Slavery by Another Name
Page 29
at empting to break the rst contract he was coerced into. When
that year of labor was nished Pat erson would be held for a third
six-month period, Kennedy ruled, for "removing a boat from its
moorings."
"Note," Kennedy reminded jurors, lifting an index nger into the
air. "In none of these cases that I have spoken about did I ever
receive one cent of costs, nor was I paid in any other way by Mr.
Pace or anybody else for trying these cases."21
The testimony of the white men in the slavery ring was crisply
consistent: al of the black men and women held to forced labor
were properly convicted of crimes; they freely agreed to be leased
as laborers; and they were never physical y abused. But outside the
courtroom, the men at the center of the investigation hardly
courtroom, the men at the center of the investigation hardly
behaved as if they were innocent. They began a campaign of
witness tampering and intimidation.
Worried that he would be charged, Mayor White in Goodwater
boarded a train in early May to Columbus, Georgia, to warn John
G. Dun-bar, the marshal who had assisted in seizing so many black
men, about the investigation. "White did not want to be indicted,"
Dunbar later testified.22
G. B. Walker, the lawyer who had helped bring at ention to the
slaving operations and set free Caldwel and Pat erson, got an
ominous let er from his cousin in Tal apoosa County. "Those people
there were his fel ow townsmen and his friends, and asked me not
to stir up anything," Walker recal ed the let er saying. "He said …for
his sake not to do anything against these parties."23
Mat Davis—the brother of John Davis—was seized from a train,
locked in the Goodwater jail, and threatened by the brother of
Robert Franklin. The white man warned Davis's father that he
would "shoot you as sure as hel " if the older man interfered.
Released several days later, Mat began hiding in the woods at
night.24
Despite the e orts to frighten the growing number of accusers,
the accounts of kidnappings and violence were making an
impression on the jury in Montgomery. Even Alabama newspaper
editors, embarrassed by national reports about the investigation,
excoriated the accused slave dealers. The ringleaders were growing
nervous. Kennedy began to wonder if he should tel the truth.
After giving testimony on May 15, Kennedy, George Cosby, and
one of the other guards from Pace's farm shared a wagon for a wet
ride back to Tal-lapoosa County. A steady drizzle pelted the men as
the mule strained to drag the hack down a pit ed, red-mud road.
Deep in the bush, the wagon broke down. The men were forced to
walk through the cold springtime muck. Cosby was frantic at the
delay. He said he needed "to be at home and get niggers out of the
way so that no papers could be served on them from the United
States court," Kennedy later testi ed. Cosby hired a horse at the rst
States court," Kennedy later testi ed. Cosby hired a horse at the rst
set lement the men reached and raced ahead. Kennedy and the
guard trudged on in the rain, certain Cosby intended to murder
witnesses.
A week later, the three men nervously sat down to a meal
together. Cosby had lost his nerve and kil ed no one. But suddenly
he reached into his shirt pocket and pul ed out a package of
morphine. Kennedy tried to wrestle it away from him. "It wil come
to this," Cosby shouted. "I am going to be convicted, and before I
wil be convicted I wil destroy myself. It is a heap bet er than to go
to the penitentiary and disgrace my family"25
At the same time, Pace and Turner hastily began freeing forced
laborers on their farms and at the quarry. Some disappeared
entirely, their fates unknown. Other blacks were warned by the
white men—or through other black employees—not to cooperate
with the federal investigation. Indeed, of the dozens of black
workers being held against their wil when Kennedy conducted the
1900 census, almost none could be located by federal agents three
years later.
On May 23, a few days after Kennedy wrestled the morphine
away from Cosby, Secret Service Agent McAdams stepped o the
rst morning train to arrive in Goodwater. McAdams walked in the
bright sunlight to Robert Franklin's mercantile store, pushed open
the glass-plated door, and informed the constable that the grand
jury had handed up an indictment for holding black workers in
peonage. Franklin, and ve others whom McAdams wouldn't
identify, were named in the indictment. By nightfal , Franklin sat in
a cel at the Montgomery County jail.
Kennedy's anxiety was growing. He had participated in dozens of
bogus trials, though he had never reaped the nancial rewards of
Pace, Turner, and the Cosbys. He was certain the government—and
perhaps his employers— would eventual y try to pin the slave trade
on him. Kennedy told one of the Secret Service agents in Tal apoosa
County he was wil ing to testify again— this time tel ing the truth.
County he was wil ing to testify again— this time tel ing the truth.
A week after Franklin's arrest, Kennedy went back to
Montgomery and stunned the grand jury. He admit ed trying scores
of black laborers to force them to work for Pace, Turner, and Cosby.
He could recal at least thirty cases in which he didn't make any
record of the proceedings or report a verdict to the county judge, as
he was required to do by law. It was clear from Kennedy's
testimony that the tra c in African Americans hadn't been limited
to men. The white landowners sought out nearly half a dozen black
women as wel , Kennedy said, with the clear implication that they
were seized for sexual services. "There were many others, but I can't
remember their names now," Kennedy said.
He claimed to have initial y used his authority as a justice of the
peace properly, but that eventual y the white landowners he
worked for demanded that he convict any black laborer they
desired. "They would send one there and have an a davit made,"
Kennedy said. The black man would be arrested, ned, and sent to
whichever farmer had arranged the arrest.
"The agreement was there was no record to be kept," Kennedy
testified. Nearly every case, he said, "was a trumped up af air."26
Other white men, fearful of the mounting evidence, began
breaking their silence about the truth of the slave farms. Wilburn
Haralson, a young farmer living near the Pace plantation, testi ed
that the Cosbys compel ed him to swear out false charges against
several black men whose sentences to work for them were about to
expire. "I was afraid not to do it, I was afraid of those folks,"
Haralson testi ed. "I was afraid they would get me in some scrape,
swear some lie on me, and get me into it, and I had a wife and
children."
A black woman named Mat ie Turner was held on the farm
inde nitely, falsely accused of prostitution, Haralson swore. The
implication was clear that Turner
was held for the sexual
exploitation of the farm. He knew of at least one slave worker who
had been murdered by a relative of the Cosbys. Haralson said few
African Americans ever escaped. George and Burancas Cosby
African Americans ever escaped. George and Burancas Cosby
patrol ed their farms with guns and used special y trained
bloodhounds to track any who tried to take ight. "They had nigger
dogs," he said. "There were two dogs at George Cosby's and two
dogs at Burancas Cosby's house."27
On May 28, U.S. Deputy Marshal A. B. Colquit hauled Francis M.
Pruit , the constable and livery stable keeper in Goodwater, to
Montgomery to hear his indictment read aloud. A total of six
indictments were handed up against Pruit and two justices of the
peace, outlining for the rst time publicly how Pace's slaving
network operated.28
The indictment charged Pruit with "forcibly seizing the body of
Ed Moody, a negro," in Coosa County and sel ing him on April 3,
1903, to Pace, who had held him against his wil since then. At the
courthouse on the day of his indictment, Pruit claimed he had
never seen Moody and didn't know Pace. Appointed to his position
as a constable by former Alabama governor Wil iam Jelks, Pruit
stoutly defended his county, claiming that Coosa citizens are "as
good as any in the State." The town of Goodwater was an
"especial y law-abiding community," he added. Without qualms,
Pruit told a newspaper reporter that as a constable he had
"frequently" arrested African Americans who then were ned by a
local magistrate and "paid out" by local white farmers. But he
insisted this was entirely within the law. The Montgomery
Advertiser reported that his claim had "an honest ring."
The fol owing day, Pace returned to Montgomery. This time, he
was accompanied from Dadevil e by U.S. marshal A. B. Colquit .
The men arrived at Union Station at dusk and headed directly to
the courtroom of Judge Jones. Pace was informed he had been
named in eight indictments as the buyer of black men seized by
local constables. Reese recounted key evidence gathered against
Pace—maintaining that one Negro woman had been kil ed on his
farm, that men and women had been forced to work nude for lack
of clothing, and that the laborers were mercilessly beaten.
of clothing, and that the laborers were mercilessly beaten.
Pace brought with him to the courtroom a bond posted by
Wil iam Gray, the Dadevil e banker who at Pace's direction had
paid out the cash used to purchase most of the enslaved black
workers.29 When the bond turned out to be insu cient, Jones
al owed Pace to travel back home with the marshal in tow to make
new arrangements to avoid jail. Pace expressed his appreciation
and retired to a Montgomery hotel to await the next morning's train
to Tal apoosa County.
Outside the courthouse that night, Pace insisted to a newspaper
reporter that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, even as he
conceded without hesitation that he had purchased men from Coosa
County o cials and worked them on his farm. He said the African
Americans were put into the prison maintained on his property,
where they and the convicts were watched over by hired guards and
hound dogs trained to track men.
He described buying John Davis from Robert Franklin for $70,
but said Davis begged to be left at the farm. Pace said he explained
to Davis that he would be held with the county convicts and treated
the same. Davis readily agreed, and Pace drew up a contract under
which he agreed to work sixteen months to pay of his fine.
Pace was unapologetic, but denied that he had acquired or held a
large number of black laborers. He had purchased no more than
ve in the previous year, he said, al of them as favors to the black
workers themselves. They were never treated brutal y, and it was
"always understood," he said, that the men would be freed if
relatives or friends reimbursed him for the costs of bailing out and
holding the laborers.30
Next to make the trip to Montgomery were George Cosby, his
nephew Burancas, and James H. Todd, one of the strongmen used
as an enforcer on the Pace farm. The men arrived in the state
capital near daylight on June 10, having spent the night on a
Western Railroad train stranded between Ope-lika and
Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram
Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram
Gibson and A. B. Colquit , who had arrested them on Tuesday.
The defendants wouldn't talk to reporters on the day of their
court appearance. Todd had been an overseer for Pace for more
than fteen years. Burancas Cosby, a twenty-three-year-old "wide in
stock, build and ruddy face," worked for his uncle George. The
younger Cosby claimed that at least two of the blacks named in the
indictment were "unknown to him." By nightfal , al had returned to
Dadevil e by train.
As word of the arrests raced across Alabama and the rest of the
country, an epic legal and political confrontation began to take
shape. J. Thomas He in—the stirring white supremacist orator who
proclaimed to the constitutional convention two years earlier that
God put "negroes" on the earth to serve white men—was the
Alabama secretary of state by 1903. Almost immediately, He in
began circulating word that he would aid the indicted white men,
perhaps even representing them in the courtroom. He would have
none of the spineless apologia for new slavery that southern
journalists and some politicians rst o ered. He embraced it as a
return to the natural order of man.
A few southerners stepped forward to genuinely condemn the
new slavery system—but very few. One was Joseph C. Manning, the
postmaster of Alexander City in Tal apoosa County. A ery
populist, he had fought in the 1890s to hold on to a coalition of
black and white voters in Alabama, and after the turn of the century
railed against the growing national consensus that blacks should be
excluded from al political activity—even within the Republican
Party. "What has become of the ringing declaration of Abraham
Lincoln that ‘The nation cannot endure half slave and half free,’ " he
wrote to an Ohio newspaper.31 He denounced the de facto
annulment of the Fifteenth Amendment and condemned Republican
leaders for their crass wil ingness "to acquiesce in slavery for the
south and stand for human liberty in the north."
Later, Manning wrote to the New York Evening Post, lashing out
at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county
at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county
al eged to have held slaves. "It is today under the law in Alabama, a
crime for a farm laborer (black) to quit his employer. He may be
denied his pay, he may be half fed, he may be beaten with a buggy
trace but if he ‘fails to keep his contract’ then he is a criminal,"
Manning insisted. "There are black belt planters who do starve,
mistre
at, abuse and beat men, and force them to break their
contract in order to get them arraigned before some demon in
white skin, but with a heart as black as hel itself; and another year
of servitude is at ached by a chain more gal ing than that of chat el
slavery to the ankle of the black man. The case of Pat erson is only
one in thousands, yes, in ten thousand….
"The Mayor of this town of Goodwater …would be
complimented in his own estimation no higher than to have it
writ en that any negro is no more worthy of human sympathy or
political consideration than is any mule, and of less kind treatment
than a good dog," Manning continued. "Here is the truth about the
South that some men of the North would ‘let alone.’ Here is the
South that should be permit ed to adopt its own course in set ling
the race problem!"32
Goodwater Mayor Dave White red back in defense of his town,
claiming that no black man or woman had ever been abused in his
court. "Unjust punishment of negroes is absolutely repulsive to me
and that no negro is imposed on when it is in my power to prevent
it," he wrote.
I defy any person to prove that any negro or white man has ever been
convicted in my court that was not guilty or that didn't have a fair trial, or
that received illegal or cruel punishment after they had been convicted.
And I am certain that I can truthfully state no negro has ever been worked
in slavery in the town of Goodwater since the day when slavery was
abolished in the sixties. It is a fact that numerous negroes have been tried
and convicted in Goodwater for stealing and have received a small ne
and a light punishment, when a white man under the same circumstances
would have been much more severely dealt with as a great allowance is
always made for the negro owing to his standing in life.33
Editors of the state's most prominent daily, the Montgomery
Advertiser, were apoplectic that Manning, an Alabama native, had
ut ered such heresy in the northern press. It cal ed Manning "rat le-
brained" and, reaching back to an archaic term for any creature that
turned against family doctrine and patriarchy, a "nest fouler."
The newspaper labeled his description of widespread slavery an
"outrageous exaggeration." The Advertiser also railed at Roosevelt's
promise at Lincoln's tomb of a "square deal" for African Americans,