"John, what did you get for those negroes?"
"Nineteen dol ars," Dunbar grudgingly replied.
Purifoy was alarmed that his friend had been party to the sel ing
of men. The two continued talking for an hour. It was apparent to
of men. The two continued talking for an hour. It was apparent to
Purifoy that Dunbar was involved in an active tra c of African
Americans.
"Do you think it's right?" Purifoy final y asked.
"Wel , everybody else was doing it," Dunbar replied.9
The evidence of Pat erson and Caldwel 's capture quickly led
investigators to the fate of three other black men rounded up in
Goodwater a day later. This time, the night marshal rounded up
Dave Johnson, Esau Wil iams, and Glennie Helms. Al were charged
with vagrancy. After a night locked in the town calaboose, they
were brought before Mayor White, who refused to al ow the black
men to cal any witnesses. White declared them guilty and ned
each $6.60.10
None had the money to pay their nes, and the three were tied
up and held until a train arrived, bound for Dadevil e. After the
short ride over, the young men were presented at the station to
Fletch Turner, who said they could choose whether to work on his
farm or Pace's. One of the most bit er incongruities of the slaving
system as it persisted into the twentieth century was the
participation of blacks in the holding of other African Americans—
another debasement shared with antebel um slavery. Black gang
leaders passed on the orders of white overseers; some blacks
assisted in restraining and stripping men to be whipped by the
bosses; and, as in the case of the young men seized in Goodwater
that night, local black workers under the control of Pace and Turner
played out a ruse to convince Johnson, Wil iams, and Helms to
quietly go along with Turner, a man whose cruelty to blacks was
widely known. "There was some colored people there told us we
had bet er go with Mr. Turner, that we would be treated a heap
bet er with Mr. Turner," Wil iams testified to the grand jurors.11
So the deal was completed, with just enough of a chimera that
the transaction had been part of a legitimate legal process and that
the black men in question had voluntarily submit ed to their fates.
the black men in question had voluntarily submit ed to their fates.
"Mr. Turner said he bought us al three for $50 …and we were to
work for four months and a half a piece," testi ed Dave Johnson.
"Mr. Dunbar sold us to him. I don't know for how much," Helms
later told the grand jury. None signed contracts agreeing to the
arrangement, though later such documents mysteriously appeared
with "X" ‘s purporting to be those of the three black men. The
gossamer facade of judicial process took only three days to weave.
The trio had been arrested on a Thursday, tried, sentenced, and
delivered to a new owner on Friday, and were at their forced labor
by dawn's break on Saturday.12
At Turner's farm, the black laborers were put to work digging
drainage, cut ing wood, and cleaning up recently cleared new
pasture—the most grueling sunrise-to-sunset tasks of a farm stil
being carved from forest. Dave Johnson was beaten on the rst
Saturday by Al en Turner, son of the man who had purchased the
three. "I was whipped," Johnson said, "because I did not know how
to ditch—laid me down at on my stomach, one man on my head
and another man to hold my legs, and whipped me across my back,
my clothes were on. I was whipped with a piece of stick about as
big as a broom handle. I got about 25 licks. I was whipped about
every day."13
Helms received his rst beating a day after Johnson's: "I was
whipped about two days after I got there," Helms testi ed later.
"Whipped me a long time, I could not tel how many licks.
Sometimes I was whipped two or three times a day, sometimes
took my clothes down and whipped me with a stick on the bare
back."14Esau Wil iams said his rst corporal punishment came a
week after arriving at Turner's farm. Over the fol owing four weeks,
"I was whipped nearly every day…. Would drop our clothes and
whip us with hickory sticks," Wil iams recounted.15 When guards
were particularly sadistic, they at ached an empty metal bul et
cartridge to the end of the stick to gouge the skin with each swing
of the branch.
After days of testimony by victims of the forced labor ring, the jury
was greeted on May 11, 1903, by the hulking gure of John Pace.
The strange weather of early spring had nal y entered a long calm.
Replanting was in ful swing. Weeks of rain had abated, and the
drying elds were teeming with workers put ing in seed. Just a few
weeks earlier, Pace and his son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, had been
aggressively gathering more laborers, some hired as free men but
most captured through the courts or their procurers scat ered in the
countryside.
Suddenly ordered to appear before the grand jury, Pace turned
the operations over to Hardy and boarded a Central of Georgia
morning train at the Dadevil e depot where he had purchased
hundreds of black men over the prior twenty years. The ride from
Dadevil e's simple train platform to the immense new red-brick
Union Station in Montgomery took not much more than an hour.
Completed just ve years earlier, Union Station, receiving trains
from six competing railroad lines, was the bustling hub of
Alabama's economy—a veritable temple to the cot on-driven
prosperity that the South was reestablishing for itself and that this
federal investigation seemed intent on disrupting.
Wel before noon, Pace was in the capital city. He walked two
short blocks down Commerce Street to Dexter Street, almost
certainly unaware of the irony of his passing the fountain in Court
Square, where Montgomery's antebel um slave market had thrived
for almost fty years with the daily auctions of African Americans
like Scip, the Cot ingham slave, and the forebears of the men and
women Pace held on his farm. Across the street was the federal
court building. Almost exactly forty years after Lincoln's order
freeing the slaves, Pace entered the grand doorway of the
courthouse, the rst man in Alabama to face the threat of criminal
sanction for holding black slaves. Forty-two years later, the modern
U.S. civil rights movement began at the same intersection when
Rosa Parks boarded a bus at the Court Square stop and refused to
give up her seat to a white man.16
In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,
In a wood-paneled private chamber inside the court building,
Pace o ered the grand jury a sanitized, yet nonetheless damning,
version of his dealings with black laborers. It must have been
unnerving for him to face a panel of "peers" that included black
men, holding authority over his freedom and fate. Whatever his
reaction to the African American faces gazing at him from the jury
box, Pace described a plantation melodrama in which he acted not
as opp
ressor but the rescuer of penniless blacks who preferred life
on his farm to jail or a forced journey into the coal mines of
Birmingham. Ignoring the rst twenty years of his active trading in
black laborers, Pace dated the beginnings of his dealings to April
1901, just two years earlier.
"The first man I got was Elbert Carmichael," Pace said, naming the
victim in what he knew was the earliest case federal investigators
had unearthed so far. Pace insisted that he asked for the proper
paperwork proving that every black man sold to him was a
legitimate convict serving a judge's sentence, but that he took the
word of constables such as Robert Franklin and John Dunbar who
sometimes said the documents had been lost. "They claimed they
did not have time to make the papers out before they caught the
train," Pace said of his arrangement in 1902 to acquire a young
African American boy named W. S. Thompson.17
In the cases of Joe Pat erson and Jim Caldwel , Pace testi ed that
he "noti ed the white people that these boys" were under his
control and that their freedom could be purchased by reimbursing
the $70 he paid for them. A few days later, G. B. Walker, the
at orney, arrived to obtain their release. Pace told the jury he was
outraged to learn that the supposed court fees on the men had
totaled only $22.50 and that they had been improperly placed on
his farm. "I did not want to hold the negroes under those terms, and
I demanded my money back," Pace testified.
As for John Davis, Pace said the black man freely admit ed
shirking a $40 bil at Robert Franklin's dry goods store. He said
Davis volunteered to work o the debt and a $35 ne under guard
at the convict farm. Pace claimed to have sent $4 to Davis's wife at
one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he
one point during the year that he held him, but admit ed that he
recouped nearly al of his expenditures at the end of the twelve-
month contract by sel ing Davis to another white farmer for $50. He
o ered no explanation for how he had the power to sel Davis,
even after al his al eged debts were paid.
Pace explained that Joe Pat erson was kept under guard an extra
half year to pay a $25 doctor's bil for treatment after Pat erson's
ngers were cut while working on the farm. Yet more time was
added, Pace explained, as penalty after Pat erson at empted to
escape and used another white landowner's boat to cross the Coosa
River during his ight. The owner of the boat and Pace's foreman,
Todd Berry, recaptured Pat erson two days later, after trailing him
with bloodhounds. Dragged back to the Pace farm, the justice of the
peace, James Kennedy, held another sham trial and sentenced
Pat erson to an additional six months of labor. Pace said other
charges could have been brought as wel , but he chose not to. "I felt
kindly towards the boy and I wanted the mat er dropped," Pace
said.18
The next day, Fletcher Turner arrived in Montgomery and made
the same walk to the courthouse to appear before the panel of
jurors. His account was even more blatantly self-serving. Turner
agreed to take on Esau Wil iams, Dave Johnson, and Glennie Helms
only as a favor to another black laborer who asked him to help the
imprisoned three youngsters, he testi ed. There had never been any
violence against anyone on his farm.
"They have three negroes down yonder," Turner quoted the other
black laborer as saying. "And I know a brother of one of the boys,
and the boy knows me, and wants me to come around and see if
you want to make a trade with him."
When Turner arrived at the train station, he said he found the
three black workers "tied in the buggy with a rope." Other white
men, including John Pace, had gathered to inspect them, a common
occurrence when word went out of black men for hire or purchase.
Turner said the three blacks looked worthless: "I wanted negroes
but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a
but no such things as them cigaret e dudes," he said, using a
common epithet for independent black men. "I asked what is the
cost of them negroes anyhow ? Where were they tried, and what
did they try them for?" Deputy Dunbar answered that they could be
had for $17.50 each.
Turner repeated to the jury his dialogue with the young black
men in the buggy:
" ‘Hel o nigger, how much is your cost?’ One of them commenced
crying and said, ‘Boss, if you wil take me I wil work for you two
years,’ " Turner claimed. "I said, ‘You are nothing but cigaret e
dudes and I would not have you.’ "
Turner described how he nonetheless began bargaining with
Grogan, the marshal from Goodwater who had arrested the three.
Grogan insisted that Turner would have to pay $53 and take al
three men.
"I won't pay any such amount," Turner said he replied.
"What wil you give?" Grogan said.
"Forty dol ars," Turner answered.
"Make it forty-five," Grogan shot back.
"No," said Turner.
Final y, Grogan relented. "Give me the money."
Turner walked into a nearby business, asked for a blank check,
and wrote it out to Dunbar for $40, against an account at the
Tal apoosa County Bank.
Turner told the jury he was incensed when he later learned that
each of the three blacks had only been ned $5 or $6 when
arrested. Turner claimed he told the young men they could leave
after four months of work instead of a year. He said the workers
were "perfectly satis ed," though he admit ed that Speedy Helms—
the "best negro of the bunch"—tried to run away. He was recaptured
and returned to the farm for a reward by a policeman in Opelika.19
Three days later, George Cosby took the stand. Like Pace and
Turner, he told the grand jury he was abbergasted by the
al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said
al egations against him by various African Americans. Cosby said
he'd had nothing to do with slavery, forced labor, or peonage. He
said he'd been a consistent friend to blacks, paying their debts and
providing work out of kindness and good intentions. His version of
events was that he paid a $10 debt to Pace on behalf of "a darkey"
named Elbert Carmichael in January or February 1901. Afterward,
he "al owed" Carmichael to live on his farm.
Carmichael was "a mighty good negro, a might good hand … a
preacher," Cosby said. He freely left the farm to return to his home
in another county. Cosby couldn't remember helping arrest and
hold on a bond a man named Jasper Kennedy. A black woman
named Mat Smith "never worked a day for me in her life," Cosby
said, reporting that after he paid a $3.45 ne for Smith, she
disappeared to her father's. As for Lum Johnson, a black worker
Cosby paid nes for on two occasions, "that negro is working for
me now. He is free. I never whipped him." The same went for Wil
Get ings, "a free hand …working for $7 month." John Bentley,
another black man on t
he farm, "came along the road the other day
and I hired him," Cosby said. Bentley feared he was about to be
accused of stealing some fence wire in another town, and wanted
Cosby to shelter him. Cosby said he agreed to do so for $9 a month,
but insisted that Bentley remained free at al times.
"Those three negroes are al that I have. I don't lock them up at
night. I have no hounds, I keep a rabbit dog. I don't go armed about
my place," Cosby said. "Those negroes are absolutely free."20
On the same day that Cosby testi ed, a federal marshal escorted
into the courthouse James M. Kennedy, the jack-of-al -trades justice
of the peace and sawmil manager who worked for John Pace. He
told the jury that in the previous eight years he had tried some
workers who ended up working for Pace, but Kennedy was evasive
about exactly how many. The handwrit en docket book, in which
the records of the arrests and trials would have been maintained,
had been lost a lit le more than a year earlier, Kennedy testi ed.
His new docket book contained entries relating only to a dozen
His new docket book contained entries relating only to a dozen
black workers—the exact same workers, remarkably, whom federal
agents had interviewed in the previous few weeks.
Kennedy con dently worked through the cases of each African
American, crisply pointing out how the proper procedures had
been fol owed, appropriate charges al eged, and necessary a davits
signed in every instance. He was con dent even about his handling
of the case of Joe Pat erson, who one week earlier told jurors the
harrowing story of his at empted escape from Pace's farm after
being repeatedly beaten. Pat erson was tracked by dogs for miles,
deep into the woods. Trapped on the bank of the Tal apoosa River,
he jumped in a smal boat tied nearby and paddled across the
water. But Pat erson was soon captured by a posse of "man-hunters"
on horseback, yelping dogs, and guards from Pace's farm. Wet and
exhausted, Pat erson was beaten with sts, boots, and sticks. Then
the white men dragged him before Kennedy for a new trial.
Those events were barely two months old when Kennedy
testi ed. He told the jury in dispassionate detail that the
proceedings against Pat erson were handled entirely within the
technicalities of Alabama law. Pat erson was ordered to work out
his original contract with Pace and an additional six months for
Slavery by Another Name Page 28