Slavery by Another Name
Page 14
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 t
o 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 jackhammer
s. 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