Slavery by Another Name
Page 34
degree," he quickly wrote the at orney general. "These practices are
indulged in many other counties in the district and our e ort shal
be made in the direction of put ing an end to them."8
But more practical men than Reese could bet er see what the
future held. White leaders were ral ying across the South,
emboldened by men such as Secretary of State He in, who was
crisscrossing Alabama denouncing Reese's investigation and
castigating any white man who did not agree. At the same time,
black preachers and African Americans who had established some
sliver of nancial security grew fearful of the rising temperature
around them. They had learned through bloody experience the
dangers of chal enging the status quo of white domination, and also
that in the in exible rituals of southern racial interaction men such
as themselves were expected to prostrate themselves before whites
as proof that they too gave no credence to the inquiries demanded
by President Roosevelt and Judge Jones.
Shortly after the Cosby sentencing, Edward M. Adams, a Secret
Service agent stationed in Montgomery, wrote to Washington
headquarters in hopes of softening any disappointment that might
come if no jury convictions were won in any of the slavery cases.
He was particularly concerned that another agent assigned to the
cases not be tainted by any such failure. "He has secured evidence in
a number of cases that ought to bring convictions, yet, knowing
public sentiment as I do, I fear, unless compromise verdicts can be
secured, that no convictions wil result," Adams wrote. "The iniquity
of peonage wil always remain in this country in practice, to
eradicate it is an interminable work. The sentiment against the
in iction of punishment to o enders nds its strongest exponent in
Secretary of State He in, an orator of no mean ability, and he is
going about the state like a roaring lion. I merely write this, to say,
that whatever the result in the trial of the cases in this court, the
failure to convict and punish o enders, cannot be charged to our
service."
Adams included with his let er a newspaper clipping reporting
Adams included with his let er a newspaper clipping reporting
that petitions signed by hundreds of blacks in Tal apoosa and Coosa
counties had been presented to Judge Jones asking for clemency for
the Cosbys. "These cases have caused a bit er feeling between the
two races," the article said with profound understatement, "and that
the petitioners believe that the peonage system is broken up, and
further says that the Cosbys are good citizens of the community."9
• •
Indeed, whatever initial contrition white southerners expressed at
the rst revelations of slavery was evaporating as it became clear
that Judge Jones and Reese had no plans to stop after a few
symbolic guilty pleas. Facing the dock of the courtroom, Fletch
Turner and his son, Al en, were ready to embrace the most brazen
defense of the new slavery yet of ered.
On July 4, at orneys for the father and son led demurrers,
chal enging the peonage charges against them. Their fundamental
objection was constructed upon a startling argument. The Turners’
lawyers conceded that their clients indeed had engaged in a form of
slavery, but that involuntary servitude wasn't peonage and therefore
wasn't il egal.
"Unlawful y and knowingly holding a person forcibly and against
his wil and requiring such person to labor for the holder to work
out a debt claimed by the holder to be due him …does not
constitute holding such person to a condition of peonage under the
laws of the United States," they wrote.10
Moreover, the Turners’ lawyers argued that no system of peonage
existed in Alabama at al , making the statute forbidding it
irrelevant, and charges based on the law impossible. They added
that since peonage was de ned as forced labor in repayment of a
debt, the Turners couldn't be convicted of peonage if, as the
government contended, the debts owed to them by black workers
were bogus.
Ignoring the claims of extreme abuse and homicide commit ed on
the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might
the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might
constitute a form of slavery but that no federal statute made slavery
a crime. Cases of slavery would have to be brought in a state court
by local o cials under Alabama's law against false imprisonment,
the lawyers argued. No acknowledgment was made that in a local
court, the prosecutor would be a white man elected in al -white
elections, the jury guaranteed to be al -white, the judges likely
involved in the slaving conspiracy, the buyers of men almost
certainly prominent local gures, black at orneys barred from
appearing, and black witnesses treated as unreliable by nature. In
the four decades since emancipation, no one could recal any such
criminal charges ever being brought in a southern court. No one
imagined that ever changing.
Astonishingly, the lawyers were on some level correct. The Civil
Rights Act of 1866, passed in the wake of the war to formalize the
ending of slavery, simply declared al persons born in the United
States to be ful - edged citizens with the right to vote regardless of
race or previous "condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." But
it did not clearly state that the holding of slaves was a crime, and
the disparate treatment of former slaves was made only a
misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail.
Later statutes in the 1870s made segregated accommodations,
schools, and anti-black-voting measures il egal, but actual y
weakened the minimum penalty for violations. In 1883, the U.S.
Supreme Court declared even those laws unconstitutional, ruling
that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments—approved in 1868
to abolish slavery and establish black citizenship—didn't authorize
Congress to pass such enforcement laws. Fol owing the growing
national sentiment that race mat ers be left alone, Congress did
nothing to l the vacuum—leaving a constitutional limbo in which
slavery as a legal concept was prohibited by the Constitution, but
no statute made an act of enslavement explicitly il egal.
It didn't mat er to the Turners’ lawyers that lit le of their defense
claims matched their earlier sworn statements when rst questioned
by a federal agent and a special U.S. commissioner two months
earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling
earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling
of black laborers was legal y or moral y suspect. He o ered
elaborate explanations for why he imprisoned a series of blacks the
federal o cer identi ed. In the case of Joe Strickland, the white
farmer conceded that the laborer didn't appear anywhere in the
records of the local courts but was nonetheless a criminal prisoner.
He claimed Strickland's records were in a di erent jurisdiction, and
/> that the Goodwater deputy sheri , Grogan, brought two black men
to the Tal apoosa County jail in July 1901 and asked Turner if he
wished to "buy" one of them out of jail. Turner claimed he entered
into a formal labor contract with the worker, who had been tried
for "riding a train," and that the local probate judge said it was
unnecessary for the court to authorize the arrangement.11
"If you behave yourself," Turner claimed to have told Strickland,
"I wil let you o in ve months." Turner demurred that he "had just
commenced in the convict business" and didn't understand the ins
and outs of the rules. In kindness, he had paid a doctor, Turner
claimed, to treat Strickland's syphilis—and then kept him at work
an extra six months simply to cover the costs. By the time of the
trial, Strickland was working in the coal mines near Birmingham,
he added.
On July 7, Glennie Helms became the rst victim of the
Tal apoosa cases to testify publicly. Moving to the witness chair just
after 5 P.M., Helms sat calmly and con dently before the courtroom
l ed with white spectators. Neatly dressed and his head cleanly
shaven, Helms said he was eighteen at the time of his capture and
was at empting to travel from Calcis—where he had worked for a
week in the lime quarry owned by Turner's family— back to his
home in Columbus, Georgia. As Helms and two companions passed
on foot through Goodwater on April 15, 1902, they were seized by
the town marshal, charged with vagrancy, immediately convicted by
the mayor, and then sold at the Dadevil e depot to Fletcher
Turner.12 Turner was apparently unaware that the three had been
working for his family's quarry and put them to work digging
ditches on his farm.
ditches on his farm.
Under questioning from Reese, Helms told the twelve white
jurors how he was brutal y beaten on his arrival at Turner's farm.
Reese, regal in a high, sti ened col ar and checkered cravat, asked
whether either of the Turners or their employees whipped him
again during the four months he was held on the farm. Helms
testi ed he was beaten nearly every day by Turner's son, Al en, or
another armed guard. After about a month of work, he escaped—
only to be captured by the sheri of another county and returned to
the farm. As punishment for eeing, he said Al en Turner whipped
him severely with a thick stick.
The cross-examination that fol owed must have been one of the
most extraordinary encounters ever in a southern courtroom. In the
witness chair sat an eighteen-year-old black boy in the simple at ire
of an indigent farmhand, largely il iterate and almost certainly the
child of parents born in antebel um slavery. Standing before him—
chal enging his account of re-enslavement—was the aristocratic
form of U.S. representative Ariosto Appling Wiley, prominent
congressman and one of the city's most notable at orneys.
Unfazed by the disjuncture of the scene, Helms hewed to his story
—as unswervingly as a skil ed plow hand cut ing neat furrows
across a eld. Unable to budge the verisimilitude of the young
man's descriptions of his capture and beatings, Representative Wiley
obsessed on what he cal ed contradictory details in the testimony.
Was the buggy in which Helms and the others were transported to
the farm owned by a livery stable or someone else? he hammered.
Final y, the lawyer portrayed Helms as a "shiftless negro" enjoying
his moment in the spotlight at the expense of the federal
government.
"Who's been taking care of you since you came here?" Wiley
asked sharply.
"Captain Dickey," replied Helms, referring to the Secret Service
agent who had guarded the black witnesses housed in a
boardinghouse since May.
Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside
Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside
the federal building, Fletcher Turner, soaked from the heat of the
courtroom, fumed to local reporters about published al egations
that his son had brutal y kil ed a black woman named Cornelia
Hammock.13 He insisted that the woman died of disease and
of ered to have her body exhumed to prove it.
The next day, a series of witnesses cal ed by the government
corroborated Helms's account. Dave Johnson, one of the other
blacks captured with him in Goodwater, the night watchman John
G. Dunbar, town mayor Dave White, and others con rmed how the
three African Americans were seized and sold.
The Turner defense aggressively at acked each witness. After the
testimony of the white at orney who bought Helms's freedom after
nding him being worked naked at the Turner sawmil , Colonel
Wiley launched a withering cross-examination—insinuating that the
lawyer, L. E. White, was so friendly to Helms's family and other
black workers that he couldn't be trusted. Wiley didn't use the
speci c words, but his message to the jury was that White was a
"nigger lover"—a man operating outside the racial rituals of the
South. The questions became so sharp that Judge Jones recessed the
proceedings and reprimanded Wiley for the calumnies against
White. "The witness must not be sneered at or insulted," Jones said.
The strategy was designed not to prove that Helms hadn't been
captured and sold—since the Turners admit ed those facts—but to
mock the black witnesses and discredit any white men who
corroborated them. It was a time-proven and honored southern
lawyerly ruse. In the rare instance that a black man or woman
received a day in court, at orneys simply ridiculed the very idea of a
black man being treated respectful y and anyone who appeared
wil ing to do so. Triggering an almost tribal form of group
solidarity, the tactic usual y triggered juries of white men to gu aw
at the comedy of a black man under oath. If the jury concluded that
the government's case was built on the testimony of worthless
African Americans and unreliable whites, Colonel Wiley was
con dent of an acquit al. He knew Alabama was tired of the
peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do
peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do
otherwise would subject them to their own ridicule as "lovers" of
blacks.
On the trial's third day, the defense presented a stream of
witnesses testifying to the Turners’ excel ent character and care of
black convicts they leased from local governments. For weeks
leading up to the trial, court observers and journalists speculated
that Secretary of State J. Thomas Hef-lin, Alabama's most
amboyant white supremacist, might represent the Turners in court
in a show of support for the men.
Just before noon, as the defense prepared to close its case, He in
was cal ed as a witness. In previous weeks, there had been no
indication that the men knew each other. But taking the stand,
He in swore that he had known Fletcher Turner for "several years"
and that Turner had always been a man of good
character. The
message to the jury—that the white orthodoxy of the South was
behind the defendants, not the opponents of slavery—was clear.
The next morning, the gal ery was jammed with observers,
including a large crowd of African Americans. As eight hours of
closing arguments by four separate at orneys ground through the
day, the sti ing courtroom became a throng of perspiring men,
aflut er with dozens of handheld fans.
The nal defense argument was explicit—whatever the facts of
the case, every white man must acquit Fletcher Turner as a message
to the rest of the United States. "Forever put at rest the agitated
minds of our Northern friends, and brand the newspaper criticisms
and caricatures which have appeared in the northern journals as a
falsi cation and a slander upon the fair name of Alabama," fumed
at orney Bulger. "I have great faith in the sons and grandsons of the
heroes of forty years ago, who fol owed Lee and Jackson for four
long years through blood and re, even from Sumter's bat ered
wal s to the famous apple tree, who went to the bat le elds of
Virginia and poured out their blood like water in defense of our
Southern homes."14
Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while
Colonel Wiley fol owed with an unrepentant message that while
"good negroes" deserved the care of the courts and the a ection of
white southerners, other blacks did not. "Shiftless vagabonds" take
the money of farms and violate contracts, just as Glennie Helms had
done, Wiley said. "If they were to be protected in this sort of thing
the farmers of this country would be ruined," he concluded.
After a two-hour break to cool the courtroom, Reese returned
with the government's nal argument. Lacing his closing with
references to the Bible and a passage in Exodus denouncing those
who tra c in slaves, he scored members of the gal ery who sneered
when blacks were referred to in court as "American citizens." Reese
argued that Turner deserved no mercy. "He bought the negroes just
like one of you would buy a horse or a cow," Reese told the jury.
"Can this man come here and ask you for mercy after that?"
After 5 P.M., Judge Jones began an emotional two-hour charge to
the jury. O ering a detailed history of the peonage statute and the
laws of labor in the United States, he reviewed the evidence