Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  from Alabama's leading slave driver, John T Milner.

  English parlayed his industrial wealth to become one of the

  South's most important nanciers as wel . In 1896, he founded

  Atlanta's Fourth National Bank and became its rst president. Early

  in the next century, after a series of mergers, it became First

  National Bank of Atlanta, one of the largest nancial institutions in

  the South.9

  Before the legislative commission in 1908, former employees of

  Chattahoochee Brick testi ed that the factory on the outskirts of

  Atlanta was a place of even greater physical coercion and indignity

  than the coal mine where Abe Wynne was kil ed. By the rst years

  of the twentieth century English had turned over daily management

  of the business to his son, Harry who later would take over

  operations and build a landmark home on Atlanta's elegant Paces

  Ferry Road, directly across from the governor's mansion.

  English strenuously denied to the commit ee that any "act of

  cruelty" had ever been "commit ed upon a convict" under the

  control of himself or any member of his family. He insisted that he

  and his son were essential y absentee owners of the brick factory,

  and his son were essential y absentee owners of the brick factory,

  having lit le to do with its daily operations. "I have not been there

  in over three years," English maintained. His son visited no more

  than once or twice a month, he said—despite company records

  showing close family management.

  The former mayor claimed he ordered the superintendent of

  operations to make certain workers "were wel fed, wel shod, wel

  clothed, and wel cared for….

  "If a warden in charge of those convicts ever commit ed an act of

  cruelty to them," English said indignantly, "and it had come to my

  knowledge, I would have had him indicted and prosecuted." Yet his

  testimony a rmed how Chat ahoochee Brick—like so many

  southern industries in which the new slavery ourished—forced

  laborers to their absolute physical limits to extract modern levels of

  production from archaic manufacturing techniques of a distant era.

  The plant used a brick-making process lit le changed from

  seventeenth-century Europe. Nearly two hundred men sold by the

  state of Georgia, the local county, and the city of Atlanta—virtual y

  al of them black—labored at the complex of buildings, giant ovens,

  and smokestacks nine miles from the city and a short distance from

  the Chat ahoochee River. Thousands of acres of cot on and

  vegetable fields owned by the company surrounded the plant.

  Gangs of prisoners sold from the pestilential city stockade on

  Bryan Street dug wet clay with shovels and picks in nearby

  riverbank pits for transport back to the plant. There, a squad of

  men pushed clay that had been cured in the open air into tens of

  thousands of rectangular molds. Once dried, the bricks were carried

  at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and

  forth—under almost continual lashing by English's overseer, Capt.

  James T. Casey—to move the bricks to one of nearly a dozen huge

  coal- red kilns, also cal ed "clamps." At each kiln, one worker stood

  atop a barrel, in the withering heat radiating from the res,

  furiously tossing the bricks into the top of the ten-foot-high oven.

  After being baked for a week or more, the ful y hardened bricks

  were loaded, stil hot, in groups of eight or ten onto crude wooden

  pal ets tied to the necks and backs of young black men. The

  pal ets tied to the necks and backs of young black men. The

  laborers ran—also carrying two more hot bricks in each hand—

  across the yard and up a narrow plank to train cars waiting on an

  adjacent railroad spur and stacked the new bricks for delivery.

  Witnesses testi ed that guards holding long horse whips struck any

  worker who slowed to a walk or paused. By the end of every day,

  200,000 or more new bricks were loaded on the railcars.

  English obviously had grown rich in his years in Atlanta, but few

  people realized quite how lucrative the slave labor business

  became. The prisoners of the brickyard produced nearly 33 mil ion

  bricks in twelve months ending in May 1907, generating sales of

  $239,402—or roughly $5.2 mil ion today. Of that, the English

  family pocketed the equivalent of nearly $1.9 mil ion in pro t—an

  almost unimaginable sum at the time.1011

  A string of witnesses told the legislative commit ee that prisoners

  at the plant were forced to work under unbearable circumstances,

  fed rot ing and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects,

  driven with whips into the hot est and most intolerable areas of the

  plant, and continual y required to work at a constant run in the

  heat of the ovens. The plant was so hot that guards didn't carry guns

  for fear their cartridges might spontaneously detonate. One former

  guard told the commit ee that two hundred to three hundred

  oggings were administered each month. "They were whipping al

  the time. It would be hard to tel how many whippings they did a

  day," testi ed Arthur W. Moore, a white ex-employee of the

  company. Another former guard said Captain Casey was a

  "barbarous" whipping boss who beat fteen to twenty convicts each

  day, often until they begged and screamed. "You can hear that any

  time you go out there. When you get within a quarter of a mile you

  wil hear them," testified Ed Strickland. 11

  A rare former convict who was white testi ed that after a black

  prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work due to a grossly

  infected hand, the camp doctor carved o the a ected skin tissue

  with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work. Instead,

  Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, col apsed after the

  procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard.

  procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard.

  "They taken the old negro out and told him to take his britches

  down, he took them down and they made him get on his al fours,"

  testi ed the former prisoner, J. A. Cochran. "I could see that he was

  a mighty sick man to be whipped. He hit him twenty-five licks."

  When Harris couldn't stand up after the whipping, he was thrown

  "in the wagon like they would a dead hog," continued Cochran, and

  taken to a nearby eld. Stil unable to get on his feet, another guard

  named Redman came over and began shouting. "Get up from there

  and get to work. If you ain't dead I wil make you dead if you don't

  go to work," Redman said. "Get up from there you damn negro. I

  know what's the mat er with you, you damn negro, you want to run

  away." Harris never stood. He died lying between the rows of

  cot on.12

  Another black laborer drew the wrath of Captain Casey when he

  said he couldn't complete his assigned task of tossing 100,000

  bricks to the top of a kiln. Sweating so profusely in the heat that

  the barrel beneath and the ground al around were drenched, the

  man said he was about to col apse. "God damn your soul," shouted

  Captain Casey, according to witnesse
s. "I wil murder you if you

  don't do that work."

  Then the overseer told the man to climb down, whipped him

  with a leather belt at ached to a wooden handle, and ordered him

  back to work. Incensed at the pace the brick thrower was working,

  Casey ordered two other black laborers to hold him across a barrel

  and began whipping again. Lash upon lash fel across his back and

  but ocks. Final y the unnamed man was released. "The negro

  staggered o to one side and fel across a lumber pile there, and

  laid there for a while," testi ed one witness. Soon he was dead. The

  camp doctor declared the cause of death to have been drinking too

  much water before going to work at the kiln.13

  On Sundays, white men came to the Chat ahoochee brickyard to

  buy, sel , and trade black men as they had livestock and, a

  generation earlier, slaves on the block. "They had them stood up in

  a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

  a row and walked around them and judged of them like you would

  a mule," Cochran said. "They would look at a man in the row and

  say, ‘Trot him around and let me see him move.’ They would come

  to one fel ow and they say ‘there is a god damn good one.’ …They

  would make such remarks as, ‘There is a man worth two hundred

  and fifty dol ars. There is one worth two hundred.’ "

  A similar picture emerged in the investigation around slave camps

  and coal mines owned by Joel Hurt, the rich Atlanta real estate

  developer and investor most remembered in Atlanta as the

  visionary behind the city's earliest and most elegant subdivisions.

  Virtual y every white person of any social signi cance lived in one

  or the other of Hurt's signature developments—the High Victorian

  Inman Park or Druid Hil s, an area of wide promenades and lush

  parks designed at his behest by the rm of Frederick Law Olmsted.

  Hurt was also the founder of Atlanta's Trust Company Bank—the

  city's other preeminent nancial institution, the streetcar operator

  that became Georgia's rst electric power company, and an early

  investor in concerns that would become some of the most iconic

  companies in the South. His namesake building near the Five Points

  business center dominated the early Atlanta skyline at seventeen

  stories—making it one of the tal est structures of the early twentieth

  century.

  In 1895, Hurt bought a group of bankrupt forced labor mines and

  furnaces on Lookout Mountain, near the Tennessee state line. The

  mines were previously owned by former Georgia governor Joseph

  E. Brown, who enthusiastical y led the secessionist movement in

  Georgia prior to 1861, governed the state during the Civil War

  years, and afterward remained a staunch defender of antebel um

  slavery.

  The most powerful politician in Georgia from the 1860s until his

  death in 1894, Brown, stil contemptuous of the Emancipation

  Proclamation, l ed his mines with scores of black men forced into

  the shafts against their wil . A legislative commit ee visiting the sites

  the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

  the same year Hurt bought them said the prisoners were "in the

  very worst condition …actual y being starved and have not

  su cient clothing …treated with great cruelty." Of particular note

  to the visiting o cials was that the mine claimed to have replaced

  whipping with the water cure torture—in which water was poured

  into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners—because it al owed miners

  to "go to work right away" after punishment.14

  Cal ed to testify before the commission at the Georgia capitol in

  1908, Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic

  for any aspect of the sprawling business he'd taken over from

  Brown and aggressively expanded through the traf ic of forced black

  laborers.

  After acquiring Brown's mines, Hurt ramped up production, in

  part to ful l contracts to sel coal to Tennessee Coal, Iron &

  Railroad in Birmingham—which couldn't get enough fuel and ore

  from its own slave mines to keep furnaces burning at ful operation.

  Hurt already had 125 convicts in his largest slave mine. He bought

  one of English's mines to acquire fty men held there, and then set

  out to obtain even more forced laborers from other work camps

  around the state.

  Hurt's gentle appearance in the witness chair—wavy black hair

  slicked to his scalp and a soft shaven face that de ed the day's

  convention for thick mustaches—was an almost obscene contrast to

  the account of slave trading he quietly of ered the commit ee.

  Needing more laborers in 1904, Hurt, who identi ed his

  profession as "capitalist," said he turned to a man who was "trading

  in" the sale and resale of leases on convicts. Soon, he was put in

  touch with J. W. Cal ahan, who held thirty-nine black and two

  white men on a turpentine farm in the deep woods of south

  Georgia. Hurt wrote him on Christmas Eve asking if the men could

  be purchased. "If you wil name the lowest price at which you are

  wil ing to dispose of them, we may be able to come to an

  agreement," Hurt wrote. "In making a price, state whether the men

  are average able-bodied; how many of them are white, if any;

  whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

  whether any of them are maimed or crippled, or in any way

  disabled…. Yours very truly, Joel Hurt."15

  Over the next week, amid the yuletide and New Year

  celebrations, Hurt and Cal ahan furiously traded let ers and

  telegrams negotiating an arrangement for fty black men. Cal ahan

  rst demanded an up-front fee of $200 per worker—or a total of

  $10,000—fol owed by monthly payments totaling $200 a year for

  each man. The price of slave labor had changed lit le in fifty years.

  Hurt countero ered an $8,000 up-front fee, and urgently wired

  his thirty-one-year-old son, George, managing the company's iron

  furnace on Lookout Mountain, that the men had been obtained.

  Before the deal could be consummated, though, Cal ahan was

  contacted by another bidder. On January 6, 1905, he sold the men

  to the competitor in an al -cash transaction.16 An infuriated Hurt

  continued to wheel and deal in the byzantine web of Georgia's slave

  tra c—threatening lawsuits against Cal ahan when he failed to

  deliver laborers on time and giving cash to state wardens who

  demanded payo s to facilitate the movement of laborers from one

  location to another. "We wil hold you for al damages which we

  may sustain if you fail or refuse to deliver the convicts," Hurt wrote

  Cal ahan in early 1905.17

  The re ned Atlanta businessman was nonchalant when the

  legislators asked about execrable descriptions of his camps, blaming

  any excesses on lax guards and wardens who—despite the payo s

  made by his companies— he said refused to work the prisoners

  hard enough.

  "They would stand up and let a convict run away from them and

  be afraid to shoot at him, and the only way to get a warden that

  was any account was to pay him extra money,"
Hurt testi ed.

  "When a convict starts to escape he ought to shoot, he ought to stop

  him or run him down and catch him."18

  Another witness before the commission—former chief warden

  Jake Moore—testi ed that no prison guard could ever "do enough

  whipping for Mr. Hurt."

  "He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

  "He wanted men whipped for singing and laughing," Moore told

  the panel.19

  When the commission cal ed Hurt's son George to testify, the

  younger Hurt said convicts in his coal mines had been punished too

  lit le—not too much. Asked to cite an occasion when a warden

  refused to punish a prisoner who should have been, Hurt said: "That

  would be like numbering the sands of the seashore."20

  "Do you remember what you wanted them whipped for?"

  responded a commissioner.

  "For the lack of work," the younger Hurt replied.

  "What was the task you required of them?"

  "From two to six tons," said Hurt.

  Asked why men had been forced to work in the mines into the

  night, violating prison rules that convicts should labor only from

  sunup to sundown, Hurt mocked the question: "Yes sir, but they are

  under the ground and it's rather hard for the warden to tel exactly

  when the sun is up or down."

  Hurt was also sarcastical y dismissive of charges that arose from

  the death of a black convict named Liddel , explaining that the man

  died not because of a whipping he received but because of "the

  bursting of a blood vessel while the convict was struggling against a

  whipping."

  Hurt said Liddel was a huge man, weighing nearly three hundred

  pounds, who refused to enter the mines. A guard chained Liddel to

  a tree in the same yard where the boy named Wynne had been

  beaten to death, and forced him to sit for hours exposed to the

  bright sun. Later, the guard ordered Liddel to lie down for a

  whipping. When he refused, four men held Liddel while the guard

  whipped him with a leather strap. Liddel began "growing purple

  under the eyes," and later died, Hurt testi ed. He added that the

  blood vessel most likely burst because "the man was guilty of

  commit ing masturbation to such an extent that his mind had

  become af ected."

  Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was

  Hurt said he witnessed another occasion when the warden was