Slavery by Another Name (19 page)

former Cot ingham slaves and their descendants, many now using

the more phonetical y correct names Cot inham or Cot enham, had

already been pul ed toward the lure of activity and wealth of

Birmingham. Huge numbers of other poor blacks and whites from

across the South were pouring into the city. Henry and Mary could

not resist the inexorable current of the new era, tugging them

toward the bulging, smoky new metropolis.

Yet already, the opportunity for the rise of new industries to open

substantial new doors for black citizenship and economic

advancement was being ignored. Even black leaders such as Booker

T. Washington were urging blacks to accept a deferential, second-

class position in American society, in return for less racial violence

by whites. African Americans increasingly found themselves trapped

between the accommodationist retreat of Washington and the

hol ow claims of harmony and goodwil by white men such as

Henry Grady

Few companies riding the southern boom saw any value in

integrating black workers into their expanding enterprises. African

Americans’ value in the new order was greatest as a defense against

unions at empting to organize free workers—especial y in

Alabama's coal elds. The utility of forced labor as a bulwark

against disruptions of the South's biggest enterprises was obvious.

Coal mines, timber camps, and farms worked by imprisoned men

couldn't be shut down by strikers, or have wages driven up by the

couldn't be shut down by strikers, or have wages driven up by the

demands of free men. The new slave labor provided an ideal

captive workforce: cheap, usual y docile, unable to organize, and

always available when free laborers refused to work.

By the end of the 1880s, at least ten thousand black men were

slaving in forced labor mines, elds, and work camps in the

formerly Confederate states.5 The resubjugation of black labor was

a lucrative enterprise, and critical to the industrialists and

entrepreneurial farmers amassing capital and land.

In Georgia, near the town of Athens, former state senator James

M. Smith held hundreds of debt slaves on a farm that stretched

thirty miles from the town he named after himself: Smithonia. In

the post-Civil War economy, Smith nurtured a smal farm into the

state's largest plantation. He became a major buyer of convicts soon

after Georgia's Reconstruction government was toppled by a

campaign of voter fraud and Ku Klux Klan violence.

On thousands of acres, he raised cot on, corn, sorghum, and

timber, and operated smal factories.6 For workers he relied on an

army of terri ed convict slaves, including many African Americans

he had owned before the war or their descendants. John Hil , a

former slave who said his relatives had been held at Smithonia for

decades after the end of slavery, described the farm in an interview

given in the 1930s: "He had what they cal ed chain-gang slaves. He

paid them out of jail for them to work for him," Hil recounted. "He

let them have money al the time so they didn't never get out of

debt with him. They had to stay there and work al the time, and if

they didn't work, he had them beat."

If workers tried to ee, Smith relied on deputy sheri s to

recapture them and his own overseers to in ict brutal punishments.

"They had dogs to trail them with so they always got caught, and

then the whipping boss beat them almost to death," Hil said. "It

was awful to hear them hol ering and begging for mercy. If they

hol ered ‘Lord have mercy!’ Marse Jim didn't hear them, but if they

cried, ‘Marse Jim have mercy!’ then he made them stop the beating.

He say, ‘The Lord rule Heaven, but Jim Smith ruled the earth.’ "7

He say, ‘The Lord rule Heaven, but Jim Smith ruled the earth.’ "

Another former governor and U.S. senator of Georgia, Joseph E.

Brown, worked hundreds of black forced laborers in his coal mines

in the northern mountains of his state. Other slave laborers helped

rebuild Brown's iron furnaces that had been destroyed by Union

troops in the Civil War. In North Carolina, the tracks of the critical,

state-owned Western & Atlantic Railroad were being laid by huge

gangs of black men compel ed by sheri s to work for the company.

In Louisiana and Mississippi, thousands of impoverished African

Americans were building levees and working massive cot on

plantations under the lash.

In Atlanta, an expert in the prewar use of slaves to build

railroads, John T Grant, and his son Wil iam Grant leased nearly

four hundred of Georgia's state and county convicts to perform the

extraordinarily harsh work of building a seventy-one-mile railway

line between the towns of Macon and Augusta. Despite reports of

terrible abuse and high mortality among the forced laborers, the

business—Grant, Alexander & Company—soon control ed nearly al

of Georgia's prisoners. Though the Civil War was nearly a decade

past, Grant, Alexander was soon laying track on projects across the

state—al of it performed with slave labor.8

Meanwhile, John Grant's railroad building partner from before

the war, Col. Lemuel P. Grant, was developing his extensive

landholdings into the city's rst major suburb, cal ed Grant Park.

The colonel, an engineer and railroad builder unrelated to John

Grant, had directed construction of the extensive forti cations

surrounding Atlanta during the Civil War using slave labor. The

neighborhood surrounded the growing city's rst substantial green

space, a Frederick Law Olmsted rm-designed park that would

permanently bear the colonel's name. Nearby, Joel Hurt—one of

the state's wealthiest men and a major leaseholder of convicts for

his Georgia Iron and Coal Company—was building another of the

city's finest residential enclaves.

The bricks used to pave the streets and line the sidewalks of these

ourishing new Victorian areas were sold in lots of a mil ion to the

Atlanta City Council by former mayor James W. English. His brick-

Atlanta City Council by former mayor James W. English. His brick-

making concern, Chat ahoochee Brick Co., would by the end of the

century churn out 300,000 hot red rectangles of hardened clay every

day—al made by forced laborers. On Sunday afternoons, white

men frequently met in the yard of the English brick factory to swap

or buy black men, lit le changed from the slave markets of a half

century earlier.9

As leases for forced laborers proliferated across the South, whites

re-adopted a sense of ownership reminiscent of antebel um days.

After the death of a partner in Stevens Bros. & Co., a pot ery factory

in Georgia's Baldwin County, in 1890, an auction was held to sel

o al the assets. The newspaper advertisement for the sale could

just as wel have been from the world of Elisha Cot ingham in the

1850s. "Wil be sold … to the highest bidder …Eleven mules, 1

horse, 1 bul , 800 bushels of corn …lease of 30 convicts with

various terms to serve, 1 grist mil ."10

Thousands more forced laborers slaved on extraordinarily

pro table farms stretching across the old slavery belt of Texas,

where prisoners were chained at the neck and held in boxcars at

night. Working from sunup to sundown, they survived on "food

buzzards would not eat" and su ered sadistic punishments.

Hundreds of men charged with pet y crimes were simply worked to

death and then buried unceremoniously wherever they fel . To

escape that fate, Texas convicts mimicked the desperate tactics of

slaves before them—slicing their heel strings, hacking o their

hands, or gouging out their eyes. A few chronicled their nightmares

in the writ en word. I spent "the prime of my life …as a slave,"

exclaimed one prisoner, while another lamented that he was

"buried alive …dead to the world."11

Speaking to a gathering of prominent black writers and thinkers

on the twentieth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation in

1883, Frederick Douglass, the aging black leader of pre-Civil War

years, lamented that despite the bloody sacri ce of black soldiers in

the ght for liberation, "in al relations of life and death, we are

met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us

met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us

accommodation …excludes our children from schools …compels us

to pursue only such labor as wil bring us the least reward."12

A few months later in 1883, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that

the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the one federal law forcing whites to

comply with the provisions of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth

amendments—awarding voting and legal rights to blacks—could be

enforced only under the most rare circumstances. Civil rights was a

local, not federal issue, the court found.

The e ect was to open the oodgates for laws throughout the

South speci cal y aimed at eliminating those new rights for former

slaves and their descendants. Justice John Marshal Harlan, the only

member of the court to oppose the opinion, publicly worried that

the amendments representing the ideals of equality and freedom

articulated by Lincoln in the Get ysburg Address, as wel as the

arching moral justi cation for the carnage of the Civil War, had

been renounced.

Douglass, despondent, wrote to an acquaintance: "We have been

…gruesomely wounded …in the house of our friends."13 In the

wake of the Supreme Court ruling, the federal government adopted

as policy that al egations of continuing slavery were mat ers whose

prosecution should be left to local authorities only—a de facto

acceptance that white southerners could do as they wished with the

black people in their midst.

The signi cance of those legal and political developments can

hardly be overstated. The era of Reconstruction and black political

control on any statewide level in the South had ended fteen years

earlier, but in the early 1880s, large numbers of African Americans

continued to vote, particularly in majority-black cot on-growing

counties. As a result, even deeply racist white politicians were

compel ed to temper—or at least consider—their rhetoric and

positions with racial implications. Funding for public schools

remained equal y apportioned to black and white children, and

African Americans in many places maintained at least some level of

access to local courts and other government services. But a

access to local courts and other government services. But a

declaration by the country's highest courts that the federal

government could not force states to comply with the constitutional

requirement of the equal treatment of citizens, regardless of race,

opened a torrent of repression.

• •

In 1888, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad entered into its rst

contract with the state of Alabama to lease convicts into the Prat

Mines. The big company took over operations from J. W. Comer,

who had long held thousands of forced laborers in his farm elds

and mines. After acquiring Prat Mines, the Tennessee company

competed for the lease on al state prisoners in an auction against

companies representing nearly every major economic gure in

Alabama or the South. Other bidders included Sloss-She eld,

several companies control ed by Milner, and a partnership between

DeBardeleben and Comer's sometime associate, Lowndes County

planter Wil iam D. McCurdy Within ve years, more than one

thousand men, nearly al of them black, were working under the

whip at the Prat Mines, and Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in

ef ect owned al state convicts for the next quarter century.

Fueled by access to this large pool of forced laborers and fresh

investment from New York, the company began a dramatic

expansion. By the end of 1889, there were eight major mine

openings in the Prat complex, producing 1.1 mil ion tons of coal in

that year alone—a nearly 25 percent increase over the prior year.

Each shaft descended several hundred feet, and then branched into

passageways fol owing a seam of coal. O the passageways, miners

excavated "rooms," leaving columns of coal at speci c intervals to

hold up the roof of the mine. A few men returned to the same

room each day, removing more coal using varying combinations of

picks, levers, dynamite, and hydraulic jackhammers. The coal was

loaded into smal cars running on narrow gauge rails through the