Slavery by Another Name (15 page)

freedom.

The reality of crime in the era, based on the actual arrest records

of many counties in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia, is that true

crime was almost trivial in most places. In the Bibb County of

January 1878, where African Americans stil had the legal right to

vote, the biggest criminal threat to the peace of the county was a

band of Gypsies plying their wares from an encampment near

Columbiana and wandering the muddy wagon rut roads in the

country. To move them along, the sheri brought charges of

vagrancy and of trading goods between the hours of sunrise and

sunset— an "o ense" that would increasingly be used to prevent

freed slaves from buying goods from anyone other than their white

landlords. Before the case could be heard, the idle Gypsies moved

on. Peace was maintained.

Later that year, during the summer, James Cot ingham, one of

Elisha's many white grandsons and a regular troublemaker in the

postwar years, was convicted of assault and bat ery with a weapon.

postwar years, was convicted of assault and bat ery with a weapon.

His fine was $1 plus court costs. He paid it and was free.

In neighboring Shelby County, the arrest log of 1878 shows only

twenty-one prisoners brought to jail for the year. There were three

homicides in that time, and a woman named Lucy Cohil was

arrested for adultery—a charge that in almost al instances stemmed

from sexual relations between a black and a white. But few other

cases even registered in the public eye. The total fees charged to al

those arrested amounted to $80.80.11 Lit le changed over the next

two years, with the number of inmates in the county jail never

exceeding twenty.

Al of that transformed as the value of leasing black convicts

became more apparent. County after county was adopting the

practice. The at raction was not just that local o cials could fob o

most of the cost and trouble of housing and guarding prisoners. By

the end of the 1870s, the opportunity represented by forcing black

laborers into the mines was being richly ful l ed at Milner's

Newcastle Coal Co., operating just north of where the Prat Mines

were then being developed, and Shelby County's Eureka mines.

The Eureka mine complex consisted of two operations, one

manned by free miners and the other by convicts. Managing the

forced labor was J. W. Comer, a descendant of one of Alabama's

great prewar slave-owning families and a brother to Braxton Bragg

Comer, who would become Alabama's governor in 1907. Under

Comer, the Eureka Iron Works thrived on a cruel mix of primitive

excavation techniques and relentless, atavistic physical force.

State inspectors sent to the convict work camps wrote repeatedly

during the 1870s that the "convicts everywhere were being properly

cared for and guarded …humanely treated."12 Similarly facile

characterizations would be issued repeatedly by other examiners

over the decades of convict leasing, often the result of payo s

between the acquirers of forced laborers and their supposed

supervisors.

The reality of conditions inside the Eureka mines was

documented with rare clarity as a result of a brief state inquiry in

documented with rare clarity as a result of a brief state inquiry in

1881 into Comer's operations and Milner's Newcastle mines. More

signi cantly, vignet es of Comer's conduct were also recorded as a

result of the presence of a prisoner able and wil ing to complain of

conditions named Ezekiel Archey and the tenure of a nominal y

sympathetic Alabama o cial in charge of guarding the welfare of

leased prisoners, Reginald H. Dawson.13

Archey, a prisoner leased into Comer's Eureka mines, wrote that

the convicts lived in a windowless log stockade, their quarters

" l ed with lth and vermin." Gunpowder cans were used to hold

human waste that periodical y "would l up and runover on bed"

where some prisoners were shackled in place at night. Prisoners left

for the mine at 3 A.M. in chains, forced to march at a quick trot.

The grueling task of boring rock for dynamite, exploding sections of

a seam of coal, and shoveling tons of the remains into cars lasted

until 8 P.M.14

"Every Day some one of us were carried to our last resting, the

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

speak," Archey wrote. "We can go back to ‘79 and ‘77 al these years

of how we sufered. No humane being can tel …yet we hear. Go

ahead. Fate seems to curse a convict. Death seems to summon us

hence." Indeed, between 1878 and 1880, twenty- ve prisoners died

at the Eureka mines, most dumped unceremoniously into shal ow

earthen pits on the edge of the mine site.15

During hearings held by the special legislative commission in

1881 to inquire into the conditions and operations of the convict

leasing system, a witness named Jonathon D. Goode testi ed that

Comer ordered a recaptured black escapee to lie "on the ground

and the dogs were biting him. He begged piteously to have the dogs

taken of of him, but Comer refused to al ow it."

Then, Comer "took a stirrup strap, doubled it and wet it, stripped

him naked, bucked him, and whipped him—unmerciful y whipped

him, over half an hour. The Negro begged them to take a gun and

kil him," Goode continued. "They left him in a Negro cabin where

… he died within a few hours."16

… he died within a few hours."

An assistant superintendent at the mine, James O’Rourke,

testi ed that guards whipped prisoners with "a leather strap or stick

about an inch broad and two foot long." For o enses as generic as

"disobeying rules," state law al owed up to thirty-nine lashes.

Punishment was far more severe for infractions as minor as ghting,

tearing bedding, or insolence toward guards. One witness told of

the use of water torture at Eureka, on convicts for whom whipping

was deemed insu cient. Such prisoners were physical y restrained.

Then, "water [was] poured in his face on the upper lip, and

e ectual y stops his breathing as long as there is a constant

stream."17 Over the next thirty years, variations of this medieval

water torture technique were repeatedly employed in southern

slave labor camps, in some cases supplanting whipping as a

preferred method of punishment. Many convict managers chose this

terrifying method because the convict was able to more quickly

recover and return to work than after a severe flogging.

The commission also investigated Milner's Newcastle mines, where

both state and county convicts were at work. Milner was already

one of the key industrial pioneers of Alabama, having mapped and

directed the e ort to build one of the state's most important

railroad routes prior to the Civil War. Milner had grown up in a

slave-owning family, and in early adulthood owned "a lit le negro

of his own named Steve, who fol owed him about like a shadow,"

according to one contemporary. Milner put his Steve and several

other slaves to work prospecting for gold in the 1840s to earn his

tuition for col ege.18 Elected to the state Senate in 1866, Milner,

short of height but a deliberate speaker, was a key gure in the

later ouster of African Americans from al political participation

and authored a widely distributed statement titled, "White Men of

Alabama Stand Together." He was one of the founders of the city of

Birmingham in the 1870s.

By 1881, Milner was already one of the state's most substantial

industrialists. His primary company, Milner Coal and Railway

industrialists. His primary company, Milner Coal and Railway

Company, developed extensive mines at Coalburg and Newcastle,

north of Birmingham. At Newcastle, Milner played the part of a

self-aggrandizing antebel um slave master. The complex featured its

own private railroad, more than 150 forced laborers acquired from

the state and various counties, and an elaborate system of high-

temperature beehive ovens used to make coke—a derivative of

regular bituminous coal from which impurities had been baked out.

A quarter mile from the mine, Milner presided over his family and

received political and business visitors in a spacious house featuring

a detached kitchen, smokehouse, and barns. Orchards and rose

gardens crowded the home.19

It was a di erent scene in the prison mine not far away. A

description of Milner's mine by The New York Times in December

1882 told of black prisoners packed into a single cramped cabin

like slaves on the Atlantic passage. The building had no windows.

Vermin-ridden bunks stacked three high were covered with straw

and "ravaged blankets." "Revoltingly lthy" food was served cold

from unwashed coal buckets, and al 150 black convicts shared

three half-barrel tubs for washing. Al convicts were forced to wear

shackles consisting of an "iron hoop fastened around the ankle to

which is at ached a chain two feet long and terminating in a ring."20

The powerful utility of slave labor as a weapon against the

unionization of free laborers began to become most apparent in

1882, when hundreds of skil ed and unskil ed workers refused to

continue work at the Prat Mines, the steadily enlarging labyrinth of

shafts on the edge of Birmingham. The miners objected to a sharp

wage reduction and the company's growing reliance on convict

laborers. Rather than relent to the strikers’ demands, the company

leased the mines to Comer, who l ed them with legions of convicts

at his disposal. The strike was crushed.21 The same year, Alabama

col ected $50,000 in revenue from the sale of convict leases.22

The impact of that relatively brief labor event and its

correspondence with payments equal to approximately $860,000 in

correspondence with payments equal to approximately $860,000 in

modern currency, when adjusted for in ation, would be felt for

decades. It forged in dramatic fashion the consensus that the coal

and steel industry of Birmingham would thrive only with a central

reliance on forced labor. That would not change for a half century.

Later in 1882, state inspectors, writing the rst candid o cial

assessment of convict camps, said the private prisons were "total y

un t for use, without ventilation, without adequate water supplies,

crowded to excess, lthy beyond description." Prisoners were

"poorly clothed and fed …excessively and sometimes cruel y

punished; there were no hospitals; the sick were neglected; and

they were so much intimidated that it was next to impossible to get

from them anything touching on their treatment."23

Milner also operated a slave mine at the aptly named Coalburg.

The place was no town, but a ramshackle mining camp adjacent to

a shaft into a seam of coal that would be exhaustively mined for

more than eighty years. The prison at Coalburg, and its nearby

successor, Flat Top, were synonymous with the most wretched

conditions that could develop in the forced labor mines. The

Coalburg prison had no oor or toilets; prisoners were fed only

meat and bread. Many men were being held long past the

expiration of their ostensible sentences. In the late spring of 1883,

eight out of one hundred prisoners died—a rate that the state prison

inspector extrapolated to be 30 percent a year.24

Milner had no compunction about his view that black prisoners

purchased from the state and from county sheri s were his to do

with as he saw t. True, they were no longer mortgaged slaves, as

were Steve and the blacks he had owned in the 1850s. But he was

as much their lord and master as he had been over the African

families. Shortly after the war, he warned fel ow southerners of the

importance of combating the "unthrift, idleness, and weeds" that

were certain to fol ow the emancipation of the slaves.25

Milner became the central gure in an orbit of shrewd but brutal

southern industrialists who shared his views on the best means of

managing black laborers. Beginning before the Civil War, Milner

managing black laborers. Beginning before the Civil War, Milner

teamed up with Wil iam Hampton Flowers to operate slave-driven

timbering operations near Bol ing, Alabama. Using mostly hand

tools and enormous exertion, the slaves fashioned thousands of

crossties for the railroads then under construction across southern