Slavery by Another Name (51 page)

irredeemably lost. He insisted, despite the mushrooming

resistance to his work, that justice stil could be served in

Alabama.

Judge Jones remained embarrassed and distressed at the mistrial

in the case of Fletcher Turner. He had been convinced that twelve

white men in Montgomery could put aside racial animosity long

enough to see the obvious guilt of a man such as Turner—even if

the jurors did so only to preserve the honor of their home state. At

the conclusion of the brief trial of Robert Franklin during the week

after Turner's guilty plea, Jones once again signaled to the jury the

defendant's guilt as he assailed Alabama's system of lower courts.

"The counsel of defendant spoke of the negro as a ‘so-cal ed citizen,’

" Jones told the court incredulously. "A man is a citizen whether he

can vote or not, and nobody loves a Government that would not

protect him." He decried Alabama's provincial sheri s and judges

who "have reestablished slavery for debt in this state."1

Much to the relief of Jones and Reese, the jury agreed. Franklin

was convicted of a single count of peonage. Final y, a southern jury

had been wil ing to honestly adjudge the actions of a white man,

nding obvious involuntary servitude to be what it truly was:

slavery.

Reese was privately adamant that his o ce would soon bring

another vol ey of slavery charges from elsewhere in the state. But

Jones was ready to declare victory. The enormous public pressure

in Montgomery to end the probe was wearing on him. Jones

declared publicly that the "peonage ring was nearly al broken up."

Alabama had been taught its lesson, Judge Jones hoped, and further

consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

consternation was unnecessary. Franklin, the constable who had so

brazenly seized John Davis, was ordered to pay $1,000. Word

spread quickly among the at orneys representing other defendants

that the court would deal just as leniently with those awaiting trial.

Within a few days, John Pace's son-in-law, Anderson Hardy, and

guard James H. Todd pleaded guilty to ve counts of peonage.

Judge Jones ned each man $1,000. They were taken back to the

Dadevil e city jail, to remain there until the penalty was paid.2 But

both men ignored the nes and were soon set free. Before the

summer term of court was over, another half dozen men pleaded

guilty and received from Jones symbolic nes. When court

reconvened in the fal of 1903, the rest of the defendants did the

same. Every major gure admit ed guilt. That was enough for

Jones.

Anxious to show that Tal apoosa County was no longer a center

of antebel um criminality and repair its reputation, a local grand

jury was impaneled in Dadevil e to examine questions of slavery

and peonage in early August. Two weeks later, in a nal report, the

panel of local men concluded that John Pace had been responsible

for virtual y al of the peonage in the area. It remonstrated Pace for

having "kept East Wilson, a negro woman who is serving a twelve

months sentence for larceny at his farm, out of the way, so that the

Sheri could not serve on her a subpoena to appear before this

Grand Jury….

"We suspect that he has kept other witnesses out of the way so

that they could not be served," the report continued. "It is our

opinion, that John W Pace and his convict farm are more

responsible, by far, than al others in our county for the abuse of

ignorant and helpless people, which is the crime known as peonage

in the Federal Court. This evil is practiced by very few in our

County, to the detriment of al , should be discontinued in our

County forever."3

Meanwhile, local residents were ral ying around the Cosby

family. George and Burancas had begun their sentences in the

Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

Atlanta federal prison. A growing number of whites complained

that it was unfair for the two men to be imprisoned when every

other participant in the slaving scheme received symbolic

punishment. More than three thousand names were a xed to a

petition seeking a pardon from President Roosevelt. Soon, even

Judge Jones supported the Cosby plea for clemency,4 5 directly

urging the president to free the two men. On September 16, 1903,

he did so. Almost as if the testimony of kidnappings, murders,

whippings, and enslavement had never been heard, the Cosbys

returned to their Red Ridge Road farm.

John Pace, the leader of the slavery ring, quietly restarted his

trade in black labor. As 1903 closed, the Alabama Board of

Inspectors of Convicts— the state entity charged with overseeing the

state's penal systems—was chagrined to discover that the county

commissioners of Tal apoosa County had renewed Pace's contract to

lease al county convicts.

As much as Judge Jones—and the more brazen apologists for

slavery across the South—had hoped the Alabama cases represented

the end of the a air, di cult realities continued to intrude. The fal

of 1903 brought new indictments in Louisiana for holding slaves,

but residents were so outraged that the marshal investigating the

cases had to ee the state for his safety. Newspapers across the

North published accounts of additional involuntary servitude in

Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, and Mississippi.6

The U.S. at orney in Mobile, Alabama, who had initiated his own

inquiries into slavery in the southern part of the state, reported

"credible reports" of peonage across his territory and in multiple

counties. But investigating the al egations and questioning terri ed

witnesses was proving di cult. "Many of them are unwil ing to

communicate anything …unless assured that it would be

con dential," wrote M. D. Wickersham to his superiors at the

Department of Justice. "Persons manifested such terror when

requested to disclose what they knew that it is doubtful if they can

be persuaded to give any valuable testimony either in the grand

jury room or before the court."7

jury room or before the court."

As in so many other places, the federal marshals in the eld

discovered that the o cial systems of leasing black convicts to

private companies and individuals had become indistinguishable

from the casual slavery ourishing on private farms. If the former

was legal, few southerners—white or black—understood why the

lat er would not be. "So many il iterate persons have confounded

the harsh, and at many times cruel, execution of the convict laws of

the state with the practice of peonage that it has been very di cult

to make them understand the line that distinguishes the one from

the other, " Wickersham wrote.

In late November, a grand jury in Macon began hearing testimony

that Georgia state representative Edward McRee, his brothers Frank

and Wil iam, two former sheri s, and other members of some of

the most powerful families in south Georgia were operating a vast

slave-driven enterprise at their 22,000-acre Kinderlou plantation

near the Florida state line.

The McRee brothers’ farm was a plantation and industrial center

that dwarfed that of John Pace—operating on a scale no antebel um

slave owner could have comprehended. Edward McRee became a

powerful elected o cial serving in the state legislature. By 1900,

the four siblings who inherited the enterprise from their empire-

building father, a noted Confederate o cer named George McRee,

each lived in a lavish mansion within a square mile of the center of

the plantation. Between them a bustling vil age— cal ed Kinderlou

in honor of the Aunt Lou who raised the four brothers from

childhood after the death of their mother—thrived with farm

laborers, tradesmen, and several smal stores. Consuming the bulk

of an entire county, the farm—basking in the subtropical warmth of

the Gulf Coast— included thousands of acres of lushly fertile sandy

loam under til at any given time. On a private spur of the Atlantic

Coast Line Railroad thrust into the center of the plantation, dozens

of boxcars waited at al times for the hundreds of thousands of

bushels of tomatoes, watermelons, cantaloupes, corn, tobacco, and

cot on. The McRees owned their own cot on gins, compresses to

make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

make bales, and warehouses to store enormous quantities of lint. A

ve-horsepower steam engine ground the plantation's sugarcane to

make syrup. Five eighty-foot-long barns were built to cure tobacco.

Cuban workers were imported to work the plantation's cigar

factory.

Thousands more acres of dense pine and hardwood fed a

ceaselessly turning sawmil , planing mil , and dry kiln. A factory on

the plantation produced thousands of pal ets, wooden crates, and

baskets for shipping agricultural produce. Deep in the forests,

McRee turpentine camps col ected rosin for their naval stores

distil ery. Three to four trains stopped daily, beginning with one at

3:30 A.M. to pick up dozens of three-foot-high barrels of milk

produced in the Kinderlou dairy8

The backbone of the plantation was smal armies of farmhands

and hundreds of mules, who were awakened by the rst bel at 4

A.M. each day and remained in the elds or factories until dark.

From "can't see to can't see," as the laborers cal ed it.

Initial y, the McRees hired only free black labor, but beginning in

the 1890s, they routinely leased a hundred or more convicts from

the state of Georgia to perform the grueling work of clearing lands,

removing stumps, ditching elds, and constructing roads. Other

prisoners hoed, plowed, and weeded the crops. Over fteen years,

thousands of men and women were forced to the plantation and

held in stockades under the watch of armed guards. After the turn

of the century, the brothers began to arrange for more forced

laborers through the sheri s of nearby counties—fueling what

eventual y grew into a sprawling tra c in humans across the

southwestern section of Georgia.

"So I was carried back to the Captain's," said a black laborer in

1904, tel ing of his imprisonment on what was almost certainly the

McRee plantation. "That night he made me strip o my clothing

down to my waist, had me tied to a tree in his backyard, ordered

his foreman to gave me thirty lashes with a buggy whip across my

bare back, and stood by until it was done."

bare back, and stood by until it was done."

The worker vividly described to a passing journalist how the

farm descended from a place of free employment in the late

nineteenth century to one of abject slavery by the rst years of the

twentieth century. The unidenti ed man was born in the last years

before the Civil War, and then hired out at age ten to the father of

the McRee brothers, a man he knew simply as "Captain." While a

teenager, the black man at empted to leave Kinderlou and work at

another plantation. Before sundown on the day of his departure,

one of the McRees and "some kind of law o cer" tracked him

down. The new employer apologized to McRee for hiring the young

worker, saying he would never have done so if he had known "this

nigger was bound out to you."

Soon afterward, one of the Captain's sons, likely Edward McRee,

took over the farm and convinced the free laborers to put their

mark on what was ostensibly a contract to work on the plantation

for up to ten years, in exchange for pay, a cabin, and some supplies.

Then McRee began building a stockade, with a long hal way down

the center and rows of crude stal s— each with two bunk beds and

mat resses—on each side. "One bright day in April …about forty

able-bodied negroes, bound in iron chains, and some of them

handcu ed were brought," the laborer recounted. Word came that

any African American, whether free or convict, who at empted to

leave the farm would be tracked down with hounds and forced

back. The contracts they had signed contained the same language

that John Pace forced men to accept, al owing the McRees to hold

the workers against their wil and beat them if they were

disobedient. "We had sold ourselves into slavery—and what could

we do about it?" the black man asked. "The white folks had al the

courts, al the guns, al the hounds, al the railroads, al the