Slavery by Another Name (69 page)

punish the convicts severely for not nishing their tasks and have

seen them work until ten and eleven o'clock at night to nish their

tasks and then be whipped for working overtime," Keith said.

Asked to describe the instruments used by the camp whipping

boss, Keith said convicts were beaten with a thick strap of leather

at ached to a handle. "You take a strip of heavy harness leather

about as wide as my three ngers or a lit le bit wider and about

two and a half feet long. It would weigh somewhere in the

neighborhood of …three and a half pounds," Keith testi ed. "Some

times they would wet the leather by spit ing on it and rubbing it on

the sand; that was when they wanted to bring the blood. It would

hurt a great deal worse to og them with it than with the dry

strap…. The sand wil take the skin of ."6

In the yard where the whippings took place, the warden also

kept a herd of between forty and fty hogs. The aggressive animals

—made fearless of the docile prisoners—crowded in on the

emaciated men to grab scraps of bread or other food that fel to the

ground. One evening, Abe Wynne was al owed to brew a pot of

co ee on an open re in the yard. Since arriving at the mine as a

fourteen-year-old, his once stout, six-foot frame withered to just 160

pounds. When a hog began nosing against him for food, he splashed

a cup of hot cof ee on the pig to drive it away.

Word quickly spread to the warden that Wynne had abused one

of his hogs. As punishment, witnesses testi ed that Wynne was

forced to strip naked, held stretched across a barrel by two other

prisoners, and then whipped with a leather strap sixty-nine times.

"The whipping was more than he could stand," Keith said.

A few days later, Wynne's older brother, Wil , visited what was

cal ed the mine hospital. He told the commission his brother was

lying on a lthy bed, stil wearing his convict stripes with no

underclothes and coated in the dust of the mine. "I saw that the boy

could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

could only live a short time and it grieved me," testi ed Wil

Wynne. "About al I asked him was if he was prepared to die."

Delirious and unable to tel his brother what happened, Wynne

died a week later. The boy's family was told he'd contracted

"gal oping" tuberculosis and succumbed suddenly7

James W English, the owner of Durham Coal and Coke, was a

luminary of the Atlanta elite and a man hardly anyone in the city

rising from the Civil War's ashes would have associated with so

cruel a kil ing as Abe Wynne's. But by 1908, English—despite

having never owned antebel um slaves—was a man whose great

personal wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of

thousands of men.

Born in 1837 near New Orleans and orphaned as a teenager, he

apprenticed himself to a carriage maker and then served notably as

a young man in the Confederate army, rising to become a captain in

a prominent Georgia brigade. Serving in a forward position near

Appomat ox, he received the rst writ en surrender demand from

Ulysses S. Grant to Robert E. Lee. After the South's defeat, he went

to Atlanta, to establish himself in the business and politics of the

bustling new capital of southern commerce. He was elected to the

city council partly on the renown of his war service, and later

served on the Atlanta school board and as the city's police

commissioner. He led a drive to make Atlanta the state capital of

Georgia, cementing its foundation as an economic center, and in

1880 he was elected mayor.8

Presiding from a regal home a few blocks from the center of the

city, English, a portly man with a thick shock of white hair and a

matching mustache, fostered a col ection of enterprises that grew as

Atlanta emerged from its Civil War ruin. The base of his wealth was

the Chat ahoochee Brick Company, a business perfectly consonant

in the 1870s and 1880s with the needs of a booming metropolis

recovering from Union general Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman's ring

of the city a decade earlier.

As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

As a police o cial and as mayor, English saw the rich potential

of using black forced laborers in his enterprises. Chat ahoochee

Brick relied on slave workers from its inception in 1878, and by the

early 1890s more than 150 prisoners were employed in the wilting

heat of its res. The company held another 150 forced laborers at a

sawmil in Richwood, Georgia, three hundred slaves at its Durham

mines in Walker County, and several dozen more at English's Iron

Belt Railroad and Mining Company. By 1897, English's enterprises

control ed 1,206 of Georgia's 2,881 convict laborers, engaged in

brick making, cut ing cross ties, lumbering, railroad construction,

and turpentining.

During his tenure as mayor of Atlanta, English launched the

Georgia Paci c Railroad, eventual y tying Atlanta to the coal elds

of Alabama and then on to the cot on nub of Greenvil e,

Mississippi. While building that rail line in 1883, English il egal y

bought hundreds of convicts—and the coal mine they worked in—

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 witnesses. "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,