Slavery by Another Name (47 page)

the rst revelations of slavery was evaporating as it became clear

that Judge Jones and Reese had no plans to stop after a few

symbolic guilty pleas. Facing the dock of the courtroom, Fletch

Turner and his son, Al en, were ready to embrace the most brazen

defense of the new slavery yet of ered.

On July 4, at orneys for the father and son led demurrers,

chal enging the peonage charges against them. Their fundamental

objection was constructed upon a startling argument. The Turners’

lawyers conceded that their clients indeed had engaged in a form of

slavery, but that involuntary servitude wasn't peonage and therefore

wasn't il egal.

"Unlawful y and knowingly holding a person forcibly and against

his wil and requiring such person to labor for the holder to work

out a debt claimed by the holder to be due him …does not

constitute holding such person to a condition of peonage under the

laws of the United States," they wrote.10

Moreover, the Turners’ lawyers argued that no system of peonage

existed in Alabama at al , making the statute forbidding it

irrelevant, and charges based on the law impossible. They added

that since peonage was de ned as forced labor in repayment of a

debt, the Turners couldn't be convicted of peonage if, as the

government contended, the debts owed to them by black workers

were bogus.

Ignoring the claims of extreme abuse and homicide commit ed on

the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might

the Turner farm, the at orneys argued that the men's behavior might

constitute a form of slavery but that no federal statute made slavery

a crime. Cases of slavery would have to be brought in a state court

by local o cials under Alabama's law against false imprisonment,

the lawyers argued. No acknowledgment was made that in a local

court, the prosecutor would be a white man elected in al -white

elections, the jury guaranteed to be al -white, the judges likely

involved in the slaving conspiracy, the buyers of men almost

certainly prominent local gures, black at orneys barred from

appearing, and black witnesses treated as unreliable by nature. In

the four decades since emancipation, no one could recal any such

criminal charges ever being brought in a southern court. No one

imagined that ever changing.

Astonishingly, the lawyers were on some level correct. The Civil

Rights Act of 1866, passed in the wake of the war to formalize the

ending of slavery, simply declared al persons born in the United

States to be ful - edged citizens with the right to vote regardless of

race or previous "condition of slavery or involuntary servitude." But

it did not clearly state that the holding of slaves was a crime, and

the disparate treatment of former slaves was made only a

misdemeanor, carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail.

Later statutes in the 1870s made segregated accommodations,

schools, and anti-black-voting measures il egal, but actual y

weakened the minimum penalty for violations. In 1883, the U.S.

Supreme Court declared even those laws unconstitutional, ruling

that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments—approved in 1868

to abolish slavery and establish black citizenship—didn't authorize

Congress to pass such enforcement laws. Fol owing the growing

national sentiment that race mat ers be left alone, Congress did

nothing to l the vacuum—leaving a constitutional limbo in which

slavery as a legal concept was prohibited by the Constitution, but

no statute made an act of enslavement explicitly il egal.

It didn't mat er to the Turners’ lawyers that lit le of their defense

claims matched their earlier sworn statements when rst questioned

by a federal agent and a special U.S. commissioner two months

earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling

earlier. Turner had sco ed at the suggestion that his past handling

of black laborers was legal y or moral y suspect. He o ered

elaborate explanations for why he imprisoned a series of blacks the

federal o cer identi ed. In the case of Joe Strickland, the white

farmer conceded that the laborer didn't appear anywhere in the

records of the local courts but was nonetheless a criminal prisoner.

He claimed Strickland's records were in a di erent jurisdiction, and

that the Goodwater deputy sheri , Grogan, brought two black men

to the Tal apoosa County jail in July 1901 and asked Turner if he

wished to "buy" one of them out of jail. Turner claimed he entered

into a formal labor contract with the worker, who had been tried

for "riding a train," and that the local probate judge said it was

unnecessary for the court to authorize the arrangement.11

"If you behave yourself," Turner claimed to have told Strickland,

"I wil let you o in ve months." Turner demurred that he "had just

commenced in the convict business" and didn't understand the ins

and outs of the rules. In kindness, he had paid a doctor, Turner

claimed, to treat Strickland's syphilis—and then kept him at work

an extra six months simply to cover the costs. By the time of the

trial, Strickland was working in the coal mines near Birmingham,

he added.

On July 7, Glennie Helms became the rst victim of the

Tal apoosa cases to testify publicly. Moving to the witness chair just

after 5 P.M., Helms sat calmly and con dently before the courtroom

l ed with white spectators. Neatly dressed and his head cleanly

shaven, Helms said he was eighteen at the time of his capture and

was at empting to travel from Calcis—where he had worked for a

week in the lime quarry owned by Turner's family— back to his

home in Columbus, Georgia. As Helms and two companions passed

on foot through Goodwater on April 15, 1902, they were seized by

the town marshal, charged with vagrancy, immediately convicted by

the mayor, and then sold at the Dadevil e depot to Fletcher

Turner.12 Turner was apparently unaware that the three had been

working for his family's quarry and put them to work digging

ditches on his farm.

ditches on his farm.

Under questioning from Reese, Helms told the twelve white

jurors how he was brutal y beaten on his arrival at Turner's farm.

Reese, regal in a high, sti ened col ar and checkered cravat, asked

whether either of the Turners or their employees whipped him

again during the four months he was held on the farm. Helms

testi ed he was beaten nearly every day by Turner's son, Al en, or

another armed guard. After about a month of work, he escaped—

only to be captured by the sheri of another county and returned to

the farm. As punishment for eeing, he said Al en Turner whipped

him severely with a thick stick.

The cross-examination that fol owed must have been one of the

most extraordinary encounters ever in a southern courtroom. In the

witness chair sat an eighteen-year-old black boy in the simple at ire

of an indigent farmhand, largely il iterate and almost certainly the

child of parents born in antebel um slavery. Standing before him—

chal enging his account of re-enslavement—was the aristocratic

form of U.S. representative Ariosto Appling Wiley, prominent

congressman and one of the city's most notable at orneys.

Unfazed by the disjuncture of the scene, Helms hewed to his story

—as unswervingly as a skil ed plow hand cut ing neat furrows

across a eld. Unable to budge the verisimilitude of the young

man's descriptions of his capture and beatings, Representative Wiley

obsessed on what he cal ed contradictory details in the testimony.

Was the buggy in which Helms and the others were transported to

the farm owned by a livery stable or someone else? he hammered.

Final y, the lawyer portrayed Helms as a "shiftless negro" enjoying

his moment in the spotlight at the expense of the federal

government.

"Who's been taking care of you since you came here?" Wiley

asked sharply.

"Captain Dickey," replied Helms, referring to the Secret Service

agent who had guarded the black witnesses housed in a

boardinghouse since May.

Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside

Night was fal ing, and the court recessed for the evening. Outside

the federal building, Fletcher Turner, soaked from the heat of the

courtroom, fumed to local reporters about published al egations

that his son had brutal y kil ed a black woman named Cornelia

Hammock.13 He insisted that the woman died of disease and

of ered to have her body exhumed to prove it.

The next day, a series of witnesses cal ed by the government

corroborated Helms's account. Dave Johnson, one of the other

blacks captured with him in Goodwater, the night watchman John

G. Dunbar, town mayor Dave White, and others con rmed how the

three African Americans were seized and sold.

The Turner defense aggressively at acked each witness. After the

testimony of the white at orney who bought Helms's freedom after

nding him being worked naked at the Turner sawmil , Colonel

Wiley launched a withering cross-examination—insinuating that the

lawyer, L. E. White, was so friendly to Helms's family and other

black workers that he couldn't be trusted. Wiley didn't use the

speci c words, but his message to the jury was that White was a

"nigger lover"—a man operating outside the racial rituals of the

South. The questions became so sharp that Judge Jones recessed the

proceedings and reprimanded Wiley for the calumnies against

White. "The witness must not be sneered at or insulted," Jones said.

The strategy was designed not to prove that Helms hadn't been

captured and sold—since the Turners admit ed those facts—but to

mock the black witnesses and discredit any white men who

corroborated them. It was a time-proven and honored southern

lawyerly ruse. In the rare instance that a black man or woman

received a day in court, at orneys simply ridiculed the very idea of a

black man being treated respectful y and anyone who appeared

wil ing to do so. Triggering an almost tribal form of group

solidarity, the tactic usual y triggered juries of white men to gu aw

at the comedy of a black man under oath. If the jury concluded that

the government's case was built on the testimony of worthless

African Americans and unreliable whites, Colonel Wiley was

con dent of an acquit al. He knew Alabama was tired of the

peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do

peonage cases. And he wanted to remind the jurors that to do

otherwise would subject them to their own ridicule as "lovers" of

blacks.

On the trial's third day, the defense presented a stream of

witnesses testifying to the Turners’ excel ent character and care of

black convicts they leased from local governments. For weeks

leading up to the trial, court observers and journalists speculated

that Secretary of State J. Thomas Hef-lin, Alabama's most

amboyant white supremacist, might represent the Turners in court

in a show of support for the men.

Just before noon, as the defense prepared to close its case, He in

was cal ed as a witness. In previous weeks, there had been no

indication that the men knew each other. But taking the stand,

He in swore that he had known Fletcher Turner for "several years"

and that Turner had always been a man of good character. The

message to the jury—that the white orthodoxy of the South was

behind the defendants, not the opponents of slavery—was clear.

The next morning, the gal ery was jammed with observers,

including a large crowd of African Americans. As eight hours of

closing arguments by four separate at orneys ground through the

day, the sti ing courtroom became a throng of perspiring men,

aflut er with dozens of handheld fans.

The nal defense argument was explicit—whatever the facts of

the case, every white man must acquit Fletcher Turner as a message

to the rest of the United States. "Forever put at rest the agitated

minds of our Northern friends, and brand the newspaper criticisms

and caricatures which have appeared in the northern journals as a

falsi cation and a slander upon the fair name of Alabama," fumed

at orney Bulger. "I have great faith in the sons and grandsons of the

heroes of forty years ago, who fol owed Lee and Jackson for four

long years through blood and re, even from Sumter's bat ered