Slavery by Another Name
Page 21
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 h
er 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