at

the Shelby County jail. Deputy Eddings no longer made regular

deliveries to Birmingham. With al state prisoners in the Banner

Mine, other companies sent out their own agents to local sheri s to

col ect convicts and haul them back to the shafts. The man from

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad paid $103.50 to acquire one last

lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W

Wal s, and John H. Huntley had al been arrested together on the

crime that had supplied thousands of laborers to the company:

"train riding."

There must have been some amazement that day in that al of the

men purchased were white. It was likely the only instance in the

company's thirty-year relationship with Shelby County sheri s in

which a shipment of men included no blacks. It would have been

no surprise though that for the "crime" which thousands of African

Americans were sent to the mines for months or years—and

hundreds of whom died for it—these ve white men received

sentences of just ten days’ labor.35

XVI

ATLANTA,

THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

"I wil murder you if you don't do that work."

During the same scorching southern summer that Green

Cot enham and so many others died deep in the Alabama coal

mines—or at the ends of ropes in places from Texas to Il inois—

a litany of horrors from the slave camps of Georgia was spil ing

into public view in Atlanta.

Beginning late in July 1908, a commission established by the

Georgia legislature convened a series of remarkable hearings into

the operations of the state's convict leasing system. Meeting early

every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating

heat, the panel cal ed more than 120 witnesses over the course of

three weeks to give testimony in the state capitol's regal Room No.

16.The architects of the investigation—primarily state senator

Thomas Felder—launched the inquiry in hopes of proving

corruption in the management of Georgia's extensive system of

buying and sel ing prisoners. It would prove that. But as the long

line of witnesses perspired beneath the chamber's whirling ceiling

fans, they learned of crimes far greater than graft and payof s.

Across Georgia, fourteen separate camps held men sold by the

state; at another sixteen locations men charged in county and city

courts were held in slavery—including more than 430 at Durham

Coal mines; more than 350 at Egypt, in the plantation belt of south

Georgia; nearly 200 at Chat ahoochee Brick Company on the

outskirts of Atlanta; and scores more at a coal mine near Lookout

Mountain. In total, at least 3,464 men and 130 women lived in

explicit forced labor in Georgia. 1

Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate

arrangements with work camps, factories, and timber operations

scat ered across the state, that no one in Georgia government could

say where any particular man might have ended up, or the true

total of African Americans being held against their wil .

Complicating any e ort to track the fates of these forced laborers,

the new slavery of Georgia had metamorphed into a ful -blown

system of human traf icking.

Felder's commit ee learned that at least six hundred slave

workers, nearly al of them African American, had been resold to

other buyers after being leased from the state for convictions on

minor of enses.2 Witness after witness—ranging from former guards

to legislators to freed slaves— o ered nauseating accounts of the

system's brutalities. Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were

left to die on the oor of a storage shed at a farm near

Mil edgevil e. Laborers who at empted escape from the Musco-gee

Brick Company were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-

long spikes turned inward—to make it impossibly painful to run

again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physical y

abusive. In almost every camp, forced laborers lived and slept for

months in the same tat ered clothing. They bedded each night on

fragments of bed linens clot ed with dirt and filth.

One legislator told of a black man at Lookout Mountain Coal and

Coke Company in the mountains of north Georgia whose arm was

broken in a rock fal inside the mine. Months later he was working

again, but with a disjointed arm, distended in a grotesque

misalignment, where the bones healed together in an unnatural

shape. At a camp in Floyd County, black women riddled with

venereal diseases worked on a roadway chained to one another.

Everywhere, prisoners worked, ate, and slept almost continual y

shackled. Legislators who visited the Pinson & Al en lumber and

turpentine camp in Mil er County were so revolted by the trash and

insect-riddled food given to prisoners, they had to leave without

completing the tour.3

In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a

clenched hand gave his name as Daniel Long. What fol owed was a

plain-spoken description of his sentence served a year earlier in a

turpentine camp after being accused of stealing a watch chain.

Senator Felder asked him if he'd been whipped.

"Yes sir," Long responded. "Say I wasn't working good enough."

Felder asked how severely and how often.

"Hit me 75 licks…. Some times twice a day," Long answered.4

Asked what was the mat er with his hand, Long said the camp

whipping boss beat it with a leather strap after Long said he was

get ing cramps from his work. After that, the boy could never open

his hand again. Final y the chairman of the commission asked Long

to take o his shirt and let the panel see his back. To gasps of

horror in the audience and grimaces on the faces of the commit ee,

the slight young man do ed his shirt and turned to reveal a back

grossly swol en and scarred with stripes from the turpentine camp

beatings. Scars and marks covered the trunk of the teenager. One

foot was stil seriously infected where a whipping had literal y

removed a piece of skin.

Long's mother moved into the witness chair and told the

commit ee how she was noti ed after his last beating that Daniel

was soon to die. The boy had been convicted of pet y theft in

Mariet a, just north of Atlanta, but was sold and resold by traders in

black labor until he arrived at the turpentine camp hundreds of

miles to the south. She borrowed money to travel to the camp in

south Georgia—walking for miles on country roads in search of

him. By the time she found the camp, her son had been sold again,

along with a crew of healthy prisoners, to a nearby farm. She asked

the whipping boss where to go to find her son.

"I don't know anything about the goddam black son of a bitch, I

beat hel out of him," Mrs. Long quoted the man saying. "He told

me if I went down that road … he would kil me and throw me in

the river. He said he had kil ed lots of goddamn negroes and

throwed them in the river."

She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk

with his clothes stuck to his scabs and oozing skin. The new owner

of the lease on her son al owed her to take him home. Only after

three months of recuperation did a doctor conclude Daniel would

survive.5

As the inquiry progressed, what began as revelations of brutish

behavior by uncouth men in distant labor camps slowly became

instead an unset ling portrait of some of Atlanta's, and Georgia's,

most prominent families—many of whom appeared to be direct

bene ciaries of the most sordid revelations in Room 16. The

commit ee learned that the kil ing of the young black boy described

by Ephraim Gaither—whose account of the decomposed body being

dragged through the woods by dogs sickened the gal ery—occurred

in a camp owned by Joel Hurt, one of Atlanta's most esteemed

businessmen, and run by his adult son, George.

Other witnesses recounted the fate of a sixteen-year-old white boy

named Abe Wynne, who was sold into the Durham Coal and Coke

Company mine after being caught two years earlier stealing two

tins of pot ed ham. The company, owned by former Atlanta mayor

James W. English, operated a dangerous shaft in north Georgia.

Some sections of the mine were l ed with more than waist-deep

water, which seeped out through the slate surrounding the coal.

Pumps were inadequate to remove the water. Not enough timbers

were provided for miners to brace the tunnels, leading to routine

and often deadly cave-ins. Even when material was provided,

miners often skipped the safety steps for fear of being punished if

they ran out of time to dig their required daily al otment, or "task,"

of coal.

"Many times the men wouldn't take time to do it because they

knew that they could not timber the wal s and nish their tasks,

and it meant a whipping if they did not nish them," testi ed R. A.

Keith, a former prisoner al owed to work as a clerk at the mine

of ice.

Every morning, slave laborers at the Durham mines were forced

to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn

bread and a piece of raw meat and to watch whippings of any

worker who failed to make task the prior day. "I have seen them

punish the convicts severely for not nishing their tasks and have

seen them work until ten and eleven o'clock at night to nish their

tasks and then be whipped for working overtime," Keith said.

Asked to describe the instruments used by the camp whipping

boss, Keith said convicts were beaten with a thick strap of leather

at ached to a handle. "You take a strip of heavy harness leather

about as wide as my three ngers or a lit le bit wider and about

two and a half feet long. It would weigh somewhere in the

neighborhood of …three and a half pounds," Keith testi ed. "Some

times they would wet the leather by spit ing on it and rubbing it on

the sand; that was when they wanted to bring the blood. It would

hurt a great deal worse to og them with it than with the dry

strap…. The sand wil take the skin of ."6

In the yard where the whippings took place, the warden also

kept a herd of between forty and fty hogs. The aggressive animals

—made fearless of the docile prisoners—crowded in on the

emaciated men to grab scraps of bread or other food that fel to the

ground. One evening, Abe Wynne was al owed to brew a pot of

co ee on an open re in the yard. Since arriving at the mine as a

fourteen-year-old, his once stout, six-foot frame withered to just 160

pounds. When a hog began nosing against him for food, he splashed

a cup of hot cof ee on the pig to drive it away.

Word quickly spread to the warden that Wynne had abused one

of his hogs. As punishment, witnesses testi ed that Wynne was

forced to strip naked, held stretched across a barrel by two other

prisoners, and then whipped with a leather strap sixty-nine times.

"The whipping was more than he could stand," Keith said.

A few days later, Wynne's older brother, Wil , visited what was

cal ed the mine hospital. He told the commission his brother was

lying on a lthy bed, stil wearing his convict stripes with no

underclothes and coated in the dust of the mine. "I saw that the boy

could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

Wynne. "About al I asked him was if he was prepared to die."

Delirious and unable to tel his brother what happened, Wynne

died a week later. The boy's family was told he'd contracted

"gal oping" tuberculosis and succumbed suddenly7

James W English, the owner of Durham Coal and Coke, was a

luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the city

rising from the Civil War's ashes would have associated with so

cruel a kil ing as Abe Wynne's. But by 1908, English—despite

having never owned antebel um slaves—was a man whose great

personal wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of

thousands of men.

Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he

apprenticed himself to a carriage maker and then served notably as

a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in

a prominent Georgia brigade. Serving in a forward position near

Appomat ox, he received the rst writ en surrender demand from

Ulysses S. Grant to Robert E. Lee. After the South's defeat, he went

to Atlanta, to establish himself in the business and politics of the

bustling new capital of southern commerce. He was elected to the

city council partly on the renown of his war service, and later

served on the Atlanta school board and as the city's police

commissioner. He led a drive to make Atlanta the state capital of

Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center, and in

1880 he was elected mayor.8

Presiding from a regal home a few blocks from the center of the

city, English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a

matching mustache, fostered a col ection of enterprises that grew as

Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin. The base of his wealth was

the Chat ahoochee Brick Company, a business perfectly consonant

in the 1870s and 1880s with the needs of a booming metropolis

recovering from Union general Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman's ring

of the city a decade earlier.

As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

of using black forced laborers in his enterprises. Chat ahoochee

Brick relied on slave workers from its inception in 1878, and by the

early 1890s more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting

heat of its res. The company held another 150 forced laborers at a

sawmil in Richwood, Georgia, three hundred slaves at its Durham

mines in Walker County, and several dozen more at English's Iron

Belt Railroad and Mining Company. By 1897, English's enterprises

control ed 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in

brick making, cut ing cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction,

and turpentining.

During his tenure as mayor of Atlanta, English launched the

Georgia Paci c Railroad, eventual y tying Atlanta to the coal elds

of Alabama and then on to the cot on nub of Greenvil e,

Mississippi. While building that rail line in 1883, English il egal y

bought hundreds of convicts—and the coal mine they worked in—

from Alabama's leading slave driver, John T Milner.

English parlayed his industrial wealth to become one of the

South's most important nanciers as wel . In 1896, he founded

Atlanta's Fourth National Bank and became its rst president. Early

in the next century, after a series of mergers, it became First

National Bank of Atlanta, one of the largest nancial institutions in

the South.9

Before the legislative commission in 1908, former employees of

Chattahoochee Brick testi ed that the factory on the outskirts of

Atlanta was a place of even greater physical coercion and indignity

than the coal mine where Abe Wynne was kil ed. By the rst years

of the twentieth century English had turned over daily management

of the business to his son, Harry who later would take over

operations and build a landmark home on Atlanta's elegant Paces

Ferry Road, directly across from the governor's mansion.

English strenuously denied to the commit ee that any "act of

cruelty" had ever been "commit ed upon a convict" under the

control of himself or any member of his family. He insisted that he

and his son were essential y absentee owners of the brick factory,

and his son were essential y absentee owners of the brick factory,

having lit le to do with its daily operations. "I have not been there

in over three years," English maintained. His son visited no more

than once or twice a month, he said—despite company records

showing close family management.

The former mayor claimed he ordered the superintendent of

operations to make certain workers "were wel fed, wel shod, wel

clothed, and wel cared for….

"If a warden in charge of those convicts ever commit ed an act of

cruelty to them," English said indignantly, "and it had come to my

knowledge, I would have had him indicted and prosecuted." Yet his

testimony a rmed how Chat ahoochee Brick—like so many

southern industries in which the new slavery ourished—forced

laborers to their absolute physical limits to extract modern levels of

production from archaic manufacturing techniques of a distant era.

The plant used a brick-making process lit le changed from

seventeenth-century Europe. Nearly two hundred men sold by the

state of Georgia, the local county, and the city of Atlanta—virtual y

al of them black—labored at the complex of buildings, giant ovens,

and smokestacks nine miles from the city and a short distance from

the Chat ahoochee River. Thousands of acres of cot on and

vegetable fields owned by the company surrounded the plant.

Gangs of prisoners sold from the pestilential city stockade on

Bryan Street dug wet clay with shovels and picks in nearby

riverbank pits for transport back to the plant. There, a squad of

men pushed clay that had been cured in the open air into tens of

thousands of rectangular molds. Once dried, the bricks were carried

at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and

forth—under almost continual lashing by English's overseer, Capt.

James T. Casey—to move the bricks to one of nearly a dozen huge

coal- red kilns, also cal ed "clamps." At each kiln, one worker stood

atop a barrel, in the withering heat radiating from the res,

furiously tossing the bricks into the top of the ten-foot-high oven.

After being baked for a week or more, the ful y hardened bricks

were loaded, stil hot, in groups of eight or ten onto crude wooden

pal ets tied to the necks and backs of young black men. The

pal ets tied to the necks and backs of young black men. The

laborers ran—also carrying two more hot bricks in each hand—

across the yard and up a narrow plank to train cars waiting on an

adjacent railroad spur and stacked the new bricks for delivery.

Witnesses testi ed that guards holding long horse whips struck any

worker who slowed to a walk or paused. By the end of every day,

200,000 or more new bricks were loaded on the railcars.

English obviously had grown rich in his years in Atlanta, but few

people realized quite how lucrative the slave labor business

became. The prisoners of the brickyard produced nearly 33 mil ion

bricks in twelve months ending in May 1907, generating sales of

$239,402—or roughly $5.2 mil ion today. Of that, the English

family pocketed the equivalent of nearly $1.9 mil ion in pro t—an

almost unimaginable sum at the time.1011

A string of witnesses told the legislative commit ee that prisoners

at the plant were forced to work under unbearable circumstances,

fed rot ing and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects,

driven with whips into the hot est and most intolerable areas of the

plant, and continual y required to work at a constant run in the

heat of the ovens. The plant was so hot that guards didn't carry guns

for fear their cartridges might spontaneously detonate. One former

guard told the commit ee that two hundred to three hundred

oggings were administered each month. "They were whipping al

the time. It would be hard to tel how many whippings they did a

day," testi ed Arthur W. Moore, a white ex-employee of the

company. Another former guard said Captain Casey was a

"barbarous" whipping boss who beat fteen to twenty convicts each

day, often until they begged and screamed. "You can hear that any

time you go out there. When you get within a quarter of a mile you

wil hear them," testified Ed Strickland. 11

A rare former convict who was white testi ed that after a black

prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work due to a grossly

infected hand, the camp doctor carved o the a ected skin tissue

with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work. Instead,

Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, col apsed after the

procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard.

procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard.

"They taken the old negro out and told him to take his britches

down, he took them down and they made him get on his al fours,"

testi ed the former prisoner, J. A. Cochran. "I could see that he was

a mighty sick man to be whipped. He hit him twenty-five licks."

When Harris couldn't stand up after the whipping, he was thrown

"in the wagon like they would a dead hog," continued Cochran, and

taken to a nearby eld. Stil unable to get on his feet, another guard

named Redman came over and began shouting. "Get up from there

and get to work. If you ain't dead I wil make you dead if you don't

go to work," Redman said. "Get up from there you damn negro. I

know what's the mat er with you, you damn negro, you want to run

away." Harris never stood. He died lying between the rows of

cot on.12

Another black laborer drew the wrath of Captain Casey when he

said he couldn't complete his assigned task of tossing 100,000

bricks to the top of a kiln. Sweating so profusely in the heat that

the barrel beneath and the ground al around were drenched, the

man said he was about to col apse. "God damn your soul," shouted

Captain Casey, according to witnesses. "I wil murder you if you

don't do that work."

Then the overseer told the man to climb down, whipped him

with a leather belt at ached to a wooden handle, and ordered him

back to work. Incensed at the pace the brick thrower was working,

Casey ordered two other black laborers to hold him across a barrel

and began whipping again. Lash upon lash fel across his back and

but ocks. Final y the unnamed man was released. "The negro

staggered o to one side and fel across a lumber pile there, and

laid there for a while," testi ed one witness. Soon he was dead. The

camp doctor declared the cause of death to have been drinking too

much water before going to work at the kiln.13

On Sundays, white men came to the Chat ahoochee brickyard to

buy, sel , and trade black men as they had livestock and, a

generation earlier, slaves on the block. "They had them stood up in

a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

a mule," Cochran said. "They would look at a man in the row and

say, ‘Trot him around and let me see him move.’ They would come

to one fel ow and they say ‘there is a god damn good one.’ …They

would make such remarks as, ‘There is a man worth two hundred

and fifty dol ars. There is one worth two hundred.’ "

A similar picture emerged in the investigation around slave camps

and coal mines owned by Joel Hurt, the rich Atlanta real estate

developer and investor most remembered in Atlanta as the

visionary behind the city's earliest and most elegant subdivisions.

Virtual y every white person of any social signi cance lived in one

or the other of Hurt's signature developments—the High Victorian

Inman Park or Druid Hil s, an area of wide promenades and lush

parks designed at his behest by the rm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

Hurt was also the founder of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank—the

city's other preeminent nancial institution, the streetcar operator

that became Georgia's rst electric power company, and an early

investor in concerns that would become some of the most iconic

companies in the South. His namesake building near the Five Points

business center dominated the early Atlanta skyline at seventeen

stories—making it one of the tal est structures of the early twentieth

century.

In 1895, Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced labor mines and

furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. The

mines were previously owned by former Georgia governor Joseph

E. Brown, who enthusiastical y led the secessionist movement in

Georgia prior to 1861, governed the state during the Civil War

years, and afterward remained a staunch defender of antebel um

slavery.

The most powerful politician in Georgia from the 1860s until his

death in 1894, Brown, stil contemptuous of the Emancipation

Proclamation, l ed his mines with scores of black men forced into

the shafts against their wil . A legislative commit ee visiting the sites

the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

very worst condition …actual y being starved and have not

su cient clothing …treated with great cruelty." Of particular note

to the visiting o cials was that the mine claimed to have replaced

whipping with the water cure torture—in which water was poured

into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners—because it al owed miners

to "go to work right away" after punishment.14

Cal ed to testify before the commission at the Georgia capitol in

1908, Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic

for any aspect of the sprawling business he'd taken over from

Brown and aggressively expanded through the traf ic of forced black

laborers.

After acquiring Brown's mines, Hurt ramped up production, in

part to ful l contracts to sel coal to Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad in Birmingham—which couldn't get enough fuel and ore

from its own slave mines to keep furnaces burning at ful operation.

Hurt already had 125 convicts in his largest slave mine. He bought

one of English's mines to acquire fty men held there, and then set

out to obtain even more forced laborers from other work camps

around the state.

Hurt's gentle appearance in the witness chair—wavy black hair

slicked to his scalp and a soft shaven face that de ed the day's

convention for thick mustaches—was an almost obscene contrast to

the account of slave trading he quietly of ered the commit ee.

Needing more laborers in 1904, Hurt, who identi ed his

profession as "capitalist," said he turned to a man who was "trading

in" the sale and resale of leases on convicts. Soon, he was put in

touch with J. W. Cal ahan, who held thirty-nine black and two

white men on a turpentine farm in the deep woods of south

Georgia. Hurt wrote him on Christmas Eve asking if the men could

be purchased. "If you wil name the lowest price at which you are

wil ing to dispose of them, we may be able to come to an

agreement," Hurt wrote. "In making a price, state whether the men

are average able-bodied; how many of them are white, if any;

whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

disabled…. Yours very truly, Joel Hurt."15

Over the next week, amid the yuletide and New Year

celebrations, Hurt and Cal ahan furiously traded let ers and

telegrams negotiating an arrangement for fty black men. Cal ahan

rst demanded an up-front fee of $200 per worker—or a total of

$10,000—fol owed by monthly payments totaling $200 a year for

each man. The price of slave labor had changed lit le in fifty years.

Hurt countero ered an $8,000 up-front fee, and urgently wired

his thirty-one-year-old son, George, managing the company's iron

furnace on Lookout Mountain, that the men had been obtained.

Before the deal could be consummated, though, Cal ahan was

contacted by another bidder. On January 6, 1905, he sold the men

to the competitor in an al -cash transaction.16 An infuriated Hurt

continued to wheel and deal in the byzantine web of Georgia's slave

tra c—threatening lawsuits against Cal ahan when he failed to

deliver laborers on time and giving cash to state wardens who

demanded payo s to facilitate the movement of laborers from one

location to another. "We wil hold you for al damages which we

may sustain if you fail or refuse to deliver the convicts," Hurt wrote

Cal ahan in early 1905.17

The re ned Atlanta businessman was nonchalant when the

legislators asked about execrable descriptions of his camps, blaming

any excesses on lax guards and wardens who—despite the payo s

made by his companies— he said refused to work the prisoners

hard enough.

"They would stand up and let a convict run away from them and

be afraid to shoot at him, and the only way to get a warden that

was any account was to pay him extra money," Hurt testi ed.

"When a convict starts to escape he ought to shoot, he ought to stop

him or run him down and catch him."18

Another witness before the commission—former chief warden

Jake Moore—testi ed that no prison guard could ever "do enough

whipping for Mr. Hurt."

"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

"He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

the panel.19

When the commission cal ed Hurt's son George to testify, the

younger Hurt said convicts in his coal mines had been punished too

lit le—not too much. Asked to cite an occasion when a warden

refused to punish a prisoner who should have been, Hurt said: "That

would be like numbering the sands of the seashore."20

"Do you remember what you wanted them whipped for?"

responded a commissioner.

"For the lack of work," the younger Hurt replied.

"What was the task you required of them?"

"From two to six tons," said Hurt.

Asked why men had been forced to work in the mines into the

night, violating prison rules that convicts should labor only from

sunup to sundown, Hurt mocked the question: "Yes sir, but they are

under the ground and it's rather hard for the warden to tel exactly

when the sun is up or down."

Hurt was also sarcastical y dismissive of charges that arose from

the death of a black convict named Liddel , explaining that the man

died not because of a whipping he received but because of "the

bursting of a blood vessel while the convict was struggling against a

whipping."

Hurt said Liddel was a huge man, weighing nearly three hundred

pounds, who refused to enter the mines. A guard chained Liddel to

a tree in the same yard where the boy named Wynne had been

beaten to death, and forced him to sit for hours exposed to the

bright sun. Later, the guard ordered Liddel to lie down for a

whipping. When he refused, four men held Liddel while the guard

whipped him with a leather strap. Liddel began "growing purple

under the eyes," and later died, Hurt testi ed. He added that the

blood vessel most likely burst because "the man was guilty of

commit ing masturbation to such an extent that his mind had

become af ected."

Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was

Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was

struggling to deal with a "powerful negro …who had been

insubordinate ever since" arriving at the mine. To force the prisoner

to begin digging, a guard told another black convict, named Jim

Blevens, to at ack him. The two African American men, both forced

against their wil s into the coal mine camp, now stood in the prison

yard facing each other like gladiators, holding mining picks in their

hands. The face-o lasted only seconds. The "insubordinate" man

lunged forward, swinging his pick wildly. The smal er man stepped

aside to dodge the at ack and then swung his own tool in a high

downward arc. The long blade of the pick descended onto the other

man's head—piercing his jaw, throat, and chest. The wounded

prisoner fel to the ground, Hurt testi ed, and Blevens "then put his

foot on the negro's head and pul ed his pick out." The injured man

died from the wound.21

As the legislative inquiry progressed into August 1908, the sordid

stories of il ness and mayhem—coupled with even more

voluminous accounts of corruption and payo s—stirred an

outpouring of public condemnation. Atlanta's leading pastor, Dr.

James W Lee, sermonized at Trinity Church that the convict leasing

system was a "disgrace" to the state. His and other churches passed

resolutions cal ing on the legislature to abolish the practice

entirely22

A technological y more advanced competitor in the brick-making

business—a young engineer named B. Mi in Hood—began

advertising "Non-Convict Bricks" in the Atlanta Constitution. The

city council—which previously bought mil ions of the former

mayor's hard red rectangles to pave hundreds of blocks of sidewalks

—voted to bar the purchase of any goods made by convicts.

Final y a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered for a

mass meeting in Atlanta's Grand Opera House—the same forum

where The Clansman had drawn sel -out crowds two years earlier.

Presided over by the state's sit ing governor, Hoke Smith, the

gathering listened to a series of speeches condemning the lease

system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

abolition. Similar public meetings in the town of Rome and

elsewhere across Georgia on the same day produced the same

result. Newspaper editorials chimed in agreement—though most

said the prisoners should be taken out of private hands and put to

work improving the state's desperately inferior roads.23

Spurred by the public outcry, Governor Smith cal ed a special

session of the state legislature, which authorized a public

referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's

nearly al -white electorate voted by a two-to-one margin to abolish

the system as of March 1909. Without slave labor, business

col apsed at Chat ahoochee Brick. Production fel by nearly 50

percent in the next year. Sales—of nineteen mil ion bricks—

dropped to less than half of 1907. Total pro t dwindled to less

than $13,000.24

The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners

seemed a harbinger of a new day—especial y coming just two years

after Atlanta's bloody race riot. Social progressives applauded the

abolition of state-sponsored forced labor as a sign of racial

moderation. Several states had already taken the momentous step

before Georgia. Tennessee eliminated the sale of men into its coal

mines in 1893. South Carolina moved to end the state government's

direct involvement in sel ing prisoners by the turn of the century.

Louisiana banned the leasing of state prisoners in 1901—spurred by

a political rivalry between the biggest buyer of men in the state and

elected leaders in control of the state capitol. Mississippi's uncouth

governor James Var-daman successful y pushed for stopping the

lease in 1907, primarily to punish the rich cot on planter class that

were his primary political enemies.25Within another ve years,

Arkansas and Texas had abandoned the system as wel . In Arkansas,

the outgoing governor, a longtime opponent of the practice,

pardoned in his last days in o ce hundreds of the prisoners held by

the state—making leasing moot.

But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil

But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil

War slavery was evolving—not disappearing. North Carolina

banned leasing just before World War I and then revived it

afterward. In Florida and Alabama— where the state-sanctioned

practice of buying and sel ing slaves was just reaching its most

evolved and highly organized form—convict leasing remained

immune at every level to the ostensible "reforms" that swept other

states. Most of the "abolitions" were motivated either by political

imperatives or simply by the changing economic and technological

circumstances of the South. As African Americans across the region

were ground into political and economic penury, the di erence in

the costs of legal y enslaved and free, but impoverished, labor

narrowed dramatical y. The cost of buying prisoners from state

governments had risen substantial y—while the cost of "free labor"

available from hundreds of thousands of essential y indentured

black laborers working on southern farms was flat or declining.

Moreover, while thousands of state prisoners in Georgia, the

Carolinas, and other states were no longer leased to private

corporations, they were being forced into an "improved" method of

coercing labor and intimidating African Americans—the chain gang.

Throughout the South, peonage and the leasing of prisoners by

county sheri s—long the most terrible aspect of the practices—

continued unabated.

Alabama's system of sel ing black men through its courts and

prison laws continued for more than fteen years after U.S. Steel

took its last shipment of convicts. Shelby County and most local

governments continued a prosperous trade in African American

forced laborers, though in the new and more orderly fashion

mandated by Judge Jones. The confessions of judgment coerced

upon thousands of African Americans for trivial or unprovable

of enses were now careful y recorded in court files.

In Washington, D.C., there was lit le evidence that forced labor was

abating. The o ces of the at orney general and the White House

continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and

continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and

involuntary servitude as elaborate and extreme as those that had

occurred on the farm of John Pace.

A deputy U.S. marshal in Roanoke, Alabama, reported in the

spring of 1906 that a white man named Silas Lacy was operating a

railroad construction camp as terrifying as those of three decades

earlier. Dozens of slaves were arrested on fabricated charges, held

against their wil , starved, and subjected to daily lashings and

tracking dogs. At least three workers had been murdered by the

owners.26

Noti ed of the ndings, the U.S. at orney general authorized

sending a federal detective in to perform a larger investigation. On

May 7, 1906, the agent wrote Warren Reese's successor in

Montgomery, Erastus J. Parsons, describing the sweep of

involuntary servitude and the perversion of the local courts to

sustain it in the southeastern counties of Alabama. The deputy said

Lacy was holding throngs of black men under the cruelest

conditions, he wrote. One "negro boy" who at empted to ee Lacy

was recaptured, whipped, and left for dead. Another black man,

Josie Frank, was "held by force and kept in a state of fear." Two

other black men, Curly Johnson and Carry Hat on, were "arrested

on a bogus charge" and held in involuntary service to pay a

fraudulent fine. "There are dozens of other similar cases," the deputy

wrote. At another camp nearby, a white man named Henry Lee

chased down two eeing black workers with dogs, "captured them

and carried them back to his camp chained together." Just west of

the Tal apoosa River, a partnership cal ed Mason & Brother

routinely "had negroes arrested on bogus warrants, in order to get

them, making them work out the cost of the arrests," wrote the

marshal.27

"Many of these parties are cruel y treated and chased by dogs

whenever they at empt to make escape," Parsons wrote to his

superiors in Washington. But even Parsons feared that a prosecution

of the slaveholders would fail. "The trouble in get ing convictions

has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a

has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a

Commissioner, somehow succeeded in driving away the witnesses,"

he wrote. "The negroes employed about these railroad camps are

gathered from the large cities throughout the south. They are

invariably given nicknames upon reaching the camps and after

making their escape … it seems ut erly impossible to get any trace

of them whatever."28

Parsons also knew that regardless of how gravely blacks were

abused, cases brought against whites for holding slaves were almost

certainly doomed in Alabama. No mat er how strong the evidence,

he became reluctant to seek charges. He passed on to Alabama

o cials the report he received from a Secret Service agent on the

Lacy case. "I have requested the authorities of the State of Alabama

to investigate," the prosecutor added.29It was ignored.

An atmosphere of intimidation suf used the areas where involuntary

servitude remained rampant. A black man named D. P. Johnson

spirited a let er to the Department of Justice in the late winter of

1907 through a veterinarian near Banks, Alabama, claiming he was

being forced to work on a county road gang to pay o debts in

connection with "a contract which he forced me to sign." The white

claiming the debt had already seized Johnson's farm, but insisted on

receiving more. "He sent me here to work out the ne and cost of

the court and the sum of money he claims to advance me. Please

investigate case for I am deprived of my liberty without due process

of law." Johnson said he had been denied the opportunity to bring

witnesses before the jury that convicted him. A federal agent

visiting the Pike County convict camp, Johnson wrote, "wil nd

condition unparal eled in our free country." The let er was led

without fol ow-up.30

In the fal of 1907, Parsons doleful y reported to the Department

of Justice an account of what happened to Ed Bet is, a black man in

Lowndes County who had the temerity to testify against Jim Payne,

the white farmer holding him as a slave. Payne was arrested by a

federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges

federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges

were dropped at a preliminary hearing. Avoiding prosecution,

however, was not su cient for Payne, who after the court hearing

paid a local deputy sheri named Underwood to seize the black

man and drag him to a county jail in the provincial town of

Haynevil e. "And there gave him a brutal whipping, because, as

stated by Underwood, he had sworn out a warrant for a white

man." Once again, Parsons politely sought permission to send a

marshal to the area for an investigation.31

In December 1907, Judge Jones contacted Parsons with

al egations he had received that a lumberman named Henry

Stephenson was holding large numbers of black workers in forced

labor at a cross-tie camp near Enterprise, Alabama. An anonymous

informer wrote Judge Jones that when one black worker ran away

and then refused to return to the camp after being tracked down,

Stephenson told him: "If you don't cut ties for me you won't cut

them for any one unless you cut them in hel ." The white man then

put a pistol to the head of the unnamed black man and red

"probably a fatal wound." At least one other white man was

present, and reported nothing of the kil ing to police authorities.32

A year later, on December 22, 1908, Wil iam Armbrecht, the U.S.

at orney in Mobile, Alabama, wrote a disappointed let er to the

U.S. at orney general. Armbrecht had presented the evidence to a

federal grand jury in Selma related to an al egation that a white

man named Pete Nevers was holding debt slaves. "I did every thing

I could to secure an indictment but failed. I can not understand why

an indictment was not found except that, the country members of

the Grand Jury in that section of Alabama are not disposed to nd

true bil s in cases of peonage. The failure to secure indictments was

not due to any lack of investigation on the part of the Special

agents who investigated this case, nor do I think it was due to any

failure on my part to present the case properly. "33

Indeed, even after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the

laws against peonage, Alabama's judicial system continued to

routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary

routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary

servitude. Armbrecht, the mysti ed failed prosecutor in Mobile,

learned in January 1909 that the deputy sheri in Selma had wired

the sheri in Mobile to grab a local black man named L. McIlwane

and hold him on any charge until he could be picked up.

McIlwane's al eged crime was that he had broken a labor contract

with a white employer near Selma. The local sheri duly arrested

McIlwane for "vagrancy" and then turned him over to the other

sherif when he arrived.

"This appears to be a clear case of peonage," commit ed by the

sherif s of two of the state's largest towns, Armbrecht wrote.34

In 1909, an internal review of al peonage prosecutions in

Alabama in the rst decade of the century found that of forty-three

indictments issued—including those of Pace and his co-conspirators,

al ended in acquit als, dismissals, suspended sentences, or

presidential pardons. A total of $300 in nes had been col ected

from the defendants; four of those convicted served short periods in

jail.35

Evidence of widespread peonage in Alabama and elsewhere in the

Black Belt sections of other southern states barely slowed. In 1913,

two Alabama men, Butler and John Searcy were nal y tried on

peonage cases—having rst delayed their trial by several years by

kidnapping the primary witness against them, a black man named

Wash Gardner, and shipping him to Cuba. The jury refused to

convict.

It was plainly apparent that convictions on peonage charges

would be nearly impossible to obtain. As cases col apsed, U.S.

at orneys in various districts continued to go through the motions of

investigating al egations of slavery. But indictments grew rare. More

and more often, federal o cials— citing a highly technical reading

of the peonage statute—asserted that they had jurisdiction only in

cases in which a slave was being held speci cal y to repay a debt.

Adopting the same legal rationale put forward by the defense

lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position

lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position

that merely forcing a man or woman to labor for nothing—or

buying them for that purpose—was not a federal crime.

Responsibility for any "action" to combat it "lies entirely within the

state," said the Department of Justice.36

The new slavery reached a critical plateau. The resubjugation of

southern blacks was achieved in such broad totality—and

rea rmed with such crushing consequences for mil ions of

individuals, that codes and statutes were increasingly unnecessary

for its preservation.

African Americans had virtual y no political representation in any

place in the South—even those where blacks of voting age made up

the overwhelming majority of the population. Public education for

African Americans was a threadbare re ection of that provided for

whites—limited to half the number of days provided for white

children in most cot on-producing counties. Only 5 percent of

whites were entirely il iterate in 1910; nearly a third of blacks

were. Nearly 69 percent of white children at ended school; 37

percent of African Americans did so. Laws writ en and unwrit en

barred African Americans from sel ing the produce of their farms to

anyone but the most powerful white merchant in their worlds and

prohibited them from buying goods from anyone else as wel .

A local grand jury in Birmingham reported that the bartering of

African Americans for sale into the state's coal mines and the

col usion of local justices of the peace in the system were only

increasing. "The dockets of the justices of the peace in this county

would convict many of them for peonage should the federal

government choose to enforce its laws," read the nal report of the

grand jurors, issued in September 1911. It cited thousands of

unwarranted arrests and instances of cruelty, such as seventeen men

penned into a fourteen-square-foot holding cel without food for up

to two days.

"It would be far bet er for the state of Alabama that every

misdemeanant in the county of Je erson should go unpunished

than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

than for a court to be run for the oppression of those unable to

protect themselves," the jurors concluded. The U.S. at orney in

Birmingham forwarded the report to Justice Department o cials in

Washington, but no federal action was ever undertaken in

response.37

Desperate for traction in the face of the forces coalescing against

African Americans, W. E. B. DuBois launched what would be the

NAACP's seminal organ, The Crisis, in 1910. But the same year,

Baltimore, fol owed by a host of cities across the South, enacted the

rst local ordinances delineating the geographic boundaries of

black and white neighborhoods.

The election in 1912 of Woodrow Wilson, an openly white

supremacist Democrat from Virginia, precipitated a dramatic

expansion of Jim Crow restrictions on African Americans. In the

nearly half century since the Civil War, the federal government had

been the one province of American public life where black o cials

could stil be appointed to important public positions, such as

postmasters, customs o cers, and other administrative roles. The

Washington government hired thousands of black workers, and

within federal buildings, African Americans maintained a measure

of civil equality with whites.

Wilson, narrowly elected in a split election among himself,

Republican Wil iam Howard Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt running

on an independent Bul Moose platform, aggressively reversed the

federal government's traditions of at least modest equity for African

Americans. In paradoxical contrast with the "Wilsonian" reputation

the president developed after World War I for his pursuit of the

visionary League of Nations, Wilson dramatical y curtailed the

number of black appointees in his own government. His

administration largely introduced to Washington, D.C., the

demeaning southern traditions of racial y segregated work spaces,

of ice buildings, and restrooms.

Wilson strongly backed the demands of southern leaders that

their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting

without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no

chal enge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African

Americans across the region. Another half century would pass

before the civil rights movement could crack the anti-black legal

regime consolidated during Wilson's tenure.

After being named president of Princeton University in 1902,

Wilson openly discouraged African Americans from applying to the

school. In his academic writings as a political scientist, he blamed

the existence of slavery not on American leaders but on England's

imposing the institution upon its colonies despite England's

abolition three decades before the Civil War.

Wilson accepted the most distended idealization of the

antebel um South and demonization of the black political

participation that fol owed. "Domestic slaves were almost uniformly

dealt with indulgently and even a ectionately by their masters," he

wrote. The Reconstruction era of African American governance in

states with black majorities was "an extraordinary carnival of public

crime." Wilson cal ed the eventual suppression of black political

activity "the natural, inevitable ascendancy of the whites."38

In 1910, the vast majority, more than 93 percent, of the 10.2

mil ion African Americans living in the United States continued to

reside in the South. Nearly 60 percent of adult black men and

nearly 50 percent of black women worked in farming.39

Among whites, farming was a path to or an established form of

economic independence. More than 3.7 mil ion white men, more

than two thirds, owned their own farms. Conditions were more

than reversed for blacks. Fewer than one third of nearly 900,000

farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men

who til ed the land. The rest worked at the behest of white men.

There is lit le empirical evidence on which to establish the

precise economic arrangements between most black families and

the landlords who so dominated their lives—especial y on the

question of how many black families lived in a form of

uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

uncompensated, de facto involuntary servitude. But what record

survives indicates that the desperate plight of black farmers

captured in DuBois's loosely ctionalized account of Lowndes

County, Alabama, was only worsening. When federal census takers

questioned every farmer in the United States in 1910, they

calculated that nearly 700,000 black men, along with at least 2.5

mil ion wives and children, lived and worked in the murky limbo

of sharecroppers and rent farmers. Tenants ostensibly paid some

form of rent for the land they farmed; sharecroppers gave up most

of their crops at the end of each season to a landlord in return for

use of his property, a house, and supplies. But under the South's

regime of legal restrictions on black mobility and job freedom, the

vast majority of those African Americans lived in a state of

subjection to the white landowners or employers. Federal

enumerators were unable to classify tens of thousands more men for

whom the nature of their relationship to white landowners was

unclear.

A separate federal survey of farmers in 1909 gave a tel ing clue to

the true status of African Americans who whites would have

claimed were free laborers. Of nearly 2.5 mil ion farms in the

eleven states of the old Confederacy, the owners of almost 1 mil ion

farms reported giving some form of compensation to workers

during the previous year. On most of the farms— a total of more

than 850,000—the entire compensation to "laborers" for the year

was less than seventy-nine dol ars.40

When The Birth of a Nation, the movie version of the racial y

vitriolic stage play The Clansman starring the former deputy sheri

from Shelby County, Alabama, appeared in 1915, President Wilson

enthusiastical y embraced it. The best-sel ing creator of the play,

Thomas Dixon, who had proclaimed in Atlanta less than a decade

earlier that the duty of every southern white man was to preserve

"Aryan supremacy," was a classmate from Johns Hopkins University

and longtime friend of the president.

Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

Swept up by the movie's romanticization of the Ku Klux Klan's

savage war on black political involvement in the 1870s, white

audiences thril ed to the silent movie, the rst ful -length American

lm. It became Hol ywood's rst true theatrical blockbuster. Its

screening for President Wilson was the rst showing of a moving

lm at the White House. Wilson helped arrange previews for other

elected o cials, members of his cabinets, and justices of the

Supreme Court. "My only regret," he reportedly said, "is that it is al

so terribly true."

As discom ting for blacks as the president's embrace of a lm

that depicted their participation in public life as no less than venal

was an extraordinary combination of applause and silence from

other white Americans. Even in the most distant left-wing reaches of

white political activism in the North, the embryonic movements to

create socialist and communist parties in the United States, many

succumbed to the lure of a caricatured view of African Americans as

an inferior class capable of comic relief but lit le more. The Masses

magazine, a groundbreaking socialist journal published in

Greenwich Vil age, routinely ran cartoons and spoofs depicting

large-lipped, bu oonish blacks. "Your pictures of colored people …

depress the negroes themselves and con rm the whites in their

contemptuous and scornful at itude," wrote a critical reader in a

1915 let er to the editor.41

In Alabama's forced labor coal mines, more than three thousand

prisoners were at work by 1915.42 A study commissioned by

Alabama's governor three years later concluded that the state's

convict system remained an "extraordinary hazard to the life and

limbs" of anyone pul ed into it. He recommended abolishing the

labor system entirely43

As thousands of black soldiers returned to the United States after

the end of World War I in 1918, anticipating that their service

overseas would earn some relief from racial animosity at home,

whites across the country rampaged again, with gruesome riots in

South Carolina, Texas, Washington, D.C., Il inois, and Arkansas, and

a new wave of lynchings.

In the spring of 1920, a white farmer in rural Jasper County,

Georgia, visited the prison stockade on Bryan Street in Atlanta—the

same one James W. English had relied on as a supply of slave labor

for Chat ahoochee Brick two decades earlier. He spot ed a strong,

young black man whose nickname was "Iron John," and paid his

ne in return for a contract on the prisoner's labor, probably for

one year.

Repeating the ritual that played out hundreds of thousands of

times in hundreds of counties across the South over more than half

a century since the end of the Civil War, the farmer, John S.

Wil iams, took the man back to his sprawling plantation and

ordered him to get to work or expect to be brutal y punished. He

was locked into a bunkhouse with about forty other black men

acquired by similar means and held against their wil .

It wasn't long before Iron John drew the wrath of Wil iams's

grown son Leroy—who believed the new laborer wasn't working

hard enough on a crew of black laborers ordered to build a fence.

Iron John was stretched across a gasoline barrel, naked from the

waist up, and whipped long and hard with a buggy whip. At some

point, he cried out angrily, "Don't hit me no more …I'd rather be

dead than treated this way"44

Leroy Wil iams drew his pistol, stepped forward, and shot the

striped and bleeding black man in the shoulder. "Do you want any

more?" he asked.

"Yes …shoot me," he answered.

The white man raised the pistol to Iron John's head and red

into his skul . He died instantly. At the instructions of the white

man, other laborers at ached Iron John's body to a heavy log with

wire, rowed it to the middle of a farm pond, and al owed it to sink.

The murder—and certainly the whippings that preceded it—were

hardly unusual. There had been many of the former and thousands

of the lat er by the time a black laborer named Gus Chapman

escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in

escaped from the Wil iams plantation in November 1920. Early in

1921, he made his way to the federal courthouse in Atlanta. Two

weeks after Chapman told his story to federal o cials, two agents

from the Department of Justice's stil new Bureau of Investigation

visited Wil iams to inquire about conditions.

They found eleven black forced laborers working in a eld, al of

them evidently there to work o criminal nes supposedly paid on

their behalf by Wil iams. The African American men were

supervised by Clyde Manning, a black overseer long entrusted by

Wil iams to keep the men on the farm while he was away. While

the agents were there, the plantation owner returned home.

Wil iams, a thin fty-four-year-old with a drawn face and slight

mustache, invited the two o cers to sit and have a glass of tea.

Reclining on chairs on the porch, the agents asked if the black eld

workers were being held in "peonage." Wil iams asked them to

explain exactly what the "peonage" law was about.

"If you pay a nigger's ne or go on his bond and you work him

on your place, you're guilty of peonage," replied George W Brown,

one of the Bureau of Investigation agents, using the time-honored

southern signal that his questions didn't indicate any particular

regard for black people.

Wil iams laughed softly, according to later testimony. "Wel , if

that is the case, me and most of the people who have done

anything of the sort were guilty of peonage," the farmer replied. "I

don't keep any of my niggers locked up. Of course, I do tel some of

them they shouldn't leave before paying the ne they rightly owe

me."

Brown and his partner seemed satis ed with the answer. The

farmer relaxed. But then Wil iams began to talk more about the

farm. He described how he sometimes hunted down escapees and

forced them to return. The agents asked if they could look around

the plantation. They saw the slave quarters, where shackles and

chains were clearly used to restrain forced laborers at night. Every

black worker they quizzed, while appearing terri ed and reluctant

to talk, nonetheless said they were satis ed with their treatment on

the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

the farm. None of the workers spoke of the murder of Iron John or

other acts of violence on the farm.

By the end of the day, the agents were convinced that Wil iams

had commit ed at least a technical violation of the peonage statute.

But to a pair of experienced eld agents, both native to the South,

the situation looked typical for most big southern farms. The

anxiety and mumbling of the workers were routine, given the

unwavering social custom of blacks showing absolute deference to

al whites and open fear to law enforcement. After al the years of

investigations and failed peonage prosecutions in the South, Brown

knew no Georgia jury would convict a white man for practices

engaged in by tens of thousands of other white farmers across the

region— especial y since Wil iams's laborers appeared relatively

wel fed and clothed. This wasn't a case worth wasting time on. The

agents explained the anti-peonage statute to the farmer again,

warning him not to violate it further.

"I don't think you need to have any fear of any case before the

federal grand jury," Brown told him as they departed.

That assurance wasn't enough for Wil iams. He was an intel igent

and relatively worldly man. Now that he understood the peonage

law more clearly—and knew that federal agents had identi ed him

as a violator— Wil iams recognized his vulnerability, and that of his

adult sons. The property he and his oldest sons farmed stretched for

miles across Jasper County. In Wil iams's big house at the center of

the plantation lived his wife and eight minor children.

He had built a comfortable and in uential life, and a farm

admired for its size and profitability. Wil iams had the distinction of

owning an early automobile, and the ear of white county leaders.

He would not risk seeing a personal empire built over twenty years

ruined. Wil iams resolved that no African American would ever

testify of the slavery on his plantation.

Just after dawn the next morning, Wil iams found Manning, the

black overseer, in the early chil and told him the other workers

could "ruin" them al . "You have to get rid of al the stockade

niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

niggers," Wil iams said. "We'l have to do away with them."

Two days later, Wil iams and Manning at acked Johnnie

Wil iams, one of the forced laborers, in a remote pasture and

bludgeoned him to death with the at side of an axe. The fol owing

morning, John Wil Gaither was ordered to begin digging a new

wel . Once it was a few feet deep, he was kil ed with a pickaxe

blow to the head and buried in the hole.

On the evening of Friday, February 25, 1921, a week after the

federal agents visited, Wil iams entered the slave quarters and told

the stunned men they were free to go. He said John Browne and

Johnny Benson should get in his car to go to the train station that

night. Instead, Wil iams drove them to an isolated spot, where

Manning wrapped chains around their bodies and at ached a heavy

iron wheel from a cot on press. The pair were thrown alive o a

bridge into the Alcovy River, where they sank into the murk and

drowned.

As darkness fel on Saturday night, Wil ie Preston, Lindsey

Peterson, and Harry Price climbed into the car under the same ruse.

They were chained to bags l ed with bricks, and Preston and

Peterson were thrown o a di erent bridge. Price, resigned to his

fate, jumped in on his own. Before the church hour on Sunday

morning, Manning split Johnny Green's skul with an axe. The

white farmer watched as Manning at acked and then instructed him

to keep hit ing Green's shat ered skul until al signs of life ceased.

After a Sunday dinner of fried chicken and biscuits, Wil iams

cal ed for Wil ie Givens, another black slave worker, to join him

and Manning for a walk into the nearby woods. At the edge of the

forest, Manning sank his axe in Givens's back. A week later,

Wil iams drowned Charlie Chisolm, the other African American

who had been ordered to assist in the kil ings, and then shot to

death Fletcher Smith, the last of the other forced laborers.

A total of eleven African Americans were murdered to conceal

slavery on the Wil iams farm. Men who had grown to adulthood in

a South steeped in terror of physical harm, or even more brutal

forms of involuntary servitude, in which they had no cause to

expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned

expect justice or equity from any white person, passively resigned

themselves to violent death, unwil ing or unable to resist.

Only after decomposing bodies began to surface in the rivers of

Jasper County did the federal agents who had been wil ing to

ignore Wil iams's slave farm a few weeks earlier grow suspicious.

Wil iams and Manning were eventual y tried and convicted for

murder in connection with the kil ings. Wil iams—the only white

man found guilty in Georgia of kil ing a black man during the

ninety years between 1877 and 1966—died in prison.45

The Wil iams farm was exceptional in the level of violence used to

conceal its use of slave labor—and the degree to which the

revolting details of that violence came to be revealed. But as John

Wil iams easily admit ed to the federal agents when they rst

arrived at his property, forced labor remained as ubiquitous as

cot on in the South, an endemic feature of the landscape and

economy.

During the investigation of Wil iams, a government prosecutor

brought charges against Arthur Farmer, Dr. James T. Tyner, and

Charles Madares for holding slaves in central Alabama. After the

indictment in March 1921, the primary witness in the case, a black

man named Jim Sten-son, was kidnapped—twice—and spirited out

of the state. The white men eventual y pleaded no contest to the

charges and received a nominal penalty. There was no prosecution

for having intimidated their victim into refusing to testify46

Increasingly, after years of absolute political hegemony by the

white supremacist southern wing of the Democratic Party, federal

o cials in the South wanted as lit le as possible to do with the

political and social in ammation that came with investigations into

any racial y oriented crime. An accusation in 1924 that the logging

camp and sawmil of S. J. Wilkins on Alabama's Tombigbee River

had held a twenty-two-year-old African American man and his

fteen-year-old brother for more than nine months— claiming they

owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.47

owed the owner $150 each—went nowhere.

U.S. at orneys and eld o ces of the Department of Justice

abrogated their role in such cases, knowing ful wel that virtual y

no act of violence by whites against African Americans—and

certainly no cases of involuntary servitude whatsoever—would ever

be prosecuted by sheri s or state o cials in the South. In April

1926, federal authorities in Birmingham were told of a brutal

whipping given to a black man working in a textile mil as a signal

to other African Americans that they shouldn't seek work above the

level of oor sweepers or janitors. The fol owing month, J. Edgar

Hoover, director of what was then cal ed the Department of

Justice's Bureau of Investigation, wrote Assistant At orney General

O. R. Luhring blithely asserting that the facts surrounding an at ack

on a black worker by whites in the Birmingham, Alabama, textile

mil didn't merit a federal investigation. "We have an enormous

amount of work on hand involving undoubted violations of Federal

statutes and I can see no reason for proceeding with this mat er,"

Hoover wrote.48 The case was ignored.

Two months later, a black woman in Birmingham named

Rebecca Jones mailed a let er to the White House, asking President

Calvin Coolidge to help her free her teenage daughter, Carolina

Dixon. The mother said two men claiming to be sheri s had seized

her daughter on a country road when she was just thirteen years old

and then held her in col usion with the Butler County judge for ve

years—forcing her to work and abusing her sexual y. When Jones

went to the farm of Tom Couch, the man holding her daughter, "I

was met with threats under the point of high powered ri es, stating

that I could not take my daughter back," Jones wrote. My "child was

scarred unmerciful in several places on her body." A federal agent

was dispatched to investigate, and the facts of the kidnapping were

put before a grand jury. It refused to indict Couch. The mat er was

dropped.49

Yet even as the federal government did lit le to check the breadth of

the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude

the new slavery, the economic logic of the system weakened. Crude

industrial enterprises to which slave labor lent itself so e ectively

for fty years were being eclipsed by modern technologies and

business strategies. Mechanized coal mining—using hydraulic

digging tools, electric lights, modern pumps, and transportation—

made obsolete the old manual labor mines of Alabama, packed

with thousands of slave workers and mules.

When cot on prices fel drastical y after World War I, and the new

scourge of the bol weevil ravaged mil ions of acres of cot on elds,

depression set in across the rural landscape. The cost of labor

plunged yet further. Prisoners o ered for sale by state o cials who

expected the returns on their business in labor to steadily increase

grew too expensive for some market conditions. Buying and sel ing

them was less and less sensible. As nancial incentives for the states

faded, political scandals and abuse outrages gained traction. In even

the most notorious states, public cries to end the leasing of convicts

to private contractors arose for the first time.

In the winter of 1921, Martin Tabert, a twenty-two-year-old white

man from a middle-class farm family in Munich, North Dakota,

decided to take a walk-about through the United States, traveling

by train, sleeping in railroad camps with tramps, and working to

support himself as he crossed the West, Midwest, and nal y the

South. Running short of money in December, Tabert, along with a

group of other itinerant men, hopped aboard a freight train without

a ticket.

Unbeknownst to Tabert, the sheri of Leon County, just south of

the Georgia state line, maintained a rich trade from spying on the

freight rails that crossed into his territory, seizing men from the

train, charging them with vagrancy or "beating" a ride on a railroad,

and sel ing them into slavery. Tabert was arrested, ned $25 for

vagrancy and then sold for three months’ work to a turpentine

camp owned by Putnam Lumber Company— then a vast enterprise

headquartered in Wisconsin but engaged in the harvest of hundreds

of thousands of swampy Florida forestland. Within days, Tabert's

family wired more than enough to pay the ne, but their son had

already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor

already been shipped into the maw of Putnam's forced labor

system. In sixty- ve years, the southern turpentine camp—

desperate, hungered, sadistical y despotic—had changed hardly at

al .Young Tabert did not last long in the putrid swamp. He was

given il - t ing shoes, and his feet became blistered and swol en. A

boil formed in his groin. Accused of shirking work in January 1922,

the slight-framed Tabert was forced by the camp whipping boss,

Walter Higginbotham, to lie on the ground as eighty- ve other

prisoners watched. Higginbotham pul ed up Tabert's shirt and

applied to his back more than thirty licks with a seven-and-a-half-

pound leather strap. By the time the beating concluded, Tabert was

"twitching on the ground," according to one witness. Higginbotham

placed his foot on Tabert's neck to keep him from moving, and

then hit him more than forty more times with the strap. The boss

ordered Tabert to stand, and when he moved too slowly, the guard

whipped him two dozen more times, witnesses later testi ed. When

the young North Dakota man, a thousand miles from home and an

immeasurable distance from any measure of sanity or decency,

nal y made it to his feet, Higginbotham chased him in a circle,

striking him over the head and shoulders, shouting repeatedly: "You

can't work yet?"

When the beating nal y ended, Tabert col apsed into his cot and

never stood again. A terrible odor rose from his body. He died the

fol owing night. A Putnam Lumber executive wrote to Tabert's

family a few days later, informing him that their son had died of

malaria and expressing the company's sympathy.

Unconvinced of the explanation for their son's death, the Tabert

family triggered a series of legal inquiries and a Pulitzer Prize-

winning journalistic investigation by the New York World.

Higginbotham was tried and convicted of second-degree murder.

But his conviction was later overturned by a Florida court. He was

never retried or punished.50 Stil , public disclosure of the gruesome

kil ing and its subsequent cover-up stirred a wave of outrage—

especial y as a demonstration that the excesses of the South's new

slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of

slavery could even extend to a white boy from a family of

distinction. The fol owing year, the Florida legislature, after an

extended debate, voted to ban the use of the whip on any prisoners

in the state.51

Alabama o cials were also under growing humanitarian and union

pressures to end the worst abuses of the convict leasing system.

Over time, state agencies took more direct control of the

supervision and punishment of convicts—though through every

purported reform, black prisoners continued to be driven beyond

reasonable human limits under the cold mandates of the

businessmen and companies who captured them.

Most reforms were cursory and super cial, such as requiring that

men be clothed during their lashings. The fee system and its pro t

motivation to encourage sheri s to make as many arrests as

possible remained in force. "Our jails are money-making machines,"

wrote a state prison inspector, W. H. Oates, in a 1922 report.

At the same time, the number of men being arrested and

sentenced to some form of hard labor in Alabama bal ooned. In the

year ending September 30, 1922, total arrests nearly reached

25,000, driven partly by new prohibition laws. Within another ve

years, the figure was 37,701 for one twelve-month period.52

In 1924, another ghastly story of death in a slave mine surfaced.

Like Martin Tabert's murder, it took on sensational proportions

when the public realized that the young white man, James Knox,

died while undergoing tortures that in the minds of most whites

could only be justified as punishment for African Americans.

Working at Sloss-She eld's Flat Top prison outside Birmingham,

Knox was rst reported to have kil ed himself. Later, a grand jury

col ected evidence showing that the whipping boss in charge of

Knox's crew punished him for slow work with the water cure so

long in use in the slave camps of the South. "James Knox died in a

laundering vat, located in the yard of the prison near the hospital,

where he was placed by two negroes…It seems likely that James

Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused

Knox died as a result of heart failure, which probably was caused

by a combination of unusual exertion and fear…. After death it

seems that a poison was injected arti cial y into his stomach in

order to simulate accidental death or suicide."53

Despite howls of protest that a white could die so ignominiously,

Alabama's prisoners continued to struggle against medieval

conditions. Monthly memos writ en by Glenn Andrews, a state

medical inspector, recorded scores of routine lashings for o enses

such as cursing, failure to dig the daily quota of coal, and

"disobedience." One entry in March 1924 reported that in the

previous month, "a negro woman was given seven lashes for cursing

and ghting. On the same day, a negro man was given seven lashes

for burning a hole in prison oor. On Feb. 14, a negro man was

given seven lashes for cursing and ghting. On the same day and for

the same of ense two negro women were given six lashes each." In a

1925 report, two black inmates, Ernest Hal man and R. B. Green,

received ve lashes each for not obeying a guard. Others were put

in chains and given up to a dozen lashes for "not working." White

prisoners, now invested in larger numbers, were more often given

solitary confinement. 54

In March 1926, the front page of the New York World featured

an exposé on southern slavery. The stories reported that in fty-one

of Alabama's sixty-seven counties, nearly one thousand prisoners

had been sold into slave mines and forced labor camps the previous

year—generating $250,000, or about $2.8 mil ion in modern

currency, for local o cials. The state government pocketed

$595,000 in 1925—or $6.6 mil ion today—sel ing about 1,300 men

to Sloss-She eld's Flat Top mine, the successor to Prat

Consolidated—now cal ed Alabama By-Products Corp.—and the

Aldrich mine in Monteval o, Alabama, the town where Green

Cot enham's mother lived her last isolated years.

Once sold, the prisoners faced beatings with steel wire, hickory

sticks, whips, and shovels. The stories described "dog houses"—

rough-hewn boxes the size of co ns into which men were locked

for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty

for up to forty-eight hours. Most prison camps had six to twenty

such houses.55

Final y, in 1927, new Alabama governor Bibb Graves moved to

stanch the long-running negative depiction of the state and its

twentieth-century slavery. He began relocating a hundred prisoners

out of the mines and other private businesses each month and sped

up construction of new prison facilities and roadwork camps where

county prisoners would soon be shackled into chain gangs—seeding

the notorious scandals of the next generation.56

On June 1, 1928, the lungs of eight hundred men l ed the damp

air of the mine shafts at Flat Top with the sounds of "Swing Low,

Sweet Chariot." The white prisoners held here and at Alabama's

only other remaining prison mine had already been relocated to

work on road gangs.

Only African Americans remained at Flat Top. They rose out of

the mile-long manway in two columns—blinking at the sudden

brightness of the summer sun. As the plaintive lyric "Coming for to

carry me home" wafted into the daylight, the prisoners marched out

of the shaft, surrounded by armed guards, and walked to a train

platform. Within a few hours, they had been transported to the

state's newly constructed Kilby Prison. No more men would be sold

into slave mines by the state of Alabama.57

More than a year later, a thirty-six-year-old man born in

Tal apoosa County and named Henry Tinsley arrived at the gates of

Kilby Prison. Like Green Cot enham, he was born decades after

Abraham Lincoln's emancipation of his parents and grandparents.

Also like Green, al his years and every facet of his life were shaped

and circumscribed by the slavery that succeeded the freedom of his

forebears.

It was Henry Tinsley and his brother, Luke, who as children three

decades earlier had been captured by John Pace and forced to work

on his brutal Tal apoosa plantation. 58 They were the two young

boys Warren Reese had discovered stil being held by Pace ve

years after taking them from their mother and long after Pace had

been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold

been pardoned by President Roosevelt on a promise never to hold

slaves again.

Henry had worked for a time in the warehouse of a grocery

wholesaler in Birmingham. He had married and fathered a child

more than a decade earlier. He had been a soldier too, cal ed in

1917 to ght in the U.S. Army59But the Alabama Henry returned to

after World War I was the same state he was born into in 1892. And

soon it returned him to the condition Alabama had reserved for him

at birth.

His crime in 1929 was recorded as assault with intent to murder.

The details of the case are lost, but the sentence of two years’

imprisonment suggests a brawl in which the other man was

injured.60 Regardless of whether the man who had grown from that

captive thirteen-year-old commit ed a real crime or whether it was

his enslavement by John Pace that led him to do so twenty-three

years later, deep into the twentieth century, Henry Tinsley wore

chains again.

XVI

FREEDOM

"In the United States one cannot sel himself."

Two years after the last convicts emerged from Flat Top prison, a

white writer named John Spivak visited the o ces of the state

Prison Commission in Georgia in September 1930. Presenting

himself in Atlanta as a journalist seeking to document reforms in

the convict system, Spivak was given a let er of introduction from

none other than the state's top penal o cer, directing the wardens

of every prison camp in Georgia to give him ful access to their

stockades and inmates.

Spivak, born in Connecticut, had worked as a police reporter for

a newspaper in his home state and as a writer of pulp ction

stories. His strong socialist leanings made him sympathetic to the

plight of blacks held against their wil in the South. His skil with

the jocular techniques of insinuating into the comfort of sheri s and

wardens gave him the tools to render an astonishingly sharp

portrait of what he found.

Contrary to the congratulatory pronouncements that fol owed

Georgia's "abolition" of the practice of sel ing black prisoners in

1908, the state had more forced labor slaves than ever by 1930. In

excess of eight thousand men—nearly al of them black—worked in

chain gangs in 116 counties. Of 1.1 mil ion African Americans in

the state that year, approximately half lived under the direct control

and force of whites—unable to move or seek employment

elsewhere under threat that doing so would lead to the dreaded

chain gang.1

Two years later Spivak published Georgia Nigger, a 241-page

ctionalized account of his nds—built around the harrowing

narrative of a young black boy drawn inexorably and cynical y into

a lifetime of slavery—on a county chain gang, as a debt slave to

farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.

farmers, as a possession bought and sold by white plantation men.

The episodes that make up the narrative could have just as easily

been rsthand accounts of the ery lynching disaster in Pine Apple,

Alabama, the brutish violence and perversion of Lowndes County

three decades earlier, or the "murder farm" of John S. Wil iams.

Unlike the plethora of chain-gang-themed novels and movies that

fol owed in the next four decades such as the 1967 lm Cool Hand

Luke—nearly al of which assiduously labored to depict the

southern penal barbarism as something directed equitably at both

whites and blacks—Spivak made no e ort to blunt the overtly

racial character of involuntary servitude. He unstintingly portrayed

a system designed to enslave or intimidate black men into

obedience. That a smal minority of white men were drawn in as

wel was peripheral and inconsequential.

Spivak created a character named David Jackson, a black

sharecropper's son rst sentenced to the chain gang of ctional

Ochlockonee County for no apparent crime. Stil a teenager, he was

released from the traveling camp—in which prisoners were, as in

actual life at the time, held in rol ing cages similar to circus wagons

transporting exotic animals. The men were perpetual y chained to

one another—eating, sleeping, working, bathing, and defecating

together, never freed from their heavy iron links.

After the character's release from the chain gang, David watched a

game of dice in an al eyway during a Saturday visit to town. A ght

breaks out: "A steel blade glinted in the yel ow light. The burly

nigger grunted and clutched at his neck. The assailant dropped the

knife and ed. Someone scooped up the money and ran. Only the

knife was left by the time the restaurant proprietor and his two

customers rushed out. David instinctively turned to the lighted

streets, hoping to lose himself in the crowds. Dark forms scurried

by. A strong hand grasped the boy's arm and a voice demanded:

‘What's yo’ hurry nigger?’

" ‘I didn't do nothing,’ " he protested frantical y.2

Rounded up with four other young black men, none of whom

was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that

was connected to the ght, Jackson is convinced by the sheri that

he must al ow the county's largest landowner to buy him or sit in a

vermin-infested jail for a year, awaiting trial. Sold to the white

plantation farmer for $25—ostensibly to pay a ne for disturbing

the peace—David is taken in chains to Jim Deering's remote

plantation. There he is worked as a slave, and witnesses how

Deering handles those blacks who resist any order— ogging men

on their naked but ocks with straps dipped in syrup and sand,

beating men with sts and clubs. As the farm fal s behind during

picking season—raising the prospect that some of the cot on in the

eld could be lost—Deering's methods of compel ing the slaves to

work harder grow even more sadistic. To teach others a lesson, he

orders a man nicknamed "High Yal er" for his lighter skin to be

whipped for stopping to get a drink of water.

A guard slipped handcu s on him. Another appeared with a long,

leather strap of knotted thongs. With a quick movement the guards threw

him face down. One sat on his shoulders and the other on his feet. Charlie

slipped the niggers overalls down until the buttocks were exposed, took

the strap and stepped back. It swished through the air and cracked like a

pistol shot on the brown flesh.

High Yaller screamed and squirmed, rubbing his face in the soil. The

guards dug their feet into the earth to keep from being thrown off.

Red welts showed on the skin.

The strap swished through the air again. High Yaller ceased screaming

before the twentieth stroke. He moaned and his body jerked

spasmodically. His face was scratched and bleeding. He tried to spit the

red clay from his mouth but it stuck to his lips and chin. The exposed

esh was a mass of welts and criss-crossed lines of blood…. Flies settled

on the raw buttocks.3

Another morning a sick prisoner named Limpy—for his injured

hip— begs in the road to be al owed to rest. Ordered to begin

picking cot on again, Limpy has the audacity to resist. He accuses

the farmer of trying to work him to death, of treating the prisoners

worse than "real" slaves before the Civil War. "If I was yo’ slave an’

you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de

you paid a t'ousan’ dol ar fo’ me you'd tek care o’ me when I git de

mis'ries but you kin git plenty mo’ niggers cheap if I die,’ " Limpy

yel ed from the pages of the book.

Deering turned on him white with fury. His st smashed against the

nigger's face. Limpy sank to the ground, blood running from his nose and

mouth….

"Get up and go to work!" Deering ordered tersely. "Get up, or I'll give

you something to get sick over!"

"Sho," he growled, "why doan you kill me now instead o’ sendin’ me out

in de fiel's to die!"

The planter's face turned apoplectic. For a moment he tried to restrain

himself. Then with a swift movement his hand darted to his hip and drew

his pistol.

With a hoarse scream Limpy tried to scramble to his feet, his hands half

raised in supplication.

"Mist’ Deerin’—" he cried.

Deering red twice. Limpy slumped to the ground, his head on his

chest….

"You asked for it, you black bastard! …I want no impudence around

here!" he shouted to the terrified niggers at the tables. "Remember that!"

He turned to the gigantic nigger beside him. "Weight the son of a bitch

and bury him in the swamp!"4

Spivak's protagonist eventual y escaped Deering's farm, but his

freedom leads only to a series of pathetic and ever more desperate

e orts to avoid returning to his slave status under Deering or

another white man. Final y nding a way out of his home county

and the feudal dominion of Deering and the sheri he control ed,

Jackson discovers that every other town in Georgia is another

vortex of police coercion and involuntary servitude. He is quickly

arrested and sold to other white men. Hunted down by

bloodhounds after another escape—betrayed by a prisoner who had

been "stretched" on a rack by guards—-Jackson is nal y resigned to

his fate. Spikes riveted to his ankles and an iron col ar padlocked to

a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.5

a five-foot chain, Jackson accepts that he wil die a slave.

To underscore the veracity of Spivak's description of black life in

Georgia, the author published as a visual epilogue to the book a

series of photographs taken in Georgia's labor camps. He reprinted

reports detailing whippings, extra chains, and "put in barrel"—a

variation of the sweatbox. One document—titled "O cial Whipping

Report"—listed fty beatings at one camp in August 1930. A gal ery

of photographs showed bloodhounds baying at an escapee in a tree.

Guards proudly demonstrated to their visitor the latest techniques of

punishment and torture—colonial-era stocks, black men trussed

around pick handles like pigs ready for slaughter, the "stretching"

rack.67

Across the South, despite claimed reforms in many states, more

prisoners than ever before were pressed into compel ed labor for

private contractors— but now almost entirely through local customs

and informal arrangements in city and county courts. The state of

Alabama was no longer sel ing slaves to coal mines, but thousands

of men continued to work on a chain gang or under lease to a local

owner. The total number of men arrested on misdemeanor charges

and subject to sale by county sheri s in 1927 grew to 37,701. One

out of every nineteen black men over the age of twelve in Alabama

was captured in some form of involuntary servitude.

The triviality of the charges used to justify the massive numbers

of people forced into labor never diminished. More than 12,500

people were arrested in Alabama in 1928 for possessing or sel ing

alcohol; 2,735 were charged with vagrancy; 2,014 with gaming; 458

for leaving the farm of an employer without permission; 154 with

the age-old vehicle for stopping intimate relations between blacks

and whites: adultery.

Roughly half of al African Americans—or 4.8 mil ion—lived in

the Black Belt region of the South in 1930, the great majority of

whom were almost certainly trapped in some form of coerced labor

like that described in Spivak's chil ing account.

Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and

Two Mississippi sheri s reported making between $20,000 and

$30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring

black laborers and sel ing them to local planters. After a plea for

more cot on pickers in August 1932, police in Macon, Georgia,

scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy"

charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner

named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a

similar roundup in the cot on town of Helena, Arkansas.8

Ot o B. Wil is, a forty-six-year-old white farmer living near

Evergreen, Alabama, deep in the Black Belt, wrote the Department

of Justice in 1933, describing the desperate system under which

black families were held as de facto serfs on the land of the county's

white landowners. Why Wil is— an Alabama-born farmer with a

wife and six children, living on land they owned—would be moved

to defend the plight of the tens of thousands of black laborers who

shared rural Hale County with him is a mystery. But in an elegant

longhand, he described point by damning point how black men and

their wives and children were compel ed to remain at work for

years upon years to retire so-cal ed debts for their seed, tools, food,

clothing, and mules that could never be extinguished, regardless of

how much cot on they grew in any year. Lit le had changed since

Klansmen in Hale County shipped R. H. Skinner to the Alabama

slave mines in 1876.

"The negro is worse than broke…. His family goes ragged and

without medical at ention and the women are at ended by ignorant

colored midwives at childbirth and many die from blood poison,"

Wil is wrote. "The negro is half starved and half clothed, yet he sees

no hope of ever being out of debt, cause many landowners tel

them if they move o his land he wil have them put in jail or

threatened bodily harm. Colored people have lit le standing in

court here. So he is afraid to move. So they are forced to remain on

and start another crop for the landlord…. These are the facts…. Is it

right?"9

Whatever motivation Wil is had in penning his detailed litany of

the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the

the mechanics of slavery in the 1930s, federal o cials weary of the

issue had lit le interest. Writing on behalf of the at orney general,

Joseph B. Keenan replied with the timeworn explanation for why

slavery was not a mat er meriting the at ention of the Department

of Justice—that only narrowly de ned debt slavery would be

examined by federal agents.

"Peonage is a condition of compulsory service based upon the

indebtedness of the peon to the master; the basal fact being

indebtedness," Keenan wrote, in bored, boilerplate language.

Ignoring that Wil is's let er explicitly described a system of holding

laborers against their wil until claimed debts were paid o , the

Justice Department o cial dismissed Wil is with a patronizing

bureaucratic directive. "If you have any speci c facts showing that

the mat er fal s within the above de nition, it is suggested that you

report the same." The case was closed.10

By the middle of the decade before World War I , federal

investigations into peonage al but stopped except in the most

egregious cases. Even those resulted in the rarest convictions. Even

more rare was meaningful punishment. On October 13, 1941,

Charles E. Bledsoe pleaded guilty in federal court in Mobile,

Alabama, to a charge of peonage for holding a black man named

Martin Thompson against his wil . Using the same technique as

John Pace in 1903, Bledsoe didn't resist the charge and trusted that

federal o cials and the U.S. District Court judge would not deal

harshly with a white man holding slaves. He was correct. Bledsoe's

punishment was a ne of $100 and six months of probation. The

status of new black slavery appeared complete. The futility of

combating it was clear.

Less than two months after the slap on the wrist of Charles Bledsoe,

the naval forces of imperial Japan launched their at ack on Pearl

Harbor. Caught at-footed and unprepared for war, U.S. o cials

frantical y planned for a massive national mobilization. President

Franklin D. Roosevelt instinctively knew the second-class citizenship

and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited

and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited

by the enemies of the United States. At orney General Francis

Biddle cal ed together his top assistants and shared the president's

concern. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to

cede virtual y al al egations of slavery to local jurisdiction—

e ectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Biddle—

favorite son of an elite Northern family in Philadelphia—was

shocked. He could not comprehend that forced labor continued in

America on more than "a few plantations."11

Nonetheless, Biddle knew that in an al -out war, in which

mil ions of African Americans would be cal ed upon to sacri ce in

a struggle to protect freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia, the

U.S. government had to make clear that anyone who continued to

practice slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment,

would be prosecuted as a criminal.

Five days after the Japanese at ack, on December 12, 1941,

Biddle issued a directive—Circular No. 3591—to al federal

prosecutors acknowledging the long history of the unwrit en federal

law enforcement policy to ignore most reports of involuntary

servitude. "A survey of the Department les on al eged peonage

violations discloses numerous instances of ‘prosecution declined,’ "

he wrote. "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the

at ention of the United States At orneys to the possibilities of

successful prosecutions stemming from al eged peonage complaints

which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke

federal prosecution." Biddle proceeded to lay out a series of federal

criminal statutes that could be used to prosecute slavery—al of

which had long been available to federal of icials.

He ordered that instead of relying on the quirks of the old anti-

peonage statute as an excuse for not at acking instances of forced

labor, prosecutors and investigators should embrace "building the

cases around the issue of involuntary servitude and slavery"12

Biddle descended from extensive antebel um Virginia

slaveholders in his mother's family and from the most pedigreed

line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-

line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-

grandfather, Nicholas Biddle, had served as president of the Bank of

the United States under President James Monroe. Like virtual y

every white American who considered themselves racial y moderate

in 1941, Biddle was more than a pet y racist as wel . In his

memoirs, Biddle chuckled at the speech of a "colored boy" testifying

in a trial early in his legal career. His "vocabulary, from a generous

estimate, could not have contained more than a few hundred

words." He described black babies born in a clinic for unwed

mothers as "exhibiting, like Indians, the glowing beauty of primitive

children." His "colored man, Benjamin …polished brass with the

ardor with which his race always approaches brass and with a grave

friendly dignity helped our guests with their coats and hats after a

dinner party"13

Yet Biddle—especial y when faced with the harsh but truthful

depiction of black life as it would be suddenly projected through

the propaganda of Japan and Germany—fundamental y grasped

that African Americans, no mat er how condescendingly he viewed

them, had been denied the compact of freedom forged in the Civil

War. "One response of this country to the chal enge of the ideals of

democracy made by the new ideologies of Fascism and

Communism has been a deepened realization of the values of a

government based on a belief in the dignity and rights of man,"

Biddle said in one major wartime speech.14 He mounted the rst

modest legal at ack on the southern states’ successful expulsion of

blacks from political participation. Unlike any prior U.S. at orney

general, he recognized the federal government's duty to admit that

African Americans were not free and to assertively enforce the

statutes writ en to protect them. "We determined to breathe new

life" into the dormant civil rights laws, Biddle later wrote.15

The Justice Department's recently formed Civil Rights Section,

created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized labor

cases, began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse.

Less than a week into the ravages of World War I , Biddle

explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas

explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas

Jones in the 1903 trials that had unwit ingly facilitated so much

slavery across the South in the intervening half century.

"In the United States one cannot sel himself as a peon or slave—

the law is xed and established to protect the weak-minded, the

poor, the miserable. Men wil sometimes sel themselves for a meal

of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his bond

to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any

such sale or contract is positively nul and void and the procuring

and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes,"

argued Biddle in his memo. Henceforth, he ordered al Department

of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in

their writ en reports. They were to instead label every le as

related to what it truly was—what it had always been for the past

seven decades: "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."16

In August 1942, a let er from a sixteen-year-old black boy arrived at

the Department of Justice al eging that Charles Bledsoe—the

Alabama man who received a $100 ne for peonage prior to

Biddle's memo—was stil holding members of the boy's family as

slaves. Despite the Biddle directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover

initial y saw no need to mount another aggressive investigation. The

U.S. at orney in Mobile, Francis H. Inge, was similarly disinterested.

"No active investigation wil be instituted," Hoover wrote to

Assistant At orney General Wendel Berge, at empting to close the

file.17

That would have been the end of the mat er even a year earlier.

But seven months into World War I , with the nation anxious to

mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's

and Germany's propaganda machines, Berge directed Hoover to

look further. "In accordance with the request of the At orney

General that we expedite cases related to Negro victims, it wil be

appreciated if this mat er is given preference," Berge wrote in a

terse let er ordering Inge into action.18

"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many

"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many

in which members of the Negro race have been the victims. Enemy

propagandists have used similar episodes in international

broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are

insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Berge wrote. "There

have been received from the President an instruction that lynching

complaints shal be investigated as soon as possible; that the results

of the investigation be made public in al instances, and the persons

responsible for such lawless acts vigorously prosecuted. The

At orney General has requested that we expedite other cases related

to Negro victims. Accordingly, you are requested to give the mat er

your immediate at ention."19

Biddle's civil rights lawyers began to reassess fundamental y the

legal breadth of the constitutional amendments ending slavery, the

Reconstruction-era statutes passed to enforce them, and other

largely forgot en laws such as the antebel um Slave Kidnapping Act,

which made it il egal to capture or hold forced laborers in U.S.

territory where slavery was prohibited.

As the war progressed, the Department of Justice vigorously

prosecuted U.S. Sugar Company in Florida for forcing black men

into their sugarcane elds. Sheri s who col uded with the company

were brought to trial. Before the end of World War I , the federal

courts would rule that slaveholders could be prosecuted for

peonage, even if the debt they claimed a worker owed them was

ctitious. It was a subtle change. But the decision eliminated what

had been a standard defense against the crime—the assertion that

no evidence of a debt between the slave and slave driver existed.

Final y, early in September 1942, a team of FBI agents, highway

patrolmen, and deputies descended on a remote farm near Beevil e,

Texas, to arrest a white farmer, Alex Skrobarcek, and his adult

daughter, Susie Skro-barcek. They were initial y charged in a state

court with maiming a mental y retarded black worker named

Alfred Irving. But a month later, lawyers at the Department of

Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held

Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held

Irving in slavery for at least four years. They were accused of

repeatedly beating the man with whips, chains, and ropes—so

much so that he was physical y disfigured from the abuse.20

Signaling the special signi cance of the case, a special assistant to

At orney General Biddle actively participated in prosecuting the

trial. He later wrote that investigators found "overwhelming"

evidence that the Skrobarceks "repeatedly horsewhipped the victim

…starved him and otherwise held him in fear."21

The at orneys argued that the century-old Slavery Kidnapping Act

applied to this case of abject involuntary servitude, in apparently

the rst such prosecution since the Civil War. The defendants were

found guilty and sentenced to federal prison. Federal o cials made

clear that the case was intended to send a message that despite any

claims by U.S. enemies, the federal government was nal y serious

about ending involuntary servitude for African Americans.

"The Skrobarczyk [sic] trial and its conclusion undoubtedly wil

be said … to have given a decisive setback to the enemy

propaganda machine …urging …negroes that their proper place in

this conflict is with the yel ow race," editorialized the Corpus Christi

Times.22

Two years later, President Harry Truman's Commit ee on Civil

Rights recommended bolstering the anti-slavery statute to plainly

criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal

criminal code was dramatical y rewrit en, further clarifying the laws

against involuntary servitude. Final y, in 1951, Congress passed

even more explicit statutes, making any form of slavery in the

United States indisputably a crime.

Reports of involuntary servitude continued to trickle in to federal

investigators wel into the 1950s. But America—however deeply

racist it remained—had begun a profound change. Mil ions of

soldiers—black and white—had witnessed the horror of racial

ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany.

Thousands of African American men who returned as ghting men,

unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that

unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that

preceded the war, abandoned the South altogether or joined in the

agitation that would become the civil rights movement. Throughout

the region, tractors, new chemicals, and cot on pickers began to

radical y reduce the need for manual labor in elds of cot on,

soybeans, and tobacco. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in

Brown v. Board of Education desegregating public schools and

reversing the cynical logic of 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, sealed

forever that the terror regime which had dominated black life over

the previous ninety years was ending.

It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hol ow

emancipation, the nal delivery of African Americans from overt

slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in

their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors

perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised

minorities.

EPILOGUE

The Ephemera of Catastrophe

Still the voice of Green Cottenham would not speak. For six years I sought signs of

him. Nowhere was there more than the faintest trace. A icker here that a brother,

Sam, almost ten years his elder, died in 1953. Musty evidence that his sisters

married and remarried. A last glimpse of Mary, his mother, living her nal years at an

address on Block Street in the town of Montevallo, a few blocks from where she and

Henry moved long before, still in the shadow of the old slavery world. There, sometime

in the 1930s, Mary Cottenham, the girl born a slave and married at the dawn of

freedom, died alone. In the place of the little house she occupied for so long, only

weeds grow.

The black Cottinghams descended from the old plantation on Six Mile Road were

scattered, in variant spellings and skin tones, across the United States. I found a woman

my own age in Shelby County named Molly Cottenham. She knew little of her family's

past.

Molly is descended from Gabe, a toddler in the Cottingham Loop house of Milt

Cottingham when he was saved by his brothers from arrest and re-enslavement in 1893.

Gabe grew to manhood and scratched together enough to eventually buy land in Shelby

County, near a community of farms called Keywater. Nearby, a ferry transported goods

across the Coosa River from Fayetteville. A contemporary of Green, living in the same

county, Gabe almost certainly would have known of his cousin's fate at Slope No. 12.

Gabe's sons, Edgar, Charlie, and Abraham, joined in the heavy labor of poorly

educated workers of the time. Abraham died pouring iron in a foundry, according to

the few stories passed down to Molly, who still lives not far from the old Keywater

homeplace. Edgar worked in a quarry before retiring and then dying in the 1980s.

Gabe was forced to ee Shelby County after a ght with a white man, Molly was told.

Edgar and Charlie lived most of their lives without their father, reared by their mother.

Little else of the context or human familial foundation survives for the descendants

of the black Cottingham line. Molly, forty- ve years old in 2008, and the mother of two

grown children, doesn't remember her grandmother's name. She never knew the

identities of her great-grandparents.1

In some respects, it is little surprise that the long-lingering persistence of American

slavery has been so largely ignored. Its longevity mars the mythology most white

Americans rely upon to explain our past and to embroider our present. At the same

time, it grieves and shames the descendants of its victims. They recoil from the

implication that emancipated black Americans could not exercise freedom, and

remained under the cruel thumb of white America, despite the explicit guarantees of

the Constitution, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and the moral resolve of

the Civil War.

Harold Cottingham lives in a modest house on a quiet street in Centre-ville, Alabama.

In an o ce he built onto his workshop in the backyard, piles of newspaper clippings

and letters are heaped where he left them years ago—while piecing together the

genealogy of all the acknowledged descendants of Elisha Cottingham. He is Elisha's

grandson, four generations removed. Every summer, Harold visits the old family burial

ground to make sure the grass has been properly cut back from the tombstones. Today,

age and health challenge his dedication to the family plot. Already, the forest has

overtaken the sunken unmarked graves of many of those who died black on the

Cottingham farm.

On a chilly day, Harold and his wife take me to lunch at Oliver's, a little restaurant in

a historic home across the street from the Bibb County courthouse and its monument to

Confederate war dead. They know by verse the heroic accounts of how Elisha extracted

a legacy from the Alabama wilderness, and each of the succeeding white generations

that followed.

Nowhere in the stories is there reference to Scip, the man who worked beside Elisha

for most of fty years, who carved the farm from the forest with him. Harold, a gentle

man, is not responsible for the washing away of the memories of the family's partners

and likely cousins of the past. They had vaporized long before Harold became the

Cottingham storyteller. "I knew there was some slaves out there," he told me. "But I

never knew there was so many."2

The residual wealth of W. D. McCurdy's baronic slave farm in Lowndes County still

dominates a cluster of fabulous white-columned mansions in the old cotton town of

Lowndesboro, Alabama. A family mansion sits at the end of McCurdy Lane. W. D.

McCurdy's great-greatgrandchildren still hold much of the family land, but cotton died

here long ago. The county's overwhelming black majority elected the rst African

American sheriff in the 1970s.

The vast wealth of John T Milner began to dissipate with his death in the early

twentieth century. The dynasty that grew from his partnership with the Flowers family

collapsed in a 1920s bank failure. By 2007, however, a Massachusetts-reared grandson

three generations removed, Chris Flowers, had resurrected and exponentially eclipsed

the family's prior fortunes. His rm, J. C. Flowers & Co., emerged as one of the most

dynamic financiers in the private equity boom on Wall Street.3

Like Elisha Cottingham's antebellum slavery, few others of the thousands of

plantation dynasties forged with the modern forced labor of John W. Pace survived its

nal abolition. The big houses of the great Kinderlou slave farm in Georgia all burned

before World War II. The McRee family fell into obscurity. Pace died within a decade

of his pardon by President Roosevelt. In 1926, a hydroelectric dam was completed by a

Southern Company subsidiary on the Tallapoosa River, several miles south of the

convergence with Big Sandy Creek. The rich river-bottom plantation of John Pace,

along with many of the other slaveholding farms along Red Ridge Road, was swallowed

under 44,000 acres of water, much of it more than one hundred feet deep. Pace's

schoolteacher son, Fulton, became a civil engineer for the town of Goodwater and died

sometime after World War II. His grandson, Fulton Jr., retired to Florida and died there

in 1976. On a hilltop, near the lake's edge, a Cosby family cemetery plot clings to

existence amid a cluster of vacation homes.4

The legacy of this slavery is stronger among the corporations that relied on it. In 1969

Walter Industries, Inc., acquired an ailing company called U.S. Pipe & Foundry

Company in Birmingham. Seventeen years earlier, that company had merged with Sloss-

She eld Iron and Steel, the company with the longest record of operating slave mines

in Alabama. The purchase included Flat Top mine, where so many black laborers

perished under the whip. Later, the company changed the name of the mine and

bulldozed the old prison stockade. The sprawling town that surrounded the shafts was

abandoned when the mine shut down. In the 1980s, Walter Industries strip-mined the

land—consuming the earth and coal with massive machines that obliterated the

landscape for miles. Only an abandoned stretch of rail line and the old commissary, its

windows blown out, survive.

The old Sloss-She eld today is a subsidiary called Sloss Industries. Its parent's best-

known enterprise is another division called Jim Walter Homes—a famous maker of

inexpensive, prefabricated homes. A sign of aspiration and success among low-income

African Americans all across the Black Belt is to leave behind public housing or

broken-down trailer homes and purchase the comfort of a Jim Walter home.

Descendants of the South's forced laborers are a critical market.

On the Web site of Sloss Industries, the company heralds its long and rich history as

a titan of southern industry that helped "launch Birmingham's rise to fame as a major

industrial center."5 There is no reference to the human engines that fueled so much

economic activity over Sloss's nearly fifty-year reliance on slaves after the Civil War.

In the 1960s, U.S. Steel published a 100th anniversary commemorative book to honor

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.'s history dating to the 1860s. But the volume says

nothing of the tens of thousands of slave workers who passed through its mines, the

armies of broken miners, the hundreds buried or burned in its graveyards and ovens.

The executives of Walter Industries in the twenty- rst century say they know nothing

of that past. "Obviously, this was a dark chapter for U.S. business," Kyle Parks, a

spokesman for the company, told me in 2001. "Certainly no company today could even

conceive of this kind of practice."

In Atlanta, the fortunes generated at slave mines, plantations, and the nightmarish

Chattahoochee Brick became pillars of the economic transformation and social orbits

of the city that would outpace all others in the South. A daughter of James W. English

married a bank executive named James Robinson Sr., who grew the Fourth National

Bank into the most prosperous in the South. The family guided the bank through a

series of mergers and acquisitions ending in 1985, when it was purchased by a

company that is now part of Wachovia Bank Corp.—the fourth largest in the United

States as measured by assets. English's great-grandson, James Robinson III, was the chief

executive o cer of American Express from 1977 to 1993 and became a member of the

board of Coca-Cola Co., where he serves today.

Joel Hurt, who believed the slaves in his coal mines could never be whipped too

much, was also chairman of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank. In 1893, Hurt installed as

head of his streetcar company his younger brother-in-law Ernest Woodru . Leveraging

his interests in real estate and slave mines, Hurt and his enterprises became Atlanta's

most energetic deal makers and buyout artists. Beginning with a sale in 1902, the

streetcar company evolved over time into Georgia Power Company— agship of

Southern Company, one of the largest electric utilities in the United States today. In

1919, after succeeding Hurt as chairman of Trust Company, Woodru engineered the

purchase of Coca-Cola for $25 million and the current incarnation of that company.

Suntrust Bank, the modern version of Trust Company, remains one of the largest

holders of stock in Coca-Cola. Woodru 's son, Robert Woodru , was named president

of Coke in 1923, and ran the company until 1954, becoming the era's most in uential

business figure in the South. He died in 1985.

But what do these threads to a terrible past tell us? Every gure who chose to continue

slavery is dead. None of the actions, however cruel, of long-dead companies or men can

be interpreted as a re ection on their current corporate manifestations or on distant

lines of familial descent. I wanted to know, though, how the heirs to slave-dependent

corporations and the pools of wealth they sometimes left behind perceive that history

today—or whether they knew of it at all.

When I contacted descendants of Atlanta's former mayor and extraordinary early

entrepreneur James W. English, who died in 1925, the family asked me to speak with

Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the son-in-law of James Robinson III. It was obvious that even

nine decades after his death, English's descendants are drenched in the lore of his

remarkable life and achievements.

Cook is an elite architect, an ardent preservationist, and the driving force behind an

ambitious plan to build a dramatic seventy-three-foot-high monument in downtown

Atlanta as a tribute to the great families of the city, including the family of Captain

English. Once it is completed, exhibition space at the classical stone archway will

house the personal papers of English, Joel Hurt, and other pioneering builders of the

city. Some black entrepreneurs of later in the twentieth century will be featured as well.

Cook told me the museum space is expected to become the primary institution for

presenting the positive history of Atlanta and its emergence as a major American city

and commercial center.

After a long lunch with Cook and English Robinson, another family member, I was

uncertain, however, about how the museum will present the crucial role of the new

slavery in building Atlanta and the fortunes of their forebear. "In the proper context, we

don't object to it being discussed," Cook told me.6 But they were insistent that no

signi cant abuses of African Americans had ever occurred at the brick factory, coal

mines, and lumber camps of a century ago. They cited an admirable account of

English's unsuccessfully attempting to calm and disperse the white mobs that rampaged

in Atlanta during the bloody race riot of 1906 and a nineteenth-century newspaper

article extolling the food and fellowship o ered to the forced laborers at the family

brick factory. They knew nothing of the real history. I sympathized with their

discomfort in encountering my contradictions to the heroic, tutelary portrait of English

handed down through generations. But I left our dialogue worried that the slaves who

made the bricks with which Atlanta was built would yet be denied their place in the

city's history.

Most corporations say it would be terribly wrong to associate their current

manifestations with the abuses of convict leasing and twentieth-century forced labor—

particularly for actions committed by companies they acquired or merged into decades

after the fact.

Drummond Coal Company, founded in 1935,7 says it has no meaningful connection

to the use of convict labor, despite its merger in 1985 with Alabama By-Products

Corp.,8 a company created through a merger in 1925 with Pratt Consolidated Coal, one

of the biggest users of forced labor during the previous two decades and owner of the

deadly Banner Mine.

Drummond today is a family-owned coal and real estate company based in Jasper,

Alabama, with mining operations in Alabama and South America. "I don't know how we

could be tied back to something that happened in the early part of the century,"

Drummond spokesman Mike Tracy said when I called to inquire about the company's

roots. "Drummond wasn't even founded then."9

U.S. Steel executives say that while convict leasing was clearly "abhorrent," their

company shouldn't be associated with it—especially events that predated the

acquisition of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad in late 1907. "When it comes to the

question of burden, I don't think anybody here at this company today would feel

burdened at all by anything that happened before 1908," Richard F. Lerach, assistant

general counsel to U.S. Steel, told me in 2001. "If we in fact knew that the people who

were there between 1908 and 1911 were forced to work in obviously unsafe

conditions, which we don't know that was true, we would feel badly about that."10

Legally, there are few grounds on which to argue that a modern corporation inherits

any liability of a predecessor's civil rights violations or other crimes that might have

occurred in the distant past. A federal judge in 2004 denounced the horrors of a 1921

rampage by whites in Tulsa, Oklahoma, who killed between one hundred and three

hundred African Americans and destroyed more than a thousand homes.11 But at the

same time he dismissed a lawsuit brought by elderly plainti s whose families were

attacked in the riot, saying the statute of limitations had passed for any legal claims and

that the passage of time would make it impossible for the truth ever to be fully

revealed.

Yet U.S. law is unequivocal that the deaths of executives who were responsible for

dubious actions don't end a company's legal obligations. And in the speci c area of

hazardous waste, the United States has adopted laws forcing companies to take

responsibility for contamination by predecessor companies, regardless of the passage of

time. "It doesn't matter whether you had nothing to do with this toxic stu . If you buy a

company that failed to clean up this stu , you're responsible," says Martha Minow, a

professor at Harvard University Law School who has written extensively about

reparations for social abuses. "Why have we done that on environmental matters, but

not race?"12

Indeed, the commercial sectors of U.S. society have never been asked to fully account

for their roles as the primary enforcers of Jim Crow segregation, and not at all for

engineering the resurrection of forced labor after the Civil War. The civil rights

movement focused on forcing government and individual citizens to integrate public

schools, reinstate full voting rights, and end offensive behavior.

But it was business that policed adherence to America's racial customs more than any

other actor in U.S. society. American banks maintained ubiquitous discriminatory

lending practices throughout the country that until the 1960s prevented millions of

working-class African Americans from obtaining the lines of credit that millions of

white families used to accumulate wealth and move from lower- to middle-class status.

Indeed, the opportunity for blacks to pursue the most basic American formula for

achieving middle-class status—buying a home in desirable neighborhoods where real

estate values were likely to appreciate over time—was openly barred by legions of real

estate agents in every city and region. Until the 1950s, rules of the National Association

of Realtors made it a violation of the organization's code of ethics for an agent to sell a

home in a white neighborhood to an African American, or vice versa. It was hundreds

of thousands of individual businesses that refused to give blacks jobs, equal pay, or

promotions. It was wealthy men on Wall Street and in the executive suites of southern

banks that nanced the organized opposition to passage of the Civil Rights Act of

1964.13

U.S. Steel executives say that whatever happened at the company's Alabama mines

long ago, it would be impossible to appropriately assign responsibility for any

corporation's actions in so remote an era. "Is it fair in fact to punish people who are

living today, who have certain assets they might have inherited from others, or

corporate assets that have been passed on?" said Lerach. "You can get to a situation

where there is such a passage of time that it simply doesn't make sense and is not fair."

U.S. Steel said it knew almost nothing about the cemeteries in Pratt City, where so

many are buried. It still owns the properties, and obtained a cemetery property tax

exemption on the largest burial eld in 1997. But o cials say they are unable to locate

records of burials there, or of the company prisons that once stood nearby, or for that

matter any other aspect of the company's history of leasing forced laborers. The only

reference to the graveyards in surviving corporate documents, they say, is a map of the

property marked with the notation "Negro Cemetery." Company o cials theorize that

the graveyard was an informal burial area used by African American families living

nearby, with no formal connection to U.S. Steel.

"Are there convicts on that site? Possibly, quite possibly," said Tom Fer-rall, the

company spokesman. "But I am unable to tell you that there are."14

A striking contrast to U.S. Steel's approach is that of Wachovia Bank, the North

Carolina financial institution that in 1985 acquired FirstAtlanta Corp., the bank born of

the wealth created by James W. English's slave-driven brick factory in Atlanta.

Prompted by an ordinance passed by the Chicago City Council, Wachovia disclosed in

2005 that two predecessor banks in Georgia and South Carolina owned or held as

collateral at least 691 slaves before the Civil War. It formally apologized to "all

Americans and especially to African Americans and people of African descent,"

established scholarship funds for minorities, and promoted a broad discussion of racial

issues inside the company. 15

Wachovia's chief executive o cer, Ken Thompson, a fty-seven-year-old native of

Rocky Mount, North Carolina, was an enlightened white southerner but had never

much considered if the racial climate of earlier eras related to the present. Like many

Americans, he was vaguely uncomfortable with the idea of delving into sensitive

discussions of race or the past.

"I had the attitude that this was something that happened ve generations ago, and

we have no responsibility for it," Thompson told me. But he was convinced by a close

adviser that the disclosure requirement ought to be taken seriously, both to ensure the

bank's ongoing business relationship with the city of Chicago and to demonstrate its

willingness to probe a difficult issue honestly.

A team of historians was hired to investigate the past records of Wachovia, all the

banks it had acquired, and all their corporate predecessors . Once the results were

back, Thompson and other top managers began meeting with employee groups to

discuss the ndings and repeatedly apologizing for the company's ties to events more

than 150 years earlier. What initially felt like a rote "diversity" relations process to

fulfill a government regulation quickly became something more profound.

"I was overwhelmed by the emotional impact our apology had …for African American

employees," Thompson said. Workers cried, held hands, embraced one another

regardless of company rank, and, in an unprecedented way, began speaking to one

another.

"Just by going through the act of acknowledging something that happened one

hundred fty years before and talking about it galvanized that group…It was cathartic,"

Thompson said. "African American employees at our company in my view all of a

sudden are always willing to give us the bene t of the doubt on our intentions about

anything that's race related. There's a deeper trust…. What you get is more

understanding and more ‘Okay let's go forward and gure out solutions for this in the

future. Let's not rehash this forever.’ "16

By frankly confronting a past that Wachovia didn't know existed and then expected to

stir anger and tumult, an old southern bank found a kind of peace.

I found something similarly gratifying in the life of Judge Eugene Reese, the grandson

of the federal prosecutor who worked so assiduously—and unsuccessfully—to beat back

slavery in 1903. The contemporary Reese actually knew nothing about that surprising

crusade by his grandfather, who died before the eventual judge was born. But like his

grandfather, Eugene Reese, a Democrat, is neither a bleeding heart nor willing to shy

away from the vestiges of slavery. "Some people say we still have slavery," he said to

me. Reese's most controversial ruling was in a 1990s case in which he declared

unconstitutional Alabama's system for funding public schools, under which schools

serving children in poor areas receive dramatically less than those in more a uent

areas. The racial implications of the system, a vestige of the same constitution that

ended black voting in 1901, are obvious. Reese was excoriated in conservative circles

in his home state.

"We've come a long way in Alabama," he told me. "But we still have a ways to go."17

That most American corporations and families would rather not reopen the details of

how they pro ted from the racial attitudes in the early twentieth century is perhaps to

be expected. More puzzling is that as badly as many young African Americans want

answers to the question of what truly happened in the century after the Civil War, many

others do not.

When Earl Brown18 became a young miner in Birmingham in the 1940s, he was sent

to the remains of Flat Top mine. Where once two train lines into the shafts had been

used to separate felony prisoners from misdemeanor prisoners, the company by then

used the double-track system to separate white miners from black. Among the African

Americans, many of the oldest laborers were former prisoners who had taken jobs as

free workers in the mine after being freed from bondage. Those men still called the

bosses in the shaft "Captain," and told stories to younger men of the bru-talizations that

had occurred underground there. When Brown became a union activist, they warned

him about the dangers of white managers and they told him stories of how they had

been drawn into the mines as slaves on the basis of trumped-up charges and

kidnappings by county sheriffs.

Brown listened. But he didn't believe. "I never found it credible," he told me.

Instead, Brown and so many other African Americans accepted a rationale that whites

had long foisted upon them. There were "good" black people and "bad" black people.

Those who ended up as slave laborers were bad or weak—adding further to the terror

of being forced to join them and to share their social stain. Their injuries, and the fear

they fostered among all other African Americans, were attributed to them—not their

white masters. Whites repeatedly tried to stir this internal black tension. When Martin

Luther King Jr. arrived in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to tour the terrorized surrounding

counties of the Black Belt, he was accused of pitting good blacks versus bad. When he

drove to Lowndes County—which a full century after the end of slavery remained a

place of desolate black powerlessness and unchecked white brutality—King and his

activists were warned not to agitate the docile "good Negroes" of the county. Despite a

population overwhelmingly majority-black, whites controlled virtually all the land, and

every aspect of politics and economics. The Calhoun School had all but collapsed. Most

African Americans remained tenants and sharecroppers, living in unplumbed hovels

little changed from the desperate conditions recorded by DuBois in 1906.

No African American had cast a vote there in the twentieth century. Galvanized by

the work of civil rights ministers, dozens of young African Americans attempted

unsuccessfully during the spring and summer of that year to register to vote outside the

Lowndes County courthouse in Hayneville. On August 20, 1965, after releasing from the

local jail a group of civil rights workers who had attempted a peaceful march in the

county, Deputy Sheriff Tom Coleman—a man cut from the same crude cloth as Sheriff J.

W. Dixon, who drove out federal investigators six decades earlier—followed the

activists down a sunny street, raised a 12-gauge shotgun, and at point-blank range

gunned down two white ministers working with the group. One, Jonathan Daniels, was

killed instantly, his body all but cut in half by the force of the blast.19

Reading Charles Silberman's Crisis in Black and White after its publication the prior

year, Martin Luther King scribbled a long note in the margins of his personal copy:

"The South deluded itself with the illusion that the Negro was happy in his place; the

North deluded itself with the illusion that it had freed the Negro. The Emancipation

Proclamation freed the slave, a legal entity, but it failed to free the Negro, a person."20

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested

and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the

beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

In my quest to nd Green Cottenham, I also discovered an unsettling truth that when

white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all

marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our

connections to the speci c crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we

are tainted by the failures of our fathers to ful ll our national credos when their

courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at

the expense of others. It is not our "fault." But it is undeniably our inheritance.

I never expected to discover my own family lines as characters in the narrative of this

book. Yet to my great surprise, I learned that the branch of black Cottinghams who left

the old farm in Alabama during the Civil War and made their way to Louisiana settled

in the parish of my mother's birth, the place where I spent countless summer days on

the modest farm of my grandparents. The Cottingham descendants expired generations

in the backwoods black settlements of Jackson Parish through the cruel decades of the

twentieth century, as my family migrated from arch-poverty to blue-collar stability and

nally to the comfort of white middle-class sanctity. Today, an ebullient woman named

Maureen Cottenham, my mother's peer, writes a regular column for the parish

newspaper on the social life of African Americans in and around Jonesboro, Louisiana.

Black Cottenhams are celebrated athletes in the schools of an adjacent town. The law

rm of my eldest cousin has represented young Cottenhams who nd their way into

trouble with the law. There is a measure of relief in that justice.

But there was more. Many times in my childhood, my grandmother Myrtie Wiggins

Blackmon told me the epic story, passed down to her by my great-great-grandmother, of

the family's passage after the Civil War from a place she called New Light, Alabama, to

the hill country of northern Louisiana. Morris Foshee, my great-great-great-grandfather,

had returned from four years of ghting with the 48th Infantry to a devastated

Alabama. An inconspicuous private who had fought with his brother Wiley from 1861

until their surrender with Lee at Appomattox, he had been too poor to own slaves

before the war, and poorer still in its aftermath. But in my visits to Alabama, searching

for the shards with which to reconstruct the evil visage of John Pace, I found in the

Tallapoosa County courthouse, among the slave deeds, mortgages, and convict

contracts, the wedding license signed by Morris and my great-great-great-grandmother. I

found the place of their farm, a few miles upstream on the Coosa River from the

horri c Threat slave plantation. New Light was actually a tiny misremem-bered and

mispronounced town called Newsite. I discovered that a distant Foshee line invested in

a sawmill once operated with forced labor.

As I tugged further at the tightly threaded shrouds of the past, I learned that Morris

and Wiley served in gallant, if misguided, company—the Tal-lapoosa County men who

famously charged the hill called Little Round Top and were repulsed by a hailstorm of

Union gun re and bayonets in the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863. They attacked

that day under the direct command of Lt. Col. Michael J. Bulger, the man who thirty

years later rose in defense of John Pace as he climbed to power in Tallapoosa County.

Another decade hence, it was Bulger's son—by then the town's most prominent lawyer—

who represented Pace in his trial for slavery in 1903.

I had no hand in the horrors perpetrated by John Pace or any of the other twentieth-

century slave masters who terrorized American blacks for four generations. But it is

nonetheless true that hundreds of millions of us spring from or bene t as a result of

lines of descent that abided those crimes and benefited from them.

Over the decades, Birmingham spread to surround the cemetery where convicts in the

rst Pratt Mines prisons were buried. Low-rent apartments on one side of the

graveyard, shabby storefronts on another, an industrial site, a city park designated for

"colored" use when it was created. In 1994, industrial archaeologist Jack Bergstresser

found the cemetery while conducting a survey for the federal government to map the

remains of nearby coke ovens, mine shafts, and railroad lines.

As a boy in the 1930s, Willie Clark, a lifelong resident of Pratt City, already knew

what lay deep in the thick underbrush. He and other youngsters played among the

unmarked graves of the rst cemetery, picking blackberries from the thorny vines that

grew wild between the plots. Burials were rare by then. The older graves had begun to

collapse, he says, exposing jumbles of human bones.

"The convicts were buried out there," Clark told me, sweeping his arm toward the

overgrown eld. "I heard my daddy talking about how they would beat the convicts

with pick handles. If they didn't like them, they would kill them…. They would put them

under harsh punishment. It was gruesome back then."21

Though in his ninth decade, Clark, more than six feet tall, could still walk with me to

the site from his nearby home and point out where old mine shafts reached the surface

and where dozens of company houses once stood. He told me his father also said that

when convicts were killed in the shafts, company o cials sometimes didn't take the

time to bury them, but instead tossed the bodies into the red-hot coke ovens glowing

nearby.

"What can you do about it now?" he says, stepping gingerly through the trees and

undergrowth. "But the company…ought to clean that land up, or turn it back over to the

city or somebody else who can make some use of it, take care of it."

On a cool fall night, Pearline Danzey the eighty-eight-year-old matriarch of the

extended family of Martin Danzy who died as a slave worker in a turpentine camp in

1916, welcomed me to her home. She presided from a worn vinyl recliner in her living

room over a parade of nieces, nephews, and children. Across the room, her

bewhiskered grandfather—one of Martin's older brothers—squints from a faded

photograph above the television set. After all these years, it is hard for Mrs. Danzey to

stay focused on the story of Uncle Martin—now commingled with so much time,

struggle, and memories of the other privations and violence that came with life as a

young black girl on a sharecrop farm. Whether the companies that played a hand in the

abuse and death of her uncle and other African Americans should be held accountable

today is an abstraction she can't or won't waste time contemplating.

" To kill a colored person then, it wasn't nothing," she says. "We was slaves too in a

way."22

For most of the Danzeys gathered that night, this is the rst time they have heard

"Pearl," as Mrs. Danzey is known to them all, tell the harsh tales of her childhood. Her

daughter Ida was of the generation in their country town that as teenagers integrated

the local schools and de ed the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s. They are lled with a sense

of righteous victory over the segregation of their childhoods. But until this night, Ida

Hogan and most of the others had never inquired—never considered really—that the

childhood Pearline was born into had been one vastly more difficult than their own.

"Our daddy and momma never taught us to hate white people…. We just got taught

who always got the job, who had authority, and we were supposed to address them with

respect," explained Ida, one of Pearline's nieces. "Until the civil rights movement we

didn't know" life could be any other way, she said.

The racial disparities of the 1950s and 1960s were the routine, rarely commented-

upon backdrop of rural black life. "We had to pick cotton to buy books, so we picked

cotton," said Cynthia James, a great-niece of Pearline's in her late forties. "It was much

later on that we realized that the raggedy old books we were getting were just being

passed on."

Inspired by Martin Luther King's historic visit to Selma, Ida and six other black

children in Abbeville in 1966 insisted on being served in the town's whites-only diner.

It was a turning point for the community. Her generation became the family's bridge

between the desperate farm life Pearl was born into and today's mystifying era, when

relative prosperity, lingering racial tensions, and the occasional biracial marriage all

coexist in Henry County.

The Danzeys live in a place where cotton has been grown for most of two centuries

and where Mrs. Danzey's family traces its history back to 1832 and a slave, Frank,

brought to the county by a local white farmer named John Danzey. Pearline

remembered her uncle Martin mostly as a man who spelled his last name without an

"e," as did one line of white Danzys who lived nearby. She said she no longer

remembered his alleged crime.

"My granddaddy used to talk about him. He went o to prison and died there," she

says. "They was real sad about it."

In years past, Pearline had told her granddaughter, Melissa Danzey Craddock, that

Uncle Martin and another local man were arrested after a brawl among men gambling

outside a rural church. By the end of the ght, one man was dead. It wasn't clear

whether the elder Mrs. Danzey's recollection had failed or, as was the case in many

black families in Alabama, the stigma of imprisonment makes her uncomfortable

discussing the subject. One thing is certain: after his arrest, Uncle Martin never came

back.

Pearl's father sharecropped all his life. "The man would take everything that was

made," she says of the white man on whose land her father worked. "I worked in the

elds for $1 a day." Her three sisters and three brothers worked alongside her. "If a

colored man hit a white man, they could come in and kill him."

She told the story of a childhood friend murdered by a white mob after allegedly

speaking to a white woman. She tells of another night, when one of her brothers, Henry

Edward Danzey, was seized by a mob after an argument at the town movie theater. The

sheri took him to the jail to stop the lynching and then let the black teenager go in

the dark. He made his way home, and Pearline's father and uncles waited all night with

pistols, sticks, and rocks, expecting the mob to arrive. The whites never came, and

Pearl's brother left town to join the army.

Only after Dr. King, she says, did "people see how colored people were treated," and

the terror began to subside.

The younger Danzeys aren't sure what to make of the story of Uncle Martin. "You

can't go back and change the past. Just don't let it happen again," says Cynthia James.

Pearline's granddaughter, Melissa Craddock, disagrees. The companies that made money

o the forced labor of Uncle Martin owe something, she says. "If there was something

that came out of that, then there ought to be compensation," she says. "That was after

slavery ended."

Cynthia's brother, James Danzey, a deeply religious forty- ve-year-old, has listened

intently as his great-aunt unspooled her stories. James Danzey brings up the talk of

slave reparations he has heard recently and of other long-ago abuses of African

Americans that have come to light in recent years.

"I believe it's God's hand," says James Danzey, who works as a counselor at a center

for behaviorally disturbed children in a nearby town. "I believe there are some good

true white people of God, who realize that their ancestors did bad, and they have to

make right."

The indictments of white people, despite her own contributions, begin to make

Pearline uneasy, though. "There've always been some good white people," she interjects.

The younger people nod heads in deference.

But James Danzey doesn't waver. "Think about all the money those companies made

on those people," he says later. "Those companies should be investigated for doing that.

They should have to pay something."23

The Danzeys were as close as I would ever come to the heart of Green Cottenham. But I

did nd a version of his voice. Louis Cottingham lives in Montevallo, Alabama, the

same small town where Green Cottenham's mother went to live on Block Street after her

son's death at the Pratt Mines. Until I called out of the blue in the winter of 2003, he

had never heard of Green Cottenham.

Cottingham's wife answered the phone. She was uncertain at the sound of an

unknown white man's voice seeking her husband. Admittedly, my appearance in the

lives of descendants of twentieth-century slaves was for many akin to the arrival of

some unidenti able creature dropped from the sky. It was, for many, an unnatural, un-

credible event. As I explained who I was, where I was calling from, and my interest in

the genealogy of the black Cottinghams, she grew impatient. No, I don't want to sell

anything, I tried to reassure her. I'm a newspaper reporter in Atlanta, writing a book

about African Americans and your husband's family.

My words, increasingly quick and pleading, were disintegrating in the telephone line

on the way to Alabama. Mrs. Cottingham was hearing none of it. Finally, I blurted that

the book was about a man in their family who had been forced into slavery long after

slavery was supposed to have ended.

"Slavery?" she screeched. "You can talk to my husband. But don't nobody round here

have anything to say about slavery."

Finally, her husband took the receiver, as his wife continued a querulous mutter in

the background. "Slavery! Nothing to say about some slave!"

Louis Cottingham's voice is strong and crisp. It resonates not with the jowly dialect of

rural Alabama blacks but the smoothly de ant lilt of urban Birmingham. "Who are you

asking about?" he wanted to know. "Green Cottenham. I don't know who that is."

"No, he wasn't a brother to my daddy. I know all the names of my daddy's brothers

and sisters."

"My grandfather? No, he wasn't named Henry. His name was Elbert."

"No, not Edgar! Elbert. E-L-B-E-R-T."

Each of his sentences ended with a successively heavier tone of nality, the signal

that at any moment, still ba ed as to why this young white voice was quizzing him

about long-dead family, Cottingham was going to say an absolute goodbye. Asking him

to bear with me just a moment more, I scanned the genealogical chart of the Cottenham

family I'd constructed over the previous fourteen months. Finally, I spotted Elbert, at a

dead end of one branch of the family. His father had been a brother of Green

Cottenham's father.

"I see it now, Cottingham," I said. "Elbert Cottingham. Yes. His father was George,

born on a plantation in Bibb County in 1825. Your daddy must have been named for

him. That was your great-grandfather."

Louis Cottingham went silent for a moment, and then spoke slowly. "Well I never

knew that. I never knew past my granddaddy and my grandmother."

His tone was still unin ected. He was curious, for an instant. Perhaps he would talk

to me, would help me unlock the enigma of Green Cotten-ham. I dropped what I knew

was my only real bombshell.

"I know the name of your great-great-grandfather too," I said. "He was Scip, and he

spelled his name Cottinham. He was born in 1802, in Africa. He's the African slave you

and your family are descended from."

"You say his name was Scip?" Cottingham said.

"Yes, I think that's short for Scipio."

"A slave named Scip. Born in, when did you say? 1802?"

"Yes sir. That's right."

Cottingham turned away from the phone and repeated to his wife, "Says there was a

slave named Scip Cottinham, born in 1802." There was wonder in Cottingham's voice as

he relayed the words. But not the wonder I had hoped for. Instead of astonishment, and

gratitude, that a stranger had o ered up the connection to Africa and lost generations

of souls that millions of American blacks claim a visceral, but ultimately almost never

requited, need to nd, the wonder in Cottingham's voice was at and heavy and

sorrowful. Sorrowful that a past escaped still lived at all. I thought to myself, he's glad

to know, but he doesn't want to know anything else. His wife had been right from the

first instant. Nobody around here wants to talk about slavery.

Still, I tried again. "Could you help me contact your older brothers who are still

alive? Perhaps they remember more," I pressed gently.

"No, I couldn't do that," he said.

Could I come to your home, I o ered, and share all that I've found? Perhaps it would

jog a recollection. Perhaps there's a younger person with an interest in history. "I could

be there in a few days," I said.

"No. No. I don't think so."

As painful as it may be to plow the past, among the ephemera left behind by

generations crushed in the wheels of American white supremacy are telling

explanations for the ssures that still thread our society. In fact, these events explain

more about the current state of American life, black and white, than the antebellum

slavery that preceded.

Certainly, the great record of forced labor across the South demands that any

consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must

acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945— well into the childhoods

of the black Americans who are only now reaching retirement age. The clock must be

reset.

Even more plain, no one who reads this book can wonder as to the origins, depth,

and visceral foundation of so many African Americans’ fundamental mistrust of our

judicial processes.

Most profoundly, the evidence moldering in county courthouses and the National

Archives compels us to confront this extinguished past, to recognize the terrible

contours of the record, to teach our children the truth of a terror that pervaded much

of American life, to celebrate its end, to lift any shame on those who could not evade

it. This book is not a call for nancial reparations. Instead, I hope it is a formidable

plea for a resurrection and fundamental reinterpretation of a tortured chapter in the

collective American past.

We should rename this era of American history known as the time of "Jim Crow

segregation." How strange that decades de ned in life by abject brutalization came to

be identi ed in history with the image of a largely forgotten white actor's minstrel

performance—a caricature called "Jim Crow." Imagine if the rst years of the Holocaust

were known by the name of Germany's most famous anti-Semitic comedian of the

1930s. Let us de ne this period of American life plainly and comprehensively. It was

the Age of Neoslavery Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's grip on U.S.

society—its intimate connections to present-day wealth and power, the depth of its

injury to millions of black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end—

can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

A few months before the publication of this book, as I studied a century-old map of

coal mines near Birmingham, it dawned on me that the name of an old mining camp

town called Docena was a Spanish translation of "dozen"—as in Slope No. 12, the

prison mine where Green Cottenham died. I quickly con rmed that Docena, at the top

of the long hill above the graveyard at Pratt Mines, was the site of the No. 12 shaft,

renamed after U.S. Steel nally stopped using slave laborers to avoid association with

the company's last forced labor mine.

I drove there on a Saturday morning, with my wife and young children in the car. On

the way we stopped near the ruins of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's Ensley furnaces.

The giant smokestacks have been dead for decades but still own the sky—like lightning

streaks of rust or a frightening amusement park ride, the kids said.

Nearby was Docena. The old mine had long been abandoned. Its opening at the

center of the little town was collapsed and unrecognizable. Trees and brush crowded a

streambed owing from the site of the entrance. A disabled white man in a crumbling

house nearby told me he remembered an old plot of unmarked graves a short distance

down the hill, in a hollow where his father had kept pigs in his childhood. It was the

mine burial ground. I knew Green's body was almost certainly buried there, just outside

what had been the walls of the Pratt No. 12 prison.

We drove to the site. It was densely covered with undergrowth and pine trees. A path

into the forest led from one heap of garbage and refuse to another. A forest re had

opened the way through another part of the woods. The children and I picked our way

through the litter and foliage. We found the brick and concrete foundation of a shower

room built for free miners after the company lost its slaves. The graves were supposed

to be a few feet away. I pressed into the thicket of scrub and briars. We studied the

ground for the telltale slumps in the earth like those scattered by the hundreds in the

burial eld at the bottom of the hill. I searched for the remains of a fence delineating a

plot, rocks in the symmetry of graves, a crude headstone, any sign. But there was

nothing. Too much time had passed. Too much had been done—or gone undone. The

last evidence of Green Cottenham's life and death was obliterated by the encroachment

of nature and the detritus of man.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As a young seventh grader in the public schools of Leland, Mississippi, in

1977, I decided to enter an essay contest sponsored by the Washington County

Historical Society. For reasons no longer remembered, I settled for a topic on

the story of an all but forgotten civil rights incident on the outskirts of our

Mississippi Delta town a little more than a decade earlier. A group of African

American farmworkers on a plantation there had gone on strike, defended

themselves against the Klan, and ultimately built a desperate but de ant

encampment called Strike City—one that persists precariously even in 2008.

The two-page essay won a second-place certificate during the county fair and

a promise that it would be included in a future journal of the historical

society. A year later, I gave a speech based on the essay in an oratorical

contest held by a local men's fraternal organization. Standing before that group

of middle-aged white men during a springtime lunch hour, I told a story that

to my twelve-year-old thinking was ancient history—but to my listeners was a

searing lightning bolt from the near past. I experienced for the rst time that

day the combustible response that can come with unearthing history that a

community would just as soon forget. My English teacher, Freida Inmon, who

unbeknownst to me had fought behind the scenes to make sure my speech was

heard that day, applauded loudly and then rescued me from an angry critic.

Later I learned that the wrathful man who berated me that day had been one of

the violent white supremacists. (For the record, I did not win the contest.)

Afterward, despite the turmoil of that day, my mother, Sarah Avery

Blackmon, urged me to " nish the story" on Strike City—to go back and talk to

even more participants, to get to the bottom of what happened in 1965, to

study the results of that incident on the people involved and the community

surrounding it. I have been doing so ever since—for thirty years attempting to

plumb the forgotten or withheld chapters of history that shape the ever larger

communities that have fascinated me. Slavery by Another Name still doesn't

nish the story, but with the help of many extraordinary friends, colleagues,

historians, and researchers, it hopefully begins to bridge a gaping omission in

American history.

The book, and the July 21, 2001, article in The Wall Street Journal that

preceded it, would never have occurred without the guidance and passion of

Jack Bergstresser, director of the museum at Tannehill Ironworks Historical

State Park in McCalla, Alabama.

The research for this book has also been made much easier by the expert

sta s of the departments of history and archives in Alabama, Georgia,

Mississippi, and Arkansas, the Atlanta History Center, and countless clerks,

sheri s, and local historical society volunteers in county seats across Alabama,

Georgia, and Florida. Of particular help were Jim Baggett, director of the

Birmingham Public Library Archives, and Bobby Joe Seales, the indefatigable

president of the Shelby County Historical Society, where I spent many days

over many years. The sta s of the libraries of Emory University in Atlanta,

Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the Harry Ransom Center at

the University of Texas at Austin were gracious and patient with my overlong

borrowings from their shelves and searches for obscure images. My thanks as

well to A. S. Williams III, of Birmingham, who generously granted access to his

unrivaled private collection of materials related to Alabama history.

I am also indebted to the many historians and scholars whose work guided

aspects of my research. Pete Daniel, curator in the Division of Work and

Industry at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, who in

1972 authored the seminal work on twentieth-century peonage in the South,

was kind enough to share a dinner and wise suggestions with me midway

through the project. For the years prior to 1900, no work rivals the research of

Mary Ellen Curtin, now a lecturer at the University of Essex, and the author of

Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900. My e ort on this book

was also inspired by the incomparable southern historian Dan T. Carter, now

at the University of South Carolina, whose 1964 thesis on convict leasing set

the groundwork for dozens of historians who have followed.

The book would never have been completed without the support of many

colleagues and editors, especially at The Wall Street Journal. My editor, John

Blanton, sharpened and elevated the original story. Managing editor Paul E.

Steiger o ered invaluable support for that article, as well as all of my other

work at the Journal since then and for the completion of this book. The

reporters of the Journal's Atlanta bureau have inspired me with their devotion

and talent—especially in their unrivaled coverage of hurricanes in recent

years. My fellow journalists and friends Nikhil Deogun, Rick Brooks, Glenn

Ru enach, Ken Wells, Catherine Williams, Carrie Teegardin, and Ken Foskett

have pushed me forward many times. I was often inspired by the late Manuel

Maloof and my wise friend Angelo Fuster. My thanks as well to Doubleday's

Bill Thomas, who suggested that I write this book; Stacy Creamer, the editor

who has gently asked for it ever since then; and David Black, my agent and

friend.

Finally, even though it is a writer's cliché, I am most grateful to my family

for their unwavering enthusiasm and patience for this project. This book has

hovered, a seemingly immovable background, over every weekend, holiday, and

beach trip in most of my remarkable son Michael's young life and for every

one of them in my extraordinary daughter Colette's. Yet they have urged me on

without fail and with my only penance being a periodic update to their

classmates. My wife, Michelle Jones Blackmon, has supported and assisted me

in more ways than I could ever record here while at the same time founding

and nurturing the amazing neighborhood school where our children learn.

This book is dedicated to them, Michelle, Michael, and Lettie.

NOTES

Abbreviations:

ADAH

Alabama Department of Archives and History,

Montgomery,

Ala.

AHC

Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Ga.

BCC

Bibb County Courthouse, Centrevil e, Ala.

Birmingham Public Library Archives, Birmingham,

BPLA

Ala.

BTW Papers Booker T. Washington Papers, Volumes 1-14

National Archives, Regional Records Center, East

EPRRC

Point, Ga.

Georgia Department of Archives and History,

GDAH

Atlanta, Ga.

NA

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

Department of Justice, Peonage Files, Record Group

RG60, NA

60, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

SCHS

Shelby County Historical Society, Columbiana, Ala.

TCC

Tal apoosa County Courthouse, Dadevil e, Ala.

INTRODUCTION

1. "Sheriff's Prisoners Register," 1906-1910, SCHS.

2. Willie Clarke, Leroy Bandy, Verdell Wade, interviews by the author with former

miners and witnesses, January 2002.

3. Ibid.

4. Carrie Kinsey to Theodore Roosevelt, July 31, 1903, RG60, NA.

CHAPTER I: THE WEDDING

1. Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818–

1918 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), p. 15.

2. Deed of Sarah Cotard to Charles Cottingham, Dec. 5, 1825; deed of Malcolm

McCray to Charles Cottingham, Jan. 8, 1831, BCC. In 1825, Charles Cottingham

paid $200 for land and lots in the town of Centreville. In 1831, he bought more

property on the east side of the Cahaba River.

3. United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United

States, 1860. East Side Cahaba River (Free Inhabitants), Bibb, Alabama, p. 157.

4. Anna Blanche Cottingham, The Cottingham's of Bibb County: Vol. 1 (Ada, Okla.:

Pontotoc County Historical and Genealogical Society, 1970), p. 10.

5. Deed of Elisha Cottingham to Rebecca Battle, May 22, 1852, BCC.

6. Ibid.

7. Marriage license of Albert Cottingham and Laura Pratt, Sept. 8, 1866, by J.W.

Starr, Bibb County Marriages, SCHS, F-115.

8. Congress enacted a bill on March 3, 1865, creating the Bureau of Refugees,

Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, with a mandate to provide food, clothing, and

other assistance to victims of the Civil War, white and black.

9. Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple

University Press, 1993), p. 101.

10. See Edward Magdol, “Local Black Leaders in the South, 1867–1875: An Essay

Toward the Reconstruction of Reconstruction History,” Societas—A Review of

Social History 4 (Spring 1974), cited in Royce, pp. 103–5.

11. Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), p. 48.

12. James R. Bennett, Old Tannehill: A History of the Pioneer Ironworks in Roupes

Valley (1829–1865) (Birmingham: Je erson County Historical Commission, 1986),

pp. 27–28.

13. Ethel Armes, “Adventures in Early Iron Country,” 1910, SCHS.

14. Doris Fancher Farrington, unpublished typescript of oral history, in possession

of author, n.d.

15. David L. Nolen, “Wilson's Raid on the Coal and Iron Industry in Shelby County”

(thesis, University of Alabama in Birmingham, Spring 1988), pp. 2–3.

16. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 22.

17. Ibid., p. 26.

18. Deed of purchase by the Confederate States of America of Bibb County Iron

Co., Sept. 7, 1863, BCC.

19. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 29.

20. Joseph Hodgson, ed., The Alabama Manual and Statistical Register for 1869

(Montgomery: Montgomery Daily Mail, 1869), p. 105.

21. Advertisement in The Sunday Mississippian, Jan. 24, 1864, ADAH.

22. Ellison, p. 134.

23. Eugenia Wallace Logan, copy of typescript of oral history, in possession of

author, 1935.

24. Cirrenia Langston, “Childhood Memories of the War Between the States,”

Centreville Press, March 14, 1934, in Fern Langston, ed., Echoes of Six Mile

(privately published, 1994), p. 107; Ellison, pp. 128–29.

25. Nolen, p. 1.

26. James Pickett Jones, Yankee Blitzkrieg: Wilson's Raid Through Alabama and

Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 3.

27. Gov. T. H. Watts to Lt. Gen. Polk, April 2, 1864, The War of Rebellion: A

Compilation of the O cial Records of the Union and Confederate Armies

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901), pp. 734–35.

28. The War of Rebellion, pp. 404–16.

29. Frank E. Vandiver, “Josiah Gorgas and the Brier eld Iron Works,” Alabama

Review, January 1950, citing Walter L. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in

Alabama (New York, 1905), p. 254.

30. Ellison, p. 144.

31. Mary Ann (Cobb) Johnson McNeill, copy of unpublished typescript, in

possession of author, n.d.

32. Ellison, p. 144.

33. Ibid., p. 147.

34. Royce, p. 72.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., p. 75.

37. Deed of Elisha and Nancy Cottingham to John P. Cottingham, James M.

Cottingham, Moses L. Cottingham, and Harry P. Cottingham, Feb. 8, 1868, BCC.

38. Deed of Rebecca Battle to Elisha Cottingham, Feb. 22, 1868, BCC.

39. Deed of Moses Cottingham to John G. Henry, Feb. 27, 1868, BCC.

40. Deed of Moses Cottingham to P.W., Feb. 27, 1868, BCC.

41. Deed of Moses L. Cottingham to J. W. Pruit, Jan. 21, 1869, BCC.

42. Deeds of Elias Bishop to McSpaden, Aug. 28, 1869; to Jasper Thompson, Aug.

21, 1869, BCC.

43. Deed of Sarah Bishop to John C. Henry, July 6, 1870, BCC.

44. Ellison, p. 92.

45. Deed of Purchase by Elias Bishop, led December 27, 1836, BCC. Bishop

acquired nearly two hundred acres on the east side of the Cahaba River, Township

22, Section 11, Range 9.

46. 1860 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Bibb County, Ala.

47. Langston, Echoes, pp. 107–11.

48. Ellison, p. 29.

49. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's landmark abolitionist novel

published in 1852, the character Augustine St. Clare tells the story of a powerful

slave named Scipio who despite repeated beatings remained obstinate and

disobedient. After Scipio escapes and is shot by a search party, St. Clare nurses him

back to health and then gives him papers setting him free. Scipio, now devoted and

gentle, rips the documents in half in gratitude to his master, and soon dies, after

embracing Christianity.

50. “Manifest of Brigantine Arethusa,” arriving Port of New Orleans, Nov. 6, 1821;

Inward Slave Manifests of the Port of New Orleans, Roll 2, January– March 1821,

Entry

#360,

transcribed

by

Dee

Parmer

Woodtor,

www.afrigeneas.com/slavedata/background.html (April 1999). A twelve-year-old

slave, height four feet three inches, named Scipio is listed among slaves owned by

Townes L. Webb of Petersburg, Virginia.

51. 1850 U.S. Census, Slave Schedule, Bibb County. The Cottingham slave quarters

were likely similar to those of John E. Green, on a 3,400-acre plantation near the

town of Woodstock, Alabama: “The place required numerous slaves and mules to

work it. The old slave cabins were located about a hundred feet north of the

present well on the southeast side of the house. Across the present highway was a

large mule lot, cotton gin, sorghum mill, and a few other smaller buildings.” See

Ellison, p. 85.

52. Record of Incorporation, Bibb Steam Mill Company, Nov. 26, 1850, BCC.

53. “Minutes of the Mobile Conference,” Methodist Church Records, pp. 37–38,

transcribed

at homepages.rootsweb.com/~marykozy/text_files/starfile.shtml.

Methodism was not a faith for those who enjoyed even modest worldly pastimes.

Early in Starr's years of service, pastors of his Alabama conference met to decry the

dangers and immorality of “dram drinking,” viewing races, attending “dancing

parties,” circuses, or theaters, and “the indulgence of super uous ornaments.” Starr

prided himself on his “rule” over his wife and children and the believers to whom

he ministered. So visceral was his passion for stern, orderly church and family

hierarchy that Starr lived much of his adult life agonizing over his shameful

pliancy as a young minister to the leaders of a congregation that wished to allow

its young people to dance. Starr con ded to another pastor late in life that as a

result he “never afterwards had the same power and in uence over a

congregation.” On his deathbed, Starr implored his fellow preachers to remember

that “the old fashioned doctrine of holiness, as taught by our fathers, is true; it is

the doctrine of the Bible …preach it to the people.”

54. Reynolds E. Wallace Jr., “Recollections of the Past: Wesley Chapel,” copy of

unpublished typescript, in possession of author, 1996.

55. Deed of J. W. and Hannah Starr to J. S. Hansberger, Nov. 24, 1868, BCC. Rev.

Starr and Hannah in November 1868 agreed to sell more than two hundred acres

east of Ridge Road to Hansberger, owner of an adjacent tannery, reserving to

themselves access to a spring on the property. Harry P. Cottingham bought a total

of 161 acres in May 1865 from the longtime family neighbor Pulaski Wallace; the

land was adjoined by two ninety-foot-wide lots sold near the same time to J. W.

Starr for $2,502. Deed of Harry P. Cottingham to P. Wallace, May 18, 1865, BCC.

56. Marguerite Starr Crain and Janell Turner Wenzel, They Followed the Sun: The

Story of James Penn Starr and Georgian Theus: Their Ancestors and Their Progenies

(Dallas:

Suburban

Tribune,

1971),

cited

at

members.aol.com/InmanGA/family.starr.html.

57. Vandiver, “Josiah Gorgas,” p. 12, citing Gorgas diary entry, Aug. 3, 1865.

58. Marriage license of Henry Cottinham and Mary Bishop, Jan. 8, 1868, by J. W.

Starr, Bibb County Marriages, SCHS.

CHAPTER I : AN INDUSTRIAL SLAVERY

1. 1860 Census.

2. Rhoda Coleman Ellison, Bibb County, Alabama: The First Hundred Years, 1818–

1918 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984), pp. 82–83.

3. Ibid.

4. Donald E. Collins, ed., “A Georgian's View of Alabama in 1836,” Alabama

Review, January 1972, p. 221.

5. Harper's Weekly, July 13, 1861, p. 442.

6. Ellison, p. 69.

7. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York: Mason

Brothers, 1860), p. 64.

8. Cited in Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and

Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1862), p. 439.

9. James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the

Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 22.

10. Ibid., p. 13.

11. Ibid., p. 23.

12. Ibid., pp. 13, 20–23.

13. Ibid., p. 26.

14. Ellison, p. 97.

15. Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Chamber of

Commerce, 1910), p. 73.

16. Ellison, p. 100.

17. Armes, p. 72.

18. Ibid., p. 71.

19. Frank E. Vandiver, “The Shelby Iron Company in the Civil War: A Study of a

Confederate Industry,” Alabama Review (January 1948), p. 14.

20. Armes, pp. 67–68.

21. James R. Bennett, Old Tannehill: A History of the Pioneer Ironworks in Roupes

Valley (1829–1865) (Birmingham, Ala.: Je erson County Historical Commission,

1986), p. 18.

22. Ibid., p. 22.

23. Ibid., p. 18.

24. The South Carolina Railroad reported in its corporate records at the end of

1861 the ownership of nearly ninety slaves, at a total investment of $77,566.

Similar records from the North Carolina Railroad during 1862 show the company

leasing 273 slaves from owners scattered across the state. By 1864, the number had

grown to nearly four hundred. The Richmond & Petersburg Railroad owned 118

slaves in that year, employing a dozen as remen and train hands, two dozen in

their mechanics shops, and a score of slaves repairing tracks. The Virginia Central

relied on more than three hundred slaves during the Civil War, primarily for the

building and repair of rail lines but also assigning dozens of blacks as brakemen

and firemen on railroad cars. Also see Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution:

Slavery in the Ante-bellum South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956).

25. Armes, pp. 76, 66, 68.

26. Ibid., p. 74.

27. Ibid., p. 78.

28. Bennett, p. 27.

29. Ibid., p. 28.

30. Armes, p. 169.

31. Anderson to Ware, Feb. 12, 1859, Shelby Iron Co. Papers, University of

Alabama Library, cited in Vandiver, “The Shelby Iron Company,” p. 15.

32. John W. Lapsley, a “militant industrialist” and early Alabama railroad builder,

was associated with the Shelby Coal Co. and the Shelby Lime Co., both essential to

the Shelby Iron Works. On March 18, 1862, to provide capital for the Confederate

expansion, Lapsley, another major slave owner named John M. McClanahan, and

Henry H. Ware, John R. Kenan, Andrew T. Jones, and James W. Lapsley each

bought a one-seventh interest in the Shelby Works. Cited in ibid., pp. 14–16.

33. 1860 Census, Shelby County Slave Schedules.

34. Referring to A. N. DeWitt & Co., Columbus, Miss., making two hundred barrels

a week; Griswold & Gunnison, pistol makers in Griswoldville, Ga. See Vandiver,

“The Shelby Iron Company.”

35. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 24.

36. Vandiver, “The Shelby Iron Company,” p. 20.

37. J. Michael Bunn, “Slavery in the Shelby Iron Works During the Civil War,”

Shelby County Historical Society Quarterly (March 2003), pp. 24–29.

38. Ibid.

39. Bennett, Old Tannehill, p. 17.

40. Armes, pp. 162–64.

41. Justin Fuller, “History of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company,

1852–1907” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1966), p. 280.

42. W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An

Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 34; also see

Alex Lichtenstein's review, Alabama Review 51 (April 1998), pp. 106–13.

43. John T. Milner, “Report to the Governor of Alabama on the Alabama Central

Railroad” (Montgomery: Advertiser Book and Job Steam Press Print, 1859), pp. 44–

45, ADAH.

44. Arney R. Childs, ed., The Private Journal of Henry William Ravenel, 1859–1887

(Columbia, S.C., 1947), p. 256, cited in William Cohen, “Negro Involuntary

Servitude in the South, 1865–1940,” Journal of Southern History (February 1976),

p. 34.

45. Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American

South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 100.

46. Ibid., p. 169.

47. Ibid., pp. 82, 117.

48. Ibid., pp. 133, 154–55, 161, 169, 202.

49. Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 14–15, 66–67.

50. Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Alabama Penitentiary for the Year

Ending Sept. 30, 1877 (Montgomery: Barrett & Brown, 1878), ADAH.

51. Convict Legislation and Rules, 1882–1883, Department of Corrections, ADAH.

52. History of the Penitentiary, Special Message of Gov. Cobb, 1882, ADAH.

53. First Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1894, to August 31, 1896 (Montgomery: Roemer Printing, 1896), ADAH.

CHAPTER I I: SLAVERY’S INCREASE

1. 1870 Census, Bibb County.

2. Headstone of Elisha Cottingham, 1793–Nov. 10, 1870; headstone of Nancy

Parker Cottingham, Feb. 3, 1796–July 22, 1873.

3. 1870 Census, Bibb County, Six Mile Township.

4. 1870 Census, Bibb County, Randolph Township, Brierfield Post Office.

5. Shelby Sentinel, Aug. 16, 1877.

6. Docket of A. M. Elliott, Justice of the Peace, 1878–1880, SCHS.

7. Convicts at Hard Labor for the County in the State of Alabama on the First Day

of March 1883, microfiche, ADAH.

8. “Jefferson County Circuit Court Convict Docket, 1902–1903,” BPLA.

9. Tallapoosa County Deed Book: “This agreement made and entered into between

men Sevi Pearson of the rst part, and John W. Pace of the second part, whereas

Sevi Pearson of the rst part has been convicted before Luke Davenport, a notary

public of and ex o cio J.P. on the 28th day of April 1885 for an assault and

battery on Cora Iverson, and a ne of sixty dollars imposed and the further sum of

ten and 50/100s cash, and whereas the said Sevi Pearson has confessed judgment

for the above arrest and John W. Pace has become his security on payment for said

conviction and upon becoming his security for said amount and paying the same

for the said Sevi Pearson, bond himself to work faithfully for John W. Pace for

eight dollars per month for nine months and further agrees that he will take such

treatment as other convicts this April 28 1885, signed in open court, Luke

Davenport, NP, Sevi Pearson, John Pace.”

10. Thomas L. Cochran to R. H. Dawson, Nov. 23, 1887, Administrative

Correspondence, 1881–1897, Dawson Letter Books. Correspondence of the

Inspectors of the Penitentiary, Department of Corrections, ADAH.

11. Shelby County Record of Prisoners, April 11, 1878, to October 11, 1878, SCHS.

12. History of the Penitentiary, Special Message of Gov. Cobb, 1882, pp. 357–58,

ADAH.

13. For an excellent examination of the dialogue between Archey and Dawson, see

Mary Ellen Curtin, Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900

(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

14. Ezekiel Archey to R. H. Dawson, Pratt Mines, Jan. 18, 1884, Dawson Letter

Books, ADAH.

15. Curtin, p. 69.

16. Testimony of Jno. D. Goode, Testimony Taken by the Joint Special Committee

of the Session of 1880–81 to Enquire into the Condition and Treatment of Convicts

of the State (Montgomery, Ala., 1881), ADAH.

17. Curtin, p. 69.

18. Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Chamber of

Commerce, 1910), p. 110.

19. Marjorie Longenecker White, The Birmingham District: An Industrial History

and Guide (Birmingham: Birmingham Publishing, 1981).

20. New York Times, Dec. 17, 1882; cited in Curtin, p. 70.

21. Curtin, p. 75.

22. Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, 1880–1882

(Montgomery, Ala.: Barrett & Brown, 1882), ADAH.

23. Cobb, Penitentiary, pp. 357–58.

24. Dawson to B. F. Porter, June 21, 1883; to B. H. Warren, June 30, 1883, Dawson

Letter Books, ADAH.

25. Armes, p. 196.

26. Curtin, p. 83.

27. Dawson to Simon O’Neal, Judge of the Probate, Russell County, May 23, 1883,

Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

28. Dawson to Judge Allston, Aug. 27, 1883, Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

29. Annual Report of Inspectors, 1878.

30. Lewis McCurdy, of Lowndesboro, Ala., telephone interview with the author,

Aug. 29, 2003

31. Dawson diary entries, Diary of Reginald Heber Dawson, 1883–1906, July 5, 13,

1883, folder 1, ADAH.

32. Dawson to Simon O’Neal, Sept. 10, 1883, A. S. Williams Collection, Eufaula

Athenaeum; Dawson to L. A. J. Cumlie, Sept. 25, 1883, Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

33. Curtin, pp. 84–88.

34. Convicts at Hard Labor, 1883.

35. Dawson Diary, July 10, 1885, ADAH.

36. Curtin, p. 88.

37. Minutes of the Board of Inspectors, 1883–1913, Department of Corrections,

ADAH.

38. Dawson Diary, July 11, 1883, ADAH.

39. Ibid., Nov. 14, 21, 1883.

40. Ibid., May 22, 1887.

41. Convict Legislation and Rules, 1882–1883, ADAH.

42. Testimony of Pratt payroll agent Justin Collins, Nov. 16, 1883, U.S. Congress,

Senate, Committee on Education and Labor, 49th Cong., 2nd Session, Testimony

Before the Committee to Investigate the Relations Between Capital and Labor 4:441,

cited in Curtin, p. 86.

43. A. T. Henley to R. H. Dawson, Dec. 7, 1883, Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

44. Ezekiel Archey to R. H. Dawson, Jan. 18, 1884, Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

45. Milner to Dawson, June 10, 1885, Dawson Letter Books, ADAH.

46. Minutes of the Shelby County Commission, December 1880, SCHS.

47. Shelby County Record of Prisoners, April 18, 1879, to Oct. 1, 1888, SCHS.

48. Shelby County Commission Minutes, July 9, 1883, SCHS.

49. Shelby County Commission Minutes, Feb. 2, 1883, SCHS. Elliott received

approval for $43.50 for fees related to state cases he had adjudged; warrants

totaling $94.65 for work in circuit court cases were also approved.

50. Shelby County Minutes, Feb. 11, 1884, SCHS.

51. J. A. MacKnight, “Columbiana: The Gem of the Hills” (Columbiana, Ala.: Shelby

County Sentinel, circa 1907), pp. 5–6.

52. Shelby County Record of Prisoners, Aug. 17, 1884, to May 16, 1886, SCHS.

53. 1880 Census, Bibb County; Bibb County Commission Minutes, July 1881,

BCCH.

54. Ibid.

55. Bibb County Commission Minutes, Oct. 8, 1881, BCCH.

56. Bibb County Commission Minutes, Oct. 31, 1881, BCCH.

57. Bibb County Commission Minutes, Feb. 13, 1893; Feb. 11, 1895, BCCH.

CHAPTER IV: GREEN COTTENHAM’S WORLD

1. Allan Nevins, Hamilton Fish: The Inner History of the Grant Administration

(New York: Dodd, Mead, 1936), 2: 853–54.

2. Nation, April 5, 1877.

3. C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction (New York: Little, Brown, 1951).

4. 1890 Census.

5. Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1886: Convict Labor

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1887).

6. Investigations regarding James M. Smith, Peonage Files, Cases 10935, 16214,

18205, RG60, NA (5280).

7. “Interview with John Hill, April 27, 1938,” Slave Narratives: A Folk History of

Slavery in the United States (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1941), Georgia

Narratives, Vol. 4, Part 2.

8. Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of

Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996), p. 48; William Andrew

Todd, “Convict Lease System,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, December 2005.

9. Proceedings: Joint Committee of the Senate and House to Investigate the Convict

Lease System of Georgia, Vol. 1, 1908, GDAH.

10. Augusta Chronicle, Jan. 3, 1891.

11. Robert Perkinson, “Hell Exploded: Prisoner Writing and the Fall of Convict

Leasing in Texas,” unpublished, Sept. 2002.

12. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

(Cambridge: Harvard University, 2001), p. 308.

13. Ibid., p. 309.

14. Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Chamber of

Commerce, 1910), p. 422.

15. Ibid., p. 423.

16. Second Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, Oct. 1, 1886, to Sept. 30,

1888 (Montgomery: W. D. Brown & Co., 1888), ADAH.

17. First Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, October 1, 1884, to October

1, 1886 (Montgomery: Barrett & Co., 1886), ADAH.

18. Proceedings: Joint Committee of the Senate and House to Investigate the

Convict Lease System of Georgia, Vol. 1: 4, 9, GDAH; also Atlanta Constitution,

June 24, 1891, p. 6.

19. Second Biennial Report of Inspectors, 1888.

20. Birmingham Daily News, May 23, 1891.

21. Third Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, Oct. 1, 1888, to Sept. 30,

1890 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1890), pp. 14–15.

22. Ibid., p. 15.

23. Ibid., pp. 20–21.

24. Ibid., pp. 242–45.

25. 1904 map of site, BPLA.

26. Third Biennial Report, 1890, pp. 242–45, 262.

27. Ibid., p. 53. Nicholson, the chaplain, boasted of the 197 sermons he had given

in the prior year at various convict camps and attendance of more than one

hundred regularly for a Sunday school at the Pratt Mines. A separate school at

Slope No. 2 prison attracted even larger crowds, he said.

28. Ibid., p. 226.

29. Ibid., pp. 78, 227.

30. Message of Thos. E. Kilby, Governor, Relative to Feeding of Prisoners,

Legislative Document No. 3, Alabama Legislature, Jan. 15, 1923 (Montgomery:

Brown Printing, 1923), author's collection; Bush citation, p. 5; “Starvation”

reference is from Dr. Glenn Andrews, quoted p. 6.; “Pale and anemic” reference

from Dr. C. H. Smith, quoted p. 7.

31. Author's analysis of Convict Record, Barbour County, Barbour County

Courthouse, Clayton, Ala.

32. G. Bridges to Lewis Grant, Feb. 24, 1891, Sheriff's Loose Papers File, SCHS.

33. Grant to Bridges, undated, Sheriff's Loose Papers File, SCHS.

34. J. McMillan to Grant, undated; P. J. Rogers to Grant, April 9, 1891, Sheri 's

Loose Papers Files, SCHS.

35. Postcard dated April 21, 1891, Sheriff's Loose Papers File, SCHS.

36. F. E. Bur tt to Grant, May 26, 1891; J. Rowland to Grant, May 27, 1891; W. B.

Fulton to Grant, Nov. 23, 1891, Sheriff's Loose Papers File, SCHS.

37. By the end of 1892, Sheri Grant had amassed scores of such letters and

telegrams, enough to stuff six file folders.

38. P. J. Rogers to L. T. Grant, April 10 and May 6, 1891, SCHS.

39. John Milner, “White Men of Alabama Stand Together,” Pamphlet Collection,

1890, ADAH.

40. Montgomery Advertiser, Feb. 2, 1889.

41. Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel

(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 142, citing H. Paul Douglass,

Christian Reconstruction in the South (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1909), pp. 122–23.

42. Bond, pp. 160–61.

43. Ibid., p. 162.

44. Annual Report, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, Reports to Board of

Directors: Dec. 19, 1892. Cahaba Coal Mining Company conveyed to Tennessee

Coal, Iron & Railroad 44,000 acres in lower Cahaba coal basin, fteen miles of

standard gauge railroad track with appurtenant equipment, 467 coke ovens, 575

tenement houses, stores, and telephone lines, and seven coal mines in active

operation with a daily capacity of 3,000 tons; Rogers to G. B. McCormack, April 14,

1894, Letterbooks of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, 1893–1895, A. S. Williams

Collection, Eufaula Athenaeum, Eufaula, Ala.

45. First Biennial Report of Inspectors, 1896.

46. Shelby County Record of Prisoners, Oct. 19, 1890, to Aug. 20, 1906, SCHS.

47. Third Biennial Report of Inspectors, 1890, pp. 54–65.

48. Ibid., pp. 242–45.

49. Thomas D. Parke, “Report by Dr. Thos. D. Parke, MD,” and the subsequent

exchange of claims by Judson Davie and Thomas Seddon regarding Sloss-

She eld's Coalburg prison are compiled in First Biennial Report of Inspectors,

1896.

50. Report of Special Committee to Investigate Convict System, Alabama

Legislature, 1897, ADAH.

51. Second Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1896, to August 30, 1898 (Montgomery: Roemer Printing, 1898), ADAH.

52. Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1900, to August 31, 1902 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1904), ADAH.

53. “Jefferson County Circuit Court Convict Docket, 1902–1903,” BPLA.

54. Ibid.

55. Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1902, to August 31, 1904 (Montgomery, Ala.: Brown Printing, 1904), ADAH.

56. Shelby County Poll Tax Book, 1890, SCHS.

57. 1900 Census, Alabama, Shelby County, ED 120, Precinct No. 4 (June 20, 1900).

CHAPTER V: THE SLAVE FARM OF JOHN PACE

1. Montgomery Advertiser, May 30, 1903, p. 1.

2. 1900 Census, Coosa County, Nixburg beat.

3. O cial Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama,

May 21–Sept. 3, 1901 (Wetampka, Ala.: 1940).

4. Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel

(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 175.

5. Affidavit of John Davis, May 9, 1903, RG60, File 76904, EPRRC.

6. Affidavit of J. L. London, May 14, 1903, RG60, File 76904, EPRRC.

7. Davis affidavit.

8. Robert Crew Smith, The Coming of the Railroad, privately published compilation

of family historical material, Goodwater, Ala., Goodwater Public Library, Genealogy

Section, n.d., p. 103.

9. Dana David White, “An Unforgettable Character,” in Coming of the Railroad, p.

113.

10. Montgomery Advertiser, July 3, 1903.

11. Deed of Property, Known as “Old Dorster Edwards place,” 1900, Tallapoosa

County Deed Books, TCC.

12. C. A. Abernathy, “The Birth of Calcis: Founding of Calcis, Turner Brothers,

Justice Store, and Our ‘Historical’ House: The Community, Its Historical

Importance, and Our Family Ties to It,” copy of unpublished typescript, Nov. 1,

1992, in possession of author.

13. Compilation by the author, based on a davits in U.S. v. Pace; U.S. v. Franklin;

U.S. v. Turner; U.S. v. Cosby; EPRRC.

14. Montgomery Advertiser, May 30, 1903, p. 1.

15. A davit of J. W. Pace, May 11, 1903, Department of Justice, File 76904,

EPRRC.

16. Sevi Pearson contract, April 28, 1885.

17. Text from April 24, 1902, contract with a man name Patterson: “I further agree

to be locked up in the cell at night and that I will be obedient and faithful in the

discharge of every duty required of me by the said Pace or his agents, and that

should the said Pace advance me anything over and above what he had already

furnished me, I agree to work for him under this contract until I have paid for

same in full, working at the rate of ve dollars per month. I agree that if I fail to

comply fully with all the obligations on my part under the contract that I will pay

the said Pace for all the cost and trouble he is put to in forcing to comply with the

same, including a reasonable attorney's fee for prosecuting or making me company

with this contract. I agree that should I fail to comply with all the requirements of

this contract on my part that said Pace is hereby authorized to hire me out to any

person, rm or corporation in the state of Alabama—at such sum as he may be

able to hire me at for a term su cient to pay him all that I may owe him,

including all cost and expense in making me do the work or apprehending and

arresting me if I escape.”

18. “Interview with Jim Threat, Nov. 4, 1937,” conducted by Jessie R. Ervin,

McAlester, Okla., Oklahoma Writers’ Project, Oklahoma Historical Society.

19. Convict Record, Autauga County Probate Clerk's Office.

20. Booker T. Washington, “Southern Prisons,” Feb. 18, 1886, letter to editor of

Southern Workman, BTW Papers, Vol. 2: 1860–1889 (Urbana: University of Illinois

Press, 1972), p. 296, http://www.historycooperative.org/btw.

21. Montgomery Daily Dispatch, Feb. 18, 1886.

22. Tallapoosa County Deed Books, August 1879. Pace paid $200 for two hundred

acres in Section 2. On Christmas Eve of 1883, he bought 200 acres for $200 in

Township 21. In November of 1886, Pace purchased 130 in Section 19, Township

21, Range 22. October 1886, he paid $200 to buy from J.B. and his wife another

portion of Section 28 in Township 21. In 1891, Pace paid $1,200 for four lots

facing the main street in Dadeville, Broadnax Street, one block away from the

antebellum county courthouse. Two years later, he bought a half interest in two

more lots on Broadnax, for $200. In 1893, he paid $1,000 for several lots in

Dadeville.

23. As part of a mining venture, late in May 1894 Pace paid for a half interest in

the minerals contained in a section of Section 16, Township 21.

24. Affidavit of J. M. Kennedy, May 30, 1903, File 76904, EPRRC.

25. Ibid.

26. Tallapoosa Voice, April 7, 1892.

27. Reprinted from Alliance Herald.

28. Ibid., Oct. 6, 1892.

29. Ibid., July 7, 1892: “The negro politicians have all been in town this week. A

majority of them will vote for Kolb for governor…. Stand rm to the nominees and

break down this e ort that is being made to have another ’80 campaign in our

county. A majority of the Democrats of our county have named their choice for

o cers—if you are a democrat vote that ticket.; there will be a picnic on R.S.

Patillos’ place in Red Ridge beat on the 20th of July. Everybody invited to come.

The men who have su ered their names to go before the people as independent

candidates have deliberately committed political suicide. Politically speaking the

four men put out on the 5th are as dead as door nails—funeral ceremonies will

occur on the first Monday in August.”

30. 1900 Census, Alabama, Tallapoosa County, Red Ridge District, pp. 1–27.

31. 1900 Census, Alabama, Tallapoosa County, Red Ridge District, p. 12. Mary

Smith was initially entered as a boarder but changed later to “servant,” thirtyseven

years old, married ten years, two children, listed as a cook; Maurice Cunningham,

initially entered as boarder but changed later to “servant,” nine years old, water

carrier with no schooling and unable to read or write; S. J. Harriet, convict,

twenty-eight; William Riddle, convict, twenty-eight years old; Archer Wiggins,

convict, thirty-two years old, married five years; Jack Armour, convict, twenty.

32. Warren S. Reese Jr. to Attorney General, March 22, 1905, Department of

Justice, Peonage Files, ff 5280-3, RG60, NA.

33. Affidavits, 1903, File 76904, EPRRC.

34. Affidavit of Joe Patterson, May 7, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

35. A davit of M. J. Scroggins, undated, Peonage Files, EPRRC. Dadeville Mayor's

Docket, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File 76904, EPRRC.

36. Affidavit of Wheeler Stone, 1903, File 76904, EPRRC.

37. Compilation by the author of personal ledgers, bank records, and sworn

statements of African Americans who were seized and white men who captured

them.

38. Pace a davit: “I paid …for him and I kept him ten months.” Thompson's

mother eventually appeared and paid to set her son free. “There was no

commitment paper from any court given me at that time,” Pace said.

39. Affidavit of Note Turke, June 30, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

40. Town of Goodwater, Acts of Board of Aldermen, Sept. 2, 1904.

41. 1900 Census, Laray A. Grogan, born May 1872, with a wife, daughter, six, son,

five, son, three.

42. Affidavit of Dock Crenshaw, May 25, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

43. Affidavit of Charley Williams, May 25, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

44. Affidavit of Pat Hill, May 12, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

CHAPTER VI: SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

1. Montgomery Advertiser, May 27, 1903.

2. Alabama voted to secede January 11, 1861; the Confederate Constitutional

Convention convened in Montgomery; Je erson Davis was sworn in on the state

capitol portico; the Confederate capital moved to Richmond, Virginia, in July

1861.

3. Charles W. Chesnutt, “Peonage, or the New Slavery,” Voice of the Negro 1

(September 1904): 394–97.

4. Booker T. Washington, “To the Colored Citizens of Alabama,” Tuskegee Student,

Feb. 28, 1895, p. 2, BTW Papers.

5. O cial Programme of Daily Events, Cotton States and International Exposition,

Dec. 30, 1895 (Atlanta: C. P. Byrd), author's collection.

6. Theodore Roosevelt to Booker T. Washington, Washington, D.C., Nov. 9, 1901,

BTW Papers.

7. TR to BTW, July 9, 1901, BTW Papers.

8. TR to BTW, March 21, 1901, BTW Papers.

9. Theodore Roosevelt, “Expansion of the White Races,” Speech to Methodist

Episcopal Church celebration of the African Diamond Jubilee, Washington, D.C.,

Jan. 18, 1909.

10. TR to BTW, Sept. 14, 1901, BTW Papers.

11. BTW to TR, Oct. 2, 1901, BTW Papers.

12. C. N. Dorsette to BTW, May 31, 1890, telegram, BTW Papers.

13. Thomas Goode Jones to BTW, June 28, 1901, BTW Papers.

14. BTW to TR, Oct. 2, 1901, BTW Papers.

15. William A. Sinclair, The Aftermath of Slavery (Boston: Small, Maynard &

Company, 1905), pp. 187–90.

16. Ibid.

17. Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 203.

18. Dadeville Spot Cash, March 13, 1903, reprinting editorial of Birmingham

Ledger.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid.

21. Sinclair, pp. 188–89.

22. New York Times, June 5, 1903.

23. Reese to Parsons, Jan. 27 and April 11, 1903, RG60, NA; typescript, “The Slave

Traffic Today,” Appointment and Credentials Files, Dept. of Justice, RG60, NA.

24. Jones to Philander C. Knox, March 21, 1903, 5280-03, RG60, NA: Sir: Some

witnesses before the Grand Jury here developed the fact that in Shelby county in

this District, and in Coosa county in the Middle district, a systematic scheme of

depriving negroes of their liberty, and hiring them out, has been practiced for

some time.

The plan is to accuse the negro of some petty o ense, and then require him, in order to

escape conviction, to enter into an agreement to pay his accuser so much money, and

sign a contract, under the terms of which his bondsmen can hire him out until he pays

a certain sum. The negro is made to believe he is a convict, and treated as such. It is

said that thirty negroes were in the stockade at one time.

25. United States v. William Eberhart, indictment, U.S. District Court, Northern

District of Georgia, April 19, 1898, Dept. of Justice, RG60, EPRRC; Atlanta Journal,

April 21, 1898.

26. Angier to Attorney General W. H. H. Miller, April 19, 1898, RG60, NA.

27. United States v. Eberhart, Jan. 25, 1899 (127 F. 254), District Judge Newman.

28. Angier to Attorney General W. H. H. Miller, Jan. 17, 1899, RG60, NA.

29. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 3.

30. Eagan to Attorney General Knox, July 13, 1901, RG60, NA.

31. Daniel, pp. 6–13.

32. Reese to Knox, April 7, 1903, ff 5280-03, #5664, RG60, NA.

33. Thomas R. Roulhac to Knox, April 9, 1903, ff 5280-03, #5762, RG60, NA:

The late Grand Jury at Birmingham Ala. made a careful investigation of the

complaints as to the attempt to deprive citizens of African descent of their

liberty and I am grati ed to state that this investigation was not only

closely and carefully made, but that the desire was universal among all its

members, composed of as excellent material, in intelligence and character,

as the district or State a ords, to vindicate the State from such unlawful

and disgraceful proceedings, and to bring to punishment every man who

by the proof was shown to have had any connection with it.

Indictments were found against nine persons, all that the testimony

connected with the transaction but enough was disclosed to show that the

same or like systems prevailed in other districts in the state. I do not think

the present the most propitious time for employing the services of a secret

Service operative. In my judgment after a comparatively short lapse of

time, his investigation will not have so much attention attracted to them as

they would have if begun immediately, and I think the participants and

those who can impart any information will be more likely to do so when

the present flutter has somewhat subsided.

It is equally gratifying to state that the said Grand Jury were aroused by

an attempt to intimidate one of the witnesses before them, and that they

promptly returned indictments against all who had any part in anything of

that character. Indictments were found against all of these, arrests were

promptly made, and such of them as were able to make bond were

admitted to bail in the sum of the Two thousand Dollars each…. One was

committed to jail in Birmingham….

No e ort will be spared to obtain a conviction of all of these parties,

and it has been reported to us that already the e ect has been most

salutary [sic] resulting in the discharge of a number whose con nement

has been illegal, or of questionable legality, and their restoration to

liberty.

34. Affidavit of L. E. White, undated, File 76909, EPRRC.

35. Reese to Knox, April 25, 1903, ff 5280-03, RG60, NA.

36. Asa Stratton to Attorney General, Feb. 18, 1897, Records Relating to the

Appointment of Federal Judges, Marshals and Attorneys, W. S. Reese Jr. le,

#068849, RG60, NA.

37. Marielou Armstrong Cory, “History of the Ladies Memorial Association,” 1902,

http://www.monumentpreservation.com/monument/history.html.

CHAPTER VI : THE INDICTMENTS

1. Montgomery Advertiser, June 9, 1903, p. 7.

2. Reese to Knox, June 15, 1903, RG60, NA.

3. A davit of Paul Ho man, May 8, 1903; a davit of Si Caldwell, May 9, 1903,

File 76909, EPRRC.

4. Davis affidavit.

5. Affidavit of J. G. Dunbar, May 11, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

6. A davit of J. L. Purifoy, May 13, 1903; a davit of Jim Caldwell, May 9, 1903,

File 76909, EPRRC.

7. A davit of D. M. White, certifying copy of Mayor's Court Docket, May 29, 1903,

File 76904, EPRRC.

8. Receipt, April 24, 1902, File 76904, Tallapoosa County Bank, EPRRC.

9. Purifoy affidavit.

10. White affidavit.

11. Affidavit of Esau Williams, May 25, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

12. A davit of Glennie Helms, May 25, 1903; a davit of Dave Johnson, May 25,

1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

13. Johnson affidavit.

14. Helms affidavit.

15. E. Williams affidavit.

16. Dec. 1, 1955.

17. Affidavit of John W. Pace, May 11, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

18. Ibid.

19. Affidavit of Fletch Turner, May 12, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

20. Affidavit of George Cosby, May 15, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

21. Affidavit of J. M. Kennedy, May 30, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

22. Dunbar affidavit.

23. Affidavit of G. B. Walker, May 12, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

24. A davit of Mat Davis, May 9, 1903, File 76909; a davit of Charles Davis, May

9, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

25. Kennedy affidavit.

26. Ibid.

27. Affidavit of J. W. Havalson, June 29, 1903, File 76909, EPRRC.

28. Montgomery Advertiser, May 30, 1903, p. 1.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Cleveland Gazette, Jan. 24, 1903, p. 2.

32. New York Evening Post, May 26, 1903, no page.

33. Montgomery Advertiser, June 13, 1903, p. 4.

34. Ibid., July 7, 1903, p. 4.

35. Ibid., June 9, 1903, p. 4.

36. Dadeville Spot Cash, June 5, 1903, p. 1.

37. New York Herald, June 8, 1903.

38. Montgomery Advertiser, June 12, 1903, p. 3.

39. Sinclair, p. 245.

40. Attorney General to Roosevelt, June 8, 1903, Executive and Congressional

Letter Book 64, p. 341, NA.

41. Reese to Knox, June 10, 1903, RG60, NA.

42. Stanley W. Finch, Examiner, to Attorney General, Feb. 18, 1904, “Report on W.

S. Reese Jr.,” ff 5280-03, RG60, NA.

43. 1900 Census, 1870 Census, 1860 Census.

44. Montgomery Advertiser, June 10, 1903, p. 3.

45. Judge Thomas G. Jones, “Charge to Jury,” June 15, 1903, 5280-03, RG60,

NA.

46. Prattville Progress, June 26, 1903, p. 2.

47. Birmingham Age-Herald, June 17, 1903.

48. Montgomery Advertiser, June 18, 1903, p. 4.

49. Reese to Knox, June 15, 1903, ff 5380-03, RG60, pp. 1–4, NA.

50. Ibid., p. 4.

51. Ibid., pp. 4–6.

52. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

53. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 46.

54. Reese to Knox, June 15, 1903, p. 8.

55. Nation, June 11, 1903, p. 1.

56. Montgomery Advertiser, June 23, 1903, p. 7.

57. Ibid., June 25, 1903.

58. Dadeville Spot Cash, June 19, 1903, quoting Atlanta Constitution.

59. Montgomery Advertiser, June 25, 1903, p. 4.

60. Ibid., June 13, 1903, p. 4.

61. Ibid., June 19, 1903, p. 9.

CHAPTER VI I: A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

1. Stanley W. Finch to Frank Strong, General Agent, Department of Justice, June 23,

1903, Peonage Files (5280), ff 9927, RG60, NA.

2. Affidavit of Owen Green, no date, File 76909, EPRRC.

3. 1860 Census (Pace month of birth: October 1853).

4. Macon Telegraph, June 25, 1903; Speer to Attorney General, June 25, 1903,

EPRRC.

5. Montgomery Advertiser, June 28, 1903, p. 3.

6. Ibid., June 30, 1903, p. 2.

7. Ibid., July 1, 1908, p. 1.

8. Reese to Attorney General, June 30, 1903, ff 10157, RG60, NA.

9. Edward M. Adams to John E. Wilkie, Chief of Treasury Secret Service

investigators, June 24, 1904, ff 13098, RG60, NA.

10. Montgomery Advertiser, July 5, 1903.

11. Affidavit of Fletcher Turner, May 12, 1903, EPRRC.

12. Helms affidavit.

13. Montgomery Advertiser, July 8, 1903.

14. Ibid., July 11, 1903.

15. Ibid.; New York Times, July 11, 1903.

16. New York Times, July 13, 1903.

17. Montgomery Advertiser, July 14, 1903, p. 1; Dadeville Spot Cash, July 17,

1903; New York Times, July 25, 1903, p. 2.

18. Montgomery Advertiser, July 21, 1903, p. 1.

CHAPTER IX: A RIVER OF ANGER

1. Reese, the prosecutor, wrote to newspapers in response that He in had grossly

understated the facts alleged in the indictments. Reese statement, July 21, 1903,

Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Cases, File 76904, EPRRC. He in replied,

denouncing Reese, and Judges Jones and Speer in Alabama and Georgia, wrapping

his condemnation in a defense of the jury system:

I care not whether the Judge be named Jones or Speer; whether he lives in

Alabama or Ohio. My contention is that no judge has the right, legal or

moral, to coerce a jury into nding a verdict to his liking, that the jurors

are the sole judges of the facts and they must nd the verdict according to

their own conviction and consciences that they are entitled to protection

from insults and abuse of the presiding judge. We cannot be too strenuous

in our e orts to guard the dignity and integrity of the jury system of our

country…. It was only when, according to my honest convictions, he had

invaded the sacred province of the jury, had used language if denunciation

and intimidation that no judicial authority on earth could warrant, and

had set a precedent fraught with the gravest danger to that ancient

institution that great bulwark of the people's rights and liberties, the “right

of trial by jury,” that I excised the right that is mine as an American

citizen to criticize his o cial conduct, and to speak publicly my views

concerning this most remarkable occurrence in Alabama. Montgomery

Advertiser, July 22, 1903, p. 2.

2. Ernest H. Hill to Reese, July 15, 1903, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File

76904, EPRRC.

3. Thomas Dixon Jr., The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden

(New York: P. F. Collier, 1902), pp. 381–84.

4. Thomas Nelson Page, The Negro: The Southerner's Problem (New York: Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1904), p. 64.

5. Montgomery Advertiser, April 25, 1903, p. 1.

6. Ibid.; Nation, Aug. 19, 1903, p. 1.

7. William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro (New York: Macmillan, 1901),

cited in Page, p. 82.

8. Montgomery Advertiser, April 26, 1903, p. 1.

9. Dadeville Spot Cash, May 15, 1903.

10. Montgomery Advertiser, May 21, 1903, p. 4.

11. Ibid., June 5, 1903, quoting Columbus Enquirer-Sun, p. 4.

12. William A. Sinclair, The Aftermath of Slavery (Boston: Small, Maynard &

Company, 1905), pp. 221–22.

13. Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume, Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New

York: St. Martin's, 1992).

14. Montgomery Advertiser, June 10, 1903, p. 1.

15. Proceedings: Joint Committee of the Senate and House to Investigate the

Convict Lease System of Georgia, Vol. 1, transcripts of rst meeting, Gaither

testimony, pp. 187–97, GDAH.

16. New York Times, July 21, 1903.

17. Montgomery Advertiser, April 10, 1903, p. 1.

18. J. E. Sistrunk to Department of Justice, July 6, 1903, Peonage Files, EPRRC.

19. Montgomery Advertiser, April 16, 1903, p. 1.

20. Ibid., May 17, 1903, p. 1.

21. Ibid., May 16, 1903, p. 1.

22. New York Times, July 5, 1903.

23. Associated Press, July 5, 1903.

24. New York Times, July 13, 14, 1903.

25. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903 (New York: Dover, 1994), pp.

23, 65.

CHAPTER X: THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

1. New York Times, July 25, 1903.

2. Dadeville Spot Cash, July 31, 1903.

3. Ibid., Aug. 14, 1903, publishing Tallapoosa County Grand Jury report, July 27,

1903.

4. Ibid., Aug. 28, 1903: “W. W. Pearson, who was one of the attorneys for the

Cosbys, says he will petition Judge Jones to commute their sentence. It will be

remembered that they plead guilty to charges of peonage against them and were

sent to the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta to serve a year and a day. It is agreed that

their penalty is too severe and the late deliverances of the court show it to be

inclined to mercy and it is thought that the petition will meet with favor…. The

citizens of Tallapoosa county are signing petitions for the release of the Cosbys

now in prison in Atlanta …claimed that the petition will go up with at least 3000

names signed to it.”

5. Montgomery Advertiser, Dec. 14, 1903: “The state convict inspectors are

surprised at the county commissioners of Tallapoosa county in awarding the

convict labor contract of that county to J. W. Pace. Pace had the county convicts at

the time he was arrested for peonage. He is now under sentence of ve years but

the sentence has been suspended by Judge Jones of the US court.”

6. Nation, Aug. 19, 1903, p. 1; New York Times, Nov. 23, 1903.

7. M. D. Wickersham to Attorney General, Sept. 21, 1903, File 5280, 14901,

Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

8. Catherine McRee Carter, “History of Kinderlou, Georgia, 1860–1940,”

unpublished typescript, December 1940, in possession of author.

9. “The New Slavery in the South, An Autobiography,” Independent, February 25,

1904, pp. 409–14.

10. Affidavit of Henry C. Dickey, Nov. 24, 1903, EPRRC.

11. Kinsey File, Department of Justice, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

12. Affidavit of Edward McRee, Nov. 24, 1903, EPRRC.

13. Opinion of Judge Emory Speer, U.S. v. McClellan and Crawley, March 17, 1904,

EPRRC.

14. Akerman to Attorney General, March 27, 1905, EPRRC.

15. Sternfeld to Reese, Nov. 12, 1903, ff 5280-17119, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

16. L. R. Farmer to Attorney General, Nov. 17, 1903, 3098-1902, Peonage Files,

RG60, NA:

Morganton N.C., Dear Sir, i write you for information i have a little girl

that has been kidnapped from me and is now under bondage in Ga and I

cant get her out only her but no of others i want ask you is it law for

people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave

without a pass my reason for writing you is the people in Ga wont do any

thing with him and if the negroes tell any thing they will beat them to

death and they are a fraid to test e against him because cary them write

back and beat them to death and some of them has beened killed trying to

get away from their and i got a little girl there and get her a way from

their if you could inform me please to write me how can tell me the

proper one over p.s. you pleas ans me at once this little of mine is begging

me to come after and i write you for information i have tried to get outte

a write of habeaus corpus and that could not get her you will nd stamp

for the ans

Rev. L.R. Farmer pastor of Baps of this place

17. Attorney General to Farmer, Nov. 18, 1903, Peonage Files, 3098-1902, RG60,

NA.

18. New York Times, Dec. 4, 1904.

19. Wilcox Progressive Era, Jan. 14, 1904, transcribed by Stephen Lee, Dec. 2003,

ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/al/wilcox/vitals/marriages/gmr12melton.txt.

20. J. R. Adams to Attorney General, Feb. 23, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

21. Ibid.

22. U.S. Commissioner to W. H. Armbrecht, Feb. 13, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60,

NA.

23. Galveston News, Dec. 27, 1903; Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 29–31, 1903.

24. Nation, Jan. 14, 1904; BTW to Edward Henry Clement, Dec. 30, 1903, BTW

Papers.

25. Finch to Attorney General, Feb. 18, 1904, File 5280-03, ff 29562, RG60, NA.

26. Reese to Attorney General, March 2, 1904, File 5280-03, ff 29606, RG60, NA.

27. Indictment of Alex D. Stephens, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File

76904, EPRRC.

28. Akerman to Attorney General, April 14, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

29. Acting Attorney General to Reese, June 24, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

30. Reese to Attorney General, Aug. 23, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

31. Clyatt v. U.S., 197 U.S. 207 (1905).

32. Jamison v. Wimbish, 130 F. 351, 355–57 (S.D. Ga. 1904) (Speer, J.).

33. Reese to Attorney General, March 25, 1905; Attorney General to Reese, March

27, 1905; File 5280-03, ff 53321, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

34. Reese to Attorney General, March 27, 1905, File 5280-03, 53574, Peonage

Files, RG60, NA.

35. “Susanna” to Jones, July 3, 1905, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File

76904, EPRRC. Susanna said a store clerk named C. L. Waldrup had detailed

information on the slavery ring; one of the black laborers being held was Dick

Gray, the same name of one of the men captured in the John Pace slavery network

ve years earlier. Susanna didn't know the names of others, but said all were held

against their will, tracked down if they attempted to leave, and forced back to the

turpentine operation at gunpoint.

36. Reese to W. H. Moody, March 27, 1905, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

37. Reese to BTW, Feb. 1, 1905, BTW Papers.

38. Attorney General to Reese, April 5, 1905, File 5280-03, 53574, Peonage

Files, RG60, NA.

39. Atlanta Constitution, March 18, 1905, p. 3.

40. Ibid., Oct. 29, 1905, p. 2; Aug. 12, 1906, p. 6.

41. Ibid., Oct. 26, 1905.

42. Ibid., Oct. 31, 1905, p. 2; Nov. 1, p. 5.

43. Author's collection.

44. Atlanta Constitution, March 16, 1906, p. 7.

45. Ibid., Nov. 6, 1905, p. 7.

46. Ibid., Oct. 16, 1905, p. 1; Oct. 29, 1905, p. 2.

CHAPTER XI: SLAVERY AFFIRMED

1. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New

York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 354–59, 436–39.

2. R. H. Ellis, “The Calhoun School, Miss Charlotte Thorn's ‘Lighthouse on the Hill’

in Lowndes County, Alabama,” Alabama Review 37, no. 3 (1984): 183–201.

3. Jonathan Grossman, “Black Studies in the Department of Labor, 1897–1907,”

Monthly Labor Review, June 1974.

4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing

My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International

Publishers, 1968), pp. 226–77.

5. Du Bois to Charles P. Neill, Nov. 2, 1906, Du Bois Papers, University of

Massachusetts, cited in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 354.

6. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 227.

7. Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 20, 21, 22, 1906.

8. For the de nitive account of the Atlanta race riot, see Mark Bauerlein,

Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter, 2001).

9. Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 12, 1906, p. 7.

10. Lewis, p. 355.

11. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 227.

12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,

1911).

13. Jamison v. Wimbish; Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 17, 1905.

14. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 62.

CHAPTER XI : NEW SOUTH RISING

1. Born Sept. 1885, 1900 Census.

2. Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1900, to August 31, 1902 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1902), ADAH.

3. Register of Prisoners Committed to the County Jail of Shelby County, 096-1, p.

172, SCHS; Schedule of Convicts obtained by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.

from Shelby County, second quarter 1904, SCHS.

4. J. A. MacKnight, “Columbiana: The Gem of the Hills,” c. 1907, published by the

Shelby County Sentinel, SCHS.

5. In June 1892, George W. Vines, superintendent of town schools, posted a notice

inviting “all white persons interested in the welfare of the Dadeville High School”

to assemble at the courthouse to select new leadership of the public school system.

6. Photograph file, SCHS.

7. MacKnight, p. 20.

8. Will Lewis was taken before Judge A. P. Longshore in February 1908. He had

taken $25 to sign a contract in the fall of 1906 agreeing to work in another local

lime kiln, this one owned by C. L. O’Neal. Three months later, he tried to leave, and

O’Neal took out a warrant for false pretense.

9. “Contract on Confession of Judgment Record,” 1903–1913, SCHS.

10. Register of Prisoners Committed to Jail, 1890–1906, SCHS, analysis by author.

11. “Contract on Confessions of Judgment Record.”

12. MacKnight's publicity pamphlet for Columbiana captured a full portrait of the

town's mercantile, legal, and political elite, all of which bene ted in some respect

from the county's active trade in forced labor. D. R. McMillan, predecessor of

Longshore as probate judge, was another of the town's most prominent attorneys.

The son of a cotton planter ruined by the Civil War, he studied law during

Reconstruction and arrived in Columbiana in 1886 to form a law practice with

former Alabama governor Rufus Cobb. By 1907, he was in partnership with J. J.

Haynes, the rising young man among lawyers in the province. The people of

Columbiana were particularly proud of their new “free school,” funded by the

town council and available to any white children living in the city limits. Milner &

Armstrong operated a steam-powered sawmill near the rail line on the outskirts of

Columbiana. Rufus Lester had arrived in Shelby as a young farmer and then taken

work in a general store, weighing sugar and measuring out calico for yeoman

families. He had risen to become owner of the business and a major buyer of

cotton for mills he owned. John S. Pitts was the county's longtime tax collector, the

right-hand man in politics of Judge Longshore. W. R. A. Milner, deputy to Sheri

Fulton, was a respected Confederate veteran.

13. Sixth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1904, to August 31, 1906 (Montgomery, 1906), ADAH.

14. Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,

1902, to August 31, 1904 (Montgomery, Ala.: Brown Printing, 1904), ADAH.

15. Sixth Biennial Report, 1906.

16. Ibid.

17. W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An

Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 310.

18. Birmingham Age-Herald, Aug. 2, 1900, cited in Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 251.

19. Justin Fuller, “History of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, 1852–

1907” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1966), pp. 273–74.

20. Birmingham Age-Herald, Aug. 2, 1900, cited in Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 251.

21. W. F. Tyler to Eagle & Phoenix Mfg. Co., Oct. 18, 1899, original in possession

of author.

22. Erskine Ramsey to H. C. Frick, Aug. 7, 1903, File 1.1.11, p. 88, BPLA.

23. 1900 Census, Jefferson County, Precinct 29.

24. Fuller, p. 331.

25. Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1905.

26. Annual Report, U.S. Steel Corp., Dec. 31, 1907; C. A. Abernathy, “The Birth of

Calcis: Founding of Calcis, Turner Brothers, Justice Store, and Our ‘Historical’

House: The Community, Its Historical Importance, and Our Family Ties to It,” copy

of unpublished typescript, Nov. 1, 1992, in possession of author.

27. Fuller, pp. 148–52; Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 290.

28. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Dynasty and the Rise of

Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), pp. 124–28; Edmund

Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 497–99; Lewis, Sloss

Furnaces, pp. 288–93; Fuller, pp. 153–54.

29. Agreement entered into by J. Craig Smith, President of the Board of Convict

Inspectors of the State of Alabama and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company,

Nov. 26, 1907, copy in possession of author.

CHAPTER XI I: THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM

1. Analysis by the author of charges and sentencings in central and southern

Alabama, 1900–1910.

2. Report of Persons Sentenced to Hard Labor for Shelby County, March 1908,

SCHS.

3. Ibid.

4. Criminal Court Records, Bibb County and Shelby County, Ala.

5. Report of Shelby County Grand Jury, Spring Term, 1908, published in Shelby

County People's Advocate, April 23, 1908.

6. Photographs on file, SCHS.

7. 1900 Census.

8. References appear frequently in archival material of women sexually abused by

police o cials and, in the case of female prisoners, other convicts. For the most

complete treatment of the conditions of female prisoners, see Mary Ellen Curtin,

Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University

Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 113–29.

9. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow

(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 269, citing Statement of Pardons, Paroles

and Commutations Granted by Cole L. Blease, 1913 (Columbia, S.C.: 1914).

CHAPTER XIV: ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE

1. Shelby M. Harrison, “A Cash-Nexus for Crime”; “The Human Side of Large

Outputs, Steel and Steel Workers in Six American States, Part IV, Birmingham

District: Labor Conservation,” both in The Survey, Jan. 6, 1912, pp. 1526–47.

2. Ramsey to G. B. McCormack, General Manager, on Pratt Division, Feb. 13, 1896,

Erskine Ramsey Papers, File 1.1.1D, BPLA.

3. TCI company photographs, in possession of author.

4. Miles College: The First Hundred Years (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005), pp.

15–18.

5. Birmingham Age-Herald, Feb. 21, 1908.

6. “County Convict Contracts,” internal memorandum of Tennessee Coal, Iron &

Railroad Co., Aug. 28, 1908, copy in possession of author.

7. Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Sept. 1, 1910 to Aug.

31, 1914 (Montgomery: 1914), ADAH.

8. “Statement of State and County Convicts at Pratt Mines Division as of Month of

August, 1908,” U.S. Steel Corp., copy in possession of author.

9. Sheriff's Prisoners Register (1908), Shelby County, SCHS.

10. Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. photograph, labeled “Muscoda Ore Mines,

Hospital in Use in 1901 and 1902,” in possession of author.

11. John N. Reynolds, Twin Hells (Chicago: M. A. Donahue & Co., 1890), pp. 86–

87.

12. Alvaran Snow Allen, “The Story of a Lie: By Convict No. 2939, Himself 15 Years

in Prison,” pamphlet printed by Mission Printing Company, Tulsa, c. 1926, in

possession of author.

13. Harvey R. Hougen, “The Impact of Politics and Prison Industry on the General

Management of the Kansas State Penitentiary, 1883–1909,” 1977, citing Carl

“Cork” Arnold, A Life Prisoner, 1906.

14. Allen, “Story of a Lie.”

15. Ibid.; Reynolds, p. 94.

16. Interview by the author of Willie Clark, 2001, 2002, 2003.

17. “Registry of Convict Deaths,” Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of

Convicts, September 1, 1906, to August 31, 1910 (Montgomery: Brown Printing,

1910), ADAH.

18. Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coal elds, 1908–21

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 1–8.

19. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 2.

20. Death Certificate—County Convict: Green Cunningham [sic], Aug. 15, 1908.

CHAPTER XV: EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

1. Atlanta Constitution, July 13, 1908, p. 1; July 15, 1908.

2. “The Lynching Century: African Americans Who Died in Racial Violence in the

United States, 1865–1965,” Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory,

www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Base/8507/NLists.htm; Atlanta Constitution, July

16, 1908.

3. Atlanta Constitution, July 29, 1908, p. 5.

4. Ibid., July 30, 1908, p. 1.

5. Ibid., Aug. 2, 1908.

6. New York Times, Aug. 16, 1908, p. 1.

7. Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–21 (Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 23–24.

8. Ibid.

9. Birmingham Age-Herald, Nov. 11, 1908, p. 1.

10. Ibid., Nov. 18, 1908, p. 5.

11. Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1906,

to August 31, 1910 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1910), ADAH.

12. Je erson County Coroner's Record, Preliminary Investigation Reports, Record

of B. L. Brasher, Coroner; O ce of Coroner/Medical Examiner, Je erson County,

Ala.

13. Sentenced to life for first-degree murder, his first criminal charge.

14. Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Chamber of

Commerce, 1910), pp. 493–95; James Saxon Childers, Erskine Ramsey: His Life and

Achievements (New York: Cartwright & Ewing, 1942), pp. 160–65, 264.

15. Montgomery Advertiser, April 12, 1911.

16. Jefferson County Coroner's Record, Preliminary Investigation Reports, Jefferson

County Coroner's Office.

17. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 7, 1908, p. 1.

18. Clayton Record, Jan. 20, 1911, p. 1.

19. Barbour County Jail Registry, undated, Sheri R. B. Teal, Barbour County

Courthouse.

20. Clayton Record, April 28, 1911, p. 1.

21. A prison inspector report from 1915 says building prior to 1913 had been

condemned.

22. Barbour County Jail Registry, 1911; Clayton Record, May 12, 1911, p. 1.

23. Jail Registry, 1911; author's analysis.

24. Jail Registry, 1911, Barbour County Courthouse.

25. Clayton Record, May 31, 1912, p. 1.

26. State Convicts Descriptive Record, 1913–1916, Vol. 8, Alabama Department of

Corrections, ADAH; Demas, p. 175; Miller, p. 488.

27. State Convicts Descriptive Record, 1913–1916, Vol. 8, Alabama Department of

Corrections, ADAH.

28. Registry of Convict Deaths.

29. Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert M. Gary: The Story of Steel (New York: D.

Appleton, 1925), pp. 310–11.

30. Transcript of Public Investigation into A airs and Conduct of the Convict

Department, March 1913, Vol. 2, Alabama Department of Corrections, ADAH,

testimony of Walker Percy, pp. 690–91.

31. Ibid., pp. 693–98.

32. Internal U.S. Steel legal memo, May 1913, in possession of author.

33. Transcript: Public Investigation, testimony of E. H. Coxe, pp. 675–77.

34. Ibid., Coxe to Oakley, Sept. 25, 1911.

35. “Report of Persons Sentenced to Hard Labor for Shelby County,” December

1913, SCHS.

CHAPTER XVI: ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY

1. Twentieth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1905: Convict Labor

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1906), p. 206.

2. Atlanta Constitution, July 11, 1908, p. 1.

3. Ibid., July 23, 1908.

4. Proceedings: Joint Committee, Daniel Long testimony, pp. 501–5, GDAH.

5. Proceedings: Joint Committee, Susan Long testimony, pp. 506–9, GDAH.

6. Proceedings: Joint Committee, R. A. Keith testimony, pp. 162–87, GDAH.

7. Proceedings: Joint Committee,Will Wynne testimony, pp. 1582–91, GDAH.

8. James W. English Personality File, AHC; also, Clement A. Evans, Confederate

Military History (Atlanta: 1899), 4: 635–38.

9. Memoirs of Georgia (Atlanta: Southern Historical Association, 1895), Vol. 1, Ch.

4, pp. 766–69.

10. Proceedings: Joint Committee, James W. English testimony, pp. 1209–40,

GDAH; Annual Statement of Brickyard Account, June 1, 1906, to May 31, 1907,

Chattahoochee Brick Company File, AHG.

11. Proceedings: Joint Committee, Arthur Moore testimony, no page number, July

23, 1908; Ed Strickland testimony, p. 479, GDAH.

12. Proceedings: Joint Committee, J. A. Cochran testimony, pp. 64–105, GDAH.

13. Ibid.; Atlanta Constitution, July 24, 1908, p. 1.

14. Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of

Convict Labor in the New South (London: Verso, 1996), p. 122.

15. Joel Hurt to J. W. Callahan, Dec. 24, 1904, and Dec. 29, 1904, GDAH.

16. J. W. Callahan to Hurt, Jan. 6, 1905, GDAH.

17. Hurt to Callahan, Jan. 5, 1905, GDAH.

18. Proceedings: Joint Committee, Joel Hurt testimony, pp. 418–48.

19. Proceedings: Joint Committee, Jake Moore testimony, Aug. 4, 1908, GDAH.

20. Proceedings: Joint Committee, George Hurt testimony, pp. 724–42, GDAH.

21. Ibid.

22. Atlanta Constitution, July 13, 1908.

23. Ibid., Aug. 3, 4, 5, 1908.

24. Annual Statement of Brickyard Account, June 1, 1909, to May 31, 1910,

Chattahoochee Brick Company File, AHC.

25. Matthew J. Mancini, One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American

South, 1866–1928 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), p. 221.

26. H. Gibson to E. J. Parsons, May 7, 1906; Thomas Jones to Attorney General,

May 11, 1906; E. J. Parsons to Attorney General, June 18, 1906, Peonage Files,

RG60, NA.

27. Gibson to Parsons, May 7, 1906, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

28. Parsons to Attorney General, May 11, 1906, File 50-87, Peonage Files, RG60,

NA.

29. Parsons to Attorney General, June 18, 1906, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

30. Johnson to Department of Justice, March 30, 1907, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

31. Parsons to Attorney General, Sept. 18, 1907, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

32. Jones to Parsons, Dec. 24, 1907; “Law Abiding Citizen” to Jones, Dec. 19, 1907;

Parsons to Attorney General, Dec. 26, 1907, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

33. W. Armbrecht to Attorney General, Dec. 22, 1908, File 50-92, Peonage Files,

RG60, NA.

34. Armbrecht to Attorney General, January 1909, RG60, NA.

35. “Statement of All Peonage Cases Since May 1, 1902,” J. W. Dimmick to M. H.

Smith, March 3, 1909, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

36. Attorney General to Herman Perkins, undated note, Sept. 1923, 50-1-6, File

5280-03-02, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

37. “Copy of Report of the September 1911 Grand Jury of the Criminal Court of

Je erson County: Justice of the Peace”; Oliver Street to Attorney General, Jan. 24,

1912, File 50-112, RG60, NA.

38. Woodrow Wilson, Division and Reunion, 1829–1889 (New York: Longmans,

Green, 1893), pp. 124, 125, 268, 273; Lawrence J. Friedman, The White Savage:

Racial Fantasies in the Postbellum South (Englewood Cli s, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,

1970); Arthur Link, Wilson: The Road to the White House (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1947); James Chace, 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs— the

Election That Changed the Country (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

39. Bureau of the Census, Bulletin 129, Negroes in the United States (Washington,

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), pp. 7, 36–39.

40. Bureau of the Census, Plantation Farming in the United States (Washington,

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), pp. 36, 37.

41. William L. O’Neill, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–1917 (Chicago:

Quadrangle, 1966), p. 232.

42. Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1910,

to August 31, 1914 (Montgomery, Ala., 1914), p. 180, ADAH.

43. Hastings H. Hart, Social Problems of Alabama: A Study of the Social Institutions

and Agencies of the State of Alabama as Related to Its War Activities (Montgomery:

Russell Sage Foundation, 1918).

44. See Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 110–31, citing trial transcript,

Georgia v. John S. Williams, Newton Superior Court, March term, 1921. For the

de nitive treatment of the Williams case, see Gregory A. Freeman, Lay This Body

Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves (Chicago: Chicago Review

Press, 1999); 1920 Census, Jasper County, Ga.

45. Ibid.

46. Thomas D. Sanford to Attorney General, April 11, 1921, 50-80-5, Peonage Files,

RG60, NA.

47. Joseph John to Attorney General, July 28, 1924, 50-30-1, Peonage Files, RG60,

NA.

48. J. Edgar Hoover to O. R. Luhring, May 13, 1926, 50-2-2-1, Peonage Files, RG60,

NA.

49. O. R. Luhring to Rebecca Jones, Aug. 6, 1926; Jones to Calvin Coolidge, July

26, 1926; a davit of Rebecca Jones, July 26, 1926; Assistant Attorney General

Nugent Dodds to Hon. Oscar DePriest, July 25, 1932; 50-1-2-2, Peonage Files,

RG60, NA.

50. N. Gordon Carper, “Martin Tabert, Martyr of an Era,” Florida Historical

Quarterly 52 (October 1973): 115–31.

51. Jacksonville Florida Times-Union, May 24 and 25, 1923.

52. Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years

Ending Sept. 30, 1928 (Montgomery: Birmingham Printing, 1928), in author's

collection.

53. Mancini, p. 115.

54. County Camp Inspection Records, Department of Corrections, ADAH.

55. New York World, March 22, 23, 24, 27, 1926.

56. Mancini, pp. 115–16.

57. Associated Press, July 2, 1928.

58. 1930 Census, Alabama Census of Kilby Prison; 1900 Census, Tallapoosa

County.

59. Draft Registration Card of Henry Tinsley, June 5, 1917, World War I Selective

Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917–1918 (Washington, D.C.: NA

M1509), online data accessed at www.ancestry.com.

60. State Convict Record, Vol. 14, Sept. 1929–Jan. 1931, p. 217, ADAH; Tinsley

died in 1971, at the “Negro” veterans’ hospital at Tuskegee Institute.

CHAPTER XVI : FREEDOM

1. 1930 Census, Georgia.

2. John Spivak, Georgia Nigger (New York: Brewer, Warren and Putnam, 1932), pp.

61–65.

3. Ibid., pp. 104–5.

4. Ibid., pp. 97–99.

5. Ibid., p. 240.

6. Ibid., unnumbered pages.

7. Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years

Ending September 30, 1928 (Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1928), in author's

collection.

8. Walter Wilson, Forced Labor in the United States (New York: International

Publishers, 1933), pp. 92–94.

9. O. B. Willis to Department of Justice, Nov. 20, 1933; Joseph B. Keenan to O. B.

Willis, Dec. 8, 1933, 50-1-0, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

10. Ibid.

11. Francis Biddle, In Brief Authority (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), p. 155.

12. Francis Biddle to All United States Attorneys, Dec. 12, 1941, “Circular No.

3591, Re: Involuntary Servitude, Slavery, and Peonage,” File 50-821, RG60, NA.

13. Francis Biddle, A Casual Past: The Reminiscences of a Former Attorney General

of the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), pp. 339, 374, 376–77.

14. Biddle, “Civil Rights and the Federal Law,” Speech at Cornell University (Oct. 4,

1944) (on le with the Duke Law Journal), cited in Risa L. Golubo , “The

Thirteenth Amendment and the Lost Origins of Civil Rights,” Duke Law Journal 50,

no. 6 (2001): 1609.

15. Biddle, Brief Authority, pp. 154–60.

16. Biddle to All U.S. Attorneys.

17. J. Edgar Hoover to Wendell Berge, July 18, 1942, Re: Charles Edward Bledsoe;

W. F. Lanier—Involuntary Servitude and Slavery, File 50-843, Peonage Files, RG60,

NA.

18. Wendell Berge to J. Edgar Hoover, Director Federal Bureau of Investigation,

Aug. 8, 1942, File 50-843, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

19. Berge to Francis H. Inge, Aug. 8, 1942, File 50-843, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.

20. Galveston Daily News, Oct. 2, 1942, p. 14.

21. Frank Coleman to U.S. Board of Parole, March 15, 1945; Douglas McGregor to

Attorney General, June 28, 1943; “Judgment, United State Circuit Court of Appeals

for the Fifth Circuit, Extract from the Minutes of June 19th, 1943,” File 50-74-6,

RG 60, NA.

22. Corpus Christi Times, March 23, 1943, quoted in Goluboff, p. 38.

EPILOGUE

1. Interview by the author of Molly Cottenham, Feb. 2002.

2. Interview by the author of Harold Cottingham, Feb. 2002.

3. Interview by the author of J. Christopher Flowers, Oct. 9, 2007.

4. Census, 1900, 1910, 1930; U.S. Social Security Administration Death Index.

5. http://www.sloss.com/coke/history.asp.

6. Interview by the author of Rodney Mills Cook Jr., and English Robinson, Oct. 2,

2007.

7. Speech by Gary N. Drummond, Oct. 2000, posted at www.drummondco.com.

8. Corporate records, Secretary of State's O ce, State of Alabama, Montgomery,

Ala.

9. Douglas A. Blackmon, “Hard Time: From Alabama's Past, Capitalism and Racism

in a Cruel Partnership,” Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2001, p. 1.

10. Ibid.

11. Hearing before U.S. District Court Judge James Elicon, Feb. 13, 2004, Tulsa.

12. Interview by the author of Martha Minow, June 2001.

13. Blackmon, “Silent Partner: How the South's Fight to Uphold Segregation Was

Funded Up North,” Wall Street Journal, June 11, 1999, p. 1.

14. Interview by the author of Tom Ferrall, 2001.

15. “Wachovia Announces National Partnerships in Support of African Americans,”

July 28, 2005, www.wachovia.com.

16. Interview by the author of Ken Thompson, chairman and chief executive

officer, Wachovia Bank, Sept. 14, 2007.

17. Interview by the author of Eugene Reese, Sept. 19, 2007.

18. Interview by the author of Earl Brown, John Burt, April 23, 2002, Birmingham,

Ala.

19. Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), pp. 303–5.

20. Martin Luther King Jr., notes in margins of Charles Silberman, Crisis in Black

and White, 1964, p. 6, Papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, AHC.

21. Blackmon, “Hard Time.”

22. Interviews by the author of Pearline Danzey, Ida Hogan, Cynthia James, Melissa

Danzey Craddock, and James Danzey, Sept. 28, 2000.

23. Ibid.

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Review, January 1948.

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Alabama,” Tuskegee Student, Feb. 28, 1895, p. 2, BTW Papers.

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American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition. Chicago, 1893.

DISSERTATIONS AND THESES

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Day, James Sanders. “Diamonds in the Rough: A History of Alabama's Cahaba Coal Field.” Ph.D. diss.,

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University of North Carolina, Chapel Hil , 1966.

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Alabama, Birmingham, Spring 1988.

CORPORATE RECORDS AND REPORTS

Agreement Entered into by J. Craig Smith, President of the Board of Convict Inspectors of the State of

Alabama and Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, Nov. 26, 1907. Author's col ection.

Annual Report, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, Reports to Board of Directors, Dec. 19, 1892.

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Athenaeum, Eufaula, Ala.

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Author's col ection.

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Structural Steel. Pit sburgh, Penn., and Chicago, Il .: Carnegie-Il inois Steel Corporation, 1936.

Birmingham, Ala.: Tennesse Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, 1936. San Francisco, Calif.: Columbia

Steel Company, 1936.

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col ection.

Sixth Annual Report of the United States Steel Corporation, for the Fiscal Year ended Dec. 31, 1907.

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States Steel Corp., 1954. An of icial company history.

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Wiebel, A. V. Biography of a Business. Tennessee Coal & Iron Division. United States Steel Corporation,

1960.

GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS

Administrative Correspondence, 1881–1897, Dawson Let er Books. Correspondence of the Inspectors of

the Penitentiary, Department of Corrections. ADAH.

Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Alabama Penitentiary, for the Year Ending Sept. 30, 1877.

Montgomery: Barret & Brown, 1878. ADAH.

Annual Report of the Inspectors of the Alabama Penitentiary, October 1, 1873, to September 30, 1874.

Montgomery: W. W. Screws, 1874. Author's col ection.

Bibb County Commission Minutes, BCCH.

Biennial Report of the Adjutant-General of Alabama, to Thos. G. Jones, Governor and Commander-in-

Chief. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1894.

Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, 1880–1882. Montgomery: Barret & Brown,

1882. ADAH.

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States At orneys, Dec. 12, 1941, File 50-821, Record Group 60, Department of Justice, National

Archives.

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Labor.Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Of ice, 1906.

“Contract on Confession of Judgment Record, 1903–1913.” SCHS.

Convict Legislation and Rules, 1882–1883, Alabama Department of Corrections. ADAH.

Convict Record, Autauga County Probate Clerks Of ice, Prat vil e, Ala.

Convict Record, undated, Barbour County. Sherif R. B. Teal, Barbour County Courthouse, Clayton, Ala.

Convicts at Hard Labor for the County in the State of Alabama on the First Day of March 1883,

microfiche. ADAH.

Dawson, R. H. Diary of Reginald Heber Dawson, 1883–1906. ADAH.

Deed of Purchase by the Confederate States of America of Bibb County Iron Co., Sept. 7, 1863, BCC.

Docket of A. M. El iot , Justice of the Peace, 1878–1880, SCHS.

Feeding Accounts, 1908, Shelby County. SCHS.

Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1902, to August 31, 1904.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1904. ADAH.

First Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1894, to August 31, 1896.

Montgomery: Roemer Printing, 1896. ADAH.

First Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, October 1, 1884, to October 1, 1886. Montgomery:

Barret & Co., 1886. ADAH.

Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1900, to August 31, 1902.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1902. ADAH.

Hart, Hastings H. Social Problems of Alabama: A Study of the Social Institutions and Agencies of the

State of Alabama as Related to Its War Activities. Montgomery: Russel Sage Foundation, 1918.

Henry County Convict Record, Henry County Courthouse, Abbevil e, Ala.

History of the Penitentiary. Special Message of Gov. Cobb, 1882. ADAH.

Jail Record, May 1888 to December 1890, Shelby County. SCHS.

Jail Register, 1907, Shelby County. SCHS.

“Jef erson County Circuit Court Convict Docket, 1902–1903.” Birmingham Public Library Archives.

Je erson County Coroner's Record, Preliminary Investigation Reports, Record of B. L. Brasher, Coroner,

Of ice of Coroner/Medical Examiner, Jef erson County.

Kilby, Thomas E. “Message Relative to Convict Lease System.” Jan. 10, 1923.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1923. Author's col ection.

——-. “Message Relative to Feeding of Prisoners.” January 15, 1923.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1923. Author's col ection.

Kolb, R. F. Annual Report of Department of Agriculture and Industries for the Fiscal Year 1912–1913.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1913.

Land Atlas and Plat Book, Bibb County, Alabama. Rockford, Il .: Rockford Map Publishers, 1989.

Lee, A. Frank. “Historical Review of the Alabama Prison System.” Department of Corrections.

Montgomery, 1960. ADAH.

Message of Thos. E. Kilby, Governor, Relative to Feeding of Prisoners, Legislative Document No. 3,

Alabama Legislature, Jan. 15, 1923 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1923). Author's col ection.

Milner, John T. “Report to the Governor of Alabama on the Alabama Central Railroad.” Montgomery:

Advertiser Book and Job Steam Press Print, 1859. ADAH.

Minutes of the Board of Inspectors, 1883–1913, Department of Corrections. ADAH.

Minutes of the Shelby County Commission, Dec. 1880, 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884.

SCHS. Oates, W. H. Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending

September 30th, 1916. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1917. ADAH.

O cial Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Alabama, May 21–Sept. 3, 1901.

Wetumpka, Ala.: 1940.

Proceedings: Joint Commit ee of the Senate and House to Investigate the Convict Lease System of

Georgia. Vols. 1 and 2, 727 pp. GDAH.

Quadrennial Report of the Board of Control and Economy: Convict Department, 1919–1922.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1922. ADAH.

Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1906, to August 31, 1910.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1910. ADAH.

Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1910, to August 31, 1914.

Montgomery, 1914. ADAH.

Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Sept. 1, 1914, to Aug. 31, 1918.

Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1918. ADAH.

Record of Incorporation, Bibb Steam Mil Company, Nov. 26, 1850. BCC.

Register of Prisoners Commit ed to the County Jail of Shelby County. SCHS.

“Report of Persons Sentenced to Hard Labor for Shelby County.” December 1913. SCHS.

Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30th,

1916. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1917.

Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30,

1920. Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1920. ADAH.

Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30th,

1926. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1926. ADAH.

Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30th,

1928. Birmingham: Birmingham Printing, 1928. Author's col ection.

Report of the State Prison Inspector of Alabama, for the Period of Two Years Ending September 30th,

1930. Montgomery: Wilson Printing Co., 1930. Author's col ection.

Schedule of Convicts Obtained by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. from Shelby County, 2nd Quarter

1904. SCHS.

Second Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1886: Convict Labor.Washington, D.C.: U.S.

Government Printing Of ice, 1887.

Second Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1896, to August 31, 1898.

Montgomery: Roemer Printing, 1898. ADAH.

Second Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, Oct. 1, 1886, to Sept. 30, 1888. Montgomery: W.

D. Brown, 1888. ADAH.

Shelby County Pol Tax Book, 1890. SCHS.

Shelby County Record of Prisoners, April 11, 1878, to October 11, 1878, SCHS. Shelby County Record

of Prisoners, April 18, 1879, to October 1, 1888.SCHS.

Shelby County Record of Prisoners, Aug. 17, 1884, to May 16, 1886.SCHS.

Shelby County Record of Prisoners, Oct. 19, 1890, to Aug. 20, 1906.SCHS.

Shelby County Sherif 's Of ice, Loose Papers File, Columbiana, Ala., SCHS.

Sherif 's Feeding Account, 1899–1907, Shelby County. SCHS.

Sherif 's Feeding Accounts, 1907, Shelby County. SCHS.

Sherif 's Prisoners Register, 1908, Shelby County. SCHS.

Sixth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1904, to August 31, 1906.

Montgomery, 1906. ADAH.

Tal apoosa County Probate Clerk's Records, Dadevil e, Ala.

Testimony Taken by the Joint Special Commit ee of the Session of 1880–81 to Enquire into the

Condition and Treatment of Convicts of the State, Testimony of Jno. D. Goode. Montgomery, Ala.,

1881. ADAH.

Third Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1, 1898, to August 31, 1900.

Montgomery: A. Roemer, 1900. ADAH.

Third Biennial Report of the Inspectors of Convicts, Oct. 1, 1888, to Sept. 30, 1890. Montgomery:

Brown Printing, 1890. ADAH.

The War of Rebel ion: A Compilation of the O cial Records of the Union and Confederate

Armies.Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Of ice, 1880–1901.

Wilcox County Probate Clerk's Records, Camden, Ala.

NEWSPAPERS

Atlanta Constitution

Atlanta Journal

Augusta Chronicle

Birmingham Age-Herald

Birmingham Daily News

Centrevil e Press

Cleveland Gazet e

Dadevil e Spot Cash

Galveston Daily News

Jacksonvil e Florida Times-Union

Montgomery Advertiser

Montgomery Daily Dispatch

New York Evening Post

New York Herald

New York Times

New York World

Prat vil e Progress

Shelby Sentinel

Sunday Mississippian

Tal apoosa Voice

Wal Street Journal

Wilcox Progressive Era

Photography Credits

Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library and

FRONTISPIECE Archives

INSERT PAGES

Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research

1 (top)

Center, University of Texas at Austin

Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library and

1 (bot om)

Archives

2 (top)

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ6-1848

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

2 (bot om)

and Archives

Courtesy of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research

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Center, University of Texas at Austin

3 (top right) Author's col ection

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ6Z-

3 (bot om)

127557

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

4(top left)

and Archives

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

4 (top right) and

Archives

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

4 (bot om)

and Archives

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

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and Archives

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

5 (top right) and Archives

Courtesy of the Alabama Department of History

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and Archives

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Author's col ection

6 (top right) Author's col ection

6 (bot om)

Courtesy of Library of Congress

Courtesy of Birmingham Public Library and

7 (top)

Archives

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Author's col ection

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USF344-

8 (top)

007S41- ZB

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-

8 (bot om)

58998

Copyright © 2008 by Douglas A. Blackmon

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Acknowledgments for photographs used by permission appear at the end of the book.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows:

Blackmon, Douglas A

Slavery by another name: the re-enslavement of black Americans

from the Civil War to World War II / Douglas A. Blackmon.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—19th century. 2. African Americans—

Civil rights—History—20th century. 3. African Americans—Employment—History. 4.

African

Americans—Crimes against—History. 5. African American prisoners—Social

conditions. 6. Forced labor—United States—History. 7. Convict labor—United States—

History. 8. Slavery—United States—History. 9. United States—Race relations—

History—19th century. 10. United States—Race relations—History—20th century. I.

Title.

E185.2.B545 2008

305.896'073—dc22 2007034500

eISBN: 978-0-307-47247-2

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.0

Table of Contents

PART ONE: THE SLOW POISON

EPILOGUE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER I: THE WEDDING

CHAPTER IX: A RIVER OF ANGER

CHAPTER X: THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

CHAPTER XI: SLAVERY AFFIRMED

CHAPTER XV: EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH

EPILOGUE