Slavery by Another Name (41 page)

the same. Davis readily agreed, and Pace drew up a contract under

which he agreed to work sixteen months to pay of his fine.

Pace was unapologetic, but denied that he had acquired or held a

large number of black laborers. He had purchased no more than

ve in the previous year, he said, al of them as favors to the black

workers themselves. They were never treated brutal y, and it was

"always understood," he said, that the men would be freed if

relatives or friends reimbursed him for the costs of bailing out and

holding the laborers.30

Next to make the trip to Montgomery were George Cosby, his

nephew Burancas, and James H. Todd, one of the strongmen used

as an enforcer on the Pace farm. The men arrived in the state

capital near daylight on June 10, having spent the night on a

Western Railroad train stranded between Ope-lika and

Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram

Montgomery. Accompanying them were Deputy Marshals Hiram

Gibson and A. B. Colquit , who had arrested them on Tuesday.

The defendants wouldn't talk to reporters on the day of their

court appearance. Todd had been an overseer for Pace for more

than fteen years. Burancas Cosby, a twenty-three-year-old "wide in

stock, build and ruddy face," worked for his uncle George. The

younger Cosby claimed that at least two of the blacks named in the

indictment were "unknown to him." By nightfal , al had returned to

Dadevil e by train.

As word of the arrests raced across Alabama and the rest of the

country, an epic legal and political confrontation began to take

shape. J. Thomas He in—the stirring white supremacist orator who

proclaimed to the constitutional convention two years earlier that

God put "negroes" on the earth to serve white men—was the

Alabama secretary of state by 1903. Almost immediately, He in

began circulating word that he would aid the indicted white men,

perhaps even representing them in the courtroom. He would have

none of the spineless apologia for new slavery that southern

journalists and some politicians rst o ered. He embraced it as a

return to the natural order of man.

A few southerners stepped forward to genuinely condemn the

new slavery system—but very few. One was Joseph C. Manning, the

postmaster of Alexander City in Tal apoosa County. A ery

populist, he had fought in the 1890s to hold on to a coalition of

black and white voters in Alabama, and after the turn of the century

railed against the growing national consensus that blacks should be

excluded from al political activity—even within the Republican

Party. "What has become of the ringing declaration of Abraham

Lincoln that ‘The nation cannot endure half slave and half free,’ " he

wrote to an Ohio newspaper.31 He denounced the de facto

annulment of the Fifteenth Amendment and condemned Republican

leaders for their crass wil ingness "to acquiesce in slavery for the

south and stand for human liberty in the north."

Later, Manning wrote to the New York Evening Post, lashing out

at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county

at the abuses of blacks he had witnessed and the men in his county

al eged to have held slaves. "It is today under the law in Alabama, a

crime for a farm laborer (black) to quit his employer. He may be

denied his pay, he may be half fed, he may be beaten with a buggy

trace but if he ‘fails to keep his contract’ then he is a criminal,"

Manning insisted. "There are black belt planters who do starve,

mistreat, abuse and beat men, and force them to break their

contract in order to get them arraigned before some demon in

white skin, but with a heart as black as hel itself; and another year

of servitude is at ached by a chain more gal ing than that of chat el

slavery to the ankle of the black man. The case of Pat erson is only

one in thousands, yes, in ten thousand….

"The Mayor of this town of Goodwater …would be

complimented in his own estimation no higher than to have it

writ en that any negro is no more worthy of human sympathy or

political consideration than is any mule, and of less kind treatment

than a good dog," Manning continued. "Here is the truth about the

South that some men of the North would ‘let alone.’ Here is the

South that should be permit ed to adopt its own course in set ling

the race problem!"32

Goodwater Mayor Dave White red back in defense of his town,

claiming that no black man or woman had ever been abused in his

court. "Unjust punishment of negroes is absolutely repulsive to me

and that no negro is imposed on when it is in my power to prevent

it," he wrote.

I defy any person to prove that any negro or white man has ever been

convicted in my court that was not guilty or that didn't have a fair trial, or

that received illegal or cruel punishment after they had been convicted.

And I am certain that I can truthfully state no negro has ever been worked

in slavery in the town of Goodwater since the day when slavery was

abolished in the sixties. It is a fact that numerous negroes have been tried

and convicted in Goodwater for stealing and have received a small ne

and a light punishment, when a white man under the same circumstances

would have been much more severely dealt with as a great allowance is

always made for the negro owing to his standing in life.33

Editors of the state's most prominent daily, the Montgomery

Advertiser, were apoplectic that Manning, an Alabama native, had

ut ered such heresy in the northern press. It cal ed Manning "rat le-

brained" and, reaching back to an archaic term for any creature that

turned against family doctrine and patriarchy, a "nest fouler."

The newspaper labeled his description of widespread slavery an

"outrageous exaggeration." The Advertiser also railed at Roosevelt's

promise at Lincoln's tomb of a "square deal" for African Americans,

and any assertion that the peonage cases were part of a larger

movement in the South to disenfranchise black men and reassert

white dominance.

Peonage was no worse than the treatment of workers in the

factories, mines, and sweatshops of the North, the newspaper

maintained.34 "These cases of ‘new slavery’ have nothing to do with

the adoption of the new Constitution in Alabama. If there is any

di erence, the mass of white people are more kindly disposed

toward the negro now than before their disfranchise-ment. These

peonage cases are simply a few here and there. There have not

been tens of thousands of such cases. We doubt extremely whether

there have been even hundreds of them in al the State in the past

twenty years."35

Nearly every Alabama leader contended the events in Tal apoosa

County constituted a smal anomaly, easily stamped out by making

examples of a few o enders. "Deputy U.S. Marshal Colquit seems

to have taken up with this county," wrote the Dadevil e Spot Cash.

"In fact three or four men of this community have been escorting

him to Montgomery where he placed them under bond, charged

with Peonage—that new word lately sprung on us which means the

enslaving of a freeman against his wil , as we understand it. This is

a pret y bad state of a airs in Alabama, but not so bad as the

northern papers would make it. These conditions wil be

thoroughly investigated and we hope every guilty party wil be

punished so that the evil wil be stopped and the blot on our state

and county removed."36

Underscoring southerners’ sense that it was hypocritical for their

region to be targeted for its racial misdeeds, residents in Bel evil e,

Il inois, went on a rampage a day after the Dadevil e editorial

appeared. A black schoolteacher named David Wyat and the town's

white school superintendent had argued over the renewal of Wyat 's

teaching certi cate. An altercation ensued. The superintendent was

shot, but not seriously harmed. Wyat was arrested and taken to jail.

By nightfal , at least two thousand whites were gathered in the

town—including many women and children encouraged to at end

the spectacle. A phalanx of two hundred men at acked the steel

doors at the rear of the jail with sledgehammers, pounding it with

thousands of hammer blows. The city's police did not voluntarily

hand the prisoner over to the crowd, but also gave no meaningful

resistance. Wyat , an educated and imposing man—standing six feet

three inches tal —waited in his cel on the second oor of the jail,

enveloped in the cacophony of the hammers pounding out his

death beat. After half an hour, the doors splintered open. Wyat was

seized from his cel and his head immediately smashed.

Dragged into the street, the mob surged around him, kicking and

stomping his body until it was mat ed in blood and dirt. A rope

was secured to his neck and tossed to two men who had climbed a

telegraph pole. Hoisted just a few feet o the ground, Wyat 's body

whipped back and forth as members of the crowd gouged, stabbed,

and sliced his torso, legs, and arms with knives. Others in the mob

gathered pickets from nearby fences and roadside signs to build a

crude pyre beneath his dangling corpse. Stil more went for

gasoline and benzene. Soon Wyat 's body was engulfed in ame. By

the time the earliest churchgoers left their homes on Sunday, June

7, the grotesque form of Wyat 's carbonized remains lay amid a

heap of ashes and smoldering wood on the street.

"The mob knew that the negro's victim was alive and had a fair

chance to recover," a correspondent for the New York Herald

dutiful y noted. "The excuse given is that the lawless element

among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it

among the negroes has been doing al sorts of deviltry, and that it

was determined to teach the negroes a wholesome lesson."37

Wyat 's lynching was unremarkable in many regards. His was the

thirtieth African American lynched in 1903. There would be at least

fty- ve more before the year ended. Yet few developments caused

as much delight to leading southern whites than a gruesome racial

atrocity commit ed in the North. Such incidents proved, in their

reckoning, that northerners were just as inclined to crimes against

African Americans as their southern cousins, and that the end result

of greater racial equality like that in the North was simply more

brazen criminality and chaos caused by blacks. Many white

southerners were further grati ed when less than two weeks later a

mob in Wilmington, Delaware, seized a black man named George

White from his jail cel . White, accused of rape and murder, was

tied to a stake, forced to confess the crimes, then shot repeatedly

and final y burned.

The Advertiser could hardly restrain its glee.

In the North the negro is an alien, an exostosis on the body politic, as it

were. They do not understand him and cannot do so. They talk

sympathetically and humidly of his wrongs and his rights, shed some tears

over his alleged cruel fate in the South, and then, if he aspires to be a

laborer in the hive of industry, they turn on him and drive him out with

curses and revilings. If he resists or falls back on the sacred laws of self-

deference and self-preservation, he is either shot down or lynched. They

love him— at a safe distance.

With us here in the South it is di erent. We received the negro by

inheritance. He came to us through the generations of slavery.

Emancipation left him stranded on the shores of a new world, for which

he had no preparation and no tness. The Southern people, remembering

the negro of the olden time, when he was the faithful servant, the willing

worker and the protector of the family of his master—with all this in their

minds our people have borne with him, have helped him and have tried to

fit him for some of the duties of citizenship. We recognize in him a part of

our population a necessary worker on the farm, in the shop and in the

home, but not in any way an equal.

And for all this because the negroes have come down to us from the

good days of old; because they are at home with us, and must perhaps

forever be in some degree our wards, we owe them justice, fair treatment,

and protection in all their civil rights. Now that they have practically lost

the right of su rage, we more than ever owe them our watch care and

should throw over and around them the shield of law and justice. The fact