waited. He dutiful y pronounced Turke guilty, though it wasn't clear
of what crime, and fined him $15 plus unspecified costs.
Turke had already been robbed by one of the white men of the
$5.41 and a pocketwatch he carried on the rst day of his
kidnapping. He had nothing with which to pay. George Cosby
appeared and proclaimed he had paid the ne. He took the silent
black man back to his farm and the corn-crib and its iron lock.
The system by which John Pace and Fletch Turner obtained black
men for their farms, sawmil s, and limestone quarry was more
re ned than the Cos-bys’ brutish tactics. The two men often spent
their days on the square in downtown Dadevil e, awaiting word via
telegraph of their various enterprises and the frequent arrival of
regular procurers of black labor, who arrived daily on the two train
runs stopping at the town depot.
Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit , the two men who seized John
Davis, were the county's most important traders in black men. At
forty-six years old, Franklin was the most atavistic of the half dozen
constables and deputies who were routinely on the prowl for black
men on behalf of Pace and Turner. In addition to his store, Franklin
was commissioned as a night watchman, paid $30 a month by the
town of Goodwater. He made easily as much again in the traf icking
of black laborers.40
Pruit , thirty-six years old, also worked as a night watchman in
Good-water and operated a livery stable as a sideline. He received
$42 a month to police the town and col ected a $2-per-family
annual tax for upkeep of the unpaved streets. Altogether, he eked
out enough to maintain his widowed mother and wife, adult sister
and brothers, and two toddling sons, in a compact wood frame
house near the center of town.
The two men's ostensible police supervisor, Goodwater marshal
John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did
John G. Dunbar, also regularly o ered black men for sale, as did
the town's other constable, Laray A. Grogan, who busily transported
black forced laborers from Goodwater to the Turner lime quarry
and kiln in the town of Calcis. Grogan, thirty years old, lived with
his young wife and three children under age six next door to Mayor
White.41
Early in April of 1902, Franklin and Pruit got word that runaways
had ed the Samples Lumber Company sawmil outside the nearby
town of Hol ands. Samples, like virtual y al lumber cut ing
operations in southern Alabama, Georgia, and Florida at the time,
was a spectacle of horrifying abuse. Young black men—and
occasional y whites—were routinely lured to remote timber camps
deep in the forests with promises of solid wages and good working
conditions. As often as not, the camps became prisons, where men
and boys were held against their wil for months or years, fed and
housed miserably, worked under brutal circumstances, and paid
lit le or nothing. Hundreds of other black men were purchased from
jails across the state. Since black men knew they enjoyed no
protection from these abuses from local sheri s or judges, they
relied on word of mouth in African American neighborhoods or
among other itinerant workers to identify which camps ful l ed
their advertisements and white men who could "be trusted."
On April 2, Dock Crenshaw, a twenty-one-year-old black laborer
from Roanoke, Alabama, agreed to take work at Samples. After one
day, Crenshaw and several other young black men realized they had
been grossly misled. Instead of $1 a day in wages, plus food and a
place to stay, the men were being stockaded and fed prisoner's
rations. Other workers told them they would never receive pay.
Instead, they were being charged $2 a week for their food and
shelter—a third of their supposed total wages.
Five young men, Crenshaw, Charles Wil iams, Pat Hil , Jim
Coleman, and Ed Moody, decided to leave at the end of the
workday and return home. This was a particularly gal ing act to the
white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to
white men in charge of Samples Lumber and an overt chal enge to
local white authorities. The sight of ve black men, most of them
teenagers, strol ing up a public road, having de ed their white
employer, justi ed a harsh response in the minds of almost every
white in the region.
As Crenshaw and two others ambled under a bridge at the edge
of the town of Goodwater that night, Franklin and a second white
man from the town stepped out of the darkness and said the men
were under arrest for "jumping" a board bil —or not paying for
food provided to them at Samples.
The ve workers were marched back to a general store in tiny
Hol ands where the town mayor convened what went for a
misdemeanor trial. Crenshaw refused to plead guilty, but the others,
pressured by the armed whites, agreed to confess. The men had
eaten only once at the mil , but the mayor found that each had
walked out on a $5 tab. Al were given nes of about $6, plus
unspeci ed "costs." Franklin told the justice of the peace not to tel
the men the ful amount they owed and that he would take care of
it.Franklin loaded the ve into a wagon and carried them back to
Good-water. After several hours locked in the same smal jail near
the railroad tracks where John Davis and so many others had been
held, Franklin, now joined by Pruit , ordered the black men onto
the next train stopping in the town. When they rol ed into the
Dadevil e station, a wagon was waiting to transport the men to
Pace's farm on the Tal apoosa River. Pace gave $25 cash to Franklin
and Pruit , $12.50 for transporting the gang, and a check on the
Tal apoosa County Bank for $100.
After several days detained by Pace, the farmer's resident
magistrate, James Kennedy, read a contract out loud to the men. Al
Charley Wil iams could fol ow was that they would have to work
there for at least seven months. They resigned themselves to their
fate and began working under armed guard every day, plowing,
hoeing, and ditching. At night, the men were locked in a crude
cel .42
cel .
Wil iams knew he was in for a hard time, but he could hardly
have imagined its details. A strapping, barrel-chested farmhand, he
wasn't accustomed to the servile status Pace's farm demanded. He
de ed directions and chal enged guards, and for that he was
whipped nearly every day, usual y with his pants pul ed to his
ankles and his back bared. The instruments of punishment used to
beat him were leather plow lines, trouser belts, or saplings.
"Anything happened to be in the boss man's hands," Wil iams
testified later.43
The younger men in the group were terri ed especial y by what
was happening. Within a month of arriving at Pace's farm, Pat Hil
and Ed Moody, both seventeen years old, tried to run away. After
traveling just four miles, they were captured by Pace's son-in-law,
Anderson Hardy. Kennedy, the justice of the peace
employed by
Pace, staged another fake trial and convicted the pair of "breaking
the contract" with Pace and sentenced them to six months of hard
labor for the county. Conveniently, Pace was under contract with
the Tal apoosa County judge to hold al local hard-labor convicts.
So Hil and Moody returned immediately to the same chain gang,
now with an additional term of six months to work and explicitly
classified as criminal convicts.
There was another lesson to be learned, however, and one that
Pace believed the other blacks being held on the farm needed to
share in as wel . The risks and futility of at empting to escape
would be demonstrated for al of Pace's laborers. Hil was led
nearly naked in front of a gang of black laborers working in a eld,
forced to bend at the waist and squat, his hands tied together
behind his knees. The point of these beatings was manyfold: the
most obvious was to create a speci c disincentive to escape. Just as
important was to show the power of whites not just to cause pain
but to force a black man to bear profound humiliation, to be
reduced to a state of pathetic powerlessness, to visibly see how
quickly and e ortlessly even the most simpleton whites could force
a de ant black man to reveal emotional vulnerability and physical
weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent
weakness. "My hands were fastened under my knees. I was bent
over and whipped on the naked back," Hil testi ed stoical y. "He
told me to count, and I counted up to 15, and could not count any
further. He whipped me about 25 licks."44
VI
SLAVERY IS NOT A CRIME
"We shal have to kil a thousand …to get them back to their
places."
The spring of 1903 arrived in Alabama with a surreal, portentous
fury. Farmers pushed hard to put a new cot on crop in the
ground, only to see nearly every seedling kil ed by an
inexplicable late freeze. Rain and fungus plagued the corn stands
rising in countless thousands of new rows.
In the black of night on April 8, a funnel cloud descended
without warning from a vertiginous sky, zigzagging north of
Birmingham, shearing one-hundred-yard-wide swaths of trees,
homes, and elds as it bounded madly into the earth and back to
the sky across a path of eighteen miles. The horizon coruscated with
astonishing arcs of lightning. By the time the wind and rain
stopped, a dozen people were dead. Five days later, another storm
lashed Bibb County, scraping past the old Cot ingham farm,
obliterating smal buildings and stripping the buds beginning to
swel on fruit trees. On the same day, another tornado—
mysteriously pouring hail but no rain—ripped through south
Alabama, kil ing three more.
Final y, as evening fel on April 19, an unnatural cold swept
across the state as the sky opened above Goodwater and Tal apoosa
County, pouring a deluge of hail and rain. Trees were stripped bare
of leaves and fruit blossoms. What was left of the cot on, corn,
purple-hul eld peas, and early sprouts of squash and okra was
beaten at into the soil. Farmers, sharecroppers, and day laborers—
free and enslaved—rushed into the fields to replant.
But by the end of April, another kind of zephyr, something just as
twisted and contradictory to the new order of the white South, was
lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among
lurking on the horizon. Whispered at the train stations and among
black laborers on Sunday mornings was a story so unbelievable
most people said it must be fable. A man who claimed to be a
federal Secret Service detective was visiting black residents in
Goodwater. Some had been sent by train to testify before a federal
grand jury col ecting evidence that white people in Tal-lapoosa
County were stil holding slaves.
By the middle of May the rumors were rampant—and seemingly
con rmed by the nearly continual presence of a burly federal agent
named E. P. McAdams. Then on May 27, newspapers across the
state carried an astounding press release issued from the
Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.:
Washington, May 26—At the request of the Department of Justice, the
United States Secret Service has undertaken the work of investigating the
charge of peonage, or holding another in servitude to work out a debt,
which has been made against persons living in the vicinity of Montgomery,
Ala. The punishment provided by the statute for this crime is a ne of not
less than $1,000 nor more than $5,000 or imprisonment of not less than
one year nor more than five.
One man, named Robert N. Franklin, has already been indicted for
keeping a negro in servitude for at least a year. Information in the hands
of [Secret Service] chief Wilkie tends to show that a regular system has
been practiced for a long time between certain magistrates and persons
who want negro laborers.
It is said the plan is to bring a poor negro before a magistrate on a
imsy charge. He is convicted and, having no money to pay a ne, the
white man o ers to advance him the money, provided the negro will make
a labor contract with him for a length of time su cient to reimburse him
for the money and trouble he has taken to keep the negro out of jail. He is
thereupon taken away and begins what is frequently a long term of cruel
servitude, being frequently whipped for failure to perform work to the
satisfaction of his employer.
An agent of the secret service who is now on the ground will make a
thorough investigation of the whole alleged system and turn over to the
United States Attorney of that district all information he may secure with a
view to the prosecution of said offenders. 1
Unexpectedly and without explanation, a ash of hope bolted
across the dark curtain fal ing on black life. Most amazing was that
it commenced in Montgomery, the city that had served brie y
during the early months of the Civil War as the national capital of
the Confederacy2 It remained the seat of a government that since
the war had eviscerated black citizenship more completely and
enthusiastical y than any other.
That the federal government would initiate such an inquiry was
mind-boggling to white southerners. Investigations of any kind by
federal agencies were extraordinarily unusual in an era that
predated the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Moreover, the South's long asserted right to manage the a airs of
black residents without northern interference had nal y been
achieved. Nearly every southern state, including Alabama, had
completed the total disenfranchisement of African Americans by
1901. Virtual y no blacks served on state juries. No blacks in the
South were permit ed to hold meaningful state or local political
o ces. There were virtual y no black sheri s, constables, or police
o cers. Blacks had been whol y shunted into their own inferior
railroad cars, restrooms, restaurants, neighborhoods, and schools.
Al of this had been accom
plished in a sudden, unfet ered grab by
white supremacists that was met outside the South with lit le more
than quiet assent. During the thirty years since Reconstruction—
despite its being a period of nearly continuous Republican control
of the White House—federal o cials raised only the faintest
concerns about white abuse of black laborers. Southern leaders
were astonished that such a protest had inexplicably arisen now.
For blacks it seemed that a true friend had miraculously come to
occupy the White House, that somehow the assurances of American
democracy might actual y ful l themselves. "The South … is in the
hands of unfriendly white men…It has been left to the Federal
Government, under that administration of President Roosevelt, to
expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to
expose this iniquity …and stretch out the long arm of the Nation to
punish and prevent it," wrote the black commentator Charles W
Chesnut . "The President has endeavored to stem the tide of
prejudice, which, sweeping up from the South, has sought to
overwhelm the Negro everywhere; and he has made it clear that he
regards himself as the representative of the people."3
This dramatic turn of events—so revolting to southern whites, so
euphoric to blacks—began with the assassination of President
Wil iam McKinley two years earlier in September 1901.
McKinley had represented more than any other American leader
at the turn of the twentieth century the experiences of those who
directly participated in the war between the North and the South
and came to see that struggle as a moral crusade against slavery and
for the preservation of the union. A young private when he
volunteered, McKinley rose steadily to the rank of major by the end
of the war on the basis of modest acts of heroism. He was the last
president who had served as an o cer in Abraham Lincoln's Grand
Army, and mil ions of aging Union veterans continued to greet him
af ectionately as Major McKinley.
But by the fal of 1901, the veterans he marched with through the
great bat les of the con ict had become a geriatric generation, their
luster increasingly pale against the new economic dramas playing
out between fabulously rich titans of manufacturing and production
such as John D. Rockefel er, Andrew Carnegie, and banker John
Slavery by Another Name Page 23
