train after testifying. Judge Jones ordered a deputy U.S. marshal to
protect the man. He urged the at orney general to send a special
investigator into the area quickly24
At orney General Knox, a shrewd lawyer from Pennsylvania who
before entering government service had amassed a fortune as
counsel to some of the largest U.S. corporations, was hardly an
obvious al y of southern blacks. A dapper man who contravened
current fashion with a clean-shaven face and sported high col ars
and broad French cu s, he had no natural a nity for the South or
its black inhabitants. His greatest claim to fame was as legal counsel
to Andrew Carnegie's vast steelmaking enterprises. In 1901, he
played a key role in the merger of Carnegie Steel with J. P.
Morgan's Federal Steel Company and virtual y every other major
steel and iron concern in the nation. The new organization was U.S.
Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity
Steel Corporation—the largest and most powerful business entity
created up to that point. It immediately control ed 7 percent of the
nation's gross domestic product. Four days after the merger was
o cial y consummated, President McKinley, a close friend since his
col ege years, named Knox at orney general. Less than six months
later, McKinley was dead, and Knox was part of Theodore
Roosevelt's cabinet.
In light of Roosevelt's pledge of a renewed commitment to black
civil rights, At orney General Knox could hardly ignore Judge
Jones's report of slavery stil being practiced forty years after
Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Moreover, the al egations
reanimated a running legal dilemma for the Justice Department. At
least some federal o cials, especial y native southern Republicans
serving as prosecutors, judges, or in government posts in the South,
were acutely aware that slavery had never truly disappeared.
The Justice Department was already on notice. Four years earlier,
in 1899, the colorful federal prosecutor in Atlanta, Edward A.
Angier, went so far as to mount a lone prosecution against one of
Georgia's most prominent planters, Wil iam Eberhart, in Oglethorpe
County, for conspiracy to hold blacks in a state of peonage—a
crime de ned by an obscure and never before used 1867 federal
law passed to prohibit the long-standing Mexican practice of debt
slavery in the new territory of New Mexico.
Relying on his brother-in-law, a justice of the peace, to convict
black laborers on any charge the planter wished to use, Eberhart
enslaved men and women and forced them to bind their children to
him as apprentices. He routinely claimed to have loaned money to
black workers and then held them on his plantation near the town
of Wintervil e to work o the debt— often for years at a time.
Before a grand jury, witnesses described Eberhart as a sadistic brute
who routinely beat adults and children to the edge of death. When
laborers ed to Atlanta, Eberhart sent deputy sheri s into the city to
hunt them down, beat them into submission, and drive them back
to the plantation in chains.
In one count of the indictment, Eberhart was charged with
enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by
enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by
falsely claiming he owed the planter money. When Cal oway
resisted, Eberhart assaulted and degraded the laborer at every
imaginable physical and emotional level: witnesses said that
Eberhart brutal y beat Cal oway's wife, Mary, and then at gunpoint
forced the woman to "yield her body to the lustful embraces" of the
plantation owner.
When Charley Cal oway at empted to escape the farm, Eberhart
had him hauled back and placed in handcu s. Eberhart then beat
him "upon the back, head, face and body" and, in an overt act of
sexual humiliation, had Cal oway stripped naked and chained into
a bed with a sick laborer named Orange Neeley
Later, Eberhart brandished his pistol and forced Cal oway "to
pinion his own beloved son, Robert Cal oway, outstretched to the
ground, and did make the said Charley Cal oway hold his said son
while the said Wil iam Eberhart did violently and unmerciful y beat
the said Robert Cal oway with heavy sticks and other weapons"
until the boy was crippled. As a nal indignity, Eberhart—like the
Alabama slavemasters who at empted to seize the children of
freedmen in the 1860s—forced Cal oway to sign contracts
apprenticing his remaining children, two of whom were stil
nursing babies, into Eberhart's control until they turned twenty-one
years old.25
Despite wide knowledge of Eberhart's sadism, scores of local
white citizens ral ied to Eberhart's defense, signing a petition that
labeled the evidence against him as "the testimony of irresponsible
negroes." Angier, the prosecutor, pressed on with the case, but
acknowledged to his superiors in Washington that "we are the
pioneers in this movement, and as this is the rst time this
‘peonage’ section has ever been invoked." Angier saw clearly that he
was at acking more than debt slavery perpetrated by a single man.
He sought permission from the Department of Justice to widen his
investigation into adjoining counties and warned: "In this
proceeding we have at acked the most powerful combination and
formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.
formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.
"Every resource known and unknown to the law wil be resorted
to by these potent and opulent in uences to break down this Bil
[of indictment], as we have selected the ring-leader for the rst
case," Angier wrote.26
In the end, it took no more than another audacious argument and
a compliant federal judge to col apse the case. Before a trial could
be convened, Eberhart's at orneys chal enged the most fundamental
premise of the case—arguing that no federal statute speci cal y
made it a crime to hold a person in slavery. The presiding judge
agreed: "The indictment did not state an o ense within the
jurisdiction of the federal courts."27 The case was never tried. "The
judge …indicated that the State Court alone had jurisdiction of the
mat ers and things embraced in these indictments," Angier wrote to
Washington.28
Despite the horror of the al egations, no local courts took up the
case. The fate of the Cal oway family was never known.
Two years later, unaware of the failed peonage prosecution in
Georgia, a U.S. commissioner named Fred Cubberly, living in the
Florida Panhandle town of Bronson, witnessed turpentine farmer J.
O. Elvington seize a black man and his wife at gunpoint, claiming
they could not leave his camp deep in the malarial swamps until a
$40 debt had been paid. The incident con rmed to Cubberly
rumors he had heard that forced labor was rampant among the
crude forest labor camps across northern Florida and adjoining
areas.29 Nearly thirty thousand men toiled in the turpentine farms
under excruciating conditions to supply a booming market for pine
tar, pitch, and turpentine used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing
ships and waterproof their ropes and riggings.
Workers carved deep V-shaped notches into the trunks of
mil ions of massive slash and longleaf pines towering in the stil
virgin forests. Smal galvanized iron boxes or gut ers were at ached
to the trees to col ect the thick, milky pine gum that oozed from the
wounds in winter. During spring and summer, as sap began to run,
mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working
mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working
feverishly from before dawn to the end of light, turpentine workers
cut fresh notches into every tree once a week, gathered the gum and
resin by hand, boiled it into vast quantities of distil ed turpentine,
and hauled it in hundreds of thousands of barrels out of the deep
woods. When trees stopped producing gum and resin, the camp
owners harvested them for lumber. As the demand for turpentine
products soared, the timber companies relentlessly acquired fresh
tracts of forest to drain and armies of men to perform the grueling
work.
Imprisoned in stockades or cel s, chained together at night or
held under armed guards on horseback, the turpentine farms were
bleak outposts miles from any chance of comfort or contact with
the outside world. Workers were forced to buy their own food and
clothes from a camp commissary and charged usurious interest rates
on the salary advances used to pay for the goods—typical y at least
100 percent.
A week after witnessing Elvington's seizure of two black workers,
Cubberly encountered three "man hunters" at the local train station,
led by Samuel M. Clyat , a turpentine farmer from Georgia
searching for several men who had run away from his camp. Clyat
and the others, including a deputy sheri from his home county,
forced two workers, Wil Gordon and Mose Ridley, back to Georgia
at gunpoint.
Cubberly began investigating similar complaints and making
reports to the U.S. at orney in Pensacola, Florida. In the summer of
1901, the federal prosecutor there, John Eagan, passed on to the
newly appointed At orney General Knox let ers from Cubberly and
a local at orney in the area al eging that "it is common practice
among parties engaged in Turpentine business in the Northern
District of Florida, to hold laborers … in a state of Involuntary
Servitude."
Eagan added that he personal y confirmed some of the al egations
and ordered that an indictment be sought. The system of coercion
he had discovered in Florida, authorized under an 1891 state law
making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages
making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages
had been advanced, was virtual y identical to that of Eberhart in
Georgia and what Alabama investigators were soon to discover.
"The laborers in this line of business are as a general rule colored
men and are imposed on and treated outrageously by their
employers," Eagan wrote. "A warrant is issued by a Justice of the
Peace and placed in the hands of a constable or sheri who
proceeds to forcibly deliver laborer to the possession of the
employers who made the complaint, and the employer holds him
in service until his claim, including al costs and charges of the
proceedings, are worked out."30
In November 1901, a Tal ahassee federal grand jury indicted
Clyat for peonage. He stood trial ve months later—despite the
unexplained disappearance of Gordon and Ridley, who were never
again seen after their seizure and return to Georgia. Clyat was
found guilty and sentenced to four years in the federal penitentiary.
Recognizing that the conviction could destroy the underpinning of
their industry—and a critical element of the southern economy—an
association of turpentine and timber companies ral ied to Clyat 's
defense. They hired as at orneys U.S. senator Augustus Octavius
Bacon and U.S. congressman Wil iam G Brantley both of Georgia. In
the lawyers’ appeal of the conviction, they observed to the higher
courts that the holding of slaves in the United States was not
technical y a crime. "Congress has never passed a law providing
punishment for slavery or for involuntary servitude," Brantley
reminded the gal ery during a speech before the U.S. House of
Representatives.31
The peonage statute, they claimed, amounted to unconstitutional
federal interference into mat ers of state jurisdiction. It was
improper to apply it to Clyat because no formal "system of
peonage" existed in the South.
As Clyat 's case languished in the Circuit Court of Appeals
throughout 1902, new al egations of slavery in the turpentine
camps continued to surface . Then came the let er to At orney
General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new
General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new
manifestation of the involuntary servitude system in Alabama,
potential y extending across an even larger area of the South.
Knox responded by directing the federal prosecutor in
Montgomery, Warren S. Reese Jr., to investigate the al egations. "I
have this day addressed a communication to each deputy marshal in
this district …requesting them to make a special investigation of the
peonage question," Reese responded enthusiastical y. "If from these
reports I am satis ed that at empts are being made or have been
made to deprive citizens of African descent of their liberty, I wil
report the same in ful to you and request the detail of a Secret
Service Operative if I deem the same necessary"32
It took less than two weeks for federal marshals to report the
discovery of scores of black slaves in Shelby, Coosa, and Tal apoosa
counties. The grand jury in Birmingham issued indictments against
nine Shelby County men near the end of April.33
But the original al egations made before the Birmingham grand
jury were tepid compared to what other agents in the field began to
learn. It was clear that not just one slavery ring existed in Alabama,
but layers upon layers of them, blanketing the state. The men
forced into labor in Shelby and Coosa counties were victims of only
the outermost edge of a network emanating from the farms and
other business interests of John Pace and his partners in Tal apoosa
County. A separate operation run by the sheri of Lowndes County
in the southern section of the state—where more than 25,000 black
farm laborers and sharecroppers lived—appeared to involve
hundreds or thousands of slaves and dozens of local landowners.
More rings operated in at least a half dozen other locations.
In some areas, local whites who were appal ed by the conduct of
their neighbors, or at orneys who had at empted in the past to free
forced black laborers in the southern courts, volunteered tales of
excruciating abuse to federal investigators. But in most locales, few
>
whites expressed any misgivings about the forced labor going on in
plain sight.
plain sight.
A lawyer named L. E. White, from Columbus, Georgia, a bustling
town on the main train line running through Tal apoosa County,
told Reese how he had traveled to Dadevil e the previous summer
looking for a missing young black man named Esau Wil iams. He
tracked him down at a farm owned by Fletch Turner, where
Wil iams and several other black men were being forced to cut
wood. White bought his freedom for $25 and returned the boy to
his mother.
A few weeks later, the family of Glennie "Speedy" Helms, another
young black man who had been traveling with Wil iams, sent the
lawyer back looking for their son. White found him and more than
a half dozen others working at a sawmil owned by Turner near the
set lement cal ed Jackson's Gap. He had to pay $48 for Helms. But
most striking to White were the execrable working conditions he
found—a scene that must have been strikingly similar to the
operations of the slavery-driven sawmil near the Cot ingham
plantation half a century earlier. "When I found this boy he was at
the sawmil at work completely naked, no clothes on at al ,
absolutely naked," White said. "And there were some six or eight
other negroes there working in the same naked condition."34
Reese was astonished by the evidence piling up in his o ce, and
quickly asked for the assignment of two Secret Service agents to
assist. "I never comprehended until now the extent of the present
method of slavery," he wrote to At orney General Knox,35 asking for
a meeting in Washington to plan a dramatic legal at ack.
The investigation could only have occurred with a man such as
Warren Reese in the role of U.S. at orney. Reese and two part-time
assistants constituted the sum total of the U.S. government's
regulatory and judicial reach into the portion of Alabama he served.
It would be another ve years before the agency that became the
Federal Bureau of Investigation was created in Washington. Until
then, the handful of investigators employed by the U.S. Justice
Department were nearly al accountants temporarily retained from
the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of
the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of
federal power in a place as remote as Alabama was only as strong
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