Slavery by Another Name (36 page)

plain sight.

A lawyer named L. E. White, from Columbus, Georgia, a bustling

town on the main train line running through Tal apoosa County,

told Reese how he had traveled to Dadevil e the previous summer

looking for a missing young black man named Esau Wil iams. He

tracked him down at a farm owned by Fletch Turner, where

Wil iams and several other black men were being forced to cut

wood. White bought his freedom for $25 and returned the boy to

his mother.

A few weeks later, the family of Glennie "Speedy" Helms, another

young black man who had been traveling with Wil iams, sent the

lawyer back looking for their son. White found him and more than

a half dozen others working at a sawmil owned by Turner near the

set lement cal ed Jackson's Gap. He had to pay $48 for Helms. But

most striking to White were the execrable working conditions he

found—a scene that must have been strikingly similar to the

operations of the slavery-driven sawmil near the Cot ingham

plantation half a century earlier. "When I found this boy he was at

the sawmil at work completely naked, no clothes on at al ,

absolutely naked," White said. "And there were some six or eight

other negroes there working in the same naked condition."34

Reese was astonished by the evidence piling up in his o ce, and

quickly asked for the assignment of two Secret Service agents to

assist. "I never comprehended until now the extent of the present

method of slavery," he wrote to At orney General Knox,35 asking for

a meeting in Washington to plan a dramatic legal at ack.

The investigation could only have occurred with a man such as

Warren Reese in the role of U.S. at orney. Reese and two part-time

assistants constituted the sum total of the U.S. government's

regulatory and judicial reach into the portion of Alabama he served.

It would be another ve years before the agency that became the

Federal Bureau of Investigation was created in Washington. Until

then, the handful of investigators employed by the U.S. Justice

Department were nearly al accountants temporarily retained from

the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of

the examiners section of the Treasury Department. The reach of

federal power in a place as remote as Alabama was only as strong

as the capabilities and political wil s of the local U.S. at orney and

federal judge.

The thirty-seven-year-old Reese exempli ed the new phenotype

of political and racial moderate that Roosevelt believed could

emerge as a new leadership class in the South—a counterpoint of

reason and modernism to noxious characters like John Pace and

other men who perverted judicial and political systems against

blacks and the constitutional amendments that were supposed to

have freed them.

Born just after the Civil War, Reese was a new husband and fast-

rising at orney in the state's capital city in 1903. Handsome, with an

academic air, Reese's piercing gaze at juries was softened by a long,

narrow face. An eloquent speaker and a orid writer, the at orney

was just mature enough to win credibility in the courtroom, just

youthful enough to ignore the obvious jeopardy that would mount

as he pressed an at ack on slavery and some of his state's most

powerful men. As al egations of slavery in his jurisdiction

multiplied, Reese demonstrated a prehensile comprehension of the

murky legal framework governing black labor, and a hard-nosed

unwil ingness to ignore the implications of the extraordinary

evidence that soon poured into his of ice.

Despite Reese's Republican a liation in rabidly Democratic and

white supremacist Alabama, he carried the social credentials of a

true son of the South. His father, W. S. Reese Sr., was a war hero

who at the age of nineteen earned a commission as a Confederate

colonel for gal antry during the ghting at Chickamauga Creek in

Georgia. After the war, the elder Reese became an activist in

Republican politics, successful y serving as mayor of Montgomery in

the 1880s and running unsuccessful y for the U.S. Senate in 1896 as

a Republican "fusion" candidate—at empting to at ract both black

and white voters. Reese's maternal grandfather, John A. Elmore,

was among Alabama's most famous at orneys—an architect of the

national government of the Confederacy and a key player in

secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.

secessionist politics at the dawn of the Civil War.

Even Alabama's leading Democrats could muster no authentic

opposition to Reese's appointment to the federal post. Dozens of

endorsements poured into the White House and headquarters of the

Department of Justice in 1897, including each state Supreme Court

justice, local judges across Alabama, bankers, railroad executives,

the president of the state senate, the speaker of the Alabama house,

Governor Joseph F. Johnston, the secretary of state, U.S. senators,

and every Republican member of the Alabama legislature. White

Republicans in Alabama saw in Reese the pro le of a potential y

dynamic new base of support—a fresh antidote to the planter class

that dominated Democratic politics, but one who could avoid the

carpetbagger taint of the Reconstruction-era Grand Old Party. "He is

a young man of promise, belongs to an old and in uential family of

this state—the source from which we must have recruits if we

expect permanent and lasting growth for republicanism in the

South," wrote one Alabama GOP leader, in a let er endorsing

Reese's candidacy. He was sworn in as U.S. at orney by President

McKinley in April 1897.36

Four years later, Roosevelt's optimism that men such as the

Reeses and Judge Thomas Jones could change the course of

southern thinking failed to account for the most powerful social

currents surging through the region. Not incidental y, Colonel Reese

and Judge Jones knew each other at least partly through their

prominent roles in the years-long drive in the 1880s to erect a

massive monument to Confederate war dead and veterans in

Montgomery. Their participation underscored the treacherous

political and social straits through which white southern moderates

were forced to navigate at the turn of the century. In the rst four

decades after the war, southern nativity and service in the war, as

Reese and Jones each claimed, were enough to meet the

prerequisites for elected o ce and leadership—and enough to at

least partly inoculate them against the charge that any white man

who supported legal rights for freed slaves was a traitor to his

region.

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of

As the twentieth century neared, though, the orthodoxy of

southern patriotism was mutating virulently. It was no longer

enough to have served honorably. The South now demanded in

public forums an increasingly rabid level of absolute adherence to a

baroque new mythology of the honorable southerner, the contented

slave, and the tragical y defeated secession. The new monument in

Montgomery, one of the largest such memorials anywhere in the

South, was that mythology incarnate. The aging former rebel

president, Je erson Davis, personal y laid its cornerstone on the

grounds of the state capitol, just a short distance from the spot

where he had taken the oath of o ce as president of the

Confederacy. The completed edi ce consisted of four statues

representing the four branches of military service spaced around the

base of an enormous column rising seventy feet above a bronze bas-

relief of a bat le scene.

Atop the shaft of Alabama limestone stood a ten-foot bronze

statue of a soldier titled Patriotism. After two decades of planning

and fund-raising, the monument was nal y unveiled before tens of

thousands of spectators in 1898. Undoubtedly, young Warren Reese

Jr. was among them.

A series of orators extol ed the virtuousness of the southern

rebel ion and the bravery and tenacity of its soldiers. Flanking the

scene was a contingent of young maidens, dressed in pure white,

gray caps, and crimson sashes, each representing one of the

Confederate states. Below the sculpture entitled Cavalry, an

inscription honored the horsemen of the rebel ion as "the

knightliest of the knightly race."37 As special agents scoured the

backcountry of Alabama ve years later, and brought tales of horror

to Montgomery in the spring of 1903, the cynicism of the South's

claim to hold a special position among the most noble civilizations

could not have escaped Reese's acute powers of observation.

An unnamed prisoner tied around a pickax for punishment in a

Georgia labor camp. Photograph by John L. Spivak, during research

for his 1932 book, Georgia Nigger.

Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad coke ovens at the Prat Mines near

Birmingham, Alabama.

A southern chain gang in 1898. Photograph by Carl Weis.