But when Alabama o cials began cut ing the number of men
supplied to U.S. Steel in the middle of that year—four years after
Gary claimed he had ordered an end to slaving in his mines—the
company protested forceful y. The company's general
superintendent, Edward H. Coxe, wrote convict bureau president
James Oakley to complain, "asking him for 30 or 40 more men."
When the number of prisoners dwindled below three hundred later
that summer, Coxe paid a personal visit to Oakley to demand more
forced laborers.33
As the end of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad's agreement with
the state was approaching, the company told Alabama o cials it
wanted to begin negotiations to extend the contract for at least one
more year. The state responded that it intended to lease al the
convicts to the Banner Mine—ostensibly because Erskine Ramsey's
company would pay more for them.
"I wish to enter a very vigorous protest against this action, as it is
manifestly unfair to us to take the men from us," responded Coxe in
a September 25, 1911, let er to the o cial in charge of convicts.
"We are paying the State a great big price for these convicts, and it
is certainly a hardship on us to deplete our organization."34
State o cials, some of whom were receiving secret payments to
help Ramsey's company, were unswayed. On January 1, 1912, the
last remaining two hundred state convicts held at the Prat Mines
were marched out under guard and turned over to their new
overseers to help replenish the ranks of forced laborers at the
Banner Mine, decimated by the disaster less than a year earlier.
On December 13, 1912, a roaming labor agent for U.S. Steel sent
out to hustle up as many workers as possible made a last stop at
the Shelby County jail. Deputy Eddings no longer made regular
deliveries to Birmingham. With al state prisoners in the Banner
Mine, other companies sent out their own agents to local sheri s to
col ect convicts and haul them back to the shafts. The man from
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad paid $103.50 to acquire one last
lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W
lot of men. George Morris, Wil iam Garland, John Archie, J. W
Wal s, and John H. Huntley had al been arrested together on the
crime that had supplied thousands of laborers to the company:
"train riding."
There must have been some amazement that day in that al of the
men purchased were white. It was likely the only instance in the
company's thirty-year relationship with Shelby County sheri s in
which a shipment of men included no blacks. It would have been
no surprise though that for the "crime" which thousands of African
Americans were sent to the mines for months or years—and
hundreds of whom died for it—these ve white men received
sentences of just ten days’ labor.35
XVI
ATLANTA,
THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY
"I wil murder you if you don't do that work."
During the same scorching southern summer that Green
Cot enham and so many others died deep in the Alabama coal
mines—or at the ends of ropes in places from Texas to Il inois—
a litany of horrors from the slave camps of Georgia was spil ing
into public view in Atlanta.
Beginning late in July 1908, a commission established by the
Georgia legislature convened a series of remarkable hearings into
the operations of the state's convict leasing system. Meeting early
every day and late into the night to escape the city's excruciating
heat, the panel cal ed more than 120 witnesses over the course of
three weeks to give testimony in the state capitol's regal Room No.
16.The architects of the investigation—primarily state senator
Thomas Felder—launched the inquiry in hopes of proving
corruption in the management of Georgia's extensive system of
buying and sel ing prisoners. It would prove that. But as the long
line of witnesses perspired beneath the chamber's whirling ceiling
fans, they learned of crimes far greater than graft and payof s.
Across Georgia, fourteen separate camps held men sold by the
state; at another sixteen locations men charged in county and city
courts were held in slavery—including more than 430 at Durham
Coal mines; more than 350 at Egypt, in the plantation belt of south
Georgia; nearly 200 at Chat ahoochee Brick Company on the
outskirts of Atlanta; and scores more at a coal mine near Lookout
Mountain. In total, at least 3,464 men and 130 women lived in
explicit forced labor in Georgia. 1
Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate
Yet so many men had been sold, under so many separate
arrangements with work camps, factories, and timber operations
scat ered across the state, that no one in Georgia government could
say where any particular man might have ended up, or the true
total of African Americans being held against their wil .
Complicating any e ort to track the fates of these forced laborers,
the new slavery of Georgia had metamorphed into a ful -blown
system of human traf icking.
Felder's commit ee learned that at least six hundred slave
workers, nearly al of them African American, had been resold to
other buyers after being leased from the state for convictions on
minor of enses.2 Witness after witness—ranging from former guards
to legislators to freed slaves— o ered nauseating accounts of the
system's brutalities. Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were
left to die on the oor of a storage shed at a farm near
Mil edgevil e. Laborers who at empted escape from the Musco-gee
Brick Company were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-
long spikes turned inward—to make it impossibly painful to run
again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physical y
abusive. In almost every camp, forced laborers lived and slept for
months in the same tat ered clothing. They bedded each night on
fragments of bed linens clot ed with dirt and filth.
One legislator told of a black man at Lookout Mountain Coal and
Coke Company in the mountains of north Georgia whose arm was
broken in a rock fal inside the mine. Months later he was working
again, but with a disjointed arm, distended in a grotesque
misalignment, where the bones healed together in an unnatural
shape. At a camp in Floyd County, black women riddled with
venereal diseases worked on a roadway chained to one another.
Everywhere, prisoners worked, ate, and slept almost continual y
shackled. Legislators who visited the Pinson & Al en lumber and
turpentine camp in Mil er County were so revolted by the trash and
insect-riddled food given to prisoners, they had to leave without
completing the tour.3
In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a
In late July, a circumspect fourteen-year-old black boy with a
clenched hand gave his name as Daniel Long. What fol owed was a
plain-spoken description of his sentence served a year earlier in a
turpentine camp after being ac
cused of stealing a watch chain.
Senator Felder asked him if he'd been whipped.
"Yes sir," Long responded. "Say I wasn't working good enough."
Felder asked how severely and how often.
"Hit me 75 licks…. Some times twice a day," Long answered.4
Asked what was the mat er with his hand, Long said the camp
whipping boss beat it with a leather strap after Long said he was
get ing cramps from his work. After that, the boy could never open
his hand again. Final y the chairman of the commission asked Long
to take o his shirt and let the panel see his back. To gasps of
horror in the audience and grimaces on the faces of the commit ee,
the slight young man do ed his shirt and turned to reveal a back
grossly swol en and scarred with stripes from the turpentine camp
beatings. Scars and marks covered the trunk of the teenager. One
foot was stil seriously infected where a whipping had literal y
removed a piece of skin.
Long's mother moved into the witness chair and told the
commit ee how she was noti ed after his last beating that Daniel
was soon to die. The boy had been convicted of pet y theft in
Mariet a, just north of Atlanta, but was sold and resold by traders in
black labor until he arrived at the turpentine camp hundreds of
miles to the south. She borrowed money to travel to the camp in
south Georgia—walking for miles on country roads in search of
him. By the time she found the camp, her son had been sold again,
along with a crew of healthy prisoners, to a nearby farm. She asked
the whipping boss where to go to find her son.
"I don't know anything about the goddam black son of a bitch, I
beat hel out of him," Mrs. Long quoted the man saying. "He told
me if I went down that road … he would kil me and throw me in
the river. He said he had kil ed lots of goddamn negroes and
throwed them in the river."
She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk
She went anyway and found Daniel barely alive, lying in a bunk
with his clothes stuck to his scabs and oozing skin. The new owner
of the lease on her son al owed her to take him home. Only after
three months of recuperation did a doctor conclude Daniel would
survive.5
As the inquiry progressed, what began as revelations of brutish
behavior by uncouth men in distant labor camps slowly became
instead an unset ling portrait of some of Atlanta's, and Georgia's,
most prominent families—many of whom appeared to be direct
bene ciaries of the most sordid revelations in Room 16. The
commit ee learned that the kil ing of the young black boy described
by Ephraim Gaither—whose account of the decomposed body being
dragged through the woods by dogs sickened the gal ery—occurred
in a camp owned by Joel Hurt, one of Atlanta's most esteemed
businessmen, and run by his adult son, George.
Other witnesses recounted the fate of a sixteen-year-old white boy
named Abe Wynne, who was sold into the Durham Coal and Coke
Company mine after being caught two years earlier stealing two
tins of pot ed ham. The company, owned by former Atlanta mayor
James W. English, operated a dangerous shaft in north Georgia.
Some sections of the mine were l ed with more than waist-deep
water, which seeped out through the slate surrounding the coal.
Pumps were inadequate to remove the water. Not enough timbers
were provided for miners to brace the tunnels, leading to routine
and often deadly cave-ins. Even when material was provided,
miners often skipped the safety steps for fear of being punished if
they ran out of time to dig their required daily al otment, or "task,"
of coal.
"Many times the men wouldn't take time to do it because they
knew that they could not timber the wal s and nish their tasks,
and it meant a whipping if they did not nish them," testi ed R. A.
Keith, a former prisoner al owed to work as a clerk at the mine
of ice.
Every morning, slave laborers at the Durham mines were forced
to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn
to gather in the yard of the camp to receive a breakfast of corn
bread and a piece of raw meat and to watch whippings of any
worker who failed to make task the prior day. "I have seen them
punish the convicts severely for not nishing their tasks and have
seen them work until ten and eleven o'clock at night to nish their
tasks and then be whipped for working overtime," Keith said.
Asked to describe the instruments used by the camp whipping
boss, Keith said convicts were beaten with a thick strap of leather
at ached to a handle. "You take a strip of heavy harness leather
about as wide as my three ngers or a lit le bit wider and about
two and a half feet long. It would weigh somewhere in the
neighborhood of …three and a half pounds," Keith testi ed. "Some
times they would wet the leather by spit ing on it and rubbing it on
the sand; that was when they wanted to bring the blood. It would
hurt a great deal worse to og them with it than with the dry
strap…. The sand wil take the skin of ."6
In the yard where the whippings took place, the warden also
kept a herd of between forty and fty hogs. The aggressive animals
—made fearless of the docile prisoners—crowded in on the
emaciated men to grab scraps of bread or other food that fel to the
ground. One evening, Abe Wynne was al owed to brew a pot of
co ee on an open re in the yard. Since arriving at the mine as a
fourteen-year-old, his once stout, six-foot frame withered to just 160
pounds. When a hog began nosing against him for food, he splashed
a cup of hot cof ee on the pig to drive it away.
Word quickly spread to the warden that Wynne had abused one
of his hogs. As punishment, witnesses testi ed that Wynne was
forced to strip naked, held stretched across a barrel by two other
prisoners, and then whipped with a leather strap sixty-nine times.
"The whipping was more than he could stand," Keith said.
A few days later, Wynne's older brother, Wil , visited what was
cal ed the mine hospital. He told the commission his brother was
lying on a lthy bed, stil wearing his convict stripes with no
underclothes and coated in the dust of the mine. "I saw that the boy
could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil
could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil
Wynne. "About al I asked him was if he was prepared to die."
Delirious and unable to tel his brother what happened, Wynne
died a week later. The boy's family was told he'd contracted
"gal oping" tuberculosis and succumbed suddenly7
James W English, the owner of Durham Coal and Coke, was a
luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the city
rising from the Civil War's ashes would have associated with so
cruel a kil ing as Abe Wynne's. But by 1908, English—despite
having never owned antebel um slaves—was a man whose great
personal wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of
thousands of men.
&n
bsp; Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he
apprenticed himself to a carriage maker and then served notably as
a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in
a prominent Georgia brigade. Serving in a forward position near
Appomat ox, he received the rst writ en surrender demand from
Ulysses S. Grant to Robert E. Lee. After the South's defeat, he went
to Atlanta, to establish himself in the business and politics of the
bustling new capital of southern commerce. He was elected to the
city council partly on the renown of his war service, and later
served on the Atlanta school board and as the city's police
commissioner. He led a drive to make Atlanta the state capital of
Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center, and in
1880 he was elected mayor.8
Presiding from a regal home a few blocks from the center of the
city, English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a
matching mustache, fostered a col ection of enterprises that grew as
Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin. The base of his wealth was
the Chat ahoochee Brick Company, a business perfectly consonant
in the 1870s and 1880s with the needs of a booming metropolis
recovering from Union general Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman's ring
of the city a decade earlier.
As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential
As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential
of using black forced laborers in his enterprises. Chat ahoochee
Brick relied on slave workers from its inception in 1878, and by the
early 1890s more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting
heat of its res. The company held another 150 forced laborers at a
sawmil in Richwood, Georgia, three hundred slaves at its Durham
mines in Walker County, and several dozen more at English's Iron
Belt Railroad and Mining Company. By 1897, English's enterprises
control ed 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in
brick making, cut ing cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction,
and turpentining.
During his tenure as mayor of Atlanta, English launched the
Georgia Paci c Railroad, eventual y tying Atlanta to the coal elds
of Alabama and then on to the cot on nub of Greenvil e,
Mississippi. While building that rail line in 1883, English il egal y
bought hundreds of convicts—and the coal mine they worked in—
Slavery by Another Name Page 50