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Slavery by Another Name

Page 11

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  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

 

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