to formulate a plan for removing African Americans from the city.
Independence Day 1903 stirred extraordinary black and white
hostility. In the tiny South Carolina town of Norway, a white
farmer's son severely beat four black workers. In retaliation, the
father, a one-armed Confederate veteran, was gunned down at his
dinner table with a shotgun blast through a window. Local whites
seized a black man in retaliation and lynched him. In response,
more than two hundred armed blacks surrounded the town on July
4, threatening to burn it to the ground. The state's governor
dispatched the South Carolina militia to counterat ack.22
In Evansvil e, Indiana, crowds of blacks and whites bat led on
July 5 over the fate of a black man accused of kil ing a white police
o cer. Whites successful y broke into the city jail, but were driven
back by armed blacks. Police charged in to disperse the crowds and
spirit away the accused man.
On the same day, a mob of six hundred whites went in search of
a black woman in Peoria, Il inois, who was accused of having
beaten a white boy. After discovering that the woman already was
in jail, the crowd at acked her home, dismantling it to the
foundation and throwing al her furniture and belongings into the
Il inois River. In Thomasvil e, Georgia, a street argument between a
black man and his wife accelerated into a running gun ght between
a white posse and crowds of African Americans.23
The New York Times opined in mid-July 1903 that "respectable
negroes" should ban the city's bad ones. "There are in New York
thousands of ut erly worthless negro desperadoes," the Times wrote,
"gamblers when they have money and thieves when they have none,
moral lepers and more dangerous than wild animals." The
newspaper fol owed up later in the month with hysterical coverage
of racial disturbances in the city. "Negroes At ack Police" blared a
headline over an account of a ght that broke out on West 62nd
Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man
Street after an Irish policeman shoved a "disrespectful" black man
on a sidewalk.24
Infuriated by the setbacks su ered by blacks in al regions of the
country, W. E. B. DuBois, the rising young sociologist—the rst
African American Ph.D. graduated by Harvard—wrote that the
South "is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk." The
emancipation act that had ended the Civil War had transmogri ed
into "a race feud," he said. "Not a single Southern legislature stood
ready to admit a Negro under any conditions, to the pol s; not a
single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible
without a system of restrictions that took al its freedoms away;
there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly
regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nul i cation as a
duty"25
X
THE DISAPPROBATION OF GOD
"It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes."
Warren Reese refused to believe the white South was
irredeemably lost. He insisted, despite the mushrooming
resistance to his work, that justice stil could be served in
Alabama.
Judge Jones remained embarrassed and distressed at the mistrial
in the case of Fletcher Turner. He had been convinced that twelve
white men in Montgomery could put aside racial animosity long
enough to see the obvious guilt of a man such as Turner—even if
the jurors did so only to preserve the honor of their home state. At
the conclusion of the brief trial of Robert Franklin during the week
after Turner's guilty plea, Jones once again signaled to the jury the
defendant's guilt as he assailed Alabama's system of lower courts.
"The counsel of defendant spoke of the negro as a ‘so-cal ed citizen,’
" Jones told the court incredulously. "A man is a citizen whether he
can vote or not, and nobody loves a Government that would not
protect him." He decried Alabama's provincial sheri s and judges
who "have reestablished slavery for debt in this state."1
Much to the relief of Jones and Reese, the jury agreed. Franklin
was convicted of a single count of peonage. Final y, a southern jury
had been wil ing to honestly adjudge the actions of a white man,
nding obvious involuntary servitude to be what it truly was:
slavery.
Reese was privately adamant that his o ce would soon bring
another vol ey of slavery charges from elsewhere in the state. But
Jones was ready to declare victory. The enormous public pressure
in Montgomery to end the probe was wearing on him. Jones
declared publicly that the "peonage ring was nearly al broken up."
Alabama had been taught its lesson, Judge Jones hoped, and further
consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so
consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so
brazenly seized John Davis, was ordered to pay $1,000. Word
spread quickly among the at orneys representing other defendants
that the court would deal just as leniently with those awaiting trial.
Within a few days, John Pace's son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, and
guard James H. Todd pleaded guilty to ve counts of peonage.
Judge Jones ned each man $1,000. They were taken back to the
Dadevil e city jail, to remain there until the penalty was paid.2 But
both men ignored the nes and were soon set free. Before the
summer term of court was over, another half dozen men pleaded
guilty and received from Jones symbolic nes. When court
reconvened in the fal of 1903, the rest of the defendants did the
same. Every major gure admit ed guilt. That was enough for
Jones.
Anxious to show that Tal apoosa County was no longer a center
of antebel um criminality and repair its reputation, a local grand
jury was impaneled in Dadevil e to examine questions of slavery
and peonage in early August. Two weeks later, in a nal report, the
panel of local men concluded that John Pace had been responsible
for virtual y al of the peonage in the area. It remonstrated Pace for
having "kept East Wilson, a negro woman who is serving a twelve
months sentence for larceny at his farm, out of the way, so that the
Sheri could not serve on her a subpoena to appear before this
Grand Jury….
"We suspect that he has kept other witnesses out of the way so
that they could not be served," the report continued. "It is our
opinion, that John W Pace and his convict farm are more
responsible, by far, than al others in our county for the abuse of
ignorant and helpless people, which is the crime known as peonage
in the Federal Court. This evil is practiced by very few in our
County, to the detriment of al , should be discontinued in our
County forever."3
Meanwhile, local residents were ral ying around the Cosby
family. George and Burancas had begun their sentences in the
Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained
Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained
that it was unfair for the t
wo men to be imprisoned when every
other participant in the slaving scheme received symbolic
punishment. More than three thousand names were a xed to a
petition seeking a pardon from President Roosevelt. Soon, even
Judge Jones supported the Cosby plea for clemency,4 5 directly
urging the president to free the two men. On September 16, 1903,
he did so. Almost as if the testimony of kidnappings, murders,
whippings, and enslavement had never been heard, the Cosbys
returned to their Red Ridge Road farm.
John Pace, the leader of the slavery ring, quietly restarted his
trade in black labor. As 1903 closed, the Alabama Board of
Inspectors of Convicts— the state entity charged with overseeing the
state's penal systems—was chagrined to discover that the county
commissioners of Tal apoosa County had renewed Pace's contract to
lease al county convicts.
As much as Judge Jones—and the more brazen apologists for
slavery across the South—had hoped the Alabama cases represented
the end of the a air, di cult realities continued to intrude. The fal
of 1903 brought new indictments in Louisiana for holding slaves,
but residents were so outraged that the marshal investigating the
cases had to ee the state for his safety. Newspapers across the
North published accounts of additional involuntary servitude in
Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.6
The U.S. at orney in Mobile, Alabama, who had initiated his own
inquiries into slavery in the southern part of the state, reported
"credible reports" of peonage across his territory and in multiple
counties. But investigating the al egations and questioning terri ed
witnesses was proving di cult. "Many of them are unwil ing to
communicate anything …unless assured that it would be
con dential," wrote M. D. Wickersham to his superiors at the
Department of Justice. "Persons manifested such terror when
requested to disclose what they knew that it is doubtful if they can
be persuaded to give any valuable testimony either in the grand
jury room or before the court."7
jury room or before the court."
As in so many other places, the federal marshals in the eld
discovered that the o cial systems of leasing black convicts to
private companies and individuals had become indistinguishable
from the casual slavery ourishing on private farms. If the former
was legal, few southerners—white or black—understood why the
lat er would not be. "So many il iterate persons have confounded
the harsh, and at many times cruel, execution of the convict laws of
the state with the practice of peonage that it has been very di cult
to make them understand the line that distinguishes the one from
the other, " Wickersham wrote.
In late November, a grand jury in Macon began hearing testimony
that Georgia state representative Edward McRee, his brothers Frank
and Wil iam, two former sheri s, and other members of some of
the most powerful families in south Georgia were operating a vast
slave-driven enterprise at their 22,000-acre Kinderlou plantation
near the Florida state line.
The McRee brothers’ farm was a plantation and industrial center
that dwarfed that of John Pace—operating on a scale no antebel um
slave owner could have comprehended. Edward McRee became a
powerful elected o cial serving in the state legislature. By 1900,
the four siblings who inherited the enterprise from their empire-
building father, a noted Confederate o cer named George McRee,
each lived in a lavish mansion within a square mile of the center of
the plantation. Between them a bustling vil age— cal ed Kinderlou
in honor of the Aunt Lou who raised the four brothers from
childhood after the death of their mother—thrived with farm
laborers, tradesmen, and several smal stores. Consuming the bulk
of an entire county, the farm—basking in the subtropical warmth of
the Gulf Coast— included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy
loam under til at any given time. On a private spur of the Atlantic
Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens
of boxcars waited at al times for the hundreds of thousands of
bushels of tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and
cot on. The McRees owned their own cot on gins, compresses to
make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A
make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A
ve-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation's sugarcane to
make syrup. Five eighty-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco.
Cuban workers were imported to work the plantation's cigar
factory.
Thousands more acres of dense pine and hardwood fed a
ceaselessly turning sawmil , planing mil , and dry kiln. A factory on
the plantation produced thousands of pal ets, wooden crates, and
baskets for shipping agricultural produce. Deep in the forests,
McRee turpentine camps col ected rosin for their naval stores
distil ery. Three to four trains stopped daily, beginning with one at
3:30 A.M. to pick up dozens of three-foot-high barrels of milk
produced in the Kinderlou dairy8
The backbone of the plantation was smal armies of farmhands
and hundreds of mules, who were awakened by the rst bel at 4
A.M. each day and remained in the elds or factories until dark.
From "can't see to can't see," as the laborers cal ed it.
Initial y, the McRees hired only free black labor, but beginning in
the 1890s, they routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from
the state of Georgia to perform the grueling work of clearing lands,
removing stumps, ditching elds, and constructing roads. Other
prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over fteen years,
thousands of men and women were forced to the plantation and
held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. After the turn
of the century, the brothers began to arrange for more forced
laborers through the sheri s of nearby counties—fueling what
eventual y grew into a sprawling tra c in humans across the
southwestern section of Georgia.
"So I was carried back to the Captain's," said a black laborer in
1904, tel ing of his imprisonment on what was almost certainly the
McRee plantation. "That night he made me strip o my clothing
down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered
his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my
bare back, and stood by until it was done."
bare back, and stood by until it was done."
The worker vividly described to a passing journalist how the
farm descended from a place of free employment in the late
nineteenth century to one of abject slavery by the rst years of the
twentieth century. The unidenti ed man was born in the last years
before the Civil War, and then hired out at age ten to the father of
the McRee brothers, a man he knew simply as "Captain." While a
teenager, the black man at empted to leave Kinderlou and work at
another plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure,
one of the McRees and "some kind of law o cer" tracked him
down. The new employer apologized to McRee for hiring the young
worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known "this
nigger was bound out to you."
Soon afterward, one of the Captain's sons, likely Edward McRee,
took over the farm and convinced the free laborers to put their
mark on what was ostensibly a contract to work on the plantation
for up to ten years, in exchange for pay, a cabin, and some supplies.
Then McRee began building a stockade, with a long hal way down
the center and rows of crude stal s— each with two bunk beds and
mat resses—on each side. "One bright day in April …about forty
able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them
handcu ed were brought," the laborer recounted. Word came that
any African American, whether free or convict, who at empted to
leave the farm would be tracked down with hounds and forced
back. The contracts they had signed contained the same language
that John Pace forced men to accept, al owing the McRees to hold
the workers against their wil and beat them if they were
disobedient. "We had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could
we do about it?" the black man asked. "The white folks had al the
courts, al the guns, al the hounds, al the railroads, al the
telegraph wires, al the newspapers, al the money, and nearly al
the land."
When his labor contract final y expired after a decade, the laborer
was told he was free to leave Kinderlou, so long as he could pay his
accumulated debt at the plantation commissary of $165. Unable to
do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to
do so, the man was compel ed to sign a new contract promising to
work on the farm until the debt was paid, but now as a convict. He
and several others were moved from their crude cabin into the
lthy stockades. The men slept each night in the same clothes they
wore in the elds, on rot ing mat resses infested with pests. Many
were chained to their beds. Food was crude and minimal.
Punishment for the disobedient was to be strapped onto a log lying
on their backs, while a guard spanked their bare feet with a plank
of wood. When the slave was freed, if he could not return to work
on his blistered feet, he was strapped to the log again, this time
Slavery by Another Name Page 37
