Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  thirty black witnesses in a closely guarded boardinghouse in a black

  neighborhood of Montgomery. Not al came from Tal apoosa or

  Coosa counties. And many witnesses were reported to have

  appeared at the federal courthouse from counties other than those

  original y targeted in the investigation.

  The ten white men from Coosa and Tal apoosa counties who had

  been indicted up to that point were summoned to appear in court

  on June 22. Pace, Fletcher, and many of the others arrived by an

  evening train the previous day. Monday morning they led into

  Judge Jones's courtroom for a grueling, hours-long hearing. Soon,

  the corridors of the federal building were clogged with lawyers in

  dark, vested suits and the curious wandering in from the streets and

  the stone steps of the courthouse. Throughout the morning, U.S.

  At orney Reese came in and out of the courtroom, consulting

  repeatedly with the bat ery of prominent lawyers representing John

  Pace.

  Montgomery buzzed with speculation. Word rippled through the

  onlookers that al charges against Kennedy would be dropped once

  he testi ed in open court. By now Kennedy was a pariah among his

  longtime friends. His confessions to the grand jury, implicating at

  least a dozen other white men, had been widely reported.

  Meanwhile, word was spreading of let ers sent the previous day to

  every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

  every Montgomery newspaper by Fletcher Turner, insisting that al

  accusations against him were false—most especial y testimony that

  women had been murdered at the Turner farm. He speci cal y

  denied the claim that Sarah Oliver had been brutal y beaten to

  death at his place during the previous winter. Then came the day's

  most sensational story: Pace planned to plead guilty to the charges

  —and then chal enge the validity of the anti-peonage statute to a

  higher court.56

  The court formal y convened at noon, with U.S. Marshal L. J.

  Bryan cal ing the names of men to form petit juries to hear the

  evidence in the cases. A large crowd of spectators jammed the

  courtroom, craning their necks to catch a glimpse across the gal ery

  of the Tal apoosa farmers. Pace, Fletcher Turner and his son, the

  three Cosbys, and other defendants sat together on a bench near the

  front of the room. At the bar were the half dozen members of their

  defense team. The old guard of Alabama was ral ying to the men.

  Among the lawyers was Thomas L. Bulger—son of the Tal apoosa

  County Confederate war hero, and D. H. Riddle, the Goodwater

  at orney who had actual y participated in some of the fake trials

  held by his mayor.

  Later, the lawyers announced the defense of the Turners had been

  joined by Gen. George P. Harrison, a int-eyed lawyer with a jet

  black beard in the imperial style of the day. He too was a widely

  remembered former Confederate commander, best known for his

  central role as a newly appointed colonel in the bloody repulse of

  the Union army's most famous black regiment, the 54th

  Massachuset s Infantry, during the gruesome bat le for Fort Wagner

  in July 1863.

  Judge Jones ordered that the trial of Pace, the Cosbys, and John

  Kennedy—the newly cooperating witness—begin one week later on

  charges of peonage and related crimes. Fletcher Turner and his son,

  Al en, would stand trial beginning July 6. A few days later, the trial

  of Robert Franklin and Francis Pruit would begin, fol owed within

  a week by Jesse Berry and James Todd, two of the enforcers who

  helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

  helped violently hold slaves on the farms, quarry, and sawmil s.

  After forming two juries and giving them instructions from the

  bench, Judge Jones turned to the crowd, warning that any person

  who entered the court with a weapon would be "sent to the

  penitentiary" for contempt of court.

  Before the day ended, Reese announced that additional

  indictments had been issued against J. Wilburn Haralson, of

  Dadevil e, and John G. Dunbar, the former city marshal of

  Goodwater then serving as marshal in Columbus, Georgia. New

  charges were also announced against the Turners, for holding a

  black woman named Camil a Hammond. In total, the grand jury

  had issued ninety-nine indictments against a total of fteen

  defendants. Pace alone faced twenty-two counts.

  Lawyers for the defendants urged Judge Jones to delay the trial

  to give the farmers time to harvest their elds and to study the

  "peculiar" and unfamiliar charges they faced. Reese said the farmers

  had created the situation for themselves and that black witnesses

  were being held in Montgomery to protect them from intimidation

  before trial. "The government is not at liberty to give in detail the

  instances of this kind," Reese said. "But it can be said that

  intimidation both of witnesses and grand jurors have been going on

  in connection with these peonage cases."

  Judge Jones concluded that a speedy trial would not burden the

  defendants unfairly, and made clear that he feared ef orts to frighten

  the witnesses. "The court has nothing to conceal, gentlemen," Judge

  Jones said. "In a great many of these cases intimidation has been

  practiced. A witness has been taken from a train. I need not say

  more. These cases must be tried as early as possible consistent with

  proper opportunity to make defense."

  It was clear that black witnesses were in danger. For days, Reese

  had been gathering African Americans critical to the trial in

  Montgomery, housing thirty of them under federal guard in "negro

  boardinghouses." At one point in the proceedings, Secret Service

  agent Capt. Henry C. Dickey arrested two black schoolteachers who

  went to the boardinghouse posing as detectives sent by Judge

  Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

  Jones. They quizzed the black workers about what they were tel ing

  government agents, apparently to report back to Pace and the other

  whites.

  Before any of the trials began, federal o cials learned that

  Tal apoosa County had appointed a deputy marshal speci cal y "to

  keep an espionage on the negro witnesses of the government,"

  reported Montgomery newspapers.57

  Until the day of the arraignments, most of Alabama's political elite

  and the white general public had imagined that the slavery

  investigation was entirely the handiwork of the White House and its

  representative in Montgomery, U.S. At orney Reese. Judge Jones's

  directions to the grand jury a week earlier were startling, but his

  confusing equivocation after denouncing involuntary servitude left

  open the question of where Jones's true al egiances rested. Across

  the South, newspapers and politicians stil banked on the fact that

  he would uphold a wel -honed ritual of southern posturing in high-

  pro le court cases involving blacks: factitiously expressing the

  importance of legal rights for African Americans while

  simultaneously ensuring no harm to a white defenda
nt and

  aggressively curtailing redress to the black victim.

  "It turns out that the main mover in Alabama to break up what is

  cal ed the peonage system, whereby convicts are held to labor

  inde nitely by white men, who pay their penal nes and contract

  their labor in return, is Judge Thomas G. Jones, ex-governor of the

  state," wrote the Atlanta Constitution. "If there is anything criminal

  in the system, that criminality should be exposed and punished

  properly, and whatever of false hue and cry there is on the a air

  should be exposed." 58

  The Montgomery Advertiser continued to proclaim mock surprise

  at the discovery of forced labor in Alabama: "The character of

  o ense was peculiar and unknown in this country since the

  emancipation of the negroes. It was practical y and to al intents the

  enslavement of men for a period of time in violation of State and

  Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

  Federal law. There has been much brutality charged and a great

  deal of testimony given …few of …the people of Alabama …ever

  dreamed of such things as seem to have existed."59

  As the rst trial neared, however, it was clear that Judge Jones

  was deviating from the script. He appeared to be serious. The

  Advertiser, alarmed that a southern leader would join with a

  Republican president from New York to at ack southern whites

  who resubjugated blacks, poured forth with what had become the

  ascendant view of turn-of-the-century white southerners. "A

  sentiment that is now practical y unanimous throughout the

  Southern States … is that we, the white men of the South, propose

  to set le racial questions in our own way and in our own time. And

  we wil do it in the way best for both races," the newspaper

  editorialized.

  Several millions of ex-slaves, suddenly exalted to citizenship, was the

  heritage we received from the Federal government. As if the mere fact of

  their presence in changed conditions was not serious enough, they were

  endowed with all the political rights that any citizen of the Union

  possessed, and for which they were neither prepared nor tted. And then,

  to add to the bitterness of our degradation, and the hopelessness of the

  problem, our country was overrun with adventurers from the North, some

  of them good and well meaning men, but others as unprincipled

  scoundrels as ever scuttled a ship or robbed a safe. It was these and their

  kind who made the condition of the Southern people unbearable and

  revolt inevitable.

  Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but

  some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses

  that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies,

  many of whom were federal o cials, against whose acts our people were

  practically powerless. And one of the worst features of this saturnalia was

  that the ballot in the hands of ex-slaves was in almost every instance, both

  from their own ignorance and at the instigation of their carpet-bag allies,

  used to despoil, degrade and humiliate the real citizens of the almost

  helpless South.

  The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

  The Advertiser asserted that southern whites made a choice for

  which they should be applauded—declining to resume armed

  rebel ion against the federal government and instead only stripping

  African Americans of the right to vote and most other legal rights.

  That northerners would complain about this—and that some

  southerners agreed—was infuriating.

  What do we see? All over the North we nd public speakers and

  newspapers assailing our methods and our people and in every way, as

  words can do, inciting the colored people to resist, fomenting discord

  between the races and in many cases maligning and vilifying the Southern

  people for their course.

  Our people do resent the interference of Northern people in a matter

  with which they have no real concern, and we intend to continue

  resenting it. What is more, we intend to settle this race question in our

  own way and if the result is to have the country "rent again into factions

  hating each other" …we shall not feel that we of the South are the

  o ending party. We do not hate the North, but we will settle the race

  question.60

  Even in the North, there was consternation about the trials

  beginning in Alabama, and stirring up issues that northern whites

  increasingly agreed should be left to southern whites to handle. The

  Chicago Tribune opined that relations between the South and North

  had deteriorated to their worst state in more than a decade and

  pointed to the current message of former President Grover

  Cleveland and other leading northerners: "The South— the white

  and the black South—should be let alone to set le their problems in

  their own way," Cleveland said.

  Edgar Gardner Murphy, a moderate white Montgomery resident,

  insisted in let ers to northern newspapers that the Tal apoosa

  peonage cases did not indicate a massive level of continued black

  enslavement. In a let er to the New York Evening Post, Murphy

  wrote:

  The sentiment of the whole state has been unanimously insistent upon a

  thorough investigation of the charges and upon the rigorous punishment

  of the guilty…. An ignorant and lowly people settled in isolated regions

  where local courts and local constabularies are often ine cient and

  sometimes corrupt are always in danger of becoming the prey of brutality

  and greed. If it is hard for the best sentiment of New York to protect

  e ectively the poor immigrants of her great port from the avarice of

  thieves and "loan sharks," and it is di cult for your city to protect some

  of its young girls from the degrading barter of the "cadet."

  He argued that the peonage cases weren't the result of leaving the

  South alone to deal with race issues. Instead, the new rise of slavery

  was caused by "a persistent policy of intrusive censure and of

  political threatenings." He said the North placed undue "pressure

  upon Southern life, put ing the South ever on the defensive and

  partly neutralizing the forces of self-criticism and of local

  responsibility. Whatever evils may now exist at the South have not

  resulted from the policy of let ing the South alone."61

  But as each defendant stood perspiring before Judge Jones in the

  increasingly crowded courtroom, wearing his best black church suit,

  bolo tie, and clutching his hat, it became clear that whatever the

  judge's southern pedigree nothing would be sacrosanct in this

  proceeding.

  VI I

  A SUMMER OF TRIALS, 1903

  "The master treated the slave unmerciful y."

  Negotiations over Pace's plea to the charges against him continued

  for days. His at orneys initial y believed that Judge Jones—like

  any other white southern judge—would feel compel ed by

  tradition and public pressure to acknowledge the untested status of

  the peonage statute and o er a symbolic punishment to Pace in

 
exchange for a guilty plea. But Judge Jones showed no sign of

  doing so. Reese, the prosecutor, was insistent that Pace be

  meaningful y punished. Pace's lawyers were certain, regardless of

  the public brouhaha in the preceding weeks, that no Alabama jury

  would actual y convict a white man on such charges. They urged

  him to wait for trial.

  Meanwhile, the city was ablaze with anxiety. In the early evening

  of the day fol owing Pace's arraignment, a former U.S. marshal

  named Charles E. Taylor confronted Deputy U.S. Marshal Byron

  Trammel on the sidewalk beneath the white-columned portico of

  the elegant Exchange Hotel, where many of the at orneys and others

  involved with the peonage cases were staying. Trammel was

  assisting Reese in the investigation.

  The two men had long disliked each other, according to mutual

  acquaintances, and there was no record of the words exchanged

  when they faced o outside the front doors of the hotel. But within

  minutes, Taylor drew a pistol. Trammel responded in kind. Shots

  were fired. Taylor was soon dead.

  Stanley W. Finch, another Department of Justice investigator in

  Montgomery , was certain the shoot-out was brought on by the

  peonage cases. He wrote to his Washington bosses that federal

  agents in Alabama—feeling increasingly more like the interloping

  Freedmen's Bureau agents who scat ered across the South thirty

  years earlier—were encountering unprecedented hostility wherever

  years earlier—were encountering unprecedented hostility wherever

  they went.

  "The country throughout this district wherever [peonage] exists is

  pret y thoroughly aroused," Finch wrote. "The fact that a Secret

  Service agent is engaged on these cases is wel known and many

  have the impression that a number of secret service agents are

  scouring the country…. Any one traveling through the country

  engaged in an investigation on behalf of the government is liable to

  be mistaken for one of these detectives. In some localities the

  sentiment has reached such a pitch that it is considered unsafe for

  anyone known as or suspected as being a government detective to

  travel."

  Nonetheless, Finch reported that involuntary servitude was

  indeed widespread across the state. He succinctly summed up the

  economics of the new slavery. "It is by no means con ned to a few

  isolated communities. I have also been again and again informed by