Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  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