Slavery by Another Name
Page 20
few who lived left the quarry with terrible, disfiguring acid scars.
Despite the dangers in making quicklime, the substance was a
critical component in the blasting of iron ore into steel and fetched
lucrative prices from the iron companies expanding at breakneck
speed in Birmingham. By the time the Turners’ ve-year-old quarry
and kiln was operating at ful capacity in 1903, its sole customer
was Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co.—the company fast
becoming the most powerful commercial interest in the state and
the keeper of more than a thousand forced laborers at its Prat
Mines.
The Turner quarry hired skil ed free laborers to run the
locomotive that dragged tons of limestone up from the quarry pit
and coopers who made barrels to ship the powder. But for the
back-jarring task of wielding picks and sledgehammers in the
bot om of the pit, and the unremit ing task of piling thousands of
tons of stone into the stone kilns, the Turners relied on Franklin,
Pruit , and the others to supply dozens of slave laborers crowded
into a crude log and stone "pen" at the edge of the quarry.
Turner himself lived in a spacious farmhouse at the Eagle Creek
farm with his extended family, including a volatile eighteen-year-
old son, Al en, who took charge whenever his father was away.
Not far from Pace's farm were George D. and Wil iam D. Cosby,
two middle-aged brothers with large landholdings who frequently
repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,
repurchased black workers from Pace and Turner. The Cosbys,
along with W.D.'s twenty-seven-year-old son, Burancas, worked the
black men and women they acquired on their own farms and also
engaged in a sideline of resel ing workers to smal er-scale farmers
nearby.
Between the fal of 1901, when John Davis was arrested in
Goodwater, and the spring of 1903, the three families—Pace,
Turner, and Cosby— bought at least eighty African American men
and women. Like the hundreds of undocumented forced workers
tal ied in the Sloss-She eld mine in 1895, none of those captured
near Goodwater ever appeared among the thousands of "o cial"
convict laborers sold by the state of Alabama and its counties. The
true total seized by the three families was almost certainly far
higher.13
A day after his arrest, John Davis stil didn't know what charge he
had been convicted of, or how much money Robert Franklin falsely
claimed he owed. After a one-hour rail ride to Dadevil e and then a
ten-mile trip by horse and wagon to a ve-hundred-acre farm at the
meeting of the Tal apoosa River and Big Sandy Creek, Davis faced
the hoary form of John W. Pace.
Pace was a towering gure. He loomed over most men, more
than six feet tal and weighing at least 275 pounds. Despite his
fortune, he stil routinely appeared in town in a col arless,
homespun shirt, homemade shoes, and a broad-brimmed black hat
—his face was ush from a life of work outdoors. By 1900, he
showed signs of gout and walked awkwardly—which he explained
as the result of severe frostbite to his feet in the past.14
Davis was pul ed from the wagon and forced to stand before the
old farmer. Pace, further confusing the contradictory bogus charges,
proclaimed that the black man owed Pruit $40 for goods
purchased at a store in Goodwater. Now he claimed Davis also
owed Franklin $35 for nes and costs from his conviction.15 Davis
had two choices, Pace said: to pay $75 immediately or agree to be
taken under his control.
taken under his control.
Davis had no choice. He had no money at al . Pace promptly
produced a two-page handwrit en contract on which Davis, who
could not read or write his name, scrawled an "X." The contract
signed, Pace paid Pruit and Franklin $75. The coerced contract was
a sham, and il egal on its face. Court decisions already in force
made it clear that even if Davis had been legitimately convicted of a
crime, he could not legal y be held on the conviction once his ne
had been paid—as Franklin and Pruit claimed they had done.
Regardless, Davis knew only that he had marked a document that
he was told obligated him to work at any task Pace demanded for
ten months, to repay the $75 Pace had "advanced" him to pay the
nes. Most signi cantly, Davis had unwit ingly agreed to language
that appeared in dozens of such contracts that Pace and others
intimidated black laborers to sign.
Under the documents, the blacks Pace acquired "agree[d] to be
locked up in the cel at night" and submit to "such treatment as
other convicts."16The contracts further authorized "that should the
said Pace advance me anything over and above what he had already
furnished me, I agree to work for him under this contract until I
have paid for same in ful ." The additional charges explicitly
included any costs resulting from a laborer at empting to escape the
farm. Most ominously, the documents al owed Pace to "hire me out
to any person, rm or corporation in the state of Alabama—at such
sum as he may be able to hire me at for a term su cient to pay
him al that I may owe him."17
For al practical purposes, Pace owned John Davis.
John Pace arrived in Tal apoosa County at the age of twenty- ve in
1879, a time when set lement towns and farms were stil being
carved from unmarked forests. Most land was dense red clay,
ecked with shards of igneous rock, layered upon the anks of
infertile ridgelines cut ing asymmetrical y to the north and east.
Gold was mined there in the 1830s and the 1840s, and the urry of
early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.
early wealth established one aspiring country town, Dadevil e.
Almost ten miles from the deep Tal apoosa River, Dadevil e had a
railroad station, a few stores, and a livery stable. Set ing it apart
from other hard-edged outposts was a smal medical institute—a
source of southern physicians since before the Civil War.
By the 1880s, the rich mineral veins were tapped out. The al ure
of cot on had replaced the magnetic at raction of gold. Farmers and
tradesmen like Pace were slipping in from Georgia and other parts
of Alabama to begin a new, more orderly domestication of the land.
Growing numbers of them worked in exasperation to clear the trees
and scratch crops out of rocky elds on the low ridges. But along
the Tal apoosa River lay a wide spine of rich al uvial soil running
through the center of the county. On that bot omland plain, where a
creek cal ed Big Sandy emptied into the Tal apoosa, spread one
great tableau of at, fertile land. Pace set out to obtain al of it he
could, and make his fortune there.
Pace had never been troubled by slavery, or any other manner of
the white man's control of blacks in the odd postwar world. For
that mat er, hardly any man Pace had ever met objected. He had
been only nine years old when his family's slaves were emancipated
from their Georgia farm during the Civil War. One of the
m, a girl
named Catherine, only a few years younger than he, never
departed. She took the Pace family name and, despite freedom,
grew to middle age as a servant in his Tal apoosa County home.
There were no il usions in this section of Alabama about the
nature of relations between black men and white. No one laid
claim to the stylized hoop-skirt vision of antebel um life embraced
in the Old South fantasies that were becoming the vogue in the rest
of the United States. Eastern Alabama had never been suited to vast
plantations where paternalistic slave masters and contented black
servants supposedly lived before the war. Black men and women in
Tal apoosa County were there to be worked, worked hard like
mules. Notwithstanding whatever the Thirteenth Amendment said
about slavery, if white people wanted to buy "Negroes" like mules,
sel them, trade them, or whip them, there was nothing wrong
about that to Pace either.
about that to Pace either.
Before the war, a slave owner named Gum Threat owned another
Tal apoosa river plantation not far from where Pace established his
rst farm. He handled his slaves in the nal years before
emancipation with indi erent brutality. "I en they ever was a devil
on this earth it was Gum Threat," recal ed one of his former slaves a
half century later. "He jest didn't have any regard for his slaves. He
made ‘em work from daylight to dark and didn't give them any
more food and clothes than they could possibly git along with. He
beat them for everything they done and a lot they didn't."
After an escaped slave named Charles Posey was dragged back to
Threat's plantation, the master stood above him on the edge of his
front porch and kicked the man under the chin. "You could hear his
neck pop. He fel to the ground and kicked around like he was
dying," recal ed the former slave who witnessed the punishment.
"They brought him to and then Gum Threat stripped him to the
waist and took him into an old building, stretched him out and
fastened his feet and hands wide apart. Then he took a live coal of
re as big as your hand and laid it in the middle of his bare back. I
remember seeing the scar there and it was about one-eighth of an
inch deep."18
John Pace recognized the value of restoring forced black labor as
soon as he arrived in Tal apoosa. Soon after the Civil War's end, the
probate judge in Dadevil e, who ran the county government,
adopted the practice of parceling out arrested blacks to farmers
who were wil ing to pay for them. Pace successful y ran for county
sheri and quickly absorbed how pro tably black men could be
rounded up and put to work in his own commercial interest, and
what lit le glimmer of judicial process was necessary to hide slavery
behind a guise of prisoners working o legal penalties for actual
crimes.
By 1885, just six years after buying his rst two hundred acres of
Tal-lapoosa river bot om, Pace reached an agreement with the
county judge to lease every prisoner sentenced to hard labor, as
wel as any unable to pay nes and court costs. As in almost every
Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.
Alabama county, that amounted to nearly every black man arrested.
Fifty years after Gum Threat's assaults on his slaves, life was lit le
changed for the new slaves of Tal apoosa County. Not far from
Pace's spread, a man named B. S. Smith operated a large farm and
timber operation on the banks of the Tal apoosa. He contracted
directly with the state of Alabama to acquire several hundred men
found guilty in state courts of felony o enses. In addition, Smith
and his wife, Elizabeth, aggressively sought scores of other forced
laborers from counties across Alabama. After the couple wrested the
contract for Autauga County prisoners away from W. D. McCurdy in
1883, Mrs. Smith complained to the county sheri that one worker
had disappeared during the transfer from McCurdy's notoriously
brutal Lowndes County farm to hers.19 By the mid-1880s, the Smith
plantation degenerated into a miserable compound of rampant
disease and death.
In 1886, a black prisoner named Alex Crews died at the Smith
convict farm from complications of severe frostbite to his feet. A
state physician visited on January 30, 1886, and reported back to
the state Board of Inspectors of Convicts. "I found the clothing of the
convicts very defective, being thin and worthless, insu cient for
protection during the cold weather. Many of them had no shoes
beyond a sole tied to their feet, there being no uppers and some
with no protection for the feet except rags tied around them. I told
Mr. Smith that the clothing and sanitary condition of the men were
miserable and outrageous."20
A reporter for the Montgomery Daily Dispatch, a black
newspaper in the state capital, wrote that one of its reporters had
asked Crews on his deathbed whether there were other men on the
Smith farm as il as he. "Oh, yes, boss," Crews replied. "Some of
them are a heap worse." The fol owing month, the president of the
Board of Inspectors of Convicts, Col. Reginald H. Daw-son, visited
the farm and reported back to Governor Edward O’Neal that he
found "seven convicts more or less frostbit en, and that one of them
…wil probably die."21 The state took no action.
Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his
Pace operated his slave farm lit le di erently, extending his
landholdings and his purchases of black men in tandem
proportions. As his operations grew, he employed a growing
number of white men to manage various enterprises and portions
of the farm. In the spring of 1892, he hired the justice of the peace,
James Kennedy, who had just married the younger sister of Pace's
wife, Mol ie. Pace had raised Mol ie almost as a daughter, and
Kennedy became in e ect his rst son-in-law. After a few months
spent running a limestone quarry in the adjacent county, Kennedy
set led into a house 150 yards from that of Pace and took over the
older man's sawmil and its squads of black hands.
Six years later, Pace added Anderson Hardy to the payrol , a man
just a few years his junior but the new husband of Pace's nineteen-
year-old daughter, Elizabeth. He lived in a house adjacent to Pace's
and acted as a foreman of the farm, guard, and, frequently, the
designated whipping boss to lash noncompliant workers.
Pace had become a great landowner by the standards of the
province and his era, with nearly a thousand acres of property
under til at the Big Sandy Creek farm and ownership of several
blocks, including a second home, in downtown Dadevil e.22 Like
many in Tal apoosa County, he also harbored visions that gold
might once again be found in the area, and purchased a half interest
in May 1894 in a labor-intensive mining venture at his end of the
county23
Powered by the ow of the Big Sandy Creek, the Pace sawmil
teemed with the black laborers he acquired from throughout
Alabama, working under conditions and with technology lit le
changed from the Bibb Steam Mil a half century earlier. Kennedy
oversaw the operation with cold indi erence, and soon began to
branch into other duties desired by Pace.
Thin, ever clad in an inexpensive rumpled jacket, balding
severely except for a few twisted locks at the crown of his forehead,
his voice high-pitched and nasal, Kennedy struck an unat ractive
pro le, a southern Icha-bod Crane, unaccustomed to and il -
equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the
equipped for power. Any of the men and boys imprisoned on the
place, and most likely al of the women, could have knocked him
to the ground. But armed with a buggy whip and his obscure
appointment as a justice of the peace, and backed by the wealthy
white men who paid him, Kennedy was transformed into a
terrifying figure.
Using his status as justice of the peace to convict and sentence
men for misdemeanor o enses, Kennedy became the on-site judge
for Pace's forced labor business. When the Cosby family wanted to
take control of a particular black man, one of the Cosbys would
order an employee to swear out an a davit accusing the African
American of a crime—usual y failure to pay for goods, breaking a
contract to work for the entire planting season, or a charge as
generic as " ghting." Often, the bogus warrants were signed by Jack
Patil o, the young son of a related white family; J. Wilburn
Haralson, another white employee of the farm; or one of several
black workers who lived permanently under the control of the
Cosbys.
Whatever the charge, the Cosbys seized the black man and took
him and their a davit to Pace's farm, where Kennedy would hold
the semblance of a trial. These proceedings never lasted more than
a few minutes, and rarely was any record of the charge or outcome
preserved. There was never an acquit al, according to later
statements by Kennedy. The defendant was always found guilty and
ordered to pay a ne he could not produce, usual y $5 plus the
costs of the arrest and trial—a total of about $20. For a black
laborer at the turn of the century in Alabama, $20 was a sum equal
to at least three months’ work. The Cosbys, who had seized the
black man to begin with, would claim to pay Kennedy the
ostensible ne and fees, and force the prisoner to sign a labor