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Slavery by Another Name

Page 20

by Douglas A. Blackmon


  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 the
m, 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

 

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