15. Sternfeld to Reese, Nov. 12, 1903, ff 5280-17119, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
16. L. R. Farmer to Attorney General, Nov. 17, 1903, 3098-1902, Peonage Files,
RG60, NA:
Morganton N.C., Dear Sir, i write you for information i have a little girl
that has been kidnapped from me and is now under bondage in Ga and I
cant get her out only her but no of others i want ask you is it law for
people to whip (col) people and keep them and not allow them to leave
without a pass my reason for writing you is the people in Ga wont do any
thing with him and if the negroes tell any thing they will beat them to
death and they are a fraid to test e against him because cary them write
back and beat them to death and some of them has beened killed trying to
get away from their and i got a little girl there and get her a way from
their if you could inform me please to write me how can tell me the
proper one over p.s. you pleas ans me at once this little of mine is begging
me to come after and i write you for information i have tried to get outte
a write of habeaus corpus and that could not get her you will nd stamp
for the ans
Rev. L.R. Farmer pastor of Baps of this place
17. Attorney General to Farmer, Nov. 18, 1903, Peonage Files, 3098-1902, RG60,
NA.
18. New York Times, Dec. 4, 1904.
19. Wilcox Progressive Era, Jan. 14, 1904, transcribed by Stephen Lee, Dec. 2003,
ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/al/wilcox/vitals/marriages/gmr12melton.txt.
20. J. R. Adams to Attorney General, Feb. 23, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
21. Ibid.
22. U.S. Commissioner to W. H. Armbrecht, Feb. 13, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60,
NA.
23. Galveston News, Dec. 27, 1903; Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 29–31, 1903.
24. Nation, Jan. 14, 1904; BTW to Edward Henry Clement, Dec. 30, 1903, BTW
Papers.
25. Finch to Attorney General, Feb. 18, 1904, File 5280-03, ff 29562, RG60, NA.
26. Reese to Attorney General, March 2, 1904, File 5280-03, ff 29606, RG60, NA.
27. Indictment of Alex D. Stephens, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File
76904, EPRRC.
28. Akerman to Attorney General, April 14, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
29. Acting Attorney General to Reese, June 24, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
30. Reese to Attorney General, Aug. 23, 1904, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
31. Clyatt v. U.S., 197 U.S. 207 (1905).
32. Jamison v. Wimbish, 130 F. 351, 355–57 (S.D. Ga. 1904) (Speer, J.).
33. Reese to Attorney General, March 25, 1905; Attorney General to Reese, March
27, 1905; File 5280-03, ff 53321, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
34. Reese to Attorney General, March 27, 1905, File 5280-03, 53574, Peonage
Files, RG60, NA.
35. “Susanna” to Jones, July 3, 1905, Miscellaneous Papers, Peonage Files, File
76904, EPRRC. Susanna said a store clerk named C. L. Waldrup had detailed
information on the slavery ring; one of the black laborers being held was Dick
Gray, the same name of one of the men captured in the John Pace slavery network
ve years earlier. Susanna didn't know the names of others, but said all were held
against their will, tracked down if they attempted to leave, and forced back to the
turpentine operation at gunpoint.
36. Reese to W. H. Moody, March 27, 1905, Peonage Files, RG60, NA.
37. Reese to BTW, Feb. 1, 1905, BTW Papers.
38. Attorney General to Reese, April 5, 1905, File 5280-03, 53574, Peonage
Files, RG60, NA.
39. Atlanta Constitution, March 18, 1905, p. 3.
40. Ibid., Oct. 29, 1905, p. 2; Aug. 12, 1906, p. 6.
41. Ibid., Oct. 26, 1905.
42. Ibid., Oct. 31, 1905, p. 2; Nov. 1, p. 5.
43. Author's collection.
44. Atlanta Constitution, March 16, 1906, p. 7.
45. Ibid., Nov. 6, 1905, p. 7.
46. Ibid., Oct. 16, 1905, p. 1; Oct. 29, 1905, p. 2.
CHAPTER XI: SLAVERY AFFIRMED
1. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New
York: Henry Holt, 1993), pp. 354–59, 436–39.
2. R. H. Ellis, “The Calhoun School, Miss Charlotte Thorn's ‘Lighthouse on the Hill’
in Lowndes County, Alabama,” Alabama Review 37, no. 3 (1984): 183–201.
3. Jonathan Grossman, “Black Studies in the Department of Labor, 1897–1907,”
Monthly Labor Review, June 1974.
4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing
My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International
Publishers, 1968), pp. 226–77.
5. Du Bois to Charles P. Neill, Nov. 2, 1906, Du Bois Papers, University of
Massachusetts, cited in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 354.
6. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 227.
7. Atlanta Constitution, Sept. 20, 21, 22, 1906.
8. For the de nitive account of the Atlanta race riot, see Mark Bauerlein,
Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (San Francisco: Encounter, 2001).
9. Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 12, 1906, p. 7.
10. Lewis, p. 355.
11. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 227.
12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co.,
1911).
13. Jamison v. Wimbish; Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 17, 1905.
14. Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1972), p. 62.
CHAPTER XI : NEW SOUTH RISING
1. Born Sept. 1885, 1900 Census.
2. Fourth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,
1900, to August 31, 1902 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1902), ADAH.
3. Register of Prisoners Committed to the County Jail of Shelby County, 096-1, p.
172, SCHS; Schedule of Convicts obtained by Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.
from Shelby County, second quarter 1904, SCHS.
4. J. A. MacKnight, “Columbiana: The Gem of the Hills,” c. 1907, published by the
Shelby County Sentinel, SCHS.
5. In June 1892, George W. Vines, superintendent of town schools, posted a notice
inviting “all white persons interested in the welfare of the Dadeville High School”
to assemble at the courthouse to select new leadership of the public school system.
6. Photograph file, SCHS.
7. MacKnight, p. 20.
8. Will Lewis was taken before Judge A. P. Longshore in February 1908. He had
taken $25 to sign a contract in the fall of 1906 agreeing to work in another local
lime kiln, this one owned by C. L. O’Neal. Three months later, he tried to leave, and
O’Neal took out a warrant for false pretense.
9. “Contract on Confession of Judgment Record,” 1903–1913, SCHS.
10. Register of Prisoners Committed to Jail, 1890–1906, SCHS, analysis by author.
11. “Contract on Confessions of Judgment Record.”
12. MacKnight's publicity pamphlet for Columbiana captured a full portrait of the
town's mercantile, legal, and political elite, all of which bene ted in some respect
from the county's active trade in forced labor. D. R. McMillan, predecessor of
Longshore as probate judge, was another of the town's most prominent attorneys.
The son of a cotton planter ruined by the Civil War, he studied law during
Reconstruction and arrived in Columbiana in 1886 to form a law pract
ice with
former Alabama governor Rufus Cobb. By 1907, he was in partnership with J. J.
Haynes, the rising young man among lawyers in the province. The people of
Columbiana were particularly proud of their new “free school,” funded by the
town council and available to any white children living in the city limits. Milner &
Armstrong operated a steam-powered sawmill near the rail line on the outskirts of
Columbiana. Rufus Lester had arrived in Shelby as a young farmer and then taken
work in a general store, weighing sugar and measuring out calico for yeoman
families. He had risen to become owner of the business and a major buyer of
cotton for mills he owned. John S. Pitts was the county's longtime tax collector, the
right-hand man in politics of Judge Longshore. W. R. A. Milner, deputy to Sheri
Fulton, was a respected Confederate veteran.
13. Sixth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,
1904, to August 31, 1906 (Montgomery, 1906), ADAH.
14. Fifth Biennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, September 1,
1902, to August 31, 1904 (Montgomery, Ala.: Brown Printing, 1904), ADAH.
15. Sixth Biennial Report, 1906.
16. Ibid.
17. W. David Lewis, Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District: An
Industrial Epic (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 310.
18. Birmingham Age-Herald, Aug. 2, 1900, cited in Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 251.
19. Justin Fuller, “History of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, 1852–
1907” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1966), pp. 273–74.
20. Birmingham Age-Herald, Aug. 2, 1900, cited in Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 251.
21. W. F. Tyler to Eagle & Phoenix Mfg. Co., Oct. 18, 1899, original in possession
of author.
22. Erskine Ramsey to H. C. Frick, Aug. 7, 1903, File 1.1.11, p. 88, BPLA.
23. 1900 Census, Jefferson County, Precinct 29.
24. Fuller, p. 331.
25. Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1905.
26. Annual Report, U.S. Steel Corp., Dec. 31, 1907; C. A. Abernathy, “The Birth of
Calcis: Founding of Calcis, Turner Brothers, Justice Store, and Our ‘Historical’
House: The Community, Its Historical Importance, and Our Family Ties to It,” copy
of unpublished typescript, Nov. 1, 1992, in possession of author.
27. Fuller, pp. 148–52; Lewis, Sloss Furnaces, p. 290.
28. Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan: An American Dynasty and the Rise of
Modern Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), pp. 124–28; Edmund
Morris, Theodore Rex (New York: Modern Library, 2002), pp. 497–99; Lewis, Sloss
Furnaces, pp. 288–93; Fuller, pp. 153–54.
29. Agreement entered into by J. Craig Smith, President of the Board of Convict
Inspectors of the State of Alabama and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company,
Nov. 26, 1907, copy in possession of author.
CHAPTER XI I: THE ARREST OF GREEN COTTENHAM
1. Analysis by the author of charges and sentencings in central and southern
Alabama, 1900–1910.
2. Report of Persons Sentenced to Hard Labor for Shelby County, March 1908,
SCHS.
3. Ibid.
4. Criminal Court Records, Bibb County and Shelby County, Ala.
5. Report of Shelby County Grand Jury, Spring Term, 1908, published in Shelby
County People's Advocate, April 23, 1908.
6. Photographs on file, SCHS.
7. 1900 Census.
8. References appear frequently in archival material of women sexually abused by
police o cials and, in the case of female prisoners, other convicts. For the most
complete treatment of the conditions of female prisoners, see Mary Ellen Curtin,
Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900 (Charlottesville: University
Press of Virginia, 2000), pp. 113–29.
9. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 269, citing Statement of Pardons, Paroles
and Commutations Granted by Cole L. Blease, 1913 (Columbia, S.C.: 1914).
CHAPTER XIV: ANATOMY OF A SLAVE MINE
1. Shelby M. Harrison, “A Cash-Nexus for Crime”; “The Human Side of Large
Outputs, Steel and Steel Workers in Six American States, Part IV, Birmingham
District: Labor Conservation,” both in The Survey, Jan. 6, 1912, pp. 1526–47.
2. Ramsey to G. B. McCormack, General Manager, on Pratt Division, Feb. 13, 1896,
Erskine Ramsey Papers, File 1.1.1D, BPLA.
3. TCI company photographs, in possession of author.
4. Miles College: The First Hundred Years (Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia, 2005), pp.
15–18.
5. Birmingham Age-Herald, Feb. 21, 1908.
6. “County Convict Contracts,” internal memorandum of Tennessee Coal, Iron &
Railroad Co., Aug. 28, 1908, copy in possession of author.
7. Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Sept. 1, 1910 to Aug.
31, 1914 (Montgomery: 1914), ADAH.
8. “Statement of State and County Convicts at Pratt Mines Division as of Month of
August, 1908,” U.S. Steel Corp., copy in possession of author.
9. Sheriff's Prisoners Register (1908), Shelby County, SCHS.
10. Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. photograph, labeled “Muscoda Ore Mines,
Hospital in Use in 1901 and 1902,” in possession of author.
11. John N. Reynolds, Twin Hells (Chicago: M. A. Donahue & Co., 1890), pp. 86–
87.
12. Alvaran Snow Allen, “The Story of a Lie: By Convict No. 2939, Himself 15 Years
in Prison,” pamphlet printed by Mission Printing Company, Tulsa, c. 1926, in
possession of author.
13. Harvey R. Hougen, “The Impact of Politics and Prison Industry on the General
Management of the Kansas State Penitentiary, 1883–1909,” 1977, citing Carl
“Cork” Arnold, A Life Prisoner, 1906.
14. Allen, “Story of a Lie.”
15. Ibid.; Reynolds, p. 94.
16. Interview by the author of Willie Clark, 2001, 2002, 2003.
17. “Registry of Convict Deaths,” Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of
Convicts, September 1, 1906, to August 31, 1910 (Montgomery: Brown Printing,
1910), ADAH.
18. Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coal elds, 1908–21
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 1–8.
19. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 6, 1908, p. 2.
20. Death Certificate—County Convict: Green Cunningham [sic], Aug. 15, 1908.
CHAPTER XV: EVERYWHERE WAS DEATH
1. Atlanta Constitution, July 13, 1908, p. 1; July 15, 1908.
2. “The Lynching Century: African Americans Who Died in Racial Violence in the
United States, 1865–1965,” Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory,
www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Base/8507/NLists.htm; Atlanta Constitution, July
16, 1908.
3. Atlanta Constitution, July 29, 1908, p. 5.
4. Ibid., July 30, 1908, p. 1.
5. Ibid., Aug. 2, 1908.
6. New York Times, Aug. 16, 1908, p. 1.
7. Brian Kelly, Race, Class, and Power in the Alabama Coalfields, 1908–21 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 23–24.
8. Ibid.
9. Birmingham Age-Herald, Nov. 11, 1908, p. 1.
10. Ibid., Nov. 18, 1908, p. 5.
11. Quadrennial Report of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Sept
ember 1, 1906,
to August 31, 1910 (Montgomery: Brown Printing, 1910), ADAH.
12. Je erson County Coroner's Record, Preliminary Investigation Reports, Record
of B. L. Brasher, Coroner; O ce of Coroner/Medical Examiner, Je erson County,
Ala.
13. Sentenced to life for first-degree murder, his first criminal charge.
14. Ethel Armes, The Story of Coal and Iron in Alabama (Birmingham: Chamber of
Commerce, 1910), pp. 493–95; James Saxon Childers, Erskine Ramsey: His Life and
Achievements (New York: Cartwright & Ewing, 1942), pp. 160–65, 264.
15. Montgomery Advertiser, April 12, 1911.
16. Jefferson County Coroner's Record, Preliminary Investigation Reports, Jefferson
County Coroner's Office.
17. Atlanta Constitution, Aug. 7, 1908, p. 1.
18. Clayton Record, Jan. 20, 1911, p. 1.
19. Barbour County Jail Registry, undated, Sheri R. B. Teal, Barbour County
Courthouse.
20. Clayton Record, April 28, 1911, p. 1.
21. A prison inspector report from 1915 says building prior to 1913 had been
condemned.
22. Barbour County Jail Registry, 1911; Clayton Record, May 12, 1911, p. 1.
23. Jail Registry, 1911; author's analysis.
24. Jail Registry, 1911, Barbour County Courthouse.
25. Clayton Record, May 31, 1912, p. 1.
26. State Convicts Descriptive Record, 1913–1916, Vol. 8, Alabama Department of
Corrections, ADAH; Demas, p. 175; Miller, p. 488.
27. State Convicts Descriptive Record, 1913–1916, Vol. 8, Alabama Department of
Corrections, ADAH.
28. Registry of Convict Deaths.
29. Ida M. Tarbell, The Life of Elbert M. Gary: The Story of Steel (New York: D.
Appleton, 1925), pp. 310–11.
30. Transcript of Public Investigation into A airs and Conduct of the Convict
Department, March 1913, Vol. 2, Alabama Department of Corrections, ADAH,
testimony of Walker Percy, pp. 690–91.
31. Ibid., pp. 693–98.
32. Internal U.S. Steel legal memo, May 1913, in possession of author.
33. Transcript: Public Investigation, testimony of E. H. Coxe, pp. 675–77.
34. Ibid., Coxe to Oakley, Sept. 25, 1911.
35. “Report of Persons Sentenced to Hard Labor for Shelby County,” December
1913, SCHS.
CHAPTER XVI: ATLANTA, THE SOUTH’S FINEST CITY
1. Twentieth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor, 1905: Convict Labor
Slavery by Another Name Page 63