Slavery by Another Name (71 page)

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

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