Slavery by Another Name
Page 56
concern. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to
cede virtual y al al egations of slavery to local jurisdiction—
e ectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted. Biddle—
favorite son of an elite Northern family in Philadelphia—was
shocked. He could not comprehend that forced labor continued in
America on more than "a few plantations."11
Nonetheless, Biddle knew that in an al -out war, in which
mil ions of African Americans would be cal ed upon to sacri ce in
a struggle to protect freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia, the
U.S. government had to make clear that anyone who continued to
practice slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment,
would be prosecuted as a criminal.
Five days after the Japanese at ack, on December 12, 1941,
Biddle issued a directive—Circular No. 3591—to al federal
prosecutors acknowledging the long history of the unwrit en federal
law enforcement policy to ignore most reports of involuntary
servitude. "A survey of the Department les on al eged peonage
violations discloses numerous instances of ‘prosecution declined,’ "
he wrote. "It is the purpose of these instructions to direct the
at ention of the United States At orneys to the possibilities of
successful prosecutions stemming from al eged peonage complaints
which have heretofore been considered inadequate to invoke
federal prosecution." Biddle proceeded to lay out a series of federal
criminal statutes that could be used to prosecute slavery—al of
which had long been available to federal of icials.
He ordered that instead of relying on the quirks of the old anti-
peonage statute as an excuse for not at acking instances of forced
labor, prosecutors and investigators should embrace "building the
cases around the issue of involuntary servitude and slavery"12
Biddle descended from extensive antebel um Virginia
slaveholders in his mother's family and from the most pedigreed
line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-
line of lawyers in the country on his father's. His great-great-
grandfather, Nicholas Biddle, had served as president of the Bank of
the United States under President James Monroe. Like virtual y
every white American who considered themselves racial y moderate
in 1941, Biddle was more than a pet y racist as wel . In his
memoirs, Biddle chuckled at the speech of a "colored boy" testifying
in a trial early in his legal career. His "vocabulary, from a generous
estimate, could not have contained more than a few hundred
words." He described black babies born in a clinic for unwed
mothers as "exhibiting, like Indians, the glowing beauty of primitive
children." His "colored man, Benjamin …polished brass with the
ardor with which his race always approaches brass and with a grave
friendly dignity helped our guests with their coats and hats after a
dinner party"13
Yet Biddle—especial y when faced with the harsh but truthful
depiction of black life as it would be suddenly projected through
the propaganda of Japan and Germany—fundamental y grasped
that African Americans, no mat er how condescendingly he viewed
them, had been denied the compact of freedom forged in the Civil
War. "One response of this country to the chal enge of the ideals of
democracy made by the new ideologies of Fascism and
Communism has been a deepened realization of the values of a
government based on a belief in the dignity and rights of man,"
Biddle said in one major wartime speech.14 He mounted the rst
modest legal at ack on the southern states’ successful expulsion of
blacks from political participation. Unlike any prior U.S. at orney
general, he recognized the federal government's duty to admit that
African Americans were not free and to assertively enforce the
statutes writ en to protect them. "We determined to breathe new
life" into the dormant civil rights laws, Biddle later wrote.15
The Justice Department's recently formed Civil Rights Section,
created primarily to investigate cases related to anti-organized labor
cases, began shifting its focus to discrimination and racial abuse.
Less than a week into the ravages of World War I , Biddle
explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas
explicitly repudiated the legal rationale laid out by Judge Thomas
Jones in the 1903 trials that had unwit ingly facilitated so much
slavery across the South in the intervening half century.
"In the United States one cannot sel himself as a peon or slave—
the law is xed and established to protect the weak-minded, the
poor, the miserable. Men wil sometimes sel themselves for a meal
of victuals or contract with another who acts as surety on his bond
to work out the amount of the bond upon his release from jail. Any
such sale or contract is positively nul and void and the procuring
and causing of such contract to be made violates [the] statutes,"
argued Biddle in his memo. Henceforth, he ordered al Department
of Justice investigators to entirely drop reference to peonage in
their writ en reports. They were to instead label every le as
related to what it truly was—what it had always been for the past
seven decades: "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."16
In August 1942, a let er from a sixteen-year-old black boy arrived at
the Department of Justice al eging that Charles Bledsoe—the
Alabama man who received a $100 ne for peonage prior to
Biddle's memo—was stil holding members of the boy's family as
slaves. Despite the Biddle directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
initial y saw no need to mount another aggressive investigation. The
U.S. at orney in Mobile, Francis H. Inge, was similarly disinterested.
"No active investigation wil be instituted," Hoover wrote to
Assistant At orney General Wendel Berge, at empting to close the
file.17
That would have been the end of the mat er even a year earlier.
But seven months into World War I , with the nation anxious to
mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's
and Germany's propaganda machines, Berge directed Hoover to
look further. "In accordance with the request of the At orney
General that we expedite cases related to Negro victims, it wil be
appreciated if this mat er is given preference," Berge wrote in a
terse let er ordering Inge into action.18
"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many
"The mat er complained of in the instant case is but one of many
in which members of the Negro race have been the victims. Enemy
propagandists have used similar episodes in international
broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are
insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Berge wrote. "There
have been received from the President an instruction that lynching
complaints shal be investigated as soon as possible; that the results
of the investigation be made public in al instances, and the persons
responsible for such lawless acts vigorously prosecuted. T
he
At orney General has requested that we expedite other cases related
to Negro victims. Accordingly, you are requested to give the mat er
your immediate at ention."19
Biddle's civil rights lawyers began to reassess fundamental y the
legal breadth of the constitutional amendments ending slavery, the
Reconstruction-era statutes passed to enforce them, and other
largely forgot en laws such as the antebel um Slave Kidnapping Act,
which made it il egal to capture or hold forced laborers in U.S.
territory where slavery was prohibited.
As the war progressed, the Department of Justice vigorously
prosecuted U.S. Sugar Company in Florida for forcing black men
into their sugarcane elds. Sheri s who col uded with the company
were brought to trial. Before the end of World War I , the federal
courts would rule that slaveholders could be prosecuted for
peonage, even if the debt they claimed a worker owed them was
ctitious. It was a subtle change. But the decision eliminated what
had been a standard defense against the crime—the assertion that
no evidence of a debt between the slave and slave driver existed.
Final y, early in September 1942, a team of FBI agents, highway
patrolmen, and deputies descended on a remote farm near Beevil e,
Texas, to arrest a white farmer, Alex Skrobarcek, and his adult
daughter, Susie Skro-barcek. They were initial y charged in a state
court with maiming a mental y retarded black worker named
Alfred Irving. But a month later, lawyers at the Department of
Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held
Justice drew a federal indictment al eging that the pair had held
Irving in slavery for at least four years. They were accused of
repeatedly beating the man with whips, chains, and ropes—so
much so that he was physical y disfigured from the abuse.20
Signaling the special signi cance of the case, a special assistant to
At orney General Biddle actively participated in prosecuting the
trial. He later wrote that investigators found "overwhelming"
evidence that the Skrobarceks "repeatedly horsewhipped the victim
…starved him and otherwise held him in fear."21
The at orneys argued that the century-old Slavery Kidnapping Act
applied to this case of abject involuntary servitude, in apparently
the rst such prosecution since the Civil War. The defendants were
found guilty and sentenced to federal prison. Federal o cials made
clear that the case was intended to send a message that despite any
claims by U.S. enemies, the federal government was nal y serious
about ending involuntary servitude for African Americans.
"The Skrobarczyk [sic] trial and its conclusion undoubtedly wil
be said … to have given a decisive setback to the enemy
propaganda machine …urging …negroes that their proper place in
this conflict is with the yel ow race," editorialized the Corpus Christi
Times.22
Two years later, President Harry Truman's Commit ee on Civil
Rights recommended bolstering the anti-slavery statute to plainly
criminalize involuntary servitude. In 1948, the entire federal
criminal code was dramatical y rewrit en, further clarifying the laws
against involuntary servitude. Final y, in 1951, Congress passed
even more explicit statutes, making any form of slavery in the
United States indisputably a crime.
Reports of involuntary servitude continued to trickle in to federal
investigators wel into the 1950s. But America—however deeply
racist it remained—had begun a profound change. Mil ions of
soldiers—black and white—had witnessed the horror of racial
ideology exalted to its most violent extremes in Nazi Germany.
Thousands of African American men who returned as ghting men,
unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that
unwil ing to capitulate again to the docile state of helplessness that
preceded the war, abandoned the South altogether or joined in the
agitation that would become the civil rights movement. Throughout
the region, tractors, new chemicals, and cot on pickers began to
radical y reduce the need for manual labor in elds of cot on,
soybeans, and tobacco. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education desegregating public schools and
reversing the cynical logic of 1896's Plessy v. Ferguson, sealed
forever that the terror regime which had dominated black life over
the previous ninety years was ending.
It was a strange irony that after seventy-four years of hol ow
emancipation, the nal delivery of African Americans from overt
slavery and from the quiet complicity of the federal government in
their servitude was precipitated only in response to the horrors
perpetrated by an enemy country against its own despised
minorities.
EPILOGUE
The Ephemera of Catastrophe
Still the voice of Green Cottenham would not speak. For six years I sought signs of
him. Nowhere was there more than the faintest trace. A icker here that a brother,
Sam, almost ten years his elder, died in 1953. Musty evidence that his sisters
married and remarried. A last glimpse of Mary, his mother, living her nal years at an
address on Block Street in the town of Montevallo, a few blocks from where she and
Henry moved long before, still in the shadow of the old slavery world. There, sometime
in the 1930s, Mary Cottenham, the girl born a slave and married at the dawn of
freedom, died alone. In the place of the little house she occupied for so long, only
weeds grow.
The black Cottinghams descended from the old plantation on Six Mile Road were
scattered, in variant spellings and skin tones, across the United States. I found a woman
my own age in Shelby County named Molly Cottenham. She knew little of her family's
past.
Molly is descended from Gabe, a toddler in the Cottingham Loop house of Milt
Cottingham when he was saved by his brothers from arrest and re-enslavement in 1893.
Gabe grew to manhood and scratched together enough to eventually buy land in Shelby
County, near a community of farms called Keywater. Nearby, a ferry transported goods
across the Coosa River from Fayetteville. A contemporary of Green, living in the same
county, Gabe almost certainly would have known of his cousin's fate at Slope No. 12.
Gabe's sons, Edgar, Charlie, and Abraham, joined in the heavy labor of poorly
educated workers of the time. Abraham died pouring iron in a foundry, according to
the few stories passed down to Molly, who still lives not far from the old Keywater
homeplace. Edgar worked in a quarry before retiring and then dying in the 1980s.
Gabe was forced to ee Shelby County after a ght with a white man, Molly was told.
Edgar and Charlie lived most of their lives without their father, reared by their mother.
Little else of the context or human familial foundation survives for the descendants
of the black Cottingham line. Molly, forty- ve years old in 2008, and the mother of two
grown children, doesn't remember her grandmother's name. She never knew the
identities of her great-grandparents.1
In
some respects, it is little surprise that the long-lingering persistence of American
slavery has been so largely ignored. Its longevity mars the mythology most white
Americans rely upon to explain our past and to embroider our present. At the same
time, it grieves and shames the descendants of its victims. They recoil from the
implication that emancipated black Americans could not exercise freedom, and
remained under the cruel thumb of white America, despite the explicit guarantees of
the Constitution, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, and the moral resolve of
the Civil War.
Harold Cottingham lives in a modest house on a quiet street in Centre-ville, Alabama.
In an o ce he built onto his workshop in the backyard, piles of newspaper clippings
and letters are heaped where he left them years ago—while piecing together the
genealogy of all the acknowledged descendants of Elisha Cottingham. He is Elisha's
grandson, four generations removed. Every summer, Harold visits the old family burial
ground to make sure the grass has been properly cut back from the tombstones. Today,
age and health challenge his dedication to the family plot. Already, the forest has
overtaken the sunken unmarked graves of many of those who died black on the
Cottingham farm.
On a chilly day, Harold and his wife take me to lunch at Oliver's, a little restaurant in
a historic home across the street from the Bibb County courthouse and its monument to
Confederate war dead. They know by verse the heroic accounts of how Elisha extracted
a legacy from the Alabama wilderness, and each of the succeeding white generations
that followed.
Nowhere in the stories is there reference to Scip, the man who worked beside Elisha
for most of fty years, who carved the farm from the forest with him. Harold, a gentle
man, is not responsible for the washing away of the memories of the family's partners
and likely cousins of the past. They had vaporized long before Harold became the
Cottingham storyteller. "I knew there was some slaves out there," he told me. "But I
never knew there was so many."2
The residual wealth of W. D. McCurdy's baronic slave farm in Lowndes County still
dominates a cluster of fabulous white-columned mansions in the old cotton town of
Lowndesboro, Alabama. A family mansion sits at the end of McCurdy Lane. W. D.
McCurdy's great-greatgrandchildren still hold much of the family land, but cotton died