presented and then explicitly urged the jurors to put aside the
appeals to Civil War loyalties and white racial al egiance o ered by
Turner's lawyers. Jones, visibly aroused, left lit le doubt as to the
verdict the jury should reach. "If you believe from al the evidence
that Turner bought this darky, took him to his place, forced him to
stay there, when he wanted to go away, and worked him as a
convict under guard to liquidate the debt paid for him, then he is
guilty," Jones said.15
Representative Wiley and Colonel Bulger shifted nervously as the
judge al but instructed the jury to convict their clients. In truth
there was also lit le doubt what would happen. Within hours of
beginning deliberations that night, word spread through the
courthouse that the jury was deadlocked—with eight men voting for
acquit al and four to convict.
Noti ed of the split the fol owing morning, an exasperated Judge
Jones cal ed the jury back into the courtroom. His con dence that
southern white men could be counted on to police themselves was
badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil
badly shaken. "If you do not return a verdict of guilty you wil
perjure yourselves in the sight of God and dishonor yourselves in
the eyes of men," Jones told the jurors. Representative Wiley rose to
object, but the judge ordered him silent and told the jurors they
would not be excused until a verdict was reached. "The court does
feel impel ed under an earnest and solemn sense of duty as to the
verdict you ought to render in this case, to appeal to your
manhood, your sense of justice, and your oaths, not to declare that a
jury in the Capital of Alabama would not enforce the law of the
United States because it happened that a negro is the victim of the
violated law and the defendant is a white man."16
When the jury resumed deliberations, the vote shifted to seven
men for conviction and ve for acquit al. But among those ve,
there was no possibility of change. On July 13, the jury reported
that they were impossibly deadlocked. Judge Jones, barely
concealing his scorn, declared a mistrial and set the Turners free.
"God forbid that the time wil ever come in this country when
you are helpless and distressed and have been the victim of
oppression when you wil be denied that protection of the law to
which you appeal and to which every law-abiding human being is
entitled among al civilized people," Jones told the jury. Reese
vowed to bring the Turners back to trial before another jury17
That would not be needed. On the fol owing Monday, Fletcher
Turner surprised Montgomery when he returned to the federal
building and took a seat with his at orney at the front of the gal ery.
When Judge Jones convened court to begin selection of jurors for
the peonage trial of Robert Franklin, one of Turner's lawyers, N. M.
Lackey, rose to speak. Turner was ready to plead guilty to a charge
of peonage in order to avoid further prosecution on any other
charges and in return for the dismissal of the counts against his son.
"My client did not realize that he was violating the law. He did not
know that he was doing anything that was not justi ed by law,"
Lackey explained. "If any cruelty was practiced it was done without
the consent of my client. In this af air my client was mistaken."18
Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true
Judge Jones insisted that the facts proved Turner engaged in true
slavery. "He purchased their liberty and services," the judge
remonstrated, as Turner stood emotionless before the bench. But
Judge Jones was no naive young Republican prosecutor. Even as he
lectured the unrepentant farmer stil driving slaves forty years after
emancipation, Jones knew hardly any jury in America, most
certainly not one in Alabama, could be relied on in 1903 to convict
the man before him. A new trial would accomplish nothing. He
accepted the plea of guilty, levied a ne of $1,000, and the case
was closed.
IX
A RIVER OF ANGER
The South Is "an armed camp."
In the three months since Reese began his slavery investigation, the
guilt of every defendant cal ed to court had in one manner or
another been established. He'd won the personal at ention and
support of the U.S. at orney general and of President Roosevelt
himself. Indeed, a new position had just been created in his o ce
to oversee an even more expansive at ack on slavery. Reese
believed history, and the power of the nation, were with him. Even
rabidly anti-black, white supremacist politicians and newspapers
such as the Montgomery Advertiser initial y reacted with
embarrassment to the peonage charges that so suddenly burst into
the public eye.
In truth, the mistrial in the case of Fletcher Turner marked an
ominous reversal. Resentment to the exposure of the new slavery
was growing. Other voices, defiant and rancorous, began to rise.
On the Saturday before Turner's surprise guilty plea, Alabama
secretary of state He in spoke to an annual reunion of Confederate
veterans in the town of Luverne, issuing a ringing endorsement of
how men such as Pace and Turner had nobly returned black
workers to their proper position as slaves and at acking Reese and
Judge Jones as wil ing to sacri ce the honor of southern whites in
return for advancement under President Roosevelt. They were nest
foulers and "nigger lovers," cried supporters of the accused. He in
and his al ies said any man who did not defy them deserved al the
contempt of the white South.
Reese and He in traded charges through the newspapers—the
U.S. at orney asserting that He in deceitful y mischaracterized the
facts of the case; He in, annealing his coarse racism in the language
of the U.S. Constitution, retorted that Judge Jones was usurping the
American ideals of trials by jury. 1
American ideals of trials by jury.
While the Turner trial was under way, a frenzied mob in
Scot sboro, Alabama, gunned down the town sheri in front of his
family as he refused to turn over a black teenager who had
al egedly "at empted criminal assault" on a nineteen-year-old white
girl. Once the sheri was dead, the black man was seized from his
cel and hanged from a telegraph pole that night.
Midway through the trial, a lawyer in Dothan, Alabama,
telegraphed Reese to report that a client, Enoch Pat erson, was
being held in peonage by the town's chief of police. Obviously, no
local system of justice was available to defend Pat erson. "I have no
redress here for his wrongs," the lawyer wrote. "I know of no way to
get justice for him but to submit the mat er to you."2 Similar
charges owed into his o ce, so numerous and substantial that
Reese—already frenzied with the duties of the trial and other
indictments—could barely manage to send acknowledgments of the
information, much less open investigations.
In Georgia, al egations surfaced in the court of Judge Emory
Speer, in the cot on-dense version of that state's Black Belt, that the
family of state representative Edward McRee, one of the most
prominent in the state, was operating a slave plantation even more
expansive and brutal than anything al eged in Tal apoosa County.
Across the nation, the spring and summer of 1903 marked a
venomous turn in relations between blacks and whites. A pal was
descending on black America, like nothing experienced since the
darkest hours of antebel um slavery. If anything, the poisoned
atmosphere and accelerating disintegration of the structure of civil
society more resembled to blacks a time two centuries earlier, when
white slave traders and their corrupted indigenous al ies descended
without explanation upon the vil ages of West Africa to plunder the
native population. For at least the next four decades, especial y on
the backcountry roads and rural rail lines of Louisiana, Mississippi,
Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida, no black person
living outside the explicit protection of whites could again feel ful y
secure.
secure.
The plummeting position of black Americans was driven by the
convergence of transforming currents in American life. In the years
of abolitionist fervor before and after the Civil War, northern whites
who pushed for ful citizenship for black freedmen operated under
naive assumptions. Many believed that once schools and wages
were extended to liberated slaves, they could be quickly and ful y
assimilated into U.S. society. In the span of half a generation, they
imagined the nation's eleven mil ion African Americans learning to
read and write and becoming dark-skinned versions of the yeoman
white farmers fanning across the western prairies.
Human slaves had been freed many times before—from the
Israelites, to the Romans, to Africans in the vast British Empire as
recently as 1834. But no society in human history had at empted to
instantly transform a vast and entrenched slave class into immediate
ful and equal citizenship. The cost of educating freed slaves and
their children came to seem unbearably enormous, even to their
purported friends. Their expectations of compensation radical y
altered the economics of southern agriculture. And even among the
most ardent abolitionists, few white Americans in any region were
truly prepared to accept black men and women, with their
seemingly inexplicable dialects, mannerisms, and supposedly
narrow skil s, as true social equals.
Moreover, Charles Darwin's stil new theory of evolution was
threading through American culture with unintended sinister
repercussions. Before the publication of Darwin's landmark On the
Origin of Species in 1859, virtual y al Americans viewed the
presumed higher and lower racial order of whites, blacks, and
native Indian tribes as mandated by God. But the nearly ubiquitous
acceptance of Christianity by American blacks—at the active
encouragement of whites—also clearly established the essential
humanity of slaves. Christianity said slaves—despite their legal
categorization as chat el—and their owners were indisputably
members of the same race. Regardless of the violence used by
whites against slaves, there was a loose consensus, even in the
South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and
South, that whites and blacks were linked in their humanity and
that God demanded some measure of moral consideration and
compassion for al . Northern opposition to slavery before the Civil
War was deeply rooted in this religious precept.
But swirling concepts of evolution upended those traditions.
Dehumanizing interpretations of the racial order were unleashed—
driven and de ned not just by skin color but by ever more re ned
concepts of blood. A new conceit of multiple, distinct human
species emerged. The Indian wars of the 1870s solidi ed a growing
sense of genetical y propel ed white superiority and of raw violence
as an appropriate method of protecting white political supremacy
and racial purity. Thousands of Civil War soldiers who had been
introduced to bat le in a moral y complex war of racial liberation
were later immersed on the Great Plains in the simple absolutism
of the pure, racial y motivated violence that would haunt the
twentieth century.
Popular American culture embraced the western con icts as
proof of white superiority—spawning hundreds of novels and short
stories that extol ed the extermination of Indian populations as the
inexorable march of white progress and eminent domain. Wil iam
"Bu alo Bil " Cody's Wild West Show became a pageant of white
supremacist rhetoric, drawing tens of mil ions of American and
European spectators in the 1880s and 1890s.
A whole new genre of ction extol ing the antebel um South and
an idealized view of slavery became immensely popular. Joel
Chandler Harris's books l ed with stories of contented slaves and
kindly masters— rst serialized in the Atlanta Constitution—sold in
enormous volumes in the North. The most sensational book in al
regions of the country remained The Leopard's Spots, a southern
romance by a former preacher named Thomas Dixon Jr.
Published in New York by Doubleday Page & Co. the previous
year, the novel was built around the quest of Confederate colonel
Charles Gas-ton to at ain love and glory as he swept away black
political participation in Reconstruction-era North Carolina.
Underscoring his repudiation of past depictions of cruel antebel um
slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the
slavery, Dixon co-opted for his characters many of the names of the
infamous Simon Legree and other key gures in Harriet Beecher
Stowe's prewar abolitionist bible, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet in Dixon's
rendering, the brutal southern slave masters were kindly; former
slaves risen to power in Reconstruction were a gruesome plague
upon whites and themselves. Late in the novel, Gaston gives his
own blood for a transfusion to a girl raped by a black man. After
her death, a relief from a life marked as despoiled, the father
refuses to have his daughter placed in a grave dug by a black man.
Confederate veterans at the funeral ral y to dig a new one.
In the novel, a black man accused of the crime is tied to a pine
tree, doused with oil, and burned to death. Dixon writes of Gaston
pondering how "the insolence of a class of young negro men was
becoming more and more intolerable."3 Gaston "was fast being
overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must
squarely face the fact that two such races, counting mil ions in
numbers, can not live together under a democracy…. Amalgamation
simply meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, at nose, massive
jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair wil register their animal marks
over the proudest intel ect and the rarest beauty of any other race.
The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood
makes a negro." The book's ini
tial printing of fteen thousand was
immediately consumed. Soon more than a mil ion copies had been
purchased. Dixon instantly became one of the most widely read
writers of the first decades of the century.
Another best-sel ing novelist of the romanticized South, Thomas
Nelson Page, became one of the country's most in uential voices on
race relations. Asserting that blacks constituted the vast majority of
rapists and criminals in the United States, and that the
overwhelming preponderance of blacks remained "ignorant" and
"immoral," Page warned that the continued coexistence of the races
was likely impossible. "After 40 years in which money and care
have been given unstintedly to uplift them …the Negro race has not
advanced at al ," Page declared. Blacks are "a vast sluggish mass of
uncooled lava over a section of the country, burying some sections
and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its
and a ecting the whole. It is apparently harmless, but beneath its
surface smolder res which may at any time burst forth
unexpectedly and spread desolation."4
Few white Americans expressed disagreement. Southern whites
cheered news in April 1903 that the New York public school
system ordered the removal from its reading lists of Uncle Tom's
Cabin. Echoing Dixon, New York public school libraries
superintendent Cland G. Leland said Stowe's depiction of
antebel um slavery "does not belong to today but to an unhappy
period of our country's history, the memory of which it is not wel
to revive in our children."5
White Americans across the country were adopting a dramatical y
revised version of the racial strife of the nineteenth century—a
mythology in which the Civil War had su ciently ameliorated the
injuries of slavery to blacks and that during the ensuing decades
southern whites heaped assistance and opportunity upon former
slaves to no avail. The new version of events declared that African
Americans—being fundamental y inferior and incorrigible—were in
the new century a burden on the nation rather than victims of its
past.6
A widely disseminated treatise on blacks published in 1901
concluded that cohabitation in the same society by whites and free
blacks would forever be cursed by the immutably brutish aspects of
African character. "The chief and overpowering element in his
Slavery by Another Name Page 35