Slavery by Another Name
Page 38
facedown, and lashed with a leather whip. Women prisoners were
held across a barrel and whipped on their bare bot oms.9
As the Alabama peonage prosecutions were get ing under way in
Montgomery, newspapers in Georgia published accusations of
extreme cruelty at Kinderlou. Embarrassed by the publicity, state
prison o cials withdrew their convicts stil held on the McRee
farm. The assistant U.S. at orney in Macon asked the Department of
Justice to send him the detective who had cracked the case against
John Pace. Agent Henry Dickey arrived by train and began
inquiring how Kinderlou plantation came to hold dozens of African
Americans against their wil . He soon discovered that the McRees
had arrangements with sheri s and other o cers in at least six
Georgia counties to seize blacks and sel them into labor—al
outside the regular processes of the criminal courts. When the
McRees learned a federal investigation was under way, they hastily
freed al of the remaining workers being held involuntarily on
Kinderlou. At least forty fled immediately10
James Robinson, the fourteen-year-old boy whose sister, Carrie
Kinsey had writ en President Roosevelt begging for his intercession
after James was captured and sold, was likely one of those al owed
to ee in the summer of 1903. Kinderlou was the farm where
Robinson was being held "in chanes" when Kinsey wrote the White
House, though o cials at the Department of Justice never
connected that her plea related to a farm then under investigation
by their agents.11
by their agents.
In November 1903, a grand jury handed up a sweeping
indictment against Edward McRee and his two brothers. The men
were charged with thirteen speci c counts of holding African
American men and women. Several of those enslaved had never
been charged or tried in any fashion. Several public o cials were
indicted for conspiring to buy and sel blacks arrested on trivial or
fabricated charges in nearby Ware County and then turning them
over to the McRees.
A day later, Edward McRee and his brothers appeared in a
Savannah courtroom. McRee assured Judge Speer that while his
family had held many African Americans in the four decades since
slavery's abolition, they never intended to enslave anyone or break
the law. "Though we are probably technical y guilty we did not
know it," McRee told the court. "This custom has been [in] existence
ever since the war…. We never knew that we were doing anything
wrong."
He insisted that no black workers were ever beaten or brutalized
—in part because no worker had ever refused to perform their
assigned duties. Hounds were never used to track runaways because
no one had ever wished to leave, he claimed.12
Whatever had happened at Kinderlou, Judge Speer was of like
mind with his counterpart in Montgomery. He was certain that
symbolic punishments like the ones he handed down to smal er-
scale farmers earlier that summer—designed to demonstrate the
il egality of slavery but not in ame the anger of local whites—were
the best remedy. The McRees were al owed to plead guilty and
accept a token fine of $1,000.
Sheri Thomas J. McClel an and another man who helped in the
capture and sale of African Americans to Kinderlou fought the
charges against them, arguing as the Turners had in Alabama that
no law speci cal y made slavery a federal crime. A member of the
U.S. Congress submit ed a legal brief in support of their arguments.
Prominent state o cials sat at the defendants’ table during a
hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators
hearing on the chal enge to their charges. Across Georgia, operators
of lumber camps—where thousands of other men were being held
under similarly dubious circumstances—watched the proceedings
closely. After reviewing the arguments, Judge Speer cited the words
of U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Mil er in the Slaughter-House
Cases, a landmark decision in 1873 establishing the distinction
between federal and state civil rights. "Undoubtedly, while negro
slavery alone was in the mind of the Congress which passed the
13th Article, it forbids any other kind of slavery, now or
hereafter."13
Speer overruled the defendants’ chal enges to the case. But once
again, in return for a guilty plea, the judge agreed to impose a
symbolic ne of $500. In the end, the only person jailed in
connection with nearly a half century of post-Civil War slavery on
the McRee plantation was a black man named George P. Hart. For
his role in sel ing a teenage girl to Frank McRee for $25, Hart spent
thirty days in jail.14
Back in Alabama, Warren Reese urged the Roosevelt administration
to mount an even more vigorous at ack on slaveholders. His o ce
reported to At orney General Knox in November that Julius
Sternfeld, the special assistant U.S. at orney assigned to the slavery
investigations, was pursuing more than forty cases in Co ee,
Geneva, Covington, Barbour, Dale, Pike, Houston, and Crenshaw
counties—al in the heavily black plantation areas of southern
Alabama. "The conditions in some of these counties are deplorable,
negroes are taken out at night time, stripped and whipped in a
most endish manner until the blood comes from them," Sternfeld
wrote to Washington. "Negro farm hands and mil workers have
been unmerciful y whipped, two negro churches destroyed by re,
the house of one negro being shot into and a negro woman's house
was riddled with shot, and while eeing with her baby in her arms
she and the baby were shot."
He vowed to ful l "the desire of President Roosevelt and the
Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary
Honorable At orney General to eradicate peonage and involuntary
servitude …and the real emancipation of hundreds of poor, helpless
creatures."15
Complaints of slavery streamed continual y into the Department
of Justice o ces in Washington, into the White House, and into
federal law enforcement o ces across Alabama and the South. Most
were al egations made by the rare quietly outraged at orney or local
Republican-appointed postmaster who, as representatives of the
party of Lincoln, stil felt some lingering political obligation to
African Americans or stil harbored hopes that blacks could again
become critical voters for the GOP. The rare rsthand accounts of
blacks held in slavery, many of them plaintive pleas furtively
scratched out in nearly indecipherable hands, were themselves
testaments to the ut er isolation and economic desperation of
mil ions of rural blacks.
In November 1903, Rev. L. R. Farmer, pastor of a black Baptist
church in Morganton, North Carolina, a verdant smal town in the
rol ing foothil s of the Appalachian Mountains, was on the verge of
despair. Farmer sent a dolorous let er to the Department of Justice.
His daughter had been stolen by white men and was being held in
slavery on a farm in Geo
rgia.
"i have a lit le girl that has been kidnapped from me …and i cant
get her out," Farmer wrote. "i want ask you is it law for people to
whip (col) people and keep them and not al ow them to leave
without a pass."16
Farmer had exhausted every remedy available to a black man
trapped in the isolation of the turn-of-the-century American South.
He had contacted local authorities about his daughter's abduction,
even going so far as to at empt to serve on her captors a writ of
habeas corpus. Al his ef orts were ignored.
"The people in Ga wont do any thing with him and if the negroes
tel any thing they wil beat them to death and they are afraid to
testi e against" the man holding his daughter and many others,
Farmer wrote. If any African Americans did talk of what was
happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to
happening, whites would "cary them write back and beat them to
death," he wrote. "some of them has beened kil ed trying to get
away from their and i got a lit le girl there," Farmer implored. A
postscript on the back of his let er was a tel ing indication of the
desperation and shat ered con dence he shared with mil ions of
blacks. Farmer pleaded for a swift answer from the government. He
enclosed a stamp for the return answer.
On November 20, after the let er's arrival at the new headquarters
of the Department of Justice, an aide to the at orney general
assigned a le number to Farmer's let er, 3098-1902. The fol owing
day, a terse, typewrit en response was mailed on behalf of the
at orney general. It concisely acknowledged receipt of the let er and
then issued a directive to Rev. Farmer:
If you wish this Department to take any action to have your daughter
released, and the guilty parties prosecuted, you should furnish me with the
names of the parties holding your daughter in bondage, the particular
place, and the names of witnesses by whom the facts can be proved.
Respectfully,
Attorney General
No reply from Farmer to the at orney general was led. No
further action was recorded by the Department of Justice.17
The tone of communications between o cials in Washington and
federal prosecutors around the South was beginning to drift.
Investigators and U.S. at orneys such as Reese believed that as they
uncovered more and more instances of ongoing slavery and
reported these horrors back to Washington, top federal o cials
would grow proportional y more alarmed— al ocating more
urgency and resources to defeat them. In fact, President Roosevelt
and his administration were growing weary of what increasingly
appeared to be a moral crusade without a clearly at ainable
resolution—a quagmire of unintended consequences. At rst
imperceptibly, then more clearly, as the al egations of slavery grew
more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in
more voluminous, caution and inertia overtook the White House in
equal proportions.
The violence of the white South grew yet more indignant. In
December 1903, as federal agents prowled adjoining areas of the
Alabama countryside, a backwater town in Wilcox County, cal ed
Pine Apple, was the scene of a singularly remarkable episode of
racial carnage.
Deep in Alabama's Black Belt region, Pine Apple embodied the
new paradigm of the rural, post-Reconstruction cot on economy.
Situated on a critical railroad connecting to Selma and the key
Gulf Coast port of Pensacola, Florida, Pine Apple boasted a
handsome col ection of genteel homes and an impressive array of
enterprises centered on the train station and its wide-planked
loading docks. An imposing bank building was the center of
commerce for the area's landed white gentry, whose children
at ended a distinguished private school cal ed Moore Academy. Its
founder and rst principal in the 1880s, John Trotwood Moore,
went on to modest literary renown in the South. Scat ered around
the bank stood a red livery stable, a few dry goods stores with wide
windows facing the muddy streets, hitching rails tied with mules,
and a water trough served by a pump. Outside the stores, an
assortment of horse- and mule-drawn gigs, wagons, and canvas-
topped buggies stood at the wait. Near the station, warehouses, a
cot on gin, and a compress were surrounded by bales upon bales of
the just completed harvest. Smoke belched from the gin as the teeth
of its machinery threshed through the last cot on of the season,
separating ber and seed. In the compress, thousands of wagons of
white lint were pressed into bales for shipment. Between the big
houses and the town's center, wood-frame cot ages were wedged
onto newly delineated lots. Along the pit ed roads fanning out into
the denuded countryside, smal clusters of log cabins, rough hewn
from nearby forest and chinked with sticky red clay, housed black
families bound to the land owned by whites.
Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the
Dozens of plantations radiated across the at landscape from the
Louisvil e & Nashvil e Railway line cut ing due south on a
perpendicular through Pine Apple and across the Black Belt. More
than 35,000 people— the great majority of them black farm
laborers at work on land owned by whites—lived here.
Unprecedented numbers of white families made wealthy by the
turn-of-the-century cot on boom had emerged as a new class of
manor-born aristocrats—consolidating land, intermarrying, and
vying for prestige in the resurgent southern planter elite. Their
towns were strung along the railroad lines through plantation
country like antique pearls of white-columned antebel um
nostalgia. The harvest season had been a euphoric one, the most
bountiful in ve years, exceeding 11 mil ion bales of cot on in the
South.18 Across Pine Apple wisps of white ber—the detritus of the
massive harvest—clung to tree branches, windowsil s, and clumps
of grass.
No family in Pine Apple was more prominent among the
nouveaux riches than the Meltons. As the end of 1903 approached,
the family anxiously prepared for a crowning wedding—the union
of the most glamorous young couple in the adjoining counties and
of two great new families. Lovely Leila Melton, the twenty-two-
year-old daughter of Wil iam and Clara Melton, was set to marry
Claud Swink, a year her senior and a promising young planter in
Dal as County. The Melton clan had long been governed by three
brothers—Wil iam, Evander, and John—whose expansive families
control ed thousands of acres of property near Pine Apple. Swink
was the only child of a similarly successful cot on barony, large and
prosperous enough that the set lement at the crossroads nearest the
family plantation had come to be known as Swinkvil e.
The union of the two young people was momentous as wel as a
distraction for family members stil grieving the death of the family
patriarch, Leila's father, Wil iam Melton. More than four years after<
br />
he succumbed on July 4, 1900, the legacy of the fty-four-year-old
plantation master stil loomed over Pine Apple, his brothers, Clara,
and his eleven grown children. Even in death, he would be present
for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a
for Leila's wedding, gazing out from an alabaster monument on a
pedestal above his grave on the hil top across the road from the
church.
Melton intended to be remembered in precise detail. His statuary
captured in crisp relief the distinct planter's regalia: a neat fedora
on his brow and a long overcoat reaching past his knees, a trim
bow tie above the vest, a heavy watch chain across a protruding
midri , an intricately decorated walking stick in his right hand, a
bulging Masonic ring on his left—totemic emblems of the wealth
and power he had extended over the family's cot on empire.
Leila's wedding also was similarly designed as an expression of
the family's extraordinary position in southern life. The ceremony
could not have been more removed from the spare a air in which
the ex-slaves of the Cot-tingham plantation set Henry and Mary on
their way a generation earlier. As the December 29 date
approached, the sanctuary of Pine Apple's Friendship Baptist
Church was decorated in an opulent display of wealth. Arches of
smilax and pink and white chrysanthemums were erected before
the altar. Above the center arch, a stu ed dove held loops of white
tul e. Along the aisle, pil ars held a candle for each year of the
bride's age.
Leila's mother busily completed the stitching and embroidery on
a stunning gown of white peau de cygne silk and duchess lace
ordered from France. The bride's second-eldest brother, Henry, was
to give her away in an elaborate ceremony of eighteen at endants,
including male and female cousins, two nieces as ower girls,
nephews as ring bearers, and Leila's brother nearest in age, Tom, as
the best man. Unbeknownst to her daughter —or the groom-to-be—
Clara Melton planned to give the couple an extraordinary gift:
$1,250 in gold with which to begin their life together.19
The lavish plans belied the cold brutality on which the wealth of
the Melton clan rested. However burnished was the Meltons’ new
patina of sophistication, the family was infamous in the area for
brutal subjection of black workers and intimidation of neighbors,