struggling to deal with a "powerful negro …who had been
insubordinate ever since" arriving at the mine. To force the prisoner
to begin digging, a guard told another black convict, named Jim
Blevens, to at ack him. The two African American men, both forced
against their wil s into the coal mine camp, now stood in the prison
yard facing each other like gladiators, holding mining picks in their
hands. The face-o lasted only seconds. The "insubordinate" man
lunged forward, swinging his pick wildly. The smal er man stepped
aside to dodge the at ack and then swung his own tool in a high
downward arc. The long blade of the pick descended onto the other
man's head—piercing his jaw, throat, and chest. The wounded
prisoner fel to the ground, Hurt testi ed, and Blevens "then put his
foot on the negro's head and pul ed his pick out." The injured man
died from the wound.21
As the legislative inquiry progressed into August 1908, the sordid
stories of il ness and mayhem—coupled with even more
voluminous accounts of corruption and payo s—stirred an
outpouring of public condemnation. Atlanta's leading pastor, Dr.
James W Lee, sermonized at Trinity Church that the convict leasing
system was a "disgrace" to the state. His and other churches passed
resolutions cal ing on the legislature to abolish the practice
entirely22
A technological y more advanced competitor in the brick-making
business—a young engineer named B. Mi in Hood—began
advertising "Non-Convict Bricks" in the Atlanta Constitution. The
city council—which previously bought mil ions of the former
mayor's hard red rectangles to pave hundreds of blocks of sidewalks
—voted to bar the purchase of any goods made by convicts.
Final y a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered for a
mass meeting in Atlanta's Grand Opera House—the same forum
where The Clansman had drawn sel -out crowds two years earlier.
Presided over by the state's sit ing governor, Hoke Smith, the
gathering listened to a series of speeches condemning the lease
system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its
system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its
abolition. Similar public meetings in the town of Rome and
elsewhere across Georgia on the same day produced the same
result. Newspaper editorials chimed in agreement—though most
said the prisoners should be taken out of private hands and put to
work improving the state's desperately inferior roads.23
Spurred by the public outcry, Governor Smith cal ed a special
session of the state legislature, which authorized a public
referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's
nearly al -white electorate voted by a two-to-one margin to abolish
the system as of March 1909. Without slave labor, business
col apsed at Chat ahoochee Brick. Production fel by nearly 50
percent in the next year. Sales—of nineteen mil ion bricks—
dropped to less than half of 1907. Total pro t dwindled to less
than $13,000.24
The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners
seemed a harbinger of a new day—especial y coming just two years
after Atlanta's bloody race riot. Social progressives applauded the
abolition of state-sponsored forced labor as a sign of racial
moderation. Several states had already taken the momentous step
before Georgia. Tennessee eliminated the sale of men into its coal
mines in 1893. South Carolina moved to end the state government's
direct involvement in sel ing prisoners by the turn of the century.
Louisiana banned the leasing of state prisoners in 1901—spurred by
a political rivalry between the biggest buyer of men in the state and
elected leaders in control of the state capitol. Mississippi's uncouth
governor James Var-daman successful y pushed for stopping the
lease in 1907, primarily to punish the rich cot on planter class that
were his primary political enemies.25Within another ve years,
Arkansas and Texas had abandoned the system as wel . In Arkansas,
the outgoing governor, a longtime opponent of the practice,
pardoned in his last days in o ce hundreds of the prisoners held by
the state—making leasing moot.
But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil
But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil
War slavery was evolving—not disappearing. North Carolina
banned leasing just before World War I and then revived it
afterward. In Florida and Alabama— where the state-sanctioned
practice of buying and sel ing slaves was just reaching its most
evolved and highly organized form—convict leasing remained
immune at every level to the ostensible "reforms" that swept other
states. Most of the "abolitions" were motivated either by political
imperatives or simply by the changing economic and technological
circumstances of the South. As African Americans across the region
were ground into political and economic penury, the di erence in
the costs of legal y enslaved and free, but impoverished, labor
narrowed dramatical y. The cost of buying prisoners from state
governments had risen substantial y—while the cost of "free labor"
available from hundreds of thousands of essential y indentured
black laborers working on southern farms was flat or declining.
Moreover, while thousands of state prisoners in Georgia, the
Carolinas, and other states were no longer leased to private
corporations, they were being forced into an "improved" method of
coercing labor and intimidating African Americans—the chain gang.
Throughout the South, peonage and the leasing of prisoners by
county sheri s—long the most terrible aspect of the practices—
continued unabated.
Alabama's system of sel ing black men through its courts and
prison laws continued for more than fteen years after U.S. Steel
took its last shipment of convicts. Shelby County and most local
governments continued a prosperous trade in African American
forced laborers, though in the new and more orderly fashion
mandated by Judge Jones. The confessions of judgment coerced
upon thousands of African Americans for trivial or unprovable
of enses were now careful y recorded in court files.
In Washington, D.C., there was lit le evidence that forced labor was
abating. The o ces of the at orney general and the White House
continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and
continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and
involuntary servitude as elaborate and extreme as those that had
occurred on the farm of John Pace.
A deputy U.S. marshal in Roanoke, Alabama, reported in the
spring of 1906 that a white man named Silas Lacy was operating a
railroad construction camp as terrifying as those of three decades
earlier. Dozens of slaves were arrested on fabricated charges, held
against their wil , starved, and subjected to daily lashings and
tracking dogs. At least three workers had been murdered by the
owners.26
> Noti ed of the ndings, the U.S. at orney general authorized
sending a federal detective in to perform a larger investigation. On
May 7, 1906, the agent wrote Warren Reese's successor in
Montgomery, Erastus J. Parsons, describing the sweep of
involuntary servitude and the perversion of the local courts to
sustain it in the southeastern counties of Alabama. The deputy said
Lacy was holding throngs of black men under the cruelest
conditions, he wrote. One "negro boy" who at empted to ee Lacy
was recaptured, whipped, and left for dead. Another black man,
Josie Frank, was "held by force and kept in a state of fear." Two
other black men, Curly Johnson and Carry Hat on, were "arrested
on a bogus charge" and held in involuntary service to pay a
fraudulent fine. "There are dozens of other similar cases," the deputy
wrote. At another camp nearby, a white man named Henry Lee
chased down two eeing black workers with dogs, "captured them
and carried them back to his camp chained together." Just west of
the Tal apoosa River, a partnership cal ed Mason & Brother
routinely "had negroes arrested on bogus warrants, in order to get
them, making them work out the cost of the arrests," wrote the
marshal.27
"Many of these parties are cruel y treated and chased by dogs
whenever they at empt to make escape," Parsons wrote to his
superiors in Washington. But even Parsons feared that a prosecution
of the slaveholders would fail. "The trouble in get ing convictions
has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a
has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a
Commissioner, somehow succeeded in driving away the witnesses,"
he wrote. "The negroes employed about these railroad camps are
gathered from the large cities throughout the south. They are
invariably given nicknames upon reaching the camps and after
making their escape … it seems ut erly impossible to get any trace
of them whatever."28
Parsons also knew that regardless of how gravely blacks were
abused, cases brought against whites for holding slaves were almost
certainly doomed in Alabama. No mat er how strong the evidence,
he became reluctant to seek charges. He passed on to Alabama
o cials the report he received from a Secret Service agent on the
Lacy case. "I have requested the authorities of the State of Alabama
to investigate," the prosecutor added.29It was ignored.
An atmosphere of intimidation suf used the areas where involuntary
servitude remained rampant. A black man named D. P. Johnson
spirited a let er to the Department of Justice in the late winter of
1907 through a veterinarian near Banks, Alabama, claiming he was
being forced to work on a county road gang to pay o debts in
connection with "a contract which he forced me to sign." The white
claiming the debt had already seized Johnson's farm, but insisted on
receiving more. "He sent me here to work out the ne and cost of
the court and the sum of money he claims to advance me. Please
investigate case for I am deprived of my liberty without due process
of law." Johnson said he had been denied the opportunity to bring
witnesses before the jury that convicted him. A federal agent
visiting the Pike County convict camp, Johnson wrote, "wil nd
condition unparal eled in our free country." The let er was led
without fol ow-up.30
In the fal of 1907, Parsons doleful y reported to the Department
of Justice an account of what happened to Ed Bet is, a black man in
Lowndes County who had the temerity to testify against Jim Payne,
the white farmer holding him as a slave. Payne was arrested by a
federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges
federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges
were dropped at a preliminary hearing. Avoiding prosecution,
however, was not su cient for Payne, who after the court hearing
paid a local deputy sheri named Underwood to seize the black
man and drag him to a county jail in the provincial town of
Haynevil e. "And there gave him a brutal whipping, because, as
stated by Underwood, he had sworn out a warrant for a white
man." Once again, Parsons politely sought permission to send a
marshal to the area for an investigation.31
In December 1907, Judge Jones contacted Parsons with
al egations he had received that a lumberman named Henry
Stephenson was holding large numbers of black workers in forced
labor at a cross-tie camp near Enterprise, Alabama. An anonymous
informer wrote Judge Jones that when one black worker ran away
and then refused to return to the camp after being tracked down,
Stephenson told him: "If you don't cut ties for me you won't cut
them for any one unless you cut them in hel ." The white man then
put a pistol to the head of the unnamed black man and red
"probably a fatal wound." At least one other white man was
present, and reported nothing of the kil ing to police authorities.32
A year later, on December 22, 1908, Wil iam Armbrecht, the U.S.
at orney in Mobile, Alabama, wrote a disappointed let er to the
U.S. at orney general. Armbrecht had presented the evidence to a
federal grand jury in Selma related to an al egation that a white
man named Pete Nevers was holding debt slaves. "I did every thing
I could to secure an indictment but failed. I can not understand why
an indictment was not found except that, the country members of
the Grand Jury in that section of Alabama are not disposed to nd
true bil s in cases of peonage. The failure to secure indictments was
not due to any lack of investigation on the part of the Special
agents who investigated this case, nor do I think it was due to any
failure on my part to present the case properly. "33
Indeed, even after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the
laws against peonage, Alabama's judicial system continued to
routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary
routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary
servitude. Armbrecht, the mysti ed failed prosecutor in Mobile,
learned in January 1909 that the deputy sheri in Selma had wired
the sheri in Mobile to grab a local black man named L. McIlwane
and hold him on any charge until he could be picked up.
McIlwane's al eged crime was that he had broken a labor contract
with a white employer near Selma. The local sheri duly arrested
McIlwane for "vagrancy" and then turned him over to the other
sherif when he arrived.
"This appears to be a clear case of peonage," commit ed by the
sherif s of two of the state's largest towns, Armbrecht wrote.34
In 1909, an internal review of al peonage prosecutions in
Alabama in the rst decade of the century found that of forty-three
indictments issued—including those of Pace and his co-conspirators,
al ended in acquit als, dismissals, suspended sentences, or
presidential pardons. A total of $300 in nes had been col ected
from the defendants; four of those convicted served short periods in
jail.35
/>
Evidence of widespread peonage in Alabama and elsewhere in the
Black Belt sections of other southern states barely slowed. In 1913,
two Alabama men, Butler and John Searcy were nal y tried on
peonage cases—having rst delayed their trial by several years by
kidnapping the primary witness against them, a black man named
Wash Gardner, and shipping him to Cuba. The jury refused to
convict.
It was plainly apparent that convictions on peonage charges
would be nearly impossible to obtain. As cases col apsed, U.S.
at orneys in various districts continued to go through the motions of
investigating al egations of slavery. But indictments grew rare. More
and more often, federal o cials— citing a highly technical reading
of the peonage statute—asserted that they had jurisdiction only in
cases in which a slave was being held speci cal y to repay a debt.
Adopting the same legal rationale put forward by the defense
lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position
lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position
that merely forcing a man or woman to labor for nothing—or
buying them for that purpose—was not a federal crime.
Responsibility for any "action" to combat it "lies entirely within the
state," said the Department of Justice.36
The new slavery reached a critical plateau. The resubjugation of
southern blacks was achieved in such broad totality—and
rea rmed with such crushing consequences for mil ions of
individuals, that codes and statutes were increasingly unnecessary
for its preservation.
African Americans had virtual y no political representation in any
place in the South—even those where blacks of voting age made up
the overwhelming majority of the population. Public education for
African Americans was a threadbare re ection of that provided for
whites—limited to half the number of days provided for white
children in most cot on-producing counties. Only 5 percent of
whites were entirely il iterate in 1910; nearly a third of blacks
were. Nearly 69 percent of white children at ended school; 37
percent of African Americans did so. Laws writ en and unwrit en
barred African Americans from sel ing the produce of their farms to
anyone but the most powerful white merchant in their worlds and
prohibited them from buying goods from anyone else as wel .
Slavery by Another Name Page 52