Slavery by Another Name (35 page)

least some federal o cials, especial y native southern Republicans

serving as prosecutors, judges, or in government posts in the South,

were acutely aware that slavery had never truly disappeared.

The Justice Department was already on notice. Four years earlier,

in 1899, the colorful federal prosecutor in Atlanta, Edward A.

Angier, went so far as to mount a lone prosecution against one of

Georgia's most prominent planters, Wil iam Eberhart, in Oglethorpe

County, for conspiracy to hold blacks in a state of peonage—a

crime de ned by an obscure and never before used 1867 federal

law passed to prohibit the long-standing Mexican practice of debt

slavery in the new territory of New Mexico.

Relying on his brother-in-law, a justice of the peace, to convict

black laborers on any charge the planter wished to use, Eberhart

enslaved men and women and forced them to bind their children to

him as apprentices. He routinely claimed to have loaned money to

black workers and then held them on his plantation near the town

of Wintervil e to work o the debt— often for years at a time.

Before a grand jury, witnesses described Eberhart as a sadistic brute

who routinely beat adults and children to the edge of death. When

laborers ed to Atlanta, Eberhart sent deputy sheri s into the city to

hunt them down, beat them into submission, and drive them back

to the plantation in chains.

In one count of the indictment, Eberhart was charged with

enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by

enslaving a black man named Charley Cal oway in January 1896 by

falsely claiming he owed the planter money. When Cal oway

resisted, Eberhart assaulted and degraded the laborer at every

imaginable physical and emotional level: witnesses said that

Eberhart brutal y beat Cal oway's wife, Mary, and then at gunpoint

forced the woman to "yield her body to the lustful embraces" of the

plantation owner.

When Charley Cal oway at empted to escape the farm, Eberhart

had him hauled back and placed in handcu s. Eberhart then beat

him "upon the back, head, face and body" and, in an overt act of

sexual humiliation, had Cal oway stripped naked and chained into

a bed with a sick laborer named Orange Neeley

Later, Eberhart brandished his pistol and forced Cal oway "to

pinion his own beloved son, Robert Cal oway, outstretched to the

ground, and did make the said Charley Cal oway hold his said son

while the said Wil iam Eberhart did violently and unmerciful y beat

the said Robert Cal oway with heavy sticks and other weapons"

until the boy was crippled. As a nal indignity, Eberhart—like the

Alabama slavemasters who at empted to seize the children of

freedmen in the 1860s—forced Cal oway to sign contracts

apprenticing his remaining children, two of whom were stil

nursing babies, into Eberhart's control until they turned twenty-one

years old.25

Despite wide knowledge of Eberhart's sadism, scores of local

white citizens ral ied to Eberhart's defense, signing a petition that

labeled the evidence against him as "the testimony of irresponsible

negroes." Angier, the prosecutor, pressed on with the case, but

acknowledged to his superiors in Washington that "we are the

pioneers in this movement, and as this is the rst time this

‘peonage’ section has ever been invoked." Angier saw clearly that he

was at acking more than debt slavery perpetrated by a single man.

He sought permission from the Department of Justice to widen his

investigation into adjoining counties and warned: "In this

proceeding we have at acked the most powerful combination and

formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.

formidable ‘Convict Ring’ (as it is cal ed) in the State.

"Every resource known and unknown to the law wil be resorted

to by these potent and opulent in uences to break down this Bil

[of indictment], as we have selected the ring-leader for the rst

case," Angier wrote.26

In the end, it took no more than another audacious argument and

a compliant federal judge to col apse the case. Before a trial could

be convened, Eberhart's at orneys chal enged the most fundamental

premise of the case—arguing that no federal statute speci cal y

made it a crime to hold a person in slavery. The presiding judge

agreed: "The indictment did not state an o ense within the

jurisdiction of the federal courts."27 The case was never tried. "The

judge …indicated that the State Court alone had jurisdiction of the

mat ers and things embraced in these indictments," Angier wrote to

Washington.28

Despite the horror of the al egations, no local courts took up the

case. The fate of the Cal oway family was never known.

Two years later, unaware of the failed peonage prosecution in

Georgia, a U.S. commissioner named Fred Cubberly, living in the

Florida Panhandle town of Bronson, witnessed turpentine farmer J.

O. Elvington seize a black man and his wife at gunpoint, claiming

they could not leave his camp deep in the malarial swamps until a

$40 debt had been paid. The incident con rmed to Cubberly

rumors he had heard that forced labor was rampant among the

crude forest labor camps across northern Florida and adjoining

areas.29 Nearly thirty thousand men toiled in the turpentine farms

under excruciating conditions to supply a booming market for pine

tar, pitch, and turpentine used to caulk the seams of wooden sailing

ships and waterproof their ropes and riggings.

Workers carved deep V-shaped notches into the trunks of

mil ions of massive slash and longleaf pines towering in the stil

virgin forests. Smal galvanized iron boxes or gut ers were at ached

to the trees to col ect the thick, milky pine gum that oozed from the

wounds in winter. During spring and summer, as sap began to run,

mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working

mil ions of gal ons of pine resin oozed into the containers. Working

feverishly from before dawn to the end of light, turpentine workers

cut fresh notches into every tree once a week, gathered the gum and

resin by hand, boiled it into vast quantities of distil ed turpentine,

and hauled it in hundreds of thousands of barrels out of the deep

woods. When trees stopped producing gum and resin, the camp

owners harvested them for lumber. As the demand for turpentine

products soared, the timber companies relentlessly acquired fresh

tracts of forest to drain and armies of men to perform the grueling

work.

Imprisoned in stockades or cel s, chained together at night or

held under armed guards on horseback, the turpentine farms were

bleak outposts miles from any chance of comfort or contact with

the outside world. Workers were forced to buy their own food and

clothes from a camp commissary and charged usurious interest rates

on the salary advances used to pay for the goods—typical y at least

100 percent.

A week after witnessing Elvington's seizure of two black workers,

Cubberly encountered three "man hunters" at the local train station,

led by Samuel M. Clyat , a turpentine farmer from Georgia

searching for several men who had run away from his camp. Clyat

and the others, including a deputy sheri from his home county,

forced two workers, Wil Gordon and Mose Ridley, back to Georgia

at gunpoint.

Cubberly began investigating similar complaints and making

reports to the U.S. at orney in Pensacola, Florida. In the summer of

1901, the federal prosecutor there, John Eagan, passed on to the

newly appointed At orney General Knox let ers from Cubberly and

a local at orney in the area al eging that "it is common practice

among parties engaged in Turpentine business in the Northern

District of Florida, to hold laborers … in a state of Involuntary

Servitude."

Eagan added that he personal y confirmed some of the al egations

and ordered that an indictment be sought. The system of coercion

he had discovered in Florida, authorized under an 1891 state law

making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages

making it a crime for a worker to leave his employer after wages

had been advanced, was virtual y identical to that of Eberhart in

Georgia and what Alabama investigators were soon to discover.

"The laborers in this line of business are as a general rule colored

men and are imposed on and treated outrageously by their

employers," Eagan wrote. "A warrant is issued by a Justice of the

Peace and placed in the hands of a constable or sheri who

proceeds to forcibly deliver laborer to the possession of the

employers who made the complaint, and the employer holds him

in service until his claim, including al costs and charges of the

proceedings, are worked out."30

In November 1901, a Tal ahassee federal grand jury indicted

Clyat for peonage. He stood trial ve months later—despite the

unexplained disappearance of Gordon and Ridley, who were never

again seen after their seizure and return to Georgia. Clyat was

found guilty and sentenced to four years in the federal penitentiary.

Recognizing that the conviction could destroy the underpinning of

their industry—and a critical element of the southern economy—an

association of turpentine and timber companies ral ied to Clyat 's

defense. They hired as at orneys U.S. senator Augustus Octavius

Bacon and U.S. congressman Wil iam G Brantley both of Georgia. In

the lawyers’ appeal of the conviction, they observed to the higher

courts that the holding of slaves in the United States was not

technical y a crime. "Congress has never passed a law providing

punishment for slavery or for involuntary servitude," Brantley

reminded the gal ery during a speech before the U.S. House of

Representatives.31

The peonage statute, they claimed, amounted to unconstitutional

federal interference into mat ers of state jurisdiction. It was

improper to apply it to Clyat because no formal "system of

peonage" existed in the South.

As Clyat 's case languished in the Circuit Court of Appeals

throughout 1902, new al egations of slavery in the turpentine

camps continued to surface . Then came the let er to At orney

General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new

General Knox from Judge Jones describing a whole new

manifestation of the involuntary servitude system in Alabama,

potential y extending across an even larger area of the South.

Knox responded by directing the federal prosecutor in

Montgomery, Warren S. Reese Jr., to investigate the al egations. "I

have this day addressed a communication to each deputy marshal in

this district …requesting them to make a special investigation of the

peonage question," Reese responded enthusiastical y. "If from these

reports I am satis ed that at empts are being made or have been

made to deprive citizens of African descent of their liberty, I wil

report the same in ful to you and request the detail of a Secret

Service Operative if I deem the same necessary"32

It took less than two weeks for federal marshals to report the

discovery of scores of black slaves in Shelby, Coosa, and Tal apoosa

counties. The grand jury in Birmingham issued indictments against

nine Shelby County men near the end of April.33

But the original al egations made before the Birmingham grand

jury were tepid compared to what other agents in the field began to

learn. It was clear that not just one slavery ring existed in Alabama,

but layers upon layers of them, blanketing the state. The men

forced into labor in Shelby and Coosa counties were victims of only

the outermost edge of a network emanating from the farms and

other business interests of John Pace and his partners in Tal apoosa

County. A separate operation run by the sheri of Lowndes County

in the southern section of the state—where more than 25,000 black

farm laborers and sharecroppers lived—appeared to involve

hundreds or thousands of slaves and dozens of local landowners.

More rings operated in at least a half dozen other locations.

In some areas, local whites who were appal ed by the conduct of

their neighbors, or at orneys who had at empted in the past to free

forced black laborers in the southern courts, volunteered tales of

excruciating abuse to federal investigators. But in most locales, few

whites expressed any misgivings about the forced labor going on in

plain sight.