Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  waited. He dutiful y pronounced Turke guilty, though it wasn't clear

  of what crime, and fined him $15 plus unspecified costs.

  Turke had already been robbed by one of the white men of the

  $5.41 and a pocketwatch he carried on the rst day of his

  kidnapping. He had nothing with which to pay. George Cosby

  appeared and proclaimed he had paid the ne. He took the silent

  black man back to his farm and the corn-crib and its iron lock.

  The system by which John Pace and Fletch Turner obtained black

  men for their farms, sawmil s, and limestone quarry was more

  re ned than the Cos-bys’ brutish tactics. The two men often spent

  their days on the square in downtown Dadevil e, awaiting word via

  telegraph of their various enterprises and the frequent arrival of

  regular procurers of black labor, who arrived daily on the two train

  runs stopping at the town depot.

  Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit , the two men who seized John

  Davis, were the county's most important traders in black men. At

  forty-six years old, Franklin was the most atavistic of the half dozen

  constables and deputies who were routinely on the prowl for black

  men on behalf of Pace and Turner. In addition to his store, Franklin

  was commissioned as a night watchman, paid $30 a month by the

  town of Goodwater. He made easily as much again in the traf icking

  of black laborers.40

  Pruit , thirty-six years old, also worked as a night watchman in

  Good-water and operated a livery stable as a sideline. He received

  $42 a month to police the town and col ected a $2-per-family

  annual tax for upkeep of the unpaved streets. Altogether, he eked

  out enough to maintain his widowed mother and wife, adult sister

  and brothers, and two toddling sons, in a compact wood frame

  house near the center of town.

  The two men's ostensible police supervisor, Goodwater marshal

  John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

  John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did

  the town's other constable, Laray A. Grogan, who busily transported

  black forced laborers from Goodwater to the Turner lime quarry

  and kiln in the town of Calcis. Grogan, thirty years old, lived with

  his young wife and three children under age six next door to Mayor

  White.41

  Early in April of 1902, Franklin and Pruit got word that runaways

  had ed the Samples Lumber Company sawmil outside the nearby

  town of Hol ands. Samples, like virtual y al lumber cut ing

  operations in southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida at the time,

  was a spectacle of horrifying abuse. Young black men—and

  occasional y whites—were routinely lured to remote timber camps

  deep in the forests with promises of solid wages and good working

  conditions. As often as not, the camps became prisons, where men

  and boys were held against their wil for months or years, fed and

  housed miserably, worked under brutal circumstances, and paid

  lit le or nothing. Hundreds of other black men were purchased from

  jails across the state. Since black men knew they enjoyed no

  protection from these abuses from local sheri s or judges, they

  relied on word of mouth in African American neighborhoods or

  among other itinerant workers to identify which camps ful l ed

  their advertisements and white men who could "be trusted."

  On April 2, Dock Crenshaw, a twenty-one-year-old black laborer

  from Roanoke, Alabama, agreed to take work at Samples. After one

  day, Crenshaw and several other young black men realized they had

  been grossly misled. Instead of $1 a day in wages, plus food and a

  place to stay, the men were being stockaded and fed prisoner's

  rations. Other workers told them they would never receive pay.

  Instead, they were being charged $2 a week for their food and

  shelter—a third of their supposed total wages.

  Five young men, Crenshaw, Charles Wil iams, Pat Hil , Jim

  Coleman, and Ed Moody, decided to leave at the end of the

  workday and return home. This was a particularly gal ing act to the

  white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

  white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to

  local white authorities. The sight of ve black men, most of them

  teenagers, strol ing up a public road, having de ed their white

  employer, justi ed a harsh response in the minds of almost every

  white in the region.

  As Crenshaw and two others ambled under a bridge at the edge

  of the town of Goodwater that night, Franklin and a second white

  man from the town stepped out of the darkness and said the men

  were under arrest for "jumping" a board bil —or not paying for

  food provided to them at Samples.

  The ve workers were marched back to a general store in tiny

  Hol ands where the town mayor convened what went for a

  misdemeanor trial. Crenshaw refused to plead guilty, but the others,

  pressured by the armed whites, agreed to confess. The men had

  eaten only once at the mil , but the mayor found that each had

  walked out on a $5 tab. Al were given nes of about $6, plus

  unspeci ed "costs." Franklin told the justice of the peace not to tel

  the men the ful amount they owed and that he would take care of

  it.Franklin loaded the ve into a wagon and carried them back to

  Good-water. After several hours locked in the same smal jail near

  the railroad tracks where John Davis and so many others had been

  held, Franklin, now joined by Pruit , ordered the black men onto

  the next train stopping in the town. When they rol ed into the

  Dadevil e station, a wagon was waiting to transport the men to

  Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. Pace gave $25 cash to Franklin

  and Pruit , $12.50 for transporting the gang, and a check on the

  Tal apoosa County Bank for $100.

  After several days detained by Pace, the farmer's resident

  magistrate, James Kennedy, read a contract out loud to the men. Al

  Charley Wil iams could fol ow was that they would have to work

  there for at least seven months. They resigned themselves to their

  fate and began working under armed guard every day, plowing,

  hoeing, and ditching. At night, the men were locked in a crude

  cel .42

  cel .

  Wil iams knew he was in for a hard time, but he could hardly

  have imagined its details. A strapping, barrel-chested farmhand, he

  wasn't accustomed to the servile status Pace's farm demanded. He

  de ed directions and chal enged guards, and for that he was

  whipped nearly every day, usual y with his pants pul ed to his

  ankles and his back bared. The instruments of punishment used to

  beat him were leather plow lines, trouser belts, or saplings.

  "Anything happened to be in the boss man's hands," Wil iams

  testified later.43

  The younger men in the group were terri ed especial y by what

  was happening. Within a month of arriving at Pace's farm, Pat Hil

  and Ed Moody, both seventeen years old, tried to run away. After

  traveling just four miles, they were captured by Pace's son-in-law,

  Anderson Hardy. Kennedy, the justice of the peace
employed by

  Pace, staged another fake trial and convicted the pair of "breaking

  the contract" with Pace and sentenced them to six months of hard

  labor for the county. Conveniently, Pace was under contract with

  the Tal apoosa County judge to hold al local hard-labor convicts.

  So Hil and Moody returned immediately to the same chain gang,

  now with an additional term of six months to work and explicitly

  classified as criminal convicts.

  There was another lesson to be learned, however, and one that

  Pace believed the other blacks being held on the farm needed to

  share in as wel . The risks and futility of at empting to escape

  would be demonstrated for al of Pace's laborers. Hil was led

  nearly naked in front of a gang of black laborers working in a eld,

  forced to bend at the waist and squat, his hands tied together

  behind his knees. The point of these beatings was manyfold: the

  most obvious was to create a speci c disincentive to escape. Just as

  important was to show the power of whites not just to cause pain

  but to force a black man to bear profound humiliation, to be

  reduced to a state of pathetic powerlessness, to visibly see how

  quickly and e ortlessly even the most simpleton whites could force

  a de ant black man to reveal emotional vulnerability and physical

  weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

  weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent

  over and whipped on the naked back," Hil testi ed stoical y. "He

  told me to count, and I counted up to 15, and could not count any

  further. He whipped me about 25 licks."44

  VI

  SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME

  "We shal have to kil a thousand …to get them back to their

  places."

  The spring of 1903 arrived in Alabama with a surreal, portentous

  fury. Farmers pushed hard to put a new cot on crop in the

  ground, only to see nearly every seedling kil ed by an

  inexplicable late freeze. Rain and fungus plagued the corn stands

  rising in countless thousands of new rows.

  In the black of night on April 8, a funnel cloud descended

  without warning from a vertiginous sky, zigzagging north of

  Birmingham, shearing one-hundred-yard-wide swaths of trees,

  homes, and elds as it bounded madly into the earth and back to

  the sky across a path of eighteen miles. The horizon coruscated with

  astonishing arcs of lightning. By the time the wind and rain

  stopped, a dozen people were dead. Five days later, another storm

  lashed Bibb County, scraping past the old Cot ingham farm,

  obliterating smal buildings and stripping the buds beginning to

  swel on fruit trees. On the same day, another tornado—

  mysteriously pouring hail but no rain—ripped through south

  Alabama, kil ing three more.

  Final y, as evening fel on April 19, an unnatural cold swept

  across the state as the sky opened above Goodwater and Tal apoosa

  County, pouring a deluge of hail and rain. Trees were stripped bare

  of leaves and fruit blossoms. What was left of the cot on, corn,

  purple-hul eld peas, and early sprouts of squash and okra was

  beaten at into the soil. Farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers—

  free and enslaved—rushed into the fields to replant.

  But by the end of April, another kind of zephyr, something just as

  twisted and contradictory to the new order of the white South, was

  lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

  lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among

  black laborers on Sunday mornings was a story so unbelievable

  most people said it must be fable. A man who claimed to be a

  federal Secret Service detective was visiting black residents in

  Goodwater. Some had been sent by train to testify before a federal

  grand jury col ecting evidence that white people in Tal-lapoosa

  County were stil holding slaves.

  By the middle of May the rumors were rampant—and seemingly

  con rmed by the nearly continual presence of a burly federal agent

  named E. P. McAdams. Then on May 27, newspapers across the

  state carried an astounding press release issued from the

  Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.:

  Washington, May 26—At the request of the Department of Justice, the

  United States Secret Service has undertaken the work of investigating the

  charge of peonage, or holding another in servitude to work out a debt,

  which has been made against persons living in the vicinity of Montgomery,

  Ala. The punishment provided by the statute for this crime is a ne of not

  less than $1,000 nor more than $5,000 or imprisonment of not less than

  one year nor more than five.

  One man, named Robert N. Franklin, has already been indicted for

  keeping a negro in servitude for at least a year. Information in the hands

  of [Secret Service] chief Wilkie tends to show that a regular system has

  been practiced for a long time between certain magistrates and persons

  who want negro laborers.

  It is said the plan is to bring a poor negro before a magistrate on a

  imsy charge. He is convicted and, having no money to pay a ne, the

  white man o ers to advance him the money, provided the negro will make

  a labor contract with him for a length of time su cient to reimburse him

  for the money and trouble he has taken to keep the negro out of jail. He is

  thereupon taken away and begins what is frequently a long term of cruel

  servitude, being frequently whipped for failure to perform work to the

  satisfaction of his employer.

  An agent of the secret service who is now on the ground will make a

  thorough investigation of the whole alleged system and turn over to the

  United States Attorney of that district all information he may secure with a

  view to the prosecution of said offenders. 1

  Unexpectedly and without explanation, a ash of hope bolted

  across the dark curtain fal ing on black life. Most amazing was that

  it commenced in Montgomery, the city that had served brie y

  during the early months of the Civil War as the national capital of

  the Confederacy2 It remained the seat of a government that since

  the war had eviscerated black citizenship more completely and

  enthusiastical y than any other.

  That the federal government would initiate such an inquiry was

  mind-boggling to white southerners. Investigations of any kind by

  federal agencies were extraordinarily unusual in an era that

  predated the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Moreover, the South's long asserted right to manage the a airs of

  black residents without northern interference had nal y been

  achieved. Nearly every southern state, including Alabama, had

  completed the total disenfranchisement of African Americans by

  1901. Virtual y no blacks served on state juries. No blacks in the

  South were permit ed to hold meaningful state or local political

  o ces. There were virtual y no black sheri s, constables, or police

  o cers. Blacks had been whol y shunted into their own inferior

  railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, neighborhoods, and schools.

  Al of this had been accom
plished in a sudden, unfet ered grab by

  white supremacists that was met outside the South with lit le more

  than quiet assent. During the thirty years since Reconstruction—

  despite its being a period of nearly continuous Republican control

  of the White House—federal o cials raised only the faintest

  concerns about white abuse of black laborers. Southern leaders

  were astonished that such a protest had inexplicably arisen now.

  For blacks it seemed that a true friend had miraculously come to

  occupy the White House, that somehow the assurances of American

  democracy might actual y ful l themselves. "The South … is in the

  hands of unfriendly white men…It has been left to the Federal

  Government, under that administration of President Roosevelt, to

  expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

  expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to

  punish and prevent it," wrote the black commentator Charles W

  Chesnut . "The President has endeavored to stem the tide of

  prejudice, which, sweeping up from the South, has sought to

  overwhelm the Negro everywhere; and he has made it clear that he

  regards himself as the representative of the people."3

  This dramatic turn of events—so revolting to southern whites, so

  euphoric to blacks—began with the assassination of President

  Wil iam McKinley two years earlier in September 1901.

  McKinley had represented more than any other American leader

  at the turn of the twentieth century the experiences of those who

  directly participated in the war between the North and the South

  and came to see that struggle as a moral crusade against slavery and

  for the preservation of the union. A young private when he

  volunteered, McKinley rose steadily to the rank of major by the end

  of the war on the basis of modest acts of heroism. He was the last

  president who had served as an o cer in Abraham Lincoln's Grand

  Army, and mil ions of aging Union veterans continued to greet him

  af ectionately as Major McKinley.

  But by the fal of 1901, the veterans he marched with through the

  great bat les of the con ict had become a geriatric generation, their

  luster increasingly pale against the new economic dramas playing

  out between fabulously rich titans of manufacturing and production

  such as John D. Rockefel er, Andrew Carnegie, and banker John