and any assertion that the peonage cases were part of a larger
movement in the South to disenfranchise black men and reassert
white dominance.
Peonage was no worse than the treatment of workers in the
factories, mines, and sweatshops of the North, the newspaper
maintained.34 "These cases of ‘new slavery’ have nothing to do with
the adoption of the new Constitution in Alabama. If there is any
di erence, the mass of white people are more kindly disposed
toward the negro now than before their disfranchise-ment. These
peonage cases are simply a few here and there. There have not
been tens of thousands of such cases. We doubt extremely whether
there have been even hundreds of them in al the State in the past
twenty years."35
Nearly every Alabama leader contended the events in Tal apoosa
County constituted a smal anomaly, easily stamped out by making
examples of a few o enders. "Deputy U.S. Marshal Colquit seems
to have taken up with this county," wrote the Dadevil e Spot Cash.
"In fact three or four men of this community have been escorting
him to Montgomery where he placed them under bond, charged
with Peonage—that new word lately sprung on us which means the
enslaving of a freeman against his wil , as we understand it. This is
a pret y bad state of a airs in Alabama, but not so bad as the
northern papers would make it. These conditions wil be
thoroughly investigated and we hope every guilty party wil be
punished so that the evil wil be stopped and the blot on our state
and county removed."36
Underscoring southerners’ sense that it was hypocritical for their
region to be targeted for its racial misdeeds, residents in Bel evil e,
Il inois, went on a rampage a day after the Dadevil e editorial
appeared. A black schoolteacher named David Wyat and the town's
white school superintendent had argued over the renewal of Wyat 's
teaching certi cate. An altercation ensued. The superintendent was
shot, but not seriously harmed. Wyat was arrested and taken to jail.
By nightfal , at least two thousand whites were gathered in the
town—including many women and children encouraged to at end
the spectacle. A phalanx of two hundred men at acked the steel
doors at the rear of the jail with sledgehammers, pounding it with
thousands of hammer blows. The city's police did not voluntarily
hand the prisoner over to the crowd, but also gave no meaningful
resistance. Wyat , an educated and imposing man—standing six feet
three inches tal —waited in his cel on the second oor of the jail,
enveloped in the cacophony of the hammers pounding out his
death beat. After half an hour, the doors splintered open. Wyat was
seized from his cel and his head immediately smashed.
Dragged into the street, the mob surged around him, kicking and
stomping his body until it was mat ed in blood and dirt. A rope
was secured to his neck and tossed to two men who had climbed a
telegraph pole. Hoisted just a few feet o the ground, Wyat 's body
whipped back and forth as members of the crowd gouged, stabbed,
and sliced his torso, legs, and arms with knives. Others in the mob
gathered pickets from nearby fences and roadside signs to build a
crude pyre beneath his dangling corpse. Stil more went for
gasoline and benzene. Soon Wyat 's body was engulfed in ame. By
the time the earliest churchgoers left their homes on Sunday, June
7, the grotesque form of Wyat 's carbonized remains lay amid a
heap of ashes and smoldering wood on the street.
"The mob knew that the negro's victim was alive and had a fair
chance to recover," a correspondent for the New York Herald
dutiful y noted. "The excuse given is that the lawless element
among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it
among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it
was determined to teach the negroes a wholesome lesson."37
Wyat 's lynching was unremarkable in many regards. His was the
thirtieth African American lynched in 1903. There would be at least
fty- ve more before the year ended. Yet few developments caused
as much delight to leading southern whites than a gruesome racial
atrocity commit ed in the North. Such incidents proved, in their
reckoning, that northerners were just as inclined to crimes against
African Americans as their southern cousins, and that the end result
of greater racial equality like that in the North was simply more
brazen criminality and chaos caused by blacks. Many white
southerners were further grati ed when less than two weeks later a
mob in Wilmington, Delaware, seized a black man named George
White from his jail cel . White, accused of rape and murder, was
tied to a stake, forced to confess the crimes, then shot repeatedly
and final y burned.
The Advertiser could hardly restrain its glee.
In the North the negro is an alien, an exostosis on the body politic, as it
were. They do not understand him and cannot do so. They talk
sympathetically and humidly of his wrongs and his rights, shed some tears
over his alleged cruel fate in the South, and then, if he aspires to be a
laborer in the hive of industry, they turn on him and drive him out with
curses and revilings. If he resists or falls back on the sacred laws of self-
deference and self-preservation, he is either shot down or lynched. They
love him— at a safe distance.
With us here in the South it is di erent. We received the negro by
inheritance. He came to us through the generations of slavery.
Emancipation left him stranded on the shores of a new world, for which
he had no preparation and no tness. The Southern people, remembering
the negro of the olden time, when he was the faithful servant, the willing
worker and the protector of the family of his master—with all this in their
minds our people have borne with him, have helped him and have tried to
fit him for some of the duties of citizenship. We recognize in him a part of
our population a necessary worker on the farm, in the shop and in the
home, but not in any way an equal.
And for all this because the negroes have come down to us from the
good days of old; because they are at home with us, and must perhaps
forever be in some degree our wards, we owe them justice, fair treatment,
and protection in all their civil rights. Now that they have practically lost
the right of su rage, we more than ever owe them our watch care and
should throw over and around them the shield of law and justice. The fact
that they are lynched in the North, or driven out like dangerous wild
beasts is no reason that our people should do the same. Let us not follow
the evil example set by those Pharisees who preach what they do not
practice and who condemn in others the deeds which they practice among
themselves. In short, let us steadfastly refuse to follow the evil examples
set by our brethren of the North and the West.38
South Carolina senator Ben Til man summed up the sentiment
more succinctly to a northern audience: "I see you are learning
how
to kil and burn ‘niggers.’ That's right. Let the good work go on.
Keep it up. You are get ing some sense."39
Roosevelt had to be astonished. Only a day before Wyat 's murder
in Bel evil e, he had been in the same state, visiting Spring eld,
barely a hundred miles away, praising black soldiers and promising
his "square deal" for African Americans. At the same time, the
Justice Department was tel ing him that slaves were stil being held
down south. There was nothing the president could do about
Wyat 's death; murder was clearly outside the jurisdiction of federal
o cials. But surely slavery, of al things, was di erent. He told
At orney General Knox he was personal y concerned about the
Alabama al egations and asked for a ful report. Roosevelt was
assured that "vigorous and uncompromising prosecutions" were
under way40
In Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese was growing more troubled
by the scale of the crimes coming to light in the grand jury room.
On June 10, he sent an alarmed report to At orney General Knox.
"The conditions of the ‘black belt’ in this district are more
deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now
deplorable as the investigations of this grand jury proceed. It is now
being revealed that hundreds of negroes are held in peonage and
involuntary servitude of the most vicious character," Reese wrote.
"Men and women are arrested on the imsiest charges …they are
brutal y whipped, worked and locked up without let or hindrance.
The tortures in icted are severe and sometimes result in total
disability or death. Some counties in this district are honey combed
with these slave trade practices."41 Worried that his report might
sound like hyperbole—and recognizing the potential y explosive
reaction to the case that was bound to soon develop local y—Reese
asked for an urgent meeting with of icials in Washington.
The stoutly bourgeois Knox, hardly two months removed from his
lavish Pit sburgh law o ces and now ensconced in the presidential
cabinet, was perplexed by Reese's let er. He had to take it seriously.
President Roosevelt had expressed concern, and the inquiry grew
from charges rst lodged by a federal judge—one of Roosevelt's
earliest appointees. Reverberations were stil rippling across the
country from the president's "square deal" speech less than a week
earlier.
But Knox couldn't avoid a measure of incredulity. How could so
dramatic a state of a airs come to pass, without chal enge, in
twentieth-century America, even in uncivilized reaches so far from
his rare ed world? Moreover, the prosecutor in Montgomery was
entirely unknown to Knox, who knew that among the scores of U.S.
at orneys named in provincial centers around the nation, many
were less-than-extraordinary political operators— holding their
positions purely as patronage to local presidential al ies or financial
backers. Two days later, on the last workday of the week, Knox told
an aide to telegraph Reese for a more complete report on the
details of the investigation. For the moment, he ignored Reese's
request for a personal audience.
The telegraph from Washington arrived at the drafty o ces of the
U.S. at orney above the Montgomery post o ce as Friday's work
hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other
hours came to a close. Reese no doubt shared it with the two other
lawyers who assisted him in government cases, Julius Sternfeld and
James K. Judkins, and the o ce secretary—his cousin Mildred
Elmore. Sit ing near the transomed door to the hal way, she
managed his correspondence and appointments and at ended to the
two modern luxuries of the o ce—a single Remington typewriter
and one telephone.42
Reese knew he faced the most consequential mat er of the ve
years since his rst appointment to o ce. In the balance of the
report requested by the at orney general hung al of the family
prestige and political support—perhaps even al of the aspirations
of eventual Republican power in his state—that had been so
dramatical y re ected in the ood of supportive let ers that paved
the way for his selection by President McKinley.
The heavy humid heat of early summer in Alabama was already
seeping into the hal ways of the post o ce building. Fixed at his
desk that afternoon, he perspired as the temperature approached
90 degrees, sunlight shafting through the wide sash of rippled glass
in his window. Past the arched doorways opening from the dark
interior of the federal building onto crowded Dexter Street, Reese
could have seen and heard the noisy throngs of pedestrians
crowding the cobblestone street on either side of the clanging
electric trol ey line running through the heart of Montgomery. Lines
of carriages and horsemen pushed slowly through the crowd. Open
wagons pul ed by mules driven by muddy black teamsters waited to
cross from side streets lit ered with manure and the debris of
commerce.
Four blocks to the east, just beyond the eld of view from Reese's
window perch, the domed Alabama state capitol peered regal y
across a city that had become, more than any other, a royal capital
of the New South— col ecting the tribute of both the region's
reengineered cot on empire and its smoke-belching new industrial
expansion.
The trol ey line ran in an asymmetric loop the length of Dexter
Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain
Street, then passed out of his view by the old slave auction fountain
in Court Square across from the Exchange Hotel. Here, buyers from
textile makers and cot on exporters encamped from hundreds and
thousands of miles away to bid and contract for delivery six months
later of mil ions of dol ars’ worth of cot on from plants only just
beginning to peek from the deep black soil of the South's richest
cot on region.
If Reese climbed into the ve-story-high tower rising atop the
post o ce, he could have fol owed the line as it threaded through
the crowds, drays, buckboards, and early automobiles chugging
down Commerce Street toward Union Station. The streetcars
crossed Bibb, Coosa, and Tal-lapoosa streets, as they rol ed past the
long row of cot on warehouses that, by early fal , would be packed
with the bulk of southern Alabama's economic output. The cot on
compress on the same street packed bil ions of pounds of lint into
ve-hundred-pound bales ready to be loaded on railcars or the
perpetual line of steamboats waiting a few hundred yards beyond,
at the edge of the Alabama River. On the docks there, scores of
black men stacked cot on bales atop loads of pig iron taken in
Birmingham the day before from the furnaces of Sloss-She eld and
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.
Montgomery luxuriated in the wealth of this surge of cot on—stil
unmolested by the scourge of the bol weevil and other new insects
and diseases that would ravage the crop beginning in a lit le more
<
br /> than a decade— and the rich new windfal pouring into the state
capital from the sale of convicts into the coal and ore mines in
Birmingham.
Cot on, steel, and timber were by far the state's largest sources of
wealth and livelihood. Alabama produced more than 1.1 mil ion
bales of the white lint in 1900—surpassing the pre-Civil War output
for the rst time and almost tripling the state's production during
the rst years fol owing the war.43 Vast tracts of forest were under
the saw. Yet mineral production and the iron and steel industry
surpassed al other economic activity. In 1905, the state's mines,
anchored by the slave camps near Birmingham, generated nearly
twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore
twelve mil ion tons of coal and almost four mil ion tons of iron ore
— making Alabama one of the foremost producers of iron, steel,
and coal in the world.
Early in the testimony before the grand jury in May of 1903,
Warren Reese shared the conventional assumption that the stories of
John Pace's abuses in Tal apoosa County were anachronistic relics—
isolated redneck antics, certain to be the subject of scorn once
exposed. But by the beginning of June, Reese realized how
signi cantly the new slavery underpinned Alabama's cot on, timber,
and steel paradise. He knew he was on the verge of an at ack on its
heart. He could not know how the ght would end, or whether he
would survive it.
At noon on June 10, the grand jury led into the courtroom to
report seventeen additional indictments. Then, foreman Judah T.
Moses, a wealthy sel er of real estate and insurance, gave Judge
Jones a writ en request for advice on the constitutionality of the
Alabama statute making it a crime for a worker to break a farm
labor contract—which was punishable by a ne of up to $50 or six
months of hard labor.
In the note, the jury asked whether the act violated the Thirteenth
and Fourteenth amendments of the Constitution. Judge Jones
replied that he had devoted "much thought" to this question and
would give them an answer later. One juror also inquired whether
a justice of the peace who gave a sentence in excess of his authority
was guilty of peonage. The judge said that the justice of the peace
would not be guilty if the sentence had simply been an honest
Slavery by Another Name Page 30