Slavery by Another Name (12 page)

1865 Mississippi statute required African American workers to

enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every

year or risk arrest. Four other states legislated that African

Americans could not legal y be hired for work without a discharge

paper from their previous employer—e ectively preventing them

from leaving the plantation of the white man they worked for. In

the 1880s, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida enacted laws

making it a criminal act for a black man to change employers

without permission.

In nearly al cases, the potential penalty awaiting black men, and

a smal number of women, snared by those laws was the prospect

of being sold into forced labor. Many states in the South and the

North at empted to place their prisoners in private hands during

the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The state of Alabama

was long predisposed to the idea, rather than taking on the cost of

housing and feeding prisoners itself. It experimented with turning

over convicts to private "wardens" during the 1840s and 1850s but

was ultimately unsatis ed with the results. The state saved some

expense but gathered no revenue. Moreover, the physical abuse that

came to be almost synonymous with privatized incarceration always

was eventual y unacceptable in an era when virtual y every convict

was white. The punishment of slaves for misdeeds rested with their

owners.

Hardly a year after the end of the war, in 1866, Alabama

governor Robert M. Pat on, in return for the total sum of $5, leased

for six years his state's 374 state prisoners to a company cal ing

itself "Smith and McMil en." The transaction was in fact a sham, as

the partnership was actual y control ed by the Alabama and

Chat anooga Railroad. Governor Pat-ton became president of the

railroad three years later.45 Such duplicity would be endemic to

convict leasing. For the next eighty years, in every southern state,

the questions of who control ed the fates of black prisoners, which

few black men and women among armies of defendants had

commit ed true crimes, and who was receiving the financial benefits

of their re-enslavement would almost always never be answered.

Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the

Later in 1866, Texas leased 250 convicts to two railroads at the

rate of $12.50 a month.46 In May 1868, four months after Henry

and Mary's wedding, the state of Georgia signed a lease under

which the Georgia and Alabama Railroad acquired one hundred

convicts, al of them black, for $2,500. Later that year, the state sold

134 prisoners to the Selma, Rome and Dalton Railroad and sent 109

others to the line being constructed between the towns of Macon

and Brunswick, Georgia.

Arkansas began contracting out its state convicts in 1867, sel ing

the rights to prisoners convicted of both state crimes and federal

of enses.47Mississippi turned over its 241 prisoners to the state's

largest cot on planter, Edmund Richardson, in 1868. Three years

later, the convicts were transferred to Nathan Bedford Forrest, the

former Confederate general, who in civilian life already was a

major planter and railroad developer. In 1866, he and ve other

former rebel o cers had founded the Ku Klux Klan. Florida leased

out half of the one hundred prisoners in its Chat a-hoochee

penitentiary in 1869.

North Carolina began "farming out" its convicts in 1872. After

white South Carolinians led by Democrat Wade Hampton violently

ousted the last black government of the state in 1877, the

legislature promptly passed a law al owing for the sale of the state's

four hundred black and thirty white prisoners.

Six years earlier, in 1871, Tennessee leased its nearly eight

hundred prisoners, nearly al of them black, to Thomas O’Conner, a

founding partner along with Arthur Colyar of Tennessee Coal, Iron

& Railroad Co.48 In the four decades after the war, as Colyar built

his company into an industrial behemoth, its center of operations

gradual y shifted to Alabama, where it was increasingly apparent

that truly vast reserves of coal and iron ore lay beneath the surface.

Colyar, like Milner, was one of those prominent southern

businessmen who bridged the era of slavery and the distinct new

economic opportunities of the region at the end of the nineteenth

century. They were true slavers, raised in the old traditions of

bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

bondage, but also men who believed that African Americans under

the lash were the key to building an industrial sector in the South to

fend of the growing influence of northern capitalists.

Already, whites realized that the combination of trumped-up

legal charges and forced labor as punishment created both a

desirable business proposition and an incredibly e ective tool for

intimidating rank-and- le emancipated African Americans and

doing away with their most ef ective leaders.

The newly instal ed white government of Hale County—deep in

the majority-black cot on growing sections of Alabama—began

leasing prisoners to private parties in August 1875. A local grand

jury said the new practice was "contributing much to the revenues

of the county, instead of being an expense." The money derived

from sel ing convicts was placed in the Fine and Forfeiture Fund,

which was used to pay fees to judges, sheri s, other low o cials,

and witnesses who helped convict defendants.

The prior year, during a violent campaign by Ku Klux Klansmen

and other white reactionaries to break up black Republican

political meetings across Alabama, a white raiding party confronted

a meeting of African Americans in Hale County. Shots were red in

the dark and two men died—one white and one black. No charges

were brought in the kil ing of the African American, but despite any

evidence they caused the shooting, leading black Republicans R. H.

Skinner and Woodvil e Hardy were charged and convicted of

murder. They were sent to the Eureka mines south of Birmingham

in the spring of 1876.49

By the end of 1877, fty convict laborers were at work in

Milner's Newcastle Coal Company mine outside Birmingham. An

additional fty-eight men had been forced into the Eureka mines he

founded near Helena. A total of 557 prisoners had been turned over

that year to private corporations by the state of Alabama. 50

By the end of Reconstruction in 1877, every formerly Confederate

state except Virginia had adopted the practice of leasing black

prisoners into commercial hands. There were variations among the

states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

states, but al shared the same basic formula. Nearly al the penal

functions of government were turned over to the companies

purchasing convicts. In return for what they paid each state, the

companies received absolute control of the prisoners. They were

ostensibly required to provide their own prisons, clothing, and

food, and bore responsibility for keeping the convicts incarcerated.

Company guards were empowered to chain prisoners, shoot those

at empting to ee, torture any who wouldn't submit, and whip the

disobedient—naked or clothed—almost without limit. Over eight

decades, almost never were there penalties to any acquirer of these

slaves for their mistreatment or deaths.

On paper, the regulations governing convict conditions required

that prisoners receive adequate food, be provided with clean living

quarters, and be protected from "cruel" or "excessive punishment."

Al oggings were to be recorded in logbooks, and indeed hundreds

were. But the only regularly enforced laws on the new slave

enterprises were those designed primarily to ensure that no black

worker received freedom or experienced anything other than

racial y segregated conditions. In Alabama, companies were fined

$150 a head if they al owed a prisoner to escape. For a time, state

law mandated that if a convict got free while being transported to

the mines, the sheri or deputy responsible had to serve out the

prisoner's sentence. Companies often faced their strongest criticism

for al owing black and white prisoners to share the same cel s.

"White convicts and colored convicts shal not be chained together,"

read Alabama law.51

In almost every respect—the acquisition of workers, the lease

arrangements, the responsibilities of the leaseholder to detain and

care for them, the incentives for good behavior—convict leasing

adopted practices almost identical to those emerging in slavery in

the 1850s.

By the late 1870s, the de ning characteristics of the new

involuntary servitude were clearly apparent. It would be obsessed

with ensuring disparate treatment of blacks, who at al times in the

ensuing fty years would constitute the vast majority of those sold

into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

into labor. They were routinely starved and brutalized by

corporations, farmers, government o cials, and smal -town

businessmen intent on achieving the most lucrative balance

between the productivity of captive labor and the cost of sustaining

them. The consequences for African Americans were grim. In the

rst two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent

of them died.52 In the fol owing year, mortality rose to 35 percent.

In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were kil ed.53

I I

SLAVERY’S INCREASE

"Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak."

Henry and Mary did not wait long to begin their increase.

Cooney, a lit le girl, came to them before the end of another

harvest season had passed.1 The arrival of an infant, even more

so a rst child, to a pair of former slaves in the rst years after

emancipation must have been an event of sublime joy. A young

black family of the early 1870s already knew that the presumptions

of ful freedom that had accompanied the end of slavery were being

gravely chal enged in the South. But surrounding and overwhelming

the anxieties triggered by those obstructions—violence by the Ku

Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups and the machinations of

white political leaders—was the astonishing range of possibilities

now at least theoretical y available to a newly born child.

While Cooney was stil a babe, the northern states by

overwhelming majorities rati ed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

amendments to the Constitution, abolishing with absolute clarity

the institution of slavery as it had existed for the previous 250 years

and granting ful citizenship and voting rights to al black

Americans. A black toddler in central Alabama would learn his rst

words at a time when black men were gathering regularly with

others to elect those who would govern their counties and states.

Cooney was seven years old when the U.S. Congress passed its

rst Civil Rights Act, further guaranteeing the right of African

Americans to vote on the same terms as whites and to live as ful

citizens in the eyes of the law. The new state legislatures of the

South, now including substantial numbers of black Republicans,

passed laws mandating for the rst time in the southern states that

children, whether black or white, be a orded some semblance of

basic education. By 1871, more than 55,000 black children were

at ending public school in Alabama.

at ending public school in Alabama.

Henry and Mary knew there would be trouble, yes, plenty of it.

But the young man and woman, il iterate, provincial, and unskil ed,

had every reason to expect nonetheless that in the expiring of ten or

twenty years, their daughter and the boisterous brood of boys and

girls who would fol ow her would live lives in a world so

transformed from their own as to be ut erly unrecognizable.

By the time Cooney turned two, as Thanksgiving approached in

1870, the most de ning feature of the old Cot ingham world,

Elisha, the white man who had sculpted the landscape onto which

Cooney was born and then seen it disintegrate, was dead.

Elisha was laid to rest at the top of the red-clay hil , surrounded

by what was left of the stand of beech and oak that had greeted his

arrival in the wilderness. As his life had been on the landscape

stretched out around him, Elisha's plot was squarely in the center of