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 t
hen 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
Slavery by Another Name Page 11