mistake, but that if the o cial "acted in bad faith or corruptly" he
would be guilty of causing the person to be held in peonage. No
judicial proceedings, regardless of how lawful they appear on their
face, would be a defense, the judge noted, if they were "a cloak or a
fraud to cover up the il egal design to cause persons to be held in
peonage."44
Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to
Five days later, on June 15, Judge Jones issued a formal charge to
the grand jury, answering their inquiries and directing how they
should interpret the federal peonage statute as their deliberations
continued. Jones began with a long discourse on the origins of the
peonage statute after the acquisition of New Mexico by the United
States, and then laid out how the new labor system of Alabama
appeared to violate that law.
Jones explained that any man who induces a laborer to sign a
contract agreeing to be held under guard and unable to leave until a
debt is paid was guilty of peonage. A citizen or law enforcement
o cer who tricked a laborer into believing he could avoid criminal
prosecution or a sentence to hard labor only by signing such a
contract was guilty of peonage, the judge explained. Anyone who
falsely accused a person of a crime in order to compel him or her
to sign such a contract or conspired to obtain the labor of a worker
through such false charges, Jones wrote, was guilty of violating the
pre-emancipation slave kidnapping act, which forbade "carrying
away any other person, with the intent that such other person be
sold into involuntary servitude."
Jones also declared Alabama's labor contract law—which bound
hundreds of thousands of black workers to white landowners—
unconstitutional. Any person held against his wil under this statute,
Jones ruled, should be released on habeas corpus—the ancient legal
principle used to win the release of the falsely imprisoned.45
Southern whites immediately recognized the implications of the
ruling, and the reaction was furious. "Judge Jones’ …opinion, if
sustained by the highest court, is far reaching and with disastrous
consequences to the labor system of the South," wrote the Prat vil e
Progress, a newspaper in the heart of a slave-riddled county. "There
must be a revolution in the labor system."46
The residents of counties across eastern Alabama were ba ed by
Judge Jones's interpretation of the law. Tens of thousands of black
workers were at labor in Alabama under contracts signed when a
white man "confessed judgment" for an arrested black man—paying
his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in
his " nes" before any prosecution commenced and receiving in
return a signed contract for labor.
These arrangements sounded precisely like the ones described by
Judge Jones as il egal. Hundreds of farmers were at risk of arrest.
Thousands more African American laborers were being forced to
work in mines and timber camps under similar contracts signed
between county governments and the state of Alabama itself. Some
local at orneys asked if farmers who worked convicts for debts were
guilty of peonage, wasn't the state of Alabama equal y guilty in its
handling of convict leases?47 It occurred to virtual y no one in
Alabama that this was precisely the point. The vast majority of
black laborers leased from the law enforcement system were being
held il egal y.
Even Judge Jones failed to comprehend the ful rami cations of
his opinion. Like many wel -intentioned but stil fundamental y
racist whites, he naively believed that the system engineered by
Pace in Tal apoosa County was an isolated instance of abuse. He
accepted the common convention of the time that African
Americans were less intel igent and more inclined to criminal
behavior than whites. He presumed that the vast majority of blacks
arrested in the South were in fact guilty of their crimes, and merited
severe punishment. What made him more "progressive" than other
whites, and where he di ered from most white southerners, was
that he believed blacks could not be brutalized in their punishment,
and that the concept of impartial treatment of al citizens by the
courts had to be upheld.
Rank-and- le southerners, especial y in rural sections with large
black populations, had no such il usions. They knew Judge Jones
had set a standard by which thousands of white men were guilty of
slave dealing, that hundreds of state and county o cials were in
jeopardy, and that the whole nancial structure of governments and
local economies was at risk. A correspondent to the Birmingham
Age-Herald reported that "more than 100 men" in the area of Coosa
and Tal apoosa counties—just two of Alabama's nearly seventy
counties—were at risk of arrest in the federal investigation. "The
people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have
people of East Alabama are very much wrought up…. They have
been working criminals for twenty years, and the majority of such
men do not know they are violating the law," the writer said.
Inundated with bewildered queries, Judge Jones began to realize
the breadth of coerced labor in his state. He hadn't intended to set
o panic. To quel anxieties, Jones quietly summoned a reporter
for the Associated Press and explained that white men could avoid
breaking the law if their contracts with blacks were approved by a
local judge and signed in court.48 Surely local judges could never
condone slavery, Jones reasoned.
While Judge Jones tried to soothe Alabama's worries, Warren
Reese asked Sternfeld, the assistant who had listened to much of the
testimony brought to the grand jury, to col ect for the at orney
general the most egregious al egations that had surfaced so far in
witness statements and reports from U.S. marshals in the
countryside. As Mildred Elmore rat led the Remington's keys, they
dictated what became an eight-page report to Washington.
"There have been agrant abuses and violations … on the part of
wealthy and in uential men," Reese began. "These violations have
not been con ned to one or two periodical and independent
instances, but it has developed into a miserable business and
custom to catch up ignorant and helpless negro men and women
upon the imsiest and the most baseless charges and carry them
before a justice of the peace who is usual y a paid hireling of these
wealthy dealers….
The victim is found guilty and a ne is assessed which, in the beginning
cannot be paid by the victim, and then it is that one of these slave dealers
steps up, pretends to be the friend of the negro …telling him he will pay
him out if he will sign a contract to work for him on his farm…
…the negro readily agrees rather than go to the mines, as he is informed
he will have to do, his ne is paid, the contract is signed, and the negro is
taken to the farm or mine or mill or quarry of the employer….
Placed into a conditio
n of involuntary servitude, he is locked up at
nights in a cell, worked under guards during the day from 3 o'clock in the
morning until 7 or 8 o'clock at night, whipped in a most cruel manner, is
insu ciently fed or poorly clad—in fact the evidence in nearly all of the
cases investigated reveals that the negro men are worked nearly naked,
while the women are worked in an equally disgraceful manner.
Brutal things have transpired and sometimes death has resulted from the
infliction of corporal punishment….
When the time of a good working negro is nearing an end, he is re-
arrested upon some trumped up charge and again carried before some
bribed justice and resentenced to an additional time. In this way negroes
have been known to have worked on these places in this situation for
years and years. They can get no word to friends nor is word allowed to
reach them from the outside world…. They are held in abject slavery
without any knowledge of what goes on in the outside world.
If they run away the dogs are placed upon their track, and they are
invariably retaken and subjected to more cruel treatment….
The indictments so far found are based upon some twenty- ve negro
men and women who have been the subjects of these violations. These are
some of the most severe instances, but it has been discovered there are
hundreds of other cases.49
Reese and Sternfeld detailed the physical abuses they had
discovered and the extraordinary obstacles to their investigation. In
Tal apoosa County, the grand jury had already issued indictments
against Pace, Fletch Turner, and the Cosbys. Also charged were the
enforcers and procurers of the system, including Robert Franklin,
Grogan, Pruit , and Dunbar, al constables. The jury had indicted the
three justices of the peace most agrantly involved—-James M.
Kennedy, Jesse L. London, and W. D. Cosby. Another eight men
who had worked as whipping guards for Pace and the other buyers
were also under charge, including Turner's son, Al en, and Pace's
son-in-law, Anderson Hardy.
Beyond Tal apoosa County, Reese reported, the grand jury was
also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles
also investigating conditions in Lowndes County—a hundred miles
away and deep in the plantation country of the Black Belt, with
more than 35,000 black farmhands and sharecroppers working
cot on on the land of white men. "This county is real y the center
where it is charged these practices are more freely indulged than
anywhere else. This county, it is claimed, is honeycombed with
slavery."50
The slaving practiced in Lowndes County was orchestrated by the
sheri himself, J. W. Dixon. In one case described by Reese, Dixon
chased down a black worker named Dil ard Freeman, who had left
his plantation without permission to visit a sick brother a few miles
away. Tracked to his mother's home, Freeman was beaten by Dixon
with a pistol, tied with a rope around the neck, and forced to run
behind a mule for more than ve miles, while the sheri fol owed
on horseback, "whipping him whenever he would lag behind."
Once back at the plantation, Reese wrote, Dixon began whipping
Freeman with a wide piece of rubber belt at ached to a wooden
handle. "Four men were required to hold him o the ground while
Mr. Dixon himself administered the punishment. When Mr. Dixon
became tired, another man was made to do the whipping. In this
way, the boy was whipped nigh until death. He cannot tel how
many licks he was hit, nor can he tel how long this happened."
After the whipping, Freeman was chained to the oor near the beds
of Dixon and his overseer.
In the grand jury room, Freeman revealed his back, Reese said,
showing "one mass of scars from his thighs to his neck."
Yet already the prospects of pursuing a conviction against the
slavers of Lowndes County and the other plantation regions where
hundreds of thousands more black farmworkers lived were being
chal enged, Reese advised the at orney general. Dil ard Freeman
was threatened with death if he testi ed to the grand jury. A
member of the Dixon family had fol owed him to the courthouse in
Montgomery on the day of his rst appearance. "It was impossible
to get anything out of him because of his fear of death."
When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went
When a black grand juror who lived in Lowndes County went
home after a week of hearing witnesses, Sheri Dixon and his four
brothers rode up to his house at midnight on horseback and
demanded to know what was being said to the grand jury—
testimony that is dictated to be secret under the U.S. Constitution.
They told the juror to remember that "he had to live in Lowndes
county, and if he did not stand up for his own people he knew
what to expect," Reese wrote.
The Dixons are "dangerous men," Reese continued. "They are said
to have kil ed several men. It is believed that witnesses who come
here and who expect to return to Lowndes county are practical y
compel ed to perjure their souls because they fear their lives."51
As the let er to Knox continued, Reese outlined how the new
slavery was far larger than one or two places, and involved far
more than scat ered pockets of involuntary servitude, confusion
about the law, or unintended violations. His timbre rising as the
report continued, Reese said that he was receiving daily let ers from
other Black Belt locations—Wilcox, Sumter, Chambers, and Co ee
counties. "Unquestionably, there are hundreds of these people in
this district who are held in abject slavery," Reese related.
The prosecutor continued that Judge Jones had just ruled that
Alabama's contract labor law—a statute shared in some form by
every southern state and e ectively criminalizing any black worker
who left the employment of a white farmer without permission—
was unconstitutional. The implications of the ruling were just
dawning on Reese. He realized the black men and women of the
South had never been truly set free.
Judge Jones's ruling, Reese wrote, "in e ect, amounts to an actual
and not a theoretical emancipation of the negro, and it is now
necessary that this o ce make an e ort to rescue these people from
their condition by and through habeas corpus proceedings."
Reese recognized that his investigation could eventual y require
thousands of court lings. He asked the at orney general to assign a
Secret Service agent to assist with the investigations and to create a
new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county
new special assistant U.S. at orney to move from county to county
in Alabama instituting legal chal enges to free enslaved blacks.
"Unless the government wil take steps to bring these habeas corpus
proceedings …they wil not be much bene ted by these
investigations." 52
As Mildred typed out the last lines of the report, the telephone
rang. Western Union told the secretary a bicycle delivery boy was
pedaling toward
them with an urgent message. When the telegram
arrived, Reese read that the at orney general wished him to
personal y deliver his report to Washington. President Roosevelt
had been briefed on the investigations and directed that a legal
at ack be ful y pressed.53 Reese cal ed Western Union and dictated
a reply. Mildred hastily retyped the last page of Reese's report: "I
have just received your wire … I wil report to you at ten o'clock
morning of seventeenth."54
Reese rushed to Washington, where he outlined for the at orney
general the details of the investigation and his belief that much
more than scat ered peonage was at stake. Knox was cautious, but
given the president's speci c interest in the cases, the expectations
raised by his speech at Lincoln's tomb, and a chorus of cries from
northern publications, he could not move slowly. "The new slave-
driving in Alabama has pricked the conscience of the nation,"
proclaimed The Nation on June 11.55
After the meeting, the at orney general authorized what
amounted to the most sweeping federal investigation into the
working conditions of southern blacks since the Civil War. He
directed U.S. at orneys in Montgomery, Birmingham, Mobile, and in
the southern sections of Georgia to begin inquiries in their districts,
including the densely populated Black Belt, and other areas where
more than a mil ion impoverished African Americans lived. Across
Alabama and Georgia, the prosecutors sent deputy federal marshals
into the countryside with orders to bring back any evidence of
ongoing slavery.
Not since the rst years of Reconstruction had law enforcement
o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of
o cials of any kind expressed interest in the legal protections of
blacks. Suddenly a squad of Secret Service agents led by an
indefatigable detective named Henry C. Dickey, as wel as every
federal marshal across a three-hundred-mile-wide swath of the
South, was quietly, if often reluctantly, quizzing African American
pastors, sharecroppers, and farmhands about the treatment of black
laborers by many of the most prominent white landowners in the
South.
By late June, sixty-three indictments had been returned by the
Montgomery grand jury, and locals expected as many as twenty
more white men to be arrested. The government was holding nearly
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