Slavery by Another Name

by Douglas A. Blackmon

  struggling to deal with a "powerful negro …who had been

  insubordinate ever since" arriving at the mine. To force the prisoner

  to begin digging, a guard told another black convict, named Jim

  Blevens, to at ack him. The two African American men, both forced

  against their wil s into the coal mine camp, now stood in the prison

  yard facing each other like gladiators, holding mining picks in their

  hands. The face-o lasted only seconds. The "insubordinate" man

  lunged forward, swinging his pick wildly. The smal er man stepped

  aside to dodge the at ack and then swung his own tool in a high

  downward arc. The long blade of the pick descended onto the other

  man's head—piercing his jaw, throat, and chest. The wounded

  prisoner fel to the ground, Hurt testi ed, and Blevens "then put his

  foot on the negro's head and pul ed his pick out." The injured man

  died from the wound.21

  As the legislative inquiry progressed into August 1908, the sordid

  stories of il ness and mayhem—coupled with even more

  voluminous accounts of corruption and payo s—stirred an

  outpouring of public condemnation. Atlanta's leading pastor, Dr.

  James W Lee, sermonized at Trinity Church that the convict leasing

  system was a "disgrace" to the state. His and other churches passed

  resolutions cal ing on the legislature to abolish the practice

  entirely22

  A technological y more advanced competitor in the brick-making

  business—a young engineer named B. Mi in Hood—began

  advertising "Non-Convict Bricks" in the Atlanta Constitution. The

  city council—which previously bought mil ions of the former

  mayor's hard red rectangles to pave hundreds of blocks of sidewalks

  —voted to bar the purchase of any goods made by convicts.

  Final y a crowd of more than two thousand people gathered for a

  mass meeting in Atlanta's Grand Opera House—the same forum

  where The Clansman had drawn sel -out crowds two years earlier.

  Presided over by the state's sit ing governor, Hoke Smith, the

  gathering listened to a series of speeches condemning the lease

  system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

  system and then voted overwhelmingly to support a cal for its

  abolition. Similar public meetings in the town of Rome and

  elsewhere across Georgia on the same day produced the same

  result. Newspaper editorials chimed in agreement—though most

  said the prisoners should be taken out of private hands and put to

  work improving the state's desperately inferior roads.23

  Spurred by the public outcry, Governor Smith cal ed a special

  session of the state legislature, which authorized a public

  referendum on the fate of the system. In October 1908, Georgia's

  nearly al -white electorate voted by a two-to-one margin to abolish

  the system as of March 1909. Without slave labor, business

  col apsed at Chat ahoochee Brick. Production fel by nearly 50

  percent in the next year. Sales—of nineteen mil ion bricks—

  dropped to less than half of 1907. Total pro t dwindled to less

  than $13,000.24

  The apparent demise of Georgia's system of leasing prisoners

  seemed a harbinger of a new day—especial y coming just two years

  after Atlanta's bloody race riot. Social progressives applauded the

  abolition of state-sponsored forced labor as a sign of racial

  moderation. Several states had already taken the momentous step

  before Georgia. Tennessee eliminated the sale of men into its coal

  mines in 1893. South Carolina moved to end the state government's

  direct involvement in sel ing prisoners by the turn of the century.

  Louisiana banned the leasing of state prisoners in 1901—spurred by

  a political rivalry between the biggest buyer of men in the state and

  elected leaders in control of the state capitol. Mississippi's uncouth

  governor James Var-daman successful y pushed for stopping the

  lease in 1907, primarily to punish the rich cot on planter class that

  were his primary political enemies.25Within another ve years,

  Arkansas and Texas had abandoned the system as wel . In Arkansas,

  the outgoing governor, a longtime opponent of the practice,

  pardoned in his last days in o ce hundreds of the prisoners held by

  the state—making leasing moot.

  But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil

  But the harsher reality of the South was that the new post-Civil

  War slavery was evolving—not disappearing. North Carolina

  banned leasing just before World War I and then revived it

  afterward. In Florida and Alabama— where the state-sanctioned

  practice of buying and sel ing slaves was just reaching its most

  evolved and highly organized form—convict leasing remained

  immune at every level to the ostensible "reforms" that swept other

  states. Most of the "abolitions" were motivated either by political

  imperatives or simply by the changing economic and technological

  circumstances of the South. As African Americans across the region

  were ground into political and economic penury, the di erence in

  the costs of legal y enslaved and free, but impoverished, labor

  narrowed dramatical y. The cost of buying prisoners from state

  governments had risen substantial y—while the cost of "free labor"

  available from hundreds of thousands of essential y indentured

  black laborers working on southern farms was flat or declining.

  Moreover, while thousands of state prisoners in Georgia, the

  Carolinas, and other states were no longer leased to private

  corporations, they were being forced into an "improved" method of

  coercing labor and intimidating African Americans—the chain gang.

  Throughout the South, peonage and the leasing of prisoners by

  county sheri s—long the most terrible aspect of the practices—

  continued unabated.

  Alabama's system of sel ing black men through its courts and

  prison laws continued for more than fteen years after U.S. Steel

  took its last shipment of convicts. Shelby County and most local

  governments continued a prosperous trade in African American

  forced laborers, though in the new and more orderly fashion

  mandated by Judge Jones. The confessions of judgment coerced

  upon thousands of African Americans for trivial or unprovable

  of enses were now careful y recorded in court files.

  In Washington, D.C., there was lit le evidence that forced labor was

  abating. The o ces of the at orney general and the White House

  continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and

  continued to receive a stream of al egations of peonage and

  involuntary servitude as elaborate and extreme as those that had

  occurred on the farm of John Pace.

  A deputy U.S. marshal in Roanoke, Alabama, reported in the

  spring of 1906 that a white man named Silas Lacy was operating a

  railroad construction camp as terrifying as those of three decades

  earlier. Dozens of slaves were arrested on fabricated charges, held

  against their wil , starved, and subjected to daily lashings and

  tracking dogs. At least three workers had been murdered by the

  owners.26

>   Noti ed of the ndings, the U.S. at orney general authorized

  sending a federal detective in to perform a larger investigation. On

  May 7, 1906, the agent wrote Warren Reese's successor in

  Montgomery, Erastus J. Parsons, describing the sweep of

  involuntary servitude and the perversion of the local courts to

  sustain it in the southeastern counties of Alabama. The deputy said

  Lacy was holding throngs of black men under the cruelest

  conditions, he wrote. One "negro boy" who at empted to ee Lacy

  was recaptured, whipped, and left for dead. Another black man,

  Josie Frank, was "held by force and kept in a state of fear." Two

  other black men, Curly Johnson and Carry Hat on, were "arrested

  on a bogus charge" and held in involuntary service to pay a

  fraudulent fine. "There are dozens of other similar cases," the deputy

  wrote. At another camp nearby, a white man named Henry Lee

  chased down two eeing black workers with dogs, "captured them

  and carried them back to his camp chained together." Just west of

  the Tal apoosa River, a partnership cal ed Mason & Brother

  routinely "had negroes arrested on bogus warrants, in order to get

  them, making them work out the cost of the arrests," wrote the

  marshal.27

  "Many of these parties are cruel y treated and chased by dogs

  whenever they at empt to make escape," Parsons wrote to his

  superiors in Washington. But even Parsons feared that a prosecution

  of the slaveholders would fail. "The trouble in get ing convictions

  has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a

  has been that the defendants, after being arraigned before a

  Commissioner, somehow succeeded in driving away the witnesses,"

  he wrote. "The negroes employed about these railroad camps are

  gathered from the large cities throughout the south. They are

  invariably given nicknames upon reaching the camps and after

  making their escape … it seems ut erly impossible to get any trace

  of them whatever."28

  Parsons also knew that regardless of how gravely blacks were

  abused, cases brought against whites for holding slaves were almost

  certainly doomed in Alabama. No mat er how strong the evidence,

  he became reluctant to seek charges. He passed on to Alabama

  o cials the report he received from a Secret Service agent on the

  Lacy case. "I have requested the authorities of the State of Alabama

  to investigate," the prosecutor added.29It was ignored.

  An atmosphere of intimidation suf used the areas where involuntary

  servitude remained rampant. A black man named D. P. Johnson

  spirited a let er to the Department of Justice in the late winter of

  1907 through a veterinarian near Banks, Alabama, claiming he was

  being forced to work on a county road gang to pay o debts in

  connection with "a contract which he forced me to sign." The white

  claiming the debt had already seized Johnson's farm, but insisted on

  receiving more. "He sent me here to work out the ne and cost of

  the court and the sum of money he claims to advance me. Please

  investigate case for I am deprived of my liberty without due process

  of law." Johnson said he had been denied the opportunity to bring

  witnesses before the jury that convicted him. A federal agent

  visiting the Pike County convict camp, Johnson wrote, "wil nd

  condition unparal eled in our free country." The let er was led

  without fol ow-up.30

  In the fal of 1907, Parsons doleful y reported to the Department

  of Justice an account of what happened to Ed Bet is, a black man in

  Lowndes County who had the temerity to testify against Jim Payne,

  the white farmer holding him as a slave. Payne was arrested by a

  federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges

  federal marshal on the basis of Bet is's statements, but the charges

  were dropped at a preliminary hearing. Avoiding prosecution,

  however, was not su cient for Payne, who after the court hearing

  paid a local deputy sheri named Underwood to seize the black

  man and drag him to a county jail in the provincial town of

  Haynevil e. "And there gave him a brutal whipping, because, as

  stated by Underwood, he had sworn out a warrant for a white

  man." Once again, Parsons politely sought permission to send a

  marshal to the area for an investigation.31

  In December 1907, Judge Jones contacted Parsons with

  al egations he had received that a lumberman named Henry

  Stephenson was holding large numbers of black workers in forced

  labor at a cross-tie camp near Enterprise, Alabama. An anonymous

  informer wrote Judge Jones that when one black worker ran away

  and then refused to return to the camp after being tracked down,

  Stephenson told him: "If you don't cut ties for me you won't cut

  them for any one unless you cut them in hel ." The white man then

  put a pistol to the head of the unnamed black man and red

  "probably a fatal wound." At least one other white man was

  present, and reported nothing of the kil ing to police authorities.32

  A year later, on December 22, 1908, Wil iam Armbrecht, the U.S.

  at orney in Mobile, Alabama, wrote a disappointed let er to the

  U.S. at orney general. Armbrecht had presented the evidence to a

  federal grand jury in Selma related to an al egation that a white

  man named Pete Nevers was holding debt slaves. "I did every thing

  I could to secure an indictment but failed. I can not understand why

  an indictment was not found except that, the country members of

  the Grand Jury in that section of Alabama are not disposed to nd

  true bil s in cases of peonage. The failure to secure indictments was

  not due to any lack of investigation on the part of the Special

  agents who investigated this case, nor do I think it was due to any

  failure on my part to present the case properly. "33

  Indeed, even after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the

  laws against peonage, Alabama's judicial system continued to

  routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary

  routinely assist in the holding of black workers to involuntary

  servitude. Armbrecht, the mysti ed failed prosecutor in Mobile,

  learned in January 1909 that the deputy sheri in Selma had wired

  the sheri in Mobile to grab a local black man named L. McIlwane

  and hold him on any charge until he could be picked up.

  McIlwane's al eged crime was that he had broken a labor contract

  with a white employer near Selma. The local sheri duly arrested

  McIlwane for "vagrancy" and then turned him over to the other

  sherif when he arrived.

  "This appears to be a clear case of peonage," commit ed by the

  sherif s of two of the state's largest towns, Armbrecht wrote.34

  In 1909, an internal review of al peonage prosecutions in

  Alabama in the rst decade of the century found that of forty-three

  indictments issued—including those of Pace and his co-conspirators,

  al ended in acquit als, dismissals, suspended sentences, or

  presidential pardons. A total of $300 in nes had been col ected

  from the defendants; four of those convicted served short periods in

  jail.35
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  Evidence of widespread peonage in Alabama and elsewhere in the

  Black Belt sections of other southern states barely slowed. In 1913,

  two Alabama men, Butler and John Searcy were nal y tried on

  peonage cases—having rst delayed their trial by several years by

  kidnapping the primary witness against them, a black man named

  Wash Gardner, and shipping him to Cuba. The jury refused to

  convict.

  It was plainly apparent that convictions on peonage charges

  would be nearly impossible to obtain. As cases col apsed, U.S.

  at orneys in various districts continued to go through the motions of

  investigating al egations of slavery. But indictments grew rare. More

  and more often, federal o cials— citing a highly technical reading

  of the peonage statute—asserted that they had jurisdiction only in

  cases in which a slave was being held speci cal y to repay a debt.

  Adopting the same legal rationale put forward by the defense

  lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position

  lawyers in the trials of 1903, o cials increasingly took the position

  that merely forcing a man or woman to labor for nothing—or

  buying them for that purpose—was not a federal crime.

  Responsibility for any "action" to combat it "lies entirely within the

  state," said the Department of Justice.36

  The new slavery reached a critical plateau. The resubjugation of

  southern blacks was achieved in such broad totality—and

  rea rmed with such crushing consequences for mil ions of

  individuals, that codes and statutes were increasingly unnecessary

  for its preservation.

  African Americans had virtual y no political representation in any

  place in the South—even those where blacks of voting age made up

  the overwhelming majority of the population. Public education for

  African Americans was a threadbare re ection of that provided for

  whites—limited to half the number of days provided for white

  children in most cot on-producing counties. Only 5 percent of

  whites were entirely il iterate in 1910; nearly a third of blacks

  were. Nearly 69 percent of white children at ended school; 37

  percent of African Americans did so. Laws writ en and unwrit en

  barred African Americans from sel ing the produce of their farms to

  anyone but the most powerful white merchant in their worlds and

  prohibited them from buying goods from anyone else as wel .