mines.
But in fact, the economic value of the slaves scooped up by labor
agents across Alabama was enormous. In August 1903, just as Judge
Jones was issuing his peonage ruling that, counter to its intention,
rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,
rati ed and codi ed the process of enslaving young black men,
Erskine Ramsey, the longtime chief of the Tennessee's company
operations, was privately gloating at the pro tability of relying on
slaves. "The operation of the convict mines has been very
remunerative," Ramsey wrote in a let er to Henry Clay Frick, the
notorious Pit sburgh industrialist.22 After building his own coke and
coal company in the 1880s and 1890s, with forty thousand acres of
coal elds and twelve thousand coke ovens, Frick became partners
with Andrew Carnegie, eventual y taking over management of
Carnegie Steel Company.
Frick was most wel known as the man who during the 1892
Homestead incident ordered a smal army of company detectives to
make war on workers striking at a Carnegie plant on the
Monongahela River in Pennsylvania. A dozen people died.
Eventual y, the state governor sent in eight thousand militiamen to
end the ghting. The strike—and organizing union—were crushed.
In 1901, Frick guided Carnegie Steel into the merger that created
U.S. Steel. Two years later, Frick was one of the wealthiest
individuals in the United States, if not the world, and continued to
invest periodical y in other industrial enterprises.
Ramsey had known Frick his entire adult life—literal y growing
up as a mechanic in a Frick coal mine supervised by his father.
Later, Ramsey was a prodigy executive in the Frick company,
becoming its youngest-ever mine manager. An uncanny engineer
and inventor, he moved to Alabama in 1887 to become chief mine
engineer for Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad. In 1903, Ramsey,
who recently had been pushed out of his role as the top o cial at
TCI, was quietly scheming to create a new coal conglomerate in
Birmingham. Eventual y he would establish Prat Consolidated Coal
Company, which grew to rival the Prat Mines in size and scope.
(The two operations shared the name of Alabama's rst frontier
industrialist, Daniel Prat , after whom Alabama's biggest coal eld
was named. But the two enterprises were completely independent
of each other.)
Ramsey wrote Frick to test his interest in investing in the new
projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor
projects. Publicly, Ramsey decried the inhumanity of forced labor
systems in the mines, but in his let er to Frick the engineer
combined a recitation of his last successes at Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad, unveiled at acks on the new management, and provided a
report on how ef ectively forced laborers could be managed.
Ramsey wrote that just before leaving the company, he opened a
new mine, Slope No. 10, at the Prat Mines complex. Transferring
convicts taken from the company's rst slave mine, No. 1, the new
prison was successful y obtaining the "cheapest coal ever produced
by the Company"—at a cost of 50 cents a ton. Powered by access to
an extraordinarily inexpensive and indefensible source of labor, the
company reached a record output of 3.4 mil ion tons of coal in
1900 and continued averaging three mil ion or more tons a year
into the next decade. The racial nature of the system was obvious.
Of the nearly one thousand convicts in the two mines, no more than
seventy were white.23 Without forced laborers, Ramsey's startling
successes would have been impossible.
A year after Ramsey's let er to Frick, white miners launched their
most ambitious strike ever against Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad,
seeking acknowledgment of their new union as a col ective
bargaining entity. Readying for bat le, the company shut down their
least e cient furnaces, and most signi cantly, converted two more
mines from free workers to forced laborers.24
The strike col apsed within twelve months. Explaining the
company's rationale for crushing the union, Don Bacon, the
president of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad told The Wal Street
Journal: "Conditions forced upon the management …had become
intolerable. The authority over your property …had to be restored
and maintained, or al hope of permanent, successful competition
…would have to be abandoned."25
Slavery, and the ability to obliterate free labor a orded by
coerced workers, was seminal to the company's success. It continued
to aggressively seek more and more compulsory workers—from the
state of Alabama, from any city or county, from any source that
would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired
would sel them. Sometime between 1903 and 1907, TCI acquired
from the family of Fletcher Turner—partner in John Pace's brutal
forced labor operation—the limestone quarry at Calcis, where so
many men seized o the back roads had been forced into
slavery26The Turner family, quietly back in the trade of black men
after Fletcher Turner's pardon, continued to operate the quarry for
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.
• •
Nearly a thousand miles—and seemingly a half century in time—
removed from the frightening Turner quarry, a historic series of
capital events was unfolding in the fal of 1907. A syndicate of Wal
Street investors, backed by brokerage rm Moore & Schley, bought
a majority stake in the shares of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad.
Armed with new nancing from the syndicate, the company
launched a major expansion of steelmaking capacity. Its output of
iron ingots increased to 400,000 tons in 1906. The fol owing year,
it won an order for 157,000 tons of steel rails for the Union Paci c
and Southern Paci c railroads—a direct chal enge to the hegemony
of U.S. Steel Corporation, the great conglomerate of the North.27
But economic turmoil around the world was rat ling the network
of trusts that had come to dominate Wal Street. These highly
speculative banks and nanciers paid exorbitant interest rates,
maintained lower cash reserves, invested heavily in risky schemes,
and backed investors seeking to monopolize key commodities. The
future of the great trusts was also in growing doubt due to a push
by President Roosevelt to punish John Rockefel er's Standard Oil. A
wide-ranging criminal indictment of Standard Oil, al eging il egal
pricing practices, rat led the market. In late October, the failure of
two prominent stock speculators in a bid to take over United
Copper Company led to the bankruptcy of two Wal Street
brokerages, a bank, and another mining company. As word spread
of the failed scheme and its e ect on other prominent bankers,
panic set into the markets. Suddenly, multiple trust banks were
under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to
under threat, and dozens of stock brokerages appeared poised to
disintegrate.
To stave o a complete col aps
e of the New York Stock Exchange
and the national depression that might fol ow, J. P. Morgan,
patriarch of the gilded Morgan Bank and architect of the 1901
merger that had created U.S. Steel, began propping up ailing trust
banks and investment houses with infusions of his own cash and
from other bankers working with him. On October 28, Morgan and
two other bankers agreed to loan $30 mil ion to the city of New
York, to prevent a failure of the local government.
Five days later, stil bat ling to hold Wal Street together, Morgan
concluded that he needed to simultaneously rescue three
desperately threatened investment houses, Trust Company of
America, Lincoln Trust, and Moore & Schley, the brokerage that had
backed the takeover the previous year of Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad Co. The rm's shares of TCI had been placed as col ateral
for $25 mil ion in loans that Moore & Schley could not pay o . It
would soon be forced to liquidate the stake—the beginnings of a
sel -of that Morgan believed might wreck Wal Street.
Morgan proposed that U.S. Steel prevent the dumping of Moore
& Schley's stock by buying the stake for a fraction of its value. In
return, the presidents of the great Wal Street trusts had to agree to
provide $25 mil ion to help bail out the other banks. Henry Clay
Frick, stil a major owner of U.S. Steel, recognized the potential y
vast value of obtaining Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's mineral
holdings and of eliminating it as a competitor. The chief executive
of U.S. Steel, a former Il inois judge named Elbert H. Gary closely
al ied with Morgan, agreed to the purchase only on the condition
that the White House rst give a promise not to at ack the deal as a
violation of new anti-monopoly laws.
After an al -night negotiation in Morgan's o ces beginning
Saturday, November 2, the terms of the deal were hammered out.
Judge Gary and Frick sped for Washington at midnight in a special
single Pul man car. Interrupting the president's breakfast, they laid
out the details of the transaction to Roosevelt and Secretary of State
Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic
Elihu Root, emphasizing the potential for a national economic
disaster if the stock markets weren't reassured.
Within twenty minutes, the president, freshly returned from a
Louisiana bear-hunting trip, agreed to support the buyout—one of
the biggest nancial transactions in the history of American
capitalism to that date. Roosevelt wired At orney General Charles J.
Bonaparte that the federal government would not oppose the
merger. Judge Gary cal ed Morgan at his o ces. Word of the deal
spread through Wal Street as the stock exchange opened on
Monday morning. The panic subsided. U.S. Steel took control of
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad for $45 mil ion—a minuscule
fraction of the estimated $1 bil ion value of its Prat Mines and
other assets in Alabama.28
That TCI was the largest customer of the Alabama slavery system
Roosevelt had once championed the destruction of was not
discussed at the White House breakfast. Three weeks later, U.S.
Steel's newly instal ed president of its Alabama property, thirty-
eight-year-old George G. Crawford , signed a new lease to acquire
four hundred prisoners from the state of Alabama for use in the
company's No. 10 and No. 3 mines.
Crawford agreed to pay $42 per month for the strongest laborers
and agreed to pay $10 for the weakest. The contract made clear
that as soon as the company's newest prison mine, a deep shaft
cal ed Slope No. 12, was ready, as many prisoners as possible
would be shifted there.29
XI I
THE ARREST OF
GREEN COTTENHAM
A War of Atrocities
Green Cotenham huddled behind the worn, whitewashed wal s
of the train depot in Columbiana. It was a clear, brisk Thursday
—sunny and crisp before noon, the temperature easing toward
the 70s by early afternoon. Green walked to the train station to play
dice, or to nd a day's labor, or for some other claimed reason that
in truth was no di erent from any other. The train station was
simply where he went almost every day, where nearly al young
black men found themselves.
The freight docks of the station in Columbiana, and in every
other county seat on the Southern Railway line between
Birmingham and Eufaula, a lush cot on center deep in southern
Alabama, were the hub of life for African American men in the
South in 1908. Open freight cars, easily boarded as trains eased out
of towns like Columbiana or when they slowed to cross rickety
bridges and tight curves, were the only mechanized means of
movement for the armies of destitute blacks searching or waiting
for work in the rst years of the century—especial y those like
Green who had uncoupled themselves from the traditional black
life of serfdom in a cot on patch. The tracks themselves, removed
from the view of most whites, were the safest paths for walking
from town to town as wel . Either way, a man on the rails or the
trains was violating Alabama law by entering the property of a
railroad company. But the appeal of motion and movement, of
opportunity, that the tracks and trains represented was too much
for a young man like Green to resist.
That spring, there were hardly any jobs for cash to be had for a
black man, unless he was wil ing to take up a cot on hoe or venture
into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the
into the giant lumber camps on the rail lines thrusting into the
swampy jungle forests below the Florida state line, or across the
Georgia border. Railroad companies claimed to pay $2 a day for a
strong hand who could handle an axe, cut ing trees or shaping rail
ties. But the railroad camps sat at the ends of long spurs cut into
near-virgin forests, with no roads or other means of exit except via
the trains that brought more fresh backs every day. Once a man
arrived, there was no departing unless the camp boss al owed it.
And there was no knowing whether the Southern Railway or any
other company would keep its word to pay the amount it
promised, or even to feed men or keep them out of the rain and
swamps. Guards with shotguns and dogs patrol ed the perimeters of
the worksites. The captains of the camps kept long leather straps,
a xed to thick wooden handles, to beat men who tried to ee.
County sheri s developed an uncanny eye for spot ing any eeing
African Americans who made it through the woods to a farm or
town, and received rewards for hauling them back in chains.
That was the work available to an independent black man like
Green: free labor camps that functioned like prisons, cot on tenancy
that equated to serfdom, or prison mines l ed with slaves. The
alternatives, reserved for African Americans who crossed a white
man or the law, were even more grim. Stil , the freight depots were
a magnet of excitement. There was always in some corner a simple
g
ame of dice being played for pennies or tobacco. Now and again,
the freight agent or some farmer in town with a wagon would pay
a man a nickel or a quarter to help move a trol ey of crates from an
open freight car. In picking season, white men would come to the
station every day looking for extra hands in the cot on elds,
apprising on sight—by the look of their hands or the smel of liquor
on their breath— whether an African American boy or man was
worth paying for a week's work in his elds, or whether they
belonged to the new class of independent blacks that whites saw as
the scourge of their lives and towns.
Regardless of their conclusions, every African American was a
nigger in a white man's eyes. So the term for those African
American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant
American men deemed speci cal y worthless for their de ant
at itudes was "cigaret e dudes." These were men cocky by
comparison to their peers; they had learned some reading and
writing, and sometimes worked and sometimes slouched on street
corners. Sometimes cigaret es sat akilter on their lips. There was
likely a bot le of moonshine or a pistol in a pocket somewhere
among each throng of young men gawking from their poses against
the board and bat en wal s of the freight station. Instead of
threadbare overal s, the uniform of al blacks and poor country
whites for as long as anyone could remember, these men might
wear trousers and jackets, even neckties. They stood by the dozens
in the studio of a black photographer in Columbiana, cigaret e
dudes lounging with their arms draped around black girls in their
best Sunday dresses, glaring at the lens. On their faces an air of
de ant con dence, visages of the men they knew they should have
been al owed to be. Among a population of 8.5 mil ion blacks in
the southern states, crushed into subservience in the forty years
since the Civil War, these men were the last refuges of resistance as
the twentieth century dawned.
According to almost every white, these cigaret e dudes were the
source of every trouble in the South. These were the blacks never to
be hired, never to be befriended—to be denied embrocation of any
kind. To be rid of them forever, by whatever means could
accomplish that goal, was something nearly every white man in the
South, most certainly in Columbiana, had openly cal ed for and
Slavery by Another Name Page 44