as the capabilities and political wil s of the local U.S. at orney and
federal judge.
The thirty-seven-year-old Reese exempli ed the new phenotype
of political and racial moderate that Roosevelt believed could
emerge as a new leadership class in the South—a counterpoint of
reason and modernism to noxious characters like John Pace and
other men who perverted judicial and political systems against
blacks and the constitutional amendments that were supposed to
have freed them.
Born just after the Civil War, Reese was a new husband and fast-
rising at orney in the state's capital city in 1903. Handsome, with an
academic air, Reese's piercing gaze at juries was softened by a long,
narrow face. An eloquent speaker and a orid writer, the at orney
was just mature enough to win credibility in the courtroom, just
youthful enough to ignore the obvious jeopardy that would mount
as he pressed an at ack on slavery and some of his state's most
powerful men. As al egations of slavery in his jurisdiction
multiplied, Reese demonstrated a prehensile comprehension of the
murky legal framework governing black labor, and a hard-nosed
unwil ingness to ignore the implications of the extraordinary
evidence that soon poured into his of ice.
Despite Reese's Republican a liation in rabidly Democratic and
white supremacist Alabama, he carried the social credentials of a
true son of the South. His father, W. S. Reese Sr., was a war hero
who at the age of nineteen earned a commission as a Confederate
colonel for gal antry during the ghting at Chickamauga Creek in
Georgia. After the war, the elder Reese became an activist in
Republican politics, successful y serving as mayor of Montgomery in
the 1880s and running unsuccessful y for the U.S. Senate in 1896 as
a Republican "fusion" candidate—at empting to at ract both black
and white voters. Reese's maternal grandfather, John A. Elmore,
was among Alabama's most famous at orneys—an architect of the
national government of the Confederacy and a key player in
secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.
secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.
Even Alabama's leading Democrats could muster no authentic
opposition to Reese's appointment to the federal post. Dozens of
endorsements poured into the White House and headquarters of the
Department of Justice in 1897, including each state Supreme Court
justice, local judges across Alabama, bankers, railroad executives,
the president of the state senate, the speaker of the Alabama house,
Governor Joseph F. Johnston, the secretary of state, U.S. senators,
and every Republican member of the Alabama legislature. White
Republicans in Alabama saw in Reese the pro le of a potential y
dynamic new base of support—a fresh antidote to the planter class
that dominated Democratic politics, but one who could avoid the
carpetbagger taint of the Reconstruction-era Grand Old Party. "He is
a young man of promise, belongs to an old and in uential family of
this state—the source from which we must have recruits if we
expect permanent and lasting growth for republicanism in the
South," wrote one Alabama GOP leader, in a let er endorsing
Reese's candidacy. He was sworn in as U.S. at orney by President
McKinley in April 1897.36
Four years later, Roosevelt's optimism that men such as the
Reeses and Judge Thomas Jones could change the course of
southern thinking failed to account for the most powerful social
currents surging through the region. Not incidental y, Colonel Reese
and Judge Jones knew each other at least partly through their
prominent roles in the years-long drive in the 1880s to erect a
massive monument to Confederate war dead and veterans in
Montgomery. Their participation underscored the treacherous
political and social straits through which white southern moderates
were forced to navigate at the turn of the century. In the rst four
decades after the war, southern nativity and service in the war, as
Reese and Jones each claimed, were enough to meet the
prerequisites for elected o ce and leadership—and enough to at
least partly inoculate them against the charge that any white man
who supported legal rights for freed slaves was a traitor to his
region.
As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of
As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of
southern patriotism was mutating virulently. It was no longer
enough to have served honorably. The South now demanded in
public forums an increasingly rabid level of absolute adherence to a
baroque new mythology of the honorable southerner, the contented
slave, and the tragical y defeated secession. The new monument in
Montgomery, one of the largest such memorials anywhere in the
South, was that mythology incarnate. The aging former rebel
president, Je erson Davis, personal y laid its cornerstone on the
grounds of the state capitol, just a short distance from the spot
where he had taken the oath of o ce as president of the
Confederacy. The completed edi ce consisted of four statues
representing the four branches of military service spaced around the
base of an enormous column rising seventy feet above a bronze bas-
relief of a bat le scene.
Atop the shaft of Alabama limestone stood a ten-foot bronze
statue of a soldier titled Patriotism. After two decades of planning
and fund-raising, the monument was nal y unveiled before tens of
thousands of spectators in 1898. Undoubtedly, young Warren Reese
Jr. was among them.
A series of orators extol ed the virtuousness of the southern
rebel ion and the bravery and tenacity of its soldiers. Flanking the
scene was a contingent of young maidens, dressed in pure white,
gray caps, and crimson sashes, each representing one of the
Confederate states. Below the sculpture entitled Cavalry, an
inscription honored the horsemen of the rebel ion as "the
knightliest of the knightly race."37 As special agents scoured the
backcountry of Alabama ve years later, and brought tales of horror
to Montgomery in the spring of 1903, the cynicism of the South's
claim to hold a special position among the most noble civilizations
could not have escaped Reese's acute powers of observation.
An unnamed prisoner tied around a pickax for punishment in a
Georgia labor camp. Photograph by John L. Spivak, during research
for his 1932 book, Georgia Nigger.
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad coke ovens at the Prat Mines near
Birmingham, Alabama.
A southern chain gang in 1898. Photograph by Carl Weis.
"Warden and his pack after capture," at Sprague Junction labor
camp in Alabama. Photograph taken sometime in the 1890s.
A prisoner receiving punishment in a Georgia labor camp.
Photograph by John L. Spivak.
A 1905 scene from Thomas W. Dixon Jr.'s white supremacist
stageplay The Clansman. From a postcard distributed by opponents
of the drama's racist message.
&nbs
p; Black convicts forced to work in Thomasvil e, Georgia, in the late
1880s. Photograph by Joseph John Kirkbride.
James Fletcher Turner.
W. D. McCurdy, baron of Lowndes County, Alabama.
U.S. At orney Warren S. Reese Jr.
John T. Milner.
John W. Pace.
U.S. District Court Judge Thomas G. Jones.
An 1880s political pamphlet distributed in Georgia by opponents
of the convict labor system.
Federal courthouse and post of ice in Montgomery Alabama. Scene
of the slavery and peonage trials of 1903. H. P. Tresslar Publisher,
Montgomery Alabama.
Abandoned convict "keep" at a lime quarry in Lee County Alabama.
Photography by E. W. Russel , 1937.
Barracks at Slope No. 12 mine for forced laborers acquired by
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company.
African Americans forced to help build river levees, probably in
Mississippi in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.
Convict wagons like these in Pit County, North Carolina, 1910,
were used across the South to transport and house African
Americans compel ed to work in road gangs, lumber camps, and
farms.
Black prisoners at work in a rock quarry, most likely in the early
1940s. Photographer unknown.
VI
THE INDICTMENTS
"I was whipped nearly every day."
In early May, a federal grand jury, the only province of the legal
system in which African Americans could stil participate in the
South, was impaneled in Montgomery to take up the mounting
evidence of slavery in Alabama. The jury of twenty-three, composed
of twenty whites and three blacks, filed into the elegant federal post
o ce and courthouse—with arched brick doorways and an
imposing square tower at the corner of Dexter Avenue and
Lawrence Street in downtown Montgomery. The foreman was
Judah T. Moses, one of Montgomery's leading Jewish businessmen.1
Soon a steady stream of witnesses—mostly black men and
women elated, bewildered, and a lit le shaken by the sudden
interest by powerful whites in their welfare—made its way to the
grand jury's chambers to tel of their entrapment back into slavery.
The scene's most extraordinary paradox was that the U.S.
commissioner—a federal magistrate with judicial powers one rank
below Judge Jones—presiding over the testimony was a young
John A. Elmore, son of one of the Confederacy's great legal
architects and absolute defenders of antebel um slavery. Yet now,
forty years after emancipation, he supervised an inquiry aimed at
nal y bringing an end to slavery in Alabama. Soon, the black
members of the jury were guiding portions of the investigation with
their own accounts of ongoing slavery2
The rst witness to make a formal statement was a white man
named Jim Ho man—without whose corroboration much of the
testimony from blacks might have been dismissed. A farmer from
the set lement of Camp Hil , Ho man testi ed on May 8 that he
had spent weeks during the previous year at empting to determine
why Jim Caldwel , the son of one of his black farmhands, had been
arrested. But everywhere Ho man or a local lawyer he hired
arrested. But everywhere Ho man or a local lawyer he hired
turned, they discovered that Caldwel and another young black man
seized at the same time had just been resold to a di erent farmer or
had been accused of new or dif erent crimes.
The mayor of Goodwater, Dave White, who had ned the two
African Americans, claimed to Ho man that he couldn't recal
details of the case or what had happened to Caldwel . He told
Ho man it would be a mistake for his lawyer to stir up trouble.
White said to give the lawyer a message: "You had bet er keep out
of this town. If you do not we wil get after you."3 The one
practicing at orney in Goodwater told Ho man that the town
watchman, John Dunbar, had found a pistol on one of the men and
a razor on the other. But Dunbar couldn't be found.
The next day, John Davis came before the jury and told of his
harrowing capture by Robert Franklin. When word of the federal
investigation spread across Alabama, the farmer who had purchased
Davis from John Pace suddenly released him, along with other
slaves. The white men hoped set ing the workers free would prove
they had never been held against their wil s. Under questioning by
Reese, Davis testi ed that afterward he was approached again by
Franklin.
"He said, John?’ I said, ‘Sir?’ He says, ‘We want you for a witness
…want you to sign a paper which won't be nothing, won't hurt
you,’ " Davis testi ed. " ‘If you want to we wil let you sign a lit le
paper, do like we tel you and I wil give you a pret y good suit of
clothes.’ I told him I did not know anything about any court."
Davis said Mayor White then intervened: "Go ahead and sign it,"
White said. "It is nothing to hurt you."
Davis refused. But after several days of harassment, clearly aware
of the risks he faced if he refused to sign the document—apparently
an a davit in which he said his arrest was proper—Davis put his
"X" on the paper. The document was never produced at court. "To
keep from being bothered with them, I just went on and signed the
paper, " Davis said. "I did not know what the paper was for. I never
read the paper. I cannot read nor write, and he did not even read it
read the paper. I cannot read nor write, and he did not even read it
to me."4
• •
Over the next week, federal agents presented a rush of testimony
from others who had witnessed or participated in the seizure of Jim
Caldwel and Herman "Joe" Pat erson. It was transparent that, like
John Davis and so many others, they had commit ed no crime.
There was no gun. And carrying a razor—even if Pat erson had
done so—wasn't even a violation of Alabama law. The facts were
that the pair passed innocently on foot through Goodwater just after
dark on April 23, 1902, headed toward Birmingham to look for
work. As the two approached a cot on gin on the edge of town,
near the Pope House restaurant, they were confronted by the night
watchman, Dunbar, and the bank clerk, J. L. Purifoy.
Dunbar told the grand jury he stopped the two because there had
been burglaries in the area recently. "I discovered two slouchy
negroes slipping towards town, and I suppose they were up to
some devilment," he testi ed.5The watchmen approached the two
young men and asked where they were going.
"To Birmingham," Caldwel said. "To work."
"You boys come on with me," Dunbar replied.6
The two white men shackled Caldwel 's wrists and grabbed
Pat erson by the arms. They marched the two laborers to the lockup
in Goodwater— the same place John Davis had been imprisoned.
Purifoy claimed later that he had searched the two and found a
razor on Pat erson and a pistol in the clothing of Caldwel . The next
morning, when the two men were brought before Mayor White,
both were charged with carrying concealed weapons
. The mayor's
court docket showed that both men pleaded guilty to the charge,
though Caldwel testi ed later he believed he had been accused of
vagrancy and that neither entered a plea at al . Regardless, Mayor
White declared the men guilty and ned each $10 plus court costs
of $1.60.7
of $1.60.
After the summary trial, Robert Franklin approached Dunbar and
told him John Pace would be pleased to buy the men. The
fol owing day Dunbar asked Purifoy to accompany him to Dadevil e
with the two captured African Americans. Virgil Smith, a black
laborer working for Purifoy at the time, warned his boss that
Dunbar was in the business of sel ing African Americans. Purifoy
was new to Goodwater, and uncertain of what his employee real y
meant. He had di culty imagining that blacks were truly being
bought and sold. "If they are sel ing Negroes," he told the black
laborer, "I wil go down there and see about it."
Dunbar, Purifoy, and the two black men rode to Dadevil e in a
horse-drawn hack. After arriving on Main Street in the town, John
Pace and Fletcher Turner approached the wagon and told Caldwel
and Pat erson to get out. Purifoy stayed with the wagon, while
Dunbar and Pace took the two black men to a nearby stable. A
short while later, Turner drove away with the prisoners, stil bound.
Franklin had arrived in town separately to negotiate a price for the
men. Pace handed over $24 in cash and scratched out a note to the
president of Tal apoosa County Bank to give Franklin another $46
from his account.8
A lit le while later, Dunbar and Purifoy, back in the now empty
wagon, rat led down a pit ed dirt road toward Goodwater.
"What have you done with the negroes," Purifoy asked.
"Turner has got them," Dunbar replied.
Had Turner paid for the men? Purifoy questioned.
"No, nothing more than the fine and costs," Dunbar replied.
The next day, the two white men saw each other again, on the
road in front of a wealthy local farmer's residence. Standing beneath
the canopy of a landmark oak tree, Purifoy directly asked his friend,
Slavery by Another Name Page 27
