Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  to formulate a plan for removing African Americans from the city.

  Independence Day 1903 stirred extraordinary black and white

  hostility. In the tiny South Carolina town of Norway, a white

  farmer's son severely beat four black workers. In retaliation, the

  father, a one-armed Confederate veteran, was gunned down at his

  dinner table with a shotgun blast through a window. Local whites

  seized a black man in retaliation and lynched him. In response,

  more than two hundred armed blacks surrounded the town on July

  4, threatening to burn it to the ground. The state's governor

  dispatched the South Carolina militia to counterat ack.22

  In Evansvil e, Indiana, crowds of blacks and whites bat led on

  July 5 over the fate of a black man accused of kil ing a white police

  o cer. Whites successful y broke into the city jail, but were driven

  back by armed blacks. Police charged in to disperse the crowds and

  spirit away the accused man.

  On the same day, a mob of six hundred whites went in search of

  a black woman in Peoria, Il inois, who was accused of having

  beaten a white boy. After discovering that the woman already was

  in jail, the crowd at acked her home, dismantling it to the

  foundation and throwing al her furniture and belongings into the

  Il inois River. In Thomasvil e, Georgia, a street argument between a

  black man and his wife accelerated into a running gun ght between

  a white posse and crowds of African Americans.23

  The New York Times opined in mid-July 1903 that "respectable

  negroes" should ban the city's bad ones. "There are in New York

  thousands of ut erly worthless negro desperadoes," the Times wrote,

  "gamblers when they have money and thieves when they have none,

  moral lepers and more dangerous than wild animals." The

  newspaper fol owed up later in the month with hysterical coverage

  of racial disturbances in the city. "Negroes At ack Police" blared a

  headline over an account of a ght that broke out on West 62nd

  Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

  Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man

  on a sidewalk.24

  Infuriated by the setbacks su ered by blacks in al regions of the

  country, W. E. B. DuBois, the rising young sociologist—the rst

  African American Ph.D. graduated by Harvard—wrote that the

  South "is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk." The

  emancipation act that had ended the Civil War had transmogri ed

  into "a race feud," he said. "Not a single Southern legislature stood

  ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the pol s; not a

  single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible

  without a system of restrictions that took al its freedoms away;

  there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly

  regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nul i cation as a

  duty"25

  X

  THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD

  "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."

  Warren Reese refused to believe the white South was

  irredeemably lost. He insisted, despite the mushrooming

  resistance to his work, that justice stil could be served in

  Alabama.

  Judge Jones remained embarrassed and distressed at the mistrial

  in the case of Fletcher Turner. He had been convinced that twelve

  white men in Montgomery could put aside racial animosity long

  enough to see the obvious guilt of a man such as Turner—even if

  the jurors did so only to preserve the honor of their home state. At

  the conclusion of the brief trial of Robert Franklin during the week

  after Turner's guilty plea, Jones once again signaled to the jury the

  defendant's guilt as he assailed Alabama's system of lower courts.

  "The counsel of defendant spoke of the negro as a ‘so-cal ed citizen,’

  " Jones told the court incredulously. "A man is a citizen whether he

  can vote or not, and nobody loves a Government that would not

  protect him." He decried Alabama's provincial sheri s and judges

  who "have reestablished slavery for debt in this state."1

  Much to the relief of Jones and Reese, the jury agreed. Franklin

  was convicted of a single count of peonage. Final y, a southern jury

  had been wil ing to honestly adjudge the actions of a white man,

  nding obvious involuntary servitude to be what it truly was:

  slavery.

  Reese was privately adamant that his o ce would soon bring

  another vol ey of slavery charges from elsewhere in the state. But

  Jones was ready to declare victory. The enormous public pressure

  in Montgomery to end the probe was wearing on him. Jones

  declared publicly that the "peonage ring was nearly al broken up."

  Alabama had been taught its lesson, Judge Jones hoped, and further

  consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

  consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

  brazenly seized John Davis, was ordered to pay $1,000. Word

  spread quickly among the at orneys representing other defendants

  that the court would deal just as leniently with those awaiting trial.

  Within a few days, John Pace's son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, and

  guard James H. Todd pleaded guilty to ve counts of peonage.

  Judge Jones ned each man $1,000. They were taken back to the

  Dadevil e city jail, to remain there until the penalty was paid.2 But

  both men ignored the nes and were soon set free. Before the

  summer term of court was over, another half dozen men pleaded

  guilty and received from Jones symbolic nes. When court

  reconvened in the fal of 1903, the rest of the defendants did the

  same. Every major gure admit ed guilt. That was enough for

  Jones.

  Anxious to show that Tal apoosa County was no longer a center

  of antebel um criminality and repair its reputation, a local grand

  jury was impaneled in Dadevil e to examine questions of slavery

  and peonage in early August. Two weeks later, in a nal report, the

  panel of local men concluded that John Pace had been responsible

  for virtual y al of the peonage in the area. It remonstrated Pace for

  having "kept East Wilson, a negro woman who is serving a twelve

  months sentence for larceny at his farm, out of the way, so that the

  Sheri could not serve on her a subpoena to appear before this

  Grand Jury….

  "We suspect that he has kept other witnesses out of the way so

  that they could not be served," the report continued. "It is our

  opinion, that John W Pace and his convict farm are more

  responsible, by far, than al others in our county for the abuse of

  ignorant and helpless people, which is the crime known as peonage

  in the Federal Court. This evil is practiced by very few in our

  County, to the detriment of al , should be discontinued in our

  County forever."3

  Meanwhile, local residents were ral ying around the Cosby

  family. George and Burancas had begun their sentences in the

  Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

  Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

  that it was unfair for the t
wo men to be imprisoned when every

  other participant in the slaving scheme received symbolic

  punishment. More than three thousand names were a xed to a

  petition seeking a pardon from President Roosevelt. Soon, even

  Judge Jones supported the Cosby plea for clemency,4 5 directly

  urging the president to free the two men. On September 16, 1903,

  he did so. Almost as if the testimony of kidnappings, murders,

  whippings, and enslavement had never been heard, the Cosbys

  returned to their Red Ridge Road farm.

  John Pace, the leader of the slavery ring, quietly restarted his

  trade in black labor. As 1903 closed, the Alabama Board of

  Inspectors of Convicts— the state entity charged with overseeing the

  state's penal systems—was chagrined to discover that the county

  commissioners of Tal apoosa County had renewed Pace's contract to

  lease al county convicts.

  As much as Judge Jones—and the more brazen apologists for

  slavery across the South—had hoped the Alabama cases represented

  the end of the a air, di cult realities continued to intrude. The fal

  of 1903 brought new indictments in Louisiana for holding slaves,

  but residents were so outraged that the marshal investigating the

  cases had to ee the state for his safety. Newspapers across the

  North published accounts of additional involuntary servitude in

  Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.6

  The U.S. at orney in Mobile, Alabama, who had initiated his own

  inquiries into slavery in the southern part of the state, reported

  "credible reports" of peonage across his territory and in multiple

  counties. But investigating the al egations and questioning terri ed

  witnesses was proving di cult. "Many of them are unwil ing to

  communicate anything …unless assured that it would be

  con dential," wrote M. D. Wickersham to his superiors at the

  Department of Justice. "Persons manifested such terror when

  requested to disclose what they knew that it is doubtful if they can

  be persuaded to give any valuable testimony either in the grand

  jury room or before the court."7

  jury room or before the court."

  As in so many other places, the federal marshals in the eld

  discovered that the o cial systems of leasing black convicts to

  private companies and individuals had become indistinguishable

  from the casual slavery ourishing on private farms. If the former

  was legal, few southerners—white or black—understood why the

  lat er would not be. "So many il iterate persons have confounded

  the harsh, and at many times cruel, execution of the convict laws of

  the state with the practice of peonage that it has been very di cult

  to make them understand the line that distinguishes the one from

  the other, " Wickersham wrote.

  In late November, a grand jury in Macon began hearing testimony

  that Georgia state representative Edward McRee, his brothers Frank

  and Wil iam, two former sheri s, and other members of some of

  the most powerful families in south Georgia were operating a vast

  slave-driven enterprise at their 22,000-acre Kinderlou plantation

  near the Florida state line.

  The McRee brothers’ farm was a plantation and industrial center

  that dwarfed that of John Pace—operating on a scale no antebel um

  slave owner could have comprehended. Edward McRee became a

  powerful elected o cial serving in the state legislature. By 1900,

  the four siblings who inherited the enterprise from their empire-

  building father, a noted Confederate o cer named George McRee,

  each lived in a lavish mansion within a square mile of the center of

  the plantation. Between them a bustling vil age— cal ed Kinderlou

  in honor of the Aunt Lou who raised the four brothers from

  childhood after the death of their mother—thrived with farm

  laborers, tradesmen, and several smal stores. Consuming the bulk

  of an entire county, the farm—basking in the subtropical warmth of

  the Gulf Coast— included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy

  loam under til at any given time. On a private spur of the Atlantic

  Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens

  of boxcars waited at al times for the hundreds of thousands of

  bushels of tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and

  cot on. The McRees owned their own cot on gins, compresses to

  make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

  make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

  ve-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation's sugarcane to

  make syrup. Five eighty-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco.

  Cuban workers were imported to work the plantation's cigar

  factory.

  Thousands more acres of dense pine and hardwood fed a

  ceaselessly turning sawmil , planing mil , and dry kiln. A factory on

  the plantation produced thousands of pal ets, wooden crates, and

  baskets for shipping agricultural produce. Deep in the forests,

  McRee turpentine camps col ected rosin for their naval stores

  distil ery. Three to four trains stopped daily, beginning with one at

  3:30 A.M. to pick up dozens of three-foot-high barrels of milk

  produced in the Kinderlou dairy8

  The backbone of the plantation was smal armies of farmhands

  and hundreds of mules, who were awakened by the rst bel at 4

  A.M. each day and remained in the elds or factories until dark.

  From "can't see to can't see," as the laborers cal ed it.

  Initial y, the McRees hired only free black labor, but beginning in

  the 1890s, they routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from

  the state of Georgia to perform the grueling work of clearing lands,

  removing stumps, ditching elds, and constructing roads. Other

  prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over fteen years,

  thousands of men and women were forced to the plantation and

  held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. After the turn

  of the century, the brothers began to arrange for more forced

  laborers through the sheri s of nearby counties—fueling what

  eventual y grew into a sprawling tra c in humans across the

  southwestern section of Georgia.

  "So I was carried back to the Captain's," said a black laborer in

  1904, tel ing of his imprisonment on what was almost certainly the

  McRee plantation. "That night he made me strip o my clothing

  down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered

  his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my

  bare back, and stood by until it was done."

  bare back, and stood by until it was done."

  The worker vividly described to a passing journalist how the

  farm descended from a place of free employment in the late

  nineteenth century to one of abject slavery by the rst years of the

  twentieth century. The unidenti ed man was born in the last years

  before the Civil War, and then hired out at age ten to the father of

  the McRee brothers, a man he knew simply as "Captain." While a

  teenager, the black man at empted to leave Kinderlou and work at

  another plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure,


  one of the McRees and "some kind of law o cer" tracked him

  down. The new employer apologized to McRee for hiring the young

  worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known "this

  nigger was bound out to you."

  Soon afterward, one of the Captain's sons, likely Edward McRee,

  took over the farm and convinced the free laborers to put their

  mark on what was ostensibly a contract to work on the plantation

  for up to ten years, in exchange for pay, a cabin, and some supplies.

  Then McRee began building a stockade, with a long hal way down

  the center and rows of crude stal s— each with two bunk beds and

  mat resses—on each side. "One bright day in April …about forty

  able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them

  handcu ed were brought," the laborer recounted. Word came that

  any African American, whether free or convict, who at empted to

  leave the farm would be tracked down with hounds and forced

  back. The contracts they had signed contained the same language

  that John Pace forced men to accept, al owing the McRees to hold

  the workers against their wil and beat them if they were

  disobedient. "We had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could

  we do about it?" the black man asked. "The white folks had al the

  courts, al the guns, al the hounds, al the railroads, al the

  telegraph wires, al the newspapers, al the money, and nearly al

  the land."

  When his labor contract final y expired after a decade, the laborer

  was told he was free to leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his

  accumulated debt at the plantation commissary of $165. Unable to

  do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

  do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to

  work on the farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict. He

  and several others were moved from their crude cabin into the

  lthy stockades. The men slept each night in the same clothes they

  wore in the elds, on rot ing mat resses infested with pests. Many

  were chained to their beds. Food was crude and minimal.

  Punishment for the disobedient was to be strapped onto a log lying

  on their backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank

  of wood. When the slave was freed, if he could not return to work

  on his blistered feet, he was strapped to the log again, this time